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Make a Resolution and Read These 5 Books in 2021

Make a Resolution and Read These 5 Books in 2021 5 Books to Read to Become a Pro-Reader Instantly Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash A year filled with unwanted circumstances, and fear has come to an end. Still, I find this year special for me because this year I have truly achieved what I could not in the past years. Like me, there are many outs there who have achieved so many great things and pursued their passion or explored their creativity this year. 2020 is a year of blessing in disguise. I have read over 21 books in the year 2020 so far. And there 5 books which I would like to recommend to others who are or want to take a resolution of reading books in the coming year 2021. I got you, my friends. These five books are thought-provoking, which will nourish your mind and will help you find your better self. Atomic Habits by James Clear This book has truly changed my perspective of doing things. It is one of the best books which I’ve read this year. Created By Author using Canva Pro Here, the author James Clear has explored and described some practical ways to build your habits, which eventually turned into a system that will help you achieve your goals quickly. He focuses on topics like; Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour. If you want better results like your idol has achieved, try to focus on their system instead of focusing on their success. Four Laws of Behaviour Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are making it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. There are some visual representations in the book which I adored. Atomic Habits is a life-changing practical guide that you can implement easily into your life to see some changes. James Clear has also explained some prominent examples which are convincing and smart. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell I was totally unaware of this book before reading it, but by the time I crossed the Steve Jobs example of why there are several factors behind his success. I was completely into it. It took me 3 days to complete this book and I have also listened to the audible version, which is also outstanding. Created By Author using Canva Pro Outliers is based on the stories of successful people and it explores the un-explored way which tells us that there are not only passion, hard-work, and goodwill involved behind all these successful billionaires. But many other things helped them to become who they are today. I truly liked the 10K hour rule concept, which describes that if you want to be a master in any kind of work. You need to have at least 10,000 hours under your belt to attain that position. Malcolm is a phenomenal story-teller and his examples are pretty well researched. It keeps you hooked till the end. There so many insightful research and theories which you have never heard of or even tried to think of. Totally out of the box! Outliers: The Story of Success, go give it a shot. It’s worth it. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey If I have summarised my experience with this book, I would say it is a hell of a fun ride, filled with laughter and learning moments. It is a love letter to life. Created By Author using Canva Pro It is a memoir filled with remembering life experiences from the life of Matthew McConaughey, written by Matthew McConaughey and also narrated by Matthew McConaughey (if you are listening to the audiobook version). I started off with a book and later shifted to an audiobook version because listening to the enchanting voice of Matthew feels so much energy. It feels like I’m in the moment experiencing those things in front of my eyes. I love his accent, the way he tells ‘Notes to self’ sections, and all the minute details about his life during Australia and how he landed on the audition of Dazed & Confused, and many more. “Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.” — Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey One thing which I learned from this memoir is to appreciate life as it is. To find greenlights instead of red and yellow. Highly Recommended. The Trial by Franz Kafka It is sad knowing Kafka left this world so early without knowing how talented he is which we all consider now years later. He is the prime example of innate talent. I have read ‘The Castle’ and recently the first fiction I read this year is ‘The Trial’ which literally blew my mind because it is so complex that I had to see the movie by the same name directed by Orson Welles in 1962 starring Anthony Perkins. Created By Author using Canva Pro In its uncomfortable portrayal of a society where people are watched by the secret police and unexpectedly detained, the trial is profoundly thought-provoking, representing the social unrest in Europe during 1914. I do not want to explain anything in detail because it is worth reading and to know how Kafka raises some questions which are noteworthy. Reading fiction like this always plays with your mind because it is boring yet challenging to grasp at the start, but it awakens that spark in your mind to learn and explore themes you haven’t discovered. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. The discovery by Freud that the dream is the medium by which the unconscious can be investigated is arguably the most revolutionary move forward in psychology’s entire history. This book caught my attention because ‘Dreams’, the word itself, is fascinating and worth exploring. Created By Author using Canva Pro Freud discusses some dreaming-thinking literature and his principles are entirely drawn from his own research, but they also draw on other people’s experiences and works in the field which would be unsurprising in itself. There are also some sections of the book which illogical for our period to believe in. But if you want to understand the psychology of dreaming, Freud’s work is absolutely worth reading. It is fascinating to look into Freud’s research about dreams and the psychology behind dreaming. “Dreams are never concerned with trivia.” — Sigmund Freud So these are my 5 book recommendation, which I want you to read and make a resolution for 2021 to read these five books next year. I am damn sure that all these books are excellent and will not disappoint in any aspect. Still, everyone has their own taste, but still. If you got any great recommendations for me please comment down your response below. I am eager to explore more books for the next year. Keep Reading.

https://medium.com/illumination/make-a-resolution-and-read-these-5-books-in-2021-7d9201cedaf6

['Neil S.']

2020-12-18 12:21:15.449000+00:00

['Mindfulness', 'Books', 'Habits', 'Novel', 'Writing']

Do you need an Amazon advertising strategy?

E-marketer recently reported that Amazon, is the number 3 Digital Ad platform in the US. Right after Google (37.1%) and Facebook (20.6%). With its 4.1% market share, Amazon has now passed mighty Oath, and Microsoft. There are many reasons for this, one of which is an accounting change at Amazon. Nonetheless, here’s the reality that should get your attention — Amazon is sitting on a massive amount of data that they will be looking to monetize through advertising. As a strategist, they should be on your radar if they weren’t already. Next question: Do you need an Amazon ad strategy right now? What problem can Amazon ads solve for you? Let’s start with the nature of the Amazon marketplace, and what sets it apart from Google and Facebook. Once you have a grip on those two things, you can answer the question of whether Amazon needs to be in your advertising mix. Direct to consumers Amazon is, of course, primarily an online marketplace for consumers and brands to sell product. To help your product rank high in Amazon search results and get the attention of your prospects, the company provides a number of paid solutions — sponsored postings, video formats, and more. But Amazon doesn’t just own the Amazon domains, it also has other major websites such as IMDB.com. So naturally you can advertise your products there, too. What does that mean for you? Simple. If your business has a direct-to-consumer relationship, i.e. you sell products directly to consumers, Amazon ads are something to take note of. And if you don’t you have to ask yourself if your product should have a direct to consumer relationship. Typically, this applies for CPG type brand who want to bypass or augment the retail distribution model. It allows them to supplement sales without investment in e-commerce and to avoid costly shelf-space wars. What that looks like in terms of Amazon strategy and how that works with your Google and Facebook strategy is to be figured out by your marketing team. A little more on that below. Target markets But Amazon’s true advertising strength comes from its data. “Today over 54% of product searches that occur on the entire internet occur on Amazon,” says Bloomberg Technology. To put it another way, Amazon has a massive, ever-growing treasure chest of detailed data on online purchase behaviour. Combine that with the data garnered from its hosting arm over the years- AWS and you can get an idea for Amazon’s scale. Their established position and their data are the true power of their advertising platform. If you believe that you can find your target market by extrapolating from their actual purchases or purchase-intent behaviours, you’ll have the right fit with Amazon. For example, for one of our clients we knew that people who are interested in musical instruments and accessories would align well with our target market. So we picked up Amazon as an advertising channel. That doesn’t mean that your ads will be on Amazon directly. It means you’ll be using Amazon insights to serve advertising throughout their owned platforms. How does it compare? Following, the framework we take my clients through to help with decision-making on Amazon advertising. Google primarily has data about the next moment: What is one person looking to do a moment from now? Where are they going to go? What are they looking for? Of course, Google has more, but this is a good place to start from a mental model perspective. The question to ask is: Do you want to catch your consumer in the very moment when they want or need your services? A classic example is a person shopping for a new car. Your ads need to be present when a prospect is doing research and moving through the buying process. No surprise, search advertising is a stable pillar in the automotive marketing mix. By contrast, Facebook’s strength come from data about habits, interests, and their connections. What does one person read? What do they like? What do they enjoy? Who are they connected to? To understand the appropriateness of this channel for your service/product, ask yourself: Do I know precisely who my target market is? What do I actually know about them demographically and psychographically? By contrast, Amazon has data about purchase intent — what do people want to buy and what have they bought. Now you have to decide whether past purchases and purchase searches are a stronger predictor for your brand or, for instance, online searches. The answer is likely a combination of both. And that’s just the beginning With Alexa, WholeFoods, and Go Stores, Amazon now offers access to voice search data, retail shopping habits, and food consumption behaviour — all in one space. And make no mistake, all that data will be eventually monetized. So. Will you have an Amazon ad strategy? Update: Amazon Tests Search-Based Retargeting, The First Time Its Search Data Leaves Its Walls

https://medium.com/empathyinc/do-you-need-an-amazon-advertising-strategy-258e04219ae5

['Mo Dezyanian']

2018-10-29 15:06:02.045000+00:00

['Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Amazon']

CatBoost: Cross-Validated Bayesian Hyperparameter Tuning

We know that, in order to train a model that generalizes well to unseen data, that we cannot overfit the model to the data. Given a real-life data set, there is no way to tell how well a model will generalize, just because you never know what kind of real life data might be thrown at the model in the future. New data might not conform well to the distributions of existing data. So you use cross-validation — divide the data into folds (let’s say 5, for now), and train on all but one of the folds (4 of them) and then test your model on the 5th — in other words, always leave one out as the validation data. So you’re actually training 5 models, each of which have different performance scores on their respective validation sets. Since these models might have different weights, in order to consolidate you have to find some “average” of the three models, something that would do well no matter what validation data it’s facing. Of course, before you do that you have to have some loss function to train the model with, and then evaluate the model using some other error measure. Let’s say we have a binary classification problem, so that the target class is {0,1}, and we decide to use the Matthews Correlation Coefficient, which is a balanced measure of classifier performance. It takes into account all 4 “quadrants” of the confusion matrix — true and false positives and negatives. CatBoost, like most decision-tree based learners, needs some hyperparameter tuning. There are plenty of hyperparameter optimization libraries in Python, but for this I am using bayesian-optimization. From their documentation is this explanation of how the whole thing works: Bayesian optimization works by constructing a posterior distribution of functions (gaussian process) that best describes the function you want to optimize. As the number of observations grows, the posterior distribution improves, and the algorithm becomes more certain of which regions in parameter space are worth exploring and which are not, as seen in the picture below. For the Matthews Correlation Coefficient, you can just use the implementation from matthews_corrcoef from sklearn.metrics. Take a gander at the code first. In this case X1 is the data matrix of features, and Y1 is the binary class targets: You’re probably familiar with the StratifiedKFold from sklearn, which divides the data into folds, while trying to keep the ratio of classes about the same in each fold. You can see here we have 5 folds, and, importantly, that we are appending the Matthews score into a list (so there will be 5 scores) and then finding the mean (np.mean(), where np is numpy). Therefore, the idea is that we are finding values of the hyperparameters that, in theory, guarantee a certain level of generalizability. In addition, we can use l2_leaf_reg, and model_size_reg, num_bins, num_leaves and other such hyperparameters to reduce overfitting. The pbounds (parameter bounds) dictionary you see in the code above contains ranges for the hyperparameters, and of course, YMMV, but I have found that these ranged are a good place to start. Sometimes, you have to run the algorithm a few times, first with wider ranges, and then narrowing it down. This is because too large a band and the algorithm might not converge in the number of iterations you’ve allotted. You can see that I did int(depth) and int(num_leaves), for example, because the BHO process will come up with floats, which then have to converted into integers, because you can’t have 2.33 leaves or 44.55 estimators (trees). I want to use the best model, so the use_best_model parameter is set to True, which means that when you call .fit, you have to add the eval_set = (valx1, valy1) bit at the end. Just to reiterate, the point of this that I wanted to create a model that is, to the best of our knowledge, generalizable — but generalizable specifically in terms of its performance on the Matthews Correlation Coefficient. You’ll find that using the ROC-AUC, F1, accuracy, or other such metrics will result in different hyperparameter values.

https://medium.com/ai-in-plain-english/catboost-cross-validated-bayesian-hyperparameter-tuning-91f1804b71dd

['Peijin Chen']

2020-09-25 14:01:30.856000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Machine Learning', 'Bayesian Optimization']

The Sharp Startup: When PayPal Found Product-Market Fit

Reflections on the 20th anniversary of a $100+ billion product Twenty years ago this month, PayPal found product-market fit. I remember the moment vividly because it’s a dramatic example of a strategy that still works today. I call it “going Sharp.” Whereas the average startup launches a bunch of features for a bunch of use cases to appeal to many possible users, the Sharp Startup focuses on a few killer features for the most desperate customer segment. In short, it finds a wedge into the market. The Sharp Startup focuses on the most desperate customer segment. It finds a wedge into the market. While it’s important to have a larger vision, the Sharp Startup remains opportunistic and agile enough that when it spots this kind of opening in the market, it drops everything else and drives all of its troops through it. I recall the moment that happened at PayPal. I was sharing an office with Luke Nosek at the legendary 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. Luke ran marketing while I was in charge of product. It was a contrast in styles as Luke was terrific at brainstorming new ideas whereas I was obsessed with getting the product to work. Crammed into a tiny office, our impromptu jam sessions resulted in some great collaborations. In November 1999, our customer service rep forwarded me an email from an eBay power seller. The eBay seller had turned the PayPal logo into a nice-looking button for her auctions and was asking our permission to use it. Ironically I was forwarded the message not for product reasons but because I was temporarily handling the company’s legal affairs, owing to a law degree I’ve hardly ever used. It was a potential trademark infringement question. At the time, we were vaguely aware of the auction use case but it was discussed along with splitting dinner tabs, student allowances, and a bunch of other nebulous value props. The truth is that we thought “emailing money” was a terrific product idea but we had no idea who would actually use it or what the market would be. Luke had come up with PayPal’s now-famous $10 signup and referral bonuses to encourage the product to spread. But without a clear picture of the ideal user, we didn’t know who to target, and adoption had been tepid. I brought up the email with Luke. It seemed extraordinary that an eBay seller had taken the time to create her own PayPal auction button. If she cared that much, how many others did too? It seemed extraordinary that an eBay seller had taken the time to create her own PayPal auction button. If she cared that much, how many others did too? We went to the eBay website and searched for ‘paypal’. Hundreds of auctions appeared in the search results because PayPal was mentioned in the item description as a possible method of payment. Our minds were blown! eBay sellers were desperate for a solution because their alternative was to wait a week for a check to arrive in the mail and then wait for it to clear. Some of them had already found PayPal on their own. One of them cared enough to make an auction button and ask our permission to use it. We were giddy. We knew we had just found signs of initial product-market fit. Now how could we accelerate it? First of all, you can use our logo, we told the auction seller. Better yet, we’re going to give you an even nicer one. We pulled in our web designer, who was none other than Chad Hurley, the future founder of YouTube. PayPal’s famous Buy Now buttons were inspired by a customer service email. Chad quickly created a pay-me-with-PayPal button that eBay sellers could embed in their auctions. They just had to copy & paste the HTML. To reduce friction further, we allowed sellers to enter their eBay credentials and we would automatically insert the button into all their auctions. In other words, we productized the idea. Fueled by the powerful incentive of the referral bonus, the program spread like wildfire in the tight-knit eBay community. Soon, most auctions were advertising PayPal. We rolled out other features for auction sellers that made it even more convenient to use PayPal. We dropped other plans and went all-in on the eBay use case. We dropped other plans and went all-in on the eBay use case. Results were immediate. At the end of 1999, PayPal had less than 10,000 users. By the end of January 2000, we hit 100,000 users. A few months after that, 1 million. By the summer of 2000, 5 million. It felt like the servers were melting. The growth curve looked like a perfect hockey stick. It was a classic Sharp strategy: we identified the most desperate customer segment, went all-in on their use case, and found ways to turbo-charge the adoption. Notably, many of the key features were distribution tricks, not just product enhancements. As a result, we captured the key beachhead market of the nascent online payments space, ahead of our many competitors. Admittedly, we were very lucky. After casting a wide net, we stumbled onto the break-out use case. But at least when fortune smiled on us in the form of a customer service email, we didn’t send it to the spam folder.

https://medium.com/craft-ventures/the-sharp-startup-when-paypal-found-product-market-fit-5ba47ad35d0b

['David Sacks']

2019-11-11 19:01:53.936000+00:00

['Startup Lessons', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Marketing', 'Venture Capital', 'Startup']

How I Quadruple my Productivity by Working at The Café

We all hit walls along the path to productivity, and although it’s not easy to overcome them, we all have ways of at least trying to do so. One of my favourite ways is to hit the café. Getting there becomes an obstacle on its own if I start thinking about the fact that I have to put on my jacket, my shoes, pack up my stuff, and ride my bike for literally 5 minutes. But one of the amazing things with creative work is that the more you output, the easier it gets. You can start completely uninspired, with no idea where you’re going. If you convince yourself to start working for 5 minutes, you could be on a 3-hour productivity rush before you even realize it. This is why I still put my jacket and my shoes on, pack up my stuff, and ride my bike for 5 minutes. Because I know it will get easier. The order The order is really important. I consider it a very small investment in myself. Whatever I order, be it a coffee, a cookie, or both, I have now spent money to be here, to get to work. I have to get a return, even on this tiny little investment. A habit is a redundant set of automatic and unconscious thoughts, behaviours, and emotions, acquired through repetition. When you’ve done something so many times that your body knows how to do it better than your mind, you’ve successfully created a habit. I like to think that I have gotten to this point with my coffeeshop routine. Once I have made the order, my brain (and body) switches to work mode. I don’t consider this coffee (or cookie) a reward, because I haven’t started working yet. The coffee is the cue that will initiate the work habit loop. The reward is the output I will have at the end of my session. josephmavericks.com (coffee icon by joe pictos from the Noun Project) If you’re interested in learning more about the habit loop, I recommend Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit. The place The café I go to is usually not crowded, therefore pretty quiet. The music is ok, the atmosphere is chill, and the chairs are somewhat comfy. The environment is important when working. The occasional environment switch is just as much. The reason I go to a café is because sometimes, I just can’t get to work at home. I walk around the house I’m distracted by everything I go have a bite in the kitchen I watch useless videos I lie in bed staring at the ceiling in a starfish position An environmental switch is one the best ways for me to change that. So I get out, and once I’m at the café, I know I’m here to work. The work I follow a very strict set of rules to make sure I maximise my return on the investment I made in myself. I do not allow myself any distraction whatsoever When I work at home, I might a have break, go for a walk, eat a snack, get distracted by a notification. Not at the coffeeshop. I barely ever use and/or need the wifi network there. I write. I disable notifications on my laptop (“do not disturb mode” on Mac) I don’t bring my phone with me unless I need it, which is almost never I don’t have breaks, because I’m sitting in a café. I can’t really go for a walk. Disable notifications on Mac Nicolas Cole didn’t have an internet connection at his place from the ages of 22 to 26. Why? Because he was working on his book, and he didn’t wan’t any sort of distraction to get in the way of his goal: finishing his book. By being so strict with himself, he drastically increased his productivity and his commitment to his target. I work in 1 or 2-hour sessions Because I force myself to not get distracted and I made a tiny financial investment in myself, I usually stay at the coffee shop for a while. I can catch up on a whole day made of constant interruptions and occasional procrastination in one coffeeshop session. I sometimes stay for more than 2 hours, and I’m always surprised by the amount of stuff I get done. Regardless of my motivation and my creative output, I don’t allow myself to leave before an hour has passed. I always end up getting to work and staying longer. I follow an agenda The first thing I do when I sit down at my table and pull out my laptop is this: I open up Textedit, and I write all the things I intend on doing during my work session. Sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s little, and I don’t always get to the end of it. But what gets done is done for good, and I don’t need to think about it anymore. It doesn’t matter if I’m over ambitious. Ambition drive results. Again, I do not allow myself to get off track. If I’m getting stuck on a task, I pick another one from my list. But I don’t think of something else I could do if it’s not on the list. The reward My greatest reward is the work I get done over my session. It makes me really happy, it pushes me to keep going forward with my project. It also makes me confident that it’s all worth it. If I’m on a roll and I feel like working even more, I might re-order something, usually a coffee. In conclusion, here are the steps of the Café Action Plan I use to overcome a wall on my productivity path:

https://medium.com/mavericks-thoughts/how-i-quadruple-my-productivity-by-going-to-the-caf%C3%A9-73cdbc526459

['Joseph Mavericks']

2019-12-14 16:48:47.625000+00:00

['Habit Building', 'Productivity', 'Motivation', 'Habits', 'Work']

How To Succeed Without Being A Workaholic: Twitter Co-founder Shares His Secret

Stone proves you can have your cake and eat it, too. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. To succeed, you must eat, sleep and breathe your work. You should put your blinders on, block out all distractions and keep your eyes on the prize. For most of us, this is our mantra. I certainly believed it until I interviewed one of today’s greatest entrepreneurs, Isaac “Biz” Stone. As the cofounder of Twitter and Blogger, his success speaks for itself. But what’s his secret? Growing up, did he solely focus on startups until he reached 10,000 hours? To understand Stone’s success, let’s rewind to his years at Wellesley High School. Back then, his friends were drama nerds, his favorite movie was The Princess Bride and he directed and starred in the school’s production of Robin Hood (posters around town read, “Isaac Stone presents: Robin Hood, Starring Biz Stone!”). He even found a way to put together the play after the school unexpectedly cut its budget. “We were scrappy. I remember going door-to-door in January collecting old Christmas trees for the backdrop of Sherwood Forest,” Stone recalled. “Come show time, we drew a full house. We did matinees, evening shows, and more. It was so successful that we even took the show on the road for a little while.” It’s easy to assume that Stone’s devotion to theater put him behind peers who spent that time hacking away in computer labs. However, University of Michigan Psychologists Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak say the opposite. In 1980, they conducted a fascinating experiment that explains why Stone’s “irrelevant” experiences actually boosted his creativity, problem-solving, and entrepreneurial abilities. To illustrate, consider this brainteaser: Suppose you’re a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach. It’s impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed, the patient will die. There is a kind of ray that can destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once at a sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed. Unfortunately, at this intensity, the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the way to the tumor will also be destroyed. At lower intensities, the rays are harmless to healthy tissue but will not affect the tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue? If you can’t solve it, you’re not alone. Only 3% of Gick and Holyoak’s subjects could. Now, read this unrelated passage and see if anything changes. A fortress was located in the center of the country. Many roads radiated out from the fortress. A general wanted to capture the fortress with his army. But he also wanted to prevent mines on the roads from destroying his army and neighboring villages. As a result, the entire army could not all go down one road to attack the fortress. However, the entire army was needed to capture the fortress; an attack by one small group could not succeed. The general therefore divided his army into several small groups. He positioned the small groups at the heads of the different roads. The small groups simultaneously converged on the fortress. In this way, the army captured the fortress. When this military story preceded the medical problem, subjects were 67% more likely to find the solution! If you’re still stumped, you kill the tumor the same way the army conquered the fortress (blast low intensity rays from different sides of the tumor and have them converge in the middle. That way, the collective ray will have a high intensity to destroy the tumor without harming the healthy tissue around it). Drawing powerful analogies between two unrelated worlds is called conceptual blending. This process has sparked countless breakthroughs, including Henry Ford’s famous idea for automobile assembly lines, which came after he saw slaughterhouses process pigs the same way. Stone changed my perspective on working hard vs. working smart. For Stone, conceptual blending between theater and startups was his X-factor. It gave him unique insights beyond others in the tech industry. His knack for understanding a customer’s pain points derives from his acting years, when he learned to empathize and put himself in other peoples’ shoes. His charisma on stage later translated to the boardroom, where he won over investors instead of audience members. “If you want to be good at what you do, you have to have new, varied experiences as much as possible,” Stone explained. “I’ve always thought that creativity and problem-solving comes from lateral thinking. In other words, the ability to connect dots you otherwise couldn’t connect if you didn’t have a robust set of experiences to draw from.” Today, Stone still adds to his robust set of experiences. Recently, he produced a short movie for Project Imagit10n with legendary director Ron Howard. Just like high school, Stone did it all: he spent many late nights writing storylines, casting actors and directing on set. The result was Evermore, a moving film about a girl who reunites her mother and grandfather using motifs from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. “I feared the ‘go back to your day job’ comment,” he said. “But it’s always worth getting new experiences when you can. The more things you do outside your comfort zone, the more you’ll make leaps and jumps when you return to your ‘normal work life.’ The more you’ll be able to see further ahead than others.” Stone’s story shows the importance of exploring the unimportant. His outlet was theater but for you it may be improv comedy, photography, or painting. For me, it’s creating cartoons. Stone helped me realize it’s beneficial to pursue interests outside work. Before, I felt downright guilty. I thought the time I spent doodling took away from my job as a product marketer. But the opposite is true. Creating the Every Vowel cartoon series has made me a clearer thinker, better designer and stronger copywriter. Looking beyond our industry helps us succeed within it. Next time you find yourself eating, sleeping, and breathing your work, just remember: taking your blinders off doesn’t mean taking your eyes off the prize.

https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-to-succeed-without-being-a-workaholic-twitter-co-founder-shares-his-secret-7dfd3d1a260a

['Jon Youshaei']

2016-10-26 22:21:33.986000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Storytelling', 'Tech', 'Twitter', 'Entrepreneurship']

Halloween in New York

Cartoonist for the New Yorker among other places. I love my mom and white wine. My graphic memoir MURDER BOOK out in 2021. Follow on Insta @CartoonsbyHilary! Follow

https://medium.com/spiralbound/halloween-in-new-york-28f3ea7dcf87

['Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell']

2018-10-19 13:01:01.837000+00:00

['Hilary Campbell', 'Nonfiction', 'Comics', 'Halloween', 'New York']

Resampling Methods for Inference Analysis

1. Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is a method to create samples with replacement from the original sample. Since it is done with replacement each data point has an equal probability of being picked subsequently. We can bootstrap n times (say 1000), calculate and record the desired estimate (i.e. mean) for each of these n samples. In the end, we can find the distribution for the desired estimate. Image by author 📢General use cases of bootstrapping are finding robust estimates of confidence intervals, standard errors of population parameters such as mean, median, correlation coefficient, regression coefficient, etc. To illustrate Bootstrapping in Python, I will be using Fish market dataset from Kaggle. The dataset consists of 7 common different fish species in fish market sales and I will be focusing on the “Roach” fish. I will also be selecting “Length1” as attribute. data = pd.read_csv('./Fish.csv') data = data.loc[data["Species"] == "Roach"]["Length1"] pd.DataFrame({'values': data.describe()}).reset_index() As above we can calculate the sample mean with data.mean(), 95% confidence intervals with np.percentile(data, [2.5,97.5]). However, by going from sample distribution to the population distribution, we are making several hidden assumptions such as: distribution of the “Length1” values are normally distributed and confidence intervals are symmetric. In most cases, these assumptions might not be correct. mean = data.mean() confidence_int = np.percentile(data, [2.5, 97.5]) Sample Mean= 20.65, 95% Confidence Interval = [14.61, 27.36] Distribution of Length1 Values with the 95% Confidence Intervals For this reason, we should bootstrap to find mean and confidence intervals.👇 mean_lengths, n = [], 1000 for i in range(n): sample = np.random.choice(data["Length1"], replace=True, size=len(data)) sample_mean = sample.mean() mean_lengths.append(sample_mean) boot_mean = np.mean(mean_lengths) boot_ci = np.percentile(mean_lengths, [2.5, 97.5]) Bootstrapped Mean= 20.60, 95% Confidence Interval = [19.22 22.07] Distribution of Bootstrapped Sample Mean Values with the 95% Confidence Intervals 2. Jackknife Resampling Jackknife resampling technique is based on creating samples by systematically leaving one observation out in the original dataset. We should calculate the desired value for each sample and then find the distribution of all values. As an example, if we are given a sample with size n, then the Jackknife estimate is found by aggregating the estimated statistic of each (n-1) samples. Image by author 📢General use cases of Jackknife resampling is finding variance and bias. mean_lengths, n = [], len(data) index = np.arange(n) for i in range(n): jk_sample = data[index != i] mean_lengths.append(jk_sample.mean()) mean_lengths_jk = np.mean(np.array(mean_lengths)) jk_variance = (n-1)*np.var(mean_lengths) Jackknife estimate of the mean = 20.64 Jackknife estimate of the variance = 0.59 3. Permutation Test Permutation test is a type of statistical significance test, which tries to obtain the distribution of the test statistic (under the null hypothesis) without making strong assumptions about data. Imagine that we are given 2 samples and we would like to test whether if these 2 samples have different characteristics (i.e. mean). We could calculate the mean of the 2 samples and decide whether they are different or not. But analyzing in this way wouldn’t be statistically significant since we do not have the data of entire population, but only subsets from it. Instead, we can perform permutation test, which works as follows: Combine two samples into a single dataset. Shuffle the combined dataset and randomly resample it into 2 datasets (sized same as prior samples). Calculate the test statistics (i.e. the difference between means) and record the value. Repeat the steps above n times (say 10000 times). Compare the original test statistic with the recorded values, if the original test statistic lies well with the permuted records then test statistics are indeed not different and the difference between sample means is only due to chance. If the original statistic lies outside of the most permuted records than it means that there is a significant difference between the two samples. To illustrate Permutation test in Python, I will be using again the Fish market dataset from Kaggle. This time I will be focusing on the “Roach” fish by selecting “Length1” & “Length2” attributes. 💬I will be investigating if the mean values of these two values differ significantly or due to chance. First 5 rows from the dataset data["Length1"].mean() data["Length2"].mean() Mean of Length1: 20.65 Mean of Length2: 22.27 We are investigating whether the difference between two sample means (-1.62) is by chance or statistically significant. --> Step 1: Combine datasets sample1 = data["Length1"] sample2 = data["Length2"] data = np.concatenate([sample1, sample2]) --> Step 2: Shuffle and randomly resample into 2 datasets perm = np.array([np.random.permutation(len(sample1) + len(sample2)) for i in range(10000)]) permuted_1_db = data[perm[:, :len(sample1)]] permuted_2_db = data[perm[:, len(sample1):]] --> Step 3: Calculate the test statistics samples = np.mean(permuted_1_db, axis=1) - np.mean(permuted_2_db, axis=1) --> Step 4: Repeat it n times Done in step 2 with for loop --> Step 5: Compare the original test stat with the recorded values test_stat = np.mean(sample1) - np.mean(sample2) p_val = 2*np.sum(samples >= np.abs(test_stat))/10000 print("p-value = {}".format(p_val)) test_statistic = -1.62 p-value = 0.15 The p-value tells us 15% of the time, we should expect to reach the similar mean difference between the 2 samples. If you want to learn more about permutation tests and hypothesis testing, you can also read my article A guide to A/B testing (attached below)⚡

https://towardsdatascience.com/resampling-methods-for-inference-analysis-e75fecfefcb2

['Idil Ismiguzel']

2020-11-25 13:39:11.932000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Statistics', 'Python', 'Education', 'Exploratory Data Analysis']

I Only Wanted to Love My Body.. A Story about Sex, Shame and Survival

My journey to understand my own sexuality took a detour early in my life. I was abused when I was younger, between the ages of four to seven. My brain stored those memories so when my hormones kicked during puberty there was a possibility things might go awry. What was natural and normal got tangled in a love affair with the trauma part of my brain. I have PTSD, so there were hormones and memories mingling with my fantasies and arousal hormones in a way that created intense turmoil and disruption. My relationship with sex has evolved, curiously and wildly over the last 28 years of my life since I decided to make sex a part of it, or even before when I was curious and too embarrassed to ask my friends. The disruption happened early when feelings of arousal became clouded in shame and guilt. What was normal and natural felt like it should be contained or only felt under the microscope of personal torture. Survival meant dissociating from the feelings of guilt and shame. These feelings were tremendously powerful and responded quite dramatically in my body. The Feelings of shame always started in my head. There, a painful sensation dripped down my brain, and suffocated my throat. Nausea then came up strong and deliberate. It echoed through my intestines as it trolled through my blood. The emotions overcame and paralyzed me physically and emotionally. My brain turned black, my body frozen. It felt like being sexually abused all over again. My body and brain felt like they were going to atrophy and die. A subtle touch to my skin from someone else was painful. The only way for my body to survive was to dissociate when shameful feelings started in my body, which meant a dissociation from sex entirely, and avoiding intimacy and connection from my sexual partners. I was not able to feel vulnerable in any way. Vulnerability was frightening. Vulnerability created pain. My abuser threatened to set me on fire if I told anyone. I grew more afraid of fire than sex, then more afraid of sex than fire. I grew up in a family that didn’t discuss, talk, or pretend sex was happening. I stayed silent about my abuse. Compounding my confusion was my attraction to both men and women, or boys and girls as it may be in high school. My mother was into making me as feminine a woman as she could control. I don’t think this was out of fear, but her own narcissism and selfishness that my outward personality be as hetero normal as possible. There was disruption in understanding my own sexuality. During puberty I became a horny teenager who couldn’t control my desires, couldn’t control my attractions, and couldn’t control my negative feelings about my desires and attractions. I was also expected to choose to live my adult life in a hetero normal nuclear family. Growing up there were very few alternative options made available to me. So, my sex life got a little weird. At least, my sexual behavior got weird. Read more about this topic: I decided that I needed to lose my virginity to a man as a sort of ritual to move forward in my life. I was not interested in connection or intimacy. It was an emotionless decision. I was an introverted, shy, but incredibly as sure a thing as any high school boy could find. Except I wasn’t announcing it to the world. The boys needed to find me. Of course, my mother would freak if I announced it. I had to keep my horniness under control. I almost had sex with a woman first, another girl in my grade. We were completely different outwardly, but we made the implied connection. She chickened out. I continued with my plan to finally see a penis in person. I was apparently not giving out the right vibe, and I wasn’t the most pretty. At least I didn’t think I was pretty. I was a short and mousy brunette. I had a lazy eye which I felt kept potential suitors away. Still, I was motivated. At home I had a hidden collection of erotica and porn. I really did. It would be another 10 years until I learned that most girls did, but I was too ashamed to say. I was trying to avoid shame. I was readily available. I was also pretty matter of fact about it, if anybody asked me. No one asked me. For years. Then someone did. It was almost a business transaction, each of us using each other for our own personal ends. He asked me while news of the fall of the Soviet Union blared from the television behind him. I was hoping it was going to happen right then, but he set up a time later in the week. Everything went as planned, except I cried a steady three hours into my sweatshirt afterwards. I wasn’t expecting it. There I was all hiccups and snot and tears. I had a red face and scratchy throat for hours. I really thought I hadn’t felt anything. I really tried to push every ounce of feeling aside during the sexual experience, but I learned feelings have to go somewhere when they’re ignored. Someone asked me again months later. A matter of fact offer for my vagina, no strings attached. No connection. The poor boy looked surprised when I casually replied, “Yeah, sure, when,” without any emotion. I agreed because the first time was clearly a fluke, but then it wasn’t. I cried harder and longer in an uncontrollable flop on the floor. It was even more confusing. I went to college shortly after this experience and quickly became quite promiscuous with men. I wanted to rid myself of the sad and pitiful crying, and thought I could control my thwarted and weird sexual thinking by having a lot of sex with men. I didn’t have much self worth, and it’s easy to predict how I felt about myself might lead to promiscuous behavior. I wasn’t seeking out fulfillment of my worth, and I certainly never felt self assured by my behavior. I was seeking control and manipulation of my feelings, but my path led me to feel more guilty and embarrassed. I became sort of a joke, in part, and that didn’t feel good. I also started to put myself into dangerous situations that left me vulnerable to violence and abuse. The act of dissociation can be effective only in the short term. The “feelings had to go somewhere” analogy meant I was seeking some other feeling as compensation for the way I disconnected. I wanted to feel alive. The feeling of danger gave me more of a false sense of control. I also wanted people to visually see how traumatized I had become, and how much help I needed to be whole. I didn’t know how to ask, and I didn’t really want it. I just wanted to wear my damage like a flag. I was raped, multiple times. Stalked, abused, and treated with the violence I sought. That realization of vulnerability regardless just because I was physically small was earth shattering. I sought to be less vulnerable by pretending violence didn’t bother me. All in an attempt to feel normal, I became more broken. I wanted to love and respect my body, but I just couldn’t make it possible. When I was twenty, I fell in love with a woman. I mean, I fell in love so ridiculously hard. It was more than lust as we became friends. She had amazing blonde hair. It was this intense love I couldn’t control. A feeling my body didn’t know how to handle. It wasn’t reciprocated, and I fell harder. Guilt, shame, love, desire, attraction, lust, disappointment, sadness, and longing in a dust bowl of intensity I could not handle. I felt all the emotions I was trying to avoid. I started cutting myself for relief, and tried to commit suicide. I still think about her often. Yeah, I did that… May I remind you that my personal sexuality is disrupted and traumatized. My brain is broken in the ways I think about and process difficult emotions. I flew harder into unchained, intense and crazy relationships with both men and women. I needed to feel alive, but also detached. A delicate balance manipulated by choosing sexual partners that fulfilled that destiny. I started drinking heavily to try and manage the feelings I did experience. I used people and let myself be used. I had surreal experiences. Mostly, I had experiences that deeply embarrassed me. A self fulfilling prophecy of shame and guilt, by trying to avoid shame and guilt. You don’t have to physically cut yourself with a razor blade to deeply wound your body and soul in irreparable ways. You can’t cry because you’ll never stop crying. My trauma was never going to magically disappear, and it was keeping me from loving myself, and loving my life. I was in quicksand, barely hanging on. I denied real sexual pleasure and connection for the high and lows of addiction to avoid real feelings and connection. Two things happened that shaped the end of this cycle. I was violently raped. I did not think I was in a dangerous situation, but it happened. It left me feeling tremendously hollow inside for about a year. Then, filled with so much emotion I couldn’t move my body. It was a culmination of shame and guilt finding its way to the surface of my skin from deep inside. I thought my sex life was over, but it was just beginning. Then, I got married. Yeah, I did that… I really didn’t think that was going to happen. My partner expected me to engage in sex in an intimate and connected way. I had to be vulnerable, and loving, and tender, and kind. Shame and guilt just spilled out of me instead. Out of every pore of my skin, unwillingly, uncontrollably and unstoppable. He was blindsided. My solution was to stop having sex. I hid my body in clothes meant for him to find me unattractive. I considered divorce. I just could not have sex anymore. That is all. The end. “Seriously, not going to have any more sex,” I said. I thought it was the end of my sex life. Except, eventually, I got horny. It was only the beginning. I discovered that my sexuality is the version of confidence and self love that I project to the world. It’s about love, connection and vulnerability. None of which I knew how to bring into the narrative of sex. I only could tell the story with guilt and shame. I felt vulnerable when people stared at my 32G chest, but I would look at that, too. They’re kind of distracting. I mistook the idea of male gaze as something to avoid. Rather, it’s something to own. Guilt and shame just also happened to be a part of my sexuality, but they don’t have to be the only parts. I can choose to invite positive feelings into the narrative. My feelings can’t kill me- even the negative ones. They’ve tried unsuccessfully to ruin a perfectly badass body for the world by suggesting I hide it. So, to new beginnings! I haven’t dried up, yet, and when that happens they make lube. Joy Ellen Sauter is a full time writer currently living in Seattle, Washington, with her partner, two teenage boys, and two dogs. She studied American History at Shippensburg Univeristy, and Penn State. She writes about Mental Health, Sexuality, Parenting a Special Needs Child, and Popular Culture/History. She fully adults, but is always trying to get a nap. She misses Philadelphia soft pretzels and her dad more than sunshine. She is writing her first novel.

https://joyellensauter.medium.com/i-only-want-to-love-my-body-4d77b481e825

['Joy Ellen Sauter']

2020-08-17 16:54:30.247000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Sexuality', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Sex']

Make Your Unconscious Conscious To Win

Make Your Unconscious Conscious To Win Mission Follow Mar 17 · 3 min read “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” –Carl Jung So now that we’re on a path to empathize and heal our intergenerational traumas, let’s take a look at the “Core Language Approach.” This is an approach developed by the It Didn’t Start With You author, Mark Wolynn, and can help us verbalize (make conscious) and then attack these challenges. The four steps: The Core Compliant The Core Descriptors The Core Sentence The Core Trauma Let’s start with “The Core Compliant.” This is the foundation of getting at our central mind and body block. What is your deepest fear? It could be a feeling or situation. What do you find yourself worrying about again and again? Write it out on paper. Try writing it again and again if you find yourself not being completely honest. Remember, you can throw away the paper later! Once you see the words, read them out loud. Mark recommends analyzing them and asking questions like: “What words… have an urgent quality to them?” “What words may not fit entirely in the context of your life experience?” (i.e. might these be the fears of your parents or grandparents?) And the most shocking: “See if you can listen to what you’ve written as though you were listening to someone else. Perhaps the words do in fact belong to someone else, and you have merely been giving them a voice. Perhaps the words belong to someone in your family who was traumatized and couldn’t speak them out loud. Maybe through your complaints, you are telling this person’s story…” Does this terror campaign you’re waging against yourself belong to you? Chances are some of it is, but not all of it. Consider looking back and seeing where this came from and how to release it back into the past. Fears from the past will never serve you in the present. Tomorrow we’ll look at “The Core Descriptors.” – Chad Grills, Mission Founder and CEO

https://medium.com/the-mission/make-your-unconscious-conscious-to-win-3ddbf07c0fd2

[]

2020-03-17 22:32:41.700000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'News', 'Podcast', 'Science']

“Don’t think of it as a conference. Think of it as binge-watching powerpoints for 10 hours straight, 4 days in a row.”

Sign up for The UX Collective Newsletter By UX Collective A weekly, ad-free newsletter that helps designers stay in the know, be productive, and think more critically about their work. Take a look

https://uxdesign.cc/dont-think-of-it-as-a-conference-72c9be56df69

['Fabricio Teixeira']

2020-11-17 00:08:44.739000+00:00

['Tweet', 'Prooductivity', 'Product Design', 'Design', 'Startup']

10 Programming Languages You Can Learn in 2021 to become a Software Developer

10 Programming Languages You Can Learn in 2021 to become a Software Developer These are the best programming languages for software development, future, and get a job in Technology with relevant links to learn them online. A couple of months ago, I was reading an interesting article on HackerNews, which argued that you should learn numerous programming languages even if you don’t need them now, and I have to say that I agreed. Since each programming language is good for something specific but not so great for others, it makes sense for Programmers and senior developers to know more than one language so that you can choose the right tool for the job. But which programming languages should you learn? As there are many programming languages ranging from big three like Java, JavaScript, and Python to lesser-known like Julia, Rust or R. The big question is which languages will give you the biggest bang for your buck? It all depends upon what do you want? For example, if you are looking for a job at big Investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley or Citi then Java is the best programming language to learn followed by C++ and C#. But, if you want to get a Job at tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft than Python and JavaScript is probably a better choice than Java. Even though Java is my favorite language, and I know a bit of C and C++, I am striving to expand beyond this year. I am particularly interested in Python and JavaScript, but you might be interested in something else. Note: Even though it can be tempting, don’t try to learn too many programming languages at once; choose one first, master it, and then move on to next one. 10 Most in-demand Programming Languages You Can Learn in 2021 Here is the list of the top 10 programming languages — — compiled with help from Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey as well as my own experience— should help give you some ideas. Particularly if you are looking for a job in big investment banks like Goldman, Citi, Morgan, JP Morgan, Barclays, etc, or on service sector companies like Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, Luxsoft, etc, which mainly work for these big financial organization. 1. Java Java is the most widely used language in Investment banks. Go to any job search websites like Monster.com or eFinancialCareer.com and you will find most of the job listings for banks like Goldman, Morgan, Citi, and others require Java Skill. Java is used everywhere and across different parts of the bank, but mostly for creating server-side applications running on Linux. One of the major reasons why Investment banks prefer Java is its concurrency features. Java has in-built support for multithreading which is needed for performance-intensive, mission-critical applications on banks. So, make sure you spend a good amount of time mastering Concurrency in Java. If you are serious about getting a job on wall street firms, Java should be the first language to master, and if you need a good resource to start with then check out The Complete Java MasterClassfrom Udemy. If you don’t mind learning from free resources, then you can also check out this list of free Java programming courses. 2. C-Sharp C# and .NET are also popular on Investment banks, particularly for creating client-side GUI. Earlier it was Java Swing but C# and .NET is now preferred for any windows based GUI application. If you are thinking about GUI development for PC and Web, C# is a great option. It’s also the programming language for the .NET framework, not to mention used heavily in game development for both PC and consoles. If you’re interested in any of the above areas, check out the Learn to Code by Making Games — — Complete C# Unity Developer from Udemy. I see more than 200K students have enrolled in this course, which speaks for its popularity. And again, if you don’t mind learning from free courses, here is a list of some free C# programming courses for beginners. 3. C/C++ C++ is another major language that is used on Investment banks and other buy-side firms. It’s used heavily on creating low latency trading applications where performance is critical. Both C and C++ are evergreen languages, and many of you probably know them from school. But if you are doing some serious work in C++, I can guarantee you that your academic experience will not be enough. You will need to join a comprehensive online course like C++: From Beginner to Expert to become industry-ready. And for my friends who want some free courses to learn C++, here is a list list of free C++ Programming courses for beginners. 4. Javascript Whether you believe it or not, JavaScript is the number one language of the web. The rise of frameworks like jQuery, Angular, and React JS has made JavaScript even more popular. Since you just cannot stay away from the web, it’s better to learn JavaScript sooner than later. It’s also the number one language for client-side validation, which really does make it work learning JavaScript. Convinced? Then this JavaScript Masterclass is a good place to start. For cheaper alternatives, check out this list of free JavaScript courses. 5. Python Python has now toppled Java to become the most taught programming language in universities and academia. It’s a very powerful language and great to generate scripts. You will find a python module for everything you can think of. For example, I was looking for a command to listen to UDP traffic in Linux but couldn’t find anything. So, I wrote a Python script in 10 minutes to do the same. If you want to learn Python, the Python Fundamentals from [Pluralsight] is one of the best online courses to start with. You will need a Pluralsight membership to get access to the course, which costs around $29 per month or $299 annually. You can also access it using their free trial. And, if you need one more choice, then The Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from zero to hero in Python 3 on Udemy is another awesome course for beginners. And if you are looking for some free alternatives, you can find a list here. 6. Kotlin If you are thinking seriously about Android App development, then Kotlin is the programming language to learn this year. It is definitely the next big thing happening in the Android world. Even though Java is my preferred language, Kotlin has got native support, and many IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio are supporting Kotlin for Android development. And if you want to learn Kotlin this year then The Complete Android Kotlin Developer Course is probably the best online course to start with. 7. Golang This is another programming language you may want to learn this year. I know it’s not currently very popular and at the same time can be hard to learn, but I feel its usage is going to increase in 2019. There are also not that many Go developers right now, so you really may want to go ahead and bite the bullet, especially if you want to create frameworks and things like that. If you can invest some time and become an expert in Go, you’re going to be in high demand. And, if you want to learn Golang this year then Go: The Complete Developer’s Guide from Udemy is the online course is probably the best place to start with 8. Swift If you are thinking about iOS development like making apps for the iPhone and iPad, then you should seriously consider learning Swift in 2019. It replaces Objective C as the preferred language to develop iOS apps. Since I am the Android guy, I have no goal with respect to Swift, but if you do, you can start with the iOS 13 and Swift 5 — The Complete iOS App Development Bootcamp. If you don’t mind learning from free resources then you can also check out this list of free iOS courses for more choices. There’s also this nifty tutorial. 9. Rust To be honest, I don’t know much about Rust since I’ve never used it, but it did take home the prize for ‘most loved programming language’ in the Stack Overflow developer survey, so there’s clearly something worth learning here. There aren’t many free Rust courses out there, but Rust For Undergrads is a good one to start with. 10. PHP If you thought that PHP is dead, then you are dead wrong. It’s still very much alive and kicking. Fifty percent (50%) of internet websites are built using PHP, and even though it’s not on my personal list of languages to learn this year, it’s still a great choice if you don’t already know it. And, if you want to learn from scratch, PHP for Beginners — Become a PHP Master — — CMS Project on Udemy is a great course. And, if you love free stuff to learn PHP, check out this list of free PHP and MySQL courses on [Hackernoon] Conclusion These are some of the best programming languages to get a Software developer job on big Investment banks like Goldman, Morgan, Barclays or HSBC. Yes, it has those usual suspects but Java and C++ are the top 2 languages to get a developer job in these big financial giants. Even if you learn just one programming language apart from the one you use on a daily basis, you will be in good shape for your career growth. The most important thing right now is to make your goal and do your best to stick with it. Happy learning! If you enjoy this article here are a few more of my write-ups you may like : Good luck with your Programming t journey! It’s certainly not going to be easy, but by following this list, you are one step closer to becoming the Software Developer, you always wanted to be If you like this article then please consider following me on twitter (javinpaul). if you’d like to be notified for every new post and don’t forget to follow javarevisited on Twitter!

https://medium.com/javarevisited/top-10-programming-languages-you-can-learn-for-jobs-and-career-in-technology-491e611c22bc

[]

2020-12-11 08:21:37.125000+00:00

['Programming', 'Java', 'Python', 'Jobs', 'Careers']

6 Signs You Have A Wounded Inner Child

1. You have a deep fear of abandonment This fear can come in the form of being clingy, codependent, overly insecure, or even as depression and anxiety. If you fear abandonment, you’re constantly afraid people in your life will leave, and it can be almost impossible to maintain healthy relationships. “Although it is not an official phobia, the fear of abandonment is arguably one of the most common and most damaging fears of all. People with the fear of abandonment may tend to display behaviors and thought patterns that affect their relationships” Lisa Fritscher, in Understanding Fear of Abandonment 2. Your boundaries are either too weak or too rigid For instance, during my childhood and teenage years, I always felt suffocated in the sense that I couldn’t express myself freely and safely. My space, identity, and self-expression were not respected. I thought it was normal — now I know it was the result of living with an authoritarian father who was constantly trying to control my behavior. This led me to fear speaking up for myself, as I’d always get punished for doing it. I have a really hard time saying no to people or expressing my truth. Besides, I realized I have been overcompensating this difficulty of mine with super rigid, inflexible boundaries that nobody can cross. One of them is my space. When I feel overwhelmed, instead of openly telling people they’ve been disrespecting my need for personal space, I simply cut them off. I know this is not healthy, but it has been my coping mechanism to protect me from my lack of boundaries. I’m working on it. 3. You’re ashamed of expressing emotions like sadness or anger Shame creates feelings of inadequacy, unworthiness, or regret, and it’s a particularly toxic emotion in children: “Shame can be experienced as such a negative, intense emotion of self-loathing that it can lead one to disown it, and, in the case of one who acts like a bully, give it away by evoking that emotion in others (…) When children are emotionally or physically abandoned, abused, or neglected they often take on the shame that belongs to the adult who left or hurt them by assuming that it’s because they themselves are the “bad” one. Some children behave in ways that make them culpable for the shame that belongs to their parents.” Mary C. Lamia, in Shame: A Concealed, Contagious, and Dangerous Emotion 4. You distrust everyone, including yourself Trust issues are a defense mechanism to try to avoid experiencing the same anxiety and heartache again, and they often stem from a wounded inner child that learned the hard way that people can’t be trusted. Things get even more complicated when you’re also filled with self-doubt. When, as a child, you were neglected, invalidated, gaslighted, or emotionally abused, it’s difficult to build your self-esteem and self-confidence. Even the smallest words have an impact. For instance, if your parents constantly told you “your grades should be better” or “don’t be so sensitive”, you absorb the message that something’s wrong with you and that you’ll never be good enough. 5. You’re a people-pleaser and you avoid conflict at all costs You’re afraid of disappointing and frustrating other people because you unconsciously associate your worth with external validation. The root of people-pleasing behavior is usually a childhood that forced you to silence your needs, thoughts, and emotions, to the point where you weaken your sense of self: “As a child, I liked nothing more than feeling indispensable and being told I was a good and nice girl. This praise was incredibly important to me, as was making others happy. My own happiness did not come into the equation; I was happy because they were happy. I felt loved, safe, and appreciated, in the short term at least. As I got older my people-pleasing went into overdrive. I continually tried to gain people’s approval, make them happy, and help them whenever needed” KJ Hutchings, in 4 Fears That Create People-Pleasers and How to Ease Them 6. You’re prone to addiction Addiction is often a symptom of underlying trauma that hasn’t been processed. Rather than confronting our issues and letting ourselves feel pain, we numb our emotions to avoid feeling at all costs. The truth is, you’re not really addicted to the substance itself; you’re addicted to the relief and escapism it provides you (I have a whole article on this topic). Ask yourself these questions:

https://medium.com/be-unique/6-signs-you-have-a-wounded-inner-child-319166feec06

['Patrícia S. Williams']

2020-12-18 20:25:17.499000+00:00

['Parenting', 'Psychology', 'Mental Health', 'Love', 'Relationships']

Why Data Science might just not be worth it

Note from the author: This is an opinion piece, so it’s probably biased to a degree. Jobs in your country and with your skillset may vary. We don’t see the world through the same eyes. Please leave your thoughts and experiences in the comment section. If you’re doing anything software related you’ve probably considered the option of switching to the field of data science. And why shouldn’t you, the jobs are supposedly everywhere, salaries are generally higher than in software development, and having the word “scientist” in your job title would make your mother proud. Well, maybe not the last one, but you get the point. After being in the field for a while now, exploring a good bit of libraries and other cool stuff, writing around 80 data science-related article, whilst in the same time exploring other options (like web and mobile development) on the side, I find my self to be qualified enough to break down the good and bad things about the field. The focus today will primarily be on the bad things because the Internet is full of “why you should become a data scientist” and “learn data science in a month” type of articles. With that being said, the ideal reader is someone who knows what will be the benefits from enrolling in the field but would also want to know what are the possible drawback. Also, someone who’s already in the field for a while might also find these points useful too. Okay, without further ado, let’s begin with the first one!

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-data-science-might-just-not-be-worth-it-c7f3daee7d8d

['Dario Radečić']

2020-05-16 21:21:42.691000+00:00

['Programming', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Python']

UX Read-A-Long #2

UX Read-A-Long #2 Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries Heya Bookclubers — It is high time for another UX “read-a-long”. Cover of “Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries” This time we will be reading Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve Portigal. The book offers “personal accounts of the challenges researchers encounter out in the field, where mishaps are inevitable, yet incredibly instructive.” You can also read a sample chapter of the book on UX Matters. The Discount The lovely people at Rosenfeld Media have provided us with a discount code to give our followers and read-a-long participants. Discount code:TheUXBookClub This code will get you 20% off your order at Rosenfeld Media. Feel free to use it for any of their books that you’d like to read. (We suggest adding The User Experience Team of One and Validating Product Ideas to your shopping cart.)

https://medium.com/the-ux-book-club/ux-read-a-long-2-1fb0c491df3d

['Meg D-K']

2017-02-22 15:39:01.392000+00:00

['User Research', 'UX', 'Books', 'Design', 'Ethnography']

What happened when I predicted on the Titanic dataset with a made from scratch Logistic Regression function

What happened when I predicted on the Titanic dataset with a made from scratch Logistic Regression function Tracyrenee Follow Dec 19 · 7 min read Because there are so many libraries in Python, the programming language I am studying, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that these libraries are comprised of functions that somebody has written. Sklearn, the library I research a lot, is completely full of supervised and unsupervised learning functions that someone has written and would like to be given credit for. In fact, the sklearn website states that if anyone uses their work to please cite this, which I endeavour to do. Not only are functions made by individuals, they are also put together by teams and even businesses. CatBoost, a competitor of the award winning XGBoost, was actually made by Yandex Technologies, who made the algorithms associated with this library open source so everybody can use them. Whilst studying data science I have entered several competitions and experimented with many models. Through my own empirical investigations, I have come to the conclusion that winners of data science competitions need to be able to perform programming above and beyond merely using a function from one of the numerous python libraries because most people with enough training can do that. It is therefore important that anyone serious about advancing in the field of data science learn how to program their own functions. I was therefore inspired to have a stab at using a made from scratch logistic regression function and found several articles where individuals have displayed their own made from scratch logistic regression functions. I was inspired to use a logistic regression function on one website, but I would like to say that the person who wrote the function used simulated data instead of real datasets, which made his predictions much easier to achieve. In addition, he did not split the dataset up for training and testing, which invalidated the accuracy recorded. Despite this, I nevertheless decided to modify and use this made from scratch logistic regression function, the link being found here:- Logistic Regression from Scratch in Python — nick becker (beckernick.github.io) I prefer to use existing datasets for my experimentation, so decided to use Kaggle’s Titanic dataset for this purpose. I find the Titanic dataset a good dataset to carry out experimentation on because I have been unable to achieve any accuracy above 78% because of the way the data is presented in the dataset. I keep trying, though, and maybe one day my persistence will pay off. Kaggle’s Titanic dataset can be found at this link:- Titanic — Machine Learning from Disaster | Kaggle The problem statement of the Titanic dataset reads as follows:- “The sinking of the Titanic is one of the most infamous shipwrecks in history. On April 15, 1912, during her maiden voyage, the widely considered “unsinkable” RMS Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone onboard, resulting in the death of 1502 out of 2224 passengers and crew. While there was some element of luck involved in surviving, it seems some groups of people were more likely to survive than others. In this challenge, we ask you to build a predictive model that answers the question: “what sorts of people were more likely to survive?” using passenger data (ie name, age, gender, socio-economic class, etc).” The first thing I did was to create an .ipynb file in Google Colab, a free online Jupyter Notebook that has several of the more common libraries already installed on it. As a result, I only needed to import the pre-installed libraries of pandas, numpy, matplotlib.pyplot and seaborn. I then loaded and read the train and test datasets, which I had downloaded from the Kaggle website and then saved to my own personal GitHub account. In this post I am only going to focus on the train dataset because I made the decision not to submit the predictions from the test dataset to Kaggle. At some point I may decide to submit the predictions to Kaggle, so never say never:- I checked for any null values and found three columns in the train dataset have missing values, being “Age”, “Cabin” and “Embarked”. I imputed the missing cells in the categorical columns by replacing them with the most frequently used value, or “mode”. I replaced the missing values in the “Age” column with the median value:- I used seaborn’s displot() function to plot the target column, being train.Survived:- Once the missing values had been imputed, I used sklearn’s OrdinalEncoder() to convert the columns with categorical data to numeric data, which is what most models want to see when they are performing computations. The only model I am aware of that will make predictions on categorical data is CatBoost and I will not be using it in this post:- Once all of the columns were comprised of numeric data, I defined the X and y variables, The dependant variable is train.Survived and the label “y” has been assigned this value. The independent values in train are assigned to the variable of X once train.Survived and train.ID have been dropped:- Once X and y had been defined, I used sklearn’s train_test_split() function to split the X dataset up for training and validation. I then used sklearn’s StandardScaler() to scale the data down to an acceptable level for use in the model when it trains, fits and predicts. I put the validation set on a counter and found that 55 people perished and 35 people survived. I then defined the variable, “class_weights”, which can be used by the model to balance the classes in the label:- Once all of the preprocessing had been accomplished, I set about using the logistic regression function that had been made from scratch. I started by creating a link function, which provides the relationship between the linear predictor and the mean of the distribution function, sigmoid(). I then created the function, log_likelihood(), which is viewed as a sum over all the training data. This function also contains a line of code that calculates the gradient of the log_likelihood. The logistic_regression() function is built and it will integrate the work of the two previous functions to be able to formulate predictions on input data. The weights were set, using the logistic_regression() function to train the model. I predicted on the training data only to obtain an accuracy, which is 80.27%. I then predicted on the validation dataset and attained an accuracy of 75.56%. When I put the prediction on a counter I found that the model predicted 63 people would perish and 27 people would survive:- I then decided to use sklearn’s LogisticRegression() and achieved an accuracy of 79.40% when I trained and fitted the data. When I predicted on the validation dataset I achieved an accuracy of 72.22%, being 3% less than the made from scratch logistic_regression() function. The reason for this is because sklearn has very tight parameters, which ultimately affects its accuracy. When I put the prediction on the counter, it revealed that 60 people were believed to have perished while 30 people were believed to have survived:- I also decided to compare the made from scratch logistic_regression() to statsmodels’ Logot(). When I predicted on the validation set, an accuracy of 75.56% was achieved, which means logistic_regression() and Logit() both record the same rate of accuracy. When I placed the prediction on a counter, the model predicted that 57 perished and 33 people survived:- To summarise, all three of the above models need to be used when endeavouring to find the best accuracy. I do feel that any person who wishes to excel at data science and win competitions needs to improve his programming skills. Performing code reviews on other programmers’ codes is always a good start in honing one’s skills to the point where he can win a competition. I have seen a few programs where logistic regression was used to score a very high accuracy, so perhaps made from scratch functions are a good starting point because they can be more easily modified than an off the shelf function provided by one of Python’s libraries, such as sklearn or statsmodels. The code for this post can be found in its entirety in my personal GitHub account, the link being found here:- Titanic-Datasets/Kaggle_Titanic_Log_Reg_Homemade_vs_SKL_vs_SM.ipynb at master · TracyRenee61/Titanic-Datasets (github.com)

https://medium.com/ai-in-plain-english/what-happened-when-i-predicted-on-the-titanic-dataset-with-a-made-from-scratch-logistic-regression-928d6a1d1984

[]

2020-12-20 09:52:25.792000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Logistic Regression']

Pangeo 2.0

This period has led to some major technological innovations that will have long-lasting impacts on climate data science (and beyond), including: Despite the diversity of these activities, an increasing amount of energy from Pangeo core contributors has recently been devoted to operating cloud-based Jupyter infrastructure, the JupyterHubs on Google Cloud and AWS that now support hundreds of active users. The project has become victim of the unexpected success of these services, which we originally developed as experimental prototypes. Pangeo as currently constituted is simply not well suited to continue to operate production-grade Jupyter-in-the-cloud services. The reason is that the project is very informally organized, lacking any formal legal identity, HR department, etc. We cannot, for example, staff a helpdesk or provide a service-level agreement. So going forward, we are going to try to wind down our current mode of operating JupyterHubs, seeking a transition to a more sustainable path! If you currently use our cloud Jupyter services, don’t worry! — they are not going away. Below we enumerate some options for those who want to keep using Pangeo in the cloud. New Infrastructure Providers A Pangeo-style cloud environment is more than just a vanilla JupyterHub — it also means access to Dask clusters on demand, plus a specialized software environment. When we started operating JupyterHubs in the cloud three years ago, there were few commercial options available for purchasing these services, and we had to roll our own. Now the situation has changed. Some exciting new companies have recently launched to provide Jupyter together with scalable Dask clusters in the cloud. These include Coiled: Founded by the Dask creators, Coiled provides Dask as a service to both individuals and enterprise. Saturn Cloud: one of the first to offer Jupyter + Dask as a service. Both of these are venture-backed companies, and both have current / former Pangeo collaborators on staff. The cloud providers themselves are also showing signs of providing similar services. The UK Met Office informatics lab has been working closely with the Microsoft Azure team to streamline the Pangeo experience there. Microsoft’s newly announced Planetary Computer project team includes long-time Pangeo contributor Tom Augspurger, and we’re excited to see what they build! Another new player in the space, aimed more at the academic research and education space, is the International Interactive Computing Collaboration (2i2c). A non-profit, 2i2c was founded by core members of Jupyter and Pangeo. 2i2c’s mission is “to accelerate research and discovery, and to empower education to be more accessible, intuitive, and enjoyable.” Its main activities are as follows: 2i2c provides managed hubs for data science in research and engineering communities. They are tailored for the communities they serve and 💯 open source. 2i2c develops, supports, leads, and advocates for open source tools in interactive computing that are created, used, and controlled by the community. Going forward, 2i2c will eventually assume operational responsibility for Pangeo current cloud JupyterHub and Binders services. These services will remain free to users, thanks to ongoing support from the NSF EarthCube program. 2i2c is hiring an Open Source Infrastructure Engineer to work on this! If you’re interested in shaping the future of interactive cloud computing, please apply!! Finally, for those who wish to deploy and operate their own Pangeo-style cloud infrastructure, Quansight recently launched the excellent Qhub project, which massively eases the pains of deployment and management. With Qhub, Groups can set up their own JupyterHubs with Dask Gateway in minutes using cloud-agnostic open-source code and then modify environments, users, groups and more by committing changes to a single YAML file on GitHub. In a similar vein, we have migrated the Pangeo helm chart to the Dask org which means its maintenance benefits from the larger Dask community. Shifting away from infrastructure operation will allow Pangeo to refocus on our core mission: cultivating the development of innovative open-source tools for solving challenging scientific problems. New Pangeo Funding and Initiatives Pangeo will continue to evolve, supported by several major new grants to collaborating institutions. Project Pythia: Education and Training Pangeo has driven forward the capabilities of Python tools for geosciences massively in the past years. But these tools will only realize their potential impact if scientists have access to high-quality training for learning to use them! A new NSF EarthCube grant, awarded to NCAR and the University at Albany, will fund the development of Project Pythia: a community educational resource. The Project Pythia portal aims to provide geoscientists at any point in their career with the educational content and real-world examples needed to learn how to navigate and integrate the myriad packages within the burgeoning Scientific Python Ecosystem. Pythia will cover a range of topics from beginning Python programming to advanced subjects such as developing scalable workflows. A particular emphasis will be placed on migrating workflows to the cloud. Educational content in the Pythia portal will be developed and vetted in part through integration with graduate and undergraduate-level coursework at the University at Albany. More on Project Pythia can be found here. Pangeo Forge: A Cloud Native Data Repository Pangeo has blazed a trail towards a “cloud native” way of working with geoscience data. This vision is laid out in the following blog post: The cloud native approach means avoiding data downloads and instead working directly with massive cloud-based datasets using on-demand scalable computing. We believe that cloud-native has the potential to transform scientific research, making scientists more productive, creative, and flexible. However, cloud native science requires cloud-based data. Currently, the process of producing analysis-ready, cloud-optimized (ARCO) data is rather painstaking and manual. Our existing Pangeo cloud data catalog is difficult to update. One option is to wait for data providers such as NASA and NOAA to begin providing their data in ARCO format. However, with Pangeo, we are taking a more proactive approach, by developing a platform for “crowdsourcing” of ARGO data. This project is called Pangeo Forge. The idea of Pangeo Forge is to copy the very successful pattern of Conda Forge for crowdsourcing the curation of an analysis-ready data library. In Conda Forge, a maintainer contributes a recipe which is used to generate a conda package from a source code tarball. Behind the scenes, CI downloads the source code, builds the package, and uploads it to a repository. In Pangeo Forge, a maintainer contributes a recipe which is used to generate an analysis-ready cloud-based copy of a dataset in a cloud-optimized format like Zarr. Behind the scenes, CI downloads the original files from their source (e.g. FTP, HTTP, or OpenDAP), combines them using xarray, writes out the Zarr file, and uploads to cloud storage. The Pangeo Forge project is just getting off the ground, but we are very excited by the possibilities. Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory recently received a major award from the NSF EarthCube project to build out Pangeo Forge, in partnership with several high-profile data providers. Stay tuned for an announcement with more detail! Pangeo for Earth System Machine Learning For over a year now, Pangeo’s Machine Learning Working Group has held an open, monthly meeting to discuss challenges and solutions around big data geoscientific machine learning. The conversations in this meeting have often centered around how to utilize Pangeo’s ecosystem of software and infrastructure to accelerate machine learning with the high-dimensional datasets often found in the geosciences. Out of those conversations grew the Pangeo-ML project and a now-funded proposal to the NASA ACCESS program. As a collaborative effort led by Joe Hamman between CarbonPlan, Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Anaconda, the Pangeo-ML project aims to make it easier to use the same software tools for interactive data exploration and ML model development. To achieve this, the project team will improve the integration of data manipulation libraries (e.g. Xarray and Pyresample) — targeting known pain points found in ML applications, and will develop new high-level interfaces between Xarray and deep-learning libraries such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. The Xbatcher project is an early example of an interface tool that helps bridge the gap between Xarray and ML libraries. Hypothetical research workflow for a scientist using Pangeo-ML. Data hosted on the cloud is integrated into a familiar ecosystem that can provide extract-transform-load functionality as well as exploratory data analysis and visualization. Using the same tool sets, scientists will be able to quickly iterate on model design, and training and validation. A Fresh Approach to our Weekly Telecons As a consequence of our drift towards operating cloud infrastructure, our weekly Pangeo meetings have sometimes been dominated by highly technical discussions of Kubernetes Taints and Tolerations (those are real terms, I promise), rather than geoscience software and its applications. As we shift our operational capacity to 2i2c, we also look forward to refreshing the structure of our weekly meeting. Going forward, this meeting will operate as a virtual seminar, showcasing a cool new tool, dataset, or scientific problem in need of a software / infrastructure solution. Each meeting will feature a 15 minute presentation, which will be recorded and shared on our website. We are currently planning the schedule for Spring 2021, so please don’t hesitate to sign up if you’re interested in presenting! Full form available at https://forms.gle/hJyhsFvueMXPgqGr6 Through this transition, Pangeo will remain an open, inclusive community. Anyone interested in engaging with the project is encouraged to check out our Discourse forum, which has become the primary forum for discussion and project communication. Stay tuned for more detailed blog posts about these various new initiatives, and Happy New Year from the Pangeo community!

https://medium.com/pangeo/pangeo-2-0-2bedf099582d

['Ryan Abernathey']

2020-12-22 15:30:23.739000+00:00

['Science', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Pangeo']

Keep it Simple: Make Bullet Journaling Work for You

Keep it Simple: Make Bullet Journaling Work for You Most people skip the basics, like rapid logging in your bullet journal. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash I have ADD and memory issues. I’ve tried many tools over the years to help me remember my life. Bullet journaling was one of the first tools that really ‘clicked’ for me and I’ve been using it for around four years. For the uninitiated: bullet journaling is a simple method of organizing your life, a productivity system, and a journal all-in-one. You can start with just a notebook and a pen. Because it is so adaptable, some people go overboard trying all the pieces of the system without mastering the basics. Rapid logging is one of those basic things. It’s just a way of writing notes as you go through your day — part to-do list and part a running stream of consciousness. Rapid Logging will help you efficiently capture your life as it happens so that you may begin to study it. Ryder Carroll, Creator of the Bullet Journal, Author of The Bullet Journal Method Rapid logging really is the key. Rapid logging bypasses the effort of most endless to-do lists. By taking short, fast notes throughout your day. You can get all the things out of your head and in one place, instead of lots of different places. As you become familiar with the way it works, you’ll add items as they come to you, any time of day. It’s ‘rapid’ for a reason: you’re removing emotion from any event, impression, note and everything else you rapid log. Stripping these items down to concise phrases helps you move quickly while writing them down. Don’t worry if you have trouble with this. I am still terrible at writing things down and stripping all the extra words. But then again, I’m a talkative person. It’s part of my charm. The mechanics of rapid logging. Rapid logging is writing notes throughout your day, doing it quickly, and organizing what you’ve written. There are four key parts of rapid logging: page numbers, topics, bullets (what you write), and signifiers (if you use them.) Page numbers are important because this is a system, not a random notebook, and you might want to refer back to notes or collections you’ve done before. You can buy notebooks with page numbers, or just hand-number the pages of a notebook you already own. Before I became a notebook snob, I regularly spent a few minutes numbering pages on my cheap notebook. It worked just as well for me. Topics are how you label your pages, sometimes just the date or sometimes the name of an event or a collection of ideas. Your bullets (tasks, events, and/or notes) have set symbols so you can tell the difference between them at a glance. These are the symbols initially shared by the creator of bullet journaling, Ryder Carroll. Image by author: A page in my bullet journal; notes for this article! Remember, be concise with the bullets you write. You’re trying to take emotion out of this part of your bullet journal. This helps objectively log it as something you want or need to do or something that’s already happened. Task Bullets I use the default dot and include a few words about the task — pick up laundry, finish service report, etc. When you have completed a task, you can “X” it off, if you need to do a task another day (called migrating), you can use a right “>” carrot. Sometimes you need to write more about a task, so you can jot more notes right there underneath it, or you can write up more detailed notes on the next open page. I’ve tried several iterations on the task bullet and have found nothing as easy to use (and quick to use) as the little dot. Event Bullets Events usually use an open circle. Events are just date-related things, either scheduled appointments or parties, or events that happened through the day you want to note — signed a contract, etc. Again, you are jotting down a few words, not a diary entry. You can write more details on another page (or after your daily log). Note Bullets Notes highlight things you might want to remember and can include facts, ideas, thoughts, etc. When I get phone calls throughout the day, I use notes to jot a quick reminder about them. When one of my kids has a seizure, I write the time, what type, and any details I need to remember for the doctor. While these work well for quick notes throughout the day, if I want to create notes for a lesson or meeting, I usually do those on a separate page. Signifiers emphasize important bullets. Use signifiers on the lefthand side of your bullets to draw attention to important notes and things you want to act on. You can use a “*” to give a task priority or an exclamation point “!” for things you want to act on — mantras, ideas, insights, etc. I use an eye or lightbulb sometimes to mark things I want to research more. Use it sparingly. If everything is a priority, nothing is. Ryder Carroll, Bullet Journal Website Daily Logs and Monthly Logs There have been months when I didn’t worry about any kind of additional logging; I just did my rapid logging every day and it suited me just fine. Essentially, my rapid logging became my daily log. Sometimes I need more structure — and you might, too. I have a simple daily log that adds a bit of structure to my rapid logging. My current daily logs start with all my known appointments, meetings, and most important to-dos, then I draw a line under them and start rapid logging for the day. Dress it Up? Experiment if You Want. In the past, I’ve tracked many items: weather, glasses of water, food eaten. If you will remember to do them every day, go for it. I rarely remember to do them more than a few days in a row, so I don’t do them. Some particularly organized people have habit trackers and other artistic stuff to track all these ‘trackable’ items. I tried them. They didn’t work for me. I work best with a very simple Bullet Journal. Every time I try to dress it up and do more with it, I end up getting frustrated and going back to the basics. Even though I have some artistic leanings, it doesn’t work when I try to combine my artistic side with my productive one. Some people create their daily logs ahead of time. I don’t do that because I don’t know how much space each day will take. Sometimes I only log a few things for a day, other days I use a few pages. Monthly Logs Monthly logs are one ‘collection’ I create most months so I can see all my appointments and meetings at a glance. On his site, Ryder Carroll suggests having a spread of two pages — a calendar page and a task page. I love the way the calendar page is organized and I use it extensively. I want to use the task page, but I rarely do. Here’s a screenshot from his site. My own calendar pages look just like his; I’ve used them like this for years now. From https://bulletjournal.com/pages/learn of the Monthly Log. Screenshot by author. Collections Collections in your bullet journal are useful. Any collection of information on one page or across several pages counts. So your daily logs, monthly logs (and future logs, if you do those) count as collections. But collections also include arbitrary information or lists you want to have in one spot. For instance, I have a “Books I want to read” collection and an “Important Odds and Ends” collection. My catch-all collection is that last one, and is where I put phone numbers, addresses, code snippets, and all kinds of other odds and ends I don’t want to lose track of, even if I don’t have a different (or better) spot to put them. It’s easy to create a collection and then forget about it (ask me how I know!), so go slow and create the ones you will use consistently. Indexes are Collections Too Remember those page numbers? You can highlight special events, important tasks, associated notes, etc., in an index in the front of your notebook by jotting down the page number and a short description of the thing you want to index. Don’t feel bad if you forget to add them to your index; I still forget. Thankfully, it’s a matter of a couple of minutes to add items to the index by flipping through the pages. Modules Carroll called different sections in the bullet journal ‘modules.’ They are how to organize the things you’re writing, and to keep track of things you want to remember, etc. Your daily log (with rapid logging!) is one of the modules. Some people use all of these types of modules, and some people only use one or two. These modules include The index — http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/#index The Future Log — http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/#index The Monthly Log — http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/#monthlylog The Daily Log — http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/#dailylog I urge you to explore the site further if you are interested in bullet journaling. Each of the modules can be used as you need them, then added to the index so you can easily refer back to them. Or don’t use any of them aside from the daily log. Are you making bullet journaling too hard? Start simple and add elements to your daily practice a little at a time so that you consistently use your bullet journal. Don’t get bogged down in the details or the pretty pages you see all over social media. Start with a daily log, whether you just use rapid logging or add a bit more structure to it. Then add in the modules and collections as you need and use them. If you find something doesn’t work for you, no problem! Just don’t do it next time around. No matter what your needs are, bullet journaling is flexible and simple enough to help you.

https://medium.com/ninja-writers/keep-it-simple-make-bullet-journaling-work-for-you-64ed29057dd4

['Kat Moody']

2020-10-13 15:49:40.387000+00:00

['Writing', 'Productivity', 'Notebook', 'Journaling', 'Bullet Journaling']

I Miss The Lighted Apple Logo

Every time I see an older MacBook with the bright white lighted Apple logo…I get envious. I imagine that was exactly the point of the logo light in the first place. In an era where Apple has killed MagSafe, the Startup Sound, Skeuomorphic design, and the iPhone’s headphone jack, among other things…I realize that it’s weird to focus on the silly little white light that used to be on the back of their laptops. A light that you can’t even see while you’re using the computer. But it was fun and cool. Sometimes that’s enough. The MacBook Air was the last holdout, and now that it’s been 12-inch-MacBooked, the light is effectively dead. I do a lot of writing in coffee shops, and over the last four years I’ve watched the screen landscape transform. It used to be a field of soft glowing white Apple logos, which stood in stark contrast to the occasional black PC monolith. Now, one by one, the lights are vanishing as the laptops are upgraded, replaced by cold metallic mirrors of aluminum. I never had the pleasure of personally owning a MacBook with the lighted Apple logo. My first MacBook was a 2016 12-inch model, which I still use from time to time in spite of Apple’s increasing attempts to squeeze it out of its own product line. The aluminum Apple logo is fine. It has a nice premium smooth feel to it, with materials that would be at home on a yacht, or an airplane, or a stereo system, or whatever. But those glowing white lights felt like they were from the future. Not the awkward 90's-but-with-smartphones-and-broadband future we’re actually living in, but the sleek future that science fiction continually promised me as a kid. There’s something magical about the way those logos glow, and how perfectly bright and natural they look even in a sunlit room. It’s a brilliantly simple design too, though its brilliance also means you can never turn the light off without turning off the machine. Perhaps Apple was so confident in its cool glowing they just figured that no one would ever want to turn it off? Unlike bespoke LED case lighting solutions, the Apple logo is simply a partially transparent window into the innards of the display, which allows the backlight to shine through. A clever trick, indeed. Photo by Dmitry Chernyshov on Unsplash I get that removing the light/magical window helps make the laptop thinner, makes the casing more robust, and helps cut down the costs of producing and repairing the display. I’m sure that piece of shiny aluminum is much easier to produce and easier to not break during production than whatever mystical semi-transparent acrylic they used for the old logos. And I know there are plenty of RGB-enabled PC’s out there if I want to get my lighting fix on. But none of them have the soft, audacious glow of the old MacBook logo. It announces itself with the firm authority of the sun, and you cannot turn it off. While I was writing this in my local coffee shop, two different dudes sat down, each of them using previous generation MacBook Airs, complete with those soft glowing logos. There’s one both to my left and my right. It’s like the Apple universe is calling out to me, thanking me for paying one final homage to their old lights. I’m not joking. Here are some bad quality photos taken with my cell phone. I have cropped both of these to stupidly small sizes because these men are far away, and I want to protect their anonymity. The second man is wearing an Atari shirt. I’m not sure what to make of this. If I were running Apple, in spite of being completely unqualified since I care more about lights and trackpads than anything else, I would have added lights to the backs of every Apple product. The iPhone. The iPad. The EarPods, even. How cool would it be if the EarPod case had a tiny glowing Apple logo on it for the charge light? At 35, I’m officially old enough now to “not know what’s cool,” but I think Apple really blew it by taking the last bits of whimsy out of the MacBook. I don’t care if it’s trying to be a fancy “productivity” machine, part of what I’ve always liked about Apple is their nod towards fun. I worry that as they push into a bigger audience and focus more and more on sleek efficient luxury, the fun will be lost forever.

https://xander51.medium.com/i-miss-the-lighted-apple-logo-a2262d6ba580

['Alex Rowe']

2019-05-21 22:20:51.269000+00:00

['Technology', 'Tech', 'Apple', 'Mac', 'Design']

9 Paid Technical Writing Programs for Developers

9 Paid Technical Writing Programs for Developers Get paid to write tutorials and blogs about frameworks and languages Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash As a developer, you’re working on some framework (if you are a JavaScript developer there is a good chance you are working on many!). You encounter a problem. The problem may be related to installation or integration of framework within your project, or it was running on a local machine but when you deployed it on the server it showed an error. So you Google it. Google throws a bunch of solutions to you. You go to the first solution, you read it, and apply it to the problem. The bugs are not resolved. So you try another solution. Still, the bug is not resolved. You read the documentation of the framework. As soon as you start to read, you realise that the documentation is not properly written. You curse the writer. Then you go to another solution. After repeating this cycle, you finally resolve the problem. All developers go through this process. The good news is, you can now monetize this process by writing about it. There are many writing programs that pay you to write how-to tutorials or blog posts for them.

https://medium.com/better-programming/9-paid-technical-writing-programs-for-developers-4e8a305e6eab

['Yaser Basravi']

2020-08-25 15:49:06.071000+00:00

['Technical Writing', 'Programming', 'Writing', 'Developer', 'Development']

Charge Yourself Before You Hit 0%

“Burnout is nature’s way of telling you, you’ve been going through the motions your soul has departed; you’re a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.” ― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man I couldn’t tell you the last time my phone went flat. Completely dead, no battery, black screen. I can recall a few instances. A day trip to the city where none of us remembered a power bank. Dinner at Nanna’s where my cousins and I realized that Nanna lived right next to a Pokestop and promptly drained our batteries. A road trip in a friends old car that had no aux cord and no charger — we actually had to use CDs to listen to music. I can’t tell you which was the most recent because my phone dying is a rare occurrence. For the most part, I don’t allow it to happen. I have two chargers, one that lives in my bedroom and another that lives in my handbag, along with a power bank (just in case). At work, there’s a charger at our lunch table. In the living room, we have a veritable HUB of chargers for all kinds of devices. The car, the kitchen, the office — chargers everywhere. Because a dead phone is useless. So, we avoid letting them die. Simple. Them’s the rules. And yet, we struggle to apply that same rule to ourselves.

https://medium.com/swlh/charge-yourself-before-you-hit-0-84b04aefb78a

['Emma Scoble']

2019-09-15 09:36:01.372000+00:00

['Productivity', 'Mental Health', 'Self', 'Work', 'Mindfulness']

If God Doesn’t Exist …

If God Doesn’t Exist … When Truth and Agnosticism Clash Image Credit: Olly *The following is a passage of writing therapy. The views expressed are an expression of my mood at the time of writing. As such, they don’t represent the entirety of my thought on the matter. If God doesn’t exist, there can be no objective truth. With nothing above us, we are all free to make our own morals. Free to choose what is right or wrong. Free to act how we like. There are no consequences beyond our own creation. No threat of an afterlife of eternal punishment. Nothing but our conscience to guide us. But what is our conscience, but a product of our environment and genetics? Put me in a different time and place and I would believe vastly different things. Place me in a different education system or with different parents and I would be on a completely different path. If God doesn’t exist, my truth is based on nothing random environmental factors. And so is yours. And so is everyone’s. Without something above us to guide our morals we are all free to act how we like. But that freedom is in fact a false freedom. I was not free to choose my parents, nor the time and place of my birth, nor my classmates, my teachers, nor any other factor. I am limited by my environment. I only have finite options that I could realistically take. Thus if God doesn’t exist and I act ‘immorally’ am I really to blame? Is anyone? In a Godless world, criminals are only breaking human law. And will only receive human punishments. In that world, the atheist is free to choose what laws they will follow and the moral standards (if any) they will adhere to. If they feel that human laws are unjust, they are free to break them. There is no objective truth holding them back. No God to guide their actions. Just themselves; which is just what the randomness of their environments created. But what do I know? I’m just a depressed agnostic. ~ Zachary Phillips Website: zachary-phillips.com | Social @zacpphillips

https://medium.com/invisible-illness/if-god-doesnt-exist-157fa6e0bbb6

['Zachary Phillips']

2019-10-17 04:47:27.637000+00:00

['Therapy', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Philosophy', 'Religion']

Watson Tutorial #1: Speech to Text + AlchemyLanguage Sentiment Analysis in Python

Introduction Speech and emotion are building blocks of how we relate to each other. When a machine understands speech and emotion, its interaction with us becomes more human. For this very reason, speech recognition and sentiment analysis are two of my favorite machine learning capabilities. Soon after joining IBM Watson, I was excited to find out that Watson Developer Cloud offers both of these services. Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to build something on top of them. The rest of this post will walk you through how I combined Watson’s Speech to Text and AlchemyLanguage using Python. Since the intended audience for this tutorial is developers, I’ll be showing as much code as possible. With that said, if you still prefer to go straight to the code, it’s here. For more of a step-by-step tutorial, read on! Edit: Watson AlchemyLanguage has since been replaced by Natural Language Understanding. The capabilities and usage remain very similar. Step 0: What You’ll Need Basic Python programming skills Python (both 2.7 and 3.x will work) development environment IBM Bluemix account for Watson API credentials (Step 1) Watson Speech to Text Service and its credentials (Step 2 and Step 3) Watson AlchemyLanguage and its credentials (Step 4) Watson Developer Cloud Python SDK (Step 5) Step 1: Create Bluemix Account Before we start coding, let’s get the credentials squared away. In order to use the the Watson services, you need to create the services and its credentials on IBM Bluemix. Bluemix is IBM’s PaaS offering that let’s you deploy and manage your cloud applications. If you prefer deploying your applications somewhere else, that’s not a problem. You can use all the Watson services via our RESTful API. However, the Bluemix platform does give you a very easy way to integrate your deployed apps with all your Watson services. Either way, go ahead and sign up for a Bluemix account to get your credentials. If you’d like to get a quick tutorial on how to get a simple web application running on Bluemix, check this out. Step 2: Create the Watson Speech to Text Service Next, you need to create a Speech to Text service on Bluemix. My preferred way of doing this is through the Cloud Foundry CLI. You can find installation instructions at the repository’s download section. In case you’re wondering, the Cloud Foundry CLI is simply a command line interface that lets you talk with Bluemix directly. Once you have the Cloud Foundry CLI, use it to login to Bluemix. After logging in, you can create the Speech to Text service from the command line in a single command. Here, I named my service speech-to-text-standard. Step 3: Create Speech to Text Credentials Now that we have a service, we need to create the credentials attached to this service. The easiest way to do this is through the Bluemix dashboard. Once you’ve logged into Bluemix, go to your dashboard and scroll to the bottom of the page. You should see the service you just created under the Services section. Find your Speech to Text service. For me, it’s called speech-to-text-service-standard. You’ll see that you currently have no credentials, but that’s easily fixed by clicking “Add Credentials”. Here’s your credentials! Remember your username and password, you’ll need it later. You now have the ability convert speech to text, whoo! Step 4: Register for AlchemyLanguage API Key In order to perform sentiment analysis on text, you’ll need the Watson AlchemyLanguage service. Since you’re already at the dashboard, let’s try another way to create a service. First find the catalog tab on top of your dashboard. Scroll down to find the Watson services, and then select AlchemyAPI. This is an alternative to Cloud Foundry CLI to create Watson services. Since this is a prototype, you can put the service in the dev space and leave it unbound. Bluemix gives you the ability to create different spaces once your deployment flow becomes more complex (you might need spaces such as dev, staging, production etc). Leaving the service unbound means this service isn’t tied to a specific application. Once the service is created, you should be able get your API key by going to Service Credentials on the left. Step 5: Python Setup Once you have your credentials, it’s almost time to code. Again, here’s the repository if you’d prefer reading the code over this how-to guide. If you’re new to Python, I recommend setting up virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper. These tools combined let you easily set up sandboxed Python environments with everything you need including pip. If you’d rather use something else, that’s fine, but make sure you have pip installed properly. Now, install the Watson Developer Cloud SDK using pip. Step 6: Code The Watson SDK makes it very easy to interact with both services. Go ahead and clone the speech-sentiment-python repository. Quick note: I use python-dotenv to manage my credentials. Here’s what my .env file looks like: The only change you need to make to the cloned repository is adding a .env file to your folder, similar to the one above. When you do python run.py you should expect a prompt that says “Please say something nice into the microphone”. The script will then listen for your voice and start recording. Say something nice please! :) The recording will stop after a significant pause. After that, you should start seeing results in your terminal similar to this. Note: The threshold to activate recording and the time delay to stop recording are all variables that are adjustable in recorder.py. If you’re in a noisy environment, you might need to adjust the microphone settings on your computer and the paramaters in recorder.py. But running a script is boring, let’s actually understand what’s going on in run.py. First, we import the necessary libraries. Notice dotenv and watson_developer_cloud. import os import json from os.path import join, dirname from dotenv import load_dotenv from watson_developer_cloud import SpeechToTextV1 as SpeechToText from watson_developer_cloud import AlchemyLanguageV1 as AlchemyLanguage Recorder is a module built on PyAudio that’ll record your voice into a .wav file. I’ll not go into the specific of how it works in this post but the code is very understandable. Feel free to take a look at recorder.py. from speech_sentiment_python.recorder import Recorder At this point, we basically need to performs three tasks in this order: Record the voice and save it into a .wav file Transcribe the audio file into text via Watson Speech to Text service Get the sentiment score of the transcribed text via Watson AlchemyLanguage record_to_file(), transcribe_audio(), and get_text_sentiment() will accomplish these tasks. record_to_file(“speech.wav”) saves your voice into speech.wav in the same folder as run.py. Of course you can change “speech.wav” to be a path pointing to wherever you’d like. recorder = Recorder(“speech.wav”) recorder.record_to_file() transcribe_audio() sends the .wav file to your Watson Speech to Text API and gets back the transcribed text. Notice how we can do this with simply one line of code using the Python SDK. def transcribe_audio(path_to_audio_file): username = os.environ.get(“BLUEMIX_USERNAME”) password = os.environ.get(“BLUEMIX_PASSWORD”) speech_to_text = SpeechToText(username=username, password=password) with open(join(dirname(__file__), path_to_audio_file), ‘rb’) as audio_file: return speech_to_text.recognize(audio_file, content_type=’audio/wav’) get_text_sentiment() takes the transcribed text and uses the AlchemyLanguage API to figure out its sentiment score. def get_text_sentiment(text): alchemy_api_key = os.environ.get(“ALCHEMY_API_KEY”) alchemy_language = AlchemyLanguage(api_key=alchemy_api_key) result = alchemy_language.sentiment(text=text) if result[‘docSentiment’][‘type’] == ‘neutral’: return ‘netural’, 0 return result[‘docSentiment’][‘type’], result[‘docSentiment’[‘score’] And that’s it, you’re done! You can now record your speech and have Watson tell you how he feels about it. Step 7: What’s Next So what’s next? As I mentioned in the beginning, I believe these two services combined make for a very engaging interaction. In my upcoming post, I’ll explore ways to combined this module with hardware to create an unique experience. Specifically, I want to build a candy machine that’ll dispense candy depending on the sentiment of your speech. Stay tuned for the Watson Polite Candy Machine! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions feel free to reach out at joshzheng@us.ibm.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.

https://medium.com/ibm-watson/watson-tutorial-1-speech-to-text-alchemylanguage-sentiment-analysis-in-python-23e1a76965c5

['Josh Zheng']

2017-06-16 03:27:55.903000+00:00

['Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Tutorial', 'Sentiment Analysis', 'Ibm Watson']

4 Habits to Let Go That Help You Beat Anxiety

According to Wikipedia Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry. Anxiety is your body reacting to stress. Ordinary anxiety is completely normal because each of us copes to some degree. The problem arises when ordinary anxiety begins to interfere with our daily life. General anxiety symptoms includes Thoughts you can’t control. Increased heart rate. Having difficulty falling asleep. You cannot concentrate. Increased breathing rate. I have made this list of four habits that helped me reduce anxiety in my life. After you put these habits aside, you can reduce anxiety in your life. 1. Not Appreciating What We Have Did you ever think that all we have today was once a wish? We always wanted that phone we use today. We always wanted the clothes that we wear today. All the people we have in our life were once desired by us. Most of the time we don’t appreciate what is in our lives today. As human beings, we set ourselves goals and once we achieve them, we set other goals to achieve. In the race to pursue goals, humans have forgotten to appreciate what we have in our lives. If a person has a sports car, he wants a private jet. A person who has a bicycle wants a sports car. So every human being in this universe wants something more in their life. The clothes we wear today are not appreciated until the day we cannot afford them. The food we eat today is not appreciated until we have the money to buy it. Parents who are always supportive of us are not appreciated until one day we lose them. You never know, what you have in your life today may disappear tomorrow. To release anxiety, we must begin to appreciate what we have in our life. The more grateful we are, the happier we will be.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/4-habits-to-let-go-that-help-you-beat-anxiety-3e076db23415

['Sanjay Priyadarshi']

2020-10-20 13:18:00.390000+00:00

['Anxiety', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Advice', 'Habits']

7 Books That Can Help You Create an Extraordinary Life in 2021

7 Books That Can Help You Create an Extraordinary Life in 2021 Books that have changed my life and could do the same for you. Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash For many years, I was just a regular guy. I followed all the “rules.” I went to university. I chased instant gratification and was addicted to video games. However, after developing a reading habit, everything for me in my life changed. I realized I didn’t have to follow the path everyone else was on. I didn’t have to live just another ordinary life. Instead, I could design my own rules and create the life I want, and this is a path that’s available for all. If you're wanting to create a life that’s beyond the status quo, then these books can certainly help. Here we go. 1. The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? by Seth Godin Here is one of Seth’s many bestsellers. This book focuses on the idea that you’ve probably been taught to play life too safe. You’ve been taught to listen to the “experts,” to fit in, to not rock the boat, and simply obey and conform. However, Seth invites everyone to see the world from a different perspective. One where you’re calling the shots, taking responsibility, and creating a life and work you’re proud of. If you’re wanting to make a difference in 2021, then I absolutely would be picking up this book. “Today, in the face of the greatest revolution of our time, we are all artists. Or at least we all have the opportunity to be artists. The only thing holding us back is us.” 2. High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way by Brendon Burchard Wanna take your life to another level in 2021? This book is going to be your field manual. Brendon Burchard has jam-packed it with knowledge and practical ideas that’ll immediately change the way you live, the emotions you feel and the results you achieve. From average to extraordinary is how your life will be after reading this book. “You can be wildly happy with what you have, and still strive to grow and contribute. So don’t ever let anyone discourage you from your ambition for a better life. Don’t minimize yourself or your dreams for any reason.” 3. The Latte Factor: Why You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Live Rich by David Bach This is a simple finance book, and it’s absolutely fantastic! The story is written as a parable, which follows a young woman who doesn’t have a healthy relationship with money. She is living paycheck to paycheck and deprives herself of living the life she really wants as she claims she “can’t afford it.” However, after being introduced to ‘the latte factor,’ her life starts to change very quickly. She begins ACTING and LIVING rich, which allows her to eventually BECOME rich because she stops clinging on to the fixed mindset she has about her money and her future. With only a 90 minute read time, there aren’t many reasons you shouldn't read this book. “Everyone builds wealth. The only question is: For whom?” 4. The Education of Millionaires: Everything You Won’t Learn in College About How to Be Successful by Michael Ellsberg If you’re in high school, college or a recent graduate, then your biggest regret is going to be not picking up this book earlier. Personally, I read it in my second year at university, and it drove me to reconsider my previous career choices and go all-in on entrepreneurship. To make a long story short: there is another career path you’re not being told about, and this book is going to show you how to walk it. “Though you may learn many wonderful things in college, your success and happiness in life will have little to do with what you study there or the letters after your name once you graduate.” 5. The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Grant Cardone Grant Cardone has a no excuse attitude towards success. In this book, he’s going to tell you bluntly that you’re probably not living up to your full potential. Instead, you could be living a 10X life, and he’s going to show you the mindsets, attitudes and behaviors to do it. If you’re willing to and want to hear the brutal truths of what it takes to succeed at the highest levels, then you're going to love this book! “Most people will admit that their goals are well below their potential — because most of the world has been convinced, persuaded, and even educated to set small, attainable, and realistic goals.” If you’re currently stuck in a state of thinking, “There must be more to life than this,” then this book is absolutely for you. Guided by his own story, Chris Guillebeau will show how to live on your own terms, create self-employment and embrace life as a constant adventure. For anyone who wants to make a bigger impact in their life; pick up this book! “The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.” 7. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller This one of the first books I read that really got me into productivity and self-improvement. It is simple, concise and informative. As the title suggests, it’s ultimately about finding the ONE thing that’s most important to your life and then only doing that thing.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/7-books-that-can-help-you-create-an-extraordinary-life-in-2021-a9bdf6133891

['Reece Robertson']

2020-12-22 20:32:43.386000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Productivity', 'Inspiration', 'Books', 'Life']

What This Epidemiologist Wants Americans to Know About Covid-19 Right Now

Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch. Photo: Kent Dayton What This Epidemiologist Wants Americans to Know About Covid-19 Right Now A leading expert on the pandemic cuts through the mixed messages and confusion One of the first scientists I reached out to in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak was Marc Lipsitch, PhD, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Soon after, he became hard to reach. Like other experts in infectious disease and epidemiology — the science of investigating causes, trends, and outcomes of diseases or other health-related events — Lipsitch’s time is in great demand from journalists and policymakers, not to mention the actual ongoing pandemic research. Since then, much has been learned about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, the disease it causes. During these seven months, Lipsitch and other scientists — just like many other Americans — have become increasingly frustrated over mixed messaging from some health officials, outright falsehoods and misinformation uttered by some politicians and circulating wildly in social media, the lack of governmental leadership in managing the U.S. pandemic response, and the resulting disagreement over basic scientific facts and ensuing political and public polarization over what to do. So on an Aug. 13 call with reporters covering a range of Covid-19 science details, I asked Lipsitch to step back and consider a broader question: Amid all the confusion, what would you most like all Americans to know right now? Here is an edited version of his responses on the call and in a subsequent exchange: Viruses don’t care “The first thing is just the very fundamental notion that if you have susceptible people, and if you have human contact, and if you have a virus to which those people are susceptible, it will spread, and the number of cases will increase. “My friend [and fellow epidemiologist] Bill Hanage sometimes says, ‘Viruses don’t read Twitter.’ They don’t care what we think about them. They don’t care what they do to the economy. They don’t care about anything. And we have to be rational in the face of that.” Wishful thinking doesn’t work “If a certain level of control measures didn’t bring transmission under control in the summer, unless there’s a lot more herd immunity to help us along, those same control measures still aren’t going to bring transmission under control in the fall and winter. Conversely, as more people start to get together in various ways, and as schools reopen, there will be more opportunities for transmission.” [Several experts have said the pandemic is likely to worsen this fall, raising concerns about the confluence with flu season.] “Wishful thinking just doesn’t help. And I think that’s been a big part of the issue, a notion in some states in particular, that somehow we can be different from all the other experiences with this virus and other viruses and we can just hope that it won’t spread when we have high levels of contact.” [He cites complacency among U.S. policymakers when the virus was spreading in China and then Europe, and then complacency by some governors during the early outbreaks in New York and other states.] Masks do work “I think it would be great if people understood that masks, although they are somewhat disgusting to wear all day, really are a part of the solution, both as a direct protective for yourself and especially for others, but also as a reminder for people, because as they see the mask, they tend to stay away.” Rampant virus spread is what’s bad for the economy “I wish there was more sense of national solidarity around the idea that if the virus is spreading fast and at high levels in a community, it’s destructive to the economy, it’s destructive to every aspect of peoples’ lives, and the need to get the virus under control is in fact an investment in the economy and in getting our lives back into a normal state, rather than the sort of opposition between the ‘openers’ and the ‘closers.’ All of us closers want to close so that we get things under control enough so that we can open. No one likes being closed. “And on the positive side, we know that concerted efforts to slow down transmission by reducing contacts can work. Many countries in Europe or Asia achieved a 10-fold reduction in cases and deaths with about two months of lockdown, and as a result of the pain they endured then, they are in a far stronger position than we are. We can still bring transmission down, but we have to make some sacrifices to do it.” I also asked Lipsitch: Have scientists and healthcare experts and journalists collectively talked and written too much about all the evolving science and incremental details (and contradictory aspects) of the virus and the disease, to the point people simply tune out? “I’m really bored of reading about Covid. But for me it’s one experience. For people who care much more about other things, it is, I presume, even more boring to have it be the only news. “Covid-19 is dominating every aspect of life. It’s changed our economy, it’s changed our educational system, it’s changed our sports, it’s changed our other forms of entertainment and our arts. It really is the story, and I don’t know what to do to stop it being dominant other than stopping the virus itself. “My overall evaluation of the coverage of this is that it’s been surprisingly good. Generalizing across different media types, almost every reporter I’ve had contact with is trying really hard to get the story right, to understand uncertainty, and to communicate clearly what’s known and what’s not known. I wonder almost if this is kind of a reaction to the fact that — with the key exception of Dr. Fauci — there hasn’t been a clear government voice in the United States that’s been loud enough at the federal level, or able to speak enough at the federal level, to fill that role, which is typically the CDC’s role. So I think journalists and scientists are collaborating quite effectively to bring that kind of information out with all the nuances. “But of course not that many people want the entire newspaper to be science, or medicine, or even public health, and I think all of us working on this pandemic look forward to being less relevant.”

https://medium.com/luminate/what-this-epidemiologist-wants-americans-to-know-about-covid-19-right-now-9e051a849ddc

['Robert Roy Britt']

2020-08-17 13:09:07.367000+00:00

['Epidemiology', 'Covid 19', 'Lipsitch', 'Coronavirus', 'Science']

What is ETL?

In our articles related to AI and Big Data in healthcare, we always talk about ETL as the core of the core process. We do not write a lot about ETL itself, though. In this post, we’ll give a short overview of this procedure and its applications in businesses. ETL is the abbreviation for Extract, Transform, Load that are three database functions: Extract is the process of reading data that is assumed to be important. The data can be either raw collected from multiple and different types of sources or taken from a source database. is the process of reading data that is assumed to be important. The data can be either raw collected from multiple and different types of sources or taken from a source database. Transform is the process of converting the extracted data from its previous format into the format required by another database. The transformation occurs by using rules or lookup tables or by combining the data with other data. is the process of converting the extracted data from its previous format into the format required by another database. The transformation occurs by using rules or lookup tables or by combining the data with other data. Load is the process of writing the data into the target database, data warehouse or another system ETL in its essence is a type of data integration used to blend data from multiple sources. ETL vs. ELT The ETL paradigm is inherent to Data Warehousing, and Big Data has significantly changed the order of the processes. In Big Data, data is “lifted and shifted” wholesale to a repository, such as a Data Lake, and is held there in the original format. It is transformed “on the fly” when needed by Data Scientists, creating the procedure of ELT, or Extract, Load, Transform. One of the main benefits of ELT is a shorter load time. As we can take advantage of the built-in processing capability of data warehouses, we can reduce the time that data spends in transit. This capability is most useful when processing large data sets required for business intelligence and big data analytics. In practice, however, things are not so black and white. Many Data Lakes, for example, contain intermediate merged and transformed data structures to ensure that each Data Scientist doesn’t repeat the same work, or carry it out in a different way. Where are ETL/ELT used? ETL is not a new technology: businesses have relied on it for many years to get a consolidated view of the data. The most common uses of ETL include: ETL and traditional uses Traditionally, ETL is used to consolidate, collect and join data from external suppliers or to migrate data from legacy systems to new systems with different data formats. ETL tools surface data from a data store in a comprehensible for business people format, making it easier to analyze and report on. The key beneficiaries of these applications are retailers and healthcare providers. ETL and metadata ETL provides a deep historical context and a consolidated view for the business by surfacing the metadata. As data architectures become more complex, it’s important to track how the different data elements are used and related within one organization. Metadata helps understand the lineage of data and its impact on other data assets in the organization. ETL and Data Quality ETL and ELT are extensively used for data cleansing, profiling and auditing ensuring that data is trustworthy. ETL tools can be integrated with data quality tools, such as those used for data profiling, deduplication or validation. ETL and Self-Service Data Access Self-service data preparation is a fast-growing field that puts the power of accessing, blending and transforming data into the hands of business users and other nontechnical data professionals. ETL codifies and reuses processes that move data without requiring technical skills to write code or scripts. With this approach integrated into the ETL process, less time is spent on data preparation, improving professionals’ productivity.

https://medium.com/sciforce/what-is-etl-1df5305bb341

[]

2019-09-27 12:48:33.283000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Healthcare', 'Big Data', 'Technology', 'Data Science']

How An Unstable Childhood Can Damage Your Love Life as an Adult

How An Unstable Childhood Can Damage Your Love Life as an Adult How to your break toxic relationship patterns. I attracted emotionally unavailable people over and over again. I accepted crumbs and took what I could get because I thought it was normal. I thought being caught in a push and pull dance meant love. When we don’t know what a secure relationship looks like, we flounder about and get hooked on the emotional highs and lows and mistake it for love. I was unconsciously addicted to the rush I got when people I liked would push me away, and come back. I truly believed this push-pull behaviour meant love and passion. When I changed my attachment style to secure, I realised it wasn’t even close to what a healthy relationship was. And maybe you don’t know what this looks like either.

https://medium.com/candour/how-an-unstable-childhood-can-damage-your-love-life-as-an-adult-2a3c7ee15ed2

['Kathrine Meraki']

2020-09-21 00:00:51.395000+00:00

['Dating', 'Mental Health', 'Self-awareness', 'This Happened To Me', 'Relationships']

5 Simple Productivity Tools That Helped Me Produce Higher Quality Work

5 Simple Productivity Tools That Helped Me Produce Higher Quality Work And helped me earn six-figures in the process with the extra time each tool gave me back. Photo by Zac Wolff on Unsplash Producing lots of work and increasing the quality of that work is difficult to accomplish when you are disorganized and can’t keep track of what is next. I used to do the following: Have thousands of emails in my inbox Have posted notes all over my workspace Have files all over my computer desktop Have a reminder app that always caused me to forget Have a calendar full of useless tasks All of these problems caused me to be disorganized. As a result, my career, writing, and family suffered. It has taken some time, but one by one over the period when I wasn’t working, I made some drastic changes and tried a few new tools. It turns out the answer to doing more work of a higher quality was easier than I thought. The goal was to do less so that more time could be invested in the areas I wanted to go deep on and produce more results in. Removing the bad habits Before exploring a few new tools to help with my productivity, I first looked to delete bad habits that caused the original problem. Here are the changes I made: Implemented inbox zero for my email Threw away all posted notes and refused to use them again Removed everything off the desktop and created folders for documents, pictures, videos and downloads that were stored on an external hard drive, out of the way Deleted all reminder apps and used the Outlook Calendar as my sole source of truth for where I had to be (it’s synced across all devices — tablet, phone, desktop, and laptop) Only items that were a must got scheduled in Outlook (no podcast interviews, “write me a free article,” let’s have a call about nothing — you get the message) Once the bad habits were taken care of, I trialed and shortlisted the following productivity tools: 1. OneTab For browser abusers like me, OneTab is a dream. It’s a browser extension that takes all your hundreds of open tabs and puts them on a single page in one tab. You go from lots of windows to one window with one tab, overnight. What I do is have windows with certain tabs grouped together for later. For example, I have a set of tabs used for writing inspiration, a set of video tabs for sharing on social media, a set of tabs for sending emails, and a read later or do later set of tabs. Once the task is complete, I file away all the tabs in OneTab and am back to a single browser tab. This is an ongoing experiment for me and there are still some tweaks that need to be made. Our obsession with hoarding browser tabs is a weird one, and OneTab can help. 2. New Tab Draft This is a productivity tool that Tiffany Sun recommended. It’s very basic and easy to use. New Tab Draft makes it so every new tab you open by default becomes a beautiful blank page that you can write down thoughts on. It’s minimalist by design and can be used to scribble ideas or to-do lists on. Every time you open a new tab and see your browser notepad, you’re reminded of what is important. 3. Trello This tool has made the biggest impact on my life. The problem I was facing started at work. I started out with an Apple Notes App on my laptop and work phone to keep track of meetings, training, action items, and learnings. One day I logged into my computer and found all my notes had disappeared. My workplace had blocked the Apple Notes App because it used iCloud instead of the company’s own cloud (understandable). I quickly had to find a company approved solution and this led me to think about how ineffective managing tasks via a notepad app was. There were pages and pages of notes and no way to work out where things were at or what was important. Thinking back to the days working in an innovation lab, I remember this tool we used called Trello. In a productivity rage of inspiration, I downloaded Trello like a five-year-old who just got given candy for the first time and began playing with it. I then went around the office and asked a few colleagues who also used it. The approach to Trello was simple: Things to do (not started), in progress (doing), and done. By seeing everything visually on a Trello Board, I could set due dates and see red for items that were overdue. It was better than any notes app or CRM for making me productive. I loved the process so much that it became a tool for my personal life too. All my writing tasks, life admin and to-do lists are now done on Trello. Making your priorities organized, with deadlines, as well as visual, is life-changing. 4. ConvertKit For as long as I’ve lived, I have hated managing email lists. It is one giant pain in the butt and sucks up precious time — with the clunky user interfaces and poorly designed user flows. When MailChimp banned me for life for no real reason, I was forced to find a new provider to manage email and be productive. ConvertKit is used by many bloggers, including Tim Ferriss — with his wildly popular Five Bullet Friday — and I thought, “if it’s good for Mr. Ferriss Wheel, perhaps, it might work for me.” It has been a game-changer. It’s easy to use for people who hate sending an email (like me) and it’s straightforward to build email audiences and create some simple funnels. 5. Notes App All Apple devices come standard with the Notes App (pretty sure Android has its own one). Even with all the tools mentioned above, I’m a writer by trade. This means writing down loads of thoughts and even drafting out stories or writing whole articles on the go. The brilliance of the Notes App is that it syncs with all of your devices. Now, this may seem stock standard but it’s not. At work, I changed my notes app to Microsoft OneNote and it’s not even close to the Notes App. The problem? OneNote doesn’t sync seamlessly. You can write a note on your phone and then a minute later attempt to read the same note on your tablet and it’s not there. There are too many screens and it is hard to sort your list of notes. The simplicity of the Notes App and the speed in which it opens and allows you to quickly write a note is brilliant. The speed is crucial because when you’re dying to take a note, you don’t want syncing or app updates to spoil your day and rob you of a good idea. Having a Notes App that syncs with all your devices is beautiful. Side note: I had the Notes App for more than five years and tried syncing my notes to be stored on all devices with one master copy. Call me stupid, but this is huge and has helped me not have to carry my laptop around as much now.

https://medium.com/swlh/5-ludicrously-simple-productivity-tools-that-helped-me-produce-higher-quality-work-1a321c8c8b46

['Tim Denning']

2019-12-17 21:42:16.580000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Technology', 'Productivity', 'Work', 'Startup']

The CVE-2018–10299 Vulnerability

For the last few days, the crypto community has been discussing a new vulnerability in the Smart Contracts of tokens based on the ERC-20 standard. We have also studied this case with great interest. This is not an ERC-20 vulnerability This error is often called a vulnerability in the ERC-20 standard. This is not the case, and the batch processing block in which the error was detected is not part of the ERC-20. In the examples mentioned in the articles, the batchTransfer is described as an additional functionality designed to transfer the same number of tokens to multiple recipients (for example, in the case of airdrops). “Production” of Errors As it usually happens, the error is obvious if you know where to look. In this case, it is even a case of several errors. The first of them is ignoring the already established de facto Safe Math library in critical cases (no one will argue that balancing verification is a very critical case). In particular, if instead of simple multiplication a function like the one below would be used: In this case, the vulnerability would not have occurred. The second error is the absence of restrictions on evoking such packet transfers. Obviously, such a scenario is rarely required and most often should be used by a limited number of users (such as contract owners or founders). The third common mistake is the thoughtless replication of written code without critical revision. This is what usually makes such vulnerabilities so widespread. Cheers ^_^

https://medium.com/karmared/the-cve-2018-10299-vulnerability-aa271ec0f16f

['Roman Ischenko']

2018-04-28 13:16:28.612000+00:00

['ICO', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Development', 'Startup']

J.K. Rowling Has Become Professor Umbridge

J.K. Rowling Has Become Professor Umbridge And how her bigotry is skewing the magical world of Harry Potter. Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash J.K. Rowling has become to our world what Dolores Umbridge is to Hogwarts. For those who may not have joined the phenomenon that is Harry Potter, Dolores Umbridge was arguably more despised than Voldemort. She was a Ministry of Magic employee who infiltrated Hogwarts as the Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts and taught by theory rather than practice. Aside from trying to downplay and hush-up the return of Voldemort, she became a major player in propagating pureblood status in the wizarding world in the following years at the ministry. To Umbridge, wizards with muggle — or non-wizard parents — didn’t and shouldn’t exist. To ignore such an existence is akin to how J.K. Rowling is showcasing her transphobia. Her transphobic comments have recently come under fire again with the plot line of her new book under her Robert Galbraith pen name — where a male serial killer dresses as a woman for murdering — colliding with the announcement of a long-awaited Hogwarts RPG from WB Games. While Hogwarts Legacy looks amazing and seems to be a dream come true for the majority of Harry Potter fans, Rowling’s recent actions and words have soured the announcement, so much so that the top stories regarding the game speak of boycotting it and the predicted results of said boycott: Google results captured by author, September 21, 2020 Rowling’s recent actions are a far cry from half a dozen years ago when, asked by a fan about the LGBT youth in Hogwarts, Rowling’s response was to show an image that stated: “If Harry Potter taught us anything, it’s that no one should live in a closet.” It’s a shame that Rowling did not continue to practice what she taught so many readers throughout Harry Potter’s years at Hogwarts. Yet, like how Harry Potter and his friends taught themselves how to defend and protect others from the dark arts when Professor Umbridge dismissed them, so too will the fandom protect one another and their love of the Harry Potter community when J.K. Rowling degrades them. Some folks are indeed boycotting the new game entirely, willing to sever any and all ties with Rowling. Others are still planning on buying it, not willing to let go of the magical world of Hogwarts, and to also support those who worked on the game, even if it will still give Rowling money. Many are planning to match, if not double, the game’s price in donations to transgender and LGBTQIA+ organizations. The legacy of Hogwarts will not be tarnished by Rowling’s current actions. Rather, it will be preserved by the fans who wholeheartedly believe in the original message of her works. The fandom has always been open, particularly with those of the LGBTQIA+ community, a magical world that accepts them just as wizards are accepted. Hogwarts was a refuge, an escape, and Rowling’s actions have attempted — whether intentional or not — to rip that safety net away. Yet, the fandom is still strong. If the author of the original works will not continue to harbor the inclusive nature that helped to make her famous, it will be the fandom that casts her away and continue to build upon the stage that Rowling started. As Hermione Granger once said, “Books and cleverness. There are more important things: friendship and bravery.” Have the courage to stand up against hatred and remember that love is the most powerful force of all.

https://medium.com/fan-fare/j-k-rowling-has-become-professor-umbridge-325a606f3bc6

['Kristen Poli']

2020-09-21 13:17:58.365000+00:00

['Harry Potter', 'LGBT Rights', 'Gaming', 'Books', 'Writing']

Paralysis by Analysis

Paralysis by Analysis Why decision-making is tough Image created by Lorie Kleiner Eckert on Pablo I recently wrote a blog in which I said, “As a Jew, I often wonder if I would have been smart enough and brave enough to leave Europe before Hitler deemed it too late.” In discussing the story with my friend, Kathy, she pooh-poohed the smart enough and brave enough issues and got to the core of my personality: I never would have been decisive enough to leave. I would have weighed the pros and cons, talked to other people about it, and researched my options, but I never would have gotten around to doing anything. Paralysis by analysis, that’s me! Recognizing the truth in her comment, I went home with a desire to practice decisiveness. The opportunity presented itself with a new Lands’ End catalog I found in the mail. A down jacket I’ve had my eye on was on sale 50% off! I love Lands’ End down coats! Their feathers don’t migrate onto my clothes as do other brands, so there’s no need to carry a lint brush when I wear one! Also, it came in my hard-to-find size: a small tall! And it came in the color I wanted, navy! I immediately added it to my online shopping cart…and then stalled out before completing the purchase. Why? Well…there’s no longer a Lands’ End store near me, so if I didn’t like it, I would need to ship it back. And speaking of such, why weren’t they offering free shipping with the initial order? And why isn’t Lands’ End like Zappos who pays the shipping in both directions? Ultimately, the sale ended before I bought the coat. Chalk one up for decision by indecision. Instead of berating myself over this, I tried to learn from it so, I did an Internet search for “Decision Making 101.” Though I found many great articles from impressive sources, none were applicable. They all started off telling me not to sweat the small stuff, but what could be smaller than a decision to buy a coat for a woman who owns a closetful of them? And yet, I was clogged up over this issue. Who could help me with that? As it turns out, Barry Schwartz, Ph.D. is just the fellow. He says the crux of the issue for modern-day decision-makers is having too many choices. Schwartz is a psychologist and professor of social theory at Swarthmore College. He is also the author of The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less, a book published in 2004 and still pertinent today. According to Schwartz, an abundance of choices is problematic whether we are buying jeans, or making decisions about education, career, friendships, sex, romance, parenting, etc. To explain his thoughts, the book opens with Schwartz telling us about an insignificant purchase of his own: He bought a pair of jeans. He confesses that he’s the sort of fellow who wears his clothes until they fall apart. When his pants ultimately did, he headed to The Gap for a new pair. It had been years since he had shopped for jeans and now it seemed that knowing his size wasn’t quite enough information. What kind of fit did he want: slim, easy, relaxed, baggy, or extra baggy? And did he want a button-fly or a zipper fly? And what kind of look did he want, faded, or regular? He ended up trying on every option. Though he understood there was very little riding on his decision, he felt one of the options must be “right” for him and he was determined to figure it out. He left the store, finally, with a pair of easy fit jeans — and with self-doubt and anxiety. Clearly, this guy would get my dilemma with the Lands’ End coat. Would my local Dillard’s big sale of the year offer an equally attractive price? Would their coat be a trendier brand? Would it be a better shade of navy? Would its temperature rating be a bit warmer for cold Cincinnati nights? And what about the coats at Macy's or Nordstrom? This Dr. Schwartz guy would understand that decision-making in a world of myriad options is tough. Better yet, I now understand it too, so I can forgive myself when I am very actively sweating the small stuff. As for larger decisions in life? For the most part, I’m pretty good at those. Like Decision-Making 101 tells me, I can identify my main objective. I can make a list of pros and cons. I can do research to eliminate bad options. I can seek the advice of someone I trust. And ultimately, I can decide. But then there’s the issue of being in Europe during the rise of Hitler. To leave or not to leave, that’s still a tough question. It’s in a class of its own. I have no idea what I would have decided. Thank God I didn’t have to. ***** For those interested, here is the story mentioned in the first paragraph: ***** I hope you love these stories of my life. If so, try my memoir: Love, Loss, and Moving On.

https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/paralysis-by-analysis-4eba2e04023a

['Lorie Kleiner Eckert']

2020-12-19 15:03:05.151000+00:00

['Life', 'Motivation', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Life Lesson']

Visions From the Neobiological Frontier

Was there an aha moment that made you realize humans are on the cusp of a “neobiological revolution”? What trends/examples were you seeing that inspired you to found NEO.LIFE? The neobiological revolution has been taking shape for the past 15 years, starting with the sequencing of the human genome. But it was really once we started being able to edit and reprogram DNA that things started to get interesting. At the same time, we started to map the brain and develop tools for not only seeing individual neurons, but to interpret brain signals and reprogram them. We can see inside organs and follow pathways we never knew existed before. We can engineer bacteria and viruses, synthesize and reprogram proteins and use Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate cells. We have massive amounts of data, not only from medical records and DNA sequencing, but also from the inputs we get from the sensors in our watches and rings, in our shirts and our diapers, in our brains and our pills. And thanks to that, we’re training neural networks and creating algorithms to parse big data sets, and finding not just correlations, but causations, and predict which treatments will work. And with our smart phones, we have a massive distribution network for pushing out new apps to monitor, educate, train, predict, prevent, and cure diseases. My aha moment came at Daniel Kraft’s Exponential Medicine conference in 02015, when I realized that today, people in medicine and life sciences not only have deep knowledge and understanding and extensive training in human biology, but also data and computer skills. Suddenly I realized this is the next stage of the digital revolution, only this time we are engineering life. And amazingly enough, many of the people at the forefront of this revolution don’t have the bandwidth to see beyond the enormous problem they’re solving in the field they’re so deeply entrenched in. I found myself telling a neuroscientist things she didn’t know about genetics. Or a longevity researcher about synthetic biology developments. And no one seemed to be paying enough attention to the role of nutrition. So that’s why I started NEO.LIFE: to help connect the dots among all these siloed disciplines; to identify the extraordinary scientists and innovators who are pioneering new biological solutions; and to help build a community and create some perspective on where this could and should (or should not) be going. Is there a particular neobiological-related project you’ve come across lately that has been especially eye-opening in terms of getting you excited about the future? There are stories every day that excite and inspire me, and choosing just one is impossible. But there are a couple of projects that really blow my mind. There is a company in Pittsburgh called Lygenesis, who are harnessing the liver’s ability to regenerate itself to save patients with end stage liver disease. They do it by using the body’s lymph nodes as mini bioreactors that can convert stem cells into liver cells. So in effect, they can engineer multiple livers within an animal. They’ve done it in mice and larger mammals and are preparing for human clinical trials. Another example is in the field of synthetic biology, where the company Novo Nutrients is using symbiotic bacteria and gas bioreactors to convert carbon dioxide into industrial fish feed at a fraction of the cost, with greater availability and eventually higher nutritional quality. I’m pretty excited about reengineering longevity, too. And I think we will learn so much about the diseases of aging in the next five years. The work at David Sinclair’s lab at Harvard is particularly exciting, as is the work at a company like BioAge, who are using historical data from blood banks combined with bioinformatics and machine learning to uncover previously unknown pathways of aging and identify the drugs that can impact those pathways. And that’s not to mention the brain-computer interfaces being developed at a company like Openwater. Or the potential for growing human organs inside pigs for human transplant patients. The list goes on. We have a lot of work to do at NEO.LIFE! NEO.LIFE has been publishing a popular newsletter and online articles about the neobiological revolution for a few years now. Why do a book? Digital media gives us access to all the world’s information. But sometimes the bigger trends and the bigger picture get lost in the torrent. People get stuck in their disciplines. And not a lot of people are doing Google searches on the term “neobiological revolution”! I have always loved big ideas supported by deep reporting and excellent writing, and wrapped in beautiful design. The work we’re covering is so foundational to our future that we wanted to capture this moment in time, and establish a baseline for what we know today, and where we hope these tools can take us. So we created a beautiful object that can sit on a coffee table or in a waiting room for all kinds of people to discover today or years from now. Think of it as an artifact for future humans, or in Long Now terms, a time capsule. We had to make it something people would pick up out of curiosity and read with a sense of wonder and hope. We hope it sparks conversations all over the world. Despite its promise, many find this emerging frontier terrifying, and raise questions around ethics, potential misuse, and unintended consequences. I imagine you hear these concerns all the time. What do you say in response? I’m still untangling the difference between ethics and morals. The science exists and isn’t stopping. The opportunities are vast and we will wonder some day in the future why we would ever have questioned a parent’s right to edit an embryo to prevent a genetically inherited disease. Or why we poured so many resources into raising animals that we then killed to eat and ship all over the world when we could have simply grown our proteins in a bioreactor down the street. As for misuse, there are lots of people thinking about this all day long. Anything can be misused, from a box cutter to an airplane to a bacterial editing tool. We have to learn responsible use of these technologies and teach our values to the next generation — or perhaps learn new values from the next generation. Evolving a comprehensive set of guidelines and regulations will not be easy, since every nation, every culture, and every genetic propensity will have its own interpretation of what’s right. What’s important is to have these conversations now and bake as many of our universal values into our technologies as we can, upfront. And then design, test, analyze, and adjust as we go along. NEO.LIFE: 25 Visions For the Future of Our Species is available for purchase here.

https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/visions-from-the-neobiological-frontier-2a786868d523

['Ahmed Kabil']

2020-04-13 13:12:26.917000+00:00

['Genomics', 'Biotechnology', 'Biology', 'Technology', 'Science']

Your “Writing” Advice Makes Me Want to Gouge My Eyes Out

When it comes to writing, nothing sends me into a blind rage like reading articles entitled Why No One is Reading Your Writing, Why No One Cares About Your Writing, or How You Should Write, You Loser, The 5,606 Things You’re Doing Wrong with Your Writing. These articles — and I use that term generously — are merely a subjective collection of one person’s experience with a few Stephen King quotes thrown in for good measure because apparently, every single person in the world has read that Stephen King book and feels the need to quote from it. PSA: Many other writers have written books on writing. Maybe read them? My first reaction is: well, who the fuck are you to make sweeping, blanket statements about what works when it comes to writing? Who made you judge, jury, and executioner? Because you’ve made a little coin on this platform you can craft scare tactics? You’ve been writing on Medium for a hot minute, and suddenly you’re positioning yourself as an oracle of the written word? Complete with formatting your articles like they’re a fifth-grade book report? Come now. Isn’t the beauty of writing in its sheer diversity? The fact that experimental writers like Amy Hempel, Kelly Link, Jenny Offill, and Ben Marcus can be just as successful in their careers than deft storytellers like Marilynne Robinson, Elena Ferrante, Lauren Groff, Laura van den Berg, Colson Whitehead, and Zadie Smith is proof that there is no single standard. Half the time, I can’t even make sense of what Ben Marcus writes, but it doesn’t make him any less potent or influential to the people who revere his work. Try convincing Faulkner to punctuate. Try telling Samuel Beckett to follow the rules when he was ridiculed when Waiting for Godot debuted on stage. Try telling Virginia Woolf (a writer who directly influenced Marquez) to not write a whole book from multiple interior points-of-view, which was just not done in the modernist fiction of her time. I can see her telling Leonard, fuck that parade before she set off to write The Waves. Try telling Zadie Smith anything. People who blindly follow the herd are sheep. People who listen to what their voice is telling them are artists. There are rules that writers break every day in their own way, and that is what makes literature remarkable. Not every writer formats their paragraphs, chapters, and dialogue in the same way. Some writers add dialogue tags. Other writers blend dialogue into the narrative — deliberately. Some writers completely forgo plot in favor of the rhythm and cadence of a line. Their passion is in the architecture of a story through language, instead of plot or character. Language is the story. Whenever I read this sanctimonious “rules” nonsense here on Medium — on how one should write, format, and publish their stories lest they are met with crippling failure — I want to gouge out my eyes with an acetylene torch because these people preach a specific format for a specific platform rather than encourage exploration and experimentation. Are novels formatted this way? Are essays in Longreads formatted this way? Have you ever published anything outside of your sphere on Medium? Have you ever worked with a book editor? If not, your articles should be titled, “The Very Specific Way I Write That Made Me $1,000 On This Very Specific Platform. Maybe, I Dunno, It’ll Work For You Too.” I tried blocking and muting all this nonsense, but it’s a contagion that is intent on sullying my feed. A quarter million people read this essay I wrote on Medium and it wasn’t formatted in the way the gurus prescribe. People didn’t read it because I spoon-fed them their medicine, they read it because it was honest. My friend Deenie Hartzog-Mislock wrote this raw, beautiful, incisive essay, and do you see her cutting up your meat for you? The oracles tell you not to use big, difficult words as if adults are feeble children who don’t have access to the internet. I was the kid who grew up dirt poor in Brooklyn, and I often mispronounced words I’d read in books because I hadn’t heard them spoken aloud. I learn new words every single day, and I use Google’s audio tool to make sure I’ve got the pronunciation. Why would I want the command of my primary language to ossify? Why would anyone want to stop learning? Even when I was getting my MFA at Columbia, there were sanctimonious assholes who bemoaned styles, genres, and formats that weren’t their own. Thankfully, there were a handful of teachers who made it clear that the best way to help someone on their journey is to give them advice that helps them get better at their particular style and voice. The point isn’t to homogenize — what is this, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? — it’s to stand out. They tell you not to use “flowery” language or write very simply — that’s cool if that’s the way you naturally write or if you’re writing pop-culture self-help, but it’s a death sentence for line writers where manipulation of language is the objective. Instead, follow this advice from Jenny Offill, a writer who actually wrote a New York Times bestseller: “But if you’re someone who is trying to move to a more pared-down language, or language that is trying to do things at a couple of different levels at the same time, the workshop environment can be difficult. So I try to teach my students to read at the line level, because I think that’s what’s helpful: to start thinking about what they’re writing line by line, as well as the bigger picture. I’m also always trying to make them read things in different genres: poetry or essays or non-fiction or primary sources from science or anthropology. I want them to get a sense of the strangeness of language. It reminds you that there are all these different ways in which you can create density and give a vital feeling to the words on.” You’re not going to learn how to write if your diet is filled with Medium articles written by people telling you how to write. You’re going to learn how to write by reading across styles and genres until you find work that speaks to you. Then, you study it. Deconstruct it. Learn from it. Determine how it can inform the words you put to paper (or screen). And then you write and then you don’t stop writing. Ever. Don’t confuse “growing your audience” [marketing] with getting better at what you live to do [studying others, practicing your craft, refining your work and honing your voice]. But hey, if you started writing five minutes ago and want to make $10,000 a month, my screed isn’t for you. Language is a crucial weapon in my arsenal. Language gives me the freedom to interpret the world and translate it in new, inventive ways. Language gives me access to libraries of images I can use and manipulate. So, for me, a limited vocabulary is imprisonment. Why must we pander to readers instead of challenging them? Are a few new words in a story really going to alienate them? It’s not like I’m publishing scientific peer review papers on Medium. Seriously. Are you that afraid? The oracles tell you that you must join groups, be part of the crowd. If not, then poor you, little newbie, wading out in the dark waters without a life jacket. Read this carefully: you don’t have to join any social media groups to be a successful writer. If you want to, awesome, but it’s not a requirement and it’s certainly not a guarantee. Half the time these communities turn into catty cliques that have a certain think speak. Better to find a handful of readers who can help make you the best writer you can be. We spend our time devoted to the periphery. As if the periphery was an altar where we’d all gather and worship. We cleave to the shiny objects that are social media, email, Facebook groups, podcasting — we’re told we have to be diversified — at the expense of the one true thing you create. The thing by which you want to be known and remembered. We give equal (if not more) weight and devotion to that which surrounds our thing instead of getting laser-focused and refining our skills, being a student — all to keep getting better at the thing. Trust me, I want to do ALL THE THINGS. Now, I ask myself what portion of my day have I committed to being a better writer, a better storyteller, and a brand builder? Am I learning something new, regardless of how minor that something is? Or am I zeroing in on the things that are conduits and bridges to and from the work? You’ve created all these points of entry to a thing that isn’t as good as the vehicle that got them there. And I say this as a marketer of 20+ years. And someone who has published professionally for the same amount of time, and has worked at a traditional book publisher (HarperCollins). Prioritize the writing, not the distribution of it. The oracles warn you about formatting. You have to have big, bold headers everywhere. Your headers are the coming attractions. Beware of large blocks of text — their eyes, their eyes! Everyone’s reading on their phone, and they CAN’T HANDLE IT. Many single-line paragraphs are the rage. And then you start to notice that all the writing looks the same. It’s well-packaged, well-spaced — formulaic in form, but not marketed! Oh, no. Marketing is such a smarmy practice. We don’t do that. No one sees the irony that their formatting rules are a form of marketing — focusing on the presentation of the work versus the work itself. Yes, you want breathing room on the page, but if someone is really pulled into a story are they really going to quit because they’re SUFFERING THE TORTURES OF THE LONG PARAGRAPH DAMNED? You’ve pretty much excluded all literature written before the iPhone. People still remember Faulkner, and that fucker had a real rap battle with the run-on sentence. I’m wading through a sea of same, and although I have the means to block the writers who flood my homepage, or opt to “see less of this,” etc., it pains me that people think they have to abide by some arbitrary rulebook to write out their heart. Think about it. Do you read books? Have you read short stories in literary magazines? Essays in print and online periodicals? Do they follow your “rules” format, which is actually best served in non-fiction, pedagogical books with their frameworks, studies, and instructional steps? Do your readers need to be hand-held every step of the way? I’ve been writing the same way for decades, and my audience has only grown. If you are telling stories that teach, inspire, motivate, and touch people, they’ll cope with a few big words and long paragraphs. Great stories bear the weight of the ephemeral. There are no rules, only the ones you make for yourself that align with your work and how you wish to communicate it. If a certain way of formatting suits you, fine, but don’t run around telling people it’s the standard. There are so many ways to be a writer. There is an infinite number of ways to tell a story. Why pander to one? Why not experiment with multitudes? Why not play? Isn’t that what we’re here to do? Write, experiment, learn, play, and write some more. How much freedom is there in a confined box? Quit it with the dogma. Forget the arbitrary rules. Write how you want to write, for long as you want to write it, in a style and format that suits you. Don’t be a copy. Fight to be singular, an original.

https://medium.com/mastering-the-mechanics/your-writing-advice-makes-me-want-to-gouge-my-eyes-out-a6c72d857834

['Felicia C. Sullivan']

2020-04-24 01:55:08.638000+00:00

['Writing', 'Authors', 'Medium', 'Work', 'Books']

Embracing the Sacredness of Your Weekend

The weekend was once a time where I was able to let go of everything from the previous week and enjoy doing something other than work. There wasn’t a pervasive sense of guilt that I carried if I indulged in an all-day movie marathon or stayed up past 1am and didn’t get anything done. That changed when I started my Master’s degree while working full time. Saturday and Sunday quickly became my main time to work on my courses, and my freedom started to erode. My intention was always to get back to a place where weekends were a time for sleeping late, mindlessly enjoying a bottle of wine with my husband and spending more time doing creative work. That didn’t happen. As soon as I was done my degree I filled up that time with a side-hustle. In fact, I was spending even more time now on evenings and weekends doing work than I had been before. It’s been over the last two years that I’ve come to realize how short-sighted this approach to living has been. The time we have each weekend is so limited and so precious, that filling it with tasks and activities that are “productive” is something of a fool’s errand. Despite this, we all continue to over-schedule ourselves all in the fear of missing out. What we give up are the few fleeting moments that we have where life actually happens. Those spontaneous, beautiful moments where you laugh until you cry, engage in deep and meaningful conversation over a long and lazy cup of coffee and connect with those that mean the most to you. It’s been my goal to reclaim the sacredness of my weekends and get back to a place where I start my new week feeling like I actually took a break. While this might be easier said than done, I’m committed to the process and even more so to the results.

https://medium.com/swlh/embracing-the-sacredness-of-your-weekend-c8dde9ef1da2

['Shannon Hennig']

2019-09-22 07:26:01.116000+00:00

['Life', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity', 'Work Life Balance', 'Life Lessons']

The Difference Between Positive & Negative Stress

By Daisy Woodward Illustrated by Assa Ariyoshi Stress is a word we all use, all of the time, to describe many different scenarios and our physical and mental response to them. “My work’s a bit stressful at the moment” is a phrase most of us say, week in, week out — when a big presentation is looming or that pile of unanswered emails begins to feel insurmountable. In this case, the stress is usually manageable: we use our body’s “fight or flight” response (the release of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which raise blood pressure and heart rate, and prepare us physically to confront impending threats) to gear ourselves up to tackle the pressurised event and, once it’s over, we return to feeling relaxed. But when the tension and anxiety linger, and don’t go away once hurdles are overcome, there’s a strong risk of more unpleasant, long-term effects on both our bodies and minds. In whatever circumstance we experience stress, though, we tend to view it as a negative force. Which is why it is surprising to discover that many scientists and psychologists have suggested that stress can in fact have advantages, as well as disadvantages, on our individual wellbeing. A recently published study by Erik Gonzalez-Mulé found that a stressful job can actually be good for your health when combined with high levels of control in decision-making. The paper tracked thousands of workers in their 60s over the course of seven years and found that those in high-stress roles where they felt they had freedom and control were 34% less likely to die than those in less stressful jobs. That said, employees in high-stress roles with low control were at the highest risk of unhealthy habits and early death. So the question is: how do we identify the “good stress” that can be harnessed to live a happier and healthier life, and what are the warning signs that the stress we’re experiencing is exceeding our ability to cope and plunging us into dangerous territory? “When we’re talking about the notion of stress being good for you, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the term ‘stress’ because, to me, stress is bad,” responds Dr. Gail Kinman, Professor of Occupational Health Psychology at the University of Bedfordshire. “What you can say is that pressure can be healthy. There is something called the Yerkes-Dodson model which was developed over 100 years ago, and it’s so plausible. Essentially you have to find out the level of pressure that allows you to achieve peak performance.” “If you have too little pressure, you’re going to be really bored and your performance and your health will suffer,” she explains. “For example, most people at some stage have done jobs that have been way below their abilities and often they end up doing them badly because they just switch off. Equally, if there’s too much pressure, your performance will suffer because it’s just too much; you can’t meet the demand. So the pressure needs to be at this particular type of level — the optimum level, let’s say — and that’s going to be different for different people. It’s finding out where that tipping point is.” There are various ways of identifying when the level of pressure you find yourself under is shifting from the motivating towards the unhealthy, Dr. Kinman continues. “Try to preempt the signals that your body and mind are giving you; the early-warning triggers that show you’re starting to feel uncomfortable. Like I get really ratty,” she laughs. “And then that is the time to realise that you should be doing something different. Self-knowledge and prioritising your self-care is really important.” People who are exposed to small but regular amounts of stress can make themselves more immune: this is known as stress inoculation Professor Stephen Joseph, a registered coaching psychologist with the British Psychology Society and author of Authentic: How to be Yourself and Why it Matters, concurs. “When we’re not leading an authentic life — when we have a niggling sense of anxiety, depression, stress — then it is usually an indication that it’s time to seek a bigger change in our life; to find a life that’s more true to ourselves.” He similarly believes that “good stress” isn’t actually stress at all. “When people are authentic, they will naturally seek out opportunities to push themselves to grow; to learn to develop; to be the best they can be. That may be challenging, it may be difficult, but it’s not stress. Equally, it’s the people who steer clear of this other type of pressure — people who try to avoid ‘stress’ altogether by shying away from a promotion at work, or staying in the same job, for example, to try and minimise those external demands on them — who are in fact experiencing the negative stress of leading an inauthentic life.” So, having established the line between what constitutes good stress — or “positive pressure” — and “negative stress”, the question that remains is can the negative kind ever be good for you? Interestingly, yes. “People who don’t have any stress in their lives at all are more likely to crumble at the first hurdle,” explains Dr. Kinman, “Whereas it is thought that people who are exposed to small but regular amounts of stress can make themselves more immune: this is known as stress inoculation.” This is particularly effective if you have been exposed to “a number of situations that are mildly stressful in your childhood and have survived those situations well, probably with the help of your parents and your friends,” says Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool. “This is because you will have developed ways of responding to stressful events which will stand you in good stead when you come across stress triggers later on.” For those of us who haven’t developed the tools to counteract stressful situations — whether that’s down to a lack of previous exposure or simply because the demands we face are beyond our natural coping abilities — there are ways of training yourself to deal with stress more positively, says Dr. Kinman. “Sometimes it can depend on how you label your internal feelings. If you look at the heart rate and blood pressure of a skydiver, they go through the roof just before they jump out of the plane. And of course if somebody is very stressed, their heart rate will be very high as well. But the people jumping out of an aeroplane are doing it because they find it exciting and challenging; they’re labelling this experience in a different type of way. So that’s one way you can try and turn the experience around.” When this is impossible because the level of pressure simply feels too high, there is also a lot to be said for believing that you have the resources to cope with the problem, she adds. “CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] can be very useful in spotting thinking errors — I’m a firm believer in interrogating the statements that start with should/shouldn’t, must/mustn’t. It can also help to think what advice you’d give to your closest friend, because often we’re much harder on ourselves than we are on other people. But one of the most important things is trying to be flexible in responding to demands: think, what resources do I have (whether they’re internal or external); what else can I try?” Professor Joseph agrees: “Being flexible in our approach to stress is the key, which again comes down to being honest with ourselves. People who really know themselves have a healthy ability to realistically appraise situations. They don’t get trapped into a rigid mindset, and they can eventually find the right way of coping.”

https://medium.com/refinery29/the-difference-between-positive-negative-stress-80732b0e9154

[]

2019-12-19 15:00:47.285000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Self', 'Careers', 'Stress']

The 7-Day Work Week Experiment — And the Wisdom of The Day of Rest

By Joel Gascoigne Recently, I religiously tried to follow a new routine I created for myself: a 7-day work week routine. The idea was quite simple: I would work 7 days a week, rest 7 days a week, go to the gym 7 days a week, reflect 7 days a week. This was less about working lots, much more about feeling fulfilled every day, feeling stretched during the day but also rested. I aimed to work less each day, and replace two hours of work with a long break in the middle of the day. The biggest thing I wanted to do was to satisfy my craving of “why not?” and to challenge the status quo of working 5 days a week and then taking 2 days off. Many of us know that working 9–5 is not the most effective way to work, and I had found this to be true for quite some time. I had a curiosity about whether the 5-day work week might also not be the most effective routine. Some of the hypotheses I had about my new 7-day work week: I would be much more successful in building solid habits that became ingrained, since I wouldn’t have two days off and then the struggle to get back into broken habits. I would be in much better sync with my team who are distributed around the world, and I would have a better handle on my emails and work by having time in the weekends too. I could work less than 40 hours a week and be more productive, since I would have long breaks between super focused work periods. The 7-day work week routine I’ve been an early riser for a couple of years now, and during this experiment I was rising at 4:30am. I aimed to do 5.5 hours of work each day, which is around 38.5 hours a week. 4:30: Rise. 5–6:30: 90 minutes of focused work. 6:30–9: Gym, breakfast, shower, etc. 9–11:30: 2.5hrs of focused work. 11:30–3pm: Lunch, then extended rest period. 3–4:30: 90 minutes of focused work. Results of the 7-day work week routine In the end, I have decided that I won’t continue with the 7-day work week routine. Here are two of the things that didn’t work out: How the world works does affect you This is one of the things I wanted to avoid believing for the longest time. I don’t think it’s ever healthy to believe things “are the way they are,” and in many cases I think this can be forgotten. After all, as entrepreneurs we are in the business of changing reality by making something out of nothing. I found that Saturdays and Sundays could never be the same as other days, as much as I wanted them to be and as much as I tried to create a routine that could be exactly the same, every day. There are more people wandering the streets, more noise outside. There is no one in the office. You can’t send certain emails, because they need to hit someone’s inbox in work hours. It’s not the best day to push a new feature or blog post. You can certainly take advantage of the fact that Saturday and Sunday are different by doing specific tasks. However, the point of my experiment was to have identical days, and in this respect it was a failure. That said, it has been a very interesting experiment and I have kept some aspects of the new routine. I burned out, even with lots of breaks I wanted every day to be exactly the same. So I worked each day and rested each day. I went to the gym every day, I adjusted my work out so that this would be sustainable. I found that even with a gym routine of just a few exercises and different muscle groups, I felt I couldn’t get adequate overall renewal just in a single day period. I worked out for 15 days straight and in the end strained a muscle and had to take almost a week off. Similarly, I found it interesting to observe how my passion towards the work I was doing adjusted. To begin with, I was excited during the first week and even at the weekend I enjoyed working. The hardest aspect I found was to stop myself working so much during the week, so that I could be fully rested and keep working at the weekend. Overall, I feel like the 7-day work week failed because of lack of an extended period of renewal. My hypothesis — that a couple of extra hours during the day and fewer overall daily hours working would be enough — was invalidated in my experience. The wisdom of the day of rest After trying a 7-day work week, I became quite fascinated by the concept of a “day of rest”. It occurred to me that this is a tradition that has been around for a very long time, and of separate origins. Almost all of the world observes some form of a weekly “day of rest.” I’m no expert on the Bible, however with a little research I found that the origin of the “seventh day” or Sabbath is Genesis 2:2–3: “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.” Similarly, in Buddhism there is the concept of Uposatha which is the Buddhist day of observance. I find it interesting how Buddhism teaches the purpose of this day: “The cleansing of the defiled mind.” I feel a sense of calm and confidence in the knowledge that many thousands of years of wisdom all converges towards the idea of a weekly day of rest. Certainly from my naive experiment I now feel that this is a very good practice. 6 days of work, 1 day of rest Both from my own experiment and the wisdom of the day of rest, I have become interested in the idea of a single day of rest. However, I have not once come across anything advocating two days of rest. This is one of my biggest takeaways from this experiment, and I plan to continue to work on the basis of 6 days of work and a single day of rest. Jim Rohn, who I have been very inspired by, also said it well: Work was so important, here was the original formula for labor. If you have forgotten it, remind yourself. Six days of labor, and one day of rest. Now, it’s important not to get those numbers mixed up. Why not five/two? Maybe one of the reasons for six/one: if you rest too long the weeds take the garden. Not to think so is naive. As soon as you’ve planted, the busy bugs and the noxious weeds are out to take it. So you can’t linger too long in the rest mode, you’ve got to go back to work. Six days of work, then rest. I think one of my biggest takeaways from trying a 7-day work week is: despite the conclusion that rest is important, a single day is the perfect amount, no more. I am working to consistently live by this method for as many of the weeks as I can during the year. I believe that this will be a key to success. Have you considered experimenting with your work week? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Related P.S. Get all our posts on workplace culture, productivity, transparency and more in your email. Sign up now.

https://medium.com/the-mission/the-7-day-work-week-experiment-and-the-wisdom-of-the-day-of-rest-8e94b12aa2d2

[]

2016-06-14 10:21:02.205000+00:00

['Work Life Balance', 'Productivity', 'Work', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Careers']

ETF Partners Capital, Sustainability through Innovation

We talk with Rob Genieser, a partner at ETF Partners Capital. PetaCrunch: What’s your investment strategy in a single tweet? Rob Genieser: Sustainability through innovation — backing great entrepreneurs who want to achieve commercial success and make the world a better place. PC: How did ETF Partners Capital start? RG: We wanted to focus on the environmental revolution, that we believed would follow the software, communications and internet revolutions that preceded it. We also thought Europe would be great for these types of “green” entrepreneurs, as Europe leads in many of these areas. PC: What do you look for in founders and their start-ups? RG: Great people make great companies. Founders have to possess a tremendous passion, and have the focus and dedication to make it happen. PC: What’s the most exciting start-up you have funded recently and why? RG: Our most recent investment was in Eagle Genomics, that is helping large organizations understand the microbiome. Billions of dollars are now spent in this area, and huge datasets are being created…but someone needs to offer the software platform that helps you curate all that information and draw understanding from the data. That is Eagle. PC: What’s the most common error founders/start-ups make? RG: The best founders listen well, and leverage the support of others. I think the biggest mistake is to go alone, when others are willing and eager to help.

https://medium.com/petacrunch/etf-partners-capital-sustainability-through-innovation-e055710092c2

['Kevin Hart']

2019-09-02 12:16:02.917000+00:00

['Innovation', 'Startup', 'VC', 'Vc Funding', 'Sustainability']

How to Take Full Advantage of Your On Deck Fellowship

Uncertainty In startups and life, there’s no such thing as a sure thing. People can go back against their word Deals fall through Promises get broken The only thing that’s guaranteed is that there are no guarantees. If you’re coming from a more corporate lifestyle, this may not have been the case. But with startups, you’re often operating with limited information and an unfair distribution of resources in a highly competitive (cutthroat) environment where you have a little to no control on … well … anything. It can be unsettling or downright discouraging to work in this state, but there are several things you can do to make it more palatable. Control your environment To prepare for uncertainty, it helps to eliminate uncertainty elsewhere in your life so when something unplanned or unforeseeable occurs (and it will), you can focus all of your attention on that rather than everything else. This means: Ensure a store of supplies (food, water, toilet paper, exercise equipment) Ensure you have enough savings (so your bills will always be paid) Ensure you have access to help, a community, and a marketplace (don’t become isolated) Ensure you have a safe, secure place to work (no interruptions, no noise, etc.) Ensure you have a safe, secure place to panic/freak out/cry (get the catharsis out of the way) Your environment and your needs may be different, so please adjust accordingly. But the key thing is if you’ve eliminated uncertainty in these areas, you have much fewer things to worry about and deal with in the short- and midterm. Here are some practical things within my control that I wish I’d done early on when I knew I was planning to start a company: If you own a home and want to get a HELOC (equity-backed loan), it’s significantly easier to do so while you still have a job rather than after you quit If you have stock options you need to sell, it’s better to sell early into the next year rather than close to the end to defer taxes. You still have to pay those taxes, but a little padding can ease your stress and feelings of uncertainty. Take more walks. After taking care of sleep, exercise, and food, I’ve found that walks in nature can resolve any remaining anxiety or issues with mood. YMMV. Control your assumptions One of the biggest sources of uncertainty in entrepreneurship, in my experience, is due to invalid assumptions (as well as implicit ones you aren’t consciously aware of). These range from the most obvious to the most subtle, but they all can be extremely deadly if you aren’t careful. Here’s a list of common startup-related assumptions: Your customers will find you as soon as you just launch a website Your customer base is willing to pay Your customer base will actually read your landing-page copy Your customer base is large enough that if they do pay, you can profit after costs Your customer acquisition costs and churn will be low Your prospective investors will invest in you with nothing but an idea You only need to reach out to a handful of investors/customers/recruits/etc. You can do everything by yourself As a founder, every decision you make is likely based on one or more untested assumptions. You may rush to get out a landing page to obtain customer signups, but no matter how good your product is, nobody finds or sees the landing page (because you need what’s referred to as distribution). Some investors you reach out to may sound perfect on paper, but they may actually only invest under certain unspoken conditions based on launch metrics, equity percentages, or founder backgrounds — you won’t know until you test your assumptions. You may believe strongly you don’t need any help and can do everything on your own. But even if you had all of the prerequisite skills, the practice, and the experience, you’ll eventually find yourself attacked on multiple fronts and can only respond to one at a time due to biology/physiology. It’s important to be aware of these assumptions, to limit them (and therefore your exposure to their downsides if you’re wrong), and to account for them. Story time Back around 2011, two amazing founder friends of mine had built an amazing, profitable startup over the course of about four years. They had done everything according to plan, one they was assumed to be correct. They raised a friends-and-family round, preseed, seed, series A, etc. They had paying customers, a successful distribution strategy, and decent profit margins (enough to pay themselves more than minimum wage and live a little). By all accounts, they were doing well. So when a strong and exciting acquisition offer came along (something around $4-5 million), they jumped at the chance. Again, by all accounts, an amazing success. After investors, vendors, costs, etc., each founder owned about 3% equity. Each walked away with about $60,000 over those four years plus roughly minimum wage salaries over the years. They’d have gotten a ton more just working at Google for the same time period (>8.3x more, in fact, pretax). They had assumed that raising money was the right thing to do for them. They started with nothing — no savings, no runway — so they had to raise early as well. Each additional fundraising round was assumed to be the correct move (it brought press, network connections, and more customers). But each and every assumption had a cost — one they wouldn’t see or realize until much later. It burned them out and deterred them from wanting to go through the process again. But I can assure you if they do make another go, they won’t make the same mistakes. Additionally, there are also some implicit, noncompany-oriented assumptions made by founders:

https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-take-full-advantage-of-your-on-deck-fellowship-88361662307c

['Van Nguyen']

2020-10-22 17:01:53.148000+00:00

['Programming', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Founders', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital']

Getting started with Google Maps in Python

Lets get started with google maps in python! We are going to cover making a basic map, adding different layers to the maps, and then creating driving directions! Before this article, I did a quick tutorial with basemap in python. In this tutorial, I will cover using the google maps api in jupyter notebook. The first step here is to get an api key from google at this link. Once this is done, you may need to run the following command in terminal and restart jupyter: jupyter nbextension enable --py gmaps Once this is complete, you are ready to jump right into making beautiful maps! Initially, we are going to want to read in our api key. To do this I completed the following steps: Save the API key in a text file Write code to read in the key and save it as a variable with open('apikey.txt') as f: api_key = f.readline() f.close Once this is complete you are ready to use the google maps api. For reference, all the material in this tutorial comes from the documentation which can be found here. You may also need to do a pip install gmaps prior to working in jupyter. Once this is done, you can initialize the session with the command: import gmaps gmaps.configure(api_key='Your api key here') After this, you can create a generic map by just creating a center location and zoom level: new_york_coordinates = (40.75, -74.00) gmaps.figure(center=new_york_coordinates, zoom_level=12) This returns the following figure: Easy first map using google maps api Now, lets say that you would like to add earthquake data to your map. There is already a dataset that google provides, and you can use this very easily to add more information to your plot using the heatmap function. import gmaps import gmaps.datasets # Use google maps api gmaps.configure(api_key=api_key) # Fill in with your API key # Get the dataset earthquake_df = gmaps.datasets.load_dataset_as_df('earthquakes') #Get the locations from the data set locations = earthquake_df[['latitude', 'longitude']] #Get the magnitude from the data weights = earthquake_df['magnitude'] #Set up your map fig = gmaps.figure() fig.add_layer(gmaps.heatmap_layer(locations, weights=weights)) fig Heatmap of Earthquake activity This can also be used in the same way I used in my previous tutorial for fires around CA. Here is how the map looks when you add a layer of current fire activity: Heatmap of current fire activity Finally, you can get out driving directions from the api. To do this there are a couple of steps. To plot route on map: Define location 1 in coordinates Define location 2 in coordinates Create layer using gmaps.directions.Directions Add layer to the map Code: import gmaps #configure api gmaps.configure(api_key=api_key) #Define location 1 and 2 Durango = (37.2753,-107.880067) SF = (37.7749,-122.419416) #Create the map fig = gmaps.figure() #create the layer layer = gmaps.directions.Directions(Durango, SF,mode='car') #Add the layer fig.add_layer(layer) fig Driving Directions And to get more information like the distance and travel time, you can use the gmaps client. The code for this is below: Shows the duration and distance for the directions There is a ton more that you can do with the api, and the documentation is awesome. If there is something I did not cover, it is a great resource in general! https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/jupyter-gmaps/latest/jupyter-gmaps.pdf

https://medium.com/future-vision/google-maps-in-python-part-2-393f96196eaf

['Elliott Saslow']

2019-08-02 20:47:50.181000+00:00

['Programming', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Mapping', 'Web Development']

How to Use Limitations to Boost Productivity

How to Use Limitations to Boost Productivity Sometimes it’s good to be cornered to be more productive Image licensed from Canva I saw a thread on Twitter where people detailed what they miss most from their pre-pandemic lives. Hanging out with friends, hugging parents, going out without a mask were common replies, but stuffing popcorn in movie theatres appeared just as much. I started to wonder what I miss most and because in my country we are almost back to normal — it left me missing travelling the most. The experience of leaving this everyday life behind to delve into a different city, hearing another language and dip my toes in the sea is on the top of my list. But surprisingly, right after these, I realised how much I miss my weekly commute to Vienna — which is 200 miles or 3 hours on the train away from where I live. I work as a freelance consultant and my main client’s headquarters are in another city, another country. Before March I commuted to Vienna, every Wednesday — getting up at 5 to catch the 6 am train, arriving there at 9 to work from the office the whole day and then catching the evening train back. It is as exhausting as it sounds, the longest day of the week was always Wednesday and I used to spend my entire Thursday recovering from it. Yet I realized I miss it. Because even if it was exhausting, I got so much done in one day that I felt okay not doing anything on the following day. The commute left me with 6 hours of a train ride, and those were the most productive hours of my entire week. Sitting in my seat, nowhere to go, nothing else to do but work or write. During an average journey — there and back — I used to write 5,000–8,000 words or to clean my inbox getting everything done for the whole week. I was focused, sharp and without distractions. I managed to use the limitations to my advantage so no wonder I wish I could be travelling there again. I might not miss the ensuing fatigue but I surely miss the exceptional productivity. It made my day and my whole week. I started to think about how I could replicate that productivity without the possibility of getting on the train, and I collected a few tips that focus on using restrictions to boost productivity. Limit the impulses The beauty of the train ride was that I had nothing else to do but to focus. The wifi is usually up and down, making it near impossible to browse endlessly without being interrupted by a tunnel. There is nothing to look at but the back of someone else’s seat. There is nothing to hear but the music in my ears. Watching out the window is not my thing but the scenery there is not too interesting after having seen it once. If you limit the impulses you would have normally, if you shut everything out, if you silence your phone and switch off notifications you can become immediately more focused. The idea of multitasking is a myth, when multitasking your brain jumps back and forth between different tasks in a short time, loosening your focus and making you more tired quicker. When at home or at the office (lucky you!) make sure that during a certain time, there is nothing to bother you. Early mornings work great for that. Stopping phone notifications is superb. Sitting in a boring environment works magic. Limit the impulses that would distract you and be there fully for your tasks. Limit the space Working from home sounded great at first until we were forced to do it. Because there are too many things happening. You get up for a coffee. Then to put the dishes away. Then it’s lunchtime. Then the postman arrives. You get up, you leave the desk, you lose focus and it’s hard to get it back. You can help yourself by limiting the space around you. Make sure you can’t go anywhere or it’s difficult to do it. Make sure that you are comfortable but no one bumps into you. Sometimes working and writing on my phone from the bathtub is the most productive time of my day — because there is nowhere to go, nothing to do. But an ugly corner in a coffee shop, a park bench without a view or a bus stop works just fine. A more comfortable limitation is when you get comfy in your bed, plugging some music in, surrounding yourself with only the things you need to work — so that unplugging and getting up shouldn’t be worth your while. Limit the time I noticed in myself and I heard a same for others too, if I have too much time to complete something I will most probably waste 90% of it with something useless. Thinking, overthinking, second-guessing myself, procrastinating my whole term away. But when there is a looming deadline, and time is scarce, I seem to be better at focusing. Having a lot to lose helps to stop me procrastinating. And I don’t like missing deadlines, self-imposed or not. You’ll be surprised what can be done in 10 minutes or 25. The Pomodoro method is a great way of setting deadlines to yourself. Working 25 minutes seems nothing, but if you set slightly impossible chunks of tasks, you will automatically become more focused. After all, it’s only 25 minutes, it can’t hurt.

https://zitafontaine.medium.com/how-to-use-limitations-to-boost-productivity-199a5d97ec93

['Zita Fontaine']

2020-07-27 14:36:31.652000+00:00

['Productivity', 'Advice', 'Work', 'Inspiration', 'Writing']

Google Cloud Platform Security Operations Center Data Lake

Data lake components Google Stackdriver Stackdriver aggregates metrics, logs, and events from infrastructure, giving developers and operators a rich set of observable signals that speed root-cause analysis and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). It provides native integration with cloud data tools like BigQuery, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Cloud Datalab, and out-of-the-box integration with tools like Splunk Enterprise. You can filter which logs to exclude by organization, folder, project, and billing id. You can enable Data Access logs at the organization, folder, or project level (other logs are enabled by default). You can specify the services whose audit logs you want to receive. For example, you might want audit logs from Compute Engine but not from Cloud SQL. Google Cloud Security Command Center Cloud Security Command Center gives enterprises consolidated visibility into their cloud assets across App Engine, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Spanner, Cloud DNS, Service accounts and Google Container Registry. Cloud Security Command Center integrates with Google Cloud Platform security tools like Cloud Security Scanner, and the Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API. It also integrates with third-party security solutions such as Acqua, Cavirin, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Dome9, Palo Alto Networks RedLock, Qualys, and Twistlock, and provides an API and schema to integrate additional third party tools. Google Cloud Dataflow Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed service for transforming and enriching data in stream (real time) and batch (historical) modes with equal reliability and expressiveness — no more complex workarounds or compromises needed. Use Cloud Dataflow as a convenient integration point to bring predictive analytics to security event management by adding TensorFlow-based Cloud Machine Learning models and APIs to your data processing pipelines. Google BigQuery BigQuery allows organizations to capture and analyze security data in real time using its powerful streaming ingestion capability so that your insights are always current. It gives you full view of all your data by seamlessly querying data stored in BigQuery’s managed columnar storage, Cloud Storage, Cloud Bigtable, Sheets, and Drive. It enables you to analyze all your security operations data, build and operationalize machine learning solutions with simple SQL, and easily and securely share insights within your organization and beyond as datasets, queries, spreadsheets, and reports. It… Integrates with existing ETL tools like Informatica and Talend to enrich the data you already use. Supports popular BI tools like Tableau, MicroStrategy, Looker, and Data Studio out of the box, so anyone can easily create reports and dashboards. BigQuery ML (beta) enables users to create and execute machine learning models using standard SQL queries; it also increases development speed by eliminating the need to move data. It supports the following types of models: Linear regression — These models can be used for predicting a numerical value. Binary logistic regression — These models can be used for predicting one of two classes (such as identifying whether an event represents a security threat). Multiclass logistic regression for classification — These models can be used to predict more than two classes such as whether an input represents a low, medium, or high impact threat. Google Cloud Storage Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storage and retrieval of any amount of data at any time. Supported data sources include Cloud Pub/Sub, Stackdriver Logging, Dataflow, and BigQuery; BigQuery can also import from Google Cloud Storage. Object Lifecycle Management provides the ability to set the object storage class (eg. Nearline, Coldline) to a lower-cost class for less frequently accessed objects, as well as delete objects, based on

https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-platform-security-operations-center-soc-data-lake-4b31e011f622

['Ferris Argyle']

2019-02-20 17:50:31.754000+00:00

['Google Cloud Platform', 'Cloud Computing', 'Security Operation Center', 'Data Lake']

Dockerizing React App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version

Dockerizing React App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version Learn How to Dockerize and make it a deployable image Photo by Dylan McLeod on Unsplash Docker is an enterprise-ready container platform that enables organizations to seamlessly build, share, and run any application, anywhere. Almost every company is containerizing its applications for faster production workloads so that they can deploy anytime and sometimes several times a day. There are so many ways we can build a React App. One way is to dockerize the React app with nodejs backend and create a docker image so that we can deploy that image any time or sometimes several times a day. In this post, we look at the example project and see the step by step guide on how we can dockerize the React app with nodejs as a server. Introduction Example Project Dockerizing the App Running The App on Docker Summary Conclusion Introduction Nowadays, it’s very common to dockerize and deploy the Docker image in the production with the help of container orchestration engines such as Docker Swarn or Kubernetes. We are going to Dockerize the app and create an image and run it on Docker on our local machine. We could also push that Image into Docker hub and pull it whenever and wherever we need it. Here is the complete guide on how to develop a React app with nodejs as a backend server. If you are not familiar with the process or you want to know before studying this guide, I would recommend you going through it. Javascript Version Prerequisite As a prerequisite, you have to install Docker for Desktop (whatever your OS is). Please follow this link to install Docker on your laptop. Once installed you can check the Docker info or version with the following commands.

https://medium.com/bb-tutorials-and-thoughts/dockerizing-react-app-with-nodejs-backend-typescript-version-55a40389b0ac

['Bhargav Bachina']

2020-08-14 05:01:01.005000+00:00

['Programming', 'Docker', 'Web Development', 'Typescript', 'React']

How to Develop A Food Recipe App: Cost, Features and Business Model

Are you a hotelier, restaurateur or a passionate cook who wants to share your best food recipes with the food lovers? Turn your well-thought recipes into a business by simply developing a food-recipe app like Tasty, Yummly, SideChef or BigOven. Cooking is an art that comes from passion and allowing people to turn any ordinary meal into mesmerising and tempting food. Most people out there take this art as their hobby or a profession. But with the fact that how people, especially foodies are turning towards mobile apps for searching a wide choice of food recipes, now is the time to take the momentum with the launch of your food cooking recipe app. If you are still confused whether it will be worth developing a food recipe app like Tasty or Yummly, then you need to go through these market insights… Here is the graph, portraying how frequently people have searched for recipes and how it is kept on rising. “According to the survey, out of 400 crore people to their home worldwide during Covid-19 pandemic, 130 crores are in India. And with activities outside the home halted, it is found that Food recipe, Netflix, Health and Ludo are the most leisure-related topics during the peak time of lockdown.” “Apart, a survey has discovered food recipe apps will enjoy the market size of 22,755,800 potential users from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Pakistan and Philippines have searched through a Facebook and shown interest in cooking.” “The mobile app industry is soaring, like never before. As of 2019, the total mobile app revenue was $461.7 billion worldwide and projected to generate $935.2 billion in 2023, it is worth considering investing in mobile apps. Moreover, 1 out of each 4 is an iPhone/iPad user of the age of 18 and older, searched for cooking food recipes.” Gone are those days when only moms used to look for a cookbook to try various cuisines at home. Several foodies are always high on cooking food by using recipe apps on a daily routine or asking google to find the best recipes for the meal. You must be wondering, while there are so many food delivery applications available to satisfy your food craving, why would one look for the recipes and devote long hours to the preparation? Well, the fact of the matter is, each recipe involves a whole gamut of ingredients, and when cooking something delectable to our taste palette, then it feels like a greater satisfaction. There are various traditional cookbooks available that help you find the recipe or do some research online and all the recipes are laid out on Google, Youtube, Facebook and more. Now you can be an expert cook in no time! But, users can do it far easy by simply installing an app to look for the recipes to cook for different occasions and purposes. Instead of going online to look for the recipes, businesses and mobile app development companies have come up with the excellent app idea that can answer all your questions in seconds. Right from what should I cook to How should I cook, a recipe app can offer you all the solutions right away. All thanks to technological advancement that helps people to try different things in a nutshell. People who do not know about cooking and ingredients at all, are cooking expertly. With the growing boon of digitization in all business verticals, it makes sense to hire a mobile app development company to build a food recipe app like Tasty and Yummly. However, whether you a startup, passionate cook or an entrepreneur, once you have decided to create a food recipe app, few of the questions will pop up in your mind as below: What Type of Food Recipe App Can You Develop? Who Can Earn From This Type Of Application? Who Will Be The End Users of Recipe App? What Features Can You Integrate Into a Food Recipe App? How Can You Make Profit From a Cooking Recipe App? How Much Does It Cost You To Launch An App? Once you get the answer to these questions, you have a better idea about the scope of your future app will have in the market and accordingly plan to create a structure of your app. Before you dig deep to find the answer to these questions, it is worth to look over two leading food recipe apps like BigOven and Yummly providing over 350,000 to 1 million recipes to the users. Both of these apps have succeeded in attracting the attention of the users despite being altogether different from each other. Though, it is crucial to realise that sticking to a single strategy will not help you win the game. So to become the next big hit of the market, you need to give a thought to different scenarios that make your product survive even in the tough competition. So, you must know an app development company that can understand your business goals and provide you with the solution that works best to meet the specific needs of the end-users. So what’s the idea behind creating a food recipe app? What Type of Recipe App Can You Develop in 2021 To Make Money? With the availability of hundreds of cooking food recipe apps, how to make your app idea stand out in the crowd is the biggest challenge for you. So the main idea behind creating the app is to surprise your audience with something exclusive than to develop an app with standard features simply. So here are the few types of app that you can consider to develop: No matter which app idea you choose to customize, make sure you have a home screen of the app that encourages users to get engaged with it for long hours. Like search bars on the homepage attract users to search for a broad choice of recipes, list the favourites and engage with the app as much as possible. If your app has a lack of content, then users will get bored and not be able to connect with your app. So here are the few parameters that you can consider while hiring software developer for the project: Advance level of App Functionality: While customizing the structure of the app and defining the functionality of the app, make sure to keep in mind the device structure. This is where you need to consider the target audience and device structure also so that the users are able to access the functionality of your app to the fullest. Multi-Purpose Apps: Make sure your app is designed to solve the multi-purpose of the users, instead of just providing a bunch of recipes. This is what users expect from the app after downloading it. Thus, your cooking and food recipe app should have different modes to satisfy the needs of the users. Food Cooking Mode: People who love to cook, whether it be men or women, professional chefs or beginners- cooking mode is the essential app functionality that users expect from you. Right from exploring new cuisines to experimenting with fresh ingredients, make sure your app has everything to engage users for long hours. Also, keep in mind to keep the interface simple and it needs to be supported by too many features. You can also choose to hire a software development company that ensures you high-quality content in the form of tutorials, video guides, photo instructions and other essential cooking tips that make the process easier for the users. Grocery Shopping Mode: Integrating ecommerce features to your app and allowing users to buy groceries from the listed stores, can be a worthy decision to entice more users to your app. And further, to enhance the functionality of the app, you can choose to incorporate the feature of providing on-demand food-ordering in an app. Who Will Be Interested in Developing and Using This Type of App? You have a brilliant app idea to startup the business, but the question is who can leverage this app idea and able to make money in 2021: Here is such kind of people who can invest in the recipe app: Professional Chefs Health Coaches Startups in the Food Industry Passionate Cooks Nutritionist Hotelier/Restaurateur But, who will be the potential customer of your application? By knowing your target audience you will be able to create a recipe app that actually helps meet the needs of the end-users. Apart from the foodies who love to browse food recipes on social media or other platforms? Here are the few other categories of the audience that you can choose to target: People living alone far away from their home Medical Patients prescribed to be on a special diet Fitness lovers who prefer to in-take a balanced diet People are fond of exploring new cuisines and eating outside. Amateurs in cooking Travellers who always roam around cities to cities. Beside every user has different cooking skills, experience and understanding, so make sure you describe each recipe with an easy to follow guide that is simple to execute. To avoid making it complicated, you can choose for android app development solutions that help you develop an app with all the necessary features. What Are the Key Features to Create the Best Recipe Book App in the Market? Features are the most important of your app development as it defines how your app will be taken in the market by the users. The choice of the features will also help you determine the cost to develop a food recipe app in 2021. So here are the few necessary features that you need to integrate into your app: User Features of Food Recipe App Registration: The first thing users will look about your app is the registration process. You can hire mobile app developers to create a comfortable and smooth registration process for users to log in your application without any hassle. To make it far more comfortable, you can also provide the provision to integrate social logins and allow users to log in just with the social pages. Profile Generation: Allow users to create a profile with the necessary information, including contact related info, their preferences and interest areas for the further recipe suggestions. Meal Plan Out: By integrating this feature, you allow the app users to plan out the weekly meal in advance so that you don’t need to think about what to bake today. Recipe List: Choosing from thousands of recipes is quite challenging for users. Therefore, categorize the list of recipes under various sections including healthy eating, salads, recipes for occasions, regular meal recipes and more. Search and Advanced Search: This feature will help you engage users for long hours and encourage them to try recipes. Also, allow users to use filters to narrow down their searches by categories, occasions, methods, diets and more. Nutritional Calculators: Nowadays, people are becoming more and more conscious of their health, so they prefer to watch out the calories and nutrients they take in. Make sure your food recipe app has this feature. Save Recipe: Add an option to save their favourite recipes and access it from anywhere, anytime. Print Recipe: Integrating this feature will help users to easily access the recipe in the printed form and avoid the inconvenience of holding a smartphone or bear the loss of the internet while cooking. Personal Note: While watching the tutorial, allow users to add private notes for the special inputs for cooking any particular recipe. Social Sharing: You can expand the reach of your recipe by allowing users to share their favourite recipe on social media. This will help garner more attention of users and engagement for your app. Photo Sharing: Allow users to click a picture and share it in an app, to help others know how it will exactly look after cooking. Review and Rating: Users can rate and review the recipe that they tried cooking. With this, they can give an idea to other app users about the performance of that recipe and how easily it is to execute. Implementing this feature to your app can be time consuming and complicated, therefore, you can choose to hire app developers to eliminate the complexity of the task. Admin Features for Creating Cooking Mobile App Manage Recipe and Subscription Packages: Recipes would be the heart of your food app, so allow admin to manage it seamlessly. Manage User Profile: This feature allows the admin to view, manage and edit the profile of the users. Manage Payments: The feature allows the admin to manage the payments done by the users for the app subscriptions, groceries, e-book purchase and more. View Earnings: With the analytics, you can determine how much your app is earning in a month. View Ratings and Reviews: Admin can view and manage the reviews and ratings given by the users and also their details. Manage Community: Admin can manage the community where the app users connect. Admin has the facility to view, hide or delete the question and answer if they find across anything inappropriate. Content Management: Content is the king of your app, so admin is responsible to manage the content published in an app and make sure to continuously update and review it. Notifications: An option to send a push notification or alerts to the app users related to the offers, coupons, new additions and features in the food recipe mobile app. So now you have all the details about who can earn from this app, who will be your end-users and what features and functionalities are required to create a food recipe app. But many of you are wondering, what all this makes sense if it is not earning you anything. Best App Monetization Methods for the Food App How to make a profit from your app is one of the most frequently asked questions by the app developers. No matter how brilliant the app development company you have deployed to the project, it is ultimately a waste if your app is not earning any money. So how can you make money from the food recipe app? These are the few app monetization strategies leveraged by thousands of apps in the app store and play store. So let’s begin with it: User Subscription: You provide additional features to the users opted for monthly subscriptions like ad-free recipes, diet oriented recipes and more. Your mobile app offers subscriptions for a certain period. In-app Adds: This is one of the traditional ways to earn money from the apps. The advertisement has become the most powerful tool for the digital market and using this tool to your recipe app will help you earn money. But make sure to advertise your product and service-related ads. If a user clicks or interacts with an ad, then you will get money. Freemium: To monetise from this strategy, you need to have a second paid version of your app. If users like a free version of your app, then they will probably download the paid app version that has extra features. Ok, now all set! You have an idea about how to make money from your app. But the only question left is how much it cost to develop a food recipe app in 2021? Well, there is no straightforward answer to this question, thus let’s find what factors are influencing the final cost of developing a food recipe app… How Much Does It Cost To Launch A Recipe App in 2021? While there is no standard cost of developing a food recipe app, but all such features there is a cost attached to it. To create a food recipe app like Yummly, it would cost you around $5000+ depending upon various factors your cost could vary. Factors ranging from designing an application, features, sizes and the platform of the app are the most critical aspects that drive the final cost of the app development. As you choose to add more and more features and complexity to your app, it is going to be a higher price. App platforms also impact the prices of the application, and developing an iOS application is comparatively more expensive than Android. In addition, the development cost of the application also varies according to the location of the developers and their skills and expertise. Make sure you have the best app development team that comprises of: Project Analyst and manager Front-end and Backend developer UX/UI Designer Quality Assurance Marketing Team All-in-all, with the average per hour cost of the developer about $50, it will cost around $5000 to $10,000+ to create an app like Yummply, BigOver, Tasty and more. Further, it can be either higher or lower, depending upon the specific needs of your business. Conclusion Undoubtedly, developing a recipe app has become a new trend especially in 2020 and expected more and more foodies are kept embracing a different way of cooking food. So with the changing psychology of the people and their eating habits, developing your own cooking and recipe book app will be a great idea for startups. Hopefully, with this blog, you have a concept and all the information with you as to how to stand out in the market with your app. But to make your application a great success in the market, you need to choose to partner with a skilled software development company that can turn your idea into a perfect solution. Also, you can leave a comment below if you have any doubts or query! https://www.twitter.com/FlutterComm

https://medium.com/flutter-community/how-to-develop-a-food-recipe-app-cost-features-and-business-model-9ef5c525edff

['Sophia Martin']

2020-12-29 05:55:26.346000+00:00

['Mobile App Development', 'Apps', 'Mobile Apps', 'Technology', 'Startup']

A new startup accelerator program for female founders.

In the world of startups, female founders are underrepresented. Last year, less than 3% of all the venture capital in the US went to companies founded by women. It’s an equity problem that we need to help address. With this in mind, I’ve designed a new Female Founder program for the 4thly Startup Accelerator, and we’re launching our first cohort in November. Recently, I told my friend Christina about these plans. She’s one of the most successful women I know, running a fast-growing $60M company and is a passionate advocate for women in business. She listened intently as I describing my plans for a new startup accelerator program focused on women. She slowly took a sip of her wine, looked up at me and said “You are aware that you’re an old white man, right?”. Excellent point. I’ll never know what it’s like to be a female founder. But my personal superpower is my rolodex. I know a lot of amazingly smart and successful Silicon Valley women who have agreed be guest speakers in my new program. I will lean heavily on them during the program to provide inspiration and guidance to the participants. My life today is focused on helping entrepreneurs of all stripes succeed and thrive. After a Silicon Valley career of my own, I now teach entrepreneurs at Stanford and coach them at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Over the past ten years, women in my Stanford course have gone from less than 15% to nearly half. I’m very proud of that. I also have five daughters. But I realize that just because I’m a startup guy who believes in women doesn’t automatically mean I can effectively run an accelerator program for women. Which means I’ll need to work extra-hard at it. “True leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed… Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.” — Sheryl Sandberg In addition to the great guest speakers, the core of the 4thly Female Founders program will be rooted in the same principles we apply to all our 4thly programs: Global and diverse. There’s a big wide world of different kinds of interesting startups out there, and we passionately believe that cross-pollination between diverse participants is a key driver for success. As we select entrepreneurs we specifically want to put together cohorts that are global and diverse. Pure digital, no travel. We use Zoom, Slack, and other tools for real-time remote immersion — no travel required. You fully immerse with the other participants in the program while still taking care of your life and business at home. “Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the World.”- Hillary Clinton Meet you where you are. Some entrepreneurs are strong in finance but weak on the technology side. Others are strong engineers but with no marketing background. In the 4thly program we meet you wherever you are and help you to build the skills and knowledge you want, across all dimensions. Intensity matters. Some accelerator programs last several months. Ours is a 60-day intensive, with full-cohort Zoom meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, plus additional 1:1 calls during the week. Great entrepreneurs embrace intensity. Equity belongs to entrepreneurs. Most startup accelerators take equity in the startups as a price of admission. I’ve never liked that model much, because entrepreneurs work their asses off to build the equity in their startups and they deserve to keep every percentage point they can. So the 4thly accelerator is strictly fee-based — participants keep 100% of their startup equity. “What I learn from talking to so many women around the world: If you can empower them with the right things, the right tools, they can lift up their family. And that ultimately lifts up their community and their society” — Melinda Gates More doing, less talking. When I teach in a university classroom, it’s in a typical lecture format. Many accelerators also have lectures, class time, and curriculum they follow. But the 4thly accelerator is about doing. Team is everything. Everybody in the cohort is focused on getting everyone else in the cohort to the next level. If someone’s bus gets stuck in the mud, then everyone in the accelerator jumps out and helps get them out of the mud and moving forward again. In the world of entrepreneurship, there is nothing more important than great teams. These core 4thly Accelerator principles, combined with an all-star lineup of female guest speakers, are designed to make this a transformational experience for the participants in our first Female Founders program. So yes, Christina, I am an old white man. I can’t change that. But I’m gonna run the most kick-ass Female Founder program, ever. :-)

https://bretwaters.medium.com/a-new-startup-accelerator-program-for-female-founders-8d5f9b5c0497

['Bret Waters']

2020-09-03 19:18:06.318000+00:00

['Women In Startups', 'Women', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship']

The Co-op Close-up: Procter & Gamble

SFU’s professional master’s program in computer science trains computational specialists in big data and visual computing. All students complete a paid co-op work placement as part of their degree. In this feature, we examine the co-op experiences of some of our big data students. Kanksha Masrani completed her bachelor’s degree in information technology at Charotar University of Science & Technology before joining SFU’s professional master’s program in computer science. Can you tell us about Procter & Gamble? What is it like working there? Procter & Gamble (P&G) is an American multinational consumer goods company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. The company specializes in a wide range of personal care and hygiene products. During my co-op here, I have been working with an exciting team where I have been given the chance to manage multiple projects at the same time. My work experience here allows me to combine my technical excellence with business and management skills while building a large network of colleagues and professionals that I can turn to when needed. P&G organizes multiple hackathons to help generate fresh ideas. People of different ages and backgrounds come together and help solve another team’s problem. You can also get involved in multiple activities happening across the organization, be it off-site events for your team or representing your product category in some sport activity. Along with the projects you own, you are encouraged to be a part of these activities to further develop your soft skills outside the workplace. Can you describe the project(s) that you are working on? In total, for the course of eight months, I was assigned five projects. In one project, I am developing a business intelligence tool on Power BI which integrates KNIME, an ETL tool used for integrating data from multiple data sources, doing required data manipulation and analysis using Python and R snippets to deliver performance data from the Nielsen database which enables faster and simpler reporting. This business intelligence tool offers insights on shares, KPIs, price, and promotions across multiple retailers and time periods for the blades and razors product category. Using the same tools — Power BI and KNIME — I am also developing an innovation tracker which is currently providing insights on price, promotion, market share, and other sales metrics for new products launched by P&G in the Canadian market. The dashboards I’ve created allow my team to dynamically explore data and derive insights that may not be easily obtained through spreadsheets. For example, the team can easily glean whether performance improved across product categories over time, and if not, which category contributed towards the decline and by how much. What are the most important skills needed in your co-op position and how has the big data program prepared you for the role? P&G puts a strong emphasis on using data to make “better, smarter, real-time business decisions.” As a Business Analyst at P&G, you are a business leader. Your role is to mine multiple sources of data, derive actionable insights, and translate complex results or algorithms into simple conclusions that will empower others to take action to win with the consumers. Business knowledge, interpersonal, and communication skills are therefore a must to thrive in this multi-functional leadership team. Nothing beats hands-on experience when it comes to skills development. At university, I mastered machine learning, big data tools and technologies, data mining, and more. But interning at P&G taught me how to apply those skills in meaningful ways and allowed me to further develop my collaboration, critical thinking, and presentation skills, for example when presenting my recommendations to non-technical executives. What are you most appreciative of when looking back at your co-op experience thus far? P&G develops future leaders by giving them meaningful responsibilities from Day One. Only four months in, I was leading a team of twelve. This gave me an opportunity to take my leadership skills from good to great. Every project was a challenge, but with the right kind of people around, it was not difficult to overcome it. The level of autonomy I have been given is very impressive. I have real, business-critical tasks to complete, and, with the support of my colleagues and mentors, I have been able to finish my projects to a high standard while also growing my confidence and knowledge. Here at P&G, if you are flexible, determined, and want to expand your skill set, there are so many opportunities to learn and grow!

https://medium.com/sfu-cspmp/the-co-op-close-up-procter-gamble-f7e2d6a69dfc

['Kathrin Knorr']

2019-11-18 18:41:17.031000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Co Op', 'Procter And Gamble', 'Business Intelligence', 'Marketing']

Those jobs are gone forever. Let’s gear up for what’s next.

And robots aren’t just boosting productivity in rich countries like the US. They’re starting to affect countries like China, too. Machines building machines The robots in a Tesla factory move around so fast that they’re encased in glass to protect human workers from them. Dongguan — a city near Hong Kong that’s basically the manufacturing capital of the world — recently launched their first automated factory. The Changying Precision Technology Company manufactures parts for mobile phones. It has 60 robot arms that work on 10 production lines that run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Each production line has 3 human workers who monitor the robots. Before these new robots arrived, the factory needed 650 human workers to be able to operate. Now it just needs 30. Since this factory laid off 95% of its workers, and handed over the task of manufacturing to the machines, its defect rate has dropped by 400%, and its overall output has nearly tripled. More production, fewer people. This is part of a massive automation initiative in China with the twin goals of cutting costs while improving the quality of manufactured goods. And keep in mind— we’re not talking about the US, where the humans manufacturing workers earn an average of $20 per hour. We’re talking about China, where the average factory worker makes closer to $2 per hour. This means that if US-based manufacturers took cost cutting as seriously as they are in China, they could afford to spend 10 times as much money automating away each human worker. In other words, regardless of which country the manufacturing takes place, it’s just a matter of time before most of its physical “building” part of it will be done by robots. But that physical “building” part of manufacturing has never been all that profitable, anyway. The text on the back of an iPhone says: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” Even though that’s probably an effort to de-emphasize the fact that the phone was “Made in China,” it’s still an important point. Because most of that value of that iPhone was indeed created in California, through the process of designing the hardware and software. To illustrate this, here’s a quick pop quiz: When Apple sells an iPhone, what percentage of the total proceeds from the sale go toward the Chinese labor it took to build that iPhone? The answer: less than two percent. That’s right — for every dollar you spend on an iPhone, about two pennies go to the factories in China that assembled it. The vast majority of that revenue comes right back to the United States. Whenever some politician talks about “bringing back the good manufacturing jobs” that’s what they’re talking about: trying to bring that 2% back to America, in the form of a few thousand new jobs. Jobs that would only exist with the help of heavy subsidies from the government, and would die off the moment the government quit paying those subsidies. And this cost doesn’t begin to account for the full side-effects of subsidizing an industry. Real-life case study: America’s steel industry in 2002 In 2002, American steel was being undercut by cheaper Chinese steel. We tried to keep the American steel industry alive by passing tariffs on foreign steel. In the end, more than 200,000 people who worked outside of the steel industry lost their jobs due to the macro-economic effects of our artificially inflated steel prices. That means more people lost their non-steel industry jobs than the entire US steel industry employed at the time (187,000 jobs). In other words, taxpayers spent billions of dollars to destroy jobs, so they could keep even fewer jobs — jobs that were dangerous and low-skill — from inevitably leaving the country. For a few more years, anyway. The good news to come out of all this misery is that we’ve discovered a better way forward. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” — Wayne Gretzky Instead of trying to bring back the manufacturing jobs that are already being automated away by machines, we have an opportunity to fill the hundreds of thousands of vacant American jobs that aren’t being automated. These are the jobs that involve telling those machines what to do. The programming jobs. And we can fund this opportunity with all that money that the politicians are wasting on trying to bring back those old manufacturing jobs that would otherwise no longer exist. Teachers, not tariffs A vast majority of the value that rolls out of factories is not produced in the factories themselves. It’s produced by people sitting in front of computers in their office — and increasingly, in their own homes. These are the people who tell the machines what to do. And the real problem our country is facing is that there aren’t enough of these people. Right now, there are hundreds of thousands of job openings for people who know how to code. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and thousands of other employers spend $5,000 per year in fees just to bring a single foreign engineer over to the US to fill a six-figure salary developer job. These companies aren’t doing this as a cost-savings measure. They’re doing this because there aren’t enough Americans who have the right skills. So here’s a simple way we can improve our economy and help people get more jobs: every time a politician mentions “bringing back those good old manufacturing jobs” we should tell that politician, “Hey, why don’t we train people to fill the good engineering jobs that never left our country in the first place?” Here are some concrete steps that we can pressure politicians to take, which will help us get more qualified Americans into these good engineering jobs: Help experienced teachers to retrain in new skills by paying for them to earn advanced degrees in computer science and software engineering from public universities. Then sponsor summer internships for these teachers to work at software companies, so they can learn even more in the field. Prioritize technology education in high school, instead of treating it as an afterthought. Require every high school student to take at least one hour of programming each day, just like they take one hour of English each day. What if administrators are unwilling to de-prioritize subjects like French? Well, just make the school day one hour longer. Programming is that important. Offer preferential financial aid to students who major in either computer science or software engineering. Leverage our nation’s massive adult education infrastructure — including community colleges — to help busy adults learn to program on nights and weekends. All the people and all the infrastructure we need to do this are already in place. We just need to adjust the economic incentives, which is something our government has the full power to do if we convince them that it’s a priority. This will be much cheaper in the long run than trying to subsidize the kind of outdated, low-value-added domestic manufacturing that politicians keep pitching to us. So the next time a politician tries to use “jobs” as a justification for handing some corporation a bunch of taxpayer money, tell them you know the score. Tell them that China can keep those low-skilled jobs of yesterday. And instead, let’s train more people for the high-skilled jobs of today. I only write about programming and technology. If you follow me on Twitter I won’t waste your time. 👍

https://medium.com/free-code-camp/we-cant-bring-back-the-old-manufacturing-jobs-12214a0ab057

['Quincy Larson']

2017-12-27 22:12:53.539000+00:00

['Design', 'Life Lessons', 'Politics', 'Tech', 'Startup']

iOS Training Log — Drawing striped overlays onto a bubble visualization

Bubble Definition/Background Strava recently shipped the (previously web & Android only) Training Log to iOS devices, which represents the athlete’s previous activities using bubbles. A “bubble”, in the context of this post, shows the accumulated volume of some activity dimension (distance, time, etc.) for a given day. This will add up the athlete’s chosen dimension for all activities on a particular day and translate that to a percentage. This percentage is piped into a scaling algorithm to determine the ideal bubble size. After sizing, athlete-selected filters and activity tags can alter the bubble’s appearance or add a visual adornment on top of the bubble’s view. For the purposes of this post, let’s focus on the “workout” tag that can be applied an activity. This will create a bubble with a striped overlay. Bubble with a sideways striped overlay How to Draw a Bubble This is the simplest part of the bubble view’s drawing since we can heavily lean on UIKit to do most of the heavy lifting. First off, we’ll create a subclass of UIView to be the bubble visualization. This subclass will override the draw(rect:) method to create a simple circle in the current context. To make our code more readable, let’s create a function in an extension to BubbleView to handle drawing the bubble and call it from the draw(rect:) implementation. Capture the current context. Set the fill of the context to the provided color ( .orange in this case) which will be used in the next operation. Fill an ellipse (which will end up as a circle if the view has a 1:1 aspect ratio) with the previously set color. Just a circle. Easy enough thanks mostly to UIKit . Let’s move on to the striped overlay now. Draw Stripes Over the Bubble at a 45° Angle We could calculate the start/end points of all the stripes using various geometry tricks but that’s difficult. Instead, let’s explore an easier way by once again leaning on UIKit for the heavy lifting. To set up the scaffolding, let’s add to the extension to BubbleView that allows an instance to easily draw this overlay and call it from our original draw(rect:) implementation. Notice the call to drawStripes(in:stripeColor:stripeWidth:) is after the call to drawBubble(in:bubbleColor:) . This is because each context-based drawing operation is stacked on the previous and we’d like the bubble to be beneath the overlay. Next, we’ll move into the stripe drawing function and fill in some sizing code. This will be explained a bit more later. This code snippet takes advantage of CGContext.translateBy(x:,y:) and CGContext.rotate(by:) to drastically simplify our drawing code. But first, let’s visualize the context’s current coordinate system. The blue grid represents the context’s theoretical bounds and the darker blue dot represents the context’s origin. Circle with a reference grid. By translating the context downward, we can get the origin closer to where we want to begin drawing the stripes. The resulting coordinate system has now been shifted such that the origin is at the bottom of the previous grid. The shifted coordinate system for the context is represented in the new green grid. Circle with translated reference grid. After this translation, we now need to rotate the context so that drawing a straight line on it will be at a 45° angle to our original context position. This is done by rotating the context around the origin (top-left) of the user coordinate system. This takes into account all previous coordinate mutations, which is just a translation in our case. The resulting coordinate system has been rotated 45° around the previous green origin. The new red user coordinate system has replaced the green coordinate system and is the current drawing coordinate system visualized. The original blue grid still remains as a visual reference for illustration purposes. Circle with translated + rotated reference grid. At this point, the red dot on the red grid illustrates position (0,0) or the origin. The x direction extends away from it upward on the 45° line while the y direction extends downward on the opposing 45° line. Before we are able to begin drawing the stripes in our new user coordinate space, we first need to ensure they are styled correctly. So, to draw the middle strip at this point, we use maxPathLength (our previous calculation for stripe length) for the length and draw it from our origin. This will stroke a stripe centered on the x-axis of the previously defined width ( stripeWidth ). Circle with line drawn on top of adjusted reference grid. This initial stripe has no mirror since it occurs on the x-axis or center of the circle. All the other stripes have stripes mirrored over the x-axis, which is centered beneath the initial stripe above. We can iterate over the entire width of our bubble drawing these mirrored stripes on each pass until we reach, or exceed, the edge of the bubble. This results in a series of stripes above and below (in the user coordinate space) our initial center stripe. Circle with stripes drawn from corner to corner of original reference grid. To make it easier to grasp what we currently have in our context without the grids, let’s remove them. Same circle as before with reference grids removed. This is close to what we are trying to accomplish except for the fact that the stripes extend past the edges of the bubble. To easily solve this problem, we need to use the bubble’s radius to apply a clip to the context before we start drawing any of the stripes and before we mutate the user coordinate space. This clip path, when applied to the context before the drawing, will clip all of the stripes that extend past the edge of the bubble. Final circle with stripes now clipped. And there we have it, an easy way to draw lots of stripes at odd angles without having to do geometry calculations other than converting the degree measurements to radians. :P Final Code

https://medium.com/strava-engineering/ios-training-log-drawing-striped-overlays-onto-a-bubble-visualization-5711e6549fb6

['Matt Robinson']

2020-07-02 20:01:01.371000+00:00

['Visualization', 'iOS', 'Apple', 'Xcode', 'iOS App Development']

Use phased projects to help you avoid the RFP process

Request for Proposal (RFP) is a time-tested procurement process that’s consistently worked well for some organizations in purchasing commodities and goods. But in the digital era, using RFPs in the procurement of creative services is an antiquated process that can cost you valuable time and may not lead to the best results. Think about it this way: an RFP makes sense if your organization is trying to find the best deal on 50 tons of concrete. But if you’re looking for someone to shape that concrete into a work of art, do you really want to start with a process designed to keep all qualified artists at arms length? Eliminating RFPs from your procurement process for creative and website development services will get you better results and save you the investment of significant time and money. Not sure how to avoid RFPs? At this point you may be pointing out the fact that whether you like it or not, your organization has procurement regulations that force you to go to an RFP if the proposed project exceeds a certain dollar figure. If this is the case let’s frame the problem it in a different way: All projects are made up of phases, which inherently make up a fraction of the total project cost.In fact, many RFPs ask creative service agencies to outline their process and project phases in the proposal response and estimate the cost of each phase. So if a cost can be assigned to each phase, why not make these phases into separate, smaller projects? This is the route more and more organizations and agencies are going when they begin to understand the downside of RFPs as they relate to creative services. This is a simplistic breakdown for illustrative purposes, but your $50,000 website project can easily become four or five individual projects that each separately fit within the purchasing limits set by your organization. When combined, these five projects equal one awesome website, and operating this way has allowed you to work with the partner of your choice. And remember how I said avoiding RFPs could actually save you money? Well here’s how: by avoiding the RPF and working directly with your chosen agency, that agency can better anticipate real costs and problems upfront after taking time to understand the project details with you. Otherwise, they are just making a best guess estimate they are locked into once it’s written in the proposal. Most agencies also put an up-charge on RFP work since they’ll only land about 10% of the RFPs they bid for, and time and money is invested into creating each RFP response proposal. Every project is a little different, so make sure you are working with an expert firm that can help you navigate this process, lay out clear phase projects, and set achievable timelines and goals. An in-depth example If you’re now intrigued and want to know more, here is a closer look at how our example $50,000 website project could be divided into smaller, less expensive projects. Project/Phase 1: Discovery ($5K) Discovery is the research and strategic planning phase that starts any successful project. Sometimes overlooked by less experienced firms, this is often the most vital part of any project where you work with the partner firm to uncover needs, define scope and timeline, and establish measurable goals for the project. If you’re unfamiliar with discovery — or want to know more about how it can help you — check out this free, 8-page Discovery Guide. Project/Phase 2: Branding ($10K) If you are going to invest the time and money into developing an extensive online tool for client, customer, or donor engagement, you really should make sure your message and brand image are on point before implementing these elements into your new website. Project/Phase 3: Content Development ($5K) Content development can include anything from photography, illustrations, video, or written copy that helps to tell your organization’s story. Project/Phase 4: UI/UX Design ($15K) This phase includes information architecture, wireframing, and visual design mockups. It may overlap with content development and testing, depending on the schedule and nature of the project. Project/Phase 5: Development & Testing ($15K) Developing the website can begin as the design phase approaches completion. A web developer takes the static, designed pages and codes them into a functional website. This phase is typically completed with user testing, bug fixing, and launching the site. If your organization has even tighter purchasing limits than those described above — or if your project contains more extensive requirements and a more hefty budget — some agencies may even be willing to break the outlined phases into smaller chunks. For example, the development and user testing phase could potentially be broken into two separate phases. Why your organization will love this new process My experience has shown that organizations who go to RFPs do so for one of three specific reasons: The Well-Intentioned Organization: This organization and project leader doesn’t realize there is a better way or isn’t sure of the organization’s policies. This team just wants to do things by the book. The Traditional Organization: This organization goes to RFP on every project regardless of the service or product they are seeking because that’s just the way it’s always been done. They like the familiarity of the RFP process. The Evil Organization: This organization just wants the FREE consulting to think out and scope the project for them so that they can take it in house. Image Courtesy of Kyla Tom, Madison Ave. Collective When presented properly, the idea of phased projects appeals to these organizations for the following reasons: Well-intentioned organizations will appreciate the speed and simplicity with which they can now get the work done and will be excited to follow this new process. will appreciate the speed and simplicity with which they can now get the work done and will be excited to follow this new process. Traditional organizations also tend to be risk and cost-averse organizations, meaning that phased projects will appeal to them because the step-by-step approach helps to eliminate unknown variables and unnecessary spending. also tend to be risk and cost-averse organizations, meaning that phased projects will appeal to them because the step-by-step approach helps to eliminate unknown variables and unnecessary spending. Evil Organizations: If this is your organization, please reconsider the moral compass guiding your business practices. While I won’t ever convince you to ditch the RFP process, I’m sure you don’t like being asked to do free work either. Are you following my logic, but still not convinced that RFPs are a bad business model for contracting creative services? A panel of experts presented on RFPs at SXSW a few years ago and their website, NoRFPs.org contains more useful information. New Approach = Consistently Better Work If you begin to engage expert creative firms outside of the RFP process, it will help save you time and money by avoiding the cumbersome RFP timeline and allowing the creative firm of your choice to hone in on the project details with you. Most importantly, you will see the reward in the quality of work produced for your organization. Do you have an upcoming project and want to test the waters with this new approach? Do a little research and make a few phone calls to agencies that are doing great work for your competitors or in similar industries to find a creative team that fits your needs. Thoughts or questions? The Madison Ave. Collective would love to hear about your experience with RFPs when contracting creative services. Share in the comments below! This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

https://medium.com/madison-ave-collective/use-phased-projects-to-help-you-avoid-the-rfp-process-18c775c3bfbc

['Logan Hoffman']

2017-03-23 19:15:19.288000+00:00

['Procurement', 'Design', 'Marketing']

13 Conda Commands for Data Scientists

Let’s get to it! 🚀 The Need Whether working locally or on a server in the cloud, you want a virtual environment to isolate your Python version and packages so that you can: use different package versions for different projects experiment with bleeding edge package versions get the same Python and package versions as your teammates so your shared code works similarly Do I have to use Conda? Nope. It’s very common in data analysis and scientific computing, but not so common outside. There are lots of tools you can use to manage virtual Python environments. conda, Venv, pyenv, pipenv, poetry, Docker, and virtualenv are the most prominent. Trust me, you don’t even want to go down this rabbit hole. 🐇 But if you must, here’s a Hacker News thread for a taste of the fun. And Yufeng G, Developer Advocate for Google Cloud, has a nice video on conda, virtualenv, and pyenv here. Today we’re exploring conda, so let’s dive in! Anaconda Anaconda is both the name of the company behind the software and the name of the fully featured software distribution. The Anaconda company offers consulting and three Anaconda editions: individual, team, and enterprise. Individual is common and powerful. It’s not like there are freeware gotchas. 😉 It’s what I use. Distributions: Anaconda vs Miniconda You can choose to download and install one of two distributions: Anaconda or Miniconda. Similarities Both Anaconda and Miniconda get you conda, the package manager and virtual environment manager in one. Both can be installed on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. Both come with Python and pip installed. Differences The Anaconda distribution installs many Python packages and tools that are common for data science. Miniconda does not. It’s the difference between a big, batteries-included download and a minimal download without many packages installed for you. Miniconda install ranges between 50 and 90 MiB in mid-2020, depending on your operating system . The Anaconda distribution requires a “minimum 5 GB disc space to download and install” — according to the docs in mid-2020. The Anaconda distribution installer also includes options to install a GUI and other popular software such as the VSCode text editor. If you are getting started with scientific computing using Python and have the space on your computer, I suggest you download the Anaconda distribution. It’s a lot of stuff, but it’s good stuff. 👍 If you’ve worked with conda previously, I suggest you download Miniconda. You can add just the packages you need as you go. 😀 See install instructions for Anaconda here and for Miniconda here. Source: pixabay.com Conda commands If you installed the Anaconda distribution you can use the GUI installer, but I suggest using the command line interface to help you work faster. You are a programmer after all (or becoming one)! 😉 Let’s look at common conda commands to create and manage conda environments. Everything is the same whether you installed Anaconda or Miniconda. It’s all conda at this point. 😀 Create conda environments conda create -n myenv pandas jupyterlab Create a new conda environment named myenv with the latest version of Python available on the main conda channel. Install pandas and jupyterlab packages into the environment. -n is short for --name . Conda asks for confirmation with package changes. Press y when asked whether you want to proceed. conda create -n myclone --clone myenv Duplicate the environment named myenv into the new environment named myclone. All the packages come along for the ride! 🚙 conda create -n myenv python=3.8 Create a new conda environment named myenv with the Python version specified. Pip and about 15 other packages are installed. Only snake picture in this guide, I promise. Source: pixabay.com Manage conda environments conda activate myenv Activate the myenv virtual environment. You can tell you are in an active virtual environment because your command line prompt will start with the name of your virtual environment in parentheses. Like this: (base) Jeffs-MBP:~ jeffhale$ The default conda environment is named base. Conda can be set up to activate an environment whenever you open your terminal. When installing the software the installer will ask you if you want to initialize it “by running conda init". I suggest you say yes so that your shell scripts get modified. Then you’ll start your terminal sessions in a conda environment. Wherever you navigate in your on CLI, you will be within your activated conda virtual environment. 🎉 conda deactivate — Deactivate the current environment. Now you won’t be in a virtual environment. The conda environment you were in still exists, you just aren’t in it. 👍 conda env list — List conda environments. conda env remove --name myenv — Remove the myenv conda environment. Delete it forever. Source: pixabay.com Manage packages in active environment Use these commands from within an active conda environment. These are the conda commands I use most frequently. 😀 conda list — List installed packages in the active environment. The output includes the package version and the conda channel the package was installed from. 👍 Conda packages conda install pandas — Download and install the pandas package from the main conda channel. conda install -c conda-forge pandas — Download and install the pandas package from the main conda-forge channel. The conda-forge channel is “A community-led collection of recipes, build infrastructure and distributions for the conda package manager.” Use the conda-forge channel when a package doesn't exist on the main channel or the version on the main channel isn't as new as you would like. Packages often get updated on conda-forge before the main conda channel. ☝️ You can also specify some other channel, but conda-forge is where you will find many packages. conda update pandas — Download and install the latest pandas package from the main conda channel. conda update all — Download and install the the latest versions of all installed packages. Can be very slow if you have a lot of outdated packages. ⚠️ conda uninstall pandas — Uninstall the pandas package in your conda environment. Pip Pip is the most common package installer. It ships with Python. When in an active conda environment, pip will install packages into that active conda environment. ⚠️ pip install -U pandas — Install or update the pandas package from PyPI, the Python package index. -U specifies to update all dependent packages. pip uninstall pandas — Uninstall the pandas package that was installed by pip. PyPI is the most common place to find Python packages. PyPI often has packages that are not on conda or conda-forge. PyPI often gets the latest version of packages first. Occasionally conda has packages that aren’t on PyPI, but that is less common. Conda and PyPI packages generally play together nicely. 🎉 Make sure that if you are installing a version of a package from PyPI you don't already have the same package installed from conda. If you do have it installed, then uninstall the conda version first. Otherwise conda won’t use the new PyPI version. By default, the official conda channel is the highest priority channel and conda will use package versions from higher priority channels first.☝️ The official conda recommendation is to try to install packages from the main conda channel first, then conda-forge as necessary, and then pip. This helps avoid conflicts. In general, installing from any of those sources should work fine. If things ever go sideways Sometimes things get messed up. Generally uninstalling packages or creating a new conda environment is all you need to fix the situation. If that doesn’t work, conda update conda updates the conda software itself. If that doesn’t work, you can uninstall and reinstall conda. 👍 There are lots of conda users out there and lots of documentation, so as always, the search engine is your friend. 😉 Source: pixabay.com Wrap I hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of conda. If you did, please share it on your favorite social media so other folks can find it, too. 😀 I write about Python, SQL, Docker, and other tech topics. If any of that’s of interest to you, sign up for my mailing list of awesome data science resources and checkout out some of my 60+ articles you grow your skills here. 👍

https://towardsdatascience.com/13-conda-commands-for-data-scientists-e443d275eb89

['Jeff Hale']

2020-09-26 12:53:28.827000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology']

What makes strong branding and how does it influence a company’s success?

In its simplest form, branding is the practice of influencing and controlling a set of associations with a company to help the business’s performance. Done successfully, an organization’s identity will be tied to select attributes—promoting its image or popularity. While absolute control over a brand is not possible, it can be influenced through deliberate design, advertising, and marketing. By these means, companies can clearly communicate the principles they stand for to target audiences. Considering the power of this practice, it’s crucial that an organization masters the pillars of creating a strong brand to get ahead. What is strong branding? A strong brand adds value to your product. It differentiates you from competitors by helping you achieve recognition and clarifies expectations for customers. The key is in highlighting the contrast between what you can offer and what already exists in the market. Effective branding elevates a product or organization by adding unique character and promise. In crafting an emotional resonance, the brand forms a lasting image in the minds of consumers.

https://uxdesign.cc/what-makes-strong-branding-and-how-does-it-influence-a-companys-success-a046d4471204

['Michelle Chiu']

2020-08-12 01:51:49.914000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Branding', 'Design', 'UX', 'Tech']

Plot with Plotly. Its like Matplotlib… But better

Plotly logo from Plotly.com Regardless of what we are learning or doing, we start with the basics, the foundation, the core. Then we learn more tools and techniques, skills and shortcuts — we learn to do things better and make it more “advanced”. Today, we will be looking at another tool to “advance” our data visualization skills. What is plotly? Why should we use it? Plot is a free and open source graphing library that makes amazing interactive graphs. It does everything that Seaborn and Matplotlib does, but makes it more fun for the viewer. Data: All the articles and author data are extracted directly from Towards Data Science from 1/1/2020 until 10/31/2020. How to get started? In order to visualize with plotly, you need to have a good understanding of Matplotlib and Seaborn. How to import : import plotly.graph_objects as go You will also see: import plotly.express as px . This wrapper allows for simpler syntax but at the cost of control over the graph. plotly.graph_objects has a wider control over what you are creating. Additionally plotly.express is still fairly new with a few bugs. top_ten_authors = df["author"].value_counts().keys().tolist()[:10] #selecting top 10 number_published = df["author"].value_counts().values.tolist() # num of pub correspoding to the top 10 authors trace = go.Pie(labels = top_ten_authors, #assigning label values = number_published, #assigning values marker = {'line': {'color': 'white', 'width': 1}}, # generating the lines #hoverinfo="value" ) data = [trace] layout = go.Layout(title="Top 10 People With Most Publications in 2020"); pie_fig = go.Figure(data=data, layout = layout); pie_fig.show() x = df['author'][:25] trace = go.Bar(x = x , y=df['claps'], text = df["reading_time"]) data=[trace] #defining layout layout = go.Layout(title='Claps Vs Authors Scatter Plot',xaxis=dict(title='Authors'),yaxis=dict(title='Claps'),hovermode='closest') #defining figure and plotting bar_fig = go.Figure(data=data,layout=layout) bar_fig.show() Being able to interact with the graphs is great for the viewer. They get to explore further into the data by zooming in and out and panning across the visualization.

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/plot-with-plotly-basics-9ae546dc03ae

['Dorjey Sherpa']

2020-11-18 12:51:26.120000+00:00

['Plotly', 'Visualization', 'Beginner']

The Curious Case of Emma Lee

It was a rainy day, the day that I met her. I remember the raindrops making their way down the shop windows as I walked along the sidewalk. I clutched my collar, holding it close to keep the precipitation out, and to keep the last vestiges of warmth inside my jacket. The jacket was old and worn, and it was already doing an unsatisfactory job keeping the rain at bay; I refused to carry an umbrella. My shoes splashed in the ever-growing menagerie of puddles, and I had to find some respite from the rain. I put my hand on the next handle I saw and pulled it open. The air was warm inside and welcoming, and it seemed I had found my way into a small bar, and with some even greater luck, I found that I was the only patron. In it, there was a small, brown-haired woman. She was cleaning glasses and didn’t seem to notice me. “What do you want?” she said. “Beer?” She never looked up from the glass. “That’s alarmingly generic.” “Do you have a better suggestion?” “No,” she said. “I just thought that a writer would be more creative.” “I guess I’m not that good,” I said before the realization hit. “How did you know I was a writer?” “I know everything about you,” she said. “You do?” “No,” she said, and pointed to my dripping tweed jacket, “but the only guy who will wear that is either a writer or wants to be.” “How do you know I’m not a wannabe?” “Is there really any difference?” she said. “I guess not.” She kept cleaning the glass, letting her long, brown curls hang in her face. I saw an open bottle next to her, and glass filled with something that wasn’t water. “What are are you drinking?” I asked. “Jameson,” she said. “What?” My question forced her to look up, and I saw for the first time how beautiful she was. She had these brown eyes that, despite how young she appeared, made her seem older. “You said my name.” “Oh god, your name is Jameson?” she said. “You wear a tweed coat, and your name is Jameson? You’re lucky you’re a writer” “As opposed to?” “You sound like you should be selling unicycles in Brooklyn,” she said. She came to the bar and sat on the bar stool. As she went to sit, she turned and tossed the towel she was holding onto the booth behind us. She forced me to snap my head back to staring at the mirror behind the bar, as she caught me admiring her from behind. “Like the view?” she asked. “I’ve seen better,” I said. “How much better?” “Not that much.” That got her to smile. “I can live with that,” she said. “So, Jameson, what brings you in here?” “The rain,” I said. “You’re not the most charming writer are you?” “I never claimed to be charming,” I said. “How come the bartender is drinking on the job?” “Don’t you drink on the job?” she asked. “True enough,” I said, “but I’m not liable if I do it.” “Neither am I,” she said and she pointed to the front window. The mere fact that I was looking at the word “OPEN” told me all I needed to know, with its “Closed” counterpart visible to the sidewalk. “Why didn’t you tell me you were closed?” “You seemed in a hurry, and I was bored,” she said, “and you’re cute.” “Really?” “I mean I’ve seen better,” she said. She winked. “Most guys would have asked for my name by now.” “Most guys would have noticed the bar’s closed.” “Most guys wouldn’t wear that ugly jacket.” “I like this jacket,” I said. “I can tell.” She was leaning ever so closer — so close that I realized just how far out of my league she was. “It doesn’t like you, though,” she said, and reached towards me, and pulled the wet tweed jacket from my shoulders. She tossed it on the table next to us. “You have one of those pretentious wool hats too, don’t you?” “I wouldn’t call it pretentious.” “I knew it,” she said. “Horned rim glasses?” “Lasik,” I said pointing to my eyes, “before they were popular.” “I told you I know all about you.” “So you’ve said,” I said, “but you haven’t mentioned how.” “I’m psychic,” she said, “or maybe a ghost. You decide. You’re the writer.” “I wouldn’t really like to know your name if you’re a ghost. I’ve never met a ghost before.” “Boo.” “That wasn’t nearly as funny as you thought it would be.” “I know, but I’m cute so I get away with it.” “And very modest,” I said. “The supernatural is not known for being humble.” “Oh,” I said, “then you should definitely tell me your name.” “Emma Lee.” “Emily? I like that.” “Not Emily. Emma. Space. Lee.” “Why do I get the feeling you’re doing this on purpose?” “Because I could have included my middle name,” she said. She leaned closer still, this time giving me an uncompromising view down her shirt. I didn’t try to hide my stare. “What’s your middle name?” “I don’t have one,” she said laughing. She took my hand and led me to the booth, and slid in next to me. “Ms. Lee,” I began. “It’s Mrs. Lee,” she said. When she said that, I’ll never quite be sure if my mouth fell open, or if it just felt that way. “Really?” “No,” she said, “I just wanted to see your reaction.” She was sitting close to me now. So close, I should have been able to feel the warmth of her body. “Sorry.” “So you’re really a Miss?” I asked. “Close enough,” she said, “but it’s a long complicated story, and this is getting incredibly close to killing the mood. So what do you write, Jameson?” “My friends call me James.” “Do you want to be friends right now?” “No.” “Then tell me, Jameson.” “Mostly detective stories,” I said. “Sometimes noir stuff. Like a modern day Raymond Chandler.” “I might need a detective.” “I’m not a detective though,” I said. “Only a writer.” “Close enough.” “What for?” “I told you it’s complicated.” “It’s the ghost thing, isn’t it?” I asked. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

https://medium.com/the-inkwell/the-curious-case-of-emma-lee-4a0e2546bb9b

['Matthew Donnellon']

2019-10-04 20:26:38.237000+00:00

['Books', 'Writing', 'Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Creative Writing']

Hate Social Media? Here Are Other Ways To Promote Your Writing

Hate Social Media? Here Are Other Ways To Promote Your Writing Hold off on that Instagram account just a little longer. Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash: a cellphone displaying an Instagram account Social media isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’s time-consuming, challenging to navigate, and sometimes just downright annoying. Personally, if I didn’t rely on Facebook and Instagram to promote my work, I would delete the apps. Even if you do enjoy using social media, promoting on various platforms is a different ball game. You have to stay on top of algorithm changes, trends, posting schedules, and interacting with others to succeed. When it comes to social media haters, there are two types of people: people who will suck it up for marketing purposes and people who wouldn’t make an Instagram account if their life depended on it. Whether you are looking to promote your writing or writing services, we often overlook other ways to do so. You can use these strategies separate from social media or pair them with your social media use, depending on which type of hater you are. Win distinctions and honors There are plenty of writers who don’t have social media, yet they remain very popular. For example, Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, does not have social media accounts or a personal website (that I can find). I would assume that becoming the Poet Laureate of the United States is enough promotion. As a writer, you can submit to contests or awards to get your name out there. If you’re just starting, try to find local contests or small contests in your niche. You can then branch out to larger ones once you have a few of those under your belt. No matter what you write, it can help to browse Submittable occasionally to check up on opportunities you may qualify for. Typically, organizations will promote the winners of certain honors and distinctions on their social pages. Depending on the opportunity, the achievement may open doors for even more promo as prominent people learn about your work because of it. Have other people promo for you In that vein, having other people promote your work for you is a great way to get around doing it yourself. It’s not a surefire substitute, but it always helps to tap into other people’s followings. Some ways to get others to promote your work include: Get on the news If you have an exciting new project coming out or you want to talk about your services, the oldest method in the book is to get on the news. Once you know your target audience, you should figure out the news sources that appeal to them. Create a list of sources, read their requirements for pitching, and send a pitch. Make sure you have an interesting angle that people would want to report on or read about. Instead of just saying, “I’m releasing a new book,” think about what your book offers to the world and what people may gain by reading it. If you don’t want to pitch, you can position yourself as an expert in your niche by becoming a source for articles already in the works. Websites such as Help a Reporter allow you to sign up and receive information about reporters looking for expert sources on various topics. When you find one that pertains to you, you can submit a quote and potentially get featured in the article. These types of features give you credibility for whatever work you do. Send your work or offer your services to popular people This is the “influencer method” that many companies use, and it works. If you’re struggling to get your foot in the door, try finding someone who already has the door wide open. Create a list of people who have popular blogs, YouTube channels, or social media accounts related to your niche, and then reach out to them. For example, if you wrote a self-help book, you can send it to people in the lifestyle and wellness niche with the hopes that they will share it with their audience. Tell friends to share your work online If you have friends with social media accounts, get them to help you. What else are friends for but for free promotion? Ask them to post about your work on their various channels or to reshare it from other sources. If your friends don’t use social media either, you can encourage them to read your work and share it with their other friends and family. Becoming a presenter at a conference, webinar, or festival can also position you as an expert in your field and garner other people’s interest. Go to events Events can be a better form of networking than social media and a quick way to put some credentials behind your name (if you’re into that). Becoming a presenter at a conference, webinar, or festival can also position you as an expert in your field and garner other people’s interest. The best part about attending events is that you already know that everyone there has some interest that aligns with yours. Networking at niche events can connect you to like-minded people. From there, look for opportunities for further collaboration with those people and build a supportive community. Have an email list Email lists can be a headache in and of themselves. But, if you don’t have social media, email is a great way to allow people to keep up with you and your work. If you have a business, you’ll probably need to take your email list more seriously and have a strategy and a messaging schedule. If you’re a writer who just wants to have somewhere for your audience live, you can have a more leisure email list and only send messages when you have an update. The hardest part about email is building that audience. The other methods I’ve listed will help you do so, as you can direct all of your connections to your email list. Once you have a solid following, email can be better than social media accounts in some ways because at least you know your audience is already interested in what you have to offer. Write for major publications When you get in good with a popular publication, you can allow your work to speak for itself with their audience. I recommend keeping a running list of publications with a large following related to your niche (think of where you like to go for information or entertainment) and noting when they open for submissions. As you well know, a well-written article or story can sometimes make readers want to learn more about the author. Additionally, most major publications have all their own forms of promotion and marketing. When you publish with them, you get to tap into the structures they have in place to promote your work for you. Get good at SEO I find it important for writers of all types to have at least a simple website where they can house all of their work. If you have a website and no social media, taking a couple of courses on search engine optimization (SEO) can’t hurt. SEO allows people to find you directly from search engines such as Google. It takes time to optimize a website and get organic traffic. Once you do, however, the results are phenomenal. Instead of casting a wide net on social media and hoping that you catch someone interested in what you are doing, SEO allows the interested parties to come directly to you. For my ghostwriting business, I directed my energy towards building out my website instead of fishing on social media. Now, people searching for ghostwriting services can find me instead of me having to find them.

https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/ways-to-promote-your-writing-fb638373e84b

['Jae Nichelle']

2020-12-18 13:02:27.716000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Freelance', 'Writing Tips', 'Social Media', 'Writing']

Has Digital Technology Shifted Traditional Brand-Consumer Relationship?

[The following article is a collaboration between a fellow team-mate, Suraj Amin and I for a competition we participated.] ​In times of the World Wide Web and omnipresent dotcoms, businesses across the globe have aggrandized their prominence with the internet bust. The world has so much information floating around that even if we logged it into a database powered by a super algorithm, it still wouldn’t be able to dichotomise the numbers. The entire world knows what the Germans counselled. ‘der Kunde ist König’. The Customer is King. But with companies in every nook, corner and domain, this statement has become more than just a good ol’ moniker. The Customer IS King. Be it any industry, business sustainability depends on whether the customer is feeling significant and that’s exactly where the challenge lies. Is your company attracting new business as well as retaining its regular customers? Are your company’s policies and strategies propelling your business northward? 20 years back, answers to these would demand a flip through the log books. However, digitisation has supplanted that measure for good. The dynamic of the world’s modus operandi has undergone a massive metamorphosis. Here are the key alterations in Customer-Brand behaviour in recent times: 1. Multi-channelling, a TON of options and the shift in loyalty - Before Digital Technology waved its magic wand, the purchasing routine of a customer was pretty uncomplicated. All that one had to do was go to a marketplace, choose from a couple of options and select the best product according to personal preference. Enter the internet. The same customer now has the power to buy products and brands from across the globe, quite literally. Multi-channeling has exposed customers to a truckload of options with the convenience of doorstep delivery. With tens of companies selling the same product, the main competition boils down to whether the brand can provide value for the customer’s money and continue to do so for as long as they intend to stay associated. Brand loyalty is not a measure of projection of sales anymore. Businesses need to be on the qui vive to attract new customers and retain old ones. 2. Product Reviews- The availability of options presents indecisiveness on a plate. Customers now have a voice of their own. The Web is replete with review portals and forums handing potential customers access to comments and reviews about a particular product before buying. Customers no longer cling to goodwill for a brand if there are others offering way more value for money. 3. The Social Media effect - Consumers have been given a plethora of channels to laud as well as criticize brands. What makes brands wary of this internet boom is the rising intolerance among Indian consumers. A recent example would be about ‘Mocambo’, a popular fine dining restaurant in Kolkata, who shut its door on a woman just because she was accompanied with her driver. A story like this would have not reached the limelight a few years back but thanks to social media, it had over a million people talking about it. In 2 days, the restaurant’s ratings on Zomato plummeted to 1.8/5 with 8000+ negative ratings. But, as it turns out, social media is a coin with two different sides. If a brand really caters to its customers, it can be rest assured that Netizens will propel the business to unmatched glory. The mammoth rise in affinity for DBS Group’s Pulse candy is one such success story. The company created a 100 crore business rather rapidly, only through word of mouth and social media publicity advocated by its avid consumers. 4. Data Analytics – There is good news for businesses as well. Brands are now capable of channeling their marketing plans to the ideal target audience. Tools like AdWords and personalized content often seem less intrusive to customers, thus enhancing its efficacy. An ancillary industry which evaluates consumer data for brands to forecast growth, demand and sales has emerged over the past decade. 5. Brand Collaboration – Brands have started product placement campaigns with popular content creators which have been instant hits. TVF has collaborated with Tata Tiago on a new show, “TVF Tripling” which centers around 3 siblings going on a road trip in a Tata Tiago. TVF has had similar previous associations with Uber and Kingfisher. These new means of promotion offer brands with high personal connect with audiences improving brand value. 6. Customer Service – With the power of technology, companies are now equipped to serve customers with year-long immediate customer service. Customers are always looking for the best value for money and improved after sales service has given brands an edge in achieving that demand. 24*7 online support has bridged the gap between customers and the brand. Has this Digital Era settled for good? Only time shall tell. Because if there’s one thing we can predict about technology it’s that it is unpredictable. After all, our most trusted brand when it comes to grocery-shopping is still the market baniya. So has digital life deflected conventional Brand-Consumer relationship beyond reproach? We’ll let you be the judge of that. - Alchemists

https://medium.com/inboundftw/has-digital-technology-shifted-traditional-brand-consumer-relationship-794eab420558

['Rishi Doshi']

2016-12-13 12:03:38.910000+00:00

['Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Entrepreneurship']

Hangin’ Up

Hangin’ Up Working suicide watch at MCC federal prison with Jeffrey Epstein my certificate and photo To nobody’s surprise, prison is a place and experience which often propels its inmates on a downward spiral to the depths of anxiety and depression. Well aware of this problem, prison administrators have designated programs to handle inmates who’ve reached rock bottom and want to end it all. Suicidal inmates were certainly not a rarity where I stayed. Guys threatened to “hang up” (the colloquial expression used for suicide) on a more or less routine basis. As such, the prison had a mini tier of suicide cells down on the second floor. Four of them in fact. And somebody had to watch those inmates who’d threatened to kill themselves. So who’s gonna watch them? In a perfect world, the BOP would hire trained psychologists to do the job. But MCC was far from a perfect world. And the BOP doesn’t have money “like that.” So you guessed it. Inmates got the job! But not to worry. We received a whole 3 to 4 hours of training before being set loose on our suicidal brothers. That exhaustive orientation consisted of a classroom session during which the applicants mostly ogled the female psychologist who taught the class. In between all those furtive glances, we were trained to fill out entries in a ledger every 15 minutes (to chronicle exactly what the inmate we’d been assigned to watch was doing at that particular moment), given a few statistics about suicide, and directed on what and what not to talk about. To say we were adequately trained for the task at hand would be a joke. At strategic points in time, officers would come to check on the watchers and the watched. And a prison psych would come in once a day to check on those who would kill themselves. But on balance, the inmates were stowed away with little to nothing with which to kill themselves (at least in theory) so diligent oversight was of the more or less variety. We watchers were assigned 4-hour shifts. The pay ranged from 12 cents to 40 cents an hour depending on whether the inmate companion was a sentenced or pretrial inmate — and (I believe) on how much education we had. As a college-educated and sentenced inmate, I got top dollar: 40 cents an hour to do this crucial job. The manner in which the shrinks convinced inmates to perform this task at such a low rate of compensation hinged on the suggestion that with a certificate (issued by the department) that an inmate companion had completed 100 hours of service on suicide watch, a judge or prospective employer might look favorably on that particular inmate for rendering such a vital service. Personally, I viewed that claim as somewhat ludicrous, and more of a hustle on the part of the BOP to induce idiots into slave employment than an activity that might actually benefit anybody in the future. I remember when the head of the program claimed that my 100-hour certificate would help me with employment when I got out, I almost laughed in her face at the suggestion. While suicide watch could truly be a deadly serious proposition, the majority of our “suicidal” inmates weren’t really going to kill themselves. They were just assholes who wanted to meet up with their dealers to score drugs! Gotta love prison! So how the fuck did they get that accomplished? No problem. An inmate’s ingenuity and creativity know no bounds. The worst 10% of the prison population ended up in special housing (or the SHU) almost always for disciplinary issues. Getting caught with a phone or using and/or dealing drugs was usually the cause. Insubordination could get you passage to the inner sanctum as well. But the authorities had to pick and choose their reprobates, as there simply were not enough cells in the SHU to handle all the fuck ups. The SHU is not the place to be. Inmates are stuck in the same 50 square feet with a celly 23 hours a day. They shower three times a week, have no access to commissary, and can’t use the phone. And it’s noisy in the SHU. Guys yell and scream all night (which they often did in general population). But the dysfunction was exponential as again, the SHU housed the worst of the worst. Some of our suicide watchers had an added incentive (beyond the 12 cents an hour and empty promise from the psych department) to work the suicide beat. These were the aforementioned drug dealers who knew their customers were in the SHU and would be threatening to “hang up” so they could go down to suicide and meet up with their guys. Once the shrinks heard the guy wanted to kill himself, they’d bring him down to a suicide cell where (drum roll) his dealer would inevitably arrive to dispense his wares. Initially, I couldn’t understand why suicidal inmates were constantly asking me who was working what shift. Finally, a friendly inmate laid it out for me. Observing this guy for an hour or two I wondered out loud “you don’t strike me as suicidal. What are you doing down here?“ after conversing with him and finding the guy completely normal (for prison that is). And that’s when he laid the entire scenario out for my comprehension. He was just down for the weekend to score his deuce. On Sunday night, he’d claim to be fine and would inevitably be returned to the SHU where he could smoke in peace. So much for suicide watch and whatever meaning it supposedly had. But to be truthful, it wasn’t always like that. There were guys who wanted to kill themselves or were just crazy enough that you understood why they were down there. The first inmate I remember watching was a kid named Bahnasawy, a young bearded, curly-haired inmate who at first blush didn’t seem all that deranged. We were not briefed on these inmates at all before reporting for work and so I had no idea of their history or anything that might help us shape the coming interaction. Like the normal human being I may or may not be, I struck up a conversation with this guy asking what he was in for. His answer came in one word: “Terror!” “Terror,” I responded. “What did you do?” “I was going to set off a bomb at a Beyonce concert,” was his response. I know this sounds strange. But when you’re in prison with all manner of murderers, child molesters and gunslingers, nothing really surprises you. “So how long did they give you?” I continued. “Forty years. I’m going to Leavenworth soon. Do you know anything about it?” Now I was stunned. Forty years? Ouch! I almost wanted to give the guy a gun and let him kill himself. Forty years in Kansas. Whoa, Dorothy! I watched Bahnasaway several times over the course of a couple of weeks. And it was only when he turned his orange outerwear inside out, wrapped it around his head, and then stuck his arm inside pretending to brandish a machine gun, did I get the full effect of his terrorist tendencies. A chill ran down my spine. He was no longer a stupid kid. Suddenly, he was a deadly ISIS operative. I realized how he’d managed to get himself 40 years. And the parade of suicidal inmates went on. We had Galichio, a mobster from Staten Island who introduced me to the word skel (as in “the guy’s a real skel”) came next. What a great word. He was only there for some peace and quiet. His bunky in the SHU never shut up and he was going crazy from lack of sleep. And there was Gaelen, who was constantly prancing around nude asking “Hey Bill! I could be a porn star, right?” I’d tell him yes, of course. And I’d add that he could be a writer, too, after he penned a semi-literate but heartfelt message to his daughter on toilet paper. I felt sorry for the guy. He really was a friendly individual. But he’d car-jacked a woman and forced her to make an ATM withdrawal. That got him a kidnapping charge. Gaelen might not even be able to raise the flagpole by the time he got out let alone star in a porn flick. Perez was not unique among inmates. He was a chomo in for disseminating child pornography. While at MDC (in Brooklyn), he’d convinced the other inmates he had a drug offense. But somehow, his reputation preceded him. And when he arrived at MCC, everybody knew he was a fucking sex offender. He hadn’t actually molested anybody. He’d just passed horrible photos back and forth in a dark web group dedicated to passing those images. The fact that he hadn’t actually engaged in sex with a minor mattered not. It was rare for inmates to confess this kind of stuff. Chomos were right at the bottom of the food chain in prison. Right next to snitches and considerably below murderers and such. You get the idea. Perez only told me this because he judged me to be civil and understanding — which I was. But when he returned to our unit after his stint in suicide, I was careful not to linger in his presence lest I be judged sympathetic to his plight. Wouldn’t want to do that! To be human is to be weak and preyed upon. And the procession continued. For me, our most noteworthy suicide tenant was a guy named Nicholas Gibson. This dude was some piece of work. He had already confessed to mutilating an old man with a sword and claimed he had 31 additional bodies notched on his bedpost! (If an inmate had murdered 32 people, it was said “he got 32 bodies.” More prison slang.) The thing about Gibson was he appeared to be completely normal. With numerous tattoos and piercings, Nick reminded me of all the alt East Village types I’ve known over the years. Not only that, he was finally apprehended just yards away from the front door of my building. And I knew the place he worked during his monthlong stay in New York. It was almost like finding a guy from the neighborhood in prison. Nick had a lot of crazy stories — most of which were corroborated by the news I found about him on Google. But the main thrust of his deal was quite unique. At age 21, Nick was committed to an Illinois Mental Hospital for what reason he wouldn’t tell me. (I guess whatever it was, it was worse than his cutting off a lawyer’s head with a sword — a crime to which he confessed without emotion.) While there, he met a 16-year-old high school intern who was in attendance studying crazies for course work. Somehow they fell in love. And when he was released, Nick went to live with her and the girl’s parents. However it happened, he was busted for statutory rape (being 5 or 6 years older than she) and served 5 years for the offense. Apparently, they really were in love. And when he was set free, they got married and ended up running a massage parlor in Miami. Nick claimed he was not a pimp and exercised the normal splits with which I’m very familiar in the massage and escort business. But he was very forthcoming about his voyages to Asia (especially Malaysia) where he’d recruit and find underage girls to come to Miami to work for him. That little deal got them both locked up…he for a longer period than she. When he was set free and went looking for his wife, he came to discover that her lawyer (they had separate representatives) had unbeknownst to Nick offered to allow the US to deport Nick’s wife once she was released. And worse, she’d been sent back to Somalia (where she was apparently from) and had been killed in the streets of a very dangerous country. Nick was beside himself and vowed revenge. He found this lawyer in a hospital recovering from surgery. Rather than kill him right then and there, Nick befriended the man and actually performed home care on him after the lawyer was released from the hospital. It was only when the man was well on the road to recovery that Nick chopped his head off. Asked why he would wait so long to kill the guy, Nick’s answer was simple and rational. He wanted that lawyer healthy and looking at the rest of his life before he took that life away. He didn’t want to kill him while he was still in recovery. Ok! (Yikes!) One night while I was down on suicide watch — but caring for a different individual, all hell broke loose around the corner at another suicide cell. The watcher began screaming bloody murder for what reason I couldn’t imagine (though often, inmates went crazy and started banging on the window, or flinging shit, or flooding the unit for no apparent reason). As I rounded the corner and peered into Nick’s cell, I saw his throat slashed and blood pouring from the cut. I thought the guy was dead. Four different CO’s entered to tend to the situation. The inmate I was watching seized the moment to continuously and ceaselessly taunt the officers “You niggers are in trouble now. You let him into the cell with razor blades. You fucked up. You’re gonna get fired.” And the officers countered accusing the watcher of shirking his duties, assessing him with the blame when I knew Montes had done nothing but his fucking 12 cent an hour job. The truth was (as I found out later when Nick returned), that he’d hidden razor blades in his hair and the officers had missed it. It was all their fault — if there was anybody to be blamed. Nick bled 3 full liters. But he got carted off to Bellevue where they saved his life so he could serve the rest of it behind bars. Nick’s claim that he’d killed 31 additional people mostly fell upon deaf ears. CO’s thought he was “grandstanding,” just looking to mitigate his conditions if he revealed to the authorities where the additional bodies lay. Anyway…Nick stuck around for a while until he was finally sent back to Miami to stand trial in the jurisdiction where he’d committed the murder. What became of him and his claim to 31 additional bodies I could not ascertain from Google, though on the BOP site, it says he’s scheduled for release in 2023. Sounds hard to believe. Must be one of the gazillion mistakes federal employees seem hell-bent on making. If nothing else, Nick illustrated beyond equivocation what a perverse place prison really is. You would think that the guy would be a despised pariah given his crime. But in actuality, it was the exact opposite. The suicide watchers loved the guy. On more than one occasion, I witnessed colleagues fist-bump Gibson through the glass as they either left or arrived for their shifts. And officers constantly questioned me about what was going on with him — and had he told me any interesting stories. Only in a prison could a guy who claimed to have killed 32 people command respect. It was at times like those that I wondered equally how I ended up behind bars and why the government saw fit to put me there in the first place. As unique and newsworthy as Nick was, the sublime became the ridiculous in short order. Because of its location in NY, NY — and its proximity to New York State court, MCC has had more than its share of high-profile inmates. Bernie Kerik, El Chapo, DMX, Manafort? They all graced our little piece of hell. And then one day, yet another pedophile arrived at the prison. But this wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill sex offender. It was a billionaire buddy of Donald Trump’s and Bill Clinton’s among many other influential people. I’d vaguely heard of this guy before on some news show and was aware he’d almost skated on a charge that involved his sexing up numerous young teenagers. Suddenly, he’d been arrested at Newark Airport and brought directly to MCC to begin his voyage through the penal system. The prison was abuzz with our new felon. But I gave him no mind. After all, I was rooming with Paul Manafort. But in short order, Epstein usurped Manafort’s newsworthiness by a country mile, and Manafort became old news in a hurry. Epstein was a billionaire (or so it was said) — and a sex offender. Clearly a much more salacious individual than the likes of a crooked Trump buddy. Jeffrey was initially brought into general population, a residence he was in no way prepared to handle. Manafort was tough — and had already spent 11 months in prison. But Jeffrey was about as soft as they come. A few days with the boys was enough. He requested protective custody. The problem with protective custody at MCC is that those who request to be housed away from the general population end up in the SHU with all the baddest boys. And we’ve already reviewed what that meant. Not surprisingly, a few days in the SHU left Jeffrey ready to “hang up.” And down to a suicide cell he went where (drum roll), I ended up spending multiple hours and shifts watching him. Round 1 set the tone for our relationship. Epstein was walked in from one of his daily sit-downs with his legal team, and escorted to his cell. I recognized Jeffrey as a contemporary right away. He was my age, my religion, and educated (as am I). He looked like all the guys I went to high school with. Once inside his cell and the guards gone, I introduced myself: “I’m Mersey. I’m here on a tax fraud charge from underreporting income I earned selling ads to New York hookers. I’m not broke. I have money and don’t want anything from you. You don’t have to worry about me.” I’m sure there was nobody else in MCC who could honestly make that claim. And Jeffrey was instantly put at ease. From there we talked about the hooker business and its accompanying ad-selling infrastructure in equal parts. I related how the entire industry worked from mostly an economic point of view — and discussed the seamy side only secondarily. While he displayed a natural interest in the girls themselves — it wasn’t overly so. And he asked nothing about anybody’s age to whom I sold these ads. You wouldn’t know anything about his crime from the conversation. After spending maybe an hour and a half on the subject, Epstein segued into how he was going to handle prisoners and prison life. This was a topic we went back to over and over again in the course of my watching him. He confessed to having been bullied throughout his youth by black guys in Coney Island. And he actually asked at one point “Do I need a big schvar?” meaning did he need a big black guy to protect him. I and everybody privy to these conversations (which would be other watchers and/or suicidal inmates) told Jeffrey the same thing. ”MCC isn’t that threatening a place. This is not a federal penitentiary. All you have to do is stand up straight, look people in the eye, give respect, and you’ll get it in return.” But whatever happened in general population had scared Epstein. And I don’t think he ever got over it. Discussing how to handle prison occupied his mind constantly during his stay at MCC. During the latter part of Jeffrey’s vacation at the prison, I became inmate companion coordinator, which meant I did the scheduling for all the suicide watchers. And I would schedule myself to watch Jeffrey every day from 7 PM — 11 PM. Each night, I would have a planned subject for discussion, the idea being to keep Jeffrey’s mind occupied so he wouldn’t dwell on his predicament and contemplate hanging up. During that 4 hour shift, Jeffrey and I would interact for about 2 of those hours. Generally, he’d be with his lawyer until 8 PM, whereupon he’d return and we’d talk. And then somewhere around 10, he’d grow tired and ask if it was ok if he went to sleep. Jeffrey had good manners like that. He also never whined about the conditions to which he was subjected (the suicide cells were spartan, to say the least). And whatever his issues, insomnia wasn’t one of them. Within minutes of declaring himself tired, Epstein would lie on his back (on a pad that was only an inch thick), place an orange sock over his eyes (we weren’t allowed to turn out the lights in the suicide cells as we had to see our charges), and snore happily almost instantly. And he’d be out for the duration. Maybe he missed his $77 million mansion. But you wouldn’t know it by his actions. The only time I heard him complain about anything had to do with the laxative the prison gave him. Whichever he wanted, he requested it not be docusate. And when that’s what they gave him, he complained. But only to me. Not to anybody that mattered. And he got over it a second later. Epstein was not one to brag or tell a lot of stories to his suicide watchers either. But one day I managed to elicit a couple of anecdotes after asking a question he couldn’t resist answering. “So Jeffrey,” said I after sitting down to watch him. “Give me one anecdote that’s emblematic of Donald Trump’s essence.” I don’t know if it was the subject matter, his mood, or how I phrased the question that got him going. But he was off and running immediately. “I got it,” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “Donald and I are on my private plane…flying from New York to Miami. And I have a French girl with me. Donald suggests we land in Atlantic City so we can show her his casino. I answer ’There’s no way we’re landing in AC. There’s nothing but white trash down there.’ The girl asks in her French accent ‘What is white trash. I don’t understand.’ And Trump chimes in ‘It’s me without money.’” Unsolicited, Jeffrey went into another anecdote. This one about Bill Clinton. “So Bill and I are walking down the street in Shanghai when a beautiful Chinese girl walks by. Bill turns to me and says ’That woman makes my dick harder than Chinese arithmetic.’” Upon hearing this I asked if Clinton liked his women young (to my recollection, my only question to Jeffrey that had anything to do with older men liking younger women). He responded, “Clinton liked his women mature.” “Is Clinton the hound dog many people say he is?” I continued. Jeffrey indicated that Bill’s philandering days are behind him now that he’s had some heart surgery. In retrospect, maybe I should have interrogated him about Prince Andrew and other “pressing” matters. But I really wasn’t thinking fame and fortune. I was more about doing the job and certainly not bringing up subjects that might cause Jeffrey to kill himself. It was my mission to keep it light and entertaining. On more than one occasion, Epstein asked “Mersey! So you’re coming back tomorrow night, right?” He came to look forward to having me as his nightly watcher. If nothing else, I provided some airy comic relief and entertainment. During another session with Epstein, I opened our discourse with the statement “So today, Jeffrey…we’re going to talk investments,” figuring this would be right in his wheelhouse. After all, he gained his connections and ensuing fame and fortune via teaching at an elite private school. And he certainly knew money and how to handle it. I was right. He was more than willing to discuss my financial options and began questioning me as to how old I am, how much money I have, and where I have it right now. All were rational and relevant facts any financial planner would want to ascertain. Then the conversation took an odd turn. When I indicated I wasn’t really one for buying equities (most of my money was in fixed income vehicles — bonds and such)…but I might dabble after I got out, he drew an odd comparison. “Stocks are like pussy,” he declared. “How so?” I went along with the train of thought — though incredulous at the suggestion. “Do you have a significant woman in your life?” he continued. “For the sake of argument, let’s say I do,” I bit. “Stocks are just like that woman. You study what makes her happy…what makes her sad. And after a while, you can predict her moods once you really understand her psyche. If you watch three stocks for six months and observe how they react to international news…and news in their sector, you should be able to predict those stocks’ movements and be ready to trade those equities successfully. And that’s how you win in the stock market.” I found the comparison a little odd. But I got what he was saying. That conversation was the only one during which I found Jeffrey to be oversexed and obsessed with women. Otherwise, everything about him was totally normal. You would never know his charge — that is — until he compared equities to pussy. Therein lay the only hint. After maybe a week spent in the suicide unit, Epstein was dispatched back to the SHU. I wasn’t privy to the decision-making process that sent him back. I just knew Epstein was gone from suicide and I wouldn’t be seeing him anymore. Or maybe not. For some reason only the warden could tell you, the prison placed Jeffrey with a murderous policeman. Why they couldn’t find some drug slinger who’d been smoking deuce and sent to the SHU for that offense rather than a murderer eludes me. And soon enough (like maybe another week), Epstein was back in suicide with abrasions on his neck. Did Epstein try to hang up — or did his bunky try to kill him? Nobody knew for sure. And Jeffrey wasn’t talking. Once back down in suicide with me as his watcher, I took no time in asking the obvious. “So Jeffrey! What the fuck happened?” His answer was ridiculous: “I don’t know. I got up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and I don’t remember anything after that.” I gave him a look like “Get the fuck outta here with that bull shit.” But I let it go in the realization that this was his paid political announcement. Like Manafort on the subject of Russian collusion, Epstein wasn’t about to be forthcoming on whether he’d tried to commit suicide or his bunky attempted to kill him. Pursuing the issue would have been futile. And I didn’t bother. Once again, Jeffrey was down with the inmate companions for another week during which time prison officials ruminated on what the fuck to do with the guy. It was bordering on ludicrous. Was he really suicidal? Could they put him in general population? A suicide inmate named Lopez reported one day that he overheard a conversation between Jeffrey and one of the shrinks in which Jeffrey asked if he could bunk with Mersey. The psych responded that I was a sentenced inmate. And Jeffrey being pretrial couldn’t be placed in the sentenced unit where I was housed. It was a prison rule that could not be broken. The very last night I ever saw Jeffrey Epstein was the only time he struck me as depressed and possibly suicidal. I reported for work and found him sitting on the stone floor with his back on his bunk while eating the prison food given him out of a styrofoam plate that was sitting between his legs. “Jeffrey! What the fuck are you doing? Why are you eating on the floor?” “It’s just easier this way,” was his response. It kind of made sense. But he did strike me as somewhat resolved to his fate that night. He’d recently been denied bail and was facing the reality of spending the rest of his life behind bars — even if he snitched on whoever else was included in his pedophiliac quests. In an odd moment, Jeffrey asked “Mersey! You need any money?” “Well,” I meditated. “I could always use money from a billionaire.” “Give me your reg number and I’ll put some money on your books,” he offered — and then took my info so he could have somebody hook me up. As usual, the conversation centered around his adapting to prison life and once again, Jeffrey signed off around 10 PM to hit the hay. I knew he’d be returning to the SHU the next day and while he slept, I penned a note full of platitudes to say goodbye — and left my cousin’s phone number in case he ever wanted to reach out. For a week, we heard nothing about Epstein. He was back in the SHU and gossip about him had subsided for the moment. There was no million dollars on my books and the Epstein chapter seemed over until on a Saturday morning, we were informed at wake-up we’d be getting breakfast in our cells. We were apparently locked down indefinitely. Jeffrey Epstein had killed himself a few hours before and the building was crawling with government agents. What I thought might be the end of the Jeffrey Epstein story was in some ways just the beginning. Speculation as to whether Epstein killed himself or was murdered in some sort of conspiracy ran wild. I didn’t see how anybody could get into his SHU cell and kill him without several people being involved. And that conspiracy would unravel quickly under investigation. I assumed he killed himself. That assumption was reinforced when a knucklehead I’ll call inmate White returned from the SHU to contribute his two cents to the debate. White was a black inmate who befriended me one day in the kitchen (where I also worked a second job) when I read him the paragraph from Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence — a passage which condemned the British for ever bringing slaves to the New World. White decided that was a hip thing for a white boy to be reading and latched onto me as his number one kitchen friend. But White needed money (or he was greedy) and decided to orchestrate a drug deal on TRULINCS, the monitored email program for inmate use. Monitored being the operative word here, White was apprehended (monitored) and thrown in the SHU for the offense. And there he was housed in the cell next door to (drum roll) Jeffrey Epstein. When White was released from the SHU and returned to our unit, he reported to me that nobody came in or out of the tier that entire night and that at some point in the wee hours, he’d heard the sound of sheets tearing from Jeffrey’s cell, a cell in which he’d been left all alone after his bunky’d been returned to general population. His conclusion was that “Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Nobody killed him.” White was most emphatic in this statement. He had no agenda in saying this and I have no reason not to believe him. And to this day, I believe Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Of that, I have little doubt. Just like almost everything else at that Godforsaken prison, the suicide program was a hot mess I decided to discard just after Jeffrey's death. For a few months, I was working two jobs at MCC. At 1 PM, I descended to the kitchen to open cans and mop floors until 6 or 7 PM. Then at 7, I’d re-descend for suicide watch after returning to the unit for just a few minutes. But one day, a CO who was supposed to be a friend, went nuts on me for no apparent reason, and sent me back to the unit with several choice words all of the four-letter variety. Rod was incredibly rude and I vowed never to work in the kitchen again until he apologized (which he did eventually). At the time of Rod’s explosion, the suicide pay had elevated to a dollar an hour. And as inmate companion coordinator, I could assign myself any shift I wanted anytime. So I simply put myself on schedule from 11 AM — 3 PM and 7 PM — 11 PM. As in “fuck the kitchen.” I have a documented bad back from a freak bicycle accident. And somehow, even though I’d been humping 50-pound cases of canned vegetables in the kitchen, my back hadn’t suffered any ill effects. But 8 hours a day in those shitty Unicor chairs down at suicide watch did what the heavy lifting in the kitchen hadn’t. Plaintive cries to the psych staff netted no response. They were completely unsympathetic to my back pain. But that was just the beginning of my problems with that staff. The inmate companion coordinator job was a clerical nightmare which without a copy machine, induced writers’ cramp for all who undertook the task. And it paid somewhere around 40 cents a day! I only took it to give myself any shift I wanted anytime. That was the only perk! Thanks to the shitty pay, we were short on employees. And after Epstein killed himself, the suicide cells were constantly filled. The shrinks took every suggestion that an inmate wanted to hang up very seriously. And they put virtually every inmate who even looked suicidal downstairs on watch. So I didn’t have enough guys to fill all the shifts. That meant I began double-shifting companions to fill all the slots. To ad insult to injury, the psych staff had given me a boatload of misinformation concerning who worked which shift. All their paperwork was wrong. So imagine that you’re the guy who was responsible for having an inmate awakened at 3 AM to work a 40 cent an hour job when 3 AM wasn’t his shift at all. He’s supposed to be working at 3 PM — but the shrinks hadn’t properly entered his work hours on my sheet. So what does that criminal do? He decides to take it out on the nearest body. And that body would be me. When I heard the gossip from one of the suicidal guys that somebody was getting ready to kick my ass, I told the shrinks they really needed to pull their shit together because I didn’t want to suffer a beating for their incompetence! So upset were the girls (the psychs) that they immediately terminated the inmate companion coordinator job — and decreed that nobody could work more than one shift a day. Which didn’t matter because once I was off the coordinator job, I wasn’t doing the scheduling anymore and wouldn’t be able to double-shift myself. Just about that time, Rod from the kitchen approached me to apologize for his outburst — and requested I return to my old job. The timing was perfect. I emailed my resignation to the shrinks. Not only would I not be doing their scheduling anymore, but I signed off on the billing job and watching any more guys who wanted to hang up. I was effectively completely out of their program. And I did suggest they pull their shit together (though not in those exact words). And so, I finished out my bid working in the kitchen and never descended to suicide watch again. My bunky took my job and within a week complained to the shrinks “I feel Mersey’s pain” when he too discovered the futility of working that beat. Forevermore, the shrinks looked very uncomfortable in my presence whenever our paths crossed. I thought they were the one competent group of administrators at the prison. But I was mistaken. Just like the rest of their colleagues, the psych staff was a fail — at least when it came to running the inmate companion program. Even after I left the facility, the Epstein story went on and on like the energizer bunny. On my first day out, I called a friend and matter-of-factly told him I’d roomed with Paul Manafort and suicide-watched Jeffrey Epstein while inside — including many particulars — and he told me “You have to go to the Daily Mail with this story. It’s worth six figures. This is going to change your life!” To be continued in my book “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous: My Year At MCC Federal Prison. More about EPSTEIN and MANAFORT:

https://medium.com/doing-time/hangin-it-up-working-suicide-watch-with-jeffrey-epstein-at-mcc-federal-prison-e7116b2d2f4

['William', 'Dollar Bill']

2020-12-01 15:48:16.386000+00:00

['Jeffrey Epstein', 'Mental Health', 'Suicide', 'Psychology', 'Prison']

How a beginner should approach Kaggle?

Being a part of Kaggle community for a year now, I am trying to bring out what has kaggle on offer for all young data scientists out like me. Most beginners believe a couple of MOOCs, some interview questions and taddaaaaaa!!!! We will land in Data Science. But as said, practical implementations & theoretical knowledge are ways apart. So, I will walk through the Do’s and Don'ts for a newbie kaggler. One must remember, Kaggle is just not a competition hosting platform, but a lot more. To start off, pick up a problem, either Titanic(classification) or House price(regression) as a lot of kernels(scripts/ipython notebooks in both R/python) would be available for them. Instead of jumping straight away to solve it, try to explore some solutions that seem relevant to you by its name having a decent score like — Titanic using Knn, titanic for Beginners — XGBoost, LGBM, etc.(can confuse you in the beginning). Understand how to approach a Data Science problem, what different models can be used for the same. Don’t try to rank higher by copying others solutions or using a black box trick you don’t know as it is never going to help. Even in interviews, the approach used for the problem is asked rather than the rank. Try to understand every step you take like reason yourself why to fill NaN values? why distribution has to be Normal? why skewness should be avoided? reasoning holds the key. If any query comes up, Kaggle Discussions can be a great place to get some wonderful solutions you might not expect googling things up!! you might get a medal as well for posting a question or answering one( I have 23!) can be a great place to get some wonderful solutions you might not expect googling things up!! you might get a medal as well for posting a question or answering one( I have 23!) Kaggle learns can be taken as a summarized version of a Data Science book, but with implementations. Do give a try. It covers python, analysis, ML, basic neural networks and many more topics. can be taken as a summarized version of a Data Science book, but with implementations. Do give a try. It covers python, analysis, ML, basic neural networks and many more topics. Apart from competitions, you can take up any Kaggle dataset ( Kaggle has a huge pool of datasets or you can also upload), do anything(but worthy) and show you analytical powers. Kaggle does provide cash prizes($2000) for best kernels as well! Cherry on the top. ( Kaggle has a huge pool of datasets or you can also upload), do anything(but worthy) and show you analytical powers. Kaggle does provide cash prizes($2000) for best kernels as well! Cherry on the top. Explore different genres like text data, time series, regression, classification, multi-classification to know about the difficulties with each type of data and don’t stick to only similar sorts of problems. like text data, time series, regression, classification, multi-classification to know about the difficulties with each type of data and don’t stick to only similar sorts of problems. Spend about 15–20 days with a single problem statement trying out all possible valid models you can think of and compare your prediction for these models. Sometimes following rules don’t give you the best predictions. statement trying out all possible valid models you can think of and compare your prediction for these models. Sometimes following rules don’t give you the best predictions. Kaggle kernels are very powerful, free GPU with most of the required libraries already installed, it can be the best place to be for Data Science. with most of the required libraries already installed, it can be the best place to be for Data Science. Follow kagglers you feel with most relevant solutions, best discussion answers, etc., you will get notified whenever they are with some sort of activity. you feel with most relevant solutions, best discussion answers, etc., you will get notified whenever they are with some sort of activity. Form up teams with fellow kagglers and take up a challenge as more minds mean more ideas. with fellow kagglers and take up a challenge as more minds mean more ideas. Do mention your kaggle activities in your resume. Its always a plus point. Kaggle can play a handy role in your exploration of Data Science. The resources provided are just unmatched. Though, most of the aspirants are trying to do things quickly and end up getting no opportunities. Take time, don’t rush to learn everything, but try up learning efficiently. If Data Science is a marathon then Kaggle is the coach!! Check out my other articles as well!! Important Analytical steps for Data Science projects Best free Data Science Resources online (pdf links available) Time Series for beginners Maze with Q Learning (codes available)

https://medium.com/data-science-in-your-pocket/how-a-beginner-should-approach-kaggle-6e7fd0d1bc41

['Mehul Gupta']

2020-04-20 05:50:08.191000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Kaggle', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Beginner']

17 Strategies for Dealing with Data, Big Data, and Even Bigger Data

Python is the most popular language for scientific and numerical computing. Pandas is the most popular for cleaning code and exploratory data analysis. Using pandas with Python allows you to handle much more data than you could with Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. SQL databases are very popular for storing data, but the Python ecosystem has many advantages over SQL when it comes to expressiveness, testing, reproducibility, and the ability to quickly perform data analysis, statistics, and machine learning. Unfortunately, if you are working locally, the amount of data that pandas can handle is limited by the amount of memory on your machine. And if you’re working in the cloud, more memory costs more money. 💵 Regardless of where you code is running you want operations to happen quickly so you can GSD (Get Stuff Done)! 😀 Things to always do If you’ve ever heard or seen advice on speeding up code you’ve seen the warning. ⚠️ Don’t prematurely optimize! ⚠️ This is good advice. But it’s also smart to know techniques so you can write clean fast code the first time. 🚀 Getting after it! Source: pixabay.com The following are three good coding practices for any size dataset. Avoid nested loops whenever possible. Here’s a brief primer on Big-O notation and algorithm analysis. One for loop nested inside another for loop generally leads to polynomial time calculations. If you have more than a few items to search through, you’ll be waiting for a while. See a nice chart and explanation here. Use list comprehensions (and dict comprehensions) whenever possible in Python. Creating a list on demand is faster than repeatedly loading and appending attributes to a list — hat tip to the Stack Overflow answer here. However, in general, don’t sacrifice clarity for speed, so be careful with nesting list comprehensions. ⚠️ In pandas, use built-in vectorized functions. The principle is same as the one behind list and dict comprehensions. Applying a function to a whole data structure at once is much faster than repeatedly calling a function. If you find yourself reaching for apply , think about whether you really need to. apply is looping over rows or columns. Vectorized methods are usually faster and less code, so they are a win on multiple fronts. 🚀 Likewise, avoid other pandas Series and DataFrame methods that loop over your data, such as applymap , itterrows , and ittertuples . If it makes sense, use the map or replace methods on a DataFrame instead of any of those other options to save lots of time. Notice that these suggestions might not hold for very small amounts of data, but in that case, the stakes are low, so who cares. 😉 This brings us to our most important rule If you can stay in pandas, stay in pandas. 🐼 It’s a happy place. 😀 Don’t worry about these speed and memory issues if you aren’t having problems and you don’t expect your data or memory footprint to balloon. But at some point storm clouds will gather. ⛈ You’ll encounter a big dataset and then you’ll want to know what to do. Let’s see some tips. Things to do with pretty big data (roughly millions of rows) Like millions of grains of sand. Source: pixabay.com Use a subset of your data to explore, clean, and make a baseline model if you’re doing machine learning. Solve 90% of your problems fast and save time and resources. This technique can help you get a good model so much faster! ⏳ Load only the columns that you need with the usecols argument when reading in your DataFrame. Less data in = win! Use dtypes efficiently. Downcast numeric columns to the smallest dtypes that makes sense with pd.to_numeric() . Convert columns with low cardinality (just a few values) to a categorical dtype. Here’s a pandas guide on efficient dtypes. Parallelize model training in scikit-learn to use more processing cores whenever possible. By default, scikit-learn uses just one of your machine’s cores. Many computers have 4 or more cores. You can use them all for parallelizable tasks by passing the keyword argument n_jobs=-1 . Save pandas DataFrames in feather or pickle formats for faster reading and writing. Hat tip to Martin Skarzynski, who links to evidence and code here. Use pd.eval to speed up pandas operations. Pass the function your usual code in a string. It does the operation much faster. Here’s a chart from tests with a 100 column DataFrame. Image from this good article on the topic by Tirthajyoti Sarkar df.query is basically same as pd.eval , but as a DataFrame method instead of a top-level pandas function. See the docs because there are some gotchas. ⚠️ Pandas is using numexpr under the hood. Numexpr also works with NumPy. Hat tip to Chris Conlan in his book Fast Python for pointing me to @Numexpr. Chris’s book is an excellent read for learning how to speed up your Python code. 👍 Things do with really big data (roughly tens of millions of rows and up) Even more data! Source: pixabay.com Use numba. Numba gives you a big speed boost if you’re doing mathematical calcs. Install numba and import it. Then use the @numba.jit decorator function when you need to loop over NumPy arrays and can't use vectorized methods. It only works withNumPy arrays. Use .to_numpy() on a pandas DataFrame to convert it to a NumPy array. Use SciPy sparse matrices when it makes sense. Scikit-learn outputs sparse arrays automatically with some transformers, such as CountVectorizer. When your data is mostly 0s or missing values, you can convert columns to sparse dtypes in pandas. Read more here. Use Dask to parallelize the reading of datasets into pandas in chunks. Dask can also parallelize data operations across multiple machines. It mimics a subset of the pandas and NumPy APIs. Dask-ML is a sister package to parallelize machine learning algorithms across multiple machines. It mimics the scikit-learn API. Dask plays nicely with other popular machine learning libraries such as XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch, and TensorFlow. Use PyTorch with or without a GPU. You can get really big speedups by using PyTorch on a GPU, as I found in this article on sorting. Things to keep an eye on/experiment with for dealing with big data in the future Keep an eye on them! Source: pixabay.com The following three packages are bleeding edge as of mid-2020. Expect configuration issues and API changes. If you are working locally on a CPU, these packages are unlikely to fit your needs. But they all look very promising and are worth keeping an eye on. 👀 Do you have access to lots of cpu cores? Does your data have more than 32 columns (necessary as of mid-2020)? Then consider Modin. It mimics a subset of the pandas library to speed up operations on large datasets. It uses Apache Arrow (via Ray) or Dask under the hood. The Dask backend is experimental. Some things weren’t fast in my tests — for example reading in data from NumPy arrays was slow and memory management was an issue. You can use jax in place of NumPy. Jax is an open source google product that’s bleeding edge. It speeds up operations by using five things under the hood: autograd, XLA, JIT, vectorizer, and parallelizer. Jax works on a CPU, GPU, or TPU and might be simpler than using PyTorch or TensorFlow to get speed boosts. Jax is good for deep learning, too. It works withNumPy version but not pandas as of mid-2020. However, you could convert a DataFrame to a TensorFlow or NumPy object and then use jax. Read more here. Rapids cuDF uses Apache Arrow on GPUs with a pandas-like API. It’s an open source Python package from NVIDIA. Rapids plays nicely with Dask, so you could get multiple GPUs processing data in parallel. For the biggest workloads, it should provide a nice boost. Other stuff to know about code speed and big data Timing operations If you want to time an operation in a Jupyter notebook, you can use %time or %%timeit magic commands. They both work on a single line or an entire code cell. %time runs once and %%timeit runs the code multiple times (the default is seven). Do check out the docs to see some subtleties. If you are working in a Python script or notebook you can import the time module, check the time before and after running code, and find the difference. When testing for time, note that different machines and software versions can cause variation. Also, caching will sometimes mislead if you are doing repeated tests. As with all experimentation, hold everything you can constant. 👍 Storing big data GitHub’s maximum file size is 100MB. You can use Git Large File Storage extension if you want to version large files with GitHub. Also, make sure you aren’t auto-uploading files to Dropbox, iCloud, or some other auto-backup service, unless you want to be. Want to learn more? The pandas docs have sections on enhancing performance and scaling to large datasets. Some of my ideas are adapted from those sections. Have other tips? I’d love to hear them over on Twitter. 🎉 Wrap You’ve seen how to write faster code. You’ve also seen how to deal with big data and really big data. Finally, you saw some new libraries that will likely continue to become more popular for processing big data. I hope you’ve found this guide to be helpful. If you did, please share it on your favorite social media so other folks can find it, too. 😀 I write about Python, SQL, Docker, and other tech topics. If any of that’s of interest to you, sign up for my mailing list of awesome data science resources and read more to help you grow your skills here. 👍

https://towardsdatascience.com/17-strategies-for-dealing-with-data-big-data-and-even-bigger-data-283426c7d260

['Jeff Hale']

2020-10-08 21:26:22.977000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Data Science']

How to Turn a Bad Day Around.

If you are reading this, you’ve had a bad day. And that’s not because you are a failure, or because you just can’t figure out how to “adult”. It’s because you are human, (unless you’re an alien, in which case, do you have bad days?) and all humans have bad days. Regardless of how successful you are, and how often you meditate, you’ll have bad days. Here are some tips on how to turn a bad day around. Forgive yourself Probably the biggest part of turning your day around is letting go of the fact it has turned or started off bad. This morning, I slept in an hour past when I planned to get up. Then I proceeded to watch TikTok for almost half an hour after breakfast. This is obviously not unprecedented, but with less time to accomplish my list of tasks, it really didn’t help. Ultimately, I realized what was happening. I was wasting time doing things that were not good for me in any way. Then I had this feeling of failure. “Why did I let this happen?” “Why did I sleep in?” “Why did I eat that full pizza last night which made running harder?” (No joke I did eat an entire pizza last night) But I realized spending time beating myself up is silly. So, I decided… “hey, you’re only human, get over it, and press on.” So, I did just that. Do what gives you clarity You will have to try different things and pay attention to how you feel, but find what bring you clarity. For me, it’s running. For others it may be, journaling, playing an instrument, brewing their coffee, going for a walk, drawing, singing, listing to Metalica, whatever it is, find it and recognize the power it has to help you center yourself. Once you know what centers you, use it to reset yourself when you catch yourself letting your day get ahold of you. Get small wins As Friday is winding to an end, I often make a list of things to do on the following day when I’m still in a work mode. This list can often be large, but when I put my mind to it can often be crossed off in a short amount of time. For me, if I’m struggling with a bad start to my day, I aim to check off the easy things on the list. The things that I would do anyway, like trim my beard. If you don’t like lists, then focus on what you did well that day, and/or focus on how good you felt a time that you did something that was hard. Oftentimes that gives you the push you need to start rolling in the right direction. Use incentives One of the only things that got me to do the things on my list, was the fact I was going to dinner with a friend. It was planned earlier in the week, but I had committed to meeting him at a certain time, so knowing that pushed me to get done the other things on my list. Another way I used incentives this week was when I told myself if I get up at 6 o’clock on the dot, without hitting snooze, I would owe myself a vanilla bean donut from Donut Planet. Let me tell you something, it worked. Prioritize Something that is hard to do, especially if you work off of a list like myself, is push something into the next day, or erase it. However, that’s what you need to do sometimes. If that thing is not the most vital, and especially if it will stress you out all day, and you know you can’t get to it, just move it to a different time, or remove it altogether. Think about the times you’ve done well I mentioned this in “Get small wins”, but it also deserves its own space. One thing that has really helped me, is to recall the times I succeeded in beating concupiscence (the tendency towards the easy). For example, I think about how great it felt that time I went to bed at 9:30 without watching any TikTok. I remember vividly how great I felt the next day, and I want that feeling again, hence I make it happen, well…I get close to it. Avoid media This one has been a huge one for me. Whenever I watch an episode of New Girl or Space Force, or when I spend time scrolling Twitter, I feel terrible. My personal tendency on the weekend is to literally do all kinds of lazy things because my logic says, it’s rewarding yourself for working 50 hours. The reality is, I actually don’t feel good about myself when I do that. If I read a book, wrote a blog post, learned some German, or went for a run, while it would appear to be exhausting, it actually fills me up. Media can be really dangerous because it’s like a firehose of dopamine rushing into your brain which then becomes addictive to the point where you can’t put it down (TikTok is the best at this IMO). The reality is our subconscious is upset that we didn’t get the things “we” wanted/needed to get done. It’s really incredible how our brains make us dissatisfied when we have not taken care of ourselves, or have not made time for what we have said is important to us. End the day well In my estimation, this is the single most important thing you can do. It is in your power at the end of the day to decide which direction you are going to end in. Even if your day went really poorly, it’s up to you to decide how the day ends. Take stock, forgive any ill feelings you have against yourself, and thank God (or whoever you thank) for all the good things of that day. Things like a house, a job, sunshine — the little things. Then end your day well with the determination that tomorrow is already off to a good start.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-to-turn-a-bad-day-around-3ee6983806c4

['Silas Mahner']

2020-07-20 18:10:40.768000+00:00

['Meditation', 'Productivity', 'Mental Health', 'Self Care', 'Focus']

5 Pairs of Magic Methods in Python That You Should Know

4. Context Manager: __enter__ and __exit__ When we deal with file objects in Python, the most frequent syntax you may have come across is probably something like this: with open('filename.txt') as file: # Your file operations go here The use of the with statement is known as the context manager technique. Specifically, in the file operation example above, the with statement will create a context manager for the file object and after the file operations, the context manager will help us close the file object such that the shared resource (i.e., the file) can become available to other processes. So, in general, context managers are Python objects that manage shared resources, such as open and close, for us. Without them, we have to manage them manually, which can be error-prone. To implement such behavior with a custom class, our class needs to implement the __enter__ and __exit__ methods. The __enter__ method sets up the context manager that prepares the needed resource for us to operate on, while the __exit__ method is to clean up any used resources that should be released to make them available. Let’s consider the following trivial example with the previous Product class: Context Manager As you can see, when the instance object is embedded in a with statement, the __enter__ method is called. When the operation is completed in the with statement, the __exit__ method is called.

https://medium.com/better-programming/5-pairs-of-magic-methods-in-python-you-should-know-f98f0e5356d6

['Yong Cui']

2020-08-28 10:45:17.641000+00:00

['Programming', 'Technology', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Artificial Intelligence']

Perfect Circle

Perfect Circle When falling tears rise When blue ocean cries When out is in When Without is within And within is without And every One loud Forms…the darkest cloud When right is left When left is right When you have no food And you take a bite When it is dark When dark is white Cease or Exist When far is near When time is now When its all here Peace and fear Becomes clear No stone is the same No breath is the same Nothing has a name Without no’s still the same Ultimate

https://medium.com/warlockworld/understanding-this-you-are-close-to-your-goal-1c5cd67b3955

['Talk To Warlock']

2017-10-18 07:23:46.968000+00:00

['Sex', 'Psychology', 'Yoga', 'Science', 'Poetry']

‘Designing Finnishness’

From hard to soft While we can say Finnishness was in a sense designed along with Finland, it is also, at the same time, much older than Finland. The Finnish language is signifcantly older. And of course the one thing non-Finns know about the Finnish language is that it is impenetrable, legendarily obscure, emblematic of an apparent hardness, or flintiness. Perhaps as a result, Diego Marani’s idiosyncratic novel ‘New Finnish Grammar’ gives us the best contemporary insight into Finnishness. In Marani’s book, Finnishness is articulated for the reader by a frequently drunk pastor, who filters every aspect of his culture through the prism of the Finnish language as well as through copious amounts of koskenkorva. While Finnishness may be invented, he states that the language itself was not. “(O)ther languages are merely temporary scaffolding for meaning. Not so for Finnish: Finnish was not invented. The sounds of our language were around us, in nature, in the woods, in the pull of the sea, in the call of the wild, in the sound of the falling snow. All we did was to bring them together and bend them to our needs.” (in Marani, ibid.) At its core there are a group of ancient words — some think a few words are over 6000 years old. Small, soft words describing the body, the landscape, the weather, the world: kuu (moon/month), suu (mouth), puu (tree), sää (weather), jää (ice), pää (head), kivi (stone), mäki (hill), joki (river), lahti (bay), järvi (lake), saari (island) … This emphasis on the physical, the body, objects within a landscape, and their various conditions is an interesting starting point for a culture. Is this why Finnishness also focuses on objects and their material qualities, the body and the landscape? In what Marani describes as “chipped sounds, words eaten away by ice and silence” we might find the origins of a later facility with objects, with architecture, and in particular with a purist form of both, a design oriented around authenticity and the qualities of natural materials. Equally, the emphasis on the body would generate the form of humanist modernism associated with brands like Artek, who aimed to “support and nourish human beings’ physical and psychological wellbeing … blending functionalism with form and sculptural simplicity with the emotional warmth of wood.” So hard conditions begat a hard language and a facility with hard materials. Yet those soft words also begat softness, through a comfort with the body and the ephemeral conditions of weather, flora and fauna. Hardness also applies to the environmental conditions Finland enjoys. It is, of course, insanely cold. Yet everything is built to withstand it, from clothing to transport to the urban plan to the buildings — I have been colder in Australian or Italian houses than I ever was in our Helsinki apartment. Equally, the delights of the Finnish summer, which can be perfectly warm, if a little brief, means it is entirely possible to witness a 60-degree centigrade temperature swing across the year. Yet thanks to engineering that swing in conditions is not a problem. Conquering such conditions means that engineering itself has been elevated to exalted status within Finnishness. Yet the next challenge is beyond engineering, beyond dealing with the hardness and difficulty of Finnish conditions, and instead dealing with soft systems, social systems. “The idea of Helsinki is radical: a new capital for a new nation; an ideal city built from tabula rasa; an orthogonal grid laid over the topographic granite of an irregular peninsular; a window to the West and the East; a showcase and platform for a political, social, cultural, and architectural experiment on a grand scale.” (Kalliala ibid.) Tsar Alexander I had designated, and in effect created, Helsinki as a kind of Special Political Zone (just as Shenzhen would be a Special Economic Zone for China almost two centuries later.) He designed it to be an autonomous Grand Duchy, a merging of Russian order with liberal European values picked up during his schooling in Switzerland. It was a prototype for politics. While hard boundaries changed in largely obvious ways, the soft system of politics draped over what would become the Republic Of Finland suggested a design of decision-making itself. Scroll forward many decades to the recent years and a practice of “strategic design” — the design of decision-making cultures — would emerge in Finland, partly courtesy of Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. The concern here is not with the production of objects, services, buildings and cities, but with the conditions that would enable those things, in order to address new kinds of highly complex and interdependent problems. Part of a growing international movement often looking at the design of the public sector, it feels like a different form of design, focused not only on those “hard” outcomes but on the soft systems of culture, management, services, and the organisation that enables them. It is a clear departure from the obvious tangibility of what people recognise as Finnish design. Is it possible to connect the institutions that have nurtured Finnish design to the nation’s history of designing cultures, which is barely recognised as design at all? How to train a generation capable of articulating the architecture of “wicked problems”, and not simply the architecture of buildings? This is the first step in evolving Finnishness — dealing with soft systems as well as hard outcomes. From silent to social That those Finnish words are “eaten away by silence” is also important. The ‘Finnish silence’ is an essential component of Finnishness, perhaps derived from the solitude that marks much of the Finns’ existence — the giant land mass, the small population, the late urbanisation: all conspire to creating an everyday life that, only a few generations ago, was based on not seeing many other people at all, for days on end. Daniel Dennett suggests that “talking, and not talking, is what makes us human.” Dennett means “not talking” in order to deliberately conceal or obscure. But in Finnishness it is often simply … not talking. Foreigners are often thrown by the Finn’s ability to deploy a gaping silence into the middle of a conversation — like the old theatre joke when the narrator utters “night falls” being underlined by a sudden curtain drop. This comfort with silence is appealing, in the context of cultures that revel in small-talk instead, in filling each moment with something, anything, essentially with the chaff of shallowness. Yet equally, it can reinforce the idea that Finnishness is socially awkward. Though it should be noted that this taciturn characteristic to Finnish communication is most frequently associated with the male of the species. Juhani Pallasmaa, who has perhaps written more influentially than any other Finnish architect, recalls of his childhood that: “Tapio Wirkkala, the legendary designer was an elder brother for me, and he taught me the importance of craft. As I had spent the decisive years of my childhood at my farmer grandfather’s humble farm, I shared a love of nature, solitude and silence with Tapio.” This is just about the most Finnish paragraph one could imagine. Craft, nature, solitude, silence.

https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/designing-finnishness-for-out-of-the-blue-the-essence-and-ambition-of-finnish-design-279c40d48bae

['Dan Hill']

2019-05-22 18:45:46.984000+00:00

['Finland', 'Culture', 'Architecture', 'Books', 'Design']

10 Life Skills they Don’t Teach in College

10 Life Skills They Don’t Teach In College And How You Can Do It Now FAQ How to network with purpose? No matter how great you start your conversation with, if your ultimate purpose is to networking, then it’s a bleak way of starting a friendship. As much as possible, reach out to people that you know and you know you as well as your classmates, professors,and friends that you think might get interested in your field. How to manage your bank account? As much as possible, start an achievable budget for yourself. The 10% of your paycheck should go to your savings for future needs. What are the easiest money saving tips? Record your expenses Make a budget Plan on saving Choose what to save Know your priorities Have the right tools How to build a career that’s all your own? When deciding a career to pursue, you must determine what you are really up to. Think of things creatively and how you can make a living out of it. Also, never forget to pursue your passions and live an extraordinary life. When to trust your gut? Be a person who won’t second-guess the choices you made throughout your life, including those small ones. Go for things that “feel right” and pay attention to those that feel “off”. What are the gut instincts that you should never ignore? Your Health When you are in danger When you want to help When you know how to do something When you think that it is truly right How to avoid burn-out? Do some meditation for about 10 minutes in a day. There are on-campus counseling also that are of great help. A limit time when using gadgets especially in the mornings and evenings. How to bounce back or the art of failing with grace? The people you admire surely have their own biographies. Read and learn from them. Take note of the ways that they did to cope up with their setbacks. Always remember to see the bigger picture and never exert too much effort on the small stuff. How to be a good partner? Either friendship or relationship, both teaches how to strike right when it comes to partnership. Think of the qualities that you’re looking for and also focus on yours. You should never be a one-sided person. What are some tips to become a good partner? See the best in your partner Have fun Be grateful to your partner Acquire a good relationship towards yourself How to communicate and negotiate well? At first, go for small negotiations. Learn to value your worth so by the time you will go out to the real world, you will know how to negotiate the right starting salary. What are some tips when negotiating? Don’t get afraid to ask Listen before you speak Do your homework Don’t rush Aim high Do not focus on the pressure How to take care of your home? House-cleaning applications and food delivery services are not cost-effective. Learn the basics of cooking and cleaning. Anyway, you can learn everything online. There are lots of videos where you can get a reference. The importance of travel? Have a scheduled trip once every six months, whether it’s out of the country or just an out of town trip. There are websites that offer affordable deals to suit your budget. What are some tips when traveling? Pack essentials inside your carry-on Take note of your hotel information Have some old currency with you Keep your boarding pass Be a Unicorn in a Sea of Donkeys Get my very best Unicorn marketing & entrepreneurship growth hacks: 2. Sign up for occasional Facebook Messenger Marketing news & tips via Facebook Messenger. About the Author Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey — provider of the World’s Best Facebook Messenger Marketing Platform. He’s also the founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. Originally posted on Mobilemonkey.com

https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/10-life-skills-they-dont-teach-in-college-b577a52d8b3

['Larry Kim']

2018-08-22 11:41:01.390000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Life Lessons', 'Marketing', 'Life']

Must read books for those aspiring to be UX designers

Must read books for those aspiring to be UX designers (and for those moving up the ladder) Where do I start? So you want to be a UX designer. And have decided that you are willing to invest energy in learning the skills and acquiring the knowledge required to become one. Where do you start? I’d say with books. In this article, I recommend five books that aspiring UX designers must read and internalise, and five more for those who are already UX designers and want to move up their career ladders. The first five Dr. Donald Norman’s seminal work and my favourite book on the list. In fact, I think this is a book everyone should read, and should be included in college syllabi. The updated version (2013) provides relevant examples that are needed to communicate with today’s audience. Don Norman wrote the book for many reasons. The initial thought was the frustration that he encountered with ‘everyday things’. His inability to operate simple things was frustrating, and after feeling flustered and confused at his inability to operate things, he realized that much of the problem was due to poorly designed interface. This made him realize that people shouldn’t feel guilty or stupid for their inability to operate devices. The fault was with the unintuitive interface — that shifts the problem space to the design of a good interface. It taught me how to think about design problems. In fact, it taught me how to look at a problem critically, and once you learn to do so, you realize that most problems in the world that pertain to product and services are design problems at one level or the other. It’s worth summarizing the main contents of the book. Chapter 1 talks about the idea that users shouldn’t need an engineering degree to know to use a product. Don introduces key principles such as visibility, mappings, affordances, signifiers, constraints, conceptual models and feedback. Plenty of fun stuff in there. Chapter 2 talks about psychology behind design what really goes on in a user’s head when they try and do/use something. Chapter 3 is about what Don calls ‘knowledge in the head’ and the ‘knowledge in the world’, which explains how people remember stuff and how design can aid people doing things in a particular manner (to prevent mistakes or frustrations). Chapter 4 is about constraints, which tells you exactly what sort of constraints help prevent errors. It talks about physical, semantic, cultural and logical constraints. Chapter 5 deals with the idea that ‘to err is human’ and therefore a good designer must think about the sort of errors/problems that a user is likely to make while using a product and how to mitigate the frustration arising out of making these errors. Chapter 6 is one of my favorites as it talks about the constant battle between aesthetics and usability. From general truths about the world and people, Chapter 7 dives into the user-centered design process and explains how you can make great products by following a certain way of working. Start with this book when beginning your journey into anything related to UX. Steve Krugg’s witty book with a wittier title. We live in a world that has changed so dramatically that users are often playing catch up. Every new product works differently. Every new app uses different interaction standards. Every second website tries to define a new information architecture for how things should be organized. Users have unconsciously decided to start rejecting products and services that require them to learn something new, or simply but, that require them to think too much. Designers must understand and empathize with users, because in one single day 1000 + apps alone are added to the App Store and a similar number to the Playstore. A simple search for a screen recorder in the App Store (something that I recently did) gave me some 300 results. Most of these do the same thing. How do I know which one to download? The first one? The free one? The highest rated one (only 20 of them had ratings, does that mean the rest are bad or simply untried?)? The smallest (lightest) one? There are just too many variables. Users in today’s world expect things to ‘just work’ or to ‘just get it’, and unless your product a path-breaking one with zero competition, be smart or be deleted (or worse ignored). The book contains numerous examples that illustrate several fundamental principles to keep in mind when designing anything; products, websites, apps, or services. Other notable topics include the fact that users don’t read stuff anymore, they merely scan, how to design home pages, how usability arguments are often a waste of time, and how to conduct cheap usability testing. Another seminal work in the field of UX. Different from Don Norman’s work in that this is more specific for UX designers and starts to introduce UXers to how to go about planning and executing UX work effectively. I’ve deliberately introduced this book after the first two because I recommend reading the other two before this to build empathy for the field, the people involved and the challenges. Jesse James Garrett, is a UX stalwart who authored this book in 2002 and then published the current edition in 2010. He worked for one of the most renowned UX consultancies called Adaptive Path. Coming to the book, it smartly breaks down the entire UX lifecycle into five phases or skeletons: Surface, Skeleton, Structure, Scope and Strategy. Let’s look at an example, from the book, to better understand these planes. Most people, at one time or another, have purchased a book over the Web. The experience is pretty much the same every time — you go to the site, you find the book you want (maybe by using a search engine or maybe by browsing a catalog), you give the site your credit card number and your address, and the site confirms that the book will be shipped to you. That neat, tidy experience actually results from a whole set of decisions — some small, some large — about how the site looks, how it behaves, and what it allows you to do. These decisions build upon each other, informing and influencing all aspects of the user experience. If we peel away the layers of that experience, we can begin to understand how those decisions are made.The Surface Plane On the surface you see a series of Web pages, made up of images and text. Some of these images are things you can click on, performing some sort of function such as taking you to a shopping cart. Some of these images are just illustrations, such as a photograph of a book cover or the logo of the site itself. The Skeleton Plane Beneath that surface is the skeleton of the site: the placement of buttons, tabs, photos, and blocks of text. The skeleton is designed to optimize the arrangement of these elements for maximum effect and efficiency — so that you remember the logo and can find that shopping cart button when you need it. The Structure Plane The skeleton is a concrete expression of the more abstract structure of the site. The skeleton might define the placement of the interface elements on our checkout page; the structure would define how users got to that page and where they could go when they were finished there. The skeleton might define the arrangement of navigational items allowing the users to browse categories of books; the structure would define what those categories actually were. The Scope Plane The structure defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together. Just what those features and functions are constitutes the scope of the site. Some sites that sell books offer a feature that enables users to save previously used addresses so they can be used again. The question of whether that feature — or any feature — is included on a site is a question of scope. The Strategy Plane The scope is fundamentally determined by the strategy of the site. This strategy incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out of it but what the users want to get out of the site as well. In the case of our bookstore example, some of the strategic objectives are pretty obvious: Users want to buy books, and we want to sell them. Other objectives might not be so easy to articulate. This interdisciplinary book, which is also available as a pocket book, is a must for designers. In little more than 200 pages, Universal Principles of Design explains a wide variety of foundational design concepts, including performance load, Occam’s Razor, and the product adoption life-cycle. Superbly illustrated and thoroughly explained, this text provides a detailed summary of over 100 mental models that relate to the design process. Each principle is explained in two pages, complete with visual examples and references to other texts for further study. In little more than 200 pages, Universal Principles of Design explains a wide variety of foundational design concepts, including performance load, Occam’s Razor, and the product adoption life-cycle. Superbly illustrated and thoroughly explained, this text provides a detailed summary of over 100 mental models that relate to the design process. Each principle is explained in two pages, complete with visual examples and references to other texts for further study. It is obviously hard to remember all these principles, so I recommend reading the book, taking note of the most relevant principles depending on what you are likely to work on, and then using it as a reference for future projects. The first book is your step forward, in terms of being highly involved and diving into the details of how to gather data and build products in a user-centered manner. It s a slightly older book and therefore not entirely up to date with examples from 2017, but it is superbly researched and presented, and remains relevant in 2017. It touches the key aspect of ‘context’, which is something you’ll hear often in the world of UX. In fact, in UX, context is every thing. To put it simply, not only do you need to understand what users want (in terms of a product or service) but also how they will use that product or service. Will they use their app while in a hurry (think Maps)? Will they use your product in case of an emergency (think fire extinguishers)? Will they use your service during an emotionally charged period (think insurance)? As a designer, you have to learn to understand and take into account these contexts of use, without which, the best product might totally fail. For example, in 2006, the American telecom giant Verizon introduced a mobile ESPN service + phone, with the idea that sports lovers will pay a premium to have access to their favorite sports on the go. It failed miserably. Was it a bad product? Probably not, but it failed because it did not recognize that watching sports is a social, enthralling activity, which people want to do with friends and family. Think how many people go to banks today vs. how many who do almost everything online? The number of the former has been growing exponentially. But how many people, who previously watched sports in stadiums, watch sports mostly at home given that there is better technology to enjoy them at home? Not many. The stadium occupancy rates for sporting events are similar, if not better than what they were a decade ago.This, slightly lengthy book, is thorough and exceptionally written. It is your go to guide for learning to to create customer-centric systems. It is specific to designing good UX for technology/systems, and doesn’t cover things such as designing services, although many concepts are cross-applicable in reality.

https://uxdesign.cc/must-read-books-for-those-aspiring-to-be-ux-designers-and-those-moving-up-the-ladder-84694766575f

['Aviram Vijh']

2018-12-13 01:35:43.810000+00:00

['Hows', 'UX', 'Books', 'Design', 'Aviram']

The Every Day Novelist: RESOURCES

I attended AWP 2019 — a writer’s conference. It had an expo that was literally packed full of booths full of small presses seeking submissions for writers, writers programs, and workshops. I thought the best way to share the information I picked up might be to write a little information about each press and collect them here in The Every Day Novelist publication. Each publication or workshop will get its own post and I’ll collect them here. Broadsided Press is a non-paying market for poetry and prose. They also offer opportunities to become grassroots publishers. December Magazine is a paying market for poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and visual art. they host annual contests for poetry and prose. Hippocampus Magazine and Books is a paying market for creative non-fiction. They also host an annual conference for creative non-fiction writers. Minerva Rising Press is a paying market for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photography, and art. They also host a blog that accepts submissions, and three contests (poetry, fiction, memoir.) They offer book development services for a fee. Pacifica Literary Review is a non-paying market for poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, visual art, and photography. They also offer contests.

https://medium.com/the-1000-day-mfa/the-every-day-novelist-resources-fb83994ed22b

['Shaunta Grimes']

2019-04-18 18:57:37.234000+00:00

['Writing', 'Reading', 'Resources', 'Publication', 'Books']

IBM Design helps Eclipse Codewind win silver in the New York Design Awards

As we see a rise in developer advocacy across the tech industry, the importance of developer experience rises with it. This has created a huge opportunity for design to make an impact. Eclipse Codewind met this challenge head on, and as a result won silver in the New York Design Awards 2020 developer platform/tool/framework category. The New York Design Awards, run by DrivenxDesign Award Programs, recognizes design that leads the way in technology and innovation. Their developer platform/tool/framework category honors platforms and services that speed up the development lifecycle and power design-driven features and experiences that would have taken years to bring to market. How does Eclipse Codewind help developers? Developers can discover Codewind outside of the IBM ecosystem, giving it a more open source look and feel Designing for developer experiences deserves unique considerations. Building and developing a cloud native, containerized applications is incredibly complex for developers, preventing them from doing the one thing they really want to do: code. They prefer developing within their preferred integrated developer environment (IDE) and avoid ping-ponging between different apps in order to get things done. Eclipse Codewind is an open source project that makes it easier for developers to create cloud-native applications within their favorite IDE. The design team at IBM took this opportunity to contribute to open source initiatives. The goal was to apply IBM Enterprise Design Thinking in adapting a browser based application to a plug-in, and converting its complex functionality to fit within some of the most popular IDE’s. Thorough research led the way We believe that user research is the secret sauce to any good design. Several user interviews revealed the pain points that application developers often face, and the design team walked away with three key insights. First, time spent learning and setting up infrastructures often feels tedious, keeping them from focusing on more complex problems. Second, developers part of a larger team struggle to consistently maintain standards and compliance. And lastly, they’re looking for a streamlined and automated process of creating, building, modifying, and testing containerized apps. As they began implementation, the design team tested Eclipse Codewind’s user experience with developers in order to inform their design roadmap. Through this research, they learned that users struggled with the getting started experience. An As-is Scenario Map helped the design team align around user pain points In response, they added project templates and a welcome page so that users won’t have to rely on documentation in order to start their first project. These changes helped immensely. Before, only 6 out of 8 users knew how to start their first project after installing Codewind. After they improved the experience, every user they tested with immediately knew how to complete the task. The Quick Start section lets users know they can begin a project with a template It’s a nice Quick Start screen and I like the big buttons. Usually with any new tools like this, it’s digging through documentation to figure out where to go and what to do. — User interview The success of this design team reminds us that design must prioritize applied user research in order to stay user-centered. I’m so proud to see their hard work recognized. Winning team Design manager: Jay Cagle Design team: Kim Holmes, Michelle Wang, Guy Loret de Mola, Rachel Chen

https://medium.com/design-ibm/ibm-design-helps-eclipse-codewind-win-silver-in-the-new-york-design-awards-2176c9347f12

['Arin Bhowmick']

2020-12-16 20:48:54.398000+00:00

['UI', 'UX Design', 'UX', 'Development', 'Design']

Pause

Back when it was optional Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash July 2017 For the last thirty days or so, I wrote every day. Two days ago I hit the pause button and took a break just to check in with my internal guidance. You see, I have OCD tendencies. I’m a list maker. The kind of person who will put something on a list after they’ve done it simply for the satisfaction of then crossing it off said list. I wanted to make sure my creative pursuit wasn’t falling into this same trap. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t becoming a compulsion rather than an outlet. So I paused. It was good timing. I have been interviewing for a real-life career change and it wasn’t as though I had a lot left over to put down in black and white anyway. This past week had left me drained dry and the ability to step away, not think, and completely collapse at the end of My Day was a gift I gave to myself. Balance is tough. In All. The. Things. Even those you love. Maybe especially those you love. Like eating candy or binge-watching your favorite Netflix show. Moderation is key. Rest and recuperation from all aspects of Life can give a fresh perspective. Learning to sit with your own company and listen to your inner wisdom is a skill set. The moral of this story: balancing My Real Life with my creative life with my spiritual life with my personal life seems to be the path to wholeness. Thanks for walking awhile with me. Namaste.

https://medium.com/recycled/pause-ed1640e0a0de

['Ann Litts']

2020-04-24 19:21:22.292000+00:00

['Balance', 'Mindfulness', 'Ocd', 'Self-awareness', 'Writing']

35,000 views. 82 cents. When Going Viral Doesn’t Pay.

Sometimes, going viral is a good thing. Especially when all those views drop dollars in the bank like you just hit the jackpot. Because while writing is fun and soothes the savage beast, getting paid to write makes it even more fun. The reality of writing is that writers often struggle… We all know that content mills don’t pay. Pretty hard to make a living on sites that pay $10 or $20 for 2500 words. Researched and edited, of course. But the truth is, it’s not much better here. For every piece that hits $500 or $1000, there’s 20 more that didn’t even make $20. Or $10. If you did the math, you’d probably find that flipping burgers pays better. I mean — how long does it take you to write an article? If you take 2 hours to draft, edit, find a photo and publish to earn $20? It’s just math. Math, and a little bit of random luck. Often, the pieces that pay are the ones that took off like you breathed some kind of magic while you were typing and you have no idea how or what you did to make the magic happen. You can read all the “how to” tips and they can’t tell you how to replicate the magic, either. Dumb luck, sometimes. A lot of writers think more views will pay off… You see it in the FB groups all the time. People talking about how many views they’re getting while everyone else watches wistfully, imagining that those views must surely translate to dollars. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t always work that way. But no. Let me show you. I messed up so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. My #1 viewed story — 44K views — $93 If you were to google “story of two wolves” or even just “two wolves” you’d find this piece stapled to the top of page one. That was the problem. 96% of the views are external and we only get paid for internal views. The only reason it made anything at all was likely that it was curated. The 4% internal views were likely driven by curation. Without curation, it likely would have earned even less. And honestly, the 4 minute read time didn’t help. If it had been a tad longer, it may have paid a little better for the few internal views it got. See?

https://medium.com/linda-caroll/35-000-views-82-cents-when-going-viral-doesnt-pay-b99ad34e8c9

['Linda Caroll']

2020-07-24 07:56:23.148000+00:00

['Writing', 'Advice', 'Inspiration', 'Marketing', 'Ideas']

The Psychological Effects of the Zero-Tolerance Immigration Policy

Effects of separation of children from parents outlined in a special issue on zero-tolerance immigration policy. By Gavin Crowell-Williamson The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s (AACAP) flagship journal, the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACP), recently released an open-access compilation of articles focusing on family separation and its relationship to toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The compilation comes on the heels of President Trump’s Zero-Tolerance Policy, which prosecutes all adults apprehended for crossing the border illegally, irrespective of asylum status or extenuating circumstances such as traveling with a minor. Over 2,300 children were separated from their parents within just one month (May 5th — June 9th) of the zero-tolerance policy’s implementation. Mad in America has previously reported on studies with a similar focus, and has noted the response of various psychology groups to the policy, but the AACAP’s response takes a more tangible step than a joint public statement. The AACAP began its engagement with the zero-tolerance policy when it released a statement in June, which reads, in part: “As child and adolescent psychiatrists, we recognize that parental support is an essential and proven factor for protecting children and helping children recover from the negative impacts of stress and trauma. Maternal support has been shown to strengthen neuroprotective factors in the brain during childhood, when children’s brains are most vulnerable. Separating children from their families in times of stress can place children at heightened and unnecessary risk for developing potentially serious and long lasting traumatic stress reactions, at the very time when they are most in need of care and support.” The journal Pediatrics released a similar statement in June, including links to a variety of articles from their journal that provided support for keeping parents and children together. The JAACAP then joined their colleagues at Pediatrics in creating their open-access compilation, which contains articles it has published since 2008 focusing on the impact of separation from a variety of different angles. JAACAP announced it will maintain and continue to update the compilation until the zero-tolerance policy is no longer in effect. The compilation includes eight major topics, including Separation, Epidemiology, Epigenetic, Neuroimaging/Neurological, PTSD, Treatment, Longitudinal and Review/Editorial. The Separation section focuses on articles such as a 2018 piece from Javanbakht and colleagues entitled Mental Health in Syrian Refugee Children Resettling in the United States: War Trauma, Migration, and the Role of Parental Stress. The piece examines anxiety and PTSD risk factors in Syrian refugee children who were recently re-settled in southeast Michigan. More than half of the refugee children had a possible anxiety disorder, while three quarters of the sample showed signs of possible separation anxiety. PTSD symptoms, meanwhile, were found in over 6% of the sample, which is higher than the general prevalence in the US. The authors recommended addressing the distress within the family as a means to avoid the lifelong medical and psychiatric consequences of such disorders. The Epidemiology section features pieces such as Maternal Early Life Experiences and Parenting: The Mediating Role of Cortisol and Executive Function. In this study, Gonzalez and colleagues investigated whether biological changes to systems such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis mediate the relationship between early-life experiences of mothers and their current parenting behaviors. Results showed an indirect relationship between maternal early life experiences, conceptualized as consistency of care and childhood maltreatment, and maternal sensitivity in parenting. The relationship had two different pathways, one through HPA function and another through HPA function and spatial working memory. The authors suggest this has implications in terms of prioritizing parenting programs to relieve stress and improve executive function to provide more sensitive caregiving. The Epigenetic section has only one piece, a 2014 article by Weder et al. called Child Abuse, Depression, and Methylation in Genes Involved with Stress, Neural Plasticity, and Brain Circuitry. The study investigated epigenetic markers as a means to predict depression in maltreated children, and found that changes in the ID3, GRIN1 and TPPP genes, in combination with maltreatment, were potentially predictive for depression in children. The genes are all relevant in stress response, neural plasticity and neural circuitry. The Neuroimaging/Neurological section contains pieces such as McLaughlin et al.’s 2015 article, Child Maltreatment and Neural Systems Underlying Emotion Regulation. The piece investigated the association between child maltreatment and neural response during passive viewing of valenced stimuli and effortful attempts to regulate emotions. The study recruited adolescents, half of whom had experienced physical and/or sexual abuse, and found that maltreatment heightened the salience of negative emotional stimuli via amygdala, putamen and anterior insula activity. The researchers suggested that maltreated adolescents use regions of the brain involved in effortful control to an increased degree when modulating the amygdala, perhaps because greater effort is necessitated in modulating the amygdala. In the PTSD section, articles such as Russell and colleagues’ 2017 piece The Network Structure of Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in Children and Adolescents Exposed to Disasters are featured. The team evaluated children and adolescents exposed to Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav for PTSD symptoms, hoping to evaluate the underlying network structure of PTSD. Their results showcased how PTSD can be viewed as a malleable web of interactions between symptoms that vary across development, which has important clinical implications in that clinicians may be able to focus more directly on central symptoms that have a cascading effect on symptoms down the road. The Treatment section focuses dominantly on the cultural adaptation of psychological trauma treatment for children, as well as investigating different contextual factors of disaster and trauma. One such factor was studied by Wolmer and colleagues, who wrote Preventing Children’s Posttraumatic Stress After Disaster with Teacher-Based Intervention: A Controlled Study. The focus of their study was whether a teacher-based preventative intervention could impact trauma symptoms in nearly 1,500 4th and 5th grade Israeli students subject to continuous rocket attacks. The results were overwhelmingly positive, as the control group showed 57% more cases of PTSD than did the intervention group, an effect that was more strongly pronounced in boys than girls. “Encounters with stress and adversity are unavoidable and stress resistance cannot reasonably reside in the avoidance of risk experiences but, rather, in successful engagement with and mastery of them,” wrote the researchers. “However, even mild stressful events may increase vulnerability to the effects of subsequent stressors if they supersede the developing organism’s ability to cope with them. Therefore, the type, timing, duration, and severity of a given stressor within a given species are likely to be important factors in determining whether early experiences ultimately produce a protective or deleterious outcome.” The Longitudinal section features a variety of topics, including a 4-year longitudinal study from Henrich and Shahar, Effects of Exposure to Rocket Attacks on Adolescent Distress and Violence: A 4-Year Longitudinal Study. Henrich and Shahar naturalistically explored how exposure to rocket attacks, anxiety, aggression, depression and violence commission were tied together. Their results differed on concurrent and longitudinal levels. Longitudinal results showed a robust effect on violence commission, moderate effects of exposure to rocket attacks on anxiety and depression and no effect on aggression. Concurrent results, meanwhile, showed that Wave 1 exposure associated with anxiety, depression, and aggression. Exposure in Wave 2 predicted violence commission in Wave 3, while exposure to terror attacks before the study were predictive of violence commission at Wave 4. Lastly, the Review/Editorial section featured a series of more long-form prose, where contributors such as Dr. Balkozar Adam wrote on Treating Refugees from Syria and Beyond: A Moral and Professional Responsibility. Dr. Adam writes: “The first step and the first principle of the Practice Parameter are to identify possible barriers that can stand in the way of treatment. For example, minorities and refugees alike often wait to access services, in part because they fear the ‘double discrimination’ of being a minority and a person with mental illness… As difficult as it might be for us to admit, we all have our biases. Our cultural biases and stereotypes can interfere with our ability to treat. These tend to be subconscious thoughts that creep into our actions. Don’t shy away from consulting with a colleague who is familiar with the culture or religion of the patient at hand. Awareness of cultural differences in the expression of distress will help us better understand the needs of our diverse patients.” **** The special edition is available to the public at no cost: https://jaacap.org/toxicstress#

https://medium.com/mad-in-america/the-psychological-effects-of-the-zero-tolerance-immigration-policy-40938202ecf1

['Mad In America']

2018-12-23 11:45:36.652000+00:00

['Mental Illness', 'Immigration', 'Psychology', 'Mental Health', 'Donald Trump']

Natural Language Processing with spaCy — Steps and Examples

Reading a String Text preprocessing is an important part and crucial step in natural language processing. It transforms the raw text into a number where Machine learning algorithms can perform better. In the below text example, Code text = """ The Republican president is being challenged by Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, who is best known as Barack Obama’s vice-president but has been in US politics since the 1970s.As election day approaches, pollingcompanies will be trying to gauge the mood of the nation by asking voters which candidate they prefer.""" #Passing the text to nlp and initialize an object called 'doc' doc = nlp(text) #Checking the type of doc object type(doc) Output When the above text is passing to ‘nlp object, spaCy first tokenizes the text to product ‘doc’ object. Then the ‘doc’ object is then processed into several steps such as tagger, parser, ner,etc.. This is also called a processing pipeline. The type of doc object is tokens. We are going to see the steps involved in the pipeline one by one.

https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/natural-language-processing-with-spacy-steps-and-examples-155618e84103

['Dhilip Subramanian']

2020-09-29 13:27:12.721000+00:00

['NLP', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence']

2 Best Practices For React File Structures

There is no by-the-book best practice for your React app’s file structure. Ultimately, these decisions are based on what works best for you and your team. These two tips are what finally helped me make sense of the chaos that is managing React components and assets in my IDE. Tip 1: Use This Versatile Folder Structure If you generate a new React app — from create-react-app, for instance — you will see everything that was created is just stuffed into the src folder. That’s fine for your app when it’s first created, but it gives you no insight about how you should ultimately structure your app’s files! Here is the solution that I use to make React file structures actually make sense: src .assets ..images ...image1.png ...image2.png ..styles ...global.css ...package.json ..fonts ...sansSerifExample.woff ...serifExample.woff .components ..App ...App.css ...App.js ...App.test.js ...package.json ..Login ...Login.css ...Login.js ...Login.test.js ...checkmark.png ...exclamation.png ...package.json ..Button ...Button.css ...Button.js ...Button.test.js ...package.json .utility ..registerServiceWorker.js ..utilityFunction1.js ..utilityFunction2.js Depending on the project, you may drift from this general outline, but I’ve found it to be the best solution so far. Here’s why: First, it’s well-organized and easily understood. Under the src folder, we have child folders for assets , components , and utility functions. Under assets , we have child folders for global CSS files, image files, and fonts. The assets folder is for any fixed asset that will be used globally within your project. These may take the form of fonts, branding images, color or pattern swatches, CSS that needs to be applicable across the entire project — whatever non-component assets that you need to have global access to go here. You may find it helpful to store other fixed assets here as well if your project has unique categories that aren’t listed in the example above. Just group them in an appropriate child folder and you’re good to go. There is also a utility folder, which is used to store utility functions that are used across the project — you might also know these as helper functions. This is a great way to keep track of the additional functional utilities you have created for your app. I often find myself copying these files wholesale from one project to another — I know I will need them eventually, after all. Centralizing them in one location saves me time not only when working on this project, but when working on future projects, too. This folder provides a known location for all of the custom utilities that I might want to duplicate elsewhere. We also have a folder most devs using React should be very familiar with — a components folder. As the name suggests, this is for components… But not just their individual js files! For each individual Component , we will create a unique child folder under components with the same name as the Component . Within each named Component folder, we store each file that is associated with the Component : A js file for the Component ’s code. file for the ’s code. A test file for any individual testing of the Component . file for any individual testing of the . A CSS file for the Component ’s custom styles. file for the ’s custom styles. Any images or other assets that are only used for this particular Component . or other that are only used for this particular . And a… package.json file? Isn’t there supposed to be an index.js file or something? Often in these types of React file structures, you will see an index.js file. Sometimes, index.js is simply the Component ’s JavaScript, whose default export is the Component itself. Other times, index.js just import s and return s the Component itself. It’s a bit of connecting things together that serves no real purpose other than allowing you to import your Component using only the folder name. While that’s a nice quality-of-life improvement, using an index.js file has plenty of other issues — most of which seem to center around the future, when you inevitably have to refactor something. Believe it or not, you’ve had a solution to these issues in front of you this entire time, and you just didn’t know it… That solution is webpack. Tip 2: Take Advantage Of Webpack For Indexing Files You’ll notice a package.json file in each Component ’s folder. This is the perfect solution to the index.js problems I just mentioned! All you have to do is create a package.json file for each Component , and list its “main” value as the file that has your primary Component code in it. So in the Button Component folder above, its package.json file has the following JSON: { “main”: “Button.js” } …and that’s it! That’s all we need to add to the file to make sure we are handling our import properly! Webpack handles the rest for us. It’s a module bundler, and we’re using it for the thing that it does best — directing import statements to the right places! It’s just saying “Hey, guess what? When you import this Button folder, the main thing you will be importing is Button.js!” So by using a statement like import Button from ‘../Button’; with our package.json solution, the outcome will be the same as if we had used import Button from ‘../Button/Button.js’; or import Button from ‘../Button/index.js’; with our old index.js solution! It’s a small adjustment, but it helps fix issues with correcting your import s in the future when you rename Components or have conditional import logic. Webpack gives you a nice, standardized import structure, which will definitely save you headaches in the future. And I didn’t mention this before, but the same can be done for other folders and files, too! In the src/assets/styles folder, there is a package.json whose JSON is: { “main”: “global.css” } And import ing it in a Component is as easy as typing import ‘../../assets/styles’; ! Thanks For Reading The above are two best practices I started using a while ago, and since that time, they have made handling React file structures an absolute breeze. The mental model I have of my code is consistent across projects now, and refactoring has been made a little bit easier by utilizing webpack for bundling files within folders properly. If you have any tips for React file structure best practices, be sure to let me know! Now go out there and fix your folders!

https://medium.com/dev-genius/2-best-practices-for-react-file-structures-b07da6c477aa

['Dan Brioli']

2020-12-17 17:01:49.320000+00:00

['Files', 'Front End Development', 'React', 'Web Development', 'Development']

7 Benefits of Waking Up Early (That Have Nothing to Do With Being Rich and Famous)

You’ll Feel Like You’re Better Than Other People Woah. This wasn’t supposed to be one of those self-help articles that speak from a pedestal, so why is this my first point? Confidence matters. Building skills and habits that make you feel better about yourself makes your life better in general. On top of that, human beings are wired to compare themselves to others. So, instead of pretending like we don’t and stay stuck in negative cycles of comparison, why not find ways to feel like you’re better — not intrinsically, but behaviorally — than other people. When you’re up at the ass crack of dawn working on your side business, exercising, or planning your day, you feel like you have a head start on the rest of the world. Once the normal time people wake up rolls around, you feel like you’re on pace to get much more done than the average person. And it feels great. You’ll Stop Doing This So Much Do you ever find yourself up late at night? Are you not getting enough sleep? One of the biggest benefits of waking up early is the ability to go to sleep early. If you wake up at 5 a.m. and you’re productive throughout the day, you’ll be more tired by the end of the night, making it easier to sleep. This creates a better sleep cycle. And sleep is important for your health. Maybe you never get totally used to waking up early, but you’ll experience an overall better sleep cycle because you’re actually ready to go to bed at night. Compare this with waking up later in the day and consuming caffeine later in the day which keeps you up longer — creating a vicious cycle where you’re stimulated yet fatigued and always feeling like you never have enough rest. You’ll Appreciate This Much More Do you have kids? I have one. A 5-year-old. I love her to death, but let’s just say meditating in silence isn’t one of her favorite activities. When she wakes up, all hell breaks loose. My day has officially started and I can look forward to a ton of noise, distraction, and chaos throughout it. Waking up early was critical in my 9 to 5 days because I had to deal with the time constraints of my job and the constraints of my child being awake and needing my attention. Combined, dealing with both is stressful. Simply having some moments to myself helped alleviate stress and anxiety. Part of the routine involves 20 minutes of meditation. I’m not going to write a long treatise about the benefits of meditation. But for me, having just 20 minutes per day where I don’t feel like the world is spinning at ten million hours per hour makes a huge impact on my sanity. If you’re an adult with kids, especially young ones, you live in the eye of a hurricane. Pile on your job, errands, and the other minutiae you have to deal with, and it’s enough to drive you nuts. You don’t have to develop a meditation practice, but you can at least get to enjoy a little time with yourself. A little silence. Trust me, you probably need it. You’ll Have a Better Chance of Accomplishing This If you’re like 70 percent of Americans, you don’t exactly love your job. Maybe you want to switch careers. Maybe you want to start a side business or even just a hobby that helps you exercise your creativity. I don’t know about you, but waking up early to do that kind of work seems easier than trying to do it after work. If you’re a night owl and that routine works, good for you, don’t change. But if you feel totally wiped out by the time you’re done with your job, getting dinner together, handling the kids, etc, a morning routine might be the only way to escape the rat race. I never wanted to start a morning routine. In fact, I never got to the point where I loved waking up early. But I did want to get rid of my soul-sucking job and that was enough motivation for me. You’ll Realize This A funny thing happened to me when I started waking up early on a regular basis. I noticed how much time there is in a single 24 hour period. It’s easy to let time slip by and, over a lifetime, you can squander the one commodity that means the most to you. After squeezing out extra time in my day by getting up earlier, I started noticing other little cracks and crevasses to fit productive time into. Circling back to the initial point of feeling like you’re ahead of the curve when you wake up early, that sense of pride will inspire you to find even more pockets of time to keep doing activities to increase your chances of reaching your goals. Your morning routine becomes a keystone habit that reinforces other positive habits. The cycle keeps going up. Every action you take serves as a feedback loop for further action. Imagine starting your day in a way that positively reinforces the rest of your day. You’ll Hardly Ever Feel Like This I hate it when I feel like I’ve wasted a day. If you’re lacking motivation, you might not be at this point yet, but when you start doing more work toward your dreams, you may develop a tendency to beat yourself up if you feel like you squandered a day. When I honor my morning routine, I can always tell myself that I spent at least an hour working on my dream. That’s reassuring and motivates me to wake up and do it all over again. You don’t have to carve out an hour + each day like I do. Your morning routine can be 10 minutes. Even that small amount of time can help you feel better about the way you spend your time. This is because subconsciously, your brain only cares about momentum, not the magnitude of the tasks you’re doing, e.g., six straight days of a solid 10-minute routine benefits you more than a single hour-long session followed by five days where you do nothing. You’ll Start to Feel This Way (And You’ll Never Want to Go Back) Some people will tell you that starting a successful morning routine will part the heavens. You’ll feel amazed and on top of the world every single day. Nah, probably not. But you’ll get used to it. If you can simply get used to waking up early — not even love it — you’ll be well on your way to achieving whatever long-term goal your mornings serve. You’ll get to reap the benefits of waking up early over and over again and it will become a habit, meaning you won’t have to do it as begrudgingly as you did when you started. You can extend this way of thinking to a ton of positive habits like diet, exercise, saving money, and more. Over time, you start to develop an identity of someone who follows through with a habit, making it easier and easier to maintain over time. The Bottom Line You don’t have to do anything. Sleep in for the rest of your life if you want. I don’t care. But if you are looking for a habit that can become a game-changer for you, waking up early is definitely one of those habits. You have a short life and time is ticking. Might as well get the most out of each and every day, right?

https://medium.com/the-ascent/7-benefits-of-waking-up-early-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-being-rich-and-famous-89d602d3539

['Ayodeji Awosika']

2020-12-22 13:02:38.642000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity', 'Morning Routines', 'Psychology']

Learning, Story telling and the Origin of the Universe

There once was a violent unstable cloud of dust that turned into a planet full of life Some scientists suggest that what made our species special, and what caused it to explode and dominate the planet is our ability to understand and tell stories. I heard this while watching this lecture on artificial intelligence last week, it did not make immediate sense to me. However now after reflecting on what a story is and what we do when we interpret the world, I think that we are constantly looking for stories out in the world, we want to find the stories and tell other people about them. Take for example Cosmology, when we try to understand the origin of the universe, we are trying to tell a story about the entire universe, who/what caused it and how did it evolve over the course of it’s history, how important characters like galaxies and black holes started to play a role, and how we came out of a cloud of gas. If you have the answer to these question, you would have the urge to tell everyone about them in story form, and few people would be so uninterested that they wouldn’t want to hear the story of our entire world! (except if their schools made them associate too much pain to hearing things like that). The key take away point I’m making is that our brains are wired in certain ways: We are social creatures and we understand things in story form, which suggests re-designing some of the things we want to teach in story form to put the learners in a position to understand even the hardest topics, and make a switch in their head that this is an interesting thing and not a boring thing. It would be a great story for civilization, if more people got together to re-design learning material in more captivating form, If more people started to learn and help each other learn. We will be happier, more reasonable human beings, more capable of advancing civilization, we will understand each other better and more importantly the story of our species will be one were we end up exploring the universe, spreading love and understanding who we are. That’s the story I wanna be a part of!

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/learning-story-telling-and-the-origin-of-the-universe-642ddd4bee53

['The Physics Connection']

2016-07-03 01:48:13.366000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Education Reform', 'Lifelong Learning', 'Science', 'Physics']

Reasons Why You Make Bad Decisions, According to Science

Our Mind Suffers from Cognitive Fatigue Our mind works like a muscle. So we are training it with it all the cognitive processes associated with it, such as willpower, decision-making, and even just our way of thinking. And as happens with the muscles of the body, when we use them over and over again without giving them time for their proper recovery, they tire and end up underperforming. On a cognitive level, with every decision we make, no matter how minimal, we are consuming a portion of our mental energy. When our mental energy is almost depleted it is much easier for our brain to go into a “survival” mode in which “no” by default is the easy option. From that cognitive survival mode, it is much easier to start making bad choices that require less effort (even though we know perfectly well what the good choices are). Let's consider an example. In a research study conducted by Columbia University, a group of research psychologists examined 1,112 trials over a 10-month period. These trials considered matters of probation, conducted by a specific commission appointed to personally evaluate the case of a convicted criminal and determine whether he was granted parole. Naturally, you would expect the judges of this commission to make their decision based on considerations such as the type of crime committed or what laws had been violated when making a decision. But what the researchers found was something very different. In fact, they saw that the judges’ decisions had nothing to do with what was happening in the courtroom or with the type of case. Instead, they were determined by the hours of the day it took for them to make a decision. Their research indicated that in trials undergone at the beginning of the morning, a criminal had up to a 65% chance of having a favorable judgment. But as the morning progressed and the judge became “worn out” by continual decision making, those odds rapidly decreased to zero. They found this clear trend after analyzing more than 1,100 cases over a period of 10 months. Regardless of the type of crime committed, it didn’t matter if it was rape, robbery, or embezzlement. A criminal was much more likely to be granted parole if his trial was the first in the morning, or the first after lunch, than at other times of the day.

https://medium.com/the-apeiron-blog/reasons-why-you-make-bad-decisions-according-to-science-e53b061926a8

['Desiree Peralta']

2020-12-23 11:03:22.975000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Advice', 'Education', 'Science']

You don’t need to get rich. You need to build wealth.

by: E.B. Johnson We seem to live our lives in the pursuit of wealth, but so many of us seem to struggle to ever achieve this. Why? Years of hard work and belief in the system should lend itself to rewards, right? Wrong. If we truly want to build wealth that bolsters us, we have to learn to switch up our mindset. It’s not about “getting rich” after all. It’s about establishing a legacy that supports our children and grandchildren for years to come. Being rich and being wealthy isn’t the same thing. Believe it or not, there’s a big difference between striking it rich and building true wealth for yourself. When you come from a lack or a sense of scarcity, the idea of getting rich becomes an intoxicating dream. You fantasize about being able to pay the bills you have, and you daydream about a big purchase here and there. These kinds of riches are impermanent, however. If we truly wish to thrive, we have to build wealth. Building wealth provides everything that “riches” cannot. Getting rich indicates a specific mindset. To get rich is to strike it lucky, or to be granted a one-off piece of largesse which washes over your life in the blink of an eye. Cultivating wealth is an entirely different mindset. When you build wealth, you aren’t looking for a handout or looking for a quick means of gratification. To build wealth means to build something which is yours. It is long-lasting, and it is sustaining, but beyond that it is also something which we can control. Rather than seeking to get rich quick, we should seek to work hard and create something in this world which is truly ours. By building wealth we give ourselves a guarantee, and our families too. A guarantee we will thrive through thick and thin, and that we will never again settle for less than we deserve. What it means to get rich. Someone who is “rich” is very different from someone who is wealthy. Not only is getting rich an impermanent state, it also indicates a need to continue the strive and struggle. Getting rich is quick money and quick goals, and for that reason it can be a quick loss too. Quick money, quick goals Think about someone you know who talks a lot about “getting rich”. Are these grand statements usually preceded with a well thought-out plan of action? Probably not. When we imagine ourselves getting rich, it is usually in a quick or miraculous manner. Maybe you imagine winning the lottery, or writing a bestseller overnight. It’s a quick money, quick goal fantasy that rarely ever plays out the way we want it to. It’s mindset that can hold us back. Short-sightedness Focusing on getting rich is ultimately a form of shortsightedness. Because of the inherent impermanence of “getting rich” (and the inherent lack of control behind such a strike-it-lucky approach) it doesn’t provide us a lot of stability for the future. You can hit that rich goal by simply getting a better job, but when that job is taken away you find yourself right back at square one. It’s not an aim that carries you into the future, but a wealth mindset can. Cutting corners Those who only seek to “get rich” are often those who are willing to cut corners. Maybe they focus on all the wrong opportunities, or they purposefully go out of their way to putting in the work it takes to build financial stability. We can’t cut corners if we want to create something for ourselves that both lasts and provides. There’s only one way to get to the level of wealth that we want, and that is by working both smart and committedly. Flash in the pan There’s a sort of flash-in-the-pan mindset that comes with wanting to be rich. Perhaps you think you’ll score it big off a lotto ticket, or get rich off a quick scheme. This wealth eventually goes away, though. It’s impermanent and only provides you with a moment of hope and a moment of stability. Being rich and being wealthy aren’t the same because one provides stability, and the other does not. One is a flash in a pan, and one is choosing to create a new pan entirely. Meeting the basics When we settle for the dream of being rich, we actually end up settling for just enough to live comfortably. This may — perhaps — offer temporary entertainment, but it doesn’t allow us to build a legacy of which we can build our lives and the launching boards of our children. Getting rich will allow you to meet the basics and be comfortable for a while, but what of the future? Used the right way and riches can help you build wealth. It takes a lot of luck to get there, though. What it means to build wealth. The wealthy live in a world that is very different from ours. The primary difference is control. When you are truly wealthy, you are given greater control of your life and that of your family’s. Wealth gives you all the stability that “getting rich” can’t, and it is built through our own ingenuity and a series of relatively passive incomes which allow us to create a legacy for our children. Building stability While getting rich can provide us with a certain level of temporary stability, it still comes with the inherent possibility of loss. That’s something that wealth doesn’t do, though. Once you’re wealthy, you stay that way unless you engage in activities that go beyond the pale of risk and sensibility. When you’re wealthy, you’re able to armor your life and stabilize it with a number of safeguards that keep you afloat no matter what calamity the rest of the world may be in. Passive incomes Those with genuine wealth are never those with a simple 9–5 or a single business opportunity on-the-go. Passive incomes are one of the primary ways the wealthy continue to build more wealth for themselves. That is to say, they create multiple channels of income, which come in to them daily, weekly or monthly. They don’t have to exert any real energy. These channels simply get set up and then provide a steady stream of money that continues to buffer the wealthy. Greater control Perhaps the greatest gift that wealth gives us is that of control. As humans, we’re always struggling to control the world around us. We want the stability of knowing we can affect our environments, and with wealth we can do that. When you are wealthy, you gain control of your day and the pace and flow of your future. It also gives you the freedom to explore different facets of life, get into politics, and change the way you work. Literally any arena of life you want to enter can be improved by building a base of wealth to work from. Freedom to explore Beyond giving you the freedom to get more enjoyably engaged in your life, building true wealth also grants you the freedom to explore your interests and opportunities. When you have wealth, you have money to play with. That is to say that you’re able to take greater risks. You can open up new avenues of business and even create new markets. Losses here and there aren’t life-ruining when you’re intelligently wealthy. Creating a legacy When you build actual wealth, you don’t just create a blanket which covers your needs. You also create a legacy which can change the course of life for your loved ones generations down the line. The world is a chaotic and a scary place. It doesn’t appear to be getting any more stable. You can leave your children and their children with a means of stability, and a source of opportunity on which to mount their own lives. You can also change society and your direct environment. How to switch your money-making mindset. Are you ready to switch from a “get rich” mindset to a “build wealth” mindset? You can switch the way you see money and the way you actionably make it. Before that can happen, though, you need to establish a self-belief system and learn how to create more opportunities for yourself. 1. Establish a self-belief system We spend a lot of time in this life trying to figure out our belief systems, but we rarely take any time to form a belief in self. When you lack self-confidence, it makes all the difference in your journey to wealth. It’s hard to create something which provides you with wealth when you don’t even have enough self-esteem to let yourself shine and create. In order to get from a place of scarcity to a place of abundance, you need to believe in your right to it. Rebuild your confidence from the ground up. It’s time for you to believe in your right to thrive and your right to lead a high-quality life. You deserve a seat at whatever table matters to you, and wealth gives you that ability. When you’re wealthy, you can change the world, but not until you change yourself. Know your worth. Know the value of your ideas. Don’t sell yourself short and don’t sell out on an idea that could take you all the way. Creativity is one of the few things which makes us exceptional as a species. Don’t allow the brutality of the world to hold you back from creating what you need to create. Believe in yourself. You’re smart enough, skilled enough, and deserving enough to have it all. 2. Create more opportunities yourself Perhaps the greatest difference between “getting rich” and building wealth is the amount of effort it takes to get where you want to go. Sure, you could win the lottery or come up with the next hot unicorn app. That doesn’t take a lot of effort, though, and it relies on a lot of variables. Therefore, you have a lot less control over the money, or even your likelihood of earning it. Building wealth is entirely different. To build wealth for yourself is to build a series of foundations which allow you to increase the power you have in your own life. It’s starting a business with the potential to grow. It’s kicking off that online writing hustle you’ve been eyeing since march. Wealthy people create even more opportunities for themselves. They don’t hit a number goal and then take their foot off the gas. They think to themselves, “I’ve opened one door. How do I open the next?” You must always be looking for the next opportunity, and when it’s not there, you have to figure out how to make one for yourself. You can take control of your life, but you first have to figure out where your channels lie. 3. Reshape your perspective Reshaping the way you see money and wealth is imperative if you want to stop struggling and looking for the next meal. You need to see money and wealth as a plentiful thing, with more than enough to go around for you and yours. You also need to stop focusing on getting rich fast, and you need to focus on creating something from your skills and interests which you can lean into and build on. There are literally millions of millionaires in the world. Why shouldn’t you be one of them? If millions of people can find a way to create wealth for themselves and their children — why can’t you? After all, they aren’t any more exceptional or any more capable than you. Not all of them were born with silver spoons in their mouths. You have to reshape the way you see money. It’s not an exclusive club. It’s a life raft you decide to put yourself in (or not). You not only have a right to build wealth, you have a right to sit at the table which millions of others are already sitting at. You just have to figure out where your channel of opportunities lie. Reshape your perspective and see yourself as a player in the game of wealth, rather than just a spectator. 4. Feel what it’s like to be wealthy Have you ever felt what it’s like to be wealthy? Believe it or not, there is a certain feeling that comes with knowing you have more than enough, and it’s a powerful thing. It gives you confidence outside of the department store, and motivates you to get more, more, more. Complacent people become ambitious when it comes to building wealth, and so much of that comes down to their inherent belief and the feeling of confidence and security they have. It’s time for you to do something which makes you feel wealthy. You don’t need to break the bank, or even take out another credit card. You can get close enough to mega-wealth to taste the possibility. Go to a luxury car dealership and walk around. Visit an open house for an exceptional property. These are not places that are off-limits to the public at large. They want your custom, whatever your wages. Hold your head up high and know that you deserve to be surrounded by nice things. Walk through a Burberry or a Coach store in the nicest clothes you own. Ask questions, feel at home. After all, this is not something foreign to you. This is a practice run for the life you are manifesting through action. 5. Take action each and every day When it comes to genuine wealth that is controlled by us (therefore allowing us to control our own lives) there is a certain effort that needs to be put in every single day. We have to take action in the name of our vision and put in the work it takes to get from Point A to Point B. Instead of wishing for the right lotto ticket; we have to brainstorm the various ways we can open up the door for ourselves. Start creating a plan of action which allows you to move closer to your goals each and every day. Sit down and get clear on what kind of wealth you want to build for yourself. What chunk of the pie are you going to claim as your own? Once you know what you want, you can break your goals down into smaller, more actionable steps. Keep in mind that this action will look very different depending on what stage of action you’re in. At first, we have to sit still, focus, and think of the future. In the next step we may be making phone calls and filling out college applications. It all comes down to making sure we have what we need to thrive. That means sometimes the action we need to take is simply taking a step back to refocus and recharge. Putting it all together… There is a massive difference between building wealth and “getting rich”. When we only pursue riches, we put ourselves in a temporary mindset in which we cut corners and look for the quickest fits. There’s no real power in getting rich. When you score big once, you can lose it just as quickly. If we want to give ourselves (and our families) true stability and opportunity, we should seek to build wealth instead of just getting rich. Establish a self-belief system and start embracing both your right and your ability to build wealth for yourself and your family. You have to believe in yourself in order to create the opportunities you need to thrive. Reshape your perspective. True wealth doesn’t come by cutting corners or get-rich-quick schemes. It comes by wholeheartedly pursuing your goals and opening every door you possibly can. See the difference between riches and wealth, and focus on embracing your right to sit at the table. Feel what it’s like to be wealthy and allow these experiences to motivate and inspire you. We can build a legacy that changes the course of our lives and our happiness. To do that, though, we have to take smart and valuable action each and every day. Are you ready to move from scarcity to a place of abundance? It’s time to invest in yourself.

https://ebjohnson.medium.com/get-rich-build-wealth-b35c074fe465

['E.B. Johnson']

2020-12-27 13:20:59.055000+00:00

['Nonfiction', 'Self', 'Motivation', 'Money', 'Finance']

Oracle Big Data Cloud, Event Hub and Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition pt.3 : Spark-Powered Data Flows, Automated Machine Learning and Thoughts on Sparkline SNAP

Oracle Big Data Cloud, Event Hub and Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition pt.3 : Spark-Powered Data Flows, Automated Machine Learning and Thoughts on Sparkline SNAP Mark Rittman Follow Jun 2, 2018 · 1 min read In this series of three blogs on Oracle Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition I’ve setup an object store data lake in Oracle Cloud using Oracle Big Data Cloud and Oracle Storage Cloud, and ingested streams of real-time event data from IoT and social media sources into Oracle Cloud’s object storage service using Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service. Read more at the new home of the MJR Analytics blog.

https://medium.com/mark-rittman/oracle-big-data-cloud-event-hub-and-analytics-cloud-data-lake-edition-pt-3-95d38c9e5148

['Mark Rittman']

2018-10-16 19:50:05.921000+00:00

['Oracle', 'Oracle Cloud', 'Data Lake', 'Analytics', 'Big Data']

Ego: Self-Discovery Oracle Card

Your ego is the roundtable of children within you doing their very best to meet your needs. You may have been taught you must destroy your ego, but there is no part of you that requires destruction. Yes, your ego makes terrible masters, but they do make fantastic servants. The children that make up your ego are the parts of you that only ever want to feel loved and helpful. Don’t shame them even more in your attempt to destroy them. Rather, help them grow up. Treat the children inside of you better than you were treated. In return, you will co-create a mature ego; one that helps you move with grace and power, always and forever affirming confidence in your worth.

https://medium.com/just-jordin/ego-self-discovery-oracle-card-d2ec2389eda1

['Jordin James']

2020-11-23 19:45:37.012000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Spirituality', 'Self', 'Inspiration']

Primer — How the industry views the IDFA

This article serves as a means to enumerate the mechanisms by which the Marketing industry leverages the IDFA token. There are four ways by which developers leverage customer data: Attribution: Share 1P data with 3P to measure user acquisition campaigns Share 1P data with 3P to measure user acquisition campaigns Personalization : Deliver contextual messages using 1P data to further engage users within the service. This includes creative optimization. : Deliver contextual messages using 1P data to further engage users within the service. This includes creative optimization. Re-Targeting: Share data with 3P for re-engagement campaigns Share data with 3P for re-engagement campaigns Monetization: Share data with entities who will display personalized ads within the application in exchange for money Glossary of terms used in this article: MMP : A mobile measurement partner helps businesses measure efficiency of advertising : A mobile measurement partner helps businesses measure efficiency of advertising Demand Partner : Also know as a DSP (Demand-Side-Platform) helps advertisers match their creatives with the best possible lead : Also know as a DSP (Demand-Side-Platform) helps advertisers match their creatives with the best possible lead SSP: Supply-Side-Platform helps businesses monetize their products by matching the user with the best possible creative Here’s an illustration of how the IDFA helps with Attribution: App-A wants to acquire more customers in the funnel App-A works with Demand Source to deliver ads in exchange for money User-X (on App-B) sees an ad that is interesting, taps and is taken to download/view App-A Demand Source ties the click with the IDFA belonging to User-X passed along from App-B (Via SSP-B) AdNetwork sends the click event (tied to the IDFA) to an MMP-A (Mobile Measurement Partner) App-A registers the launch and subsequent events tied to User-X with the IDFA App-A sends the launch+subsequent conversion events to MMP-A MMP-A uses the click to understand conversions at key milestones — This helps evaluate the quality of the user as well as the channel Here’s an illustration of how the IDFA helps with Personalization: App-A wants to re-engage an existing user-X from other apps (eg: A personalized Netflix trailer in your Facebook feed) App-A enlists MMP to deliver segments as targetable assets App-A delivers a cohort of IDFAs to the MMP-A MMP-A passes cohort along to partners including FB, Google and other ad-exchanges The ad gets displayed to user in App-C; If tapped, launches App-A App-A passes additional telemetrics (keyed-off IDFA) over to the MMP MMP delivers attribution+LTV analytics to App-A Here’s an illustration of how the IDFA helps with Monetization: App-A wants to provide their users with a freemium alternative to consuming content by displaying ads App-A enlists SSP-A to work with one or more exchanges to sell their ad spots On a per-user basis, App-A delivers user attributes to SSP-A to fill an ad spot with an impression.These attributes are tied to the IDFA. SSP-A passes the word along to DSP/AdNetwork (in real time) to fetch and fill the best possible advert Finally, here’s an illustration of how the IDFA helps with Re-targeting: App-A has signed User-X up for a freemium/subscription service User-X attempts the subscription trial, engages with the service to a fair degree User-X finds the service useful but too expensive at the offered price point. User-X churns from service App-A uniquely identifies churners and advertises a special winback deal from within the application In parallel, App-A enlists the help of partners such as Google and FB to retarget users The IDFA is leveraged for the purposes of identifying the user outside the app sandbox Now that we’ve reviewed the mechanisms by which the advertising/marketing eco-system leverages the IDFA, we will analyze the impact of said practices in Part-II. Feel free to drop me a note should you find this interesting and have additional questions.

https://abishekashok.medium.com/the-idfa-conundrum-8c32810abf76

['Abishek Ashok']

2020-12-07 18:18:41.973000+00:00

['Gaming', 'Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Idfa', 'Apple']

How to deploy your Microservices under Kubernetes with Gravitee and Elassandra

By default, the Gravitee API Manager rely on MongoDB for its configuration and Elasticsearch for log analytics, but deploying many components can by more tricky and more expensive than having a single distributed data store. To simplify the stack, the Gravitee repository for Elassandra can be used to store Gravitee configuration, Rate Limits, Logs and Metrics, along with your application data in Elassandra (aka Elasticsearch + Cassandra), with the following benefits: Distributed Gravitee configuration on many datacenters through the Cassandra replication (in active/active mode). Elasticsearch reporting for Gravitee analytics (gravitee logs and metrics). Scalability by adding Elassandra nodes (without re-indexing) and datacenters (for geo localisation concerns or workload separation) Reduce the global complexity and TCO by using the same NoSQL datastore for both Gravitee and APIs data storage. We will now see how to deploy all these components under Kubernetes. Deploy Traefik In order to expose the Gravitee components to the internet (gateways and management services), we obviously use Traefik, the modern reverse proxy. Traefik watches for incoming kubernetes ingresses events and automatically deploy routers, services, handlers, etc… Traefik is deployed using a HELM Chart as follow: Deploy an Elassandra Cluster 3 Elassandra PODs has been deployed as a Kubernetes StatefulSet using this HELM chart. IMPORTANT NOTE: Cassandra spread replicas across racks to ensure data remains available if a rack goes down. Deploying Cassandra or Elassandra with one Kubernetes StatefulSet cannot ensure that a pod are always deployed on the right cloud-provider zone or region. In order to meet this constraint, Strapdata will release soon a Kubernetes operator for Elassandra. Deploy Gravitee As shown in the main figure, Gravitee has 3 components: The manager service to manage the gravitee configuration The user interface (or portal) The gateways, to manager acces to your API endpoints In order to deploy Gravitee including the Elassandra repository, we have used the HELM chart available at helm-gravitee. In the HELM values.yaml, the following es and elassandra blocks describe connection to both Elasticsearch (for Gravitee Analytics) and to Elassandra, which is very close to Apache Cassandra. The elassandra.endpoint specifies the Elasticsearch endpoint to be able to create and search across Elasticsearch indices. Detail about deploying Gravitee under Kubernetes can be found here on Medium. Deploy your application We deploy here a sample Micronaut application basketapp allowing to store and search baskets stored as JSON documents through a REST API. The basketapp stores its data into Elassandra, using Cassandra CQL to insert/select rows, and Elasticsearch queries through the CQL driver to search for documents. This basic application is deployed as a Kubernetes deployment with an HELM chart included in the basketapp code. When everything is deployed, we have the following pods running in our Kuberenetes cluster: The 3 Gravitee components (api management, ui, and gateway) are accessible from outside the Kubernetes cluster through Traefik with an external load balancer. On an Elassandra pod, we can check that the basketapp and the Gravitee Elasticsearch indices are green: Register your API into Gravitee As described in the micronaut documentation, we use an annotation in the Micronaut Application.java, where the servers.url points to our application. Be careful, URL context path cannot be null: The swagger descriptor is generated at compile time by Micronaut, and server URLs may depend on your deployments, so we introduced a controller to dynamically replace the servers.url with the application kuberenetes service name. The swagger descriptor is available from a pod at http://basketapp:8080/basketapp/swagger, the URL used to import the API into Gravitee: Log into the API Manager portal as the administrator and register your application by providing a swagger descriptor. 2. Start and publish the API 3. Create an API plan. To keep the demo simple, you choose a keyless authentication, but Gravitee provides many ways to secure access to your API. 4. Publish to the API plan and deploy it to the gateways. You can request then your basket API through the Gravitee gateway service: Logs and metrics Thanks to Elassandra, Gravitee analytics works like Elasticsearch. You can check API performances, application load, and enable API logging for a while.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-deploy-your-microservices-under-kubernetes-with-gravitee-and-elassandra-fa533adde64d

['Vincent Royer']

2019-10-16 18:19:36.575000+00:00

['Elassandra', 'API', 'Elasticsearch', 'Microservices', 'Kubernetes']

Well Architect Framework — Performance Efficiency on the Cloud

Scaling Up or Scaling Out The architecture’s deployment should consider the right tools and technology which can support to handle the unpredictable load on the application. It encompasses either Scale-up or Scale-out of the cloud resources. Scale-up or Scale-down is upgrading or degrading the tier for existing cloud resources. For E.g. we can increase a virtual machine from 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM to 2 vCPUs and 7 GB of RAM. is upgrading or degrading the tier for existing cloud resources. For E.g. we can increase a virtual machine from 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM to 2 vCPUs and 7 GB of RAM. Scale-out or Scale-in is adding or reducing the resource instances to support the load of your application. For e.g. adding more front-end VMs to the application to level or the amount of load increase. This unpredictable scaling based on workload is very much possible with having resources in the Cloud. To scale these types of capabilities in an on-premises environment, you typically have to wait for procurement and installation of the necessary hardware before you can start using the new level of scale. Autoscale Autoscale is a feature that allows you to scale either on a metric-based event-trigger or at a particular schedule. An example to add the instance of a VM when CPU thresholds breached 80% or before the start of the business at 08:00 AM. Storage Performance Another aspect of improving application performance is to reduce the bottleneck at improving the performance of the storage layer. This can be accomplished by considering various aspects by choosing the right storage technology or by architectural considerations. Let’s touch upon a few concepts — Choice of Disk The persistent data is stored ultimately in a disk, the way you consider the choice of VM depending on your application workload, similarly the choice of disk plays a vital role. Consider from the choice — HDD: Spindle disk storage, used where the application is not bound to the consistent throughput, latency. Mainly used for dev/test workloads. SSD: SSD-backed storage has a low latency of an SSD but with lower levels of throughput. A non-production web server is a good use case for this disk type. Premium SSD: Suitable for production workloads where it demands for consistent high-throughput, low-latency, and highest reliability. Caching Caching is the most common approach to improve application performance. It is achieved by adding a cache-layer between the application and the storage. The most frequently accessed data is stored in-memory with cache components, you have control over the type of data stored, how often it refreshes, and when it expires. Polyglot Persistence Polyglot persistence is the use of different data storage technologies to handle your storage requirements. Suppose that you store application assets in a blob store, product reviews and recommendations in a NoSQL store, and user profile or account data in a SQL database. In this particular approach, each business use-case is supported by just-right storage technology and architecture adoption. Network Performance The network plays an important aspect in improvising application performance, the ultimate goal is to minimize the overall network latency by incorporating best practices within the architecture. The concept of network latency plays a vital role in the Cloud than that of traditional data-center because in the former the resources are distributed across racks, data-center, and regions. Thus the latency is directly proportional to the distance between application users and the data-center. There are various considerations while deciding the network in the overall application’s solution architcture. Host correlated application resources close to each other. For example — application frontend, backend services, and database persistence should reside in the same Cloud region close to the end-users. Consider load-balanced front-ends, globally distributed backend services, and database read-replicas for supporting users from multiple geographies. Consider using the caching layer, application cache, or content CDN, to minimize high-latency calls to remote databases for frequently accessed data. The dedicated connection between your network and the public Cloud. It gives you guaranteed performance and ensures that your users have the best path to all of your Azure resources. Example — Azure Express Route, AWS Direct Connect, or GCP Interconnect. Considering the impact of network latency on your architecture is important to ensure the best possible performance for your users How to identify the performance bottlenecks? The answer is hidden in identifying optimal tools and processes that can help you to make sure that the application performs well. Let’s help you to understand the performance requirement. One can debate that even if the Cloud gives you an opportunity to keep improving performance and scalability endlessly but this approach eventually can become too expensive to the business. Therefore, the performance measurement criteria should be influenced by the Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs)desired by the business from the application, by that way the performance goals can be achieved seamlessly with appropriate justification to the business. Once NFRs are identified you need to plan your monitoring and operations rules. Every public cloud provides tools and processes to track the performance of the applications and other resources. Azure — Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights. AWS — Cloud Watch, Cloud Trail. GCP — Stack Driver Conclusion In this post, we discussed some of the key principles of the performance efficiency pillar of the Cloud Well-Architected Framework. I tried to highlight the importance of various options for scaling your application, how to use autoscaling to handle scaling automatically. I also touched upon the proper storage tier has a direct impact on performance, and using caching service, and polyglot database choices. Lastly, ways to identify performance bottlenecks in your application by using the right choice of tools to monitor the applications and other cloud resources.

https://towardsdatascience.com/well-architect-framework-performance-efficiency-on-the-cloud-15cf87c10297

['Pankaj Jainani']

2020-12-27 17:16:16.822000+00:00

['Architecture', 'Azure', 'AWS', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Cloud Computing']

Understanding Sex Addiction

Understanding Sex Addiction How self-isolation from coronavirus impacts sex addicts and their partners Photo by Joe deSousa on Unsplash Self-isolation is causing partners to spend a considerable amount of time together under the same roof. I’m curious how Sex Addicts (SA’s) and their significant others are coping? The question led me to have a conversation with a woman I know well. Let’s call her Pam for anonymity. Pam is a former wife of a Sex Addict (SA). For twenty years, she lived through hell and, through time and experience, evolved into a valuable knowledge source, managing an online sexual addiction support system and became an essential lifeline for spouses of Sex Addicts. Pam has either seen or heard it all. The following interview with Pam delves into what SA’s and significant others may be facing right now during self-isolation. Pam explains how a person becomes addicted to pornography, how the addiction progresses, and what chemical changes occur in the brain. We discuss reprogramming opportunities, available treatment, and resources. Pam’s former spouse is male; this interview is slanted toward men who are sexual addicts. In our discussion, we also refer to porn and sex addiction as interchangeable. [Lisa] How do you envision pornography or sex addicts are coping right now in self-isolation? [Pam] I believe being in self-isolation will exacerbate the problem. Many Sexaholics Anonymous (SA) group meetings are canceled, and no face to face support is available. The coronavirus is a time of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety for many, and Sex Addicts use porn and masturbation as self-soothing activities for their default mechanism. With people in quarantine, men will be going through withdrawal as their wives are with them regularly, and they can’t watch as often as they want to, given they’ll be under scrutiny. I’m sure there will be more unhappiness than ever. While their partners may wish for more reassurance, more times of closeness, and feelings of being protected and loved. The SA is incapable of providing these emotions so he will do whatever he can to create distance — coldness, fighting, being overly critical, etc. to ensure there is space between them and enabling addictive behavior. [Lisa] Let’s take a step back for a moment; how do you define a sex addict? Pam performs a specific search on Google and provides the following research paper. “Sex Addiction, Neuroscience Trauma, and More!” written by Stefanie Carnes, Ph.D., CSAT-S. [Pam] reads: A pathological relationship to a mood-altering experience (sex) that the individual continues to engage in despite adverse consequences. It is very much a physical addiction. [Lisa] This statement provides a clear understanding of the problem. During quarantine, what signs can spouses look out for? [Pam] Increased time on the computer or phone. Hiding what he’s looking at. Passwording his devices and not allowing you access. Unexplained time away from home. Excuses not to accompany you on outings and preferring to stay home alone. Loss of interest in sex. Coldness. Continually picking fights to put distance between you. Making excuses not to sleep together. [Lisa] What happens if the sex addict is not able to get what he or she needs right now due to being in isolation with their partner? [Pam] When sex addicts can’t get their fix, they go into withdrawal almost with the same symptoms as a drug addict. Symptoms include anxiety, short temper, anger, nausea, and even physical pain. [Lisa] How do people become addicted to porn? [Pam] One of the most common reasons is early sexual experience before maturity, often in childhood. It is not uncommon for SA’s to be victims of childhood sexual abuse. The first introduction to pornography may involve magazines, or videos, or online. Pam is correct. Carnes research paper reports the following reasons: 72% experienced physical abuse 81% experienced sexual abuse 97% experienced emotional abuse [Lisa] In our previous conversations, you mentioned there’s a slippery slope with porn addiction. Can you describe this process from beginning to advanced stages? [Pam] In the beginning, curiosity leads people to seek out images. Porn sites offer lots of free drawing cards. [Lisa] Wait — what’s a drawing card? [Pam] When you first go on porn sites you can see short videos which are usually soft porn with a short teaser trailer to harder stuff and a place to enter your credit card number. For some, it whets the appetite for more consumption, like how a long sip of Crown Royal demands the whole bottle for an alcoholic. Soon, porn becomes harder as the neurons in the brain are re-wired and desensitized by tamer acts. To meet demand, watching more disgusting, demeaning, and sometimes violent or sex acts with children are required to stimulate the brain. Soon it can evolve from just watching pornography to performing the actions themselves. And affairs begin. Online dating sites are filled with SA’s looking for no strings attached thrills. Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash [Lisa] Tell me more about the term “emotional anorexia.” How does an SA’s personality change over time? [Pam] Dr. Douglas Weiss coined the phrase. He’s a psychologist and the founder of Heart to Heart Counseling Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Here he explains what this is between man and wife. When love happens between two people in a ‘normal’ sexual, loving relationship, the man’s brain imprints with his partner’s body and sexual rewards come from that. Her body and looks become associated with sex in his brain, and the look of his wife turns him on sexually. It doesn’t matter if she is fat or thin, ugly or gorgeous; his imprint of her nude body triggers sexual desire and loving emotions. Once an SA has become strongly addicted, chances are he no longer views sex with his partner as desirable for several reasons. She is human versus online porn women and may complain about things like demanding foreplay, romance, and expect sexual gratification. To most SA’s, this is not desirable. His online girls never whine. They always look perfect and do as they’re told. Of course, they adore him in his fantasy world. Since he lives in a world of make-believe, trying to integrate back into the real world with a partner who makes demands and has expectations is beyond what he is willing to give. Once he’s involved with viewing pornography and masturbates, it doesn’t take long before he can no longer enjoy intimacy. According to Dr. Weiss’s research, intimacy anorexia is caused by four major sources [Lisa] What happens on a chemical level to a person’s brain as they evolve more in-depth into the addiction? Pam pulls up another online research paper from TE Robinson and B. Kolb titled Structural plasticity associated with exposure to drugs of abuse. She starts to read it aloud to me. Recent research has shown that non-drug addictions such as gambling, binge-eating, and sexual activities affect brain function in ways similar to alcohol and drug addiction. Many addiction studies focus on what is referred to as the pleasure/reward circuitry and their corresponding neurotransmitters — chemicals that are responsible for the communication between neurons. Pam looks up at me. I nod my head in understanding and ask her to continue reading aloud: One of the neurotransmitters frequently identified as central to addiction is dopamine. A behavior or drug that produces pleasure induces a rush of dopamine that ultimately “reinforces” that behavior, making it more likely to occur. The amygdala, basal ganglia, and other reward centers play a role in the reinforcement of the activity that produces pleasure. Changes in the brain’s neural pathways are referred to as “plasticity”; and “synaptic plasticity” refers to changes among neuronal connections. [Lisa] To recap, research substantiates the idea that porn addiction can alter brain plasticity. [Pam] Exactly. Black and white image of a man staring at a fuzzy TV screen [Lisa] Can the addict ever reprogram their brain back to its original state? [Pam] With time, and a lot of work, the addict’s brain can return to normal. After all, it is considered plastic and can change and mold. It takes strict refusal to view porn and a program of recovery for both partners. There is a slow, gentle approach to introducing intimacy back into the marriage. In time, if conditions are met, the SA can once again look at his partner with desire and love. He must be forever vigilant not to allow himself to be triggered and may have to avoid places that he once went to fill his needs. Places like the beach, shopping mall, downtown street, and, most importantly, his computer. An accountability program for the computer can be installed, protecting the SA from entering sites that are not safe. [Lisa] What treatment is available for porn addicts? There are several treatment centers and resources available for sexual addiction. Some require in house treatment for 30 days or more with extensive programs involved. Others are geared towards the husband and wife. There are 12 step sexual addiction groups in most urban spaces and as well as support groups for partners. Online support groups exist also. [Lisa] Support resources will be included at the end of this post. My last question to you, Pam — will you be willing to share your personal story with us in Part 2? [Pam] Yes, absolutely. In the next post, we continue to speak with Pam to understand what it was like to be a spouse of a sex addict. She reveals how she discovered her husband’s addiction, it’s progression and the evolution of her own feelings. Pam will describe her difficulty in accepting sexual addiction as a disease. Next, we talk about the support she received and how Pam became a voice for spouses of SA’s. The interview will conclude with the outcome of Pam’s marriage and where she is today on her journey. If this interview resonates with you, know you are not alone. There are resources available to help in your time of need. Resources Help Available: United States Help Available: Canada Scholarly Journals Associations General More like this:

https://medium.com/beingwell/interview-with-a-spouse-of-a-sex-addict-part-1-732146e1b5f9

['Lisa Bradburn']

2020-04-10 21:04:05.269000+00:00

['Addiction', 'Interview', 'Mental Health', 'Sex', 'Coronavirus']

How to Change the Way You Talk to Yourself

“Just sit still,” Dad would tell one of my brothers. Everyone knows kids have trouble sitting still for anything, even hair cuts. The electric shaver he used to cut hair would get too close to their scalps. They’d flinch and cry out, “Ow!” “Stupid idiot! I told you to sit still,” Dad would say, slapping them. Some conversations refuse to leave our memories. And sometimes the words we can’t forget are the ones we tell ourselves. But I’ve learned how to change the way I talk to myself. The negatives They say it takes 9 positives to combat one negative thing we hear. Nine. And yet, we replay the negatives, in which case, we need to up our efforts considerably. But it seems that negatives somehow cling to us, like this poem I wrote. A Magnet I seem to have a magnet that’s deep inside my head. And I repel the positive and keep what’s bad instead. Have you ever been on your way somewhere, knowing you should turn left? You’ve done it many times before, your car knows it by heart. But for some odd reason, you turn right. And immediately you hear: What did you do that for? What’s the matter with you? You never do anything right! So how can we combat those accusations? Because clearly, they will happen. It’s not even a matter of “if,” but rather a matter of when. Affirmations I’ve found writing out affirmations is helpful. It was something a counselor suggested, since I struggle with negative self-talk. Affirmations became my friends. The only rule is that they must be positive. Affirmations are statements that affirm you as a person. If you have also heard negative statements in your own voice, think of things you wish others had said to you. Things like: It’s okay, you made a mistake. You did your best, it’s alright. You can always try it again. You can go further by adding positive words to your inner vocabulary. Words that may feel strange at first, but add them just the same. Words like: You’re smart. You’re funny. People like being with you. The longer your list, the more you’ll have in store for fighting the negatives. If we consistently fight the negatives, eventually, we won’t get slaughtered every time we make a mistake. Once is not enough With affirmations, what you want to do is write them out by hand about ten times. Writing it out helps you retain it. And the more times you write them during the day, the more effective you will find them. One time for each one is just not enough. True story: I once had a problem with my older brother. Okay, several. And I made everything worse in my own head because I thought I had to like him, and it was clear I did not. At least, at that time. One affirmation that freed me up was this: I have the right to not like my brother. I have the right to not like my brother. I have the right to not… By giving myself the right, I felt less shame when I’d have a negative thought about him. When I gave myself the right, I treated each little thing separately, and that was doable. I kept a spiral notebook, filled with this affirmation, as well as many others. Running across it, I had to smile. You see, I was so skeptical. But not only did it work, I ended up seeing a lot of great things in my brother, I would have missed. And when that happened, I easily cleaned out the closet of my mind and had a good chance of strengthening my relationship with him. Years later, when he shared he had Pancreatic cancer, I was there for him completely. Not just because he was family, but because he was someone I loved and liked. I’m so thankful I opened my mind, and my life to him. Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash Make a list Jot down the negative things you tell yourself, or even those you hear from others. And when you have that list, next to each word, write the opposite word. Write what you would like said to you. Examples: stupid — intelligent ugly — nice looking insensitive — care about people Everyone’s list will be different, because we’re all unique, but there will be some words that find themselves on many lists. Listen to your inner voice. Pay attention to how you feel when you talk to yourself. I have found I’ve even changed the tone of how I talk to me. While some negative self-talk starts in their family of origin, this is not the case for everyone. Some people will start off with a great home base. But somewhere along the line, they meet someone who puts them down. Instead of standing up to it, they start believing the negatives. The good news is, you can build up your self-confidence. You can change your self-talk and actually become your own biggest fan. P.T.S.D. I struggle with post traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes buttons get pressed, and while I look like I’m an adult, my inner dialog is shaming the child within. Affirmations have been helpful to me because I realize buttons will get pressed in life. The experiences we have now will remind us of other ones, sometimes painful. How we talk to ourselves really matters. I’ve found some sentences that help those who struggle with anxiety or depression. When I was in a dark place in my thinking, it felt like I would always be there. Like it was inescapable. These affirmations helped me: You’re not always going to feel like this. You’re okay. It will be alright. People who struggle with negative self-talk need someone on their side. And who better than the person who’s always with them? Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash “Be nice” One of my friends struggled with putting herself down. Maybe in a way, she thought she’d beat everyone else to it. Finally, one day I told her, “Sherry, be nice to my friend.” And she smiled. From the time we are little, we’re told, “be nice.” In our homes, we are told to get along with our siblings. And then we go to Kindergarten, and the teacher tells us, “Be nice.” And we really try. But it’s towards others, not inwardly. It’s time to realize how we treat ourselves matters much more than we thought. Even the Bible says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:30–31) Try it out. Write down some of the negatives you tell yourself. Take a few minutes and they’ll surface. Think of the last time you got embarrassed, you’ll be able to think of a lot of negatives surrounding that. Jot down others as they happen. You have nothing to lose by trying this out. There will always be negative When I was younger and my friends went on to college, I tried to go too, but my mom’s death a few years earlier made it impossible to think. Thirty years later, I returned to school. First I attended a junior college, and then with an A.A. degree, I transferred to a university and graduated Summa Cum Laude. And I remember calling my aunt on the phone, “Aunt Jeanette, I did it. I graduated.” She said, “You graduated?” And then she added, “You could have done this years ago.” But even her words did not squelch my feelings of accomplishment. The real victory When I attended Judson University, in Elgin, it meant I had a 40-minute drive. The drive was unfamiliar. That scared me because I am direction deficient. Don’t bother to look it up, I’ve given myself that title. It simply means when it comes to going anywhere, the probability is high that I will get lost. My classes were condensed, so I’d get my B.A. in 15 months, but that still meant I would be going to class twice a week and mostly at night. With a hand-drawn map from my husband, I set off on my first day. I can do this, I told myself. And true to my form, I got lost. Sitting on the side of the road in tears, I felt defeated. How could I do this 88 more times? Judson University was near an expressway, so I could have saved time by taking that route. But I was too scared. One day, I was just about at school. I saw the expressway ahead and knew I had made it. But instead of taking the street I needed, I turned too soon. And the next thing I knew, I was ON the expressway. Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash I tried to remain calm as tears ran down my face and my heart beat out of my chest. I managed to get off in a couple of exits. I walked in the gas station for directions. (This was pre-cellphones and G.P.S’s.) “How can I get to Judson University?” I panted. “Oh, you’re almost there,” the attendant replied. “All you have to do is get back on the expressway…” “No!” I interrupted, I don’t want to take the expressway.” And so he explained the longer, less traveled route. And 40 minutes later, I walked in class, my red face stained with tears of humiliation. Did I have what it took? Eventually, I learned the route there and back. Yes, I got lost a couple more times. No, I did not take the expressway again. That lesson in life would come much later. I did it! Graduation day, as I waited to receive my diploma, I knew what I had accomplished to get there. And I heard my own words, “Good job Anne. I knew you could do it.” Those trips taught me how to talk to myself. I learned how to calm myself down when I got lost. You can do this. I know you can do it. Just breathe. And you know what? I was right. I did do it. And whatever it is that you’re facing, you can do it too. For inside of you lives a person who can root for you the loudest. Give yourself a chance. Call to Action: Do you struggle with negative self-talk? What have you found effective? I’d love to hear from you.

https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-to-change-the-way-you-talk-to-yourself-c148c5441b69

['Anne Peterson']

2019-11-05 14:20:50.452000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Mental Health', 'Weekly Prompts', 'Growth', 'Self Improvement']

In Times of an Unknown Future, Let Synchronicity Be Your Guide!

As Corona Virus demands change, a transforming culture grant us permission to be who we never thought we would be. photo by Mackenzie Andersen of sculpture by Weston and Brenda Andersen for Andersen Design I awoke in the morning in an instance that dreaming becomes consciousness, a transition as elusive to detect as that precise moment when night becomes dawn. I was travelling in my dream on the main road out of town passing through the point where the Harbor becomes Boothbay. On the side of the road, I saw a sign that said “Learn Farm”, crafted on a wooden board painted with weathered white paint, and written in Times New Roman font. A frame around the words lent the sign traditionally old fashioned flair. In dream word play, the message is its new but its old, Times, New Roman, correlating with to my concept of a twenty-first century cottage industry, a network of businesses in residence, pre-industrial culture resurrected for a world evolving toward smaller, autonomous interactive parts. At first instance I read “Learn” as the name of a family farm, and on second thought I understood it to be a verb. The sign was on the right side of the road, off the beaten track, only noticed while passing it by. as I made a mental note that it is the right way to go. Tall Pelican by Andersen Design, Photo by Susan Mackenzie Andersen Looming ahead is that political conglomeration known as the Boothbay Roundabout. I am on a track to go through it. Too late to turn around, I am traveling too quickly toward the point where the common road makes way for the new main drag connecting centers of concentrated wealth, halting the common traffic in its tracks, or else speeding it along without pause into the conflation of streams going round and round the roundabout, to decorative effect. In former times the functions served by the roundabout infrastructure, were handled off to the side of the common road, concerning only those whom it needed to concern. Photo by Mackenzie Andersen The roundabout is a political construct, one I must deal with as the path I am travelling in my dream offers no other choice than to keep on moving forward into the future. And so it is in life that one must become a political actor, play or be played. Large well capitalized businesses negotiate with state policy makers to achieve their own ends. Small businesses must do the same. A vision of a network of independent slip casting studios becomes more viable if business in residence zoning is actualized in law and if financing options are crafted by similar intents as those applied to stand alone housing and business development. The ideal first step wherein vision becomes actualization is the acquisition of real estate for a center of learning, research, a small production where training can happen and a gallery and someday-social-gathering-space can serve as a center for a community of like minded artisans and entrepreneurs, all the while working on advocating for better laws, ordinances, and public programs to manifest an extended network of independent contractors. Call it “Learn Farm”, for short. Vintage Creamer in rare yellow ochre glaze both by Weston Neil Andersen, photo by author Independent contractors are today’s dynamic players in remote working culture. This is their time to make a big social impact. The goal is to establish a network of independent slip-casting contracting studios. I have contacted many local economic development resources during the past decade receiving no response. Writing and publishing casts a wider net but the wider net might take one further away from where one needs to be rooted. By going around the roundabout about one can turn around and get back to the right turn in the road. Perhaps the roundabout I am entering are orbits of my own making, meeting and converging, seemingly through happenstance, or as Jung would say, synchronicity, or meaningful co-incidence. Synchronicity is the guide which navigates through the unfamiliar. When all orbits are synchronized from the center outward they act as one reverberating wave function. Vintage Creamer and Sugar Set in classic Blue Green Hand Painted Stripes, Photo by Mackenzie Andersen I began this story with the intention of introducing the new website design which I have been developing during the past six weeks, repurposing our website which markets products as a tool to promote a KickStarter campaign and extended fundraising efforts. These days every presentation is supposed to be as short as an elevator pitch. Once, the recommended time of a video was three minutes but it is now said to be better done in two. So my challenge is how does one communicate something so complex as our business in simple form? The complexity can be communicated using a link to our website where the full range of the Andersen Design’s work from mid-century to 21st century is represented. As in a dream, a link is shorthand for an expansive concept. Most of our standard line is out of stock as we no longer have a studio for production but the line continues to retain its market appeal representing a qualified economic development asset. As a small size production it cannot saturate a global or even a national market. The many variables in our line and processes makes the making of the line an engaging experience involving hands-on physicality. Please check out and sign up in support of our pre-launch efforts. Sleeping Sandpiper, designed and decorated by Elise, Photo by Mackenzie As I am working on my new design, I receive an invitation from a venue where I publish, to participate in a newly forming consulting platform. The platform handles the transactions and relationships between parties, crucial as a matter of trust in a globally connected world, and a hedge against fraud. The platform is geographically located in Singapore, an Asian city-state. Lately I have been watching television series from another Asian country, Korea, finding the culture to be more American than the United States is at this present moment, which I find fascinating. The sound track for one Korean love story drama, features a uniquely rendered version of “Stand by Your Man”. The dialogue is Korean but the music is American country. That was a diversion, or maybe not. In another recent dream my Dad was standing between my desk and the window and told me to get a new chair. In the material world, the chair I was using was falling apart, until a couple of days ago, when I fixed it. At that time I literally needed a new chair but in dream speak, the message delivered by my father, standing between my seat of work and the window of opportunity, is that I need to get myself better SIT-uated. This new opportunity offers the potential to become better situated. There is no guidebook, not even sample profiles. The lack of a guide is a situation common to many, facing new situations in the wake of corona virus. Sheeba in unglazed white stoneware by Weston, Photo by Mackenzie A company culture that invites one to become what one doesn’t think of becoming oneself, is inspiring and motivational, granting permission to believe in learning as a continual transformative process, which in todays world takes place at a faster and faster rate. Many careers may be outpaced by new technological developments but hand made ceramics is as old as human history. By continuing to exist as an entity, Andersen Design, and other small businesses provide the opportunity for others to discover skills and talents that they might not otherwise know they have, adding variety to available options. Many decades ago, I read a book by Harold Geneen, in which it was said that Geneen would offer potential employees higher pay than they expected while presenting them with the greatest challenge of their life. That was the Geneen company culture. Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned. Harold Geneen As I was formulating the new website, I had been planning to offer services on our website but left it to the last. As it happened The web design was nearing completion when the new consulting opportunity presented itself. Sheba by Weston, glazed in White and decorated by Christine, Photo by Susan (Mackenzie) The consulting platform is entirely different than any other I know because it features writers who are also the consultants. The writers come from many different fields and walks of life. The website is called Data Driven Investor, which on the surface is not where I expect to be published but that is relative to on how widely or narrowly one defines data. Is the definition of data exclusive to what can be gathered in a computer compiler or is it inclusive of a living experience, more subjective than objective? As we move into the area of quantum computing we are entering a domain in which the observer affects the observed. Computer input and out put is artificial intelligence, but human intelligence programs the computer. Can artificial intelligence program AI, intelligently? That is a question on the looming horizon of the new frontier. In the meantime, the human mind retains its mystery, The many voices of the family of man is how we create our database of living information. The great twentieth century science fiction writer, Philip K Dock coined it as Valis, Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a book he wrote as fiction about a character who perceives ancient Rome at the time of Christ, superimposed on California in 1974. Yes, that’s Times New Roman in short code. Dick said his novel, Valis, is autobiographical but no one would be believe it so he published it as fiction, because truth is stranger than fiction and nature will always be infinitely more than artificial intelligence can know.

https://medium.com/illumination/in-times-of-and-unknown-future-let-synchronicity-be-your-guide-22056043d274

['Mackenzie Andersen']

2020-12-19 06:03:02.972000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Spirituality', 'Economic Development', 'Dreams', 'Entrepreneurship']

How to Attract Top Tech Talent

How to Attract Top Tech Talent Four suggestions for recruiting talented technology individuals into your new digital startup team (Singapore context) A few years ago, I joined my first company through a hackathon event that I participated in while studying (and struggling) in university. Hackathons and events are an effective way to recruit tech talents in Singapore. I enjoyed my time in the company; I started as an intern and converted to full-time subsequently. Looking back, joining the hackathon was the best investment of my time. I later introduced the rest of my friends into the team. Fast forward a few years later, today, I’m placed in the role to assist with the recruitment of digital talents into a new digital team. Do note that this is not an HR role. I’ll be sharing some suggestions based on my conversations with fellow technologists and what has worked for me. #1: Focus on building an influential culture and community The salary for talented technology professionals (at least in Singapore) is generally competitive enough. My technology counterparts (the good ones) are earning quite a decent amount of salary, up to a point where further increments don’t contribute much to their lives. If you want to reach out to talented tech individuals that are well taken care of, you’ll have to focus on the components at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; this includes a pleasant environment, community, and culture, etc. Building a culture that attracts strong talents is no easy task, and it can take a significant amount of time and effort. The foundation is critical, e.g. the first few members of the team would set the stage for the rest of the community. If you’re already in an existing large team with an undesired culture in place, it may be worth considering to start a new team with a clean slate. While your team is still small and new, it’s essential to invest time and resource in planning the types of benefits and leaders to bring into your organisation. Based on my experience, I’ve seen two successful approaches which may work for you: Set the desired environment — if you’re looking to create a digital startup culture and environment to facilitate innovation, follow the industry leaders. New hires coming from those environments would not get too much of a culture shock, and you’ll attract similar type people. Recruit the influential leader — although this might incur you quite a sum at the start, it could be beneficial in the long run as the rest of the team is likely to follow a good leader into the new organisation; a leader is a strong ambassador. Having an influential culture and community creates a positive reinforcing feedback loop, whereby the people in your team become ambassadors to refer people that fits and grows the culture. Now, where can you find these people and the influential leader? I’ll be covering that shortly in the subsequent sections. #2: Provide meaning and recognition Apart from having a good culture and community, the work has to be meaningful and rewarding to attract the top tech talent who wants to make a difference. As a tinkerer, one of the most disappointing things to experience is after spending a significant amount of time and effort building something only to see it go to waste; we want to create things that make an impact. Choose the type of projects you undertake wisely. Eventually, you’ll have to sell the projects to the rest of your team to get their buy-in and commitment to start the journey together with you. Find meaning and purpose in the projects that you and your team choose to undertake — pick up negotiation and sales skills if you have to. The best kinds of project are those with nationwide impact and media publicity upon launch, e.g. apps related to COVID-19 to help citizens. One of the questions I often hear these days from my talented tech counterparts are: “What kind of interesting projects does the team do?” Meaningful projects are a strong selling point for your team to attract talented tech individuals who are keen to make an impact. #3: Illustrate prospects for the role It’s important to illustrate the prospect for the role that you’re recruiting. Explain how you’ll be grooming individuals to become a product owner or architect, etc. While some technologists would prefer to stay as a rockstar developer or technical wizard, many see themselves as future product owners (PO), architects and project managers (PM). By showcasing the road map upfront, it could attract potential hires looking to advance further gradually. You may want to consider including a short description or detail in the job description indicating the type of prospects that the role could open up to, e.g. progression after two to three years to PO, PM, etc. The potential candidate can then envision their success and progress in your team. #4: Visit and recruit from tech hangouts, events, and online I joined my company through a digital hackathon event. I remember during the event, my team had a mentor assigned to my team. The mentor is a project manager from the company that took time off projects to participate in the hackathon to coach teams. We asked him what’s in it for him being here? It’s simple. He said, “We’re looking to hire strong individuals for our team, and we can usually find them here at competitions.” There’s quite a lot of truth in that. During my university days, the ones who join competitions are either those that can juggle multiple commitments (ambitious), keen learners, are genuinely passionate, or a combination of each. These are the groups of people who make time to hone their craft. If you want to look for the best talent, you’ll have to visit the places that these groups of people gather. You don’t need to organise a hackathon. There are various options these days: Tech events, e.g. UX meetups, Hackathons, etc. University career shows and seminars (as a speaker/contributor: go early and stay later to network with the ones who are interested) Online micro-communities, e.g. Telegram groups, Slack groups, etc. LinkedIn It’d be worthwhile even if you don’t get any potential candidates from these events, because these people may refer their friends to you or reach out to you again someday.

https://medium.com/the-internal-startup/how-to-attract-good-tech-talent-ebd349805cda

['Jimmy Soh']

2020-06-12 15:48:08.892000+00:00

['Recruiting', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Talent Acquisition', 'Startup', 'Digital Transformation']

What makes Python the “Best of the Best?”

Python is an object-oriented, interpreted, and high-level popular programing language with dynamic semantics. It is desirable for rapid application development, combined with dynamic binding and dynamic typing, its high-level built-in data structure, and connecting existing components together used for as a scripting or glue language. The cost of program maintenance reduces because Python is easy and simple to learn syntax emphasizes readability. Python is a popular and most lovable programming language globally because of the increased productivity it provides. According to Google Trends, let’s have a quick view of Python’s popularity all over the world. Here in this blog, some most noteworthy Python features make it best of the best tool for professionals of all skill levels are provided: 1. Open-source language Python is opensource, so to install and use Python, you don’t need to pay charges. That means to the public, the source code of Python is available freely. From Python’s official website, you can easily download it. The Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) supported by the Python so you can distribute and change it. This allowed by the Python community for the improve its features continuously. 2. High-level language: You do not need to perform memory management and do not need to remember its system architecture since Python is a high-level language. To Python’s user-friendliness, this features contributions. 3. Python = Simplicity To learn quickly is not enough for any programming language. Right! Here Python is not easy to learn, but it is also easy to learn, but in the use and implementation, that is an excellent point about Python that male developers fall in love with Python. You can master python coding’s nitty-gritty In a few days, with syntax similar to English. Through its readability factor enhancing Python is dynamically typed, so that makes indentation mandatory, 4. Object-oriented and functional: Python supports object-oriented and functional features. Python helps various inheritances also, unlike Java. An object-oriented programming language can model real-world data while on functions (code that can be reused) a functional language focuses. 5. It’s interpreted: Related Java and C++, unlike compiled language wherein you need to compile the code and then run it. Python executes it line by line instead of all at once executing the source code. Because you can do it while writing the code, this makes it easier to debug a python code. 6. The vast collection of Libraries: Python comes with a vast collection of libraries — the extensive collection of Python libraries you can automatically download with it when you download Python. For every single thing, you don’t need to write individual code because these libraries are built-in. For threading, web browsers, regular expressions, unit-testing, email, CGI, database, image manipulation, documentation-generation, and many more Python has packages and libraries. 7. Portable: Python is highly flexible, meaning, portable, for a Linux machine or window machine, a python code written that also can run on iOS and vise versa- in the code, you don’t need to male any alterations. Different machines need to write different code with Python eliminates (in your python code, just make sure there’s no system-dependent feature). 8. Extensible and embeddable: To write specific parts of your python code in other programming languages that Python allows you, so it’s an extensible language such as C++. In the source code of other languages, you can also embed your Python code similarly. In another language, this allows you to integrate Python’s scripting functionalities into code written. Conclusion: After reading about what makes Python best of the best, it is safe to conclude that Python is the best capable programming language for handling any development requirement. In the field of Data Science and Specifically in Machine Learning, businesses hire Python developers more from a Python development company to make Python applications that gained newfound traction in the last few years.

https://medium.com/devtechtoday/what-makes-python-the-best-of-the-best-55e285adea37

['Binal Prajapati']

2020-09-29 07:52:13.195000+00:00

['Python', 'Technology', 'Development', 'Developer', 'Python Programming']

The Stones of Taru Village

Taru was destroyed in 1994. “Our village was already dying by the time the planes came,” Haydar says. “A friend of mine — his parents ventured out one night with a flashlight to visit him on the other side of the village. You see how tiny it is here. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes away, but they were old and it took some time. They passed through a soldier checkpoint without incident. On the way back, an hour or two later, they were shot on approach at the same checkpoint. Murdered just like that. The soldier who pulled the trigger said he thought they were ‘terrorists’ when he saw the light of their flashlight bobbing along the trail, the exact same flashlight he had let through just an hour before. It never became news of course.” Haydar has a sweeping bush of white hair and an equally bushy moustache that covers his upper lip. When he tells a story, I notice he sometimes holds the tip of his tongue on his bottom lip before he delivers the funny part. His wife is a tall elegant woman, with a long face and eyes that retain a somber light even when she smiles. With the tulip glasses of fresh tea, she serves German ginger cookies and cucumbers from their garden, then sits down at the end of the table where I, the foreign zava (groom), look completely lost. Everyone is speaking a mix of Turkish, which I know, and Kurmanji Kurdish, which I don’t. And somehow the climax of every story comes in Kurmanji. “And then you wouldn’t believe who I saw coming!” Haydar says. “I swear, you’ll die laughing! It was…” Kurmanji! Everyone but me erupts into guffaws. “I feel this land in my bones,” Suzan says, giving her husband a quiet smile and then looking back at me. “I’m proud we’ve come back, but I wasn’t born in this village, you know, but in Kumsor — where your wife’s ancestors came from a long long time ago. It means Qızılbaş, the red heads.” “In Tunceli,” I say. “In Dersim,” she corrects. “So you speak Zaza?” “I speak Dimilli. And also Kurmanji and Turkish.” She is gentle, but adamant about these corrections. It’s not pride but a simple insistence on the truth. In Turkey there are two main branches of Kurd. One is popularly known as the Zazas, who historically immigrated first, probably before the Byzantines arrived. Taru village once stood and stands again on the border of their territory. To the east is the province of Bingöl, where my wife’s village lies hidden in a deep valley just a few kilometers away. To the west, is the province of Tunceli, the land once called Dersim on the maps and still called that by the people who live here — in private at least. It was here, in 1938, that the army of the new Turkish republic massacred tens of thousands of Zaza Kurds when they resisted assimilation. Dersim was renamed Tunceli in an effort to obliterate its past, and some of its territory was redistributed to other provinces. The people were moved, too — a monstrous feat of social engineering aimed at diluting those that survived the massacres. The locals speak a variant of Kurdish called Zaza by people who aren’t Zaza, and increasingly by people who are. The name is supposedly pejorative — a mocking of the z sounds that pervade the language. Dersimlis particular about their culture and history call their language Dimili. Their religion is different, too. They are Alevis, not Sunnis Muslims, and don’t celebrate Ramadan or do the namaz or have mosques in their villages. Some don’t even consider themselves Muslims. My wife can remember her grandmother saying prayers to the moon when she was a girl. Taru village is named for Mt. Taru (the name means “slope” in Dimilli), a rugged, sharp mountain north of my wife’s village. Taru is a volcanic crag of dark red rock which presides like a god over every settlement in the region along with its partner, Mt. Silbüs, which looms to the north of it — slightly higher but less harrowing. According to one of the many local legends, the two peaks were once lovers — a shepherd boy and his girl, Kurdish and Armenian, frozen now in stone for all time by the magic of a witch. The road over the mountain to the village is so treacherous that at one point, where the left half has washed away down into a ravine and the right side is covered in sharp rocks the size of a human head, I had to stop our tiny Chevrolet and tell my wife, “We can’t go on. We’ll destroy the car or fall off the edge.” It took her five minutes of intense argument to persuade me to move forward, each rocky crunch on the chassis making me grind my teeth. “The road to Taru has always been horrible,” Haydar tells us once we are safe and sound in his dining room. “When I was a kid, I had to walk it all the way down to the town of Xolxol to go to school. Piles of snow and ice, and sometimes bears and wolves. Once I was trudging up the hill and suddenly at the top I noticed a huge wolf watching me approach. I just froze. We regarded each other for a moment — how do you do? — and then I slowly eased backward down the hill. I didn’t make it to school that day. Absent on account of wolves.” Caves in Taru and Silbüs served as hiding places for Dimilli Kurds fleeing the Dersim massacres in 1938. Fugitives discovered there were bombed to every last man, woman, and child by the Turkish Air Force, led, according to village legend, by Atatürk’s adopted daughter, Sabiha Gökçen herself. This is not ancient history to the people of my wife’s village. A few nights later, at dinner, one of my wife’s cousins relates a story he heard from his grandmother. “My grandmother remembers the massacres. Her voice still shakes when she tells it. She says that they all knew what was happening. Between the refugees and rumors and the bombings, the whole village figured that their turn was coming. It was September. The army was just on the other side of Silbüs. They heard that they were shooting everyone, so the village met in someone’s house to figure out what to do. They decided not to resist — they’d be caught on the road if they tried to run anyway, and all the hiding places in the mountains had been discovered. They all went home that night and locked up their houses — all the doors and windows were shuttered tightly. They said their goodbyes and waited for whatever was to come. My grandma was just a girl. She remembers clinging to her mother and watching the door all night, expecting at any moment someone to kick it in, drive them all outside, and shoot them. But the bullets never came. The government had called an end to the operations that night. They were saved by a hair’s breadth.” But then came the 1980 coup and the Turkish war with the PKK. The local Kurds were tired of being told they didn’t exist by the Turkish government. They were tired of being arrested, tired of their culture being illegal, tired of their language being forbidden. All the villages in the area were given Turkish names — mentioning the Kurdish one once would have landed you in prison, charged with “splitting the country.” In 2010, bowing to a new spirit of openness, all the village signs offered up the original — and true — names of the villages in parenthesis. When you turn onto the road to my wife’s village, a sign says SARITOSUN — (CONAG). The Turkish authorities have a funny way of putting truth in parentheses and quotes — the Armenian ‘genocide’ for example — and leaving lies well enough alone. My wife remembers these times with great bitterness. “We used to bury our cassette tapes of Kurdish music. It wasn’t even safe to hide them in the house.” Now, the language has been targeted once more. The Turkish government has declared that it will purge the country of “terrorists and traitors.” Kurdish mayors in eighty-nine Kurdish cities have been forcibly replaced by “trustees” sent from the ruling party. The city halls have been stripped of all signage bearing Kurdish words and festooned with Turkish flags. The images of proud young police and soldiers posing in front of the damage circulate all over Twitter. The bombings in Dersim have resumed as well. Journalists in the region have been detained for filming helicopters dropping explosives on a village.

https://medium.com/little-fiction-big-truths/the-stones-of-taru-village-bcaaeea725d9

['Little Fiction']

2017-05-03 10:01:04.668000+00:00

['Turkey', 'Conflict', 'Nonfiction']

How To Win Your Next Opportunity in a Progressive Organisation.

What makes them a progressive company? One of the elements that stands out about Oppo is that they take their ingredients seriously. That goes for both their product, which took 24 months to develop, but also the attention they give to creating the right formula for a happy and healthy work environment — free ice cream included. Due to the changing work of work, growing organisation in the 21st century need to look and behave differently to their predecessors in order to thrive. Oppo does this in three ways: They are mission-led. Oppo has a vision to eradicate terrible food choices and provide an alternative that isn’t bland or boring. They believe that “food that isn’t healthy and tasty is broken”. Oppo keeps this mission at the heart of their choices, making them an authentic voice in the health food industry. However not only do they seek to improve their product, but they apply the same principles to developing their team. They hold ‘round tables’ where they encourage blue-sky thinking, personal audits and aim to put in place new practices to set their team up for success. A progressive company looks to combine their mission with the success of the individual in order to sustainably achieve growth and employee satisfaction. They value autonomy. At Oppo every team member has a turn taking ice cream samples to pitch at retailers which is a huge part of their success. The team member who currently has ownership of this area did so off the back of this test. By discovering that she’s the best at it (and that she enjoys it) now gives her the freedom to succeed in a way that aligns her talents with the company mission. And she is free to run with it however she chooses. The team is intimate and well balanced; there are no middle-managers. They also have ‘on-boarding co-dating’ where you will grab a drink or a coffee with each team member and get to know them personally before becoming involved professionally. They are growing responsibly. With great growth comes great responsibility, and this rings true for the stage Oppo is currently at. They’ve even been known to ‘err on the side of conservative’ when it comes to predicting their sale success rate in-store, which significantly separates them from existing money-hungry-growth-stage counterparts. They care about their culture, their work environment and the quality of their product and are determined to maintain that commitment despite their growth. Authentically demonstrating consideration for people, purpose and profit shows that Oppo is testing out what it means to be a progressive company in a way that is right for them.

https://medium.com/21st-century-career/how-to-win-your-next-opportunity-in-a-progressive-organisation-a1d851ef8549

['Escape The City']

2016-02-20 14:13:26.700000+00:00

['Startup', 'Job Hunting', 'Entrepreneurship']

How I manage my time and a team of 130 employees

Originally published on JOTFORM.COM Oliver Burkeman is preoccupied with the topic. Obsessed, even. Recently, the author and Guardian journalist confessed that he’s “unreasonably fascinated by other people’s daily schedules.” His mental library includes specific details, like how fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld sleeps exactly seven hours a night (regardless of when he goes to bed) or that Out of Africa writer Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) subsisted on oysters, champagne and amphetamines. Burkeman says, like all humans, he’s a natural voyeur. He also admits that he’s looking for tips; ways to boost his own success. And he’s not alone. Lately, we’ve seen an explosion of articles, podcasts, blog posts, and books on the topic of daily routines. So naturally… I’m going to share my own. While I would never consider myself a public figure like Lagerfeld, people often ask how I structure my days at JotForm — and if I can offer a few hints or tricks in the process, I’m happy to reveal what I can. The morning 7 am Wake up 8 am My trainer is waiting for me at the gym. Knowing that I’ll stand him up if I hit “snooze” quickly gets my feet on the floor. We work out together for an hour, with a combination of cardio and weight training. 10 am Arrive at the office. I grab a fresh cup of coffee (heaven) and open AI Writer on my computer. 10 am-12 pm Creative time. This is the most important part of my workday. It would be so easy to answer emails and get lost in my inbox, but I protect these hours at all costs. After the gym, my brain is full of oxygen and I can think clearly. What do I think about? Anything from business problems to product ideas. First, I write morning pages to get the garbage out, then I see what bubbles up. By the end of those two hours, I try to structure my thoughts into an actionable format, whether that’s an email, a plan, or a presentation. I don’t always sit at the computer for two full hours, either. Sometimes a conversation fuels creative thought, so I might chat with a colleague or team member The takeaway When your business or your work is going well, it’s easy to shift into automatic. That approach works for a while, but eventually, success demands change. And even if change is slow, staying in automatic can mean missed opportunities. Creative time should also include strategic thinking. When you feel clear and energetic, and you’re flowing in those peak hours, try to dig in and look at what’s going on in your business or your work life: What are the weak points? What’s going well? How can you amplify your current success? Game-changing ideas won’t happen when you’re on a (metaphorical) treadmill. But if you think deeply and look for solutions, you will eventually find them. The afternoon 12 pm Walk to lunch, either with someone from our team or a local colleague. 12:30–1:30 pm Eat lunch and get to know our employees better. I often learn as much from these conversations as I do during meetings and demo days. From personal goals to product issues, we cover it all. The 30-minute walk each way is equally energizing. 2–5 pm Meetings and emails. I used to routinely stay at the office until 8 pm or later, but my oldest son just started kindergarten, and I wasn’t seeing him very much. I decided that I would pick him up at 5 pm, at least four days a week (Tuesdays are longer meeting days). 5–11 pm Now that I’m home earlier, I’m reminded of an obvious truth: young kids are exhausting. I get down on the floor and play with them for an hour, then I need to rest for an hour. Then we play again. This continues until their bedtime. When I’m not playing, I read or watch a TV show — usually something light, like House, Mars or nature documentaries. Never the news. It makes me crazy. I love having so much time at home now, and I try not to work during the evening. Separating work and family is important to me, and I encourage — and often require — our staff to do the same. The takeaway Work creates more work. The more time we spend developing new ideas, the more time we’ll need to spend executing them. That’s not necessarily a problem, but here’s what’s more important: creating work that matters. Meaningful work requires deep, focused concentration, but it also demands downtime. Stepping away from the office, when possible, allows your mind to reshuffle the deck. Rest can generate more breakthroughs than metaphorically banging your head against the wall for 10+ hours a day. In the 13 years since I started JotForm, I’ve also learned to hone in on critical problems and ideas. My days at the office aren’t (usually) very long, but I try to make every minute count. Even leaving my desk and taking employees to lunch keeps me connected to every part of the company. I realize that’s a privilege, but it’s also my job as a leader. Identify your most meaningful work, and what helps you to produce it. Then, do everything in your power to create a schedule that supports, instead of depletes, your individual genius. Energy gains and drains A recent survey of nearly 1,200 U.S. workers found that 76% of participants said they felt tired many days of the week, and at least 15% fell asleep during the day at least once a week. Poor or inadequate sleep can certainly be a problem, but several other factors can also affect our energy — and how we structure our days. Over the years, I’ve developed a list of what increases, versus decreases, the energy we need to produce work that matters. Increases energy: Daily workouts and exercise Integrated rest — sleep, spending time outside, taking breaks, walking meetings and lunches Asynchronous communication — instant messaging tools like Slack can waste time and sap energy. It’s easier to consider what you want to say, write a clear email, and then get back to work while the recipient takes the time they need to respond Having control over your work — if someone is constantly telling us what to do, or tasks repeatedly arrive that require immediate attention, that’s an energy drain Having a purpose — knowing the reason behind our day-to-day work is energizing. It’s also easier to decide what to do, and what to set aside. When we tackle projects based on that purpose, we feel alive and excited, even when the work is challenging A room of your own — whether it’s a team room with a door that closes (like we have at JotForm) or a clear, dedicated space for creativity, it’s essential to eliminate distractions and find your flow Appreciating others — people need to know why their contributions matter. Understanding the impact of our work is invigorating, whether we’re coding, teaching, cleaning, or designing. Say thank-you at every opportunity and recognize outstanding effort Decreases energy: Constant communication — the repeated “ping” of instant messages, Slack notes, texts and calls is exhausting. Whenever possible, disable notifications. We all need mental space to focus, whether we operate on a manager’s schedule or a maker’s schedule Loud places — chatty phone calls, nearby meetings, a colleague’s music, and the proverbial watercooler conversations can be an instant energy drain. Quiet is a valuable currency when we’re trying to go deep Too much work — when we juggle too many different balls, we rarely keep any of them in the air for long. Something inevitably suffers, and that can lead to more work, frustration, and even some guilt. Focus is almost always more effective Deadlines — stress can provide an addictive energy hit, but it’s impossible to sustain that feeling for the long run. A rare, short-term deadline — like a major launch — is fine, because we’re usually meeting a need and we typically feel a sense of accomplishment at the finish line. But constant deadlines will quickly lead to burnout Too many urgent tasks — beyond real deadlines, managing too many daily requests and time-sensitive questions can create anxiety. Our ritual fascination It’s tempting to believe other people’s routines hold the key to success — even when the details border on eccentric. After all, if the 85-year-old Lagerfeld begins his day with Diet Coke and steamed apples, he must be doing something right, right? But even Burkeman admits that he’s unlikely to become a legendary fashion designer by guzzling cans of pop, or by logging a four-mile run at 5 am, like the former PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi. “The best defence I can offer,” Burkeman writes, “is that poring over others’ schedules makes me, in a fruitful way, more conscious of my own; experimenting with the tricks I learn is fun, and making daily tasks a little more entertaining surely isn’t a crime.” Becoming more conscious of our own daily rhythms and routines is the true key to success: Understanding what works, and then building on it. Harnessing and protecting our energy. Having the discipline to prioritize essential activities and bypass the rest. That’s when our human curiosity, and a little voyeurism, truly pays off.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-manage-my-time-and-a-team-of-130-employees-db87d3eb1313

['Aytekin Tank']

2019-08-26 11:51:26.968000+00:00

['Life', 'Inspiration', 'Productivity', 'Culture', 'Writing']

Luke Woodham and the Pearl High School Massacre

Luke Woodham and the Pearl High School Massacre Filled with rage for most of his life, Luke exploded in 1997, killing three people — including his own mother — and wounding seven others. Photo by William Isted on Unsplash Luke Woodham was born on February 5, 1981. As a toddler, Luke was adorable; a blonde-haired, blue-eyed bundle of energy who had an active imagination and loved to read. By the time he started kindergarten, however, Luke was somewhat overweight and needed thick eyeglasses to see. Mary Ann Woodham dressed him each day in clothes that looked old-fashioned, and she kept his hair so closely cropped that it made him look as if he had a receding hairline. Looking like a little old man, he was an easy target for bullies at school, and he would endure their insults throughout his entire school career. Luke’s home life was far from ideal. His parents would often fight, and their screaming matches terrified him. They divorced when he was eight, and Luke’s father made no effort to stay in contact with his children. Luke was convinced that he was to blame for the failure of his parents’ marriage, and he sank into a deep depression. It’s not common for a child so young to experience serious depression like this, but Luke’s mother does not appear to have noticed that there was anything wrong with her youngest son. Luke and his older brother did not get along with each other, adding to his stress at home. His brother was seven years old when Luke was born, and was hostile toward him from the beginning, physically abusing Luke whenever their parents weren’t looking. This aggression spilled over into their interactions with other children, and they were seldom invited back for a second playdate. After one particularly aggressive fight with his brother, Luke began screaming that he wished he were dead and that he would rather be in hell. It was a disturbing remark coming from a child who was only nine, but it failed to get any kind of reaction from his family. Luke Woodham (Photo from 1996 Pearl High School Yearbook) Mary Ann was described as a somewhat overbearing mother, and Luke’s older brother spent as much time away from the home as possible so that he didn’t have to deal with her. This meant that Luke was responsible for a majority of the household chores; while he would reluctantly obey Mary Ann when he was a child, as he got older his willingness to help out around the house diminished. He claimed that he felt suffocated by his mother, whom he described as being verbally abusive and constantly micro-managing all aspects of his life. Even after he reached his teenage years, Mary Ann continued to control the food he ate, the clothes he wore, and his hairstyle. Mary Ann was frustrated with the hand life had dealt her, and whether she intended to or not, she passed much of her misery onto her youngest son. Once, when Luke scraped some unfinished food off his plate into the garbage, she picked the food out of the trash and forced Luke to eat it all. It was a needlessly harsh way of teaching him not to waste food. When she caught Luke sneaking one of her cigarettes, she forced him to smoke two packs. Eventually, he threw up on the floor. If she felt that his room was not clean enough, she would throw some of his toys and other belongings into the trash and refuse to let him retrieve them. She dropped him off at school each morning, insisting on kissing him goodbye despite the fact that it made him the subject of ridicule at school. She would often use Luke as a sounding board, telling him intimate details about her life and asking him for advice on what she should do. Although she claimed to be a strong Christian woman, she often left Luke home alone overnight while she went out on various dates. Unsupervised and feeling unloved, Luke would turn to food for comfort. School continued to be an unhappy place for Luke. Because he was overweight, other students constantly made fun of him and frequently beat him up. If he tried to stand up for himself, the treatment got worse. After numerous occasions where his lunch was stolen and crushed by bullies, Luke eventually stopped making eye contact, choosing instead to shuffle through the hallways alone. At home, he would shut himself in his bedroom, where he could temporarily escape by reading or playing guitar. His older brother had been popular in school, and his mother didn’t understand why Luke couldn’t be more like him. As a child, Luke had been a bright boy who got A’s and B’s in all his classes, but this started to change after he began attending Pearl High School. Although he still spent a lot of time reading and believed he was more intelligent than most of his classmates, his grades plummeted and he had to repeat his freshman year. It was a huge blow to his ego. Mary Anne Woodham (Photo from Findagrave.com) Despite all the time that he spent alone in his room, Luke wasn’t completely without companionship. Lee Ann Dew, a senior at Pearl High School who lived close to Luke, would sometimes drive him to school in the morning and even took him to the prom that spring. He was never accepted by the popular crowd at school, but he was on friendly terms with a few of his male classmates and would occasionally socialize with them outside of school. But inside, he seethed with rage over the fact that he wasn’t popular. When Luke was 15, he began dating Christina Menefee. A popular, sweet teenager who was extremely outgoing and had lots of friends, Christina was new to the area and not particularly concerned with Luke’s social status. She did well in school; math and biology were her favorite subjects. She participated in the Junior Naval ROTC, possibly to follow in her father’s footsteps, he had retired from the Navy in 1989. She always had a soft spot for underdogs, and Luke certainly fit that description. After she saw Luke sitting alone at lunch, she decided to join him and the two soon began to get together outside of school. Christy’s father, who always made sure to check out anyone she dated, approved of Luke. Although he was somewhat shy and quiet, he had polite manners, always addressing Bob Menefee as “sir” when he visited Christy’s house. The Menefees had a habit of bestowing nicknames on all of Christy’s friends, and they chose “Luke Skywalker” for Luke. Despite the fact that her friends, as well as almost everyone else at school, tried to dissuade Christy from hanging out with Luke, she felt sorry for him. She encouraged Luke to grow his hair out, a change from the old-fashioned haircut his mother preferred, and his school picture that year shows a boy who bears little resemblance to the one who would be seen all over television the following year. Unfortunately for Luke, Christy soon grew tired of certain aspects of the relationship. Whenever Luke would come over to her house to visit her, his mother insisted on coming with him. Although she found it slightly endearing at first, assuming that it was some kind of Southern custom, she soon tired of Luke’s controlling and unstable nature as well as his overbearing mother. When Luke began getting angry with her if she didn’t call him at a certain time each day, Christy decided she didn’t want to see him anymore. She told Luke of her decision on October 1, 1996. She tried to let him down easy, telling him that they could remain friends, but Luke was inconsolable. The relationship had only lasted for about a month, and Luke blamed his mother for the breakup. In his journal, Luke wrote a statement swearing that he would never again allow himself to be hurt by a woman. He signed it in his own blood. Christy Menefee (Photo from Findagrave.com) Not long after his breakup with Christy, Luke got a part-time job at Domino’s Pizza. It got him out of the house and away from his mother, and also helped him to make some new friends. A co-worker, Donnie Brooks, introduced Luke to a group of teenage boys who often got together for role-playing games, and soon Luke was considered one of them. Although the group tended to do fairly well in school and were seen as being quite religious — a necessary trait for anyone living in evangelical Pearl — they dabbled in Satanism and idolized Hitler. Luke grew especially close to Grant Boyette, the unofficial leader of the group. Grant had come up with the name “the Kroth” for the group, and it consisted of about a half dozen teenage boys. Grant’s parents were the founding members of a local Baptist church, and he had carefully cultivated a persona of a pious, God-fearing Christian. In reality, he believed in Satanism and witchcraft, and convinced Luke that he could cast spells on people. In December 1996, Grant gave Luke a piece of paper that had a pentagram on it. He told him to use it — by meditating in a dark room while kneeling down with the paper pressed against his forehead — whenever he needed anything. Luke took the paper, but didn’t think much of it. The following month, Luke attempted to use the paper as a way of getting revenge against a boy named Danny who often bullied him. Nothing happened to Danny, but one of Danny’s friends was hit by a car and killed, and Luke was convinced he had caused the car to hit him. This event marked a turning point for Luke. In the past, he had simply seen the occult as a mere curiosity, but he now believed in it wholeheartedly and saw Grant as a god-like figure. He began spending all his time with Grant, but it wasn’t a healthy friendship. Luke had always been violent, and Grant seemed to bring out the worst in him. Together, the pair tortured and killed Luke’s dog, a small Shih Tzu named Sparkle. The dog had always been a source of unconditional love for Luke, but this no longer mattered to him. He noted in his journal that the dog’s yelps of pain had seemed almost human, and coldly described everything that was done to her. Sensing a violent change in Luke and Grant, the other boys in their group stopped associating with them. They were undeterred by the loss of friends; they had bigger things to think about. They were planning a rampage shooting at Pearl High School. On the night of September 28th, Lucas Thomas stopped by Luke’s house. Lucas was one of the only people besides Grant who was still on friendly terms with Luke. The two boys ordered some pizzas, but the dinner conversation soon took a gruesome turn. Luke told Lucas in detail about his plan to kill his mother, steal her car, and drive it to school so he could go after Christina Menefee. He planned to use one of his brother’s guns, and he fully expected to be killed in a police shootout. It was a way for him to essentially commit suicide, but also take others down with him. He wanted people to remember his name. Lucas was unsure if Luke was serious. He was. On the evening of September 30th, Luke asked his mother if he could borrow her car. Her negative answer was to be expected, considering Luke did not yet have a driver’s license, but it gave him a reason to storm off to his room and shut himself inside for the night. At some point, he called Lucas and told him that he would definitely be going through with his plan the next morning. It’s unclear if Lucas believed him or not, but he made no effort to dissuade Luke, nor did he bother to warn the police or any of the potential victims about the plan. Luke Woodham after his arrest (Photo from Alchetron.com) Luke set his alarm for 5:00am on the morning of October 1st. It was exactly one year after Christy had broken up with him, a grim anniversary he planned to celebrate with bloodshed. It was still twilight, and he expected that his mother would be sound asleep. He got a butcher knife from the kitchen, and then went back to his room to grab a baseball bat and a pillow. Once he was armed, he crept down the hallway towards his mother’s room. He was shocked to discover that his mother was awake and coming down the hallway. He had planned on attacking her while she was asleep and unable to fight back, but had neglected to take into account the fact that she often went jogging early in the morning. Instead he attacked her in the hallway, and was most likely surprised by how hard she tried to fight him off. She broke away from him at one point and managed to make it into her bedroom, but Luke was able to force his way inside. It was as if a volcano inside of him had finally erupted. He repeatedly stabbed her, then bashed her with the baseball bat as she pleaded for her life. Unmoved, Luke continued the assault, eventually smothering her with the pillow. His rage finally spent, he calmly cleaned himself off, took the time to write out a five page suicide note/last will and testament, and called Grant to tell him what he had done. While he was on the phone with Grant, he received a call from Lucas asking if he had done what he said he was going to do. Once he had briefed both friends on the events that had taken place that morning, he retrieved a rifle that had belonged to his brother and calmly drove to the school. When he arrived, he went inside and handed a stack of papers to Justin Sledge, another member of the Kroth. He instructed Justin to give the papers to Grant. Justin could see that the papers appeared to be Luke’s will, and he immediately surmised what was about to take place. Rather than warn any of the teachers and students who were milling around the commons, Justin gathered some of his friends and headed for the library, knowing they would be safe there. Luke went out to his mother’s car and retrieved the shotgun, then went back into the school and straight to where Christina was standing, chatting with some friends before classes started. He shot her in the chest at point-blank range. His rage not satisfied, he fired again, this time hitting Lydia Dew. Lydia was described as the sweetest person, always happy and always hugging people, and certainly not someone anyone believed would be targeted for murder. She had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time that morning, and later not even Luke could explain why he shot her. “I never had anything against Lydia. She was probably the best person in Pearl.” Ironically, Lydia had also been teased a lot at school for being overweight; she was probably one of the few people in the school that understood the bullying that Luke went through. It was heartbreaking for her older sister, Leah Ann, who had gone to the prom with Luke the previous year and had considered him a friend. Lydia Dew (Photo from 1996 Pearl High School Yearbook) Luke continued down the hallway, randomly shooting people. He was described as calm and nonchalant, methodically thumbing new rounds into the side port as the old shells were ejected. He continued to calmly fire as panic erupted in the hallway. Most students tried to run or hide behind something to stay out of his line of fire. Those students that he hit fell to the floor, unable to fully comprehend what was taking place. Luke showed no emotion at all. As he surveyed the damage, he noticed Jerry Safley lying in a pool of blood. Jerry had been hit in the leg and foot, and was starting to go into shock. When Luke saw Jerry, he stopped and apologized to him, telling him that he hadn’t meant to shoot him. He had mistaken Jerry for another student who was on the football team, a student that he hated and wanted to kill. Luckily, that student had gotten stuck in traffic and hadn’t yet made it to the school. Eventually, the gun ran out of shells and there was a pause in the shooting while Luke attempted to reload. Taking advantage of the situation, a male student tackled Luke to the ground and attempted to get the gun away from him. Luke was able to get away from the student, but he must have realized that any more attempts at reloading the gun would be futile and he needed to leave. It was over eleven minutes after it started. Still betraying no emotion, Luke simply turned and exited the school, heading back to his mother’s car. By this time, the principal had heard the gunshots and had already called 911. As Luke attempted to leave, assistant principal Joel Myrick followed him. Joel was an officer in the Army Reserves, and he knew he had his gun in the glove compartment of his car. Realizing it was the only way he could level the playing field, he grabbed his gun and chased after Luke, yelling for him to stop. Luke ignored him and tried to take off in his mother’s car, but he wasn’t a skilled driver — he had never driven before that morning — and he almost immediately lost control of the car. He sat there, gripping the steering wheel, as Joel ran up and put his gun to Luke’s neck. Joel yanked him out of the car and kept him immobilized on the ground until police got there. His only explanation for the bloodshed was that “the world has wronged me.” When he was taken to the police station, Luke waived his right to an attorney and agreed to talk with the detectives. One of them noticed all the cuts he had on his hands and asked him what they were from. Still completely calm, Luke matter-of-factly told the detective that he had gotten the cuts while “killing my mom.” It was an answer none of the detectives had expected. Luke had just shot up a high school and killed his own mother, but it didn’t seem to faze him at all. If anything, he seemed to be proud of what he had done, and even commented to one detective that he was pretty sure his killing spree was going to make him quite famous. Police were dispatched to the house and confirmed that they had located the body of a woman. Mary Ann hadn’t died easy; she had desperately tried to ward off her deranged son. An autopsy revealed 11 deep slashes on her arms, most likely inflicted while she was trying to protect herself. She had seven stab wounds on the rest of her body, three of them on her chest. She had been bludgeoned with a baseball bat and her jaw had been shattered. Despite the horrific injuries she had suffered, the pathologist who performed the autopsy stated that she had remained alive for around 30 minutes or so before bleeding to death. From the information contained in the note Luke wrote on the morning of the crime, it appears he saw the killings as a way for him to get revenge on a world that had never been kind to him. He complained about how “throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated….I have no mercy for humanity, for they created me, they tortured me until I snapped and became what I am today!” He denied that his act was a product of any kind of mental illness. “I am not insane. I am angry. This world shit on me for the final time. I am not spoiled or lazy, for murder is not weak or slow-witted. Murder is gutsy and daring.” He refused to accept any blame for his actions, claiming that the world — and especially Christina — were responsible his rampage. “People like me are mistreated every day. I do this to show society “push us and we will push back.” I suffered all my life.” Yet in police interviews, he stated that the entire reason for the massacre was his jealousy over the fact that Christina had broken up with him. Luke Woodham (Photo from Alchetron.com) The tiny town of Pearl was still reeling in shock about the murders when police announced that they had arrested five other boys, all members of the Kroth, and charged them with conspiracy to commit murder. It was more than most people in the community could handle. The entire town was in shock over the allegations of Satanism, and had trouble comprehending how six seemingly normal, suburban teenagers ended up on such a dark path. In the end, Luke was the only person put on trial for the shooting, but those in the community who were hoping to learn why he had shot up the school were disappointed. The case presented by Luke’s defense team sought to deflect blame away from Luke; they claimed that Grant was the one actually responsible for the shooting. Luke denied culpability for any of his actions. Although Luke had been adamant in his suicide note that he was not insane, he changed his story during the trial. He claimed that he saw various red-eyed demons, and told police that he was under the control of 100,000 demons conjured by Grant on the morning that he killed his mother. “They said I was nothing and I would never be anything if I didn’t get to that school and kill those people.” He also stated that he could hear Grant’s voice inside his head while he was killing his mother, but later claimed that he never wanted to hurt his mother and had absolutely no recollection of doing anything to her. He blamed everything on Grant. “He told me I had to kill my mom. He told me I had to get the gun and the car and go to school and get my revenge on Christy and cause a reign of terror.” Grant was called to the witness stand, but wisely invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and prevented the defense from being allowed to question him. Luke was tried twice, once for the murder of his mother and once for the school shooting. In both cases, he entered a plea of not guilty despite the fact that he had confessed his guilt to police. At each trial, his defense team tried unsuccessfully to paint him as a mentally ill teen easily influenced and manipulated by Grant, but neither jury could be swayed. He was found guilty in both cases, and was sentenced to serve three life sentences plus an additional 140 years. Charges against the other members of the Kroth were, for the most part, dismissed at the request of the prosecution because they simply didn’t have enough evidence. Grant took a plea deal and would eventually serve six months in jail for his role, and Justin spent four months in a juvenile detention center. The Pearl High School community struggled to heal after the massacre and questioned if there was anything they could have done differently that would have prevented the shooting from taking place. There is no doubt that Luke had been bullied in school and had an unstable home life, but there are many other teens in the same situation who do not resort to mass murder. Although Luke tried to place most of the blame on Grant, and it seems clear that Grant egged him on, Luke’s own rage at Christy placed a huge role in his rampage. His anger was likely capable of sustaining the attack even if Grant hadn’t been in the picture. While Luke and Grant spent a lot of time together outside of school, this was a voluntary choice on Luke’s part. Grant had graduated from Pearl High School the previous year; if Luke had decided to discontinue the friendship, he could have done so without fear of being bullied by Grant at school. Instead, Luke would often skip class to spend more time with Grant, and the pair got more violent as time went by. No longer content to simply talk about killing people, they spent a week torturing Luke’s dog before finally killing her. Once he had killed what had been a beloved family pet, it was quite easy for Luke to make the jump to murdering his classmates, many of whom he couldn’t stand. Like so many other prisoners, once Luke was convicted he became a born again Christian and expressed some remorse for what he had done. He wrote to an evangelist, telling the man he thought that they should work together because he believed that his story could help save others. In the 18 months following the massacre at Pearl High School, there were four school shootings that made national news. Luke believed that he was responsible for this, claiming that he was the person who had kicked off the school shooting craze. He may have been giving himself too much credit as there were several notable school shootings in the two years leading up to Luke’s rampage. The cases of Jamie Rouse, Barry Loukaitis, and Evan Ramsey had all received extensive coverage by the national media, though Luke’s case received even more coverage due to the fact that he also killed his mother. While he may not have influenced the wave of school shooters who came after him, he did influence some of the lawmakers in his home state: in the aftermath of Luke’s massacre, the state of Mississippi made killing anyone on school grounds a capital crime. Luke remains incarcerated in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. In 2010, he wrote to the Mississippi governor asking for clemency, but his request was denied. Under his current sentence, he will be eligible for parole in 2046 when he is 65-years-old.

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/luke-woodham-and-the-pearl-high-school-massacre-ccfc254482ad

['Jenn Baxter']

2020-12-27 23:33:19.547000+00:00

['True Crime', 'School Shootings', 'Nonfiction', 'Mental Health', 'History']

Launching a blog post series to showcase our design team talent

Diving into a company’s blog is one of the best ways I learn about an organization. It offers a glimpse into who I could be potentially working with, the projects I could take ownership of, and what the culture is like. In a sense, my first impression can be formed prior to meeting anyone from the teams. With these thoughts in mind, I conceived the idea of creating a blog post series to highlight our designers at MongoDB. I was certain it’d be a great avenue to educate candidates on who we are, what we do, and what we find important. I envisioned it as a helpful resource for both future intern cohort applicants and design role candidates as our team continues to scale. The main goals of the initiative were to allow readers to: Learn more about our core values on the MongoDB design team Understand the responsibilities that a design role at MongoDB entails Educate themselves on the variety of projects MongoDB designers are involved in Grab insights on what MongoDB designers have learned from prior experiences that’ve helped us in our current roles Get a better sense of personalities at MongoDB by learning what the team finds time for outside of the day-to-day job Ultimately, we wanted readers to fully envision what it would be like to work as a designer at MongoDB. I pitched the idea to my manager and, once it was signed off, I reached out to our team for participants in the series. On Slack, I sent out a blurb in our #design channel to recruit those wanted to be featured. To enforce fairness and diversity in participants, I had a “sign-up document” that permitted one person from each product team to be included.

https://uxdesign.cc/launching-mongodbs-meet-the-team-blog-post-series-f286de73694e

['Michelle Chiu']

2020-10-20 20:31:04.748000+00:00

['Technology', 'User Experience', 'Tech', 'Design', 'Writing']

From Insight to Action to Stranger Things — Acrotrend Solutions

In our previous episode of Stranger Things, we looked at how insight drives Netflix’s success. If you missed that post, you can read it here. As we move through the DATA > INSIGHT > ACTION loop, this blog post deep-dives further into the ACTION aspect of Netflix’s data. When we arrive at the Insights stage, 50% of the work has been done: Netflix has made an agreement with Stranger Things’ producers, defined the Stranger Things promotion roadmap and has the KPI framework setup. Now it’s time to create and execute the plan. Netflix already knows who, when, where, what and how to target their subscribers even before spending money on the project. Of course, in reality, it’s a bit more complex than that, but crucially, Netflix is clear on the cost and timelines required to achieve the expected return on their investment. In theory, there are 3 types of audiences here: - FANS: Current subscribers who have been identified as perfect candidates to watch Stranger Things. For them, the cost of marketing activities per user will be relatively low as Netflix already knows that they have a high interest in this genre. According to Symphony AdvancedMedia, Stranger Things Season 1 averaged 8.2m viewers among adults aged 18–49 over the first 17 days. We can assume that most of these viewers belong to this audience set. - CLIENTS: Current subscribers who don’t particularly show interest in Science Fiction-Horror programmes like Stranger Things. Here the marketing effort is higher than for fans, because Netflix has to convince them to watch, whereas the previous segment is already hooked. Using matchmaking and personalising the customer experience, Netflix can drive additional conversions, which also mean higher customer satisfaction and higher retention rates. - PROSPECTS: Science Fiction-Horror fans who aren’t subscribers of Netflix. Converting this audience type will require a significant investment into marketing activities through social media, newspaper articles, physical and digital advertisement. The conversion will be lower, but every new subscription also means a bigger user base and therefore more revenue. Conclusion And there we have it. We hope our Stranger Things mini-series has been an enlightening read and has demonstrated how Netflix makes successful, critical decisions based on data. Clearly, data cannot make every decision by itself; there are some situations where intuition must be used. This is why we prefer to talk about decision-making ‘tools’ rather than as technology that replaces humans — because it doesn’t, and it shouldn’t. Using data to make decisions about your organisation’s next investment or to help you build a strategy is not restricted only to movie industry. This process can be mirrored across any type of business that wants to minimise risk and make more profit. If our series has whet your appetite for more, and you want to become a data-driven organisation, find out more about how Acrotrend can support you on this journey.

https://medium.com/acrotrend-consultancy/from-insight-to-action-to-stranger-things-acrotrend-solutions-c3917fca3c8f

['Acrotrend Consultancy']

2019-08-15 12:55:33.504000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Business Intelligence', 'Netflix', 'Marketing', 'Customer Analytics']

Great Characters Leap off the Page

You’ve thought about your characters. You’ve defined them. You’ve written biographies and histories. They’re 3-dimensional, living beings in your head. All that’s left to do is introduce them to your reader by making them jump off the page. How do we do that? First Impressions Just like real life, when we meet someone in a movie we instantly form a first impression. As the writer, you get to choose what that impression will be. As the writer, you want your reader to instantly grasp the defining qualities of your main character. How your character walks into the world of your movie, what they look like and what they say will form the first indelible image of your characters in the mind of your reader. Everyone in life has a predominant attitude that defines who they are. The same applies to characters in a script. What is their general point of view towards the world? What is their first response to most things? What is their initial attitude? These traits inform your audience. They tell your reader how to see your main character. To ensure that your character comes across the way you want, define what your character’s main impulse tends toward. Are they generally happy? Or they depressed? Are they judgmental? Open-minded? Cheap? Bitter? Kind? Whatever you come up with for your character, write it down and remember it. Put it on a card or piece of paper and keep it on your desk: “My character’s first impulse will be to ___________.” When you’re trying to define your character’s main quality, think about where you want them to end up at the end of the story. In order for your character’s journey to be significant, their attitudes at the beginning of their arc should be as far away from where they end up as possible. Write an Introductory Sentence Before you introduce your main character in your script, know what you want to say about them. Separate from the script, write a precise and specific sentence that describes and defines your character. Analyze the sentence for what information is and isn’t essential. Have you made it as clear and concise and charming as possible? Have you pared it down to only the most essential qualities? Once you have, craft the description so that your reader sees and experience your character in action as they first enter the movie. Remember, everyone always has an agenda — something they want — even if they’re not aware of it. When you introduce your character, they should be in middle of trying to achieve something. Show, Don’t Tell Writers often fall into the trap of using character description to tell the reader information they want the audience to know. This is a mistake. If an actor portraying a character cannot act out on-screen the information you are describing, then this information is exposition which shouldn’t be there. Save the information to be revealed later by the character’s actions. Let your characters demonstrate to the reader who they are. If you describe a character a certain way, that character must prove your point through action. If you say your character is smart, they had better do some really intelligent things. If you say they are funny, they had better make us laugh. No matter how much you tell a reader who or what a character is, if the character’s actions don’t bear out that truth, the reader won’t believe it. The reader will form their own opinions based on what they see in the character’s actions and emotions. Find the Contradictions People are not logical. They are “psychological.” They have conflicting experiences; and thus, they have conflicting ideas and impulses. Like real people, characters are consistent but often contradictory. In every great character there is a unique and specific paradox. A believable and effective character will have one main paradox that makes them intriguing and mysterious. When trying to define that paradox it’s easiest to think of it in juxtaposition to opposing traits. Define it as a “but” phrase that contrasts the two conflicting impulses. If possible, go beyond obvious and find a paradox that surprises the reader by going against what is expected. Once you’ve found the right paradox, before you start writing, experiment with where and how the paradox is revealed. Try revealing your character’s paradox at different points in your outline. When done right, this paradox will surprise your audience, inform them about a different side of your character and make the audience feel more connected and empathetic towards them. For that to happen, your reader must already have enough information about a character to think that they know who that person is. If you reveal the paradox too early, there won’t be enough context to make is a surprise. If you reveal it too late, it will seem like a plot device. The trick — through trial and error — is to find the placement that’s most effective for what you want the reader to think about your character at that specific moment in the character’s journey.

https://medium.com/swlh/great-characters-leap-off-the-page-a63b25bb9a19

['P.W. Alex Er']

2020-05-03 11:11:07.672000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Writers On Writing', 'Characters', 'Character Development', 'Writing']

Give it a SPIN!

Charts are wonderful — they generate information out of myriad little details, unlock insights out of a seemingly unrelated tonnage of data, and to a great extent help uncover the iceberg that’s hidden beneath the cresting water. In my view, data visualization is an interesting blend of art & science that generates engagement and drives further exploration of any given topic. As a self-professed data visualization geek, charts have always fascinated me as a great tool for communicating insights. The ground level fundamentals are obvious by now — each chart is different, and they are most effective when used in the purpose for which they were intended. But on top of it, I have always found playing with a chart and tweaking an existing graphic could be so much fun. One of such things that I find extremely interesting to do? Spinning a chart. Here’s what I mean. Spin it by 180 degrees Below is a line chart that represents number of average footfalls in the local metro stations of one of the major metropolis in the world. Chart 1: Average daily footfalls trend You’d be able to easily identify that there’s a significantly large rush on the weekdays during both AM & PM working hours-time. On weekends, the rush is typically more prominent during the middle of the day. Also, notice that the peak weekend rush is only, at most, half of the peak weekday rush. But now I’ll rotate this same graph by 180 degrees, and with some adjustments on the X-axis, I get the version below: Chart 2.1: Chart 1 rotated by 180 degrees As compared to chart 1, the peaks here are either during mid-day or during the night when trains are not operational (in other words, the inverse of the original). Say I change the y-axis here to “Available Space in the Station” (denoted by Space in the chart). Don’t worry about the actual unit of space; the intent is only to understand the appropriate pattern. Chart 2.2: Average Daily Available Space Index The first graph helped us easily visualize when are the busiest times on the Metro. However, for an Operations worker, who’s looking to utilize station space (perhaps as a source of revenue generation) or primarily wants to understand empty capacity, this is a much more direct depiction compared to Chart 1. And this will be true for any attribute that has an inverse relationship with footfalls / busy-ness. For example, it could be measuring “availability of vacant seats in train” (assuming train frequency doesn’t drop significantly during the day). So, for a person traveling with large luggage or an elderly for whom comfort is more important than actual travel time, this graph gives them a far more direct answer as to when are easier times for them to travel. Chart 1, though, is absolutely the right answer if a decision has to be made for things that are in positive relation with footfall, such as how many ticket counters should be active at what time, what quantity of security personnel need to be deployed & when to better manage oncoming crowds or so on. This is but one simple example from a specific area, but more generally, for two KPIs or metrics that are opposing in nature, a rotation by 180 degrees on one will almost always help to communicate the inverse message of the other. Spin it by 90 degrees Let’s look at this graph below: Chart 3: Profit % by Products This is great if we are looking say at a direct metric like Profitability for different products (A1, A2…A6 in the above) for a given period of time (the exact numbers are again hypothetical and not important). Very easily, it becomes clear which product is riding up north vis-à-vis which product is sliding down south. A1 and A6 seem to be driving lots of profit, while A5 may be worth revisiting for this hypothetical business! But once again, I just can’t help myself rotating this chart. This time, however, I am going to rotate it by only 90 degrees. Chart 4: Forecast Deviation across Products The same Chart 3 would now look like lefthand side image in the graphic above, to which I am going to do some adjustments so that it becomes a better presentation as depicted in the righthand size image above. For Chart 4, rather than representing it as Profit %, consider a new use case — there’s an inventory management system in place, which has a forecast to predict what should be the inventory level for each product. To ensure that the forecast is as close as reality, typically, operations staff would want to monitor the difference between actual and predicted levels on an ongoing basis. The larger the difference, the larger the need to fine-tune the model. And this is such an important function since whether it is under-stocking (Actual Demand greater than Forecast) or over-stocking (Actual Demand less than Forecast), both situations are either significant revenue lost or cost to organization, if the deviation is above a tolerable threshold. In this case, if Chart 3 (un-rotated version) was used — a positive Y-axis would have indicated over-stock situations while negative Y-axis would have indicated under stock situations. See below: Typically in a chart like that, cognitively we are so attuned to perceive a negative y-value as bad and positive y-value as good, so there’s a good chance many users may get misled attributing under-stocking to be a problem area but not over-stocking, when in reality, large deviations are most likely equally bad, regardless of direction. Precisely these are such situations when a rotated chart as in Chart 4 will come in handy. Users looking at this chart are more likely to not get biased and would tend to understand the interpretation of the bars for themselves in order to draw an appropriate conclusion. So while Chart 3 was good for metrics where order of directions matter (i.e. one of a positive/negative axis value is actually an exclusively a good-bad situation), Chart 4 is better for metrics where neither direction is disproportionately important, case in point being bi-directional deviation from the center. Long story short: what message you’re trying to send with your chart matters. Whenever you are creating a graph from scratch, you need to think about what that chart is going to convey, which type of chart should be selected, what would be the axes, layout, labels, etc. And if you are already following these fundamental best practices, the graphs you create will start speaking clearly to your audience. And while you are doing this, there’s no harm in giving your chart a spin — who knows, something that was confounding your audience may suddenly nail it 90 degrees later! Or you get to see something that you didn’t even think of when you started! Saurabh Singhal is a Data Visualization & Analytics specialist who takes pride in delivering business value by generating data based insights. He is passionate about data, number crunching & everything around that. In another universe, “Data & Numbers” would have been his most sophisticated & closest ally. It would be a character whose alien musings may get unfathomable at times but would always be engrossing & enriching!

https://medium.com/nightingale/give-it-a-spin-40f2f7574627

['Saurabh Singhal']

2020-04-29 13:01:01.091000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Insight Data Science', 'Analytics', 'Insights', 'Visualization']

Influencer Marketing — Influencers, Screws, Reviews

Bernard Goldbach https://www.flickr.com/photos/topgold/ In the 1860’s a prominent machinist named William Sellers set out on a mission to standardise the common screw. Importantly, this was a screw by his own design. At that time, screws were made individually, by hand, on demand. Sellers saw the opportunity to develop an interchangeable screw, which could be mass-produced and lead to lower prices and speed of delivery. It also meant specialist screw machinists lost their uniqueness and most likely their trade. Much like the scribe, who objected heavily to the printing press, the machinists would do everything in their power to block Sellers. Hand-made screws meant repeat business for machinists and that customers were locked in. In the 1860’s Sellers set out on an influencer campaign. Connection and influence became his leading tactic. And so, Sellers targeted influential and heavy users of the screw. He started with the railroad and U.S, navy. This created an air of momentum, much like a snowball starting to roll down a hill. With this momentum, word of mouth played its part, closely followed by (the medium of choice at that time), the newspaper. As you can guess, Sellers won and today we see the result of his vision. Once standardisation bedded in, so did an eco-system of standardized products around the screw. Influencers If you take Sellers tactic and view it as a framework you can see how it is the essence of influencer marketing. A top PR firm owner once described PR to me as follows: If I were to tell you my blog is great that is communications. If I told someone to tell other people my blog is great that is marketing. If people tell each other my blog is great, that is PR. Taking this simple formula and applying it to Influencer Marketing we get a mix of 2 and 3. On this week’s Innovation Show we talk to №1 Global “Digital Marketing Influencer” in 2016 and Forbes “Top 20 Influencer of CMO’s” in 2017, Jeff Bullas. As a recognised influencer Jeff tells us how to engage influencers like him. Jeff describes influencer marketing as follows: “Influencer marketing is reaching the tribes of influencers, people, who have built credibility and authenticity in their niche and their industry and quite often is doing that through great content.” — Jeff Bullas There are some conflicts that need to be balanced to achieve this. The influencer will not waver on their credibility and promote a product they do not believe in. Jeff sees co-created or collaboratively created content as the best way to achieve influencer marketing. This content needs to address the pain points or interests of the tribe. Lazy marketers will create a blanket piece of content and expect this to be one size fits all (much like Sellers’ screw above). Content distribution does not work that way. Jeff sees the influencer as the orchestrator of how to distribute content as well as the co-creator of this content. Distribution is key, as the influencer inherently understands the content consumption habits of their tribe and how each platform plays a different role. When you place content on a non-owned platform you must observe the behavior of the audience of that platform. Big brands are so used to mass media messaging that they struggle when it comes to influencer marketing. The reality is the advertising landscape has been atomised into much smaller slices of the pie. To compete as a marketer one must embark on a journey of constant education. One must learn the platforms by doing, not reading and thus understand which are relevant for your brand and your audience. Many measurement metrics need to be reimagined and recalibrated for today’s world of marketing. Many marketers do not convert their marketing effort to sales. The challenge is often that there are very few board members who are aware what is good and what is not and so very few call it as it really is… A final piece of the pie to consider is the education piece of marketing. Jeff sees marketing as 75% education and 25% sales and feels marketers consistently fail at the last piece, hence the adage that the best marketers are ex-salespeople. Reviews On this week’s show we also talk to Gisela Hausmann, author of nine books, including the award-winning “Naked Determination”. Gisela is an email evangelist, and an expert Amazon reviewer and Amazon review coach. The reason both Jeff and Gisela are on the same show is the common denominator of authenticity. In a world of always on, of suspicion of advertising, of ad blocking and (bad) content marketing authenticity is king. This is no different for the world of reviews. If Amazon or iTunes sniff a false or planted review they will come down very harshly on the culprit. Why are reviews important? No-one really believes the highly produced piece to camera any more. Yes, it still has its place, but the savvy marketer needs to consider every customer touch point. Reviews are an aspect so often overlooked, when you think about human behavior, reviews are an essential slice of the marketing pie. Think for a moment of a purchase decision. A buyer will check user reviews before they read an article in the newspaper or a YouTube video by the brand. This is akin to checking tripadvisor reviews or forum reviews before deciding on a hotel destination. Gisela gives us some real nuggets such as how it is vital for any brand selling on Amazon to ensure they get reviewed on Amazon US first. Why? Amazon US is a blanket review site where the reviews for the US are also made available in other countries and are placed below the local market reviews. Unbeknownst to most is that when you place a review on Amazon it is only available on that local market’s website. Gisela also tells us how to approach professional reviewers, for example do not try to impress or woo the reviewer. Reviewers get sent the product to review, but there are strict regulations around what they can do with the product, for example Amazon won’t let them sell a product they review. We discuss an example of one reviewer who reviews Dog products. This reviewer uses the product, reviews it and then donates everything to a local dog shelter. You can see the correlation between influencers, screws and reviews now. Marketers need to re-educate themselves. The old world is long dead, we are in a world of accelerated innovation and innovation is a form of evolution that often people don’t see until it is too late. Don’t be a stagnant marketer and never take risks. This is a journey with no destination. The destination is the journey. To excel in the new business environment in any respect we must embark on a journey of constant learning, self-improvement and enjoy the journey. THANKS FOR READING On this week’s Innovation Show we talk to №1 Global “Digital Marketing Influencer”, 2016 and Forbes “Top 20 Influencers of CMO’s” in 2017, Jeff Bullas. As an influencer Jeff tells us how to engage an influencer to excel at influence marketing. He also lets us know a bit about his mindset and what drives him. We talk to Gisela Hausmann, author of nine books, including award-winning “Naked Determination” Gisela is an email evangelist, and an expert Amazon reviewer and review coach. Finally, we talk to Lisa Marie Clinton, founder and CEO of Avail (Assisted Visuals Achieving Independent Living). Avail is a portable, discreet virtual assistant. It works as an e-learning app and web portal for children and adults with intellectual or development disabilities. The app and site deliver smart prompts based on the person’s ability, so it is personalised to the user. You can subscribe on iTunes here. Website is here. TuneIn is here. Soundcloud is below.

https://medium.com/thethursdaythought/influencer-marketing-influencers-screws-reviews-ce5e037742a6

['Aidan Mccullen']

2017-02-09 19:19:06.644000+00:00

['Influencer Marketing', 'Social Media', 'Amazon', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing']

The Ultimate Guide To Growing Your Audience

The Ultimate Guide To Growing Your Audience The six elements of an effective audience growth strategy. Congrats! If you read this, you’ll already have done more than most people do to grow their audience. What follows is a breakdown of the keys to audience growth and how to establish the necessary mindset to build your fanbase and further your career. While every creator’s specific situation is unique, this overview is designed to help you develop a strategy you can adapt to your own particular goals and needs. If you’d like additional help, there’s information at the bottom of this post about how I can work with you to help you figure it out. How I Know What I Know Before I get into the advice, here’s a bit about my background and experience with growing audiences for creative work. I’ve worked in a combination of content production, social media, and marketing for the past 20 years and learned the basic principles of audience growth are the same — no matter whether you’re a comedian, musician, blogger, author, filmmaker, or the most popular entertainment show on the planet (the Oscars). Here are a few examples of audiences I’ve grown over the years: - I oversaw digital media and marketing for The Academy and The Oscars for five years. During that time I grew the Academy’s social following from 400,000 fans to more than 10 million and helped create one of the biggest social media moments in history — the Ellen selfie. - I created Connected Comedy, which became the largest source of comedy marketing information in the world with an audience of more than 20,000 comedians. - I created the For The Interested newsletter, a weekly collection of 10 ideas to help people learn, do, and become better at their work, art, and life. It has attracted 15,000 subscribers in its first year. I’ve also helped clients like New Line Cinema, Focus Features, Participant Media, Warner Bros. Television, and many comedians, writers, musicians, and businesses build audiences and promote their creations. What An Audience Actually Is Let’s start with some clarity about what it means to have an audience. Too often creators think of their “audience” as the number of people who consume their creations. But I disagree. Your audience isn’t the number of people who consume a particular creation, but rather the number of people you can count on to consume your NEXT creation. This is a HUGE and important difference that can (and should) shift your entire mindset about audience growth. If you have a video go viral and get seen by a million people, but none of them subscribe to your YouTube channel or email list, have you really grown your audience? No. Because without a CONNECTION to your fans, you have no ability to ensure they will see your NEXT creation — which is ultimately what matters and why it’s a more accurate way to measure your audience. If 500 people come see your show, love it, and leave without connecting to you in any way that you can reach them next week, then you didn’t grow your audience at all. Quite the opposite. All you did was let 500 people who should be in your audience walk out the door without becoming part of your fanbase. Five hundred people who loved you but didn’t connect with you is nothing more than 500 missed opportunities. As you read on, keep in mind these audience growth strategies are not just about getting exposure for your work — they’re about building your actual audience. That’s what matters. That’s what careers are built on. The 6 Elements Of Audience Growth Six elements need to come together in order to grow your audience. If you struggle to grow your audience or are just starting out, it’s important to think through each of these elements and develop a strategy to address each one. And if you want to improve your rate of existing audience growth, it’s helpful to analyze the current status of each element to figure out where you can improve and what opportunities you may be missing. Element 1: Audience Identification You can’t grow your audience until you decide who you want to be in your audience. Who’s most likely to enjoy what you create? Hone in on a profile of those people. How old are they? Do they live in cities or suburbs? Are they married or single? Rich or poor? What kind of jobs do they have? What are their interests? Then, think about what other things those people consume. Who are their favorite creators? What do they read, watch and listen to? Who do they follow on social media? What do they care about? What do they value? What motivates them? Another way to think about this is to answer this question: If I guaranteed you 1,000 people would see your next creation, but those people couldn’t include anybody you know or anybody famous…who would you choose to be in that crowd? You’d choose the people most likely to enjoy what you do — that’s your target audience. This doesn’t mean your target audience are the only people who will ultimately become a part of your audience. If your target audience is women, that doesn’t mean you can’t have male fans. What it means is you’re going to target your content and promotion to reach that ideal audience and grow from there. Think of it like a dartboard. Your target audience is the bullseye and you aim for that. But some of your darts will inevitably land outside the bullseye and attract other fans as well. Element 2: Content Creation This is the fun part. Or at least the reason most of us create things in the first place. Your content is the gas that fuels your audience growth — it’s what attracts people and convinces them to stick around for the long haul. But there are two truths about content creation you need to understand. 1. Your content has to be good. I repeat, your content has to be good. If your content’s not good, none of this other stuff matters because it won’t work. You can’t trick somebody into becoming your fan and nobody becomes a fan of things that aren’t good. (NOTE: Keep in mind that good is subjective and you don’t need everybody to think your work is good — you just need your target audience to think it’s good.) 2. You need to produce content on an ongoing basis. Because audience growth is fueled by content, it’s important to regularly create stuff and put it into the world. If you only put something out once every few months or once a year, your opportunity for audience growth is significantly diminished. On the other hand, don’t feel like you need to constantly post a million things a day on social media — quality is as important as quantity. In a perfect world, at least three pieces of content a week works well. (NOTE: That doesn’t mean if you’re an author you have to publish three books a week or a musician has to release three songs a week. Content can take many forms and be as simple as a compelling and high quality social media update. The point is to create and share valuable content on a consistent basis). Element 3: Content Optimization Creating great content is only half the battle. You also must optimize that content to ensure you get the most out of it. This includes everything from how the content is posted, to how it’s positioned, to how it’s repurposed. These little things make a big difference in the ultimate performance of the content. For example, posting a video to Facebook as a YouTube link reduces its reach (because Facebook’s algorithm hates YouTube) while posting your video as a natively uploaded Facebook video increases its reach (because Facebook’s algorithm loves its own video player). Another example is taking something you wrote that’s great and chopping it up to get multiple pieces of great content out of the work you’ve already done. One post can be turned into multiple short posts, quotes from it can be turned into compelling images, and more. Most creators don’t get the maximum value out of their creations and as a result their content reaches fewer people and attracts fewer fans. Element 4: Content Distribution and Promotion Once your content’s optimized, it’s ready to be unleashed on the world — this is where your distribution and promotion plan comes in. Don’t believe the myth that things magically go “viral.” To grow an audience you have to be strategic about how to get your work seen. For starters, think back to the Audience Identification phase. Your initial efforts should be geared toward getting your content into the places where your target audience is likely to see them — after all, they’re the ones you think are most likely to enjoy it. That’s why it’s important to figure out what your target audience consumes and where they consume it — it helps you find them. Whether on blogs, social platforms, influencers, playlists, or anything else you can come up with — you want to get your creations where people are already looking. The other key to distribution is to recognize there are two ways to get attention for your work: Earned media and Paid media. If possible, use both. Earned media is anything you can do to get other people with an audience to share your work with their audience. This includes press, PR, influencers, and leveraging anybody else who has the ability to tell more people about your work. Paid media is advertising — but it’s not the typical commercials and banner ads you likely ignore. Instead, pay to promote your actual content through things like Facebook ads, which are incredibly powerful because they put your content where people will actually engage with it — in their feeds. Every creator should use Facebook ads to grow their audience because it allows you to get your content in front of your exact target audience in an incredibly inexpensive way. A quick example: I recently helped a comedian promote her upcoming show in a city where she didn’t live and had no pre-existing audience. Using Facebook ads, we were able to reach her exact target audience (in her case it was 20–40 year old gay men and women who enjoy stand up comedy and live within 50 miles of the comedy club). For just $14, 780 people in that target audience saw a video of her standup and a plug for the upcoming show — 18 of them clicked through to the club’s ticket sales page to buy tickets. All that for $14. There’s no excuse for creators not to use Facebook ads to grow their audience and promote their content and shows. For what you spend on a cup of coffee each day, you can get meaningful results. Element 5: Audience Conversion This is the single most overlooked element of audience growth. Remember how I said your audience isn’t how many people saw your last creation, but rather how many you can count on to see your next one? That’s why this audience conversion step is so crucial. Audience conversion is your ability to convert people who are exposed to your content into members of your actual audience. It’s how you take somebody who’s a casual viewer or listener and turn them into a fan you can reach with your future work. To do this, you must first select a key conversion metric to measure your audience growth. There are multiple metrics that could work for you depending on your goals. In most cases, turning somebody into an email subscriber is what provides you the most value. But you could decide instead to have your key conversion metric be podcast or YouTube subscribers, social media followers, or whatever method you choose that enables you to efficiently reach that person with your future creations. While you may want multiple conversions (it’s great to have people follow you on Twitter AND join your email list for example), you’ll have the most success if you focus on one single metric. The more asks you make of people, the less likely they are to do any of them. So pick one key metric and use your content and distribution to drive people to take that single action. This metric is not only how you will measure your audience growth, but it’s also how you’ll measure the success of your creative work. If you perform for 100 people and they love the show but none of them join your email list, that show was less valuable for you than the one where only 50 people liked the show, but 40 of them joined your list. Remember: Audience growth is about a mindset and when you see this conversion metric as your goal, it enables you to make meaningful progress much quicker than you otherwise would. Element 6: Audience Activation The final step in the process of audience growth is to activate the audience you’ve acquired. This means figuring out ways to get your existing audience to consume and share your content as well as developing strategies to get your audience to spread the word about you and your work. Once you’ve identified your target audience, gotten your content in front of them, and converted them into your fans, the work’s not done. In some ways, it’s just begun. Your ability to activate your audience is a key to supercharging your growth because it means that each additional new fan brings with them a whole network of other people they can introduce to your creations. The best audiences are the ones with the most engaged and passionate fans. And the most engaged fans are the ones where creators are committed to serve and connect with them. Treat your fans like gold and take a personal interest in them — they’re the key to your ultimate success. 5 Common Audience Growth Mistakes Every creator is different, but here are five of the most common mistakes I see creators make when it comes to audience growth. 1. Don’t choose a target audience that’s too broad or not defined at all. If you’re a comic, your target audience isn’t just “people who like comedy” and if you’re a hip hop artist your audience isn’t just “people who like hip hop music.” Think about it — Louis CK has a huge audience, but it’s only made of people who like a certain type of comedy. The same is true for Jay Z — his work is targeted at people who enjoy a certain type of hip hop. The more you narrow your target audience, the easier it becomes to find, reach, and connect with those people and the stronger those connections tend to be. Get specific. 2. Don’t ask people to subscribe to your mailing list without explaining its value. Don’t ask people to subscribe to your mailing list or newsletter without giving them a reason to do so — and that reason should be an offer of something THEY value, not just something YOU value. Too often creators ask people to subscribe to their list without explaining what’s in it for the subscriber or with promises of things like updates about your future shows which is more valuable to YOU than THEM. Mailing lists that don’t offer (and deliver) a clear value proposition to potential subscribers, don’t get sign ups. 3. Don’t ask more from your fans than you’re willing to give to your fans. You have to care more about your fans than they do about you and you have to make that clear to them. If you take them for granted, if you don’t care about their interests, and if you don’t make attempts to genuinely get to know them, you can’t expect them to care about you. You will owe your entire career to your fans so treat them that way. 4. Don’t expect results from mediocre content. Remember how I said your content has to be good or else none of this other stuff will ever work? Well, I’m going to say it again. Your content has to be good. Real good. If you’re hustling and following all this advice and still not getting any traction then maybe it’s time to focus on improving your content. It might just not be good enough — yet. 5. Don’t refuse to invest in audience growth. Audience growth doesn’t happen overnight and neither do successful careers. Play the long game and concentrate on making steady progress instead of looking for shortcuts and expecting to be an overnight superstar. Audience growth is hard — it takes time, effort, patience, and resources. If you’re not willing to invest in growing your audience, you shouldn’t expect to have one. Recommended Audience Growth Articles I’ve written a lot about various audience growth tactics beyond the overview in this post. Here are a few you may want to check out: How to grow your audience using Facebook. How I doubled the reach of my Facebook posts without spending any money. Why you need to stalk your audience on Facebook. 5 keys to a successful creative career. How to get more people to subscribe to your newsletter. How to get over your fear of self-promotion. How to use a one-action strategy to activate your audience. You don’t find your “voice” — you develop it. How you answer these four questions determines your social media success. Why most social media strategies fail. Recommended Books There are tons of great books out there about audience growth, but here are five that I strongly recommend for creators. Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us Contagious: Why Things Catch On #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take On Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys To Creativity Want More Help? I consult with creators and companies to help them grow and activate their audience. If you’d like to discuss how I can help you, email me at josh@joshspector.com. Thanks for reading and I hope you found this info helpful. Good luck with your new and improved audience! Are You One Of The Interested? Each week I share actionable ideas to improve your work, art, and life with The Interested. Click below to see them.

https://medium.com/an-idea-for-you/the-ultimate-guide-to-growing-your-audience-5a25af3bbcff

['Josh Spector']

2019-10-24 22:16:32.219000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Startup', 'Social Media', 'Digital Marketing', 'Entertainment']

Boundaries Are Not Walls

Boundaries Are Not Walls Bringing us together and to better mental well-being The term ‘boundary’ can sometimes be misleading. We aren’t talking about building walls. We are building a fence — remember, ‘good fences make good neighbors’. Boundaries are necessary to establish better relationships with ourselves and others. Not only are boundaries crucial in establishing your own identity, but also necessary for your mental health and well-being. They can be physical or emotional, loose or rigid. They are what you feel is necessary. Setting boundaries is hard. I wish it were easy, but I won’t lie to you. It’s hard to say the word ‘no’ especially when you want to help someone out, look good for your boss. We get it, no one wants to let anyone else down. When did saying ‘no’ cast you in a negative light? We continue to work hours upon hours, sending emails and slack messages late into the night to show that we are working in hard, especially in a remote setting. When did exhaustion become a status symbol? You feel the pressure day in and day out. That’s right, you might be heading toward ‘burnout’ — mental exhaustion — because you cannot say ‘no.’ It’s a recipe for disaster. Photo by Tony Tran on Unsplash I’ve recently reestablished my own boundaries; especially as they pertain to work during the year of COVID-19. Is there a better year other than 2020 to work on the promotion of self-care or working to help others amongst a tsunami of negativity? Working from home during a pandemic has created varying blurred lines. When does the work day begin? When does it end? One forgets that the drive to and from work may be utilized to decompress, shrug off any negative feelings that might persist after a hard day. Getting up and walking down the hall to the bathroom to get a few extra steps or even taking a moment to walk to the other end of the office to chat with a coworker — those helped! I certainly utilized my commute to decompress on the ride home, however, I don’t miss it. It allows me to get almost an hour and a half back with work when I am not in the car. Go figure. However, this is dangerous. I found myself working earlier and earlier, but also later and later. I took control. I decided that 5pm was the cutoff…no matter what time I started. This single step — this one boundary that I have established for myself — has single-handedly turned some of my stress and mental exhaustion upside down. It wasn’t easy, there was the anxiety over unanswered emails or unread slack messages; but this is something for me! This is something I needed to do to be okay so that I can be better for everyone else and be there for those in need of support. We must first understand our own limits. Some of us have deep reservoirs of resiliency, or maybe just a shallow puddle drying up in the midday summer heat. One of the first steps in establishing boundaries for yourself is to understand and identify your specific pain points. Then, outline specifically what that boundary is to whomever needs to hear it.

https://medium.com/narrative/boundaries-are-not-walls-e828dde8b9cf

['Tara Rose']

2020-10-16 12:12:55.277000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Mental Health Awareness', 'Self Improvement']

Don’t Try to be Anyone’s Rock if You’re a Pile of Rubble

Christmas is one big bundle of obligation at the best of times. Add 2020 into the mix and we have one magnificent ball of clusterfuckery. We’re all trying to figure out how to make this holiday season as normal as possible when we know that normal doesn’t exist right now. Let’s not pretend that millions of people haven’t lost jobs, livelihoods, and loved ones this year. Instead, let’s call it like we see it and admit that nobody’s Christmas will be as merry as it usually is. No one is coming home for the holidays and if they are, they’re probably breaking a law or two in doing so. The majority of us are struggling in one way or another this year and some of us will be lucky to accomplish getting out of bed for the holidays. I don’t want to get out of bed on Christmas morning, and I certainly don’t want to pretend to be festive when the most important human in my life became an angel this year. Yet, there are other important people still with me and the weight of my loss rests on their shoulders too. But I don’t feel like trying to add joy and merriment to anyone’s Christmas. I don’t feel it’s my job to show up, never mind lift up anyone during the holidays. The fact that this holiday season is upon me only three months after the worst event of my life, and on the tail end of a whole pandemic, is an inconvenience that I resent right now. It weighs heavily on me that I am someone else’s child because it feels as though I’m expected to grace my mother with my presence. I’m not in a position to be anyone’s rock right now. I suspect many of us feel the same way. Millions of people worldwide have succumbed to 2020, whether due to Coronavirus or other tragic spinoffs of this shit show. Some of us aren’t ready to fake it just yet. I have invested a grand total of ZERO into Christmas shopping and I don’t intend to. There’s only one gift in the whole world that I want and I can’t get it — so I’m opting out of Christmas this year. Believe me when I say I’m just showing up for the food. If I had my way I’d choose to spend Christmas day alone, playing in a snow drift with my dog. We got a fantastically large dump of snow this week and it is my sole desire to play in it like a child. Nobody needs permission to not show up for Christmas this year. If you don’t feel like giving into the obligation, then don’t. I wrote this more for the people who have expectations of others showing up for them. Some of us don’t have the heart to show up right now so if we don’t, allow us some grace and realize that we’re allowing ourselves to feel what we need to feel. We didn’t all come through this year unscathed and some of us will never, ever know normal again. Remind yourself that if you came through 2020 with a heartbeat and a pulse you’ll be okay, one step at a time.

https://medium.com/rogues-gallery/dont-try-to-be-anyone-s-rock-if-you-re-a-pile-of-rubble-f858fd93031c

['Kristi Keller']

2020-12-24 18:42:49.015000+00:00

['Mindfulness', 'Mental Health', 'Self Love', '2020', 'Wellness']

How To Write A Book Review

Photo by Daria Obymaha from Pexels Reading. Chances are, for you to have clicked on this blog post, you’re into it (otherwise why are you here, seriously?), and you have some thoughts about some of the stuff you read. You’ve likely found that, to be considering writing a review, you’ve come across a book that was so brilliant or so awful that you just need to shout about it. Or, perhaps, you need to write a report on something you’ve read, but aren’t sure how to go about it. Either way, I’ve got you covered. Without further ado, here’s how you write a book review! Step 1: To Spoil or Not To Spoil: That is the Question Before you start writing your review, it’s good to have an idea about whether your review will contain spoilers or not. It might not seem like that big of an issue, but if you want people to read future reviews (and, you know, not leave a flaming pile of angry complaints in your comments section) you need to think about your target audience and what they want from your review. If you’re writing a review for someone who is thinking about reading the book, keeping your review spoiler-free is probably a safe bet. If you’re writing a review for, say, a parent looking to buy a book for their teenager or someone who’s read the book, spoilers won’t be a big issue. If you decide to write a review that features spoilers, for the love of all that is good and mighty, warn your audience! Maybe you need to have a good rant or praise your favourite book, but make sure your audience goes into your review knowing what to expect so they’re on the same page. (See what I did there?) Step 2: The Book Is About What Now…? There’s no point telling the reader about what makes the book so wonderful (or terrible) if they don’t know what it’s about. You don’t have to go into depth about the book (after all, that’s what the rest of the review is about), but it helps to give your audience an idea of what happens in the story so that they can understand the rest of your review. If you’re not sure what to say, focus on the blurb and by mention the critical points of the story. Here’s an example: In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry (also known as the ‘Boy Who Lived’) learns he is a wizard and goes to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to learn magic. Along the way, he begins to learn about the wizarding world and meet new friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. But when Harry worries that someone is trying to steal the Philosopher’s Stone, he and his friends must work together to try and stop the culprit. Obviously, we know there is a lot more to the story than that, but this is a good starting point before you expand on other aspects of the story in your review. If you decide to include spoilers, you might talk about Professor Snape and Quirrell, Quidditch etc, but make sure to keep your summary as brief as possible. If you explain so much that there’s no point in your audience reading (or re-reading) the book, you’ve taken it too far! Warning: Don’t talk about the ending at the beginning of your review! You can explain what you did or didn’t like about it (if you have a particularly strong opinion later) or say whether you did or didn’t like it, but don’t go into detail what happens straight off the bat. Step 3: That. Is. So. Cool! Think about what the book did well (if anything). In a spoiler-free version, you might be more general and speak about which characters you liked or how it was written. In a spoiler version, you would go into more detail about the plot and events. For example: Spoiler-free: The story has a few moments that are emotional where Harry thinks about his parents and how he misses them. These moments are really touching and remind the reader that he is a small boy who is vulnerable in a lot of ways. Spoiler: The Mirror of Erised shows the viewer their heart’s desire, so when Harry sees his parents, you realise just how much he misses them. This bit of the book offers a genuinely touching moment where Harry speaks to Dumbledore about the need to find acceptance and move on. In a spoiler-free version, you can talk about events that happen early on or which are well-known or promoted. However, avoid plot points or twists later on in the book, which could spoil a reader’s later enjoyment or ruin surprises. For example, it wouldn’t be a big spoiler to say that Harry gets an owl called Hedwig because that doesn’t have a significant impact on the plot, but it would be a big spoiler to explain who was after the Philosopher’s Stone (or Sorcerer’s Stone for any American readers!) Step 4: *Face Palm* Now, we’ve established what the book does well, what doesn’t it do well? What bits were disappointing or made you so bitterly angry that you wanted to throw it across the room (and not in the way the author intended)? Unless the book is the best thing you’ve ever read, the chances are that it’s going to have its moments that make you cringe or start counting pages to the end of the chapter. Talk about them! Once again, think about your audience! If it’s one overarching point, touch on it but avoid going into too much detail if you’re not sharing any spoilers. If you’re talking about specifics, make sure you have your spoiler warning in place. Here’s a quick example: Spoiler-free: When you learn how Harry ends up with his relatives, it’s hard not to judge Dumbledore harshly or question just what he was thinking. Spoiler: Can we talk about Dumbledore? Seriously. He left a baby on a doorstep in October! It would have been freezing cold! Couldn’t he have knocked on the door first? Maybe said, oh I don’t know: “Would you mind taking care of your nephew? What’s that? Oh, you hate magic? Well then let me take this child elsewhere. Toodle-pip!”* *This point is used solely to explain the differences and would not be considered a major spoiler considering it happens in the first chapter. Though seriously, Dumbledore what were you thinking- blood wards or not, that’s just lousy childcare. Step 5: Does it work? What is the story trying to achieve and does it do it? Using our Harry Potter example: does the book do a good job of telling a story about a boy wizard who is trying to stop the Philosopher’s Stone from being stolen? If you’ve read fantasy, does it do a good job of world-building and explaining fantasy aspects such as magic systems, history, race etc? Or, if the story is a romance, is the couple worth rooting for and are the characters interesting? Think about what the story is trying to achieve then explain why you think it does or doesn’t accomplish its goal. Step 6: And, the verdict is… Would you recommend the book? What would you rate it overall? After all, this is what those who’ve read your review are trying to find out, so don’t leave them waiting any longer to find out whether the book is worth a read or needs to be avoided at all costs. You can either say whether you liked the book or not- a simple ‘read it’ or ‘run screaming’ will do here- or you can give it a rating out of five stars. You can even take it a step further by recommending the book to a certain kind of reader (a life-saver for prospective gift-givers) or those who enjoy a certain type of trope. For example: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is an excellent read for those who enjoy fantasies about magic and ‘chosen ones’. The story (and series) can serve as a great introduction to books for new readers.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-write-a-book-review-b6d3f2fae388

['Mary Fletcher']

2020-01-21 12:13:34.650000+00:00

['Review', 'Books', 'Reading', 'Readers', 'Writing']

How to Build Antifragile Organisations

How to Build Antifragile Organisations Be like viruses and bacteria — embrace stressors and disruption. Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash Whenever we try to eliminate viruses and bacteria, it comes back stronger the next time — requiring a stronger antidote to eliminate it. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. — Freidrich Nietzsche Things that Gain from Disorder Certain organisms thrive in disorder and chaotic situations. Nassim Taleb coined the term “Antifragile” to describe this phenomenon. Antifragile is: Different from robust and fragile — if fragility means breaking in chaos and robustness being immune to chaos, antifragile means thriving in chaos. — if fragility means breaking in chaos and robustness being immune to chaos, antifragile means thriving in chaos. Having limited downside and unlimited upside — a state whereby you can potentially gain huge benefits from sudden shocks to the environment with limited losses. — a state whereby you can potentially gain huge benefits from sudden shocks to the environment with limited losses. Desiring volatility, uncertainty, disorder, and chaos — growth and progress is accelerated in such situations and environments. Some examples of antifragility include: Startups — potential to grow into “unicorns” (unlimited upside) and failure is generally limited to the capital invested. — potential to grow into “unicorns” (unlimited upside) and failure is generally limited to the capital invested. Muscles — hypertrophy occurs when fibres of the muscle sustain damage or injury, after repairing the damaged fibres, the mass and size of muscles grow larger. — hypertrophy occurs when fibres of the muscle sustain damage or injury, after repairing the damaged fibres, the mass and size of muscles grow larger. Human psychology — through adversity and challenges, i.e. heartbreaks, failures, our minds have the potential to capitalise on adversities and come back stronger than ever. There are several other examples, i.e. body immune system, bacteria, etc. but I hope you get the idea. The Antidote to Black Swans With the advancements in technology and the acceleration of digitalisation today, the environment is transforming at a much faster rate — resulting in higher occurrences of “Black Swans”, i.e. disruptive solutions. I was in an environment which dealt with the VUCA situation rather well. Here are three key lessons which I found useful in navigating today’s VUCA environment: Focus on the things that don’t change (Via negativa): we cannot predict what changes may come, but we know what’s unlikely to change, e.g. consumer’s demand for better experiences and services, and focus on those things. Disrupt internally and externally: constantly seek problems — the bigger, the better — to solve, because that’s where we can find opportunities for change and improvement. Frequent pitch sessions and hackathons were organised throughout the year to cultivate the mindset of embracing problems. Change and reorganise with the times: regardless of whether times are good or bad, the organisation structure is constantly updating to the environment. Company reorganisations were common to adapt. Considering antifragility is the second-order effect of a disruption at the underlying layer, e.g. our cells killed by bacteria to boost our immune system in the long run, we can induce it by gradually exposing ourselves to disruption for our benefit, i.e. rapid growth. I realised that these “disruptions” could be viewed as insights that help us to learn, improve and grow. Once we are able to change our perspective on VUCA and create a system that allows us to benefit from it, we’ll be seeking and embracing more of such situations. An example would be the recent COVID-19 situation which led to major disruptions in various sectors, i.e. transportation, retail, etc. and a drastic change in consumer behaviour. To the Antifragilist, this situation could pose a fantastic opportunity to start an online business where it would address the change in consumer’s demand for goods. In this case, taking a small risk could potentially yield a large reward. In the above example, the underlying assumption is that consumers are constantly demanding convenience and better experiences (#1: focus on things that don’t change). You may have to disrupt your existing model (#2: disrupt internally) and repivot to the new normal (#3: change with the times) and forge ahead. Down to the Individual I apply the same principles to my personal life. Here are some of my approaches: Experiment often and make bold moves — through the lens of having little to lose and a lot to gain. Although I’ve had several past experiences which almost cost me my life, those are the also the ones that changed me the most — for the better. — through the lens of having little to lose and a lot to gain. Although I’ve had several past experiences which almost cost me my life, those are the also the ones that changed me the most — for the better. Eliminate the noise and distractions — focus on the core principles rather than the specific details. Principles and mental models are some of the things which stood the test of time and can be applied across industries — a worthwhile investment. Sometimes, it’s more about knowing what is irrelevant and what not to do that’s more important. — focus on the core principles rather than the specific details. Principles and mental models are some of the things which stood the test of time and can be applied across industries — a worthwhile investment. Sometimes, it’s more about knowing what is irrelevant and what not to do that’s more important. Reinvent oneself often — sometimes, hard choices would have to be made to grow; just like how the caterpillar has to digest itself to grow parts of the butterfly. When I found that I wasn’t growing the way I intended in a particular environment, I had to make hard switches and sacrifices. All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there. — Charlie Munger Key takeaways The hydra is the prime example of antifragility. Slay one head, and two grows in its place. The more significant the disruption, the stronger it gets.

https://medium.com/the-internal-startup/how-to-build-anti-fragile-organisations-372c00689bd2

['Jimmy Soh']

2020-06-28 15:24:52.321000+00:00

['Business Strategy', 'Personal Development', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Technology']

The Future is Quantum

The intelligence community doesn’t have to worry about such threats yet, however. Since quantum physicists began working in earnest to try and create a quantum computer in the late 1990s, they have yet to build anything approaching a working machine, never mind running anything as complex as Grover’s or Shor’s algorithms at scale. That’s due to one simple reason: to create an effective quantum computer, it’s necessary to isolate qubits from the outside environment enough so that interactions with the outside world don’t create errors, a concept known as coherence. At the same time, they have to be sufficiently connected to the environment that they can be manipulated into performing the operations required of them. That combination has proven extremely difficult, especially as engineers have tried to scale up from two qubits to 5 or 10 or 100. “Even five or six years ago, it wasn’t clear we’d ever be able to make a useable system,” says Robert Schoelkopf, a Yale physicist who has been experimenting to create quantum computers since 1998. “In the beginning, the question was if we would ever be able to make a qubit well enough and isolated from the environment enough that we could have superconductors that we could manipulate with some reasonable fidelity.” Currently, two leading contenders for quantum computing technology are superconducting circuits and trapped ions, both of which have their benefits and drawbacks. Superconducting circuit qubits, like those in Oliver’s lab at MIT, use the same basic techniques as those used to create modern computer chips, using semiconductor manufacturing tools to deposit, pattern, and etch superconducting aluminum on silicon wafers. For the qubit, two layers of superconducting aluminum are separated by a layer of insulating aluminum oxide; through that, a tiny tunnel called a “Josephson junction” allows millions of electron pairs to flow without resistance, creating quantum states and discrete energy levels just like a giant atom. By cooling the qubit down to extremely low temperatures, engineers can control the frequencies at which this state resonates to create two phases, which then become the 0 and 1. By hitting the qubit with a microwave pulse, they can drive the transition from one state to another, or leave it in superposition between them. The problem is that, thus far, the circuits can only remain in superposition for relatively small periods of time — currently around 100 microseconds. “We want to make that lifetime as long as possible compared to how long it takes to drive from ground to excited states,” says Oliver. “The question is how many of these gates can I perform before I lose that quantum information.’ Current times are still long enough to perform 1,000 to 10,000 gates depending on the complexity of the operation, a tremendous improvement over the past 15 years, but not yet long enough to do anything useful. (Left) Peter Johnson, Quantum information scientist, co-founder Zapata Computing (Right) Robert Schoelkopf, Sterling Professor of Applied Physics and Physics, Yale University. Chief Architect & Co-founder, Quantum Circuits The other leading form of qubits today are trapped ions, which consist of charged particles suspended in vacuum with an electromagnetic field, and hit with pulses from lasers to drive their different states. Compared to superconducting qubits, trapped ions are able to maintain their coherence longer — up to a leisurely second or longer — but they are also much slower to respond from pulses from the outside environment, so the total number of gates possible with both technologies is about the same. Superconducting qubits and trapped ions have other differences as well. With trapped ions, for example, it’s possible to entangle any qubit with any other in the same trap. With superconducting qubits, however, qubits must each be discretely connected to each other in order to allow entanglement — so in linear architecture, for example, each qubit could only be entangled with its immediate neighbor, while in a square lattice, each could be connected with perpendicularly or diagonally with multiple other qubits. Oliver’s lab has been further experimenting with a three-dimensional architecture that could create connections between qubits that are not immediately adjacent. Behind those technologies are a number of other techniques for creating qubits that may one day show promise or even exceed the abilities of superconductors and trapped ions. After all, as MIT physicist Seth Lloyd once said, since the natural state of the world is quantum, “Almost anything becomes a quantum computer if you shine the right kind of light on it.” So far, other contenders include: neutral atoms, single atoms suspended in a lattice that can be hit by lasers to excite them to a quantum state without affecting nearby atoms; photons, quanta of light emitted by atoms that can be redirected to interact with themselves with mirrors; quantum dots, consisting of “puddles” of electrons on the nanoscale, each with its own quantum spin; and nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, which exploit natural imperfections in diamonds that create free-floating spare electrons that can be manipulated into a quantum state.,,, Another dark horse technology are topological qubits, theorized by Alexei Kitaev at CalTech, which depend on a theoretical quasiparticle called a Majorana fermion. The advantage of these qubits is that they are theoretically much more stable than other kinds; the disadvantage is that to date, no one has successfully demonstrated that such particles exist. Each of these technologies has its own advantages and disadvantages — some are faster, for example, while others are less error-prone, though none of them are so far ideal. “These days, it’s hard to pick a winner,” says Savoie. “You know, which horse do you want? Well, that one’s slow and gimpy, but this one’s got a sore on its heel. They are all kind of bad.” No matter what technology is used, creating a functional quantum computer requires simultaneously making qubits faster and protecting them from the errors that can cause decoherence in order to maintain their superposition states longer. Errors can result from two sources: control errors and decoherence. A control error is analogous to setting the radio dial slightly off from a station, creating a bit of static. With superconducting qubits, for example, each one will be slightly different than the others, and they must be carefully calibrated in order to respond to the microwave pulses that control their gates. Bristlecone quantum processor. Photo by Erik Lucero, Google. Decoherence errors are a bit more insidious — the same entanglement that allows qubits to connect with one another can backfire when they become entangled with other atoms in the environment instead. “There is something that’s called the monogamy of entanglement,” says Peter Johnson, a quantum theorist at Harvard who is also part of the founding team of Zapata. “If I am wed to you, I can’t be wed to someone else.” In order to protect against such promiscuity, quantum engineers follow one of two methods. Passive error suppression consists of sending small pulses to dynamically decouple qubits from the environment. Oliver likens it to the way lacrosse players cradle the ball in the stick pocket, moving it rhythmically back and forth as they run down the field. “If you just held the stick, the ball would fall out,” he says. “By making these body motions periodically, it will stay in longer.” Active error correction, meanwhile, focuses on flooding the zone with so many qubits that they will together compensate for decoherence in any small number of them. “You are kind of hiding the information from the environment,” says Johnson, who poses the following analogy: “Say I wanted to tell you whether the Celtics won last night, and I am going to do this by handing you a penny that is either heads or tails. But there is a 10 percent chance of the coin being flipped.” One way to protect against that problem would be to send three pennies instead of one — so even if one penny came out tails, you could still be relatively sure from the two heads that Boston won the game. Extrapolated out beyond three pennies, it’s easy to see how each additional penny you received would increase your confidence until you got to the point where you absolutely certain of the outcome. Unfortunately, achieving that kind of error correction with a 100-qubit computer would require on the order of 100,000 or a million qubits just to keep errors in check. “That gets costly very quickly,” says Johnson. “A million pennies is $10,000.” Of course, when talking about qubits rather than pennies, that costs gets astronomically larger. In the short term, most companies working towards creating a quantum computer are focusing just on putting enough qubits together into a single device in order to actually do simple computations. Due to the substantial costs of fabrication, companies have had to choose one technology. By far, the most popular is superconducting qubits, which is the method of choice for IBM, Google, and Intel, who can leverage their existing expertise in lithographic tools for silicon in a new superconducting medium. Several startups are also experimenting with superconducting qubits, including Rigetti Computing, based in Berkeley, California, and Quantum Circuits, spun out of Schoelkopf’s Yale lab. Maryland-based startup IonQ, meanwhile, is pursuing a trapped ion approach, while Microsoft has placed a bet on topological qubits. As MIT physicist Seth Lloyd once said, since the natural state of the world in quantum, “Almost anything becomes a quantum computer if you shine the right kind of light on it.” All of these companies are engaged in a race to see who can put the most qubits together into a functioning chip in order to be the first to achieve the quantum supremacy moment that can demonstrate a quantum computer that can best its classical cousins. At the present moment, Google is leading that race with the announcement in March of a 72-qubit processor it dubbed Bristlecone after the prickly distribution of x-shaped qubits in its square array. In its announcement of the technology, Google said that it believed that it could use a processor of this size to demonstrate quantum supremacy. Of course, that feat requires performing calculations with a low enough degree of errors. “The critical piece is not just the number of qubits, it’s also the fidelity of the system,” says Google researcher Sergio Boixo, a former physics professor at the University of Southern California. While Google hasn’t released the error rates for its current chip, past chips have had rates as low as 0.6 percent for 2-qubit gates, a critical measure of fidelity. Boixo notes that Google has focused its efforts on increasing the number of qubits while maintaining the current rates of fidelity, and eventually even increasing gate fidelity. The company estimates that it will need error rates of less than 0.5 for 2-qubit gates to achieve quantum supremacy, and recently updated its timeline to predict it would achieve that supremacy sometime this year. IBM and Intel are not far behind, unveiling 50-qubit and 49-qubit chips respectively at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. With a low enough error rate, those chips could also achieve quantum supremacy in the near term. Rigetti 19Q Processor. Photo by IBM. The best way for a quantum computer to demonstrate supremacy, of course, would be to model a quantum system. Even the most basic chemical reactions, however, are beyond the scope of the noisy non-error corrected devices any of the companies will be able to produce in the near future. In a paper published in April in Nature Physics, Boixo proposed that the one way to demonstrate quantum supremacy would be to calculate the outcome of a sampling of random quantum circuits — a task notoriously difficult for classical computers to achieve. Such a task, while certainly a milestone, would be a far cry from a universal quantum computer that could run useful algorithms such as Grover’s and Shor’s algorithms or simulate quantum systems for use in chemistry and biology. For that reason, many quantum researchers have moved away from using the term quantum supremacy as the indicator for achieving success in the field. Even Caltech physicist John Preskill, who first coined the term quantum supremacy in 2011 has tried to downplay the hype, writing in a paper published in January that “quantum supremacy is a worthy goal, notable for entrepreneurs and investors not so much because of its intrinsic importance, but rather as a sign of progress towards more valuable applications further down the road.” In his paper, Preskill proposed a new-term, NISQ or “noisy intermediate stage quantum” to define the stage in which systems with 50 to 100 qubits might still be able to perform useful tasks better than classical computers, even without error correction. “I want to revolutionize history through computing.” Alán Aspuru-Guzik That’s been the focus of chemistry professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik, who is currently at Harvard but moving to the University of Toronto this summer. His office is full of Shepard Fairey graphic prints of revolutionaries in red and black. “I like these images of these heroes doing something for humanity,” he says. “I want to revolutionize history though computing.” After watching his postdocs and graduate students leave one by one for the likes of Google and Intel, he decided to start his own quantum computing company last summer, sketching out the company “over a couple of burritos at the Qdoba in Harvard Square.” After casting around for a sufficiently revolutionary name, he settled on Zapata, after Emiliano Zapata, the peasant leader during the Mexican revolution. “He was a good guy, and he had a beautiful moustache,” he says. Unlike most quantum companies, which have focused on building quantum computing hardware, Zapata has focused on what might be considered software — the algorithms that drive quantum computing calculations. Before creation of a universal error-corrected quantum computer powerful enough to run algorithms like Grover’s and Shor’s, Aspuru-Guzik says, there will be a long period in which they can still run useful programs. “We already know the algorithms for a million qubits,” he says. “My company’s job is to figure out what are the algorithms for these decades of 100, 1,000, and 10,000 qubits.” Zapata is looking past the point of quantum supremacy — which Aspuru-Guzik prefers to call “quantum inflection point — because the word supremacy is loaded politically” to how quantum computing can best classical computing in the NISQ era. “The interesting point is what happens between 200 and a million qubits. What’s the first point that it will do a quantum task that is useful for humanity?” Sergio Boixo, Research Scientist and Theory Team, Lead of Quantum AI, Google Ultimately, Zapata aims to focus on chemistry, which Aspuru-Guzik and Peter Love identified more than a decade ago as the ultimate quantum problem, helping to design algorithms that might better identify catalysts for chemical processes or candidate molecules and materials. In the meantime, however, he says quantum algorithms will be able to aid in any problem that will require a more optimal answer, even if it can’t ultimately provide the best answer. Those problems could include machine learning, compression, route optimization, and searching. He calls such algorithms “variational algorithms” and compares them to tuning a guitar string with the help of a tuning fork. “The tuner is what I want the quantum algorithm to do, but I can use the algorithm to get the strings of a chord closer to the notes I want,” he says. Zapata’s CEO Chris Savoie compares this stage in quantum software development to the early years of classical computing, even before the invention of assembly language, never mind modern computer languages like C. At this point, the company is literally sketching out its algorithms as complex circuits, and sending those to companies it partners with in order to perform certain tasks. “So the program software is a soft piece of paper for now,” he quips. So far, Savoie estimates, Zapata has been involved in a large majority of the near-term algorithms currently being tested on quantum computers, partnering with all of the major companies to run algorithms on their systems. Being flexible on which technology its uses allows Zapata to pick the ideal configuration of qubits able to be entangled with each other in order to pull it off. “We might go to a customer like a pharmaceutical company, and they say, here’s the mathematical problem we’re trying to solve,” he says, “and we take that and draw a bunch of Greek letters on the board, and then convert that into a diagram. Then we might say, oh wow, I need linear connectivity for this thing — or I need a lot of samples, so I need faster gate speeds, and we’ll make that choice.” In various ways, other companies are developing their own approaches for making quantum computing useful in the near term. Schoelkopf, who created his own company Quantum Circuits out of his lab at Yale, is pursuing a strategy of integrating both hardware and software in one package. “We plan to field the first useful quantum computing systems,” he says. “It’s likely this will be offered as a service, since these things aren’t very portable for now.” His lab has been pursuing a unique modular architecture, which would put qubits on smaller chips that could be networked into a system in different configurations depending on what type of problem a client is trying to solve. “It means you could probably be more efficient in implementing certain algorithms, because you are not stuck to one network of connectivity,” he says. The real race my not be between quantum and classical computers, after all, but between quantum hardware and quantum software. In addition to its own success in fabricating quantum chips, IBM has focused efforts on educating the public on the potential of quantum computers, to prepare them for the eventual moment when they will be able to perform useful functions. Recently, it launched the Q Experience, a cloud-based interface in which users can use a quantum composer, which looks like an image of guitar tablature to drag-and-drop gates onto qubits to perform algorithms on real quantum computing hardware. “It allows us to reach a broader community of students, researchers, and just people who are interested in learning about new computing technology,” says Jerry Chow, IBM’s manager of experimental quantum computing. “The idea is to break down barriers, so you are not the only person at the cocktail party who understand what quantum computing is.” (Left) Chad Rigetti, Founder and CEO, Rigetti Computing (Right) Jerry Chow, Manager of Experimental Quantum Computing, IBM IBM’s website also features video tutorials by its engineers breaking down quantum computing concepts into bite-sized 3-minute lessons to demystify the field. “We call that getting ‘quantum ready,’” Chow says. Already, the company has gotten a lot of interest from college and even high school students eager to learn about the new technology. For more advanced users, IBM has begun to develop its own programming language for quantum computing called QISKit, an open-source software which uses Python scripts to execute algorithms on quantum hardware. “One of the most important things we can do in the near term is get more people involved,” Chow says. “It’s really tapping into the developer mindset, where we want to cultivate the next generation of quantum developers.” Berkeley-based start-up Rigetti has been building it own “soup-to-nuts” quantum company from the ground up, including building chips, computer, and software at the same time. The company has focused on speed, building a quantum integrated circuit fabrication lab that can iterate a new design on a 4–6 week timeline, rather than the 12–18 month timeline that might be typical to build a new quantum chip. “Since we first started manufacturing chips in January 2016, we’ve doubled the number of qubits every six months, and we expect to keep doubling every 6 months for a handful of years,” says CEO Chad Rigetti. Currently, Rigetti’s biggest publicly released chip has 19 qubits — though he says they already have a doubling or two beyond that (though the company has not released exactly how many yet). Rigetti Lab in Berkeley. Photo by Rigetti. Like IBM, Rigetti has created its own cloud-based programming interface, which is calls Forest, a similarly open-source software using Python scripts. Rather than focus solely on the quantum environment, however, Rigetti’s language allows for the integration of quantum and classical computers in the same program, something the company calls “quantum-classical hybrid computing.” “It uses a quantum computer as part of an optimization loop on a classical machine,” Rigetti explains. Rather than quantum supremacy, he likes to use the term “quantum advantage” to explain how, in the near-term at least, quantum computing can help to improve solutions to problems by providing an answer that is more efficient, or takes less time, or costs less money, than a classical computer can do alone. Until engineers can truly build a quantum computer that is free enough from errors to perform the advanced calculations, this may be the future — a convergence of increasingly better quantum computers and increasingly better algorithms to perform more and more useful tasks. The real race may not be between quantum and classical computers, after all, but between quantum hardware and quantum software. “Quantum chips are going to continue to improve at an exponential rate, and pretty soon the physical capability is going to outstrip what we know how to take advantage of,” Rigetti says. “There will be huge value in capturing the right algorithms to unlock these possibilities.”

https://the-engine.medium.com/the-future-is-quantum-7be654e359f2

['The Engine']

2019-01-08 21:35:37.594000+00:00

['Physics', 'Computer Science', 'Science', 'Quantum Computing', 'Entrepreneurship']