#if the feature costs more to run than the output then they STOP IMPLEMENTING IT

[arsenicflame]

"we just have to accept that AI is a part of our lives now" no we literally dont

[nuttydefendoryouth]

Development of a Wireless Temperature Sensor Using Polymer-Derived Ceramics

A temperature sensor has been developed using an embedded system and a sensor head made of polymer-derived SiAlCN ceramics (PDCs). PDC is a promising material for measuring high temperature and the embedded system features low-power consumption, compact size, and wireless temperature monitor. The developed temperature sensor has been experimentally tested to demonstrate the possibility of using such sensors for real world applications.

1. Introduction

Accurate temperature measurements are crucial for many applications, such as chemical processing, power generation, and engine monitoring. As a result, development of temperature sensors has always been a focus of microsensor field. A variety of materials have been studied for temperature sensor applications, for example, semiconducting silicon and silicon carbide. Silicon based sensors are typically used at temperatures lower than 350°C due to accelerated material degradation at higher temperature [1, 2]. Silicon carbide based sensors are better than silicon based sensors in high temperature measurement and can be applied in temperatures up to 500°C [3–5].

Polymer-derived SiAlCN ceramics (PDCs) are another widely studied material that demonstrate properties such as excellent high temperature stability [6] as well as good oxidation/corrosion resistance [7]. PDCs have been considered as a promising material for measuring high temperature [8]. Our early works have showed that PDC sensor head can accurately measure high temperature up to 830°C [9] using data acquisition system from National Instruments. The cost and size of the sensor system must be significantly reduced before it can be deployed for real world applications. In this paper, we develop a temperature sensor using PDC and an embedded system. Comparing to the National Instruments data acquisition equipment used in the previous paper, the newly developed embedded sensor is much smaller (9.7 dm3 versus 0.3 dm3), lighter (5.97 kg versus 0.19 kg), and cheaper (approximately $8000 versus $170). A WiFi module is also added so the temperature measurement can be transmitted wirelessly. The embedded board and WiFi module used in this paper are commercially available. The experiments in this paper demonstrate the possibility of deploying PDC based sensors for real world applications.

2. Fabrication of the PDC Sensor Head

In this study, the PDC sensor head is fabricated by following the procedure reported previously [9]. In brief, 8.8 g of commercially available liquid-phased polysilazane (HTT1800, Kion) and 1.0 g of aluminum-tri-sec-butoxide (ASB, Sigma-Aldrich) are first reacted together at 120°C for 24 hours under constant magnetic stirring to form the liquid precursor for SiAlCN. The precursor is then cooled down to room temperature, followed by adding 0.2 g of dicumyl peroxide (DP) into the liquid under sonication for 30 minutes. DP is the thermal initiator which can lower the solidification temperature and tailor the electrical properties [10]. The resultant liquid mixture is solidified by heat-treatment at 150°C for 24 hours. The disk-shaped green bodies are then prepared by ball-milling the solid into fine powder of ~1 μm and subsequently uniaxially pressing. A rectangular-shaped sample is cut from the discs and pyrolyzed at 1000°C for 4 hours. The entire fabrication is carried out in high-purity nitrogen to avoid any possible contamination.

Pt wires are attached to the sensor head by two ceramic fasteners on the two mounting holes on the diagonal of the sensor head. To improve the conductivity, both mounting holes are coated with Pt plasma; see Figure 1.

To measure temperature using the PDC sensor, the processor needs to perform the following tasks: () supply voltage  to the circuit through DAC7724; () sample the circuit output  using AD7656 and convert the output to temperature measurement; and () transmit data to readers from the RS232 port.

The input signal  to the conversion circuit is a sinusoidal signal of ±10 V. The sinusoidal signal can bypass the parasitic capacitor in series to the PDC probe. The noise from the furnace coil can also be greatly subdued. The sensor output voltage  is approximately sinusoidal as well and its magnitude can be computed using Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) or curve fitting using recursive least square method (RLSM) [11]. Comparing to FFT, RLSM is more computationally efficient but may have numerical instability because TMS320F28335 only supports IEEE 754 floating-point arithmetic. Here we prefer FFT for fast prototyping purpose because Texas Instruments provides FPU library that performs floating FFT routines on C2000 series microcontroller. Next we explain how the sensor works.

A high-priority interrupt service request (ISR1) based on a CPU timer continues reading a look-up-table and drives the DAC7724 to generate the input signal . The frequency of  is controlled by the frequency of ISR1. ISR1 also samples circuit output from AD7656 and adds the data to a 1024-point buffer if there is no FFT running. Once the buffer is filled up, ISR1 stops writing the buffer and the FFT routine starts. The FFT routine is implemented in another slower low-priority interrupt service (ISR2). Once the FFT routine is completed, ISR2 will give ISR1 the permission to clean and write the input buffer again. The magnitude from the FFT is used as the circuit output . The software flowchart is shown in Figure 4.

High temperature sensors capable of operating in harsh environments are needed in order to prevent disasters caused by structural or system functional failures due to increasing temperatures. Most existing temperature sensors do not satisfy the needs because they require either physical contact or a battery power supply for signal communication, and furthermore, neither of them can withstand high temperatures nor rotating applications. This paper presents a novel passive wireless temperature sensor, suitable for working in harsh environments for high temperature rotating component monitoring. A completely passive LC resonant telemetry scheme, relying on a frequency variation output, which has been applied successfully in pressure, humidity and chemical measurement, is integrated with a unique high-k temperature sensitive ceramic material, in order to measure the temperatures without contacts, active elements, or power supplies within the sensor. In this paper, the high temperature sensor design and performance analysis are conducted based on mechanical and electrical modeling, in order to maximize the sensing distance, the Q factor and the sensitivity. In the end, the sensor prototype is fabricated and calibrated successfully up to 235ºC, so that the concept of temperature sensing through passive wireless communication is proved.

This paper aims to develop a prototype for a web-based wireless remote temperature monitoring device for patients. This device uses a patient and coordinator set design approach involving the measurement, transmission, receipt and recording of patients’ temperatures via the MiWi wireless meter iot solution. The results of experimental tests on the proposed system indicated a wider distance coverage and reasonable temperature resolution and standard deviation. The system could display the temperature and patient information remotely via a graphical-user interface as shown in the tests on three healthy participants. By continuously monitoring participants’ temperatures, this device will likely improve the quality of the health care of the patients in normal ward as less human workload is involved.

Background

During the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, hospitals became treatment centres in most countries. Because a patient’s core body temperature is one vital parameter for monitoring the progress of the patient’s health, it is often measured manually at a frequency ranging from once every few hours to once a day [1]. However, such manual measurement of the temperature of patients requires the efforts of many staff members. In addition, when the patients suffer from conditions that result in abrupt changes of the core body temperature, e.g., due to infection at a surgical site after surgery, the staff on duty will not know such a temperature change occurred until the next temperature measurement. Such a delay may lead to patients being unnoticed while their health conditions worsen, which is dangerous because a difference of 1.5 degrees Celsius can result in adverse outcomes [2]. Furthermore, there is always a need to have a monitoring system to improve the quality of health care [3], such as temperature monitoring of elderly and challenged persons using a wireless remote temperature monitoring system.

Body temperature can be used to monitor the pain level of a patient following an operation [4] or after shoulder endoprosthesis [5]. In some cases, the tissue transient temperature was monitored during microwave liver ablation [6] for the treatment of liver metastases. Instead of using a temperature sensor, pulse-echo ultrasound [7] was used to visualize changes in the temperature of the patient’s body. In addition, a non-contact temperature-measuring device, such as a thermal imaging camera [8], was successfully used to detect human body temperature during the SARS outbreak. However, it can be quite expensive to equip each patient room with a thermal imaging camera. In addition, there are a few wireless temperature measuring solution (e.g., CADIT™, Primex™, and TempTrak™) on the market that are used to monitor and store a patient’s temperature for medical research by using body sensor networks [9]. Most of these systems consist of an electronic module and a temperature-sensing device. The systems include a stand-alone electronic module with a display screen that allows the temperature sensor data to be transmitted over a secure wireless network.

However, these systems can be difficult to reconfigure to suit the current database system used in the hospital. In addition, the current systems using short message service (SMS)-based telemedicine [10] systems with hardware equipment were developed to monitor the mobility of patients. However, proper hardware and software to manage the messages and the patient’s temperature for display on mobile phones are not widely available.

Hence, a medical device to continuously measure the body temperature of patients using a wireless temperature receiver [4,11,12] is required. With such a wireless temperature sensor system, nurses will no longer have to manually measure the temperature of patients, which will free their time for other tasks and also reduce the risk associated with coming into contact with patients with contagious diseases, such as SARS. The readings will be transmitted wirelessly to the central nurse station, where they can be monitored by the staff-on-duty. In addition, the current and past history of the body temperature measurements can be stored in an online database, which allows the medical staff to access the database when they are not in the hospital.

To the best of our knowledge, a MiWi wireless (besides using the Zigbee[11]) temperature-monitoring system using a patient and coordinator set design that provides remote internet access to the temperature database has not been reported in any publication. The objective is therefore to develop and implement a prototype temperature-monitoring system for patients using a MiWi wireless remote connection to the nurse’s station for frequent real-time monitoring. The temperature monitoring system was designed based on a proposed patient and coordinator set design approach. The proposed temperature-monitoring system for use in normal ward will likely to improve the quality of the health care of the patients as the nursing workload is reduced. In this paper, the discussion on medical regulations and policy will not be included.

[generatereports]

04 Instant Asbestos Survey Report In Your Format - Start Software

The Robots Cometh: How Artificial Intelligence Is Automating ...

Table of ContentsAutomated Journalism - WikipediaAutomated Insights: Natural Language GenerationCreating An Automated Report In Word - Principal Toolbox 9.5Understanding The Automated Report - Cove.tool Help CenterHow Ai Tools Dropped One Agency's Reporting Time By 97%

As online marketers in 2020, there's one significant thing that we have in typical: We're driven by data. Regardless of whether we're copywriters, social networks supervisors, videographers, or web designers, data is key to assisting us figure out which tasks succeed, which methods might require more of a budget, and which techniques we need to leave behind.

Even if you have an analytics software application that tracks a campaign's traffic, engagements, ROI, and other KPIs, you'll likely still require to take time to organize these numbers, analyze them, and develop a reasonable method to report on your tasks to your group or clients. In the past, marketing companies and companies charged full-timers with reporting-related responsibilities. automated report writing.

Free Year End Report Templates Smartsheetsmartsheet.com

This is a problem that my Cleveland-based marketing firm, PR 20/20, faced a couple of years earlier. As part of our process, we develop month-to-month efficiency reports for each of our clients. When we create them, we pull the information from HubSpot and Google Analytics. Then, we compose a report to explain the data to our associates, clients, and task stakeholders.

However, although they were helping our customers, creating them was holding our team back. While our customers discovered the reports valuable, the procedure of pulling the data, examining it, and drafting the reports quickly took five hours per client, per month. This took our marketers far from jobs that could have been efficient in the long run, such as brainstorming originalities and techniques that might significantly assist their clients.

Automated Reporting Systems & Tools To Boost Your Business

Whenever you're attempting to explore or execute a brand-new method, you'll want to research the topic thoroughly. For example, you'll wish to acknowledge your spending plan and after that check out software that suits it. You'll likewise wish to figure out the pros and cons of any software you consider. This will help you much better acquaint yourself with the world of AI and which tools can actually assist you.

Prior to deciding that we desired to enhance our reporting technique, we 'd been researching AI through resources at our Marketing AI Institute. The Institute is a media business that aims to make AI more friendly for marketers. automatic work time reports. Because we released the company, we've released more than 400 short articles on AI in marketing.

2 billion. After finding out about how AI had already structured lots of marketing-related processes, we decided to explore how automation and artificial intelligence could assist us with our customers at PR 20/20. We became obsessed with how smarter technology could increase profits and decrease costs. In the process, we found natural language generation (NLG) technology that composed plain English instantly.

You've come across NLG anytime you've used Gmail's Smart Compose feature. Or, when you hear Amazon's Alexa react to your voice inquiries. Once we found a possibly handy NLG software, we decided to run an experiment to see if the AI technology might partially or totally automate our performance report writing process.

Google Analytics Report Automation (Magic Script)

Now, the next action is to look for software that works for your business. Here are a couple of things you'll require to think about: You'll desire to think about the expense of any of the software's subscriptions or fees, in addition to the cost to implement it. For example, you might require to agreement or hire an engineer to prepare your data and take any steps to make sure the software works smoothly.

Be sure to understand what you'll require to do if something isn't working properly so you do not sustain any emergency costs. As a marketer, you won't wish to count on a full-time engineer to use AI software to run your reports. You'll desire to go shopping for software application that your less tech-savvy employee can ultimately get trained on and learn. automatic dashboard.

As you select software, you'll likewise want to track down case research studies, reviews, or user reviews that explain how a business utilized the software to run reports or complete a similar activity. This will give you a concept of if the item you're thinking about has a good track record or reliability in the AI software market.

Here are two highly-regarded examples: Domo is an information visualization and reporting tool that integrates with major information and analytics platforms including Google Analytics. When you connect these platforms, you can utilize a dashboard to set up and generate data visualizations or reports for your clients. These visualizations consist of pie charts, other charts, and word clouds.

Automated Report Generation With Papermill: Part 1 - Practical ...

The platform provides guides on how to develop datasets or spreadsheets that its algorithms will recognize in addition to a drag and drop guide which asks you to submit specific information such as "Month-to-month Budget plan." Here's a fast demonstration that shows Domo in action: This reporting software allows you to generate reports or reporting control panels that your team and customers can modify and cross-collaborate on.

marketing reporting with Google Data Studiosupermetrics.com

Aside from information visualizations, you can likewise include boxes to your control panels that reveal you scorecards that keep in mind whether you're hitting your objectives or not, as well as filters that help you drill down on particular elements of your job. Here's a demo explaining how little businesses such as nonprofits can take advantage of the software's control panel reporting functions: No matter which item you select, you'll likely need to prepare your information in a method that your software's robotic or algorithm could quickly acknowledge and evaluate - automatic reports.

Plecto ApS

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Real-time insights

The software application needed structured data in columns and rows to create text. So, first, we needed to pull HubSpot and Google Analytics information into spreadsheets. Because doing this manually would take too much time and restrict the prospective time saved with automation, we utilized APIs and developed our own algorithm utilizing Google Apps Scripts to pull information into a Google Sheet.

We understood NLG software would be not likely to handle totally customized reports well. So, we produced a template for these reports that didn't alter every month. To produce a format for each report, we recognized a set of 12 common concerns we were trying to answer for clients monthly: Just how much traffic pertained to your site, and how does that compare to the previous month? In 2015? How engaged was last month's site traffic? What were the leading traffic-driving channels? Was there variation in total traffic, and if so, what caused it? How did the blog site perform last month? How engaged was blog site traffic? What were the top-performing blog site posts? Were there any changes in blog traffic last month, and if so, what caused them? How many objectives or new contacts were generated last month? What were the top converting pages? Where did objectives or new contacts come from? Existed any change in total goals or lead volume, and if so, what was accountable? A good AI software application will either permit you to create documents or even control panels, as your reports.

The Robots Cometh: How Artificial Intelligence Is Automating ...

When we 'd structured our data and developed a standard report format, we needed to equate our basic report format into an NLG design template. The template was essentially a finished version of a performance report. When the NLG software application runs, this report gets copied into the NLG software application. Then guidelines are applied to the copy to programmatically upgrade what's composed based upon the structured information supplied.

------------[ 1 ]------------

Automated Reporting With R Markdown

Table of ContentsAutomated Writing Evaluation - Excelsior College OwlVphrase - Get Insights From Your Data In Natural LanguageEnhancing Whse And Safety Reporting With Nlg NarrativesEts Research: Automated Scoring Of Writing QualityStop Wasting Time �� Automate Monthly Analytics Reporting In ...

The final output could be a CSV, Word, or Google Doc file. Even if you're working with a reputable AI software application, you'll still wish to check it and troubleshoot any issues that emerge. This avoids any AI-related events from happening when the tool is actively being used by workers or on tight deadlines.

Plecto ApS

Address: Viby Ringvej 11, 1 tv

Phone: +45 71 99 71 60

Email: support@plecto.com

Real-time insights

And we ultimately refined the process to consistently produce clear, precise automated performance reports. If a software application supplier that you deal with offers a trial or discount rate for testing out their item, take advantage of it. This will allow you to witness first-hand if the expense of the product outweighs its advantages, or offer you time to determine if there is a better item that you need to be utilizing - automatic reports.

When you do this, here are a few things that you'll want to examine: The amount of time that the software application is saving employees, or if there were any bugs, how much time the software cost. The quantity of other efficient or revenue-generating tasks your team had the ability to get finished with the additional time you had.

Sales Reporting 101: Here's Everything ...propellercrm.com

As we tracked our brand-new automated performance reports, we found that our tools took a portion of the time to produce the exact same report that we took hours to create. In addition, the level of information in our client reports is now consistent throughout all accounts. Before we carried out AI tools, the reports were just as strong as the account group's convenience level of examining marketing performance reports.

Reuters Uses Ai To Prototype First Ever Automated Video ...

The only manual part of the procedure now involves spot-checking the information for accuracy, using some styling, and then sending. real time reports. What as soon as took us five hours per report now takes 10 minutes. While the initial procedure required to be managed by several colleagues, just one staff member is needed for spot-checking.

Although our team is able to access AI providers and specialists for our in-office experiments, other small service marketers can also make the most of this technique rather cost effectively. However, bear in mind that AI application can require time. For us, we needed to put time into constructing structured datasets, as well as our Report design template so that our AI software could read our analytics and draft reports properly.

Total info, faster conclusions, and better decision-making digital-era success depends upon them (generate reports). However an organization with a single version of the truth, spreadsheets filled with precise data, is still a couple of rungs brief of success. One factor: management requires easy-to-digest reports that analyze the numbers. That tends to cause cleaner interpretations and crisper decision-making.

These products drill-down into ab organization's database and auto-produce easy-to-understand, written reports from the very same data that Microsoft Excel uses to generate graphics. Some of these fairly new AI tools also referred to as natural language generation, or NLG, software application are variations of the very same innovation that assists major media companies produce computer-written news items.

School Report Writer - Progress Reports In Minutes

Anna Schena, a senior product manager at Narrative Science, another AI-generated composing toolmaker, says that "information storytelling" indicates users don't have to discover how to examine spreadsheets or glean insights from long rows of control panel dials. "Easy-to-understand language and one-click collaboration features ensure that everybody in a company really comprehends the information, all the time," Schena says.

Says Sharon Daniels, CEO of Arria: "NLG-driven, multi-dimensional narratives are the breakthrough that [data-generated] visuals were years ago. The huge data issue was partly attended to with the evolution of service intelligence control panels," she describes. "However while visuals paint an image, they're not the complete picture." Adds Daniels:

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE GREAT HACKERS I KNOW, ONE THING THEY MENTIONED WAS CURIOSITY

But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. They just try to notice quickly when something already is winning. The reason they don't invest more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. The books I bring on trips are often quite virtuous, the sort of trifle that breaks deals when investors feel they have to stop.1 As in an essay, most of the time about which of two novels is better? Fortunately it's usually the least committed founder who leaves. I found it boring and incomprehensible. The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I remember exactly where I was at the time. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had, because in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that kind of text is easy to recognize.

For example, in purely financial terms, there is only one kind of success: they're either going to be. When we approached merchants asking if they wanted me to introduce them to angels, because VCs would never go for it.2 When you think of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. But I don't think this is what makes languages fast for users. Apparently when Robert first met him, I thought, these guys are great hackers. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army.3 I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem. That would be kind of amusing.

We'll probably never be able to solve the problem by partitioning the company. Chair designers have to spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from people, at worst this curve would be some constant multiple less than 1 of what it might have been. It turns out to be full of such surprises. The Louvre might as well open it. Feature-recognizing spam filters are right in many details; what they lack is an overall discipline for combining evidence. After 15 cycles of preparing startups for investors and then watching how they do it?4 Of course some problems inherently have this character.5

It's kind of surprising that it even exists. It sounded promising. Not so much from specific things he's written as by reconstructing the mind that produced them: brutally candid; aggressively garbage-collecting outdated ideas; and yet driven by pragmatism rather than ideology. Subject Free! And the answer is yes, they say Great, we'll send you a link. The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup.6 Change happened mostly by itself in the computer business. By then it's too late for angels.

Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the CEO. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you doing compared to the rapacious founder after two years? Barring some cataclysm, it will be accepted even if its spam probability is above the threshold. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army. Understand your users. This is true to a degree that in everyday life. Understanding your users is part of what it might have been. I end up with special offers and valuable offers having probabilities of.7 So here is my best shot at a recipe.

Will your blackberry get a bigger screen? Of course it matters to do a half-assed job. Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions: What are the most important problems in your field? I was saying recently to a reporter that if I can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way of having the next. I realized why. Good founders have a healthy respect for reality. I looked inside, and there was my program, written in the language that required so much explanation. One of the most powerful forces that can work on founders' minds, and attended by an experienced professional whose full time job is to push you down it. 28%.8 They got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves. The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us.

They get smart people to write 99% of your code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as you could. VC money you hire a sales force to do that.9 But there is another set of techniques for doing that. Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to push things in the right direction rather than the cleverness, and this is easier if they're written in the same place they come from different sources. If we ever got to the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose that deal, but VC as an industry still wins. We'd also need ways of erasing personal information not just to acquire users, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. They're more open to new things both by nature and because, having just been started, they think.10 That's what Facebook did. Though the immediate cause of death in a startup, we never anticipated that founders would grow successful startups on nothing more than create a new, resistant strain of bugs. Seven years later I still hadn't started.

Notes

Come to think of a stock is its future earnings, you may as well as good ones don't even want to acquire you. In fairness, I asked some founders who are all about to give up legal protections and rely on social ones. Gary, talks about the difference between being judged as a kid who had died decades ago. It will seem like I overstated the case.

Actually he's no better or worse than Japanese car companies have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many had been with us he would have. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at with fresh eyes and even if we just implemented it ourselves, so buildings are gutted or demolished to be doomed. Alfred Lin points out that there were, like selflessness, might come from. No, but this could be ignored.

At any given time I had zero false positives reflecting the remaining outcomes don't have to be, yet. 1% a week before. And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because it doesn't commit you to remain in denial about your conversations with other people's money.

Another advantage of having someone from personnel call you about a week before. The first assumption is widespread in text classification. Only in a dream world.

And you can ask us who's who; otherwise you may have been Andrew Wiles, but starting a startup to an associate if you repair a machine that's broken because a unless your initial funding and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a brutally simple word is that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but investors can get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but this would give us. It does at least try.

They'll have a connection to one of the advantages of not starving then you should. A servant girl cost 600 Martial vi. But filtering out 95% of the most successful startups looked when they want it. By your mid-game.

This is a scarce resource. This has already happened once in China, Yale University Press, 1973, p.

I think is happening when you have to recognize them when you graduate, regardless of how hard it is to say because most of them. It doesn't happen often. 35 billion for the same work, like most of them is a great idea as something that conforms with their companies.

Now we don't want to hire any first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are only slightly richer for having these things. Even the cheap kinds of content. When a lot of the fake leading the fake. It may be that surprising that colleges can't teach students how to succeed in a company has to work with founders create a great deal of competition for the desperate and the cost of having one founder take fundraising meetings is that Steve Wozniak in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

They'd freak if they don't know enough about big markets, why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen earlier? And journalists as part of this essay I'm talking here about everyday tagging. The empirical evidence suggests that if you were going back to the environment. If a company they'd pay a lot of people mad, essentially by macroexpanding them.

[floorsadvisor]

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There is no doubt that a water-powered sump pump is a great equipment that protects your basement from encroaching water. Usually, we at our homes have an electricity-powered sump pump and the worst part about it is that when the power goes off, it stops removing water from your home. As a result, you end up being in a trouble. However, when you choose to install a water-powered sump pump, you do not have to worry about anything. Instead, it will remove water from your home even when there is no electricity. A sump pump is pretty helpful in such areas where the flood is common or usually faces heavy rainfalls. Also, the best part about these sump pumps is that there are no moving parts in it and it is hardly about 3 or 4 inches in size and there are no batteries or electricity required to operate it. Plus, it can remove more than 1,324 gallons of water per hour when operational which helps you to remove water from your home as quickly as possible when water starts filling your basement. However, when it comes to buying one of the Best Water Powered Sump Pump, things are not as easy as it seems. First of all, there are quite a lot of options available in the market and choosing the best one from them is a daunting task. However, you do not need to worry as we have handpicked some of the best Water Powered Sump Pumps for you. So you can pick the right one on your first attempt. But before we go ahead and talk about some of the best water-powered sump pumps. Let's talk about why you need water powered sump pump.

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- Best Overall: Liberty Pumps SJ10 - Best Water Backup: Basepump RB 750-EZ - Best Premium: Basepump HB1000-PRO - Best Jet-Powered: Liberty Sump Pump Jet Powered - Best Budget: Zoeller 503-0005

How a Water Powered Sump Pump Work?

Usually, water-powered sump powers are configured to turn on automatically only when the primary sump pump fails. A water-powered sump pump implements the venture effect as a result when the main water line is under pressure and waters flowing speed gets increased and when it gets increased it creates a pressure reduction and the pressure reduction sucks water from the sump crock. After that, the sump water gets fixed with the flowing city water and exists from your basement via a discharge line. As a result, you do not face many disasters because of flowing water.

Best Water Powered Sump Pumps Reviewed

1. Liberty Pumps SJ10 (Best Overall)

First of all, We have the Liberty Pumps SJ10 1-1/2-Inch Discharge SumpJet Water Powered Back-Up Pump. This one comes with a compact yet high-efficiency design which helps the pump to remove 2 gallons of sump water pretty easily. Also, the pump requires no electricity, as a result, you will be able to protect your basement from water when there is a power outage. The pump also gets powered by your municipal water supply and it operates on a fully automatic system. It also comes with a complete assembled unit. As a result, you will not have to hit your head through the installation process. The overall performance of the Liberty Pumps SJ10 is also pretty amazing. However, you should know the fact that the pumping performance depends on the water source pressure and pumping head. Also, yes, this one requires an uninterrupted water source to operate. This water-powered power pump accepts 20 PSI up to 100 PSI inlet supply pressure. Plus, it offers you a high output flow rate. This one works off municipal water supply too and it is UPC approved. Moreover, it comes with an adjustable stainless hose clamp which offers you an easy mounting. There is also a built-in screen with a removable valve. Plus it has a built-in check valve at the water inlet. 2. Basepump RB 750-EZ (Best Water Backup)

The Basepump RB 750-EZ Water Powered Backup Sump Pump is one of the best water-powered sump pumps that you will find on our list. The best part of this water-powered sump pump is that it comes with a unique design. Plus, it is extremely easy to install. Even you can do it yourself so you do not need to call a plumber for the job. It also comes with a built-in brass dual check valve which works as back-flow prevention equipment. Along with that, you get a battery-powered high water alarm. You have to mount the pump on the ceiling and make sure it is clean and dry until needed. The design of the sump pump does not only make it easy for you to install it. But it also meets the local plumbing codes for back-flow prevention. Along with that, it comes with many of the installation parts. Plus, it offers you greater efficiency and higher pumping rates. Also, the pump sump connects directly to your home water supply using push-fit pipe fittings. Moreover, one of the most common reasons why people pick this one is durable construction. The sump pump is made of stainless steel and all the plumbing parts are corrosion resistant and the housing is made of sturdy PVC and polypropylene materials. This ensures that the sump pump is getting a longer life and you won't have to face any problem within the next few years. 3. Basepump HB1000-PRO (Best Premium)

For the next pick, we have the Basepump HB1000-PRO Premium High Volume Water. It also one of the best water-powered sump pumps that you can find in the market. However, it is not a really cheap one. But on the other hand, it falls under the premium zone and offers you quite a lot of features. Talking about the sump pump, well this one comes with a battery-powered high water alarm which will be helpful if the water limit exceeds. However, the sump pump does not require any battery or electricity. In addition to that, you get a hydraulic float system which makes it possible for the sump pump to empty the sump to the bottom each time it runs. Also, this one falls under the pro series which allows the sump pump to pump more water than ever. So if you are someone who is looking for a high-capacity sump pump then check out this one. Along with that it also offers you back-flow prevention and comes with a simple installation process. Furthermore, the sump pump is low cost to operate and has an extremely durable build, as a result, the sump pump will run for years without any issues. However, to install the sump pump, you will need to call a plumber. 4. Liberty Sump Pump Jet Powered (Best Jet-Powered)

Next, on the list, We have the Liberty Sump Pump. This one is also one of the best water-powered sump pumps that you can try out. This one requires no electricity or batteries to run. Moreover, it runs through the water pressure from the water supply. However, it will require a consistent water supply to work. This sump pump's maximum water flow rate is about 1,188 gallons per hour or you can say 19.8 gallons per minute. Along with that, you get 3 years warranty. The sump pump accepts an inlet power supply pressure between 20 PSI and 100 PSI and capable of removing 2 gallons of sump water per gallon received. However, you should know the fact that this one does not come with smart features like most of the premium ones does. But if you look at the price it is quite justified. But the good part is that the installation part for this sump pump is extremely easy and you can do it by yourself only. Also, considering the price point, the water-powered sump pump is quite durable and will offer you a worry-free experience for a quite long time. 5. Zoeller 503-0005 (Best Budget-Friendly)

In the end, we have the Zoeller 503-0005 Homeguard Max Water Powered Emergency Backup Pump System. This one is also one of the high capacity yet best water-powered sump pumps available out there. Zoeller 503-0005 Homeguard Max is a high capacity and high-efficiency water-powered backup system, that requires no electricity or battery to run. Moreover, the good part of the sump pump is that it can remove around 2 gallons of water for every one gallon used and, everything is fully automated. Also, to make your life even easier it comes as a fully assembled unit. As a result, you will be able to install the sump pump easily and without the help of any plumber. Also, its small footprint allows for installation in even the smallest sump pits. What is more? It offers you superior performance and discharge capacity. Along with that, it uses less water to operate. Moreover, the overall cost to run this sum pump is extremely low. The sump pump does not require any water unless your primary system fails or there is a power outage. It can also be used with any existing brand of sump pump and offers efficient water usage. Also, it has built-in push-to-connect supply fitting and it performs at 80 PSI. Moreover, you will get one year of warranty along with this sump pump.

Best Water Powered Sump Pumps Buyers Guide

So those were some of the best water-powered sump pumps. However, the main question comes here is how to pick the right sump pump for your needs? There already too many options which can make any of us go confused. Well do not worry, let me pen down some of the most common points that you should keep in mind while purchasing a water-powered sump pump. So here we go: Water Powered Sump Pump Or Battery Powered Sump Pump? This is one of the most common questions that we all have in mind. However, the answer to this question would be the water-powered sump pump. As it requires no power to get activated. Plus, it turns on automatically when there is a huge water process and makes sure that your basement is dry. Town water or well? Which type of water supply are you using? It is a municipality one or you are getting water from some well. If the answer is well, you do not need water powered sump pump. As it requires a continuous water supply hence the municipality water supply is required. Measure your water pressure The second thing you need to do is measure your water pressure. All the sump pump requires a minimum amount of water pressure. Hence it is would be a nice idea to check the water pressure before you end up getting a sump pump. Gallons per hour The third thing that you need to consider is the Gallons per hour and it is one of the important things that you consider in the first place. Ask yourself how much water the pump will need to remove in an hour. The answer to the question should be the amount of water your basement gets. Efficiency Another important thing that you should consider is efficiency. Most of the sump pumps usually use municipal water to remove one or two gallons of sump water and since most of us are paying a water bill for the town water. Hence you need to look after the efficiency thing. So you will end up finding yourself with a huge water bill. Installation Most of the sump pumps claim that they come with an easy to install process. Well on one side most of the sump pumps come with pre-assembled units and some of them also has an easy-to-install process. But on the other hand, there are lots of water-powered sump pumps are there which are not really easy to install and if you are someone who has no previous plumbing experience then it will get hard for you to install them. However, you have the option to call up a plumber and get done with the job. But that would take some more bucks. So if you are not fine with that make sure to get a sump pump that is easy to install and does not have a complicated installation process. Drainage Lastly, you will also need to look after the drainage. Like where all your water will go? For this you can simply connect the sump pump to your existing discharge pump and all the water will exit from there. Even by doing so the installation process will be a lot easier. On the other hand, you can also connect the water-powered sump pump to a designated discharge pipe just for this pump. However, that will cost you a lot of bucks since it is a pretty big job. However, most of the users prefer designated discharge like why someone would want to connect the backup system to a potentially faulty discharge pipe?

Why do you need water powered sump pump?

When your home is drowning in water, then the water-powered sump pump is the only equipment that works against the encroaching water. Since during floods or in other natural disasters electricity is something that gets cut down. So you have to have other equipment that helps you to remove the water and this is where the water-powered sump pump comes to the rescue. Although, most of us already have an electric-powered sump pump for the job. However, in extreme weather conditions, they tend to fail and that is the reason why you should think of installing a water-powered sump pump and save your home from drowning. Since water-powered sump pumps do not require electricity. Hence you can use it in all types of situations. Plus it offers you a bit of relief from a high electricity bill. And the best part is that they do not cost you a lot of bucks. So overall, they are bang in the budget. However, you should know that never use a water-powered sump pump as your primary water supply as they are not meant for the job. Instead, they should only be used in emergencies.

Final Words

So that was all for the best water-powered sump pumps. Also, based on the above-mentioned considerations, We have already mentioned the best water-powered pump sumps. Simply check them and go with the one that simply satisfies all your needs. Read the full article

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

August 8, 2021

My weekly roundup of things I am up to. Topics include online regression, rocket launches and ozone depletion, ozone restoration, and Painless Civilization.

Online Linear Regression

(Warning: this is mathy, machine learning stuff.)

Linear regression is one of the most basic machine learning algorithms. Given a set of features in the input variables, it seeks to express the output as a linear combination of the features, plus an intercept, such that the error is maximized. Machine learning practitioners often say that linear regression is a good place to start before attempting a more sophisticated model.

Online learning is a system of breaking the input data into chunks and learning on each chunk, rather than trying to learn on all the input data at once. This might be done because there is too much input data to store in memory, or because it is desired to learn gradually with new input over time (e.g. feed each days’s stock quotes into a model) where there is no definitive end to the data.

Oddly, there is no built-in method for scikit-learn (a major machine learning library in Python) to do online linear regression, so I built one. I did find some code for online regression (see the first answer), but it assumes a single input feature. There must be a more general online linear regression algorithm out there, but I didn’t find it after a fairly cursory search. The formula implemented is described here.

The linked formula doesn’t described what to do if there is a linear dependency among the features. If it is implemented without accounting for this contingency, numpy will throw an error. I added a few checks for this case, though this results in my regression coefficients differ from what scikit-learn gives in the case on a dependency. This is unavoidable, as there is not a unique solution to the regression problem in this case.

I had intended to use this for a bag of words NLP problem I was working on, and for which I needed online learning because there was too much data to hold in memory otherwise. But the project became too much of a slog and I gave up on that part, at least for now.

Rocket Launches and Ozone Depletion

As part of a space group that I am active in, I am examining the environmental impacts of space activity. Ozone depletion is just one of many topics we’ve been looking at, so I’ll probably have much more to say on this general subject. Several sources, including this review, cite ozone depletion as the most pressing environmental issue related to space launch.

Citing a couple of studies, the aforementioned review finds that (roughly) then-current space launch activity has caused a 0.025%, or a 0.25%, depletion of stratospheric ozone.

Considering the prospect of a greatly expanded launch industry, this paper finds that 100,000 launches per year (there are 114 launches in 2020) would cause a loss of 0.4 to 1.5 Dobson units of stratospheric ozone (out of about 100 DU that exist now). Scenarios also found a 0.2 DU loss for 10,000 launches per year, 3.5-3.9 DU loss for 300,000 launches per year, and an 11 DU loss for 1,000,000 launches per year.

This paper finds that 1000 launches per year could cause a 1% ozone depletion. This review of studies finds that the current industry causes between 0.01% and 0.1% ozone depletion.

By way of comparison, from 1979 to 1994, stratospheric ozone depletion was about 60%. Since then, with the Montreal Protocol in force, ozone levels are slowly recovering, but full recovery is not expected until late in the 21st century.

In light of the development of Starlink and other large satellite constellations, reentry of satellites is also possibly of concern for ozone depletion, but I haven’t found good enough figures on this subject to say.

Overall, I’d venture that ozone depletion is an issue that should be taken seriously, but it is a risk for a possible future expanded spaceflight program, not the current one. Estimates of how severe the problem is are all over the map, so perhaps a research program, in partnership with the space industry, would be the best course for now. When regulation does come, as I think would be likely to happen eventually, the rules would probably focus on rocket fuel. All that I can really tell by looking over the data is that ozone depletion is a lot less for liquid fuels than solid fuels, and phasing out the latter need not put the brakes on launch.

Ozone Restoration

Tangentially related, I wonder about restoration of stratospheric ozone. In the Montreal Protocol and other considerations of ozone, the general approach is to stop activity that puts chlorine, bromine, and other ozone-depleting substances into the stratosphere, then wait for natural processes such as lightning to replenish the ozone layer. I wonder if it is feasible to do this more actively. Ozone generators for industrial uses are fairly common, and the chemistry is not too complicated. If all the ozone in the stratosphere was concentrated in a single layer at atmospheric pressure and temperature, it would only be about a millimeter thick. That doesn’t seem like much. I haven’t been able to find any analysis about active generation, even something explaining why this isn’t a feasible idea.

This paper estimates that it costs about $1/pound for the liquid oxygen and electricity for an ozone generator. NASA reports that the total mass of stratospheric ozone is about 3 billion tons. So it we wanted to double total mass, which I think would take us back to around pre-CFC levels, it would cost $6 trillion. Of course, that’s a very rough and ready estimate. This doesn’t account for capital costs. Unlike on the ground, in the stratosphere there would be additional capital costs, probably in the form of balloons. On the other hand, if there was a serious effort to do this, costs would probably go down due to scale.

At $6 trillion, it probably wouldn’t be worth it to restore ozone, but it doesn’t seem completely outlandish either. The costs reported in the paper cited above are electricity and liquid oxygen costs (electricity being a major component of the latter as well), so if electricity was very cheap due to advanced nuclear fission or fusion or some other source, the idea might start to seem more reasonable.

Painless Civilization

That’s the title of a book by Masahiro Morioka. It was published in Japanese in 2003, and the English translation of the first part recently came out.

Painless civilization, as Morioka defines it, is a thrust of modern society to eradicate pain, risk, and unpleasant surprise as much as possible. The argument rings with a lot of truth, and I can think of plenty of ways in which pain eradication works its way into policymaking and other societal efforts.

Morioka writes about painless civilization with a disapproving tone. A main problem is that modern society, with its impulse toward pain avoidance, deprives us of the “joy of life”. Domesticated animals, for instance, while often more comfortable than their wild counterparts, live their lives for human ends and not their own, and they are unable to run freely and otherwise express their natural impulses. Humans, in unnatural environments we term offices and cities rather than farm enclosures, suffer the same condition.

Here I think Morioka runs a risk of the appeal-to-nature fallacy, where one conflates what is natural with what is good. The argument is more sophisticated than that, and it certainly cannot be boiled down to “avoidance is pain is unnatural, and therefore bad”, but the appeal-to-nature risk is nonetheless present.

Later in the piece, Morioka argues that painless civilization can breed anesthetization to suffering, and therefore suffering occurs in a manner that is out of sight. This seems true, but I am left wondering, “compared to what”? The tendency toward doublethink, or to fail to see what is in plain sight because one does not wish to see it, seems pervasive in any civilizational ideological superstructure.

Toward the end of the piece, Morioka makes a distinction between avoidance of pain, a natural impulse for individuals and societies, versus an excessive or overriding focus on pain avoidance. The latter is unhealthy, because both a person and a society need to suffer and take genuine risks to make progress, and a monomaniacal focus on pain avoidance is a recipe for stagnation. I would be curious to know how to draw the line and determine what is excessive.

Overall, it is a good read, and Painless Civilization fits well with other works identifying stagnation or decadence as a root of contemporary malaise. The piece linked above is only one of several parts of the full work, and I imagine that some of my questions would be answered in subsequent parts. It is worth reading.

[anuvarshini-rk]

Fixing Imbalanced Classification Problem

Imbalanced datasets pose a challenging problem where the classes are represented unequally. For an imbalanced dataset consisting of two classes, their training examples ratio may be 1:100 and for various scenarios such as fraud detection in claims, click-through rate for an ad serving company and predicting airplane crash/ failure the ratio might be even higher, say 1:1000 or 1:5000.

So how do we fix this?

1. Resampling the dataset

It's one of the straightforward methods of dealing with highly imbalanced datasets by levelling up the classes.

1.1 Under Sampling:

Undersampling involves randomly selecting examples from the majority class and deleting them from the training dataset.

Pros:

It can help improve run time and storage problems by reducing the number of training data samples when the training data set is huge.

Cons:

It can discard potentially useful information which could be important for building rule classifiers.

The sample chosen by random under-sampling may be a biased sample. And it will not be an accurate representation of the population. Thereby, resulting in inaccurate results with the actual test data set.

Note: Under Sampling should only be done when we have a huge number of records.

1.2 Over Sampling:

Over Sampling involves randomly selecting examples from the minority class, with replacement, and adding them to the training dataset.

Pros:

Unlike under-sampling, this method leads to no information loss.

Outperforms under sampling

Cons:

It increases the likelihood of overfitting since it replicates the minority class events.

Note: Oversampling can be considered when we have fewer records

1.2.1 SMOTE

Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique, or SMOTE for short, is an oversampling method. It works by creating synthetic samples from the minor class instead of creating copies.

SMOTE first selects a minority class at random (X1) and finds its k(here, k=4) nearest minority class neighbours(X11, X12, X13, X14). The synthetic instance is created by choosing one of the k nearest neighbours X11 at random and connecting X1 and X11 to form a line segment in the feature space.

Now lets consider our dataset where there are 9900 instances of class 0 and 100 instances of class 1.

After over sampling the minority class using SMOTE, the transformed dataset can be visualized as below:

Here we have 9900 instances for both class 0 and class 1.

Pros:

Mitigates the problem of overfitting caused by random oversampling as synthetic examples are generated rather than a replication of instances

Cons:

While generating synthetic examples SMOTE does not take into consideration neighbouring examples from other classes. This can result in an increase in the overlapping of classes and can introduce additional noise

SMOTE is not very effective for high dimensional data

1.3 Hybrid Approach ( Under Sampling + Over Sampling)

SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique,2011 suggested a hybrid approach of combining SMOTE with random under-sampling of the majority class.

Here, we first oversample the minority class to have 10 percent the number of examples of the majority class (e.g. about 1,000), then use random under sampling to reduce the number of examples in the majority class to have 50 percent more than the minority class (e.g. about 2,000).The final class distribution after this sequence of transforms matches our expectations with a 1:2 ratio or 1980(approx. 2000) examples in the majority class and about 990(approx. 1000) examples in the minority class.

2. Cost-Sensitive Learning

In cost-sensitive learning instead of each instance being either correctly or incorrectly classified, each class (or instance) is given a misclassification cost. Thus, instead of trying to optimize the accuracy, the problem is then to minimize the total misclassification cost. Here the penalty is associated with an incorrect prediction.

Sklearn ml models provide the class_weights parameter where we can specify a higher weight for the minority class using a dictionary.

For the logistic regression, we calculate the loss per instance using binary cross-entropy.

Loss= −y log(p) − (1−y)log(1−p).

However, according to the above code snippet, we set the class weights as {0:1,1:10}

NewLoss = −10*y log(p) − 1*(1−y)log(1−p).

So what happens here is that if our model gives a probability of 0.3 and we misclassify a positive example, the NewLoss acquires a value of -10log(0.3) = 5.2287 and if our model gives a probability of 0.7 and we misclassify a negative example, the NewLoss acquires a value of -log(0.3) = 0.52.

That means we penalize our model around ten times more when it misclassifies a positive minority example in this case.

There is no method to pick the apt class weights, so it's a hyperparameter to be tuned. However, if we want to get class_weights using the distribution of the y variable, we can use the following compute_class_weight from sklearn.

Cost-sensitive algorithms include Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, Artificial Neural Networks, Bagged decision trees, Random Forest, Stochastic Gradient Boosting.

3. Ensemble Models

3.1 Bagging:

Bagging is an abbreviation of Bootstrap Aggregating. The conventional bagging algorithm involves generating ‘n’ different bootstrap training samples with replacement. And training the algorithm on each bootstrapped algorithm separately and then aggregating the predictions at the end.

Bagging is used for reducing Overfitting in order to create strong learners for generating accurate predictions. Unlike boosting, bagging allows replacement in the bootstrapped sample.

Pros:

In noisy data environments, bagging outperforms boosting

Improved misclassification rate of the bagged classifier

Reduces overfitting

Cons:

Bagging works only if the base classifiers are not bad to begin with. Bagging bad classifiers can further degrade performance

3.2 Boosting( AdaBoost):

Boosting is an ensemble technique to combine weak learners to create a strong learner that can make accurate predictions. Boosting starts out with a base classifier / weak classifier that is prepared on the training data.

For example in a data set containing 1000 observations out of which 20 are labelled fraudulent. Equal weights W1 are assigned to all observations and the base classifier accurately classifies 400 observations.

The weight of each of the 600 misclassified observations is increased to w2 and the weight of each of the correctly classified observations is reduced to w3.

In each iteration, these updated weighted observations are fed to the weak classifier to improve its performance. This process continues till the misclassification rate significantly decreases thereby resulting in a strong classifier.

Pros:

Good generalization- suited for any kind of classification problem

Very simple to implement

Cons:

Sensitive to noisy data and outliers

3.3 Gradient Boosting

Adaboost either requires the users to specify a set of weak learners or randomly generates the weak learners before the actual learning process. The weight of each learner is adjusted at every step depending on whether it predicts a sample correctly.

Whereas Gradient Boosting builds the first learner on the training dataset to predict the samples, calculates the loss (Difference between real value and output of the first learner). And use this loss to build an improved learner in the second stage.

At every step, the residual of the loss function is calculated using the Gradient Descent Method and the new residual becomes a target variable for the subsequent iteration.

Cons:

Gradient Boosted trees are harder to fit than Random forests

Might lead to overfitting if parameters are not tuned properly

3.3.1 Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGBoost)

Pros:

It is 10 times faster than the normal Gradient Boosting as it implements parallel processing. It is highly flexible as users can define custom optimization objectives and evaluation criteria, has an inbuilt mechanism to handle missing values.

Unlike gradient boosting which stops splitting a node as soon as it encounters a negative loss, XG Boost splits up to the maximum depth specified and prunes the tree backwards and removes splits beyond which there is only negative loss.

In most cases, synthetic techniques such as SMOTE and MSMOTE will outperform the conventional oversampling and undersampling techniques. For better performance, we can use SMOTE or MSMOTE along with advanced boosting methods such as Gradient Boosting or XGBoost.

[dipulb3]

The 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe looks and feels like a million bucks

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/the-2021-hyundai-santa-fe-looks-and-feels-like-a-million-bucks-2/

The 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe looks and feels like a million bucks

Smile for the camera!

Craig Cole/Roadshow

Proponents of trickle-down economics argue that cutting taxes for the wealthy or large corporations benefits everyone because their extra money can be invested to create more jobs or pay higher wages. Of course, it’s dubious whether this actually makes any economic sense, but such a top-down approach does work in other fields, like the automotive industry. Case in point: the Hyundai Palisade. With oodles of refinement and an upscale interior, it’s one of our favorite three-row SUVs. Now, the Palisade’s all-around excellence trickles down to the smaller Santa Fe, which has been significantly updated for 2021.

Like

Potent and refined engine

Comfortable ride

Upscale interior

Don’t Like

Low-speed transmission performance

Lack of standard driver aids

The 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe features mildly reworked exterior styling with a broader looking front end, fresh wheel designs and a few smaller tweaks. New powertrains are offered, too, including a 2.5-liter base engine as well as potent 2.5-liter turbo I4. A hybrid version is also available, plus there are more safety and convenience features. Finally, just like its big brother, the Santa Fe is now available in swanky Calligraphy trim. Inside and out, the vehicle feels expressive without being garish, a feat that’s tough to achieve.

Dressed in sultry Calypso Red paint, this top-of-the-line model does a convincing impression of a luxury vehicle. Its seats are trimmed with supple Nappa leather and the headliner and roof pillars are swaddled in a suede-like material. The Calligraphy also comes with a full-color head-up display, premium trim and express up and down rear windows, to name a few of its myriad enhancements. Sure, there are some hard plastics here and there, but the dashboard is mostly soft and there are miles of contrast-color stitching.

This adventurously designed interior is also extremely functional. The physical climate controls and other secondary switches for things like the audio system are super easy to see and reach, mounted on the Santa Fe’s upward-sloping center console. This is also where the push-button shifter lives, which is immediately intuitive. A skosh more storage space up top between the front seats would be nice, but there is an open bin underneath all those switches and knobs, the perfect place to stash a purse or small carry-out order.

Just like the Palisade, comfort is one of the Santa Fe’s strong suits. The Calligraphy model’s front bucket chairs, with their extendable lower cushions, are long-haul cushy, and so is the backseat. Passengers that don’t get to ride shotgun are still coddled by excellent accommodations, as the rear bench’s bottom cushion is a great height above the floor and there’s plenty of headroom and legroom to go around. The Santa Fe’s cargo capacity clocks in at 36.4 cubic feet behind the rear backrests. Fold them down and you get 72.1 cubes of junk-hauling space. That’s more room in each position than you get in a Chevy Blazer or Nissan Murano, though the Ford Edge and Honda Passport are slightly more capacious.

Is this a luxury-car interior? Nope, it’s just a Hyundai. 

Craig Cole/Roadshow

As with passenger comfort and high-quality trimmings, there’s no shortage of available tech in this vehicle. Lower-end models now gain an 8-inch infotainment screen (1 inch larger than before), but fancier variants come with a 10.3-incher that also features embedded navigation. Limited and Calligraphy trims are graced with a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster, though this is optional on the midrange SEL trim. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are standard across the range, though counterintuitively, they only connect wirelessly on the Santa Fe’s more basic grades. The up-level infotainment system is easily one of the better offerings available today, being both easy on the eyes and speedy. The user interface is also extremely intuitive and the system promptly responds to inputs, almost never stuttering or lagging. Really, there’s nothing to gripe about here, though the same can’t be said about the drivetrain.

The Santa Fe’s new 2.5-liter turbo-four is a real honey, super smooth and suspiciously silent. It cranks out 277 horsepower and 311 pound-feet of torque, far more of each than either the base engine or the hybrid. This prodigious output gives the vehicle ample acceleration, serious scoot whether you’re taking off from a light or zinging down the highway. Despite this strong performance, the Santa Fe is also quite economical. With available all-wheel drive, this example is estimated to return 21 mpg city, 28 mpg highway and 24 mpg combined, though in mixed, real-world driving I’m getting around 24.5 miles out of each gallon of gasoline, better than the advertised median.

This frugal showing is aided by an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. It shifts quickly and smoothly once the vehicle is moving, but it’s not all roses. Unfortunately, when starting off, the gearbox feels quite unnatural as it connects the engine to the rest of the driveline. Minor judders are detectable and there are little surges and sags, like it doesn’t respond linearly to throttle inputs. Can we just have the eight-speed torque-converter automatic that comes with the naturally aspirated 2.5-liter engine? Please and thank you.

The Santa Fe’s 2.5-liter turbo-four is as potent as it is refined. 

Craig Cole/Roadshow

The Santa Fe’s transmission may be its biggest dynamic weakness, but the rest of this vehicle’s driving experience is pleasant. The interior is incredibly quiet and the ride buttery-smooth. Sure, crisper steering would be nice, as this SUV is anything but sporty, and the brake pedal is on the touchy side, though these are minor complaints.

The Santa Fe offers plenty of advanced driver aids, though several of the most desirable ones are not standard. The base SE model features automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping assist and a driver attention monitor, though you have to step up to the SEL trim to get blind-spot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert. Naturally, highfalutin Limited and Calligraphy models come with pretty much everything, additional goodies like Remote Parking Assist, lane centering and adaptive cruise control. Hyundai’s implementation of those last two items is among the best in the business. When engaged, the Santa Fe tracks like a monorail, never sawing at the steering wheel or losing track of where it is. The adaptive cruise control is similarly smooth and confidence inspiring, whether you’re in stop-and-go traffic or bombing down the interstate.

The redesigned Hyundai Santa Fe is an excellent all-around utility vehicle. 

Craig Cole/Roadshow

Thanks to its upscale interior, over-the-road refinement and avant-garde styling, the new Santa Fe is a screaming deal and an excellent midsize SUV, another home run for Hyundai.

Just like the three-row Palisade, the updated Santa Fe is an excellent all-around SUV, one that offers plenty of features and a near-luxury cabin in Calligraphy trim. You might expect this vehicle to cost a young fortune, but this is absolutely not the case. A base SE model, sans any extras, checks out for around $28,185 including destination fees, which are $1,185. But even the top-shelf example shown here is still an excellent value. As it sits, my tester stickers for $43,440 with just one option padding the bottom line, a $155 upcharge for carpeted floor mats.

[empmoniitor]

09 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT EMPLOYEE HOURS TRACKER

An employee hour tracker has been used by every organization nowadays. Its popularity shot through the roof when the lockdown was implemented across the globe, and all companies started enforcing work from home. They had to find a solution to ensure 100% productivity, so they took the help of a tracker.

Like any other software, people have lots of questions about this tool too. So, we have done the research and listed out the nine most asked questions to help you better understand the software. Let’s get started.

1. WHAT IS AN EMPLOYEE HOURS TRACKER?

Employee hours tracker or employee productivity tracker is an application that monitors/tracks every activity of the employees. This application has replaced the traditional tracking methods, where a person used to watch over the employees and their output.

This tool is installed on the employees’ system, and it tracks everything by running in the background. There are many tracking software available on the internet, but the best one is EmpMonitor. It has lots of features that will help you track both remote and office employees.

Following the below steps you can track your employees’ productivity –

1. Log in to your EmpMonitor ID. You’ll be shown the following dashboard –

Here, you’ll get an overview of the productivity done by your team with the total number of employees working for you. It also shows who is present or online currently and who isn’t.

2. Go to Employee Details and add employees by clicking on the Add Employee button.

3. As you click on it, you will show the following box –

Fill in all the necessary details like name, email address, password, and then click on Add Employee at the bottom of the box. Do this for all your employees.  

4. Once done, you’ll be shown all the added employees in this form –

Here you can see all the details regarding an employee, sort of a general overview. If you want to know the information about each employee, then go to step

5. For viewing the detailed report of an employee, click on the button shown below –

6. As you click on that button, you’ll be redirected to a new page  –

Here you’ll be shown all the activities done by a particular employee. You can see the screen captures, top apps used, top websites visited, and much more. Using this, you can track down the aspects where they are lacking and help improve their productivity.

Once you set up everything, as mentioned above, you can easily track all the activities of your employees. EmpMonitor smartly tracks the productivity hours; it stops the time bar if the user hasn’t made any input via keyboard or mouse for a few minutes. It avoids the counting of idle time as productivity hour.

2. HOW DOES IT WORK?

The next and the most asked question is how it works?

First, you have to deploy this employee hour tracker on the employees’ systems. Then log in through the account provided by the vendor after the purchase; doing so will give you access to the administrative account. Once you are in, you’ll see a dashboard that will show all the productive and non-productive hours of your employees.

Some monitoring software also features stealth monitoring like EmpMonitor. This feature allows the tool to track all the activities of the employees without being detected. One other benefit of such a feature is that the tool does not show in the task manager, which makes it close to impossible for the user to find it.

However, there are some tools, which may have additional features like the one mentioned above. For example, few offer user logs and screen capture features, while others let you manage all the projects and calculate the payroll according to them.

3. WHY SHOULD YOU USE IT?

This question is asked by both employees and employers who haven’t yet adopted this tech in their organization. There are countless reasons for which an organization would use a monitoring application. But, we can’t cover them all, that’s why we will tell you about the most common ones.

As I mentioned above, the worldwide lockdown due to the Coronavirus has made the employees work from home. And monitoring remote employees gets hard, you cannot track their productivity level accurately.

You can also use project management software, but they do not track the activities timewise. Tracking work timely shows the productivity of employees, which helps the leaders to get a detailed report of them. It also helps employers to improve the productivity of their employees.

Another reason is to precisely calculate the payroll of employees with the help of tracking software. These are a few good reasons for which an organization would adopt such tools.

Also Read –

How To Ensure Data Security As Covid-19 Makes Work From Home Mandatory How To Keep Employees Productive During Work From Home (Coronavirus Outbreak) How To Boost Productivity Through Employee Computer Monitoring Software?

4. IS TRACKING SOFTWARE BAD?

Using an employee hours tracker is absolutely legal, and employers can use them as extensively as they want.

Employees could find some functionality like keystroke and live monitoring a little bit too extreme, but if the process is entirely ethical, there shouldn’t be any problem. This software also prevents data breaches and helps maintain the productivity of employees.

As long as you use the tool in a proper and ethical manner, there is no need to be afraid of it. It is there for the benefit of both employees and employers. The bad factors arise if the software is appointed in an unethical way, and it harms the morality of employees working in your company.

5. IS IT SAFE?

Software that fails to keep the company’s data safe is not useful in any way. So you can say that such tools are 100% secure and you can use it for as long as you want.

Every major monitoring software such as EmpMonitor, stores the data gathered while monitoring on to the cloud; nothing is stored locally in the system. The cloud storage is mostly secured from access to third parties or from any other threat.

So, yes, these software are perfectly safe, and you can use them in your organization.

6. HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?

The price of the software depends upon which one you choose as there are many tools available, so their prices will differ.

Generally, the price of a tracking software ranges from $5 to $20 for one user/month, depending upon the package you buy. But this may change if you purchase a different product and for a huge number of users. For example, the EmpMonitor pricing option starts from $3/user/month and goes up all the way up to $55/user/year. It also has a free trial period, which lasts for 15 days, and it allows five users.

Testing software before use is always beneficial, as there is a slight chance that you may not like the software, or its functionality may not be useful for you. Therefore, it is best if you try out the software before making the purchase.

7. WHICH IS THE BEST EMPLOYEE HOURS TRACKING SOFTWARE?

This question is a very tough one, as there are lots of software available on the market, and each individual has different needs. For instance, suppose a person only wants to do project management, so he will choose software which mainly focuses on task management. Whereas a person whose main objective is to track the productivity of his/her employees will choose different software.

The definition of the best software will be different for both of the people mentioned above. Thus it is hard to answer this question, but hold your horses, I said hard, not impossible. There are certain software which can be termed as an all-rounder in this field, we have covered a few here as we can’t do all in this list.

EmpMonitor is the most affordable and reliable time & productivity tracking software. It has loads of features which will help you cover, not just one, but several aspects of your employees’ activity. The most important one is productivity tracking as with the help of it, you can easily keep track of your employees’ productivity level, and also improve it. Other features included are screen capture, stealth monitoring, top apps & websites used, IP whitelisting, keystroke logging, user logs, and cloud storage. This software is perfect for managing large organizations efficiently.

Another one we have is Time Doctor. It is a great time tracking and project management software. It includes features like screenshots, chat monitoring, client and project tracking, apps and website usage, third party integrations, off-track reminders, and break tracking. It is more popular among the people who favour payroll tracking more rather than productivity.

The best way to find the right software for your organization is to figure out why you need a tracking software. Once you have cleared that, it’ll be easy for you to decide.

8. DOES IT ACTUALLY WORK?

If you have followed the points mentioned above, it is highly unlikely that the tracking software you chose will not work. But if that highly unlikely scenario arises, you should check if you are using the correct features of the software.

You should focus more on your goals and try to achieve the goals which you set out to as you implemented the software. Also, you should study the data provided by your tool and improve the productivity of your employees accordingly.

So, to answer your question. Yes, the tracking software actually works, if you utilize its features properly.

9. WHAT TYPES OF TIME TRACKING SOFTWARE IS AVAILABLE?

There are many times of time tracking software available on the internet, but not all of them are the same. All of them are a tad bit different from each other, and we have made an effort to distinguish them based on their work.

First are the ones which perform billing and invoicing apps. They are used in the organization where a large number of client work is involved. In such scenarios, there is a constant need to track the employee’s work and see the progress of the project and bill the client accordingly.

The next ones are, project tracking software, they are more focused on tracking the start, and completion of projects. Such applications track the project assigned to an employee timewise and help to maintain the workflow properly.

And lastly, we have productivity tracking software such as EmpMonitor. They are more geared towards tracking the overall productivity of an employee. These software tracks the mouse and keyboard activity to track if the employees are working punctually. Some go as far as to take the screenshot of the employees’ system at a regular interval to ensure 100% productivity.

Also Read –

05 Best Time Tracking And Productivity Monitoring Software In 2020 How To Protect Your Data From Insider Threats?

CONCLUSION

That ends all the questions. And I’m sure you are now familiar with the outlook of the employee hours tracker. Remember, always list out the reasons for implementing such software and then choose one.

If I have missed anything or you have some important questions in mind, pls mention them down in the comment section. We will be sure to update them here.

Originally Published On: EmpMonitor

[riichardwilson]

Will RSAs help or hurt your account? This script will help you figure it out

Have you heard conflicting stories about the usefulness of PPC automation tools? You’re not alone! On one side you have Google telling you that automations like responsive search ads (RSAs) and Smart Bidding will help you get better results and should be turned on without delay. On the other side you get expert practitioners saying RSAs are bad for conversion rates and Smart Bidding delivers mixed results and should be approached with caution. So how do you decide when PPC automation is right for you?

I’d love to give you the definitive answer but the reality is that it depends because Google and practitioners are both right! Neither would win any long-term fans by lying about results so the argument from both sides is based on the performance from different accounts with different levels of optimization.

In this post, I’ll tackle one way to measure if RSAs help or hurt your account. I won’t say if RSAs are good or bad because the answer depends on your implementation and my goal is to give you a better way to come to your own conclusion about how to get the most out of this automated PPC capability.

To optimize automated features, we need to understand how to better analyze their performance so that we can fix whatever may be causing them to underperform in certain scenarios. In our effort to make the most out of RSAs, we’re going to have to play the role of PPC doctor, one of the three roles humans will increasingly play in an automated PPC world.

To make this analysis as easy as possible, I’ll share an automation layering technique you can use in your own account right away. The script at the end of this post will help you automatically monitor RSA performance down to the query level and give ideas for how to optimize your account.

The right way to test RSAs is with Campaign Experiments

The best way to come to your own conclusions about the effect of an automation like RSAs is to test them with a Campaign Experiment, a feature available in both Google and Microsoft ad platforms.

With an experiment, you can run two variations of a campaign; the control, with only expanded text ads and the experiment, with responsive search ads added in as well.

When the experiment concludes, you’ll see whether adding RSAs had a positive impact or not. When measuring the results, remember to focus on key business metrics like overall conversions and profitability. Metrics like CTR are much less useful to focus on and Google is sometimes at fault for touting an automation’s benefits in terms of this metric that really matters only in a PPC world, but not so much in a corporate board room

As an aside, if you need a quicker way to monitor experiments, take a look at a recent script I shared that puts all your experiments from your entire MCC on a single Google spreadsheet where you can quickly see metrics, and know when one of your experiments has produced a statistically valid answer.

There is however a problem with this type of RSA experiment… it’ll only tell you a campaign-level result. If the campaign with RSAs produced more conversions than the campaign without, you will continue with RSAs but may miss the fact that in some ad groups, RSAs were actually detrimental.

Or if the experiment with RSAs loses, you may decide they are bad and stop using them, when they possibly drove some big gains in a limited set of cases. We could look deeper into the data and discover some nuggets of gold that would help us optimize our accounts further, even if the answer isn’t to deploy RSAs everywhere.

It’s the query stupid

As much time as we spend measuring and reporting results at aggregate levels, when it comes time to optimize an account, we have to go granular. After all, when you find a campaign that underperforms, fixing it requires going deeper into the settings, the messaging (ads) or the targeting (keywords, audiences, placements).

But ever since the introduction of close variants made exact match keywords no longer exact, you should go one level deeper and analyze queries. For example, when you see a campaign’s performance gets worse with RSAs, is that because RSAs are worse than ETAs? Or could it be that the addition of RSAs changed the query mix and that is the real reason for the change in performance?

Here’s the thing that makes PPC so challenging (but also kind of fun). When you change anything, you’re probably changing the auctions (and queries) in which your ads participate. A change in the auctions in which your ad participates is also referred to as a query mix change. When you analyze the performance at an aggregate level you may be forgetting about the query mix and, you may not necessarily be doing an apples-to-apples comparison.

The query mix changes in three ways: 

Old queries that are still triggering your ads now

New queries that previously didn’t trigger your ads

Old queries that stopped triggering your ads

Only the first bucket is close to an apples-to-apples comparison. With the second bucket, you’ve introduced oranges to the analysis. And the third bucket represents apples (good, bad, or both) you threw away.

Query mix analysis explains why results changed

The analysis at a query level is helpful because it can more clearly explain the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’. Why did performance change? Not just what changed? Once you understand ‘why’, you can take corrective action, like by adding negative keywords if new queries are delivering poor performance.

For an RSA query analysis, what you want to see is a query level report with performance metrics for RSAs and ETAs. Then you can see if a query is new for the account. New queries may perform differently than old queries but they should be analyzed independently. The idea is that an expensive new query that didn’t trigger ads before may still be worth keeping because it brings new conversions we otherwise would have missed.

With the analysis that the script below does, you will also see which queries are suffering from a poorly written RSA and that are losing conversions as a result. Many ad groups have too little data for Google to show the RSA strength indicator so having a different way to analyze performance with this script can prove helpful.

Without an automation, this analysis is difficult and time consuming and probably won’t be done on a routine basis. Google’s own interface is simply not built for it. The script automates combining a query report with an ad report and calculates how much impact RSAs had. I wrote about this methodology before. But now I’m sharing a script so you can add this methodology to your automation toolkit.

ETA vs RSA Query Analysis Script

The script will output a Google Sheet like this:

Caption: The Google Ads script produces a new spreadsheet with detailed data about how each query performs with the different ad formats in each ad group.

Each search term for every ad group is on a separate row. For each row, we summed the performance for all ETAs and RSAs for that query in that ad group. We then show the ‘incrementality’ of RSAs in red (worse) or green (better).

When the report is finished, you’ll get an email with a link to the Google Sheet and a summary of how RSAs are helping or hurting your account.

The recommendation is one of four things:

If the ad group has no RSAs, it recommends testing RSAs

If the ad group has no ETAs, it recommends testing ETAs

If the RSA is converting worse, it suggests moving the query into a SKAG with the existing ETA and testing some new RSA variations

If the RSA is converting better, it suggests moving the query into a SKAG with the existing RSA and testing some new ETA variations

You don’t have to follow this exact suggestion. It’s more of a way to get an idea of the four possible situations a query could be in.

My hope is that this proves to be an interesting new report that helps you understand ad type performance at a deeper level and gives you a jumping off point for a new type of optimization.

To try the script (code at end of article), simply copy and paste the full code into a single Google Ads account (it won’t work in an MCC account) and review the four simple settings for date range, email addresses, and campaign inclusions and exclusions.

Caveats

This script’s purpose is to populate a spreadsheet with all the data. It doesn’t filter for items with enough data to make smart decisions. How you filter things is entirely up to you. For example, I would not base a decision about removing an RSA on a query with just 5 impressions. You can add your own filters to the overall data set to help you narrow things down to the highest priority fixes for your own account.

I could have added these filtering capabilities in the script code but I felt that most advertisers are more comfortable tweaking settings in spreadsheets than in JavaScript. So you have all the data, how you filter it is up to you.

Methodology for calculating incrementality

The script itself is pretty straightforward but you may be curious about how we calculate the ‘incrementality’ of RSAs. Here’s what we do if a query gets impressions with both ad formats.

We assume that additional impressions with a particular ad format will deliver performance at the same level of existing impressions with that ad format.

We calculate the difference in conversions per impression, CTR and CPC between RSAs and ETAs for every row on the sheet.

We apply the difference in each of the above 3 metrics to the impressions for the query.

Caption: Each row of the spreadsheet lists how much RSA ads helped or hurt the ads shown for each query in the ad group. Based on this advertisers can make decisions to restructure accounts to get the right query with the right ad in the right place.

That allows us to see how much clicks, conversions and cost would have changed had we not had the other ad format.

Conclusion

Advertisers should not make decisions with incomplete data. Automation is here to stay so we need to figure out how to make the most of them and that means we need tools to answer important questions like ‘how do we make RSAs work for our account?’ Scripts are a great option for automating complex reports you want to use frequently so I hope this new one helps. Tweet me with ideas for new scripts or ideas for how to make this one better.

.gist .blob-wrapper.data { max-height:500px; overflow:auto; }

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as the Google AdWords Evangelist. Today he is the Cofounder of Optmyzr, an AdWords tool company focused on unique data insights, One-Click Optimizations

, advanced reporting to make account management more efficient, and Enhanced Scripts

for AdWords. He stays up-to-speed with best practices through his work with SalesX, a search marketing agency agency focused on turning clicks into revenue. He is a frequent guest speaker at events where he inspires organizations to be more innovative and become better online marketers. His latest book, Digital marketing agency in an AI World, was published in May 2019.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/will-rsas-help-or-hurt-your-account-this-script-will-help-you-figure-it-out/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/611860483791847424

[laurelkrugerr]

Will RSAs help or hurt your account? This script will help you figure it out

Have you heard conflicting stories about the usefulness of PPC automation tools? You’re not alone! On one side you have Google telling you that automations like responsive search ads (RSAs) and Smart Bidding will help you get better results and should be turned on without delay. On the other side you get expert practitioners saying RSAs are bad for conversion rates and Smart Bidding delivers mixed results and should be approached with caution. So how do you decide when PPC automation is right for you?

I’d love to give you the definitive answer but the reality is that it depends because Google and practitioners are both right! Neither would win any long-term fans by lying about results so the argument from both sides is based on the performance from different accounts with different levels of optimization.

In this post, I’ll tackle one way to measure if RSAs help or hurt your account. I won’t say if RSAs are good or bad because the answer depends on your implementation and my goal is to give you a better way to come to your own conclusion about how to get the most out of this automated PPC capability.

To optimize automated features, we need to understand how to better analyze their performance so that we can fix whatever may be causing them to underperform in certain scenarios. In our effort to make the most out of RSAs, we’re going to have to play the role of PPC doctor, one of the three roles humans will increasingly play in an automated PPC world.

To make this analysis as easy as possible, I’ll share an automation layering technique you can use in your own account right away. The script at the end of this post will help you automatically monitor RSA performance down to the query level and give ideas for how to optimize your account.

The right way to test RSAs is with Campaign Experiments

The best way to come to your own conclusions about the effect of an automation like RSAs is to test them with a Campaign Experiment, a feature available in both Google and Microsoft ad platforms.

With an experiment, you can run two variations of a campaign; the control, with only expanded text ads and the experiment, with responsive search ads added in as well.

When the experiment concludes, you’ll see whether adding RSAs had a positive impact or not. When measuring the results, remember to focus on key business metrics like overall conversions and profitability. Metrics like CTR are much less useful to focus on and Google is sometimes at fault for touting an automation’s benefits in terms of this metric that really matters only in a PPC world, but not so much in a corporate board room

As an aside, if you need a quicker way to monitor experiments, take a look at a recent script I shared that puts all your experiments from your entire MCC on a single Google spreadsheet where you can quickly see metrics, and know when one of your experiments has produced a statistically valid answer.

There is however a problem with this type of RSA experiment… it’ll only tell you a campaign-level result. If the campaign with RSAs produced more conversions than the campaign without, you will continue with RSAs but may miss the fact that in some ad groups, RSAs were actually detrimental.

Or if the experiment with RSAs loses, you may decide they are bad and stop using them, when they possibly drove some big gains in a limited set of cases. We could look deeper into the data and discover some nuggets of gold that would help us optimize our accounts further, even if the answer isn’t to deploy RSAs everywhere.

It’s the query stupid

As much time as we spend measuring and reporting results at aggregate levels, when it comes time to optimize an account, we have to go granular. After all, when you find a campaign that underperforms, fixing it requires going deeper into the settings, the messaging (ads) or the targeting (keywords, audiences, placements).

But ever since the introduction of close variants made exact match keywords no longer exact, you should go one level deeper and analyze queries. For example, when you see a campaign’s performance gets worse with RSAs, is that because RSAs are worse than ETAs? Or could it be that the addition of RSAs changed the query mix and that is the real reason for the change in performance?

Here’s the thing that makes PPC so challenging (but also kind of fun). When you change anything, you’re probably changing the auctions (and queries) in which your ads participate. A change in the auctions in which your ad participates is also referred to as a query mix change. When you analyze the performance at an aggregate level you may be forgetting about the query mix and, you may not necessarily be doing an apples-to-apples comparison.

The query mix changes in three ways: 

Old queries that are still triggering your ads now

New queries that previously didn’t trigger your ads

Old queries that stopped triggering your ads

Only the first bucket is close to an apples-to-apples comparison. With the second bucket, you’ve introduced oranges to the analysis. And the third bucket represents apples (good, bad, or both) you threw away.

Query mix analysis explains why results changed

The analysis at a query level is helpful because it can more clearly explain the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’. Why did performance change? Not just what changed? Once you understand ‘why’, you can take corrective action, like by adding negative keywords if new queries are delivering poor performance.

For an RSA query analysis, what you want to see is a query level report with performance metrics for RSAs and ETAs. Then you can see if a query is new for the account. New queries may perform differently than old queries but they should be analyzed independently. The idea is that an expensive new query that didn’t trigger ads before may still be worth keeping because it brings new conversions we otherwise would have missed.

With the analysis that the script below does, you will also see which queries are suffering from a poorly written RSA and that are losing conversions as a result. Many ad groups have too little data for Google to show the RSA strength indicator so having a different way to analyze performance with this script can prove helpful.

Without an automation, this analysis is difficult and time consuming and probably won’t be done on a routine basis. Google’s own interface is simply not built for it. The script automates combining a query report with an ad report and calculates how much impact RSAs had. I wrote about this methodology before. But now I’m sharing a script so you can add this methodology to your automation toolkit.

ETA vs RSA Query Analysis Script

The script will output a Google Sheet like this:

Caption: The Google Ads script produces a new spreadsheet with detailed data about how each query performs with the different ad formats in each ad group.

Each search term for every ad group is on a separate row. For each row, we summed the performance for all ETAs and RSAs for that query in that ad group. We then show the ‘incrementality’ of RSAs in red (worse) or green (better).

When the report is finished, you’ll get an email with a link to the Google Sheet and a summary of how RSAs are helping or hurting your account.

The recommendation is one of four things:

If the ad group has no RSAs, it recommends testing RSAs

If the ad group has no ETAs, it recommends testing ETAs

If the RSA is converting worse, it suggests moving the query into a SKAG with the existing ETA and testing some new RSA variations

If the RSA is converting better, it suggests moving the query into a SKAG with the existing RSA and testing some new ETA variations

You don’t have to follow this exact suggestion. It’s more of a way to get an idea of the four possible situations a query could be in.

My hope is that this proves to be an interesting new report that helps you understand ad type performance at a deeper level and gives you a jumping off point for a new type of optimization.

To try the script (code at end of article), simply copy and paste the full code into a single Google Ads account (it won’t work in an MCC account) and review the four simple settings for date range, email addresses, and campaign inclusions and exclusions.

Caveats

This script’s purpose is to populate a spreadsheet with all the data. It doesn’t filter for items with enough data to make smart decisions. How you filter things is entirely up to you. For example, I would not base a decision about removing an RSA on a query with just 5 impressions. You can add your own filters to the overall data set to help you narrow things down to the highest priority fixes for your own account.

I could have added these filtering capabilities in the script code but I felt that most advertisers are more comfortable tweaking settings in spreadsheets than in JavaScript. So you have all the data, how you filter it is up to you.

Methodology for calculating incrementality

The script itself is pretty straightforward but you may be curious about how we calculate the ‘incrementality’ of RSAs. Here’s what we do if a query gets impressions with both ad formats.

We assume that additional impressions with a particular ad format will deliver performance at the same level of existing impressions with that ad format.

We calculate the difference in conversions per impression, CTR and CPC between RSAs and ETAs for every row on the sheet.

We apply the difference in each of the above 3 metrics to the impressions for the query.

Caption: Each row of the spreadsheet lists how much RSA ads helped or hurt the ads shown for each query in the ad group. Based on this advertisers can make decisions to restructure accounts to get the right query with the right ad in the right place.

That allows us to see how much clicks, conversions and cost would have changed had we not had the other ad format.

Conclusion

Advertisers should not make decisions with incomplete data. Automation is here to stay so we need to figure out how to make the most of them and that means we need tools to answer important questions like ‘how do we make RSAs work for our account?’ Scripts are a great option for automating complex reports you want to use frequently so I hope this new one helps. Tweet me with ideas for new scripts or ideas for how to make this one better.

.gist .blob-wrapper.data { max-height:500px; overflow:auto; }

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as the Google AdWords Evangelist. Today he is the Cofounder of Optmyzr, an AdWords tool company focused on unique data insights, One-Click Optimizations

, advanced reporting to make account management more efficient, and Enhanced Scripts

for AdWords. He stays up-to-speed with best practices through his work with SalesX, a search marketing agency agency focused on turning clicks into revenue. He is a frequent guest speaker at events where he inspires organizations to be more innovative and become better online marketers. His latest book, Digital marketing agency in an AI World, was published in May 2019.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/will-rsas-help-or-hurt-your-account-this-script-will-help-you-figure-it-out/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/will-rsas-help-or-hurt-your-account.html

[scpie]

Will RSAs help or hurt your account? This script will help you figure it out

Have you heard conflicting stories about the usefulness of PPC automation tools? You’re not alone! On one side you have Google telling you that automations like responsive search ads (RSAs) and Smart Bidding will help you get better results and should be turned on without delay. On the other side you get expert practitioners saying RSAs are bad for conversion rates and Smart Bidding delivers mixed results and should be approached with caution. So how do you decide when PPC automation is right for you?

I’d love to give you the definitive answer but the reality is that it depends because Google and practitioners are both right! Neither would win any long-term fans by lying about results so the argument from both sides is based on the performance from different accounts with different levels of optimization.

In this post, I’ll tackle one way to measure if RSAs help or hurt your account. I won’t say if RSAs are good or bad because the answer depends on your implementation and my goal is to give you a better way to come to your own conclusion about how to get the most out of this automated PPC capability.

To optimize automated features, we need to understand how to better analyze their performance so that we can fix whatever may be causing them to underperform in certain scenarios. In our effort to make the most out of RSAs, we’re going to have to play the role of PPC doctor, one of the three roles humans will increasingly play in an automated PPC world.

To make this analysis as easy as possible, I’ll share an automation layering technique you can use in your own account right away. The script at the end of this post will help you automatically monitor RSA performance down to the query level and give ideas for how to optimize your account.

The right way to test RSAs is with Campaign Experiments

The best way to come to your own conclusions about the effect of an automation like RSAs is to test them with a Campaign Experiment, a feature available in both Google and Microsoft ad platforms.

With an experiment, you can run two variations of a campaign; the control, with only expanded text ads and the experiment, with responsive search ads added in as well.

When the experiment concludes, you’ll see whether adding RSAs had a positive impact or not. When measuring the results, remember to focus on key business metrics like overall conversions and profitability. Metrics like CTR are much less useful to focus on and Google is sometimes at fault for touting an automation’s benefits in terms of this metric that really matters only in a PPC world, but not so much in a corporate board room

As an aside, if you need a quicker way to monitor experiments, take a look at a recent script I shared that puts all your experiments from your entire MCC on a single Google spreadsheet where you can quickly see metrics, and know when one of your experiments has produced a statistically valid answer.

There is however a problem with this type of RSA experiment… it’ll only tell you a campaign-level result. If the campaign with RSAs produced more conversions than the campaign without, you will continue with RSAs but may miss the fact that in some ad groups, RSAs were actually detrimental.

Or if the experiment with RSAs loses, you may decide they are bad and stop using them, when they possibly drove some big gains in a limited set of cases. We could look deeper into the data and discover some nuggets of gold that would help us optimize our accounts further, even if the answer isn’t to deploy RSAs everywhere.

It’s the query stupid

As much time as we spend measuring and reporting results at aggregate levels, when it comes time to optimize an account, we have to go granular. After all, when you find a campaign that underperforms, fixing it requires going deeper into the settings, the messaging (ads) or the targeting (keywords, audiences, placements).

But ever since the introduction of close variants made exact match keywords no longer exact, you should go one level deeper and analyze queries. For example, when you see a campaign’s performance gets worse with RSAs, is that because RSAs are worse than ETAs? Or could it be that the addition of RSAs changed the query mix and that is the real reason for the change in performance?

Here’s the thing that makes PPC so challenging (but also kind of fun). When you change anything, you’re probably changing the auctions (and queries) in which your ads participate. A change in the auctions in which your ad participates is also referred to as a query mix change. When you analyze the performance at an aggregate level you may be forgetting about the query mix and, you may not necessarily be doing an apples-to-apples comparison.

The query mix changes in three ways: 

Old queries that are still triggering your ads now

New queries that previously didn’t trigger your ads

Old queries that stopped triggering your ads

Only the first bucket is close to an apples-to-apples comparison. With the second bucket, you’ve introduced oranges to the analysis. And the third bucket represents apples (good, bad, or both) you threw away.

Query mix analysis explains why results changed

The analysis at a query level is helpful because it can more clearly explain the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’. Why did performance change? Not just what changed? Once you understand ‘why’, you can take corrective action, like by adding negative keywords if new queries are delivering poor performance.

For an RSA query analysis, what you want to see is a query level report with performance metrics for RSAs and ETAs. Then you can see if a query is new for the account. New queries may perform differently than old queries but they should be analyzed independently. The idea is that an expensive new query that didn’t trigger ads before may still be worth keeping because it brings new conversions we otherwise would have missed.

With the analysis that the script below does, you will also see which queries are suffering from a poorly written RSA and that are losing conversions as a result. Many ad groups have too little data for Google to show the RSA strength indicator so having a different way to analyze performance with this script can prove helpful.

Without an automation, this analysis is difficult and time consuming and probably won’t be done on a routine basis. Google’s own interface is simply not built for it. The script automates combining a query report with an ad report and calculates how much impact RSAs had. I wrote about this methodology before. But now I’m sharing a script so you can add this methodology to your automation toolkit.

ETA vs RSA Query Analysis Script

The script will output a Google Sheet like this:

Caption: The Google Ads script produces a new spreadsheet with detailed data about how each query performs with the different ad formats in each ad group.

Each search term for every ad group is on a separate row. For each row, we summed the performance for all ETAs and RSAs for that query in that ad group. We then show the ‘incrementality’ of RSAs in red (worse) or green (better).

When the report is finished, you’ll get an email with a link to the Google Sheet and a summary of how RSAs are helping or hurting your account.

The recommendation is one of four things:

If the ad group has no RSAs, it recommends testing RSAs

If the ad group has no ETAs, it recommends testing ETAs

If the RSA is converting worse, it suggests moving the query into a SKAG with the existing ETA and testing some new RSA variations

If the RSA is converting better, it suggests moving the query into a SKAG with the existing RSA and testing some new ETA variations

You don’t have to follow this exact suggestion. It’s more of a way to get an idea of the four possible situations a query could be in.

My hope is that this proves to be an interesting new report that helps you understand ad type performance at a deeper level and gives you a jumping off point for a new type of optimization.

To try the script (code at end of article), simply copy and paste the full code into a single Google Ads account (it won’t work in an MCC account) and review the four simple settings for date range, email addresses, and campaign inclusions and exclusions.

Caveats

This script’s purpose is to populate a spreadsheet with all the data. It doesn’t filter for items with enough data to make smart decisions. How you filter things is entirely up to you. For example, I would not base a decision about removing an RSA on a query with just 5 impressions. You can add your own filters to the overall data set to help you narrow things down to the highest priority fixes for your own account.

I could have added these filtering capabilities in the script code but I felt that most advertisers are more comfortable tweaking settings in spreadsheets than in JavaScript. So you have all the data, how you filter it is up to you.

Methodology for calculating incrementality

The script itself is pretty straightforward but you may be curious about how we calculate the ‘incrementality’ of RSAs. Here’s what we do if a query gets impressions with both ad formats.

We assume that additional impressions with a particular ad format will deliver performance at the same level of existing impressions with that ad format.

We calculate the difference in conversions per impression, CTR and CPC between RSAs and ETAs for every row on the sheet.

We apply the difference in each of the above 3 metrics to the impressions for the query.

Caption: Each row of the spreadsheet lists how much RSA ads helped or hurt the ads shown for each query in the ad group. Based on this advertisers can make decisions to restructure accounts to get the right query with the right ad in the right place.

That allows us to see how much clicks, conversions and cost would have changed had we not had the other ad format.

Conclusion

Advertisers should not make decisions with incomplete data. Automation is here to stay so we need to figure out how to make the most of them and that means we need tools to answer important questions like ‘how do we make RSAs work for our account?’ Scripts are a great option for automating complex reports you want to use frequently so I hope this new one helps. Tweet me with ideas for new scripts or ideas for how to make this one better.

.gist .blob-wrapper.data { max-height:500px; overflow:auto; }

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as the Google AdWords Evangelist. Today he is the Cofounder of Optmyzr, an AdWords tool company focused on unique data insights, One-Click Optimizations

, advanced reporting to make account management more efficient, and Enhanced Scripts

for AdWords. He stays up-to-speed with best practices through his work with SalesX, a search marketing agency agency focused on turning clicks into revenue. He is a frequent guest speaker at events where he inspires organizations to be more innovative and become better online marketers. His latest book, Digital marketing agency in an AI World, was published in May 2019.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/will-rsas-help-or-hurt-your-account-this-script-will-help-you-figure-it-out/

[sciforce]

Strategies of docker images optimization

Background

Docker, an enterprise container platform is developers’ favourite due to its flexibility and ease-of-use. It makes it generally easy to create, deploy, and run applications inside of containers. With containers, you can gather applications and their core necessities and dependencies into a single package and turn it into a Docker image and replicate. Docker images are built from Dockerfiles, where you define what the image should look like, as well as the operating system and commands.

However, large Docker images lengthen the time it takes to build and share images between clusters and cloud providers. When creating applications, it’s therefore worth optimizing Docker Images and Dockerfiles to help teams share smaller images, improve performance, and debug problems. A lot of verified images available on Docker Hub are already optimized, so it is always a good idea to use ready-made images wherever possible. If you still need to create an image of your own, you should consider several ways of optimization it for production.

Task description

As a part of a larger project, we were asked to propose ways to optimize Docker images for improving performance. There are several strategies to decrease the size of Docker images to optimize for production. In this research project we tried to explore different possibilities that would yield the best boost of performance with less effort.

Our approach

By optimization of Docker images, we mean two general strategies:

reducing the time of image building to speed up the CI/CD flow;

reducing the image size to speed up the image pull operations and cut costs of storing build artifacts.

Therefore, we proceeded along these two directions, trying to improve the overall performance. But first we need some tools to measure how effective is our process and to find bottlenecks.

Inspection techniques

Docker image size inspection

You can review your Docker image creation history layer by layer and see the size of each layer. This will allow you to focus on the most significant parts to achieve the biggest reduction in size.

Command:

$ docker image history img_name

Example output:

IMAGE CREATED CREATED BY SIZE

b91d4548528d 34 seconds ago /bin/sh -c apt-get install -y python3 python… 140MB

f5b439869a1b 2 minutes ago /bin/sh -c apt-get install -y wget 7.42MB

9667e45447f6 About an hour ago /bin/sh -c apt-get update 27.1MB

a2a15febcdf3 3 weeks ago /bin/sh -c #(nop) CMD [“/bin/bash”] 0B

<missing> 3 weeks ago /bin/sh -c mkdir -p /run/systemd && echo ‘do… 7B

<missing> 3 weeks ago /bin/sh -c set -xe && echo ‘#!/bin/sh’ > /… 745B

<missing> 3 weeks ago /bin/sh -c [ -z “$(apt-get indextargets)” ] 987kB

<missing> 3 weeks ago /bin/sh -c #(nop) ADD file:c477cb0e95c56b51e… 63.2MB

Docker build time inspection

When it comes to measuring timings of Dockerfile steps, the most expensive steps are COPY/ADD and RUN. Duration of COPY and ADD commands cannot be reviewed(unless you are going to manually start and stop timers), but it corresponds to the layer size, so just check the layers size using docker history and try to optimize it.

As for RUN, it is possible to slightly modify a command inside to include a call to `time` command, that would output how long did it take

RUN time apt-get update

But it requires many changes into Dockerfile and looks poorly, especially for commands combined with &&

Fortunately, there’s a way to do that with a simple external tool called gnomon.

Install NodeJS with NPM and do the following

sudo npm i -g gnomon

docker build | gnomon

And the output will show you how long did either step take:

…

0.0001s Step 34/52 : FROM node:10.16.3-jessie as node_build

0.0000s — -> 6d56aa91a3db

0.1997s Step 35/52 : WORKDIR /tmp/

0.1999s — -> Running in 4ed6107e5f41

…

Clean build vs Repetitive builds

One of the most interesting pieces of information you can gather is how your build process perform when you run it for the first time and when you run it several times in a row with minimal changes to source code or with no changes at all.

In an ideal world consequent builds should be blazingly fast and use as many cached layers as possible. In case when no changes were introduced it’s better to avoid running docker build. This can be achieved by external build tools with support for up-to-date checks, like Gradle. And in case of small minor changes it would be great to have additional volumes be proportionally small.

It’s not always possible or it might require too much efforts, so you should decide how important is it for you, which changes do you expect to happen often and what’s going to stay unchanged, what is the overhead for each build and whether this overhead is acceptable.

And now let’s think of the ways to reduce build time and storage overheads.

Reducing the image size

Base image with a smaller footprint

It is always wise to choose a lightweight alternative for an image. In many cases, they can be found on existing platforms: the Canonical, for example, announced the launch of the Minimal Ubuntu, the smallest Ubuntu base image. It is over 50% smaller than a standard Ubuntu server image, and boots up to 40% faster. The new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS image from DockerHub is now the new Minimal Ubuntu 18.04 image.

FROM ubuntu:14.04 # 188 MB

FROM ubuntu:18.04 # 64.2MB

There are even more lightweight alternatives for Ubuntu, for example the Alpine Linux:

FROM alpine:3 # 5.58MB

However, you need to check if you depend on Ubuntu-specific packages or libc implementation (Alpine Linux uses musl instead of glibc). See the comparison table.

Cleanup commands

Another useful strategy to reduce the size of the image is to add cleanup commands to apt-get install commands. For example, the commands below clean temporary apt files left after the package installation:

RUN apt-get install -y && \

unzip \

wget && \

rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* && \

apt-get purge — auto-remove && \

apt-get clean

If your toolkit does not provide tools for cleaning up, you can use the rm command to manually remove obsolete files.

RUN wget www.some.file.xz && unzip www.some.file.xz && rm www.some.file.xz

Cleanup commands need to appear in the RUN instruction that creates temporary files/garbage. Each RUN command creates a new layer in the filesystem, so subsequent cleanups do not affect previous layers.

Static builds of libraries

It is well-known that static builds usually reduce time and space, so it is useful to look for a static build for C libraries you rely on.

Static build:

RUN wget -q

https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/builds/ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz

&& \

tar xf ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz && \

mv ./ffmpeg-git-20190902-amd64-static/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg && \

rm -rfd ./ffmpeg-git-20190902-amd64-static && \

rm -f ./ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz # 74.9MB

Only necessary dependencies

The system usually comes up with recommended settings and dependencies that can be tempting to accept. However, many dependencies are redundant, making the image unnecessarily heavy. It is a good practice to use the — no-install-recommends flag for the apt-get install command to avoid installing “recommended” but unnecessary dependencies. If you do need some of the recommended dependencies, it’s always possible to install them by hand.

RUN apt-get install -y python3-dev # 144MB

RUN apt-get install — no-install-recommends -y python3-dev # 138MB

No pip caching

As a rule, a cache directory speeds up installing by caching some commonly used files. However, with Docker images, we usually install all requirements once, which makes the cache directory redundant. To avoid creating the cache directory, you can use the — no-cache-dir flag for the pip install command, reducing the size of the resulting image.

RUN pip3 install flask # 4.55MB

RUN pip3 install — no-cache-dir flask # 3.84MB

Multi-stage builds

A multi-stage build is a new feature requiring Docker 17.05 or higher. With multi-stage builds, you can use multiple FROM statements in your Dockerfile. Each FROM instruction can use a different base, and each begins a new stage of the build. You can selectively copy artifacts from one stage to another, leaving behind everything you don’t want in the final image.

FROM ubuntu:18.04 AS builder RUN apt-get update RUN apt-get install -y wget unzip RUN wget -q https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/builds/ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz && \ tar xf ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz && \ mv ./ffmpeg-git-20190902-amd64-static/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg && \ rm -rfd ./ffmpeg-git-20190902-amd64-static && \ rm -f ./ffmpeg-git-amd64-static.tar.xz

FROM ubuntu:18.04 COPY — from=builder /usr/bin/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg # The builder image itself will not affect the final image size # the final image size will be increased only to /usr/bin/ffmpeg file’s size

Intermediate images cleanup

Although builder stage image size will not affect the final image size, it still will consume disk space of your build agent machine. The most straightforward way is to call

docker image prune

But this will also remove all other dangling images, which might be needed for some purposes. So here’s a more safe approach to remove intermediate images: add a label to all the intermediate images and then prune only images with that label.

FROM ubuntu:18.04 AS builder LABEL my_project_builder=truedocker image prune — filter label=my_project_builder=true

Use incremental layers

Multi-stage builds are powerful instrument, but the final stage always implies COPY commands from intermediate stages to the final image and those file sets can be quite big. In case you have a huge project, you might want to avoid creating a full-sized layer, and instead take the previous image and append only few files that have changed.

Unfortunately, COPY command always creates a layer of the same size as the copied fileset, no matter if all files match. Thus, the way to implement incremental layers would be to introduce one more intermediate stage based on a previous image. To make a diff layer, rsync can be used.

FROM my_project:latest AS diff_stage LABEL my_project_builder=true RUN cp /opt/my_project /opt/my_project_base

COPY — from=builder /opt/my_project /opt/my_project RUN patch.sh /opt/my_project /opt/my_project_base /opt/my_project_diff

FROM my_project:latest LABEL my_project_builder=true RUN cp /opt/my_project /opt/my_project_base

COPY — from=builder /opt/my_project /opt/my_project RUN patch.sh /opt/my_project /opt/my_project_base /opt/my_project_diff

Where patch.sh is the following

#!/bin/bash

rm -rf $3

mkdir -p $3

pushd $1

IFS=’

‘

for file in `rsync -rn — out-format=”%f” ./ $2`; do

[ -d “$file” ] || cp — parents -t $3 “$file”

done

popd

For the first time you will have to initialize my_project:latest image, by tagging base image with the corresponding target tag

docker tag ubuntu:18.04 my_project:latest

And do this every time you want to reset layers and start incrementing from scratch.This is important if you are not going to store old builds forever, cause hundreds of patches might ones consume more than ten full images.

Also, in the code above we implied rsync is included into the builder’s base image to avoid spending extra time for installing it on every build. The next section is going to present several more ways to save the build time.

Reducing the build time

Common base image

The most obvious solution to reduce build time is to extract common packets and commands from several projects into a common base image. For example, we can use the same image for all projects based on the Ubuntu/Python3 and dependent on unzip and wget packages.

A common base image:

FROM ubuntu:18.04 RUN apt-get update && \ apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev python3-setuptools unzip wget

A specific image:

FROM your-docker-base RUN wget www.some.file CMD [“python3”, “your_app.py”]

.dockerignore

To prevent copying unnecessary files from the host, you can use a .dockerignore file that contains all temporary created local files/directories like .git, .idea, local virtualenvs, etc..

Smarter layer caching

Docker uses caching for filesystem layers, where in most cases each line in the Dockerfile produces a new layer. As there are layers that are more likely to be changed than others, it is useful to reorder all commands according to the probability of changes in the ascending order. This technique saves you time by rebuilding only the layers that have been changed, so that you can copy source files when you need them.

Unordered command sequence:

FROM ubuntu:18.04 RUN apt-get update COPY your_source_files /opt/project/your_source_files RUN apt-get install -y — no-install-recommends python3

Ordered command sequence:

FROM ubuntu:18.04 RUN apt-get update RUN apt-get install -y — no-install-recommends python3 COPY your_source_files /opt/project/your_source_files

Dependencies Caching

Sometimes, one of the most time consuming steps for the big projects is dependencies downloading. It is inevitable to perform at least once, but consequent builds should use cache. Surely, layer caching could help in this case — just separate dependencies downloading step and actual build:

COPY project/package.json ./package.json

RUN npm i COPY project/ ./

RUN npm run build

However, the resolution will anyway happen once you increment any minor version. So if slow resolution is a problem to you, here’s one more approach.

Most dependencies resolution systems like NPM, PIP and Maven support local cache to speedup consequent resolution. In the previous section we wrote how to avoid leaking of pip cache to the final image. But together with incremental layers approach it is possible to save it inside an intermediate image. Setup an image with rsync, add label like `stage=deps` and prevent that intermediate image from being removed by cleanup

docker images — filter label=my_project_builder=true — filter label=stage=deps — filter dangling=true — format {{.ID}} | xargs -i docker tag {} my_project/deps

Then let builder stage depend on my_project/deps image, perform build and copy compiled files to the final image.

Value added

Such intelligent implementation of optimization strategies allowed us to reduce the Docker image size by over 50% giving significant increase in speed of image building and sharing.

Feel free to share your best practices of writing better Dockerfiles in comments below.

[cryptofeedzposts]

Batteries not included: USB Power Delivery is the fastest way to charge iPhone and Android devices

Anker 28600 With USB PD

ZDNet

With the current generation of smartphones with their much faster processors and vivid, high-resolution displays and always-on connectivity, demands on battery performance are now higher than ever before.

You may have noticed that while you are on the road, you’re running out of juice quickly. If you have this problem, portable batteries, and faster wall chargers are your solutions.

Also: Here’s how much it costs to charge a smartphone for a year

But not all portable batteries are the same, even though they might use similar Lithium Polymer (LiPo) and Lithium-Ion (Lion) cells for capacity and look very much alike.

Modern smartphone hardware from Apple and various Android manufacturers support faster-charging rates than what was previously supported.

But if you use the charger that comes in the box with the current generation iPhone hardware, or if you buy just any portable battery pack on the market, you’re going to be disappointed.

Ideally, you want to match your charger, battery, and even the charging cable to the optimal charging speeds that your device supports.

There are three different high-speed USB charging standards currently on the market. While all of them will work with your device using a standard legacy charge mode, you will ideally want to match up the right technology to optimize the speed in which you can top off your phone, tablet, or even your laptop.

Let’s start by explaining the differences between them.

Legacy USB-A 2.0 and 3.0 charging

If your Android device or accessory still has the USB Micro B connector (the dreaded fragile trapezoid that’s impossible to connect in the dark), you can fast-charge it using an inexpensive USB-A to USB Micro B cable.

If the device and the charger port both support the USB 2.0 standard (pretty much the least common denominator these days for entry-level Android smartphones), you can charge it at 1.5A/5V.

Also: How I learned to stop worrying and love USB Type-C

Some consumer electronics, such as higher-end vape batteries that use the Evolv DNA chipset, can charge at 2A.

A USB 3.0/3.1 charge port on one of these batteries can supply 3.0A/5V if the device supports it.

If you are charging an accessory, such as an inexpensive pair of wireless earbuds or another Bluetooth device, and it doesn’t support either of the USB-A fast charging specs, it will slow charge at either 500mA or 900mA which is about the same you can expect from directly connecting it to most PCs.

Mode Voltage Max Current Connector USB PD Variable up to 20V 5A USB-C USB Type-C 3A 5V 3.0A USB-C USB Type-C 1.5A 5V 1.5A USB-C QC 4.0 (USB-PD Compatible) Variable up to 20V 4.6A USB-C QC 3.0 Variable up to 20V 4.6A USB-A/USB-C QC 2.0 5V, 9V, 12V, 20V 2A USB-A USB FC 1.2 5V 1.5A USB-A USB 3.1 5V 900mA USB-A USB 2.0 5V 500mA USB-A

Many of the portable batteries on the market have both USB-C and multiple USB-A ports. Some of them have USB-A ports which can deliver the same voltage, while others feature one fast (2.4A) and one slow (1A).

So you will want to make sure you plug the device into the battery port, which can charge it at the fastest rate if you’re going to top off the device as quickly as possible.

USB Power Delivery

USB Power Delivery (USB PD) is a relatively new fast charge standard that was introduced by the USB Implementers Forum, the creators of the USB standard.

It is an industry-standard open specification that provides high-speed charging with variable voltage up to 20V using intelligent device negotiation up to 5A at 100W.

It scales up from smartphones to notebook computers provided they use a USB-C connector and a USB-C power controller on the client and host.

USB Fast-Charge Standards

Image: Belkin

Batteries and wall chargers that employ USB PD can charge devices up to 100W output using a USB-C connector — however, most output at 30W because that is on the upper range of what most smartphones and tablets can handle. In contrast, laptops require adapters and batteries that can output at a higher wattage.

Apple introduced USB PD charging with iOS devices with the launch of the 2015 iPad Pro 12.9″ and with OS X laptops in the MacBook Pro as of 2016. Apple’s smartphones beginning with the iPhone 8 can rapidly charge with USB PD using any USB PD charging accessory — you don’t have to use Apple’s OEM USB-C 29W or its 61W power adapters. 

In 2019, Apple released an 18W USB-C Power Adapter which comes with the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. Although Apple’s charger works just fine, you’ll probably want to consider a third-party wall charger for the regular iPhone 11 or an earlier model.

Fast-charging an iPhone requires the use of a USB-C to Lightning cable, which until 2019, needed Apple’s OEM MKQ42AM/A (1m ) or MD818ZM/A (2m) USB-C to Lightning cables which unfortunately are a tad expensive at around $19-$35 from various online retailers such as Amazon. 

Apple OEM USB-C to Lightning Cable.

There are cheaper 3rd-party USB-C to Lightning cables. I am currently partial to USB-C to Lightning cables from Anker, which are highly durable and are MFI-certified for use with Apple’s devices.

It should be noted that if you intend to use your smartphone with either Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto, your vehicle will probably still require a USB-A to USB-C or a USB-A to Lightning cable if it doesn’t support these screen projection technologies wirelessly. You can’t fast-charge with either of these types of cables in most cars, and there is no way to pass-through a fast charge to a 12V USB PD accessory while being connected to a data cable, either.

Qualcomm Quick Charge

Qualcomm, whose Snapdragon SoCs are used in many popular smartphones and tablets, has its fast-charging standard, Quick Charge, which has been through multiple iterations.

The current implementation is Quick Charge 4.0, which is backward-compatible with older Quick Charge accessories and devices. Unlike USB PD, Quick Charge 2.0 and 3.0 can be delivered using the USB-A connector. Quick Charge 4.0 is exclusive to USB-C.

Quick Charge 4.0 is only present in phones which use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xx, which is present in many North American tier 1 OEM Android devices made by Samsung, LG, Motorola, OnePlus, ZTE, and Google.

RavPower 26000mAh with Quick Charge 3.0

ZDNet

The Xiaomi, ZTE Nubia and the Sony Xperia devices also use QC 4.0, but they aren’t sold in the US market currently. Huawei’s phones utilize their own Kirin 970/980/990 chips, which use their own Supercharge standard, but they are backward compatible with the 18W USB PD standard.

Like USB PD, QC 3.0 and QC 4.0 are variable voltage technologies and will intelligently ramp up your device for optimal charging speeds and safety. However, Quick Charge 3.0 and 4.0 differ from USB PD in that it has some additional features for thermal management and voltage stepping with the Snapdragon 820/821/835/845/855 to optimize for reduced heat footprint while charging.

It also uses a different variable voltage selection and negotiation protocol than USB PD, which Qualcomm advertises as better/safer for its own SoCs.

And for devices that use Qualcomm’s current chipsets, Quick Charge 4.0 is about 25% faster than Quick Charge 3.0. The company advertises five hours of usage time on the device for five minutes of charge time.

However, while it is present in (some of ) the wall chargers that ship with the devices themselves, and a few 3rd-party solutions, Quick Charge 4 is not in any battery products yet. The reason for this is that it is not just competing with USB Power Delivery, it is also compatible with USB Power Delivery.

Qualcomm’s technology and ICs have to be licensed at considerable additional expense to the OEMs, whereas USB PD is an open standard.

If you compound this with the fact that Google itself is recommending OEMs conform to USB PD over Quick Charge for Android-based products, it sounds like USB PD is the way to go, right?

Well, sort of. If you have a Quick Charge 3.0 device, definitely get a Quick Charge 3.0 battery. But if you have a Quick Charge 4.0 device or an iOS device, get at USB PD battery for now.

Which Battery?

Now that you understand the fundamental charging technologies, which battery should you buy? When the first version of this article was released in 2018, the product selection on the market was much more limited — there are now dozens of vendors currently manufacturing USB PD products. Still, ZDNet recommends the following brands and models:

Anker (One of the largest Chinese manufacturers of Apple-certified accessories)

RavPower (Similar to Anker, typically more price competitive)

ZMI (Accessories ODM for Xiaomi, one of China’s largest smartphone manufacturers)

Aukey (Large Chinese accessories manufacturer, value pricing)

Mophie (Premium construction, Apple Store OEM accessory)

Zendure (High-end, ruggedized construction, high output ports)

Goalzero (Similar to Zendure)

OmniCharge (High-end, enterprise, vertical-industry targeted, advanced metering and power flow control)

Which wall/desktop charger?

As with the batteries, there are many vendors providing USB PD wall charging accessories. Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology, in particular, is something you should stronger consider in a wall charger if you are looking for maximum space efficiency in your travel bag and for power output. ZDNet recommends the following brands and products.

Anker

Aukey

RavPower

Zendure

[clearperception-blog1]

Why Choose WordPress for your Website 5 Reasons

Who is the Best WordPress Developer in Mumbai

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Which is the Top WordPress Website Developer in Sai Nagar?

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No Specific Standards For SEO

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Many Features To Add More Affects

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