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How to Ramp Up to a Daily Writing Habit

I’ve written something every day of my life since I was about ten. I actually have a strong memory of the day when I decided that I wanted to be a writer and that I was going to practice every day. I was in the sixth grade. (Because my birthday is in late October, near the cut off, I was ten in the sixth grade — one of the youngest.) Tomie dePaola. (Wikimedia Commons) A writer named Tomie dePaola came to my school for an author visit. Even then, in 1981, he looked like a grandpa. He passed earlier this year, at 85. What I remember, vividly, is that Tomie told us that he wrote on yellow legal pads with Sharpie markers. Every day. It was the first time that my brain made the connection between the books that I adored and the idea that someone normal wrote them. This was just — someone’s grandpa. And he wrote every day on a yellow legal pad with a Sharpie marker. I carried those two tools with me everywhere until after high school. I developed a strong writing habit from a young age. But sometimes that habit needs tweaking. I’ve definitely found myself lost. Writing every day, but not on any project that comes together the way I want it to. Or writing things that don’t move me toward the writing career I want. After my second book didn’t sell the way I’d hoped it would, I found myself in a deep funk. Still writing every day, but I didn’t write fiction for a full year. Building up a writing habit and maintaining it and making sure it’s the habit you actually want are all moving parts of the same goal — and it’s work to maintain them. Here are some questions to consider, if you want to build your own writing habit. How often do you write now? Be honest with yourself. There’s no point in fudging here. And there’s no judgement. If you’re not writing regularly at all, just own that. But also, own the regular writing you do, even if it doesn’t feel like enough. What you want here is a starting point, even if that starting point is zero. Even a tiny amount of writing, if you do it regularly, counts. So if you write a blog post every Monday or you spend a few minutes writing your novel on your lunch hour, that counts. Why don’t you write more? Once you know where you’re starting from, you’ll have a gap. I love gaps. Because gaps are concrete things that can be bridged. So, if right now you’re not writing at all or you’re writing once or twice a week, but you want to write every day — there’s your gap. The next question to ask yourself is why the gap is there. What’s keeping you from writing more often? Maybe you’re too busy. Maybe you’re just not motivated. Or you get distracted easily. If you’re too busy — it’s possible you aren’t prioritizing writing high enough, perhaps a mindset shift toward thinking about your writing as your job would help. If you’re not motivated — it’s possible your writer brain is getting in the way, insisting you need your muse to show up, perhaps a routine for calling your muse would help (I like to light a yellow candle.) If you get distracted — it’s possible you need a system, perhaps the Pomodoro Technique, to help you focus. Whatever it is that’s keeping you from your goal, there’s a bridge out there. You need to identify it, though, so that you know which bridge to build. Why do you WANT to write more? It can help, immensely, to think about why a daily writing habit is something you want to build. Maybe you have a day job you really want out of, and you’d like to replace it with writing. I’ve been there. Maybe you have a story that’s been stirring inside you for a long time and you really want to get it out. Maybe you just love books and you want to write one so you can knock it off your bucket list. Maybe you want to start a blog because you’ve got something to say that you believe there’s an audience out there for. Whatever it is, if you identify it, that thing will help motivate you toward building your daily writing habit. Ease On Up Here’s the good news. You don’t have to go from zero to daily overnight. Really. You don’t. No one is going to come take away your writer card if you go slow and easy and build up your habit. I promise. Start where you are. That might be no regular writing. It might be four days a week. Maybe it’s already a daily habit, but that habit isn’t very focused. Decide on what your habit will be. If you’re starting from zero, your habit might just be writing once a week, at a regular, set time. If you already do that, or you already write more often, just acknowledge it and start there for week one. If you’re like me, by the way, and you already have a solid daily writing habit — your habit might actually be what you’re writing, not that you’re writing at all. For instance, recently I’ve struggled to finish a novel that I was halfway through for longer than I care to admit. I was already writing every day, but I needed to shift my habit so that it became writing every day on that novel. Next week, add a day. Just one day. When that feels solid, add another one. And keep going until you’re showing up every day for your craft. This calendar is my favorite tool for creating and maintaining a writing habit.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-ramp-up-to-a-daily-writing-habit-894c12418660

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-08-08 15:33:04.061000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Habits', 'Ninjabyob', 'Writing']

The Dark Side of Creativity

When our species first arose on this planet, it was in the midst of a rather cold and indifferent natural environment. Mother Nature didn’t necessarily care about whether our particular primate offshoot would survive long enough to develop civilization. The dinosaurs that had dominated the planet for millions of years were wiped out in one fell swoop by a large rock that just happened to collide with Earth, and there are innumerable other chance events that could have led to our ancestors being eradicated before Homosapiens ever came to be. It’s within this harsh context that all human striving and creativity should be understood — we had to innovate, and innovate rapidly, in order to free ourselves from being at the mercy of nature’s whims. For all the problems modern society confronts us with, from the perspective of our ancestors of even just a few generations ago, we live like kings and queens. We worry not about being eaten by a hungry lion, and we enjoy the comforts of plumbing, air conditioning, heating, and clean water (at least in the developed world) readily available on tap. These things — and everything else we take for granted — are the results of human creativity and ingenuity. Therefore, we tend to think of creativity as a force for good, a way to “improve” the quality of human life, and something that we should all work to develop. Yet at the same time, it is this very same creative urge to separate ourselves from our environment — in effect creating our own — that has bred a whole host of new problems, ones that threaten us on a planetary scale. Climate change is the result of having invented electricity, automobiles, aircraft, and other technologies that demand the burning of fossil fuels and oil. Modern agricultural techniques have allowed the human population to explode way past historic levels, necessitating the need to take more and more habitat away from wildlife to make space for our farms and cities. And perhaps most strangely, the mass production of “comfortable” lifestyles has left modern human beings feeling estranged from themselves and confused. We carry genetic programming that helped us survive when we were still learning how to walk upright and speak our first words, yet which we find ourselves plagued by as modern culture continues to emerge. Much of the technology we have produced (such as smartphones and social media) have unintended, negative consequences as the result of how little we still seem to understand about the genetic and psychological forces that drive us — forces that were forged in the treetops and plains of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. This is the dark side of creativity — for every problem we have managed to solve, we have unknowingly created scores of new ones. Even apparently beneficial inventions have unintended negative consequences. Television is a fantastic tool for increasing the range of what we can experience, but it can make us addicted to redundant information that appeals to the lowest common denominator of human interests. Every new meme — the car, the computer, the contraceptive pill, patriotism or multiculturalism — changes the way we think and act, and has a potentially dark side that often reveals itself only when it is too late, after we have resigned ourselves that the innovation is here to stay. — Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi One could be forgiven, then, for taking a cynical point-of-view, of saying, “Well, I guess that’s it then. We can’t improve the world, so why even try?” And yet continuing our efforts to improve both ourselves as individuals and the world we live in is really all we can do — the alternative is to stagnate where we are and consume the last bounties of Mother Earth until she has nothing left to offer, at which point we secure our own extinction. This is why it is essential — now more than ever — to understand how our best efforts to liberate ourselves from the natural environment that birthed us have gone a bit overboard, so that we may think of tomorrow’s solutions in terms of how to live in harmony with nature — including our own. It is an awareness of any problem that is the first and most necessary ingredient to solving the problem — and thankfully, human beings are now experiencing an exploding epiphany regarding our interconnectivity with the natural world and our dependency on it, even if our initial desire to break free from it was justified. We are learning that our desire to control nature — when taken too far — leads to a rebound that eventually harms more than helps us. This is the basic law of human ingenuity that we try very hard to ignore: the greater the power to change the environment, the greater the chances of producing undesirable as well as desirable results. — Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi The temptation, then, becomes to reject progress entirely, to condemn the past few thousand years of human cultural development, and to yearn for some sort of return to an “archaic” period in which human beings lived in harmony with the environment. But it is as unwise to condemn humanity’s striving for progress as it is to embrace it with reckless abandon. We may have lived in harmony with the environment thousands of years ago, but it was a harmony that cared not about human fears and desires. Though we have created seemingly unconquerable problems today, we have to find it in ourselves to forgive our ancestors for doing all they could to gain some degree of control over human destiny — and then we have to go further in pushing our creative ingenuity to devise solutions that take the planet into account as much as they do human needs and aspirations. And why should it be that we cannot both look out for our own species even as we come to see ourselves as the gentle caretakers of our lonely Garden of Eden? Luckily, in contrast to the horrors of the twentieth century, modern science has helped to elucidate the patterns of nature’s operation — and how human beings fit into them. It has done so in a way that has gone far beyond the mythopoetic accounts of our ancestors — stunning in their own way, yet nonetheless much more esoteric and hard to practically apply. It is now possible for us to create technologies, design homes and cities, and adopt modern lifestyles that have, at their foundation, lessons learned from nature’s processes — which are always effortless in their operation. As we go about solving the problems of our current age, we can always carry — in the back of our minds — the awareness that a solution is valuable insofar as it helps guide our civilization back toward some form of equilibrium with the planet. If it doesn’t, we can safely disregard the idea, and move along. You may be thinking that this doesn’t apply to your life because these are problems that our society faces on a larger scale. What can any individual hope to do in the face of such sweeping issues? The answer is to learn how to be happy, and to be happy in such a way as to become the living example of the type of human being that the world needs more of in order for the human experiment to continue. On the plains of Africa, material comfort was hard to come by. For this reason, it is easy to understand why — as civilizations eventually flowered in Egypt, the Near East, and beyond — material luxury, wealth, and societal status were seen as the keys to happiness. When capitalism came along, the keys to upward social mobility were granted to ever-increasing portions of the population, and we followed the examples of the kings, emperors, and aristocrats who had come before, thinking that if we could live their life, we’d finally discover joy. But today, we know better. More wealth doesn’t necessarily correlate to more happiness, and no amount of property ownership can compensate for an unfulfilling life. And so discovering happiness today is a creative act — it is up to each individual to define the meaning of their own lives, to choose the activities that bring them the most joy, and to share the knowledge they learn along the way with others. Such an approach toward life can begin taking the dark side of human creativity and begin transforming it into its opposite — the light. We can deprioritize external markers of success in favor of internal ones — which nonetheless can be outwardly shared with others anyway. After all, is not a well-written blog post a sign of one’s joy, or a beautiful painting the same? We may not be able to get rid of our desire for progress, to constantly strive for self-improvement and the betterment of society. But we can ensure that these desires are channeled in such a way as to ensure that they constantly carry that awareness of our tendency to create new problems as we solve old ones. If we can do that then we may discover, as time goes on, that we create fewer and fewer problems with each new solution, until we finally reach a point at which humanity is, to paraphrase the psychonaut Terence McKenna, released into the potential of its very own imagination.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-dark-side-of-creativity-7a1ca9679079

['Colton Tanner Casados-Medve']

2020-12-24 18:03:58.734000+00:00

['Growth', 'Creativity', 'Technology', 'Self-awareness', 'Future']

Amazon is commoditising your products!

Amazon. A buzz word that’s been floating around for quite some time now, which eventually drifted its way into the product marketing space. I know we are all aware of the rise of “commoditisation” — the increasing homogeneity across products and higher price sensitivity of consumers. But what we’re also seeing is that Amazon has been quite a culprit of exacerbating this phenomenon. Undertaking a brief research of this, I found that the rise of Amazon’s “Alexa”, has been promoting it aggressively. You can conveniently ask her for a generic product where she provides you with a range of alternatives. You can then compare and choose the best available price. It is from this that we’re noticing people pay little to no attention to the brand of which they purchase from. Now, the question at the top of our tongues must be: how should I respond to this Amazon effect? What does this mean for my brand? Alexa is now your daily driver I’ve ventured on to research this, and here’s what I’ve found: 1. Find hidden needs The once widely held view that a consumer derives value from the uniqueness of a product, has been greatly overshadowed by commoditisation. This may stunt any efforts to differentiate a product in a market that is becoming price focused. However, a significant way to make your product stand out is to identify a need that is not known, even to the customer. This leads onto not only identifying value gaps in the market, but creating them yourself. A prime example of this is the MP3 Walkman. Before it, we had the “Stereobelt”- a portable cassette player with headphones. Whilst it did meet the needs of consumers wanting portable music, Sony Corp. co-founder Masaru Ibuka, took this further and asked his designers for something more compact and travel-friendly. This paved the way for the Sony “Soundabout” which later became the “MP3 Walkman” The idea behind it was to completely revolutionise technology and “mobility”- something that consumers needed, but was not met by any other alternative. Although the Walkman itself is being outshone by smart phones now, it did establish the early foundation for mobile technologies, and caused a hike in music consumption. It is a leading example of going further into a customer’s needs. Ultimately, in spite of the presence of e-commerce aggregators, there is no dearth of new companies finding new business models and brand positioning to win the market. Take companies like Warby Parker, Bonobo, Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s, Tom Shoes and many more. All of them have launched exclusive to e-commerce aggregators and build big businesses at that. What have we learnt from them? Customers reward companies that are unique, still. If you can realise the potential of ‘hidden’ jobs that go above customer expectations, it may be a significant point of differentiation- particularly for a generic product. 2. Expand your line of thinking- shift from the product to the whole process: Much focus is on the product itself. But the process before delivering the product to its end user could be proven to be just as important. Let’s take on the example of IKEA. IKEA is known for its low-cost, functional and environmentally-friendly products- things that are proven to be quite valuable to a consumer. However, what makes their products so disruptive? It lies in the fact that IKEA is able to eliminate the transportation costs that consumers dread, especially when moving into a new home. In order for consumers to not have to pay for a moving van, or take multiple trips to the furniture store, IKEA provides take-home-and-assemble kits which put the assembly process in the hands of the consumer. This not only reduces transportation costs and improves the mobility of furniture parts, but it gives the consumer the experience of personalising their own furniture. IKEA successfully capitalises on these ideas, by keeping in mind not just the product but the process that a consumer undergoes when purchasing a product. This line of thinking is at the basis of process innovation- an implementation of new and radical methods of production or delivery. A highly disruptive production and/or delivery method does not only mean potentially lowering your total costs, but may bring customer delight to your customer. This provides a highly competitive edge, in the presence of e-commerce aggregators. 3. Don’t forget about the niche Finally, we have niche marketing- a channelling of marketing efforts towards a highly defined segment of the total market. We may often believe that targeting arenas with high traffic is an effective way to generate sales. In this market, you are able to target a need that is not being met by generic products produced by mainstream firms. More importantly, you ultimately face less competition. We take for example the catering industry. Within it, is a niche market for catering specifically to senior citizens. A study by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) estimated that about 90% of retirees prefer to continue to live at home rather than retirement villages. This has opened up the idea of food delivery services to those who are housebound or unable to drive. It has also provided opportunities for expansion from catering, to home care services such as cleaning, gardening, meal preparation, and more. Such a strategy is more of a dodge method; for firms escaping the wave of commoditisation. In saying this however, this strategy is ideal for firms with highly specialised services, and more importantly, deep customer relationships. The niche market is much more limited, and hence, much riskier- especially for small businesses who are just starting out. To take this further, we have found that companies that rely only on online aggregators miss the opportunity to really develop a direct personal connect with their consumer (since that’s what the aggregator does for you). In the long run, this is not a very good idea. Recently, restaurants in the UK started creating their own tech platforms, since giving away commissions and data to the likes of Just Eat is not making great business sense. (Read this article) This trend will soon catch up in many other industries. In sum, there’s a great opportunity to build a brand and stand out even today. The opportunity is to get away from commoditisation and take control. The other option is only an unsustainable price war.

https://medium.com/drizzlin/amazon-is-commoditising-your-products-96835a9a6c9f

['Andrea Virrey']

2017-11-23 04:23:45.422000+00:00

['Amazon', 'Amazon Echo', 'Startup', 'Alexa', 'AI']

6 Ways to Focus and Get Shit Done

You have a full time job, brilliant ideas to share with the world, a side hustle to manage, sleep to catch up on, exercise to power through, and about 100 other #adulting things to take care of. 24 hours in a day seems like we would have plenty of time to get all of our shit done — doesn’t Beyonce have those same 1,440 minutes? But time seems to escape us, the weeks add up… and we’re not sure if we’ve made any progress at all. So how do you get all of this shit done, without losing it!? Check out my top tips for getting shit done: 1. KEEP YOUR FIRE FUELED Attitude is everything. Being grateful and passionate about your life goes a long way during difficult hustle days. We all go through shit — maybe you love your full time job, but have to work a side gig to pay the bills; or perhaps you’re no longer passionate about your career, and struggle to find a side hustle you’re pumped about. If you’re not doing what you love right now, seek out the small things that bring you joy and start a daily gratitude practice to keep a positive mindset. If you’re seeking what sparks your internal flame, check out my post on figuring out your purpose: 2. SET INTENTIONS To create and maintain daily motivation to get shit done — write your goals down! Even if they are big, lofty dreams — it helps to see them on paper and break them out into small steps that you should be taking in that right direction. Whether it’s project based goals, annual achievements, or a lifelong vision — knowing what you are hustling for will fuel your drive and ensure your time is well spent. 3. BREAK IT DOWN People often never even start to chip away at their goals because it seems like such a big task to tackle. Once you have stated your intentions, take each of your goals and break them out into a series of smaller goals that you can accomplish each month throughout the year. Then, take it further and break it down into what you can handle a week at a time. This way you know what you have to do, so you can schedule the appropriate chunks of time to do it and get that shit done. 4. SCHEDULE PRIORITIES Ask yourself — “What will I do this week to create my legacy?”. Staying organized and keeping an ongoing task list helps you see what’s coming up, where you need to schedule work or playtime in, evaluate your priorities, and tackle your to do list as efficiently as possible. Writing down ideas, notes, and future tasks can help clear the clutter from your brain so you’re able to focus on the task in the moment. Knowing what you have on your plate allows you to evaluate what you’re spending your time on and how you should spend it. 5. CHUNK IT OUT Set aside chunks of time to power through and focus on only the priorities you set for the day so you can work as quickly and efficiently as possible. You could try an interactive journal: Pierre Khawand, work and productivity expert, has a book called The Perfect 15-Minute Day: Managing Your Time, Thoughts, and Emotions, which helps you stay aware of what you’re working on and stay focused by working in highly productive bursts of short 15-minute increments. Knowing that you’ve set aside specific time for tasks will keep you on track and focused in the moment. 6. TAKE A BREAK This tip has been a tough pill for my Type A self to swallow — but it’s turned into my ultimate productivity hack. The hustle is real, but giving yourself time to rest and reflect will ensure you are efficient and healthy in the long run. If you’re constantly trying to run at full speed, you can get tired and anxious and that will only hinder the time it takes to achieve your goals. Scheduling in chunks of free playtime and using your vacation days allow you to stay refreshed and creative! Every single day counts leading up to your big dreams, and even though you can’t get it all done right now, every task will add up to something grand. By writing down your intentions, breaking down and scheduling priorities, and chunking out time to focus, you can make sure the work you’re doing is leading you in the right direction with every project you take on and every person you meet.

https://medium.com/swlh/6-ways-to-focus-and-get-shit-done-9bff3fb77aa5

['Stephanie Huston']

2018-03-06 18:48:21.614000+00:00

['Startup', 'Life Lessons', 'Self', 'Productivity', 'Creativity']

Two Surprising Ways Collecting Data on Myself Transformed My Life

Two Surprising Ways Collecting Data on Myself Transformed My Life For real growth, go deeper than an app on your smartphone Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash If you haven’t tried collecting data on yourself, you need to start right now. Until you do, you may have trouble understanding your own actions. Since I started doing so, my life has changed in multiple ways. By collecting data on myself, I finally understood the habits and behaviors that held me back from achieving my goals. I attained a new level of focus in both my personal and professional lives. Ultimately, my work performance improved drastically, and I was selected for an important (and unexpected) promotion. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t started recording information about myself in an old-fashioned notebook. The idea had been suggested to me by a friend, but I ignored the advice until things got terrible, and I felt lost. I changed course while in the midst of a months-long rut. I had a falling out with my boss and an argument with my wife on the same day. This was not like me! I (mostly) get along with people! I knew something was wrong. I always had the best of intentions but was failing to deliver on multiple fronts. I did not understand what was happening. Then I decided I had to figure out why... That’s when I turned to data. I work with it every day, and I am very aware of its business uses, but I was unsure about using data personally. I was aware of data for personal use via fitness and dieting apps and smartwatches. I had seen many get results using them. However, fitness and diet were not my issues. Could I possibly collect anything actionable? I could, and I did, and I will show you how. Quick notes: You don’t need a fancy app or smartwatch for this to work. I am advocating the use of manual data collection of a personal nature. For the last two years, collecting data on myself has allowed me to improve my life in several areas. Following, I will explain what I did and what the results were, along with some ideas on how you might use personal data in your own life.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/two-surprising-ways-collecting-data-on-myself-transformed-my-life-46d932a29a46

['Adam Rains']

2020-12-14 16:22:31.378000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Work', 'Productivity', 'Creativity']

Deploying a Spring Boot Microservice to Application Container — Oracle Cloud

In the development of large systems, it is common to develop various components and libraries that implement various functions, ranging from the implementation of business requirements to technical tasks, such as an XML parser, for example. Microservices architecture allows to avoid monolith application for large system. It provides loose coupling between collaborating processes which runs independently in different environments with tight cohesion. So lets discuss it with an example. For example imagine an online shop with separate microservices for user-accounts, product-catalog order-processing and shopping carts. So these components are inevitably important for such a large online shopping portal. For online shopping system we could use following architectures. Shopping system with Microservices In this architecture style the main application is divided in a set of sub applications called microservices. One large application is divided into multiple collaborating processes as shown below. I will not talk in detail about microservices here. That is a separate topic to be discussed. I have created a web-app which uses Spring boot, Spring JPA, H2 in memory database and Thymeleaf template for building UI. Before going into implementation, please watch below video to see how end result will be displayed. Why Spring Boot for Microservices Development It comes with the ease of developing REST-service controllers, business services, and data repositories. Setup new service by using Spring Boot Expose resources via a RestController Consume remote services using RestTemplate. Oracle has built a platform to support micro-services development. Oracle Application container cloud is one of them. It is a run time container which can run application build in Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby as of now. For more detailed information about Oracle ACCS, please read this article and another one. Oracle ACCS create run time docker container. Important point to take care of is host and port of your application. If working locally host is localhost and on 8080 port. In ACCS environment it will be definitely different. This can be managed via setting properties in main class of Spring boot as follow Setting optional Configuration for ACC Now look at implementation of SpringBoot application Developer entity In this application, I am integrating Spring Data JPA into our Spring Boot application. We will be extending CrudRepository which in turn extends the Repositoryinterface and hence there is no need of implementing our own methods. CrudRepository CrudRepository provides methods for the CRUD operations. This interface extends the Repository interface. When you define CrudRepository, you have to pass two parameters: type of the entity and type of the entity’s id field. This interface has the following methods: S save(S entity) T findOne(ID primaryKey) Iterable findAll() Long count() void delete(T entity) boolean exists(ID primaryKey) Finally Spring Boot Controller class as Spring Boot Controller. Application project structure as below - You can find the complete source code in my GitHub account. Now ,we will deploy the application to Oracle Application container cloud. Deployment to Application Container Cloud Navigate to Oracle Cloud dashboard. Click on Create instance. 2. On dashboard the user will see all oracle cloud services to which he has access. Click on Application container cloud. 3. Click on Create application on Application container cloud console. 4. Click on Java SE as application platform. 5. Upload archive zip file. Provide the application name, notification email, Java SE version, no of instance and memory information and click on create. 6. After a while the application is deployed and the user can view information about the deployed application. Now Application is deployed successfully. Once deployed, you will also get mail notification as below. If you hit browser with URL/developers , then application demo will work as shown in video. That’s it . We deployed Spring Micro-services application successfully. If you come across any issues or want to check log then navigate to Administration section on left side and click on logs tab. Logs are stored via Oracle Storage cloud service. If you want to connect application with database on cloud then on deployment section, you can connect with Oracle Database cloud service or MySql cloud service via Service binding section. You can also set environment variable at run time in deployment section. That’s all for now. Happy learning on Oracle Cloud.

https://medium.com/oracledevs/deploying-a-spring-boot-micro-services-application-to-oracle-application-container-cloud-95238f1b7ab7

['Vinay Kumar']

2017-08-29 18:04:05.752000+00:00

['Microservices', 'Java', 'Oracle Cloud', 'Spring Boot', 'Cloud Computing']

A Short Guide to Writing Personal Essays That Rock

The Formula I will be brief, because I did not lie when I said this was a short guide. 1. Open with a Bang Drawing your reader in is a difficult task, especially if you tend to have a dry and expositional voice. That’s why I find that opening with a beautiful sensory image helps to transition the reader into the essay — it allows them to find a peaceful and often beautiful point of entry into the tale while also giving them a good sense of your voice as narrator. Take a peak at some of these openings I’m quite proud of: The rainclouds crossed their dense arms across the bank of mountains before us, casting an ominous and stern air over our adventure, but my older sister and I didn’t care. — I Am Finally Learning to Love My Body The grocery store is ground-zero for sensory overload. The array of bright, fluorescent trays set into the ceiling lights the cavernous space with an overly-cheerful glow, casting no shadows and bathing the shiny plastic-wrapped food in an eerie, alien tint. The scuffle and shuffle of feet across the tile, the “beep, beep” of the cashiers ringing up customers, the rattle of shopping cart wheels, the enclosed and crowded spaces between the aisles heavy with noise and energy, all of it battering me over the head from the moment I step inside of the store. — COVID-19 Has Made Me More Agoraphobic Than Ever When you draw your reader in from the first moment, it’s hard for them to want to stop reading. So meaty. Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash 2. Move onto the Meat Once you’ve established a sensory image that is appropriate for the story, it’s time to move onto the meat of the personal essay, where it’s okay to get a bit expositional. Explaining yourself in an almost casual way will reaffirm your voice as well as allow you to give the dry facts behind your essay without boring your readers to death. I find that speaking simply to your audience about your point makes it much easier to understand — being clear to all readers is an onerous task, but when you put forth your own points without becoming unnecessarily dense or overarticulate, it’s much easier for readers to grasp the main idea of your essay and resonate with it. 3. Sensory Image Sandwich I like to call this part the “sensory image sandwich” — after explaining your main idea/thesis, it’s time to show your readers what you mean. Here is the time go even deeper into your essay, hopefully painting a sensory picture for your reader to help keep them engaged with your narrative as well as the main thoughts behind the piece. Demonstrate your the themes and lessons of the essay in this part, as tying together those sensory images with deep truths about life is an easy way to connect all of the dots. The yummiest sandwich of all: a sensory sandwich. Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash Oftentimes, I try to elongate this part as much as possible, filling it with lessons and epiphanies my readers might find helpful interspersed with whatever story I am painting. But no one wants an essay to go on too long, which is why it’s important to wrap up without repeating yourself endlessly. Demonstrate your most important points and paint a few pictures, but then it’s time to end on a good note so the reader can take those lessons with them without growing bored. 4. End with a Positive Punch Endings are never easy, especially if you’re like me and tend to be a bit more wordy than the average person. Don’t end the essay before its natural conclusion just because you’re feeling antsy — I find that most pieces have a natural endpoint that becomes clear once I’ve written my way to it. Punch them in the face with positivity. Photo by Ivan Pergasi on Unsplash Even if the story you are telling is not a happy one, I always think it’s important to end on a positive or at least hopeful note. While not everything in life is positive or hopeful, it’s also a concern to me if I make my readers more depressed or put them into a negative mood. That’s not to say everything is all sunshine and rainbows and needs to end happily, but it’s just what people need sometimes. If you need some inspiration, here are a few of my favorite ending lines: Inhale that pure golden magic straight into your soul. That’s the power of a novel. — Three Reasons Why Novels Are Necessary It’s never too late to begin again. — Your Ultimate Guide to Discovering Inspiration And sometimes I feel an answer, rising up beneath my skin in goosebumps or rolling through my brain like a stray thought, and I sink into that feeling: of being heard and being answered by God and knowing, despite all of the pain, I am not alone. — LSD Saved My Soul One other silly thing I try to do is end my piece with a rhyme or near-rhyme. After reading a whole page of narrative, it can be impactful to bring some rhythm into your piece to end with a positive punch. Here’s an example of what I mean: Body hair is beautiful. It’s okay if you don’t agree. You do you, and I’ll do me. — I Don’t Shave (Anywhere) Don’t be afraid to try new things with your endings. But don’t go on too long and risk alienating your readers who just want to you to get to the damn point, already. Go forth and rock, my dudes. Photo by Antoine Julien on Unsplash Now Go Forth and Write Rocking Essays This formula obviously isn’t foolproof, but nothing in writing is. Much of the writer’s life is a slog — slogging through writer’s block, slogging through editing, slogging through rejections — but attacking an idea with a structure in mind enables you to take control of your process. The road of a writer is full of bumps, potholes, and wrong turns. Tighten up your structure and you may make it a smoother, more enjoyable journey towards knowing yourself and sharing your eternal wisdom.

https://medium.com/swlh/a-short-guide-to-writing-personal-essays-that-rock-8b364bea853c

['Sam Ripples']

2020-06-28 09:57:01.368000+00:00

['Writing', 'Productivity', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity', 'Inspiration']

The Race Is On to Find the Holy Grail of Covid-19 Antibodies

The Race Is On to Find the Holy Grail of Covid-19 Antibodies Lab-made antibodies could be our best hope against the pandemic — and future ones A nurse handles Covid-19 blood samples. Photo: Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images Carl Hansen was in the middle of running a pandemic simulation at AbCellera, the Vancouver biotech company where he is CEO, when the first reports of a mysterious respiratory disease trickled out of China. It was mid-January, and the Canadian company was testing how quickly it could find promising antibodies against the coronaviruses that cause MERS and SARS. Its goal was to identify and reproduce these antibodies — proteins produced by the immune system in response to an infection — within 60 days. But when the first U.S. case of Covid-19 was detected on January 21 in Washington state, Hansen cut that simulation short to focus on the new threat. “Then the missing piece was to find a blood sample,” he tells OneZero. After AbCellera got its hands on a small vial of blood from an early U.S. Covid-19 patient on February 28, Hansen and his team immediately started looking for antibodies in it. Now, he and other scientists are racing to find potent antibodies in the blood of human Covid-19 survivors, in lab mice, and in other animals. The hope is that the most effective ones — known as neutralizing antibodies — could be used to both treat people who are sick with the disease and also act as a kind of temporary vaccine for those who are at high risk of contracting it. Though one drug for Covid-19, remdesivir, was granted emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, experts say it’s not a knockout punch against the virus. With a vaccine at least a year away, more treatments will be needed. In the absence of a vaccine, some think lab-produced antibodies that mimic the real thing are the best hope for beating back the coronavirus, as well as any new infectious pathogens that could emerge in the future. When the body detects a foreign invader, like SARS-CoV-2, it mounts an immune response and starts making a host of antibodies that are specific to the invader. Neutralizing antibodies are particularly good at helping the body fight off infection. Scientists want to use one or a few of these neutralizing antibodies as a drug to help those hospitalized with Covid-19 recover more quickly, or prevent people who are exposed to the virus from getting sick in the first place. The trick, though, is finding the right antibodies. Singling them out and analyzing them used to take years of research. But new technology is speeding up the process so much that it now takes days or weeks. Now, a handful of companies are already manufacturing SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and plan to start testing them in people by summer.

https://onezero.medium.com/the-race-is-on-to-find-the-holy-grail-of-covid-19-antibodies-db8f8961ac20

['Emily Mullin']

2020-08-01 17:52:05.672000+00:00

['Health', 'Covid 19', 'Coronavirus', 'Science', 'Antibodies']

An Intro to Integer Programming for Engineers: Simplified Bus Scheduling

Image: Steve Skiena This article was originally part of Remix’s series on the software engineering problems they face. In this installment, Dan Hipschman walks through bus driver scheduling and a simplified approach to solving it using integer programming. I studied NP-Hardness in school but never tackled any problems in real life. Until now. At Remix, I finally encountered NP-Hardness, adding a powerful new tool called integer programming to my tool belt. This is an intro to integer programming for engineers who haven’t used it. The goal is for you to start thinking about some ways you can use integer programming and wanting to learn more. The Bus Driver Scheduling Problem Let’s start with a motivating example. At Remix we improve public transportation, especially bus systems. Have you ever wondered how bus drivers coordinate their lunch breaks? Or if you aren’t on the bus that often, maybe you’ve wondered how flight attendants and pilots fly around the world and end up back home, which is a similar problem. We’re going to solve the problem of scheduling bus driver shifts in this post. I’m going to include working code, so for the full experience, please break out your shell and editor to follow along. Let’s frame the problem. Say we have four bus routes, called A, B, C, and D. Let’s assume that each route takes an hour to complete. They’re loops, so they start and end in the same place. Each route has one bus running on it from 9 AM until 9 PM. Finally, the routes all converge at the same point every hour on the hour, so it would be easy for drivers to switch shifts and take their lunch breaks at that location. I drew some demo routes that all converge in the top right of the map to make this clear. Since our bus service runs from 9 AM until 9 PM, and each route takes an hour to complete, we’ll have 12 full trips for each route (48 total trips). Let’s represent each trip as a tuple: (route_name, hour_of_day) . Let’s write a function to generate these. Don’t worry if you don’t know Python, we’ll keep it simple. Here’s our resulting 48 trips: >>> generate_trips('ABCD', 9, 12 + 9) [('A', 9), ('A', 10), ('A', 11), ('A', 12), ('A', 13), ('A', 14), ('A', 15), ('A', 16), ('A', 17), ('A', 18), ('A', 19), ('A', 20), ('A', 21), ('B', 9), ('B', 10), ('B', 11), ('B', 12), ('B', 13), ('B', 14), ('B', 15), ('B', 16), ('B', 17), ('B', 18), ('B', 19), ('B', 20), ('B', 21), ('C', 9), ('C', 10), ('C', 11), ('C', 12), ('C', 13), ('C', 14), ('C', 15), ('C', 16), ('C', 17), ('C', 18), ('C', 19), ('C', 20), ('C', 21), ('D', 9), ('D', 10), ('D', 11), ('D', 12), ('D', 13), ('D', 14), ('D', 15), ('D', 16), ('D', 17), ('D', 18), ('D', 19), ('D', 20), ('D', 21)] The driver scheduling problem is that we have some work that needs to be done, and we need to assign it to drivers. In other words, we want to come up with a set of duties for the bus drivers, where a duty is simply a list of trips the need to drive. Every trip must be part of exactly one driver’s duty. Let’s further assume we have some rules from payroll: Each duty over four hours should allow the driver to have a break Drivers get paid for each hour they work, but not for breaks They get a minimum pay of eight hours for coming into work (known as guaranteed pay) They get 1.5x pay for each hour they work over eight hours (overtime pay) We’d like not only to determine a set of duties, but the payroll department would like us to minimize driving costs. How do we do this? Well, as you might have guessed, we use integer programming… somehow. But first let me explain what integer programming is. What Is Integer Programming Anyway? As a precursor to integer programming, I’m going to define linear programming. Linear programs are mathematical models and there are algorithms to solve them. Let’s start with a linear expression. This is called the objective function: The goal of linear programming is to minimize some objective function. By “some” objective function, I mean that n and the a’s are all known for a particular problem. E.g., 3 * x1 + 14 * x2 . Now, of course, if that was all there was to it, we could just set all the x to zero. However, linear programs are also allowed to have one or more constraints. Constraints are each simply another linear expression, set less than or equal to zero. Note that the coefficients of the x’s can be different than the objective, and there can be a constant term as well. E.g., And so on. There can be as many constraints as you like. Note that some factors in the constraints could be zero, effectively meaning that not every variable needs to be in every constraint. Equality is allowed, using a sort of “trick” which you can verify. The following: is equivalent to: OK, so given the objective and the constraints, the goal of linear programming is to minimize the objective. Let’s Jump Into a Shell Let’s make this concrete and jump into a shell. We can install and use a Python integer programming solver library to demonstrate all this (it also solves linear programs). The Python package is called Pulp. Here’s a demo: $ pip install pulp $ python >>> from pulp import * >>> x1 = LpVariable('x1') >>> p = LpProblem('p', LpMinimize) >>> p += x1 >>> p.solve() 1 >>> LpStatus {0: 'Not Solved', 1: 'Optimal', -2: 'Unbounded', -1: 'Infeasible', -3: 'Undefined'} >>> x1.value() 0.0 Let’s walk through this line by line. $ pip install pulp This simply installs pulp. If you’re not in a virtualenv , you might need to use sudo . >>> from pulp import * This imports Pulp. I’m going to be lazy and import everything into the global namespace using * . Everything in Pulp starts with “Lp” or “lp” so it should be clear what came from the module. >>> x1 = LpVariable('x1') This creates a variable. The argument is the name, which is arbitrary (just make it unique if you create more than one variable). >>> p = LpProblem('p', LpMinimize) This creates a problem, which is Pulp’s way of keeping pieces of the linear program together. The first argument is another arbitrary name. The second is LpMinimize because the default is to maximize the objective. (Minimizing and maximizing are mathematically equivalent — multiply the objective by -1 — so linear programming can do both). We’ll “add” the objective function with the following syntax (Pulp uses a lot of operator overloading): >>> p += x1 Hence our objective function is as follows: Not very exciting, but let’s see what happens. >>> p.solve() 1 >>> LpStatus {0: 'Not Solved', 1: 'Optimal', -2: 'Unbounded', -1: 'Infeasible', -3: 'Undefined'} The solve function returns a status. The different statuses are described in LpStatus . In this case, Pulp is telling us it found an optimal solution to the problem. After calling solve , the variables will have their value set to whatever minimizes the objective. So let’s inspect: >>> x1.value() 0.0 Pulp tells us that the assigning 0 to x1 minimizes the objective (remember that all the variables are nonnegative). In this case the problem was trivial. So let’s add a constraint: >>> p += x1 >= 1 >>> p.solve() 1 >>> x1.value() 1.0 This adds a constraint that x1 >= 1 , and then re-solves. Obviously the minimal value of x1 is now 1 , since 0 is not allowed by the constraint. Now our complete linear program is: Progress! We’ve learned how to write and solve linear programs using Pulp. Solving the Driver Scheduling Problem Let’s move on to integer programming, and how it gets us closer to solving our driver scheduling problem. An integer program is exactly the same as a linear program, with the additional constraint that all x are integers. I.e, Without getting into theory, I’ll just mention that solving integer programs is an NP-hard problem. However, there are algorithms that can often solve them much faster than brute force. Pulp can also solve integer programs, which I’ll show you in a bit. But first, let’s discuss the high level approach to how integer programs will solve our original driver scheduling problem. We’ll solve our problem by modeling it as a weighted set partitioning problem. This image gives an intuitive idea of the problem: On the left we have 12 items (the dots) and 7 sets containing different combinations of items. The solution to the set partitioning problem is the fewest number of sets which include all the items with no overlap. — Image by Steven Skiena. The idea is that we have a set of items, represented by the points in the lefthand image above. We also have a set of sets, each represented by a squiggly loop in the left image. In this case, for example, there are seven sets (trust me, since counting them is probably bad for your eyes). The set partitioning problem is to find the smallest number of sets that contain all the items (points), without any overlap between sets (hence a “partition”). Every point must be in one and exactly one set. The solution to the problem above is shown on the righthand side. The weighted set partitioning problem is when we assign a cost to each set. Then, instead of minimizing the number of sets, we minimize the sum of the values of the sets we choose. You can see that if we set all the weights to one, we get the original set partitioning problem. Set partitioning is NP-complete (both weighted and unweighted). However, we can use integer programming to solve it optimally. NP-complete doesn’t mean that problems are always slow to solve. It only means that we can construct degenerates cases that cause any general algorithm to run slowly some of the time. At least, to the best of our knowledge (unless someone proves P=NP). Integer programs can often be solved relatively quickly. In our problem, the dots in the set partitioning diagram are trips a bus takes from its origin to its destination (our tuples), and the sets are potential driver duties. In other words, each duty is a set of trips that a driver could potentially do. We’ll assign a weight to those sets using the driver pay rules we defined above (overtime, guarantee pay, etc.). When we solve the weighted set partitioning problem, we’ll get the set of duties that cover all the trips and minimize the sum of individual drivers’ costs. This is exactly what we want. So here’s how we’ll do it. Each potential duty will be a variable (an x) in our integer program. We’ll further constrain all the x to be between zero and one. Since they’re integers, this actually restricts them to be exactly zero or one. The idea behind this is that a particular x will be one in the solution if the solver decides that using the duty is part of the optimal solution, and zero if the duty is discarded as not being part of the optimal solution. The coefficient of each x is the cost of that duty in terms of driver pay. Hence our integer program looks like this (let’s use p for pay instead of the a’s we were using above): This means we have n potential duties. Each p is the driver pay (hence payroll cost) of the duty. We want Pulp to choose some x’s to be zero and some to be one. By doing this, our objective function will turn into the sum of the payments we have to make. And we want to minimize this. Of course, as is, there are no constraints that some x need to be selected (set to one) at all. Hence, Pulp will helpfully set all x to zero to minimize the objective. What constraints do we need to add? Well, every trip needs to be in exactly one duty. So we can add a constraint for every trip, so that the x’s corresponding to the duties that trip appears in sum up to 1. For example, we might have a constraint like this: This assumes for simplicity’s sake that the first five x’s correspond to the duties containing trip ('A', 9) . Likewise, we’d have a constraint like this for every other trip. These constraints say that for a given trip, exactly one duty must include it. No more, no less. Time to Write Some Code! OK, so we’re ready to write some code to solve our problem! Well, we’re close! But there’s one more hitch. Where are we going to get all the possible duties from? Generating every possible duty explodes exponentially with the number of trips. Hence, for now, we’ll randomly generate duties, and see what happens. We already have code written above to generate the set of trips. Let’s write a function to randomly generate some duties from those trips. We’ll make sure that we don’t generate a duty with multiple trips that occur at the same time. So let’s write it like this: We’ll randomly choose the number of trips in the duty Then we’ll randomly choose the hours for those trips Then we’ll randomly choose the routes for each trip Here’s the fully functioning code to generate trips and duties (extending the code above): When I run this, here’s what I get: $ ./duty_generation.py [[('A', 14), ('A', 18)], [('A', 9), ('B', 11), ('B', 12), ('D', 14), ('A', 15), ('A', 16), ('D', 18)], [('C', 17), ('B', 18)], [('C', 18)], [('B', 9), ('C', 11), ('A', 16), ('B', 18), ('D', 19), ('C', 20)]] Great! Now let’s write a function that tells us how much each duty costs: And here’s what the output looks like when I run it (I actually ran it a few times to get an interesting mix of costs): [(1000000.0, [('C', 9), ('A', 10), ('C', 11), ('C', 12), ('B', 13), ('A', 14), ('B', 15), ('C', 16), ('A', 17), ('C', 18), ('B', 19), ('B', 20)]), (8, [('B', 12), ('A', 13), ('C', 17)]), (8, [('B', 11), ('D', 13), ('D', 14), ('A', 16), ('A', 17), ('C', 19)]), (8, [('C', 16)]), (11.0, [('C', 10), ('A', 11), ('C', 12), ('D', 13), ('C', 14), ('D', 15), ('A', 16), ('A', 18), ('B', 19), ('C', 20)])] The Fun Part OK! Now for the really fun part, solving the problem! Here’s the code. Recall the Pulp code we wrote above, as we’re building on top of it. Here’s the complete runnable code. Let’s run it and see what happens. The output will be fairly long because I’m asking Pulp to print a representation of the problem. I’ll truncate some repetitive parts to make it shorter: driver_scheduling: MINIMIZE 12.5*x1 + 8*x10 + 8*x11 + 8*x12 + 8*x13 + 8*x14 + 8*x15 + 8*x16 + 8*x17 + 8*x18 + 8*x19 + 9.5*x2 + 8*x20 + 8*x21 + 8*x22 + 8*x23 + 8*x24 + 8*x25 + 8*x26 + 8*x27 + 8*x28 + 8*x29 + 8*x3 + 8*x30 + 8*x31 + 8*x32 + 8*x33 + 8*x34 + 8*x35 + 8*x36 + 8*x37 + 8*x38 + 8*x39 + 1000000.0*x4 + 8*x40 + 8*x41 + 8*x42 + 8*x43 + 8*x44 + 8*x45 + 8*x46 + 8*x47 + 8*x48 + 8*x49 + 11.0*x5 + 8*x50 + 8*x51 + 8*x52 + 8*x53 + 8*x6 + 8*x7 + 8*x8 + 8*x9 + 0.0 SUBJECT TO _C1: x7 = 1 _C2: x33 = 1 _C3: x1 + x45 = 1 _C4: x14 + x2 + x5 = 1 _C5: x1 + x20 + x4 = 1 ... _C47: x25 + x4 = 1 _C48: x24 = 1 VARIABLES 0 <= x1 <= 1 Integer ... 0 <= x9 <= 1 Integer Optimal Cost: 239.5 [[('B', 9), ('B', 10), ('B', 11), ('D', 12), ('D', 13), ('D', 14), ('D', 16), ('B', 17), ('D', 18), ('D', 19), ('B', 20)], [('D', 10), ('C', 11), ('B', 13), ('B', 14), ('D', 15), ('C', 16), ('A', 17), ('B', 18), ('A', 19), ('D', 20)], [('A', 9)], [('A', 10)], [('A', 11)], [('A', 12)], [('A', 13)], [('A', 14)], [('A', 15)], [('A', 16)], [('A', 18)], [('A', 20)], [('B', 12)], [('B', 15)], [('B', 16)], [('B', 19)], [('C', 9)], [('C', 10)], [('C', 12)], [('C', 13)], [('C', 14)], [('C', 15)], [('C', 17)], [('C', 18)], [('C', 19)], [('C', 20)], [('D', 9)], [('D', 11)], [('D', 17)]] So for all our hard work, we have a solution! Hooray! But it’s a pretty crummy one. Most drivers do one trip, get paid the minimum of 8 hours, and go home. Well, it’s good for them, but payroll won’t be happy. This is because we’re only generating 5 duties, of course. Let’s increase that to 100 duties. And let’s also time how long it takes. Here’s the result (without Pulp output this time): Optimal Cost: 120 [[('A', 9), ('C', 11), ('D', 13), ('A', 14), ('D', 15)], [('A', 10), ('D', 11), ('C', 13), ('A', 16), ('B', 18), ('D', 19)], [('C', 17)], [('D', 14), ('C', 15), ('D', 16), ('D', 17), ('A', 19)], [('C', 9), ('B', 10), ('D', 18), ('C', 19), ('A', 20)], [('B', 11), ('C', 14), ('C', 16), ('A', 18), ('B', 19), ('B', 20)], [('D', 10), ('A', 12), ('A', 13), ('B', 16), ('A', 17), ('C', 18), ('C', 20)], [('D', 9), ('C', 10), ('D', 12), ('B', 13), ('B', 17), ('D', 20)], [('A', 11)], [('A', 15)], [('B', 9)], [('B', 12)], [('B', 14)], [('B', 15)], [('C', 12)]] real 0m1.297s user 0m0.110s sys 0m0.000s That’s much better! The cost is almost half! But it’s still not great. Let’s generate 1000 duties. Optimal Cost: 70.0 [[('C', 9), ('C', 11), ('C', 12), ('A', 15), ('C', 18), ('A', 19)], [('A', 10), ('A', 11), ('D', 12), ('A', 13), ('A', 16), ('D', 18), ('C', 20)], [('A', 9), ('C', 10), ('A', 12), ('C', 13), ('B', 14), ('D', 15), ('D', 16), ('C', 17), ('B', 19)], [('D', 10), ('B', 12), ('B', 13), ('A', 14), ('B', 16), ('A', 17), ('B', 18), ('C', 19), ('B', 20)], [('B', 9), ('B', 10), ('B', 11), ('D', 13), ('D', 14), ('B', 15), ('C', 16), ('B', 17), ('A', 18), ('D', 19)], [('D', 9), ('D', 11), ('C', 14), ('D', 17), ('A', 20)], [('D', 20)], [('C', 15)]] real 4m41.586s user 3m11.270s sys 0m0.990s Phew, that’s much better. But also much slower! Well, we are solving an NP-complete problem after all. In practice, we could speed this up by generating duties more cleverly. E.g., there’s no reason for drivers to jump back and forth between routes all the time. If we limited that, we could generate more “good” duties, while ignoring “bad” duties without passing them to the solver. There are also much more advanced techniques to speed up and improve results, but the intent of this article is to whet your appetite. Integer Programming as a Flexible Framework So that’s it! We’ve used integer programming to solve our problem. And we’ve saved the effort of thinking up an algorithm for this specific problem, which would probably be either slow, or suboptimal, or both. Integer programming also gives us a very flexible framework for making changes. E.g., if we can customize the cost function to penalize some duties (like those that switch routes too often because that’s confusing). When the problem gets more complicated, such as routes ending in different locations, or trips starting and ending at different times, integer programming can handle that really easily. If you don’t want something to happen you can either just add a severe penalty (like we did with the driver break rule), or add a constraint. There are many other interesting classes of problems that can be solved using integer programming as well. Since solving an integer program is NP-hard, it can in fact be used to solve many NP and NP-complete problems (as long as you can model it as an integer program without exponential growth). This is a very powerful tool, because it’s often much easier and effective to model an NP or NP-complete problem as an integer program than it is to write an algorithm to solve it. You can also solve polynomial time algorithms using integer programming, and this is still often useful as a first cut solution, and it often turns out to be fast enough. To name just a few other examples of problems that integer programming is well suited to solve: Transportation problems (such as package delivery, or resource delivery such as energy distribution) Warehouse and container packing problems Matching problems (such as what stock brokerages do to match buyers with sellers, or scheduling which sports teams play each other) Map coloring By the way, Pulp is a Python wrapper around back end solvers written in C. By default it uses CBC, which is an open source solver. There are commercial solvers as well. These are often used for harder problems in industry because they can be much faster. One well-known commercial solver is called Gurobi, and they have many example usages of integer programming. I encourage you to look through some Pulp case studies as well. I hope you’ve found this interesting! Please comment or share this if you did. We’re planning to write another post going into more depth, so follow us if you’re interested. Want to work on these types of problems? Remix is hiring!

https://medium.com/make-computer-science-fun-again/an-intro-to-integer-programming-for-engineers-simplified-bus-scheduling-bd3d64895e92

['Dan Hipschman']

2020-04-11 22:35:26.543000+00:00

['Scheduling', 'Python', 'Software Engineering', 'Product At Remix', 'Engineering']

6 Morning Habits to Help You Seize the Day, Every Day

6 Morning Habits to Help You Seize the Day, Every Day Your morning routine is the single most constructive part of your day — invest in it. Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash There are days where I manage to check everything off my to-do list. And there are days where I don’t even come close. You’ve probably experienced that feeling. It gets to about 4:00 pm and you realize there’s no way you have the energy left to complete everything you have to do today. You’ve had a slow day. The truth is that you might be setting yourself up to ‘fail’ from the very start of the day without even realizing it. A series of small, counter-productive habits at the start of your day can have a big impact on your mindset. Instead of giving you the energy you need for a productive day, they’re eating away at your motivation. Carving out time first thing in the morning to get yourself in the right frame of mind, could be the single most constructive thing you do all day. And the best part is, that these small, seemingly insignificant acts can reap huge rewards. In time, you’ll benefit from the compound effect. As Darren Hardy explains: “Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE” — The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success’ The more you practice the same morning habits, the easier they become. They become habitual; you’ll soon start to do them without much conscious effort. They’ll form part of a healthy morning routine that sets you up for the day on the right foot. So here are 6 simple morning habits that have been tried, tested, and adopted by several highly successful people.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/6-morning-habits-to-help-you-seize-the-day-every-day-f6c0e0d5540a

['Laura Izquierdo']

2020-12-13 16:02:37.865000+00:00

['Work', 'Productivity', 'Success', 'Creativity', 'Psychology']

Answers to the Important FAQs About KNN Algorithm

In KNN, K stands for the number of nearest observations considered for predicting the class of new observation. e.g, There are two classes to predict i.e, 0 or 1. Now there are 5 neighbors near to the given observation and the class of those 5 neighbours is 1,1,1,0,0. It means new observation belong to the class 1. I hope this makes it clear that how important is the value of K in this algorithm. Again, like K in K means algorithm, KNN also allows to predict the correct value of K by iteratively trying all the values of K and see the best performance using technique like elbow method. There is a little caveat here to the value of K. And, I feel this is the right time to put light on the concept called bias variance trade off. We can have one separate discussion for this topic. Just overview, high bias leads to under fitting of the model and high variance means complex model which could lead to overfitting. Most of you would have understand where am i heading to. Conclusion is that we need to have correct value of K to avoid overfitting and underfitting in this algorithm. e.g, We keep value of k is 1 then it is high biased and if value of K is N the it is high variance. You have to decide best option and value of K to get the best results. Most of the time interesting question comes to mind, and it would have come to your mind too. It happened to me too. What will happen in case of DRAW (No winners). So, answer is quite simple, we always keep the value of K as odd, we don’t want to deal with conflict and give more complexity to the simplest model. Advantages 1. Simple to implement 2. Very robust. Capable of handling non linear and linear solution both 3. low cost algorithm and easy to visualize too Disadvantages 1. Expensive algorithm. It calculates distance at runtime for the test observation with all the existing observation to get given k values. Yes, of course, we have methods to overcome this approach and tune this. 2. Very sensitive to the given data. Noisy or unbalanced data. Wrong observations and outliers could make this algorithm perform worst. It needs perfect data to perform well which is almost requirement of every ML model. Common use cases : Forecasting, data compression or prediction etc.

https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/answers-to-the-most-frequently-asked-questions-about-knn-algorithm-7e5de68e7b73

['Laxman Singh']

2020-12-15 12:15:06.917000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'AI']

Could Carbon Save The Planet?

Could Carbon Save The Planet? A new miracle material could turn the tides on global warming. The world faces a crisis, one propagated by a single element, carbon. Humanity is pumping out record levels of carbon dioxide, methane, plastics and pollutants, all of which use carbon chemistry at their core. These chemicals are heating the planet, destroying our oceans and wrecking the land. But could a revolutionary new use for carbon help us turn the tides on the environmental catastrophe we have created? We basically have two problems here, our waste polluting the environment and our means of generating energy. Our modern comfortable lives depend on the use of a vast amount of energy and the cheap supply of mass-produced goods. Both of which pump out carbon-based pollutants. So we need a way of reducing the carbon waste in the environment all-the-while keeping our sources of energy high enough to fuel our modern lives. Recent innovations like electric cars that are actually useful, vast wind farms, solar power stations, recycling and biodegradable products have taken us closer and closer to climate nirvana. But these have two big flaws, the batteries needed to hold the energy are massively damaging to the environment (though an electric car is still better than a petrol one) and none of this actually reduces the carbon already out there in the wide world. But a new battery technology could change all of that. Imagine if you could recycle plastic or pull carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into a battery that would outperform anything in use today. This is the future promised by Graphene. Digram of graphene — Pixabay Graphene is simply carbon arranged in a flat honeycomb lattice a single atom thick. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? In fact, Graphite is lots of fragmented layers of Graphene on top of each other. So you will have some of this wonder material in your pencil case. But Graphene has some rather amazing properties that mean it can create a battery revolution. It is a zero-gap semiconductor; this basically means it conducts electricity incredibly well, better than any metal. But it also ‘hangs onto’ the Electrons very well, the Electrons can leave the edge of the sheet and form a circuit, but they find it hard to leave the middle of the sheet. We can use these properties to enhance our current battery technology (still storing the energy in chemical bonds), but if we could make enough Graphene, we could build supercapacitors out of Graphene (storing energy in pure electromagnetic potential). A capacitor is just two plates of very electrically conductive material sandwiched either side of a thin insulator. This means you can pass a change between the two plates, one becomes electrically positive, and the other negative as one gets Electron-rich and the other Electron-poor. Once the maximum charge has been built up, you can use it just like a battery. Normal capacitors are great for dumping small amounts of energy very quickly. The flash on a camera tends to use a capacitor to generate a short bright flash, but it couldn’t power a light for any decent period of time. Bring in Graphene supercapacitors, just like normal capacitors they can dump all their electrical energy very quickly, but they have a much higher capacity. One of these could power a light for a very long time. Even better they only take a few seconds to charge fully! So while a Graphene doped Li-ion battery can now be found in the highest performing commercially available batteries, it is these supercapacitors that will bring along a revolution. Imagine an electric car powered by Graphene supercapacitors. It would be able to charge in a minute or two, power the car for 500 miles or dump all of its energy at once, delivering several thousand horsepower. All while the battery pack weighs less and the batteries don’t degrade over time. How brilliant! But this quick charging and high power doesn’t just mean insanely good cars. One of the big issues we have with renewable energy is capturing it for later. We have very efficient solar and wind power, but our current range of batteries can’t charge quick enough to make the most of the peak power moments. This means loads of the energy generated actually goes to waste. On the contrast, Graphene supercapacitors would be able to keep up with the charging and power demands that we have become accustomed to. Using Graphene supercapacitors to store renewable energy means that we can switch to 100% renewables quicker, with less wind farms and solar power plants. Solar power plant — Pixabay Oh, and on the subject of solar and wind power. Graphene can be used to make ultra-efficient solar panels and generators. So having wide-spread use will also mean that these power plants can produce even more power! It is important to remember that Graphene is non-toxic. We could dump thousands of tonnes of it in the ocean and we wouldn’t see many negative effects — certainly not to the scale that our current technology does. All of the current technology that it could replace (like Li-Ion batteries) require toxic, rare Earth metals. These are killing the environment, are hard to come by and the mines used to extract them have questionable human rights records. Graphene could be made in a way no other rare Earth metal can be, atmospheric extraction. There is currently too much CO² in the atmosphere and too much plastic in the water. We can extract the carbon from these sources, releasing oxygen from CO² and Hydrogen from plastics (which we could also use as fuel). This would mean that the Graphene produced could be massively carbon negative, reducing the amount of carbon in the environment, turning the tides on climate change and pollution! So, why don’t we have Graphene powered smartphones or cars yet? If this technology is so amazing shouldn’t we be pushing for it?! Well, Graphene is a little harder to produce than I have lead on. Our technology to make it right now can produce small flakes of Graphene that can be used to enhance metals, fabrics and sensors at a relatively cheap price. However, making large sheets of graphene, as you would need for superconductors, is not currently possible. After all, this is a single atom thick sheet; we are talking about engineering that is on the molecular scale here. However, there is no reason to say that these advances are impossible. After all, scientists in 2015 discovered a way to make Graphene for 100 times less and just a few days ago NanoTech got $27.5 million in funding to create Graphene batteries. Jumps in technology like this means that your devices may be powered by pure carbon in the not too distant future. So, can carbon save the planet? Theoretically yes it can! There is a way in which we can use the carbon compounds that we have polluted the world with to produce technology far more powerful than we currently have whilst reducing the global levels of carbon. We just need to figure out the logistics of getting these atoms in the right order.

https://medium.com/predict/could-carbon-save-the-planet-229fe4598c36

['Will Lockett']

2020-10-14 21:52:33.178000+00:00

['Environment', 'Climate Change', 'Science', 'Technology', 'Future']

How to Never Run Out of Story Ideas Again

Thanks to Ninja Writers, I interact with thousands of writers every week. It’s pretty damn cool. My job is to talk about writing with writers. Seriously. There are two things I hear, probably more than anything else. Where do you get your ideas? I want to be a writer, but I don’t know what to write about. Those are basically the same question, right? Or one question and one reason for asking it. Hopefully it helps to know that all writers struggle with the idea pit. Here’s Stephen King’s answer to The Question. I get my ideas from everywhere. But what all of my ideas boil down to is seeing maybe one thing, but in a lot of cases it’s seeing two things and having them come together in some new and interesting way, and then adding the question ‘What if?’ ‘What if’ is always the key question. And Neil Gaiman’s. ‘I make them up,’ I tell them. ‘Out of my head.’ I used to give flip answers when someone asked me The Question. Like ‘heaven’ or ‘on sale at the Wal-Mart.’ But the truth was, ideas freaked me out. I had never run out of them, but I only ever had one at a time. So I was in a constant state of worry that whatever I was working on was my last good idea ever. The entirety of my career rested in the palm of this this one idea. Talk about putting pressure on a thing. I also realized, eventually, that the next idea that I did get always came when I was smack in the heart of the boring part of writing the first one. The boring part, in case you’re wondering, is the second act. The middle. The part where you’re done with the exciting beginning and you haven’t got to the rush of the finish yet. The part where my brain is willing to do anything, including be brilliant, to get me out of having to do that work. You know that scene in 10 Things I Hate About You where Julia Stiles flashes the teacher so Heath Ledger can sneak out of detention? That’s my brain on writing the second act. So, I’d give up on the idea that suddenly felt boring and wrong, and switch to this one fantastic, shiny idea. Because of course that’s the right thing to do. Shiny New Idea is going to make me a superstar. And it would be my only idea for a while. Then I’d get to Act Two. And, well, you know. Some new idea would flash my brain and I’d sneak out the window and abandon the last great idea. If I was going to have a career as a writer, something had to give. I needed to be able to stay with one idea all the way through, and I needed a way to capture the shiny new ones. And I needed a method for developing new ideas at will, so that I could let go of the fear of running out of them. I put a lot of effort in the last couple of years into learning how to develop and capture ideas. And it worked. No kidding. I turned myself into an idea machine. I teach the method for free here. At Ninja Writers, we call it H2DSI — or How to Develop (and test) a Story Idea. Today, I just want to go over the ‘develop’ part. I swear, it’s like magic. You’ll want a notebook and a pen (or a computer, if you’re less analog than me.) And a couple of hours that can be spread over a few days. That’s it. Ready? Step One: Make a list of characters Mark Twain based Huckleberry Finn on a real person. Someone he knew. “In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person — boy or man — in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us.” Agatha Christie’s infamous Miss Marple was inspired by her own grandmother. “Although a completely cheerful person, she always expected the worst of anyone and everything. And with almost frightening accuracy she was usually proved right. [She used to say] ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if so-and-so was going on.’ And although with no grounds for these assertions, that was exactly what was going on. …[The character of Miss Marple] insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I think I hardly noticed her arrival.” You know people like Tom Blakenship. You probably have a grandma or uncle or first grade teacher who had some kind of personality quirk that’s stuck with you. Spend some time making a list of them. Every single character you’ve collected in the nooks and crannies of your mind over the course of your life. Just a line or two is fine. Just this morning I added two to mine. Assignment: Make a list of at least ten potential characters. Step Two: Make a list of settings For J.R.R. Tolkien, it all started with a hole. I love this story. [I remember] the actual flashpoint. I can still see the corner in my house in 20 Northmoor Road where it happened. I’d got an enormous pile of exam papers there and was marking school examinations in the summer time, which was very laborious, and unfortunately also boring. I remember picking up a paper and nearly gave it an extra mark, or extra five marks actually, because one page on this particular paper was left blank. Glorious! Nothing to read. So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Thing at the Top of the Stairs” was inspired by a setting he held on to for most of his life. When I was 4 or 5, 6 years old, we had the bathroom upstairs. And in the middle of the night, when I had to go up there, I had to run halfway up the stairs, turn on the light before I could go the rest of the way. Well, when I was doing this, I’d always say to myself, now, don’t look at the top of the stairs because “it” will be waiting for you. And I never learned not to look. And I would scream and fall back down the stairs, and my mother or father would get up and sigh and say, oh, my God. Here we go again. And they’d turn the light on for me and let me go upstairs. Just like you did with characters, open your notebook to a fresh sheet and start a list of settings. You have them, already. That spot where you felt safe when you were six. The place where you had your first kiss. The gym locker room after basketball practice. The way, way back of your grandpa’s station wagon. The book I’m writing now was inspired by two settings from my list. The house my dad lived in when I was about ten years old. It was tall and skinny, with a bedroom perched on top like a cherry on a cupcake, surrounded by a 360-degree balcony. And the stairs leading down from a bluff to the beach where we took a family picture twenty years ago. (That picture was photobombed by an elderly couple who legit stopped and turned and posed for it. They’re on my character list.) Assignment: Make a list of at least ten potential settings. Step Three: Make a list of situations Audrey Niffenegger’s inspiration for The Time Traveler’s Wife came from character, but especially situation. “The idea came in the form of the title, while I was drawing one day. I wrote it down and began to turn it over in my head. The title contained two characters, the time traveler and his wife. It seemed that it might be rather trying to be the wife. I imagined her waiting. Then I had an image of an old woman in a bright room, waiting, and I knew that was the end of the story. After that it was a matter of figuring out who these people were, and how that woman got to that room.” Kahled Hosseini wrote the short story that became The Kite Runner after seeing a story on the news. “I was watching a news story in the spring of 1999 on television, and this news story was about the Taliban. And it was talking about all the different impositions that the Taliban had placed on the Afghan people. And at some point along the line, it mentioned that they had banned the sport of kite flying, which kind of struck a personal chord for me, because as a boy I grew up in Kabul with all my cousins and friends flying kites.” Situation is just another word for story. Not a whole story, though. A snippet of a story. A seed of one. Open another clean sheet in your notebook and start writing a list of situations. Think about news stories that have stuck with you. People you’ve met, who told you something interesting that sometimes pops up for you again. Your family history. (It’s okay — these are just seeds, right? Don’t worry about whether someone might be upset that their situation made it on your list.) My book The Astonishing Maybe came from a situation I’d been holding on to for a long time — one from my own childhood — a girl coping with her father being in prison. Assignment: Make a list of ten potential situations. Step Four: Pretend you’re at a Chinese restaurant Once you have your three lists, start putting them together. Really, just pick a character, a setting, and a situation. See how it sits with you. Tweak it until you’re happy with it, then add it to your idea barn. And do it again. And again. And just because you used a character, setting, or situation for one idea, doesn’t mean you have to cross it off your list. Until you’ve written the idea into a book and published it, it’s all still fair game. Assignment: Shuffle your potentialities into at least three new ideas.

https://medium.com/the-1000-day-mfa/how-to-never-run-out-of-story-ideas-again-13609f57b9c4

['Shaunta Grimes']

2019-05-26 13:01:31.153000+00:00

['Ideas', 'Writing', 'Productivity', 'Creativity', 'Fiction']

Creating a Daily Writing Habit Means Being the Boss of Yourself

I wake up thinking about writing. On a really good morning, I’ve dreamed about my novel the night before and the writing just flows super easy. I know exactly what I’m going to write. On a less good morning, it’s painful to pick a few words out of my head and it’s even worse knowing that they suck so bad there’s no way they’re going to make it to the final draft. After I’ve worked on my novel, I write a blog post. Like I’m doing right now. It’s 8:45 in the morning. I had a decently good time working on my novel and wrote 1000 words in forty-five minutes. I’m getting close to the end of this one. I hit 71,000 words today. By ten most mornings, I’ve worked on my novel and written a blog post. The rest of the day is pretty scheduled. I teach classes, work on writing classes to teach later, coach clients, send emails, work on projects. All of that is part of my writing business. I count it as writing. But it’s the first work — the work on my novel — that I have to keep the tightest rein on. That’s the work that it would be easy to let slip. And it really is a slippery slope. I could get so caught up in the things that feel like writing, that I actually just let my novel go all together. Writing is Your Job This is what I have to remind myself of, fairly often. Even when I don’t have a book contract (and I don’t, at the moment), fiction writing is my job. I’m the boss of it. No one is going to fire me if I don’t show up. No one is going to insist that I keep to a time clock. I am the boss. If I want to be a novelist, I have to show up to write my novel. And I have to do that regularly. Religiously, even. Because this is the hardest work I’ve ever done. It would be so easy to let it go, without even realizing I’ve done it. I could wait until I have more time. Or until my muse shows up and I’m inspired. Or until I have an idea that I can’t ignore. I could wait for a thousand things and the next thing I know, I’ll be 90 years old, wishing I hadn’t let my novels go. Teeny, Tiny Goals Are Small, But Mighty As the boss of my novel-writing business, I schedule myself for ten minutes of work a day. I’m a freaking slave driver — that’s ten minutes a day, with no days off. Day in. Day out. Every single day. I can write one page in ten minutes. If I never work more than my scheduled time, I’ll write a novel a year. Can you see how mighty that little goal is? A novel a year — ten minutes at a time. The only thing that can possibly stop me is if I don’t show up. Your teeny, tiny goal might be different from mine. It might be smaller. Maybe ten minutes isn’t the powerful trigger for you that it is for me. For me, I’ll write my ten minutes rather than break my streak. But maybe you find yourself skipping your ten minutes pretty often. That’s okay. Make it smaller. Write for five minutes a day and you’ll finish a novel every other year. Unless, of course, those five minutes turn into more on some days. Schedule Small; Leave Room For Overtime The key here is to schedule your time religiously — ten minutes a day (or less) — set it stone. Not just any ten minutes. Ten specific minutes. You’re on the clock for your writing business, after all. But don’t squeeze your ten minutes into a hole in your schedule so tight that there’s no room for overtime. If you’re on a roll, you want the space to keep going. My goal for today was to write for ten minutes. That’s about 250 words. I wrote 1000 in forty-five minutes. Overtime. My writing is hard scheduled for 8:00 to 8:10 a.m. every morning. But I don’t have something else scheduled at 8:10. I have time to keep going, if I’m feeling it. If my story is flowing and it’s a good morning. Take a look at your calendar. When do you have time where you can schedule your writing? Pretend someone is offering you a job. A tiny one. They’re going to expect you to show up for ten minutes a day, with an option for overtime if you want it. But those ten minutes are non-negotiable. Be a Hard-Ass Boss I am the most driven boss I’ve ever had. No one has ever expected more of me than I expect of myself. I wouldn’t work seven days a week for anyone else. I wouldn’t show up to do work that has no guarantee of pay for anyone else. You are your own boss. And for a while, maybe even for a long time, you’re going to have to be a tough enough boss to keep things going even when you have no real indication that the work your doing is going to have the result that you want it to. You don’t get to know if you’ll be a successful writer until after a lot of work is done. That’s the way this business works. You have to expect a lot from yourself, because for a long time, no one else will expect it from you. You have to be willing to drive yourself. You have to expect yourself to show up and do good work, even when you don’t feel it. That’s where a daily writing habit comes from. It’s not a feel-good exercise, although it does feel good. It’s a practice. And it’s a job.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/creating-a-daily-writing-habit-means-being-the-boss-of-yourself-b0c92ec80d72

['Shaunta Grimes']

2020-08-14 13:11:29.895000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Productivity', 'Habits', 'Ninjabyob', 'Writing']

If You Have Mid-Life Burnout, Do These 4 Things — Quickly

You’re tired upon tired: short on energy, low on motivation. There’s always so much to do: work, relationship, family, chores, life admin — you’re on the hamster wheel and it never ends. Even a weekend away doesn’t refresh you. Mid-life is a common time for the cracks to appear. That’s when people are often sandwiched between raising kids, caring for elderly parents and trying to rise up the ranks at work. It’s also when we come face to face with the life choices we’ve made — and the consequences — and we begin to see life as finite. Time is running out. What’s Mid-Life Burnout? Burnout is the term commonly used to describe chronic work stress but it can be applied to life, generally. Burnout can be hard to spot because it starts slowly and presents in the same way as symptoms of mild-to-moderate depression that, if left unchecked, can morph into serious clinical problems. So it’s important to keep an eye on yourself as the years stack up. Here are the key signs of burnout as they apply to mid-life. 1. Physical and mental exhaustion. Many mid-lifers are hitting the peak of their professional careers at the same time as they are raising kids and looking after aging parents. The relentless demands and worries coming from all angles — along with the sameness of their days and little time for fun — gets to people. They’ll often report erratic sleep, problems with concentration and decision making, feeling flat, more anxious and “lost”. Physically, there may be stomach problems, headaches and unexplained aches and pains. People often explain these away as “getting older” but it’s often the fallout of all the stress they’re under. 2. Feeling cynical about work and relationships. Burnout, like depression, negatively colours our view of ourselves, our people and our future. And that can lead us to see the worst in our partners, family, close friends and the people we work with. And once we get into the habit of seeing the downside, it’s hard to see anything else. People often report less tolerance/more conflict with their partners — especially over chores, money and sex — and feel bleak about the future of their relationship. On the work front, people may feel professionally stuck which fuels feelings of discontent. 3. Feeling like you’re not doing anything well. Mid-lifers will often say they feel they’re they’re failing on all fronts. Everything is “once over lightly”. Or they’ll manage to do one thing well (like work) but be hyper-irritable and short on energy with partners and kids, which upsets them and causes guilt. A feeling of futility creeps in when they realise they don’t have the time or headspace to think about what they’re doing all this for and what their next step might be. What To Do: 4 Strategies That Will Help 1. Pay attention — and take a break. Seriously. Burnout is no joke. It’s the clearest sign you are desperate for a mental and physical rest. Take a break immediately if you can and put some boundaries around all the demands on your time. Only your family will care if your health is compromised — everyone else will just look around for someone to take your place. 2. Do the hard math on your schedule. Pause! Even when people are run ragged they’ll often keep saying yes; they’ll do that little bit of overtime for the boss, they’ll help out a friend in need, they’ll let their kids add another activity to their schedules. Maybe they’re kind by nature or like to please or are super-responsible — or it’s just habit. Be careful about continuing to operate on automatic pilot — it’ll come back to bite you. Take an inventory of your schedule, then ruthlessly clear out everything that’s unnecessary. Then make it a rule that if you can’t add something to your schedule without dropping something else — and stick to it. 3. Carve out some regular “me” time. This can be particularly challenging for people who don’t have any free time. But if you don’t do anything for yourself, you’ll be resentful (as well as burnt out). You don’t have to have a lot of “me” time to feel better, just a couple of regular slots you can count on AND enjoy. And some of it should be alone so you have time to think about your future or next step. 4. Find a way to get excited. When you’re struggling with burnout, all forms of positive emotion (except cynical laughter) seem to go walkabout on you. Don’t try to force yourself to feel happy — it won’t work. Just find one little (lawful) thing that gets you a little excited and go do it. It may be something you haven’t done for a while, or it may be a swerve in a new direction. But once you feel that buzz again, you’ll be up for creating ways to have more of it. As entrepreneur Tim Ferris says: “Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.”

https://medium.com/on-the-couch/if-you-have-mid-life-burnout-do-these-4-things-quickly-c6971c787fe4

['Karen Nimmo']

2020-12-01 18:56:35.447000+00:00

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

5 Ways We Misunderstand the Mechanics of COVID-19 Infection

COVID has set records for infection all over the country. It took only ten days for the nation’s total number of cases to go from 9 million to ten million. Every time we break a record, news outlets compare the new total with the previous one. They highlight the challenge that awaits President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. No one explains how Europe and the United States can be surprised by COVID rates of infection. No one explains how big numbers grow so fast. There may be a better way to think about this data. 1.) The virus moves in predictable ways In Abundance: Why the Future is Faster Than You Think, by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, they write that computing, medicine, energy, and other sectors of technology expand at an exponential rate. They propose a set of conditions to describe this expansion — the 6 Ds of Disruptive Technology. Their model of exponential technology and how it spreads is useful when applied to COVID. It focuses attention where it’s most needed — earlier in the narrative. They explain the visibility of the wave and how that changes over time. Finally, they name the period of time when the totals are all we notice. The East and countries such as New Zealand and Australia have a zero-tolerance approach to COVID. The West is willing to live with a higher degree of infection. While geography and culture play a role in this difference, the United States is unlikely to adopt a more stringent approach to the virus. Flattening the curve is the American method of dealing with the virus. It presumes that it is possible to stop before reaching the point of zero new infections. It assumes this halt can occur in a sustainable manner. Every country that tried to do so returned to high rates of infection and is now in lockdown. The US also has high infection rates but no plan to lockdown. Flattening the curve leads to increased totals over time. To check that hypothesis, let’s observe how COVID spread in the state of Wisconsin from February to now. 2.) Data looks deceptive when infections are low Wisconsin started with one case. Note each time the cases double or grow by an exponent greater than 2. Feb. 5 — 1 case. A trip to Beijing caused the exposure. Mar. 9 — 2 cases. Three is more than double one Mar. 11— 6 cases in total. March 13 — 19 cases. It took two days for the infections to triple. March 17— 47 cases. It four days to more than double. It took two days shy of a month and a half for Wisconsin go from one case to 47. Though this is a meteoric rise in terms of rate, it gets little attention because the numbers seem small. 3.) Data looks disruptive when infections are high The numbers doubled, tripled, or grew by an even more significant factor every two to five days. As the tally increased to the thousands, the cycle between exponential multiples took longer. It was two days to go from 2 to 6 cases, but five days to go from 585 on March 25 to 1,221 on March 30. The first colossal benchmark would happen in six months. September 20 — 100,000 cases. There was no huge alarm or call to action as the number ramped up by more than a hundred percent over and over again. On this day, though, the governor called a press conference to point out that, while this is a high watermark, it took seven and a half months to get there. The message was not to panic. October 26 — 201,049 cases. The tone of this press conference was dire. The data was no different from observations made months before — cases increase by large steps every few days. This number was magnitudes higher though. No one seemed to grasp that the next 100,000 would arrive even sooner than the last. Nov. 7–263,130 cases. At their current rate of 6,100 to 7,100 cases per day, Wisconsin will reach the 300,000 benchmark in six days. It will have taken eighteen days, or exactly half the time it took the prior 100,000. 4.) Exponential Vectors Work a Certain Way Kotler and Diamandis state that the first of the 6 Ds is digitization. That’s when an idea can be expressed in ones and zeros and becomes as easy to share as the Internet. When COVID presents in a new area it also becomes exponential. Deceptive is the most critical characteristic of an exponential vector-like COVID — it’s the one we overlook time and again. When an idea is digitized, its first growth spurt is deceptive. The first phases are nearly invisible. When Russell Kirsch scanned a photo of his son in 1957 to make the first digital picture, Kodak had no reason to worry. Steven Sasser of Eastman Kodak would create the first portable digital camera in 1975. When Steve Jobs went to Xerox Parc with Dave Wozniak, there was still no reason for Kodak to panic. Yet the writing was on the wall, as it was for CDs, VCRs, video cameras, and so many more separate goods and services that are now cheap or free in our phones. That’s what the deceptive phase is like. You cannot see the iPhone that will spell your doom. In the COVID example, that corresponds to when infection totals are low. It’s easy to conclude the low numbers are good news. They miss the way in which these numbers rise, by doubling, tripling, and more. Disruptive, in the technology sector, is when an existing market is disrupted by a new market created by exponential technology. Amazon’s effect on bookstores is an example. With COVID, you might tolerate infection totals of 200, 20,000, and even 200,000, but every country has a number X such that X is too many infected citizens even for them. Sweden eventually locked down, and so it seems, did almost every other country in Europe as case totals massively ramped up. 5.) Takeaways

https://medium.com/swlh/5-ways-we-misunderstand-the-mechanics-of-covid-19-infection-6ae1f3ea114e

['Michael B. Wharton']

2020-11-11 12:29:42.224000+00:00

['Science', 'Data Science', 'Health', 'Coronavirus']

How Apps Are Helping Us With Our Mental Health

How Apps Are Helping Us With Our Mental Health COVID-19 unveiled a promising frontier in digital mental health solutions. Living through a global pandemic may feel a bit surreal and otherworldly. You’re stuck at home, deprived of your everyday routine overnight. So you’re sitting there, trying to navigate through the new reality circulating between the land of the couch and the land of the bed. A bit lonely or just bored, you pick up your phone. Again. But then your casual social media scrolling gives you more anxiety because it’s like Cardi B screaming “coronavirus” straight into your ear (if you have no idea what I’m talking about you’re doing a good job with your self-isolation, keep it up). If it’s not corona, it’s dozens of your friends manifesting they’re changing their lives, learning new languages, transforming into fitness and/or coaching gurus. And don’t get me wrong. It’s OK. But not doing this is also OK. A card from a card game We Are Not Really Strangers. It’s like Cards Against Humanity, but for building emotional connections. We’re worried about our mental health (and finally talking about it) There’s no denying that we, as a society, have found ourselves in this all-inclusive crisis, an economical one, but also a societal one. Well over 100 countries worldwide introduced either a full or partial lockdown, affecting billions of people. We are struggling. Struggling with real tangible daily mini-crises and trying to make do in a, sometimes, impossible environment. But research shows, we’re just as well struggling on the inside. According to NRC, almost 48% of Millenials and Generation Z admitted their mental health has somewhat worsened due to the COVID-19 crisis. Generation X is not far below with 40%. We might be feeling powerless, angry, confused and on top of that, we’re often drastically cut off from our usual sources of support. But at least we’re finally talking about it. As if we’re learning that showing vulnerability in a time of a crisis is not a sign of weakness, it’s just a part of being human. New tools to combat the old fears We’re turning to technology for help more than ever. Thankfully the digital world is beautiful in its diversity and the Internet is filled not only with unsolicited advice (we all know it more than we’d want to), but also ideas and innovation, limited only to how much we’re willing to give out. And since it’s Mental Health Awareness Month, we should embrace this one trend emerging through our feeds and through technology: mental health awareness and innovation in a time of a crisis. What we’re seeing right now is an emerging world of digital tools and initiatives unveiling the chance and potential of technology to help us, soothe us and comfort us. Source: Empowering 8 Billion Minds Enabling Better Mental Health for All via the Ethical Adoption of Technologies, World Economic Forum Even though the experience we go through right now can feel quite alone, actually, we’re all in this together. And this time it’s not just a slogan. Let me show you around. New social platforms are setting the mental awareness trend You’re probably familiar with Tiktok. Just like every novel concept quickly going viral, it may be a bit tricky to define. In short, it’s a place for short-form mobile videos. You’ll find your usual there, the cats, the dogs, and (sometimes) the ugly. But frankly, I didn’t expect to find a therapist there. Julie Smith is the first mental health professional to use the platform and having almost 700k followers as of now, her influence is undisputed. Why am I even mentioning this? She inspires people to acknowledge and take care of their mental health, sometimes book their first-ever therapist appointment. She spreads awareness and encourages people that might have been reluctant before. But she’s also a clear sign that healthcare professionals are recognising the digital game potential. And both of those things are invaluable and show prospect for future digital mental health tools development. Self-management apps, meditation and chatbot chitchats There are times when you need to vent, but there’s no one around. A realistic threat, especially right now. And even though experts agree that no app can replace a doctor’s consultation, self-care digital tools have their own part to play. Because of their low entry barrier (anonymity, accessibility, convenience) they can serve as a hopeful introduction to a long journey inwards. Even though it’s too early for most companies to share reliable stats, mental health apps providers admit they notice a major usage increase. You know the big guys in the industry, Headspace, Calm, Happify. But let me introduce you to some trailblazing ones that pave the road to the future of mental health digital tools. Wysa (below, screenshotted on the left) is an AI-based “emotionally intelligent” bot that will talk you through the daily stress and coach you about basic coping techniques, all of which are therapy-based. The product is the result of co-effort of a 15-people team of psychologists, designers developers, and its aim is simple: to help people build up their own emotional resilience to what’s happening around. #SelfCare (above, on the right) app presents a more gamified approach to calming your reality. Unlike traditional games that get increasingly more stressful as you progress, the #SelfCare interactions begin disorderly and awkward and become more orderly and satisfying. There are no levels of difficulty, no winning, and no losing. The only goal is to feel better. More governments and national organizations recognize the power behind digital mental aid tools. US National Center for PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) has recently released an app specifically to help people cope with pandemic fears and overall stress, COVID Coach. On a more humorous note, some time ago I stumbled upon a guided meditation that can resonate with the more skeptical folks out there. If you’re like me and despite always wanting to try mindfulness, you could just never find the right kind that would speak to your inner sarcastic self, you should definitely check out this “honest” meditation. It’s short (warning: there’s some cursing going on). But maybe showing a bit of humor and anger relief is just the way to go to show all disbelievers the power of a 2 minutes separation from your own twisted thoughts? An unexpected (but needed) addition to your mindfulness routine Initial research findings show that people in lockdown experience significant twists with their sex drive. Some will withdraw, some will crave even more human connection than before. But digital gives new ways to navigate through it as well. Femtasy is a female-focused startup and the first audio streaming platform with sensual stories for women and couples. The app, developed by EL Passion, has already proved in the German-speaking countries, that sensual time, “me time” and self-love can reduce stress and anxiety significantly. Now they’re expanding into a global English-speaking market. Soon, we may witness a revolution of the approach to bodily pleasures, which, after all, are also pleasures of the mind. Reconnecting with the world (but digitally) Adrienne Heinz, a clinical research psychologist at the US Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD points out that our routines are the scaffolding of life. We organize our time and information around them. And this is why we feel so lost when suddenly everything twists around (like right now). As individuals, we can’t do much about closed cinemas, museums or canceled vacation plans. But we can take the present situation to our advantage and discover new ways to cope. Google’s Art & Culture museum tours and 360-degree U.S National Parks visits proved to be a great and inspiring gateway from the confinement reality. Other initiatives will follow. Check out Globetrotter, a fun web app our Front-end developer created roughly in 2 days. Obviously it’s still in beta, but it may help you learn a couple of new things about the world you didn’t know. So what’s the takeaway here? 2020 may be the year of a global pandemic, conspiracy theories thriving, the Pentagon releasing “supposed” UFO videos. TL;DR: it may be scary. But it’s also a year we should acknowledge our collective potential; that we’re actually capable of altering the reality around us and making it a tiny bit more bearable. After 2008 Great Recession we witnessed a boom of startups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber; and now, more than 10 years after, can you imagine the digital landscape without them? Digital solutions can help us, soothe us, comfort us in a variety of new ways we’re just discovering as we go. And the innovation is very much needed in the face of adversity and a Brave New World we’re just might be entering.

https://medium.com/elpassion/digital-products-are-consoling-our-troubled-minds-fc9f940a5299

['Patrycja Paterska']

2020-07-08 10:13:37.854000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Mental Health', 'Apps']

Optimized World. Optimized World: Part 1

The following is the answer from OR-Tools — Get Started with OR-Tools for Python source: https://developers.google.com/optimization/introduction/python The following sections will get you started with OR-Tools for Python: What is an optimization problem? The goal of optimization is to find the best solution to a problem out of a large set of possible solutions. (Sometimes you’ll be satisfied with finding any feasible solution; OR-Tools can do that as well.) Here’s a typical optimization problem. Suppose that a shipping company delivers packages to its customers using a fleet of trucks. Every day, the company must assign packages to trucks, and then choose a route for each truck to deliver its packages. Each possible assignment of packages and routes has a cost, based on the total travel distance for the trucks, and possibly other factors as well. The problem is to choose the assignments of packages and routes that has the least cost. Like all optimization problems, this problem has the following elements: The objective — the quantity you want to optimize. In the example above, the objective is to minimize cost. To set up an optimization problem, you need to define a function that calculates the value of the objective for any possible solution. This is called the objective function. In the preceding example, the objective function would calculate the total cost of any assignment of packages and routes. — the quantity you want to optimize. In the example above, the objective is to minimize cost. To set up an optimization problem, you need to define a function that calculates the value of the objective for any possible solution. This is called the objective function. In the preceding example, the objective function would calculate the total cost of any assignment of packages and routes. An optimal solution is one for which the value of the objective function is the best. (“Best” can be either a maximum or a minimum.) The constraints — restrictions on the set of possible solutions, based on the specific requirements of the problem. For example, if the shipping company can’t assign packages above a given weight to trucks, this would impose a constraint on the solutions. A feasible solution is one that satisfies all the given constraints for the problem, without necessarily being optimal. The first step in solving an optimization problem is identifying the objective and constraints. Solving an optimization problem in Python Next, we give an example of an optimization problem, and show how to set up and solve it in Python. A linear optimization example One of the oldest and most widely-used areas of optimization is linear optimization (or linear programming), in which the objective function and the constraints can be written as linear expressions. Here’s a simple example of this type of problem. Maximize 3x + y subject to the following constraints: The objective function in this example is 3x + y. Both the objective function and the constraints are given by linear expressions, which makes this a linear problem. Main steps in solving the problem For each language, the basic steps for setting up and solving a problem are the same: Import the required libraries. Declare the solver. Create the variables. Define the constraints. Define the objective function. Invoke the solver and display the results. Python program This section walks through a Python program that sets up and solves the problem. Note: The complete program and steps for running it are shown at the end of the section. Here are the steps: Import the required libraries. from __future__ import print_function from ortools.linear_solver import pywraplp Declare the solver. # Create the linear solver with the GLOP backend. solver = pywraplp.Solver.CreateSolver(‘GLOP’) pywraplp is a Python wrapper for the underlying C++ solver. The argument GLOP_LINEAR_PROGRAMMING specifies GLOP, the OR-Tools linear solver. Create the variables. # Create the variables x and y. x = solver.NumVar(0, 1, ‘x’) y = solver.NumVar(0, 2, ‘y’) print(‘Number of variables =’, solver.NumVariables()) Define the constraints. The first two constraints, 0 ≤ x ≤ 1 and 0 ≤ y ≤ 2, are already set by the definitions of the variables. The following code defines the constraint x + y ≤ 2: # Create a linear constraint, 0 <= x + y <= 2. ct = solver.Constraint(0, 2, ‘ct’) ct.SetCoefficient(x, 1) ct.SetCoefficient(y, 1) print(‘Number of constraints =’, solver.NumConstraints()) The method SetCoefficient sets the coefficients of x and y in the expression for the constraint. Define the objective function. # Create the objective function, 3 * x + y. objective = solver.Objective() objective.SetCoefficient(x, 3) objective.SetCoefficient(y, 1) objective.SetMaximization() The method SetMaximization declares this to be a maximization problem. Invoke the solver and display the results. solver.Solve() print(‘Solution:’) print(‘Objective value =’, objective.Value()) print(‘x =’, x.solution_value()) print(‘y =’, y.solution_value()) Complete program The complete program is shown below. from __future__ import print_function from ortools.linear_solver import pywraplp def main(): # Create the linear solver with the GLOP backend. solver = pywraplp.Solver.CreateSolver('GLOP') # Create the variables x and y. x = solver.NumVar(0, 1, 'x') y = solver.NumVar(0, 2, 'y') print('Number of variables =', solver.NumVariables()) # Create a linear constraint, 0 <= x + y <= 2. ct = solver.Constraint(0, 2, 'ct') ct.SetCoefficient(x, 1) ct.SetCoefficient(y, 1) print('Number of constraints =', solver.NumConstraints()) # Create the objective function, 3 * x + y. objective = solver.Objective() objective.SetCoefficient(x, 3) objective.SetCoefficient(y, 1) objective.SetMaximization() solver.Solve() print('Solution:') print('Objective value =', objective.Value()) print('x =', x.solution_value()) print('y =', y.solution_value()) if __name__ == '__main__': main() Running the program You can run the program above as follows: Copy and paste the code above into new file and save it as program.py . Open a command window and change to the directory where you saved program.py . At the command prompt, enter python relative/path/to/program.py where relative/path/to/ is the path to the directory where you saved the program. The program returns the values of x and y that maximize the objective function: Solution: x = 1.0 y = 1.0 More Python examples For more Python examples that illustrate how to solve various types of optimization problems, see Examples. Identifying the type of problem you wish to solve There are many different types of optimization problems in the world. For each type of problem, there are different approaches and algorithms for finding an optimal solution. Before you can start writing a program to solve an optimization problem, you need to identify what type of problem you are dealing with, and then choose an appropriate solver — an algorithm for finding an optimal solution. Below you will find a brief overview of the types of problems that OR-Tools solves, and links to the sections in this guide that explain how to solve each problem type. Linear optimization As you learned in the previous section, a linear optimization problem is one in which the objective function and the constraints linear expressions in the variables. The primary solver in OR-Tools for this type of problem is the linear optimization solver, which is actually a wrapper for several different libraries for linear and mixed-integer optimization, including third-party libraries. Learn more about linear optimization Constraint optimization Constraint optimization, or constraint programming (CP), identifies feasible solutions out of a very large set of candidates, where the problem can be modeled in terms of arbitrary constraints. CP is based on feasibility (finding a feasible solution) rather than optimization (finding an optimal solution) and focuses on the constraints and variables rather than the objective function. However, CP can be used to solve optimization problems, simply by comparing the values of the objective function for all feasible solutions. Learn more about constraint optimization Mixed-integer optimization A mixed integer optimization problem is one in which some or all of the variables are required to be integers. An example is the assignment problem, in which a group of workers needs be assigned to a set of tasks. For each worker and task, you define a variable whose value is 1 if the given worker is assigned to the given task, and 0 otherwise. In this case, the variables can only take on the values 0 or 1. Learn more about mixed-integer optimization Bin packing Bin packing is the problem of packing a set of objects of different sizes into containers with different capacities. The goal is to pack as many of the objects as possible, subject to the capacities of the containers. A special case of this is the knapsack problem, in which there is just one container. Learn more about bin packing Network flows Many optimization problems can be represented by a directed graph consisting of nodes and directed arcs between them. For example, transportation problems, in which goods are shipped across a railway network, can be represented by a graph in which the arcs are rail lines and the nodes are distribution centers. In the maximum flow problem, each arc has a maximum capacity that can be transported across it. The problem is to assign the amount of goods to be shipped across each arc so that the total quantity being transported is as large as possible. Learn more about network flows Assignment Assignment problems involve assigning a group of agents (say, workers or machines) to a set of tasks, where there is a fixed cost for assigning each agent to a specific task. The problem is to find the assignment with the least total cost. Assignment problems are actually a special case of network flow problems. Learn more about assignment Scheduling Scheduling problems involve assigning resources to perform a set of tasks at specific times. An important example is the job shop problem, in which multiple jobs are processed on several machines. Each job consists of a sequence of tasks, which must be performed in a given order, and each task must be processed on a specific machine. The problem is to assign a schedule so that all jobs are completed in as short an interval of time as possible. Learn more about scheduling Routing Routing problems involve finding the optimal routes for a fleet of vehicles to traverse a network, defined by a directed graph. The problem of assigning packages to delivery trucks, described in What is an optimization problem?, is one example of a routing problem. Another is the traveling salesman problem. Learn more about routing source: https://developers.google.com/optimization/introduction/python

https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/optimized-world-253bed3dfc2d

['Venali Sonone']

2020-11-27 09:09:02.681000+00:00

['Python', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Big Data', 'Data Analysis', 'Data Science']

Is Migrate for Anthos a real game changer?

Over the years, GCP (Google Cloud Platform) has introduced plethora of new services, but the US-based cloud giant is still mainly known for two products: Kubernetes and AI. As you may know since 2003 Google has been an early adopter of containerized infrastructure for their own internal workloads. They developed a container orchestration tool, Borg, later making it open-source and renaming Kubernetes. Today it is the most known container orchestration tool in the industry. Google brings their years of expertise in managing millions of containers for their own workload and introduced them as a service in 2014 in the form of the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). GKE is the best Kubernetes platform in the industry. Google was the first cloud vendor to provide a managed Kubernetes service. GKE is even included in their enterprise strategy, making them a differentiator among their rivals. In 2018 Google brought a new service, Anthos. A hybrid multi-cloud platform based on GKE which helps to extend Google cloud services to on-premise and other clouds. Anthos is not a single product, but rather an umbrella covering multiple services. Migrate for Anthos is a migration tool under this umbrella that allows direct migration of virtual machines (VMs) into containers running on GKE. Enterprises all over the world are trying to modernize their legacy monolithic applications into microservices and containers to bring better performance, agility and cost savings. This takes barely two lines to cover yet it is not so simple when it comes to a real scenario. It needs a lot of time and manual intervention in terms of planning, assessment, code changes, etc. By the introduction of Migrate for Anthos, GCP was able to solve some of these problems and make the enterprise cloud adoption much easier. There are many cloud migration tools available in the market and most of them tackle the VM-to-VM migration scenario. Where other cloud providers suggest the first step towards cloud adoption to be lift and shift to VMs in the cloud, GCP takes a different approach. Migrate for Anthos is a one of a kind solution to automate the process of VM-to-container migrations and make life easier for cloud engineers and developers. How Migrate for Anthos works Migrate for Anthos works on top of Anthos and uses GKE as the containerization platform. It converts VMs to containers running in GKE. Where you see “system container” you might think it is still the monolithic approach and not microservices adoption. What is the benefit then? Even though it is monolithic, it takes advantage of portability, better packaging and utilizes the flexibility of the cloud. On top of that, the workload is in the cloud in a containerized environment, allowing to further break down the application into microservices as a roadmap. The diagram above shows a full-fledged VM migrated into a container using Migrate for Anthos. After the migration, many of the VM components are now managed by GKE. Even though it is a system container, it will increase performance and improve management. There are prerequisites to be fulfilled before using Migrate for Anthos, like OS (operating system) or VM source platform. Not all workloads are suitable for Migrate for Anthos either. This migration approach is not possible in scenarios like high performance or memory-intensive workloads, software licenses tied to hardware workloads or applications needing a special kernel or hardware. Migrate for Anthos is a really good product to make enterprise cloud adoption faster and efficient. The future holds more options and use cases of this product for sure.

https://medium.com/adfolks/is-migrate-for-anthos-a-real-game-changer-13aac3568e9f

['Shine Rappy']

2020-06-17 08:45:38.095000+00:00

['Google Cloud Platform', 'Google', 'Containers', 'Cloud Computing', 'Kubernetes']

The Vicious Circle of Mediocre Work

1. Identify your quadrants on how you spend time Stephen Covey famous quadrants of busyness illustrate the problem. Most of us think we’re working on urgent and important stuff. The irony is that urgent often doesn’t equate to important at all. Urgent needs to be done, but important is where you can have impact. Not surprisingly… What’s important to someone else often ends up feeling urgent to you. I’d argue that urgency is the number one reason passionate people get stuck in mediocrity. But it depends on the type of urgency. A limited amount of urgency can be a great source of inspiration. It can help us prioritize, be focused, and get stuff done. But once urgency becomes a default state in how you, your team, or your company operates, it inadvertently becomes a catalyst for mediocre work. Too much mediocre work, too many sacrifices, and a continuous lack of pride doesn’t just kill passion and create a culture of mediocrity. It makes people quit. So… What are you excited about? What are you excited about? Chances are it’s not what you spend your lion’s share of time working on. We all have responsibilities and even if you’re at a startup — living the dream — and super excited about shipping your world changing idea, you probably still need to write that damn investors report from time to time. That’s probably ok. A 100% focus on one single task is not just an illusion, but it can actually severely limit your ability to stay flexible and improve your ideas along the way. But there is a large body of research that shows that people who find ways to do what they love, excel in how they contribute, grow, and ultimately succeed. We’ve heard that story a couple of times didn’t we? But while the do-what-you-love mantra has gotten so much attention lately, the necessary sacrifice to get there didn’t. 2. Regaining focus Staying focused is not easy. I’m terrible at it, not just because I have severe ADHD, but because I easily get excited about new ideas. The struggle of passion, is a struggle of focus. At the core of our focus lies our ability to say no. Breaking a constant sense of urgency only happens, once we learn how to say no and start reconnecting with the values we deeply care about. This is—I believe—our ticket out of mediocrity. Saying no is like standing in parking lot and trying to spot your car. What color is it? Red? Great. Your brain will automatically adjust your perception and make red cars pop while the blue, gray and black ones slowly fade in the background. This is called selective attention. It’s magical, it works, and we should learn how to put it to work outside of the parking lot. After all, this is not about you finding your car, but about you deciding how you spend your time. Without the willingness to allow other priorities to fade in the back, focus won’t happen and we risk getting sucked right back into the vicious circle of mediocrity. 3. Keep saying no You’ve made it till here. You kept saying no, you were able to resist distractions, and start seeing your first results. Congratulations. Let’s tap ourselves on the back and celebrate that moment for a second. That was great. Now what? The problem with successes, no matter how big or small, is that they will make it even harder for you to stay focused. I know people who get invited to conferences and give one talk after another while at the same time neglecting the very thing that got them on stage in the first place. Focus needs deliberate practice and attention. We need to nurture it. We need to focus on staying focused. Let’s keep doing that and hopefully it will keep us out of the dreaded cycle. Conclusion Even though we may think that mediocre work is avoidable, in reality, it’s not. Our capacity to create great things also relies on our willingness to be mediocre along the way. The important part is giving ourselves the tools to ensure growth. And I think the steps to get there are remarkably simple. It starts by stopping to operate in a constant sense of urgency, remembering why you signed up for what you do, and keeping your focus on things where you personally feel like you can make the most significant contribution. Do you have some tips for all of us out there who have a hard time to focus? Please share. Hopefully that resonates with you. If it does, some clap clap 👏 would be great if you feel like it could help others break the loop. We can keep in touch on Medium or on Twitter.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-vicious-circle-of-mediocre-work-c15e98a30798

['Adrian Zumbrunnen']

2017-12-15 09:22:22.259000+00:00

['Design Thinking', 'Startup', 'Design', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity']

How To Reverse 4 of the Most Dangerous Consumer Biases With Your Brand

You don’t need to understand every bias. What you need to understand is how they work in the flow of logic, according to Benson: 1. Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal. 2. Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story. 3. Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions. 4. This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world. Cognitive biases reveal our nature as consumers. We think and decide in non-sensical ways on a granular level, but pull back you’ll see the coping mechanisms that these biases afford us. Information processing is basically storytelling, and biases are a shortcut to creating meaning. That’s why your brand strategy is so crucial — it tells the story that facilitates the decision to purchase. It creates the meaning the customer needs in order to buy. Yes, you can control (or exploit) consumer biases with product, UX and customer service, but none of these touch points can frame a belief before it has even been established. I’m going to show you how biases can be leveraged through brand story instead. The story is always what matters. Without it, we drown as consumers searching for meaning in a pool of meaningless information. Understand the biases that reveal what your customer wants, and then give them the meaning they’re looking for… before they misinterpret it for themselves. 4 Consumer Biases That Threaten Conversion, and How to Reverse Them We tend to choose options for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is unknown — even if the unknown option has the potential for better gains. Thinx is a fascinating case study on what happens when you attack the ambiguity effect head-on. I was hesitant before buying my first set. They were expensive, unlike anything I had ever bought before, and the real big question was — would they work? There is no way to understate that last concern. The idea of “period-proof underwear” possibly not working was a non-starter. As it is for nearly every woman, the shame, embarrassment and fear feels insurmountable. Thinx turned the ambiguous into something concrete by being everything a period brand isn’t. Instead of demonstrating with blue liquids as so many brands have done for generations, they used blood bags and red colors throughout their advertising. They resisted using euphemisms and analogies, and instead used language like “This is the story of a girl who bled a river and… it was fine” or “No, they don’t feel like diapers, and it’s not like sitting in your own blood. Boom.” They resisted generalizations and used real measurements of blood capacity, flow and wearability. A day in the life of a real menstruating human. Sure they were more comfortable, more eco-friendly, and safer, but that didn’t matter. When consumers like me suffer from the Ambiguity Effect, the potential for better gains don’t fully register — not when the status quo of pads and tampons are dependable and safe (no matter how uncomfortable or archaic they are). That’s why Thinx got straight to the heart of the matter. They had to break taboos to get there, but by doing that, they marginalized their competition. “There are so many ways to go wrong. All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.” ― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad There is constant anxiety about the unknown, about getting it wrong and missing the mark… especially in a space where no one has the guts/ permission to say it in plain terms. If your customers are resisting conversion from a competitor brand because of the Ambiguity Effect, consider finding new ways to tell a story where ambiguity is eliminated and the very DNA of your brand story celebrates a new, known reality free of risk. Reactive Devaluation: We devalue thoughts and ideas if we believe they originated from an antagonistic figure, even if we may have otherwise found them valuable. Semmelweis Effect: We have a strong tendency to reflexively reject anything new because it doesn’t match up with our norms, standards or beliefs. Blu E-Cigarettes was dealing with a lot of shame-based beliefs and mentalities among their intended audience when they launched a few years back. There was a huge cognitive dissonance between what smokers knew (smoking kills) and what they did (smoked). They understood that presenting their E-Cig product solely as a healthy alternative (which was at the time supposedly deemed 95% safer than smoking regular cigarettes) would only reinforce that dissonance and shame, especially if it was told by a member of the health community (an antagonist) so they had to tell a new story. They had to tell the story from an insider’s point of view. And just as importantly, they, had to tap into a different set of secret norms and beliefs. Stephen Dorff flips the script. As I wrote in my article on The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands: All you had to do was take it from the rugged, free-thinking Stephen Dorff himself when he said, “I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I want to light up […] We’re all adults here. It’s time we take our freedom back. C’mon guys, rise from the ashes.” Those are fighting words. Those are words that make it ok to be a smoker… words, I’ll add, that smokers never hear. It flipped the script and said you’re not the bad guy, you’re the victim. You don’t deserve to be vilified. Blu tapped into a secret belief — that smokers aren’t bad people. It was a very different kind of message that wouldn’t have been heard if it didn’t come from someone on the inside. If you want to combat Reactive Devaluation and the Semmelweis Effect for a group, create a story of empowerment and tell it from the inside. Create a new truth that acknowledges peoples’ secret desires. “And perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humor. We all think the one we’ve got — or haven’t got — is just about right and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step.” — Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of The Blu story changed the behavior by acknowledging an unspoken belief. [Read more about cognitive dissonance and easing the customer’s tension here.] We tend to take personal credit for our successes by attributing them to our inherent characteristics, yet distance ourselves from our failures by ascribing them to external factors beyond our control. I was an early adopter of Digit — a lightweight app that siphoned small amounts of money out of my checking account and placed it in a separate savings account in the background. It was a brainless way to save money that I wouldn’t have otherwise. And I loved it. Eight months of Digit afforded me a trip to London. But when the company announced they were going to enforce a new $2.99 monthly fee, I disconnected my account. My Self-Serving Bias was saying, “I can save that money on my own. What do I need to pay $2.99 a month to Digit for?!” Digit: Always just a money-saving app on top of an algorithm… when it could be so much more. Even though the fee was small, the “irony of paying money to save money was too much” for some, including me, and I never reconnected my account. Digit failed to spot the bias and just kept sending me innocuous email reminders to update my banking details. What they missed was a big opportunity to change the story and shift my perspective. Imagine — what if they had repositioned themselves from a money saving/ money management app to a self-care tool? (stay with me here…) Digit is a new kind of self-care platform. Every 6–8 months, Digit makes sure you can treat yourself to the vacation, spa weekend, shopping spree, dinner party, home upgrade, or paid off credit card debt you need to live a happy life. If they had told that story, I would have framed my relationship with the app very differently. I believe I can save a little money every week if I have to, but a memorable self-care experience every 6–8 months is not something I can do on my own. “Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.” ― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao This new story would have forced me to bear witness to what was truly gained when I had the app, and then lost when I gave it up. We use objects the way they are traditionally meant to be used. If we need a paperweight, but only have a hammer, we may not think to use the hammer as a paperweight. Functional Fixedness keeps us from experiencing old things in new ways, and in my experience that goes for any kind of product, not just objects. About a decade ago, denim was the clothing staple for women everywhere in the US. For nearly every day-to-day occasion, from daywear to casual evening, jeans anchored a woman’s outfit. At that point Lululemon had been around for a while, but they began to see a change in the way customers wore their athletic and yoga-inspired clothing. As a small niche of women increasingly wore Lululemon gear outside of the gym, overall jean sales were starting to decline and Lululemon made a pointed discovery — they were no longer just in the athletic/ gear business. They were in the fashion business. Their styles evolved into fashion-forward cuts and prints, aesthetic began to take precedence over performance, and their story expanded into a brand-led vision for who the modern, active woman was… all while the new ‘athleisure’ category was beginning to emerge. Well said. While it’s unclear where the athleisure name came from, Lululemon took it, owned it, and ran with it. They became the poster child for athlesiure and thereby gave mainstream women a clear signal of when and how to wear their clothing. If Lululemon had continued to run their company like a pure workout brand in those early days, the mainstream consumer would have kept using it merely as workout clothing — in the gym, for a limited purpose, and clear-cut use case. That Functional Fixedness Bias was reversed with a refreshed brand story. People can’t properly discover your new product if they expect it to work like an old standard. After all, our expectations frame our experiences. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes. — Marcel Proust As I have written before, new languages and narratives that force your customer to engage with your product outside of the typical consideration set can help you get past the bias. You have to knock users out of their fixed mental boxes in order to come to your product free of preconceived notions. Only then will they accept the experience you’ve intended.

https://medium.com/startup-grind/an-antidote-for-the-most-dangerous-consumer-biases-5e5341385629

['Jasmine Bina']

2020-02-07 17:45:32.734000+00:00

['Psychology', 'Startup', 'Branding', 'Marketing', 'Brand Strategy']

What If Apple, Google or Amazon Accepted Bitcoin?

Apple Known for its lineup of Mac computers, the iPhone and iTunes, Apple has been ranked the most valuable brand in the world. The company is trying to compete with bitcoin through its mobile payments product called Apple Pay. “Apple would not have as strong of an impact compared to Amazon or Google.” — David Moon, co-founder of Spelunk.in Unlike the other two companies here, the likelihood of Apple accepting bitcoin and the subsequent effect it would have might be smaller. Google Google makes 95% of its revenue from ads, a business model it knows is unsustainable for the long term. This is why it has expanded into things like mobile devices, self driving cars and drone-based delivey systems. “If Google AdSense and YouTube started to pay out in bitcoin, I think that would be very impactful.” — Valerian Bennett, creator of theprotocol.tv Google’s interest in digital currencies is high. Its Google Wallet platform hasn’t done well and it invested in digital currency startup Ripple Labs. Amazon Amazon is the largest online retailer in the United States. It exerts a lot of influence on the digital economy. Many consumers buy things regularly via Amazon. Because of this, Amazon’s impact on bitcoin, if it were to accept it, would be gigantic. “All are great companies, but I buy 20–100x more from Amazon than Google or Apple.” — Jason Chroman, Enthusiast Startup Purse.io does most of its business just being a broker for bitcoin transactions on Amazon. They help users save up to 30% on Amazon.

https://medium.com/zapchain-magazine/what-if-apple-google-or-amazon-accepted-bitcoin-96ea4b9fe87a

['Daniel Cawrey']

2015-04-01 17:12:20.801000+00:00

['Amazon', 'Apple', 'Ripple Labs', 'Google']

In Search of Awe

In Search of Awe Consumption is a progressive disease* Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash One benefit of pregnancy which counters the joys of lightning crotch (Google it, I dare you) is the guilt-less freedom to say no. At first, I felt like a wing-clipped bird but now it’s as though those secret fantasies of having an extended period of mild but debilitating sickness so as to grab some respite from the chaos of modern life have come true. Because most of the time, pregnant or not, I’m exhausted. Got to return that library book, get petrol, buy a card for Sarah, clean the car, reply to that email, call Mum and Dad, clean the windows, organise the pantry, fix the bike, paint the house, invite the neighbours over, befriend an elderly person, get my Masters, start an NGO, find a cure for cancer. I need everything done by yesterday. Which brings me to awe. The last 33 weeks, I’ve experienced an increase in awe. Every time there’s a kick or roll or I see the tiny complex figure on an ultrasound, I feel awe. Every time I imagine this completely new being equipped with personality and soul who will never exist again, I feel awe. I wonder if it’s the missing ingredient, the brown sugar to my Weet-Bix, the antidote to the busyness scourge. Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder. A few years ago, I was in the Whitsundays with some friends on a yacht. We’d visited the sacred Ngaro island, rich with Aboriginal significance that day and had docked for the night. The air was still and enveloped in silence, punctuated by the lapping the water on the boat’s hull. I was lying in a hammock looking at the extraordinary fabric of stars glittering across the sky. I could hear a dolphin, puffs of water exhaling from its blowhole emerging and submerging under the water’s surface, presumably looking for fish. I got up and looked in the water and saw a network of phosphorescent algae glowing, sparkling like the stars in the sky. I breathed it in, this feeling. I am a tiny speck in a huge universe which is not remotely aware of my first world problems. Our whole world is contained in the palm of our hands, faces aglow in the iLight. We are in the driver’s seat, controlling every aspect of our lives. No question left unanswered by the glorious Google oracle. The perception of control is exhausting because at any point we could drop the ball and the responsibility lies squarely on us. The New Scientist talks about ‘the profound effects’ of awe. ‘Feeling awestruck can dissolve our very sense of self, bringing a host of benefits from lowering stress and boosting creativity to making us nicer people’ (Jo Marchant, New Scientist) “The irony of our existence is this: We are infinitesimal in the grand scheme of evolution, a tiny organism on Earth. And yet, personally, collectively, we are changing the planet through our voracity, the velocity of our reach, our desires, our ambitions, and our appetites. Consumption is a progressive disease.” (*Terry Tempest Williams) Consumption of our precious time for the sake of control. Being unable to say no because we wear busyness like a badge of honour. It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the backyard with my brother who’s down from Sydney. We’re both tired and watching the clouds drift over, waiting for a moment of sunshine. The stormy textures of the clouds which shift and morph hold our attention for at least half an hour. I realise that maybe awe isn’t an elusive emotion reserved for exotic holidays on a yacht. I can find it in the everyday, the mundane. Perhaps when we surrender our control to the grand and complex universe, embracing our smallness, we can breathe again.

https://medium.com/publishous/in-search-of-awe-9a51f8500a03

['Cherie Gilmour']

2019-08-27 21:58:53.610000+00:00

['Life', 'Motivation', 'Self-awareness', 'Storytelling', 'Self Improvement']

How to Use a Journalistic Mindset to Write About Any Topic

How to Use a Journalistic Mindset to Write About Any Topic To create stories about subjects you’re unfamiliar with, be inquisitive and do your research like a journalist would. Photo by LUM3N on Unsplash Being humble enough to admit what you don’t know is generally a great trait, but if you only stick to writing about topics you have deep expertise in, you can paint yourself into a tiny, frustrating corner. While you don’t want to write about topics you’re unfamiliar with just for the sake of it — look on social media to see how exasperating and potentially dangerous it can be when someone shares an uneducated opinion — there are plenty of legitimate reasons to wade into unfamiliar territory. For example, maybe you want to change your career path, such as if you currently write about education but want to move into covering technology. Or maybe you just have an interesting idea for a news article, marketing content or a fictional story that requires digging into a new subject. So to start writing about an unfamiliar topic, think like a journalist. That means using an inquisitive mind to uncover the who, what, where, when, why and how (sometimes called the “five W’s and how” or the “six W’s”) of a topic so that you can share a story with your audience, who aren’t necessarily subject-matter experts themselves. Many writers, like myself, started off by studying journalism in college, rather than a specific subject. Yet I soon found myself writing about niche finance topics for a living, even though I never worked in finance. If you think about it, this type of scenario happens all the time. Writers have to start somewhere, and if only industry practitioners wrote about their fields, then journalism schools and the media as we know it wouldn’t exist. Instead, you can use the following three practices to figure out the six W’s and create a competent story around any subject: 1. Read, Read, Read Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash Like the three most important aspects of real estate — location, location, location — you should read, read, read if you want to write about a topic you’re unfamiliar with. You don’t have to open up college textbooks necessarily, but you can read as much as you need to online until you feel comfortable with the topic. For example, you could read: News articles where interviewees share their views on relevant topics Blog posts written by industry insiders Studies published by reputable research companies Whitepapers created by respected organizations If you have time, you could also read non-fiction books about the subject. Or if you don’t process information well by reading, you could get to a similar place by watching videos from reputable media outlets, companies, non-profit organizations, academics, etc. Personally, however, I tend to find more in-depth, helpful written options, so I recommend trying to first find sources to read. 2. Interview Experts Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash Another common aspect of journalism is interviewing experts to provide credibility, context and color to stories. But these interviews aren’t always just about producing quotes. A journalist can interview others as part of deepening the writer’s personal understanding, and you can do the same in your own writing. Ideally, you could include quotes or paraphrases to entice potential interviewees to participate, but you still can find people willing to share their views and explain concepts to you for your background information, such as if they’re passionate about the subject and eager to spread that knowledge. Professors and other academics can be a great starting point. For instance, if you want to write about robotics but don’t know much about the subject, you could ask an engineering professor for examples of how robotics currently make an impact on day-to-day life for the average person. In many cases, especially if the interviewee is being quoted, they want to help you get the story right and are willing to take the time to improve your own knowledge, as they understand that someone who doesn’t work in that field wouldn’t know much about it. Also keep in mind that you don’t have to interview high-profile people or reach out to strangers. Maybe you have a friend, family member or colleague who has worked in the field you want to write about, and you can leverage them as a resource to help fill in your knowledge gaps. You might be surprised how willing people are to help if you ask. 3. Focus on What You Do Know Photo by Chris Spiegl on Unsplash You don’t have to write much about an unfamiliar subject to still wade into that territory, especially if this is an early foray for you into writing about new topics. Leverage what you can find through your research (e.g., reading and interviewing) to touch on the new subject, and then highlight other aspects of the story that might be more in your wheelhouse. Sticking with the robotics example, you might not know much about the technical aspects, but you might be familiar with writing about economic issues or maybe you like to write about the human condition. As such, you could find an angle to the story where you incorporate what you do know, like writing about how the rise of robotics will cause humans to rethink the importance of hard work. No one’s expecting or necessarily wants you to write an essay about what goes into coding and manufacturing robots. Instead, focus on what you do know and tie the new subject into one that makes sense for yourself and your audience.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-use-a-journalistic-mindset-to-write-about-any-topic-2289652a588f

['Jake Safane']

2020-05-25 22:57:42.568000+00:00

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

Here’s what your playlist says about you.

Music maybe the most powerful way in which we express our personalities. But how much can we really learn about ourselves based on just our favorite music? Believe it or not our musical taste say more about who we really are than the clothes we wear or the friends we choose to hang out with. We can’t deny the fact that music speaks to us. We connect with music, we relate to its rhythm melodies, harmonies and lyrics. And the powerful tune can invoke magnificent emotions within us. The psychological effect of music on the human brain has been studied extensively in 21st century. But what does our musical taste say about us? Why we like certain genres and can’t stand others? Why we listen to some music on repeat while just wanting to shut down the others? Most people find themselves listening to one or two genres almost exclusively. But have you ever wondered why you might be attracted to pop, metal, country or classical? There’ve been a number of studies that examined this interesting subject with incredible results. Do you like heavy duty or complex music like jazz or classical? According to some studies, People who like certain genre might be more creative or have a higher IQ. While people who love pop music tend to be more extroverted and honest than others. If you like rap music, you probably are pretty outgoing and socially well connected. While, Country music fans are usually pretty conventional and hardworking. And how can we forget our metal heads? Metal heads tend to be more introverted and could even suffer from low self-esteem. Every single music genre says something about our personalities. It is so much interesting these days, where new age psychologists are getting deeper into the impact of music in our lives. Now let’s dig even deeper into it. Music can bring astonishing change in our moods with just some beats. From happy to suicidal and from sad to lively. And there’s one emotion that we have all been through is Nostalgia. Nostalgia is one of the most powerful emotions that music can evoke. But why is certain music more nostalgic than others? Suddenly, music flings us back in time to a forgotten moment in our lives. But why does that happen? Why does some music seem more nostalgic than others? An interesting study in 2010 found that autobiographical music was most likely to cause nostalgic emotions. Or in other words, music that involved a real-life story from the perspective of the singer. Even more interesting was the fact that music with mixed emotions caused the most nostalgia. Why does some music give us the shivers? Have you ever experienced a really powerful piece of music? Was it powerful enough that you found yourself getting the shivers? Did goosebumps start to appear on your body? If so, you’re not the only one. This is a very common experience. But why does some music evokes such a powerful physical reaction in us? An impressive study tried to answer this question, and it was found that the people who are more open to new experiences were more likely to experience shivers when listening to music. You’re also more likely to have this powerful reaction if you listen to tons of music throughout each day. But according to this study, It doesn’t really matter which genre you’re listening to. Why do some people love bass? The heavy booming nature of bass is a big part of popular music these days. Some people absolutely love bass and this musical element seems to affect them in a deep way. But why are some people so crazy about bass? One study found that males are more likely to enjoy heavy bass in music. There’s even more suggestion that those who enjoy bass are more likely to have anti social tendencies and borderline personality disorders. But these are of course very rare cases and correlation doesn’t always equal causation. That means, just because we feel certain feelings simultaneously that doesn’t mean that one emotion causes another. Why athletes love “pump up” music? There’s definitely a very specific type of music we listen to at the gym; It’s usually vigorous pump up music with high BPM that gets us motivated and excited. But why does this kind of music seem to be so fitting for athletic activity? One study found a link between our music preferences and our ideal self-image. Basically people prefer music that they think is most fitting to their own perception of themselves. Athletes love vigorous music because they feel it fits with their dynamic lifestyle and persona. Why teens love heavier music? We’re all familiar with that one stereotype of the angsty teen who love heavy metal. And sometimes the stereotype is a reality for many teens. But have you ever wondered why some teens seemed drawn to heavy metal and heavier genres in general? One study looked into this and found something very interesting. Apparently, teens with this music preference are more likely to feel rejected and have low self-esteem. Although once again, this doesn’t mean that everyone who enjoys metal or heavy genres has these issues. Why some people like repetitive music? Most of the times repetitive music is generally seen as a bad thing, but some music with repetitive elements can be calming and in a kind, meditative as well. But why do some people prefer a repetitive music? Some studies have suggested that those who are less open to new experiences might be more likely to enjoy repetitive music. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with either repetitive music or being less open to new experiences. Some people are just naturally more conservative and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s definitely an interesting tidbit of information that sheds light on the link between musical tastes and preferences. Last few words: Musical taste can really tell a lot about a person. Now how you can use that information is on you. One interesting idea would be to share your musical playlist with spouse or the one you are dating and find out if studies discussed above are Aye or Nay.

https://medium.com/the-psychic-dose/heres-what-your-playlist-says-about-you-f6dc680276fd

['Mr. Curiosity']

2020-09-26 07:33:58.427000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Music', 'Love', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement']

Draw your goals

Working alone (mostly in my house) as the solo founder of Pictal Health, it’s hard to get anything done. I find myself tossing a load in the laundry, wiping down counters, and getting into the weeds with home office organization. Before I know it, multiple hours have disappeared, my house is sparkling, and I am disappointed in myself because I haven’t accomplished anything. In my prior work as a User Experience Designer, I collaborated closely with people who were counting on me to get my work done; accountability to others has always been my top motivator. Now, in this accountability void, I’ve been adopting various strategies for staying focused and making progress. Drawing my weekly goals has been an important part of my regimen, and I’m going to show you in a minute exactly how I do it. But first, why did I decide to draw my goals? Last year I took an online class called RESET with Jocelyn K. Glei, which I highly recommend; the class is described as ‘a cosmic tune-up for your workday’ and it’s intended to help people ‘work in a way that is intentional, energizing, and inspiring.’ Throughout the course, Jocelyn encouraged us to work in analog (e.g., on paper) and to find creative ways make our progress visible, which helps provide a feeling of momentum. At the same time, I was working with a coach who encouraged me to draw out my goals for the company. Finally, a good friend was starting a company at the same time as me, and for awhile we met weekly to share our progress. I started drawing my weekly goals for her, and I never looked back. How I draw my goals Each Sunday, I have a recurring appointment on my calendar to sit down and draw my goals for the following week — usually 5 or 6 larger tasks, plus a few scattered to-dos. Using my trusty Sharpie Fine pen, I draw outlines of shapes for each item on a regular piece of 8.5x11 printer paper. I use outlines so that as my week progresses, I can start to fill in the shape with colored pencils. I like to add some sassy flair to make my shapes more fun to fill in. Every day or two I color in my progress on each of my goals. I also fill in the word ‘Goals’ as I make my way through the week; it’s like an overall progress indicator. It’s calming and satisfying to shade in the outlines with various colors and patterns. There is actually research supporting the benefits of coloring — adult coloring has been shown to reduce anxiety, stress, and depressive symptoms (source). Hey, I’ll take it. Life as a solo entrepreneur can be weird and lonely. I find it motivating to see how my page is filling up over the course of a week. It’s an at-a-glance reminder of the progress I’m making — progress that would normally be invisible, since nearly all of my work is computer-based. I’m better able to see and celebrate ‘small wins’ on this long journey. I’ve done this each week since 2/25/19, and I keep the stack of completed goals on my desk; it’s nice to see it grow increasingly tall, another measure of progress.

https://medium.com/pictal-health/draw-your-goals-f32b39465e1b

['Katie Mccurdy']

2019-12-06 15:05:30.099000+00:00

['Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Drawing', 'Productivity']

[原來根本搞錯問題] 從模式選擇談壞味道識別

Kuma老師的軟體工程教室 Welcome to the Kingdom of Software Engineering

https://medium.com/kuma%E8%80%81%E5%B8%AB%E7%9A%84%E8%BB%9F%E9%AB%94%E5%B7%A5%E7%A8%8B%E6%95%99%E5%AE%A4/%E5%8E%9F%E4%BE%86%E6%A0%B9%E6%9C%AC%E6%90%9E%E9%8C%AF%E5%95%8F%E9%A1%8C-%E5%BE%9E%E6%A8%A1%E5%BC%8F%E9%81%B8%E6%93%87%E8%AB%87%E5%A3%9E%E5%91%B3%E9%81%93%E8%AD%98%E5%88%A5-c4a4339d279f

['Yu-Song Syu']

2020-10-26 14:09:42.747000+00:00

['Design Patterns', 'Coding', 'Development', 'Code Smells', 'Software Engineering']

How to Never Run Out of Things to Blog About

When I talk to people about whether or not they should be blogging one thing comes up over and over again. What will I write about? What if I run out of ideas? I just don’t have that much to say. I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve felt that panic when you’re staring at a blank page and you’re absolutely sure that there’s no way you can think of anything to write about that anyone will want to read. I figured out how to never feel that again. I have a few exercises that have pretty much turned me into an idea machine. Idea One: The Quora Method Quora is a social media platform that focuses on questions and answers. People can ask questions and answer them. That means that there are literally tens of thousands of questions on just about every topic under the sun. And when you look up a topic, not only can you see the questions people (people=readers) are interested in, you can see how many people have followed the question. So you have an indication about which questions are really burning. I have a student who raises parrots. She’s pretty sure that no one wants to hear about that. Quora begs to differ. It’s a very, very niche topic — but that can actually be okay. Because chances are good that not too many people are writing on the topic and the people who are interested are likely to be very, very interested. When they find someone writing on their topic, they’ll follow that writer. To use the Quora method, follow these steps: Make a list of topics. Think of things you’re good at, things you want to be good at, things that are interesting about you, and things that interest you. Go to Quora.com and search for one of the topics. Look at the ‘questions’ view. Search through the questions, paying attention to how many people are following them. Make a list of possible blog posts, based on the questions. Idea Two: The Book Method This is a relatively simple technique. Take a look at the books in your library (or go to the public library) about the topic you want to write about. Open one to any page. Just any page at all. I like to write about productivity. I have a copy of Seth Godin’s book The Dip on my desk. When I flipped it open, randomly, I got pages 18 and 19. Looking at those pages, I see the Dip (the subject of the book) described as “artificial screens set up to keep people like you out.” Like an organic chemistry class for pre-med students — a really difficult class that weeds out the people who just aren’t going to make it through medical school. I also see a suggestion that successful people “don’t just ride outthe Dip. They don’t just buckle down adn survive it. No, hey lean into the Dip.” It took me two minutes to check out those pages and now I can add these blog post ideas to my list: What are the ‘artificial screens’ set up to keep most people out of being successful writers? What does the Dip look like for fiction writers? How about for bloggers? What does leaning into that Dip look like? How have I experienced the Dip in my writing career and how did I lean into it? Did I come across any artificial screens? It’s easy to think that you’re competing against every single person who ever thought about writing a book. But are you really? What if all you have to do is make sure that you’re not caught by those artificial screens? How to decide if it’s time to pack your writing dreams in and move on to something else. Try to think outside the box, as you pull ideas from books. You don’t want to just regurgitate what you’re reading. If you use both of these methods, you should have no problem coming up with a month’s worth of blog post ideas in an hour. Do that once a month, and you’ll never run out of things to write about. Idea Three: The Ubersuggest Method Neil Patel’s site, Ubersuggest, is a great resource. And best of all, it’s completely free. All you do is type a keyword, in this case a topic you’d like to write about, into the search bar. And Ubersuggest will spit out all kinds of goodies. Like the related searches that people have been making on Google. And other blog posts on the same topic.

https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-never-run-out-of-things-to-blog-about-614f7961a204

['Shaunta Grimes']

2019-11-13 13:37:14.172000+00:00

['Freelancing', 'Writing', 'Blogging', 'Creativity', 'Productivity']

AI for Software Engineering — Industry Landscape (03/Oct/2017)

Columns Semantics The Primary Criteria to categorize Solutions is the SDLC Phase. Independent on which Software Development Methodology you use, size of your team or type of your Product, you need to go through these Phases. We took the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) Knowledge Areas and merged some of them by few reasons. The main reason is that it is not always possible to unambiguously define which Solutions fall into which Category. Also, few of the SWEBOK Knowledge Areas were eliminated as not common and not related directly to SDLC. Rows Semantics Rows represent Maturity Level of the Solutions (highest row — most mature). The classification was made based on next criteria. B2B Ready : there is a website for the Solution with at least one of the next information: Pricing, Customers, Testimonials. : there is a website for the Solution with at least one of the next information: Pricing, Customers, Testimonials. B2C Ready : the same as “B2B Ready”, but AI is applied to SE indirectly: not through Tools for Software Engineers, but directly to Products, used by end Customers. : the same as “B2B Ready”, but AI is applied to SE indirectly: not through Tools for Software Engineers, but directly to Products, used by end Customers. Academic Research : there is an extended description of the Solution in a Paper either in a Demo, but there are no known commercial applications. : there is an extended description of the Solution in a Paper either in a Demo, but there are no known commercial applications. Landing Page: there is only a web page with a description of a Solution, but with no information about Pricing, Customers or Testimonials. Companies List (alphabetically) Acellere | AppAchhi | Appdiff | Applitools |Codebeat |Codebots | Codota | DecibelInsight |Deckard AI |DeepCoder |DiffBlue |Fedr8 |Firedrop |Logz.io |Memorio.io |NARCIA |Near AI |Prodo.AI |Qualicen |RainforestQA |Re:infer |React VT |ReTest |RobustFill |RUBRIC |Sourcegraph |Stepsize |Talla |The Grid |UCDD |Uizard |Windmill |Wix |Zeenflow Instead of Conclusion You may have already counted that there are only 13 Solutions presented in the “B2B Ready” Category, which is the Core of the Industry. That’s not much, but there are other 13 Solutions in the “Landing Page” Category, and most of them were created in 2017. One more challenge is related to that there are Solutions, which are created and used inside of Software Companies, but information about which is not available publicly. We would like to call such Companies to endorse the experience sharing to intensify the Industry development. Forecast. Our forecast is that by the end of 2019 there will be 400 Solutions, falling into the ‘Ready for B2B’ Category. AI for SE is new Machine Tools. Find out why in our next Article (follow the Publication to not miss it).

https://medium.com/ai-for-software-engineering/ai-for-software-engineering-industry-landscape-d8c7c7f82ba

['Valentin Grigoryevsky']

2018-08-13 10:16:23.480000+00:00

['AI', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Landscape']

Submit your Medium story to The Startup in two easy steps

1. Have a peek at our guidelines: What to avoid Already-published stories: we accept unpublished drafts only. we accept Stock photography: instead of using cheap stock images, try giving your story some love by picking a beautiful, free picture from websites like Unsplash, Pexels, Burst, The Stocks. instead of using cheap stock images, try giving your story some love by picking a beautiful, free picture from websites like Unsplash, Pexels, Burst, The Stocks. Clickbait headlines: e.g “These 5 things will make you insanely successful”. e.g “These 5 things will make you insanely successful”. Aggressive call-to-actions throughout and at the bottom of your story. throughout and at the bottom of your story. Heavy self-promotion: talking about your business is OK but don’t let it turn your audience off. What we prioritize Stories behind Medium’s paywall: Medium has recently launched its Partner Program that allows writers to finally make money off their writing. We know how difficult it is to make a living as a writer and we fully support this program. As part of our efforts to help as many writers as possible, we’ll prioritize publishing stories behind the paywall over free stories. We figured Medium algorithm also favors partner stories — putting your story behind the paywall increases your chances of being featured and reaching a bigger audience. To join the program: the Medium Partner Program link on https://medium.com/creators page. Our resources that can help answer some of your questions: Topics we’re interested in Startup culture: Entrepreneurship, creativity, freelancing, startups, investing, innovation, marketing, social media, leadership and management. Entrepreneurship, creativity, freelancing, startups, investing, innovation, marketing, social media, leadership and management. The future of technology and blockchain: Artificial Intelligence, cryptocurrencies, ICO, ethereum, VR/AR/MR, IoT, robotics, data science, machine learning, big data. Artificial Intelligence, cryptocurrencies, ICO, ethereum, VR/AR/MR, IoT, robotics, data science, machine learning, big data. Web development and design: UX, UI, design, developing, programming, apps, software, hardware, SaaS. Timings: the 36-hour rule We’re doing our best to help every talented writer reach our audience, but we do receive a ton of submissions every day. Let’s make a deal so we don’t waste your time: if we don’t get back to you within 36 hours (from the moment you submit), please consider your story not accepted this time. Don’t let this discourage you from submitting your future drafts, though. I’m an approver writer who got published in The Startup in the past but my recent submissions don’t seem to get accepted. How long does it take? Our 36-hour rule applies to every single submission. So if we don’t get back to you within 36 hours (from the moment you submit), please consider your story not accepted this time. 2. Please fill out the form below: **We reserve the right to edit photographs and copy where necessary** Thank you in advance. Ali

https://medium.com/swlh/when-one-upvote-is-worth-a-thousand-visitors-3e8ed27bcd3e

['Ali Mese']

2020-04-15 07:21:24.342000+00:00

['Growth', 'Marketing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Tech']

The Best Way to Succeed as a Writer Is to Demand Less of Yourself

The Best Way to Succeed as a Writer Is to Demand Less of Yourself Paul Kix Follow Nov 11 · 3 min read The power that comes from meeting ridiculously modest goals Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash I finished the first draft of a screenplay last week. It’s the fourth one I’ve written in three years, and I’ve written all of them in the hours when I’ve not been writing a book, or writing here, or on my blog, or for other websites or magazines. I’m not super-human. I don’t even consider myself prodigious. My trick, if I have one, is to set ridiculously modest goals for my output and then meet them every day. Before I wrote my last book I thought about how I would pace myself. I had a full-time job and a large family and a taste for good Scotch. I didn’t want to give up my life for the book. So I studied other writers, when they wrote but also how much each day. I liked Graham Greene’s model for output: 500 words a day, five or six days a week. (Greene lightly fictionalized his approach in The End of the Affair, the audio version of which Colin Firth narrates. It’s amazing.) Five hundred words a day is between an hour and a half to three hours of work for me. That’s manageable. With the last book I could wake early and get 500 words down before I made breakfast for the kids or took meetings at the day job. That was the point. You should never strain when you’re writing a book or a long magazine piece or essay. Straining leads to exhaustion and exhaustion to frustration and frustration to poorly told stories or, worse, abandoned writing projects. You will never publish what you don’t finish. When I started writing screenplays and TV pilots, in the gaps in my calendar when I wasn’t writing a book, I set the same low standard: Two pages a day. I can sometimes finish that in a half hour. Sometimes it takes two and a half hours because I’m imagining the progression of subsequent scenes. In either case it’s manageable, and because of that I return to the work the next day, which is how I’ve written four scripts in three years. Hit me up if you want to know more about how to manage multiple writing projects at the same time. I’ve developed a system for that too, one I began to lay out here and might cover in more depth elsewhere. Next week, I’ll start to revise my new script. I’m envisioning it as a feature film and, as you’ll see below, this one is too long. I’ll be cutting whole scenes and re-writing others and every day doing the minimum amount of work to feel like I’m making real progress. New to my writing? I’m a best-selling author who’s written for The New Yorker, GQ, ESPN, and New York, among other titles. My first book, The Saboteur, was optioned by DreamWorks to be turned into a film. I’m now at work on a second book for Celadon about a pivotal 10-week period in the Civil Rights Movement that still defines our lives.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-best-way-to-succeed-as-a-writer-is-to-demand-less-of-yourself-234dd7fdd777

['Paul Kix']

2020-11-12 03:06:13.702000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Writing', 'Psychology', 'Creative Process', 'Creativity']

Decouple Your Code With Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection James Shore, the author of The Art of Agile Development, put it quite nicely: “Dependency injection is a 25-dollar term for a 5-cent concept.” The concept is actually really simple: Giving a component all the things it needs to do its job. In general, it means decoupling components by providing their dependencies from the outside, instead of creating them directly, which would create adhesion. There are different ways how we can provide an instance with its necessary dependencies: Constructor injection Property injection Method injection Constructor injection Constructor, or initializer-based dependency injection, means providing all required dependencies during the initialization of an instance, as constructor arguments: Thanks to this simple change, we can offset most of the initial disadvantages: Easily replaceable: DbManager and Calculator are no longer bound to the concrete implementations, and are now mockable for unit-testing. and are no longer bound to the concrete implementations, and are now mockable for unit-testing. Already initialized and “ready-to-go”: We don’t need to worry about any sub-dependencies required by our dependencies (e.g., database filename, significant digits), or that they might crash during initialization. Mandatory requirements: The caller knows exactly what’s needed to create a DataProcessor . . Immutability: Dependencies are still final. Even though constructor injection is the preferred way of many DI frameworks, it has its obvious disadvantages, too. The most significant one is that all dependencies must be provided at initialization. Sometimes, we don’t initialize a component ourselves or we aren’t able to provide all dependencies at that point. Or we need to use another constructor. And once the dependencies are set, they can’t be changed. But we can mitigate these problems by using one of the other injection types. Property injection Sometimes we don’t have access to the actual initialization of type, and only have an already initialized instance. Or the needed dependency is not explicitly known at initialization as it would be later on. In these cases, instead of relying on a constructor, we can use property injection: No constructor is needed anymore, we can provide the dependencies at any time after initialization. But this way of injection also comes with drawbacks: Mutability. Our DataProcessor is no longer guaranteed to be “ready-to-go” after initialization. Being able to change the dependencies at will might give us more flexibility, but also the disadvantage of more runtime-checks. We now have to deal with the possibility of a NullPointerException when accessing the dependencies. Method injection Even though we decoupled the dependencies with constructor injection and/or property injection, by doing so, we still only have a single choice. What if we need another Calculator in some situations? We don’t want to add additional properties or constructor arguments for a second Calculator , because there might be a third one needed in the future. And changing the property every time before we call calc(...) isn't feasible either, and will most likely lead to bugs using the wrong one. A better way is to parameterize the method call itself with its dependency: Now the caller of calc(...) is responsible for providing an appropriate Calculator instance, and DataProcessor is completely decoupled from it. Even more flexibility can be gained by mixing different types of injection, and providing a default Calculator :

https://medium.com/better-programming/decouple-your-code-with-dependency-injection-d893ae9edcf8

['Ben Weidig']

2020-02-25 22:48:34.350000+00:00

['Java', 'Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Development', 'Development']

Locked Into Routine

I go to the same coffee shop every day, except on Tuesdays when I’m in a different part of town — then I go to a different coffee shop. I take my laptop, order my usual coffee, and get to work quietly. The staff know my name, I know them, and I’m comfortable there. But what happens when the routine has to change? I’ve written about decision fatigue in the past, and how there is some science behind the idea that automating certain decisions can leave your mind free for other things. Steve Jobs and his self-imposed ‘uniform’ is the example often given as the success story for not busying your mind with insignificant decisions. The apparent science behind decision fatigue helped me to normalise and explain my love for the predictable. It was a way to understand that changes and decision-making were, in fact, exhausting (and more so for some than others). Us routine lovers can get a lot done by removing these small decisions, but does it leave us out of practice for when a decision needs to be made? I think so. But I also think I won’t change any time soon. My usual coffee yesterday was “ruined” when I couldn’t get a seat at my favourite part of the cafe. The waiter offered me three options; join the “boys” at a table in the cafe (a couple of his friends who I didn’t know), sit out the back at what is practically the bar, or sit in the area without a front wall, effectively sitting outside. I chose the latter, froze, and didn’t get much work done. (Because all I could think about was how cold I was and how I wasn’t in my usual section of the cafe.) And then it happened again Often on the weekends I go back to the same cafe in the afternoon for a wine. Again with my laptop, but this time to do some more creative work. Since my morning work time had been interrupted by the change of scenery I hoped the afternoon would be better. It was worse! They had roped off the normal section of the cafe in preparation for a function. The waiter did say I could sit in there for another hour or so, but I really didn’t want to be the weirdo sitting behind the velvet rope. So again, I sat in the cold section of the cafe. I didn’t enjoy it and made a mental note that I needed to find a new local. Today I went back to an older local of mine. I used to be a regular there when they had nice, friendly French waiters, but over time they all went home and the staff were replaced with less happy people. Also, the WiFi is unreliable and that bugs me. While I could focus and get some work done, it was harder than usual. We’ve all got different levels of tolerability to routine and change. I like routine and things I know, so I don’t need to process the difference. My sister (who has the same parents as me and was raised the same) can handle anything. She’s adaptable to change and it doesn’t phase her. She also knows me well enough to give me a heads up that she changed laundry detergent before I visit because she knows I’ll notice the different smell. The self-awareness key I was in my thirties before I realised how much change bugged me, but once I did things got a little easier. Yes, my cafe being busier than normal was enough to spark a blog post, but it didn’t ruin my entire week. The key is to plan as much as possible, and to plan for slight changes or deviations from the path. This reduces the amount of effort actually going into the new decision. So while maybe I’ll go to a different cafe, like hell I’m getting anything other than a long black with hot milk on the side! (A very “Melbourne” way of ordering coffee, and not as weird as it sounds to the rest of the world.)

https://medium.com/swlh/locked-into-routine-357d2cf90d4

['Kirsty Hutton']

2019-11-29 22:02:06.545000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Routine', 'Productivity', 'Motivation', 'Coffee']

I’m Not Really Keen On Getting A COVID-19 Vaccine. Here’s Why.

What a vaccine does contain According to the World Health Organization, Vaccines contain weakened or inactive parts of a particular organism (antigen) that triggers an immune response within the body. Newer vaccines contain the blueprint for producing antigens rather than the antigen itself. Regardless of whether the vaccine is made up of the antigen itself or the blueprint so that the body will produce the antigen, this weakened version will not cause the disease in the person receiving the vaccine, but it will prompt their immune system to respond much as it would have on its first reaction to the actual pathogen. Some vaccines require multiple doses, given weeks or months apart. This is sometimes needed to allow for the production of long-lived antibodies and development of memory cells. In this way, the body is trained to fight the specific disease-causing organism, building up memory of the pathogen so as to rapidly fight it if and when exposed in the future. For the COVID-19 coronavirus particles, the vaccine contains inactivated fragments of their messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) identifier strands: The vaccines contain synthetic mRNA, which is genetic information used to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The spike protein is the part of the virus that attaches to human cells. The spike protein alone cannot cause COVID-19. Once the spike protein is created it causes the immune system to make antibodies against the virus. These antibodies can the provide protection if a person comes into contact with the virus. The mRNA vaccines are noninfectious and do not enter the human cell nucleus so it cannot be inserted into human DNA. Additionally, mRNA is rapidly broken down, and this theoretically reduces chances for long term side effects. The assumption behind this entire sequence of events is that the immune system can create antibodies that can hopefully detect the actual mRNA of the virus that creates the spike protein, such that the immune system is able to respond adequately and tag the virus for destruction. The problem with this assumption is that it assumes that our immune system is capable of destroying all this RNA rapidly. Because let’s face the elephant in the room: all these studies about the vaccines only focus about the immune system generating the necessary antibodies to tag the virus, and we then assume that the destruction is rapid.

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/im-not-really-keen-on-getting-a-covid-19-vaccine-here-s-why-9f7d93469c2f

['Dr Joel Yong']

2020-12-26 15:17:41.825000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'Healthcare', 'Health', 'Science', 'Coronavirus']

How to Make a Health App in 5 Steps

How to Make a Health App in 5 Steps Development of a tool to organize medical records Health data is essential for medicine in the work of saving lives. Medical records provide vital information about the patients’ physical situation. We file these records disorganized, usually on a piece of paper. This information is also private. Medical confidentiality is people’s right. When the doctor consults the patient, they transmit the information from memory. Data communication is inaccurate. The professional has only time to read the latest tests if the patient remembered to take them. This problem could be solved using an app. # 1 Write the user story Apps are stories, which can be a friendly conversation. The user story is an agile software development approach. Its characteristic is the informal description of the system’s functions. The most common format comprises three parts: as a <person who wants something>, I want <something I’m looking for> so that <I can what need>. As a patient, I want to organize my medical records to secure access to my health data. # 2 Modeling the data JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data exchange format. The language is natural to read and write by humans. It uses conventions that enable interpretation in almost programming languages: C#, JavaScript, and Python. In JSON modeling, collections of name-value pairs structure the data. The other structure is the list of values. The object encloses in square brackets {}, each name followed by a colon (:) and the name-value pairs are closed with a comma (,). For the data model of this project, the patient has his records. The records contain the type of test, the result of the examination, and the date of collection. { "patient": "name", "record": [ { "labexam": "test name", "result": "result number", "date": "collection day" } ] } # 3 Design an app prototype A reference available when coding the app facilitates the work of the developer. Several programs are available to design prototypes. We chose Adobe XD, a vector-based user experience design tool for apps. The header presents the app name and a subtitle. The second component is the form for creating record data with three inputs: test, result, and date. The reading card shows the archived records containing the test, result, and date. For development, the card could report the standard result indicators. There is also a progress bar. At this stage, we will take the example of the glucose test. # 4 Configure the application environment The Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) proposal is an architecture that is gaining attention because it is a cloud computing design model. They present four arguments: better performance, top security, scalability, and proper development experience. The interesting point is to develop the entire project in a single folder. To the data, the service is FaunaDB, which is a data server in the cloud “serverless.” The tests performed were very satisfactory because of the simplicity of use and the speed of the return. For the API, the tool is Netlify, which is a website development and publishing platform. To the user interface, the choice is the library React, the JavaScript code open maintained by Facebook. Versioning control is in GitHub. Node.js makes JavaScript interpreting. Another installation is the development environment (IDE), which will be Visual Studio Code. I consulted two tutorials: “Building Serverless CRUD apps with Netlify Functions & FaunaDB,” by David Wells, and “Let’s Build a Note-Taking App With React and FaunaDB,” by Indrek Lasn. Creating the collection of the database FaunaDB is an exciting option for database service. Through the website, it is possible to create the data collection where the information will store safely. The steps are to login to the website and create a database, collection, index, and security key. Please copy the letters and numbers of the key, as it is the only access. Creating the project In the terminal (Command Prompt in Windows), use the Create a New React App. npm install -g create-react-app npx create-react-app myhealth && cd myhealth Inside the created folder, install React Bootstrap and FaunaDB dependencies. npm install react-bootstrap bootstrap npm install — save faunadb Don’t worry about these “warn.” Install the Netlify Dev package in the project. npm install netlify-cli -g Open the project in the Visual Studio Code.

https://medium.com/4devs/how-to-make-a-health-app-in-5-steps-6e17a0868bd0

['Daniel Roncaglia']

2020-05-20 22:26:50.605000+00:00

['Serverless', 'Apps', 'Health', 'Development', 'Design']

COVID-19 Cases Are Rising, So Why Are Deaths Flatlining?

COVID-19 Cases Are Rising, So Why Are Deaths Flatlining? The gap between soaring cases and falling deaths is being weaponized by the right to claim a hollow victory in the face of shameless failure. What’s really going on? Image: The Atlantic By Derek Thompson For the past few weeks, I have been obsessed with a mystery emerging in the national COVID-19 data. Cases have soared to terrifying levels since June. Yesterday, the U.S. had 62,000 confirmed cases, an all-time high — and about five times more than the entire continent of Europe. Several U.S. states, including Arizona and Florida, currently have more confirmed cases per capita than any other country in the world. But average daily deaths are down 75 percent from their April peak. Despite higher death counts on Tuesday and Wednesday, the weekly average has largely plateaued in the past two weeks. The gap between spiking cases and falling-then-flatlining deaths has become the latest partisan flashpoint. President Donald Trump has brushed off the coronavirus surge by emphasizing the lower death rate, saying that “99 percent of [COVID-19 cases] are totally harmless.” On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Americans against “[taking] comfort in the lower rate of death” just hours before Trump tweeted triumphantly: “Death Rate from Coronavirus is down tenfold!” In the fog of pandemic, every statistic tells a story, but no one statistic tells the whole truth. Conservatives seeking refuge in today’s death counts may find, in a matter of days, that deaths are clearly resurging and their narrative is rapidly deteriorating. But liberals, too, should avoid the temptation to flatly reject any remotely positive finding, for fear that it will give succor to the president. What follows are five possible explanations for the case-death gap. Take them as complementary, rather than competing, theories. 1. Deaths lag cases — and that might explain almost everything. You can’t have a serious discussion about case and death numbers without noting that people die of diseases after they get sick. It follows that there should be a lag between a surge in cases and a surge in deaths. More subtly, there can also be a lag between the date a person dies and the date the death certificate is issued, and another lag before that death is reported to the state and the federal government. As this chart from the COVID Tracking Project shows, the official reporting of a COVID-19 death can lag COVID-19 exposure by up to a month. This suggests that the surge in deaths is coming. In Arizona, Florida, and Texas, the death surge is already happening. Since June 7, the seven-day average of deaths in those hot-spot states has increased 69 percent, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The death lag is probably the most important thing to understand in evaluating the case-death gap. But it doesn’t explain everything. Even where deaths are rising, corresponding cases are rising notably faster. 2. Expanded testing is finding more cases, milder cases, and earlier cases. There is a bad way to talk about testing, and a nuanced way to talk about it. The simplistic version, which we often hear from the president, is that cases are surging only because the number of tests is rising. That’s just wrong. Since the beginning of June, the share of COVID-19 tests that have come back positive has increased from 4.5 percent to 8 percent. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing across the South and West. Those are clear signs of an underlying outbreak. Something subtler is happening. The huge increase in testing is an unalloyed good, but it might be tricking us with some confusing weeks of data. In March and April, tests were scarce, and medical providers had to ration tests for the sickest patients. Now that testing has expanded into communities across the U.S., the results might be picking up milder, or even asymptomatic, cases of COVID-19. The whole point of testing is to find cases, trace the patients’ close contacts, and isolate the sick. But our superior testing capacity makes it difficult to do apples-to-apples comparisons with the initial surge; it’s like trying to compare the height of two mountains when one of the peaks is obscured by clouds. The epidemiologist Ellie Murray has also cautioned that identifying new fatal cases of COVID-19 earlier in the victims’ disease process could mean a longer lag between detection and death. This phenomenon, known as “lead time bias,” might be telling us that a big death surge is coming. And maybe it is. Maybe this is all as simple as nationwide deaths are about to soar, again. But there are still three reasons to think that any forthcoming death surge could be materially different from the one that brutalized the Northeast in March and April: younger patients, better hospital outcomes, and summer effects. 3. The typical COVID-19 patient is getting younger. The most important COVID-19 story right now may be the age shift. In Florida, the median age of new COVID-19 cases fell from 65 in March to 35 in June. Then it fell again, to just 21 in July. In Arizona, Texas, and California, young adults getting sick have been driving the surge. If the latest surge is concentrated among younger Americans, that would partly explain the declining death count. Young people are much less likely to die from this disease, even if they face other health risks. International data from South Korea, Spain, China, and Italy suggest that the COVID-19 case-fatality rate for people older than 70 is more than 100 times greater than for those younger than 40. The youth shift seems very real, but what’s behind it is harder to say. Maybe older Americans are being more cautious about avoiding crowded indoor spaces. Maybe news reports of young people packing themselves into bars explain the youth spike, since indoor bars are exquisitely designed to spread the virus. Or maybe state and local governments that rushed to reopen the economy pushed young people into work environments that got them sick. “The people in the service economy and the retail industry, they tend to be young, and they can’t work remotely,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant professor at the University of Florida. Texas Governor Greg Abbott blamed reckless young people for driving the spike, but the true locus of recklessness might be the governor’s mansion. No matter the cause, interpreting the “youth surge” as good news would be a mistake. Young people infected with COVID-19 still face extreme dangers — and present real danger to their close contacts and their community. “We see people in their 20s and 30s in our ICUs gasping for air because they have COVID-19,” James McDeavitt, the dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, told The Wall Street Journal. Young people who feel fine can still contract long-term organ damage, particularly to their lungs. They can pass the disease to more vulnerable people, who end up in the hospital; a youth surge could easily translate into a broader uptick some weeks from now. And the sheer breadth of the youth surge could force businesses to shut down, throwing millions more people into limbo or outright unemployment. 4. Hospitalized patients are dying less frequently, even without a home-run treatment. So far, we’ve focused on the gap between cases and deaths. But there’s another gap that deserves our attention. Hospitalizations and deaths moved up and down in tandem before June. After June, they’ve diverged. National hospitalizations are rising, but deaths aren’t. The hospitalization and death data that we have aren’t good enough or timely enough to say anything definitive. But the chart suggests some good news (finally): Patients at hospitals are dying less. Indeed, other countries have seen the same. One study from a hospital in Milan found that from March to May, the mortality rate of its COVID-19 patients declined from 24 percent to 2 percent — “without significant changes in patients’ age.” British hospitals found that their hospital mortality rate has declined every month since April. So what’s going on? Maybe doctors are just getting smarter about the disease. In early 2020, the novelty of the coronavirus meant that doctors had no idea what to expect. Health-care professionals were initially shocked that what they assumed to be a respiratory disease was causing blood clots, microvascular thrombosis, and organ damage. But millions of cases and hundreds of white papers later, we know more. That’s how, for example, doctors know to prescribe the steroid dexamethasone to rein in out-of-control immune responses that destroy patients’ organs. Finally, it’s notable that mortality declined in Italian and British hospitals when they weren’t overrun with patients. This is another reason why flattening the curve isn’t just a buzzy slogan, but a matter of life and death. As hospitals across Texas and Arizona start to fill up, we’ll see whether hospital mortality increases again. 5. Summer might be helping — but probably only a little bit. Several remaining theories about the case-death gap are more speculative, mostly falling under the category of “summer is just different.” The transition to summer may have stamped out other illnesses that were weakening our immune systems. People in the Northern Hemisphere may absorb more Vitamin D in the summer, which might mitigate COVID-19 mortality. The virus might have mutated to become more contagious, but not more deadly, which might — in combination with other factors, like superior hospital treatment of the disease — exacerbate an outbreak in cases that doesn’t correspond with an increase in deaths. Finally, as more people wear masks and move their activities outside in the summer, they might come into contact with smaller infecting doses of COVID-19. Some epidemiologists have claimed that there is a relationship between viral load and severity. With more masks and more outdoor interactions, it’s possible that the recent surge is partly buoyed by an increase in these low-dosage cases. The case-death gap remains a bonfire of unknowns. And, as we’ve seen, uncertainty is a cavity where propaganda can breed. So let’s conclude with what we know for sure: The surge in cases represents a vast and tragic American failure — even if it doesn’t lead to a correspondingly dramatic spike in deaths. This virus is a cryptic devil. It can brutalize people’s bodies for weeks or months, even if it doesn’t kill them. It can savage the lungs of young people, even when it doesn’t produce other symptoms. Those who are infected can transmit it to more vulnerable people. Those who contract severe cases can be sent to the hospital for weeks and live for months — which may turn into years — with aftershocks from the illness. Outbreaks might make school openings implausible, sports improbable, and ordinary life impossible. When President Trump and others point exclusively to lagging death figures during a surge, they are trying to tell you that America is, secretly, winning the war on COVID-19. But we’re not. The summer surge is an exceptionally American failure, born of absent leadership and terrible public-health communication. After all the graphs, statistics, science, and interpretations, we’re left with a simple fact: Hundreds of Americans are dying every day of a disease that is infecting several hundred thousand of them every week. If that’s success, let’s pray we never see failure.

https://medium.com/the-atlantic/covid-19-cases-are-rising-so-why-are-deaths-flatlining-3d801eb78871

['The Atlantic']

2020-07-09 16:41:16.630000+00:00

['Science', 'Health', 'Coronavirus']

The Girl Who Saved Me From Panic Disorder

A photo I took of Louise in the hills of San Luis Obispo The Girl Who Saved Me From Panic Disorder And the tools I used to heal. It began at my bank. The teller noticed something was wrong. “Sir? Sir, are you okay?” In retrospect, he probably thought I was choking. Choking or having a meltdown. It was a meltdown. I told the teller I was fine, finished my transaction, then power-walked into the parking lot and gasped in the fresh air. Once calm, I looked up at the few lonely clouds in the San Luis Obispo sky. I knew exactly what had happened. “My first panic attack,” I told myself. I returned to my San Luis Obispo on-campus apartment thinking it was a one-off thing. But the next day, it happened again in my English class. As the class discussed works in colonial American literature, I kept my head on my desk and felt like death. After the attack, I told my professor I was unwell. “Yeah, I can tell. Go on home and get some rest.” The walk back to my apartment was full of terrors. Trees swaying in the wind made me shutter. Approaching friends made me hide in my hands. When I reached my apartment, I told my roommates something was happening. I told them not to enter my room. I sat in the dark with a gripping stomach ache and a new understanding of “the dark night of the soul.” I gagged on rice crackers and the thought that my panic was unwarranted. It seemed like a random intruder from some undiscoverable source. In the following days, my school attendance was scarce. I didn’t socialize. I couldn’t tell anyone about my panic. Who could I tell? I could hardly admit to myself that I was drowning in my own mind, sinking in a seemingly inescapable sinkhole of suffering… It felt something like rock bottom. Enter Louise. “Photographing Louise charmed me. Her eyes revealed her deep experience and her smile was something like a sanctuary I could comfortably rest in.” She traveled from England to San Luis Obispo to study psychology. We met around the time my panic began. She was trying to get away from frat parties and weekends of heavy drinking. I was trying to get away from my panic. We began taking long walks together through the hills of San Luis Obispo. I’d often bring my camera along. Photographing Louise charmed me. Her eyes revealed her deep experience and her smile was something like a sanctuary I could comfortably rest in. I was only ever able to tell Louise about my panic because of her soft soul and obvious expertise in all things psychology …and because our friendship turned romantic.

https://medium.com/invisible-illness/the-girl-who-saved-me-from-panic-disorder-ee6cd38db5da

['Jacob Lopez']

2020-08-27 20:43:04.765000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Psychology', 'Mindfulness']

How to manage states with State Design Pattern in C#?

State design challenges The pattern was developed to overcome two primary design challenges: How can an object change its behavior when its internal state changes? How can state-specific behaviors be defined in a way that states can be added without altering the behaviors of existing states? Boolean Flag Pattern can answer to the first challenge. The object will know when to change its behavior because we detect internal changes with boolean flags. You can use boolean flags and decision-making statements to take control of object states. The second can be answered with the Boolean Flag Pattern too. In this case, state-specific behaviors are code segments of the decision-making statement body. You will not alter this code segment. You will add a new branch of if or switch statement. But this solution brings more complex code. More states mean boolean flags. More boolean flags indicate more decision-making statements, which means more debug time while fixing the bug, which means headache, which means you will need a booster which leads to alcoholism. Created by Katemangostar State Design Pattern State Pattern is part of behavior patterns designed to avoid overusing of decision-making statements by applying bright use of object-oriented languages. The pattern consists of three components: Context Abstract State Concrete State In the diagram above, you can see a representation of Context(DogContext), Abstract State(IDogState), and Concrete States(SleepState and BarkState). The Context contains a method TransitionToState , and this is the only allowed way to change the transition of the Dog object. The method invokes the EnterState method of its parameter, the object of an Abstract State(IDogState). Also, it introduces a value of parameter into Context’s property CurrentState . Method EnterState of Concrete States will do state-specific behavior. Methods Bark and Sleep are triggers to change state from one to another if it is allowed. For example, if the dog can change state from bark into sleep but not the other way around, implementation will look like this. Pros and Cons Code following State Design Pattern is: More modular. Easier to maintain. Less challenging to debug. More extensible. As a disadvantage can be mention:

https://medium.com/net-core/how-to-manage-states-with-state-design-pattern-in-c-d4ca47ec6aa

['Daniel Rusnok']

2020-10-06 19:11:26.389000+00:00

['Coding', 'Csharp', 'Software Development', 'Development', 'Design Patterns']

21 Tips to Write Good Technical Articles

The Tips Don’t start writing anywhere and everywhere Before you start writing, establish a few places where you can do serious writing without any distractions (your desk in the study, your bedroom, at the garden, etc.). Once you establish the place, make it sacred. Nothing else should be done out there. Prepare a writing chart for the week ahead mentioning the datess and times at which you’ll write These charts need to track a minimum of three things: (1) time spent writing, (2) pages completed, and (3) the percentage of planned writing completed. These charts provide the motivation and feedback you need for your writing journey. Steal like an artist Yes, there’s no such thing as a new-minted, original idea. And stealing like an artist means reading others’ articles and identifying topics where you can bring your own perspective and treatment based on your unique experience. The best time to get ideas is when you’re at your groggiest (half asleep, just waking up, etc.) Studies have proved that our focus broadens when our minds are at a suboptimal level, allowing us to create more connections, as we’re open and in a free-flowing mode. On the other hand, the best time to write is when your creative cells are at their extreme peak and when you’re having your best focus (mornings, evenings, or whatever time works for you) Just write in the free-flow mode without any interruptions in order to achieve maximum productivity. Combine ideas to find new ways to connect existing themes For example, take a piece of paper, and write some suggestions in some categories. Programming (e.g., senior programmer, junior programmer, polyglot programmer) Relationships (e.g., casual, long-time, long-distance) Software-development techniques (Agile, Kanban, etc.) Now pick up any two items, and write a story. For example, you can write the story about two senior programmers using Agile, or you can write about a polyglot junior programmer. One of the easiest methods to write technical articles is by using the Carpenter method Select the ideas. Breakdown/outline your intended article into paragraphs (opening. middle and closing). String the ideas within the outline to create the first rough draft. Tackle one paragraph at a time, and polish it further. Read and edit the whole flow, and tighten the final piece into a nicely flowing article. Remember the key message in this style is to let go of perfection. The first draft is imperfect, and that’s perfectly OK. The final output is your masterpiece, your chef-d’œuvre, and only that is important. The problem statement should be clear and should be delivered by the second paragraph — at the latest Yes, many authors neglect to write a clear problem statement, leaving the readers scratching their heads figuring out what the writer is trying is tell them in the article. The key is to have a clear, concise, and well-articulated problem statement before the solution. Use the inverted-pyramid concept to structure your solution in such a way that the reader stays interested The concept is as follows: Summarize the most important point, the lede. Reveal the direction the article is headed. Flesh out the story with further details added to pique the reader’s curiosity. Don’t use jargon When I say not to use jargon, I’m not advocating leaving out necessary technical terms, but I’m saying it is to ensure the language is as clear as possible. For example, a hardcore technical term like the modulator valve control ring can be referred to simply: “Tighten the modulator valve control ring securely.” This is preferable to adding complexity like, “Apply sufficient torque to the modulator valve control ring to ensure that the control ring assembly is securely attached to the terminal.” Don’t use a long word when a short one is available If writers use pretentious words when other simpler words would convey the same meaning, they risk alienating the reader. Strike out as many words as possible The journalist Harold Evans once famously invited readers to consider which words written on a market signpost can be deleted without altering the meaning. The words were “FRESH FISH SOLD HERE.” Evans said all of the words can be deleted, as fish needs to be fresh and sold. So the signpost itself is a waste of money. The idea is to delete and delete and delete ruthlessly until nothing can be deleted any further without altering the meaning. Good writing is simple In fact, the hallmark of good writing is it can be expressed in a way that reasonably intelligent people can understand. If that’s not happening, it just means the writer hasn’t taken enough pain to present it succinctly. Always boil down a sentence to its simplest form, and keep doing it until it can’t be simplified any further. Pacing is the key to reader engagement When it comes to the flow of your article, what matters most is that the pace you’ve chosen remains consistent as the article progresses. A consistent pace (slow, fast, meandering, etc.) keeps the reader engaged and interested until the end. Package your writing in small chunks Human-memory buffers are notoriously short and can’t contain more than 15 words at a time. This puts a constraint on the reader’s understanding, and by the time a reader completes a really long sentence, their buffer gets depleted and they lose track. That’s why breaking your copy into small, concise, and meaningful sentences is required to pass the message across succinctly. Speak the language of the audience For example, a post you write on LinkedIn for senior-level software professionals will read very differently from a post you write on Facebook for school children. Not only do these two groups of people have different challenges, but their language, their taglines, and the lingo they use to speak about their needs also differ considerably. You need to research your audience to know the kind of language they speak and tailor your article accordingly. Be very careful when using tables and charts, as sometimes they contain unnecessary information that diverts the reader from your article Use these artifacts only when they’re really required, and the reader needs to go through them to understand the gist. Avoid if not required. The closing paragraph should contain both a summary and a conclusion, both of which are very important in technical articles The summary section gives the gist of your article and gives your reader a flash-card type of takeaway. The conclusion, on the other hand, is the place where the author can conclude the journey of the problem, starting from the introduction right until the final resolution. This is also the place where authors can highlight any unresolved issues or even next steps (a sequel to the article maybe?). Acknowledgments and references are often overlooked You may have gotten help from somebody to strengthen your article or maybe you referred to a book in your research for the article. While a separate section might not be required, it’s always a good practice to be gracious in acknowledging help if taken. Pay attention to food A proper food balance is important for maintaining healthy nutrition for the mind and body. And recent studies published in the Public Health Journal have also proved it takes less than 30 minutes to go from a sugar rush to a full-on sugar crash, which means we get more tired than energized thanks to sugar consumption. The key is moderation. Eating moderately means listening to your body and thereby helping your mind to perform to its full potential. Charge yourself into a better writer. Lastly, don’t push yourself too hard Writing needn’t be as strenuous as running a triathlon. Just write for 30 minutes to one hour, and then go about your day. Then on the following day, push yourself a bit harder. Build your writing muscle, one ligament at a time. Not a wasted word. Not a wasted effort. This is the key to being a productive and creative writer.

https://medium.com/better-programming/21-tips-to-write-good-technical-articles-486aa400c44b

['Mythili The Dreamer']

2020-07-01 03:35:19.977000+00:00

['Startup', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Writing']

Create image classification for recognizing persons, animals, others. Using TensorFlow

So, Let’s start :) At first, we need a dataset with the next classes: - Person - Animals - Other Let me describe what each class I mean: In a first-class “person”, we should have any images of peoples but WITHOUT ANIMALS. In the next class “animals”, we should have images with animals WITHOUT HUMAN. In this class, including images with the next classes: dog (different breeds), squirrel (different breeds), horse, chicken, cats, raccoon, deer. In this class, including images with the next classes: dog (different breeds), squirrel (different breeds), horse, chicken, cats, raccoon, deer. In the last class “other”, we should have any images WITHOUT HUMAN AND ANIMAL. I created a dataset with 113k. images with 3 classes which I described above. This dataset was created from a lot of datasets Kaggle platform: Person: Animals: Other: I already created a notebook that already does this. But, if you want run this notebook in colab you need to create datasets manually. You can just open a notebook in Colab and watch how model training :) I created a model that has a result for NEW data: 0.008% for loss and 100.00% accuracy. I guess it’s a perfect result. confusion matrix (Photo,GIF by Author) https://github.com/oleksandr-g-rock/How_to_create-image-classification-for-recognizing-persons-animals-others/blob/main/0_w1p1XToA7zVEMsAk.png So link for the notebook here. Also, I saved the best model file (with format h5) with the best result here. Result: - I created a model that has a result for NEW data: 0.008% for loss and 100.00% accuracy. I guess it’s a perfect result. - link for the notebook here. - Code for this article available here. - I saved the best model file (with format h5) with the best result here.

https://oleksandrg.medium.com/create-image-classification-for-recognizing-persons-animals-others-daad028762cb

['Alex G.']

2020-12-14 03:21:32.938000+00:00

['Keras', 'Matplotlib', 'Computer Vision', 'Python', 'TensorFlow']

60 Ways to Think Differently about the Future

PART 1: A JOURNEY INTO THE PAST “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.” — Isaac Asimov 1 Earthrise “Collectively and individually, we have more control now over how our future unfolds than ever before. But our ability to envision and engineer the future comes with almost unimaginable levels of responsibility.” 2 Origins “We now know that what we think of as ‘past’ and ‘future’ are merely the byproducts of the laws of physics that emerged after the big bang took place.” 3 Light “Light reveals a pathway between where we are now and where we’re heading. It enables us to develop new knowledge as it illuminates the world around us.” 4 Movement “Movement — whether the oscillation of an electron, the passing of a light beam, or the falling of a glass — marks the transition between past and present, and points toward the future.” 5 Time “We are, at every level, creatures of time, immersed in it, obsessed by it, yet unable to control it.” 6 Entropy “Entropy is one of those concepts that people often invoke when they try to explain life, the universe, and everything, yet is rarely understood — much to the chagrin of physicists the world over.” 7 Emergence “We are, in effect, localized anti-entropy machines that have the ability to change the future from its default mode to something entirely different.” 8 Evolution “DNA turned out to be an incredibly powerful entropy accelerator. Fed by heat, chemical energy, and ionizing radiation, it became the defining base code of increasingly advanced organisms that were ever more adept at making use of the energy around them and discarding it in a slightly less-usable form.” 9 Anticipation “[Anticipation] is part of a suite of abilities that lay the foundations that enable organisms to not only envision the future, but to plan for it as well.” 10 Instinct “Instinct relies on the future being similar to the past, and predictable based on what’s happened time and time again. But humans have put a huge wrench in this biological master plan as we’ve developed the ability to change the future faster than any evolutionary process can accommodate.” 11 Causality “No matter how convoluted and complex the threads tying the past, present, and future become, each past action sends ripples into the future that spark a cascade of sympathetic reactions.” 12 Memory “If we have no memory of what’s happened in the near past, we have no way of connecting effects we observe to what caused them. And this in turn means that we cannot begin to understand how our actions potentially influence the future.” 13 Learning “Learning is what begins to carry us beyond instinct and allows us to start intentionally crafting the future.” 14 Intentionality “Intentionality is the connective tissue between learning and outcomes. It’s the link between observing which levers in the present can be used to nudge the future in different directions, and having the wherewithal to actually pull them.” 15 Intelligence “[E]ssential as our intelligence is to imagining and building the future, it’s surprisingly hard to pin down precisely what we mean by it.” 16 Knowledge “When combined with our intelligence, knowledge helps us begin to connect cause with effect, and to create the models and tools that allow us to make use of these connections.” 17 Reason “Our ability to reason is what helps us imagine the possible outcomes of events and actions, and to focus on the more plausible ones.”

https://medium.com/edge-of-innovation/60-ways-to-think-differently-about-the-future-a53cd214536a

['Andrew Maynard']

2020-11-14 18:31:36.996000+00:00

['Future', 'Technology', 'Humanity', 'Science', 'Environment']

Dear Grocery Girl

Dear Grocery Girl I see you caring (only) about yourself Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash Dear Grocery Girl, Just to be clear, I am stalking you. I’ve had my eye on you since you grabbed the last mini-cart in the parking lot. Your mask dangles over your ear like some forgotten bra on the clothesline, left out in the rain. You have lipstick on. Lipstick! Who has worn lipstick since February? That shade of pink gives you away and I watch, pushing my cart two cart-lengths behind, as you stop before the sliding doors to hang the other mask strap over your ear. You make it through the gatekeeper, you know the lady at the door who has the worst shift: checking for masks on entry. Then you do the unspeakable. Like some entitled seventh-grader sticking her gum under a desk, you shove that mask in your Kate Spade. First of all, you clearly are not there to shop for your family. Your lipstick and speed-shopping show me you are on a mission, and no one is going to get in your way. Second of all, I see you not once, but two times, scratching your nose. What is so hard to understand about the importance of wearing a mask in public? I follow you at least twelve feet behind, making sure not to touch the same items as you. I am not shopping for chardonnay anyway. You don’t even notice the elderly couple pass you on the other side of the aisle. They pass slowly, and the woman looks back at you and shakes her head. I try to imagine confronting you, but instead, I take out my phone, in one passive-aggressive minute, you have become a permanent meme for the narcissism, ignorance, and carelessness that plagues our country. You probably won’t care because girl, you are Instagram ready. Next time, I’m going to make a scene. Wear your mask! Sincerely, Concerned Mom

https://medium.com/rogues-gallery/dear-grocery-girl-682110c69b1f

['Rae Lately']

2020-09-22 15:20:41.537000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'Opinion', 'Society', 'Coronavirus', 'Health']

Python Microservices: Choices, Key Concepts, and Project setup

Microservices Python Microservices: Choices, Key Concepts, and Project setup Distilled lessons from building microservices powering Slang Labs platform. Presented in a PyCon India 2019 tutorial. At SlangLabs, we are building a platform for programmers to easily and quickly add multilingual, multimodal Voice Augmented eXperiences (VAX) to their mobile and web apps. Think of an assistant like Alexa or Siri, but running inside your app and tailored for your app. The platform consists of: Console to configure a buddy for an app, to configure a buddy for an app, SDKs for Android and Web (JavaScript) providing voice-to-action capabilities, for Android and Web (JavaScript) providing voice-to-action capabilities, Microservices that SDKs invoke to infer the intent inherent in the voice utterance of an end-user, and extract associated entities, and that SDKs invoke to infer the intent inherent in the voice utterance of an end-user, and extract associated entities, and Analytics to analyze end-user behavior and improve the experience. This blog post is to share the best practices and lessons we have learned while building the microservices. Why Python At the idea-phase of a startup, one has some sense of destination and direction but does not know exactly what to build. That clarity emerges only through iterations and experimentations. We were no different, so we had to pick a programming language and microservice framework suitable for rapid prototyping. These were our key considerations: Rapid Development: high velocity of experimentations for quick implementation and evaluation of ideas. high velocity of experimentations for quick implementation and evaluation of ideas. Performance: lightweight yet mature microservice framework, efficient for mostly IO-bound application, scales to high throughput for concurrent requests. lightweight yet mature microservice framework, efficient for mostly IO-bound application, scales to high throughput for concurrent requests. Tools Infrastructure: for automated testing, cloud deployment, monitoring. for automated testing, cloud deployment, monitoring. Machine Learning (ML): easy availability of libraries and frameworks. easy availability of libraries and frameworks. Hiring: access to talent and expertise. There is no perfect choice for the programming language that ticks all of the above. It finally boils down to Python vs. Java/Scala because these are the only feasible languages for machine learning work. While Java has better performance and tooling, Python is apt for rapid prototyping. At that stage, we favored rapid development and machine learning over other considerations, therefore picked Python. Microservice architecture facilitates each service to independently choose the programming language and framework, and there is no need to standardize on one. However, a heterogeneous system adds DevOps and infra overheads, which we wanted to avoid as we were just a couple of guys hacking the system. With time, our team and platform grew and now has microservices in Go-lang and JavaScript too. Comparison of Programming Languages. 😀: Great, 😊: Nice, 😐: Ok, 😓: Bad. Why Tornado With Python, came its infamous Global Interpreter Lock. In brief, a thread can execute only if it has acquired the Python interpreter lock. Since it is a global lock, only one thread of the program can acquire it and therefore run at a time, even if the hardware has multiple CPUs. It effectively renders Python programs limited to single-threaded performance. While GIL is a serious limitation for CPU-bound concurrent Python apps, for IO-bound apps, cooperative multitasking of AsyncIO offers good performance (more about it later). For performance, we desired a web framework which is lightweight yet mature, and has AsyncIO APIs. We evaluated three Python Web Frameworks: Django, Flask, and Tornado. Django follows the “batteries included” approach, it has everything you will need and more. While that eliminates integration compatibility blues, it also makes it bulky. It does not have AsyncIO APIs. follows the “batteries included” approach, it has everything you will need and more. While that eliminates integration compatibility blues, it also makes it bulky. It does not have AsyncIO APIs. Flask , on the other hand, is super lightweight and has a simple way of defining service endpoints through annotation. It does not have AsyncIO APIs. , on the other hand, is super lightweight and has a simple way of defining service endpoints through annotation. It does not have AsyncIO APIs. Tornado is somewhere between Django and Flask, it is neither as barebone as Flask nor as heavy as Django. It has quite a number of configurations, hooks, and a nice testing framework. It had been having event-loop for scheduling cooperative tasks for much before AsyncIO, and had started supporting AsyncIO event loop and syntax. Tornado was just right for our needs. But most of our design tactics are independent of that choice, and are applicable regardless of the chosen web framework. In recent time, more AsyncIO Python web frameworks are emerging: Sanic, Vibora, Quart, FastAPI. Even Django is beginning to support async. Comparison of Python Web Frameworks. 😀: Great, 😊: Nice, 😐: Ok, 😓: Bad. Overcoming Global Interpreter Lock Before we plunge into design and code, let’s understand some key concepts: cooperative multitasking, non-blocking calls, and AsyncIO. Preemptive vs Cooperative Multitasking Threads follow the model of preemptive multitasking. Each thread executes one task. OS schedule a thread on a CPU, and after a fixed interval (or when the thread gets blocked typically due to an IO operation, whichever happens first), OS interrupts the thread and schedules another waiting thread on CPU. In this model of concurrency, multiple threads can execute parallelly on multiple CPUs, as well as interleaved on a single CPU. In cooperative multitasking, there is a queue of tasks. When a task is scheduled for execution, it executes till a point of its choice (typically an IO wait) and yields control back to the event loop scheduler, which puts it the waiting queue, and schedules another task. At any time, only one task is executing, but it gives an appearance of concurrency. Preemptive Multitasking vs. Cooperative Multitasking. Synchronous vs Asynchronous Calls In synchronous or blocking function calls, the control returns back to the caller only after completion. Consider the following pseudocode: bytes = read() print(bytes) print("done") # "done" is printed only after bytes. In asynchronous or non-blocking function calls, the control returns immediately to the caller. The called function can pause while execution. It takes a callback routine as an argument, and when the called function finishes and results are ready, it invokes the callback with results. Meanwhile, the caller function resumes execution even before completion of the called function. Assume there is a non-blocking async_read function, which takes a callback function, and calls it with the read bytes. Consider the following pseudocode: asyn_read(print) print("done") # "done" may be printed before bytes. As you can see asynchronous code with callbacks is hard to understand because the execution order of the code can be different from the lexical order. Python AsyncIO AsyncIO syntax of async and await facilitates writing asynchronous code in synchronous style instead of using callbacks, making code easy to understand. import asyncio async def f(): bytes = await async_read() # f pauses here, yields control. # Resumes when result (bytes) is ready. print(bytes) print("done") asyncio.run(f()) # Append f() to the IO Event Loop queue When a function is async, it is called coroutine. It must be awaited, as its results will be available only in the future. An await expression yields the control to the scheduler. Code after the await expression is like a callback, the control to be resumed here later when the coroutine completes and results are ready. AsyncIO has an IO Event Loop, a queue that holds all completed coroutines ready to be resumed. Derisking by Design While Tornado has worked out well for us so far, we did not know it then. We designed our microservices such that the Tornado-dependent code was segregated and localized. It was to easily migrate to a different framework if the need arises. Regardless, it is a good idea to structure your microservice into two layers: The Web Framework Layer and framework independent Service Layer. Web Framework Layer Web Framework Layer is responsible for REST service endpoints over HTTP protocols. It does not have any business logic. It processes incoming requests, extracts relevant information from the payload, and calls a function in the Service Layer which performs business logic. It packages the returned results appropriately and sends the response. For Tornado, it consists of two files: server.py contains an HTTP server that starts the event loop and application. contains an HTTP server that starts the event loop and application. app.py contains endpoint routes that map REST API to a function in the service layer (specifically to a function in service.py, see next). Service Layer The Service Layer contains only business logic, and knows nothing about HTTP or REST. That allows any communication protocol to be stitched on top of it without touching business logic. There is only one requirement for this layer: service.py must contain all functions needed to implement the service endpoints. Think of it as logical service APIs, independent of any Web framework or communication protocol. Logical service APIs allow the Web Framework Layer to be implemented (and replaced) without getting into the nitty-gritty of the inner working of the service. It also facilitates standardization and sharing of a large portion of web framework code across services. Testing We are rare among startups to automate testing and code coverage from the very beginning. It may appear counter-intuitive but we did it to maintain high velocity, and fearlessly change any part of the system. Tests offered us a safety net needed while developing in a dynamically-typed interpreted language. It was also partly due to paranoia regarding our non-obvious choice of Tornado, to safeguard us in case we need to change it. There are three types of tests: Unit Tests: Limited to independently test a class or function, mostly for leaf-level independent classes/functions. Limited to independently test a class or function, mostly for leaf-level independent classes/functions. Integration Tests: To test the working of multiple classes and functions. Out of process or network API calls (such as databases and other services) are mocked. To test the working of multiple classes and functions. Out of process or network API calls (such as databases and other services) are mocked. End-to-End Tests: To test deployment on test or stage environment. Nothing is mocked, just that data is not from the prod environment and may be synthetic. We wrote integration tests both for the Service Layer to test business logic, as well as for the Web Framework Layer to test the functioning of REST endpoints in the Tornado server. Tests for Tornado and Service Layers. Project Setup Get Source Code Clone the GitHub repo and inspect the content: $ git clone https://github.com/scgupta/tutorial-python-microservice-tornado.git $ cd tutorial-python-microservice-tornado $ git checkout -b <branch> tag-01-project-setup $ tree . . ├── LICENSE ├── README.md ├── addrservice │ └── __init__.py ├── requirements.txt ├── run.py └── tests ├── __init__.py ├── integration │ └── __init__.py └── unit └── __init__.py The directory addrservice is for the source code of the service, and the directory test is for keeping the tests. Setup Virtual Environment Using a virtual environment is one of the best practices, especially when you work on multiple projects. Create one for this project, and install the dependencies from requirements.txt : $ python3 -m venv .venv $ source ./.venv/bin/activate $ pip install --upgrade pip $ pip3 install -r ./requirements.txt Tools The script run.py is a handy utility script to run static type checker, linter, unit tests, and code coverage. In this series, you will see that using these tools from the very beginning is actually most economical, and does not add perceived overhead. Let’s try running these. In each of the following, you can use either of the commands. Static Type Checker: mypy package $ mypy ./addrservice ./tests $ ./run.py typecheck Linter: flake8 package $ flake8 ./addrservice ./tests $ ./run.py lint Unit Tests: Python unittest framework $ python -m unittest discover tests -p '*_test.py' $ ./run.py test This will run all tests in the directory tests . You can run unit or integration test suites (in tests/unit and tests/integration directories respectively) as following: $ ./run.py test --suite unit $ ./run.py test --suite integration Code Coverage: coverage package $ coverage run --source=addrservice --branch -m unittest discover tests -p '*_test.py' $ coverage run --source=addrservice --branch ./run.py test After running tests with code coverage, you can get the report: $ coverage report Name Stmts Miss Branch BrPart Cover ----------------------------------------------------------- addrservice/__init__.py 2 2 0 0 0% You can also generate HTML report: $ coverage html $ open htmlcov/index.html If you are able to run all these commands, your project setup is complete. Summary There are several choices for building microservices: Java, JavaScript, Python, and Go. If microservice involves interfacing with ML libs, choices reduce to Java and Python. For quick prototyping, Python is more suitable. But it comes with the drawback of Global Interpreter Lock. Cooperative multitasking with non-blocking asynchronous calls using asyncio comes to rescue. Tornado is the only mature Python web framework with asyncio APIs. Layered design can derisk in case the framework is to be changed in the future. Tests can also be layered: unit, integration, and end-to-end. It is easy to setup lint, test, code coverage from the very beginning of the project.

https://medium.com/swlh/python-microservices-01-tornado-asyncio-lint-test-coverage-project-setup-9fbf4ca3bf90

['Satish Chandra Gupta']

2020-12-08 09:35:43.749000+00:00

['Software Development', 'Programming', 'Microservices', 'Python', 'Software Engineering']

What Famous Startup Taglines Can Teach You About Headlines

10 Insights That Can Be Applied to Headlines 1. Tell your reader how you’ll help them These examples promise to help us do something. Although they don’t explicitly include the words ‘How to,’ you could add ‘How’ to the front of these taglines: Trello: How to work more collaboratively and get more done Asana: How to keep your team organized and connected Postfity: How to save time on social media Animoto: How to easily make your own videos Animatron: How to make marketing videos in minutes As writers: Do a Google search and you’ll see that we naturally want practical answers to our questions. We want the knowledge so we can go ahead and implement solutions. For instance, if we look up a topic such as ‘write headlines,’ you’ll see under the section People also ask: “How headlines are written” and “How do you write a powerful headline.” ‘How to’ headlines are powerful — we constantly seek knowledge and information. As shown, you don’t necessarily have to add ‘How to’ in front of a headline. What’s important is if you’re promising an answer to a burning question in your article, make it obvious. 2. Promise to make lives easier Our bodies and brains focus on conserving energy. With so many tasks, people, and emails screaming out for our limited attention, we’ve got to filter out and prioritize. Marketers of these software examples understand that — and promise solutions that will help readers filter and prioritize. They do it by making it easy for their prospect to decide they need this software for what’s important: to keep connected, work collaboratively, design anything anywhere, build a professional network. As writers: Keep in mind what our reader’s life looks like and offer ways to make their lives easier. 3. Use simple language Software marketers use casual, plain English that gives us instant understanding. No impressive words. No teasers. No bullsh*t. These businesses know the value of words and know how to harness their power. Everything teams need, all in one place In this together. Keeping you connected, wherever you are. Easily make your own videos. As writers: When we understand that the focus of our brains is to conserve energy, it helps us realize why writing simply matters. Impressive, complicated words slow down your reader. They won’t think you’re any smarter or more professional either. Even experts prefer plain English. Think of the words you use in conversation. When we’re asking for a coffee, we don’t say: ‘My intention is to take ownership of a full-bodied latte.’ We say: ‘I’d like a latte.’ Choose: ‘use’ instead of ‘utilize,’ ‘because’ instead of ‘as a consequence of,’ and ‘help’ instead of ‘assistance.’ Check out The A-Z of alternative words (Plain English Campaign) and From legalese to readease (New Zealand Law Society). 4. Carefully select words Certain words and phrases are like bombs. They’re compact yet powerful. The taglines we’ve seen are filled with power bombs: ‘Everything’ ‘One place’ ‘All-in-one’ ‘Save’ ‘Organize’ ‘Community’ ‘Collaboratively’ As writers: Take the time to choose your words. Use words in a positive way. And use active verbs that help readers imagine gaining a benefit from your writing. Help them become more productive, less stressed, and more creative. 5. Know your target audience Many of the businesses explicitly mention their target audiences: Freshbooks has been designed for small business. Animatron empowers businesses and individuals. LinkedIn speaks to professionals. As writers: Don’t be afraid to niche. Let’s avoid letterbox drop writing — generic writing that gets thrown out because it’s given to everyone, yet not addressed to anyone. Decide who you are writing for and mention them in your headline. 6. Tap into people’s deeper needs These businesses aren’t just offering us another app or another piece of software. Instead, they know their reader’s great pains and deepest desires. They capture attention with the right words. This works because they know exactly who they’re speaking to. LinkedIn knows professionals want to widen their professional network. Animatron knows small businesses and individuals would love a way to create their own videos easily. Canva knows teams, individuals, beginners, and experts want a way to design a range of items for different channels. As writers: We need to understand the deepest needs and desires of our readers if we are to stop their wandering eyes and busy minds. We can do this by understanding mass desires. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs gives a good overview of what we need to not only survive, but to thrive — physiological needs such as water, safety needs, the need to belong by having friends, the need to feel accomplished, and the need for self-actualization by achieving our full potential. Tap into people’s needs. 7. Short and sharp These taglines are efficient. They hit the right spot in readers. They don’t waste words. Keep your team organized and connected. Save time on social media. Everything teams need, all in one place. As writers: Let’s write our headlines with the same attitude. Use the minimum amount of words for maximum impact. 8. Use subtitles to reinforce headlines As good as these taglines are, many of these businesses realize one thing: they can’t say everything in one short line. So many clarify and amplify their messages in a second line: their subtitles. Freshbooks: The all-new Freshbooks is accounting software that makes running your small business easy, fast, and secure. Spend less time on accounting and more time doing the work you love. Asana: With Asana’s work management platform, your team can stay focused on their goals, projects, and tasks — no matter when or where they work. Postfity: Schedule posts to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram (reminders), and VKontakete! With our post scheduler you can manage social networks, schedule posts and engage your audiences. As writers: Subtitles are typically overlooked. Yet both headlines and subtitles work together to build curiosity and tell the reader what the piece is about. Uncertainty is stressful. Remove that stress for your reader and you’ll be more likely to be read, sell your book, or score a download. You can create certainty with: Verbs: help your reader visualize using your product, achieving a change, or getting something. In our examples above, readers are attracted to verbs such as ‘easy,’ ‘fast,’ ‘secure,’ ‘focused,’ and ‘manage.’ Specificity: tell your reader they will get tips, inspiring stories, advice, compelling ideas. The businesses tell us their software will help their target markets: spend more time doing work you love, less time on accounting, run a business with ease, speed, and privacy, manage social networks, schedule posts, engage audiences. Reader needs and desires: Subtitles are a second chance to persuade your reader that you understand them and you’ve got what they need. Reinforce your headlines with well-crafted subtitles. 9. Address readers The taglines speak to readers directly through their use of ‘you.’ This helps readers feel like the solutions have been made for them. Compare how these two versions feel and sound: Keep your team organized Keep their teams organized Trello lets you work more collaboratively Trello lets teams work more collaboratively Easily make your own videos Easily make videos As writers: Use “you” and “your” — the active voice will feel like you are personally speaking to your reader. It‘s a simple yet powerful way to draw them into your writing. Include your reader by addressing them directly. 10. Clear offerings What all of the above one to nine points do is clarify what the business is offering their prospect. Headlines, subheadings, explicit audience, simple language, tapping into needs and desires, subtitles…. these help readers understand quickly and easily whether these products are for them and how they’ll fulfill a need. As writers: When we clearly convey the crux of our writing in our headline and subtitle, we show respect for our reader’s time and we’re more likely to interest the right readers. Readers who will appreciate what we have to share and be more likely to return for more. Use your headlines to clearly tell readers what your writing offers.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/what-famous-startup-taglines-can-teach-you-about-headlines-377fdfea6f8e

['Cynthia Marinakos']

2020-05-24 02:04:40.362000+00:00

['Headline Hacks', 'Business', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Productivity']

Looking back at the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence

Brain by Gordon Johnson Looking back at the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence Hands-on collection and analysis of Twitter and Google Trends data with twint and Python Among photos of the black hole, editing genes, quantum computers outperforming classical machines, and the ongoing debate on climate change… the past year brought a well-deserved recognition of deep learning — the technology behind so many digital solutions that it’s hard to keep track. The ACM Turing Award for 2018, also known as the Nobel Prize of Computing, was awarded to Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton for breakthroughs in deep neural networks development for computing. Machine learning is inescapable and currently augments our everyday life starting from machine translation to a plethora of smart assistance. For example, predictive keyboards are integrated in our mobile phones to suggest words based on our writing style. Technology affects the everyday lives of many people — but are we ready? Our readiness can be seen by the delayed reaction from the law enforcement bodies who have just started to introduce laws regulating the usage of AI. In response during the last few years, relevant research areas emerged: eXplainable Artificial Intelligence or XAI and Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning in short FATML. The focus of XAI is to provide an understanding of trained models, which are often referred to as black boxes, and assess their trustworthiness. A crucial part of XAI is visualization, where the user of the black box model is given one or many visual representations to better understand how a certain task is solved. There is on-going research that aims to develop methods to explain deep neural networks. Some works rely on feature visualization, others are described in the building blocks of interpretability, exploring neural networks with activation atlases, LIME, TCAV, etc. The list does not end here as new methods are being published and old one rediscovered. Useful resource of some common techniques used in XAI can be found in the book by Christoph Molnar Interpretable Machine Learning. Channel’s attribution can reveal what channels contributed to the final output classification and to what extent. The Building Blocks of Interpretability Activation Atlas of Inception V1, layer Mixed5B. Atlas of features shows how the network typically represents some concepts. The topic of XAI is hot and the demand keeps on growing as more methods are being published. Yet, is there a way to get global insight into this growing trend? Let’s check out some clues together and try to answer some relevant questions: How interesting is AI? How interesting is XAI? Was this interest always present? To answer those questions, I collected data from two sources: Google Trends for topics: Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning Twitter for hashtags: #AI and #XAI. These should show us how popular are the subjects of AI and XAI under the assumption that the chosen keywords and hashtags, as well as platforms, are representative of the subject and the internet users. Among 4.48 billion Internet users worldwide, Twitter is used by roughly 330 million of them, which constitutes less than a thousandth fraction of 1%. Despite being a niche it is a popular medium to communicate breaking news. On the other hand, Google Search Engine globally accounts for 76% and 86% of desktop and mobile search traffic, respectively. Looking at just Twitter data wouldn’t be representative for the whole Internet users community but it is exactly why it’s worth it as its specific to a micro-blogging platform, it limits content to messages of 280 characters, and hashtags in tweets makes it very easy to classify. For the context, Google Trends are also presented. Just during the last three weeks of 2019, there were more than 7000 tweets with the hashtag #AI per day, which translates to the fact that Every 12 seconds there is someone who tweets about #AI. Exaggerating we can say that every 12 seconds there is a breaking news involving AI. This is all great, but who can catch up? Who can understand the impact of AI and alleviate the risks? We can see how the field of artificial intelligence became more and more popular by looking at the increasing interest rate across years 2015–2019, roughly starting with the publishing of the Deep Learning article in Nature in spring 2015, authored by the three Turing award recipients. In the chart below we can see similar rising interest trends among topics of artificial intelligence — AI, machine learning — ML (a subcategory of AI) and deep learning — DL (a subcategory of ML). Explainable Artificial Intelligence as a subject in Google Trends as well as in Twitter is getting more popular, we can see the red trend-lines in the charts below, where the data downloaded from Google Trends are compared with the data collected from Twitter using twint. Google Trends for Explainable Artificial Intelligence, annotated with the date of publishing Deep Learning article in Nature by LeCun, Bengio & Hinton, introduction and implementation dates of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Tweets for hashtag: #xai, annotated with the date of publishing Deep Learning article in Nature by LeCun, Bengio & Hinton, introduction and implementation dates of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Every 20 minutes someone is tweeting about #XAI. So for 1 tweet about #XAI there are 240 tweets about #AI. XAI is getting more and more popular and we can clearly see this in the increasing number of tweets and terms searched for in Google. Back in 2017 before the implementation of GDPR Google’s research chief — Peter Norvig questioned the value of eXplainable AI, recalling poor explaining performance of humans. Although there may be other ways of checking for algorithms correctness like robustness against adversarial attacks or detection of bias, eXplainable AI attracts enthusiasts and is still getting more popular. If the trend will continue, next year we could observe further rise of interest in XAI with average interest per month rising to 55 points or more from current 47. In summary, every 12 seconds there is someone who tweets about AI. Every 20 minutes someone is tweeting about eXplainable AI. Google Trends for the topic of eXplainable AI and tweet counts show similar rising trends over the last 5 years. The source code and the data used to create these charts are all available here. Go check it out for yourself and let’s maybe visualize those trends next year!!

https://medium.com/nightingale/looking-back-at-the-explainable-artificial-intelligence-62d25a2136a9

['Adrianna Janik']

2020-01-14 14:01:01.359000+00:00

['Data Visualization', 'Explainable Ai', 'Google', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence']

A Cheat Sheet for Choosing the Right Data Visualizations

Today, organizations of all industries and sizes use data to tap into the wellness of their business. Anyone who can easily see trends and spot problems can make smarter decisions. Therefore, you have to visualize your data if you want to be competitive. Data visualizations are images that show measurement and activity. They’re key components of business presentations and they’re the building blocks of dashboards. But despite their ubiquity, not everyone knows how to select and format them properly. And if you can’t visualize your data well, your colleagues can’t uncover any insights that lead to growth. Every successful data visualization begins with a clear understanding of what you want to analyze. Once you realize the true purpose of these data visualizations — and avoid some common pitfalls with using them — you can effectively illustrate any type of information you want. 1: SINGLE VALUE

https://medium.com/eyeful/a-cheat-sheet-for-choosing-the-right-data-visualizations-8f63a6242f1e

['Therese Moriarty']

2019-09-24 02:45:36.258000+00:00

['Eyeful How To', 'Business Intelligence', 'Dashboard', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Analysis']

The Problem With Science

Or should I say — the problem with people? Photo by Lily Banse on Unsplash Science has a problem. Or maybe it’s more like we have a problem with science. And since I’m a high school science teacher, this problem is one I’ve had to wrestle with. A lot. My son is turning four next week. He loves trucks, monster trucks, bulldozers, fire trucks, and dirt bikes. And he also loves Caldecott Medal-winning books. Early on, he started noticing the gold and silver circles emblazoned on books like Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McClosky and Owl Moon by Janet Yolen. At Barnes and Noble, I always have a hard time saying no. But I’d be a monster to tun him down when he says, “Please, mom! It’s a Caldecott book!” Although the Caldecott books lack the excitement of the noise-maker books or the action figure books published by Disney or Pixar, he still loves them. As a result, we often end up reading them on repeat until I can recite each page without even glancing at it. This fall, we’ve been reading the 1947 Caldecott Medal winner. It’s called The Little Island, by Margaret Wise Brown and I’ve got to say, it is a very strange book. To summarize, it’s a year in the life of a small, rocky island off the coast of Maine. It starts off describing the plants, weather, and animals on the island. Pretty boilerplate reading. But then towards the end, a young, faceless couple sails to the island with a little black kitten. The little kitten starts an argument with the island, which is when things start to get weird. The island — yes, it’s a talking island — points out to the kitten that it is connected to the land under the sea. The kitten finds this farfetched and wants proof. So, the kitten catches a fish with its paw. The kitten interrogates the fish about the island’s absurd claim: “How is an island part of the land?” “Come with me,” said the fish, “down into the dark secret places of the sea and I will show you.” “I can’t swim,” said the cat. “Show me another way or I’ll eat you up.” “Then you must take it on faith what I tell you,” said the fish. “What’s that?” said the cat — “Faith.” “To believe what I tell you about what you don’t know,” said the fish. In case you’ve forgotten, we’re currently experiencing a global pandemic of historic proportions. And as we’ve moved through different phases of it — the beginning of the beginning, the pre-middle, the end of the beginning, the pre-surge, and more — I’ve been struck by this section of the book again and again. The virus that has taken us to our knees is tiny — .0000000393701 inches in diameter. For reference, the poppy seed on your bagel is .04 inches in diameter. We can’t see it. We can’t touch it, hold it in our hands or swat it with a fly swatter. This means, like the little kitten, we’re left to have faith in what other people tell us about the virus. And with no shortage of people telling us about it, it can be tough to know who to believe. It’s hard to sort the anecdotes from the opinions from the facts, especially since they all sort of sound the same. Lots of times, wanting to do the right thing, people believe in information that sounds science-ish, but isn’t actually based in science. Yesterday, I had a discussion with one of my students about masks. She pointed out, “The carbon dioxide molecules cling to the fibers of the mask and then when you rebreathe them, they build up to toxic levels in your body until you pass out.” Science-ish. But certainly not true. When I asked her where she heard this, she rolled her eyes — duh — the internet. It’s easy to criticize her in her for being naive, but we all fall victim to this false logic in one way or another. Early on, I told my son that the pandemic would be over by his birthday and he could have a big party at his favorite farm. I thought I was right, but in fact — I was dead wrong. In a way, we’re all a bunch of little black kittens, just pulling fish out of the water, trying to figure out if we can trust what they’re telling us. And the problem is, there’s a lot of fish in the sea. There are scientist fish, politician fish, conspiracy fish, religious fish, Twitter fish, and crazy fish. And it’s not always easy to tell the difference, which means knowing who to believe feels incredibly hard. As a result, we tend to believe for the wrong reasons. We believe them because they are loud, or because they are confident. We believe them because our friends believe them. We believe them because they are attractive or because they have a million followers. We believe them because they are saying something we already believe to be true. It’s not a great system. I’ve been reading a book — not a Caldecott winner, but still a great book — called The Ghost Map with my students this fall. It’s the true story of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854. For a story that happened more than a century and a half ago, it’s shockingly relevant. In 1854, popular, but wrong ideas about how cholera was spread resulted in many unnecessary deaths. In 1854, letters to the editor of popular newspapers suggested that people should try unproven cholera remedies like heroin and bloodletting. In 1854, an unknown scientist found the cause of cholera but wasn’t able to convince people of his ideas until he teamed up with a popular, well-connected clergyman. In reading this book, I’m reminded of two things: the first is that science doesn’t change. Gravity, water, chemical reactions, pathogens — they carry on regardless of our understanding of them. The second is that there’s nothing new about human nature. We will always struggle to believe in things we can’t see. We will always make bad decisions. We will always believe the wrong people and make the wrong call. But what keeps us from going extinct in a folly of our own errors is our constant, steady drive to do better. But while science doesn’t change and human nature doesn’t change, there is something that does change. It’s our acceptance and understanding of science. It ebbs and flows across time and topic in strange and unpredictable ways. Consider this — at a time when DNA testing services like 23andMe are exploding in popularity, many people reject ideas about climate change. I’d love to talk to someone who believes in science enough to spit in a tube and find out their great-great-grandpa is from Tuvalu, but not enough to accept the fact that sea-level rise is predicted to destroy the island nation in less than a hundred years time. And here’s the thing — science doesn’t care if we believe in it or understand it. It just marches on, growing, killing, swelling, shrinking. To science, we’re just a bunch of faces in the bleachers trying to figure out the rules of the game. So I guess the question for the day is this: are we ebbing, or flowing? As a teacher, I hope we are ebbing. I hope we are learning to believe in scientists and the things they tell us, even when we tell us about things we can’t see or touch. In The Little Island, the fish explains to the Kitten how the land and the island are connected underwater. And even though the kitten can’t see it for himself, accepts what the fish says.

https://medium.com/beingwell/the-problem-with-science-3cd35af5c524

['Emily Kingsley']

2020-10-04 13:38:15.761000+00:00

['Education', 'Books', 'Society', 'Culture', 'Science']

Inspiration Is Never In Short Supply

Inspiration Is Never In Short Supply There’s always something to write about There was a point a few months ago when I thought I would have nothing left to write about. I had a few more ideas lined up, but beyond that, I was struggling to come up with any more. I remember thinking to myself, “What am I going to do in a few weeks when I’ve run out of ideas?” My mind was drawing blanks and no matter where I went, or where I looked, I struggled to come up with any new ideas for my blog posts. It was a few weeks after this, that the ideas started to flow again. I’m not sure what started it. Maybe, it was the trips that I went on. Taking myself out of my usual settings may have helped my creative juices to flow. I don’t know. What I do know is that I started to see inspiration all around me. Seemingly trivial events became ideas that I could write about. My mind had opened up and I was more receptive to interpreting what I was seeing and writing about it. It’s easy to think you have nothing left to write. It’s a common concern for writers. But the truth is, inspiration is everywhere. We just need to look for it.

https://tom-stevenson.medium.com/inspiration-is-never-in-short-supply-5019d9024e9d

['Tom Stevenson']

2019-10-20 15:12:51.923000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Productivity', 'Writing', 'Inspiration', 'Creativity']

A Look Into The Cell Graveyard

A Look Into The Cell Graveyard Or what happens to cells when they die. Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash The cells in our body all experience a finite lifespan. Even as they’re continuously dividing and multiplying, there will come a point in time where they are unable to carry out that function anymore. And we see that occurring as we age. We can’t do things at age 50 that we could do at age 20. Inevitably, as we grow older, the efficiency of the cellular reproduction decreases, and we experience this gradual loss of function in our lives. Molecular biology usually focuses on the reproduction process… But what happens to the cells that are supposed to die?

https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/a-look-into-the-cell-graveyard-bf8854483ff

['Dr Joel Yong']

2020-12-08 06:35:10.999000+00:00

['Healthcare', 'Health', 'Science', 'Biology', 'Coronavirus']

How to find outliers and anomalies using Isolation Forest

How to find outliers and anomalies using Isolation Forest Tracyrenee Follow Dec 11 · 4 min read I made a previous video about finding outliers in the candidate votes of the US presidential elections from 1976 to 2020, the link being found here:- A Data-Driven Analysis Of Trump’s ‘Voter Fraud’ Claims In The 2020 Presidential Election | by Tracyrenee | AI In Plain English | Dec, 2020 | Medium The presidential elections only come around once every four years, so I felt it would be a good idea to search for outliers in more practical, day to day activities, such as the housing market. I chose the train dataset from Kaggle’s Ames House Price competition to carry out this test, with the web address for this dataset being found here:- House Prices: Advanced Regression Techniques | Kaggle Once I downloaded the dataset and saved it to my personal GitHub account, i created a program using Google Colab because it is free and has many libraries already installed on it. The link for Google Colab can be found here:- Welcome to Colaboratory — Colaboratory (google.com) Once my program was initiated, I imported the libraries I would need:- I then loaded the dataset onto the program and read it:- I carried out a graphical analysis and found that most of the house prices were between $100,000 and $300,000, but there were a few outliers of over $700,000:- I also created a box plot and found that the better the overall quality of the home, the higher in price it was likely to be:- I then checked for any null values and found there were quite a few columns that had missing data:- I imputed the missing values by replacing the null values in categorical columns with the most used values and the null values in numerical columns with the median values:- I then ordinal encoded all of the categorical columns because most models want this type of data to be converted to numeric data before fitting it:- I defined the X and y variables that were used to train, fit and make predictions. The y variable, being the target, was composed of train.SalePrice. I employed feature selection to define the X variable, so dropped a number of columns in an attempt to improve accuracy. I then used sklearn’s train_test_split function to break the X dataset into four smaller datasets for training, fitting and predicting:- I then created a pipeline where the data would be scaled and then trained and fit into sklearn’s GradientBoostingRegressor. I achieved 99.96% accuracy when I employed this technique. I predicted on the validation set and attained 95.21% accuracy:- I created a dataframe where the actual values in the validation set can be compared to the predicted values:- After making predictions on the Ames House Prices train dataset, I wanted to obtain information of outliers. I created another model, which was sklearn’s IsolationForest in this instance. I set contamination to 1%, which means that 1% of the examplies would be considered outliers. I created two new columns called “scores” and “anomaly” in the train dataset. Each row is given a score based on the “SalePrice” and values of either 1 or -1 are placed in the “anomaly” column. If the value of -1 is present in the “anomaly” column then this indicates the price is an outlier:- I then printed out a list of anomalies. Fifteen anomalies came up, which is 1% of the number of rows in the dataset:- I then decided I wanted to see all of the sale prices greater than $500,000 and there were 9 properties that met this criteria:- I checked the accuracy and it was 166.67%, the reason being I was dividing 15 anomalies by 9 outliers. I also made a visual representation of the scores of each property as compared to its sale price:- The code for this program can be found in its entirety in my personal GitHub account, found here:- House-Prices/Kaggle_Ames_Housing_Prices_Isolation_Forest.ipynb at master · TracyRenee61/House-Prices (github.com)

https://medium.com/ai-in-plain-english/how-to-find-outliers-and-anomalies-using-isolation-forest-388e5fec2762

[]

2020-12-12 09:17:13.654000+00:00

['Unsupervised Learning', 'Kaggle', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Isolation Forests']

How to Install Kubernetes Ingress on a Raspberry Pi Cluster

Setting Up Traefik Installing the Traefik Ingress controller is relatively simple. Note: This is different than the “Kubernetes & Traefik 101” reference. helm install stable/traefik --name <your-name-here> --set dashboard.enabled=true,serviceType=NodePort,dashboard.domain=dashboard.traefik,rbac.enabled=true,externalIP=<pi-router-IP>,imageTag=1.7.12 --namespace kube-system This is a relatively common way of installing Traefik. Here’s what the various parts of the above command mean: stable/traefik is a Helm chart that describes how to deploy Traefik. The interesting thing about this is it references a multiarch Docker image, so we don’t have to worry about finding an arm image to install. is a Helm chart that describes how to deploy Traefik. The interesting thing about this is it references a multiarch Docker image, so we don’t have to worry about finding an image to install. <your-name-here> is the name Helm will give to the deployment and will also be part of the Kubernetes resource names (e.g., the deployment name). On my cluster, I used the relatively boring name of my-traefik-release . is the name Helm will give to the deployment and will also be part of the Kubernetes resource names (e.g., the deployment name). On my cluster, I used the relatively boring name of . dashboard.enabled=true indicates that the Traefik dashboard should be available. indicates that the Traefik dashboard should be available. serviceType=NodePort indicates that external access to the dashboard is via a NodePort . More on this later. indicates that external access to the dashboard is via a . More on this later. dashboard.domain=dashboard.traefik specifies that the Traefik dashboard is configured to be reachable using dashboard.traefik as the host name (e.g., http://dashboard.traefik . We’ll be using this later to confirm the installation. specifies that the Traefik dashboard is configured to be reachable using as the host name (e.g., . We’ll be using this later to confirm the installation. rbac.enabled means that Traefik is being configured for extended Kubernetes permissions. To be frank, I’m not quite sure why this is required, but it is. means that Traefik is being configured for extended Kubernetes permissions. To be frank, I’m not quite sure why this is required, but it is. externalIP=<pi-router-IP> is needed to expose the external address Traefik will be listening on. pi-router-IP references the external network IP address for our Pi Router. In “Setup a Raspberry Pi Cluster,” this is the kubemaster host at 10.0.0.100 . is needed to expose the external address Traefik will be listening on. references the external network IP address for our Pi Router. In “Setup a Raspberry Pi Cluster,” this is the host at . imageTag=1.7.12 installs a specific version of Traefik. If this isn’t specified, the latest image of Traefik will be installed. Traefik just released a new major version 2.x. Since this series was started before 2.x was released, and uses v1.7.12, I thought it best to stick with that version. installs a specific version of Traefik. If this isn’t specified, the latest image of Traefik will be installed. Traefik just released a new major version 2.x. Since this series was started before 2.x was released, and uses v1.7.12, I thought it best to stick with that version. --namespace kube-system installs Traefik into the kube-system namespace. This is somewhat arbitrary — you can change it if you like. Here’s the output from my environment: You can verify the installation by checking the deployment: Note that the service my-traefik-release ’s EXTERNAL-IP value is what we specified in the helm install ... command. A final way of verifying the installation is to open the Traefik dashboard. Note that the service my-traefik-release has a type of NodePort . The service’s port(s) are 80:31214/TCP,443:30308/TCP . The port information is needed to create the URL for the dashboard. Per the port information, it’s located at http://dashboard.traefik:31214/dashboard/ . Port 31214 comes from the HTTP external port as specified in 80:31214 . Note that 443:30308/TCP refers to HTTPS endpoints. It’s likely the ports from your installation will be different. To access the dashboard from curl or a browser, you’ll need to add the dashboard’s hostname to /etc/hosts . If you used a different IP address for your PI router, use that instead of 10.0.0.100 . 10.0.0.100 dashboard.traefik This is needed because Traefik is routing on the host name dashboard.traefik . An /etc/hosts entry is needed so the host name used in any requests can be resolved correctly. Here’s what the Traefik dashboard looks like on my cluster: My Traefik dashboard at http://dashboard.traefik:31214

https://medium.com/better-programming/install-kubernetes-ingress-on-a-raspberry-pi-cluster-e8d5086c5009

['Richard Youngkin']

2020-04-13 15:46:42.788000+00:00

['Programming', 'Kubernetes', 'Microservices', 'Raspberry Pi', 'Engineering']

Autism is a Creative Boon.

I’ve written before about the public — and professional — misconception of Autism as monolithic. Since it was first “discovered” by neurotypical professionals, Autism has been seen as a severe condition that appears in withdrawn, difficult boys who adore math, cars, or lining up their toy trains on the carpet. For decades this stereotype has persisted, and reinforced itself; Autistic people who match the stereotype are more likely to be diagnosed and receive services, and Autistic people who are women, or Black, or who are creative and expressive are ignored and discounted. The persistent portrayal of Autism as monolithic is a direct result of doctors and psychologists’ disdain for Autistic people. If you want to eradicate Autism from the population — an end-goal desired by many doctors & therapists, as well as all of Autism Speaks — it’s to your benefit to paint the Autism with wide brushstrokes. A homogenized, over-simplified view of Autistic people makes it easier to view them as less-than-human. Conversely, if you acknowledge that Autistic people vary in all kinds of ways — and acknowledge that many of them benefit from their Autism — the view that Autism ought to be “cured” (read: purged from society) gets a lot harder to justify. The fact is, Autism is an incredibly diverse and multifaceted neurotype, a source of human variation as beautiful and complex as eye color or body shape. Autism is not a simple spectrum for “low” to “high” functioning; it’s more like a sundae layered with a variety of toppings. And each one of those “toppings” — Autistic traits — can be mild, moderate, or strong in its intensity. Image originally by No More Puzzle Profits Sometimes, Autism comes with a heavy sprinkling of sensory sensitivity. Sometimes, it comes with a delicious caramel drizzle of disliking eye contact. Autism can be topped with a bright red cherry of hyper-focus. Or it can be filled with chocolate chips self-stimulatory behavior. Each Autistic person has a unique combination of Autistic traits, each in different amounts. And, just as ice cream toppings combine in interesting ways with the base flavor of the ice cream itself, Autistic traits interact (and intersect) with the Autistic person’s other attributes — such as their gender, race, culture of origin, and personality. Autistic women are often more skilled at making eye contact and feigning neurotypical behavior than autistic men are, for example. Similarly, Autistic people who are creatively inclined may develop an obsessive special interest in music, painting, or sculpture, rather than the more stereotypical trains and math. Autism is diverse, in part, because it isn’t some malignant disorder that impairs functioning or erodes personality. It’s a neurotype — a core part of who a person is. And all kinds of people can be Autistic. To illustrate this, I’d like to introduce you to five famous, creative Autistic people. This List is Carefully Curated There are many bad lists of “Celebrities with Autism” on the internet. Often they’re rife with speculation, and impose a diagnosis on a person from afar, without their consent. The lists tend to include historical figures who wouldn’t have even been familiar with Autism during their lifetimes (like Emily Dickenson or Albert Einstein), and celebrities who have done reprehensible things (like Woody Allen). I’m not interested in placing a label on anyone who hasn’t already actively claimed it. I’m also not interested in celebrating Autistic (or suspected-Autistic) people who are predatory or who view their Autism as a negative. Therefore, this list only includes celebrities who have publicly self-identified as Autistic (or as having Asperger’s), and who have discussed their Autism as something that society should work to accept and accommodate, rather than eradicate. These openly Autistic people are all creative, expressive people — and that’s a very deliberate choice as well. These individuals flout the stereotype of Autism as condition that blunts and flattens; their lives and work reveal Autism to be a source of vibrance and uniqueness. Their struggles and challenges point to the fact that Autism is a neurotype that must be better accommodated and understood by the neurotypical public, rather than destroyed/”cured”. Daryl Hannah Actor Daryl Hannah has described, in numerous interviews, the impact being Autistic has had on her professional life as an actor and activist. Throughout her life, she has been underestimated, and excluded, due to neuroatypical behavior such as avoiding eye contact and rocking in place to self-soothe. When she was a child, medical professionals mistakenly believed her disability warranted institutionalization and heavy medication. She was not expected to live an independent life. She defied this underestimation by moving to LA to pursue acting. Throughout her acting career, Daryl Hannah embodied characters that were intense, fiercely independent, and charismatic in their strangeness. Her roles in Clan of the Cave Bear and Splash, in particular, strike me as Autistic-adjacent. In both films, her characters are outsiders thrown into societies — and species — that are utterly unfamiliar, with strange customs that are hard to obey and social norms that are difficult to make sense of. The characters weren’t intentionally written to be Autistic, of course, but Hannah’s portrayal of them is infused with her own neuroatypicality. Hannah’s character in Kill Bill can also be easily read as an Autistic. Elle Driver is a strange spitfire, utterly unique in her style of dress, mannerisms, and way of speaking. Throughout the entire movie, she paves her own odd way — breaking rules, dressing like a weird 1970’s business pirate, and refusing to tolerate ignorance or disrespect. Though she’s aligned with the titular “Bill”, she follows an ethical system all her own — and tramples over anyone who gets in the way of it. Autistic people often loathe following pointless social rules — including gender norms and standards of politesse. Elle Driver illustrates that beautifully, in a captivating, severe package. Though Hannah was unquestionably a talented and distinctive actor, her career suffered due to other people’s intolerance of her Autism. Hannah found movie premiers and awards shows intensely anxiety provoking, and avoided giving interviews as much as possible. She was discouraged from publicly using self-stimulatory behavior (or “stimming”) — a practice many Autistic people find calming and immensely beneficial — as a means of processing her anxiety. Eventually, multiple film studios blacklisted Hannah in response to her social awkwardness. Daryl Hannah’s experiences are an excellent introduction to the social model of disability. Hannah was clearly capable of being a proficient, talented actor. Her major impediment, professionally, was other people’s expectations of what acceptable professional behavior looked like. Today, she is an effective and devoted environmental activist, and does occasionally still appear in films and TV. Her latest role, as of this writing, was Angelica Turing in Sens8. Dan Aykroyd Autistic people are often stereotyped as being monotonous and humorless. Actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd’s is a perfect counter-example. In fact, he has frequently cited his Autism as a font of creativity, and the main reason that Ghostbusters even exists. Aykroyd exhibited early precursors to Autism as a child — including Tourette’s — but did not seek an Autism assessment until adulthood, at his wife’s prompting. One of his most evident Autistic traits was his special interests — he was obsessed with ghosts, ghost hunting, and law enforcement throughout the 1980’s, which lead, in part, to the creation of Ghostbusters. Aykroyd also credits his Autism with the development of many of his characters. As a child, he spent a lot of time looking at his own image in the mirror, making faces and practicing expressions. Many Autistic people struggle to emote in socially appropriate ways, and use facial or verbal ticks as a stim; Aykroyd used these traits to hone his performance skills. In an interview with the Guardian, he states: “My very mild Asperger’s has helped me creatively. I sometimes hear a voice and think: “That could be a character I could do.” Though a state of Autistic hyper-focus is often mistaken as a flat, robotic state by neurotypical people, Aykroyd’s work demonstrates that it can be a source of inspiration and expressiveness. In addition, Aykroyd’s affable, warm public persona challenges the notion of Autistic people as cold and unemotional. Aykroyd shows clearly, and proudly, that Autistic people can be goofy, friendly, and expressive. They can love music, comedy, vodka, and ghosts, just like anyone else. Stephen Wiltshire Architectural artist and “human camera” Stephen Wiltshire is perhaps best known for the viral video in which he recreates a cityscape with photorealistic detail, after viewing it just once from the window of a helicopter. The video, and much of the writing about Stephen, unfortunately buys into common journalist tropes about Autistic adults: he’s portrayed as an “inspiring” savant, whose worth as a disabled person has been earned via his talent. Even his moniker — the human camera — reinforces the stereotype of Autistic people as robotic and inhuman. But Wiltshire is so much more than all that. A London native, Wiltshire was nonverbal throughout his childhood. Like many Autistic people, he found forming words difficult, despite immense social and educational pressure to communicate in neurotypical ways. His special interest, and primary mode of communication, was always drawing. Teachers forced a five-year-old Wiltshire to speak by withholding arts supplies from him. Frustrated, and denied his central mode of self-expression, Wiltshire produced vocalizations, and eventually said his first word — “paper”. He became fully verbal several years later. Initially interested in drawing animals and cars, at age seven Wiltshire became interested in the city’s landmark buildings. A teacher accompanied him on drawing trips throughout London, and Wiltshire began to develop his skills and receive local acclaim for his hyper-realistic sketches. His photographic memory, Autistic hyper-focus, and obsessive interest in architecture allowed him to make creative and technical strides with remarkable speed. Local acclaim exploded into national and international notoriety, and at age 8, Wiltshire was commissioned by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to draw the Salisbury Cathedral. Wiltshire and his art have toured internationally, and he has published four books of his work. His third book, Floating Cities, made it to the number-one position on the Sunday Times Bestseller List. In 2006, Wiltshire opened a permanent art gallery in London’s Royal Opera Arcade. He has drawn cityscapes from memory throughout the world, and often uses his art to fund raise for locations that have been devastated by natural disaster. Wiltshire is an Autistic figure of incredible importance. His story highlights that Autistic people can be deeply creative and expressive, that nonverbal people have massive and beautiful inner lives, and that neurotypical social skills are not required to live a life of fulfillment and success. Wiltshire’s childhood mistreatment by teachers also should serve as a reminder that Autistic people deserve to pursue their passions, and that they shouldn’t be denied their creative outlets as a means of forcing “normal” communicative behavior on them. Gary Numan In 1979, British musician Gary Numan introduced the world to paradigm shifting, genre-breaking synthetic music with his albums Replica and The Pleasure Principle. In the years since the release of those albums, Numan has remained a ridiculously prolific, experimental, and genre-busting artist, all traits he attributes to his Autism. Numan experienced Autistic meltdowns and behavioral problems throughout his childhood and adolescent years; symptoms for which he was medicated. As a teen, he developed special interests in piloting and, when his father bought him a guitar, music. He rapidly developed into an immensely productive artist: by age 21 he had released three albums, in two different genres. Following the release of his second and third albums in 1979, Numan soared to notoriety. He found the sudden spate of attention and media appearances very anxiety-provoking and overstimulating. To make performances bearable, he established an alienlike, robotic stage persona, with stiff movements and a faraway stare. This persona entranced his early fans, and allowed Numan to incorporate his Autism into his performance. Numan continued to churn out albums throughout the early and mid-80’s, and made frequent media appearances, though he was infamously shy and awkward. In interviews, he’d avoid eye contact and hide behind hats and heavy makeup, and would sometimes fidget with toy planes. His responses to interview questions were often hyper-literal and unexpectedly candid — which often threw interviewers for a loop. Numan maintained his high productivity throughout the 90’s and 2000’s, creating music in a variety of genres including punk rock, synth pop, and industrial music. In interviews, Numan frequently explains how his neurotype helped him to thrive and grow as an artist — Autism allows him to focus intently on the music he is creating, allowing the rest of the world to “drop away”. His varied special interests have driven him to pursue mastery of multiple genres. Throughout his early career, Numan’s parents provided him with a great deal of support — his father served as his manager, and his mother made his costumes and ran his fan club. As an adult, his main source of emotional and social support is his wife, Gemma O’Neill. Gemma has an Autistic brother, and was the first person to suggest that Numan look into the neurotype as an explanation for his tendency towards obsession and his social problems. Numan’s career illustrates that Autistic people can be successful professionals and artists, even if they struggle with social skills or executive functioning. When Autistic people have an encouraging and understanding support network, they can thrive in fields that are unfairly tailored to neurotypical people. Courtney Love Musician and actor Courtney Love was identified as Autistic by a therapist when she was nine. As a child, she struggled behaviorally and academically, and had trouble making friends. As a teenager, her behavioral problems worsened, and she was expelled from school, then arrested for shoplifting and sent to a juvenile correctional facility. She became legally emancipated at sixteen, and began working odd jobs and stripping to support herself. In college, Love still struggled to make friends, and developed social skills by emulating drag queens that she had watched at local gay bars. Many Autistic people identify strongly with fictional personas, and adopt the language, mannerism, or personalities of media figures they admire — and in Love’s case, it proved successful. She began acting and performing music, using the outlandish, wild persona she had developed for herself. She eventually taught herself to play guitar, and in 1988, formed the band Hole. Courtney Love’s early music was a testament to her experiences as a disabled and socially alienated young woman. Hole’s debut single, “R*tard Girl” describes a mocked, alienated disabled girl; in interviews, Love has stated the song is about her experience of getting picked on for being shy and awkward as a child. Courtney Love transitioned from music to acting in the mid-1990’s, and in 1996 earned a Golden Globe for her performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Throughout the 2000’s, she continued acting, producing music as a solo artist and with Hole, and even dabbled in visual art and fashion. In interviews, Love is infamous for being unfiltered. Her frank discussion of drug addiction, grief, and legal troubles made her the subject of a great deal of media interest over the years. Her openness, strangeness, and candor have often been interpreted as signs that she is still actively using drugs, or that she is an irresponsible parent and a “mess”. Viewing Courtney Love’s creative success, adventurousness, and strangeness through a lens of Autism helps a unified image of her come into focus. She has been less direct than some of the other people on this list about how her Autism connects to her professional life, but the content of her lyrics and her choices of acting roles reveals a common thread: like every other Autistic person mentioned here, she found a creative outlet that allowed her to express deeply-felt estrangement from mainstream, neurotypical society.

https://devonprice.medium.com/autism-is-a-creative-boon-b9974e137099

['Devon Price']

2018-04-02 18:36:44.172000+00:00

['Art', 'Psychology', 'Mental Health', 'Autism', 'Creativity']

The Genius Formula of BTS- The K-Pop Phenomenon That Took The World By Storm

Disclaimer: The content you’ll read below is based on extensive research on my part and my personal experiences with the band over the years. I am by no means a BTS expert, so do let me know if there is any errata in my claims. Thank you! Just under a month ago, the South Korean boy band BTS attained the №1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 with their single ‘Dynamite’- an astronomical feat no other South Korean act has ever come close to achieving before. Their energetic, disco-funk themed music video for the single has also cemented a new record high for the most number of views on Youtube in 24 hours- 101.1 million views. It’s at a whopping 371 million views right now, and it’ll only keep climbing higher. They’ve also amassed the biggest weekly digital sales sum since Prince and the Revolution’s 1984 classic “Purple Rain” 3 years ago. Since the release of Dynamite, they’ve also performed at the VMAs & America’s Got Talent- two of the most desirable and sought-after platforms for any artist to promote their material. And there’s definitely more prestigious stages to come. BTS performing Dynamite at the VMAs And BTS is definitely no stranger on the Billboard. Prior to the release of Dynamite, they already boast four №1 albums on the Billboard 200 chart in under two years, making them the first group to achieve such a feat since the Beatles. They also hold the record for the most weeks at №1 on the Social 50 chart (195 and counting). And this is just in America. Domestically, their recent album Map Of The Soul: 7, holds the title of the best selling album in the country, with more than 4 million copies sold to date. This is just one of the countless other stupendous records set so far. But things weren’t always so rosy for the world’s biggest boy band. In fact, BTS had to endure numerous hardships before they even had a sniff of success.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/the-genius-formula-of-bts-the-kpop-phenomenon-that-took-the-world-by-storm-4042010c396b

[]

2020-09-26 09:39:50.986000+00:00

['Fashion', 'Business', 'Marketing', 'Creativity', 'Music']

The Songs that Save Our Lives

A few weeks ago, I was catching up on my Instagram stories (I’m really bad about doing the Instagram stories, and checking them, but that’s a whole different adventure) and I came across the Kerrigan-Lowdermilk story that showed their new merch. And when I saw the “Holding On” shirt, my heart nearly stopped. It may just be the most beautiful t-shirt I’ve ever seen. The reason for that? Well, it goes back a ways. I first discovered Kait and Brian’s music the summer after I graduated from high school. This story may be mostly apocryphal, as I don’t trust my memory from back then, but I have a vague recollection of cramming into my best friend’s car, getting on Interstate 405 after a night at the beach, when “Freedom” (from what was known at the time as The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown and is now The Mad Ones) blasted through her speakers. Those of you familiar with this song — and you all should be — will know that this moment is almost too perfect; a bunch of teens crammed into a car on a balmy SoCal summer night, windows down, spirits high, when the perfect road trip anthem comes on. I fell in love with the song as much as I fell in love with that moment. As we didn’t have Shazam at the time, I held on to a snippet of the lyrics, which I googled when I got home. And thus, my enduring love for all things Kerrigan-Lowdermilk began. I was at the time in my life when I thought things would be taking off. I didn’t yet know that, just a couple months from that night, I would lose the first of my three friends in three years to cancer. I couldn’t foresee the depressive episode that would swallow most of my twenties (“the best years of your life!”) and cost me most of my friendships, including all of the friends in the car with me that night. But I had the music, and the music saved me. There were many nights — too many nights — in the years that followed when the only things that kept me going, the only thing that kept me connected to the earth beneath me, were these lyrics from the song “Holding On”: The Earth keeps turning, The light keeps shifting, And I keep holding on. I would listen to “Holding On” whenever possible. If I was somewhere that I could, I would sing along. And, on those bad nights, I would speak the words to myself. It was a prayer at a time when I had begun to lose my faith. It was a promise when all of the promises in my life were unravelling. It was something to hold onto when there was nothing else. Even when it was a struggle, even when I kept failing, I had, at least, the music. I had my mantra. It seems like such a silly; three lines, thirteen words, from a song that most of the world wouldn’t recognize. But those words kept me going through the bad times. They got me to both Kerrigan-Lowdermilk shows in Los Angeles in 2013, where I got to lose my heart in my favorite music and end the night by singing my mantra with a room full of beautiful strangers. Almost ten years have passed since that summer night in the car. Ten difficult years when I wasn’t sure if I would make it. Now I’m edging out of my twenty-somethings and staring down the barrel of the tick…tick…BOOM! But that’s another show and another story. Life is better now, even if it’s still not what I wanted. I still haven’t been to New York City, still haven’t planted myself in a Broadway theater, still haven’t made a career in this world that I love. It might sound silly or petty, but watching people who are a decade (or more) younger than you live out their dreams and take advantage of opportunities you never had but always wanted is painful. You feel like the world is ending. You feel like a failure. But, as hard and hopeless as it has been, I keep holding on. That’s no small thing, and neither is this t-shirt, as silly as it may sound. I get to wear these words that have sustained me — my mantra, Kait’s lyrics — for the world to see. For anyone out there in case you, too, need them: The Earth keeps turning, The light keeps shifting, And I keep holding on. If you need these words, take them. They are there for you. If there are other words, other lyrics or poems or lines from plays or books, that keep you afloat, cling to them. Do not be afraid. Do not be ashamed. Our culture largely likes to dismiss art, especially art that doesn’t serve as a means to bring the creators or performers a ton of money. But art is vital. Words are vital. Music is vital. They can keep you alive. Cling to what you can. Cling to what you love. Keep holding on.

https://zachjpayne.medium.com/the-songs-that-save-our-lives-f06469cf362c

['Zach J. Payne']

2019-03-04 20:13:17.873000+00:00

['Music', 'Mental Health', 'Art', 'Creativity', 'Survival']

Threading the Needle: How to Save Nature and Humanity without Sacrificing Either Part I

Saving nature without sacrificing modern life is the preeminent challenge of our time. It is a complicated problem that must be attacked simultaneously from multiple angles. Failure to act on one angle will invalidate efforts on other angles. This problem must be addressed in two distinct phases. First, we must stop living in a manner that actively harms both ourselves and the natural world. Then we must learn how to create a world where both nature and humanity thrive. This two-part article will explore how we can reorganize our civilization to be compatible with such a vision. Part II can be found here. Part I: First, Do No Harm It is necessary to begin first with the practice of harm reduction. Before we can heal our relationship with nature, we must first stop actively harming it. Any serious effort to preserve the natural world must transform the agricultural system, economic system, and cultural attitudes that presently threaten it. Anything short of this will result in a heavily degraded world left behind for future generations. Agriculture: Agriculture is by far the largest human enterprise on the planet by land area. It is also a leading contributing factor to global biodiversity loss, oceanic dead zones, nitrous-oxide and methane emissions, deforestation, soil degradation, and chemical pollutants such as pesticides. To confront this, we must address both how we produce our food and what foods we consume. The single quickest way to dramatically and positively transform the agricultural system would be a widespread adoption of plant-based diets. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this. An overwhelming 67% of arable land in the United States grows feed explicitly for livestock. Globally, animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation. This is especially concerning at the global level, because as nations become wealthier, they consume more calories from animal products, and most of the world’s arable land is already cultivated. By dramatically reducing our consumption of animal products, we can reduce the land needed for agriculture and its associated environmental impact. Following this, we can take further steps to reduce the footprint of agriculture such as cutting food waste, recycling nutrients from our waste streams, and transitioning from traditional outdoor farming to vertical indoor farming. To the extent that it is possible, we could move our agricultural center to be within our urban centers, freeing up additional land, reducing dependence on variable natural cycles, and allowing for the integration of urban organic waste with vertical farms. This would have the added benefit of dramatically reducing the need for fertilizers and pesticides and the deleterious effects of their application and overuse. The combined result of these changes would dramatically increase the efficiency of our food system and shrink the footprint of required arable land to feed a growing global population. What we do with the land that is freed from intensive agriculture is up to us. Economy: Resource extraction is necessary for us to enjoy the benefits of modern life, but we cannot continue to wantonly destroy the environment to procure its wealth. Alongside changes to the way we produce and consume food, we must change the way we consume, produce, and distribute resources and wealth, and manage our perceptions of what it means to lead a good life. We can start by dramatically curtailing our consumption habits. This could be achieved through legislation that restricts purchases of resource-intensive goods such as personal vehicles and electronics. Alongside this, we could mandate that all consumer goods be built for reliability and longevity, be easily repairable, and be easy to recycle at the manufacturer’s expense. Further reductions in the need for commodities could be achieved through sharing economies, where communities share tools and resources, similar to libraries with books, as opposed to strictly individual ownership. Parallel to the reduction of resource extraction, we can and should innovate less harmful ways to extract resources from the earth. The cost of extracting resources, including environmental degradation and human hardship, should be fully reflected in consumer products. This would also have the side effect of increasing the economic incentive to recycle materials from our waste stream. Many raw materials and consumer goods are imported at present. Integral to the success of these policies would be tariffs or other restrictions that prevent corporations from outsourcing pollution and human suffering for cheaper products. The lowest cost way to reduce consumption would be to re-envision our notions of wealth beyond strictly material measures and develop economic metrics that measure welfare rather than “growth.” One vision for what a post-growth economy might look like in practice is “Doughnut Economics.” In this model, societal well-being is measured through several metrics with a floor and a ceiling. The floor represents a basic standard of living inclusive of income, education, resilience, voice, jobs, energy, social equity, gender equality, health, and access to food and clean water. The ceiling represents certain planetary boundaries such as climate change, freshwater use, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycle, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, atmospheric aerosol loading, ozone depletion, biodiversity loss, and land use changes. These changes, if enacted, could create an economy that delivers a high standard of living without sacrificing the planet in the process. Perhaps in the process, we could find greater satisfaction with our lives as well. Culture: Transforming the dominant culture is far harder than transforming the economy as it is less tangible, though it is no less important. The prevailing culture encourages the cynical exploitation of the vulnerable by the strong and places people into a struggle for dominance over each other. Ultimately, most of our major social and environmental crises all stem from these toxic attitudes entrenched in our culture. We evolved as a collaborative species that is most successful when living in groups. That our culture endorses extreme individualism is fundamentally a denial of what it means to be human, backed up by millennia of human evolution in groups. These entrenched attitudes have pushed us to a point of existential crisis, both literal and figurative. The dominant cultural framework is fundamentally incapable of solving the problems that we face, as it is what created the problems in the first place. The solution to this is to radically transform our culture into one that embraces vulnerability, solidarity, and the work to dismantle oppressive institutions. This may not prevent states from failing, mass migration as cities flood, crop failures, or species extinctions, but it will create a kinder, gentler, and more resilient world to live in. By changing the way we think about our world and each other, we stand a better chance of solving the most difficult challenges of our time. Bringing it All Together: Achieving the transformation of just one of these three systems would be revolutionary. Achieving the transformation of all three would be a change like no other in human history. Perhaps the closest analogue would be when humans adopted agriculture and first started settling in cities. And yet, we are at a time unlike any other in history. The challenge of our times necessitates that we act quickly, boldly, and across multiple dimensions. We must work within the institutions that are available to us at any given time. The world is not a blank slate for us to write on however we see fit. Rather, like evolution through natural selection, we must make do with what we have, seize opportunities as they become available, and modify existing structures to suit our needs. Similar to evolution, change can happen very rapidly when conditions become favorable or unfavorable to one group over another. One step that could help put us on a path towards the transformation of our systems is to grant personhood to land. New Zealand has been a pioneer in granting personhood to non-traditional entities. In 2013, personhood was granted to Te Urewera national park. The Whanganui River and subsequently Mount Taranaki were granted personhood in 2017. Similar to how we do not tolerate abuses for people or certain animals, land ownership (or perhaps more accurately, guardianship) would be denied to those who abuse, exploit, or otherwise mismanage it. Any act of harm to the land would be legally treated in the same manner as acts of harm to a person. This is fundamentally at odds with certain beliefs about private property in our culture, but we can no longer afford to view land as property for one to do with as they please. These protections would require a minimum standard of stewardship that would balance conservation, food production, and resource extraction. In many ways, we already have models for this through the Forest Service and Park Service. However, privately owned land is not afforded the same protection, and protections for public land are often not enforced. In the present framework, landowners might be fined for certain forms of mismanagement, but suffer no risk of losing their property. There must be real consequences for the misuse and mismanagement (and benefits for responsible stewardship) of land if we are to change our relationship with it. The ramifications of this would be nothing short of transformative for all three of the aforementioned dimensions of society: agriculture, economics, and culture. For agriculture, it would make sense to do away with environmentally destructive methods of food production. Livestock grazing would rank near the top, as it contributes to increased methane emissions, soil erosion and degradation, increased suspended sediments in rivers, manure pollution, water scarcity due to irrigation for supplemental feed crops, and the spread of invasive species such as cheatgrass. As much as 41% of land in the contiguous US is used for ranching and pastoral agriculture. This is an enormous amount of land that could be restored for conservation value, spanning a wide variety of habitats across the US. For economics, this could radically transform how and where we extract and manage resources, and how we handle land that has been degraded due to resource extraction. Certain highly destructive forms of resource extraction could be permanently discontinued, such as clear-cutting of forests, mountaintop removal for coal extraction, and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Alternative, less harmful methods of resource extraction could become favored over their destructive counterparts, such as hemp farming for textiles and paper products, third-generation biofuels for liquid fuel alternatives, or green-mining techniques for metal extraction. Culturally, giving land legal personhood could lead to long term changes in public perception of our place in the landscape from one of taking to one that is more fundamentally rooted in reciprocity. As one cannot own a person, land ownership as a concept would be challenged to its core. This could establish a system of “the commons” where land is not owned by individuals but is collectively shared; the closest analogue we have for this presently is our public lands. As persons have legal rights, protections, and the ability to bring action in court, one could realistically consider the public bringing forward charges on its behalf. The most egregious acts of systematic harm to the environment could be brought up as “crimes against the environment” and “ecocide” in a parallel manner to “crimes against humanity” and genocide. Such changes would be nothing short of revolutionary, and yet our times call for bold and visionary thinking. The time to act is now or never.

https://medium.com/climate-conscious/threading-the-needle-how-to-save-nature-and-humanity-without-sacrificing-either-part-i-d2d094419686

['Charles Whitaker']

2020-11-16 06:24:12.774000+00:00

['Climate Change', 'Culture', 'Society', 'Future', 'Sustainability']

My Exact $2,000 a Month Online Side-Hustle Daily Routine

Becoming a full-time, work-for-yourself writer and online entrepreneur is a dream that thousands — if not millions — of individuals aspire to achieve. Like many things worthwhile, in order to become one, it takes time and a lot of hard work. For a lot of people (myself included), it all starts when you are currently grinding away at a full-time job. What's more, is this full-time job is something you're trying to get out of. Enter — the Art of The Side Hustle. Side hustles have been talked about a lot in the last 5 or so years. What is a side hustle? According to Oberlo a side hustle is, "a way to make money outside of your 9 to 5 job. It allows you to make more money that’ll give you the freedom to pursue your passions, buy things you need or want, and lower any financial worries. Truth is, most 9 to 5 jobs don’t pay the bills. Especially if you’re just starting out in your career." I'd personally take that last paragraph a bit further with, "The truth is, most 9 to 5 jobs don't pay the bills. They further don't bring the type of meaning and fulfillment one expected when starting out." That's why a side hustle can be so beautiful and rewarding. If done correctly, an individual can work towards and fulfilling and meaningful goal while simultaneously supplementing his or her income — sometimes in the range of thousands per month. Now a side hustle that either builds to full-time income or helps supplement income for discretionary purchases can take many forms. For me, it took the form of writing online articles and using those articles to drive traffic so I could market and sell my digital products. In this article, we'll go over the exact routine I used to build up to my $2,000 a month online side hustle. I made that money through the publication of online content as well as the sale of digital downloads and online courses. We'll go over how to generate writing prompts within your niche, how to publish articles that make money, and how to drive those money-making articles to the sale of your digital products. Let's get into it.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/my-exact-2-000-a-month-online-side-hustle-daily-routine-de22640b18d9

['Jon Brosio']

2020-08-28 17:31:02.824000+00:00

['Motivation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Success', 'Digital Marketing', 'Writing']

Wearing A Mask Is About Respect and…Yes, Freedom

Wearing A Mask Is About Respect and…Yes, Freedom Respect for the healthcare system, respect for each other, and freedom from COVID-19 Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash As we are learning more about this virus and its transmission, it is becoming clearer that wearing masks can make a big impact in reducing the person-to-person spread of SARS CoV-2. Unfortunately, the recommendation to wear a mask has led to significant anger (and even violence) among some of our fellow Americans. “It’s about freedom,” some say. “I have the freedom to not wear a mask, and no one can make me wear one.” I understand this sentiment. At the same time, we are all in this together, and each of us has a role to play in fighting this virus. My colleagues and I — the doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and others — are directly on the front lines, risking our lives to take care of the sickest patients afflicted by COVID-19. Our other American brothers and sisters not on the front lines can play their part by wearing a mask when out in public spaces. This is especially essential now that most of the country is emerging out of lockdown. Now, we in the healthcare field did not answer the calling to get respect. While it is nice no doubt, receiving respect is not why I became an ICU doctor. I became an ICU doctor because I love helping people survive their critical illness, which is why the overwhelming death we have seen from COVID-19 has been quite distressful for my colleagues and me. If I only have 35 ventilators and all are occupied by COVID patients, and you are patient number 36 that needs a ventilator to survive, I can’t help you. Photo by Javier Matheu on Unsplash And so, when I say wearing a mask is showing respect, it is the respect for the healthcare system and its capacity to take care of everyone who may need medical care. Now, this term, “healthcare system capacity,” is abstract and may not be clear what it means. And so, let me put it this way: let’s say I am taking care of patients in the hospital in your city or town. Let’s say I only have 35 ventilators, and everyone is occupied by a COVID patient. If you are patient number 36 gasping for air and needing a ventilator to survive, I can’t help you. This is a nightmare scenario for me as an ICU doctor, and I do not want to ever face this scenario. This is what “flattening the curve” means on a practical, “on the ground” level: it is allowing me to always be able to take care of every patient that comes to my ICU door that needs care. And wearing a mask when we are out in public helps lower the transmission of COVID-19 and keeps the healthcare system intact. In addition, wearing a mask is about respect for each other. More and more evidence is emerging that people can spread COVID-19 either before they develop symptoms or without developing symptoms at all. And so, when I wear a mask, I am protecting you from myself. The reverse is true as well. When I am wearing a mask, I am showing that I am doing what I can to protect everyone around me from this horrible disease. And while I’d much rather shake your hand in person, wearing a mask can be seen as the “new handshake” of the COVID-19 era. Moreover, wearing a mask is truly about freedom: freedom from contracting this horrible affliction. Nothing in life is 100% except death and taxes. There is no guarantee that this measure or that will prevent us from contracting COVID-19 with 100% certainty. Still, it is clear that wearing a mask makes a tremendous impact, and it can mean freedom from getting this disease. Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash And that means freedom from fever, body aches, fatigue; it means freedom from dangerously low oxygen levels that can threaten your life; it means freedom from gasping for air and possibly needing a ventilator. It means freedom from being alone in a hospital possibly for weeks on end; it means freedom from risking death — all alone without family at your side — from respiratory failure or kidney failure or heart attacks. It means freedom from having our children possibly getting a mysterious and dangerous inflammatory illness, which has been fatal; it means freedom from young people — in their 30s, 40s, and 50s — getting and dying from strokes (which many of my colleagues have seen). Getting this illness will take away many of our freedoms which we take for granted. When we wear a mask, it is not encroaching upon our freedom; it is doing what we can to preserve our freedom from a truly frightening scourge. It is truly unfortunate that a mask has become a symbol of oppression. That was never the intention. A mask is a very simple way that all of us in the American family can protect each other and help protect our precious healthcare resources. It is the very least we can do.

https://medium.com/beingwell/wearing-a-mask-is-about-respect-and-yes-freedom-5576e1cc7861

['Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa']

2020-06-09 01:27:22.526000+00:00

['Society', 'Healthcare', 'Health', 'Medicine', 'Coronavirus']

Writers Express Gratitude During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Writers Express Gratitude During the Covid-19 Pandemic The Being Well writers continue to search for answers. Thanksgiving 2020. It is more important than ever to find a way to be grateful for all that we have been given during challenging times. As the world struggles through the Covid-19 pandemic, the Being Well writing team comes together to celebrate our lives, our families, and our health. We will continue to write our way through the pandemic doing our part to bring up-to-date, scientifically validated content to our readers worldwide. Editor and ICU physician Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa starts us off with a Thanksgiving story of gratitude called There, But For The Grace of God, Go I. As we think about grace, we often reflect on happiness. Editor Dr. Patricia Farrell reminds us in her story When Great Is Never Good Enough that chasing happiness may be an endless and empty goal unless we make peace within ourselves. I feel tremendous gratitude to all who have joined the Being Well team. Each writer brings value to our community, and I am touched to see our followers continue to grow. I am immensely proud to see our writers clap, follow, and comment on each others’ work. Each day, I work to discover new writers and contributors. I felt such joy when Nzuekoh Nchinda, MD, a University of Washington general surgery resident, shares her story When A Scalpel Cut Doesn’t Bring Complete Healing. She takes us inside the mind of a doctor-in-training. She reminds us of the importance of mentorship during our training. The human element of care shines bright as she expresses a beautiful empathy for her young patient and family. Being Well celebrate’s our writers’ diversity. We are blessed with many healthcare provider authors. We also encourage patients to share their personal experiences. Jacqueline Dooley finds aid through the kindness of strangers in her story Finding Gratitude in the Face of Despair. As Thanksgiving passes, we transition into the Holiday Season. In the middle of a Covid-19 surge, flu season is right around the corner. I shared my thoughts in my story featured in the Medium Coronavirus Blog Doctors Sound the Alarm on Covid-19 Cases. Is Anyone Listening? I also want to thank Raven Baxter AKA Raven the Science Maven for reminding us all that science is fun. Her rap explanation of immunology is amazing. Check it out here. Coronavirus Dr. Anthony Fauci and other world experts have warned of a dark winter. The next few months are going to be the hardest yet. In science, we learn from the past, so we do not repeat the same mistakes. Research scientist Walter Harrington shares how our understanding of influenza gives us clues for what to expect this winter in What Will Winter Bring for Covid-19? Previous pandemics may provide even further guidance. Robert Turner reflects on the long-term genetic consequences of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic in Can the Covid-19 Virus Alter Our DNA? Just in time for winter, we received more encouraging Covid-19 vaccine news. Because the leading vaccine candidates require two doses one month apart with a three-week window to develop immunity-inducing antibodies, the timeline shows zero chance a vaccine plays a meaningful role in the next three months. As several vaccines arrive on the scene, many wonder if too many choices create a new set of problems. Research scientist Ethan Milne does not think so. He reports how consumer behavior research does not apply to vaccinations in his story Vaccines Are Not Like Jam. Cost may inhibit access to Covid-19 vaccination. Robert Turner highlights a disturbing trend in CNN Helps Kick Off The Vaccine Bidding Wars. What’s Your Health Worth? Rolling out vaccines to 328.2 million Americans will be one of the first challenges for President-Elect Joe Biden. But we can not forget the mental health needs of healthcare providers and patients. Psychiatrist Grant H Brenner provides a much-needed reminder in his story An Open Letter to President-Elect Biden: Psychiatry & The Covid-19 Advisory Board Fitness Many of us are working out to lose the quarantine 15. Medium publication Feedium founder J.J. Pryor exposes the hard truth that working out will not offset a bad diet in You Can’t Out-Train Your Diet — Believe Me. Michael Hunter MD continues to bring us actionable fitness tips to help us achieve our goals in these three stories: Mental health Psychiatrist Grant Brenner shows us how developmental trauma affects our relationships later in life in Six Ways Developmental Trauma Shapes Adult Identity. Jean Anne Feldeisen demonstrates how therapists work to build trusting relationships when meeting someone new. These lessons apply to all of us in her story How Therapists Create Useful Relationships with New Clients. We gain an understanding of provider burnout as Dentist Michelle Middleton shares why she is leaving clinical practice in Why I Won’t Miss Clinical Dentistry. Dr. Patricia Farrell explains how habitual lying becomes easier because of our brain structures in Lying and the Eagerly Agreeable Dishonest Brain. She also tells us it is time to throw out an outdated test in her story It’s About Time We Trashed the Questionable Rorschach. Society Check out the new consumer safety project launched by Medika Life. MOBILIZE™ Health, Robert Turner, and the Medika team take on protecting vulnerable groups by focusing on quacks and medical charlatans. The failure to regulate dangerous products like Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) puts children’s lives at risk. Find out more in this disturbing story Debunking Bleach and Chlorine Dioxide as a Medical Treatment. Older adults are another at-risk population. Dr. Patricia Farrell explains how nursing homes are not the answer for all, and for some, it means loss of independence and a broken heart. She shares the challenges in “I Want to Go Home!” The Mournful Cries in Nursing Homes. General health Health Finance Institute links climate change and environmental research to demonstrate the negative effects on our health in The Double Burden of Respiratory NCDs and Air Pollution. The pollution problem will not help our next author Dr. Rich Sobel who shares his lifetime struggle with asthma and hay fever in We’re Just Big Slime Buckets. Will computer vision be a useful tool in cancer detection? James Goydos, MD explains this upcoming technological innovation in Skin Cancer & Computer Vision — A New Sense? Maybe a dirty environment has some benefits? Tara Fernandez analyzes new research on infant immune development in Dirty Sheets Make Babies Healthier. The editorial team Dr. Patricia Farrell, Dr. Hesham A. Hassaballa, Dr. Jeff Livingston, and Robert Turner updated the submission guidelines to help you get your stories published. Here are our tips and tools. Come join the team. Let’s grow together Growing a publication is a community effort, and we can not do it without you. Twitter is a key tool to grow your followers and spread validated information. Follow the Being Well writers list. Lisa Bradburn, a Psychotherapist-In-Training, promotes our authors’ stories on the Being Well Facebook page. Help support the page by following, commenting, and sharing.

https://medium.com/beingwell/writers-express-gratitude-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-b7e656595c5b

['Dr Jeff Livingston']

2020-11-29 20:06:19.576000+00:00

['Health', 'Mental Health', 'Covid 19', 'Society', 'Fitness']

Amazon EC2 — A Step By Step Tutorial

Launching an EC2 instance Signing up For AWS To launch an EC2 instance first you’ll need to set up an AWS account. Amazon provides new users with 1 year of free tire access which comes with free access to various AWS services within certain limits. To get more information about AWS free tier and creating an AWS account visit this link. Launching EC2 instance from the Management Console Although there are various options provided by AWS to launch an EC2 instance (management console, CLI, APIs, and SDKs), AWS Management Console provides an interactive and neatly built user interface from which we can access and manage all the available services of AWS. To launch an EC2 instance, log in to your account that will take you to the management console. Your management console looks like this: AWS Management Console You can search for the EC2 service in the search bar or you can select your service from the Services option in the navbar at the top. The EC2 service will be under the compute category. Upon selecting the EC2 service you’ll be on the following screen.

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/launching-an-amazon-ec2-instance-a-step-by-step-tutorial-da8af465aa64

['Furqan Butt']

2020-08-28 12:40:55.103000+00:00

['Cloud Computing', 'Ec2', 'Iaas', 'Big Data', 'AWS']

The Music That Moved Me in 2018

Jason Isbell — Southeastern I’ve written before about how talented Jason Isbell is, and his album that came out in 2017 — The Nashville Sound — was my favorite of last year. Out of all of his music, though, I still think this release is his best. It’s musically diverse, skillfully written, and contains some of the best lyrics that I’ve ever heard. The way that Isbell sums up both the American South and life in general is what sets him apart from nearly every other songwriter in the country. There’s no pretension in his lyrics, and he skillfully explores topics like loss, love, and hope in ways that are truly unique. I’ve attempted to write about some of his best songs before, so I’ll refrain from repeating myself here, but his music continues to move me in ways that no other artist can. On a song-by-song basis, Southeastern contains some of his best musical moments “Cover me Up” was probably his best-known song before “If We Were Vampires,” and “Flying Over Water” (my personal favorite of his), “Elephant,” and “Relatively Easy” are all classics as well. Whenever I don’t know what to listen to, I often turn to this album. The music here fits almost any situation or mood. Manchester Orchestra — Black Mile to the Surface This album came out last year and it has rarely fallen out of my usual rotation of music. Andy Hull a lyrical mastermind, and the band’s decades of experience build to what is their best album to date. It’s dark, brooding, and sad, and every moment is compelling in some way. The songs here range across a variety of different topics and musical themes. There are loud, angry songs, quiet, contemplative ones, and motifs of despair and hope that interweave themselves together. This is certainly not an easy album to listen to, but the musical and lyrical expertise make it one of my favorites ever. I kept coming back to this album because of its maturity. 2018 has been a difficult year for me personally, and many of the feelings I’ve grappled with I find on this album. That doesn’t mean the actual circumstances that crop up in Hull’s lyrics match my own life at all, but rather that there’s an emotional overlap that I find soothing. Foxing — Nearer My God I wrote earlier about how much I love the title track off this album, but the entire project is pretty great as well. This is an album that I had to listen through a few times before it sunk in, mostly due to some of the musical choices. The songs often ramble and meander along, and consequently I think this album as a whole could stand to be a few minutes shorter. Nearer My God makes this list because of the moments when it shines brightest. The title track is magnificent, and other songs — like “Bastardizer” or “Gameshark” — are also compelling. I still need to listen to Foxing’s discography a little more before I will feel that I truly understand their music, and the same goes for this album. At its best moments, though, it’s fantastic in every way. The National — High Violet The National as a band is regarded as one of the most talented and consistent indie rock groups in existence. Their last five albums have all been magnificent, and it’s not surprising to see their fans expound on the merits of any single one. Matt Berninger’s distinctive vocals and melancholy lyrics are a staple in their genre, as are Bryan Devendorf’s drumlines. For some reason, though, High Violet has always been my favorite album from The National’s library. This year, I came back to it again and again. The opening notes of “Terrible Love,” the drumbeats and melodies of “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” and the inescapable sadness of “Sorrow” all register somewhere in my psyche and emotions, and they all remind me both of events this year and the first time I played this album. As 2018 ends, I’ve been playing through The National’s catalogue again and again. I think I’ve started to take their greatness for granted, and somehow became less impressed with each consistent and beautiful album they released. If nothing else, writing a few lines about High Violet is a reminder of how great this band really is. Even if The National stopped recording today, their library would be one of the best I’ve ever heard.

https://medium.com/the-coastline-is-quiet/the-music-that-moved-me-in-2018-3fd8797404bb

['Thomas Jenkins']

2018-12-31 17:29:58.307000+00:00

['Writing', 'Music', 'Culture', '2018', 'Design']

Profession

As we get older, our professions become more involved and demanding. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For those of us who aspire to be creatives, having a job that puts demands on some other part of the mind can be liberating. Novelists who have made a career as copywriters may find it hard to come home to work on their own writing after a day of writing for someone else. This is understandable. After all, the same part of the brain is being utilized. But if you can manage to have a job that does not require that part of your creative brain, you can have the best of both worlds. Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson worked nights as a hotel clerk so he could have more time to write. That’s admirable. The graveyard shift is bad enough, but doing it for a purpose takes the sting out a bit. Either way, his gamble paid off. We all have to have priorities. If you can manage to leverage your profession for artistic expression, you are lucky indeed.

https://medium.com/my-clothes-have-ink-stains/profession-8f2d8b7c49bc

['Carlos Lewis']

2016-09-07 00:06:18.435000+00:00

['Books', 'Work', 'Creativity', 'Brandon Sanderson', 'Writing']

Funnel charts with Python

Matplotlib There is no method for instantly creating funnel charts in Matplotlib, so let’s start with a simple horizontal bar chart and build from there. import matplotlib.pyplot as plt y = [5,4,3,2,1] x = [80,73,58,42,23] plt.barh(y, x) Horizontal Bar Chart — Image by the author That’s actually quite close to what we want, so why not stop here and use a bar chart instead? It may be even easier to compare the values with a simple bar chart, but choosing the funnel-shaped one can make the relationship between the bars more explicit and make our visualization more appealing. Ok, so we’ll need to plot one bar at a time and use the ‘left’ parameter to adjust its position in the chart. Let’s check how this works. y = [5,4,3,2,1] x = [80,73,58,42,23] x_max = 100 x_min = 0 for idx, val in enumerate(x): plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = idx+5) plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) Horizontal bar chart with floating bars — Image by the author We have the bars' size, which is x and the range of the x-axis, which is 100. The difference between those values is the blank space, and to center the bars, we need to have the same amount of blank space on each side. So we can say that: left = (size of the bar - x-axis range) / 2 Let’s see how this looks. y = [5,4,3,2,1] x = [80,73,58,42,23] x_max = 100 x_min = 0 for idx, val in enumerate(x): left = (x_max - val)/2 plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = left, color='grey') plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) Funnel chart — Image by the author Great! But the axis information doesn’t mean much now that the bars don’t have the same starting point. We need to print the values on the bars and connect them. y = [5,4,3,2,1] x = [80,73,58,42,23] x_max = 100 x_min = 0 fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(12,6)) for idx, val in enumerate(x): left = (x_max - val)/2 plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = left, color='grey', height=1, edgecolor='black') # value plt.text(50, y[idx], x[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') plt.axis('off') plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) Funnel chart with values — Image by the author Alright, we could add a title, some labels for the bars, and call it a day. But let’s give our viewers some eye-candy and add a shadow connecting the bars instead of just stacking them. That will make our chart and the connection between the bars more clear. First, let’s define all the variables we’ll need from matplotlib import font_manager as fm # funnel chart y = [5,4,3,2,1] x = [80,73,58,42,23] labels = ['Hot Leads', 'Samples Sent', 'Quotes', 'Negotiations', 'Sales'] x_max = 100 x_min = 0 x_range = x_max - x_min fpath = "fonts/NotoSans-Regular.ttf" font = fm.FontProperties(fname=fpath) Now, let’s add some more details to our plot. fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(12,6)) for idx, val in enumerate(x): left = (x_range - val)/2 plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = left, color='#808B96', height=.8, edgecolor='black') # label plt.text(50, y[idx]+0.1, labels[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') # value plt.text(50, y[idx]-0.3, x[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) plt.axis('off') plt.title('Beskar Forging Services Inc.', fontproperties=font, loc='center', fontsize=24, color='#2A2A2A') plt.show() Funnel chart with title and labels — Image by the author *Font from https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Noto+Sans We’ll plot a line from one side to the other of the bars. We can use the value of left to find the start and end of the bar and the y-value to find its center. fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(12,6)) for idx, val in enumerate(x): left = (x_range - val)/2 plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = left, color='#808B96', height=.8, edgecolor='black') # label plt.text(50, y[idx]+0.1, labels[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') # value plt.text(50, y[idx]-0.3, x[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') plt.plot([left, 100-left], [y[idx], y[idx]]) plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) plt.axis('off') plt.title('Beskar Forging Services Inc.', fontproperties=font, loc='center', fontsize=24, color='#2A2A2A') plt.show() Funnel chart with some lines on it — Image by the author Now let’s move this line to the bottom of the bar, and since we won’t have a connection after the last bar, we can skip drawing a shadow for it. We defined the bars' height as 0.8, so to move the lines to the bottom, we could decrease y to 0.4. We’ll also need the coordinates of the top of the next bar. fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(12,6)) for idx, val in enumerate(x): left = (x_range - val)/2 plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = left, color='#808B96', height=.8, edgecolor='black') # label plt.text(50, y[idx]+0.1, labels[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') # value plt.text(50, y[idx]-0.3, x[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') if idx != len(x)-1: next_left = (x_range - x[idx+1])/2 plt.plot([left, 100-left], [y[idx]-0.4, y[idx]-0.4]) plt.plot([next_left, 100-next_left], [y[idx+1]+0.4, y[idx+1]+0.4]) plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) plt.axis('off') plt.title('Beskar Forging Services Inc.', fontproperties=font, loc='center', fontsize=24, color='#2A2A2A') plt.show() Funnel chart with even more lines on it — Image by the author We found all the points we need to draw. Now we can connect those points and see if we get the shape we’re looking for. Don’t forget to repeat the first point at the end to close the polygon. fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(12,6)) for idx, val in enumerate(x): left = (x_range - val)/2 plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = left, color='#808B96', height=.8, edgecolor='black') # label plt.text(50, y[idx]+0.1, labels[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') # value plt.text(50, y[idx]-0.3, x[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') if idx != len(x)-1: next_left = (x_range - x[idx+1])/2 shadow_x = [left, next_left, 100-next_left, 100-left, left] shadow_y = [y[idx]-0.4, y[idx+1]+0.4, y[idx+1]+0.4, y[idx]-0.4, y[idx]-0.4] plt.plot(shadow_x, shadow_y) plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) plt.axis('off') plt.title('Beskar Forging Services Inc.', fontproperties=font, loc='center', fontsize=24, color='#2A2A2A') plt.show() Funnel chart with the bars connected — Image by the author Perfect. All that’s left to do is change the .plot to .fill and we have our funnel chart ready. fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(12,6)) for idx, val in enumerate(x): left = (x_range - val)/2 plt.barh(y[idx], x[idx], left = left, color='#808B96', height=.8) # label plt.text(50, y[idx]+0.1, labels[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') # value plt.text(50, y[idx]-0.3, x[idx], ha='center', fontproperties=font, fontsize=16, color='#2A2A2A') if idx != len(x)-1: next_left = (x_range - x[idx+1])/2 shadow_x = [left, next_left, 100-next_left, 100-left, left] shadow_y = [y[idx]-0.4, y[idx+1]+0.4, y[idx+1]+0.4, y[idx]-0.4, y[idx]-0.4] plt.fill(shadow_x, shadow_y, color='grey', alpha=0.6) plt.xlim(x_min, x_max) plt.axis('off') plt.title('Beskar Forging Services Inc.', fontproperties=font, loc='center', fontsize=24, color='#2A2A2A') plt.show() Funnel chart — Image by the author There it is! Drawing a funnel chart with Matplotlib can go from simple to complex very quickly. But that’s the fun of Matplotlib; we have the freedom to draw pretty much anything.

https://towardsdatascience.com/funnel-charts-with-python-1ef1a2b183ab

['Thiago Carvalho']

2020-12-11 13:53:21.600000+00:00

['Python', 'Matplotlib', 'Plotly', 'Data Analysis', 'Data Visualization']

Beating the Winter Doldrums with Inspiration from the Past and Present

By Annie Mark-Westfall My column is due in two days, and I am staring into a panicked abyss. To inspire myself, I take a brisk walk while my husband puts the kids to bed. As I set out, I narrate and write in my head, badly. I get stuck on whether the word “brisk” is meant to describe the pace or the biting cold, and roll my eyes. For the duration of the walk, I will wrestle my thoughts, alternately trying to focus and to let my mind empty itself. Think. Don’t think. Think. It gives me flashbacks to being a middle-schooler at a mall in middle America, standing in front of a large display of those 3-D hidden image posters. Those posters were the fake news of the 1990s, I am sure of it. My friends always claimed to see a floating sailboat, while I stood there dumbly. “Just focus on one spot. Do you see it?” “No, no! Don’t focus on anything, just let your vision get blurry. Do you see it now?” My thoughts return to the present, where I am walking quickly in the freezing cold of January in Berlin, musing now on the cliché “waste not, want not.” For a year, I have been rolling this concept over in my head, wondering at the direction of causation. How a refrigerator full of leftovers does seem to reduce my appetite. Just don’t think, Annie. I pause at the site of Albert Einstein’s old apartment building. It was destroyed in the war. In Berlin, we say “the war” the way New Yorkers say “the city” — as if there is only one. An etched sign marks the location. Berlin does not light its streets the way US cities do, and my neighborhood is particularly residential, so the sign is barely visible. We bring all our visitors here, so I know that it details, both in German and English, how Einstein used to host famous and talented guests. How they would spend evenings discussing the secrets of the universe and other urgent and important matters. Here, he wrote his theory of relativity. THINK, Annie! The numbness is setting in. I forget how cold Berlin is, and should have worn a longer coat. It was almost 60 degrees when we were back in Ohio for the holidays. A friend who attends the climate negotiations texted me from Katowice, Poland in December, “We are all f*cked. Learn survival skills and move to higher ground.” Don’t think about that. On the move again, I return to another friend’s idea to relaunch a Berlin salon, reminiscent of the ones run by Jewish women starting from the late 18thcentury. I am desperate for her to do this, and to include me. I think about my living room: its warmth from the radiator, inviting Persian rugs, and soft floor lamps. Our 12-foot ceilings and stained-glass windows. I am a Jewish woman. Can I make this happen? I chasten myself to sit back and stop it. It was not my idea. And my living room is not my own. It has French doors that connect to the kids’ room, and is perpetually strewn with baby dolls, mateless socks, child-size kitchen supplies. Approaching home now, I recall how earlier in the evening, my 3-year-old asked, “How do you say ‘salad’ in Polish?” I vow that 2019 will be a year of delighting at these questions, rather than a sighed, “I don’t know, baby, eat your dinner.” Think. I grab my computer and thaw out on the couch. I go online and am both relieved and dismayed to read that my column from last January similarly noted this soul-level exhaustion and lack of inspiration. Think, dammit! Next to me on the couch is the latest unopened letter from Grandma Bea, her familiar cursive handwriting shaky across the envelope. I adore these letters and their everyday non-news. The essence of her character leaps off the page even as she claims she has nothing to write. This letter once again recounts her delight from a deer’s visit to her backyard bird feeder a few weeks ago. The event has found its way into three letters over the weeks, along with a detailed weather report. “My freezer is full and my fridge is stocked, so let it snow!” Grandma Bea knows how to warm a soul, even from across an ocean. To start my year, I read When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, the terminally ill brain surgeon on a quest for the meaning of life. His memoir intersperses quotes from literature and facts from neuroscience, and left me bereft when I turned the last page at the solitary hour of 2:00 am. Thinking now about Dr. Kalanithi’s calling as a doctor, and Grandma Bea’s notes on substituting gluten-free flour in her famous banana cake recipe, my breath catches at their hyper-focused sense of purpose. Last summer, while I was still on maternity leave, I met up with a friend from college who was passing through Berlin. We sat in a café together, and as I shushed my baby, I hungrily asked questions about her life as a writer, feeling pangs of jealousy. Although I have meticulously crafted my dream life here in Berlin, I admittedly had hoped writing would play more of a role in my life than it currently does. The conversation turned to one of her award-winning essays, on the topic of whales and something else brilliant and divergent like prison reform. The combination came to her after a professor urged her to return to a subject that she was “passionate about as a child.” As I sit on my couch now, eight months later, trying again to conjure something that inspired me as a child, I hear the baby cry in the next room, followed by my husband’s voice, urgent, patient, frustrated, calm. I google “3-D image posters” and try to focus. Originally published at thewildword.com.

https://thewildwordmagazine.medium.com/beating-the-winter-doldrums-with-inspiration-from-the-past-and-present-annie-mark-westfall-b87c828cc720

['The Wild Word Magazine']

2019-02-04 09:47:24.391000+00:00

['Women', 'Writing', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Motherhood']

Silicon Valley’s Brain-Meddling: A New Frontier For Tech Gadgetry

Introducing his students to the study of the human brain Jeff Lichtman, a Harvard Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, once asked: “If understanding everything you need to know about the brain was a mile, how far have we walked?”. He received answers like ‘three-quarters of a mile’, ‘half a mile’, and ‘a quarter of a mile’. The professor’s response?: “I think about three inches.” Last month, Lichtman’s quip made it into the pages of a new report by the Royal Society which examines the prospects for neural (or “brain-computer”) interfaces, a hot research area that has seen billions of dollars of funding plunged into it over the last few years, and not without cause. It is projected that the worldwide market for neurotech products — defined as “the application of electronics and engineering to the human nervous system” — will reach as much as $13.3 billion by 2022. So, despite our admitted lack of understanding, it seems the brain is a new and significant frontier for tech-pioneers looking to reinvent — and perhaps irreversibly influence — the way we interact with the world. The Royal Society report speculates: Mental health conditions could be treated by using interfaces to target relevant parts of the brain, bringing relief to the hundreds of millions worldwide who have depression. Even Alzheimer’s disease, which has proved resistant to conventional therapies, might be halted or reversed. Outside of medical use: People could undergo ‘whole brain diagnosis’ to identify their unique talents and challenges. Today’s ‘brain training’ computer games, whose impact is debated, might give way to demonstrably effective ‘brain cleaning’ or ‘mind gym’ sessions to keep minds sharp and creative. Neural interfaces offer myriad possibilities to enhance everyday life. We could use our minds to open doors, turn on lights, play games, operate equipment or type on computers. Then there are opportunities to enhance or supercharge the brain itself. Implants, helmets, headbands or other devices could help us remember more, learn faster, make better decisions more quickly and solve problems, free from biases… Mood, knowledge and memory could be securely and confidentially backed up or uploaded to a digital cloud. I know, it’s a lot. And I’ve omitted the references to telepathy, the potential merging of human with artificial intelligence, and the option to hook your neural interface up to that of another animal, like a bird. To a sci-fi nut, this must all sound like manna from heaven. To the rest of us it’s likely to be a little bewildering (to say the least). So, is this a real proposition? Or just the (fairly creepy) wishlist of some over-ambitious Silicon Valley nerds? The truth is that it’s difficult to tell what the long-term trajectory for brain-computer interfaces will be but, to a degree, they are already here. Though still fairly elementary, we currently have drones and artificial limbs that can be controlled using the brain alone, as well as headsets that boost concentration and memory. Some of these technologies are invasive, but many are not. Some record and react to brain activity, some stimulate it, and some do both. Reassuringly, it’s non-invasive technologies that look to be headed for commercial distribution. Most of these are re-imaginings of the electroencephalogram (EEG), a system that monitors and records electrical impulses in the brain. One of the leaders in the commercial space, CTRL-Labs, specifically focuses on what it calls ‘intention capture’. Their product is a electromyogram (EMG)-based wristband, which can respond to electrical signals as they activate in a user’s arm muscle. At the moment, the company’s demo has a player controlling a simple game using only this impulse detection and no physical movement (take a look). If you’re cynical about how far this could go, you should know that Facebook acquired CTRL-Labs last month, and just a couple of weeks ago leaked transcripts from Mark Zuckerberg’s internal meetings reinforced the firm’s keen interest in brain-computer interfaces. Giving his thoughts on Elon Musk’s Neuralink project, Zuck says: I am very excited about the brain-computer interfaces for non-invasive. What we hope to be able to do is just be able to pick up even a couple of bits. So you could do something like, you’re looking at something in AR, and you can click with your brain. That’s exciting … Or a dialogue comes up, and you don’t have to use your hands, you can just say yes or no. That’s a bit of input. If you get to two bits, you can start controlling a menu, right, where basically you can scroll through a menu and tap. You get to a bunch more bits, you can start typing with your brain without having to use your hands or eyes or anything like that. And I think that’s pretty exciting. So I think as part of AR and VR, we’ll end up having hand interfaces, we’ll end up having voice, and I think we’ll have a little bit of just direct brain. If a little bit of “direct brain” doesn’t bother you, it’s worth looking ahead to the possibilities that extend beyond basic control of an elementary system. For example, we already have neural systems that can read moods and emotions. Last year, The South China Morning Post reported that this kind of technology had been deployed by Chinese firms looking to monitor employees for signs of anger, anxiety or depression using devices built into headwear and hats. And perhaps even more impressively (or disturbingly), researchers at Kyoto University in Japan have been able to use a deep neural network to convert brain signals from an fMRI scan (used to map neural activity) into an image that contains many of the shape and color characteristics as one viewed by the subject of the scan. This is all just to say that these types of systems are unlikely to cease development once they provide the capabilities to click or scroll in Mark Zuckerberg’s AR hellscape. The Royal Society report makes sure to flag some early concerns. Most rational-thinking people won’t be too far behind them: What would it mean if an external company or government could gain access to our moods, or even our thoughts? How might human privacy — and indeed autonomy — be protected in if these technologies became ubiquitous? How can we ensure that they wouldn’t be weaponized by bad actors or governments to influence and control entire populations? (And is it okay if they only want to subliminally coax us to eat more healthily or respect the rules…?) It’s not hard to think of governments that will be watching the progression of this technology very keenly. Though it’s only fair to weigh risks against benefits before eagerly ringing the alarm bell, even here there is ambiguity. The benefits of commercializing this technology seem extremely limited, at least on the face of it. Game play? Fitness? Hands-free navigation of an augmented or virtual reality environments? None of these feel like strong arguments for selling access to our brains. But what about neural interfaces that could improve memory or concentration, making us super productive in life and work? Presumably, one could make the case that this is a worthwhile trade? Well, incidentally, completely separate research released just after the Royal Society report should urge caution around attempts to enhance such functions. A new journal in Science published findings that appear to affirm the long held theory that there is an active “forgetting mechanism” which kicks in while we sleep. The study found that when researchers suppressed neurons that produce the naturally occurring hypothalamic melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH) in mice, their memory performance actually increased. In other words, without this unnatural suppression these hormones act very deliberately to impair — or “modulate” — our memories. This is a biological addition, not some kind of “lack” that we must compensate for with technology. We might safely assume that it serves some worthwhile evolutionary purpose. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that if we didn’t forget we would live in a perpetual state of confusion, our brains awash with confusing superfluous information. One curious story that speaks to the chaos of the ever-remembering mind is that of the man who became known as subject S; a young Moscow-based journalist (later identified as Solomon Shereshevsky) who approached neuropsychologist Dr. Alexander Luria in 1929 with a very peculiar problem: he could not forget. According to Luria’s reports, subject S. was able to remember foreign poems, scientific formulas, and enormously long strings of words and numbers decades after he had been told them. He recited them to perfection every time Luria tested him. Great asset, eh? To never forget a name at a cocktail party, miss a birthday, fail a test on a fact or formula you already learned? To remember your own human life with crystal clarity rather than with the foggy haze that tends to wash over even our dearest memories? Not so. According to the New York Times: S.’s ability to remember was also a hindrance in everyday life. He had a hard time understanding abstract concepts or figurative language, and he was terrible at recognizing faces because he had memorized them at an exact point in time, with specific facial expressions and features. The ability to forget, scientists eventually came to realize, was just as vital as the ability to remember. Who knows what psychological or neural confusion could eventually be brought on by using brain-computer interfaces to optimize evolutionary facets… But we probably shouldn’t run screaming for the hills just yet. These systems are in their infancy, and there have been incredible breakthroughs in the research that should yield great benefits for people with mental and physical impairments. Nevertheless, The Royal Society are right to get ahead of the ethical and moral dilemmas that will accompany the commercialization of this type of technology. It is unfamiliar terrain, and allowing a system to intervene on our physical and mental capacities is an unprecedented encroachment that could easily turn sour. Certainly if we are to judge by the ways technological intelligence and surveillance have been wielded so far. For now we should keep a close watching brief on how this technology develops, as well as any-and-all proposals for its use. One thing seems to be true, if we thought society had already reached its technological saturation point, we “ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.

https://towardsdatascience.com/silicon-valleys-brain-meddling-a-new-frontier-for-tech-gadgetry-5bcd357c4189

['Fiona J Mcevoy']

2019-10-18 16:30:36.322000+00:00

['Neuroscience', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Brain', 'Ethics']

2020 Guide to Freelance Writer Salaries

Let’s get the crappy part out of the way. When you’re first starting out as a freelance writer, you may feel a bit discouraged because nobody wants to pay you what you’re worth. You’ll see a ton of short writing jobs out there between $5 to $10, work that any professional might charge $100 or more for. The unfortunate part about this is that this part of the market exists because plenty of people are willing to work for those low amounts. In the beginning, we might think that it’s a rite of passage because we don’t have any professional experience under our belts, and if we could simply get a handful of low-paying gigs out of the way to build our portfolio, it might be okay. On the surface, that’s true, but underneath it all, it de-values what we bring to the table. There’s also another side to it that should be considered. There are some freelance writers in certain economies who can live well on these low-paying gigs. As an example, I once had an author contact me about editing their book. They lived in an African country with a low cost of living. When I did my research on their economy, I realized that what I was charging for the edit would be comparable to nearly a year’s worth of wages for someone living there. It was an impossible situation I couldn’t solve. In the end, I offered to edit a small portion of the manuscript in exchange for this author signing up for my email list. I didn’t want to completely turn her away, but I also knew there was no way the project would be worth my time if I lowered my own income standard to hers. So, how do you get past both these hurdles? The answer lies in exactly what type of clients you’re interested in working with. If you want to build a freelance career that pays you what you’re worth, you need to focus solely on seeking out the clients who can benefit from your skill level and who understand the value a great writer can bring to the table. Are these jobs harder to find? Yes, of course they are, but we should focus on that old adage that tells us to work smarter, not harder. Working smarter means focusing your business on the clients who understand what you have to offer. And once you’ve decided what kind of freelance writer you want to be, you also must figure out what you can reasonably charge your future clients. To get a good idea of the potential of various types of writing services, I’m going to talk about different opportunities and what some successful freelancers are making from that type of work. Some of the writing opportunities I’ll talk about here are client-based while others are based on making sales of writing products you create to sell to the public. But no matter what, you still need to focus on who that ideal audience is. (This is something I’ll talk about at length in future blog posts.) 1 — How much can I make as a freelance editor? To start off, let’s look at the going rates in the publishing industry for professional editors. (You can find this information at the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) website. I’ve done the work here to break the hourly rates down to per word rates based on their time estimates.) Keep in mind that these are only guidelines. Some editors charge a bit below these rates and are quite experienced while others charge much more. Let’s break these rates down into real-world examples. I’ll use one of my past projects as a generic example. Let’s say a self-publishing memoir author has come to you with a manuscript of 120,000 words. Since memoirs tend to be a bit longer than other types of nonfiction books, this isn’t out of the ordinary. And let’s say — in a perfect world — they would like to hire you as their developmental editor, line editor, copy editor, and proofreader. So, let’s break this down. Developmental Editing — $4,320 Line Editing — $3,240 Copy Editing — $1,440 Proofreading — $1,080 So, at the lower end of these editing rates, the total for this contract would be $10,080. Now, I normally give a bit of a discount when they hire me for all services, so let’s discount it at 15% for a final total of $8,568. If you were lucky enough to land contracts like this once a month, you’d ease into the six-figure freelancer category in twelve months only taking on one client per month. Sounds like a dream, right? Well, to be honest, I don’t get the opportunity to do a lot of these projects, so it’s not as easy to accomplish as you’d hope. So, let’s look at a more realistic pretend project. Let’s say another self-publishing author contacted you, but instead of a memoir, this author needs a novel edited. The manuscript is complete at 70,000 words, which is about average for a full-length novel. Instead of all four services, they only want to hire you for a line edit and copy edit. Line Editing — $1,890 Copy Editing — $840 Total: $2,730 This is much closer to the reality of day-to-day life as a freelance editor. If you were a full-time freelancer, you could easily handle three of these projects per month, totaling up to $8,190 in income per month. That’s only a couple thousand shy of a six-figure income, and that’s not bad at all. However, unless you’ve been working for a while and you’re in high demand, you won’t always be able to command your top rates. I’m a managing editor for an editing guild and projects with a budget of $1,500 or less are much closer to reality. In a situation like that, you’d have to decide if it was worth it to lower your rates, or if you were going to stand strong with the full rate you quoted. The solution for that is to structure your editing business from the start to go after those higher-end projects, and doing so would easily allow you to earn six figures once you got the marketing right. 2—How much can I make as a freelance blogger? From low to high, there really isn’t one figure that gives an accurate representation of the income-earning potential of being a full-time freelance blogger. Some bloggers make absolutely no income from their blogs while some bloggers make six or seven figures a year from the work they put into their blogs. Before we get into the numbers, let’s first talk about ways a blogger earns income only through their blog. Selling services and products you personally deliver Advertising Sponsored blog posts Affiliate marketing Donations Writing and selling a book based on your blog Online courses eBooks Now, let’s talk about the income potential of each of these elements of a freelance blogging business. Services and Products This can be anything that relates back to what your blog is about. For instance, if your blog is inspirational or motivational, you might become a motivational speaker and book paid speaking engagements. As a beginner, you might be able to command a $500 fee for each speaking engagement you do. You’d have to do quite a few of those—at least 8—EVERY MONTH if you wanted to make $50,000 a year from your blog. Ouch. That’s quite a bit of work! However, once you build up your brand and social media following, you’ll be able to work toward making up to $20,000 per speaking engagement. Advertising Once you build up some traffic, this will be a more ideal income-earning activity for your blog because it’s not as time-intensive as the speaking engagement example I used above. Forget Google AdSense. That just clutters your content, and you don’t make a livable wage with that. What you want to do is sell advertising space directly to other businesses that have the same target audience as you. You can either set a specific dollar amount for each type of ad (like $50, $500, $1,000, etc.), or you can charge according to the traffic you receive, which has the possibility to earn you several thousand dollars per month if your traffic is excellent. Sponsored Blog Posts A sponsored blog post is when another business or entrepreneur pays you to publish a blog on your website. They’ll either hire you to write the blog post, or they will supply the content for you. You’re going to be able to earn much more money if they hire you to write the post—perhaps about $600 to $1,000 per post if you have really good traffic on your website. You might even be able to charge more if you offer an extensive marketing plan for their sponsored blog post. Affiliate Marketing Using affiliate links and ads is one of the more profitable ways to monetize your blog. One of the affiliate programs I belong to pays out $1,000 for every sale I send to them. Others offer a generous percentage for each sale, sometimes 40% to 50% of the total cost of the program or product. Though the higher commissions might be more challenging to sell because they are attached to higher-ticker items, they can be a great boost to your income if you can sell at least three of them per month. Donations Most blogs that ask for donations aren’t really making a livable income from their blog. When they ask for donations, it’s generally to help pay for the costs of hosting. So, while donations can help, I wouldn’t rely on them for a full-time income as a freelance writer. Book Publishing If you have a well-defined theme or niche for your blog, once you’ve accumulated enough blog posts (20 to 30), consider how they might all fit together in a full-length book (or eBook) you can publish. Some independent authors I know are making six and seven figures from publishing their books, so if you don’t limit your book promotion efforts, I think the income potential is tremendous there. [Want to learn how to make 18 streams of income from your book?] Online Courses Similar to book publishing, if you have a strong theme or niche for your blog, look for opportunities to create a variety of courses based on the topics of your blog. I’ve seen online courses sell from anywhere between $49 and $5,000—and there are some high-end courses that charge more than that. eBooks The beauty of eBooks is that they don’t have to even be close to the same length as a standard book. eBooks I’ve paid for in the past have been around 20 pages or more. You can add in images and diagrams to make the text easier to read, and that will also take the burden off you to write a lot of content. You can either sell these through your website or upload them to Amazon (or any of the other book retailers). When you combine all of these income opportunities for blogs together, it allows you to earn AT LEAST a six-figure income doing something you love—and you get to help people in the process! 3—How much can I make as a freelance copywriter? To start off this conversation, let’s look at some of the rates for beginning freelance copywriters: Blogs—$100+ Case Studies—$300+ White Papers—$200+ per page Short Info Pages—$100+ per web page Long Sales Page—$200+ Short Marketing Emails—$200+ Freelance copywriting is still one of the most lucrative freelancing fields to break into today, and it seems like the demand has been growing as more technologies emerge, algorithms are updated, and new social networking trends pop up regularly. One way you can use your copywriting skills to create a stronger business is through specializing in a specific type of copywriting skill. For instance, how much easier do you think it would be to create a name as the go-to person for short email copy vs. being a generalist who can write all forms of copywriting? When you niche down, you make it much easier for your potential clients to find you, allowing you to build a client base much faster if you’re going after any copywriting project you can get your hands on. However, keep in mind that doesn’t mean that you can’t offer those other copywriting services. If I was starting a new copywriting business today, I’d first build a foundation on that one thing, then once that starts to grow, I’d extend my offering to other forms of sales copy my clients need written. Using email copy as an easy example again, let’s crunch the numbers further: Let’s say you land a client that retains you on a six-month contract to write weekly email copy, locking in a per-email rate of $250/email. That’s $1,000 of income per month. So, in theory, all you would need to make six-figures that year would be to acquire and maintain nine clients who needed weekly email copy written. Again, in theory, let’s say it takes one to two hours to write each email once you have the pertinent information and graphics you need. You could easily write two emails per workday, then use the rest of the day for marketing or other business activities. And this is something that holds true for many other freelance jobs—the actual work you’re paid to do doesn’t take as much time as it does to bring that client in. I’d like to say it’s just this easy to build and maintain a freelance business, but it’s not. It takes time to make the connections, and you don’t always get to keep every single client who hires you. The average client retention rate is around 20%, so you’re going to have to continually work the business to work in the business. But don’t let the obstacles tell a story you don’t want to hear. Once your business starts blossoming, it will be worth all the hard work you’ve put in and so much more. Start out small today with the resources you currently have, and if you stick to it, you’ll eventually end up with something you can be proud of—and something that will more than pay the bills.

https://medium.com/swlh/2020-guide-to-freelance-writer-salary-potential-402dbf860971

['Tina Morlock']

2020-10-11 05:22:59.912000+00:00

['Freelancing', 'Blog', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing']

How to Create Captivating Animations in Python

How to Create Captivating Animations in Python Learn to generate animations using Matplotlib with examples Animations are quite a captivating way to illustrate a process. This post aims to emphasize on Matplotlib animations. Matplotlib is a complete framework for the creation of fixed, animated and engaging representation in Python. This also conveniently combines with libraries such as Pandas and Seaborn to produce more advanced animations. Animations The simplest way to describe a real-time visual is using one of the following Animation classes. Animation A base class for Animations. A base class for Animations. FuncAnimationCreates a graphic by repeatedly calling a function func. a graphic by repeatedly calling a function func. ArtistAnimation Animation using a fixed set of Artist objects. However, out of those, FuncAnimation is more useful. To save an animation to disk use Animation.save or Animation.to_html5_video Now, we start with our first animation in the Jupyter Notebooks. Using Celluloid Module Celluloid module makes simple animation process by adapting your existing visualization code to create an animation. It creates a matplotlib Figure and create a Camera from it: from celluloid import Camera fig = plt.figure() camera = Camera(fig) Reusing the figure and after each frame is built, take a snapshot with the camera. plt.plot(...) plt.fancy_stuff() camera.snap() After all, frames have been captured and create the animation. animation = camera.animate() Installation pip install celluloid A few examples of the Celluloid module are given below: Minimal Subplots Images Domain colouring example Legends Limitations of Celluloid:

https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/how-to-create-captivating-animations-in-python-e912ac043663

['Vivek Coder']

2020-09-24 16:59:47.856000+00:00

['Python', 'Matplotlib', 'Animation', 'Productivity', 'Data Visualization']

How Gut Microbes Talk to the Vagus Nerve

What Happens at Vagus How Gut Microbes Talk to the Vagus Nerve Decoding the interkingdom crosstalk between microbes and humans. Image by Tomislav Jakupec from Pixabay “Although the gut microbiota can communicate by endocrine and immune pathways, perhaps the fastest and most direct way for the microbiota to influence the brain is by hijacking vagus nerve signalling,” writes Christine Fulling and colleagues from APC Microbiome Ireland — the research centre that pioneered the microbiota-gut-brain axis. The vagus nerve is the main effector of the “rest-and-digest” nervous system — which is why it’s famous for its profound implications in wellness and health, as Markham Heid has written in Elemental: How the Vagus Nerve Works The vagus nerve serves to transmit neural information that informs the brain of the state of other organs. It links many visceral organs — especially the gut— to the nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) of the brainstem. The information relayed to the NTS then projects to the forebrain areas involved in emotion and motivation — such as the amygdala, hypothalamus, substantia nigra, hippocampus and ventral tegmental area. Cleave the vagus nerve and the activities of these brain regions go haywire. Arguably the biggest influencer on the strength of vagal tone — meaning the activity of the vagus nerve — is the trillions of microbes that reside in the gut. Cut the vagus nerve connecting the gut to the brain and neuropsychiatric diseases will always develop. And this phenomenon has been well replicated in animals and humans since the beginning of the 21st century. “The vagus nerve is able to sense the microbiota, to transfer this gut information to the central nervous system where it is integrated, and then to generate an adapted or inappropriate response,” writes Bruno Bonaz, Professor of Gastroenterology in the Grenoble Faculty of Medicine and Hospital, France and colleagues in the Frontiers of Neuroscience. So how do gut microbes talk to the vagus nerve? Calming Signals from GABA Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a neurochemical that calm the nerves. That’s why GABA is sold as a dietary supplement to lower stress and improve sleep. Mice fed with Lactobacillus rhamnosus showed changes in GABA activities in some brain regions — the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — in such a way that lowered their depressive and anxious behaviours. These behavioural benefits did not occur in mice whose vagus nerve was cut. Introduce L. rhamnosus into the mice gut, in turn, increased their vagal tone. Likewise, feeding mice with Lactobacillus casei stimulated their vagus nerve while lowering their levels of stress hormones. Giving milk fermented with L. casei to stressed students also reduced their stress hormones compared to placebo milk. GABA is a neurochemical — which means it interacts with neurons. The vagus nerve and its connections to the intestinal nerves have a lot of GABA receptors on their surface. And many Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species have enzymes that make GABA from dietary glutamate. This microbial GABA can, therefore, bind to the vagus nerve to send ‘calming’ signals to the GABA centre in the brain. Happy Signals from Serotonin Serotonin is another neurochemical with many functions of which it’s most known for happiness. That’s why antidepressants commonly aim to restore serotonin levels in the brain, broadly speaking. Supplementing mice with Lactobacillus helveticus increased growth factors and serotonin levels in their brain which cured them of depression. A 2019 study replicated this finding wherein L. helveticus increased serotonin receptors in the nucleus accumbens, “which plays an important role in stress resilience,” the authors stated. Indeed, those mice didn’t become depressed from repeated emotional stress from social defeat by bigger mice whereas control mice easily developed helplessness. Following the same mechanism as above, certain L. helveticus and other Lactobacillus species produce serotonin at amounts equivalent to the human bloodstream. While serotonin is a larger neurochemical that doesn’t cross the blood-brain-barrier, it can interact with serotonin receptors on the intestinal and vagus nerves — to relay ‘happy’ and ‘resilience’ signals to the serotonin centre in the brain. Bonding Signals from Oxytocin Oxytocin is the real name of the ‘love’ or ‘cuddle’ hormone. Because of its involvement in bonding, oxytocin is also responsible for social skills. Despite being a hormone that interacts with glands, oxytocin also has neurochemical properties — thus a neurohormone. Image credit: Open-access publication from Sgritta et al. Mechanisms Underlying Microbial-Mediated Changes in Social Behavior in Mouse Models of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Neuron. 2019;101(2):246–259.e6. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2018.11.018 Autistic mice that received Lactobacillus reuteri completely recovered their social skills—but only if the vagus nerve was intact. This reversal of social deficits happened as a result of more abundance of oxytocin-receiving dopaminergic neurons in the brain. “We discovered that L. reuteri promotes social behaviour via the vagus nerve, a nerve that bi-directionally connects the gut and the brain and the oxytocin-dopamine reward system,” the authors stated. But how exactly L. reuteri talks to the vagus nerve, in this case, is not understood. “L. reuteri emerges an intriguing non-invasive therapeutic alternative to persistently increase ‘‘endogenous’’ oxytocin levels in the brain,” the authors concluded in their 2019 paper printed in the prestigious journal, Neuron. Anti-Inflammatory Signals from Butyrate This mechanism is more indirect: Gut inflammation is known to decrease the vagal tone leading to a disharmonized communication between the brain and vagus nerve. And vagus nerve stimulation (a medical procedure), in turn, increases the vagal tone and reduces gut inflammation. Aside from vagus nerve stimulation, butyrate can achieve the same effect owing to its potent anti-inflammatory effects that are systems-wide — from locally in the gut to 11 other distant organs including the brain. Increased butyrate production from gut bacteria such as Faecalibacterium, Roseburia, Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species would, thus, prevent gut inflammation and help the vagal tone to stay strong. Putting it Together “A dysregulated gut microbiota translates to a shift in the production of neuroactive metabolites and alters host neurotransmitter circuitry,” I wrote in the Frontiers of Neuroscience. How gut microbes affect the brain neurochemistry may occur via endocrinal, immune and/or neural pathways — of which the vagus nerve is the quickest, as Fulling et al. agreed. “It is clear that in the context of microbiota at least what happens in vagus doesn’t stay in vagus but affects many aspects of emotionality and neurobiology,” continues Fulling and colleagues. Following the importance of vagus nerve in brain health, Professor Bonaz advised that “monitoring and targeting vagal tone through vagus nerve stimulation, microbiota modulation (using prebiotics, probiotics, faecal microbiota transplantation, diet)… complementary medicine (hypnosis, meditation), cognitive-behavioural therapies, deep breathing, and moderate and sustainable physical activity would be of interest to restore a homeostatic microbiota-gut-brain axis.” Aside from medical treatments like vagus nerve stimulation and psychotherapy, the other methods of keeping a healthy vagal tone Prof. Bonaz suggested are practical at our own means: Eat well, think well, breathe well and exercise well.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/how-gut-microbes-talk-to-the-vagus-nerve-e478ff7cf06

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-03-27 12:53:20.599000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Education', 'Advice', 'Science', 'Psychology']

Drugs are Rapidly Becoming Healthcare’s Greatest Burden

The Psychiatric profession is the biggest culprit Image/Medika Life/CC License Magic, mystery, smoke, and mirrors. It's a sight you'd expect from a carnival sideshow, but you need to go no further than your local American university where psilocybin is handed out to “depressed cancer patients” in a ritual that is reminiscent of a new age reenactment of a native American in pursuit of his spirit guide or a poor rendition of Carlos Castaneda embarking on his psychedelic journey of discovery. It's a tip of the hat to faith healers, shamans, and witch doctors. It is also a shameful marketing ploy by medically trained professionals that should know better and it is a seriously dangerous red flashing light for the profession and its credibility. Drugs have become our fallback for almost everything. Practitioners in general are massively guilty of doling them out as a panacea for socially compromised adults. Adults that possess no life skills or coping mechanisms are simply drugged into oblivion. You don't need to worry about handling life if you’re too stoned to notice it. Forget therapy or actually trying to provide the necessary life skills. Too time-consuming and really, why cure when you create a lifetime of dependence? Medicine is slipping, quitely, intentionally and unnoticed, into a new sideline. Diagnosing mental distress is becoming the traveling quack show we so despise, prescribing drugs to treat conditions that mostly don't exist, conditions some practitioners are unqualified to recognize, let alone prescribe for, and unfortunately, when it comes to those who are trained, the fallback (and sometimes go-to)treatment is the ever lucrative cocktail of mind-altering concoctions we now have at our disposal. I would go so far as to say that 90% of the patients showing up cap in hand at your door aren't suffering from any condition your medication could possibly treat, let alone cure. I’d add to this that 99% of any MD’s deciding to prescribe medication aren't qualified or trained to recognize the symptoms of real mental conditions or diseases, symptoms psychologists often get wrong. Forget management, if that's where you're going. That isn't an out either. Someone who hasn't been given the tools or strategies to cope with life doesn't require medication, they need the school of life and real help to develop mechanisms many of us are already fortunate enough to possess. Medicating these patients is CRIMINAL. It is WRONG. It is UNETHICAL. Don’t prescribe, refer. I would suggest to our modern-day mental health professionals and doctors alike, that unless you are really gullible or simply follow the flock, that you are aware of the failings in your treatment of these individuals. It’s an easy out, isn't it? We’ve conditioned the patients to expect the pill. The miracle in the bottle, the panacea that will solve all of life's problems. Your patient doesn't want any other form of help. They simply want the easy route and they’ll sit in front of you and whine till you get out that pad and start writing. Part of you justifies it with a simplistic thought to ease your conscience. If you don't prescribe, they’ll simply get it somewhere else. So you cave in. It's quicker, it's easier and at least, you think to yourself as you start writing, you can keep an eye on them. WRONG. STOP. What you are doing is unethical. Is it in the patient's best interest? Are you properly qualified to make that judgment? Do you understand that you are fundamentally changing the course of the person’s life sitting in front of you. Do you REALLY? Those quick, few lines on that script are potentially going to create a life of addiction and dependency. Was that why you joined the medical profession. For some doctors and many psychiatrists, it clearly seems to be. Your flashing lights, new age mumbo jumbo, and cutting edge designer drugs are simply complex rituals you've designed to cover your snake oil shows. The best interests of the patient ceased being at issue years ago and the danger now, as even universities get involved in the medical mystery tour routine, is that people will start to perceive this as being real medicine. It isn't and every effort must be made to ensure it never becomes that. It is a marketing farce, quackery, and pseudoscience wrapped up in what you assume to be a professional presentation to fool the public We see you. We see the lives you are destroying and you better believe we aren't going to let it go. It's time to clean up your sad acts. Revert back to your core principles and HELP the patient, not yourselves. Why Treat when you can Cure? By all means, assist your patients, but do so ethically. Treat them humanely and help them to address the shortcomings in their lives by providing them with lasting skills to cope with their existences. None of this involves any need to get your local pharmacist involved. You’ll find the rewards from this difficult and lengthy process to be far more rewarding than all the time you currently spend arranging your mirrors and putting on the makeup. Where are your facts? Oh, they're coming. Don't fret. This is simply a warning shot, fired across the bows, to encourage those with sense to pause, stop, and re-assess their current practices. Most will ignore it, but it may hopefully reach a few professionals. Medika will be publishing a few in-depth articles in the coming weeks on the disgraceful practices that are now becoming almost routine within the mental health community. Medication will feature strongly, as will the tendency to misdiagnose. To push patients into neatly labeled boxes, each representing a different condition. Boxes that simplify everyone's life. The patient considers his medication justified, even if the diagnosis of late-onset autism seems a little iffy. The care provider has only to continue handing out the medication and monitoring the patient. A lengthy and sometimes lifelong relationship that benefits no one, other than the prescribing practitioner. Good doctors, ethical doctors, of whom there are many, whose sole purpose is to ensure the health of their patients, are also compromised as trust in the profession is eroded. Patients no longer view the profession with the dewy-eyed trust enjoyed by doctors fifty years ago. No one is more to blame for this than the quacks and charlatans from within the ranks of medicine itself. That these quacks were, and are still able, in some instances, to pursue their chosen professions, speaks volumes to the lack of proper, swift, and merciless sanction from governing bodies. Lenient approaches from regulatory bodies within certain states encourage the problem and any potential solutions to eradicating this rot from the medical profession have to be undertaken with the full engagement of these bodies. It must be eradicated. Medicine cannot afford further dilution of the trust it enjoys from the public. The consequences will be devastating, impacting vaccination rates, terminal care, and the inevitable escalating costs of trying to save those who have ventured away from traditional medicine to seek salvation in the hands of the natural healers and fraudsters that permeate the internet. If we continue to dispense so easily, to medicate without sound reason, then we are in effect digging our own graves. You cannot magic away the problems of two generations of poorly parented adults with a pill. You see doctor, your patients aren't ill, they are just ill-prepared. I’d also like to add a closing note to MD’s who feel they are qualified to diagnose the patient sitting in front of them. You aren't. I don't care about your justifications or life experience. You arent a qualified psychiatrist, individuals who may I point out, despite years of additional training, still struggle to diagnose a large percentage of their patients accurately. As an MD, you stand no chance. This isn't meant as a snub, merely a fair reflection of what you have been trained for. You refer all other medical conditions to your colleagues and yet you feel capable of diagnosing possibly the most complex of all conditions, the human mind. Think about that the next time you reach for your notepad and pen.

https://medium.com/beingwell/drugs-are-rapidly-becoming-healthcares-greatest-burden-ba75f3ddb0b

['Robert Turner']

2020-12-15 14:24:24.190000+00:00

['Prescription Drugs', 'Psychology', 'Health', 'Drugs', 'Mental Health']

Permissionless Professors #4: Brian Balfour

We believe monetization is a hidden secret. Secrets hiding in plain sight. From the psychology of anchoring, the mathematics of power-law pricing tables, the application of demand elasticity, and the market positioning of your price — your path to better monetization awaits. Follow

https://medium.com/monetization-manifesto/permissionless-professors-4-brian-balfour-19e04709426

['Gary Bailey - Monetization Manifesto']

2020-12-17 14:53:34.978000+00:00

['Growth', 'Marketing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Monetization']

A neural data science: how and why

How is it — or could it be — done? Here’s a rough guide. The raison d’etre of the neural data scientist is to ask scientific questions of data from systems neuroscience; to ask: how do all these neurons work together to do their thing? There are roughly three ways we can answer that question. We can see these three ways by looking at the correspondence between established classes of problems in machine learning and computational challenges in systems neuroscience. Let’s start by looking at what we have to work with. We have some data from n neurons that we’ve collected over time. We’ll lump these into a matrix we’ll call X — as many columns as neurons, and as many rows as time-points we’ve recorded (where it’s up to us how long a “time-point” lasts: we might make it short, and just have each entry record a 1 for a spike, and 0 otherwise. Or we might make it long, and each entry records the number of spikes during that elapsed time). Over that time, stuff has been happening in the world — including what the body has been doing. So let’s lump all that into a matrix we’ll call S — as many columns as there are features in the world we care about, and as many rows as time-points we’ve recorded for those features. Traditionally, machine learning involves building three classes of models about the state of the world and the available data: generative, discriminative, and density. As a rough guide, this table shows how each class corresponds to a fundamental question in systems neuroscience: 1/ Density models P(X): is there structure in the spikes? Sounds dull. But actually this is key to great swathes of neuroscience research, in which we want to know the effect of something (a drug, a behaviour, a sleep) on the brain; in which we are asking: how has the structure of neural activity changed? With a recording of a bunch of neurons, we can answer this in three ways. First, we can quantify the spike-train of each neuron, by measuring the statistics of each column of X, like the rate of spiking. And then ask: what is the model P(X) for these statistics? We can cluster these statistics to find “types” of neuron; or simply fit models to their entire joint distribution. Either way, we have some model of the data structure at the granularity of single neurons. Second, we can create generative models of the entire population’s activity, using the rows of X — the vectors of the moment-to-moment activity of the whole population. Such models typically aim to understand how much of the structure of X can be recreated from just a few constraints, whether they be the distribution of how many vectors have how many spikes; or the pairwise correlations between neurons; or combinations thereof. These are particularly useful for working out if there is any special sauce in the population’s activity, if it is anything more than the collective activity of a set of independent or boringly simple neurons. Third, we can take the position that the neural activity in X is some high dimensional realisation of a low dimensional space, where the number of dimensions D << n. Typically we mean by this: some neurons in X are correlated, so we don’t need to use the whole of X to understand the population — instead we can replace them with a much simpler representation. We might cluster the time-series directly, so decomposing X into a set of N smaller matrices X_1 to X_N, each of which has (relatively) strong correlations within it, and so can be treated independently. Or we might use some kind of dimension reduction approach like Principal Components Analysis, to get a small set of time-series that each describes one dominant form of variation in the population’s activity over time. We can do more than this. The above assumes we want to use dimension reduction to collapse neurons — that we apply reduction to the columns of X. But we could just as easily collapse time, by applying dimension reduction to the rows of X. Rather than asking if neural activity is redundant, this is asking if different moments in time have similar patterns of neural activity. If there are only a handful of these, clearly the dynamics of the recorded neurons are very simple. We can throw in dynamical systems approaches here too. Here we try to fit simple models to the changes in X over time (i.e. mapping from one row to the next), and use those models to quantify the types of dynamics X contains — using terms like “attractor”, “separatrix”, “saddle node”, “pitchfork bifurcation”, and “the Arsenal collapse” (only one of those is not a real thing). One might plausibly argue the dynamical models so fitted are all density models P(X), as they describe the structure of the data. Hell, we could even try and fit an entire dynamical model of a neural circuit, a bunch of differential equations describing each neuron, to X, so that our model P(X) is then sampled every time we run the model from different initial conditions. With these density models, we can fit them separately to the neural activity we recorded in a bunch of different states (S1, S2,…, Sm), and answer questions like: how does the structure of a population of neurons change between sleeping and waking? Or during development of the animal? Or in the course of learning a task (where S1 might be trial 1, and S2 trial 2; or S1 is session 1 and S2 session 2; or many combinations thereof). We can also ask: how many dimensions does neuron activity span? Are the dimensions different between different regions of cortex? And has anyone seen my keys?

https://medium.com/the-spike/a-neural-data-science-how-and-why-d7e3969086f2

['Mark Humphries']

2019-10-22 20:15:46.670000+00:00

['Neuroscience', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Science']

The New UK Coronavirus Variant Is Troubling, But No Reason To Panic.

The New UK Coronavirus Variant Is Troubling, But No Reason To Panic. There’s no evidence it provokes more severe disease or impacts on vaccines. Photo by CDC on Unsplash Since early December, a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has been identified in the United Kingdom (UK). Baptized B.1.1.7, this new strain appeared after diverse mutations of the virus. What do we know about the new variant of the coronavirus? 1. The new variant seems more contagious In the evolution of a virus, mutations are frequent events. Concerned the SARS-CoV-2, numerous mutations were observed those last months, but still had no significant effect on the transmission of the virus, its contagiousness, or its severity. Differently, B.1.1.7 seems more contagious and seems to explain the acceleration of contaminations observed in December in England. According to Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, this variant has an cumulated transmission rate of 50 to 70% compared to other strains present in the UK. 2. B.1.1.7 variant doesn’t appear to cause more severe forms The new variant does not seem to lead to more severe manifestations of covid. Studies are awaited to confirm this theory, especially with what happens in South Africa, where a variant close to the B.1.1.7 was observed. This African variant spread fast, and preliminary studies have shown that people infected express higher viral load. And it’s known that a higher viral load is usually associated with the severity of symptoms. 3. Children would be more sensitive to it The increased transmissibility could be due to the way the virus infects children. According to Wendy Barclay, a UK government adviser and virologist at Imperial College London, the new strain could make children “as sensitive as adults” to covid. Analysis has started to confirm this hypothesis. 4. Vaccines would remain effective against this variant For now, scientists doubt that the mutation has an impact on vaccines. The effectiveness of the two vaccines Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, already authorized in several countries of the world, is based on creating immunity against the coronavirus by preparing our immune system to recognize a viral protein: the protein S (spike protein). Prof Uğur Şahin, CEO of BioNTech, says about this new variant: “Scientifically, the likelihood is high that this is the case because even though this variant has multiple mutations, only 1% of the relevant protein has changed. That means 99% are still the same, and we know that the immune response that our vaccine uses is attacking this protein from multiple sides. So the likelihood is high that the vaccine will still work. But we will get the results in two weeks, and then we can be sure”.

https://medium.com/illumination/the-new-uk-coronavirus-variant-is-troubling-but-no-reason-to-panic-72123212a5fa

['Rachid Meharich']

2020-12-27 09:03:14.756000+00:00

['Science', 'Covid 19', 'Health', 'Coronavirus']

120 Days Without Social Media…Surprisingly, Nothing Has Changed Without It.

This is socializing in 2020 A little more than 4 months ago I began the process of deleting all my social media accounts. At the time, I felt that my compulsion to check social media was effecting my relationship with my wife, and infant daughter. I found myself messing with my phone during quiet times with the baby that will certainly not last forever. Yet, there I was, watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Instagram story instead of being present and enjoying these truly fleeting moments. That’s just one example of how I could not control my consumption of digital media, and trust me, it’s far from the only example I could think of. So with that in mind, I began the process of detoxing from social media. This obviously isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but the process felt to me a lot like an addict who had to wean themselves off of opioids. I slowly lowered the dose of social media until finally I had almost no digital footprint left. First, I deleted every social media app off of my phone. Like any addict, I found work arounds to get my fix. I was constantly visiting my Instagram account from Chrome’s web browser on my phone or laptop, and despite an extremely inferior experience to the app, it still gave me the brain numbing distraction I was seeking. Over the years, I had built a very small “following” of mainly strangers that I, at best, barely knew. Yet the account was still hard for me to delete. Instagram was my main social media fix. It’s where I would go for memes, updates on my friends’ lives, excitement from likes and stories I posted; but mainly, it served as a distraction from my real life to a life that I had so perfectly curated. However, after about a month of deleting and reactivating my IG account, I finally managed to delete my beloved Instagram account for good. After IG was gone, I quickly replaced that fix with Facebook. I caught myself going down rabbit holes looking at high school people’s profiles who I haven’t spoken to in real life in about 15 years. It was like going to my high school reunion only better, because I could judge them without actually having to talk to them. Sounds like the behavior of a healthy person, right? But, eventually, I ran out of rabbit holes, and with that, I deactivated my Facebook account. Next, was Twitter. This was the easiest to delete. Twitter is a dumpster fire. Enough said. Me. Stressed and anxious, without any social media to distract my thoughts. So there I was. No more active social accounts. I felt the anxiety build, and only told a few of my closest friends that I had deleted social media. I didn’t want to the person who announces their departure from social media… like any of their followers actually give a shit (insert eye roll emoji). However, Checking my social media feeds had become so ingrained in my routine that whenever I opened my phone I would click on the Chrome web browser and start typing in the URL for IG or Facebook out of pure muscle memory before I would recall that I deleted everything. I needed to start retraining my mind, and this would only come with time. And now that time has added up to just over 120 days and I’ll be honest, not much has changed. I still feel my anxiety and sadness build and my mind start to wander and get distracted when I feel bored or have some rote task to accomplish. But now, I am forced to sit with that anxiety, sadness, or boredom. Face it head on. Processing why I am feeling anxious or sad in certain moments is really hard, and with the amount of caffeine I consume on a daily basis it’s often really hard for me to slow my mind down in general. But now, I don’t have the crutch that allows the cycle to perpetuate. Instead, when I start to feel overwhelmed, or feel my mind start to spiral, I remind myself to put my feet back on the ground. I look around and name some things in the room, take some deep breaths, or go do a Headspace guided meditation. (No big deal, but I am currently on a 160 day Headspace meditation streak, so I’m pretty much the Dali Lama…right?) So no, nothing has really changed; and no, I haven’t had some sort of life altering realization. But, I now am starting to practice to sit and be present, and deal with the boredom and insecurity that lead me to jump to social media in the first place. This skill couldn’t be perfected in 4 short months, or even a year’s time. It’s going to take me my entire lifetime of work to make it happen, but I had to start somewhere. Now, please excuse me while I go share this article on my social media feeds. If you recently deleted your social media, or are thinking about it, drop me a line in the comment section or email! Would love to hear other people’s thoughts and experiences! Cheers!

https://medium.com/wholistique/120-days-without-social-media-surprisingly-nothing-has-changed-without-it-a7786e9b609e

['Greg Rasmuson']

2020-11-10 19:40:15.409000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Mental Health', 'Social Media', 'Mind', 'Society']

A stunning Japanese philosophy that will make you a better marketer, entrepreneur and human.

Did someone just flush the toilet? There was nothing perfect about my grandmother, her life nor the restaurant she had created. But, it was in this imperfection where the beauty could be found. While she was one of the most gifted cooks I’ve ever met, she didn’t measure a damn thing, she didn’t own a recipe book, she had no “process”. She just did the best she could with what she had. She grew up extraordinarily poor and never had the luxury that the pompous celebrity-chefs have of “cooking with the finest ingredients”. And, because of this, she was forced to make due. And, when you’re forced to make due, you’re forced to accept that there is no such thing as perfect. This was the beauty in my grandmother — she was this beautiful curation of imperfections. As I’ve gone about building Honey Copy, my creative writing shop that works with brands on writing pretty words that sell whatever it is they’re selling, I’ve embraced some of this philosophy. I’ve come to find that no brand nor business is perfect and that so much of being a successful marketer is about understanding this and marketing the beauty in a brand’s imperfections. For some companies, that has meant admitting they’re not the best. By doing this, by embracing wabi-sabi, marketers and entrepreneurs can build more unique, authentic brands. At Panda Express, customers are going to get the exact same “perfect” watered down experience whether they’re dining at a chain in New York City or one in the middle of Idaho. But, what made folks choose my grandmother’s restaurant over Panda express was that it felt so damn human. Customers were elbow to elbow with other customers. Bangs and clacks could be heard from the back of the restaurant as cooks were busy at work. The restaurant was so small that if someone flushed a toilet, you could hear it. At times the service was a bit slow, it could by no means be described as zippy. But, despite all of this, folks showed up, time and time again, because they were getting a perfectly imperfect experience they could find nowhere else. Not to mention, a damn good meal, too.

https://coleschafer.medium.com/a-stunning-japanese-philosophy-that-will-make-you-a-better-marketer-entrepreneur-and-human-82c1359e64af

['Cole Schafer']

2019-08-21 20:21:42.967000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Business', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life', 'Writing']

How to Make Google Love You (Even if You Don’t Love Google)

How to Make Google Love You (Even if You Don’t Love Google) Online experiences begin with search engines and Google is #1 Photo by Kai Wenzel on Unsplash In today’s digitalized world, search engines are one of the most powerful marketing tools. Search has become an essential part of our daily lives. The search engine that most people use is Google. Almost 30% of global web traffic was generated via online search usage and 76% of all global searches take place on Google. Online experiences usually begin with a search engine. So, it’s important that Google loves you to drive traffic to your website. Research shows search engines drive 300% more traffic to websites than social media. Let’s discuss how you can get more traffic from Google even if you think they are greedy, sneaky, and dominate the market too much. Google learns every time a user searches and they want to give each searcher answers to their questions as soon as possible. It’s called searcher task accomplishment. So, it’s important to help Google help you. Here are five things you should do to make sure Google loves you.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/how-to-make-google-love-you-even-if-you-dont-love-google-ef449b96e706

['Matthew Royse']

2020-12-28 16:22:49.770000+00:00

['Writing', 'Google', 'Business', 'Marketing', 'Search Engines']

Reading Fiction Will Make You a More Empathetic Person Who Makes Better Decisions

Reading Fiction Will Make You a More Empathetic Person Who Makes Better Decisions So why is it missing from so many self-help recipes? Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield Have you ever noticed that fiction books are hardly ever mentioned when people give out book recommendations? How many times have you seen ‘read fiction’ on a list of ways to change your life, 10x your results, and crush the competition? Whether its the famous reading lists of icons like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet or the glut of listicle masterpieces from popular productivity bloggers, fiction books rarely seem to make it into the better-version-of-yourself-toolkit. The tacit implication seems to be that fiction rarely rises to the level of usefulness offered by its non-fiction counterparts. When it comes to leveling up, it seems like fiction just doesn’t quite make the grade. The Self-Help industry has an empathy problem. So too does productivity culture. Reading fiction might be a crucial part of the antidote. An article in The Harvard Business Review cites several studies that found reading fiction can help people develop important skills like “empathy, theory of mind, and critical thinking,” that are often associated with a high EQ or emotional intelligence: “Research, however, suggests that reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. For example, reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations.” We spend so much time reading about how to stand out, how to be rare and valuable, how to level up, about extraordinary people and their accomplishments, and not enough time inhabiting the headspace of other, often more ordinary people we are apt to encounter in works of fiction. Consequently, these are the types of people we are also more apt to encounter in our own daily realities. Maybe reading strictly for knowledge isn’t the only reason to pick up a book. In fact, it might not even be the best reason.

https://medium.com/tom-thoughts/reading-fiction-will-make-you-a-more-empathetic-person-who-makes-better-decisions-4f5c97d65d34

['Tom Belskie']

2020-07-31 10:10:29.045000+00:00

['Books', 'Reading', 'Self Improvement', 'Creativity', 'Productivity']

The new landing page is to have no landing page at all

The new landing page is to have no landing page at all Quicker to value means quicker to pay. by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash I want you to take a hard look at your product and ask yourself if you really need that landing page, all that text, or even that intro video. What if you got rid of it all and just shoved them right into the product? I hear you. You have reasons for not letting people access your product right away. They might even be good reasons. While I think you should reconsider those reasons, here are a few ways you can get customers experiencing your product within the first five seconds of hitting your existing landing page. Add a button to let them play with it Baremetrics gives you a LIVE DEMO button right at the top LIVE DEMO button right at the top of the landing page Live, interactive demo of the product, no login required Like Baremetrics, Kampsite has a big See Example button right at the top of their homepage which lets you dive into the product and experience it after just one click. See Example button right at top Live product just a click away Proof gives you a popup on the bottom-left corner which is exactly what you’ll get on your own site if you use their product. Not all products can do this, but for marketing popups, livechat, and similar site extensions, this is a great way to get your value across quickly.

https://uxdesign.cc/the-new-landing-page-is-to-have-no-landing-page-at-all-bb57ca1548f1

['Titus Decali']

2020-01-11 22:11:53.398000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Design', 'Web Development', 'Startup', 'Growth Hacking']

Happy data scientist: How to build a business intelligence app with 10 lines of python code

In this post, I’d like to show how to quickly create a Tableau-like BI application on top of your data in a Jupyter Notebook using the atoti python module. It can give your users an easy way to: explore the data produced by your model with an interactive UI, play around and see it in various projections without the need to run any notebook or to write any code or depending on someone to ingest it into a standalone BI solution. In the study “2020 State of Data Science — moving from hype towards maturity”, Anaconda discovered that “Fewer than half (48%) of respondents feel they can demonstrate the impact of data science on business outcomes”. As a remedy the Anaconda team has suggested to focus on removing “the barriers to deployment” and for data scientists on learning “to communicate the value of their work”. My own small research is showing that pro data scientists tend to present the results of the work in a form of a Jupyter Notebook or a pdf file: Jupyter notebooks are great for working on models, but they are not so great in their raw form for presenting results to users. By starting a BI app on top of the collected and enriched data sets and letting business users “experience” the data, slice and dice it, we encourage early feedback, help unlocking imagination and discovering the value of the ML algorithm at earlier stages of development. launching atoti UI In a BI app business users can explore the data — filter, drill-in and even run what-if analysis without the need to write any code — like in excel but from a web gui. Charts, pivot tables, formatting, conditional formatting and interactive recalculations, and scenarios will be available to them. Python implementation Now I’ll show you how to quickly start a BI app locally or on a server from a jupyter notebook using atoti python module and give the end user a link to slice and dice the data set. These are the 10 lines code: They perform these 4 steps: import atoti . You can find the installation steps for conda and pip in the doc. . You can find the installation steps for conda and pip in the doc. create a session — at this step an in-memory data cube is span on your machine or on a server and the UI is launched. You can open the URL of the app by running session.url Next step is to load the data from a pandas dataframe into the app engine (creating an in-memory datastore). You could connect the app to other sources, for instance, csv files, parquet, kafka feed and others. from a pandas dataframe into the app engine (creating an in-memory datastore). You could connect the app to other sources, for instance, csv files, parquet, kafka feed and others. Finally, the create_cube command is populating measures and dimensions. Later if you want, you can load more data sources and link them together in a snowflake-type of data schema. Or you can define simple or sophisticated calculations for your end users to look at. You can find some reference examples in the atoti gallery. Under the hood Starting using atoti python module is not hard — just a few lines of code and one module to install, but do not let this easiness to confuse you — under the hood the bi app you are launching is powered by a fairly sophisticated technology which utilizes an in-memory database engine, datastores capable of handling real-time data updates and reactive UI. Conclusion Productionalizing analytical models and helping users adopt them is not easy. I hope this example can help you engage business users as early as possible. As a power user of atoti, I build models for risk analytics in financial institutions, please check my other posts for more sophisticated examples of non-linear aggregations and complex calculations.

https://medium.com/atoti/happy-data-scientist-how-to-build-a-business-intelligence-app-with-10-lines-of-python-code-45569f837b78

['Anastasia V Polyakova']

2020-10-22 18:38:44.419000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Dataviz', 'Bi', 'Data Science', 'Python']

The Pandemic’s Future: A Book Review on ‘From Killer to Common Cold’

Coronavirus The Pandemic’s Future: A Book Review on ‘From Killer to Common Cold’ This book describes the concept of herd protection, which is different from herd immunity, and how the remainder of the pandemic will unfold. Globe vector created by freepik — www.freepik.com The explosion of scientific literature on Covid-19 and its extensive coverage from mainstream and other media sources has resulted in a downpour of fresh details about the virus. Hardly a day goes by without some new finding of a previously unrecognized symptom, an observational study on a repurposed drug, an argument about masks, the story of a country that finally got it right or, perhaps, one that keeps getting it wrong. What’s important and what’s not? Sometimes it seems impossible to see the forest for the trees. Many individuals, particularly those in the United States, are still searching for a trustworthy and comprehensive guide to navigating the pandemic, and I believe this book, “From Killer to Common Cold” delivers. Its author, David Graham, MD, a board-certified infectious disease specialist, needs just 78 pages to answer the most relevant and fundamental questions many are asking about the novel coronavirus like, ‘What will the pandemic look like moving forward?’ and ‘How do we reasonably protect ourselves and loved ones?’ Graham takes a unique approach by personifying the virus and identifying its ‘goals’ from an evolutionary perspective. Rather than clinging to every piece of pre-published minutiae — a mistake some experts, myself included, have made — Graham uses his unique understanding of coronaviruses, both past and present, he has accumulated while practicing infectious disease. He wraps his extensive knowledge into a neat package and succinctly delivers it to his readers. So, let’s take a brief look at what this book is about. That is because Graham, along with many other health experts, recognized early on that SARS-CoV-2 had spread too far and was too difficult to trace that it could no longer be eradicated. The end result is not in question In the first chapter, Graham asserts that the ultimate outcome of the pandemic is clear. The part of the pandemic that remains in question is what happens between now and the end. He comments, “I believe the destiny of [the virus] SARS-CoV-2 is already written. With or without a vaccine, with or without an effective treatment, with or without expected technological advances, we are destined to interact with this virus forever.” Graham notes that there are four other coronaviruses, namely HCoV-229E, -NL63, -OC43, and -HKU1, that have caused epidemics or pandemics in the past. These viruses were likely more deadly to humans initially but now cause the common cold. Their progression to a less lethal version of themselves is a product of evolutionary biology. Just as with the novel coronavirus, these previous coronaviruses likely caused symptoms that ranged from nothing, to that of a common cold, to pneumonia and even death. Our ancestors who survived previous coronavirus pandemics, at least the ones of childbearing age or younger, possessed immune systems capable of withstanding the virus. In the past, as well as today, immunity to these older coronaviruses would wane over time. However, as we’ve seen with Covid-19, patients who overcome initial infections generally retain enough immunity to survive subsequent exposures and infections as well. According to Graham, the common-cold coronaviruses have become endemic meaning they, “circulate widely, at all times, and in low levels in human populations throughout the world.” He foresees that “SARS-CoV-2 will become the fifth endemic human coronavirus.” That is because Graham, along with many other health experts, recognized early on that SARS-CoV-2 had spread too far and was too difficult to trace that it could no longer be eradicated. In contrast, the two other known coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, that caused outbreaks earlier this century failed to become endemic, each for a slightly different reason. SARS was too lethal and didn’t have a long incubation period. As a result, cases of SARS could be traced until it was eliminated from the human population. MERS, which is endemic among camels, is transmitted poorly from human to human. So, despite MERS also being very lethal, it has not spread significantly within the human population. No, herd protection is not Graham’s attempt at a more socially acceptable definition of herd immunity. What is herd protection? After establishing that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic with an ever-declining lethality, Graham moves on to discuss how this will take place. He starts by coining and describing the term ‘herd protection’. No, herd protection is not Graham’s attempt at a more socially acceptable definition of herd immunity. It is a unique concept that, in my opinion, cleverly bridges the gap between increasingly divergent schools of thought regarding herd immunity. But before we get to herd protection, let’s back up and review the definition of herd immunity. If you recall, the concept of herd immunity can be defined as the minimum percentage of a population needed to be immune to a disease in order for the disease not to transmit efficiently. This percentage is determined by how contagious a disease is. Most epidemiologists project the threshold for herd immunity to Covid-19 to be about 60–80% of the population. So, when 60–80% are immune, the pandemic starts slowing. It doesn’t fully halt, though, in part because immunity to Covid-19 isn’t permanent. The virus in this scenario then becomes endemic and continues to circulate causing fewer infections and less deadly outbreaks as the years go on. Graham explains that herd immunity is not an ideal term to use when referring to Covid-19. He believes the label of herd immunity should generally be reserved for diseases that can be stopped through vaccination alone. While a vaccine may be helpful to some degree for Covid-19, the end of the pandemic will occur by way of a number of factors, not just a vaccine. These factors form the components of herd protection and include, heterogeneous mixing, pre-existing immunity, absence of susceptibility, naturally acquired immunity, and immunity acquired by vaccination. We’ll breakdown what each of these means in a moment. I realize it might sound like splitting hairs over semantics, but I can’t emphasize enough the importance of this concept, herd protection. There is considerable debate about whether natural herd immunity to Covid-19 is possible, if it would be good for society, and if it should be a strategy to manage the pandemic. Undertones of this dispute arise from scientific publications to social media posts and everywhere in-between. Graham neutralizes this issue by revealing that herd protection is indeed possible, it’s how the pandemic will end, and its arrival is unequivocally good for society. Herd protection is not a strategy, per se, but it’s a goal. It provides a target that governments, communities, and their leaders can aim for. The goal isn’t to get there as quickly as possible, but to arrive safely and minimize suffering along the way. Now, let’s unpack each of the components of herd protection and how they contribute to the immunity of a population. 1. Heterogeneous mixing Calculations for herd immunity traditionally assume a population that mixes randomly. Graham recognizes, however, that, “We don’t mix randomly, but rather with the same people over and over again. And some mix more than others.” This lack of random mixing is called heterogeneous mixing. Although this is probably the most esoteric component of herd protection, it’s important to mention nonetheless. Okay, let’s move on to the others. 2. Pre-existing immunity By using the term, pre-existing immunity, Graham is referring to a subset of people who have been exposed to other coronaviruses in the past besides SARS-CoV-2. The immune systems of some of these individuals are able to recognize and attack the novel coronavirus in addition to whatever other coronaviruses they were exposed to previously. This is called cross-reactivity, and some researchers estimate that the immune systems of 40–60% of the population may possess cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2. Science author, Dr. Dana Smith explains the concept very articulately here: 3. Absence of susceptibility Another phenomenon Graham highlights is the idea that some individuals are susceptible to infection from SARS-CoV-2 while others are not. He considers outbreaks on cruise ships or in prisons and wonders, “Why don’t 100% of people get Covid-19 after significant exposure?” This is not the same thing as pre-existing immunity and may be related to genetic predisposition. Graham uses the example of rare individuals who lack the cellular receptors used by HIV to enter cells. These people don’t get HIV because it literally can’t enter their bodies. It’s not that they’re immune, they just aren’t susceptible. Similarly, and for reasons that remain unclear, there are a number of people who aren’t susceptible to Covid-19. Research indicates that this number is higher for younger people. Graham uses figures derived from an article published in the journal, Nature Medicine, below, to describe the concept.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/book-review-from-killer-to-common-cold-b0a2584a36ea

['Bo Stapler']

2020-11-13 21:38:04.551000+00:00

['Covid-19', 'Science', 'Healthcare', 'Coronavirus', 'Health']

“There Are Still Faint Glimmers Of Civilization Left In This Barbaric Slaughterhouse That Was Once Known As Humanity.”

Wouldn’t it be lovely to throw myself out of an open window? Sometimes, I think about open windows and extension cords — even on my better days. Even after I tongue my morning meds. I breathe and let it pass. Ignore the incoming tide and wreckage on the shore. I tell myself it’s going to get better, it has to get better, no matter how many people shout in my ear it’s naive to believe it is or ever will be. I see people I know clink glasses in front of a tree. They photograph their day and publish it for the feed to see. People who wear masks and are woke, but not woke enough to sacrifice one holiday for the greater good. They just had to travel to sip cocktails and feel the binding warmth that only the tightest of unmasked hugs brings. When questioned, they stomp their little feet, get defensive, talk about all the protective measures they’ve taken, and I sigh because this is how we got here in the first place — our greed and selfishness. Our blindness to our wants and how they always seem to rise above everyone else. I think about this when I’m shut in an apartment that isn’t mine, crouched in front of a space heater because it’s never warm, and there’s only cereal and pasta in the cupboard because I’d forgotten to go shopping. It’s Christmas and I’m spooning corn flakes into a body that doesn’t crave it. It’s Christmas and there are no glinting lights, no towering trees, no sun to stand in because we live in forever shade, and I read a pile of emails from strangers asking for things. I read a pile of comments from “well, actually” bros and think, it’s true — they really do never sleep. The more I hold on to holidays past — friends singing loud and off-key, a patchwork of family, warm toddies and lasagna forked onto plates, snow coming down in sheets, I brace myself. Am I going to cry? No, that is decidedly not me. Instead, I eat my cold cereal on the one day in L.A. when it rains because this is my default setting. Feeling nothing in an unimaginable something. I watch animal rescue videos for four hours straight, telling myself, as the great M. Gustave once said in The Grand Budapest Hotel, “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” I have to believe this. Otherwise, what’s the point. There are decent people in this world even though we’re drowning in indecency. I don’t have a permanent home because the plan was to move abroad. Shuttle myself every few months to another AirBNB and wait until the borders open. Until my passport is no longer a paperweight. Until I can file the paperwork to live in a country where I don’t have to pay $600 a month for a healthcare plan that barely covers the flu shot. Live in a country where I can speak a new language and start over. I practice my once-fluent Spanish, faintly remembering how I spoke English and Spanish in equal measure when I was small. When I barely towered above my mother’s knees and parroted titi around the house. I consider the French I learned once for three months and the German I’d abandoned to crawl my way back to Spanish. I’m feeling suffocated by English, willing it to exile. The more I write and speak it, the more I feel estranged from it. I can’t explain the chasm I feel widening between who I am and the language I speak in the country I was raised in — I can only suggest a kind of absence, a gaping hole where love and pride once resided. I’m willing to discard the language I know to fumble in the dark to another. It started many years ago when I’d travel and people asked where I was from and I’d say, New York, and they’d say, America, and I’d correct them, repeating, New York, New York. How do I reconcile the home I knew for forty years is now a stranger? How I move from place to place, but can’t find where I fit? I couldn’t articulate the shame I felt when I heard the word American, but I could discern its form and shape. When I lived in Joshua Tree, I’d lay in the grass and watch the sky become a bruise, darken, and sandblast to unfurl a landscape of white stars. I’d snow-angel even though there was no snow. Tapping my heels, like Dorothy, like Odysseus, desperate to find my way home. What if I wasn’t running away from something, but running to something? I think about this lately because I can’t seem to sit still. I feel this urgency to flee the inferno before I can tongue the flames. When we’re small, our parents are gods. They’re magnificent, just, and right. But as we grow older we start to see them for who they are — flawed humans. People doing the best they can with what they have. Sometimes, we see them for the villains they always were when we were too young to know or refused to see. Humans that are monsters. I grew up proud of being American. I felt the weight of its white bread and sugar, its traveling circus and great plains. But the child grows into a cynical teenager into an adult and once that adult sees America for what it is — sometimes, a flawed human, other times a vicious monster — there’s no going back. There’s no returning to the land where everyone is beautiful and no one hurts. I feel strong, healthy, and hopeful but it’s hard to reconcile my sense of hope with the brushfire surrounding me, the sadness and rightful rage rising up all around me. We are ravaged. Bracing for the tsunami that has become our everyday. Living in fear of collapsing under the weight of it. I’m angry people can’t stay home, can’t wear masks, can’t be decent. I’m tired of people parading their greed, oblivious to it. It’s easy for me to be sickened by the world around me — but what would that do? I’ve been sick, angry, tired, and traumatized for years and look how its aged and withered me. I’m no better off, none the wiser. Maybe I got some good stories out of it, who can say? I’m not stronger for wanting to die countless times over the past few years — I’m stronger for having endured. For waking up and saying, I have to live today. Even when my brain tells me how easy it would be to reach for that extension cord, open that window. I have to believe “there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” Otherwise, I’m frightened of the moment when all lights are extinguished in the dark. I’m terrified of the day we wake and there is no sun.

https://medium.com/the-gathering-kind/there-are-still-faint-glimmers-of-civilization-left-in-this-barbaric-slaughterhouse-that-was-once-1fa2f5adbf86

['Felicia C. Sullivan']

2020-12-27 01:09:46.823000+00:00

['Society', 'Writing', 'America', 'Mental Health', 'Culture']

Sure, AI can be creative, but it will never possess genius

Sarah Bernhardt plays Hamlet, London 1899 “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?” The close of Act II Scene ii, and Hamlet questions how the performers in a play about the siege of Troy are able to convey such emotion — feel such empathy — for the stranger queen of an ancient city. The construct here is complex. A play within a play, sparking a key moment of introspection, and ultimately self doubt. It is no coincidence that in this same work we find perhaps the earliest use of the term “my mind’s eye,” heralding a shift in theatrical focus from traditions of enacted disputes, lovers passions, and farce, to more a more nuanced kind of drama that issues from psychological turmoil. Hamlet is generally considered to be a work of creative genius. For many laboring in the creative arts, works like this and those in its broader category serve as aspirational benchmarks. Indelible reminders of the brilliant outlands of human creativity. Now, for the first time in our history, humans have a rival in deliberate acts of aesthetic creation. In the midst of the avalanche of artificial intelligence hype comes a new promise — creative AI; here to relieve us of burdensome tasks including musical, literary, and artistic composition. In a recent episode of Gigaom’s Voices in AI podcast, Max Welling, a Vice President of Technologies at Qualcomm, explained the possibility of replicating an endeavor that, until now, was the sole purview of humanity: “Sometimes people say that being creative is something very magical. That’s not something we could ever create in a computer, but I don’t agree… Creativity is really combining sort of elements of things that you’ve learned in the past in very surprising new ways, right? A recombination of modules into new ways that are very surprising to others. Now we are reasonably good at this as humans but I would say, with computers, there’s no reason why they couldn’t do that a lot better even than humans.” Welling is not alone in either his view of what constitutes creativity or his ambition for intelligent machines. When asked about a future in which children might learn creativity from educational systems, a spokesman for edtech firm Squirrel AI similarly told me: “We believe artificial intelligence will surpass humanity in terms of creativity in 5 to 10 years.” Surpass! Apparently, they have ascertained the four component building blocks of creativity, each of which is now demonstrable in artificially intelligent computers: extensive knowledge, curiosity, divergent thinking, and logical induction. Creative AI, another company invested in this growing field, may not have declared that the literary works of computers will make great novels look like bored doodles, but they have championed its burgeoning prowess in assisting human creativity. They say we’re trending towards unprecedented access to creative tools (photo editors, music studios, etc) as well as greater opportunity for collaboration (social online platforms). This is giving rise to what they’ve termed “the escalation of creativity”; or “a world where creativity is highly accessible and anyone can write at the level of Shakespeare, compose music on par with Bach, paint in the style of Van Gogh…” Such opinions are indicative of a viral belief that just about anything can be broken into modules or captured as data, quantified, and ultimately replicated or coached by machines. Even creative brilliance. Edmond de Bellamy, a generative adversarial network portrait painting To me, this deeply misunderstands the goals and the joys of true creativity. Even if we concede to Squirrel AI that curiosity (for example) is an axiomatic part of creation, they chose evidence it with reference to a deep learning system that recently outperformed human players of the game, Montezuma’s Revenge. This might be impressive, but its a kind of curiosity needs to be closely stewarded by the machine’s human creators. And while evidence suggests that toddlers learn and adapt in a markedly systematic way — making inferences based on statistical probability using similar “algorithms” to AI — they are indisputably the volitional prime mover in this process. As Berkeley University professor and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik characterizes it, small children “get into everything” as part of their evidence gathering. We know from experience that this means exploring various surroundings, artefacts, emotions, communications, sensations, etc. Even for a “curious” AI, their equivalent domain is necessarily limited. Artistic AI learns how to do art from art; it does not compose art in response to its environment. Yet this is a crucial component of what creative art is. It is a reaction to and an expression of our lived experiences. Where we find creative genius — be it in a single work of creativity, or in the collective works of one human creator — we are taken with its ability to assimilate and transmit something profound. We may not be able to articulate its features, but we can say that it is a vehicle for message, usually wrapped in an emotion. A mechanical system might be able to produce something that looks just like a Banksy but, like a forgery, it’s affective inauthenticity invalidates it’s artistic value. A true creator cannot be without thought or consciousness, and an AI cannot produce work that is a commentary on a world it cannot experience. Just as one can’t express the feeling of the wind in one’s hair if one has never experienced the wind, nor grown any hair. Outside of the sensual or emotional, great feats of creativity generally draw down our dense networks of associations familiar to human beings, but often unspoken. Paul Sager has written of the massive emphasis humans place on associations, borrowing an example from Simon Blackburn: “Imagine I invite you over to dinner and, while carving the roast, I casually mention that this is the very knife that the assassin used to murder my wife and children. Would you still be comfortable eating the slice of beef I’ve just plopped on to your plate?” It is the salience of these types of social and psychological associations that creatively brilliant works play with so adeptly. As a corollary, much of our enjoyment is derived from our efforts to determine the creator’s motivations, or the subject’s intent. Banksy, Girl With Heart Balloon Is Hamlet really mad? Is the Mona Lisa smiling? What do Pi’s animals teach us about belief? And Willy Loman about success? Why does David look so mournfully at the Head of Goliath?These things are not accessible through the computational analysis of data. Nor can works of similar worth be produced without a species-level understanding of the human condition that underpins them. This is not to say that science has no place in creativity. On the contrary, the history of creative artifacts would be much poorer without assistive technologies. Paintbrushes, pens, typewriters, photographic cameras, recording studios — the list goes on. With this prodigious ancestry, new artificially intelligent technologies will undoubtedly facilitate as yet unknown fields of creative art to amaze and challenge us all. The rather smug language of “augmentation” is the vogue way of describing this assistance, but it is just a veiled way of admitting that, when it comes to meaningful creative efforts , AI will be a tool, not a Tolkien. This distinction is important, and especially at a time when practitioners are describing artificial creativity as “the ultimate moonshot” for AI. In reality, these systems are not striving to create beautiful, challenging things. Rather, they are trying to predict and produce things that humans may respond to as worthwhile or beautiful. In other walks of life — like marketing and advertising– such methods have so far been extremely successful in predicting, and then gradually shaping, our preferences and behaviors. Soon we may find our artistic tastes recalibrating in favor of creative works that are produced quickly, easily, and at a fraction of the cost of authentically composed pieces. This shaping may already be happening. Like Hamlet’s players, AI does not portray true emotion, only its superficial signifiers. It is mimicry, which has its uses (including entertainment), but can never replace brilliance. Let’s make sure that, as attempts are made to boil human creativity down to its composite parts and cheaply simulate it, at the same time intelligent technologies are used to cultivate and elevate the real deal.

https://towardsdatascience.com/sure-ai-can-be-creative-but-it-will-never-possess-genius-8a6fecd7fbbc

['Fiona J Mcevoy']

2019-08-28 15:02:28.875000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Creativity', 'Technology', 'Art', 'Future']

How to Create Interactive Climate Model Maps in Python

“El Niño is likely this winter,” the forecaster says. “El Niño typically brings above-normal winter cloudiness and rainfall across the southern U.S. and milder conditions to Canada…” You may have heard something like this spoken on your TV, radio, or written on the Internet recently. Have you ever wondered how a meteorologist or climatologist comes to such conclusions? In this post, we’ll show you how to create interactive climate maps using the Copernicus Data Store, where you can visualize, examine, and explore the same data that your local forecaster sees. Keep reading to learn how to make an interactive version of this March 2019 precipitation anomaly map. Copernicus is a game-changing project that “makes information about the past, present, and future climate freely available, and functions as a one-stop shop for users to explore climate data.” Access to data is open, free and unrestricted. We have entered a golden age of freely available weather and climate data on the web — spanning time horizons from the next few hours or days and even into the coming weeks or months. NOAA’s NCEP NOMADS is a treasure trove of such information, and now the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts’ Copernicus Climate Data Store has burst onto the scene. Before we start mapping, let’s get set up with Copernicus. We’ll use their API to get the climate data for our visualizations. Getting started is easy: Make an account here. Navigate to the ‘data store’ portion of the site. In this post, we’ll look at ‘seasonal forecast’ data sets (access here). For further weather and climate map inspiration, check out our post ‘How to Create 2D and 3D Interactive Weather Maps in Python and R’. 1. Download your first data set In the climate forecasting space, anomalies (difference from average) are often the most frequently examined data. While looking at raw outputs can be useful in some circumstances, the end goal is to understand how much warmer, cooler, drier, or wetter than normal an area may be. For the purposes of this post, we’ll be looking at forecast anomalies. In order to work with this climate data in Plotly, you’ll need to download the data in NetCDF format. To do this, you will have to install the Climate Data Store Application Program Interface (CDS API). For Python users, this step should be pretty straightforward: Install the CDS API key and store it in your home directory. 2. Install the CDS API client using `pip install cdsapi`. Now let’s download some data 👌 We’ll start off with a sea surface temperature data set from the ECMWF model, often considered the gold standard when it comes to weather and climate prediction. Follow this link to the data and navigate to the “Download Data” tab in the page. Under the “Download Data” tab, you’ll find a form where you can specify the data you’d like to download through the API. Selections in this form will create an API request for the desired data. To view this request, fill out the form and click the red “Show API request” button at the bottom-left beneath the form. Fill out your form like this: Then, click the “Show API request” to reveal your request. (“Hide API request” tucks it away again.) Next, copy this API request and paste it into a Jupyter notebook. Remember when we mentioned that it needs to be in NetCDF format? This is where we’ll change the requested file format from GRIB to NetCDF: Click HERE for an example Jupyter Notebook to download and process the climate data. 2. Your first plot: Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Now you should have your data set in your home directory. Next, we leverage the power of Python with Plotly to view and inspect climate data in a new, interactive format that enables you to zoom to low levels for greater detail. Gone are the days of worrying about whether data for your country will show. In this case we’ll produce a world map with data that covers the Earth 👌 🗺️ The first plot shows sea surface temperature anomalies: essentially, how much warmer or cooler than average the sea surface temperature is at a given location (or grid box). Sea surface temperature anomalies are particularly important in the tropical oceans, as anomalies help to modify the Walker Circulation, which plays a major role in precipitation and temperature patterns across the global tropics (and to a lesser extent the middle latitudes). Early in 2019, there is an El Niño signature in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The warmest sea surface temperatures (and anomalies) are located across the west-central equatorial Pacific, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north of Fiji. This has been an area of consistent atmospheric lift, increased cloud cover, and precipitation. You can download the Jupyter Notebook here and use it to make all the plots below. 3. Air Temperature Anomaly This plot looks at the forecast air temperature anomaly, in Celsius, for the month of March 2019. These model data also come from the ECMWF, although the Copernicus data store hosts four additional models from institutions across Europe: UK Met Office (UKMO), Météo France, Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), and Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC). Red colors show warmer-than-average temperatures while blue indicates below-average temperatures. 4. Precipitation Anomaly This plot examines precipitation rate anomaly in mm/second for the month of March 2019. Precipitation is often considered one of the most challenging parameters to forecast. Generally speaking, precipitation outlooks have lower confidence than temperature outlooks. This is because rain and snow can be irregular in coverage and intensity — there may be sharp differences in amounts over short distances, depending on the lay of the land (e.g. more in the mountain ranges, less in the valleys). Compared to temperature, it is generally much less uniform and therefore a more frequent forecast challenge. In the chart below, negative values (blues) indicate below-normal monthly precipitation while positive values (yellows, oranges) indicate above-normal monthly precipitation. So, with this wealth of climate data at your fingertips, get graphing with Plotly and start exploring your world in a new way!

https://medium.com/plotly/how-to-create-interactive-climate-model-maps-in-python-28eed13ccb00

[]

2019-02-11 19:31:00.738000+00:00

['Mapping', 'Weather', 'Plotly', 'Climate Change', 'Data Visualization']

Our FAQs

Writers What happens when I submit my article to TDS? Thank you so much for taking the time to submit your article to our team! We will review it as soon as we can. If we believe that your article is excellent and ready to go, this is how you will be able to add your post to our publication. If “Towards Data Science” shows up after you click on “Add to publication” in the dropdown menu at the top of the page, that means we have added you as an author and are waiting for you to submit your article. Once you have submitted your article, it will be reviewed by an editor before a final decision is made. If we think that your article is interesting but needs to be improved, someone from our team will provide you with feedback directly on your submitted Medium article. Please note that we only respond to articles that were properly submitted using either our form or via an email that exactly follows the instructions listed here. We don’t respond to pitches or questions already answered in our FAQs or on our Contribute page. We also ignore articles that don’t comply with our rules. If you haven’t heard from us within the next five working days, please carefully check the article you submitted to our team. See if you can now submit it directly to TDS and look for any private notes from us that you may have missed. You should also make sure to check your spam folder. If you just can’t reach us, the best thing for you to do is submit your article to another publication. Although we’d love to, we can’t provide customized feedback to everyone because we simply receive too many submissions. You can learn more about our decision here and submit another post in a month.

https://medium.com/p/462571b65b35#a082

['Tds Editors']

2020-11-19 01:16:58.476000+00:00

['Writers’ Guide', 'Tds Team', 'Writers Guide']

How I Managed to Write a Novel Alongside a Full-Time Job

If you asked my ten-year-old self what she wanted to be when she was older, she would’ve answered without hesitation: “I want to be an author.” Reader, let me tell you, my younger self would be proud because as of the 3 October 2020, I finished my 80,000-word manuscript. This is hopefully the first of many novels I’ll write in my life, but having finished my first project of that scale is an indescribable feeling. Of course, it’s not really finished — the manuscript is currently resting, and after a few weeks away from it I’ll revise it before I start querying agents. But it has a beginning, a middle and an end, hence I use the word ‘finished’. Lots of people want to write books, but few people actually do. What’s the secret to finishing your masterpiece? I don’t profess to know it all, but here are a few things that helped me. I spent time planning the project I’ve got several ideas for novels, but few that I’ve actually taken the time to sit down and map out properly in terms of what happens chapter-by-chapter. I always used to read writing manuals by established authors that told me to plan, plan, plan, but for some reason I thought I was too much of a prodigy to follow their guidance. Surprise, surprise, I hit a wall. Every damn time. I’ve got another book that I’ve written 13,000 words of, that I don’t know where it’s going next. Why? Because I didn’t plan it properly. I knew the overall storyline, but I had no idea what happened chapter to chapter. But this project was different. Before I even started writing, I knew the birthdays of each of my characters. I knew exactly what motivated them, how they would act in a certain situation, and crucially why they behave a certain way. I didn’t realise it before, but these are the things that drive your plot forward, which is why it’s important to take the time to establish credible motivations for your characters. I had the planning documents sat on Google Drive waiting for the right time to start writing for a few months. So why was 2020 my year? Well, it’s got something to do with an abundance of time spent inside. Lockdown: an introvert’s dream 2020 has been a challenging year, but compared to most people my situation throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has been very fortunate. I’ve had a stable source of income throughout, and a job I could easily do from home (I work in Marketing). As an introverted person, I’ve got an abundance of hobbies I can do inside; I love reading, cooking, drawing, and of course, writing has always been a go to. So I found it easy to fill all the extra time we had inside due to the pandemic. My extroverted boyfriend who loves sport? Not so much. In the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown, I coordinated the first print magazine edition of my website ‘The Indiependent’. We raised money for the British Lung Foundation while also providing lots of early career stage journalists with their first ever print byline — that felt pretty damn special. But, almost as soon as the project went to print I found myself thinking: “What do I do now?” I spent a few months reading, and even picked up my sketchbook for the first time in a while, but I was still restless. I needed something challenging to do. I wrote a few articles, but I wanted something bigger, meatier to sink my teeth into. And so, I started writing my book in the evenings after work, and on weekends. But I was working in Google Docs, and jumping between character profiles, and my chapter plot summary notes. It was a bit disorganised, and sometimes I spent so long re-reading what I’d written the day before to get back into it that I barely wrote anything in each session. But then something magic happened. I learned about Scrivener This is not a paid product placement, just to be clear. Scrivener is simply so brilliant, it sells itself. I follow a journalist who has been busy writing her own book and she tweeted a screenshot of the software, which allows you to set yourself session word targets, as well as an overall target for your manuscript. I enquired what the software was, she replied, and I downloaded the free trial. The best thing about the trial is that it only counts the day where you open the software to write on your book, which is pretty neat if you’re trying to fit in writing as of when you have 30 minutes to yourself and don’t have the luxury of being able to write every day. It’s also only $47, so when you decide you can’t do without it in your life, it doesn’t break the bank. It’s hard to describe, but the way the software is laid out makes it incredibly easy to jump between planning documents, character or place sheets, research and best of all none of that stuff gets included in the overall word count. You can also annotate your project with ease, with different coloured markers for different stages of your revision process. Once you’re done, you can easily compile it into a manuscript which meets industry requirements within a couple of clicks, too. The software made the process of sitting down to write a lot more straight-forward. But how did I get past the inevitable slump? I used social media for accountability If you haven’t already sussed it out yet, I’m one of those people who always has a project on the go. This means that I am constantly juggling a lot of balls at any one time, and sometimes, balls fall by the wayside after something new and shiny catches my attention. I start and don’t finish a lot of projects, which is why actually seeing my novel through to the end feels like such a major achievement. But one way I’ve found to make myself more accountable is by using social media to document the progress of my projects. Fairly early on, I posted a photo of my word count on Twitter which showed that I was in the process of writing a novel. A couple of days later, I shared the updated word count with a comment about my progress. A few days later, another photo, with a few words about my rate of progress. People favourited and engaged with the post, asking what software I was using (“It’s this great thing called Scrivener, I’m honestly not getting paid to write about it — I swear!”). Others spurred me on, with words of encouragement. The more words I wrote, the more invested my followers seemed to be, applauding me when I passed the 50% mark, and then later, the 75% mark. My final tweet where I shared that I had finished the manuscript had a whopping 200+ likes, and 10 comments. Posting about your writing journey on social media isn’t going to get the words on the page any faster — in fact, you might find yourself mindlessly scrolling on Twitter instead of typing. But having that community of people to support you will help you on the days that you don’t really feel like writing. You’ll be writing not just for yourself, but for them too. Here are just a few of the things that helped me finish my novel this year. I hope you find it useful — if you have any other tips or tricks for finishing your damn manuscript, let me know in the comments below!

https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-managed-to-write-a-novel-alongside-a-full-time-job-cd54cc2b737c

['Beth Kirkbride']

2020-10-24 19:40:36.859000+00:00

['Literature', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips', 'Books']

The Psychological Imperative of Characterization

The Psychological Imperative of Characterization How writers can use psychology and archetypes to create more engaging and honest characters. With thoughts on the role of narrative in human identity. Our brains take in information about the world through the senses. The little experience simulator processes sensory information, and we react to this information to play the video game we call life. But, we have another powerful tool that informs our reactions outside of sensory input: narrative. I always want to hang out with the storyteller. I love those old guys who have stories they’ve been refining for years with family, at dinner parties, with anyone who’ll listen. It isn’t important that his stories are actually true. Most stories get stretched with time. What is important is how truthful his story is. Children suffer from this. They will experience something incredible, but they lack the storytelling skill to communicate the importance of the event. I think the stories children tell are boring because they lack experience. They experience life, but they are in the process of creating their narrative. The best characters have motivations that are real, have a psychological purpose, and reveal a truth about the human experience. Narrative is important because it is one point in the data set of human experiences. As someone who consumes narrative, we begin to see patterns of human behavior based on each of these individual tales. For writers, these patterns of behavior become archetypes. Archetypes are simply patterns of behavior. An example of an archetypal figure is the mother. Now, if we were simply using our senses, then we would understand that there are similarities in the experiences of women who have children. This isn’t interesting, and it’s certainly not narrative. The narrative element to archetypal figures rests in motivation. When we look at the motivations of mothers, we get into different motivational archetypes. A mother may want to have a child because she’s vain. She may want to have a child to continue her family lineage. She may not even want a child. These motivations create narrative. They’re also interesting to consider. So, we have to base characters on their psychological motivations. We find archetypal patterns in motivations, too. The best characters have motivations that are real, have a psychological purpose, and reveal a truth the about human experience. Carl Jung believed that humans possessed an inherent, a priori unconsciousness that consisted of “mythological motifs … primordial images … and myths.” He called this the “collective unconsciousness.” If this is true, then writers should be able to tap into the collective unconsciousness to create characters that are true, captivating, and relatable. Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels Here is my plan. I’m going to try to become better at writing characters by studying psychology. I’m going to do a deep dive into the work of Carl Jung. I’m going to examine the archetypes of human motivation. Next, I’m going to make sense of the human psyche by exploring twelve archetypal figures. My objective is to understand patterns of human behavior. My other objective is to use psychology to root my characters in psychological realism. For each archetypal figure, I want to create a template of human behavior. The first installment will be ‘the outlaw’ archetypal figure.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-psychological-imperative-of-characterization-970d3c18d699

['Adam Thompson']

2019-07-04 06:49:48.410000+00:00

['Work', 'Creativity', 'Psychology', 'Writing']

Как рассказать историю при помощи интерактивной карты

В KnightLab полагают, что современная журналистика оказалась под контролем «технократов», которые ничего не смыслят в профессии: What problem are we solving? We care deeply about journalism. […] But in 2013, journalism is still struggling with its digitally-focused future. Technologists are winning at media technology innovation, but they do not understand “journalism”. Worse, many journalists barely understand how the Internet works, let alone how to get the most out of storytelling on the web.

https://medium.com/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C-%D1%87%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C-%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE-%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C-%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%B0/%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BA-%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C-%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8E-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%89%D0%B8-%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9-%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D1%8B-edfaae5500e6

['We Shall Burn Bright']

2015-06-17 21:22:51.387000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Visualization', 'Journalism']

Developing an Author Brand When Your Passions are All Over the Map

Branding for Nonconformists Developing an Author Brand When Your Passions are All Over the Map Do I have to pick ONE thing to be known for? Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash A decade ago, back when people were still reading personal blogs (remember those?), my sister remarked, “You’d attract a lot more readers if you only wrote about one thing” — an observation rather than a criticism. In addition to the writing advice and book recommendations you’d expect from an author, I posted with equal enthusiasm about my knitting and sewing projects, vegetarian (and later vegan) cooking, and our adventures across five continents. Maintaining separate blogs on each topic didn’t feel like an efficient use of my time, and the prospect of limiting myself to book talk felt inauthentic. The downside was that a reader who’d enjoyed one of my fantasy novels might react to my blog content with puzzlement or disinterest instead of becoming an even bigger fan, but I decided that was a risk worth taking. I continued to thumb my nose at any author asserting that real writers don’t indulge passions apart from the written word. Creative cross-pollination had always seemed perfectly self evident to me: each of my artistic outlets continually informing and inspiring the others. So when book marketers started pushing the concept of author branding, I was at a loss. How could I effectively “position myself” if I refused to specialize? The question compounded itself as I branched out from novels about cloning ancestors, witchy spies, teen cannibals, Marian apparitions, and time slips (plus my guidebook to Ireland) into “sneaky self-help” books on ego management and turbocharging one’s creativity through ethical veganism. I’ve been publishing for well over a decade now, and while I am in regular social-media contact with a small group of loyal fans, it seems as if the majority of my readers are enthusiastic about only one of my books, and then they move on. I could hire a marketing consultant, but I’m pretty sure what they’d say: the problem is I’m all over the map. Is it even possible to develop a cohesive author brand without choosing between writing for adults and writing for children, impossible scenarios and practical philosophy, literature and veganism? Few authors have attempted this wide a range; the first who comes to mind is Martha Brockenbrough, who publishes picture books and young adult fantasy along with Alexander Hamilton, Revolutionary and Unpresidented, which are meticulously researched biographies primarily for a teen audience. While her body of work seems eclectic at first glance, Martha is consistently writing for a younger audience, so that a reader of hers can start with her picture books and in a few years move on to The Game of Love and Death. My body of work offers no such logical progression; if a tween enjoys my cozy children’s fantasy they could eventually crack my young-adult horror novel, but the tone of these two stories is so drastically different that I don’t expect this to happen often. Marketing gurus tell us an essential element of one’s brand is reliability, which is to say that both new and established readers have a clear idea of what to expect from you. I, on the other hand, have essentially made a career out of 137º turns. The catch about personal-growth writing is that you have to reserve a certain amount of creative bandwidth for following through on your own advice. In my forthcoming book on veganism and creativity, I suggest my readers shift focus from minimizing their weaknesses — becoming less of what they don’t want to be — to becoming more of what they already are. That’s the approach I intend to take toward developing a more effective author brand, and in the process I’m hoping to create a useful case study for other multi-passionate writers. Here are four initial steps I’m taking toward figuring out a brand that works for me: Get super clear on why I’m doing this (or why anyone should). I don’t need 100,000 Twitter followers; what I need is to position my work so that it’s as easily findable as it possibly can be. Here’s how I articulated this challenge to Heather in an email the other day: I’ve been thinking about my initial attitude about all this — ‘oh, I just need to get this content out there and if people are going to find it, they’ll find it’ — and I have replaced this with a much more useful evangelist-on-a-city-corner analogy, which is that we can have insightful and potentially life-changing messages to share, but if we’re sharing them on a backstreet overlooking the railroad track, then we ain’t savin’ nobody. Having a website with SEO keywords isn’t going to accomplish that in and of itself. Posting daily on social media isn’t automatically going to do it either. So what is? Find the through-line. Is there a unifying theme across my seemingly disparate body of work? Can I create my brand along this through-line without letting go of the things that bring me incredible amounts of joy—all of which make my work worth reading? Connect with my ideal audience where they’re already hanging out. Back in May I started a weekly Youtube challenge so I can become more comfortable in front of the camera (and with being seen in general). No matter how solid the content and production values, though, building a channel from scratch is tough going. When I got back on Medium recently after publishing a piece on Tenderly, it occurred to me that the readership here values fresh and innovative writing on creativity and personal development. Reading great Medium content, becoming an active community member, and publishing my own work here is the most natural course of action. Get as clear as can be on this one, too: what’s the need my work is answering? In the case of Life Without Envy, the book’s promise is clear from the subtitle: Ego Management for Creative People. Many people have told me they knew they needed to read it based on the title alone. But my forthcoming book on veganism and creativity is going to be a trickier title to position, since I’m articulating a need that potential readers don’t realize they have, highlighting a connection between emotional wellness and unethical food sources that they may not feel ready to make. It doesn’t surprise me that the only readers who seem to be excited for this one are the already-vegan—but do I want to build my author brand with an underlying attitude of “oh well, maybe I’m too far ahead of my time”? Baloney. Over the past few years I’ve become a teller of uncomfortable truths, and I have to figure out a way to work with this.

https://cometparty.medium.com/developing-an-author-brand-when-your-passions-are-all-over-the-map-377af917cc12

['Camille Deangelis']

2019-08-26 13:23:50.869000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Books', 'Branding', 'Writing', 'Publishing']

The Reason Why We Can’t Smell Our Own House

As the days etch on, I can’t help but think about the friendships I’ve had in my formative years, where we would invite our friends to our homes — with our parents’ permission obviously — and they would invite us back. When we visited a new friend or acquaintance, their house had this innate but benign signature smell. It seemed to be exclusive to their house only, no matter how many times you visited them afterward. However, if you told them that their house had a unique smell, they would usually be oblivious, shrug their shoulders, and move on. Then, the tables would turn, where they would visit you and they would tell you that your house has a unique smell, too. It could be a myriad of normal smells, ranging from pepper to freshly brewed coffee, to the faintest hints of lavender, or even freshly cut lemons. Either way, we sometimes get oblivious to the smells in our own home sometimes. It’s called olfactory adaptation. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash Olfactory adaptation, alternatively known as olfactory fatigue and nose blindness, is just a temporary inability to identify certain smells after prolonged exposure to it. For example, if you chewed a strong brand of minty gum for about an hour or so, you will eventually stop smelling it. Some of the smell might have genuinely weaned off, but your brain has grown fully numb to it, and you initially forget about the gum chewing. Hours later, your partner comes in, excited to share something with you. They open the door and are momentarily taken aback by the mint’s sheer power. They too, will eventually fall prey to the tantalizing reaches of olfactory adaptation. However, it’s not a terrible thing to have. Think of our cavemen ancestors. If they were hiding from predators, olfactory adaptation could have comforted the person, especially as the smells would have taken the backburner for more pressing matters, like finding food and preparing a better shelter. Photo by Dan Edwards on Unsplash — New smells crop up, but that’s part of life. When you inhale, there are various molecules that permeate off of the things in our environment, and they work their way into our nostrils, onto a wall of mucus at our throat’s backside, called the olfactory epithelium. These molecules get dissolved and bind to special receptors that fire signals to the brain, which is then registered as a specific smell. In theory, you could trick yourself into smelling something else with the help of a trusted loved one, as a study in 2001 has shown. For example, imagine someone shared a mysterious dish with you. You’re not sure what this dish is made out of, and so, you ask them. They lie, without you knowing, and tell you it’s a variation of something that you already like, such as your favourite food. This neutral smell might be more favourably received until the deception is discovered. However, the same loved one could also trick you in the other direction, by insinuating that you are smelling something super disgusting. I’ll let you use your imagination on that. Photo by Andrey Zvyagintsev on Unsplash — She’s not impressed. Either way, changes to our surroundings, require us to be mindful of the things happening in our environment. Our brain is constantly calibrating, processing new sights, sounds, and smells. If you’re unsure if your house is smelling good or not, perhaps you can leave the room — and perhaps the entire house itself — for a few hours and then come back to it later. If you’re still unsure, you could take a quick jog up and down the stairs or do some other kind of sudden movement, like jumping jacks and stretches. As long as you surround yourself with the most wondrous smells, perhaps the rest will follow, and everyone will walk out of the situation much happier than before.

https://medium.com/science-soul/the-reason-why-we-cant-smell-our-own-house-1514ab70b57a

['Synthia Satkuna', 'Ma Candidate']

2020-11-20 00:53:55.656000+00:00

['Smells', 'Science', 'Psychology', 'Writing', 'Nose']

Why Covid Long-Haulers Should Be Careful About Vaccines

Why Covid Long-Haulers Should Be Careful About Vaccines Understanding who might be at risk for post-vaccine autoimmunity, including mRNA-based vaccines. Health vector created by pikisuperstar — www.freepik.com In 2011, Yehuda Shoenfeld, MD, a world-leading autoimmunity professor with over 1,700 peer-reviewed publications, coined the term ASIA: Autoimmune/inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants. It’s also called Shoenfeld’s syndrome or post-vaccination autoimmunity. Here comes a predicament: Should people at risk for ASIA, such as those with autoimmune conditions like Covid-19 long-haulers, get a vaccine? A backdrop on ASIA Adjuvant, the second A in ASIA, means to aid in Latin. In medicine, an adjuvant is a substance that boosts immune responses to a vaccine. Common adjuvants include alum, squalene, killed bacterial products, and mineral oil. Adjuvants can also be found elsewhere, such as silicone breast implants or cosmetic fillers. While the biomolecular mechanisms of ASIA are complex and variable, the simple reason is that the immune system of some may be frailer to stimulation than others, leading to more chaotic immune responses. Evidently, persons with these traits are already prone to autoimmune diseases, and the adjuvant in vaccines might have pulled the final trigger. ASIA has been recorded following most vaccine types, including the flu shot, according to a 2013 research review of Prof. Shoenfeld. “Reports on autoimmune reactions after vaccination would constitute probably less than 0.01% of all vaccinations performed worldwide, although this rate may be biased by under-reporting,” the review further stated. “In addition, many of those reactions are mild and self-limited.” Symptoms of ASIA include muscle weakness, arthritis, chronic fatigue, sleep disturbances, memory and concentration difficulties, fever, and dry mouth. ASIA patients typically had auto-antibodies — antibodies the immune system makes to neutralize pathogens, but end up attacking human cells for reasons such as molecular mimicry or defective antibodies — in their blood. People at risk for ASIA In a 2015 research review, Prof. Shoenfeld and his team scoured the literature for information on ASIA risk factors. Drawing on case reports, case series, autopsies, and cohort studies, they identified a few indications on who tended to develop ASIA: People with a history of post-vaccination autoimmune phenomena. People with a history of allergy. People with autoimmune conditions or disorders. People at risk for autoimmunity. They include those with a family history of autoimmune diseases, pre-existing auto-antibodies, smoking habits, and sub-par hormonal regulation. Evidently, persons with these traits are already prone to autoimmune diseases, and the adjuvant in vaccines might have pulled the final trigger. One caveat is that risks of ASIA were not quantified due to a lack of studies with a proper control or comparison group and adequate sample size, which is expected since ASIA only affects a rare subset of the population. “The rarity of the adverse manifestations strongly suggests that the benefits of the vaccines largely overwhelm the risks,” the team wrote, and instead advocated for “the development of safer and personalized vaccines.” Prof. Shoenfeld also led a 2017 study that provides further insights into who might be susceptible to ASIA. This study used an international ASIA registry that contains inputs from published reports and unpublished physician’s diagnoses of ASIA cases. As of December 2016, the registry recorded 300 ASIA cases, and analyses revealed that: The overwhelming majority of cases (86.7%) were females. The average age of diagnosis was 37.6 years, ranging from 4 to 82 years. 20.3% of cases had a personal or family history of autoimmune diseases. 76.6% of cases received vaccines in the past decade, usually the hepatitis B virus (54.8%), human papillomavirus (20.8%), influenza (13.9%), and other vaccines (10.5%). The other 23.4% of cases had adjuvant exposure via other means, such as cosmetic fillers (e.g., mineral oil, hyaluronic acid, polyalkylimide, and collagen) or silicone breast implants. From these analyses, it’s evident that factors predisposing people to ASIA also include female sex, personal or family history of autoimmune diseases, and hepatitis B vaccine. But such results must also be interpreted in light of the study limitations, as the authors pointed out. One issue is underreporting, as only qualified rheumatologists can send their data into the ASIA registry. Cases in the registry are also not sampled randomly, so some bias may be present, making the results less generalizable to a broader population. Finally, Prof. Shoenfel asserted that vaccines are important life-saving tools. “The rarity of the adverse manifestations strongly suggests that the benefits of the vaccines largely overwhelm the risks,” the team wrote, and instead advocated for “the development of safer and personalized vaccines.” Should Covid-19 long-haulers take a vaccine? Covid-19 long-haulers suffer symptoms — such as fatigue, brain fog, and shortest of breath — for up to three months and counting. Probable causes of long-Covid are unresolved inflammation or auto-antibodies. For this reason, SARS-CoV-2 has been called an ‘autoimmune virus.’ A newer study published this month reveals that 13.1% of patients with mild-to-moderate Covid-19— without any pre-existing thyroid condition — suffered thyroid damage, which might lead to thyroid-related autoimmune diseases. “A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity.” As Covid-19 long-haulers may qualify as persons with autoimmune conditions, they fit the criteria for persons at risk for ASIA. This begs the question: Will a vaccine worsen or re-trigger long-Covid symptoms? While a vaccine would hypothetically increase the risk of a long-hauler developing ASIA, the risks of not taking a vaccine should also be considered. Since infections can induce autoimmunity, avoiding risks of post-vaccine autoimmunity (or ASIA) comes with risks of post-infection autoimmunity. According to a research review of three immunologist professors in the Lancet, the latter's risks are much higher. Thus, the European League Against Vaccination (EULAR) advised that people with an autoimmune condition should still take a vaccine, but with a personalized plan, to prevent the greater complications infections can cause. For instance, live vaccines should be avoided, and vaccines should be taken when the autoimmune condition is stable. The CDC also has a webpage on “Who Should NOT Get Vaccinated with these Vaccines?” which include people with a history of autoimmune diseases or post-vaccination autoimmunity that should consult a healthcare provider for a customized vaccination plan. Even for the leading Pfizer's mRNA vaccine with over 90% efficacy (unpublished data), the risk of ASIA should not be neglected. “A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity,” stated a 2018 paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. “Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken.” Short abstract Autoimmune/inflammatory Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants (ASIA) or post-vaccine autoimmunity was only coined less than a decade ago. Adjuvants are usually used in vaccines and, to a lesser extent, in cosmetic fillers or silicone breast implants. ASIA typically affects those with autoimmune conditions or with a family or personal history of it. And long-Covid can be considered as an autoimmune condition. Thus, it’s advised that Covid long-haulers be careful and seek medical advice before getting a vaccine. Thanks to Mad Mockingbird

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/why-covid-long-haulers-should-be-careful-about-vaccines-790fc1d366e8

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-11-13 09:03:18.158000+00:00

['Science', 'Advice', 'Vaccines', 'Coronavirus', 'Health']

What is the data science community’s favourite media source?

[Image by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash] This is that time of the year when Kaggle shares data from its industry-wide survey on its platform and challenges the Data Scientists all over the world to analyze that data and present a truly comprehensive view on the current state of data science and machine learning. Ergo, as a fellow data scientist, after looking at the dataset, I felt that it will be a nice exercise to know more about the patterns in the community. In order to make this analysis, a bit more easy to read, I have divided it into a series of articles: Part 1 : What’s Data Science Community’s Favourite media source? Part 2 : Most Popular Machine Learning Tools and Algorithms Part 3 : What's more popular Google Colab , Kaggle Kernels or Jupyter Notebooks? Part 4 : Current State of Machine Learning in Industry Since medium is a platform where we share our ideas and latest discoveries, it will be great if we start by uncovering some of the most popular sources of information and learning within the community. For the purpose of this article, as discussed above, I have used Kaggle 2020 Survey Data. So without a further ado, let’s just dive in and find out who is using what for keeping themselves up to date on ML/DS news. Kaggle, YouTube and Blogs are the most popular source of regular information and learning. POPULAR MEDIA SOURCES USED BY DATA SCIENCE COMMUNITY Kaggle Notebooks and its Forums have been the most popular source of information and entertainment for data scientists world over, followed by Youtube and Blogs such as Towards Data Science and Analytics Vidhya. Fig 1 : Popular Media Sources [Image by Author] Now that we know the most popular sources, let’s dig a bit further and try to explore if this preferences changes with Age, Gender, Region, Education level,Years of experience and Role. POPULAR MEDIA SOURCES FOR ALL AGES Blogs as the most popular source of information among late vicenarians, a.k.a data scientists in their late twenties(25–29 years), followed by early vicenarians(22–24 years). Popularity of blogs seems to decrease as people age. This can be attributed to the fact that we have most aspiring and serving data scientists in the age group of 18–40 years. Fig 2: Popularity of Blogs by Age Group[Image by Author] Youtube have been the second most popular source of information among Data Scientists. But let’s see, what age groups are more attracted towards it. The age distribution is more or less similar to Blog’s audience, but with only difference that we have slightly more audience in 30 and above age group who prefer reading blogs rather than watching YouTube. Fig 3: Popularity of Youtube by Age Group[Image by Author] Kaggle, the winner of everyone’s attention does well for all age groups. Data Scientists of all ages trust Kaggle forums for their ultimate source of information and learning. Fig 4: Popularity of Kaggle by Age Group[Image by Author] DO WOMEN CHOOSE THEIR MEDIA SOURCE DIFFERENTLY? There have been many historical evidences of battle of sexes. But after analyzing the Kaggle dataset, we find that there is no such battle here. Women and Men all prefer Kaggle, Youtube and Blogs equally to keep themselves updated. Fig 5: Popularity of Blogs among Sexes[Image by Author] Fig 6: Popularity of Youtube among Sexes[Image by Author] Fig 7: Popularity of Kaggle among Sexes[Image by Author] You might observe stark difference in count of Men and Women respondents. This may be due to underrepresentation of Women in Data Sciences. DOES EDUCATION LEVEL, LEVEL UP THE CHOICE OF MEDIA SOURCE ? All three media sources, be it Kaggle, Youtube or Blogs find a great audience in people with Master’s Degree, followed by Bachelor’s Degree. This can also be attributed to the fact that most of the Data Scientist either hold a Master’s or Bachelor’s Degree. Fig 8: Popularity of Blogs among Education Level[Image by Author] A very interesting observation is that Data Science Burghers with no formal education after High School, college dropouts and professional degree holder’s find Youtube as their favourite source of information and learning. Fig 9: Popularity of Youtube among Sexes[Image by Author] Fig 10: Popularity of Kaggle among Sexes[Image by Author] NATIONALITIES AND PREFERENCE FOR MEDIA SOURCE When we look at the popularity of a media sources across geographies, we conclude that Kaggle is the most popular source. But there were certain interesting observations such as Blogs are a little less popular in certain regions, particularly in Brazil compared to YouTube and Kaggle. On the other hands, blogs are the most popular source of information in USA. Nearly, 37% of fellow data scientists rely on blogs.This could be attributed to the popularity of Medium in USA. Fig 11: Popularity of Blogs across Geographies[Image by Author] Youtube is the second most popular source of information across all countries except USA. Other countries such as India, Brazil, Russia, Japan, etc rely on YouTube after Kaggle. Fig 12: Popularity of YouTube across Geographies [Image by Author] Kaggle is the indisputable king of media sources in the data science community. This hold true evenly across geographies except for USA. Fig 13: Popularity of Kaggle across Geographies [Image by Author] SHOULD MY CURRENT ROLE DEFINE MY CHOICE OF MEDIA SOURCE? Yet again, Kaggle is the most popular media source across all roles. Albeit, we can observe inclination of people with Data Scientist and Statistician role towards blogs rather than YouTube as their regular source of information. Fig 14: Popularity of Blogs across Roles [Image by Author] Fig 15: Popularity of YouTube across Roles [Image by Author] Kaggle is the most popular source of media for everyone, be it Data Scientist, Research Scientist, Machine Learning or any other role. Fig 16: Popularity of Kaggle across Roles [Image by Author] DOES PREFERENCE FOR MEDIA SOURCE CHANGE WITH PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE? Kaggle is the first choice for most of the data scientists. But we see a general trend that across all platforms people engage progressively when they have 0 to 5 years of programming experience . After that, their interactions seems to decrease may due to their shift towards leadership roles. Fig 17: Popularity of Blogs across Experience[Image by Author] YouTube is the go to media source for people with zero to 1 year of programming experience. Fig 18: Popularity of YouTube across Experience [Image by Author] Kaggle is the favourite media source for data scientists with 1+ years of experience in programming. This can be attributed to the fact that once you know programming you might want to practice on challenges and what could be better than Kaggle. Fig 19: Popularity of Kaggle across Experience [Image by Author] SAMPLE CODE I will be uploading the entire analysis on my github. Feel free to check that out. For the time being, here is the code for visualizations used in this article. Code for the first count plot : Code for the count plots with hue : Code for geographical plots : WRAP UP As per the analysis, we can conclude that Kaggle is the favourite media source in the data science community, followed by YouTube and Blogs. This holds true across geographies, sexes, job roles, age etc. While other players such as Reddit, Email newsletters, Journals etc. are all at almost the same level. REFERENCES

https://towardsdatascience.com/whats-data-science-community-s-favourite-media-source-18a2c5e91bc6

['Priyanka Meena']

2020-12-03 22:09:36.764000+00:00

['Matplotlib', 'Kaggle', 'Data Analysis', 'Visualization', 'Data Science']

You are wrong about being wrong

Why we make mistakes Error occurs when our model of reality clashes with, well, actual reality. Our mistakes shock us so much partly because we forget that we interact with the real world only indirectly. Whether it’s through our senses, or constructed theories of how the world works, we navigate life using imperfect tools. Our mistakes, then are simply a case of these tools proving inadequate in a given situation. Photo by Sasha Mk on Unsplash Using this prism, even the concept of knowledge is not sacred any more. As has been proven throughout history, what is considered the truth today might be falsified tomorrow by progress in science or cultural norms. This means that knowledge is really just a set of beliefs that have not yet been proven wrong. Error, therefore, is not a rare occurrence but an ever-present possibility at the boundary of our beliefs and the real world. Leaving facts and science aside, we still cannot help but create theories of why things happen in the world. This tendency for sense-making is so deeply ingrained that we don’t even realize it’s happening. It is only when the belief fails that we become aware of its existence. Haven’t all of us have asked ourselves in exasperation after messing up: ‘Why did I do that?’ ‘How could I have been so foolish?’ This is us coming face to face with our faulty beliefs. How mistakes make us feel We are what we believe in. What differentiates us from each other is our beliefs — whether about ourselves or the world at large. Making mistakes violates these beliefs, which is why it feels like a part of us has been torn away. Since our identity is inextricable from our beliefs, being wrong unsettles our own idea about ourselves. This is even more true for experts who define themselves by their ability to be right. More poignantly, the falsification of one belief puts the whole enterprise of believing in jeopardy. After all, if we can be wrong about something we strongly believed in, what else can we be wrong about? Mistakes feel so terrible because they seem to tell us that we are not as smart or reliable as we thought we were. Another reason why we fear mistakes so much is because of the emotions they engender within us. If you really get down to it, it’s the feelings of guilt, embarrassment, and shame that we fear more. Take away the emotion and the errors don’t seem intimidating any more. As Schulz quotes a psychoanalyst in her book: Our capacity to tolerate error depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion. Finally, our aversion to being wrong has important implications on how we feel about the mistakes of others. Given how we chew ourselves out when we mess up, we are only too eager to do the same to others. Combine this attitude with a propensity to theorize and you have the classic response to mistakes: blame. So innately hardwired is this drive that we feel deeply unsettled when we can’t find someone (or even something) to blame. A new lens for error In a world that is too complex for us to understand fully, mistakes are a given. This means we need a new definition of error that is not only realistic, but also more humane. In this description, error is not something undesirable but a signal drawing our attention to what is important. Even in environments where we should strive to minimize error — such as health care — it is possible to do so only when we acknowledge its inevitability. This shift in perspective will allow us to see errors for what they really are: opportunities to become better. What’s more, in some cases mistakes aren’t just unavoidable, they’re necessary. Our understanding of life and the world is an incomplete jigsaw puzzle; mistakes help us know what the missing pieces are. This principle is most apparent when we are learning a new skill. As any good teacher would tell you, the more mistakes you make, the better you become. As you attempt even harder levels, error is a useful companion because it reminds you of what you don’t know yet. So accept that you don’t know everything and be grateful for mistakes because they shine a light on areas that need your attention. Error is so powerful simply because it conveys more information than being right. When you’re right, any supporting evidence only confirms what you already know. But when you are wrong, just that one data point can force you to dismantle your entire belief structure. This is why the scientific method is based on falsifying a hypothesis rather than finding confirming evidence. More famously, as Nassim Taleb’s famous example shows: The existence of even a million white swans doesn’t prove that black swans don’t exist. However, sighting just one black swan is enough to prove that all swans are not white. Didn’t expect to see me, did you? Moreover, always being right is literally depressing. It is a proven fact that depressed people have a too accurate view of the world and are therefore frozen into inaction because they simply don’t see the point. Normal folks, meanwhile, are able to stay blissfully happy thanks to their imperfect beliefs. This inability to accurately perceive reality is not only the definition of error, but also what gives rise to two of our most human qualities: imagination and hope. After all, it is only because they refuse to see the writing on the wall that great entrepreneurs, leaders and artists go on to achieve what others deem impossible. Conclusion If there’s any doubt about how fundamental error is to our existence, we only need consider how the process of evolution got us here. Set off by faulty mutations, this slow and silent force shapes all life on earth by constantly testing and discarding, using mistakes to drive a species forward. In other words, we humans are merely a link in a long succession of failed prototypes. It is more important to realize, however, that error is not so much an anomaly, as it is a peek at the reality hidden from us. Even the most basic of mistakes stem from the same faulty belief that the world is predictable and we know all there is to know about it. Therefore, in order to protect ourselves from error we have to first accept that we can never completely eliminate it. Only then can we stop living in fear and embrace mistakes for what they really are: opportunities to become better than who we are today.

https://dhawalsharma.medium.com/you-are-wrong-about-being-wrong-10eab77a8b53

['Dhawal Sharma']

2020-03-05 06:13:13.734000+00:00

['Startup', 'Motivation', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Learning']

4 Unusual Ways to Relax in 2021 and Beyond

Watching ASMR Videos About a year ago, I randomly opened up my YouTube app to watch a music video. The first thing that popped up on my YouTube homepage was a video with the title “99.9% of you will sleep to this ASMR video”. The promise of sleep seemed too good to be true. I didn’t even know what ASMR was. However, once I watched that video, I was hooked. Also, as promised by the video, I fell asleep after a few minutes. It was almost like being hypnotized. ASMR is Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It can best be described as a “tingly feeling” that one experiences in response to certain sounds and triggers. The triggers and sounds can include whispering, the sounds from turning the pages of a book, the rustle of newspapers and my favorite sound which is the tapping of nails on a solid surface. There is a lot of controversy about the benefits of ASMR. Some people even go as far as calling it witchcraft and nonsensical. My personal experience is that depending on the type of sounds and the video, it can be very relaxing. I will admit that I have watched ASMR videos just for the purpose of wanting to fall asleep. How to watch ASMR videos safely There are so many different types of ASMR videos and not all of it may seem wholesome. Some videos are of a sexual nature. It is up to you to choose the right ASMR video. Personally, I like the ones that focus on harmless stuff like turning the pages of a book, rummaging through a purse, or fingernail tapping sounds made on different objects. Basically ASMR helps me to relax and sleep. It is important to note that not everyone experiences ASMR. Some people are not geared to being sensitive to these sounds and triggers. Also, not much research has been done on ASMR. There is no concrete proof or evidence that it has actual benefits even though the majority of people have found it to be very relaxing.

https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/4-unusual-ways-to-relax-in-2021-and-beyond-120c71b709a1

['Anita Durairaj']

2021-12-29 00:00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Self', 'Motivation', 'Health']

Interactive Visualization with Plotly and Dash

For around 3 years of my experience I was using matplotlib for visualization, around 2 months back following an advice of my colleague, I gave a try to plotly and dash. I was so impressed from the library that I have posted tutorials about these libraries on my YouTube channel “when math’s meets coding”. Today I am going to share my experience with these libraries this may motivate others to give a try to Plotly and Dash. Check out Complete video Tutorial for Plotly and Dash Plotly have a clear advantage over matplotlib when it comes to the interactivity, reason is simple it is written in plotly.js which is built in d3.js. editing or modifying plots is as simple as writing a CSS code. Plotly with Dash is a complete capsule solution for visualization in python. with help of plotly and dash you can develop a complete visualization application with a singe page script in python. Dash is another open source library with inbuilt flask application which permits you host your plots on provided web address or IP. All the codes and article are available on GitHub. After gaining basic understanding of such library its best practice to solve some problem with help to underlying library. In this article I will try to give basic introduction of plotly and dash components then try to make a simple dashboard. Idea over here is to create a dashboard with interactive drop-down menu with below steps Create a random data-generator with numpy and pandas Create layout of dashboard with drop-down menu Create a category column in the random data-set with three inbuilt category “good”, “bad” and “worst” now put these category in the drop-down Once user select any category from drop-down apply filter for that category in the data-frame and plot filtered data in the dashboard Lets understand these components with coding Install dependencies pip install plotly pip install dash Importing all required libraries import plotly import dash import plotly.offline as pyo import plotly.graph_objs as go import numpy as np import dash_html_components as html import dash_core_components as dcc from dash.dependencies import State, Input, Output import pandas as pd Random data Generating function Writing a random data-frame generating function whose data utilized to create dashboards global cat_g ,sample_type cat_g = ["good","bad","worst"] def datagen(): my_sample_data = np.random.random_sample([100,3]) sample_Cat = [cat_g[np.random.randint(0,3)] for i in range(100)] Base_Data = pd.DataFrame(my_sample_data,columns=["val_1","val_2","val_3"]) Base_Data["sample_Cat"] = sample_Cat return(Base_Data) DataFrame Generated by function Our Objective to develop a dashboard which will look like this Final script result dashboard hosted with dash Dash Core components Dash core components are drop-down, Slider ,range-slider etc you can put all these component with small script for details about these components visit below page Values and Labels You need to create values and label dictionary to use dash core components, label will come on the UI and values will be forwarded to the function which user interact with the dashboard this can be done as below. cat_g = ["good","bad","worst"] ## Creating values and labels for drop-down options_list = [] for i in cat_g: options_list.append({'label': i, 'value': i}) Here “good”, “bad” and “worst” will be seen on the dashboard and passed to the figure generating function. Figure Generator Function You need to write a function which will generate figure based on given filtered data, here is the sample code for it def fig_generator(sample_data): sample_data = sample_data.reset_index(drop=True) sample_data.head() plot_data =[] for i in range(1,4): plot_data.append(go.Scatter(x=sample_data.index, y=sample_data['val_'+ str(i)], name = 'val_'+ str(i) )) plot_layout = go.Layout(title = " This plot is generated using plotly ") fig = go.Figure( data = plot_data ,layout = plot_layout) return(fig.data,fig.layout) Dash Html component For creating a web based application you need html components. Dash provides these html components like Div tags Header. For more information about Dash Html components check out below link Defining Dash Layout You need to define a layout for dash in which you can provide styling with css components, do not forget to provide id’s to all html components. Id’s are the reference for these placeholders , For changing anything inside the placeholder you need to create a call back function then by giving the reference id’s. Callback Function in dash For any change based on users input given in drop-down you need to create a call back function all input and output components id’s you need to provide as arguments of the callback function here is the call back function used in our code. [Input("drop_down_1", "value")]) def updateplot(input_cat): df= datagen() sample_data = df[df["sample_Cat"] == input_cat ] trace,layout = fig_generator(sample_data) return { 'data': trace, 'layout':layout } if __name__=='__main__': app.run_server() @app .callback(Output("plot_area", 'figure'),[Input("drop_down_1", "value")])def updateplot(input_cat):df= datagen()sample_data = df[df["sample_Cat"] == input_cat ]trace,layout = fig_generator(sample_data)return {'data': trace,'layout':layoutif __name__=='__main__':app.run_server() Complete Script Here is the complete script that can be utilized to generate such dashboard in python.

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/interactive-visualization-with-plotly-and-dash-f3f840b786fa

['Jay Shankar']

2020-01-30 04:35:34.299000+00:00

['Dashboard', 'Data Visualization', 'Dash', 'Plotly', 'Python']

How the Brain Copes With Social Distancing

How the Brain Copes With Social Distancing The psychology behind personal space Photo: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images Something isn’t right. They no longer acknowledge the presence of one another. Solitary or in couples, they scatter themselves in an oddly equidistant manner across the sand. They wander without purpose. When the path of one comes close to another, an invisible field leads them to alter their course, like two opposing magnets. It creates a cold, bleak vibe that contrasts ironically with the hot, sunny beach. This is the scene I now see on my morning walk. You are no doubt seeing similar eerie sights in your part of the world, as social distancing has become our new norm. While there is an undeniable need for such restrictions, observing how we behave in these times leaves me truly baffled. Why does social distancing feel so unsettling? Personal space To understand the effect social distancing is having on us, we must first understand why six feet is considered “distant” in the first place. In early childhood, we have little concept of social distance. As we grow older, we learn to manage distance in our interactions. By age 12, we have developed our own sense of “personal space.” Most of this awareness is subconscious, but it becomes conscious when someone breaches it. This reaction comes from the amygdala. The amygdala is the brain’s secret service bodyguard that can see threats before you are conscious of them. This built-in bodyguard kindly initiates your fight-or-flight response and helps you form and store memories associated with emotional events. If you removed my amygdala, I would have no concept of personal space. I would also become docile, fearless, and hypersexual, which would probably make social distancing rather difficult. We are evolutionarily wired to give greater distance to sick people. This may seem cruel, but there has always been a clear survival advantage to doing so. Proxemics Managing space in social encounters has become a science. Proxemics is the “study of human use of space and the effects it has on behaviour, communication and social interaction.” Edward Hall defined this term in 1963 and went on to describe four social boundaries: Images courtesy of the author Public space: Greater than 12 feet (or 3.5 meters). This is the distance we maintain from an audience to whom we are delivering a speech. If you are here, thank you for attending my talk, but until my speech is over, please keep this distance — at a minimum. Social space: Four to 12 feet (or 1.2 to 3.5 meters). This is the most comfortable distance to keep with people we don’t know well. If you are here, I assume you have come to thank me for my wonderful speech. This is your limit for now. Personal space: 1.5 to four feet (or 0.5 to 1.2 meters). This is for people we know and trust. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. It means I must like you. But I must insist that you come no farther. Intimate space: Less than 1.5 feet away (or 0.5 meters). This is reserved for romantic partners, close friends, and family. If you are none of those, I fear you may have misinterpreted my invitation. My amygdala is now firing a signal to my hypothalamus, triggering the release of stress hormones, should I need to physically remove you. Here is what social distancing looks like with all of this in mind: As you can see, new guidelines eclipse our personal space by four feet, and good luck getting anywhere near my intimate space. While Hall described exact values, these are a general guide, given that they depend on many factors. Exceptions are also made in certain situations. Fine, come on in Haruki lives in Tokyo and just wouldn’t make it into work on time without that helpful train conductor stuffing him into an already overflowing subway car, nestling his body tightly between two sweaty commuters whom he now knows well — or at least he knows their familiar contours. Haruki would rather not be so intimately acquainted with other commuters, but it is a sacrifice he is willing to make to get to work on time. There are instances where we will happily allow even our intimate space to be breached by strangers, like during a haircut or a massage. As a doctor, it took me a while to get used to routinely breaching a patient’s personal space while providing medical care. If you have ever had your eyes examined with an ophthalmoscope, feeling the doctor’s warm breath on your face as your amygdala starts firing, you know what I mean. We are flexible when we need to be but would prefer to maintain our personal space where possible. Warm Argentinians and cold Hungarians There are also cultural differences. A study in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology led by Agnieszka Sorokowska asked subjects from all over the world to rate the distances from which they felt most comfortable interacting with a stranger, an acquaintance, and someone close to them. As you can see, culture has a significant impact on proxemics. On the warm end of the scale, we have Argentinians, who must really be feeling the new six-foot rule. Hungarians, on the other hand, might be less bothered by it. Not everyone is invited We will allow pretty much anyone into our social space, certain people into our personal space, and a select few into our intimate space. But how do we decide who gets what invitation? Like most of our behavior, our emotions decide this for us. If we like someone and find them trustworthy, we will “invite” them from our social space into our personal space. We might smile at them, hold eye contact, or lean our bodies toward them. If we really like someone, they might even get an invitation into our intimate space. If they are a close friend or family member, we might place an arm on their shoulder. If they are a potential mate, well, I’ll tell you when you’re older. If we dislike someone, we may try to put a wider space between us and them. We may point or lean our bodies away, signaling our desire for space. The superficial, new wiring of habit could never supersede the deep, fundamental programming of what makes us human. Innate social distancing We are evolutionarily wired to give greater distance to sick people. This may seem cruel, but there has always been a clear survival advantage to doing so. We see this in chimpanzees, which cast out a sick member of the tribe but may welcome them back in if their symptoms subside. As we evolved into polite human beings, this innate behavior became inhibited, but we still feel it. We may want to stand back from someone who is sneezing but just can’t bring ourselves to do it. This is partly why social distancing is so hard. It feels rude. Today, distancing ourselves from possible risk is being encouraged — but our brains are struggling to implement it. This is because we must do it with everyone, whether they appear sick or not. For someone who appears sick, it might be easier as our primitive brain will tell us to do that anyway. But the coronavirus, as we know, is infectious long before symptoms appear. How long must we habitually distance ourselves from those who do not appear sick? The power of habit Humans are remarkably adaptable. In just 66 days, the brain can form a behavioral pathway so powerful that it becomes automatic. Once this time has elapsed, science would suggest that social distancing may become habitual. What would that look like? In typical “social space” interactions, particularly those we are still having with shopkeepers or pharmacists, we may no longer have to remind ourselves of the six-foot rule. We may default to it. We may also feel particularly accustomed to chatting with anyone we don’t like from a distance. But the habit won’t go much further than this, and here is why: It will be competing with our primordial desire to close the very gap that social distancing has created — the superficial, new wiring of habit could never supersede the deep, fundamental programming of what makes us human. Closing the gap We begin interacting with a stranger in “social space,” but as soon as we build a rapport, we feel a desire to close the gap. No amount of social distancing will take that desire away from us. The coronavirus may be reformatting the dimensions of our interactions, but our societies are built on the same age-old social distances. See how hard it is to keep distance in supermarkets? They haven’t been designed to allow for so much space between us. The good news is that when restrictions end, we will be able to relate to one another like we always have. The bad news is that close talkers will soon enough be back, spitting in your face and firing up your amygdala once again.

https://elemental.medium.com/why-social-distancing-will-never-change-who-we-are-fe0c9b6abd77

['Dr. Adam Bell']

2020-08-23 01:37:15.378000+00:00

['Coronavirus', 'Life', 'Science', 'Psychology', 'Culture']

I Got Rejected by Apple Music… So I Redesigned It

I’d like to preface this case study by stating that my intentions behind redesigning Apple Music were in no way driven by indignation or spite. Earlier this year I applied and interviewed for a graphic design internship at Apple Music (an opportunity of a lifetime), and was turned down with a very kind letter stating that although they liked my work, they wanted to see more growth and training. At first, I was frustrated — Northwestern University doesn’t offer any sort of undergraduate graphic design program, so whatever growth they were looking for would have to be self taught… …but as soon as I came to this realization, I became inspired to embark on what became a a three-month long journey to the holy grail — the iOS app that Apple Music deserves. For me, this was an opportunity to really dig my teeth into UX research and design, an excuse to spend way too much time on Sketch and Principle, a reason to bore everyone around me with my notebook of crudely drawn wireframes 😂… What you’ll find below is a case study offering potential solutions to address some of Apple Music’s problems, as well as ideas for future development. My process was guided by qualitative user research, Apple’s official Design Principles, and my own designer intuition. Introduction As a designer with a background in music composition and performance, I have always been passionate about experiences that marry music and technology. Through design, I hope to one day make the experience of music more accessible and enjoyable. However, Apple Music has always frustrated me. What was meant to be the service to convert everyone in the world to streaming is going through puberty — a phrase which here means steadily maturing yet unattractive compared to the adults in the game (aka Spotify). To better understand Apple Music, I took a trip down memory lane and revisited its inception. Plagued with a notoriously confusing interface and a half-baked visual identity, Apple Music’s first identity was the culprit of many headaches.

https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-rejected-by-apple-music-so-i-redesigned-it-b7e2e4dc64bf

['Jason Yuan']

2020-05-12 16:03:08.889000+00:00

['Apple', 'Music', 'UX Design', 'Tech', 'Design']

Running Out of Time Every Day? Here’s What You’re Doing Wrong

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash In the Western world, we’re obsessed with time. We schedule meetings to start at precise times, we rush to get things done as fast as possible, and we tend to view time as a kind of currency, which we desperately need to allocate effectively. Right or wrong, these are the expectations our society places on us, and it’s aggravating when you reach the end of your day feeling like you’ve “run out” of time. Common complaints like “there isn’t enough time in the day” get passed around the office, serving as an expression of desire for more productive hours to get things done. But here’s the thing — you have the same hours to work with as everybody else. What you need isn’t to cram more hours into an arbitrarily defined day, but to make better use of the hours you have. If you feel like you’re always running out of time, there’s probably a reason for it — and you’re probably guilty of at least one of these seven time-sucking productivity sins. 1. You’re Not Setting a Schedule Consider the idea of Parkinson’s Law; essentially, it’s the tendency for the amount of time it takes to complete a task to expand to fill whatever amount of time is allotted for it. If you have an hour to complete a report that usually only takes 45 minutes, you’ll find yourself taking the full hour. This is just one of the reasons why setting a semi-strict schedule for yourself is necessary if you want to get everything done in a timely manner. Every night before work, sit down and set a schedule that includes everything you want to accomplish, even if you include some leeway for communication and interruptions. 2. You Aren’t Prioritizing Effectively When you feel like you’ve “run out of time,” it usually isn’t because you have a handful of small, easy, unimportant tasks leftover. It usually means you’ve forgotten or neglected something big — and that means you probably didn’t prioritize your day adequately. Organize your tasks into different tiers of importance, and focus on your most important tasks first. If you feel like everything’s important, you need to take a step back and subdivide even further. 3. You Lose Track of Time How many times throughout the day do you look up at the clock and say, “it’s that time already?” If you feel pressed for time, chances are it happens often. This is because you aren’t keeping track of your time; just like it’s important to track your spending to stay within your budget, it’s important to track your time to get everything done in a day. Set alarms and notifications on your phone to keep yourself aware of the time, or use time-tracking software to study the broader trends of your working experience. 4. You’re Trying to Multitask This one is counterintuitive. If you’re strapped for time, you’ll likely be tempted to stack tasks on top of each other, completing multiple things at once in the same amount of time. It’s a good, time-saving strategy, right? Wrong. The science is in on this one. Multitasking actually makes you less productive — and negatively affects the quality of your work. Don’t do it. 5. You Don’t Delegate Enough You have employees. You have teammates. If your schedule is really so packed you literally feel like there isn’t enough time in the day, you need to delegate some of those tasks to other people. Delegating efficiently is a skill all its own, but you’ll need to master it if you want to keep your sanity in this high-pressure environment. 6. Your Communication Is Inefficient Most time is lost due to inefficient communication, one way or another. Maybe you spend too long writing emails or chatting with colleagues. Maybe too much of your day is tied up in taking phone calls and getting interrupted. Maybe your team’s communication is disorganized, and it makes you spend twice as long on certain tasks. A thousand things could be wrong here, but smoother, more concise, more streamlined communication can solve almost any of them. 7. You Don’t Have the Right Tools We live in a glorious age of technology — so what devices, software, and platforms are you using to get your job done? I have a personal list of favorite tools I practically couldn’t live without, and collectively, they’ve probably saved me thousands of hours of time. Yes, there’s a financial cost to most of them, but it’s well worth the exchange to get more of my time back. If you aren’t using any high-tech tools in your job, or if the ones you have are more irritating than helpful, it’s time to do some research and find some systems to help you out. Being a business owner is demanding, and nobody is arguing that. But no matter how long your task list gets or how many people you have to deal with on a given day, there are always enough hours available to you — if you know how to use them properly. In time, with practice, you’ll get better at maximizing your productive efficiency, and soon, that feeling that you’re perpetually “out of time” is going to pass.

https://jaysondemers.medium.com/running-out-of-time-every-day-heres-what-you-re-doing-wrong-37d55583716f

['Jayson Demers']

2020-11-09 23:38:29.682000+00:00

['Entrepreneur', 'Productivity', 'Time Management', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship']

I’m Reverting to My 9-Year-Old Self To Be More Productive

I’m Reverting to My 9-Year-Old Self To Be More Productive The perks of not caring what others think Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash I’ve been feeling pretty down lately. I’m not sure if it’s the quarantine blues setting in or if I’m just stressed out with life in general. We are trying to play some major catch-up financially after being laid off for 7 months, so I suspect that has something to do with my current emotional state. The thing is, I don’t want to feel this way. Sometimes when I’m feeling down, I like to bask in my depression. It just feels so good to swim around in sadness for a while. You know, turn on some Alanis Morissette and watch yourself cry in the mirror for a good hour or so. However, that’s not where I’m at. Right now, I want to be productive. I have this angsty feeling that I need to produce and create as much as I possibly can in the coming days, weeks, months. However, that becomes tough when you’re not feeling up to anything mentally. It’s as if my will for productivity is at war with my emotional, mental well being, and it’s not going well at all. The other day I was waiting in my car to pick my daughter up from school. A kid about 9 years old walked by, and he sparked the inspiration I so badly needed at that moment. This kid — this awesomely unaffected little boy — was having a full out conversation with himself as he walked home from school. He was laughing and muttering, using oversized hand gestures and simply having a grand ole chat all by his lonesome. Being today’s day and age, I checked to see if he had earbuds in or a Bluetooth headset — maybe he was talking on the phone? Nope, this conversation was just him, and I loved seeing it.

https://medium.com/honest-creative/im-reverting-to-my-9-year-old-self-to-be-more-productive-508238102db2

['Lindsay Brown']

2020-11-03 16:57:29.988000+00:00

['Childhood', 'Work', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Productivity']

7 Journalism Lessons That I Learned From The Information’s News School

Over July, I participated in The Information’s News Summer School, which explored some of the biggest opportunities in journalism at this moment. If you are not familiar with The Information, it is a very high-quality digital publication with deeply reported articles about the industry that you probably won’t find elsewhere. As someone who has been practicing data science journalism over the past two years, I was highly interested in obtaining best practices from different types of journalism to improve my writing and explore the boundaries of other mediums. Below are my notes from the seven lectures that I attended in the program: 1 — On Reporting In Public Ben Smith, New York Times media columnist and former Buzzfeed editor-in-chief, shared his experience of public reporting in the digital age. Here are my key takeaways: Figure out what questions are not being answered, and then answer them. Build expertise in a narrow lane via newsletters and podcasts. Think about the “permanence” of your stories. What piece of information would be relevant weeks or months from the time of publishing? Email stories to your sources for fact-check. Always treat your sources with a lot of respect while getting information. Technology can bring tremendous opportunities to journalism in the future. Leverage the tools out there to make your job more effective. 2 — On Digital Design and Creativity Stephanie Mehta and Mike Schnaidt from Fast Company gave a talk on digital design, creativity, and the future of magazines. Sticking with the motto of “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” they shared the seven ways to simplify visual storytelling:

https://medium.com/constraint-drives-creativity/7-journalism-lessons-that-i-learned-from-the-informations-news-school-c60c3789557a

['James Le']

2020-08-11 22:35:00.179000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Writing', 'Journalism', 'Podcast', 'News']

Python Project To Improve Your Productivity For The New Year

Building the simple code block: We already discussed about the notification class. This class offers us the notify function. The information and syntax of the notify method is as discussed below. Syntax: notify (title='', message='', app_name='', app_icon='', timeout=10, ticker='', toast=False) title (str) — Title of the notification (str) — Title of the notification message (str) — Message of the notification (str) — Message of the notification app_name (str) — Name of the app launching this notification (str) — Name of the app launching this notification app_icon (str) — Icon to be displayed along with the message (str) — Icon to be displayed along with the message timeout (int) — time to display the message for, defaults to 10 (int) — time to display the message for, defaults to 10 ticker (str) — text to display on status bar as the notification arrives (str) — text to display on status bar as the notification arrives toast (bool) — simple Android message instead of full notification Now that we have a brief idea of the function in the notification class, let us understand how we can implement this. The below code block is the main procedure to define your tasks at hand. if __name__ == "__main__": while True: notification.notify( title = "ALERT!!!", message = "Take a break! It has been an hour!", timeout = 10 ) time.sleep(3600) Now, we will proceed to understand each line in the above code block step by step. The if __name__ == “__main__”: is an extremely important concept in Python. Before executing code, Python interpreter reads source file and define few special variables/global variables. If the python interpreter is running that module (the source file) as the main program, it sets the special __name__ variable to have a value “__main__”. If this file is being imported from another module, __name__ will be set to the module’s name. Module’s name is available as value to __name__ global variable. Refer to the following website for further information of this concept in more detail. We will then assign a while loop to run the code as long as it is True. This basically means that the code block will run for the time interval that we have set for running the program. Here, I have set the time required to run the program as 3600 seconds i.e. a total of one hour. After each hour, I will receive my reminder notification. Finally, we have the notification class with the notify method defined. We will set all the required parameters, as suggested in the code block. You are free to change the contents of the parameters according to your schedule or the tasks you have to perform. You can also determine how long you want the notification to remain on the display screen with the timeout instance. You can have multiple scripts running on your Desktop background that will consistently remind and alert you about the various tasks you need to perform throughout the course of the day, week, month, or year. To Run the script just run the following command in the command prompt as shown in the below code line. Make sure to replace the main.py with the name of your script file. pythonw .\main.py You can also simply use the python main.py command as well to run the script. After an hour you should receive the following alert. You will continuously receive these alerts every hour or until the time stipulation that you have set because of the while loop that is defined in the code. In the next section, you can analyze and copy and paste the entire code with the GitHub Gist provided.

https://towardsdatascience.com/python-project-to-improve-your-productivity-for-the-new-year-1956824eddb1

['Bharath K']

2020-12-29 14:30:28.166000+00:00

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

Tutorial on Data Visualization: Weather Data

Tutorial on Data Visualization: Weather Data Weather data analysis and visualization using Python’s Matplotlib Data Visualization is more of an Art than Science. To produce a good visualization, you need to put several pieces of code together for an excellent end result. This tutorial demonstrates how a good data visualization can be produced by analyzing weather data. This code performs the following: It returns a line graph of the record high and records low temperatures by day of the year over the period 2005–2014. The area between the record high and record low temperatures for each day of the year is shaded. Overlays a scatter of the 2015 data for any points (highs and lows) for which the ten-year record (2005–2014) record high or record low was broken in 2015. Dataset: The NOAA dataset used for this project is stored in the file weather_data.csv . This data comes from a subset of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Daily Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN-Daily). The GHCN-Daily is comprised of daily climate records from thousands of land surface stations across the globe. The data was collected from data stations near Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. The complete code for this article can be downloaded from this repository: https://github.com/bot13956/weather_pattern. 1. Import necessary libraries and dataset import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import pandas as pd import numpy as np df=pd.read_csv('weather_data.csv') df.head() 2. Data preparation and analysis #convert temperature from tenths of degree C to degree C df['Data_Value']=0.1*df.Data_Value days=list(map(lambda x: x.split('-')[-2]+'-'+x.split('-')[-1], df.Date)) years=list(map(lambda x: x.split('-')[0], df.Date)) df['Days']=days df['Years']=years df_2005_to_2014=df[(df.Days!='02-29')&(df.Years!='2015')] df_2015=df[(df.Days!='02-29')&(df.Years=='2015')] df_max=df_2005_to_2014.groupby(['Element','Days']).max() df_min = df_2005_to_2014.groupby(['Element','Days']).min() df_2015_max=df_2015.groupby(['Element','Days']).max() df_2015_min = df_2015.groupby(['Element','Days']).min() record_max=df_max.loc['TMAX'].Data_Value record_min=df_min.loc['TMIN'].Data_Value record_2015_max=df_2015_max.loc['TMAX'].Data_Value record_2015_min=df_2015_min.loc['TMIN'].Data_Value 3. Generate Data Visualization plt.figure(figsize=(10,7)) plt.plot(np.arange(len(record_max)),record_max, '--k', label="record high") plt.plot(np.arange(len(record_max)),record_min, '-k',label="record low") plt.scatter(np.where(record_2015_min < record_min.values), record_2015_min[record_2015_min < record_min].values,c='b',label='2015 break low') plt.scatter(np.where(record_2015_max > record_max.values), record_2015_max[record_2015_max > record_max].values,c='r',label='2015 break high') plt.xlabel('month',size=14) plt.ylabel('temperature($^\circ C$ )',size=14) plt.xticks(np.arange(0,365,31), ['Jan','Feb', 'Mar','Apr','May','Jun','Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec']) ax=plt.gca() ax.axis([0,365,-40,40]) plt.gca().fill_between(np.arange(0,365),record_min, record_max, facecolor='blue',alpha=0.25) plt.title('Record temperatures for different months between 2005-2014',size=14) plt.legend(loc=0) plt.show() In summary, we’ve shown how a simple data visualization plot can be generated using Python’s Matplotlib library. The complete code for this article can be downloaded from this repository: https://github.com/bot13956/weather_pattern.

https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/tutorial-on-data-visualization-weather-data-52efa1bef183

['Benjamin Obi Tayo Ph.D.']

2020-06-11 17:01:39.220000+00:00

['Python', 'Matplotlib', 'Weather', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization']

In News Industry, a Stark Divide Between Haves and Have-Nots

Keach Hagey, Lukas Alpert, and Yaryna Serkez’s piece in The Wall Street Journal take a deep dive into the steep decline of local news coverage, as smaller papers fail to make the digital transition that larger players did. Now, local journalism is in danger of vanishing. Local papers have suffered sharper declines in circulation than national outlets and greater incursions into their online advertising businesses from tech giants such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc…The shrinking of the local news landscape is leaving Americans with less information about what’s happening close to them, a fact Facebook recently acknowledged as it struggled to expand its local-news product but couldn’t find enough stories. With more and more local outlets becoming online-only, digital ad sales seemed like a viable solution for smaller papers to stay afloat. But digital ad sales don’t come close to offsetting what’s being lost in print. While Google and Facebook have siphoned ad dollars away from all publishers, local news publishers have been the hardest hit. The tech giants suck up 77% of the digital advertising revenue in local markets, compared to 58% on a national level, according to estimates from Borrell Associates and eMarketer. In addition to outlining how local news coverage and advertising are linked, Hagey, Alpert, and Serkez discuss the futility of subscription solutions for smaller, local papers: The Times converts 3.6% of its readers and the Journal 4.5%, while Gannett, which has a big audience across its local papers, is especially inefficient, converting just 0.4% of its digital audience into paying subscribers, according to the Journal’s analysis of digital audience and subscription data. Their deep dive also explores media job losses and outlet closures across the country, and accompanying data visualizations illustrate just how steep the decline has been. What’s scarier is just how little the public is aware of the death of local journalism: A recent Pew study found that 71% of Americans believed local news outlets were doing well financially, though only 14% actually paid for local news. Read more at https://www.wsj.com/graphics/local-newspapers-stark-divide/.

https://medium.com/save-journalism/in-news-industry-a-stark-divide-between-haves-and-have-nots-3252b47e2cfc

['Save Journalism']

2019-05-06 15:38:17.281000+00:00

['Facebook', 'Google', 'Newspapers', 'Journalism', 'Digital Advertising']