Datasets:

Kamaljp

/

medium_articles

like 5

Why corporate venturing is more like hedging than institutional venturing

Why corporate venturing is more like hedging than institutional venturing Corporate venture arms with strategic mandate should stop trying to be like institutional venture firms. Photo by Karl Bewick It is no secret that corporate venture capital, in the grand scheme of things, has not been blessed with success. Even though the lifespan of the typical corporate venture arm has increased from just one year historically to four years more recently, this is still less than half the time institutional venture firms take to close out their funds. Institutional venture firms ask their investors to stick around for ten to twelve years, knowing that the portfolio startups that contribute the most to their funds’ returns will need this much time to exit. Within just four years, it is nearly impossible for a corporate venture arm to create any meaningful impact. Why do so many corporate venture arms close up shop prematurely? Some might argue it is because corporate venture arms often have less experienced partners compared to institutional venture firms. As a consequence, so the reasoning goes, corporate venture arms have access to fewer opportunities and make suboptimal investment decisions among those opportunities, two compounding effects. Others might doubt the suitability of the members of the typical corporate investment committee. These frequently include executives from the parent corporation with little prior venturing experience, who, in the worst case, could be swayed by fear of cannibalization and corporate politics. Yet others might contend that the average corporate venture arm is not set up to make a large enough number of transactions to diversify sufficiently. All of these concerns may be justified in some cases and can indeed give institutional venture firms an edge over corporate venture arms. But none of them is an inherent characteristic of corporate venture arms. If a corporation just hires the right partners into their venture arm, finds capable, external advisors for their investment committee, dimensions the fund so as to allow for a sufficient number of deals, and opens up offices around the world to cover the most vibrant innovation hotspots, these limitations disappear. This said, there is one innate characteristic of corporate venture arms that does hold them back vis-a-vis institutional venture firms, and neither a stellar team nor the perfect setup can fix it: This is the strategic mandate that most corporate venture arms are given, but institutional venture firms never need to worry about. Most corporate venture arms serve a dual purpose: A strategic mandate to help the corporation learn about emerging technologies, new business models, or the lean and agile ways of working of strong startups. And a financial goal, in some cases pegged to benchmarks for institutional venture firms. The reason the strategic mandate holds corporate venture arms back is because it conflicts with the financial goal. It reduces the expected financial return of the venture arm relative to what it could be without the strategic mandate. (The qualifier “expected” is important here because there are clearly corporate venture arms that perform just as well, or better, than some institutional venture firms.) The strategic mandate adds an extra filter to the set of opportunities that the corporate venture arm is allowed to consider. This puts pressure on the financial return because it narrows the opportunity set: Some of the opportunities that do not pass through the extra filter may have been great ones financially, but the corporate venture arm just cannot pursue them. An institutional venture firm in general has a broader set of opportunities to choose from. The opportunity set of an institutional venture firm versus that of a corporate venture arm The strategic mandate furthermore can cause a corporate venture arm to focus on the wrong thing. It requires the corporate venture arm to pick startups based on the use cases they are addressing, whereas an institutional venture firm can focus on the team of the startup. The use case is a two-sided sword: On one hand, it is the only way for the corporate venture arm to assess strategic relevance. On the other hand, it is generally not a great predictor of the future success of a startup. The best such predictor is the team — its grit, camaraderie, and experience — and this is precisely what institutional venture firms can lean on when they make investment decisions. On top of this, the use case is generally not even stable over time. Almost every startup goes through pivots. And every time a startup pivots, its use case might change. So the portfolio startups of a corporate venture arm may become less interesting to the corporation over time, whereas startups that start out with use cases outside of the corporation’s wheelhouse might eventually become relevant. Strategic mandate and financial return therefore work against each other. One cannot optimize for both. Independently of how experienced the team and how professional the setup, a strategically motivated corporate venture arm is always at a disadvantage compared to a purely financially motivated institutional venture firm that can invest more broadly. Strategic mandate and financial return work against each other. One cannot optimize for both. Of course, not all corporate venture arms have a strategic mandate. So what about those that do not? Prominent examples include GV, previously known as Google Ventures and a purely financially motivated venture arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Sapphire Ventures, a venture firm owned by enterprise software maker SAP, and Cisco’s new Decibel subsidiary. These corporate venture arms are investment vehicles, not innovation disciplines. They exist to put the corporation’s cash reserves to good use. Because corporate venture arms without strategic mandate are equivalent to institutional venture firms, which are also purely financially motivated, the remainder of this article will treat them as institutional venture firms. This leaves two categories of venture capital to distinguish: Corporate venture arms with strategic mandate on one hand, and institutional venture firms (including corporate venture arms without strategic mandate) on the other. Due to their strategic mandate and its adverse effect on expected financial return, corporate venture arms are more risky and financially less lucrative compared to institutional venture firms. Consequently, from a financial perspective, corporate venturing has an opportunity cost and should be done only for its impact as an innovation discipline. Corporations should be aware of this and use corporate venturing only where other innovation disciplines are less effective. As a previous blog article has shown, startup partnerships are preferable over corporate venturing for all innovation that is compatible with the way the corporation does business. In other words, if the corporation can apply an innovation without materially altering their structures and processes, then they can partner with the startup and learn just as much as they would if they were to invest in the startup and take a board seat. The sweet spot of corporate venturing is innovation that is incompatible with the way the corporation does business. Startup partnerships are infeasible in this case because the startup’s value-add is not a fit for the corporation’s structures and processes. For example, the startup may be targeting a customer segment that the corporation’s go-to-market motion leaves deliberately unaddressed; it may use a subscription-based business model while the corporation sells by the unit; or it may distribute its products online only, while the corporations uses brick-and-mortar outlets. Whatever the reason, if the ways in which corporation and startup do business are incompatible with each other, a venture investment and a board seat is the only way for the corporation to learn from the startup. The sweet spot of corporate venturing is innovation that is incompatible with the way the corporation does business. Corporate venture arms should therefore focus on innovation incompatible with the way their parent corporations do business, and refrain from investing in anything compatible. This way, they can ensure they operate at their sweet spot and leave other areas to innovation disciplines that are a better fit. Of course, absent a clear directive to do so, it is easy to see why corporate venture arms will be inclined to invest in both compatible and incompatible innovation: Narrowing the aperture to incompatible innovation will again contract their opportunity set, compounding the effect of the strategic mandate and further reducing their expected financial return. But the narrow aperture is crucial because investing in compatible innovation is neither financially nor strategically justifiable. Not financially, because the opportunity cost of corporate venturing, as shown above, implies that corporate venturing should never be done for financial reasons. Not strategically, because a startup partnership offers the same learnings for less in the case of compatible innovation. Rewarding the partners of a corporate venture arm based on financial return is therefore an adverse incentive that might undermine the strategic mandate of the venture arm and erode its focus on incompatible innovation. One might wonder if a corporate venture arm is still worth having as one reduces the scope of it to the intersection of the strategic mandate and incompatible innovation. Is the learning opportunity still significant enough? Is the opportunity set, and hence the expected financial return, not too modest at this point? Make no mistake: Corporate venturing is indeed an indispensable innovation discipline. Because the intersection of a strategic mandate and incompatible innovation is precisely where some of the most impactful innovation can come from. And if ignored, this can also be the innovation most detrimental for a corporation. Oftentimes the kind of innovation most impactful is new technology that allows an industry’s value proposition to be delivered in a better way. This kind of innovation is always incompatible with the way incumbents do business because it alters to a significant extent how value is delivered. And it is dangerous because, even though it may appeal strongly to customers, the corporation will struggle to take advantage of it due to its mismatch with the way business is being done at present. Fortunately, a corporate venture arm can step in on behalf of the corporation when this happens. It can make an investment, take a board seat, and keep a close eye on the innovation. Later — or even directly, in lieu of the initial investment, depending on urgency and the maturity of available startups — it can get the corporation ready for an acquisition. This will defend the corporation against incompatible innovation, and potentially enable it to come out stronger if competitors fail to act correspondingly. All things considered, the role of a corporate venture arm is more similar to that of a hedge than it is to that of an institutional venture firm. It allows the corporation to protect itself against incompatible innovation that could render the corporation’s business model obsolete. Also, like a hedge, corporate venturing is not free: The opportunity cost implied by the narrower opportunity set of a corporate venture arm compared to that of an institutional venture firm means that the corporation could be making higher gains on its funds by investing elsewhere. But, as with any hedge, this cost may pay off handsomely at some point, like when the next incompatible innovation comes about.

https://medium.com/premainstream/why-corporate-venturing-is-like-hedging-78f5385c871f

['Christian Vogt']

2019-05-19 17:37:28.722000+00:00

['Partnerships', 'Innovation', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Venture Capital']

Are You Living Your Life with the End Result in Mind?

Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash Want to change your life, in both profound ways and small, day to day as well as over the big picture? A powerful way to live your life daily, even moment to moment, is to keep this line of thinking ever at the forefront of your thoughts. Live your life with the end result in mind. How do you want to be remembered by the people who are deeply special to you? What do you want to have experienced, done, seen, learned, said, when your time here on Earth comes to a close? Who do you want to be while you are here in the world? How do you want to treat the people you love most? What kind of colleague do you want to have been? Friend? Romantic love? What do you want to have spent the bulk of your life focusing on? Cultivating? Growing? Building? Doing? Saying? These are questions that most of us ponder for a few moments once in a while, and then promptly forget about. Allowing them to be buried under the sea of “to-dos” in everyday life, most of which are time killers and probably aren’t especially important over the long run. Too many of us, in fact, I would venture most (myself included), tend to get caught in the mostly mindless autopilot of daily routine. What we need to do on this or that day, what to make for dinner, or where to grab lunch. Why our idiot of a co-worker just did or said that. How tired we are. That we need to grab more dish soap. A couple of these may be important. Most though are distractions, not really important for the big picture painting of our lives. Instead, tending towards taking our attention away from the much larger, opportunity laden, wide-sweeping potential of all that is life. Then suddenly, we look up and it’s a year, five years, or even ten years later. And still, our lives consist of routinized, generally monotonous, comfortable pictures. The same relationships for years and years, whether each of those (romantic, platonic, even familial) are actually good and healthy fits for us any longer or not. Likely the same job, whether it alights one's heart or not. Probably hanging out with most of the same people and in many of the same locales during one's free time. While this is a comfortable way to live… it’s far from living up to our fullest and most awe-inspiring potential. It's far from reveling in the short time that each of us has here, alive in this world, with all of the awe, whimsy, curiosity, and sense of agency that we could. It’s far from living life with the end result in mind. Instead, it’s more along the lines of merely existing, moving through one’s days on autopilot, complacent, and sticking to that which is safe and easy. And when we forget or fail to live with the end result in mind, our lives tend to become dull, stunted, lacking in color or challenge, as well as void of so much of the beauty, thrill, sense of personal purpose, and fulfillment of which they could be filled with. When you operate and think, daily, with the end result of your life in mind, it helps to cut through the clutter of your heart, thoughts, and jumbled “to do” list to what really matters. Asking yourself, day to day, even moment to moment, “the end will come. In fact, it’s coming closer with each passing day.” “What do I really want to do?” “What do I not want to do, or, what makes me distinctly unhappy which I am continuing to invest in and spend time on? Why? And, how can I change this immediately?” “Who do I deeply love, and do I show them this often via both my words and actions?” “What do I want to experience and see? What must I do before my time runs out?” “What makes my heart truly sing? And am I filling my days with as much of that as possible?” “How do I want to be remembered by the core people I cherish and adore?” Living with such a mindset at the forefront of your mind can majorly impact your day to day choices, as well as larger life decisions. When you consider that time is ticking, life is short, that you only have so much time left on this Earth and then guess what? It’s all going black, baby. This can help you get serious and crystal clear, fast, with regards to what you want to be doing, with whom you want to be doing it, and on what you choose to focus. When we forget this crucial mindset and let it fall to the wayside, this tends to result in growing complacent. Letting each day slide, unmemorably, into the next. Life becomes a blur of days that look much the same. This leads to looking up, years later, and regretting. Lamenting, man, if only I had said, or done, or pursued, or been braver, or worker harder at that thing, or not given up that project I so loved, you get the idea. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s a major case of settling for all that one could have done and experienced, if they lived with far more bravery, intent, motivation, stronger direction, and awareness. When we forget to live our lives with the end result in mind, we forget to live. Want to change your life drastically? Decide to live with this knowledge at the forefront, front row, and center stage of your mind every single day, and throughout each day. You are likely to find yourself as a result, changing much of your behaviors and responses to other aspects of life. When you live your life with the end result in mind…ask yourself often, is this situation, relationship, job, or way of being how I want to be spending my fleeting time here on Earth? Does this fill my life with meaning? Does it add to my emotional health? Is it good for me? Do I love it? Is this truly good enough? Do I want to dare to grow further, to experience more? To seek beyond? To pursue joy, further growth, and my utmost health (both physically and emotionally)? Ask yourself, “What is it I deeply wish and need to do with my one wild and precious life?” And then, examine your life as it is now and whatever doesn't match, start fixing and altering now so that it will be in line with the answer. No one said it would be easy. No one said it will not be scary. I can tell you personally, I’ve been absolutely terrified prior to doing most of the biggest things that have ended up changing my life in monumental ways. To name a few: moving to a foreign country where I knew no one, didn’t speak the language, and without a job lined up. Leaving someone I had been with romantically for nearly ten years because while loving him, knowing we were not a good fit, and then finally garnering the guts to let him go. Standing up for myself and finding the courage to draw a line in the sand with regards to certain toxic family members or situations. Letting go of a couple of friends over the years, and even a couple of family members who were not good for me, because they brought more pain and harm than good into my life. All of these scenarios absolutely terrified me, were some of the hardest things I have ever challenged myself to do, and yet all of them have led to life riches I could not have imagined, further personal growth, greater health and happiness, and even magic later on down the road, as an indirect (or direct) result of my having made those really tough decisions and leaps. You can live a life of magic, romance, wonder, and awe. You can experience, do, and feel wondrous, meaningful things. You can have emotionally deep, beautiful, poignant connections with a handful of amazing people whom you choose to cultivate and build so with. You can have a job that fills you with purpose and passion. You can venture to jaw-dropping locales and thrilling new places. You can publish that book, or draw people towards loving your photographs, poetry, pottery, you name it. You can move people with your words and work. In fact, you can change lives with it. You can love, deeply, wholly, in a way that fills your soul, if you so choose to. You can host memorable, emotional, fantastic celebrations with people you love. You can live in other countries, different parts of the world. And revel in other miraculous chapters of your life in each varying place. You can stand up for yourself to people who are shitty, harmful, or hurtful when you need to- though it will be hard (especially when they are people you love…and yes, sometimes they will be). You can do this, and you will grow stronger, more self-assured, happier, and emotionally healthier for doing so. Your relationships will improve as a result. You can choose carefully (and should do so) the people you let into your life and heart. You can sprint after the projects, passions, people, and pursuits, that set your heart on fire. Are you living your life, every single day, considering carefully the end result? All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. Don’t take too long to decide though, it’ll be too late. Decide now. And then run like hell towards those people, experiences, goals, values, projects, ways of being, and paths.

https://brookemeredith.medium.com/are-you-living-your-life-with-the-end-result-in-mind-d5062d56f54e

['Brooke Meredith']

2019-09-19 14:45:43.215000+00:00

['Motivation', 'Self', 'Psychology', 'Life Lessons', 'Inspiration']

Metrics Deep-Dive for Product Managers

Metrics Deep-Dive for Product Managers Measure & Track the Entire Path to Market for your Product Photo by Jungwoo Hong This post appeared in my weekly newsletter on Product Management. Sign up here to get new posts straight to your inbox. ? Find me on twitter Want to Connect Last week, I wrote a post about why having an End-to-End Analytics Strategy for your Product is so important to drive successful outcomes. If you missed that post, you can read it here. Now having an analytics strategy is one thing, but the ‘execution’ is where the rubber meets the road. The two key questions before you can implement your strategy are What metrics do you want to measure at each stage of your product’s Go-To-Market plan? Given the metrics you chose — How to set things up and what tools you’ll need? The rule of thumb is this — your Metrics must be meaningful given the context. They must be set up so that they tell you a story of whatever it is that you want to measure. In this post, let’s pick a product and walk through an example scenario for what Metrics make sense to measure. Let’s take a look at the Go-To-Market plan and the different stages of the customer acquisition path for a product and understand the metrics in context. “Smart Locks” Co. Imagine your product is a smart lock system that helps people lock /unlock doors through their phones. It has a Wi-Fi-enabled lock hardware + a mobile app to control the lock via your phone. Now let’s say that you have an online-only Go-To-Market path — which means you have a website where people can buy these locks from, and you have an amazon product listing as well. Once people buy the lock they can download an iOS/Android app from the app store for FREE. Here’s what a common Customer Acquisition path for this product might look like People search for “Smart Lock/ Wi-fi Locks” on Google They click your ad and land on your website’s Landing page to check out your product If they are sold on your product, they purchase it right away or convert to become your customers — good for you! If they are interested but iffy or are just checking out different options — they may simply bounce off of your website and/or provide you with their email address to learn more about the product, wait for promotions, deals, etc. The vast majority of the people that land on your website will follow this step. For each of these steps, you need solid data on how things are looking and where the frictions are. You need to establish goals — what does success looks like for each step and then define metrics that are most important to hit those goals. Measuring what matters at each step Let’s look at key metrics for each step of your customer acquisition plan for Smart Locks. **A word of caution before we proceed though — before setting up metrics and tracking visitors please make sure you properly understand, acknowledge, and implement user data collection policies and consent requirements. Most countries have regulations on how user data may be collected, stored, and processed. As a rule of thumb, only collect data that is absolutely important and get the user’s consent before doing so.** Alright, here we go #1. Landing Page Metrics When a visitor first lands onto your marketing website or landing page, they may be arriving at your page from many different sources. There are several important things you’d want to know about your landing pages and who is visiting them, but here are the bare minimum that we must track How many people are visiting your landing page? (landing page views) Where are these visitors coming from? (Source) Which pages do people spend the most time on? How many visitors actually convert ( hit that “Call to Action” button )? How many people did nothing/ bounced despite visiting your landing page? and why? (bounce rate) How many people hit your call to action button leaving you with additional information (e.g. email?) “Call to Action” (CTA) is where it all starts Your landing page will have a “Call to Action” Form where you’ll want your visitors to take a specific action say, “Send me deals & offers” in exchange for some basic info, a Name, and/or an Email at the minimum. Here’s an example from another Smart Lock maker. As soon as a visitor to your website gives you an email, they become a Lead in your system that has the potential to convert a paying customer. So, From a pure analytics standpoint, the Call to Action form is the gateway to your Lead Funnel. Once you capture a lead in your lead funnel, your analytics focus will shift to measuring a different set of metrics. These are metrics that’ll act as a report card for your sales and marketing efforts and they’ll ground you on what areas need to be worked upon, and those that are maximizing ROI. Let’s look at them next. #2. Lead Funnel Metrics At this point, your customer acquisition funnel has people in it that it seems like are interested in buying a smartwatch — and you need to market your product to these folks. So what do you do? You design and deploy marketing campaigns — Email Marketing, Retargeting, Remarketing campaigns — and for each campaign, you can measure how these folks are responding to your promotions. Ultimately, your lead’s engagement patterns and the specific actions they take will tell you how likely they are to become a paying customer. This brings us to Lead Funnel Metrics. Say you are running an email campaign where you send periodic offers and deals as well as content about how great your smart locks are: To see if people are engaging with your emails you’ll probably care about some of the following metrics How many people open your emails? (Open rate) How many people clicked on the links in your email(Click Through Rates) How many people that received an email — with a call to action — went ahead and did what you wanted them to do (make a purchase, upgrade to the premium tier, etc. )? (Conversion Rates) How many emails were not delivered? (Bounce Rates) Here’s a great link for which metrics to track if you are running an email campaign. You are going to use these metrics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns. Again the exact metrics you’ll care about will be based upon the kind of marketing campaign you are running and your product itself — but you get the drift. #3. Conversion Metrics As your marketing campaigns qualify leads and move them down the Funnel stages, you’ll measure and capture your conversion metrics — to give you a sense of how your leads are progressing through the funnel. The goal is to make sure that your leads are getting closer to a purchase decision. Here are a few important questions that your metrics must answer: How many ‘raw’ leads convert to “Marketing Qualified Leads”? How many Marketing Qualified Leads Convert to “Sales Qualified Leads”? How many “Sales Qualified Leads” convert to paying customers? What’s the Average time spent between each of the above conversion events? How long is the overall Sales Cycle — from lead to a paying customer? What is your total cost of customer acquisition? What marketing campaigns are driving conversions, which ones aren’t? For people that convert, how did they first arrive at our landing page (source)? #4. Usage & Customer Experience Metrics Let’s say you just successfully converted a lead into a customer and they bought your Smart Lock from Amazon. Next, they download a free app, create an account, and start using your product! Getting this far is a big deal, but the job ain’t over yet. “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” — Walt Disney At this point, you need to make sure users are having an amazing experience with your product. The goal is to maximize customer retention and drive repeat usage and purchases. You want them to have a great onboarding experience. Maybe you have some premium features in the app that you want them to purchase. But above all, once somebody is a customer, You’ll want to make them look like superstars for using your product. You want to turn them into marketers for your product so they tell others how great your product is. There is nothing stronger than word of mouth marketing. A paying customer is sacred and you cannot afford to lose them. So what are you going to measure that helps you keep them? What you will measure is largely going to depend upon your specific product and the business goals that you want to hit. Here are a few things you’ll want to track for our smart lock example How many amazon/app store reviews does the product have? what’s the ratio of 5-star reviews to the total reviews? What are the “Product Returns” ratios like? What’s the NPS score for this product? How often is the product used? What are the top features that users engage with? What do your user segments look like? Who are your power users? Who are the ones that sparingly use it? What are the leading indicators that a user/customer is not having a great time with your product? These metrics are akin to the diagnostics data from onboard a rocketship that can help you guide it to orbit. Instrumenting your Metrics Now that you’ve defined all the metrics across all stages of the entire customer acquisition path — next comes the implementation phase — i.e. instrumenting the metrics into your product Choosing what tools to use is a key decision that requires some thought based on features, available resources, and even your customer acquisition channels (offline/online), etc. In the next post, I’ll dive deeper and look at the tools available to help instrument these metrics as well as some common pitfalls to watch out for. As always, Thanks for reading! You can sign up here to get new posts straight to your inbox.

https://medium.com/swlh/metrics-deep-dive-for-product-managers-79ed426fa3b

['Abhishek Chakravarty']

2020-11-09 17:42:54.982000+00:00

['Startup', 'Marketing', 'Product Management', 'Metrics']

New Age Spirituality and the Law of Attraction Did Nothing to Cure My Depression

It was only because of the love of my family that I felt the strength and intense obligation to keep my life. When I was introduced to the Gospel of Jesus, I was introduced to a hope I never knew. A Light that was true, genuine, and everlasting through every circumstance. I so desperately needed this Light, and I was unaware that I was keeping my own self captive from experiencing the joy I saw in others. I studied the Word out of sheer curiosity at first, just like everything else. I allowed myself to shed the veil of pessimism that kept me from reading the bible I was gifted decades ago. I kept up with sermons as much as a could, from my home pastor at Hope City to the teachings that came from watching Transformation Church online. These teachings slowly began to help me connect the dots between the characters, stories, and parables in the bible that made me scratch my head. Having proper context made all the difference, things were beginning to actually start making sense. What I didn’t know, was that my soul was still corrupted by idols and false teachings. I still entertained the darkness (which I now know to be witchcraft and sorcery) and tried to be the god of my life, unknowingly. There was no real space in my heart for all of the light to come in because I didn’t release the darkness of the things from my past. I wasn’t fully surrendered to anything, just going through cycles of feeling extremely good on Sunday, miserable by Monday afternoon, and numb with indifference until the next time I heard a good word. “There is only change in the soul when there is development in the spirit.” — Dr. Tony Evans Humility and surrender were the missing links in my spiritual development. I had to do what Adam and Eve refused to do. I had to let myself acknowledge to God (Who already knew) where I was, that I went the wrong way, and that I don’t want to continue going down that path. I had to confess my sins of disobedience, idolatry, and unbelief. I put my faith in the universe and in all the information I could remember from self help books. I developed a strange lust for spiritual power that only brought more confusion into my life. I had to completely break free from the new age ideologies that had me thinking I knew better than the One who made me. In my surrender, I pleaded for wisdom and understanding. Once I did this, He showed me everything I was missing. To my surprise, it was all so simple. “YOU MUST UNDERSTAND” digital art by Ebony. Photo shot by Light. The root of all madness was in me all along. Pride kept me from peace, this I now know to be true. I let myself suffer in silence, thinking that I can manifest joy, true love, and my dream job/car through the law of attraction if I just tried hard enough. It never worked. My perspective on life was all jacked up, and my unwillingness to admit this to myself was exactly why that dark cloud of depression always found her way back to me. I wanted to control my life, because I let the false teachings of new age culture convince me that I was mighty enough to do so — that I could choose my own method of healing without any confession, accountability, or true assessment of my brokenness. The thing about worshipping the universe is that it stops there, worshipping and relying on created things that have no true power. Ironically enough, the universe itself has been obedient to The Creator since Genesis. All I know is, being aware that Mercury was in retrograde (AGAIN) only added to my anxiety. Knowing that my identity as a libra made me prone to indecision made me more insecure. All of this knowledge kept me in chains. I had the key to freedom all along. God showed me all of my madness through His Word and through the testimonies of believers that He brought into my life. He showed me that even in my ability to achieve mighty works like David (and Samson), I can still fall victim to the desires of my lust which only leads to death. He showed me that, like Sarai and Abraham, in my impatience I had the capability of manipulating a situation and fool myself into thinking I’m helping God do His job when in reality, I’m only creating more unnecessary obstacles for myself. He showed me that, like Adam and Eve, I have a rebellious nature that will lead me to the very things my Spirit knows are not good to me. He showed me generations of ancestors who, at their own will, left the presence of the God who rescued them countless times to worship idols — just like people today. Of course, I didn’t care to know these things about myself. But it was important to know what I was dealing with because in reality, I had become my own worst enemy in this fight for my life. “Long ago I broke the yoke that oppressed you and tore away the chains of your slavery, but you still said ‘I will not serve you.” On every hill and under every green tree, you have prostituted yourselves by bowing down to idols.” – Jeremiah 2:20 NLT Acknowledging the victory that is already yours is the secret sauce. Jesus did many miraculous things that make my heart flutter when I think about it, but the most significant was His crucifixion. I’m no theologian so I won’t overwhelm you with too much detail. However I will reference something very significant that took place in Luke 23 to explain the goodness of God. Jesus is being mocked and crucified, nailed to a cross. Innocent and blameless, this is the fate that even the Roman governor (Pilate) could not understand (Luke 23:4). It was only because of the persistence of the leading priests and teachers of the religious law and their accusations that lead to this undeserving guilty verdict. There are two criminals next to him on either side sharing His same fate. One of them, puffed up with pride, joins the mockery and demands Jesus to prove Himself as the Messiah by saving them and Himself (clearly unaware of His true purpose). The second criminal on the other side of Jesus is appalled, rebukes him and says the following: “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” – Luke 23:40–42 Jesus, God in the flesh, dying for the sins of the world, in all of His goodness simply said “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” In order to overcome depression, you have to be willing to undergo spiritual open heart surgery. It’s more than just thinking positive thoughts and saying affirmations. That’s like putting a bandage on a broken leg. Suppressing the negative emotions with toxic habits and fleeting pleasures is even worse. That’s like taking a shot of Robitussin a day to cure mental illness. Fighting depression is equivalent to fighting for your life. But just like with any fight, when you utilize the right weapons, protection, and strategy, victory becomes your birthright.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/new-age-spirituality-and-the-law-of-attraction-did-nothing-to-cure-my-depression-6a9efd148af3

['Mildred X']

2020-10-27 15:34:45.591000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Mindfulness', 'Mental Health', 'Spirituality', 'Christianity']

Between the (book) covers: Design Beyond Devices

Between the (book) covers: Design Beyond Devices Four themes woven throughout my new book on multimodal and cross-device design On December 1, 2020, my first book Design Beyond Devices will ship worldwide. As so many authors do, I wrote this book partially because I wish it had existed when I was tackling the big unknowns on projects like Alexa Notifications, the Echo Look, the Echo Show, and Windows Automotive. But I was also inspired to write because as an industry, we still seem to be focusing on individual touchpoints rather than focusing on the customer’s journey between touchpoints. And I wrote the book because so many of our devices are now capable of interacting with us in so many ways. These days, it should less about “designing for a smart speaker” or “designing for a desktop” — many of these devices share capabilities. The real skill is figuring out exactly how your customer wants to interact in the moment. Or better yet, how might you allow your customer to choose their mode of interaction IN the moment? Design Beyond Devices by Cheryl Platz: Available from Rosenfeld Media and on Amazon in print and digital. The elevator pitch Over the past year, when folks outside the industry asked me what I was writing about I’d say: “I’m writing a design book that I hope will help teach designers how to design the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.” If you’ve ever watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, you’ve seen the vision of the future I’m chasing. Interactions that span tablets, touchscreens, physical controls, voice interactions — even augmented reality, all while allowing crew members to seamlessly move between modes of interaction as needed. But underneath all that simplicity must lie a framework of great complexity. Still waters run deep. The full title of the book is “Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences.” I haven’t seen any confusion about the term ‘cross-device,’ but the term ‘multimodal’ is still unfamiliar to many designers. What the heck am I talking about, anyway? Ironically, the term “multimodal” is itself multimodal. It’s been defined multiple ways in different contexts. In THIS context: A mode is a type of communication, and humans receive communication using their senses. I go on to define 5 categories of communication in the book: Visual, auditory (audio), haptic (direct/physical), kinetic (motion-based), and ambient (indirect). is a type of communication, and humans receive communication using their senses. I go on to define 5 categories of communication in the book: Visual, auditory (audio), haptic (direct/physical), kinetic (motion-based), and ambient (indirect). A multimodal interaction is an exchange between two parties (a device and a human being) where multiple input or output modalities may be used simultaneously or sequentially depending upon context and preference. Why include both multimodality AND cross-device design? It’s short-sighted to assume ANY experience exists in a vaccum. Our customers are swimming in devices. Even websites are cross-device now: most websites have to function on desktop and mobile, which means interruption, context, and notifications become relevant. And the limits of multimodality on one device may cause a customer to turn to another device. The deeper concepts But for better or worse, this is a design book released in the throes of a turbulent 2020. It’s not enough just to throw some design ideas at you and run away. It was extremely important to me that this book provide you with a sound foundation for evaluating your ideas through lenses of inclusion, bias, impact, and beyond. Just because we CAN build it doesn’t mean we SHOULD. The following four themes are woven deeply into the book’s 15 chapters (chapter list available at the Rosenfeld Media site): Customer context & ethics Multimodal frameworks Ideation and Execution Emerging technology Let’s dive more deeply into each of these themes so you know what we’re getting into. Theme 1: Customer context and ethics It was important to me that this book be more than just an exploration of what we CAN do — it’s an exploration of HOW we should move forward and what we owe our customers. Creating the World We Want to Live In (Chapter 1) provides definitions and context that will frame the rest of our explorations: from definitions of multimodality and gender equity to deeper discussions on disability, inclusive design, anti-racism, and anti-neutrality. Capturing Customer Context (Chapter 2) provides you with a functional, improv-inspired framework for deepening your customer outreach and research to include the extra context you need when designing multi-device, multimodal experiences. Understanding Busy Humans (Chapter 3) helps you break down human behavior into patterns that can be represented within your system or platform as a part of teaching your devices to interrupt and interact politely and responsibly. Should You Build It? (Chapter 15) concludes the book with a new framework for ethically querying your work: PICS or It Shouldn’t Happen. You’ll find a series of prompts to challenge your problem definition, your degree of inclusion, your theory of change, and the systems you’re influencing. Theme 2: Multimodal Frameworks Once you’ve fully explored your customer’s context and assessed the potential impact of your project on the environments and systems with which it will engage, it’s time to start exploring how multimodality might be applied to those situations. Activity, Interrupted (Chapter 4) walks you through a process I first spearheaded for Alexa Notifications: creating an interruption matrix that takes your customer activity model and maps it against your potential interruptions, defining predictable interaction patterns for each combination. The Spectrum of Multimodality (Chapter 7) helps you figure out what approach to multimodality will make most sense for your customer based on two key dimensions: their proximity to their device(s) and the amount of information being communicated. Read an excerpt from Chapter 7 on the Rosenfeld Media Medium page! Let’s Get Proactive (Chapter 10) What are the common patterns of interruption? What are the philosophies and pitfalls behind proactive interactions in interactive systems? This chapter draws from my experience on notification systems to help you chart your own path. From Envisioning to Execution (Chapter 12) In the midst of the discussion of implementation, we explore an extension of Brad Frost’s Atomic Design to cope with the added complexity of multimodality — multimodal atomic design. Theme 3: Ideation and execution But how do you take these amorphous, big, intimidating ideas and make them real? How do you communicate these designs in a way that makes them understandable by your implementation partners? It’s a (multimodal) trap! (Chapter 8): Seasoned veterans of multimodal and cross-device design will know when to ask difficult questions, but will you? This chapter covers some of the stickiest areas you’re likely to encounter — from ergonomics to multi-user scenarios. Lost in Transition (Chapter 9): Whether you’re focusing on a single multimodal device or an expansive cross-device experience, transitions will make or break your experience. We inventory the most difficult types of transitions and what to look out for along the way. Breathe Life into the Unknown (Chapter 11): From the Opti-Pessimism framework from exploring the best and worst cases of your idea to storyboarding, bodystorming, and a variety of prototyping philosophies — this chapter will kick-start your attempts to make your ideas real. From Envisioning to Execution (Chapter 12): Learn a common visual language for multimodal flows, review tangible examples of multiple approaches to documenting time-bound multimodal designs, and explore how you might expand existing design systems to account for multimodality. Theme 4: Emerging Technology Many readers won’t yet feel fully comfortable with multimodal technologies, or perhaps may not even see themselves as multimodal designers at all. That’s OK! This book contains plenty of background to bring folks of all experience levels up to speed. The Language of Devices (Chapter 5): In this chapter, we take a complete inventory of the available output modalities and technologies available to you, along with inclusivity considerations and case studies along the way. Expressing Intent (Chapter 6): An exploration of the current state of input technologies, from natural language understanding through gestural interfaces — with plenty of inclusivity considerations and case studies to flesh out your understanding. Beyond Devices: Human + AI Collaboration (Chapter 13): It is near-impossible to work with modern multimodal systems without dealing with AI. Learn the basics: types of machine learning, types of bias, and how to cope with designing with AI on your project. Beyond Reality: XR, VR, MR, AR (Chapter 14): At the bleeding edge of multimodality, extended reality experiences are just pushing from niche to mainstream. Learn the difference between virtual reality, mixed reality, and artificial reality — and what makes design for XR different. Learn More If you’re intrigued by the concepts described here, the book is available via Rosenfeld Media or your local Amazon storefront. If you pick up the book, find me on Twitter at @funnygodmother or @ideaplatz to share your thoughts. And may 2021 see us to better outcomes — the final frontier is waiting for you! Podcasts Upcoming events (Talks & Workshops)

https://medium.com/ideaplatz/between-the-book-covers-design-beyond-devices-e026f143ec6c

['Cheryl Platz']

2020-12-02 00:48:26.755000+00:00

['User Experience', 'Technology', 'Voice Assistant', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Design']

How NOT to Be Super Indecisive About Everything You Do

How NOT to Be Super Indecisive About Everything You Do 7 things I learned from taking forever to get a new iPhone Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash You’re probably here because you struggle to be decisive. Because you agonize over basic choices you must make to move your life forward. You worry, you waste weeks, and you feel embarrassed for taking so long. If so, welcome to Indecisive Anonymous; let’s rock this journey together! If not, I hope you’re entertained by my story anyway. Don’t feel bad if you’re indecisive as all heck. I’ve taken 3 whole months to replace my iPhone after I broke it. I did buy a cheap refurbished one in the meantime, but it had a fatal flaw (turning on and off every several minutes). After finally making a proper purchase after 3 months, I still woke up the next morning feeling like I’d made the wrong choice. I worried, I wasted weeks of my life, and I’ve sure felt embarrassed about it. But I also learned 7 things. These lessons will make me a stronger decision-maker, starting… tomorrow? No, wait, I think it’s today. Yes, starting today!

https://medium.com/love-everyone/how-not-to-be-super-indecisive-about-everything-you-do-60b9b0e3dc5f

['Phoenix Huber']

2020-10-19 08:19:34.993000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Technology', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement']

Top 10 Elon Musk Productivity Secrets for Insane Success

I read Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future over the summer. It’s a fantastic read and a detailed account of the ups and downs of one of the biggest visionaries of our time. It also gives you a sneak peek into Musk’s work ethic and productivity secrets he uses to run multiple companies. Now, Elon Musk is a smarter than average individual and has enormous ambition and drive. But I think that us–mere mortals–can incorporate some of his productivity secrets into our daily lives. Here are the top 10 productivity secrets of Elon Musk and how you can apply them: #1 Start the Day with Critical Work As the CEO of three companies — Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink — Elon Musk has a lot of things to stay on top on a day to day basis. That’s why he starts his day with his most critical work. For Musk, this means dealing with important emails that he needs to address in order to unblock other people’s work and progress. He typically starts the day at 7 a.m. and replies to critical emails for at least half an hour. Musk is careful to filter anything that is not deemed critical, focusing on only the most important items. In his own words at the USC Commencement Speech: “Focus on signal over noise. Don’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t actually make things better.” Apply This Productivity Secret Find your most important task (MIT) for the day and tackle it first. Your MIT should be the one thing that creates the most impact on your work. For example: My most important task is writing awesome content. That’s why I always start the day by sitting down and writing. I won’t move on to the next task before writing at least 1000 words. What’s your most important task? Use the 80/20 rule to help you figure it out and get in the habit of doing it before moving to anything else. #2 Use Feedback Loops Musk has a very tight schedule, often working at different locations on any given day. That’s why he’s constantly trying to optimize his time. While admitting he hadn’t read any books on time management, Musk shared some insightful advice on how to become better: “I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” Musk incorporates not only his own feedback but also of others: he urges entrepreneurs to seek preferably negative feedback. While it might be hurtful at first, you normally end up getting a lot more out of it. He also focuses on hiring the best people in any field that can provide consistent and truthful feedback. Shortening the feedback loops lead to increased efficiency, faster implementation, and a better-finished product. Apply This Productivity Secret The great thing about this particular Elon Musk productivity secret is that it works for both your professional and personal life. Gather your team and solicit feedback about a particular product, feature, management style, business process, or anything that you are currently trying to improve. “Don’t tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like.” You can do the same exercise with friends. And while the negative feedback may be wrong, you know they are simply trying to help you and it’s well-intentioned. #3 Reason from First Principles A first principle is a basic assumption that can’t be deduced from any other proposition. It’s the only sure thing in a complex problem. Musk reasons from first principles, rather than by analogy (such as previous experiences). This way you build your reasoning from the ground up: “You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that and then see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work. And it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past. It’s harder to think that way, though.” Here’s an example of first principles reasoning, from Musk himself: “What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.” Instead of buying a rocket for millions of dollars, Musk decided to purchase the raw materials for cheap and build the rockets himself in his own company. And SpaceX was born. Apply This Productivity Secret Reasoning from first principles forces you to think differently. First Principles is about getting to the root cause of the problem. You have to break down the problem into its basic elements. There are three main steps to apply this thinking framework: Identify and define current assumptions: when faced with a problem, write down your current assumptions about it Break it down into the fundamental principles: find the most basic truths or elements of the problem. Is Musk’s words: “Boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say ‘okay, what are we sure is true’…and then reason up from there.” Create new solutions: if you deconstructed the problem following the first two steps, you are now ready to create new solutions from scratch If you want a deeper look into Musk’s mind and reasoning by first principles, read one of my all-time favorite articles: The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce. #4 Use Asynchronous Communication The first productivity hack gave you a slight hint for this one: Musk prefers to communicate on his own terms. That means defaulting to email and texts, both asynchronous ways of communication. In his own words: “I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.” He also makes himself hard to reach for people outside his company by using an obscure email address. This lets him focus on actual work for his companies. Apply This Productivity Secret Progress comes from being focused and performing Deep Work. This means living as asynchronously as possible and with minimal interruptions from coworkers. Here are three solutions to start working on your terms (in order of difficulty): Turn off notifications: shut all notifications down on your phone, computer, and any other gadgets you use. If it’s truly important, people will call shut all notifications down on your phone, computer, and any other gadgets you use. If it’s truly important, people will call Decline meetings: don’t agree to a meeting unless there is a clear agenda and you know the expected outcome; if possible, use email instead don’t agree to a meeting unless there is a clear agenda and you know the expected outcome; if possible, use email instead Work remotely: a noisy office means distractions, whereas working from home is done in silence. If that’s not a possibility, ask for a private office Minimize distractions in your daily life in order to make progress in meaningful work. #5 Master Communication When Musk is not building rockets or revolutionizing the automobile industry, there’s one place you can always find him: on email. He joked at a conference: “I do a lot of email — very good at email. That’s my core competency”. He is extremely clear, concise, and direct on his emails. As an example, read the email sent to his entire staff about the use of acronyms aptly called “Acronyms Seriously Suck”. He frequently emails his entire company with updates, how to communicate, company visions and mission, and being more productive at work. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.” He is also a master at public speaking, converting complex concepts into easy to understand language using an authentic voice. Musk often uses the present tense when talking about visionary topics, a language trick that excites the listener into feeling the future is now. Apply This Productivity Secret According to a study of Carleton University, a third of the workweek of the “typical’’ knowledge worker is spent on email. That’s why mastering communication over email is an art form. You want to be succinct but also get your message across. In an email, every word counts. Here are some tips on how to master communication over email: Keep it short: don’t write ten sentences when two suffice. To practice, take an email you’ve already written in a normal fashion and edit it down to half the words don’t write ten sentences when two suffice. To practice, take an email you’ve already written in a normal fashion and edit it down to half the words Avoid squishy words: avoid writing “I feel”, “I’m not sure”, “perhaps”, using the passive voice, or any adverbs that waste time for both you and your recipient and create confusion and misunderstandings avoid writing “I feel”, “I’m not sure”, “perhaps”, using the passive voice, or any adverbs that waste time for both you and your recipient and create confusion and misunderstandings Know what you want: think about the intended outcome of the email and outline it first in plain-spoken language. With practice, this outline IS your email think about the intended outcome of the email and outline it first in plain-spoken language. With practice, this outline IS your email Bold the important: if you need a reply from a particular person on a thread with multiple people, put their name in bold with action items and timeline if you need a reply from a particular person on a thread with multiple people, put their name in bold with action items and timeline Forwarding code of conduct: never forward along a massive email chain without a few bullet points as a quick summary at the top explaining why you’re sending it and action items you need from the other person #6 Batch Tasks Musk multi-tasks strategically. Whenever possible, he combines several tasks together in a productivity hack known as batching. For example, he answers emails while eating or having a meeting over lunch. Here’s a quote from Elon on the subject: “But what I find is I’m able to be with [my kids] and still be on email. I can be with them and still be working at the same time… If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to get my job done.” Another example is going through emails and invoices while on phone meetings or interviews. Apply This Productivity Secret Studies have confirmed that multi-tasking is normally less efficient than single-tasking. The brain needs time to adjust when navigating different tasks, also known as task switching. Switching makes you tired and unproductive, not the tasks themselves. But if you batch similar tasks that call for similar mindsets you can efficiently work on multiple tasks without losing your workflow. In other words, your brain is focused on one type of task at a time. Here are a couple of examples: Outlining all your blog posts for the upcoming week in one sitting Processing all emails, Slack, phone calls, and other communications at once Updating several related worksheets at the same time To find more activities you can stack, write down all your general activities for the day and week and identify the ones that can be batched together. Try the batch a couple of times and rearrange tasks if necessary. To process batches even faster, use the Pomodoro Technique. #7 Scheduling Running three companies is no small feat, which means time is of the essence for Elon Musk. He is constantly trying to optimize his time using feedback loops. Like many other ultra-productive and successful people, he follows a very detailed and specific daily schedule. He breaks his calendar into five-minute slots and finding your way into one of those openings is tough work. He prioritizes engineering, design, and manufacturing, spending 80 percent of his time at work on those areas. “I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.” By splitting his day into 5-minute chunks, Musk manages to get more tasks scheduled into his work. Apply This Productivity Secret The most productive people work from their calendar instead of a to-do list. Calendars are finite and give you a better sense of time, making it easier to determine how much time you have to complete projects during your week. Breaking your days into small chunks and scheduling tasks on your calendar can boost your productivity. But you don’t have to use 5-minute chunks. I found that the most efficient way of organizing my work is to break the days into 30-minute slots. Find a timing that works best for you and your work. And make sure that you schedule everything: checking email, calling clients, lunch, and meetings. Everything goes on your calendar. Rip to-do lists and instead work from your calendar. #8 Embrace Stretch Goals Perhaps one of Musk’s most notorious character traits is his tendency to set incredibly ambitious deadlines for his companies’ projects. He uses stretch goals as a way to change perception: “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.” Here’s a story from a former SpaceX executive: “It’s like he has everyone working on this car that is meant to get from Los Angeles to New York on one tank of gas. They will work on the car for a year and test all of its parts. Then, when they set off for New York after that year, all the vice presidents think privately that the car will be lucky to get to Las Vegas. What ends up happening is that the car gets to New Mexico — twice as far as they ever expected — and Elon is still mad. He gets twice as much as anyone else out of people.” (emphasis mine) The last sentence illustrates the power of stretch goals. Even in the face of failure, your goal was so outrageous, so impossible to achieve, that you celebrate the small achievements you made because you expected that nothing would come out of it. The initial plan of Tesla was to start shipping the Roadster in 2006. The company pushed that deadline back several times until the car actually became available in 2008. Even though they released its car almost two years after the deadline, Tesla delivered the first completely battery-powered electric car. In his own words: “I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.” Musk’s stretch goals have given us a world where one of the best cars you can buy is electric, and where we finally have reusable rockets: “When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.” Setting goals that maintain the status quo doesn’t get you reusable rockets. Apply This Productivity Secret The intention of setting stretch goals is to push yourself outside the comfort zone. Growth doesn’t happen when you keep doing what you’ve already done in the past. It comes from failing while trying to make progress. If you aim to achieve five great things and only succeed at two of them, you are outperforming all the people who never tried in the first place. Stretch goals demand more quantity and quality of work and force you to innovate more often than ordinary goals. And in the pursuit of it, you grow your skills to where they need to be in order to get it done. At first, you won’t know how ambitious your stretch goals should be. Using trial and error, understand how much past your limits you should push. But the most important thing is to start trying and then adjust as you go. Next time you are making plans for work, take a few extra minutes to include a stretch goal. Try to push yourself to perform 50% better than your normal goal requires. Go big and see if you can surprise yourself with incredible performance. Using this strategy is the first step towards smashing goals and reaching targets you didn’t even think were possible! #9 Develop a Growth Mindset In 2004, Musk called a supplier to get the price of an electromechanical actuator. The supplier quoted $120,000. Reasoning from first principles, Musk broke down the components needed and asked Steve Davis, now SpaceX’s director of advanced projects, to build one from scratch for under $5,000. Davis spent nine months designing and building the actuator for $3,900, which flew to space inside the Falcon 1 rocket. Elon Musk is never satisfied with where he is now. His companies have had enormous achievements, but Musk knows that there’s always room for improvement — in every area. There’s always a better, faster, or cheaper way to do things: “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” This is what is called a growth mindset, an important skill that separates successful people from everyone else. When you have a growth mindset, you know you can learn anything if you put enough effort into it. And if you fail, you approach the problem from a different angle until you find a solution that works. You iterate until you get it right. In Musk’s words: “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” The opposite is known as a fixed mindset, where the status quo is rarely challenged. Things will always be the way they are because “that’s how we do things around here”. Preconceived notions are taken as universal truths, instead of being questioned. Thus, people stagnate. On the other hand, developing a growth-oriented mindset brings progress to both our personal and professional lives. And even if you manage small gains each day are small, they compound over time. A 1% gain every day compounds to almost 3800% increase over a year. Apply This Productivity Secret Growth comes from tackling difficult problems, questions, and challenges. In order to succeed, you need to train the brain to look at failures and struggles as progress, as getting closer to the solution. Here’s how you can start developing a growth mindset: Continual learning: expand your knowledge with books, learn from your personal challenges, and from others; loading your brain with fresh knowledge enables it to come up with new ideas and solutions that add value to your job and life expand your knowledge with books, learn from your personal challenges, and from others; loading your brain with fresh knowledge enables it to come up with new ideas and solutions that add value to your job and life Be persistent: shift your perspective to look at failures as minor setbacks and learning experiences in the great scheme of things; adapt and iterate your ideas so you can be successful on the next try shift your perspective to look at failures as minor setbacks and learning experiences in the great scheme of things; adapt and iterate your ideas so you can be successful on the next try Live for challenges: if you have two choices, choose the harder; look at challenges as an opportunity to expand your skills and grow if you have two choices, choose the harder; look at challenges as an opportunity to expand your skills and grow Embrace failure: at some point in life, everybody fails; learn from failures by understanding what went wrong and how it can be improved and use that experience in the next try at some point in life, everybody fails; learn from failures by understanding what went wrong and how it can be improved and use that experience in the next try Open to feedback: effective and timely feedback on areas to improve is a critical component of success; be more open to receiving feedback, even the non-constructive one effective and timely feedback on areas to improve is a critical component of success; be more open to receiving feedback, even the non-constructive one Celebrate others: “no man is an island”, so start supporting other people successes because they won’t dampen yours; when it’s your time to shine, they will celebrate with you #10 Develop a Wide Knowledge Base According to his brother, Musk used to read 2 books a day from an early age. In other words: he devoured knowledge. This led to a wide understanding of many sciences, such as physics, math, engineering, and computer science. One of my favorite quotes is about how he describes knowledge: “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.” Even when running his companies, Musk constantly tries to learn from the people around him that have more knowledge on a specific topic. Here’s a passage from the book: “He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.” Over the years, Musk developed T-shaped skills: a lot of knowledge in one particular field and a substantial amount of knowledge in many other disciplines and topics. This allowed him to be world-class in one field (business) but also use his broad knowledge to innovate, find different solutions, be more creative, and collaborate with experts in other fields effectively. Apply This Productivity Secret Let’s start with a practical example: you want to be healthy. In order to be healthy, practicing just one sport isn’t going to cut it. You need to know a whole lot of skills: you need to learn the basics of a good diet, how to develop muscle, flexibility, different cardio, condition, etc. While you have deep knowledge in a particular field — the sport — , you also developed broad knowledge in many other areas which are the basis on being healthy. This is the T-shaped skills approach. Let’s look at someone who works in Marketing or Growth: deep knowledge in acquisition channels such as PPC, SEO, and viral loops, while also having broad knowledge over other topics such as statistics, some programming, design principles, and copywriting. Here’s how you can develop T-shaped skills in your area: Draw a T and list the main skills, secondary skills, and base knowledge. If it helps, model a successful person in your field and their range of expertise Now see where you stand in each of those areas Improve your deep expertise by reading books, taking courses, reading about your industry, and learning from other people Continually reevaluate yourself in the areas and adjust your learning to become T-shaped #11 BONUS: Showering One of the most upvoted questions on the 2015 Reddit AMA with Musk was:“What daily habit do you believe has the largest positive impact on your life?” To which Musk simply replied: “Showering.” In another interview, Musk admitted the shower is where he normally comes up with the best ideas: “This sounds really cliche, but like, the shower is probably like the most… wake up, go shower in the morning and I think so what’s really happened is things have percolated in the subconscious and it’s not really occurring in the shower but you’re kinda getting the results from last night’s you know, computation, basically.” (emphasis mine) I think that’s the lesson in productivity from showering: your brain has been working all night for you, trying to come up with solutions in the background. It takes a few minutes to turn “on” and that can happen during the shower, helping you see challenges with more clarity. It also provides you with quiet time to think right after refreshing your brain. You can use it to plan the day ahead or think about solutions for problems you might face during the day ahead, for example. “I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.” Stay blessed, and stay inspired!

https://medium.com/swlh/top-10-elon-musk-productivity-secrets-for-insane-success-dae584c88e03

['Dan Silvestre']

2020-05-25 15:00:40.046000+00:00

['Work', 'Growth', 'Productivity', 'Elon Musk', 'Entrepreneurship']

Dave Chappelle’s “Unforgiven” Is A Masterpiece Of Persuasive Writing

I can just take it Like all good stories, Unforgiven plays out over three acts, the first of which is set back when Dave was fourteen years old. Even though he was just getting started in comedy, he was, it will surprise nobody to learn, a natural. From the first moment he got up on stage, Dave displayed a level of poise and confidence far beyond his years. And as the older comedians watched him perform, perhaps they forget that he was still a child. When one of his fellow comics asked if he could “borrow” a joke for an audition at a different club, Dave innocently said, ”Sure.” He was still too trusting to know any better. Not yet wise enough to feel that twinge of warning that you’re no doubt feeling in your gut. A few weeks later, when the same guy uses his joke in a live performance, Dave pulls him aside after the set. “Hey man,” Dave said, “I don’t mind you borrowing the joke, but you have to give it back!” The man apologised and offered to buy the joke for a measly $50. Dave, a new comedian trying to build up a body of work, said no. It didn’t go down well. The older man looms over the young boy, making sure he gets a sense of how much bigger and stronger he is, then he leans in close and says, “Really? I can just take it.” And he does. Dave tells us that even now, thirty-two years later, he still thinks about that man on a daily basis. It was the first time in his life that somebody had taken something that he believed was his, but it wouldn’t be the last. The first act establishes Dave as the underdog. A child, being taken advantage of by a world he’s still too naive to understand and too young to truly belong in. It’s impossible not to feel the injustice of what happened to him. But as we do, Dave ups the stakes.

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/dave-chappelles-unforgiven-is-a-masterpiece-of-persuasive-writing-f0ef600c7290

['Steve Qj']

2020-12-06 00:30:24.489000+00:00

['Comedy', 'Television', 'Dave Chappelle', 'Storytelling', 'Writing']

I think I’ve got a clue for the secret success of Fatim Hemraj on News Break

I think I’ve got a clue for the secret success of Fatim Hemraj on News Break Some writers may have hidden power for influencing their readers. Let me elaborate on this remark. For the goal is to highlight high achievers in our community. Because writers need inspiration. Fatim Hemraj has joined ILLUMINATION-Curated as soon as we established the publication. Since then, she has been submitting remarkable stories delighting our readers. True Crime Readers like her topic so much that some even requested more stories from Fatim in our readers feedback letters. Why am I highlighting Fatim’s writing for ILLUMINATION-Curated? Since last few days, I started discovering many writers contributing to our publications on News Break. When reviewing featured stories on News Break, I came across Fatim’s profile. It is a pleasant surprise. I want to share my findings to inspire our writers. Here is the profile which speaks itself. What is impressive about this profile is with only ten posts Fatim received 520K views, which means that each story averaged 52K views. This is a remarkable achievement for a writer. Besides, in such a short time, Fatim gained 2073 followers. I have seen many writers on News Break recently, but this profile is the most outstanding one. It aligns with her success on ILLUMINATION-Curated. In my view secret of Fatim’s success is her ability to engage the readers. Her readers admire her pen and her diligence on true crime topic. Working with top writers like Fatim is a pleasure on ILLUMINATION-Curated. She is a source of inspiration for our readers and the readers of News Break. Here is a quick taste to give you about Fatim’s two stories on News Break. If you haven’t applied to News Break Creator program yet, you may use my disclosed affiliate link to start your application. If you have questions about the program, you can approach me on our Slack workspace. Thank you for reading my perspectives. I hope you find this story inspiring. How to connect with me I established three significant publications supporting 7,000+ writers and serving 70,000+ readers on Medium. Join my publications requesting access here. You are welcome to subscribe to my 100K+ mailing list, to collaborate, enhance your network, receive technology and leadership newsletters reflecting my industry experience. I am on ILLUMINATION Slack Workspace. Connect with me on News Break. Connect with me on Vocal Media. I use Linktree to share my social platforms.

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/i-think-ive-got-a-clue-for-the-secret-success-of-fatim-hemraj-on-news-break-1ed914842b3e

['Dr Mehmet Yildiz']

2020-12-26 04:21:34.150000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Technology', 'Self Improvement', 'Freelancing', 'Writing']

Architecture as Pedagogy

The 128,000-square-foot building, with a base of five floors and a tower of 11 floors that structurally aligns with the adjacent brutalist Altschul Hall, is designed to encourage interaction between students and faculty in one dynamic complex. Organized as a fully interdisciplinary community, the complex transitions from active, bustling spaces to quiet, reflective spaces as one moves their way to the top. Inside the library, a signature stairwell leads users up from a ground floor space with a cafe, suite of multimedia Centers, and a wide variety of study areas to quieter, more individual spaces surrounded by books. The Milstein Center alleviates the campus’ office space shortage, becoming the new multidisciplinary home to departments affiliated with social sciences including economics, urban studies, political science and history. It also contains expanded conference facilities and features the Vagelos Computational Sciences Center, the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. The Milstein Center is home to several academic centers that help students explore new ways of learning through hands-on research, collaborations, and conversations including the Empirical Reasoning Center, Design Center, Digital Humanities Center, Sloate Media Center, and the Movement Lab. These innovative centers provide a range of resources that reflect the connections and intersections that lie at the core of Barnard’s educational philosophy. “The new building permits students to find a space that invites them to study and learn, that engages them with all kinds of technology, and enables that staff of the library to move forward and help support and innovate our curriculum,” says Provost Linda Bell. Outdoor spaces play a critical role in the Milstein Center’s vibrancy, with terraces on the second, third, and fourth floors. As part of the project, Lehman Lawn was slightly elevated in order create a more accessible and connected campus entrance. Photo © Magda Biernat Outdoor spaces play a critical role in the center’s vibrancy as well, with terraces on the second, third, and fourth floors that make for exceptional areas for studying or socializing. SOM also slightly raised the elevation of the Lehman Lawn, the open space between Barnard’s wrought iron fencing and The Milstein Center, in order to create a more accessible entry to the heart of the campus and connected campus experience. “The Milstein Center is more than a wonderful new building. It is a game changer for Barnard…and it will help Barnard become even more extraordinary,” says the college’s president Sian Beilock. Inside and out, top to bottom, the building is a fresh and diversified source of vitality for a comprehensive, cutting-edge education nestled within an urban campus. How did it all come to be? The team answers below: What made Barnard a unique client? Carrie Moore: There were so many women represented on the client side, starting at the interview. For me, that was profound because I could look out to the other end of the table and see people who looked like me and that was not the case on any prior projects I had worked on. Of course Barnard is a women’s school, but I do think team diversity is where things are shifting within higher ed in general. That dynamic was a key component to the project’s success. Meredith Bostwick-Lorenzo Eiroa: Working on a site like The Milstein Center is quite special because the intervention that was required is right at the heart of the campus that is essentially the size of one large Manhattan block. Ask any student and they will tell you that Barnard is a special campus and community in the middle of the big city. Meredith Bostwick-Lorenzo Eiroa meets with Barnard students on the campus lawn. Photo © Asiya Khaki If you’re standing on the main lawn you can see every corner of the full campus, so site visits became the perfect opportunity to casually take in feedback from students and faculty we’d run into outside of formal meetings. The physical place makes a strong campus and community like none I’ve ever seen working with higher education clients. Those experiences sparked so many ideas and spearheaded the need to create something special that is uniquely of this place — a new kind of library. What did Barnard outline as their key needs? Colin Koop: They essentially had a building dedicated to book storage and faculty offices but what they wanted was a building that was more interdisciplinary — a crossroads with a set of space types which would appeal to a broad demographic of teachers and students. They had a desire for engaged pedagogy, a movement lab, and study spaces. The campus as a whole did not have enough seats for students to study, collaborate, or socialize, so huge swaths of students were heading to Columbia to find seats. This wasn’t just about the pedagogy of the library, but also the quantity of area that students could use for anything. The Movement Lab is one of the center’s several academic centers helping students explore new ways of learning. Photo © Magda Biernat How much of a role did students have in the design process? Meredith: When we began thinking about what our first meetings might be like, I made a call to Debora Spar, the college president at the time, who was the champion for this project from the beginning. I asked, ‘What’s the right way to begin to engage with the Barnard community?’ and she said, ‘Start with the students… let’s listen.’ So together with Debora and Brightspot Strategy, we crafted a series of listening sessions on multiple themes that shape the student experience at Barnard: how they study, how they want to collaborate with their peers, what they’d like to see in a new kind of library, what we can learn from what works today, and what’s missing. Our initial interactions were a set of questions and intake sessions to learn from students, staff, faculty, and leadership. From those sessions, we were able to better understand how to best scaffold their learning and support different student experiences through the course of their studies. What kind of surprises showed up along the way? Meredith: We were dealing with a very constrained site with ever-increasing requirements and nuances. It was a fast-paced schedule, with a growing list of program needs to be met within a constrained budget. During the programming process, we learned that Barnard students can access several physical spaces at Columbia University, so the question then became ‘What do we already have at Columbia versus what do we need here?’ One of the greatest challenges was to reevaluate with library staff and faculty how to right-size the facility in the absence of a library Dean in the design phases: How many collections would it hold? What would be kept offsite? How would the special collections and archives grow? What instructional and media spaces would it serve? We also had to determine what other types of study and learning spaces would be critical for a 21st century library. The challenge was then to balance a variety of needs within a total space budget, while finding opportunities to create new Centers and flexible spaces that could host student-centered needs that had not yet been defined. Carrie: After all of the consensus building and collaboration in the programming effort, we all eventually had to make a tough call around shrinking the size of the building to keep it within a shrinking budget. There was one program reconciliation meeting with faculty where by the end of it, everyone from Barnard’s side was in agreement on what they would sacrifice for the sake of a better project overall. We expected this conversation to be a struggle, but because there was so much involvement from the start, everyone was on the same page. We had that one session and then we were able to move forward with everyone getting what they were looking for, which was remarkable.

https://som.medium.com/architecture-as-pedagogy-dc685dd3f86a

[]

2020-11-17 14:45:04.439000+00:00

['Barnard College', 'Architecture', 'Higher Ed', 'Design', 'New York']

Truth and Trust: the Rise and Fall of the Expert

French Biologist Louis Pasteur (Credit: Science History Institute/Gregory Tobias) We live in a ‘post-truth world’. That phrase is rather Orwellian, a reality of alternative facts and fake news, where society questions everything, and is sceptical of everyone. But if there is one title that has lost any legitimacy in our modern age it is the expert, generally defined as a person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject. Most conspiracy theories in our modern age are founded in this distrust in experts — scientists, economists, professors, doctors. But where does the idea of the ‘expert’ come from? 1 — The Rise of the Expert Political economist William Davies in his book ‘Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason’ argues that the concept of the expert originated in the destructive religious wars of the 17th Century, with the bloody clash of Catholics and Protestants. Davies argues that people had to grapple with the basic question: in a world recently ravaged by hatred, how do we build a world built on trust rather than fear or anger? Philosopher Thomas Hobbes answered that it was simple — a strong government intimidating the populace would instil trust between subjects. If you were a victim of a crime, you could trust the Leviathan, or the sovereign, would punish the perpetrator. Hobbes argued this creates trust between not only the subject and their sovereign, but the subject and his peer — the fear of punishment would keep them in-line, and so more trustworthy. The merchant classes of history had a similar crisis of trust: how can I trust this person will pay me back? Merchants and financiers experienced the same problem with the world’s monarchs — how can I trust the King or Queen to pay me back the money I lent them to raise an army? Even scientists had this issue, how can a scientist trust the observations made by a peer they have never met? The answer to all these trust gaps is the expert. Davies writes, “Pioneering communities of merchants and gentlemen introduced strict new rules for how their impressions should be recorded and spoken of, to avoid exaggeration and distortion, using numbers and public record-keeping.” Examples of this concept are evidenced all over history. Merchants began extensive book-keeping, which could be scrutinised by anyone looking to do business with them. The Bank of England was formed to bridge another trust gap, how could lenders know the Crown would pay them back? The Monarchy crafted extensive record-keeping techniques to convince financiers that they would honour their debts. Even Coffeehouses are examples of this, where numberphiles would meet to discuss issues, and solve them objectively with stats, facts, and logic. Davies says that “…In the 1670s, the suggestion that political questions be settled on the basis of numerical facts was radical” whereas nowadays it is an obvious necessity. 2 — The Fall of the Expert Unfortunately sentiment towards experts has changed. The trust has been broken due to the idea that you should only believe what your own eyes tell you, a noble principle but often a problematic one. This is an overt rejection of expertise, or as Davies remarks, “To trust in science is to trust in the capacity of people to report and record things in adequate fashion … We’re willing to ‘take their word for it’, rather than constantly refer back to the thing itself.” But the marked change in experts has also shown itself in a change in conspiracy theories. Where old conspiracy theories may try to make sense of life-changing events, attempting to help bring order or clarity, modern conspiracies are exactly that, all conspiracy and no theory. As Professor Nancy Rosenblum states, “The purpose of conspiracy theories is no longer to explain reality or offer some accounts of the world; instead, the point is to erode trust in public figures or institutions.” For Rosenblum the point of modern conspiracies is to erode faith in institutions, specifically the medical and scientific establishment. This lack of trust permeates our society, and not all for bad reasons. Governments are full of so-called “experts” like Chief Advisor Dominic Cummings, touting solutions to modern problems, all in hopes to serve their own political or personal agendas. All things therefore should be analysed critically and with scepticism, because experts, like all things, come with problems. Many experts will point towards metrics that make them look better, and often have political agendas or simply fail to see the damage of their policies. Davies explains, “The resentment of elites that we see around us today is fuelled by a sense [that the promise of experts] is now bogus … Revelations of their personal moral failings, via media exposés, leaks, and social media searches, make the distinctions of these figures ever harder to sustain. Their claim to represent our interests becomes nothing but a shroud for their own political agendas.” Essentially, the distrust of experts is so complex because it is sometimes justified and sometimes not. However, Rosenblum argues that it is not just the trust in institutions and science that’s at risk, but our trust in each other. Older conspiracy theories generally targeted and criticised those at the top; governments, businesses etc. Modern conspiracies target both the top and the bottom: survivors of school shootings are labelled ‘Crisis Actors’, Scientists and teachers are called ‘shills’, and so on. Davies argues that our lack of trust in experts, elites or each other has led to a Hobbesian war of all against all (not that we want to murder each other as Hobbes argued, but rather that we distrust the basic premise of our so-called ‘opponents’). It’s led to arguments now being places to achieve victory over others, rather than reveal truth, you win an argument, politicians ‘destroy’ their opponents. The gamification of truth doesn’t benefit anyone. Some may believe it allows for a market where truth and fiction are more easily distinguished, but the opposite is true. 3 — Pseudoscience There is a prime example of how experts and conspiracies can crossover. The pandemic has sparked a lot of speculation and one of the most prominent, albeit nonsensical ones, is that 5G towers caused Covid-19. But let’s take this conspiracy back to its root, to one man: Thomas Cowan. Like any reputable ‘expert‘, Cowan published his claims on YouTube — garnering half a million views, before being removed for going against YouTube’s community guidelines. His idea that 5G towers caused our pandemic has been promulgated by various celebrities such as Woody Harrelson (who are by no stretch of the imagination medical experts), and in the UK, people have torched several 5G towers for their alleged role in the pandemic. But what did Cowan actually claim, we know he said that he believed 5G towers caused the pandemic, but how exactly? Cowan believes that when our cells get sick they excrete toxins, and 5G is allegedly poisoning those cells leading to them, in his ‘expert’ words, “Pooping out poisons.” In Cowan’s many YouTube videos he makes 4 main claims: (a) viruses do not cause diseases (b) the Spanish Flu that killed tens of millions was caused by the electrification of the Earth and waves being produced by radios © because we are ‘electrical beings’ other major outbreaks in the last Century were caused by the aforementioned ’electrification’ (d) vaccines are bad. Cowan seems to have forgotten (or rather chooses to ignore) the fact that there have been diseases and indeed massive pandemics such as the Bubonic Plague, small pox, or measles, which all occurred prior to the discovery of electricity. However, proving that diseases existed before electricity does not disprove that electricity causes diseases, yet Cowan’s argument simply seems to be that all that is natural is good. Take for example when he spoke about how humanity used to drink more ‘pure’ water, yet again conveniently forgetting (or as mentioned intentionally ignoring) the thousands of years people died from drinking water teeming with harmful pathogens. One may think to themselves at this point ‘how do people fall for this, and believe a random guy who uploaded a conspiracy with almost no accurate scientific theory to YouTube?’ And you may be quick to respond ‘People are just really stupid!’ But alas that is not the case. The kind of conspiracy Cowan is promoting is a form of pseudoscience, and pseudoscience for all it’s fallacies is rather anatomically complex. See pseudoscience often preys on the fact that its victims are educated, giving us ideas that cater to our relatively basic understanding of science taught in schools. The success of pseudoscience does not hinge on the idiocy of people, but rather the fact that not everyone is capable of understanding every single scientific principle that intersects with their lives. This is exactly what Cowan utilises to spread his 5G tower conspiracy. Pseudoscience often looks like real science, they trot out ‘experts’, real people with M.D.s and PhDs from actual universities, such as Cowan, a medical doctor (graduating from Michigan State University College of Human Medicine) and vice President of the Physicians Association for Anthroposophical Medicine, as well as a founding board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation. But if one thing is already evident — Cowan is NOT an expert. Yes — he has the titles and the criteria that may make you believe he is an expert, and hence adopt his claims as fact, but a greater analysis shows how his claims are dangerous pseudoscientific nonsense. Pseudoscience consist of two main things: a misunderstanding (or manipulation) of context, and large interpretive leaps of scientific theory. Let’s look at a real scientist, an actual expert, called Louis Pasteur. Pasteur’s experimentation not only gave us ‘pasteurised milk’ but the formation of the Germ Theory of Disease -the idea that microorganisms or pathogens can cause disease — the same theory that Cowan seems to be denying by stating that viruses do not cause diseases, but rather electricity does. Pasteur’s scientific rival, a man with ten times more scientific knowledge and expertise than Cowan, Robert Koch, was also looking into microorganisms. Koch’s work in microbiology is how we are able to discern the difference between the standard flu and viruses such as Covid-19. In his videos Cowan cites Koch to support his claims that the Coronavirus was not caused by…a virus. Koch and his peers were faced with the question of how a scientist could determine, out of all the millions of microorganisms in the human body, which one is making us ill. Koch sought to resolve this conundrum by coming up with his four postulates: 1) We can suspect a specific microorganism of causing an illness if we can find that organism in all the cases of that illness (this isn’t enough though as there are many microorganisms in our bodies). 2) One has to be able to isolate this specific microorganism and grow it in a pure culture. 3) The cultured microbe will cause a disease in a healthy host (although scientists tend to use healthy cells or animals rather than intentionally making others ill nowadays). 4) You are able to watch as your newly infected organism produces enough of the virus or bacteria for you to once again isolate it in a petri dish, thus reducing the search. But how does Cowan use Koch’s otherwise sound scientific process to make an absurd claim that 5G towers cause Covid-19? Simply, through the two limbs of pseudoscience: a manipulation of context and large interpretive leaps of scientific theory. Cowan claims that in Boston during the Spanish Flu pandemic, scientists extracted mucus from infected people and injected them into healthy people, eliciting no symptoms (disqualified by Koch’s third postulate), except the paper referenced by Cowan, ‘Experiments to Determine Mode of Spread of Influenza’ by Milton J. Rosenaw, M.D. sees the author worry he is carrying out the experiment all wrong. But Cowan cites a real scientific study without the sufficient context simply to give an air of legitimacy to an otherwise ridiculous claim. The findings into the origin of the Spanish Flu came about from a community of scientists rather than one lone study or researcher as Cowan seems to imply. Koch’s postulates are still used today, although they are not perfect. For instance, such as in the Covid-19 pandemic, some people contract the virus but show no symptoms. Scientists often debate how to best tweak Koch’s postulates — modern techniques such as sequencing the genome of a suspected virus and comparing it to genetically similar viruses (like Covid-19 to SARS) can help us identify the microbial-causes of an illness, an idea not even dream-able in Koch’s time. But people like Cowan who play fast and loose with scientific principles will make claims that Koch’s postulate assert that 100% of people with the virus or bacteria should have symptoms, an idea not even Koch believed! Put frankly, Dr Thomas Cowan is just another snake oil salesman who points to real scientific research or theory crafted by actual scientific experts to imply that he is correct, and is himself an expert. And although he is a medical doctor, a person who should have the medical context to know why his claims are obviously false, it is worth noting that most doctors are not research scientists — their training does not focus on critical thinking or research techniques, and so when speaking on matters like these they should not be branded as ‘experts’ no matter how hard they try to convince you they are. This is a part of the reason you can see countless people with medical degrees claiming ridiculous things about vaccines or Covid-19: they think simply being armed with the certification and facts in a vacuum will lead to the right conclusion. Let’s take a look at another piece of ‘evidence’ Cowan uses to support his 5G tower conspiracy. He claims that 5G was launched in Wuhan, China were the virus is thought to have originated. Now aside from that being blatantly false as 5G originated in parts of South Korea and the US first, it suggests that Cowan is trying to use correlative evidence to support his claims, and as any student can tell you, correlation does not equal causation. That’s not to deny that correlation isn’t important evidence occasionally, but this correlative evidence is contrary to Cowan’s statement, as places without 5G are still experiencing Covid. Cowan is a prime example of how human bias enters the scientific process. Science is not, as Cowan and his fellow pseudoscientists would have you believe, an individual process were one scientists does a study and single-handedly changes the game, but is done in cooperation with other scientists through peer-reviews and the such. Science is a web of knowledge, not individual facts or studies separated from their context. That is what makes science robust. So when Cowan points to the basics of virology to forge a hoax as this, it is only the context of his evidence that can save us. If one needs better evidence of Cowan’s lack of expertise and failed understanding of the cooperative nature of science, look no further than the time that Cowan had his medical license put on probation for 5 years after he suggested a patient with breast cancer should take a drug that has never gone through any safety trials, without even suggesting to the patient that it may be dangerous, and without consulting their medical records or making an in-person examination. The irony of Cowan condemning 5G for being a technology with unknown consequences whilst recommending drugs with unknown side-effects is hopefully not lost on anyone. But besides the danger that Cowan’s claims pose in terms of public health, he and his ilk represent the loss of trust in experts. There are thousands upon thousands of people like Cowan who paint themselves as experts while simultaneously making the most amateur errors. It’s these sort of people who give the real expert a bad name, who bring down the names of real scientists like Koch and Pasteur, who repulse people from bastions of truth, who lead to governments ignoring the medical advise of actual experts (as has been the case in many countries during the Covid-19 pandemic). Michael Gove said during the Brexit campaign of 2016 that Britain has allegedly “had enough of experts” but it is evident (especially with Gove in a position of power) that we need them. To quote Professor Timothy Snyder, “If you want to rip the heart out of a Democracy, you go after facts. That’s what modern authoritarians do. Step 1: you lie all the time. Step 2: you say it’s your opponents and the journalists who lie. Step 3: everyone looks around and says, ‘what is truth? There is no truth.’ Then resistance is impossible and the game is over.”

https://adamdesalle.medium.com/truth-and-trust-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-expert-f502a3a6b2dd

['Adam De Salle']

2020-09-04 19:49:26.985000+00:00

['Expert', 'Expertise', 'Science', '5g', 'Coronavirus']

4 Top AI/ML Github Repositories in November 2020

4 Top AI/ML Github Repositories in November 2020 Some of these will blow your mind Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash Data Scientists and Machine Learning researchers will both keep a nose around for what’s going on in the community. There are various ways to do this: by checking out what’s going on in Kaggle or Product Hunt. Maybe having a look through stack overflow trends, or even looking at GitHub trends. I’m a curious individual, so I wanted to see what had been trending this month: all of which I found to be pretty damn interesting. Here goes it:

https://towardsdatascience.com/4-top-ai-ml-github-repositories-in-november-2020-aa51656aaab9

['Mohammad Ahmad']

2020-11-20 22:13:05.806000+00:00

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

How to Calm Your Wolves

Long ago, I came to understand my dreams aren’t a simple mishmash of absurdities. They have a purpose. Untapped, however, they remain obscure. Like me, you have a guidance system, friend, and creative sage at your disposal who delivers data as you sleep. Its offerings arise in a foreign language though. Not one unfamiliar because it’s from another country, but due to the way it communicates artistically with symbols, myths, and emotions. You can optimize your life if you learn to untangle the stories woven into your dreams since they reveal your innermost joys, fears, and unmet needs. What are dreams? Your dreams are truth-tellers, they illustrate what’s going on in your life and in your head. The kind you call nightmares stem from data in the subconscious, existing below everyday thoughts and feelings. Sometimes they arise from recurrent self-talk, or challenging circumstances, linked to charged emotions or events your mind wants to understand. You don’t experience data you can’t handle until you are ready. Nonetheless, if you don’t want to deal with what ails you, uncomfortable hidden material won’t go away. It settles beneath your waking mind to swim before your slumbering eyes. “But my dreams make little sense,” you might say. “How can I read them?” Your subconscious speaks in a format that seems strange until understood. Learn the true language of dreams — not the one-fits-all language but the personal one — and the symbols, patterns, and weird mind movies you see will have meaning. How your dreams can help you Deal with the problems your dreams uncover and your waking life will improve. Your confidence will rise and you’ll be happier. Your dreams can show you which path to follow or reveal what you want most but are scared to acknowledge. The wolves of the forest Over twenty years ago I had a repetitive dream in which a pack of wolves snapped at my heels as I escaped up a tree in a forest. The dream was so real I could sense hot breath on my ankles and hear teeth gnashing. Every night the same thing occurred. I hurried through the forest in the half-light as mist swirled and branches cracked underfoot. My heart raced and the hair on the back of my neck lifted as I twisted to glance behind me and saw the wolves. Then, the chase began. I was lucid yet didn’t seek to control what transpired until I trained as a counselor and thought, “How can I help people if I can’t manage my own challenges?” I worked through the psychology section of the city library, sent for books about dreams and sleep, and asked everyone I knew to describe their dreams. Soon, I recognized dream patterns, and friends experimented with my ideas on how to connect with and interpret their dreams. As I analyzed more dreams, I noted characters and circumstances in night-time imaginings were gifts, contributions from the subconscious; hints of what lay beneath awareness. Dreams were tools to promote knowledge and growth. I observed the mind shows the dreamer what they need to know in ways they can “feel” rather than grasp with logic. Indeed, feelings are the keys that unlock your dreams. Calming the wolves The first step was to communicate with the safe, non-threatening parts of my dream. So, when I went into a sleepy state, I asked the trees in the forest why they were in my night-time imaginings. “We are where you hide,” they said. I put my hand on the bark of an oak and thanked it for being my friend. “We aren’t your friends any more than the wolves are your enemies,” the tree replied. “We shelter you from fear but sharpen terror if you stay with us too long.” I remained in bed for ages the next morning figuring out the tree’s message and realized the wolves were my fears and hiding from them made them more prominent. It stood to reason facing them would make them go. Determined to stop running and meet the wolves that night, I slipped into Dreamland, hastened through the woods, heard the branches crack underfoot and looked behind me. My plan to greet the wolves had changed the dream. The creatures took longer to appear and approached me cautiously. When I spotted them, however, my resolve melted, and I ran. The wolves were crazed when they saw me scarper. Spit flew from their jowls. They growled and, for the first time, I dreamed I felt their teeth in my flesh. That morning my skin was hot and damp, and crushed by failure, I considered what went wrong. I had been positive at first, but losing my nerve gave the wolves fuel. If only I was calm, they might be calm too. I tried again and sunk into the dream. This time, though, I thought “I will see the wolves as playful puppies” When they appeared, the wolves looked menacing and wild. “You are just pups,” I told them. With that, they opened their eyes wide as if waiting for me to make a move. Then I did something brave. I reached out my hand, and resting it on the head of the nearest wolf, watched her close her eyes and fade. Quickly, the other wolves disappeared too. In that exact moment, I felt a huge surge of compassion for them. After that night I faced a real-life fear and confronted someone who, as an adult when I was just a kid, bullied me. I didn’t get an apology, but I forgave the individual anyway, and my confidence increased. The wolves never returned. How to communicate with your dreams Your dreams relate to your memories and knowledge, so can’t be interpreted exactly the same way as mine. Nonetheless, aspects of your life that bring you joy will also make you happy in your dreams. Those you dislike or worry about will appear as powerful characters or circumstances. I was lucid when I experienced my dream — I sensed I was asleep. You need not be sleeping before you connect with your dream images though. Wait until you are drowsy, or induce extreme relaxation — brainwave entrainment or tranquil music should do the trick. When relaxed, recall your dream and let it play like a movie in your mind. Note the sounds, sights, scents, and anything else about the dream that catches your attention. When you are fully awake, jot your experience in a notebook. Questions to consider: · Which aspects of the dream stand out? · How did you feel in the dream? · And afterward? Relax deeply again. Remember the dream as though it’s occurring. Ask the features and characters in the dream what they represent. When you are alert, record your discoveries and piece everything together. Your emotions give clues as do symbols, characters, and everything that sticks in your mind. Dream-work can change your waking reality because it alters how you think and behave and influences what you attract. So, when you next awaken after a night’s imaginative adventures, why not unwrap their meaning and make the most of them.

https://medium.com/recycled/how-to-calm-your-wolves-4506913dec53

['Bridget Webber']

2019-11-06 17:50:33.024000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Self', 'Behavior Change', 'Psychology', 'Dreams']

Why Does Everything Feel So Hard Right Now If I’m Fine?

A light-skinned woman sits in a half-full bathtub, her face and arms hunched over her knees in sadness. Photo courtesy of Tophee Marquez, Pexels. There’s a very unique feeling that I’ve come to associate with our new normal now that we’re social distancing long-term and I don’t seem to be alone in this feeling. It’s the feeling of continuously large, emotional reactions getting squished into a manageable package so that I can function in day to day life. It’s a sense that there is a constant threat surrounding me, followed by a layer of all-encompassing grief and compassion fatigue, all of which is smothered by a blanket of avoidance, dismissal, and critical judgment of myself for struggling when “there’s nothing wrong.” It’s saying, “I’m fine” and your voice is a little too squeaky or a little too loud and you kind of want to cry after you’ve said it. In addition to the very normal sense of loss of our old world and concrete sources of stress like financial instability, the impossible delegation of labor in a home with children and working adults, or having a loved one hospitalized, there are a few other mental health-related reasons that everything is hard right now that may not be intuitive. Even if you’re technically “fine” right now you might not be feeling so fine and there’s probably a good reason for that. We Have Lost Access to the State of Autopilot First, a general overview of how brains work: Our brains, though amazingly complex, are also incredibly lazy. If there is a more resource-efficient way to do something, your brain will find it. Whenever you complete a task, you’re sending a signal down the corresponding neural pathway for that task. Just like how a physical path in a forest gets wider and smoother the more often it’s used, the more often you repeat an action, the stronger that neural pathway gets, which in turn makes it easier for the signal to pass through and the task to be done. The more you do something, the easier it is to do. When you’ve done a task the same way enough times, the act of doing that task is actually processed differently by your brain: You go on autopilot. When you’re on autopilot, you don’t have to be consciously making all of the choices that the task is made up of. You can zone out and focus on other things while your brain enables you to finish the task unconsciously. This is why, on days you are feeling particularly distracted, you might find that you have driven home from work without much memory of getting yourself there. Your neural pathways related to the skill of driving and following your route home are well-worn enough that you could safely drive on autopilot. The reason we have autopilot is that our brains only have a limited amount of conscious energy to devote to tasks that require active focus and decision making. Imagine if you had to focus intently on every aspect of tying your shoes and brushing your teeth and putting on your clothes all the time? That would be exhausting, right? The ability to defer certain tasks to autopilot saves your brain a HUGE amount of energy. A plastic model of a human brain where the cross-section of the interior is shown. Photo courtesy of Robina Weermeijer, Unsplash. The process of moving a task from conscious focus to autopilot is more casually known as habit building, which takes time and repetition. There’s varying research on how many correct repetitions of a task you need before it’s solid enough in your brain that you can let go (and this number also depends on variables like the complexity of the task etc) but building a new habit takes somewhere in the vicinity of a month of consistently and consciously doing the task correctly. Until the task is solidly in autopilot, you have to work a lot harder to make it happen. Even more laborious is the process of replacing an old habit. For example, if you have a habit of leaving your dirty plates on the table for days at a time and you want to switch to collecting them and washing them immediately after eating, you not only have to do the conscious work of building the habit to wash the dishes after meals but you also have to override the autopilot that’s already in place from your previous habit. Your brain is REALLY REALLY going to want to default to that old habit of just leaving the dishes on the table because defaulting to autopilot is so much less work. The large amount of effort required for habit-building and habit-replacing is why when people go on self-improvement kicks and declare they’re going to transform their lives by working out every day, keeping their house clean, eating healthy, learning a new language, all at once, they usually crash and burn. We just don’t have enough conscious energy to maintain the level of activity required to build 20–50 habits at the same time, for more than a few days. How’s This Info Connected to COVID-19? When businesses closed and social distancing began, just about every aspect of our lives changed, which also means, almost every routine needed to continue meeting our basic needs also changed. How we buy and cook food changed; how we do our jobs changed; how we socialize and entertain ourselves changed; how we run errands changed. Even the most basic task of walking around in public — continuously altering your path in order to stay 6 ft away from everyone at all times — changed. A medium-skinned woman wearing a black coat and a medical mask walks through the city and looks thoughtfully as a light-skinned man wearing a mask, talks on a cell phone in soft focus nearby. Photo courtesy of Gustavo Fring, Pexels. Every one of these changes required us to abandon dozens of solidly autopilot habits and learn equal amounts of brand new habits to adapt to the changes, in a very short amount of time. Unlike that fitness-kick we went through in January, the consequences for failing to adopt these new habits could be deadly, to you or someone you love. You’re not supposed to start twenty new habits at once but we didn’t have a choice. To make matters worse, we are still actively researching and learning about COVID-19, and each time new information comes out, there are additional changes required of us. After a week of working hard on our new habits, we learn we needed to change these habits or add even more, which repeats again the following week. Any semblance of a routine we build up is immediately disrupted again, giving us no time to relax into any kind of predictability. Our brains are having to make active, conscious decisions, around the clock, just to handle basic functions. It. Is. Exhausting. Habits are Harder for Neurodiverse Brains to Develop In addition to this baseline exhaustion, if you’re neurodivergent in some way, such as having ADHD, major depression, or if you struggle at all with executive function (the mechanism in your brain that translates the idea that you should do something into the action of doing it) you get an added level of difficulty in developing new habits. We know dopamine as the “happiness chemical” but it also helps you feel accomplished when you’ve completed a task. In a neurotypical brain, going through a strictly practical and unexciting routine isn’t so bad because you are getting little zaps of dopamine for each task you complete. It’s not fun but you do feel a sense of satisfaction in completing it. In addition, a neurotypical brain releases dopamine in anticipation of completing a task, so you get a hit of dopamine at the start of a task to motivate you to do it and then another hit when you finish it. But the structure of neurodivergent brains is such that transmitting dopamine is physically more difficult for your brain to do, meaning the threshold to receiving that little boost of motivation is higher. You could go through the same boring routine and get NO dopamine as a reward for completing the same tasks, and instead of getting a sense of accomplished satisfaction, it just feels like a pointless slog. It is way harder to motivate yourself to do a task when you never feel that inner sense of accomplishment, so given the choice, you’re much more likely to opt out of the task if you can. A dozen large white mugs dirty from coffee, stacked in a disorganized way across a wooden table. Photo courtesy of Izzie R, Unsplash. This process is also a mechanism that neurotypical folks are totally unaware of in themselves and they simply don’t know what it would be like to complete a task and receive zero dopamine in response. Looking at them breeze through work that you have to fight through, it’s very easy to beat yourself up and assume that the difference between you and a neurotypical person is just self-control. But you cannot simply will dopamine into existence. There are treatments and tools that can help with executive dysfunction but it’s exceedingly rare that “Just push harder” is the tool that works. Given this added difficulty in making a conscious choice to do an unrewarding action, when you could so easily avoid it and save the mental energy, handling our current barrage of new habits is even more challenging. Quarantine Can Bear Resemblance to Traumatic Environments I want to start this section by acknowledging that some people are living in unsafe or abusive situations made worse by the requirement to stay home and that the sheer stress of the practical realities of losing your income, little to no access to child care, and avoiding a potentially deadly threat can be traumatic in and of itself. The following observations are not meant to underestimate the severity of those circumstances and the potential for real trauma in our current reality. And yet many trauma-survivors who are technically safe are still finding that the current circumstances are triggering memories of their past traumas, even if their finances or access to food and shelter aren’t actually at risk. Unfortunately, many of the necessary practices during a pandemic mirror the coping mechanisms/circumstances related to trauma and abuse: Extreme isolation, the constant practice of self-denial, the acceptance of your needs going unmet long term, a sense of powerlessness about your external environment, thinking of yourself or your body as a danger you must protect other people from, and having to develop a tolerance to the constant low-level threat to your physical safety, are all common themes in traumatic or abusive experiences. If your past traumas are getting triggered, it’s likely that your nervous system is in an overactive state which can result in: difficulty concentrating, poor sleep, nightmares, irritation, anger, anxiety, a feeling of being “stuck” or frozen, further isolating yourself from social contact, and aversion toward tasks or activities that just feel like “too much”. A light-skinned woman sits on a couch dressed in a cozy sweater, shorts, and socks, holding a book in her lap and a cup of coffee in her hand. Photo courtesy of Anthony Tran, Unsplash. Mental health is a complicated subject in the best of times and during our current crisis, it’s even harder to receive or implement treatment while still maintaining basic life necessities. I don’t have simple solutions to offer you for these heightened challenges but I do want you to take this information and use it to offer yourself compassion if/when you’re struggling. Our knowledge of how to function in society has not equipped us to handle a pandemic and it’s a little bit like we’re having to start over our lives as adults and start learning how to do everything again from scratch. So, I encourage you to consciously alter your expectations of yourself to something that reflects our new reality, don’t be afraid to use external tools or ask for help even if you haven’t needed them in the past, and forgive yourself when you aren’t able to meet the same standards that pre-virus you could meet.

https://medium.com/invisible-illness/why-does-everything-feel-so-hard-right-now-if-nothing-is-wrong-e16230a99a80

['Kella Hanna-Wayne']

2020-04-23 19:02:43.446000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Illness', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement']

Working with JSON and Python in your Data Projects

Working with JSON and Python in your Data Projects For many different kinds of projects you will get in touch with data in JSON format — Here is what you need to know to get started. Photo by XPS on Unsplash Use cases can variate for example from big data integration projects, where you transfer data from an API to your Data Warehouse to a one-man-data science project where you need some external data to your Jupyter Notebook. How to deal with JSON and to extract the data you need will be explained in the following article with the help of some Python examples. JSON on the fly JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data-interchange format. Users can easily read and write this format, and machines can easily parse and generate. JSON is built on two structures: A collection of name/value pairs: In various languages, this is realized as an object, record, struct, dictionary, hash table, keyed list, or associative array. An ordered list of values: In most languages, this is realized as an array, vector, list, or sequence [1]. In the figure below, you can see a typical JSON example. The JSON object begins with a { followed by a name (“company”) and a value (“mycompany”). Often, you will find also objects inside an object. The element “employee” is a classical example of an array which also can have another array within. Example JSON — Source: techplanet.com [2] Examples For the examples I used the API from https://finnhub.io/ which provides paid services besides a lot of free to use financial data. Example 1: JSON with object in object With the libraries requests and json you easily get the data from the API: Jupyter Notebook After getting the response in a JSON format you can easily flatten it with json_normalize and load it into a Pandas dataframe. Having the data in a data frame then makes it easy to use the data for Data Science tasks or to load it into a database. Example 2: Read from JSON array It is a bit harder to get the data out of an array in an object but also with objects within the array itself — like you can see here: The idea is to get the period based data for every stock in a relational table structure. Here, we will need some loops: Example 3: Explicit keys and values The example above with the goal to get certain keys and values can be realized by: Here, I get the second item (period November) out of the array and the corresponding buy=18 value. Example 4: Write dataframe to JSON format If you need it the other way around, you can simply do it via: out = df.to_json(orient=’records’)[1:-1].replace(‘},{‘, ‘} {‘) This is often needed if you want to write your data back into systems like a Data Warehouse or Data Lake. Modern Data Warehouse technologies like Amazon’s Redshift or Google’s Big Query also often support JSON and nested data structures. Conclusion When working with data you can’t avoid JSON, especially when working with APIs and free data sources. Also for data integration to your data management systems it could be a good idea to use the JSON format. Many modern technologies are supporting the JSON format. I hope this article gives you the most important information about JSON and some examples of how you can actually get started to work with this kind of data. Sources and Further Readings [1] JSON.org, Introducing JSON [2] techplanet.com, JSON Example (2019) Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/working-with-json-and-python-in-your-data-projects-7b0952842ee5

[]

2020-12-26 12:49:15.356000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Python', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Json', 'Bigquery']

If You’re Lonely in the Holidays, Do These 7 Things

A young woman told me in therapy she was a perpetual liar. They weren’t big, harmful lies. They were little lies she told her parents, her colleagues — and herself — about the social life she wasn’t having. The truth was, she was desperately lonely — and ashamed of it. She didn’t have a bestie or a group to hang out with, and the lies were a cover for her feelings. Loneliness has had a moment this year. On the pandemic landscape, many people have struggled with the loss of live human connection; gotten a taste of how loneliness impacts mental health — and spirit. And, hopefully, those experiences have ignited empathy for those who suffer from chronic isolation. Most Loneliness Doesn’t Last — But Some Does. Studies indicate up to 75% of us will feel lonely at some point. For most it’s temporary, linked to life circumstances: grief or illness, a relationship breakup, a move to a new town, city or country. Sometimes, it’s connected to pursuing a dream or living a life no-one else understands. Or it may be about exclusion: knowing you’ve been left off someone’s party guest list or are not part of the crowd. Chronic loneliness is another matter: when it digs in, it can have a significant impact on a person’s mental state, leading to problems that need professional intervention. But everyone can do with some strategies to help alleviate those times when we feel alone, left out or misunderstood. 7 Strategies for Feeling Less Alone “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson 1. Stay off social media (at least for a while). The holidays can be a tough time for lonely people. As others talk up their plans, and social media fills up with photos of laughing groups, many feel the burn of isolation. But remember those images mostly represent the best of people’s lives — not the worst. The online world can be a great distraction, but only if what you’re engaging in makes you feel better, not worse. Why would you actively pursue something that makes you feel bad? 2. Externalise feelings: they’re better out than in. Negative thoughts and feelings have a nasty way of never giving you a break. So find a (healthy) way to download: someone you can trust with your vulnerability or a therapist if your budget allows. If there’s no-one around with whom you can be honest with your feelings, grab a journal or open a file on your laptop, dump them there (and don’t read them back). Or express them through exercise, dance or singing. Or even yell them into the void. Aim for out — not in. 3. Switch your focus outwards to others. Feeling bad or lonely can set up a mental loop, in which we over-focus on ourselves and the negativity of our circumstances. The best way to break it is to do something for someone else, however small. It’ll make you both feel better. 4. Make something unapologetically bad. Creativity is hugely helpful for your mental state because it takes you out of your head and into your body. I’d go further and say we’d all be happier if we tapped our creativity, if we just got out and “made stuff”. You don’t have to be an artist; you don’t have to have a talent for anything. Just make something — a poem, a garden, a meal, a cake, a puzzle, a piece of art or furniture, a tapestry, an app, toy soldiers, whatever appeals to you. 5. Go hang out somewhere soothing. We all have environments in which we feel better, healthier, more ourselves. The beach, a bush walk, your tool shed, a movie theatre, a plant barn, the pool. Train yourself to notice the environments in which you feel good. Spend time there — or book yourself a treat — and feel yourself breathe. 6. Be purposeful with your days. Sometimes loneliness is not about lack of company. It’s about a lack of activities that fill you up. You don’t have to have a grand passion (if you did you probably wouldn’t feel lonely) but feeling purposeful, or useful, helps. If you’re really struggling just take it one day at a time. Ask: what can I do today that feels meaningful? And if the word meaningful makes you feel stressed, just aim for useful. 7. Hook the feelings to your life — not yourself. Loneliness can tempt us into attributing isolation to flaws in our character/s. Yes — you have flaws, but console yourself with the fact that everyone does. Being lonely does not mean you’re a bad or unworthy person. It doesn’t have to mean anything other than you are feeling alone right now. So remind yourself that what you are experiencing is temporary. That life can, and does, change. It’s inevitable. Yours will too.

https://medium.com/on-the-couch/if-youre-lonely-in-the-holidays-do-these-7-things-f6b88e797dc0

['Karen Nimmo']

2020-12-15 11:07:35.989000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Loneliness', 'Relationships', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement']

Year in Review: here’s the 21 articles and podcasts I produced about changing journalistic practice in 2020

This is the second article in a short-series bringing together all of my work from the past year. Although there’s some cross-over between many of these categories, this installment looks specifically at my writing dedicated to journalistic practice. Audio and Podcasting Local Journalism Published at the end of 2019, “Shifting Practices for a Stronger Tomorrow: Local Journalism in the Pacific Northwest,” stemmed from a roundtable held earlier in the year in Portland (OR). During summer 2020 I split the report up, publishing each chapter individually on Medium. *Also available in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese and Russian, and republished by the Associação Brasileira dos Jornalistas (Brazilian Association of Journalists). Remote Working Reporting Social Media University of Oregon, School of Journalism, alumni

https://medium.com/damian-radcliffe/year-in-review-heres-the-21-articles-and-podcasts-i-produced-about-changing-journalistic-practice-5ea967284328

['Damian Radcliffe']

2020-12-21 16:03:11.774000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Careers', 'Journalists', 'Journalism', 'Reporting']

Today I launched my first mobile app. Here’s what I learned

I’ve been writing a fair bit on Medium recently, sharing valuable design and development knowledge I gained from working on my first app, Crypto Price Tracker that I just launched today, on 28th Jan. I wanted to share my story of working on this app from the day I started until today. I hope this post helps and inspires other young programmers (or really anyone who’s interested in making tech products!) to acquire valuable technical skills, identify market needs, build great products with their skills that solve those market needs. A bit of background on me: I’m a 16-years-old homeschooler. I’ve been learning digital design and programming since I was 13. I was the youngest intern at Salesforce in Bangalore in winter 2016. I attended MIT Launch summer program in 2017 summer where my team and I launched Universeaty. That was the first time I tried my hands at iOS apps and loved how much faster it was to build tangible products and see results of my work when building mobile apps. Bringing my ideas to software was much easier and more fun! I started learning Swift and iOS app development from online courses on Treehouse, Udemy, watched videos on YouTube and practiced building basic apps. That laid out my programming foundations. I started building more serious and complex apps after a few weeks of learning and practice. Around 20th November, 2017 I decided that I wanted to work on a cryptocurrency price tracker, alerts, and portfolio management app. I’ve shared a bit of the story about my motivation here. I recently realised that sharing my story and some of the lessons I learned along my journey is indeed helpful to others! Getting Started It was hard to get started: uncertainty, unknown unknowns, things to think about, and decisions to make. No clue what to start with and where. But I knew my first step was conducting some market research to know exactly what my target audience wanted — the features, the design, and just about everything that I’d build in the app. I posted on Reddit, Facebook groups, Quora, and asked a few friends who were invested and interested in cryptos. I got some solid feedback on the idea and was much more educated about the needs of my target users. The next step was to design the app. I started with drawing the user-flow diagrams and wireframes. I then moved on to using design software to create mock-ups and a prototype. I’ve written a different story about designing mobile apps from scratch, and I’ve shared pictures of every design stage of Crypto Price Tracker app. And the end result of this process was this: A delightful design :) Developing Crypto Price Tracker I was pretty afraid of reaching this stage, because I was (and still am) a programming beginner. I didn’t know a lot of Swift and had no clue how I’d set up the server for notifications, among many other technical hurdles. I had so much stuff to do for the app with little technical skills. But I was confident I could figure out things and learn along the way as I build each feature. And, in hindsight, I can say I did :) I started out with importing all the designs in Xcode and setting a raw build for every screen. I divided my coding work based on features I’d need in the app. Quite a few times, I had to scrap things off my spec (and edit designs) because they seemed time consuming to develop (especially if it seemed that they’d offer little functionality). I wrote the networking code to display data from the APIs I was using and built the main interface of my app. I then moved on to the “Wishlist” feature of the app. Now, to save data locally in a user’s phone, you need to create Core Data models — something I had never worked with before. And more technical gaps and challenges came up. But I kept on learning. When I needed something, I’d Google it. Usually, there were helpful answers, code snippets, or video tutorials for almost everything. Whenever I got stuck, I would ask on StackOverflow or email my mentors for help. Slowly, I started becoming much more comfortable jumping into unknown things. At the end of the three weeks that I spent coding the app, I improved a lot as a programmer. I learnt concepts and got to actually practice by building a real app. I got to work with a number of interesting iOS technologies, libraries, and frameworks. I still need to improve a lot as a developer. My app sometimes loads slow. It’s not the most optimised or the fastest app out there. But I’m still pretty glad I was able to build something useful and valuable. The next step I had planned was that I’d localize my app in 10 languages. I thought it was easy since my app isn’t text-heavy. Boy, I was wrong! Localization is a very time consuming process for apps. I’m writing a separate story to explain how to localize technically. At the end of 8 weeks (from the day I started market research), I had fully designed and developed an app that showed real-time prices of over 1000+ cryptocurrencies from 18 exchanges in 32 fiat currencies. There were price graphs (showing historical prices from 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, and 1 year), portfolio management, time-based and threshold-based alerts. It was localized in 10 languages. I also optimised my app for iPhone X. Once my build was ready, the next step was to invite users to test and give feedback on the app. Testing and Submitting the App I was quite proud of my app and was super excited to put it out there on TestFlight and invite all of my friends and users to test it! After a long wait of two days, the beta app review was finally approved. I invited my friends to test it and they loved the app. All of them shared feedback, ideas for features to have in future updates, and much more. The app had zero crashes! The v1.0 build was all ready for submission. My 100 screenshots (5 screenshots for iPhone 5.5 inch and 5 for iPhone 5.8 inch for each language) were ready, my metadata was localized too, and my video preview was done. There were some unexpected challenges in uploading the video preview because the fps (frames per second) was too high. By this point I had grown to embrace unexpected challenges and was able to handle them effectively. I was able to finish everything and submit the app for review on time. Here’s a short video preview of Crypto Price Tracker. Two days later, at 4AM, I got the rejection email. This made me extremely anxious. So many thoughts were rushing through my head before I read the reasons for rejection. Apple rejected the app because the design didn’t look good when viewed on iPad. I had no clue that iPhone-only apps had to be compatible with iPads as well. In the next few hours, I read some guides and fixed all the constraints and Auto Layout issues, tested the app on iPad simulator and it worked. I submitted the build for review again. One day later, I finally got the approval! It was a relief, and now I could focus back on the product. I had gotten a ton of feedback and bugs reported from testers. I made those small bug fixes and some translations edits, and uploaded the final build. It got approved in just 12 hours! My app was now a whole lot better and I’m glad so many people tested it and reported bugs that would have otherwise gone in the app reviews by angry customers. In the days leading up to launch, I put together this story from the notes I made and my daily journal so I could share the lessons with everyone. Some Lessons I Learned Localization is a great idea. Until now, I was regretting my decision of localizing my app in 10 languages. I’d written some Quora answers on how it was the most time-consuming thing I did for my app and I’d not advise any indie developer without the budget to outsource to localize. But now my opinion has changed. Localizing your app in 10–12 languages using Google Translate and having friends proofread it is a great way to reach a larger audience for your app. Apple also loves localized apps more. You can’t always get everything right and every possible string localized. But you can get 80% of the results (i.e., text translated) with the 20% of the work. People are much more willing to help you than you think. I am very grateful to have a number of friends and mentors who helped me a lot in this journey. But I was simply astonished how so many strangers responded to me when I reached out to them and helped me. Very early on in my journey, when I just had a little prototype of the main interface of my app, I reached out to Carla White after I had read her amazing book. She mentored me and helped me with her advice for the app. As I was localizing my app, I needed proofreaders for each language to make sure the translations (done using Google Translate) are good and context specific. Pascal commented on my story on Medium offering his help with German translations. I reached out to him and on a really short notice, he really did edit my German translations! And many more complete strangers offered their help. One important key takeaway from this would be: People are willing to help you. Reach out to them, be sincere, and they will help you in any way they can! :D User feedback early on is super critical. Not only do the kind words from your fans or believers motivate you, but a lot of your early users will give you ideas for features, for design improvements, and much more valuable feedback. One of the mistakes I made was testing very late. I uploaded my build for TestFlight testing only ~1 week before planned launch when the app was pretty much ready and I couldn’t make major changes. If I had asked my users to start testing weeks ago when I just had the main interface, I’d have gotten lots of feedback and would have improved upon it. And iterated that for every major feature, my app would have been a whole lot better. Quite a few testers have mentioned things that could have been fixed in 2–3 days if I had sent out the build for testing earlier. So my advice to everyone would be: Get your app in the hands of your users and have them test it asap and get feedback! Some Helpful Tools I Used AppLaunchPad for creating multiple sets of screenshots (for many localizations) faster. Cocoapods. SwiftyJSON and Alamofire for writing better networking code, Charts for creating price graphs. There’s a cocoapod for almost everything! Firebase for the push notifications server and for the caching server to store prices every 5 mins to update the price graphs. Two APIs for prices: cryptowatch and CoinCap. This API for currency rates for conversion. It feels great to be able to share the lessons I learned and my journey with a large audience. I hope this serves as an inspiration to other people to try out learning programming and building apps or really anything they’re interested in. I’m personally going to start out with learning ML and data science after my app — so don’t be afraid of experimenting with different fields! Try out something difficult and something that makes you uncomfortable. The things hardest to do are usually the most interesting and rewarding in the end. :) If you liked reading this and have feedback or any thoughts to share, don’t hesitate to email me at harshita@harshitaapps.com. And if you like my app, you can download it from the App Store here. :)

https://medium.com/free-code-camp/today-i-launched-my-first-mobile-app-heres-what-i-learned-6fc25c14eee6

['Harshita Arora']

2018-01-28 14:22:33.465000+00:00

['Cryptocurrency', 'Programming', 'Design', 'iOS', 'Startup']

How to Recognize Exclusion in AI

By Joyce Chou, Oscar Murillo, and Roger Ibars Can artificial intelligence be racist? Well, it depends. Let’s say you’re an African-American student at a school that uses facial recognition software. The school uses it to access the building and online homework assignments. But the software’s got a problem. Its makers used only light-skinned test subjects to train its algorithms. Your skin is darker, and the software has trouble recognizing you. Sometimes you’re late to class, or can’t get your assignments on time. Your grades suffer. The result is discrimination based solely on skin color. This isn’t a real example, but similar AI missteps have already become infamous in the tech industry and in social media. The industry is excited about AI for good reason — big data and machine learning are lighting up powerful experiences that were unimaginable just a few years ago. But for AI to fulfill its promise, the systems must be trustworthy. The more trust people have, the more they interact with the systems, and systems use more data to give better results. But trust takes a long time to build, and bias can tear it down instantaneously, doing real harm to large communities. Recognizing exclusion in AI At Microsoft, we’ve developed inclusive design tools and processes to recognize people with physical disabilities in our design process. As we’ve evolved our practices, we’ve expanded our design thinking to other areas of exclusion, including cognitive issues, learning style preferences, and social bias. It’s time to take that same approach to AI. Bias in AI will happen unless it’s built from the start with inclusion in mind. The most critical step in creating inclusive AI is to recognize where and how bias infects the system. Our first inclusive design principle is recognize exclusion. The guide we’re unveiling here breaks down AI bias into distinct categories so product creators can identify issues early on, anticipate future problems, and make better decisions along the way. It allows teams to see clearly where their systems can go wrong, so they can identify bias and build experiences that deliver on the promise of AI for everyone. Five ways to identify bias We worked with academic and industry thought leaders to determine five ways to identify bias. Then, we used childhood situations as metaphors to illustrate the behavior in each category. Why? We can all relate to childhood episodes of bias, and it fits into a nice metaphor: AI is in its infancy, and like children, how it grows reflects how we raise and nurture it. Each bias category includes a childhood metaphor that illustrates it, its definition, a product example, and a stress test for your teams and AI work. Here’s how the biases break down: By addressing these five biases first, we can create more inclusive products. Dataset Bias Dataset bias is similar to a young child’s small view of the world. A young child defines the world purely on the small amount they can see. Eventually, the child learns that most of the world lies beyond the small set of information that’s within their field of vision. This is the root of dataset bias: intelligence based on information that’s too small or homogenous. Definition: When the data used to train machine learning models doesn’t represent the diversity of the customer base. Large-scale datasets are the foundation of AI. At the same time, datasets have often been reduced to generalizations that don’t consider a variety of users and therefore underrepresent them. Product example: Machine vision technologies — such as web cameras to track user movements — that only work well for small subsets of users based on race (predominantly white), because the initial training data excluded other races and skin tones. Stress test: If you’re using a training dataset, does that sample include everyone in your customer base? And if not, have you tested your results with people who weren’t part of your sample? What about the people on your AI teams — are they inclusive, diverse, and sensitive to recognizing bias? Associations Bias Human associations can be perpetuated in AI training, like assumed gender roles. Imagine some kids who like to play “doctor.” The boys want the doctor roles and assume the girls will play the nurses. The girls have to make their case to overturn assumptions. “Hey, girls can be doctors too!” Definition: When the data used to train a model reinforces and multiplies a cultural bias. When training AI algorithms, human biases can make their way to machine learning. Perpetuating those biases in future interactions may lead to unfair customer experiences. Product example: Language translation tools that make gender assumptions (e.g. pilots are male and flight attendants are female). Stress test: Are your results making associations that perpetuate stereotypes in gender or ethnicity? What can you do to break undesirable and unfair associations? Is your dataset already classified and labeled? Automation Bias A machine is trying to get to a fast, automated outcome. It doesn’t know what the human on the other end wants. Imagine a girl getting a makeover. The girl likes sports, loves a natural look and hates anything artificial. The beautician has different ideas about beauty, applies tons of makeup and a fussy hairdo. The results make the beautician happy, but horrify the girl. Definition: When automated decisions override social and cultural considerations. Predictive programs may automate goals that go against human diversity. The algorithms aren’t accountable to humans, but make decisions with human impact. AI designers and practitioners need to consider the goals of the people affected by the systems they build. Product example: Beautification photo filters reinforce a European notion of beauty on facial images, like lightening skin tone. Stress test: Would real, diverse customers agree with your algorithm’s conclusions? Is your AI system overruling human decisions and favoring automated decision making? How do you ensure there’s a human POV in the loop? Interaction Bias AI chatbots are susceptible to malicious human input, and need safeguards to remain inoffensive. A popular kids’ game is “Telephone.” The first person in a group whispers a sentence to next person, who then whispers it to the next person — and so on until the last person says what they heard. The point is to see how the information changes naturally through so many hand-offs. But say one kid changes it intentionally to create a more ridiculous result. It may be funnier, but the spirit of seeing what happens naturally is broken. Definition: When humans tamper with AI and create biased results. Today’s chatbots can make jokes and fool people into thinking they’re human much of the time. But many attempts to humanize artificial intelligence have unintentionally tainted computer programs with toxic human bias. Interaction Bias will appear when bots learn dynamically without safeguards against toxicity. Product example: Humans deliberately input racist or sexist language into a chatbot to train it to say offensive things. Stress test: Do you have checks in place to identify malicious intent toward your system? What does your AI system learn from people? Did you design for real-time interaction and learning? What does that mean for what it reflects back to customers? Confirmation Bias When the same confirmation is made over and over, the outcome is less diverse, less exploratory. Think of the kid who gets a toy dinosaur for a present one year. Other family members see the dinosaur and give him more dinosaurs. In several years, friends and family assume the kid is a dinosaur fanatic, and keep giving more dinosaurs until he has a huge collection. Definition: When oversimplified personalization makes biased assumptions for a group or an individual. Confirmation Bias interprets information in a way that confirms preconceptions. AI algorithms serve up content that matches what other people have already chosen. This excludes results from people who made less popular choices. A knowledge worker who is only getting information from the people who think like her will never see contrasting points of view and will be blocked from seeing alternatives and diverse ideas. Product example: Shopping sites that show recommendations for things the customer has already bought. Stress test: Does your algorithm build on and reinforce only popular preferences? Is your AI system able to evolve dynamically as your customers changes over time? Is your AI system helping your customers to have a more diverse and inclusive view of the world? Using this primer As designers and creators of artificial intelligence experiences, it’s on us to be thoughtful about how AI evolves and how it impacts real people. This primer is the start of a long road to create experiences that serve everyone equally. If we apply these ideas to our initial example of the African-American girl misread by the facial recognition software, we can label that as Dataset Bias: the software was trained with data that was too narrow. By recognizing and understanding those biases from the start, we can test the system against other human considerations, and build more inclusive experiences. Could our facial recognition software be subject to deliberately erroneous data? What other biases could infect the experience? Most people working in AI have anecdotal evidence of situations like these. Embarrassing, offensive outcomes from unintentional bias that we all want to identify and avoid. Our goal here is to help you recognize the underlying bias that leads to these situations. Start with these categories and test your experience with these types of bias in mind, so you can focus on delivering the potential of AI to all your customers.

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/how-to-recognize-exclusion-in-ai-ec2d6d89f850

['Inclusive Design']

2019-08-27 16:06:06.098000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Inclusive Design', 'Microsoft', 'Bias', 'Design']

Create Any Image with C# And A Generative Adversarial Network

In this article I’m going to build a specialized neural network architecture called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). GANs are weird. Here’s what they look like: The Generator is a convolutional neural network (CNN) laid out in reverse. A normal CNN reads in an image and outputs a list of class probabilities which usually indicate if the image contains a person, animal, or object. But a reverse CNN does the opposite: we create a 1-dimensional class vector (just a list of numbers) and the network will convert this information to a fully realized machine-generated color image. And by tweaking the class vector, we can make the network generate any kind of image. Of course, these images might not be particularly good. The generator might try to generate a picture of a horse, but how would it know if the output image looks anything like a real horse? This is where the Discriminator comes in. The discriminator is a regular CNN that is trained to identify images of people, animals, objects, or landscapes. Its job is to look at the images created by the generator, compare them to a dataset of real images, and correctly identify every real and generated image. We can now run the generator and the discriminator against each other. We have the generator create a stream of fake images and then feed these images into the discriminator. Then we ask the discriminator to classify all the fakes produced by the generator: At first, this will be easy because the generator will not be very good at creating fakes. But after each training epoch, the generator gets a little better at producing fakes, and the discriminator becomes a little better at spotting the fakes. We continue to train, until the fakes produced by the generator have become so good that we humans can no longer tell the difference between the fakes and the real images. This specific architecture is called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), and it’s a very cool and active area of research right now. We can use GANs to create a wide range of computer-generated images: human faces animals landscapes computer game characters spaceships furniture …. and much more! Four years ago, a group of machine learning researchers used a GAN to create pictures of human faces. Here’s what the start of the art looked like back then: Not bad, right? But that was four years ago. Check out what’s possible today: Keep in mind that these people don’t exist anywhere on the planet. Their faces have been randomly constructed, one pixel at a time, by a GAN trained on a dataset of human faces. How cool is that? I’m going to build an app that sets up a generative adversarial network, trains it on the well-known image dataset, and use it to generate images of frogs. I’m going to use the famous CIFAR-10 dataset which contains 60,000 color images of 32x32 pixels. Here’s a sampling of the dataset for 10 random classes: I’ll use a subset of the dataset that contains 5,000 images of frog species. You can download the image subset here. Save the file as frog_pictures.zip and place it in the project folder I’m about to create below. My challenge is to build an app that uses a GAN to generate better and better images of hypothetical frogs, until the images are so good that they look exactly like real frogs. Let’s get started. I will create a new NET Core application from scratch: $ dotnet new console -o GanDemo $ cd GanDemo I will place the zip file with the frog images in this folder because the code I’m going to type next will expect it here. Now I’ll install the following package: $ dotnet add package CNTK.Gpu The CNTK.GPU library is Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit that can train and run deep neural networks. It will train and run deep neural networks using your GPU. You’ll need an NVidia GPU and Cuda graphics drivers for this to work. If you don’t have an NVidia GPU or suitable drivers, the library will fall back and use the CPU instead. This will work but training neural networks will take significantly longer. CNTK is a low-level tensor library for building, training, and running deep neural networks. The code to build deep neural network can get a bit verbose, so I’ve developed a little wrapper called CNTKUtil that will help me write code faster. I’ll download the CNTKUtil files and place them in a new CNTKUtil folder at the same level as the GanDemo project folder. Now I can create a project reference like this: $ dotnet add reference ../CNTKUtil/CNTKUtil.csproj Now I am ready to start writing code. I’ll edit the Program.cs file with Visual Studio Code and add the following code: This code calls ZipFile.ExtractToDirectory to extract the dataset from the archive and store it in the project folder. Then I use the DataUtil.LoadBinary method to load the frog images in memory. You can see from the arguments that I’m loading 5000 images of 32x32 pixels with 3 color channels. Now I need to tell CNTK what shape the input data of the generator will have: The input to the generator is a 1-dimensional tensor with a preset number of latent dimensions (32 in this case). By inputting numbers on these 32 input nodes, I trigger the generator to create a new image that will hopefully resemble a frog. My next step is to design the generator. I’m going to use a reverse CNN with 7 layers that looks like this: Here are some interesting facts about this network: The generator looks like a CNN in reverse. We start with a 1-dimensional input vector, the layers get progressively larger, and we end with a 32 by 32 pixel image at the output. There’s a layer called Reshape. It converts the 1-dimensional output of the dense layer into a 2-dimensional tensor which more closely resembles an image. There’s a layer called Transposed Convolution. This is a reverse version of the convolution layer that makes the image larger, not smaller. All the convolutional layers use the LeakyReLU activation function, not the regular ReLU function. The final convolutional layer at the end uses Hyperbolic Tan activation, and not the Sigmoid function. You might be wondering how this specific architecture was discovered, and the answer is: by plain old trial and error. Many researchers have tried to create stable generators and they have produced these guidelines. Nobody really knows why this network architecture works well and all the alternatives are unstable. The field of machine learning is simply too young, and for now all we have are these field-tested rules of thumb. I’ll add the following code to build the generator: This code calls Dense and Reshape to add a classifier and reshape the latent input to a tensor with a 16x16x128 shape. Then the code calls Convolution2D to add a convolution layer with a 5x5 kernel. The magic happens in the ConvolutionTranspose call that sets up a reverse convolution layer. The 16x16x256 input tensor is blown up to 32x32x256 using a 4x4 kernel and a stride of 2. The output flows through two more Convolution2D layers and then encounters the final Convolution2D layer that converts the tensor to 32x32x3, exactly the dimensions of a generated CIFAR-10 color image. Note the use of the LeakyReLU activation function everywhere, except in the final convolution layer that uses Tanh. Now I need to tell CNTK what shape the input data of the discriminator will have: Remember that the generator and the discriminator are mounted end-to-end, with the generated image feeding directly into the discriminator. So, the input of the discriminator is the generated image, a tensor with a 32x32x3 shape. Now I’m ready to build the discriminator. This is a regular convolutional neural network with 4 convolutional layers: However, note that: There are no pooling layers in the network. Instead, the convolution layers use a 4x4 stride to reduce the size of the feature maps. All the convolutional layers again use the LeakyReLU activation function for extra stability. This was again discovered by trial and error. Neural networks that use strides are a lot more stable and robust than networks that rely on pooling. And we need that extra stability to get the GAN working. The following code will build the discriminator: Note the four calls to Convolution2D to set up the convolution layers with LeakyReLU activation, and the Dropout and Dense calls to add a dropout layer and a classifier using Sigmoid activation. Now I’m ready to assemble the GAN. This is quite easy: The Gan helper class has a nice CreateGan method that will assemble a GAN from a generator and a discriminator by joining them together. Now I need to tell CNTK the shape of the output of the GAN: Remember that a GAN is a generator and a discriminator laid end to end. The discriminator classifies all images into fakes and non-fakes and only has a single output node. So, the GAN itself also has a single output node, and I can tell CNTK that the output is a 0-dimensional tensor (= a single node). Now I need to set up the loss function to use to train the discriminator and the GAN. Since I’m classifying images into a single class (fake/non-fake), I can use binary cross entropy here: Next, I need to decide which algorithm to use to train the discriminator and the GAN. There are many algorithms derived from Gradient Descent that I can use here. For this article I’m going to use the AdaDeltaLearner. This learning algorithm works well for training GANs: I’m almost ready to train the GAN. My last step is to set up trainers for calculating the discriminator and gan loss during each training epoch: The GetTrainer method sets up two trainers that will track the discriminator and gan loss during the training process. Now I’m finally ready to start training! Let’s set up an output folder to store the images: And now I can start training: I am training the GAN for 100,000 epochs using a batch size of 8 images. Training a GAN is a 5-step process: Run the discriminator to get a list of fake images Combine real and fake images into a training batch Train the discriminator on this batch Combine real and fake images into a misleading batch where every image has been incorrectly labelled Train the GAN on the misleading batch to help the generator create better fakes Let’s start with training the discriminator: The Gan.GenerateImages method uses the generator to create a list of fake images. I then call Gan.GetTrainingBatch to get a new batch of 8 images to train on. This batch contains a mix of real and fake images with each image correctly labelled. I then call TrainBatch on the discriminator trainer to train the discriminator on this training batch. This will help the discriminator get better and better at spotting fakes. I am now halfway done. Now it’s time to create the misleading batch and train the GAN: The Gan.GetMisleadingBatch method sets up a misleading batch. This is a training batch of real and fake images with every image labelled incorrectly. I then call TrainBatch on the GAN trainer to train the entire GAN on the misleading batch. This will help the generator create better fakes to fool the discriminator. And that’s the entire training process. Now let’s log my progress every 100 epochs: And I’m going to pull the generated image from the middle of the GAN every 1,000 epochs: This code pulls the first generated image from the generatedImages variable and calls Gan.SaveImage to save it to disk. Optionally you can uncomment the second block of code to also save one of the training images to disk. This will let you compare the generated images to the training images, to see how well the GAN is doing at faking frog pictures. I’m now ready to build the app. I’ll start by building the CNTKUtil project: $ $ dotnet build -o bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.0 -p:Platform=x64 This will build the CNKTUtil project. Note how I’m specifying the x64 platform because the CNTK library requires a 64-bit build. Now I’ll do the same in the GanDemo folder: $ dotnet build -o bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.0 -p:Platform=x64 This will build the app. Note how I’m again specifying the x64 platform. Now I can run my app: $ dotnet run The app will create the GAN, load the CIFAR-10 images, train the GAN on the images, and extract a generated image every 1,000 epochs. Here’s what that looks like: The discriminator has 790,913 trainable parameters, and the generator has over 6.2 million! This truly is a monster of a neural network. Training a single epoch is snappy on my Surface Book 2 with a GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, but it still takes over 90 minutes to reach epoch 50,000. Training this GAN really takes an exceedingly long time. Here is my first run. I aborted the training at epoch 50,000: You can see that I was off to a good start. The generator mixes green and purple pixels and creates vertical black stripes to create a frog pattern. Unfortunately, the GAN got stuck at epoch 21,000 and kept generating the same image over and over: a purple background with fuzzy vertical black stripes. This is typical when training GANs. The loss surface is absolutely littered with false minima and the training loop can very easily get stuck in a solution that doesn’t look much like a frog at all. The only solution is to restart training and hope that the next run will produce better results. Here’s my second attempt: I aborted this run at epoch 10,000. You can see that this attempt got stuck right at the start. Every image after epoch 1,000 is just a featureless pink square. The loss function for this GAN really is a minefield with false minima lurking everywhere. Here’s an older run I did on my MacBook Pro using only the CPU: This one only got up to epoch 3,700 (CPU computation is much slower than the GPU) but the patterns are starting to look nice. Anastasios Stamoulis, the original author of the code that CNTKUtil is based on, ran this code on a much more powerful computer and this is what his frogs looked like once he got near epoch 66,000: That’s starting to look a lot like real frogs! Feel free to grab my code and run it on your own computer. How realistic can you make your machine-generated frog images?

https://medium.com/machinelearningadvantage/create-any-image-with-c-and-a-generative-adversarial-network-6031a4b90dec

['Mark Farragher']

2020-04-12 18:59:53.870000+00:00

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

Submission Guidelines for PsychoLogically

How to format the article To format it properly so that the chances of curation is the maximum, please follow the Medium guidelines. You can always follow the below-mentioned article for more clear instructions. You can also check for this article for tips and tricks for writing on Medium. In short, submit unpublished drafts. Self-published articles are also allowed. Make sure that the image is credited and there is zero plagiarism. Use subheaders and headers to divide the texts into readable chunks. The story with the reading time of 4 to 7 minutes tends to do the best. However, shorter work is also accepted.

https://medium.com/psychologically/submission-guidelines-for-psychologically-f9269cae3350

['Jyoti Meena']

2020-10-09 06:39:03.411000+00:00

['Style Guides', 'Submission Guidelines', 'Psychology', 'Publication', 'Writing']

The Coronavirus Crisis Shows Why, If We Are To Solve Big Problems, We First Need To Rebuild Trust

We’re beginning to see the peak of the Coronavirus crisis in hard-hit urban areas like New York City, thanks to social distancing measures and the bravery and dedication of healthcare workers. Yet despite the progress, you only have to look at Singapore to see that the epidemic can back flare up at any time. Meanwhile, we’re seeing armed mobs show up at state capitals to protest lockdown restrictions even as Covid-19 hotspots shift from larger cities to rural areas like Albany, GA, Sioux Falls, SD and Gallup, NM. In many ways, these areas are more vulnerable due to higher prevalence of health conditions and less access to medical care. Clearly, we have a deep problem with trust. Research from Gallup finds that trust in institutions has been declining for decades. A study at Ohio State found that, when confronted with scientific evidence that conflicted with their views, people would question the objectivity of the science. Our social contract is broken. We need to establish a new one. Disruptive Generational Shifts We didn’t get here by accident. Our current age of distrust grew out of four generational shifts that have been brewing over the last 50 years. First, and most obvious, are the technology shifts, including digital technology, as well as advances in antibiotics, genomics and agriculture. Generally, these have been positive developments, but have contributed to historically high levels of income inequality, which undermines social cohesion. The second shift is of resources. We have seen oil’s rise to dominance since the 1970s, which has greatly affected geopolitics over the past half-century, but now may be reversing. The price for oil actually fell into negative territory recently. Coal has largely been displaced by natural gas and renewables, while other resources, such as rare earth elements, are in high demand and subject to supply disruptions. The third shift is migratory. Since 1970, the share of immigrants in the US has risen from a low of 4.7% to 13.6% of the population, the most since the 1890s. In 2015, the foreign born population in the US totaled almost 45 million, many of which have religious and cultural heritages that often seem strange to their native born neighbors. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, we are beginning to see a massive demographic shift. Over the next decade, baby-boomers, many of whom came of age during the Reagan revolution, will be replaced by millennials, whose experiences with the Great Recession, debilitating student loan debt and rising healthcare costs, have very different priorities. So you can see where all the tension in our society is coming from. Americans are seeing their work life disrupted by technology, while they also compete for scarce resources with people who not only look and sound different, but often have very different values and beliefs, and all this is happening in the midst of a massive generational political shift. Our Prisoner’s Dilemma In theory, finding a way forward shouldn’t be complicated. We only need to analyze the issues, identify options and build a consensus on what to do. Yet in the early 1950’s, researchers at the RAND Corporation were able to show why things aren’t so simple, through a thought experiment called the prisoner’s dilemma, which involves two suspects being interrogated separately. Here’s how it works: If both prisoners cooperate with each other and neither confesses, they each get one year in prison on a lesser charge. If one confesses, he gets off scot-free, while his partner gets five years. If they both rat each other out, then they get three years each for a total of six years, collectively the worst outcome of all. Notice how if each player acts purely out of rational self-interest, the best strategy is to defect. No matter what the other does, each one is better off ratting his partner out. Yet in the pursuit of self-interest, both are made worse off. It’s a frustrating problem. Game theorists call it a Nash equilibrium — one in which nobody can improve their position by a unilateral move. It takes trust. It seems that we have a similar problem today. For example, in their study of the Tea Party movement, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williams found that the activists, who were mostly older Americans, were not against government spending in general. For instance, they supported Medicare and Social Security. It was the benefits that went to others, who they saw as “freeloaders,” that they found objectionable. Rebuilding Shared Purpose It’s not hard to see why we’re so divided in America. 50 years ago, our society was largely homogeneous — white, christian and middle class. Today, however, due to the four generational shifts noted above, we’ve become a patchwork of interests and cultures and that makes it hard to create the kind of trust we need to overcome our prisoner’s dilemma. For example, the Tea Party activists that Skocpol and Williams studied believed that younger Americans were trying to get free healthcare and didn’t want to pay for it. Younger Americans, however, could point out that they not only already have to pay into the Medicare system that older Americans enjoy, but that they will also have to pay for decades of debt that their elders have accrued (in large part because of Medicare). Finding shared purpose is even more difficult when race and culture come into play. Many people want to protect and preserve their communities from people they see as having different values and heritage. Many of those protesting the Covid-19 restrictions made clear that one reason they resented the restrictions was because they were being imposed from outside their communities. Yet if we are ever going to be able to meet the challenges that face us today — and Covid-19 is only one of many — we will need to create a new sense of shared purpose. Rewriting The Social Contract The challenges we face today can seem overwhelming, but we’ve been here before. In the 1930s and 40s, we faced a global depression, massive genocides and a world war that claimed the lives of 75 million people. Europe, once the center of western civilization, was in ruins, its people struggling to survive. Yet out of those ashes we built a new world order and a new social contract. The United Nations created a global forum for solving problems, Bretton Woods established a global financial system and the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. In the US, the New Deal permanently altered the role of the public sector. Out of World War II a new vision for public funding of science transformed America into a technological superpower. These institutions were far from perfect, but they served us well for half a century. However then, as now, we can’t create a better future simply by looking to the past. The public trust has been shattered because our institutions have failed us. Technology won’t save us. Markets won’t save us. We need to save ourselves. Yet still, I have to believe our future is bright. The coronavirus pandemic has brought about the greatest scientific mobilization in history and inspired a level of collaboration that until now would have been unheard of. The money and effort invested will likely pay dividends far beyond the current crisis. Similar efforts can help us meet our other challenges. The first step, however, is to reestablish trust. Lasting change is always built on common ground. Greg Satell is an international keynote speaker, adviser and bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. His previous effort, Mapping Innovation, was selected as one of the best business books of 2017. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com and follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto

https://greg-satell.medium.com/the-coronavirus-crisis-shows-why-if-we-are-to-solve-big-problems-we-first-need-to-rebuild-trust-8f5ea74512c1

['Greg Satell']

2020-05-23 12:04:42.156000+00:00

['Leadership', 'Coronavirus', 'Trust']

Building a Machine Learning Recommendation Model from Scratch

In this tutorial, we build a regression model using the cruise_ship_info.csv dataset for recommending the crew size for potential cruise ship buyers. This tutorial will highlight important data science and machine learning concepts such as: a) data preprocessing and variable selection b) basic regression model building c) hyperparameters tuning b) model evaluation d) techniques for dimensionality reduction The code for building this recommender system can be found on GitHub. 1. Import necessary libraries import numpy as np import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import seaborn as sns 2. Read dataset and display columns df=pd.read_csv("cruise_ship_info.csv") df.head() 3. Calculate basic summary statistics for the dataset df.describe() 4. Generate scatter pair plot cols = ['Age', 'Tonnage', 'passengers', 'length', 'cabins','passenger_density','crew'] sns.pairplot(df[cols], size=2.0) Observations from part 4: 1) We observe that variables are on different scales, for sample the Age variable ranges from about 16 years to 48 years, while the Tonnage variable ranges from 2 to 220. It is therefore important that when a regression model is built using these variables, variables be brought to the same scale either by standardizing or normalizing the data. 2) We also observe that the target variable ‘crew’ correlates well with 4 predictor variables, namely, ‘Tonnage’, ‘passengers’, ‘length’, and ‘cabins’. 5. Variable selection for predicting “crew” size 5a. Calculation of covariance matrix cols = ['Age', 'Tonnage', 'passengers', 'length', 'cabins','passenger_density','crew'] from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler stdsc = StandardScaler() X_std = stdsc.fit_transform(df[cols].iloc[:,range(0,7)].values) cov_mat =np.cov(X_std.T) plt.figure(figsize=(10,10)) sns.set(font_scale=1.5) hm = sns.heatmap(cov_mat, cbar=True, annot=True, square=True, fmt='.2f', annot_kws={'size': 12}, yticklabels=cols, xticklabels=cols) plt.title('Covariance matrix showing correlation coefficients') plt.tight_layout() plt.show() 5b. Selecting predictor and target variables From the covariance matrix plot above, we see that the “crew” variable correlates strongly with 4 predictor variables: “Tonnage”, “passengers”, “length, and “cabins”. cols_selected = ['Tonnage', 'passengers', 'length', 'cabins','crew'] df[cols_selected].head() X = df[cols_selected].iloc[:,0:4].values # features matrix y = df[cols_selected]['crew'].values # target variable 6. Data partitioning into training and testing sets from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split X = df[cols_selected].iloc[:,0:4].values y = df[cols_selected]['crew'] X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split( X, y, test_size=0.4, random_state=0) 7. Building a multi-regression model Our machine learning regression model for predicting a ship’s “crew” size can be expressed as: from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression slr = LinearRegression() slr.fit(X_train, y_train) y_train_pred = slr.predict(X_train) y_test_pred = slr.predict(X_test) plt.scatter(y_train_pred, y_train_pred - y_train, c='steelblue', marker='o', edgecolor='white', label='Training data') plt.scatter(y_test_pred, y_test_pred - y_test, c='limegreen', marker='s', edgecolor='white', label='Test data') plt.xlabel('Predicted values') plt.ylabel('Residuals') plt.legend(loc='upper left') plt.hlines(y=0, xmin=-10, xmax=50, color='black', lw=2) plt.xlim([-10, 50]) plt.tight_layout() plt.legend(loc='lower right') plt.show() 7a. Evaluation of regression model from sklearn.metrics import r2_score from sklearn.metrics import mean_squared_error print('MSE train: %.3f, test: %.3f' % ( mean_squared_error(y_train, y_train_pred), mean_squared_error(y_test, y_test_pred))) print('R^2 train: %.3f, test: %.3f' % ( r2_score(y_train, y_train_pred), r2_score(y_test, y_test_pred))) MSE train: 0.955, test: 0.889 R^2 train: 0.920, test: 0.928 7b. Regression coefficients slr.fit(X_train, y_train).intercept_ -0.7525074496158393 slr.fit(X_train, y_train).coef_ array([ 0.01902703, -0.15001099, 0.37876395, 0.77613801]) 8. Feature Standardization, Cross-Validation, and Hyperparameter Tuning from sklearn.metrics import r2_score from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split X = df[cols_selected].iloc[:,0:4].values y = df[cols_selected]['crew'] from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler sc_y = StandardScaler() sc_x = StandardScaler() y_std = sc_y.fit_transform(y_train[:, np.newaxis]).flatten() train_score = [] test_score = [] for i in range(10): X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split( X, y, test_size=0.4, random_state=i) y_train_std = sc_y.fit_transform(y_train[:, np.newaxis]).flatten() from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler from sklearn.decomposition import PCA from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline pipe_lr = Pipeline([('scl', StandardScaler()),('pca', PCA(n_components=4)),('slr', LinearRegression())]) pipe_lr.fit(X_train, y_train_std) y_train_pred_std=pipe_lr.predict(X_train) y_test_pred_std=pipe_lr.predict(X_test) y_train_pred=sc_y.inverse_transform(y_train_pred_std) y_test_pred=sc_y.inverse_transform(y_test_pred_std) train_score = np.append(train_score, r2_score(y_train, y_train_pred)) test_score = np.append(test_score, r2_score(y_test, y_test_pred)) 9. Techniques of Dimensionality Reduction 9a. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) train_score = [] test_score = [] cum_variance = [] for i in range(1,5): X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split( X, y, test_size=0.4, random_state=0) y_train_std = sc_y.fit_transform(y_train[:, np.newaxis]).flatten() from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler from sklearn.decomposition import PCA from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline pipe_lr = Pipeline([('scl', StandardScaler()),('pca', PCA(n_components=i)),('slr', LinearRegression())]) pipe_lr.fit(X_train, y_train_std) y_train_pred_std=pipe_lr.predict(X_train) y_test_pred_std=pipe_lr.predict(X_test) y_train_pred=sc_y.inverse_transform(y_train_pred_std) y_test_pred=sc_y.inverse_transform(y_test_pred_std) train_score = np.append(train_score, r2_score(y_train, y_train_pred)) test_score = np.append(test_score, r2_score(y_test, y_test_pred)) cum_variance = np.append(cum_variance, np.sum(pipe_lr.fit(X_train, y_train).named_steps['pca'].explained_variance_ratio_)) plt.scatter(cum_variance,train_score, label = 'train_score') plt.plot(cum_variance, train_score) plt.scatter(cum_variance,test_score, label = 'test_score') plt.plot(cum_variance, test_score) plt.xlabel('cumulative variance') plt.ylabel('R2_score') plt.legend() plt.show() Observations from part 9a: We observe that by increasing the number of principal components from 1 to 4, the train and test scores improve. This is because, with fewer components, there is a high bias error in the model, since the model is overly simplified. As we increase the number of principal components, the bias error will reduce, but complexity in the model increases. 9b. Regularized Regression: Lasso from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split( X, y, test_size=0.4, random_state=0) y_train_std = sc_y.fit_transform(y_train[:, np.newaxis]).flatten() X_train_std = sc_x.fit_transform(X_train) X_test_std = sc_x.transform(X_test) alpha = np.linspace(0.01,0.4,10) #lasso parameters from sklearn.linear_model import Lasso lasso = Lasso(alpha=0.7) r2_train=[] r2_test=[] norm = [] for i in range(10): lasso = Lasso(alpha=alpha[i]) lasso.fit(X_train_std,y_train_std) y_train_std=lasso.predict(X_train_std) y_test_std=lasso.predict(X_test_std) r2_train=np.append(r2_train,r2_score(y_train,sc_y.inverse_transform(y_train_std))) r2_test=np.append(r2_test,r2_score(y_test,sc_y.inverse_transform(y_test_std))) norm= np.append(norm,np.linalg.norm(lasso.coef_)) plt.scatter(alpha,r2_train,label='r2_train') plt.plot(alpha,r2_train) plt.scatter(alpha,r2_test,label='r2_test') plt.plot(alpha,r2_test) plt.scatter(alpha,norm,label = 'norm') plt.plot(alpha,norm) plt.ylim(-0.1,1) plt.xlim(0,.43) plt.xlabel('alpha') plt.ylabel('R2_score') plt.legend() plt.show() Observations from part 9b: We observe that as the regularization parameter alpha increases, the norm of the regression coefficients become smaller and smaller. This means more regression coefficients are forced to zero, which intend to increases bias error (oversimplification). The best value to balance bias-variance tradeoff is when alpha is kept low, say alpha = 0.1 or less. Summary In summary, we’ve shown how a simple regression model can be built using the cruise_ship_info.csv dataset for predicting the crew size for potential ship buyers. The code for this recommendation system can be found on GitHub. References

https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/machine-learning-model-for-recommending-the-crew-size-for-cruise-ship-buyers-6dd478ad9900

['Benjamin Obi Tayo Ph.D.']

2019-07-01 18:52:08.754000+00:00

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

Make your Machine Learning Models Come Alive with Streamlit

Streamlit is a new open source library that uses Python and integrates well with common data science libraries. It handles interactivity and visualizations very well. To paraphrase co-founder Adrien Treuille, Streamlit apps are Python scripts that treat widgets as variables, can reuse data and computations, and can be developed in a live coding environment. Streamlit is great for rapid development! Quick Start: Getting started with Streamlit is as easy as: In your Python virtual environment pip install -U streamlit pandas . Type the following in your text editor and save the file as my_app.py: import streamlit as st import pandas as pd df = pd.DataFrame(dict(a=[1, 2, 4], b=[3, 1, 7])) st.line_chart(df) 3. Execute streamlit run my_app.py in your terminal. Code and see output in real time Boom! 🧨 You’ve created a chart your user can interact with and download! A line chart Let’s dive into what Streamlit is and isn’t. What Streamlit is Loved by users Young Opinionated Quick to start using Pure Python Ideal for visualization Good for interactivity Loved by users ❤️ I just have anecdotes here, but read through comments on the Streamlit community forum and issues on GitHub and you’ll see users are really excited about Streamlit. It’s solving a pain point for data scientists. 🎉 Young 🐣 Streamlit was officially launched in fall 2019 and has been iterated on quickly. The library is backed by a Silicon Valley venture-funded startup that raised $6 million USD in seed funding at launch. Opinionated ☝️ Streamlit will give you a single-page app with an optional side bar. You can add one element after another vertically. The Streamlit server reruns your script from top to bottom every time. There are no callbacks. Streamlit allows you to cache functions, so that you only re-run code and re-load data when necessary. Quick to start using 🏃🏾‍♀️ As you saw above, Streamlit comes with batteries included. It plays nicely with the Python data science stack: pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and PyTorch. Pure Python 🐍 If Javascript frameworks and the Model-view-controller paradigm (MVC) aren’t your things, Streamlit has you covered. You just need Python functions, control flow, and decorators. Sprinkle in some Markdown and HTML/CSS if you want to adjust the formatting. Ideal for visualization 📊 Streamlit has uses Altair by default by plotting. It makes it easy to change to other visualization options such as Matplotlib, Plotly, Bokeh, Holoviews, Graphviz, and deck.gl. Good for interactivity ⏯ Built-in Streamlit functions make it easy to add checkboxes, dropdown menus, text boxes, and other interactive features. Streamlit treats these widgets as variables, as you’ll see in a moment. Now that you’ve seen what Streamlit IS, let’s see what it IS NOT. What Streamlit is not 🚫 (as of v0.60.0) A full web framework Ideal for styling control Good for managing session state Not a full web framework 🕸 Streamlit is not a fully featured web framework. There’s no router, so you can’t have multiple pages. There’s no authentication. You can’t add javascript, so popups aren’t happening. Not ideal for styling control 🎨 Changing the CSS is not straightforward. Right now, some CSS and Javascript customizations are hacky and some are impossible. Side-by-side elements aren’t available yet. Not good for managing session state 🎮 It’s possible — but not easy — to manage session state. Streamlit is working on a solution. Here’s a prototype. The upside of not having to think about state is that building an app that doesn’t need to preserve state is easy. 🙂 The downside is that it’s a pain to build an app that needs state. ☹️ The Future 🎁 The good news is that improvements in all of these areas are in the works! 🎉Here’s the 2020 roadmap. Note that one-click deployment is a key part of the Streamlit company’s plan to make money. 💰 Alright, now that you have the lay of the land, let’s see how to use Streamlit! ⚡️ Updated Dec. 22, 2020 — Streamlit isn’t too tricky to deploy, so I’ve removed that issue. Using Streamlit To run the code below, install Streamlit into a virtual environment with Python, pandas, NumPy, and Plotly. As of this writing, Streamlit is only on PyPI so you need to pip install it. I suggest you set up your web browser and your code editor side-by-side for the best development experience. 😀 You can rerun your code manually on each update by clicking Rerun in the web app after you change your code. I suggest you set your app to rerun automatically by clicking Always rerun. Header buttons after a change You might need to refresh your webpage or restart your Streamlit server occasionally if the wires really get twisted, but generally, things should just work. 👍 If you get stuck, the Streamlit docs are unusually clear. And here’s the community forum. Let’s take the 10 key Streamlit functions for a spin. 10 Key functions Headings Text Markdown Dataframes Visualizations Interactive widgets CSS modifications Media Caching Miscellaneous features Let’s look at headings first. Headings With Streamilt installed and a Streamlit server serving your file ( streamlit run my_app.py ), enter the following code in your text editor and watch the magic happen in your web browser. 🐇 import streamlit as st st.title("The Title for my App") st.header("A Header") st.subheader("A Subheader") If you don’t see anything, copy the Network URL from the terminal to a web browser window. Or click the Rerun button at the top of your browser window if your Streamlit server is already running. 😉 title, header, subheader = h1, h2, h3 Using your browser inspection tool, you can verify that these functions create h1, h2, and h3 HTML tags, respectively. If you need an HTML primer, I suggest heading to W3 Schools. 👍 Text Output text with st.write() . st.write("Some text to output") Or skip st.write() if you don’t need special functionality and just type the string alone. "Some text to output" Like Jupyter notebooks, a value or a variable name by itself will output to the screen. Unlike a Jupyter notebook, the result of a method call will not output anything. You have to save the return value as a variable to display it. ☝️ For example, the following won’t display anything: ("Some text to output").upper() But this will: my_uppercased_string = ("Some text to output").upper() my_uppercased_string Output text It bears repeating that Streamlit reruns your code from top to bottom every time you make a change. As you explore Streamlit you will find you don’t want to display everything all the time. Comment out blocks of code to save time and screen real estate. 👍 Markdown You can use markdown to format your text and add emoji like this: st.markdown("_This_ __is__ *__markdown__*. 😀") Which displays this: Markdown stying You can also add links using Markdown like this: st.markdown('Learn Python [here](https://memorablepython.com)') Viola! A link appears. We’ll explore other Markdown use cases in a moment. DataFrames Streamlit was built with data scientists in mind. You can output the contents of a pandas DataFrame directly like this: df = pd.DataFrame(dict(a=[1, 2, 4], b=[3, 1, 7])) df The columns are automatically sortable by the user. 🎉 If you want styling enhancements, use st.dataframe() explicitly. For example, you can highlight the minimum value in each column like this: st.dataframe(df.style.highlight_min(axis=0)) DataFrame with highlighting Alternatively, you can use st.write() to achieve the same outcome like this: st.write(df.style.highlight_min(axis=0)) st.write() detects the type of object passed to it and adjusts accordingly. Now let’s see what Streamlit can do with plots. Visualizations Streamlit makes visualizations a breeze. 💨 It provides default functions for interactive line, area, and bar, charts. You saw st.line_chart() above. st.bar_chart() and st.area_chart() are similar. They all use the Altair plotting library under the hood. There are a number of other top-level functions that wrap plotting libraries, such as st.pyplot() for Matplotlib and st.map() for Mapbox GL. Here’s the code to create a map adopted from the docs: map_data = pd.DataFrame( np.random.randn(1000, 2) / [50, 50] + [38.9, -77], columns=['lat', 'lon'] ) st.map(map_data) And here’s the output: Output of st.map() Alternatively, you can use your favorite Python plotting library. For example, here’s a geo-visualization adopted from the Plotly docs. with st.spinner("Component is loading"): fig = px.scatter_geo( df_geo, # just making it take some time load title='Gapminder Data', locations="iso_alpha", color="continent", hover_name="country", size="pop", animation_frame="year", projection="robinson", ) fig Plotly with Streamlit Note that we added a st.spinner() context block to display a message while our content was loading. 👍 Streamlit’s plotting is very cool! Now let’s look at the interactive features that are at the heart of Streamlit. Interactive widgets Streamlit uses pre-defined functions to create interactive widgets. Here’s an example select widget. select widget output The code to create the widget and variable is just one line! transport = st.selectbox(label=”Select Transportation”, options=[“car”, “bike”, “walk”]) Here are seven Streamlit functions you can use to have a user to select something. I include the required arguments and a description for each widget. button(label='Click to do something') — click a button — click a button radio(label='Choose', options=['rock', 'classical', 'jazz']) — radio button — radio button checkbox(label='Check the box') — toggle a checkbox — toggle a checkbox selectbox(label='Choose one', options=['walk', 'bike']) — select an option from a dropdown menu — select an option from a dropdown menu multiselect(label='Choose as many as you like', options=['walk', 'bike']) — select multiple options from a dropdown menu — select multiple options from a dropdown menu slider(label='Slide the bar') — select a value from a slider bar — select a value from a slider bar beta_color_picker(label='Pick a color') — pick a color Here are six functions for a user to input or upload something. number_input(label='Input a number') — input a number — input a number text_input(label='Enter text') — input text — input text text_area(label='Write an essay') — input multi-line text — input multi-line text date_input(label='Input a date') — input a date — input a date time_input(label='Input a time') — input a time — input a time file_uploader(label='Upload a .jpg file') — upload a file Just pass the interactive function a label that the user will see. Save the return value as a variable and do something with it. It’s that easy! 😀 Let’s see more about how to use these widgets. Using widgets The widgets are customizable and come with sensible defaults. For example, here’s the st.date_input() widget code: date = st.date_input(label='Input a date') date And the result: You can pass date_input a default value, a minimum value, or a maximum value. Right now, the respective defaults for date_input are today, January 1, 2001, and today plus 10 years. Note that no duplicate widgets are allowed. Each widget must be differentiated by the arguments you pass it or else you will get an error. If needed, you can pass a key argument to ensure uniqueness. 👆 I won’t demo all the widget types here, but let’s look at a few common patterns. You’ll often use a checkbox with an if statement. Here’s how to display or hide a DataFrame depending upon whether a user has checked a box. display_df = st.checkbox(label='Want to see the data?') if display_df: df Here’s what the output looks like: Checkbox with control flow to display a dataframe Add any of the widgets to the sidebar with st.sidebar like this: st.sidebar.radio( label="Choose wisely", options=["Laser Tag", "Ax Throwing", "Trampoline Park"] ) Now an expandable sidebar will hold the widget. 👍 The side bar expanded with the radio buttons. While most of the widgets have been around for a while, the color picker widget is in beta, and subject to change. Here’s the code: user_color = st.beta_color_picker("Pick a color") user_color Color picker widget Streamlit widgets are a big part of what makes the library so powerful. I encourage you to play with them to see just how cool they are! 😀 CSS Modifications Modifying CSS in Streamlit is possible, but not elegant. You can modify the CSS through use of st.markdown("<style> some css goes here </style>") . Here’s a basic example to change the color of the text on a section of a page. st.markdown( ''' <span style="color:blue"> Print it in blue. <br /> Please. 😀 </span> ''', unsafe_allow_html=True ) Note the use of triple quotes for multiline CSS. ☝️ Changing the color of text. You must use st.markdown() with the keyword argument unsafe_allow_html=True to access the underlying CSS. Interactive CSS Let’s see how the color picker widget could allow a user to change the background on the page. Here’s the code. user_color = st.beta_color_picker("Pick a color") user_color if user_color != "#000000": st.markdown( f"<style> body{{ background-color: {user_color};}}</style>", unsafe_allow_html=True ) Note double curly braces {{ }} are needed to escape because of string interpolation. Here’s the color picker in action: Using the color picker to change the CSS on the page Bootstrap Streamlit uses Bootstrap for styling, so you have access to Bootstrap classes such as buttons and warnings. For example, here’s how to display a success badge: st.markdown( '<span class="badge badge-pill badge-success"> Badge </span>', unsafe_allow_html=True ) Badge output that uses Bootstrap You can try to make a grid layout with Bootstrap, but Streamlit widgets won’t respect the layout, so it’s not a good option. ☹ ️A grid layout solution is in the works. 🙂 Remove Branding Here’s the code to remove the remove the hamburger menu and the footer with Made with Streamlit text: hide_st_style = """ <style> #MainMenu {visibility: hidden;} footer {visibility: hidden;} </style> """ st.markdown(hide_st_style, unsafe_allow_html=True) -source: Streamlit forums. Media Let’s see how to display images, videos, and audio files in your Streamlit app. Image You need to import the PIL library to display an image with st.image() . Here’s code you can use to get an image from a user and display it: from PIL import Image img = [] img = st.file_uploader(label='input', type=['png', 'jpg']) if img: image = Image.open(img) st.image(image, caption='Your Image') You can specify a width and BGR channel, if necessary. Video Play a video with st.video() . You can play your own video or one on YouTube. Here’s how you play a YouTube video starting at 45 seconds: st.video( 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqAJLh9wuZ0', start_time=45 ) The default video format is mp4, but you can specify another format. Audio Play an audio file with st.audio() . You can specify something other than the default wav file type and and pass a start time. Caching Caching can save your app users time the second time they load your app. Caching allows your app to avoid reloading the same files and redoing the same calculations. Add caching with the @st.cache decorator. Here’s a basic explanation of how Streamlit caching works: Streamlit checks these four things: The input parameters that you called the function with The value of any external variable used in the function The body of the function The body of any function used inside the cached function If this is the first time Streamlit has seen these four components with these exact values and in this exact combination and order, it runs the function and stores the result in a local cache. Then, next time the cached function is called, if none of these components changed, Streamlit will just skip executing the function altogether and, instead, return the output previously stored in the cache. -source: the docs. Caching can be helpful to speed up the feel of your app, but it can also be tricky and sometimes behaves unexpectedly. ⚠️ Miscellaneous Features Streamlit makes it easy for users to create a screen recording from the hamburger menu. The Record a screencast option gives users a range of screen options to record. This can be helpful for collaboration. 👍 You can easily display the code behind your Streamlit app. Just put the code you want to display within a st.echo() context block like this: with st.echo(): def my_function(): return None The output is nicely formatted code that looks like this on the user’s screen: Code from the app Alternatively, if you want to display formatted code but not run it, use st.code() like this: st.code( """ my_var = f"testing my code {1 + 2} times" """ ) Code not run by the app Wrap Streamlit lets you quickly turn a machine learning model into a basic app. It’s packed with useful features and has a roadmap to overcome many of its current limitations. I think it will become a popular self-service tool the data scientist’s toolbox. In a future article I plan to discuss deploying Streamlit to the cloud. Follow me to make sure you don’t miss it! I hope you found this introduction to Streamlit 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, 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/make-your-machine-learning-models-come-alive-with-streamlit-48e6eb8e3004

['Jeff Hale']

2020-12-23 01:46:07.977000+00:00

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

How to Work for Long Term Goals If You Hate Delaying Gratification

Why Delayed Gratification Is Not a Suitable Strategy For millennia, humans lived from moment to moment. We had to continually think about how to get food, avoid predators, and find shelter. While our world is very different from our ancestors’, experts showed that our brains didn’t change much compared to early humans. We still love and seek immediately rewarding actions. Eating sweets, gossiping, and hearing stories, are all integral parts of who we are. By delaying instant gratification, you wage a losing battle between your homo-sapiens instincts and your modern aspirations. Yet today, you do most of what you do not to get immediate gratification, but rather to achieve something or be someone later on. Building a successful startup, investing money, or training to be fit, have no seemingly instant rewards. This contrast between modern success habits and deeply-rooted tendencies begs the question: “is it possible to make long term oriented work immediately satisfying?” James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, answers this question best. He says: “What is immediately rewarded is often repeated.” What he means is this: if a habit gives you a dopamine hit, you’re more likely to do it again and again. Otherwise, you’ll have no reasons to keep doing what you’re doing. While gratification from indulging in sweets or checking social media is not beneficial, a feeling of joy right after important work can be crucial in keeping you excited. At the same time, the long term rewards pile up in the background. Instead of delaying gratification, a better strategy is to add a bit of fun and excitement to your work while slowly moving forward. This way, you won’t need to delay anything. Your brain will process hard work as if it’s eating ice cream. Here are three tactics to make difficult and critical tasks more fun to do.

https://medium.com/mind-cafe/how-to-work-for-long-term-goals-if-you-hate-delaying-gratification-467e17f628d9

['Younes Henni']

2020-12-11 19:58:08.631000+00:00

['Education', 'Productivity', 'Motivation', 'Life', 'Self Improvement']

How to Write a Badass Beginning

How to Write a Badass Beginning Tips to start your novel off strong Picture from movie-screencaps.com Your book’s introduction is one of the most important parts you will write. It will determine whether or not a publisher wants to work with you and if a reader will continue reading. In it, the tone for the rest of your book will be set, giving readers a taste of your writing style and what they are in for. For these reasons, many writers find that writing their novel’s beginning is a rather daunting task. In my previous blog post, I discussed different ways you can begin your book: the mid-conflict beginning, the mundane beginning, the day that changes everything, the pre-storyline beginning, the narrative beginning, and the retrospective beginning. Now that you have some ideas for how you can begin your story, let’s take a look at some of the ways you can get your reader and publisher hooked: 1. THE FIRST SENTENCE AND PARAGRAPH What’s even more important than the first chapter? The first sentence. It’s alarming how many readers give up after only the first sentence or paragraph. On those few words weigh the fate of your book, making it that much more important to write a gripping introductory paragraph. If you can get your reader through that, they are much more likely to at least make it through the first chapter. You can do this by.. Opening with something intriguing or startling (something peculiar, a scandal, or a horrendous or magical event) I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. — I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith Marley was dead, to begin with. — A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space — Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood Opening with a “question.” In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. — The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1, “What advice did his father give him?” The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.- Ishmael, Daniel Quinn. “What is the ad about?” Opening with something relatable or insightful Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. — The Year of Magical Thinking, Chapter 1, Joan Didion With everyone, I think, memories of early childhood consist of a series of visual impressions, many very clear but lacking any sense of chronology. — The Siren And Selected Writings, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 2. DO NOT OPEN WITH A CLICHE It looks lazy to utilize an overused introduction (as though you copied it), even if it was anything but lazy for you. If you can, avoiding beginnings which start with a dream, an alarm clock, a morning routine, and in-depth explanations about the weather. You want your book to stand out amongst the rest, not sound like every other book. Introductions like these will likely make the reader sigh and put down your book before getting far, and no one wants that. 3. INTRODUCE YOUR PROTAGONIST ASAP Many authors begin their books with describing or showing their main character, and for good reason. Your protagonist is the most important character to the reader; it is who they will be reading about or through for the duration of the novel. It can often make or break a book depending on if your reader loves or hates them and if they can empathize with them or not. Because of this, it’s a good idea to ensure that your protagonist is likeable ( not perfect), and to introduce them as early on as possible. The more real your protagonist seems and the more relatable they are, the stronger the connection will be between them and the reader. This protagonist should also be fascinating in some way, whether that is by displaying confusing or conflicting personality traits, having hidden motives or a past which they refuse to speak of, being frequently gossiped about, or by having a unique and compelling way of thinking and speaking. 4. INCLUDE A SCENE The best way to introduce the characteristics of a protagonist, along with introducing other things (such as plot points and secondary characters), is to show, not tell. Do you want readers to know your world is magic? Instead of outright telling them “ in this vast, magical world..” show them elements of the world that make it magic. J.K. Rowling implemented this in Harry Potter by including Dumbledore’s Put-Outer and by having McGonagall transform from a cat to a human. Do you want readers to know your protagonist is caring? Write a conversational scene where they are comforting someone or going out of their way to help someone in need. Do you want readers to know two people are best friends? Write a conversational scene where it is evident that both friends are very comfortable with each other and able to speak about personal matters freely. 5. GIVE A TASTE OF YOUR SETTING/WORLD Your setting — where the story takes place — sets the whole mood/tone of the book. In some novels, it is the first thing that is described, paving the path to introduce the protagonist shortly after, and allowing the reader to first gather some insight about the main character’s situation: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats-the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill-The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it-and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river. This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. — The Hobbit, Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party, J.R.R. Tolkien Here, Tolkien describes the unique culture of the Hobbits to begin with, introducing and explaining the main character’s unique upbringing before introducing him. Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the literature of any age or country. Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could by possibility have occurred. — Oliver Twist, Chapter 1, Charles Dickens Here, Dickens follows a similar pattern, introducing Oliver Twist’s environment before introducing Oliver himself, and in doing so, revealing that Oliver is an orphan boy who has likely had a miserable childhood ( how happy of a life can one have while in a workhouse?). Beneath are some examples of introductions describing the weather, which is an important element in these novels: It’s freezing — an extraordinary 0 Fahrenfeit — and its snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik — big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost. — Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I was wearing my favorite shirt — sleeveless, white eyelet lace; I was wearing it as a farewell gesture. My carry-on item was a parka. In the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State, a small town named Forks exists under a near-constant cover of clouds. It rains on this inconsequential town more than any other place in the United States of America. It was from this town and its gloomy, omnipresent shade that my mother escaped with me when I was only a few months old. It was in this town that I’d been compelled to spend a month every summer until I was fourteen. That was the year I finally put my foot down; these past three summers, my dad, Charlie, vacationed with me in California for two weeks instead. It was to Forks that I now exiled myself — an action that I took with great horror. I detested Forks. I loved Phoenix. I loved the sun and the blistering heat. I loved the vigorous, sprawling city. — Twilight, Chapter 1, First Sight, Stephenie Meyer Meyer utilizes the peaceful and mundane beginning — until everything changes — to emphasize the boring life prior to the unexpected events soon to take place. Consider your book’s setting, and the effect it has on the story: Is your setting/world typical, with supernatural or romantic events soon to occur in this most unexpected environment? Is your setting/world advanced technologically, residing in the future, where only the most intelligent succeed? Is your setting/world fantastical and full of magic? Your setting may also reveal things about your character and plot, without outright needing to explain it: If your main character is working as a surgeon, it’s safe to say they are intelligent, driven, and want to help people. If your main character is outside of their high school while everyone else is inside, it’s presumed that they don’t care much about their education and that they are rebellious. If your story begins in a utopia, it’s fair to assume that something will either destroy that peace and tranquility, or that the utopian aspects are a mirage. If your story begins in a war zone, it goes without saying that everyone in the area has endured a lot of pain and suffering. 6. FORESHADOW Foreshadowing gives your readers an opportunity to connect the dots with given clues and fill in missing pieces of information, which is a very satisfying experience. What certain characters say can foreshadow later events (perhaps a wise wizard or a seer), incidents may re-occur on a larger scale (Harry Potter defeating Voldemort as a baby foreshadows his defeat of Voldemort when he is grown), and even changes in the weather can foreshadow the future (such as the phrase “ winter is coming “ in Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, which is both literal and symbolic). There may also be objects shown early on, which do not become integral to the plot until later (perhaps turning out to be enchanted or historic), or ideas and predictions which are meaningless or misunderstood until new information is revealed. Foreshadowing early on and throughout your novel also shows how much thought you put into the story, with even the smaller details of it being intentional and important. To do this well, know your ending before you start writing your beginning. 7. POSE A QUESTION(S) Throughout your book, questions will be what keeps readers hooked, awaiting the answers to those questions and creating hypotheses about what they might be. The earlier on you introduce a question — even if that question to a secondary plot point — the better (although it is a good idea to also foreshadow the main conflict/question in the story). The goal of these strategically-asked questions are to peak the reader’s curiosity without divulging too much information. This can be a hard balance to find, but it can be done, both directly and indirectly. Direct: This is often done by having the protagonist also seeking the answer to said question, and the reader tags along with them on their quest for answers. In The Lord of the Rings, we learn about the mysterious ring early on, of both its immense power and dark nature. Answers to questions about the ring are given here and there as Frodo moves forward on his journey, such as who created it, who the true ringmaster is, how the ring can change a person (or Hobbit), and how and if it can be destroyed. In The Witcher series on Netflix, viewers, along with Geralt (although he appears to avoid it at first), want to know what Renfri meant when she said, “You will try to outrun the girl in the woods, but you cannot. She is your destiny.” Ciri also has questions, wanting to know what her grandmother meant when she said the world depends on her survival and why she had been so closely protected her whole life. Indirect: You can also introduce questions more subtly and directed toward the reader (possibly which the characters already know the answers to, or do not bother to ask). These can be as vague as a looming sense of darkness, which the people of the world and reader can sense, or something may feel “off” about a seemingly normal thing. The question(s) may also be about the history and dynamics of the world, the governing bodies, and the characters. You will want to include a variety of questions within the very first few pages of your book, also providing some minor answers as “rewards” ( while keeping the main answers veiled until the end/climax). 8. END CHAPTER 1 WITH A CLIFFHANGER You will want to end nearly all of your chapters with a cliffhanger (question), but it is especially important to end chapter 1 this way so the reader will be eager to delve into chapter 2. The further along they read, the more invested they will become in your story. 9. INCLUDE AN INCITING INCIDENT As early on as the first (or second) chapter, you are going to want to incorporate your inciting incident, which is what will change everything about the protagonist’s life prior to it and kick the story into its rising action. Examples of types of inciting incidents: A loss or death of a caretaker or someone close to the protagonist (A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket) A call to adventure (The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien) A mysterious crime takes place, which needs solving (BBC Sherlock) Crossing paths with someone who will soon be very important in their life (most romantic novels) A new phase of life begins (starting school, work, or moving) The protagonist is threatened by someone (and have no choice but to flee, attack, or defend themselves) A new opportunity arises (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl) A weighty task is given to the protagonist to carry out Once an inciting incident is incorporated and there is a sense of risk in your novel, it will create excitement for the reader. This excitement will make them eager to turn the pages, hopefully all the way through to the very end. 10. DO NOT INFO-DROP Of course you want your reader to have an enjoyable experience reading your book, and as exciting as it is to share your world’s history, lore, locations, characters, and artifacts, it’s not recommended to do so all at once. Allow the reader to experience the world as if they are actually entering into it themselves; one piece at a time. If you do dump too much information all at once — especially in the very beginning, which many authors make the mistake of — you risk your reader getting bored and overwhelmed, causing them to quit reading because they just don’t care enough about your world ( yet) to learn all the nitty-gritties about it. No one wants to keep track of over twenty characters and their kingdoms and lineages without any context or motivation. When you are describing things, ask yourself if it is immediately important or not. If it’s not.. it can probably wait until later. One great way to pace yourself is to have your protagonist also experience the world for the first time. This is done well in Harry Potter by J.K. Rowlin g, where a magical boy has no inkling that a magical world even exists until the readers get to learn about it with him. In summary, be patient with your storytelling, and let it progress naturally.

https://medium.com/fantasy-writing-school/how-to-write-a-badass-beginning-7f7fdfca064b

['Jenna Mcrae']

2020-12-04 00:57:29.124000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing Advice', 'Chapter 1', 'Writing']

Gene Therapy in Dogs & Random Number Generator Made from DNA

NEWSLETTER Gene Therapy in Dogs & Random Number Generator Made from DNA This Week in Synthetic Biology (Issue #16) Annie Spratt on Unsplash. Receive this newsletter every Friday morning! Sign up here: https://synbio.substack.com/ Reach out on Twitter. A Gene Therapy, Tested on Dogs, Has Issues For CRISPR-based gene therapies to work, you first need to squeeze a Cas protein and guide RNAs into a teeny tiny virus. Then, that packaged virus — bearing its gene-editing payload — has to be inserted into the body. The most common “delivery vehicle” for gene therapies are AAVs, or adeno-associated viruses. Long considered to be extremely safe, a new study, the most in-depth of its kind, is shedding new light on their long-term efficacy. Researchers injected nine dogs with hemophilia A, a type of bleeding disorder, with an AAV “payload”. Then, they followed the dogs over a period of ten years. The gene therapy was extremely effective. The nine treated dogs, together, only had seven bleeding episodes during the study period. Eleven untreated dogs with hemophilia, by comparison, had about twelve bleeding episodes each — every single year. Still, the researchers found that, in the livers of six of the treated dogs, 1,741 AAV integration events had occurred. That means that viral genetic material is being inserted into genomic DNA, often near very important genes. Dr. Charles Venditti, writing on this study for Nature Biotechnology, commented that these “results increase concerns about the long-term safety of AAV gene therapy,” but also called for more long-term studies and generally praised the work. This study was published in Nature Biotechnology. Link Random Number Generator, Made from DNA Chemists have been synthesizing custom DNA sequences for decades. Now, with the technology reaching relative maturity — and with costs plummeting — DNA is considered a viable means to store data. But for DNA-based storage to compete with normal hard drives, researchers need to find ways to encrypt the data stored in nucleic acids. A new study solves part of the problem, using the inherent stochasticity of DNA synthesis to create massive collections of truly random numbers. The authors argue that, by finding a means to create a large volume of random numbers, those looking to develop DNA hard drives could “guarantee security of encryption and decryption schemes for exchanging sensitive information…” To create the random sequences, the researchers combined all four nucleotides — A,T,C,G — into a single reaction vessel and allowed the DNA strand to grow. When each strand reached a specified length, it was cleaved from the reaction chamber. Using this approach, they managed to “obtain 7 million GB of randomness from one synthesis run, which can be read out using state-of-the-art sequencing technologies at rates of [about] 300 kB/s.” This study was published in Nature Communications and is open access. Link A Protocol for Evolution Overdrive In 2011, a paper in Nature disclosed a method to continuously evolve biomolecules, in the laboratory, using phages (a type of virus that infects bacteria). Since that initial study, the method, called PACE — phage-assisted continuous evolution — has vastly improved. Now, instead of waiting thousands of years for a protein to evolve a new function, PACE can be used to iterate through hundreds of rounds of evolutionary selection in a few weeks. A new paper in Nature Protocols offers an in-depth set of procedures to perform PACE (and its cousin, PANCE) experiments in the laboratory. The researchers write that their “protocol can be performed in as little as 2 weeks to complete more than 100 rounds of evolution (complete cycles of mutation, selection and replication)…” If you’re interested in adopting continuous evolution in your research group — or garage, maybe (?) — then this paper will prove useful. I suggest taking a look at David Liu’s tweet for more details. Link CRISPR + Lipids = Cancer Gene Therapy CRISPR-Cas9, delivered to tumors, have a pretty low genetic editing efficiency. Now, an open access study in Science Advances reports that a specific type of lipid, packaged with Cas9 mRNA and guide RNAs and injected into the brains of mice with glioblastoma, “enabled up to ~70% gene editing in vivo, which caused tumor cell apoptosis, inhibited tumor growth by 50%, and improved survival by 30%.” That’s a big improvement over some prior efforts to reduce tumor sizes with CRISPR therapies in mice. The researchers also demonstrated that the injections caused “no apparent clinical signs of toxicity,” unlike other methods for gene delivery. Link A “Hidden” Carbon Fixation Pathway Found in E. coli To build all the myriad molecules and structures needed for life, organisms need carbon. Plants “fix” carbon by capturing carbon dioxide in the air, and converting it into organic compounds and sugars. Animals and many bacteria, however, are heterotrophs — to survive, they need to hunt down and feed on organic compounds. In a new study, researchers used only the genes found naturally in an E. coli bacterium to create a carbon fixation pathway. They first identified several possible pathways for carbon fixation in E. coli and decided to experimentally implement the pathway that happened to be the shortest, which they called the GED (Gnd-Entner-Doudoroff) cycle. Then, they deleted genes to “shunt” metabolites through that specific pathway, essentially forcing the E. coli cells to use it. The team demonstrated that carbon fixation via this pathway is not only possible, but could “provide (almost) all biomass building blocks and cellular energy…” This study is open access and was published in Nature Communications. Link

https://medium.com/bioeconomy-xyz/gene-therapy-in-dogs-has-a-problem-random-number-generator-made-from-dna-89d782a8996b

['Niko Mccarty']

2020-11-20 13:41:35.028000+00:00

['Newsletter', 'News', 'Science', 'Tech', 'Biotechnology']

Use the Zeigarnik Effect to Improve Your Productivity

Use the Zeigarnik Effect to Improve Your Productivity Why feeling guilty for things you don’t get done isn’t actually a bad thing Image by David Iskander on Unsplash If you can’t stop thinking about the cliffhanger of your favorite Netflix series or find it hard to concentrate because that unfinished work project keeps intruding in your thoughts, well, you are not alone. There is a reason why everybody can’t stop thinking about uncompleted tasks: psychologists call this phenomenon the Zeigarnik effect. The effect was discovered and described by a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik in the 1920s. Dr. Zeigarnik was having dinner with friends when she noticed that the waiters at the restaurant were able to remember long and complex orders, but they couldn’t remember what people had ordered after the bill was paid. Dr. Zeigarnik designed a series of experiments to uncover the process behind this phenomenon. The participants had to perform some simple tasks, like completing a puzzle or solving math problems. Half of the people participating in the experiments were interrupted partway through these tasks, while the others were able to complete them uninterrupted. After an hour, Zeigarnik asked the participants to describe what they had been working on: she discovered that those whose work had been interrupted were twice as likely to remember what they had been doing as those who had completed their tasks. The Science Behind the Effect We need to understand how short-term memory works to understand the Zeigarnik phenomenon. Short-time memory is limited in capacity, so in order to hold on to pieces of information, we have to keep rehearsing them, and this requires mental effort. People use tricks to constantly pull memories back into awareness — the Zeigarnik effect is one of them. We better remember uncompleted tasks by thinking of them more often. Dr. Zeigarnik suggests that failing to complete a task creates a cognitive tension: when we start working on a task and are suddenly interrupted, a task-specific tension is created. Through continuous tension, the content is made more easily accessible and can be easily remembered. This tension though makes it hard for us to concentrate on anything else: the only way to let go of it is to complete the unfinished task. How to Use the Phenomenon to Your Advantage People usually feel bad about incomplete tasks and experience stress because of the intrusive thoughts accompanying unfinished or interrupted activities. Luckily, there are a few ways to use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage if we learn how to channel our thoughts and desire to get the job done. Boost Your Productivity When I have a boring work task that I am reluctant to begin, I tend to procrastinate and leave it to the very last minute. The result? I rush through the task, feeling stressed, and more prone to make mistakes. To avoid this, you can do a simple thing: make a start on your task. You don’t have to complete the task immediately; simply starting can have a huge impact on motivation. Once you have started working on a task, you’ll find it keeps popping into your head… until you complete it. Generate Interest in Your Work Content marketers and advertisers use the Zeigarnik effect to persuade consumers to buy products; filmmakers and directors make use of this strategy too by creating powerful cliffhanger endings that make spectators want to see more. As a writer, you can put the Zeigarnik effect to use by promoting further consumption of the material you are writing. How? Don’t disclose all the information at the beginning — break down the content into smaller parts, each one containing one more piece of information: in this way, readers will have to complete the article in order to feel they have completed their task. Improve Your Memory If you want to learn and remember something more easily, take short breaks while working on a task or studying a subject. The task-specific tension will make it easier to access relevant information and will help strengthen your memory. When you take a break, do something completely unrelated to your task: if you were writing, go for a walk or make a coffee. Achieve Your Goals Setting your goals and writing them down is the best way to achieve them. The Zeigarnik effect will keep reminding you of these uncompleted tasks until you reach them. Failing to reach one of your goals will create tension within you, and the thought of your goals will keep popping into your head as a friendly reminder, motivating you to achieve them. Write a To-do-list Finally, don’t let the Zeigarnik phenomenon affect your mental health and well-being. When you fail to complete a task, the task-related tension in your brain can lead to stress, anxiety, and even burnout, which can all impact productivity. To contain the negative effect of the Zeigarnik phenomenon, you can try writing a to-do list of your unfinished tasks at the end of the day: acknowledging that you have outstanding tasks and writing down that you will complete them allow you to experience fewer distractions during the day, to feel relax and ready to focus.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/use-the-zeigarnik-effect-to-improve-your-productivity-219efc04af47

['Giulia Penni']

2020-12-21 15:11:46.913000+00:00

['Cognitive Bias', 'Productivity', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement', 'Zeigarnik Effect']

VCs, Startups and Covid-19

2020s BLACK SWAN, THE PRE- AND POST-COVID-19 ERA VCs, Startups and Covid-19 Opportunity or Genuine Economic Deterioration? Powerpoint skills — Level Pro The past years have been like a never ending romantic walk in the park for startups and VCs, love was in the air — no doubt. VC funds have raised massive amounts of capital within the past decade, as values have gradually shifted from public to private markets. Within the same period startups experienced an aggressive funding bull run, peaking at USD 140B in 2019, compared to USD 28B in 2006. Within the same period pre-money seed valuations doubled from USD 4.2M to USD 8M, series A pre-money valuations went up from USD 10M to USD 29M. Currently, we have more VC financed USD 1B+ (>60) unicorns than ever — what a time to be alive. As if this wasn’t enough, VC funds sit on a Dagobert Duck sized pile of dry powder, waiting to be deployed. Though, Covid-19 may kill the romance for good. The VC ecosystem really hates uncertainty, as well as deflation. Why should I buy something today, if I may buy it cheaper tomorrow? A USD 20M pre-money deal today may fund a USD 10M pre-money deal in 6 to 12 month, even if the financial performance did not change at all. The pre-Covid-19 Era If there is money in the market for “tinder for adoption”, “social networks for unemployed”, “yelp for people” or a website to “blackmail your friends” (YES, all of them received funding), you actually know something is fundamentally wrong. Usually the invisible hand (Adam Smith — smart guy) would correct the market, like it did during the dot-com bubble. But nothing happened so far, that’s why the VC market used to look like this: Valuations across all stages were at an all time high, they have been growing steadily in multiple industries, for the past 15 years. Round sizes were sky rocketing from high to higher, especially in series B/C/D rounds, mostly due to massive USD 1B+ VC funds and of course Softbank. Dilution was gradually decreasing and fairly low, as VCs were competing for the best startups and entrepreneurs, while LPs continued to seek yield in a zero interest environment. Liquidity could not have been higher, due to the vivid and growing ecosystem of VCs, CVCs and government initiatives. Burn rates hit the ceiling and were higher than ever. Growing cash-burn monsters were fuled with VC money, like a bodybuilder on steroids. Profitability on a unit economic basis was low, hyper growth and market share were the main success indicators. C ovid-19 brought a massive change of wind, the world is upside down now. We are in the middle of an economic free fall, capital markets are down, credit markets are frozen, central banks are interfering and uncertainty is our new companion. The post-Covid-19 Era Ups and downs always occur the oil squeeze, the dot-com bubble, the global financial crisis, the euro crisis and now Covid-19—though, this situation somehow feels very different, I assume that recovery will be long, painful and paved with uncertainty. In order to grasp the actual implication of Covid-19, I would like to compare it to the global financial crisis in 2008 and the dot-com bubble in 2000. Right after Lehman fell, the invested VC Dollars dropped by 40% and whopping 49% after the dot-com bubble bursted, it took over two years to recover from the crisis in both cases. Though, it is important to remark that seed rounds recovered the fastest and series C rounds took the longest. Looking at historic data, I found an interesting aspect. The deal count for early stage funding rounds did not change at all, aside of Q3/2008 which saw a dip. Valuations and round sizes were the main contributing factor to the decline in VC Dollars invested. On the VC side, limited partner commitments to VC funds fell by over 40% after 2000 and by whopping 58% after 2008. Therefore, we will likely see a similar dip here after Covid-19. Lets compare today and the next 12 to 24 month with the pre-Covid-19 world: Valuations across all stages will dramatically go down, especially in series B/C/D rounds, VCs will be very cautious with new deals. They will focus on their existing portfolio and opportunistic deals only. Round sizes will drop and see new lows over the next month. Cash is king and so is runway, startups will opt to stay funded for as long as possible. Dilution will increase over time, especially in seed rounds. Blended dilution over multiple rounds will see new highs. Liquidity of VC funds will go down over time. New first time funds will be seldom, second and third time funds will be smaller than expected. Burn rate of startups will go down, downsizing and bootstrapping will be basic survival requirements. Profitability will have to increase, being cash-flow positive will be the new hyper growth. The market will change for startups and VCs, we will move from a honeymoon phase to a real marriage with problems and challenges ahead of us. There will be fewer fear of missing out rounds and the upcoming rounds will surely be tougher than last year. Startups, as well as VCs will have to expect slower growth rates, longer sales cycles and higher (natural) churn rates. Fundraising velocity will slow down, while being more difficult in general. There will be a general drop in business activity across industries, due to uncertainty and market volatility. Supply chains will see massive disruptions, due to the unprecedented lockdown in China and other markets. Prices, M&A activities and IPOs will decrease or slow down. Could this be an opportunity to re-think how VCs invest into startups and how startups deploy their capital? Maybe a reset from 1 back to 0 is necessary from time to time, in order to maintain a sustainable and frugal startup ecosystem? The Covid-19 Crisis Playbook Most of the entrepreneurs raising money these days have never been in a recession, probably because they are too young. Entrepreneurs need to prepare for a down market, as the rules have changed. Raising capital is somehow like playing a game of chess with a grand master (in this case the VC). Every conversation or meeting is a strategic move to position your startup, as an awesome investment and the best deal around. Great companies are build in good and bad markets, the best companies will still get funded—survival of the fittest. Therefore, entrepreneurs have to sell their startup according to the adjusted investment criteria of VCs. Typically recessions are great markets to start a company. For example Google, PayPal and Salesforce soldiered through the aftermath of the dot-com bubble. Or more recently Airbnb, Square, Stripe, Uber and Instagram were founded in the midst of the global financial Crisis. Entrepreneurs should carefully think about the following 10 action steps: Burn your 2020 business plan and strategy, start with a blank canvas. React, adopt and iterate fast! Be proactive and focus on profitability. Extend your runway, cut costs and streamline cash relevant operations. Focus. Eliminate side project, experiments and underperforming units. Be conservative raising funds, accept higher dilution and lower valuations. Question your business fundamentals, revise key performing indicators. Raise productivity and re-think your headcount, downsize your team. Communicate well and often with your customers, investors and board. Demonstrate the leadership your team needs, during this stressful time. Cash is king, evaluate all alternatives and don’t rely on VC investments.

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/vcs-startups-and-covid-19-8c54a3f83e59

['Marc Penkala']

2020-03-25 10:01:07.940000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Venture Capitalist', 'Startup Lessons', 'Startup', 'Funding']

Tennessee Williams meets Ernest Hemingway for Lunch at the Floridita, Cuba 1959

It was the English theatre critic, Kenneth Tynan, who brought Williams and Hemingway together… Williams. Library of America In April 1959, Tynan was travelling to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro, who’d recently chased Batista off the island, and called in to see Tennessee Williams — who was living in Key West at the time — suggesting the playwright might like to come along. “ I’ve arranged to have lunch with Hemingway at the Floridita tomorrow, “ said Tynan, “ why not join us?” “ Hemingway? You are joking, right? I’ve heard he kicks people like me in the crotch.” “ Nonsense. But if he does I shall kick him back.” In the end curiosity got the better of Williams, and the two writers headed off to Cuba. Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III, was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. His first great theatrical hit, The Glass Menagerie, was staged in 1944. From that moment on he never looked back as a playwright. By the time of the lunch with Hemingway, Sweet Bird of Youth had been doing good business on Broadway for a month, and he was now considered, along with Miller and O’Neill, to be one of America’s greatest playwrights. Tynan. BBC The young Kenneth Tynan, in just a handful of years, had changed the way theatre critics wrote, creating a style that was to be taken up by just about every young reviewer thereafter: stylish, Hemingwayesque, no holds barred stuff that gave moulding old British newspaers a new lease of life. Tynan supported, and championed, almost single-handedly, the rise of the so called ‘angry young men’ of literature and the theatre, most notably John Osborne and his play, Look Back in Anger, the success of which, sadly, destroyed the career of Terence Rattigan. Tynan was a rising star. Hemingway was on his last legs with only one more book left in him, and suicide just around the corner. But Williams, who admired Hemingway’s work, still feared the tall and big chested novelist who greeted him and Tynan with handshakes and hugs, as they walked into the famous Floridita bar and restaurant. Hemingway ordered Papa Doble (double frozen daiquiris) all round, signed a few autographs, and then had to listen to a trio of singers salute Hemingway with a new song they’d written about a local lesbian who could not, no matter how much she tried “…change her appetites to suit papa.” Hemingway laughed and hugged the singers, tipping them well, before explaining, to Williams and Tynan, that the bronze bust of himself on the bar in the corner was always covered up for Lent. The 2003 life size statue replaced the bust. Source: Wikimedia Commons Hemingway then ordered lunch, lobster with a salad, and white wine. The group were then joined by another journalist, and sometime friend of Hemingway’s, George Plimpton, who spotted that Tennessee looked slightly terrified, and as Plimpton put it “…Tennessee Williams’ tendencies were perfectly visible and I never saw anything but the greatest respect Hemingway had for him.” Williams then told Hemingway he’d met the bullfighter Ordóñez in Spain, describing him as “…a lovely boy, very friendly, very accessible.” Hemingway said nothing. Williams then said: “ I was introduced to Pauline back in Key West. I was very sorry to hear of her death, what…?” “ She died like everybody else,” said Ernest, “and after that she was dead.” There was something of a pause then: The conversation moved on to the air crashes Hemingway and Mary had suffered in Africa, with Hemingway giving detailed descriptions, and how close they came to death, with Hemingway adding: “ You can survive on one kidney, but if your liver gives out, you’re through.” He then made his goodbyes and said what a pleasure it had been: “ To meet you Tennessee, and can I say how much I enjoy your work, although I’ve never seen any of your plays I do enjoy reading them. Take care of yourself…” “ Thank you, I will, and you.” They both ignored the advice. In the summer of 1959 Ernest travelled to Spain to cover the bullfights. He was supposed to write a series of short articles, in the end they turned into a very good book, The Dangerous Summer. Kenneth Tynan turned up in Spain at the same time, gate-crashing Hemingway’s lunches. I think it can be assumed Hemingway had rather gone off the young man who would be the first to use the ‘f’ word on British TV. Tennessee Williams died in 1983, Kenneth Tynan in 1980. Hemingway met Fidel Castro in May 1960, and was told by the new Cuban President that when they were fighting in the mountains they used For Whom the Bell Tolls as a guerrilla manual. That would have pleased Hemingway. Hemingway with Castro. Source: Travel Trade Caribbean Note: Although based on fact I have used some creative licence with regard some of the dialogue.

https://stevenewmanwriter.medium.com/tennessee-williams-meets-ernest-hemingway-for-lunch-at-the-floridita-cuba-1959-85334211c037

['Steve Newman Writer']

2019-01-23 23:20:56.639000+00:00

['Cuba', 'Culture', 'Books', 'History', 'Writing']

31 Books from 2018 you need to read in 2019

Photo by Filios Sazeides on Unsplash Start the year-off catching up on all the literary gems from 2018. These were my all-time favourite books of 2018. If you didn’t get a chance to read these I would highly recommend picking these up in 2019 :) Any others that should be here? Feel free to comment below. Best Literature and Fiction Books of 2018 1. Circe by Madeline Miller Poetic fiction based on the fascinating story of the peculiar daughter of the sun god, Helios. Choosing to build relationships with mortals on earth, she discovers her power of witchcraft, transforming enemies into monsters. Zeus banishes her to an island where she perfects her talent for witchcraft. However she is cast as someone who must be tamed and choose between her God family and the mortals she loves. The book itself relays many analogies of being true to one’s self and discovering our own magic and abilities. It also explores what is means to be a powerful women amongst powerful men and acknowledges that woman often cannot enjoy a similar status to successful men. Instead she is viewed as a scary sorceress. A unique story created by Madeline Miller — if you love Greek mythology, you’ll love this. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2KGzfkj 2. A Place for Us: A Novel by Fatima Farheen Mirza A story about belonging, identity, culture and what it means to be American and Muslim, bridging the old with the new. An estranged son, the youngest of three strives to balance being true to himself whilst remaining loyal to the family and culture he comes from. The older two siblings marry for love and not tradition. All reunited at a family wedding, the parents come to terms with their children, reconciling strong family bonds that made them a close-knit family in the early years to weakened ties and betrayal as they find themselves caught between two different cultures after immigrating to the US from India. A colourful story from an upcoming literary genius, the book will touch your heart. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2u2aTqV 3. You Think It, I’ll Say It: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld A wholesome collection of short stories exploring the human experience — serendipity, surprising coincidences, debatable decisions, missed opportunities and chances. Each story is filled with wonderful characters “that take up residence in your head” as quoted by the Washington post. A talented storyteller, Sittenfeld crafts tales about envy, affairs, business empires built on lies, difficult childhood friends that resurface from the past and your enviable high school friend whose life may not be what it seems. Engaging human stories that draw you in, you’ll enjoy each and every one. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2MOMTyv 4. The Overstory by Richard Powers Richard Powers’ 12th novel, The Overstory tells the tale of two very different worlds — one of humans and that of non-humans (trees) caught up in the timber wars of the Pacific Northwest. A beautiful novel of humans reconnecting with nature with a select few having access to an invisible yet fascinatingly inventive world. A complex plot with colourful, rich characters — a revealing and rewarding read that will re-kindle your love for nature. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2tYAEIu 5. Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak Eleven years since The Book Thief , Zusak entertains us with Bridge of Clay, a novel about five young brothers who are reunited with their father after a long absence having lived on their own with no adult guidance. An emotional tale about family, forgiveness and loss as they discover the secret behind his disappearance. A life-changing literary remedy for life itself. Grab a copy here. 6. Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami My favourite Japanese author, Murakami brings forth his latest offering after four years of solid writing about a Tokyo artist who paints portraits and embarks on a journey of self-discovery after running away from his divorce-seeking wife. He seeks comfort at a mountain retreat owned by the famous father of an artist friend who suffers from dementia. Here he discovers a painting that moulds reality into odd shapes. With an intriguing plot about the friend’s father, a teenage girl and the supernatural, he discovers truths about love, art, war and loneliness. A feast for your imagination, the novel draws haunting parallels with the Great Gatsby. Grab a copy here. 7. Transcription by Kate Atkinson After the success of Life after Life, Kate Atkinson brings us this fabulous spy novel set post World War II. Impeccably researched, capturing the horrors and trials of war so meticulously, the story tells the tale of Juliet Armstrong, a BBC producer, who is recruited by MI5 to listen to World War II archived tapes and transcribe the dialogue into reports. As she listens, she discovers secrets of undercover agents and fascist traitors and is forced to reckon with unfinished consequences even after the war is over. Dark humour, haunting and harrowing, this book time travels to different decades and is a fresh take on a World War II story. Grab a copy here. 8. Normal People (Novel) by Sally Rooney A Man Booker prize nominee and Sally Rooney’s second novel exquisitely narrates a human story about two romantically-linked young adults, finding their place in the world amongst societal and family pressures to fit in. An intimate coming of age story filled with humour and heartfelt romance. Rooney’s writing will make you feel you are part of the story. Grab your copy here. Best True Crime Book of 2018 9. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara A true crime masterpiece by a talented yet obsessed author, Michelle McNamara’s pursuit of the truth of the elusive Golden State Killer who raped and murdered his victims first in Northern California and then Southern California led her to investigate the case till her death. For more than ten years, the serial killer managed to evade some of the best police forces in the state. Michelle diligently searched through online reports, interviewed victims and articulately recounted the true crime story. The Golden State Killer was between the ages of 18 and 30 and always targeted suburban homes, attacking families whilst asleep, blinding them with his torch. Often wearing a mask, these families could only identify him through his voice. Completed by Michelle’s lead researcher and colleague after her death the book serves as a great tool and resource for hopefully a case that will be solved someday. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2IYa472 Best Business and Leadership Books of 2018 10. Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World by Nomi Prins A meticulous and detailed exposé of the actions of central bankers as they attempted to calm the markets post the 2007–8 financial crisis. Ironically, the crisis catapulted central bankers into significantly more power than they had experienced before. Their policy initiatives led to unthinkable money pouring into financial markets through the very masterminds who had created the crisis in the first place: the private banking sector. This resulted in an immediate devaluation of people’s savings and income. Governments were indirectly endorsing the creation of asset bubbles and market manipulation. The EU, by far, led the worst crisis management response. Featuring in-depth conversations and detail from the key players, Ben Bernanke, Christine Lagarde, Mario Draghi and Janet Yellen, the world feels a lot smaller than it is, with the actions of one country having rippling effects on the rest of the world economy. Impressive, detailed and heavily researched, this is definitely one book that makes this year’s best business books’ list. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2MWi3UN 11. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start Up by John Carreyrou One of the biggest corporate frauds since Enron, prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou, ambitiously tells the story of a young female CEO and Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, and her company Theranos who sought to change the medical world through the provision of instant blood testing. So powerful was the idea, concept and story, the company was initially valued at US$9 billion only to come crashing down on the stark realisation that there was no technology that could do this yet, despite Holmes’s persistent claims to the contrary. Endless testing at Walgreens led to inaccurate results putting patients at risk. Theranos struggled to get it right. A fine piece of good old-fashioned investigative journalism by Carreyrou, who interviewed more than 60 Theranos employees as well as test patients and doctors to get to the bottom of the story. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2u3udE8 12. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results, metrics that help determine how top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Google uses it, Bono uses it and so does Bill Gates. Filled with anecdotes and case studies from companies who have successfully used these to grow and prosper, John Doer, the prolific Silicon Valley venture capitalist tells a story of how operational excellence is achieved through the use of these OKRs. He first came across these when he worked at Intel for Andy Grove however has since adopted them and imposed them on most of his portfolio companies including one of the best investments he made, Google. If you are an entrepreneur or business owner, you’ll be compelled to adopt these before you finish the book. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2KCvFYl 13. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker A unique and unusual book narrating the power of gatherings and how to make them remarkable so that they benefit each and every person at the gathering. A gathering is defined as an event where three or more people come together for a specific purpose. As someone who has researched and facilitated highly effective gatherings for the World Economic Forum and the Museum of Modern Art, Parker pulls together elements of what makes gatherings so great and how to incorporate these in your next event, whether that is a simple home barbecue, a work meeting, a dinner party or a wedding. An innovative and creative read. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2KB1yAJ 14. On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis As the title suggests, this book is a masterclass on strategic thinking by Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis who taught strategic decision-making as a year-long seminar at Yale. For the first time ever the sought after theory and content covering strategic decision-making in crisis situations is neatly captured in a succinct book. A fascinating book on the art of leadership using strategic insights and pulling together learnings and wisdom from historical events. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2MSp2xY 15. Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better And Achieve More by Morten T. Hansen “Do less, then obsess” is the motto of this book. The idea is to focus on two to three clear challenges and goals that will really make a difference to your work. Effectively prioritising these will make a bigger difference than trying to do everything well. In addition, working out what NOT to do might be the most productive thing you could do. Based on a five year study where 5,000+ people participated, the book is filled with stories from people all over the world who have had a huge impact on the people around them. Examples include that of an Indian farmer made a dramatic improvement to the lives of women in his village, a sushi chef who was awarded the maximum 3 Michelin stars and the reason for why Alfred Hitchcock’s movie ‘Psycho’ proved to be hugely popular with audiences. The book helps you assess your strengths and weaknesses and use this to develop your own unique style that will help you be the most productive version of you. This includes developing individual strategies that increase your productivity over your peers. To quote The Washington Post, Great At Work is one of the best books on leadership to read in 2018. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2KYUTw8 16. The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person You Hate by Fran Hauser When I first saw the title of this book, I thought this would be yet another book on how to help women thrive in the work place with the usual strategies and tips. However as I progressed through the book, there were an incredible amount of valuable lessons: authenticity, integrity and kindness can get you very far without having to fall into the ‘nice’ category or the ‘bitch’ category. What makes the book so appealing is Hauser’s knack for story telling and use of a huge number of personal examples to illustrate powerful messages that help navigate tough work environments. Although not obvious from the title, the book is also a great lesson in leadership — how to mentor yourself as well as mentor others. Whilst it appears to be written for women, I would classify this as an intelligent and intuitive personal development book that applies to men and women equally. Life-affirming, liberating and powerful, it definitely serves as a top ten career and personal development guide for 2018. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2u0ellQ Best Memoir Books of 2018 17. Educated by Tara Westover A fascinating true story about a young girl who grows up in an isolated community in the mountains of Southeastern Idaho. The youngest of seven siblings, at age 30 she has never left home, has been homeschooled and works for her mother and father, who don’t believe in western medicine. Her father, who suffers from bipolar depression, sells scrap metal from his junkyard and builds barns and hay sheds for farmers in nearby towns. Her mother is a herbalist and works as an assistant to an unlicensed midwife. Tara helps both her father in the junk yard scrapping metal and her mother preparing herbs and helping with live births. Her father’s rage from depression often manifests as violence, inflicting wounds and burns on all the siblings. They are not allowed to see a normal doctor and any illness must be treated using herbs from their mother’s ‘herbal’ pharmacy. Once Tara suffered from tonsillitis and her father made her stand with her mouth open in the sun for a whole month. In her early 30s, Tara does something prolific. She follows her older brother’s example and secretly learns how to read. Tara eventually passes her ACT and is accepted to Brigham Young University. Her relationship with her father worsens and she leaves home in pursuit of further education. She has no idea about the Holocaust or Napoleon or other remarkable historical events. However her hunger to learn and her capacity to self-educate is recognised by her professors and she manages to secure a fellowship at Cambridge University first and then at Harvard University where she completes a PHD in history. After what she has achieved and her enlightening journey, it is difficult to transition back to life in Idaho and the family she loves whose values and way of life are so different. A beautiful tale of inner conflict balancing family loyalty and the pain and loss that comes from the inevitable weakening of ties with the people so dear to your heart. A summer must-read. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2zCrFlS 18. The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú At a time when the US-Mexican border is so topical, this book provides a moving account into the tragedies that take place on both sides of the border. Cantú — a second generation Mexican — American was born to an immigrant Mexican mother who is also a park ranger. He grew up in the national parks and was very fond of the border which he visited so frequently. He pursued a degree in border relations and eventually joined ‘Border Patrol’. Having to enforce immigration laws as an agent is a difficult path to follow when you see the struggles of many immigrants who come from a similar path to his. There is no right or wrong, only the grey zone — Cantú struggles with what he observes day-to-day — the drug cartels, the human trafficking, dealing with death and murder and having to send to detention the ones they find alive. After a while he leaves this path to work in an office job instead. However he is haunted by the non-return of one of his friends who travels across the border to visit his dying mother in Mexico. His friend is detained for the simple crime of not having ‘proper papers’ to re-enter the US. His friend’s wife and sons are still in the US. Cantú is caught up in his friend’s civil trial, desperately trying to draw on his knowledge and contacts from his previous role in ‘Border Patrol’ to help him. The memoir calls for the need to look beyond the black and white requirements of state policy and make a judgement call for the sake of humanity. A heart-breaking account that highlights how complicated the whole US-Mexico border issue really is. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2lXJjqr 19. Becoming by Michelle Obama From one of the most influential women of our time, comes her highly awaited memoir, “Becoming”. Michelle Obama’s new memoir is out in November and it promises to be an intimate portrait of a lady who has inspired millions around the world. The book delves into her childhood, her work at the White House, her prolific public health campaign and motherhood. Becoming by Michelle Obama Grab your copy here. Best Political Books of 2018 20. A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership by James Comey We see a personal side to Comey in this book as he conscientiously sets out to tell his side of the story. The memoir details Comey’s time at the FBI including his work under the Bush and Obama administration as well as his short stint working for President Trump. He uses his legal training to present a compelling case for the decisions he made and the consequences of these decisions on the conclusions of the Clinton email scandal and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. And if you thought this book was about Trump-bashing, its not — 80% of the book is about Comey’s life and reads more as a fascinating and informative biography of his life than anything else, including some great anecdotes on what makes a great leader. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2MVuXlW 21. The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis The narrative king has once again churned this page-turner, spinning a political narrative on the inner workings of the Trump Government, pre-election to present day; depicting what we should be shockingly scared of. Understaffed departments, neglected agencies and unthinkable risks lurk round the corner. For example, black market uranium monitored by the Department of Energy lacks sufficient inspectors to prevent it from falling into terrorist hands — what does this mean? Well uranium is used for nuclear warfare and so the biggest nuclear risk is coming from the White House itself. Surprising insights into the most dysfunctional and complicated government on the planet. 22. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse by Michael Wolff A fast-paced and dynamic account of what it is like to be part of the presidential team of one of the most controversial, hot-headed and outrageous president in US history in the first 9 months of his presidency. The book includes details you will not find elsewhere including the conflict between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his chief strategist Steve Bannon, the letting go of James Comey and what it is like to work for Trump from the horses’ mouths. Humorous and explosive, the book holds high entertainment value and confirms most things you might perceive Trump to be. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2IXSS1v Best Mysteries and Thrillers Books of 2018 23. The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn An adult thriller, The Woman in the Window, is a fast-paced page-turner that will leave you wanting more every time you put it down. A woman living in New York city, separated from her husband, spends most of her day at home drinking, watching old movies and avoiding leaving the house. One day she comes across her new neighbours across the window who appear to be a normal family — a couple and their son. However the more she spends her time checking out their activities, the more she begins to see disturbing things. Unclear as to whether it is the alcohol and pills and her own mind playing tricks on her or whether it is in fact hauntingly real, she cannot stop thinking about whether she needs to act on what she has seen. An intriguing, psychological thriller. If you don’t want to read this one, wait for the movie as I am almost certain there will be one. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2ucdiP0 24. The President is Missing: A Novel by Bill Clinton and James Patterson One for the political junkies who also enjoy a bit of drama and suspense. An unprecedented attack is set to hit the United States of America. It is not clear whether the President himself is the key suspect with talk of a traitor in the cabinet. The plot thickens as the President himself goes missing. A dramatic thriller that takes place over three days, you’ll find yourself devouring the book. Authentic, with the detail only a president would know, both Patterson and Clinton are great content collaborators resulting in a fabulous cyberterrorism thriller that is due to translate into a TV series next year. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2J15cyl Best Romance Book of 2018 25. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang If you’ve never been interested in the romance genre or have lost interest in it, then this is the book that will rekindle it. The book’s protagonist, Stella Lane, is a highly successful mathematician who uses data to determine what customers will purchase next. This skill has allowed her to become wealthy at age thirty however where she excels in her money-making abilities, she struggles in the relationship category. Stella suffers from Asperger’s and barely has any dating experience. She decides to hire an escort to help her practice french-kissing with a professional. Escort, Michael Phan, is a wonderful teacher whose lesson plan goes beyond the french-kissing to include foreplay and the missionary position amongst other things. Soon Stella finds herself craving more and more of the sexual activity with Phan, and she discovers the logic behind this craving. Refreshing, unique and a different take on romance, Helen Hoang has carved out a name for herself and I can’t wait to see what she comes out with next. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2KBaGFm Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018 26. The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander Short fiction with only a 100 pages of reading, Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing intertwines two very different stories: one about a group of female factory workers who die of radiation poisoning and that of an elephant put to death using electricity. Highly creative, Bolander weaves together two violent and abusive stories and leads us into a moral debate about the meaning of humanity and justice. Whilst it may take a while to into, it is worth sticking out till the end — trust me you will be glad you did and its a short read anyway. Don’t forget the Kleenex too. Grab a copy here: https://amzn.to/2J1ri3p 27. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan Michael Pollan, a prolific writer on food, a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a long-time contributor to the New York Times, talks about his new book on the potential benefits of psychedelics on the mind and their ability to fundamentally cure chronic mental and physical illnesses. The book called How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is largely inspired by his dying father who struggled and died from terminal cancer before the book was published. Recent research suggests that psychedelics could amplify the power of psychiatry comparable to what the ‘microscope did for biology’ or ‘the telescope for astronomy’ as quoted by Stanislav Grof. The book offers hope to readers that one day psychedelics might help treat people with life-threatening conditions such as cancer or difficult mental illness. Pollen, through his writing, offers hope and respite to others as a tribute to his 88-year old father. Compelling and beautifully written. Grab a copy here: https://amzn.to/2J2mSJF 28. Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking This one was hungrily anticipated — it’s his final book and the last we’ll hear from him on the big questions of life (namely does God exist, threat of nuclear war, artificial intelligence, space colonisation and climate change) as he leaves us with his final thoughts on an unfinished quest of understanding the universe. The book comprises material from his personal archives and includes a foreword from Eddie Redmayne (the Oscar-winning actor who portrayed Hawking in “The Theory of Everything”) and an afterword from his daughter Lucy. If you’re a first time Audible user, read it for free by signing up. Best Humour and Entertainment Book of 2018 29. Calypso by David Sedaris A collection of short stories, filled with humour and sharp observations on real life. “Calypso” by David Sedaris, will make you feel like you are hanging out with your favourite quirky friends — the ones who make you feel glad you are not one of them but whose company, thoughts, insight and stories you enjoy very much. The stories are centred around his family relationships including his sister’s suicide, his obsession with the Fitbit and even include some funny observations on astrology. If you are looking for something hilarious to read this is by the far one of the funniest books of 2018. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2zi1C39 Best Young Adult Books of 2018 30. Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orisha) by Tomi Adeyemi A debut novel from the Nigerian-American writer Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone is a wonderful fantasy novel set in Orïsha, and tells a tale of a battle against magic and those who wish to destroy it forever. There is on-going violence against the maji people and the current monarchy. The setting draws parallels with the tribal warfare that still exists in many African countries today. Zélie, the heroine of the book, works closely with a rogue princess who has betrayed the monarchy to bring magic back and overthrow the monarchy. Fast-paced, compelling with a colourful cast of characters it is little surprise that the book is due to be made into a movie by Fox Studios in collaboration with the producers of Twilight and the Maze Runner. And if you prefer to read the book then to watch the movie then read this and keep an eye out for the next one. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2MVKqCe 31. A Land of Permanent Goodbyes by Atia Abawi Written by a refugee herself, this is perhaps Abawi’s bibliotherapy. The story unfolds in a city that is in the midst of war, and Tareq, the book’s protagonist, has to make some important choices if he is to survive. Daesh fighters threaten to kill and with daily public beheadings Tareq and his family have no choice but to leave their beloved country. On a mission to flee through Syria, Turkey and Greece, the book tells a tale of resilience and courage in order to complete a harrowing journey for the sole purpose of surviving. A powerful story that touches on rape, child trafficking and death it is a heavy read that is very well-written. It will give you full access to what it is like to be a refugee on a horrifying journey. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2uceAtk Best Cooking, Food and Wine Books of 2018 32. Once Upon a Chef, the Cookbook: 100 Tested, Perfected, and Family-Approved Recipes by Jennifer Segal Popular food blogger and chef, Jennifer Segal, shares 100 tried and tested recipes for every meal of the day. The recipes are geared towards the busy working parent who is short of time but wants to cook a wonderful, gourmet meal for the family. Full of helpful tips on seasoning and balancing flavours, it’s a great addition to any collection of cookbooks. And if that’s not enough the great selection of photos of each of the 100 recipes are delightful. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2KB4Yn3 33. Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering by Joanna Gaines and Marah Stets A number one New York Times bestseller, Magnolia Table, is a wonderful family recipe book of 125 recipes that range from American classics to ethnic delicacies. The book caters for a variety of meals throughout the day. Personal stories, great photos and helpful notes make the book unique and different to other recipe books on the market with a delicious emphasis on farm-to-table methods. Simply mouth-watering. Grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/2IZNo6F

https://booktherapy-by-bijal.medium.com/31-books-from-2018-you-need-to-read-in-2019-82e5ffb438d6

['Bijal A Shah']

2020-12-13 22:46:46.038000+00:00

['Books', 'Reading', 'Literature', 'Nonfiction', 'Fiction']

Entrepreneur

What is an entrepreneur? Who’s an entrepreneur? How to define it? These are questions I’ve been asking myself more and more, for a couple of months now, while been involved on projects and with people that will fit into that category. So, I’m planning to keep asking those questions (and few more) not only to myself, but to others, aiming to put them together and share the answers and insights. The format is not well defined yet, but I’ll be working on series of stories, documenting my process and journey as an “Entrepreneur”. The fears, the lessons, the myths, the assumptions and failures. The goal? To bridge the gap between reality and fiction, between beginners and top players; going through what actually happens in that middle ground that almost no one talks about, that occurs between ideas, execution and growth, and how long does actually take to make thing happen.

https://medium.com/thoughts-on-the-go-journal/entrepreneur-8a05683271e2

['Joseph Emmi']

2016-10-30 00:14:47.585000+00:00

['Work', 'Hard Work', 'Side Project', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship']

Have you tried Pylance for VS Code? If not, here’s why you should.

PYTHON DEVELOPMENT | VISUAL STUDIO CODE Have you tried Pylance for VS Code? If not, here’s why you should. The latest language server for Python (from Microsoft) is a massive productivity enhancer. If you work with Python and Visual Studio Code, go ahead and do yourself a favor: download the Pylance extension (preview) and try it out for yourself. What is Pylance? Pylance is an extension for Visual Studio Code. More specifically, Pylance is a Python language server — this means it offers enhancements to IntelliSense, syntax highlighting, package import resolution, and a myriad of other features for an improved development experience in the Python language. You can find the full list of features here. To keep things simple, I’m going to focus on the three most useful features based on my experience with the extension thus far. Automatic imports (a.k.a. less headache) In Python, understanding how to correctly import dependencies from both internal and external modules is a challenge for newbies and professionals alike. The Pylance extension offers a feature which automatically adds imports to the top of your Python files when you reference a dependency in your environment. It will also show a lightbulb icon with suggestions to add or remove imports depending on the scenario. It’s worth mentioning that you need to have the modules you’re referencing installed in your Python environment for this to work.

https://towardsdatascience.com/have-you-tried-pylance-for-vs-code-if-not-heres-why-you-should-a8a7b5adc5f2

['Sj Porter']

2020-10-17 04:21:46.596000+00:00

['Python', 'Development', 'Python Programming', 'Vscode Extension', 'Vscode']

How Setting Ridiculously Small Goals Can Lead to Big Success

Tiny things add up. Taken on their own, they might seem insignificant, but put them all together, and yeah. They can lead to big things. Several years ago, when I’d just started Ninja Writers, I signed up for a year-long business coaching program. I knew I had a good idea and it was working, but I needed some guidance if I was going to hold on to this thing. Part of that program involved traveling three times that year for in-person meetings with the mentor and the whole group. During my one-on-one session at the first in-person meeting, I told the mentor that I had a daily goal of writing for ten minutes every day. He was mildly appalled and spent the rest of that weekend talking about how we can get me up to more writing. I struggled to make him understand that writing for ten minutes a day — my teeny, tiny goal — was a life-changing-level powerful tool. I wasn’t going to change it, no matter how much I’d paid him for advice. Because it was working. What that man struggled to understand was that my teeny-tiny goal was not a stopping point. It was a starting point. A minimum, not a maximum. It wasn’t like I was setting a kitchen timer and stopping mid-word when my ten minutes were up. A Teeny-Tiny Goal is a Psychological Tool My ten-minutes-a-day tiny goal was the difference between zero and one. Most days, I write far more than ten minutes. Some of those days, I surprise myself. I don’t want to start, but once I do I get on a roll and words just flow. But some days? Some days for ten minutes I agonize and it sucks, but I do it because it’s just easier to do the damn thing than it is to break my streak. I can (and do) write for ten minutes even on the busiest day or the most awful day. I’ve written for ten minutes sitting in a hospital room with family members. I’ve written for ten minutes with Norovirus. I wrote for ten minutes on the day my youngest daughter was born, fifteen years ago. I have no found a day, so far, that was so difficult that I had to break my streak. Your Teeny-Tiny Goal is Your Tiniest Job I like to think of my tiny goal as the atom of my writing business. Basically, it isn’t really any more than a solid daily writing habit. I have a long, long, long standing goal of writing for at least 10 minutes per day on my work-in-progress novel. But I use the same tiny goal for other writing projects as well. For instance, if I’m struggling with blogging and need to reinstate that habit, I might institute a goal of working for ten minutes at the end of my day on tomorrow’s blog post. I know myself well enough to know that if I have a blog post started, I’m far more likely to finish it, rather than just decide to skip blogging for the day. If I do that for a month or so, I’ll find myself back in the habit of regular blogging and won’t need to make myself do it every night anymore. Teeny-Tiny Goals for Non-Deadline Jobs Very small goals are an excellent tool for jobs where you don’t have an external deadline. For instance, if you have a freelance writing job, you probably have an editor who expects you to turn in a piece at a specific time. Your writer brain accepts that you’re going to have to do that work and you might not need a tiny goal for it at all. But if you’re writing a novel or blog posts that don’t have an editor waiting on them, it can be a lot harder to keep to a schedule. That’s where teeny-tiny goals shine the brightest. They encourage you to respect your writing business the way you’d respect anyone else’s business, if you were working for them. And they keep those long projects, that you might have to work on for a long time without getting much feedback or reward, top of mind since you’re touching them daily. Teeny-Tiny Goals Lead to a Daily Habit I can’t imagine writing a post advising you to show up at a job working for someone else every single day. Or even getting into the habit of doing almost any kind of work every day. Like, if you were an accountant, I probably wouldn’t work this hard to convince you to do instill a client bookkeeping habit. And to be honest, if the entirety of your writing business involves writing copy for other people or that sort of thing, then having regular work hours that involve entire days off, is probably a good thing. But for lots of us, writing is more than a job. It’s a passion. It’s at least half hobby. And if that sounds like you, then I really do think that a daily writing habit is a good idea. Because writing is also really hard. And if you’re doing writing that doesn’t earn you any money (yet) then it’s so easy to let it slip. You look up one day and realize you haven’t worked on your novel or written a blog post or a poem or whatever in months. Some days, I literally only spend ten minutes working on my novel. That’s my baseline minimum. I get full-credit for the day if I spend ten minutes making forward progress. And I get that full credit no matter how many days in a row I go between writing for longer than ten minutes. As a result, I’ve written a book a year for fifteen years. I’ve written thousands of blog posts. I’ve built a legitimate business around my writing. Set Yourself Up for Success It’s one thing to decide you want a daily writing habit and another entirely to actually develop one. Here are some ideas that I hope will help. Start With a Project This is a part of the teeny-tiny goal idea that it took me a long time to figure out I actually have to articulate. Tiny goals work best when they are tied to a specific project. So pick one — mine is usually the novel I’m working on, but sometimes I use them for blogging projects, too. The goal is to work for a few minutes a day on the same project. Choose the Right Teeny-Tiny Goal My best advice for choosing your tiny goal is to pick one that’s easier to keep than it is to break. For me, that’s ten minutes a day. If you find yourself routinely not writing for ten minutes a day, make it smaller. Even if you have to go all the way down to one minute or even one sentence a day. You don’t need to make your goal bigger — even if you’re exceeding it every day. Remember, your teeny-tiny goal is your fallback. It’s the bare minimum. It should be very small. So small that it almost seems ridiculous. Remember it’s About Starting Your teeny-tiny goal isn’t about finishing, even though I promise you that if you make one and stick to it, you will finish your projects with more consistency. But really? This goal is about getting started every day. It’s about word one. Use Your FRED I wrote yesterday about FRED — my favorite writing accountability tool. Basically, just get a calendar and give yourself a star for every day that meet your tiny goal. Log Your Work At the end of your writing session, jot down what you worked on. Your word count, the blog post you wrote, the project you worked on. There’s real magic in seeing how your work stacks up into something significant. Same Time Every Day If you’re struggling to develop a daily writing habit, I highly recommend scheduling it the same way you’d schedule working for someone else. This is your job, after all. Showing up at the same time every day can really help you when you’re first developing that habit. Use a Timer If it helps, especially in the beginning, use a timer. I like using one on my phone that doesn’t make enough noise to distract me if I’m on a roll. Sometimes I’ll just keep resetting it to see how many ten minute blocks I can get in. Go Ahead — Make a Teeny-Tiny Goal Pick a project and then choose a teeny-tiny goal to help you finish it. You can start with ten minutes a day to see if it works as well for you as it does for me. If it doesn’t and you find yourself skipping days, make it smaller.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-setting-ridiculously-small-goals-can-lead-to-big-success-23d06d176341

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-08-03 17:33:18.605000+00:00

['Books', 'Blogging', 'Ninjabyob', 'Habit', 'Writing']

How to Bind DataTable to DataGrid in Xamarin

As many of you know, .NET Standard 2.0 introduced support for DataSet and DataTable. With that, we got overwhelming demand for support to bind DataTable to the Xamarin.Forms DataGrid. We are happy to announce that this feature is available with our 2019 Volume 3 — Beta release. In this blog, I am going to walk you through how to bind the DataTable class to the Xamarin.Forms DataGrid control. Data binding Let’s create a simple data table with Order details data. You won’t need any additional stuff for binding, just create the data table and assign it directly to DataGrid’s ItemsSource property. You can also bind the data table from the data set. ViewModel creation Create a view model class in the Xamarin project similar to the one in the following code example public class ViewModel { public ViewModel() { DataTableCollection = GetDataTable(); } public DataTable DataTableCollection { get; set; } private DataTable GetDataTable() { DataTable dataTable = new DataTable(); dataTable.Rows.Add(1001, "Maria Anders", "ALFKI", "Germany"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1002, "Ana Trujilo", "ANATR", "Mexico"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1003, "Antonio Moreno","ENDGY", "Mexico"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1004, "Thomas Hardy", "ANTON", "UK"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1005, "Christina Berglund", "BERGS", "Sweden"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1006, "Hanna Moos", "BLAUS", "Germany"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1007, "Frederique Citeaux", "BLONP", "France"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1008, "Martin Sommer", "BOLID", "Spain"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1009, "Laurence Lebihan", "BONAP", "France"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1010, "Kathryn", "BOTTM", "Canada"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1011, "Tamer", "XDKLF", "UK"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1012, "Martin", "QEUDJ", "US"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1013, "Nancy", "ALOPS", "France"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1014, "Janet", "KSDIO", "Canada"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1015, "Dodsworth", "AWSDE", "Canada"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1016, "Buchanan", "CDFKL", "Germany"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1017, "Therasa", "WSCJD", "Canada"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1018, "Margaret", "PLSKD", "UK"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1019, "Anto", "CCDSE", "Sweden"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1020, "Edward", "EWUJG", "Germany"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1021, "Anne", "AWSDK", "US"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1022, "Callahan", "ODKLF", "UK"); dataTable.Rows.Add(1023, "Vinet", "OEDKL", "France"); return dataTable; } } Binding ItemsSource in XAML In the main page, add the necessary XML namespace to use SfDataGrid control, set the BindingContext of the page to the ViewModel class, and bind the ItemSource of SfDataGrid with the DataTableCollection. DataTable binding in Xamarin Data Grid CRUD operations DataGrid automatically refreshes the UI whenever we add, delete or modify the rows of the underlying DataTable collection. Data operations DataGrid supports various data operations to represent the data in it. The following are supported by default: Sorting (including multicolumn sorting) Grouping (including multicolumn grouping) Filtering Summaries Sorting You can sort columns with the various built-in options such as multicolumn sorting and tri-state sorting. But custom sorting is not supported. In the following screenshot, the data grid is sorted in ascending order with respect to the Customer Name column. Data Grid sorted ascending with respect to the Customer Name Grouping The data can be organized in a hierarchical structure based on matching field values. Multigrouping and custom grouping are also supported. Data grouped with respect to Country in Data Grid Filtering DataGrid’s built-in View.Filtering is not supported for the DataTable class. But, you can filter the records using DataTable’s DataView.RowFilter property. In the following example, the DataView.RowFilter property is set as “[Country] = ‘Canada’”. Row filter applied to the Data Grid Summaries All summary types supported by DataGrid are supported for DataTable, i.e. group summary, caption summary, and table summary. Summaries displayed in the Data Grid Other features The support for all other features, such as stacked headers, row drag and drop, unbound column, and unbound row, of DataGrid are available. You can refer to the user guide to learn more about the DataGrid’s feature sets. Conclusion I hope you enjoyed this quick walk-through of DataTable binding support in DataGrid. This support is available with our 2019 Volume 3 beta release, which you can download from here. If you have any questions or require clarification about this feature, please let us know in the comments below. You can also contact us through our support forum, Direct-Trac, or our feedback portal. We are happy to assist you!

https://medium.com/syncfusion/how-to-bind-datatable-to-datagrid-in-xamarin-98e342bbbeb3

['Suresh Mohan']

2019-09-25 11:01:02.745000+00:00

['Android App Development', 'Mobile App Development', 'Programming', 'Productivity', 'Xamarin']

I Cheated On My Husband A Week Before We Got Married

At first, his polyamorous “confession” seemed heartfelt and a we’ve-been-together-for-a-long-time-people-change-YOLO sort of thing. I, of course, had empathy for how “transparent” he was with me. But there was something about his presentation that didn’t feel good in my heart of hearts. Maybe it was the back and forth between his proclamation of polyamory and monogamy. I believed, after his seemingly heartfelt testimony, that he was polyamorous. Whereas the next day, he would convince me, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was monogamous, always has been, always will be, and loved me and the family-life more than life itself. Maybe his controlling behavior getting more nefarious as the days passed was what sounded off the alarms in my gut. Or how any hint of my autonomy sent him into a jealous rage. His tantrums went as far as to confront an unsuspecting long-time friend of ours to confirm that we were sleeping together (while he was at work and I was home with our two kids all. day. long.) That was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. But to him, it made sense that I was capable of such wicked deceit because I messed around with the stripper fifteen-year prior. What do I really think was going on? Projection. My ex-husband’s guilty conscience was knawing a cheating-sized hole right through him. I wish I would have been completely honest with him the morning after my Bachelorette party. If what he says is genuine (and not manipulation at its absolute best), I could have avoided divorce altogether. He said he would have never married me in the first place had I been honest and given him a choice.

https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/i-cheated-on-my-husband-a-week-before-we-got-married-acec44aa09a1

['Divina Grey']

2020-12-23 19:33:11.251000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Sexuality', 'Writing']

On Remembering How to do Human

Can you ever forget how to be a human in the world? When major depressive disorder imprisoned me in my head and threw away the key for five years, I lost myself almost entirely. Such was the disconnect between my previous life and what I had become that I looked in the mirror one morning and had no idea who was staring back at me. After being mostly housebound for many years, I couldn’t even remember how to put makeup on with confidence and put my best face forward. Somehow, the little gestures that make up daily human interactions were more difficult to relearn than my job. Even though I lost my writing voice for five years, I’m a journalist by profession and writing has always been vocation. I did struggle a lot at first but it was nothing in comparison to how much I’m struggling with the rest of normal life as I try and put back together all the pieces of my identity. Despite depression, I’m still a communicator at heart, endlessly curious about our shared humanness. On the professional front at least, I’m operational, motivated, and able to think strategically. And I haven’t lost the innate ability to build a rapport with random strangers from all walks of life in no time and under most circumstances. On the personal front however, I’m a two-legged tornado made of chaos, confusion, and endless epiphanies.

https://asingularstory.medium.com/on-remembering-how-to-do-human-39d5f19c457e

['A Singular Story']

2020-12-10 15:17:37.189000+00:00

['Self', 'Mental Health', 'Relationships', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology']

Shinrin-Yoku, Seeking Stillness in Nature

I recently traveled to the mountains in Colorado and hiked in nature almost every day with the intention to find this inner peace and clarity that everyone seems to boast about. I wanted to first-handedly experience the benefits that shinrin-yoku practice promises. Self-reflecting and guidance from mentors have coerced me to face my childhood traumas and its impact on my current behaviors. It has allowed me to step out of victim mentality towards creating peace with past events and constructing my crucibles as lessons to be learned. By immersing myself in this nature-therapy that Japanese philosophy swears by for achieving inner personal freedom, I was able to further manifest my intentions and put a couple of things into perspective. The goal of this trip was to let go of the idea of victimizing myself by connecting deeply with my thoughts and emotions. Nature was simply a medium in helping me achieve a peaceful environment in which to contemplate. Along with achieving my above-mentioned goal. These were some of my other realizations: Reminder Of Insignificance I stood in awe as the peaks of numerous grand mountains towered above me, amongst which I felt trivial. Without even seeking the state of mindfulness, my senses were more perceptive to the chirping of birds, the chilly breeze, splatters of water hitting my skin from the pressure of falling from the peaks to the ground. I could clearly hear my inhales and exhales and heart pulsing as I started to notice a flood of emotions starting to consume my body. It was a strange reunion of my internal body with the external environment, something that I had never felt before. It was all too sacred for me to translate into words, but I felt insignificant, still, and humbled — while filled with the sentiments of being powerful and unstoppable. Ryan Holiday in his book Stillness is the Key mentions, “Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It sharpens perspectives and illuminates connections.” There in the foothills of Colorado’s mountains, I stood as evidence that shinrin-yoku is a magical concept. Being in the Moment To stop my mind from thinking about uncertainty around the future is a task as difficult as quitting caffeine. I can do it, but it requires a lot of self-control, effort, and perseverance. I love coffee as much as ruminating on future goals and getting anxious over it. Mountains act as a source of comfort and inspiration, teaching me to reside in the moment. The key is unplugging from technological devices when on hikes and truly observing your surroundings. Often when trudging our way through life, we forget to appreciate moments right in front of us. The gift of mindfulness by being in nature is a reminder to slow down and direct all my attention to one moment only — the present. Being in the present means non-judgmental awareness of my thoughts, where I am not reacting to it, pushing it away, or trying to brainstorm solutions around it. Just truly being with it. We are all Connected The depth of similarity in human beings with each other and with other species is mind-blowing. This realization is constantly reinforced by being in nature. The sharing of the same moon and sun across the globe is a constant reminder that we are all connected, despite being thousands of miles apart. As I see swaying leaves on the trees and the peaks towering over me, I am reminded that these landmarks have been standing since the beginning of time — resilient, adapting to whatever situations that have been forced upon mankind. Throughout history, the world has faced multiple challenges, and somehow life is still continuing. Somehow, we have managed to overcome even the biggest of difficulties towards advancement — a reassurance that is much needed in modern times with ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and a corrupt political system.

https://medium.com/modernmeraki/shinrin-yoku-seeking-stillness-in-nature-f4be97b7ef8a

[]

2020-07-28 21:57:51.988000+00:00

['Japanese', 'Mental Health', 'Nature', 'Personal Development', 'Wellness']

The Making of a Portfolio Site

The Making of a Portfolio Site I have been inspired by the portfolio sites of peers and mentors and often wished I had my own, so when the time came to choose a capstone project for Foundations at Holberton School I transformed that wish into a goal with a timeline. This website is the product. Purpose and Product Who is a portfolio site “for”? I asked myself that question from the start of this project, as I created User Stories and designed the flow of the site. My initial MVP spec was my very first as a dev, and it fell quite short. Yes, this site is for recruiters and managers, people looking to hire me. Yes, this site is for peers in the industry so that they might recommend me or ask questions. Still, I forgot about one very important User Story: mine. My User Story might be the most important one. It would not do to have a portfolio showcase that I was not personally proud of, that I could not easily add to, or that simply didn’t make me happy to use. I was a week into this build when I had that realization, and switching gears to meet this User Story was a great decision. The focus of this project was one of personal growth. I had no experience with React, Next, or Vercel. I had limited experience in even vanilla Javascript. What I did have was an immediate affinity for React, and a strong desire to dissect it and make it do beautiful things for me. While ultimately I wanted to meet my MVP+ by deadline, I did not want to sacrifice my User Story just to “get it done”. I am well pleased with my results. Working solo on a timeline designed for teams was a challenge, but it also gave me freedom. I alone made the decisions for this design, and I allowed myself to explore rabbit holes when time allowed. I built this website over 3 weeks in October, 2020. As I write, there is still much to improve, and I find myself excited for what’s next. Who am I? Building a professional web presence begs another question, “Who am I?” Or perhaps better put, “Who do I want to be?” I am graduating this week from a year-long Software Engineering intensive, so I am a Software Engineer. It feels strange to type that. The truth is, I never expected to make it this far. Not that I found the work too challenging, but when I embarked on this path I did not imagine the destination, just the journey. Being here, at the end of Foundations, is surreal. I recognize that this was the goal all along, but I am a bit like Charlie Bucket these days. Willy Wonka: “But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who got everything he always wanted.” Charlie Bucket: “What Happened?” Willy Wonka: “He lived happily ever after.” I chose Holberton in order to redefine who I am in the world. It was more than fitting, then , to define myself professionally with my capstone project. I wanted fast, beautiful, interesting. I wanted a place to share both my thoughts and my work– a build with great bones and lovely features. I believe I have succeeded. Choices & Features The repository for this site has no .html files, and the blog/portfolio content is brought in from Markdown. I love Markdown and publishing my blog from .md files was a feature I built this site around. I also found other features I wanted to incorporate along the way, resulting in a product that exceeds my MVP specification. React and Next.js were choices that flowed from a tutorial I played with as a side project. Deployment with Vercel was a leap I made when Heroku and Netlify were both unresponsive to my questions. Vercel is Next.js, and has excellent customer support. React blog engine using gray-matter and react-markdown to lift entries from .md files React-markdown is a library that provides the React component to render the Markdown markup. Gray-matter creates objects from a string or file. These two packages, within my Next build, transform Markdown files into Objects to render them along dynamic routes according to my slug template. Persistent Light & Dark mode with a simple click Who doesn’t love dark mode? I’ve implemented Javascript and CSS that enables the switch with a single click that persists across pages. As a dark mode fan myself, I love how this feature puts the user first. useEffect() and useState() are powerful React Hooks which enable this feature, along with localStorage . Future improvements might include a Redux store to simplify the code involved. Enhanced codeblocks from Markdown with syntax highlighting Markdown supports code snippets and blocks, but what if we could make them better? Two packages, react-syntax-highlighter and react-copy-to-clipboard add functionality to my blog and portfolio entries. I can choose my syntax highlighting style at the time of writing, and users can copy to their clipboard with a single click. Since I write technical articles frequently, this feature was high priority. Deployment As I mentioned earlier, I chose Vercel to continuously deploy my site, and I am very happy with the results. While such a site with a single team member (me) is an almost laughable under-use of the power Vercel offers, it has given me a glimpse into modern deployment methods. Vercel allows me to deploy whenever I push to main , and can also reserve branches for soft or development deploy as needed to view live changes. Would you like to see it yourself? Check out the Deployment section in the README. Challenges This project was not without its challenges, and even left me with one or two I could not surmount before deadline. Perhaps the greatest of these was setting up loaders in the next.config.js file. I needed raw loading for the Markdown blog feature, but no amount of research enabled me to also add .svg loading without breaking the blog. This problem ultimately led me to post my first question ever on Stack Overflow, which remains unanswered. I am half-convinced no one know how to nest these configurations properly. Another result of this challenge was my attendance at the first Next.js web conference, where Next.js 10 was revealed. The new Next.js solves almost all of my configuration issues. You can read more about that on the Next.js Blog. The Keynote from Next.js.conf! While I will be migrating to Next.js 10 this winter, the takeaway from this is that even unsolved challenges can lead to growth. I did more research on this topic than any other, reached out online in many new ways, and ultimately attended a conference with tens of thousands of peers– all because of my config file. This was the single greatest point of growth during my Portfolio Project. What have I learned? I think it’s clear that building this site was a huge step up for me technically and personally. I cannot wait to use React again and I feel more confident than ever before. The real lessons, though, are broader than any one framework: Don’t be afraid of new technologies. I know I have the resources to learn new things, and the only thing that can keep me from understanding is my own fear of jumping in. I was afraid to learn a whole new framework, but nothing is scarier than C and as Holberton students, that foundation is one of our superpowers. Use things and break them Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You can learn more from dissection, repair, and the eventual ‘ask for help’ than any tutorial. CSS is like Schrodinger’s cat Both awesome and not awesome at the same time. Awesome: there’s really no end to the possibilities. Not Awesome: there’s really no end to the possibilities. Sure, I am not the first to make a dig at CSS, but I believe this is important to mention because growth as an engineer is not always the result of winning. I struggled with CSS and found I was my own worst enemy at times. If I had it to do over I would make many changes. The good news is, I can do it over, and I will carry the lessons I have learned along the way. Foundation: Built I graduate from Foundations this Friday, having built a strong foundation as an engineer. This project and the resulting website are also a foundation that I hope to build upon during my Specializations year. From the initial proposal to the finished product, I feel I have leveled up. Here’s to many more levels! Who am I? part 2 I’m a Full Stack Software Engineer entering my second year at Holberton School, specializing in Web Stack. Over the past year I have build a foundation in computer science concepts, C, Python, and algorithmic problem-solving. Would you like to learn more about this project? Check out: The GitHub repository The Landing Page Thanks for reading! ❤ Tabitha

https://tabbykatz.medium.com/the-making-of-a-portfolio-site-92bd5b6ebd8f

["Tabitha O'Melay"]

2020-11-06 17:46:20.006000+00:00

['Front End Development', 'React', 'Holberton School', 'Nextjs', 'Software Engineering']

Why Fintech Companies Use Haskell

Why Fintech Companies Use Haskell The benefits of functional programming for fintech products Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash Fintech is one of the biggest and fastest-growing IT markets today. It is an emerging industry that uses technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. Mobile banking, investing services, and cryptocurrency are all solutions that make financial services more accessible to the general public. One significant trend that we have witnessed in fintech is the use of functional programming languages. In this blog post, we will delve deeper into the state of fintech right now, and how exactly functional programming can improve modern fintech products. In the end, we will list some companies that use FP in their trading, banking, or fintech infrastructures. Benefits of functional programming languages Banks, trading firms, and fintech projects use functional programming languages like Haskell because of the properties which imperative programming does not provide. Most of the big companies mention three main reasons: Strong typing helps prevent errors in the code that could lead to problems somewhere down the path. For example, Barclays lists strong typing as one of the reasons for choosing Haskell for their derivative algorithms; The code is more readable and maintainable, and as a result, it is easier to find bugs and reduce the risk of exploits. Functional programming handles concurrency better, so these languages excel at complex tasks that involve parallel actions. Let’s look at the most popular areas in fintech right now and how functional programming can help in their specific use cases. State of fintech The term “fintech” includes a massive amount of companies that work on a range of technologies and projects with different approaches. Today, thousands of startups are working on unique technologies, some of which include KYC/ID with AI and telemetry, payment and lending protocols, and others. The field is a puzzle that consists of a huge amount of details. Furthermore, all these small puzzle pieces are trying to be interoperable with each other in real-time. To achieve that speed of service, technologies that provide faster and more concurrent services need to be employed. Some of the functional programming technologies (for example, ones that support actor-like models) are well-suited for making this diverse ecosystem more effective. To give an overarching view, here are some of the global trends that we see in the fintech market and FP technologies that can help them in their rise. AI, Big Data, IoT The technologies mentioned above are the most demanded. They are used for the development and implementation of chatbots, virtual consultants and virtual advisories, voice recognition, process automation, predictive analysis (including credit scoring and fraud monitoring). The goal of using those technologies is personalization, transaction security, an increase in time management efficiency, and client behavior analysis. FP can bring success to these fields. Scala is already widely used in big data for its superior concurrency and Apache Spark, while Nerves, an Elixir framework, looks very promising for IoT. Transaction processing and infrastructure The number of card transactions grows by a CAGR of 13.6% annually, according to the Global Payments 2019 report. One reason for that is the integration of biometric analysis and contactless payments. Functional programming languages allow for the building of stable infrastructures that are more reliable, fault-tolerant, and have fewer errors. In particular, Elixir is great for situations where you need to handle a lot of small interactions from a multitude of users. Credit and insurance technologies Today, credits and insurance are issued not only by traditional banks but by smaller private companies and startups. There are tons of projects that provide P2P lending, and technologies in this field are developing very fast. If you are a startup in the field of credit or insurance, you need to move fast. A well-built FP team will be able to iterate quickly and scale your product better, since the paradigm allows for better productivity and faster large-scale changes. Read our interview with a startup in the field of reinsurance, Riskbook, to learn more about the benefits of Haskell for rapidly changing fields. Blockchain and cryptoсurrencies Businesses use blockchain technology as a fast and safe way of dealing, monitoring funds, making quick international payments, storing and sharing reports. A lot of banks unite under Ripple or HyperLedger partnership to exchange information between them. Blockchain can be used to store biometric data as well. Functional programming (especially Haskell) is great for handling blockchains due to immutability, type safety, and the ability to manage distributed computation well. Haskell also enables one to build excellent domain-specific languages, such as smart contract languages. Companies that use functional programming Fintech Klarna The European payments startup Klarna uses a wide variety of functional programming languages like Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell. The core of their services is in Erlang. Digital Asset Digital Asset is a fintech company that helps companies design and run the next generation of business applications, mainly with the help of DAML, a smart contract language written in Scala. They have a multitude of languages on their GitHub, including Haskell and Scala. Adjoint Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates. Right now, their main product is Adjoint Treasury, a real-time payments and settlement platform for corporate treasuries. Banking & trading Barclays Barclays has an embedded domain-specific functional language (FPF) written in Haskell to specify exotic equity derivatives. We have covered it in more detail in our Haskell stories of success. Standard Chartered Bank Standard Chartered uses their own strict dialect of Haskell called Mu, and has an insanely large codebase, featuring around half a million lines of Haskell code and 4.5 million lines of Mu code. Tinkoff Bank Tinkoff uses Haskell for the backend of Tinkoff Travel Agency and Scala for the backend of Tinkoff Bank. Jane Street Jane Street uses OCaml for almost all the backend, from low-latency trading and market risk systems to tools for managing and monitoring infrastructure, workflow tools, and data analytics. To learn more about the reasons for this choice, you can watch a detailed talk from their tech side: Why OCaml. Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley uses Scala and is home to massive large-scale Scala projects. For more information on Scala at Morgan Stanley, you can check this short video. And many more In addition, many other financial companies have used or use Haskell or other functional programming languages: JP Morgan BNB Paribas Merrill Lynch Bank of America Deutsche Bank ABN AMRO Credit Suisse Global Allston Trading With a lot of heavyweight banks and startups doing functional programming, it seems to be a trend that won’t go away. Furthermore, fintech is becoming more complex and distributed every minute, with banks realizing that in the face of the COVID crisis, they are not digital enough. Functional programming, it seems, has the tools to solve the problems associated with that. Whether you are a fintech startup or a bank, perhaps it is time to start thinking about making a switch to a more future-proof technology.

https://medium.com/dev-genius/why-fintech-companies-use-haskell-5ae2c85831b3

[]

2020-10-16 14:49:56.210000+00:00

['Fintech', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Development', 'Functional Programming', 'Programming']

Everyone’s Got Their Carol Baskin

Everyone’s Got Their Carol Baskin Not Everyone is Going to Be Nice to You… As America watched a series that kept getting weirder and more bizarre by the moment, unable to take our fixated eyes off our screens, trapped in our homes during a global pandemic with little recourse for doing much else, we stared in wonder at what is arguably the weirdest story of the last century. For those who missed it, yes, I’m talking about the docuseries Tiger King, with its wild cast of characters, a show that follows Joe Exotic, the owner of a private zoo as he acts out his frustrations against his arch-nemesis, Carol Baskin. Carol is nothing like Joe. Joe is a loud-mouthed, gun-toting, mullet-sporting, gay Oklahoma man who’s not afraid to announce his displeasure, even if it means talking about hurting or killing other people openly. Carol is much slower and more calculated and, without giving away too much of the plot, we can say that the story hinges on an ongoing feud between these two central characters who are plainly incompatible. Joe wants to keep his private zoo, Carol wants to destroy his private zoo, there's not a lot of common ground between these two viewpoints. But I didn’t come here to give you an unnecessary review of the Tiger King series. I came to discuss the fact that everyone, yes, everyone has their Carol Baskin — and it’s nothing new. Everyone has that one person who’s just hellbent on destroying them and their prospects, their ideas, their goals, their dreams…The same games we see cast before us on the world stage, as we clutch our fleece microfiber blankets and stare with wide eyes at Tiger King on our screens, what we watch has played out many, many times before, from the annals of Rome and the rivalries of Pompeius the Great and Julius Caesar; to Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, wherever there have been people, there have been brutal contests over one person or another’s success or failure. Generations come, generations go, there’s nothing new under the sun…you know the rest. The point is that everyone has that one person who wants to see them fail. They’re sitting there, right now, watching your social media feeds, scoping out your internet presence, they might even be seething over your very existence, right now, in this moment. You might even be one of those readers of mine, my at-an-arms-length personal version of Carol Baskin. We wonder why such people exist and feel the need to waste their time with us in the first place. It’s baffling. Grudges make zero sense to me. Honestly, I’m not much of one to ramble on about “haters” and consider such culture as what it is, which is paranoia culture. A lot of people, usually people who smoke arguably way too much weed, tend to falsely conclude that the whole world is after them. This isn’t true, it’s just a way for them to magnify their own self-importance in their own eyes — they have hierarchy complexes and it shows. But it is true, what Machiavelli once said: “Because of the envious nature of humans, it has always been no less dangerous to discover new methods and institutions than to explore unknown oceans and lands, since humans are quicker to criticize than praise the deeds of others.” People are, well…people. Flawed, natural, human, and yes, sometimes petty, jealous, and catty. If you think you don’t have your Carol Baskin, guess what, you’re kidding yourself. Everyone and I mean everyone, has their Carol Baskin. It’s what you do with your Carol Baskin that matters.

https://medium.com/moments-of-passion/everyones-got-their-carol-baskin-e7c7cc29fb13

['Joe Duncan']

2020-05-17 07:45:59.158000+00:00

['Self', 'Philosophy', 'Mental Health', 'Relationships', 'Psychology']

Why Disney Should Do a Live-Action Remake of The Sword in the Stone.

Why Disney Should Do a Live-Action Remake of The Sword in the Stone. Brett Seegmiller Follow Jan 25 · 6 min read Very rarely do the Disney live-action remakes improve upon their animated predecessors. Almost every creative decision that was added to remakes such as Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Aladdin were unnecessary and made them easily worse than the originals. I recently watched Aladdin for the first time on Disney Plus, and all I could think throughout the entire excruciating experience was that this new Aladdin was basically a glorified Disney Channel TV movie. With many of the original cartoons — like the ones I’ve already mentioned — they were nearly perfect from a creative and storytelling perspective, so there wasn’t really any room for improvement. But then there are Disney classics such as The Sword in the Stone. After watching the travesty that was Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, I decided to watch the story about young King Arthur and the crotchety wizard, Merlin, in an effort to clear my head. The Sword in the Stone, for the most part, is still just as enjoyable now as it was when I was a kid. But now that I’m older and more discerning, I realized that out of any Disney cartoon classic, no story was more primed for a live-action update than The Sword in the Stone. (Interestingly enough, before working on this story, I didn’t actually know that The Sword in the Stone is already in some level of pre-production at Disney, though it’s been a while since there’s been any update on that front.) Regardless of whether or not a live-action remake will actually get off the ground, there’s one big reason why the Sword in the Stone should be remade more than any other Disney cartoon. Unlike many of the other classic movies which are — as I said, nearly perfect — the charming story of young King Arthur’s education is fundamentally flawed. I’m a big Bill Peet fan who was the writer of The Sword in the Stone mostly due to his children’s books, so I always appreciated the story and the creative direction of the film. Having said that, the story of King Arthur’s education at the hands of Merlin — while appreciated due to its focus on education and technology — doesn’t really go anywhere. Throughout the story, Merlin is constantly telling young Arthur — or Wart, as he’s commonly called — to “use his head.” Usually, this is accompanied by a battering on the young man’s head with the wizard’s crooked cane. This version of Merlin is hilarious because he’s a paradoxical character. He’s a wizard who’s obsessed with technology and education, in spite of the fact that he’s a practitioner of magic who uses spells to get his way. In fact, he doesn’t teach Arthur anything about magic, which I much appreciated. Instead, he teaches Arthur the laws of the natural world using magic. His goal is to educate Arthur on how to “use his head” instead of relying on brawn like his older adopted brother, Kay. Yet, in the end. Arthur never really has to use his head. He utilizes his obvious intelligence and natural physical skill as he traverses Merlin’s lessons that involve being transformed into forest creatures, but at the end of the story, it’s just by chance that Arthur suddenly finds himself king. What this boils down to is that the film sets up foreshadowing for Arthur to have to “use his head” to progress as a character, but never does. He just becomes king without even having to try. Up to this time in the story, Arthur is continuously belittled and bullied by his adoptive adopted brother, Kay. While Kay attempts to thwart Arthur from being named king by trying to pull the sword from the stone after it had already been pulled, he finds himself unable to do so, just like every other man who attempts it. It instantly becomes clear that Arthur is “ordained by God” to be the new king. But without any further conflict, everyone bows, and Arthur is officially the new king. It’s pretty abrupt and anti-climatic when you think about it. But this got me thinking. If the Sword in the Stone ever actually does get remade, here is what Disney should do to improve upon the animated version. (The keyword here is “improve.”) Instead of Kay bowing down to young Arthur and acknowledging his kinghood, he should challenge Arthur to a duel. (It should also be shown that up to this point, Kay was the leading in the games and that he was clearly going to win the championship. This way, Kay feels that Wart stole the crown from him.) The onlookers should be split because while it appears that Arthur is “ordained by heaven,” many others are appalled at the thought of a child becoming the new king, so everyone compromises and agree that a duel is acceptable. During the course of the joust and sword duel, Arthur has to take the lessons he’s learned from Merlin during their adventures as woodland creatures to outsmart the brutish Kay. This duel between Kay and Wart should parallel the battle between Merlin and Mad Madam Mim. During the wizard’s duel between Merlin and Mim, Merlin has to continually outsmart the sociopathic Mim by keeping a level head and using the environment to his advantage. In much the same way, Wart should utilize Merlin’s lessons to defeat Kay using the same strategies that Merlin used to outsmart Mim in a David and Goliath-esque battle. Of course, Arthur is victorious in the end, and only after Kay’s defeat does he truly earn his status as king. And due to his education at the hands of Merlin and his forgiving nature, Arthur forgives Kay for any wrongdoing, and Kay becomes the first knight of Arthur’s famed round table. This simple change in the story wouldn’t be to simply drag out the runtime, but it would enhance the story because it would pay off the story’s foreshadowing in a logical way, because in the end, Arthur had to “use his head.” Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with the Sword in the Stone, except for the underutilized ending. So while I’m sick of remakes getting green-lit with no other purpose than to make money, with the Sword in the Stone, there’s a legitimate reason to remake such a story. If done correctly, it could be leaps and bounds better than the original. Heaven forbid Disney actually proceeds forward with any more live-action remakes, but if they do, please focus on stories like the Sword in the Stone that can actually be improved upon, and not merely for the fact that they’ll make money. And if Disney does indeed ever make this happen, please take it from me. Most of the story doesn’t need to change. It’s almost perfect. Except for the ending. Fix the ending. And that’s it. If you enjoy movies and liked this story, give me some claps and follow me for more stories like this! Check out my YouTube channel here!

https://medium.com/oddbs/why-disney-should-do-a-live-action-remake-of-the-sword-in-the-stone-452065c2c9eb

['Brett Seegmiller']

2020-01-25 21:20:29.069000+00:00

['Movies', 'Disney', 'Storytelling', 'Film', 'Writing']

How to Ditch Clickbait

If content is king, does its quality matter? The entire goal of content marketing is to try and nurture or even convert leads. So long as people are looking at your blog/e-book/infographic and you’re collecting the information you need, that’s what counts. Even if you’re not writing content for marketing purposes, isn’t the important part is that people look at it? In reality, quality is the crown content should wear. Whether it’s a free e-book, blog, infographic or something entirely different, you should be able to hang your hat on it. It’s great if people are engaging with your content. But if people click on a blog only to be disappointed your article is completely irrelevant to the headline, you’re not making waves. You’re not even really treading water. Even if you’re not a marketer and still creating content, you might have encountered and fought the temptation to go the route of less resistance and pick a “gimme” topic. But if you want engaged readers that stick around, you need to dump clickbait and leave it behind. Find a New Angle Sometimes the easiest route for your writing isn’t the best approach. Going for surface-level or 20,000-foot observation on a topic doesn’t work if you want to focus on a subject matter. A deep dive into a complicated or nuanced topic can’t be explained in a bog-standard 5-paragraph essay or blog post. And retreading the ground of more popular or mainstream articles won’t get you far either. Find something new to say about your topic from a perspective that hasn’t been explored yet. If you’re really stumped, ask yourself a few questions: Is there an intersection between your chosen topic and another discipline? Has new or groundbreaking research shed more light on your topic that hasn’t been thoroughly explored? Is there a “Devil’s Advocate” position to your own point of view you can dive into or refute? Has this topic already been discussed and given a wide range of conclusions by other writers? Medium itself discourages clickbait-y titles and sensationalized “hooks.” But outside of Medium, in a world where it’s a race to find as many eyeballs as possible, what’s the verdict? It turns out that Google feels similarly, stressing correct and accurate information in content over eye-catching titles and meta descriptions. Ditch the sensationalized title and description and get to the root of what you’re really trying to say. You want people to consume your content, not gloss over it. Readers will dive deeper into your content instead of skim the surface when you give them something to engage with. Back Up Your Claims With Solid Evidence If you have a point to make, you need to back it up. It’s not enough to just put the main thesis of your blog or article out in the open. If you have something you want to say — especially if it’s a hot take or even controversial — you’re going to need to cite some sources. The best sources are ones with experts and solid research behind them. Research can be time-consuming, but having some authority backing up your claims is worth it. Much like writing a term paper, your word alone might not be alone to convince a reader of your point. Whether you’re quoting someone or referencing an article itself, citations give you credibility. Go beyond the first few results in your research while you’re at it; industry news sites can have the latest developments in a field or something groundbreaking that will transform a discipline. It almost goes without saying, but you can’t lift content for your own. The line between plagiarizing content and referencing it is thin, but it’s still there. And just like with schoolwork, you can pay the price for duplicate content in SEO rankings. And there’s another benefit to citing your sources with an anchor link to the original article— if you can become an authority yourself, other authors may cite your own posts and give you an all-important backlink. Educate Before You Try to Persuade No one likes to be sold to. The “Buyer’s Journey” in marketing is a map of where your potential customer stands on their way to completing a purchase. In general, there are three major phases: The Awareness Stage , where someone becomes aware they have a problem that needs solving or a question that needs an answer. , where someone becomes aware they have a problem that needs solving or a question that needs an answer. The Consideration Stage , when a potential customer is now considering what solution to choose for their problem. , when a potential customer is now considering what solution to choose for their problem. The Decision Stage, where a potential buyer considers and evaluates what steps they need to take to purchase a chosen solution and become a customer. These stages can be a part of your writing regardless of if you have a product or service you’re pitching in your blog post or your content. The content you publish for your readers doesn’t need to sell something at all if you’re just shedding light on how a reader can solve a problem they have. This works well because those readers are just looking for answers or possible solutions to a problem they have. They’re only becoming aware of a problem, so it’s too early to really be pitching something. It can turn them off from your content piece altogether, defeating the purpose of publishing it entirely. Prioritizing education, even if your readers are at the consideration stage, is still important. If you can provide one key insight and your readers walk away with something new, then you’re off to a fantastic start. Stuff Your Content With Insights, Not Keywords “Keyword stuffing” is the practice of cramming a chosen keyword into your writing as much as possible to try and game the Google search engine results page (SERP). In theory, the more the keyword appears, the better your chances are for ranking near the top. In the past, this tactic might have worked. However, with Google frowning on this practice and recommending content creators focus on page quality, restricting your keywords to the major features of your article like the title tag, description and URL sets up your metadata without sacrificing the quality Google is looking for. Using keywords sparingly makes for better overall content and a better strategy. Photo by Ivan Samkov on Pexels Leave the Clickbait at the Door Content is king and quality is its crown. In that regard, focusing on what you can bring to the table and not what your content can do for you in clicks, web traffic and engagement can yield better results. Invest in writing and creating content that educates instead of strictly fostering clicks. You may not go viral because of your eye-catching title, but the readers who do engage with your content will be interested in what you have to say through the end of your article — or at least beyond the opening sentence.

https://medium.com/curious/how-to-ditch-clickbait-892936661c57

['Kristen Tally']

2020-12-28 15:34:55.765000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Writing Tips', 'Blogging', 'Writing']

How To Be a Great Photographer (and Maybe Everything Else)

I suck at photography. I take a photo and, to me, it looks like puke. It looks dead. I wish I were better. Chase Jarvis is a great photographer. He’s won all sorts of awards. I wanted to talk to him. So I lied. He asked me if he could interview me for Chase Jarvis Live, his website where he’s interviewed 100s of people. I said ‘yes’ but I had only one motive. I don’t like being interviewed. It feels embarrassing. I don’t think I have anything to teach anyone. I’ve fallen so many times that I’m now broken. I’m ok with that. That’s not what this is about. I went to the interview. There were lights, camera, action. Chase asked, “Who are you?” to get me talking. So I changed direction, “But first, I have to ask you…what can you tell me so that within one hour I can leave here and take the best photo I’ve ever taken?” He laughed. I didn’t want to answer any questions. I wanted to ask. If I can’t listen, I can’t learn. If I am speaking, I can’t listen. If I am answering, I’m not asking. “First find out what your filter is. Do you like taking pictures of people, buildings, nature, whatever.” Easy. “Sad people,” I said. “Ok. Go out on the street. Find someone you feel some sort of connection with before you take their picture. But try to be as close to them as possible.” “How do I get close up though. Won’t that be weird?” “Here’s what you do. Just go and talk to them. Say, ‘I’ve been having a hard time lately with grief. When I saw you I felt an instant connection and felt like you could understand and I would really like to take your picture.’ ” I never thought about talking to them. I always thought of photographs as somehow being taken secretly. “Won’t that make them pose?” “No, you’re building a connection. It’s almost like you’re sharing a story. They will relate to you. You have to get good at connecting with people in ten seconds.” More important than technique. More important than equipment. More important than the angle or the sunlight or the details of the photo was simply the art of connection. Two people connecting can create a work of art. Nothing else. I liked that. People sometimes ask me, “What software do you use to write?” I use Facebook status update. And I make sure I have something to say. After we were finished I went outside and saw a woman that looked interesting. I asked her where she was from. She said Mexico. I asked her since she was from Mexico, what were her feelings about Donald Trump? She said, I’m for Donald Trump. I said, You might be the only Mexican ever who is for Donald Trump. She said, Everyone is the same. I’m sick of the same. Maybe he will do something different. Change is important. Not all change is the same, but I left it at that. I said, show me your tattoo. She had a tattoo of an elephant on her arm. She picked up her sleeve so I can see all of it. She told me sometimes she and her husband have had hard times. I said, Can I take your photo. Yes, she said. So I took her photo. It wasn’t a good photo. But it was my first attempt at taking a photo based on connection. Today I will try again. And tomorrow. And then the next day. If I don’t get better, I will at least have fun trying. And what else is there in life but to play as much as possible? Every attempt at art depends first on connection. Every business depends on connection. When I tried the original iPod I listened to all of the music I loved as a kid. I was walking around with a smile all day. Steve Jobs somehow connected with me through that iPod. I’ve read my favorite book of stories over 300 times. I fall in love with it each time. It’s about characters that seem so lost but bit by bit they hang onto their lives through their connection with each other. I can relate to that. If I want to sell an idea, if I want to convince, if I want someone to like to me, I have to figure out how to connect. The only skill for survival and success is having that ability to connect. I’m glad I learned something from Chase. My ego hopes he learned something from me but I don’t know. I’m not going to post the photograph I took. I’m shy about it. But I’ll post one of my favorite photographs instead. My favorite changes maybe every day. But this is today’s favorite. It’s about fear. This post. This photograph. You. Me. I hope we can tape this together. I hope we can connect. “Everyone always asks me what camera I use,” Chase said, “But greatness is about storytelling.”

https://medium.com/the-mission/how-to-be-a-great-photographer-and-maybe-everything-else-71627b73df2c

['James Altucher']

2016-04-25 20:13:25.801000+00:00

['Success', 'Marketing', 'Storytelling']

The Case Against To-Do Lists (and What to Use Instead)

The Case Against To-Do Lists (and What to Use Instead) To-do lists are supposed to keep us on task. It turns out they do the opposite. Illustrations: Fru Pinter Say you bought a new phone, but at the end of each day, without fail, the operating system crashed. Would you keep using it? Of course not. You’d take the phone back to the store, complain, and get a new one. And yet many people run their entire lives on a faulty operating system. It’s called the to-do list. Countless productivity experts and creators of to-do list apps tell us that in order to get things done, we need to make a list of our tasks. Don’t get me wrong: Dumping everything you need to do out of your head and into a journal or app is good and necessary. What I’m about to argue against is the way many people use to-do lists to run their lives, as I did for decades. Have you ever met someone who manages their day using a to-do list and actually finishes everything they set out to do? Me neither. To-do list devotees keep an ongoing register of all the things they promise to get done, but at the end of each day, they’re surprised to find that their list of uncompleted tasks has gotten longer, not shorter. The next day, they repeat the Sisyphean practice. Their days, months, and sometimes entire careers are spent in a harried blur of feeling like they’re never doing enough. If this sounds familiar, I’m here to assure you that it’s not you — it’s the system. You’re basically running your life on Windows 95. Thankfully, there’s a better, more effective way to manage your tasks, but before we get into that, let’s discuss what’s wrong with to-do lists. Illustrations: Fru Pinter To-do lists make you think you’re the problem Ever notice how much easier it is to add things to your to-do list than to actually do them? With no constraints, we just fill up our lists with even more things we’ll never finish. Back when I was letting to-do lists run my days, I’d blame myself for not finishing all the tasks I’d written down. I’d think there must be something wrong with me or with my inability to follow through. I didn’t realize this negative self-talk reinforced a kind of stereotype that made me less likely to accomplish my goals. As I described in my book, Indistractable, several studies have found that behavior change requires identity change. If you want to get in shape, you can’t give up one month after setting a New Year’s resolution. You must see yourself as an athlete, so you can commit to exercising for the rest of your life. What kind of identity does an ever-incomplete to-do list reinforce? Not a positive one. Having a constant reminder that we didn’t do what we said we’d do cements a self-stereotype. Eventually, we begrudgingly accept not following through. I’ll finish it tomorrow, we tell ourselves. What’s one more day? We repeat this cycle until the narrative begins to change from what we do to who we are. This happened to me: I allowed myself to believe I was the kind of person who was “easily distracted,” and I, therefore, became increasingly distractible. I started telling myself I was “bad at managing my time” and began acting accordingly. But it wasn’t me that was “broken.” People are awful at predicting how long tasks will take them to complete — hence our habitual failure to finish what’s on our to-do lists. It’s the methodology that’s screwed up. To-do lists lead to distraction Running your life using a to-do list leads to more distraction, not less. To understand why, it’s important to understand what “distraction” is. A distraction is any action that pulls us away from what we intend to do. The opposite of distraction is not “focus.” It’s “traction.” Both words come from the same Latin root trahere, which means “to pull.” Both words also end with the same six-letter word, “action,” reminding us that both “traction” and “distraction” are actions we decide to take, not things that randomly happen to us. Understanding the distinction between traction and distraction is critical. By this definition, we cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it is distracting us from. Therefore, we can’t say we got distracted unless we have defined, in advance, what traction means for us at that moment in time. Playing video games or watching television can be an act of traction if that’s what you planned to do with your time. Conversely, working on a task most people would laud as “productive” can be a horrible distraction if it is not what you committed to doing with your time. When I used a to-do list to run my day, I’d start the morning ticking off tasks, thinking I was on point. I didn’t realize I was letting my to-do list lead me towards distractions that were preventing me from reaching my goals. For instance, even when I knew I had a big project looming and needed to spend the morning working on it to meet my deadline, glancing at my to-do list gave me permission to escape into doing something — anything — else. Hey, look! My to-do list says it’s time to rearrange my desktop icons into color-coded, alphabetized folders!? Okay! I guess I’ll do that real quick before I start writing that report I’ve been putting off. To-do lists allow us to get distracted by the easy or urgent tasks at the expense of the important work. We get pulled off track by the most pernicious form of distraction — the kind we succumb to without realizing it’s happening. We run faster and faster in the name of getting things done, without realizing we’re headed in the wrong direction. Then when we finally realize we didn’t allocate the necessary time to work on the most important tasks, we tell ourselves, it’s okay. I crossed five things off my list. I’m good. To-do lists destroy the fun in life Before I staged a coup d’etat against my to-do list, I used to let my unfinished tasks invade my thoughts and leisure time. I’d sit down for a pleasant dinner with my family, only to start thinking about all the things left undone on my to-do list. Later, when I’d play with my daughter, the unchecked boxes would start to torment me. A recent study found that intrusive thought, including thinking about what we “should” be doing, can kill the enjoyment of life’s most important pleasures. The tyranny of the to-do list comes not only from its power to waste our time while we’re working but also its ability to take over our minds while we’re trying to actually have a life. Time studies show Americans far underestimate how much leisure time they have. Both mothers and fathers in several Western nations spend significantly more time with their children than previous generations. Yet, even though Americans have time to watch on average nearly five hours of television every day, they report feeling busier than ever. My hunch is that few working professionals today, especially high performers, even remember what leisure time is supposed to feel like. They’ve simply forgotten how wonderful it feels to have the peace of mind of spending time solely focused on their children or taking a walk. Fortunately, there’s a research-backed way to help you reclaim more joy from every minute of your day. Instead of being a to-do list maker, become a schedule builder To free yourself from the tyranny of the to-do list, you must break the habit of looking at your list to tell you what to do. So what’s the alternative? Build a weekly schedule. Keeping a schedule seems simple, yet most people don’t do it (or don’t do it correctly). They plop a meeting or two onto their calendar and leave the rest of it blank. A better approach is to use what psychologists call “setting an implementation intention,” a fancy term for deciding what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. Planning in advance how you intend to spend your time is the only way to know the difference between traction (what you said you would do) and distraction (anything else). Keeping a calendar is not only useful for work-related tasks. We can hold time for our important relationships and for investing in ourselves. The practice fixes all three faults of running your day with a to-do list. First, being a schedule builder instead of a to-do list maker affirms a better self-image. People are awful at predicting how long a task will take them to complete — hence our habitual failure to finish the tasks on our to-do lists. From now on, measure yourself not by what you finished, but whether you did what you said you would do, for as long as you said you would, without distraction. Second, unlike a to-do list, deciding how you will spend your time in advance has been shown to lead to fewer distractions. A schedule makes it more likely you will stay on track by adding the constraint of a fixed period of time. When you know you only have one hour to work on a task, you become more focused instead of letting yourself flounder. Finally, using a schedule brings back the fun in life by relieving the feeling that you should be doing something else. If you’ve scheduled time to play video games, there’s nowhere else you should be and nothing else you should do. You can finally enjoy leisure time without guilt. In fact, doing work when you schedule time for fun would now become a distraction, since it’s not what you planned to do with your time. If you’re ready to build your own schedule, I’ve provided an in-depth guide and schedule maker tool here. The goal is to schedule every part of your day on your schedule maker — a concept that sounds stressful until you remember that this includes downtime. (This technique is called “timeboxing” or making a “zero-based calendar.”) Does making a schedule guarantee you’ll never go off track? Of course not. But it’s important to be aware that when we don’t plan time in our day to do what really matters, life quickly falls out of balance. We can all upgrade our life operating systems and learn better ways to get more out of our days.

https://forge.medium.com/be-a-schedule-builder-not-a-to-do-list-maker-396096a7486a

['Nir Eyal']

2020-11-20 18:40:11.224000+00:00

['Behavior Change', 'Productivity', 'Time Management', 'Psychology', 'Growth Hacking']

Why Having Secure Attachment Doesn’t Make You Invincible

You Might Feel The Urge To Run In The Beginning Have you recently worked on shifting your attachment style? Maybe you’ve opened up the door to attachment and are learning about it now. Well, you might find dating securely attached people different. Dating them might feel boring. Don’t run yet! Your addiction hasn’t been fed. It’s because secure people don’t give you the emotionally rollercoaster fix you’re used to. This doesn’t mean you’re a horrible monster who wants to suffer, not at all. But when we’re insecurely attached, our brains and bodies are wired to anticipate emotional highs and lows. There’s no need to tip-toe around a secure partner, or even hide your feelings from them. Heck, you can trust each other and not feel jealous. Sounds like a scam, right? Kristen Hick rightly said: “Instead of feeling comfortable and even attracted to secure partnerships, you might feel bored and uninterested in partners who don’t keep you on your toes with emotional ups and downs.” Predictability and having someone share their wants and needs with you can feel overwhelming when you’re not used to it. I felt this way when I met my partner. She was loving, kind, dependable and supportive. It can send your brain into shock mode when you’ve never experienced this kindness from someone before. You haven’t had your insecure attachment fix You might be caught off guard and have emotional reactions you didn’t expect. I cried on the second, third and fourth date (maybe the fifth too) at the start of my relationship with my partner. We laugh about it now, but I felt terrible at the time. Acknowledge your brain is weaning off it’s addiction to insecure drama. You might want to run away when these feelings jump out at you unexpectedly. What To Do Understand it could be your insecure attachment getting activated — If you feel bored of like there’s no connection, why not give it a shot? You’ll see if insecure attachment is clouding your vision, or if you don’t connect. Mindfulness practice — Practising breathing techniques when you’re feeling wobbly can help you feel grounded again. My therapist taught me the STOP Technique:

https://medium.com/candour/why-having-secure-attachment-doesnt-make-you-invincible-5cce2e1f11a7

['Kathrine Meraki']

2020-09-21 00:00:45.557000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Self Love', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Psychology']

Why Creative Advertising Desperately Needs UX Design Input

We’re well into the digital age, but surprisingly (or not) the advertising industry has been struggling to catch up. While we realize that cross-platform campaigns are more effective and that consumers have more control over what ads they’re exposed to, many advertisers fail to effectively put two and two together. As ad opportunities and ad-blocking & skipping have risen in parallel, so have consumers’ standards for creative. This means a higher barrier of entry for digital creative work and zero tolerance for subpar ads. So is the answer to simply make better ads or, dare I say, ads that people care about? Perhaps, but that’s all easier said than done. What we can do though, and what has been done for decades in web and tech design, is consider the consumer’s experience with our creative. Enter: UX Design. UX Design, or User-Experience Design, is the process of improving a user’s access of and interaction with a product, namely by empathizing with the user and placing their context at the center of the work. While it’s traditionally been applied to technical fields like HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), it is at it’s core an industry-agnostic approach that’s proving more relevant to creative advertising than ever before. In our case, we’re not working with products or websites, but rather creative ads. Let’s take for example the opportunity for UX Design in creating seamless ad experiences on Snapchat. Users access the app for a wide array of purposes, from passively viewing stories to actively taking and sharing photos. This means creative ads should consider not only the technical specs of these units, but also how users arrive at these units, their intended experience, and how executions might be tailored to better fit their environments and expectations. Passive vs. Active User Experience of Snapchat. AdAge was keen enough to cover this impending collision of UX and creative storytelling back in 2014, and a recent IAB study reports that 73% of industry executives believe user experience needs to be improved in digital work. Given need and demand for UX rigor are at an all-time high, how do we go about supplying it? Well, if we’re concerned with the consumer context in which ads live, in other words how ads appear to users, then look no further than your friendly neighborhood Comms Planner. We published an article back in May covering 9 reasons your brand needs a Comms Planning. The ninth reason — to follow changes in media, understand new platforms, and craft channel-specific creative — is where UX Design comes in, and what we’ll expand on. “#9. Comms Planning’s role is to follow changes in media and understand new platforms, in order to integrate them into campaigns and help create channel specific executions.” Just like UX Designers, Comms Planners empathize with users to address two main concerns: how creative work is accessed, and how it’s experienced. To these ends, we utilize two tools: Ecosystems and Tactical Briefs. Ecosystems help us map the interaction of cross-platform assets and understand how users will navigate through them. Creative improvements that result from this include the sequencing of work, or the exposure of consumers to assets in a manner that eases them into subsequent work (e.g. how might users better digest a long form YouTube video if they’ve been primed with a related Snapchat ad?). Tactical Briefs provide platform-specific guidelines that require not only having up-to-date channel knowledge, but also empathizing with users. More specifically, knowing that not only do technical specs vary by platform, but so do users’ expected experiences (e.g. users might enjoy full audio on YouTube, yet find it jarring on a Facebook). This matter of varying digestion methods is something we’ve tackled in past articles, from playing with video pacing for mobile to breaking down the true role of banners. So what‘s the result of using these tools and considering users’ access and experience of creative? Work that people like, or at least don’t hate. So if you don’t have a Comms Planner on your team yet, you might want to reconsider. There’s no better time than now, and as new digital opportunities and updates continue to roll out at breakneck speed, the need and demand for UX rigor will only grow.

https://medium.com/comms-planning/why-creative-advertising-desperately-needs-ux-design-487e5c5fc6d5

['Bryant Lim']

2017-02-15 16:39:58.918000+00:00

['Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Design', 'Digital Marketing', 'UX']

Being Good Enough Every Day Is Just As Good as Being Great

Being Good Enough Every Day Is Just As Good as Being Great If you show up every day, it all adds up. @brucemars unsplash.com When I started working from home, I thought of my work as a side gig. There’s no expectation of actually making a living. I thought my entrepreneurial activities will be an investment in my future. With only 4 hours dedicated to writing every day, I thought of my freelance writing career as a source of extra income. When my finances took a major hit in May of this year, I started to make real efforts at making writing a career. Just thinking about paying the bills every month is a real boost of motivation. As I started to take on real freelance writing clients, I got over my own imposter syndrome. I started to call myself a real writer. My writing sessions lengthened from 4 hours to 6 hours. Before, I used to write one article every day. Now, I aim to write three well-researched articles every day. I realized that the trick to writing is to simply write. Being “Good Enough” every day adds up to solid results at the end of the month. As long as I showed up (even if late), I will be able to reap the rewards later on. In the beginning, it was simply hard I remember at the beginning of getting up in the middle of the night to write, my son would sense that I woke up and wake up, too. I’d end up making him pancakes and entertain him until he went back to sleep. It would be 5 am by then. I’d take an hour to write an article and submit it to a publication. I remember when I first started my blog, I worked non-stop through Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year to upgrade my Wordpress website to set it up for collaborations with other bloggers. Juggling quality time with my son, I ended up working multiple all-nighters to get the job done. I remember working through unbearable pain from my tooth infection. Between the pain medicine and the coffee that I consumed, I somehow completed all my articles for myself and for clients. I remember falling asleep next to my son while playing with him after writing all night. My son usually shakes me awake when he realizes I drifted off. In time, everything became easier. Writing prolifically In the middle of my fourth month of writing regularly, I mastered the art of writing prolifically. When I spent time thinking over ideas for my articles during the day, I can usually write a good article in about an hour or two. I also used the idea of “sprints” to force my words and sentences to come out. I find that putting just the right amount of pressure on myself allows me to hold myself accountable. Mindset change The one thing that persistently held me back as a writer is: perfectionism. In the beginning, I scrutinized my choices of wording and sentence structures too much. In time, my mindset changed. In order to make a living, I realized that writing “good enough” articles leads to new ideas for other articles. Inevitably, some of these articles will be great articles as I developed each idea thoroughly. In my mind, with or without readership, simply completing articles and writing “good enough” articles are enough for me as a writer. One day, if I practiced long enough, I will be able to write a book. Writing can lead to other careers In this day and age, everyone’s trying to claim expertise in a subject matter. Experts often use writing as a tool to publicize their work. When I started to write, I still thought of myself as a technologist. By writing, I am hoping to go back to my career as a technologist. Writing is a kind of a bridge for all the careers that I’m passionate about. Writing is also a bridge for all the entrepreneurial activities that I embark on. Writing helps me reflect on past careers, past experiences, and past passions in a way that allows me to take these passions to the next level. Sometimes, writing client articles even pushes me into learning new technologies and stay on top of technology trends.

https://junwuwriting.medium.com/being-good-enough-every-day-is-just-as-good-as-being-great-44e4bd4dbef0

['Jun Wu']

2019-10-06 12:30:07.745000+00:00

['Self', 'Leadership', 'Freelancing', 'Motivation', 'Writing']

How to Get the Most Dominant Color of an Image

How to Get the Name of the Most Dominant Colors The logic is to iterate over all image pixels and to get their labels. Then, based on the frequency, we will get the n most frequent color names. Image by Fantasy Milos. This is the function that converts an RGB pixel to a color name: Now let’s write a function that takes as an input the image and returns the top n colors as well as their corresponding weights/proportions in the image: As we can see, the three most dominant colors are “steelblue” (10.74%), “lightseagreen” (10.3%), and “cornflowerblue”(8.98%)!

https://medium.com/better-programming/most-dominant-color-of-an-image-4645419af9ce

['George Pipis']

2020-12-01 16:20:45.964000+00:00

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

Creating Passive Income with Zazzle

What is Passive Income? Passive income is generally defined as a stream of income earned with little or no ongoing effort needed from the individual receiving the passive income in order to grow the stream of income. Passive income is income that is not proportional to the time you physically put into acquiring it. Active income (typically one’s regular job or additional part time jobs) is a direct exchange of your time and skills for money. Examples of passive income include real estate rental income, stock dividends, fixed income/bonds, book royalties, peer-to-peer lending, and stock photography royalties. The intriguing thing about passive income is that it can generated literally while you are sleeping, freeing up additional time for hobbies or allowing you to increase your earnings by performing some other form of work while still generating previously established streams of passive income. An example of this would be a person working a 9–5 office job where they are paid a fixed salary. This same person also receives regular passive income from an eBook that he wrote on gardening over two years ago. The office job requires direct effort to produce the agreed upon amount of income. The eBook is different. Regardless of what is going on in the office employee’s life, the book is listed for sale in its digital form on Amazon and the author does not have to perform any work (beyond the initial creation of the content) to maintain this stream of income. Can you Generate Passive Income From Zazzle? The short answer is yes — you can definitely generate passive income using Zazzle. However, like many sources of passive income, the potential earnings vary widely. Personal Zazzle Earnings I have used Zazzle sporadically over the last few years. I’ve listed a few designs that did not take me a lot of time to create and were mostly for fun. Based on my monthly earnings, shown below, I can confirm it is not that hard to make $15–$25 in true passive income (After uploading the digital design, I did not do any promotion or additional work — the listings have been up for 2 years without edits).

https://medium.com/escaping-the-9-to-5/creating-passive-income-with-zazzle-b1bc06d59dd9

['Casey Botticello']

2020-05-06 02:29:23.569000+00:00

['Technology', 'Social Media', 'Productivity', 'Zazzle', 'Entrepreneurship']

Disruptive Interfaces & The Emerging Battle To Be The Default

A new battle is brewing to be the default of every choice we make. As modern interfaces like voice remove options, augmented reality overlays our physical world, and artificial intelligence gains our trust by transcending our own reasoning, DEFAULTS WILL RULE THE WORLD. I’ve come to call them disruptive interfaces — drastically simpler and more accessible interfaces that ultimately commoditize everything underneath. Once powerful companies that have invested millions or billions in their brands, achieved dominance through network effects, or compete with sophisticated supply chains are vulnerable to losing their pricing power, differentiation, and being all-together excluded from the moment where customers make decisions. In 2014, I shared some thoughts on how “the interface layer” would commoditize much of the technology underneath. I explained, “it’s not just about great design, it’s about the integration of the actions that make life easier and the commoditization of the services underneath…a shift in the economy that is driven by designers rather than cable executives, tech titans, and logistics masterminds. It is a “closed” user experience built on top of a wide open and hotly competitive ecosystem of services”. What I didn’t realize was just how disruptive such interfaces would be. Like a game of slap a hand, where hands pile upon one another until the winning hand is the one that lays on top of the stack, a disruptive interface is one that, either by consumer preference or brute force, layers on top of other products/services and gains control of the end-user’s experience (and thus decisions). Disruptive interfaces are successful because they are simpler and offer a better user experience than the more clunky and complex systems they supplant. Consider the massive increase in quality of user experience over the years for a simple task like buying batteries. No surprise, your first option during a voice purchase experience is Amazon’s own branded batteries. Apparently the same goes for eggs… New mediums on the horizon, namely voice and augmented reality — coupled with the rapid ramp of artificial intelligence, will do far more than save us time. They will eliminate browsing all-together by proposing a default answer for every need (and eliminating options). At first blush, this time-savings is a great benefit. But the implications are far reaching. As machine learning understands how we live and work better than we do, we will not only want but expect the best solution for every problem to be the default. As interfaces reach their own version of “singularity,” when they become intelligent and reduced enough that they stop offering choice and only present a single option (and execute it for us), being the default becomes the ultimate prize for every product and service. Considerations & Implications: Consequences of disruptive interfaces and the battle to be the default: Living By A String Of Defaults Imagine a world where we all live by a string defaults, from the ride you order in the morning, the lunch that is delivered, the groceries you buy, the music you listen to, and perhaps even the media you consume. We’ll all listen to the version of Jingle Bells that Amazon, Apple, or Google plays by default. We’ll favor the default option not only because it is fastest, but because it (presumably) takes our interests into account. Such power in defaults will unleash a competitive — and potentially regulatory — dynamic that the world has never seen. The most impactful aspect of such a scenario is the new frictionless motion it will create for how we live. If your brand or service is included in the motion you’ll have a remarkable advantage. If you’re not, you’re screwed. Hardware Will Eat Software There are two fascinating strategies at play at both ends of the stack. One is commonly referred to as “down to the metal,” where services and applications want to be tightly coupled with the chips and core components of hardware to offer a differentiating experience. The other strategy is to own “the interface layer” where customer decisions are ultimately made. Web browsers were the ultimate interface layer for many years. Now, native operating systems that accompany hardware (Alexa, iOS, Android, etc..) have become increasingly coupled with underlying mobile services and offer native default experiences (vs. those powered by apps that users must opt into). Ironically, the hardware manufacturers that were once pitied for being commoditized as simple vestibules for third-party software will ultimately own the interfaces that rule our everyday lives. They may not own or operate the underlying services, but they’ll have more control over them — not less. Digital Real-Estate Will Become More Scarce, & More Expensive Just as companies have increasingly felt the need to pay Google for great positioning on keyword searches, including searches for their own brands, companies will need to do the same for modern day defaults like voice and AR (augmented reality). What you see around you by default in augmented reality, and whatever is presented to you by default whenever you ask a voice assistant, is precious real-estate. The pay-to-play to get discovered within commerce interfaces has already begun. Google has been doing this for many years, and I’d love to know how much revenue is generated from brands buying their own search terms. In April 2018, Amazon’s advertising revenue, paid by merchants to have their own products discovered within Amazon’s customer experience, surpassed $2 billion. In the digital world, the land owner is whoever owns the interface. And as we all know, real-estate is a great business but doesn’t always serve the needs of a community first... Own Your Own Wallet, Or Be Owned Here’s another question I’ve been pondering: In the battle at the interface level, will every company that wants to own a consumer-facing interface need to offer a wallet? When we start paying for things with our voice or just by walking out of a store, we’ll pay with the default wallet that the store or application queries first. When you think about how the “wallet ecosystem” has evolved, you start seeing a strategy to become a payment service rather than be disrupted by a payment service. This trend prompts a whole series of questions: Will every service that wants to own an interface (as opposed to be subservient to one) need to have its own wallet? Is there a limit to how many wallets we can manage, or will they work behind the scenes? Will some of these wallets offer their own currency? Will one wallet (like Amazon Pay or Apple Pay) offer advantages for loyalty as a way to keep us living within their ecosystem? I suspect loyalty will define the next generation of wallets. In An AR World, What Sources & Notifications Are On By Default? Imagine putting on those futuristic glasses for the first time and then going outside for a walk. Which content and notifications to you see by default? Perhaps you can turn on “Sources” of AR content by genres, and micro-manage the “on/off” settings for brands within each genre? A fascinating battle will emerge to be “default on” in AR by genre. Your augmented experience of the world will have a default view determined by whatever your default display options by genre are, and then you’ll further refine as a result of your real-world experiences and evolving preferences. As my friend Dave Morin likes to say, “the devil’s in the default,” and this will have a greater impact in AR than ever before. As my product teams at Adobe work with partners to help designers create for AR, we’re realizing how many of these questions have yet to be answered. “The devil’s in the default.” -Dave Morin Great AI Will Antiquate The Age Of Interfaces Famed design duo Charles and Ray Eames once suggested that “After the age of information comes the age of choices.” But as artificial intelligence gets to know us better than we know ourselves, will the need for choices be made obsolete? Being a bit more provocative here: Are visual interfaces and choices as we know them over? Artificial intelligence is simplifying (or entirely removing) options, and the accuracy of AI may bring us to the point where there will no longer be an interface. Is the ultimate goal of interface design to eliminate the need for choice? Or will designers and product leaders learn that choice is a uniquely human and primal desire that we didn’t know we wanted until we were able to operate without it? “The perfection of data will, eventually, give rise to a world in which every consumer can be paired up with goods that meet his or her biological, rather than consumptive, tendencies,” writes Zander Nethercutt. Will we stop searching and choosing once we trust airtificial intelligence more than ourselves and feel “paired” with everything we need? Implications For Customers, Brands & Commerce What does living a life of defaults mean for consumers? For starters, we will need to verify the pricing we get and the quality we receive. As we surrender choice, we cannot surrender any form of diligence. Living by the defaults requires another level of trust in the machine. We will need to trust but must also develop mechanisms to verify. It also means that we’ll all have more in common with each other when it comes to necessities, while striving to differentiate ourselves when it comes to auxiliary purchases. I think we’ll become more brand agnostic (lowest price, fastest option) for stuff that doesn’t define us, and develop stronger brand preferences for anything differentiating (fashion, experiences, relationship-driven services, and value statements). So much more is liable to become commoditized, from fine foods to ride-sharing, entertainment services, media, and more. In the future, we’ll have all the basics provided by just a few sources, but will define ourselves by a long-tail of purchases from niche, local, and highly personalized brands and providers. Consider these quotes from Julie Creswell in the New York Times on the rise of Amazon’s own in-house brands (first brought to my attention from M.G. Siegler’s newsletter): “Around 2009, Amazon quietly entered the private-label business by offering a handful of items under a new brand called AmazonBasics. Early offerings were the kinds of unglamorous products consumers typically bought at their local hardware store: power cords and cables for electronics and, in particular, batteries — with prices roughly 30 percent lower than that of national brands like Energizer and Duracell. The results were stunning. In just a few years, AmazonBasics had grabbed nearly a third of the online market for batteries, outselling both Energizer and Duracell on its site.” “About 70 percent of the word searches done on Amazon’s search browser are for generic goods. That means consumers are typing in “men’s underwear” or “running shoes” rather than asking, specifically, for Hanes or Nike.” “Grundy said when the contract for the AmazonBasics batteries, which are made by a manufacturer in the Far East, next comes up for bid, likely bidders could include Energizer and Duracell.” An Opportunity & Responsibility For Designers As with most topics that fascinate me, designers are the winners and, in this case, can also be our saviors. In just the past few decades, interfaces have evolved from physical buttons to grayscale screens navigated with a mouse to millions of full-color pixels, and then to touch, and then voice, and soon augmented reality. While the actions, like connecting with friends, turning on the lights, buying groceries, or ordering a car, haven’t changed much, the interfaces we use look and feel completely different. They have fewer steps and smarter defaults. Generally speaking, the better an interface becomes, the less navigation (and thinking) it requires. The best product designers look for ways to eliminate or streamline choices, leverage existing patterns and muscle memory to make products familiar, and develop a better “first mile” experience. They must also take great care in determining the defaults. Most consumer products report that 90% of customers keep the default settings they’re given rather than customize their experience. Over the years, there have been a few attempts at a “Designer Code Of Ethics,” and I would propose that the modern version should include guidance on communicating the presence of artificial intelligence and the sources of the choices you’re seeing (or aren’t seeing). As modern interfaces emerge that are simpler and artificially intelligent, a largely invisible yet heated battle is brewing across every product and service to be the default that you see and hear at the interface layer — the customer-facing surface where decisions are made. ~~ Follow Scott on Twitter, get the latest book — The Messy Middle, read recent posts on the attack of the microbrands and crafting products in the middle, or sign up for an infrequent newsletter summary of insights.

https://medium.com/positiveslope/disruptive-interfaces-the-emerging-battle-to-be-the-default-23a6485a6f29

['Scott Belsky']

2018-09-21 14:42:45.388000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Product Management', 'Design', 'Product Design', 'Venture Capital']

A Window on the Warriors Dynasty

A Window on the Warriors Dynasty A review of Ethan Sherwood Strauss’s “The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty” Do you miss basketball? In this unprecedented time of school closures and stay-at-home orders, I’m surprised by how much I miss basketball. But if you’re anything like me, I have a drug for you. It won’t cure the sickness, but it will lessen the symptoms. It’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss’s new book, The Victory Machine. Strauss is a beat reporter assigned to the Golden State Warriors for the Athletic, and he’s been covering the Warriors since before they won their first title. In other words, he saw the whole saga up close, and he has a story to share. In his own words: This is a story of ultimate success. It’s also a story of why ultimate success cannot sustain. Strauss begins the story in 2010 before Joe Lacob bought the Warriors. It continues through Joe Lacob’s “lightyears ahead” interview, the birth of the Warriors dynasty under Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, 73 wins, Durant’s arrival, a few NBA titles, and Durant’s departure. It’s a story a lot of us know well, but Strauss tells it with the connections and the knowledge he has gained over the years. That turns The Victory Machine into a brand new story: one about professional athletes’, owners, and basketball operations guys, who they are, and what they’ll do to win. Strauss’s perspective also has a fresh pop of honesty and humor. His writing style is casual in its use of language, a necessary quality in a book about athletes and Ops men with a wide-ranging vocabulary of profanities, and he is not afraid to use the first-person whenever necessary to add personal anecdotes, insights, and true-to-life panache to the narrative. My favorite parts of Strauss’s writing, however, are the unique perceptions he gleans from his time spent with the athletes we love to watch from afar. He sets the stage early on in the book: Superstars show more loyalty to their brand than to their teams. LeBron James is on his fourth NBA team, having gone from savior to villain to savior again in his home state of Ohio, and then on to Hollywood for a new conquest. Through all of that, he stayed true to his lifetime deal with Nike. It figures. Nike boasts the ability to extend his sphere of influence long after retirement, across time and across the world. An NBA team is impotent by comparison. Maybe I’m just not as connected to the NBA world as I like to think, but this changed so much of what I thought I knew about player movement when I began to think about basketball players and teams in this way. Strauss also gives insight into specific players such as Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and especially Kevin Durant. Durant is probably the most dominant subject in The Victory Machine, and you will probably think differently about him after his portrayal. (Hint: Durant will not be happy about this book.) It’s also about the relationships between players and personnel. I especially enjoyed his characterization of the D’Angelo Russell deal and its possible effects on Warriors staff: Of course, nobody quite knew if Lacob and Myers were Russell’s new bosses. If Russell faltered and lost value, Lacob and Myers retained their authority. If the twenty-three-year-old exceeded expectations and turned into a bona fide star of the future? Then Lacob and Myers would lose control and lose authority. They were hoping for this, even banking on their own usurpation. These were highly successful men whose hope was to be subservient to the whims of a twenty-something. In other words, they were at the top of the food chain in Basketball Ops. But sprinkled into Strauss’s book are understandings that apply to all of us, whether rich and famous or middle-class and unknown. He writes: When we feel attacked and that fight-or-flight drive kicks in, we tend to remember the experience. I often hear from media members about how awful the fans on Twitter are. I’ll take a glance at their mentions and often see mostly anodyne or positive responses. Those don’t stick, apparently. Strauss is describing players’ relationships with fans, but he’s also employing a concept that applies to everyone. Whether you’ve seen it on Twitter or not, you’ve experienced the disproportionate effects of insults on your mind and behavior. And sometimes it’s encouraging to know that players, coaches and media members fall into the same mental traps as you do. The Victory Machine is a helpful salve for the pain of missing basketball games and basketball content. But it’s not just that. The book is a window on the basketball world and a foggy mirror to our own. I highly recommend it to any basketball fan. Enjoy and stay safe. I received an eARC of The Victory Machine courtesy of Public Affairs and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

https://medium.com/park-recommendations/a-window-on-the-warriors-dynasty-db39c4b4c47e

['Jason Park']

2020-05-10 12:09:51.733000+00:00

['Nonfiction', 'Basketball', 'Books', 'Sports', 'Book Review']

My thoughts on S.A. Chakraborty’s “The Empire of Gold”

The book I want to spend this post briefly reviewing, The Empire of Gold, is an excellent end to what was already a great Daevabad Trilogy. This trilogy is set in a fantasy version of the Middle East, a backdrop to conflict between a large cast of humanoid magical creatures. All three books flip between the protagonists of three different characters, all vying for the control of Daevabad, the city at the core of their world. These three characters — Nahri, Alizayd, and Dara — all have compelling motivations and personalities. They’re in near-constant conflict throughout all three novels, but each one has his/her own strengths and weaknesses. Plenty of fantasy books have great characters, but I think what makes this series stand out is that all three of these are so interesting for the entire course of three pretty long books. They don’t just have their moments — they’re consistently great. I also really enjoyed Chrakraborty’s prose. There’s a pretty fair amount of exposition and info-dumps throughout all three novels, but it’s all delivered pretty painlessly. From dialog to descriptions, there were very few moments that felt awkward or forced. The dialog is also quick and snappy, helping to give each character depth. Finally, the plot is compelling and brings up some interesting and complex themes. There’s a subplot of racism that is a through-line throughout the entire trilogy, for example. But even on its own, the main story thread is fascinating. With some late-story revelations, Chakraborty concludes her story brilliantly. And at the surface, the political intrigue, war, inter-family rivalries, and scheming all make each chapter fascinating. If there are is any criticism to be made, it’s that some of the rules of the world feel a little contrived to fit the plot beats. I don’t want to get too far into spoilers, but there are a few moments near the end of The Empire of Gold where other characters that we’ve barely heard from previously step into the story. Their actions — while deeply interesting — came across as something of a deus ex machina. In all fairness, Chakraborty’s characters seem to feel the same way, but I think this is worth pointing out. There’s much more that could be said about Chakraborty’s trilogy. I’ve seen a decent amount of buzz for it online, but in my opinion these books should be making greater waves. This is a bold, confident story with compelling characters and a satisfying conclusion. As far as books of 2020, The Empire of Gold is one of the best I’ve read.

https://medium.com/the-coastline-is-quiet/my-thoughts-on-s-a-chakrabortys-the-empire-of-gold-10b10a3ebc81

['Thomas Jenkins']

2020-10-29 00:49:09.799000+00:00

['Science Fiction', 'Review', 'Books', 'Fantasy', 'Writing']

12 Very Creative Ways to Promote Your Writing

As writers, the hustle to self-promote is more exhausting than the actual work of writing. As necessary as it is, we can get really bored really fast doing this thing day in and day out. It seems endless, right? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Over and over. But there are a few other things you can do to mix things up and get your work out there. Set yourself up with a rotation of these and your links will get more “airtime” and in more places, which is favorable for search engine algorithms. Here are a few self-promotion options you may not have considered. Goodreads quotes I often search online for quotes and inevitably Goodreads shows up in the search. Have your author page polished up there and start posting quotes of your work on your page. You never know when your work may appear as others search for quotes. Building your following on Goodreads is also helpful if you intend to release books. On the author page there is also an “ask me questions” feature, which is a good way to connect with readers. People who love reading kind of readers! Canva quote graphics for Pinterest Canva is an excellent source for creating graphics that will draw clicks and engagements. You will have to research the correct sizing for the graphic you will create. It will depend on which site you want to share it to. I name the pictures as I save them as “A World Without Butterflies — Insta” of “A World Without Butterflies — FB cover” etc so that I know which graphic can be used for which site based on the dimensions. If your dimensions are off the site you post it to will cut off the edges or stretch your image, distorting your image and sometimes making it really blurry. Podcast interviews Shortly after my book was released I received several invitations to interview. Do this! It doesn’t matter if you hate your speaking voice. Consider it great practice for book signings or speaking engagements. One of the most fun things I have ever done to promote my work was the Words from the River podcast interview with Laurie Livingston Nave. Quora I’ll admit, Quora didn’t appeal to me for a long time. I recently went in, changed my whole profile to be “author specific” and started leaving very thorough poetry answers on existing questions with a plug for one of my poetry articles slid carefully into the answer. It is a great way to find your audience. If you’ve written “How to Line Dance Without Looking Stupid,” then go on Quora and find the people asking questions about line dancing or country music and find a way to creatively and honestly answer, while linking your article in the answer. YouTube and Soundcloud readings Seriously, get over hating your own voice. Recording readings or making quick videos on the topics you write in can give you one more way to promote your work. The video-clickers on your social media may be more tactile learners that need a visual. This is a good way to draw them to your site and your work. I did a 14 minute video discussing my book and reading a few poems and shared it on my YouTube channel (the one with 3 followers) and shared the link a few places. It garnered 47 views in a day or two. I posted the link to my author pages on Goodreads, Amazon, and to my blog. Use smaller sites like Mirakee and Flipboard Mirakee is a great place for poetry snippets and quotes — a very visual site with a younger following. Flipboard allows you to post your articles like a collection of online magazines that people can follow. Call your local newspaper You never know! My local paper is going to do a feature article on my new book. It helps that I am in a small town and being an “author” is akin to celebrity-dom. Get creative with hashtags Research your hashtags. Use popular ones. But also, if it is an article about gardening, think about these readers. What will they follow and search for? Reel them in with a popular hashtag in the areas of their interests. For example, my book title is “organic” so when I share it with #organic I may end up with followers of homesteading or gardening. These are the same kind of folks who may like poetry that is deeply nature-based. It works. If the name of the book were “airplanes” I would get a very different response from the hashtag #airplanes. Hashtag not to mark your work but to lure your readers. — Christina Ward Create share groups This is an idea I have been kicking around for a while. Creating a small group of 3–5 people who agree to do a share rotation of work. If there are 3 of you, each person can share their “promo-of the-day” link or two to the group, and as you make your promotion rounds you share yours, then theirs, and they do the same for you. Set an agreed number of sites to share to and number of shares so you each benefit from the sharing collaboration. Manystories or other social groups for your platform Whatever your writing platform, find the social groups. Don’t forget to check Reddit (subreddits), Linkedin (groups), and Twitter (lists). If you are a Medium writer, you need to be sharing daily to Manystories. I have very few followers there (less than 50) but I still get clicks from there on my articles. Manystories also selects stories to share on the front page of the site each day and will notify you if your work is selected to distribute. Find influencers who post affiliate links I’ll admit — I am a bit fuzzy on how all this works but people who have very large social media followings will often set themselves up in affiliate programs. Find these people. See if you can get them to include affiliate links to your work on their sites or newsletters. They get a cut of any sales that come from their affiliate link on your book (or other sales item.) Business cards / word of mouth Yes. Good old-fashioned business cards. (I designed mine at Vistaprint.) When you are out and about, name drop yourself as an author. Strike up natural conversations with people and give them your business card. Invite them to read your work. You never know when these brief encounters could lead to book sales. List a professional email on your business cards as well for any follow-up questions they may have. author’s photo These are just a few ideas but if you take a bit of time to think “outside of the box” you may come up with a few others. I’d love to hear your tips if you’d like to drop them in the comments. Happy promoting!

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/12-very-creative-ways-to-promote-your-writing-10935af79647

['Christina M. Ward']

2020-09-04 14:54:52.365000+00:00

['Work', 'Social Media', 'Productivity', 'Poetry', 'Writing']

Build Silicon Valley’s Hotdog Detector With C# And CNTK

In the TV show Silicon Valley there’s a famous scene where Jian-Yang demonstrates the SeeFood app that can identify any kind of food in an image. Of course, this being Silicon Valley, there’s a catch: the app can only identify hotdogs and classifies everything else as ‘not hotdog’. Watch the full clip below: In this article I am going to build this same app which must be able to identify hotdogs in any image. The easiest way to do this is to build a convolutional neural network and train it on a dataset of hotdog and not-hotdog images. The Kaggle Hotdog dataset has exactly what I need. I’ll download the archive and create hotdog and nothotdog folders in the project folder that I’m going to create below. Here’s what the hotdog set looks like: Hotdogs! These are 499 pictures of hotdogs. I also have a second set with 499 images of food that isn’t a hotdog: Not hotdogs! I will need to train a neural network on these image sets and get the hotdog detection accuracy as high as possible. Let’s get started. I need to build a new application from scratch by opening a terminal and creating a new NET Core console project: $ dotnet new console -o HotdogNotHotdog $ cd HotdogNotHotdog I will copy the two dataset folders hotdog and nothotdog into this folder because the code I’m about to type next will expect it here. Now I will install the following packages: $ dotnet add package CNTK.GPU $ dotnet add package XPlot.Plotly $ dotnet add package Fsharp.Core The CNTK.GPU library is Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit that can train and run deep neural networks. And Xplot.Plotly is an awesome plotting library based on Plotly. The library is designed for F# so I also need to pull in the Fsharp.Core library. The CNTK.GPU package will train and run deep neural networks using my GPU. I have a nice laptop with an NVidia GPU and a Cuda graphics driver for this to work. If you don’t have an NVidia GPU or suitable drivers, the library will fall back and use the CPU instead. This will work but training neural networks will take significantly longer. CNTK is a low-level tensor library for building, training, and running deep neural networks. The code to build deep neural network can get a bit verbose, so I’ve developed a little wrapper called CNTKUtil that helps me write code faster. You can download the CNTKUtil files here and save them in a new CNTKUtil folder at the same level as the project folder. When I’m in the console project folder, I can create a project reference to CNTKUtil like this: $ dotnet add reference ..\CNTKUtil\CNTKUtil.csproj Now I am ready to start writing code. I’ll edit the Program.cs file with Visual Studio Code and change it like this: The first thing I need to do is add a method to build mapping files. These are text files that map each image in the dataset to a corresponding label. I will encode a hotdog with a ‘1’ and a not-hotdog with a ‘0’ value. So the mapping file should look like this: The training mapping file You can see that each image has been paired with a label indicating if the image contains a hotdog or not. I will now add a method that will automatically create the mapping files: This method uses Directory.GetFiles to collect all image files in the dataset and then uses nested loops to write the file names to train_map.txt and test_map.txt files. These mapping files contain all image file names for training and testing the neural network. If you want, you can experiment with the sizes of the training and testing partitions by changing the values of the trainingSetSize and testingSetSize constants. Just make sure they both add up to 499. Now it’s time to start writing the main program method: This code calls CreateMappingFiles to set up the training and testing mapping files. Then it calls GetImageReader twice to set up two image readers, one for the training images and one for the testing images. Note that the images in the training set are randomized. I do this to prevent the neural network from learning patterns associated with the specific sorting of the images in the dataset. Note the imageWidth, imageHeight, and numChannels constants. I am going to rescale every image to 150x150 pixels and feed all 3 color channels into the neural network. This means I will be training directly on color images without transforming them to grayscale first. Now I need to tell CNTK what shape the input data has that I’ll train the neural network on, and what shape the output data of the neural network will have: Note the first Var method which tells CNTK that my neural network will use a 3-dimensional tensor of 150 by 150 pixels with 3 color channels each. This matches the shape of the images returned by the trainingReader and testingReader. The second Var method tells CNTK that I want my neural network to output a 1-dimensional tensor of 2 float values. The first float will indicate the probability that the image does not contain a hotdog, and the second float indicates the probability that the image does contain a hotdog. My next step is to design the neural network. I will use a deep convolutional neural network with a mix of convolution and pooling layers, a dropout layer to stabilize training, and two dense layers for classification. I’ll use the ReLU activation function for the convolution layers and the classifier, and Softmax activation for the final dense layer. The network looks like this: Behold the convolutional neural network The network has the following layers: A 3x3 convolution layer with 32 filters and ReLU A 2x2 max pooling layer with stride 2 A 3x3 convolution layer with 64 filters and ReLU A 2x2 max pooling layer with stride 2 A 3x3 convolution layer with 128 filters and ReLU A 2x2 max pooling layer with stride 2 A 3x3 convolution layer with 128 filters and ReLU A 2x2 max pooling layer with stride 2 A dropout layer with a 50% dropout rate A 512-node hidden layer with ReLU A 2-node output layer with softmax Here’s the code to build the neural network: Each Convolution2D call adds a convolution layer, Pooling adds a pooling layer, Dropout adds a dropout layer, and Dense adds a dense feed-forward layer to the network. I am using ReLU activation almost everywhere, with Softmax only in the final dense layer. Then I use the ToSummary method to output a description of the architecture of the neural network to the console. Now I need to decide which loss function to use to train the neural network, and how I am going to track the prediction error of the network during each training epoch. For this assignment I’ll use CrossEntropyWithSoftmax as the loss function because it’s the standard metric for measuring multiclass classification loss with softmax. I’ll track the error with the ClassificationError metric. This is the number of times (expressed as a percentage) that the model predictions are wrong. An error of 0 means the predictions are correct all the time, and an error of 1 means the predictions are wrong all the time. Next I need to decide which algorithm to use to train the neural network. There are many possible algorithms derived from Gradient Descent that I can use here. For this assignment I’m going to use the AdamLearner. You can learn more about the Adam algorithm here: https://machinelearningmastery.com/adam... These configuration values are a good starting point for many machine learning scenarios, but you can tweak them if you like to try and improve the quality of the predictions. I’m almost ready to train. My final step is to set up a trainer and an evaluator for calculating the loss and the error during each training epoch: The GetTrainer method sets up a trainer which will track the loss and the error for the training partition. And GetEvaluator will set up an evaluator that tracks the error in the test partition. Now I’m finally ready to start training the neural network: I am training the network for 100 epochs using a batch size of 16. During training I’ll track the loss and errors in the loss, trainingError and testingError arrays. Once training is done, I show the final testing error on the console. This is the percentage of mistakes the network makes when predicting hotdogs. Note that the error and the accuracy are related: accuracy = 1 — error. So I also report the final accuracy of the neural network. Here’s the code to train the neural network. This code goes inside the for loop: The while loop keeps training until the neural network has processed every image in the training set once. Inside the loop I call GetBatch to get a training batch of images and then access the StreamInfo method to get the feature batch (the images) and the label batch (the zeroes and ones indicating hotdogs). Then I call TrainBatch to train the neural network on these two batches of training data. The TrainBatch method returns the loss and error, but only for training on the 16-image batch. So I simply add up all these values and divide them by the number of batches in the dataset. That gives me the average loss and error for the predictions on the training partition during the current epoch, and I report this to the console. So now I know the training loss and error for one single training epoch. The next step is to test the network by making predictions about the data in the testing partition and calculate the testing error. This code goes inside the epoch loop and right below the training code: Again I use a while loop to process each image in the partition, calling GetBatch to get the images and StreamInfo to access the feature and label batches. But note that I am now using the testingReader to get the images in the test set. I call TestBatch to test the neural network on the 16-image test batch. The method returns the error for the batch, and I again add up the errors for each batch and divide by the number of batches. That gives me the average error in the neural network predictions on the test partition for this epoch. After training completes, the training and testing errors for each epoch will be available in the trainingError and testingError arrays. Let’s use XPlot to create a nice plot of the two error curves so I can check for overfitting: This code creates a Plot with two Scatter graphs. The first one plots the trainingError values as accuracies and the second one plots the testingError values as accuracies. Also note the WithOptions call that forces the y-axis to start at zero. Finally I call File.WriteAllText to write the plot to disk as a HTML file. I’m now ready to build the app. I’ll start by compiling the CNTKUtil project: $ dotnet build -o bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.0 -p:Platform=x64 This will build the CNKTUtil project. Note how I’m specifying the x64 platform because the CNTK library requires a 64-bit build. Now I’ll do the same in the HotdogNotHotdog folder: $ dotnet build -o bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.0 -p:Platform=x64 This will build the app. Note how I am again specifying the x64 platform. Now I’ll run the app: $ dotnet run Here’s what the running app looks like in my Powershell terminal:

https://medium.com/machinelearningadvantage/build-jian-yangs-hotdog-detector-with-c-and-cntk-6830948d08fd

['Mark Farragher']

2019-11-20 11:21:52.129000+00:00

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

How To Keep Your Fitness Routine Intact When Old Habits Come A’Knockin’

Two essential tools. At any point in life, when you’re trying to change for the better, i.e. workout more, eat better, take better care of your health, learn something new, to stick with it long enough so that it makes a difference in your life, there need to be two things in your arsenal: Time and Practice. This is true for anything in life. Time to allow new habits to form—time to screw up, redirect, learn, and make sticky because the more time you give something, its chances of sticking improve exponentially. There are going to be mistakes and setbacks and life’s little bitchslaps that knock us off our feet, and the critic inside our head doesn’t like too much error, nor does it appreciate results that take too long to produce. This means you have to act deliberately. To do that, you must be certain of your desired outcome. There’s no dilly-dallying. The vision is essential. This critic is holding you to a higher standard and if it feels the trajectory is going in completely the wrong direction, it will convince you to jump ship. Being crystal clear on your outcome is what will keep the critic engaged, and that will give you the freedom of more time to pursue your goal. The critic won’t be tapping its foot, pointing at its watch nudging you to move on to the next thing. Often we embark on the journey with no plan, no backpack filled with snacks, or water and we’re wearing the completely wrong shoes. We’re fed up, frustrated, angry, upset, depressed, feeling lousy about ourselves, and desperate for change — none of which equips us for what’s ahead. You don’t plan your honeymoon on a whim. You take the time to plan the most luxurious vacation ever because you know this fact: this has to be the best trip of my life. You search out the best restaurants, hotels, spas, and excursions. And your inner critic is all for it, giving you the freedom to do your research because it knows what you're after. A sexy honeymoon. Fitness, for whatever reason, is made up mostly of the Land of the Lost people, everyone stumbling around confused as to how this new world works, grabbing at the first opportunity that promises an easy way out — lose 20lbs in 5 days? Sign me up! It all sounds good, but before we get underway, we’re already looking for the quickest way out because we don’t know what we’re really after, and we don’t know how to stick with something we don’t know. Capisce?

https://medium.com/project-slim-waistline/how-you-plan-a-trip-of-a-lifetime-should-be-the-same-way-you-plan-your-workouts-ffe22619bfd5

['Am Costanzo']

2020-12-12 14:03:02.381000+00:00

['Self', 'Motivation', 'Wellness', 'Fitness', 'Life']

Sports Viewership Is Soaring: What is Sports Industry Doing to Ensure Unparalleled Growth. 7 Sports Industry Trends

Sports viewership is soaring, and revenue is growing faster than some countries’ GDP, making it a $700 billion-dollar global industry. What makes the sports industry so successful? This is the result of sports business adapting to modern challenges, trends, and audiences — embracing digitalization, big data, technology, and the newest research in many disciplines, including psychology. It’s crucial to understand future changes in the industry in order to adapt, improve, and move forward. The first MIT Sports Entrepreneurship Bootcamp in cooperation with WHU — Otto Beisheim School of Management sponsored by DFL Bundesliga and Sporttotal was held at the state of the art TSG Hoffenheim’s PreZero Arena not only offered the opportunity to dig deeper into the fascinating sports business growth insights but also us as humans. Here are the seven most important current sports industry trends: 1.FOCUS. Clear philosophy (to win or to earn) for on-field and off-field activities. According to Ben Shields, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the sports business strategies fall into two categories: for on-the-field operations, the key question to answer is “how do we help to win”; for off-the-field solutions, the question is “how do we help to earn money.” For example, German Bundesliga has built itself to be one of the most powerful media companies. Distilling a clear philosophy for off-field activities strengthens the organization and helps it become distinctive and unbeatable. Ben Shields, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management 2. SCALABLE DIRECTION. Elite teams are creating scalable & transferable business models by focusing on fans. Sports teams — especially German elite teams — are discovering that their players are not the center of attention — their fans are. Players come and go, get injured, games are won and lost — a lot of success factors depend on pure luck. The business problem that requires a solution is how to make fans come to games no matter who plays. “Fans are the stars of the show. Leagues and teams are going directly to them now,” explained Ben Shields, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Teams are learning to discover the engine that drives business. For example, sports teams are creating their business plans based on enhancing their community’s participation in sports and growing fans’ loyalty to the club instead of focusing on athletes. Big data, also used in sports, help gain clarity and deeper perspectives. 3. SMART DATA — Only transferring big data into smart data helps achieve meaningful results. Big data is essential in today’s sports industry. From wearables that track runner’s movements to trackers in hockey pucks or basketball nets, fan engagement charts, ticket sales, and sponsorship behaviors — it all comes down to huge amounts of data that has to be put in context. However, big data is not always interpreted in the right way. Sascha L. Schmidt, Director, Center for Sports and Management at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management “Big data, big words, little action. We need to transform big data into smart data,” explained Sascha L. Schmidt, Director, Center for Sports and Management at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management. As companies are priding themselves in having collected big data and promoting it as their competitive advantage, only very few know how to use that data to have meaningful results. The interpretation of this data is the fundamental step into turning it into smart data that can help an athlete, a team, and sports business. By correctly analyzing the tremendous amount of data, teams can understand how to keep players healthy, create strategies to win, deliver excitement to fans and profitable exposure to sponsors. 4. PERSONALIZATION. Personalization of game experiences. The days when enjoying the game meant only sitting in the stadium or in front of the screen are over. The fans want to engage with their favorite teams, follow their adored players into the stadium, and share special moments with the world. Personalization is one of the most important methods used by the sports industry to make the game experience better for everyone. There are services offering camera angles with zoomed-in views meant for mobile devices, and the NBA now offers live on-screen group chats with celeb influencers, in-depth analytics and so on. Moving forward, there will be services designed to let fans engage with the content, even more, using personalized camera angles, gamification, etc. The personalization method is also helping with athletes’ health, scouting, company’s employee’s career paths and so on. Christian Seifert, CEO of DFL GmbH 5. BREAKING LIMITS. Breaking limits by promoting human & technology interaction. Technological innovations have become one of the most important pieces of athlete development. Data analysis may help optimize player’s performance as well as determine the risk of trauma, leading to a 30 percent reduction in player injuries. Dr. Brett Kirby, Lead Physiologist of Next Generation Research in Nike Sport Research Lab, has been working on Nike’s Breaking2 attempt to break a marathon run in less than two hours. The meticulous data was used to select a fitting athlete and create a tailored training course. The experiment ended in a history-making run: on October 12th of 2019, the Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge finished the 42.2 km distance in a fascinating 1:59:40 time, becoming the first athlete to run a marathon in under two hours. 6. DRIVING CHANGE. Instilling systematic structures of change for future-readiness. For a long time, sports were considered to be a hobby, no one was taking sports business seriously. Those who saw the major changes in media, technologies and people’s lifestyles could predict the sports business growth and take advantage of it. Erdin Beshimov, Lecturer and Director, MIT Bootcamps “On the surface, we see only certain events, but underneath there are patterns of change and systematic structures that are driving those events. If you understand systematic structures, you don’t need to wait for events to happen. You become the driving force of global change,” explained Erdin Beshimov, Lecturer and Director, MIT Bootcamps on the transforming changes of the sports industry. Therefore, it’s advisable not to get attached to one worldview or one idea. The biggest problem is when sports entrepreneurs are getting attached to their business idea believing that it is their golden ticket to make a significant difference and fearing that a new idea will never come again. The instant habit of attachment to familiar paralyzes the opportunity for better options to reveal themselves and create constant possibilities to be at the forefront of endemic and inevitable changes. 7. REDUCING PERSONAL BIASES. Experienced support helps eliminate personal biases that stand on the way to greatness. Dr. Peter Gorlich, Managing Director at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, the premier league football club “I am the one who makes the most mistakes in the organization — this is why I have a separate department that helps me fix those failures,” openly admitted Dr. Peter Gorlich, Managing Director at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, the premier league football club. According to the researcher Tim Rees, ongoing support of friends and family may be one of the crucial elements for an athlete’s performance. For his study, Rees used a sample of high-level professional golf players and found that stressors were associated with worse performance, whereas athletes that received social support performed significantly better. As we aim to achieve the highest goals in sports, we encounter bigger challenges than ever before. The fear of failing and the consequences of bad decisions dramatically increase with every step and the support of the right people becomes essential. Inga Stasiulionytė, Olympian, head of the MIT Sports Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, founders coach and Silke Mayer, President of Dirk Nowitzki Foundation

https://medium.com/ofounders/sports-viewership-is-soaring-what-is-sports-industry-doing-to-ensure-unparalleled-growth-7-trends-e7e8c16d8a48

['Inga Stasiulionyte']

2020-01-29 09:42:31.315000+00:00

['Coaching', 'Sports', 'Startup', 'Sports Business', 'Entrepreneurship']

Fear and Loathing in Entrepreneurial Journalism: The First Steps

My project has been around since 2013, but the mission of transforming it into an actual business brings me a great amount of fear. Thinking like an entrepreneur is a practical, down-to-earth mode of seeing the world. You have to build something that is both likable and profitable. We are so used to hearing stories about geniuses that magically invent a smashing product — that changes the world—but we rarely (if ever) hear about the actual effort put into it. This is the scary part. When I created Me Explica, an explanatory news website/platform, I managed to attract some attention. People thought it was interesting that there was someone trying to simplify what was on newspapers, news sites, social media, everywhere. Mind you that Vox did not exist at that time: it was founded in 2014. My site was really something new. I had an idea—a pretty good one, although not revolutionary— that was it. With no business training whatsoever, I got stuck and could not figure out how to capitalize on what I had created. Vox came along and got noticed in Brazil, and traditional media outlets started to do the same thing I was doing — with far greater reach, resources, and profit. Well, maybe not profit, but with a business model (or something like that). One outlet even tried to steal the name "Me Explica," but I have a copyright lawyer. The excitement about what I was doing eventually wore off and I had to face reality: I had not and could not create a business with the resources that were available to me. In Brazil, we have entrepreneurial journalists, but there is nowhere you can turn to if you need the training to become one. So here I am, in New York City, taking part in a program that will teach me the skills I sorely need to transform that old idea into a sustainable business. I should be happy, right? Well, I am, but I am also very afraid. Being an entrepreneurial journalist means that you have joined a group of very bright and dedicated people in the world that are working their asses off to create ways for journalism to survive. It is a challenge that entails learning about what people want and need, how money flows, what a good business looks like, and how promising ideas failed. It means giving up the notion that all it takes to succeed is having your heart in the right place and a song in your head. Not a song, an idea. This is scary because, in general, journalists have not been challenged to think about what they are doing. We assume that our articles and investigations are serving the general interest, democracy, and freedom of expression. But are these pieces actually reaching people? Or have we relied on an outdated model for news delivery (and news making)? My first answer is yes, we have. To try to build something new and relevant, it will be necessary for us to reach out to our consumers and ask: what do you want from us? How can we better serve you? For me, this is particularly scary because journalists are not taught to think like that. Giving the audience what it wants means resorting to sensationalism, puff pieces, and pandering. It means being populistic. Maybe there's a gray area. Being an entrepreneurial journalist means tossing all assumptions aside and listening. And, with a better sense of what it looks like in the real world, acting strategically to bring news to the people. The program has just started and I hope this fear of the unknown will soon reveal itself as an executable plan of action. That's what we are here for.

https://medium.com/journalism-innovation/fear-and-loathing-in-entrepreneurial-journalism-the-first-steps-aa69b14701ed

['Diogo A. Rodriguez']

2019-02-18 03:45:44.386000+00:00

['Media', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Journalism', 'Brazil']

Data Science Helps Sustainability in These 6 Awesome Ways

1: Climate Change Prediction The easiest way for machine learning and statistics to help climate change is by aiding prediction. Climate prediction reporting, weather models, and various other models are built using historical data and as many parts of our environment have been measured over a period of time, data exists for us to run models on. The reports from these experiments are vital for various governments, charities and non-profits to best allocate resources so it’s imperative that the results are accurate. Data Science and Machine Learning specifically aim to model the mean and variance (amongst other things), so over the past 10 years as computational power and data storage/recording techniques have improved, there’s been a flood of new information about the environment. 2: Renewable Energy Optimisation Solar, Wind and Water energies are fantastic options for renewable energies. They’re not costly and also not very difficult to harness. Using a number of data science techniques, different algorithms can be implemented so that processing a huge amount of data is easy and can lead to insights that can really make an impact on achieving sustainability goals. Different Solar, Hydro and Wind Power Plants have been set up throughout the world and using data science, these plants are monitored and operated. Bearing this in mind, the cost of producing renewable electricity is becoming cheaper every year and its only time for the optimisation models to prefer renewable energy over traditional sources. 3: Carbon Emission Measurement Managing the amount of carbon a company or entity produces is a big issue. Firstly, it’s near impossible to measure it exactly (where do you draw the line?) but also, what constitutes your responsibility. If you take the tube to work, should you offset the carbon produced there, or, should the tube operator? A number of data science methods exist now which help in this endeavour. The systems can now implement carbon trackers which gathers data on the amount of carbon emission from different factories. Now any data you collect in this space will be slightly noisy so various methods exist that try to model the correct distribution and then aim to minimise the amount being produced. 4: Water Conservation Despite the earth being mostly water, the amount we can actively drink and use is significantly less so we need to focus on the conservation of water. However, it’s apparent that capitalist ideals often don’t fall in line with what society needs. Take the example of Avocados in Mexico. This ‘green gold’ requires a significant amount of fresh water and as such, farmers provide this. However, the towns near these farms end up going through periods of drought: farmers prefer their crops to be watered rather than other humans. OK maybe that’s a bit facetious but the point stands — sustainable water provisions need to be more widely available and that’s where Data Science can come in. A study has shown that an average American Household consumes about 320 gallons of water per day. Using Smart Irrigation System, enabled by data science techniques, can save up to 8800 gallons water per home per year. 5: Heat Energy Conservation NEST thermostats don’t just look cool — they offer a service to consumers that makes their lives both easier and more sustainable. These thermostats are expensive but the use of Smart Thermostats can reduce minimum 10% energy on heating and 15% energy on cooling. If that’s not a fantastic use of Data Science; I’m not sure what is. 6: Extreme Weather Forecasting and Preventive Measures Extreme weather forecasting is notoriously difficult. Often, these events are mathematically so unlikely but even then, they occur in new ways that catches everyone off guard. Given that, the use of data from highly affected areas can be used to model the boundaries within which extreme weather occurs. Is it dependent on X or Y? The awesome thing is that now, we spend so much time measuring various parts of the environmental ecosystem that our understanding of what drives these events improves every day. This technology, as you guessed, can save thousands of lives (easily). As an example, the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms have been using GAN’s (General Adversarial Network) to model what it would look like if severe weather storms effected previously ‘safe’ areas.

https://medium.com/swlh/data-science-helps-sustainability-in-these-6-awesome-ways-2b5253e8aa42

['Mohammad Ahmad']

2020-11-29 19:52:54.913000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Environment', 'Technology', 'Tech', 'Sustainability']

10 Best Big Data and Hadoop Tutorials, Books, and Courses to learn in 2021

10 Best Big Data and Hadoop Tutorials, Books, and Courses to learn in 2021 javinpaul Follow Sep 15 · 7 min read image_credit — Udemy Hello guys, if you are looking to learn Big Data and Hadoop, and looking for some excellent books, courses, and tutorials to start with, then you have come to the right place. In the past have shared some free Big Data and Hadoop Courses and the best Big Data Courses and In this article, I am going to share some of the best resources to learn Big Data and Hadoop, including tutorials, books, and online courses. You can use these resources to learn both Big Data in general and Hadoop in particular at a time and place convenient to you. Best Big Data and Hadoop Books, Courses, and Tutorials So, what are we waiting for, let’s dive into the best books, courses, and tutorials to learn Big Data and Hadoop in-depth? Here is the list of the best online resources to learn Big Data: 1. The Ultimate Hands-On Hadoop (udemy.com) An excellent course to learn Hadoop online. It’s very comprehensive and covers Hadoop, MapReduce, HDFS, Spark, Pig, Hive, HBase, MongoDB, Cassandra, Flume — the list goes on! Over 25 technologies. This is one of the best Big Data and Hadoop course on Udemy, created by Frank Kane, this course is really the ultimate tutorial for learning Hadoop in depth. If you can pick just one course from this list, choose this one. It’s not free but the worth of its price and you can get in just $10 on Udemy sales which happens every now and then. Here is the link to join this course — The Ultimate Hands-On Hadoop

https://medium.com/javarevisited/10-best-big-data-and-hadoop-tutorials-books-and-courses-to-learn-in-2020-aaca8cfccb80

[]

2020-12-14 06:39:53.342000+00:00

['Big Data', 'Books', 'Hadoop', 'Tutorial', 'Data Science']

How to get started with Machine Learning in about 10 minutes

Python Machine Learning Projects Of course, reading and studying alone will not bring you where you need to go. You need actual practice. As I said on my blog, learning the tools is pointless if you do not jump into the data. And so, I introduce you to a place where you can find Python Machine Learning Projects easily. Courtesy of Kaggle.com Kaggle is a platform where you can dive directly into the data. You’ll solve projects and get really good at Machine Learning. Something that might make you more interested in it: the Machine Learning competitions it holds may give a prize as big as $100,000. And you might want to try your luck. Haha. But, the most important thing is not the money — it is really a place where you can find Machine Learning with Python Projects. There are lots of projects you can try. But if you are a newbie, and I assume you are, you will want to join this competition. Here’s an example project that we’ll use in the below tutorial: Yes, the infamous Titanic. A tragic disaster in 1912, that took the lives of 1502 people from 2224 passengers and crew. This Kaggle competition (or I can say tutorial) gives you the real data about the disaster. And your task is to explain the data so that you can predict whether a personal survived or not during the incident. Machine Learning with Python Tutorial Before going deep into the data of the Titanic, let’s install some tools you need. Of course, Python. You need to install it first from the Python offfical website. You need to install version 3.6+ to keep up to date with the libraries. After that, you need to install all the libraries via Python pip. Pip should be installed automatically with the distribution of Python you just downloaded. Then install the things you need via pip. Open your terminal, command line, or Powershell, and write the following: pip install numpy pip install pandas pip install matplotlib pip install seaborn pip install scikit-learn pip install jupyter Well, everything looks good. But wait, what is jupyter? Jupyter stands for Julia, Python, and R, hence Jupytr. But it’s an odd combo of words, so they changed it into just Jupyter. It is a famous notebook where you can write Python code interactively. Just type jupyter notebook in your terminal and you will open a browser page like this: Jupyter Notebook Write the code inside the green rectangle and you can write and evaluate Python code interactively. Now you have installed all the tools. Let’s get going! Data Exploration The first step is to explore the data. You need to download the data from the Titanic page in Kaggle. Then put the extracted data inside a folder where you start your Jupyter notebook. Then import the necessary libraries: import numpy as np import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import seaborn as sns import warnings warnings.filterwarnings('ignore') %matplotlib inline Then load the data: train_df=pd.read_csv("train.csv") train_df.head() You will see something like this: That is our data. It has the following columns: PassengerId, the identifier of the passenger Survived, whether he/she survived or not Pclass, the class of the service, maybe 1 is economy, 2 is business, and 3 is first class Name, the name of the passenger Sex Age Sibsp, or siblings and spouses, number of siblings and spouses on board Parch, or parents and children, number of them on board Ticket, ticket detail Cabin, their cabin. NaN means unknown Embarked, the origin of embarkation, S for Southampton, Q for Queenstown, C for Cherbourg While exploring data, we often find missing data. Let’s see them: def missingdata(data): total = data.isnull().sum().sort_values(ascending = False) percent = (data.isnull().sum()/data.isnull().count()*100).sort_values(ascending = False) ms=pd.concat([total, percent], axis=1, keys=['Total', 'Percent']) ms= ms[ms["Percent"] > 0] f,ax =plt.subplots(figsize=(8,6)) plt.xticks(rotation='90') fig=sns.barplot(ms.index, ms["Percent"],color="green",alpha=0.8) plt.xlabel('Features', fontsize=15) plt.ylabel('Percent of missing values', fontsize=15) plt.title('Percent missing data by feature', fontsize=15) return ms missingdata(train_df) We will see a result like this: The cabin, age, and embarked data has some missing values. And cabin information is largely missing. We need to do something about them. This is what we call Data Cleaning. Data Cleaning This is what we use 90% of the time. We will do Data Cleaning a lot for every single Machine Learning project. When the data is clean, we can easily jump ahead to the next step without worrying about anything. The most common technique in Data Cleaning is filling missing data. You can fill the data missing with Mode, Mean, or Median. There is no absolute rule on these choices — you can try to choose one after another and see the performance. But, for a rule of thumb, you can only use mode for categorized data, and you can use median or mean for continuous data. So let’s fill the embarkation data with Mode and the Age data with median. train_df['Embarked'].fillna(train_df['Embarked'].mode()[0], inplace = True) train_df['Age'].fillna(train_df['Age'].median(), inplace = True) The next important technique is to just remove the data, especially for largely missing data. Let’s do it for the cabin data. drop_column = ['Cabin'] train_df.drop(drop_column, axis=1, inplace = True) Now we can check the data we have cleaned. print('check the nan value in train data') print(train_df.isnull().sum()) Perfect! No missing data found. Means the data has been cleaned.

https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-get-started-with-machine-learning-in-less-than-10-minutes-b5ea68462d23

['Tirmidzi Faizal Aflahi']

2019-06-05 02:36:23.568000+00:00

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

Why I Am Never Retiring

Do We Really Want to Stop Working? To me, retirement conjures up images of cruising around in a Hawaiian shirt, shifting between knitting projects, poker tournaments with friends, and hours upon hours of daytime TV. That might be fun for a week — maybe two. But just farting around like that for fifteen to twenty years? Not my idea of a good time. In all seriousness, though, I understand craving freedom from the daily grind — especially years and years of it. But when we finally escape the routine of working for a paycheck, what comes next? Well, hopefully, lots of time and ample health for pursuing our hobbies. Or taking vacations to places we’ve been dying to see for years. Or visiting friends and family more often. Or doing volunteer work. You know — the kinds of things that give our lives meaning that we don’t always have enough time to do in our busy, workaday lives. But consider also what you get from working and having an occupation. What does your career give you? Maybe it’s a sense of purpose or fulfillment — or, if the work itself isn’t anything special, you’ve probably at least made some friends or found a sense of community among the people you work with. For the sake of argument, let’s say you work with a bunch of insufferable jerks at a job you despise. You may be literally counting the days until you’re done. But your job still lends structure to your day and provides a concrete thing for you to get up and do in the morning. That in itself can be valuable. When you stop working, you give all of that up. Your days will be wide open, and you’ll need to create the structure that your work once gave you. The whole way of life that you’ve been used to will disappear — and it’ll take some time for you to adapt. Having an occupation also engages and strengthens the neural networks in our brain and nervous system. There’s research showing that when we stop working, we lose many of the neural connections that we aren’t using anymore, and our cognitive functions start to deteriorate. We might be able to slow this decline by choosing meaningful activities to replace our work — but the key is that we need to stay engaged with something, or else we start to waste away. Other studies have shown that we are happiest when we have a few free hours each day — no more or less than that. Having too little free time can lead us down the road to burnout, but having too much free time is just as detrimental to our well-being. Personally, I don’t see myself wanting to stop working. Admittedly, I’m lucky to be able to say that I do get purpose and fulfillment from my work. But even if I didn’t, I still think I’d want to have odd jobs as a senior citizen so that I’d have something to get out of the house and do — an outlet for my time and energy. Or maybe I’d try my hand at a different kind of business. Maybe I’d open a little breakfast diner and serve up greasy eggs and hash browns to my patrons as I chat them up and refill their coffees. Who knows? I don’t know what I’d do. But I wouldn’t do nothing. The thought of having nothing to do, nothing to strive for, and nowhere to be depresses me beyond words.

https://medium.com/curious/why-i-am-never-retiring-597fdae2d12

['Amber Carlson']

2020-12-24 22:47:22.674000+00:00

['Life', 'Wellness', 'Psychology', 'Life Lessons', 'Retirement']

Achieving exactly-once processing with Flink and InfluxDB

We have talked a lot about data on the Streamroot tech blog, and for good reason. Powering millions of video sessions online every day, we have a lot of material to work with. Delivering video content — especially with hybrid CDN and peer-to-peer systems — is a highly complex undertaking that requires us to continuously collect and process feedback events to gauge its performance and make sure everything is working properly. As we discussed in previous posts, Streamroot uses its data pipeline to AB test new features, to understand the effects of external factors on our delivery solution, and to improve the overall quality of our products. It is also used to expose certain traffic data to our customers via our graphic user interface, which is what I’d like to talk about today. Put simply, we send feedback metrics as json payloads to a Kafka broker from where various consumers process those metrics for different purposes. One of our critical consumers is responsible for feeding our customer-facing time series database InfluxDB. This database is accessed by our customer dashboard, which displays a variety of peer-to-peer delivery and quality of service data for the broadcaster’s streams, platforms, ISPs, etc. In this post I’d like to focus on this critical consumer whose job is to pre-aggregate time series data (hence its name, the aggregator) so that InfluxDB isn’t overloaded and can respond smoothly. This aggregator is actually a Flink job that: Reads data from Kafka Groups data by some key of interest (for instance a stream id) Aggregates metrics for each key (for instance counting unique users on a given stream) Does all that on time windows of 5 minutes Sends the results to InfluxDB Flink has really good built-in windowing and aggregation support so most steps weren’t too difficult to implement. However, the last step — that is, sending results to InfluxDB — was tricky to get right as many things can go wrong. For instance, InfluxDB can be down, a Flink machine can fail, etc. And since the resulting data will be exposed to our customers we needed to have strong guarantees such as exactly-once processing and no data loss. To ensure that stateful computations are resilient, Flink provides a checkpoint based-mechanism. At regular intervals, it snapshots the states of the stateful components of a given job and saves it to an external backend (for instance files on a distributed storage such as HDFS). As an end user, what we have to do is essentially implement interfaces for our custom components and Flink will do the rest! In this post we’ll implement a fully resilient InfluxDB sink (Flink’s abstraction for outputting data); we’ll start with a bare-bones implementation and improve it gradually. All of the code is available on Github and the tests can be run locally through a docker-compose setup that is also provided (it will spin up Flink and InfluxDB). Basic implementation — InfluxSinkV1 First of all, let’s write a simple implementation of a sink writing data points to InfluxDB. A sink class must implement SinkFunction<IN> ; however, here we choose to extend RichSinkFunction<IN> . The reason for this is that the rich version provides a public void open(...) method that can be used to initialize any kind of complex/non-serializable state. In this case, the transient InfluxDB client is not Serializable which is why we have to create it through this open(...) method. The main sink method invoke(...) is quite simple: it takes a Point and uses the influx client to send it. Let’s check that everything is working correctly with a quick unit test: Assuming that you have docker-compose running, as mentioned in the introduction, you can run this test with: Everything looks good! However, there’s an issue. Writing data points one by one, every time that invoke(...) is called is quite inefficient for InfluxDB. So let's see what we can do about that. Adding batching support — InfluxSinkV2 It turns out that the influx client has built-in support for batching! To use it all we need to do is to call enableBatch(...) as follows: As for the unit test, we need to change it a bit to take into account the batching duration: You can test it with: But is it really that simple to handle batching properly? What happens if a failure occurs between two batches? It’s very likely that data points being buffered will get lost as Flink has no idea that we are buffering them. So let’s see how we can handle a stateful sink properly with Flink. Fully resilient implementation — InfluxSinkV3 To achieve resiliency we need to have the following mechanisms in place: Explicitly handle buffered points (leverage Flink’s checkpoints) Control batches of data points sent to InfluxDB Retry in case of failure (stop processing until recovery succeeds) Explicitly handle buffered points Flink’s documentation mentions managed operator states for handling this situation. This mechanism requires us to implement CheckpointedFunction to leverage Flink's checkpoints and thus be able to snapshot/recover the data points that are being buffered and batch sent. Here are the two new methods that we will have to implement: So we have to buffer points within our sink implementation. Let’s do that with a simple List<Point> : In this new version our sink’s main method invoke(...) is now simply buffering points up to batchSize : Let’s implement snapshotState(...) and initializeState(...) to respectively backup and restore bufferedPoints through checkpointedState : Control batches of data points sent to InfluxDB Since we stopped relying on the influx client’s built-in batching feature, we will have to roll our own. Luckily we can leverage OkHttpClient , on top of which influx client is built, to achieve batching. To this end, we’ll start by defining a custom InfluxBatchService as follows: Now let’s come back to the mysterious batchWrite(bufferedPoints) that we skipped earlier in the new invoke(...) method and let's see how it uses our new InfluxBatchService : It simply iterates through data points and call lineProtocol to format them to the InfluxDB protocol before batch sending them with a POST request. There has been a lot of changes since InfluxSinkV1 already, but are we done? Not yet! With our new batching approach we're flushing data points only when our buffer is full. What if we buffer points that are the result of 10-minute windowed aggregations and that our buffer isn't full? Well, they won't be flushed until the next 10-minute window ... Not very nice. So let’s add a final piece to our custom batching implementation: a time limit. The idea is that we want to flush our buffered point as soon as one of the two following conditions is met: either the batchSize is reached, or batchFreqMs has elapsed. To achieve that we can make use of a SingleThreadScheduledExecutor that will regularly flush the buffered points. To make sure that everything is thread-safe we can simply add synchronized to all methods interacting with bufferedPoints . Let’s not forget to clean up the scheduled executor when the sink is being stopped: With this new mechanism, invoke(...) will also have to make use of flushPoints() : And now flushPoints() is responsible for triggering batchWrite(bufferedPoints) and clearing the buffer: We finally have a complete batching mechanism in place! But as you can see from the last line in flushPoints() , we're not doing much when an exception occurs... This brings us to our last feature: proper error handling and retries. Retry in case of failure The last piece of this InfluxSinkV3 is the retry mechanism that will make use of the Failsafe library. What we want is to stop processing when an InfluxDB related error occurs, and have a retry policy to help recover the situation. Let’s define a retry policy that will just keep on retrying to send the current batch of data at regular intervals: Now we wrap our call to batchWrite(bufferedPoints) with a Failsafe.with(retryPolicy) call. It will handle IOException s and errors returned by InfluxDB by retrying infinitely. Last but not least, let’s modify batchWrite(...) so that it can be used by Failsafe functions. Let's also keep track of the number of retries. And at last we’re all done! For completeness sake here is the final version of InfluxSinkV3 . Testing resiliency Let’s summarize all the features we implemented: Back up and restore state with bufferedPoints / checkpointedState / Custom InfluxBatchService with configurable flushing of batchSize / batchFreqMs with configurable flushing of / Error handling and retries with Failsafe Our features look good; now we’d like to verify them with some unit tests. Let’s at least check that our retry mechanism is working well. For that we’ll use a library called NetCrusher that can simulate a network failure. Let's modify our test setup so as to proxy connections to our local InfluxDB through a TcpCrusher so that we can stop and restart TCP traffic at will. Our new resiliency test looks like this: Again assuming that you have docker-compose running, you can run this test with: The test should pass and we can see in the output that it has retried many times before successfully sending the current batch: Improving usability with a builder — InfluxSinkV4 We ended up with a lot of parameters for our InfluxSink which make it a bit cumbersome to use. A simple solution for that is to use a builder to set up all parameters in a clean and fluent fashion. Let’s see it in action with a complete Flink job that will: Read and parse integer data points from a network socket Sum data over 10-second windows Send the results to a local InfluxDB (running in docker) Complete instructions to run this job can be found on Github. Conclusion It’s been quite a journey from the naive InfluxSinkV1 to the fully resilient InfluxSinkV4 but it was worth it! We’ve addressed efficiency issues and stateful computation pitfalls when working with Flink and InfluxDB: Batch write data points to InfluxDB Regularly back up buffered points with Flink’s checkpoints Handle errors with a fine-tuned retry policy

https://medium.com/streamroot-developers-blog/achieving-exactly-once-processing-with-flink-and-influxdb-3b876915f8cd

['Leroux Romain']

2019-06-05 17:03:59.349000+00:00

['Flink', 'Distributed Systems', 'Influxdb', 'Java', 'Big Data']

What Are The 8 Steps You Should Take To Have A Highly Motivated Team

You want a highly motivated team? Well, then you need to walk the walk, and talk the talk every single day. It’s easy to motivated and enthusiastic when things are going well. The true test of a CEO is how the CEO reacts when things aren’t going well. Picture: Depositphotos For example, you just lost your largest customer. You’re still motivated. Or maybe your latest funding round fell through at the worst possible moment. You’re still motivated. You can’t ever give in to despair as CEO. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is watching how you deal with adversity. You have to stay positive and motivated regardless of how bad the situation might truly be. Your team’s motivation starts with you and your actions. These actions include: A. You need to hire a fanatical team. Specifically, you want a team that lives and breathes what your company is working on. You want a team with a great attitude. In short, you want fanatics. Fanatics keep going even when times get rough. Fanatics don’t care if the odds are against them. Fanatics don’t need you to motivate them because they motivate themselves. Then… B. Give your team exciting work to do. You’ve got a great team. The easiest way to keep your team motivated is give your team exciting work to do. In fact, you should do more than give your team exciting work. You should give your team more authority, more autonomy, and more decision-making ability. Then… C. You need to Be transparent with your team. You’re going to have missteps and mistakes. That’s a given. How you handle the missteps and the mistakes makes all the difference. The natural reaction is to downplay these mistakes. Don’t do that. Use your missteps and mistakes as a way to show your humility. Your openness and honesty will build trust. And, because you have a great team, you’ll find your team will become your partner in helping solve the problems you encounter building your company. Then… D. You want to Create a great work environment. — No brilliant jerks. Do you want to demotivate your team? Then hire that brilliant jerk you’re thinking about hiring. I’ve been there. I know the allure of hiring brilliant jerks is tough to ignore. You’re having trouble finding top talent. I get it. Then you get a resume. The engineer’s background looks promising. Then you interview the engineer. Sure enough, the engineer is technically brilliant, but you can see there might be interpersonal issues. You go ahead and hire the engineer. Then the complaints start coming in. “We’ll make it work,” you say to yourself. Then one of your best engineers quits. Then another. Don’t make the mistake I made. Keep morale high by keeping the brilliant jerks out of your company. Then… E. You want to Hold your team accountable. Great employees want to be held accountable. Now, I’m not suggesting you micromanage your team. In fact, I’m a big believer in giving your team as much autonomy as possible. I am suggesting you set goals and objectives for your team, and hold them (and you) accountable for meeting the goals. Then… F. You want to Use Kaizen, the theory of small incremental goals. Since we’re on the subject of goals, use Kaizen to build momentum in your organization. Kaizen is the concept of using small, incremental goals to achieve larger goals. I’m not saying you shouldn’t set your big, hairy audacious goal. I am saying that setting small, achievable incremental goals is the way to get to your big goal. For example, let’s say you have a long-term goal of $10M/Year in revenue. You should absolutely set that as a long-term goal. And you should set your monthly goals accordingly. Maybe your first month’s revenue goal is $1,000. Then set your first monthly goal at $1,000. And then make sure you hit the goal! Then you do it again the next month, and you keep doing meeting your short-term goals every month. That’s how you build momentum, and that’s how you keep your team motivated on the road to your long-term big hairy audacious goal. Then… G. Set rewards for hitting your goals — celebrate your successes. Building a company should be fun for you and your team. Yes, there’s a lot of grinding you have to do, but there’s no reason you can’t celebrate your success along the way. Give your team a reward when you hit certain objectives. For example, you just launched your first product, on schedule no less, so you give your team free movie tickets. You had your first $1,000 month of revenue (remember the goals are small at the start), so you give each member of your team a $10 Starbucks gift card. You just got to cash flow positive (this is a huge goal for any startup), you give every member of your team a $1,000 bonus and throw a blowout party that, momentarily, sets you in the red. You get the idea. Make the goals and the rewards consistent with your company. And make the rewards somewhat frequent like at least once every quarter. That way you keep the dopamine coming. Then… H. You absolutely, positively want to get rid of the bad apples. I already told you to stay away from brilliant jerks. But what should you do about the employees that aren’t working out even if they are a founder? Everyone’s watching what you’re going to do when someone isn’t working out. And the longer you wait to take action, the worse things will get. Your team will lose motivation if there are employees that are disruptive or just not performing well. You have no choice if you want a motivated team but to take action and remove the underperforming employees. The reaction when you do take action is always the same. “What took you so long?” Your employees always know who needs to go long before you do. As you can see, there’s a lot you can do to keep your team motivated. You can hire a great team, give your team exciting work, be transparent, create a great work environment, hold your team accountable, use Kaizen, set rewards for hitting your goals, and get rid of your bad apples. Finally remember, most importantly, that your team’s motivation starts with you and your actions. For more, read: http://www.brettjfox.com/why-your-startup-culture-is-the-key-to-your-companys-success/

https://brett-j-fox.medium.com/what-are-the-8-steps-you-should-take-to-have-a-highly-motivated-team-3eca050b348c

['Brett Fox']

2019-10-09 00:39:58.574000+00:00

['Technology', 'Management', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Venture Capital']

Progressive Enhancement with WebGL and React

These days, it’s very common to mix creative technologies like WebGL with traditional HTML/CSS when building websites. In this post, I will try to outline how we at 14islands approach this trend to ensure the content is still available to as many visitors as possible. All of these techniques were used on our new company website 14islands.com. Thoughts on accessibility Go back just a few years and responsive web design, progressive enhancement and mobile-first were all the rage. Here’s the thing — they are still valid practices, and just because we have access to new shiny toys doesn’t mean we get a free pass to only build websites for desktop screens and the latest browser technology. Assumptions made by most WebGL websites Everybody loves a cool loading animation — Having a preloader allows the browser to download all assets before showing the website. Large images are known to cause lag as they are uploaded to the GPU for the first time. For this reason, it’s common for WebGL apps to preload and pre-render textures before showing the website. Everybody loves to scroll — Having only one long page means the WebGL canvas can create all objects for the whole website on page load (during the preloader animation), and there are no requests to load new pages or new assets to worry about. Everybody has a modern browser — Building for advanced browsers and adding polyfills for missing features. Some websites even lock the user out if the browser lacks support for a modern feature. Because of these assumptions, it’s common to create and position all content using Javascript (e.g. https://github.com/react-spring/react-three-flex). Sometimes, text content is rendered only as WebGL textures, which makes the content essentially images. In reality, it depends™️ If you’re doing a cool campaign site or interactive experience, many of these assumptions might be correct. However, for many projects, having quick access to the content, a high level of accessibility and SEO are equally important to delivering a memorable creative experience. Not all websites can afford a long loading animation. Visitors have short attention spans, and it can impact conversion rates and sales. A progressively enhanced experience We usually use Gatsby.js on our projects. It’s fast, has a good ecosystem of plugins to speed up common tasks, and offers server-side rendering out of the box. As any fan of static websites knows, server-side rendering is great for SEO and accessibility since the content can be accessed without executing a bunch of Javascript. We also want to make sure text content is available even if WebGL isn’t supported. In fact, our javascript heavy React and WebGL website even renders without Javascript support: 😲 With Javascript enabled but no WebGL support, you get some fancier hover states and the ability to play our showreel in a cool dark cinema mode: 😎🍿 And if the browser supports WebGL, you get all the gooey blob magic: 🎩🐇 When feature detection falls short Unfortunately, some browsers will gladly say that they support WebGL, but they are simply too weak to run the code with good performance. There’s no good way to feature-detect powerful devices. Some try to measure the frame rate over time or use a combination of other features, but none of them are very robust. In our case, we simply base it on screen size and assume that a larger screen corresponds to a more powerful device (which may or may not be true). React & Three.js We like to use the Three.js WebGL library. The pace at which it updates and introduces breaking changes is mind-blowing. Any third-party react library that tries to provide a 1:1 mapping of Three.js objects to React components will probably not be maintained for long. react-three-fiber takes a different approach by hooking into the React reconciler and proxies JSX tags to Three.js objects. It doesn't even care what version of Three we are using, which makes it future proof. Having said that, there are definitely pitfalls and enough performance gotchas for a future blog post. 😬 Enhancing with WebGL We created a framework on top of react-three-fiber that enables us to add WebGL functionality to any existing React component on the website. At the core we have one global shared WebGL canvas that stays in between page loads: export const wrapRootElement = ({ element }) => ( <> {element} <GlobalCanvas/> </> ) Each UI component can opt-in to use this global canvas using a custom useCanvas() hook: const Image = () => { const ref = useRef() // add webgl component to global canvas while mounted useCanvas(<WebGlImage image={ref} />) return <img ref={ref} src={...} /> } When the <Image> component mounts, it tells the global canvas to render <WebGlImage> . It will also automatically remove the WebGL mesh and clean up resources when it unmounts. This keeps our code modular and hides the details of the WebGL implementation from regular UI components. The <WebGlImage> is responsible for hiding the normal image element and draw a WebGL mesh in its place. Syncing DOM content with WebGL canvas 🔮 A big challenge is to sync the fixed canvas elements with the scrollable HTML content. The technique we use largely follows an approach that tracks “proxy” elements in the normal page flow and updates the WebGL scene positions to match them. Since Javascript is inevitably slower than native scrolling, this can make the WebGL scene feel laggy. The most common way to fix this is to have some easing on the WebGL position update. Here’s an example of a WebGL image with easing next to some normal content. Notice how the image all of a sudden feels more smooth than the DOM content because of the easing: To fix this, most websites also introduce a virtual scroll on the HTML content with a matching easing function. This makes the whole page move with the same feeling, and while it’s for sure less performant than a native scroll, it still perceived as being smoother when all items move at the same speed: A virtual scroll means that we move all HTML content with Javascript, and it’s a known source of many accessibility issues. For some projects, it’s worth the trade-off, while other projects might require a higher level of accessibility. There are many libraries for virtual/smooth scrolling available. We suggest you pick one which at least retains the browser’s native scrollbar. Closing thoughts 💡 To be honest, if load time and maximum device support is your highest priority, you shouldn’t use WebGL at all. But for some websites (like ours), there is a good middle ground. By adding WebGL to existing HTML elements on the page, we can split up the work better. Some developers can focus on building a solid responsive website layout, and the WebGL can be added on top in a second iteration. Of course, everything needs to be thoroughly tested together, as there are many performance pitfalls when using this technique. There are downsides to this approach. Loading large images might cause scroll jank, and it becomes harder to achieve smooth page transitions when everything isn’t preloaded. Accessibility also takes a hit due to having virtual scrolling of the DOM. Let us know if you have ideas on how to improve this even further, we’d love to hear more how others approach this!

https://medium.com/14islands/progressive-enhancement-with-webgl-and-react-71cd19e66d4

['David Lindkvist']

2020-09-10 12:12:53.525000+00:00

['Development', 'React', 'HTML', 'Webgl', 'Threejs']

Doing Pride Right

It seems that every June we see more and more brands joining in on Pride Month fun and jumping in to bed with the LGBTQ+ community by adorning their products and ads with rainbow flags. There’s something be said for the symbolic value of such openness especially to a community marginalized for so long. But can you blame folks for being just a tad skeptical? Are all of these brands really down for the cause, or do they just see Pride as an easy marketing ploy? Are they only in it for the celebration, or do they recognize the distance the LGBTQ+ community still has to go to achieve true equality? Is there a more effective way to spend the money they’re using on Pride activations to create a greater impact? To answer some of these questions, we asked members of our studio to share their favorite examples of brands doing right by Pride with thoughtful and meaningful interactions and experiences. What stood out were the brands that made inclusiveness a priority and developed ideas to help solve real issues facing the community. Squarespace Squarespace is an accessible platform for any and all to create websites — online portfolios, blogs, e-commerce stores and similar. In partnership with photographer Ryan Pfluger, they created a microsite amplifying the voices of five LGBTQIA+ community members who happen to be Squarespace customers. Most brands trample all over Pride month, plastering their temporarily rainbow-ized logo over the community’s experiences. Squarespace actually built something by-and-for the community. Exposure to different perspectives is vital for inclusivity. -Wednesday Krus, Designer MasterCard MasterCard is probably the most successful and buzz-worthy example this year, allowing trans and nonbinary members to use their chosen names on their credit cards. They are calling this their True Name initiative. To promote this message, they partnered with the NYC Commission on Human Rights to transform the West Village’s iconic Gay Street sign into Acceptance Street. Mastercard’s Gay Street signage is one example of an LGBTQ+ activation that goes beyond a rainbow logo — being mindful of the cultural and iconic value the small stretch of road in NYC’s West Village represents. By first understanding the ever-evolving LGBTQ+ culture and the need for broader identity recognition among the public, the symbolic nature of expanding Gay Street’s signage to make it more relevant to the current climate signals the brand’s willingness to listen, learn and use their global platform to take a risk on communities who still aren’t accepted by the mainstream. -Matty Brownell, Designer LinkNYC & Tinder For Pride Month, New York-based creatives Isabel Castillo Guijarro and Ben Wagner collaborated to curate the works of 25 LGBTQIA+ designers, illustrators, & artists, which will take over the screens of LinkNYC’s Wi-Fi kiosks all over the city. Their self-initiated project not only amplifies NYC Pride but also unlocks the potential of public spaces as a platform for activist art — something we’re deeply interested in as a design studio. I’m looking forward to spotting them in the wild! Tinder hosted a one-day-only event right by our office in the Flatiron District inviting people to go down its giant rainbow slide and “slide into their Senator’s DMs” asking for Equality Act support, simultaneously triggering a donation to the Human Rights Campaign. Pride Month has been incorporated into corporate logos galore, in what is basically rainbow-washing. But Tinder’s activation stands out because the brand encourages civic engagement by pushing people to contact their senators, driving meaningful change while doing what they do best (slide into DMs). -Shivani Gorle, Strategist Gap Last week on World Refugee Day I attended an event and conversation panel presented by Rainbow Railroad, an organization committed to helping LGBT people “escape state-sponsored violence” and learned about the experiences of LGBT refugees. A sponsor for the event was the Gap, and I learned the real changes they have been implementing in their company. Not only do their advertisements feature LGBTQ+ people during Pride, but the Gap has made a real effort to hire LGBTQ+ people as employees. I appreciate that the company goes beyond the typical June celebration and makes a real effort of inclusivity. -Katie Williams, Account Manager Levi’s Most know Levi’s as a brand deeply rooted in its values, history and heritage. As pretty much the only brand I trust in jeans, I was pleased to recently learn that its history includes being a long-standing ally to the LGBTQ community. In an article written about their more than 15-piece 2019 Pride collection, from which 100% of the profits will go to advocacy group OutRight Action International, I found out that in 1992 Levi’s became the first Fortune 500 company to provide same-sex partner benefits. Knowing that the fight for equality is far from over, I was both surprised and happy that such a big brand that I personally support stood up in solidarity at time when few other brands would, and they continue to do so year after year as some continue to take a seat. -Dylan Stiga, Strategist Corona I love the Corona ads that have been running on LinkNYC kiosks around the city for the past few weeks. They get a little cheesy with the line of rainbow-hued lime wedges in front of a bottle of beer, but it’s the ad’s tagline that really gets me: Tops Off. Bottoms Up. The bar is low here, but there’s something vaguely subversive about it. The desexualization of queer people in mainstream media is well-documented: plenty of folks are happy to accept more LGBTQ representation so long as we’re presented as unthreatening and inoffensive. Directly or even obliquely dealing with actual sex is still largely taboo because it makes some people squeamish. So the pretty direct reference to the top/bottom labels caught me off guard, in a good way, when I saw the ad. Is it a big risk? Not really; it’s still coded language. But it’s farther than a lot of companies are willing to go. -Brendan Crain, Director of Content US Chamber of Commerce Having worked with a lot of chambers of commerce and business organizations, I know how challenging it can be for them to represent their communities effectively while still trying to help drive progress. It’s a tough position to navigate. So I think it’s extremely encouraging to see the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the largest business advocacy groups in the country, finally taking a stand this year on LGBTQ+ rights and voicing its unequivocal support for the Equality Act. While some feel it’s long overdue, I’m with Equality Ohio director Alana Jochum, who told Bloomberg Businessweek “it may be game changing to help others to realize this really is an economic issue.” — Jessie McGuire, Managing Director ___________________________________________________________________ Pride is an amazing time for members of the LGBTQ+ community and their allies to celebrate, reflect and build. It’s also an opportunity for brands to do the same, as long as there is proper intent behind their actions. But more importantly, brands should see Pride as the kick-off to start conversations and create impact around issues facing the community. The issues affecting the daily lives of LGBTQ+ members aren’t confined to the month of June, and neither should a brand’s support and solidarity.

https://medium.com/thoughtmatter/doing-pride-right-6eb30bb7151d

[]

2019-07-02 18:28:37.046000+00:00

['Branding', 'Thinking', 'Marketing', 'Design', 'LGBTQ']

Little Bets: How Tiny Actions Can Lead to Huge Payoffs

Photo by Cleyton Ewerton on Unsplash There’s one variable self-improvement gurus fail to highlight when it comes to being successful. No matter how hard you work, how smart you are, or who you know, there’s one factor to your success that’s out of your control. Luck. Actually, luck puts too much context on what can simply be called chance. Chance is a constant in all of our lives. Think about how chance influences many huge aspects of your life — who your parents are, who you decide to marry, the career you choose, etc. You have some control and agency over your life and the decisions you make, but chance is the missing puzzle piece in the totality of your in life. So, how do you deal with chance? If success is partially due to luck, how do you know which moves to make and whether or not those moves even contributed to your success at all? How do you deal with failure? How do you know when to hold em or when to fold ‘em? There’s a strategy you can use that can lead to huge payoffs without risking too much in the process. I’m going to teach you that strategy. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about why you have such a hard time dealing with chance in the first place. Why You Struggle With Uncertainty “We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.” Nassim Taleb The mismatch between academia and reality causes you to view success and failure in the wrong way. In school, you’re taught to look at success in a deterministic way. Study for the test. The test has ‘x’ amount of questions. Get a certain percentage of questions right and you’re guaranteed a certain grade. In the real world, the set of ‘questions’ is infinite. You can think of each decision you make as an answer to a question in the ‘test’ of life. The difference between school and the real world, however, is that the value of getting a single question right or the downside for getting it wrong varies widely. If you took a test and got one answer out of 20 correct, you’d have an abysmal result. In real life, getting one decision right out of 20 can make you wildly successful. because certain decisions you make can have a much higher payoff if you get them right. In school, you’re taught to think in a linear way. You have a predictable route to success based on an incremental pattern you can easily observe. If you want to be successful in the real world, begin to think in terms of risk and payoff. Adopt the approach of a savvy gambler. This will be difficult because of the way you’ve been conditioned to think about outcomes, too. Annie Duke, an ex-professional poker player who wrote the best selling book Thinking in Bets, talks about the idea of ‘resulting’ a process where people judge you on the results of your decisions rather than the quality of the decisions themselves: “Outcomes don’t tell us what’s our fault and what isn’t, what we should take credit for and what we shouldn’t. Unlike in chess, we can’t simply work backward from the quality of the outcome to determine the quality of our beliefs or decisions. This makes learning from outcomes a pretty haphazard process.” Nobody pats you on the back for coming up with a good idea and executing the right strategy, only to fail. Some ‘successful’ people take a subpar approach and end up wildly successful due to chance. Survivorship bias causes us to give credit to the people at the top of their field without acknowledging that equally smart and capable people tried the same strategies and failed. Combine all these factors and you can see why people have such a hard time dealing with risk. You’re conditioned to fear uncertainty and you’re trained to look for predictable routes of success. On top of that, society misunderstands how success and failure actually work. Fortunately, there’s a process you can use to increase your odds of success, aim for high payoffs, and avoid catastrophic failure. Little Bets: The Simple and Safe Strategy to Massive Success “Two fundamental advantages of the little bets approach are highlighted in the research of Professor Saras Sarasvathy: that it enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain […]Seasoned entrepreneurs, she emphasizes, will tend to determine in advance what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains.” — Peter Sims You live in an amazing time to be alive because you can execute this strategy over and over again for little to no cost until it works. The strategy is simple — make little bets that don’t set you up for ruin. You look for places to make bets that have high upside and a low downside. Instead of placing big bets on your future, bets that could wipe you out, you make smart strategic moves and iterate over time. If you wanted to start a business a few decades ago, you’d have to deal with higher risks. You probably had to get a loan from the bank for startup capital. You’d need to have a physical storefront or warehouse, carry inventory before selling it, and hire staff. In this scenario, you don’t get unlimited chances to start a successful business. Henry Ford famously got his company to take off after two prior failures — he probably wouldn’t have gotten a fourth chance. These days, you’re in the perfect environment to create businesses and projects that have low capital requirements, so low that you can keep trying them over and over again. Some examples of little bets you can make are: Creating content — I write something new almost every day. I put the same amount of effort into each post, but some just take off. Usually, the ones that take off make up for the ones that flop. And even if they all flopped, I’d lose out on nothing but time. Most content creation platforms like YouTube, WordPress, Medium, etc. are either free or affordable for anyone with an internet connection and a computer. — I write something new almost every day. I put the same amount of effort into each post, but some just take off. Usually, the ones that take off make up for the ones that flop. And even if they all flopped, I’d lose out on nothing but time. Most content creation platforms like YouTube, WordPress, Medium, etc. are either free or affordable for anyone with an internet connection and a computer. Minimum viable product — With access to affordable freelancers and manufacturers around the world, you can come up with a concept for a product for cheap, or even no money, test it out to see if it works first, then add more inventory if there’s demand. With the ‘no money’ example, you can run ads for a product idea and see if people click on it. — With access to affordable freelancers and manufacturers around the world, you can come up with a concept for a product for cheap, or even no money, test it out to see if it works first, then add more inventory if there’s demand. With the ‘no money’ example, you can run ads for a product idea and see if people click on it. Low (or no) inventory businesses — With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to carry any inventory to sell products. You can think of each promotion you do to promote these products as a little bet. There are several businesses where you can make money simply by being the middle man, e.g., wholesaling real estate or craigslist flipping. You can think of this concept of little bets in a ton of different contexts. You can attempt to find success in any area of life in a way that protects your downside and maximizes your upside. To be successful and find a strategy that pays off, you need to change the way you think about risk. Change Your Relationship With Risk “If you do things that are safe but feel risky, you gain a significant advantage in the marketplace.” Taylor Pearson It’s interesting. The societal narrative about risk is often the opposite of the truth. You’re told that starting a business is ‘risky’, but as I’ve just shown you, there are low-cost ways to start a business. Many of the things you’re told are safe are sitting on top of dynamite piles of risk: Homeownership — Lose your job or watch the economy tank and all of a sudden this ‘safe investment’ becomes very risky, especially if you bought ‘too much house’ — Lose your job or watch the economy tank and all of a sudden this ‘safe investment’ becomes very risky, especially if you bought ‘too much house’ Employment — Most people choose employment because it provides a higher measure of security than working for yourself. On the surface, this is true. But, as we can all see, job security is a myth. And unfortunately, many people build bad habits because they never think they’re going to lose their jobs. So when the tide goes out, they’re swimming naked. Nassim Taleb says it well “The three most harmful addictions are heroin carbohydrates and a monthly salary.” — Most people choose employment because it provides a higher measure of security than working for yourself. On the surface, this is true. But, as we can all see, job security is a myth. And unfortunately, many people build bad habits because they never think they’re going to lose their jobs. So when the tide goes out, they’re swimming naked. Nassim Taleb says it well “The three most harmful addictions are heroin carbohydrates and a monthly salary.” Education — Let’s just say giving an 18-year-old an $100,000 loan for any sort of education doesn’t always lead to success. You’re told education is a safe path to a better life but is being leveraged for six-figures with shrinking traditional employment prospects even worth it at this point? In general, you’re taught this narrative about avoiding risk that actually ends up putting you in a ton of risk. Who’s living a riskier lifestyle? An employee with tons of debt or a debt-free entrepreneur or freelancer with an ‘unreliable’ income? You’d have to judge case by case, but often engaging in riskier activities creates a level of security because you develop a higher level of awareness. Who’s more likely to be more careful with their finances? Someone with a regular paycheck or someone with an income that varies? Who’s more likely to stay on top of the latest trends in their industry? Someone who gets paid the same amount no matter what or someone who’s incentivized to innovate and continue to make little bets seeking a higher payoff? Who’s more alive? The little bet lifestyle gives you the excitement of uncertainty while reducing the chance of experiencing the pain of catastrophic failure. Also, you can build a bridge to this lifestyle in a pretty safe way. How to Properly Execute the Strategy “The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.” — James Altucher The gameplan for success in 2020 and beyond is simple. Keep your job. Keep the stable areas of your life stable and make little bets in your spare time. Maybe you start a side business or become a content creator. Maybe you take a small portion of your money on the side an invest it. Not even for financial gain, but for fun, you can try all these little projects in your spare time. Once you find something that sticks, grow it until you feel safe enough to make the leap. I worked on my writing for five years while maintaining a full-time job. When I went full-time, I had a cash reserve and had been making more money with my side hustle than my job for six months straight. Do I still face risks? Absolutely. Is there a scenario where I could get wiped out? Sure, there always is. But I continue to plan my life in a way where the bets I make are never too major. I wouldn’t pour all my savings into a new business strategy. When it comes to business strategies, I make a bet small enough that I’m willing to lose every penny, e.g., spending roughly $10,000 to create my last book. I’m constantly on my toes, which keeps me from slacking off. Each day I create something new, something with a chance to take off. You can build a life like this. You can do it slowly without ever having to risk your livelihood. If you don’t have a lot of money, you can always bet with your time. Learning something new is a little bet you can make in your future. We live in an era where you can create a new life by messing around on your smartphone. There are so many opportunities for you to make a splash by simply dipping your toe in the water. To develop the attitude you need to take these small risks, consider the fact that you’re always risking something anyway. Always. You’re making a bet regardless of what you do. Inaction is a bet. You’re betting that your future will get better, or at least not get worse if you decide to keep doing the same things you’re doing. Often, you act in a way that makes the bet you’ll see tomorrow, which is never guaranteed. Jim Rohn says it well “the minute you were born, things got risky.” You might as well aim for a life that gives you the best odds for success and see what happens next.

https://medium.com/publishous/little-bets-how-tiny-actions-can-lead-to-huge-payoffs-20ea4eabcb60

['Ayodeji Awosika']

2020-10-01 21:37:50.481000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Self Improvement']

Keep Your Medium Stories Alive

Do your old Medium articles slip off the paywall and into the realm of the unread? No one wants dead articles — which is why people used to give them a new heading and image, and republish them (a no-no according to Medium guidelines). But there is an easy way to keep them breathing! You may have noticed writers popping links into their articles, like this: I hear you — it can be an irritation having links within a story — but it is an alternative way to revive your old articles and give your readers something to click on if they love what you have to say and want more of it. Place a couple at the end if you don’t like the idea interrupting your story’s flow. I wouldn’t place more than three (unless you’re doing particular collection for an article — like my Ready to Publish? 14 Articles to help you through the process). One to two relevant article links are usually enough to give readers something interesting.

https://medium.com/inspired-writer/keep-your-medium-stories-alive-52ba69ba1d38

['Kelly Eden']

2019-11-27 09:16:33.875000+00:00

['Self', 'Medium', 'Writing Tips', 'Productivity', 'Writing']

COVID-19: Using AI to Predict Stock Market Movement

Written July 2020 With the spread of COVID-19, global stock markets have declined significantly. U.S indices including the S&P 500, Dow Jones and NASDAQ have dropped close to 30%, bringing us to values which were previously observed in 2017. GSPC, DJI, IXIC Index Values (Yahoo Finance, 2020/03/31) From prior crashes we know that large drops in the stock market results in excellent investment opportunities. But how do we know the right time to take a shot and buy some stocks 🤔? This past week, I challenged myself to train an AI to predict the S&P 500’s movement based on data from past market crashes. If you are interested in the process/programming behind the AI, I will be breaking it down in the next section. Otherwise, you can skip to the end to see the final result! Programming the AI (Python) GitHub: https://github.com/Vedant-Gupta523/corona-ai The Data Set The data I used consists of the S&P 500 index value for the following crashes: The Wall Street Crash (1929) The 73–74 Market Crash (1973) Black Monday (1987) The Dot Com Bubble (2000) The Financial Crisis (2007) COVID-19 (2020) For each of the above, I used values starting from 100 days before the pre-crash peak up until the index regained its initial value (the current value in the case of COVID-19). Objective: Train a Support Vector Regressor (SVR) to predict the next index value given the 30 prior values. Pre-processing The Data I start by importing all of the libraries I will use. I then create a Pandas DataFrame out of my data set. # Importing libraries import numpy as np import pandas as pd from sklearn.preprocessing import MinMaxScaler from sklearn.svm import SVR import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # Get data from csv file dataset = pd.read_csv("data.csv") A good machine learning practice is to scale the data we train on. This is because normalization helps weigh all of our features equally. In some cases, it can also help speed up the calculations our model performs! With the data from the DataFrame I create two lists, a scaled data set for training our model and an unscaled data set for graphing/visualization. Additionally, I break the scaled data set into our training data (all crashes excluding COVID-19) and our test data (COVID-19). # Create scaled/unscaled datasets, divide into train and test data scaler = MinMaxScaler(feature_range=(0,1)) scaled_dataset = [] unscaled_dataset = [] for crash in list(dataset)[1:]: data = dataset.filter([crash]) scaled_dataset.append(scaler.fit_transform((data.values))) unscaled_dataset.append(data.values) for i in range(len(scaled_dataset)): scaled_dataset[i] = np.reshape(list(filter(lambda x: x==x, scaled_dataset[i])), (len(list(filter(lambda x: x==x, scaled_dataset[i]))), 1)) unscaled_dataset[i] = np.reshape(list(filter(lambda x: x==x, unscaled_dataset[i])), (len(list(filter(lambda x: x==x, unscaled_dataset[i]))), 1)) train_data = scaled_dataset[:-1] test_data = scaled_dataset[-1] unscaled_test_data = unscaled_dataset[-1] Next we separate our independent variable (prior 30 index values) from our dependent variable (next day’s index value). This is done for both our training set and our test set. # Number of prior values (can be changed) batch_size = 30 # Split data x_train = [] x_test = [] y_train = [] y_unscaled_test = [] y_scaled_test = [] for crash in train_data: for i in range(batch_size, len(crash)): x_train.append(crash[i-batch_size:i, 0]) y_train.append(crash[i, 0]) for i in range(batch_size, len(test_data)): x_test.append(test_data[i-batch_size:i, 0]) y_unscaled_test.append(unscaled_test_data[i, 0]) y_scaled_test.append(test_data[i, 0]) Finally, we train our SVR on the training data and make predictions 😎. # Fitting SVR to the dataset regressor = SVR(kernel = "rbf") regressor.fit(x_train, y_train) # Making predictions on test data y_pred = [] for test_case in x_test: y_pred.append(regressor.predict([test_case])) y_pred = scaler.inverse_transform(y_pred) # Making predictions beyond known data x_future_test = x_test[-1][1:] x_future_test = [np.append(x_future_test, y_scaled_test[-1])] future_preds = [] for i in range(future_prediction_size): future_preds.append(regressor.predict([x_future_test[i]])) x_future_test.append(np.append(x_future_test[i][1:], future_preds[i])) future_preds = scaler.inverse_transform(future_preds) Bonus: Graph the results # Graphing predictions plt.title("COVID-19 Crash Analysis") plt.xlabel("Days from Crash") plt.ylabel("S&P 500") plt.plot([x for x in range(-99, len(y_pred) - 99)], y_pred, color = "orange") plt.plot([x for x in range(-99, len(y_pred) - 99)], y_unscaled_test, linewidth=1) plt.plot([x for x in range(len(y_pred) - 99, len(y_pred) - 99 + future_prediction_size)] , future_preds, color = "red") plt.show() The Results Blue — Actual values, Orange — Predicted values based on prior 30 actual values, Red — Predicted values based on prior 30 predicted values After running the code, the AI outputs the above graph with a one month prediction. It suggests that the S&P 500 index will rise for the next two weeks and then decline the following two weeks. Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that these predictions will be accurate or even close. Making predictions with AI has both pros and cons: Pros AI is excellent at finding mathematical correlations in previous events and applying them to predict a new situation. Cons Stock prices are affected by countless factors which are next to impossible to predict with AI. The further into the future we try to predict, the more inaccurate our predictions become. This is because predictions that are farther out start to be based on previously predicted values. Conclusion Despite staying at home, this past week has been an amazing learning experience. I look forward to taking up more programming projects while I have all this extra time on my hands 🙌. If you have any questions or you just want to say hello, feel free to email me at vedantgupta523@gmail.com 😃.

https://vedantgupta523.medium.com/predicting-the-coronavirus-market-crash-using-ai-7b98aed917fb

['Vedant Gupta']

2020-12-02 00:49:43.836000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Support Vector Regression', 'Coronavirus', 'Stock Market', 'Predictive Analytics']

One Sentence Is All You Need to Get Started

One Sentence Is All You Need to Get Started Expert running tips that will also improve your writing. Photo by Kristian Egelund on Unsplash As my profile states I walk or run 10,000 steps everyday. That’s about 7.5 km. And you know what? I never feel like doing those 10,000 steps. Whether you are a professional athlete or a newbie, there are plenty of days you won’t feel like working out. Life gets busy. The weather is poor. The desire to flop down on a sofa and watch Netflix is strong. The trick is to go even when you don’t feel like it. Don’t sit around waiting for the moment when you feel like going for a run, because that moment may never come. A run is always worth it. Running fills a person with a sense of “I can do anything.” Knowing this I block the voice in my head that wants me to stay exactly where I am. That lazy voice is not my friend. Because I run and write I can’t help but notice similarities between the two. 1) Getting started is hard When you come home from a run you’ll be glad you didn’t listen to the lazy voice inside your head. “I really regret that run.” — Said no one. Ever. The same goes for writing. The first few sentences are the hardest, especially if you’re a procrastinator like me. Write something instead of nothing. Get it down. Write one true sentence. You might change it later, but it’s a start. Once you are warmed up both writing and running are easier. 2) Persistence is key Seven years ago I trained for my first marathon. It was a life changing experience and I have not stopped running since. I know how hard it is to regain fitness when I stop. This motivates me to keep up workouts. The key for success at anything is to do it on a regular basis and set incremental goals. Writing is no exception. It is only with practice that your talent amplifies and grows. You build up momentum and readership overtime. Every run and story is important. 3) Results vary Some days I have incredible workouts. Other days I am slow and lethargic. To stay motivated I shake it up. I enjoy running trails, swimming, yoga and hiking. I vary the intensity. I know I risk burn out or injury otherwise. When it comes to writing, some days I am inspired and words flow. Other days less so. On days when I need a break from long-form stories, I turn to poetry and haiku. It flexes a different muscle and refreshes my writing mojo. Don’t give up simply because you have an off day (or week or month). 4) Scheduling helps Like most people I struggle with conflicting priorities. When demands overwhelm I often get things done through sheer bloody mindedness. I exercise and write on certain days of the week and if that means I wake up earlier than the sparrows so be it. Scheduling helps manifest your goals. 5) Comparison has it uses. When I race my goal is to improve my personal best. I follow the pacemakers to make sure I am running at the desired speed. Running alongside a pacer helps me realize my goals. Likewise with writing there are certain people you keep an eye on. They are like pacemakers in a race. Their achievements inspire and spur you on to greater things. Sometimes you can’t keep up the pace and that’s okay. We all have different starting lines when it comes to writing. The key is to give it your best shot and never stop trying to improve. 6) Anyone can do it. You don’t have to be good at running to lay claim to the title of “runner”. All you need is to put on running shoes and head out the door. If you’ve overcome that lazy voice in your head you’re already a winner! By the same token, it doesn’t matter if you are not very good at writing yet. Writing is a disciplined craft. Like any craft it is only with practice your talent amplifies and grows. If there are naysayers in your life, ignore them. The last word Running and writing might appear as polar extremes. One requires a high level of physical exertion; the other is a cerebral activity. Yet running is as much of a disciple as writing. You do both whether you feel like it or not. You make them part of your daily routine. Some days you’ll want to quit writing or running but you don’t. You dig deep. You commit. You continue until one day they are part of your identity. When that lazy voice tries to dissuade you, remember this: One step. One sentence. That’s all you need to get started. Thank you for reading!

https://medium.com/mindset-matters/one-sentence-is-all-you-need-to-get-started-7721aef6b7d9

['Lucy King']

2019-08-24 05:29:38.994000+00:00

['Productivity', 'Running', 'Fitness', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement']

What My 2020 Startup Experience Taught Me About Work (and Life)

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash I’ve always hated riding rollercoasters. I hate the exact moment when the cart pauses at the peak of the ride — I would cover my eyes and wait for the ride to be over. I don’t mind the height or speed, but I hate not knowing what turn or slope will come next. The anticipation made me anxious. Reflecting on the last ten months of my startup experience, I am still in disbelief at how unpredictable the journey was so far. The rapid pace and the constant firefighting came as no surprise — I knew these coming in. But what shocked me was how my mindset changed. I am no longer anxious about the unpredictability of work or the impossibility of anticipating change. I now uncover my eyes, raise my arms, and just lean into whatever direction the ride is headed. So, what’s changed? I did not gain clairvoyance overnight, nor did my experience allow me to anticipate the future better. I learned to think differently — to stop worrying about what’s ahead and just enjoy the ride. Here are my five lessons from 2020 that drove this mindset shift: I don’t know what’s ahead, but I know I’ll figure it out. As an analytical person, I find spreadsheets and quantitative analysis comforting. But as good as spreadsheets are as a decision-making framework, no amount of statistical work can predict uncertainty. Work and life don’t work in averages, the ‘seasonality’ of our good and bad moments doesn’t manifest according to a historical schedule. I cannot model unexpected surprises, so I no longer stress myself out trying to analyze them. Rather, I simply believe that I (with the amazing people I work with) can figure out whatever problem comes along — and that is enough certainty for me. With that faith, the discount rate of my projections becomes zero. When the cart is burning, put out the closest fires first. In the early days of my career, a key success metric was clearing out my inbox. Productivity was the sole determinant of job progression. But as the scope of my responsibilities widened, this method was no longer feasible. Solving big challenges requires more than productivity. It requires the clarity to prioritize key issues, and the emotional maturity to acknowledge your finite capacity. When everything comes at you all at once, put out the biggest, closest fires first. Be willing to leave the rest of the fires for another time, or for other people. You only have one extinguisher. Problems are opportunities when flipped upside down. I struggled with my work-from-home setup the first few months — I was ill from extended screen time, and felt emotionally drained from the lack of human connection. But these challenges were also opportunities for new forms of personal and professional growth. I connected with many old friends all over the world (and made new ones), participated in remote global conferences, and freed up a significant time for reading and writing. While I deeply empathize with the mental health challenges that come with remote work and social distancing, lingering in misery has never been helpful for me. Instead, I found ways to turn these challenges into opportunities. Lean into the changes. My role changed many times the last six months, and I benefitted from the dynamic setup. Each new responsibility broadened my viewpoint of the business, and taught me what my strengths and weaknesses were. The changes made me nervous, of course. This constant shift contradicts my instinct to seek stability. Having new roles mean I’m starting from scratch — I need to develop a new set of skills and adapt to a new routine. But rather than feeling rattled, I was excited. The influence of these changes on my sense of self has largely to do with mindset. Instead of seeing these changes as disruptive, I leaned into these changes and saw them for what they were— a new realm of possibilities. Enjoy the ride and don’t throw up. Here’s my most crucial lesson: No matter how ambitious, noble, or world-changing your work is, no matter how many people’s livelihoods are at stake, the most important person in your journey is you. The time you allocate for your happiness and well-being does not compete with the time you spend fulfilling your purpose and mission. Rather, your happiness and well-being are pre-requisites to doing meaningful work. Your work (and life) is a rollercoaster, but it is your rollercoaster. If you are anxious and cover your eyes the entire time, then what’s the point of riding? Set the pace, height, and complexity that works for you. Find the setup that brings you joy and pushes you just beyond the edge of your comfort zone. And if you get dizzy, pause the ride. Get out and take a breather. Don’t make yourself miserable; don’t throw up. The ride of work and life is a thrill, but only if you go through it with your arms stretched out and your eyes wide open. Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/what-my-2020-startup-experience-taught-me-about-work-and-life-9331f8131f0

['Riche Lim']

2020-12-27 04:54:24.992000+00:00

['Work', 'Startup Lessons', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life']

You Didn’t Really Want Him. You Wanted to Be Him.

Use Your “Hurt Locker” as an Opportunity to Grow The problem with dating a “hurt locker” is that it’s mind-fuckery. One thing can lead to another and, before you know it, you’re psychologically intoxicated by a heavy cocktail of brain chemicals. All your past issues seem to snowball into one, coming at you at a dangerous speed. As the break-up unravels and reality kicks in, you feel like your existence is being dismantled. Something is broken inside, but you can’t pinpoint what. The truth you already know is: men and romantic relationships aren’t your answers — you are. But encountering your “hurt locker” is an incredible opportunity for you to learn about yourself and turn your life around. It’s what I did. I thought to myself: My “hurt locker” couldn’t give me what I needed — okay. But what is it that I really needed? Why was I so irrationally drawn to him? What did I value so highly in him that I tolerated his bad treatment of me? Why exactly did I value that? In my case, my attachment to him told me a few core things about myself: I valued hard work, but I didn’t think I was working hard enough. I was convinced that my emotional and introverted nature was holding me back (I was wrong), and I needed security. I idealised the guy who had nothing in common with me because I didn’t know how to love and value myself. It was the insight that led me to go to therapy and stop dating altogether. During 2019, I fought hard against my inner working and started to learn how to meet my own needs. I identified my values and took actions that aligned with those values. I embraced my core gifts and stopped looking at myself through the lens of others — It’s my life; I call the shots; I make it work. The process was slow and difficult, but it was essential. I felt like I was walking in the dark, but my gut told me that I was going the right way. It’s my life; I call the shots; I make it work. Soon, the light came, and guess what — it came from me. As I gave myself everything I’d been looking for in other people, I was able to see my “hurt locker” for exactly what he was: equally scared, broken, and lost, and definitely not a role model to measure myself against. Well, I could be wrong about him but, frankly, it’s none of my business. The point is, I looked at him then, not as a reflection of me, but as a separate person who, like everyone else, had something good and bad to learn from. In other words, I stopped objectifying him, and that’s when I was able to let go. As I got on with my blissful life, I naturally became indifferent to him. Meeting my “hurt locker” was a traumatising experience but, in hindsight, it gave me more than it ever took away from me. In fact, it gave me the rest of my life. For the first time, I stepped into my whole self and felt okay on my own. It closed all the wrong doors and opened so many new ones that were just right for me. Now that I’m happily engaged, I realise something significant. There’s a stark difference between the wrong people I dated and the man who is going to be my husband. I felt pulled towards the “hurt locker” and the guys before him because I hated myself and wanted a life different from mine. However, I chose my fiancé because I loved myself and I loved that he was similar to me.

https://medium.com/tinglymind/you-didnt-really-want-him-you-wanted-to-be-him-c29cf7acfc2a

['Ellen Nguyen']

2020-12-08 14:40:29.075000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Relationships', 'Love', 'Psychology', 'Dating']

Anger: Self-Discovery Card

Anger highlights boundaries and betrayal, and it points you back to your own worth. Anger is most powerful not when it is used to throw tantrums or burn others down, but when it is used to protect your worth and evolve your opinion of yourself. The heat of your anger doesn’t have to burn others. Instead, channel it to set fierce boundaries around what you will and will not tolerate and implement effective action. Let your anger fuel you to live in integrity with yourself and others. Let your anger remind you that you are not here to play small and let others shame you for being you, but to be yourself, fully alive. Let your anger highlight the ways you have been under-living your life, and let it fuel you to live your life as fully as possible.

https://medium.com/just-jordin/anger-self-discovery-card-3a6c8d20f036

['Jordin James']

2020-08-24 17:51:05.829000+00:00

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

Identifying Outliers — Part One

Pandas has quite a few handy methods to clean up messy data, like dropna,drop_duplicates, etc.. However, finding and removing outliers is one of those functions that we would like to have and still not exist yet. Here I would like to share with you how to do it step by step in details: The key to defining an outlier lays at the boundary we employed. Here I will give 3 different ways to define the boundary, namely, the Average mean, the Moving Average mean and the Exponential Weighted Moving Average mean. 1. Data preparation Here I used Apple’s 10-year stock history price and returns from Yahoo Finance as an example, of course, you can use any data. import pandas as pd import yfinance as yf import matplotlib.pyplot as plt plt.style.use('seaborn') plt.rcParams['figure.dpi'] = 300 df = yf.download('AAPL', start = '2000-01-01', end= '2010-12-31') As we only care about the returns, a new DataFrame (d1) is created to hold the adjusted price and returns. d1 = pd.DataFrame(df['Adj Close']) d1.rename(columns={'Adj Close':'adj_close'}, inplace=True) d1['simple_rtn']=d1.adj_close.pct_change() d1.head() 2. Using mean and standard deviation as the boundary. Calculate the mean and std of the simple_rtn: d1_mean = d1['simple_rtn'].agg(['mean', 'std']) If we use mean and one std as the boundary, the results will look like these: fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10,6)) d1['simple_rtn'].plot(label='simple_rtn', legend=True, ax = ax) plt.axhline(y=d1_mean.loc['mean'], c='r', label='mean') plt.axhline(y=d1_mean.loc['std'], c='c', linestyle='-.',label='std') plt.axhline(y=-d1_mean.loc['std'], c='c', linestyle='-.',label='std') plt.legend(loc='lower right') What happens if I use 3 times std instead? Looks good! Now is the time to look for those outliers: mu = d1_mean.loc['mean'] sigma = d1_mean.loc['std'] def get_outliers(df, mu=mu, sigma=sigma, n_sigmas=3): ''' df: the DataFrame mu: mean sigmas: std n_sigmas: number of std as boundary ''' x = df['simple_rtn'] mu = mu sigma = sigma if (x > mu+n_sigmas*sigma) | (x<mu-n_sigmas*sigma): return 1 else: return 0 After applied the rule get_outliers to the stock price return, a new column is created:

https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/identifying-outliers-part-one-c0a31d9faefa

['Ke Gui']

2020-10-28 11:02:29.811000+00:00

['Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Cleaning', 'Data Science', 'Stock Market']

Announcing a new Video Series: “An Introduction to Digital Analytics”

Announcing a new Video Series: “An Introduction to Digital Analytics” A journey about making digital analytics videos extremely useful Last week, we gave a presentation titled an “Introduction to Digital Analytics (And More)” to fellows at the Venture for America training camp. As we were preparing for the presentation, the idea came to me to make the presentation so well-designed and user friendly that the fellows could take the slides I used and present them to their future bosses, surely impressing the heck out of them. I communicated this idea to the fellows after the presentation and they were all are super thrilled about it. For this reason, we have decided to revisit the presentations we have given to the fellows in order to refine and redesign the elements. We’ll also film videos that serve as sample presentations for those slides. In addition to making slides designed well enough to be presented to their bosses (and yours), we are also going to attach worksheets, custom Google Analytics Dashboards, and other useful tools in order to make sure that you can use what we have presented in the day-to-day operations of your business. In order to get this done (and because we’re spending most of our time on development at the moment) we have decided to break up the presentation into 15–20 manageable pieces. We’ll perfect and release one piece a week. Hence, we are happy to announce our “Introduction to Digital Analytics” video series. Since this series covers pretty much the same content as our Google Analytics video series it will replace it. This series is going to be divided into four primary modules: Why is Digital Analytics Important — this section is geared towards convincing you and your boss that digital analytics is crucial for your business, B2C or B2B. An Introduction to the Customer Journey — this section offers you background on theories of the“customer journey”, and gives you an overview of popular analytics tools on the market . Introduction to Google Analytics — this section gives you an overview of how to setup Google Analytics, along with basic fundamentals of the tool such as metrics vs dimensions. Common Google Analytics Use Cases — this section shows you 5–6 common, and extremely useful Google Analytics analyses you can carry out to accomplish different goals. You can follow this video series in three ways: Subscribe to our medium publication analytics for humans Subscribe to our youtube channel Subscribe to our newsletter using the box below. The first part of this video series (due next week) is going to discuss why digital analytics is important for your business. Until then, I would like to say that I am extremely excited to create this series and hope it can provide you with some real value!

https://medium.com/analytics-for-humans/announcing-introduction-to-digital-analytics-video-series-f759f75fbd8f

['Bill Su']

2018-06-08 19:55:57.237000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Small Business', 'Digital Marketing', 'Google Analytics', 'Startup']

How ‘Breaking Up’ Apple and Amazon Might Actually Work

How ‘Breaking Up’ Apple and Amazon Might Actually Work A banking law from 1956 offers a realistic model for regulating dominant internet platforms Photo: Pool/Getty Images Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context. “Break up Big Tech” has become a rallying cry for some, especially on the left, who see the largest tech companies’ power as a threat to innovation, small business, and perhaps even democracy. The call made headlines last year when Elizabeth Warren, who was then a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, outlined an aggressive plan to do just that. And it drew fresh attention with last month’s widely publicized antitrust hearing, which featured the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. I wrote at the time about the parallels (and differences) between that hearing and the Big Tobacco hearings of the 1990s. Along the way, more moderate critics of the technology industry, along with its defenders, have tried to pump the brakes on the breakup train. “Breaking up big tech companies is the nuclear option,” Jeff Bercovici argued in Inc last year, in response to Warren’s proposal. “Why not try fixing what’s broken before pushing the button?” In January, a Wired op-ed’s headline implored, “Don’t Break Up Big Tech.” Author Zachary Karabell warned, “‘Break them up’ is an easy slogan, and an appealing one; but like so many easy things, it will solve little.” Some experts with impressive credentials agreed. “Just ‘break them up’ is an oversimplified sound bite, not a real policy that would restore competition in digital markets and benefit consumers,” wrote Fiona Scott Morton, a Yale economist who specializes in antitrust, in the Washington Post last year. (Only later did she disclose that she has a side gig as a paid adviser to Amazon and Apple.) What might not be obvious from this discourse is that there are ways to break up Big Tech that amount to both far more than a “sound bite” and far less than a “nuclear option” — and which have the potential to address specific competition concerns in a coherent and carefully targeted way. This week, the chair of the House antitrust subcommittee hinted that at least one of those might soon be in the offing. The Pattern The antitrust assault on Big Tech is taking shape. Bipartisan recommendations for antitrust action against the tech giants could come as soon as September , Rep. David Cicilline, D-MA, told Bloomberg on Wednesday. Cicilline chairs the House antitrust subcommittee that has conducted a year-long antitrust investigation, including last month’s high-profile antitrust hearing. That hearing was the sixth in the ongoing probe, which is expected to culminate in a report to Congress. , Rep. David Cicilline, D-MA, told Bloomberg on Wednesday. Cicilline chairs the House antitrust subcommittee that has conducted a year-long antitrust investigation, including last month’s high-profile antitrust hearing. That hearing was the sixth in the ongoing probe, which is expected to culminate in a report to Congress. In an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang, Cicilline got specific for the first time about what that report might say . The subcommittee is developing a “menu of options,” he said, that include updating old antitrust statutes aimed at oil and railroad monopolies; reforming federal antitrust agencies and making sure they have the resources to prosecute companies; and revitalizing private-sector enforcement. . The subcommittee is developing a “menu of options,” he said, that include updating old antitrust statutes aimed at oil and railroad monopolies; reforming federal antitrust agencies and making sure they have the resources to prosecute companies; and revitalizing private-sector enforcement. Most interestingly, he hinted at two potential pieces of legislation that would target the tech sector in particular . One would seek to enforce principles of portability and interoperability. The second, he said, would be more ambitious in scope: “a sort of Glass-Steagall of the internet, saying you can either be a platform or you can be a producer of goods and services. You cannot do both, because they’d be in conflict.” . One would seek to enforce principles of portability and interoperability. The second, he said, would be more ambitious in scope: “a sort of Glass-Steagall of the internet, saying you can either be a platform or you can be a producer of goods and services. You cannot do both, because they’d be in conflict.” The Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, required the separation of commercial banking from investment banking. It was crafted to address the conflicts of interest that arose when banks invested consumers’ assets in securities. The legislation divided financial institutions into investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and commercial banks such as Bank of America. Its 1999 repeal was cited by some economists as a precipitating factor in the 2008 financial crisis. A “Glass-Steagall of the internet,” in Cicilline’s analogy, would address the conflicts of interest that arise when companies that own dominant tech platforms also compete with the third parties who use those platforms . . For instance, Apple presumably would no longer be allowed to both control iOS and offer services such as Apple Music that go head-to-head on iOS with rivals such as Spotify. Amazon might no longer be allowed to produce its own lines of clothing and household goods to rival those of third-party sellers on its site. (Its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, has similar issues.) Google, perhaps, would have to give up on services such as Google Shopping, which allegedly benefits from high placement in its own search results. It’s less clear to me which of Facebook’s existing products would run afoul of it, if any. Likely, Facebook’s social networking dominance would be targeted through some of the other mechanisms Cicilline mentioned ; he specifically called its acquisition of Instagram “illegal.” ; he specifically called its acquisition of Instagram “illegal.” At the risk of getting wonky, an even better analogy than Glass-Steagall might be the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 , which banned banks from holding ownership stakes in non-banking industries. The concern was that bank holding companies could boost their own non-banking businesses over those of rivals with favorable loan terms, or nudge their loan clients to patronize their other businesses. That sounds a lot like how Apple, Amazon, and in some cases Google allegedly tilt their platforms to favor their own services. , which banned banks from holding ownership stakes in non-banking industries. The concern was that bank holding companies could boost their own non-banking businesses over those of rivals with favorable loan terms, or nudge their loan clients to patronize their other businesses. That sounds a lot like how Apple, Amazon, and in some cases Google allegedly tilt their platforms to favor their own services. If this sort of legislation came to pass, the result would be a form of “breaking up Big Tech,” as some of the giants would likely be required to sell off or shutter some of their business lines. It echoes at least one part of Warren’s plan, which called for “large tech platforms to be designated as ‘Platform Utilities’ and broken apart from any participant on that platform.” Yet it would likely leave intact the core of each business , and would not necessarily require the tortuous untangling of, say, Apple’s hardware products from iOS, or Amazon.com from Amazon Web Services, which seems to be what some opponents of breakups have in mind. No doubt the details would still be tricky and heavily litigated. But they’d be unlikely to cripple the tech giants in the ways that would leave them unable to compete globally with Chinese rivals, which is a fear that the U.S. tech companies have been busy stoking. , and would not necessarily require the tortuous untangling of, say, Apple’s hardware products from iOS, or Amazon.com from Amazon Web Services, which seems to be what some opponents of breakups have in mind. No doubt the details would still be tricky and heavily litigated. But they’d be unlikely to cripple the tech giants in the ways that would leave them unable to compete globally with Chinese rivals, which is a fear that the U.S. tech companies have been busy stoking. There are some persuasive arguments for going much farther than a Glass-Steagall or Bank Holding Company Act to rein in the internet’s behemoths. Longtime digital rights activist and blogger Cory Doctorow made the case for robust antitrust action in a new book published on OneZero this week , called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. The book is especially worth reading for anyone familiar with Shoshana Zuboff’s influential 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which Doctorow builds on and critiques. Zephyr Teachout’s book Break ’Em Up and Tim Wu’s book The Curse of Bigness are two other recent works that view size itself as the crux of the antitrust problem. , called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. The book is especially worth reading for anyone familiar with Shoshana Zuboff’s influential 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which Doctorow builds on and critiques. Zephyr Teachout’s book Break ’Em Up and Tim Wu’s book The Curse of Bigness are two other recent works that view size itself as the crux of the antitrust problem. But Cicilline’s comments to Bloomberg suggest that a full dismantling of Silicon Valley’s dominance is unlikely to be an outcome of the current investigation. That may disappoint critics such as Doctorow, Teachout, and Wu. At the same time, it should puncture the notion that breaking up Big Tech is something to be feared — at least, by anyone other than the tech giants themselves. Undercurrents Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time Threads of the Week

https://onezero.medium.com/how-breaking-up-apple-and-amazon-might-actually-work-8daceb3140ab

['Will Oremus']

2020-09-08 14:58:00.336000+00:00

['Pattern Matching', 'Apple', 'Amazon']

That Urge to Write- Hypergraphia

That Urge to Write- Hypergraphia That Weekend Page Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash He can see that the home is upside down, they both are working in the balcony garden, rearranging pots and potting new plants. I am not there with them I am sitting in my favourite place and writing this poem. Now that we have a balcony garden it’s a distraction for them just like poems are for me. When I am sad and tired with life I sit back and write and they dig and uproot, plant and water the plants. I see them trying to find solace in that earthy fragrance, for me after so many years it’s still poems. I think with time we all find that outlet for peace some do it with writing others with whatever makes them feel happy. In my family I have that strong urge to write anytime. When I am not writing I carry those words with me like those dense clouds which can rain down anytime. My loved ones know this, so they don’t stop me from wandering to those faraway lands whenever they see me sitting quietly in a corner and tapping away those stories nestled in my mind. Maybe they know they I am trying to be free from that mesh which has choked my brain nerves. Being a writer sometimes it’s suffocating to hold those words and when I fail to carry the weight of my thoughts. I crumble. That’s when poems happen on the page. The dust no one sees. I know how it feels to be empty again and wait for those dreams to talk to me. It’s not easy to stay with me, I am never the same. Sometimes there are dense clouds which I need to clear to see the clear sky other time there are raindrops which I need to hear. I change with the colours in the sky, my thoughts vary because of the light and when I write, I let it go. I don’t pause, I pick those tiny pebbles choked somewhere and let them drift. When I write I know I am trying to cross the bridge.

https://medium.com/scribe/that-urge-to-write-hypergraphia-c598ec4925fa

['Priyanka Srivastava']

2020-08-08 15:07:21.402000+00:00

['Prose', 'Writers On Writing', 'Nonfiction', 'This Happened To Me', 'Writing']

How To Be Vulnerable

How To Be Vulnerable It’s Time to Open Up Photo by Genessa Panainte on Unsplash I cry a lot. Nobody knows. Because I don’t want anyone to know. I don’t want anyone to comfort me. I don’t want anyone to console me. I don’t want anyone to touch me when I am sad. I like to feel sad. It reminds that I am still here. But it also f*cking hurts. I bury myself in work. I hibernate in an Internet cocoon. I lay comfortably behind a screen. I unravel. I stop myself from crying. But it all builds up. And one day the dam will break. I will like it when it does. I lose myself in fatherhood. I lose myself in loss. I lose myself in ego-spirals. I lose myself because of a broken world. Sometimes I want to lose myself. Sometimes it’s an excuse to hide. It is an excuse. But I don’t know what I’m scared of. Maybe I’m scared of dying. Maybe I’m scared of losing someone I can’t live without. Maybe I belong alone. Maybe I am unlovable. Maybe I use maybe as yet another excuse not to say yes to everything. I love myself more than I hate myself. I have no reason to hate myself, but still, some days I walk by the mirror and call myself a name. I don’t know why. I am objectively a good person, even to myself. I don’t know if I want to be more or less. Or to just disappear. I think about how I was holding my mother’s hand when she took her last breath. I was 20. I think about how I was holding my father’s hand when he took his last breath. I was 33. I wonder what I’d be like if they were still here. I wonder what my kids would be like with them in their lives. It’s easier for me to open up online. My friends don’t read this. I wouldn’t care if they did. They probably know all this. My oldest friends know me. They know me when I am pretending I am ok. I am not ok. I am rarely ok. But I am always stable. Being vulnerable feels good. But the Internet has made vulnerability a commodity. There are people on this site who use it as a crutch. As a content churn. That is really f*cking sad. And messed up. But it’s real. Sometimes I feel like I deserve bad karma. There is literally no reason for this. I’ve lived a fairly pristine existence, but for a few minor anomalies. It’s almost as if I want to be bad, but I can’t be. Because I know that inside, I am good. And I would be uncomfortable being bad. I hold doors. I say thank you to everyone. I pay attention to people. I haven’t left my house much since March. Like, less than you. I can’t tell if I hate it or love it. Or if my existence right now is so static, I am in a simulation of myself. I am static. It’s hard to be vulnerable. People judge your vulnerability. God forbid you admit that you are not ok. Diagnosis. Medication. Hospitalization. For some people, all of those are relevant and important and life-saving. But for some people, it’s ok to just feel like hurting yourself. Even if you never plan on doing it. Admitting it isn’t always a sign of more. It’s ok if you want someone to break up with you because you don’t think you deserve them. It’s probably not healthy, but it’s ok. A lot is ok. It’s ok to feel like the world has failed you. What’s not ok is to act like an entitled prick all the time. Yeah, there are too many of those people. Do you ever wonder what the point of someone who plagiarizes is? Is it that they are so desperate for attention that will do something that is so easy to figure out? Do you ever wonder if Internet sites truly care about ethics? Or is literally everything in our lives fully commercialized? Some days I want to punch a wall. I don’t even know why. I am completely calm all the time. I think my insides hold some mild rage. Maybe because of all I’ve lost. I miss them. I miss being a son. I miss my mommy. I miss my daddy. I cry a lot. Like, more than you would expect. I cry watching The Good Doctor. I cry watching A Million Little Things. I cry listening to Shallow. I’m kind of an emotional basket case. But no one knows. I am not embarrassed in the slightest bit. I like crying. Just not around anyone else. I want to crack myself open and lay threadbare on a spool for the world to see. I want to lay in a forest for eight hours. On the ground. I want to stare at the sky and the trees. I don’t care if a bird sh*ts on me. I want to breathe in the crispest air in the world. I want that air to cleanse me and make me feel better. Part of me doesn't want to feel better. People used to say I moped around a lot. I did. I was lonely. I think I wanted to be held more than I was. I still mope around, but it’s different. Now I just see time slipping through my fingers while I stand in one place. My feet are cemented. I’m bored. I’ve never been addicted to anything. I can stop doing anything. I don’t feel like I need anything in my life. Besides my kids. And that’s a problem. Because I probably need love. Like a lot of love. Better love. A different kind of love. From someone who actually gets me. I think I deserve that, but in the same thought, I like to tell myself I am fine being alone. That solitude suits me. And in a lot of ways it does. But it’s because I am numb. The pins and needles of my life don’t allow me to feel enough. I’m scared to feel something. I’m scared to lose something. I think about dying a lot. I worry that my kids will be lost without me and the next second I worry that they will be fine without me. And what was I here for anyway? Some days I wonder if I am really good at anything. Even the stuff I know I am good at. I think someone will read this and suggest I get on some medication. I think that sounds stupid. Because the act of spraying vulnerable thoughts on a wall is not a defect. It’s just an emotional brainstorm. It feels good even when it feels bad. I used to be rigid. Then I realized I had an appetizer portion of Asperger’s. A lot of people don’t believe that. They think it’s an excuse I use to make the fact that I don’t want to emote or connect or go to parties more palatable. I don’t give a f*ck what they think anymore. I fall where I fall. Sometimes I want to fall down and then stay there. I’ve never heard voices. I wish I did. And that they were my mom or dad. Sometimes I see birds near my garage and I think they are them. I don’t care how that sounds. I miss them. I don’t think I’ve recovered from their deaths. It doesn’t matter how old I am. I can’t recover. If I hadn’t found writing again a few years ago, I know I would have a lot more anger inside of me that would be constantly festering. If I hadn’t found meditation a few years ago, I may have had a heart attack. Or panic attacks. Or an overload of stress. Mindfulness and awareness are what makes me breathe. And get up in the morning. And my kids. Even when they don’t want to talk to me. I still love them more than I could possibly ever love anything. I wonder if other people get tired of reading the same story from the same writers, in a different form, every other day. The same narrative. The same. The same. The same. The same. Different headline. Different paragraph structure. Same. Sh*t. I like writing whatever the f*ck I want to. Including the * that I put in all the curse words in here except for prick. Because prick looks better and is contextually accurate without an *. I may be the only writer who doesn’t care if you read me. Or follow me. Or follow me just because you want something. I am oblivious. You can stop. I don’t notice. I don’t care. I wonder what it would feel like to love someone like I love my kids. That would be nice. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be as nice as I think. Because I think I love my kids too much sometimes. And it causes pressure for them. And then I feel bad about myself, as if I can’t do anything right. Even when it comes to unconditional love. Do you ever just want to spill your darkest secrets onto this screen? I don’t have many, but this is what it is to me. To be vulnerable. This is how to be vulnerable. This is how to stop caring about what everyone thinks. Or what comes next. Or what this will mean. Or anything. These are just words. They come from the inside of my heart. But they are still just words. But when the words you write can touch someone else, even for a second, you have achieved something. It’s why I write poetry. Well, I have to write poetry. It spills from my arm and eyes and ears and my mouth. It has to come out. But what I’ve come to find is that the less I care about who reads it, the more meaningful it is when someone does. And when it hits them straight in the chest. The biggest compliment I can get is a tear. Not a word. Emotion from my words. That is pure. I cry a lot. It feels good. Maybe one day I will be bold enough to cry with you. But until then, my words are my tears.

https://medium.com/assemblage/how-to-be-vulnerable-473977fa525f

['Jonathan Greene']

2020-12-19 04:36:02.362000+00:00

['Personal Growth', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Vulnerability', 'Writing']

How I’ve Used Miro to Launch 5 Success Projects — Why I Love Miro

The ingenious design feature of the moving pointers is that it kills two birds with one stone. One use case automatically serves a second use case. The first use case for the live movements of the cursors is confirmation that your team members are in the Miro whiteboard space. The second use case is feedback. When I collaborate with others and I ask them, “Hey do you see this feature right here?” — The moment their cursor moves to the section in question, I’ve received the feedback that they do see the feature I am talking about before they respond. Implicit feedback, plus, this is the type of detail I pay attention to when using this product. 2. Marketplace Apps, API, & SDK I personally don’t use these features as most of my use cases are solo work. However, I feel like I can’t write about Miro without touching on the true capabilities of Miro’s marketplace. I’ll briefly talk about these features. Just as they had 100’s of templates to choose from, their moneymaker is in their marketplace app integrations that allow teams & companies to use other services they pay for within Miro and vice versa. They have over 50 apps that integrate within Miro. To just name popular ones: Slack, Google Suite, Microsoft Suite, Salesforce, Github, Notion (embed native option), Trello (embed native option), Hubspot, Evernote, and Zapier Miro allows you to access these apps within your Miro Board so that in Real-Time you do not have to leave one application to access the other. If you have a unique tech stack and don’t see something you like, you’ll most likely need to use their API or SDK that allows you to customize almost any application you want. It seems they have a GitHub page with open source examples. These are all enterprise features that probably cost a lot. The Free Version For me, I’ve never paid Miro for their product (sorry Miro). If you are a solo user like me (most of the time), you can get by without paying. Here is what you get with the free version of Miro: Unlimited Team Members Maximum 3 Boards No controlled access (you can’t choose who has access to which Board, they get access to all Boards) All of the core integrations except the workflow apps such as Jira, Kanban, and Asana configurations However, this is ABSOLUTELY enough to get the job done. Here are a few growth hacking strategies I’ve learned over the years in order to get the most of my free Miro access: Invite as many people as you want into your Board space. Each Board is an infinite space. If you need more than 3 Boards, start utilizing relative regions within one whiteboard space. Use frames to delineate the region. If you are a solo user, there is no reason not to use the infinite space to separate out your work. If you want to create custom templates that you’d want all your users to use (or scale), just make the template once and copy & paste the existing template into the new or existing Boards. On the Miro website, it says the Kanban plugin is for Team (paid) version, however, I have access to it with the free version…so use the Kanban if you want! If you pay for Jira, Trello, or other workflow management software, you won’t be able to use them integrated within the Miro board. However, you can create a template version. My advice would be to just use the template version in Miro. With limited commenting and collaboration features, instead, you can literally type your comments within the Miro space using color-coded rules that match a user's name. A little hacky, but it works! A few features that cannot be worked around are the privacy settings and high-resolution exports. I didn’t mention this earlier, but you can’t export high-resolution PDFs and image files from your Board. You can only do low-resolution in the free version. Additionally, if you want to invite someone to collaborate on one Board, but DO NOT want them to see another board you have, tough luck. You are open for business. No way around this. In my case, I trust the people I am inviting to my Boards, plus it’s not the biggest deal if they see what I am working on. Of course, everyone’s case is different. The real why I love using Miro is in their prioritization of design thinking. In my mind, this is how I foresee the design process occurring once their VP of Product decides to brainstorm on a feature for one of their products. For example, I've laid out my assumptions of how things work in the design team at Miro (I have no clue but I’m just assuming based on my personal use cases). The following are questions that I feel get asked in this order to design the products they do. Let’s use my personal favorite feature of Miro to walk through this process: Built-In Templates (visual below)

https://medium.com/skilluped/how-ive-used-miro-to-launch-5-success-projects-why-i-love-miro-6c80e3f35465

['Drew Teller']

2020-12-09 00:19:44.412000+00:00

['Technology', 'Design', 'Productivity', 'SaaS', 'UX']

Is the Word ‘Dashboard’ Losing Its Value?

On a dedicated channel, #dvs-topics-in-data-viz, in the Data Visualization Society Slack, our members discuss questions and issues pertinent to the field of data visualization. Discussion topics rotate every two weeks, and while subjects vary, each one challenges our members to think deeply and holistically about questions that affect the field of data visualization. At the end of each discussion, the moderator recaps some of the insights and observations in a post on Nightingale. You can find all of the other discussions here. Recently I had the opportunity to host the first Topic in Data Viz of 2020: Is the word dashboard losing its value? The data viz community came to the fore and provided lots of interesting discussions and points of view. Before we dive in, we should define what a dashboard is. Stephen Few, one of the pioneers in the data visualisation space, defines a dashboard as “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” My initial reason for looking into this topic is that I believe that the word dashboard no longer carries the significance it once did. A few years ago, reports were all that we knew when referring to data visualisation, and then came dashboards; hip, novel, fresh, and innovative. But as tools, skills, and techniques evolved, it seems like dashboard is no longer the best terminology. In many visualization tools, we can create visualisations that are almost app-like, not to mention some of the fantastic work we see on the open source and custom side of things. Calling the work ‘dashboard’ can feel like a disservice to the fantastic work showcased in the Information is Beautiful awards or some of the work we see in the Tableau community, for instance. In summary, is calling something a dashboard lessening the value of the work created? Why does this matter? Is it a case of semantics or is there an intrinsic reason why we should care about naming visualisations or data products? I believe that we should strive to achieve some commonality in the way we name our work as data visualisation practitioners, and look for ways to distinguish different types. At first glance there seems to be an agreement that the word Dashboard is overused and has lost some of its value, but the bigger issue at hand is the misuse of the word as a catch-all. Dashboard is still the best way to describe some visualisations. For instance, hospitals and nurses may require a dashboard to display liquid levels and the readings of important sensors vital to the treatment of their patients. We should, however, be more judicious in the way we label our work. Sometimes a report is just that, and many have found that other words still conveys the intended message. But as other terms such as scrollytelling and storytelling are used more often, we should aim to distinguish the various types of work we produce with different terminology. Confusion seems to have derived from two distinct places: from companies, who started to use the word dashboard to mean anything that has a chart or some type of data information, often in lieu of reports. The second is vendors themselves such as Tableau and Splunk. Tableau’s own definition of a dashboard is an interesting one. The way it’s defined is a collection of charts or visualisation objects. Their desktop product has three main elements: views, dashboards, and stories, where a dashboard is a collection of views. As the Tableau community great and the platform became more widely used, so did the use of the word dashboard. For the longest time, the term fit; it was hip and new, and provided a degree of interactivity that could be argued as a difference from reports. But as misuse of the word grew, Tableau also evolved, and their current product is so focused on the ability to interact with the data by way of app-like experiences that a dashboard is almost like the old sofa in a new house. Some of the most well-known alternative words include “interactive dashboard,” “vizapp,” “analytical application,” and “monitoring tool,” the latter describing intention. Members of the Data Visualisation Society provided some additional ideas from their own experiences. For instance, Ryan Davis said, “I normally refer to my d3 dashboards as ‘interactive dashboards,’ which I think helps to distinguish them somewhat from a generic reporting screen.” Nicole Edmonds believes that while the term shouldn’t be a catch-all, it still has its place. “I don’t think ‘dashboard’ should be a catch-all term for the broad spectrum of visualisation work that occurs, but I think contextually it still has its place for now.” Elijah Meeks, on the other hand, said “At both Stanford and Netflix I actively pushed against ‘dashboards’ because I felt like it was a limiting term that didn’t catch the imagination of stakeholders.” Consensus, however, is never easy to reach and while those are alternatives, we need to also consider the intended audience. For many stakeholders, the word dashboard is now something they understand and relate to. Whatever terminology we eventually adopt will take a while to be adopted and is bound to provoke some confusion. For example, “X application” conjures visions of the Apple Store and Google Play. Finally, it’s interesting to note that even as we talk about terminology, one hurdle crops up time and time again. Limiting the amount of information to the absolutely necessary for the task at hand is always imperative. Perhaps that will be a topic for next time?!

https://medium.com/nightingale/is-the-word-dashboard-losing-its-value-8cdfbff32c14

['David Pires']

2020-07-06 20:28:07.322000+00:00

['Business Intelligence', 'Topicsindv', 'UX Design', 'Analytics', 'Dashboard']

How to Create Your Own Personal Writing Style Guide

How to Create Your Own Personal Writing Style Guide Making your life as a professional writer a little easier. Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash In my last article, I talked about why style guides were important and how to choose the best one for your needs. Today, however, I want to show you how you can make your own style guide, suited to your specific needs as a writer. Why Why would you want to create your own style guide? Well, as handy as the mass market style guides are, they are slanted to certain broadly-defined groups: Chicago to journalists, MLA to academics, and APA to people in the social sciences. But what if you belong to none of these? What if you write strictly experimental fiction, sci-fi or fantasy? If you do a lot of worldbuilding or you, say, create a new language for your characters, then a conventional style guide isn’t going to help you much. Likewise, if you write in a specific nonfiction niche like history (or historical fiction), you’ll want to keep track of key dates and details that consistently color your work. If you work in a scientific specialty that has a lot of its own terminology (e.g. environment, physics, or mathematics), a style guide that includes spellings, principles, references, and equation formatting means that the references you need are at your fingertips, and that you use them in a consistent manner each time you write a piece. What So, what should go into your style guide? In addition to some of the things I’ve already mentioned, you can have a section for character names that you’ve created along with their spellings and meanings. Every time you create a new world, you should create a new style guide to go along with it. Add details like geography, topography, cultural norms, languages, currencies, social structure, flora and fauna, and more. Keeping such details constant throughout the book(s) is something your readers expect. Try not to mess it up! Nonfiction writers will find it helpful to add terminology that you use frequently to a themed dictionary; doing this will keep you from having to constantly tell your word crunching software that, yes, this is a real word and this is how it’s spelled. Where This is probably the toughest part of the process. If your style guide isn’t too complicated you can make a simple Google or Word document on your computer — or a notebook, if you’re old school, like me. It would be best to have separate sections for different topics: all names together, all jargon together, worldbuilding details together, formulas together, etc. If your document is more than 5 or 10 pages, you’re going to want to come up with a better system of organizing the material or you’re never going to be able to find anything when you need it. The best approach for analog (i.e. non-tech) people is a large ring-binder with section dividers that you can easily rearrange and add more paper to as your style guide gets more complex. If you’re writing fiction, I suggest using a new notebook or binder for each book so you don’t mix up the details from one into another. If all of your novels take place in the same world, you can have a “master” style guide, with separate smaller notebooks for each new novel. If you’re into technology, there are a number of programs that can help organize your style guide online. Trello is a project management app that’s easy for beginners to learn with strong basic features like idea grouping, change tracking, and calendar organization. Asana is similar, with an intuitive interface and fewer features than Trello. Here is a list of ten different project tracking apps in this comprehensive article by the financial gurus at The Motley Fool (see the sidebar in that article). Writing programs and apps made specifically for plotting and novel organization can be helpful for fiction writers. Scrivener is a highly detailed software package for writers with nearly endless capabilities, but a steep learning curve. If you want something similar but easier, Dabble is a great choice that allows you the organizing capabilities of Scrivener without the headaches. Note-taking apps like Evernote, Milanote, and OneNote are basic online notebooks, while Scribus makes arranging layouts of your notes a breeze. Here’s a list of ten top apps for writers, courtesy of top tech magazine PCMag. Even standard word processing software like Word and Google Docs can be used to arrange lists of words and names in alphabetical order, create basic charts and tables, track changes to your style guide, and sort pages in a specific order. If you are unsure of your needs, try starting with a simple document first and then expand it as you go if necessary. How It’s probably easiest to begin with the list of “errors” that your current software editor keeps red-lining. Technical jargon, proper nouns, unusual spellings, and foreign words are frequent stumbling blocks for standard programs. Start by adding these exceptions to the dictionary that comes with the software package. This is typically accomplished by right-clicking on the highlighted word and then scrolling down to “add to dictionary” in the menu. Word has the ability to store specialized formatting needs for journals or science-based articles under the “References” tab on the taskbar. “Insert” makes adding headers, footers, and specialty text simple, while “Find and Replace” makes it easy to swap out specific terms for generic words. Sometimes, using this feature is easier than typing ‘diethylamino hydroxybenzoyl hexyl benzoate’ fifteen times in an article. Don’t ask me how I know this. Google Docs and Storyist (for Macs) as well as other writing programs have these same abilities; the names and steps may vary a bit. Whatever method you choose, creating your own style guide can make your writing process quicker and more error-free. And isn’t that what we aspire to as professional writers? Here’s your choice of my free guides: writing, personal improvement, or the environment. DRM is an award-winning author and the publisher of What to do About…Everything, and Boomer: Unfiltered. She writes in science, writing, mental health, and the environment on A Writer’s Mind.

https://medium.com/what-to-do-about-everything/how-to-create-your-own-personal-writing-style-guide-d21c17edeb47

[]

2020-09-06 04:07:48.664000+00:00

['Work', 'Writing Tips', 'Productivity', 'Grammar', 'Writing']

How to Create an Impressive Headline

How to Create an Impressive Headline 3 Types of eye-catching titles to use for your articles Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash In the past, I always struggled with choosing good-looking titles for my articles. I tried to make them functional, and make them stick in the reader’s mind, to attract their curiosity and make them read what I had to say. Still, I made two colossal mistakes. The first one was using titles that attracted me instead of the masses, and the second was using generic headlines with no power words. It frustrated me. I had no clue about which was the problem, so I couldn’t even imagine a solution. Then I did some researches; I read many articles on how people’s mind gets attracted, and I understood my taste differs from the others. I love poetic headlines, titles that wink at me something, but the vast majority of people likes something else. Thus I learned to forge what they liked, so to create a honeypot for my readers. The Headline’s Secret There are three types of headlines you can use to make your article more eye-catching and stand out. Or, at least, those are the three I discovered. As a general rule, when writing an article, always remember to trigger an emotion in the reader’s mind, starting with the title. It doesn’t matter if it is negative or positive, but you need to find a trigger and a necessity in the reader’s daily experience, so you can meet their expectations and solve their doubts. From what I studied in these last months I’ve been writing, I extracted three types of headlines with a high probability of affecting the reader’s attention. Let’s analyze them one by one. Headline #1 — Deliberate Emotion and Emphasis The first headline is the one that uses emotion deliberately and goes straight to the point. If you express the right emotion and emphasize it properly, it can become one of the most powerful titles you can forge. Still, keep in mind positive emotions are notable, but negative emotions sometimes are even better. You should address those and give a solution to escape them. For these titles, power words like mistake, hate, or even forever, can enhance the appeal. Also, you can use numbers, since several studies highlighted how they attract people more than written words. 3 Mistakes you will regret your Entire Life This headline uses the emotion of regret, and the longevity of the entire reader’s life, to attract the attention. Also, it uses a number as the first word of the title and the mistake power word. Since nobody wants to fail in their lives, the readers will open the article and see how to prevent a potential problem. However, most of the time, they will fastly skim through it to see what to avoid, so try to keep them interested in the first lines of your story and create a link with their experience as soon as possible. You are not as happy as you thought. Here’s why. Using a positive emotion, and then negating it, has an enormous impact on the readers’ emotions. Your title will make them feel threatened by their environment, and they will search for a solution in your words. This headline deliberately aims to create doubt in their mind. Why shouldn’t they be happy? What are they missing? Still, be careful. Once you attract them, give significant explanations and solutions to the danger you alerted, or they won’t come back to read any other articles. Headline #2 — “How to” and an action Different from the first one, the second headline uses a practical necessity of the reader and tries to satisfy it with useful suggestions and tricks that could help. It usually contains much of the writer’s experience, and it uses scientific researches to support its thesis. In these articles, you become the seller of a lifestyle, while the reader is the buyer observing the potential gain you are showing. For this reason, the benefit has to be crystal clear. Using the how-to power word is not enough: make your article captivating, or it will not get reads. I use this headline type frequently, so I will make some examples of my how-to articles. As you can see, the headline starts with the how-to formula and then expresses a specific concept: the promise to the public. These few words contain what the readers will achieve if they open your article, but also the hook that will draw them in. The concept of the idea bucket is unknown, since it is my creation, so it winks to the curiosity of the reader. What is the idea bucket? How does it work? The only way to know the answers is to read the article. This headline also starts with the how-to formula, but it is slightly different. Instead of trying to develop curiosity, here I use a straightforward language to make a promise to the reader. The power words are only two. The first one, stoic, explains the concept of the article, while the second, happy, promises a fulfilling emotion. As always, when you promise such a beautiful feeling, make sure you deliver. Nobody wants to read an article that promises things but then accomplishes nothing. Headline #3 — Counterintuitive opinion and benefits The last headline aims to trigger a consistent emotional burst in the reader, searching for controversy and clamor. The goal is to express and convince the readers of a thesis contrary to the common belief. So the writer has to explain why the alternative is more precious, and why it brings more benefits than the predominant vision. These titles can also use a technique based on brackets. As in the last example of the second headline, brackets can help you reinforce the message, or completely twist it. School prepares you for life (or does it?) In this first example, you have a recurrent belief (the school preparing people for life) and the beginning of doubt. Without the part inside the brackets, the title wouldn’t sell anything to the writer, and nobody will open it. But the brackets make it more appealing because it triggers curiosity and doubt inside the readers’ mind, so they will be more willing to read it. Why shouldn’t school prepare people for life? What is the secret the author discovered and wants me to know? To-do lists (do not) improve your productivity Again, in this title, we have a common belief, but here the author plays with the possibility of negating the thesis with only two words. Notice that, by invalidating the argument, you also offer a hidden benefit, which is the possibility to be more productive by abandoning to-do lists. Still, you are not saying it deliberately, so the reader again develops curiosity. Usually, those kinds of articles always work. Controversy and conspiracy are welcome these days, but never forget to give some reasonable explanations while keeping your intellectual honesty intact. An Article is not a Book Most people write articles and give them poetic names as if it was a book, but the vast majority of readers do not care about the title, they care about the message. Journalism has accustomed us to direct and appealing titles, those that give useful information and, but also attract attention. The readers search both for controversy and benefits in your articles. They don’t want to know what you did yesterday in your bedroom. They want to understand what you learned from staying all night up, unable to sleep, how it influenced your body, and how you overcame it. They want to improve their lives, and yours should be the article to help them succeed. Sell your knowledge to your public and give them what they are seeking. Any writer has a unique experience to share. With time, you will find your target to influence.

https://medium.com/get-better-togetter/how-to-create-an-impressive-headline-8d299f179faa

['Cosmin Angheluta']

2020-08-14 15:18:19.470000+00:00

['Writing', 'Headlines', 'Writing Tips', 'Productivity', 'Writer']

Doubt is One of the Most Powerful Forms of Curiosity and Change

I like the direct way Hecht states each considerable and challenging idea in the above quote. All of this is easier said than done, but it is worth saying, and it is worth striving for — all of it. Don’t worry so much about what’s to come. Meantime, enjoy yourself more. You got this. Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht is a powerful discourse on the concept of doubt. Many faith traditions speak of doubt, many in moderate forms suggesting a healthy faith depends on doubt, yet it is viewed as suspect when you have a “dark night of the soul.” In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind, especially from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin, to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world’s greatest “intellectual virtuosos,” who are also humanity’s greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin — and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning. It looks at doubt both from within and external to belief. It examines the motives and believers and gives each its appropriate doubting due.

https://medium.com/big-self-society/doubt-is-one-of-the-most-powerful-forms-of-curiosity-and-change-aa14b3453dd7

['Chad Prevost']

2020-11-03 14:42:51.455000+00:00

['Two Minute Takeaway', 'Inspiration', 'Books', 'Psychology', 'Authors']

Moderna Vs. Pfizer mRNA Vaccines for Covid-19: The Key Points

Moderna Vs. Pfizer mRNA Vaccines for Covid-19: The Key Points Explaining the efficacy and safety profiles, handling protocols, and remaining questions about disease spread and long-term immunity and safety between the two vaccines. Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels The fastest vaccine the FDA has approved was the Ebola DNA-based vaccine that took about five years. For Covid-19, in less than a year, we already have two candidate vaccines — mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna — awaiting approval this year or early 2021. A record-breaking indeed. How do the two mRNA vaccines compare, and what makes them so effective? And what are the things left unanswered? Current knowledge 1. Efficacy While data is yet to be published as formal peer-reviewed scientific papers, Pfizer claimed a 95% efficacy, and Moderna claimed a 94.5% efficacy in preventing Covid-19 infections in press-releases. As Pfizer has not provided as much clinical information as Moderna, this section will focus on the latter. As it’s our own cells that make it, the protein’s expression and levels are more stable and, thus, enable a more potent immunogenic response. Moderna’s phase III clinical trial enrolled 30,000 participants in the U.S. and randomized them into the vaccine or placebo group. After administering the shots on day-1 and day-29, the researchers waited until 95 participants become positive for SARS-CoV-2. (Assuming 1% of the population gets infected, we can expect 300 infections out of the 30,000 sample size, so 95 is a satisfactory number.) The trial then unblinded the 95 participants. Results found that 90 of them belonged to the placebo group and only five to the vaccine group. In these 95 cases, there were 15 adults aged >65 and 20 people of color. Moderna’s trial also reported 11 severe Covid-19 cases that all belonged to the placebo group. This means that Moderna’s vaccine is 94.7% (90/95) effective in preventing Covid-19, which applies to severe cases and diverse populations. 19th November update: Pfizer just updated their webpage to provide more clinical information. Pfizer’s clinical trial recruited 43,000 participants with a similar study design as Moderna’s. Pfizer did the unblinding once they reached 170 cases of Covid-19, of whom 162 were in the placebo and eight in the vaccine group. There were 10 severe cases, of which nine belonged to the placebo group. The vaccine was also effective across age, sex, race, and ethnicity groups. Overall, that makes 95.3% (162/170) effectiveness. The striking effectiveness of the mRNA vaccine lies in its biology. mRNA stands for messenger RNA, a genetic sequence that carries information that the cell’s ribosome reads. mRNA thus messages the cell’s ribosome to make new proteins without any involvement of outside proteins or microbes (as seen with traditional vaccine types). As it’s our own cells that make it, the protein’s expression and levels are more stable and, thus, enable a more potent immunogenic response. 2. Safety Both Pfizer and Moderna reported no significant safety concerns about their vaccines. While Pfizer has not released the specifics data about its vaccine’s safety, Moderna has documented a few. In Moderna’s clinical trial, side effects include fatigue (9.7%), myalgia (8.9%), arthralgia (5.2%), headache (4.5%), pain (4.1%), and redness at the injection site (2.0%) that are temporary. These side effects are also commonly seen with other vaccines, so they are not much of a concern. 19th November update: Pfizer’s clinical trial reported that notable side effects with over 2% occurrence were only fatigue (3.8%) and headache (2%). These lesser side effect rates than Moderna’s is an encouraging finding. But considering that mRNA is so fragile, long-term health problems are unlikely. 3. Storage conditions Pfizer’s vaccine needs to be stored at -70°C or below. In contrast, Moderna’s vaccine only requires a -20°C storage condition, the same as a regular fridge freezer. Both vaccines can last for six months in their respective temperatures. Moderna’s vaccine can even be stored at 2–8°C for 30 days, and at room temperature for 12 hours. So, Moderna’s vaccine is much easier to distribute. As mRNA is single-stranded, it’s much less stable than its DNA counterpart and degrades easily. So, a freezing temperature at -70°C preserves the mRNA integrity. In contrast, DNA is double-stranded and coiled into a helical formation that is more structurally tough. But Moderna’s vaccine used a lipid nanoparticle coating to increase the mRNA stability. “[It’s] kind of like putting your chocolate inside a candy coating — you have an M&M, so the chocolate doesn’t melt,” explained Margaret A. Liu, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California and a former president of the International Society for Vaccines. As expected from a company that developed two candidate mRNA vaccines in the past, this is very innovative. 4. Booster shots Pfizer’s vaccine requires two shots taken three weeks apart (i.e., days 1 and 22). The same applies to Moderna’vaccine that needs two shots taken four weeks apart (i.e., days 1 and 29). This means double the syringes, clinical visits, vaccine vials, time, and workload. For Pfizer’s vaccine, it also means twice the trouble in distributions, owing to its strict storage condition, especially in developing countries or areas. For Moderna’s vaccine, the one-week extra time between shots is also encouraging as it allows a buffer time for any unexpected events. Remaining questions 1. Transmission For one, we still don’t know if these vaccines prevent transmission. “Even if [Covid-19] vaccines were able to confer protection from disease, they might not reduce transmission similarly,” a paper in The Lancet stated. However, if the vaccines protect the high-risk groups, that alone would significantly reduce the pandemic’s health burden. As one in five SARS-CoV-2 infections shows no symptoms but remains contagious, we should hope that the mRNA vaccines stop transmission as well. Plus, we can control a few lifestyle factors to maximize our chances of successful, potent immunization. 2. Long-term efficacy As these mRNA vaccines rely on B-cell antibody responses that tend to wane over time, lifelong protection is not guaranteed. But the good news is that these mRNA vaccines also trigger T-cell immunity, although to a lesser extent than B-cell, which could provide a more robust immunological memory. Another upside is that even waning antibodies can still provide protection via other mechanisms such as T-cell-induced activation of antibodies. So, we can be assured that immunity does not fade easily. Immunity may be less effective but unlikely to turn zero. Plus, we can control a few lifestyle factors to maximize our chances of successful, potent immunization. 3. Long-term safety This one is controversial. As mRNA vaccines are new inventions, they have never been approved for any infectious diseases. So, there are no prior research or historical records we can rely on, unlike the traditional types like live, inactivated, or protein-based vaccines. But considering that mRNA is so fragile, long-term health problems are unlikely. “We will have a safety profile for only a certain number of months, so if there is a long-term effect after two years, we cannot know,” said Dr. Tal Brosh, head of the Infectious Disease Unit at Samson Assuta Ashdod Hospital. If we wait for two years, “then we would have the coronavirus for two more years.” Short abstract Moderna’s vaccine has less stringent storage and booster shot requirements, which helps make mass distribution easier. Both Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines have similar efficacy at around 95%, which applies to severe Covid-19 cases and diverse populations with no major safety issues. Notably, Pfizer’s vaccine has lower side effect rates than Moderna’s. But whether these mRNA vaccines stop transmission, provide lifelong immunity, or are safe in the long-run remains unanswered. Still, mRNA vaccines' success is something to be optimistic about as it’s one step closer to normalcy. Lastly, comparing the two mRNA vaccines shouldn't promote competition as “this really isn’t a race,” said Professor Liu. “Just by sheer numbers, we probably need multiple, multiple vaccines.” Who knows if the third vaccine (like AstraZeneca’s one) is the better one. December 2020 updates: Both Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 have successfully attained FDA approval for public use.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/moderna-vs-pfizer-mrna-vaccines-for-covid-19-the-key-points-39da4fe65e0d

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-12-25 01:28:21.709000+00:00

['Technology', 'Science', 'Innovation', 'Coronavirus', 'Life']

How to Establish Trust Using the Paid, Owned, and Earned Framework

Paid Media: We Pay People to Say We’re Innovative In this model, trust comes at a price. How much are we willing to pay to say we are the most innovative company selling whatever we sell? Brands can plaster the message on billboards and digital ads, add it to their radio and Pandora scripts, but it’s all the same. The same way advertisers told the public that butter was healthy, they also claimed there were no risks associated with smoking cigarettes. Paid media is bullshit unless it has substance. Heineken understood that drunk driving was an issue they wanted to tackle head-on, so they launched a series of anti-drunk driving campaigns in a creative, and dare I say innovative, way. They worked with behavioral designers to normalize the idea of being a designated driver at local bars and pubs in the UK. These bars were called nudge bars and were designed to reward and celebrate designated drivers by removing the stigma attached to not drinking in a social setting. According to Edelman.com, the newly designed nudge bar experiences resulted in an overall reduction in drunk driving behavior upwards of 50%. 80% of people said the program would encourage them to support their friends not to drink alcohol if driving, with 60% of people claiming it made them think about changing their behavior. They also aligned themselves with Formula 1 racing champions to communicate the message of not drinking while driving. Redesigning the bar experience to keep customers and the community safe is an excellent example of innovation. Instead of concentrating on the message of innovation itself, Heineken doubled down on its mission to reduce drunk driving behavior by changing the customer experience where customers spend their time — at the pub. Heineken then turned this social experiment into their advertising campaigns by running paid TV and digital video ads about the experiment. According to Statista: Heineken beer generated approximately 800 million U.S. dollars in sales in the United States in 2018, making it one of the leading brands on the country’s imported beer brand sales rankings. Social good and innovation are a winning combination. Trust was established with customers, and all they had to do was tell their story on paid channels.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-to-establish-trust-using-the-paid-owned-and-earned-framework-1336f92eb4a0

['Joe Wilson']

2020-11-24 14:02:15.704000+00:00

['Paid Owned Earned', 'Marketing', 'Trust', 'Innovation', 'Customer']

10 things I learned working at a startup as a product designer

It’s been just over a year at Propelor as a product designer. Propelor is a modern investment tool that makes portfolio management easy for everyone. I currently am the sole designer in the company and our goal is to make it easier to be a self-directed investor and to encourage more people to start investing for themselves. I plan on writing this article to reflect on what I’ve learned so far and how much I’ve grown. I also hope to share my experience with those who are interested in working at a startup, or new to the design industry. Without further ado, here they are: Familiarize yourself with non-design tools Learning new tools especially non-design software can be uncomfortable but learning it will help you so much not only in your design process but also in communicating with stakeholders. I learned Google Analytics at Propelor and it was a pretty big learning curve. You don’t have to master it, just learn a little at a time by figuring out how to find the specific info you need! 2. Priortize. Priortize. Priortize. Identify what’s a must vs nice-to-have. Prioritize the tasks based on if you will be blocking someone else if you don’t have it done. Scope hammering is also another strategy that also helps you focus on the main purpose of the project. 3. Hey, it’s okay to not be pixel-perfect. I’m not saying that being pixel-perfect is not important!! It is important but working at a startup, we work very fast and unfortunately, I don’t always have the time to be pixel perfect on every single mockup. This relates to the point above of prioritizing what’s important and what’s considered a must vs nice-to-have. 4. Be a design leader. Show initiatives. Speak their language. Every company has its own design process in place. I think it’s important to continue to educate others about design as you work together so that they can understand why design is important or sometimes why it takes longer than the stakeholder thinks. At Propelor, we didn’t have a design library system so essentially we would be making slightly different UI components every project and wouldn't have them documented and therefore was not reusable. Creating the library would take time and it was on my mind for a while but just never had the time to allocate to do this. Long story long, I suggested to my CEO that we have it built. I could have said something like, “We should build the design library so that we can document UI components, and plus, all other companies have it”. You can see here that this doesn’t incorporate any business value when speaking to a business-focused stakeholder and sounds like this is only beneficial to me. As you may know, the design library brings a lot more value than that. It helps provide consistency in communicating the brand and connected user experience. It also helps standardize the code for devs and be able to reuse the components saving us time and allow us to work much faster. Now, this aligns a lot more at the business level and how this can create impact across different teams. If we can work faster, we can allocate our time to tackle the next priority. 5. Use business goals as your north star This is what my senior designer told me and I think this is so helpful. Me being a user-focused designer, of course I’m always thinking about the users but at the end of the day, things we do need to provide business value. 6. Communicate proactively (especially with pandemic and WFH) Communication and being transparent is key to great teamwork. Great teamwork allows us to work effectively together and this ultimately helps us make a great product. With the pandemic and the team working from home, it became evidently important to keep everyone updated on your progress without someone necessarily asking you for your status. Overcommunicate and do not wait for the next stand up or next team meeting to address problems. 7. Stay 2 steps ahead If a problem needs to be discussed with the stakeholder, don’t just bring up the problem but come to them with possible solutions so the decision can be made in the same meeting. Along with solutions, I try to reach out to devs to figure out the estimate of each option so that during the meeting we can weigh out the options based on how much time we have for the project and how much higher in priority is it to solve the problem compared to other problems. 8. Collaborate with everyone Talk to people with who you don’t directly work. Get feedback on the product and learn what users like or dislike, what other ideas do they have in mind to make the product better? They are the experts in their field, so make sure you use that as a resource! 9. It’s okay to say “I don’t know” but make sure to figure it out later Sometimes a question is thrown to you in the middle of the meeting and you are put on the spot. I used to have a mini panic attack because I didn’t have an answer. It made me feel like I wasn’t prepared for a meeting. But over time, I came up with my little formula to use when you don’t have an answer: “I don’t know” + [what I’ll do] + [how long it will take] + [how they will be informed] An example would be: I don’t know the answer right now. I need to look into x,y,z to figure it out and I will ping you sometime today on Slack once I find out. Trust me. It’s wayyyyyy better than BS-ing! 10. NEVER think of yourself as a “junior” designer Saving the best for last. I had a difficult time changing my mindset. I’ve always thought of my career path to be a very cookie-cutter style. You start off as a junior designer, after a couple of years you become an intermediate designer, and then after many years, you become a senior designer. Right?! This mindset made me so insecure when sharing my design thoughts. Sometimes I would literally start my sentence, “I don’t know if it’s because I’m junior but I think…” and then share the rest of my opinion. There is no right or wrong. Like what my senior designer told me, your opinion is equally as important whether you are junior or senior. This change of mind has helped me tremendously in the growth of my professional career.

https://sionsideup.medium.com/10-things-i-learned-working-at-a-startup-as-a-product-designer-be029601cb0c

['Sion Chung']

2020-10-31 02:57:43.932000+00:00

['Learning', 'Startup', 'Product Design', 'Design']

0–100 in the Digital Marketing Track. Why & How We Get There

A common obstacle for entrepreneurs and corporate professionals is learning tangible skillsets on the go or keeping up with the evolution of the skillset. This disadvantage coupled with the necessity to operate at the maximum capacity can create frequent opportunities for critical errors. AstroLabs Academy was formed to address this challenge. Many enabled founders or professionals were restricted from lack of talent or knowledge in areas like Digital Marketing, Web Development and Analytics that were subsequently hurting the growth of their business. Through action based blended learning, flexible hours, industry certifications and instructors that are full-time operators; we merit our programs as courses built by practitioners for practitioners. Organic Social Media Instructed by Mike Al Naji The Digital Marketing Track is our most successfull program in terms of demand and number of learners that completed the course. We had recently completed our 6th Digital Marketing Track, with a full house of 24. Ranging from Entrepreneurs & Marketing Executives to Chief Marketing Officers across industries, this track had a diverse and highly driven class of learners who blew us away in terms of drive to learn. SEO Optimisation Instructed by Naguib Toihiri From mastering analytics to developing an email marketing strategy for customer retention, learners deep dive in to commonly used marketing channels from strategy to execution. Curious to learn more? Here are some actual tips from our instructors during the track. Digital Marketing Is Marketing And Marketing Is All For Nothing If You Do Not Know Your Customers Intimately. A great and well forgotten insight mentioned by our lead instructor, Ahmad on Day 1. It can be easy to move on from where the foundation of great marketing strategy comes from, and losing touch with your customers is a sure shot way of not seeing the return you expect from execution. Define Metrics & Conversions And Measure Their Value For Your Business. Digital Marketing is a growth based game and seeing growth in a business is an indicator that you’re on to something. By establishing a clear metric that acts as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator), you allow 1 person handling growth or a team handling mutiple layers to follow one north star more than anything else. A good metric for this is CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) which is how much are you spending to acquire 1 customer. Track All Of Your Outreach. Ask any Marketing executive why Digital is now their main area of focus and they will more than likely say this, “I can now track every penny of our Marketing budget”. Great (and free!) tools like Google Analytics allow single users all the way to major corporations to track data across the board and more importantly learn insights. Which leads me to my next and final point. Scale If It Works. Shift It Doesn’t. The true success factor is this. The ability to measure, track and learn allows agile startups and big businesses to double down on what customers are wanting more of and shift efforts on channels or initiatives that are not bringing in the desired results. There lies true growth. Like any skillset, getting good at Digital Marketing takes consistent and deliberate effort. While most learning comes from doing; mastering tools & developing a solid foundation is crucial for building momentum in the right direction. We Have An Upcoming Digital Marketing Track and Web Development Track in Dubai! Click On This Line To Learn More Or Get In Touch If You Have Questions.

https://medium.com/astrolabs/0-100-in-the-digital-marketing-track-why-how-we-get-there-7bfe4bc46001

['Raunak Datt']

2017-08-22 08:02:58.760000+00:00

['Learning', 'Digital Marketing', 'Motivation', 'Insights', 'Entrepreneurship']

How to Master Yourself Like a Shaolin Monk

5 Hindrances Along the Way to Self-Discovery and Personal Growth The society we are living in holds temptations and challenges at every corner. When we are entangled in our thoughts, we lose sight of ourselves and what matters. If you are surrounded by fog how can you catch sight of the right path? Created by the author Learning about the 5 hindrances will help you to spot the different challenges in your life. Once recognized, you can overcome the hindrances on your journey to self-discovery. The five hindrances are describing different states of the mind, in those states of the mind, it becomes very hard to see clearly and therefore engage in the right decisions. — Master Shi Heng Yi What holds us back from finding our path? Sensual Desire The first hindrance describes any temptation that stimulates your 5 senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. If you follow a temptation then you have lost focus on your path. If the positive emotion is overwhelming and turns into an obsession then you might not be able to return. Think of how obsessively we are consuming media. We are sitting for hours watching Netflix instead of pursuing the things that add value to our lives. Imagine how much additional time you would have to work on your side business or to spend with your loved ones. You should enjoy your life with all 5 senses but don’t let the temptations become obsessions. Then you will end up in the fog. Ill will / Aversion Negative emotions stop us from enjoying life and seeing circumstances in their true perspective. They make us blind. The only thing we can focus on is our anger or grief. Negative emotions are holding us back and make us weaker if we don’t learn to accept them and finally let them go. One of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences. — Psychologist, Jonathan M. Adler Adler In our lifetime, we will encounter a range of emotions and some of them will be negative. This is human. But only if we learn how to process anger and grief can we find our path. Whatever it is that you dislike, it won’t make it a pleasant journey, unless you learn to let go of this ill-will. — Master Shi Heng Yi You can find the silver lining in any negative experience. See it as an opportunity to learn something about yourself and to improve. Dullness /Heaviness In the Shaolin culture, dullness and heaviness refer to a lack of motivation and energy to walk the path of life. In modern society, we call it depression whereas Buddhism speaks of imprisonment. The only way out is to take control of your life and find a way out of your cell. Use the available energy to do things that will make you feel better and finally help you to break out of imprisonment. Restlessness Distraction and restlessness are one of the major hindrances for every human being in the modern world. Higher. Faster. Better. More. There is so much going on that we don’t know where to focus on first. But it seems this phenomenon occurred even a few hundred years ago. Buddha called it the monkey mind. We need to tame this monkey who jumps from thought to thought, meeting to meeting, message to message. If we have too many things going on, we have no time to see clearly. The mind acts like an enemy for those who do not control it. — The Bhagavad Gita Being present requires us to calm down and focus on the here and now. Forget about the past and don’t worry about the future. They are not real. Truth and reality only lie in the present moment. A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusion. — Alan Watts Skeptical Doubt Getting lost in your thoughts is often toxic. Do you know the little voice in your head telling you self-destructive lies? you are not good enough… he is probably with somebody else…your writing sucks, nobody wants to read that sh…. Don’t listen to that, this is not you talking. It is just your mind. This is what the Shaolin call a state of indecisiveness and skeptical doubt. The more you let your mind take over the more you will get disconnected from your goals, dreams, and values. Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. — Suzy Kassem Your doubts will make you stop right where you are and it is more strenuous to start moving again. So you might never proceed.

https://medium.com/mind-cafe/how-to-master-yourself-like-a-shaolin-monk-65deec8c88ca

['Karolin Wanner']

2020-05-15 18:24:10.549000+00:00

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

The 5 Components of $1,000 Articles

The 5 Components of $1,000 Articles Insights from analyzing my best-performing and selling articles Photo by Sara Deis on Unsplash One thousand dollar articles are the ones that every professional writer aims to sell. This often means that you’re paid $1 or more per word. The norm of this type of pay comes from working with big clients or working with big publications. When you’re starting as a writer, you’re more likely to sell an article to a big publication for $1,000 than to gain a client that pays $1 per word consistently. I began my writing career on Medium last year. My first $1,000 article was one that was distributed by Medium in one of their partnered publications. Then, in the next few months, I sold a few articles for $350 a piece. Slowly, after a few months, I sold articles for $750 a piece. The slow ramp-up isn’t uncommon. You need inspiration to write $1,000 articles. The quality of these articles is very different. You’re telling stories in these articles. If you put out eBooks of these articles, people will buy them. After reading many articles in big publications such as the Atlantic, the New York Times, and other publications that will pay $500 to $1,000 for a feature article, I worked out the anatomy of a $1,000 article. Before I dive into the anatomy in this article, let me assure you that you’ll need the following tools to write this article:

https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-5-components-of-1-000-articles-223603b687e1

['Jun Wu']

2020-04-03 19:48:30.539000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Writing Tips', 'Viral', 'Writing']

Groups and pinned columns

We are excited to introduce some new features for the table views. Groups for visual tables Sometimes there is a need to group table rows by the desired criterion. For example, it is handy to group completed stories and bugs by project or feature. Our latest release brought the possibility to apply up to three groups to any visual table. The example below shows the table with two groups configured. Table Editor: Report View: Totals, group color, and other dimension settings can be changed using dimension popup shown by clicking on the group green rectangle in the report editor. Pinned columns Your important columns can be pinned in visual tables now. It is useful when the table has a lot of columns and some of them should be always visible. Please find a way to pin a column on a screen below. Now your pinned column will be always visible. Vizydrop is a visualization platform, can be used standalone, in Fibery and as Trello power-up or in Targetprocess. It is available as Jira add-on in Atlassian Marketplace. Please let us know about any questions or comments.

https://medium.com/vizydrop/groups-and-pinned-columns-4d18fdf5db0

['Oleg Seriaga']

2020-03-11 11:53:47.930000+00:00

['Dashboard', 'Charts', 'Visualization']

Writing a Kubernetes Operator in Python without frameworks and SDK

Currently, Go is a de facto monopoly among programming languages that people choose to create Kubernetes operators. Their preferences stem from objective reasons such as: There is a powerful framework for developing operators with Go — Operator SDK. Many Go-based applications, such as Docker and Kubernetes, have become game changers. Writing an operator in Go allows you to speak with the ecosystem in the same language. High performance of Go-based applications as well as simple mechanisms to use the concurrency right out of the box. But what if lack of time or simply motivation prevents you from studying Go? In this article, we’ll show you how to create a solid operator using one of the most popular programming languages that almost every DevOps engineer is familiar with — Python. Please welcome Copyrator — the copy operator! To make things easy and practical, let’s create a simple operator designed to copy ConfigMap when a new namespace shows up or when one of the following two objects — ConfigMap or Secret — changes its state. From the practical side, our new operator can be used for bulk updates of the application’s configuration (by updating ConfigMap) or for resetting secrets, e.g. keys used for Docker Registry (when a Secret is added to the namespace). So what features should a good Kubernetes operator have? Let’s name them: The interaction with the operator is made via Custom Resource Definitions (hereinafter CRD). The operator is configurable. We can use command line flags and environment variables to set it up. Docker image and Helm chart are created with simplicity in mind so that users can install it effortlessly (basically with just one command) into their Kubernetes clusters. CRD In order for the operator to know which resources and where to look for, we need to set some rules. Each rule will be represented as a specific CRD object. What fields should this CRD object have? Type of the resource that we are interested in (ConfigMap or Secret). List of namespaces that store resources. Selector which helps us in searching for resources in the particular namespace. Let’s define our CRD: apiVersion: apiextensions.k8s.io/v1beta1 kind: CustomResourceDefinition metadata: name: copyrator.flant.com spec: group: flant.com versions: - name: v1 served: true storage: true scope: Namespaced names: plural: copyrators singular: copyrator kind: CopyratorRule shortNames: - copyr validation: openAPIV3Schema: type: object properties: ruleType: type: string namespaces: type: array items: type: string selector: type: string … and immediately add a simple rule to select ConfigMaps with labels matching copyrator: "true" in the default namespace: apiVersion: flant.com/v1 kind: CopyratorRule metadata: name: main-rule labels: module: copyrator ruleType: configmap selector: copyrator: "true" namespace: default Well done! Now we have to obtain information about our rule somehow. It’s time to say we are not going to make our cluster API’s requests manually. For this purpose we will use a Python library called kubernetes-client: import kubernetes from contextlib import suppress CRD_GROUP = 'flant.com' CRD_VERSION = 'v1' CRD_PLURAL = 'copyrators' def load_crd(namespace, name): client = kubernetes.client.ApiClient() custom_api = kubernetes.client.CustomObjectsApi(client) with suppress(kubernetes.client.api_client.ApiException): crd = custom_api.get_namespaced_custom_object( CRD_GROUP, CRD_VERSION, namespace, CRD_PLURAL, name, ) return {x: crd[x] for x in ('ruleType', 'selector', 'namespace')} By executing the above code, we will get the following result: {'ruleType': 'configmap', 'selector': {'copyrator': 'true'}, 'namespace': ['default']} Great! Now we have a specific rule for the operator. What’s important, we’ve been able to do it via the so-called Kubernetes way. Environment variables or flags? Both! Now it is time to proceed to the basic operator setup. There are two main approaches to configuring applications: via command line parameters, via environment variables. You can retrieve settings via command line parameters with more flexibility and support/validation of data types. We will use an argparser module from the standard Python library. Details and examples of its use are available in the Python documentation. Here is an example of configuring the retrieval of command line flags, adapted to our case: parser = ArgumentParser( description='Copyrator - copy operator.', prog='copyrator' ) parser.add_argument( '--namespace', type=str, default=getenv('NAMESPACE', 'default'), help='Operator Namespace' ) parser.add_argument( '--rule-name', type=str, default=getenv('RULE_NAME', 'main-rule'), help='CRD Name' ) args = parser.parse_args() On the other hand, you can easily pass service information about the pod into the container via environment variables in Kubernetes. For example, you can get information about the namespace where the pod is running via the following structure: env: - name: NAMESPACE valueFrom: fieldRef: fieldPath: metadata.namespace The operating logic of the operator Let’s use special maps to divide methods for working with ConfigMap and Secret. They will allow us to figure out what methods we need for tracking and creating an object: LIST_TYPES_MAP = { 'configmap': 'list_namespaced_config_map', 'secret': 'list_namespaced_secret', } CREATE_TYPES_MAP = { 'configmap': 'create_namespaced_config_map', 'secret': 'create_namespaced_secret', } Then you have to receive events from the API server. We will implement that functionality in the following manner: def handle(specs): kubernetes.config.load_incluster_config() v1 = kubernetes.client.CoreV1Api() # Get the method for tracking objects method = getattr(v1, LIST_TYPES_MAP[specs['ruleType']]) func = partial(method, specs['namespace']) w = kubernetes.watch.Watch() for event in w.stream(func, _request_timeout=60): handle_event(v1, specs, event) After the event is received, we proceed to the underlying logic of handling it: # Types of events to which we will respond ALLOWED_EVENT_TYPES = {'ADDED', 'UPDATED'} def handle_event(v1, specs, event): if event['type'] not in ALLOWED_EVENT_TYPES: return object_ = event['object'] labels = object_['metadata'].get('labels', {}) # Look for the matches using selector for key, value in specs['selector'].items(): if labels.get(key) != value: return # Get active namespaces namespaces = map( lambda x: x.metadata.name, filter( lambda x: x.status.phase == 'Active', v1.list_namespace().items ) ) for namespace in namespaces: # Clear the metadata, set the namespace object_['metadata'] = { 'labels': object_['metadata']['labels'], 'namespace': namespace, 'name': object_['metadata']['name'], } # Call the method for creating/updating an object methodcaller( CREATE_TYPES_MAP[specs['ruleType']], namespace, object_ )(v1) The basic logic is complete! Now we need to pack it into the single Python package. Let’s create setup.py and add metadata about the project to it: from sys import version_info from sys import version_info from setuptools import find_packages, setup if version_info[:2] < (3, 5): raise RuntimeError( 'Unsupported python version %s.' % '.'.join(version_info) ) _NAME = 'copyrator' setup( name=_NAME, version='0.0.1', packages=find_packages(), classifiers=[ 'Development Status :: 3 - Alpha', 'Programming Language :: Python', 'Programming Language :: Python :: 3', 'Programming Language :: Python :: 3.5', 'Programming Language :: Python :: 3.6', 'Programming Language :: Python :: 3.7', ], author='Flant', author_email='maksim.nabokikh@flant.com', include_package_data=True, install_requires=[ 'kubernetes==9.0.0', ], entry_points={ 'console_scripts': [ '{0} = {0}.cli:main'.format(_NAME), ] } ) NB: Python client library for Kubernetes has its own versioning system. The compatibility of the client’s and Kubernetes’ versions is outlined in this matrix. Currently, our project has the following structure: copyrator ├── copyrator │ ├── cli.py # Command line operating logic │ ├── constant.py # Constants that we described above │ ├── load_crd.py # CRD loading logic │ └── operator.pyк # Basic logic of the operator └── setup.py # Package description Docker and Helm The resulting Dockerfile will be ridiculously simple: we will take the basic python-alpine image and install our package (let’s postpone its optimization until better times): FROM python:3.7.3-alpine3.9 ADD . /app RUN pip3 install /app ENTRYPOINT ["copyrator"] The deployment for Copyrator is also very simple: apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: name: {{ .Chart.Name }} spec: selector: matchLabels: name: {{ .Chart.Name }} template: metadata: labels: name: {{ .Chart.Name }} spec: containers: - name: {{ .Chart.Name }} image: privaterepo.yourcompany.com/copyrator:latest imagePullPolicy: Always args: ["--rule-type", "main-rule"] env: - name: NAMESPACE valueFrom: fieldRef: fieldPath: metadata.namespace serviceAccountName: {{ .Chart.Name }}-acc Finally, we have to create a relevant role for the operator with the necessary permissions: apiVersion: v1 kind: ServiceAccount metadata: name: {{ .Chart.Name }}-acc --- apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1 kind: ClusterRole metadata: name: {{ .Chart.Name }} rules: - apiGroups: [""] resources: ["namespaces"] verbs: ["get", "watch", "list"] - apiGroups: [""] resources: ["secrets", "configmaps"] verbs: ["*"] --- apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1 kind: ClusterRoleBinding metadata: name: {{ .Chart.Name }} roleRef: apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io kind: ClusterRole name: {{ .Chart.Name }} subjects: - kind: ServiceAccount name: {{ .Chart.Name }}-acc Conclusion In this article, we showed you how to create your own Python-based operator for Kubernetes. Of course, it still has room to grow: you can enrich it with the abilities to process several rules, monitor changes in its CRDs on its own, benefit from concurrency capabilities… All code is available in our public repository so you could get acquainted with it. If you’re interested in other examples of Python-based operators, we can recommend you to pay attention to two operators for deploying mongodb (here and here). P.S. If you don’t feel like dealing with Kubernetes events, or you are just more comfortable working with Bash, then you might also enjoy our easy-to-use solution called shell-operator (we have announced it in April). P.P.S. There is also an alternative way to use Python for writing K8s — via specific framework called kopf (Kubernetes Operator Pythonic Framework). It’s useful if you want to minimize your Python code for that. Check kopf docs here. This article has been originally written and published in Russian language by Flant’s engineer Maksim Nabokikh. More technical stuff from our engineers is to come soon — please don’t forget to follow our blog!

https://medium.com/flant-com/kubernetes-operator-in-python-451f2d2e33f3

['Flant Staff']

2019-10-05 06:59:58.474000+00:00

['Kubernetes', 'Python', 'Kubernetes Operator', 'DevOps']

7 reasons why blogging is like planning for luck to happen

Photo by Amy Reed on Unsplash You can’t predict what happens when you blog. Expecting that blogging will generate more sales — or more money on Medium — right away would be to simplify the equation and disappoint you. When you start blogging and start sharing your work on social media, you will learn that it leads to many other experiences and opportunities you would not have expected. To me, blogging is like planning for lucky circumstances to happen. In this blog, I have found seven reasons why that seems to be the case for me — and would probably be for you too! 1. I get more speaking engagements Not long ago, I wrote a blog about why it’s crucial to improve the digital workplace during the Covid-19 outbreak. The blog became quite popular in my LinkedIn network. A couple of days later, someone sent me a message on LinkedIn, as he was looking for a speaker who could give an inspiring talk about working from home. When we had our first call, he told me: “Someone in my network recommended you and I checked out your profile, and it looks like you could be the right person!” Another time a sister to someone in my network contacted me. Back then, I had just published a blog about digital communication and collaboration. She was not working in the area of communication but needed a speaker about it for their upcoming conference. So she asked her brother if he knew someone who would come and speak about this. Luckily, her brother is connected with me on LinkedIn and he had just seen my blog post. Two weeks later I delivered my keynote at their conference outside Stockholm. Some would call it pure luck, I call it planned serendipity! 2. My speeches have improved Speaking in Moscow, February 2020 Part of my business is to do keynote speeches at international conferences or corporate events. Blogging has actually helped me become a better speaker, because: I use blogging as part of my preparation. A week before the speaking engagement I would usually write a blog about the topic I will speak about. Often, I will actually be writing my speech. I research a lot when I blog, and a lot of the things I pick up during the research phase can be used in my keynote speeches. 3. I have grown my network Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash Every time I blog, I get more followers or connections. My activity on social media has doubled my followership on LinkedIn within the last year. It also makes it easier to connect with people, as they can check you out and see what you stand for. A bigger network means a potentially bigger readership and so on… But even more importantly, I have met people I would never have met without blogging. This has also enriched my personal life, not only my professional life. I am confident, that should I ever choose to step into a role in corporate life again, the network I have now will make success a lot more likely. I have access to much more knowledge than I had just one year ago. 4. I get paid for writing Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash I am sometimes asked to write articles about my field of expertise for different online media — and the reason they found me was — surprise — because of my blogs! 5. I get readers without writing Photo by Merakist on Unsplash I don’t know a lot about SEO optimization. This is something I have to learn about in the future, as it could help make my blogs rank higher. For now, Medium is much better at that than I am. The first article I published on Medium, became quite popular and was distributed in some of Mediums topics. The article was about something I called “Return on Experience”. If you google that term, you will get approximately 3.900.000.000 results. My article ranks number 3 and generates a great flow of reads every single week. 6. I have been offered jobs and partnerships Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash Last year, I was contacted by an executive recruitment agency who saw my profile on LinkedIn. The position I was offered was very attractive — and a huge step up the career ladder. When I asked them how they found me, they told me that I was one of the first who popped up in the search result — and that the content I shared on my profile was very relevant and made them think I would be the right candidate. There are definitely thousands of better CVs out there than mine. But somehow my profile caught their attention. 7. I am setting my self up to write a book Blogging is a great way to prepare for writing a book. It is one of the things I would really like to do. And my blogs are my preparation for that. I am creating a lot of content that could be reused in some form, but also because I blogging gives you the feedback you need to improve. This helps me understand what kind of topics/headlines and pictures catch people’s attention. There are only good reasons to get started Blogging is a way to make your “shopping window”- your profile on social media platforms — appealing and interesting for people. It makes you stand out and it is easier to figure out if you are the one I should contact. Let’s say you are a “Project Manager”, and there is no more information about you on your profile on LinkedIn. In that case, you are 1 out of 9 million other project managers on LinkedIn. Blogging makes you stand out. It makes you unique and hereby it makes whatever you do or sell unique. Because people want what YOU have to offer — not just your product or service. Blogging is not a popularity contest — you don’t have to get a million reads or a million followers. It is about inspiring your network and strengthening your personal brand. And blogging is a really good way to do that. There is really not a lot to be afraid of. Have fun — and if there is anything I can do for you, let me know. The easiest way to get in touch is by connecting with me on LinkedIn. I will leave you with a great video from the author of “Smarketing”, Adam Gray on how to stand out.

https://medium.com/swlh/7-reasons-why-blogging-is-like-planning-for-luck-to-happen-13fe98c12991

['Jonas Bladt Hansen']

2020-04-18 11:09:03.778000+00:00

['Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Blogging', 'Writing', 'Social Selling']

Want To Guarantee A Job Tomorrow? Study These 3 Areas Today

“person walking holding brown leather bag” by Marten Bjork on Unsplash The blockchain. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Which of these areas should you study today to guarantee a job tomorrow? And what should you do if technology isn’t your passion? According to a recent Harvard Business Review article by John Hagel III, three kinds of jobs will thrive as automation advances: composers, coaches and creators. Studying these areas today will help you avoid the unemployment line tomorrow. The good news is these types of jobs directly relate to creative projects and working with other people. In other words, you don’t need to become a tech savant. Create Unique Products According to Statista, the number of self-published books in the United States alone jumped from approximately 100,000 to almost 800,000 between 2000 and 2016. The tools for creators are becoming easier to use. Vellum, for example, simplifies turning manuscripts into print and Kindle book files you can publish on Amazon and eliminates (or at least reduces) the cost of hiring a book designer. You can even turn your passions into products that sell. For example, Australian businessman Adam Jelic of MiGoals created a series of daily planners because he felt passionate about productivity. Now his company is about to expand into Europe. He described his lightbulb moments in 2009, “One of my teachers said take a scrap piece of paper and write your goals on it. I said, ‘I’m going to print my own goal-setting diary, something that’s aesthetically appealing and well-constructed.’” Compose Personal Experiences Consider the four-plus billion dollar brand CrossFit. It enables fitness fans to train alongside other people in a way that is not possible in the gym. A monthly membership costs more than at a typical gym, and its exercises often intimidate new people. When I joined a local CrossFit gym, or box, watching the other members train inspired me. So I began practicing exercises like squats, deadlifts and power cleans in ways I’d never attempted at a traditional gym. Like many CrossFit fans, I realized it offers a unique experience for members that more than justifies the premium membership fee. Alternatively, Tails in the United Kingdom is a rapidly growing business in part because it provides delivers personalised, hand-blended dog food that animal lovers can’t buy in a supermarket.. In other words, many customers are becoming more interested in discovering engaging experiences than they are with acquiring products. Coach Clients to Succeed You probably had at least one teacher or lecturer who took special interest in your education. He or she might have helped you achieve a breakthrough in your studies that was impossible for you alone. After graduation, finding these mentors becomes more difficult because colleagues are focused on achieving their goals. This is why a good coach is valuable, and you can turn this need into a lucrative side business. “Coaching is a competitive advantage over people that are limited to books and classes. As business becomes more competitive, people are turning to coaches to help personalize their growth and to hold them accountable for following through,” said Tony Stubblebine, founder of Coach.me. For example, let’s say you struggled with time management and overwhelm at work but after much research, taming a to-do list is a pleasure. Now your manager lauds your productivity. Consider turning what you learned the hard way into a coaching service or course for other executives or entrepreneurs. The Robots Are Coming It’s fun to daydream about buying Lamborghinis with money earned through blockchain, but if you really want to prepare for tomorrow, focus on building your skills in the three areas Hagel cites. If you’re creative, use the tools already available to create valuable product for your 1,000 true fans. If you’re passionate about a hobby, investigate turning your knowledge into composing a unique experience for customers. Finally, if you’ve conquered a problem at work, consider if you can help others who are struggling with this same issue. When our robot overlords arrive, you’ll be ready.

https://bryanjcollins.medium.com/want-to-guarantee-a-job-tomorrow-study-these-3-areas-today-6a6d0b83d8b0

['Bryan Collins']

2019-02-27 16:20:05.158000+00:00

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

Dangerously unhealthy reading habits

It will come as no shock to any reader that people’s mental health has suffered during the current pandemic. Eating disorder charity Beat has reported a 73% surge in demand for its various support services during the rise of COVID 19 in the U.K. This statistic came as no surprise to me as during the early weeks of lockdown and social distancing, my body and losing weight became my quarantine project. I’m not sure as to why my worries over my body had come to a head during this period, but memes mocking weight gain, videos urging us to become ‘quaren-toned,’ and health anxieties certainly didn’t help. This led to me seeking out fictional and personal accounts of women’s struggles with eating disorders and how these women eventually recovered. Purge: Rehab Diaries begins with a refreshing discussion of the various forms eating disorder books take on, that is, self-help texts and a cross between the traditional memoir and self-help book. Johns explains that eating disorders are sadly not so simple, and rarely can they be navigated by following a handy step by step guide fuelled by God or the latest treatment program. Johns then emphasises that despite several months in an inpatient unit, she is not cured of her disorder, and self-help guides are rarely correct when they urge readers to be fully recovered once and for all following treatment. Unfortunately, eating disorders are often life long and require ongoing therapy and support. I have found Johns words to ring true during my somewhat bizarre stint into solely reading books on eating disorders. Memoir after memoir assured me that it would not be a manual for those seeking out new destructive disordered behaviours, rather it would be the story of the woman’s — because so many are overwhelmingly written by women — descent into her disorder and her eventual recovery. Yet time after time the authors would essentially provide a how-to guide for developing an eating disorder. While Purge does at times detail the author’s behaviour during this time, it is never cast in a positive light, nor are we as readers supposed to approve. Instead, we see a woman truly battling with an ongoing illness. Unlike other well-meaning but perhaps naive authors, Johns knows full well that she may have readers scouring her memoir for tips and tricks. She is careful with what behaviours she includes and the way she portrays them. This review shall truly strive to not provide readers with eating disorder habits or suggestions. I will not discuss the behaviours covered in Johns’ memoir, nor shall I list my own. I will note that Johns’ text could prove triggering for those grappling with disordered eating or eating disorders, and the following review could prove to be distressing, too. To combat this and to prepare potential readers, I have provided a list of resources below for those living in both the U.K. and the U.S.

https://medium.com/the-open-bookshelf/unhealthy-reading-habits-mental-and-physical-1aa58a3585d8

['Rowen Ellis']

2020-07-08 18:49:08.190000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Books', 'Eating Disorders', 'Eating Disorder Recovery', 'Self Improvement']

Developing a fully Serverless Web app

Developing a fully Serverless Web app Background As many companies tend towards a service oriented architecture, developers will often wonder whether more and more parts of their service could be moved into the cloud. Databases, file storage, and even servers are slowly transitioning to the cloud, with servers being run in virtual containers as opposed to being hosted on a dedicated machine. Recently, FaaS (function as a service) were introduced to allow developers to upload their “application logic” to the cloud without requiring the server, essentially abstracting the servers away. Despite not having to worry about the servers, developers find that they now have to deal with the cloud. Complexity with uploading, deploying and versioning now become cloud related. This, along with several current limitations of the FaaS model, has often positioned serverless technology as being best suited towards complementing a dedicated server. Motivation Recently, the Serverless Framework was introduced allowing us to abstract even the cloud part of the development process away. Now, with just about everything server or cloud related hidden away, developers have the ability to directly write code related to the actual application. The serverless model also offers several other advantages over traditional servers such as costs and ease of scaling. So would it be possible to completely replace the server with a serverless model? Taking into account the limitations of the FaaS model, we set out to build a fully functional, cloud based, serverless app. What did we build? A service that allows Hootsuite employees to list themselves and their skills as well as create, search and join internal projects within the company. The backend for our service will be primarily based on AWS Lambda, an event driven FaaS Platform provided by Amazon. The computing service is provided in the form of Lambda functions. To build this project, we would need the Lambdas to be able to carry out some simple tasks: Store users and projects in a database Retrieve users and projects in a database Modify attributes of the users and projects Along with some more powerful capabilities: Search users and projects Sending emails to users Rank projects by upvotes and time In addition, the Lambdas will need to be able to connect to several other services so we can easily integrate with them. For this project, we used the following AWS services: Lambda — serverless computing IAM & Cognito — permissions and authentication DynamoDB — data storage S3 — static website hosting and file storage SES — sending emails Cloudwatch — debugging and scheduling events Cloudfront — hosting the production single page application (SPA) API Gateway — http endpoints to front our Lambda functions And a 3rd party service: Algolia — search service S3_website — open source application to assist with deploying static Web sites on S3 For the SPA frontend: React — responsive UI React-Bootstrap — Twitter Bootstrap with React Most importantly, the Serverless Framework is used in our project to test and deploy our infrastructure. Since we don’t have to worry about configuring services in the AWS cloud or anything DevOps related, we were able to focus on writing application code, rAPIdly deploying and working through our milestones. The constraints Before we jump in and start developing the entire app, it is best to know exactly what we are working with. Lambdas, as given by the name, are anonymous functions. Therefore, our backend is technically limited to single, independent function calls. The only other resources we have are storage and services on the cloud. This puts several constraints on our fully serverless app that traditional servers would have little trouble with. We outline some of these constraints below. Statelessness of Lambda functions The Lambda functions themselves are event driven and naturally stateless. Each event from the client is typically followed by a single invocation of a function. This typically delegates the storage of state to server memory such as Redis or a database. In our case, since we only have cloud resources, we chose to use a NoSQL serverless database (DynamoDB) for fast storage and retrieval. Consequently, our workflow and functions must be designed to work with single, independent, stateless functions. Prolonged workloads Currently, there is a 5 minute execution time limit for Lambda functions, in contrast with traditional servers which have no execution time limit. This makes the use of Lambdas challenging for tasks that require continuous execution such as processing data streams. If there is a task that would take longer than 5 minutes, the workload must be split into batches, with the data blocks and state being kept track of externally. Scheduled tasks however, were simple to configure. Any Lambda that was uploaded to AWS could be configured to run at a set interval using Amazon Cloudwatch. So if something was required to run continually using Lambdas, there is the option to schedule events with short intervals, mimicking a continuous runtime. However, the application should be designed to completely avoid this. In fact, serverless architecture actually encourages tasks like this to be built as an independent service, exposing its own APIs and allowing other services to connect with it. Cold start When the Lambda functions are not in use, the cloud provider typically “spins down” the function. When they are invoked again, the function’s runtime container is required to “spin up” before executing the functions. This means any overhead required to set up the execution environment, such as the JVM for Java functions, will add additional latency to the initial execution time. An analysis of start times was done earlier this year by Neil Powers and Paul Cowles. For background and housekeeping tasks, this is hardly an issue. However, for the app we are building, several pieces of IO are bound directly to the Lambda functions. This means careful attention must be paid towards preventing the cold start and keeping the user satisfied in the frontend. For Java implementations, a “ping” might be required when the user initially loads the client so that the functions are ready when they are invoked by the user. For this app, we chose to use Node.js as recent sources indicated it has the shorter startup latency. Dependency and locality Many of the advantages and disadvantages of Lambda are based on how the AWS Lambda execution model works. When a function is initially invoked, AWS launches a container and executes your function based on your configuration settings (cold start). For subsequent invocations, AWS Lambda will try to reuse that container to execute the function. If there are high amounts of traffic and more requests are being made, AWS Lambda will simply spin up more containers and accommodate the demand. Each container will incur the startup cost. From this, it is obvious that AWS Lambda takes care of any horizontal scaling for you, which is a huge advantage. Unfortunately, since each function gets its own separate container, there will be overhead associated with creating each container. This also means spitting up your Lambda functions into chunks of smaller Lambda functions will further increase that overhead. Since Lambda containers are created on demand, there is no guarantee that your functions will be running within the same memory space or even the same machine. Unlike traditional servers where there are negligible costs in performance when randomly accessing any function within the code, Lambda functions are not “local” and must pass state back and forth through the cloud. From this, it is obviously not a good idea to wait for several dependent functions on the client side, especially if it is user facing. If functions must be chained, they should be done so on the cloud side where there is the option to configure message passing in Amazon SNS or by using services such as AWS Step Functions for function workflows. Authentication This part has less to do with serverless architecture, but it shows how our app connects to a BaaS (backend as a service) to manage things like authentication. Since all the server-side logic is managed by the BaaS provider, things are still serverless from our point of view. Skip ahead if you’re just interested in the serverless architecture. As we mentioned above, a typical user of our app will be interacting with several of Amazon’s services. We needed a way to manage authentication along with several AWS permissions and API access. Amazon IAM (Identity and Access Management) and Cognito allowed us to configure these right within the console. To specify a certain AWS action that is allowed or disallowed (such as uploading to S3), it can be added as an IAM policy. With several of these policies, they can be associated with a role. A role is simply made up of several policies. Now with the role configured, it can be added to Cognito Federated Identities, essentially creating a “type” of user for us to vendor out. Following this, we need an identity provider to authenticate a user, allowing us to vendor out an instance of our federated identities. For this app, we chose a custom identity provider in the form of a Cognito User Pool. This allows us to handle registration, maintain the user directory, and provide our own identity tokens for the authentication, while keeping everything on the cloud. The workflow for authentication is shown below. The client sends its authentication information to the IdP (Identity Provider) Our IdP (Cognito User Pool) sends a confirmation token to the client and Amazon Federated Identities The client sends its token to Federated Identities and the token is verified Federated Identities retrieves the IAM role corresponding to the IdP and returns temporary access credentials Our client can now access our app’s API and services using the credentials Now we can go ahead and add any permissions we want to give to the user. The full serverless architecture Our Lambda functions are invoked by the client through Amazon API Gateway. Subsequently, the Lambda function will invoke the API of another service and return the corresponding results. The following shows a typical Lambda function workflow: However, there are several other ways to invoke a Lambda function. Several of Amazon’s services such as S3, DynamoDB, SES, and even Alexa have the ability to trigger Lambdas. We used Cloudwatch events for example, to schedule a project ranking algorithm. This also means we can use Lambdas to control workflow between our microservices. One useful Lambda trigger we used was Amazon Cognito’s pre-signup trigger (shown below). This allows us to verify whether the emails are from Hootsuite before they are sent off to the Identity Provider. This effectively restricts access to Hootsuite employees only. There are also event hooks at every step of the signup or login workflow, giving us high flexibility to customize our authentication. Search A cool thing about serverless is the ease of connecting with other services. The ability to perform fast, complex and dynamic searches on databases often requires running a server instance (Elasticsearch). Since we wanted the app to be completely built on top of serverless services, we delegated the task to Algolia, a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider. From our side, all we have to do is use their API to index items and perform queries through Lambda, and we are able to remain serverless. This essentially makes the combination of all the Lambdas our “server”, allowing them to be the layer that manages workflow and modifies the state of our application. The following illustrates this: From this, it is clear that our Lambda function layer has essentially replaced the “server” layer of traditional applications. Frontend For the single page React app, we build it separately from the Lambdas, communicating only through the API Gateway. The static app is hosted by S3 and served through Cloudfront. With serverless architecture, we expect to be building several components completely independently, similar to what we have here. Developing Lambda functions The actual development process after the initial AWS setup was exactly as simple and productive as advertised. After adding your function to a serverless configuration file, the only thing left for you to do was to write the actual function. To test your function, the Serverless Framework provides the option to invoke your Lambda functions locally by mocking the request. This means the functions can be run without being uploaded to the Cloud and any console output and exceptions will go straight to the terminal that invoked the function. After some use, it felt as convenient as running the function straight from an IDE. Functions can also be debugged on the cloud. Any exceptions, logs, or function invocations are automatically recorded. After a bit of navigation on Amazon Cloudwatch, you can find logs and statistics on every version of every function that was deployed. So if you needed to track down the request that was causing errors in production, it can easily be done through Cloudwatch. As for uploading and deployment, it was as simple as typing a single command in the serverless CLI. Previously, there were a multitude of configurations and actions that needed to be done each time you wanted to upload your Lambda functions. This required developers to write and debug their own scripts to automate that process. With the Serverless Framework, all of this is now built in and automated. The very last bit of anything that has to do with servers is now abstracted away and it truly feels like the development process is “serverless”. Benefits Zero fixed cost Many of Amazon’s services have free tiers to cover usage during development. This allows the developer to experiment with projects at virtually no cost. Once in production, pricing for Serverless services are usage based, so if a service does not get used, the developer incurs no cost. This extends to the storage we used as well; DynamoDB has no cost for the rest state. A traditional server hosted in the cloud such as an EC2 instance will be charged hourly, making Serverless the cheaper alternative for developing prototypes and intermittently and lightly used production applications. Reduced time on Devops With the introduction of FaaS, a large portion of a DevOps’ time has been shifted to maintaining and building infrastructure between the code and the cloud provider instead of the server. With the introduction of the Serverless Framework, yet another gap has been closed, putting the developer’s code closer and closer to production and removing a considerable amount of the DevOps work required. As demonstrated by this project, a relatively small amount of time was put towards planning the architecture and setting up services, while the majority of the time was used to develop the actual application. Enforcement of the micro in microservices Another benefit of a full FaaS backend is that you are fundamentally limited to microservices. Several of our app’s requirements, such as authentication and search, require a continuously running service. Since directly building something like that doesn’t suit AWS Lambda, we must delegate them to microservices. The authentication and search would then have to be built as separate services or outsourced to another pre-existing service. Our app can then connect to that microservice through their API, which is managed independently from our app. Building for a serverless world inherently restricts you to building true microservices. So is there a functionality that doesn’t suit Lambda functions? Build it as an external microservice and connect the app to it. What’s next? Serverless technology has gone through a lot of growth in the past year. Several guides and tutorials we read up on in the beginning of this project have actually been updated to include recent updates from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. By the time more people read this, there will certainly be more improvements made to the serverless stack. We have demonstrated that serverless is a cheap, fast way to develop and deploy microservices and even full-fledged Web applications. As serverless and cloud technology continues to improve, the performance cost generally associated with FaaS architecture will be less and less noticeable. Serverless is already commonly integrated with server hosted microservices. It is very likely that the container and serverless movements converge in the future. Even if not the case, it is likely only a matter of time before a company that is built on top of microservices more fully embraces a serverless infrastructure. About the author Harry is a full-stack developer working on the People team at Hootsuite. He is a 3rd year student at the University of Waterloo studying Computer Engineering. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

https://medium.com/hootsuite-engineering/developing-a-fully-serverless-web-app-84ff897de8a1

['Hootsuite Engineering']

2018-02-07 18:35:42.597000+00:00

['Code', 'Co Op', 'Microservices', 'Design']

Givers Need Boundaries Because Takers Don’t Have Any

Givers Need Boundaries Because Takers Don’t Have Any Setting limits when people demand too much. Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash We’ve all encountered someone who has drained you of something (time, effort, money, etc.) without giving much in return. Often times people who are accustomed to someone dropping everything for them have no limits and will push you until you have nothing left to give. Whether these ‘takers’ are your family, your partner, or work colleagues it’s time to set some boundaries in your life. ‘Takers’ are more than comfortable filling up your schedule for you without considering how this will affect you and your life. Considering the circumstances that a global health crisis has brought us to, many of us have more time at home now. If we’re home more often we should be able to get more done. Right? Often times this persistent pressure to achieve more, do more, and be more can lead to burnout. If you don’t know what burnout is just know that I truly envy you, but honestly, you’ve probably experienced this at one time or another and just haven’t quite placed your finger on it yet. So, what is burnout? According to Psychology Today, burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Boundaries with partners, bosses, and family help us to avoid burnout by preventing the stress of feeling obligated to overwork ourselves. Creating Boundaries To create boundaries, you first have to dissect your emotional and physical needs. This may be difficult if you’ve been putting aside your own well-being for long enough. However, it is a crucial step in setting boundaries that truly help your life. Never exchange your values and limits to make another person more comfortable. Your needs are just as important as theirs, and you should not constantly put others above your own health. Be assertive and respectful when setting boundaries. Setting boundaries is not a bad thing. There are many people who might find themselves offended when you attempt to set a boundary, but you have to remember that you aren’t doing anything wrong. Be kind, but don’t get bullied into caving in. Setting boundaries can be a difficult and even lengthy process, but the first steps are always the hardest ones. The more accustomed you become to setting boundaries that are comfortable for you the easier it will become. Setting boundaries is a practical and uplifting way to bring back your empowerment and positively impact your quality of life.

https://medium.com/change-becomes-you/givers-need-boundaries-because-takers-dont-have-any-a056cd9f68da

['Emma Comeaux']

2020-12-07 12:42:59.667000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Mental Health', 'Self Love', 'Life', 'Self Improvement']

Introducing: The Writer John Walter

BIO FOR ILLUMINATION Also the musician, storyteller, father, husband, cyclist and much else. Image generated by WordArt I am many things. I identify as a creative person. I have “done” lots of things in my life. It has been quite a roller coaster ride so far, and I have no reason to suppose it is going to let up any time soon. Two years ago, I lost my 28 yr old daughter to suicide. It has knocked me for six. I picked up the telephone to receive the news, and as I replaced the receiver, my life changed forever. Within days I had signed up to train as a counsellor. I now exist in a world where people around me are continually examining and exploring their lives and motivations. I can live no other way. Writing has become part of my journey and one of the tools to keep me alert in my process to continue in a purposeful life. Growing up: By the seaside in a big house with a massive garden. Lots of siblings, lots of relatives visiting and camping on the lawn. Lots of noise and chaos. Occasionally Bishops coming to tea. I retreated to my room and played my guitar, wrote songs and read books I couldn’t understand because I liked the feel of it. Education: It didn’t make sense. How could I reconcile an A++ for a piece of creative writing followed by 6 of the best for wearing pink socks? On the one hand, I was rewarded and encouraged in my creative pursuits. At the same time, I was doing it all wrong. I should be studying serious subjects that would get me a job. A child of the ‘60s: In other times I might have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, but in the ’60s long hair, bells and flowery shirts were all part of being a teenage boy. My hero Jimi Hendrix was an icon of masculinity who wore flamboyant shirts with beads and necklaces. At 18, I grew a fluffy moustache so that people would stop calling me miss. Kicked out of the house: My mum did it very gently and subtly, but after failing almost everything at school and then spending the summer helping myself to the use of her car and lounging about aimlessly, she had come to the end of her tether. I found myself in a bedsit in London with an electric guitar and an intention to make it big as a rock star. The big-time that never really happened: The reality was that I worked in a factory to pay my rent, and I had no connections in London. I was miserable. Slowly I made connections, married a beautiful young woman and found myself playing piano and synth in a good quality function band twice a week. I discovered Jazz. I started devouring everything I could, borrowing vinyl records of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis from Peckham Library. I went to workshops on Saturdays, rehearsals on Thursdays and attended two evening classes each week. I was obsessed with improvisation. My wife left me. I crashed my cars. I crashed my life, and all my instruments were stolen. I had an affair with a married woman and drank continuously. The Rescue: My second wife got in contact through a mutual friend. She was on placement in London and knew no one. We both clung to each other. Within weeks my 8-year stint in London was over. I moved to Bristol to live with the love of my life and trained to be a teacher. Jazz musician: No more function band to distract me. I focused on playing jazz piano. It was an excellent way to earn extra money as a full-time student. The scene in Bristol was very vibrant, and for a few years, I was playing regularly with some fabulous musicians. I ran my own bands and composed all the music. Family Life: Teaching and raising a family was all-consuming, so I dropped Jazz from my life. I worked freelance as a storyteller. I ran storytelling workshops, I sang in choirs. I kept switching jobs trying to find the right fit eventually teaching music in a secondary school. I discovered African drumming and became obsessed with that. In 2000 I set up DrumCrazy which served me well until 2013 when the financial pressures became too much. Empty Nest: Both girls had left home, and I was playing Jazz again in low key local venues. We tried being Foster parents for a few years, but with no money coming in I reluctantly returned to teaching. I wrote a novel and hid it in a drawer. A struggle bit: We downsized, I hated teaching, I was miserable. We moved back to live by the beach. I got a brain tumour that rendered me deaf in one ear, and this was the excuse I needed to retire from teaching. Then Holly took her life. Now I write. I am training to be a counsellor. I play Jazz when I can. I make Storytelling videos. I love cooking. I have pulled the novel out of the drawer and dusted it off. It is like Holly’s death was a slap around the face. Like I was flailing about hysterically not knowing what to do with myself, and she made me stop. I reconsidered everything. It is like I was so busy worrying about what I should be doing that I wasn’t doing anything. I have never been more content. I am a writer, counsellor, musician, storyteller, videographer. As well as all those things I wrote on my lizard. Why a lizard? Well, ten years ago, I wrote The Lizard Song for young children. It was my most successful youtube video totalling 150,000 views. I like Lizards.

https://medium.com/illumination/introducing-the-writer-john-walter-4b606d0e0ad0

['John Walter']

2020-07-22 22:00:59.808000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Writing', 'Writer', 'Biography', 'Improvisation']

How Technology Is Solving Africa’s Biggest Problems

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Africa’s independence. There is the feeling, however, that the continent still remains in the shadows of the Berlin Conference. Although 60 years may seem like a long enough period for countries to find their way and emerge as regional leaders, today, Africa remains the poorest and least-developed continent in the world. Hunger, poverty, lack of clean water and electricity, terrorism, local ethnic and religious conflicts, corruption, disease outbreaks — this was Africa’s story till the early 2000s. During the last two decades, however, the continent has made remarkable progress and embarked on a road to a brighter future. The improved political situation, ambitious economic plans, and much better living conditions have paved the way for Africa’s much-needed revival. Although today some of the widely-known problems are still around, their overall effect has been widely mitigated. What is left for Africa to solve may still be a long-enough list, but thanks to technology, entrepreneurship, and globalization, the future of the continent seems brighter than ever. Africa’s painful past and hopeful future The scars of Africa’s painful past are still evident today. One of the significant problems tormenting the continent is the unstable and opaque political environment. Most countries have gone through two liberation periods in their recent history. First, they had to shake off the effect of Europe’s colonization. Next, there were local dictatorships that had to be dealt with. Today, it is the battle for establishing fully-functioning and transparent democratic governments to rule in the long-term. This is critical as countries with weak democratic foundations have proven to be the perfect environment for corruption to flourish and penetrate local governing and private structures. The problem is so severe that in 2015, Transparency International estimated that approximately 75 million Africans had paid a bribe during the past year. What is more concerning is the fact that the majority had done so just to get access to basic services that should otherwise be publicly accessible. Despite African leaders’ commitments that 2018 would have been the year of anti-corruption, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) paints a gloomy picture as the region’s average score was just 32 out of 100. Another major problem for Africa’s future is the high level of unemployment. Although the average unemployment rate for the continent is 6.1%, according to data from the World Bank, there are countries like South Africa and Botswana where the numbers reach 27.0% and 17.9%, respectively. The more concerning fact is that, according to the International Labour Organization, the youth unemployment rate on the continent exceeds 30%. The most urgent problem that Africa has to solve, however, is improving the healthcare system. Although a lot has been made in the recent years, Africa remains the continent with the worst medical treatment and living conditions. A direct consequence is the life expectancy of 62.8 years. In comparison, the life expectancy for EU citizens is 81.0 years. But the limited access to adequate public healthcare services isn’t the only reason for this. Such is also the poverty, high prevalence of AIDS, local instabilities, violent conflicts, lack of clean water, electricity deficiency, and more. As Dr. Ola Brown, one of the continent’s leaders, states in her TEDx speech, every single dollar invested in the healthcare system will make a double return in terms of economic output. Although all these major issues remain on the table, one thing is clear — Africa has the perfect prerequisites to turn things around and capitalize on its potential. The shift to democracy and external initiatives like The Bloomberg Media Initiative Africa, intended to strengthen the media industry and promote market transparency, are fundamental steps that will ensure the long-term growth and sustainable business environment. In terms of economic growth, the continent is already doing wonders. The positives are a direct consequence of local efforts and international partnerships and growth programs such as the Everything but Arms (EBA), the Africa-Europe Alliance, and the US’ African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Although the continent is home to 34 of the 48 least developed countries, today, 6 out of the ten fastest-growing economies worldwide are African countries with Ghana on top of the global ranking. Also, according to the World Bank’s 2019 Doing Business index, 5 of the ten most improved countries are in Africa. Another key positive that should be acknowledged is the massive increase in Africa’s population during the last four decades. Consequently, today it is the continent with the youngest population. In some countries, more than 50% of the citizens are aged 25 or younger. With the right investments, concentrated efforts, and sustainable development programs, a fact like this can do wonders for Africa’s future. Technology as the main building block Africa’s unexplored potential, fast-growing and young population, and the horizon of opportunities present start-ups with a solid foundation for skyrocket success. Local entrepreneurs acknowledge the continent’s problems as issues they are responsible for solving. Furthermore, business leaders are driven by a deeper purpose — to disrupt the status quo and commit to long-term success that will help bring Africa on the world’s innovation map. African entrepreneurs recognize technology as the greatest tool for building resilient business models that can help satisfy the continent’s needs. Financial sector Kenya is one of the countries that have acknowledged the benefits of blockchain’s adoption and its potential to streamline niche sectors like digital payments, governance structures, agrotech, etc. Factors such as the population’s high literacy rate, good existing infrastructure, high connectivity, and welcoming business climate have helped the country establish itself as Africa’s leading blockchain innovation hub. As a result, Kenya became a birthplace for M-PESA, a mobile money transfer service provider that was key to solving the problem of sending money to unbanked relatives living in rural areas. The good example was followed by other start-ups such as Paga, a mobile payment company based in Nigeria, focused on tackling the problem with the lack of access to basic financial services in the region. In 2014, for example, more than 66% of adult Africans didn’t have a bank account. Thanks to companies like Paga, which managed to sign up more than 8 million users in less than ten years and currently processes over $2 billion in payments, the number of unbanked African citizens dropped massively. Paga’s Founder Tayo Oviosu (source: FurtherAfrica) Other businesses like Dala and Wala have also embraced the mission of making financial services available to as many people as possible. By running blockchain-based solutions, they have helped many Africans make free-of-charge transactions. The results are staggering — today, Africa has more than 120 million active mobile money accounts. This remarkable progress is projected to add more than $300 billion to the continent’s GDP by 2025. Let’s now focus on a sector that is in a way bigger need for improvements than financial services. Healthcare The health sector in Africa presents some worrying statistics. Africa accounts for more than 65% of all deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth on a global scale, while one child in 9 dies before the age of 5, simply because of the lack of diagnostic tools. The reason — if you look at a satellite photo of Africa at night, you will find it hard to distinguish the mainland from the ocean. Due to the concentration of big cities in particular areas and the lack of electricity all over the continent, two-thirds of its territory is covered in darkness. The regions that are off the grid suffer from healthcare issues as the hospitals find it impossible to store medicine or vaccines. A satellite photo of Africa at night Once again, technology comes to the rescue with plenty of successful start-ups turning things around already. The British start-up, Babylon Health, for example, operates in Rwanda with more than 600 000 clients. For less than a dollar, Rwandans get access to a phone consultation with a doctor, which helps improve disease prevention and treatment efficiency. Leading tech companies like Philips and IBM are also helping improve Africa’s medical sector. The Dutch electronics firm, for example, has designed a portable Doppler ultrasound machine that needs no power and helps reading out a fetus’s heartbeat patterns. This methodology has proved to be much more efficient when compared to traditional Pinard horns. A trial test in Uganda, for example, revealed that more than 60% of the scanned patients needed urgent treatment. The innovative solution now comes as a solar panel-powered pack with another useful tool — a mobile chest monitor that tracks babies breathing and prevents pneumonia. Another inspiring and highly-valuable medical device is the Cardiopad, which tries to solve the problem with the lack of cardiologists on the continent. To put in perspective how serious the issue is — in Cameroon, there are currently 60 cardiologists for a population of 22 million (or one cardiologist per every 366 666 people). The Cardiopad works as a remote examination device that conducts a standard ECG test and records the data on a server to help with the prevention and further treatment of cardiology problems. The Cardiopad in action (source: QZ) IBM, on the other hand, employs AI to fight malaria and drug-resistant tuberculosis. The positive example is followed by the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières which also helps diagnose malaria with the help of smartphone cameras. The lack of professional medical staff that the healthcare industry in Africa suffered from for many years is now tackled with the help of robot doctors. The Helen Joseph hospital in Johannesburg, one of the busiest HIV clinics on the continent, accepts more than 750 patients per day. Due to the lack of medical staff, robot pharmacists are proving to be a real help in bringing treatment to as many patients as possible by prescribing and packing drugs. This has helped reduce the waiting times in the clinic from 4 hours to 20 minutes. Other companies like Zipline have developed specialized drones to process blood, medicine, or industrial cargo deliveries to hard-to-reach regions. These types of solutions help with the safe and timely delivery in military zones, rural areas or for emergent situations, while at the same time cut transportation costs. Another remarkable project healthcare project is Flying Doctors Nigeria — a medical emergency service with about 20 charter aircrafts, specializing in air ambulances, medico-logistics services, medical infrastructural development, and medical training services. Talent development Thanks to technology, Africa is now making the right steps towards reducing youth unemployment as well. The first step in the process, proper education and self-development is taken care of start-ups like Kytabu — a company that makes it possible for students and teachers in underprivileged schools or low-income regions to lease textbooks on mobile devices. There are also companies like the Uganda-based Fundibots, focused on improving technical education among young students by bringing robots to classrooms. Fundi Bots Robotics Bootcamp (source: FundiBots) The positive trend continues with high-tech firms like Andela, working with leading global corporations, and helping them find talented programmers. Andela recruits African developers, trains them, and connects them with employers from all around the world, mainly US tech giants. In the long-term, such a policy will result in the establishment of a talented community of developers and business professionals, who can become the spine of Africa’s future. Indirectly, the chance to earn a higher income by working for companies from abroad results in more spending power among young Africans, which further contributes to the local economy. Africa’s only direction is forward Africa’s story is a remarkable one. The innovations are born out of necessity, not out of the capitalistic driving forces. Local entrepreneurs have grown up in poverty, hunger, and violence, which have proven to be the most efficient motivators. The majority have seen and been through the worst, and their only trajectory is upwards. Foreign investors and companies also contribute actively to solving Africa’s leading problems. The fruitful combination of local talent and inspiration with international know-how and resources paves the way for Africa’s sustainable growth. The continent, with its abundance of resources, growing young population, and continuously improving business climate is a perfect investment opportunity for foreign companies to invest and expand their operations there. And with the promising economic growth in some African countries, it may be just a matter of time before we see the next leading innovation hub.

https://viktortachev.medium.com/how-technology-is-solving-africas-biggest-problems-f2b5c70d954d

['Viktor Tachev']

2020-05-16 11:11:40.544000+00:00

['Development', 'Technology', 'Startup', 'Africa', 'Economics']

4 Simple Libraries to Quickly Benchmark Python Code

Testing your code for speed and efficiency is a crucial aspect of software development. When code takes too long or consumes too much of a resource like memory or CPU you can quickly run into a wide range of issues. The machines your code runs on can become unstable, your code can produce unintentional side effects and in some cases even data loss. Making sure to examine glaring performance issues as they arise is helpful, but it is equally as important to establish performance baselines and profiles as well. Code should be tested for functionality from start to finish during the development process, but it is also important to test for performance as well. Building good habits of testing your code for things like speed and resource utilization while writing it will save you headaches down the road. In this article we’re going to explore ways that you can benchmark and baseline your Python code. The libraries we’ll look at are freely available and provide flexible ways to do things like performance timing, resource consumption measurement and more. Let’s get started. First up is a Python utility that’s been around for a while and is widely popular for performing quick performance tests. Let’s setup a simple test script and use timeit.Timer to run a simple time test: #!/usr/bin/env python3 # test.py import timeit import time def long_function(): print('function start') time.sleep(5) print('function end') print(timeit.Timer(long_function).timeit(number=2)) Inside our long_function we introduce some delay using time.sleep in order to simulate some long running tasks. Next, in order to actually test our function we pass it to to timeit.Timer . The Timer class measures the overall execution speed of the function. The number argument specifies how many times the test should be repeated. This is useful if you have functions that may have even a slight variation in execution time. Repeating the test will build a better picture of speed because you’ll have more data to work with. After running the code above you should get the following output. This shows that timeit ran our function twice and then produced the total time it took. Since we’re just sleeping, our variance won’t be too much: function start function end function start function end 10.00957689608913 The timeit library is great for performing quick, isolated tests on snippets of code but can also be run from the command-line as a standalone unit and contains even more useful parameters. Check out the detailed documentation for more info: The next library we’ll explore is called line_profiler and its usage is a bit more unique than other solutions. The line_profiler library allows you to get the execution time of each individual line in a file. This is incredibly useful if you’re having trouble narrowing down slow functions or third-party calls in a larger file. Seeing the time spent on each line let’s you quickly pinpoint issues instead of digging through line after line of dense code. The standard usage for line_profiler can seem a bit confusing at first, but once you use it a few times it becomes easier. In order to profile your code, you need to add @profile decorators to each function. Let’s re-use our example from before and tweak it to see how this works: #!/usr/bin/env python3 # test.py import time @profile def long_function(): print('function start') time.sleep(5) print('function end') def long_function():print('function start')time.sleep(5)print('function end') long_function() Looks pretty simple right? That’s because with line_profiler you don’t have to import anything or change your code very much, you just have to add the decorator. Since we’ve got our decorator setup on our slow function, the only thing left to do it actually test the code. In order to run line_profiler you have to do two things outside of your code: kernprof -l test.py python -m line_profiler test.py.lprof The first command above will run actually run line_profiler on your file and generate a separate .lprof file in the same directory. This .lprof file contains the results from which a report can be produced using the module itself in the second command. Let’s take a look at the output from the second command: Timer unit: 1e-06 s Total time: 5.00472 s File: test.py Function: long_function at line 6 ============================================================== 6 @profile 7 def long_function(): 8 1 15.0 15.0 0.0 print('function start') 9 1 5004679.0 5004679.0 100.0 time.sleep(5) 10 1 21.0 21.0 0.0 print('function end') Line # Hits Time Per Hit % Time Line Contents==============================================================7 def long_function():8 1 15.0 15.0 0.0 print('function start')9 1 5004679.0 5004679.0 100.0 time.sleep(5)10 1 21.0 21.0 0.0 print('function end') Each line for the profiled function is listed with its detailed statistics. Because we spend so much of our time in long_function sleeping it takes up almost 100% of the execution time of the file. Using line_profiler to generate a breakdown of where all of your execution time is going let’s you quickly determine where you may need to focus on refactoring or speeding up slow tasks. Check out the documentation for more info: For the next two libraries we’re going to shift gears and focus on the underlying resource implications of running Python code. Being able to tell how much CPU and memory your code use is almost mandatory in a modern environment. Setting unbounded processes off to chew through cycles is taboo and could land you in a world of pain. That’s where resource comes in. This library will let you measure resource usage in your code and even set limitations on how much of a particular resource can be consumed. Let’s look at an example of how to inspect the CPU usage from within a script: #!/usr/bin/env python3 # test.py import time from resource import getrusage, RUSAGE_SELF def long_function(): for i in range(10 ** 10): 2 + 2 long_function() print(getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF)) In this example we’ve again modified our existing script in order to pull in the resource package. In order to put a larger load on the CPU during the long_function we loop over a large range of numbers and force the CPU to perform some calculations. This will produce a higher load than simply sleeping. Once our test has completed, we should be able to see the following usage output: resource.struct_rusage(ru_utime=152.395004, ru_stime=0.035994, ru_maxrss=8536, ru_ixrss=0, ru_idrss=0, ru_isrss=0, ru_minflt=1092, ru_majflt=0, ru_nswap=0, ru_inblock=0, ru_oublock=0, ru_msgsnd=0, ru_msgrcv=0, ru_nsignals=0, ru_nvcsw=0, ru_nivcsw=1604) We can see in this output that we spent quite a lot of user CPU cycles. If you examine the ru_utime (which is user time) figure it shows we spent a total of 152 seconds of time. Not only can you measure CPU time, but the some other other metrics also give you insight into things like block IO and stack memory usage. For more detailed information, check out the documentation: The memory_profiler library is similar to line_profiler but focuses on producing stats directly related to memory usage. When you run memory_profiler on your code, you still get a line-by-line breakdown, but with a focus on overall and incremental memory usage by line. Just like in line_profiler we’re going to use the same decorator structure to test our code. Here is the modified example code: #!/usr/bin/env python3 # test.py @profile def long_function(): data = [] for i in range(100000): data.append(i) return data def long_function():data = []for i in range(100000):data.append(i)return data long_function() In the above example we create a test list and push a large range of integers into it. This slowly balloons the list so we can see the memory usage grow over time. In order to view the memory_profiler report you can simply run: python -m memory_profiler test.py This should produce the following report containing line-by-line memory statistics: Filename: tat.py ============================================================ 3 38.207 MiB 38.207 MiB 1 4 def long_function(): 5 38.207 MiB 0.000 MiB 1 data = [] 6 41.934 MiB 2.695 MiB 100001 for i in range(100000): 7 41.934 MiB 1.031 MiB 100000 data.append(i) 8 41.934 MiB 0.000 MiB 1 return data Line # Mem usage Increment Occurences Line Contents============================================================3 38.207 MiB 38.207 MiB 1 @profile 4 def long_function():5 38.207 MiB 0.000 MiB 1 data = []6 41.934 MiB 2.695 MiB 100001 for i in range(100000):7 41.934 MiB 1.031 MiB 100000 data.append(i)8 41.934 MiB 0.000 MiB 1 return data As you can see, our function starts out with about 38MB of memory usage and grows to 41.9MB after our list is filled. Although you can obtain memory usage information from the resource library, it does not produce a detailed line-by-line breakdown like memory_profiler . If you’re hunting down a memory leak or dealing with a particularly bloated application this is the way to go.

https://medium.com/swlh/4-simple-libraries-to-quickly-benchmark-python-code-8d3dfd288d7a

['Tate Galbraith']

2020-12-04 07:05:01.129000+00:00

['Code', 'Python', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming']

The Casserole Equation

Photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash Last week, my husband had a COVID exposure at his workplace. He is still going to his office, alongside a small number of people in a healthcare setting where everyone is following the rules, and we have deemed it to be relatively low-risk in terms of exposure. In the rest of our lives, we live in a bubble with a very small number of people we see in person. But someone in his workplace tested positive, and they had to launch into all the protocols and reporting and testing and contact tracing. He was deemed not to have primary exposure, but we still operated as if he had. About five days into this, he got sick. He is not a guy who gets sick, so we immediately assumed that he’d gotten COVID and that I had been exposed, too. It was quickly proved that he had experienced a badly timed and short-lived bout of food poisoning — but in that gap between not knowing and knowing, I was making plans in my mind for how we would quarantine for the next two weeks. My work is 100% virtual and always has been, so that is not an issue — and is one of the blessings of being a book coach. It’s mobile, it’s home-based, it’s completely in my control how much I work, when, and how. As long as there is Internet service, I can keep working. The issue had to do with food. We would need food. And this thought — how to best use Doordash and UberEats and grocery store deliveries, and how much we could lean on our friends here to bring us fresh veggies or a comforting casserole of the kind people always make when someone is sick (cheesy things like lasagne, enchiladas, turkey and broccoli au gratin) — led me to think about social media and marketing for book coaches. I know, I know — big leap there. But stay with me… So many of the students in Author Accelerator’s Book Coach Training and Certification Program are worried about marketing their businesses, and tied up in that worry is a fear or dislike of social media. They don’t want to have to be on it or to figure it out (and there’s always something new to figure out.) They worry that telling people about the services they offer (to help those people with things those people really need help with) will make it seem like they are a slimy salesperson. It’s something we talk about all the time — how to reach the writers you want to serve, how to market your business in a way that will be effective but will not suck your soul dry, how to convince yourself that you do in fact have something of value that is worth paying for. These are big questions and not incidentally, they are the same questions the writers that the book coaches serve must ask themselves, as well. My answers have been honed over many years, and over many conversations, especially with Dan Blank of wegrowmedia and author of Be the Gateway. Dan is a book marketing and platform building expert who shares my philosophy that you have to focus on the social part of social media. You have to understand that you are simply seeking to connect to people — people who are interested in what you do, and what you think, and what you create, and what you stand for and what you sell, and people who do things and think things and create things and stand for things and sell things that you are, in turn, interested in yourself. If all you consider are the tactics of social media — how to run Pinterest ads or increase your followers on Instagram — you are missing the point. And if all you consider is the technology — how to repost your newsletter on Medium or how to simulcast on Zoom and Facebook (something KJ Dell’Antonia and I struggled to figure out yesterday morning when we were doing a show about her decision whether to become a book coach) you are also missing the point. Click to hear me and KJ (who I coached through her novel, The Chicken Sisters, coming out in December) discuss whether SHE should become a book coach. We talked about the 3 key questions to evaluate a shiny new thing — What do you want? Why do you want it? What will it cost you to get it? Technology and tactics are just the how of it all; the why of it is people. If we want to serve people by offering them the chance to learn from us or work with us or read what we have written, we can’t escape the people part. And social media happens to be where the people are right now in the year 2020. So you really do have to find a way to get comfortable with it and comfortable with yourself as someone who has something worth paying attention to, or you probably have to consider another kind of business. The Dark Side I get that there are big downsides to social media. The dangerous dark side has been much in the news lately with the election and the persistence of violence and the question of what is true and who gets to decide about that truth. The danger was summed up in the documentary, The Social Dilemma, a harrowing peek into the way social media manipulates us and uses us and fools us and divides us and perhaps becomes the end of us. While watching, I was ready to pull the plug on all of it and opt-out completely, but then I remembered that I make my living in a virtual world, and teach others to make a living in the virtual world, and since I am not about to become, say, a dentist or a tennis pro or the owner of a vegetable stand (things one does locally and in-person), I will have to engage social media. It is therefore up to me to navigate it in a way that I believe will not ruin me or the people I serve or the democracy I live in. The Way Forward The only way I know how to do this, at the moment, is to be intentional about how I use social media, how much I use it, and why I use it, and to keep learning about the ways that it uses me. It’s not a terribly elegant answer, but it’s what I’ve got right now. It helps me to think about the big goals of the work I am doing, my deep level why for running a book coach training business and working as a book coach. To wit: I am working to empower people — mostly women — to launch and run businesses that will sustain them financially, satisfy them intellectually, and enrich their lives. I am working to help establish an industry — book coaching — that has not existed before. I am trying to make a change in the way writing is taught and writers are supported. I am trying to shift the way we think about creative pursuits and money — to end the narrative that writers don’t make money — by teaching book coaches to teach writers to think of their work as an investment, as a business, and to think of themselves as worthy of being paid for it. I am trying to build a business that is a good place for my employees to work. I am trying to lead the way as a book coach myself, and serve my clients in the most excellent way I can. I am trying to earn more money than I have ever earned before because money is the proof of many of the concepts I am teaching and also because money will allow me to do the things I want to do for myself and my family and the world. So yes, social media is terribly frustrating to figure out and it can be overwhelming and there is the conglomerate on the other side of the screen that we must never forget. But if I am using it in service of all these good things, I think I can sleep at night. My Personal Worry (We’re Finally Getting to the Casserole Part!) My biggest worry about building a virtual business with virtual connections all over the world (I have students and clients in Rome and England, Croatia and Zimbabwe, Switzerland and Singapore, and Boston and Florida and all over the United States) has to do with the fear about what you do when you really just need a hug and someone to bring a casserole. If all my friends and connections and business associates are scattered around the world, and if I only connect to them by social media or through phones and screens, who comes to help me if my husband and I are locked in our house for two weeks — or if, say, something terrible happened like a dire illness or accident? What good are those virtual “friends” in a catastrophe??? That is where my brain goes — and where it went when I thought I was going to need to plan a two-week quarantine. We have moved back to a town where we have some very dear friends and family, but we don’t have a broad in-person social network here and COVID has ruined all chances of building one. So what good will my online virtual social world do me when what I really need is someone to show up at my door with lasagne? What if, when the chips are down, the world I have built myself to live and work in turns out to be a hollow shell of nothingness? That is the Casserole Equation — this calculation I have made about my work and my life and social media that makes total sense except for the question of the casserole. How do I account for the casserole problem? Ijeoma Oluo’s Tragedy Gave Me An Answer I follow Ijeoma Oluo, the author of So You Want to Talk About Race and the forthcoming Mediocre, on Instagram. I don’t spend a lot of time on Instagram — it’s my newest social media and I am still working to understand it — so when I say “follow,” I mean that lightly. But she has built a community on Instagram of 410,000 people, which is impressive and worth studying — what is she doing on there? How does she engage with people? How is she connecting? One day (September 18) I saw a picture of her that did not look Instagrammy. It looked like someone who had been devastated. It looked like someone crying. Intrigued, I clicked on the video and learned that Ijeoma’s family’s home had burned down. She lives in Portland, Oregon and it wasn’t the wildfires — it was a house fire. An electrical short of some kind. They barely got out and they lost everything. In this post, she is sharing her story with this community of humans who have gathered around her. It’s so raw it is painful to watch. But she explains why she is sharing, why she is crying, why she is grateful for everything she does have in her life and her world. Over the following weeks, she posted about people who had sent her ice cream and makeup (which she loves), and jewelry and gift cards and food and clothing and pajamas and hair wraps, and people who had offered her money and rooms to sleep in, among other things. It was such an outpouring of love and support. And all I could think of was IT’S THE CASSEROLE!!!!!! She got the casserole!!!!! And all from people on her Instagram feed. A month later, she wrote this post: Here are her words so you can read them all: It has been a month and a year. In the span of 30 days we lost a friend, lost our home in a fire, and my older son contracted COVID-19. I’m not going to pretend that these last weeks have been easy, or even that I’m doing okay. Some days I am, some I’m not. My son is recovering which is definitely helping, but I’ve found myself crying for no reason (or, to be more accurate, every reason) at least once a day. But I’m also constantly aware of how fortunate we are in the community we have. We have been surrounded in love every moment of every day of our own crises within crisis. If there is one thing I’ve learned in 2020, it’s that everything you put into community you get back tenfold. We are all getting through this together and I will be honored to continue to spend time and energy in support of my community the way it has supported my family. We are still finding joy every day, still prioritizing love every day, still working toward healing every day, and I hope that you have the love and support to do the same. Also, I put on makeup today and I’m quite pleased with it. Sometimes the little things help too. This whole gorgeous and moving thing — her post, her photo, her recovery from this horrible event — stopped me cold. She had the catastrophic thing happen and the generosity she had put into the world — into social media — came back to her tenfold. I consider this an argument for social media, an argument for generosity as a business practice, and an argument that humanity is going to be okay.

https://medium.com/no-blank-pages/the-casserole-equation-18b1b3567028

['Jennie Nash']

2020-10-23 14:44:40.555000+00:00

['Writing', 'Inspiration', 'Books', 'Authors', 'Books And Authors']