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dukeofriven · 5 years

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From An Old Internet Veteran: Go, and Sin No More

I wish I could explain to young people how wild the internet was as it went from the ‘weird niche thing for lame nerds’ irrelevancy of the early 90s and the “Boy This World Wide Web Thing Sure Is Nifty”-style painful optimism that describes 97% of Western Culture between 1994 and 2002 to the ‘Mad Max But Statistically Less Australian” culture that was the internet from 2002 to around 2010. I come neither to praise this era of internet nor condemn it. I merely want understanding. I cannot polish a lumpen pile of rape jokes, Chuck Norris glorification, “ironic” racism, and numa numa fat shaming and say that it’s misunderstood comedic genius. Trash is still trash even if it wins a bunch of Emmys. But at the same time I cannot take you with me back to the 90s and get you to feel, on a visceral level, what it was like to live in a place where Bart Simpson was both promoted as a real and present danger to the moral upbringing of the world’s children and was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential icons of the 20th century. And because I cannot do that I cannot get you to understand how freeing it felt to be on the internet in that Mad Max era. Ten years before a yellow boy shouting “Don’t have a cow” while doing a pathetic kick-flip on a chunky skateboard was considered the potential downfall of humanity’s children, but now you could make something so risqué that the old-guard stuffed-shirt in 1994 would have died on the spot, his brain unable to consider anything so outside his moral world view. I cannot easily make you understand a time when nobody just said whatever it was they wanted, not just because they had no platform to do so but because the rigidity of social convention was so strong. Nobody ever had hardcore lesbian sex on Northern Exposure on prime time television. Nobody on the X-Files ever died by having their head smashed in a car door repeatedly like a melon until viscera spilled all over the pavement. You could not have made Game of Thrones or Steven Universe in 1995. Forget the graphics, forget the budget, you simply couldn’t do or say any of that on television for either kids or adults. The Mad Max internet changed that - changed the very firmament of what was acceptable in media for every genre and for every demographic. Is this a good thing? Not particularly. Is this a bad thing? Not particularly. If this sound frustratingly ambivalent that’s because it is: were we to go back and do it all again, knowing all that we know now, would we do it the same way? No. But then, we would not know all that we know now had we not learned it by making the attempt in the first place.

This poor comfort for someone who dives into some 2006 webcomic with a reputation of a Legacy Touchstone and finds it full of ‘jokes’ about their gender, or sexual preference, or the liberal use of the r-slur, or a kind of hyper-suburban comedic racial ignorance. I am not here to argue that that had any value merely because it was transgressive. But the same space that opened-up to let such ugly things out also opened-up places for marginalized groups to made themselves known, groups who never before had such public voices.

Imagine an apocalypse. Imagine society rebuilding in the ashes. Imagine how many false starts and missteps there would be and you begin to understand just a little of what that period was like. It was embarrassing. It was cruel. It was childish and stupid. But in living through it we grew up. Or, at least, those of us capable of growing up grew up, and learned, and learned to be better - learned what better was. And then we built new places where other people could learn too - and spread the gospel of being better. One of the things that always irritates me when it comes to young people talking about the past is the unexamined privilege of knowledge being at your fingertips. It’s more than just everyone carrying a wireless-internet connected computer in their pocket at all times. It’s more than just a Wikipedia with hundreds of millions of articles and a reputation for fact sourcing. It’s more than just a Google that works. If you never experienced it you cannot imagine what using WebCrawler was like in 1995 against Ask Jeeves in 2005 against Google in 2015 - or even Google between 2005 and 2015. Most people don’t go around thinking about SEO and search engine algorithms but maybe we should because anyone who wants to go “this info’s been on the internet since day one so people have no excuse not to know it” disingenuously argues that information search and retrieval has been consistent across the decades. There was a time - not all that long ago - when to look something up on-line involved getting the tacit agreement of everyone in your household to lose the use of the sole telephone for as long as you were web browsing. There was a time - not all that long ago - when ‘looking something up’ was to burden everyone around you with inconveniences, and while you were doing your web searches there was no guarantee what you wanted could be found with the primitive technology of the day. Do you know how much I’ve learned since joining Tumblr in 2011? On a fundamental level, both about myself and the make-up of our species in terms of social conception? I recently went through a bunch of old posts, removing those with broken links and meaningless content, but also shit that just embarrasses me now - mostly opinions from a period where I hadn’t yet had a chance to learn because the spaces in which to learn it did not yet exist. It’s not just things like communities for [demographic X] - it’s things like “communities for [demographic X] with an ability to broadcast their voices and have platforms able to network their ideas and audience halls able to receive them and a search engine to guide people to that community and a basic understanding that the community even exists in the first place.” And this does not even begin to touch on internet access, something that even now is not a universal thing, and for which getting angry about people’s ignorance reflects a bias all its own. I say all this because I think that a core tenant of cringe culture is a myth of universal access to knowledge and universal awareness of one’s own ignorance. I look back on old posts of things I said and I cringe with self-hatred - cringe enough to rip them down and stuff them in the trash. “HOW DID I THINK THAT?” and “HOW DID I NOT KNOW?” But why should I have known - what, in my life, would ever have put better ideas across my desk? That I can meaningfully speak now about privilege and intersectionality and historiography is because between then and now I was put in a place to learn these things. I was exposed to ideas that I had never before been exposed to, and was given the grace to learn. I am tired of the expectation that every aspect of our past selves should be held to the same standard as the present. (Yes, to all the disingenuous bad-faith trolls out there, I obviously and of course am advocating for complete and total uncritical pardon for everything in the past ever. Were you a neo-Nazi ten years ago? Water under the bridge without question because that’s obviously, obviously, obviously the sort of extreme outlier case I am talking about good on you for being clever enough to notice.) But for the non-dipshits out there who understand how to read without injecting insincere hyperbole into every argument, I want us to be kinder to our past selves when we have learned to be better. It’s okay that you used to like Sherlock - there were genuinely fun things about it, and it’s okay that you didn’t possess an expert grasp of post-graduate feminist critical theory when you were 21. Or 31. Or 41. More concepts of academia have filtered into mainstream consciousness than ever before - and in saying that we should remember the corollary that ten, twenty, thirty years ago that was not the case. We knew less, had access to less, and were exposed to narrower viewpoints than we are today. It is unfortunate - but it was not our fault, and we cannot easily blame ourselves for it any longer. Nothing makes my blood boil more than seeing people taking umbrage that... oh, Farmer Joe McSmithHead of Buttnut, Alabama in 1963 was ignorant of internal Chinese politics and said some untrue things about Chinese Communism. But the only thing Farmer Joe had to tell him of the outside world was a radio that played country music, a TV with four channels and strict content guidelines to only show pleasant, moral, and god-fearing content, and the three books in the Buttnut library, two of which were the Bible. There have, and will always be, certain moral lines so obvious that people of any era should always be held accountable to them. But above that, in the more trivial space of media consumption, absorption, and critique, we have to learn to be more forgiving - to ourselves and to others, so long as in the present we have changed. Did you use the r-slur a lot because it was practically a form of punctuation on 4chan and that’s where you learned the ways of the internet? Did you learn the harmfulness of this practice and cease to do it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Did you and your friends used to make jokes about how Mexicans smelled because you saw Seinfeld do that in his standup and the whole TV laughed as though it was funny? Did you realize one day ‘wait a minute that’s actually super gross’ and stop repeating it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Have you gone back to a beloved childhood property and found it’s full of woman-beating and weird views on homosexuality? Did you find yourself able to critique this beloved thing and did not defensively double-down on shielding it from all harsh words? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. I will not allow us to dismiss the cruelty and hurt of Mad Max Internet Culture with a flippant ‘well that’s just how it was back then” but nor will I allow anyone to condemn us all as being consciously unfeeling, willfully ignorant, purposefully hateful. Some of us were. But some of us did not know, could not have known, needed to learn - and we were lucky enough to live in a time before cringe culture and cancel culture where we were allowed to have that opportunity to learn and grow. We need that today, for all young people who think themselves as woke as can be and ten years from now will look back and blush with shame for things they said and did in total ignorance. The sin is choosing to never change, not failing to change sooner.

#cringe culture #cancel culture #4chan #mad max #internet culture #the simpsons #bart simpson #r-slur #x-files #game of thrones #steven universe #Northern Exposure #chuck norris #jerry seinfeld #Alabama #communism #long post

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freeselfeducation · 6 years

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& this goes back to the BODY: <----- use the language until it’s DAMPENED (my body is a trigger, shit) and where do you first learn about the BODY?

The Church : it’s sacred & a gift

Parents : a gift to the one you marry

The school : personal space

The Belief : after trauma to the Body, there’s only one way to make it sacred again

RTI is Response To Intervention

✔️✔️🔥 : Left for ME to #FIND

This is how my mind unWINDs by recalling the past & trusting self that none of their bullshhhIT can last, it’s in the PAST so the lessons they cast, I’m granted access and here’s everyone’s HALL PASS

An Entrance Slip & an Exit Slip

ES es is the sound sssss

gonna put Sarah Sanders down for the way she lies, a permanent frown, the focus is morality, trust yo’self that you’ll never drOWn

let go of the ways that hurt worse

stay the course, emotions 101, thought works

ED IT & be delivered from it

Elevate Difference Delineate Ignorance

...now create it, let’s begin...

THE PAST [thoughts caught]

When a student (or any person) is struggling options do exist IF willing to LEARN about what deep down motivates them? Know your JOB...

ED flashback a student is meant to learn, make mistakes, ask questions & get everything they CAN before it’s over. That time to be wrong & to be “happy,” more like secure.

The greatest benefit a parent or teacher can provide to create LIFELONG LEARNERS, those rare firecrackers who pop when a new idea hits, as if it entered their heads, made contact with the appropriate thinking that already existed & with that spark, a wild inferno can grow and that’s the point where we forgot that spark! From the very smallest, something very grand or very dangerous can develop & you must GO THROUGH that fire, feel it’s char, taste its rage.

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed so the impact that got me here needs its polar opposite & that’s sights, sounds, physical touches, repeated battering, voices that don’t stop yet at the same time aren’t saying anything to HELP, and in some cases, with conscious harm. Let’s sound the alarms!! This is the first time connecting two thoughts that have roamed freely and never meeting -- consciousness & alarms -- with the fact on the street, this was the first sound that alerted me to a change.

I’d do what I’d usually do when I hear an ambulance, or cop car, a firetruck, who knows, you gotta look, but when I turned OUCH & then whoosh, and crack, snap, rattle and OUUUUCH. Then I learned when I heard that sound to not do what I’ve done since a very small girl, being told to pay attention when you hear this! Look up & get your wits about ya, to get outta the way! To pray (for those in need & for those who are going to help)

THE SELF : physical, emotional. mental. sexual & the #1 thing that determines a happy life or one met with daily suffering : independence & beyond

When you have the ability to support yourself (& family) & not fear where you’ll sleep, what you’ll eat & drink for the next days, weeks, safety being the #1 factor for us to work hard (support families or pets), stay true (not just for social media shaming) & most of all TAKE PRIDE in WHO WE ARE & make that matter most

When standards slide, it si 100% certain that most will take advantage & the ones who are “above that” look the other way, so a new type of self-education that I’m demanding after a series of events that connected ABUSES between home/school that we all experience...I just got to see behind-the-scenes of MAJOR HYPOCRISY and it changed me.

In these posts, this DISorder of words, thoughts & not having control of my body is new experience & don’t just appear out of nowhere. A series of events had to happen for this to happen, but the story about me, it’s those that let IT happen over & over and also those who PRESED in with consciousness.

Having a self-DOubt never felt before how shown me what you MUST DO & NOT DO post tragedy, whatever the trauma is & I will be sharing some of the tricks & strategies to help build your ability to self-education, only after TRAUMA & in the ways that relate to primary age kids since we must ACCEPT there are differences in intelligence that gives people an edge.

It’s taking a long time to figure out a format that will EFFECTIVELY help manage racing thoughts that are triggers, and have been masked in every & all ways based on others’ opinions, assumption & flat out selfishness & ability to ever see another person before self & THIS is the enemy that promoted the creation of this blog. To feel this strongly to do this (for me, someone who has not embraced tech for many many reasons, but most of all, I prefer the “real-world” and my attentions remains in the “real-world” but I needed a way to stay connected after multiple assaults & a physical injury & mental diagnosis (PTSD) that I can finally say, “thanks” to.

The reason for that is if it’s genuine, the feeling is REAL, successful movement through the acute stages have been competed & now you get to restructure, re-build that life & with knowledge of the past & now, I can say this with enthusiasm, but it wasn’t automatic & can’t be done with “a thought” or “repeated effort” or even “time,” this being the solution but only because it’s forgotten, right? The body remembers 100%. What it takes to end trauma is making the BEST of “your WORST” and the first step are in the details...

FBA (Functional Behavior Analysis) is the prompting event:

The prompting event is the moment “behavior” or “thoughts” or a “feeling” appear that create emotion (good or bad) with a focus on the undesirable ones. To say “negative” means a negative & the idea is to be positive or neutral in words since we’re describing behaviors, not the student (where I learned to track, assess, recommend, monitor, adapt, reflect, conclude, repeat) since I will never accept that a student is the problem until all avenues are exhausted since the opinion to GIVE UP, LABEL, assume is “low” or give a “name to,” let’s say weird, these acts done without EFFORT or THOUGHT. It’s become normal. Violence. Already dripping with humiliation from individuals who could so easily lie. Don’t you want to know the effect of your lies?

EXPOSING MYSELF in the safest way I know how--through books, language, words & imagery since their PRACTICE is to reward for SILENCE & ACCEPTANCE of a belief that is simply not possible to stay IN ME.

The word was Weird this being the trigger to go back to all the ways one is mentally abused, summed up in one word, so can it be erased & destroyed with one word, too?

Why did FBA create triggers?

A : it was a waste of time to ever have to write...

AA : Absolute Answer ∆ it’s paperwork that is done but HAS NO MEANING

other examples of paperwork : yes yes yes yes yes yes, omg

Children Crying from self-harm & wanting friends & using absolutes (e.g. NEVER, ALWAYS) that linger on an ECHO--ECHOO--ECHOOO...the same exact words as this child, made from a child that is in an adult body. Now it’s getting interesting. Crying & DOING harm in the same ways -->-->-->--> this triggered the ACT of discrimination of being given NO classroom & made to LEARN in settings that guarantees TEACHING is a waste of time. Not really fair, see. You can’t just shuffle these kids around when a perfectly suitable space is available & that’s where I ask for motivation?

Why do such a deceitful thing?

I simply did not know that IT takes TIME to know why people do what they do. Now that I know I can see that I survivED, but I also can’t NOT share what I learned from this experience since it something CHANGES LIFE as you know it, at the very least, you reflect a little

Dedicated to the master of self-education : TY 🤗

#let's begin

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amorphousalien · 7 years

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So, not that literally anyone cares, but here's the deal with that person that was harassing me all week. Waay back in the good ol days of mid 2015 (sarcasm, fuck 2015)- I was experiencing a lot of really intense, frequent Rick shifts that were making me near catatonically depressed and dissociated. After seeing the season 2 finale, they just got worse. So I opted to unfollow all the r/n/m blogs I was following, stay out of the tags, stop looking canonmates, etc pretty much everything but actually taking Rick off my kinlist because I wasn't coping with it well and I needed to take a break. I even put on several pages of my blog that I did not want /anyone/ kin from ric/kandmorty contacting me because at the time it was basically a trigger. Then I start getting messages fromsomeome kin with M/orty, asking to talk to me, compare memories, etc. I told them I didn't want to talk to anyone, that it was triggering, etc. I accidentally posted one of their asks publically instead of privately, because mobile sux, and wound up getting a slew of TERRIFYING messages from them saying shit like "How could you do this to me?? I trusted you!! You exposed us!! How could you do this why would you do this to us?? I'm going to have to delete my tumblr because of you, how could you do this, we trusted you!" I panicked, deleted the ask, apologized profusely, and was generally successfully guilt tripped into allowing this person to continue messaging me and probing me for information about my Rick kintype. For maybe 6 months, they continued talking to me. I would ignore them for as long as I could, but eventually caved and replied to them out of boredom or fear, or they'd send me a slew of guilt trippy messages apologizing for bothering me, saying they were such an awful person, they always did this, everyone hates them etc etc etc. After 6 months, I was accepted to Job Corps and told them I was leaving for school and would have no internet access until I graduated. About four months into school l, my parents bought me a phone and were paying for my service. I logged back into tumblr to find about twenty "Hey"s and "Hi"s and "Oh my god I'm so sorry I know you hate me I just don't know what to do I'm so awful I'm sorry for bothering you"s in my messages from them. I told them I was in school and wouldn't have time to message them very often. I wanted them to just leave me alone, but I didn't want to be outright mean and they weren't taking the hint that I didn't want to talk to them. Or maybe they were and that's why they'd send me that guilt trippy bullshit every few weeks. And unfortunately I was an anxious wreck having just escaped multiple physically, memtally, emotionally, and sexually abusive relationships at this point. So I was easily manipulated and desperate for friendship. Which they knew. I'd mentioned it briefly and had vented about it multiple times on my kin blog. Anywho. I came back from school after about 6 months. Tumblr had dome some weird update and I couldn't log into my account anymore (except from my ipad where I was still logged in). I remade my account and directed everyone to my new kin blog (this one). I'd kinda forgotten about them at this point, but when I remade my blog they started messaging me again. I was pretty worn down and still pretty desperate for friends. I was recovering from the depressive Rick shifts and started talking to them more and more about our canons, and eventually decided we were canonmates. By the time we'd 'known' each other for about a year, they'd mentioned to me multiple times that they were living in an abusive situation and needed to get out. Three things about that last sentence. 1. *Known: Our entire relationship was one of us (mostly them) messaging the other every few days, or even every couple of weeks, to say "Hey"-"Hi"-"How are you"-"Fine, you?"-"I'm ok" and then maybe they'd complain (extremely vaguely) about something going on at home. 2. Everything they said about their abuse was extremely vague. The most detail I could ever get was that the house they were living in was not being maintained and there was never any food. Which they blamed on their parents despite being a 20 year old adult. 3. I'd spent hours trying to give them help getting out. I looked up resource centers in their area, homeless shelters, disability, food stamps, offered to write their resume for them, etc etc etc. I was practically offering to do everything for them to get them on their feet, and they shot down my advice every single time. Around 11 months into our friendship, they told me they couldn't take being there anymore and they were going to run away. They didn't know where they were going, didn't care, kept talking about being homeless and living on the streets to get away from where they were now. So I told them to come to Colorado (where I live) so I could at least offer help in person. November of 2016, they bought a bus ticket and came to Colorado. I picked them up and took them to my apartment (a three bedroom townhouse I shared with three roommates. They were all upstairs, I lived in a sectioned off half-room behind the living room). At the time, I was working 40 hours a week at a thrift store making about 9$/h. This job was not only tearing my already chronically ill body apart, but was also causing weekly psychotic episodes and mental breakdowns. I was 3000$ in debt with my roommates. My rent was 400$/month and I was making maybe 700$/month. Even so. I was using all of my spare money feeding them, buying them a tracphone and service, toiletries, clothes, etc etc Despite how much I was spending on them, they were still asking for more food, expensive food, cigarettes, alcohol, and weed. And if I didn't say yes, they'd spiral into depressive episodes, hiding either in my room, the living room, or the bathroom, and cry. And then ask again twenty minutes later. Over. And over again. Until I said yes. They talked 24/7. Literally. 24/7. From the SECOND I came home from work til I went to bed. And frequently came into my room multiple times throughout the night to ask for cigarettes and weed. Despite the fact that I had to wake up at 6am for work. It got to the point where, despite being in constant physical pain and despite the mental break downs, I was volunteering for overtime at work every single day to afford to keep them fed and to just fucking avoid their non stop talking and guilt tripping. And this was not non stop conversing. It was non stop THEM talking. I didn't exist. I could not get a word in. They didn't expect me to reply except for an occasional "Isn't that funny/weird?" or "Do you ever do that that??". I basically clocked out mentally any time I was home. I wasn't a person to them. I was just expected to listen quietly to their thousand and one stories. I already made posts back when this started about what happened while they lived with me, so I'm not gonna go into any more detail. I don't remember most of it anyways. It was such an incredibly stressful point in my life, I developed a new alter in my system. I was rarely fronting. It was so bad, the alter that /never/ fronts, had to take over to deal with what was happening. This person has been stalking me from the second they found my blog, and five months after I kicked them out and blocked them, they're still stalking me. I had to install an ip tracker on my blog. They were checking my blog damn near 20 times a day and sending me 10 or more messages every day. I barely posted half of what I got. I was even so desperate as to text their mom to beg for help. I wanted this to end before it started. I never wanted to know them. I want nothing to do with them. I don't want to be dealing with this. I am an asocial agoraphobic shut-in. I don't want any part of this. I don't care what happens to them. I don't care what happens to Rain or Darcy or the 'KuroNekoClan'. All I was is for this to be over. I want to be left alone. I want to finish repressing everything about them. I want them to completely disappear from my memory. I have never hated nor been so terrified of someone as I am in regards to this person. I'm gonna go back to radio silence on this blog for a few more days just to be sure they're not still checking it. Everyone can still PM and I'll still reply to asks, but I'm not gonna be posting on here til I feel safe.

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billydmacklin · 5 years

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Fall Checklist: DIY Spray Foam Insulation with Dow Froth-Pak!

This blog mini-series is a paid partnership with Lowe’s! Thank you for supporting my sponsors!

If you’ve read the title of this post and are thinking it’s already winter, then meteorologically yes, you’d be correct. BUT NOT ACCORDING TO ASTRONOMY, which places the first day of winter on December 21st this year, so take that! We’ll now move forward with the premise that it’s still fall and I’m right on schedule with wrapping up a semi-gargantuan to-do list of time-sensitive projects I really wanted to accomplish before this winter—at which point I will…uh…keep working, but on different stuff. Fun stuff. I’m excited for this winter stuff.

So. Having taken care of some overdue work like overseeding my grass, planting shrubs, pressure washing filthy siding, securing my garage/personal lumber yard, and wrapping up the major outstanding work on the side of the house, I’m turning my attention back toward the inside of the house. And there was a pretty major, glaring issue that I’m a little ashamed to admit. Behold:

It’s literally been YEARS since we’ve talked about it, but maybe you remember this room above my kitchen? It’s been through a lot…maybe this will jog your memory? Behold, again:

When I bought this house, it had been divided into two apartments and this room served as the upstairs apartment’s kitchen. I wrote about the preliminary demo work all the way back in 2013…and then evidently didn’t mention it again except in the context of the exterior work which involved removing the door and the window and replacing them with two little casement windows—an approximation of what I think that back wall originally looked like.

Anyway. At some point in there, I gutted the whole room. Part of one wall had been lost early on to a plumbing issue. Another wall because of the new window arrangement. The rest of the walls and ceiling were a material probably installed in the 1930s called Celotex, which is generally used as a rigid insulation board rather than a finished wall surface, but I digress. It all had to go—nothing original left anyway. Unlike the rest of the house, this section is 1 1/2 story—meaning there’s no attic above this room, and no reason the ceiling can’t be vaulted up to the ridge. Sweet!

Except…that was approximately 3 years ago. And aside from becoming a dumping ground for random crap (what else do you do when your mom sends you boxes of stuff you thought had long since been disposed of from your childhood bedroom?), it’s just sat that way. A shell full of potential, but not even approaching the top of any priority list.

Do you spot a problem here? I’ll give you a big hint that’s literally in the title of the post: NO INSULATION. I LIVE IN UPSTATE NEW YORK, PEOPLE. HEAT IS EXPENSIVE AND IT GETS COLD COLD COLD. WHAT A BAD CHOICE.

Seeing as this uninsulated room also became an unheated room as a result of other work, and therefore basically a barn atop my kitchen, this has meant a frigid kitchen below and the necessity of a space heater up here in the winter to prevent the pipes from freezing, as my bathroom is on the other side of one of the walls. Lest you feel like that’s overkill, I initiated this program only after the pipes had already frozen.

Twice.

Now, I’m no energy efficiency expert (SURPRISE!), but this much I know. Hot air rises. Insulation keeps it from rising up and out of the house. I chose not to insulate between floors in my house (a subject of some debate in the renovation world), meaning that any heat from my kitchen/first floor rises up into this room, and then promptly out the walls/roof and away into the sky. You know that emoji of the flying stack of money? That’s kind of what I’ve come to picture emerging from my roofline around this time of year.

If you’ve worked on an old house, you’ve likely encountered the issue of insulation at one point or another. There are many options out there, each with their own pros and cons, but one that’s been gaining major traction for the last couple decades is closed-cell spray foam insulation. There are a lot of great things about it—it’s efficient, fairly quick to install, provides a vapor barrier, and even improves the structural rigidity of a building. That last aspect dovetails nicely with the fact that it fills irregular gaps and areas in an existing structure that might be difficult to access/fill with more traditional products like fiberglass bat. Old houses tend to have both weird areas like that and structural components that may not necessarily be a problem but also wouldn’t meet modern building standards, so the added structural strength—while it shouldn’t be relied upon to resolve an actual structural issue—is a nice bonus. To my knowledge, closed-cell spray foam application has always been the purview of professional installers, but now there’s an option for the ambitious homeowner or budding professional too! That’s me!

We are talking specifically about the Dow Froth-Pak system, available at Lowe’s! Right off the bat I want to make clear that this stuff is SERIOUS BUSINESS—while this post is intended to help others and share my experience, you absolutely must read the manual that comes with the kit, take all necessary precautions, and research anything you feel uneasy about before trying this at home. Don’t be stupid, basically. Let’s dive in.

When I first saw this product, I didn’t totally know what to make of it. Is it closed cell or open cell? Can someone like me even use it? Is it just a big version of those cans of Great Stuff? Can I do a whole room? A whole house? What is a board foot??! I will try to address all of these things, because there isn’t a ton of information online about it in one place.

EVALUATE YOUR PROJECT

So you’re thinking of using Dow Froth-Pak to meet an insulation need. There are a few things to consider.

How much area are you trying to cover? My room is about 13′ x 16′, with a vaulted ceiling about 10′ at the peak. Two of those walls are exterior walls that need to be insulated, as well as the whole ceiling. I haven’t excluded windows in that calculation, which is my lazy way to round up when figuring out what I need plus accounting for some waste. I think this product is good for a situation like mine—where you need to do ONE room or ONE ceiling or something like that, or you want to seal up areas like where floor joists meet the rim joist over a foundation in an entire basement. If the project is bigger than that, I’d definitely recommend at least quoting the job with a professional spray foam installer—it may actually be less expensive than buying the amount of kits you’d have to buy, and obviously save you some serious, potentially hazardous work.

Is there a product better suited to your needs? There are several compelling reasons to choose spray-foam insulation—but fiberglass bat, blown-in cellulose, or a number of other products may help bring costs down. In my case, I have irregularly spaced studs, meaning variably sized stud cavities, as well as a lot of weird shapes and angles (due to post-and-beam construction and the vaulted ceiling) that would make installation of other products difficult. Obviously insulation works best when it achieves good coverage, and all of the irregularities with my framing would leave opportunities for lots of gaps and cracks with a product that can’t easily adapt to the shape of its space.

Are you up for it? If you’re not one for following directions or reading warning labels, avoid this. It’s not technically difficult but it can be somewhat physically demanding and messy. You also need to be at the proper stage of your project—which is AFTER framing work (including adding nailers or furring!), rough electric and rough plumbing are done. If you aren’t ready to put up drywall, you aren’t ready for spray foam insulation.

CALCULATE THE AMOUNT OF PRODUCT YOU NEED

Dow Froth-Pak is closed-cell insulation, created by combining the contents of two tanks. One difference between closed-cell and open-cell spray foam is the thickness you want to spray. Open-cell spray foam is less dense, so you can fill a stud cavity and cut away the excess before installing your finished walls. Closed-cell is denser (with a higher R-value) and ideally should be a bit recessed in the stud bay—it can be cut back, but it’s more difficult. The amount of product you need will depend on the thickness you want to achieve. Each inch of thickness creates about R-6. So two inches = R-12, three inches = R-18, and so on. Local building code may require a minimal R-value depending on where you’re installing—always check.

Calculate your BOARD FEET. The Froth-Paks come in different sizes—to make it simple, let’s look at the Froth-Pak 210. The “210” refers to the number of board feet—which is a measure of volume, NOT surface area, but all you need to know to calculate it is the square footage of the areas you need to cover. It’s a simple calculation:

Length in inches x Width in inches x Preferred depth of the spray foam in inches. Divide the result by 144.

So for example, an 8′ x 8′ wall with 3″ of foam would be:

96″ x 96″ x 3″ = 27,648 / 144 = 192 Board Feet

In other words, one Dow Froth-Pak 210 will provide about 3.25″ thickness of foam over an 8’x8′ wall.

AND THAT IS AS MUCH MATH AS I EVER WANT TO DO IN BLOG FORMAT. This is not a math blog. I’m sure those exist and I’m also sure I’m not interested.

I was hoping to get about 3 inches of spray foam on all exterior walls/ceilings, and my total board feet was about 1,350. Ideally I would have bought two Froth-Pak 650s and one Froth-Pak 210, but the 650 was out of stock so I bought all 210s instead. The product is the same, it’s just the amount in each kit that changes.

The total cost of that, by the way? A little over $1,800 clams. Add in various other supplies (we’ll get to that!) and it’s about $2,000 to insulate this room. To be honest I was excited to try the product and didn’t try to quote it out to a professional, so I can’t tell you how they compare cost-wise, but local labor prices can be all over the map so I’m not sure how helpful that would be anyway.

INSTALLING THE DOW FROTH-PAK FOAM INSULATION KIT

SO. With framing, furring (mostly just to compensate for old, uneven framing), and electric complete, it’s time to get down to it! Again—I AM NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE MANUAL. I’m just a guy with a dream of a warm house in January.

Step 1: Check the temperature of your tank contents—this threw me for a loop so I’m making it item 1. There is a small temperature gauge on the side of the tanks, and a cut-out on the front of the box so you can read it without even unpacking everything. The interior contents of the tanks need to be between 75-85 degrees for optimal performance/mixing. This is a two-part system, so dispensing the proper mix is essential, and the temperature affects that. 75-85 degrees is WARM! Just sitting in my house, the tanks were reading much too cold so I placed the whole box on top of my cast iron hot water radiators (which are toasty to the touch but nowhere near enough to burn you), making sure to check them every 20 minutes or so as the contents slowly warmed up. NOTE: Dow recommends use of a particular heat tape or heat blanket for this purpose. I didn’t have them. Again, don’t be stupid—this had the contents heating at a pace of about 5 degrees per hour, so it took a few hours. Heating too rapidly/aggressively could cause an explosion, you crazy thing!

Step 2: Prep! If you don’t want it to get covered in spray foam, mask it off—ideally with something you don’t mind throwing away at the end. I had some already used 6-mil plastic in the garage that I used to mask off the chimney, the baseboards, and the door to the room. If I had more I’d have used it on the floor, too, but I just had this tarp. You also want to seal off the work space from the rest of the house as well as you can, and ventilate it (I opened all the windows and had a good cross-breeze, but the manual goes into good detail). I used my Bostitch pneumatic staple gun (currently on sale for $40!!) to keep my masking in place—it was a bit easier to put it up when working alone, and more secure than tape. Contractor bags worked nicely for wrapping the collar ties, which will probably be cleaned up a little and left exposed.

Step 3: Put on your costume! Like I said—this is serious business. Spray foam is both extremely sticky when wet and all kinds of toxic, so this is not a place you want to skimp. That means a disposable full-body suit, full protective eyewear, chemical resistant gloves, and a full-face or half-mask air-purifying respirator—I used this 3M one from Lowe’s, fitted with these cartridges. Small tip I wish I had: cover the face of your goggles with clear packing tape that you can remove and replace as needed. Dried spray foam can be removed from glass with a razor blade, but goggles are plastic and overspray may accumulate and make it difficult to see, and the spray foam will not come off without scratching them up too much to be usable. A headlamp may be helpful for darker spaces—I love this rechargeable LED Craftsman one (also on sale!).

Step 4: Unbox your Froth-Pak kit, ensuring the temperature gauge is between 75-85 degrees. The room and surfaces to be sprayed don’t have to be that warm, just the interior contents of the tanks. Shake both tanks for 30-60 seconds. You can shake them individually or use the carrying handle to hold them above the ground and rock them back and forth.

Step 5: Open the top valves on both tanks COMPLETELY. It’s very important that both valves are entirely open to ensure a proper mix. You should see the chemicals move through the hoses as the valves are opened—one is clear and one is brown-ish.

Step 6: Using the packet provided, apply some petroleum jelly to the inside face of the dispenser. This is primarily if you plan to use the Froth-Pak over multiple sessions and need to keep the dispenser free of dried foam between uses.

Step 7: Insert the nozzle into the dispenser gun. The Froth-Pak comes with two nozzle shapes—a blue “fan” nozzle and a clear “cone” nozzle. For a situation like mine, the fan nozzle proved the most helpful in terms of creating an even spray across a large surface. Dow gives you lots of spare nozzles that you may or may not use—but after you’ve started with one, it has to be changed any time there’s more than 30 seconds between sprays because the product cures so quickly and any blockage could screw up the ratio of the two parts. When the nozzle is fully inserted, you should hear a click and the yellow nozzle ejector will be clamped down.

Step 8: Pointing the dispenser into a container like a trash can (I used the box it all came in), purge the lines for 5-10 seconds. Foam should dispense pretty quickly.

Step 9: Practice! TAKE THIS PART SERIOUSLY. It definitely takes some getting used to. Using whatever you have available (I had a scrap piece of sheetrock), practice applying the foam as you will on your surface. You want to stay perpendicular to the surface, at an even distance (6″-24″ away), moving at an even pace in a side to side stroke. ALSO. VERY IMPORTANT. The foam only cures properly (and safely) if the layer of expanded foam is 2 inches or less. It will expand 3-4 times its thickness, so you want an even 1/4″-1/2″ coverage while you spray. Inconsistencies in your pace, distance, or angle will result in an uneven application—and it’s harder than it looks, I promise. Especially with all that gear on and the pace you kind of need to keep up.

Step 10: Check your practice area. About 1 minute after spraying, it should have fully expanded and dried to the touch. It’s fully cured in 5 minutes—which is kind of bonkers.

Step 11: Start spraying! At this point you’ll probably want to change your nozzle. Using all the knowledge in your brains and safety equipment on your body, get to work. Perpendicular to your surface. Even distance. Even pace. Side to side. 1/4″-1/2″ thickness. Don’t panic. Because the foam cures so quickly, you can apply additional layers within minutes to build up to your final thickness—it’s better to do several thin applications than a too-thick application . To ensure you don’t run out of nozzles, you want to work fairly quickly. Avoid applying foam over foam that was just sprayed and is in the process of curing, and avoid build-up of foam beyond the depth of the wall, as this will need to be removed later on. Each Froth-Pak 210 took me about 20-30 minutes to mix, get set up, and use. By the way, the foam will stick to a lot of things including rigid foam boards—which you can see were already installed on parts of the back wall, and I just sprayed right over them since there was plenty of space in the cavity. Those foam boards should be R-10 on their own.

Step 12: The tanks will become increasingly lightweight as the contents are dispensed, which makes them more likely to tip over as you move. I’d highly recommend having a helper for this job (also in full protective equipment) who can help ensure the tanks stay upright, move them while you work around the room, and help identify areas that need more applied. As the tanks are nearing empty, you will notice the pressure change (kind of a quick sputtering) and the foam may look slightly different (darker, more viscous). STOP IMMEDIATELY. This foam is the wrong ratio and will not expand/cure properly—don’t think you can squeeze just a little more out, because those tanks are DONE. RETIRED. NO MORE FOAM 4 U. The tanks should feel empty, although there might be a little more liquid in there you can hear. That’s OK. It’s still done. I promise.

Step 13: Do not. Think that. You can just. Throw these things away. I said it all dramatic like that so you read past the word “done” (see item 12.). The manual explains a whole easy-peasy but super duper important disposal protocol, which is in place so you don’t inadvertently cause an explosion. I have nothing new to add to that so just please make sure you read it and do it, ok?

SO. IT HAS COME TO PASS. The whole insulation process took about 4-5 hours start to finish (including the masking and prep, but the tanks had to heat up for longer beforehand), and I think the coverage was basically as advertised so I didn’t need additional tanks. I found the technique of getting an even coating fairly challenging (you can see areas that look good and areas that look…not so good)—I do feel like I improved throughout the process, but since my first coat wasn’t especially smooth I didn’t give myself the best foundation. Like with painting, small lumps become bigger and bigger lumps with each new coat.

I was a bit nervous about fumes, but I left the windows open for about 12 hours after finishing up and I really don’t notice a smell when I go in there! Like…at all? Maybe something faint that could also be my imagination? I can tell you the difference is like night and day, heat-wise. It hasn’t been there long enough to know how it affects my bills/consumption (and those two casement windows are still drafty as hell—another thing on the ole to-do), but the kitchen below feels warmer and suddenly this room is OK to be in! It’s 30 degrees out! The street noise is also much quieter, and the whole room is immediately so much BRIGHTER—which doesn’t really matter because it’ll all be covered, but it makes it so much easier to work in especially in the evening hours which is when I’m the most likely to tackle stuff.

SO MUCH EASIER, IN FACT, that now I’m like…am I finishing this room now? To be totally honest I’ve forced myself to kind of stay away from it for a long time now just because there are so many more pressing things (I SEE YOU, KITCHEN. I JUST CAN’T AFFORD YOU. I’M WORKING ON IT.)…but now that it’s to this point, and I feel like I know what I want to do, it’s pretty much just a bunch of carpentry I could chip away at? Little by little? With supplies I mostly already have? And then? I could? Have guests? Like a person? Who owns a rather large house? And lives? Alone?

Dare to dream.

Fall Checklist: DIY Spray Foam Insulation with Dow Froth-Pak! published first on https://carpetgurus.tumblr.com/

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carygarman980 · 5 years

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Fall Checklist: DIY Spray Foam Insulation with Dow Froth-Pak!

This blog mini-series is a paid partnership with Lowe’s! Thank you for supporting my sponsors!

It’s literally been YEARS since we’ve talked about it, but maybe you remember this room above my kitchen? It’s been through a lot…maybe this will jog your memory? Behold, again:

Twice.

EVALUATE YOUR PROJECT

So you’re thinking of using Dow Froth-Pak to meet an insulation need. There are a few things to consider.

CALCULATE THE AMOUNT OF PRODUCT YOU NEED

Length in inches x Width in inches x Preferred depth of the spray foam in inches. Divide the result by 144.

So for example, an 8′ x 8′ wall with 3″ of foam would be:

96″ x 96″ x 3″ = 27,648 / 144 = 192 Board Feet

In other words, one Dow Froth-Pak 210 will provide about 3.25″ thickness of foam over an 8’x8′ wall.

AND THAT IS AS MUCH MATH AS I EVER WANT TO DO IN BLOG FORMAT. This is not a math blog. I’m sure those exist and I’m also sure I’m not interested.

INSTALLING THE DOW FROTH-PAK FOAM INSULATION KIT

Step 8: Pointing the dispenser into a container like a trash can (I used the box it all came in), purge the lines for 5-10 seconds. Foam should dispense pretty quickly.

Step 10: Check your practice area. About 1 minute after spraying, it should have fully expanded and dried to the touch. It’s fully cured in 5 minutes—which is kind of bonkers.

Dare to dream.

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chocolate-brownies · 6 years

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I despise making school lunches. Each morning, I stumble through the motions of slicing cucumbers, rinsing berries, and filling water bottles, all the while feeling irritable and even slightly resentful. The lunches aren’t particularly challenging to assemble — my daughters are content with mild variations on the theme of sandwich, fruit, veggies, and a salty, crunchy snack.

Even so, I can’t stand it. There’s no good reason for my annoyance, but there it is every morning, as dependable as the sunrise and my daughters’ hunger rages if I don’t put enough food in their lunch bags.

And then one morning a thought suddenly popped into my mind, emerging unbidden through the cloud of crankiness.

I am so lucky.

Within seconds, those four words bloomed throughout my awareness, and all I could think about was how lucky I am. I am so lucky to live in a home with electricity, running water, and a functional refrigerator. I am so lucky to live near a grocery store with a plentiful selection of fresh food and snacks, to live in a world where pre-packaged pretzels and reusable ice-packs exist — and to have enough money to afford them. I am so lucky to have the physical ability to get myself out of bed, walk down the stairs, and make their lunches. I am so lucky to have two daughters who are healthy enough to eat and digest the food I send with them.

I am so damn lucky.

I can’t tell you where this sudden burst of gratitude came from, but I do know this: that small shift in perspective immediately made my morning lunch routine immensely easier. Rather than feeling frustrated and annoyed, I felt calm and present. Rather than mentally grumbling my way through the morning, I was able to appreciate my situation.

Rather than feeling frustrated and annoyed, I felt calm and present. Rather than mentally grumbling my way through the morning, I was able to appreciate my situation.

I had found the mental salve to my morning moodiness. Now, whenever I notice my internal annoyance ramping up, I respond with gratitude.

I am so grateful for peanut butter. Thank goodness for this magical source of protein that my daughters will actually eat. And jelly, sweet, sweet, jelly. I can’t forget sliced bread — oh, the magic of sliced bread! Imagine if I had to cut those slices myself each morning? What a mess that would be.

Don’t get me wrong — I still don’t enjoy making lunches, but the process doesn’t feel like such a struggle when I remember to be grateful. It gives me just enough space from my cranky brain to choose a different response to whatever is going on.

Five Ways Gratitude Can Make Parenting Easier

Gratitude has become one of my go-to responses to difficult parenting situations, and not just during mundane or unpleasant tasks. Here are few other times:

1. When I’m completely exhausted and just can’t deal. Whenever this happens, I am at high risk of throwing my own private pity party, which doesn’t help anything. A moment of gratitude shuts that party down so I can get clear on what I need to do and get through the rest of the day.

2. Whenever my girls get sick or injured, my thoughts start spinning. I waver between worrying about their health and stressing about the work I won’t get done. Reminding myself of all I have to be grateful for — that they aren’t sicker, that we have access to pediatric emergency rooms, skilled doctors, and health insurance — halts my mind’s cycle of rumination (which only augments stress and worry) and helps me get steady on my feet again so I can do what’s needed — not just stress in circles.

3. When I’m anxious about the future. My daughter’s health is just one of the many issues that trigger my anxiety — the full list could fill a library. Anxiety thrives in future thinking — gratitude lives in the present. When I focus on everything there is to appreciate in the here and now, my anxiety decreases dramatically.

It’s as if I’m in constant Cinderella mode — the more beautiful the shoe is, the more I worry about the other one dropping.

4. When I can’t help but imagine the worst. I have an incredible ability to catastrophize my way through almost any experience, even the positive ones. It’s as if I’m in constant Cinderella mode — the more beautiful the shoe is, the more I worry about the other one dropping. Focusing on all that I have to be grateful for helps me savor the best moments of parenting, rather than getting caught up in imagining the worst.

5. When I’m distracted. I try to stay as present as I can for my kids, but sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard because parenting can be boring or infuriating or confusing or downright gross. Sometimes I can bring myself back with a few deep breaths, but other times I need a stronger anchor. Gratitude is that anchor.

How to Be Grateful When Parenting is Grating on You

One of the many cool things about gratitude is that the more you practice it, the more easily it will come to you. Before you know it, you’ll be grateful to be covered in toddler vomit at 2 AM. And yes, toddler vomit at 2 AM totally sucks, but at least you’re not adding to the suckage.

When I’m at the end of my tether, I often add a little humor, hence, I’ve created a mental cue with the acronym GRATE — a way to inspire feelings of gratitude when parenting starts to grate on me:

G — Gratitude: Remember that gratitude is a go-to practice in difficult moments. R — Realize: Realize that you’re in a negative headspace — this is the first and crucial step toward an attitude adjustment. A — Appreciate: Find something to appreciate. Anything, really. If you’re struggling, here are a few options to get you started:

Your teeth didn’t just spontaneously fall out of your face. (Or maybe just noticing them now gave you an opportunity to unclench your jaw or anywhere else you might be holding tension in your face.)

You don’t have a massive sinkhole in the middle of your kitchen.

Toilet paper. (I once spent an entire summer using newspaper. Don’t ask. Just be grateful.)

Gravity. Oh, beautiful, dependable, gravity. (You think toddler vomit is bad? Try FLOATING toddler vomit. Yeah. Um. No.)

You are still breathing. This ain’t nothing, people. Take a few deep breaths if for no other reason than you can.

T — Thank you. Send a little mental or verbal shout-out to whoever you want: the universe, your pediatrician, spouse, car, or cat, the stranger who gave you back your daughter’s pacifier when she dropped it, or even your kitchen floor for not suddenly opening up under your feet. E — Enjoy the moment: Enjoy the moment of peace and calm — it won’t be long before your kids give you another opportunity to practice gratitude. Again.

Manage Big Parenting Feelings Before They Manage You

A 5-Minute Gratitude Practice: Focus on the Good by Tapping into Your Senses

The post The Power of Gratitude in Parenting appeared first on Mindful.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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blogdasuma-blog · 7 years

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Goodbye Age of Hadoop – Hello Cambrian Explosion of Deep Learning

New Post has been published on http://dasuma.es/es/goodbye-age-hadoop-hello-cambrian-explosion-deep-learning/

Goodbye Age of Hadoop – Hello Cambrian Explosion of Deep Learning

Summary: Some observations about new major trends and directions in data science drawn from the Strata+Hadoop conference in San Jose last week.

I’m fresh off my annual field trip to the Strata+Hadoop conference in San Jose last week. This is always exciting, enervating, and exhausting but it remains the single best place to pick up on what’s changing in our profession.

This conference is on a world tour with four more stops before repeating next year. The New York show is supposed to be a little bigger (hard to imagine) but the San Jose show is closest to our intellectual birthplace. After all this is the place where to call yourself a nerd would be regarded as a humble brag.

I’ll try to briefly share the major themes and changes I found this year and will write later in more depth about some of these.

End of the Era of Hadoop

From the time it went open source in 2007 Hadoop and its related technologies have been profound drivers of the growth of data science. Doug Cutting remains one of the three Strata conference chairs. However, we all know that Hadoop/MapReduce has made its mark but that it’s no longer cutting edge. In fact we know that Apache Spark has eclipsed Hadoop and it would be fair to say that Spark was last year’s big news.

To put a stake in it, O’Reilly announced at this year’s Strata+Hadoop that the conference would henceforth be known as the Strata Data Conference. So farewell age of Hadoop.

Artificial Intelligence

I am as jaded as the next guy and maybe a little more so at the over hyped furor around AI. As I walked the conference floor I felt compelled to challenge any vendor with the temerity to put AI in their descriptors.

Actually there was very little of this at the show. AI tends to be most over hyped when we’re talking about apps but Strata+Hadoop is more about tools than apps. There were two or three vendors that I thought had applied the AI frosting a little thick but there were a few others where the label was appropriate and the capabilities pretty interesting. More about these good guys later.

In the learning program there were again two or three sessions aimed at AI use cases in business and these were uniformly well reasoned. Specifically that means acknowledging that this is in its infancy and while you should keep an eye on it, investing now would be speculative at best.

The Cambrian Explosion in Deep Learning

One of our general session speakers used this phrase to describe the hockey-stick like growth we’ve been experiencing in Deep Learning and AI in general. The original use of the phrase is credited to Gill Pratt, the DARPA Program Manager who oversaw the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

If you remember a little about your earth history, we trundled along with one-celled creatures for billions of years until about a half-a-billion years ago when, at the beginning of the Cambrian period, life diversified in a way that can truly be characterized as an explosion. Academic theory is that very small changes like the evolution of sight organs so changed the playing field that the exploitation of this new capability drove the development of additional capabilities that – you know – resulted in us.

So while data scientists are a little cautious to talk about the wonders of artificial intelligence, they are very enthusiastic in talking about the new capabilities presented by Deep Learning. This may seem a little paradoxical but I invite you to think about it this way.

Robust AI is the accumulated capabilities of speech, text, NLP, image processing, robotics, knowledge recovery, and several other human-like capabilities that at this point are very early in development and not at all well or easily integrated.

Deep Learning however is a group of tools that we are applying to develop these capabilities, including Convolutional Neural Nets, Recurrent Neural Nets, Generative Adversarial Neural Nets, and Reinforcement Learning to name the most popular. All of these are subsets of Deep Learning and all are accessed through the newly emerging Deep Learning platforms like TensorFlow, MXNet, Theano, Torch, and several others.

Like all platform battles, the winner who gains the most users will be the next IoS, Android, or Windows. Right now it appears Google’s TensorFlow is in the lead and there were at least four or five program sessions, some of them full-day, that were oversubscribed providing both general guidance as well as hands-on training in TensorFlow. So while the buzz around AI was appropriately subdued, the enthusiasm for learning about TensorFlow was in full flower. The emergence of Deep Learning platforms may be the slight evolutionary change that triggers the explosion of AI.

Platform Convergence

In the beginning you could pick a portion of the data science workflow and build a successful business there. Many of today’s largest companies got their start this way. Not anymore. Now everybody wants to be an end-to-end platform from data source to the deployment of models and other forms of exploitation. He with the most users will win and once adopted the pain of switching will be high. The same dynamic that continues to make enterprise ERP systems so sticky – it’s too painful to switch.

We’ve seen in the last years analytic platforms like SAS and SPSS add full data access and blending capability. We’ve seen blending platforms like Alteryx extend into analytics and visualization. So here are two new and rather unexpected additions to the full spectrum platform game:

Cloudera announces its own Data Science Workbench with capabilities in R, Python, and Scala.

Intel (yes Intel?) who just paid $15 Billion for Mobileye to seize its place in the self-driving car space is rolling out two data science platforms, Saffron and Nirvana, one aimed at IoT and the other at deep learning.

DataOps and Data Engineers

As recently as a year or so ago the term ‘data scientist’ applied to someone doing predictive analytics as well as the person you would turn to to implement Spark or a data lake. Thankfully over not too long a period we have come to differentiate Data Scientists from Data Engineers and acknowledge their special skill set that blends traditional CS skills with the new disciplines needed to store, extract, and utilize data for data scientists.

Now that this differentiation is a little clearer, we see a parallel rise in a new category of tools and platforms best described as DataOps. Philosophically similar to DevOps, DataOps tools and platforms are aimed at regularizing and simplifying the tasks of Data Engineers, particularly as it applies to repetitive tasks that may need to be repeated dozens or even hundreds of times for different data sources and different data destinations. Two new companies, both startups, Nexla, and Data Kitchen take a fairly narrow but deep view. Others like Qubole are laying claim to this area by better defining capabilities within their existing platforms.

Emerging Productivity Enhancements for Data Scientists

We may think the business world is populated by companies with just a few (if any) data scientists working together and for the most part we’d be right. However, this is not the market most vendors at Strata are interested in. They are pursuing wallet share among the Global 8000. That’s 8000 companies with more than $1 Billion in revenue and assuredly 100% commitment to predictive analytics.

I haven’t seen any specific data but an informal poll of vendors says these companies employee from 20 to several hundred data scientists each. When you have that many data scientists in one place you have to start thinking about efficiency and productivity. And there’s a major theme for this year – productivity enhancements for data scientists.

The list of vendors with this focus is too long for this article and DataOps just above is part of this. Here are just a few mentions of notable companies and their approach.

DataRobot: We reviewed DataRobot a year ago when it looked like predictive analytics was about to be fully automated and data scientists unemployed by 2025. That was a little premature. However, DataRobot has found a foothold by dramatically speeding up model development. This is one-click-to-model. Their platform cleans data, does feature engineering and identification, runs thousands of potential models/hyper parameter combinations in parallel, and deploys champion models in a fraction of the time it would take a team of data scientists.

SqlStream: Deploy a blazing fast stream processing system in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the compute resources distros like Spark require. Make it so easy to manage that very little is needed of data engineers, and make it easy to change the logic and models within the stream without a team of data scientists.

Bansai: TensorFlow is complex and tough to learn. Bansai is introducing a higher level language that looks a lot like Python but manipulates deep learning algorithms in all the major deep learning platforms. Their initial target is reinforcement learning for robotics and the payoff is to solve the shortage of deep learning-qualified data scientists that are a bottleneck for development.

Qubole: Makes it easy to almost instantly establish a big data repository and begin analytics. You can’t completely replace data engineers but you can dramatically increase the number of data scientists each engineer can support with this SaaS implementation.

Emergence of the Data Science Appliance

Similar to productivity enhancements but aimed at business users who want solutions without necessarily needing to know the underlying data science are a group of offerings that intentionally hide the data science and focus on the business problem.

Anodot: Delivers a sophisticated anomaly detection system that looks at all your streaming data and decides both what’s anomalous and what’s important. This is catching on among ecommerce vendors and digital enterprises, some of whom have reportedly thrown out their internally developed anomaly detectors in favor of Anodot’s offering.

GeoStrategies: This company uses GIS data for site location and market identification and penetration studies. Lots of sophisticated platforms can do that too but GeoStrategies goes out of its way to hide the data science in favor of a UI that’s very intuitive for their business users.

Women in Data Science

Finally, my unscientific tally was that about 20% of attendees and a slightly higher percentage of presenters were women. This may not be representative of our profession as a whole as folks who attend these conferences may have different profiles than the whole industry. Still, while we might wish this was more like 50/50 I thought participation by our female members was a reasonably strong showing.

About the author: Bill Vorhies is Editorial Director for Data Science Central and has practiced as a data scientist and commercial predictive modeler since 2001. He can be reached at:

[email protected]

Original post here

Posted by William Vorhies on March 20, 2017 at 4:48pm

#Big Data #hadoop #machine learning

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