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There's much to be said about the simple pleasures in life. This could be for some a gentle stroll on a cold winters day. Fortunately for those of a more temperamental nature it could be hoicking themselves as high as they can into the air from a transitional shaped wavey press of ply. Investing in this jump ramp from Graw is one… Read more →
Tag: Chris Barrett
Ashton-under-Lyne is a place on earth
A place on earth. One we share On a cold winters day Skateboarding January in Ashton-under-Lyne is a wonderful place Ashton – under – Lyne Read more →
Toes and Hills
The streets have hills, the hills have eyes Your feet have toes, your toes have eyes What's left what's right upside downside inside out Watch your toes pose as the concrete glows Point the nose with the toes and don't look back Gravity knows we point our toes Get ready steady it's down hill we goes Read more →
Welcome to Boneside
What do you do with too much time and concrete on your hands. You build a boneside thats what you do. The scrap of waste land under the viaduct has been disused for years. Home to a dilapidated car park, the ghost of a petrol station and a large pile of rubble. The bridge, a historic landmark. When it… Read more →
Mad Hatters part 3 (stuck in a bubble)
Wood to wallride creation we created to skate just the other day. John Bell wasted no time in surfing the concrete wave we found underneath a homely monolith called something something tower. Chris Barrett fought a tough fight to bring the rock fakie home. A place with more to skate for those who seek and destroy and seek some more.… Read more →
FOR SALE SBT Morrissey backprint long sleeve
For sale, bad man Barrett's long sleeve (only new and minus the stains). Link to store in sidebar. Look for the pirate. Selling my soul for a corporate goal. All products are made in extremely small numbers so if you buy SBT it's guaranteed to be an original, home grown, skater owned skate brand for the black eyed nobody. Support… Read more →
Archive 6 " Chris Barrett footage"
So here we are. Another Stupid Bloody Tuesday post. This time I bring to your skateboard driven eyeballs another film edited from the "archive". This time I bring you a Chris Barrett section. Now hows about that, not bad for a bazra. The picture below is from last week. Barrett's a staple feature on S.B.T, partly because I never leave… Read more →
Painting Pavements
Painting pavement with rubber soles Free expression my favourite thing Street poetry without words Future feet kicking board Scoring scabs No comply Flips Goal Read more →
Kerbside for the Boredom
Boredom is a terrible thing. It's 99.9% of the reason people do stupid things. Photography visually distracts and delays some boredom for perhaps a minute and film a little longer. The internet is best though. Build a thing and skate it, no more boredom. Skate a thing, shoot a photo and put it on stupid bloody tuesday, I'm not bored.… Read more →
SBT Weekend in the City 2015
S.B.T weekend in the city film 2015. Features Chris Barrett, David Walton, Ash Burgess, Daniel James, Matt Sheerin and yours truly. Also features 'New Order', vinyl records, slamming, blood, hill bombing and a camera from 1983. Thanks to Lewis Threadgold and 'Lurker' for organising a sick competition in Manchester. All the other entries were absolutely powerful this year, looking forward… Read more →
Four at Stocky Blocks and one for D.I.Y Doozer
Stockport fountains are a hive of skateboard activity. It's also a hive of smashed glass, mislead youth and trouble. That's none of my business. I like to skate, shoot photos and hopefully project something worthwhile, something that's not a complete waste of time. I think there's a little skate scene here, and by scene I mean a counter culture. At… Read more →
Skateboarding Walls like Wheels of Water
It's seldom said that walls are a comfortable thing. The partition of space creates illusions. Street after street we follow walls, we live in walls and we use them for punishment, law and order. Nothing can be more real than four walls. Our society loves walls my psyche creates them and like most things we can skate them. Walls are… Read more →
Underground Wonderground
Half of all skateboarding occurs in places that have another purpose. I skated with the Bazra on a cold rainy evening around a multi storey car park and we took these shots. The kickflip through the rusty iron structure ranks as one of the gnarliest kickflips imaginable. The elevation needed to clear the low bar and shapes thrown to fit… Read more →
Stockers Winter Socks
Bloody cold outside A bit cold for skateboarding A wise man said to me "Go skateboarding" So I did. It was good. Read more →
Archive Four (street lines come in two's)
Ten lines of two tricks over 10 years (or more) from early 90's forgotten street legends and modern day plywood wizards alike. Archive four became a game of numbers and street sounds. Things to look out for. The background lurker taking a slam, a pressure flip up a block, the background lurker posing a tail stall and Reiss actually street… Read more →
Cold first post 2015
It's cold, its January, it's winter. Skate switch wear tee's, flash on. Switch roles, add time, add blue. Rough bank, add gloves, flash on. A new year and we have no plan. I like it like that. Read more →
Gallery 2014, the year (and a bit) in photos
Here we have a gallery of images as featured on S.B.T 2014. All shot by my crooked fingers (except for the selfies shot by Lewis, Lloyd and Barrett) It's a New Year post so take your time, hurry up the choice is yours go for a skate. [Show as slideshow] It's been a year, and I've had a few of… Read more →
Art Park Skate
Art in the skatepark, not a bad idea. Skateboarding has got art in it. We use our feet for something individual, we are kinetic and creative and what we do is always our own. Skateboarding without 'art' would be skaeboding. How we got here I don't know. Avoid the bull and skate to create. Do what you can and try… Read more →
Stratosphere crooked grind, damp Stockfordian block. Prime colour planner seeks cold damp winter palette We are not robot, we are human. Time is spacial. Skateboarding is art. No trick is ever the same. Nothing to lose nothing to gain. Read more →
Weekend in the City 2014 S.B.T film
The team S.B.T consisted of Zack Riley, Chris Barrett, Neil Worthington, Reiss Johnson and yours truly. The plan was simple. Avoid the well known Manchester street spots and skate whatever we find the rougher the better. Film it, edit it, capture Reiss on vert. Lastly, photograph the crap out of everything add Joy Division. S.B.T Weekend in the City 2014… Read more →
Three for Tuesday, bish bosh Barrett
Keep it short. Went for a skate, bumped into Barrett. Chris has not skated for weeks due to a knee injury, today was the first skate. Chris proceeds to grind a behemoth street bollard like he was buttering toast. Then takes on a muddy gap with Mach ten speed and street pop. Chris Barrett finishes the evening with a switch… Read more →
Three for…Thursday
Digging into the archive and pulling out three photo's for the post. Here we go. First up Threaders ollie into a steep concrete descent. It was a windy day and Lewis had a fight on with the wind. Shouting at the sky and pushing himself as he always does to make the trick. He's class that lad. Next up Lloyd… Read more →
Miller Flip with Bad Man
Words by Chris Barrett. "How to miller flip-Ride Up the quarter with speed -grab Indy -throw your body backwards so you feel like your gonna land on your head – as you feel like your gonna die reach your hand out as close to the coping as possible and spring your self onto your feet – bend your knees… Read more →


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You don't have to be how anyone else expects you to be.
And not in some hedonistic way – because you don't have to do everything you want to do either.
I knew I liked computers when I was little – not so much the hardware part of them, but the infinite worlds that lived inside a computer with an internet connection. For better or for worse, my parents let me use the computer in our living room when I was pretty young, so I remember finding the fascinating world of RPGs (you can read more here) when I was 9.
Message board RPGs let me flex my burgeoning creative writing skills, explore early user interfaces, and learn basic HTML and CSS (helpful for coding emails 15 years later). I wrote long, involved signatures with character details like physical traits, family trees, and life events. A vast majority of them had to do with teenagers finding adventure at boarding schools, probably fueled by my love of Harry Potter.
I loved using the computer. Given the choice between it and playing outside on a summer day, I would have chosen the former every time. In 2018, I am regretful to say that I no longer spend my time creating fantastical characters in scantly-trodden corners of the internet, but learning about technology and groups of people are still two of my favorite things.
You don't have to want to go to happy hour every night and you don't have to want to keep buying workout clothes until you have more pairs of leggings than the yoga classes you could possibly go to. You don't have to be energized by the Saturday afternoon roar of the football crowd at a sports bar.
(You can, but you don't have to.)
You're allowed to cook in your tiny little apartment and bring your lunch to work and eat what you want and not eat salads for every meal. You're allowed to crave solitude from living in such a congested place, from the bodies jostled together on the train over the Williamsburg Bridge in the bleary mornings and right back as the sun sets a fire over the whole town. You're allowed to make your regular trips to the pizza place around the corner and to the grocery store with the cramped aisles and come back just to sit cross-legged on the couch. You can stop to think and give yourself time to compose thoughts, or your response, and you don't have to know everything all the time.
You know you're allowed to, cognitively, but every day the hurriedness of coworkers and the brusqueness of those on the train and on the street, it says "Try being like me; it's the way we do things."
You don't have to laugh at all the same jokes and you don't have to agree with everything said. You can laugh at what you truly find funny and speak up when you or someone else are being hurt. You can use your voice and use it again and again and again; learn to flex the vulnerability muscle that is simultaneously scary and revolutionary.
You can be all these things without building a bridge between yourself and others – in fact, you can use who you are to connect more authentically. You can not be afraid of who you are and not be afraid of who others are either.

subset: commoncrawl


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Documentary, 63', Cuba
La Arrancada follows a the life of a Cuban family; a single mother with two children yearning to leave Cuba and follow their dreams. The running theme is overt: Cuba's youth want escape. A place previously untapped and unfazed by the globalisation around it, has now opened its borders, connected to the internet and joined the milieu of amateur photographers on Instagram. As Cuban youth experience capitalism in all its glory via social media, the desire to get out brews deeper and deeper. In this particular family, the son hopes to find work in Chile and the daughter, Jennifer—the best runner in Cuba—hopes her running is enough to buy her an athletic scholarship in Germany.
Aldemar Matias paints a portrait of what it's like to grow up in Cuba today, stuck in a world of false promises and in an economic system that turns the individual against themselves.
Jennifer is compelled to either quit running due to an injury or excel far enough to get to Germany, a dream she relives in her head by walking through the college campus on Google Maps. The necessity for something else is very apparent. Cubans gather in packs around wi-fi offering park, ironically lit by their phones alone as a power outage causes a black out—and try to Skype with loved ones living abroad. Where people once came together in parks, they now gather in search for connection—maybe to each other, but mostly to the rest of the world. The feeling is ubiquitous: whether or not Cubans (and Jennifer) will 'make it' is unsure, but one thing is, Cuban youth feel isolated and crave more interaction with the rest of the world.
Aldemar's access and intimacy with his subjects is admirable, however, the theme of escape was possibly too repetitive and obvious. There was definitely a missed opportunity to delve deeper into a human exploration of desires and happiness. What is it that doesn't make this seemingly very loving and caring family fulfilled? What does this say about our inherent desires as humans to excel in something? And what can Cubans do to possibly change their current political system? As some of the kids say at one point, none of them want to be in Cuba in 10 years, yet they want to die and be buried here, nowhere else. They love their country, yet the plethora of opportunities available makes them want more.
- Shalini Adnani


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AI sounds great, but we just want to build better software. In this talk we aim to cut through the endless hype and jargon to answer the key question of how to build better software using AI. We show how self-optimization, a surprisingly simple and intuitive paradigm, can deliver all tangible benefits of AI without having to deal with complex and brittle pipelines, algorithms, models, or even data. We present a complete walkthrough and live demonstration as well as many real-world results and comparisons against traditional methodology. Finally, we review various relevant market dynamics, including increasingly AI-driven acquisition channels (search engines, app stores, social feeds, ad networks etc), that are rapidly making effective optimization crucial for software products and developers to achieve their full potential in the marketplace.
Sounds good. Hi. Before we start, can I get a quick show of hands?
How many product people do we have here?
You know, product managers, product engineers?
Oh, none? Oh, one? Okay, great.
How about marketing people- people who work on marketing?
No? None?
How about growth people? You know, growth hackers- that kind of thing?
None? Okay, interesting.
How many people here do A/B testing? Okay, a few.
How about other ways of improving metrics, or optimizing metrics?
A couple, okay. All right. Thanks, guys.
Let's get started.
So my name is Olcan, the C sounds like a J. It's a Turkish name. I am the founder and CEO at Scaled Inference. And I have been writing code for well, over 25 years now. About half of that was at Google. I have built websites, mobile apps, search engines, analytics services,platforms that power them. So, you know, I like to call myself a developer. I think I deserved that by now. And I was always interested in AI.
From the time I heard about it, when I was 15 or 16, I thought it was very exciting. But I didn't really get into it until about 10 years ago in Google research, and then later with Google brain. And by that time- you know, my perspective on it was that of a developer. How do we use AI to build better software? How does it help us do that? I believe that AI is going to give us a much better future, but it is also going to do that by empowering us to realize our full potential. And that is the mission of my company, Scaled Inference.
So in this talk, there are three parts. First we are going to start with the "Why?" You know, why optimize?, Why self-optimization?
And then we are gonna get into the "How?" How do we do self-optimization?
And in the end, we are going to look at some code. We are going to optimize some metrics. So we are really going to dig in by the end.
Well, let me start with the "Why?" So what I would like to do is to walk you guys through what is called a customer funnel. If you build any kind of software product or service, then what you are probably going to need to do is to acquire users from one of these, what you might call "acquisition channels" or "acquisitions sources".
You know that you want people to come to your website from Google. Or, you want people to download your app from the app store, right? But you don't want them to stop there. You want them to actually complete some kind of signup process, or onboarding process on your mobile app.
And you don't want them to stop there, either. You want them to actually start using your product, to engage your product- you know, read articles, send messages, whatever it is your product does. And, you want them to keep using the product. You want them to come back the next day, or the next week. And ultimately, your goal is to deliver as much value as you can with as little cost as you can.
None of these levels are optional. If you don't do well at deeper levels, you will fail later in the process. But, you do have to have good metrics across the entire funnel to succeed long term.
Now, a lot of us are probably familiar with optimizing the acquisition layer. We have acronyms for that. You know, search engine optimization, app store optimization, social media optimization-- that kind of thing.
It's mostly manual, but, we still get the idea of trying to improve our acquisition metrics. What many of us might not realize though, is that these acquisition sources or channels are increasingly preferring to send people to websites or apps that have much better downstream metrics below the acquisition level.
So, Google will prefer to send people to content that is more engaging. If people immediately leave your site, that is going to hurt your Google rankings. Same thing as with the app stores, they prefer to send people to download apps that they are going to actually keep on their device, that they are going to complete the onboarding for, and actually come back the next day.
So, there is an increasing trend for acquisition channels to prefer better downstream metrics. So what we can do is we can start trying to optimize our metrics at the next level down, the activation level. We might start doing some kind of personalization, some kind of A/B testing on our web pages, or mobile apps. And this will help a lot. This will actually not just help metrics at that level, but actually at the level above for the reason I described earlier. Search engines will prefer your website because you are actually engaging your users better. And app stores will prefer your apps because you are actually retaining your users much better.
But, what if we could actually optimize across the entire funnel? What if we could optimize at every level, and in every piece of software that we have that affects our metrics there? And what if that was actually easy to do? That is why we are here.
So let me start with the current state-of-the-art, or current methodology, as I call it sometimes. And it all starts with actually defining and measuring our metrics. We can't improve our metrics if we don't even measure them! And this is traditionally called analytics. There are standards around this. Around how to track our events, and define our metrics.
If you want to measure click-through rates, you are going to have to track the click event, for example. So, this is pretty standard. And of course, we don't want to stop there, you know. The idea is not just to watch our metrics to go up and down, but we actually want to do something about it. We want to improve our metrics.
This is what we call experimentation, there are many names for it: A/B testing, split testing, hypothesis testing. But all of those things are essentially the same. The idea is that we have two or more variations of our product that is deployed. Variation A is probably what we are doing now, and variation B is what we are considering switching to if it has better metrics. So we deploy both of those, we measure their metrics. And if B turns out to be better than A, we are going to switch to B. And we just have to be a little bit patient, you know. We want the result to be significant. We do not want to act unless it is a significant result. Typically, we are looking for a 90-95% confidence before we act on it. And this makes us feel good, you know. We are not arbitrarily making changes to our software. We are actually looking for evidence before we make changes. It makes us feel good, but, not everything is good.
You know, maybe our metrics are not improving as much or as quickly as we hoped, right? Or maybe the improvements are not sticking, or it is not adding up somehow. If your experiments are taking longer, they are coming back inconclusive or negative, or maybe it is starting to feel like a waste of time. You might start wondering, "should we just move quickly based on hunch?" "Are we better off?" The problem is not experimentation.
Experimentation, as you know, is why science works. It has hundreds of years of theory behind it, so there is no problem with that. The problem is in trying to optimize or improve our software metrics using experimentation. There are many, many technical problems with that, but I just want to go over three of them.
The first one is that metrics change continuously, constantly, and- you know, what this means is that the underlying truth that we have a hypothesis about is changing, even as we gather evidence for it, okay? This is about as bad as it sounds. And there are many reasons why metrics change, you know. Your user population might change, their behavior might change, and you are actually changing your application, right? That is the whole point of optimizing. We are making changes to our app. So the metrics are always changing. How do we know that the experiments and the conclusions we had from earlier are still valid, right?
Are we going to run those experiments again to make sure? Probably not, right? That sounds terrible, so this is a big, big problem. The second problem is that A/B testing is simply a very poor optimization strategy. What's a good optimization strategy? Well, it's one that is explicitly designed to improve your metrics as quickly as possible, okay? A/B testing is definitely not that. I won't go into the details, but I'll just show you some data later that compares against A/B testing on real-world examples, okay?
Now, the third thing I want to mention is that A/B tests are generally oblivious to contextual wins and losses. What I mean by that is that in running an A/B test, we are aggregating over groups that may behave very differently. We have to do that because we want to compute averages that have statistical significance to them, right? To conclude, A is better than B on average does not in any way rule out a large population where A must, may actually be much worse. That is called a contextual loss, or where B actually might be much better, okay? That is called a contextual win.
These are all hidden in the averages in an A/B testing and, as developers, I mean, imagine, you know, how much more insight, how much more value you could drive from your work if only we could take advantage of those contextual wins, right? And on the flip side, I mean, the whole point of experimenting was that we wanted to be careful, right? We don't want to hurt our metrics or users. We wanted to act based on evidence. But, the contextual losses are actually getting worse and worse as we blindly optimize these averages, okay? I mean, imagine how that defeats the whole purpose of experimenting in the first place.
So, these three problems are really big problems. I will just stop there as far as talking about problems. So what do we do about this, you know? Are we just gonna act based on hunch?
No, there is a much better way. And, the much better way that we have found is to take analytics and A/B testing exactly as they are. We do not want to reinvent the wheel there, right? But to introduce automation and machine learning into the process. What kind of automation do we get? Well, we can actually automatically discover and surface the contextual wins and losses that we want to know about. We can automatically find and execute the most effective policies, the most effective optimization strategies for our problem. And we can do all of that with much better statistical rigor than we think we have with A/B testing, okay?
The best part, I think, is that all of this, it turns out, can happen behind the scenes, kind of under the hood of traditional analytics and A/B testing that we may already know about, or that we may already be doing. If you are already doing analytics and A/B testing today, you probably do not have to do any additional work to get started with this new concept. So the new concept we call self-optimizing software, we use this cute little bot icon that we lovingly named Amp.
Amp refers to both the new concept, a new paradigm, and also the new platform, the Amp.ai platform, that makes it very easy for developers. So let me just review the the benefits of this. What do we get by doing self-optimization? There are two things.
First of all, as I mentioned this is a much more effective way to optimize our metrics compared to experimentation, right? The other thing, though, is that this is a way to take advantage of AI and machine learning in virtually all of our software for all of our key metrics. I mean, how cool is that, right? Arguably, all we need from machine learning and AI at the end of the day is for our own key metrics to improve, right?
If we could get that, we're getting all the tangible benefits. And if that is easy to do, we are getting that without all the baggage, okay? And, the baggage of machine learning these days under the traditional paradigm, I won't get into any details, but I'll just point out some papers published by companies like Google about the technical debt-- the high interest credit card of technical debt of machine-learning. The 43 rules of practical machine learning-- I mean, I think 43 rules of practical anything means that thing is not very practical, right? And at the bottom here we have a quote from a recent major machine learning conference. Ali Rahimi, one of the top researchers in the field, he was receiving an award for work that he did 10 years ago. He said that machine learning has turned into alchemy. And this actually stirred a lot of debate in the community, and a lot of self-reflection, and so on.
But as developers, you know, alchemy sounds terrible, right? It sounds like it will be hard to debug. It would be hard to maintain, right? So I don't think any of us would want alchemy in our software. So one of the main benefits is that we get AI in all of our software to improve our key metrics without resorting to alchemy, okay? Let's focus now on the comparison against experimentation.
So, we keep claiming that it is much more effective. How do we measure that? How do we know that? So this is the kind of chart we like to look at when we look at the effectiveness of an optimization strategy, okay? The way to do that is to fix the amount of time or number of sessions that we give this strategy. One of the strategies here is traditional A/B testing. So we wait until certain significance is achieved, and then we immediately deploy the the better variation to our product, which by the way is very generous to A/B testing because there are usually additional delay. Someone has to look at the data, someone has to deploy the variant, and so on. But let's actually be very generous and automate all of that away. And, what we do with the strategies is we look at how much the metric improves over that period, and we look at the cumulative gains over that period.
The way to think about that is the additional signups, or additional check-outs, or additional conversions, or whatever you're interested in over that period, right? And in every case that we've been able to look at from real-world A/B tests, we found a similar result. That there is an enormous inefficiency in trying to optimize your metrics using an A/B test. And, I should say, you know, metric gains is actually like the return on investment. It's actually more important than the metric that's achieved here. I'll show you in a minute what the metric improvement was, but that's actually less important. Because you can always invest more time, you know, more effort, more money, or whatever. And, get better metrics, but what is the return on that investment you're making? And that's what this chart measures- that's the gain factor, okay? So another way to visualize the gain factor, you know, is something like this. This is what 1X might look like, and I think this is what 8.4X would look like in comparison. I think it looks a lot better. And at Scaled Inference, you know, we love to look at this kind of data visualization, because it reminds us of our mission which, like I mentioned at the beginning, is to empower people ultimately to reach their full potential. You know, AI is just the means to that end, right? So let's look at some more results.
Again, in bold is the gain factor, each of these is a different use case and the gain factor is what tells you how effective the optimization strategy is. We also report the metrics here, but remember we can always invest more time and effort to improve those metrics further. So that's not as important. And we don't always have permission to disclose company names, but the one at the bottom, I'd like to tell you a lot more about that. That company is Teespring. Teespring is a major platform for buyers and sellers of custom apparel, including t-shirts. And they are also a major e-commerce business by now. And they will tell you that they owe much of that to aggressive and extensive A/B testing that they do throughout their site. And, they have been doing that for many years.
They wanted to apply self-optimization using our AI platform on their check-out flow. That's also where they concentrated all of their A/B testing efforts over the years. They felt that it was highly optimized. They had recently hired conversion optimization experts who went in and tried to improve things further, but their conclusion was that they seem to be at some kind of local optimum that, yeah, they are not gonna make it with small changes. They need to start making big changes to hopefully get improvements. So, after all of that, they were quite skeptical trying out a new idea like this. And they have been optimizing, or self-optimizing, I should say, a lot of different variables through their site and in check-out flow. But I want to concentrate on one of them today.
By the way, we call variations, actions. It reminds us that is the part of the user flow that we have controlled over, okay? And in this case, action A is their current checkout flow. Which kind of seems to encourage people to add more things to their cart, okay? And we're introducing an action B to the system that we think encourages people to check-out, to go directly to check-out more. If you are metric is revenue, it is not obvious at all which one of these is better, okay? You can imagine action A being better, because more items would get added to cart, right? But you can imagine action B being better, because more people might actually finish the check-out flow, right? So it's not obvious, and if you run an A/B test, the A/B test might tell you that on average- you know, maybe A is slightly better, B is slightly better. And then, you might deploy that to all of your users for all of the sessions, and then get a slight improvement.
But, what we found when we applied self-optimization is that it actually depends on the context, okay? So it depends on the connection speed, for example. Depends on the device that is being used, the screen size of that device, the time of day, even weekend versus weekday, where the user is coming from, what websites, you know. What other app? So all these things presumably are correlated with how impulsive that users are in that particular session. And depending on that, which action wins will change, right? So, if you do that, then you are able to achieve much better metrics, and that's what Teespring did in this use case.
So that about sums up the why, for today. I want to start getting into the how. Like I promised, we are gonna see a demo, and we are going to see some code, and optimize some metrics. But let me give you the big picture a little bit. Now, there are three three things that are involved here. There is our software. You know, again this is not just our websites and mobile apps but our back-end systems, really anything that is involved in our customer funnel. And we have our platform in the middle, the amp.ai platform, and we have people, you know, this is probably mostly developers but it could be product managers, and marketers and others, anybody who cares about metrics.
So, the first thing is the platform collects events from our applications. Like I said, this is just traditional analytics. And if you already have instrumentation to collect events using other providers like Google Analytics or Mixpanel or anything like that, we can use it. And, based on those events, we can provide certain insights. Obviously, the insights will depend on how you are using our platform. But even with a minimal integration, you know, a one-line copy/paste integration, we can actually tell you what your key contexts are, and specifically in which context you are most underperforming, or under-serving. So Teespring would have found that their checkout flow is actually under serving slow connections, okay? They need to encourage maybe people to check out faster.
So, that is the kind of insight you can get with a very minimal integration. And then, you define your metrics and this is an iterative process. You might start with just a couple of metrics that you think you care about. Over time, you are expected to have more metrics that you care about: some metrics you want higher, some lower, some you just want to keep an eye on. You are not sure yet. Some metrics you want to know within a certain range. They are sometimes called guardrail metrics. And there is a sense of priority, you know, some metrics you care a lot more about. Like for Teespring, of course it is important that more items are added to cart. You know, that increases their revenue. But somehow, it seems much more important that they actually finish the check-out process, right? So that metric seems slightly more important than the other metric, but both are important. So that is an iterative process. But, as soon as you define your metrics, another iterative process can start.
This is our platform starting to learn and deploy what we call policies. Policies are very simple, they are just a bunch of instructions or rules that tell your application which action to take in which context. It can be randomized. Meaning, we might tell your application will take either A or B randomly in this context. And that is necessary for our system to explore new actions, right? If you introduce a new action especially at the beginning, we are going to need to experiment with that. And as soon as the policies are starting to get deployed, the self-optimization loop starts. But like I said, both of these iterations are important. Both the self-optimization loop and the human loop where we refine our metrics. And remember if you are running experiments, what we do is we actually cut the loop of the optimization to look at the data and the results. And that actually hurts our metrics and hurts our users.
So instead of doing that, we can let the system just continuously optimize and let the system tell us what it can about our users and about our application, and use that to improve the process by refining our metrics or other things.
The last thing I want to tell you about is that these iterations that you do with your users or sessions is you don't have to do it for all of your users or all of your sessions. You can start with a subset. We call it the optimized groups or the amped group. And this is very similar to experimenting with a subset of your users or sessions. But instead of experimenting on them, you are actually continuously trying to improve metrics for them, and to learn from them, right? So that sounds a lot better than actually experimenting on them. And even with a small group on which you are optimizing, you can get extremely valuable information.
You can learn about which policies are achieving better metrics. You can learn about what are the contextual wins and losses, and the contexts are also automatically learned. You can learn about which context and which actions seem to matter more, you know, which ones are giving you the bigger wins.
Using all that information, you can then go back to the system and specify better metrics, specify better actions. And it's not just about, you know, adding new actions which might be a lot of work. It might be about actually taking actions away, right? If you realize that an action is actually not giving you the metric gains you hoped for, it may not be worth the maintenance cost or the complexity cost of that action. So you might just take that away. And better context, like I have said this is a contextual policy-learning system. So the more context we can provide, the more effective actually the optimization becomes, right?
Okay, I think that is enough talk for all of us. So I am just gonna jump into a little demo here. We call this the Hello, World! of self-optimizing software. And I hope you guys can see this. Okay, great. So- so there's a bunch of things going on here.So let me just quickly explain. On the left, we have our website. I am going to log into the amp console in a moment. On the right, we have an example app that I am going to talk about. And then on the upper right, you have the code for that app, okay? I am going to explain all these things in a moment, but there's three windows going on here.
So this example, we are going to look at the Hello, World! example is actually on our website under the developer's section, okay? So if you go there, you can actually see all the client libraries that we have for different platforms. And yeah, the same example is actually there, and you can run this a bunch of times. And every time you run this example, it is like a new instance of this Hello, World! application. The part that the application controls is the action in the middle. And in this case, we are determining what style to use for Hello, World!. The rest of it: the context and the outcome, we have to simulate because remember we are just running the app on the same device repeatedly. So to give it different context, we have to actually simulate that context.
And by running this a bunch of times, you can kind of get a sense of the different contexts that are possible. In this case, there is really only two: adult, and child, and you can also see that the action is changing which is what I was talking about earlier. Self-optimizing software has the ability to vary its behavior depending on the context in order to optimize for outcomes, right? And you can also see outcomes here can be happy or not happy. So it is a very simple example that is meant to illustrate the key concepts and the simple API.
So at the bottom right here, we have another instance of the same app. This one just has a few additional features that I am going to need for this demo. On the top right, as I mentioned, is the code for the app and is extremely simple. There are three parts to it that actually correspond to these three sections. First, we observe some context. In this case, there are just two kinds of context, we either observe child or adult;. There is a single function call here for that. And next, we decide the action which is the text style in this case. That happens on this line. There are three possibilities- regular, fun, or classic. And depending on that, we changed the style of the Hello, World! text on the page.
At the end, we observe an outcome. If the user is happy, we will observe the user happy event. And this would be, you know, whatever key outcome we have in our application, obviously. You can not always observe whether the user is happy or not, that tends to be tricky. Okay, great. So let me actually login to our console here, on a special account just for you guys. Just gonna call this demo for talk. And it just occurred to me that our booth is using the same accounts. I hope my guys do not delete the demo. So I created a project. I am just gonna grab the project key here, and let me resize this a little bit. Second just plug the project key over here in this: Hello, World! app down here. And I am just going to run this a few times, let me resize this a little bit more.
What I am trying to do is run it until I get a happy face, okay? What that means is that the user happy event is submitted to the back-end. And by running it a few times, I can do two things. I can go to the console, first of all. I can look at these sessions as they were received by our back-ends. You know, I see here there was an amp session event which is a standard event that we have with a whole bunch of contexts that we automatically extract, so you do not have to report all of that. And here is the user type event that this Hello, World! application is reporting. And here is the text style that was decided, in this case, regular, and so on. So you can make sure that the integration is working correctly as you expect.
As I mentioned, since we got the happy face there, we can actually go in and define our metric that we want to optimize. Let's call it happiness! And what we want to do is increase the occurrences of the user happy event, right? So we just select that. We want to maximize it with high priority. We don't have any other metrics, so let's just do our best with this one. We will just create that metric.
Now you may notice also that as I run this app, the action is not changing, it is just showing the regular action. And the reason for that is although the the code is there for this action to be optimized, we have not yet enabled optimization. And before we enable optimization, all they do is return the first option that it has. We call that the default action;. So this makes it very easy and zero-risk to introduce decision points all over your applications. There is no risk, there is very little effort. Whatever you are doing now, you just call that the first option, you give it a name. And then whatever alternatives you want to introduce, you just add them as you go, okay?
So anyway here, since we have already submitted some sessions with this decision point, we can actually go ahead and enable optimization there. So I am just gonna go in, and look at the decisions that were received so far. I see it here as text style, so I am gonna enable that. I can actually take a look at the values it has: regular, fun, and classic.
Great, it looks like what I am trying to optimize so let me select that one. Save that. Okay, good. So I actually authorize the system to start optimizing that decision point. And the next thing I am going to do is allocate some percentage of my users. As I mentioned, you can pick a small percentage if you want to see what happens initially. Here, since this is a demo, I am gonna go with 80%, okay? So that's that. And that is it.
So at this point once I start running these sessions, it's actually going to immediately start learning and immediately start deploying policies to our web application, okay? So- so one of the features here is that I can just click a button, and this is going to repeatedly run these sessions at a high rate. And all we have to do now is wait, maybe 30 seconds hopefully, and- and see the results in the console.
And what's happening right now is, as I mentioned, every new instance of the app is actually benefiting from all the prior instances. You know, which might have been on different devices, for different users, different times, and so on. So, yeah, actually we are starting to get some results here. I'll give it some more time. You can see the app actually experimenting with different variations now. You know, it's not always showing the same thing. And what we are really interested in is what is the metric that the app is achieving on user happiness- the frequency of sessions where user happy event occurs.
Alright, there you go. So we are starting to get some meaningful numbers here. You can see on the right side- on the right edge of the left side. Sorry- you can see the overall- actually let me switch to Amp. You can see the Amped policy is starting to do better than the baseline already. That was about 30 seconds or so, I think. You can see it's already up over 32% over this time period. By the way, this happened in real time, okay? The platform did not know anything about our app before. And not only is the average much better right now, but we actually found two contexts- user type adult and user type child. And in both of those contexts, we are up significantly. On adult context we are up 30%, on child context we are up 40%, right?! So not only are we optimizing the average, but we see these important segments, and we are optimizing those individual segments. Now I'll pause this at this point. And so in this case, we were able to just jump right into optimization because in this example, we already had the actions available. You know, the regular, fun, and classic. If you don't have the actions available to you yet, or you don't want to optimize them yet, then you can still get started under the analyze section of the console.
So what analyze section can do is tell you not only what your average metric is, so in this case, happiness on average is about 52, but it can actually automatically discover these key contexts for you. This is what I was referring to earlier as learned key context. It can tell you that you have two contexts: child, and adult; and that you are actually significantly underperforming, in this case, on the child segment. And doing well relatively speaking on the adult segment. So this is new information that you can get without even introducing any actions to your system- just reusing existing instrumentation you may have.
So that's our demo. Just gonna go back here. And thank you for listening. That was actually the whole talk. And please visit us at either amp.ai or scaledinference.com. We are hiring at all positions, and don't forget to request your free account, okay? These are not limited in any way for a while and it's first-come first- serve. Thanks. Any questions?
Man: Is there a number of runs you have to do in general to get a enough or a little data?
Olcan: Sir, can you speak up a little bit?
Man: About how many runs do you need to get the data?
Olcan: Oh yeah, that's a great question. So how many runs, how many sessions are needed before the metric can improve? That depends primarily on how impactful the actions are that you have. If you have two actions and one of them has much better metrics in some context, let's say better 20%, 30%, that is much easier to discover and exploit. And that might take only a few hundred runs or sessions. But, if your actions are not impactful, at least contextually, so they are only different by a few percent, you are going to need a lot more data. So you might be familiar with this from A/B testing, where you will need a larger sample. So you won't know that before starting out- how impactful they are.But we find that people are often surprised especially contextually. There is usually some context where that action is actually much better.
Man: Thank you.
Olcan: Go ahead.
Man 2: So, yeah. I have a question. Between context and actions, and the other things you mentioned, there is a really large sample space that you are optimizing over.
Olcan That's right.
Man 2: Not to mention the difficulty in statistical inference.
Olcan: Yeah.
Man 2: 95% confidence-
Olcan: Yeah.
Man 2: -like, going over-
Olcan: Right.
Man 2: -hundreds of different combinations-
Olcan: That's right.
Man 2: What sort of methods do you use? Did you-?
Olcan: Yeah. So, the question was: with all the context that we have, and all the actions we might have, in the space, the search space, the optimization space is huge. So, how do we deal with that?
And, the answer is that is where we actually transition from statistics, where you can get guarantees just from your training data, into machine learning, where you actually have to set aside some testing data or hold out data, and do things like cross validation or other forms of testing your hypothesis. You have to be careful about how you explore that space. In general, this type of system has to be quite agnostic to the specific methods used. It needs to be able to explore a wide range of strategies. And just evaluate its performance on hold-out data, or test data. So that is what makes us a machine learning problem and not necessarily a statistical problem. Any other questions? Go ahead.
Man 3: Your team claims to offer licenses for self-posting of the service source or, entirely as a service model?
Olcan: Yes, That's a great question. We just launched the platform a couple of weeks ago. And this is actually the first public presentation for you guys. We are open to anything at this point. We are very flexible about licensing. Please just reach out to us.
Man 3: For things, specifically about concerns and like, uncertain privacy, and sort of the proliferation of user data out into...
Olcan: Right, yes. That is definitely something I would love to talk to you about.
Any other questions? No? All right. Thanks, everyone.


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Ken Clarke
Content - 6 Delivery - 4
Its always good to see Ken Clarke but I am afraid he did less than brilliantly today. He had some good policy announcements (Corp' Tax reduction) but rambled a bit.
My largest concern was that he constantly talked about 'when we become the govt'. Way too assumptive and complacent.


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Picked up a camera at the age of 16 and haven't looked back.
The human experience is my focus and making images that capture people, places, and the things that make them unique is the goal.
Originally from Portland, OR I am currently calling Los Angeles home. With a passion deeply rooted in travel, home is a fleeting feeling that can be found in a hotel room, photo studio, or a beautiful vista.
Always looking to meet fellow creatives so don't hesitate to reach out for your next project or even the perfect cup of coffee.


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Spark Inside provides coaching to young offenders, aged 15-25 in prisons and young offenders institutions in the South East.
CEO & Founder, Baillie Aaron set up the organisation 5 years ago following a university lecture where she learned about the challenges ex-offenders face in finding a job when they leave prison.
In that time she's grown her team to 30, and share's her experience of trusting your intuition, the power of coaching, and the importance of creating evaluation which suits your organisation's purpose and ethos.
£15 billion of taxpayers money is spent on the prison system in the UK each year.
Prisons should be
places of rehabilitation.
However, they don't help young people
move on from crime.
75% will reoffend within
two years of release.
Find out more about Spark Inside here.
Subscribe to the Podcast
Never miss an episode with the latest Share Impact podcast in your inbox every week


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iRock School of Music is a contemporary music service enhancing the way music is taught in schools. They specialise in working with 4-11 year olds by delivering band lessons in schools around the UK.
We worked with iRock to create both video and photo content. This is now being used across their social media, and website. iRock are using the video and photos as part of a digital brochure which they are taking around schools to promote their service.


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The Everything Index: 'Guardians of the Galaxy' Blasts Past Liam Payne
Marvel's next great superhero franchise is more powerful than a naked One Direction member
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Marvel's next great superhero franchise is more powerful than a naked One Direction member
Pop's wild child risks extreme sunburn on this week's power rankings
Yankovic is back, and he edges out Rihanna in this week's pop-culture power rankings
Plus, Lana Del Rey, Hope Solo and more in our pop-culture power rankings
The U.S. wins at the World Cup, Kendall Jenner and Miley Cyrus handle things on the homefront
Fall Out Boy bassist speaks exclusively about the "expansion" of his label, DCD2
A hip-hop baby and a black-belt beauty queen battle it out on our pop-culture power rankings
Meet the players who have taxed us from the charity stripe
We rank the pop-culture power players, from Rih Rih to 1D
The former Walkmen member returns to cover the NBA for 'Rolling Stone'


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In fact the question is dealt with in various pieces of legislation which forbids ambiguity or deception in the promotion or sale of goods or services. The widely accepted rule said Barry - the law, in fact - is that "all permanent fixtures are included in the sale of a property and may not be removed by the seller." But this begs the question of what's permanent and what's temporary. "The simplest way to determine this is to imagine turning the house upside down," said Barry. "What would fall off and what would remain in place?"
It goes further, though, because you need to determine if an item of personal property is moveable, or whether it's become a fixture. If it's attached permanently to the buildings or property by means of nuts, bolts, glue, cement, etc. - or even if it's been planted and has taken roots - it's considered to have become immovable property and thus part of the real estate. So, for example, curtain rails (which are screwed to the walls) are fixtures, while the curtains themselves - which are only temporarily clipped to the rails - will usually be considered personal property, and would therefore not be included in the sale.
You do have the right to negotiate which items are included and which are excluded from a sale. But, said Barry, making sure that both parties understand exactly what's included requires a certain amount of responsibility - and even hard work - on the part of the seller. "The golden rule," he said, "is to leave nothing open to doubt or misinterpretation." And the only way to do this is to write into your contract a list of all permanent fixtures included or excluded from the sale (and if you are planning to leave any movable items behind, you should list those, too).
Drawing up such a list might be tedious, but it's "particularly important because if the matter does reach the courts, South African property law almost always relies very heavily on written rather than verbal agreements." Barry warned, though, that "if the removal of a permanent fixture results in some part of the remaining structure being damaged - as it usually does - the contract must stipulate that the repairs will be completed at the seller's expense prior to transfer." So to answer your question: Yes, you can take it with you. As long as everyone knows you're planning to.
Reference: Private Property


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What's all this about?
It's the BMW Z4, third generation, undergoing some final testing at the German manufacturer's south of France test base, which is called Miramas. Although heavily disguised and quite a few months ahead of the expected commencement of production, we already have some salient facts about the Z4 Mk3.
Such as?
Well, what should be obvious for a start is the material the roof is made out of - fabric, rather than metal. That means the Z4 has reverted to the type of the original Bangle Z4 of 2003, rather than the SLK-mimicking second-gen Z4 with its folding tin-lid. But the other proportions - short overhangs, long bonnet, rear-slung passenger compartment - are all classic roadster and classic Z4.
Do we know anything else about it?
Jointly developed with Toyota, which will sit its forthcoming Supra sports coupe on the same chassis and underpinnings as the BMW, the disguised Z4 prototype is going through driving dynamics testing at Miramas. The German brand has already confirmed one model of Z4, called the M40i, which means the inline-six turbocharged 3.0-litre petrol engine with 340hp/450Nm that's widely in service within the company's products at the moment. BMW also says the M40i has lowered sports suspension with electronically controlled dampers, a newly-developed front axle, M light alloy wheels with mixed-size tyres front to rear, an uprated M sports braking system and an electronically controlled limited-slip differential.
Any words from the team behind the Z4?
Indeed there are. Jos van As, head of application for suspension, said: "The vehicle concept of the new BMW Z4 is geared consistently towards agility and driving dynamics. The high level of body stiffness and the very rigid suspension attachment provide the perfect basis for a set-up that guarantees the performance qualities of a genuine sports car in terms of steering precision as well as longitudinal and transverse acceleration."
And when will we see it on the roads?
The Z4 should hit the streets in the UK in the first half of 2019.


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Greater Atlanta Coin Show
2016, our 29th
of monthly coin
With only the two dollar coins in the 1999 Susan B. Anthony mint set, the US Mint kept the informational insert
simple and brief.
The front of the insert in the 1999 Susan B. Anthony mint set looks similar to the outer envelope
but without "Philadelphia" and "Denver" on the ends. The obverse image of the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin
shows in the middle behind the title, "1999 United States Mint Susan B. Anthony Uncirculated Coin Set." The color
of the insert is a more vibrant blue rather than the muted purplish-blue of the outer envelope.
Inside the insert, the US Mint provides historical information about the Susan B. Anthony
dollar coin. They also explain that the 1999 Susan B. Anthony mint set is a limited-edition product.
The bottom section inside the 1999 Susan B. Anthony mint set insert identifies the dollar coin's
specifications and characteristics. These include the obverse and reverse designs, the artist, the metal
composition, weight, size and type of edge on the coin.
Coin Shows GACS Numismatic Shoppe Contact Us Privacy Site Map
© Copyright Atlanta Coin Expositions, 2008-2016. All Rights
Several of the links on the pages within this web site go to affiliate vendors.
A vendor affiliation can mean a small monetary compensation to the web site owner.


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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? @ Harold Pinter Theatre
Monday 06/03/17
Cast: Imelda Staunton, Conleth Hill, Luke Treadaway and Imogen Poots
Running Time: 3 hours, inc. interval
The late Edward Albee is proving popular in the West End this year – as well as The Goat (Or Who is Sylvia?) which opens later this year, we also have this star-studded revival of his most-known work, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This fiery piece features a young couple being 'entertained' by the warring George and Martha (played to perfection by Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill) and proves to be a taut and tense production, so much so that it hit the news recently because eating has been banned in the auditorium.
The production translates well to the stage of the Harold Pinter – it feels intimate and the naturalistic set gives a good replication of a middle-class American home, One of the production choices that seems strange though is the rather long second half (which contains both Acts 2 and 3 with a five minute pause). This would have worked better with Acts 1 and 2 shown before the interval due to the lack of time passed between them, and Act 3 after due to the definite passage of time between that and Act 2. Act 2 also works as a better interval as there is higher dramatic tension between the leads.
The cast assembled for this production of Woolf is phenomenal. Staunton brings a masterful performance as Martha, with a venom and power that is frightening, but also a fragility in the closing scenes that is moving. Hill has the challenging task in the power struggle – at times he must be put upon and downtrodden and then ultimately in charge and does both beautifully. Both Luke Treadaway and Imogen Poots present the younger couple skilfully. Treadaway really plays on the character's ambitious nature well and Imogen highlights the delicate and fragile nature of Honey.
Summary: A tremendous cast provides a thrilling and tense revival of this classic by Albee. A must for all fans of the modern classic. *****


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Shelly Matt is one of the nicest people I know. She opens her home and heart to so many people. She goes out of her way to help you anyway she can. When Shelly wants to accomplish something she puts her heart and soul into it an gets it done.
— Pat G.
Shelly is a very Ambitious, success driven but very fair. She is compassionate about the things she cares for deeply-friends, family and her career. She is cheerful, funny, generous and very amicable, she is well liked.
— Marsha M.
Shelly is a very driven person who gets the job done! She is very direct, and to the point. Shelly never meets a stranger.
— Dan
Dealing with Financing
As the events of the last few years in the real estate industry show, people forget about the tremendous financial responsibility of purchasing a home at their peril. Here are a few tips for dealing with the dollar...
Preparing to Sell
Selling your home doesn′t just mean hiring a realtor to stick a sign out front. There are a lot of preparations you should make to ensure you...
Relocating to the Big City
Moving from a small town or suburb to a large city can be an intimidating proposition. Here are a few tips to help make your move as painless as...
5 Tips for Buying a Home
Looking to buy a home? Here are five essential tips for making the process as smooth as possible.Get your finances in order.Start by getting a full...
All listing information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed and should be independently verified through personal inspection by appropriate professionals. Listings displayed on this website may be subject to prior sale or removal from sale. Availability of any listing should always be independently verified. Listing information is provided by My Florida Regional MLS DBA Stellar MLS for consumer personal, non-commercial use, solely to identify potential properties for potential purchase. All other use is strictly prohibited and may violate relevant federal and state law.
Updated: 23rd October, 2019 7:06 AM.


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Leaked version of "Don't Don't Do It" appears with Frank Ocean feature
Music Mafia, a group known to leak unreleased singles and demos from major label artists, has struck once again with another new mix of a Frank Ocean feature.
Frank was credited as a writer on N.E.R.D.'s "Don't Don't Do It," which came out in December, but he is not featured in the final mix. Today we can hear what his contribution sounds like from his own mouth.
Take a listen below and read more about his contribution from Pharrell here.
You can also download a tag-free version courtesy of and edited by /u/y0gurtoffical right here.


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There are days when you feel lazy and do not want to leave the apartment. Yet I have to as I have a photo shoot at the Eiffel Tower today. Luckily it's not as early as usual; my appointment is only at 11AM. I finally leave the apartment and make my way slowly to the metro station, which takes me to the meeting point in less than 45 minutes. But I end up arriving late all the same which I didn't want because it's not professional, but I will say it was not entirely my fault: The train always gets delayed when it's not the right time, but it still means I have to run to the appointment.
I apologize to Amanda and Andrew when I arrive of course. They're a young and lovely couple and have traveled from the US. I feel so grateful at that moment: How many foreigners want to see the Eiffel Tower but once in their lifetime, and I actually live here, in Paris, right in the center and I can see it anytime I want. Amanda and Andrew seem not to be typical Americans and that's the first thing they tell me when we meet: We don't want to do the classic poses the Americans usually want to do! :) But any crazy ones, just for fun, to remember their crazy time in Paris.
We start walking and I was really amazed how comfortable they are with the poses. Amanda jumps on Andrew's back, they hug, they kiss very sweetly, they look at each other tenderly and even though they've been together for over a decade, they look as much in love as if they've only just started dating... Lots of emotion wells up seeing that.
After having done all the crazy things they can do, we walk towards the river Seine for a quieter time to capture the final memories. A couple of shots more here and there hand in hand in beautiful light before I put all my equipment back in my bag to run to the next photo session at idyllic Bir-Hakeim Bridge.


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Omowunmi will launch her clothing line on the 7th of February 2016 at the Polo Avenue Victoria Island Lagos.
The Omowunmi label was created from a desire to create a fresh urban persona for a woman with a social lifestyle. The founder wanted to create a brand because of her thirst for beautiful things that were trendy and depicted a sociable woman. Printed fabrics with bold colours, 3D designed petals, structural pieces and simplistic fine lines is what the Omowunmi label is about. This is a Nigerian-based women's clothing label that incorporates vibrant, colourful and urban designs on high quality fabrics to create unique apparel.
This ready to wear brand targets women between ages 20 to 40. A range of the brand is called the "MOMA range" which includes elegant Caftans for women who love the one piece, well-embroidered rich, effortlessly chic and elegant look. Another range is the OMA, which forms her initials and signifies a woman of class who likes to express herself in the simplest form.
Omowunmi is a label that depicts a woman personifying freedom, elegance and class. It is for the woman with a social lifestyle, encompassing an outfit for work, black-tie, cocktail, party wear, day wears and even linen beach wear. An Omowunmi woman has a certain lifestyle; she's social yet reserved, trendy yet effortlessly chic. She reflects a girl next door who embodies the Celebrity Culture.
The creative director Omowunmi Akinnifesi is the former Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria 2005, Miss Tourism International Ukraine 2005 and Nigeria's representative to the Miss World in China 2005. As an art lover who also loves Tourism, she was honoured as the Environmental Ambassador for Lagos State Nigeria. In the creation of the clothing line she travelled through New York, South Africa, Jordan, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Turkey, London and Vietnam inspired by the environment, festivals, nature, Safari wild life and the social lifestyles of these metropolitan cities.
She produces an exciting range of outfits through her strong sense of personal style and identity from Petal prints to Monochrome, Pearly and Coal palettes. Omowunmi ready to wear clothing is available in selected designer retail stores such as Meidei, Zaazai in Lagos, and will later be found in Abuja and Port Harcourt coupled with her online store under currently under construction called www.shopomowunmi.com.
Instagram handle @shopOmowunmi
Twitter: @shopOmowunmi
Facebook: Omowunmi Ready to wear brand


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Execute Scheduled Actions in Event Processes
When you create a process that starts when a platform event is received, you can set times to execute actions. Previously, only record-change processes supported scheduled actions. But event processes can do more with scheduled actions. These scheduled actions can create or update data that's stored outside of Salesforce via external objects. Record-change processes don't support external objects.
Where: This change applies to Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions.
Why: For example, when an order is created, a third-party order management system publishes the platform event message for Order Status. When a process receives the event message, the process checks that the external order status is new. External Order is an external object.
The process then creates a contact record in Salesforce and schedules an action to update the external order status.
How: When you create an event process, both immediate and scheduled actions are displayed as options.


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John and I have been married eight years. Carolyn was born in 2002, Katie (Katherine) in 2004, Josie (Josephine) in 2006 and Charles in 2008. As all parents say about their children, they've brought us great joy.
We're living in the Twin cities, attending Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church and working. John works at Best Buy Corp. and I work as a math teacher at Paideia Tutorials, which meets bi-weekly.


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A lot of people ask us why we ended up in Texas first. Well, simple answer is we got picked up by a distributor there first. But don't worry, we know our fans in other parts of the country are counting the clock waiting for Tubi and we got you. Our shipment to NY lands in late March, meaning bottles should be on the shelves on NYC retailers shortly thereafter. We'll be listing each and every location where you can find Tubi on our Where to Buy tab. In the meantime, if you want to be the first to get your hands on a bottle or don't live in New York state, online shipping pre-orders are now open and bottles will go out to pre-order customers first, as soon as DrinkUpNY, our online retail partner, receives their first shipment. We'd love to hear from Tubi fans where you'd like to be able to order Tubi in NY so use our Contact Us tab to shoot us all of the bars and liquor stores you frequent and we'll make sure they stock Tubi! Cheers!
New York, NY - We're coming for you!
in Alcohol


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From P.F., Ashland, OR
Healing hands reach from the heart,
Open channels for a touch
That the textbook cannot teach.
Healing eyes, glowing face,
Open to give,
Sensitive enough to receive, too full to waste time.
Protecting old fragile feelings,
Too busy living to worry about death.
The healer knows death intimately, without fear
Respecting its kick-ass priority setting, but not bowing to its illusionary power
The healer is humbled only by the Giver of Life.
Her true strength is invisible to the casual passerby.
Her inner beauty is unseen by all who are caught in appearances.
The passerby may never know, he was changed by her healing touch
Save deep in his heart
Which walks away singing its own silent song.
Chris, this poem is about and for you.


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There's so much pressure to be perfect this time of year. It's important to find the perfect gift, host the perfect party, find the perfect tree (and decorate it perfectly) - all while looking like a model from a glossy magazine.
And then there's reality. Which is much, much different. No matter how hard we try, it's not perfect.
I'd like to argue that in that imperfection itself lies what's perfect for you. Your holidays aren't about a spectacular tree, it's about the one that's slightly crooked, but hung with the decorations your kids have made. It's about the laughter you and your family shared over the pie that didn't turn out quite right, and getting to the Big Night without making your RA flare. And most importantly, it's the love you feel for each other, regardless of the gift.
We'd like to encourage you to share what makes your holidays unique and special in December's #ChronicLifeClub. Take a picture of what you love about the holidays and post it on our RAHealthCentral Facebook page or on Twitter. Don't forget the hashtag #ChronicLifeClub. A selection will appear in a slideshow early in the new year.
And that's what this month is about here on HealthCentral's RA site: helping you to celebrate the holidays and the new year your way. Vanessa is going to share tips for making holiday shopping easier with RA, because the easier the shopping is, the more energy you have for everything else that needs to get done. You may want to also make it easier for your loved ones to shop for you. Share this list with gift ideas for people with RA.
As we already have some great articles for surviving the holidays with RA, this year, we also want to focus on the future. Later this month, I'll write about resolutions for RA, and Britt is going to share her thoughts on choosing your own path when you have a chronic illness. Leslie is going to join us in this theme, exploring her dreams of the future with RA, as well as the future of this disease.
Although we are big fans of the December holidays, we're not going to just focus on making merry this month. We will also bring you informative articles about RA itself, including some interesting new research and an article about what to do when things aren't working out with your rheumatologist.
We look forward to hearing your stories of how you deal with your RA and the holiday here and on our Facebook page, and of course to see your photos on #ChronicLifeClub!


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In this guitar lesson, we cover how to play the Christmas song Last Christmas by Wham! This is one of the easiest of the Christmas songs on this website and will be fine for anyone comfortable with G and C chords to play and sing along to.
See the Star Wars Christmas Jumper I'm wearing in this video on Amazon using the links below!
Amazon UK
Here's my brand new lessons for 2016, pretty easy and ideal for beginners!
Strumming pattern used in tutorial above
Here's an older lesson which I taught with my buddy Dave. This one is a little harder and you can learn more of the riff too!


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Added: 12/23/2014 by RichFamous175
- Instant Download: No Waiting!
Rich Fa'mus delivers a early Christmas gift. Releasing his debut mixtape "Mucho Stuntiando" making this a big day in hip hop. Melodic tones sit over smooth soul healing beats as well as aggressive strong structure and creative topics. This is appetizer before he releases his "Sleep Is For The Rich" EP early 2015.
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WICEN NSW Inc. is a volunteer group comprised of licensed amateur radio operators who provide emergency communications in times when the public communications infrastructure such as phone networks degrade or fail. WICEN operates as a specialist support squad of the Volunteer Rescue Association.
WICEN has teams of trained operators available at short notice, ready to provide emergency communications support. These teams can access a state-wide network of VHF and UHF repeaters, and where necessary, can rapidly move portable repeaters to the emergency location. WICEN also has long range skills and capability with access to numerous allocations in the high frequency bands.
To support the community WICEN can also provide communication services to organisations who are operating fund raising style events in remote and difficult terrain. These events provide excellent training opportunities for WICEN members. They include charity walks and runs, horse enduro activities, car rallies, canoe races and bush navigation exercises.


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Attended the preview screening of action-comedy - Tower Heist (tickets provided by UIP Singapore and omy.sg ) on Tuesday 1st November 2011 @ The Cathey.
Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy lead an all-star cast in Tower Heist, a comedy caper about working stiffs who seek revenge on the Wall Street swindler who stiffed them. After the workers at a luxury Central Park condominium discover the penthouse billionaire has stolen their retirement, they plot the ultimate revenge: a heist to reclaim what he took from them.
Queens native Josh Kovacs (Stiller) has managed one of the most luxurious and well-secured residences in New York City for more than a decade. Under his watchful eye, nothing goes undetected. In the swankiest unit atop Josh's building, Wall Street titan Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda) is under house arrest after being caught stealing two billion from his investors. The hardest hit among those he defrauded? The tower staffers whose pensions he was entrusted to manage.
With only days before Arthur gets away with the perfect crime, Josh's crew turns to petty crook Slide (Murphy) to plan the nearly impossible…to steal what they are sure is hidden in Arthur's guarded condo. Though amateurs, these rookie thieves know the building better than anyone. Turns out they've been casing the place for years, they just didn't know it.
[Sub to ClevverMovies's Channel on Youtube -they always update trailers of up and coming movies)
When I enter the cinema, I didnt have high expectation on the movie, I've only watched one of the trailer on Youtube (the above one).. and I knew I shouldn't think too much on the plots or anythings... just sit back and relax.
It's a comedy and the casts (Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy and Matthew Broderick) just spell "FUNNY" in all way!! ^.~
I really enjoy Eddie Murphy comedic acting/action...
Ben Stiller weird sense of humour and
Matthew Broderick "blur expression" kinda of acting. (Remember him in The Stepford Wives, Inspector Gadget(one of my fave) Election, Godzilla(fave), Addicted to Love(fave), The Cable Guy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (fave) and ects.. all have that cute and funny "blur expression")
Ben Stiller weird sense of humour and
Matthew Broderick "blur expression" kinda of acting. (Remember him in The Stepford Wives, Inspector Gadget(one of my fave) Election, Godzilla(fave), Addicted to Love(fave), The Cable Guy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (fave) and ects.. all have that cute and funny "blur expression")
The chemistry between the casts were really good, especially Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller(I would love to see them acting together again in future projects)... they doesn't feel/look odd or let you think that they are just "acting".
The whole movie feel like a simple and funnier version of Leverage and Ocean's eleven... it's totally fun to see!!
But I do felt that some of the plots seem kinda impossible in real life...
For examples:: How come the elevator can support the weight of a solid gold car?? Or the cable from the swing-stage scaffolds doesn't break off from that heavy soild gold car?? Well... it's a funny movie, I bet if they fell off from thirty floors they will survive too(lolx)
Anyway, this was an entertaining movie, I really enjoyed it.. it's funny, interesting[though not really that original- but still interesting enough (like I never get sick of "Cinderella" type of plot)] and abit of suspension.
My fave scene would be the Silky Terrier part... lolx... cuteness max! <3
My Rating: 8/10
Tower Heist start showing in Cinema yesterday (03 November 2011)
Images Source from google search.
Images Source from google search.


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Broker on why insurance fraud is a major issue in Canada | Insurance Business
Jackie Doell (pictured), commercial broker and branch partner at A-WIN Insurance, became interested in the insurance business at a young age when she was helping out her broker father in his office. When she made the leap to the industry in her early 20s, she set big goals for herself and managed to accomplish one that was at the top of her list: owning her own brokerage.
In this Q&A, Doell looks back at her many achievements, and highlights the challenges that brokers face today. Hint: millennials and technology aren't the only ones on her list.
Tell us about your career trajectory. How did you end up in the insurance business?
I grew up with insurance in my household as this was the only career my father had, and I found it very interesting listening to his stories throughout the years. I actually used to go to work with him at night and pretend I was him behind the desk. After school, too, my sister and I would do the brokerage filing when paper was a staple in our industry.
I started my career in 1994 after I needed a change from management and marketing. I always had a dream of running my own brokerage and I remember feeling it might only be a pipe dream till 2012 when I was given an opportunity to start my A-WIN Insurance branch in Medicine Hat. So, I left my lucrative position at that point to start a one-woman brokerage with big dreams and goals to fill.
Today, we have three brokers and we are hiring again as our growth has been amazing through many hours and days of hard work and dedication to growth.
What is the most fulfilling aspect of your work?
It's simple: knowing I've made a difference and I make a difference. I'm a very hands-on broker and will dedicate many hours to any client I have. I know my clients trust me with their biggest financial assets they own or operate, and I will work my hardest to make sure they have the right coverage and the carrier fulfils their obligations in the event of a claim.
I love putting the puzzle of coverage together on commercial insurance and also knowing I will never be bored in our industry as I have never had the same day twice in my 24 years of work.
When you look back at your career, what would you say are your proudest accomplishments as a broker?
Four stand out. The first one is definitely owning my own brokerage in 2012 because that was a lifelong goal for me. Second is sustaining a 98% retention average with my clients, and having some of these clients for over 20 years shows a lot. Third, being in a highly male-dominated sector of my industry and achieving the personal success, and fourth, I take great pride in my education that will always continue in my career.
How does A-WIN Insurance differentiate itself from competitors?
Every insurance brokerage is different and A-WIN recognizes that. One way it does this is to provide a franchise program for qualified insurance professionals to enjoy the independence of a solely owned branch while benefiting from the advantages of being part of a larger organization. Along with the A-WIN brand, the franchisees have access to the top Canadian insurers, advanced technology systems, marketing, accounting and a broad range of backend services. This allows me and other branch partners to focus on sales and service, and A-WIN handles the rest for us.
As the vice-president of the Insurance Brokers Association of Alberta's Medicine Hat Chapter, what are you hearing about the challenges facing brokers in the province today?
I have been serving on this board for eight years consistently. Our challenges are weather-related cat losses, trying to balance premiums paid to coverage offered, auto claims that have increased substantially due to increased costs of auto repairs, increased bodily injury claims, and a really big one is our insurance fraud. I believe it's estimated to be over $2 billion in Canada right now.
As an industry, we also face ongoing challenges of brokers entering into insurance as a career. We have a very difficult exam for licensing and we have a shortage of youth wanting to enter into our industry. We are also challenged with keeping up with technology. This includes what brokers need, with what our carriers need, and what our consumers want.
What positive changes in the industry have you seen over the past few years?
I feel our industry has become more proactive than ever before. The leading insurance companies continue to update coverage offerings based on the ever-changing needs of the Canadian marketplace. I also find we, as brokers, have played a prominent role in educating consumers on insurance more than ever as trends in coverages change on a regular basis.
At A-WIN in particular, we have been on this journey to provide clients with more information so they have a better understanding of what they are buying and they can make more informed choices now. It's been really clear all policies are not created equal and you really do get what you pay for, so knowledge is huge.
If you weren't working in the insurance space, what would you be doing right now?
I would probably be a counsellor because I just love helping people with uncertainty. And I definitely would be lying on a beach for six months of the year.


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Clear Channel, Westwood Profits Fall
The sluggish ad market is hurting the bottom line at two radio giants -- Clear Channel Communications Inc. and Westwood One Inc.
Clear Channel said early Friday that third-quarter profit tumbled 59 percent from a year earlier to $261 million. In addition to general ad market sluggishness, among other possible factors in the downturn were the sale of its Spanish-language broadcasting business and dumping highly rated shock jock Howard Stern in six markets.
Radio revenues fell by $3.6 million from a year earlier to $960 million. It blamed declines in national ads from carmakers and phone companies.
The company cut its 2004 profit forecast. It now expects EPS to rise "in the mid to high teens" on a percentage basis. Just three months ago it was promising that the jump would be in the high teens to low twenties.
Westwood One's third-quarter profit fell to 24 cents, a nickel short of what financial analysts were expecting. Westwood CEO Shane Coppola blamed "an inconsistent overall advertising marketplace."


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Feb 19, According to a recent analysis of Google data by economist Seth Stephens- Davidowitz, the top penis-related search was "how to make my.
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Surgery is The Only Way to Truly Get a Bigger Penis
Description:Filler are less of a risk than surgery and, because they are temporary, carry no long-term undesired effects," says Dr. Another simple non-surgical, non-medical way to increase apparent penis length is to lose weight. Another method is simply taking a shower and directing the hot water towards your penis, which in turn will increase blood flow and once again create much larger penis size than what you had before. A lot of men want enhancement but it tends to only hurt your sex life, not help. Doggy Style It can really help to put a pillow under her hips and have him adjust as necessary. Male pride is a rascally creature, isn't it?


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- Kavemen -
Mystical Sri Lanka Tattoo Festival 2018
By Sajani Dilhara
We're super stoked to let all you beard lovers, ink collectors and music enthusiasts know that Kavemen is going to be at the upcoming Mystical Tattoo Festival in December 2018!
Yes, you heard us right! We are going to be having our very own stall loaded to the brim with our products ranging from beard oils, accessories, washes and everything else that you ever wanted to try out in one spot!
The Mystical Tattoo Festival is organized by our very own local ink veteran, the maestro Nirmal Dias who will be accompanied by his artist crew; Ashan De Silva, Heshan De Silva and Milinda Silva to name a few. The Mystical Tattoo Festival is the FIRST international tattoo festival in Sri Lanka so if you love ink and have been dreaming of that piece you always wanted to get, this is your chance to get it done from the very best!
We are also joining our beards with the very bearded Whirlwind; a band that has set a pioneering trend in the local music scene headed by the creative genius Misha (we love that beard), Chunky, Crescent and Chandu. Watch these musicians strum out their melodies live while and belt out some seriously loved lyrics in the island.
We are also thrilled to have Pictorial Studios on-board as our Official Photography Partner and they will be joining us at the festival to capture the special moments in their unique and uber-cool style.
The festival will be held at the Berjaya Hotel, College Avenue, Mount Lavinia on the 8th and 9th of December 2018 from 11 am – 11 pm on both days.
So save the date fellow beardos and come on over to get inked and check out our latest products while you're at it too! Don't forget we've got some crazy amazing Ink Balms that are just perfect for tattoo maintenance and quality protection too!
See you there peeps!
For more information or bookings:
+94 77 167 2878


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Online Cooking Sources
The way we enjoy our cooking recipes has changed tremendously over the past twenty years. Today every dish or recipe you want to master can be found on the internet as well as the traditional cookbook. From quick online download one recipes, to entire e-cookbooks, to Facebook and YouTube videos, each source offers countless recipes for the home cook. Similarly, all the best food publications now have great recipes and food bloggers online daily. Cooking from a tablet with downloaded recipes is easier and cheaper than cooking from books bought and stored on shelves, all designed to reduce your kitchen stress. This online cooking revolution has some cooks asking, is there a need for hardcopy cookbooks anymore, because everything we need is on the internet. Today's cooks don't pull a book off a shelf to find a recipe. Instead, they go to a mobile phone or do a quick search online for that favorite recipe. In fact, the majority of home chefs, as much as 50%, use free online cooking recipe sources. But, a very small number of cooks buy e-cook books, and less review cookbooks on mobile apps. In future, those cooks who own more cookbooks than they will ever use might use cookbooks less, because online and mobile sources are getting better.
Hardcopy Cookbooks
On the other hand, the internet world of online recipes has not rendered cookbooks obsolete. Sales suggest that a large number of cooking enthusiast still read cooking magazines and books. The main factors that still influence people to buy cookbooks are easy to prepare step-by-step recipes instruction that match their family's tastes. Older cookbooks, especially the classic cookbooks, tend to be just a big collection of recipes running endlessly on and on, one right after the other. However, today's cookbooks are no longer just cookbooks, offering so much more than just recipes. They promote not just cuisine, or how to use a special/rare ingredient, but offer colorful cooking experiences from across the globe, taking your cooking talents to new heights. For this reason, cookbooks are not just for cooks anymore, but for collectors and as gifts usually given by old school cooks not yet internet savvy. Still others buy cookbooks on impulse, either by discovering them online or in a store. In addition, although the internet is conveniently fast, hardcopy cookbooks can be passed along to friends and family. Modern cookbooks have become works of art you want to read.
Current Trends
Whether your desire is online or hardcopy recipes you can stay current on all the latest recipes in the cooking world from across the globe. For instance, learn about one of the latest crazes in food plans or diets, The Paleo. This food plan promotes eating grass-fed meats, fish/seafood, fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, eggs, nuts, seeds, and oils such as olive, walnut, flaxseed, macadamia, avocado, and coconut. In contrast, don't eat cereal grains, legumes (including peanuts), dairy, refined sugar, potatoes, salty foods, refined vegetable oils, processed foods, or candy/junk food. If the Mediterranean or diabetic diets are in your healthy eating plan you can find those, too. Discover that American food cooking variety beats out Italian, seafood, southwestern (Tex-Mex) and Mexican/Central American cooking. Also surprisingly with all the hip about healthy eating, gluten free and vegetarian cooking show the least interest. You can also find some of the most up to date health tips. For example, researchers offered proof that vegetarian protein is just as beneficial for lean muscle mass, bone mineral density, and muscle strength as animal protein. Important information for those cutting animal fat from their diet.
Informed home cooks are looking for and finding better ways to promote wellness through healthier eating habits and choices in their homes. No longer is healthy eating about dieting and weight loss alone according to Allrecipes.com; it is about "clean eating". For you cooking enthusiasts, here are some other websites to add to your list: www.bettycrocker.com, (still the most popular cookbook), http://allrecipes.com (the most popular website), http://www.cookinglight.com, https://www.target.com/s/best+cook+books, http://www.foodandwine.com (my favorite), and www.cookbooks.com. These websites cover more than just the latest trends in food and cooking; many include reviews on new kitchen products, designs, and fine wine, too. Using the internet or cookbooks recipes for home cooking is not only alive and well, but thriving. To find all your available cooking interest in paperback, hardback or e-reader edition Click HERE.