Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Coronavirus is spreading so quickly that our brains can't keep up. Experts explain why.

We answer the often searched question: "What are the symptoms of coronavirus versus the flu?" USA TODAY

The number of coronavirus deaths in the United States rose from 1 to 100 in a little more than two weeks. About a week later, the number skyrocketed to 1,000.

Those numbers are tragic. For many people, they're also disorienting and confusing. How did the number get so high so fast?

And while spikes in number of confirmed cases can be in part attributed to better testing, the number of deaths also shows a disease that is spreading alarmingly fast.

You're right to be baffled by the rapid spread of the virus, according to Columbia University's Hod Lipson. The sudden spike is an example of a concept that is "fundamentally difficult ... for the human mind to understand."

You might remember it from middle or high school: exponential growth.

The term is thrown around in our daily vocabulary, but in the case of coronavirus, it has a technical meaning that will help you understand why the virus is spreading so quickly â€" and how its course could be altered.

The doubling penny

Lipson used a common example to explain how exponential growth tricks your mind.

Pick which option you think will make you the most money in a month:

  • $10,000 on every day of the month.
  • A penny that doubles in value every day.
  • The correct answer is the penny.

    The first option will leave you with about $300,000 in a month. The magic penny will be worth several million dollars.

    Graphs: U.S. state coronavirus curves show many could be close behind New York

    What does the coronavirus do to your body? Everything to know about the infection process

    That's an example of exponential growth, and it's something we don't see very often in real life, said Lipson, who often talks about exponential growth as it relates to computing power and artificial intelligence.

    At first, the process is "deceptively slow," he said. But as the numbers get bigger, they grow so rapidly it's hard for our minds to keep up.

    In our example, a cent becomes two in a single day at the beginning of the month. But by the end, 1  million would become 2 million in a day. 

    In our day-to-day experience, growth usually happens at a much steadier rate â€" more like the $10,000 option.

    What does all this have to do with coronavirus?

    A highly contagious virus like the one that causes COVID-19 has the potential to spread exponentially â€" and in many areas of the world, it is currently doing so.

    That's because of its reproduction number â€" how many healthy people a sick person infects on average.

    For COVID-19, that number is likely higher than two, according to Melissa Nolan, an infectious disease expert and professor at the University of South Carolina.

    One sick person quickly becomes two; two becomes four; four becomes eight. Graph it on a chart, and the line quickly skyrockets upward.

    It's worth noting that our ability to test for the virus makes all this data messy, Nolan said. In some cases, spikes in confirmed cases says more about our ability to test for the virus than it says about how fast the virus is actually spreading.

    Will coronavirus cases keep growing exponentially?

    Not forever. The question is when the growth will slow and why.

    This is the idea behind "flattening the curve": The virus' exponential spread can be slowed down.

    Nolan gave a few examples of how that might play out:

  • Social distancing: Keeping people apart will make it harder for the virus to spread. But exactly what impact it has is difficult to predict and will likely vary by location.
  • The virus itself: Many viruses mutate and adapt. This could happen in the case of COVID-19, but it's impossible to say at this time what effect a mutated virus would have.
  • Herd immunity: Many experts believe people who recover from the virus will be immune from it for a time, although more research is needed on the subject. As more people become immune, the harder it is for the virus to spread. This is also the concept behind how a vaccine can halt the spread of a disease.
  • Social distancing matters. Here is how to do it and how it can help curb the COVID-19 pandemic. USA TODAY

    The math lesson you probably forgot

    If you want to revisit the math behind exponential growth, here's a quick refresher.

    You may remember expressions that look like this: 24

    That means "two, multiplied by itself four times". That kind of calculation forms the basis of exponential growth.

    Michelle Boyd â€" a high school math teacher in York County, Pennsylvania â€" said students learn the foundations of the concept in middle school.

    They'll apply those lessons later in financial calculations, statistics, algebra and trigonometry. For some of her students, she brings the lesson home by doing hands-on activities demonstrating exponential growth â€" the results are often shocking to them.

    Exponential growth is so difficult to visualize that it is often graphed in a special way, Lipson said.

    It's called a logarithmic scale, and it's easy to spot: Just look for graphs, like the one below, that have huge jumps in their scale. 

    Notice that the second tick mark after 100 is not 200 â€" it's 1,000. That big jump in scale flattens out the exponential data.

    This makes for a much neater presentation and can help the viewer spot trends, Lipson said.

    But it also is "deceptively disarming," he said.

    If you used a regular scale on the chart, the lines in the graph above would all essentially point straight up.

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    Monday, March 30, 2020

    Here's a Simple Card Trick You Can Learn in a Minute

    Our friends at BoingBoing put together a video to show you a simple and fun card trick that anyone can learn in no time: Using a deck of playing cards, make three piles of three cards each. Flip a pile over to note the bottom card and then combine all three piles into one, making sure that the pile you flipped over is on top. After that, spell out the card you saw.

    If you had the two of spades. Simply spell out T-W-O while dealing a card face down on top of each other. Stop and then put the leftover cards on top of the three cards you dealt. Spell out O-F while dealing. Put the leftover cards on top. Spell out S-P-A-D-E-S, put cards on top. Then spell out M-A-G-I-C while dealing cards but on 'C', deal the card face up. It'll be the two of spades.

    The trick, which was invented by magician Jim Steinmeyer, works because of the wonderful world of math. Basically, the sequence of which you spell out the words strategically moves the card you revealed to be placed in the 5th position of your 9 card pile. So when you flip the card over on 'C' (the fifth letter in Magic), the card you're looking for will be right there. I've been doing this trick over and over and giggling to myself every time. [BoingBoing]

    G/O Media may get a commission

    Wednesday, March 25, 2020

    Yes, You Can Do AI Without Sacrificing Privacy

    (archy13/Shutterstock)

    In general, the more data you have, the better your machine learning model is going to be. But stockpiling vast amounts of data also carries a certain privacy, security, and regulatory risks. With new privacy-preserving techniques, however, data scientists can move forward with their AI projects without putting privacy at risk.

    To get the low down on privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML), we talked to Intel’s Casimir Wierzynski, a senior director in the office of the CTO in the company’s AI Platforms Group. Wierzynski leads Intel’s research efforts to “identify, synthesize, and incubate” emerging technologies for AI.

    According to Wierzynski, Intel is offering several techniques that data science practitioners can use to preserve private data while still benefiting from machine learning. What’s more, data science teams don’t have to make major sacrifices in terms of performance or accuracy of the models, he said.

    If sometimes sounds too good to be true, Wierzynski admits. “When I describe some of these new techniques that we’re making available to developers, on their face, they’re like, really? You can do that?” he said. “That sounds kind of magical.”

    But it’s not magic. In fact, the three PPML techniques that Wierzynski explained to Datanamiâ€"including federated learning, homomorphic encryption, and differential privacyâ€"are all available today.

    Federated Learning

    Data scientists have long known about the advantages of combining multiple data sets into one massive collection. By pooling the data together, it’s easier to spot new correlations, and machine learning models can be built to take advantage of the novel connections.

    But pooling large amounts of data into a data lake carries its own risks, including the possibility of the data falling into the wrong hands. There are also the logistical hassles of ETL-ing large amounts of data around, which also opens up the data to security lapses. For that reason, some organizations deem creating large pools of data too risky for some data.

    With the trick of federated learning, data scientists can build and train machine learning models using data that’s physically stored in separate silos, which eliminates the risk of bringing all the data together. This is an important breakthrough for certain data sets that organizations could not pool together

    “One of the things that we’re trying to enable with these privacy-preserving ML techniques is to unlock these data silos to make data source that previously couldn’t be pooled together,” Wierzynski said. “Now it’s OK to do that, but still preserve the underlying privacy and security.”

    Homomorphic Encryption

    Intel is working with others in industry, government, and academia to develop homomorphic encryption techniques, which essentially allow sensitive data to be processed and statistical operations to be performed while it’s encrypted, thereby eliminating the need to expose the data in plain text.

    “It means that you can move your sensitive data into this encrypted scape, do the math in this encrypted space that you were hoping to do in the raw data space, and then when you bring the answer back to the raw data space, it’s actually the answer you would have gotten if you just stayed in that space the whole time,” he said.

    Homomorphic encryption isn’t new. According to Wierzynski, the cryptographic schemes that support homomorphic encryption have been around for 15 to 20 years. But there have been a number of improvements in the last five years that enable this technique to run faster, and so it’s increasingly one of the tools that data scientists can turn to when handling sensitive data.

    “One of the things my team has done specifically is around homomorphic encryption is to provide open source libraries,” Wierzynski says. “One is called HE Transformer, which lets data scientists use their usual tools like TensorFLow and PyTorch and deploy their models under the hood using homomorphic encryption without having to change their code.”

    There are no standards yet around homomorphic encryption, but progress is being made on that front, and Wierzynski anticipates a standard being established perhaps in the 2023-24 timeframe. The chipmaker is also working on hardware acceleration options for homomorphic encryption, which would further boost performance.

    Differential Privacy

    One of the bizarre characteristics of machine learning models is the capability to extract details of the data used to train the model just by exercising the model itself. That’s not a big issue in some domains, but it certainly is a problem when some of the training set contains private information.

    (Olga-Salt/Shutterstock)

    “You definitely want your machine learning system to learn the key trends and the core relationships,” Wierzynski said. “But you don’t want them to take that a step too far and now kind of overlearn in some sense and learn aspects of the data that are very idiosyncratic and specific to one person, which can then be teased out by a bad person later and violate privacy.”

    For example, say a text prediction algorithm was developed to accelerate typing on a mobile phone. The system should be smart enough to be able to predict the next word with some level of accuracy, but it should not return a value when a phrase like “Bob’s Social Security number is….” is typed in. If it does that, then it’s not only learned the rules of English, “but it’s learned very specific things about individuals in the data set, and that’s too far,” Wierzynski said.

    The most common way to implement differential privacy is to add some noise to the training process, or to “fuzz” the data in some way,” Wierzynski said. “And if you do that in the right amount, then you are still able to extract the key relationships and obscure the idiosyncratic information, the individual data,” he continues. “You can imagine if you add a lot of noise, if you take it too far, you’ll end up obscuring the key relationships too, so the trick with these use cases is to find that sweet spot.”

    ML Data Combos

    Every organization is different, and chief data officers should be ready to explore multiple privacy-preserving techniques to fit their specific use cases. “There’s no single technology that’s a silver bullet for privacy,” Wierzynski said. “It’s usually a combination of techniques.”

    Casimir Wierzynski is a senior director in the office of the CTO in Intel’s AI Platforms Group

    For example, you might want to fuzz the data a bit when utilizing federated learning techniques, Wierzynski said. “When you decentralize the learning, the machine learning model usually needs additional privacy protection just because the intermediate calculations that go between users in federated learning can actually reveal something about the model or reveal something about the underlying data,” he said.

    As data privacy laws like CCPA and GDPR proliferate, organizations will be forced to account for privacy of their customers’ data. The threat of steep fines and public shaming for mishandling sensitive data is a strong motivator for organizations to enact strong data privacy and security standards.

    But these laws also potentially have a dampening effect on advanced analytics and AI use cases. With PPML, organizations can continue to explore these powerful AI techniques while working to minimize some of the security risks associated with handling large amounts of sensitive data.

    Related Items:

    Weighing the Impact of a Facial Recognition Ban

    Data Privacy Day: Putting Good (and Bad) Practices in the Spotlight

    Keeping Your Models on the Straight and Narrow

    Monday, March 23, 2020

    Fate: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Being A Master

    After watching Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works, and the Heaven's Feel movies, someone might think they know anything and everything about being a Master. Those people would be wrong.

    RELATED: Fate/Stay Night: 10 Things You Never Knew About Rin

    In truth, there are plenty of matters about being a master that are only brought up in the games, visual novels, spin-off shows, and other supplementary material. Even then, the main anime entries of the series only mention some things in passing. Here are 10 things you didn't know about being a master in the Fate Universe.

    10 Mana Replacement

    Here is something they only hover around in the TV entries of the series and don't get into too much in any of the other for-all-ages adaptations of the franchise. If a master is lacking in the mana department, either from being a bad mage or a regular human, there are other ways of supplementing a Servants need for mana.

    There is the evil route of having the Servant gobble up the mana from innocents. Something that Shinji and Rider, Kotomine and Gilgamesh, and Kuzuki and Caster attempt to do in varying levels of success. Then there's the less evil but more intimate route. As it turns out, Servants can gain mana from bodily fluids. This includes blood, saliva, and sexual fluids too.

    9 The Dangers Of A Berserker Class Servant

    Berserkers are usually the Servant a Master can most likely count on to up-end the earth, cause destruction in their wake, and shake the ground they walk on. Often being gifted with a heaping helping of muscle power to go with all of that at insanity.

    So, why wouldn't someone want to be the Master of a Berserker? Because it would kill them. Berserkers are like the mana equivalent of an open facet. They are constantly on and drain an immense amount of mana from their contractor. So much so, that most of their Masters become dried up mana vessels and die from it.

    8 Originally, Servants Didn't Have Human Masters

    Originally, the Grail War, as we know it, was actually developed from an entirely different ritual. Whenever the earth was in true danger, the Earth and the collective unconsciousness of mankind, Alaya, would act as a master and summon seven Grand Servants. These Servants would be considered the best in their class and would be set up against whatever world-ending disaster threatened the earth.

    RELATED: Fate/Stay Night: Servants, Ranked According To Power

    So leave it to greedy magi to take a ritual for defending the earth and turn it into a cheap imitation for their own goals. The Holy Grail War as we know it is just a smaller derivation of a much larger ritual. One where the Earth and Alaya acted as the Masters for the seven summoned Servants.

    7 It's Not Normally Possible To Transfer Control Of A Command Seal

    This might come as a shock to those that have watched the 4th and 5th Holy Grail Wars. Both of which have examples of a Command Seal and a Servant transferring ownership to another person, but the whole process is much more than one person giving another person permission to use their Servant.

    The whole process is a delicate piece of work that can become akin to tearing out another person's nerves if done wrong, which is exactly why Masters usually need something like the Book of the False Attendant (the book Shinji holds) or some other magic spell to properly do the trick. Otherwise, it could render the Master paralyzed or worse.

    6 Masters And Servants Share An Invisible Bond That Other Magicians Can Feel

    At the very least, if the person has a bit of magical aptitude themselves. When a Master summons their Servant they become linked by a magical bond. That magical bond then unconsciously leaks mana toward their Servant when needed. Creating a sort of spiritual leash for their Servant.

    That link then makes an almost impossible-to-miss connection for any spellcaster worth their salt in magical power. It created a figurative trail of bread crumbs for a magus to follow back towards a Master. That's if they can get past the Servant, though.

    5 A Master's Goal Was Originally About Reaching The Root

    In the Type-Moon Universe, the Root is the metaphysical plane of existence where all events and phenomena from the past, present, and future originate from. Though, it might be better to use its other name, the Akashic Records, to get the point across.

    RELATED: Fate: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Holy Grail War

    Back before the Grail War became one big battle to make a wish on the Holy Grail, the original intention was for a magus to find their way to the Root. They figured that if they were to follow the dying Servants back to where they came from, they would be able to reach the Throne of Heroes, which resided in the Root. Thereby reaching the Root. A feat that could grant them all the knowledge in the universe, awesome magical power, or make them a god.

    4 Masters Were Unsupervised

    It might have been a good idea to somehow regulate the powers of Masters and their Servants during a Grail War. Unfortunately, they didn't think to do that until the third Holy Grail War.

    It was then that the Mage Association sought an outside power to regulate them in this grand ritual. The Church readily agreeing for a number of reasons. First, the whole ritual is based around one of their most important artifacts. Even if the grail itself is most likely a sham. Secondly, they wanted to make sure that no magi use its wish-granting power to change the world at large, which is why they usually try and help a person seeking the Root to limit that possibility.

    3 Two Masters Can Summon The Same Servant

    The way the Throne of Heroes works is more like a metaphysical copy machine than a cage for the souls of Heroic spirits that lets them out once in a while. A copy machine that can then modify them depending on their legends and popular culture.

    And that's the reason why it is possible to summon the same Servant in the same Grail War. As long as they qualify as another class, it's possible for the Throne of Heroes to spit out one version of the Servant and then another for a different class. Though, even summoning the same Servant in the same class is possible. Records show that two twins in the 3rd Holy Grail War summoned the same Saber servant due to their unique sorcery trait.

    2 Normally A Bad Idea To Materialize Two Or More Servants At The Same Time

    Having the power of two Servants at the same time seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, there is one big problem in that calculation. That problem, ladies and gentlemen, would be the Master in charge of them.

    RELATED: Fate: 10 Amazing Works Of Fan Art That We Love

    Simple math would dictate that twice the Servants would be twice the power, but unfortunately, being tied to a Master would hold both of them back. Since they would both be tied to a single Master as their power source, they would only be able to draw a certain amount before limiting the other. Basically ending with both of the Servants not being able to draw their full power because they are sharing it with another.

    1 "Are You My Master?" Is More Than Just For Show

    It is the most famous scene in the history of Fate/Stay Night. Tread over constantly in the adaptations and with a reference in almost every single spin-off since then. The words may seem like a simple question for the viewer, but they are actually much more in context.

    Summoning and then being contracted to a Servant doesn't complete until both of them acknowledge their roles. So the simple act of a Servant asking that question to a Master is to properly establish their roles and complete the ritual, with the added bonus that the Servant can now use a Master's mana as power for themselves. Without it, most would just fade back into nothingness.

    NEXT: Fate/Stay Night: 10 Things You Never Knew About Sakura

    Next One Piece: 10 Clues About One Piece That Oda Left In The Manga Over The Years

    About The Author

    Gamer, writer, reader, and your friendly neighborhood CBR writer. Eduardo Luquin has been a geek for most of his life and he doesn't plan to stop anytime soon. Join him as he looks through the internet for memes, laughter, and the little known information about your favorite things!

    More About Eduardo Luquin

    Joe Biden: Survival of the Unfittest

    Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

    Since becoming his party's frontrunner and presumed nominee, Joe Biden has been hard at work, providing more fodder for future Trump campaign attack ads against himself. No need for 'deep fakes' when your opponent willingly offers up his Blooper reels for the benefit of your own re-election campaign. There was something more viral than COVID-19 going around last week – recent footage of the former VP losing his marbles on Livestream and then wandering offscreen to retrieve them – or was he sleepwalking into traffic after hearing about his own car crash performance as it happened? Let's just say his latest attempt at self-immolation just added more fuel to the rumors that he's firing blanks instead of neurons.

    Some will consider this open acknowledgment of Biden's obvious and worsening dementia as belittling to all aging sufferers of this disease, but they would be missing an important point: Ordinary people in his position relinquish their driver's licenses, give power-of-attorney to responsible relatives or caregivers, and voluntarily cede their autonomy for their own well-being – and for the safety of others. They perform these grim, end-of-life rituals with dignity and above all, integrity. By clinging to denial and ignoring medical advice, (as Biden seems to be doing) he risks being manipulated and exploited by those who will eventually exert absolute control over him, and by extension, us.

    It's not just dementia behind his decision to make another failed bid for the presidency, but the still active reptile part of his part that has always been its guiding force. 'Survival of the unfittest' is the evolutionary principle of the political class and the law of the Swamp. Biden has always been a primordial, slime dweller with a keen cockroach-like ability to adapt to his surroundings. He can do the bidding of a pro-segregation Senator, taking the opposite stance of his party on the issue of bussing, while using Black Panther talking points to make the case for institutional racism. He can serve at the behest of the first black president as his official court jester without ever having taken an honest inventory of his past, except to fill in the blanks between writing and passing atrocious Republican bills with fabricated stories of civil rights heroism. Today, Biden sees his role as the DNC's black vote magnet as a natural extension of his previous incarnation as a "tough love" foreman on Strom Thurmond's cotton plantation. There, he sharpened the implements Master Thurmond used to keep the slaves in line.

    As Vice-President, he put a drunk handyman spin on the murderous policies for the two parties he serves, making drone programs and regime change seem as harmless as pretend-pissing in a punchbowl. You might even say that pretend pissing in a punchbowl has been Biden's stock in trade for his entire political career. Degenerative brain disease has eroded the buffoonery down to a husk, and made visible the incontinent serial killer behind Pogo the Senator. The brightly colored cords that the infamous clown killer used to publicly entertain children with sleight of hand magic tricks was the same ligature used in private to incapacitate his victims. On both occasions, his targets were willingly duped into entrusting their safety to a clown with handcuffs. Now the DNC is asking voters to do the same. Biden's bland, the average guy next door appeal has always masked a homicidal predator, now reduced to a math-addled playground flasher.

    Neither time nor cognitive decline has, however, has calmed his blood lust or a lifelong commitment to planetary collapse. Violence has never been far from the surface of Biden's carefully crafted persona of an affable, gaffe-prone uncle whose wandering hands always "accidentally" settle on a pre-pubescent girl. Nor has his tongue ever resisted the urge to turn a plagiarized platitude into a bellicose non sequitur. Gone is the deceptive veneer of unfiltered naivete, and in its place, open declarations of violent intent. At this onset stage of his senility, he is only able to articulate the hate speech underlying every bill he helped write in the Senate, including the Patriot Act which he insists was pushed through by leprechauns who had stolen his identity.

    Girls over the age of eleven are "dog-faced pony soldiers", a pro-gun union leader at his campaign events, a street gang rival to be taken outside and thrashed. Black voters remain on the receiving end of badly told anecdotes involving of all Freudian things, "thugs" with switchblades – not to mention fabricated stories about being arrested in apartheid-era South Africa. Was it there that he wrapped a bicycle chain around the skull of President Corn Pop after he was caught in the White-Only swimming pool? "I'd better ask my sister/wife who has a birthday next year in 2018 while I was serving pizza in the Senate as its grease monkey on my back". Biden seems to fare better when just telling bald-faced lies as he did recently during his debate with Bernie Sanders. Not reviving Corn Pop or mangling the Declaration of Independence was evidence provided by the establishment media of their preferred candidate's triumphant return to lucidity.

    Perhaps his fellow swamp denizens see the opportunity the ascension of another unqualified halfwit to the presidency. The opportunity, that is, to keep another Imbecile-in-Chief pre-occupied with crayons, just as they kept Bush Jr entertained with finger paints, and Trump pre-occupied with Twitter. Where most people see a Biden presidency as a climactic finish to a decades-long race to the bottom, the mostly unseen Beltway bottom feeders perhaps relish the prospect of coalescing around a compliant invertebrate that will do their bidding. This can be easily achieved if the Democrats can convince those much-coveted and largely imaginary swing voters that Joe Biden is the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. "America, we present to you another doddering, red-baiting crypto-fascist with word soup all over his bib". Somewhere Donald Trump is scratching his hair plugs in wonder over his latest victory.

    Sunday, March 22, 2020

    Hey Ray! Performing A Card Trick Using ‘Mathgic!’

    PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — As a meteorologist, I use math to predict the behavior of many different ingredients in the atmosphere.

    Math is a great tool to predict things.

    It is an even greater prediction tool when you are in control of most or all of the variables.

    That is how we can use 21 playing cards to wow our friends and family with MAGIC!

    This magic trick, though, is actually possible because of math!  Should we call it mathgic?

    Anyway, the math that makes this work is complex, and rather than give you a math class, let's just talk about what it does.

    With our set up of 21 cards it provides the groundwork to push the card to the middle of the deck in only a few steps.

    Let's get into the steps to make this "mathgic" work!

    (NOTE: I am breaking this down into mini steps, so it will have more than three steps in this explantion, but once you get the hang of this, you will see how this works in 3 steps)

    WATCH: Ray Petelin Gives The Full Description

    Step 1: Deal the cards out into 3 columns, from left to right.  Do this until all 21 cards are dealt. (you should have 3 columns of 7 cards).

    Step 2:  Have an unsuspecting victim…I mean participant… look at the cards, NOT TOUCH THE CARDS, and mentally pick a card and remember it.

    Step 3: Ask the participant which row it is.

    Step 4: Sweep each column up into its own pile, while maintaining the order of the cards.  You will stack these piles on top of each other with the pile containing the participant's card IN THE MIDDLE of the 2 piles (THIS IS IMPORTANT because it is what causes the math to help us force the card to the middle of the deck, even if we don't know what it is).

    Step 5: Deal the cards out, just like you did in step one.

    Step 6: Ask the participant which pile it is in.

    Step 7: Sweep the cards up, just like in step 4, putting the pile with the participant's card in the middle.

    Step 8: Deal the cards out one more time, just like step one.

    Step 9: Ask the participant which pile it is in.

    Step 10: Sweep the cards up, just like in step 4, putting the pile with the participant's card in the middle.

    Now, all the steps have been performed.

    This means we have grouped, or forced the card to the middle of the deck.

    Since there are 21 cards, that means the middle card is the 11th card, so just deal the cards off the top of the deck.

    When you get to the 11th card, flip it over and assert your wizardly dominance!

    MORE MAGICAL VARIATON

    This is how I show it in the explainer video.

    Have a participant shuffle the 21 cards, and "cut the deck".

    When they cut the deck, have them memorize the card they see.

    Then go to step one.  Skip step two. Then do the rest.

    Wednesday, March 18, 2020

    Shaifer’s FETC® keynote tapped into Gen Z’s STEM career goals

    Creating a STEM pipeline—particularly for underrepresented students—is about more than earning a salary

    Generation Z STEM guru Justin Shaifer's FETC keynote highlighted that a majority of students are envisioning STEM careers.

    Generation Z STEM guru Justin Shaifer opened some eyes during his keynote speech at @FETC2020: Today's K-12 students are passionate and ambitious when it comes to science, technology, engineering and math.

    In fact, an overwhelming majority of today's high school students envision careers in medicine, science and biotechnology, according to a survey done by the National Society of High School Scholars.

    But for Shaifer, who says his goal is to make STEM cool, says creating a STEM pipeline—particularly for underrepresented students— is about more than earning a salary.

    "A lot of people think of STEM as a series of jobs that are going to prepare people for the modern workforce, or a couple of lessons that you need to learn in the classroom," Shaifer said in an exclusive FETC interview with District Administration.

    More from DA: Why Daniel Pink's FETC keynote on school timing sparked a tweetstorm

    "The way I approach and engage kids who are from underestimated backgrounds in STEM is by helping them view STEM as a tool they can use to empower themselves and solve problems in their communities," added Shaifer, who is also known as 'Mr. Fascinate.'

    In the High School Scholars survey of students' career goals, STEM landed in the top 3 spots: 39% of respondents planned careers in medicine and health care; 20% wanted to go into science; and 18% hoped to pursue biology or biotechnology.

    The next highest, business, was mentioned by 17% of students.

    In his FETC keynote, Shaifer shared apps, software, platforms and sites that engage students in STEM, including:

    Shaifer also focused on how students' access to technology required that teachers shift from traditional instructional approaches. They must now act as digital guides who vet resources for their students and help them use ed tech productively.

    More from DA: Why extracurriculars are not 'extra'

    "Information is everywhere," Shaifer said. "Inspiration is not."

    To this end, he encouraged educators to let kids watch science-based magic tricks on YouTube. "If you can't engage kids by showing them videos of these cool tricks on YouTube, then I don't know what to tell you," he said.

    Shaifer told DA that it's essential for teachers to make STEM fun if they expect students to pursue degrees in the field.

    "A lot of the kids I work with want to get into the NBA or NFL, and they have ESPN to show them 'Here's the cool, glamorized version of what you can become,'" he says. "Right now, we do all sorts of fun pop-up STEM events for kids in the New York City area—we taught kids how to race drones and they're learning how to use drones in the process, and 3D printing where they're creating their own badges."

    More from DA: Why FETC attendees are one step closer to obtaining an ed tech micro-credential

    Teachers can also use students' inherent interests to liven up STEM by hosting science rap competitions, Minecraft expos and similar events.

    Shaifer also told DA that he sees a bright future in STEM for Gen Z, but that rapidly advancing technology and skills are "completely leaving behind the stagnant classroom model."

    "We have a lot of work to do in education in designing environments that are similar to work environments," Shaifer said. "The stuff I was working on in my tech job—I did none of that stuff while in the classroom. Everything I learned on the spot, or went and watched YouTube videos and taught myself."

    Interested in edtech? Keep up with DA's Future of Education Technology Conference®.

    Tuesday, March 17, 2020

    From Levittown to master of legal thrillers

    Who says you can't go home again?

    Long Island native and bestselling mystery writer Phillip Margolin returned to his hometown of Levittown earlier this month to be inducted into the Levittown High Hall of Fame. The very same week, he celebrated publishing his 23rd novel A Reasonable Doubt (St. Martin's Press, $27.99).

    Margolin, a former attorney, spoke by phone from Portland, Oregon about Perry Mason, the Levittown pool and the power of chess.

    When you were growing up in Levittown in the 1950s, did you ever think you might get inducted into the Levittown High Hall of Fame?

    I was shocked when I got the letter! I was not a stellar student. In fact, I was a failure growing up. I was a lousy student, didn't get into any college I applied to the first time, or law school. Things finally started going uphill after I went to the Peace Corps. I had an exciting career as a criminal defense lawyer for 25 years, and then I became a bestselling writer. I just sent my 24th book to my publisher.

    What is your fondest memory of growing up in Levittown?

    Levittown was great for kids. There were big families and someone was always playing football or baseball or heading to the pool, which was very close to my house. We rode bikes all over, going to the deli and grabbing hero sandwiches. We'd play tennis on the town courts and the loser would have to buy Twinkies and Cokes. I even had a paper route, and I think it was for Newsday.

    How did you transform from a lousy student into a Hall of Famer?

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    Chess really turned me around. I flunked math in eighth grade — this was the best thing to ever happen to me. The summer school math teacher was a chess player and we started playing after class. I was a poor student because I had a short attention span. If I didn't get a problem in two seconds, I'd lose interest. But in chess you have to sit for long periods of time and analyze. It trained me to become unemotional and objective about schoolwork, to not get upset if I couldn't figure out a math problem. I had a low opinion of my IQ and didn't think I was smart, but I started thinking that if I could beat my math teacher at chess, maybe I'm not so stupid after all. In ninth grade I applied myself and went from a C average to 90s and in another two years I was taking all honors classes.

    Did you always want to be a writer?

    I never even thought of being a writer growing up. Since I was 12 years old, I only wanted to be like Perry Mason and do murder cases. I read all his books as a kid and then moved on to Ellery Queen. When I was in Liberia, West Africa with the Peace Corps, there was no rule of law; they had secret police, torture, and you had no right to an attorney. After two years in Africa, I came back and decided to go to law school. I wrote my first book the summer between law school and my first job.

    This is your fourth book following young criminal defense attorney Robin Lockwood. But this is your first that focuses on magic.

    I just love magic. When I moved to Oregon in 1970 there was a show late at night where they had magic. I'd never seen big time magic, where they made people disappear and things like that, and I became obsessed. I wondered how they did it. Over the years, I've seen the big magicians in person, but I still don't know how they do it, and I still love it! I got this idea for a magician who gets murdered in the middle of performing on stage in front of 3,000 people. That was the fun part for me, working out the murder.

    Did you ever try your hand at magic?

    No, I have really poor eye-hand coordination. I play tons of sports, but I'm not good at any of them. You have to really manipulate cards and I can barely tie my shoes.

    You dedicated this book to former executive director of Chess for Success. Do you still play chess?

    Chess is, pound-for-pound, the best educational tool, period. I helped form the nonprofit Chess for Success, which is now in more than 100 schools and 20 school districts. It is an educational program that uses chess to trick kids into learning. We work with 4,000 kids a year and I know what you are thinking: they are probably all nerds with pocket protectors. Not true! I challenge you to come up with a group as diverse as ours. We teach boys and girls, gifted and talented, kids with physical disabilities, learning disabilities, non-English speaking kids, and they all work together on an even playing field. All these kids get to participate.

    Has chess helped you become a better mystery writer?

    Unemotionally and objectively analyzing problems — that's what chess teaches you. Now I am able to take a look at what I am writing and say: I wrote this, and this is really not very good, and I've got to keep working. If an editor says, "I don't like this," I'm not upset that he's bad-mouthing my brilliant prose. Instead, if what he is saying makes sense, I figure out how to correct the problem. It's all chess!

    By Kelly McMasters Special to Newsday

    Monday, March 16, 2020

    Celebrity mathemagician Art Benjamin shares his secrets of mental math March 13

    CLEMSON — Mathematician, magician and professor Arthur Benjamin brings his fast-paced presentation to campus, performing high-speed mental calculations, memorization tricks and other astounding math stunts.

    Art Benjamin in tux holding magic hat with numbers

    Art Benjamin brings his dynamic math + magic presentation to Clemson on March 13, 2020.Image Credit: Courtesy of Art Benjamin

    His talk, "The secrets of mental math," will take place at 11:15 a.m. on Friday, March 13, 2020, in the Watt Family Innovation Center auditorium.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

    Benjamin combines his love for mathematics and magic to create a dynamic presentation where he demonstrates and explains his secrets for performing rapid mental calculations faster than a calculator. Audience members will see why the Los Angeles Times described Benjamin this way: "He talks like a performer, acts like a magician, and multiplies faster than a calculator."

    Benjamin is the Smallwood Family Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. He is an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and was listed by Princeton Review as one of America's Top 300 Professors. He has appeared on the Today Show, CNN, and The Colbert Report and he has been profiled in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Scientific American, Wired, and Reader's Digest.

    One of his TED Talks has been viewed more than 20 million times. He has a Ph.D. in mathematical sciences from Johns Hopkins University.

    Benjamin's talk is sponsored by the College of Science's Discover Science Lecture Series.

    Friday, March 13, 2020

    Paris mayor's race takes a run at Airbnb-style rentals

    Airbnb has made a mantra of travelling off the beaten path and "living like a local". But in Paris, the apartment-sharing giant's biggest market globally, a number of those locals say the path to their doors – and through their cobbled courtyards, and up the echoey stairwells of their charming walk-ups – are now well-beaten enough, merci. The result? Every major candidate in the race for Paris City Hall is stumping, more or less, to roll up the welcome mat.

    After taking the fight to Airbnb for years as mayor, incumbent Anne Hidalgo has pledged to hold a referendum in every Paris arrondissement (district) over Airbnb if she wins re-election after the March 22 run-off.

    The issue of short-term tourist rentals was hardly a glint in the eye of politicians in 2014, during the last Paris mayor's race. This time, candidates from left to right are campaigning on technical solutions to what is, they appear to agree, a problem.

    "Local shops [are] disappearing, but Airbnbs [are] everywhere, which fuel property speculation, luxury shops and mono-activity that targets affluent tourists alone," green EELV candidate David Belliard's programme rails, namechecking Montmartre and the Marais."Whole neighbourhoods are dying because Parisians are forced to leave them, no longer able to afford to live or shop there."

    The French Communist Party's Ian Brossat, who is Hidalgo's right-hand-man on housing, has touted a ban. Brossat even wrote a book on the subject in 2018 called "Airbnb: The Uber-ised City". But the right doesn't disagree. Conservative candidate Rachida Dati has said short-term rental "platforms have killed places like the Ile Saint-Louis", and told French daily Le Monde that "Airbnb must be restricted, regulated and banned in some districts".

    City Hall contenders are proposing to lower the number of days Parisians are allowed to rent out their own homes, down from 120, and/or double, even triple, the number of inspectors charged with sussing out infractions, up from the current 35.

    Detractors include local residents groups, who deride short-term rental tourists as nuisances, driving up home prices and driving out businesses authentic neighbourhoods need; and hoteliers, who see short-term rental landlords as free-riders impinging on their businesses without the expense of meeting industry norms. When Airbnb signed a major sponsorship deal in November with the International Olympic Committee through 2028 — a stretch that includes the Paris 2024 summer Games — Hidalgo and Paris hoteliers alike were livid.

    Part-time Paris?

    "For us, in the beginning, Airbnb wasn't a problem when it fell under the sharing economy," Brossat tells FRANCE 24 in his bright City Hall office overlooking the tin roofs of the Marais. "The problem is that pretty quickly it went from a sharing economy to a predatory economy, with more and more professionals stepping into the breach who decided to make a business of it full-time."

    Paris's Communist deputy mayor in charge of housing under the Socialist Hidalgo, Brossat cites as concerns now the loss of housing, residents being replaced with tourists, the noise tourists bring into residential buildings, and neighbourhoods losing their identities when they "are no longer lived in but merely visited".

    Ian Brossat in Paris on April 11, 2019. © Anne-Christine Poujoulat, AFP

    Take Ile Saint-Louis or the Marais, Brossat says. "We have 26 percent of the housing in the first four arrondissements of Paris no longer occupied by residents year-round," be it because the properties are now second homes or Airbnb-style rentals. "We don't want Paris to become solely a display case."

    Mayor Hidalgo's long-standing battle with Airbnb is well-documented. Over the course of her six-year term, City Hall beefed up a housing-fraud brigade that scrapes the web and beats the pavement, following up on neighbours' complaints or, once a month, fanning out across a single neighbourhood for a crackdown operation. The City of Paris has tacked on new constraints like requiring registration numbers for every rental. It has squeezed into local legislation all that French law allows to rein in overzealous landlords, then lobbied the French government for broader powers. From Airbnb, it obtained the payment of a tourist tax on stays, like the one hotels collect – in 2019 Paris brought in €15.3m from this tourist tax. Hidalgo and Brossat have also pled the city's case in Brussels and at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

    As it stands today, Paris homeowners are allowed to rent out their primary residences for up to 120 days per year; they can rent out their second homes in Paris all year round, but only if they also rent out an equivalent property as social housing in the same neighbourhood or put up twice the surface for rent as traditional housing. Professionals can buy up some commercial spaces to rent out short-term if they apply to change the property's purpose to hotel accommodation. Still, local politicians and many Parisians alike want more done.

    "When I became deputy mayor in 2014, residents didn't understand why we were tackling this phenomenon," Brossat says. "Today, they reproach us for not going far enough. So it's clear the situation has changed."

    Paris rentals: 60,000-100,000

    And how quickly it has. "Airbnb was born [in San Francisco] in 2008 and has developed pretty exponentially since 2010, notably in Paris, which is the city most concerned in the world by such rentals and particularly by Airbnb," says Sciences Po Rennes lecturer Thomas Aguilera, a specialist on public policy, urban planning and tourism. He says Paris listings number "between 60,000 and 100,000 apartments on all platforms, so not just Airbnb... an exponential development, quick, massive and pertaining to just about every neighbourhood". But the academic guards against making causal leaps.

    The rise of Airbnb, after all, fits into a larger story about mass tourism and globalisation that began well before two California roommates inflated an air mattress on their living-room floor on the road to fame and fortune. It is part of the narrative of "intensive touristification" that invested cities like Barcelona, Berlin, Venice, Prague and Lisbon in the 1990s and 2000s. Paris, after all, is the world's tourism capital. Aguilera and colleagues Francesca Artioli and Claire Colomb are conducting a research project to measure short-term rentals' impact on cities, but he says economists, geographers and sociologists are only beginning to make sense of the data.

    "No study has proven, has developed a scientific model, that puts a causal link between Airbnb's development and residents disappearing in the Marais," Aguilera cautions, as just one example of the work left to be done. "It might be proven, but it has to be done first."

    A short-term rental concierge business on the rue Saint-Denis in Paris's 2nd arrondissement. © Tracy McNicoll, France 24

    The numbers game, indeed, is rife in the French capital. The City of Paris estimates that some 20,000 to 30,000 apartments have been lost to the Parisian rental market, rented out short-term year-round through Airbnb and some 300 other, smaller platforms. Airbnb, for its part, says it only had 4,100 apartments rented out for more than 120 days in Paris in 2019, and of those only 1,040 for more than 255 days. As of December 2019, Airbnb is required to file a list of its rentals with authorities annually. But the French government didn't obligate the firm to append a listing's web address, the URL, as Paris requested, which means it takes "ten times longer", Brossat says, for inspectors to cross-check the information themselves.

    "Four thousand, yeah. Airbnb is lying," says Brossat, with a cackle. "Airbnb is not telling us the truth about its numbers. When we ask Parisians what they think, what they feel, we see that the phenomenon has spread much more than Airbnb says. But there isn't much point in the numbers war. The issue for us is to protect Parisians. Airbnb is protecting its business," Brossat says in office, its walls clad with art and an antique French Communist Party poster.

    Exodus

    One can't blame tourists for seeking out an authentic local experience in the world's tourism capital. But the thing about Paris is, as Europe's smallest capital by size, there aren't all that many locals to speak of. A dense warren of streets struck through with avenues and the city's compact old-build charm mean there is precious little space for new construction within its Périphérique ring-road. About 2.15 million people live in Paris, set against the 50 million tourists who visited the greater Paris area in 2018. And lately, there are fewer Parisians every year.

    "Between 2012 and 2017, the population rose in every department in France, except Paris," the country's statistical agency, l'Insee, wrote in December 2019. "The capital loses 11,000 inhabitants every year, even though it was gaining 10,000 between 2007 and 2012."

    Many attribute the mini-exodus at least in part to the rising cost of housing in a city that saw property prices hit the symbolic €10,000 per square metre mark last August, skyrocketing 66 percent over the previous decade. Prices appear to be driving middle-class families out of town. There were 1,400 fewer children in Paris schools last September, after drops between 2,000 and 3,000 over the previous four years.

    Children enter their classroom on the first day of the 2019 school year at an elementary school in Paris. © Martin Bureau, AFP

    Some quarters have lost more locals than others. The city's expensive central districts have been shedding residents disproportionately. In the very heart of the city, the 2nd arrondissement has lost more than 10 percent of its population since 2015 and seen three kindergarten classes close. As it happens, while Paris's central arrondissements bid au revoir to those locals, they are also seeing short-term rental properties bloom en masse. And residents' frustration has crystallised around Airbnb as the dominant market player.

    Looking to succeed the current EELV green party mayor of the 2nd arrondissement in a new district that takes in the first four arrondissements, Raphaëlle Rémy-Leleu is campaigning for "a brigade of 100 inspectors in the capital to fight against the diverting of the principal of the collaborative economy and the disneylandification of the central neighbourhoods".

    "Airbnb didn't cause the housing problems. The gentrification of Paris is much older than that. But it is an accelerator of that gentrification," Brossat says at City Hall. "Housing wasn't cheap in the centre of Paris before Airbnb. But the problem has accelerated because of Airbnb," he says. "There is a demographic phenomenon linked to a lower birth rate. But there is also an incontestable phenomenon of the eviction of families [as rentals develop]. A number of apartments that were being rented to families are now rented to tourists year-round. That's the truth."

    'Disneylandification'

    The Disneyland reference resonates with speech therapist Aurore Wait. "I get the feeling that I'm in an artificial city where there are no longer people who work. There are essentially people in leisure situations," says Wait, who has lived in the 2nd arrondissement for 40 years. "If you're over 40, you feel a bit in the way," the 60-year-old tells FRANCE 24.

    Wait was attending an event on Monday off the pedestrian rue Montorgueil in the 2nd on "the harm mass tourism is doing to housing and residents". Hosted by a group called ParisVsBnB, which documents the spread of short-term rentals in the city, and housing rights group Droit au Logement, it was billed as a debate but it wasn't a particular heated one. Despite burgeoning coronavirus concerns, more than a hundred people turned out for the event at the local sports centre's amphitheatre. Most seemed to agree with the posted premise that short-term rentals are detrimental here.

    "How can one even conceive of a 20m2 apartment that brings in €7,000 a month?" Franck Briand of ParisVsBnB asked rhetorically on stage. "It's something that was completely unimaginable eight years ago. Today, thanks to rentals by the day, that is what is happening in our neighbourhood, in the second arrondissement."

    Jean-Baptiste Eyraud, the spokesman for Droit au Logement, took the mic at one point, intoning "Airbnb everywhere, housing nowhere!" and briefly got a chant going through the crowd. Another man was invited to talk about the "We sign it" petition he started to ban Airbnb in Paris, with 12,659 signatures so far. Others came with questions about how to fight noisy short-term rentals in their buildings. One young woman suggested, in hardly veiled terms, squatting rentals to bring awareness to the housing cause.

    In 2019, Airbnb and the Louvre held a contest to spend the night in a little pyramid at the museum. © Charles Platiau, Reuters

    Aurore Wait, for her part, has been trying to put her finger on a feeling, about why she's been so uneasy about pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly redevelopment in Paris. Looking at a map at the debate of where Airbnb rentals are concentrated in Paris was a revelation. "Basically, the neighbourhood is going to become a completely fake neighbourhood made for tourists," overrun with space for "meandering", she says. "What I don't understand is, why am I struggling with that when I could appreciate it? I don't have a car in Paris, I bike, I walk a lot, and still this city has become almost intolerable to me."

    "The thing about Airbnb is that this city is turning into a thing that's pleasant for tourists, for people who have nothing else to do," says Wait, who lives in a sixth-floor walk-up near the Palais Royal. She finds she avoids the pedestrian, restaurant-lined rue Montorgueil now and expresses a nostalgia for a grittier Paris, when the heart of the city beat at the rhythm of the people who live and work here. "There's a sort of fake festivity [now]. A sort of, hey, how funny, there are only people having drinks on terraces all day long. It's amazing. There aren't any calm places anymore."

    Up on stage, packing up after the debate went long, Briand is no stranger to that sentiment. The ParisVsBnB member weathered four years in a flat on the rue de Palestro nearby, living above a party pad. The owner, who reportedly also runs 36 other rental properties, bought an old garage and applied for a "change of purpose". He converted it into a short-term rental for tourists that could sleep 15. But nobody got much sleep. The nightly noise was too much for Briand and his full-time neighbours to bear.

    "With all the problems we had, with the terrorist attacks in Paris, with the Gilets Jaunes, the police weren't available. So when we called for them to intervene, they didn't come," Briand says. "We really felt abandoned, at every level, by the City, by public authorities, etc. And they, meanwhile, during all that time, they prospered."

    The building's homeowners finally won a court battle against the landlord, who was forced to shut down the apartment's basement addition. Now, the rental sleeps six. "There are always a bit more and it doesn't prevent parties. But now, instead of going downstairs every day, shouting, making war, I go down every other week. But it's a battle that continues," says Briand, who is also on the Montorgueil-Saint-Denis neighbourhood council. "Four years. We suffered, huh? In chatting with other residents on the street, we realised that this was affecting quite a few other buildings, with this party element."

    Keymasters

    A block over, on the rue Saint-Denis, a street famed in Paris for its motley mix of sex shops, textile wholesalers, bars and restaurants, cobbler Mickaël Amari looks none the worse for the short-term rental invasion. Customers are unusually sparse this Tuesday lunch hour, but Amari puts that down to coronavirus more than Airbnb. The cobbler, who has tended this shop for 13 years and watched the neighbourhood evolve, has seen the concierge businesses that manage short-term rentals pop up all over the area, like one called "Urban Flat in Paris" up the rue Saint-Denis. "There is one on the rue Saint-Sauveur, on the rue Mandar... There are plenty," he says.

    Shoe and boot repair shops in particular are cited as the sorts of neighbourhood businesses at risk of replacement when a quarter tips into serving visitors instead of locals; tourists just don't stop in to have their brogues re-soled. But the chatty, affable Amari, who is quick to perform a magic trick for new customers, still has plenty of local clients dropping off footwear at his "Ali Baba's cavern" of a shop. And he boasts another draw for the rental crowd since he cuts keys. "We make a lot of keys for them," he says. "Because they want to rent apartments out, they need three, four, five keys at a time."

    Cobbler Mickaël Amari cuts keys for Airbnb-style renters on the rue Saint-Denis in Paris's 2nd arrondissement. © Tracy McNicoll, France 24

    Just then, a tall, bearded neighbour comes in looking to have a key badge made. Is he an Airbnb renter? "I do Airbnb. Why?" he asks. When he hears the candidates for Paris mayor are all looking to rein in short-term rentals, he wants to learn more. "What are there platforms, if I might ask?... I'm wondering if they want to outlaw it," he says. "Is that a real possibility?"

    Happy to chat "as long as you're not taking names", the 39-year-old explains that he already rents out a small studio in this "crazy gentrifying" neighbourhood, but recently bought a commercial space in an apartment building nearby to convert into several short-term rentals. Finding a convertible commercial space is one of the biggest hassles for Airbnb investors, he explains, "because that's the gem". Pushing through his building's large wood door into a long narrow stretch of courtyard, he explains the ground-floor property had been a textile workshop. The mouldy space was "like a sweatshop" with the buzz of sewing machines running through the night and elicited "endless complaints" from building residents.

    The property owner points out a number pad tucked under the workshop-style window of another courtyard apartment next door, a commercial space already converted for short-term rentals. Tourists can unlock the door with a code. "The owner doesn't have to say hello or anything," the man explains. He notes that the noise from that other rental echoing through the resonant courtyard drove a family upstairs to move away, a situation he is looking to avoid for the family who lives next door to the space he bought. "I was thinking of doing offices, just to make it easy for myself. But when I did the math, it was not even close," he says, wide-eyed.

    "Off the record, I understand why people are complaining," he says. "There is such a shortage of living space, in all the major European cities." But he reasons he isn't taking away anyone's housing with his new venture. "It would have been offices," he says.

    Across town, Airbnb renter Nicolas Tsaros isn't keeping such a low profile. Tsaros lists five apartments near the Eiffel Tower on Airbnb for about €130 a night. Before cancellations over the coronavirus scare, he says he was largely booked through October. He makes no secret of the fact he has rented the apartments out illegally, without the proper authorisation. At odds with the City, he faces up to €50,000 in fines per apartment. So he wrote a book about it. Tsaros's "Chronicles of an Airbnb renter in Paris: Revelations on a war against Parisians" came out in January.

    One of Nicolas Tsaros's rental listings on Airbnb. © Nicolas Tsaros/Airbnb

    An early adopter, Tsaros first rented out his own apartment in 2008 or 2009, he says, coming off four years of welfare benefits and managing bands in a music market ailing under the digital onslaught. He bought a first rental apartment as a test and banks, buoyed by the results, were relaxed about financing more in quick succession. "That situation would not be possible today," he says, citing banks' skittishness in the face of contempt at City Hall.

    Tsaros likens himself to a whistleblower, pinpointing unfairness. When he first invested, under former Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanöe, he says, the powers that be were more tolerant of short-term renters. The landlord, who has a day job in the tourism sector on the side, sees short-term rentals as a drop in the bucket of Paris's housing problem — representing a tiny percentage of Paris rental housing stock using the City's numbers, or "really nothing" using Airbnb's figures.

    "It's the scapegoat," Tsaros says. "Today, Ian Brossat [as deputy mayor for housing] is getting completely carried away in designating a guilty party and working his niche this way, but it is completely just abject." 

    Tsaros's book calls for a moratorium on short-term rental inspectors' summonses to allow an impact assessment in Paris. "Because we are told that Airbnb is responsible for everything, but without reasons, without arguments," he says. "Today, interest rates are extremely low. It is obvious that over a period of five years, prices were going to soar. It seems obvious to me. But that it isn't being broached."

    Tsaros suggests the so-called GAFAs, American tech giants like Airbnb, "are always the bad guys" to the Communists and Socialists at Paris City Hall. "For me, this is a life I'm building," he says. "Someone who has 30 apartments is a professional. One has to know to tell the difference."

    The nuclear option

    If Hidalgo wins a second term this month, Parisians can expect to be called back to the ballot box about Airbnb within months. But the questions on the ballot paper won't technically be questions Paris can answer itself, for now. Both queries being mooted – about whether the 120-day limit should be tighter and whether short-term rentals of whole apartments should be banned – are out of Paris's jurisdiction and meant to force the French government's hand.

    At City Hall, Brossat is clearly in favour of Paris broadening its powers on those questions.

    "I think we could obtain a lot of things from Airbnb if we had that threat at our disposal. It's the nuclear weapon," he says. "Today, the government isn't in favour at all. But I'm convinced that if hundreds of thousands of Parisians demand it, the government will surely have to consider it."

    12 Hacks For Cheap Starbucks Drinks That'll Save You Big Time

    While Starbucks drinks might as well be part of our bodies at this point, making that daily coffee run can get pretty expensive over time. And while you could always cut back on coffee to save some money... who actually wants to do that? Thankfully, there are hacks for cheaper Starbucks drinks that'll help you make sure you're fueling your coffee cravings but not your credit card bills.

    Americans spend an average of about $718 a year on coffee, according to GoBankingRates.com. But that's just the average overall. Millennials spend about $848 a year, and those ages 35-44 spend about $886 a year on coffee. While you may not notice this while you buy your $3 or $4 cup of coffee everyday, it starts to add up.

    Considering the fact that Starbucks prices on all cups of coffee were hiked up about 10 to 20 cents in 2018, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that just means more money out of your pocket. But you shouldn't have to sacrifice your favorite morning pick-me-up because of the price. Where there's a will, there's a latte macchiato— and a way!

    Here are 12 Starbucks hacks to make your next drink cost a little less.

    1. Bring Your Own Cup Or Mug

    Save money and the environment at the same time by bringing your own reusable coffee cup or mug the next time you get coffee. Whenever you bring your own cup (and it doesn't have to be a Starbucks cup!), Starbucks takes 10 cents off your drink. It may not seem like much, but sometimes that 10 cents can be the reason your drink ends up being under $2. And it can definitely add up over time.

    2. Make Your Own Drinks

    Sure, it's easy to order one of Starbucks' cleverly-named pre-created drinks, but it's cheaper (and more fun) to make one of your own. This way, you're sure to get exactly what you want in a drink and you're likely to save some cents. For example, instead of asking for an iced latte you can order a doppio, or a double shot of espresso over ice, and just add milk. This gives you a "latte" with two shots of espresso for either $2.75 or $3.55 (depending on what size you get), when a regular latte with only one shot will cost you $3.45.

    3. Order 'Short' Instead Of 'Tall' 4. Sign Up For Starbucks Rewards

    Starbucks has plenty of deals and savings for their most loyal customers that they give out often as part of the Starbucks Rewards program. You sign up for the rewards and get stars every time that you buy something. There are days that stars are doubled and other days when you get free stars. Eventually, these stars can be used to cash in drinks or deals on drinks.

    5. Don't Buy Water

    If you ever need a sip of water in between your coffee, don't buy bottled water. Instead, ask for a cup of water with or without ice. The baristas will always give it to you and you'll save a little over $2. You'll have your thirst quenched and you won't even have to pay a single cent. Bring in your own water bottle, and you'll also be saving some plastic!

    6. Order A French Press Pot

    If you and your friends are all in the mood for coffee (and have the same general taste), order a French Press Pot of your favorite mutual coffee instead of buying separate drinks. This way, you'll all get a drink, and you can share the costs, making it cheaper. Plus, it might just start a new tradition with you and your friends. If you don't see it on the menu, ask your barista.

    7. Order Venti Instead Of Two Drinks

    If you and a friend want to buy some drinks, try ordering a Venti of the drink instead of two separate Tall ones. You'll still get a good amount of coffee and you'll be able to split the price of just one drink. Just make sure you both can agree on a drink. For example, if you both want a Caffe Mocha, instead of ordering two-$3.45 Tall orders, you can split one $4.65 Venti for about $2.32 each.

    8. Ask For Whipped Cream Instead Of Syrups

    If you think your drink won't be sweet enough but don't want to throw more money down for a syrup or splash, just ask to add whipped cream like NBC News suggests. It's totally free and will be just the added sweetness you need. Plus, who doesn't love whipped cream?

    9. Take Advantage Of 'Happy Hour'

    Starbucks often hosts different "Happy Hours" throughout the year, especially during the holiday season. On some Thursdays in November and December 2019, for instance, the company offered a buy-one-get-one free deal on any handcrafted drink, grande or bigger as part of its Happy Hour promotion. By constantly checking Starbucks social media accounts and the Starbucks app, you'll be notified of when the Happy Hour days are going on.

    10. Replace Your Latte With A Cold Brew

    Starbucks cold brews are often super strong. So if you order one grande cold brew, you can actually turn it into two separate iced lattes, according to NBC News. Just split the 16-ounce cold brew into two separate cups of the same size, and then pour milk over each one. You now have two grande iced lattes (normally priced at $2.65 each) for just $3.25 total.

    11. Order A Venti Drink, No Ice, And Ask For Three Grande Cups With Ice

    You've likely seen different iterations of this Starbucks hack all over TikTok. If you order Venti drink with no ice and then two Grande cups with just ice, you can distribute the Venti drink into the two Grande cups with a little bit to spare. (This isn't magic. Just math.) In theory, you're getting two drinks for the price of one (plus 50 cents), ultimately saving yourself about $2.75. This relies on your Venti drink with no ice being filled to the brim and poses some questions about how potent or watered down your drinks will end up tasting. Also, be forewarned, you might piss your barista off a little. But if saving $2.75 is worth the angry glare, it's a hack you can give a shot.

    12. Order A Tall Drink, No Ice, And Ask For Venti Cup Of Ice

    Like the drink hack above, your mileage may vary as well as the amount that you irritate your barista. As you may have seen on TikTok, if you order a Tall drink without ice you can pour that into a Venti cup of just ice and fill it to the brim. So, in theory, you're getting a Venti drink for the size of a Tall. Of course, that relies on your barista filling your Tall drink up to the brim.

    You don't have to break the bank every time you want to enjoy a delicious cup of coffee. So next time you find yourself on line at Starbucks (probably tomorrow morning), remember these few tricks and you might be able to bring your tab down.

    Thursday, March 12, 2020

    Geek of the Week: With laser focus, Jon-Tait Beason embraces iOS engineering at Glowforge

    Jon-Tait Beason on the Seattle waterfront. (Adventures With Kate Photo)

    When Jon-Tait "Jazbo" Beason moved from Jamaica to the United States 15 years ago, he was pursuing his goal to become a physician. While studying Radiologic Technology and Biochemistry at the University of Charleston in West Virginia, he ran into complications related to being an international student and decided to shift his focus.

    Working as a math and science tutor, he noticed that his students all had iPhones but none were being leveraged to make learning accessible and fun, as he put it. He decided to learn to write software and edX's free Introduction to Computer Science course kickstarted his journey of learning and discovery.

     If you can write software, you can build anything you can imagine, putting you in a position where you can really impact people's lives positively.

    "When I completed that, I still needed to learn how to make iOS apps so I took another free course from Stanford," Beason said. "I then shipped an app to the store, learning a ton in the process and started looking for jobs."

    Beason sent applications to about 40 companies, mostly getting silent rejections before seeing a tweet during Black History Month in 2016 from someone looking to help underrepresented folks get into tech. Beason was put in touch with Glowforge in Seattle and he's now been with the Seattle startup as an iOS engineer for almost four years.

    Our latest Geek of the Week writes software for various systems, mostly for front end applications. He also makes his fair share of stuff with the company's 3D laser cutter.

    "I make a lot of cool things such as iPad cases, personalized wallets (lots of wallets), dominoes, tool holders, photo frames, necklaces," Beason said. "With the Glowforge, you are only limited by your imagination."

    Away from work, Beason is an admin with two of the biggest iOS engineering Slack communities in the world and loves hanging out in those spaces. He gives conference talks — most recently at try! Swift Tokyo — and attends Xcoders, an iOS and MacOs engineering meet up in Seattle. Beason is also working on a chapter for Swift For Good, a book where 20 authors from the iOS engineering community contributed a technical chapter and all proceeds will go to the non-profit organization Black Girls Code.

    "I love to hang with the fam, teach and learn, solve interesting problems, and invest resources in things that are bigger than me," he said.

    Learn more about this week's Geek of the Week, Jon-Tait Beason

    What do you do, and why do you do it? As an iOS engineer, I work in a field that evolves at the speed of light, providing a constant source of intellectual stimulation. I get to learn and impart the knowledge I gather to others. Furthermore, I can convert seemingly senseless concentration changes of synaptic sodium and potassium ions into something I can interact with — into something you can interact with. At times, I feel like I can watch these ions flow from my brain through fingers, into my Mac and eventually onto my device. Ions to pixels. This way, I have the ability to build amazing experiences that can bring joy to people. WATTBA.

    What's the single most important thing people should know about your field? If you can write software, you can build anything you can imagine, putting you in a position where you can really impact people's lives positively. That said, our field isn't exactly equitable, failing at times to see how exclusive and reeking of fraternalism it can be, and how boardroom decisions to maximize profits can put vulnerable people at risk.

    Where do you find your inspiration? The journey of learning and discovery when creating things or thinking about creating things keeps me inspired. Even more so, having friends across the creative spectrum, making things from exotic furniture to category-defining software keeps me motivated to do my best work.

    What's the one piece of technology you couldn't live without, and why? My Mac. I never leave it behind because behind this Mac, there is no telling what I will create.

    (Photo courtesy of Jon-Tait Beason)

    What's your workspace like, and why does it work for you? A standing desk, an external monitor, keyboard and a magic mouse when I am at the office. Otherwise, just my MBP and any location with reliable WiFi :sweat_smile:

    Your best tip or trick for managing everyday work and life. (Help us out, we need it.) First, be radical about setting up your devices in a way such that they can't summon you, at least when you are away from the office. Keep "Do Not Disturb" on all the time, turn off all notifications, quit Slack unless unless you are actively using it, don't use your devices in your bed or after waking up and block most _distraction_ apps until 1 p.m. Obviously, some folks take calls and that requires adjustments. Otherwise, folks with real emergencies will call 911.

    Secondly, get active outside of work. Our kids play sports and have practices multiple times per week so I have to leave work at 4 p.m. most days to get them to practice and for me to go to the gym. By the time we get back home and have dinner, it is time for showers and bed. They have weekend games so we spend whole weekends attending those sometimes. Being engaged and keeping those around you engaged makes it easier to disconnect. To be frank, writing software and learning to write it better is actually one of my hobbies. So, I take my Mac with me everywhere I go, even if I may not use it. Having a work machine might mean I pick up a ticket on a flight but it also means I can help someone out in one of our Slack communities, work on side project or write a blog post. But I choose when I open my device, not my notifications. I do it for fun, not to get promoted.

    Mac, Windows or Linux? Mac.

    Kirk, Picard, or Janeway? I don't know who those people are. And no, I won't Google them.

    Transporter, Time Machine or Cloak of Invisibility? Transporter.

    If someone gave me $1 million to launch a startup, I would … I would start a company to build software that empowers anyone to create, publish and get paid, not just those with specialized design skills and hefty budgets. Maybe one day that company could have a major office on the North Coast of Jamaica, hiring local talent.

    I once waited in line for … The iPhone.

    Your role models: My mom. She raised seven kids as a single mother. Most of the things that drive today me are values my mom inculcated in me as a child. Her attention to detail, her discipline, her persistence and her resilience are at levels I aspire to reach.

    Greatest game in history: "Mortal Kombat Trilogy."

    Best gadget ever: iPhone, Apple Watch, Nokia 3310 in that order.

    First computer: HP tx1000 Convertible Notebook.

    Current phone: iPhone 11 Pro.

    Favorite app: Overcast.

    Favorite cause: Black Girls Code.

    Most important technology of 2020: Artificial intelligence.

    Most important technology of 2022: Augmented reality.

    Final words of advice for your fellow geeks: We should do collabs like YouTubers.

    Website: bugkrusha.com (currently offline getting some fresh paint)

    Twitter: @bugkrusha

    LinkedIn: Jon-Tait Beason

    Wednesday, March 11, 2020

    Here's the 'ideal income' for the typical American family

    Some amount of money could just buy you and your family happiness, claims a new study published in Nature Human Behavior led by Andrew T. Jebb, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. "We found that the ideal income point is $95,000 for life evaluation and $60,000 to $75,000 for emotional well-being" for an individual, Jebb told Purdue, and more for a family.

    For people in North America specifically, the magic "life evaluation" number is $105,000, just about what Warren Buffett, one of the world's richest people, says he could be happy with. That would reflect your overall assessment of how satisfied you are with your circumstances.

    For families in North America, you have to do a little math to figure out the magic "life evaluation" number. "To obtain estimates for households with more people, one can simply multiply the satiation estimate by the square root of the house-hold size," the report notes. So the ideal income for an American family of four, for instance, would be $210,000.

    Earn any higher than this threshold, though, and the researchers found you might actually experience lower overall satisfaction. Jebb asserts that higher income is often associated with larger workloads and less free time. You can also get more competitive once your basic needs are met, and it can hurt to focus too much on material gain and social status.

    The researchers also figured out the income associated with the somewhat more modest standard of "emotional well-being" by making a focused assessment of people's day-to-day feelings. They found that making between $65,000 and $95,000 per individual in North America could help keep you happy.

    In a prominent study published back in 2010, economists from Princeton University polled 450,000 Americans and found, similarly, that happiness does increase with wealth, but the correlation peaks at earning $75,000 per year.

    Jebb's team's findings are based on a Gallup World Poll of more than 1.7 million individuals from 164 countries. Unsurprisingly, results from different regions varied considerably. The general trend was that, in wealthier places, people tended to say they needed more money to be happy.

    "These findings speak to a broader issue of money and happiness across cultures," Jebb said. "Money is only a part of what really makes us happy, and we're learning more about the limits of money."

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