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Do Good Looks (Beauty) Give You An Advantage? | Does one’s physical attractiveness have a positive or negative impact on life? Does it give you an advantage when it comes to finding a mate, getting good grades in school, getting a job or being more successful in life? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? What does the research tell us? And while most of us would prefer a world where you are not judged solely by your appearance, should we admit the reality of that’s the way things are.
Is There a Definitive View of Beauty?
The dictionary defines beauty as“the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.”
The classical Greek noun that best translates to the English-language words “beauty” or “beautiful” was κάλλος, kallos, and the adjective was καλός, kalos. However, kalos may and is also translated as ″good″ or ″of fine quality″ and thus has a broader meaning than mere physical or material beauty. Similarly, kallos was used differently from the English word beauty in that it first and foremost applied to humans and bears an erotic connotation.
The earliest Western theory of beauty can be found in the works of early Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratic period, such as Pythagoras. The Pythagorean school saw a strong connection between mathematics and beauty. In particular, they noted that objects proportioned according to the golden ratio seemed more attractive. Ancient Greek architecture is based on this view of symmetry and proportion.
Thus physical attractiveness can be seen as the degree to which a person’s physical features are considered aesthetically pleasing or beautiful . The term often implies sexual attractiveness or desirability, but can also be distinct from either. There are many factors which influence one person’s attraction to another, with physical aspects being one of them. Physical attraction itself includes universal perceptions common to all human cultures, as well as aspects that are culturally and socially dependent, along with individual subjective preferences.
Evolutionary psychologists have tried to answer why individuals who are more physically attractive should also, on average, be more intelligent, and have put forward the notion that both general intelligence and physical attractiveness may be indicators of underlying genetic fitness. A person’s physical characteristics can signal cues to fertility and health, with statistical modelling studies showing that the facial shape variables that reflect aspects of physiological health, including body fat and blood pressure, also influence observers’ perceptions of health. Attending to these factors increases reproductive success, furthering the representation of one’s genes in the population.
Most studies of the brain activation associated with the perception of attractiveness show photographs of faces to their participants and let them or a comparable group of people rate the attractiveness of these faces. Such studies consistently find that activity in certain parts of the orbitofrontal cortex increases with increasing attractiveness of faces. This neural response has been interpreted as a reaction on the rewarding nature of attractiveness, as similar increases in activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex can be seen in response to smiling faces and to statements of morally good actions. While most of these studies have not assessed participants of both genders or homosexual individuals, evidence from one study including male and female hetero- and homosexual individuals indicate that some of the aforementioned increases in brain activity are restricted to images of faces of the gender participants feel sexually attracted to.
With regard to brain activation related to the perception of attractive bodies, one study with heterosexual participants suggests that activity in the nucleus accumbens and the anterior cingulate cortex increases with increasing attractiveness. The same study finds that for faces and bodies alike, the medial part of the orbitofrontal cortex responds with greater activity to both very attractive and very unattractive pictures.
Across cultures, what is beautiful is assumed to be good; attractive people are assumed to be more extroverted, popular, and happy. This could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, as, from a young age, attractive people receive more attention that helps them develop these characteristics. In one study, beautiful people were found to be generally happier than less beautiful or plain people, perhaps because these outgoing personality traits are linked to happiness, or perhaps because beauty led to increased economic benefits which partially explained the increased happiness.
Beauty is not subjective according to several research studies. Contrary to popular belief, men and women generally agree on who is and who is not physically attractive, even across different cultures.
What makes someone physically attractive or “beautiful”?
Certain physical features are preferred. High cheekbones, fuller lips, big eyes, and a thin chin are associated with sexiness in women, whereas a big jaw and broad chin are preferred in men. Smooth skin, shiny hair, and facial symmetry are also key aspects of beauty. According to various studies, these provide measures of health, good genes, intelligence, and success.
Beautiful people are actually healthier. Although the link between facial symmetry and real health is weak, there is some evidence that individuals with more distinct facial features, considered less attractive, are more susceptible to disease, parasites, and other illnesses. Specifically, in a study of 17-year-olds, researchers found that facial distinctiveness was linked to poor health i n both men and women, either during childhood or adolescence. Facial averageness, on the other hand, was linked to good health. One theory is that distinctive facial traits are tied to chromosomal disorders. The preference for average faces may have evolved as a way of identifying a mate with good genes. I t’s easier for beautiful people to find mates. Men seek attractive women as mates because good looks signal youth, health, and reproductive fitness.
Although the link between facial symmetry and real health is weak, there is some evidence that individuals with more distinct facial features, considered less attractive, are more susceptible to disease, parasites, and other illnesses. Specifically, in a study of 17-year-olds, n both men and women, either during childhood or adolescence. Facial averageness, on the other hand, was linked to good health. One theory is that distinctive facial traits are tied to chromosomal disorders. The preference for average faces may have evolved as a way of identifying a mate with good genes. I Men seek attractive women as mates because good looks signal youth, health, and reproductive fitness. Beautiful people are more intelligent. University of New Mexico researchers found that general intelligence is positively linked to body symmetry , a characteristic that is indicative of attractive qualities like health, social dominance, and fitness-related biological traits.
University of New Mexico researchers found that a characteristic that is indicative of attractive qualities like health, social dominance, and fitness-related biological traits. Beautiful people are more persuasive. Good-looking people can use their sex appeal to command attention and to get ahead , say in a job interview or when asking for a promotion. Attractive people are more persuasive, in part, because they also possess or develop key personality traits — like intelligence and strong social skills — that make them more effective communicators . Researchers also found that compared to unattractive speakers, attractive speakers were much more fluent talkers.
Good-looking people can , say in a job interview or when asking for a promotion. Attractive people are more persuasive, in part, because they also possess or develop key personality traits — like intelligence and strong social skills — that Researchers also found that compared to unattractive speakers, attractive speakers were much more fluent talkers. Companies with good-looking executives have higher sales. In a study of nearly 300 Dutch advertising agencies, economists found that firms with better-looking executives had higher revenues . Overall productivity, and resulting sales, were greater in companies with more attractive managers, partly because firms with more attractive workers have the competitive advantage when client interactions are involved. Companies that place a premium on hiring very attractive people had on average higher revenues than similar companies which did not. He says the public clearly rewards businesses with the beautiful faces. In The New York Times interview, Hamermesh found that for beautiful people in general, “Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors.”
In a study of nearly 300 Dutch advertising agencies, Overall productivity, and resulting sales, were greater in companies with more attractive managers, partly because firms with more attractive workers have the competitive advantage when client interactions are involved. Companies that place a premium on hiring very attractive people had on average higher revenues than similar companies which did not. He says the public clearly rewards businesses with the beautiful faces. In interview, Hamermesh found that for beautiful people in general, “Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors.” Beautiful people have an advantage in politics. Beautiful people have the upper-hand in politics, according to a study in Finland which found that both male and female political candidates who look better than their competitors are more successful. The study’s authors suggest that voters favor good-looking candidates because they enjoy watching them and they fare better in social situations. Canadian research, meanwhile, is diving deep into how beauty influences politics, finding that good-looking politicians of both sexes enjoy a distinct advantage when wooing uninformed voters. Daniel Stockemer, a political studies professor at the University of Ottawa, published the latest in a series of studies that use images of candidates in 2008 U.S. congressional elections to gauge how physical attraction affects voting preferences. A test group of more than 2,400 Canadian participants — students from University of Ottawa and Western University in London, Ont. — were shown the candidates’ photos without any indicator of the person’s name, party affiliation or qualifications. On average, these “voters” cast 34.8 per cent more ballots in favor of attractive candidates than unattractive ones; 21 per cent more for candidates whose appearances had been rated as neutral.
Beautiful people are perceived as more likeable and trustworthy. Beautiful people are typically treated better by others. In a study from Harvard University, researchers found that wearing makeup, shown to enhance a woman’s attractiveness, boosted people’s perceptions of that subject’s competence, likability, attractiveness, and trustworthiness.
Other Studies That Examined the Impact of Physical Attractiveness
Taller men have an advantage.The British National Child Development study conducted by Daniel Nettle of the Open University shows that the taller men are, the less likely they were to be single or childless, concluding that taller men are deemed more sexually attractive and more likely to find a mate. “In choosing a husband, size matters,” Dr. Nettle argues. A study by researchers at the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina and the University of Pittsburgh found tall people earned considerably more money throughout their careers than shorter workers.
Attractive men have higher IQs. Researchers at the London School of Economics studied 52,000 people in the U.K. and U.S., and their results were conclusive: Attractive men have IQs 13.6 points above average, while attractive women score 11.4 points higher. “Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence,” said the lead researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa. The research was published in the professional journal Intelligence. In what many would regard as a controversial perspective, Kanazawa says, “our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific,” adding, “it is not a prescription for how to great or judge others.”
Researchers at the London School of Economics studied 52,000 people in the U.K. and U.S., and their results were conclusive: Attractive men have IQs 13.6 points above average, while attractive women score 11.4 points higher. “Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence,” said the lead researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa. The research was published in the professional journal Intelligence. In what many would regard as a controversial perspective, Kanazawa says, “our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific,” adding, “it is not a prescription for how to great or judge others.” Face symmetry is seen as attractive. Charles Feng of Stanford University, writing in the Journal of Young Investigators, contends as far back as Plato in ancient Greece, people believed in the ideal proportions of a woman’s face. Today, science has demonstrated that symmetry has been proven to be inherently attractive to the human eye, in terms of the similarity between the left and right sides of the face. Victor Johnson of New Mexico State University used a program called FacePrints, which shows viewers facial images of variable attractiveness in which viewers rate the images as a perfect 10 out of 10 in attractiveness were those images of almost perfect symmetry. A University of Louisville study gave viewers a similar test, which included photos of Asians, Latinos and other ethic groups from 13 different countries. The results were the same, with respect to symmetry. Other research has pointed to men’s preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio (WHRs). Elaine Wong and her team at the University of Wisconsin analyzed photos of 55 male CEOs of large companies and the companies’ return on assets. The study found that companies with CEOs who have a higher facial width relative to facial height perform better financially. The group included former CEOs Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines and Bob Allen of AT&T. Similarly, researchers at the University of Toronto and University of California found that female faces were deemed most attractive if the vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth was 36% of the face’s length and the horizontal distance between the eyes was 46% of the facial width.
First impressions count. A University of British Columbia study found that people identify the personality traits of people who are physically attractive more accurately than others during short encounters. The study showed a positive bias toward attractive people. “If people think Jane is beautiful and she is very organized and somewhat generous, people will see her as more organized and generous than she really is, says lead researcher Jeremy Biesanz. The researchers argue that people are motivated to pay closer attention to beautiful people.
A University of British Columbia study found that people identify the personality traits of people who are physically attractive more accurately than others during short encounters. The study showed a positive bias toward attractive people. “If people think Jane is beautiful and she is very organized and somewhat generous, people will see her as more organized and generous than she really is, says lead researcher Jeremy Biesanz. The researchers argue that people are motivated to pay closer attention to beautiful people. Attractive people make higher salaries. In the workplace, your face really can be your fortune. When everything else is considered, more attractive people tend to earn more money and climb higher on the corporate ladder than people who are considered less pleasing to the eye. One study of MBA graduates found that there was about a 10 to 15% difference in earnings between the most and least attractive people in the group — which added up to about $230,000 over a lifetime . “You are being conferred advantages throughout your life, from your schooldays into the workplace,” says Walker. Economist Daniel Hamermesh, of the University of Texas, Austin, has found nicely put-together men generally have better luck than other men in snagging extra earnings, as well as fetching pretty, high-salaried wives. He led a major study in four countries, including Canada. In his new book, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, Hamermesh cites studies showing handsome men, on average, earn five-per-cent more than their less-attractive counterparts, while good-looking women earn four-per-cent more.
In the workplace, your face really can be your fortune. When everything else is considered, more attractive people tend to earn more money and climb higher on the corporate ladder than people who are considered less pleasing to the eye. One study of MBA graduates found that there was about a 10 to 15% difference in earnings between the most and least attractive people in the group — which “You are being conferred advantages throughout your life, from your schooldays into the workplace,” says Walker. Economist Daniel Hamermesh, of the University of Texas, Austin, has found nicely put-together men generally have better luck than other men in snagging extra earnings, as well as fetching pretty, high-salaried wives. He led a major study in four countries, including Canada. In his new book, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, Hamermesh cites studies showing handsome men, on average, earn five-per-cent more than their less-attractive counterparts, while good-looking women earn four-per-cent more. Beautiful students get better grades and treated better in school. Being the most beautiful or handsome is not as important as being above average, sociologist Rachel Gordon of the University of Illinois-Chicago suggests in a peer-reviewed book from the Society for Research in Child Development,which she co-authored. For both girls and boys, being rated as attractive rather than average in looks — what Gordon calls “standing out from the crowd” — is most important for adolescents, she says. “The attractive do have a GPA advantage (over) the average,” Gordon says. Findings appear in Physical Attractiveness and the Accumulation of Social and Human Capital in Adolescence and Young Adulthood. The advantage often stems from adolescence, when the better-looking get better grades and are more likely to attain a college degree, setting them on a path for economic advantages as well, she says. According to the available evidence, the bubble is a reality. Researchers Slattery Walker and Tonia Frevert found a wealth of research showing that better looking students, at school and university, tend to be judged by teachers as being more competent and intelligent — and that was reflected in the grades they gave them. It appears that the social benefits of good looks begin to accumulate quite early.
Attractive people are treated better in the justice system. The influence of beauty does not stop at the political choices we make. Our judicial process is also susceptible to the influences of body dimension and bone structure.Researchers have found that attractive male criminal defendants are twice as likely to avoid jail time as unattractive miscreants. That’s why trial lawyers dress their clients up.The relative good looks of civil litigants also influence juries, which award twice the damages when plaintiff is better looking than the defendant and half the compensation when the defendant is more physically attractive than the plaintiff.
The influence of beauty does not stop at the political choices we make. Our judicial process is also susceptible to the influences of body dimension and bone structure.Researchers have found that attractive male criminal defendants are twice as likely to avoid jail time as unattractive miscreants. That’s why trial lawyers dress their clients up.The relative good looks of civil litigants also influence juries, which award twice the damages when plaintiff is better looking than the defendant and half the compensation when the defendant is more physically attractive than the plaintiff. Attractive CEOs are presumed to be more competent. A second study by Duke University researchers John Graham, Campbell Harvey and Manju Puri found CEOs are more likely than non-CEOs to be rated as competent looking. The team found that CEOs rated competent just by their appearance tended to have higher incomes.
Daniel Hamermesh, author of Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, argues the belief that attractiveness is subjective is a myth: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Hamermesh writes, “but most beholders view beauty similarly.” Hamermesh also argues that unattractive individuals are “disadvantage,” in the same way those might be physically disabled or lacking intelligence, and therefore are vulnerable to discrimination. So during a recession such as we have been experiencing, attractive people will have a better chance of keeping of finding a job, and securing credit than less attractive people, he contends. This creates legal issues, he says, for less attractive people to sue for compensation for potential loss of earnings.
Hamermesh contends his research shows that attractive people charm interviewers, get hired and promoted faster, are more likely to make more sales and get paid better. You would think that the importance of attractiveness depends on the type of occupation — for example, being an actor, entertainer or broadcaster. But Hamermesh says it applies to all occupations, but more in some than others.
Some would argue that making judgments based on physical attractiveness is not a bad thing, particularly for women. Catherine Hakim, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, and author of the book, Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom, advances a controversial perspective, suggesting professional women should use their “erotic capital” — beauty, sex appeal, charm, dress sense, liveliness, and fitness — to get ahead at work. Hakim is an expert on women’s employment and theories of female status in society. According to her, the “beauty premium” is an important economic factor in our careers, citing a U.S. survey that found good-looking lawyers earn between 10–12% more than less attractive colleagues. “Meritocracies are supposed to champion intelligence, qualifications and experience. But physical and socially attractive deliver substantial benefits in all social interaction — making a person more persuasive, able to secure the co-operation of colleagues, attract customers and sell products,” she writes in a column for a London newspaper.
Not all the research is in agreement
Elliot Anderson, a social psychologist at Stanford University who believes self-fulfilling prophesy — in which a person’s confident self-perception, further perpetuated by healthy feedback from others — plays a role in success.
There are other detractors and critics of the cited research. There is no evidence that these results are actually favored in evolutionary terms, argues Adam Eyre-Walker from the Center for the Study of Evolution at the University of Sussex, contending that it may be instead the influence of culture: “We are taught to look upon tall men and small women as desirable, he says. So our preference for attractive people has been culturally created and is not hard-wired in the human species.”
“When you look at attractive people, your expectations go way up,” says Rick Wilson, the Rice University political scientist who led the study. “When they send less than you expect, you think, ‘Geez, what a snob,’ and you refuse to reward them with as much. We called this a beauty penalty.”
Wilson, who conducted his study on students at three U.S. universities, believes this phenomenon could extend to the political world. But it’s just one example of the suite of trust issues the beautiful-is-good stereotype raises. While past research shows visually appealing job candidates enjoy a clear advantage over equally qualified but less attractive rivals, it also suggests the lookers wind up paying a price after winning their positions. “We expect greater things from these people than we do from others,” notes Patzer. “When they don’t live up to our hopes, we take it out on them.” Women, in particular, have a paradoxical relationship with their best-looking peers: a U.S. study published in 1984 suggests that the better-looking a woman is, the more egocentric other females perceive her to be, even though they find her to be socially desirable. Research done five years ago in Israel found attractive women — though assumed by female peers to be independent and concerned for others — reported their own values to be socially conformist and self-promoting.
Psychologists have also begun to uncover the dark side of being beautiful:
Beautiful people are less likely to be hired (sometimes) . Although beauty can help in the search for a job, it’s not always true. When employers are making a decision about someone of the same sex, they can let their jealousy get the better of them. One recent study has suggested that people who are highly attractive are at a disadvantage in the hiring process when the decision-makers are the same sex. It seems we perceive beautiful people who are the same sex as a threat
. Although beauty can help in the search for a job, it’s not always true. When employers are making a decision about someone of the same sex, they can let their jealousy get the better of them. One recent study has suggested that people who are highly attractive are at a disadvantage in the hiring process when the decision-makers are the same sex. It seems we perceive beautiful people who are the same sex as a threat Beauty limits job choice for females . There’s evidence that female beauty can be a problem in jobs with strong gender stereotypes. For example a beautiful woman may be at a disadvantage when applying for a job which is associated with masculinity, like a prison guard or a mechanical engineer. The same doesn’t seem to be true for attractive men. They can happily apply for jobs as nurses, lingerie salespersons or HR managers without their beauty counting against for or against them.
. that female beauty can be a problem in jobs with strong gender stereotypes. For example a beautiful woman may be at a disadvantage when applying for a job which is associated with masculinity, like a prison guard or a mechanical engineer. The same doesn’t seem to be true for attractive men. They can happily apply for jobs as nurses, lingerie salespersons or HR managers without their beauty counting against for or against them. Lucky to be beautiful . If beautiful people are successful, is it because of their talent, or is it just their looks? After all, people are lucky to be beautiful and we know all the advantages of that. Research finds that when judging their own sex, people are more likely to think beautiful people’s success is due to their beauty, not their talent.
. If beautiful people are successful, is it because of their talent, or is it just their looks? After all, people are lucky to be beautiful and we know all the advantages of that. finds that when judging their own sex, people are more likely to think beautiful people’s success is due to their beauty, not their talent. Social rejection. Although attractive people are generally more popular socially, there’s some evidence that very attractive people can experience social rejection from members of their own sex. People in relationships also protect themselves from beauty by ignoring it. Research shows that when we’re thinking about love we automatically ignore attractive members of the opposite sex, probably to protect our feelings about our long-term partner.
Although attractive people are generally more popular socially, there’s that very attractive people can experience social rejection from members of their own sex. People in relationships also protect themselves from beauty by ignoring it. shows that when we’re thinking about love we automatically ignore attractive members of the opposite sex, probably to protect our feelings about our long-term partner. Gender and jealousy . Most of the research has been done on heterosexuals but it’s possible similar biases operate for gay people. For both gay and straight, the extent of the biases probably depends on how attractive you are (or at least how attractive you perceive yourself to be). People who are themselves attractive probably don’t feel as defensive around other attractive people, so the biases are likely to be weaker for them.
. Most of the research has been done on heterosexuals but it’s possible similar biases operate for gay people. For both gay and straight, the extent of the biases probably depends on how attractive you are (or at least how attractive you perceive yourself to be). People who are themselves attractive probably don’t feel as defensive around other attractive people, so the biases are likely to be weaker for them. Beautiful people don’t get credit for other talents or abilities . Research has shown that when women and men look at gorgeous women’s success, they immediately tend to credit their success to their looks , and not any talents or brains they may possess. Actually, beauty has both positive and negative effects on us. Chances are she’ll be taken more seriously by a male, but not by much. If she’s being scrutinized and considered by other women, then the highly attractive woman is at a big disadvantage. Probably the most difficult thing a beautiful woman has to deal with is social rejection. When it comes to members of her own sex she is often an outcast. As listed by the Top 10 Things t hat make a woman threatening to other women, the #1 threat is beauty. Whether it’s true or not, other women perceive the beauty as a threat to steal their man away. They may not trust their spouse/boyfriend/lover in the presence of such beauty, and simply prefer to reject her instead.
. Research has shown that when women and men look at gorgeous women’s success, they immediately tend to and not any talents or brains they may possess. Actually, beauty has both on us. Chances are she’ll be taken more seriously by a male, but not by much. If she’s being scrutinized and considered by other women, then the highly attractive woman is at a big disadvantage. Probably the most difficult thing a beautiful woman has to deal with is social rejection. When it comes to she is often an outcast. As listed by the hat make a woman threatening to other women, the #1 threat is beauty. Whether it’s true or not, other women perceive the beauty as a threat to steal their man away. They may not trust their spouse/boyfriend/lover in the presence of such beauty, and simply prefer to reject her instead. Physical attractiveness can have a negative effect on income. Researchers have previously found that income is associated with attractiveness, leading to the idea of both a beauty premium and an ugliness penalty. A common explanation is discrimination: employers seek out beautiful people and reject or ignore those harder on the eye. But i n the Journal of Business Psychology , Satoshi Kanazawa and Mary Still have published research aiming to upset this. The biggest takeaway is that being perceived as very unattractive may not incur an income penalty at all. The researchers drew on a longitudinal study of 20,000 young Americans, interviewed at home at age 16 and then on three more occasions up to the age of 29. Overall, there was a positive association between attractiveness and earnings. But there was an anomaly: very unattractive participants kept bucking the trend. Those participants who were rated very unattractive at age 29 were earning significantly more than people judged more attractive than them, including (though to a lesser extent) the very attractive. The correlation between extreme unattractiveness and higher pay remained using median earnings and looking separately at men and women. The authors argue this is hard to square with the usual discrimination explanation for why attractiveness (or lack of it) is associated with income. After all, why would employers be less discriminatory towards the worst-looking people?
Researchers have previously found that income is associated with attractiveness, leading to the idea of both a beauty premium and an ugliness penalty. A common explanation is discrimination: employers seek out beautiful people and reject or ignore those harder on the eye. But i Satoshi Kanazawa and Mary Still have published research aiming to upset this. The biggest takeaway is that being perceived as very unattractive may not incur an income penalty at all. The researchers drew on a longitudinal study of 20,000 young Americans, interviewed at home at age 16 and then on three more occasions up to the age of 29. Overall, there was a positive association between attractiveness and earnings. But there was an anomaly: very unattractive participants kept bucking the trend. Those participants who were rated very unattractive at age 29 were earning significantly more than people judged more attractive than them, including (though to a lesser extent) the very attractive. The correlation between extreme unattractiveness and higher pay remained using median earnings and looking separately at men and women. The authors argue this is hard to square with the usual discrimination explanation for why attractiveness (or lack of it) is associated with income. After all, why would employers be less discriminatory towards the worst-looking people? Beautiful people may have less stable long term relationships. You probably won’t be reaching for your violin too quickly but a series of new studies provide compelling evidence that beauty is a kind of “relationship liability”. While more physically attractive people have a clear advantage when it comes to finding partners, the results suggest that their relationships are more likely to breakdown, at least in part because they take greater interest in alternative partners, especially when dissatisfied in their current relationship.It seems there are complicating factors: jealousy is one, and this new research , published in Personal Relationships, suggests that less stability in their romantic relationships is another. Christine Ma-Kellams at Harvard University and her colleagues began by asking two women to judge the attractiveness of 238 men as pictured in their high school yearbooks aged 17 to 18. The researchers then accessed Ancestry.com to find the men’s marriage and divorce data for the 30 years since their high school photos were taken. The men who were rated as more facially attractive were more likely to be divorced and to have had marriages of shorter length. Next the researchers accessed the divorce and marriage data for the top 20 actors and actresses listed on IMDB.com and the world’s 100 most powerful celebrities according to Forbes (removing duplicates resulted in a list of 130 celebs). The same female raters who judged the men’s attractiveness in the first study also rated the attractiveness of the celebrities. The more attractive celebrities were more likely to be divorced and they tended to be married for shorter lengths of time. A final study conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website was similar but added a couple of twists: some participants were first made to feel attractive by looking at pictures of unattractive people before rating their own attractiveness; also participants in this study rated their satisfaction with their current relationship. All participants then went on to rate the physical appeal of several images of good-looking people of the opposite sex. The results showed that participants made to feel physically attractive tended to rate the good-looking people in the photos as more appealing, but only if they were currently in a relationship with which they were dissatisfied.
You probably won’t be reaching for your violin too quickly but a series of new studies provide that beauty is a kind of “relationship liability”. While more physically attractive people have a clear advantage when it comes to finding partners, the results suggest that their relationships are more likely to breakdown, at least in part because they take greater interest in alternative partners, especially when dissatisfied in their current relationship.It seems there are complicating factors: jealousy is one, and this published in Personal Relationships, suggests that less stability in their romantic relationships is another. Christine Ma-Kellams at Harvard University and her colleagues began by asking two women to judge the attractiveness of 238 men as pictured in their high school yearbooks aged 17 to 18. The researchers then accessed Ancestry.com to find the men’s marriage and divorce data for the 30 years since their high school photos were taken. The men who were rated as more facially attractive were more likely to be divorced and to have had marriages of shorter length. Next the researchers accessed the divorce and marriage data for the top 20 actors and actresses listed on IMDB.com and the world’s 100 most powerful celebrities according to Forbes (removing duplicates resulted in a list of 130 celebs). The same female raters who judged the men’s attractiveness in the first study also rated the attractiveness of the celebrities. The more attractive celebrities were more likely to be divorced and they tended to be married for shorter lengths of time. A final study conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website was similar but added a couple of twists: some participants were first made to feel attractive by looking at pictures of unattractive people before rating their own attractiveness; also participants in this study rated their satisfaction with their current relationship. All participants then went on to rate the physical appeal of several images of good-looking people of the opposite sex. The results showed that participants made to feel physically attractive tended to rate the good-looking people in the photos as more appealing, but only if they were currently in a relationship with which they were dissatisfied. Physical attractiveness can work against both male and female employees at performance review time , according to Professor Comila Shahai-Dennin. Bosses regard good-looking employees as failing because of their own shortcomings, but they see less-attractive workers as victims of circumstance. In addition co-workers often perceive the very attractive as self-centered and even resent them. Finally, those with superstar appearances sometimes rely on those looks instead of putting forth the same effort as average-looking workers.
, according to Professor Comila Shahai-Dennin. Bosses regard good-looking employees as failing because of their own shortcomings, but they see less-attractive workers as victims of circumstance. In addition co-workers often perceive the very attractive as self-centered and even resent them. Finally, those with superstar appearances sometimes rely on those looks instead of putting forth the same effort as average-looking workers. Beautiful people can be lonely. And the bubble of beauty can be a somewhat lonely place. One study in 1975, for instance, found that people tend to move further away from a beautiful woman on the pathway — perhaps as a mark of respect, but still making interaction more distant. “Attractiveness can convey more power over visible space — but that in turn can make others feel they can’t approach that person,” says Frevert. Interestingly, the online dating website OKCupid recently reported that people with the most flawlessly beautiful profile pictures are less likely to find dates than those with quirkier, less perfect pics — perhaps because the prospective dates are less intimidated
Newsweek surveyed 202 corporate hiring managers, from human-resources staff to senior-level vice presidents, as well as 964 members of the public, only to confirm what no qualified (or unqualified) employee wants to admit: from hiring to office politics to promotions, even, looking good is no longer something we can dismiss as frivolous or vain.
Fifty-seven percent of hiring managers told Newsweek that qualified but unattractive candidates are likely to have a harder time landing a job, while more than half advised spending as much time and money on “making sure they look attractive” as on perfecting a résumé. When it comes to women, apparently, flaunting our assets works: 61 percent of managers (the majority of them men) said it would be an advantage for a woman to wear clothing showing off her figure at work. Asked to rank employee attributes in order of importance, meanwhile, managers placed looks above education: of nine character traits, it came in third, below experience (№1) and confidence (№2) but above “where a candidate went to school” (№4). Does that mean you should drop out of Harvard and invest in a nose job? Probably not. But a state school might be just as marketable. “This is the new reality of the job market,” says one New York recruiter, who asked to have her name withheld because she advises job candidates for a living. “It’s better to be average and good- looking than brilliant and unattractive.”
Universities position themselves as places where brains matter. It seems strange then that students at a US university would rate attractive academics to be better teachers. This was the finding of a recent paper from the University of Memphis, which concluded that female academics suffered most from this.
It raises an uncomfortable proposition, that beauty trumps brains even in 21st century workplaces. It would certainly be supported by veteran female broadcasters such as radio presenter Libby Purves, who recently complained about the way the BBC dispenses with women of a certain age.
Another survey, this time in the UK, gave a deeper sense of the problem. It reported that employers were asking female employees to dress “sexier” and wear make-up during video meetings.
Published by law firm Slater and Gordon over the summer, and based on a poll of 2,000 office-based staff working from home during lockdown, the report found that 35% of women had experienced at least one sexist demand from their employer, usually relating to how they dressed for video meetings. Women also reported being asked to wear more makeup, do something to their hair or dress more provocatively. Reasons offered by their bosses were that it would “help win business” and be “pleasing to a client”.
It seems as though the shift to more virtual working has not eradicated what Danielle Parsons, an employment lawyer at Slater and Gordon, described as “archaic behavior” which “has no place in the modern working world”. When employees’ performance is judged on the basis of their physical appearance, potentially shaping their pay and prospects in work, it is known as “lookism.” It’s not illegal, but arguably it should be.
Beauty and the boss
The Slater and Gordon survey findings affirm that many trends described in the book, Aesthetic Labour, are widespread and continuing despite remote working. The book reports over 20 years of research and thinking about this problem. Although the research started by focusing on front line work in hospitality and retail, the same issue has expanded into a diverse range of roles including academics, traffic wardens, recruitment consultants, interpreters, TV news anchors and circus acrobats.
Companies think that paying greater attention to employees’ appearance will make them more competitive, while public sector organizations think it will make them more liked. As a result, they are all becoming ever more prescriptive in telling employees how they should look, dress and talk.
It happens both to men and women, though more often to women, and is often tied in more broadly with sexualizing them at work. For example, while Slater and Gordon found that one-third of men and women had “put up with” comments about their appearance during video calls, women were much likelier to face degrading requests to appear sexier.
When researchers analyzed ten years of employees’ complaints about lookism to the Equal Opportunities Commission in Australia, they found that the proportion from men was rising across sectors but that two-thirds of complaints were still from women. Interestingly, the University of Memphis study found no correlation for male academics between how their looks were perceived and how their performance was rated.
Society’s obsession
Of course, workplaces cannot be divorced from society in general, and within the book we chart the increasing obsession with appearance. This anesthetization of individuals is partly driven by the ever-growing reach and importance of the beauty industry and a huge rise in cosmetic — now increasingly labelled aesthetic — surgery.
These trends are perhaps understandable given that those deemed to be “attractive” benefit from a “beauty premium” whereby they are more likely to get a job, more likely to get better pay and more likely to be promoted. Being deemed unattractive or lacking the right dress sense can be reasons to be denied a job, but they are not illegal.
Some researchers have described an emerging aesthetic economy. Clearly this raises concerns about unfair discrimination, but without the legal protection afforded to, say, disabled people.
Not only has this trend continued during the pandemic, it might even have been compounded. With the first genuine signs of rising unemployment reported this month, research already suggests a 14-fold increase in the number of applicants for some job roles. For example, one restaurant in Manchester had over 1,000 applicants for a receptionist position, while the upmarket pub chain All Bar One reported over 500 applicants for a single bar staff role in Liverpool.
Employers are now clearly split for choice when it comes to filling available positions, and those perceived to be better looking will likely have a better chance. We know from research by the University of Strathclyde’s Tom Baum and his colleagues that the hospitality industry was precarious and exploitative enough even before COVID.
It all suggests that “lookism” is not going away. If we are to avoid the archaic practices of the old normal permeating the new normal, it is time to rethink what we expect from the workplace of the future. One obvious change that could happen is making discrimination on the basis of looks illegal. That would ensure that everyone, regardless of their appearance, has equal opportunity in the world of work to come.
There are various forces to blame for much of this, from an economy that allows pickiness to a plastic-surgery industry that encourages superficial notions of beauty. In reality, it’s a confluence of cultural forces that has left us clutching, desperately, to an ever-evolving beauty ideal. Today’s young workers were reared on the kind of reality TV and pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything is a candidate for upgrade. We’ve watched bodies transformed on Extreme Makeover, faces taken apart and pieced back together on I Want a Famous Face. We compare ourselves with the airbrushed images in advertisements and magazines, and read surveys — like this one — that confirm our worst fears. We are a culture more sexualized than ever, with technology that’s made it easier than ever to “better” ourselves, warping our standards for what’s normal. Plastic surgery used to be for the rich and famous; today we’ve leveled the playing field with cheap boob jobs, tummy tucks, and outpatient procedures you can get on your lunch break. Where that leads us is running to stand still: Taught that good looks are no longer a gift but a ceaseless pursuit.
Whether we like it or not, and whether it’s less a case of cause and effect than correlation, in Western culture, which is highly influenced by media and advertising, research shows beauty matters; it pervades our society and how we choose our leaders, our loved ones and friends, bosses and co-workers. On the other hand, making judgments and decisions about people in terms of relationships, hiring, promotion and compensation solely based upon physical attractiveness — or even being influenced by it — is clearly discriminatory and ultimately harmful. The question remains, what is to be done about it?
Read my latest book: I Know Myself and Neither Do You: Why Charisma, Confidence and Pedigree Won’t Take You Where You Want To Go, available in paperback and ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia and Asia. | https://medium.com/@raybwilliams/do-good-looks-beauty-give-you-an-advantage-a7eff408230d | ['Ray Williams'] | 2020-11-13 16:07:36.488000+00:00 | ['Beauty', 'Discrimination', 'Symmetry', 'Iq', 'Good Looks'] |
Restoring Eroded Text in Plate Inscriptions’ Images using Deep Learning | Abstract — Since the invention of writing, history has been recorded through different inscribed texts such as manuscripts, plate inscriptions, stone inscriptions, etc. However, many of these texts have been destroyed overtime causing a huge information loss. The goal of this work is to apply deep learning techniques such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Natural Language processing (NLP) to predict and input eroded text in images of plate inscriptions. Our contribution is to recover information that will be otherwise lost forever.
I. INTRODUCTION
Many ancient history manuscripts have been degraded, spoiled, stained, torn or lost overtime. In such cases, we often found a large quantity of text and information missing in these manuscripts. In this paper, we will explore different deep learning methods that will help us recover the lost information. Our work is divided in two parts. First, we will use CNN techniques to extract the characters from the images and in the second part, we will use NLP to predict the missing text.
II. DATA
Our Data is comprised of ancient plate inscriptions’ images gathered from a New Jersey museum. As stated above, our work is divided in two parts: in the first part, we build a CNN model to extract the characters from the plates’ images. To achieve this goal, we will use the publicly available datasets ”EMNIST” to train our model. Then, we will use our plate inscriptions images for testing and extraction of characters. In the second part, we use a pre trained NLP model to predict the missing text; we will use both a generated synthetic data and the text data extracted from the plates’ images to test our model. As stated above, the plates’ images contain eroded and/or stained text. Only a portion of the text can be read while the other portion is wiped out as shown in the picture below:
III. PROBLEM DEFINITION
Restoring text is a complex and daunting task. However, it is an important problem as it can help deal with large scale information reconstruction of lost heritage. It is important to recover lost information because it helps us understand better our history. History in return helps societies develop a better understanding of the world which can push more scientific discoveries in the future. Also, many organizations around the world still have their information stored in form of document papers; and these documents have been sometimes physically stained. With the advancing of new technologies, this information can be restored. Text restoration is also an important task in different fields such as speech transcription, autocorrection applications, social media, sentiment analysis, etc.
Our paper is divided in two parts. In the first part, we focus on recognizing and extracting the characters from the plates’ images. In this section we will explore the different and recent works done in the character recognition field of computer vision. We will also explain our data acquisition, and methodology processes. Then we will discuss our experimental results. In the second part, we will concentrate on explaining our methodology as well as the data used to predict the missing text from the characters extracted from the plates’ images.
IV. PARTI
A. Related Work
Text recognition is a challenging task since the images usually suffer from background noise, blur, and/or distortion. Previously, methods for recognizing text have focused more on scanned documents but these methods are very limited as they are unable to efficiently deal with eroded and/or distorted text. In recent years, computer vision researchers have been focusing more on text recognition in natural scenes. Jaderberg [1] was among the first to propose a CNN based model for text recognition to classify words into a pre- defined set of words in the dictionary. The methods first detect each character using binarization or sliding window operation, then the characters are formed together and recognized as a word. More recent works have then followed which addressed Jaderberg’s limitations. They generally do not require a dictionary and treat scene text recognition as a labeling problem where text is represented as a sequence of characters. Zhou [2] proposed a fully convolutional neural network adapted for text detection which is trained to directly predict the existence of text instances and their geometries from full images. This eliminated intermediate steps such as candidate proposal, text region formation and word partition. Similarly, Yin [3] proposed an implicit segmentation method which overcomes the difficulty of character segmentation by sliding window and the underlying CNN character model can be learned end-to-end. Ren [4] also proposed another CNN based model called the attention convolutional neural network. It is composed of an attention feature encoder, a convolutional sequence modeling module and a CTC module. Finally, Borisyuk [5] from Facebook also proposed a system based on Faster-RCNN model. The system is responsible for detecting regions of the image that contain text. After that, a fully-convolutional character-based recognition model is used to process the detected locations and recognize the text they contain.
B. Data Acquisition and Preprocessing
For our training, we use the EMNIST publicly available dataset from the NIST Special Database 19. There are six different splits provided in this dataset but we will only use one which is the ”EMNIST Letters”. This split is comprised of 145,600-character images with 26 balanced classes. Each class represents a letter in the alphabet. For example, class 1 represents the letter ”A”, class 2 represents the letter ”B”, etc. Each image in the dataset is of size 28x28 and grayscale. Sample images from the EMNIST dataset is shown below:
Fig. 1 Different Images from the EMNIST Dataset
We used 100,000 images out of the 145,600 from the dataset for the training and validation.
We also set aside 20,000 images to test our model and predict how well it will do on images it has never seen before. We also test the model on character images from the plates. The testing process and results will be discussed later in another section.
C. Method
To train our data, we build a CNN model similar to the one described in [3]. We build a 15-layer CNN model. Our input shape is 28x28 which is the shape of each image in the EMNIST dataset. The filters of the convolutional layers are of size 3X3 and the stride is fixed to one. The feature map is increased from 50 to 400. Spatial pooling is after every 3 convolutional layers and succeeded with max pooling of stride 2. Each convolutional has a “relu” activation, a “uniform” kernel initializer and a padding “same”. At the end of the model, the feature maps are flattened, followed by 2 fully- connected layers of 900 and 200 units respectfully. Finally, we have a SoftMax layer at the end of the model.
D. Experimental Results
1) Results on EMNIST Dataset: As briefly mentioned above, we set aside 20,000 images from the EMNIST dataset to test our model. These images are first preprocessed before being fed into the model. Using the ”model.evaluate()” function in Keras, we got an accuracy of 95% which proves that our model does well in recognizing letters.
2) Results on plates character images: To predict each character in the plates images, we first built a sliding window-based python program where each window contains a specific character. The original window size is 32x32x3, but it is resized to 28x28 to meet our input shape requirements. We then feed the window content to the model for the letter prediction. Unfortunately, most of the characters could not be recognized by the model and since the model is not doing better than random guess, we decided to not use its results in the second part of our problem. Instead, we used online Optical Character Recognition software to extract the text from the plates images. The histogram below shows the performance of the model on the EMNIST dataset vs plates images:
V. PARTII
A. Methodology
In this second section, we try to predict the missing (eroded) text from the plates inscriptions images. We are using a modification of the BERT model developed by Google AI in 2019 by Devlin [6]. BERT has a natural advantage to recover missing words using their surrounding words as hints. For the purpose of this paper, we made some modifications to the SoftMax layer of the model to improve accuracy.
1) Introduction to BERT model: Since its implementation, BERT has become the new state-of-the-art model in the Natural Language Processing field. It is a pre-trained model, which means it can be applied to multiple language tasks such as document classification and question answering. Thanks to its excellent performance, it has made new records on 11 NLP tasks from the time when it was released. The architecture of BERT is based on a multi-layer bidirectional Transformer encoder as mentioned in Vaswani [7]. In more details, there are two types of BERT model. The first one is BERT Base where the number of Transformer blocks, hidden size, and number of self-attention heads are 12, 768, and 12 respectively. The second one is the BERT Large which includes 24 Transformer blocks, 1024 hidden states and 16 self-attention heads. Also, the word embedding list for BERT has 30,000 tokens, and the maximum length of input sentence should be 512 tokens. BERT has two main unsupervised pre-training tasks. Masked Language Model is the first one and it is used to predict a masked (missing) word in a sentence through deep bi- directional architecture. The second task is Next Sentence Prediction. It is based on two input sentences, and the model will predict whether one sentence is immediately after another one. Depending on the task at hand, BERT’s parameters are updated effectively. For this paper, BertTokenizer, BertModel and BertFor- MaskedLM are imported from pytorch-pretrained-bert. Further modifications would be conducted on the bert-large-uncased extracted from Masked Language Model as explained below.
2) Modification on BERT: BERT is a word-based model. After the two pre-training tasks mentioned above, a list of 30,000 words is generated. Using the Masked Language Model as the downstream task, BERT can predict a masked word (unknown word) in a sentence using the words before and after it as clues (hints). However, BERT does not use any information about the masked word itself as clues to make its prediction. Yet, in many real-world scenarios such as ours, some eroded words are not completely wiped out. We can still extract some information such as few letters left in the word and/or its length. Using this information and combining both the word length and the letters left out as hints in the Masked Language Model, the prediction accuracy can improve. In the Masked Language Model, the last layer is a SoftMax, which will output a predicted word with maximum probabilities. Given some letters in the masked word and its length as screening conditions, if the predicted word with the maximum probability does not satisfy those screening conditions, we will compare the word with the second maximum probability with the hints and verify if the conditions are matched. In an iterative loop, if any word meets our given conditions, that word will be the final output at this masked location in the sentence. Based on this modification on the SoftMax layer, a more accurate prediction is generated.
B. Data
1) Synthetic Data: In order to justify the performance of our modified version of BERT, it is necessary to test it at scale. As the texts on the plates are not domain specific, the 20 newsgroups text dataset in Scikit-Learn is introduced here, which includes 18,000 short news. For each news, two words are masked and substituted as [MASK] sign randomly, and our modified BERT model is used to predict the words at the places of the [MASK] sign. When taking the letter clues into consideration, two or three random letters are used as hints in the SoftMax layer.
For the synthetic data generated from the 20 newsgroups text dataset, the modified BERT is tested in two scales. The first scale has 1,911 masked words (Figure 1), and another one has 5705 masked words (Figure 2). Meanwhile, each test is divided into two parts. When predicting the masked words, the clues about the letters and the word length will be taken into consideration for fifty percent of samples in one part (the columns with the top as “50%” in Figure 1 and Figure 2), and the clues will be used for all the samples in another part (the columns with the top as “100%” in Figure 1 and Figure 2). In terms of letter clue, if too many letters (more than three) in a masked word are known, it is then easy to quickly predict the word. However, if only one letter is used as a clue, the prediction becomes harder. Thus, to make the situation close to reality, a synthetic masked word is only allowed to have two or three letters as a letter clue (hint).
2) Authentic Data: For the sake of applying the modified BERT into a realistic scenario, nine pates images are used. Since the texts on those plates are eroded to some extent, the eroded parts are marked as [MASK] like in the synthetic data. In addition, not all the eroded words are fully distorted, thus some hints can be extracted. In this case, if some letters and the length of eroded words can be recognized, we will be used as the clues for prediction.
C. Experimental Results
1) Synthetic Data: Figure 1 and Figure 2, show the prediction accuracy for 1,911 and 5,705 masked words respectively from the synthetic data using the modified BERT. Firstly, regarding the word length as clues, it is evident that word length could improve prediction accuracy to a large extent. When there is no letter clue applied in the prediction, the accuracy rate only increases from around 40% to 57%. This shows that other than the word length, the letter clue in a masked word plays a more important role. Comparing with employing no letter clue, the accuracy rate climbs to about 67% when two or three letter clues are used. If we combine both the letter clue and the word length, the prediction accuracy is between 70% and 73%, which proves the efficacy of the modified BERT. However, there is no obvious difference when applying two or three letter clues. The reason may be that two letter clues may be just enough and ideal for the model. If with two letter clues, the predicted word is incorrect, adding a third letter clue will not improve the accuracy, thus the model will still not predict the correct word. In addition, the length of the token list in BERT is only about 30,000, which concludes that some uncommon words are not included in the list. In this case, no matter how many letter clues are used, the modified BERT will not be able to predict the correct word if it is among those uncommon words.
2) Authentic Data: After justifying the effectiveness of the modified BERT model on synthetic data, 55 masked words on nine plate images are used in the model to recover the eroded words. All the hints of the eroded words are extracted from the plates based on their situation. When not considering any hint of the masked word, the prediction accuracy is only 45%. However, this result goes up to 67% when considering only the word length as clue. Interestingly, if only the letter clues are used, the result would be 76%. Finally taking both the world length and the letters as hints, the final accuracy rate reaches 81%. Two eroded plates and their prediction results are presented below. For the image plate 1 (Figure 3), it is eroded to some extent, and “represent”, “New”, “Jersey”, “most”, “immigrants” and “immigration” are the eroded words that should be recovered (Figure 4). Comparing the prediction results given by the original BERT and the modified BERT, which takes the word clues into consideration, the modified predicts three more words than the original BERT – “describe”, “America” and “many”.
For the image plate 2 (Figure 5), if using the original BERT and not using any information about the masked word as hint, three words are predicted incorrectly (Figure 6). However, two of these words are predicted correctly after using information about the masked word as clues into the modified BERT. It is therefore apparent that the modified BERT with hints about the masked word is able to improve prediction results significantly.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we first attempted to extract characters from plates’ images. We proposed a text recognition model based on previous work done in the field. The model was trained on a publicly available character dataset. The experiments were done on both the EMNIST dataset images and our plates’ images. However, even though the model achieved a good accuracy on the EMNIST dataset, it could not do better than random guess when tested on plates’ images. For this reason, it was better to use public Optical Character Recognition software online to extract the characters in order to proceed to the second part of our work. In the second and part of the paper, we investigated a modified version of the BERT model that predicts eroded text in our plates’ images. The proposed method achieves superior performance for our task comparing to the original BERT model.
In the future, we will train our CNN model on more challenging datasets. We will add more sophisticated preprocessing methods such as histogram matching and Gaussian noise.
REFERENCES
[1] M. Jaderberg, K. Simonyan, A. Vedaldi, and A. Zisserman. Reading text in the wild with convolutional neural networks. IJCV, 2016.
[2] X. Zhou, C. Yao, H. Wen, Y. Wang, S. Zhou, W. He, and J. Liang. EAST: an efficient and accurate scene text detector. In CVPR, 2017.
[3] F. Yin, Y. Wu, X. Zhang, and C. Liu. Scene text recognition with sliding convolutional character models. CoRR, abs/1709.01727, 2017.
[4] S. Ren, K. He, R. Girshick, and J. Sun: Towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks. TPAMI, 2017.
[5] F. Borisyuk, A. Gordo, V. Sivakumar: Rosetta: Large scale system for text detection and recognition in images. TPAMI, 2019.
[6] J. Devlin, M. Chang, K. Lee, K. Toutanova. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. Google AI Language, 2019.
[7] A. Vaswani, N. Shazeer, N. Parmar, J. Uszkoreit, L. Jones, A. Gomez, L. Kaiser, and I. Polosukhin.. Attention is all you need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pages 6000–6010, 2017. | https://medium.com/@halzouma/restoring-eroded-text-in-plate-inscriptions-images-using-deep-learning-4d0e7b6d53e7 | ['Hassia Alzouma'] | 2020-12-16 03:48:41.393000+00:00 | ['Deeplearing', 'Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Convolutional Network', 'Bert', 'NLP'] |
The Best Code Review Feedback I Ever Received | The Best Code Review Feedback I Ever Received
Keep your changes small
Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
As a junior engineer, I became prolific at making large, sweeping changes. I’d see a problem and then tackle it head-on.
This usually meant that I’d send out gigantic code reviews. I’d touch everything from the UI all the way down to database — in a single change.
I was proud of my ability to keep the whole system in my head like that. I was proud of working “quickly.” I was proud of my audacity, my bravery, my ability to take on big problems.
One day, a senior engineer pulled me aside and gave me the best code review feedback I’ve ever received in my career. He told me to break up my gigantic code reviews into smaller, incremental changes.
My immediate reaction was to be annoyed. I didn’t understand why he wanted me to break up my changes. I had a lot of pride in my ability to think big! Why was he telling me that my work was bad?! Planning out incremental steps would only slow me down!
I didn’t yet understand the many benefits of small, incremental changes. I’m glad I listened to this senior engineer anyway. I’m glad I learned to make smaller, incremental changes.
It’s now a superpower of mine. | https://medium.com/better-programming/the-best-code-review-feedback-i-ever-received-43313a503517 | ['Ceyla Ponders'] | 2019-11-14 15:00:47.024000+00:00 | ['Deployment', 'Software Development', 'Bugs', 'Programming', 'Code Review'] |
2020 ‧ Comedy/Drama ‧ 1h 36m (Review) | Half Brothers
PG-13 | 2020 ‧ Comedy/Drama ‧ 1h 36m
(Review)
“Half Brothers” is half amazing
So, I just finished this film last night and I loved the message it was trying to send, half Brothers is a road trip\Bromance movie that sends two brothers on a road trip tracing the path their father took as an immigrant from Mexico to learn about his story and hardships in a new country.
When the Economy crashes Flavio (Juan Pablo Espinosa), flees to America and never returns, leaving his son to grow up without a father. The now grown-up Renato (Luis Gerardo Méndez) gets a call from his dying father’s new wife and it brings his rage to the surface, and when he goes to America to say his goodbyes, he instead learns he has a half brother, Asher (Connor Del Rio), and now has to solve his father’s riddle to find out the truth behind his life’s story.
While the message of the film is beautiful, unfortunately, that message is tarnished by the unbalanced story, while the film is funny, even hilarious at times, it takes away from the main message this film is trying to send. I wish we could have just seen Flavio’s (Juan Pablo Espinosa) story I feel like the Two brothers going on a road trip was a creative but worse way of telling their father’s story, but even with all of that said I would still recommend this movie to my family and friends who like comedy and Drama. Even though this film does not fully come across as a Drama there are still moments that tug the heartstrings!
⭐️⭐️⭐️➕ | https://medium.com/@towe.blake01/half-brothers-pg-13-2020-comedy-drama-1h-36m-review-94c944ca40fe | ["Blake'S Movie Reviews"] | 2020-12-26 20:46:56.124000+00:00 | ['Review', 'Film', 'Movie Review', 'Movies', 'Halfbrothers'] |
Creating Neuromorphic Designs in SwiftUI | Neuromorphic Design in SwiftUI
Color sets
To your project’s assets folder, add three new color sets by clicking the + sign. Below, we are going to add colors for both dark and light mode:
Make your first color set and name it mainColor . This color set is for the background and UI elements. The hex color value for the light color is #EFEEEE and #1F242F for the dark color.
The second color set is for the top-left shadow. The hex color value for the light color is #FFFFFF and #292D38 for the dark color.
The last color set is going to be for the bottom-right shadow. The light color hue is #D1CDC7 and the dark color is #14151C.
SwiftUI code
Below, I created a container for our neuromorphic design by using ViewBuilder . You can see in the code how and where to use the colors. You can adjust the shadow radius to your liking:
We can test the design with the simple code below: | https://medium.com/better-programming/creating-neuromorphic-designs-in-swiftui-290c01331738 | [] | 2020-12-22 19:26:24.391000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Swiftui', 'Neuromorphic', 'iOS', 'Swift'] |
WEYU Earn: Earn Crypto, NFTs and some major prizes | Now! Let’s take a closer look at how to get started on WEYU Earn.
#1 Get a BSC wallet and a Sollana wallet
The first step is to get a wallet. Why do you need both, you ask? Well you don’t. Ether one will do to register and gain access to the WEYU Earn platform. However, many of the prizes and redeemable items will be associated with both blockchains, and therefore, connecting both wallets is a great idea — trust! You can always add a second wallet after registering initially with just one.
We highly suggest that you use Metamask for your BSC connection and Phantom with Sollana… Again, trust us on this one.
Get Metamask HERE
Get Phantom HERE
#2 Register for WEYU Earn
There are 3 simple steps to register for WEYU Earn
a) Connect Wallet
Go to the WEYU Earn homepage and connect ether your BSC wallet or your Sollana wallet.
b) Link Telegram
Telegram will be one of the main channels of communication when it comes to the WEYU Earn community. Once your Telegram account is linked, it will prompt the WEYU Telegram Bot, but….more on that later.
c) Email Address
Enter your email as a backup to stay notified on general updates and any additional winnings that you may have earned.
#3 Start Earning WEYU Points!
Once you are registered, you can immediately start earning points! WEYU Points are awarded every time you complete a simple task or refer a friend to WEYU Earn.You will be able to see all of your earned points on your profile page. Your WEYU Earn Telegram bot will also keep you up to date on your point status and other WEYU Earn news. | https://medium.com/@weyu-io/weyu-earn-earn-crypto-nfts-and-some-major-prizes-e2f61cf67b9b | [] | 2021-12-30 16:49:23.402000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Nft Marketplace', 'Nft Collectibles', 'Future Of Work', 'Nft'] |
How Planning Out Every Minute of My Day has Increased my Productivity | This might sound crazy, but at 7 years old, I started to create hourly schedules and task planners. I don’t know what compelled this type of planning, but for as long as I can remember, I have been type-A in the sense that having no plan stresses me out. This includes traveling plans even for “relaxing” vacations, plans for simple hangouts with friends, plans to finish group assignments, etc.
Now, what type of plans did a 7-year-old need to write down? I vividly remember creating schedules that allotted time to practice piano, clean my room, draw, watch tv, play basketball, read the bible, read other books, and even scheduling time to tell my mom about my day. These were some pretty well thought out schedules; the only issue was I rarely followed through on them.
For better or for worse, I am type B in most other areas of life. This means that I never got too stressed if I didn’t complete the plan or if plans needed to change throughout the day; I was satisfied with just having a general outline to follow.
I abandoned this practice in middle school where I had too much free time and not enough drive (I got home from middle school at 1:45 pm, had approximately 1 hour of homework a day, and participated in absolutely no after school activities other than engaging in 3 way prank calls, updating my AIM away message, and reranking my top friends on myspace based on whoever decided to join my prank call shenanigans that day).
I also didn’t see much use for it in high school, where I didn’t have enough hours in the day to waste any moments planning for those hours ( I got home from high school at about 7 pm after a long day of AP classes, club activities, and track practice, and had to fit in 16 hours of homework, 8 hours of sleep, and 4 hours of studying for standardized tests in the 12 hours available to me before school started again).
By college, I recalled the benefits of this type of scheduling and was the appropriate amount of busy to test out this method again.Unfortunately, I was surrounded by a ton of type-A high achievers, who made it rather apparent that creating a plan and failing to finish everything on this plan was equivalent to having no plan at all. I got frustrated with my inability to plan appropriately, and frustration for me leads to less effort. Needles to say, I once again abandoned the tool that had been so fun for me as a kid.
This quarantine induced WFH/social isolation situation has allowed me to figure out my most optimal routine. It might have something to do with the fact that I’m back in my childhood home, but I have once again returned to this method of scheduling out my day and have never felt so productive or content with any other system. Here’s what I do, and here’s why it has lead to both an actual increase in my daily accomplishments, and an increase in how accomplished I feel.
My big secret is: I write down what I plan to do with each minute of the day. I don’t even use any fancy calendar or app for this, although I’m sure that some exist. I simply open up the notes app on my laptop or phone and write down what I think I should do with all 24 hours available to me.
A day’s plan might look like this:
7- 7:30: Yoga,meditation,etc
7:30–8:30: Coding Practce
8:30- 12: Work — weekly report + look into traffic
12–2: Workout and Shower and Lunch Break
2–3: Work — prep for meeting
3–4: Writing — work on blog post
4–5: Work — meeting & prep for tomorrow’s touchbase
5–6: Edit Resume
6–7: Work? If necessary
7–7:45 — Tutoring
7:45 -8:30: Eat dinner
8:30–9:30- read, chill,etc.
Or sometimes more like this:
8–9:30: Run+ Workout, Shower, etc.
9:30–10: Emails
10–10:45: Writing
10:45–11:30: Work on Canva Post
11:30–12:30: Target & Post office Run
12:30–1:30: Make lunch, eat chill a bit
1:30–3: Work on social Media posts
3–3:30: Call Restaurants
3:30–4: Clean Up
4–5: Read a Bit
5–6: Walk + then yoga
6–8: Cook Dinner, Eat, Chill
8–9:30: Work on tomorrow’s Canva Post
As you can see, I allocate time for various work activities, time to run errands, time to exercise, and even time for relaxing activities.
How do I come up with these plans? Understanding how you feel during different parts of the day is crucial to this planning system’s success. Before you begin planning this way, track your feelings (tired, motivated, creative, lazy) at different parts of the day, and notice how these feelings impact whatever you are working on.
For example, in the morning, I know that my mind is the sharpest — so I’ll always attempt to do something before lunch that needs a lot of brainpower. On the flip side, by 7 pm, you couldn’t pay me to write or workout, so I make sure to leave those hours for tasks that require a bit less effort. I also know that after a workout, I’ll be feeling a little lazy — so I always add in a buffer period before I’ll get back to my optimal state.
So why has it been so effective? The first major reason that this plan has worked so well it’s so simple to stick to! As I said earlier, having no plan stresses me out and yet every time I’ve tried to use to-do-lists or schedule builders in the past I’ve given up. AKA I’ve lived a life full of stress and did not get nearly as many things done as I do now. This planning system has been so easy to stick to because I’ve recognized the patterns in my preferences. It’s so much easier to stick to a plan that is already optimized for how you’d like to spend your day.
The second reason this plan has been so effective is because it’s based upon hours spent rather than tasks completed. Building a plan this way limits feelings of frustration when tasks inevitably aren’t completed as quickly as you expected. I no longer put exact expectations upon completing assignments because so many things take either a longer or a shorter amount of time than I expect. This is because of the planning fallacy. We are inherently pretty bad at estimating how long it will take to complete something so instead I just focus on how many hours I’m putting in. This leads to considerably less frustration and increased sentiments of accomplishment, which keeps me motivated regardless of my exact output.
The last reason that this plan has worked so well for me is that I’ve let myself be type B about it. Again, I don’t know if it’s the influence of living in my childhood home, but I’m perfectly okay with not completing all these plans and have even come to expect this! If an errand takes an entire hour longer than expected — that’s perfectly fine. I’ll look at the rest of my schedule and decide what I can either spend less time on or what can be moved to the next day without negatively impacting my weekly goals. Each day, I build in more work than I need to actually complete or even hope to achieve for the day. This way, even if I only spend about 75% of the time allotted according to plan — I’ll have done everything I need to do. I end each day having accomplished all my goals and rarely have that burnout feeling like I used to.
Wondering whether this type of planning can work for strict deadlines?
I am pleased to tell you that it definitely can, with one little caveat. YOU MUST STOP (or significantly limit) PROCRASTINATION. Strict deadlines rarely sneak up on you in most industries (I feel for anyone who works somewhere with constant quick turnarounds- this may not be the best plan for you). Instead, you usually know when something is due and can schedule a time to work on it hours, days, or weeks in advance. Understanding when you’ll be most motivated to work on a task is even more important when it comes to a project with a deadline. Don’t schedule time to work on it late at night when you have a tendency to get distracted. Figure out when you’re most likely to actually complete the assignment and plan accordingly.
And there you have it — a straightforward and effective way to be more productive. Give this a try, and let me know if you are a fellow type A/type B/routine loving weirdo! | https://medium.com/@lidowu7/how-planning-out-every-minute-of-my-day-has-increased-my-productivity-4b9e36fa522 | ['Lola Idowu'] | 2020-12-23 00:40:59.104000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Habits', 'Planning', 'Life', 'Productivity'] |
Meet the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Cléo de Mérode | Meet the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Cléo de Mérode
Portrait of Cléo de Mérode (Source: Public domain, color by Klimbim)
She was the most famous woman in the world. Everyone knew her face. Millions scanned the newspapers for tidbits of information about her. Millions more purchased postcards, playing cards, and other items bearing her likeness. She was featured in print advertisements and on posters everywhere: the great beauty of the Belle Époque.
Triple-view postcard featuring Cléo de Mérode (Source: Public Domain)
Dozens of painters, sculptors, photographers, sketch artists, and cartoonists labored to capture her image. Even scandal did not diminish her popularity. It only increased it. But today, hardly anyone knows her name. Who was Cléo de Mérode? Here is her story.
A child prodigy and teen trend-setter
Cléo as a child (Source: Public Domain)
Cléopâtre-Diane de Mérode (1875–1966) was born in Paris, France, into an aristocratic and artistic family. Her parents, Viennese Baroness Vincentia Maria Cäcilia Catharina de Mérode and Austrian judge Theodor Christomannos were not married and estranged. Consequently, the first time Cléo met her father, she was a young adult.
When she was eight, Cléo’s mother enrolled her in ballet classes. The child made her professional debut as a dancer at the Paris Opéra when she was 11. At 16, she was already turning heads with her signature hairstyle, the chignon.
“The Stockholm telephone authorities are finding fault now with the way in which (switchboard operators) do their hair. It appears that of late the Swedish lassies …have adopted the mode of coiffure first initiated by the French dancer Cleo de Merode, in which the hair is drawn over the ears. The subscribers have since found a falling off in the hearing powers of the operators, as the result of which complaints of inefficiency in the service have been made.” — The American telephone journal, Volume 8, 1903
Cléo’s signature hairstyle (Source: Public Domain)
The hairstyle became so popular that it nearly inspired a strike by Swedish telephone operators. Ordered by management to stop wearing their hair over their ears like Cléo de Mérode, they flatly refused to comply.
How the Swedes resolved the dispute is unknown, but the incident shows the dancer’s powerful influence on fashion and beauty trends.
When she wasn’t dancing, beginning in her teen years, Cléo de Mérode was modeling for some of the greatest artists of the day. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, famous for his paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers, did her portrait as did Edgar Degas.
Portrait by Giovanni Boldini, 1901 (Source: Public Domain)
Other painters who captured her likeness include Manuel Benedito, Giovanni Boldini, Georges Clairin, François Flameng, Henri Gervex, Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Alfredo Müller, Einar Nerman, József Rippl-Rónai, and Carlos Vázquez Úbeda.
She also posed for sculptors Eugène-Denis Arrondelle, Mariano Benlliure, Alexandre Falguière (twice), and Ernst Seger.
The dancer is said to be the model for Alphonse Mucha’s stunning series of Art Nouveau busts La Nature, although this is unsubstantiated.
You can see the wax mask of her by Georges Despret at the Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum in Brussels.
Cléo de Mérode is depicted in countless newspaper and magazine illustrations, cartoons, and postcards. Georges Goursat drew several caricatures of her during the 1900s.
Photos by Nadar (Source: Public Domain)
But nothing had a greater impact on Cléo de Mérode’s fame than her photographs. Her image was easily mass-produced and distributed worldwide. A postcard bearing her likeness, sent from Uruguay in 1904, recently sold on eBay.
Some of the more prominent photographers who photographed the beauty included Nadar and his son Paul Nadar, Léopold-Émile Reutlinger, and his son Jean Reutlinger, Henri Manuel, Charles Ogerau, and Otto Sarony.
These images, usually on postcards, are still popular with collectors. Millions of these were produced and sold each year throughout her heyday and beyond. People were crazy for Cléo. Anything with her name or picture on it, be it underwear or playing cards, sold like hotcakes.
Gossip Girl of La Belle Époque
Promotional photo showing deMérode’s left ear (Source: Public Domain)
Beauty and fame invariably attract envy and conjecture. One of the first rumors circulated about Cléo was that she used her famous hairstyle, which completely covered her ears, to conceal that she was missing either one or both of them.
There’s no reason to believe the missing ear rumor is true, although, in nearly every photo of her to be found, her ears aren’t visible, nor does she appear to be wearing earrings. Some versions of Mucha’s bust La Nature are equipped with earrings, but the ear lobe isn’t depicted. Obviously, nothing other than a photograph would prove it one way or another, and I could only find one, confirming that her left ear was intact.
Cartoon By Auguste Roubille depicting Léopold II and Cléo de Mérode (Source: Public Domain)
The next rumor about de Mérode was much more serious. It was spread beginning in the fall of 1895, implying that 20-year-old Cléo was having an affair with 60-year-old King Leopold II of Belgium. The age difference aside, Leopold was a world-class womanizer, married, and the father of four children. The press began revering to the pair as “Cléopold.”
Initially, the gossip hurt de Mérode’s reputation somewhat. It didn’t help when in 1899, Leopold took 16-year-old French prostitute Caroline Lacroix as his mistress and proceeded to father two children by her.
This gave the rumor mongers additional clout in deeming Cléo de Mérode a courtesan in service to the king.
Gossip columnists and political cartoonists had a field day with the Cléopold scenario, and the rumor persisted for nearly 10 years. Cléo denied any involvement with Leopold, and evidence suggests she was telling the truth. An article in the June 4, 1911, edition of the New York Times declared no foundation to the rumor. The dancer did not, however, deny the allegation too vigorously. After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
(Cléo de Mérode and the Falguière sculpture depicted in a painting by Carlos Vázquez Úbeda “Cléo de Mérode at the Salon” (Source: Public Domain)
Not long after the Cléopold rumor began, de Mérode caused another sensation over the sculpture La Danseuse that Alexandre Falguièr exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in the spring of 1896.
Falguièr said that he based the life-sized marble nude on a full-body plaster cast of Cléo de Mérode. The critical reception for La Danseuse was not good.
In her article “The corset, the bicycle and the Hottentot: Alexandre Falguière’s The Dancer and Cléo de Mérode’s modern, feminine body” academic Susan Waller writes that art critics reacted with unusual vehemence to the artwork, labeling it a “modern” body and denouncing it as “deformed” or “damaged.”
Perhaps the bad reviews motivated de Mérode to strenuously deny having posed for the body, only the face. Whether or not she was telling the truth, she took advantage of the association by using a facsimile of the statue in one of her later performances.
“Her beauty is not only remarkable, judged by any standpoint, but it is of a type very different from that which is ordinarily offered to the eye of the pleasure-loving public… A suggestion of chastity, of melancholy, or even of piety in the object of (the Parisian’s)carnal admiration revives his jaded senses. Cleo de Merode pleases this refined Parisian taste.” — from the New York newspaper the Journal, May 17, 1896
The furor over the statue inspired Carlos Vasquez y Obeda to paint Cléo de Mérode au Salon, which is currently in a private collection. It shows Cléo and another woman at the Salon exhibition inspecting the statue. La Danseuse can be seen at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
International sensation
Cléo de Mérode
(Source: The Sketch — August 31st, 1910)
Thanks to her image's wide distribution, the world at large was anxious to experience Cléo de Mérode in the flesh. She toured Europe, where she was generally well-received, except for her appearance at the Alhambra in London in 1902.
In an interview with the British illustrated weekly journal The Sketch, she is quoted as saying, “I dance the ancient dances, the Louis XIII, the Louis XV, the gavot, the pavan, the minuet, and I led at Royan Louis Ganne’s ballet of ‘Phryne.’ I am gowned by a real dressmaker. I know music very well and play the piano as little as possible. I know how to arrange a basket of fruit, place flowers in a jardiniere, and touch a book without spoiling it. I have read the poets and the historians, and I do not write. I wear stockings that are as fine as a woven mist. What other accomplishments shall I speak of?”
F.A. von Kaulbach. Portrait of Cleo de Merode, 1904
The Sketch also provided its readers with de Mérode’s measurements so they could compare them with what the magazine deemed to be those of the Perfect Woman entitled, “Attribute: Cleo de Merode (Perfect Woman)”
(An hourglass figure was considered the standard of beauty at that time):
“Weight: 121 1/4 lbs. (140 lbs.)
Height: 5 ft. 6 in. (5 ft. 6 in.)
Waist: 19 ins. (21 in.)
Neck: 4 in. (4 in.)
Calf: 4 3/4 in. (4 3/4 in.)
Hips: 2 3/4 in. (13 in.)
Shoulders: 13 in. (14 in.)”
The dancer’s first appearance in New York City, in 1897, was a disappointment. Her month-long booking at Koster and Bial’s music hall appearance failed to charm the critics. They were less than complimentary, to put it mildly.
“Cléo de Mérode can go back to her inconspicuous position among the ballet dancers at the Paris Opéra, crowned with the distinction of having made the most successful failure of the season. Critics and public joined in a chorus of disappointment after her first appearance at Koster & Bial’s, and yet she has set a new fashion in personal adornment, crowds mark her progress on the street, and large audiences assemble to see her.” — theater critic for Munsey’s Magazine
The bad reviews didn’t worry Cléo. She was making 40 times her salary at the Paris Opéra. Her response to reports of her critical failure in New York included some criticism of her own.
Portrait by Paul Nadar (Source: Public Domain
“The papers stated that I was a failure, but they lied. I pleased the Americans vastly. The papers pretended that I danced badly, as if Americans could tell. They know nothing about dancing and don’t like ballets.” — Cléo de Mérode
At the height of her fame in France, de Mérode made what was considered to be a risky decision for a “serious artiste.” She agreed to appear at the notorious Folies Bergère cabaret music hall. Some feared it would end her career, but those fears were unfounded. Instead, it garnered her a whole new host of fans. She continued to enjoy a large measure of notoriety until World War I, during which time she entertained wounded soldiers, dancing well into her forties.
The curtain comes down
Poster for Peacock Alley (Source: Public Domain)
In her later years, de Mérode retired to the seaside, where she taught dance and crafted figurines as a hobby. She was also involved in two lawsuits.
In 1923 she unsuccessfully sued the owners of the film Peacock Alley, one of the biggest hits of 1922. The dancer claimed the film’s characters and plotline damaged her reputation. In it, the main character “Cleo of Paris” gives birth to an illegitimate child. The court did not find sufficient parallels to de Mérode’s life to rule in her favor.
(Source: raptisrarebooks.com)
In 1950, however, she successfully sued Simone de Beauvoir for libel. In her book The Second Sex, Beauvoir described de Mérode as a prostitute who came from peasant stock and further claimed she had assumed an aristocratic-sounding stage name to further her career.
Although she had asked for five million francs in damages, the judge only awarded de Mérode one franc because she never properly refuted the rumors previously and had used them to garner publicity. He also ordered de Beauvoir to delete the section about de Mérode in subsequent editions of her book.
Collage of photos by Cecil Beaton (Source: Vogue magazine, fair use)
Cléo de Mérode set the record straight in her autobiography, Le Ballet de ma vie (The Dance of My Life), which was published in 1955.
One of de Mérode’s last interviews was in 1964, for Vogue magazine. Cecil Beaton visited her at her Paris apartment. His photographs and interview of her were featured in the magazine’s February 15, 1964 issue.
Beaton wrote that, as he left, she asked him to destroy any unflattering photos.
Cléo de Mérode never married nor had any children. In her autobiography, she writes that she was only involved with two men in her life: a French aristocrat who died of typhoid fever in 1904 and, from 1906 to 1919, Spanish sculptor Luis de Périnat.
The de Merode tomb in Pere La Chaise Cemetery, Paris
On October 17, 1966, Cléo de Mérode died in the same Paris apartment at 15 Rue de Téhéran where she gave her Vogue interview.
She is interred at the famous Paris cemetery Père Lachaise alongside her mother. Adorning the tomb is a statue of Cléo in mourning sculpted by her former lover Luis de Périnat. | https://historyofyesterday.com/meet-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-the-world-cl%C3%A9o-de-m%C3%A9rode-bdeb5c3dcae | ['Denise Shelton'] | 2021-06-01 20:49:22.171000+00:00 | ['La Belle Époque', 'History', 'Beauty', 'Dance', 'Celebrity'] |
The true midrange speaker driver | Is there any way of standardizing what makes a midrange driver really great? Do we even know what it is?
I have made my 10 commandments of a true midrange!
What matters and why do certain seemingly unimportant factors play an important role?
Read more about it below!
The midrange driver in a loudspeaker carries most of the information from the human voice and for almost all tonal instruments. It has to deal with both tones and transients at a huge range of levels. Its role is so important that even playing without a tweeter and a woofer, a great midrange would still sound good. Therefore we should really care about its qualities. This is the driver that can really make or break a loudspeaker.
There are quite a few loudspeaker driver manufacturers out there that offer something labeled as a midrange driver. Many of these use technologies that are obviously there to improve the drivers ability to perform midrange as apposed to a woofer. There are also lots of full range drivers out there, obviously optimized for full frequency range performance. Many argue that those are often better midrange drivers than the typical midrange driver. So why don’t the midrange drivers borrow technology from full range drivers? And what would the disadvantages of this be?
Historically there are a few quite remarkable midrange drivers. I would like to use the famous Focal 7k2 as a benchmark for this article to make things a bit more hands on and easy to understand. This is a driver that went out of production many years ago, and a predecessor really does not exist. Just to put things into perspective, please note that this document has no reference to a web page or an e-mail address. It is a really old driver.
Anyway, this is, as you can see, a kevlar driver. That is not a hugely popular material today. It was much more popular in the 90’s. And this illustrates a bit of where I am going with this, because frequency response and asthetics tends to be everything today, and if it is also underhang, and has a cone material with the right marketing word in its name, then you are all good to go. So what else is there to notice about this driver?
The motor
A surprisingly often overlooked part of the driver is its motor. I remember people were bragging about large magnets as a measure of quality of a driver. They might have been closer to the truth than they knew. The Focal has a 134 mm magnet, a pretty huge magnet for a 7 inch driver, especially for a midrange. As you can also see, it has a sensitivity of 95,2dB which is outstanding for an 8 ohm driver of this size. So obviously, high sensitivity has been a target for the team who made this. The inductance is fairly low for a driver with a 40mm coil without shorting rings. It is safe to assume that this is not very far from well saturated, and that really makes a difference. I do not know if this was even a goal, but still they seem to have achieved it. If they had added extensive copper rings as well, the motor performance could have been pretty outstanding by today’s standard.
The coil length is 13mm so it is fairly long for a midrange, but only a single layer, which makes it light. And this is really a key factor on a midrange driver, keeping the components attached to the cone as lights as humanly possible. This really rules out redesigning a woofer to make it into a midrange. If they had swapped the copper wire for aluminium, it would have been even better. They would have needed a marginally wider winding for the same force factor, but the reduced mass means they would not have needed the same force factor for an even higher efficiency. This driver also maybe has even more excursion capacity than you need from a midrange driver. It depends on where you want to cross it, but really optimizing for midrange often means ruling out crossing it over at 100Hz. And since its Fs is around 100Hz, the dominant oposing factor to force factor will be suspension and cabinet, rather than mass, for the lowest octave when crossed over that low.
Damping
One part of the driver that has received lots of attention the later years is the voice coil former. Everyone is moving to titanium, as it is fairly fast (in terms of speed of sound), it is robust, and it is a poor conductor. That means it has many of the same properties as Kapton or polyimide which is also used in the Focal driver. Non conductive bobbins means eddy currents are not generated in the bobbin as it moves in the magnetic field. This leads to higher Qms and lower Rms, also known as mechanical loss. Back in the days, woofers were often offered with aluminium voice coil former, and some were offered with a Kapton option. These versions did typically have higher Qms, lower Rms, slightly rougher frequency response, and still many people think they had far superior midrange performance. This is likely as the difference in frequency response between the aluminium and Kapton bobbins was not caused by removing resonances, just by masking them in the time domain by adding mechanical loss. So the smoother frequency response did not actually translate to smoother sound like one could be lead to believe. This could also be seen on the impedance curve, if it was honestly and precisely plotted.
Look carefully at the impedance curve
Looking at the Focal again, it is easy to see the peak of the fundamental resonance. If we look closely, we can also see a tiny raise around 1–1,5kHz. This peak corresponds to a rise in the frequency response, also very subtile, in the same range. It is likely that this is related to the suspension of the driver. On woofers this is typically far more prominent than we see here. Using a Kapton coil former, an copper voice coil and a rubber surround would probably not have made this possible. But the Focal has cloth surround. More specific, it is a short stroke narrow surround weighing almost nothing. We can see from both the smooth impedance and the high Qms that this is also a very low loss suspension.
In this same time period, some manufacturers chose to use high loss surround and aluminium voice coil former in combination with polypropylene cones. These drivers had extremely low Qms and they behaved almost like a mechanical resistor. In theory this looks like a great idea, but there are two big problems with this. One is that any problem will be so well hidden that it is hard to find, and therefore also just as hard to solve. The other problem is that mechanical resistors doe not return only heat, but translates a lot of energy back as non linear and non harmonic distortion. A neat example of this is the hysteresis loops of magnetic materials as described in Purifi Audio’s brilliant article here: https://purifi-audio.com/2020/04/28/this-thing-we-have-about-hysteresis-distortion/
Heat
We often think more about heat when dealing with woofers as they often seem to require more power to be driven to their extremes. However, a midrange is always used together with woofers, and has to follow them all the way. Many midranges are also crossed over below the baffel step, meaning they have to deliver 6dB more, or handle 4 times the power of a tweeter with the same efficiency for the same sound pressure. Typical energy distribution in musical content peaks around 100Hz, and can be as much as 10dB lower at 1kHz, meaning that a midrange that is crossed over low may have to handle more than 40 times the power of the tweeter. This could translate to some serious heat.
The Focal uses a 40mm coil, and its dimensions tells us a lot about how it might cope with power. We can compare it to the Morel TSCM634 wich is a driver about the same size, but with a huge 75mm voice coil. As we increase the size of a driver, the increased diameter translates to a squared increase in surface are. For the voice coil, however, this is a linear relationship, so an 80mm voice coil is only has twice the surface area of a 40mm voice coil. This means the Morel is not that much bigger. The Morel has a 5,5mm winding length, while the Focal has 13mm, so more than twice that of the Morel. This means that in total, they have about the same surface area to radiate heat.
But the sensitivity of the Focal is 6dB more than that of the Morel. And the Morel is a 4 ohm driver, meaning the Morel has to deal with 8 times as much power for the same SPL as the Focal. So even if the Morel has some shorting rings that might help it a bit, the Focal is likely to stay far cooler. And when the coil starts heating up, the sensitivity of the driver drops resulting in a slow modulation of the signal as heat reacts rather slowly.
Under hung
Another difference between the two is that the Morel has a coil that is shorter than the gap, while the Focal has one that is longer than its gap. It has been suggested that under hung designs (short coil in tall gap) are superior, but evidence tells us that this is far from a universal truth. For a motor that is not saturated, under hung designs struggle with flux escaping to other parts of the gap where there is no force field from the coil. An under hung design also means a short coil that can sometimes have extremely low power handling. On the other hand, an under hung design allows for a very short and therefore lightweight coil. A short coil can use thinner wire, gaining even more in the mass savings department. So the question should probably rather be if the motor is or can be saturated, and if the driver can achieve a sufficiently high efficiency and through that still easilt handle the heat of anything we throw at it, and a bit more, without noticeable power compression.
Inductance
In my article about inductance, I cover the most important bits of this. You can read it here:
https://jrkpost.medium.com/the-broken-transients-94b21e7282da
This is an important basic parameter for midrange drivers and lots of information can be read from how the designer has worked with inductance in the driver. My opinion is that a midrange should have low inductance, added shorting rings to further reduce inductance, and a saturated motor.
The cone
Some manufacturers do struggle to get certain cone materials to work in certain frames. Not that they do not fit, but they can not get them to perform as well as with other frames. This is not at all due to the frame. It is allways a question of what you glue directly to the cone. The specific frame might dictate the use of a different surround that is strengthened and optimized for bass applications. It we look at the dimensions and materials of the surround, and the size, material and number of layers of the coil, we get some good information about what the cone needs to carry around. This lets us know a great deal about how long it will take for it to exit all of its energy.
Imagine a fishing pole. We hold it in our hand, and wipes it around a bit. We stop the motion, and the remaining motion of the pole stops after a short time. We then add a weight to the far end of the pole to mimic a heavy suspension. We make the same motion, and we notice that the pole takes far more time to settle with this added mass. If we analyze the modal frequencies of the pole we will see that they actually depend significantly on the mass we have in both ends. Reducing the mass of the surround has a huge impact but reducing the mass of the coil also has a pretty noticable impact, and often far more can be done to the coil if it is really heavy to begin with. This is also where the amplifier “grabs” the cone, but the drivers resistance and any passive crossover will together produce a lowered mechanical damping factor, meaning that we are not really holding the pole, we rather have a mass at each end, and we apply some force to one of them, which is the coil.
So for a cone to perform at its best we should make sure it does not have to carry around lots of added mass. It has to carry its own mass and any added mass will just add more potential resonances. The Focal driver has a very light surround, and it could have had an even lighter coil but it is still a much lower moving mass driver than most of its current competitors. At 10,4g, for a driver that is in between a 6,5 and an 8 inch driver in size, that is pretty low.
When is too much?
It is possible to get even lower than that. Dayton has an 8 inch full range driver that has lower moving mass (8,4g), and that is not even close to setting any record. To reach these numbers you will off course have to lighten the coil as much as possible, but you also need to lighten the cone, a lot. A very thin cone has numerous resonances that are easily triggered by almost anything. It is like covering the ceiling of an opera house in different sized bells, hoping they won’t start ringing when music is performed. This is an effective way to get lots of high end output from a big cone, but with a less than optimal time domain performance, especially above the primary funamental breakup.
But a midrange does not have to enter its upper modal range, or break up as it is commonly called. We can keep it in the pass band range where the output level does not need to consist of modes. A slightly heavier and far stronger cone does the trick. Carefully balancing it between stiffness and damping is one good way to allow it to be crossed over relatively high. Another way is to make a cone that is so stiff, the pass band ends way above the cross over point. But as engineering requires some particular shapes and masses for a driver to work there is really a limit to how far we can go. Both of these methods allows for a much cleaner midrange. The damping that is naturally within a hard cone is really not a bad thing. We can not take advantage of a cone without damping unless it is infinitely hard, it would simply ring for seconds after you mute the music.
So what we should take from the full range driver is the low Mms in combination with what is often a fairly stable motor. They may actually often be poorly constructed, but the low mass means the job for the motor is so easy. Even the slightly increased mass of a midrange driver should be quite easy for a not overly advanced motor. But for som proper dynamic performance, it really pays off to go the extra mile on the motor as well.
To sum it up:
A true midrange should follow a set of design guidelines. They should be as follows:
1: The driver should not have any non subtile characteristics within its entire working range.
2: The coil mass should be less than 1g.
3: The driver should have a narrow cloth or similar low mass and low loss surround.
4: The total Mms should be less than 0,08g/cm².
5: Any steel present in the gap should be saturated to >1,9T.
6: The driver should use shorting rings inside the gap.
7: The coil should be wound with aluminium ribbon wire on a bobbin no more conductive than titanium.
8: The motor should allow for 2mm of excursion with less than 2,5% deviation from the Bl factor at its resting point, including both the effects of motion and AC current.
9: The efficiency of the driver should be at least 93dB/1W/1m and it should be able to handle transients at >114dB.
10: The cone should have no modes for at least 1 octave past its low pass crossover point and have a loss factor of less than 0,1.
Yes, you are absolutely right, this rules out all midranges ever built on several of these points. Even the first point rules out almost every midrange driver in production. But these are the things that really matter, and should be the guideline for designing midrange drivers. And they are all possible to realize within one single driver.
Let’s call this “The 10 commandments of true midrange”, and label any driver that is able to fulfill them “True midrange”.
Jørn Rune Kviserud
Tonalab
April 13. 2021 | https://medium.com/@jrkpost/the-true-midrange-speaker-driver-1da12977f854 | ['Jørn Rune Kviserud'] | 2021-04-13 19:01:19.879000+00:00 | ['Audio', 'Speakers', 'Electronics', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Technology'] |
Email Marketing Rules | Email marketing can be advantageous for any business, regardless of what product or service is on offer. It is much cheaper than other kinds of advertizing. Moreover, it is good for building trust between your customers and you. As a result, your sales will increase and you will make more profit.
The basis of email marketing is a targeted, voluntary mailing list. If you have a list of subscribers who trust you and consider you an expert in a specific area, you are on the right path.
Here are some rules to help you make and extend your mailing list:
Provide useful, relevant, unique content . Users won’t subscribe just because your subscription is free of charge. You must provide unique, valuable information, which will be useful to your subscribers.
. Users won’t subscribe just because your subscription is free of charge. You must provide unique, valuable information, which will be useful to your subscribers. Place the subscription form where it can be easily seen . It must be easily accessible, not hidden in the bottom of some unimportant page of your site. If you have a blog, the sidebar is the best place for the subscription form.
. It must be easily accessible, not hidden in the bottom of some unimportant page of your site. If you have a blog, the sidebar is the best place for the subscription form. Make the subscription process as simple as possible . Do not make too many mandatory fields, or risk losing potential subscribers! In most cases, the subscriber’s name and email address will be enough.
. Do not make too many mandatory fields, or risk losing potential subscribers! In most cases, the subscriber’s name and email address will be enough. Personalize the subscription process . The percentage of subscription confirmations will increase considerably if the users who filled the subscription form are redirected to a webpage where they are addressed by name.
. The percentage of subscription confirmations will increase considerably if the users who filled the subscription form are redirected to a webpage where they are addressed by name. Be sure to note that all subscriber data are confidential ! Many users worry that they may become an easy target of spammers if they subscribe to some mailing list. Explain to your potential subscribers that you guarantee full confidentiality of their data. It’s advisable to make a special page describing your confidentiality policy and put a link to this page below the subscription form.
! Many users worry that they may become an easy target of spammers if they subscribe to some mailing list. Explain to your potential subscribers that you guarantee full confidentiality of their data. It’s advisable to make a special page describing your confidentiality policy and put a link to this page below the subscription form. Be sincere, persuasive, and honest about what users will get if they subscribe to your mailing list.
about what users will get if they subscribe to your mailing list. Show an example of your direct email to your site or blog visitors . By doing that, you will let your potential subscribers get acquainted with your mailing list before subscribing and take an informed decision.
Tell the people about the frequency of your direct emails. Do not flood your subscribers with too many messages!
. By doing that, you will let your potential subscribers get acquainted with your mailing list before subscribing and take an informed decision. Tell the people about the frequency of your direct emails. Do not flood your subscribers with too many messages! Make an archive of your mailing list at your website . Such an archive, containing all issues of your mailing list, may be one more reason for potential users to subscribe. Moreover, it will help you generate additional search traffic for your site.
. Such an archive, containing all issues of your mailing list, may be one more reason for potential users to subscribe. Moreover, it will help you generate additional search traffic for your site. Contact other mailing list authors . Let them know that you are willing to mention their mailing lists in your direct emails if they agree to do the same for you. It will help both you and other authors to increase the number of subscribers in less time.
. Let them know that you are willing to mention their mailing lists in your direct emails if they agree to do the same for you. It will help both you and other authors to increase the number of subscribers in less time. Be sure to offer useful freebies ! Write a book or make a report in the PDF format, and promise to give that freebie to each user who subscribes to your mailing list.
! Write a book or make a report in the PDF format, and promise to give that freebie to each user who subscribes to your mailing list. Offer discounts for your products or services to every subscriber.
for your products or services to every subscriber. Ask your subscribers to tell other people about your mailing list . Word of mouth is a very effective kind of advertizing, which works greatly for email marketing. If your subscribers consider your content useful and informative, they will be happy to share it with their friends and acquaintances. In this way, you can get a lot of new subscribers.
. Word of mouth is a very effective kind of advertizing, which works greatly for email marketing. If your subscribers consider your content useful and informative, they will be happy to share it with their friends and acquaintances. In this way, you can get a lot of new subscribers. Add a subscription link to your email signature .
. Add a Subscribe button to your direct emails . If you use plain text (not HTML) format in your email messages, add a link to the subscription webpage. It may seem unnecessary (because the user is already subscribed to your mailing list), but keep in mind that your subscribers will be forwarding some issues to their friends or acquaintances. So it makes sense to make the subscription process as easy as possible.
. If you use plain text (not HTML) format in your email messages, add a link to the subscription webpage. It may seem unnecessary (because the user is already subscribed to your mailing list), but keep in mind that your subscribers will be forwarding some issues to their friends or acquaintances. So it makes sense to make the subscription process as easy as possible. Create a special page for subscription . The separate page for subscribing to your mailing list should be intended for that purpose only. It must have a persuasive header and list all advantages to make your visitors want to subscribe immediately. After creating that page, find out the most popular keywords and run contextual ads.
. The separate page for subscribing to your mailing list should be intended for that purpose only. It must have a persuasive header and list all advantages to make your visitors want to subscribe immediately. After creating that page, find out the most popular keywords and run contextual ads. Remember to place user testimonials on your subscription page. It’s very important to do that! Place there some 2 or 3 opinions of satisfied users. You can use testimonials in any format, though multimedia (audio or video) formats usually make them more trustworthy. People like to follow other people — that’s human nature.
See also: | https://medium.com/@letsextract/email-marketing-rules-316d09ef58b7 | ['David Barov'] | 2020-12-20 18:23:47.463000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Promotion', 'Email Marketing Rules', 'Rules', 'Email Marketing Tips'] |
Lockdown Economy Mexico in a Change Management Consultancy with Gloria de León | The interview was transcribed and adapted into an article by Megan Cansfield
Lockdown Economy: Interviews by think tank AlterContacts.org with real entrepreneurs sharing insights, challenges and successes during the COVID19 global pandemic to inspire, motivate and encourage other entrepreneurs around the world.
In this interview, we meet Gloria de Leon, the founder of boutique consultancy Ad Hoc that helps leaders to manage change and has been active on the Latin American market since 2007. While the online world was filling up with many “how-to” offers, Gloria and her business partners paused their activity to observe the market. A big advantage was to hear how people from around the world reacted to the crisis and what they were concerned with. That allowed Gloria together with the think tank AlterContacts to spot an opportunity to help decision-makers deal with the post-crisis. Gloria also shares her perspective on the future of facilitation. According to her, the quality of in-person meetings has to improve which will give rise to methodologies such as Lego Serious Play.
Watch the video version of the interview.
Can you tell me a bit more about your consultancy? How long ago did you start it?
Gloria: Actually, I call my consultancy a “boutique consultancy” company because we are just a few people. We started in 2007, so actually, we have around 13 years of being in the market.
That’s quite impressive. Can you tell a bit more about what it is that you do?
Gloria: We have two big chapters. The first one is to help them in change management processes, mainly in IT implementations. Most of our clients are part of IT areas in big companies. When they implement something new, they invite us to manage the change. This is one part of the business. The other core is training in Lego Serious Play methods. I am a trainer on that. I train future facilitators in order to deliver solutions using these methods. And we have another area, which is about how to help managers or directors in order to improve their leadership, whatever leadership means for them. We are also a group of mentors that help the directors in order to make better decisions.
Driving change, mentoring, and facilitating — that all sounds to me like things that happen in-person, in the office, on the spot. And of course, there’s a lockdown; the whole world was asked to stay at home. How did that affect your business?
Gloria: Actually, considering that we have a change management mindset, what we started to do is to find a new way to do things. The first thing we did is to stop doing things and to observe what was happening. In that observation and sharing with other partners in other countries as part of our network in another context, we found an opportunity to create a kind of mentoring for the decisionmakers no matter the size of the company in order to help them with how to overcome these crises. There is also an economic crisis in Latin America that we are facing, and I think for the world in different steps. We decided to stop doing things and not to communicate anything because we saw the network and the internet was overcrowded with information about how to do this, how to do that. So we decided to step back, observe, and detect an opportunity to help people.
From the initial pause in all the activities, then you found a way to prototype something new and start designing something new for people to actually manage that crisis in their own companies.
Gloria: Yes, actually, another crisis: the post-crisis. Because I think that a lot of our competitors, trainers, and “experts” decided to go outside and show people or teach people how to manage the crisis. But what we see as a company is a big opportunity to help people in the post-crisis process in order to make better decisions. For example, the first thought of an owner of a company in this situation is to reduce their size, to refocus on specific things. This is a common, natural decision that the people used to do in the past. But considering that we’re facing a totally new environment in which no one of course was prepared to face that, I think that — we as a company think that — we have to step back and take a kind of different decision, to “explore” different possibilities.
Do you also do that online, or do you plan to do it more in person when the lockdown is lifted and you can actually go to see people?
Gloria: We’re doing that now online, and for us, it’s a big opportunity because our clients were not prepared, and maybe they didn’t accept to have things on a remote mode like this, in virtual mode. But actually, because of this situation, the clients are open to retraining, to be mentored, to have consultancy in this way. So we are doing this in a remote way, and the thing that we design actually is planned to do in a remote way. The nice thing is that we are able to use people or to include consultants of different countries as a part of the contact network. As you know actually, we are using part of the members in order to offer solutions in Latin America. And otherwise, clients would not be able and open to having these consultants on a virtual mode.
Basically, it opened up a little bit of a new proposition that you could introduce where they are more accepting of remote consultants, more accepting of remote help and mentoring.
Gloria: Actually, in a lot of ways, of course, they wouldn’t accept it.
I have to ask, though, because we know that a lot of businesses have been experiencing a slowdown, to say the least; maybe businesses that you’ve been working with as clients have also been experiencing that. Do you see any sales done at the moment, or do you envision them coming in soon?
Gloria: Actually at this moment I don’t think people are ready to buy something because they are fixing things inside their businesses and in their lives, so I think in a few months companies are going to be ready to have help.
So even though you used your time quite proactively to develop a new proposition and you see that the market is ready for that proposition, there’s still not as much interest to pay for it right now, today?
Gloria: No, actually, they are interested in paying now, because what we are offering now is to manage this now. I misunderstood the question, actually, they are ready to pay for that.
Well, we’ll see how it goes, right? Of course, wishing you all the success! Do you have a lot of contact with your clients to test your ideas with them, or do you have contact with your competition? How do you stay on top of what’s happening and what they are doing?
Gloria: Actually, the nice thing, first of all with other contacts, is that we have the opportunity to share between countries and between continents because we have people in some countries. Also, I am part of the network of facilitators of LSP, Lego Serious Play. Because of those reasons, I have an extremely good opportunity to share and hear what is happening in different parts of the world. What I’ve found is mainly people, in general, were not worried about being infected by the virus. The main worry was the sustainability of themselves, no matter if they were clients, competitors, or alumni of LSP. The main worry that I found is how to be sustainable on that. So, yes, I have the opportunity to hear those stories, and because of that we, with other contacts, designed this product.
So, actually, how to survive, how to survive this crisis: is that what you mean?
Gloria: Yeah. Not this crisis, the post-crisis.
I know that you are one of the twelve master Lego Serious Play facilitators, right?
Gloria: Trainer. We only have two masters. I am part of the two masters’ twelve trainers in the world.
All of the activity is based around facilitating dialogue for other people, and in your role, you teach others to do that, so you teach facilitators how to do that. Do you see a big change in that area? Do you see a lot of people cancelling their training or signing up? What is the dynamic there?
Gloria: To my surprise, no. It happened as exactly the opposite because in terms of training, people have come to me specifically to ask for information about when I am going to start training people, so there is a clear need. Human beings, we are designed to be together in contact, so in this “new normal,” I think there is a big opportunity for face-to-face meetings. Because of that, the quality of these meetings has to improve. People in the meetings will have less time than in the past, and because of that reason, this kind of method like Lego Serious Play is very useful because the method gives the opportunity to speak, to hear each other, to share, and to unlock new knowledge about things that matter for us — for us and for them. So actually, to my surprise, the method will be more useful once we could have meetings together, and of course, with these new rules about distance, all the things are going to change. Of course, we’ve been through that on sessions, but I think that kind of meetings with that kind of method will be very helpful for the organizations.
I think that a lot of the facilitators are going to be happy to hear this. From what I heard from many facilitators here who are not teaching others how to present but more so they work with companies already, they struggle because they had a lot of events planned and most of those events got cancelled, and they tried to transfer it online and it doesn’t seem to work as they would hope. As you said, we have to be in the same room together; it’s just a different thing. Do you have any advice to give to those facilitators? To the people who you’ve trained maybe in the past?
Gloria: Actually, yes. I am advising most of them about being serious when they choose to use Lego Serious Play. Lego Serious Play is for face-to-face meetings; it doesn’t work so well in the distance because the power of the method is the 3-D perspective, and this meeting between you and me is not really a meeting, a three-dimensional meeting. So considering that, I think a risk of bringing Lego Serious Play in this remote mode is to damage the quality of the delivery for the client with the method. I think we have to wait and be professional, to remain serious about the use of the method.
Yes, absolutely. If the name of the method has the word “play” in it, I think we need to be especially serious about this kind of thing.
Gloria: I did a post today about that, because I have a quotation request from a potential client and he told me that someone else offered him a thing that is not difficult, so when I saw the proposal of my “competitor,” I said, “Come on, they have to be serious when they offer the method.” Part of the principle is because in this case of this playing, playing is associated with fun, and fun is associated with playing, laughing all the time, or being entertained. And this method is not for entertainment; it’s not just for fun.
Well, hopefully, the people who are watching us can also go and read your post about that since you published it. And I’m just going to ask you shortly about this: what is the future? You mentioned this briefly already during the rest of the interview, but maybe something else that you missed out? What is the outlook in the coming months, for you and for your business?
Gloria: I think it is a challenging time in order to continue doing the thing that we love to: that is, helping people to manage change. But also, it is a big opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to find different competencies within us in order to develop different things.
That’s excellent! That’s a really good finishing touch, I think. Thank you very much, Gloria, for sharing this with us.
About the Guest
Gloria de León is a founder of Ad Hoc el cambio a tu medida, a Change Management Boutique Consultancy Firm in Mexico City. The company is focused on delivering solutions ad hoc to our clients’ needs, we do not offer a method, we offer solutions. We are part of a Latinamerican Network of Consultants with presence in Guatemala, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panamá, Bolivia and Chile. Gloria is a Senior Change Management Specialist. She is also one of the twelve Trainer of Facilitators in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Method of the Associations of Master Trainers in Denmark, able to certify facilitators around the world.
www.adhoc.org.mx
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloria-de-leon-15257837/ | https://medium.com/@altercontacts/lockdown-economy-mexico-in-a-change-management-consultancy-with-gloria-de-le%C3%B3n-44493ad7b8f8 | ['Lockdown Economy'] | 2020-12-13 19:45:23.016000+00:00 | ['Consulting', 'Small Business', 'Lego', 'Coronavirus', 'Lockdown'] |
November Edition — Editors’ Top Picks | November Edition — Editors’ Top Picks
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
November was another fantastic month at Scrittura! We welcome more and more talented writers each day, it seems. I am ecstatic at the quality of poetry and prose you have all been submitting. Truly, this is a stellar place to come read on Medium!
It’s hard to believe it’s already time for another one of these showcases to brag a little longer about the talent here. But, such is the plague…I mean, c’est la vie! Each month it takes me a little longer to make my picks, so much good material to choose from. You all ought to be very proud.
At any rate, please enjoy our editors’ favourite selections for November of 2020.
Zay’s Picks:
Viraji’s Picks:
J.D.’s Picks:
The Scrittura Team
Lori Lamothe Georgia Lewitt Louis Dennis Lowell Woluchem Aspen Blue Mahnoor Chaudhry MDSHall Amy Jasek Mary Jones Barry Dawson IV Ian Cunnold Patrick M. Ohana Zay Pareltheon Eli Snow Viraji Ogodapola Ema Dumitru Kristen v.H. Middleton Hannah Dziura Janaka Stagnaro Joseph Lieungh Joseph Coco Samantha Lazar Paroma Sen Mimi Bordeaux Jasmine Abbi. Camille Fairbanks Kevin E. Pittack Jr. Sydney Duke Richey Sydney J. Shipp Josh Lonsdale Isaac Dennett Jay Sizemore Vera Hadzic Victoria Ponte Charlotte Allan Debbie Miller Carolyn Riker Samuel Clarke Dermott Hayes Dr. Jackie Greenwood Gurpreet Dhariwal Ray Lobo Rosy Rane Qalam Dana Sanford Suntonu Bhadra Wendell McQuary Suzanne V. Tanner Johanna Geary Jenny Justice Tre L. Loadholt Jenine Bsharah Baines Josie Elbiry AK (Aaska Aejaz) Johannes Mudi Ana-Maria Schweitzer Ann Marie Steele Kim Cullen Sarah E Sturgis Simran Kankas C.J. Obikile The Conscious Wordsmith Jessica Lee McMillan Ronald Mathew Gerardo Rene Paz Rhonda Marrone Aaron Quist Mohan Boone Angelina Der Arakelian Amanda Dalmas Daniel A. Teo | https://medium.com/scrittura/november-edition-editors-top-picks-b5e2314e57aa | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2021-01-06 05:11:10.244000+00:00 | ['November', 'Editors Pick', 'Scrittura'] |
Best smart plugs: These gadgets will turn any electrical outlet into a smart socket | You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great (Zig Ziglar) | https://medium.com/@gabriel27632995/best-smart-plugs-these-gadgets-will-turn-any-electrical-outlet-into-a-smart-socket-654f5afeabcc | [] | 2020-12-24 02:33:16.382000+00:00 | ['Connected Home', 'Audio', 'Entertainment', 'Services'] |
DIY: 3 things you should not be delegating | Being a fan of delegation and automation, I face more and more its limits in terms of personal meaningfulness. I am listing here 3 things I consider that one should be very careful about in case of potential delegating.
Your understanding of the world and your place in it
We take many things as given, and our worldview is among them. We seldom question the worldview we have which to the big extend we received from others. Therefore, we are kind of delegating others to form our own worldview which can be a dangerous thing. Your special time with and for your close ones
To delegate somebody choosing a present for your close person, to delegate entertaining of your close ones to somebody, or to delegate care for them are some examples of potentially risky delegation, in my opinion. Your fun, play, and even some routine activities
In our capitalistic world, effectiveness is considered to be a key virtue. Is it really all about effectiveness? If so, then robots will be perfect humans. Isn’t life a lot about fun and play? Moreover, even such tasks as washing dishes or cleaning the home can be pretty nurturing to our balance.
How about you? What do you prefer to do yourself and what to delegate?
PS. Feel free to apply for a free 50 minutes online coaching session on www.sergiysumnikov.com. | https://medium.com/@sergiysumnikov/diy-3-things-you-should-not-be-delegating-e7ea8feedee1 | ['Sergiy Sumnikov'] | 2021-01-20 16:39:38.929000+00:00 | ['Meaningful Life', 'Joy', 'DIY', 'Automation', 'Delegation'] |
Meet Confio Series #3 | Confio people
Hello, World!
It gets colder and colder in the northern hemisphere. My only wish is that by the end of winter when the snow melts, Covid19 disappears with it.
Wishing everyone’s safety from the bottom of our hearts, let’s meet Abel.
Who are you, Abel?
Hi, I’m Abel. I am from Vigo, a northwestern city in Spain. I studied computer engineering, specialized in the development of large software systems. Then I worked full time as a researcher on virtualization of 5G network for almost 2 years. During this time, I had a chance to do a little frontend project which made me happy, so I decided to change my career as a frontend developer.
Then, I stopped working for some months, dedicated my time studying online courses to gain frontend development-related knowledge, then I worked as a frontend & QA dev for more than 1 year in IOV. Then I joined Confio as a frontend developer this summer.
What do you do in Confio?
I do frontend development work.
What I have done with Confio so far is;
Implemented dApps that showcase CosmJS, the common Javascript library for the whole Cosmos blockchain ecosystem. Developed visualizer for IBC(Inter-blockchain communication) Made some tutorials and dApp templates for developers with Orkun. This was for the HackAtom V workshop. Helped to recruit Javascript evangelist and senior React engineer. Did some maintenance work for the code explorer and other standalone dApps
Describe what your work is like at Confio.
For starters, I get requirements for the app from Simon or Ethan.
Then I get code reviews from Ethan, or Simon. If it is frontend-focused, then I get it from Will.
If there is some kind of design already, I see them first. I explore API then I do sketches, then I code.
If there is no design, I start with sketching on paper to think of applications’ route, etc. This was the case with the IBC visualizer, and the UI of it was totally improvised. Sketches on paper help me think about UI, API, and applications.
I usually have CosmJS questions to Simon and Will, they guide me through it, or if I realize CosmJS has something missing, I tell them to add those things to CosmJS, they do it, then I can use it.
So I guess that makes me the first frontend user of new CosmJS features.
How do you work outside of Confio? (if any)
I just do some online courses that interest me. To keep up with new frontend technologies, to learn better what I am doing.
These days, I am learning React. Well, I have been using it for 2 years but currently, I’m doing a React course for deeper knowledge.
What have you learned with Confio?
I learned independence.
I got a lot of support from dev peers, got code reviews, but a huge amount of frontend decisions are up to me.
I learned a lot of typescript and code practices from Will and Simon. And I learned how to make tutorials and workshops from Orkun.
What do you think about Confio’s working environment? In general, including colleagues, communication, culture…
It’s apparent that everyone is surrounded with trust, like the company’s name “Confio”(Trust in Spanish). That is the main thing I would say.
I trust the judgment of others. I can ask questions and I get honest answers.
When I have an issue, I can rely on my peers as they are very friendly people.
They are not afraid to give some bad news even, their bad news.
Transparency is the top priority that leads us to make better long-term decisions and to get a big picture of the company, I think.
Wanna say something?
If you are enthusiastic about state-of-the-art blockchain technology, Confio is the best place for you.
If you don’t like working remotely, then this is not for you. Also, if you are easily distracted, remote working won’t be that productive. | https://medium.com/confio/meet-confio-series-3-9c4942d4f71 | ['Misang Ryu'] | 2020-12-03 15:39:57.790000+00:00 | ['Company Culture', 'Confio', 'Testimonials', 'Recruiting', 'Teammates'] |
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) | Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table embark on a surreal search for the Holy Grail, encountering many silly people and obstacles.
Originally broadcast on the BBC between 1969–1974, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was written and performed by its six members: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam. As a free-roaming sketch show loosely held together by Gilliam’s iconic animations, it pushed the boundaries of what comedy could be.
Producing 45 episodes over five years, the Pythons targeted the peculiarities of British life, organised religion, and politics — placing them in absurd situations laden with risqué humour. They steered away from the bawdy humour popular in The Benny Hill Show (1955–1989) or best exemplified by the sight of Barbara Windsor’s bra pinging off in Carry On Camping (1969). The Pythons pioneered and revolutionised British comedy, giving it intellectual silliness, and their influence crossed oceans and made them global stars.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail represented a chance for the Pythons to reunite after Flying Circus had come to an end. John Cleese was yet to find huge success with Fawlty Towers (1975–79), and Michael Palin’s hadn’t yet made Ripping Yarns (1976). Their individual work in the early-’70s wasn’t as memorable as their Python output had been, so the gang came together to make a spoof movie of the Arthurian legend. And they felt creatively rejuvenated after years apart, helped by the return of John Cleese — who hadn’t been part of the final series of Flying Circus because he felt they’d started to repeat themselves.
In 963 AD, King Arthur (Chapman) and his squire Patsy (Gilliam) travel across Britain searching for the bravest men to join their Knights of the Round Table. After recruiting Sir Bedevere (Jones), Sir Lancelot (Cleese), and Sir Galahad (Palin), amongst others, Arthur leads his trusted knights to Camelot. On their way, God speaks to them and gives Arthur the task of finding the Holy Grail, and as they search for clues the knights encounter a variety of obstacles and enemies including rude Frenchmen, a relentless Black Knight who feels no pain, and a lethal rabbit with “big pointy teeth.”
All of the Pythons are fantastic in multiple roles. My favourite is the wonderful John Cleese. You won’t catch him doing his famous silly walks, but his range is more evident in the many characters he plays: from the noble Sir Lancelot needlessly butchering the inhabitants of a castle before offering a deadpan “sorry”, to eccentric Scottish pyromaniac Tim the Enchanter, his performances are excellent and prove he’s one of Britain’s great comic talents.
Another highlight is the late Graham Chapman as straight-faced Arthur. Unafraid to delve into the absurd, he delivers his lines with perfect comic timing. Chapman actually caused problems behind the scenes as they made the film. Having befriended The Who ‘s drummer Keith Moon, who was a bad influence, his addiction to alcohol caused Chapman to forget his lines and often keel over. Although his excellent performance suggests the opposite, Chapman was inebriated throughout most of the shoot, and yet he managed to portray King Arthur as a poised and bonkers royal doing insane things like questioning a troll about the airspeed velocity of a swallow.
The Holy Grail features the same kind of brilliant comic writing that characterised the best episodes of the TV series. Everything from scientific observations to religious doctrine is poked fun at. It’s understandable if the absurd humour isn’t to your taste, however. Before Python, British comedy was grounded and formulaic, making jokes about everyday situations with traditional setups and punchlines. The story of King Arthur and his quest for the Holy Grail is just as ludicrous as the logic that if a woman weighs as much as a duck she’s a witch. Although one could argue the narrative is a string of comedy skits stitched together by crude animations, one can appreciate the hidden depths and intelligence of their approach.
Embracing The Holy Grail is to embrace the absurd and disregard logic. It blends slapstick comedy with cheesy humour and dry wit, making almost no sense at all. Yet it still holds up today. Expressed by George Harrison himself, the Pythons are “The Beatles of comedy.” Sure, a side-quest for a shrubbery may be pointless, the knights may not always be brave, and a killer bunny makes for an unconventional monster… yet they’re all components of a hilarious medieval adventure. I find the best comedy pushes boundaries. Although Holy Grail is a ridiculous comedy, it manages to tackle several controversial issues of the day: homosexuality, Christianity, and class divisions (“Help! I’m being repressed!”) Even the art of filmmaking is tackled as they consistently break the fourth wall, even telling the narrator to “get on with it.”
The script is tight from beginning to end and was written with the same rules as the television series: if it’s not funny, it goes. During production, this resulted in half the script being binned simply because it didn’t gel with the narrative. In doing so, every conversation builds to a climax and barely a line goes by that isn’t quotable. The script is a perfect balance between the verbal and the visual, the high-brow and low-brow. It’s the quality of the humour — irreverent, clever, and challenging — that makes The Holy Grail above par. It laid the groundwork for modern British comedians like Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boost and Sacha Baron Cohen with Da Ali G Show. Even across the Atlantic, The Knights Who Say ‘Ni’ has become familiar to a different generation after appearing in an episode of The Simpsons.
Made with a measly £200,000, directors Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam received investments from rock bands such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Genesis. Filmed in the foggy moors of Scotland during the spring of 1974, Gilliam and Jones managed to stretch out every penny: in true Python style, each actor plays several roles, the diffused lighting is often awful, and the crude violence is laughable by today’s standards. However, one can see the directors had a deep passion for this low-budget project. What the production lacked in money, they made up with creative genius. The sound of clapping coconuts replacing unaffordable horses is one of the funniest gags in history. This rough-and-ready approach is now part of Holy Grail’ s charm and the reason it works so well.
Many of the visually striking set-pieces were created by Terry Gilliam. Despite its tiny budget, Holy Grail is one of the most visually interesting of the Python movies. The use of unusual camera angels to tighten the surreal atmosphere, along with the gritty ‘bring out your dead’ plague scene, is torn straight from Gilliam’s mind. One only has to look at Gilliam’s subsequent solo work that immediately followed, Jabberwocky (1977) and Time Bandits (1981), to see he directs with a specific style. His precision and obsession caused friction on-set with Jones, but the results speak for themselves. The sets and costume designs are unforgettable, too. By emoving Hollywood sensationalism, the clothing is naturally stained and ragged to create a realistic medieval look.
Naturally, Holy Grail contains its fair share of weaknesses. Both Gilliam and Jones have stated that their directorial debut was a learning experience from beginning to end. The shaky camera and rough editing clearly suggest the two friends were making it up as they went along, which results in several scenes outstaying their welcome. During a regrettably sluggish middle section, we follow the knights’ individual story arcs and it sucks the pace out of the film a little.
Several rumours have circulated that the film’s shoestring budget resulted in its infamous ‘cop-out’ ending. Allegedly, the original script ended with King Arthur and his knights discovering the Holy Grail in modern-day Harrod’s, a famous department store in London. This idea was abandoned and a slightly better but similar sequence was shot instead, with modern-day cops catching up with King Arthur and putting an end to the adventure. The abruptness of the ending suits the wacky style of Monty Python, but the final sequence is always lost on me.
As a teenager, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was my second introduction to the comedy of Python, following Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). There’s always debate about which film is superior and, personally, Holy Grail is my favourite of the two. The first time I saw it I laughed throughout. 15 years later, it still makes me laugh and remains as quotable as ever. I understand madcap Python humour is an acquired taste but, regardless of what type of comedy tickles your funnybone, Holy Grail is sure to elicit at least one big smile. Visually it hasn’t stood the test of time too well, that’s true, but ’tis a silly film that deserves its glistening reputation.
Cast & Crew
directors: Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones.
writers: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones & Michael Palin.
starring: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones & Michael Palin.
Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on September 3, 2019. | https://medium.com/framerated/monty-python-and-the-holy-grail-1975-4baba112117d | ["Jonathan 'Jono' Simpson"] | 2019-09-19 20:26:29.496000+00:00 | ['Monty Python', 'Review', 'Film', 'Movies', 'Culture'] |
The 6 Golden Rules of Persuasion | And how you can use them in Marketing!
I was recently doing a course by CXL Institute and boy, do they have an amazing repository of great insights!
As a marketer, you would always want to persuade your audience to act. It could be as simple as watching a 30-second video, or it might be as critical a decision as buying a B2B software — the point is how do you get your audience to understand the true value of your offering without being salesy about it? How do you break the barriers and inhibitions of your audience and help them understand what you truly bring to the table? ( given that you have a valuable offering vs not-so-great-content wrapped in marketing fluff )
Here are 6 golden rules that could come in handy for you to persuade your audience to ‘ACT’.
Reciprocity: Accept to Give before You Expect to Get
Have you ever tried offering a drink to someone in a group ( of course, without being creepy about it!) or better give a valuable recommendation to a new joiner in your team? They immediately feel more comfortable around you — are more receptive and have a positive, open body language towards you.
This is plain human psychology! The idea of reciprocity says that people by nature feel obliged to provide either discounts or concessions to others if they’ve received favors from those others.
Psychology explains this by stressing that we humans simply hate to feel indebted to other people!
The idea to is offer value to your audience without any ( or any major ) ask — it could be an eBook, a toolkit, an ROI calculator, a diet plan — something they would benefit from. The result — they would be more likely to buy something from you!
Commitment: People Don’t Like To Go Back On Their Word
Let’s be honest here. It’s human to try and feel good about yourself. You wouldn’t want to recognize yourself as someone who would go back on your words.
The principle of commitment (and consistency, too) declares that we human beings have a deep need to be seen as consistent. As such, once we have publicly committed to something or someone, then we are so much more likely to go through and deliver on that commitment!
Marketers could use this! Think of a multi-page form — You split your large form into multiple small steps (multi-step form). Once people fill out the first part of the form and see there’s more to fill on the second page, they’re much more likely to do it since they already got started with it (unless it’s a 15-page documentary — keep it short!).
My take here is that it’s a double-edged sword. In today’s day and age, readers are skeptical, about EVERYTHING! The world is going through a content deluge and digital fatigue with pandemic-enforced restrictions where you have at least 20 non-work, promise-to-be-good-content emails, every single day! The result — it is difficult to win your readers’ confidence and get a commitment.
Social Proof: There’s Safety in Numbers!
Here’s another interesting one. Let’s think! Did you try bunking in school or college? The more important question is — did you do it alone? Most likely not! It could be the smartest project on the planet or the dumbest prank with your friends — we as humans, believe in the safety in numbers ( even if you are doing something stupid in a group, LOL )
Think about this in your professional space — If your coworkers are working late, then you are more likely to do the same. We’re even more influenced by this principle when we’re unsure of ourselves or if the people we observe seem to be similar to us!
How does this apply in marketing? Here are 2 reasons —
1. Nobody wants to be the only idiot buying your stuff.
2. People don’t want to make the wrong choice at the risk of being judged by their spouses, bosses, colleagues, or friends
Social proof is one of the strongest pivots you could include for your website, your landing page, your case study — you name it! It not only gives a massive conversion push but drives your brand to get your customers to advocate on your behalf.
Think of a prospect landing on your website thinking — “ Hmm, I haven’t heard of them, let’s see…. Oh! They have 15,000 customers including Nike, Adidas and P&G ”— instantly, boosts the confidence in your brand!
Authority: Follow Me!
Have you ever wondered why people with authority, for instance, Doctors, Police Men, or C-Suite Executives have an air of persuasion around them, and more often than not, people unquestionably follow their lead?
It’s another intriguing aspect of psychology — the urge to have an ideal idol to follow!
Marketers could use an authority figure to make their case more convincing. For instance —
Use prominent athletes if you want to sell fitness products.
Use well-known doctors and medical researchers on health-related websites.
Use famous chefs if you want to sell food.
In the longer term, companies should aim to become ‘an authority’ in the space themselves. And the marketers should focus on driving this through thought-provoking, thought-leadership content, and ideas. Establish your brand as THE EXCLUSIVE brand to address the challenges and pain-points of your audience.
Scarcity: Shorter the Supply, Greater the Demand
Scarcity is defined as the perception of products seeming to become more attractive when their perceived availability is rather limited.
As known to most marketers, this is a very good optimization technique to drive conversions ( faster ) if it’s authentic.
There are essentially two aspects of it —
Time ( 30 days left! ) Quantity ( 2 left in stock!)
Needless to say, you would have seen this principle being used all across from flight booking websites, to hotels, to e-commerce websites and supermarkets!
While being a great tactic, if your users figure out that it’s a buy-bait and a fake-scarcity, no athlete would run away faster than that lead or be as pissed! Your visitors will see right through it and would lose trust in your brand.
Liking & Unity: We Are the Same As YOU
Think of a friend you like. Now imagine that friend recommends you to read a certain book or watch a specific movie? How likely are you to do the same as compared to when a stranger or an acquaintance shares the same recommendation? Well, we both know the answer!
Liking is based on sharing something similar with people you like!
Marketers could use this golden rule to establish a sense of similarity with their buyer — showcase the similarities in company culture, the values and vision shared by your team and how they are aligned with your target audience. A well-executed “About Us” page can go a long way.
Another interesting concept is Unity. Have you ever been at a party or conference and met someone that went to the same University as you did? Or maybe you two previously worked at the same company. You felt an instant connection, didn’t you?
The Unity Principle is the shared identity that the influencer shares with the influencee.
Help your customers, product users identify themselves as a cult or a part of a cool club! Marketers could use it for better conversions in the following ways —
Use Specific and Unique Jargon: How do you feel about inside jokes and abbreviations within your closest friend circle? It’s annoying for others but tell me if it doesn’t make your gang feel more intimate. Group homogeneity allows deeper trust among customers and helps them become better advocates for you and your brand while growing the network and community. Convey Exclusivity: In today’s age, most senior executives are looking to ‘be one of the few’. One of the few to bring digital transformation to the company, to be the agent of change for the organization — to be the Knight in Shining Armor! As Marketers, we should be able to tap into this emotion to get actions and make our business case with this emotional hook. Co-creation or Sharing an Experience: At the cost of sounding repetitive, it’s a fact that people like to feel good about themselves. They like to feel that they have contributed to something big and their efforts are valued. Make your customers and prospects a part of your marketing efforts and in turn, your organization — get their inputs on your understanding of their pain-points, invite candid feedback on your product, get their insights on the next product you are launching. It starts with a simple question, “can I get your advice?” but goes a long way in making your customers an extended marketing team.
Marketing is as much science as it is an art. And what’s more interesting is that it is a chess that you play with your audience’s attention with visual suggestions, typography, head-turning texts, and carefully placed hooks.
Leveraging the power of persuasion in storytelling is one great hack to get your visitors to convert more! | https://medium.com/@ayan-mishra910/the-6-golden-rules-of-persuasion-caf04e383f24 | ['Ayan Mishra'] | 2020-12-24 05:28:50.227000+00:00 | ['Marketing Strategies', 'Storytelling', 'Persuasion', 'Psychology', 'Cxl Minidegree'] |
Starting something new | It started with a random thinking of doing something apart from work but always was conitnuing my exploration on what to do next, perhaps something more than my job. I found that I can also write on medium and see if this somthing good that can spark my interest. I have also been reading blogs in Javascripts and other tech related stuffs for my work, but didn’t know that this platform can be utilized for writing. I have left writing a long time back, maybe its been 9+yrs. Thanks to Shelby Church for introducing me to medium. | https://medium.com/@amanrf1/starting-something-new-53abeff8713a | ['Aman Ansari'] | 2020-12-23 16:50:03.165000+00:00 | ['Thoughts', 'Experience', 'Personal Development', 'Explore'] |
The Importance of Team Belief | Your team won’t just believe in your company’s mission or the work that comes with it overnight. As a leader, it is your responsibility to inspire and instill belief. If a leader is going to help their team to perform at their best, the team must evolve to believe in the leader, their teammates, the company and the work.
People guard against believing in things they can’t see, touch or personally experience, and their professional beliefs are no different. Professional belief comes with more complexity than other types of beliefs. For example, someone can choose to be a fan of a team and believe that the team is going to have a good season, but whether or not this is true has no real impact on that person’s life.
My parents loved baseball, and they were New York Mets fans. They believed season after season that the Mets were going to be good, and it didn’t matter if they were wrong. They still watched the games and rooted for the Mets, even after hope for a good season was gone. This kind of arm’s length belief that has no real personal negative consequences to it is what I refer to as a superficial belief. Sports fans probably don’t see it that way, but it is a belief in people and an endeavor that you’re not directly involved in. For many people, their work is on an entirely different level of belief.
Team members know whether belief is manufactured or whether it is based on a solid foundation. Belief that is manufactured asks people to deny what they know to be true to believe in something other than the truth. Manufactured belief can also be labeled as manipulated belief. A leader who asks their team members to believe in a mission and work that is not grounded in a believable foundation risks losing respect and credibility.
A believable foundation includes elements like a worthy mission, the right team to accomplish the mission, the right leadership and the organizational support and commitment to see the mission through. Professional belief, for most people, is about what could be based upon what is. Most people are not willing to risk their professional time, earning potential and reputation to believe in a mission and work that is unsubstantiated and that has very low odds of succeeding. Leaders need to build a belief case and communicate it clearly so that team members can buy into what the leader is asking them to do.
People are very good at sniffing out false beliefs — and leaders that try to sell false beliefs. Every team member knows whether the mission is worthy and whether the work is worthwhile. Teams are not fooled when a leader or coach tries to convince them they have what it takes to succeed when they know they don’t. This is not to say that the leader and team shouldn’t begin working on and making strides toward the mission, but by being honest from the start, guiding the team and equipping them with the tools they need to succeed, they build trust and credibility as a leader. To truly believe a team can succeed, the team members need to believe they have the skills and expertise to do so. Without belief in the capability of the team, there can be no belief in the mission, the work or the leader.
A team’s belief in a mission and a leader is rooted in trust, honesty and transparency. A deep-rooted belief that can help a team overcome great odds and challenges covers every aspect of a team’s mission and work. Belief is either present, or it isn’t. The best leaders are the ones who facilitate belief among their team members because they are open and direct about the path ahead — the good, the bad and the ugly. This should include real talk about real issues and how the leader anticipates the team can overcome them. People follow leaders because they share the same professional beliefs and they also believe that the leader believes in them. Leaders believing in people comes first. A leader must first believe in their team members for the team members to believe in the leader.
Being a professional leader is an immense challenge and responsibility. There is tremendous pressure on business leaders to produce and to get their teams to perform consistently at a high level. What happened last year, last quarter, last month and last week doesn’t matter. Leaders are expected and required to produce in the now. The expectations and pressure can cause some leaders to become more manager than leader. Processes, equipment and tasks get managed. People get led. Leaders that fall into managing versus leading don’t typically even realize it is happening, but by the time they do, it’s likely too late to recover with that team because they will have lost belief in the leader.
Leaders engender belief from their team members by providing an environment where the team members can ply their craft and do their work unencumbered by company bureaucracy, politics and cultural challenges. Leaders who engage in and foster these negative company dynamics are more likely to have to resort to management tactics rather than leadership. Team members believe in leaders who believe in them and protect them so they can do their best work. In some ways this is the essence of leadership. You facilitate an environment and conditions for team members to do their best work. That is all any professional asks for.
Leaders, if you don’t believe in your team currently and they don’t believe in you, you need to assess whether you have the right team. If you don’t have the right team, then start working on building a team you can believe in. You will not succeed as a leader if you don’t believe in your team and your team doesn’t believe in you.
Originally posted with Columbus Business First
-Ryan Frederick, Principal at AWH | https://medium.com/@awhnet/the-importance-of-team-belief-a807c72b1069 | [] | 2020-12-16 14:55:21.981000+00:00 | ['Team Building', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Entrepreneur', 'Team'] |
Albert Boufarah Explains How Recycling Has Evolved to Adapt to Modern Technology | Recycling methods have come a long way in the past 25 years. E-waste recycling firms are now able to recover materials that would have gone to waste in the past. With the increased efficiency in recycling methods comes a lower carbon footprint for the electronics industry and for the consumer. The CEO of SAMR Inc., Albert Boufarah , explains how new methods in the recycling industry have caused an increase in the number of reusable materials.
The Plastics CrisisA study published in the journal Royal Society Philosophical Transactions Biological Sciences found that 4 percent of the world’s oil and gas production was used in the manufacturing of plastic products. Another 3 to 4 percent of this non-renewable resource was used to transport these products. Plastics are polluting our environment, especially our oceans, and piling up in landfills. Since there are so many wasteful cases of single-use or limited-use plastic products that will be discarded within a year, it quickly becomes clear that this system of production cannot last for many more years. Advanced recycling of plastics means that more materials can be reused, cutting down on the carbon footprint from the production and shipment of these products.
New Methods of Recycling PlasticsAdvanced techniques in recycling plastics include the use of robots to separate and identify materials and sort them for the recycling process. These AI-enabled robots are able to make fine distinctions between materials that the human eye cannot match. This means that more materials will be recycled in appropriate ways. Infrared (IR) systems are also being used to separate the waste stream. IR can pick out different types of plastics and determine their composition, sorting them properly. Plastics are being developed which are easier to recycle. Much of the waste stream results from polyethylene and polypropylene materials. A new hybrid form of these plastics makes a copolymer that lasts longer, is appropriate for more applications, and is easier to recycle than polyethylene and polypropylene on their own. Another advanced technique for recycling plastic involves a reduction in the amount of water needed for the process. Some recycling companies have pioneered the use of systems that can clean, cool, and recycle plastics without the use of water. Reduced energy and water use are another important way that recycling reduces the environmental impact of plastics.
Innovations in Metal RecyclingOne of the key byproducts of recycling electronics is metal. Gold, copper, tin, and aluminum are only a few examples of the metals used to manufacture high-tech devices. In the past, metals were not often removed from high-tech products when they were recycled. The special characteristic of metals is that they do not lose their properties when they are recycled. They can continue to exist in a useful form well beyond the lifespan of the product that contains them. This means that recycling metals from high-tech products is a winning proposition. New methods, like the use of robotics, can detect the presence of recyclable metals and appropriately divert the materials in the recycling line. Apple has introduced a recycling robot called Daisy that properly separates materials for reuse and recycling. This machine is responsible for recycling 200 iPhone units per hour. Glass Recycling Glass as a material has made incredible strides over the past 25 years. New touchscreens made of Gorilla Glass and other highly advanced materials have made computer products more durable and safer to operate. The glass recycling system has not changed as much as the plastic and metal recycling systems, but there are some notable changes to mention. Unfortunately, not all glass products used in electronics products are recyclable. One of the most notorious offenders is CRT glass used in old tube computer monitors and televisions. This is because the glass contains a high volume of lead. There are a great number of these products in the recycling waste stream, and much of that material is lost.
Advances in Recycling Benefit Our Carbon Footprint Electronics users should be aware of the ways in which their products can be recycled. Albert Boufarah encourages all owners of electronic devices to look into the benefits of recycling their machines rather than releasing them into the waste stream. When more materials are recycled, the global carbon footprint is improved. Fewer resources are needed for producing or transporting electronics. The most exciting advances in recycling have come in the area of plastics, with glass and metals also experiencing significant changes in their recycling processes. Taking care to separate these products from the general waste stream can have a positive impact on the Earth’s environment and offset some of the costs of our technological advancements. | https://medium.com/@SAMR-Inc./albert-boufarah-explains-how-recycling-has-evolved-to-adapt-to-modern-technology-f74ea1c6324a | ['Samr Inc.'] | 2021-08-27 20:14:26.286000+00:00 | ['Computer Recycling', 'Electronic Waste', 'Recycle', 'Entrepreneur', 'New Jersey'] |
Breaking down the Forbes Blockchain 50 | Playing the field
We were interested to see what the most popular development platforms are for these unicorns. Ethereum is being used for developing blockchain applications by 22 companies on the Forbes 50. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as Ethereum was designed to accommodate decentralized applications and smart contracts. Following closely behind are the 21 companies building on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. The appeal of this system is that it is still open source, but is designed to be natively permissioned. Large corporations find the appeal of a permissioned blockchain like Hyperledger to be quite compelling, though Ethereum also supports similar configurations despite its more utopian origins.
Corda is the next most popular platform with 14 companies. Corda is enterprise distributed ledger technology (DLT) from the R3 consortium, which is made up of 200 of the world’s biggest banks and multinationals. JP Morgan’s Quorum, which powers its Interbank Information Network of 75 worldwide banking partners, is being actively developed on by 11 of the Forbes Blockchain 50. Like Ethereum, Hyperledger, and Corda, Quorum is open source and is being contributed to by developers all over the world. IBM, one of Hyperledger’s primary supporters, has five of the Forbes Blockchain 50 developing on its own platform.
The most interesting trend across these 50 companies is that nearly all of them are building on more than one blockchain platform. While these firms may end up committing to developing on a singular technology (such as Ant Financial or Oracle), it is clear that for now, they are hedging by working with multiple platforms. In the diagram below, you will see these company logos appear in multiple columns. | https://medium.com/blockdata/breaking-down-the-forbes-blockchain-50-2f44e9902537 | [] | 2020-03-04 15:51:57.790000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Hyperledger', 'Bitcoin'] |
Gun Violence In Chicago | Gun violence has been a controversial and widely known, topic of discussion here in the US. The definition of gun violence is as follows: Violence committed with a gun. This includes homicides, assaults, and suicides. The lack of reform is one of the many factors to assist in the rising number of gun-related deaths.
It’s apparent that mass and school shootings have become rather prevalent in today’s society. According to authors at the Chicago Tribune, there are over 2,500 victims of gun violence. That’s a bit more than twice the amount of students enrolled at the middle school I attended my eighth grade year.
Are we prepared to just accept the statistics and ignore the consequences? What about those who lose their family members, loved ones, lifelong friends? Where is their peace of mind?
My partner, Emoni Harris, had the privilege of connecting with a gun violence victim, Tonja Yarbar. Tonja and Emoni begin by listing the positives of growing up in a dangerous city like Chicago.
Always being around family, having close relationships with neighbors and their family’s neighbors, couldn’t beat the terror Tonja witnessed. As she goes into depth about the first time she witnessed a violent gun-related incident, the trauma that followed never fell to the back of her mind.
“I was 16. She looked like she was about four of five. I was stuck. It’s a messed up feeling because you wanna help and make sure she’s okay, but you can’t touch her because of [your] fingerprints.”
Emoni and Tonja continue to talk about the severity that gun-related issues bring up. How the constant fatality only progresses and generalizing ideas for what we can do to prevent it from rising.
Though gun violence is indisputable, the grimness seems temporary to many. According to Dstasi and Micah Materre at WGN, what seems like a typical Chicago day includes eight people being injured every three hours in Chicago due to gun-related incidents.
It’s no doubt that the Chicago has had a past with violence killings, but why are we so willing for it to continue? For more information on Chicago’s history of gun violence, seek the article linked below.
https://wgntv.com/2019/10/29/how-a-history-of-segregation-contributes-to-an-epidemic-of-violence-in-chicago/
For some, the reality of gun-related violence is very much present every single day. It wasn’t too long ago, another gun violence incident occurred on August 4th, of this year.
It was reported that 59 people were shot, and seven ended up dying. NBC News declared the experience, ‘the most violent weekend of the year’ for local Chicagoan's.
This is only one of many casualties news outlets have reported over the year. The trauma, leaving an even bigger outcome.
“That feeling of constant threat takes your comfort away” — Corniki Bonds, 40, West Side of Chicago
To simplify the complexity of Chicago’s gun violence history, we’ve created a timeline for the number of homicides from 1960 to 2015. The numbers range anywhere from 300 homicides to over 800.
The timeline shows the highest number of homicides occurred throughout the 1980’s, whereas the lowest can be seen in the 1960's. | https://medium.com/social-media-as-news-cod/gun-violence-in-chicago-1ad1c4909cfb | ['Mishelina Iracheta'] | 2019-12-11 18:35:37.709000+00:00 | ['Blm', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Gun Violence', 'Guns', 'Chicago'] |
Is There A Push For Socialism Within America? | To answer the initial premise, one must first slog through a series of questions in gauging the depth of such impending discourse to be had. Fundamentally of which, the question — Were the Founding Fathers Socialist where they not only championed, but constructed the first ever universal healthcare in American history by charging sailors one to two pennies per to the government that ran the then, modern day, healthcare system? Was Reagan a ‘Red’ as he implemented the policies left over from the ‘New Deal’ where the government intervened in the growth of fruits such as oranges allowing them to rot within the California sun as an endless sea of red upon the horizon to keep prices high, disallowing consumers to buy such product cheap thus inextricably hurting farmers? “In socialist economies, consumer prices are usually controlled by the government. Capitalists say this can lead to shortages and surpluses of essential products, yet commits to the very same vices begging the question — Is it only Socialism when others do it, but not America?”
Another such initial question to be asked in framing the conversation would be how one instinctively, if not historically, views Socialism — whether as a baseless signifier of a European hellscape rather than the more accurate descriptor of what one ultimately believes. This is pertinent where as Warren Buffet asserted “Government needs to reallocate some resources … be it extreme cases such as World War II, that’s the closest that we have come (as a nation) to Socialism.” Millennials and Generation Z are far more embracing of incorporating Socialistic elements into a broken system than preceding generations inundated by dutiful brainwashing dating back to, and largely defined as a historical linchpin, the McCarthy hearings and the blacklists that derived from which where a young Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, would sell out Hollywood rivals as Communists cementing television roles for himself while his acting career waned.
It is important to note both the complicity that Reagan had as a budding Republican in which, and how such was prescient upon the role he would ultimately play later as America’s 40th president (1981–89) to a fallen Russia where both were equally calculated, thus setting up the return of the “Red Scare” under a Trump administration where the right wing would all but trip over one another running for a camera crew instilling such vivid demonizations of both China and Russia as preambles for war while galvanizing the sustainability of Capitalism the world over. Yet if we were to heed the advice of Sun Tzu who suggested “If one must go to war, they have already lost,” sustainability is all but tenable.
But such preludes were dubious at best given one’s ultimate determination in regard to what is and isn’t Socialism, especially inherent Socialism within America. For reference, Capitalism dates back to 1400 AD in Europe where Socialism sought it’s origins to the age of Plato, but found it’s definitive resurgence in France, in 1800 AD where the prevailing winds lend more so toward Capitalism in feasibility, Socialistic trends crop up roughly every fifty years or thereabout.
As author George Monbiot asserted during a lecture upon Consumerism, Capitalism and Neo-liberalism on July 16, 2020 — “Not everyone can afford a swimming pool, a tennis court, an art gallery and playground, yet there isn’t enough land for each to do so. But in creating those things far from taking away resources and spaces from other people, you open them up to other people. And the more that we can start to share public assets and natural wealth, then the more chance we have of everybody achieving a decent quality of life without actually bursting through the planetary boundaries.” He goes on to define Capitalism for the flawed ideology that it is in asserting that the perception exists that “your money grants you the right to natural wealth” whereas “everyone has a right to the equal enjoyment of such natural wealth” which runs counter to this modern day version of Manifest Destiny. “Its not the possession of natural wealth, but the enjoyment of it, and the enjoyment should come before possession.”
“The net product of Capitalism, or the aggregate product of everyone’s profit generating activity is economic growth. The system is deemed to fail even if economic growth falters. And governments, and everybody embedded within the capitalist system does what they can to get growth back on track.” To punctuate such a poignant thought, the FED has set about over the past year wrought with record high bankruptcies, homelessness, national debt in dollars, and small businesses going under due, in large part to the pandemic, printing money continuously offering bailout after bailout to corporations without it’s desired effect. Such a fruitless act plays into the gross misunderstanding that Trickle Down Economics works where historically there is no evidence to prove the veracity of such a philosophy.
Monbiot went on to suggest “And continued perpetual growth would be absolutely fine if the planet were growing at the same rate. But perpetual growth on a finite planet is, as we know, a recipe for catastrophe. The argument that many people will use is — ‘well, growth can be decoupled from material resource consumption.’ As we switch from a goods economy to a service based economy, we can keep growing and everyone can have more and more money, but we will consume fewer and fewer goods. Its a lovely idea in theory, but bizarrely, we are heading in the opposite direction.”
“So while in the last two decades of the 20th century, there was a relative decoupling — not an absolute decoupling, and we weren’t using fewer goods — we were just using fewer goods or fewer materials per unit of economic growth. In the 21rst century so far, there has been a recoupling where we are now using more materials per unit of economic growth. Even in countries like this where we move further into a service based economy. Why? It turns out that services use an awful lot of goods. If you fly on a plane or make a film, or do any of the activities that we regard as service based activities, you have to use an awful lot of goods. And while you can demonstrate relative decoupling in some countries in some periods of history, no one has ever shown absolute decoupling of material resource consumption in any country at any time. In other words, while economic growth continues, nowhere have we seen an absolute decline in the amount of materials that we are using.”
8:35 “Already we
Through much labor in wading through dated material and subsequently flawed precepts of a comprehensive understanding of what Socialism ultimately is through its many colors and hues, I found this definition to be one of the more inclusive and therefore more insightful — “Socialism describes a variety of economic systems under which the means of production are owned equally by everyone in society. In some socialist economies, the democratically elected government owns and controls major businesses and industries. In other socialist economies, production is controlled by worker cooperatives. In a few others, individual ownership of enterprise and property is allowed, but with high taxes and government control.” By Robert Longley.
It’s my assertion (more fact than theory) that the Left now resoundingly remains entrenched within the middle regardless of the hysteria surrounding Socialism while the right incessantly, regrettably, moves more to the fringe of the party while shouting unfounded hysterics toward a return toward a “Red Scare” due, in large part, to gross ignorance surrounding Socialism — a topic that immediately calls upon the reader to set such parameters of the conversation by asking ‘political’ or ‘economic’ Socialism where the two are vastly different. Within this vain, top-down Socialism asserts that one must first gain power in order to enact their policies where bottom-up Socialism establishes it’s policies at the bottom — co-ops being the chief example of which — which inevitably and intrinsically changes the power structure at the top. Further, Socialism has many branches inasmuch as Conservatism does. So there is no one definitive preamble that one can subscribe to it in enumerating their many misinterpretation of such a nuanced philosophy without being both intellectually dishonest and led by hubris, not fact, in doing so. None of the policies that have been put forward by Democrats — or such policies that are feared that they might put forward — emphatically reside within a Socialistic camp. Or no more that systemically or historically have etched their mark upon the American landscape.
Contextually, there were various periods spread throughout American history where policies like those of a more centrist, modern based Democratic party were based upon “for a greater good” — the GI Bill, a minimum wage, removing children from the workforce, lesser hours within the work day and better working conditions, along with collective bargaining to name but a few. LBJ ushered in Medicaid, Medicare, the Headstart program along with the National Endowment for the Arts and Public Broadcasting Corporation as part of his ‘Great Society’ program. It is the absence of such forward-thinking, and the general fear of a “Red Scare” part two, that has led to such a pragmatic perspective — one encroaching upon the favor and/or policy making of both sides of the aisle that have been readily and ignorantly dismissed from the larger conversation.
So much so that the causality of which has led to stagnant wage increases dating back to the 70's, further historical highs in wealth inequality and national debt, the inherent and systematic need for UBIs, and an under educated citizenry in a great many pertinent area of thought and/or expertise due to exponential rises in cost of post-secondary education. As a footnote to the latter, modern economist have elucidated on the lack of teaching of Socialism within post-secondary educations for multiple generations has fed into the grave misinterpretations and the preponderance of ignorance upon the topic of Socialism that forces any honest discourse virtually impossible without long, drawn out conversations dispelling widespread and generational generalizations toward which.
But as the conversation grows — if it can bud into honest debate — one must rightly contrast the flaws within each system. Through capitalism, a economic recession happens every seven to ten years resulting within government intervention. For context, every President since LBJ have raised the national debt by at least 30% To which, only three times within America’s storied history has the budget ever been balanced — under LBJ, Eisenhower, and lastly, Clinton, who, upon September 30th, 1998, announce a balanced budget ushering in wasteful spending by his successors. Yet a historical asterisk marred LBJ’s name where adding Social Security to the overall budget ledger inevitably masked the deficit he created. According to Robert Reich, “Over the last 40 years:
Wages for the top o.1% grew 345%
Wages for the top 1% grew by 160%
The share of wages for the bottom 90% shrunk…
Unfettered capitalism has pulverized the working class.” Typically, 80% of federal spending goes toward medicaid, medicare, social security, national defense, and paying on the interest on the national debt.
In conclusion, such Socialistic(?) constructs like UBIs and co-ops are being utilized if not being ground tested all over the world, but specifically within the parameters of this discussion, also in America with great success. Specifically, but not solely to one example and not the other, co-ops have saved entire regions from abject poverty allowing them to flourish in the same regard as microlending transformatively saved third world countries by granting them access to, and a furtherance of financial mobility. Once the data is entered covering the rate of success or failure that UBIs’ will have within the immediacy, countries will be better able to customize them as the world enters into a third industrial age within the next 20 to 50 years (probably sooner) that is going to further remove the already depleted and unskilled middle class in market related talents as a bulwark of consumer spending. Where credit cards were the go-to intermediary during the 80’s and upwards. thus supplementing income for a stagnating middle class, UBIs will vastly, and inevitably, take over such a vital role to perpetuate consumer spending as the unskilled middle class and working poor are crushed under the weight of a markedly unfettered and self-serving capitalistic economic system.
. | https://medium.com/@civicsandcritics/why-is-there-such-a-push-for-socialism-within-america-1de56c1c601e | ['Civics And Critics'] | 2021-01-04 06:08:20.700000+00:00 | ['Socialism', 'Poitics', 'Capitalism', 'America', 'Policy'] |
Shout Out to Whispers! | Starting today, Mobcrush allows private messaging through our new Whispers feature in our latest update on iOS, Android and Web.
You can message your friends by simply typing /w username followed by your message, then voila! You’ve just sent a private message that only you and your friend can see. Replying is even simpler. To reply, just type /r and BOOM you’re typing a message to the last person who contacted you.
The messages will follow you in chat wherever you go, so don’t be afraid to take a look around at the other streams, because your conversation will travel with you!
Whispers only works if the other person is online, so meet up on Mobcrush and start Whispering away!
For more details on Whispers check out our FAQ HERE, and make sure you update to the latest version of Mobcrush to start Whispering.
But Whispers aren’t the only thing we’ve been working on…
It’s been a busy Fall here at Mobcrush HQ, so here’s a quick recap on the 5 latest features that are available in Mobcrush now.
ReplayKit Live launched with iOS 10. Woah. Streaming right from an iPhone or iPad is now only one touch away. New games are adding live broadcasting daily, like Asphalt 8: Airborne, Modern Combat 5: Blackout and Vainglory. Plus, more huge games are right around the corner.
Donations. Are. Live! You can now donate to your favorite broadcasters on Mobcrush. Look for the gift icon and show the #mobfam some love.
Mobcrush Bot exists?? Not much is known about Mobcrush Bot, but we were recently able to capture this rare footage below. Watch carefully and get your own Mobcrush Bot here for further study.
Tournament Time. Go head-to-head in our new mobile tournament series, powered by our friends at ESL. Glory and prizes are up for grabs each week, so make sure to sign up, compete and stream Vainglory, Hearthstone, Modern Combat 5 and Clash Royale.
Who doesn’t love stickers? Especially when they’re this adorable. Meet Mobcat, Crushwolf, Fat Dragon and Dedcat inside our new sticker pack for iMessage in iOS 10.
That’s a wrap! Look for more exciting updates out of Mobcrush HQ coming your way soon.
❤ The Mobcrush Team
P.S. #StreamVainglory all month and tag @Vainglory and @Mobcrush on Twitter for a chance to win an iPhone 7 Plus! | https://blog.mobcrush.com/whispers-9bbd51091682 | [] | 2016-11-12 01:13:29.938000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Esports', 'Mobile', 'iOS', 'Android'] |
The Importance of Product Management in Government | The Importance of Product Management in Government
By: Chris Johnston & Kelly O’Connor
In providing services to its taxpayer, the U.S. Government builds and maintains thousands of digital products: prospective students apply for loans, Veterans refill prescriptions, travelers get passports, and citizens file taxes. The list goes on.
The U.S. Government has delivered much of the ubiquitous technology we use today. The Internet, microchip and GPS were developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, the electronic health record, pacemaker, nicotine patch were products of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and fire resistant clothing and infant formula were invented at NASA. These are just a few examples of government innovation.
But the approach taken to build and deliver digital products needs to evolve to take advantage of modern software development methods including agile iterative development, human centered design, and continuous delivery. Despite fancy design labs and alleged “digital transformation” capabilities, most vendors and government agencies continue to deliver digital products using traditional project management and waterfall development methods.
We can improve both user experience and cost efficiencies of digital product development in government by doing two things:
Designate experienced government product managers to lead digital product development; and Evolve our national model of service to make it easier and more attractive for talented private sector product managers, engineers, and designers to serve in government for “tours of duty.”
Why does government need “product managers”?
If you search for “product manager” on USAJobs (the government’s hiring website), you won’t find many postings. But you will find hundreds, even thousands, of project and program manager openings.
That’s because it’s common across government agencies and vendors in the federal space, to use the terms “project” and “product” synonymously. While both are important, they require different tools, methods, and skillsets:
Project management is focused on managing to a plan. Focus areas include managing schedule, budget, risk, policy compliance and reporting status to stakeholders. Success for a project manager is delivering a defined scope of work on-time and on-budget.
is focused on managing to a plan. Focus areas include managing schedule, budget, risk, policy compliance and reporting status to stakeholders. Success for a project manager is delivering a defined scope of work on-time and on-budget. Product management is focused on delivering a product a user wants or needs. Focus areas include user research, design thinking, iterative development, and delivering minimum viable products quickly. Success for a product manager is delivering a product that users love — and use to complete tasks (or in the private sector — a product customers will pay for)!
Most government managers (and government vendors) have extensive project management training and a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification but little or no training in things like design thinking, iterative releases, product funnels and analytics, and user research.
Because government outsources most of its information technology development, partnering with vendors who understand the difference between project and product management is critical. In order for this outsourced model to work, government must have a lean team of in-house digital experts and product managers to help procure, oversee, and deliver modern, user-friendly products to users.
Product managers have a wide scope of responsibility throughout the product lifecycle:
Understand the customer and the problems they are facing Build, iterate, and release a product that addresses the problems, with direct input from those users Define objectives, measure results, and make improvements according to data Drive communication about the product benefits and (in the private sector) the overall profitability of the product.
Understanding your customers and their problems comes from user research: speaking directly with users; watching them, in context, trying to solve a problem on their own; asking them in many different ways what problem they need to solve and how they feel about a given solution. This approach to building interactive systems is typically referred to as Human-Centered Design (HCD), User-Centered Design, or Design Thinking. Involving a human perspective throughout the product design process helps ensure that the resulting product is usable, effective, efficient, and enjoyable. Think about any frustrating product you may have used in the past. You might have complained, “Did anybody even use this before they started selling it?” In all likelihood, nobody did.
Once you have identified the problem and are ready to start building a product, your users are still central to the process. Neglecting to include user input during implementation is probably one of the biggest causes of failure in government projects. It is unlikely that your initial research identified the precise, perfect way to solve the problem. Assuming that’s true, when do you want to learn you’re wrong? Typically, the government learns at the end of the project, after years have passed and millions of dollars spent. Instead, using an Agile approach to software development, you can deliver a minimal viable product (MVP) that solves part of the need or problem. With the feedback from your users, you can then make changes to the requirements and build and release the next iteration of the product.
In addition to the direct user research discussed earlier that helps understand users and their problems, it’s also imperative to collect quantitative data. When the Digital Service team at the Department of Veterans Affairs launches new products, we develop metrics that help us know quickly if we are meeting our goals. For example, when we launched a new online healthcare application for Veterans, our goal was to make it easier for Veterans to apply for healthcare, thus increasing the percentage of applications that the VA received electronically. This trailing metric — applications submitted electronically — was just the first we defined. We also identified a leading indicator of the amount of traffic received at the start of the application. This gave us insight into how well we were driving usage and communicating the benefits of the online application process from Vets.gov. We then developed usage metrics in the form of a user funnel and defined key steps in the application process to see where Veterans were dropping out.
Defining success metrics helps you focus on what’s important in your product and how well it solves the problems you’ve identified. Defining key steps the user must take is also important in order to shine a spotlight on where in the process users are failing. With this data, you can conduct further in-person research to understand why they are failing and devise an even better solution.
Evolving our National Model of Service
In the legal industry, lawyers fiercely compete to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. What if we could replicate this model for technology?
Many people in today’s technology workforce aren’t drawn to a long-term career service role in government, but they do want to have an impact and work on something they care about. And what better place to do that than in government?
The U.S. Digital Service enables product managers, engineers, and designers from the private sector to serve two years or more on a “tour of duty” in government working on problems like immigration, education, Veteran services, health care, and data security and privacy.
This model enables a powerful combination of private sector innovation, government career service leadership and subject matter expertise, and vendor outsourcing capabilities to scale and support innovative products. Moreover, if this model was bi-directional, government career service employees would be empowered to work for a year or two at top performing companies in the private sector and bring all that learning back to government.
The U.S. needs to enhance our model of service to enable talented and driven product managers, engineers, and designers to go back and forth between the public and private sectors more easily. Imagine if our colleagues at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs could work for a year or two with top tech companies. There would be a tremendous amount of shared learning and innovation in both the public and private sector.
The U.S. Government has delivered an incredible amount of technical innovation this past century, and to continue we need to build product management capabilities in government and modernize our national model of service. | https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/the-importance-of-product-management-in-government-b59933d01874 | ['U.S. Digital Service'] | 2018-08-23 16:09:28.793000+00:00 | ['Government', 'Civictech', 'Product'] |
Microsoft Build 2020 Expert Q&A: Cloud AI and Machine Learning Resources | Today at //MSBuild I hosted an Expert Q&A: Cloud AI and Machine Learning session on Microsoft Cloud AI and ML technologies. The following is a list of some of my answers to some of my favorite questions that I received.
If you have any other open questions or topics you want to learn more about in the AI/ML space be sure to comment below. If you are new to Azure you can get started a free subscription using the link below.
Questions Table Of Contents
What is your day to day like as an AI Cloud Advocate? Where can I get started learning AI/ML? Where can I find AI/ML case studies and examples? Do you know of any good resources to get started with Speech Synthesis and Classification? What cool ML/AI work have you seen regarding Covid-19? Is there any shortcut for identifying a model against a particular problem without doing extensive research on the data? For Quality Analysts/Quality Engineers that are new to ML, where would you recommend starting when learning how to validate/interpret models and/or validating the impact of applied ML? Do you have some insights to Azure ML Data labeling tool? Does it support (semi-auto) labeling methods? What about instance segmentation annotation? Is there a Template for CI/CD for Azure Custom Vision and Azure QnA Maker? I have a lot of documents in different formats Word, PDF, Image, Text how can I extract the text so that I can process them with AI/ML. Does Microsoft have any resources for Classification Aerial or Satellite Imagery Do you have any solutions coming to help with scarcity of initial data especially with computer vision and speech synthesis? How much experience do you have with deploying deep learning models on IoT/hardware devices and which products utilizes this the best right now? How will DeepStream integration with Azure IoT edge be supported and any upcoming features or modules for IoT edge? In your opinion when is it good to use Databricks and when is it good to use AzureML?
Expert Q&A: Cloud AI and Machine Learning Questions
1. What is your day to day like as an AI Cloud Advocate?
This is a great question. While no two days are exactly the same as a developer advocate I spend my time divided between the follow three areas:
Community — you’ll see me both offline (whether it’s conferences, meetups, and user groups) and online (from forums to open source projects and social media outlets) meeting and collaborating with you here in Israel. Content — we believe in the power of quality documentation. We listen to you and then directly contribute your feedback to making our documentation as empowering as possible.We also author blog posts, write articles, create videos, contribute to and create our own open source projects based on your needs. Engineering — at the end of the day, we are all engineers. We connect with developers in the field, foster strong relationships with teams at Microsoft, and work together to improve the experience of building solutions in the cloud.
I do things like:
Developing open source code to unblock you and provide inspiration.
Write blog posts and articles about topics I believe will help you accomplish more.
Ensure you have the best possible documentation available.
Learning from you at user groups and conferences.
Share learnings and updates with you at meetups and conferences.
Connecting with you over social media @pythiccoder.
Taking your feedback back to the correct product teams who can make a difference.
Listening and growing, every day.
For more information check out my post on the topic
2. Where can I get started learning AI/ML?
There are a lot of amazing places to get started with AI/ML if you ask me almost too many here are some of my favorite resources.
3. Where can I find AI/ML case studies and examples?
Microsoft provides some pretty great resources for our AI case studies I will link to a few of them below.
4. Do you know of any good resources to get started with Speech Synthesis and Classification?
For getting started I would recommend checking out the Azure Speech Cognitive service offering. We have some really nice getting started demos for creating Speech to Text, Text to Speech and custom voice applications.
To learn check more check out are documentation below.
5. What cool ML/AI work have you seen regarding Covid-19?
There have been some really creative AI/ML solutions in this space. I’ll link to a couple really interesting ones that Microsoft has been directly involved in.
Also check out this awesome dataset put together by AI2.
6. Is there any shortcut for identifying a model against a particular problem without doing extensive research on the data?
It is critical to get to know your data in order to build quality AI models how ever in order to better get to know your data it is worth experimenting with different architectures. For classical Machine Learning problems I recommend taking a look at the cheat sheet below.
But this is where in my opinion the Azure AutoML Service shines. With very little configuration and no code you can quickly test many model architectures to find a strong starting base line for your data.
For more information check out our documentation.
7. For Quality Analysts/Quality Engineers that are new to ML, where would you recommend starting when learning how to validate/interpret models and/or validating the impact of applied ML?
This is a great question I actually gave a presentation on this very topic just a few days ago (see below.)
While interpretability in machine learning is still an open area for research I’d recommend taking a look at the Microsoft Interpretability toolkit as a strong starting point.
Check out the documentation and getting started notebooks below to learn more.
I also have a good post on SHAP values that I’d recommend as well
One last area that is worth keeping an eye on is Data Drift we have some great tooling to help with this as well.
8. Do you have some insights to Azure ML Data labeling tool? Does it support (semi-auto) labeling methods? What about instance segmentation annotation?
With the release of Azure ML, Microsoft provided a new labeling tool that currently supports image and bounding box labeling.
The ML assisted labeling page lets you trigger automatic machine learning models to accelerate the labeling task and is supported in the Enterprise Azure ML Tier.
If you need instance segmentation or Video annotation support I suggest looking at the open source Microsoft VoTT tool.
9. Is there a Template for CI/CD for Azure Custom Vision and Azure QnA Maker?
Yes check out the resources below.
10. I have a lot of documents in different formats Word, PDF, Image, Text how can I extract the text so that I can process them with AI/ML.
This is a great question Microsoft put together a reference architecture for exactly this scenario using Cognitive Search . Check out the documentation and JFK example below.
Also check out the form Azure Form Recognizer Service.
11. Does Microsoft have any resources for Classification Aerial or Satellite Imagery
Yes check out the resources below.
12. Do you have any solutions coming to help with scarcity of initial data especially with computer vision and speech synthesis?
There are couple different approaches to handle scarcity of data from transfer learning from simulation, data augmentation, and one shot/ meta learning approaches I will provide some resources below.
13. How much experience do you have with deploying deep learning models on IoT/hardware devices and which products utilizes this the best right now?
I have a good deal of experience with IoT Edge computing, the Cognitive Service Container Instances, Azure Machine Learning and the Custom Vision service are great examples of AI on the edge.
14. How will DeepStream integration with Azure IoT edge be supported and any upcoming features or modules for IoT edge?
Great question take a look at the documentation and great demonstration video here from my Colleague Paul DeCarlo.
15. In your opinion when is it good to use Databricks and when is it good to use AzureML?
This is a really good question that deserves a more in depth follow up post. As a general rule of thumb in my experience it makes sense to use Databricks for data process and AzureML for model development and deployment. Stay tuned for a more in depth follow up post.
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About the Author
Aaron (Ari) Bornstein is an AI researcher with a passion for history, engaging with new technologies and computational medicine. As an Open Source Engineer at Microsoft’s Cloud Developer Advocacy team, he collaborates with Israeli Hi-Tech Community, to solve real world problems with game changing technologies that are then documented, open sourced, and shared with the rest of the world. | https://medium.com/microsoftazure/microsoft-build-2020-expert-q-a-cloud-ai-and-machine-learning-resources-7c7ac2485989 | ['Aaron', 'Ari'] | 2020-05-20 19:27:04.046000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'AI', 'Microsoft', 'Azure'] |
Merry Christmas, I am very board reading your poems. 💜💜💜 | in The Bazaar of the Bizarre | https://medium.com/@dyspla/merry-christmas-i-am-very-board-reading-your-poems-afdb6db72ec8 | ['Lennie Varvarides'] | 2020-12-25 09:40:05.918000+00:00 | ['Feedback', 'Poets On Medium', 'Creative Process', 'Relationships', 'Poetry'] |
Why I Let Go of My Soulmate Relationship | Why I Let Go of My Soulmate Relationship
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
Our society is defined by ego. Many of us are addicted to money and power and status. We feel bad when we don’t achieve what we want. We are told we need to work hard and earn our place in the world in order to fit in, need to find the perfect relationship and raise the perfect children, build the perfect career and be the perfect friend. We want everything; growth, money, love, freedom, happiness, connection, safety. Only then can we feel ‘fulfilled’. It’s all about us, to feed our ego. I have also lived my life for the last 32 years like that and was never aware of it. But then I met somebody that could be defined as my ‘twin flame’ and it changed everything.
I didn’t even know this type of love really existed.
When I met my boyfriend I thought I hit the jackpot: we had a crazy connection, spiritual sex, challenged each other, had deep conversations, the same hobbies and interests, the same core values. I didn’t even know this type of love really existed. On top of that he was also intelligent, rich, good looking, charming, sweet & loving, got along with my friends and was good in bed. What more could I want?
Our relationship seemed like a dream, even other people noticed it. People were drawn to us, came to us to ask for advice and were amazed by how much of a perfect team we were despite our differences. It was then that somebody referred me to an article about twin flames. I have always been skeptical about spirituality and soul mates, thought that everything in life was just a coincidence and we as humans mean nothing to the universe. I perceived monogamy and marriage as a product of society, a way to live to their standards and to get the most money and value out of you. I never believed that two people could be ‘made for each other’.
So the term twin flame cringed all the cells in my body. I was the most independent and autonomous person I knew, how could I be part of another soul? For those unfamiliar with the term twin flame or twin soul; it is said that your soul can split into two separate beings before you are born into your life on earth, to serve a higher purpose and to grow individually before you can reach union again. I know this sounds very vague and hoohaa-y and that’s exactly what I thought at first. When two twin flames meet, their relationship is from a different level. They are usually mirrors of each other, but share the same core values. They can’t stay away from each other, even if the circumstances in their lives make it almost impossible to form a relationship. It’s a very challenging bond as you bring up each other’s deepest fears and shadows. I realised I had met my twin flame after reading that article.
Our relationship was a rollercoaster on every possible level. We fell so in love that we both got scared of the connection. We entered into a spiritual awakening process. Were each other’s opposites and at the same time exactly the same. He was rich and career-focused; I was poor and a hippie traveler. He had a wife and kids; I was free and never committed. He was extrovert and outgoing; I was introvert and quiet. He meditated and read books; I partied and took drugs. He is from Latin America; I am from Europe. He was born in 77; I in 88. He was already married for 20 years; I never a had a serious relationship until I was 28.
The differences between us were insane, but we were drawn to each other like magnets.
We challenged each other’s lives and habits, grew immensely and learned a lot from each other. We had the same values in life: both the urge to protect the natural world, both interested in spiritual connections, both exploring polyamory, both free souls from the inside, both questioning society. We lived a very similar childhood, but came out completely different. His father was an alcoholic who died young; my father was a narcissist who moved to the other side of the world.
Because of him I started to be more awakened, questioned everything we do in life and how we see the world.
When we met, we both knew our lives were never gonna be the same again. I stayed in the same country after six years of traveling to be with him, he started thinking about divorcing his wife. He was teaching me on how to make lots of money and mentally challenge myself and I showed him how to live more in the moment and how to devalue money. Because of him I started to be more awakened, questioned everything we do in life and how we see the world. I developed deep friendships that I could never achieve before. Began to read spiritual texts and started to meditate. We took psychedelics together and practiced tantric sex that brought us to heights that I could not even fantasise about.
Our relationship was almost impossible. He lived in another city an hour’s flight away from where I stayed, had a wife and two teenage kids, owned multiple companies and was planning to move to another country. And I was a digital nomad planning to travel the world forever. But our connection changed everything. We were so sure of our love that he even told his wife about me and they opened up to be polyamorous, which is still a huge taboo in Mexico (where we live). We broke all rules of a conventional relationship and inspired others to do the same. I met his friends and business partners and learned a great deal about the Mexican upper rich layer. And they were astounded by how their millionaire friend could fall so hard for a poor backpacker girl.
I went through such an inner growth process during this relationship that at some point started to question my ego. Wasn’t our love based on ego as well? We pushed everything and everybody aside to be together, convinced his wife to try polyamory and he planned to move his whole family to the city where I was staying. I started to lose my independence to be with him whenever his schedule allowed it. I felt more and more that my ego was getting addicted to his love, his money, this way of life he was giving me.
With this realisation my body started to react as well; I lost weight, my hair started to fall out and every morning I woke up at 4am with anxiety attacks. I couldn’t place this altered state of mind and blamed it on external things. I learned to live with it for a while and stopped listening to my inner voice. Our relationship started to become more of a control game. We both wanted all of each other, all of our time together, we didn’t hang out with friends anymore, he didn’t spend time with his wife and kids anymore and we both felt this huge pressure to make it work between us.
So I broke my own heart and left him.
His children were the ultimate reason for our break-up. I knew that our egos were controlling our lives and our love for each other. His kids needed a father to be there for them, an example to look up to. Not a dad that is spending all his weekends with his girlfriend while their mother was heart-broken at home waiting for her husband to divorce her. She had also felt and seen our connection and realised that she could never reach that type of love with him. They were heading for a divorce and I knew that they needed time as a family to go through this process without my influence.
So I broke my own heart and left him. I stopped listening to my desperately screaming ego telling me to stay with him. I know that our love is worth fighting for and I will probably never achieve this type of connection again, but in order for complete union both souls have to let go of all attachments. He was too attached to me and forgot about these little human beings he was supposed to raise. My ego died when I made that decision and that, I think, is the ultimate expression of love.
I can only hope that one day we will meet again. | https://medium.com/hello-love/why-i-let-go-of-my-twin-flame-relationship-490f91c595e9 | ['Anna Foga'] | 2021-02-06 19:04:31.421000+00:00 | ['Breakups', 'Twin Flame', 'Spirituality', 'Relationships', 'Love'] |
Learning what you learned and how it impacts you. | Do you ever sit pondering what you have learnt in school/college and how much its useful?
Well, this thought comes to all of us at many points in life.
Why i needed to learn about Hydro-chloric acid? I work as a software developer.
What was the point of stressing on Pythagoras theorem if i was to sit for an interview of a sales representative?
Why do we learn?
Simple. Its the Curiosity.
We ask questions from the day we start to speak. And it never ends. We interact, we ask, we learn, we change and we move on with our lives.
The one who never asks is questioned.
If we can’t reason about something we are curious about, we need answers. And there’s always someone who knows.
How Learning starts?
For starters, i am not some philosopher who thinks about education as a full time career. This article is just about sharing my thoughts about how it turned out for me.
So the question i am trying to answer here is How learning started for me.
We go to school at the age of three and continue until our college to read on a fixed set of syllabus. From where i come , we don’t even get to experiment with what i should study in my college. I chose a stream based on the “Trend” and that’s it. Its the story of millions.
I see the whole education system trying to teach one that he should know in this world. Starting with language till the time he can decide what he wants to learn specifically about something.
Why should i learn?
This is what we never ask when we get into the jail of education system. Its only when we question it, we think its too late. And guess what, it’s never late.
Start today and after 30 days you’ll be glad you started.
Its always about asking the Right Question. But there’s no wrong question(s) — that we hear our mentors/teachers/Gurus say.
I believe Right Question leads one in right direction and that’s the key not everybody have.
There is no “should” in what we ____ learn. We learn anyway.
When learning happens, it strengthens what we understand. | https://medium.com/@harsimransinghchhabra/learning-what-you-learned-and-how-it-impacts-you-a5104594a2fc | ['Harsimran Singh'] | 2020-12-23 07:33:51.625000+00:00 | ['Knowledge', 'Learning', 'Storyteller', 'Curiosity', 'Growth'] |
by Martino Pietropoli | First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-fluxus/friday-were-all-the-same-b7559db8c490 | ['Martino Pietropoli'] | 2018-09-21 00:22:18.099000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Comics', 'Cartoon', 'Friday'] |
#36: It’s a Family Affair | Featuring Auntie Terrie
Listen Now
Show Notes
Auntie Terrie shares what it was like being a woman working in tech at IBM in the 60’s along with her take on cryptocurrency. In part 2, Che Mott gives a European perspective to regulation of the blockchain and privacy with the new GDPR law, while announcing the Global Venture Forum in San Francisco on May 11 and 12th. gvxchange.com/globalventureforum Tech Advisors: Samsung Vs, GE Vs, Adobe, ServiceNow, IBM Vs, Blockchain@BerkeleyPartners: TheHeart, Mind The Bridge, Flanders Investment & Trade Agency, Startup Estonia, Open Austria, Berkeley alumni and MBAs Details on The Global Venture Forum: Brings insight, networks and paths to cooperation with industry, May 11 and 12th Speakers: Christopher “Che” Mott, CEO GVF Raymond Liao — MD Samsung NEXT, Industry & Investor leaders. Alexandra Johnson, Managing Director, DFJ VTB Aurora Deborah Magid — Director Software Strategy, IBM Ventures Ivar Siimar, Trind Ventures Sam Lee, CEO, Blockchain Global Peter Braun, European Business Angel Network Board Member Jesse DeMesa, Principal Partners, Momenta Partners Mo Gaber, Global Practice Director, Digital Strategy, Adobe Abhishek Shukla, Managing Director, Software Investments, GE Ventures Rodrigo Prudencio, Leads Alexa Accelerator — Amazon Alexa Fund Moderator: Marco Marinucci — CEO, Mind The Bridge w Startup Europe Partnership Tomasz Rudolf, CEO TheHeart.
Transcript
Coming Soon. | https://medium.com/coloringcrypto/36-its-a-family-affair-87e150fe4dce | ['Kelly Mcquade-W.'] | 2018-07-04 00:05:53.117000+00:00 | ['Startup'] |
7 Most visited places around the world | The mother world is filled with a variety of destinations and a variety of attractions for exploring. This isn’t easy to make a list of the most visited places in the world.
Image Source: canyoneches.org
Here I have described five best places to visit in the world to help reduce your research effort:
Thailand — 22.78 million
Most probably this place comes first when we think about places to visit around the world. With all of its excellence, it is considered as the most visited city in the world.
Image Source: picswalls.com
One-third of travelers in the world travel in this place. This place never sees the shortage of travelers for any reason. If you plan to have a tour after coronavirus abroad, this is the must-visit place for you.
Every beach in Thailand has its eccentric tastes. This is ideal for a family tour outside India. Enjoy the loud and crazy Paying beach, and it remains glittering, even in the evening. Exotic bats, shows, and the alluring street food vendors make this place more vulnerable.
You can also read: Protective measures while going on tour post COVID-19 lockdown
Switzerland — 20.42 million
Switzerland or the ‘paradise on earth’ is famous for its majestic beauty. From the breathtaking view of snow top mountains to the exquisite lake and the magnificent and charming ancient wonders, Switzerland is the must-visit place in the world.
Image Source: greatrail.com
This small country has a lot of things that everyone should explore once in their life. Added to all of this, this small country is very safe and clean. The transportation system is also secure, and most amazingly, it doesn’t have any language barriers.
Paris, France — 19.1 million
Paris, or the city of light, attracts millions of visitors to enjoy its breathtaking excellence. No matter the weather or anything, tourists love this place for all of its excellence.
Image Source: centraveler.com
The divine art collection and plenty of delicious cuisines don’t let people avoid this country. It has the gentle river Seine where the morning and evening ambiance soothes the soul.
The stately museums inspire to come in this place again and again, and the centuries-old churches create spirituality in mind. The blocks of Rococo and Neoclassical style architecture will be an exception; it also makes people remember this country for a lifetime.
Dubai — 15.79 million
Dubai is popular for its luxury shopping hauls and noticeable buildings. Here you will have a glimpse of massive malls, glass building, swanky hotels, and the never-ending deserts.
Image Source: cntravellerme.com
It also adds old souls, historic homes, and tea houses. The world’s tallest hotel is also structured here. To enjoy all its delightful excellence, more than 19.5 million people visit this place.
You can also read: Discover The Stunning Landscapes On Luxurious Norway Cruise
Rome — 13.76 million
No one in the world doesn’t dream about traveling in Rome. Rome houses about 12 of Italy’s spectacular world heritage sites that include Pantheon, the Coliseum, St. Peter’s square, Navona square, etc.
Image Source: travelsandliving.com
The marvelous architectural delight of Rome exposes the history of this place. Rome also makes itself so famous for having some of the masterpieces painting, sculpture, etc. To make your day in Rome, take an affordable Rome sightseeing package and enjoy this beautiful place.
New York — 13.13 million
If you are wondering what to see in the USA, then the first place that you should choose is its New York. Most probably this is the main St vibrant city of America that ‘never sleeps’.
Image Source: pixeltalk.net
The busy cars, people, and the bustling nightlife make people wow. Some of the iconic sights can be also visited there are Empire state building, mind-blowing restaurants, and the neon-lit silent ambiance attracts people very much.
Bali, Indonesia — 8.26 million
Who doesn’t know about his place? This is the most popular honeymoon place in the world. Not only for the honeymoon, if you are seeking a relaxing week, then it is a reasonable Bali package for you.
Image Source: bookmundi.com
This place is basically visited by all aged people as it has all types of pleasure for them. But as per the recent report, it receives more than 30 percent of tourists per year for just making a honeymoon. The exquisite cuisine, which is inspired by world-famous dishes, scenic beauty, and a hub of culture and tradition, Bali attracts all aged people for traveling in Bali.
These all are the places that you shouldn’t miss traveling. For selecting your next destination, contact the local tour operator, and get ready for a breathtaking journey in your life.
You can also read: The Best Vacation Places To Visit In Florida | https://medium.com/@thespecialstories/7-most-visited-places-around-the-world-e95fd67661b3 | ['The Specialstories'] | 2020-06-23 10:31:56.816000+00:00 | ['Vacation', 'Travel', 'Most Visited Countries', 'Traveling', 'Thespecialstories'] |
Write a new more hopeful story everyday that encourages the soul | Write a new more hopeful story everyday that encourages the soul
2020 has been the roughest year, yet there is still so much to be grateful for. We have to count our blessings if we are to see the light. Peace can sometimes escape us when we only focus on the problems. What we focus on enlargens.
If we stay positive and look for solutions we can boldly and confidently go into the future with a greater expectation. We have learnt resilience, humility, carefulness, emphathy and the value of human life, more so than ever before.
We find favour in every path we encounter when we change our mindset and our beliefs. We can really begin to make headway and progress moving into new wonderful things.
This constant renewal of the mind brings peace to the heart, joy to our soul and transformation to our lives.
We begin to walk the path of serenity and surrender instead of angst and fear of the unknown. Trusting that this is as a season and it can only get better ftom here on end.
We thank our lucky stars that we have the gift of life and begin to live it at its fullest for that is where there is fullness of joy. This can be our daily walk and way of life. Hope for the future with great fulfillment and upliftment.
If you found this encouraging and hopeful then follow and recommend. | https://medium.com/@angeliichoo77/write-a-new-more-hopeful-story-everyday-that-encourages-the-soul-9acac5f1a72c | [] | 2020-12-20 09:29:06.840000+00:00 | ['Peace', 'Christmas', 'Journal', 'Hope', 'Joy'] |
Los Angeles Lakers vs New York Knicks Free NBA Spread Prediction, 12–12–2017 | Free NBA Pick by Samar Baht of Sports Picks Forum
Los Angeles Lakers vs New York Knicks Free NBA Prediction
NBA: Tuesday, December 12th 7:00 PM EST
Odds: Knicks -3.5, 213
An inter-conference clash between the Los Angles Lakers and the New York Knicks take the court in our Tuesday night featured matchup. The New York Knicks (13–13) will be 3.5-point favorites at home in Madison Square Garden and the Over/Under (O/U) opened at 212 points. Both teams defeated their last opponent. The Knicks defeated the Atlanta Hawks 111–107, while the Lakers beat the Charlotte Hornets 110–99.
Los Angeles won the first two games of this four-game Eastern road swing by downing Philadelphia and Charlotte. The Lakers are 14th in the league in scoring offense as they put up 106 points per game and they are 4th in rebounding. The Lakers stand 24th in the league in scoring defense as they allow 108.7 points per night. Brandon Ingram averages a team-high 16.2 points per game while Jordan Clarkson chips in 15.2 points a night. Lonzo Ball adds 8.6 points, 6.8 rebounds and 7.1 assists per game.
The Knicks have played much better on their home court (12–5) which is one of the better home court records in the NBA. Kristaps Porzingis leads this Knicks team with 25.5 PPG and presents a mismatch playing the power forward position at 7'3". Enes Kanter has been a nice addition to this team, Kanter came from the Thunder in the Carmelo Trade. Kanter is leading the Knicks in rebounds with 10.3 per game. The Knicks are averaging 104 points per game and giving up 103.8 to their opponents.
The Lakers score the most points in the paint in the league this season, scoring 54.5 points in there per game. The Knicks, though, have been the second-best team at defending inside, allowing just 39.5 points per game. The Lakers also concede the most points in the paint in the NBA, and the Knicks will be hoping to capitalize on that given they are a top ten team in this category. The battle of the paint is always important in Lakers games, and the stats suggest they will be up against it in this one.
The Knicks are a much better team at home this season and they are 10–3 ATS in their last 13 home games, 6–1 ATS in their last 7 vs. Western Conference and they are 7–2 ATS in their last 9 home games vs. a team with a losing road record. I am backing the Knicks (-3.5) at home in this matchup vs the Lakers.
Lakers vs Knicks FREE Pick: Knicks -3.5 | https://medium.com/verifiedcappers/los-angeles-lakers-vs-new-york-knicks-free-nba-spread-prediction-12-12-2017-3d3990726a5c | ['Sports Picks Forum'] | 2017-12-12 13:18:31.385000+00:00 | ['NBA', 'Los Angeles Lakers', 'New York Knicks', 'Sports Betting', 'Gambling'] |
Huobi DM To Launch Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Contracts on April 12 | Huobi DM To Launch Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Contracts on April 12
SINGAPORE, April 11, 2019
SINGAPORE, April 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Users will soon have even more flexibility and choices on Huobi Derivative Market (Huobi DM). Bitcoin Cash (BCH) service will go live tomorrow on the crypto asset contract platform and two more coins are scheduled to be launched before the end of May.
Huobi DM
Inclusion on Huobi DM means traders will be able to take both long and short positions on BCH, allowing for arbitrage, speculation, and hedging. Since 2017, Bitcoin Cash’s value has fluctuated between $75.08 and $4,355.62.
In addition to BCH, Huobi DM offers weekly, bi-weekly, and quarterly cryptocurrency contracts for Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), EOS (EOS), Litecoin (LTC), and, as of last month, Ripple (XRP). Since its launch in late 2018, Huobi DM has grown rapidly, recently exceeding USD$92 billion in cumulative trading volume.
Features of Huobi DM:
Competitive fee structure for BCH: 0.02% to open or close for makers and 0.03% to open or close for takers.
Superior risk management: including Price Limit, Order Limit, and Position Limit.
Superior risk control: with the sophisticated price limit mechanism, no claw back has occurred since its launch.
Real-time risk supervision: Huobi constantly monitor contract prices, index prices, abnormal transactions, and positions.
Newly raised open position limits for all crypto contracts to up to twice their previous level and order limits to more than double their previous level.
User protections: To cover the societal losses attributed to unfilled liquidated orders/settle incidents in contract trading, Huobi also has a dedicated Risk Management Insurance Fund for each trading pair.
Disclaimers: Digital assets are innovative trading products, and prices fluctuate greatly. Please rationally judge your trading ability and make decisions prudently. Please note that users must clear the requisite KYC checks and assessments prior to commencing usage of Huobi DM. Huobi DM is not available to users from the United States of America, Singapore, Israel, Iraq, Hong Kong (China), Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Malaysia, Syria, Samoa Eastern, Puerto Rico, Guam, Bangladesh, Ecuador, and Kyrgyzstan.
For more information on Huobi DM, please visit www.hbdm.com
About Huobi:
Consisting of ten upstream and downstream enterprises, Huobi Group is the world’s leading blockchain company. Established in 2013, Huobi Group’s accumulative turnover exceeds US $1 trillion. It proudly provides safe, secure, and convenient cryptocurrency trading and asset management services to millions of users in 130+ countries.
For more info, please visit www.hbg.com
News source: MorningStar.com
Join
Website: www.hbdm.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HuobiDM
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/huobi-dm/
WeChat： dm19415 ，dm19178
QQ Group： 566109118
Telegram：https://t.me/huobidmofficial | https://medium.com/huobi-dm-news-roundup-archieves/huobi-dm-to-launch-bitcoin-cash-bch-contracts-on-april-12-83c54dedb59 | ['Huobi Futures'] | 2019-10-09 06:01:27.430000+00:00 | ['Huobiglobal', 'Bitcoincash', 'Huobidm', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Working with a JSONB Array of Objects in PostgreSQL | Let’s Get Started!
Building Our Data
Open pgAdmin and create a database as desired. Right-Click on the database name and choose Query Tool. Run the snippet below to create a simple table that will have an id, purchaser name and a jsonb column that stores an array of json objects, which will store items purchased.
CREATE TABLE public.purchases
(
id serial PRIMARY KEY,
purchaser varchar(50),
items_purchased jsonb
);
4. Run the snippet below to insert four records in to the table.
INSERT INTO purchases (purchaser,items_purchased) VALUES ('Bob',
'[{
"productid": 1,
"name": "Dell 123 Laptop Computer",
"price": 1300 },
{
"productid": 2,
"name": "Mechanical Keyboard",
"price": 120 }
]'); INSERT INTO purchases (purchaser,items_purchased) VALUES('Carol',
'[{
"productid": 3,
"name": "Virtual Keyboard",
"price": 150 }, {
"productid": 1,
"name": "Dell 123 Laptop Computer",
"price": 1300 },
{
"productid": 8,
"name": "LG Ultrawide Monitor",
"price": 190 }
]'); INSERT INTO purchases (purchaser,items_purchased) VALUES ('Ted',
'[{
"productid": 6,
"name": "Ergonomic Keyboard",
"price": 90 },
{
"productid": 7,
"name": "Dell 789 Desktop Computer",
"price": 120 }
]'); INSERT INTO purchases (purchaser,items_purchased) VALUES('Alice',
'[{
"productid": 7,
"name": "Dell 789 Desktop Computer",
"price": 120 },
{
"productid": 2,
"name": "Mechanical Keyboard",
"price": 120 }
]');
5. To see our data, run the query below.
SELECT * FROM purchases;
purchases with a jsonb column of items purchased
Our Queries
Getting All Items Purchased For An Account
This is the most straightforward query.
Run the query below to get all items purchased by Ted.
SELECT items_purchased FROM purchases
WHERE id=3
Array of json objects
Front-End
Thinking of this an API end-point result, this is perfect for the front-end developer to use Array.map(), Array.filter() or Array.forEach() and others operations for processing on the front-end.
Getting A Specific Item Purchased For An Account
Here we have several options depending on the request.
Looking at Carol, id=2, we see she has purchased,
[
{
"name": "Virtual Keyboard",
"price": 150,
"productid": 3
},
{
"name": "Dell 123 Laptop Computer",
"price": 1300,
"productid": 1
},
{
"name": "LG Ultrawide Monitor",
"price": 190,
"productid": 8
}
]
Let’s start by running the query below and examining what we get.
SELECT arr.position,arr.item_object
FROM purchases,
jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
WHERE id=2;
Pulling each json object out along with it’s ordinal position in the array
This gives us each json object (item purchased) out along with it’s ordinal position in the array.
jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
We passed to jsonb_array_elements the jsonb column with an array of objects. This breaks the array in to separate json objects.
the jsonb column with an array of objects. This breaks the array in to separate json objects. We included with ordinality . This tells PostgreSQL to include the ordinal position. Note this starts at 1. But when dealing with array, it starts at 0.
. This tells PostgreSQL to include the ordinal position. Note this starts at 1. But when dealing with array, it starts at 0. The name “arr” is arbitrary.
The name “item_object” is arbitrary and references a purchase json object in our case.
The word position is a key word.
is a key word. We can access the position and the item_object by using the syntax, arr.position and arr.item_object. We actually do not need to include the “arr” prefix, we can just use position and item_object.
More on jsonb_to_array() may be found here.
Now that we see how the data is transformed, if we want the second purchase by Carol, we simply create a Where clause specifying the ordinal position in the array.
2. If we know the ordinal position in the Array, we can just specify it in the Where Clause.
Run the query below to get just the second item purchased by Carol, id=2.
SELECT arr.item_object
FROM purchases,jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
WHERE id=2 and arr.position=2;
Second item purchased
3. If we do not know the position but we know the productid (or any Key) we can use a sub query that finds the ordinal position.
Run the query below to produce the same result as above.
SELECT arr.item_object
FROM purchases,jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
WHERE id=2 and arr.position=Cast((select arr.position FROM purchases, jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
WHERE id=2 and arr.item_object->>'productid' = '1') as int)
The ->> operator will return the value of the Key (productid) contained in item_object as text. That is why we use ‘1’ even though productid is a number.
Even though the ordinal position is a bigint, we must Cast it to int or bigint.
Front-End
Thinking of this an API end-point result, this is perfect for the front-end developer. We get back a nice clean json object they can manipulate or display.
4. As a bonus we will incorporate a technique from my last article to get the highest price item purchased by Carol, id=2.
SELECT arr.item_object,arr.item_object->>'price'
FROM purchases,
jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
WHERE id=2
and arr.item_object->>'price' = Cast((Select max(item_prices.price) as p
FROM purchases,jsonb_to_recordset(purchases.items_purchased) as item_prices(price int)
WHERE id=2) as varchar);
I have included “arr.item_object’->>’price’ in the Select clause so we can see that the data type returned is text. Hence the need for the Cast() function.
Highest priced item
Without explaining too much from my prior article, the jsonb_to_recordset() function allows us to extract data out in to relational columns, against which we can query.
More on jsonb operators can be found here.
Adding A New Purchase To An Account
If we look at Bob’s purchases, we see he has purchased,
[
{
"name": "Dell 123 Laptop Computer",
"price": 1300,
"productid": 1
},
{
"name": "Mechanical Keyboard",
"price": 120,
"productid": 2
}
]
Bob is about to purchase a monitor.
{
"name": "LG Ultrawide Monitor",
"price": 190,
"productid": 8
}
Run the query below to add a purchase to the items_purchased array for Bob, id=1.
UPDATE purchases SET items_purchased = items_purchased ||
'{"name": "LG Ultrawide Monitor",
"price": 190,
"productid": 8}' ::jsonb
WHERE id=1;
Bob has now purchased a monitor.
Bob’s new purchase
Here we have used the concatenation operator, ||, to concatenate on to the array a jsonb objects.
Front-End
Thinking of this an API end-point, this is perfect use for an HTTP PATCH request. The front-end sends a PATCH request and the json object to be added in the Body.
2. Special case — no existing purchases. If items_purchased is null, we need to use an additional function, COALESCE.
UPDATE purchases SET items_purchased = COALESCE(items_purchased, '[]'::jsonb) ||
'{"name": "LG Ultrawide Monitor",
"price": 190,
"productid": 8}' ::jsonb
WHERE id=1;
We often use the COALESCE function to substitute a default value for null values when we querying the data
In our example, we substituted and empty array and then concatenated because you cannot concatenate on to null.
More on COALESCE can be found here.
Removing A Purchase From An Account
Important Note: Previously we used “with ordinality” to get “position” in the array. This works fine when using the jsonb_array_elements() function. But it is important to note that while this ordinal value starts with the number 1, a jsonb array of objects starts at 0.
When the position in the array is known, this is as simple as using the ‘-’ operator.
The “-” operator description in the documentation is a bit vague in my opinion.
Delete key/value pair or string element from left operand. Key/value pairs are matched based on their key value.
Bob returned his Mechanical Keyboard. Let’s remove item number 2 from his items_purchased. First query for Bob’s items to see he has three, and then remove item 2.
SELECT * FROM purchases where id=1;
Bob has three items
Item number 2, Mechanical Keyboard, is at array position 1.
UPDATE purchases SET items_purchased = items_purchased - 1
WHERE id=1;
Bob without item number 2 or array position 1
What if the position is not known? Maybe the productid is known. To our rescue comes a previously used query.
The query below gives the ordinal position of the Dell 123 Laptop, productid=1, for Carol, id=2.
SELECT position FROM purchases, jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
WHERE id=2 and item_object->>'productid' = '1';
This will return the number 2 since the Dell 123 Laptop for Carol is in the second position in the array. However, if we use this to help us remove an item, it will remove the third item since, as mention in the note above, the array position starts with 0. The solution is easy, just use position-1
2. Finding the position of the item in the array and then removing the item.
Carol. Dell 123 Laptop in ordinal position 2 but array position 1.
UPDATE purchases SET items_purchased = items_purchased -
Cast((SELECT position - 1 FROM purchases, jsonb_array_elements(items_purchased) with ordinality arr(item_object, position)
WHERE id=2 and item_object->>'productid' = '1') as int)
WHERE id=2;
Carol without productid=1. This had ordinal position 2 but array position 1.
We used a a query to find the position in Carol’s items_purchased for productid=1. This returned ordinal position 2. Therefore we used position-1 to get array location 1.
Even though the ordinal position is a bigint, we must Cast it to int or bigint.
Also recall that the ->> returns a string so in item_object->>’productid’ = ‘1’ we compare against the string version of the productid, even though it is a number in the json.
Indexing
Based on a couple of questions from readers, I have added indexing the items_purchased column and a Key value in the JSON.
Indexing the Column
CREATE INDEX idx_purchases ON public.purchases (items_purchased);
This creates a btree index.
Indexing a Key in the JSONB Column
For a specific Key, name here, in the field use,
CREATE INDEX idx_purchases_name
ON public.purchases
((items_purchased ->> ‘name’));
This creates a btree index on name.
In our small data set you may not see the index being used when you do an Explain Analyze.
When an index is used in a SELECT query, first the position of the requested rows is fetched from the index (instead of from the table directly). Then, the requested rows (a subset of the total) are actually fetched from the table. It’s a two step process. Given a large enough number of requested rows (such as all the posts with an id greater than 10), it is actually more efficient to go fetch all those rows from the table directly rather than to go through the extra step of asking the index for the position of those rows and next fetch those specific rows from the table. If the percentage of the rows is smaller than 5-10% of all rows in the table the benefit of using the information stored in the index outweighs the additional intermediate step.
Full article here.
Conclusion
To recap. In this article we continued the work done in the prior article of querying the jsonb array of objects as a recordset by adding the ability to get specific array objects, add a new array object and remove array objects.
PostgreSQL has many functions and operators for JSON data and we will explore some of these others in future articles.
I am using them everyday as I build a RESTful API for a PERN stack.
If you found this useful, start exploring json, jsonb and the other operators and functions for JSON as well as the regular SQL operations available in PostgreSQL.
Thank you for reading and coding along!
You may also enjoy, | https://levelup.gitconnected.com/working-with-a-jsonb-array-of-objects-in-postgresql-d2b7e7f4db87 | ['Gravity Well', 'Rob Tomlin'] | 2021-03-23 12:46:14.537000+00:00 | ['Api Development', 'Database', 'Postgres', 'NoSQL', 'Json'] |
Ethereum Daily Price Forecast (10/27/20) — Failed Attempt to Retake $400 | Ethereum fell on Monday, dropping below the $400 in a wild day, closing around the $390 level. $400 will likely be a highly contested level which will likely be increasingly tenuous as volatility and uncertainty in traditional markets are climbing.
(October 26, 2020 8:00 PM EST)
Outlook: Ethereum fell a bit to start off the week, losing the $400 level but settling just below it. This is short-term bearish. I’ve mentioned before that $400 is a major inflection point for ETH and will probably not be claimed as support without a fight. That being said, we’re making higher highs and higher lows, so I think there’s a good chance ETH pulls back to the 50 Day EMA or $350 before finding support, at which point I expect ETH to continue upward and make another run at $400. Climbing volatility in traditional markets will bleed into crypto as well, but will probably not be as bearish for assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum due to the fact they tend to trade more closely with gold, which is not always correlated with equities. However, one thing to keep in mind is the DXY (US Dollar), which has a relationship with BTC. I’m a buyer on dips in ETH, and I think a pullback to the $350 level is excellent value and a buy on the dip. Noone knows how the next few weeks are going to shake out and what kind of effect they’ll have on the markets: this much is true. However, once the dust has settled, I think crypto assets like Ethereum are poised for an extremely strong rebound in Q4 into 2021. Regardless of the total amount of a COVID stimulus package or whether taxes and interest rates are higher or lower, the macro environment remains the same, and the best possible investment assets to hold in such as scenario are crypto.
Support: Look for support at the 50 Day EMA around $365 and then $350. As mentioned previously, I need to see an impulsive wave higher above $400 again to be able to call it support. That didn’t happen, so ETH pulled back, and now I’m looking for a bounce off support to reattempt $400. Longer-term support should be found around $300 which is only a few bucks higher than the 200 Day EMA, which is nearby.
Resistance: $400 is my inflection point where I perceive ETH in a bull market. Once ETH moves above $400 in a decisive move upwards, then we’ll look for confirmation of support and then look higher to $450 and $500. Frankly, once ETH is above $500, I think there’s no turning back.
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Buy Bitcoin here. | https://medium.com/@moneyredpill/ethereum-daily-price-forecast-10-27-20-failed-attempt-to-retake-400-3d5626ff1dd7 | [] | 2020-10-27 01:14:38.784000+00:00 | ['Ethereum Price', 'Eth', 'Ether', 'Cryptoforecast', 'Ethereum News'] |
Machine learning basic library abstract | Before starting machine learning I’m starting machine learning required library using python .
pandas Numpy matplotlib sklearn
The Pandas Library:-
To install pandas use
“pip install pandas”
pandas is used for handle dataframe and is used to load data using different functions like
pd.load_csv()
pd.load_html()
pd.load_sql()
or different functions these all things in pandas loaded for dataset.
when we analyse dataset we use drop data,fillna data or imputer these function used for get perfect dataset for training .
2. The Numpy Library:-
At the dawn of the Python language, the developers began to need to perform numerical calculations, especially when this language began to be considered by the scientific community.
The first attempt was Numeric, developed by Jim Hugunin in 1995, which was successively followed by an alternative package called Numarray.
Both packages were specialized for the calculation of arrays, and each of them had strengths depending on which case they were used.
Thus, they were used differently depending on where they showed to be more efficient. This ambiguity led then to the idea of unifying the two packages and therefore Travis Oliphant started to develop the NumPy library.
Its first release (v 1.0) occurred in 2006. From that moment on, NumPy has proved to be the extension library of Python for scientific computing, and it is currently the most widely used package for the calculation of multidimensional arrays and large arrays.
In addition, the package also comes with a range of functions that allow you to perform operations on arrays in a highly efficient way and to perform high-level mathematical calculations.
Currently, NumPy is open source and licensed under BSD. There are many contributors that with their support have expanded the potential of this library.
Numpy is used for array.
when we required to convert image into array we use numpy function.
in deep learning CNN model all image converted in vector and these vector stored into arrays
to install numpy :
On Linux (Ubuntu and Debian)
sudo apt-get install python-numpy
On Linux (Fedora)
sudo yum install numpy scipy
On Windows with Anaconda
conda install numpy
3.The Matplotlib Library
Matplotlib is a Python library specializing in the development of two-dimensional charts (including 3D charts);
in recent years, it has been widespread in scientific and engineering circles (http://matplolib.org).
Among all the features that have made it the most used tool in the graphical representation of data, there are a few that stand out:
extreme simplicity in its use
gradual development and interactive data visualization • expressions and texts in LaTeX
greater control over graphic elements
export in many formats such as PNG, PDF, SVG, and EPS.
Matplotlib is designed to reproduce as much as possible an environment similar to Matlab in terms of both graphic view and syntactic form
matplotlib is used for
visualization.
for plot of result in regression algorithm uses matplot.lib for understanding output
4.The scikit-learn Library:-
scikit-learn is a Python module that integrates many of machine learning algorithms.
This library was developed initially by Cournapeu in 2007, but the first real release was in 2010.
This library is part of the SciPy (Scientific Python) group, a set of libraries created for scientific computing and especially for data analysis, many of which are discussed in this book.
Generally these libraries are defined as SciKits, hence the first part of the name of this library.
The second part of the library’s name is derived from Machine Learning, the discipline pertaining to this library. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/machine-learning-basic-library-abstract-7440a3af0d8c | [] | 2020-10-11 13:05:51.393000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Sklearn', 'Python', 'Pandas', 'Data Science'] |
Making a Responsive Header With MaterialUI and React | Making a Responsive Header With MaterialUI and React
Part 2
Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash.
Hi! Previously, we learned how to build a basic Header component using Material UI and React to achieve the static result below:
Image credit: Author
In this tutorial, let’s turn this static desktop version into a mobile view when the user resizes their screen. Responsive design is important, as you would not want to rob your users of a good experience when navigating your web app on their mobile device. If you haven’t done so already, check out my previous tutorial to build out a basic desktop header before proceeding!
By the end of this tutorial, we will achieve the following:
GIF credit: Author
Let’s get started! FYI: You can access the source code on GitHub to follow along. | https://medium.com/better-programming/making-a-basic-header-responsive-with-materialui-and-react-2198fac923c8 | [] | 2020-11-16 17:13:41.210000+00:00 | ['Responsive Design', 'Reactjs', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'React'] |
Creepin’ it Real: Why Bats Don’t Suck | How We Benefit From Bats
Although they might be cast in the role of creepy creatures of the night, bats are actually unsung superheroes vital to the health of our environment and our economy. By providing a number of services from pollination to seed dispersal (through their poop!), many ecosystems and agricultural systems wouldn’t survive without bats.
There’s no denying that during this festive season, tequila would be sorely missed if there were no bats to pollinate agave plants. Without bats, you could also say goodbye to your morning smoothies because bats are key pollinators for mangoes, peaches, guava and bananas. And you know the pumpkin spice everything we all crave this time of year? Well, pumpkin spice requires cloves, and — you guessed it — bats are key pollinators for cloves.
Pumpkin Spice Latte. Getty Images
Our winged friends are also the midwatch vanguards of pest control, saving crops from cucumber beetles, stink bugs, leafhoppers and June bugs. In fact, bats eat so many insects that studies estimate their economic impact to be more than $1 billion per year in avoided crop damage and pesticide costs in the U.S. corn industry alone. Across all agricultural production, consumption of insect pests by bats results in a savings of at least $3.7 billion per year. This also means fewer insects that carry diseases like malaria and West Nile virus. And since bats eat so many insects — many of which have shiny exoskeletons — some bats have guano that sparkles. So, maybe your favorite tween vampire movie wasn’t so far off, after all?
Bats are real wing-mates for human health, too. Scientists have been studying bats to understand their exceptional tolerance to DNA damage, parasites and viruses, in the hopes of finding a way to improve human resilience against RNA viruses like Ebola and coronaviruses, parasites like malaria and DNA damage from cancers. Scientists have also been studying the saliva of bats in an effort to develop a medication for stroke patients.
Oh, and you’ll never guess what they named it.
Draculin.
A drug named after a vampire, derived from a vampire bat, which was named after vampires.
M-E-T-A.
Randall Cobb Mind Blown. Giphy
Threats to Bats
As fun as it is to deal in the macabre when it comes to scary stories about bats, these amazing animals need our help. Bats are declining across the globe. Disease, habitat loss and human activity, including disruption during hibernation, all play a major role in the decline of bat populations worldwide.
In North America, a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome has claimed the lives of more than 6 million bats since it was first documented in 2006. White-nose syndrome has since spread at alarming rates, making it one of the deadliest wildlife diseases on the continent.
A bat with white-nose syndrome. Photo by USFWS
The tell-tale fungus that causes white-nose syndrome is primarily spread from bat to bat, but it can also be spread from the environment to bats, as the fungus can survive for many years in the soil in caves and mines where bats hibernate. Scientists have demonstrated that it may be possible for humans to inadvertently carry fungal spores on their clothes or equipment, which can facilitate its spread to new areas.
What We’re Doing to Help Bats
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is working with our partners to protect bats, research treatment and management options to halt the spread of white-nose syndrome, and raise awareness about just how incredible and vulnerable bats are.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National White-Nose Syndrome Assistant Coordinator Jonathan Reichard inspects a little brown bat to determine its age, sex and reproductive status. Photo by Keith Shannon/USFWS
Over the the last decade, USFWS has awarded more than $35 million in grants to researchers and state wildlife agencies to contain the spread of white-nose syndrome, improve our understanding of this fungus and its impacts, and develop tools to increase the survival of affected bat species.
Starting in 2017, we leveraged private investments through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Bats for the Future Fund to begin implementing white-nose syndrome treatments. Last year, USFWS launched a $100,000 challenge to find innovative ways to permanently eradicate, weaken or disarm the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome. Multiple exciting treatment tools are now being tested, including probiotic compounds to inhibit fungal growth, UV light, fungal vaccines, molecular and genetic tools and habitat modifications to help bats persist.
USFWS and others are also working to minimize bat mortality from wind turbines and many federal and state natural resource agencies and conservation organizations have protected caves and mines important for cave-dwelling bats. Currently, 12 species of bats in the United States are protected as federally endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Search “ bat ” here to see them all.
How You Can Help
● Talk about bats. Share what you’ve learned about the importance of bats. We can all benefit from a greater understanding of the world around us. While it is always smart to be aware of the risk of rabies infection from bats, understanding bats will go a long way toward protecting these amazing creatures and ourselves.
● Do not disturb. Even slight disturbances can cause bats to leave their roosts and force them to use valuable energy reserves needed to survive hibernation. Do your part to protect them by respecting all cave closures and advisories, avoiding caves with hibernating bats and following national decontamination procedures before and after visiting caves and mines.
● Turn off the lights. Light pollution can disrupt or deter bats. Providing a dark environment can help improve conditions for bats.
● Reduce pesticide use. Consider using natural pest control remedies, such as soapy water, beer or garlic. Pesticides can affect the food and water supply for bats.
● Plant a garden. Creating a garden will help attract insects that help pollinate plants and feed bats, contributing to the circle of life.
● Build a bat house or bat box. These tiny structures are a win-win for bats and humans. They can hold up to 100 bats, providing them with much-needed roosts while the bats keep the pests at bay around your house.
● More ways to be friends to bats.
USFWS biologist holds a little brown bat. Photo by Ann Froschauer/USFWS
So, the next time you’re in line for your latte or toasting happy hour with friends, send some love to a bat and help us ensure that we can continue to benefit from the services they provide that make our lives better — and a little more delicious. | https://usfws.medium.com/creepin-it-real-why-bats-don-t-suck-8ed65a076819 | ['U.S. Fish', 'Wildlife Service'] | 2020-10-30 14:28:09.477000+00:00 | ['Usfws', 'Pollinators', 'Conservation', 'Vampires', 'Bats'] |
A Tale Grief and Loss | A Tale Grief and Loss
She asked him
“When you going to leave?”
“Just…..”
And he left the words hung like that the door was swinging back and fro unsaid and unfinished.
Thats it the conversation lasted for two sec and six words.
Hateing herself is so easy for her than this, she can do it all day long still not enough. Its been a muscle memory now.
The floor is still cold and her bare feets could feel it, but she stood waiting maybe he forget something and he will come back and kiss the life out of her or maybe she is just tired of trying to get her reflexes back and when the freezing cold become unreal she laid on the floor.
“I wish I could go back in time I wish I could go on doing all the mistakes right I wish I say sorry to all those peoples I lost contact, with a promise of being in touch as it was a promise that the connection we made is all beyond the network ”
She thought of the roads she saw yesterday and how this four years have changed so much.
In her and the road the concrete have glamoured its presence by peebles and cement beautifull in itself where mine is glamoured with grief I am hiding behind thosw of the places and people I left behind.
She knew she was leaving for good afterall she made the decision for herself.
“I wish I could say thank you to all those people for their broken promise as a goodbye gift before they left stealing my version of them. my version with them that exists now in each of our universes”
Now whenever I look back and I see this person laughing straight at my face. She is everywhere, in my sleep in my dreams, in the bathroom mirror sometimes in his face too plugging me through his eyes.
There is a void in his eyes where she hide rest and reside.
Even her thought makes me go cold.
“I wish I could hold myself still for a while and remind myself of that hurricane thrown over her withering in dirt she stands with smile the every harsh word that resonates And tell her its not that worth to stop and break the sun is not down yet”
It is too hard to concentrate, that is the reason he is slipping away?
I stopped looking in mirror , because their tendency to lie is negligible.
I can not sail through it.
I will drown myself. My own weight will be blamed.
The waste of the space .
The waste of effort.
“Whats hard it takes to fool the chaos Whats greater woes it can bear in that smile after tsunami who washed behind the wricked towns in hope and they played on who hope ”
the door bell rang.
She did not made an effort.
He always keep the key, she knows him well.
He found her in kitchen sipping on the coffee.
He is been noticeing her high intake of caffein.
“come…lets go to backyard”
“for what? it is dark out….”
“For this…”
He knows her love for plants and that she always wanted the nursery in their home.
I want to grow these old places right in my balcony, with you. I want to grow paradises like a flirting greenery, with you. I want to grow big branches thin and weak ,with you. I want to grow small into big with all this things. I need you.
If you love them you tell them they deserve to be loved
What you have used does not mean you should keep it
“ You know why dead people gets more flower than living one! Because regret is always greater than gratitude "
- ANNE FRANK . | https://medium.com/@ghonmodepriti203/she-asked-him-3af520692840 | ['Priti Ghonmode'] | 2021-06-24 18:18:32.136000+00:00 | ['Support', 'Short Story', 'Mental Health', 'Love Lasts', 'Depression'] |
A Bandwagon Society Questioned | Bandwagon is a type of persuasive, commonly used in ads along with the “Heavy Words” and “Famous People Use” techniques. To start, bandwagon is believing that something is true or something is good because others believe that way. This technique is heavily influenced by other’s thoughts. For example, you can be someone that dislikes popcorn (and there is reasons for that), but continue to eat it anyways. However, it is not the best thing to base your decisions off; sometimes you realize that the claim is shaky and probably wouldn’t be true. Also, sometimes not many people actually believe in it; it can be just a false claim.
In our everyday life, bandwagon is, again, heavily used. For example, the internet search actually uses bandwagon in a process called “weighing”; the basic idea is that if others are liking something, than you should too. This can lead to unwanted and frustrating results when you’re trying to search up something, like the general website over a personal page.
Something bandwagon is not to be confused with is popular opinion; popular opinion is just the opinion that most people are going with, which often leads to bandwagon. The theater uses this when displaying movies; it simply shows which movies are the most popular with. Also, this is sometimes confused with mental opinion; mental opinion is choosing something because it looks like everybody is choosing it. An example of this might be at the ice cream shop; you would see a tray that’s almost empty and choose it because you think that it must be good because “everybody else” wants it.
While often used in ads, bandwagon is everywhere in our society: the school, the Laser Tag arcade games, you name it. However, many are questioning if this type of society is actually the society we want to build.
Due to the current COVID-19 outbreak, people believe that bandwagon has been lowered; but, it is most likely around the same because that shopping is practically a must at the times. So what can we do to stop the percentage from raising?
Well, the first step is awareness. By being aware of the effects of bandwagon, and effects of every other persuasive tools, you can actually resist it because you know what it can cause, and how bad the lie can actually be. A technique I recommend is, the next time you see a bandwagon, think to yourself: “Do I really need that? Is my own consciousness telling me to do so?” This questioning phrase can help to reduce the temptation greatly. Also, this type of thinking would also help reduce the effects drastically: “I am not anybody else”. With this kind of mindset it is possible to even not have the hint of temptation to believe in the bandwagon.
The second step is a pattern to follow: Stop, Think, Realize, Decide. Stop your body when you realize a bandwagon. Then, think to you the mindset that was mentioned in the previous step. Next, realize if you really believe the bandwagon. Lastly, decide what to do. This pattern would help you control your body and rest while changing your mindset.
The final step is control. Rest and think about all your main body parts. Imagine that you’re swimming in a pool. Relax and calm down. As you’re doing this, remove all the thoughts you had, and focus on a dot in the distance. Remember what you actually wanted, and direct yourself where to go. By doing this, you can clear all your thoughts and focus back on your objective.
And what if all this fails? There is actually a simple solution. Make your own choices. Forget about all others; believe that they are all gone. The decision is up to you. You can always trust yourself like you can count on your fingers. | https://medium.com/@supaplzd/a-bandwagon-society-questioned-f27828c58875 | ['Ja Zz'] | 2020-04-23 05:57:27.655000+00:00 | ['Persuasion', 'Resistance', 'Self Realization', 'Techniques'] |
The impact of polling places on voting | Efforts to increase voter participation have largely focused on designing more efficient and convenient ways to bring voters to the polls on and before Election Day, or to reduce the burden of voter registration. But an underappreciated determinant of voter participation is the attributes of location at which we vote. The location, staffing, and operation of polling places may have an independent effect on voter turnout. The accessibility of polling places, the time it takes to check-in and to vote, and the experiences voters have with poll workers and the polling place environment can deter, obstruct and prevent persons from voting.
Drawing on a nationwide study of polling places attributes in the 2016 and 2018 elections, we estimate the effects of a wide range of polling places attributes on the voter turnout. We organize these polling place attributes into:
contemporaneous attributes expected to impact turnout in the immediate election, and downstream attributes expected to impact turnout only in future elections.
Our current analysis finds significant relationships between turnout in the contemporaneous 2016 election and two important polling place attributes observed in 2016 polling places. First, the visibility of the polling place (e.g. a visible address, name, signs, and flags) is associated with a 4 percentage point increase in turnout. Second, a high quality interior of the polling place (rated “excellent” by observers) was associated with a 2.5 percentage point increase in turnout. However, other attributes expected to have a contemporaneous impact, based on past research and/or theory, did not show evidence of significant relationships. Further, examining 2018 turnout reveals no support for expected downstream impacts of any polling place attributes.
In sum, we find important effects from polling place attributes for scholars, election administrators, and policy-makers to ensure polling places do not deter voters, while also suggesting that many aspects of polling places may not have significant impact on turnout, although these attributes often have important impacts on voter confidence in elections. | https://medium.com/mit-election-lab/the-impact-of-polling-places-on-voting-2db006e31afb | ['Mit Election Lab'] | 2019-07-11 15:53:05.269000+00:00 | ['Esra2019', 'Politics', 'Voting'] |
Lost in Imagination | I look towards the wondrous sky
I admire the clouds so frightfully high
I imagine a small world in the clouds
Beyond our recognition, no overcrowds
I see nothing of a noted mark
My imagination colours in the spark
Flying under the clouds, seeking creativity
I stumble upon vibrant festivity
Though life is dreary, banal, and warring
The sky illustrates a visual soaring
As the creative mind relentlessly flows
And reality loosens its grip and slows
Keeping grounded to the scene
I pace around and come clean
While productive and pragmatic
Childhood brings upon the dramatic | https://medium.com/illumination/lost-in-imagination-fa30da49f236 | ['Synthia Satkuna', 'Ma Candidate'] | 2020-12-28 18:42:11.600000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Imagination', 'Poem', 'Sky', 'Poetry'] |
Eliminating MySQL replication lag for schema changes | At Chargebee, our primary database technology is MySQL, hosted on Amazon RDS instances. Each of our microservices have schemas isolated from each other. All the data is further sharded horizontally with each shard storing data for a set of merchant businesses. A “shard” consists of a Multi-AZ source and one or more replicas.
As evident in the diagram above, we use MySQL Replication to scale out our database reads, adding replicas as needed to serve requests. Currently, more than 70% of the read traffic is served by the replicas. Further, updating indexes during writes involves additional overhead, so the number of indexes on the source are kept at a minimum. Although all indexes present in the source are also present in the replicas, some indexes are exclusively for the replicas and not for the source. These are typically indexes for fields that attract heavy read traffic such as custom fields.
Large replication lags¹ make the replicas unusable for our services and increases load on the source. Consequently, ensuring that replication lag stays under acceptable limits is a critical SRE requirement.
ALTER TABLE for large tables
Our MySQL databases are such that while the source allows parallel transactions in many cases, all the transactions on the replicas are serialized.
Consider the following transactions, including an ALTER TABLE , executing on the source:
Transactions running in parallel on the source.
The same transactions are executed in the replicas one after another, in order of their commit time on the source:
Serialized transactions on a replica
As indicated in the diagrams above, due to serialization of transactions on the replicas, Txn-3, which was committed a few milliseconds after 05:00 hrs in the source gets committed in the replica only after 05.20 hrs. | https://medium.com/chargebee-engineering/eliminating-mysql-replication-lag-for-schema-changes-6b86f2480319 | ['Adithya K S'] | 2020-11-25 21:40:01.495000+00:00 | ['MySQL', 'Alter Table', 'Replication Lag'] |
3 Strategies I Tested to Show Up Full of Energy No Matter What | How do you maintain your energy levels? What do you do to have even more energy? Hint: It’s not about willpower!
If your body cannot create the energy it needs, the brain, which is an energy hog, panics and returns to a primitive state focused on fear, hunger, or procreation. You know the symptoms: forgetfulness, cravings, brain fog, drowsiness, anger, lack of willpower. Yes, willpower depends on your energy levels. As a result, a lack of willpower is not a moral failing, but an energy deficit.
Is it possible, every day, to draw on a constant supply of energy without too many peaks and crashes? I believe it is, and that is our normal state, often lost to the hectic pace of more-more or to an “I’m just getting older” mentality. I’ll admit, I’m so convinced, energy has become a bit of an obsession.
The basics
Did you know that our energy depends on our mitochondria? Mitochondria are organelles in cells that produce the energy used to fuel our daily activities. They are the basis of all our energy — for both the muscles and the brain. It is therefore necessary to treat them particularly well.
Moreover, brain, heart and retina cells have the most mitochondria and suffer the most when energy demand exceeds supply. All the unpleasant aspects of aging — fatigue, fat accumulation, muscle loss and cognitive decline — stem from weakened mitochondria.
3 strategies to have more energy
Here are three basic strategies I’ve tested and have worked for me. Test them yourself. | https://medium.com/@annetrager/3-strategies-i-tested-to-show-up-full-of-energy-no-matter-what-c99f963f4206 | ['Anne Trager'] | 2020-12-22 09:12:27.511000+00:00 | ['Lifestyle', 'Lifestyle Design', 'Energy', 'Life Hacking', 'Wellbeing'] |
Touched | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/blueinsight/touched-f9f825a83619 | ['Jacqueline A'] | 2020-12-19 18:57:50.243000+00:00 | ['Blue Insights', 'Relationships', 'Prose', 'Self', 'Self Discovery'] |
5 TIPS TO BE A PERFECT JOB CANDIDATE | Image source: cbtnews.com
Ever wondered how to become a perfect job candidate, the perfect person that a hiring manager is looking for? Wouldn't it be great to work for the organization that you've dreamt of? Of course, everyone does. But does everyone know how to become that “perfect candidate”? I definitely won't share obvious facts like dressing professionally for an interview, but some very small but very powerful pointers that can make you get your dream job.
Here are the five important tips:
Do your Research
By research I mean, What do you know about the company you are applying for? What the company or the organization has been up to lately, most influential accomplishments, the company culture, and most importantly the company’s competitors. Not only will it provide you a broader illustration of how the organization functions but it will also leave a commendatory impression on the interviewer because you will most unquestionably be questioned about the company during the job interview.
2. Does your resume resemble the job description?
One should optimize their resume to match the job description provided by the company before applying to a company. By this, I definitely am not suggesting one to lie on their resume but to just make sure their experience and skills are mostly what a company desires their future job candidate to possess. One can do this by targeting certain influential keywords that are plowed in a company’s job description and instilling them in their own resume or CV.
3. Be early, but not too early!
Being punctual on an in-person interview or even a zoom interview shows the interviewer how dedicated and serious you are about the job. I would suggest all job applicants to at the online or offline destination at least 3–5 minutes prior to the interview. Even a minute late to an interview will leave a negative impression about you and you will most plausibly be declined for the position you applied for. Make sure you are not showing up 30 minutes or even 15 minutes prior because hiring managers have back to back meetings, and you showing up early when they might not be ready for you and this can be problematic for them.
4. LinkedIn is the passkey to secure that position!
LinkedIn has grown to be one of the primary key tools for decision-makers and recruiters to determine whether you are a perfect candidate for the job or not. LinkedIn allows professionals to recognize proof of your social involvement and achievements as well as to explore how many people endorsed you for the specific skills they are seeking in a potential job candidate. It is very important to maintain a good LinkedIn profile the moment one enters the professional world as it allows job seekers to portray their own personal brand.
5. Don't make it all about you
The mistake that most of the candidates make during an interview is centering too much on themselves, but in an interview, it is not really about you, it is about what the company you are interviewing for wants in you. Stand out from other applicants by presenting examples of your prior work experiences and tailor them in accordance with what the company would like to hear. Allow the interviewer to ask questions, and initiate conversations based on their questions. Lastly, make sure to ask questions, whether it is the company’s culture, challenges, and anything else important to you, this will reveal to the interviewer how serious you are about this position.
I hope you guys enjoyed reading the blog and found it informative.
Good luck with your job interviews! | https://medium.com/@joytrehan/5-tips-to-be-a-perfect-job-candidate-eadefe4c0156 | ['Joy Trehan'] | 2020-12-21 05:06:34.310000+00:00 | ['Job Hunting', 'Job Search', 'Job Interview', 'Jobs', 'Interview'] |
Corporations are Just as Responsible for Closing the Economic Divide as Government | With a contentious election soon to be behind us and a new commander in chief likely to be placed into office, Black Americans and other minorities may have hope for police and prison reform among improvements in other areas that disproportionately impact their communities.
One area that likely won’t be improved upon by a new administration is the economic divide between whites and minorities — a.k.a. economic inequality.
Poverty in America has remained relatively unchanged since 1970. The poverty rate has increased 14 times and decreased 17 times since then — with economic recessions causing the jumps, according to the United States Census Bureau.
Coming off of the Great Recession in the late 2000s, the poverty rate had dropped down to 12.3% in 2017. In 2019, it dropped down to 10.5% — making it five-straight years of declines.
In the midst of another recession, the poverty rate will surely increase in 2020, though we won’t know the data until sometime in 2021.
Before knowing those numbers, though, we can still look at the past five years — which showed declines in poverty across all races.
There are a couple of ways to look at these results. If you are inclined to not give President Donald Trump credit for bringing people out of poverty and want to attribute it to other factors, that’s probably correct. Trump has largely operated within the status quo that has developed in America, establishing relatively minor policy changes that do little to even the playing field and close the class divide.
An American economy will hum under almost any president, no matter the party. Both Democratic and Republican leaders have seen great gains (and losses) in GDP growth. Both parties have also seen success in creating jobs.
Unemployment rates among Blacks and Hispanics also fall or rise at a relatively similar rate no matter who is in office.
That is the sad truth of it: while politicians will go out of their way claiming to fight for struggling minorities, the likelihood is that they won’t do more than their predecessors. That’s not to say a future president can’t get the job done at a quicker pace, but history tells us the numbers won’t change drastically no matter who is in charge.
The American economic system — which is less capitalist than you may think, by the way — is sold as a powerful machine that can change anyone’s life if they are willing to participate. This is true on some levels, but unfairly forgets the poor and blames the less fortunate for being in the hole they were born into.
Minorities aren’t the only people living in poverty; whites make up the largest representation of the poor community by number. This is how it should be, however, as whites make up the largest representation of people in the United States.
In terms of percentages, 9.1% of whites are in poverty. Nearly 19% of Blacks and 16% of Hispanics are impoverished, meanwhile.
The easiest way out of poverty is to attain a job that pays well. To get most of those jobs, you need education. That’s where the impoverished get lost: most inner-city schools struggle to set kids up for success. Funded by the poor families in the district, money is stretched thin and kids don’t get the same schooling available in the wealthier surrounding counties.
From The Atlantic:
Students frequently had substitutes because so many teachers got frustrated and left, they didn’t have as much time to spend on computer projects because they had to share computers, and they were suspended more frequently in the poor district, she said; in the wealthier area, teachers and guidance counselors would have time to work with misbehaving students rather than expelling them right away.
Poor students have little chance of keeping up with their richer counterparts in the suburbs. To escape these communities filled with violence and general uncertainty, post-secondary schooling, or a decent-paying job after earning a high school diploma, is the key. But the lack of funding slims the odds drastically.
Nationally, high-poverty districts spend 15.6 percent less per student than low-poverty districts do, according to U.S. Department of Education. Lower spending can irreparably damage a child’s future, especially for kids from poor families. A 20 percent increase in per-pupil spending a year for poor children can lead to an additional year of completed education, 25 percent higher earnings, and a 20-percentage point reduction in the incidence of poverty in adulthood, according to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Giving students in poor communities equal funding to students in rich communities is the best place to start for closing the racial economic divide in America. There are issues minorities face, however, that go beyond the government’s control. | https://medium.com/@dylanhughes/corporations-are-just-as-responsible-for-closing-the-economic-divide-as-government-3f850c90c84d | ['Dylan Hughes'] | 2020-11-10 22:48:53.276000+00:00 | ['Race', 'Racial Justice', 'Economics', 'Finance', 'Business'] |
On-boarding Update: September 2019 | We recently announced ICO participants were eligible to onboard and start trading on the platform. Here’s a recap of what’s been happening for the past few weeks.
A few weeks ago, we announced to our community they would be eligible to trade on LGO if they had participated in our ICO back in 2018. We have sent out invitations and are happy to share the following statistics:
1000 members have completed their onboarding sign up so far.
845 have received a KYC/AML link
415 have passed (i.e. given all the info to the KYC provider with a successful response)
126 have received their invitation code
Given community requests, we’d like to bring clarity to our rewards for ICO participants who join the platform: : | https://medium.com/lgogroup/on-boarding-update-september-2019-30c248bba909 | [] | 2019-09-23 17:22:40.496000+00:00 | ['Blockchain'] |
“Would you budget your kindness please?” | Like a lot of people who grew up in developing countries in the 90s, I eventually grew somewhat accustomed to these kinds of unavoidable signs of poverty and suffering in the world around me. However, I never grew accustomed to the idea that we couldn’t create a new way of doing things. A new system that could, at the very least, alleviate the worst suffering that human and non-human sentient beings endure on a daily basis, in large part due to the misfortune of the condition of their birth rather than any action or inaction that they were actually responsible for.
Now, just by virtue of the fact that you’re reading this means that you’re not among the roughly 4 billion people who don’t have access to the internet. And since you’re reading this article, which (I’d like to believe) is at a fairly advanced grade level of English, you’re also likely from either a developed country with a fairly high GDP per capita or from a developing country where you have an earning potential that is 30–35% higher than your fellow citizens.
Now that we have a vague idea of who you are, dear reader, I ask that you reflect on a simple question.
In your opinion, what is of greater moral importance, one extra drink (say 8€) on a Friday night out on the town or saving 111 unfortunate children from a possible cocktail of malnutrition, anemia and impaired cognitive function that can result in death?
If it is an extra drink, I’d suggest closing this page now.
Not because I’m attempting to demonize the act of drinking or you in any way, dear reader, but simply because the rest of this article rests on you having picked the children and it would be a waste of your time to read any further.
If you didn’t pick the drink, as a thought experiment, I’d ask you to consider what the other relatively insignificant and trivial things are in your life that you’d consider sacrificing to protect a few hundred more children from a truly painful existence.
Uptil a point, most people find that this exercise is fairly easy. Out of the window go all the impulse buys that you still regret, that Amazon delivery you wish you had thought about more before ordering and that extra drink that coaxed you with sweet words under the moonlight and then pushed you into that well called hangover the next morning.
However, there then comes a point where it becomes much more difficult to determine the order of “moral importance” between the things you consume and the people that you can save. For some this may be their family’s insurance, for others it may be the concert that they’ve been waiting a lifetime for.
This article does not seek to judge anyone’s attributions of moral importance but merely to point out that many at this stage, choose to believe that there’s only so much that they can do and that they just aren’t powerful or rich enough (like Bill Gates) to really change the entire world and therefore sink into a fairly stable, forgettable despondency that is occasionally awoken to action at the sight of seemingly high impact giving opportunity. Some others, resolve to become amazing altruists after they begin to earn amazing amounts of money. I relate to these archetypes because I’ve been in these shoes myself, and still continue to be on most days.
Over time however, I’ve found that one approach allows an individual to consistently alleviate suffering they care about, while still living a fairly comfortable life. Simply by budgeting your donations at the start of every year based on what you can give and planning to keep that budget aside (just like rent money) for the organizations/people most efficient at eliminating suffering you care about, you can begin to be as rigorous and intentional with your philanthropic ‘investments’ as you are with our investments in financial instruments like stocks and mutual funds.
But on an “operational” level, what is “giving what you can” exactly?
Some people who have pursued this exercise yearly have found that between 2% and 10% of yearly income tends to be a reasonable person standard for philanthropic giving that does not damage one’s overall quality of life. For students and the unemployed, that number is 1% of your spending money (not including tuition of course), which if you live around Paris, is around one or two drinks fewer every month. More than reasonable in my opinion, given that the beneficiaries can number in the hundreds yearly.
For some, 10% may sound like an exorbitant amount of money to give away every year (while for some this may turn out to be easy). No doubt, this is partly an initial aspirational figure for those who’d like to have something to aim for with their monetary generosity. But on the other hand, it is also significant enough that it does force you to ask yourself what the real critical drivers are for your own idea of quality of life.
Of course, just like the rest of life, there will be years where your control systems will fail, comfort will come first, and you’ll miss your budget targets, to the ire of the boss/angel on your shoulder.
But this doesn’t mean you close down your division/fund and retire.
While the world is rapidly improving, there are still billions of sentient beings that need your aid and finding the right organizations to act through can still be difficult. Websites like Givewell, Life You Can Save, Giving What We Can and Animal Charity Evaluators can be really helpful in directing you towards organizations that are the most effective at alleviating suffering in across different target areas like sanitation, malnutrition, education etc. In time, you may however find that there are better ways of determining where your money and time will have the greatest impact in terms of alleviating suffering, especially in the communities where we live. For instance, like traditional investments, you can estimate your returns but it’s an imperfect science at best. Furthermore, because ‘markets’ for impact are likely even more inefficient than financial markets, there are likely local or widely unknown impact opportunities where you can be more catalytic/generate counterfactual impact.
So go ahead and create your impact budget for next year, visit these websites, become involved in your local community, pick the charities and social enterprises that are high impact and rooted in metrics, tell your friends about what you’re doing, and remember what to do when the bartender offers you an extra round next Friday.
Tips: If you want to deworm way more than 111 children, consider donating to Evidence Action.
Bonus tip: Keep a lookout for matching challenges to double your donations. Essentially, for every dollar/euro you donate, the matcher donates a euro as well. Basically they’re like 2 for 1 offers suddenly appearing for your favourite treat ie. it’s just plain and absolutely silly not to take advantage. | https://medium.com/@abhi_kumar/would-you-budget-your-kindness-please-cbf4e6eb24ed | ['Abhi Kumar'] | 2019-05-06 00:42:01.381000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Nonprofit', 'Budget', 'Impact'] |
Creating your own IT product — how can we help you go this way | Introduction
This is a proposal article. We won’t tell you what is right and what is not necessary to do when creating your product.
If you have an idea to make a standard solution and sell it as a ready-made box with modifications for the client, we can offer to consider our Falcon Space platform as the basis of your solution.
Here we will look at the main points on using Falcon Space as the basis of the solution, and what advantages it gives you as the owner of your solution.
That might be the solution: CRM real estate, a platform for a specific industry, ERP system for a particular industry. Ie you create your template solution on 90% covers the basic needs of your customer in this system (the other 10% is custom work to suit customer requirements).
In general, this can be any web solution that requires functional personal accounts with tables, forms, graphs, and catalogs.
What we offer
We offer you to create your own solution based on Falcon Space. This will allow you to quickly make a basic demo of your solution for customers. You can make a decision either on your own (if you are a developer who knows SQL), or on our own (for a regular customer development project).
Your solution may look something like our solutions on http://demo.web-automation.ru/
You independently determine the course of development of your solution, its marketing and composition.
Our interest is that we get a percentage of the box’s solidity from the sale of each standard solution. This way, you don’t pay for the box until you have sales.
We work only with legal entities and individual entrepreneurs.
As an additional help, we provide advice on the system’s functionality and solving technical problems.
We also provide assistance in product development — developing the marketing and functionality of your product.
Advantages of using the platform
Possibility of improvements to solutions
Ability to modify the solution for the customer — each instance of the solution can be separately modified for the client. The fact is that very rarely a ready-made boxed solution 100% meets all the needs of the customer. Therefore, it is very important to be able to modify the solution for yourself (i.e. for your customer)..
Low cost of ownership
To develop your solution, just one person who knows MS SQL Server (writing stored procedures) and Bootstrap 4 (HTML layout) is enough. In the case of classic Fullstack development, you need a whole Department of specialists.
The solution itself does not require large hosting/server resources.
Typical user-friendly interface
The platform by default has a nice responsive and flexible interface for personal accounts. Due to the standardization of the interface, development is accelerated and the introduction of new functionality is greatly simplified.
High development speed
The implementation of the functionality on the platform implies the use of only standard components with a minimum of custom (JS, CSS). Everything depends only on the speed of creating stored procedures in SQL. Almost any element is managed via a particular SQL stored procedure.
A large amount of various features
The system has a large number of different features that you can gradually use with your solution. These are chats, integration with Telegram, directories, universal API, localization, more than 50 controls in the form, and much more. For the full list, see the platform updates, which can be added to your solution after updating the platform core.
Action plan for creating your own solution
If you found our offer interesting, then I suggest this roadmap:
1. Learn the platform in its basic form
See demo stand of components of the system. Watch demo of ready-made solutions. Learn the general features of the system.
If you have technical skills, you can also view the platform documentation in more detail.
2. Describe your solution
Come up with your own version of the solution and describe it in the form of a project concept. To do this, you can use our project concept template.
3. Contact us
Use chat or Whatsapp to contact us. Give information about what decision you want to make and what background you have in your chosen field and technical skills
4. Trial work on the platform
If you make the decision yourself, we will provide you with a demo stand for testing. This way, you will be able to feel the platform from the inside and understand how it is suitable for your project.
5. Partner contract
We conclude a partnership agreement, where we prescribe conditions for the sale of licenses, discounts, and the order of interaction.
6. Creating a solution
Either we create a solution for you as a customer for a development project, or you independently create a solution based on the platform with our advice on problem points.
7. Promotion of the product
You start promoting your created product: you write content for it, create demo access, run ads, process incoming leads, etc.You start promoting your created product: you write content for it, create demo access, run ads, process incoming leads, etc.
8. Sales of solutions and improvements for the client
You sell the solution to your customers and coordinate with them improvements and adaptations of your solution for them (the project of improvements). we advise and help solve technical problems on the use of the platform.
Conclusion
If you have a good experience with SQL and Bootstrap, then you can master the platform in 2–3 weeks.
The time frame for creating a solution can vary greatly depending on the scope of the solution.
If you make a basic demo of a prototype solution, then in most cases such a prototype solution can be made in 1 month, run the demo, and then gradually improve and refine its capabilities.
Thus, with a good combination of circumstances (your skills and the initial volume of the solution), in 2 months you may have your own solution, which you can then promote to the market.
Originally published at https://falconspace.site. | https://medium.com/@webautomation/creating-your-own-it-product-how-can-we-help-you-go-this-way-f586e26f863b | [] | 2020-12-21 15:38:32.405000+00:00 | ['It Management', 'It Service Management', 'Webdev', 'It Busniess', 'Sql'] |
An Introduction to Simpson’s Paradox | Simpson’s paradox is a fascinating phenomena that illustrates the importance of causality in reasoning. If you haven’t already read it, you should check out The Book of Why — it’s one of the most important books of this decade.
I think Simpson’s paradox is a great introduction to the value of causal reasoning. In this post I’m going to walk through a few examples to elucidate how it arises, and how we can start to formalize our thinking around it.
Batting Averages
A common example of Simpson’s Paradox comes from Ken Ross. He showed that when looking at Derek Jeter’s and David Justice’s batting averages, a curious contradiction arises:
David Justice has a better batting average every year, but Derek Jeter has a better batting average overall!
Derek Jeter has a worse batting average every season, but somehow has a better batting average overall!
If we stare at this for a moment, the reason becomes clear as a few things stand out. In the first year, Derek and David both had low scores; in the second year they both had high scores. Most importantly, Derek’s low score was only from a few at bats, and thus doesn’t factor into his overall average very strongly. David, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite — his lower score makes up the vast majority of his attempts at bat. Even though David did slightly better in both years without weighting, when we combine this imbalance of at bats with their similarly large difference in score, we get this result. Simpson’s paradox shows us that a properly weighted average for an overall statistic can contradict the trends we see in every subgroup.
Another simple example — this time graphical — is below. Let’s say very young people (who tend to be shorter than adults) practice a lot of basketball and are pretty good. Let’s say older folks (who tend to be taller) quit practicing and generally are actually pretty bad at shooting hoops.
Now let’s say we measure their performance shooting hoops, with the hopes of finally proving that taller people are better at basketball. And what we get looks like this:
A graphical example of Simpson’s paradox. Taller kids and taller adults are both better at basketball, but in general being tall makes you worse!
Another conundrum! It appears that — for each age group — being taller means you are a better basketball player. Overall, though, being taller makes you worse!
We all know that being tall makes you better, and the right way to interpret this result is separated by age instead of using the overall population. But why and how do we know that? And how do we generalize that rule of thumb to trickier situations?
Causal Reasoning
Here’s a more difficult example, which mirrors a real life medical study. Imagine you’re sick, and you’re offered a drug that had the following results for previous patients:
Uh oh. The drug is good for men, good for women, and bad for people.
You read it correctly. This drug improves your odds of recovering if you’re a man; it also improves your odds of recovering if you’re a woman. But if you’re a person, it’s more likely to harm you. Do you take this drug?
Thankfully, the above statement is logically incoherent and false. But it’s easy to read the data and see it that way. How can we address this problem?
The Answer
We *know* that there are three things at work here to give us Simpson’s paradox. There’s (1) the gender of the patient, (2) how effective the drug is, and (3) how likely a patient is to be in a treatment or non-treatment group. Remember, it’s the imbalance of the groups that makes it possible for the overall average to be weighted differently then the trend in each subgroup.
The question then becomes, where are the causal relationships? It’s safe to say that your gender isn’t going to change based on your treatment or recovery. On the other hand, gender does seem to influence how likely you are to choose the treatment — women chose it 75% of the time, while only 12% of the men did.
Given we’re examining the data in this way, we clearly believe that gender might influence recovery. Finally (and obviously), treatment will affect your chance of recovery and not the other way around. We can draw a nice little causal diagram to summarize all of our causal knowledge.
A simple causal diagram of what’s going on. Gender alters the likelihood of accepting treatment. We also expect the likelihood of recovery to be a function of both receiving treatment AND gender.
Where do things go wrong? Hopefully it’s clear that the ‘gender-influenced treatment selection’ part of the diagram — that arrow linking gender to treatment — is what is causing our paradox.
We don’t want that information to alter our decision. How likely someone is to choose the treatment doesn’t tell us anything about how effective the treatment ultimately is for them. To get an accurate account for how effective this drug is for people as a whole, we must eliminate that link. In other words, we should just average the percentages of each group, without weighting them by size. This removes the effect of uneven treatment selection by the two genders.
Simpson’s paradox is resolved!
Does It Generalize?
In the case above, it made sense to trust the sub-groupings and not the overall average. In other cases, it can be the opposite.
Take an example (this one from Judea Pearl’s book) where we look at a drug designed for heart attack prevention, and we assess its effect on low-blood pressure and high-blood pressure individuals. We see a similar issue — the drug decreases heart attacks in people with low- and high- blood pressure, but increases heart attacks overall! What do we do? In this case, when we draw a causal diagram, it might look something like this:
Causal Diagram for our second example. In this case, the blood pressure is a mediating variable in the path from treatment to heart attack, and thus we should trust the overall statistic.
This looks very similar to our first example, but it’s not. Look closely. The locations of our subgroups and the treatment have switched.
In the first case, our subgroup (gender) affected who receives treatment. In the second, our subgroup (blood pressure) is affected by who receives treatment.
In this case, both the risk of heart attack and the patient’s blood pressure are causally downstream from treatment, so we should not subdivide by blood pressure. Blood pressure is a mechanism by which the treatment is working — it’s a mediating variable along the causal path from treatment to heart attack risk.
Contrast that to the prior case, where the relationship between treatment and recovery was confounded by gender. Gender was upstream of both treatment selection and recovery; to get at the real relationship between treatment and recovery we were forced to condition on it. When the treatment has no graphical parents, we don’t need the secondary variable. When it does (and that parent has a ‘backdoor path’ to the effect of interest), we do.
Another Approach
Another way to think about Simpson’s paradox is through the language of pure statistics. First let’s take a small detour back through the basics.
A joint probability can be easily factored into a product of conditionals. Here’s a fun example — you’re getting a new dog, and you’re interested in their personality! Some of the dogs are (Y)oung, some are (I)ntelligent (and some aren’t), and some are quite (E)nergetic.
Below is the box that represents the distribution of dog personality probabilities. We set the area of the square equal to 1. Drop a pin, and the dog it represents will have the personality traits underneath.
Amongst all the possible dogs, you can see some are young, some are smart, some are energetic, and a few are all three. The likelihood of a random dog with some specific combination of traits can be factored easily — below is a simple example to illustrate how when we’re looking for young, intelligent, and energetic dogs (Y=1, I=1, and E=1).
Factoring a joint probability into the product of conditionals.
Why would you want to factor a joint into conditionals like that? In the context of Simpson’s paradox, we’ll answer that by revisiting our first example above.
In that example, we were looking at the joint probability of (T) Treatment, (G) Gender, and (R) Recovery. We want to query the likelihood of R=1 (a successful recovery) given other combinations of gender and treatment. Let’s factor our joint so we can work with it:
All possible ways to rewrite that joint as a product of conditioned variables.
There are six ways to factor a joint of three variables. However, in this case we are trying to take an observation of relationships (in which it’s okay to say things like ‘the probability someone is a man given they recovered successfully’) and instead query causal relationships between them (‘if we force the probability of treatment to equal 1, what happens to a man’s recovery?’). Here we introduce Pearl’s do-operator.
Instead of p(R|T), an observation about the correlation between treatment and recovery, we actually care about p(R|do(T)) — the probability of a recovery given we causally intervene and force treatment (setting T=1 by force of will). The do operator limits how we can factor our joint, because we must keep do(T) on the right side of the conditional line with respect to recovery to answer a causal question about how treatment affects recovery.
So we’re interested in p(R|G, do(T)). That leaves us with two options:
In the second choice we find p(G|do(T)), a nonsensical relationship. We’re now thinking causally, and this term begs the question ‘What is the probability that your gender changes given you had treatment?’ If gender doesn’t change when we do(T), we can’t use a term like this coherently in a causal setting.
The first equation, on the other hand, doesn’t have logical flaws. We notice that p(do(T)|G) is just 1 — the probability we do(T) conditioned on anything rational will be 1, as that’s the definition of the do operator. We can remove this term and simplify our expression.
Another way to say it is that the likelihood of accepting treatment based on gender is not something we want affecting our assessment of the probability of treatment success, so the term has to go. We know this term is bad news because of our causal intuition. Our conditionals must follow our causal instincts, matching our causal graph such that the probability of child nodes are always (and only) conditioned on their parents.
We’re left with p(R | do(T), G) * p(G). It shows us that the likelihood of recovery is related to the fraction of people in that gender, not the overall population. This gives us the same answer as our causal diagram through a more formal process.
Real Life, Man
Simpson’s Paradox can come up in real life — like in the famously contentious gender bias issue at UC Berkeley. Its real beauty, though, lies in illustrating and introducing the rationale behind causal reasoning in statistics.
None of what we did makes sense in the context of standard statistics, but it does make sense. I hope this introduction to Simpson’s paradox gave you a taste for how to start formalizing your causal logic.
For a long time, statistics has lacked the language to discuss causal reasoning and relationships. Thankfully it seems the world of statistics is actively shifting. With it will come a huge boon for science. | https://towardsdatascience.com/simpsons-paradox-d2f4d8f08d42 | ['David Ramsay'] | 2019-09-16 02:04:24.897000+00:00 | ['Bayesian Statistics', 'Judea Pearl', 'Simpsons Paradox', 'Data Science', 'Causality'] |
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Distribution date: 25th Aug
Instructions:
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When Airdrop Campaign starts?
POVO Gaming airdrop campaign will be live on Aug 10th and ending on August 20th.
When Airdrop Distribution?
POVO will select the winning participants who completed all steps for the POVO Airdrop campaign. The list of winners will be announced on August 25TH.
Social Links: | https://medium.com/@povofinance/povo-games-nft-airdrop-is-now-live-10k-worth-povo-tokens-reward-4eadbfd9039d | [] | 2021-08-13 13:44:58.299000+00:00 | ['Bsc', 'Airdrop', 'Nft', 'Staking', 'Defi'] |
Should You Stay In Your Lane as a Writer? | Stay in your lane can mean a couple of things.
Sometimes it means minding your own business. Keeping your head down and just doing your own thing and not worrying about what other people are doing.
Sometimes it means staying within the boundaries of a field of focus — especially if you’re an entrepreneurial type. Being a specialist, instead of a jack-of-all-trades.
It’s one of those platitudes that kind of hits me wrong — but also sort of makes sense.
I mean, if you know what it is you want to do, it makes sense to focus on that and do it really well. Willy nilly branching out can be problematic.
I’ve had friends try so hard to make a go of writing and fail because they couldn’t settle into a groove.
But I kind of hate the idea of someone else telling me that I have to stay in my own lane. Especially with regard to writing.
One of the things I love about blogging is that I can write about any old thing that comes to my mind and there isn’t anyone to tell me I can’t.
And if Neil Gaiman can write everything from picture books to books for adults, why can’t I?
Maybe I won’t have as many readers when I write about certain topics. Maybe I won’t be paid as much. But if I learn something or I enjoy myself or have an interest in establishing myself in that lane (so to speak) then that’s okay.
For writers, I think there’s room for both having a lane — or a niche — and also exploring outside of that lane.
The key is to know where your lane is, so that you can branch out on your own terms.
If you’re a non-fiction writer, your lane is the topic or topics that you write about regularly and with authority.
For instance, my non-fiction writing lanes are writing in general, but especially fiction writing. Also online business, productivity, and the business of writing.
If you’re not sure, or you’re a new writer, ask yourself these questions:
What are you good at?
What could you teach someone else?
What do people come to you for help with?
What do you spend your time learning?
What are you passionate about?
What topic did you read the most about last year?
One way to find your lane is to post this on social media:
What do you think I’m good at?
I get it. It’s going to feel seriously awkward. Like you’re fishing for compliments. But if you can’t figure it out for yourself, you’ll get some interesting responses if you’re brave enough.
If you’ve written blog posts already on a pretty broad array of topics, take a look at the analytics for them. Which are getting the most traffic? Which are getting the most interaction from readers?
Those posts are probably written in your lane.
Did you have fun writing them? This is an important question, because none of this matters if you’re not having fun.
Your lane is the lane where you want to be.
Let me say that one more time.
Your lane is the lane where you want to be.
Even if you are an absolute authority in a specific topic and you could teach the whole world something about it, if you don’t want to write about it, it’s not your lane.
You do not want to get yourself in a situation where you’ve built an audience who is expecting work from you on a specific subject and you’re making money writing on that subject — and you hate the work.
By the way, this goes for fiction writers as well. I’ve known fiction writers who’ve found success writing books they weren’t happy writing and struggled to shift gears.
That’s a trap that’s very difficult to get out of.
So, one more time for the writers in the back. Your lane is the lane where you want to be. Even if that’s not the lane where you are currently an expert.
We’re clear on that, right?
Changing Lanes Out of Impatience
Here’s what I see happen pretty often.
A writer starts writing on a subject they like a lot. They write a few posts. Or maybe they write an ebook. Or they write a novel. And they don’t get the kind of traction they want.
Nothing goes viral. Or they don’t make any money. (Or not as much as they thought they would) Or the book they self-published flops. Or they don’t get an agent.
So, they change lanes.
They start writing on a different topic. And nothing goes viral, etc.
They don’t feel like this lane works for them the way they want it to, either.
So they change lanes. Again.
The problem is that this person is trying to get from point A to point Z and they keep getting off at the first exit and going back to the start, then taking a different route.
They’re moving, and they’re logging miles, but they’re not actually making progress. They aren’t sticking with anything long enough to actually get good at it.
(Their starts might be getting better though, after doing them so many times. So there’s that.)
Here’s the thing about Neil Gaiman and his writing everything from picture books through adult novels. Somewhere in the beginning of his learning how to write, he stuck with something long enough to become a good writer. Then he branched out.
I remember reading that he had the idea for The Graveyard Book (a young adult book) for twenty years and had to wait until he was a good enough writer to actually write it.
Changing Lanes With Intention
What if, instead of changing lanes completely, because you’re impatient with how things are going, you changed lanes with intention.
You start out writing in your lane, about the topic that you’re very sure you want to write about. The lane you love.
Then, sometimes you branch out and add a new lane.
These are sometimes called shoulders, especially if they’re semi-related to the topic you’re already writing about. If I write about marketing, for instance, I’m writing in a shoulder lane to writing.
Writing middle grade is kind of a shoulder of writing young adult. It’s different, but not like crazy different.
But sometimes I write about my eating disorder. Or about taking care of my parents-in-law who both have Alzheimer’s and live with my husband and I. Or about being a soccer mom.
I’m knocking around an idea for a picture book about a spider that lives outside my office window.
Those are topics that are just entirely outside of my lane.
When I write on those topics, it’s because I have something I want to say. I know that those posts will get less traffic than blog posts that I write that are in my lane. But I don’t mind.
There are real benefits to leaving your lane sometimes.
Taking a break from my lane keeps you sharp. You might have to do research when you write about something you’re less familiar with. You’ll have to think in different ways. That’s good for your brain.
And you’ll find connections between the lanes sometimes that you never would have seen otherwise. That’s always very cool.
And it’s fun. It feeds the rebel soul. | https://medium.com/the-write-brain/should-you-stay-in-your-lane-as-a-writer-735517e5769b | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2019-08-16 15:40:40.696000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Productivity', 'Work', 'Writing'] |
What is Content Marketing? | How is content marketing different from traditional advertising?
What most people find difficult to understand about content marketing is how it differs from traditional advertising. After all, if “content is king,” what have companies been marketing with all these years?
Traditional advertising is interruptive and allows marketers to push out their message in front of their audience — regardless of whether or not they want to see it. Traditional advertising rushes at consumers in the form of newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboards, radio ads, television ads, and direct mailings.
On the other hand, content marketing is much more subtle. This marketing is entertaining and educational. It draws in customers through storytelling, articles, blog posts, newsletters, emails, quizzes, infographics, videos, and podcasts. Content marketing offers consumers value and thereby makes them appreciate your company’s existence. You’re not advertising directly to your customers. You’re offering them something in your marketing that helps them feel connected to your brand.
Content marketing also excels through avenues like a company or outside blog, social media sites, YouTube, and online articles. These formats have only become more available in the past two decades, and companies are taking advantage of them.
There are a few other ways that you may distinguish content marketing from traditional advertising:
Short-term v. Long-term
Traditional advertising operated on the idea that a customer would see the ad and be enticed to buy the product immediately. But…who actually does this? Conversely, content marketing doesn’t worry about selling a product each and every time they get in front of their customer. Companies who focus on this strategy know that the best way to their customers’ wallets is by providing valuable content.
Talking to v. Talking with
Traditional advertising talks to customers. There’s no dialogue or relationship. It’s just a litany of benefits of a product or service. Content marketing, especially on social media, allows customers to respond, engage, interact, and get involved. You can gauge interest in certain topics or ask for feedback on new ideas. It allows you to cater your marketing and campaigns to your audience instead of telling them what you think they want you to hear.
Showing v. Nurturing
A great example of traditional advertising is a car dealership commercial. Within seconds, you know all about the business and product that is being sold to you. The person on the screen is talking at you, telling you what you could have, and showing you the price tag for it.
Content marketing is the opposite. It’s a slower process, and it targets customers who have an interest in your industry. By producing content that they find useful or interesting, you create and nurture a relationship with them. You provide value and keep them coming back.
General v. Targeted
Traditional advertising is about getting your message in front of as many people as possible. Content marketing targets a specific group of individuals. Before putting out a content marketing campaign, businesses will research that specific audience and look at trends that do well among that group. The more they know about them, the greater chance they have of boosting engagement, getting new sales, developing customer loyalty, and more! | https://medium.com/digital-marketing-lab/what-is-content-marketing-1a910111d6c1 | ['Casey Botticello'] | 2020-12-19 00:01:54.477000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Technology', 'Social Media', 'Productivity', 'Writing'] |
Scraping By | Scraping By
A Poem
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
My friends commented
on how I was scraping by
as if I had the skin of a knife
They said it was nice
how the rubble stayed on
the sidewalk, and didn’t
ruin my floor
I tried to protest my
banking information
show them that they really
had got it all wrong
But turning back around
towards them
I saw I was alone
with a overcooked piece of pasta
posing as a receipt | https://medium.com/the-bazaar-of-the-bizarre/scraping-by-ad78db1206e3 | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-11 06:26:48.838000+00:00 | ['Image', 'Poetry', 'Madness', 'Musing', 'Loneliness'] |
What Every Mother Does Not Know ! | If one thing is a constant in your child’s life, it’s their mom!
Not to take anything away from dads, but mother always have that special touch.
As much as you may love your child, moms seem to forget a very important lesson about their kid. This lesson is counter-intuitive. Few mothers even know about it. Yet it is 100 percent in control of your relationship with your child!
Have you ever wondered why there seems to be so many single mothers, while there is only a few single fathers? The reason for this is not often talked about. Here is the one reason, your body (if your woman) sends out chemicals that force you to love your child. Men do not produce these chemicals. Even if a mother wanted to give up her child, it would be extremely difficult.
What does this mean for your relationship with your child?
You can not be rational. It is hardwired into your body to support and protect your kid. Therefore, everything that happens in your child’s life will feel like it is happening to you.
Last evening I was speaking with my mother about our experience together growing up. She still holds on to the guilty feels about certain situations. Her logical mind tells her to let go of these feelings, but her emotional mind will not let them go.
From experience I can tell you that growing up was a roller coaster for many reasons. It is much more complex when the child and mother are sharing the experiences with the same level of emotions. This is the very reason for fights with your kid.
What is a mother to do? Feel guilt? Constantly express your feelings to your kid? No! You need to check your emotions.
I am not saying quit loving your kids or not be emotional in general. What I am saying is you need to have your “inner” parenting skills together. You can not be on the same emotional roller coaster as your kid. You have to develop your “inner” skills. Kids struggle with understanding themselves, if you as a parent can figure it out either, you both are in the same stinking ship.
Eventually, what happen is you learn how to positively address your emotional issues. You learn how effectively control you feelings, and then you teach your child to do the same thing.
One great way to clam your emotions is exercise. If you walk 30 minutes a day, it will greatly improve your physical and emotional help. What is even better is if you walk with you kid; it will allow for conversation to flow, it frees emotions that might be built up, most important it builds your connection with your kid.
Another tip is to be selfish! Mothers are notorious for not giving themselves time. I know when my mom was raising the four kids in our family she would work a 16 hour day from firs thing in the morning until we fell asleep at time. Set aside time for your emotional health.
Lastly, make time for you and your kid to bond. Do not just go through the motions of life. Finding activities that you can do together that will bring you together.
John T.S. Murphy- went from being the kid that most parent wish they NEVER had. To a success story. Graduating College, Owner of Multiple Business, and a Constant Addict for Self Improvement. He has a new book titled “GIVE UP NOW, YOUR A FAILURE!” The book is a how-to guide for people dealing with their Learning Disabilities.
Find out more | https://medium.com/@fuzailhayaat/what-every-mother-does-not-know-1375688f2423 | ['Fuzail Hayaat'] | 2021-05-18 16:43:30.584000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Kids', 'Mothers And Daughters', 'Baby Care', 'Moms'] |
Setting up a quick JSON server (RESTful API) | Today we’ll go into setting up a quick RESTful API using JSON server, It’s honestly one on the fastest ways to set up a server, it’s quite handy when working on small projects. So this tutorial would be perfect for those working on small portfolio projects or even code challenges.
We’ll jump right into it, Please do NOTE that this tutorial will only focus on setting up a backend, so we won’t have any client. I will be testing http requests using POSTMAN.
First let’s create ourselves a folder where we’ll handle our code. I have named mine “vanilla-json-server” and the IDE of my choice will be VSCODE.
In you terminal run the following command
npm init -y
A package.json file will then be create for you.
Be sure to add the follow line on code just underneath the “test” script.
"server": "node server.js"
Create a server.js file and the db.json file within the root directory of your project. You could either create new files named server.js & db.json within your file explorer/IDE or run the following command in your terminal.
touch server.js db.json
We’ll need the json server dependency so lets install it with the following command.
npm install json-server --save
Your package.json file should look like the following.
package.json
Let’s setup our server. Inside our server.js file copy and paste the following code.
Here we setup our json-server linked to interact with our db.json
database. In our database we’ll have the following initial dummy data.
db.json
We have all the necessary files, data and installs needed. Now lets run out JSON server with the follow command.
npm run server
Your Server should be running on port 3000, to test if it’s actually running, point your URL to the “users” route either in browser or postman as shown below.
Browser
Postman
Additional CRUD Commands
Now that our server is up and working, We can use the remaining CRUD commands like POST, PUT and DELETE. NOTE that we don’t have any client so we’ll use POSTMAN to do these basic CRUD functionalities.
POST Data
Using the URL http://localhost:3000/users, Use the POST request in POSTMAN to post new data.
In the header tab you’ll need to add “Content-type : application/json” to join our body fields as we post data to our database. Demonstration shown below:
Post Headers
Now switch to the body tab to add the fields we’d like to send to our database.
Post Body
PUT (Update) Data
Now to update our data be sure to add the id parameter to your URL like this http://localhost:3000/users/3 and lets update the JSON object we just posted. Firstly Change the POST request to a PUT request and remove the id field in the raw json object. Now we able to update any other field we desire, so I’ll just update the username as show below.
Put Body
DELETE Data
Similar to the PUT request we’ll need to add the id parameter to indicate which JSON Object to remove. So lets remove the JSON object we just updated with the URL http://localhost:3000/users/3. Remember to switch the PUT request to DELETE to make this work. Demonstration shown below.
Delete Request
Congrats you have reached the end of the tutorial. Hope this helps you out. Comments and feedback welcome, Always willing to improve :).
Here’s the LINK to project repo.
Let me know if you require a part 2, I could include a vanilla html&js , Vue or React client. Leave a comment ;).
Feel free to Follow me on Twitter. | https://medium.com/cbazil-dev/setting-up-a-quick-json-server-restful-api-e5535685c223 | ['Chad Bosch'] | 2020-12-22 08:23:58.514000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Json Api', 'Backend', 'Servers', 'Json'] |
How branding helps in marketing? | Branding, by true definition, is a marketing practice wherein a company creates a name, symbol or design that is easily identifiable as belonging to the company. This helps to identify a product and distinguish it from other products and services in the market.
Brand and branding are complex terms that encapsulate many different things and a brand development strategy can help you establish the difference.
With the rising competition, branding and the right brand development service is proving to be one of the most important aspects of any business.
Companies that effectively focus on their brand and the right brand development strategy are able to better differentiate themselves from the competition, and have better marketing.
Branding helps you stand out in a saturated market
2. Branding gives you credibility
3. With a clear brand, you can charge what you’re worth
4. Branding leads to customer loyalty
5. Branding leads to returning customers & referrals
6. Branding = Consistency
7. Branding helps to attract your ideal clients
Branding makes a lasting impression on customers and also enhances brand recall value. It is a way of distinguishing yourself from the competitors and clarifying what it is you offer that makes you the better choice.
Branding not only creates loyal customers, but it also long term loyal employees.
A quality brand strategy gives people something to believe in and something to stand behind. It also helps employees understand the purpose of the organization they work for. | https://medium.com/@leadsbrandc0nnect/how-branding-helps-in-marketing-83589a440bdf | ['Leads Brand'] | 2021-04-13 07:22:26.517000+00:00 | ['Company', 'Brand Development', 'Services', 'Agency'] |
How to Date a Tech Bro | This post was inspired by Anita Ihuman’s How to date a tech sis In this post, let me walk you over the fundamentals of dating a tech bro!
Keep your bags packed
Tech bros in general are travel enthusiasts. They spend most of the time staring at screens (from dual monitors to smartphones) and love the occasional escape to a few days of digital detox.
Be creative in your gifts
As a techie, he probably makes enough money. He also loves the thrill of reading through articles and watching hundreds of YouTube reviews before making an informed decision. Do not deprive him of this adrenaline rush! Instead, get to know him and spend some time making something. He loves a personal touch.
Be prepared to watch Nerdy movies
Please know the difference between Star Trek, Star Wars, and Guardian of the Galaxy. Be ready to waste weekends with a rerun of the Batman trilogy, or a Marvel marathon! The good part is, he can pause and explain the intricate details if you blink and miss an important part.
Confide in him
He is a keeper of secrets. So go ahead and make some confessions. Feeling insecure about something? Go ahead and talk to him. He makes a living out of turning bugs into features. He will be more than happy to show you the perfect picture of yourself that he sees!
Treat his pet well
A vast majority of techies own pets, and you better be comfortable with his furry friends or that might be a deal-breaker!
Be explicit
No, they don’t understand unspoken words. They are worse than men in general when it comes to picking up social cues. Their evolution was hindered by the amount of console.log and System.out.println they frantically typed in! So please speak up and be assured that it will be heard.
Don’t plan anything in the morning
These creatures are night owls and show their worst colors when woke up early! So plan events accordingly; he will most likely not join you in your morning yoga! Going for a post-dinner stroll? Count him in.
Read and support his blog
Yes please! Blogs are not always tutorials and there are often some gems like these! You don’t have to be a techie to show some support. Read them, share them with your friends. Help them get their dose of dopamine.
Conclusion
Go ahead and get that tech bro of yours! While they are relatively low maintenance, be warned they are fragile! So do not drop, knock, or spill coffee (on them or their work). Wish you the best of luck! | https://medium.com/ones-zeros/how-to-date-a-tech-bro-c5dfa47d4935 | ['Niladri Roy'] | 2020-12-23 10:29:52.459000+00:00 | ['Datingadvice', 'Funny', 'Humor', 'Devlife'] |
A Teen in 2020 | This is the first of my papers where i will be writing about my thoughts as a teen in this age. I will be writing about mental health, school, family and religion.
In my first paper i will be writing about my thoughts on covid-19 and everything that has come with it but from a teens perspective.
Covid-19 has been different in many places across the world yet there was a similar view that everyone was in it together and that we were all to do are bit, that was all good in the beginning in march to June but after that we lost faith. i know by that point that i struggled to see what was going on, as there was a lot of confusing and false information surrounding the corona virus.
On the 20th of march was the last day for schools across the U.K as to stop the spread of the viruses as it was said as teens and young children were super spreaders. The news wasn’t much of a shock as there was already talk but no one had predicted that it the government would go through with yet they did and to take it one step more they put the whole of the U.K in a lockdown. All non essential shops would close, leisure facilities would close and no one were allowed out of your house as long as it was an emergency.
The moment the news broke, it felt the world stop and not even for a second but the whole night i wondered what just happened and what was going to happen.
The following week people were to work from home and my school work was online. I, like many teens my age had the feeling of strangeness as the freedom we had for meeting up with friends and other family relatives was gone yet we now had a new freedom of our education, a freedom i personal never felt before. This brought new challenges and struggles, the first month or two i enjoyed although the subjects i once never liked i didn’t do, things became more open as i would mostly do tasks when i felt like them instead of when i would be forced to do it. As time flew by things started to get worse and i couldn’t find away out, i was lonely and depressed, in a constant battle to find some hope or anything to keep me going but i found it hard, daily tasks were a struggle all the time, getting out of bed in the morning was the worst one of all as i saw no reason to getting up when my days were reduced to nothing. i felt that i wasn’t living but a zombie that shuffled around the house, my only purpose was to consume any food item i locked eyes on.
It was in this days were a felt all my hope lost and humanity striped away when i found the world of WitchTok.
In my next paper i will writing about the beginning of witchcraft and more. | https://medium.com/@adamfergus19/a-teen-in-2020-5fb654cca027 | ['Adam Fergus'] | 2020-12-20 00:46:22.891000+00:00 | ['Teenagers', 'Carona Virus', 'Mental Health'] |
My Hands Betrayed Me | Today I write about the unfaithfulness of my hands. The lethargic style they adopted and the faulty impact on my brain. I will just go straight to the point.
I have lost it, or let’s say I’m losing it. I’m losing the friendship, companionship, trust, love, and everything amazing relationship that my pen has with my note. And all thanks to my hands
How did I get here, the point to which my note and pen are unlovable?
To which my pen lies unproductive in the leaves of my plain notes
To which my pen no longer calls my note comforting and my note no longer calls my pen Smart.
They swore to be together forever Comfort & Smart forever.
At what point did they lose interest in each other
Who would have thought that my pen would see my note and not crave to design it with letters from its heart or that my note would rather stay plain than be graced by the intelligent words of my pen?
Who would have thought that they’d go days, weeks, months without craving each other’s presence?
How did I miss not writing in a day, now two days, a week now a month and counting..
I’m not aware of the fight between my pen and note
I do not know the day they disagreed and chose to be apart
I can’t tell if they’ve been unfaithful to each other.
But I know my hands knew and kept it from me. I don’t even have an excuse but my hands knew all along and they didn’t tell me.
From the pinching of my right fingers around my pen to my lazy left palm relaxing on my notebook to the movement of my wrist and arms, I couldn’t have been more disappointed.
Today my hands choose to reconcile by the way. I understand that my note will not pick my pen and write by itself, it would take the effort of my hand. That effort is “ me being deliberate”
Perhaps, I haven’t been deliberate about writing hence I am my hand, my hand is me.
This rant is to many years of writing again.
Cheers! | https://medium.com/@techisfemale/my-hands-betrayed-me-80ee19b29e6d | [] | 2020-05-04 17:55:50.441000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Software Testing', 'People', 'Betrayal', 'Writers Life'] |
Time is the element for restaurants | At BidShore, we believe that our business is truly changing the world by best utilizing one very important element: TIME.
With only about 2% of printed coupons from restaurants actually getting redeemed, there is no doubt about it that the way of printed coupons leaves the world with so much additional waste in both materials, and time from our friends- the restaurant owners.
As for our amazing BidShore customers, precious moments of their life can slip away in a hunt for a coupon, a deal, or finding the local specials in order to maximize their visit at the best price.
As local small businesses grow, they require to always be filling their days with hungry customers — it’s a race against their biggest nemesis- time. The more time passes that they are not serving customers, food is going bad.
Let time be on your side to fill your stomach, your wallet, while supporting our local business owners and eliminating landfill waste when you maximize your time with an experience like BidShore.
Together, we can continue to make such a positive impact on the world around us! | https://medium.com/bidshore/time-is-the-element-for-restaurants-46dd4c15c522 | [] | 2020-03-25 19:11:11.653000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Coupon', 'Restaurant'] |
Reason Behind Popularity Of Streaming Devices in world | Streaming device is the invention which allows the personal as well as the online access of the movies on the TV. Various devices come in different shapes and sizes. Streaming device is your fantastic option to fulfill the all in 1 requirement of everyday entertainment routine. There are a handful of streaming devices that are operating out there such as Google chrome cast, Apple TV, Roku, NVIDIA Shield TV, and few more. These gadgets have their own importance. These devices helps to conduct the internet trend on the huge screen. With the help of the streaming device, you can watch the videos on your TV that you watch most on the Laptops and cellular phones. This usually means that you don’t need to endanger yourself with the short screen of the notebook.
One of the most attractive features of this streaming device is the fact that it is easy and simple to use. Some of those streaming devices include Apple TV Player, Chrome cast, Amazon Fire TV, NVIDIA Shield, and Roku. There’s not any such complication located in them while utilizing. Streaming devices save the space and also make you away from the hassles of wires. There’s the selection of stations which you can choose to subscribe. Some streaming gadgets boosts the privacy of the stations so you could operate the channel only once entering the PIN code that you have selected. A number of those streaming devices let 700+ stations and a number are limited towards the material they represent. There is an advantage of a free subscription to the channels. You have the option to operate the huge list of stations which you wish to watch. Trending channels that are offered are providing are Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video Prime, Hotstar Sling TV, YouTube, and a lot more.
The characteristics and design of these streaming devices are made by keeping in mind different users. You can use your Smartphone as a distant of the device. On the opposite side, people who wish to get the conventional remote like TV to control are benefited with the remote that is gained together with the devices. All these accessories are quite helpful for its customers to give the comfort level. The creation of those revolutionary devices helped many people to make entertainment a priority and also treat the amusement taste bud how it should be. Some devices permit you to play the matches too.
Don’t Forget to read About Tamil Movie Download and watch
One of the finest advantages that streaming device offers you will be your voice searches and operations. You’re provided with 4K ultra high-definition. Some devices are elastic for example; Roku has different devices which you can take anywhere and everywhere. If you are going on vacation, then you can connect your device to the TV at the hotel. You can capture the shows and when these displays are online, then you can eliminate the recording hassle and then view it anytime. Some people have enough time to view the television, they could view the episodes, series, videos, and songs that they missed watching during the weekend. A brand new feature that you may research is your personal listening. Here, you’re allowed to listen to the content of this TV along with your earphones. For example, Roku remote gets the connectivity assistance of this earphones with which you are able to listen to all with the support of both earphones and eliminates others to know about your listening. (Afilmywap 2021)
I’m using a streaming device from past 8 months. I am rather glad to have such creation in life as it enabled me to see my favorite online series on TV. I went for a trip where I missed the show and streaming apparatus let me view after I came back home. | https://medium.com/@adxxzsdad/reason-behind-popularity-of-streaming-devices-in-world-576c739cc5ba | [] | 2020-12-30 06:53:37.718000+00:00 | ['Tamil Movie', 'Netflix', 'Zee5', 'Stream', 'Amazon'] |
Designing for the IIoT…What You Need to Know About Software | Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
The first things that may come to mind when hearing the term the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are the physical sensors, actuators, and other components that are used to implement an IIoT system. While the equipment used to monitor and control industrial processes is vitally important to the viability of the system, the hardware alone cannot provide the expected benefits. The software that powers the implementation is of equal importance in designing an IIoT system that meets the organization’s overall expectations.
The IIoT can be seen as a specialized branch of the consumer-oriented Internet of Things (IoT) concept. Both employ smart technology to connect devices to automate or perform various activities. In the case of the IoT, the activities revolve around issues designed to improve the lives of the general population. Smart appliances and mobile devices enable individuals to automate and exert remote control over various aspects of their day-to-day existence. They are becoming more ubiquitous every day and promise to transform the future in ways we can only imagine.
The IIoT deals with processes that are less obvious, but are arguably more important to the safety and well-being of society. IIoT implementations are used to control hydroelectric plants, maintain automated production lines, and keep industrial facilities operating at peak efficiency. While they are less visible than IoT systems, they are essential to the infrastructure on which we all rely.
Types of IIoT Software
Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash
There are several types of software required in the construction of a working IIoT environment. They can be broadly defined as providing these functions:
Human interaction with the system
* Collecting data from IIoT sensors
* Storing the data
* Processing the data
These categories of software are needed to fulfill the requirements of an IIoT implementation, which is designed to oversee or automate a complicated process. We will take a deeper look into why these types of software applications and tools are required and investigate some of the available options. Since the cloud is an integral part of the IIoT, we will concentrate on software solutions offered by cloud providers. As we look at these software offerings, there will necessarily be a crossover between those marketed as IIoT or IoT solutions due to the similarity in their functionality.
Human Machine Interfaces
The ability to provide human interaction with the automated systems under the control of an IIoT system is essential from a safety and security perspective. There needs to be a method for operators to assume control of the system in the event of unanticipated problems. Human machine interfaces (HMIs) can be implemented through software alone or as an embedded program built into IIoT devices.
A higher degree of functionality is afforded by HMIs that are implemented as standalone software applications. They can provide operators the ability to view an entire installation and quickly drill down to isolate a specific component. Touchscreen technology is used to enable staff members access to the HMI from tablet devices. Embedded HMIs are more limited and often control a single device or subsystem.
Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash
Data Collection Software
The sources of the information used in an IIoT system are devices employed to monitor environmental variables such as heat or humidity. They might be relaying data on the state of certain industrial processes that are critically important and may cause safety concerns if they malfunction. The quality of data they provide is essential to the overall viability of the IIoT implementation.
Embedded software is primarily responsible for the flow of data from physical monitoring devices to the computer systems that will process it. Embedded software can be seen as a system contained within a mechanical or electronic device. It is made up of a sensor-based input system, output actuator, microcontroller, and a minimal amount of local memory.
As can be seen from its components, sensors and actuators, two critical parts of an IIoT system make use of embedded software. Devices use embedded software to measure conditions and send that information along for processing. In some cases, an action may be triggered by the received data. Therefore, embedded software forms the foundation of any IIoT implementation.
Traditionally, embedded software has been proprietary, making interoperability with products from multiple vendors impossible. This also makes it difficult or impossible to update the software to take advantage of technological breakthroughs. Recent moves toward employing open-source embedded software promise to minimize this problem.
When designing an IIoT implementation, you need to ensure the compatibility of the physical components with the other software and hardware resources that comprise the system. Maintaining interoperability may limit your available choices in hardware procurement.
Data Storage Software
One of the defining characteristics of the IIoT is the incredible volume of data generated by the connected network of monitoring devices. The purpose of an IIoT system is to collect this data and put it to productive use. Storing data is an essential task to make it available for further processing. It needs to be readily available for use in real-time and historical processes, such as predictive analytics or capacity planning.
The cloud offers flexibility and scalability that fit well with the storage requirements of the IIoT. Businesses can easily add storage capacity as their needs change without the complications and expense of adding on-premises resources. Cloud vendors often offer different performance and price options that provide a block, file, or object storage interface. The selected interface will coincide with the type of storage chosen for the given cloud application.
Several distinct functions and features go into comprehensive storage software. Backup and recovery is a critical function of storage software. The ability to quickly access dynamic data, as well as migrate static information to longterm media, are other important features of storage software. Encrypting data during transit and while it is at rest are also vitally important to maintain privacy and security.
Major cloud vendors such as Amazon and Google have end-to-end storage solutions that include robust feature sets. Third-party options are also available that integrate with cloud providers and furnish the ability to manage the storage requirements of an IIoT system. You need to ensure that the storage software you select gives you the flexibility of accessing your data when you want it and that it can handle the type of data generated from IIoT devices.
Data Processing Software
Data processing is a term that can be broadly interpreted. For this discussion, we will categorize it as an application or software solution used to process data collected from IIoT devices. The data can be used for a wide variety of purposes based on the requirements of the system it is supporting.
Data may be needed for use in real-time decision making, historical analysis, or both. Analytics is becoming an increasingly important technique in business and industry and can be put to good use with the data that the IIoT produces. Digital twins that are used to simulate physical objects or processes in real time are driven by data obtained from IIoT devices. Dashboards that enable data to be disseminated and understood by non-technical personnel are extremely useful, for both monitoring and analysis. The specific software deployed needs to be fully integrated with the overall goals of the system, as well as the storage methods used.
Here again, there are a plethora of applications and data processing software options available from the large cloud vendors that are specifically tailored to the needs of IIoT implementations. An example is the large portfolio of solutions offered by Microsoft Azure. In some cases, it may make sense to select a vendor based wholly on the software tools they offer.
Databases straddle the line between data processing and storage software but are integrally important in facilitating an effective IIoT implementation. Compatibility between the databases and analytical software is essential when designing the system. Make sure that the visualization tools you choose can interact with your database platforms.
The software choices used in an IIoT implementation are just as important as the hardware selections. From the software used to collect data to the HMIs used to override the system, the applications need to work together in augmenting the information returned from the network of IIoT devices. This type of complementary relationship will return the most value from the IIoT system. | https://medium.com/@davidhoysan/designing-for-the-iiot-what-you-need-to-know-about-software-65db81084be6 | ['David Hoysan'] | 2020-03-03 15:35:14.465000+00:00 | ['Iiot', 'Data', 'Software', 'Industry', 'Hardware'] |
Escort Recruiting Mega Style | Escort Recruiting Mega Style
Forget About Pimps! Networks Like Lifetime and Hollywood Movies Recruit Escorts Into the Profession. And They Do It a Division At a Time!
Dylan Kidd — Unsplash
We read, hear and watch a lot of news about traffickers who lure girls into the escort profession. Maybe it’s true…and maybe it’s fiction. But I gained a little insight this afternoon that might really turn the mainstream on its ear.
I was on the phone with an old buddy yesterday — an independently-operating escort who calls herself Candy — when somehow the conversation turned to that old rite of passage thing (the usual sexual abuse mythology which is generally true)…and then to how she was lured into the profession in the first place. And you might find the seminal recruitment tool sublimely enlightening.
No, it wasn’t a big, bad pimp driving a $100,000 Benz — or a foreign broker who “turned her out.” It was a movie on THE LIFETIME CHANNEL that did the job! Yup! The girl was just 14 years old when one night she watched “THE MAYFLOWER MADAM” (the story of Sydney Biddle Barrows) on the “chick channel” — and there is where she found her calling!
Now Candy is no dumbbell — at least academically speaking. En route to her destiny, the Sweet One enrolled in UCLA on scholarship. But once out in the world on her own, the lure of that fantasy so groomed by that movie she’d seen just a few years back, beckoned. And so she dropped out within weeks to pursue her particular dream — one of making the big bucks in the escort game. And sure enough at just 18 years of age, Candy was living in her own cozy apartment, shopping till she dropped, and earning 900 bucks a day to pay the way!
This I find fascinating. While law enforcement pursues any number of facilitators and traffickers whom they think are the culprits, a freakin’ cable channel just might be doing more to glamorize the escort world and recruit young girls into the profession than the people they’re spending all that money to track!
And what about “PRETTY WOMAN” the movie? How many women decided to give it a go based on that fucking fairy tale? I mean…come on! Who wouldn’t want to marry a handsome trillionaire?? Put me in a wig and sign me up! Ya think maybe a few girls entered the rank and file based on that fairy tale?
But that’s not all of it! The media aids and abets the process in less obvious and more workaday ways. New York City’s most notorious madam runs three separate places and is in constant need of new faces to titillate her endless list of regular customers. And while a significant percentage come from word of mouth and friends of her current employees, the lion’s share find her via the internet help wanted ads she runs on a daily basis. Yessirree! The boss lady recruits via the Internet — yet another medium attracting young ladies.
While her ads are fairly obvious, others are not. Emma, a beautiful Korean girl, found the business from the help wanted pages of a Korean daily. Worded in such a way as to hoodwink the paper itself so the owner could run the ad in the first place, Emma answered thinking she’d only be giving massages. When she called, the boss asked “You know men, right?” She got the picture right away!
But really…recruitment to the business can happen in any number of much more organic ways. Take Sexxxy Sadie, a college-educated Jewish woman born (by her own admission) with a healthy appetite for carnal fun. She had a job writing insurance policies and one day commuted to a prospective client who as it turned out owned a massage parlor. He liked her…asked her out on a date…and then gently enlightened her. She never worked for him…but shortly thereafter, checked the help wanted ads in the Voice adult section and started work making the big bucks…all of which brings us back to the media as recruiters.
When it comes to The Great American Hoochie Mama, the “hood rats” hit the bricks the old fashioned way. Race or ethnicity notwithstanding (not all hood rats are women of color), these girls tend to get pimped by a smooth-talking player. He could be in the club. Or he could be driving down the boulevard in a tricked out ride. After the initial overture, Homey might run some ads for her if he’s an enterprising individual, or more often than not, will place her with an escort agency where she’ll receive roughly 50% of the money she earns…and then go home to turn her share over to “daddy!”
New York City is chock full of foreign escorts…especially of the Asian variety. How does recruitment work with them? Suzie, a phone girl who’s managed virtually every massage parlor in the Big Apple, reports that recruitment back in the home country starts at what is called a “hostess bar,” a ubiquitous and completely legal enterprise peculiar to their culture.
In an American bistro, a waitress takes your order…slings it on the table…and then presents you with a check. But a Korean hostess bar is different. Often a bunch of businessmen will get their own room in which to drink. Their waitress not only pours their beverages…but sits and chats with them — and might even perform a little karaoke for their entertainment. While nothing illegal or sexual goes on, the leap to massage parlor work from the hostess bar isn’t quite as pronounced as going directly into the fire. And in fact, the hostess bar serves as a sort of minor league training ground. Once working as a waitress, the girl networks with her colleagues and customers and sooner than later discovers other options to make bigger bucks. And so it goes in Korea…and China as well according to Suzie.
Clearly, recruitment tools — be they old school or media-driven — supply workers for a business that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The world’s oldest profession has that moniker for a reason. Its survivability rivals that of a cockroach in a nuclear war! But really…when you think about it…isn’t all the media coverage/glorification of the trade as culpable as any pimp or trafficker? It’s such a powerful recruitment tool! Pimps do it one girl at a time. But Lifetime? Thousands and thousands! Not to mention Hollywood! OMG! Don’t tell me networks and movie companies don’t profit! How much do you think Gary Marshall earned on Pretty Woman?
Of course, the constitution protects people like Gary and networks like The Lifetime Channel. Thus, they get to earn millions without regard for how many mixed up young girls they entice into the business while at the same time, some dude who posts an ad on an adult directory site as a favor to his favorite escort to gain her favor, runs the risk of arrest for so doing…all of which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nor does the wack-a-mole mentality of law enforcement which seems to target buck privates and not the commissioned officers.
In a perfect world, this would all be legal. But that’s a discussion for another day. I’m not saying that it’s time to censor any of the media in this arena…just that recognizing how escorts are enticed into the business is more complicated than it seems. There are many forces at work (some unrecognized) doing an excellent job…as there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of practitioners despite law enforcement’s best efforts.
Wanna read more escort exposes? Try these! | https://medium.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-escorts-but/escort-recruiting-mega-style-18865fa74d30 | ['William', 'Dollar Bill'] | 2020-12-20 23:16:59.041000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Escorts', 'Sex', 'Psychology', 'Life Lessons'] |
My Friends Said, ‘Go On The Rebound’ | The Idea of you seemed so easy and harmless mixed with sharp liquid.
Yet so did the apple before the sour bite chucked humanity out of the garden.
They promised laughs and hazy smiles.
Easy relief and an itch finally scratched.
But is the morning version of myself,
Willing to pay my night self’s price?
For that short moment of thoughtless relief,
Will it be worth the pain in the morning?
When awaken to smudge mascara and glitter around my neck.
Will it be worth the red-rimmed eyes, tangled hair, and bruises along my skin?
Will it be worth that awkward conversation?
“Do you take sugar in your tea?”
“I should really be going.”
“Oh really? You can stay longer if you like.”
Translation: Thank God you’re finally going, and I never have to see you again.
When the door shuts and I step under water spray to clean you off of my skin,
I look back in the mirror and think,
Was it really worth it? Following their lead?
Because now I feel worse than I did before.
-ARTEMIS INKS | https://medium.com/write-like-a-girl/my-friends-said-go-on-the-rebound-af8bd612a4ca | ['Artemis Inks'] | 2020-11-23 20:41:30.550000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Love', 'Sex', 'Poetry', 'Dating'] |
Did the Jetsons ever worry that Rosie was a spy? | As families around the world excitedly gobble up devices that connect to the Internet of Things (IoT), home life is starting to look more and more like an episode of The Jetsons. (If you’re too young to have spent Saturday mornings watching The Jetsons, this clip explains a lot about our current fascination with household technology!)
But the Jetsons never seemed to worry about the security of the devices that made their lives so easy. It’s a different story for today’s homeowners (whether you know it or not). Home IoT devices are notoriously easy to hack — and cybercriminals know it. But you don’t have to give up all of your connected devices; you just have to learn how to secure them.
What falls under the term “IoT”?
“IoT” refers to the Internet of Things and includes all of those cool, helpful, and trendy devices that rely on a connection to the internet to work. Amazon Echo and Google Home are obvious examples, but there are so many more:
Doorbells that let you see who’s at your door via your smartphone
Light bulbs that can be turned on and off from your smartphone, helping you save energy costs (not to mention the more fun aspects like syncing them to a playlist when you’re having a party)
Smart locks that let you unlock your door remotely for your babysitter, dog walker, or the Amazon delivery guy
TVs that let you stream content from Netflix, Hulu, etc.
Healthcare devices — from patches to ingestibles and implanted devices — that record vital signs and other information and, in some cases, transmit them to health care providers and family members.
There are even refrigerators that know when you’re out of milk (and add it to your grocery list) and diapers that let you know when your baby needs to be changed. In fact, there seems to be no end to our appetite for IoT devices: There are already more of them in use than there are people on the planet. And it’s predicted that, by 2020, there will be around three devices per person.
Unfortunately, at this point, most of them are vulnerable to attack.
Why in the world would anybody want to hack light bulbs?
Because the light bulbs themselves aren’t the real target. Once hackers access that light bulb, they have access to everything else on the same network…which for many homeowners, is everything. Including the computers that store their personal data, the passwords to their bank accounts, etc. To build on the pop culture theme, remember that all Luke needed to do to take down the Death Star was to hit one tiny exhaust port.
When it comes to security, your IoT devices are the equivalent of that exhaust port. If hackers can get into one, they can get into the whole shebang.
Is that really a thing?
Yep. One report stated that the average IoT device is attacked every two minutes (and that was back in 2017). Not that all of them were successful, of course, but far too many are. Here are some of the most notorious examples:
Back in 2016, a botnet took down huge portions of the internet, including sites like Netflix, Twitter, and CNN. That takes a lot of computing power, and, in this case, investigators determined that power came from hundreds of thousands of IoT devices — things like TVs, digital cameras and DVRs — that were hijacked without their owners’ knowledge.
In 2014, an Ohio couple was startled awake in the middle of the night when they heard a male voice screaming, “Wake up, baby! Wake up, baby!” It turned out that someone had hacked into and taken control of their “smart” baby monitor. When they raced into their baby’s room, the camera turned toward them and started shouting obscenities.
Another couple had a similar experience one evening when their Alexa Dot started screaming “like a child in a horror movie dream.”
A family in Oregon received a call from one of the father’s work colleagues, letting them know that Alexa had sent him a recording of what they thought was a private conversation (fortunately, it was just about what kind of flooring to buy). An Amazon engineer was able to go through the logs and determined that it was the equivalent of a cell phone butt dial: Alexa heard certain words in a certain order and acted on what she thought was a command, even though nobody was talking to her.
And those are just a few documented examples. It’s not too hard to imagine some real nightmare scenarios:
What if your smart smoke and carbon monoxide detectors were attacked by a Stuxnet-like virus that turned them off while all signals indicated they were still on and functioning properly?
What if your security cameras or nanny cams were used to scout your home for valuables, so criminals would know whether to bother breaking in?
What if a cybercriminal hacked into your smart light bulb (something that can be done in as little as three minutes) and switched it to the “home” setting, thereby telling your smart hub to turn off your alarm and unlock your doors?
None of this means you have to give up your smart home devices, but it does mean you should give some serious thought to the security risks and take steps to protect yourself and your family.
What homeowners can do to make their connected homes more secure
The easy answer? Education. There are a lot of simple things homeowners could be doing to secure their devices, but they’re not doing them because no one ever told them they should. Here are some of the most important:
Before you purchase a new IoT device, do your homework. First, think about why you want it, and ask yourself if it’s worth the security risk. If you decide that it is, start researching the product. Some brands are more secure than others. One non-negotiable: Make sure it can be updated with software and firmware patches. Many IoT devices can’t be updated when new vulnerabilities are discovered. Those are the ones you want to leave on the shelf!
Buy a router that allows you to set up more than one network: Newer routers often allow you to set up multiple networks. (Hint: You don’t have to stick with the router you got from your service provider.) Put your personal computers and anything else that contains sensitive data on one network, and put all of your IoT devices on another. That way, if one does get hacked, the damage will be contained.
When you buy an IoT device, create a new password: If a device comes with default login credentials, change them right away — when you set the device up. (Don’t think you’ll do it later, once everything is in place, because you’ll probably forget.) Why is this so important? Because the default password is often the same across an entire product line, and few self-respecting criminals would pass on the opportunity to hack so many devices at once. It doesn’t even take a hacking genius to find out what the default password is — the information is often available online. So, to quote Nike, just do it.
For both your router and all of your connected devices, install software and firmware updates as soon as they’re available, since they’re often used to fix security issues. If possible, set your device preferences so that these updates are installed automatically. In most cases, though, you’ll have to go to the manufacturer’s website to see if there are any updates available, so set yourself a reminder to check for updates on a regular basis. (Or try syncing it to the time changes, like the reminders to change the batteries in your smoke detectors.)
Take the time to read the user’s guide. It may be boring, but it may still contain valuable information, like the fact that there are no plans to provide updates or patches (in which case I’d strongly recommend returning the device right away).
Avoid internet cafes and other places where you have to rely on public WiFi. Cybercriminals can camp out at a table in your favorite coffee shop and gain access to the smartphone apps you use to control your IoT devices. Once they’ve done that, they can access the devices themselves — as well as every other connected device on that network.
Taking these steps will make the average connected home much more secure than it is today. For homeowners who want to take their security even further, you can find advanced steps in this white paper about security in the smart home.
Originally published at www.pattipodnar.com
Featured image credit: Jon Betts via Flickr Creative Commons license | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/did-the-jetsons-every-worry-that-rosie-was-a-spy-42e6a1479886 | ['Patti Wigley Podnar'] | 2019-09-26 11:26:02.456000+00:00 | ['Smart Home', 'IoT', 'Privacy', 'Internet of Things', 'Connected Home'] |
Kislay’s Newsletter #19 | Hello Everyone!
The nineteenth edition of my weekly newsletter is out! Check it out here!
The Stripe engineering team on the first 10 years of their payment API, Packy McCormick on the power of an API strategy, John Cutler on one-person non-teams, and a guide to building great command-line tools.
If you like reading about software engineering, organization design, and the occasional book review, you should subscribe to receive the next editions of this newsletter. Check out the archive and sign up.
If you like what you find, bring your friends and let’s talk software and teams! Drop me a line if you have any feedback about the newsletter or the stuff shared in it.
Cheers!
Kislay | https://medium.com/@kislayverma/kislays-newsletter-19-b020a252fe56 | ['Kislay Verma'] | 2020-12-26 06:02:47.286000+00:00 | ['Payments', 'Organization Design', 'Command Line', 'Newsletter', 'API'] |
Legaltech and Arbitration | What is Legaltech?
Let’s start with the basic definition of the legaltech. Legaltech is the use of technology and software to provide legal services in a more efficient way. The companies which call themselves legaltech products are generally start-ups and they try to disrupt the legal market by offering innovative solutions.
You may think that the legal sector cannot be easily disrupted by the startups however many startups have started to appear in the sector and some large law firms have already begun using them in their tasks. Therefore, it is always better to follow the developments and be able to adapt to the changes otherwise you could stay behind your competitors.
Why do we need legaltech in arbitration?
A fundamental principle in arbitration is that parties would aim to have their cases solved in a just, quick and efficient manner. Legal technology tools can be a catalyzer for accomplishing this aim. There are right now numerous startups working on how to render viable mechanisms for this end to law firms, arbitrators and other interested parties. Let’s have a look at one of the startups founded to realize this purpose.
JUS MUNDI
This is a startup based in Paris which aspires to be a worldwide search engine for international law and arbitration. It has recently received a €1 million seed funding to enhance its product. It was founded by 5 engineers and a lawyer, Jean-Rémi de Maistre, in late 2018.
The team has collected lots of international arbitration awards and treaties between states in order to form a database for their products. They also update their databases by integrating new cases and treaties.
Their main focus is on investor state dispute settlement and private international law however they will offer additional fields of law such as competition law.
Their services can be divided under two topics. First is the legal research. It has over 15,000 comprehensive cases, judgments enforcing or setting aside awards and ISDS and other international law related documents. It can be time-saving and efficient for both arbitrators and counsels or researchers and students to conduct researches by using this search engine. The other feature under this topic is wiki notes in which users can easily and rapidly look up to the legal notions written by legal experts they are facing with nevertheless it is now under development.
The second service it presents is the arbitrator research. There is arbitrator directory comprising a list of arbitrators. It enables users to have an access to the analytics in relation to an arbitrator’s activity and their legal reasoning. This information is provided by the relevant arbitration institutions or courts’ permissions. This tool may help speeding up the search for the most suitable arbitrators and their due diligence analysis in relation to relevant arbitration case.
Furthermore, it exists a conflict checker tool where users can register their requested arbitrator candidate and any other arbitrator, law firm or the state to foresee any possible direct or indirect conflict.
This startup has received support from many prestigious law firms in arbitration field and law schools such as Harvard and Sorbonne Law School which have been using the product. To support their community, they are now offering free trial until April 30, 2020 which is a great opportunity to experience it! | https://medium.com/@legaltechnology/legaltech-and-arbitration-dafc4a192e7e | ['Legal Technology'] | 2020-04-06 15:23:30.648000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Legal', 'Arbitration', 'Legaltech', 'Startup'] |
I Wanted To Be A Happy Writer | I Wanted To Be A Happy Writer
Image screenshot from Pinterest
I’ve tried. Countless times. I‘ve tried to write something, anything, that would beam with positivity. I’ve wanted to make someone’s day by gentle coaxing and encouragement rather than the white-hot rage of injustice.
I recently watched a Netflix program that featured Trent Reznor. He was walking through a song on his second album called ‘Hurt’. It’s a great tune full of resentment and pain. It comes from a dark place and one in which Trent wasn’t willing to expand upon. And then they played the Johnny Cash cover.
Cash covered the song as he was slowly dying from cancer. In the video, he’s frail and looking back on life. The song takes on a whole different meaning. A code for his legacy with the piano thumping out every last heartbeat of his life. I have serious issues listening and viewing this version. Without fail, it brings tears to my eyes and I can’t help but think of my own Dad passing away from cancer.
The emotional journey.
There are days I wonder if I could ever be happy. Dark days when nothing goes to plan. Misery beckons round every corner. Nothing can cheer me up as I disappear into my self-loathing for the day. On days like that, it’s hard to muster the energy to write or to go to work and do my full-time job. It’s even harder to face my children with a big smile and send them off for the day happy and content.
It’s an odd day. Nothing more than that. I don’t suffer from depression. I’ve never needed medication. It’s a singular long day where getting out of bed is the hardest obstacle I’ll face. An odd day that seeps into my writing. Permeates the words. Brings the page down with its relentless nihilism.
Who wants to read that?
I want to be a happy writer but fear that anything I write will never make people happy. There are no funny tales on days like this. Of course, one of the issues to never writing about happiness is, I’m never exposed to happy writing. I don’t seek out comedic prose. I’m not exposed to uplifting stories. The problem really does begin and end with me.
What if I started to read nothing but self-help and inspiring storytelling? Would that take hold within my work? Can I train myself into becoming a happy writer? Or would that be a false dichotomy of who I am? Here’s the real me and this piece of writing is the fake bullshit I’ve put out because people love reading this mindless crap that makes their day better.
I dislike reading happy, inspiring journeys. They bore me. The ‘Good to Great to Unstoppable Bollocks of Positivity’ ’ or ‘The 1000x Rule To Live Your Best Life of Pretentious Happiness’. I would rather be depressed than take the perma-tan sunshine Prozac of those literary gems.
I probably need some self-help.
But here’s the deal. By writing anti-jocular, non-jovial, and mildly depressing stories, I can find release. It helps me to debug. It’s cathartic for me to spill my feelings and words onto a page. I need to write upsetting, painful, and dispiriting articles in order to cleanse me. I can’t help it. I need to vomit these words out. A personal purge to make me feel happy again.
Already Johnny Cash has become a distant memory.
Happiness is an illusion in my writing and one that I don’t find easy to write or that I’m even comfortable writing. Maybe one day I’ll swallow some Happy Pills and inspire a generation to be less inward-looking and brim with positivity.
Until then, thank you for reading.
xxx | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/i-wanted-to-be-a-happy-writer-e811583b580b | ['Reuben Salsa'] | 2020-12-18 01:04:03.905000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Salsa', 'The Bad Influence', 'Self', 'Happy'] |
How to create a stunning personal portfolio website for free | How to create a stunning personal portfolio website for free
A personal portfolio website is like a digital resume. It can make a lot of difference in your career. It can be a great platform for you to publish your work and portfolio, it could help in gaining an audience or followers for yourself, it could be a great way to impress or attract employers. It can also act as your digital resume and can help in bringing some good opportunities your way.
What are the steps involved in building a personal website using GitHub Pages?
Many might have some questions regarding the technical capabilities that would be required to build a personal portfolio website, the good news is just a little bit of knowledge about HTML and CSS is enough to set-up your own personal website using GitHub pages. Besides, maybe some background about basic git commands can be helpful. If you have no idea about HTML, CSS, or Git Commands, it will be still fine. I have provided the details and references to help you create one for yourself.
The steps involved are,
Step 1 — Create a GitHub repository for your website
Step 2 — Download a free template
Step 3 — Modify the template to your requirement
Step 4 — Make the contact form work using Formspree
Step 5 — Publish the code to your GitHub Page repository
Step 6 — Create a domain in your name
Step 7 — That’s it, your website is ready!
In the article, I will be providing you guidelines on building a personal portfolio website for free using GitHub Pages with some amazing functionalities like having a contact form so that users can contact you directly from your website. I will also provide you details about getting some amazing templates and tools for free that will make empower your website to look dynamic. The only potential cost would the domain cost if you choose to have a custom personal URL but otherwise, it will be completely free.
Step 1 — Create a GitHub repository for your website
Go to your GitHub and create a new repository in the below format. This is different from a regular repository and hence follow the naming conventions. The structures for a personal website and organization are slightly different here in this article we are going to see in detail about the personal portfolio website.
Please Note, the name of this repository should be [Your Git User Name].github.io
In my case, the username of my GitHub account is “rsharankumar”, please use your user name and create this repository. You can configure the readme file later also if you are going to use a custom domain and point it to this site then you would need to add a file named “CNAME” as well, this file should have the name of your domain. You can find my repository here
Step 2 — Download a free template
There are several free HTML templates available for us to use. One such website offering a variety of free templates is HTML5, check this out and once you have identified the template that matches your requirement, download it.
There was a template called Dimensions which I found to be a perfect match for my requirement. Here is a screenshot of the template as shown on their website
Free template from HTML5
Alternatively, if you don’t find the options interesting then you can create one for yourself from scratch as well or buy a template.
Step 3 — Modify the template to your requirement
Open the template that you have downloaded and start making changes to it. A little bit of knowledge about HTML and CSS is mostly enough to make the required modifications to the template. First try to focus on fixing the contents in the template, remove the modules that you feel are not required for your purpose and start editing the high-level contents like your name, your basic profile information, and the details that can be focused on as we progress.
Some key points to keep in mind while updating the template
Provide your Name and summary on the Home page
Update links to your social media profiles
Add your profile picture to the website
Add additional information about yourself and your portfolio
Add links to places where you write, contribute, or participate. Don’t forget to add links to your blogs, kaggle profile, and other places related to your work
Step 4 — Make the contact form work using Formspree
Providing links to your social media profiles should be enough for anyone stumbling upon your website to reach but having a contact form will make it look more professional. In general, to make the contact form work you need to have a dedicated server but with the help of Formspree, it is now easy.
Create an account in formspree and make a note of your form id. Now go to the website folder and open the “index.html” and go to the session that has the code for the Contact Form. And update the “form_id” highlighted below with yours and ensure that the method = “post”.
Screenshot from Formspree
That’s it, now you have a working contact form as well, so now your website visitors can just directly use the form to contact you directly instead of taking additional effort to reach you on other means.
Step 5 — Publish the code to your GitHub Page repository
Once you are comfortable with the updates you have made to the repository then it is time to push to code to the repository you have created.
Open terminal/shell if you are using a Mac/Linux or tool such as Git Bash if you are using Windows machines.
From the terminal or gitbash, go inside the folder directory where you have the scripts and files of your website.
Initialize the directory using the “Git init” command
And just for the first time add the remote repository using the below command
Use can use the “git add” command to move your changes to the staging area. The command to be used is
Then use “git commit” to save the changes with a suitable message
Finally, push the scripts and files to the repository using git push. The command would look like
If you have any questions about this process refer to the article here. It clearly explains the steps involved.
Step 6 — Create a domain in your name
If you would want to make it more professional or if you would like to have a custom URL, then buy a domain and point it to this GitHub page. If you are not sure about buying a domain and making changes to it, then refer to the article here.
Step 7 — That’s it, your website is ready!
Here is the link to my website. If you are not using a domain for yourself then it is completely free and can be created in under an hour. If you are using your own domain then it might take slightly more than an hour as the updates made to your domain would take a bit of time to reflect. Refer below for video tutorial on creating a personal portfolio website, | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-create-a-stunning-personal-portfolio-website-for-free-50ec15b059dd | ['Sharan Kumar Ravindran'] | 2020-12-30 13:43:58.170000+00:00 | ['Portfolio Website', 'Data Science', 'Portfolio'] |
The Discovery of Wine’s Structural Form | The Discovery of Wine’s Structural Form
Image by the author.
Hello there. Today I will present a guided tutorial for applying Kemp & Tenembaum’s brilliant “form discovery” algorithm to a wine dataset. Ultimately, this provides a data-driven map to choose wines from, based on our tastes. If you are, like me, fond of data science, machine learning, cognition and/or a wine lover, then you might find this post interesting.
[disclaimer: I am by no means implying that the method employed here is the best. Actually, if you know of ways it could be improved I’d love to hear them!]
First of all, like every recipe, we’ll start with a list of things we need:
✓ Wine dataset ( freely available here)
✓ Python (I use PyCharm)
✓ Kemp & Tenenbaum’s algorithm (here)
✓ Graphviz (here: make sure to download a version that contains neato)
✓ Matlab
Essentially, in their work Kemp & Tenenbaum created an algorithm which finds the best structural representation for a dataset, without any assumption nor indication about this dimension. It achieves this feat by organizing input data in 8 “fundamental forms” and assigning a sort of score to each, in order to find the one that fits the data best.
These domain-aspecific forms are: partition, order, ring, hierarchy, chain, tree, grid and cylinder. Each protoform, depicted below, is derived from graph theory and has its own specific rules guiding how the data clusters are related. If this sounds confusing don’t fret! Further below we’ll link these somewhat abstract words with a hands-on example (we won’t be going into the details of the paper though).
Figure adapted from “The Discovery of Structual Form” in PNAS, published under Creative Commons.
In the paper, the authors provide several worked examples with different datasets, however I felt it’d be fun to try to use it on my own on new data. To look for an appropriate dataset, I headed over to kaggle where one may find exactly this type of thing. The ‘wine reviews’ dataset caught my attention because it contained the type of information one might use as features to provide to the algorithm, so wine not?
This dataset contains 260.000 bottles of wine, with info for each wine such as the name, variety, country of origin, price and, importantly, a review written by a sommelier. I figured one could find a way to extract the recurring words inside all these reviews and then use those as features to feed to the algorithm
To do so, one could use part of the process used to generate one of those “wordclouds” that seem to be everywhere nowadays.
Here’s an example of what a wordcloud looks like. You should have seen at least one in your life. Image by Alberto Frigo, public domain
Imagine the disbelief when I searched ‘python wordcloud tutorial’ and the first result was a guide employing exactly the same dataset I had chosen to work with! Beginner’s luck at its finest.
Anyhow, we’ll use this method to extract the most common words that the sommeliers use to describe wine tastes, assign such features to a list of wine varieties, feed it to Kemp & Tenenbaum’s algorithm and see how it arranges them for us. Easy.
Alrighty, we can begin with the step-by-step breakdown of the pipeline.
points 1 to 10 for basic data manipulation and wordcloud set up, 11 to 19 setting the matrix for the algorithm and feeding it, point 20 for the result
1.As is the custom in Python, we begin the script by importing the necessary packages (called like this since they literally contain codes that do things). Shockingly, before they can be imported, packages need to be installed. The way you do this depends on how you’re using Python. I’ll just briefly mention how to do it in PyCharm. Basically, each package installation involves a single line of code written in the terminal, with the general structure of “pip install nameofthepackage” (as reference, here you can find instructions to install pandas for various builds). The needed packages are matplotlib to help us make graphs, numpy and pandas to deal with manipulating data, scipy.io converts a Python output to use it in Matlab and tkinter allows us to make a menu to pick stuff from. I guess you can figure out what wordcloud is useful for.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import scipy.io as sio
import tkinter as tk
from wordcloud import WordCloud, STOPWORDS
When we import a package as *something*, it means we can reference that *something* to access the codes from the package, hence why it’s usually an abbreviation of the name itself. Just to type a bit less.
2. Now we can load the dataset into Python. I’m assuming it was already downloaded from kaggle, saved in the directory we’re working in and named winedata1 and winedata2, since for some reason the dataset is split into two halves.
df1 = pd.read_csv("winedata1.csv")
Like that, we’ve assigned to the variable called “df1” all that is contained in the file “winedata1.csv”. This is done through a pandas function (read_csv), which we access by calling the abbreviation we chose for pandas when importing it (pd). If you’re wondering what a csv file is, think of an excel sheet. If you’re wondering what an excel sheet is, think of numbers and words arranged into tables with rows and columns. If you’re wondering what numbers, tables, rows and columns are… well, uh.. nevermind.
Anyways, we’ll do this also for the second half of the dataset:
df2 = pd.read_csv("winedata2.csv")
Then, we combine these two separate dataframes (yay! a new word) by using another pandas function that does exactly this, and restore the whole dataset:
dataset = pd.concat([df1, df2])
3. As I mentioned earlier, this dataset contains wines from all over the world. It’s probably best if we narrow down the wines we’ll use by their country of production, since a Cabernet produced in someplace may differ in features from a Cabernet produced elsewhere.
Is there a better way to do this than a pop-up window which you can scroll through and pick a country from? I don’t think so.
Before doing that, it’s a good idea to know how many countries there are in the dataset. We’re lazy, so we let the computer count this (number of unique words in the country column of the dataset), and tell us (print).
print("There are {} countries producing wine in the whole dataset, please choose one by selecting it from the list"
" and pressing enter".format(len(dataset.country.unique())))
Next, we’ll set up the pop-up window, using the tkinter package (tk).
window = tk.Tk()
window.title(‘Wine producing countries’)
window.geometry(‘100x150’)
tiny_list = tk.Listbox(window)
tiny_list.pack(expand=True, fill="both")
countries = dataset.country.unique() for item in range(len(countries)):
tiny_list.insert("end", countries[item])
tiny_list.select_set(0)
tiny_list.focus_set()
We also need to write a tiny function that allows us to choose a country from the pop-window, and close it once we do so.
def exit_gui(event):
global choice
choice = tiny_list.curselection()
window.destroy()
Finally we can run the window, letting the machine know that our choice will be signalled by pressing return, and have it inform us of the choice we made.
window.bind("<Return>", exit_gui)
window.mainloop()
print("Wines from", countries[choice], "were chosen.")
Image by author
In this tutorial, I chose Italian wines, but the code should run fine with most choices. However, if a country with few wines is chosen there may be issues, so don’t scroll too far down.
4. Now let’s make a variable with all the data of wine bottles from the country we chose. We’ll call it ‘wines’, because how else would we name it? This is what we’ll work with from now on.
wines = dataset[dataset.country == countries[choice]]
Also, there’s multiple bottles for each wine variety, so it’s a good idea to print out what those varieties are.
print(wines.groupby("variety").describe())
In the case of Italian wines, there are some ‘blends’ among the varieties. Since the first goal is to match the wine varieties with their taste features, it is advisable to just go ahead and remove these wines, as their flavor will vary too much, depending on the ‘blend’, to be grouped in a single variety.
wines = wines[wines.variety != "Red Blend"]
wines = wines[wines.variety != "White Blend"]
wines = wines[wines.variety != "Sparkling Blend"]
It’s also a good idea to remove the varieties that have less than 20 entries in the dataset, as there won’t be enough data to decently estimate their flavors.
wines = wines.groupby("variety").filter(lambda x: len(x) > 20)
5. In this part we take care of another issue in the dataset: some varieties are named slightly different, but are actually the same. For example, some wines are labelled as ‘Sauvignon’ and others as ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ when they refer exactly to the same variety. This type of issue is normal with large datasets, and it needs to be fixed.
The following bit of code looks for similarities in the name of all the varieties and asks what the user wants to do if they partially match, giving 3 options to choose from :
[1] to merge the two varieties with a similar name (and choose which name to keep).
[2] to remove one of the two from the dataset (and choose which one).
[3] to just ignore them and carry on.
Once finished, the program tells us the number of remaining varieties.
varietylist = sorted(wines.variety.unique(), key=len) for first_index in range(len(varietylist)):
try:
for second_index in range(first_index + 1, len(varietylist)):
if varietylist[first_index] in varietylist[second_index]:
first_rep = varietylist[first_index]
second_rep = varietylist[second_index]
print('
detected a repetition between', first_rep, 'and', second_rep)
choice = input('How would you like to proceed? [1]Rename (merge), [2]Remove, [3]Ignore')
if int(choice) == 1:
subchoice = input(
'Would you like to [1]assign ' + first_rep + ' to ' + second_rep + ' or [2]viceversa?')
if int(subchoice) == 1:
wines.loc[wines['variety'] == first_rep] = second_rep
elif int(subchoice) == 2:
wines.loc[wines['variety'] == second_rep] = first_rep
if int(choice) == 2:
menu = list([first_rep, second_rep])
subchoice = input('Which type would you like to drop?' +
' [1]' + first_rep + ' has' + ' ' +
str(len(wines.loc[wines['variety'] == first_rep])) + ' entries' +
' or ' + '[2]' + second_rep + ' has' + ' ' +
str(len(wines.loc[wines['variety'] == second_rep])) + ' entries')
wines = wines[wines.variety != menu[int(subchoice) - 1]]
if int(choice) == 3:
continue
finally:
continue print("there are", len(wines.variety.unique()), "varieties of wine left in the data")
6. Okay, it’s about time we make a plot to have a rough look at the data we’re working with. To do so, we use matplotlib which will output a figure like the one below.
plt.figure(figsize=(15, 10))
wines.groupby("variety").size().sort_values(ascending=False).plot.bar()
plt.xticks(rotation=80)
plt.xlabel("Type of Grape")
plt.ylabel("Number of Wines")
plt.show
A histogram giving us a quick feel of how many wines (vertical axis) each wine variety (horizontal axis) has. Image by author.
7. If you had a look at the dataset, you’d noticed there’s a lot of other information I haven’t even mentioned. In fact it is useless for our purposes, and we’ll drop it from the ‘wines’ dataframe. How? Well, with the drop command and a list of the column names we deem no longer desirable.
wines.drop(
["country", "winery", "designation", "province", "region_1", "region_2", "price", "points", "taster_name",
"taster_twitter_handle", "title"], inplace=True, axis=1)
8. Here the wordcloud process begins, which will look for the most common words in a given text. First of all, all the sommelier reviews of each bottle of wine are joined into a single, very large (> 7 million words in this case) text. Since many of these words aren’t tasty taste features, we make a filter to block some (stopwords) and avoid getting them in the result. The wordcloud is then generated.
text = " ".join(review for review in wines.description)
print("There are {} words in the combination of all reviews.".format(len(text))) stopwords= set(STOPWORDS)
stopwords.update(["drink", "now", "wine", "flavor", "flavors", "show", "hint", "sangiovese", "expression", "delivers", "of",
"open", "made", "quality", "end", "layer", "generous", "aromas", "occasion", "nose", "carry", "over", "a",
"offer", "chardonnay", "offers", "make", "nose", "cabernet sauvignon", "merlot", "through", "with", "now",
"close", "palate", "texture", "feel", "mouth", "mouthfeel", "year", "boast", "touch", "the", "elegant",
"well", "one", "pretty", "pinot grigio", "lead", "vintage", "personality", "boasts", "savory", "and", "is",
"imported", "along", "load", "years", "give", "intensity", "made", "followed", "whiff", "elegant", "has",
"pair", "note", "aroma", "this", "suggest", "with", "after", "aged", "dominate", "opens", "fragrance",
"those", "who", "enjoy", "that", "recall", "pair", "time", "come", "around", "completed", "by",
"but", "find", "delicious", "blast", "still", "nebbiolo", "glass", "already", "opens", "doles", "note",
"less", "which", "such", "it", "despite", "care", "gone", "framed", "in", "drinks", "packed", "packs",
"bouquet", "local", "italian", "finish", "aromas", "assertive", "delightful", "evolved",
"evolves", "italy", "would", "intensity", "genuine", "wonderful", "smelling", "manifested", "bursting",
"modern", "solid", "qualities", "more", "than", "terms", "here", "ambitious", "version", "unique", "into",
"southern", "northern", "enough", "really", "very", "plenty", "touch", "particularly", "probably",
"opulent", "attractive", "should", "be", "drunk", "any", "doesn't", "marked", "excellent", "bloated",
"steady", "on", "crowd", "packed", "grapes", "rich", "beautiful", "presents", "approachable", "shows",
"you", "although", "need", "along", "alongside", "accompanied"]) wordcloud = WordCloud(stopwords=stopwords, max_words=1000).generate(text)
This part gets a bit manual, in the sense that I haven’t found an automatic way of extracting the taste features from our wordcloud in a satisfying manner, since no matter how many stopwords you put, some irrelevant words are still going to pass through. So, you can either trust me, or have a look yourself at wordcloud.words_ and check which are the most common/relevant taste features that sommeliers assign to wines (I did this across countries of production). Anyhow, here’s the taste features list:
features = list(['description', 'variety', 'sweet', 'black cherry', 'tobacco', 'coffee', 'clove', 'chocolate', 'rose',
'cinnamon', 'oak', 'leather', 'peach', 'red berry', 'thick', 'blue flower', 'white flower', 'licorice',
'plum', 'vanilla', 'almond', 'wild berry', 'alcohol', 'blackberry', 'cola', 'honey', 'toast', 'prune',
'pear', 'spice', 'black pepper', 'white pepper', 'apple', 'creamy', 'soil', 'nectarine', 'truffle',
'smooth', 'citrus', 'stone fruit', 'acidity', 'tannin', 'simple', 'floral', 'mint', 'mocha',
'red cherry', 'orchard fruit', 'raspberry', 'wood', 'menthol', 'exotic', 'blueberry', 'yellow fruit',
'bitter', 'mineral', 'crisp', 'violet', 'herb', 'anise', 'apricot', 'spring flower', 'espresso', 'dry',
'forest', 'lemon', 'tangerine', 'nut', 'astringent', 'thyme', 'acacia', 'saline', 'kiwi', 'bodied',
'structured', 'dried', 'cantaloupe', 'rosemary', 'earth', 'cocoa', 'sage', 'cigar', 'currant', 'sour',
'barrique', 'hazelnut', 'maple syrup', 'mushroom', 'balsamic', 'nutty', 'toasted', 'syrupy', 'cedar',
'smoky', 'tropical', 'gentle', 'delicate', 'easy drinking', "strawberry", "orange", "figs", "silky"])
Not bad. In a matter of seconds, we squeezed over 7 million words to get precisely 100 out. If you noticed ‘description’ and ‘variety’ at the beginning, it’s a workaround I did for dataframe manipulation and will soon be dropped.
9. As mentioned, Data Camp has a tutorial on generating a wordcloud from this same dataset and how to put it in some internet-downloaded image through Python. However, one may decide to go over at WordArt with the taste features list and get a faster and nicer result, like this one:
A prettier wordcloud. Image by author.
10. We’re done with the first part of the plan, i.e. extracting the flavors of wines from the dataset. Now, we need the program to assign these taste features to the varieties of wine. We start by making the extracted features columns in the dataframe, and then for each single bottle of wine we check if its sommelier’s review contains any of those features, which will give us a nice “logical”, yes/no (1/0), matrix indicating if a bottle of wine has a certain taste feature.
wines = wines.reindex(columns=features)
for feats in range(2, len(features)):
wines[features[feats]] = wines['description'].str.contains(features[feats])
That was fast. Now we can drop the sommelier’s descriptions from our data, ’cause we’re done with them. Hate the game, not the player.
wines.drop('description', inplace=True, axis=1)
11. Finally, we make a new dataframe that sums all these 1s and 0s, collapsing the data by variety of wine! Meaning that, if our dataset had 2 bottles of Sangiovese wine, and both had ‘tannin’ as a feature, the new matrix would have a single Sangiovese row with a 2 in the ‘tannin’ column, while if only one of the bottles had ‘chocolate’ now we’d have a 1 in the ‘chocolate’ column and if neither had ‘peach’ then there would be a 0 in that column, and so on for all features and varieties. We’ll call this tasteoccurrences.
tasteoccurrences = wines.groupby("variety").sum()
12. Thanks to this project, I learned that sommeliers have one trait in common with academics: when writing, they open a thesaurus and look for fancy synonyms, to gain sophistication and reduce repetitions. That is unless they actually intend that ‘coffee’, ‘espresso’ and ‘mocha’ are different flavors, which I doubt. So, we need to sum and drop all these redundant features.
tasteoccurrences["coffee"] = tasteoccurrences["coffee"] + tasteoccurrences["espresso"] + tasteoccurrences["mocha"]
tasteoccurrences["mint"] = tasteoccurrences["mint"] + tasteoccurrences["menthol"]
tasteoccurrences["floral"] = tasteoccurrences["floral"] + tasteoccurrences["spring flower"] + tasteoccurrences[
"white flower"]
tasteoccurrences["citrus"] = tasteoccurrences["citrus"] + tasteoccurrences["lemon"] + tasteoccurrences["tangerine"]
tasteoccurrences["structured"] = tasteoccurrences["structured"] + tasteoccurrences["bodied"]
tasteoccurrences["soil"] = tasteoccurrences['soil'] + tasteoccurrences["earth"]
tasteoccurrences["chocolate"] = tasteoccurrences["chocolate"] + tasteoccurrences["cocoa"]
tasteoccurrences["tobacco"] = tasteoccurrences["tobacco"] + tasteoccurrences["cigar"]
tasteoccurrences["alcohol"] = tasteoccurrences["alcohol"] + tasteoccurrences["barrique"]
tasteoccurrences["nut"] = tasteoccurrences["nut"] + tasteoccurrences["nutty"]
tasteoccurrences["toasted"] = tasteoccurrences["toasted"] + tasteoccurrences["toast"]
tasteoccurrences["syrupy"] = tasteoccurrences["syrupy"] + tasteoccurrences["maple syrup"]
tasteoccurrences["wood"] = tasteoccurrences["wood"] + tasteoccurrences["cedar"]
tasteoccurrences["delicate"] = tasteoccurrences["delicate"] + tasteoccurrences["easy drinking"] +
tasteoccurrences["simple"]
tasteoccurrences["smooth"] = tasteoccurrences["smooth"] + tasteoccurrences["silky"]
tasteoccurrences.drop(["espresso", "menthol", "mocha", "spring flower", "tangerine", "lemon", "bodied", "white flower",
"earth", "cocoa", "cigar", "barrique", "nutty", "toast", "maple syrup", "cedar", "simple",
"silky",
"easy drinking"], inplace=True, axis=1)
13. For the final data manipulation part, we’ll normalize the summed scores. This is done by subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation. First, we need to replace the zeros with a null value or it will affect the mean.
tasteoccurrences.replace({0: np.nan}, inplace=True)
Thanks to the normalization (or standardization) here below, the values in our new matrix (the very originally named datamatrix) will indicate how much the features for each wine variety are distant from the mean, in terms of standard deviations. This is known as Z score, and most stats boil down to it. We can use it as a guide to pick which features to retain per variety.
I set a very lax half a standard deviation threshold (> = 0.5) in the code, to reject the features that are rarely associated with some variety. For reference, what we call ‘statistical significance’ consists in a distance of 2 standard deviations from the mean, so we are at 1/4 of that here.
datamatrix = pd.DataFrame(columns=tasteoccurrences.columns) for grapes in range(len(tasteoccurrences)):
datamatrix.loc[grapes, :] = (tasteoccurrences.iloc[grapes, :] - tasteoccurrences.iloc[grapes,:].mean()) / tasteoccurrences.iloc[grapes,:].std() >= 0.5
14. Then, the names of the rows (i.e. the wine varieties) are transferred from tasteoccurrences to datamatrix, and specify its contents as integers (aka numbers), otherwise Matlab is going to unnecessarily annoy us by considering them strings (aka text) when we go over there (soon).
datamatrix.index = tasteoccurrences.index
datamatrix = datamatrix.astype(int)
And get rid of all flavors that haven’t been assigned to any wine variety.
datamatrix = datamatrix.reindex(columns=datamatrix.columns[datamatrix.sum() != 0])
15. Also, the algorithm ideally needs more features (flavors) than entitites (wine varieties) (i.e. more columns than rows). So, we make a quick loop that gets rid of some varieties until this condition is met. Here I drop the varieties with fewer features, just another arbitrary choice.
while datamatrix.shape[0] > datamatrix.shape[1]:
lowfeat_wines = datamatrix.sum(axis=1) < (datamatrix.sum(axis=1).mean() - (datamatrix.sum(axis=1).std()))
datamatrix.drop(datamatrix[lowfeat_wines].index, inplace=True, axis=0)
16. We set up the matrix, with the row and column names saved separately, to be converted to Matlab. Obviously the path where they’ll be saved needs to be changed if you want to run this.
datamatrix = datamatrix.reindex(columns=datamatrix.columns[datamatrix.sum() != 0]) names = np.sort(list(datamatrix.index))
mdic = {"names": names}
sio.savemat("wine_names.mat", mdic)
datamatrix.to_csv(r'C:\Users\stempio\PycharmProjects\AdditionalSources\winedatapyt.csv', index=False)
All is set for the final stage in Matlab, and the algorithm is pretty easy to set-up. In my case, the trickiest part was getting the right graphviz version and installing it correctly.
17. Through Matlab, we move our Python output files to the directory where Kemp & Tenembaum’s algorithm data folder is located.
kemp_path = 'C:\Users\stempio\Documents\MATLAB\formalgo\data';
movefile('C:\Users\stempio\PycharmProjects\AdditionalSources\winedatapyt.csv' , kemp_path)
movefile('C:\Users\stempio\PycharmProjects\AdditionalSources\wine_names.mat' , kemp_path)
18. We teleport to that directory, and perform some minor manipulations on the data. The meal for the algorithm is ready, and this is the salt at the end.
Kindly made for this article by Massimo de Antonis.
cd(kemp_path)
load('wine_names')
names = cellstr(names);
temp = readtable('winedatapyt.csv');
features = temp.Properties.VariableNames';
data = table2array(temp); save('italian_wines', 'data', 'features', 'names')
cd ..
We need to make a small edit to the algorithm’s masterrun.m file, by changing line 35.
thisdata = 21
Similarly, we modify setps.m, by adding the name of our data file (‘italian_wines’ in this case) to the list at line 12 and 27, following the format that is already there.
Just like that, we can run the algorithm in the command window by typing:
masterrun
It’ll work its magic trying to discover the ideal structural form in which to arrange the data it was fed with. The best part is that it will actually show us how it’s trying to figure it out, and if you don’t find this fascinating I doubt you’ve made it this far, but kudos to you regardless!
19. Once it’s done (may take a while), the output we’re interested in will be in the variable modellike, specifically in its 21st column (the number of thisdata that we set up above). We’re interested in the structural form with the highest score, so we look for the max across rows. Then we plot it with its names.
[~, idx] = max(modellike(:,21)); draw_dot(structure{idx,21}.adj, names{21})
And voilà. The first time i managed to run this, it gave me a ring structure as result, which is particularly remarkable given that graphs dealing with taste and flavour are usually depicted as wheels. It also followed the colours of the wines, without being given any indication about it!
“Italian wine ring”, sounds slightly dodgy. Image by author
However, as I refined the code and added features, the algorithm also changed its output, and in the final script it outputted a chain. So the results will vary according to the data, but still following the colour and taste dispositions.
“Italian wine chain”, now that could be a liquor store name. Image by author.
20. Admittedly though, the output of Kemp & Tenenbaum’s algorithm does not look as good as its theory, and also doesn’t convey much information about the entities (wines) and features (flavors). So I asked a good friend of mine for suggestions to help improve its looks. Without further ado, here’s the final form: | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-discovery-of-wines-structural-form-cb92a103b411 | ['Stefano Ioannucci'] | 2021-01-31 16:59:41.729000+00:00 | ['Editors Pick', 'Algorithms', 'Data Visualization', 'Graph Theory', 'Wine'] |
Using NoSQL instead of SQL, so Why? | Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Using NoSQL instead of SQL, so Why?
The concept of NoSQL, which we have begun to hear frequently recently, has emerged as an alternative to relational database systems (RDBMS), which have been indispensable in the informatics world for years.
At the same time, it is the general name given to horizontally scalable systems that have emerged in order to store the increasing data of the internet and to meet the needs of systems with high traffic.
Since the SQL language used in RDBMS is not used in NoSQL systems, it is named “No SQL”. It is sometimes referred to as “Not Only SQL”, although it has somehow held a place in the market, but is not yet accepted as an industry standard. In fact, discussions are inevitable, as always when talking about which technology is best to solve business problems.
And still today, IT professionals do not yet have a common opinion on the concept of NoSQL.
There are some facts the debate is based on:
Google and Amazon keep internet data on Big Table, not RDBMS. (i.e. NoSQL systems)
Storing large volumes of data without structure. A NoSQL database doesn’t limit storable data types
Using cloud computing and storage. Cloud-based storage is a great solution, but it requires data to be easily spread across multiple servers for scaling.
And rapid development.
How are NoSQL systems different from RDBMS?
7 Reasons
1.RDBMS are transaction-based systems.
2. There is no “transaction” concept in NoSQL system.
3. Performance gain is aimed with horizontal growth in NoSQL systems.
4. While data in RDBMS are found in tables, in defined columns row by row, NoSQL systems are not dependent on fixed table definitions.
5. In RDBMS, data is regularly normalized to separate tables according to their relationships, and a join is used to access data in this process.
6. In RDBMS, it is not necessary to separate the data from each other with a single primary key. However, NoSQL systems basically access data through singular keys.
7. Some of the NoSQL systems have map reduce capability. In this way, analyzes that are very complex to be performed with SQL on RDBMS can be easily performed with map reduce.
So what are the pros and cons of NoSQL systems?
7 Effects
1.NoSQL systems offer high accessibility. In terms of reading and writing performances, they can be relatively more efficient than RDBMSs.
2. Due to their flexible structure, they provide convenience in terms of programming and maintenance.
3. Since most of them are open source and suitable for cloud computing, they are cost effective.
4. However, it will be difficult to adapt applications using RDBMS systems to NoSQL systems at first. Even if the data is successfully moved, codes that use merging will need to be changed.
5. Likewise, it may be necessary to provide key-based data access instead of query-based data access.
6. They do not yet have advanced features in data security as much as RDBMSs.
7. Documentation and professional support may not be sufficient in some projects. | https://medium.com/think-make/sql-and-nosql-which-to-use-6641dbaee36f | ['Kurt F.'] | 2020-10-09 08:54:19.827000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Data Analysis', 'Data Management', 'NoSQL', 'Sql'] |
CSS Variables and How To Use Them | A lot of people don’t know about CSS variables, and you might be one of them! It’s time to learn about CSS variables and how you can use them.
CSS variables are declared for a specific element as a custom property. Then, you can use that custom property anywhere you use that element.
Declaration and Usage
Here’s how you declare a custom property:
element {
--background-color: #f00;
}
Here, element can be a selector of any element, for example, div, p, .test, etc…
What we did is that we declared a custom property for this element called --background-color . All CSS custom properties must start with -- .
Now, we can use this custom property inside element using the var function.
element {
background-color: var(--background-color);
}
Here, we assigned the background-color property of element to the variable we declared earlier.
This is nice and all, but usually we have repetition inside different elements, not just one. declaring a custom variable inside one element type is not very convenient.
In order to use a custom property inside more than one element type, we can declare the custom property inside the :root pseudo-class.
:root {
--primary-color: #333;
}
Now, we can use the variable --primary-color inside any element in our document:
div {
color: var(--primary-color);
} p {
background-color: var(--primary-color);
} .fancy {
border-color: var(--primary-color);
}
By declaring our custom property inside :root , we are now able to use it inside div to set the text color, p to set the background color, and any element having class fancy to set the border color. This way, not only did we minimize repetition, but we also made it easier to edit and change our website’s primary color at any given point.
Inheritance
Elements can also inherit custom properties. For example, let’s say we have the following HTML:
<div class="parent">
<div class="first-child"></div>
<div class="second-child"><div>
</div>
Then, we declare a variable called --text-size on .parent :
.parent {
--text-size: 15px;
}
Now, we can use --text-size not only inside .parent , but also inside its children as well:
.first-child {
font-size: var(--text-size);
}
We can also override custom properties. We can do that by redeclaring the custom property inside the child element:
.second-child {
--text-size: 30px;
}
Now, if you use --text-size inside .second-child , it’ll be evaluated to 30px, but if you use it inside .first-child or .parent , it will still be 15px.
Fallback Values
You can also define a fallback value for a variable by passing a second parameter to var . For example:
.second-child {
font-size: var(--text-size, 30px);
}
Fallback values are used when the variable is not defined yet. They are not used as a fallback to browser incompatibility.
Conclusion
And that’s how you can use CSS variables! Keep in mind that some browsers like Internet Explorer don’t support them, so if you need to support all browsers you need to take that into consideration. | https://shahednasser.medium.com/css-variables-and-how-to-use-them-bd9724cb6566 | ['Shahed Nasser'] | 2019-05-22 22:57:56.928000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Programming', 'CSS', 'Tutorial', 'Web Development'] |
The Common Approach to Binary Classification | Here are the topics of study in this article:
Input & output
Encoding & decoding
Validating
Predicting
Regularization
The General Approach
The general approach to building deep learning algorithms is gonna be first knowing what data you have and in which format. Then figuring out what your goal is with the data. This step is what we call the Input and Output Step. At this stage, we should also partition the input examples into Training Set and Testing Test.
At this 30'000 feet above view, we know in general terms if we have a classification or regression problem. With this information we figure out how to get our input data transformed into a viable input to the neural network. This stage, we should call the Encode and Decode Step, also in the real world called Preprocessing Step.
We know the rough architecture of our neural network. But in the Architecture Step we will commit to the layer architecture specifically, based on how complicated the input data and how complicated the task is, you will use more or less layers.
The next step is the Components Step, when you will choose the loss function, the metrics and the optimizer. The metrics are what you will use to regularize.
And finally the most important step of training. In the Training Step, we will choose a rough number of epochs to iterate. As well as the batch size. This step may also be called the Fitting Step, because you are fitting the model to the data.
In the last step, Evaluation Step, you evaluate all the metrics and stop the fitting process right before it over-fits. The model will freeze the weights at this stage and theoretically it is optimally positioned to give high accuracy on unseen data.
These steps are quite simple, but if it seems still a bit abstract. The following is a simple example to solidify you understanding. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-common-approach-to-binary-classification-fd7ff1d2ea47 | ['Jake Batsuuri'] | 2020-05-30 03:25:21.848000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Programming', 'Movies', 'Deep Learning'] |
How Bloggers & Influencers Can Grow Their Following Using Alexa | At The Voice Event 2020, I talk to my friend Jeff Blankenburg from Amazon about how Bloggers and Influencers can grow their following using Alexa.
In addition to what he mentions in this video, bloggers can also voice enable their WordPress blog for Alexa and Google Assistant using a plug-in called TheVoiceDesigner.com.
Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC and founder of The Voice Event, and The Voice Designer, has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 15 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing, Email Marketing and most recently, Voice App Design and Development — Alexa Skills and Google Actions. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data. | https://medium.com/@datadrivendesignnashville/how-bloggers-influencers-can-grow-their-following-using-alexa-a7dd55e70d95 | ['Paul Hickey'] | 2020-12-20 23:54:07.751000+00:00 | ['Voice Technology', 'Wordpress Plugins', 'Blogger', 'Alexa', 'WordPress'] |
What Women Want | Photo credit: Cottonbro on Pexels
In an industry where buzzwords like “customer journey,” “persona,” “pain-points” and “influencer” dominate, it’s ironic that 91% of women feel advertisers don’t understand them. This is especially troubling considering they account for 85% of all purchases. It seems that in our efforts to craft clever creative, we lost site of something really important—reality. After all, advertising can’t be effective if it doesn’t resonate with its audience.
At Struck, we’re helping our clients connect with women in meaningful ways. In July of 2020, at the direction of our president, Pauline Ploquin, we strengthened our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion team, providing them with new resources and added support. Among other issues, Pauline asked the team to challenge gender stereotypes and open doors for female advancement. As a result, we have established mentoring partnerships, created new leadership opportunities and welcomed our women not only to sit at the table, but to conduct meetings around it.
The women at Struck are of diverse ages, cultures and backgrounds. Each brings her unique perspective to our various projects and teams. Welcoming these insights has helped us better meet the needs of our clients. It’s also challenged us to address faulty assumptions within ourselves and the work we create. We no longer believe in “male” projects or that stereotypically male industries can’t benefit from female contribution, or vice versa. In fact, we know that the more diverse our teams become, the more creative and effective our work can be. We also know that we all have personal bias. We recognize that it’s not unusual for our preconceived ideas to be wrong, especially about gender’s relationship to products, industries and brands.
For example, many of us were surprised to learn that women own 39% of all privately held businesses in the United States. With this information in hand, we featured several diverse, female business owners in a recent campaign. Not only was the approach unusual, it was meaningful. Our female audience was longing to be seen as the entrepreneurs they are and to have someone speak to their needs. At the same time, the campaign expanded our client’s reach and set them apart from the sea of sameness—a sea that was predominately white and male. Their brand instantly became more visible, modern, sophisticated and inclusive.
With diversity as a renewed priority, we are now featuring female voice talent more than ever before. In fact, a woman is now the voice for the state of Utah’s tourism efforts. It makes strategic sense considering women influence 80% of all travel decisions. We also recently used female talent to motivate an entire organization via an emotional, mantra video. The warm, optimistic timbre of her voice left viewers of both genders feeling inspired.
Our remarkable female employees have helped bio-tech companies address emotionally difficult topics with honesty and compassion. They have empathized with the difficulties of motherhood and brought understanding to the stigma of mental health. Besides these more expected impacts, our women have also contributed to kick-ass strategies, production, partnerships and creative, even in stereotypically male-dominated industries. We’re so excited to elevate them and their diverse talents, and we’re grateful for the benefits they bring to our agency and clients. | https://medium.com/experienceaffinity/what-women-want-7b632de91142 | ['Julie Comstock'] | 2020-12-18 15:55:44.002000+00:00 | ['Equality', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Marketing', 'Advertising', 'Women In The Workplace'] |
Innovating apart: How to create an inclusive remote working session | mapodile/ Getty Images
With many organizations moving to more of an all-remote working format, use this time as an opportunity to create virtual working sessions with your team. This will ensure that our solo work environment will not create silos. Working sessions are often more useful than a traditional meeting because they keep the team’s engagement and innovation high while working through complex challenges. The types of meetings that could become remote working sessions include:
Planning
Kick-off
Brainstorming
Data Synthesis
Retrospective
Any time you are trying to share information, understand perspectives and create new possibilities make it a collaborative working session to ensure you are working in an inclusive way.
The key steps for creating a great remote working session are also best practices for great facilitation:
Create an engaging and time-boxed agenda
Plan out a diverse set of segments include: information sharing (research share out), group activities, individual reflection moments and generous amounts of time for group discussions
Keep in mind that people need breaks. If you are having a longer session allocate 15 minutes for breaks about every 90 minutes.
Be intentional with building rapport. Build in a few minutes of friendly conversation at the opening of your agenda and have everyone introduce themself.
Set aside time for everyone to think and be heard. Include several moments where you pause for questions or comments. You may need more reflection moments depending on the complexity of the topic. (Example: Allow for questions and comments following any time information or ideas are shared with the group at large.)
Keep it as simple as possible. Break up longer sessions into multi-day events. (Example: Have two 2-hour sessions over the span of two days.)
Close your agenda with an action planning exercise so participants know what the next steps will be.
Set expectations
Share the goal/focus of the session in your invitation to your participants. If you have a set of outcomes that you hope to achieve, include that as well.
In your invitation list out the intended outcomes of the session instead of your agenda. This keeps the focus on what you hope everyone gets out of the session and articulates the value of working together. You can create this list by mirroring your agenda. (Example: Agenda item- Draft principles that define the attributes of a successful solution. Outcome- Agree on a set of principles that articulate the attributes our solution should include.)
Let each team member know if there is anything they are responsible for bringing or reviewing before the meeting.
Start the session with a welcome, review of the agenda, the goal of the session and ground rules. Here are a few suggestions for ground rules:
Keep phones and notifications silent. All members are expected to participate in all phases of the process. Respect the speaker. Sign when we are going off-track.
Set up your virtual workspace
Create a living working space by setting up the templates for the activities in the order you will do them on your virtual board. Popular tools to facilitate this include Miro or Mural.
Place your expectation setting content on the far left of the working space: agenda, ground rules, and goal.
Then include an ice breaker activity space that will allow people to learn how to use the tool and provide the opportunity for everyone to give a warm welcome. (Example: Post up your name in a virtual sticky note and add an icon that expresses something that is on your mind today)
Also, be sure you know how to properly invite people to the workspace. Do your participants have an account for the tool? If not, what is the best way to have them join?
Included in your virtual workspace are the tools you are using for video conferencing and messaging. Let your team know at the start of the session that if they miss a chance to share a comment that you will be collecting questions and comments through your video’s chat or your shared messenger application. Have a person assigned to watch for new messages.
Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash
Create presentation materials
If you are sharing large amounts of information or guiding people through a multistage activity, companion slides are helpful breaks in the working session experience to clearly articulate new information
Do a run-through
It is up to your comfort level how you would like to practice your working session.
Very seasoned facilitators may have another person review their agenda, materials, and workspace and give feedback.
A novice facilitator may benefit from a call with an experienced facilitator and running through the activities, material, and workspace.
No matter how you practice, focus on becoming comfortable and familiar with your plan and also willing to update anything that is not working well
Communicate how everyone will help make the session inviting and inclusive.
At the start of the session encourage all attendees to use video. Seeing everyone’s faces will help the group feel connected and heard throughout the session.
Create a way to get feedback
Uplevel your remote sessions by finding out what worked and what didn’t work.
After your action planning try to give your participants the 3–5 minutes at the close of your session to leave feedback. This space would be at the far right of your workspace.
Example exercise: The Rose, Bud, Thorn method. Have each participant note what worked (roses), note what didn’t work well (thorns), and note ideas for how to make it better (bud)).
Review the feedback after the session is over and address the concerns and ideas in your next working session.
FS Productions / Getty Images
Last but not least, BRING A GREAT ATTITUDE!
When you focus on the great possibilities that are available to your team by working in this way, your team will be more likely to see the opportunities where this style of working can be applied in the future.
Now go forth and collaborate! | https://medium.com/cisco-design-community/innovating-apart-how-to-create-an-inclusive-remote-working-session-eb5640cf4aa5 | ['Elayna Spratley'] | 2020-03-06 19:06:04.119000+00:00 | ['Corporate Innovation', 'Design Thinking', 'Remote Working', 'Meetings', 'Collaboration'] |
Running fast.ai on WSL 2 using GPU | Recently I started taking the Practical Deep Learning for Coders course on fast.ai. One of the firsts recommendations is to use cloud based servers like Collab or Gradient for running your Jupyter notebooks. But what if you already have a computer that has a decent GPU and you want to use it? The course doesn’t give details on the setup so I took the liberty of documenting my journey.
Recently I got a new laptop with an RTX 2070 so I did not want to miss the chance to give it a stress test of running/training multiple models while taking the course.
Also another thing is that recently I’ve been impressed with the capabilities of WSL, since frequently I run Windows only programs but also I like having that super user control on Linux. So because of that I decided to try to do the setup on WSL.
I ended up following 2–3 different tutorials to finally make it work, so this is a “Franken-tutorial” of how to get there + some steps I added.
Summary
Steps 1 to 7:
“Franken-tutorial” = steps from a compilation of multiple other tutorial. Each of the steps has a link to the original source.
Steps 8 to 13:
Steps I came up with to run fast ai on a Docker container using GPU inside WSL
Notes:
This tutorial makes use of Docker and VS Code, if you don’t have experience using these, it’s OK. I tried to add the necessary instructions so that anyone without much experience could use them. Also I added sections of “Programmer tips” in case you have experience and wish to learn a little bit more.
The steps
1. Install the latest Windows Insider Dev Channel build
Join the Insiders program and get the Dev build version that allows you to use WSL.
https://insider.windows.com/getting-started/#install
2. Install the latest WSL Cuda driver from Nvidia
GPU in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) | NVIDIA Developer
Make sure the driver is installed properly. An easy check is to open ‘Task Manager’ -> ‘Performance’ and checking out that your Nvidia card does show up there.
3. Enable and install WSL 2 on your machine
Follow the instructions here: Install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 10 | Microsoft Docs
4. Install and run a Linux distribution — I recommend Ubuntu 18.04
Go the Windows Store and install Ubuntu
5. Open Ubuntu and go through the initial setup
6. Install CUDA related stuff inside WSL
$ apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
$ sh -c 'echo "deb http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64 /" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cuda.list'
$ apt-get update $ apt-get install -y cuda-toolkit-11-0
After this step you can test out using your GPU inside WSL by running the BlackScholes example
$ cd /usr/local/cuda/samples/4_Finance/BlackScholes
$ make
$ ./BlackScholes
If the installation was successful, you should be able to see in the results lines like these ones:
Executing Black-Scholes GPU kernel (131072 iterations)...
Options count : 8000000
BlackScholesGPU() time : 1.314299 msec
Effective memory bandwidth: 60.868973 GB/s
Gigaoptions per second : 6.086897
6. Install Docker inside WSL
If you have Docker installed on Windows, remove it first. The version on Windows does not support yet docker using the GPU.
$ curl https://get.docker.com | sh $ distribution=$(. /etc/os-release;echo $ID$VERSION_ID)
$ curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
$ curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/$distribution/nvidia-docker.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-docker.list
$ curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/experimental/$distribution/libnvidia-container-experimental.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libnvidia-container-experimental.list $ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-docker2
After this step, Docker is installed and ready to be used.
On a separate terminal run the following to Stop/Start the Docker service:
$ sudo service docker stop
$ sudo service docker start
7. Testing Docker containers using CUDA
Run the following command to create a sample Docker container that uses the GPU.
docker run --gpus all nvcr.io/nvidia/k8s/cuda-sample:nbody nbody -gpu -benchmark
After running it, you should see a similar result:
> Compute 6.1 CUDA device: [GeForce GTX 1070]
15360 bodies, total time for 10 iterations: 11.949 ms
= 197.446 billion interactions per second
= 3948.925 single-precision GFLOP/s at 20 flops per interaction
There are more examples you can try on the link below:
8. FINALLY setting up Fast.ai — no more “Franken-tutorial”
Download the fast ai repo inside WSL.
$ mkdir repos
$ cd repos
$ git clone
$ cd fastbook $ cd ~$ mkdir repos$ cd repos$ git clone https://github.com/fastai/fastbook.git $ cd fastbook
Open VS Code from WSL (WSL installs VS Code in case you don’t have it)
$ code .
The first time you open VS Code from WSL it will suggest extensions such as Remote - WSL.
Install the following extensions:
Remote-WSL
Docker
Once you install the Docker extension you’ll notice that the docker containers you ran on the examples previously are there stopped.
Programmer tip: If you use Docker frequently this extension is pretty useful since it gives a simple UI interface to handle containers, check the status, see images, check logs, etc.
9. Creating a fastai Docker image
On the root of the repo, create a file called Dockerfile with the following content.
It’s OK if you are not familiar with Docker. In case you are curious, what this Dockerfile is doing is using an existing image of Jupyter using GPU and on top of that installing the fast ai dependencies specified in the requirements.txt in the repo.
10. Setting up your VS Code env
Creating VS Code tasks for easier use
10.1 CTRL + SHIFT + P, Type Tasks and select Tasks: Configure Tasks
10.2 Select Create tasks.json and then choose ‘Others’
A new file will show up under <root>/.vscode/tasks.json
10.3 Open the tasks.json and add the following tasks
Programmer tip If you have never used VS Code tasks and you use VS Code in your projects I would recommend taking a look at this feature. VS Code tasks are super useful when working on projects since it allows to check in command line commands for Windows or Linux and have all the commands in the repo. Before making use of VS Code Tasks, every dev in my team had their own file with common commands to run, now we all use the same commands using VS Code Tasks.
What are these tasks?
start docker service: does exactly that. If you recall the setup you ran this command to get Docker running. On WSL, when starting a new session you’ll have to start docker manually. There are ways to do this automatically on WSL boot (adding some commands to your .bashrc) but personally I rather choose when to run Docker since I don’t always use Docker when running WSL. — run every time you start a WSL session and you want to use this setup
create image: it tells docker to create an image from the Dockerfile created previously called fastbook — run once only
start jupyter: it creates a docker container ready to run Jupyter with the WSL using the image created with the create image command — run once and when you delete the container
11. Run the VS Code tasks
To run VS Code tasks do: CTRL + SHIFT+ P, type Tasks and select “Tasks: Run Task”. Once you do you’ll see something like this:
A window with the tasks you previously created on the tasks.json
If you already have Docker running skip this, if not run “start docker service”.
Then run “create image”.
And finally run “start jupyter”.
If you installed the Docker extension you’ll see your container running there and also you’ll see an http address of where you can access your notebook:
VS Code Docker extension
Now you can just click on the URL that shows up on your console and open it on your preferred browser. | https://medium.com/@esttenorio/running-fast-ai-on-wsl-2-using-gpu-b8eee2b2e777 | ['Estefanía Tenorio'] | 2020-12-24 05:56:19.596000+00:00 | ['Gpu', 'Fastai', 'Nvidia Docker', 'Wsl', 'Jupyter Notebook'] |
Lab-Grown Dog Food Is First Step to a Clean Meat Empire | Lab-Grown Dog Food Is First Step to a Clean Meat Empire
This startup’s founders eat their own kibble—and they plan to feed you someday too.
Wild Earth meatless dog food, left, emerges after the company’s scientists grow hundreds of strains of a fungus to find the strongest ones. (Photo at left courtesy of Wild Earth; other photos by Grace Rubenstein)
Someday the meat you eat will be as likely to have grown in a lab as on the farm. And the pathway from the lab to your plate may run through the sloppy dog dish on your kitchen floor.
Ryan Bethencourt and Ron Shigeta, two of the minds behind the biotech accelerator IndieBio, are about to launch a line of slaughter-free pet food with a company they call Wild Earth. First, they’re hitting the $30 billion pet-food market with dog kibble made with protein manufactured by living cells. That product comes out this spring.
Next, in a year or two, they intend to produce cat food made with real mouse meat but no actual mice. The meat will be grown by propagating mouse muscle cells in the lab. Cats may lap it up, but the idea concerns some inventors who want finicky humans to stay hungry for lab-grown meat, too.
“We’re really using biology as a technology to do molecular manufacturing of food today, and that’s something that all of us nerds have been dreaming about forever,” Bethencourt says.
Wild Earth’s first product, for dogs, relies on a microscopic fungus called Aspergillus oryzae, better known as koji. The small team at Wild Earth, based in the Bonneville Labs biotech incubator in an industrial area of Berkeley, California, feeds it sugar water and houses it at the ideal temperature, with the right pH and oxygen levels. And the happy koji churns out protein that the team then bakes into kibble. The fungus is, in essence, the manufacturer; the humans selectively cultivate koji strains with useful properties, such as fast growth or high output of protein or vitamin A.
With peppy enthusiasm, Bethencourt pulls petri dishes out of the lab’s incubator and shows off the strains of A. oryzae growing inside. We’re in a room Wild Earth shares with Finless Foods, which is growing fish fillets in the lab and is one of IndieBio’s investments. Wild Earth’s petri dishes don’t look exactly appetizing. They’re filled with organisms growing in an array of gag-inducing forms and colors. Some look like lumpy white cheese, others like the kind of spongy brown mold that you might find under your deck after a wet winter. The lab smells faintly yeasty.
Ryan Bethencourt and Wild Earth’s head of operations, Abril Estrada, open a liquid nitrogen canister to extract tiny samples of Wild Earth’s next product in development: mouse meat for cats, grown without any actual mice.
Appearances aside, koji has been used to produce human food for hundreds if not thousands of years. It’s a fermenting agent, similar to the microorganisms found in a sourdough starter, used commonly in Japan to produce soy sauce, miso, and sake. Bethencourt likens the Wild Earth protein-production protocol to something not so different from home-brewing beer.
In fact, he and Shigeta hatched the koji idea because Shigeta was growing his own fungi in the lab to use in making sauces at home. “It would drive me nuts sometimes, because I’m like, ‘Hey, those fungi grow really well, be careful you don’t contaminate any of the other plates in the refrigerator,’” Bethencourt says.
In another lab room, a five-liter glass container called a bioreactor spins a milky beige solution of A. oryzae spores mixed with sugar water. The volume of the mixture will nearly double over a few days, as the fungi munch on sugar and pump out protein. Then, fermentation technician Chris Thompson-Kucera will strain the mixture through a mesh bag designed for making almond milk, extracting a thick, tahini-like paste.
Wild Earth’s mission excites Bethencourt in particular because he is a vegan for reasons of animal welfare. (Shigeta is an omnivore.) He foster-parents rescue dogs and feels unsettled feeding them meaty kibble made from other animals that might have suffered in the production process. Conventional pet food also suffers from a mystery-meat image and public suspicion about its supply chain, as it’s made from “byproduct,” animal parts not used for human food. The fact that several leading brands of dog food were recently discovered to have small amounts of sodium pentobarbital, a euthanasia drug used to put animals to sleep, didn’t help.
An argument also can be made that meatless pet food will have a smaller environmental footprint. Producing meat for pet food gobbles up huge quantities of land, water, and fuel. But Bethencourt believes the animal welfare aspect, as with cage-free eggs, will sell better. He also plans to monitor the health of his earliest canine customers, and hopes to prove that dogs eating meatless diets have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Vegan dog food already exists — along with some controversy over whether it’s really nutritionally suited to dogs. Cailin Heinze, a nutritionist at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, explains that dogs can theoretically thrive on a meatless diet, but “there is a much more narrow margin for error for a vegan diet than a more traditional diet that utilizes both plant and animal ingredients, so these diets are much harder to formulate.” A 2015 study of 24 vegetarian foods for dogs and cats found that almost all contained the minimum recommended protein levels but only one in four had adequate amounts of amino acids.
Heinze adds that there isn’t enough research to know whether dogs on meatless diets stay as healthy as others over the course of years. Given the uncertainty, she does not recommend strict vegan diets for dogs except those with certain health conditions—though she writes that “most dogs can do quite well” on a vegan diet that’s carefully designed.
The bioreactor at right contains a swirling brew of future dog food. Spin koji spores with a bit of sugar water, and they produce a beige-colored protein.
So what, besides the protein source, sets Wild Earth apart? The company claims that its kibble will have a higher protein content and eventually, as production scales up, a lower cost. Popular vegan and vegetarian dog-food brands contain about 18 to 24 percent protein and can cost upward of $50 for a 20-pound bag. Wild Earth’s inventors say theirs will contain 30 percent protein. At first, it will be a premium product, at over $20 for a five-pound bag. But since koji is so low-maintenance (and does not, unlike plant protein, require large-scale agriculture to produce), the founders aim ultimately to bring the price down to mid-range.
Bags of Wild Earth’s prototype kibble sit on a desk amid the rows of bright cubicles in Bonneville Labs’ work space. These are “vegan bacon” flavor and baked with a blend of koji-made protein and chickpea flour. Wild Earth’s head of operations, Abril Estrada, is experimenting with different flours, such as buckwheat and pea, to get the right fiber content and texture. She’s also fine-tuning two other flavors of kibble: vegan cheese and vegan chicken. Once those recipes are ready, the food will be produced at a commercial kitchen in Oakland. Wild Earth intends to deliver its first bags for sale to 100 handpicked customers in June.
Estrada offers me a piece of the brown, oval-shaped dog food. It is dense, crunchy, and earthy, with a taste like a dark rye cracker. Bethencourt pops one in his mouth, too. “I’ve eaten so much of this stuff,” he says.
Viewing the next product in development, the cultured mouse meat, is a far less casual affair. Back in the lab, Bethencourt and Estrada don insulated gloves and open a hefty canister of liquid nitrogen. Vapor pours out as they extract a little test tube containing a speck of Wild Earth’s edgier protein. No taste tests here. “It’s a bit gooey,” says Bethencourt. “It’s definitely not ready for prime time, but we wanted to say it’s possible.”
This mouse meat was grown in the lab from an existing line of mouse-muscle cells normally used for science experiments, not food. It’s key to Wild Earth’s aim to make cat food, because cats, unlike dogs, must eat meat. Wild Earth still has to develop a way to culture the cells without bovine growth hormone. Making lab-grown meat for dog food will be next.
Wild Earth’s product rollout has a stealthier aim: a stepwise progression toward normalcy for animal-free meat. If fungus-made protein for dogs is Wild Earth’s gateway to lab-grown mouse meat for cats, then the cat food is Bethencourt’s Trojan horse to introduce lab-grown meat for humans.
“If I was asked: ‘In 10 years’ time are we going have clean meat?’ Without a doubt,” Bethencourt says. “In five years’ time, I’m hopeful.”
But getting there by way of pet food? Bethencourt acknowledges that he has colleagues in the lab-grown food industry who wish he wouldn’t go that route. Lab-grown meat already will have to overcome an ick factor among some people. If the first major commercial lab-grown meat product is pet food, won’t people think lab-grown meat is (wait for it) for the dogs?
Bethencourt, though, is going to the barricades, aiming to upend an industry that he sees as unkind and unsustainable.
“I won’t say who, but pretty much everyone says, ‘Don’t do it,’” he says. “I hear where everyone is coming from, but this is something we can do, and it’s going to be transformative. The sooner we get there the better.” | https://medium.com/neodotlife/wild-earth-lab-grown-pet-food-bb8a19dfaf5a | ['Grace Rubenstein'] | 2020-10-22 23:08:56.583000+00:00 | ['Dogs', 'Science', 'Cats', 'Pets', 'Food'] |
Exploratory Data Analysis to understand consumer behaviour | In the following post, we will be exploring the dataset for a fictitious meal kit company, Apprentice Chef, and deducing key insights and actionable for the company in an effort to increase the Revenue.
Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash
Apprentice Chef is a gem for those seeking a convenient and healthy meal option. Unlike its counterparts, Apprentice Chef comes with award-winning disposable cookware, which sets it apart & may seem like a go-to alternative for the environmentally conscious. It has meals ranging from USD 10 to USD 23, much like its competitors, both online & offline. A typical Apprentice Chef meal, consisting of proteins, vegetables, carbs, and seasoning, takes about 30 minutes to prepare. The meal-kit comes with a step-by-step, detailed description of a gourmet recipe cherished by a novice & veteran chef alike.
The convenience of the meals doesn’t keep it from being an economical, sustainable, and a gastronomical delight.
Understanding the dataset
Variables at our disposal
We have thirty variables that shed light on the performance of the company across functions. To understand how each feature affects the Revenue, we must group the variables based on what they highlight about the consumer. The broad categories can be:
Demographics: Variables which give demographics of the consumer
Affinity: Variables which directly impact Revenue like purchases made
Behavior: Variables which highlight the behavior of the consumer like enrolments
Online Behaviour: Variables which help understand the consumer’s online behavior and engagement like clicks
Convenience: Variables which offer convenience to the consumer like the presence of a refrigerated locker
Inconvenience: Variables which indicate inconvenience caused to the consumer like late deliveries
Segmenting
Understanding consumer behavior is a multifaceted process. To simplify this, we can segment the consumers based on:
1. Rating: Five segments for every star of the rating given.
2. Revenue: Quartiles based on the average Revenue generated.
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
The primary objective of the EDA will be to understand which features impact the revenue.
Dissecting consumer behavior will involve looking at the given variables in isolation and also their relation to other relevant variables. The following analysis will be carried out for the dataset:
Univariate Analysis: Will be performed to understand the range, dispersion, and outliers of individual variables. The segments can be color-coded into the plots to add more meaning to univariate analysis.
Graphs to be plotted: Histogram, FacetGrid, Boxplot
Bivariate & Multivariate Analysis: It’s imperative to understand correlation between variables while inferring business dependencies.
Graphs to be plotted: Pairplot, HeatMap, Scatterplot with three variables (lm plot)
Key inferences
There is a definite difference in behavior between customers who have rated favorably and the ones who haven’t. Every business touchpoint is an opportunity for the brand to elevate consumer experience and thus influence the rating given.
Consumers who have rated the brand favorably have far fewer clicks.
It can be assumed that those who have rated the service favorably have had to take lesser effort (effort is equal to clicks on the site). The lower rating could also be a consequence of the consumer not being able to find a meal of their choice despite spending a lot of time on the site.
We cannot conclusively infer what causes the other without further qualitative research.
The created segments behave differently only for variables with a high correlation with Revenue.
It is no secret that few variables will have a more direct impact on the Revenue. Within our Affinity Variables, some have high correlation like Largest Meals Ordered & Total Meals ordered as compared to others like Weekly Plans. It is interesting to note that our created segments (both Revenue & Ratings) behave differently for the variables which are highly correlated with Revenue. The same cannot be said for less correlated variables. The Pairplot below helps us view this at a glance:
On further investigation with facet grids and box plots, we discover that the behavior of consumers within the created segments has disparity ie, the data within these segments have variation within their range, dispersion, and outliers. Along with understanding the variables in isolation, it is essential to see it from this lens to understand consumer behavior effectively.
Recommendation
Segmentation of customers for improving retention efforts
Retention of customers is one of the biggest challenges pertaining to increasing revenue faced by the meal kit industry today. With the EDA, it is established that segmented customers behave differently with the business. The retention rate within these segments is bound to differ, too ie, some customers may be far easy to retain over others. Within the ones who are hard to retain, the ones with high attribution to Revenue need immediate attention. The existing data needs to be enriched with recency and frequency of meal purchases to deduce more sophisticated segments. | https://medium.com/data-science-paraphernalia/exploratory-data-analysis-to-understand-consumer-behaviour-47416599bc13 | ['Prajakta S Parkar'] | 2020-05-05 05:40:14.681000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Python', 'Data Analysis', 'Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Data Visualization'] |
Money and the theory of exchange | By Alasdair Macleod
Evidence mounts that the global credit cycle has turned towards its perennial crisis stage. This time, the gathering forces appear to be on a scale greater than any in living memory and therefore the inflation of all major currencies to deal with it will be on an unprecedented scale. The potential collapse of the current monetary system as a consequence must be taken very seriously.
To understand the consequences of what is likely to unfold requires a proper understanding of what money is and of the purpose for its existence. It does not accord with any state theory of money. This article summarises the true economic role of money and how its use-value is derived. Only then can we apply the lessons of theory and empirical evidence to anticipate what lies ahead.
Introduction
Through a combination of economic theory and empirical evidence, it is easy to establish that changes in our economic condition will prove to turn negative in the next few years. We cannot with certainty establish the timing and scale; that is the province of informed speculation. But we do know that a cycle of credit always terminating in a periodic crisis exists and we can explain why. We know that it is a repetitive cycle of events, a new crisis is now due, and the misuse of money is at the centre of it.
This time, the negative forces are unquestionably more violent than last time, threatening not just a recession, but something considerably more vicious. And anticipating, which we can do with total certainty, the statists’ monetary response to what we now know to be a forthcoming event, we can also say it will be met with a new wave of monetary expansion. The precedent was set by the Lehman crisis, when the greatest coordinated injection of money in the history of central banking was undertaken by the major central banks to buy off the consequences of previous monetary expansions. This one threatens to be even larger.
Consequences begat other consequences. But, by and large, they have not materialised in the form widely expected. Following Lehman, monetarists expected the purchasing power of currencies to decline in unison, and to a degree they did. How much they have declined becomes debatable, because government statistics try to measure the unmeasurable and fail to produce satisfactory answers. With respect to both economics and money, the problem for the ordinary person is further compounded by governments and their agencies acting like the three wise monkeys. They see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. And hey presto! There is no evil.
For a long time, those that determine what is best for us have been inhabiting another planet. They pursue economic and monetary policies that become more destabilising with each turn of the credit cycle. By statistical method they supress evidence of the consequences. Government finances benefited from the Lehman experiment with their expanding debt financed by the expansion of money and credit, which escalated with the interest cost conveniently suppressed. Government is all right Jack, so the little people, its electors, must be as well.
The forthcoming tsunami of money and credit, which if recent history is any guide, will be through quantitative easing, providing finance for worsening government deficits and supporting the banks they licence. The little people might take a different view of the consequences for state-issued currencies, as the debasement unfolds. This article anticipates that alternative view by explaining what money is, its validity, and how a state-issued currency differs from true money, in order to inform readers ahead of events instead of learning the lesson in retrospect.
The economic role of money
For all governments the role of state-issued money is to provide themselves with funds by facilitating tax payments, provide seigniorage from its issue and to manage economic outcomes. This was not money’s original role and is not the way economic actors in the wider economy utilise it.
Money’s proper role is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services in a world that works through the division of labour. It is itself a commodity, but with a specific function and suitability. It must be commonly accepted by economic actors, and for the purpose of exchange have an objective value; that is to say any variations in price during an exchange for goods must be viewed by both buyer and seller as coming from the goods side. This is the subjectivity in a transaction, the difference of opinion in price between exchanging parties, which must always be confined to the good or service being exchanged. It brings in value as a concept, which is conventionally measured in money under the assumption that money is the constant and all variations in values are in the goods.
However, this common view is incorrect. With money acting as the facilitator for an exchange of goods the value of one good must be considered in relation to all the others an individual may desire. If you buy something, you are giving up the opportunity to buy something else, so personal preferences at any moment in time will set the value that an individual decides a good or service is worth, not its measurement in money. At that moment in time, if the individual values an item highly in his personal schedule of needs and wants, then he may pay the price asked or he may haggle for a lower price. But it must be understood he nearly always values it because he wants it, not because of the money-price. If price was the principal motivation for exchange, we’d all end up with useless items.
Our needs and wants are therefore entirely personal and a medium of exchange must allow us to realise them by being objective in terms of its value for all transactions. It is what gives money its purchasing power. But that is for the purpose of transactions only; for other purposes, money is subjective in its value, its subjectivity wholly derived from its objective role as a medium of exchange.
Understanding that money can be objective for the purpose of transactions while subjective for other purposes allows us to accept an apparent contradiction, that money has no price while having a price. It is also why people can hold different views on the value of money relative to goods while accepting it in return for goods. Some are content to hold it in quantity, while others dispose of it rapidly.
If the public subjectively changes its general level of relative preference between money and goods, money’s purchasing power alters materially. If preferences for money increase, then its purchasing power will rise, which is expressed in falling prices for goods and services. If preferences for money decline, then its purchasing power also declines, leading to higher prices for goods and services. If all preference for holding a currency evaporates, it loses its objective role as money in transactions altogether.
How money derives its objective value
Money does not arrive at an objective value by accident. For everyone in a community, and for those that trade with it from outside, to accept it as money requires them to refer to their experience of it as money. Its subjective value, in this case the value ascribed to money prior to every transaction, must coincide with its objective value when an exchange takes place. Money’s subjective value is therefore drawn from experience of its recent history as money, which in turn is drawn from the more distant past.
We may not consciously do this, but when you take a $50 bill or a £20 note from your wallet you know it is money and you know pretty much what it will buy. The subjective value of the money in your hand is central to its role for the exchange of goods, goods exchanged with a view to being consumed, while money is not. Money will continue to circulate for the purpose of future transactions and that is its sole purpose. If it lacks credibility as money it cannot perform this role, so that credibility, regarded subjectively in your hand, is vital to it. The Austrian economist von Mises called it a theorem of regression, whereby to prove its current validity to the user, its qualification as money theoretically links step by step back to the moment when the money became money.
In the cases of gold and silver their role as money evolved from their prior value as commodities for other purposes before they become money. They were accepted as money because they had and still have value for other uses and possess the enduring qualities that allowed them to survive as media for exchange long after other rival commodities for that role were abandoned. They were selected as money by an evolutionary process decided by economic actors dividing their labour and accumulating material wealth. Consequently, they have both been used as media of exchange for five or more millennia, sometimes individually and often together.
Silver lost out to gold in the ealy 1870s when Europe progressively moved onto a common gold standard, after the United Kingdom, the leading trading nation at that time, had set the gold sovereign as its monetary standard after the defeat of Napoleon. From 1873, silver’s price declined sharply following its general demonetisation in Europe and the gold standard reigned until the First World War.
A gold standard meant that physical gold was represented in transactions by local currencies, which were free to be exchanged for gold by the general public at any time. Whether it was marks, pounds, francs or dollars, these bank notes were proxy for gold and therefore drew their credibility from it. A user making a subjective assessment of a gold-backed currency saw in a bank note a regression to gold’s value. It lasted, in America at least, until 1933, when President Roosevelt forbade the ownership of gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates in America. The link with gold at $20.67 remained but citizens were unable to exercise it. The following January Roosevelt devalued the dollar to $35.00 per ounce.
As money changed from gold through the medium of the dollar to just paper dollars, few saw anything amiss, because they were used to using paper dollars anyway. The government argued that gold confiscation was somehow necessary as an emergency measure in order to combat the depression, and it was only later that it became clear that far from gold convertibility returning after the crisis was over, it would be restricted to foreign governments and central banks.
The only money permitted to circulate in America was the paper dollar and the people had no option but to accept it. It must also be noted that the public is normally slow to understand that there has been a fundamental change in how they should view money. It had become an article of faith that a dollar was a dollar. Everyone accounted in dollars, paid their taxes in dollars and maintained bank balances in dollars. The history of the dollar’s circulation appeared to confirm its validity.
Now let us imagine that a government decides to introduce a new currency overnight. Without a measured regression to earlier values, the public would only accept it with difficulty. If the issuing government had good standing with its electors, that might help. But if the government is demonstrably not to be trusted with respect to monetary policy, the fact that it chooses to issue a new currency would be regarded by its citizens with disbelief.
This has been confirmed in the few cases where this has happened. When the assignat failed at the time of the French revolution, it was replaced by the mandats territorial. It was originally set at 30 assignats. The mandats lost all purchasing power within six months. Attempts to introduce new replacement currencies in Zimbabwe have met similar fates. When people are forced to use a new currency when an old one fails, even at gunpoint they know its worthlessness because there is no history of a new currency as money. In the event the current monetary system fails, a government-contrived reset will almost certainly fail as well for this reason.
For people in the eurozone the euro replaced national currencies on a ratio basis which were already circulating as money, so from Day One euros were accepted as money. The fact that its creation was planned long in advance and not born out of a crisis was also vital to its acceptability. In this respect euros were and still are different from instances where a completely new fiat currency replaces a failed predecessor.
However, with today’s dollar-based system of pure fiat currencies, regression to earlier values cannot not give us a convincing reason for current values. The only regression is an implied one to the dollar, which does not resolve our problem. Currencies only retain a purchasing power because people are naturally unwilling to accept the consequences of the regression logic. This puts state-issued unbacked currencies at permanent risk of an unexpected loss of their role as money.
The instance of a fiat currency collapse that people often refer to was that of the paper mark in 1923, but they are not usually aware of the sequence of events that led to it. In the nineteenth century, Bismarck unified all the German-speaking states, with the exception of Austria. Trading was under a gold standard and it was a remarkably successful exercise. But in 1905 Georg Knapp published his State Theory of Money, in which he argued that money should be a creation of the state, not private actors. It was an argument for a paper currency without the need for gold to back it; a licence for the state to fund itself through the expansion of the circulating medium.
Bismarck used this latitude to equip Germany with armaments before the First World War, and when Germany lost, in post-war years printing of unbacked currency accounted for roughly 90% of government income, only 10% coming from taxes and trade tariffs. Consequently, the purchasing power of the papiermark fell rapidly under the burden of its expansion, until about May 1923 when the general public became finally convinced it was worthless. It led to the phenomenon of the crack-up boom, when everyone furiously dumped worthless marks for anything they could buy.
The mark finally lost its ability to act as the objective value in transactions by November 1923, a process that only took that long because in Germany’s cash-based economy there was a perpetual shortage of paper notes to turn wages into goods.
The relevance to today’s monetary condition
The lessons from history and from the theory of exchange give us a framework for understanding how a second acceleration in the debasement of fiat currencies (the first having followed the Lehman crisis) is likely to affect their purchasing power and their status as circulating media. This article has highlighted some of the fallacies, such as money as a measure of value when the value of anything actually depends upon how it ranks in the schedules of the needs and wants of individuals.
It has explained how money can have an objective value for the purposes of exchange while having a subjective value at all other times. We can draw the inference that as money fails to be a medium for valuation, it invalidates all statistical constructions and therefore the foundations of macroeconomics. We know that a government which issues its own unbacked state currency runs a continual risk that one day it will be deemed unsuitable and spurned by the public for the role of money.
Against these difficulties, the state has the power of compulsion. It can prohibit the use of other monetary media, and it can ban the use of alternative stores of value, as President Roosevelt did with gold in 1933. In favour of state issued currencies, those with a long history of circulation will continue to be accepted for a time by a public always reluctant to discard them even after the evidence shows them to be unsuitable as money.
Other than from the more obvious effects of increases in the quantity of money in circulation, the key to understanding that a money’s purchasing power can change rests on two foundations. The first is its subjectivity, which is not taken into account by policy planners who always regard money as a mechanism for objective valuation. While recognising the reality that exchange rates between currencies fluctuate, money’s subjectivity is an alien concept to them.
The second pillar is changes in the public’s relative preferences between money and goods. At their extremes they can either afford a high value to money or destroy it entirely, irrespective of the quantity in circulation. It is here that the role of savers is important. Nations such as China and Japan have high savings ratios, and an expansion of the quantity ends up mostly being deposited in the banking system instead of being spent. Consumer prices rise less than they otherwise would, because the preference for holding money relative to goods has increased.
The situation in countries where consumer credit predominates is very different. Among the general public bank deposits are already minimal, and expansion of money and credit ends up in bank balances mainly owed to foreigners, large businesses and purely financial entities.
America and the dollar fall into this category. The bulk of deposits are due to large businesses and financial entities. Both, but the latter particularly, are highly regulated and by being forced to comply with accounting and financial regulations, have little option other than to retain deposits. To the extent they are trapped within the fiat currency system, they can only pass on their bank deposits to similarly confined economic actors. By a process of elimination, we know that the threat to monetary and financial stability must come from an accumulation of liabilities to foreigners.
According to US Treasury TIC data, short-term liabilities to foreigners payable in dollars including deposits, treasury bills and other short-term negotiable securities in the banking system amounted to $5.39 trillion last July.[i] At the same time they owned $7.01 trillion of treasury and agency securities out of a total of long-term securities amounting to $19.76 trillion.[ii] Total foreign exposure to the dollar is therefore estimated at over $25 trillion on US Treasury estimates, about 120% of America’s current GDP.
On any basis the dollar is significantly over-owned by foreigners, despite the common view in US-centric financial markets to the contrary. The reasons foreign governments and foreign-owned corporations own dollars are related to trade, or investment and speculation. Trade-related holdings are always justified so long as the dollar is the international reserve currency in which everything is priced. Therefore, if there is a contraction in international trade it follows that foreigners will turn net sellers of the dollar because their balances become too high. And if investment attractions wane, there is the potential for a multi-trillion disposal of bonds, equities and therefor the dollar as well.
For the US Government, foreign selling of the dollar could create severe difficulties at a time when its budget deficit is rising, because without an increase in the domestic savings ratio, the government will then become dependent on an inflation of money and credit to fund its budget deficits. And as foreigners reduce their dollar holdings, its purchasing power will be certain to diminish, further increasing government costs in nominal terms. At the same time bond yields, representing the cost of funding for US Treasuries can only rise, despite attempts at interest rate suppression. Very rapidly, conditions which favour government borrowing can turn sour.
Where the dollar goes, so do the other fiat currencies. Coordination of monetary policies at the G20 level ensures all currencies are to different degrees in the same boat. Sounder forms of money will be sought by the general public in all trading nations and we should expect a return to gold, silver and perhaps bitcoin, will be an early feature. The subjective value of the dollar will almost certainly be reflected in rising commodity prices, despite a credit-induced slump in business activity. And the slightest hint that the Fed will consider reducing interest rates to zero or even below will put all commodities into a permanent state of backwardation, driving up prices measured in dollars and its fiat cohort as well.
Manufacturers will be increasingly squeezed by falling purchasing powers for fiat currencies, caught between rising input costs and accumulating inventories. Unemployment will rise, yet money will continue to be inflated by central banks tasked with funding escalating government deficits and rescuing insolvent banks. This has happened before with every credit crisis. Where the forthcoming crisis differs is the sheer scale of it this time.
It is hard to see how a fiat currency system that has evolved from being cloaked in gold to be revealed as completely unclothed can survive a transition from abject complacency to systemic catastrophe. Extend and pretend will no longer work. Those that escape the worst of the damage will be the few who through a measured understanding of money and the theory of exchange know they must take early action to protect themselves and their families.
They will also have learned that price is irrelevant, and its use as a guide to true values is mistaken. Far more important is the collective schedule of everyone’s needs and wants, which under anticipated conditions is bound to favour under-owned gold, silver and even bitcoin for those attuned to it.
On the basis of a rational understanding of what money truly is and the limits of its objectivity to the act of exchange, those who act early and are not misled by the apparent cost of protecting themselves from the failure of state currencies when measured in the declining purchasing power of their fiat currency, will surely suffer least. | https://medium.com/goldmoney/money-and-the-theory-of-exchange-10cca7a6e7d1 | [] | 2019-10-17 17:08:13.650000+00:00 | ['Gold', 'Economics', 'History', 'Macroeconomics', 'Money'] |
On Sarah Frankcom | With regards to the still developing case of Sarah Frankcom and the allegations made against her at LAMDA, I realise I’m probably not the best person to comment. Certainly, I’m not a neutral person. Yet I offer my thoughts because I care about Sarah, I care about LAMDA, and I care about the health of our drama schools, our theatres, our industry.
Sarah has been a mentor, a colleague and a friend for the best part of four years now. In that time we have made four shows together, and are in the process of developing a fifth. I’ve worked with her at both the Exchange and at LAMDA. I owe a huge deal of my practice and craft to her; the lessons she taught me; her faith in me. I owe much more to her too, outside the rehearsal room. At times when I’ve been in personal crisis, she’s been there with kindness, strength and love.
The story reported in The Stage yesterday is of course, then, highly emotive for me, as I’m sure it must be for the many people whose work Sarah has influenced across her career. These people now, understandably, feel a need to stand by her in solidarity in the face of these allegations and what is, in my opinion, an inflammatory article. I felt the same need yesterday. However, I hesitated: the dangers of social media, of clickbait headlines, of knee-jerk, vituperative Tweets means that complexity is flattened and space for ambiguity is taken out.
I hope in discussing this, then, to acknowledge an important caveat that is found in ambiguity. Two things can be true at the same time. Namely
a) we can deeply love and admire people
b) the people we love and admire can cause very real and serious harm
It is right and fair that employees should have the right to make complaints, and for those complaints to be taken seriously by boards and senior management. Power should and must be held to account, and in this, personal testimonies are useful only up to a point.
Having said all this, we can still take issue with the way this has been reported. We all know from experience that our leading cultural organisations can be backwards and stuck in the past. We know, too, that Sarah was appointed to LAMDA with the intention of making radical change: this was the very reason the board appointed her. That radical change included shifting the school away from ableism, classism, racism, misogyny. To create a more inclusive, accessible organisation. This is evident in the work Sarah did with the building. For example, the reduction of audition fees by 75%; the work programmed for the students; the teachers and artists she invited in.
The Stage article privileges this letter to the board written by two former members of staff and highlights, unhelpfully, the incendiary language used (“toxic”, “corrosion”, “overbearing”). This represents only one side of the story. While of course this inquiry should be allowed to take place, in due process, this smacks to me of an old guard taking issue with the new direction the organisation was headed in, and how the world was changing around them.
As Sarah said herself in an interview with Lyn Gardner:
“It is exciting but dismantling is difficult too. Many people are resistant to change, they like things to stay the same. Sometimes it can feel particularly difficult when on a daily basis we are all living through a changing world. But you can’t not do it because it’s difficult.”
Those words are the Sarah I know. Perhaps, invariably I will defend her. I am not ashamed of that. I can also support her while acknowledging the complexity of the situation. I don’t know what happened at LAMDA, nor of course do I know any of the ins and outs of employment law. I have no doubt that it’s a complicated, messy business.
Fundamentally, though, the Sarah I know is an artist and leader of deep integrity and moral fervour who I genuinely believe wanted to change LAMDA, and by proxy the whole industry, for the better. The conversations we had about decolonising the canon, and the resistance this was met with, exist in my memory as a smaller example of the kind of arguments she must have been having day in, day out.
This sort of stuff hurts. Of course Sarah had power in the situation. But there is power too in the cultural monolith, the entrenched structural hegemony that would squash any challenge to the status quo, that would silence and stifle the voices that are trying to create change and a more equitable society. And there’s no way Sarah has more power than that.
And perhaps most importantly, this stuff hurts us all, and distracts from the task at hand — trying to make our industry and the world a better place. We are in the business of imagining better futures. The journey is difficult and long and requires plenty of creativity and resilience. We all deserve care in that.
I am angry at the way the story has been told and angry at the lack of care taken. Let’s hope that everyone involved gets the care and love they need, and, if she feels able and willing, Sarah gets a chance to say her side of the story as well. | https://medium.com/@atrirohan/on-sarah-frankcom-825ed8807637 | ['Atri Rohan Banerjee'] | 2021-08-11 11:39:49.351000+00:00 | ['Drama School', 'The Stage', 'Sarah Frankcom', 'Lamda', 'Theatre'] |
Affect of Corona Virus on Tourism Industry | Empty hotels, cancelled flights, closed tourist sights. The coronavirus is crippling global tourism. The industry is already expecting losses running into billions.The crisis in Europe are still growing: Since the outbreak in Italy, popular tourist destinations are often deserted.
In Venice and Milan, museums, theaters and places of interest remain closed, major events have been cancelled. In France, too, the Louvre remains closed for a third consecutive day because employees have stopped working for fear of infection.
Meanwhile in Germany, following the cancellation of the International Tourism Fair (ITB), people are more concerned over the impact of travel cancellations from the Asia. The German National Tourist Board (GNTB) expects overnight stays from China to fall by between 17 and 25%. As tourists from China make a significant contribution to sales, amounting to around €8 billion ($9 billion) a year, the losses are likely to have a severe impact on tourism in Germany too.
Tourism comes at a Standstill in Malaysia
In Malaysia, local tour operators are facing over 3,000 tour group cancellations. And according to the Malaysian Association of Hotels (MAH), room cancellations have picked up since the Chinese New Year holidays, when the Chinese government issued a ban on its citizens from booking overseas tours, flights and hotels.
Due to the Covid-19 crisis, MAH estimated losses suffered by hotels to reach “hundreds of thousands” of ringgit, especially at destinations which are highly dependent on the China tourist market.
Hotels at Kota Kinabalu (Sabah) and Langkawi (Kedah) in particular, are anticipating a drop in occupancy from 30% to 60% immediately, while other destinations like Melaka, Ipoh (Perak), Port Dickson (Negri Sembilan) and Penang are looking at an immediate impact from 10% to 50%.
Tourism industry seeing bad times in Indonesia
The Indonesian government has said it would provide at least $744 million in subsidies for workers, airlines, hotels, tourists and regional governments in Indonesia’s major tourist destinations to counter the economic slowdown expected as a fallout from the Covid-19 outbreak wreaking havoc in China.
The Chinese were the second-largest group of foreign tourists visiting Indonesia last year, and the loss of their business could cause local establishments to lose a total of $500 million in tourism revenue per month. Regions most vulnerable to such a blow are Chinese travelers’ favorites Bali, North Sulawesi and the Riau Islands.
Impact on Global Economy
Businesses are dealing with lost revenue and disrupted supply chains due to China’s factory shutdowns. Weeks after China imposed travel restrictions on million of its people, Italy placed quarantine measures on its entire population. On 11 March, some key industries in Wuhan were told they can resume, a day after Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the city for the first time since the outbreak began.
On 9 March, oil prices lost as much as a third of their value — the biggest daily rout since the 1991 Gulf War, as Saudi Arabia and Russia signaled they would hike output in a market already awash with crude, after their three-year supply pact collapsed.
Dips Reported in Global Travel Revenue
On 12 March, markets dipped further on US President Donald Trump’s decision to impose sweeping restrictions on travel from Europe. But the announcement on 13 March of $50 billion to fight the crisis cheered markets somewhat.
The outbreak has the potential to cause severe economic and market dislocation. But the scale of the impact will ultimately be determined by how the virus spreads and evolves, which is almost impossible to predict, as well as how governments respond.
Globalization has encouraged companies to build supply chains that cut across national borders, making economies much more interconnected. The major central banks have used up much of the ammunition they would typically deploy to fight economic downturns since the 2008 financial crisis, and global debt levels have never been higher. Rising nationalism may make it harder to coordinate a worldwide response, if that’s required. A resident wears a protective mask while riding a scooter on February 5, 2020, in Wuhan. | https://medium.com/@travelpedia/affect-of-corona-virus-on-tourism-industry-da922ae966e7 | [] | 2020-03-17 16:55:19.851000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Tourism', 'Corona Virus'] |
I’m Reverting to My 9-Year-Old Self To Be More Productive | I’m Reverting to My 9-Year-Old Self To Be More Productive
The perks of not caring what others think
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
I’ve been feeling pretty down lately. I’m not sure if it’s the quarantine blues setting in or if I’m just stressed out with life in general. We are trying to play some major catch-up financially after being laid off for 7 months, so I suspect that has something to do with my current emotional state.
The thing is, I don’t want to feel this way.
Sometimes when I’m feeling down, I like to bask in my depression. It just feels so good to swim around in sadness for a while. You know, turn on some Alanis Morissette and watch yourself cry in the mirror for a good hour or so.
However, that’s not where I’m at. Right now, I want to be productive. I have this angsty feeling that I need to produce and create as much as I possibly can in the coming days, weeks, months. However, that becomes tough when you’re not feeling up to anything mentally.
It’s as if my will for productivity is at war with my emotional, mental well being, and it’s not going well at all.
The other day I was waiting in my car to pick my daughter up from school. A kid about 9 years old walked by, and he sparked the inspiration I so badly needed at that moment.
This kid — this awesomely unaffected little boy — was having a full out conversation with himself as he walked home from school. He was laughing and muttering, using oversized hand gestures and simply having a grand ole chat all by his lonesome.
Being today’s day and age, I checked to see if he had earbuds in or a Bluetooth headset — maybe he was talking on the phone? Nope, this conversation was just him, and I loved seeing it. | https://medium.com/honest-creative/im-reverting-to-my-9-year-old-self-to-be-more-productive-508238102db2 | ['Lindsay Brown'] | 2020-11-03 16:57:29.988000+00:00 | ['Childhood', 'Work', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Productivity'] |
It Was Meant to Be Perfect | Poetry Sunday
It Was Meant to Be Perfect
It chose to be itself.
Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash
In her mind’s eye, the table gleams with heirloom china and polished sterling,
Graced with perfect abundance of bold magnolias and sweet roses and
Huge, open-faced white flowers with no names (but from the greenhouse
So the gardener knows so she doesn’t have to).
In her studio apartment, the table tilts to the right, couch threatens to burst,
The neighbors are fighting or having a party — whatever it is, it is too loud
For the magic she hoped to summon to transform today’s dismal drab
To that far-off, impossible place where the fruit is ripe and invites savor.
When they came, they brought desperation — purchased chocolate
To make up for botched cookies they brought to share anyway.
The fruit in the basket was soft, sad, and slumped
Like her secondhand couch except you could eat it.
The wind-scarred pears came from Oregon
Where the fires scorched, destroyed homes and dreams,
And made possible a gift of presence,
A moment of sweetness despite unending onslaught of strange.
It was not at all what she had in mind when she invited them
To raise a glass and toast the year they’d survived (but barely),
But somehow, someway, the imperfect was perfect
With friends to share the strange, wild wonderful. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/it-was-meant-to-be-perfect-9f2b9505cf06 | ['Louise Foerster'] | 2020-12-27 13:02:39.137000+00:00 | ['Celebration', 'Inspiration', 'Poetry', 'Gifts', 'Poetry Sunday'] |
Op-Ed Criticizing Jill Biden’s Use of the Title “Doctor” Draws Outrage | Reactions to Epstein’s Article Are Strong
Epstein and the Wall Street Journal were immediately called out for article, particularly by women. Many women called Epstein out for misogyny. Still, others felt that the article reeked of an elitism that is all too familiar to women in academia.
“Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr. Jill Biden” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.”
Defenders of Epstein noted that his language is partly a reflection of his age — the essayist is 83 and comes from a time when it was more acceptable to call a woman or someone younger by the title “kiddo.” Dr. Biden is 69.
Others thought that Epstein’s argument, no matter how poorly delivered, had some merit. Paul A. Gigot, the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s “Opinion” section defended Epstein saying, “There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”
Gigot went on to accuse Democrats of using the piece for their own political purposes, saying that as she moved into a leading role in education policy, Dr. Biden was now subject to commentary.
Northwestern University, where Epstein taught for thirty years, promptly distanced itself from him. In response to the controversy, Northwestern issued a statement pointing out that Epstein had not been affiliated with the University since 2003 and that they disagreed with “the misogynist views” expressed by Epstein in the article. | https://medium.com/write-like-a-girl/op-ed-criticizing-jill-bidens-use-of-the-title-doctor-draws-outrage-46f97adc158b | ['Rose Bak'] | 2020-12-16 18:38:23.744000+00:00 | ['Doctors', 'Women', 'Politics', 'Education', 'Social Media'] |
All about Gradient Descent in Machine Learning and Deep Learning! | Ever wondered how the machine learning algorithms give us the optimal result, whether it is prediction, classification or any other? How those algorithms work? What is the maths behind those algorithms which leads to the result, which can be used as a tool to assess real world problems? Gradient Descent algorithm is the one which makes the magic possible.
Gradient Descent is the backbone of every machine learning algorithm and it also acts as a base for many deep learning optimizers. It works on a simple mechanism, and it is to find the optimal weights for the loss function by iterating over the error curve of values shown above, by which the error in the model predictions and the actual values is minimum.
Consider, a case in which we manually used let’s say 15 values and calculated the loss for each of those values according to any loss function, in this case we can do because the values are 15 only, it is very small number, but it will not lead to the optimal result, and in real world we have to use many values in order to conclude a value which minimises the loss i.e. the error in model prediction and the real world values. Here comes Gradient Descent into action.
Actually what this algorithm does is, it just calculates the derivative(gradient means derivative in this equation) of the function which has to be minimized and constantly works in the direction to minimize the loss. Now, there will be some people who may ask that calculating the derivative of a function isn’t a big deal, but my question to those people is that can they calculate the derivative of an equation which is of degree 100? I know that it is not possible for humans. That is why we need to take help of gradient descent algorithm.
The approach of this algorithm is to minimize the derivative and make the point converge at the global minimum of the loss function curve.
Loss function curve
Now, consider a point is at the left part on the boundary of the above curve, then if we draw a line vertical line through that point as shown in the curve, then definitely the slope of that line is negative, & from here if we keep on increasing the value of the loss function or in other words if we keep on adding the gradient(which is negative), it will converge at the global minimum. If the point is present initially at the right part on the boundary of the curve shown above, from that point if we draw a line, it’s slope will be positive, and now we have to subtract the gradient because it is positive in order to reach to the global minimum.
So, according to the above explanation, gradient descent decides the loss function in such a way which satisfies both the conditions of gradient that is positive and negative.
Till here, according to my explanation gradient descent work can be represented as:
weights = weights — derivative(loss function) → Equation (1)
There can be some problem in the above equation in the case suppose the derivative is too large or too small, then there will be a problem to reach the converging point i.e. minimum point in the loss function graph at which optimal weights are located.
In order to deal with the above problem we use a parameter called Learning rate which is used to control the above problem. Learning rate is multiplied by derivative(loss function) which helps to control the growth of derivative(loss function).
Problems associated with inefficient learning Rate
In the above shown graph, problems of inefficient learning rate is clearly depicted, and we can clearly see that if learning rate is large, then it will make derivative(loss function) shoot in a particular direction, and if it is small then derivative(loss function) will reach to the global minimum but it will take a very long period of time.
So, we have to choose learning rate accordingly, & the best value of it can be found by experimentation.
Now, the final equation becomes: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/all-about-gradient-descent-in-machine-learning-and-deep-learning-3dea4b269bf0 | ['Harshit Dawar'] | 2020-05-07 17:02:28.326000+00:00 | ['Loss Function', 'Deep Learning', 'Data Science', 'Gradient Descent', 'Machine Learning'] |
The security issues in cloud computing | Abstract
The cyber security field consists of many sections that create the cyber space collectively. One such component is cloud computing. Cloud computing takes a very significant part in the cyber space in the present. Therefore, discussing the cloud computing issues is very important. The objective of this report is to address some of the most critical issues in cloud computing. In order to complete that objective, first cloud computing and the fundamental nature of cloud computing issues are introduced. Then, the evolution of cloud computing and cloud computing issues are discussed by mainly focusing on Virtualization security issues and Data storage and computing security issues. The report also covers the future development of the cloud computing issues along with the counter measures. As discussed in the paper, cloud computing is and will continue to grow to be used due to the many benefits it offers. Therefore, it is important to focus on improving the cloud computing security.
Key terms: cloud computing issues, virtualization security issues, data storage and computing security issues
1. Introduction
Cloud computing can be known as providing various services that people can use throughout internet. The users can access information which is found without physical contact in the cloud or a virtual space that is why this method is named as cloud computing. It provides many resources like servers, networks, storage, applications, software and services. Nowadays people and businesses use cloud computing for many reasons including increased productivity, cost cutting, speed and efficiency and performance. Cloud services provide users the ability to store files and applications on remote servers. When it is needed, users can access that data through internet. It means users can access in any place. Cloud computing permits the user to work remotely. Because of this people who use cloud computing can access their data, work, and applications in whichever device which users can connect internet, any place in the world. Cloud computing provides many services with multiple functions including: Emails, generate and trial apps, analyze data, storage, backup, and withdraw data, audio and video streaming, on demand software delivery. Cloud computing is using many different organizations within a vast range. There are many different clouds. The first is Private cloud, and here cloud infrastructure is supported by a single entity containing various users (e.g., business units) for exclusive use. It can be owned, controlled and managed by, or some combination of the company, a third party and may reside on or off site. The second is Community cloud, where cloud infrastructure is provided for absolute use by a common user group of organizations with mutual interests (e.g., project, compliance). It may be owned, controlled, and run by one or several community groups, a third party, or any composition thereof, and it can prevail on or off premises. The third is Public cloud and the cloud infrastructure is given to the general public for free use. It can be owned, controlled, and functioned by, or some composition of, any type of organization. It inhabits at the premises of the cloud provider. The fourth is Hybrid cloud here the cloud infrastructure comprise of two or more independent cloud infrastructures (private, group or public) which remain specific units but are connected together by systemised or proprietary technology that allows data and portability of applications (e.g. cloud bursting for load balancing between cloud). [1]
Cloud computing is associated with complicated technology unlike a single piece of technology. It is a system mainly consisting of three services, software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). SaaS stands for Software-as-a-service and includes granting license of a software application to customers. The issuing of these licenses can be done through either model of pay-as-yougo or on-demand (e.g. Microsoft Office’s 365). IaaS stands for Infrastructure-as-aservice and this provides a technique for the services of storage and delivery between OS and servers using IP-based connectivity which is done as a part of an on-demand service. The benefit for clients is that they can acquire software or servers through outsourced, on demand service instead of buying those (e.g. IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure). PaaS stands for Platform-as-a-service and it is known as the most complicated out of the three levels of cloud-based computing. PaaS is similar to some extent to SaaS, the main dissimilarity is that PaaS is a platform to design software supplied through internet (e.g. Force.com and Heroku) opposed to delivering software online. [2] People have many benefits by using cloud computing. Cloud-based software provides many different services with benefits for companies. It includes the ability to use software through a native app or a browse from any device. Consequently, users may move their files and settings to a different device without any trouble. Cloud computing not only provides accessing files on many devices. Rather than that, users are enabled to check their emails on any device and if needed users can store files (e.g. Dropbox and Google drive). Cloud computing services are useful for backing up files, important data, music files, and photographs as well. Those files and stuff are available when the hard drive gets crashed. Also cloud computing causes huge cost saving for the huge businesses. Before cloud computing become a good solution, companies required to purchase, build, maintain, high cost information management technology and infrastructure. But, after cloud computing became popular it enabled users to complete their tasks online easily. The cloud structure helps the users to save storage space on their computers. It also provides quicker updates through the products available via the web instead of the conventional, material methods like discs or flash drives (Adobe users can access applications in its Creative Suite through an Internet-based subscription. This provides the benefits of downloading new versions and fixes to their programs easily). Aside from all the benefits discussed above, cloud computing also has the fair share of its own risks. These risks mainly include cloud computing security issues. To increase the benefits of cloud computing, it is important identify the issues in cloud computing and to develop counter measures.
2. Evolution of the cloud security issues
Cloud computing is not a very new concept of technology. Cloud computing has developed step by step including Grid computing, Utility computing, Application Service Provision, and Software as a Service etc. Providing computing resource through a global network started in the sixties as concept. First the idea of the cloud computing concept by John McCarthy emerged around 1961. It was a brilliant idea but to activate the cloud-computing concept the technology was not ready. After some decades the idea of the cloud computing emerged in nineties. In 1999, Salesforce.com used a simple website to provide applications to users, in 2002, Amazon started to deliver many services through the Amazon web services, in 2009, computing enterprise applications were provided by Google Apps, and in 2009, Microsoft started the cloud services. As in the examples, cloud computing has become a mainstream in today world. Along with the development in the cloud computing the security issues also increased. There are many different types of security issues associated with the cloud computing. Those cloud security issues are not only affecting the cloud computing service providers. It also affects the cloud computing users as well. [3] The figure 2.1 below shows the increasing popularity of using cloud computing between 2008 and 2020, which makes it clear that usage of cloud computing is a rapidly growing trend.
Figure 2.1 Total size of the public cloud computing market from 2008 to 2020
Cloud computing services are very useful for users and the companies. Nowadays it is a very popular computing method all around the world. But, cloud computing has many security issues. There are five categories of cloud computing issues, namely, security policies, user-oriented security, data storage security, application security, and network security. Among these cloud security issues categories User-oriented security issues and The issues of data storage protection impact users more and more and are of greatest importance. This can be categorized in the following categories: data storage and computer protection problems, protection problems for virtualization, Internet and web security problems, network problems, problems with access control, software security issues, trustee management issues and enforcement concerns and legal aspects. [4] The following Figure 2.2 indicates that the highest-ranking issue among cloud computing concerns is issues concerning protection, which decide how security problems in cloud computing will be handled.
Figure 2.2 Rated issues on cloud / on demand model
Source: — IDC Enterprise Panel, 3Q09, n = 263
Among the security issues regarding cloud computing, protection problems for virtualization and Data storage and computer protection problems can be considered most critical issues. Those managed to evolve with the advancement of cloud computing and are still present even with the modern technology. When the protection problems for virtualization is considered, virtualization can be known as the method which enables several Virtual Machines (guest machines) to operate on a solitary physical machine (host machine) and share the physical machine resources. This allows a single server to host a large number of guest virtual machines, operating system, and applications short of the added expense and complications arising from running such various physical machines separately. There are various ways for virtualization to take place. This could be application based, device based, virtualization of storage, virtualization of desktops, or virtualization of networks. It can also be hypervisor-based or non-hypervisor-based. Cloud computing is an extensible resource pooling framework with the aid of virtualization. Security is the biggest challenge any company faces during the conversion and deployment of their cloud infrastructure system. However, virtualization associated with many issues like issues with the guest, issues with the host OS, issues with the hypervisor, issues with the management interface, and issues with the networks. [5]
First is issues with the guest. There are two states that the guest image may exist in cloud infrastructure, either active or inactive. Although active guests have a broader area of attack, inactive guest images are still major security issues. The security vulnerabilities are not patching to inactive dormant virtual machines. One attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities and can gain control of the virtual machines. Although, the guest image has been inactive for some time, but it can still have confidential data like keys that could cause data breach. Active virtual machines have the entire attack surface, with some conventional virtualization technology issues, available for each physical computing process. An active virtual machine can be targeted from the internet, like every other physical device. Adjacent guest virtual machines can attack during cross-VM attacks, and because they share the same hardware it can have a more negative impact. Often, guest can benefit from the vulnerable situation to increase their privilege of controlling other virtual machines. [6] The second is Issues with the host OS. Every guest virtual machine run atop the host. However, if the host gets compromised, no guest part will be protected, so it is a very important job to protect the host. Nevertheless, securing the host is not so easy as the cloud service providers pay extra effort to harden the host, but there is always a risk of unfounded new security hole that can cause failure. An assailant using a Guest virtual machine will take advantage of vulnerabilities and increase their host control advantages, and if a host is controlled by an attacker, it may control all guest virtual machines above. Often, this kind of attack is called a host attack guest. Denial of Service attack is also a popular attack threatening the server to avoid responding to lawful requests by swamping bad requests. Local Denial of Service is used in the cloud network that certain virtual machine guests can do by grabbing all available resources and destroying all other virtual machines. Guest virtual machine can also use the unreported backdoor in the I/O system. It is known as information leakage, to access unprivileged details. And it can cause for malicious action by attacker. Along with local guest virtual machine, any other internet hacker may also aim the host operating system like every other physical computing device connected to the internet. [6]
The third is Issues with the Hypervisor. The hypervisor is software that acts as a manager of the virtual machine, lying between the virtual machines and the hardware. As it possesses the authority to control all the virtual machines operating on the physical network, damaging the hardware could cause notable harm to the entire cloud and cause significant harm to the entire cloud infrastructure. Virtual machine escape is a big attack on the hypervisor. In this hack, the attacker gets means to execute code to bypass the OS protection layer and begin to communicate straight with the hypervisor. In the cloud infrastructure, hypervisors gain a change at runtime at certain events to prevent downtime. Backdoor or rootkit can be introduced into the hypervisor during this change, and it can be used to manipulate the whole system. White box attacks are exceedingly rare cloud systems, but because of rogue system administrators and employees, those pose significant security issues because they can take advantage of their privileges to inject malicious below. [6]
The fourth is Issues with the Management Interface. The management interface is used in the cloud infrastructure to manipulate, maintain, and monitor guest virtual machines. As described above, the management interface location leans on the virtualization type utilized in the system. Guest virtual machines may jeopardize the management interface that can result in leakage of information and arbitrary code execution. Cloud systems where the web-based management interfaces are available to easily manipulate and display the virtual machines opens web-based attack surfaces. [6] The fifth is Issues with the Networks. Network virtualization operates well inside the cloud, so it provides many attack-surfaces in the cloud infrastructure. Virtual networks have different attack surfaces found on each software system (e.g. buffer overflow, integer overflow, etc.) which resulted because they are software-based. Compared to physical networks, software-based networks have less protection, so it is not hard to exploit and create network traffic that can cause major loss. Although several virtual defense solutions exist, traditional security issues still remain, such as the vulnerability of software-based systems. The networks can be threatened during virtual machine migration, which can cause data leakage and raise the question of the safety of the image of the virtual machine. There are several virtual networks that can be exploited by the entire cloud infrastructure and cause severe problems. As described above Virtualization issue is a very critical issue in cloud computing. It is a cloud infrastructure based issue. [6]
Data storage and computer protection problems. Data is an important aspect of cloud computing. Data stored in the cloud is secluded in an unreadable manner to the customers. Customers are unwilling to reveal the personal information or are always scared of losing the data, negative outcomes which may come up during controlling and processing. Therefore, the data must be unchanged during computation, restricted at every stage of processing and permanently stored for updating. The user does not know what happens to the data either in remote storage or in third party storage after storage in the cloud. The data owner is unaware of the cloud storage location, security infrastructure and cloud protection procedures. Quality of service is the essential aspect of cloud storage. A cloud storage provider requires proven methods and procedures to store data in the cloud efficiently and reliably. Safety and their solutions related to data storage, stable computing, availability of data and services, security mechanisms, cloud data recycling, and a variety of malware. To build a comfortable atmosphere, users need a system that saves data regularly, easily and safely in the cloud. [4]
Data storage. Losing control in the data storage is a significant problem in the cloud computing, because it does not have complete control of the data and is more difficult to verify originality of data and confidentiality. The cloud computer consumer is divided between data, servers and storage. A storage pool that can save data is provided by cloud computing. The server pool site is disclosed, and the provider of cloud service monitors and maintains it. The virtual level abstraction makes it difficult to locate the storage server’s real site. The user allows control to some extent only on the virtual machines. Data storage features such as multi-tenancy and virtualization give the attacker more opportunities to execute the hacking. Cloud data centers are used to store user data. Most major players have very low competitive cost of offering cloud storage. The circulated data is extremely excessive and is stored at various locations. The reliability of the electrical source and effective cooling secure the data is readily accessible. Cloud space can be reused efficiently with the aid of correct space allocation procedure. The data excessiveness supplies a procedure where data is backed up to another cloud server for to make sure that the data are easily accessible. If a data center is entirely ill functioning, backup data server can be used. In different countries Google and Amazon run various data centers. These companies store the data with a multi-placement feature. It also may trigger fresh security risks and legal issues, because worldwide stored data has different policies. [8] Stable computing. Most security service aim is to enforce the Software-as-a-Service application front end interface that comes at times the customer requests to web service or an HTML page. These applications may be changed or modified with behavioral pattern. When an application is called a specific application or service, a service tree can be created, the request is simply switched along the required services. Because of misconfiguration and malicious servers, a computing infrastructure that computes huge data sets in expanded system may produce the unexpected, wrong, and corrupt consequences. It is difficult to get and reliable and correct computing server. [8] Availabilities of data and services. The cloud’s physical and virtual resources are readily available. Structural modifications are needed in application and infrastructure level to achieve easy accessibility and adjustability of services and data. Running application that is alive with many servers can be one solution. But this causes Denial of service attack. Another problem with cloud computing is the availability of hardware. One fault may direct to fragmentary or total system break down, as a result of such system failure, impacting the quality of data and services. The lack of physical facilities will cause cloud unavailability that hamper the whole online work circle and trigger hazard. [9] Cryptography. The cloud information and data are secured using cryptographic mechanisms. It is a main idea for cloud security. It transforms the plain text data into another cipher text type. Poor application of the algorithm or the use of weak key encryption raises attack probability. For cryptography, the frequent attack is brute force attack, matching every feasible key for a known range with the encryption key. Another problem with passwords is that people build common words, such as their email passwords or the name of their partner. When easy to guess the security key data breaches can occur. Likewise, encryption issue is a huge problem in cloud computing. Cloud data recycling. It was a smart idea to reclaim the cloud space until the data was fully used and sent to disposal. However, it can be assured that the previous user’s data will not be available to the next customer. The procedure of cleansing or discarding data is called sanitization. Revived data are accessible to users like delivered way after sanitization. Data sanitization is an important activity in the distributed system to correctly dump of the data and pick the data that is given to the disposal. Data leakages and data loss may occur if the data are not properly sanitized. That is how cloud data recycling issue affected to the users. Data backup. Another critical thing in cloud computing is recovery of data from the cloud. A standard data backup process is required to ensure the data availability. This data backup process is conducted on the side of the service provider and allows data to recover in the an HTML page. These applications may be changed or modified with behavioral pattern. When an application is called a specific application or service, a service tree can be created, the request is simply switched along the required services. Because of misconfiguration and malicious servers, a computing infrastructure that computes huge data sets in expanded system may produce the unexpected, wrong, and corrupt consequences. It is difficult to get and reliable and correct computing server. [8] Availabilities of data and services. The cloud’s physical and virtual resources are readily available. Structural modifications are needed in application and infrastructure level to achieve easy accessibility and adjustability of services and data. Running application that is alive with many servers can be one solution. But this causes Denial of service attack. Another problem with cloud computing is the availability of hardware. One fault may direct to fragmentary or total system break down, as a result of such system failure, impacting the quality of data and services. The lack of physical facilities will cause cloud unavailability that hamper the whole online work circle and trigger hazard. [9] Cryptography. The cloud information and data are secured using cryptographic mechanisms. It is a main idea for cloud security. It transforms the plain text data into another cipher text type. Poor application of the algorithm or the use of weak key encryption raises attack probability. For cryptography, the frequent attack is brute force attack, matching every feasible key for a known range with the encryption key. Another problem with passwords is that people build common words, such as their email passwords or the name of their partner. When easy to guess the security key data breaches can occur. Likewise, encryption issue is a huge problem in cloud computing. Cloud data recycling. It was a smart idea to reclaim the cloud space until the data was fully used and sent to disposal. However, it can be assured that the previous user’s data will not be available to the next customer. The procedure of cleansing or discarding data is called sanitization. Revived data are accessible to users like delivered way after sanitization. Data sanitization is an important activity in the distributed system to correctly dump of the data and pick the data that is given to the disposal. Data leakages and data loss may occur if the data are not properly sanitized. That is how cloud data recycling issue affected to the users. Data backup. Another critical thing in cloud computing is recovery of data from the cloud. A standard data backup process is required to ensure the data availability. This data backup process is conducted on the side of the service provider and allows data to recover in the event of natural or unnatural hazards. Backup storage can be compromised by the frequent hackings such as unauthorized access and data tempering. So, people often find this form of threat to the data backup period. Data recovery. Cloud computing has functionality of resource pooling and elasticity. This component offers cloud capabilities for the requested user to manage dynamic and on demand resources. Since of this feature data recovery and confidentiality can be violated. It could be likely that the resources allocated to a requested user are transferred to someone else later. The hacker will use data recovery technique and locate the data from early users. It can cause many significant harms to the confidential user data.
Privacy and integrity. Though cloud computing has a computing network model that offers cost-effective and systematic infrastructure services. The task maintaining infrastructure does not have collaboration of users. This allows for the different security problems. That can direct to increased security risks in terms of data privacy and confidentiality in the cloud, the number of users and applications is growing. In the shared environment, malicious users collect user information which can breach the user’s privacy and integrity, but non-malicious users can also violate the data. Malware is very dangerous to cloud computers, since cloud data can be los or corrupted. Anti-virus agents are assigned to secure from those malwares. When the malware enters the network, antivirus agents must check the signature of the malware and if a coincidental match of signature occurs , but the possibility of a similar thing happening is rare, then the malware injects in to the network and it may remove the data, manipulate the data or do something with the data. If the anti-virus agent could not detect the malware it may cause very serious problems. Malware will spread to all files that are associated with the file to which it attached. As discussed above Data storage and computing security issue major problem affected to the users in cloud computing. [4]
3. Future developments in the area
When we focus on future development of cloud security issues, we mainly focus on two major sections. The two major sections are future development of cloud computing and future development of security issues in cloud computing. The first is Future development of cloud computing: Cloud computing’s market growth has assesed significantly to the rising carbon emission from ICTs, posing a concern about the energy-efficient and green existence of cloud computing. According to a prediction, carbon emissions are rising at a three times faster rate between 2002 and 2020, that currently amounts to 7.8 billion tons per year. Multiple studies indicate that cloud storage is a green technology, while there are several reports showing that cloud computing and data centers are contributing to significant co2 rises in the environment. Cloud framework has many features that render cloud computing much greener, but numerous technical efforts are still needed to make it possible. The first such effort is, Technology should be built at various levels (algorithm, compiler, OS and application) to improve system energy efficiency. Resources should be allocated to the application based on the necessary level of output in order to maximize energy versus consumption offs. The second is, to achieve green cloud computing, cloud providers need to consider and calculate existing data center capacity, server capacity usage, cooling requirements, and cooling designs in order to achieve maximum performance. Therefore, consumption of the energy of all the elements and resources of cloud computing software is calculated. The third is, all important factors such as network, memory cooling and CPU should be taken into accounts at the data center to design holistic resource scheduling solutions. The fourth is, it is the collective duty of both customers and suppliers to ensure that the changes triggered by the new technologies do not endanger the health of human society. Cloud companies need to deploy their data centers near renewable energy resources if they want to optimize the use of green energy. And the fifth is, cloud computing’s energy demands need to be reduced, as this cloud provider wants to take some essential measures to use renewable resources. In future development of cloud computing there are important trends like Quantum computing, Automation, and Open source development to get cloud computing to a better place. [10]
The second is Future development of security issues in cloud computing. As explained above in the paper we have various types of security concerns. In the future development of the security issues of cloud computing it need be reduced issues and more secure in the future. As mentioned earlier the virtualization issue and the data storage and computing security issues are the modern and critical issues in cloud computing. So, we must focus on the future development of those cloud issues. The first is protection problems for virtualization: First, for a good future development of virtualization in cloud computing should avoid from virtualization issues. For that, we must focus on some countermeasures. The first is Hardening the hypervisor and Virtual machine. Frequently, as explained earlier, hackers take advantages of error or vulnerabilities in the hypervisors, so it is necessary to strengthen the hypervisor. Proper firewall and antivirus configuration are necessary for the exposed terminals to prevent black box attacks. Hypervisor manage all the guest virtual machines, therefore it must be at top of the security management list of priorities. The second is secure programing. Cloud service providers and sellers must stick to safe programming methods and conduct tough trialing to prevent errors and vulnerabilities because this can result serious harm. The third is Securing the network. The protected network is necessary to evade leakage of information, execution of arbitrary code, redirection of network traffic and stability of virtual machines. Network should be protected using the secure communication channel such as SSL and IPsec. [6] The second issue is Data storage and computer protection problems. For the data storage future development, we need to avoid from the data storage issues: better security for resident data, File Assured Deletion scheme for data security, and using secure cloud protocol for secure storage are the better solutions for the cloud security issues. With almost half of the world now online and more users added each day as communications networks expand, it is fair that demand for the cloud storage will continue to grow. This means that more companies will be providing those services with new features in the future. [11] Future cloud storages will come up with these features. More trust, the risk of someone else using or losing the information has been shown to be largely unfounded enough times that trust between business and private individuals is rising. Data lost cost will be reduced, this means the data loss risk will reduce in the future development in the cloud storage. Data encryption and security will continue to improve, some of cloud storage’s main concerns is the hackers’ ability for accessing large quantities of information that can be used for unauthorized purposes. Although there is still a danger that a hacker might get around safety measures, programs have continued to reduce this danger. Better methods of encryption and protection features based on custom software designs mean data is safer than it is on home PC. Data storage providers retain staff experts who are constantly tracking networks and servers to ensure the protection and privacy of your files, and customized cloud storage. [12]
4. Conclusion
This report on cloud computing security issues mainly focuses on the objective of discussing the highest of critical, modern security issues in cloud computing. Cloud computing can be known as using a network of remote servers anchored on the internet to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer, according to the dictionary. Cloud computing has gained increasing popularity over time due to its many benefits. The way it offers software, infrastructure and platforms as services has helped to save a lot of expenses of using computer technology. Cloud computing also has many security issues as it provides space for storage of data of many users, and all the processes and other activities are conducted by a main host computer where the user cannot see or be certain of where the data has stored and processes are conducted. There are many such security issues regarding cloud computing. Some of those issues have managed to evolve along with the development of cloud computing making them very critical. The virtualization security issues, and data storage and computing security issues are selected in this report to discuss the evolution of the cloud computing issues as those were highlighted as the some of the modern and critical issues. Those issues are discussed thoroughly in this report. The future development of these cloud computing issues is discussed in this report paying special attention on counter measures as well. It is crucial to discuss the future development of cloud computing and the regarding security issues considering the increasing popularity it is gaining. It can be predicted that the near future will require a high level of cloud computing services. Addressing those issues and developing counter measures can contribute to the future development of cloud computing. Cloud computing may be considered as a huge part of present and future cyber space, which explains the significance of the study done in this report.
5. References
[1] N. I. o. S. a. Technology, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, Information Technology Laboratory, 2009.
[2] D. Zissis and D. Lekkas, “Addressing cloud computing security issues,” Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 28, pp. 583–592, 2012.
[3] “History and Vision of Cloud Computing,” Times of Cloud, 2013. [Online]. Available: https://timesofcloud.com/cloud-tutorial/history-and-vision-of-cloudcomputing/. [Accessed 16 April 2020].
[4] A. Singh and K. Chatterjee, “Cloud security issues and challenges: a survey,” Journal of Network and Computer Applications , vol. 10, no. 1016, 2016.
[5] A. Oludele, E. C. Ogu, K. ‘Shade and U. Chinrcherem, “On the Evolution of Virtualization and Cloud Computing: A Review,” Journal of Computer Sciences and Applications, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 40–43, 2014.
[6] V. Kumar and R. S. Rathore, “Security Issues with Virtualization in Cloud Computing,” in International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication Control and Networking, Greater Noida, 2018.
[7] D. Perez-Botero, J. Szefer and R. B. Lee, “Characterizing hypervisor vulnerabilities in cloud computing servers,” in International Workshop on Security in Cloud computing, 2013.
[8] Z. Xiao and Y. Xiao , “Security and privecy in cloud computing,” Communications Surveys and Tutorials, IEEE, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 843–859, 2013.
[9] S. P. Ahuja and D. komathukattil, “A survey of the state of cloud security,” Network and Communication Technologies, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 66–75, 2012.
[10] I. R. Khan and M. Alam, “Cloud Computing: Issues and Future Direction,” Institute of Technology and Management, Aligarh, 2017.
[11] S. K. Sood, “A combined approach to ensure data security in cloud computing,” Journal of network and computer applications, vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 1831–1838, 2012.
[12] “The Future of cloud Storage,” CloudStorageBoss, 11 August 2016. [Online]. Available: http://www.cloudstorageboss.com/the-future-of-cloud-storage/. [Accessed 18 April 2020]. | https://medium.com/@sudhamed8/the-security-issues-in-cloud-computing-c2562f6d201d | ['Sudharaka Medagedara'] | 2020-12-17 09:52:29.389000+00:00 | ['Cloud Computing', 'Cybersecurity', 'Cloud Services', 'Vulnerability', 'Cloud Security'] |
Our first grant recipients and what’s next for Reclamation Ventures. | Our first grant recipients and what’s next for Reclamation Ventures.
I’m honored to announce that Octavia Raheem and Julio Rivera are both receiving a $5,000 impact grant from Reclamation Ventures for their work to create more space for all of us to breathe. Nicole Cardoza Follow Sep 23, 2019 · 3 min read
Julio Rivera (left) and Octavia Raheem (right)
Octavia Raheem is the founder of Sacred Chill West, “a yoga and meditation studio on the westside of Atlanta committed to being a refuge to people who have been dismissed or treated invisible in other yoga spaces. Our group of dynamic and experienced teachers reflect the diversity of our city. Each encouraged to connect the knowledge learned from their extensive yoga trainings and studies with the wisdom gained from their lived experience and perspective in order to lead and inspire students in an accessible and authentic manner.”
Julio Rivera started Liberate Meditation “to support the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color community in our collective healing from the wounds of racial trauma, marginalization, and colonization. Our first step in fulfilling on our mission is our free meditation app that has talks and guided meditations from some of the best meditation teachers that identify as BIPOC in the US. We believe in a future where our community thrives in their individual lives with joy and peace, as well as celebrates each others’ differences with solidarity and love.”
It’s because of everyone’s support and solidarity that we were able to offer two grants this round, and we’re grateful for this community. We’re also grateful for our team of advisors that donated their time to the application review process. With over 200 applications from incredibly inspiring individuals, choosing just two people to support was challenging. Nevertheless, we are humbled by the dedication of both of these founders in their work.
The second grant opportunity from Reclamation Ventures is currently accepting applications until October 25.
U.S.-based underestimated entrepreneurs that are building a company that increases access to wellness are encouraged to apply. The winner, like the ones mentioned above, will receive $5,000 in unrestricted funding to help them scale their work. | https://medium.com/reclamation-ventures/our-first-grant-recipients-and-whats-next-for-reclamation-ventures-f2181b8fda7e | ['Nicole Cardoza'] | 2019-09-23 11:57:33.310000+00:00 | ['Yôga', 'Impact Investing', 'Equity', 'Meditation', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Is PureVPN Versus Surfshark a Good Comparison? | When it comes to choosing between PureVPN and Surfshark , the winner is going to be Surfshark . PureVPN was designed by hackers who wanted to find out what the hackers were up to. Surfshark on the other hand was created for the common consumer who wants a simple solution to their problems. Surfshark works great with any connection speed because it offers tunneling abilities. This means that your data can bypass possible access routes that could slow down your internet or prevent you from getting online at all.
Tunneling gives Surfshark the ability to secure all of your data so that it can go through without interruption. This includes things like downloading applications, using programs, or even viewing or sharing files. With Surfshark on your PC you don’t have to worry about getting data on another computer that might have the potential to slow down your connection or even take your personal information.
It is important to understand how Surfshark works. It works very simply. First of all, it creates a virtual tunnel through which your data is protected. This tunnel is also secure so that hackers cannot use your information to break into your system. You can still use the internet and share files with others while Surfshark is working to protect your system.
PureVPN works great for using while you are traveling. You can bypass possible routes that could potentially slow down your internet connection or prevent you from getting online at all. It will keep your data secure while you are on the go. In addition, you can set up multiple tunnels so that if one connection is slower than the others, you can choose to use a different tunnel so that your data is not lost. If you are worried about the possibility of someone changing IP addresses, you can choose to have PureVPN set up a static IP address every time so that your activity is limited to a certain area. This way you are safe from hackers who might be able to control your data or even use it for illegal means.
Although it is possible to detect Surfshark when you are surfing, this does not mean that you would be in danger. The reason behind this is that Surfshark works with a network of servers that detect unsecured access to the internet. They do not distinguish between secure and unprotected browsing. Because of this, all of your surfing activities are tracked and logged. The reason for this is so that they can offer the best protection for your personal information.
PureVPN versus Surfshark are an easy comparison to make. The bottom line is that you need to think carefully about what you are doing when you are using the internet. There are many ways that hackers can get into your system and steal your information. Using a service like Surfshark can help you to make your surfing more secure and you can surf the web with confidence. Do your research and find a reliable provider so that your data is safe.
…Disclaimer (This article contains affiliate links. If you buy a product via a link, it does not increase your costs. On the other hand, it gives you counts and earns me a small commission which allows me to make detailed Reviews like this.) | https://medium.com/@how-do-u/is-purevpn-versus-surfshark-a-good-comparison-6d1aa5f71bb6 | ['How Do U'] | 2020-12-27 17:46:23.670000+00:00 | ['Purevpn', 'Internet Security', 'Surfshark', 'VPN', 'Hacking'] |
Victims of domestic violence — you are not alone! | Victims of domestic violence — you are not alone!
#takeaction podcast with Hera Hussain, the founder of CHAYN. An award-winning, open-source project run by 400 volunteers from 15 countries. Their resources are openly licensed so charities around the world can use, remix and distribute our work! Chayn’s design principle: Design with, not for. We Encourage Nov 23, 2020·3 min read
Hera Hussain is the Founder of CHAYN — a global volunteer-run project crowdsourcing resources on the web to address gender-based violence. Chayn has reached more than 360 000 people through its resources which are designed with survivors of abuse.
Listen the podcast
Who is Hera Hussain?
Born in Scotland, raised in Pakistan and now living in the UK, Hera knew from early on she wanted to empower women. Hera is a passionate believer in using the power of open source technology and open data to solve the world’s pressing issues. Hera was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 list.
Hera came to UK for university and tried to think about several kinds of social enterprise ideas in ethical fashion, which would support women facing abuse with employment and training. Over time, she started working in the technology startup space. Chayn happened by chance. She helped two friends escape abusive marriages and experienced significant challenges in finding basic information like their rights and how to cope with trauma. She thought if she could just put together critical information in easy language online, it could change lives and solve real problems.
What is Chayn?
CHAYN is a global volunteer network addressing gender-based violence by creating intersectional survivor-led resources online. Chayn started in 2013, and have since reached more than 300 000 people and 1.2 million views across the world.
Chayn is an open-source project crowdsourced by hundreds of volunteers to support victims of domestic violence, by collecting relevant information and resources to Chayn platoform for easy access for the victims. As we have learned here at We Encourage, there are plenty of information available, but it is scattered and it is hard for the victims of violence to find right kind of information for their needs. Also, for many victims of violence, the time and energy goes to suriving day to day and it is difficult to find the time and energy needed for browsing through the internet for relevant information.
At Chayn platform victims of domestic violence can find:
Open and free resources crowdsourced with love
from survivors, experts & people
who give a damn around the world.
Toolkits & how to guides Country sites & platforms to support women Digital services
Bloom — remote trauma support
Bloom is a free, web-based support service run by Chayn. Designed for anyone who is currently experiencing or has experienced domestic and sexual abuse, support is offered via 5 courses. Each one offers tailored tips, tricks, tools, and comforting words to our community. Working through a course will involve learning, reflecting, and processing how what we’ve experienced has affected us — in a safe and empowering space. All of the courses are delivered anonymously, within a group setting, and alongside other survivors via Telegram and WhatsApp.
If you are interested in volunteering in Chayn, please contact them. The Chayn project is aiming to offer support and help for people all over the world, so don’t hesitate to contact, if you can support them to bring it to your country. | https://medium.com/@we-encourage/victims-of-domestic-violence-you-are-not-alone-4f31a26ae1e4 | ['We Encourage'] | 2020-11-23 16:07:32.778000+00:00 | ['Domestic Violence', 'Intimate Partner Violence', 'Domestic Abuse', 'Intimate Partner Abuse'] |
What is varna dharma..? | Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash
Varna and jAti are different. jAti is a hereditary based system whose implementation impeded knowledge progression by removing natural selection processes and gridlocked the sub-continent into thousands of years of darkness, out of which it is yet to evolve.
Varna dharma is a law. It’s a law of professions, which is eternal and applicable to any social grouping, be it the Universe or a human society.
Varna dharma says there are four eternal professions. Knowledge providers, Service providers, Material providers and that remains physical labor. In any evolution, knowledge providers /Brahmanas lead first (entropy), service providers/kSatriyas lead next (energy), material providers /Vaizyas lead next (mass), physical labor/Zudras lead next (matter forms). This is a cycle of evolution, which will keep cyclically running one after another, raising the level of evolution from Universe as a society to human society.
The Yugas appear in this order. Where Brahmanas/entropy leads it is satya yuga, where ksatriyas/energy leads it is treta yuga, where vaizyas/mass leads it is dva-apara yuga, where zudras/matter forms lead it is kali yuga.
For eg. in the Universe, entropy or micro-states appear first even without addition of energy, then energy expansion happens, then mass manifests, then matter forms arise.
In human beings, people who provide knowledge take lead, then people who use that knowledge to provide service takes lead, then people who use that knowledge and service to provide materials/goods lead, then people who just remain physical labor lead the society through their sheer numbers, simply because the scientific advancements/economic systems do not keep pace with each other, throwing out a lot of people as labor who have to develop new skillsets.
This is how any society will work and that is an eternal law. A society which ensures that people who are thrown out as physical labor due to mismatch between scientific advancements and economic systems, learn new skills/knowledge and produce the next set of knowledge providers/brahmanas will evolve. A satya yuga has to evolve out of kali yuga. If this evolution does not happen, the society will perish.
If the society evolves and out of this physical labor, if it produces knowledge providers using the huge brain power available with these people, then a new knowledge revolution starts. Again the evolutionary cycle repeats. | https://medium.com/@vedicstudies/what-is-varna-dharma-80bfe03152f | [] | 2020-12-08 03:05:22.502000+00:00 | ['Varna', 'Dharma', 'Evolution', 'Yuga'] |
I Keep a Letter in My Drawer Addressed to Myself | I have a letter in the drawer of my side-table addressed to my future self — written in December 2019 earmarked for December 2020.
It is not the quintessential where do you see yourself in 5 years? — kind of letter. It is an abbreviated version, with less fuzz and more soul. For me, it is a yearly executive meeting that I have with myself.
My meeting agenda includes:
➰A quick check-in on how I am doing
➰How I have held up to my intent in the past year and
➰My hopes for the next 12 months
Reading this one letter can transport me through a time-lapse for the past 365 days, and like looking through a crystal ball, launch me into the next 365.
Nothing too far-fetched, but hey, the world is my oyster. The annual letter writing practice has taught me a lot about myself and how I approach a new year. | https://medium.com/the-masterpiece/i-keep-a-letter-in-my-drawer-addressed-to-myself-8d1b0bb502db | ['Chetna Jai'] | 2020-12-04 16:26:13.199000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'The Masterpiece', 'Future', 'Life', 'Present'] |
THE STORY OF LOGISTIC REGRESSION CONTINUES… | In this article I will continue with the Story of Logistic Regression, if you have not read the previous article, here is the link
Let me make things clear and simple, even in this article i won’t be able to complete Logistic Regression because its a broad topic and we are covering it in detail so it is better to plan what we gonna cover in this article.
We will be covering:
Probablistic approach of sigma function. Optimization Theory. We will derive optimization problem of LR by geometry. WEIGHT VECTOR We will deal with Overfitting problem. We will see L1 and L2 regularization in detail.
So lets get started,
Probablistic approach of sigma function
Uptil now we have derived the optimization problem which can handle outliers by tappering off the distance we know why sigma function is used. One of the reason we use sigma function is that it has a great probalistic interpretation.
Lets see now the probablistic interpretation of sigma function.
CASE 1
Lets say we have the same classification problem in which we are classifying positives with negatives so lets imagine a query point which lies on the hyperplane, now intutively there is a 50 -50 chance for the query point to be classify as positve and as negative as well. So what will be the probablity that point is positive, it is 0.5 without any doubt and same for negative.
P(Y=1)=0.5
we have a sigma function which is defined as
sigma=1/(1+e^(-s)) and here for LR,
s=yi*w^T*xi, for the above problem w^T*xi is “0” because point lies on the hyperplane so s=0 which means sigma =0.5 same as probablity(found above)
CASE 2
Lets say we have the same classification problem in which we are classifying positives with negatives so lets imagine a query point which lies at a distance of 100 from hyperplane as shown in the image, now first think as according to our sigmoid function, below is the graph of sigma function.
when the point is at a far distance, lets say w^T*xi(distance from hyperplane) is 100 as i mention above and in the same direction of w, according to the graph its value will be 0.99999 which you can derive from the formula as well means P(Y=1)=0.99999 means there is a 99 percent probablity that Y belongs to positive class. So we can easily claim one result from this that is,
sigma(w^T*xi)=P(y=1) , where P(y=1) is equal to probability when y=1 means the point belongs to positive class.
It is obvious that “sigma(w^T*xi)” values lies from 0 to 1 as probablity value lies from 0 to 1.
Optimization Theory For LOGISTIC REGRESSION
So we need some optimization tools to optimize our LR problem. We can solve the previous optimization problem as well but we want to make it much better.
Uptil now we have seen our optimization problem which is less impacted by outliers.
Now to find the more optimize one, lets understand some optimization theory.
Monotonic Functions
lets say i have two points x1 and x2 and i know x1>x2 so if there is a function g(x1) and there is a function g(x2) and
if g(x1) >g(x2) then
g(x) is a monotonically increasing function like log(x)
As you can see in the graph, if x increases log(x) increases. Log(x) is a motonotically increasing function.
Now lets say we have a optimization problem in which we need to find the best value of x which minimize x^2
Now we can easily give its answer to be “0". As we can see in the graph below that for x=0 , x^2 is 0 which is the minimum value so x* value is 0 from the above picture.
Now lets say i have a function g(x) =log(x) and i want to find the best value of x for which i can get the minimum of g(f(x)) where f(x) is x^2.
so again i have a optimization problem in which we need to find the x which minimizes g(f(x))
g(f(x))= log(x^2).
Now optimization theory says that x* which we found in the first problem( while using only f(x)=x^2) is equal to x’ which we found in the second problem( while using g(f(x)) if g(x) is monotonically increasing.
We can see it by the graph below as well, we found x*=0 so if we see the plot of log(x^2), we can see it is minimum at 0 and this happens because log(x) is a monotonially increasing function.
Lets apply this theory to our LR OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM
WEIGHT VECTOR
Now one think can be very easily misunderstood that is
“w*” vector, firstly this is a vector which we got after solving the optimization problem.
HOW WE SOLVE IT?
We will discuss this is detail in future but for now lets say we got w*(optimal w) somehow, for now i will write w* as w only.
So “w” is a d dimension vector because otherwise w^T*x is not possible as x is also d dimensions.
Here dimensions simply means features so
We can understand a w vector as weights for each feature.
w=<w1, w2, w3…wd>
for features
f=<f1, f2, f3….fd>
a weight for each feature.
Lets see what happens at the testing time.
So lets say you have a query point(xq) and you need to find its class lable(yq) which can be positive or negative.
so if
w^T*xq>0 then yq=+ve
where w is the optimal w which we found after solving the optimization problem.
if
w^T*xq<0 then yq=-ve
OVER FITTING PROBLEM
Now we have a problem, lets see it through.
Uptil now we got our optimized probelm
lets say zi=yi*w^T*xi
now if we analyze we know by nature, exp(-zi) is always greater equal to zero, (1+exp(-zi)) is always greater than zero and log being a monotic function
log(1+exp(-zi))>0
So summation of all the values of log over different zi’s is greater than zero,means if we want to find the minimum value, it must be zero. So basically we need to find out w* for which the whole summation term becomes zero.
Now if we analyze closely we can say log value is “0” only at x=1, log(1)=0, means 1+exp(-zi)=1, means exp(-zi) becomes 0, for which zi has to become infinity.
zi =yi*w^T*xi, we are given with yi and xi, when we are saying zi’s to become infinity that means w has to become infinite and if zi is infinity we are also saying that zi>0 means we are always classifying the all the training points correctly and that means we are overfitting the model.
Now if we Recall we are foregetting one key aspect that w is normal to hyperplane.
w^t*w=1, we have not used this condition anywhere.
so lets use this.
HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS PROBLEM?
The answer is Regularization, there are two types of regularization L1 AND L2, Regularization simply is like to add the other term so that it create stablity and reduce overfitting.
L2 Regularization
if we write our optimization problem like this,
Now if we see we want to find the w which minimizes this whole term, if we want to reduce log term we need to increase w and if we increase w term then the regularization term will be maximum and we won’t get minimum value and there is a no use of regularization term.
Now if we decrease the value of w, then log term will not be 0 and again we wont find the minimum value.
Here lambda is a hyperparameter which can be find by cross validation
So if lamda is “0” means no regularization term means overfitting.
And if lambda is infinity means influence of loss term will be less so there will be no use training data, model will underfit.
L1 REGULARIZATION
L1 REGULARIZATION IS GREAT IF YOU WANT LOW LATENCY SPECIALLY IN INTERNET COMPANIES WHERE USE EXPECT RESULT TO COME IN SECONDS.
It actually creates a the solution of logistic regresstion that is “w” too sparse means if w are less significant, if some features are less significant in contributing for the solution then L1 will make that w zero.
PPPPPP
WHY L1 CREATES SPARCITY IN “W” COMPARED TO L2 REGULARIZATION??
There is another method of regularization and that is Elastic Net. We bascially combined both L1 and L2 and used simply found two hyperparametes by cross validation.
So thats it for this article, thats more or less the story behind LOGISTIC REGRESSION.
Thanks for reading. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/the-story-of-logistic-regression-contiues-2170395afb39 | ['Nishesh Gogia'] | 2020-09-07 13:23:25.713000+00:00 | ['Data Science Interview', 'Logistic Regression', 'Interview Questions', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Calculating Beta vs Bitcoin | A few days ago a few friends asked me to calculate beta for several coins versus Bitcoin. Below is a 60 day beta calculation of a few alt coins against BTC. Now it probably makes sense to use a different proxy for the market instead of Bitcoin. A better solution would be to put together a weighted basket of currencies or using the CoinMarketCap total market instead. Feel free to use the code below. I use Plotly for my charting. I’ve never calculated before so I may be wrong in my approach. If you have feedback please let me know on Twitter or via email (contact@quantalys.us).
If you have other ideas for analytics please let me know.
originally: https://github.com/jhogan4288/coinmarketcap-history
In [1]:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from __future__ import division
import pandas as pd
import datetime
import os
#ignore warnings
import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
In [2]:
import coinmarketcap_usd_history
In [3]:
from pandas_datareader import data as pdr
/take in date until today
In [164]:
def beta(coin1, coin2, start, end):
x=coinmarketcap_usd_history.main([coin1,start,end,'--dataframe'])
y=coinmarketcap_usd_history.main([coin2,start,end,'--dataframe'])
z=[x,y]
for z in z:
z['Change']=0.000000
for index, row in z.iterrows():
if index>0:
z['Change'][index]=(z['Close'][index]/z['Close'][index-1])-1.000
return [x, y]
In [5]:
coin1, coin2, coin3, coin4, coin5 ='bitcoin','ethereum','neo','qtum','bitcoin-cash'
coin_names=[coin1,coin2,coin3,coin4,coin5]
In [6]:
import datetime
In [17]:
t=datetime.datetime.today().strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
In [166]:
btc=beta(coin1,coin1,'2016-01-01',t)
In [19]:
coin1_list=beta(coin1,coin2,'2016-01-01',t)
In [20]:
coin3_list=beta(coin1,coin3,'2016-11-01',t)
In [21]:
coin4_list=beta(coin1,coin4,'2017-07-15',t)
In [22]:
coin5_list=beta(coin1,coin5,'2017-08-15',t)
In [176]:
roll_period=60
In [154]:
coins=[coin1_list, coin3_list, coin4_list, coin5_list]
In [198]:
k=0
col_names=[]
df=pd.DataFrame() for j in coins[0:4]:
z=[]
for i in range(0, j[0].count().max()-1):
y=j[0][i:i+roll_period-1]['Change'].cov(j[1][i:i+roll_period-1]['Change'])/j[0][i:i+roll_period-1]['Change'].var(axis=0)
x=(j[0]['Date'][i],
j[0]['Close'][i], #coin 1 close
j[0]['Change'][i], #coin 1 change
j[1]['Close'][i], #coin 2 close
j[1]['Change'][i], #coin 2 change
y)
z.append(x)
df_temp=pd.DataFrame(z,
columns=['Date',
coin_names[0] + ' Close',
coin_names[k+1] + ' Close',
coin_names[0] + ' chg',
coin_names[k+1] + ' chg',
'Beta '+ coin_names[k+1]])
if k==0:
df=df_temp
if k>0:
df=pd.merge(df[['Date'] + col_names], df_temp[['Date','Beta ' + coin_names[k+1]]], how='left').fillna("")
col_names.append('Beta ' + coin_names[k+1])
k+=1
In [172]:
#use for singular beta
z=[]
for i in range(1, btc[0].count().max()-1):
y=btc[0][i:i+roll_period]['Change'].cov(btc[1][i:i+roll_period]['Change'])/btc[0][i:i+roll_period]['Change'].var(axis=0)
x=(btc[0]['Date'][i],
btc[0]['Close'][i], #coin 1 close
btc[0]['Change'][i], #coin 1 change
btc[1]['Close'][i], #coin 2 close
btc[1]['Change'][i], #coin 2 change
y)
z.append(x)
df_temp=pd.DataFrame(z)
if k==0:
btc=df_temp
In [157]:
import plotly
In [137]:
api_key='xxxxxxxxx'
user_name='username'
In [138]:
plotly.tools.set_credentials_file(username=user_name, api_key=api_key)
In [187]:
df.dtypes
Out[187]:
Date datetime64[ns]
Beta ethereum float64
Beta neo object
Beta qtum object
Beta bitcoin-cash object
dtype: object
In [212]:
import plotly.plotly as py
from plotly.graph_objs import * low_bound=365
high_bound=roll_period b_eth = Scatter(
x=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Date'],
y=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Beta ethereum'],
name='b_eth'
) b_neo = Scatter(
x=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Date'],
y=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Beta neo'],
name='b_neo'
) b_qtum = Scatter(
x=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Date'],
y=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Beta qtum'],
name='b_qtum'
) b_bch = Scatter(
x=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Date'],
y=df[(df['Date']>datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-low_bound)) &
(df['Date']<datetime.datetime.today()+datetime.timedelta(days=-high_bound))
]['Beta bitcoin-cash'],
name='b_bch'
) data = Data([b_eth, b_neo, b_qtum, b_bch]) py.plot(data, filename = 'basic-line', title='Rolling ' + str(roll_period) + ' day beta') High five! You successfully sent some data to your account on plotly. View your plot in your browser at https://plot.ly/~quantalysus/0 or inside your plot.ly account where it is named 'basic-line'
Out[212]:
u'https://plot.ly/~quantalysus/0'
In [202]:
coin1_list[0].to_csv('bitcoin.csv')
coin1_list[1].to_csv('ethereum.csv')
Roadmap
1) Add rolling 90 days
2) Find solution for minimum date bounds for alternative coins
3) Put charts on Plotly
4) Publish chart on Quantalysus
5) Publish Google Doc data | https://medium.com/quantalysus/calculating-beta-vs-bitcoin-84152f0a5353 | [] | 2018-03-28 02:19:47.840000+00:00 | ['Qtum', 'Ethereum', 'Python', 'Plotly', 'Bitcoin'] |
Laptop Buyer’s Guide For The 2020 Holidays | It’s the holiday season again and there’s a bunch of sleek new laptop models out there. Which one should you get? Inspired by my friends' constant questioning of specs and model names, I’ve decided to write a dedicated guide — one that isn’t sponsored by a big name manufacturer or brand. This one’s real. I’m here to teach you how to properly watch out for trickery commonly employed by retailers and maybe break the jargon used as marketing buzz words.
Ready? Let’s begin.
Image by Jaycee Mariano
Online or Traditional?
The first major question is, would you opt for e-commerce or go to the malls to check and test out the lineup yourself? This is important as there are different variables at play here. Some are beyond your control and you should be prepared for this.
Online
The thing with ordering online is, well first off, if you’re coming from the general western part of the world, you’re not unfamiliar with ordering expensive electronics via Amazon or Best Buy. If you’re from, say, the Southeast Asian region, this might be concerning, especially if there’s no cash-on-delivery option. Naturally, Online buying has a lot more things you can’t control, like the time of fulfillment, or the parcel might go missing — that sort of thing. I urge you to only buy from reputable sellers and not some shady store with an obviously-fake price, do your research.
Traditional
I have more experience purchasing computers and related items this way, and is my preferred method as you can test the product immediately if its fully operational, or a dud. Plus you know where to return it, and there’s a huge chance they have stock for a replacement, and the process is instantaneous.
What Is The Laptop’s Purpose?
Use case is an extremely important aspect of getting, well, pretty much anything. Is it a general purpose workstation? A spreadsheet encoder? A social media notebook? Will you develop apps with it? Or will you play demanding games with it?
Your purpose of buying a laptop is more important as it narrows down the choices that may appeal to you, or the person you’re giving that laptop to.
Social Media Consumption
Most things run on a web browser nowadays, and most laptop models are designed around running web browsers really well. If you or your gift’s recipient’s use case falls under the category of Twitter, Facebook, or even Reddit, literally any entry-level laptop will do. If you have extra money to burn, a Macbook Air, because that’s easier to carry around when it’s back to school.
I recommend anything within the (USD) $400 to $500 range. Don’t overspend on a laptop with immensely high specs. That’s probably overpowered for this purpose. These machines will usually have decent power and somewhere around the 8GB of RAM. Windows 10 tends to consume almost half of that immediately, so be wary of 4GB RAM models.
Image by Kaboompics.com
Workstation
I’ll go ahead and group the use case of app development, multimedia, and business in this category. This can generally range from $400 to $1000 depending on what scale of the workload is going to be put on the machine.
App developers, of whatever kind using whatever language or framework tend to use a lot of RAM and processing power (CPU). Graphics don’t really matter a whole lot — unless they’re using the graphics chip for machine learning or some other highly specialized use case. A $600 laptop should be okay as long as the CPU and RAM are decent. I’m talking the Intel H CPUs, just look for the H at the end of the model name, like Intel Core i5-8300H, or 9300H etc. For AMD, check out the Ryzen U series, similar in nomenclature, Ryzen 5 2500U, or 4700U etc. Don’t cheap out on RAM, you’ve been warned.
If you’re doing multimedia work like photography or illustrations, using a lot of Wacom peripherals, that leans a little heavier on graphics. Try finding a laptop equipped with an Nvidia MX350 graphics, or the AMD Vega 9. The distinct difference of laptops equipped with these versus those without is simple: they have a dedicated graphics chip capable of working alongside the CPU. This is helps reduce the CPU workload and extend its lifespan, plus the performance generally tends to be better.
Doing documents and assorted office work? Being tasked to do Zoom or Skype calls? Any laptop running Windows 10 that has a half-decent webcam should help. Just don’t ever cheap out on RAM, trust me on this. Terrible things will happen if you decide to opt for a 4GB machine.
Video Editing / CAD
This particular use case is graphics intensive, and is possibly one of the priciest to grab. Unless you take my tip right now and skip to the gaming laptop advice.
If you’re serious about CAD and/or video editing, the Quadro laptops are what you’re after. They’re not cheap. While there are exceptions, they generally have a price tag that’s higher than most gaming laptops. And their availability is always in question, compared to our next entry.
That sucks right? Let’s move on.
Gaming
Be honest, you’re here for this purpose. Even if you say you’re not, you still want to run games on your laptop anyway.
There’s a wide range of machines capable of running games, but which ones can run Cyberpunk 2077? Or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla? Perhaps you just want to play Counter Strike on it and call it a day. Whichever it is, I assure you, it’s expensive. It always will be. Let’s get it out of the door now, gaming laptops will always have hefty price tags, that’s expected. Still want one? Okay, let’s keep going.
Image by Fredrick Tendong
Gaming laptops are nothing more than regular laptops with powerful hardware. They can do whatever a normal laptop can, but so much faster. A lot of gaming laptop models are notoriously heavy and bulky making them not suited for frequent on-the-go use. There are slimmer and more stylish lineups out there but those gravitate towards the $1200 to $2000+ range.
What does this mean if you’re not really a gamer but need all this horsepower for a laptop? Turns out this is a cheaper alternative if you do video editing and CAD a lot. There are ultrabooks with gaming GPUs, which means you can use them if you need excellent color accuracy with the screen.
If you’re the type of person who likes to game on the side but also depend on their laptop as a workstation, consider a gaming laptop.
There’s also a lot of models with subtle design that doesn’t explode with RGB christmas lights. Again, they’re generally more expensive due to their slimmer form factor. Just prepare a budget range of $600 to $2000+. Still cheaper than a Macbook Pro.
Speaking of a Macbook Pro, these aren’t gaming machines. Don’t expect them to be. I’ve heard one person ask me if that is a good gaming laptop. They’re not for 2 reasons: 1. Hardware is not geared towards gaming, and 2. The operating system lacks support for a lot of games. While they’re certainly powerful machines, don’t get one because you want to game on it.
Specs Demystified
I’ll briefly go over some of the commonly thrown laptop specs by retailers and a bunch of online sellers.
Image by Pok Rie
CPU
The CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is what you’d usually look at to determine the overall speed of that machine. I’m oversimplifying of course but what you need to know is that model nomenclature is confusing. Not on purpose. Let’s try to break that barrier now:
Intel
The Core series is the most well-known for Intel, and they tend to be on almost every laptop for sale right now. The 8th gen to 10th gen lineup of Core series CPUs are pretty good, most sellers are transparent enough to just copy and paste the spec sheet, revealing the generation and type of CPU. There are suffix letters denoting the series of the chip, H series is geared towards performance, while the U series is for power saving.
AMD
They have an even more confusing lineup but if you’re after an AMD laptop, or just so happens your child is bugging you to get one, it’s probably because of the Ryzen series. Can’t really go wrong with any of them, depends on your budget — which we will tackle later.
GPU
The Graphics Processing Unit is kinda like your computer’s CPU but is specifically designed around rendering computer graphics. These are not the same as Integrated Graphics. The main difference being is that a GPU is a discrete physical chip on your laptop’s motherboard, while Integrated Graphics is built right into your CPU.
To help you get started, Nvidia is the easiest one to latch onto, as AMD tends to have the worse nomenclature compared to its closest competitor. If you’re aim is to do some gaming, go for the Nvidia GTX 10 or 16 series of cards. If you’re extra serious about graphics, go for the RTX 2000 series.
To be fair to those who want Radeon, there are a few laptops with the RX 5500 GPU out there, they’re not common, and I heard the build quality isn’t up to par compared to mainline Intel + Nvidia machines. I’m currently using something called an RX560X, which turns out to be just one of its many retail names — making AMD the most confusing for graphics.
RAM — Random Access Memory (GB)
Your laptop’s RAM determines the amount of applications and processes you can run at a time. The more you have, the more apps you can run concurrently. The less you have, the more likely it is for your machine to slowdown and eventually crash. I will keep repeating this but don’t buy a 4GB laptop.
HDD / SSD (GB and/or TB)
Hard Disk Drives are the older generation of storage media, they’re cheaper and tend to have higher capacity and lifespan. They’re meant to work alongside the Solid State Drive nowadays.
SSDs are expensive, and the price goes exponentially higher for bigger capacity. You’ll want to use this for your operating system’s boot drive.
Image by Karolina Gabrowska
Budget
Depending on your purpose above, and what specs you generally want, higher budget means higher performance and portability. Quick tips time:
Concept Stores Are Pricey
If you purchase from a branded concept store, as in the store with the brand name, they generally tend to be more expensive. There are reasons for this, but that’s outside our topic. Go for reputable retailers. This applies to online as well.
Older Generations Are Still Fast But Cheaper
Don’t always go for the latest and greatest, because they’re obviously going to be more expensive. I recommend you check out 2–3 year old models because they’re still fast and future-proof for today’s workload, especially if that workload only involves web browsing.
It’s Buying Time
If you decided to go online for purchasing, this is the end of the line for you. I can’t really ask you to test the device first or get a feel for its build quality, that sort of thing. I recommend watching some well-known content creators on YouTube for laptop reviews to at least know what it’s like owning that specific model. I do also suggest that you record your package arrival and opening so if it just so happens you receive a paperweight instead of a laptop, you have good proof.
Common Sleight of Hand In Retail
I’ve had the displeasure at being at the receiving end of some of this stuff when I first bought a laptop. They’re evolving every year.
Image by Felix Lichtenfeld
Upgrade Switcheroo
Do you want an upgrade for that laptop? Know the make and model of the RAM or SSD, these are usually the only things you can upgrade when buying a laptop. It’s common that retailers switch up the common Kingston drives for some cheap and unknown maker then charge you all the same. Ask them to show the upgrade’s origin or packaging.
Installation Fee
If you so happen to apply an upgrade, you will be charged for installation fee. Which I think is unfair, installing NVMe SSD and RAM is so hilariously easy, you can look this up on Google and do it yourself for free.
If they say they’re moving Windows from the preinstalled HDD to the SSD, and it costs money, be prepared for a hefty fee. Unless you really don’t want to move Windows yourself — prepare cash on hand.
Promo Coupon And Warranty
Does that laptop come with freebies or a coupon? Do you NOT care for those? Or maybe that “free" upgrade requires you to register the employee’s name instead of yours?
This is a giant red flag to step away from that store. They will register the coupon and in turn the warranty under their name. You’ll have basically no ownership of the laptop that you paid for. Avoid this at all costs!
Some Final Things To Consider
Always remember to test your laptop of choice before getting it. Don’t ever rush to grab one because your EQ is running short after 2020 robbed you of a good time.
“But my friend says X brand sucks, Y brand is better!” Don’t listen to that argument. Everyone says every brand sucks. You should pursue doing research before buying anything, it’s good for both your brain and your wallet. You at least now know better.
On the topic of Used Laptops, I really don’t recommend this. No amount of reassurance stickers is going to make that thing last longer or magically remove defects. Unless you’re really strapped for cash, then go for it, no one’s stopping you.
Image by Lisa Fotios
Conclusion
Okay that was a lot, if you made it this far, congratulations! You now know way better than you otherwise would have. This is baseline knowledge and there’s a lot more to consumer electronics that the marketing people sweep under the rug.
I didn’t do laptop recommendations because that means making assumptions about your use case and budget, and even current location!
Anyway thanks for reading. I hope this helps you in some way, or at least clears out much of the smoke and mirrors of laptops and computers in general. | https://medium.com/@alphonso-javier/laptop-buyers-guide-for-the-2020-holidays-83477963f612 | ['Al Javier'] | 2020-12-09 08:23:46.543000+00:00 | ['Shopping', 'Gifts', 'Holidays', 'Laptop', 'Guides And Tutorials'] |
Trump Isn’t Losing The Election, Yet | Trump Isn’t Losing The Election, Yet
It’s a strategy we’ve seen before and was effective.
Photo from Associated Press
Poll after poll after poll has shown Donald J. Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by a huge margin. One poll shows Trump lagging behind Biden by 16 points in Michigan, a crucial swing state in the 2020 election. The left screamed this from the rooftops for a moment.
Until they realized that this would make some Biden voters complacent. There is some debate as to whether this is a Trump strategy or not, but what most can agree on is that if voters think Biden has the election in the bag, they won’t vote.
For proof of this, scholars and political pundits don’t need to reach back very far into history. They just need to look at the 2016 election.
The Hillary Effect
Many people viewed the 2016 election, less as an actual election process, and more of a coronation of Hillary Clinton. Her credentials spoke to her experience and begged for her to become the first female president. When Trump won the Republican nomination, calling the general election a farce was being generous.
Under normal circumstances, Trump’s obvious and blatant racism would have curtailed most candidates. Mocking disabled reporters and boasting about being able to commit crimes would have been the final nail in the coffin. Mitt Romney was roasted for much less.
Every single poll showed Hillary winning the election. While she was considered the lesser of two evils, there was some excitement around her campaign and she seemed destined to move into the White House.
Yet it was Trump who inaugurated thanks to the electoral college. His victory in three states was so razor-thin that many thought there should have been a recount in those states. It didn’t happen.
Hillary won the popular vote by more than 3 million.
Biden’s Dilemma
How is it possible that Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote? In states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, he brought in less than 10,000 more votes. Some Monday morning quarterbacks have said Hillary’s big mistake was not visiting those states and assuming that they would go for her.
Why did she not go there? Because the polls showed her ahead in each of those states until it was too late. Some of her voters may not have felt an urgent need to cast their ballots because they assumed she would easily sail to victory. Something that Trump allegedly believed as well.
With the polls showing much the same thing in 2020, what is Biden to do? Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, economic collapse, and protests against systemic racism, his polling advantage has been on an upswing all year. But there is a danger in believing the polls and not campaigning, as some high ranking officials have suggested.
They want Trump to self-destruct. It is almost certain that he will.
What To Do?
But his from the hip commentary and racist language is what attracted some voters to him in the first place. Trump is no ordinary politician. Scandal after scandal has slid right off of him, including him blackmailing the president of Ukraine, which led to him being impeached by the House of Representatives.
The senate acquitting him has emboldened him as he wields the power afforded to him by the office as he bats away negative press. His former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is set to publish a damning memoir and Trump is using the Department of Justice as an arm of his PR wing to silence a dissenting voice.
An action that he has tried to take with poll numbers that suggest he is losing to Biden. White House attorneys sent a letter to CNN asking them to retract their story and issue an apology to Trump. As their evidence, they shared a poll given by John McLaughlin that shows Trump ahead by unbelievable margins. The issue with this was that McLaughlin is notoriously wrong with his polls and worded his survey in a provocative way.
With all of this, Biden staying out of the campaign as much as possible does sound like a good way to ensure victory. However, he needs to excite his voters and get them to the polls in November. It would also be wise for the former vice president to really focus on exciting his supporters in swing states.
There should be a celebration that it seems like Trump might be evicted from the people’s house. But we should be cautious that the polls have been wrong before and could be stuck with him for another four years. | https://medium.com/harsh-light-news/trump-isnt-losing-the-election-yet-bc1a843baf4d | ['Edward Anderson'] | 2020-06-18 17:33:20.066000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Opinion', 'Strategy', 'Careers', 'Election 2020'] |
Subsets and Splits