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Do You Wonder What Your Dreams Want to Tell You?

Do you wonder what your dreams want to tell you? Rivetted by dreamtime imaginings years ago, I studied imagery and its meaning. Visualizations while half-asleep and those encountered in Dreamland seized my imagination. I wanted to understand them. I found, sometimes, dreams depict what happens in the day. If you engage in a repetitive task, like conveyor-belt factory work, for instance, you might continue with your chore in a dream the following night. At other times, however, your dreams offer profound insights. Before I experimented with my own dreams, and those of friends, I had already examined symbolism and emotive content to fathom dream meanings with diverse success. But I learned how to create my own connections with symbols and embed them in my mind, which then uses them during my night-time imaginings, and you can too. Emotions and symbols Dream interpretations, I discovered, link with precise symbols held in your subconscious, like swords with conflict or love and hearts. I saw how dreams could describe innermost secrets. Studying emotions, I noted, was important too. When fear joins with heart imagery in dreams, for instance, it may reveal an unwillingness to love (dread of loss or rejection). Distorted dream symbols make clarification difficult, though. Your subconscious attributes associations with them, but results are muddy. That is, unless you expand your cognizant repertoire of symbols and attach them with exact meanings. Once sophisticated and repeated, they can penetrate your subconscious and crop up in your dreams. Decipher (and note symbols and their associations) It helps to work with what you have rather than start from scratch. Before you add fresh symbols, note pre-existing links you’ve already conjured. Balloons, for example, might connect with freedom in your mind and rage or passion with fire. You may find dream dictionaries useful. Then again, the author’s interpretation of symbol meanings, which vary, must match yours, and it’s a hit and miss affair. Hence, they don’t work for everyone. Many images and their meanings are imprinted in your subconscious, and the information in reference books won’t always be applicable. List links your mind has already made. Next, add extra symbols, those you require your subconscious to connect with explicit meanings. This will improve how your mind communicates via your dreamworld. So, on the left side of your list you might write ‘dove’ as a symbol, and on the other side ‘peace.’ (A generic example, but yours will be exclusive to you). Create links between meanings and symbols When sleepy, read the list before you go to bed. Picture symbols and their translations. Include emotion, too. To connect fog with misunderstanding, for instance, recollect what confusion’s like as you imagine yourself encircled by smoke. Interpret your dreams When entrenched in your subconscious, the symbols you’ve learned will appear in your dreams. And you’ll understand them. You can also ask your mind questions. You might wish to know if someone’s an apt romantic partner or whether the investment you consider making is astute. Your subconscious stores everything you understand about the topic and can offer helpful tips as you sleep. After repetition, you’ll no longer need your symbol list. Your psyche will have soaked them up and stored them ready for use. Sometimes, your dreams won’t reveal anything pertinent. At others, however, they will reveal extraordinary insights.

https://medium.com/recycled/do-you-wonder-what-your-dreams-want-to-tell-you-c4cd196a1716

['Bridget Webber']

2020-11-10 01:51:56.699000+00:00

['Mind', 'Nonfiction', 'Life', 'Psychology', 'Dreams']

On Being Held Hostage by Depression

For over four years, “You’ll never write again” is the mantra playing on a loop between my ears. Vocation becomes affliction, soon demanding journalism and I break up. Although ours has always been a precarious union often funded by other work on the side, I’m bereft of purpose without it. Worse, I’m still hard-wired for the job. Curiosity keeps craving words and the blank page taunts me daily with threats of impending intellectual inertia. So I placate curiosity with my library card, gorging on books in a bid to keep it — and myself — alive. It seems to work. But survival doesn’t pay. I need to start earning a living again, find a way to transfer my skill set to another industry, reinvent, rebrand, relaunch. This dehumanizing approach to work does nothing for my depression. I’m not a fucking product, I want to scream, I’m a human! So what if I’m fallible? News flash: We all are. And yet, with only the slightest touch of editorial alchemy, I transform my stay in Depressionland into a “sabbatical”, thus proving to myself my copywriting chops are still intact. At the time, I’ve only been out of commission for two years. One word is all it takes to preempt awkward questions, one word is all it takes to conjure up the illusion of agency and success. Most importantly, one word is all it takes to slay the guilt and shame associated with not earning a living for so long. But the word “sabbatical” rings hollow and feels awkward. Try as I might, I can’t get behind it. Besides, it conveys an aura of professional privilege that has always been alien to me. Case in point: I worked in Portugal under brutal financial austerity measures. As a result, my career is littered with the corpses of editorial endeavors that met an untimely end when public funding and advertising revenues ran out. What’s more, the lie touches a nerve. By passing off fiction as fact, I’ve become a full-fledged member of Depressionland’s cult of societal silence. Not only have I turned on myself, but I’ve become complicit in the very thing I decry.

https://medium.com/invisible-illness/is-depression-holding-you-hostage-too-573f412f0c4d

['A Singular Story']

2020-12-10 15:18:23.213000+00:00

['Journalism', 'Depression', 'Mental Health', 'Suicide', 'Life Lessons']

Image compression using singular value decomposition

Welcome back! Last time we have introduced the SVD-decomposition and discussed the rank-k approximation of a matrix A. We have also seen a small example how it works, but we probably failed to convince the Reader why such suspicious-looking matrix manipulation would be useful outside of mathematics. To ease the doubt about the applicability of this mathematical tool, we are going to show an interesting application of the SVD-decomposition, namely image compression. Image compression using SVD Images are represented in a rectangular array where each element corresponds to the grayscale value for that pixel. For coloured images we have a 3-dimensional array of size n×m×3, where n and m represent the number of pixels vertically and horizontally, respectively, and for each pixel we store the intensity for colours red, green and blue. What we are going to do is to repeat the low-rank approximation procedure that we introduced last week on a larger matrix, that is, we create the low-rank approximation of a matrix that represents an image for each colour separately. The resulting 3-dimensional array will be a good approximation of the original image, as we will see soon. The Ipython notebook with the following code snippets can be downloaded from this location. For demonstration purposes we have chosen an image of the Castle hill in Budapest. The original image we would like to compress can be found below. Castle hill, Budapest The image can be imported into the notebook by using the PIL package. We have also normalized the intensity values in each pixel, that’s why we have divided the values by 255. The next step is to separate the grayscale values for each color, that is, we work with 3 independent 2-dimensional matrices, and perform an SVD-decomposition for each colour separately. We have picked k=50, that is, we construct the best rank-50 approximations of the intensity matrices for each colour. We can calculate how many bytes are needed to store the pieces of the rank-50 approximation compared to the size of the original image. Actually, we have achieved a compression rate 8% which means that only 8% of the original storage space is used for those matrices from which we can restore a matrix that is close to the original one (the closest among all matrices that have rank 50). Well, the restored matrix can be close to the original image, but are we satisfied with the result? Good compression rate usually means quite bad quality, so let’s check what we have achieved. Castle hill, restored image using rank-50 approximation The buildings are recognisable, still, the approximate image is quite distorted and noisy. We have also repeated the experiments using k=10 and k=200. The resulting approximations can be found below. For the sake of completeness, the storage of the matrices for k=10 requires 62,080 bytes resulting in an impressive 1.6% compression rate (albeit the recovered image is nearly unrecognizable) whilst for k=200 the storage space is 12,561,600 bytes and the compression rate is 32.2%. You may also would like try to compress several images using different values for k. You can do this by downloading the Ipython notebook and run the code on the images of your choice. Castle hill, restored image using rank-10 approximation Castle hill, restored image using rank-200 approximation To sum up, the singular value decomposition is a very powerful mathematical tool with applications in many fields, like image compression that we have just covered briefly, but there are many others. SVD-decomposition is generally a good choice when one has to compress large dataset (that is, reduce their dimensions) in such a way that the inner structure and correspondence relations between the data points are preserved in some way. Principal component analysis is a good example, we might devote a post for it sometime.

https://medium.com/balabit-unsupervised/image-compression-using-singular-value-decomposition-de20451c69a3

['Unsupervised Blog']

2018-07-10 15:04:13.779000+00:00

['Compression', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Data Science', 'Image Processing']

A Look Into The Future: The Value of Science Fiction

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading.” — Ray Bradbury Food For Thought The Value Of Science Fiction Science fiction is the telescope that looks into the future. Through science fiction literature and films, we are able to address technological change, existential risks, and cultural crises that may define our future. This form of deep imagination is the ultimate form of preparation. It not only allows us to speculate what the future could look like, it also gives us tools to draw from when/if these or similar events actually take place. To help prove our point, here are how some of the greatest sci-fi minds speak about the value of the genre. 😏🚀 Isaac Asimov: “It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be…Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence…has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.” Ray Bradbury: “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.” “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” Douglas Adams: “Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” Philip K. Dick: “I, for one, bet on science as helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given us more lives than it has taken; we must remember that.” Gene Roddenberry: “For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.” And finally, Arthur Clarke:

https://medium.com/the-mission/a-look-into-the-future-the-value-of-science-fiction-3ac1519de7d9

[]

2019-04-12 19:32:00.174000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Science Fiction', 'Reading', 'News', 'Science']

You Have to Impress Your Subconscious If You Want Affirmations to Work

Internal conflict arises when the data in your mind differs from what you say aloud. My friend Connie, for instance, repeats positive affirmations in front of her bathroom mirror. She looks herself in the eye and says “you have a brilliant memory” and “your confidence grows day-by-day.” Over lunch on Tuesday, though, she voiced disgruntlement and told me affirmations don’t work. “Studies show…” but before I finished my sentence, she said: “Don’t talk about studies! I’m living proof affirmations are useless.” “Well, I think the opposite.” She frowned until her forehead wrinkles looked like waves. “What do you mean?” I mentioned studies tell us everything you say and think is an affirmation when coupled with emotion, not just affirmations you create on purpose. “Hang on a minute, everything?” “Yep. You can tell your reflection you’re confident and happy until the cows come home, but if your words the rest of the day, including those you think, state the opposite they’ll dominate.” “Are you sure?” “Sure. Your brain accepts what you tell it most often. When you criticize yourself, you create beliefs that don’t serve you.” “And they are the same as affirmations?” “Yes.” “Darn it.” If my conversation with Connie’s captured your attention, you might wonder how to cut out the negative thoughts and words that take precedence over preferred affirmations. Connie felt the same. “I’m doomed then. There’s no way I can stop criticizing myself.” “Maybe you needn’t cut out every negative word to win the war, but make sure the balance tips in favor of positivity.” “So I can still slip up?” “I guess. It’s just necessary to produce more positivity than negativity. You know, so positivity tips the scales.” “I can do that. I think…” “Remember to add emotion. Only things you think or say with conviction impress your mind.” She grimaced. “How do I add emotion?” “The same way you are now. You’re implanting the idea affirmations are difficult; sowing an unhelpful seed.” “So, have I got this straight? How I feel when I experience thoughts and words has an impact. If I am unemotional, an affirmation doesn’t work? And if I say one thing, but think another, it won’t help me?” “Correct.” “No wonder saying positive stuff to my reflection was no good. I didn’t believe it. I thought the words were enough.” “Yeah, and you had negative thoughts that negated your efforts, anyway.” “I don’t get it, though. I mean, how can I add belief to an affirmation I don’t believe? When I say ‘I’m confident,’ but I’m not yet, the affirmation won’t work.” “Hmm. Okay. Think of something you believe in for a moment.” “Right. I’ve thought of something.” “What does it feel like?” Connie looked baffled. “Feel like?” “In your body. The feeling of confidence in a belief impacts your body. Where is it, and what’s it like?” “My spine straightens and I seem taller.” “Anything else?” “I can breathe better. Straightening my spine has opened my airways.” “Good. We’re getting somewhere. When you think about a solid belief, your back straightens and you take full breaths.” “Yes.” “That makes sense. I’m guessing the topic you’re thinking about makes you happy too?” “That’s right. Why do you say that?” “Because joy feels expansive in the body. You open up when you’re happy and restrict body functions when you’re sad. Right! We’ve got information to use now.” “You want me to straighten my spine and take deep breaths when I say my affirmations?” “Yes. More than that though. Get in the right frame of mind first too. Think of the same topic you’ve just considered. The one that made you straighten up and feel good. Then do the spine and breathing as you say affirmations.” “Simple. It sounds doable. What about negative thoughts that pop into my head?” “There’s no need to make things complicated. Just straighten your spine, take deep breaths and ignore unwanted thoughts.” “And if I put myself down in a conversation?” “Do the same thing. Correct yourself. Straighten up. Breathe. Expand your chest and say an affirmation you prefer.” Connie tells me affirmations work for her now. Interestingly, I learned how to make my own affirmations work too by teaching Connie. Sometimes you learn best by describing how to do something and then doing it.

https://medium.com/recycled/you-have-to-impress-your-subconscious-if-you-want-affirmations-to-work-586599f4b4c1

['Bridget Webber']

2019-11-02 11:10:12.873000+00:00

['Law Of Attraction', 'Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Affirmations', 'Psychology']

Entrepreneurship can‘t be taught

Business skills can be taught; entrepreneurial qualities like grit and risk tolerance are inborn. So can entrepreneurship be taught? Most entrepreneurs and investors seem to think the answer is ‘no’. Most academicians and students think the answer is ‘yes’. — Amity University I sincerely believe that exceptional entrepreneurs have what it takes in them from the day they were born, and I think most psychologists will agree with me. We’re talking about the unicorns; the ones that make it to a respectable IPO. Why? Let me explain with a simple but intuitive analogy. Entrepreneurs are born, not bred How does one cultivate a great world class musician, say a pianist? First you gather all the young kids who can play the instrument. You then ask respectable piano teachers to evaluate who had the innate talent and aptitude to go far. And then you get these teachers to take them under their wings and put them through years of rigorous training and dedication to the craft. You do not however, make playing the piano seem very cool and glamorous to attract general interest in all children, get a bunch of people who have never played the piano to evaluate them, and then choose a large number as apprentices and hope that eventually a few of them would achieve greatness. The same could be said of any other achievements that require a lot of talent, determination and passion to succeed. I believe being a successful entrepreneur falls into such a category, having failed miserably in one attempt, achieved minor success in another, and met and talked with many who fell into both ends of the spectrum. Encouraging entrepreneurial ‘spirit’ Some governments or academic institutions believe that encouraging entrepreneurial spirit is the key to creating more successful entrepreneurs. I believe that is a mistake. Getting more people to try does not increase the odds of getting successful startups . The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘spirit’ as “the prevailing or typical quality, mood or attitude of a person, group or period of time”. By this very definition it implies that any ‘spirit’ is temporary in nature. Rather than developing an overall sense of ‘entrepreneurial spirit’, it might be better to identify individuals with inherently strong entrepreneurial qualities that will last — passion, grit, resourcefulness, risk-taking aptitude — and giving them the encouragement and assistance they need to fully develop their potential over the long and obstacle laden process they will surely face. It’s cool to do a startup With big money and so much glamour propaganda injected into entrepreneurship these days, I have met many young founders doing startups because it is now ‘cooler’ and less boring than working in a big corporation. They also tend to choose popular themes such as Artificial Intelligence or Blockchain because it’s easier to get investors’ attention. They quote Jack Ma or Steve Jobs as role models and use popular lingo like solving “pain points” that venture capitalists love to hear in pitches.

https://lancengym.medium.com/entrepreneurship-cant-be-taught-980380d2423d

['Lance Ng']

2018-11-21 01:13:14.664000+00:00

['Startup Lessons', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Entrepreneur', 'Founders']

Connecting with the Autistic Adults in Your Life

Connecting with the Autistic Adults in Your Life Tips for educators, therapists, friends, and loved ones Photo by Dario Valenzuela on Unsplash I’m an adult Autistic person, and I love being Autistic. Autism has brought a lot of wonderful things into my life. It’s given me the focus and intensity required to become a prolific writer. It’s helped me develop an analytic, critical perspective that can cut through the bullshit of bureaucracy, meaningless social rules, outdated gender norms, and so much more. And Autism has taught me to be strong in the face of judgement and ostracism, allowing me to stand up for what is right and provide a warm embrace to other people who have been excluded for being strange, inappropriate, not enough, “wrong”. But for all its gifts, Autism also has its share of challenges. Actually, scratch that. It’s not Autism that’s the problem. It’s how other people respond to Autism. Mainstream, neurotypical society creates loud, bright, unpredictable spaces, then expects Autistic people to navigate them seamlessly, without a wince or a complaint. When an Autistic person struggles, they are typically blamed for being oversensitive, or non-compliant, or simply for not trying enough. Without ever meaning to, allistic (non-Autistic) people lay out numerous Autism-unfriendly expectations for how other people think and act, and routinely express themselves in ways that Autistic people find confounding. When we aren’t subjected to allistic expectations and norms, many Autistic folks get along just fine. Being Autistic, by itself, can be pretty easy. It’s being Autistic around neurotypical people that is hard. A couple of days ago, an allistic therapist tweeted at me, asking how she could better serve her Autistic patients. I was so glad she knew to ask. Most mental health providers aren’t taught much about what Autism looks like in adults. Adult educators usually don’t know a thing about the topic. Neither do the friends and loved ones of Autistic adults. There’s a lot of very general information about childhood Autism to be found online, mostly stereotypical stuff best suited for cisgender boys with “masculine” interests, but if you love an Autistic person who differs from that mold, particularly an adult, you’re probably kind of lost. So, how do you support the Autistic adults around you? How can you make the world a more accessible place for us? How can you be a more accommodating coworker, therapist, lover, or friend? Here are a few tips, inspired by a blend of my own experience, the (limited) research that is available, and countless conversations with my Autistic peers: Communicate Directly — Even When It’s Uncomfortable I often find that non-autistic people communicate in indirect, symbolic ways. They often care more about conveying a general feeling than they do expressing the literal truth. A lot of their messaging occurs on a non-verbal or social level, and when you’re Autistic, it’s easy to miss entirely. Many non-Autistics seem to be especially uncomfortable with negativity. Saying “no” to an idea, telling a person they’ve got the facts wrong, passing judgement on an unethical act — these are really difficult for allistics to express. Instead, they’ll approach the truth from an angle. They’ll use sarcasm, veiled compliments, and small talk to make a point rather than stating it outright. It confuses Autistic people a lot, and makes us feel crazy. For example, I’ve noticed that when an allistic person doesn’t want to do something, they will often point out an irrelevant flaw with the suggestion instead of just saying “sorry, I’m not interested in that activity”. Or they’ll say “maybe” when they actually mean “no”. They’ll broadcast countless nonverbal messages that mean anything from “please come over here” to “stop doing that” to “please leave me alone to talk with this person”, and then get frustrated when Autistic people can’t read them. There’s also a frustrating lack of consistency in what an allistic person’s veiled message even is. Sometimes, an allistic person will vent or complain about a stressful situation as a way of indirectly asking for help in handling it. Other times, they’ll vent and complain because they want a supportive ear — and will be offended if somebody tries to offer them advice. It’s very hard to tell the difference. Most Autistic people try very, very hard to communicate well. Because we’ve been told we’re “weird” all our lives, we work hard to present ourselves and our ideas in comprehensible ways. Because we are often ignored or silenced, we expend a lot of effort trying to be heard and taken seriously. Unfortunately, the allistic people around us fail to put the same level of effort into communicating effectively with us. Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash Many Autistic people have a hard time detecting sarcasm, and we usually believe people mean exactly what they say. So if you want to express yourself to one of us, don’t dodge the issue. Just say it outright. “I can’t do that”“Please give me some space”, “I don’t understand what you mean, can you explain it again?”, “I’m tired of talking about this”, and “I would love to do that” are all great examples of clear, direct communication. Just say what you mean. It’s that simple! Of course, I recognize that for many allistic people, being straightforward isn’t actually simple at all. You’ve been taught all your life to temper rejection with praise, to hide disagreement behind agreeable language. But when you’re communicating with Autistic folks, you’ve got to throw that playbook — and your fears of being “negative” — out the window. As a general rule, we don’t get offended when people tell us “no”. In fact, clear boundaries and honest rejections can help us feel safe. Most of the time we have to guess frantically at what allistic people mean, so it’s a relief when one just lays out how they’re actually feeling. Also, try not to be offended when we are similarly direct or blunt with you. We’re not trying to be hurtful or barbed. We’re just trying to express our feelings in a way that won’t be misconstrued. Manage Expectations Autistic folks expect people’s actions to be predictable and logical. To most of us, numbers have specific meanings, life has a structure, and things happen for a reason. When allistic people operate in vaguer, more intuitive terms, it can really throw us for a loop. Here’s a really simple example. If my partner says he’s going to be ready to leave the house in five minutes, I assume he’ll be out the door in exactly five minutes. But often, “in five minutes” means something way more amorphous and vague to him than that. It’s more about a feeling of readiness than it is about something quantifiable. I know this about him — we’ve been together nine years — yet my brain short-circuits with confusion every single time it happens. Similarly, when an allistic coworker tells me they’ll have a draft ready “by tomorrow”, I assume they have an accurate gauge on how long a task will take, and have set aside that amount of time to get it done. This almost never actually happens. I have found that for most allistic people, “tomorrow” is more aspirational than it is literal. When someone says “this will be done tomorrow” what they often mean is something like, “I’m gonna start working on it sometime this week”. No human being is completely rational; even Autistic folks aren’t robots. But when we’re surrounded by allistic people who communicate in vague, emotion-based ways, we often end up feeling like confused robots who haven’t been properly programmed to interpret human speech. We thrive on consistency and feel most at ease when we know what to expect, so the more accurate you can be with us, the better. Not sure how long an activity will take to complete? Give an estimate that allows room for error and setbacks. Want to cancel plans? Just say that you need to cancel, instead of using wishy-washy language about how you “might not be up for it”. Have to deviate from the pre-determined schedule? Let the Autistic person know as soon as you can, so we can prepare for it. Don’t try to soften the blow with euphemistic language — we might miss the message or be confused about why a change is happening. Be Willing to Go Deep Autistic people do not live in the shallows. We are obsessive and passionate. Most of us have a variety of rotating special interests, which we consume information about voraciously. We can spend hours joyously hyper-focusing on an activity or creative outlet, so delighted that we forget to eat or drink. We love intellectual debates, pedantic conversations, and getting lost in the weeds. Unfortunately, all too many non-Autistic folks see our deep capacity for engagement as “cringey”, immature, or embarrassing. Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash I will never understand why someone would choose to only love something in half measures. It’s tragic to me that some people never get to throw themselves into the depths of passion for fear of seeming “weird”. Loving something intensely is a wonderful escape from the stressors of everyday life. It’s a transcendent experience. It helps us develop new skills and knowledge bases, and connects us with other people who share that capacity for depth. Of course, allistic people are completely capable of going just as deep as Autistic people are. You can decide at any time to abandon your fears of seeming “cringey”, and take the plunge right along with us. You might find you like how it feels to lose yourself to obsession every once in a while. Want to dive in? It’s really easy. Just ask an Autistic person about a topic that interests them, and really listen, with a genuine ear. Often, allistic people will do this frustrating thing where they’ll bring up an exciting, complex topic, but then quickly lose interest the second an Autistic person really tries to engage with the topic’s depth. It’s not a crime to prefer small talk, but most Autistics want to get more philosophical or analytical than that. Try coming along for the ride. You might learn something! Autistic people love to share information about the topics that excite us. The process is called “info-dumping”, but it’s really an expression of affection and passion. You don’t have to sit and listen to one of us prattle on about Pokemon forever if you don’t want to, but if you can find common ground with one of us, there’s a lot of potential for connection and creativity. Passionate Autistic people are the lifeblood of every nerd community, online database, and digital subculture. We pour a ton of energy into these social groups, and help make them into eccentric, comfortable spaces where everyone is welcome. Don’t be afraid to join them and geek out with us — nobody is going to judge you. It’s cool to be earnest. It’s fun to care about things! And the more time you spend with Autistic people, the less self-conscious you’ll feel about whatever freaky or niche interests you might have lurking inside you. Don’t Expect Our Emotions to Look Like Yours A few months ago, a lot of well-meaning feminist writers wrote pieces celebrating the fact that climate activist Greta Thunberg doesn’t smile very often. In a world where women are expected to be easygoing and pleasant to look at, it seemed revolutionary for a teenager girl to move through the world with a flat, serious face. Shockingly, most of these essays said little about the fact that Thunberg is an out, proud Autistic young woman. You cannot separate Thunberg’s steely confidence from her Autism, and you can’t discuss the criticism she faces without acknowledging the ableism at the core of it. Thunberg isn’t just criticized for frowning because she is a young woman. It’s also because her way of emoting and expressing herself is deeply, proudly Autistic, and most people are still very uncomfortable with that. Autistic emotions are different. We are often “flat-affected” and seem far less expressive and outgoing than our non-Autistic peers. This can leave people with the impression that we have no feelings or internal lives at all. Our neutral, resting expressions can read as angry, blank, or depressed to allistic people. We often get told to “smile!”, or get criticized for seeming unfriendly, but faking the cheerful bubbliness that allistic people desire from us can be downright exhausting. Paradoxically, many Autistics actually experience emotions very intensely. When we’re happy, we may flap our hands, rock in place, or make gleeful, chirpy noises. When we’re angry we may try to hit ourselves in the head. We can even be sent into a full-blown meltdown state if we become too overwhelmed with grief, sadness, frustration, or excitement. When an emotional overload happens, and we find ourselves crying on the floor or slapping the walls out of sheer rage, people view us as abnormal or scary. And when allistic people are scared of us, the results can be deadly. Expressing emotions as an Autistic person is a total double-bind. If we try to look calm and behave “normally”, people think we are emotionless automatons. Yet if we express ourselves in the loud, physical, abnormal ways that feel authentic, people think that we’re freaks. Whichever route we choose, we end up being corrected and reprimanded constantly. By the time we’re adults, most of us have been told thousands of times that our emotions are totally inappropriate, so we’ve learned to don an impassive, phony mask instead. “Masking” Autism is exhausting. A lot of research has shown that the better an Autistic person is at feigning a neurotypical personality, the greater a toll it takes on our mental health. So if you want to be a true and committed ally to the Austitic folks around you, you’ve got to get comfortable with our unique ways of expressing emotion. If you love an Autistic person, don’t try to guess what they are feeling. Don’t assume that just because their face is flat and serious-seeming that they are angry, or sad, or depressed. Don’t ask us constantly if we are “doing okay” or if “something is wrong” — it can feel like a reprimand to put our mask back on. Don’t tell the Autistic people in your life that their happy flapping or sorrowful bawling is “too much”. Read up on Autistic meltdowns, and come to understand how emotional overloads feel. Most of all, don’t pressure Autistic people to feign a neurotypical personality. One of the most damaging things you can do to one of us is to judge and stifle our authentic, healthy communication. Relax the Social Rules Most social norms are completely arbitrary and have no logical explanation. This confounds the hell out of most Autistic people. Why does wearing a piece of elaborately knotted fabric around your throat signify that you are a professional? Why are some complicated hairstyles considered fancy, yet other, equally elaborate hairstyles are considered workplace-inappropriate? Why do we routinely ask people how they are doing, yet never expect a negative reply? At best, these pointless rules are an annoyance that neurotypical people learn to ignore. At worst, they are a means of exclusion, making public life inaccessible for anyone who is marginalized. Rules about what counts as ‘professional’ conduct and attire are often racist, sexist, transphobic, and ableist to a massive degree. One of the greatest gifts of Autism is a keen ability to see through all this arbitrary prejudice. Many of us find it nigh impossible to follow rules that make no sense or are damaging. If a piece of useless fabric is physically uncomfortable, we’re not gonna wear it. If a gender norm is reductive, we’re not going to follow it. If there’s an injustice staring us in the face, we’re going to want to confront it, even if the allistic people around us view doing so as ‘impolite’. In mainstream, neurotypical society, this amazing gift is instead perceived as a curse. Sitting comfortably and wearing cozy clothing is seen as sloppy or immature. Honesty and authenticity gets us labeled rude. If we don’t provide the socially expected amount of eye contact, people think we’re liars, or even joke that we seem dangerous and scary. We end up being ostracized despite having done no harm at all. If you want to help Autistic people thrive, you’ve got to loosen the rules. In professional settings, really consider which expectations are important, and which are arbitrary signifiers of status or ability. Does having a dress code impact how business is done in any measurable way? If people are permitted to a little strange, is there any harm done? Do you need every employee to be a talented conversationalist, or is there room in your world for people who are shy, with stuttering voices or gazes that never leave the floor? Outside of work and school, consider how social norms influence your social perceptions. Are you creeped out when you see a guy rocking in place on the bus? If someone takes a few seconds longer than normal to answer a question, do you respect them less? Do you think it’s wrong or inappropriate for an adult to sleep with a stuffed animal? Do you only choose friends who dress, talk, emote, think, and live as you do? Why? Don’t be afraid to surround yourself with people who make you feel a little awkward sometimes. And don’t hesitate to stand up for those among us who come across as unusual, eccentric, or harmlessly awkward. People who behave and think in non-normative ways can challenge you and help you to grow. And being around a variety of types of people can free you to be more authentically, bizarrely yourself, too. … Being Autistic in a neurotypical society means constantly violating the rules of a game that no one taught you how to play, and which you never consented to being a part of. You’re constantly being told, in indirect ways, that your actions, mannerisms, and words are unacceptable. People seem to be constantly misleading you, and yet find your attempts at clearing things up to be rude or suspect. When you do finally figure out the rules of the game, you discover that they are incredibly taxing and emotionally depleting for you to follow. It can be despair-inducing, and deeply isolating. This can all change in an instant, however, when an allistic person makes the choice to meet us halfway. When people are honest and straightforward with us, we are able to form safe, healthy relationships with strong lines of communication. When we are celebrated for our weirdness, we get to challenge the status quo in important, far-reaching ways. And when we are allowed to express ourselves without fear of reprisal, we get to share our deep capacity for joy with a world that desperately needs it. Autistic people do not need to be cured — we need to be accommodated. Thankfully, if you’re an allistic ally, accommodation can be easy. Just relax your adherence to social norms, get comfortable with a bit of strangeness, and tell us how you’re feeling. We want to get to know you. We have been reaching out and making overtures all our lives. Make an effort to know us, too.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/connecting-with-the-autistic-adults-in-your-life-64a4e3df950e

['Devon Price']

2020-01-07 20:34:48.152000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Education', 'Autism', 'Psychology', 'Disability']

How Abzu adapted to Corona times

How Abzu adapted to Corona times Small and large adjustments from a global artificial intelligence startup March 2020 is a month we will never forget. The world changed quite quickly, and we were all stunned by the severity of the crisis as countries shut down and borders rapidly closed. Here at Abzu, we are categorically aware that every state’s response is unique. We’re a European company at heart with offices in Barcelona and Copenhagen, and the situation in each country is quite different: Spain was hit quickly and hard with the virus, and a mandate was put in place that required everyone to shelter at home. Our Barcelonian coworkers and friends can only leave their homes to buy medicine or necessary groceries. Schools and the public sector are closed. Denmark has been mostly shut down since March 11th, but it has recently started a gradual reopening. At the time of writing, schools and kindergartens have partially reopened. Abzu is an international company, famous for our self-organizing culture, and we already have an established culture of running “video windows” the entire workday to connect our two offices and anyone working remotely. We use Zoom a lot for daily check-ins and various pairings or meetings. Daily check-ins every morning at Abzu In the “new normal,” we’ve democratized our “video window”: now we leave a Zoom room open all day, which has an average of eight Abzu faces at any time with various emotions (concentration, frustration, amusement, etc.), or sometimes empty chairs or couches as symbols of solidarity, or the occasional cat or kid vying for attention. Our mics are mostly muted, but it recreates the feeling of being around our colleagues. It’s a small change that has returned large, fuzzy dividends. Human connection during a time of isolation But a significant change for us was our decision to alter the launch of our product which we had planned for full release in April 2020. Of course the decision was difficult — especially as plans had been underway for over two years — but it was abruptly apparent that we had to adjust more than just tech use in this “new normal”. We’ve shifted our plans to an invite-only launch. It’s a little annoying, but we’ll change the face of artificial intelligence with a select group of users instead of the public. And although this wasn’t the big splash we have all been working towards, it has its benefits: white-glove onboarding service, more tailored feedback, and the opportunity to improve our digital communications. Some home offices are tidier than others It’s been a privilege to see how well all the Abzoids have adapted to this situation, with children running around them and up and down the walls, and a monumental shift in product strategy. It’s humbling, to say the least. But I am looking forward to our next in-person gathering. We all miss the hugs. Whatever changes Coronavirus has forced you and your team to make in your culture and operations, don’t underestimate the toll it takes on your employees. Whether they’re still sheltering in place under heavy restrictions or gradually reopening — which has its own set of unique challenges — we’ve found that small and genuine tokens of appreciation and connection go a very long way. When you’re making deadlines, sometimes you need coffee, soda, and beer A few tips and techniques that have done more than keep us sane:

https://medium.com/abzuai/how-abzu-adapted-to-corona-times-2735c4e37b3b

['Jonas Wilstrup']

2020-04-21 14:02:54.752000+00:00

['Remote Working', 'Teal Organizations', 'Work From Home', 'Startup', 'Coronavirus']

A Reading List for a Vegan Left

When so much coverage of veganism is divorced from politics, it was a breath of fresh air to read a recent BBC piece covering a boom in vegan restaurants in St. Petersburg, Russia — all run by anarchists. “Inside, rainbow-flag tote bags, feminist stickers and vegan condoms are sold alongside plant-based Napoleon cakes and reusable straws. In the freezer, there are varenyky and pel’meni dumplings made by She’s Got A Knife, a ‘feminist horizontalist culinary project’,” the piece by Ashitha Nagesh reads. “In a back room, there’s an unassuming hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Tempeh Time. It’s dedicated to serving dishes made with tempeh — pronounced ‘tem-pay’ — a protein made from fermented soya beans.” Nagesh covers quite a bit of vegan anarchist history in the piece, which got me thinking about what a starter reading list for a vegan left would look like. Here, some highly recommended work for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of veganism as a coherent political philosophy that seeks to break down oppression in all its forms. This is mentioned in the BBC piece as the piece of writing that coined the term “veganarchist” in 1997. It outlines the interlocking oppressions faced by humans and nonhuman animals, and how a liberal approach to veganism misses significant points. “It is not enough to boycott the meat industry and hope that resources will be re-allocated to feed the hungry,” writes Dominick. “We must establish a system which actually intends to meet human needs, which implies social revolution.” Here, the three writers respond to the left’s general dismissal of animal rights as a bourgeois concern. “The problem with the view that the animal rights movement finds its roots exclusively in bourgeois ideology is that it is simply wrong,” they write. “There was, of course, a bourgeois presence in the movement, but is role has been greatly over-emphasized to the detriment of socialist thought on the doctrinal level, and the important practical participation by women and the working classes.” New Press Sunaura Taylor is one of the best thinkers on human and nonhuman animal oppression. In this newer classic, she outlines similarities between the treatment of animal and disabled bodies. “Clearly we project ableism onto nonhuman animals,” she writes. “Do we also project disability itself? If the notion of disability is a social construction, what does it mean to say that an animal is disabled?” One of the texts that comes up most enthusiastically every time vegan anarchy is discussed is this cookbook zine that brings together manifestos and recipes for a punk guide to life and cooking without succumbing (too much) to the Establishment. Bringing down the government with vegetables never seemed so fun. Bloomsbury An absolutely indispensable vegan theory text that establishes the connections between consumption of animal bodies and women’s bodies. To understand ecofeminism and the ways in which meat consumption constantly reincorporates itself into the culture through patriarchy, pick it up. Often, anarchists dismiss veganism as essentially a consumer-based boycott, thus meaningless as political action. Here, Torres breaks that perspective down through Marxist and anarchist thought to make the anti-capitalist case for animal rights.

https://medium.com/tenderlymag/a-reading-list-for-a-vegan-left-acbf3edd2494

['Alicia Kennedy']

2019-11-27 16:33:55.836000+00:00

['Philosophy', 'Books', 'Reading', 'Vegan', 'Politics']

The Art of Effective Visualization of Multi-dimensional Data

It’s quite easy to contrast and compare these statistical measures for the different types of wine samples. Notice the stark difference in some of the attributes. We will emphasize those in some of our visualizations later on. Univariate Analysis Univariate analysis is basically the simplest form of data analysis or visualization where we are only concerned with analyzing one data attribute or variable and visualizing the same (one dimension). Visualizing data in One Dimension (1-D) One of the quickest and most effective ways to visualize all numeric data and their distributions, is to leverage histograms using pandas Visualizing attributes as one-dimensional data The plots above give a good idea about the basic data distribution of any of the attributes. Let’s drill down to visualizing one of the continuous, numeric attributes. Essentially a histogram or a density plot works quite well in understanding how the data is distributed for that attribute. Visualizing one-dimensional continuous, numeric data It is quite evident from the above plot that there is a definite right skew in the distribution for wine sulphates . Visualizing a discrete, categorical data attribute is slightly different and bar plots are one of the most effective ways to do the same. You can use pie-charts also but in general try avoiding them altogether, especially when the number of distinct categories is more than three. Visualizing one-dimensional discrete, categorical data Let’s move on to looking at higher dimensional data now. Multivariate Analysis Multivariate analysis is where the fun as well as the complexity begins. Here we analyze multiple data dimensions or attributes (2 or more). Multivariate analysis not only involves just checking out distributions but also potential relationships, patterns and correlations amongst these attributes. You can also leverage inferential statistics and hypothesis testing if necessary based on the problem to be solved at hand to check out statistical significance for different attributes, groups and so on. Visualizing data in Two Dimensions (2-D) One of the best ways to check out potential relationships or correlations amongst the different data attributes is to leverage a pair-wise correlation matrix and depict it as a heatmap. Visualizing two-dimensional data with a correlation heatmap The gradients in the heatmap vary based on the strength of the correlation and you can clearly see it is very easy to spot potential attributes having strong correlations amongst themselves. Another way to visualize the same is to use pair-wise scatter plots amongst attributes of interest. Visualizing two-dimensional data with pair-wise scatter plots Based on the above plot, you can see that scatter plots are also a decent way of observing potential relationships or patterns in two-dimensions for data attributes. An important point to note about pairwise scatter plots is that the plots are actually symmetric. The scatterplot for any pair of attributes (X, Y) looks different from the same attributes in (Y, X) only because the vertical and horizontal scales are different. It does not contain any new information. Another way of visualizing multivariate data for multiple attributes together is to use parallel coordinates. Parallel coordinates to visualize multi-dimensional data Basically, in this visualization as depicted above, points are represented as connected line segments. Each vertical line represents one data attribute. One complete set of connected line segments across all the attributes represents one data point. Hence points that tend to cluster will appear closer together. Just by looking at it, we can clearly see that density is slightly more for red wines as compared to white wines. Also residual sugar and total sulfur dioxide is higher for white wines as compared to red and fixed acidity is higher for red wines as compared to white wines . Check out the statistics from the statistic table we derived earlier to validate this assumption! Let’s look at some ways in which we can visualize two continuous, numeric attributes. Scatter plots and joint plots in particular are good ways to not only check for patterns, relationships but also see the individual distributions for the attributes. Visualizing two-dimensional continuous, numeric data using scatter plots and joint plots The scatter plot is depicted on the left side and the joint plot on the right in the above figure. Like we mentioned, you can check out correlations, relationships as well as individual distributions in the joint plot. How about visualizing two discrete, categorical attributes? One way is to leverage separate plots (subplots) or facets for one of the categorical dimensions. Visualizing two-dimensional discrete, categorical data using bar plots and subplots (facets) While this is a good way to visualize categorical data, as you can see, leveraging matplotlib has resulted in writing a lot of code. Another good way is to use stacked bars or multiple bars for the different attributes in a single plot. We can leverage seaborn for the same easily. Visualizing two-dimensional discrete, categorical data in a single bar chart This definitely looks cleaner and you can also effectively compare the different categories easily from this single plot. Let’s look at visualizing mixed attributes in two-dimensions (essentially numeric and categorical together). One way is to use faceting\subplots along with generic histograms or density plots. Visualizing mixed attributes in two-dimensions leveraging facets and histograms\density plots While this is good, once again we have a lot of boilerplate code which we can avoid by leveraging seaborn and even depict the plots in one single chart. Leveraging multiple histograms for mixed attributes in two-dimensions You can see the plot generated above is clear and concise and we can easily compare across the distributions easily. Besides this, box plots are another way of effectively depicting groups of numeric data based on the different values in the categorical attribute. Box plots are a good way to know the quartile values in the data and also potential outliers. Box Plots as an effective representation of two-dimensional mixed attributes Another similar visualization is violin plots, which are another effective way to visualize grouped numeric data using kernel density plots (depicts probability density of the data at different values). Violin Plots as an effective representation of two-dimensional mixed attributes You can clearly see the density plots above for the different wine quality categories for wine sulphate . Visualizing data till two-dimensions is pretty straightforward but starts becoming complex as the number of dimensions (attributes) start increasing. The reason is because we are bound by the two-dimensions of our display mediums and our environment. For three-dimensional data, we can introduce a fake notion of depth by taking a z-axis in our chart or leveraging subplots and facets. However for data higher than three-dimensions, it becomes even more difficult to visualize the same. The best way to go higher than three dimensions is to use plot facets, color, shapes, sizes, depth and so on. You can also use time as a dimension by making an animated plot for other attributes over time (considering time is a dimension in the data). Check out Hans Roslin’s excellent talk to get an idea of the same! Visualizing data in Three Dimensions (3-D) Considering three attributes or dimensions in the data, we can visualize them by considering a pair-wise scatter plot and introducing the notion of color or hue to separate out values in a categorical dimension. Visualizing three-dimensional data with scatter plots and hue (color) The above plot enables you to check out correlations and patterns and also compare around wine groups. Like we can clearly see total sulfur dioxide and residual sugar is higher for white wine as compared to red. Let’s look at strategies for visualizing three continuous, numeric attributes. One way would be to have two dimensions represented as the regular length (x-axis)and breadth (y-axis) and also take the notion of depth (z-axis) for the third dimension. Visualizing three-dimensional numeric data by introducing the notion of depth We can also still leverage the regular 2-D axes and introduce the notion of size as the third dimension (essentially a bubble chart) where the size of the dots indicate the quantity of the third dimension. Visualizing three-dimensional numeric data by introducing the notion of size Thus you can see how the chart above is not a conventional scatter plot but more of a bubble chart with varying point sizes (bubbles) based on the quantity of residual sugar . Of course its not always that you will find definite patterns in the data like in this case, we see varying sizes across the other two dimensions. For visualizing three discrete, categorical attributes, while we can use the conventional bar plots, we can leverage the notion of hue as well as facets or subplots to support the additional third dimension. The seaborn framework helps us keep the code to a minimum and plot this effectively. Visualizing three-dimensional categorical data by introducing the notion of hue and facets The chart above clearly shows the frequency pertaining to each of the dimensions and you can see how easy and effective this can be in understanding relevant insights. Considering visualization for three mixed attributes, we can use the notion of hue for separating our groups in one of the categorical attributes while using conventional visualizations like scatter plots for visualizing two dimensions for numeric attributes. Visualizing mixed attributes in three-dimensions leveraging scatter plots and the concept of hue Thus hue acts as a good separator for the categories or groups and while there is no or very weak correlation as observed above, we can still understand from these plots that sulphates are slightly higher for red wines as compared to white. Instead of a scatter plot, you can also use a kernel density plot to understand the data in three dimensions. Visualizing mixed attributes in three-dimensions leveraging kernel density plots and the concept of hue It is quite evident and expected that red wine samples have higher sulphate levels as compared to white wines. You can also see the density concentrations based on the hue intensity. In case we are dealing with more than one categorical attribute in the three dimensions, we can use hue and one of the regular axes for visualizing data and use visualizations like box plots or violin plots to visualize the different groups of data. Visualizing mixed attributes in three-dimensions leveraging split violin plots and the concept of hue In the figure above, we can see that in the 3-D visualization on the right hand plot, we have represented wine quality on the x-axis and wine_type as the hue. We can clearly see some interesting insights like volatile acidity is higher for red wines as compared to white wines. You can also consider using box plots for representing mixed attributes with more than one categorical variable in a similar way. Visualizing mixed attributes in three-dimensions leveraging box plots and the concept of hue We can see that both for quality and quality_label attributes, the wine alcohol content increases with better quality. Also red wines tend to have a sightly higher median alcohol content as compared to white wines based on the quality class. However if we check the quality ratings, we can see that for lower rated wines (3 & 4), the white wine median alcohol content is greater than red wine samples. Otherwise red wines seem to have a slightly higher median alcohol content in general as compared to white wines. Visualizing data in Four Dimensions (4-D) Based on our discussion earlier, we leverage various components of the charts visualize multiple dimensions. One way to visualize data in four dimensions is to use depth and hue as specific data dimensions in a conventional plot like a scatter plot. Visualizing data in four-dimensions leveraging scatter plots and the concept of hue and depth The wine_type attribute is denoted by the hue which is quite evident from the above plot. Also, while interpreting these visualizations start getting difficult due to the complex nature of the plots, you can still gather insights like fixed acidity is higher for red wines and residual sugar is higher for white wines. Of course if there were some association between alcohol and fixed acidity we might have seen a gradually increasing or decreasing plane of data points showing some trend. Another strategy is to keep a 2-D plot but use hue and data point size as data dimensions. Typically this would be a bubble chart similar to what we visualized earlier. Visualizing data in four-dimensions leveraging bubble charts and the concept of hue and size We use hue to represent wine_type and the data point size to represent residual sugar . We do see similar patterns from what we observed in the previous chart and bubble sizes are larger for white wine in general indicate residual sugar values are higher for white wine as compared to red. If we have more that two categorical attributes to represent, we can reuse our concept of leveraging hue and facets to depict these attributes and regular plots like scatter plots to represent the numeric attributes. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Visualizing data in four-dimensions leveraging scatter plots and the concept of hue and facets The effectiveness of this visualization is verified by the fact we can easily spot multiple patterns. The volatile acidity levels for white wines are lower and also high quality wines have lower acidity levels. Also based on white wine samples, high quality wines have higher levels of alcohol and low quality wines have the lowest levels of alcohol ! Let’s take up a similar example with some other attributes and build a visualization in four dimensions. Visualizing data in four-dimensions leveraging scatter plots and the concept of hue and facets We clearly see that high quality wines have lower content of total sulfur dioxide which is quite relevant if you also have the necessary domain knowledge about wine composition. We also see that total sulfur dioxide levels for red wine are lower than white wine. The volatile acidity levels are however higher for red wines in several data points. Visualizing data in Five Dimensions (5-D) Once again following a similar strategy as we followed in the previous section, to visualize data in five dimensions, we leverage various plotting components. Let’s use depth, hue and size to represent three of the data dimensions besides regular axes representing the other two dimensions. Since we use the notion of size, we will be basically plotting a three dimensional bubble chart. Visualizing data in five-dimensions leveraging bubble charts and the concept of hue, depth and size This chart depicts the same patterns and insights that we talked about in the previous section. However, we can also see that based on the point sizes which are represented by total sulfur dioxide , white wines have higher total sulfur dioxide levels as compared to red wines. Instead of depth, we can also use facets along with hue to represent more than one categorical attribute in these five data dimensions. One of the attributes representing size can be numerical (continuous) or even categorical (but we might need to represent it with numbers for data point sizes). While we don’t depict that here due to the lack of categorical attributes, feel free to try it out on your own datasets. Visualizing data in five-dimensions leveraging bubble charts and the concept of hue, facets and size This is basically an alternative approach to visualizing the same plot which we plotted previously for five dimensions. While the additional dimension of depth might confuse many when looking at the plot we plotted previously, this plot due to the advantage of facets, still remains effectively on the 2-D plane and hence is often more effective and easy to interpret. We can already see that it’s becoming complex handling so many data dimensions! If some of you are thinking, why not add more dimensions? Let’s go ahead and give it a shot! Visualizing data in Six Dimensions (6-D) Now that we are having fun (I hope!), let’s add another data dimension in our visualizations. We will leverage depth, hue, size and shape besides our regular two axes to depict all the six data dimensions. Visualizing data in six-dimensions leveraging scatter charts and the concept of hue, depth, shape and size Wow that is six dimensions in one plot! We have wine quality_label depicted by shapes, high (the squared pixel), medium (the X marks) and low (the circles) quality wines. The wine_type is represented by hue, fixed acidity by the depth and data point size represents total sulfur dioxide content. Interpreting this might seem a bit taxing but consider a couple of components at a time when trying to understand what’s going on. Considering shape & y-axis, we have high and medium quality wines having higher alcohol levels as compared to low quality wines. Considering hue and size, we have higher content of total sulfur dioxide for white wines as compared to red wines. Considering depth and hue, we have white wines having lower fixed acidity levels as compared to red wines. Considering hue and x-axis, we have red wines having lower levels of residual sugar as compared to white wines. Considering hue and shape, white wines seem to have more high quality wines as compared to red wines (possibly due to larger sample size of white wines). We can also build a 6-D visualization by removing the depth component and use facets instead for a categorical attribute.

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-art-of-effective-visualization-of-multi-dimensional-data-6c7202990c57

['Dipanjan', 'Dj']

2018-12-11 15:32:45.250000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Towards Data Science', 'Visualization']

“There are only two ways to tell your story.”

Getting Attention A brand does not want attention. A brand wants revenue. A brand acquires revenue by selling its product. But in order to sell its product for revenue, the brand must first get people to pay attention to that product. So every brand needs to be in the business of getting attention whether they want to be or not. At the end of the day, everything is PR. There is only one way to get attention The only way to get attention is to tell stories. Brands should know this well, for what is a brand but a story itself. There are only two ways to tell these stories: You can get others to tell your story, or you can tell your story yourself. Getting others to tell your story Brands don’t make stories, they make products. So to get stories made, they need to find a storyteller. When a brand finds that storyteller, the storyteller wants to tell the brand’s story in the storyteller’s own way. That’s the challenge. But storytellers have large audiences, and that’s the opportunity. Storytellers reach large audiences because the storyteller tells stories their audience wants to hear. To the audience, those stories are timely or relevant or interesting. The audience feels like the storyteller understands their needs. Between the audience and the storyteller there is trust, which is the foundation of any good relationship. Which means: when you get others to tell your story, you are renting their audience’s trust. Large & Rented Audience: The storyteller can reach a large audience because the storyteller tells stories the audience wants to hear. The brand rents the audience. Telling your story to others When you tell your story to others you have control of that story, but you reach a smaller audience. You reach a smaller audience because the story is about yourself. Instead of understanding the audience, you are asking them to understand you. Sadly for our purposes, but luckily for humans in general, there are fewer people who care about you than there are people who care about themselves. That’s one challenge. Another challenge is brands, despite being stories themselves, aren’t very good at telling more stories. A brand is good at products, and meetings about products, and sometimes products that help you have more meetings. But the production line for a story rarely moves at the speed of a production line for a product or a meeting, or has the same incentives. Nobody’s bonus is tied to making stories. All that said, when you tell your own story, you create trust with your smaller audience. That’s the opportunity. Trust over time equals a growing audience. But of course, there is no trust without consistency. Small & Dedicated Audience: The brand reaches a small (but dedicated) audience by telling stories about itself. The brand owns the audience. The third way Misleading titles of Medium posts notwithstanding, there is actually a third way to tell your story—and that’s not to tell your story at all. The third way is to tell an audience a story about themselves. That is, to tell a story about an aspirational topic that exists between you and your audience and is born of mutual interest. This is, for example, is how Vanity Fair works, and WIRED works, and whatever publication you read works. The editors are experts in celebrity, or technology (or whatever) and they tell stories about celebrity, or technology (or whatever) to an audience who is already interested in those topics. For the editors, the topics are an expression of their expertise. For the audience, the topics are an expression of their aspirations. Brands, you’re probably already aware, do this too. GE is in the business of several industries, and GE Reports covers the future of innovation in those industries. Autodesk in the business of 3D software, and AutoDesk’s Redshift covers the future of creative building. Google in the business of selling information, and Google’s Think Quarterly covers the future of marketing. The editors and their audience form a venn diagram. In the middle are the topics they have in common. Large & Aspirational Audience: The brand can reach a larger audience if the brand tells aspirational stories about a mutual interest, thus positioning itself as that Ozymandian of things, the “thought leader”. Funnily enough, you may have noticed Facebook and Instagram and Google and anything that’s customized to your interests works like this, too. They’re all expert in telling you stories that you‘re likely to be most interested in. Which is just to say, pay attention to the stories people want to hear. There’s money in that banana stand. And stop it with the meetings. Nobody likes those.

https://stevebryant.medium.com/there-are-only-two-ways-to-tell-your-story-2e72d0f50ce

['Steve Bryant']

2020-03-09 13:45:44.234000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Technology', 'Marketing', 'Tech', 'Content Marketing']

A creative introduction to EDA

What is the Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)? What you should do when a new, unknown dataset is given. Here we are going to review some basic techniques to perform a successful exploration of data. There are many motivations behind this set of procedures. If you get meaningful insights you may be able to design outperforming models saving computational efforts. If the intuition about data is clear it will be easier to develop appropriate hypothesis with which build a good model. And so on… This insights will have different consequences on your dataset. You may be lead to keep or modify some feature, remove o create some feature from the old one. Such procedure have different names like feature selection, among others. Here we will use the term EDA as a (positive) umbrella term. A good EDA can help you to decide in which way you should spent more or less time in preprocessing, building baselines, modeling ecc.. One important counterpart is data visualization. If there is a pattern in the data it may be found, with some luck, with an appropriate visualization. Here we will show some, EDA oriented, visualization techniques. It means that these visualization will be mid-quality but very easy to implement. Given a problem which you know nothing about a good strategy is to make up your mind and clarify what you should do. Mostly, we don’t need to know that much about the topic, since data science is a very generic discipline and cover a wide range of topics. Just a couple of tips: 1 search other people solution to similar problems with github, medium.. 2 googling and searching on wikipedia, to get the features meaning Disclaimer Keep in mind that EDA is not a linear, sequential procedure. You will never be given a recipe or a list of steps to follow. Here we are in the realm of intuition and the reader should interpret this notebook as a collection of tips, techniques, good practices. Some lines of code are not extensively explained and some passages may seem dead leaves.. they are suggestions and is up to you to develop what you find interesting. We strongly encourage to use your creativity! LET’S START You can download the notebook from the link: https://github.com/MLJCUnito/HowToTackleAMLCompetition You will never use one library, but rather a combination of multiple libraries. Be bright, and develop your intuition about how to combine at least the most famous python libraries. First we import some libraries import pandas as pd import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import os import seaborn as sns %matplotlib inline Here we set an environment variable,the path that will tell the computer where data are stored. You may want to download the dataset directly from the jupyter notebook, but it is quite a complicated story that depends on the machine you are working with… You can download the dataset from your browser, and move it to your working directory with your favorite procedure. You can find the dataset here: https://www.kaggle.com/fayomi/advertising/download DATA_FOLDER = # your path here adv = pd.read_csv(os.path.join(DATA_FOLDER, 'advertising.csv')) Let’s give a look at the data, and check what features contains. This step is crucial, because if we already know the research field where features come from we could start to figure out how to proceed with our analysis. We may easily figure out what the baselines of the problem are. We need to be as informed as possible about features meaning. It is often useful answer one question in different ways, ie understand different commands can help us to solve the same problem. Maybe, sometimes further, these little differences in the output will be helpful! What can we expect to see when exploring the basic features of a dataframe? How many entries are there in the dataset? Which features are contained? print( “ Dataset shape: “,adv.shape[0]) print( “ Number of features: “, adv.shape[1] ) print( “ Your features are: ”) print(adv.columns) print(“ Features Types: “) print(adv.dtypes) The standard access to a dataframe column is dataframe.[“featuename”]. We can have easier access, avoiding strings usage, in the format `dataframe.featurename`, as if it were a object method. We can do that if we slightly change the columns names removing all the spaces and renaming the columns with these new strings features = list(adv.columns) for f in features: phi = f.replace(‘ ‘,’’) adv = adv.rename(columns = {f:phi}) The following command just shows the first rows of our dataset. In the first column we have the features names. The remaining columns are the entries of the dataset. This kind of visualization may be more eye pleasant the the former ones if the number of features is not that large adv.head().T Another important dataframe method is `info`, which summarizes the dataframe content. With this command we can even see that there are not missing values in the data which, as we will see in future posts, may be something important to think about. adv.info() It is in the spirit of EDA to understand which feature of the raw dataset plays which role. Since this is an advertisement dataset we can say that there is one feature more important than all the other, ClickedonAd that is a binary feature. Let’s see what contains: adv.ClickedonAd.head(11) Now we can check if the dataset is balanced, ie if there are as many samples of one kind as the other: n = len(pd.unique(adv[‘ClickedonAd’])) print(“Number of unique values :”, n) print(adv[‘ClickedonAd’].value_counts()) We were lucky! We found that our dataset is perfectly balanced. In real situations this never happens and this fact absolutely needs to be checked every time we analyze a new dataset. Now, brief digression. This perfect balance is a feature of `case study` datasets. They are data preprocessed by the provider in order to be easier to analyze. Even if they are `toy problems` they are very helpful because you can learn the basics of EDA without worrying that much about other messy things such as decoding, preprocessing, augmentation and so on. For sake of simplicity we can save the target feature in a different object and then remove it from the data. target = adv.ClickedonAd adv = adv.drop(["ClickedonAd"],axis=1) Here is a binary classification problem! We can investigate features correlations plotting the 2d histogram of a couple of variables. This exploration may help us to decide how to proceed in data preprocessing or, in general, further investigations. f, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 10)) sns.kdeplot(adv.Age, adv.DailyTimeSpentonSite, color="b", ax=ax) sns.rugplot(adv.Age, color="r", ax=ax) sns.rugplot(adv.DailyTimeSpentonSite, vertical=True, ax=ax) From the former plot we see that we may proceed with a clustering analysis or, in general, unsupervised learning procedures. We can extend the former reasoning plotting all the couples of numeric features. We could do that for other feature types, and we left it as an exercise for the reader. A reason for our choice is that pandas can encode integers and categorical features in the same way. This happens because it may not be clear for some variables, such as age, if they should be treated as integers or categorical. How to use these amphibious kind of variable is up to you and your intuition /knowledge about data. numeric_adv = adv.select_dtypes(include=[np.float]) numeric_adv.head() from pandas.plotting import scatter_matrix scatter_matrix(numeric_adv, alpha=0.3, figsize=(10,10)) This plot is not that clear but suggest that we should investigate the correlations between `DailyTimeSpentonSite` and `DailyInternetUsage`. This clustering will identify two communities: the first is composed by users that spent a lot of their daily internet time on the site, the other that do the opposite. f, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 6)) sns.kdeplot(adv.DailyInternetUsage, adv.DailyTimeSpentonSite, color="b", ax=ax) sns.rugplot(adv.Age, color="r", ax=ax) sns.rugplot(adv.DailyTimeSpentonSite, vertical=True, ax=ax) We can tye to create a new feature, the `faithfulness` of a user. We would like that this feature encodes the clustering structure. We expect that this feature exhibits a bimodal histogram so it will be easier for our algorithm to build correlations between data and target. We try the following combination from scipy.stats import norm adv["Faithfulness"]=( adv["DailyTimeSpentonSite"]*adv["DailyInternetUsage"]/ (adv["DailyTimeSpentonSite"]+adv["DailyInternetUsage"]) ) sns.distplot(adv[‘Faithfulness’], hist=False, color=’r’, rug=True); We combined the information of two feature into a new, maybe better one. At this point we may be tempted to drop the two old features. This may lead to some issue during training and so on but this is not the place to discuss this problem. We are happy to have found such a new feature and for sake of simplicity we will drop the old features keeping only the new one. This is a procedure that is known as feature reduction. Now let’s focus on the features encoded by pandas as objects: object_features = ['AdTopicLine', 'City', 'Country'] adv[object_features].describe(include=['O']) As we can see from the table above that all the values in column “Ad Topic Line” is unique, while the “City” column contains 969 unique values out of 1000. There are too many unique elements within these two categorical columns and it is generally difficult to perform a prediction from a flat histogram. We can consider those features as noise since or they have uniform almost distribution or they are constants, which does not carry information too. In the next post we will see some more robust procedure to detect such features. Because of that, they will be omitted from from the analysis. The third categorical variable, i.e “Country”, has a unique element (France) that repeats 9 times. Additionally, we can determine countries with the highest number of visitors. The table below shows the 20 most represented countries in our DataFrame. pd.crosstab(index=adv['Country'], columns='count').sort_values(['count'], ascending=False).head(10) We have already seen, there are 237 different unique countries in our dataset and no single country is too dominant. A large number of unique elements will not allow a model to establish meaningful relationships. For that reason, this variable will be excluded too. It is too difficult to learn from (almost) flat distribution that is equivalent to white noise. data = adv.drop([‘AdTopicLine’, ‘City’, ‘Country’], axis=1) Now, let’s focus on a single feature, *Timestamp*. It contains date and time of the day when the entry was recorded. Entries are recorded in the format *date&hour*. It is likely that, if we split this one in two new features, like *day* and *hour* we may be able to observe different kind of pattern occurring in the two new features. The idea here is that individual activities are determined by time management. We manage in different ways our time on the week scale respect to the 24h scale. It is often a good idea to create new features from the “raw”. With a physics analogy, it is like if we are separating the different time scales of our problem. First, we give a look at this “Mother” feature: print ( adv.Timestamp ) Our purpose now is to create three new features by splitting one column in three. If we split features and properly operate on them we may get something useful. The “Day of the week” variable contains values from 0 to 6, where each number represents a specific day of the week (from Monday to Sunday). The category values here are the days of the week, which may be useful to detect periodic pattern in our data. Hours will be categorical too. Date will remain in pandas time format. We can proceed as follows 1 convert the timestamp column (string format) into pandas datetime format 2 through the dt method split time and date, hour and day of the week and assign them to new columns 3 Eliminate the timestamp column. There is no information loss here 4 check the output adv[‘Timestamp’] = pd.to_datetime(adv[‘Timestamp’]) adv_times=adv[‘Timestamp’] adv[‘Hour’] = pd.to_datetime(adv_times, format=’%H:%M’).dt.hour adv[‘Date’] = pd.to_datetime(adv_times, format=’%M:%D’).dt.date adv[‘WDay’] = pd.to_datetime(adv_times).dt.weekday adv[‘Click’] = target adv = adv.drop(['Timestamp'], axis=1) adv.head() We can evaluate how much time our dataset spans and fix our problem timescale print('Train min/max date:', adv.Date.min(), adv.Date.max() ) print('Dataset time span: ',adv.Date.max()-adv.Date.min()) First, one very simple histogram: which day of the week carry us more information? Is there a “special day”? It does not seem, but we can detect a periodic pattern in the data. We can do the same for the hours of the day. ax = adv['WDay'].value_counts(sort=False).plot(kind='bar') ax.set_xlabel("Day of the week") ax.set_ylabel("Records") ax = adv[‘Hour’].value_counts(sort=False).plot(kind=’bar’) ax.set_xlabel(“Hour of the day”) ax.set_ylabel(“Records”) To obtain this result we have never filtered the data or, equivalently, we didn’t transformed our features. They are still raw. Can we extract more information -as in the first feature reduction case- modifying the original data, applying some kind of filtering? If true, this may lead us to meaningful insights. We can try to drop all entries where the used did not clicked on the ad, in order to investigate if there is a daily-based preference in clicking adv_time = pd.DataFrame() adv_time[‘WDay’] = adv[‘WDay’] #adv_time[‘Hour’] = pd.to_datetime(adv[‘Hour’]) adv_time[‘Hour’] = adv[‘Hour’] adv_time[‘Click’] = target adv_time.info() Can we see if there are hour of the day where we should do targeted advertisement? The idea here is to separate, according to the target feature (ClickedOnAd) a variable of interest. This may not lead to a particular result, but is to enforce our intuition about data. Now let’s focus only on the time features. We can try to see if the appreciation or not of our advertise exhibit different patterns that we can employ in some way. Here we employ the mask concept: it can be thought as a boolean grid that filters our dataframe according to a characteristic condition and help us to split the data in more and more parts mask_one = (adv_time[‘Click’] == 1) adv_time_one = adv_time[mask_one] mask_zero = (adv_time[‘Click’] == 0) adv_time_zero = adv_time[mask_zero] Let’s see if there are some evident patterns in the features we found, with a simple plot fig = plt.figure(figsize=(20,15)) ax = fig.add_subplot(221) adv_time_one['WDay'].value_counts(sort=False).plot(kind='bar') ax.set_xlabel("WDay people click") ax.set_ylabel("Records") ax = fig.add_subplot(222) adv_time_zero['WDay'].value_counts(sort=False).plot(kind='bar') ax.set_xlabel("WDay people DON'T click") fig = plt.figure(figsize=(20,15)) ax = fig.add_subplot(221) adv_time_one['Hour'].value_counts(sort=False).plot(kind='bar',title="Hour people click") ax.set_xlabel("Hour people click") ax.set_ylabel("Records") ax = fig.add_subplot(222) adv_time_zero['Hour'].value_counts(sort=False).plot(kind='bar',title="Hour people DON'T click") ax.set_xlabel("Hour people DON'T click") There may be patterns in data, but it is not obvious how to proceed. It is not obvious which model we should choose, since there are no evident clustering or periodicity in the preference or not for clicking. With this little failure we are facing the necessity to introduce an automatic feature extraction mechanics, possibly designed according to some optimization principle. This is the basic idea behind machine learning or, more specifically, neural networks! Conclusions: In this post we introduced some good practices for an efficient EDA. If the number of features is not too large we can try to study little groups of features, according to their type. Once this is done we have a wide range of choices. With some patience we can investigate the basic correlations between our features. For a first step a basic scatter plot is enough. From the insights that we obtain here we can try to investigate some couples of variables that exhibit particular patterns. If this is the case we can try to create new features as combinations of the raw ones and if this combination seems to reasonably resemble the properties of the couple clustering we can replace the old variables with the new one. This procedure is known as feature reduction. We can get feature reduction even investigating the variability of values that our features take. We can group those values in a histogram and if it happens to be flat we can consider it as pure noise and drop these features. We can follow the opposite practice: feature augmentation. This procedure allows us to create new features from a raw one, as happened with temporal data. From a yy/mm/dd hh/mm entry we created tree new features: the hour, the day of the week and the date of the advestising-user interaction, starting from a a physics-like reasoning. Unfortunately, further investigation showed us that such procedure does not lead to clear patterns. This little failure is not purely a bad thing and we can learn something important from that. If data does not exhibit a clear clustering we may imagine to introduce some algorithm able to extract or design with an automatic procedure meaningful combinations of the features. That’s why with highly dimensional problems we need to introduce machine learning. I hope this article was useful for you. If you have any, do not hesitate in posting a comment! Thanks! References: https://www.coursera.org/learn/competitive-data-science https://stackabuse.com/predicting-customer-ad-clicks-via-machine-learning/ Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Hsuan-Tien Lin, “Learning from Data”

https://medium.com/mljcunito/a-creative-introduction-to-eda-be9e906cbcb

['Jacopo Pasqualini']

2020-10-18 21:58:21.807000+00:00

['Python', 'Exploratory Data Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Pandas', 'Advertising']

Moving pixels and throwing shapes: how exercise has made me a better designer

The benefits of exercise are well-known and the fitness industry is growing more than ever. I’m pretty sure that the majority of my colleagues here in the Idean London studio take up some sort of physical exercise as part of their weekly routine. The culture of our studio is pretty ‘hip and healthy’ — we have fresh fruit available in our kitchens, a great mental health policy in place and a qualified colleague has run the odd yoga sessions in the studio. Personally, physical exercise has become a large part of my daily life and I’m fully embracing the benefits of it in and outside of work — but it hasn’t always been so. I was never the sporty type at school nor particularly enjoyed the PE lessons. I dreaded the annual sports day and when puberty hit, I became increasingly self-conscious of my body shape. I wouldn’t have believed it if you had told my younger self that I would come to love exercise and go the gym most days. So how did a self-conscious girl come to love exercise? I first entered the gym the year I graduated university. This was the year of the financial crisis. Fresh out of uni, graduates were wandering their way around London like lost lambs trying to find a place who would take them on for an internship. It was TOUGH. Finding a place that will let you gain some experience was incredibly difficult, let alone obtaining a job. After spending a few months building my portfolio website, sending out emails to all the agencies, I found myself pressing the refresh button on my email every 5 minutes — waiting to see if I had received any replies from potential employers. With each rejection, unsuccessful interview and empty inbox, I was losing hope. Of course with no income and low mood I became reluctant to step out of the house and meet friends; because traveling out to see them for some kind of social activity required; money. I was still living at home and my mother had noticed how reclusive I was becoming. My mother, who had been a member of a local gym for a few years, persuaded me to give the gym a try to give myself a breather. My growing frustrations, bored of staying at home, and along with a bit of an ever-present desire to lose some weight I decided to give it a go. How did I find it? I HATED IT Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing, they seemed to ‘get it’. At first I kind of floated around, mostly sticking to the treadmill and then venturing onto other machines a few minutes at a time. I then plucked enough courage to join the classes — this was a game changer. Although at first I was the one hiding behind at the back of the class struggling to follow and coordinate my body, within a few months time I noticed how I was getting better at controlling how my body moves. I thought to myself that if I gave it my all in the classes, not worried about how I looked, I would look like I knew what I was doing whilst probably burning a few more calories than my fellow classmates. I had changed my mindset. This worked. As my muscles became accustomed to the repeated basic moves, I made the movements bigger to make it more physically challenging and with that, caught the attention of the instructors and the occasional shout-outs of praise during the classes. I even had compliments from fellow classmates. I found the praises were embarrassing at first but it did wonders for my morale. I became someone who got to classes early so I could get the front row spot. Bang in centre. I became friends with the regular attendees, and we even began to socialise together outside the gym. The friends I had made there were people I wouldn’t typically come across in my social circle; students, mothers and people much older than my parents.

https://medium.com/ideas-by-idean/moving-pixels-and-throwing-shapes-how-exercise-has-made-me-a-better-designer-ce7a1c1d3f22

['Yuri Yoshimura']

2019-08-13 14:09:09.067000+00:00

['Work', 'Work Life Balance', 'Design', 'Productivity', 'Fitness']

How Virtual Assistant Tech Can Help Local News and Local Business Thrive

In the current advertising environment, extracting value from a journalism business — especially a niche or local news site — is becoming more difficult than ever. As a fellow in the 2019 Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism program, I was interested in making my venture sustainable. Called Livin’ Americana, its goal is to surface the stories of exceptional Latinx people in cities where we don’t expect a growing Latinx population, places like Nashville. The venture I’m planning would include in-depth and engaging multimedia stories as well as real-life events to build our audience. However, it’s clear to me that my business model needs to be more distinctive, compared to others already doing this type of work. In addition, I need to establish a Minimum Viable Product that draws a clearer line to revenue than the broad idea I originally envisioned. As I conducted my due diligence for Livin’ Americana it also became more clear to me that many of the people who’ve been doing this work for years say that making money has been extremely difficult. Even established and respected independent community journalists often have to work multiple jobs to earn a decent living, which in turn means that even some of our most trusted community voices are in serious trouble. Starting a pure-journalism venture from scratch without massive financial backing was not the best first step for me. However, I haven’t given up on Livin’ Americana, instead, I have decided to focus on developing a business that — while not pure journalism — is in the service of journalism, helping established but financially struggling journalists grow their revenue. Today I’m introducing LatinXConneX, an advertising and virtual assistant technology studio that allows journalists, especially niche, local, and hyperlocal news sites — who due to their geographic or demographic size can’t grow a large enough audience to sell the advertisements necessary to be sustainable in today’s pay-per-click and pay-per-ad-impression digital advertising market — extract value from the trusted relationships they’ve built with their audiences. Meanwhile, as local news outlets struggle, local businesses and service providers are also fighting to survive as they compete against online retail and digital goods and services providers. For local businesses, while there may be enough customers living nearby, the entrepreneurs aren’t reaching them effectively. In the past, a local newspaper was a great ad-delivery vehicle, but dwindling circulation has made it more difficult for local businesses to reach local customers and to compete with the targeted and programmatic digital ad-delivery mechanisms that national retail chains and online sellers can leverage. The impact on our local communities is palpable. Main streets and other business districts are often littered with empty storefronts or long walls of security gates, devoid of commerce. But LatinXConneX believes that there is untapped value in niche and local outlets — especially those that are located in predominantly Latino communities — that goes beyond page views or ad impressions. It’s called trust. Local residents, LatinX audiences, and niche news consumers trust their local and niche news sources for recommendations on goods and services, what’s the best restaurant in town, which retailers have the best deals, and what community events are worth attending. We believe that the authenticity and trust that niche, LatinX, hyperlocal, and local news sites have established uniquely positions them to satisfy the need of local businesses who have been unable to effectively target nearby customers looking for the goods and services they provide. We believe our virtual assistant technology can help local news sites reach their neighbors and finally extract value from the trust they’ve built after years of authentically serving their communities. LatinXConneX Three Pillars: We help news platforms with a loyal following earn revenue that isn’t dependent on generating millions of ad impressions or massive audience numbers. News platforms leverage the monetary value businesses place on the trust readers give to the recommendations made by news outlets. We expect our virtual assistant technology to help increase a news platform’s ad revenue beyond what traditional web- and newsletter-advertising services can bring. with a loyal following earn revenue that isn’t dependent on generating millions of ad impressions or massive audience numbers. News platforms leverage the monetary value businesses place on the trust readers give to the recommendations made by news outlets. We expect our virtual assistant technology to help increase a news platform’s ad revenue beyond what traditional web- and newsletter-advertising services can bring. We help businesses offer their goods and services to thousands of local customers. Rather than being reliant on capturing a passive audience, who can easily overlook a newspaper ad. Or lose a potential client because their offering was lost in a sea of Google search results, or outranked by fakes, our virtual concierge technology lets local business directly reach customers searching for the goods and services they’re offering right where they live and on their preferred platform (Facebook, web, or text). It also allows businesses to immediately provide their clients with the good or service at the moment they need it, rather than having them wait for days for delivery. offer their goods and services to thousands of local customers. Rather than being reliant on capturing a passive audience, who can easily overlook a newspaper ad. Or lose a potential client because their offering was lost in a sea of Google search results, or outranked by fakes, our virtual concierge technology lets local business directly reach customers searching for the goods and services they’re offering right where they live and on their preferred platform (Facebook, web, or text). It also allows businesses to immediately provide their clients with the good or service at the moment they need it, rather than having them wait for days for delivery. We help audiences get the local news, community information, and valuable deals they WANT right when they want it. LatinXConneX users should never cringe when their phone vibrates with an incoming message from us. On the contrary, we want our audience to eagerly await the next amazing offer or the next headline that LatinXConneX delivers to them via our media clients. Even better, we expect our audiences will actively engage with our virtual assistants and use them as their trusted community guides for concise, actionable information, rather than going down the Google search rabbit-hole. Or having to wait days or hours for an item. We will never overwhelm, send unvetted info, or spam our users. If they’re ever annoyed by our service, we’ve failed. The Uptown Collective Case Study Growing an audience is the most difficult aspect of creating a sustainable media business. That’s why, instead of focusing on building our own audience, we will team up with Uptown Collective, an established hyperlocal site with 50,000 active users on the web, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and its weekly newsletter, which has struggled to monetize its platform. For the next three months, LatinXConneX and Uptown Collective will develop a media kit around our advertising model, develop a virtual assistant technology called the Uptown Collective Concierge, and sign-on advertisers. Furthermore, once we’ve developed those aspects, we will launch our beta version, which will serve as a case study to test our business model. At the conclusion of the case study, we expect to have a proof-of-concept we can then use to attract more advertisers, onboard more media companies, and possibly pitch to investors. I’m excited by the prospects of LatinXConneX as a business, and as the first step towards building Livin’ Americana Global Media. Stay tuned!

https://medium.com/journalism-innovation/how-virtual-assistants-can-help-local-news-and-local-biz-thrive-92926b66d0e4

['Octavio Blanco']

2019-04-05 03:21:00.768000+00:00

['Latinx', 'Journalism', 'Local Retail', 'Local News', 'Entrepreneurship']

100 not-so-good things to do if you want to be a successful homesteader

I saw an article recently about things you should learn if you want to be a good homesteader — or at least things you should master if you want to live a more self-reliant lifestyle. It was a good list, and I can proudly say that between myself and my husband, we have pretty much accomplished — or, umm, at least practiced — very nearly the entirety of that particular list. We have been homesteading for the past several years, not completely off grid, but at the edge of it. We are much more self-sufficient than we were when we started, although we know we have many skills to learn before we can really hold our heads high. What I have learned about people who want to give homesteading a go, is that many people love the IDEA of homesteading, but really have no clue as to what this lifestyle consists of. There are a great number of articles and resources out there that show the pretty side of homesteading — beautiful chickens in the yard, a lush garden, homegrown food on the table… but there aren’t many resources out there that focus on the hard work, the lessons in ingenuity, the character traits that are a must. Hopefully this article will drive two points home — Number one, it’s hard work. Every day. Number two, the rewards cannot be measured. If you’re considering venturing off into this lifestyle, take a look at my list below. It will help you decide if you’ve really got what it takes. And for those of you who can relate, I’m sure it’ll make you laugh out loud a time or two — we’ve all learned many of these things the hard way! Enjoy — and know that you can do anything you set your mind to. And if this lifestyle is something you want to undertake, if you’ve got the drive and determination, if you’ve got a good attitude and can laugh at yourself and at broken well pumps and muddy shoes and ‘possums on the porch, you will succeed and you will not regret the decision to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Homesteading will truly change your life and make you stronger, wiser and tireder at the end of the day… and you’ll never want to move back into a conventional neighborhood ever again! 100 not-so-good things to be or do if you want to be a successful homesteader:

https://medium.com/driftwood-chronicle/100-not-so-good-things-to-do-if-you-want-to-be-a-successful-homesteader-e9ac2dde6da3

['Tauna Pierce']

2016-11-18 13:57:38.831000+00:00

['Homesteading', 'Environment', 'Edible Backyard', 'Off Grid Lifestyle', 'Sustainability']

Your Home Needs One Simple Design Philosophy to Be More Productive and Happier

As the pandemic stretches on, most of us have hit the breaking point of working from home fever. Our home feels constricted, in some moments even claustrophobic. Time feels featureless; the clock a stagnant lake. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been working from my home. This is the first time I had settled in one place for more than a few months. Before the pandemic, training contracts took me to other cities and countries every 2 or 3 months. After a few months of being stuck at home, my home office has lost its luster. You know what I’m talking about. The depressing monotony of looking at the same walls is driving you crazy. Every day is fraught with stress and you’re stuck home, working part-time or full-time. Juggling work and your home life are utterly exhausting. The stress is causing you to get short and snap at your partner. As the pandemic continues, you’re worried you will lose your paycheck or have your salary cut at some point. All these spending too much time in a confined space has thrown your productivity out of the window. At one point, I got alarmed when I fixated on a crevice in the ceiling, instead of writing an article the whole afternoon. That day felt like the walls were collapsing on me. I wished to get out and teach my students face-to-face — even though I knew it was impossible. Before I went crazy, a friend suggested turning to houseplants to give my home a sense of serenity. I started reading about a design philosophy called biophilia — bringing nature inside. I started bringing nature’s magic back into my home. Today, I’m writing to you from my new biophilic designed home. It has been two months since I purchased houseplants and flowers for my studio apartment where I live with my partner. The plants I see when I wake up and sit down in front of my computer help me find a sense of equilibrium and comfort. My productivity has improved and I’m a lot happier these days. If I’m going to spend every day, every week, and every month in my apartment, then it has to be a sanctuary for me. A place where I can take a break and have some serenity. Where a sustained engagement with nature improves my mood and boosts my productivity. Even if the pandemic is still haunting the outdoors, you can bring nature inside. Even if you have a tiny space for your home office, you can create a harmonious work environment. Proximity of nature, even if you buy a tiny, single green houseplant, fosters a positive connection with your workplace. Or you can just put a visual image of your favorite nature picture on your walls. Before the pandemic, you could do lots of things to boost your productivity. You could call your friends and visit your favorite park in your city. You could watch fresh green leaves unfurling right in front of your eyes. You could recharge your system by walking in a garden that’s bursting into life. You could take off your shoes and feel the damp earth beneath your feet and feel you could do anything. Now, any outside exposure is scary. We’re terrified of contracting the coronavirus. So, we’re reorienting our home to create a restorative workplace inside. Some of us are creating spaces in our homes to put houseplants that energize, stimulate, and connect us. We’re designing nature’s magic back into our homes where they can give us a calm, relaxing, and restorative effect on our work. Yes, this is an indirect experience with nature. But it’s still a wonderful experience. This is because… Productivity enhancement is one of the priceless biophilic design benefits. One study conducted in two large commercial offices in the UK and The Netherlands showed that ‘green’ offices with plants made staff 15% more productive than ‘lean’ designs stripped of greenery. Purchasing gorgeous houseplants and putting them in every room of my apartment is the best decision I made since the pandemic started. My plants help me project a soothing image to colleagues on daily video calls. I can show my energy on the camera when I teach my students online. I no longer look at a ceiling and get bored. Instead, I can look at my plants and feel soothed. Intentionally putting plants inside your home can boost your productivity. When you have a plant inside your home, your creativity and attention span increases. You get a decent handle on stress. Because filling your indoor environment with plants boosts the creation of melatonin. Melatonin is important since it regulates people’s sleep-wake cycles, making a noticeable difference in your energy levels. These days, an optimal work-from-home condition is a necessary tool. We don’t know how long we will work from home. 2020 has been an education in learning to swim in an ocean of not knowing. For me, the uncertainty has been exhausting. We have to design our home with our well-being in mind. When we work from home, it needs to feel like we’re walking through an open door, instead of banging our head against a wall. Buying in-house plants for your home is a great place to start. Giant companies had already designed their offices with a biophilic design before the world heard of a vicious virus. Microsoft debuted tree-house conference rooms in Redmond, Washington. Facebook created a 3.6-acre rooftop garden at its Silicon Valley hub. You can make your home a place where you can have some serenity and foster a positive connection with your work. Your home does not have to be a mansion to benefit from nature. With any available space you have, buy houseplants you can put in pots. While you’re at it, use any available natural light. Sunlight stimulates the hypothalamus or the mood center of the brain. Any ray of sunshine that comes through your window boosts your productivity. It soothes you. So, open your curtains. Keep your windows clear and clean. No blinds. Look outside your window and think about how you can bring nature inside your home. When you do, you create a work environment with your well-being in mind. I hope you create a tiny refuge in your home from the bruising world outside.

https://bandaxen.medium.com/your-home-needs-one-simple-design-philosophy-to-be-more-productive-and-happier-1a66907392ef

['Banchiwosen Woldeyesus', 'Blogger Ethiopia']

2020-11-11 08:43:52.499000+00:00

['Nature', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Productivity Hacks', 'Coronavirus']

Visualize an Interesting Sorting Algorithms With Python

NOTE:- In this article, we will also compute the number of operations performed and will be able to see the time complexity of the sorting algorithm. As our purpose is to only visualize the sorting algorithms hence I will be using the merge sort for a demonstration but you should implement the rest of them in order to understand the differences among them. Before we start coding, you must have python 3.3 or above installed because I have used the yield from feature or generator. Let’s Start:- Firstly you need to import the given libraries. We have used the random module in order to generate a random array of numbers to be sorted. The matplotlib pyplot and animation modules will be used to animate the sorting algorithm. import random import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import matplotlib.animation as anim Below the given swap function will be used to swap the elements in the given array. Defining a separate function is useful as it will be used exhaustively throughout different algorithms. def swap(A, i, j): a = A[j] A[j] = A[i] A[i] = a # also in python A[i],A[j]=A[j],A[i] We have used Merge Sort to demonstrate this visualization because this is the most popular and one of the best sorting algorithms out there. Merge sort follows Divide and Conquer technique for sorting. It divides the array into two subarrays and each of these is sorted by calling the merge sort recursively on them. Our main focus is to visualize the algorithm hence I will not explain the working of it. The following code shows the merge sort. In order to get the intuition on how it works, one can follow this video on youtube jenny’s lecture. def merge_sort(arr,lb,ub): if(ub<=lb): return elif(lb<ub): mid =(lb+ub)//2 yield from merge_sort(arr,lb,mid) yield from merge_sort(arr,mid+1,ub) yield from merge(arr,lb,mid,ub) yield arr def merge(arr,lb,mid,ub): new = [] i = lb j = mid+1 while(i<=mid and j<=ub): if(arr[i]<arr[j]): new.append(arr[i]) i+=1 else: new.append(arr[j]) j+=1 if(i>mid): while(j<=ub): new.append(arr[j]) j+=1 else: while(i<=mid): new.append(arr[i]) i+=1 for i,val in enumerate(new): arr[lb+i] = val yield arr Now we will simply create the random list of numbers to be sorted and the length of the array will be decided by the user itself. After that, if condition is used to choose the algorithm. n = int(input("Enter the number of elements:")) al = int(input("Choose algorithm: 1.Bubble 2.Insertion 3.Quick 4.Selection 5.Merge Sort)) array = [i + 1 for i in range(n)] random.shuffle(array) if(al==1): title = "Bubble Sort" algo = sort_buble(array) elif(al==2): title = "Insertion Sort" algo = insertion_sort(array) elif(al==3): title = "Quick Sort" algo = quick_Sort(array,0,n-1) elif(al==4): title="Selection Sort" algo = selection_sort(array) elif (al == 5): title = "Merge Sort" algo=merge_sort(array,0,n-1) Now we will create a canvas for the animation using matplotlib figure and axis . Then we have created the bar plot in which each bar will represent one number of the array. Here text() is used to show the number of operations on the canvas. The first two arguments are the position of the label. transform=ax.transAxes tells that the first two arguments are the axis fractions, not data coordinates. fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.set_title(title) bar_rec = ax.bar(range(len(array)), array, align='edge') text = ax.text(0.02, 0.95, "", transform=ax.transAxes) The update_plot function is used to update the figure for each frame of our animation. Actually, this function will pass to anima.FuncAnimamtion() that uses it to update the plot. Here we have passed the input array, rec which is defined above, and the epochs that keep the track of number of operations performed. One may think that we can simply use integer value instead of a list in epochs but integer like epoch = 0 cannot be passed by reference but only by value, unlike a list, which is passed by reference. The set_height() is used to update the height of each bar. epochs = [0] def update_plot(array, rec, epochs): for rec, val in zip(rec, array): rec.set_height(val) epochs[0]+= 1 text.set_text("No.of operations :{}".format(epochs[0])) In the end, we create anima object in which we pass frames=algo that takes generator function(the algorithm is a generator function as it contains yield ) and after that, it passes the generated or updated array to the update_plot , fargs takes additional arguments i.e. epochs and bar_rec and interval is the delay between each frame in milliseconds. And finally, we use plt.show() to plot the animated figure. anima = anim.FuncAnimation(fig, func=update_plot, fargs=(bar_rec, epochs), frames=algo, interval=1, repeat=False) plt.show() Full code with all sorting algorithms is available in my Github repo. Check it out. And if you like this article, please let me know. Check out my article on Convert Images to ASCII Art Images Using Python Learn more about the animationFunction

https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/visualize-interesting-sorting-algorithms-with-python-bdd64bdd0713

['Pushkara Sharma']

2020-08-27 03:10:58.026000+00:00

['Python', 'Sorting Algorithms', 'Programming', 'Merge Sort', 'Visualization']

The 3 Most Important Lessons I Learned From Writing A Book

The 3 Most Important Lessons I Learned From Writing A Book #2 Don’t be afraid to start again Image Source: Pixabay Writing a book I was happy with took me a long time. I am still unsure if I am happy with the book I’ve just finished. It always feels like there’s something else that needs changing, redoing, fine-tuning — but despite the laborious editing process, I feel so proud that I finally finished a book that I believe in and beta readers love. Finishing a book is most definitely the hardest thing about writing a novel. There are so many obstacles during the process where it’s so easy to become perturbed and incredibly difficult to push through your fears, self-doubt and feeling overwhelmed by the scale of your project. Even though I am still fine-tuning my own book, I am elated that I finished something. I am currently seeking representation for this book and whatever happens, writing this book has definitely given me some incredibly valuable lessons that I will carry with me throughout my writing career. Just keep going In order to just keep going, you need to have fun. Editing is not fun — so do not do this until you have FINISHED the first draft. I cannot stress this enough. I would still be redoing my beginning if I kept on editing and editing instead of getting the story down on paper. The best way to finish the first draft and make it to the end of your story is to just write. Do not worry about editing, fine-tuning or about writing the best beginning of a book ever. All of this will come later. Now, at the beginning of the process, it is time to get to know your story, get to know your characters and make a connection with everything you have created so that it becomes almost impossible to pull away from the thing you love and leave it unfinished. That’s how you will finish a book. You just need to keep going. Don’t be afraid to start again If it’s no good, or you have heavy doubts, get rid of it. Start again. Yes. You absolutely have to do this if you want to do more than finish a book. Starting again when needed is how you finish a good book. If you keep a dull chapter or a plot hole simply because you cannot face all the work you’ll have to do to fix it, then your book will never be finished. You will get bored. You will become unmotivated. Say goodbye to your work in progress if you can’t be bothered to make the changes necessary to make your novel great. Producing something great is absolutely worth all the effort it takes to get there. It’s overwhelming at first but once you take the plunge, it feels incredibly satisfying. Writing is a labour of love — working through the hardest parts where you want to give up is what helps you to fall in love even more with your book and your characters. So don’t be afraid to start again if something isn’t working — the only way you’ll get to the place you want to be is if you keep writing. Once the first draft is done, you don’t have to settle. If writing a second draft means that most of the first draft is changed, then so be it. It’s what must be done if you want to finish writing a book you’re proud of. Be honest I wouldn’t have been able to build a connection with my characters, my story, and finish the project if I wasn’t honest and didn’t open my heart to the story. Putting a piece of yourself into the book and your heart and soul into finishing it is what will help you accomplish the ultimate goal of finishing a book you love, and one that readers love and can identify with. At the beginning, the love and connection to a story comes from you. If you, the creator, cannot see the book’s potential, then no one else will. If you want to stand a chance of connecting with your readers, then your book needs to be authentic and capture something universal so that readers can make an attachment and feel something after reading your work, long after they’ve finished reading the last page. The only way to do this is to be honest. If you want readers to care, then you need to care too.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/the-3-most-important-lessons-i-learned-from-writing-a-book-70ad190f272d

['Kat Morris']

2020-08-20 15:40:34.187000+00:00

['Writing Tips', 'Writing', 'Books', 'Self', 'Writers On Writing']

An Introduction to Message Queues With RabbitMQ and Python

What Is a Message Queue in the First Place? Message queues (MQ) are a fundamental concept in programming and software development. In a distributed system, a message queue is the backbone of the system. A message queue allows inter-process communication between services/applications in your system (eg. Service A can talk to Service B). In MQ terminology, the service that emits the message is called the producer worker, while the service that listens and reacts to messages is called the consumer worker. This is how communication happens between the services. You can scale up or down the number of producer and consumer workers running depending on their loads. For example, you may have two producers running in two VMs and ten consumers running CPU-intensive tasks across 10 VMs. You can also increase the number of workers during the day and shut down the workers at night (provided that your application traffic is a diurnal pattern).

https://medium.com/better-programming/introduction-to-message-queue-with-rabbitmq-python-639e397cb668

['Mohamad Fadhil']

2020-10-14 02:42:02.766000+00:00

['Python', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Python3']

Getting Started with PySpark for Big Data Analytics using Jupyter Notebooks and Jupyter Docker Stacks

Introduction There is little question, big data analytics, data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), a subcategory of AI, have all experienced a tremendous surge in popularity over the last few years. Behind the hype curves and marketing buzz, these technologies are having a significant influence on many aspects of our modern lives. Due to their popularity and potential benefits, academic institutions and commercial enterprises are rushing to train large numbers of Data Scientists and ML and AI Engineers. Search results courtesy GoogleTrends (https://trends.google.com) Learning popular programming paradigms, such as Python, Scala, R, Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Apache Kafka, requires the use of multiple complex technologies. Installing, configuring, and managing these technologies often demands an advanced level of familiarity with Linux, distributed systems, cloud- and container-based platforms, databases, and data-streaming applications. These barriers may prove a deterrent to Students, Mathematicians, Statisticians, and Data Scientists. Search results courtesy GoogleTrends (https://trends.google.com) Driven by the explosive growth of these technologies and the need to train individuals, many commercial enterprises are lowering the barriers to entry, making it easier to get started. The three major cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, all have multiple Big Data-, AI- and ML-as-a-Service offerings. Similarly, many open-source projects are also lowering the barriers to entry into these technologies. An excellent example of an open-source project working on this challenge is Project Jupyter. Similar to the Spark Notebook and Apache Zeppelin projects, Jupyter Notebooks enables data-driven, interactive, and collaborative data analytics with Julia, Scala, Python, R, and SQL. This post will demonstrate the creation of a containerized development environment, using Jupyter Docker Stacks. The environment will be suited for learning and developing applications for Apache Spark, using the Python, Scala, and R programming languages. This post is not intended to be a tutorial on Spark, PySpark, or Jupyter Notebooks. Featured Technologies The following technologies are featured prominently in this post. Jupyter Notebooks According to Project Jupyter, the Jupyter Notebook, formerly known as the IPython Notebook, is an open-source web application that allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. Uses include data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more. The word, Jupyter, is a loose acronym for Julia, Python, and R, but today, the Jupyter supports many programming languages. Interest in Jupyter Notebooks has grown dramatically. Search results courtesy GoogleTrends (https://trends.google.com) Jupyter Docker Stacks To enable quick and easy access to Jupyter Notebooks, Project Jupyter has created Jupyter Docker Stacks. The stacks are ready-to-run Docker images containing Jupyter applications, along with accompanying technologies. Currently, eight different Jupyter Docker Stacks focus on a particular area of practice. They include SciPy (Python-based mathematics, science, and engineering), TensorFlow, R Project for statistical computing, Data Science with Julia, and the main subject of this post, PySpark. The stacks also include a rich variety of well-known packages to extend their functionality, such as scikit-learn, pandas, Matplotlib, Bokeh, ipywidgets (interactive HTML widgets), and Facets. Apache Spark According to Apache, Spark is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing, used by well-known, modern enterprises, such as Netflix, Yahoo, and eBay. With speeds up to 100x faster than Hadoop, Apache Spark achieves high performance for static, batch, and streaming data, using a state-of-the-art DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) scheduler, a query optimizer, and a physical execution engine. Spark’s polyglot programming model allows users to write applications quickly in Scala, Java, Python, R, and SQL. Spark includes libraries for Spark SQL (DataFrames and Datasets), MLlib (Machine Learning), GraphX (Graph Processing), and DStreams (Spark Streaming). You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on Amazon EC2, Apache Hadoop YARN, Mesos, or Kubernetes. PySpark The Spark Python API, PySpark, exposes the Spark programming model to Python. PySpark is built on top of Spark’s Java API. Data is processed in Python and cached and shuffled in the JVM. According to Apache, Py4J enables Python programs running in a Python interpreter to dynamically access Java objects in a JVM. Docker According to Docker, their technology developers and IT the freedom to build, manage and secure business-critical applications without the fear of technology or infrastructure lock-in. Although Kubernetes is now the leading open-source container orchestration platform, Docker is still the predominant underlying container engine technology. For this post, I am using Docker Desktop Community version for macOS. Docker Swarm Current versions of Docker include both a Kubernetes and Swarm orchestrator for deploying and managing containers. We will choose Swarm for this demonstration. According to Docker, Swarm is the cluster management and orchestration features embedded in the Docker Engine are built using swarmkit. Swarmkit is a separate project which implements Docker’s orchestration layer and is used directly within Docker. PostgreSQL PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system. According to their website, PostgreSQL comes with many features aimed to help developers build applications, administrators to protect data integrity and build fault-tolerant environments, and help manage data no matter how big or small the dataset. Demonstration To show the capabilities of the Jupyter development environment, I will demonstrate a few typical use cases, such as executing Python scripts, submitting PySpark jobs, working with Jupyter Notebooks, and reading and writing data to and from different format files and to a database. We will be using the jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image. This image includes Python, R, and Scala support for Apache Spark, using Apache Toree. Architecture As shown below, we will stand-up a Docker stack, consisting of Jupyter All-Spark-Notebook, PostgreSQL 10.5, and Adminer containers. The Docker stack will have local directories bind-mounted into the containers. Files from our GitHub project will be shared with the Jupyter application container through a bind-mounted directory. Our PostgreSQL data will also be persisted through a bind-mounted directory. This allows us to persist data external to the ephemeral containers. Source Code All open-sourced code for this post can be found on GitHub. Use the following command to clone the project. The post and project code was last updated on 9/28/2019. --branch master --single-branch --depth 1 --no-tags \ https://github.com/garystafford/pyspark-setup-demo.git git clone \--branch master --single-branch --depth 1 --no-tags \ Source code samples are displayed as GitHub Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers. Deploy Docker Stack To start, create the $HOME/data/postgres directory to store PostgreSQL data files. This directory will be bind-mounted into the PostgreSQL container on line 36 of the stack.yml file, $HOME/data/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data . The HOME environment variable assumes you are working on Linux or macOS and is equivalent to HOMEPATH on Windows. The Jupyter container’s working directory is set on line 10 of the stack.yml file, working_dir:/home/$USER/work . The local bind-mounted working directory is $PWD/work . This path is bind-mounted to the working directory in the Jupyter container, on line 24 of the stack.yml file, $PWD/work:/home/$USER/work . The PWD environment variable assumes you are working on Linux or macOS ( CD on Windows). By default, the user within the Jupyter container is jovyan . Optionally, I have chosen to override that user with my own local host’s user account, as shown on line 16 of the stack.yml file, NB_USER: $USER . I have used the macOS host’s USER environment variable value (equivalent to USERNAME on Windows). There are many options for configuring the Jupyter container, detailed here. Several of those options are shown on lines 12-18 of the stack.yml file (gist). Assuming you have a recent version of Docker installed on your local development machine, and running in swarm mode, standing up the stack is as easy as running the following command from the root directory of the project: docker stack deploy -c stack.yml pyspark The Docker stack consists of a new overlay network, pyspark-net , and three containers. To confirm the stack deployed, you can run the following command: docker stack ps pyspark --no-trunc Note the jupyter/all-spark-notebook container is quite large. Depending on your Internet connection, if this is the first time you have pulled this Docker image, the stack may take several minutes to enter a running state. To access the Jupyter Notebook application, you need to obtain the Jupyter URL and access token (read more here). This information is output in the Jupyter container log, which can be accessed with the following command: docker logs $(docker ps | grep pyspark_pyspark | awk '{print $NF}') Using the URL and token shown in the log output, you will be able to access the Jupyter web-based user interface on localhost port 8888. Once there, from the Jupyter dashboard landing page, you should see all the files in the project’s work/ directory. Also shown below, note the types of files you are able to create from the dashboard, including Python 3, R, Scala (using Toree or spylon-kernal), and text. You can also open a Jupyter Terminal or create a new Folder. Running Python Scripts Instead of worrying about installing and maintaining the latest version of Python and packages on your own development machine, we can run our Python scripts from the Jupyter container. At the time of this post, the latest jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image runs Python 3.7.3 and Conda 4.6.14. Let’s start with a simple example of the Jupyter container’s capabilities by running a Python script. I’ve included a sample Python script, 01_simple_script.py. Run the script from within the Jupyter container, from a Jupyter Terminal window: python ./01_simple_script.py You should observe the following output. Kaggle Datasets To explore the features of the Jupyter Notebook container and PySpark, we will use a publically-available dataset from Kaggle. Kaggle is a fantastic open-source resource for datasets used for big-data and ML applications. Their tagline is ‘Kaggle is the place to do data science projects’. For this demonstration, I chose the ‘Transactions from a Bakery’ dataset from Kaggle. The dataset contains 21,294 rows, each with four columns of data. Although certainly nowhere near ‘big data’, the dataset is large enough to test out the Jupyter container functionality (gist). Submitting Spark Jobs We are not limited to Jupyter Notebooks to interact with Spark, we can also submit scripts directly to Spark from a Jupyter Terminal, or from our IDE. I have included a simple Python script, 02_bakery_dataframes.py. The script loads the Kaggle Bakery dataset from the CSV file into a Spark DataFrame. The script then prints out the top ten rows of data, along with a count of the total number of rows in the DataFrame. Run the script directly from a Jupyter Terminal window: python ./02_bakery_dataframes.py An example of the output of the Spark job is shown below. At the time of this post, the latest jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image runs Spark 2.4.3, Scala 2.11.12, and Java 1.8.0_191 using the OpenJDK. More typically, you would submit the Spark job, using the spark-submit command. Use a Jupyter Terminal window to run the following command: $SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-submit 02_bakery_dataframes.py Below, we see the beginning of the output from Spark, using the spark-submit command. Below, we see the scheduled tasks executing and the output of the print statement, displaying the top 10 rows of bakery data. Interacting with Databases Often with Spark, you are loading data from one or more data sources (input). After performing operations and transformations on the data, the data is persisted or conveyed to another system for further processing (output). To demonstrate the flexibility of the Jupyter Docker Stacks to work with databases, I have added PostgreSQL to the Docker Stack. We can read and write data from the Jupyter container to the PostgreSQL instance, running in a separate container. To begin, we will run a SQL script, written in Python, to create our database schema and some test data in a new database table. To do so, we will need to install the psycopg2 package into our Jupyter container. You can use the docker exec command from your terminal. Alternatively, as a superuser, your user has administrative access to install Python packages within the Jupyter container using the Jupyter Terminal window. Both pip and conda are available to install packages, see details here. Run the following command to install psycopg2 : # using pip docker exec -it \ $(docker ps | grep pyspark_pyspark | awk '{print $NF}') \ pip install psycopg2-binary These packages give Python the ability to interact with PostgreSQL. The included Python script, 03_load_sql.py, will execute a set of SQL statements, contained in a SQL file, bakery_sample.sql, against the PostgreSQL container instance. To execute the script, run the following command: python ./03_load_sql.py This should result in the following output, if successful. To confirm the SQL script’s success, I have included Adminer. Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin) is a full-featured database management tool written in PHP. Adminer natively recognizes PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and MongoDB, among other database engines. Adminer should be available on localhost port 8080. The password credentials, shown below, are available in the stack.yml file. The server name, postgres , is the name of the PostgreSQL container. This is the domain name the Jupyter container will use to communicate with the PostgreSQL container. Connecting to the demo database with Adminer, we should see the bakery_basket table. The table should contain three rows of data, as shown below. Developing Jupyter NoteBooks The true power of the Jupyter Docker Stacks containers is Jupyter Notebooks. According to the Jupyter Project, the notebook extends the console-based approach to interactive computing in a qualitatively new direction, providing a web-based application suitable for capturing the whole computation process: developing, documenting, and executing code, as well as communicating the results. Notebook documents contain the inputs and outputs of an interactive session as well as additional text that accompanies the code but is not meant for execution. To see the power of Jupyter Notebooks, I have written a basic notebook document, 04_pyspark_demo_notebook.ipynb. The document performs some typical PySpark functions, such as loading data from a CSV file and from the PostgreSQL database, performing some basic data analytics with Spark SQL, graphing the data using BokehJS, and finally, saving data back to the database, as well as to the popular Apache Parquet file format. Below we see the notebook document, using the Jupyter Notebook user interface. PostgreSQL Driver The only notebook document dependency, not natively part of the Jupyter Image, is the PostgreSQL JDBC driver. The driver, postgresql-42.2.8.jar , is included in the project and referenced in the configuration of the notebook’s Spark Session. The JAR is added to the spark.driver.extraClassPath runtime environment property. This ensures the JAR is available to Spark (written in Scala) when the job is run. PyCharm Since the working directory for the project is shared with the container, you can also edit files, including notebook documents, in your favorite IDE, such as JetBrains PyCharm. PyCharm has built-in language support for Jupyter Notebooks, as shown below. As mentioned earlier, a key feature of Jupyter Notebooks is their ability to save the output from each Cell as part of the notebook document. Below, we see the notebook document on GitHub. The output is saved, as part of the notebook document. Not only can you distribute the notebook document, but you can also preserve and share the output from each cell. Using Additional Packages As mentioned in the Introduction, the Jupyter Docker Stacks come ready-to-run, with a rich variety of Python packages to extend their functionality. To demonstrate the use of these packages, I have created a second Jupyter notebook document, 05_pyspark_demo_notebook.ipynb. This notebook document uses SciPy (Python-based mathematics, science, and engineering), NumPy (Python-based scientific computing), and the Plotly Python Graphing Library. While NumPy and SciPy are included on the Jupyter Docker Image, the Notebook used pip to install Plotly. Similar to Bokeh, shown previously, we can combine these libraries to create rich, interactive data visualizations. To use Plotly, you will need to sign up for a free account and obtain a username and API key. Shown below, we use Plotly to construct a bar chart of daily bakery items sold for the year 2017 based on the Kaggle dataset. The chart uses SciPy and NumPy to construct a linear fit (regression) and plot a line of best fit to the bakery data. The chart also uses SciPy’s Savitzky-Golay Filter to plot the second line, illustrating a smoothing of our bakery data. Plotly also provides Chart Studio Online Chart Maker. Plotly describes Chart Studio as the world’s most sophisticated editor for creating D3.js and WebGL charts. Shown below, we have the ability to enhance, stylize, and share our bakery data visualization using the free version of Chart Studio Cloud. nbviewer Notebooks can also be viewed using Jupyter nbviewer, hosted on Rackspace. Below, we see the output of a cell from this project’s notebook document, showing a BokehJS chart, using nbviewer. You can view this project’s actual notebook document, using nbviewer, here. Monitoring Spark Jobs The Jupyter Docker container exposes Spark’s monitoring and instrumentation web user interface. We can observe each Spark Job in great detail. We can review details of each stage of the Spark job, including a visualization of the DAG, which Spark constructs as part of the job execution plan, using the DAG Scheduler. We can also review the timing of each event, occurring as part of the stages of the Spark job. We can also use the Spark interface to review and confirm the runtime environment, including versions of Java, Scala, and Spark, as well as packages available on the Java classpath. Spark Performance Spark, running on a single node within the Jupyter container, on your development system, is not a substitute for a full Spark cluster, running on bare metal or robust virtualized hardware, with YARN, Mesos, or Kubernetes. In my opinion, you should adjust Docker to support an acceptable performance profile for the stack, running only a modest workload. You are not trying to replace the need to run real jobs on a Production Spark cluster. We can use the docker stats command to examine the container’s CPU and memory metrics: docker stats \ --format "table {{.Name}}\t{{.CPUPerc}}\t{{.MemUsage}}\t{{.MemPerc}}" Below, we see the stats from the stack’s three containers immediately after being deployed, showing little or no activity. Here, Docker has been allocated 2 CPUs, 3GB of RAM, and 2 GB of swap space available, from the host machine. Compare the stats above with the same three containers, while the example notebook document is running on Spark. The CPU shows a spike, but memory usage appears to be within acceptable ranges. Linux top and htop Another option to examine container performance metrics is with top. We can use the docker exec command to execute the top command within the Jupyter container, sorting processes by CPU usage: docker exec -it \ $(docker ps | grep _pyspark | awk '{print $NF}') \ top -o %CPU With top , we can observe the individual performance of each process running in the Jupyter container. Lastly, htop, an interactive process viewer for Unix, can be installed into the container and ran with the following set of bash commands, from a Jupyter Terminal window or using docker exec : docker exec -it \ $(docker ps | grep _pyspark | awk '{print $NF}') \ sh -c "apt-get update && apt-get install htop && htop --sort-key PERCENT_CPU" With htop , we can observe individual CPU activity. The two CPUs at the top left of the htop window are the two CPUs assigned to Docker. We get insight into the way Docker is using each CPU, as well as other basic performance metrics, like memory and swap. Assuming your development machine host has them available, it is easy to allocate more compute resources to Docker if required. However, in my opinion, this stack is optimized for development and learning, using reasonably sized datasets for data analysis and ML. It should not be necessary to allocate excessive resources to Docker, possibly starving your host machine’s own compute capabilities. Conclusion In this brief post, we have seen how easy it is to get started learning and developing applications for big data analytics, using Python, Spark, and PySpark, thanks to the Jupyter Docker Stacks. We could use the same stack to learn and develop for machine learning, using Python, Scala, and R. Extending the stack’s capabilities is as simple as swapping out this Jupyter image for another, with a different set of tools, as well as adding additional containers to the stack, such as Apache Kafka or Apache Cassandra. Originally published at programmaticponderings.com on November 20, 2018. The post and project code was updated on September 28, 2019. All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients.

https://garystafford.medium.com/getting-started-with-pyspark-for-big-data-analytics-using-jupyter-notebooks-and-docker-ba39d2e3d6c7

['Gary A. Stafford']

2020-01-07 23:21:39.401000+00:00

['Apache Spark', 'Python', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Docker', 'Pyspark']

The 5 Marketing Benefits of Acquisitions

Recently, the idea of “acquisitions for marketing” has fascinated me. What does this mean? It refers to situations where companies acquire other businesses or assets as a way to grow their primary product(s) or improve their marketing. Huge companies use acquisitions for marketing all of the time. Examples of this practice in large corporations include: As these examples hopefully illustrate, big companies like to buy other businesses as a way to market their existing products and grow their overall value. I see so many large businesses grow via M&A, but I often wonder why more startups don’t use the same strategy. In response, a practical person might bring up the fact that startups don’t have the resources to practice M&A in a way that creates meaningful results. After all, Google, Facebook, Apple, and other titans can pay millions or billions of dollars to buy other companies without even breaking a sweat. But, the benefits that businesses experience from acquisitions can translate to smaller startups. They just apply at a smaller scale. In fact, the startup ecosystem is filled with companies that used acquisitions to accelerate their growth. For that reason, in this article, I will share the specific growth and marketing benefits startups often receive after acquiring other companies. Benefits Startups Can Experience When Acquiring Other Companies Some of the positives of acquisitions for marketing for startups include: 1. Increased traffic at the top of the funnel. Amazon provides an excellent case study of how acquisitions can increase top-of-funnel traffic. Tens of millions of people visit sites like IMDb, Box Office Mojo, Goodreads, and Twitch.tv (all acquired by Amazon over the past 20+ years) every month. Many, if not most, of the people who visit these properties are looking to learn more about movies, books, or video games. Amazon, which is the world’s largest seller of movies, books, and video games, can efficiently use these properties to link to products on its website. These content-heavy businesses may not account for most of Amazon’s traffic, but they definitely send lots of targeted visitors to Amazon.com. There are plenty of other acquisitions that lead to more traffic for a company’s primary product or service. For example, the company behind Fomo acquired a content-focused site called Built With Shopify. Built With Shopify interviews Shopify entrepreneurs who publish the revenues generated by their stores. We can assume that the site’s viral, SEO-friendly, ecommerce-focused content likely creates substantial amounts of inbound traffic. Thanks to strategically placed ads throughout the site, this acquisition should have lead to a nice bump in visitors to Fomo. As one final case study, consider the mattress review industry. With the rise of direct-to-consumer mattress brands like Casper and Tuft & Needle, several enterprising entrepreneurs started review sites focused on these new products. By including affiliate links with the mattresses they reviewed, bloggers began to earn serious money. As this story indicates, the most-visited mattress review websites became a vital referral source for players in the industry. In fact, in a controversial move, Casper ended up suing and then acquiring Sleepopolis, one of the sector’s prominent review sites. With the acquisition, Casper gained control of a website it could use to direct additional visitors to Casper.com. Are there blogs, review websites, or content-focused assets (such as Instagram or Youtube accounts) with relevance to your product that you can acquire? If so, you can consider purchasing one or more of these properties and using them to increase traffic to your primary product. 2. Significant PR and content marketing. It’s no secret that the press loves to cover mergers and acquisitions. While acquisitions worth billions or hundreds of millions of dollars tend to get the most attention from journalists, smaller sales can get plenty of love as well. Just search “Mergers and Acquisitions” in Google News or “acquisition” in Techcrunch, and you’ll see tens of thousands of articles about how this company bought that startup. Whether it’s a $5M deal or a $16B deal, reporters like to write about acquisitions because they fascinate people. Why? Although I can’t claim to understand the psychology behind why people love acquisitions, two potential reasons come to mind: Acquisitions are very rare. Everyone knows plenty of entrepreneurs, but how many people do you know whose companies got acquired? Probably not too many. Even though entrepreneurship is pretty popular, it’s still somewhat rare. But, acquisitions are incredibly uncommon, which means people love to read about them when they happen. After all, we love to learn about what doesn’t often occur. People like to picture themselves as a part of an acquired company. Starting a successful company and selling it for millions of dollars is difficult. However, imagining that you’ve started a big company and sold it for millions of dollars is easy. Rather than put in the work required to achieve the former, most people are happy with the latter. This idea may explain why acquisition stories are so popular; they give people a chance to think about what it would be like to earn fabulous wealth. Acquisitions of small products or websites in the range of $10,000 — $3/5M might not get much attention from the press. But, because of the reasons mentioned above, if you write about a small acquisition made by your company on its blog or Medium, many people will likely read about it. This is one of the rare situations where the typically untrue cliche “If you build (or write about) it, they will come” actually rings true. Just look at the following popular articles about very small acquisitions to get a sense of how well this type of content can do and how compelling it can be: You shouldn’t acquire a product or website just for the PR or content marketing boost it might bring. But, keep in mind that this is a marketing benefit of acquisitions. 3. The opportunity to cross-sell your primary product and the one you’ve acquired. If you acquire a product that’s relevant to some or all of your customers but has a different value proposition or focus than your core business, you can cross-sell it to them. Similarly, you can potentially cross-sell your core business’s product to the customers of the company you’ve acquired. In these situations, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. How? If you combine two revenue-generating products under one company and leverage those products’ audiences to consistently cross-sell each service, both products will grow faster and be more valuable than before. When it comes to this type of acquisitions as marketing, Microsoft has made several exciting purchases. Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub provides exciting cross-selling opportunities for its enterprise business. The company can now efficiently cross-sell its Azure hosting product to GitHub’s users and at the same time encourage its existing Azure users to become GitHub customers. In its consumer business, Microsoft’s acquisition of Minecraft was another way to increase the value of two different companies through cross-selling. As the owner of Minecraft, Microsoft can encourage its existing Xbox users to check out the game. And, it can now market Xbox and its associated games to the vast Minecraft user base for free. Microsoft acquired GitHub and Minecraft for $7.5B and $2.5B, respectively. However, not all successful acquisitions with cross-selling potential have to be billion or multi-million dollar deals. 4. The removal of a competitor from the market and the chance to onboard its customers to your product. It’s common for companies to buy other products, startups, or IP to bring competitors’ customers to their product. A recent and now somewhat famous example of this is Slack’s acquisition of Hipchat. Hipchat was one of Slack’s main competitors in the employee chat and communication market. Yet, as Slack’s dominance grew, Hipchat floundered. With the acquisition of Hipchat, Slack plans to shut down the service and migrate its existing users over to its product. In the end, this is advantageous for Slack because it now has to deal with one less competitor and it can quickly add a significant number of users to its platform. Also, I can’t forget to mention all of the PR Slack has gotten from the deal (see benefit 1 above). Another company that has taken this approach is Fomo. In the past year, Fomo acquired a competitor called Refurther. Just like Slack’s acquisition of Hipchat, Fomo’s acquisition of Refurther helps with its marketing by removing a competitor and bringing that former competitor’s customers onto the platform. When it comes to acquisitions as marketing, if your industry has many small competitors, it may make sense to acquire some of them as your company grows. The examples of Slack and Fomo show how effective strategy this can be. 5. A fresh infusion of new talent and processes. Companies, especially large corporations, frequently acquire other businesses as a way to bring smart talent into their organizations. These acquisitions, typically referred to as acquihires, can help with marketing by bringing in the new skills, knowledge, or processes companies need to launch fresh products or grow existing ones. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of acquihire examples. A few include: Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed in 2009 (Bret Taylor, one of the co-founders of FriendFeed, became Facebook’s CTO as a part of the deal). Twitter’s acquisition of AdGrok, which added two talented engineers to its advertising team. Google acquired Kevin Rose’s company Milk to add him to its team. Large corporations recognize that even if they don’t see value in a startup’s product or underlying tech, teams at certain companies can add real value to their organizations. While acquihires by Facebook, Twitter, and Google often range from $1M — $50+M, small startups can participate as well. In his excellent book Lost and Founder, when describing the different acquihires Moz has made, Rand Fishkin writes: Moz has completed six transactions to accomplish precisely this. One of those was a young man who’d just graduated college but had built a useful product in his spare time at school that proved to me, and to our team, that he could be incredibly valuable. We paid a small acquisition price ($18,000) and brought him on board at Moz at a salary, with stock options, and with influence greater than what we’d have offered a candidate who simply applied to a job posting. Another was a pair of SEO professionals who’d built a successful consulting practice and whose skills we wanted internally for our product and engineering teams. We paid $330,000 (plus stock options and retention bonuses) to get them here, a nice multiple on their business in addition to strong salaries and benefits. As this example hopefully illustrates, small-scale acquihires, in the range of $X0,000 — $X00,000 can help nascent startups add the talent they need to grow. If your startup requires talent with unique skills to hit new product or growth milestones, acquihires may help you get there. In these cases, acquisitions can help with marketing, just not in the most direct way. Bringing It Together Acquiring any company or asset involves some risk, and you should always do extensive due diligence before purchasing another business. After all, history is riddled with botched acquisitions like: However, I hope this article has shown you that when done right, acquisitions can be a useful marketing tool. To learn more about M&A, we recommend checking out the following resources:

https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-5-marketing-benefits-of-acquisitions-1eeb6561549d

[]

2018-08-13 16:25:33.216000+00:00

['Mergers And Acquisitions', 'Marketing', 'Acquisitions', 'Startup', 'Acquisitions Marketing']

Did Anyone Else Just Feel A Surge of, Like, Wellness?

Self-care hits different now Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash On Saturday afternoon, after a tall glass of Crémant and a great deal of screaming out the window, I did something a bit odd for such an enormous moment: I took a shower. One of those delicious, long, thorough showers where you come out feeling impossibly clean and fresh. I washed my hair! I shaved my legs! I did a special face scrub! And it didn’t end there: I blow-dried my hair, put on a cute outfit (a skirt!), applied lipstick. The next day, I drank utter gallons of water and did yoga and ate kale. I didn’t even touch a corkscrew. It all felt so different: Sure, I’ve been keeping myself (and my children, thank you very much) alive and fairly healthy, but the actions I’ve been taking to do so have felt like self-care in spite of all the factors conspiring to bring me down. In spite of the whole world. As though my kettlebell swings are helping me not letting the terrorists (or the fascists, or the virus) win. But after the election was called on Saturday, I suddenly just wanted to feel and look and be at my best. Like there was hope again, and I wanted to rise to the occasion. I posted about this oddly healthy feeling on Instagram, and the “SAME!”s began to roll in. “I feel ready to get back to life,” one friend said. “I feel so refreshed,” another reported. And “I woke up this morning, ran 5 miles, and am currently wearing a hair and face mask.” And “I feel motivated to TRY again.” As with so many strange feelings, there’s a brain-science explanation for this: “When we feel helpless and hopeless, there’s a neurobiological shift in our brain functioning. Specifically, the brain region of the frontal lobes becomes sluggish and dimmed, which reduces our ability to problem solve, reason, plan, have insight and feel motivated. This is why many people find it hard to self-care during times of stress,” Deborah Serani, PsyD, author and professor at Adelphi University, tells me. “However, when we feel hopeful or our mood brightens, these areas in the frontal lobe are reactivated, and that’s why you find yourself feeling renewed — able again to self-care.” Of course, if you’re not in this boat, you’re not alone: Plenty of folks are experiencing an “emotional hangover,” feeling totally spent and nowhere near as celebratory as they may have expected. If that’s you — or if the reality that we’re still living in very dark times and grappling with an out-of-control pandemic is outweighing that little dose of optimism — focus on what you can control, Serani suggests. “Resilient people don’t ask why things are the way they are. The move into action mode. Studies show when we keep a scheduled routine, practice gratefulness, recognize strengths instead of weaknesses and reflect on simple daily meaningful experiences, we can move better through challenges,” she says. As for me, I’m enjoying the surge of energy (and the delicious home-cooked meals I suddenly have the urge to make again), but also looking for ways to pump the brakes so I can keep taking care throughout what’s sure to be a very difficult winter. “Self-care can be used to plan for future stressors,” Serani says. “It’s a good idea to take into account how Covid is still a major health concern, and plan for challenges that may come with school, work, and personal issues.” And as always, don’t forget that self-care can be small (which is good for me, because there’s not a hell of a lot of extra time around here for long indulgent showers, generally). “My go-to technique is to feed my senses each and every day,” Serani says. “A long glance at the sunset, savoring a cup of tea, listening to a beach soundscape as I drive home, cuddling with my beloved, lighting a scented candle or spraying some lavender on my pillowcase helps me feel centered and calm. Even if it’s for just a few moments, research says sensorial experiences can have a profound effect on your sense of well-being.”

https://anna.medium.com/did-anyone-else-just-feel-a-surge-of-like-wellness-a56ec54f2494

['Anna Maltby']

2020-11-11 20:13:48.786000+00:00

['Wellness', 'Election Stress Relief', 'Motivation', 'Self Care']

One Book Inspired Alexander The Great And “The Warriors”

One Book Inspired Alexander The Great And “The Warriors” March Of The Ten Thousand Greek Hoplites — Via Wikimedia [Public Domain] “Let us not, in the name of the gods, wait for others to come to us and summon us to the noblest deeds, but let us take the lead ourselves and arouse the rest to valour. Show yourselves the best of the captains, and more worthy to be generals than the generals themselves. As for me, if you choose to set out upon this course, I am ready to follow you; but if you assign me the leadership, I do not plead my youth as an excuse; rather, I believe I am in the very prime of my power to ward off dangers from my own head.” — Xenophon’s speech to the Greek mercenaries, “Anabasis” (The Long March) Often many larger than life events in history are built upon the skeleton of events which came before. Similarly, events within our more reachable cultural history often borrow from these events as well. Most times we don’t even notice the pieces which were borrowed to construct the larger event and the smaller cultural creations afterwards. One of these events occurred in 401 BC in the Persian Empire. A war of succession took place between two brothers vying for the throne at a small Babylonian village named Cunaxa. The upstart Cyrus the Younger would attempt to remove his brother Artaxerxes II from power. Cyrus would raise and army and hire an insurance policy to make sure this happened. The insurance policy would be the greatest armed force gold could assemble. This force consisted of a group of 10,000 or so heavily armored Greek mercenaries from various city states. The army would be led by a Spartan general to boot — Clearchus. The force would march in tight phalanx formations, forming a spear-wielding porcupine appearance. These mercenaries would be made up of tough adventurers, seeking fortune and glory. Their armor reflected the brilliance of the sun and their phalanx formation inspired dread from lightly armed infantries who would face them. Cyrus beamed with confidence — it would only be a matter of time before he sat on the throne. Victory would be a forgone conclusion. Within hours the tides would completely turn. The Greeks would blow the force they faced off the battlefield, chasing them into the distance. Cyrus would confidently charge into battle with his cavalry to deal with the rest and be cut to ribbons. The rest of his Persian army would be scattered. The Greeks would figure out the results of the battle the next day. Their employer was dead, and they were trapped far from home in a foreign land with no way out. To make matters worse, their leaders would be tricked into a meeting with Artaxerxes and be slaughtered. Without generals and without a plan, a leader would arise to organize the group. Xenophon would convince the troops surrender wasn’t an option. They’d walk home through the heart of enemy territory together and once again see Greece. His story would be told in the “March Of The Ten Thousand” or the “Anabasis”.

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/one-book-inspired-alexander-the-great-and-the-warriors-9035ad965766

['Erik Brown']

2020-06-27 19:01:34.275000+00:00

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

4 Ways to Turn Your Eco-Anxiety Into Action

1. Take it easy, change your go-to font Printer cartridges may seem like small beans, but they add up. Every year an estimated 300 million cartridges end up in landfills. As if that wasn’t enough, a single cartridge takes roughly one gallon of oil to produce and a thousand years to decompose. According to Evolve Recycling, In one year, if the world’s discarded cartridges were stacked end-to-end, they would circle the earth twice. Considering the sheer amount of cartridges used in all walks of life, and that only 30% of cartridges are recycled this is a huge problem. However, with an easy change of font, we can cut back the number of ink cartridges used annually by 100–150 million. Century Gothic compared to Arial uses up to 30% less ink and can significantly lengthen the lifespan of your cartridge. If Century Gothic isn’t your vibe, then try the classic Times New Roman which uses 27% less ink than Arial. Other ink reducing fonts include Garamond, Calibri, Courier, and Baskerville Old Face. However, if you’re looking for something truly unique and innovative consider downloading Ryman Eco or Ecofont. Both fonts were designed with sustainability in mind. What they do differently is that instead of filling in the letters with ink, they intentionally carve out tiny circles in the letters. This measure maintains readability while reducing ink usage by 20 - 50%. Photo Credit: Kon Karampelas on Unsplash 2. Netflix and delete your junk email Did you know that each email has a carbon footprint? According to The Carbon Literacy Project, An average spam email: 0.3 g CO2e A standard email: 4 g CO2e An email with “long and tiresome attachments”: 50 g CO2e Scaled up, the average person’s inbox, outbox, and spam folders account for the usage of 1,652 grams of CO2e daily and 0.6 tonnes of CO2e annually. Going paperless is the greenest option, but it may be not as green as we’d thought (unless powered by renewable energy). Have no fear, here are some tips to reduce the carbon footprint of your email: Avoid sending attachments : instead, link to files that are stored online such as Google Drive or OneNote. : instead, link to files that are stored online such as Google Drive or OneNote. Clean your subscription and mailing lists: by unsubscribing from a few unnecessary and left unread senders, you could cut 15g of CO2e per week. by unsubscribing from a few unnecessary and left unread senders, you could cut 15g of CO2e per week. Opt for lower resolution images: this could save 50g of CO2e per email. this could save 50g of CO2e per email. Triple check that email before sending: this small act can reduce the need to send follow up emails. Take a moment when you’re not doing anything but basking in eco-anxiety to scour your overflowing inbox and do away with the emails and senders that don’t serve you. This simple action will save your sanity while saving some carbon emissions. 3. Take to the web Activism in 2020 is a bit different than in 1920 — we are fortunate enough to have a world of knowledge, literature, and petitions at our fingertips. Unfortunately, sometimes the important stuff gets buried in our feed. Petitions don’t guarantee change, but they do bring awareness. And, if there are thousands of people flooding social media with posts and Tweets on an issue which in turn brings about bad publicity for a brand or organization, they’re more likely to work to find a resolution to save face. Some underrated topics and petitions include: There are many other environmental topics to bring awareness to that go beyond typical green issues; topics such as the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act that aims to tackle environmental racism and the Honest Ads Act that targets covert political ads. What’s key to making these petitions count is sharing them. Signing petitions is a great start, but putting and maintaining pressure on offenders or voicing support for legislation goes a long way in raising their priority in the public sphere. 4. Send some (low-res) emails As previously stated, action is crucial. Signing petitions is a great start, but creating your own movement is next level activism. Photo Credit: Campaign Creators on Unsplash Shoot an email to a local business or company that could improve its sustainability. Offer a simple fix they could implement that isn’t too costly or time-intensive. Depending on where they stand on acknowledging global warming, there could be push back so keeping it light and simple is the best route. With time, you can build up to bigger initiatives. This method of action can also work in your own office or workplace — although I highly caution keeping a neutral tone. I’ve found that overly passionate or (slightly) passive-aggressive works against the cause and only builds resistance. Another idea is to create your own micro-campaign. Identify a cause or petition that energizes you and find ways to share it. Through websites like Canva you can easily create free graphics that highlight why you care about the cause and why others should, too. This might seem daunting and time-consuming, but in the long-run, they can spare direct involvement. Creative campaigns can make the outreach to smaller, local businesses quicker and even indirectly encourage others to change. Pro tip: spread the word on alternative energy. In the US, there are tax incentives for implementing features that increase energy efficiency or create renewable energy. Bigger corporations looking to either off-set their carbon footprint, go neutral or negative or get that sweet tax cut will actually cover the cost for others to incorporate these elements in their building’s, structures, or communities. Simply pointing this out or sending some light information to brands or businesses you have rapport with could be enough to get them to seriously reconsider their sustainability model.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/4-ways-to-turn-your-eco-anxiety-into-action-432af7bf71b4

['Alexis Bondy']

2020-09-24 17:35:34.912000+00:00

['Ecoanxiety', 'Environment', 'Sustainability']

Empathy, the Most Powerful Design Tool

Artificial Intelligence is on everyone’s mind, it seems. It’s our savior. No wait, it’s an existential threat to humanity. No wait, it’s sort of both, as long as designers take an oath and run interference. Tune your ear to the tech industry, and you’ll hear AI buzzing beneath the cacophony, threatening the fabric of creativity while moving us into a simpler, automated future. At least that’s the narrative being spun. And while it’s [very!] important to start thinking about the ramifications of AI to our future humanity, there’s another concern knocking at the door of creative minds — the proliferation of design tools and design systems. You know the ones — Sketch, Zeplin, Proto.io, Figma, Origami, Framer, InVision, Principle, Marvel — the list grows as we speak. Not quite AI, but sophisticated as hell. If you can dream it, you can do it, with a small learning curve to get up to speed. Borrow an entire design system from the likes of Google, MailChimp, or Trello. Everything is open source and everything is awesome. Right? Maybe. We’re at an interesting crossroads in 2018, building tools that simultaneously embolden and decommission creativity. If a designer’s job can be canned into a magical automated machine, do we need designers anymore? Visual language can now be lifted and pieced together brilliantly like so many Legos. Your artistry and inventiveness need not apply. The machines have got it from here, thank you very much. This is a sad diagnosis, I know. The writer in me fears the little bots who will start composing the world’s poetry, excusing the humble wordsmith to the corners of oblivion. Designers are in the same awkward position. You want to innovate and inspire, you want to build great things that help people be more creative, you certainly want life to be easier for pixel-pushers around the world. But you also want to design. To feel artistic inspiration pour from your mind into your work. To create something meaningful, new, and original. I believe it’s still possible to do all of that in this new Design Age. The role of designer is changing, but not in a bad way. Now more than ever, designers have become spirit guides in the tech world, affecting change with their best unicorn skill — empathy. It’s become a buzz word, I know. But it really does make all the difference, and empathy’s hard to teach. A good designer will see the onslaught of automated creation tools and think: awesome. Now I can really focus on the customer. Rather than sensing a personal threat to individuality, they’ll bend their minds in new ways to reimagine customer journeys and the full arc of user experience. Having an at-the-ready design system isn’t suffocating, it’s freeing, and lays the groundwork for truly creative breakthroughs. That’s the challenge to designers in this new paradigm, and their greatest responsibility — to assert design authority in a provocative, world-changing way. 2017 was arguably The Year of the Designer — seats at the table were won. In 2018, it’s about delivering on that chutzpah and defending the very soul of humanity, to be perfectly dramatic about it. The whole AI thing may just be simmering now, but it’s already proving to be troublesome in some areas. Remember the Microsoft Tay debacle? Tay was sent bravely forth into the depths of Twitter to test natural language and machine learning capabilities. Poor Tay was corrupted by humans within hours and forced to fall on her sword. It was sort of an awful thing; but also a great learning moment. The entire industry could see it as an opportunity to bring mindful, fair design to digital assistants like Alexa and Cortana. And now, within the methods of Inclusive Design thinking, Microsoft is teaching others to combat those unintended biases that creep into AI and machine learning. The designer has become a guardian for social good. This is the landscape and a call to arms. Use those rapid prototyping tools, those artistic chops, that right-brain/left-brain hybrid mind, that designer instinct that leads you to create ethical, inclusive experiences. The world is at your feet and asking for empathy. To stay in-the-know with Microsoft Design, follow us on Dribbble, Twitter and Facebook, or join our Windows Insider program. And if you are interested in joining our team, head over to aka.ms/DesignCareers.

https://medium.com/microsoft-design/empathy-the-most-powerful-design-tool-5044525be92d

['Danielle Mcclune']

2019-08-27 17:30:40.415000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Microsoft', 'UX Design', 'Creators', 'Design']

Artificial Intelligence Marketing

AI Marketing Nowadays, we are hearing experts and professionals talking about the good sides of innovation. Robots helping humans rehabilitate from fatal diseases or machines predicting future consumers’ behaviors. On the other hand, many are also talking about job replacement. For these ones, the robots will take everything and destroy the planet once and for all. No more jobs, the human destiny is to die burdened under the weight of the machines. Thanks God, the future is better than many expect it to be ;-) A couple of years ago, I was working in a robotic company based in Italy called @TelerobotLabs — later acquired by the larger group “Danieli Automation” as a new and stronger robotic department — and the idea of working with robots for the future of the humanity was extremely exciting. Of course, the very preeminent mystery was: Is there a chance robots will take over the planet and destroy everything like in the movie “Terminator”? There wasn’t a better answer than the one CEO, David Corsini, gave me at that time. “Until the robots are plugged into the wall, we’ll simply unplug them.” So, after this assumption, please sit down on your sofa and enjoy the article because no one is gonna take over your couch. What is Artificial Intelligence? In order to give you a better idea of what we are talking about, I’d love to start from the very scratch and clarify — once and for all — the doubts anyone might have by reading this article from the youngest to the oldest. Since I am also still learning about this fascinating world I want to use other people’s experience to describe what artificial intelligence is and how it has developed in the previous years. Bernard Marr, a Forbes writer, defined temporarily and etymologically: “Artificial Intelligence has been around for a long time — the Greek myths contain stories of mechanical men designed to mimic our own behavior. Very early European computers were conceived as “logical machines” and by reproducing capabilities such as basic arithmetic and memory, engineers saw their job, fundamentally, as attempting to create mechanical brains. As technology, and, most importantly, our understanding of how our minds work, has progressed, our concept of what constitutes AI has changed. Rather than increasingly complex calculations, work in the field of AI concentrated on mimicking human decision-making processes and carrying out tasks in ever more human ways.” John McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, described Artificial Intelligence in a research as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals, and some machines.” After an in-depth research, I came up with an easy definition of what Artificial Intelligence means. AI is the ability of a machine (computer) to perform tasks in a way that will end up with meaningful solutions to the initial assignments, compared to the typical decisional process of a human. Did you hear about Machine Learning and Deep Learning? Easily, these are two applications of AI. Actually, machine learning incorporates deep learning to some extent. Somebody could also say the opposite, we will analyze the differences in a second. What is Machine Learning? and Deep Learning? To make it easier and faster for me ;-) I like to share the NVIDIA definition of Machine Learning: Machine Learning at its most basic is the practice of using algorithms to parse data, learn from it, and then make a determination or prediction about something in the world. So rather than hand-coding software routines with a specific set of instructions to accomplish a particular task, the machine is “trained” using large amounts of data and algorithms that give it the ability to learn how to perform the task. Deep Learning involves feeding a computer system a lot of data, which it can use to make decisions about other data which is fed through neural networks, as is the case in machine learning. These networks — logical constructions which ask a series of binary true/false questions, or extract a numerical value, of every bit of data which pass through them, and classify it according to the answers received. As our teacher, Francesco Mosconi said: “Deep Learning is a Machine Learning that works really well with large amounts of unstructured data like images or text”. Francesco is founder @DataWeekends, a Machine Learning and Deep Learning workshop program to teach basically anyone (I made it ;-) how to code an AI machine. “Today, image recognition by machines trained via deep learning in some scenarios is better than humans, and that ranges from cats to identifying indicators for cancer in blood and tumors in MRI scans” — NVIDIA says. So, why explaining in a such “deep” way how AI works and is composed? The answer is that in order to fully understand how Artificial Intelligence Marketing works is also imperative to understand how AI itself operates. Then, understanding the AIM application is easier — nonetheless, I helped you to balance your knowledge with the topic. Now, another important step. What do we mean when we say Marketing? I need you to understand what marketing means. I am giving you an easy definition. Marketing is the process and the action of promoting and selling products to consumers (a deeper analysis could be made on this definition but we will stick with an easy one since our objective isn’t based on this study). ..and we come to AIM — Artificial Intelligence Marketing ! I consider it obvious, but it couldn’t be, how these two — very different, apparently — fields are coming together. The connection between Artificial Intelligence and Marketing is based on finding the perfect way of promoting and selling the perfect product to the right person at the right time. You see how the definition is turning into something extremely specific and defined. The perfect way… The perfect product… The right person… The right time… These “RIGHTs” remind me of the “Just-in-time” Japanese process, also known as TPS- Toyota Production System — as a “methodology aimed primarily at reducing flow times within production system as well as response times from suppliers and to customers” (Wikipedia, 2016). Many believe that marketing will be one of the first disciplines disrupted by AI. But marketing and business relationships are human relationships, how will these ‘machines’ actually be sentient? Personal relationships … even if not reciprocated, that will feel very real to us. “ And where will AI affect day-to-day consumers the most? According to PHD, it will be with “information-access, entertainment-centric and social-connection platforms accessed across multiple devices”. I personally decided to categorize these processes under what I called Artificial Intelligence Marketing. Meaning all the systems are using Artificial Intelligence in a way that can influence the marketing activities as we’ve never seen before, from the perfect customization of everything the customer will need to predicting his behavior and desires. In this way, we will track and lead this conversation by suggesting and exposing the new trends/startups to the marketers community (and not just them) and deeply analyzing how this ecosystem will disrupt the previous scenario. So what is Artificial Intelligence Marketing going to be? For me is going to be the perfect strategy. The word perfect is going to impact every product and service. We will have what we want right there. There are some areas which will be more exposed and others less so. I posted this question to the guys that are currently active on the Growth Hackers -GrowthHackes.com — platform (founded by Sean Ellis) and I got some very interesting answers, especially the one my friend Arsene gave me: “It’s still in its infancy (see Persado for the copywriting aspect of it), we can envision an interesting wave of AI content creation apps since curation is just a limited first step. It’s very time consuming for marketers to develop content, and even more stay up to par with the latest in SEO algorithm (Hummingbird and what next?) to develop topical depth that favors SERP ranking. […] There definitely is a clear trend in AI chatbot. A number of platforms make it extremely easy even for the nontech savvy marketer to create new AI-persona chatbots, content-aware chatbots and more. We are also going to see that AI permeates new forms of media in these new “channels” such as real-time video content analysis to create brand-new forms of must-have users engagement in both the B2C and B2B spaces. […]” There is a phrase I believe is traveling behind all these big question marks and AI influencing marketing: “If a Tesla can drive itself on autopilot at 70mph on the highway taking in all the surrounding environment inputs, we can help marketers do the same with all the data inputs they are analyzing.” What are the Artificial Intelligence applications in the Marketing Activities? I was just reading a few days ago an interesting article written by DemandBase saying that 80% of all Marketing Executives Predict Artificial Intelligence Will Revolutionize Marketing by 2020. But actually, AI is already revolutionizing Marketing. There are dozens of applications already set up. Here you have a breakdown I made from a personal research into what I thought were the main applications (I’ll try to put them in decreasing order of relevance): Analytics. It’s extremely incredible how much data big companies have nowadays. What’s interesting? The point is that right now this data is not used in any way. AI will help to organize, select, prioritize and come up with the right data at the right moment for the right task. (Noodle.ai) Preventing fraud. Today one of the biggest challenges where AI already helped a lot is internet fraud detection. The relevance of AI is not just for card issuers, though. Data breaches is something retailers have been exposed to for a long time. AI will help to prevent fraud analyzing not just structured data but also unstructured data. (PayPal) Predictive Customer Service. Imagine you can give to your customer the right product at the right moment at the right price. With AI you can. (Intel, Saffron, Digital Genius, Assist.ai etc.). Product pricing. I have always been excited thinking that I could find a certain product at the price I was expecting. AI allows companies to predict the perfect price and generate a custom fare for the specific expectations of the different customers — it is a sort of dynamic price optimization based on the prospects. Forecasting. Clearly one of the biggest potentials that AI has is predicting, almost whatever we need for each business market. AI helps companies to foretell — almost perfectly optimized — how the sales will look like in 6 months/1 year from now. Of course, it is something businesses are already used to do, but today these forecasts are not very accurate and easy to do. AI will take the numbers directly from the companies’ financial statements, CRMs and all the useful documents a firm is producing. These are the main applications where AI is influencing and will influence marketing. Here many others: 6. Image Recognition 7. Voice Recognition 8. Language Recognition 9. Virtual Assistants/Agents (Waston, IBM; Domino; Coca-Cola) 10. Website Designing Optimization (The Grid; etc.) 11. Recommendations — products, food, social platforms (Facebook; Amazon; Uber; Netflix; LinkedIn; Google Plus; etc.) 12. Content curation 13. Search engines (Rankbrain; Boomtrain; etc.) 14. Social semantic (Tay, Microsoft etc.) 15. Localization (Facebook drones; etc.) 16. Sentimental Analysis + location recommendation (Facebook; etc.) [Happy person in a fun place] 17. Customer segmentation 18. Color adaptation — websites changing color based on the customer preferences. 19. Content generation 20. Refine marketing. Of course, the major number of AI applications in marketing are online-based processes. It is also considerable the offline world. AI will physically help people in the everyday things. Customer experience would be the very first application that comes up to my mind. Talking about something more important than marketing, Microsoft announced in 2016 its ambition to defeat cancer using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze research papers in close to real time. However, we will start considering the online environment since at the moment it’s the most affected one. NB you can be part of our Meetup group and start meeting with other professional discussing this topic. Here is the link to subscribe to the group — — — — — — — — — — > http://bit.ly/2mt9iFk <— — — — — — — — — — Please leave any comment you might have below, you will be considered part of the next wave of the Artificial Intelligence Marketing 😎 Originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artificial-intelligence-marketing-association-manifesto-gobbi

https://medium.com/aimarketingassociation/artificial-intelligence-marketing-9c9bcbbacf8c

['Federico Gobbi']

2017-03-31 03:11:30.046000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Marketing', 'Deep Learning', 'Digital Marketing']

Quick Bookmark-able Prototyping with Vue.js and Visual Studio Code

Working on the Chewy Design System team generally involves switching between engineering new UI components and constructing prototypes made from existing shared components within our Chewy Design System. While I won’t be discussing design systems in detail, there is certainly rewarding reading out there for those looking to get up to speed. In short, a design system and UI library share styling and/or component logic between the design, prototype and production code while letting each stage focus on what it does best. And when it comes to where you develop, I’ll be focusing on a couple of helpful shortcuts using Visual Studio Code. For brevity, this article assumes your familiarity with words like “components” or “prototypes” and that you have a reasonable grasp of frameworks like Vue.js and their respective tooling. What makes a good prototype? We want our prototypes to be fast to create, yet forward-thinking. They should enable teams to communicate and work through issues before production development, such as user flows, tricky new interactions, accessibility and basic content and data flow. Now, consider an app that features search results or displays specific resource information. In a recent project, we made the decision to reflect the user’s choices in the page URL. This gave teams an excellent way to share various states in a single-page application during the prototyping phase of the project. When teams are able to share and bookmark multiple scenarios (inside the same test interface), prototypes excel as a tool for communicating. In the early phases of a project, it’s especially important to have practical discussions around a working example. Various teams and stakeholders will have the opportunity to marshal critical input around a tangible application. We’re creating a simple search page in this article, but imagine how a prototype like this would be helpful for an interactive grade book, product comparison widget or an interface that helps customers conduct complex product searches. In this post, we will generate a simple, bookmark-able prototype that relies on an external REST API using Vue.js. Afterwards, we’ll review how it fits into a general prototype workflow. Route Params Let’s preview what your application URL might look like when a user searches for certain terms with certain parameters. Example 1: /search?q=labrador&subject=dogs Depending on the server configuration of your deployment environment (where you deploy your app and give others access), the request above may look a bit different: Example 2: /#/search?q=labrador&subject=dogs Example 1, using URL params, may look more familiar than Example 2, which uses hash params (notice how everything comes after the hash). Hash params however, require no additional server configuration and may be easier to release in your organization. Thankfully, Vue.js handles most of the work for you so that you don’t have to change much code to take advantage of reading parameters from both configurations. Get Your Data Early Prototype work often begins when we receive technical requirements from stakeholders and design mockups that detail how the app should look and behave. In our example, we have been tasked with creating a pet-centric search tool using the Open Library Search API. We already save time by using a working endpoint, so we won’t even need to generate mock data or artificially force that data to conditionally show different information. Our search query mentioned above looks like this when sent to the JSON API: http://openlibrary.org/search.json?title=labrador&subject=dogs Note: Another useful piece of information about Open Library is where to find images. If the cover_id attribute is present, we should be able to display a book cover by referencing this information. We will use this attribute for our thumbnail paths. https://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/9144885-L.jpg For the purpose of initial testing, consider saving a static copy of the JSON response locally until you’re ready to interact with the UI you’re creating. This will cut down on how often you hit the API as you get started and protect you from quota limits. Or, if it’s an internal API, it will shield you from unexpected API deployments or build errors that could disrupt your development timeline. In a typical Vue.js project, we can just save our test data here /public/assets/data/search_example.json and reach it with any XML Http Requests (XHRs) later. Scaffolding Your App From here, there are lots of options to quickly leap into a running app. We’ll use vue create via Vue CLI so that we’re up and running in seconds. If you see recurring patterns, consider creating custom templates for Vue CLI. You might also consider using third-party tools like Vetur, Yeoman or even Angular Schematics to quickly set up scaffolding through generators or templates that jumpstart your new prototypes via the command line. For now, we’ll follow this basic sequence of commands. First, fire up VS Code and open the folder you intend to develop in. Launch the inline terminal and type: $ vue create routing-demo-app Choose “Manually”, select the “Routing” option and hit enter. Then, use “n” for history mode and the default for everything else. A “Y” for history mode would represent a project that conforms to that first example we discussed around routing. Next, change directories and add the following packages: $ cd routing-demo-app $ yarn add axios ant-design-vue $ yarn add node-sass sass-loader $ yarn $ yarn serve Using yarn serve should present you with a URL for visiting your running boilerplate application. Open `src/main.js` and add the following lines after `import router from ‘./router’`: import axios from 'axios'; // http clientimport Antd from 'ant-design-vue'; // your ui library import 'ant-design-vue/dist/antd.css'; // ui library styles Vue.use(Antd); // setting up UI libraryVue.prototype.$http = axios; // setting up axios These lines import the packages you added earlier from the command line and set us up to have access to Axios throughout any component in the application. As we’ll see, Axios helps to normalize the interface for http requests through the browser, making them dead simple to use. Now, inside `router/index.js`, replace the routing: const routes = [ { path: '/', name: 'home', component: Home } ] Next, remove the “nav” div from `src/App.vue` (we won’t need it) and add a :key attribute to the router-view component. Make sure you add the colon, as it tells Vue to process the reference being passed. We want it to look like this: <router-view :key="$route.fullPath"/> That’s it for set-up! While at Chewy we use our own internal UI library and design system, we will use “AntD ” in this example so you can follow along. With a good UI library, developers don’t have to worry about color palettes, UI styles or many concerns related to accessibility. Those features and solutions would already be baked into simple-to-use stylesheets and convenient reusable web components. Templating Let’s go to `src/views/Home.vue` and delete everything inside of the DIV tag with the “class” of “home”. Your template snippet should now look like this: <div class="home"></div> Now, change this into a form element by selecting “div” from the root template element and typing “form”. Notice how VS Code will automatically change the closing tag for you. Set your cursor inside this element and add the following inside the tag: <form class="home"> <p> <a-input-search name="q" v-model="q" class="searchbox" @search="onSearch" enterButton="Search"></a-input-search> </p> <p> <a-radio-group v-model="petType"> <a-radio-button v-for="petType in getPetTypes" :key="petType.value" :value="petType.value"> {{petType.label}}</a-radio-button> </a-radio-group> </p> <hr> <a-table :columns="columns" :dataSource="results"></a-table></form> If you’re using Visual Studio Code, you may want to experiment with the power of Emmet, which comes enabled by default with this IDE. It allows you to use shortcuts (as shown below) to expand into full HTML. p>a-input-search[enterButton=Search] Wiring it Up Inside the <script> tag, add your menu item data: const petTypes = 'All,Dogs,Cats,Birds'; Next you’ll add the column descriptions for the table component. This array takes advantage of how the table component is structured by allowing developers to add both the name of the header and instructions on how to render the cells below them in one fell swoop. Here, we specify a template to use for the “title” cells (we will add this shortly) and join the array of values returned by “author_name” and “subject” in the response data: const columns = [ { title: 'Title', key: 'title', scopedSlots: { customRender: 'title' }, width: '20%' }, { title: 'Date', dataIndex: 'first_publish_year', width: '10%' }, { title: 'Author(s)', dataIndex: 'author_name', width: '20%', customRender: row => `${row ? row.join(', '): ''}` }, { title: 'Subject', key: 'subject', customRender: row => `${row.subject ? row.subject.join(' '): ''}` }, ]; Add the following attributes inside export default : data: () => { return { dataSource: process.env.VUE_APP_DATA_SOURCE || 'remote', results: [], columns, petType: 'all', q: '' }; }, created: { // TBD }, methods: { onSearch: () => { // TBD } }, computed: { getPetTypes: () => { const pts = petTypes.split(','); return pts.map(pt => Object({ value: pt.toLowerCase(), label: pt }) ) } } Now, append these styles below your script tag and add the “lang” attribute so that you can take advantage of the scss support we added earlier. <style lang="scss"> .home { width: 80%; margin: 30px auto; .searchbox { width: 60%; } .thumb { text-align: center; } } </style> Personally, I really appreciate how simple it is to change and edit templates, code and styling in Vue’s signature (and entirely optional) “single file component” format. That said, the final three steps are all located in this same document. We need to add our custom template for one of the table cells, add our code to perform the search action (the “onSearch” method), and add our code to retrieve the data from the API (which we will place in our “created” lifecycle hook). Add the following slot content to the template inside the table component: <a-table :columns="columns" :dataSource="results"> <div class="thumb" slot="title" slot-scope="row"> <img v-if="row['title']" :src="showThumb(row)" width="50" /><br /> <strong>{{ row.title }}</strong> </div> </a-table> Our onSearch method is short and sweet, firing when the user hits the “search” button or “enter”. It takes the data bound to our form and updates the route based on the user’s choices. Meanwhile, we use a special method to render the thumbnail path for each item in our result set depending on whether an image is present (a custom “default” image was added to the assets directory for these cases). methods: { onSearch() { const routeQuery = {}; routeQuery['q'] = this.q; routeQuery['petType'] = this.petType; this.$router.replace({ path: this.$route.path, query: routeQuery }); } }, showThumb(row) { return row['cover_i'] ? `//covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/${row['cover_i']}-S.jpg`: `/assets/default-S.jpg`; } Finally, what happens in the “created” life cycle hook makes it all work. Back when we set the “key” value of the router-view to the full path of the route, it ensures the component will be re-rendered each time the route changes (even just the parameters). In other words, each time the user’s search options are submitted, the “created” hook is called and the latest results are assigned to our results property. created() { if(this.$route.query['q'] || this.$route.query['petType']) { this.q = this.$route.query['q']; this.petType = this.$route.query['petType']; this.$http .get(this.dataSource === 'remote' ? `http://openlibrary.org/search.json?title=${this.q} &subject=${(this.petType==='all'?'pets':this.petType)}`: '/assets/search_example.json') .then(response => { this.results = response.data.docs; }); } }, Also note that I’ve created a data property which pulls from an environment variable that determines whether the static JSON file should be called. This setting helps keep things stable as I work through how best to format the templates. It not only protects me from API related issues, but also means that I can develop while completely offline (if I find myself working on functionality that doesn’t require dynamic data). You can change this environment variable to “local” by placing an “.env” file at the root of your project directory and adding this line: VUE_APP_DATA_SOURCE=local You’ll need to re-run yarn serve to see this take effect. You can change environment variables by pointing to environment-specific .env files at build time during your project deployment or by passing override values directly via the build commands, allowing you to change key aspects of your app as needed. And we are done! Try clicking around your new prototype. Test different keywords and pet types. Paste the resulting link in a different browser and see the same search results appear. Try this entire process a few times from scratch using Vue CLI and different project names, and see how long it takes you to get an entirely new prototype up and running. As presented here, it should easily take less than ten minutes. Experiment with shaving off more steps and tuning the workflow to suit your own style. Conclusion Prototyping can often be a thankless task. At times it can even seem like a speed bump to releasing short iterative changes or completing time-sensitive launches. However, prototypes more often serve as a shield against wasted effort retooling production-ready code. They are also invaluable tools for conducting user research and provide ample opportunities for discovering hidden yet vital business requirements early on. Basic prototyping workflow: Requirements and Designs Gather Your Data Build and Test Your Prototype Deployment Discussion (rinse and repeat) Done right, rapid, collaboration-friendly working examples are truly a welcome blueprint for success! by Dudley Ablorh-Bryan UX Developer @ Chewy

https://medium.com/chewy-innovation/quick-bookmark-able-prototyping-with-vue-js-and-visual-studio-code-17090b1b9189

[]

2020-02-12 20:01:29.085000+00:00

['Vscode', 'Design', 'Prototyping', 'Vuejs', 'Chewy']

Passing on a Legacy Without Reproducing

When I got married, I was 42 years old. My wife was 38. One of the things we came to realize early on in our relationship was that we did not want to have children. We both love kids. In addition to our nephews and niece by blood, we have a number of other kids in our lives which we are Aunty and Uncle to. We also agreed that had we met ten years before we did, this might have been a very different story. Back then both of us would likely have wanted to produce kids. Now, though, we both determined that that ship had sailed. It never ceases to amaze me how many people have opinions on this topic. My wife, more than I, has gotten the “but you’re so good with kids! You’d be such a great parent” speech. I have no doubt I’d have been a great dad…but I also know that, now, in my 40’s, I have become too selfish and too set in my ways to be a parent. One of the main reasons to produce children is to pass on your DNA. You keep your family line going, create the next generation, and theoretically pass on what you have learned when you have kids. It’s in our makeup as human beings to pass on a legacy. Some legacies, however, are not so specific. Kids do not necessarily wind up like their parents in any way, shape, or form. That’s totally ok, because we are all unique individuals, and in some cases being other than our parents is better for us (and quite possibly the world). As a writer, my DNA, my legacy, are my words. Hopefully, they’ll manage to outlive me. A legacy in words The books, the blogs, and even the journals I create contain who I am better than my DNA could, and likely will still be here after I am gone. These are the children I am producing and leaving to carry on after I am gone. Cheesy? Maybe — but that doesn’t make it any less true. Whether words of wisdom, bad poetry, comedy, fiction, inspiration, self-help and mindfulness, or what-have-you, the words I write will outlive me. Arrogant? No, because no matter whether you think my words are crap or helpful and inspiring, they are out there. This is not about my ego, because I don’t write for my own ego. I write because it is what I am inspired to do. Yes, I desire to make my living off my words. But that’s not egotistical or arrogant, it’s following my passion. I love to write. When I sit in front of a blank screen, I may struggle for a time, but I always manage to find words to share. Much of our history comes from words and art. One of the things that drives me the most nuts about how schools tend to cut funding for the arts and music, but support athletics, is the shortsightedness of it all. Do we remember who won Roman athletic competitions, or Roman art, words, and music? This has nothing to do with becoming famous (though I’d love to have that level of success of course). It is all about my desire to inspire, educate, and help other people in this world, whether via my fiction or non-fiction.

https://mjblehart.medium.com/passing-on-a-legacy-without-reproducing-561fd606a832

['Mj Blehart']

2019-06-11 12:27:13.754000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Mindfulness', 'Writing', 'Inspiration', 'Life']

The Art of Difficult Conversations

“The questions that we don’t ask because of fear are framing the very stories that we create in the absence of truth.” I have been been an avoider of difficult conversations for as long as I can remember. I’m always afraid of being wrong about my feelings (honestly, that alone deserves its own conversation). I’m always afraid of having my words misconstrued. And then, there are the countless “what ifs”. What if I look foolish? What if I’m overreacting? What if they won’t love me anymore? What if they leave? The questions that we don’t ask because of fear are framing the very stories that we create in the absence of truth. For me, creating stories in my mind has always felt safer than searching for truths that can ground me in reality. That’s because the truth would potentially require me to sit with the discomfort of some of my fears being proven right. And who wants to sit with discomfort? Obviously not me because the truth is that I am a 26 year old woman who has allowed a number of relationships and dreams to die because I couldn’t sit with discomfort. I didn’t want to confront myself and I didn’t want others to confront me with things that would potentially unsettle me. So like many of us do, I ran. I ran from myself for years until literally 6 months ago when I had no where else to run except my therapist’s couch. My lack of self-trust and my fear of sitting with the unsettling things of life has resulted in missed opportunities to go deeper. And by ‘deeper’, I’m talking about the act of tapping into the more meaningful parts of life that can only be reached by pushing past the tense and uncomfortable parts. Those parts of life are inevitable no matter how far we try to run or how much we try to disassociate ourselves from them, and to do anything but acknowledge this reality will cause us to suffer. Running also prevents us from holding space for difficult conversations with ourselves and with others. That space is so desperately needed for progress in every area of our lives. I have this deep belief that we are all interconnected. There’s no getting around that. Your existence affects mine and mine, yours. So when even one of us is brave enough to hold space for difficult conversations that lead to a greater understanding and healing, that healing affects us all. And collective healing is truly powerful. “I started to realize that facing the truth wasn’t as scary or painful as I’d built it up to be in my mind. I actually started to crave more of the truth. ” My personal life during most of 2019 shined flood lights on the conversations that I’ve desperately needed for so long. Some with a handful of other people, but most importantly with myself. Who am I when I’m not trying to be what I think others want me to be? What is it that brings me joy and why have I not been doing more of that unapologetically? Why am I repeating the same actions and expecting different results? Why am allowing myself to be stuck in a marriage that I know neither of us is happy in? Hard, messy questions. All of which I’d pushed down until very much like an overstuffed suitcase, all of the messy, uncomfortable, even painful parts of my life exploded and I had no other choice, but to face it. But you want to know what happened? I survived. Each day that I faced myself, I was fully convinced that the tightness in my chest was going to kill me, but it didn’t. In fact, I started to thrive in many ways because once I became aware, I found that I was actually more empowered to make choices that aligned with my core self. And alignment with my core self has radically impacted the way that I walk through this world and my relationship with others. I started to realize that facing the truth wasn’t as scary or painful as I’d built it up to be in my mind. I actually started to crave more of the truth. Trust. Trust that you are ready and capable to have those difficult conversations. Know that your value is inherent and isn’t determined by the outcomes of those conversations. It is certainly easier said than done. In all honesty, sometimes I still find myself cowering with fear to confront myself — let alone others. But it’s possible and necessary. And what I have learned is that oftentimes the most beneficial things in our lives are not acquired with ease or with easy choices.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-art-of-difficult-conversations-7e54d7adf2a7

['Kashara Johnson']

2020-01-17 10:52:06.211000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Mental Health', 'Community', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement']

Factory Design Pattern. Overview

Overview The factory pattern is a popular design pattern in Java because it is one of the best way to create an object. The general idea is allowing the user to create objects without exposing the logic behind it. Instead an interface is provided for the user to know what method to be called to create the object. Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash Implementation Interface Animal.java public interface Animal { void species(); } Implement Interface Dog.java public class Dog implements Animal { @Override public void species() { System.out.println("It's a dog."); } } Cat.java public class Cat implements Animal { @Override public void species() { System.out.println("It's a cat."); } } Bird.java public class Bird implements Animal { @Override public void species() { System.out.println("It's a bird."); } } Factory public class AnimalFactory { // use getAnimal method to get object of type animal public Animal getAnimal(String animalSpecies){ switch(animalSpecies.toLowerCase()) { case "dog": return new Dog(); case "cat: return new Cat(); case "bird": return new Bird(); default: return null; } } } Use Factory public class FactoryPattern { public static void main(String[] args) { AnimalFactory animalFactory = new AnimalFactory(); // Get Dog object through factory Animal dog = animalFactory.getAnimal("dog"); // Call species method of Dog dog.species(); // Get Cat object through factory Animal cat = animalFactory.getAnimal("cat"); // Call species of Cat cat.species(); // Get Bird object through factory Animal bird = animalFactory.getAnimal("bird"); // Call species of Bird bird.species(); } } >> It's a dog. >> It's a cat. >> It's a bird. Conclusion Factory design pattern contains the logic of how the object is created. It is can also be used to contain all logic for creating new objects. This makes it easier to locate code instead of searching through the entire application. This also makes it easier to add new classes to the factory. If the logic for creating a new object is fairly simple you probably do not need a factory.

https://medium.com/dev-genius/factory-pattern-839995462096

['Daniel Liu']

2020-11-04 18:57:20.141000+00:00

['Backend Development', 'Design Patterns', 'Factory Pattern', 'Java', 'Programming']

If you want to design effective ads, learn to play battleships

If you want to design effective ads, learn to play battleships For a game that seemingly has nothing to do with advertising, Battleships can teach us a whole lot. You’ve probably played Battleships. You know, the game where two players place a set of battleships on a grid, and take it in turns to sink one another’s ships by guessing their location. For a game that ostensibly has nothing to do with ads or marketing, it can teach us a hell of a lot about both of them. To see why, let’s consider a simplified game of Battleships. Hunting Battleships Let’s say you’re playing a game of Battleships with a 10x10 grid, and (to keep things simple) we’ll say that each player has one ship that’s 5 grid squares long. You and the other player place your ship on the grid, and the game begins. You go first. You reckon that your first guess doesn’t really matter much so you choose it at random: D3. The guns fire and the shells start ringing, but it’s a miss. No hit. Your opponent plays their turn, they miss too. It’s now your second go, and you have to choose where to take your next shot. You’ve got one key piece of information from round 1, that there’s no ship in D3. But why exactly is this useful? It’s useful because it tells us that the opponent’s ship is less likely to be in one of the grid squares immediately adjacent to D3, than it is to be in a square far away. In case it’s not obvious why, consider the range possible locations your opponent’s ship could be in before and after you found out that it wasn’t in D3. At the start of the game, their ship could’ve been anywhere on the board. Once you learned it didn’t have any part of it in D3, there were fewer possible locations near D3 that it could have been in. For example, you now know that it couldn’t have been in grid squares D1 to D5, because if it would then your shot in D3 would’ve hit it. There are a number of different possibilities in which the ship is in D3 that have been ruled out by the outcome of your first turn. Because we know the ship is five squares long, this decreases the probability that the ship is in any of the surrounding squares too. So, what do you do? If you’re clever about it, you won’t try D4 on your second go. Or D2, C3, or E3. It’s not impossible that the opponent’s ship could be in these squares, but it’s less likely to be in any of them now you know it’s definitely not in D3. The smart second move would be to try somewhere on the other side of the board, maybe an F6 for instance. Because this is sufficiently far away from D3, knowing that your opponent’s ship isn’t in D3 doesn’t decrease the likelihood that their ship is in F6. And if their ship isn’t in F6? Maybe on your third go you try somewhere you haven’t explored yet; perhaps the top left or the bottom right of the board. This process will keep going, where you continue to look for parts of the board you haven’t tested yet, until you get a hit. Once you get a hit, you know that their ship will be in at least one of the immediately adjacent squares to where you got the hit. At this point, your strategy switches. Instead of looking for unexplored bits of the board, you look at the squares right next to where you’ve just explored. You keep doing this until you’ve found the grid squares that their ship occupies, and the game is over. Where do ads come in? Often when it comes to designing ads, newer brands are guilty of putting out a ton of ads all with only very minor differences. The idea seems to make sense; test small differences in the styling or the messaging on the ads, in order to learn what works best. The problem though is that this approach only makes sense for well-established brands, who already know with a high degree of accuracy which of their ads resonate best. When you have heaps of historical data about what works, you can afford to go granular on what you test. Newer brands, or brands launching new products, are staring at the equivalent of an empty Battleships board at the start of the game. They don’t have data on what resonates; they haven’t taken any shots yet. Putting out batch after batch of creatives with a similar look and feel is like taking the opening moves A1, A2, A3, and so on. You’d never do this in a game of Battleships. As we saw earlier, if your first shot misses you move to the other side of the board, and so on. And yet most brands do the complete opposite of this, churning out near-identical creatives in the hope that shifting one square at a time will get them their first hit. Sure, this could work. You might find the best ad ever on your third narrow iteration, but it’s unlikely. You’re much more likely to find your best ad by casting your net wide initially, and only then narrowing down more and more on what works. The space of possible ads is much more complex than a 2-dimensional Battleships grid. If you wanted to massively simplify it though you could imagine it as being 2-dimensional. You could label its axes as something like creative style and messaging style: These labels are just examples, you can think of them however makes most sense to you. What’s important when you’re producing creatives is to think how closely they all sit together in this space. If they’re all very close together, you’re unlikely to learn much from your test. This is fine if you already know which area of the graph works for you; if you’re already well-established and know exactly what resonates with your target audience. Realistically though, this isn’t true for most advertisers. Most advertisers should be casting their net much more broadly, and testing all around the space to find what works for them. It’s only by really testing all areas of the graph that you can have the confidence to really start narrowing down your testing. If your shot at D3 was a miss, you shouldn’t try D4 until you’ve tried the rest of the board.

https://uxdesign.cc/if-you-want-to-design-effective-ads-learn-to-play-battleships-4e43d66206f5

['Mack Grenfell']

2020-06-14 07:57:41.954000+00:00

['Growth', 'Marketing', 'Design', 'Data Science', 'Advertising']

The Digital Liquid Lean Startup Methodology

The Digital Liquid Lean Startup Methodology An approach to deliver relevant solutions to solve the right problems and scale at speed. The digital liquid lean startup methodology augments the team with advanced digital tools to rapidly build solutions on a scalable architecture—providing an additional boost to the build, measure and learn feedback loop—to disrupt quickly in an uncertain environment. A Modified Approach There are two distinct components in the digital liquid lean startup method that contributes to the significant increase in velocity: 1) the use of advanced digital (DevOps) tools to scale solution quickly, and 2) adoption of the liquid assembly philosophy, e.g. reusable building blocks (APIs), to facilitate innovation and speed. The four iterative stages of the approach are listed below: Ideate: identify novel problems, business cases, new technologies, potential partnerships, new business models, etc. via workshops and formulate ideas and hypotheses to test. Show me: transform ideas into mock-ups and prototypes via the liquid assembly of reusable building blocks and templates to obtain initial stakeholder buy-in. Prove it: validate the prototype against hypotheses in a scaled-down live environment with users to obtain quantifiable proof of the solution’s viability. Scale it: deliver the solution to the masses at speed via easily scalable, API-driven IT architecture and DevOps tools. By adopting the above approach coupled with proper governance, a lean team of approximately five could deliver impactful solutions over time. The Benefits to the Table The value increases because of a positive reinforcing feedback loop whereby the output of the loop (in stage #4), e.g. reusable building blocks, enhances the overall speed in the subsequent loops in the form of contributing more reusable blocks for innovation at speed (stage #2). The digital lean startup method brings the following benefits to the table: Addresses the right problems —through constant measurements, validated learning, and hypotheses testing to find out what the market needs. —through constant measurements, validated learning, and hypotheses testing to find out what the market needs. Saves time and cost — fail fast and repivot quickly when solutions don’t work out; make multiple small investments rather than a single huge one. — fail fast and repivot quickly when solutions don’t work out; make multiple small investments rather than a single huge one. Achieve speed to market—solutions are built to scale quickly upon proving of value. In large organisations, especially in times of uncertainty, a separate lean startup team is set up to test innovative ideas that can potentially disrupt and improve existing processes without being constrained by existing workflows. Set up for Success A good team consist of a combination of roles and skill sets e.g. UI/UX, DevOps, Developers, Team Lead, Product Owner, Architect, etc. Some members can have a dual role setup as well – the team setup is largely based on the program objectives. The environment plays a large role in the success of the methodology, and it can be broken down into two parts: Innovative environment – frequent forum or pitch sessions to provide opportunities to share new ideas and innovation. Also, hire innovative minds from hackathons/events and include relevant case challenges in the hiring process to get good talent. Development environment – available tools and platforms to facilitate collaboration, e.g. developers’ portal, communication channels, innovation platforms, etc. Another important element for success is inculcating the innovative mindset into the team by fostering governance, e.g. documentation, and adhering to the liquid lean philosophy, e.g. work smarter, not harder; don’t reinvent the wheel, etc. Some of the potential pitfalls and things to look out for: Lack of governance and documentation – resulting in confusion, increased overheads and eventual slow delivery. – resulting in confusion, increased overheads and eventual slow delivery. Poor architecture design/foundation – resulting in monolithic services that are non-reusable and difficult to scale. – resulting in monolithic services that are non-reusable and difficult to scale. Lack of user and market research – moving too fast into building a solution can result in excessive changes that leads to team burnout. Takeaway Overall, when the methodology is applied together with the right environment with proper governance in place, it bring wealth of benefits to your organisation. However, be sure to watch out for potential pitfalls that would disrupt the feedback loop.

https://medium.com/the-internal-startup/the-digital-liquid-lean-startup-methodology-6794376a10ef

['Jimmy Soh']

2020-06-28 15:35:29.043000+00:00

['Technology', 'Programming', 'Business Strategy', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship']

Finding Success On Medium

Success on Medium is having an audience. I am a musician. One thing most musicians desire is an audience. Making music for yourself is fine, but nothing compares to performing for an audience. That instant feedback, that energy, that connection. It is powerful stuff. It is the main reason musicians practice for countless hours and put up with all the hassles that go with live performance. Those moments on stage. I want my writing to have an audience. I used to find an audience for my short humor on Facebook. My friends and I would post goofy things and have fun commenting on them. Then Facebook turned into an infuriating, meme-infested ranting soapbox and self-promotional pitstop. The fun was gone. I tried publishing my own website, but it was a lonely experience. The only interaction I got was an occasional question. I pretty much gave up on fun interaction online until I discovered Medium. I wasn’t sure my humor would find an audience on Medium. Thankfully, it did — in time. I certainly don’t have as large a following as some self-help gurus. So what? I would rather have a handful of readers who genuinely like what I write than thousands who are indifferent or just trying to emulate me. As a musician, I have played for small audiences and thousands of people. I will take a small audience who is excited, dancing, and really enjoying the music over a huge audience giving me polite applause any day. I can honestly say, if no one was reading my writing, I wouldn’t be writing. I don’t write for myself. I don’t journal. I don’t write as therapy. I don’t “have to” write. None of those are bad things. They are good. But I write for an audience (feedback, claps, response.) I want my writing to entertain or move readers, and that requires an audience. On Medium, I have found a small, loyal audience. That is success to me.

https://medium.com/mark-starlin-writes/finding-success-on-medium-2d6223e807c5

['Mark Starlin']

2019-12-08 20:46:47.391000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Medium', 'Money', 'Success', 'Writing']

Data Journalism: redefining community awareness and decision making in Sudan

The concept of data journalism is allowing data to pave context and build in credibility to the story. Datasets can be found ready made in the internet, or created by extracting it from multimedia files (pdf, videos, audio) or from people through a series of interviews, analysis, research and any other means of discovery which will result in a wholesome set of information to be used as a point of reference for readers, communities, governments, etc. Its process has a series of steps that anyone can learn and master.[ It has unlimited uses and benefits, and has a huge positive impact on the communities and readers. There are some essential tools for data journalism. This field isn’t new, it’s just trendy. There’re a number of professionals in this field that you should follow where they could provide further insight on data journalism. Alex Howard defined it as: “gathering, cleaning, organizing, analyzing, visualizing and publishing data to support the creation of acts of journalism.” The Data I’m not going to define what data is in this section , but I’ll be giving you brief case studies and demonstrate data in a more digestible light. Not all official data sources are reliable, accurate, or correct. This can be solved by getting the officials’ people’s attention to this matter, so that they can fix it. You can do this by writing an article about it by the way! As it will require a huge effort, a master plan, and a budge. However, institutions with a capability to satisfy these factors can change and improve data sources for a better and wider use. To bring this to light on an individual level, one can use whatever at his/her disposal to resolve the facts such as blogging or social media. The best way that you acquire data is to create your own datasets from scratch. Only then you’ll be sure that you got what want. You can create big datasets about the smallest things around the world. Moreover, the most important thing is how will you visualize the data because it might be the most important aspect of all. The colors, the graph type, the scales and etc. It should be readable, understandable and digestible for your readers. When discovering data, you should look at it from a wider angle and provide alternative stories to it. Be sceptic, but not cynic about the data. Do not interpret the data, but rather let it speak by itself. Uncertainty is good because you might not have the answer, or the best answer, and you get to ask more questions and discover more. The investigation in itself is a story. “Data is not the whole story because the people are the main source. Interviews are still crucial . A clear example that emphasizes this claim is when there was a story about real estate deals made by investors in family houses. It was noticed that there was this one particular house in the dataset that was exchanged multiple times, and the people involved in these multiple transactions of this one house were interviewed, the story became richer and more amusing! Data helps journalists to verify claims, tackle bigger stories, find new stories, illuminate murky issues, report more efficiently.” Ben Casselman from the New York Times What data isn’t: According to the Guardian, data is not: a force unto itself, speak for itself, power by itself, a perfect reflection of the world, or easy to interpret . R-Programming Language, Python Programming Language, Tableau Software, Power Bi Software, and Web Scrapping Tools are all useful software tools that you’ll need to learn in order to becomes a data journalist. “I ask myself whether the numbers I’m looking at will start a new conversation that people aren’t having yet, or if they will add to an existing conversation in a valuable way. If the answer to both of those questions is no, then I don’t bother to write the piece.” Mona Chalabi Data journalism process is 80% perspiration, 10% great ideas, and 10% output. It can be either a long investigative process, or a short one that covers only key data.[1] History of Data Journalism Data journalism is very old. You can take a look at Florence Nightingale (1858), and at John Snow’s Cholera Visualization.

https://ahmed-elaffendi.medium.com/data-journalism-redefining-community-awareness-and-decision-making-in-sudan-ef2eaff0d4f3

['Ahmed El-Affendi']

2020-10-28 02:47:18.083000+00:00

['Journalism', 'Sudan', 'Data Journalism', 'Data Science', 'Writing']

Dynamic Pluggable Microservice Framework

Easily deploy RESTful Microservices using this pluggable microservice framework. No more coding RESTful Interfaces. No more having to debug your RESTful Interfaces. This is functional programming meets pluggability meets minimal code meets ease of use. What could be easier than coding your microservices as Python functions in a single module and then drop your microservice module into a directory and then simply make RESTful AJAX Calls to run your microservices? Oh, you have a complete Python Package for your microservices? Ok. No problem. You will want to expose some of them as endpoints and call them from some kind of a RESTful Interface, yes? So now you code your exposable functions that call your real functions from your real Packages and drop your exposed modules into a directory and now all those microservice functions are exposed as RESTful endpoints without having to restart the server. Sounds too good to be true? Check it our for yourself. https://github.com/raychorn/microservices-framework Need a Docker Container ready to run this framework? docker pull raychorn/microservices-framework:0.7.0 then do a “git clone https://github.com/raychorn/microservices-framework” followed by “git pull origin main” to get the latest code from the repo. Or check-out the Releases to pick the release you want to install. Requires Python 3.8.x and PIP and virtualenv all of which have been installed in the Docker Container along with MongoDB as a bonus. There is, of course, a requirements.txt file you can use to install all the required Python Packages for this framework. Need to see how the framework works? See the unit tests and the sample Modules. Let’s talk about Dynamic RESTful URLs. Most of the time, when working with Django one end-up coding a bunch of urls in the urls.py file, one url spec for each endpoint and the list of urls can become quite complex and unwieldy. What if there was a better way to handle this complexity? What if you could code a single URL spec for Django that could handle every conceivable RESTful url you might wish to use? What if there were a way to configure this behavior using a config file? Some urls need 1 or 2 parameters and others require 3 or 4 parameters while some require 5 or 6 parameters. What if you wanted to add another url spec that for some reason required 10’s or 100’s of url parameters and this too was configurable. Does this sound too good to be true? Maybe so. Or maybe there’s working code that can do this. Point being now you can break free of having to code individual urls for Django. Ok. So dynamic urls for Django. Cool. So how do you access all those url parameters at runtime? Ever hear about **kwargs? Yup, this allows you to ingest a Python dictionary into your function via kwargs (see the modules in the plugins directory for some examples of how this works). By default the first url parameter is accessed from kwargs as: kwargs.get(‘param1’) which says if the variable exists in the dictionary then give it to me or give me a default of None. What if you wanted to rename these parameters because you don’t like the defaults? See the file named “.env” where this can be done. What if you wanted to rename or remap the url parameters on the fly? This too is supported by the 1.0.0 Release. Now you can remap url parameter names on the fly for each RESTful Call and they all appear in your functions via **kwargs. Ok. So what if you wanted to use Query Parameters for your GET calls? This is supported and they appear in the **kwargs. Nice, huh? Which HTTP Methods are supported? GET, PUT, POST and DELETE. Can I get a directory of my plugged-in modules? Yes, this is supported. What about Module Aliasing? Yes, this too is supported along with API Versioning. Put your API versions into separate Python Modules and alias them as “v1”, “v2” and “v3” and now you can publish your API Versions that look like API Versions without having to expose the name of the actual modules or module names. What about exposing a single microservice function using more than one HTTP Method? This too is supported. You can specify the list of HTTP Methods as a Python list or a pipe delimited list in a string or a single HTTP Method name. Again, see the example modules provided by the Release you want to use. The built-in directory function provides all these details as JSON so you can easily publish your endpoints. Be sure to use unique function aliases, this too is supported, or bad things might happen. Be sure to use unique module aliases or bad things might happen. Do I need to restart the server every time I want to deploy a new module? Nope. Just drop the module into the plugins directory and issue the directory URL to see the newly plugged module’s information. This is all dynamic. What if you wanted to deploy your Java microservices using this framework? This too is supported. Code a command line interface for your Java classes and use the appropriate Python code to issue each command line via separate Python functions and your Java or node.js or Go or whatever other Language or technology you may wish to use can be easily deployed all without having to restart the RESTful Server. What if you wanted to deploy your Rust code using this framework? Well this too is supported. You can code Python extensions using Rust and then call your Rust functions from your Rust Python extensions and then deploy Python-based “.pyd” files from your Rust development environments. Slick, huh? Stop coding Microservice RESTful Interfaces by hand and start doing this automatically using this framework. Automation frees us from the tediousness of common every day activities. This framework frees everyone from the most tedious part of publishing function as RESTful AJAX calls. Now you can focus all your efforts on producing Python Modules with easy to understand function decorators to “expose” endpoints. Be sure to notice how to code “private” functions in your modules; bad things might happen if you tried to “expose” a “private” function but you can learn all about this by doing it. Welcome to the 21st Century.

https://raychorn.medium.com/dynamic-pluggable-microservice-framework-83ddc4b3d26e

[]

2020-12-15 01:59:15.114000+00:00

['Python', 'Functional Programming', 'Dynamic Programming', 'Rest Api', 'Microservices']

There Is No Lift to Success — You Have to Take the Stairs

There Is No Lift to Success — You Have to Take the Stairs More effort is the fastest way to achieve better results. Image by kinkate from Pixabay We are always looking for shortcuts and easier ways to do things. We want to achieve more by doing less. People love to hear about hacks and tricks to get great results without much effort. Unfortunately, a lot of this advice is rubbish. Anyone who ever achieved outstanding performance, has put in a ton of effort. For those of you who are waiting for the lift to success, I have news; it will not arrive. Although the stairs next to the lift may look long and scary, they are the only and the fastest way to the top. The sooner you start the climb, the faster you will reach your goals. Building muscle Few people disagree that lifting weights results in stronger muscles. By gradually increasing the weights, you can completely transform your body. We see direct results between how much effort we put in and how fast we improve. In the gym, you see exactly how many kilos you lift and can count how many repetitions you do. If you were able to lift 20 kilos last week, and now you can lift 25, you have made progress. The connection between effort and improvement is not always as evident in other areas of life. How do you know if you’ve become a better writer? How do you know if you’ve improved your business or communication skills? Are you a better salsa dancer than last week? Have you become a better friend, son, father, mother or spouse? No precise measure of success Since most activities don’t come with an exact measurement of success, there will be no number that tells you how good you are or if you are even moving in the right direction. This makes it easy to lose track of the connection between effort and improvement. Just because we can’t see something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When we see progress, it’s easy to stay motivated. When the improvement is less noticeable, or we reach a plateau, it can be more challenging to keep going. It’s crucial to remember that plateaus are an important part of the learning process. It takes time to incorporate a new skill we have learned. This takes much longer than performing a particular action correctly, in isolation. Although plateaus may feel frustrating, they are an essential part of the learning process, and by doing many quality repetitions, we move to the level of fluency that’s required to level up. Make effort effortless Making effort effortless is a key mindset that many top athletes and performers have, that makes challenging practice a lot easier. It’s about embracing the challenge and the path to reach your goals. The reason why an activity seems effortful is usually because of the way we perceive it. Expending effort feels more tiresome in the moment than just relaxing. As you keep improving, you will start to associate effort with your best achievements. Although it’s effortful right then, you know it will lead to wins and great performances in the long run. Embrace reality ‘Enduring means accepting. Accepting things as they are and not as you would wish them to be, and then looking ahead, not behind.’ -Rafael Nadal Rafael Nadal was facing Roger Federer in the final of the Monte Carlo tennis tournament when he asked his coach and uncle, Toni Nadal: ‘How do you see the game today?’ Toni told him: ‘I see it as complicated. Federer has a better drive than yours. His backhand is better. The volley is better too.’ And when he was about to say: ‘Your serves are not even comparable,’ Rafael stopped him and said: ‘Whew! Stop, stop. Are you trying to support me or not?’ Toni: ‘I don’t want to lie to you. It’s better to know the truth. Then you can do something about it. It’s better to know what you have to deal with.’ Accepting reality is a crucial part on your path to progress. People always like to hear how good they are. That they are the best or better than others. That the road to the top will be easy. This will not help them to become better. If on the other hand, you know where you are lacking, you can do something about it and improve. Toni Nadal ended the conversation with Rafa like this: ‘If you’re capable of playing every point as if it were the last one. If you’re capable of playing this match as if life depends on it. If you’re more excited than him and you’re ready to run faster than him. I think you’ll have lots of chances of victory.’ Nadal won the match. Get a head start The earlier you realise that there is no lift to success, the sooner you can start walking up those stairs. As you start climbing, your overview will become better, and you will realise that most people are standing at the bottom, hoping for the lift to arrive. Instead of waiting, it’s better to embrace reality and start the climb. The longer you get up the stairs, the more your shape will improve, and you will most likely begin to enjoy the rise. As you get fit, going up the stairs is not as effortful as you feared. Laziness If you want to become great at what you do, laziness is not an option. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read somewhere that you can become great at a skill in 20 hours. It’s not true. This is the story you want to hear, and the person telling it may have a hidden agenda, like selling a product or increasing their book sales. Even if you may think of yourself as a lazy person, there are probably areas in life where you are super engaged and excited. These are the areas/skills where you have the potential to reach excellence. Try to pursue those activities you are so excited about, that you don’t mind if you have to do a hundred or thousand hours of practice. What about disabled people? ‘There is no lift to success; you have to take the stairs.’ This quote may seem unfair to disabled people or anyone who doesn’t enjoy physical activity. But, it’s crucial to remember that it’s only a metaphor, and does in no way imply that people with disabilities can’t be successful, because they can’t take the stairs. Putting in effort may not involve physical exertion at all. Putting in mental effort is another way to improve. If you’re trying to learn a language or become a better chess player, it requires hours of mental effort, which can be just as challenging as going for a run or climbing a mountain. If you’re in a wheelchair, you can instead imagine a slope to roll up or anything else that you find challenging. Indeed, you can create a completely different metaphor, if that better illustrates the situation. The takeaway message will be the same, that putting in more effort is the fastest way to achieve results. Best of luck with your learning. Take home message Putting in effort is the fastest way to improve and reach your goals. We often look for shortcuts, but these are often false promises, that are delaying our progress. Great performers tend to enjoy the process as they know it leads to results and better performance. To improve, it’s essential to accept reality. Only then can we change it. Thanks for reading! :)

https://medium.com/skilluped/there-is-no-lift-to-success-you-have-to-take-the-stairs-b9d02504cf80

['Erik Hamre']

2020-12-08 12:32:35.235000+00:00

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

13 Digital Marketing Ebooks That Will Help You Achieve Your Online Marketing Goals

It pays to sharpen your skills. “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” — Benjamin Franklin. If you are in digital marketing space, learning tips and tactics from experts can make a lot of things simpler for you. A lot depends upon you and your understanding of the mediums and strategies. This week, we put on our reading glasses to bring to you the best digital marketing ebooks. We picked 13 of the best ebooks that can help you manage your strategies better. Check them out: Influencer marketing, the best strategy for visibility and conversions, can be pretty confusing sometimes. How can you do influencer marketing successfully? Should you focus on paid influencers or earned influencers? This book by Jay Baer tries to answer those questions and more. Jay touches on a lot of other aspects as well. Like the fact that brands need influencers. But influencers need brands so that they are able to develop and post interesting content for their followers. He talks about the different kinds of influencers (mega, macro and micro), and their impact on marketing and more. Check it out. This is a very useful ebook for marketers who want to improve their lead generation. It talks about inbound content marketing. And teaches you how to use it correctly to attract targeted people. Peter discusses social media marketing, and other remarketing tactics for generating leads. He also talks, in detail, about the internet sales funnel. He teaches you all about advertising on the internet so that you can drive targeted traffic to your website. You will also learn about using dedicated sales-based landing pages. Kevan Lee and the Buffer team share 25 social media strategies you can use. A social media strategy is more than posting content. You need to work on achieving goals. In this ebook, there are many actionable tips that can be useful to you as you work on social media. One tip which Kevin and the team share is about choosing 1–3 areas of expertise to post your content on. Your followers should be able to figure you out easily. There is also a tip on testing your posting frequency. Find out if posting more than specific times a day is costing you followers. Read it to learn more tips. It is important that you achieve your marketing goals with the help of your content marketing strategies. For that, you need to study your data and steer your content marketing efforts in a way that is guided by data. You need to analyze what content is resulting in what kinds of results, and accordingly plan your strategy. Hana Abaza explains it all very efficiently in the book. She makes sure you don’t approach content marketing as “hit or miss.” Instead, use it as a tool to achieve your objectives. She talks about using data for the content creation process. And she stresses the effectiveness of the process of content distribution. A/B testing and optimization give marketers a better idea what works for their customers and what doesn’t. They aim at optimizing conversions, which isn’t easy. There is a lot of experimentation involved. This expert survival guide contains optimization tips from 30 experts which can guide your own processes as a marketer. The experts give you tips on avoiding roadblocks and help you take your testing program to the next level. They tell you what to expect when you plant your optimization strategy. This book will help you create a smart experiment hypothesis. Which will help you build better testing processes. Landing page copywriting is so much more than putting a headline and purposeful copy together. The success of your marketing strategies depend on the success of your landing pages. Are you able to attract visitors? Or is your copy driving them away? Joanna Wiebe shares her tips on writing a good landing page. She talks about critical copy elements a landing page must have for conversions. Read the book to find out about the right elements you must include, clickworthy calls-to-actions, and more. Marketers who have been tip toeing around influencer marketing should read this ebook by Digital Marketing Consultant Shane Barker to learn all about influencer marketing. Among other things, this ebook will help you find the right influencers. You need to focus on building long term relationships with your influencers. And Shane tells you how to do it. He provides compelling pitches and templates that can help you connect for effective influencer outreach. This ebook also provides you a long list of tools that will help you optimize your influencer marketing efforts. #8. Conversations Not Campaigns by Marketo This digital marketing ebook talks about the finer nuances of email marketing. “Batch and blast” is not the ideal scenario for marketers. There needs to be personal connect. You need to address the individual and talk directly to him or her in a personalized way. For success, you need to have conversations while marketing, with emails not blasting email campaigns. Give your recipients reasons to engage with the messages of your emails, says Marketo. Marketers need to cultivate a relationship-oriented mindset. They need to build relationships on one-to-one basis over a period of time. Among other things, the ebook tells you about behavioral filters and triggering messages based on behavior. In this digital marketing ebook, international speaker and writer, Oli Gardner, talks about the, “Attention-Driven” design principle to design persuasive landing pages. You must make the designs as clutter free as you can. Distractions dilute the main message. Which then hurts the ROI of the campaigns. Oli Gardner discusses concepts like attention ratios, and how to use designs to prevent the loss of mental energy. Designs that cater to a psychology win. To find out how Interaction design can help you increase conversions, read the book. #10. The Complete Guide to Social Media For B2B Marketers by Salesforce Pardot Social media has changed the way we communicate. The effects of social media has been tremendous on B2B marketers too. They are integrating social media strategies to communicate with both their clients and their prospects. Navigating the world of social media can be challenging. But this ebook provides the e-marketers tips on leveraging social media. It tells you all about the metrics that need to be tracked, the type of content best suited for different platforms, and how to drive conversions and engagements through social media. #11. Successfully Generate Leads To Grow Your Business With Facebook Ads by Adespresso When the world has latched on to social media platform like Facebook with gusto, it makes sense that you leverage thise platforms for leads. The reach and targeting options available with Facebook are top notch. You can use Facebook ads to generate leads, and this ebook by Adespresso will help you do just that. This ebook talks about the different types of lead magnets you can use. It provides tips on driving traffic through lead magnets. You can learn how to nurture leads. And it will help you build impressive landing pages with the help of different landing page tools. #12. Instagram For Business For Dummies by Jennifer Herman, Eric Butow, and Corey Walker Instagram can be leveraged efficiently by businesses to improve brand visibility, lead generation, and conversions. Businesses can benefit by developing brand narratives about their products and services. And sharing them on Instagram. It will help you connect to your audiences in new ways. Brands can easily showcase your products and offer an insider’s view to your prospects and customers. You can work on building your Instagram profile, increasing your reach and engagement, creating contests, and more. The book provides your business many useful tips on leveraging this powerful platform. #13. 50 Shades of Growth by Sid Bharath and Danny Halerwich This is a very useful digital marketing ebook for marketers dealing in ecommerce. This book provides 50 ecommerce growth hacks which can help you take your business to next level. The book is easy to read and the concepts are explained step-by-step. This book includes growth hacks from experts who have successfully grown their ecommerce businesses. It includes plenty of useful tips to experiment with and use. It has a comprehensive list of marketing and optimization tools. And readers can get exclusive deals on these tools too. Conclusion The ever-evolving space of digital marketing provides you with plenty of opportunities to learn and grow. There are helpful resources, forums, experts you can reach out to, and conferences that discuss the challenges (and their solutions). I have brought you this valuable list of digital marketing ebooks which can help you understand the concepts and provide you tips and hacks to do your job as a marketer in a better way. The best thing is that all these books are completely free. You simply click on the links given to download them so you can read at your convenience. I hope you find the books useful. Please let us know about any other valuable resources you have found useful. We would love to hear from you. Originally published at Shanebarker.com.

https://medium.com/the-mission/13-digital-marketing-ebooks-that-will-help-you-achieve-your-online-marketing-goals-5c741b4fb9b5

['Shane Barker']

2018-06-21 05:05:32.209000+00:00

['Marketing Strategies', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Free Ebook', 'Startup']

About Me — Greyson Alman. American Football Coach/Personal…

Bio Background I’m a 30 something-year-old Filipino-American who was born and raised in Southern California. I got my B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Redlands. (A small liberal arts college in Southern California) My plan was to become a High School Math Teacher after graduation. Like most of my plans, things did not work out like I originally planned. American Football Instead of becoming a teacher immediately after university, I decided to play American Football in Europe for one year first. As usual, things did not go according to plan. I ended up playing for three seasons in Europe (2 in Serbia, 1 in Poland) Then I started coaching after my playing career ended. ( 2 seasons in Poland so far) Since I have no plans to stop coaching anytime soon, it is safe to say my math teaching career is not likely. ESL Teacher In 2016 I was playing American Football in Poland. A language school approached me with an opportunity to teach English as a Second Language. I immediately fell in love with teaching and have been doing it ever since. (in addition to my playing/coaching career) Personal Trainer My borderline obsession with self-improvement led me to become a Certified Personal Trainer. The overachiever in me did not allow me to stop at one certification. I have three certifications from the International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA):

https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-greyson-alman-8d33d3a15ace

['Greyson Alman']

2020-12-04 01:02:41.672000+00:00

['About Me', 'Self', 'Nonfiction', 'Introduction', 'Writing']

11: Post-traumatic urbanism and radical indigenism

This simple notion — that all your basic everyday needs, from education to commerce to healthcare to culture and so on, are located within 15 minutes walk or bike of your front door — requires a way of thinking, planning, designing, and acting that I was first introduced to in Sydney, almost 15 years ago, by Adrian Lahoud when we were both involved in University of Technology, Sydney (Adrian is now at the Royal College of Art). Lahoud’s concept of post-traumatic urbanism was based on research into cities like Beirut and Berlin, exploring the super-local infrastructures of everyday life, and the purposeful redundancy built into cities that cannot promise that a bridge, say, will be there from one day to the next. This means not just one large pharmacy or baker or police station, for example, but many small ones, a more dispersed distribution pattern mimicking what network designers would call ‘redundancy’ (if one goes down, there’s another within reach.) In the context of cities, that kind of effectiveness also generates community, health, diversity, and local economy. This is counter to much of the efficiency logic of recent decades; witness the growth of super-hospitals, versus more distributed patterns of healthcare. This, despite exemplary work like Stroke Pathways demonstrating the folly of that centralised, efficiency-led thinking. The smart city agenda, somehow still going despite everything, has always been easy to skewer for its efficiency mantra. Cities are not about efficiency, and never have been. The most meaningful urban experiences are generally the most inefficient. But this lack of efficiency is also why they are naturally resilient, if their design patterns follow the purposeful redundancy described above. Our food systems have been made overly-efficient, via ‘just-in-time’ practices, as the unnecessary panic buying has quickly revealed (just as the Queensland floods did.) “Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity.” — Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, 26 March 2020 A post-virus edition of post-traumatic urbanism will be a topic to revive imminently. And yet, well outside of such immediate urban trauma, I’ve used the concept on numerous urban development and city strategy projects, due partly to its simple, graspable common sense, as well as the broader forms of value it can generate. Some version of the idea underpins the recent contribution to the Mayor of London’s strategy for high streets, as well as current projects here in Sweden. It certainly informed the Non-Grid ‘network urbanism’ concepts which worked their way into strategies for major urban developments in Amsterdam and Melbourne. Again, these are urban patterns we needed to reinforce and reiterate anyway; the virus may force us to move more quickly in that direction. Cities remain fundamentally resilient, including dense cities. Assuming we move past social distancing, and even the present fear of touch of shared surfaces, we can bring back our sense of cities as threads and knots of social urban spaces, with all the tactility and texture that implies. Perhaps the virus will give us pause to consider how to ensure they are even more resilient, aligning the distributed network urbanism patterns of post-traumatic cities with the post-systems thinking, nature-based infrastructures touched on below. In the post-trauma redesign, if we motivate for it, we may be able head off the much greater urban trauma likely from the climate crisis. Contrary to some positions that could emerge from a bacteria-centred redesign, this means the very opposite of the concentrated, centralised, securitised, privatised, overly-sanitised places that at least one strain of urban planning and development has been creating over the last few decades. The shorthand for that pattern would be malls, big box retail parks, and global-finance-theme parks like Hudson Yards and the like. This is not a resilient structure; it is not “the green reed which bends in the wind” but “the mighty oak which breaks in a storm”, if you like. Such ‘places’ are horribly exposed at times like this—and thus emptied fairly quickly, and valueless, a stranded asset. Whereas, outside of their dwellings, many people are currently inhabiting the smaller pockets of space in and around their neighbourhoods: local parks, even just copses or patches of grass or playgrounds; the street corners (talking at a safe distance) of diverse, scaled-well high streets, that can actually speak to and articulate the local communities they sit in; the little knots of interaction that make up a genuine neighbourhood; “a labyrinth of small, intimate territories, a random constellation of stars”, as Aldo Van Eyck wrote about his distributed playground systems for healing the scars of post-WWII-traumatic Amsterdam. A key text, particularly if we extend the idea to a social life beyond humans If we built on these themes of open, distributed, decentralised, networked, ‘small pieces loosely joined’, multiplied-many-times with massive diversity and purposeful redundancy, and pivoting around the social life of small urban spaces—organised into Baran webs rather than the Legrand star—we would likely find a far more resilient pattern for city life, and urban growth. If we then fundamentally reorient that around a hugely increased emphasis on biodiversity i.e. not just human-centred design, stretching from the street corners out to the distant fields of agriculture and landscape that support them, we solve for climate, health, social justice, and pandemic simultaneously. That extends the ideas of social life to include the many other natural elements that ‘socialise’ in our cities. (These patterns, in pre-virus mode, were the essence of the plans and sketches my old team did for Amsterdam districts, which I’ll share in more detail one day.)

https://medium.com/slowdown-papers/11-post-traumatic-urbanism-and-radical-indigenism-c2a21dc7ba69

['Dan Hill']

2020-04-22 15:32:08.940000+00:00

['Cities', 'Design', 'Indigenous', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19']

I’m Sad About Animals All The Time

I’m Sad About Animals All The Time I am a committed animal rights activist, but the feeling of hopelessness I have about this cause is starting to get to me… Photo by Elmira Gokoryan on Unsplash Dear Nice Vegan, I’m a committed animal rights activist. I stopped eating meat when I was seven — moments after my mom explained that chicken was actually, well, chickens — and never looked back, going fully vegan when I was 16. I have attended protests, vigils, and I have an Instagram account devoted to vegan activism (and occasionally a delicious vegan donut). I don’t work full-time for animal rights, but I spend many nights and weekends volunteering for animal-rights organizations, and my social life is dominated by mingling with other activists (usually at protests and vegan events). My problem is that… I’m really sad. All the time. I think constantly about the people around me who still eat meat and seemingly approve of the torture and cruelty inflicted on animals by the industrial animal farming industry. I want to scream every time one of my few remaining non-vegan friends posts something about homeless dogs or a petition to stop someone from shooting tigers when they still eat meat every single day. I know I’m alienating people I love (because they’ve told me that I am), but it’s not because I feel like I’m better than them. I just want to help the animals, and I can’t stand that they don’t care. When I think too much about the scale of the cruelty — billions and billions of animals — I just break down in tears. I’ve been considering therapy, but I’m honestly terrified that they might make fun of me for being so sensitive or just not understand where I’m coming from at all. Do you have any advice for me? Signed, Debbie Downer Dear Debbie, I really wish I could give you a hug! I want to say first that I can tell from your letter that you are incredibly brave, compassionate, and thoughtful — and I know you’re going to get through this. The feelings you’re having are totally valid, and you’re probably not as alone as you think. Many activists of all types experience this kind of burnout and depression. I want to start with your last thought first. I do think you should consider seeing a therapist, but I also don’t think your fear about them is unreasonable. Not all doctors are great at understanding outside-of-the-box thinking, and if you make an appointment with the closest therapist on Google, you may indeed find yourself with someone who really doesn’t understand your ethical vegan mindset. What you need is a real human recommendation from someone who’s seen a therapist who might be a good fit for you. This could ideally come from someone in your animal rights circles — I don’t think you necessarily need a vegan therapist specifically, but they do exist and might be even more helpful to you specifically. I know it’s kind of scary to ask people for a therapist recommendation, but it’s way more common than you might think — and anyone worth being friends with is never going to judge you for it. Depending on how shy you’re feeling, you could ask people one on one or just make a post on a local vegan facebook group asking for recommendations. Don’t be afraid to shop for a therapist that works for you —if you see someone you don’t like, don’t go back! Your therapist should be able to make you feel fairly at ease on your first visit, and sometimes the chemistry is just not right. I know it’s daunting, but I think it will be incredibly worthwhile for you to have a structured way to start working through this with a person you feel you can really truly trust. I definitely know I can’t solve it for you here, but I do have some more ideas. In general, I think you can and should think about how to look to your existing community for more emotional support. A lot of folks who do the kind of activism and believe in the things you believe in are definitely experiencing similar feelings. Y’all may not be talking about it when you’re on the picket line, but if you have some closer friends who are also involved in activism, I think it’s time to confide in them. My prediction is that you’ll find that many of them are experiencing very similar emotions. That said, I also think that something which might be key for you here is to figure out how to take real breaks and expand your hobbies to some things that have nothing to do with animal activism at all. If you’re operating an Instagram account and looking at activists’ photos of hurt animals all day and attending protests and volunteering nights and weekend, you’re not leaving a lot of time outside of work to think about anything BUT the animals. And as you’ve realized, that kind of buildup is not actually making you a better advocate — it’s making you feel bitter, resentful, and sad. Before you explode, you need outlets to give your brain and your big, big heart a break from this work so you can come back to it refreshed and renewed when you’re ready. Think about something you like, or have always been interested in, that truly has nothing to do with animals — seeing live music? Comedy? A pottery class? Whatever it is, try to dedicate at least one night every week to just that. No browsing activist Instagram or participating in discussions on vegan Facebook that night. No trying to convince your new classmates to go vegan or obsessing over the band’s politics. Just let yourself completely enjoy something that isn’t “for the animals,” but is for you. You’re an animal too, after all — live your life enjoying the freedom you think we all deserve. I know you’re a passionate activist who wants to do as much as you can, but you’ll truly be able to do more and better things for animals if you’re balanced. I don’t have one magical method for making the sadness of caring about animals in a world that doesn’t go away. We all experience it, sometimes in crashing waves or sometimes in small passing moments. What helps me is realizing that I’m not alone (thanks to people like you!), realizing that there are thousands of people dedicated to helping reduce the cruelty we inflict on other species — whether it’s with activism or cooking delicious vegan food or making a place in their home for a rescued pig. Take care of yourself, I need you! Love, Summer Anne (A Nice Vegan) P.S. More tips on self-care for activists at Bitch.

https://medium.com/tenderlymag/ask-a-nice-vegan-im-sad-about-animals-all-the-time-7612ad6b01f0

['Summer Anne Burton']

2019-10-02 16:01:01.588000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Advice', 'Vegan', 'Equality', 'Burnout']

The Seven Stages of Writing Grief

More from Susan Orlean Follow Staff writer, The New Yorker. Author of The Library Book, The Orchid Thief, and more…Head of my very own Literati.com book club (join me!)

https://susanorlean.medium.com/the-seven-stages-of-writing-grief-7cdc9d26ad9

['Susan Orlean']

2020-12-29 22:25:54.359000+00:00

['Writing Tips', 'Journalism', 'First Person', 'Writing']

Extra Time During the Age of the Virus

Extra Time During the Age of the Virus Ideas for those who have extra time in these virus times Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash First, to those who have no extra time, or who are working as always, thank you! Thank you to the health care workers, grocery store workers, Walmart and Target workers, farmers, distribution center workers, and anyone else who has to work normally or even more than usual. To those of us who have extra time because of a missing commute, or because we’re laid off, what should we do with the free time? Maybe it’s not free time because you now have the added duties of homeschooling your kids, or something else. But if you do have more free time, here are some ideas: What’s the meaning of life? Perhaps try reading straight through the New Testament of the Bible, starting with Matthew, if you haven’t already. Find a job at one of the many places that are hiring! Learn something new! This could be an immediate skill that could be very marketable such as something related to artificial intelligence or software development. There are tons of free places to learn, but you could start with edX where you can audit a course from an Ivy League institution for free! Check it out here. You could also use a site like that to learn (or to learn about) software development, architecture, flying drones, engineering, or robotics. Really anything that could be immediately marketable in the workplace today, or something like AI (artificial intelligence) that could also be valuable in the workplace of tomorrow. What can you be learning that could be make the world a better place as we come out of this pandemic or ever have another one? edX is just one site, there are tons like this. Consider Coursera (free to audit classes), Udacity (free to audit classes), Codecademy (learn programming — coding — for free or pay for it), Udemy, LinkedIn Learning (get a free month), Khan Academy (always free), Pluralsight (free for April), Blinkist (non-fiction book summaries — free for 7 days for new customers, old customers might be free until April 25th: I am), and FutureLearn. Some of these places have discounts, or, better yet, are entirely free! Sometimes you have to look a little to see that things are free (like Coursera) up to the point that you want a certificate or to be graded, and then it would cost money. In many cases you can get all of the skills and knowledge without any cost, or pay a little and opt for the certificate. Take up something old! We still need fun, too. Reach out to an old friend, re-pick up an old hobby, or learn a new hobby. Play games, have fun. Learn or do art, music, history, philosophy, or whatever it might be. This virus has a horrible cost, and I’m sorry to everyone who is struggling with their health, with worsened health, or with loved ones they’ve lost or who are impacted by the virus. But what if we come out of this much stronger, much smarter, with a greater sense of truth, goodness, the meaning of life, and with a better ability to handle a crisis like this should it ever happen again? What if everyone who is furloughed or laid off either gets back to work right away in essential jobs or learns how to be creative and skills up to learn what they’ve always wanted to learn, or to learn what’s needed to be learned (like machine learning, datascience, deep learning, robotics, and self-driving car technology) in the future of the economy? Should we make it our goal to hit the ground running when we come out of this? I see this virus as a great reset, and perhaps at the end of it a ton of us will be in a better place than where we once were. Maybe not in terms of economics, or in terms of the people who are no longer with us, but in terms of ourselves. Let’s improve ourselves, somehow.

https://medium.com/predict/extra-time-during-the-age-of-the-virus-39b67154f649

['Eric Martin']

2020-04-05 16:42:43.152000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Learning', 'Free Time', 'Coronavirus', 'Extra Time']

There Are 1,385,000 New Articles Posted on Medium Every Month

I kind of stole this title... I mean, not really. But credit where it’s due. Earlier this week, J.J. Pryor wrote a post about Medium statistics and how much people earn. But in the article, I came across this line… — There are 1,385,000 new articles posted on Medium every month What the…? Seriously? 1,385,000 posts every month? That’s 47,000 posts every day. 1,958 new posts every hour. Tick tock. Another couple thousand posts. And you wonder why there’s a curation queue? Omg, the poor curators! Can you even imagine having to wade through that amount of content to pick the shiny bright ones from the stinking piles of hot steaming garbage? How do you even get seen? A lot of it is crap. And short reads. Sorry to be so blunt. There’s a lot of content that goes up that no one is ever going to read. I don’t know if people are using content spinners or robots to churn out content but there’s a lot of bad content. I’m not talking about decent writers who haven’t found their audience yet. I’m talking about content that’s not readable. There’s a writer “out there” who pastes in excerpts from public domain works taken off Gutenberg. It never gets any reads. He keeps doing it. I’m sure there’s a reason people do stuff like that, but I don’t have the mental hijinks to understand why. I shake my head and move on. Don’t even ask me how I know about those people. If you know, don’t say it. Thanks. Also? Short reads. There’s a guy who pumps out half a dozen haiku every day. I guess he likes them. I’m not sure that volume makes up for lack of read time. Those 5 line verses aren’t really a one minute read. It’s just that Medium doesn’t log read time under a minute. Know what I mean? Here’s the thing. Now that Medium brought in “short form content” we might as well use some of that to stay in the feed. But if all you DO is short form? I’m not sure that’s going to go so well. Point is, most of the competition — isn’t. Know what I mean? It’s just not. But still. 47,000 posts per day. It’s a lot going into the publication feeds. How do you even get seen? We writers aren’t writing for ourselves. I mean, I know we “say” we are. But no. It only starts there, in that we choose what we want to write about. But after that — once we hit publish ? No one wants to publish to the sound of crickets. If we really didn’t care if anyone read our writing, we’d be writing in a paper notebook. Or on our computer. For ourselves. Hitting publish means we want readers. So I started thinking about it. Really. How do people get seen? 7 ways to up the odds of getting seen… It made me think about how to stand out of the crowd. So I came up with a few ideas. If you have more, feel welcome to add them in the comments. 1. Frequency really helps Here’s the thing. All those 47,000 posts every day aren’t in one giant feed. What a nightmare that would be. But no. They’re going up in publication feeds. And they’re going into the feeds of your followers. So that gives you a couple of shots at getting seen. You can up the odds of visibility through frequency. Tim Denning posted 66 posts in the past month. Many of the top writers post every day. Some people think that sounds crazy. And it kind of does. But think about it. If you have a job, doesn’t your boss expect you to show up and do some work every day? Yeah. Mine too. It might mean you do some writing on the weekend. Might mean you need to come up with a system that works for you. But frequency helps. If you can’t write daily, at least be consistent. Tell your readers when you post. Tell them you’ll be there every Monday and Friday, or whatever. Caveat — because there’s always one of those. Writing a big volume of crap won’t help. It will do the opposite. People will unfollow and dismiss. Doesn’t matter if a buffet is all you can eat if nothing there is worth eating. 2. You’ve got to be interesting, dammit. I wish I could say it’s about good writing. But nope. It’s really not. It’s not about excellent writing. It’s about excellent topics. You can write about your sister in law’s baby shower if you want to, but really, how many people are going to be interested? The internet isn’t really your diary. Unless your life is really that juicy. The people writing personal experience posts know how to spin it into a story with an actual take away for the reader. Because it’s not about you. It’s about the reader. Unless you’re Kim Kardashian. Then nevermind. But if you’re not a celebrity with millions of snoopy McGee fans that want to know the minutiae of your life? You’re going to have to grab their interest with the topics you pick to write about. Caveat — don’t lean on meta posts. People don’t go to Business Insider to read articles about how to succeed on Business Insider. That meta thing is big on Medium, and I get it. Like bringing candy to the playground. But it won’t ever get curated, and the curated articles tend to live longer. In my experience. 3. Your title has to kick. serious. butt. So many writers have lame, lame titles. So weak. If you can figure out how to write great titles, you’re halfway home. First of all, don’t use titles that read like they belong on a book cover. Think newspaper headlines. Roughly half the people who click the title will read the entire article. So work on titles. The more clicks you get, the more reads. Also? You have 100 characters with title and subtitle combined. Use them. You can check the character count at: https://charactercounttool.com/ If you really suck at titles, you need to come up with something that work to help you do better. Here’s one idea. Go grab a list of the titles in the popular reads. Then modify them for your topic. For example, the #3 article right now is: The Overwhelming Racism Of COVID Coverage Make that into a formula. Like so… The Overwhelming ___________ of __________ You can do the same using titles off news feeds. Or newspapers. Or magazines, or even other content sites. Here’s another idea. Do what I did. If you’re reading a post and you see a line marked “top highlight” see if you can use that as a title to write about. But give credit for heaven’s sakes. Writers need to give credit when due. As your titles get better, your views will increase. 4. You need to open strong. It sucks when you nail the title— but once the reader clicks, you lose them. Poof. Instantly. Because the opening was weak and boring. Stephen King once said he can spend months or even years figuring out the opening for a new book. If you’re writing online, it’s even more important. Everyone says headline, headline, headline — but a weak opening can undo all the work you put into crafting the best headline. The best openings often start with a person the reader can relate to, or a fact they didn’t know and want to know more about. I was not sorry when my brother died. That’s the first sentence in Nervous Conditions. You can’t read a sentence like that and not read the next one. See what I mean? Start strong. Caveat — use formatting. Please. It doesn’t matter how strong your opening is if you don’t use the enter key (like, ever) and your writing is a wall of text. People bail on that. Too hard to read. 5. You’ve got to be smarter about publications I wrote an entire post about this so I won’t drone on. I’ll link it at the bottom. Here’s the reader’s digest version. People click on familiar faces. If you’re jumping around looking for the magic publication that will give you a whack of views — that’s the recipe for failure. Because you’re not posting to any one publication often enough to become a familiar face. Think about going to a concert or some place there’s 20,000 people in the audience. You’re not going to recognize someone you’ve only seen once. But magically, you can scan the crowd and spot your co-worker. Same concept. You need to build familiarity with an audience. More in the article linked at the bottom. 6. Comment. Lots. How many comments can you write in the time it would take you to write another article? A lot, I bet. Comments are a great way to make an impression on people. When you do that, they often check out your work. But don’t be trite. Don’t post crap like “nice post” — that’s Facebook junk. You’ll just be ignored. Have conversations. Add something to a discussion. And don’t be a jerk, running around disagreeing with all the people who have different opinions than you. That will make an impression on people, for sure, but probably not the impression you were hoping to make. Also? Don’t paste links to your stories into other people’s comments. That’s just tacky and gauche. People see right through that. Might as well just put on your invisibility cloak, because that’s what the end result will be. Think of Medium as a place for conversations. If people like what you have to say in comments, if you come across as helpful or insightful, they’ll come check out your work. 7. You need to build your own list! If you’re not building a list, most people will never see your posts. They can’t. It’s not humanly possible. 47,000 posts per day. I mean, how many people do YOU follow? Do you see all their posts? No. Reader loyalty is part of the new algorithm, here. You know that, right? When readers “loyally” read your writing, that increases your earnings. By calculating a share of member reading time, we support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers. [more info here] Doesn’t matter how much your readers love your writing, if you don’t show up in their feed and you’re not curated, you might as well be invisible. It can be a fancy list with opt in and such if you want. But even a digest of your posts sent once a week for people who like your work is helpful. For you and them. I hate when I “miss” posts by my favorite writers. If you have your own publication, you can send newsletters. But if you’re publishing to other publications — start a list. In the beginning, it will be a lot of work for little result. Count on that. (Ask me how I know) But as it grows? You’ll start to see that when you send out that digest, you get a real nice bump in traffic. It’s enough to make you truly appreciate those readers. Which is kind of the point, know what I mean? And it doesn’t even have to cost money. Here’s 5 places to build a list free. Is it worth the bother? That’s what I’ve heard people ask. There’s so much competition here, is it even worth the bother to try to get some visibility. 2 years ago, Medium was getting 90 million unique visitors per month. Today? Medium gets around 416 million visits per month. You know anywhere else that draws that many readers? I mean sure — instagram has a ton of traffic. Facebook, too. But here, they’re all self identified readers. What more could a writer ask for? Yes, it’s hard work. Hard, hard work. You’re going to have to work your butt off. Learn to write more compelling. Create stronger titles. That which is “easy” and that which is “worth it” are seldom the same. The numbers boggle my mind. 47,000 posts a day is a lot of competition. A lot. Staggering. But still — 416 million visits per month. Even a small piece of that pie would taste so lovely. Right?

https://medium.com/linda-caroll/there-are-1-385-000-new-articles-posted-on-medium-every-month-37f988c31b64

['Linda Caroll']

2020-09-18 14:46:12.964000+00:00

['Self', 'Self Growth', 'Inspiration', 'Marketing', 'Writing']

The 3 Realizations That Happen During A Spiritual Awakening

The beginning of a spiritual awakening is often a crude ending. Though we imagine it to be a serene process through which we become acquainted with our innermost selves, it is often the opposite. This process does not comfort you to rest, it awakens you with a fire. Most people embark on their awakening journey in the aftermath of what is referred to as a catalyst event: a breakup, job loss, or the passing of a beloved family member. It’s at this moment that our discomfort reaches a tipping point, and we are forced to reconcile the fact that we can no longer go on as we are. It’s at this point that we often start searching: for truth, for dogma, for information, for knowledge, but mostly, for ourselves. What do we want, and what will it take to get it? Must we live like this forever? Is there a better, easier way to approach the world and our role in it? A true spiritual awakening typically happens in three parts, and the realizations usually occur in the following order. 1. Something needs to change and I must be the one to change it. The first and most formidable step is really a wake-up call. It’s the moment at which we realize that something in our lives needs to be amended, shifted or eliminated, and we are the ones responsible for making sure that happens. The very first step of an awakening is the assumption of responsibility. When we recognize that nobody else will change our lives, nor is it their job to, we begin the important (albeit humbling) work of doing it on our own. 2. My habits, beliefs and behaviors are creating my life experience. Once we do take responsibility for our lives and begin to make positive changes, another truth becomes clear: our habits, beliefs and behaviors are creating if not at minimum influencing our life experience more than any external circumstance is. When we start to reclaim our power, we recognize that our potential is truly limitless, and we can create precisely the type of life we dream of having. The process of waking up is akin to realizing that we fell asleep in the driver’s seat, but we’re still behind the wheel. 3. I can use my power for the greater good. When we recognize just how much power we have to create what we want to experience in life, we often use it to solve our own problems first. However, the final step of a spiritual awakening is when we recognize that we want to use our newfound power for the sake of the greater good. When we only want to help ourselves, we have found our egos. When we want to help others, we have found our souls. The way we may go about doing this varies. We may simply want to share information that will help others heal and improve themselves. We may want to show others greater compassion, or even embark on philanthropic work. In other cases, we may simply shift our careers or our spare time to get involved in activities and practices that promote wellbeing. Regardless, it’s this three step process that leads people from lives of deep frustration and regret to empowerment and fulfillment.

https://briaeliza.medium.com/the-3-realizations-that-happen-during-a-spiritual-awakening-654793e94c41

['Brianna Wiest']

2020-01-08 14:56:41.503000+00:00

['Spirituality', 'Life Lessons', 'Motivation', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement']

Wow, I Reached 7,000 Followers on Medium!

One thing I don’t often pay much attention to on Medium is my number of followers. Because there’s something kind of strange about the number of followers you have on Medium: at the end of the day… it doesn’t matter a whole lot. When you have a few thousand followers on Twitter, theoretically up to a few thousand people who follow you might see your latest tweet you send into the universe. Sure, most of them won’t, but at least the thought is there. I mean, if you have a couple million followers and you tweet something, people are definitely going to see it! Medium works a little differently. If you create a publication and people follow it, then yes, that makes a difference because you can e-mail Newsletters to those followers and keep them up to date about your latest Medium stories. A follower to your publication is a huge deal. Lots more important, I think, than a follower of just you. A follower of just you is basically a nod saying you’re doing good work, I like what you’re writing, you have been helpful to me, keep it up! When I follow another writer, it’s for no other reason than to say, I like what you’re doing here on Medium.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/wow-i-reached-7-000-followers-on-medium-952f2fd0d0f9

['Brian Rowe']

2020-10-06 16:27:09.091000+00:00

['Medium', 'Success', 'Followers', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing']

Why is Blockchain NOT the challenge but the SOLUTION to sustainable energy

1. Decentralized energy supply system and household participation One of the most special opportunities that Blockchain brings to the energy sector is that it encourages the growth of electricity ‘prosumers’. Prosumers refers to households that are able to generate electricity or become the supplier of electricity, for example, by having a solar panel installed in their buildings. By putting consumers at the heart of the system, both renewable energy consumption and production can be enhanced, creating a positive feedback loop that accelerates the transformation of society from non-renewable to renewable energy in a self-sustaining way. In order to bring such a system to reality, there need to be an incentive mechanism, for instance, prosumers should expect to be rewarded with positive return from investing in installing a solar panel. However, in the current electricity supply system, the challenge is not only that there isn’t a trusted platform to facilitate household electricity transactions, but also the fact that multiple intermediaries and complexity in regulatory compliance cuts the potential income for households from engaging in electricity trades. Many governors and scholars in this field have recognized the need for changes, in 2017 the European Union’s Clean Energy Package was implemented, with a set of rules on household energy producing, storage and trading, aiming to encourage consumers to actively participate in electricity trading. Academic literature has extensively focused on improving the market design by establishing local storage systems into national operations of power systems, nevertheless, progress is slow and we haven’t seen significant changes in the past few years. This is where a decentralized Blockchain system could come into play. Firstly and most importantly, Blockchain Technology could create a trustless network to encourage Peer to Peer (P2P) electricity transactions. In any P2P transaction, trust between parties are extremely important. If we think about how Uber, Airbnb have built up their P2P exchange system, parties involved in the transaction have trust in the paring and verification mechanisms of the platform, for example, the registration process to become a Uber driver. Blockchain technology provides an even stronger ‘trustless’ system, where you don’t have to trust the counterparty, but only the technology. By offering cryptographic ways of tracking transactions, the transparency in terms of transaction records and anonymity in terms of personal information are both enhanced. Without a centralized control, identical databases that records each and every transaction ( in an encrypted form) are stored in the device of every player involved, and in order for a transaction to be recorded, all parties need to reach consensus and validate the transaction. image source: unsplash “Historically, although there are some exceptions, people tended not to share with strangers or those outside their social networks. Sharing was confined to trusted individuals such as family, friends and neighbours. Today’s sharing platforms facilitate sharing among people who do not know each other, and who lack friends or connections in common.” (Frenken and Schor, 2017). Furthermore, through the use of a distributed ledger system, many intermediaries are removed from the transaction, a pure peer to peer transaction is possible to achieve. This reduces cost and time of transaction, increasing the “profit margin” and incentive for households to engage in energy trading activities. We have already seen practical implementations in many countries around the globe, both startups and traditional large energy suppliers are actively pushing for such a revolution. For instance, in 2018, Centrica- the owner of British Gas worked with a American startup to initiate an energy sharing project for their Local Energy Market. The project aims to enable trading of energy between local businesses, consumers, the national grid and other participants in the UK. Another well-known case is the Australian startup “Power Ledger”. It uses a blockchain-based network to establish a peer to peer energy trading platform. Some of its key benefits include real-time payment, automated low cost settlement, neighborhoods trading, transparent trading information and much more. One of the most interesting features of Power Ledger is that it comprises of both a permissioned and a permissionless blockchain infrastructure. The permissionless blockchain operates on a global scale to allow international market trading, whereas the permissioned blockchain operates among local trusted peers. The platform also uses two tokens as assets: one called “POWR” — which is used to access the global P2P trading market, while the other one — “Sparkz” usually functions in the local network as the trading currency, representing the electricity price and the local “real-world” currency. In combination, the system ensures value via “POWR” tokens and facilitates exchange through “Sparkz” . Other P2P electricity trading startups and projects you could explore include: Apart from solar panels, another active field is electric vehicle charging. Sales of electricity vehicles is increasing dramatically year on year. Overall sales of Tesla’s Electric vehicle is expected to surpass 10 million by 2025, and responding to such a trend, the demand for charging stations will scale up exponentially. This puts pressure on the national electricity grid as millions of drivers demand for energy flows to charge their cars at the same time. The idea of ‘distributed’ charging stations matches well with blockchain’s characteristics, it could play a key role in improving the coordination of a distributed charging network by allowing any owner of EV charger to be a supplier. The use of blockchain smart contract enables trusted payment and transaction to be made between individual EV owners and EV charger providers who are unknown to each other. image source: unsplash The Share & Charge project initiated by Slock.it is an example of P2P EV charging station project, allowing households owning charging stations to provide charging services to drivers. It could benefit the ‘suppliers’ by recouping the cost of their investment, while broadening the geographical coverage of EV charging stations to benefit the drivers. The app has been available since the 28th of April for charging stations located in Germany.

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/why-is-blockchain-not-the-challenge-but-the-solution-to-sustainable-energy-e3265a42a61a

['Americana Chen']

2020-12-28 12:47:21.101000+00:00

['Energy', 'Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Sustainability', 'Renewable Energy']

Project: Quick & dirty

Project: Quick & dirty Dijkstra would not like it “I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself “Dijkstra would not have liked this”, well, that would be enough immortality for me.” — Edsger W. Dijkstra, both leader in the pursuit of simplicity and the abolition of the GOTO statement from programming. Nine times out of ten, when you ask managers to pick among different implementation options, they answer: The simpler. which is a shy way to say: The quicker. which sounds frustrating as if they didn’t pick attention to the pros and cons you just described, as if the only criterion was speed. All they have in mind at this time is the next delivery date and they just compare two short-term costs: cost (quick) < cost (clean) Which is usually true. However this is using the “quick” part of the equation only. The full equation goes like this: cost (quickAndDirty) = cost (quick) + cost (dirty) What is cost (dirty) exactly? It is the time developers will spend to re-write or refactor the quick code in a way that it is maintainable, so that further developments will not slow down. However, as that cleanup operation implies re-writing (i.e. dumping the quick code and replacing it by the clean version), we can state that: cost (quickAndDirty) = cost (quick) + cost (clean) and so that: cost (quickAndDirty) > cost (clean) Impact over time To illustrate this approach and alternatives, we built a model to simulate: the cost (time spent) of development ; (time spent) of development ; the technical debt , which is the sum of all quick code ; , which is the sum of all quick code ; the codebase maintainability , i.e. the ability to read/understand it and change it. , i.e. the ability to read/understand it and change it. the delivery pace as the amount of features shipped without regressions. Even when coded “cleanly” (debt is zero here), the complexity of the built software increases over time along with the code size (accumulation of new features delivered). Without regular refactoring, the maintainability decreases as the code gets more and more complex and the cost of adding new features in such a poor code increases. The curve of delivery flattens and in the end you cannot deliver anymore (logarithmic scales are used here to better show evolutions over time). Now let’s look at the worse-case scenario of doing only quick & dirty development instead of clean ones: As the technical debt increases, maintainability decreases half earlier, down to a level where no delivery can be done anymore (flatline of shipping) as the code got too hard to maintain without breaking things. The cost of development curve steepens for the same reasons: because of the poor quality code, it takes longer and longer to produce new features without breaking existing ones. So even with speed as the single criterion, we can see that repeated local speed (the “quick” part with “dirty” effects) impairs global speed (delivery pace). When to handle technical debt? Actually the cost of a technical debt can only be accounted to a subsequent development iteration (which makes it even less noticeable at start). This can be the immediate next one: cost (quickNDirt1) = cost (quick1) cost (cleanDev2) = cost (dirty1) + cost (dev2) In that scenario systematic immediate cleanup of the dirty code make things better: With systematic cleanup the debt never increases more than one iteration. Maintainability gets jagged (because of each dirty-then-cleanup cycle) but keeps an acceptable level longer, allowing to deliver longer as well. Cost is sometimes higher tough, as cleaning is more costly (=2) than dirtying (=1). However cleanup phases (accounted as the “cost of dirty”) can also be delayed (they are often), and occur to some later iteration: cost (quickNDirt1) = cost (quick1) cost (dev2) = cost (dev2) cost (cleanDev3) = cost (dirty1) + cost (dev3) But each new quick & dirty code in the interim will add up to the debt: cost (quickNDirt1) = cost (quick1) cost (quickNDirt2) = cost (quick2) cost (cleanDev3) = cost (dirty1) + cost (dirty2) + cost (dev3) Now let’s test a fool hypothesis: could letting the debt increase be beneficial in any way? Not resolving all the debt makes it increase progressively. The cost saved by not cleaning up all the debt (quick dev) is actually increased by the bad consequences on maintainability, which falls earlier, thus impairing the delivery capability more quickly. This doesn’t seem to be a good solution as increasing letting the debt grow costs you more in the end (as any debt does). One could say that you pay maintainability “interests” in this case. Even clean code requires refactoring But that is not enough. As we saw in the first graph, writing only “clean” code warrants a good delivery but still at an increasing cost, because even clean code requires periodic refactoring so that new features can be integrated, not just as additions (thus adding complexity), but merged into concepts shared by the whole codebase. You can see that as keeping a room clean but, as new furnitures are added in, wanting to move or replace some of them to make the whole thing more practicable. Once again, even if refactoring is costly, it should be seen as beneficial to the whole project’s maintainability (and so lifespan). Thus, on the long run, the cost of refactoring will be balanced by the increased maintainability: Avoiding quick & dirty to avoid debt is not enough: another kind of “implicit” debt with the increasing complexity of the product, and adding periodic refactorings allow to mitigate the loss of maintainability while keeping a good delivery pace, while not making costs worse. Now, what if the quick & dirty + cleanup (the other “no debt” approach) would include such periodic refactoring as well? Quick & dirty, if cleaned up, look similar to the clean code approach when including refactorings, but is a bit more costly and fails in maintainability earlier, because of the time lost in a subsequent cleaning up iteration (instead of writing clean version directly). As a result, delivery is less optimal. Conclusion Maintainability is a key factor of project development as it impacts both delivery capability and cost. Poor maintainability also have more unacknowledged effects such as bad stability (i.e. more regressions as the code is getting obscure) and developers productivity (coding is getting harder and more stressful). In real life, quick & dirty iterations cannot be avoided for both business reasons (deliver a feature to sign a contract typically) and developers laziness (“but it works” attitude) but their effect is detrimental on maintainability. The only way to mitigate the maintainability damage of quick & dirty iterations is to compensate them by “cleanup” iterations. However, because those cleanup additional iterations result in time loss, cleaned-up quick & dirty code can be summed up as “clean code in twice iterations”. However, another dimension of maintainability loss is the “natural” tendency of any code to get more complex (and so less maintainable) as it gets bigger and bigger (as a result of features additions). That means that any “no debt” approach (either “quick & dirty + cleanup” or “clean”) require periodic refactoring to keep a reasonable maintainability rate. In the end, both the amount of quick & dirty and refactoring iterations will dictate the product life expectancy, that is, the time when the code base will be deemed not maintainable anymore and will stop the delivery capability. At this point the only options will be either product freeze/discontinuation or full rewrite. As the old saying goes: — Why refactor it, since we’ll rewrite it from scratch in two years? — To avoid rewriting it from scratch in two years. The approach of your choice will dictate how long your product is expected to live.

https://javarome.medium.com/project-quick-dirty-6d2ca4a8eddb

['Jérôme Beau']

2020-10-13 09:22:53.730000+00:00

['Development', 'Project Management', 'Programming', 'Design', 'Quality']

How And When To Write In Layers

Every writer faces that difficult scene. You know the one I’m talking about. You know what needs to happen in that scene, how it should play out, but when it comes to getting it down on paper, you sit staring at the screen. For me, this often happens during action scenes. I always worry that I’m not going to give enough detail, or the sequence will be muddy and the reader won’t be able to follow along. One of the tricks I have found when facing this situation is to write in layers. Writing in layers Every scene consists of three main components. Dialogue, action, and description. Now, think about what your strengths and weaknesses are. For me, dialogue comes easy. I am always at a loss as to what I should add in for description. Start with your strength. Write out the entire scene using what ever you are strong at. For example (a bad short example): “Put the knife down, and step away from the body.” “This isn’t what it looks like.” “I’m not going to tell you again.” I can hear the voices speak clearly in my head, and can see what is going on. Now, I still hate description, so I’ll add in a little action. Craig whipped his gun out of it’s holster and leveled it at the young woman, his hands steady. “Put the knife down, and step away from the body.” “This isn’t what it looks like.” Her entire body trembled as she raised her eyes to meet his. “I’m not going to tell you again.” Different scenarios played through Craig’s mind as he stood at a standstill, waiting to see what happened. When you’ve completed the second layer, you’ve come to the last step, and the hardest step. Now you face your weakness. For me, trying to describe things is a struggle. I’m worried there won’t be enough description, or I’ll put in too much. Or maybe I won’t use the right words. But, now is the time to face that. The woman hadn’t heard him as he’d turned the corner into the alley and she stood motionless. Craig whipped his gun out of it’s holster and leveled it at the young woman, his hands steady. What the hell had he walked into? “Put the knife down, and step away from the body.” She jerked her head and looked at him, her teary eyes wide. Blood trailed from her hairline and down the side of her face. One strap of her blue silk nightie was ripped and hung limply, her breast barely remaining covered. “This isn’t what it looks like.” Her entire body trembled as she raised her eyes to meet his. Blood from the crumpled form of the man on the ground pooled around her bare feet, forming a shallow puddle. “I’m not going to tell you again.” Different scenarios played through Craig’s mind as he stood at a standstill, waiting to see what happened. A cool breeze shifted the thin material and she shivered. She lifted her hands in front of her and stared down at her bloody hand still gripping the handle of the large kitchen knife. It fell to a clatter on the asphalt as she stumbled back, attempting to wipe the blood from her palms. By writing in layers, I was able to take three simple sentences of dialogue, and turn it into a scene. The more I read through it now, the more I see places that I can add in some description or some action. I can imagine how the scene ends, and what will happen in the next one. When I am at a complete standstill, writing in layers helps to unblock me. It is more time consuming than just writing out a scene the normal way, so it is not something I would recommend doing every single time. But when you are stuck? You know what the scene is about and have an idea of what is going to be said, what needs to happen, that’s when this method helps to get it down on the page. Try it out. Don’t just sit there staring at a blank white screen, watching the cursor blink at you. Pick one of the three components and start there. Before you know it, that scene will be written and ready to be edited. Good luck, and happy writing!

https://stefanivader.medium.com/how-and-when-to-write-in-layers-6daa84b3fe09

['Stefani Vader']

2019-03-22 13:26:30.274000+00:00

['Writing Tips', 'Writers Block', 'Motivation', 'How To', 'Writing']

How to get your product noticed

How to get your product noticed Offer value in exchange for your customers’ attention Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash Recently I launched a new business. It’s based around a little software plugin that I made. I spent lots of time testing it, perfecting the code and packaging it up in a nice looking website with great documentation and plenty of examples. The initial product development was done. All that was left to do is sell. But how do I drive people to my website? I could post on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, with links back to my site, but what sort of content will build engagement and interest? Then I had a realisation which answers this question. And it’s not limited to the internet and online sales — it applies to any product sold in any way. To get your customers’ attention you need to give them value in addition to the value they will get from the product itself. In other words, you need to give them value in exchange for their attention. I’ll explain what I mean, but first a brief story about lunch. What’s lunch got to do with it? Yesterday I went to lunch with the CEO of a technology vendor. She has been trying to sell her company’s product to me and my employer for some time. This is the fourth lunch we’ve had over the last two years and at no stage has it appeared that I’m close to making a purchase. It’s not that the product lacks interest or potential value to my organisation, it’s that my organisation is not ready, internally, to adopt the new way of working that would be required to use the product. So why do the CEO and I continue to meet for lunch every few months? For the CEO, in part she sees the possibility of a sale, even though it is uncertain and still some time away. But that’s not all. She is very well connected in the industry and is able to provide real value by connecting people and identifying trends. This is value that she provides to me when we meet and, I imagine, to others when she meets with them. And it’s only possible because she cultivates and maintains broad connections, including with me. This is why I am willing to spend time with her every few months — I get real value from the meetings. I give her my time and attention, she gives me value in the form of connections and industry observations. And I am more likely to buy her company’s product than if we didn’t meet. The meetings ensure that I don’t forget about her company, and that I consider its product if and when the time is right. What about other types of products, like those not sold by sales people? The principal of “value in exchange for attention” applies to other types of products as well, even those not sold by sales people. Consider a loaf of bread you buy in the supermarket. Does the baker of the bread give value in exchange for your attention? They do. It takes the form of convenience, which the baker buys from the supermarket and gives to you. Supermarkets sell lots of products but the main value they provide is convenience. They aggregate products and bring them physically close to consumers, creating shops where space is valuable and scarce. Manufacturers and wholesalers compete for that space by paying to get their product on the supermarket’s shelves. Sometimes they pay money, sometimes they sell their product at discounted rates. Either way, they pay. Ultimately they are buying a little piece of the “convenience pie” owned by the supermarket. The baker gives you value in the form of convenience delivered to you via the supermarket, you give the baker your attention when you’re in the supermarket perusing the bread isle.

https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-to-get-your-product-noticed-b7ff6d1c7dd6

['Elliot Leibu']

2019-06-08 12:00:03.916000+00:00

['Sales', 'Marketing', 'Production Adoption', 'Online', 'Entrepreneurship']

How to Figure Out What You Should Do as an Entrepreneur

I’ve always been a writer. More specifically, a blogger. While maintaining an award winning travel blog for ten years, I thought I might be able to replicate that sense of community and notoriety around a personal blog as well. But it only took me one year to realize I couldn’t replicate it through a personal blog because it’s just too personal. I abandoned the idea in exchange for writing on a platform that already had it’s own community — this platform. It’s like a vacation home here, all I had to do was show up with my suitcase and move in. While on “vacation” I never let go of my two blog properties. I’ve kept the travel one alive online because it’s still a valuable resource for thousands of readers. And I kept the personal web space because it’s a great custom domain name for me as a writer, even if it’s just been sitting around collecting dust for a couple of years. Recently, I revisited the dust and tumbleweeds of my writer web space, trying to come up with ideas to revamp it. Having abandoned it long ago, I never gave up on the idea that one day it might have a new purpose, a business purpose. After spending more than a year marinating in ideas about exactly who I would like to be as a writer, I have finally figured it out. All I had to do was look at my lonely web page — a spectacular photo of myself overlooking a never ending vista of the Caribbean sea. The idea of who I used to be and who I could be, came flooding into my mind. Go with what you know It’s crazy that it took more than a year to figure this one out. It really is as simple as “go with what you know.” The challenge lies in figuring out what you do know well enough to build a business around. Each of us knows how to do something that no one else knows as intrinsically as we do. Once you identify that particular chunk of knowledge, you can begin the task of dissecting it into bite-sized, deliverable pieces. In my case, abandoning my blogging career for a long time was the only way to decipher what my saleable knowledge actually was. Not only was I a travel writer for a long, long time, I now have the elemental skills needed to build effective communities around the trade. I have fundamental expertise in how to execute the craft. And I have inside information gained solely from my own trial and error. Nobody else knows what I know because no one experienced it the way I did. My knowledge is so much more than those just starting out on the same path. I learned what I didn’t want It’s funny how you can figure out what you don’t want by doing what you thought you wanted. Throughout my career I adored the writing and traveling aspects, but as my reputation morphed into its own beast I realized that I did not want to be everyone’s ticket to free advice. It’s overwhelming, as I previously wrote in this piece. I could have never figured out that I didn’t want the influencer life unless I had lived through it. This is one aspect of writing that newbies starting out may not consider, which is another teachable component. Each little stumbling block from the past turns into a foundation to build on for the future. No matter what piece of knowledge you have acquired in your area of expertise, it is something that not everyone is privy to. The people will show you what they want Perhaps the most interesting aspect of letting go were my observations after the fact. If you were any good at what you used to do, the people will keep letting you know. Having left my web space intact, I have and still do receive regular emails from those who stumble onto my site. They still ask questions, they still want answers. I call it research, only I don’t have to actively do it because they’re serving it up to me on a silver platter. Are you catching on yet? I’ve been taking notes. Lots and lots of notes. This is a buildable tool and another teachable component. I learned what I actually wanted This is perhaps the most important slice of the pie. After retiring from what I thought I loved doing, and letting it turn to dust and tumbleweeds, there was a gaping hole in my life that had always been filled by “doing.” I came to a point where I had a bit of regret. I wished I’d known everything I now know, when I started out so many years ago. I wished I’d had systems in place from the start because it would have made the journey so much more practical and fruitful. As I have learned, there’s no way to figure anything out until you put in the time doing it. It is only in doing that you begin to see patterns and figure out ways to streamline your work. Another key point I learned was that I did want the travel part of my job, but I did not want the commitment part. In the last few years of my career I found myself resenting the obligation aspects of my work, because that took the pleasure out of the enjoyable parts. When this happens in any job, it’s a clear sign that it’s time to move on. What do you do after you’ve decided to move on? The answer is simple. You fill the gaping hole of “not doing” by changing gears. You gather the pieces you loved most about your past work and build them into a complete new structure to move forward with. Letting go of the old and latching on to the new and improved is something that can only be achieved through time and distance away from it. When you leave any career, the whole thing doesn’t have to go down the tube. By allowing yourself the space and time away from it, you’re eventually able to realize what you loved most about it and why. And that? It’s the sweet spot we should be aiming for when considering any new business venture.

https://medium.com/narrative/how-to-figure-out-what-you-should-do-as-an-entrepreneur-bf7a690ac8f0

['Kristi Keller']

2020-02-04 16:56:07.741000+00:00

['This Happened To Me', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Career Advice', 'Work', 'Writing']

Are You Wasting Your Life?

Short Life Lessons: Are You Wasting Your Life? We spend most of our time working in dead-end jobs and numb ourselves in front of screens when we are home. Are we wasting our lives? Made with Canva My father once told me an anecdote that stuck with me ever since: Two friends went out for a walk to the local graveyard. During their walk, they passed dozens of tombstones. One of the friends noticed the numbers on the tombstones and asked the other: “What’s going on with these numbers? They don’t add up!” He points at the tombstone next to him. “It says 1902 to1975. And below it says, he lived 8 years.” Then he points at another tombstone. “ There it says, 1933–1990, but the note says that she lived only 5 years.” The other friend replied: “Ah, yes. The note below determines the number of years this person really lived his or her life to the fullest.” The first friend started laughing and told the other: “When I die … please write on my tombstone: Born Dead.” We all laughed at this joke back then, but I still think about this story all the time. Especially whenever I waste time with senseless things. Whenever I binge-watch another season of another show on Netflix, I think of this story. Whenever I do a stupid and senseless job, I think of this story. Whenever I play another hour of another stupid mobile game, I think of this story. Whenever I do anything really, I think to myself: “Does this add value to my life? Does this add numbers to my tombstone? Does this thing have a purpose? Am I going anywhere with it? Can I get it to the bank and cash out (figuratively and literally)?” I admit this creates a sense of stress sometimes. I am not able to chill out and enjoy my free time after work at times. I often feel like I have to be more productive. I feel like I have to create more, experience more, achieve more, and move my life-count further up before I go to bed again and the whole cycle repeats itself the next day. But when I finally do something valuable, it feels just so much more satisfying. However, I frequently watch some of my friends, who still have the same soul-destroying jobs, still live with their parents, still play the same games and they just seem to stay frozen in time in general. They seem to be stuck in the comfort of their own lives, immune or unwilling to change. For me, this sounds like pure horror but I can’t quite tell if they are happy or unhappy with their lives. They seem more chilled out than me at least. Are they moving their life-counter up by doing another stupid quest in World of Warcraft? I really can’t say. But I guess everyone has to decide for themselves what makes their counter go up. “Does this add value to my life? Does this add numbers to my tombstone? Does this thing have purpose? Am I going anywhere with it? Can I get it to the bank and cash out (figuratively and literally)?” Are you already adding numbers to your counter or are you still just wasting time? Think about what number would be written on your tombstone! Tell me in the comments. What are your guilty pleasures when it comes to wasting time? I guarantee you will think about this story the next time you watch another episode of “Dancing Stars.”

https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/are-you-wasting-your-life-effe345a6748

[]

2020-11-02 18:02:36.617000+00:00

['Personal Growth', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Success']

Cultivating Attention in the Classroom

Cultivating Attention in the Classroom A review of James Lang’s *Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It* When you were in high school, how much did you see people disciplined for being distracted in class? One of my teachers used to (by his own admission) throws a chalkboard eraser at distracted students in the back of the room. You could see the eraser marks on the back wall sometimes. You might notice by the “chalkboard eraser” reference: this was pre-iPhone days. Are classroom distractions a new thing? While distractions have proved easier to come by since 2007 (the year the iPhone came out and my senior year of high school), to say that pre-2007 students weren’t similarly distracted in class is almost laughable. I didn’t have a smartphone until after I graduated from college, but I was still frequently distracted in class. When the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to seems unworthy of your attention, the brain finds other things to do. Smartphones have diverted that attention mostly to one place for a majority of people, but take away student phones and I promise you they would find other distractions on which to shift their attention. That is why it was so refreshing to read James Lang’s new book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. Lang is clear that distraction is a natural state of the human brain, but is not simply defeatist. It’s right there in the title: what you can do about it. So what is the answer? Lang writes: (We) need to turn our heads away from distraction and toward attention. Our challenge is not to wall off distractions; our challenge is to cultivate attention, and help students use it in the service of meaningful learning. So how do teachers cultivate attention in the classroom? That is what Lang explores for the rest of the book. From student buy-in on device policies to the teacher circulating the room or strategically placing oneself at the back of the room, Lang gives some simple advice that is commonly given in good teaching training. However, some of his advice is less simple and more philosophical, shifting the paradigm of your entire classroom and your relationship to your students. One of Lang’s more philosophical ideas that will shift how I teach: transparent talk. He suggests letting students in on not only the “how” but the “why” behind everything you do. Proactively explaining why each building block of learning in the classroom is important will keep students’ attention when you might otherwise lose them. Lang gives examples: • “Today I am lecturing because this material is incredibly complex and I’d like to boil it down to a few essentials for you. You’re very welcome to follow along or take notes on your laptop; you’ll find the slides in the course web pages.” • “We’re going to spend the last fifteen minutes of class thinking and talking about why we should still read poems like this one: Why do they still matter to us today, two hundred years after they were composed? You don’t need to take notes for the next part of class, so I want devices closed, so we can give our full attention to one another.” • “We use groups in this context because I want to help you connect with the peers you’ll be working with on your final projects. You don’t need your devices here; I want you to focus on working with each other, and you will only need one person to record your work on the whiteboards around the room. Afterward you can take pictures of the board if you want to preserve the ideas for yourself.” Such transparent talk articulates whether they will need their devices, but that’s really a side issue. More importantly, it clarifies the purposes of all of our work. It makes the classroom more like a communal learning experience than like a magician performing for his mystified audience. This will shift and already has shifted my entire teaching strategy in large and small ways, especially as I am teaching virtually and in-person at the same time right now. Ensuring that students understand the learning objective for the day is one thing. It can often be like someone saying “Here, this is what we’re going to learn today” and then 45 minutes later you come back and say “Hey, remember this? Look, we actually learned it!” and students are to be shocked and awed. Deconstructing every step and making it clear why that step is so important, that process is something that so many teachers miss but will help students immensely in staying attentive. Why? Because they understand the immediate purpose. As Lang says, learning isn’t a magic trick anymore. It’s something that each student has control over by focusing his or her attention on a specific purpose. Other principles of Lang’s that were especially helpful include employing 1) student curiosity and 2) what Lang calls “signature attention activities”. Curiosity is another aspect teachers often miss because we assume that students should be interested in our material because it’s interesting to us or because they should know it’s important. (Then we get frustrated when they say things like “We talk about China SO much. Why do we have to learn about China?” Or is that just me?) But Lang conveys a sort of manifesto in his chapter on cultivating curiosity in the classroom, urging teachers to think about what questions first interested them in their chosen field. For me, I started college with a curiosity about what the rest of the world is like, what makes people different, and how your past or your nation’s past affects who you are today. Is it surprising, then, that I am teaching world history and psychology? If I share this curiosity with my students on the first day rather than bore them with specifics about the syllabus, how much more likely is it that they will be interested in the content? So, what is it for you? What first made you interested in your chosen content area? And how can you translate that to students? While curiosity is important in cultivating student attention, sustaining that attention takes work. Lang shares some surprising research on student attention that essentially shows attention flagging every few minutes and sometimes more often than that, so Lang argues that teachers should be keenly aware of when attention is flagging and be ready with a quick change of pace. That doesn’t mean it has to be something big or even something that takes more than a minute, but teachers should have “signature attention activities” in the back pocket such as an engaging question you can tailor to the day’s lesson easily, or an image that relates to the content in some way that students can analyze. These activities and many more don’t take very long and don’t take a lot of planning, but they can have tremendous effects on student attention. Lang gives a lot more examples of these types of activities in Distracted. Since Distracted was mostly written pre-pandemic, there is a lot of specific advice in Lang’s book that won’t work under COVID restrictions. (For example, I can’t circulate the room right now even for those few students who are in-person.) However, the vast majority of the book is full of advice that can be implemented in big and small ways no matter where you are or what you are teaching. It is honestly the most applicable book on the art of teaching that I have read since good old Harry Wong’s The First Days of School. So if you are a teacher, especially one interested in educational psychology or how to cultivate attention, please read Distracted. Our students will be better for it. I received a review copy of Distracted courtesy of Basic Books and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

https://medium.com/park-recommendations/cultivating-attention-in-the-classroom-c78364235fae

['Jason Park']

2020-10-20 12:48:40.991000+00:00

['Education', 'Books', 'Reading', 'Psychology', 'Teaching']

The Science of How Things Backfire

The Science of How Things Backfire Or, Why Would Anything Ever Go Right? Urizen shows his book of laws. Image: William Blake Archive When human endeavors so often go wrongly, we blame people for making bad decisions, whether from a moral, or political, or scientific point of view. This only raises our emotional temperature without fixing problems or heading off future catastrophes. However, there are recent theories that explain that many failures stem from general dynamical patterns. Let’s look at two of these patterns. They might someday be part of a science of how to get things done, a kind of moral philosophy of the practical. How the Deck Is Stacked First, let’s consider what we’re up against. As in, what are the given background conditions for any human project, the constraints that we simply have to accommodate? Murphy. The first is commonly called Murphy’s Law: what can go wrong will go wrong. This is really the second law of thermodynamics. It says there are many ways for disorder to increase and very few for it to decrease. We ourselves are temporary thrusts against the gradient of disorder. Things we do to provide ourselves a safe environment are therefore also temporary. This can happen at a low level of abstraction, as when things that we make wear themselves out, when our food rots, our bodies degrade, or when weather tears up our habitations. But it also applies at a higher level of abstraction. Case in point being software. It is hard-to-impossible to make a useful program that does not have ways to fail. Likewise, our social and cultural arrangements are subject to decay. Unintention. Economists speak about a “law” of unintended consequences. We do something to solve a problem, but as a result, some other problem arises, something that we could not or did not predict. Examples are innumerable, but for now, remember that every drug has unwanted (so-called) “side” effects. The underlying core principle of unintended consequences is the familiar chaos theory, the butterfly wing effect. Human Nature. The third thing we are stuck with is human nature, a conglomeration that includes some real downers. We have sociopaths. We have tribalism. Selfishness and free-riders cause problems directly and indirectly by causing trust issues. We find it hard to agree on basic facts because we are ruled by unconscious cognitive biases. One bias (that I have covered elsewhere) happens when we try to understand others’ motivations, a process called Theory of Mind. We over-generalize this, thus attributing agency to parts of nature that don’t have it. We then manufacture belief in supernatural forces whose whims we need to appease. The resulting behavior may be benign (nature worship), or harmless (folk tales), or horribly wrong (crusades, crucifixions, cleansings). Another major “human nature” issue is in the scope of how many other people that a person cares about. This sets up conflicts between those who care only about family or tribe versus those who also care about larger groups or even humanity as a whole. So, we exist in a background of threats from: entropy, inability to foresee the consequences of our actions, and everyone’s often unconscious cognitive biases. There are also higher principles involved, dynamics that lead good intentions astray. Moloch, AKA the Multipolar Trap Moloch: by John Singer Sargent @ Boston Public Library An anonymous blogger, pseudonym-ed Scott Alexander, gave us a catchy name for the most destructive dynamic in the world. Moloch was an ancient Carthaginian god of human sacrifice. In Allen Ginsburg’s famous poem, Howl, Moloch was identified with all the myriad horrors and miseries of civilization. Alexander, impressed by the analogy, used Moloch as the nickname for what he termed multipolar traps. These are situations that can arise whenever multiple parties are pursuing some valuable goal, G. Nearly always the end in itself or some resource leading to it will be in short supply, and thus competition will arise. The bad dynamic occurs when someone decides to sacrifice some other value, V, in order to get ahead. Any other parties will be out-competed unless they also sacrifice V. Soon everyone who survives the competition will find themselves without V and possibly have less of the original goal G. There can instead emerge a monopoly or oligopoly when one player or a few players sacrifice enough V’s to get all the G. The Two-Income Multipolar Trap The more interesting cases are those where there are many players. Consider the story documented in Elizabeth Warren’s 2004 book, The Two-Income Trap. Suppose the Goal is to live in a safe neighborhood with good schools. The game players are families raising children. To buy a home in an expensive school district, both parents have to work. The Values sacrificed include time with children, cultural opportunity and diversity, as well as the money that is used for child care, higher taxes (because higher joint income), mortgage increases, a second car, convenience foods, and tranquilizers. Also sacrificed are the aspirations of people who can’t get good enough jobs to compete. These folks are not even in the original game; they are collateral damage. Meanwhile, the price of desirable houses goes up and up, taking the Goal out of reach for many. Without anyone making a decision to do so, other values are sacrificed as household stress, debt, divorce, and bankruptcy increase. Of course, as we know, it went further than that. Even back then Warren mentioned subprime mortgages as a dangerous development. Libertarian, greed-is-good schemes are Moloch’s favorite food. Now, in the continuing aftermath of the last crash, it’s Jurassic Park for the middle class, bunkers for the rich, and fascism for the rest. Moloch, indeed. So the first Failure (note capital F) dynamic is Moloch of the Multipolar Traps. ‘Multipolar’ because it is a competition of multiple parties. ‘Traps’ because once you are in the downward spiral, you are stuck until something gives, some limit is reached. In our two-income example, perhaps the limit is a pandemic with widespread unemployment, or… pick your own favorite show-stopper. Surrogation Traps The story above, of course, has a lot more going on than a multipolar trap. It has the basic background conditions mentioned earlier, and several doses of our second major type of Failure dynamic. That dynamic has several technical names from game theory, economics and even from artificial intelligence theory. But the name I like is a new-ish one, Surrogation. It simply means the substitution of a surrogate goal for an actual goal. It sounds innocent enough. However, there are plenty of times when we get together and agree on totally admirable goals, and it still ends in tears. Take a moment and remember the Phrygian king King Midas. Dionysus offered Midas anything he wanted as payment for a favor. What he wanted was riches, but his surrogate for that (“let everything that I touch turn to gold”), awarded literally by Dionysus, was a curse. Surrogation is the basis of legal systems. A prescriptive law is said to have a spirit (its goal), which is to encourage some better state of affairs or to eliminate some problem. On the other hand, the letter of the law (its surrogate) specifies rules for bringing the spirit to fruition. Rules for shaping human behavior are often tricky, and so laws are imperfect. William Blake’s mythical being, Urizen (”your reason”), tried to constrain the universe by creating laws but made chaos and misery instead. We engage in projects whose ideal outcome might be easily stated and agreed upon, but whose execution has to be guided by a substitute. The surrogate is that which can be measured, or tracked, or is simply feasible for the situation. Effort can only be applied to the surrogate, not to the actual goal. Wise observers tell us that an enterprise based on surrogation very often misses its mark. The ill effect of surrogation is so reliable that there’s a version known as Goodhart’s Law. Economist Charles Goodhart said: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. So we can design a project (private or public, it doesn’t matter), and say (oh, so smugly) that we’ll know we’re getting there because we will measure X, Y, and Z. The measures are chosen because they make sense, they logically connect somehow with our project’s true goal. Often they are measures of the direct effects of particular policies that we think will help lead us towards our real goal. Perhaps in the past, they even occurred at times when we seemed closer to achieving the goal. So, we’re set, all happy because we have a good goal and good measures to lead us to it. We change our policies to set the project in motion and sit back to watch our success. In what way could anything go wrong? Let us count the ways, as explained by Scott Garrabrant, one of those people who tries to imagine how we might get super AIs to behave admirably. (1) Goal Drift. People who have incentives to do things that change the Surrogate measures start to think of the Surogate as an end in itself. The Surrogate mentally becomes the new Goal. But optimizing for the Surrogate does not optimize for the Goal. (2) Causal Disconnect. The Surrogate and the Goal have been correlated in the past because they both are affected by other causes. But changing the Surrogate has no causal effect on the Goal at all. Or maybe you failed to realize that the Goal actually causes changes in the Surrogate, but not vice versa. You can’t make yourself taller by practicing basketball skills. Sometimes the project itself changes the causal effect. We decide to place a wind farm in an area where there is a lot of wind. We calculate how many windmills to use and what our power output (the Goal) should be. But the presence of many windmills in an area actually decreases the Surrogate measure, wind speed. (3) Statistical Regression. The correlation of the Surrogate with the Goal is causal, but imperfect, because random other unknown causes are involved. When your actions increase the Surrogate measure, there might be no corresponding effect on the Goal. Sometimes you look at multiple Surrogate measures and pick the one that correlates best with the Goal. But (says basic statistical theory) that correlation, because it is high, is most likely to be high due partly to random factors. So when you start to use the Surrogate, its actual correlation with the Goal becomes less, i.e., it “regresses towards the mean”. Height is correlated with basketball ability, but unless you are the coach in a tiny town, you don’t just pick players based on height. (4) Gaming. Perhaps the most powerful way that Surrogates fail to lead to Goals is also the one that is easiest to understand. People are getting rewarded for changing the value of the Surrogate. So, they find the easiest way to do that, which might have no effect on the Goal, or may even work against it. Here are some classic real examples of surrogate gaming. Many more can be found in attempts to regulate the financial industry. The Cobra Effect. Offer a bounty in India for dead cobras, and people start raising cobras to turn in for the bounty. When the government wises up, the unused cobras get released, increasing the population that everyone wanted to decrease. Central Planning Confounded. Soviet factories that are rewarded for the Surrogate, number of nails, produce a lot of tiny useless nails. Moloch Eats College Loans I was tempted to write the TL;DR about college loans, which involves interlocking hierarchies of surrogation and the two levels of multipolar traps. Instead, readers can try to puzzle that out for themselves. The top-level goals are American national competitiveness in a knowledge economy, and rewarding careers for individuals. The surrogate policy was to have government guarantees of student loans, making them easy to obtain. The unintended results were rampant college cost inflation, the rise of fraudulent educational enterprises (even a disreputable real estate developer could start one), staggering student debt, adjunct professors living out of their cars, and higher unemployment for graduates. There’s probably also a multipolar/surrogate story for the U.S.’s absurdly expensive health care, or any <unfavorable adjective> <tragic societal circumstance>. Can We Do Better Than Muddling Through? We need people to understand that there are dynamics to how things go wrong. Partly that is a problem of education. Most people prefer simple slogans to complicated (’blah blah, blah blah blah’) explanations. Another barrier is the pervasive, eternal multipolar and surrogate trap of power politics, which also is subject to the corrosive influence of sociopaths and narcissists. In fact, power politics might be a selective pressure for the elevation of bad characters. What we need from political and business leadership is not competitive gamesmanship. They should help develop and then make use of a science of the possible; to use factual evidence, obtained by transparent processes; to acknowledge traps and weigh trade-offs, crafting better incentives, and making clear priorities. We desperately need to realize that there are too many of us, interdependent and chewing up planetary resources that took enormous, deep time to create. We are stuck in the biggest multipolar trap of them all, our own tar pit of hubris, myopia, and fear. And half the United States’ electorate still denies all of this.

https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/the-science-of-how-things-backfire-e9c6a9d2560e

['Ted Wade']

2020-11-14 18:17:43.389000+00:00

['Philosophy', 'Science', 'Psychology', 'Economics', 'Politics']

A Visual Approach to Scientific Communication

Process On the technical side, my workflow can be broken down into four main components—narrative building, scene construction (in Illustrator), animation (in After Effects), packaging (in PowerPoint). A brief summary of each follows:

https://medium.com/hh-design/a-visual-approach-to-scientific-communication-68c868b69d6b

['Chen Ye']

2016-01-04 06:45:21.938000+00:00

['Biology', 'Visualization', 'Design']

How to upload my own notebook to Kaggle

Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google LLC, is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. Kaggle allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges. This article let we know how to uploads our own notebook and dataset on Kaggle. There are some basic steps that all are given below with screenshot representation. Step 1:- Login your account Step 2:- Click on “Notebooks” Step 3:- Click on “New Notebook” Step 4:- Click on “Create” after selecting the relevant options Step 5:- Click on “File”, below the title of the notebook Step 6:- Click on “Upload Notebook” The notebook has been uploaded. If you want, you can save your notebook without data set otherwise you can upload the data set that is related to this Notebook. Step 7:- Click on “Add data” Step 8:- Click on “Upload a Dataset” Step 9:- Click on “Select Files to Upload” Step 10:- Click on “Skip duplicate” This is the success popup of the dataset that has been uploaded. Step 11:- Click on “Save Version” Save the notebook version with details. Adding collaborators is easy: just go to the Options page and search for another user by name. You can even choose who gets View or Edit permissions using the dropdown.

https://rajputankit22.medium.com/how-to-upload-my-own-notebook-to-kaggle-2b0dedbb5a6b

['Ankit Kumar Rajpoot']

2020-06-07 16:47:13.314000+00:00

['Python', 'Dataset', 'Kaggle', 'Notebook']

Why I’m leaving Silicon Valley

Here’s something I never thought I’d say: this is my last week in Silicon Valley. This post is a personal one. Rather than sharing insights on Blockchain or Javascript, I’d like to walk through my inner journey the past few years. It’s a journey that’s left me itching for change — and driving down to Los Angeles to set up a new home base is a big one! How I landed in Silicon Valley I moved to Silicon Valley during the summer of 2012, a little over five years ago. I had just graduated college and serendipitously landed here because of a new job offer. I was eager and anxious to start my career out here and frankly had no idea what to expect. As it turned out, I lucked out — Silicon Valley is one of the best places in the world for entrepreneurs, engineers, and anyone bold enough to try and change the world through technology. …This was a stark contrast to life in my New Jersey hometown, where most people went to the community college, pursued 9-to-5 jobs, and settled into comfortable lives by their mid-20s. There was very little space there for thinking big, or taking risks, or creating your own career path. So, landing in San Francisco was the best kind of culture shock imaginable. Suddenly, I was surrounded by technology and innovation and immersed in a community where challenging yourself was actually encouraged. The next three years of living in San Francisco had a path-altering impact on my life, as I began to learn that crazy ideas aren’t “crazy” for those of us willing to put in the work and take a few risks. First challenge: Goldman Sachs That first post-college job was as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, where I was able to learn how tech company financials work at a fundamental level through working with CEOs and CFOs preparing for IPO rounds and acquisitions. This was hugely beneficial when I later moved on to working with some of those tech companies directly, and planted the seeds of my interest in solving problems with software. After a year at Goldman Sachs, however, I realized that a career in banking was not what I wanted long term. I wanted to go back to being an engineer as I had been in college. So I decided to go against the grain and say goodbye to a “successful” position. Where was I off to next? Second challenge: Andreessen Horowitz Well, I was on the brink of leaving to join as a systems engineer for a small industrial startup in the middle of the country. But after a random cold email followed by a long series of unexpected events, I got an offer to join Andreessen Horowitz on the deal team. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up — and thank God I didn’t. I spent the next two years at Andreessen Horowitz, where I worked with and learned from the pioneers of the web, like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Chris Dixon, and many others. I saw thousands of companies come through the doors — I saw their ideas, their teams, their challenges and their strengths. I learned the ins and outs of building a successful technology startup, and on the flip side, learned the common mistakes that lead to failure. Most importantly, I met incredible entrepreneurs who inspired me to also become like them one day. Third challenge: returning to engineering When I left a16z, I made the transition to software engineering. I was young and wanted to go out and just build stuff for the world. You could say that I had “entrepreneur envy” — I was eager to build products day to day, and eventually start my own company. I’ve written about my experience extensively in the past. This transition was nothing short of amazing. I was learning and growing at a break-neck pace. I was passionate and excited by my work. Frankly, I was having so much fun being an engineer that not a single day felt like “work”. But beyond just loving my work, I also felt empowered. Empowered to do things I never thought were possible before. Because being an engineer gave me freedom. Freedom to build anything I want, whenever I want and wherever I want. The freedom to learn how everything works at a fundamental level. The freedom to teach and empower new developers. And most importantly, the freedom to be a creator and literally, create something from nothing. When things started to feel different It was only after I left Andreessen Horowitz to return to an engineering track that my feelings about life in Silicon Valley started to change. Thanks to the freedoms of the developer lifestyle, I started to travel more and meet engineers from all around the world — Paris, London, India, Vienna, Australia, Berlin, Tel Aviv, South Africa, Argentina, South Korea — and I started to see that Silicon Valley wasn’t the only place where world-changing engineering, technology, and innovation was happening. What I once thought was only something I could find in Silicon Valley, was starting to appear in every city I visited. Early seeds of technology and innovation were being planted in places like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Berlin, Tel Aviv, India, Switzerland and even South Africa. This isn’t exactly a surprise, since one of the Internet’s core functions is to make access to knowledge available everywhere. I personally taught myself almost everything I know about programming on the internet (outside some fundamentals from Hack Reactor), for free. And I’m just one of thousands of learners using the Internet to access information that used to be limited to elite colleges like Stanford, Berkeley, or MIT. These days, techies aren’t limited to Silicon Valley if they want to find funding and a community. Many other cities with active and relevant tech scenes have their own unique cultures, art, cuisines, and activities to offer. The group think issue in Silicon Valley Despite it being the center of tech and innovation for decades, I’m not the only engineer to notice a degree of homogeny in Silicon Valley culture lately. What made it homogenous was that everyone seemed to have a similar story — whether they were software engineers, product managers, venture capitalists or entrepreneurs. The career paths and goals may have been different from what my home town in New Jersey offered… but within the Valley, you’d hear the same stories over and over. Every coffee shop I went to or restaurant I ate at, I’d overhear people talking about their $20M rounds, $200M exits or their 200% YoY growth. What was once a beautiful thing — the like-mindedness — was no longer beautiful to me. I started to notice a lot of similar thinking — group think as they call it. Silicon Valley is paradoxically a predictable place founded on the idea of being unpredictable. My first Silicon Valley lesson: say “yes” to your desires and create your own path This isn’t to say Silicon Valley hasn’t taught me anything important. It’s been a perfect place to learn to take risks. A place to learn the value of creating your own path, and to prove to myself that I can do it. While living here, I’ve made a deliberate effort to say yes to my dreams. I wanted the freedom to build anything I want, and I earned that. I wanted to learn and grow as quickly as possible, and I’ve proven that. I wanted to meet people from around the world and learn from them, and I got that. I wanted to find my purpose instead of following a “successful” path, and I did that. Most importantly, I wanted to pave a path that is unique to me, and I’m doing exactly that. I’m only a couple years into it, and the future feels unlimited. Looking back, when I left Andreessen Horowitz to pursue this path, I set out a three-part roadmap for myself: Figure out what I like developing the most. Get really good at it. Use those skills to have a positive impact on the world. I spent the past two years learning many different areas of programming (e.g. web development, mobile development, distributed systems, etc.) and various application areas (e.g. machine learning, blockchain, etc.). I purposely stayed broad and exposed myself to as much as possible, and learned to code things that interested me most. Eventually, I fell in love with blockchain development. My fascination with blockchains started when we first made the investment in Coinbase at a16z, and ever since, I’ve been keeping up with the technology and eventually joined Coinbase as a software engineer, which helped me further dive deeper into the space. After Coinbase, I continued to tinker and teach myself various aspects of blockchain, and now I’m at phase two, where I’m focusing on getting really good at it. The next step is to use my skills to “build a world-changing company or something else entirely”. Leading the path I want to lead doesn’t require me to be in Silicon valley anymore. I don’t need to be here to follow my personal roadmap. Having the freedom of an engineer to learn and grow as an entrepreneur, writer, and speaker has opened me up to a whole new world. It made me realize that I can be an engineer, entrepreneur, writer and speaker from anywhere in the world. “If you set goals and go after them with all the determination you can muster, your gifts will take you places that will amaze you.” — Les Brown My second Silicon Valley lesson: You don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to change the world The world is becoming increasingly global. Silicon Valley is just one way of living. One way of thinking. One way of viewing the world. But there’s so many other ways. Because after all, technology is global, engineering is global, innovation is global and entrepreneurship is global. It’s evident by the fact that we now see countries like India and China leap frog generations of western technology and even inventing their own ways — take mPesa in Kenya, Paytm in India, or WeChat in China. Moreover, it’s become easier than ever to connect with anyone thousands of miles away. Being physically present is no longer a requirement. I can code from South Africa and still ship a product to someone in Silicon Valley. Beyond this, what really nudged me was when I realized that the blockchain revolution is global. I’ve spent the past year doing research and development in blockchain technologies, and noticed that many cities outside of the valley, like New York, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Bangkok, are making immense strides in pushing blockchains forward. Many well known projects and efforts to bring blockchain to the masses are being started from places outside of Silicon Valley. For once, I noticed that Silicon Valley isn’t the center of it. So then a crazy idea came to my head. Can I leave Silicon Valley and still pursue my dreams? Can I still build a massive and world-changing company? Can I still make a big impact in this world? The answer to that increasingly became a clear yes. Of course, there’s a strong argument for staying in Silicon Valley. After all, this place has a massive network of entrepreneurs and people who “get it”. This place knows how to breed amazing startups. Moreover, I’ve personally built up a great network in Silicon Valley over the past five years. I could easily stay and lead a very successful life here, financially at least. But frankly, I don’t want to. That feels a bit too easy. I’m young, passionate, and driven — I can’t let inertia, familiarity, comfort or money hold me back from going on to to doing bigger and harder things. I’m going to challenge myself. I’m going to fight for my goals. To work day and night for them. And money isn’t going to get me any of these things. Money has never been my main motivator. I left Goldman Sachs before my first-year bonus because I was too eager to sit back for two months hating my life, instead of starting my new career at a16z. Then I left an amazing career at a16z to go become a developer. Challenge and impact are what gets me out of bed in the morning. I have this burning desire to do even more, see more and experience more, outside of Silicon Valley. When the opportunity exists to experience a whole new city and still do what I love, why not just go out there and try? Why not try to expose myself to ideas in a place where the opportunities are wide open? Why not meet other types of people, learn other skills, and live on the edge a little? Here I am: ready to do exactly that! Onwards to the next city Perhaps my feeling and frustrations towards Silicon Valley and San Francisco are merely a fact of being here for too long. Perhaps they’re just from me needing a change. Perhaps they’re just from finding my true calling as an engineer, builder, writer and entrepreneur and realizing that I can do that from anywhere. I’m ready to pick up my bags and embark onto the next adventure in Los Angeles. Am I scared? Hell yeah I’m scared. I know practically no one in Los Angeles except for a few college friends who I haven’t spoken to in years. While on one hand, this sounds scary, on the other hand, I’ll admit that I’m beyond ecstatic to get out there and build up my network from ground up, just like I have done for the past five years in Silicon Valley. And the best part is, I can always come back here — for a day, a week or a month. Silicon Valley is where my entire network is, and they aren’t going anywhere. If I come back a year, or two years, or even five years from now, most of them will still be here. Why Los Angeles

https://preethikasireddy.medium.com/why-im-leaving-silicon-valley-72919edb3297

['Preethi Kasireddy']

2020-12-12 00:06:48.187000+00:00

['Startup', 'Silicon Valley', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency']

Leave Stress Behind Home is for Relaxation

Leave Stress Behind Home is for Relaxation Three tips on how you can relax while at home. Going home should be a calming time, but the simple truth is that you’re most likely going to get more stressed out when you finally arrive. Dishes to do, a home to clean, kids to worry about, and a spouse that may just want to sit with you. It’s hard to do everything and it is not always a fun thing to do, going home, but we can relax a little while we are doing everything. Listen to something. If you ever find yourself doing a task that doesn’t require your full attention you should be listening to something. Dishes, laundry, cleaning, or anything of this nature requires only a little percent of your attention span. Don’t waste that time, instead destress your mind and travel to another world. Put on a book, a song, or something that will challenge your mind to think of something new instead of just, “does this shirt needing ironing?” It’s called parent time. Ok this idea is one that can work if done right. Here’s how it works you tell you kids that they have 30 mins to do something, they can’t talk to you about it, and have to focus on getting it done for 30 mins. If you are able to get it to work you train your child to be productive and learn to focus, and you get 30 minutes of peace. Otherwise, put on an educational app and say play, you have about 22–32 minutes before they get bored or have a question. Don’t bring work home with you. This is a tough idea for a lot of people to understand. Work happens when you are at work, and just because you have your work on the go now does not mean you need to get it done at home. If you can’t get what you need to get done at work either you aren’t being productive and selective with your time, you have to much work being given to you, or you need to ask for a raise. That being said though find ways to block out your time, and remember that work should not intrude on your life. Turn your home office into a gym, into a play room for the kids, or a home theater, and don’t spend all your free time at home doing your work. Okay, these things are obviously a little easier said than done, but if you devote some time to not taking your work home with you, to teaching your kids to focus, and invest in your well being than you are going to live a much less stressed out life.

https://medium.com/thrive-global/leave-stress-behind-home-is-for-relaxation-4986ff43d3a4

['Saliba Faddoul']

2019-04-10 21:38:51.273000+00:00

['Wellbeing', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Wellness', 'Lifestyle']

7 Golden Rules for Not Taking Things Too Personally

Do you take things personally? Of course you do — we all do. It’s almost impossible to float through life immune to the judgments of others, unless you interact with no-one, ever. But the difficulty comes when we take things too personally, when we let the opinions of others pierce our emotional skins, superficially or right to the core of who we are. But here’s the thing. No matter who we are, or what we do, we’ll be judged. The more we try, the more risks we take, the louder we sing, the more crap we’ll get. And, even if we do nothing but lie on the sofa every night with a king-size block of chocolate, we’ll be judged on that too. The point is, we can’t stop the onslaught of others’ opinions about us. It’s futile to try. But we can master the way we deal with them. Here’s how. 7 Golden Rules for Not Taking Things Too Personally “If you are impeccable with your word, if you don’t take anything personally, if you don’t make assumptions, if you always do your best, then you are going to have a beautiful life. — Miguel Ruiz Taking things personally just means you’re a person with a healthy emotional radar. You Feel Stuff, which is a good thing. So you don’t need to develop a “thick skin”. But you do have to understand that taking everything personally will put you at the mercy of life’s slings and arrows. It will make you play small. Is that what you really want? Before you take things (deeply) to heart, run this checklist. 1. Do you know who they are? Who has judged/hurt you? Do you even know who they are? The harshest critics are often anonymous voices on social media. Immediately dismiss the criticism of anyone who hides behind a mask, an unfathomable user name or weird avatar. Freedom of speech is important. People should be allowed to have and express opinions. Anonymous constructive comments are okay. Anonymous mean comments are cowardly. Why would you let a coward hiding behind a keyboard hurt you? Why would you allow anyone who doesn’t know you to hurt you? 2. Do they (really) matter to you? So many people are affected by the words, actions, opinions of people who don’t really matter. That mother in the school playground. That friend who left you out who won’t be a friend in the end. That obnoxious guy in the next cubicle at work. That micro-managing boss you will eventually move on from. The toxic ex you never have to see again. Some slick politician you’ll never have to meet. Yes, they’ve hurt or annoyed you but, when you step back and see the big picture, they’re not truly important to you. So keep them in their place; don’t make them bigger than they are. And, if they do matter to you, don’t be too quick to react. Listen — and try to understand their perspective. 3. Are they Going Low? “When they go low, we go high.” — Michelle Obama Michelle Obama popularised this slogan, offering restraint as an antidote to criticism. She later explained it was not about banishing hurt feelings, but about not allowing yourself to stoop to an angry or low level response, to maintain your dignity in the face of challenge. Ignore anyone who judges you based on your looks, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, any points of difference, personality and relationships. That’s none of their business. Smile and think this: if they’re making it personal, they can’t have anything substantial to say. 4. Know this is about them. There is great power in realising the way a person speaks about or acts towards about others is utterly revealing of who they are. In their comments, posts, tweets, behaviour — or acts of meanness — they are telling you about their history, their belief systems, their character, their emotional game, the often narrow way they view the world. They’re standing before you — Naked. Any poisonous judgments they make are a product of who they are. It’s helpful to understand that. It’s helpful to know that’s NOT who you want to be. It’s probably even more helpful to stay away from them. 5. Don’t make assumptions. The number one rule of psychology is “make no assumptions”. When you are upset or angry it’s easy to assume you know what the other person meant. It’s also possible you have it completely wrong. Stay neutral: allow another person’s opinions to be theirs — and theirs alone. You don’t have to do anything with them. 6. Figure out how they can help you. Often the reason we’re hurt by criticism is because it “hits a nerve”, we believe it contains a kernel of truth. Feedback is not always negative. And, even if it is, it can contain things that can help us, particularly around our work. If you’ve had some feedback that’s hard to take, sit with it a while and — when you’re ready — unpack it and see what you can learn. There are always better, or alternative, ways to do things. Stay open to them. 7. Don’t let them limit your life. The great danger in taking things too personally is that you get defensive and it begins to dictate your life. Your critics can keep you in a box, closing your heart and mind to new experiences, to possibility. Don’t let them trap you. Don’t let turn you into a victim. Don’t let them own your life. If you are going to do anything worthwhile at all, the critics will come for you. But they’ll only win if you hand them the power to do so.

https://karennimmo.medium.com/7-golden-rules-for-not-taking-things-too-personally-581efcae02f4

['Karen Nimmo']

2020-11-24 11:07:28.285000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Inspiration']

I used Instagram captions to earn $10,000 a month as a writer

Two years ago, I quit my job at a Fortune 100 company to pursue my passion as a nutritionist. I went back to school to do a master's degree and very quickly went from being a financially stable, got-my-life-together 24-year-old to just another directionless, penniless millennial. I now earn $10,000+ a month as a full-time freelancer writer because of Instagram (no, I’m not Instagram famous). I used Instagram to market myself to work with some of the biggest brands in the health and fitness industry, and here’s how. It all started with a lil vanity. I’ll be totally transparent: This whole journey started with a lil vanity. I went to Thailand just before I quit my job (a classic tale), and I met a photographer. We became friends and she took some pictures of me. Prior to Thailand, I had been painfully insecure in front of a camera, but the Thai air just really brought it out of me (see below). I posted the pictures on Instagram and I started to gain a little baby following. Photo by author I worked hard at the gym and was physically fit, which led to me receiving some messages regarding my workout routine and diet, which to me was wild, why would anyone care, right? But I was an avid gym junkie and prospective nutritionist, plus I had a bachelor’s in science — I knew what I was talking about, so I decided to answer the questions in my Instagram captions. Lesson 1: Add value — By posting free, useful, and well-thought out information on social media — without asking for anything in return or advertising any paid service — you add value in a distinct and trustworthy way. If you start your social media journey with advertising your service BEFORE adding value, how will your audience know that you’re legitimate? Many marketers traditionally add value via customer service, inspirational visual content, blog posts, infographics, video content, etc., but Instagram captions are widely underutilized as a way to effectively add value for writers. In the beginning, no one wants to read your 2,000 word blog post. Prospective clients want snippets of your writing skills, like a quick 300 word Instagram caption. Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash After quitting my job, going back to university, and qualifying as a fitness coach, I continued snapping selfies and posting captions about my fitness and diet hacks. I never had more than around 10,000 followers, and in the grand scheme of Instagram, that is miniscule. However, as per Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans theory, all you really need to be a successful creator is 1,000 true fans. Or, in my case, Instagram followers. I was approached online by a popular boxing gym who explained that they had read my Instagram captions and wondered if I would write a full-length article for them. Of course, I obliged and was paid £25 to write a 500-word article — which to me was awesome because I had been writing 350 words (roughly the limit for Instagram) for free, just for fun.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/i-used-instagram-captions-to-earn-10-000-a-month-as-a-writer-e7ce00bcfd4e

['Emilina Lomas']

2020-10-21 20:30:00.683000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Writing', 'Instagram', 'Social Media']

Designing a chatbot with IBM Watson Assistant

Chatbot, also known as “conversational agent”, is a trending technology. Chatbots are changing the business landscape. Its emergence in the enterprise has several implications that require some thought. Building a bot is not a hard task; with the rise of many platforms, it’s now easier than ever to develop and deploy one. The challenge with chatbots lies in delivering a good user experience, and they only present opportunities if done right. But, designing a conversation that meets consumer needs and returns real business value requires a nuanced strategy and in-depth considerations. The experience you are creating for your clients is paramount. Before moving quickly to development, figure out the problem areas that you, your users, and your employees are struggling with, and if a chatbot is the best fit to meet everyone’s needs. * Deploying chatbots in the enterprise raises a host of potential issues that inevitably affect the deployment of enterprise software, including performance, scalability, and especially security. Enterprise chatbots may require access to user credentials, profile information, and enterprise data to perform useful functions. Any chatbot initiative must comply with enterprise cybersecurity standards. * In this post, we’ll be taking a look at addressing some of these concerns and show how to design a chatbot using IBM Watson Assistant. Figure 1: IBM Watson Assistant meet IBM Enterprise Design Thinking What is exactly a chatbot? In general terms, a chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) conversational agent, which conducts conversations via text or voice commands in a natural language conversation. It communicates and performs basic tasks such as answering questions or placing product orders. Chatbots’ primary purpose is to streamline interactions between people and services through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps, or through the telephone and interactive voice response (IVR). Other options include: Used for service or as a marketing tool for engagement Provide content, facilitate a purchase, or connect with consumers Combine the ability to scale and personalization Provide support Suggest product recommendations Leveraged for conversational marketing campaigns The goal is to have chatbots written in a way to mimic spoken human speech to simulate a conversation with a real person performing any task. Chatbots can learn. Should you feed it a large number of conversation logs, the bot could be trained in a way to understand what type of question needed and what kind of answers to answer. Eventually the bot can be trained enough where you could not tell it is a bot. “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was a human” — Alan Turing These conversational bots are getting smarter. They are less prone to errors based on how they are trained. Hence, they can provide better customer experience and can help establish a better brand. There are tons of services to help you build chatbots, each with varying degrees of control, and these services have also become increasingly sophisticated. Unlike as seen in countless movies with “science fiction” depicted as awkward speech with robotic cadence, chatbots have come a long way! It’s safe to say that chatbots are still growing. Bots are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and are capable of answering customers’ questions much quicker than human agents can. Is chatbot the right solution? Don’t build a conversation for building’s sake. Stall the idea of a conversation agent as a solution before clearly identifying what is it that you’re trying to achieve. First, ask yourself a few of these questions: What is the focus area of the business that needs improvement now? Who are all the users and stakeholders involved in this area, and how are they interacting with each other? What’s not working for them? Why are they struggling? What is the desired business outcome if we can change that? If you already have a chatbot/conversation agent operating today, ask yourself: Are they performing up to expectations? Are they meeting your KPIs? Are users getting helpful answers? Is the conversation designed well to serve the users needs? Also think about potential pitfalls of chatbot: Can bots put people at risk? How are the bots trained and do they contain biased information? Align together towards the vision Once you have a clear business fit for a chatbot, then invite the stakeholders and sponsor users to a design thinking workshop. In this workshop, have the participants go through convergent and divergent activities to understand, explore, and define how chatbot fits into improving user experience. Use activities like Empathy Map and As-Is Scenario to understand the pain points experienced today. Identify areas where a conversational agent can help to improve the experience; look for areas where the user is asking the most questions and are the most confused and frustrated. These areas will be good candidates for where a chatbot can help. Then, prioritize with the team on which of the identified pain points will be the most important and feasible. Using the prioritized pain points as a guide, discuss and identify content, information, questions, and answers that could alleviate the pain points. Identify top priority areas that are the most import to your personas. Dialogue design In this blog, we will use IBM Watson Assistant to design a conversation. The archetypal chatbot consists of 3 specific concepts: intents, entities, dialog, as described in detail below. Let’s design a chatbot for your business and understand what it takes to create a purpose-built one that also delivers a superior conversational experience. Figure 2: A typical approach used when deploying Watson Assistant Intents An intent is a purpose or goal expressed in a customer’s input, such as answering a question or a pressing a bill payment. By recognizing the intent expressed in a customer’s input, the Assistance service chooses the correct dialog flow for responding to it. An intent is a category that defines a user’s goal or purpose or These categories are trained using representative examples Recognizing the intents does not require knowing the specifics of the user request — it is a way to guide the dialog flow in the appropriate direction Entities An entity represents a class of object or a data type that is relevant to a user’s purpose. By recognizing the entities that are mentioned in the user’s input, the Assistance service can choose the specific actions to take to fulfill an intent. It’s also Watson’s way of handling significant parts of an input that should be used to alter the way it responds to the intent. Entities are the subjects of intents Entities are specific values that clarify user intent and trigger fine-tuned actions and responses and trigger fine-tuned actions and responses For each value, you can include a list of synonyms to capture the possible varieties in user expression to capture the possible varieties in user expression Entities represent information in the user input that is relevant to the user’s purpose. System entities System entities are common entities created by IBM that could be used across any use case. They are ready to be used as soon as you add them, such as: @sys-date @sys-time @sys-number Dialog The dialog component of the Assistance service uses the intents and entities that are identified in the user’s input, plus context from the application, to interact with the user and ultimately provide a useful response. The dialog is represented graphically as a tree, so create a branch to process each intent that you define. The dialog node is made of a trigger and a response, where the trigger is the condition Dialog matches intents (what users say) to responses (what the bot says back) Each dialog node contains, at a minimum, a condition and a response The dialog response defines how to reply to the user Figure 3: Depiction of a simple dialog Slots Add slots to a dialog node to gather multiple pieces of information from a user within that node. Slots collect data at the user’s pace. Details the user provides upfront are saved, and the service asks only for the details they do not. Slots… Reduce development time Get the information you need before you can respond accurately to the user Answer follow-up questions without having to reestablish the user’s goal Identify the type of information you want to extract from the user’s response Our experience designing a chatbot For a delightful user experience, you can’t run away from asking these core questions at the heart of your design, and each question needs to be carefully and meticulously considered with the different facets: Is my product well-suited to be a bot? How to design a meaningful conversation? Will the chatbot understand the messages it receives? How to create a simple design for an immediate and direct solution to a person’s problem? Will the design solve the problem reliably? What are the logical conversation path(s) for users to follow? What are the integration points? Can the bot handle more complex queries and tasks? What user pain point does it solve? What type of friction will it remove from the current process? How to prevent the chatbot from asking the wrong questions and collecting unnecessary information? When to override the bot (and allow for a graceful failover)? Figure 4: Steve Jobs’ quote Chatbot conversational flow A chatbot conversational flow works like a decision tree, which gives you a comprehensive list of decisions, events, and outcomes as depicted below: Figure 5: Basic transactions for a banking use case. Prerequisites To follow along, you are required to have these accounts and tools in place: Start with an account on IBM Cloud. It’s free of cost to start with. Setup Watson Assistance If you want to follow along, the full solution can be found at the link: Create a banking chatbot with FAQ discovery, anger detection, and natural language understanding. Figure 6: Watson banking chatbot Steps to creating successful chatbots Identify the problem to be solved and use case Choose the channel for your bot (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack) Choose the right use case for your bot Choose the services you will use to build your chatbot (in this case we are planning to use IBM Watson) Emulate conversations to train and retrain bot. Test Launch and learn Included components: IBM Watson Assistant: Build, test, and deploy a bot or virtual agent across mobile devices, messaging platforms, or even on a physical robot IBM Watson Discovery: A cognitive search and content analytics engine for applications to identify patterns, trends, and actionable insights IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding: Analyze text to extract meta-data from content such as concepts, entities, keywords, categories, sentiment, emotion, relations, and semantic roles, using natural language understanding IBM Watson Tone Analyzer: Uses linguistic analysis to detect communication tones in written text Node.js: An asynchronous event driven JavaScript runtime, designed to build scalable applications Conclusion In recent years, AI and machine learning have changed the way we go about our day-to-day business. Chatbots have conquered the market. No longer a nascent technology, chatbots are now mainstream. Its business impacts include breakthrough across different industries, such as financial services, retail, oilfield services, hospitals, and insurance companies. The chatbots market was worth USD 1274.428 million in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 7591.82 million by 2024, registering a CAGR of 34.75% over the period (2019–2024). According to IBM in 2017, 265 billion customer requests are recorded per year and businesses spend nearly $1.3 trillion to service these requests. Using chatbots can help them save up to 30% of this. On a closing note, if you asked me the question, “Are chatbots a must-have?”, you can extrapolate and figure out on which side of the track that I’m seating! Chatbots are here to stay! Food for thought: Intelligence of Chatbot Can bots communicate intelligent insights? Is Human Intelligence underrated? Is Artificial Intelligence overrated, an actual breakthrough, or still in its infancy? Will bots eventually be equipped to deal with complex issues such as geoeconomic and geopolitical problems? Attribution Special thank you to the IBM Garage Singapore team: Oliver Senti, Practice Manager; Eunice Shin, Sr UX Designer; Ma Li, Architect / Data Scientist; Iris Tan, UX Designer and Thanh Son Le from the Cognitive Solutions Engineer, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform Expert & Delivery Services. References For more details on designing and building chatbots, please refer to the links below where you can find many read up on AI-powered chatbots:

https://medium.com/ibm-garage/designing-a-chatbot-with-ibm-watson-assistant-7e11b94c2b3d

['Ernese Norelus']

2019-09-30 22:58:06.041000+00:00

['Design Thinking', 'Design', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Chatbots', 'Bots']

No longer alone, no longer invisible

No longer alone, no longer invisible A love letter to a love story ‘Heartstopper’ is a love story — between friends, between lovers, between family. Written and illustrated by Alice Oseman, Heartstopper follows the lives of Nick and Charlie, two teenage boys who meet at school and fall in love — the full synopsis is available on Oseman’s website. Heartstopper’s ability to address serious issues (such as mental illness and bullying) while telling an uplifting and adorkable love story is integral to its appeal. Before writing this review, I sought to gain more insight into how others feel about this comic, especially LGBTQ+ and neurodiverse readers. Going through the survey responses was incredible. I read comments that expressed exactly how I felt, and I confess that I cried reading some of the answers. “We exist and we deserve to have stories about us and be more than just the best friend of the protagonist.” — smile__hoya Content warning: References to eating disorders. Representation matters When I asked readers why minority representation was important in YA fiction, responses overwhelmingly cited the need to show people that they aren’t alone, abnormal or a burden. Sometimes we don’t even realise how necessary this is until we see ourselves within the pages (@bookdragonbrew). Seeing LGBTQ+ characters (like us) who struggle with mental health (like us), managing to find such happiness in life, gives us hope and comfort that though the road may be long, things will get better (@steeviekate). “Reading [‘Heartstopper’] is like my antidepressant, it helps me to see how maybe I could meet someone who can understand me and care about me as Nick cares about Charlie.” — Lucci Heartstopper’s realistic yet positive focus “on support, healing and recovery” (Vol. 3, Author’s Note) is particularly helpful for those who feel unable to discuss these issues with the people around them. I was lucky that I could share with my friends and family, and not everyone is in this position. ‘Heartstopper’ stars the characters Nick Nelson (left) and Charlie Spring (right). An oft-cited example of Heartstopper’s relatability is Nick’s journey towards recognising his bisexuality, and the reassurance that it’s okay not to have it all figured out immediately. In a world where it can feel like everyone’s supposed to already know their sexuality from the get-go, Nick’s slow, dawning realisation is intensely meaningful for those of us who came relatively ‘late’ into our queer identities (@areadersworld; @jayjo-reads). I wish I’d had Heartstopper when I myself, at eighteen, was going through exactly the same confusion as Nick. The fear he feels about coming out to his mum, even though he knows she loves him, is near identical to my own and others’ experiences. Eating disorders are not an exclusively female experience Several readers relate specifically to how Charlie’s eating disorder (ED) is portrayed, in that it stems more from anxiety rather than body image issues, as well as the simple fact that Charlie is male. Male characters struggling with EDs aren’t commonly depicted — only two out of a list of 50 recommended books about ED feature a male protagonist with an ED, despite 25% of people with anorexia being male (NEDA, 2018). This kindred understanding given to us by Heartstopper recalls the song ‘You Will Be Found’ from Dear Evan Hansen: “There’s a place where we don’t have to feel unknown…And every time that you call out, you’re a little less alone.” “Reading books about LGBT+ characters and mental illness…felt like a hug to me…A story to tell you “hey, it’s okay, other people feel like this too. And they got [through] it. So will you.” — solitairians Diversity doesn’t have to make a point, it’s a fact of life Heartstopper’s supporting characters are also casually diverse, well-written and never come across as tokenised. Some readers identify with Elle, who is trans (cin_toazt; Anon.), while others relate to Tao’s efforts to be a good friend (Anon.). Still others connect to Aled, an asexual/demisexual character (Anon.; lostmindbooks; sascha.w5), Tara and Darcy’s lesbian relationship (iseultslibrary; iammadeofporcelain; Anon.), and also their hijabi classmate in Vol.3 (Anon.). “A hijabi character just chilling out with everyone else at a party and joining in with the games felt…refreshing to see…even when Muslim side characters are included, there’s [often] some kind of focus on them being different in some way.” — Anonymous Supporting characters Tara (left) and Darcy (right) featured in a mini-comic (‘Heartstopper’, Volume 1). Heartstopper has been a source of guidance and solace for many LGBTQ+ and/or neurodiverse readers, inspiring some to come out to their parents, and helping others realise that they are not obliged to forgive the people who have hurt and tormented them (@littlemel0dies). Additionally, Heartstopper offers valuable lessons for people who want to gain greater understanding of their neurodiverse, LGBTQ+ friends and neighbours, so they can better support them (@jake.m.williams). Readers relate to Nick trying to help Charlie with his ED (@wckedlittletown), also reflected in the comments of Heartstopper’s recent Tapas update (April 11th 2020) where readers discussed how to support friends struggling with an ED. “[In school, we] don’t really learn about mental health or sexuality… so seeing someone representing that in a comic [is] great.” — confaix “Seeing this representation in media is so helpful and informative, especially since [I] have friends with mental health problems and…want to understand them and be there for them as much as possible.” — Anonymous Diverse reads like Heartstopper challenge stigmas, “[bringing] more acceptance and understanding to society” (@reenaofpashadunes). Yet it is only recently that mainstream media seems to have woken up to this. As YA fiction is so widely read, it ought to more accurately reflect the diversity the world holds (Eléonore), especially experiences (both the beautiful and the challenging) that were previously drowned out by dominant narratives in history (@thereal_jdneal). “Many past portrayals of LGBTQIA+ people…either focused on the drama of coming out or traumas caused by their sexuality, or…a throwaway singular side character that had little impact on the story…Mental health often played either too much or too little of a role in many YA fictions until recently. It was either the one thing that characterised a character or…‘X was morbidly depressed until Y came along and immediately their life was all better’.” — AnxiousAtlas Heartstopper is not just a novel for LGBTQ+ audiences — yes, it stars several LGBTQ+ characters, but it also depicts a wide range of life experiences with both its teen and adult characters, such as teachers, giving it a huge scope of appeal for everyone (@sascha.w5). “I love that [Heartstopper] is out there for kids seeking representation and for others who just want to read a great story.” — Anonymous “[Heartstopper] helped with my anxiety about growing up...[I’m] still pretty young and…often scared about stuff like drinking, parties, relationships…this helps me stop worrying sometimes by showing what it’s actually like.” — Anonymous We came for the story, but stayed for the characters It’s unsurprising that ‘characters’ was referenced so many times as a favourite aspect of Heartstopper. If I love a character, I will happily read about them doing the most mundane things, because this is real life, and in real life I’m always interested in the people I love. I don’t think the romance would be half as emotionally tangible if readers didn’t feel like we were rooting for people that we know and love. Nick and Charlie feel particularly real because Heartstopper isn’t only about their queerness — we get to see all the other sides of them too (@ladysmallsteps). Key words commonly used by readers to describe their favourite things about Heartstopper (created using WordItOut). Heartstopper focuses on the hopeful and the everyday, and the drama never feel contrived, showing readers that queer relationships and queer lives don’t need to be riddled with high-stakes miscommunications to be interesting or real. Nick’s realisation that he’s made bad friends is never a fun discovery, but unfortunately it seems many of us can relate. On the bright side, Heartstopper does vividly illustrate key features of a strong, trusting friendship (@Orphea Solace), and how such support networks can help us overcome difficult situations (Fred Cronin). “Nick and Charlie’s story is made up of…episodes of their lives…There’s no overarching drama — because it’s just real life. Just one normal, loving relationship between two people.” — Oseman, 2016 I really appreciated Heartstopper’s emphasis on open dialogue, consent and healthy relationships. Oseman sought to write the type of story she’d have loved to read as a teen, and this sentiment is certainly echoed amongst Heartstopper’s readers, myself included. “‘Heartstopper’ is everything I wish my teenage years had been. When I came out, it wasn’t by choice, and it wasn’t pleasant. There were no LGBTQ+ positive books, and any depiction on TV was considered “dirty” or uncouth. ‘Heartstopper’ is the thing that so many young people can see themselves in, in a way that’s accessible for them, without any of the old, seedy connotations that used to accompany queer literature.” — Tsam (A Boy with a Book) Heartstopper is very accessible, as its free availability online makes it a safe space for readers who aren’t out and can’t risk ordering the physical books. Its episodic plot line also increases readability for those who have trouble focusing for extensive periods of time (Richard O'Keeffe). Common words respondents used to characterise what impact Heartstopper had on them (created using WordItOut). Heartstopper has had a markedly positive impact on most readers — over 91% — and it’s profoundly moving to see how it’s become such a beacon in the dark. Another beautiful thing is the blossoming of friendships within the fandom (@the-arktic; @locklyle; @thatgaypotterhead) — I myself met @wyaakk through supporting each other’s fan-art. “I [struggle] with anxiety and depression. I read Heartstopper during a very rough time and they were the only thing that made me feel and granted me escapism.” — The Reading Witch “I’m just prouder of myself, I’m much happier with who I am [after reading ‘Heartstopper’]…The characters…became my friends when I thought I didn’t have any.” — cin_toazt “[I]t’s like the characters taught me to stand up for myself and love myself for who I am no matter what.” — Anonymous Representation matters, but so does artistic inspiration I would be remiss not to mention how brilliantly emotive Oseman’s art is. I love how she does facial expressions, light and shadow. It’s deceptively simple but astonishingly expressive, imbued with so much detail, down to even the panel shapes themselves (The Reading Witch). Oseman has even inspired readers to start drawing again (@jayjo-reads) — I certainly never considered creating my own graphic novel before reading Heartstopper. A collection of Oseman’s novels: ‘Solitaire’ (2014), ‘Radio Silence’ (2016), ‘I Was Born For This’ (2018), ‘Heartstopper’ (2016-present). None of Oseman’s books had been on a bestseller list before ‘Heartstopper’ Vol. 3 entered the UK Children’s Book Chart. Honestly, I was shocked. In my little bookstagram bubble of Heartstopper hype, I’d somehow already assumed Oseman was a nationally bestselling author! While Heartstopper is relatively well-known, Oseman’s other works haven’t received half the attention that they deserve (@locklyle). “YA fiction…has a history of being whitewashed and romanticizing mental illness…[Oseman] does a great job of [getting] her novels sensitivity read in order to not write anything misleading.” — seaweedsoda I look forward to Oseman’s Loveless (July 9th), an own-voices novel featuring a university student coming to terms with her aro/ace sexuality, and her novella Nick and Charlie (Aug 6th). If Heartstopper has taught me anything, it’s that no one should have to feel isolated. So reach out to a relative, a lover, a friend— because we are no longer alone.

https://medium.com/the-open-bookshelf/no-longer-alone-no-longer-invisible-7ecac90ba0a8

['Sabrina Ki']

2020-04-24 08:42:55.662000+00:00

['Book Review', 'Books', 'Mental Health', 'LGBTQ', 'Culture']

Designing Multi-Faceted Lives

“With our society’s ever-growing emphasis on self-care and self-improvement, maybe what we could all use is a whole-hearted commitment to designing multi-faceted lives for ourselves. ” Our world seems to be an increasingly scary place to live. There’s so much fear and anger bubbling up from deep below the surface. Thich Nhat Hahn says that fear and anger stem from a lack of understanding. That idea has been on my mind for a couple of months now and has been reshaping the way that I interact with others as I navigate through this world. With all of the natural disasters, political turmoil, and social injustices against marginalized individuals and communities, I often forget that this is an unprecedented time to be alive. As a collective group that for so long has been left out of conversations and blocked from seats at the table, we have entered into an era where we have the opportunity to build our own tables and seats. People are watching and listening. Our influence and stories are being more widely acknowledged and embraced. And while we don’t need the gaze of the dominant culture to validate our existence or our stories, I have to admit that it is still encouraging to witness. Many times I think about opportunities — both the kinds given and the kinds created by oneself. To be honest, I frequently take both for granted. Speaking as a woman of color, feeling empowered to revel in my Blackness is a privilege that was not, and for many is still not afforded. It’s a privilege to be able to leverage and share our stories and experiences, and it’s also a privilege to have a sense agency over our lives given what many who came before us had to sacrifice to make this possible in the first place. With that being said, I think it’s an important reminder that there’s no time to be shy about our strengths, gifts, and abilities. There’s a time to be humble, but not self-deprecating. Imposter syndrome and shame can be easily disguised or mistaken as humility. We have to learn to distinguish. Even still, I regularly feel uncomfortable acknowledging my talents and abilities. I’m sure some of you reading this struggle, too. It feels like I’m constantly walking on a tight rope calculating the exact balance between being proud, but not too proud and yet never so proud that I make another person uncomfortable. It’s quite frankly exhausting and I’ve come to wonder if maybe there is no balance at all. Maybe it’s just you and me and us — simply existing while allowing ourselves to be proud of how far we’ve journeyed to get to this exact moment in time. With our society’s ever-growing emphasis on self-care and self-improvement, maybe what we could all use is a whole-hearted commitment to designing multi-faceted lives for ourselves. Lives that encompass and integrate more of who we are in all areas. Lives that are not pieced and boxed according to societal pressures, but that are fluid, intentional, and fully ours. It’s cool in theory, but how exactly do we do that? “…on the other side of letting ourselves off the hook is freedom.” Let Yourself Off the Hook Following a series of therapy sessions, I’ve come to realize that it begins with letting ourselves off the hook. Growing up as a little Black girl living in the Deep South, I quickly came to understand the meaning of “working twice as hard to get half as much”. It’s a phrase that many of us from a variety of marginalized community groups have heard. And I think that for a while, I truly believed that living out that notion was helpful and would compel me to try my best in everything that I did. But that was only true up to a certain point. It wasn’t until recently that I began to see the long-term ramifications of such a phrase and how a lack of grace and no room for error leads to creative paralysis. I couldn’t be vulnerable with myself about my strengths and weaknesses because of my intense fear of failure and unwillingness to forgive myself. To be completely honest, I still struggle with this — hence the reason I faithfully attend weekly therapy sessions. So while I’m still working to grasp more concrete answers to my never-ending list of questions, one thing I have come to understand is that on the other side of letting ourselves off the hook is freedom. Yet we oftentimes don’t know what to do with freedom. With freedom comes choices and with choices comes a need for grace when we stumble. However, if we don’t have space for grace or room for error, then how can we move forward in freedom? The “not knowing” is scary and the path of least resistance is forever tempting us to stay with what we’ve always known for comfort’s sake. And so for those reasons — comfort and fear — we keep ourselves on our hooks and we accept less than what we deserve, and we do less than we are capable of doing. But in spite of our fears, we have to do it. We have to let ourselves off the hook. To help me move forward, I had to create a language that encompassed grace and margin of error. Maybe it will also help you. “I did the best that I could with what I knew and with the tools that I had at the time. I cannot hold my past self to the standards that I now have because I didn’t know any better at the time. If I am free to revel in my abilities and knowledge at this moment, then I am also able to forgive myself for the mistakes that I have made in the past.” “Designing a multi-faceted life requires the flexibility, willingness, and courage to change.” Be Willing to Challenge Your Beliefs In addition to letting ourselves off the hook, we also need a willingness to re-evaluate our beliefs. Stay with me here. If we took the time to consider what we believe and why we believe it, we’d probably find that many of those beliefs are simply narratives that we’ve created to explain our own cultural experiences. Beliefs, aside from ones that uphold human rights and those rooted in scientific evidence, are not necessarily fact, and a belief that may be true when applied to one culture may certainly not be true when applied to another. If this is the case, then what would happen if we traded our ethics, beliefs, and ways of viewing the world for another’s? How might communities and spaces exist? How would this serve our greater purpose in this life? Designing a multi-faceted life requires the flexibility, willingness, and courage to change. But change, in my opinion, can only really happen when we’re willing to challenge our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our lives. They dictate how we will treat others and ourselves. They inform our views of the world and the imprints that we place on our Earth. Our future depends on our awareness of our connection to one another. And for that reason we must continually question our narratives. Determine which hold true and which should be discarded. Our capacity to build integrated, multi-faceted lives for ourselves is directly proportionate to our capacity to use empathy in order to challenge our beliefs. “And with healing comes this desire to no longer compartmentalize pieces of ourselves, but to show up and integrate.” This truly is an unprecedented time to be alive. Being intentional about designing multi-faceted lives for ourselves means that we can create space for impact and change and healing. Our gifts, abilities, stories and ideas are not given merely for our individual benefit. They are meant to be shared freely. The turmoil we see brewing in our world shows us the places where healing and emotional justice needs to take place. It’s our responsibility to bring a little bit of healing to our lives. And with healing comes this desire to no longer compartmentalize pieces of ourselves, but to show up and integrate. We are all connected and that means that our healing doesn’t just impact us, but it impacts those around us.

https://medium.com/swlh/designing-multi-faceted-lives-ba2b900372c6

['Kashara Johnson']

2019-09-09 11:59:18.068000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Mental Health']

“Anxiety is a body event.”

As a clinician in private practice, one of the phrases that I hear myself saying over and over, often in this way is this: “Remember, anxiety is a body event.” So what does this mean? First, this statement, “anxiety is a body event”, reminds us that when we feel anxiety, it is made up of physical sensations. While you may not have all of the symptoms, people often describe an increased heart rate, sweating, tingling fingers, chest tightening, chest pain, nausea or pain in their stomach, feeling hot, and changes in breathing that usually show up like quick, short breaths. These symptoms are often followed along by a deep sense of fear, of feeling closed in and needing to get out. You may feel as if you are about to die. This can also show up like an overwhelming irritability that may lead you to lash out at people around you. Anxiety is about “fight or flight”, so some of us are likely to want to run . . . and some of us get ready for a fight. And all of this is NORMAL and NATURAL; we need this system! The problem is that this system has been triggered by some internal or external event that has bypassed your “thinking” brain and is talking directly to your body first. This reaction is about survival, and correct or not, your lower brain has decided to pull the switch to help you live through whatever is happening. Emphasizing the body is important because that is where we need to first target our interventions. Photo by Leisy Vidal on Unsplash Depending on who the client is, sometimes we will take crayons or a pen and draw our nervous system together, linking our anxious brain with our lungs, our heart, our muscles, making a stop by the adrenal glands sitting on top of the kidneys, all the way down to our feet, since running is something that anxiety will often lead us to want to do. So with that understanding of how anxiety, something that starts in our brain, affects our body, that leads me to the perhaps more important place. Second, this statement, “anxiety is a body event”, reminds us that we need to talk to our body first before we talk to our “thinking” brain. It is a common mistake. I see lots of parents who try to reason with their child that “No, there is a not a monster under the bed.” The child remains scared, so the parent thinks that saying this LOUDER and THREATENING some punishment will surely make this situation go away. At that point, the child has probably gone into “freeze” mode due to the anxiety getting worse, not better. The quiet of “freeze” mode may look like calm, but actually this child is more scared, more worried about what you as the “big scary adult” are going to do next. And even though I have used the example of child and adult, you can easily see where this happens between two adults, especially adults in a relationship. I will often have the spouse come in with a patient to learn about what anxiety is so that they can respond in a way that helps the situation be better, not worse. This is why interventions with anxiety are often activities like focusing on the breath in your belly, taking a warm bath or shower, taking a walk, petting the dog, getting or receiving a hug. In order to calm a “body” event, you have to talk to the body. The body only understands soothing and calming, not communication filled with words like “But that isn’t real!” or “For the last time, you are not about to die!” Even though anxiety sometimes starts in the thoughts, most often the future-oriented, “what if” variety, it proceeds to the physical very quickly. The physical body is where the intervention must first be targeted. So with all that “in mind”, remember that anxiety is a body event. We feel it physically, but that also means that the key to working through it in therapy and at home is physical too.

https://medium.com/whenanxietystrikes/anxiety-is-a-body-event-52dcbd73c381

['Jason B. Hobbs Lcsw']

2019-03-20 14:06:20.356000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Anxiety', 'Parenting', 'Therapy']

Ten Considerations Before You Create Another Chart About COVID-19

3. Aggregations and calculations that can be done with the case data are not necessarily what should be done with the case data. Tableau and other tools make it easy to quickly create charts, graphs, and maps, as well as to run calculations with those numbers. It’s also common practice in data visualization to create benchmarks or comparisons between groups and countries in our work. However, when visualizing COVID-19 data these calculations need to reflect the basic principles of epidemiology. There are nuances in the definitions of different kinds of cases (including COVID-19 definitions) which affect whether they can be aggregated or not. In public health, there are calculated metrics — such as case fatality rate — with very specific definitions that are used to understand and monitor disease spread and human impact. Just because you can perform a mathematical function on a set of health statistics doesn’t mean you should. For example, one chart shared about COVID-19 summed the total deaths to date and divided it by the known days in the epidemic to create a special disease deaths per day aggregation. Then, that number was calculated for other major diseases for comparison. At best, this is an inaccurate comparison due to major differences in our knowledge of and resources for testing and treatment of COVID-19 compared to other diseases. At worst, it significantly understates the seriousness of COVID-19 and causes people to ignore the advice of public health professionals on social distancing and other individual actions that can slow the spread of the virus. Finally, determining the share of the population infected or the share of infected persons who die from the disease are incredibly challenging calculations due to uncertainty in the denominator. Proceed with extreme caution when calculating any rates, and, better yet, please leave the rate calculations to the epidemiologists. 4. Be cautious when making generalized predictions or comparisons based on regionally specific data. Many factors affect the spread and impact of the virus — such as the measures taken by a government to combat the spread and underlying population demographics. Because of these differences, consider what is implied when making comparisons between countries with very different population sizes, political environments, and public health systems. For example, the population of Italy skews older than that of China or the US. Because elderly populations have been identified at higher risk and are more likely to require hospital care, the percentage of cases requiring hospitalization may be higher in Italy than in countries with a younger population. (More on the ways demographics are influencing outcomes in Italy.) 5. Visualizations should inform and be honest about what isn’t represented. There is much uncertainty in the data we have, particularly when trying to extrapolate to a general population. With an emerging disease, disaggregating and looking at cases and rates in sub-populations can help us to better understand the disease. The number of confirmed cases is only a subset of infected persons in the population, and the number is impacted by health seeking behavior (if I’m sick, do I go to the doctor?), test kit availability (if I go to the doctor, can I get a test?), health systems factors, and other considerations. COVID-19 is not a death sentence, and our visualizations need to reflect that. Including ‘recovered cases’ is an essential piece of context in visualizing case numbers. Reiterating here: calculating rates — like the case fatality rate — is challenging without an accurate denominator. Leave the rate calculations to the epidemiologists. 6. Epidemiologists and public health agencies create complex models to understand how the disease may progress. These data are likely not going to feed into a dashboard, but sometimes get cited and sourced in static charts and graphs. The benefit of using results from models from WHO, CDC, and other public health experts is that they typically go through some level of peer-review before being published. Proceed with caution if incorporating these numbers in a visualization though: models are complex, as they try to account for the behavior of the virus, human behavior, and systems factors. As a result, models will change. If you use data from a model, document the inputs and sources thoroughly. 7. Data scientists and statisticians have also been publishing their own models and related conclusions about disease projections. Use these with caution in framing your visualization and analysis unless they are well sourced, documented, and explained. **Preferably validated by an epidemiologist or someone else with related expertise.** Modeling disease is complex (see #6). Rough, “back of the envelope” calculations can be more fear-inducing than helpful. Instead, rely on well-sourced models from public health agencies and experts. 8. Make thoughtful design decisions. Still committed to creating a visualization about COVID-19? Read existing resources on responsible visualization approaches in this context before publishing any charts or maps. Datawrapper has an excellent set of responsible visualizations of COVID-19 with notes on the design decisions they made. “What we considered when making these visualizations” from the awesome team at Datawrapper (Source) You can also read this excellent thread of recommendations and critiques on visualizing COVID-19 from Evan Peck. 9. Consider the human side of what you create. Reference terms correctly (see WHO definitions for COVID-19 cases, an explainer on R0, and the CDC Glossary as resources) and clearly define each metric for your audience somewhere in the visualization — that can be a footnote, title, subtitle, annotation, explainer text…just make sure it’s there. Be considerate of the language you use in your visualization. Remember that behind every data point is a person in a COVID-19 dataset. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable having someone from a high risk group read what you wrote, please revise. 10. Consider how visualizations can impact (and encourage) social responsibility as we see COVID-19 in our respective communities. Self quarantine where appropriate. Ensure we’re not stigmatizing people who are from countries and regions that have had a lot of cases. Understand what additional steps you can take to flatten the curve and slow the spread of the virus in your community. Esther Kim and Carl Bergstrom (Source) And finally, consider visualizing other relevant data about impacted communities if you don’t feel you have the public health knowledge to add to the conversation around COVID-19 cases. Epidemic data isn’t a dataset to play with just to have something to show off on Twitter.

https://medium.com/nightingale/ten-considerations-before-you-create-another-chart-about-covid-19-27d3bd691be8

['Amanda Makulec']

2020-04-27 18:54:22.572000+00:00

['Public Health', 'Dataviz', 'Covid 19', 'Coronavirus', 'Topicsindv']

The Trick to Early Morning Productivity Hacks

We all want to find ways to be more productive and maximize our days. We hunt for lifehacks on how to improve our performance and find article upon article advising us to wake up at 3, 4, or 5 am to work out, meditate, do yoga, hit the gym, etc. before actually “starting” the day (going to work?). We’re inundated with people telling us how they wake up at unspeakable times in the morning and go to sleep running on fumes, convincing us to do the same over and over again until we see similar results. We’re bombarded with people, like Gary Vaynerchuk telling us to hustle, hustle, and hustle some more! Here’s the thing too many people get wrong about these supposed lifehacks — the message isn’t the problem. What you’re taking from it is. As the old saying goes, take advice with a grain of salt (or skepticism, if you’ve never heard that term). Why We Should Wake Up Early Waking up early isn’t about beating sunrise or being able to brag to your friends — who, by the way, probably couldn’t be paid to care any less — about how maximized your days and work schedule are. Waking up early with the intent of maximizing your day isn’t actually about the day, your work, or your schedule. It’s about you! Once we get our “real” day started — which is the time when we go to work — our entire process becomes about everything and everyone but ourselves. We have to think about our bosses, our employees, our coworkers, our customers, and our families. In a world where many of us define our existence on who we know, what we do, and what we’ve accomplished, we fail to remind ourselves that what makes our contributions so eye-opening, the work so valuable, and the ways we process so original, is the unique perspective we lend to the world around us. Waking up early and doing all of these activities isn’t about the activities at all. It’s about making time for and reclaiming control of the most valuable asset we have — our imaginative minds. Sometimes to do that, we find clarity by activating our bodies with physical activity. Taking time to start the day with our own interests in mind — the point of all this stuff, anyway — helps set our minds free, recentering ourselves, and subsequently giving ourselves a platform of clarity to launch the rest of the day from. Maybe you’ll use that time for yoga. Maybe you’ll go to the gym to work on the summer body you’ve put off for the past six summers. Maybe you’ll start up your Xbox and play a game. But you should if you want to because that time is yours to use in any way you please. It’s not for your boss or your followers, and definitely not for the project you’re a little behind on. So while the idea of getting up early might seemingly be about maximizing your day by accomplishing a bunch of things before others even wake up, it’s really about giving yourself the permission to reclaim valuable time for yourself and no one else. That’s pretty hard to do when your alarm clock is set for a time that only allows you to possibly make breakfast but ultimately just get ready for work and head out of the door. Photo by Andy Beales on Unsplash You’re More Than Just the Work You Do Consumerism has encouraged us to believe that who we are is defined by which job title we have, which car we drive, how large our home is, and a ton of other vanity metrics we subconsciously compete for. You only have one life to live. So while we do need to work to pay bills, public recognition for our work is fantastically flattering, and fancy cars (but really, the attention and favorable assumptions about us that come with them) might be great, focusing on these things might not be the best way to attain them and, even more so, using them as the basis of our merits might actually only send us further down the rabbit hole of emptiness or faux fulfillment in vanity appraisals. That’s why a lot of the same people who will peddle these types of productivity hacks will also tell you that work (or your thing) isn’t about the money. On one hand, it’s easy for them to say because for many of them the comfort level they have, wise money management practices, and sometimes generational wealth (don’t believe everyone’s definition of broke is the same as yours), make money a non-factor for them. On the other hand, you could make the argument that money is such a non-factor for them because they understand that with unique work, disruptive perspective, and a dynamic process comes compensation. Regardless of where they work, the product will always be them and, therefore, will recreate itself as they grow. That has nothing to do with a job title or what car you drive. It has everything to do with having full agency over who you are and allowing yourself the luxury of not depending on the vanity of things to define yourself like so many of us do. Photo by Icons8 team on Unsplash Don’t Blame Gary Vee (or any other “motivational” characters) Gary — like many others who produce content to inspire their followers — has an immense library of videos and articles in which he tells people that if they want something, they have to hustle for it harder than they’ve ever hustled, every single day, no excuses. For him, that means working (last I checked) 18-hour days. People see his content and while some admire his tenacity and use him as inspiration to do the same, there’s a sizable chunk of his audience who admonish him at times because they feel that what he is encouraging is glamorized burnout. The important thing to remember when seeing and hearing these things is this — they aren’t telling you what to do. They’re not promising equal or similar success by doing what they do. They’re simply telling you their story, process, or vision. It’s up to you to decide how much of that you want to use in your own life. What motivates them might not motivate you. The path to success is not a solid line with solid rules that lead to solid results. If that were the case, we would all be successful because we decided to do sun salutations in work clothes at 3 am in front of our local bodegas and coffee shops before the sun rose to salute back. Photo by Icons8 team on Unsplash Time is a Construct of Limitation and Freedom This brings me to my last point — not everyone is a morning person and it’s perfectly fine to not be. While I definitely get a jolt of clarity from waking up at 6 or 7 am and getting in a quick run, I have also put down some of my best work at between 1 am and 4 am while in the dark, blasting death metal and smashing away at my keyboard. You have to find the balance for yourself and give yourself permission to jump out of the box. We spend so much time trying to fit in so people can easily define us based on their limited imaginations that we undervalue our own definitions of self. There is no right time for productivity. In my opinion, there is only time taken to not be distracted from self. Not a morning person? Cool! Use your peak imaginative hours to put in work, even if that means you don’t have time for 5 am runs through the South Bronx all winter. Instead of waking up super early, use the time at night to create and give yourself a template to start the following day strong with (which I would advise you do even if you are a morning person). I’m not about to tell someone who is currently a bartender with aspirations for more who is working from 5 pm to 2 am and gets home at 4 am to change and go to the gym because, you know, early. For them, maybe 10 or 11 am is that time. Taking time to be selfish has a bad rap. But like anything else, moderation is key. So before you go ahead and read a ton of articles filled hacks to help you maximize your productivity by doing activities you’ll probably fall asleep doing, take 10 minutes, a half-hour, or an entire hour to dedicate some time to yourself because all the work you do is not who you are, but that work is derived from fostering imagination and embracing your unique additions to the process.

https://andrewofnewyork.medium.com/early-morning-productivity-hacks-have-nothing-to-do-with-waking-up-a-zombie-373d649ec1bd

['Andrew Rowley']

2020-03-26 14:07:20.872000+00:00

['Work Life Balance', 'Motivation', 'Work', 'Productivity', 'Life']

10 Reasons to Edit After You Publish

It may drive your publisher crazy, but its the best way to increase your metrics Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash 100 years ago, writers had to wait until they were dead to gain fame and fortune, and only ten years ago, the idea that your words could be read by thousands without even knowing the name of your editor was nonsense. Oh how the world has changed. Welcome to Medium, the Netflix of words, where you are the product and as a reward, you get to keep a few pennies of the profit. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read “Your Medium Ecosystem” and consider which level of the platform you currently can access, based on your successes here to date. There are pros and cons to working as a writer on Medium. In order to enjoy the benefits of the platform, it’s essential that you understand what it is and how it works. Before the digital age, writing was essentially an act of faith. I had faith in myself and my skill as a writer, and if a publisher chose to put their faith in my ability to sell books, then I’d have the chance to get my words into the hands of my readers. Once that happened, as a writer, all I’d be left with is the faith that my words would serve my reader well. But, I had no way of knowing. Medium changes all of that. Thanks to Medium, as a writer, I can know in real time how my words are impacting my readers. Some feedback mechanisms are obvious. But, it’s the less obvious ones that are more important. Reader/Writer Feedback Loop Impressions Read Time Claps Comment Quoting and tagging my story Reposting the link to my story I’m a Publisher’s Nightmare… My heart goes out to Medium publishers, those altruistic folks who work tirelessly for no compensation, polishing the product that is their publication. Some set clear and strict style guides and all beg that we writers refrain from being generally hateful, and follow laws, of governments and Medium alike. But, the platform has pit the poor fools at our mercy entirely, as we writers retain the rights to our work (yes, even with the new 2020 terms of service!), and the rights to edit our stories, even long after they’re published. I’m a good girl. I don’t like being anyone’s nightmare, but here’s the thing… If you’re not using the real-time feedback loop offered to you by Medium to improve your work after its published, you’re missing out on all of the benefits of the platform. It’s only once you get your words out into the world that the real fun begins. Medium is the Netflix of Publishing How is it possible that Netflix went from being a service that mails you DVDs to one of the largest producers of original content, investing $17 billion in 2020, in such a short time-frame? It goes back to faith. And big data. Unlike the old world, where the only way to know what folks liked and disliked was to ask them and to track their spending habits, Netflix knows exactly what you binge watch in the middle of the night. They track your curiosities and cravings in real time, and translate that into dollars, used to produce original content that speaks directly to your interests. Medium is no different, except that we writers are paid far less for our words than the folks hired by Netflix to produce the next blockbuster. How To Use Your Stats Though Medium pays fractions of pennies for seconds of read time, they let writers in on the fun of the feedback loop by sharing stats with us in real time. If you don’t analyze your stats, you’re handicapping yourself and signaling that you’re content to be writing in an echo chamber. (If you have less than 100 followers, the tips below only apply to those stories you publish with a big publication. Read “Your Medium Ecosystem” for details.) How To Analyze Your Stats Use these 10 metrics to improve your work Views: High = Good image and headline! = Good image and headline! Low = Does your image depict something people want? Does your headline answer a burning questions? Views vs Reads High = Good introductory paragraph! = Good introductory paragraph! Low = Are you burying your lead? Say your most interesting idea in the most interesting way possible in your first paragraph. Reads vs Read Ratio High = Good writing! Good writing! Low = Is your story readable? Is it edited? Have you told reader’s (literally) that you are not an expert in your subject? Fans After 2019, tracking fans became a mixed bag because Medium has made it clear that claps do not impact compensation. Lazy users do not clap, and social media support group users (from your trusted FB community, and the like) do. But, if we exclude those two groups, claps can indicate that your message has really hit home. High = You have fan loyalty or have shared a powerful message! = You have fan loyalty or have shared a powerful message! Low = Find the most concise and impactful sentence in your piece and turn it into a pull quote. If you can’t find one, add one ASAP. Going Viral Viral = 1K reads in less than 24 hrs. Whoo Hoo!! 1K reads in less than 24 hrs. Whoo Hoo!! Not Viral = Viral stories make use of lists, fear and sometimes humor. And luck. So, good luck! The best time to consider these metrics is during the first 24 hours after you publish, when your story is displaying on the homepage of your selected publication and has just been pushed out to your readers. By polishing my work in this way, I’ve succeeded in increasing Read Ratios from 25% to 66% within hours, transforming articles that may have flopped into profitable pieces. The real-time feedback loop allows me to take my readers into account in my work, offering them content that is readable and compelling. It makes me a better writer and my work more worthwhile to my readers. Here are the stories I referenced above:

https://medium.com/suggestion-box/i-m-a-publishers-nightmare-444ba9bf84c3

['Sarene B. Arias']

2020-09-30 19:18:13.573000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Self Improvement', 'Writing', 'Blogging', 'Innovation']

PandasGUI: Analyzing Pandas dataframes with a Graphical User Interface

Today the pandas library has become the defacto tool for doing any exploratory data analysis in Python. Its versatility, flexibility, and ease of use makes it the library of choice for many data scientists today. The pandas' library also enjoys excellent community support and thus is always under active development and improvement. Due to this indispensable nature of pandas, various tools have been created from time to time to enhance its effectiveness or improve upon it. There are two specific sets of tools that I have encountered when it comes to pandas: Tools that can perform basic EDA in two or three lines of code. These libraries essentially use pandas’ functions under the hood. Examples are SweetViz and Pandas profiling library. GUI-based alternatives to pandas, for example, Bamboolib. Recently, I came across another GUI based alternative to pandas called PandasGUI. One thing that struck was that it offered capabilities of plotting as well as reframing the dataframe. Also, the user has the freedom to perform custom operations too. This article will try and explain its various features and functionalities and how you could use it for your data.

https://towardsdatascience.com/pandasgui-analyzing-pandas-dataframes-with-a-graphical-user-interface-36f5c1357b1d

['Parul Pandey']

2020-10-23 13:35:14.189000+00:00

['Pandas Dataframe', 'Pandas', 'GUI', 'Python', 'Exploratory Data Analysis']

REMARKABLE NETWORKS: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST COMMUNITY

REMARKABLE NETWORKS: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST COMMUNITY The 2019 Sustainability Graduate Programs Student Showcase ‍‍Tuesday, September 17, 2019 Jay Lanier of Interface delivered the keynote address for the 2019 Sustainability Graduate Programs Student Showcase held at The Graduate School at Brookstown Inn. The event was an end of year celebration to recognize the class of 2019 and welcome the incoming class of 2020. Graduate Students presented capstone projects of their work from the Applied Sustainability course with the Yadkin Riverkeeper. TREES TALK TO EACH OTHER. Now, of course, they lack mouths to render speech and have nothing in the way of language that a linguist could recognize, but they absolutely communicate. I’m currently reading a book by a German Forrester named Peter Wohlleben called The Hidden Life of Trees. He describes how acacia trees on the Savannah of Africa tell one another that a hungry giraffe is out to hit the leaf buffet so its neighbors can immediately create the compounds that make them taste bad. In the beech and oak forests of his home in the Eifel mountains, Wohlleben talks about the communication through roots that allow bigger, stronger and older trees to share nutrients and water with sick, small and damaged neighboring trees. It turns out that trees work best in forests. It may be easy to assume that a lone tree, with no need to share its light, water or nutrients would be better off than a crowded group. As it turns out though, that group, with its social bonds could better be thought of as a superorganism, where it is truly more than the sum of its parts. Grade school biology taught us the survival of the fittest. We, as individuals, automatically tend to interpret that as survival of the fittest individually. But what if we change individual to the word community? Survival of the best community. A close-knit fabric of interwoven roots voluntarily shifting resources to create the maximum benefit for one another and, by proxy, an entire woodland ecosystem. Cooperation that begets abundance. A community that thrives, rather than simply survives. It used to be that the forest was a truly scary place. How many fairy tales took very dark turns when the Brothers Grimm sent their protagonists …into the woods? So often, it was used as the stand-in for all things unknown, wild, foreign — weighed in equal parts fear but also enchantment. It represented both dread and magic. So why the discussion about the woods and fairytales at a ceremony focused on your accomplishments in the study of sustainability? After all, many of us will go to work in a system that has grown and has a continued belief in the survival of the fittest individual. And with good reason in many ways. With the rise of our industrial system, the world’s desperately poor has fallen by over 1 billion people in less than 20 years. A physicist would look at such a result and immediately ask, “At what cost?” For much of our history as a species, those costs were negligible, or even outright invisible. But as our 7.5 billion people’s needs begin to ask questions of the earth’s abundance, the limits of exponential growth in a closed system are becoming more and more apparent. The morality of meeting the basic needs of so many are coming into conflict with the generous systems that allowed for such amazing growth of humanity in the first place. Back in 1944, the US Coast Guard released 29 reindeer on St. Matthew Island in the middle of the Bering Sea. Some of you may be familiar with the example I am preparing to cite here, but for those of you who aren’t, St. Matthew is a windblown, battered island that would be pretty unpleasant for most people. But it was an absolute reindeer paradise. Those 29 reindeer grew, thrived and procreated — quite successfully, I might add. There were no forces against their growth and prosperity. By the year 1963, there were not 29, not 290, not 2,900, but 6,000 reindeer on this small island in the middle of the Bering Sea. By 1965 only 42 remained. They overshot the carrying capacity and abundance of the paradise they had known. One that seemed to have been made just for them. You might expect, with that kind of correction to a population, they could continue to build their population up once again into something a little bit more sustainable. But by 1984, the last reindeer on St. Matthew Island had perished. The systems that provided for the reindeer had disappeared along with them. So, once again, why a tale of reindeer collapse in an audience all too familiar with the risks of population overshoot and collapse? The reindeer of St. Matthew Island, in their own strange way, have brought me here to be with you today. In Paul Hawken’s book, The Ecology of Commerce, he cited this natural experiment in his chapter called the Death of Birth. It was this chapter, that fell into the hands of a founder and CEO of an industrial manufacturing company that was later described as a spear in the chest that lodged in the heart of a man looking for the answer to a simple question: “What is Interface doing for the environment?” Interface is the world’s largest manufacturer of carpet tile. Back in 1973, Ray Anderson waged his life savings and that of his best friend on a vision of a modular floor that would meet the needs of the modern workplace. It quickly grew into a $1 billion per year business going public in 1983. By 1994, Ray had every reason to be proud of a global business that he built himself, legally, that employed 5,000 people across the world. By all measures of the time, he had earned a relaxing retirement by making something from nothing, playing by the rules. In Hawken’s conclusion, the only entity big enough, powerful enough and pervasive enough to reverse these problems was business and industry itself. Interface didn’t have to be the problem, it could be the solution. But whose rules were those? Upon reading The Ecology of Commerce, he realized that the decline of our biosphere was directly linked to the rise of industrialization. The take, make, waste model of which Interface was built, was doomed to fail someday — the moment our limited resources ran out. Ray was convicted as a “plunderer of the earth,” but there was a silver lining. In Hawken’s conclusion, the only entity big enough, powerful enough and pervasive enough to reverse these problems was business and industry itself. Interface didn’t have to be the problem, it could be the solution. In response, Ray set Interface on an uncharted course to a goal called Mission Zero, where by the year 2020 we would have zero negative impact on the environment. It was silly, it was audacious, it was ridiculous, but most importantly, it has been incredibly successful. Typically, sustainability initiatives are viewed as expensive window dressing handled by the marketing department. But when you take the time and commit to learning from the master of efficiency and innovation, Mother Nature, the inspiration for both people and product is astounding. I’m pleased to announce that on net we have met our Mission Zero goal, but much like the Hippocratic Oath in medicine, doing no harm is only the first step in curing a broken system. In our next chapter, we have begun what we call The Climate Take Back, using Interface as a model business that creates our products and systems in a way that sequesters atmospheric carbon, just like a forest. In fact, we produce a carpet tile already that when made leaves less climate-changing CO2 in the air than had it never been made. It will be available here in the US next year. In this new vision for our business, we have begun our first steps to emulate the cooperative systems that the longest-lived residents of our planet already have mastered. We like to call it Factories as Forests. And we are doing much better than surviving. We are thriving. MONUMENTAL CHANGE OFTEN BEGINS WITH SMALL GESTURES All of this started from one exceptionally sane, or monumentally crazy, idea that business, industry and commerce have a lot to learn from nature. We may not have the next Ray Anderson in this room with us today, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Do you know where Ray got that copy of Hawken’s book? Not some other big shot exec or policy guru. It came from Joyce Lattelle. A salesperson in the Bay Area who gave the book to Ray on a whim months before. Monumental change often begins with small gestures. Many of you will go on to work for organizations with a clear purpose to affect the greater good using sustainability as a guiding principle in your mission. Many of you will go to work in organizations that don’t live up to the morals you hold dear in conserving our planet. I am here to tell you that both roles are critical to our local and global communities. Think back to the trees we began discussing. If they serve as a model for the next industrial revolution, they are built as competing to be the most cooperative and to be systems that create abundance and generosity at every exchange, then you are the stewards of that forest. You are the guides. You are the ones who can show others that the future isn’t scary for all its vastness and still unknown secrets. You can (and will!) show them that this future as a forest is a place of refuge, of wonder, of abundance and magic. Be the leaders who show them the forest so they can truly see the trees. The Sustainability Graduate Programs at Wake Forest University would like to extend a special thank you to our program partners and project hosts: Yadkin Riverkeeper; VF Corporation; Wrangler Jeans; Hanesbrands Inc; Ray C. Anderson Foundation, Interface Carpets; Wise Man Brewing; Trinity Consulting; VisionaryLogic; Ducks Unlimited; Elizabeth River Project and all other organizations and individuals that offered their time and support.

https://medium.com/the-sustainability-graduate-programs/remarkable-networks-survival-of-the-fittest-community-9b6855dbb3aa

['Wake Forest Mas']

2019-10-16 21:04:54.684000+00:00

['Biomimicry', 'Zero Waste', 'Sustainability', 'Environment', 'Manufacturing']

How Breaking Your Good Habits Now Can Create Stronger, Healthier Habits in the Future

Nobody wants to break perfectly healthy habits on purpose. I did. Photo by Giancarlo Revolledo on Unsplash Whether you are training for a marathon, writing a book, or strictly following a healthy diet, there comes a time where you might fall off the wagon. A lot of people try to stay on track and consecutively mark productive days on the calendar. Whenever we miss a day due to unforeseen circumstances or take a day off for rest, we might be hard on ourselves and urgently reassure our anxious mind that we will be back at it the next day. Sometimes, we end up having to take more time off than intended. Instead of one day, it spirals into two or three, maybe even a week. At the end of the week you might be thinking “well, I haven’t done anything productive for 6 days, so whats another day”. That’s how the spiral begins. We’ve all been there before. Weeks turn to months, and before you know it, you almost forget what its like to be on track and to be productive. On a streak? Good. Break it. Photo by Adam Tinworth on Unsplash We are always taught and encouraged to be productive, but never to be unproductive. Here’s what I mean. When you break a streak, it might spiral into a period of inactivity, and it’s hard to bounce back. We are never taught how to bounce back. Establishing a deliberate practice on bouncing back is nobody’s responsibility but our own. This can and will help you establish better habits for the long term. This winter, after an unproductive weekend, I was determined to stop my self doubt, negative self talk, and laziness from creeping in. I am usually pretty good at getting back on the grind but I always struggle with taking the first few steps. While I was on a streak of successful writing sessions, runs, and workouts, I chose a day I would stop entirely for 3 days, whether I wanted to or not. On the fourth day, I marked it in my calendar that I would pick right back up where I left off. I was in control. I practiced being active about my choice, which helped me overcome being reactive later. During those 3 days, I didn’t feel guilty, lazy, or anxious. This was time I had deliberately set aside for doing nothing. On the fourth day, I was focused and aware I would be starting back up again, and I did. So how did this help? Practice makes better, aim for perfect later Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash We will all catch a cold at some point. That was me last week, sneezing and sniffling with what felt like a 10 pound weight fused to my frontal lobe. If I wanted to recover quickly, I knew I needed a lot of rest and time for my body to heal. Running was out of the question, and it was hard to focus on writing for more than 30 minutes. I was okay with that. As long as I had this cold, I would relax, guilt free, and pick it back up once I was healthy. The guilt and negative emotions I felt about being stagnant were dulled by my previous 3 day practice of of doing nothing. I knew how to bounce back. It wasn’t perfect right away, but I definitely felt better and more relaxed about not doing much. The cold was passing, I could feel that my head was clearing. I planned to start back up the next day, guilt free, not telling myself I had wasted precious time. It seemed to work. I felt good, I was productive, and I had avoided the infamous downward spiral into laziness and self-loathing. Apply your new found perspective when you can but don’t over do it Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash These days I know how to bounce back. We can look at every weekend off or unexpected schedule changes as a challenge and an opportunity to practice. Tell yourself that you are making the decision to take a break, and set a date for your return to action. It feels extremely liberating and it puts you in control. You have a timeline, so you’re not caught in a never ending loop of anxiety wondering when you will have the guts to start back up again. Just don’t overdo it. This can’t be an excuse for creating additional unnecessary plans for things that really don’t forward your personal development. Practice doing nothing deliberately, so when the time comes and it’s out of your control, you can banish thoughts of guilt and low self worth, and replace them with a practiced plan. Our brains love structure. Teaching yourself this integrity on your own terms will help you immensely in the long run.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/how-breaking-your-good-habits-now-can-create-stronger-healthier-habits-in-the-future-33b952f18df8

['Michal Bernolak']

2019-03-28 17:56:56.348000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Startup', 'Productivity', 'Habits', 'Strategy']

Open-sourcing KingPin, building blocks for scaling Pinterest

Shu Zhang | Pinterest engineer, Infrastructure When we first started building Pinterest, we used Python as our development language, which helped us build quickly and reliably. Over the years we built many tools around Python, including Pinball, MySQL_utils and pymemcache, as well as a set of libraries used daily for service communication and configuration management. Today we’re releasing this toolset, KingPin, as our latest open-source package. KingPin contains some of the best practices we learned when scaling Pinterest, including: A local daemon to deal with the ZooKeeper’s single point of failure (SPOF) problem. The daemon is running on ~20K hosts delivering configuration data in less than 10 seconds. A Python Thrift client wrapper for enhanced functionality. We send hundreds of thousands of requests per second via this Python client across Pinterest. A configuration management framework. We have over 400 configurations being updated and consumed through this framework. KingPin use cases You may want to try out KingPin in any of the following cases: Your stack is also Python-oriented and running on AWS. You want to make your ZooKeeper cluster more robust and resilient. You’re building a configuration system and want your configurations to support a rich set of data structures like lists, maps, sets and JSON. You want to use S3 to store some of the most critical metadata. You’re using Thrift and looking for a more reliable client library. KingPin architecture KingPin has the following components working together: Kazoo Utils: A wrapper for Kazoo that implements the utils we use for the RPC framework, service discovery and some enhancements of native Kazoo APIs. A wrapper for Kazoo that implements the utils we use for the RPC framework, service discovery and some enhancements of native Kazoo APIs. Thrift Utils: A greenlet-safe wrapper for Python Thrift client with error handling, retry handling, load balancing and connection pool management built in. A greenlet-safe wrapper for Python Thrift client with error handling, retry handling, load balancing and connection pool management built in. Config Utils: A system that stores configuration on S3 and uses ZooKeeper as the notification system to broadcast updates to subscribers. (See our previous blog post for additional details.) A system that stores configuration on S3 and uses ZooKeeper as the notification system to broadcast updates to subscribers. (See our previous blog post for additional details.) ZK Update Monitor: A local daemon and server that syncs subscribed configurations and serversets to local disk from ZooKeeper and S3. This is a key part of how we make our use of ZooKeeper fault-tolerant. (For more on this design, check out this blog post.) A local daemon and server that syncs subscribed configurations and serversets to local disk from ZooKeeper and S3. This is a key part of how we make our use of ZooKeeper fault-tolerant. (For more on this design, check out this blog post.) Decider: A utility we use to control online logic flow, one typical use case is experiment control. Deciders are set so every A/B testing experiment can be turned on or off in real-time without any code deploy. Decider is built on top of Config Utils. A utility we use to control online logic flow, one typical use case is experiment control. Deciders are set so every A/B testing experiment can be turned on or off in real-time without any code deploy. Decider is built on top of Config Utils. Managed Data Structures: A convenient map/list data structure abstraction in Python built on top of Config Utils. A convenient map/list data structure abstraction in Python built on top of Config Utils. MetaConfig Manager: A system that manages all configurations/serversets and dependencies (subscriptions), built on top of Config Utils. Real-time configuration management and deployment An additional use case of KingPin is managing configurations in real-time. For example, engineers might create a new configuration via MetaConfig Manager and add it to a subscription we call “Dependencies.” Configuration content is stored in S3 as the ground truth and uses ZooKeeper to track and propagate updates. In order to get the configuration subscribed downloaded properly, ZK Update Monitor must be running on the subscriber machine. Applications can read the file out and decode into Python object for CRUD operations using variety of APIs. Service discovery We rely on KingPin to move towards SOA (service oriented architecture) inside Pinterest. An essential building block for SOA is service discovery. A service client needs to know the addresses of the service endpoints to connect and send request to them. KingPin provides a script for service endpoints to register themselves to ZooKeeper so the endpoint list (“serverset”) can be consumed by service clients. Similarly, ZK Update Monitor downloads the serverset from ZooKeeper and puts it into a local file. Serversets change dynamically when server nodes join or leave. Using the Mixin provided in Thrift Utils, a Thrift client reads the local serverset file and talks to the endpoints using any HostSelector algorithm. The Mixin also manages the connection pool and allow users to set various timeouts and retry policies according to specific use cases. Getting started We use KingPin across various parts of our infrastructure. For example, ZK Update Monitor is running on every box at Pinterest to deploy the latest configurations and serversets in real-time. Managed data structures are used for serving write-rare-read-frequent configuration data, such as a blacklist of domains we use to filter spam. The Python service framework is used by every Thrift client.here are hundreds of deciders controlling online logic and turning on and off various experiments. You can now access the source code, how-tos and examples for your own use. If you have any question or comments, reach us at kingpin-dev@googlegroups.com. Acknowledgements: KingPin is a joint effort across Pinterest engineering and has significantly evolved over the years. Contributors include Xiaofang Chen, Tracy Chou, Dannie Chu, Pavan Chitumalla, Steve Cohen, Jayme Cox, Michael Fu, Jiacheng Hong, Xun Liu, Yash Nelapati, Aren Sandersen, Aleksandar Veselinovic, Chris Walters, Yongsheng Wu and Shu Zhang. Thanks to Jon Parise for his support during the open-sourcing effort.

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/open-sourcing-kingpin-building-blocks-for-scaling-pinterest-8febe81f2c1c

['Pinterest Engineering']

2017-02-21 19:33:53.218000+00:00

['Python', 'Open Source', 'Microservices', 'Kingpin', 'DevOps']

10 Simple Steps to Steady Blogging

Do you struggle to keep up with consistently posting to your blog, email newsletter, or even a podcast? Let’s solve that once and for all, right now. I’m going to share the 10 simple steps that will create an easily manageable system for your blog. This is what I have learned after helping people launch thousands of blogs, and in writing my own weekly blog for 12 years. This is my best advice. Okay, let’s dig in… Step #1: Have a Clear Focus You want to be laser-focused on what you write about, and who you write for. Create a mission statement for the blog, identifying exactly what you are focused on and why. Be clear about who this blog is for. Have a picture in your mind of the exact person who will read this. Don’t write for “an audience,” write for one person. Step #2: Mindmap the Themes Now that you have a clear mission and sense of who this blog is for, create a mindmap of the basic themes. You can do this on paper, or via software such as Freemind. Create a circle in the middle and write your mission. Then create a line extending out and write one primary theme of it you will dig into. Draw a circle around that. For that specific theme, create sub-topics around it. Step #3 Create an Editorial Calendar Create a basic schedule to adhere to. Get out a paper calendar or use software such as Excel to create a basic editorial calendar. Plan to post to your blog at least once per week, if possible. Take each of the themes from the mindmap, and begin to place each general theme on a given day or week. Plan 6–12 weeks out. You do not have to stick to a rigid schedule such as this, but I find that it is a useful organization tool, and prevents bloggers from feeling that they are starting from scratch each week. Step #4: Consider Different Types of Posts You Can Create Consider how each theme you write about can take a different form. Would your mission and the person you are writing for benefit from a long story, or a short how-to post? Would they prefer a video? Would a quote be useful? Do they need links and research? Would a drawing be most engaging to them? Don’t feel trapped by “best practices” you read about the blog content that works best based on “industry trends.” Instead, focus intensely how your themes and mission can best connect with an actual person. On your calendar, you can color-code these different content types. Blue can be a poem, red a short how-to post, yellow a long essay, green a diagram, etc. Step #5: Capture Ideas Your mission and themes will be a general guide, but I encourage you to have a place to capture ideas for specific blog posts. If you prefer paper, buy a small notebook that will fit in your pocket and an equally small pen. Jot down ideas as you have them. If you prefer digital, download Evernote on your phone and computer so that you can capture ideas when you have them, or even just save a photo of something that inspires an idea. Step #6: Process Your Ideas Process those ideas weekly. Review your notes, and begin to outline how they would fit into specific blog posts. Use a writing tool such as Scrivener where you can outline multiple blog posts in one place, or create a folder on Dropbox (so you can access them anywhere) where you can keep these ideas organized. As ideas slowly turn into potential blog posts, brainstorm potential headlines early. Create an outline of what a final blog post may look like. This can consist of a few key phrases that gives the post a narrative arc. Consider how this post could delight the person you are writing it for. If you have a file of outlines such as this, you never have to worry about writers block. When you sit down to write, you can choose the outline that is most interesting to you. This gives you a massive head start. You are FINISHING, not STARTING. Step #7: Create a Writing Routine Writing isn’t easy, and it can be an emotional process. Prepare for that by creating a routine that includes some of these steps: Ideation Outlining Writing Re-writing Editing Creating final headline Formatting Final proofing You can even include these steps on an editorial calendar. Perhaps you want to focus on one post per week, and align each of these actions to a specific day. Or maybe you want to batch posts… outlining several at once, or writing several at once. Then processing them the next week through editing and formatting. It’s up to you. Step #8: Find Collaborators Consider if you need an accountability partner to keep you motivated. Or if you have a friend who will proofread posts. Or if you want to hire an illustrator on Fiverr.com to create diagrams for each post. I have those things. I bounce ideas off of the people in my mastermind group every single day. I have hired someone to keep me accountable to certain aspects of my social media calendar. I have a friend I chat with once per week to talk about big picture plans, and keep me focused on item #1 above: the mission and who I write for. I strongly encourage you to involve others in this process. Step #9: Obsess About Engagement Writing a blog is about sharing a message with someone. To do that most effectively, become more and more curious about who these people are, and what engages them. I wrote a whole book about audience research, and I suppose the short version is: care about those you hope to reach. Give yourself a few months to experiment. Concern yourself with crafting the best blog posts you possibly can, and on meaningfully connecting it with others in a way that is welcome to them, not spammy. Step #10: Celebrate Throughout this process, you may feel uncertain. You may seek immediate validation of the work you post, and it may be difficult to receive that very quickly. You may hope for a lot of social media shares or page views, and you may be disappointed. Keep going. Celebrate what you do create each week. How your mission has become clearer. How you identified more ideas that inspire you. How you wrote more posts. How you connected with at least one person. Because if you can make one person’s day better, you have changed their world. Thanks. -Dan

https://medium.com/creative-shift/10-simple-steps-to-steady-blogging-3f08ba7dacce

['Dan Blank']

2017-11-03 10:47:25.680000+00:00

['Email Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Writing', 'Blogging', 'Writer']

Notes on TypeScript: Inferring React PropTypes

These notes should help in better understanding TypeScript and might be helpful when needing to lookup up how to leverage TypeScript in a specific situation. All examples are based on TypeScript 3.2. PropTypes and Inference More often than not we might be working on an existing React application, where a team has decided to introduce TypeScript. This would also mostly mean that if Components props have to be defined at some point, either defining all at once or gradually. In some cases there also might be existing prop-type definitions. Instead of removing the existing prop-type definitions, we might be able to build a bridge between these prop-types and TypeScript. In this part of the “Notes on TypeScript” we will learn how we can leverage TypeScript to infer these component prop-types. Before we begin, it’s important to note that the PropTypes type package offers PropTypes.InferProps , which enables to infer the types for an existing prop-type definition like so: const userPropTypes = { id: PropTypes.number.isRequired, name: PropTypes.string.isRequired, active: PropTypes.bool }; types UserProps = PropTypes.InferProps<typeof userPropTypes>; But let’s take a step back for a minute. What does calling typeof on a PropType definition return? type TypeOfUserProps = typeof userPropTypes; /* type TypeOfUserProps = { id: PropTypes.Validator<number>; name: PropTypes.Validator<string>; active: PropTypes.Requireable<boolean>; } */ If we take a closer look at userPropTypes , we can see that id and name are required and that the active flag is optional. When inferring these prop-type definitions, we can see that the returned type definition wraps the defined types into either a Validator or Requireable , depending on the fact, that the type has been defined as required or not. So internally PropTypes.InferProps differentiates between required and optional types and then creates an intersection between these two groups. We won't go too deep into the implementation details, but there is a need to find out if a prop-type is required or not. An internal IsOptional type checks if a type is null | undefined and then determines if the type is optional. Next, let’s build a small example, to verify if we can transform any prop-type definitions to actual TypeScript types. We have a User component with existing prop-type and default props definitions. const userPropTypes = { id: PropTypes.number.isRequired, name: PropTypes.string.isRequired, active: PropTypes.bool }; const userDefaultProps = { name: "Test" }; const User = (props /*: PropTypes? */) => { return ( <div> id: {props.id} name: {props.name} status: {props.active ? "active" : "inactive"} </div> ); }; User.defaultProps = userDefaultProps; How can we infer these userPropTypes and provide the missing types for the User component? Our first approach would be to go back to the very first example in this write-up: const userPropTypes = { id: PropTypes.number.isRequired, name: PropTypes.string.isRequired, active: PropTypes.bool }; types UserProps = PropTypes.InferProps<typeof userPropTypes>; If we verify the example, we can see that this is already working as expected. const User = (props: UserProps) => { // ... } <User id={1} /> // Works! <User id="1!" /> // Error! Type 'string' is not assignable to type 'number' <User /> // Error! Property 'id' is missing But we’re not considering any default props, although this should not be the case, they might have a different type. This means we need to extend the existing mechanism to include the inference of default props. There is not very much we need to do: type InferPropTypes< PropTypes, DefaultProps = {}, Props = PropTypes.InferProps<PropTypes> > = { [Key in keyof Props]: Key extends keyof DefaultProps ? Props[Key] | DefaultProps[Key] : Props[Key] }; If we take a closer look at the above InferPropTypes type, we can notice that we accept the prop-type and default prop types and then infer the provided prop-types. Next, we map over these inferred prop types and check if a key is also defined in the default props. The key extends keyof DefaultProps part helps us to find out if a key actually exists in the default props. If this is the case we return a union of the prop and default prop value type else we only return the prop value type. Finally we can use our newly defined InferPropTypes as shown in the next example. type UserProps = InferPropTypes<typeof userPropTypes, typeof userDefaultProps>; Running our User component again, shows that everything works as expected. const User = (props: UserProps) => { // ... } <User id={1} /> // Works! <User id="1!" /> // Error! Type 'string' is not assignable to type 'number' <User /> // Error! Property 'id' is missing We should have a basic understanding of how we can infer existing prop-type definition in a React application when working with TypeScript.

https://medium.com/javascript-inside/notes-on-typescript-inferring-react-proptypes-dfb93100523d

['A. Sharif']

2019-03-10 16:52:39.370000+00:00

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

There Used to be Music

My life is filled with music. To me, it’s essentially synonymous with silence because I never truly experience the latter due to all the music. One particular night was no different. The windows were open while I cooked dinner. The music was loud but distant. It was coming from an amphitheater nearby I think. It had a Dave Matthews Band sort of vibe to it. I imagined what it must be like to be there tonight instead of at home with my daughter. I’d love to trade one of these stale nights for one painted with livelier shades. The last time I was there I danced the night away. Later, I was folding laundry while sitting on the bed in my room. My neighbors loved to play music every Sunday. I liked to listen but another neighbor likes to compete by drowning out their music with Jazz and soul music while he gives his truck its weekly wax. This makes for a weird combination — classic rock mixed with Jazz. I grew used to it, even came to expect it on Sundays, but I never really mentioned it to anyone because it had such an insidious entry into my life. A weirder combination though, and one worth mentioning? Barney’s classic “I love you” played simultaneously with Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.” This time, the source of the music seemed closer, just outside my window even. And actually, for a split second, I thought I saw Barney in my room. What can I say? I live in an eclectic neighborhood with lots of children. I hadn’t slept. I was tired. The brain fog was probably building; I was an unreliable source. If the neighbors weren’t Playing live music and nothing was going on at the amphitheater, I could hear opera music. I’ve always been within earshot of it. I’m never sure who’s playing it, but I can hear it in the distance— My friends all say I have the best hearing. And that day, just like any other day, I could hear my boyfriend’s television playing from the other room. The door was shut and he said he hadn’t left anything on but I didn’t believe him; he did it all the time. I nagged at him to remember to turn his tv off. I questioned why children were playing outside at midnight on a school night. I asked everyone if they could hear that girl calling for help. I insisted fireworks were exploding outside. …I ended up with a psychiatrist. A diagnosis didn’t take long and it lead to many answers. It may seem as though these auditory hallucinations should have been obvious to me. Wasn’t it easy to figure out no one else was hearing these things? Well, I never knew anything else, so to me, it was normal. Schizophrenia has made many parts of my life confusing. I’m medicated now and much healthier (I can definitely do without the voices). But when silence comes around, I can’t help but miss those thirty years of music.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/there-used-to-be-music-d1f7b594bde0

['Juliette Roanoke']

2020-09-18 01:01:47.940000+00:00

['Self', 'Mental Health', 'Schizophrenia', 'This Happened To Me', 'Psychology']

Here’s The Style Of Business Plan You Should Write

Here’s The Style Of Business Plan You Should Write Should you go all-in on a 20+ page business plan? Bogdan Karlenko The first big project many new entrepreneurs take on for their new venture is the business plan. Having written a lot of business plans over my career for myself and my clients, I have a strong opinion on 20+ page business plans and their lack of necessity for most entrepreneurs. The majority of startups can do just fine with a 5–10 page business plan. The key to taking the right business plan journey is to define a clear intention for your plan. A lot of entrepreneurs dive into creating a business plan but don’t put any intention behind it. What ends up happening is that they write this long, multi-hour document and then never glance at it again. Without a clear intention, I’ve seen many business plans get abandoned after the finish line push. Sounds like a waste of 30 hours. Tip number one when it comes to writing a business plan: get clear on why you’re writing it. Is your intention to use the business plan to: Pursue investment from investors who would like to see a business plan? If not, what is the purpose of the document? Will you use it as a roadmap to be followed by your team members? Will it help you clarify your thinking process behind the business? Here are some tips on the business plan style you should pursue after you become clear on your plan’s intention. Business plan as an investment document Do you think it’s worth starting on a 30-hour business plan if no one will read it but you? Committing to writing a business plan once you have some soft yeses from potential investors seems logical, writing one with the hopes that a cold lead will respond is a bit far-fetched. I prefer not to start on a 30-hour project unless I have some investors in the pipeline. This is why I recommend that business plans should not be prewritten before solid investor interest. You can create an outline and a writing plan in preparation, but that’s about it. Once this pipeline is primed, the timing of writing the business plan has to be perfect. In other words, you have to get writing and deliver that business plan as soon as you can to investors, while the coals are hot. (It’s important to note that some investors also won’t care to see a long business plan. Some investors are okay with just seeing a pitch deck and detailed financials. Know your audience and plan accordingly.) A substantial business plan for investors should be about 20+ pages long and include thorough market research not only for your industry but from a zoomed-out perspective of external market factors that will affect your business. You should also possess a solid, thought-out strategy for all major arms of your business and realistic financial projections. Some entrepreneurs trust their ability to write a full business plan in a short period of time. Others who are not as well-versed with writing can hire a business plan writer to turnaround a business plan in a short period of time. Good places to find writers like these are on platforms like Upwork. Business plan as a roadmap or for clarity If you’re not planning on taking any investors and are crafting a business plan to use it more as a roadmap, I recommend that you opt for a shorter business plan, coming in at around 5–10 pages. You can also use an alternative like a business plan canvas to create a more succinct business plan. Even though a descriptive, well-researched 20+ page business plan can only be useful — in my experience, I’ve found that business plans made during the ideation phase age very quickly. I’ve seen some business plans become obsolete as soon as 6 months because of changes integrated after the testing/implementation phase. In a business plan used for the purposes of providing a roadmap, or to clarify one’s vision for the business, I recommend that you strongly focus on the positioning you’ll be using to define your business’ mission and vision, its unique value proposition, and the data and research defining your target customer’s shopping behaviors. Utilizing this approach, this document can act as a reference for your business’ copy and voice on its website, social media and other consumer-facing channels. The purpose of this document will be to help your business hammer out its unique angle and key plays when it comes to appealing to its audience in a compelling manner. This central pillar can be a useful document to share with collaborators such as marketers, designers, business strategists, and more.

https://medium.com/sales-mastery/heres-the-style-of-business-plan-you-should-write-1728aa99d4f3

['Sophia Sunwoo']

2020-06-01 15:01:01.170000+00:00

['Entrepreneur', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business Plan', 'Startup']

The 10 Commandments of Social Media Marketing

5. Be Generous With the Information You Give to Followers In the past, I have had clients that were way too worried about losing business by giving too much away. I’ve had catering clients refuse to use brilliant wedding tips articles all because one comment suggested having a pot luck wedding reception. Restaurants have also refused to share stories which suggest a person might do anything other than eat... there. This is a narrow and shortsighted strategy. Who are we kidding? Restaurants and caterers know that their customers could be foodies who often cook for themselves. Don’t fight reality! Your social media strategy will make a much bigger and better impact by actively engaging with your clients. If your client is a piemaker, they can’t just sell their followers pies all the damn time. They need to sell the image and feel of homemade pies. The comfort and fun. In that vein, show customers how to make the pies. Show them how your client makes them better. Share fun pie trivia, and talk about all of the occasions for indulging in pie. Followers love businesses that don’t take themselves so seriously.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/10-commandments-of-social-media-marketing-8446129e6e1

['Shannon Ashley']

2019-09-27 15:42:24.731000+00:00

['Freelancing', 'Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Success', 'Writing']

Nostalgic for New Bookstores? Not I.

Not even if Barnes & Noble disappears tomorrow. Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash As you probably know, the book-selling and publishing industries are undergoing severe change, economic convulsions and high tech disintermediation. That last one is a fancy word for new technological developments causing extreme disruption in business models. I don’t have any insider insight into all this, but one aspect of the ongoing streams of arguments bugs me. So many people talk about new bookstores as though they are the book publishing equivalent of Mom and apple pie. Do We Really NEED New Bookstores to Hold Up the Sky? There’s a subtext that we as readers and writers need new bookstores. That without them we wouldn’t be recreational readers. That American culture depends on them. That they deserve preserving even if they’re not profitable. So commentators look at the decline in brick and mortar bookstores in the United States, and decide the sky is falling. In a sense, they’re right. Independent bookstores have been in decline for several decades, thanks to the two corporate behemoths. The Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie You’ve Got Mail dramatized the issue. Tom Hanks’s character was the grandson of a family-owned book chain to make him more sympathetic, but the movie certainly took aim at how Borders and Barnes and Noble discounted book prices to drive independents out of business. Because those companies were so large, they could take advantage of economic efficiencies impossible for the owners of single bookstores. Many right-thinking culture snobs of that era decried the rise of those corporate big box stores. That’s even though the average Barnes and Noble and Borders store carried FAR MORE titles on their shelves than any independent bookstore I’ve ever been in. How times have changed. Borders declared bankruptcy in early 2012. One corporate behemoth out of the game. Barnes and Noble are closing some retail stores, and converting a lot of space to nonbook use. Would you like a game with that? James Patterson took out a full page ad in the New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly calling for some type of government intervention to protect book publishers and book sellers. In interviews, he did cite several European countries as good examples of governments protecting bookstores for the sake of culture and literacy. James Patterson on government intervention in book publishing An Ebook Pioneer Went to Bat for New Bookstores Stephen King released the first mass market ebook, Riding the Bullet, back in 2000 — years before Amazon produced the Kindle. In 2009, he came with a novella (title: Ur) that’s only available on Kindle. Therefore, fans had no reason to think he’s a Luddite. However, when King released Joyland in 2013, it didn’t have an ebook edition. (It does now.) His stated goal: helping bookstores, who have helped him so much over the year. He is on record as saying people who want to read that book should get off the stick and drive to an actual bookstore to buy it. Stephen King on Joyland This makes no sense to me. Maybe he got push-back from bookstores over Ur, but he did his fans, especially those in rural areas, a disservice. Now, I’m a reading addict, have been since age 7 or so. I’ve read as many books as just about anybody. And over the years I’ve spent a large amount of money on books. Sometimes I told myself to stop, to read more of my To Be Read boxes (NOT a mere stack of books, mind you — a stack of boxes), but something always came out I needed to buy and read right away. That’s been my pattern for over fifty-five years now. I’ve been in more bookstores than most people my age have owned TVs. Why do I support the movement toward ebooks? So why don’t I feel any of this great nostalgia for new bookstores? Because it’s 95% BS. *GASP!* How can I say such a thing? What About Mom and Apple Pie? Let’s step back and get a little perspective, okay? Printed books have been around since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Literacy, writing, periodicals and literature have spread gradually since that point. In 19th century America, literacy was still an elite skill. For most frontier farmers, miners, soldiers and factory workers, literacy was for the upper classes, preachers and men of questionable masculinity by the standards of the time. (Preachers were allowed to read so they could know what’s in the Bible.) (When Oscar Wilde toured the Old West, the miners in Leadville took him down a deep shaft, thinking he’d be one effete English “Nancy boy” shaking in his boots. Instead, he out-drank them all.) Those people were rough, but not necessarily ignorant. They memorized poetry and knew Shakespeare and classical mythology. But they didn’t sit down and read novels. Probably many more people attended Mark Twain’s lectures and readings than actually read his works. However, late in the 19th century, that changed, thanks to the implementation of universal education. Also, no doubt, to the desire by many immigrants to see their children grow up to become successful. Many European immigrants also brought a respect for culture and education with them. Anyway, the demand grew for stories. Humanity needs stories, but only the elite could afford to buy the expensive hardcover books sold in bookstores. And bookstores existed only in large cities. That does make sense economically. A bookstore owners need to sell books to pay the rent, and if the only two literate people in a fifty-mile radius are the preacher and the newspaper editor, that wouldn’t work. Therefore, some enterprising entrepreneurs brought out dime novels to meet the need for cheap stories. Most of their distribution no doubt came in large cities, where there were enough literate (often barely literate) men and women entertained by the stories. But they also reached American small towns and cities. These tales were never published in luxurious hardback books. Hardcover books were reserved for the wealthy, and sold in new bookstores. Dime novels most likely spread through newsstands, candy stories and so on. Pulp Magazines Also Brought Cheap Adventure Stories to the Masses “Literary” Publishers Ignored Late in the 19th century, pulp magazines became the dominant vehicle for cheap adventure fiction. A ton of them filled the newsstand racks. The black and white photo down the page at this site gives an idea of how magazines on display used to look. And that’s on a city sidewalk. Here’s a display in Manhattan that appears to be outside a drugstore. Here’s a picture that gives a closer look at a few of them. Pulp Magazines Created the Idea of Genres A few of the pulps, such as Blue Book, published almost any kind of story if well written and exciting enough, but most were specialized, so readers would look for the same title next month. Before this period, general readers would of course perceive that The Time Machine by H.G. Wells was a different sort of novel than Moby Dick by Herman Melville. But book publishers brought out any story they considered good enough. They did not have separate imprints for science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, and so on. They expected all their customers to be a potential customer for every novel. But periodical publishers wanted that reader recognition and bonding, to create loyalty to their magazine titles. So, pulp magazines came, by the hundreds. Spicy stories. Air war stories. Love stories. Confessions. Mysteries. Westerns. Hardboiled private eyes. Science fiction. Horror. Also, magazines dedicated to one character, such as Doc Savage. More expensively produced magazines (“slicks”) published stories intended for more sophisticated audiences. This included The Saturday Evening Post. In the 1920's, when the average annual wage was $1,296, the Post paid $1 a word. Sell one story a year to the Post and you were set for the year. That’s how F. Scott Fitzgerald paid off his debts and supported his wife Zelda in the mental institution. Although they competed with the growing movie and (starting in the 20's) radio industries for the fiction-seeking audience’s time and money, pulps survived until 1955. Supposedly it was a problem in distribution that finally did them in, not the growing competition from television and paperback books, their direct heir. Some pulps still survive, though in the smaller digest format: ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION (which began life as the pulp ASTOUNDING). My point is, reading and fiction thrived for decades with little or no support from new bookstores. How New Bookstores did NOT Help Me I grew up in the small city of Alton, Illinois, just north of St. Louis, MO, but considered part of the Metro St. Louis area. So although my immediate environment was much like a small town, I had ready access to a significant urban area. What do I owe to new bookstores for my love of books and reading from an early age? Nada. Of course, schools got me started reading, and supplied my earliest books. My mother took us to Hayner’s Children’s Library. In the summer after the third grade, I won the summer contest for reading the most books. Despite attending on the swim team practice every morning and playing in the pool all afternoon. Freddy the Pig. The juvenile novels by Robert Heinlein. A Wrinkle in Time. Hundreds I’ve forgotten. Before long, I walked up the stairs and began checking out the adult section of the library. I remember the awe and chills I felt looking up and spotting the huge collection by Arthur C. Clarke, Across the Sea of Stars. What a great title. In the years to come, I checked out hundreds of library books. If there’s any one American institution responsible for widespread literacy and the appreciation of literature, “great” and genre, it’s not bookstores — it’s the public library. God Bless Andrew Carnegie. (Though I’m not sure whether or not he funded Alton’s public library.) (I just found out. The Jennie D. Hayner Library Association actually turned down funding from Mr. Carnegie because it would have required Alton’s residents to pay a tax to continuing to support library. Until the city took it over just before I was born, it was the only totally free library in the United States. So I owe a big debt of gratitude to Jennie D. Hayner and the other ladies who founded the original Alton Library Association in 1852.) (But God Bless Andrew Carnegie anyway for all the other public libraries he helped build.) Yet, the Big 5 publishers the cultural elites are crying tears for, are making life difficult for libraries. How the big publishers are hurting libraries Mr. Patterson, explain to me again how book publishers protect American culture? God Bless the Newsstands and Paperback Books If there’s another American institution that also deserves immeasurable credit for widespread literacy and the appreciation of literature, it’s the newsstand. (And the candy stores and drug stores that also carried magazines, comic books and paperbacks on display.) Why hasn’t anyone bemoaned the death of the newsstand? Although I got lots of free reading material from Hayner Library, it was certainly not the only source of my literary fix. From kindergarten through sixth grade, I attended McKinley Elementary School in the North Alton business district. I don’t recall exactly when my mother decided I was big/old enough to walk home from school, but it was at least by the fourth grade. Alone and with friends, I explored the possibilities of fun and adventure. And soon discovered the Wardein Pharmacy I walked past carried lots of magazines and comic books. And held a revolving rack of paperback books. Mass market paperback books. Also called pocket books, because you could fit them into the back pocket of your pants. The true heirs to the pulp tradition. Especially paperback originals. These proved so popular, hardcover publishers began selling the paperback rights to the “elite” novels. Soon it became SOP for a book first published in hardcover to come out as a paperback about a year or so later. This made even “literature” cheap enough for working people to afford. Books that bombed as hardcovers could make a profit and even build an author’s reputation in paperback. However, only hardcover book publishers were respected among the literary hoi polloi. Paperback originals continued to have a lower reputation, a carryover from the pulps. Jumping from paperback originals to hardcover publication was a milestone in an author’s career. Paperbacks began to appear in the 1930's, and were especially popular with mystery fans. By the 1950's, as pulps fell in popularity or distribution, paperback originals took their place. At first, the main genres served were mysteries and westerns. Fawcett Crest Gold Medal books published a lot of terrific mystery and thriller books: Wade Miller, John D. McDonald, and many more. Except for a few “literary” works such as those of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, science fiction as we know it today is a creature of the pulp era. Although many adventure writers dabbled in it or used its ideas as exotic settings for adventures (Edgar Rice Burroughs), the first magazine devoted exclusively to science fiction was AMAZING, founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. The great SF writers of the early generation — Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein — as well as many others, wrote their stories for the magazines, never expecting them to be reprinted in permanent book editions. One of the first science fiction publishers was Fantasy Press, established in 1946 by Lloyd Eshback. While he probably also hoped to make some money, Eshback founded Fantasy Press as an act of love for the genre. Related to science fiction is fantasy and horror. The pulp era was not a good one for straight fantasy as a genre. The one pulp magazine devoted to straight fantasy was Unknown Worlds, and it lasted only four years. However, the more dark fantasy oriented Weird Tales made history. Among others, it published Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and H.P. Lovecraft. Neither of those two authors ever saw or — possibly — imagined, their stories would someday be collected into books and even celebrated and praised around the world. Both died in 1936, long before they achieved fame and a kind of outgroup stardom. In 1940, a Lovecraft devotee named August Derleth founded Arkham House, devoted to promoting Lovecraft and similar horror works. Its first book, The Outsider and Others, is now worth a lot of money. As Fantasy Press, Arkham House and a few others were small publishers devoted to extremely “fringe” genres and authors, I’m certain the bookstores of the time never carried their books. They sold through ads placed in the magazines, science fiction conventions and word of mouth. Science fiction book publishing didn’t really begin until the early 1950's. Doubleday did start publishing science fiction in hardcover editions, then made book club editions available to those who couldn’t afford hardcover. In paperback, Ace Books and Ballantine began the next phase of the genre’s popularity. Three Cheers for Revolving Wire Racks of Paperback Books I’m fairly certainly Wardein’s is where I bought my first Fantastic Four comic book (#15 — how I regretted not getting #1) and first Spiderman (#6). I’m also fairly certain that’s where I spotted the Richard Powers covers of the Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Chessmen of Mars was the first ERB book I bought and read. Ballantine reprinted the Mars and Tarzan books and gave them all great Powers covers. Ace got hold of the rest, and gave them even better covers by Frank Frazetta. I still well remember buying Carson of Venus by ERB there at Wardein’s. But Wardein’s was primarily a drugstore. Their magazines and comic books occupied a section of the wall about four feet long. I appreciated the comics, and, later on, the magazines. (Magazine of IF, Galaxy, Amazing, Fantastic, etc). But most of the magazines were mass market. Time, Newsweek, Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post, and a long row of confessions magazines. And the paperback books occupied just one revolving wire rack with, I believe, four columns. It didn’t take long to turn it around to look for new releases. Then I discovered the newsstand across State Street. I don’t recall its name. It had at least four or five revolving racks of paperback books, and many shelves of periodicals. It smelled strongly of tobacco, which I didn’t like, but I put up with it to browse through all those books for sale. So for years, I bought comics, magazines, and paperback books from Wardein and that newsstand. After I went on to high school, I bought from Kerr Drug in Upper Alton and the Broadway Newsstand downtown. Man, talk about a cramped, dark little place. The front of the Broadway newsstand was small, and the one aisle leading to the back even more narrow. The better for the tiny, cramped lady who owned it to keep an eye on customers, I guess. But she carried magazines I saw nowhere else: The Magazine of Horror and Startling Mysteries Stories. These were digest sized magazines that consisted mainly of sloppy reprints of stories from Weird Tales, selected by Robert A.W. Lowndes, an old time fan and pro. Since Weird Tales was long out of print and only available from mail order used dealers who charged extremely high prices for them, I loved getting to read those old stories. RAWL reprinted Lovecraft stories I could not find in paperback. Non-Conan Howard. Seabury Quinn Jules de Grandin stories. But RAWL sometimes bought new stories as well. Two issues of Startling Mysteries Stories, which I bought at that newsstand when they were brand new, each published a short story by a newcomer named Stephen King. They now command a hefty price from dealers. Mr. King, I Discovered You in a Newsstand — Not a New Bookstore! As I recall, this same newsstand is where I could depend on finding the latest releases from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and the Ace Science Fiction Specials (edited by Terry Carr). The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series was the highest quality line of fantasy books ever published. The Ace Science Fiction Specials was the highest quality line of science fiction titles. And I bought them all — at a newsstand, NOT a bookstore! I Didn’t Set Foot Inside a New Bookstore Until I Started College To the best of my memory, the first new bookstore I ever walked into was the university bookstore in Columbia, Missouri when I bought my first semester’s textbooks. And others. I enjoyed browsing through the many fiction books required by some class or other, and bought some. Still, my hometown, Alton, Illinois did NOT have a bookstore! Heck, it doesn’t even have one now. You live in Alton and you want to go to a new bookstore, you have to drive across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to St. Louis. Then you must search for the nearest Barnes and Noble that’s still open. As I recall, when it opened in 1978, Alton Square Mall had both a Waldenbooks and a B. Dalton, but that didn’t last long. Sometime in the 70's, The Godfrey Book Store opened in Monticello Plaza, and I remember going there to visit with a buddy who was a clerk, but it long ago converted to a used bookstore. All right, St. Louis is a big city. St. Louis had bookstores, though I never entered one until I was grown. I loved all of them, but they didn’t make me. They didn’t nourish my love of science fiction and other genre fiction. I bought a lot at Paul’s Books in University City, especially when I lived around the corner in the Loop neighborhood. Yet they eventually went under, despite their close proximity to the staff and students of Washington University. I’ve forgotten the name of the bookstore that occupied three separate locations in downtown Clayton, before the owners sold out to Borders Books. Left Bank Books on Euclid Avenue carried a small assortment of bestsellers and ordinary genre books. They are a hippie/New Left collective, and so mainly carried a lot of leftwing periodicals and books you couldn’t find anywhere else. It still survives. I do recall how happy I was when Barnes and Noble opened its first area store. In Ladue, but near both Clayton and University City. Hey, I never said I didn’t like new bookstores. I’ve been in lots of them over the years. And independent bookstores? As the corporate chains collapse and shrink, they’re actually increasing in numbers. They can focus on specific genres — science fiction, mysteries and so on. They can carry small publisher offerings not available at B & N. They can talk to the customers and find out what they like and enjoy. And some of them are now partnering with Kobo. Go to the bookstore, browse, find a book you enjoy, but instead of then going to Amazon to buy it, you can buy it in electronic form right there at the store, and they get a percentage. Only fair. The Megabookstores Saturated the St. Louis Market But I’m not nostalgic about the whole idea of new bookstores. And I never dreamed St. Louis could support close to twenty superbookstores. (Now, with Borders out of the picture, it doesn’t.) And I’ve been close to a major metropolitan area. Many people live hours away from the nearest supersized bookstore. That was true even before Borders slit their own throat and finished bleeding to death. So Stephen King’s admonition to fans to off their sticks and go to a bookstore to buy King’s book Joyland was ignorant. Of geography. I don’t know about Maine, but out here in flyover country, people who live in small towns may be a hundred miles or so away from the nearest brick-and-mortar new bookstore. They have NEVER been well-served by new bookstores. Their drugstores used to get new comics, magazines and paperbacks, but that distribution system is now gone. Now, if a writer’s fans are forced to buy the physical book, they’re going to order it from Amazon anyway. Why not let the UPS do the driving? How does it help new bookstores for people to order a physical, paper book from Amazon instead of a Kindle version? I don’t know. My main point: I’m a voracious reader and book consumer. But new bookstores didn’t make me that way. Libraries did. Newsstands did. Used bookstores did. I am Nostalgic for Used Bookstores All right, I didn’t talk about used bookstores. This story is long enough. Let’s just say used bookstores perform an important function new bookstores do not — they make older works available to readers. If a writer is not a bestseller, new bookstores don’t carry their backlist. If you just today discover an author who’s been writing for years, so you want to read all their old books, and their name isn’t Stephen King or James Patterson, a new bookstore won’t help you. Heck, I bet they don’t carry more than a fracture of the backlist of even those two guys. You can check out a used bookstore if you live near any, or go to Amazon. If you’re lucky, there are Kindle editions of the older works. Older paperbacks are usually available on Amazon. Amazon has done readers and used bookstores a tremendous service by allowing used bookstores to list their inventory on Amazon. I’ve spend hundreds of hours of my life staring at the shelves of used bookstores, searching for something I wanted. Thanks to Amazon, books available in used bookstores all over the country are now easily available to readers — no matter where they live. That’s a tremendous service to those of us who feel compelled to buy every book beloved authors have ever published. And it’s a major service to those used bookstores. Now they can sell books to readers all over the country, or the world. Used bookstores have had it rough economically as well as used bookstores. Many have gone out of business. But, I suspect, some used bookstores in small towns are now thriving. They don’t have to pay the exorbitant rents necessary to attract a lot of traffic. They might simply exist in a garage or basement. By listing on Amazon, they can sell their inventory to anybody. By De-Emphasizing All Books Except the Latest Hardcover Releases by A-List Writers, It’s New Bookstores that are Degrading the Culture New bookstores are where you go to buy hardcovers of bestselling writers when they’re first released. I for one never joined the fan club of hardcover editions. They’re expensive. And trade paperback editions, which I never saw on sale when growing up, aren’t much better. Too big, too expensive. Both formats are difficult to read while I eat. Both formats are difficult to carry around while waiting at the bus stop. They don’t fit into the back pocket of your jeans as paperbacks used to. (In fairness, Kindles don’t either. But they are easier to carry around than a hardcover book.) The more new bookstores cater to the grab so-and-so’s expensive new hardcover on its publication date crowd and the Big 5 publishers who cater to that mentality because that’s where their profit is, the more irrelevant they are to me. I don’t see how making every release of a new hardcover by a bestselling author at the expense of making writer backlists available to readers is promoting “culture.” The I enjoy browsing at Amazon because I know just about every book in English ever published might be available. My emotional attachment is to the paperback, and the Big 5 are abandoning that format. They hate to cater to readers who want to pay only $8 for a book. Self-published ebooks are the new mass market paperback books. Let’s stay in touch. Sign up for my daily email list.

https://richardstooker.medium.com/nostalgic-for-new-bookstores-not-i-7f60066360af

['Richard Stooker']

2019-06-07 16:31:00.745000+00:00

['Books', 'Publishing', 'Reading', 'Fiction', 'Writing']

The Difference Between Trustworthiness and Trust Is “Merit”

Trustworthiness Truth is some people “seem” to be trustworthy, while they are merely brilliant manipulators who mastered the art of mirroring: When someone mirrors us, they are doing a range of things. They may mimic us, emulate us, be interested in us, share our interests, point out our strengths, gently point out our weaknesses, and simply reflect us. Healthy mirroring involves a person who sees us accurately, and who allows us to see them as well. It is safe. It is reciprocal. It is honest. It is kind. Having this sort of holistic mirroring leaves us feeling safe. Narcissistic mirroring is a whole other game. The process is less about seeing you in some meaningful way than it is about data gathering. — Dr. Ramani Durvasula Interestingly, those fake trustworthy people sell to you, on purpose, the kind of connection you crave. As a human being, and before our life-time of conditioning even started, we used to be a secure interdependent person: When I am physically interdependent, I know that I can do any physical task alone. But, I also recognize that you and I, working together, could do much better than, even at my best, I can accomplish alone. If I am emotionally interdependent, I am emotionally healthy and self-reliant, but I also admit my need for sharing the love. If I am intellectually interdependent, I can recognize that our analytical skills put together could take us to the farthest places I would have never been able to reach alone! The conditioning made us accumulate numerous limiting beliefs about ourselves and build an insecure attachment style — 1. Fearful-Avoidant, 2. Anxious-Preoccupied, and 3. Dismissive-avoidant (some people might be a combination of two styles). The style depends on our bond with our caregivers and how they loved us conditionally and/or inconsistently. Some of us might have been raised by narcissistic parents, resulting in microtraumas, which sometimes could lead to CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). What happens during adulthood is that we tend to look for the patterns we know and perceive as the “norm” in our relationships. Manipulators, and especially malignant narcissists — described in the words of Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg (1970) as sadistic psychopaths — know it and exploit it shamelessly. Always keep in mind that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is best known as the triplet {E, E, E}: Entitlement, Exploitation, and lack of Empathy, along with the grandiosity pattern and need for control. More to the point, after studying your attachment style — and they are experts in doing so in no time— they make sure to provide you with your familiar patterns no matter the kind of relationship — be it a life partner, a colleague, a friend, you name it! It is their intentional strategy to seem trustworthy to you. Giving them your trust for free is the shortest road to abuse, anger, disappointment, frustration, sadness, disgust, confusion, guilt, shame — sometimes even losing your sanity especially when your self-esteem is low and that you are a codependent (quick to self-doubt and self-loathing and having weak emotional boundaries). Bear in mind that not only manipulators can violate your boundaries, be selfish, toxic, and unable to value your investment in the relationship and honor your feelings. Many kind souls may disappoint you because they don’t know better. Should you be interested, I explored the topic here: As a general rule, trust is a gift you should only grant to the person who deserves it, no matter how trustworthy they might seem to be! What does it take to build trust? Trust as a verb is “built”. It involves making deposits. The first and major one is showing integrity. Unfortunately, spotting duplicity requires making use of one’s critical thinking skills. And because most people are operating on auto-pilot without even being aware of it, their self-awareness human endowment and the ability to question everything, including their own thoughts, are sadly out of service most of the time. A non-exhaustive list of other deposits could be: Active listening, making the person we are interacting with feel seen and understood or what we call providing them with psychological air, as well as attending to the little courtesies and small kindnesses. The latter part is not the same thing as merely buying you gifts. It is about the “being” versus the “doing”. Courtesy of the author Clarifying the expectations of every party from the relationship and getting them on the table in the most transparent way. Courtesy of the author Keeping promises: you need to understand that some people tend to build their hopes — in some cases their lives — around your promises. keeping your commitments is showing you care, and this could build bridges of trust that span the gaps of understanding. I mean, let’s be pragmatic! We will not be able to understand people from the very first interactions. It takes time, and that’s okay! Courtesy of the author Apologizing quickly and sincerely whenever screwing things up, as we all do. It takes a great deal of internal security and strength of character. Courtesy of the author Making those deposits raises the “Trust Reserve”. In other words, the trust will not be easily lost. We can make mistakes and withdrawals from the reserve — or what Stephen Covey liked to call the “Emotional Bank Account” — and there will still be room to continue trusting the person and elevate it again. Final thoughts Unless you fully reconnected with your purest gut, that is having entirely re-written your invasive subconscious program, and which was never achieved by any human being, most probably— at least, according to my limited knowledge, giving your trust for free is seldom a winning strategy. More often than you would like to believe, you granted your gift to a person in whom you saw great potential. Sadly, the potential is anything but enough whenever the person is not ready to break their denial circle. You can continue believing in potential and risking to break your heart over and over again or decide your sacred trust needs to be deserved. The choice is yours!

https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/the-difference-between-trustworthiness-and-trust-is-merit-2bc90bc9b482

['Myriam Ben Salem']

2020-12-28 09:58:02.358000+00:00

['Self', 'Philosophy', 'Trust', 'Relationships', 'Psychology']

Michael Orthofer on Why Fiction Matters (Ep. 11)

COWEN: What’s your theory of America? Where have we gone wrong? You say correctly there was more interest in foreign fiction in the 1970s, right? We’ve moved away from that. Why has that happened? What’s the institutional failure behind that? You could say lack of someone like you may be part of it, but you’re here now. It’s still the case. A novel comes out in American English, and they try to hide the fact that it was translated, quite often. I’m sure you’ve seen this, or maybe not seen it. ORTHOFER: Right. Well, I think, actually, things have improved a lot in the time I’ve been running the site. I think a major reason was that there was a generational shift from, especially, the publishing world. The publishers would come across from Europe around World War II, who obviously had brought a lot of international fiction, who were aware of what was being written elsewhere in the world — mainly in Europe, unfortunately, so relatively localized as well, but still. But you also had it with the interest in Japanese fiction, for example. There was that generation, which is also very much due to the sudden interest in Japan from World War II — the people who learned Japanese and then began translating the work. And I think there was a generational shift which played itself out most fully in the 1990s. But yeah, I’m not sure why exactly it went as far down as it did. The wonderful thing is that translation has really been revived in the past couple of years. I think there really has been a greater interest in — especially, with smaller publishers who are really interested in publishing translations. COWEN: But it is a kind of paradox of globalization, right? After the ’70s in particular, immigration to the United States goes up quite rapidly. There’s a lot more trade, especially with Asia. Many more Americans get passports. They travel abroad. And yet, at the same time, we’re less interested in some aspects of foreign literature. Maybe there’s something more general to this. If you think of America as, in some ways, an open country, actually we’re much less willing to watch foreign films than are people from most other countries. Then you go to Canada, for all of its talk of cultural protectionism — they do a small amount of it — or Paris, arguably they’re, in many ways, more open to foreign cultures than America. What’s the general paradoxical lesson about globalization we can pull out of all of this? ORTHOFER: It might be a cultural thing that America has, in many ways, always been sort of integrating. It has integrated the immigrants that have come in, and it has valued that they become American, that they adopt American values. And part of that has been leaving behind, to a certain extent, the culture. I think there’s a great amount of literature of sort of the first-, second-, third-generation Americans and — but it’s almost all in English. And there’s very little of returning to the languages that these immigrants brought with them. On the other hand, it’s fascinating how many foreign authors live, especially in university settings, in the United States. But they live in these sort of isolated pockets. They’re not part of the broader American literary culture, which I find a bizarre paradox. I don’t quite understand why that happens. COWEN: Let me tell you an argument about New York City which I occasionally hear. And I know it’s not true about you, but whether you think it’s true at all. And it gets at these paradoxes of globalization. That in some ways New York City, or maybe just Manhattan, is fairly provincial because people think — and they’re led to believe — that the whole world comes here. In some ways that’s true, both tourism and migration, but you don’t actually get the whole world here at all. You get a highly processed, filtered version of a bit of it from each particular region. Then people here, in a way, become more inward looking. They don’t go as many other places. They feel everything is right here. They get into their routines. And is it possible that parts of Manhattan are evolving into this highly provincial place because of these cultural paradoxes? ORTHOFER: I think so, although New York still remains such a dynamic place because you also have great shifts in what populations come here and how that affects the city, I think. And so there is that dynamism, the changing neighborhoods. I still think, in that sense, it is a very vibrant city. And it’s fairly unprovincial for a metropolitan city, compared to even some European — I mean, I’m from Austria, and Vienna is a cosmopolitan city, but in the end of things, it is — . COWEN: Still Vienna. ORTHOFER: It is, yeah. On hacking books COWEN: My friend Ben Casnocha — he’s always talking to me about this idea of life hacks, like advice where you can live your life or learn things more efficiently. Let’s say I was approaching foreign-language literature in translation as an economist, and the following life hack occurred to me. I’m going to lay it out, and you tell me why it’s wrong. There’s always more to read, always more wonderful things to read in all of the major languages. But if you can read a language fluently, usually you’ll enjoy the fiction or poetry in that language much more. You’re not going to run out of things to read in the languages you can read in. Therefore, in translated literature, you should read the very most famous works. If you don’t read Russian, yes, read Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace and a few things, and then stop. And if you read, say, English, Spanish, and French, then just read in those languages. Translated literature — at the margin, put it aside; never look at it again. That’s not what you do, but what’s wrong with that argument? ORTHOFER: I think you’re really missing so much, because the problem is finding what is of value, what is important. And I mean, we have these established books like War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, but Russian literature goes so much deeper, for example, to take just an example of a big language. It also changes with time so rapidly. I think that in every 10‑year period, you could select a new set of a dozen recent — relatively recent, of the past quarter-century from that culture — works which would give you a completely different view and provide you with a completely different experience. And the bigger problem I see, of course, is that you’re missing out on so much literature from elsewhere, that there really is — for a lot of cultures and languages, there isn’t that standout that you know. You know, Russia, Tolstoy, got it. But if you want to read something from the Philippines, you’re unlikely to be able to find that one author. There are so many other languages and cultures. There is so much being written now which it really is worthwhile keeping up with. COWEN: Would you agree, then, that it’s a good life hack, say, for poetry? If I try to read poetry originally written in Russian — I don’t speak Russian. I understand some of it. I know enough to get that I’m not getting it when I read it in English. It just doesn’t come through, no matter how great the poet, and I don’t enjoy it that much. So in this case I followed the life hack. I just don’t read poetry in Russian, and I feel that’s efficient. Do you agree with that when it comes to poetry? But I do read poetry in the languages I read well. ORTHOFER: Poetry is a bit more difficult because, first of all, there seems a lot more with less poetry that stands out. It’s very difficult, often, to recognize the great poetry of the day in the time being, especially with modern poetry. I find it very difficult to get a sense of what I really should be focusing on. So I mean, I guess it is a useful life hack because, really, there is only so much we can read. I might very well act similarly with poetry, because I don’t spend that much time reading poetry, but with fiction I wouldn’t accept it. No. COWEN: Here’s another life hack which I totally reject, but it may just be because I’m an addict of sorts. You tell me why, for you, it’s wrong. A lot of people say to me, “Well, I love fiction, but I’m never going to read new works because I can’t tell what’s really good. I’ll just wait 20 years and then look back on what was truly excellent from 20 years ago and read that 20 years later. In the meantime, now I’ll just read classics or things in other areas which are verified as being truly excellent.” Does that make sense? ORTHOFER: I worry very much about people who rely on what gets that stamp of approval. Just because it has a cover review in the New York Times Book Review does not mean that that book really is, if we look at it from five or ten years down the road — that that book will still be a significant work. I find so much which is highly praised at any one point long‑term won’t be. Again, however — . I worry very much about people who rely on what gets that stamp of approval. Just because it has a cover review in the New York Times Book Review does not mean that that book really is, if we look at it from five or ten years down the road — that that book will still be a significant work. COWEN: Then wait longer. Wait 30 years. ORTHOFER: Much that we look back on, is — we’ve lost in the margins as well because it’s really hard to keep track of all the great books. We saw at the Strand earlier today Stoner, John Williams. This is a book that disappeared from view for a long time. It was always recognized, sort of. People would say, “This is a great book,” but it had really fallen out of view. Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai was just republished. COWEN: I just ordered it on Amazon. I’m excited to get my copy. I didn’t know about it. ORTHOFER: This was sort of a — not legendary text, but it had gotten a great deal of attention when it first came out. Then, through an odd series of coincidences, it just sort of fell from view. There are many, many, many more books which are in this gray zone where, if you really dig, if you really look, you can still pluck them out. But because there’s so much new work being published, it’s very difficult for it to rise out of that noise. COWEN: Say I’m an American, but I’m someone who doesn’t have as much time to read as you do or I do. I’m only going to take away one book tip from this podcast or video. I’m going to walk into a Barnes and Noble or go to Amazon, and I want to buy a new book. At the margin, what’s the piece of information I should have that will help me make a better decision other than just saying, “Well, go to Literary Saloon and see what I tell you to do.” More generally, I forgot my iPad, I’m in Strand or Barnes and Noble. Tyler and Michael shopping at the Strand Book Store in Manhattan ORTHOFER: Well, I think, depending on the bookstore — but it works, probably, even for many of the Barnes and Noble ones — I really think you should have some faith in the staff that they will be able to best guide you. I’m certain at Strand, for example, which — the booksellers there are book lovers — if you give them a bit of information about what would be suitable for you, that they will be able to guide you. I like to think that the Complete Review is meant to guide readers to their books, right? COWEN: Of course. ORTHOFER: I think on the more localized level in the bookstore, you hopefully get that as well. COWEN: I think I’ve bought more than a hundred books because of you, so I thank you for that. Let’s say now I’m someone who more or less reads for a living. Maybe I write books, or I’m a book reviewer, or I’m a certain kind of journalist, or I work in publishing. You can give me advice at the margin — how to make a better book choice, something to buy and read. For that kind of person, it’s harder to give advice, right? ORTHOFER: Very much so. COWEN: What would your advice be? ORTHOFER: I don’t know that I would — I don’t really have a system for picking books myself. I’m very much — . COWEN: That can’t be true. You may not have articulated your system. But I saw you in the Strand. You have rules and principles. You turn the corner at a certain time. You know what sections to go to. ORTHOFER: Right. It’s a very personal selection process, I think. I think it’s whatever information works for you. One source of information, for example, is seeing what imprint has published — a certain publisher. If New Directions or New York Review Books has brought out a volume, you know possibly what kind of book this might be. That helps narrow it down. Used-book stores — you have to be familiar with the older imprints, for example, which just takes a lot of practice, I guess. That, for example, is one of the sources of information. It’s very difficult, I think, to narrow it down. I think that’s one of the wonderful things of going in a bookstore and of being willing to take a chance and pick up something that hasn’t been shoved down your throat, hasn’t been recommended in 15 different publications, because the offerings out there are so rich that you can really find many things just at the extremes. I think that’s one of the wonderful things of going in a bookstore and of being willing to take a chance and pick up something that hasn’t been shoved down your throat, hasn’t been recommended in 15 different publications, because the offerings out there are so rich that you can really find many things just at the extremes. COWEN: I once did an experiment. I went into a bookstore, and I said, “I’m just going to pick out the book whose cover I like the best and put aside whatever other impressions I might have of that book and really see this through,” just to see how good of a predictor that would be. I ended up liking the cover of a Kate Christensen novel. I then liked the novel, and I’ve liked some of her subsequent writing. When it comes to covers, covers are there, in a way, to trick us, but there’s also a kind of matching going on. It signals, maybe, how intellectual the book is or what kind of person should buy or read that book. You see a cover. How do you decipher or decode the information there? If you like the cover, does it sway you? ORTHOFER: It can sway me, but it rarely does. I’m not a big cover person. I’m really a text person, not an image person. And so I try to see beyond the cover, but the aesthetics obviously do play somewhat of a role. But it’s a very — I think a cover can attract my attention but won’t be decisive. I don’t think anything about a cover could convince me that this is a book I must have. I think I will leaf beyond that, but it can get me to pick up the book. COWEN: Say a parent comes to you. The parent says, “I have a 12‑year‑old, smart child, shows some interest in now wanting to read,” what advice do you give that parent for hooking the child on reading? Since you yourself — your whole life, you’ve had this extreme, intense love of reading — maybe you were born with it — but how do people get hooked on reading? What do you tell that parent? ORTHOFER: I think you want to let them loose in a book environment, in the library, in the bookstore. And you want to give them the freedom to explore for themselves, because I think reading is very much a personal thing, especially in childhood and especially when parents are often tempted to — “Well, is this a book that’s good for the kid?” I think you want to avoid that, because the child has a completely different perspective and really has to want to read the book. I think by letting them make their own choices, their own selections, finding their own way, and not really pressuring them. I don’t think you want to say, “Reading is good for you. You have to read whatever it is.” Just make it easy for them to read whatever they want to read. COWEN: You know what I did a few times with Yana? I’d put a book on the table. I’d point at it. I’d say, “You’re not ready for this yet.” Then I’d just walk away. ORTHOFER: [laughs] That’s usually a good trick. COWEN: That was fairly effective. ORTHOFER: I can imagine, yeah. On translations, great books, and the merits of being a completist COWEN: Are there books which are better translated into languages other than the languages they were written in — novels? ORTHOFER: I think there are, probably many which are, let’s say, B novels. Pulp novels, for example, can often be, especially stylistically, improved in translation. You often have so‑called literary authors translating crime authors, B-list crime authors, and they do a wonderful job of it. There are also cases where I don’t think it’s better, but some of the most interesting — the translations that appeal most to me are those of experimental works which basically are not — you can’t translate them literally. The word‑for‑word don’t come close. The translator basically becomes a re-creator of the text and takes a new approach. Some of those are wonderful as well. COWEN: What’s the best book that you never finished? ORTHOFER: That I never finished? I don’t know because I really finish almost everything. It takes a lot for me to give up on a book. COWEN: See, I don’t finish most of my books. Maybe I finish 10 percent — I’m not sure — but a clear minority. Why finish books that are not as good as the next book you could be reading in respective value terms? ORTHOFER: Right, right. Yeah, but I can’t think of any. There are probably some long books which I haven’t made my way entirely through — let’s say Richardson’s Clarissa, which is a huge book, which I’ve never sat down to read from beginning to end. Perhaps something like that, but nothing really strikes me, because a good book — I want to finish that book. It would have been a not-very-memorable book in any case. [laughs] COWEN: Of the so‑called great books, what’s the one that disappointed you most? ORTHOFER: Of the so‑called great ones? Well, it’s difficult knowing what that canon is. COWEN: Take like Harold Bloom’s list in the back of his book, the western canon of fiction, something like that, maybe a little broader. ORTHOFER: Yeah, no, I have difficulty with especially the verse epics. I’ve never finished the Aeneid, for example, or something like that. I have difficulty getting into some of those. I think, of the great authors, the one I have the most difficulty with is probably Dostoevsky. I’ve read most of those. I think The Prince is probably my favorite, or The Idiot, as it’s sometimes translated. I’m not a big fan of Dostoevsky. COWEN: Tom G wrote this question in to me on Marginal Revolution: “Which are the first three books that come to mind in answer to the question, ‘What books made him feel really good after finishing them?’ Quickest answer desired.” ORTHOFER: [laughs] Again, this is the kind of question I have great difficulty with, because I don’t know what made me feel happiest. I don’t know that the — immediate satisfaction, I couldn’t even think of one off the top of my head. COWEN: Now, my theory of you as a reviewer and reader is that you love highly complex books that are long and very puzzling to work out what’s going on. ORTHOFER: I do enjoy those very much, yes. COWEN: So I’m going to bring up two or three of those, and you can tell us what’s in them for you or why we should care. Here’s volume one of a Chinese book — used to be known as Dream of the Red Chamber. Now it’s more often called Story of the Stone. Penguin translation. You’re an advocate of this book. It’s very long. This is only one volume. ORTHOFER: Of five, yes. COWEN: What’s in here? ORTHOFER: Basically, it’s a family saga and basically a love story of the main character and the two women, girls when it starts out. It starts out when he was a young boy. It’s basically a novel which has everything. It’s comprehensive. It’s such a sweeping book. It’s really one that you can get lost in over a long period of time. It’s a book that is very easy to return to, because there is so much in it. COWEN: Even though on the Wikipedia page, 40 main characters are listed, plus minor characters. That’s going to be tough going, right, even with a good translation? ORTHOFER: It depends. I think it conveniently probably has the list of characters. COWEN: It does, but even with a cheat sheet, 40 is hard. ORTHOFER: Right, the main characters. There really are the central characters and the more incidental characters. The story focuses on groups of characters at a time. There are not 40 people onstage all the time, so that makes it somewhat simpler. It is initially, perhaps — if you haven’t read much Chinese fiction, the Chinese names alone can be confusing. I don’t think — that’s the least of the hurdles to the book, I think. It’s also very accessible. It’s just a compelling story. It really describes these characters and their feelings very well — and a wonderful picture, also, of the China of the times, which is a totally different world. COWEN: Which is the 18th century, yeah. An author you’re a big advocate of, Arno Schmidt, right? ORTHOFER: Yes. COWEN: You’ve written a book on him. It’s the book here. His masterwork is coming out in English, actually, translated for the first time this September. Is that correct? ORTHOFER: Yes. COWEN: The German title is Zettels Traum. What’s the English title? ORTHOFER: Bottom’s Dream. COWEN: Bottom’s Dream. Most people have never heard of Arno Schmidt. ORTHOFER: Regrettably, no. COWEN: We have a chance now to read his masterwork. Some of his others are in English already. Tell us why we should care. ORTHOFER: Well, Bottom’s Dream — I don’t know how many people will actually read that. That is a very complicated piece of work. Arno Schmidt is a fascinating — . COWEN: You love it, right? You’ve written a book on Schmidt. ORTHOFER: I do, but again, it’s on Schmidt as a whole, and Schmidt has written in several different categories. He’s also written short novels and stories which are much more accessible. COWEN: But you giggled when you read Bottom’s Dream, right? ORTHOFER: Yes. COWEN: You giggled a lot. ORTHOFER: The English edition, I think, is just under 1,500 pages. COWEN: A mere pittance compared to Dream of the Red Chamber, right? ORTHOFER: It’s going to be about this big, and it’s written in three columns per page. There’s the main story. Then you have the commentary and not quite the footnotes but the elaborations on the side. COWEN: Talk us into the work now. ORTHOFER: It covers a seven‑day span. Basically it’s a story of translation. Some translators come to an expert on Poe and ask his advice about translating Poe. As the title Bottom’s Dream also suggests, there’s a Shakespearean aspect to it as well. And I don’t even know if it’s Schmidt’s greatest work. In some ways, because it is beyond anything almost anyone else has ever tried to write, it is an immense accomplishment. It’s not the first Schmidt work you want to read. COWEN: What’s the first Schmidt work you want to read? ORTHOFER: If you eventually want to read Bottom’s Dream, then The School for Atheists is the one to read. COWEN: And that’s in English now? ORTHOFER: That’s in English now. Interestingly, the person who translated all these books is John E. Woods, who is famous for his translations of Thomas Mann. He did the definitive Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks. He’s almost been translating Arno Schmidt for decades now, and Bottom’s Dream — . COWEN: Do you like the translations? ORTHOFER: Yes. And Schmidt, again, is one of these writers who you really — it’s difficult to translate him just literally. In the case of Bottom’s Dream and The School for Atheists, he called them his typoscript books because they were written on larger-than-normal pieces of paper and allowed not just writing line by line, as we’re used to, but playing with the text. For example, one of his favorite things to do was with words where you can change the beginning of the word. You have both school bus and schoolchild. He would have school as one word and then bus and child on top of each other, so you could add both meanings of the word. He would take this to the nth degree. Bottom’s Dream and also The School for Atheists allow for incredible literary play. Schmidt is also — I read a fair amount. I read probably more than most people. COWEN: Probably. [laughs] ORTHOFER: Arno Schmidt is an order or two above me as a reader. He wrote a lot, but basically he’s one of the great readers of all times. And one of the reasons I also appreciate him so much is because he’s directed me to so much more reading. And there are a couple of authors — . COWEN: He’s like you? ORTHOFER: Perhaps. COWEN: Or you’re like him? ORTHOFER: On some level, yes. COWEN: Here’s your book out not too long ago, The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction. Another author you promote in this book and elsewhere, Luis Goytisolo. ORTHOFER: Juan Goytisolo. Luis is the brother. COWEN: But both of them you like, right? ORTHOFER: Unfortunately, Luis — nothing of his has been translated yet, although his major work, the title of which escapes me — . COWEN: Antagonía. ORTHOFER: Antagonía is coming out from Dalkey Archive as well. COWEN: Oh, I didn’t know this. ORTHOFER: It’s the same publishers who are publishing Bottom’s Dream. COWEN: It strikes me as a book you would love. ORTHOFER: It does, it does, but unfortunately I have not read that yet. COWEN: The brother, Juan — why is he special? ORTHOFER: He writes in so many different registers. He’s not satisfied with a simple — even when he’s successful with one way of storytelling, he tries out different things, new things. He tells stories in new ways. Also, he’s been a wonderful chronicler of Spain and especially the Spanish conflict with the Islamic world, which goes back to when part of Spain was Islamic. That’s been a tension that has been in the culture for well over 1,000 years. He has written several works which I find really superior. He’s one of those authors where you won’t get the same book you got last time. You’ll get something completely different when you pick up the next one. He’s one of those authors who also manages to do — he’s not going to fail at these attempts. If they are failures, they’re interesting failures. That appeals to me greatly. He’s one of those authors where, if something new of his is coming out, I’m going to make a beeline for it. On things under- and overrrated COWEN: There’s a segment of these chats — you may have heard of it — it’s called “overrated or underrated?” I’m going to call out a few names, books, whatever. You’re free to decline if you don’t want to offend anyone or other reasons. We’ll try just a few, and you tell us overrated or underrated, J. K. Rowling? ORTHOFER: As a writer, I feel perhaps overrated, but as a cultural phenomenon, I think perfectly fine. It’s hard to say underrated, because she is sort of the ne plus ultra of children’s writing. COWEN: Goethe, overrated or underrated? ORTHOFER: Especially in English, absolutely underrated. Goethe is a far more significant author than anybody here seems to realize. The TLS just has a review of a new Princeton anthology of the essential Goethe, 1,000 pages. You can’t stuff him into 1,000 pages because there is so much there and so much variety, too, which is also one of the astonishing things. He is the greatest poet of the times, the greatest dramatist of his times. And he was an astounding novelist as well. COWEN: And scientist, a good scientist. ORTHOFER: Yes, and the Conversations with Eckermann and Soret. You have all these different things which are just superior. In English he’s vastly underrated. In Germany I think they get it. They know. COWEN: Angela Merkel, underrated or overrated? ORTHOFER: [laughs] I actually have not ever read anything by Angela Merkel. COWEN: Not as a writer, as a political leader. ORTHOFER: Again, it probably depends where — I admire her. I think, among the political leaders currently operating in Europe, and especially since we’re speaking shortly after the whole Brexit vote and the turnover that happened in England there, I think she’s probably underrated. COWEN: Herman Melville? ORTHOFER: Probably also underrated. COWEN: We’re agreeing on all these so far, if you’re curious. ORTHOFER: [laughs] All right. Yeah, I think people also don’t range far enough with Melville. When the argument of the great American novel comes up, I always make a plug for The Confidence-Man, which I think is representative. It says so much about America that I think that would be my choice for the great American novel, and especially from Melville. Yeah, I think he’s also underrated. I think people also don’t range far enough with Melville. When the argument of the great American novel comes up, I always make a plug for The Confidence-Man, which I think is representative. It says so much about America that I think that would be my choice for the great American novel, and especially from Melville. Yeah, I think he’s also underrated. COWEN: Thomas Bernhard? ORTHOFER: He’s very fashionable, but also I don’t think he can be underrated. I’m also completely behind him. I think he was a remarkable author I’ve always enjoyed. Even though there is a droning similarity to much of his bitter ranting, it completely wins me over. I don’t think I’ve been disappointed by any Bernhard. COWEN: Wittgenstein’s Nephew is my favorite and then The Loser, Der Untergeher. But all of them, I think, are fantastic. For me, very underrated. Another Austrian, Friedrich A. Hayek, the economist? Again, you’re free to pass. ORTHOFER: I perhaps don’t like what his arguments are always employed for. I mean, currently he’s, obviously, a very popular economist to rely on. I think it gets dangerous with the interpretation of the philosophy. I’m a bit more leery of too much enthusiasm for him — but again, obviously such a significant figure that it’s very difficult to underrate him, I think. COWEN: For fiction, what would be the country or region — now, what’s a country, what’s a region is even up for grabs — that is really underappreciated relative to what it has done? If you say, “Oh, classic Russian fiction,” even if people haven’t read it, people know there’s a lot there. You probably wouldn’t pick that. What’s the counterintuitive pick for most underrated region or country for wonderful fiction? ORTHOFER: Underrated, I would absolutely think the regional language and literature of India. I think surprisingly, even though, perhaps, English is the main literary language of India and a great deal is locally translated, even there much of the vernacular literature still isn’t available in English. What one can see of it and also in part hear about it — we’re missing an awful lot. There is a literary culture there, especially, for example, in Bengali, but we’ve had that since Tagore. One of the remarkable things is Tagore won his Nobel prize over a hundred years ago, and there are still novels by him which haven’t been translated into English. He is really a very good novelist. It’s truly worthwhile, and this goes for many regions. The southern region of Kerala where they write in Malayalam — there’s remarkable literary production there, and we just see so little of it. Also, what is available, because a fair amount is — it tends to be underappreciated, especially in America and the United Kingdom. It hasn’t really reached these shores. COWEN: Would you pick any part of the world as overrated for literature? In a way I know you think it’s all underrated, but in relative terms? ORTHOFER: I think the American dominance is still too overbearing worldwide. COWEN: We agree on this, too. I’m happy to hear you say that, but go on. ORTHOFER: [laughs] I think American literature is too often given a free pass, especially abroad, because we’re so used to it being so dominant. I really think, if any is overrated, it is American fiction. I think American literature is too often given a free pass, especially abroad, because we’re so used to it being so dominant. I really think, if any is overrated, it is American fiction. COWEN: Most of it bores me. One of my pieces of advice for people going to a bookstore — I would just say, “Don’t buy an American novel,” all other things equal, because they’re fairly likely to do so. They’re more likely to have heard of it, without any kind of bias necessarily operating. “Refuse to buy American novels for a year,” I think, is a good piece of advice for a lot of people. ORTHOFER: That is, probably. Yes, that probably is. COWEN: If you think of all of your beliefs about literature, books, fiction — or you can go more broadly if you’d like — what’s the belief you hold that other smart people you respect would find the most absurd? If someone said, “Oh, I think Robert Heinlein is the greatest author ever to have walked on Earth,” that would be considered absurd. It’s not my belief, probably not yours. What’s your craziest view relative to the other people you think are smart and respect? ORTHOFER: In a literary sense? COWEN: You can go broader if you want. Start with literary. ORTHOFER: Oh God, I don’t know. My opinions are so firmly held. I believe them to be so obvious. COWEN: No, you may still think you’re right. ORTHOFER: Right, but see, I don’t know. COWEN: But other people don’t agree. ORTHOFER: I don’t get those disagreements. They don’t dare disagree to my face, apparently. I really don’t know. Nothing comes obviously to mind. COWEN: And more generally? ORTHOFER: Also not. More generally, I guess the standout belief is I don’t see myself having the concern for mortality which most other people seem to have. That seems to be a very popular thing in reading, as well, that there’s this obsession with mortality, which I find a bit odd. COWEN: You think we fear death too much? ORTHOFER: Yes, and many people seem to really obsess about it in a certain sense. That’s something — I don’t think necessarily my opinion is strange. It’s something so foreign to me. The other thing is, also, I have great difficulty with religion. The God concept is just — I can’t — I really don’t know how to regard that. It is one I can’t fit into my worldview and any of my actions. Even though I read a great deal which also, again, is based on this, that part of it always remains foreign to me. COWEN: When it comes to death, would you say death is underrated or life is overrated? ORTHOFER: You can’t overrate life. It’s all we’ve got. Again, because I don’t believe in the religion aspect of it, too, I don’t believe in the afterlife. I definitely think life is underrated, but death is an inevitability. You take it as it comes because there’s no other way to take it. You can’t overrate life. It’s all we’ve got. Again, because I don’t believe in the religion aspect of it, too, I don’t believe in the afterlife. I definitely think life is underrated, but death is an inevitability. You take it as it comes because there’s no other way to take it. On the charm of the Complete Review COWEN: Let me tell you about one of the things I find most charming about your site and your reviews. There’s this unusual mix between extreme passion for the subject, curiosity, and drive to get the books and track what’s coming out, reading them, and then a lot about how other people are reviewing the books. If one reads your site, they don’t just get you. You get a whole broad panoply of other reviews. It’s one of the most valuable things. But then, on the other hand, you’re very hard to impress as a reader. You give these short capsules of your reviews. Here are three of your more recent ones. ORTHOFER: Oh dear. [laughs] COWEN: I quote: “Passable ultra‑lite fare.” Here’s another one: “Typical Carlotto tale of justice in a flawed world.” So there’s something reductionist. Here’s one — you were very enthusiastic — “Nicely done.” I know those are shorter capsules for broader, more detailed reviews, but this mix between the blasé and the enthusiasm and how willing you are to just retreat into like, “Eh” — that’s what I find so intriguing about Literary Saloon. Is there anything you would say to that? ORTHOFER: I hope people use the site in that way. In a way my reviews presuppose familiarity with the site. I assume that people — they look up a couple of reviews, and they get an idea of what this person is doing. The capsule reviews, I think, are a counterbalance to the longer reviews, in which, often, I will be more enthusiastic. This ultra‑lite novel — I gave it a B. It’s perfectly competently done, but it’s just a vacuous, problematic — there’s so little to it, but it’s still perfectly readable. I hope I explained that fully in the review itself. COWEN: You did. ORTHOFER: The original idea behind the site was to be able to link to other reviews. And also I have the review quotes from the major review publications, where there are review quotes available, which I actually did sort of as a countermeasure. I was so irritated by the blurbs you find on the back of the paperback editions, which are not at all representative of the reviews of the book. I wanted to give the honest blurbs of the reviews. It’s always been important to me that my opinion is my opinion. You really should seek out as many different ones as possible. To be able to give access to all these different reviews to point readers to — because some readers rely on a certain reviewer — if I can give them the link to that for this book so that they will get an opinion which, perhaps, is more informative to them than mine can be because they don’t see eye to eye with me, I think that’s a very important thing. Having as many different opinions as possible — to me that always seems beneficial. I realize now we have this issue of whether the wisdom of crowds really is wisdom and whether it doesn’t overcomplicate matters as well. But it’s always been important to me that I have very strongly held opinions, but please also consider the other opinions. COWEN: Other reviews — and here I mean media, not bloggers — how corrupt are they? ORTHOFER: Corrupt in what sense? COWEN: That there’s something in the process which involves favoritism, and maybe there’s an incentive for excess enthusiasm. If your book review section reviews thirteen books and says they’re all mediocre, people won’t buy the books, but more importantly, they’ll stop buying your book review section. Right? ORTHOFER: Yes. COWEN: Do you think there’s, for instance, an incentive to be too positive or some other skew? ORTHOFER: I don’t know that it’s as blatant as that. I definitely think editors certainly prefer positive reviews. There are some newspapers which basically won’t print negative reviews. I think that’s always an issue. They can say, “Well, we preselect. That’s the way we do it.” One of the things I love about how I’m able to review books is that I’ll review almost anything. I will actually review it even if I do not enjoy the book, even if I have immense problems with the book, because I think that’s just — . COWEN: You don’t put them down like I do. Take New York Times or Amazon; I know there’s both. If you had to choose, which do you trust more? ORTHOFER: I don’t know if I can — I like Amazon because I can get a lot of information out of Amazon, the way the information is presented and, in part, with the reviews, depending on how widely it’s been reviewed. Part of the problem with the New York Times, of course, is that they can only review so few books. You have really so little information, or information about so few titles, whereas Amazon, you have at least some information about practically everything. In that sense, Goodreads is perhaps even more useful, especially with the foreign-language books. There will usually at least be people who have already reviewed the foreign-language edition. That’s helpful. One of the things I find remarkable about my site is I try to link to big media reviews. And an extraordinary number of the books which I cover basically go unreviewed in the major media, often even in Publishers Weekly, which I find kind of shocking. I do review obscure books, but it’s not that obscure. I’m fascinated — the Literary Hub is a very good website now, which collects a lot of literary information. They’ve also now started a review-aggregating part of the site called Book Marks. Basically what they do is when they find reviews in three of the publications they monitor — which are basically all American major publications and a few Internet sites — if they have three reviews for a book, then they’ll put that on Book Marks with the summaries and links to the reviews. So, sort of what I do. I find maybe one out of ten of the books I cover qualify for that. I find that shocking. On the complete Michael Orthofer COWEN: We know you can read in a lot of different languages, and we know you read a lot of books. To close, what are three other things about yourself you might want to tell us, not to do with books? ORTHOFER: I don’t know that anyone would find anything interesting about me. I don’t know what could possibly — . COWEN: Ice sculpture, perhaps? ORTHOFER: The ice sculpture. COWEN: Dare I mention it? ORTHOFER: You can mention it. COWEN: You’re a fan of doing ice sculpture. ORTHOFER: I am. Basically, when there’s a lot of snow out, I won’t just build a snowman, but I will try to sculpt as much as I can out of the snow. I enjoy doing that because the snow is always different. The conditions are always different. What you can make out of it is different. It’s also completely transitory. It’s gone usually in a short time, sometimes a few weeks or months. It’s the Andy Goldsworthy sculptures in nature taken to the more extreme, because the snow is obviously really very short lasting. It also shape‑shifts as it collapses, as it falls apart. COWEN: You were born in Graz, Austria, right? ORTHOFER: I was, yes. COWEN: You have a background in law. Is that correct? ORTHOFER: I do. I have a degree in law. I’m a New York State lawyer. COWEN: You were put off by the academic nature of formal literary study because it involved so little reading of books and too much theory? ORTHOFER: Very much so, yes. I was disappointed at university. Basically, you could study literature without reading basically, without reading fiction especially, and more importantly without really engaging in fiction, I think. Literature can lend itself to theory. You can build theory around it, but I don’t find that a useful way of dealing with literature. COWEN: Anyway, thank you very much, Michael. Again, this is Michael’s book, Columbia University Press, The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction. Michael Orthofer, in my opinion still vastly underrated. ORTHOFER: [laughs] Thank you so much.

https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/michael-orthofer-complete-review-fiction-literary-saloon-b028a1ca2620

['Mercatus Center']

2020-07-02 20:26:50.292000+00:00

['Books', 'Podcast', 'Fiction', 'Interview', 'Writing']

Preserving My Writing In Print

I came to a realization after writing on Medium for almost two years. All of my Medium writing existed only in digital form. Those under the age of 35 are probably fine with their photos, music, and writing existing only in digital format. But for many of us, a physical book is a wonderful thing. It is more than just printed and bound words, it is a tactile experience. Much like a photo album or a vinyl record album, a printed book creates an emotional response. I grew up with printed books, vinyl records, and film cameras. The excitement of getting film back from the photo developer was part of the fun of taking photographs. As was reading the liner notes and enjoying the artwork on record album covers. I decided I wanted my writing to exist in physical form, so I could enjoy the tactile experience of a book I created. I wanted to be able to open it and see my words in print. Since I write mainly short humor and fiction, and I realize that I am in the minor leagues of writing, I hold no illusions of getting my stories published traditionally. But just because they are not mainstream enough to attract a traditional publisher, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be published and enjoyed by a small group of friends and family. You don’t have to be a great photographer to make a photo album. Or a great musician to make a video of yourself performing. So why not make a book of your writing? Unless you are holding out hope for a traditional publishing contract, I see little reason not self-publish a book. If you have been writing for any length of time, you probably have enough material to collect into a book. I have written hundreds of stories on Medium over the past two years. I collected many of them into two books. A book of humor and a book of fiction. The humor book has over 240 stories. Many are very short, but comedy doesn’t require great length. Some of the funniest jokes are quite short. There are longer stories also, but most are quick reads. The Fiction book has 92 stories ranging from 50-word microfiction to 13,300-word stories. It covers a wide variety of genres and also includes a good bit of humor. But they all have one thing in common. I wrote them. Which is why I choose the name Mark Starlin Writes! as the series name. The humor book is titled Mark Starlin Writes! Humor, and as you might have guessed, the fiction book is titled Mark Starlin Writes! Stories. I already have some experience with self-publishing. I am a guitar instructor and have created my own guitar method books, which I self-publish and give to my students. I have been doing those for about 10 years, updating them over the years. I use the POD (print on demand) company LuLu.com because they are the only POD provider that offers coil-bound books, which are perfect for music books since they will lay flat on a music stand. Of course, we all know Amazon has a near-monopoly on the book market, so if you are hoping to get your books listed in the biggest market, they are the one to go with. We also know that everyone else is listed there also. But I am not chasing big sales. I mainly wanted the books for myself. If others want a copy, I am happy to make them available in the stores. So I created my paperback books on both Amazon and Lulu (using the same pdf.) And knowing that many prefer digital books, I created versions for Apple Books (iBooks) and am currently working on Kindle versions.

https://medium.com/mark-starlin-writes/preserving-my-writing-in-print-8e32a2338547

['Mark Starlin']

2020-09-09 17:57:39.072000+00:00

['Other Stories', 'Books', 'Writing', 'Stories', 'Self Publishing']

Some People Won’t Like It When You Market Your Work

Some People Won’t Like It When You Market Your Work But don’t let that stop you Photo by Jukebox Print on Unsplash I got chewed out the other day for sending out a publication letter with a link to the trending stories on that pub. The criticism seemed to be that I’m greedy and selfish for wanting more people to read more of my work. Apparently. And so it goes. Because I make my living by writing online, marketing my work is something that some folks don’t think I should do. They seem to think it somehow suggests that I don’t appreciate what I have, or that I’m trying to steal business from other writers. You know, writing for a living is already a tough gig, but this attitude among writers only makes it harder. I have to wonder if my fellow writer who told me to “give it a rest” is just as outraged by billboards and television commercials. Are they sick of marketing from conglomerate corporations, or just indie writers like me?

https://medium.com/better-marketing/some-people-wont-like-it-when-you-market-your-work-92ef77248756

['Shannon Ashley']

2019-12-11 19:33:09.976000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Writing', 'Work', 'Blogging', 'Life']

Web Notifications Introduction: News on Lock(screens)

Web Notifications Introduction: News on Lock(screens) How the Guardian US Mobile Innovation Lab has experimented with telling stories in web notifications. An Android lock screen at the beginning of our EU referendum experiment. At the end of last week, we (the Mobile Lab) all turned to look at each other. “Can you believe it’s only been 18 days since we ran our first public experiment?” one of us asked. We could not in fact believe it. After months of ramping up the lab, we were suddenly operating at full speed. The last several weeks have been huge for us: We welcomed another developer, Connor Jennings; we ran two public versions of our jobs report notification experiment; we covered two primary nights through notifications; and we ran a notifications experiment covering the EU referendum. And we’ve learned a lot. We’ve known since establishing our five areas of focus that we wanted to experiment with notifications. The jobs report, primaries, and now the EU referendum, have been interesting for a few reasons: they are events that unfold over the course of a number of hours where there are smaller developments throughout. Most organizations are using news alerts to push out top news, and include only straight headlines. This is with good reason: alerts require an app download, and a user’s options are usually either to get every alert (although some organizations have broken down the options to set of topical preferences: sports, business, etc) or none, making the risk of alienating a user with one too many alerts a constant. But notifications, we believe, can also be used to tell a targeted piece of a story (or even the entire story itself) right on users’ lockscreens. With the capacity for pushing out alerts now built into Chrome (aside from its iOS app), publishers suddenly have a broader range of options for what they do with the format. It has some defined parameters (character counts, limited actions, for example) but is also flexible enough to deliver information in a variety of ways and formats. It also offers publishers options for how long they run a set of alerts from one time to ad infinitum. For users, signing up to receive a set of notifications requires no big commitments like a download or registration. However, with this access to users’ lockscreens delivering relevant, timely content is no less a challenge. Editors need to make careful choices about what they deliver, how many alerts they send and how often. We’ve started experimenting and hope others will, too. As of now we’ve tested five types of web notifications, which we’ve profiled here (click on names for full write-ups of each): Interactive — which allows users to chart a path through a story, or can help break down a dense topic like the US jobs report. — which allows users to chart a path through a story, or can help break down a dense topic like the US jobs report. Auto-updating — which is a single notification that automatically updates with new information, for example with an elections data feed. — which is a single notification that automatically updates with new information, for example with an elections data feed. Key events — which tell a piece of a story and can usually stand alone; sometimes used to fill time gaps between other notification types. which tell a piece of a story and can usually stand alone; sometimes used to fill time gaps between other notification types. Sequential — which offers users only one path through a predetermined thread of information, for example a Top 10 list. — which offers users only one path through a predetermined thread of information, for example a Top 10 list. Live polling — which brings users into the conversation in real time through questions and live answers, i.e. about the EU referendum results. We’ve also posted technical write-ups of the back- and front-end code that powers the notifications experiments, with the hope that developers in other newsrooms wanting to test web notifications on their own could look to these documents to see how to start. For now our formats are targeted to Android. In its release of iOS 10, Apple will include some increased functionality into iPhone and iPad notifications. We plan to experiment there, as well. In the meantime, we welcome your questions and suggestions. Drop us a note: innovationlab@theguardian.com The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab operates with the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

https://medium.com/the-guardian-mobile-innovation-lab/web-notifications-introduction-news-on-lock-screens-ba0d685cb4e2

['Sasha Koren']

2016-07-11 17:16:01.908000+00:00

['Journalism', 'News', 'Mobile', 'Storytelling', 'Web Notifications']

How I tricked myself into writing a novel

My happy place: writing. Also, a martini. For most of my life I’ve wanted to write Something Grand: something with an impressive word count. A novel. Ideally a well-written, enjoyable-to-read novel that would sell a million copies, get five stars on GoodReads and qualify me as the Great Canadian Writer of my generation. Yet, despite collecting shelves of dusty, half-filled notebooks, despite a degree in English literature and creative writing, despite investing in some very beautiful ink pens, I could never write more than 4,000 words per project. I just didn’t have a Story to tell. But then some wise people in my life said some wise things, and I read some helpful phrases in the (many, many) writing books I’d collected, and magic happened: I wrote a 92,384-word story. For those of you who feel that same LONGING to create a Grand Something, here is how I tricked myself into writing a novel. Maybe these tricks will help you too: Step 1: Find your story Write What You Read In early 2017, after decades of me angst-ing about NOT yet writing a novel and thereby fulfilling My Writerly Destiny, my mom pointed out I only read mystery books; the only Netflix shows I watch are mystery series. MOM: “Why don’t you try writing a mystery?” Her suggestion reminded me of two quotes I’d scribbled down: “If we didn’t have to worry about being published and being judged, how many more of us might write a novel just for the joy of making one?” – Julia Cameron, The Right to Write “If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison, from her speech at a meeting of the Ohio Arts Council I was inspired, so I began contemplating murders. I’ve always rolled my eyes at mysteries where the murderer, once exposed, is revealed as insane: I wanted a murder that was justified. A murderer with whom we could empathize. A logical, necessary death. Eventually, I imagined a murder scenario that made sense to me, with characters and motives and subplots and themes that I was excited to explore. I wanted to write a murder mystery set in the farmers’ market world that I knew so well; I was excited to expose the “seedy underbelly” of market politics, the contrast between the customers’ wholesome market experience and the farmers’ harried reality. Finding Myself as a Genre Writer One of the reasons I’d struggled so much to write a Grand Something in my twenties was because I thought only “literary fiction” was real literature. It was Art, while genre fiction (mysteries, westerns, fantasy, thrillers, romance) was for the less-discerning masses. At university, we didn’t read or talk about genre fiction unless a (misguided, determined) student submitted those stories to a workshop, or a (rebel) professor (e.g. W.D. Valgardson) added those books to our course reading list (e.g. First Blood). It was a big step for me to “come out” and accept myself as a mystery writer. Even now I wince and avoid mentioning my chosen genre in conversations, because I carry the shame from my post-secondary days. Which is just silly. Step 2: Flesh it out So: finally I had a story to tell, in a genre I’d been reading (researching!) since my Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew adolescence. Here is a magical thing about genre fiction: there is an inherent structure to follow. If I wanted a murder to take place, I would need to set the scene, cause the death, show the discovery of the body, show the subsequent investigation, drop in some clues, include some “red herrings” (false clues), kill another character to muddy the waters, create a dramatic crisis, and give a conclusion where Everything Is Revealed. I charted these scenes out using post-it notes on poster board and finally felt confident that I had a big enough story to fill a novel. This reminded me of another bit o’ wisdom I’d read: “Writing is about getting something down, not about thinking something up.” – Julia Cameron, The Right to Write All I had to do was write out the scenes of my story. That didn’t seem too hard. Step 3: Write the first draft This confidence nosedived when I learned: a modern murder mystery novel needs to be around 92,000 words to make a traditional publisher happy. I had never written that many words for a single project before. Once again, I was intimidated and overwhelmed by the sheer number of words. I shared my fears with my husband, Brock, and he did the math: 92,000 words divided by 365 days = 252 words per day. BROCK: “Can you write 252 words a day for a year?” ME: “Yes. Easily.” And so I began to write. I made myself write at least 252 words every day: I wouldn’t let myself go to bed until I met my daily quota. Often, I wrote more. And I found that, if I got my required words written first thing in the morning, I felt calm and fulfilled for the rest of the day. I coasted along to the 45,000 word mark, loving the writing process. (Mmmm first draft bliss.) Life vs. Art When Brock’s terminal cancer progressed to the point where he needed more of my time and attention, I took a break from the book. It was a conscious decision: I knew the story would be waiting for me when I was ready and able to go back to work. I knew I had limited time left with my sweetie. That break continued through Brock’s death, the next few months of packing and preparing for our planned move, the move itself, and then the Christmas holidays. “I Need Help.” By January 2018, I was ready to finish the second half of my manuscript. But I needed help. I needed someone to push me and check in with me, as my husband had done. So I signed up for OneRoom, an online coaching program. I told my novel-writing coach, Erica Wright, that my goal was to submit my manuscript to three competitions in the fall. She worked backward, did the math, and announced I needed to write 1,000 words a week, with a first draft deadline of July. FIRST GUT RESPONSE: “YIKES!” SECOND GUT RESPONSE: “Hell yes.” I was now motivated to keep writing, and devised a plan to make that possible. Whenever my four-year-old son was in preschool, I would drive to the nearest cafe and write the entire time. I used a writing program called Scrivener to manage my increasingly bulky manuscript: the program tracked my word count progress with a delightful pie chart. Having this visual representation of my progress kept me motivated and gave me milestones to celebrate. I completed my first full draft a little after my deadline, and submitted it to the three writing contests. Step 4: Revise & polish The next challenge — and one I’m still facing — is tweaking and revising my first draft to make it a strong, readable, polished final version. My 92,000ish-word first draft was massive. I found it overwhelming to work with and didn’t know where to start with the revision stage. I deflected this challenge by sending it to other writers for their input. The first chapter went to a reader via Sisters in Crime’s Mystery Agent service. I emailed the full draft to three different readers. One was Erica, whom I paid to give me detailed comments and suggestions for improvement. While I waited for these “beta readers’” feedback, I tried to make my 300+ page manuscript more manageable. I summarized the scenes on pieces of paper and glued them in order into a scrapbook. I made big-picture notes to move scene #4, delete scene #13, rewrite scene #32. When my readers’ comments came back, I made notes on or under each scene. Now all I have to do is refer to my scrapbook as I progress through the book, incorporating the edits scene by scene. Staying Motivated In April, during my rewriting stage, I learned the first draft of my novel had made the shortlist for the Crime Writers of Canada’s Unhanged Arthur Ellis Award: my mystery manuscript is one of the five best unpublished mysteries by a first-time author in Canada. This was fantastic, mind-exploding news … and completely demotivating. Why should I struggle to polish my book if it was already good enough for publication? Luckily, I didn’t win the award. Now I’m driven to make my story the best it can be. While I’m still not done the second draft of my book, I know I’ll finish it this summer, and am motivated by my next goal: submitting it to my list of dream agents and publishers, with a lovely “Arthur Ellis Award shortlist” credential on my cover letter. In other words … If you dream of writing a novel or a Grand Something, perhaps these lessons I’ve learned will help you too. In short: Know Thyself. I needed concrete goals, deadlines, some sort of coach, and milestone rewards. I needed to plot my story out in advance, while other writers (“pantsers”) prefer to create as they go. What approach works best for you? What carrots and sticks do you need? Inspire the Rider; Clear the Path for the Elephant. It’s great that you WANT to write down your story, but you need to clear the path for yourself too: arrange child care, make a writing space, schedule writing time on your calendar, or do whatever you have to do to make it POSSIBLE to write. (For more on the Rider/Elephant analogy, read Switch, by Chip & Dan Heath.) Let Yourself Be a Writer. Indulge those stationary fetishes, invest in writer-friendly software like Scrivener, and read inspirational writer books like The Right to Write. Just write, dammit Once we find our story, make the time to write, and actually put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), there is often a moment of self-doubt. SELF: “What if this is shit?” Here’s one last bite of wisdom that helped me through that anxiety: “OK, Universe. You take care of the quality. I’ll take care of the quantity.” – Julia Cameron, The Right to Write Take a breath. Remember your story. Write it down. Read more of my writing on Medium:

https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-tricked-myself-into-writing-a-novel-d726953979b6

['Heather Mcleod']

2019-09-25 17:52:42.060000+00:00

['Creative Process', 'Motivation', 'Writing', 'Creative Writing', 'Inspiration']

Forget Science; This is COVID-19 We’re Dealing With!

Forget Science; This is COVID-19 We’re Dealing With! How public health policy threw science under the bus in response to the novel coronavirus. Ignoring Years Lost and Quality of Life Lost While raw mortality figures get the most headlines, not all deaths are equal. I mentioned this idea in “The Cost of Saving a Life.” It sounds harsh, but at the same time, we also think this way when someone young dies: “it’s a shame that they died so young.” Why? It’s because there’s a lot of life potential lost when someone dies. They had their whole lives ahead of them. On the other hand, someone who’s 90 has already won the lotto, so to speak, by significantly outliving the average person. COVID-19 affects elderly far more severely than it affects young people, including infants. While infants aren’t immune, significant loss of life, and quality of life, seems low for very young people. That’s a good thing. Moreover, comorbidity has an exceptionally large impact on the survival rate of those infected with SARS-CoV-2. A lot of people who have died this year, from COVID-19, could have died anyway, even had they not been infected. All of those deaths are now being attributed to COVID-19, rather than underlying conditions, which is drastically skewing the accounting. If we looked at years of life lost, and more so quality adjusted life years lost, and compared it to other diseases, COVID-19 would look a lot less troubling. It wouldn’t be something that we could ignore, but the optics of the disease would be very different. Ignoring Cost Benefit Analysis There’s still a lot of information to gather regarding the impact that this coronavirus has had on the world, from a health perspective. And I do plan on doing a more detailed analysis, as more statistics become available. However, I want to consider an extreme scenario, in order to show just how much those involved in public health policy have ignored rational practice on this matter. At the time of writing this article, a little under 200,000 people are estimated to have died because of COVID-19. While high comorbidity and high average age of succumbers alters the calculus on the matter, I want to instead do the calculation assuming that people who die are of average age and in perfect health, and will remain that way for the rest of their lives. The average life expectancy in the United States is about 78.6 years and the median age is 38.2 years old. In many parts of the world, average age is lower, but in many parts of the world, life expectancy is a lot lower too. I’ll use this figure to reach a number of QALYs lost per life lost to be 40. That’s approximately 8 million QALYs lost due to the pandemic. How many QALYs have been saved because of the lockdown effort? 10% of that figure? 25% of that figure? I’m going to assume that it’s double that figure. So assuming that our magical lockdown has saved 16 million QALYs, what’s the cost per QALY? According to a BBC report, the direct cost of the lockdowns so far has been about 3.3T USD, with immediate indirect costs, such as loan guarantees, bringing the total to 7.8T USD. This figure does not take into account current losses in economic output or long term consequences of the lockdowns. It also doesn’t take into account the actual medical expenses of saving anyone. But I’ll use this figure rather than one that includes any of that information. The result: 487,500 USD per QALY Those who have read my other piece on the cost of saving a life will notice that this figure is almost twice the high end cost for saving a QALY, in the United States. That means that even with all these assumptions driving down the cost per QALY, and using a very high figure for efficient cost per QALY, we could effectively save about two people, for every person saved because of this lockdown. Opportunity Cost A concept less employed directly by public health policy, but one that helps to understand the importance of cost per QALY is opportunity cost. This economic concept is essentially the lost benefits or opportunity, that could have been enjoyed, had we selected a different choice. What could we have done with the 7.8T USD, rather than spend it on tackling the COVID-19 epidemic? Suppose we still wanted a solid chunk to go directly to COVID-19 research and treatment and reserved half, or 3.9T USD for that purpose. A major problem with COVID-19 is the lack of hospital beds available. Moreover, if we could build hospital beds around the world, and fund their upkeep, we could save a lot of lives in the long term. Suppose we wanted to build hospitals with a 120 bed capacity and fund it for 10 years. How much would it cost? According to The Keiser Health Foundation, the cost per impatient day at a nonprofit hospital was a little over 2,600 USD. This figure is the high end of the list, but was also from 2018, so taking into account inflation and bumping up costs to give a safety buffer I’ll estimate it at a cost of 3,000 USD per inpatient day. Meanwhile, FIXR gives an approximate construction cost of 112.5M USD for a 120 bed hospital with an ER and maternity ward with 210M for a high end teaching hospital. I’ll use the latter figure. A 120 bed hospital would have an approximate annual cost of about 131.5M USD based on the above estimate of the cost per inpatient day, bringing the construction and ten year maintenance cost to 1.525B USD. Using just the 3.9T USD reserve would allow the construction of over 2,500 high end hospitals that would be fully funded, ignoring any revenues, for ten years. These hospitals could handle a total of 300,000 patients at any time, before even functioning above capacity. Once again, these hospitals would be state of the art teaching hospitals, which means that they would also be able to train new doctors who could save more lives, and conduct novel research which would do the same. And it would still leave another 3.9T for direct efforts to combat COVID-19. If that’s not opportunity lost, then I don’t know what is. Ignoring Standard Practices Of course, the question of whether social distancing and all of these other efforts are worth it also depends on whether or not lives are actually being saved. In the above analysis, I pretended that the efforts were saving a lot of lives, and a lot of QALYs. But the science isn’t there. And that’s a problem. Generally speaking, when public health experts decide to implement a policy, they do so only after scientific justification becomes robust, or the impact appears minimal. Especially when the policy is mandated by law, policy must be well informed. And yet, there is little justification to the extreme social distancing mandates that have been put in place. I won’t go into detail in this article, because I’ve addressed the issue in “The Potential Success and Failures of Social Distancing” and in the summary of my own epidemiological models testing social distancing efforts. But to quickly summarize my findings, voluntary cyclical social distancing appears to be rather effective, but extreme social distancing is not. Of course, it is not on me to justify the claim that these efforts don’t work. Generally speaking, we assume that a medical or public health intervention doesn’t work, until the science justifies the claim that it does. We also assume that they have significant side effects, until science justifies the claim that they don’t. And yet, science not only fails to justify these mandates, or that there are limited harmful side effects, but often contradicts those positions. Therefore, current practice is not informed by science, but rather by irrational fear and politics. Further Reading I mentioned “The Cot of Saving a Life” in the beginning of this article. It’s a useful read if you’re interested in the basic ideas behind decision making in public health. I would also recommend a number of the courses on public health and epidemiology, offered by Coursera. I’ve taken a number of courses, and this specialization is a useful one, if you’re truly interested in learning about public health science and epidemiology.

https://medium.com/politicoid/forget-science-this-is-covid-19-were-dealing-with-35c3a9aa8627

['Daniel Goldman']

2020-05-14 12:06:07.879000+00:00

['Economics', 'Pubic Health', 'Science', 'Coronavirus', 'Politics']

Design is storytelling: a model

The best resources for designers starting in Design, UX, and UI. Bootcamp is a new product publication from the team behind the UX Collective (http://uxdesign.cc). To submit your story: hello@uxdesign.cc Follow

https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/design-is-storytelling-a-model-a9d1b01cb97e

['Arushi Singh']

2020-12-21 01:56:22.417000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Design Process', 'Design', 'Design Storytelling', 'Design Thinking']

How to create dashboard for free with Google Sheets and Chart.js

Dashboards are a convenient method for quickly present data. For data scientists and analysts, it’s the tool of choice for showing results of their work to the non-technical recipients. Of course, there are many services for making online dashboards with no or little code. Using ready-made solutions such as Tableau, Qlikview or Google Data Studio, quick production of decent looking charts and dashboards is not a problem. However, most of them are too expensive. We also often encounter situations where the possibilities for adapting views to exceptional data are limited. On the other hand, tailored, self-hosted solutions cause other difficulties. You need hosting and you are unlikely to want to play with the administration of a large system just to collect and present the necessary data. However, it is possible to serve web applications directly from Google Apps Script. In this article, I show you how to create a simple dashboard using data from Google Sheet and Chart.js. First, we will set up templated HTML in Google Apps Script. Next, we will with Chart.js. Then, you will learn how to fetch data from Google Sheets (e.g. when updating information visible in the dashboard) and insert it to the template. Once you set up the dataflow, you can use it in many projects.

https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-create-dashboard-for-free-with-google-sheets-and-chart-js-8c319ab8809b

['Rafał Rybnik']

2020-12-29 14:41:57.492000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Charts', 'Dashboard', 'Web Development', 'Visualization']

My Boss of 4 Years Ghosted Me When I Told Him I Had to Quit My Job

I used to be a big fan of social media marketing. Work from home! Set your own hours! Work in your PJs, put on Netflix, and keep your baby at home. So convenient! (And a little like online dating.) Sadly, there’s also a dark side to the social media hustle of the gig economy. Writers often overlook it because we so desperately want to work from home. Flexible work hours are like the new American dream. For nearly four years, I worked from home as a writer for a social media management agency. Talk about gig economy — I got paid a flat rate per task, regardless of the time it took to finish. I began writing for the startup around the time they first launched, and my client load steadily increased so that in less than a year, I became one of two full-time writers. For a long time, I thought it was a good job. But I gave it an awful lot of extra credit for being better than it really was. This seems to be a common problem for writers, and practically anyone who’s first dipping their toes into this new American dream. Yes, the main benefit was that I got to work from home, so I didn’t have to worry about putting my daughter in daycare — which was very important to me. She was just an infant when I began the work, and today she’s almost 5. At first, the perks seemed to outweigh the drawbacks. I could take the job with me wherever and whenever I moved. And of course, since some friends ran the company, it initially felt like they cared about me and my daughter personally. There was a feeling of job security as if somebody cared that I had a big enough workload to pay the bills. These were nice people, so I never doubted they’d treat me decently as long as I submitted good work. Whenever a client quit, I could count on getting replacements as new ones signed up. That in itself was such a big perk that it overshadowed some of the downsides I experienced in those early days. Like not getting paid for every task. Businesses are using contract workers however it suits them. I should have been wary about the self-employed nature of the job from the start. Under the gig economy, an increasing number of businesses are relying upon “independent contractors.” In my experience, you get treated like an employee whenever it suits the business, but not when it suits you. That means you might perform all of the day-to-day work, like writing the social media content and seeking out appropriate articles for the company’s clients. But there will be no room for growth. Despite my non-employee status, I still had managers whom I reported to. They were salaried. The writers, designers, and editors were all contractors. We All had weekly due dates and the tasks were much more commonly micromanaged than typical contract work. Of course, we received none of the perks of an employee. No benefits. We were responsible for payroll taxes. There was no paid training. Emails and meetings could suck away your time, all for zero pay. It was a lot like that online boyfriend or girlfriend who defines your relationship however it suits them. If you bring up possibly needing more, they claim, "You knew what this was. Don't ruin a good thing." Content mills take advantage of creators hoping to earn a real living. When I first began the job, our pay seemed pretty straightforward. Some of it was quite low, but I didn’t know any better. So I went along with it. They paid out $1.25 per social media post, which meant finding an appropriate and recent article for the client and writing a brief blurb about it for Facebook or whatever platform(s) the customer used. Most clients had 5–7 of these a week. Eventually, the company took on franchise clients, and for every “sub-account” under a franchise, that $1.25 was reduced by half. Each sub-account had to use different copy in the post or blog, but the links could be the same. In the beginning, we also got $25 per 300-word blog post. Not every client had a blog, but those who did got two each month. About a year into the work, compensation for a blog was reduced to $10 although the blog length and standards increased for better SEO performance. Writers also received a $20 setup fee for a new client on each applicable social media platform. This task included creating the copy for profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn. They later did away with this task which meant acquainting yourself with a new client was done on your time, and all unpaid. Initially, every client with a blog also got a newsletter. That meant that I had to go into MailChimp every month to copy and paste content from the previous month into a newsletter, and send it out after an editor approved it. Although there was a $20 newsletter setup fee, there was no monthly recurring fee paid to me as a writer for creating a new newsletter every month or sending it. At one point, I had 25 clients with blogs. That meant working on 25 monthly newsletters for zero pay. Management didn’t understand the problem because I wasn’t creating new content, it was just copying and pasting. What a huge red flag. It took many conversations for anyone to understand what I was talking about when I said a writer shouldn’t have to do an unpaid task. Every newsletter took at least 10–20 minutes. Multiply that by 25 clients, and I was working for hours every month for free. After much discussion, management begrudgingly announced that writers would get paid $7 per newsletter. It was hardly a win, however. They didn’t issue backpay, and they quit including newsletters in a client’s blog package. It became an add-on instead. And then a relic, since clients didn’t want to pay for it as an additional fee. I never thought my Christian friends would run a content mill, until I actually worked for them. To put the pay into perspective, a client with a “full package” was paying about $850 a month (plus a $700 setup fee) for daily posts on a few platforms, and two monthly blog posts. I received about $120 of that per month. And as time went on, most clients had smaller packages between $250 and $650 per month. Writers received a fraction of that pay despite doing the bulk of the actual day-to-day work. Editors made even less. $0.25 (yes, cents) per post and $3 a blog. Honestly? I never thought my Christian friends would run a content mill, until I actually worked for them. And as it often goes in online dating, I realized that the company didn't care what was best for its people. Independent contractors may suffer if they talk to startups about their pay. While I stayed with the company for close to four years, this last year was particularly disconcerting. It all started when I dared to approach management about the fact that our compensation for a blog was cut from $25 down to $10. As tactfully and diplomatically as possible, I tried to explain how the 60% pay cut had made it hard to research and write a quality piece. At every step along the way, I asked the other full-time writer what she felt, and if my tone was coming across alright before I sent any email. It turned out that she agreed, and enthusiastically asked for updates. But she wouldn’t add her own two cents to management. I naively took on all of that risk myself. Despite the fact that I repeatedly told my boss I knew a pay bump was unlikely, and that I was sorry to bring up something as awkward as pay, it seems that I really stepped in it, so to speak. I began that conversation in the fall of 2017, and the topic basically fizzled out within a couple months. Unfortunately, my client load fizzled out right along with it. They quit replacing clients for me, and my workload shrunk. I asked my manager if there was something I could improve to get more clients. He told me I was doing fine, and that they simply didn’t have enough clients to go around. Oddly enough, they hired on six or seven new writers at that time. One of the writers began taking on new clients more quickly than anyone else. As my client list shrunk, hers grew exponentially. And then I found out that she was my manager’s sister. The situation struck my editor as odd. No one could explain to me why I wasn’t being given new clients after years of devoted service. I began waking up with crushing anxiety that my daughter and I would wind up homeless again. I decided to speak to my friend’s husband about the matter since he was one of the founders/owners and I’d lived in his attic one summer before I became a mom. I thought if anything, he would at least be honest with me about what was going on. None of this would have gone over well with a real HR department. According to the owner, I was performing just fine. He said my manager would have told him otherwise. So why wasn’t I getting new clients? The owner chalked it up to the idea that I wasn’t grateful for the work I got. He brought up the fact that I had gone to my manager about the blog pay reduction, and said, “People probably don’t feel like giving you more work when you don’t think we pay you enough.” Even at the time, I couldn’t help but think of that conversation as an HR nightmare. The owner basically admitted I wasn’t getting new clients because I dared to offer feedback on the pay. He went onto tell me that my manager was a saint, and that I should apologize by email for the whole blog pay debacle. I felt like I was trapped in a bad episode of The Twilight Zone. It was beyond weird. The rest of our conversation was essentially a lecture from the owner regarding social graces. Super great for an aspie like me. He said that I needed to remember I’d catch more flies with honey, and that I needed to change my tone if I was going to work in communications like social media. I couldn’t help but think how misplaced his words would be if I were a man. He suggested that any misunderstanding regarding my intent was always my fault, because “it doesn’t matter how you intend it if one person misunderstands you.” I just wondered why the same damn thing didn’t apply to management. To my shame, I was scared to death of losing my job, so I did everything the owner suggested. I apologized. Hell, I groveled. I didn’t say anything that could be misinterpreted as ungrateful. I was extra sweet. All of it felt incredibly petty, like chatting with a potential date online who decides to punish you whenever you don't do exactly what they want. When you’re an independent contractor, they don’t have to give you a reason for giving you less work. None of my efforts to resolve the situation helped. The owner ended our call by promising to talk to my manager and getting me new clients. What really happened? I began to have clients taken away. All that groveling was useless. And despite being told I performed well, it suddenly seemed like I couldn’t do anything right. Ironically, the quality of my work was called into question after I went to the owner. And certain standards being applied to me were not applied to my coworkers. Of course, when it came to the apology email, my manager told me he was never offended and never even thought I’d been ungrateful at all. No need to apologize, he said. Funny how nothing anyone told me lined up. The worst thing about the whole situation was that nobody would actually come out and tell me why they were cutting down my clients. At one point management accused me of linking to a client’s competitors. Knowing that I wasn’t doing that, I asked for an example of my error. They were never able to come up with one. As a single mom who had depended upon this work for years, I felt deeply betrayed. I asked if I should start looking for another job. No answer. I asked another manager what I could do better and explained that I wasn’t going to be able to afford preschool for my daughter as planned. She responded that it wasn’t appropriate to discuss pay. And again, gave no answer for what I was doing wrong. By spring, my “saintly” manager’s sister had replaced me as one of the full-time writers. That’s when I realized the gig economy wasn’t as great as it once seemed. Being a contract worker, with employee treatment only when it benefits the company sucks. Nobody deserves a toxic workplace. Businesses within the big economy often forget that work culture matters even when it’s online. My old company became terribly toxic, and I wasn’t the only one to notice. The other full-time writer quit talking to me once I confessed I was losing clients after bringing up the blog pay. I suppose she didn’t want to look guilty by association. A newish manager was increasingly snippy to the point of being plain rude. Asking a question and then chastising me for my answer. Making mistakes but taking zero responsibility with qualms about putting errors all on me and my editor. Other people noticed problems too. They questioned how Christians could treat their workers so poorly, especially a single mom. Were they trying to get me to quit? That was a common question asked by friends within and outside of the startup. Within a year of bringing up the blog pay, I hated working there. It was miserable. I felt like I was on constant eggshells, and in a last ditch effort, I tried to talk to another owner. The first owner’s wife, and someone who was once my best friend in town. Or so I thought. I asked for her advice on resolving the issue and she told me it was all in my head. It was one of the weirdest conversations of my life. Since she wasn’t actually working with the business anymore, she said she couldn’t give me advice on how to interpret the dynamic there. Yet she went onto tell me that any problem I thought I was having was nonsense, and that everyone else was trying to be professional. For the first time in ages, I stood up for myself and explained that I wasn’t the only person facing or observing issues in the company. And although I told her I didn’t want the situation to come between us and would have to agree to disagree, she quit speaking to me. Quit inviting me and my daughter over for the holidays. Instead, she immediately vented to Facebook that she was such a nice and caring person but she didn’t have a magic wand to fix other people’s lives. Twenty+ people replied that she was the best and some people just didn’t want to help themselves. Of course, I never wanted her to fix my life. I simply wanted advice as a woman with Asperger’s on what I could do to get new clients again because it felt like everything I said dug me further into a hole. I never understood why my questions were so taboo. So I finally decided to call it quits. The more I began to write here for myself, the more I knew I wanted to leave my social media marketing days behind. I realized that I’d been breaking my back to write content I didn’t even like, and the money wasn’t that good. There were no opportunities for growth. No raises, no benefits, no appreciation. A writer like myself was entirely dispensable and clearly, I was vain to believe I deserved at least $25 for a single blog. At the end of November, I developed pneumonia that went into December. I was exhausted and miserable. And for the first time, I genuinely couldn’t finish my social media work. It was pretty damn frightening, but I realized that the time spent writing my own stories had become much more valuable than my contract work. Not to mention it was so much more fulfilling. So I drafted an email resignation on December 16th. Of course, I thanked management for all of their help over the years and credited the job for getting me back on my feet after my crisis pregnancy. Nothing says “thank you for your service” like the silent treatment. To be fair, of the two managers I emailed, the newest one responded to ask if I would be willing to stay on in a lesser capacity. I declined. She was “nicer” than expected given her previous correspondence over the past year. But my main manager, the one person at the company who worked with me the entire time I was there? He said nothing in response to my resignation. Is it really so hard to wish someone well after four years of service? He never once acknowledged my email. Never said thank you for my service, never wished me well… despite the fact that I thanked him and wished him well. And honestly? That stung enough for me to help affirm that the discord was never all in my head. Maybe he really did want me to quit. Then again, what do I know? I’ve basically been working since I was 14, and this is the first time a boss didn’t bother to thank me when I left. We were Facebook friends too, but he quit acknowledging me altogether. Perhaps I’m just one more millennial expecting to be coddled, huh? At any rate, I’ve learned to value my skills and not settle for peanuts when it comes to my writing goals. Plus, I can thank that experience in the gig economy for leading me to finally select a job that pays per reader engagement. I know, I know. Perhaps I’m just one more millennial expecting to be coddled, huh? Though technically I’m a “Zennial,” we might still be presumed an overly-entitled bunch. Oh well. I still never want to sell myself short again. Let’s face it — I used to write blogs for small businesses that virtually nobody was going to read. For peanuts. These days, I get nearly 150,000 reads a month writing about whatever is on my mind, and make more than ever before. (Ahem. Knock on wood.) It’s a helluva lot more satisfying if you ask me. A lot of us have settled for shitty dates and shitty jobs with people who don't value our efforts. My advice? Start valuing yourself.

https://medium.com/awkwardly-honest/my-boss-of-4-years-ghosted-me-when-i-told-him-i-had-to-quit-my-job-b974c998940c

['Shannon Ashley']

2019-03-09 21:09:00.675000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Culture', 'Social Media', 'Freelancing', 'Writing']

Hand Stimming Can Be a Life Saver

Misunderstanding My suspicion is that most people find stimming disruptive because they are very forcefully ignoring, neglecting, and repressing their own intense cravings to stim. I am not saying people are consciously choosing to neglect, but that we’ve been socially trained in the direction of bypassing this common need. The body being is so sensitive by nature, in all people, that a lack of physical stimming means less energetic flow through the system. Makes sense, right? Less energetic flow means more stagnancy. Stagnancy equates to stress. Stagnancy equates to blockages in the circuitry of our body being system where stress starts to pile up and go moldy — causing disorder and disease. I want to suggest that repressing stimming is actually disruptive behavior. Some people work out once a day or once a week and feel that’s what they need. Awesome. As a super-sensitive person, I am pretty acutely aware of the external stimulation my body being is continuously absorbing through the day, and so stimming throughout the day feels like my genuine need. If I allow myself an active practice, I can keep my energy flowing in a healthful fluidity with small but very regular doses of “stimming” behavior.

https://medium.com/psychologically/why-so-much-hand-stimming-dc6d29c2359c

['Kelsey Jean Marie']

2020-11-10 10:47:25.970000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Advice', 'Autism', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology']

Why Excellence has Lost its Meaning. And How to Fix It.

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected,” Steve Jobs advised on the importance of maintaining high standards. And yet, these words — excellence and quality — have become so relentlessly overused and misapplied that they’ve largely become meaningless. With every company that promises a commitment to quality while selling marginal products, the notion of excellence becomes diluted. With every organization that claims to prioritize excellence, yet rewards employees for contrasting behaviors, we further distance these words from their meanings and the ideals that they represent. If you look on the Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Company website, it’ll say that quality and safety are top priorities. They promise that every one of their employees is guided by their Company pledge: I always put safety first. I look for and act to resolve unsafe situations. I help and encourage others to act safely. Which all sounds good. And for a company of over 20,000 employees that services millions of electrical and natural gas customers, it’s a critical pursuit. Except for the fact that PG&E was recently accused of neglecting it’s aging power line and tower infrastructure — the result of which caused a deadly fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people. Further reviews showed that this wasn’t a one-time aberration. In a 2017 internal presentation, the company identified that while the mean life expectancy of their transmission towards is 65 years, the average age of their towers in the field is 68 years, with the oldest having been up for more than a century. Overall, the company seemed content to address those repairs that it considered to be highest risk, while adopting a business model of responding to failures. But…the safety pledge. How could this happen when the website is so clear? How could something like this happen when the company clearly values safety and quality so much? I suppose that putting some buzzwords and promises on a website doesn’t make it a reality. It’s relatively easy to put some claims on a website. And it doesn’t take much to throw some motivational posters on the wall or have senior management give some rousing speeches. Yet none of this leads to a culture of excellence. As Ed Catmull wrote, “To ensure quality then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.” The question then becomes, for others to attribute these words to us, what would we want them to see? If our company truly embraced a commitment to excellence, how would that show itself? And based on my experience, the answer comes down to four main methods. There’s No Gap between Leadership Words and Behaviors “I wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.” — Indra Nooyi In 1982, seven people died from poisoned Tylenol in the Chicago area. Very quickly in the investigation, it became apparent that the cyanide-laced bottles were not a result of sabotage in production or supply chain, instead caused by someone tampering with the bottles following delivery to the individual stores. It’s difficult to imagine not having tamper-proof bottles for medicine, but apparently in 1982 it was fairly easy to simply open up a bottle, add some cyanide tablets, and put it back on the shelf. Johnson & Johnson faced a crisis. They owned 35% of the market and Tylenol was their most profitable product. The tampered products were not a result of company malpractice — relieving the organization of liability. Should they recall all products to ensure the safety of their customers? Was their first duty to use some of those funds to console the affected families? Or should they protect their shareholders and focus on a public relations campaign? Fortunately, Johnson & Johnson has a Credo: a code originally written in 1943 by chairman Robert Wood Johnson that is literally carved in stone at the company’s headquarters. It begins with the promise that first priority will always be to customers: “We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality.” Johnson & Johnson quickly performed a nationwide recall of Tylenol, estimated to cost $100 million. And while at the time of the scare, the company’s market share collapsed to 8%, it rebounded within a year — a feat credited to the company’s prompt response and demonstrated commitment to quality. It’s easy to embrace quality and excellence when everything is going well. But it’s in times of adversity that our true motives become apparent. Johnson & Johnson’s management had a choice — $100 million or the safety of their customers. They chose to be true to their credo — and demonstrate that the company will stand behind their priorities even in the face of tremendous adversity. In order to instill a vision and values throughout an organization, leaders must communicate it consistently and effectively. But that’s not enough. Leaders also need to live the vision. They need to consistently demonstrate the values every day — regardless of the situation. When leaders fail to do this — when there’s a gap between what they say and what they do — people quickly become disillusioned over the true priorities of the organization. In the wise words of Norman Vincent Peale, “Nothing is more confusing than people who give good advice but set a bad example.” Good leaders realize that with every action they take, they are setting an example for others. With each decision, they’re either reinforcing a vision of excellence or detracting from it. To develop a culture of quality and excellence, there cannot be a gap between what leaders say and what they do. As the old saying goes, “Followers may doubt what their leaders say, but they usually believe what they do.” Every Employee Feels Responsible for Excellence “Responsibility equals accountability equals ownership. And a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have.” — Pat Summitt In the Netherlands, home care nursing practices were algorithmically standardized and prescribed down to the minute. It was a very efficient method of scheduling nurses based on availability and expected need. And the nurses hated it. So one of them, Jos de Blok, proposed a new method. He suggested that since it’s nearly impossible to predict the exact treatment that each patient will need, they should try just letting the nurses decide. As a result, Jos found that patients got better in half the time and costs fell by 30%. As Jos described these results to Margaret Heffernan, he said, “Well, I had no idea it could be so easy to find such a huge improvement, because this isn’t the kind of thing you can know or predict sitting at a desk or staring at a computer screen.” And indeed, this method of pushing decision-making down to the individual nurses has now expanded across the Netherlands and around the world. In Linchpin, Seth Godin cites the words of General Charles Krulak, who theorized that in an age of constant accessibility, the corporal and soldiers in the field would have more leverage than ever before. In Krulak’s words, “In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well.” The future of our organizations will be in the hands of the people in the field, not the generals back home. Quality and excellence can only be achieved by the people who actually perform the work. And in order to do this, management needs to give them the freedom to make the right decisions. In too many companies, we try to proceduralize performance. Management develops step-by-step procedures to ensure that people do their job right, every time. But preventing errors and demanding compliance are very different than pursuing excellence. For one, there’s something inherently wrong with the business model of hiring bright people, training them extensively, and then telling them that the most important thing is to follow a procedure. But more importantly, the more that management tries to think for our employees, the less we teach people to think for themselves. And what organization can achieve excellence when only 5% of their people are committed to thinking independently and looking for new opportunities to add value? One of the defining traits of a company that’s committed to excellence is that employees are free to apply judgment and do what’s right — especially in situations that fall outside the rules. People need guidelines and training to help them act responsibly. And they need clarity on the company’s vision to act in its best interest. But once these areas are covered, we typically get the best results when decisions are made by those closest to the work. For people to drive excellence in an organization, they need to own the result. They need to take pride in the fruits of their labor. And it’s much easier to own the result when people can influence the outcome. As Captain L. David Marquet wrote in Turn the Ship Around!, “The first step in changing the genetic code of any organization or system is delegating control, or decision-making authority, as much as is comfortable, and then adding a pinch more.” Standards of Excellence are Applied Consciously and Consistently “Excellence is in the next five minutes, or nothing at all.” — Tom Peters, Tribe of Mentors When Bill Walsh took over the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, they were a dismal 2–14, and the worst team in the NFL. Three years later, they won the Super Bowl. Despite a miraculous transformation, there was no miracle epiphany. There was no one major change that led to this turnaround. It was the compilation of thousands of seemingly minor changes. Walsh implemented Standards of Performance. He instilled discipline and excellence into every moment. Plays were graded down to the inch. Players could not sit down on the practice field. Sportsmanship, cleanliness, and teamwork were primary focuses. As Ryan Holiday describes in Ego is the Enemy, “These seemingly simple but exacting standards mattered more than some grand vision or power trip. In his eyes, if the players take care of the details, ‘the score takes care of itself.’ The winning would happen.” Most of us consider excellence as some future goal. Something that we aspire to achieve some day. But excellence isn’t an outcome. It’s a process. Imagine your standards as a physical bar. You set it at a certain height and that’s the level of expectation for both your performance and that of others. But the bar is rarely fixed. Each action brings the potential to either raise it or lower it. Each choice can either raise or lower those standards for the next time. Sometimes lowering our standards is necessary. Occasionally we need to lower the bar to meet a conflicting trade-off. But while it may be unavoidable, it should never be unintentional. Because unless it’s recognized as an intentional departure, it’s unlikely that it’ll ever be corrected in the future. Most companies that fall into quality issues don’t get there in one large jump. It happens in many small decisions that begin to compound. It happens when each time the bar drops, it normalizes at that new level. When behaviors happen that lower your standards, are they corrected or allowed to continue for next time? If people make commitments, even for seemingly trivial requests, do they follow through? Before an employee requests someone’s help, did they at least try to figure it out on their own? Can you see quality and professionalism in everything that people develop, even internal emails? Is punctuality or tardiness the norm for meetings? Are meetings structured and useful or pointless wastes of peoples’ time? When people disagree on a topic, is there a healthy debate or unprofessional squabbling? While meeting punctuality and email professionalism may seem like minor issues, they’re frequently indicative of much greater problems within an organization. If the bar has been lowered for these items, what else has it been lowered for? We’re either holding up our standards or starting to fall below them. As the great historian Will Durant wrote in his 1926 tome, The Story of Philosophy (and frequently misquoted to Aristotle), “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by doing his actions; we are we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Measurements Incentivize the Right Behavior “What gets measured gets managed,” wrote Peter Drucker in his 1954 book, The Practice of Management. And while he’s right, as he so often is, many companies have ignored Drucker’s concept and turned this into the false corollary of “What can’t be measured isn’t worth managing.” Which is a problem. Because many of the things that are easy to measure aren’t indicative of a culture of excellence. It’s easy to measure clicks and attention. It’s much more difficult to measure work that has a meaningful impact. It’s easy to measure the size of someone’s social network. It’s more difficult to measure the depth of a relationship. Chargeable hours, throughput quantity, quarterly ROI, and minimum specification requirements are all easy things to measure. But none of them drive a culture that’s built on excellence. Worse, prioritizing these areas can incentivize people to sacrifice quality in pursuit of superficial metrics. If you’re focused on minimizing impact to this week’s schedule, you’re less likely to test a long-term process improvement. If you’re going to be rewarded for how many problems you solve, you’re not incentivized to keep your projects running smoothly in the first place. And if you’re solely measured on meeting your individual performance goals, there’s little reason to help out your neighbor or invest time in coaching and developing others. The best indicator of how people will perform is what they’re incentivized to do. And unless incentives align the interests of individuals to the interests of the group as a whole, they’re working against the company’s performance. What behaviors truly matter to your organization? Are your measurements incentivizing people towards those behaviors or away from them? When we only focus on what’s easy to measure, we drive focus away from the areas that are not. Which is just about everything that matters most. Build a Culture of Excellence “Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.” — John W. Gardner When we consider why people act the way that they do, we tend to look at their personality. We look at their individual values and principles and concoct a story that explains their behaviors. Yet this often ignores the impact of situational pressures. While people will be driven by their own intrinsic values, they’re also heavily driven by their surrounding environment — for better or worse. I firmly believe that the large majority of people show up at work each day looking to do great work and make a positive impact. It’s then up to management to make sure that they have an environment to be successful. Many companies have recently come out with empowerment initiatives — programs designed to encourage people to take ownership and perform high quality work. Yet I can’t help but wonder if the only reason that these companies need to empower people is because they’ve previously disempowered them. Put another way, how would you feel if someone told you that they were going to empower you? The good news is that if I’m right, and most people want to deliver excellent work, the act of encouraging it is less about motivating people and more about avoiding behaviors that will demotivate them. Make sure leadership consistently demonstrates the company vision. Drive ownership and decision-making to the working level. Apply standards of excellence consistently and consciously. And make sure that measurements and incentives reinforce the right behaviors. None of that is complicated. But it does require intent. It requires hard choices. And most importantly, it requires that we stop thinking of excellence as a consequence and start seeing it as a prerequisite. It requires that we make quality a mindset that influences every alternative that we consider before any decision or any action. Until it becomes a defining characteristic of everything that we do. Thanks, as always, for reading. This is by no means an all-encompassing list, so if you have other suggestions, please feel free to chime in and start a conversation. Cheers!

https://jswilder16.medium.com/why-excellence-has-lost-its-meaning-and-how-to-fix-it-710a63e81233

['Jake Wilder']

2019-08-17 14:06:20.629000+00:00

['Management', 'Leadership', 'Productivity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Self Improvement']

Peak Performance for Anxiety Sufferers

Research shows our worries aren’t as well-founded as we often think. Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting. Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology People diagnosed with anxiety disorders are often concerned that they aren’t doing as well as they should be doing. This can be true for people with Social Anxiety Disorder, who fear and often come to believe that other people are judging them harshly, laughing at them, or otherwise finding them worse than worst, for people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, who chronically ruminate, nagging at themselves day in and day out, and often experiencing physical symptoms such as muscle tension, headaches, and nervousness, and for people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, who are bound to compulsive behaviors and obsessional thoughts which can take over in the form of time-consuming rituals and routines, strong superstitions, and considerable sadness and frustration. Can You See the Real You? Given that anxiety disorders, like other psychiatric conditions including depression and post- traumatic stress, change the way we perceive ourselves and others-distorting our sense of reality-are those of us who struggle with anxiety disorders really as bad as we think we are? How much do anxiety disorders change the way we function, and is it always negative? Here’s a place where self-doubt can be healthy -learning to be skeptical of self-defeating thoughts and critique entrenched negative self-representations. As the psychiatrist and founder of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis Harry Stack Sullivan noted, people can be seen as having three basic kinds of self-identifications, or “personifications”: Good Me, Bad Me and Not Me. If we have a pretty good sense of self, we are usually in tune with the Good Me versions of or variations on ourselves. Greater anxiety biases us for Bad Me, a seductive place where the risk of failure seems more tolerable because we are pre-judged as lacking. Let’s not talk about Not Me, where the existence of whatever it is about ourselves is too troubling to even entertain, kind of like Jung’s idea of The Shadow, the Dark Night of the Soul. How to Separate Truth from Reality Two recent studies offer optimistic finding for people learning to live with anxiety, recognizing when anxiety is useful and informative, and when anxiety tries to tell us things about ourselves and others which simply are not true. In psychoanalysis, the term “transference” is used to name distortions which cause us to read things into other people which are not there, traditionally a form of identification. A therapist reminds me of my father, and then when the therapist does something my father used to do, I jump to an emotional conclusion that it was for the same reason as my father. Our brains process social information as well as self-referential information. The information pathways for these different categories of information overlaps, because we are inherently social. Personal information is mediated by the social context, and how people act toward us can influence how we see ourselves. In a way, this is similar to the Freudian notion of transference, a kind of noise which makes interpretation of social information in driving self-assessment sometimes ambiguous. Anxiety past a certain threshold, anxiety which begins to affect executive function in the frontal cortex, throws off correction of distorted ideas sometimes making it seem as if our worst fears were coming true. Generalized Anxiety Disorder and OCD: Perception versus Performance In the first study, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Yale University compared healthy controls with patients diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. They wanted to look at how people with clinically-significant anxiety might different both in terms of actual and perceived performance. Would people with an anxiety disorder see themselves as less-than, and would this be reflected in how they actually did on tasks? Would anxiety convey any advantages? Researchers looked at anxiety through the lens of what psychologists have named Dual Mechanism Control Theory, a psychologically- and neuroscientifically-based approach to understanding how two different decision-making systems ideally work together to determine behavior, or clash and cause dysfunction. Dual Mechanism Control Theory focuses on two contrasting features of brain function: proactive control and reactive control. According to study authors, “Proactive control is a form of early selection (i.e., filtering out irrelevant information at earlier stages of processing) and involves the effortful and active maintenance of task goals over time. By contrast, reactive control is a late-stage correction mechanism that is mobilized only after a conflict or other triggering stimulus is detected.” Proactive control requires long-term thinking, planning, intentionally, allocation of future resources in a thoughtful way, developing contingency plans to be responsive to unexpected events, and so on. Reactive control is in place to fix issues which come up when proactive elements run out of options. When foresight runs out of contingency plans, reactive systems are ready, willing and variably able. Variably able because, as we know, reactive behavior doesn’t always fit the situation at hand, especially when we have been pre-conditioned to expect people and the world to be different from how they really are. Participants in the study were evaluated using standard diagnostic interview tools and several clinical research-standard scales for anxiety, stress, worry, depression, OCD and related conditions, and the Attentional Control Scale (a self-report assessment of how well a person can direct their attention), They took tests measuring actual performance on tasks requiring cognitive control, using the AX-Continuous Performance Task, to look at proactive and reactive strategies for deciding how to deal with a challenging situation involving split-second decisions about whether or not to press the right key depending on how changing sequences of letters are presented on a computer screen. Finally, participants’ Task Effort was estimated by looking at how often they selected more draining proactive control strategies over those who chose the path-of-least-resistance reactive strategies by looking at which AX-Continuous Performance Task sequences they favored (some being more proactively and other more reactively biased decisions). And here’s the first piece of good news. Even though the average person in the anxiety disorder group saw themselves as performing more poorly, on actual performances measures they were as good as the control group. They felt like they weren’t able to pay attention, but they actually focused well. The anxiety disorder group even showed a tendency to perform faster and with greater effort than the healthy control group on proactive tasks. Clinical participants tried harder than healthy controls overall, while the healthy controls made a greater effort in association with less worry. Be Chill In the second study, researchers from the University of Greenwich, London wanted to find out if higher levels of social anxiety would impair social performance in actual social situations. They recruited people for the study and had them participate in two different socially-demanding tasks. In the first, they had three minutes to put together a speech about either it being OK to lie, or arguing that any crime can be justified. They then delivered the speech to a few other people, who they thought were other study participants but were actual secret-agent researchers rating their performance. In the second task, participants had to meet someone new (again, an undercover researcher), and get to know they as much as possible during a three minute conversation. Public speaking and meeting someone new, both situations which can be challenging and even seem impossible when social anxiety is high. Participants completed a self-assessment Social Phobia scale, their baseline level of anxiety and anxiety during the task was measured, and how well they did socially was evaluated using the Social Performance Rating Scale, looking at five elements: Gaze-quality of eye contact?; Vocal Quality-the sense of clarity and connection conveyed in tone and manner of speech; Length-how much the mumbled and droned on; Discomfort-how much looked physically out-of-sorts, fidgeting or looking stiff, etc.; and Flow-how well they spoke and included what the other person was saying into the conversation. The second piece of good news is that people with higher levels of social anxiety were good when it came to communication-the spoke smoothly, free to hold good conversation. They looked more nervous to observers but did fine in the interaction. Don’t pay too much attention if you feel physical anxiety, perhaps mentally tag it as a symptom but then move on-even if your body feels off or your voice shakes a bit. It may be helpful to remind and reassure oneself that it isn’t as bad as anxiety leads us to believe, with research to back it up. For others, however, even “knowing” that it isn’t as bad as we think has little impact. The emotional reality trumps what we know to be objectively (so to speak) true. Anxiety, friend or foe? Listening to anxiety is a tricky business. Threat, fear and stress-responses serve important functions for us, changing the way the brain works to better match a more challenging environment. Anxiety helps direct attention and prepare the brain and body for dealing with a potentially tough situation. Stress responses prepare us for action, shunting resources away from non-essential function. Anxiety can motivate us, making us aware of a problem which needs to be addressed. How do we know when to obey anxiety and steer clear of something, or make note of anxiety’s alarm and move forward into the anxiety-provoking situation? There’s an unclear tipping point after which adaptive moderate anxiety levels trail off, and higher anxiety levels start to cause distortions. Anxiety can tell us that the environment is more challenging than it actually is, magnifying the sense of worry about negative outcomes and causing us to doubt our competence. This defensive response can protect against the emotional risk of failure, while also making it more likely one will fail by undermining our sense of self-efficacy and making us feel like we can do it. The present research shows that when people do persevere in the face of anxiety, we do perform as well on cognitive and social performance metrics (at least those used in these studies) as do people without clinically-significant anxiety. Knowing this is the case makes it easier to counter self-defeating inner voices, choosing “yes” over “no”, steering clear of self-fulfilling prophecy land, and moving forward with confidence.

https://granthbrennermd.medium.com/peak-performance-for-anxiety-sufferers-a294b97975f7

['Grant H Brenner']

2019-04-29 00:05:12.405000+00:00

['Mindfulness', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Anxiety', 'Self Improvement']

Version Control for Jupyter Notebook

Jupyter Notebook Best Practices for Data Science by Jonathan Whitmore has been incredibly helpful and I’ve been strongly encouraging team members to adopt at least a subset of them, specifically the post-save hook and the notebook naming convention. Post-save Hook The idea is to automatically save a copy of the notebook in both Python script and HTML format whenever the notebook is saved. I used to clear all output in the notebook before committing it to the version control to make change history cleaner, but that creates two problems: If the data processing part of the notebook requires more than ten minutes to run, it would create a strong incentive for the reviewer to skip actually running the notebook, and instead just read through the code and assuming it does what it appears to do. This is assuming the trained model is serialized in some way for the reviewer to load, otherwise it may take hours to train on reviewer’s system. The distribution of the pre-trained model brings up the next problem: There’s no easy way to distributed the data and model files along with the notebook. Storing and transferring gigabytes of data isn’t that easy for data scientist, and asking data engineers to build something internally just for this may not be cost-effective. For “Big Data” scenario, you wouldn’t want to save Spark access credentials inside the notebooks (really dangerous), so you’d need to find some way to securely manage the cluster access. (There’s a new framework called Data Version Control that looks promising. But you’d need to pay fees to Google or Amazon for the cloud storage.) All in all, the most direct way to solve these problems is to just include the outputs of the notebook in the version control. (Though I’d recommend restart the kernel and re-run the whole notebook sequentially before committing.) Convert the notebook to a Python script and a HTML file. Use the Python script to do code diff in the review process. HTML file works best as an attachment in cross-team communication emails. (Personally I’d only add HTML files to version control only if there are active participants of the project who don’t really use Jupyter.) The following gist is basically the direct copy from Jupyter Notebook Best Practices for Data Science. It’s tested against the latest Jupyter and put here for quick reference: There are two ways to use the above script: Put it at the top of ~/.jupyter/jupyter_notebook_config.py . (Run jupyter notebook --generate-config to create it if you don’t have it yet) Use export JUPYTER_CONFIG_DIR=~/.jupyter_profile2 to specify the config folder if you want different configurations for different projects. Put it in the root of the project folder (where you run jupyter notebook command) as jupyter_notebook_config.py . There’s more! Jupyter notebook, if used properly, can be a very high leverage tool that boosts the efficiency of team collaboration. Please check out Jupyter Notebook Best Practices for Data Science for more. 20190313 Update There’s a new tool that enables direct Diff of Jupyter notebook on Github: I haven’t found time to really try it yet, but I’ve heard good things about it:

https://towardsdatascience.com/version-control-for-jupyter-notebook-3e6cef13392d

['Ceshine Lee']

2019-03-13 10:09:41.400000+00:00

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

I Published over 150 Stories on Medium — Here’s What I Learned

If you’re new to Medium; write, a lot. As I said, I’ve managed to push out around 2–3 articles per day since September. However, I took a break these last few weeks, where I noticed something utterly heartbreaking. I’d normally average around a few hundred views per day. Yet, I almost dwindled to a measly 5–10 views per day without publishing anything new over the last few weeks. Heartbreaking. Daily Views/ October Daily Views/ November As you can see, due to my lack of writing — even with over 80 curated articles — my daily views started to dwindle. Last week, I committed to getting back into the habit of publishing at least 1–2 articles per day, and you know what? Immediately, my daily views rebounded back to an average of 200–300 views per day. Now, to many of you, it may not seem like much, but the point is there to prove. Your old posts will get lost in a sea of desperate writers. To make it on Medium, you have to write consistently — at least in the beginning. Maybe, one day, when I have thousands of followers, then I’ll be able to relax — slow down. Until then, I make it a habit to write a lot.

https://medium.com/swlh/i-published-over-150-stories-on-medium-heres-what-i-learned-5920a6bbbb36

['Jazz Parks']

2020-11-27 09:47:29.781000+00:00

['Self', 'Life Lessons', 'Blog', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing']

Here’s a short-form post about my experiment with short-form posts. I’ll keep this one short.

Here’s a short-form post about my experiment with short-form posts. I’ll keep this one short. Real. Short. If you want to know the results of my little experiment, here you go:

https://medium.com/the-book-mechanic/heres-a-short-form-post-about-my-experiment-with-short-form-posts-i-ll-keep-this-one-short-c2bea750f329

['August Birch']

2020-12-16 16:08:55.242000+00:00

['Medim', 'Marketing', 'Money', 'Life Lessons', 'Writing']

The Resilient Postdoc: How to be ok in an uncertain career.

The resilient postdoc In case the time I have invested in wrestling this might return some interest for postgrad students and postdocs with the same worries, here’s some unsolicited advice on building resilience in the face of postdoc career anxiety. Where are the exits? The most important and productive thing to do is prepare yourself for an exit before you need it. I have a whole post on this in the works. So for now, lie down on this couch and lets talk about our feelings. Is your job your identity? This is both an asset and a liability. Academic careers reward those who let career conform the shape of their lives. Surrender to it and your platter of opportunities broadens. But hitching your identity to a job also makes you vulnerable when things aren’t working out at work. Finding meaning outside of work is a healthy strategy for taking pressure off career as a means to fulfillment. Think of it like an investment portfolio, spreading risk and associated reward. If your relationships, family, pets, hobbies, community work etc are thriving and fulfilling, you’ll be buffered against career anxiety. Another sensible strategy is re-framing your identity around skills, rather than a role. The talents and skills you hone are more a part of you than the job title, however society more often places prestige on the title, not the skills. Thinking about what else you could or should be doing is totally normal. Everyone is doing it, all the time. Most postdocs I talk to, many lecturers, most people in most jobs. I don’t know if this cognitive bias has a name, but it probably should. There’s no harm in occasionally fantasizing about the vineyard/cafe/photography/alpaca business you could go and open, but you’re probably falling victim to the focusing effect (see below). Exiting academia won’t be your last move. There’s only so much momentum a publication record gives you to exit, re-enter and remain competitive. This increases the stakes on the decision to leave or not. However your first move out of academia need not be immune to revision. Release yourself from the pressure of finding the perfect job straight out of research. Trying new things is the only way to settle on what works for you, and in many ways researchers have been conditioned to avoid swapping and changing, because singular focus and narrow expertise is rewarded in academia. Beware the grass-is-greener. Focusing on contract impermanence might lead you to think that other jobs with ongoing status are more desirable than they really are. This is the focusing effect, where we compare complex things along only one or two axes of variation. Plenty of people with ongoing jobs are unhappy and think your job looks marvelous because… There are perks to this job. In science and academia we have the opportunity, at times, to make work a pleasure. Take advantage of that. If you’re not going to get to do this job forever, focus on the good things, don’t make it shit for yourself. Enjoy the moment. The abyss is exciting. The end of a contract and unemployment can be seen as a career existential oubliette, or an exciting opportunity forcing your hand into taking a risk and trying some new things. Framing is powerful. Deliberately try to look at the same event from different angles. Talking to colleagues can get tough. Don’t whinge, but never avoid communicating the facts. If you let your anxiety too often cloud your interactions with co-workers, you will find no one wants to get stuck in a conversation with you. When you need to talk, find the colleagues/mentors who you trust and can speak to in confidence, vent to family/friends, or speak to a counselor. Stop looking sideways. People are going to get the jobs you want and missed out on. People are holding jobs you could probably do better than them. Dwelling on the number of people with your equivalent expertise who have found an ongoing role is demoralizing and unhelpful. It is also classic survivorship bias. It is easy to count the number of jobs that get filled by someone other than you, but much harder to count the number of failed job applications alongside yours. Get off Twitter. Academics on Twitter are commonly whining or flexing, neither of which will make you feel better. You won’t starve, life goes on. You’re a highly trained, intelligent individual with skills to offer. I cannot speak for all economies, but in Australia there are jobs everywhere for people like you. It’s also the case that for most of us, we return to baseline fairly quickly and adapt to what’s in front of us. The very worst outcome of a career change is highly unlikely to live up to the weight of anxiety the transition can create.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-resilient-postdoc-how-to-be-ok-with-uncertainty-cb9660ace549

['Michael Whitehead']

2019-09-30 12:01:39.926000+00:00

['Early Career Researchers', 'Mental Health', 'Careers', 'Science', 'Academia']

Anxiety Ruined My Sleepover — here’s how to stop it ruining yours.

Popping my head over the edge of my bed I gave my friend Missy a smile. She was laying on the mattress that we had dragged off the day bed in the living room. It was now situated on my bedroom floor, next to my bed. Mum had made it up all nice and cosy for her — white downy sheets, pink and green blankets and extra fluffy pillows. It was the first time I had ever invited a school friend over for a sleep over. To say I was excited is an understatement. Missy was one of the most popular, most confident girls in school (keeping in mind we were 6 years old at the time). The fact that she had come to my place for a sleepover was awesome. We had had the best afternoon, playing in the pool and the backyard. In the evening mum had ordered pizza for us and we guzzled enough Creaming Soda to keep us wired for hours. And that is where we found ourselves as mum tucked us in and shut the door behind her on the way out. Sugar happily buzzing through our veins. We were unable to settle. I felt so contentedly happy. As I popped my head over the edge of my bed to give Missy a smile though, the expression on her face was anything but happy. Missy, with her wavy brown hair and Bambi like brown eyes, was crying. Her bottom lip quivered uncontrollably. Eventually she sobbed out that she wanted to go home. My 6 year old heart broke. My friend didn’t want to stay over. I started crying. It became mayhem. Mum, hearing all the crying coming from my bedroom came running in, my dad close on her heels. As Missy cried out that she wanted her mum and her own bed, I couldn’t stop yammering that my friend wanted to leave me. Mum did what she had to do: she packed up Missy’s stuff and popped her in the car for dad to drive her home. After Dad and Missy had left I sat with mum and asked her if Missy didn’t like me anymore. Mum explained that Missy still liked me, but she was just missing her mum too much to stay overnight. Mum explained to me that for all Missy’s confidence and pizazz for life, she had never slept over at a friend’s house before, and maybe, just maybe it had been a bit to much for her to do. As a child I never really understood what mum was talking about. I just nodded my head, latching onto the nugget of information that Missy still wanted to be my friend. But as an adult and after experiencing my own anxiety, I can understand that Missy had had a panic attack. In fact, like Missy, you can be the most confident person in the world and in some situations still be overwhelmingly anxious. Missy, at high school, became the most popular girl, she was an extreme example of an extrovert. Except for when it came to being away from home. This was her anxious no-go zone. Her taboo experience. Her brick wall boundary. Whereas me, I was and am your classic introvert. I felt anxiety speaking up in class and being the centre of attention. To much socialising turned me into Oscar the Grouch. I was that kid comfortable enough to play by themselves for hours. Though at the same time I adored sleeping over at my friend’s places. The thought of playing with my friend’s toys (Kelly had the best Star Wars figurines, OMG!) and watching scary movies that my parent’s would never let me watch (Alex introduced me to Nightmare on Elm Street at the age of 10) was bliss. Anxiety can never be stereotyped or boxed into specific personality traits. Anyone of us can experience it in any given situation. Even the most confident of us. What exactly is anxiety though?

https://medium.com/swlh/anxiety-ruined-my-sleepover-heres-how-to-stop-it-ruining-yours-5646fff278e5

['Elizabeth Wright']

2020-01-17 00:26:31.313000+00:00

['Friendship', 'Life', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology', 'Anxiety']

The reality of being a junior software engineer at a small startup

Real world software development is indeed quite different from what they teach in school. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash Here is what I have learned after working at a startup that builds a web application tailored to customers’ specific requirements. 1. Being a full stack engineer is not an option but a necessity As a small startup company with only 7 people, there are simply not enough resources to hire people specializing only in the frontend, backend, database or design. This is probably very different from how those big companies work. We usually have several projects from different clients going on concurrently. Everyone needs to complete different projects independently. Thus, it is necessary for everyone to know all aspects of web development to implement features and fix bugs. For example, we had to fully implement a feature that allows the user to add and edit records in a system. We need to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build out forms on the frontend. While on the backend, PHP and MySQL languages are required to perform read and write database operations. Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay 2. Shipping product which closely meets customers’ budget and requirements The client sometimes needs software urgently to solve some problem. They set tight deadlines and offer a limited budget. There is always a trade-off in development time, price and quality of a software product. It is really difficult to deliver a high quality yet cheap product under a tight deadline. Thus we have to prioritize on developing the core requirements of the software first. A high-quality product takes time to build. To deliver the product on time and within the budget, sometimes we are forced to trade off on the aspects of aesthetics and user experience. But to be fair, the customer did clearly mention to us that what he wants is just a web application that can work. He emphasized many times that he does not care about the aesthetics of the user interface, so long as we charge him the cheapest price possible. It might sound like the customer wants a subpar product. But I would rather say he just wants a “Minimum Viable Product” or “Proof of Concept”. It is far from perfect, but good enough to be used to automate some manual work in his company. Moreover, software development is an iterative process. If the software has been proven to be useful in real-world usage, the client probably would not hesitate to pay more for us to improve on it. Image by bruce mars from Pexels 3. Hacky code and workarounds are sometimes unavoidable Nobody likes to write ugly code which works but is not maintainable and scalable. Nobody likes to accumulate technical debt and pay the price for it later. Personally, I have always tried to write readable and clean code. But sometimes there is simply no choice. When integrating some third-party API, sometimes it will throw some unexpected results. Usually, their documentation will never clearly explain why. When using some external open source libraries, it is inevitable that there are some minor bugs in it here and there. In my experience, the incompatibility between different versions of libraries is often the number one culprit for unexpected bugs. All of this may cause the application to crash, and your clients are going to be extremely unhappy about it. Although the bugs are in someone else’s code, they will think it is all your fault, and will definitely hold you accountable for it. In this case, the only way to resolve these bugs in the third party code is by implementing some clever workaround in your code. The patch might be ugly, but it works and enables the product to be shipped quickly. Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay 4. There is nothing wrong with using old school technology (like PHP, jQuery) In more recent years, a lot of newer and cooler technology has emerged. We have React.js, Vue.js, express.js, Golang, Scala and etc. A lot of people start to look down on older technology like PHP, jQuery, and Java because they are so “boring” and ubiquitous. As a developer, it is always exciting to learn new technologies and build stuff with them. But from a business point of view, there is often no strong reason to use the latest and greatest technology. In my workplace, the senior engineer has more than 10 years of experience in developing PHP applications. Thus, we have access to a deep PHP codebase on common features like sending emails, sending notifications to a mobile app, and uploading images to AWS S3. This means to implement a new feature in a project, we can copy-paste some code from older projects and do some necessary modifications. It enables us to develop web applications quickly. Although PHP has its own flaws as a language, it is good enough as a tool to build out the product that meets our customers’ requirements. Also, there is a lot of hot debate out there on whether the good old jQuery should be abandoned in favor of pure vanilla JavaScript. Some people dislike using jQuery because it requires loading a 30kb library (minified and gzipped) when loading the webpage. They advocate the use of vanilla JavaScript as it can make web applications that are more lightweight and load faster. But considering the popularity of jQuery, most of the developers around me are much more familiar with jQuery. They can get things done quickly with it. Using a 30kb library sounds like a relatively small price to pay for higher development velocity. Also, why not use the newer and cooler frameworks like React.js or Angular.js? In my case, most of the projects I have done are related to inventory management systems used internally by the clients’ company. The good old jQuery seems sufficient to implement all the features as per required by the clients. Well, using JavaScript frameworks to build a Single Page Application may provide a better user experience. But it feels a bit like overkill for smaller web application used internally by a few company admins. That said, we are not against the usage of new technology. We will not hesitate to use the modern JavaScript frameworks if our client demanded a dynamic web application with complex frontend features. Conclusion Being a software engineer is really so much more than writing some code. Ultimately, the real challenge lies in understanding the problem faced by the customer. Then develop a solution within the budget and deadline. Thank you so much for reading! 😊 Feel free to follow me on Twitter for more stories like this. 😉

https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-reality-of-being-a-junior-software-engineer-at-a-small-startup-3d50004fb721

['Tan Le Tian']

2019-05-06 15:47:31.677000+00:00

['Software Engineering', 'Junior Developer', 'Tech', 'Startup', 'Programming']

Kaggle #1 Winning Approach for Image Classification Challenge

The task of classifying the images into respective classes, the task has been divided into 5 steps: STEP 1: The first and the most important task in Machine Learning is to analyze the dataset before proceeding with any algorithms. This is important in order to understand the complexity of the dataset which will eventually help in designing the algorithm. The distribution of images and the classes are as follows: As already mentioned before, there are 12 classes and a total of 4750 images. However, as seen from the above, the distribution is not even and the class distribution varies from maximum of 654 images to a minimum of 221 images. This clearly demonstrates the data is imbalanced and the data need to be balanced in order to get the best results. We will come to that in STEP 3. Image distribution per class Now it is important to visualize the images in order to understand the data even better. So, some sample images from each class is displayed in order to see how the images differ from each other. There is nothing much that can be understood from the images above as all the images looked pretty much same. So, I decided to see the distribution of the images using a visulaization techninque called t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) is a technique for dimensionality reduction that is particularly well suited for the visualization of high-dimensional datasets. The technique can be implemented via Barnes-Hut approximations, allowing it to be applied on large real-world datasets.[14] t-SNE visualization of the dataset Now after looking closely, we can hardly see the difference in the classes. So it is important to understand if the data is very difficult to distinguish only for humans or it is difficult for the machine learning model too. So, we will do a basic benchmark for it. Training and Validation Set Before starting with the model benchmark, we need to divide the data into training and validation dataset. Validation set plays the role of the test dataset before the model is tested on the original test set. So, basically a model is trained on the training dataset and is tested on the validation set and then the model can be improved over the validation set over time. Once we are satisfied with the results of validation set, we can apply the model on our real test dataset. This way, we can see the whether the model is overfitting or underfitting on our validation set which can help us in better fitting the model. So we divide our dataset of 4750 images by keeping 80 percent images as training dataset and 20 percent as validation set.

https://medium.com/neuralspace/kaggle-1-winning-approach-for-image-classification-challenge-9c1188157a86

['Kumar Shridhar']

2018-09-30 12:57:25.480000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Kaggle', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Convolutional Network', 'Deep Learning']

Psychological Wars in Jobless Mind

What happened now? What is my future? How I can get job? Do I have to improve my skills? How I will survive without earning? What happened if I will reject in interview? Others have more skills and confidence. My life will be destroy if couldn’t get job now. All my friends have jobs or business, How I can compete with them? How I will face my family and society with jobless status? I have skills but no job. Is there any bad luck with me? Human mind is full of complexities. It depends on us that we control it or it will control us. Life is full of surprises. It is a travel of joy and sorrow. Right now our topic is about jobless people. Almost every one of us has gone through this stage of joblessness. Every jobless mind has different fears which he/she suffering from. Lets talk about different fears. During preparation his/her resume, educational documents or when applying for job many fears running in his/her mind. Is my resume is perfect? What happened if more qualified people will apply for this job? What I will say if interviewer ask about experience? If I couldn’t get interview call? If my college mate or friends will get job and I will not? What I will tell my family If I rejected in interview? First of all we have to acknowledge and understand that there is no perfection in the world. Whatever your qualification you can improve your skills by using different mediums. I got rejected in my first 5 interviews and its was most desperate time in my life. I moved from my hometown for job that time and also running out of money. Only one meal in 36 hours and saving money by walking miles for interview. But what I learnt that time to control my mind and prepared myself for next challenge. After 5 times rejection I recalled my memory and fixed my mistakes. Reviewed my resume. Designed more dummy work for portfolio according to latest trends and techniques. Worst part of this whole process was my incomplete graduation. But in the end I got my first job in 6th interview and salary was handsome that time. If you are newly graduate or searching for your first job please don’t worry about rejections. It is your learning period. After every interview you will learn lot of things about yourself and your particular field. Just give your best and always be ready to learn. What I observe from personal experience when I was at my first job I was working like a slave or robot. I always said yes to every task and spent hours after job hours to complete that tasks. That type of fear is very dangerous you assume that existing job is last job for you in the world. No one will hire your or you don’t have any choice other than this. But there is many opportunities for you. If you are thinking that your skills are not growing in current job just left it in good way and go for other job. In first ten years of career we have to explore things as we can. Personally I started my first job in a software service company where I designed different types of apps and after that I joined a company who was working on artificial intelligence and data. Both companies have huge differences but I learnt many things from both jobs. Conclusion is that you have to control your negative thoughts and fears by learning new skills. Always prepare for challenge and rejections. Rejections is part of life. It will take you up not down but for going up you have to learn from rejection. Review yourself and your skills everyday. In the end I will say again no one is perfect or perfectionist in this world.

https://medium.com/nyc-design/physiological-wars-in-jobless-mind-c20e74ffa4be

['Salman Habib']

2020-09-22 03:27:32.800000+00:00

['Jobs', 'User Experience', 'New York', 'Fear', 'Psychology']

How Our Journalism Creators Program is Taking Flight

How Our Journalism Creators Program is Taking Flight Launching our 100-day online-only pilot program I’m excited to share that today we’ve invited 20 journalism innovators to join us from around the world, selected from a stellar application pool for the first iteration of our new Journalism Creators Program. We received 163 applications from 56 distinct countries. Here’s our official announcement with the participant bios. Our cohort includes a Marine Corps Veteran, a former NPR Executive Producer, an LA Times Arts Reporter, a former NYC Media Lab director, a restorative justice pioneer, two TEDx speakers, an anthropologist and others developing niche independent projects. Many are focused on market gaps ignored by larger media organizations. 65% of the accepted cohort is female 60% are people of color The accepted candidates come from all over the world: 7 from the US including three from New York City the including three from New York City 5 from Europe including Germany, Switzerland and Turkey including Germany, Switzerland and Turkey 4 from Asia including Hong Kong, Singapore and India including Hong Kong, Singapore and India Plus Brazil, Mexico, Qatar and Tanzania An emerging ecosystem Our new Journalism Creators program is part of a burgeoning ecosystem made up of creators themselves, supportive journalism organizations, and emerging platforms that provide publishing infrastructure for independents. Funders supporting nascent efforts also play a crucial role—providing room for experimentation. Anchored by a new generation of creators opting out of larger organizations, the ecosystem is strengthened by institutions like the Local Independent Online News Publishers network (LION), the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), the new News Product Alliance, and so many other journalism institutions now making a habit of sharing toolkits, best practices, case studies and other practical resources. Emerging platforms are another key element empowering creators to focus on serving communities directly. Substack, Pico, Patreon, Kickstarter, Steady, Anchor, Glow, Supercast, Memberful, Medium, Subtext and many others enable creators to set up direct financial relationships with readers, listeners, viewers, and members. This word cloud illustrates terms that frequently appeared in application responses Whereas in 2010 many of the applicants to our then in-person entrepreneurial program expressed a sense of curiosity and excitement about journalism innovation, our 2020 pool exhibited a clear passion for overhauling career trajectories. This fall’s applicant pool was so strong that we could have accepted a full second cohort of outstanding professionals. We’re starting with a small initial group for this pilot as we experiment with creative new approaches to flexible remote learning. We’ll invite applications in January for a second cohort, followed by a third next fall. Our founding objective, as outlined in my post about planting the seeds for a new era of entrepreneurial journalism, remains to support independent journalists in creating new products and services, in particular those reaching underserved communities. If you’d like to follow along with the 100-day program that begins October 13, join our newsletter list for periodic updates. Or follow this Twitter list of the participants. And if you have ideas for collaborating on this effort to strengthen the new journalism creators ecosystem, please be in touch: jeremy.caplan@journalism.cuny.edu. We’d love to continue expanding our network of partners.

https://medium.com/journalism-innovation/how-our-journalism-creators-program-is-taking-flight-aee0d7aca346

['Jeremy Caplan']

2020-10-07 18:40:47.890000+00:00

['Passion Economy', 'Journalism Education', 'Journalism Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Journalism']

How To Publish Less And Make Thousands More

Ever since I started writing on Medium, people told me to publish twice a day to earn the most money. But, if you publish twice a day, you either run out of things to say or the quality of your writing suffers. I struggled with this dilemma at the end of last year. I couldn’t publish twice a day anymore because I had two other jobs writing elsewhere. It’s impossible to keep the flood of creativity going. I’m a prolific writer. Now, sometimes, on my good days, I can write 3 to 5 articles a day. On bad days, I write at least 1 article a day. I have to write that much to keep the flow of my income streams. But, I also take days off. Sometimes, I go a week without writing a line. When I can’t write, I often work on marketing my writing. Consistency is key, but you can refill your creative juices by working on a completely unrelated subject that uses a different part of your brain. Here’s my list of optimizations to fill content gaps and make sure that I attend to all my platforms and my clients. Ever since I started to use this list, I’ve diversified my income streams and make thousands instead of hundreds from my writing. Last year, my monthly income came from writing 60 articles on Medium and making just $2200 in my best month. This year, my monthly income comes from 60 articles distributed across various streams of income: Platform 1: 10 articles Platform 2: 20 articles Client 1: 10 articles Client 2: 10 articles Client 3: 10 articles Now, my Medium income only pays my utilities, but I’m okay with that. My entire income can now pay all of my living expenses as I slowly pull myself out of my financial hole. But, these 60 articles each month have to be all high quality now, posted on various platforms. In some months, I can even get away with writing about 30 articles a month. Create Impactful Content When you create high value, impactful, ever-green content, you can share them over and over again. People will read them when you reshare them. If someone tells you that their blogpost lasts only 6 weeks of traffic, you can tell them that they are wrong. I’ve seen good content last for months if not the whole year. In the last few months, my number of tweets fell about 90% on my account, yet, my tweet impressions have kept rising. Repost and Re-share Your Content When I don’t have time to create content on Medium, where your frequency of posting matters, I simply repost content from another platform that I know is high quality. On social media accounts, it’s especially easy to re-share your content consistently. You can schedule them to go out on these platforms for the entire month. You don’t always have to promote the latest content. You can promote older content, too. Create Content From Different Angles Journalists are notorious for being busy. I’ve learned a few tricks working amongst them. One that’s especially useful is that I now create content based on “topics”. I will pick one topic and then write about it from different angles. If you imagine a 3000-word blog post broken up into sections, you may have 6 to 7 sections. Instead of 6 to 7 sections, you can split these sections into 3 blog posts. Then, you write different intros for them. You also make sure that they are all taking on different angles. You put unique research into each of them. Once you are done, you have different takes on the same subject ready to post on different platforms. In this case, the thorough research that you’ve done yields, not one article, but 3 articles. Cap Your Hours of Work Based on Potential Payment In the beginning, when writing on a platform, I never conform to this rule. I will spend extra hours working on articles to gain a reputation. However, after some time once I establish my reputation, I spend the amount of hours base on the exact pay that I was getting. It makes no sense to spend 10 hours writing something that will only pay you $30. Instead, you should spend 10 hours writing for a project that pays at least $200. Think about the hourly rate that you are getting. Once you establish a reputation, don’t sell yourself short. Do I still take jobs once in a while that are below the market rate? Yes. I do that because I support a family and my cost is high. No matter what, the bills have to be paid. But, will I work with clients who can’t use my value or don’t see my writing as valuable? No. Because at the end of the day it’s a marketplace. Do work on platforms that you get paid on, because then your work is valuable. Otherwise, your valuable time can be spent elsewhere doing a lot more valuable work.

https://medium.com/jun-wu-blog/how-to-publish-less-and-make-thousands-more-8b5271f8b0d1

['Jun Wu']

2020-04-11 13:09:50.975000+00:00

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

This Is What Loneliness Feels Like (And What It Does To Us)

‘Eventually most of us come to see that our feelings of unbelonging are unexceptional, and that the truly heroic act is to carry on trying to connect with others, even if it can be dispiriting to keep doing something you are not very good at.’ — Joe Moran, Shrinking Violets For a long time, I avoided writing about loneliness despite its pervasive influence on my life. The reasons for that are manifold. Firstly, it took me a long time to even notice I was experiencing it. I am introverted by nature and I both like and need solitude. I’d lived alone with virtually no social contact for nearly six months before I recognised it. And it would take another six months for me to realise it was impacting me. Second, it felt like a dirty secret, like I would taint myself by writing about it. They say that everything we do online is part of our resumes and admitting that I spend more time talking to my cat than to humans is not the kind of qualification I want to display. It is the fear of judgement that makes so many of us hide our loneliness. Yet I do not believe there has ever been anything wrong with me. I simply chose to focus on work and learning and that led me away from people, at a time when my old social circles collapses. At the same time, I think this is one of the topics that those of us who can and want to share our experiences with, have a responsibility to do so. Ironically, it does help others to feel less alone. I’ve spent 3/4 of my working life as a remote freelancer, working alone. I lived alone for a year in an area where I barely knew anyone. I once spent a month alone in a barn in the countryside. I’ve travelled alone for months. I go out to eat alone or to concerts, to museums and galleries. I’ve spent New Years alone, Christmas alone, birthdays alone, any holiday you can name alone. It is my default state. Earlier this year, I met up with someone I know from college. In passing, I mentioned how alone I’d felt for months before moving to the city. She said that wasn’t true, that she’d felt lonely but was always surrounded by people. I described how, on several occasions, I’d taken the SIM out of my phone for two, three weeks and put it in a cupboard, and the only person to contact me during that time was my mother. She looked uncomfortable, surprised, got the point, and I realised how abnormal the way I lived at that time was. That the loneliness I felt was not the kind experienced by those with housemates and social circles and partners. The difference between perceiving yourself to be isolated and actually being isolated is that, in the latter case, you sense the lack of a safety net. You know there’s no one to stop you falling. She wrote it off as my own fault. I didn’t bother to argue.

https://medium.com/swlh/this-is-what-loneliness-feels-like-1796e1a7ea8d

['Rosie L']

2018-11-26 18:24:33.379000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Writing', 'Loneliness', 'Mental Health']