There is a complete loss of confidence in the space. Bitcoin and other cryptos are plunging, and companies such as Coinbase are announcing layoffs. However, cryptos are falling sharply because they are being hit by the same factors impacting stocks and other assets. Consumer prices are surging, and the Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates to bring down inflation.

The cryptocurrency world is in chaos

Since Bitcoin hit an all-time high in November, the value of the world's most popular digital currency has fallen by about 70%, Ether is down by around 70% this year, and so is Dogecoin. Bitcoin's backers have always claimed the digital currency would be an "inflation hedge," but it hasn't behaved that way. Instead, this crash in crypto prices shows that cryptocurrencies are primarily speculative financial assets subject to macroeconomic forces.

Cryptocurrencies are by and large speculative financial assets

It's been a rude awakening for the millions of people who bought cryptocurrencies. 2021 was the height of digital currencies, which swelled to $3 trillion. Today, the total value of the crypto market has been shaved to about $1 trillion. Some backers of cryptocurrencies still believe a "crypto winter" could lead to a "crypto spring." In the past, deep downturns have led to strong rebounds.

What is means for those who got into cryptos

The increase in amateur investors, combined with the growing complexity of some of the cryptocurrency products, are worrying regulators as they want to prevent people from being taken advantage of. Crypto markets are still fairly new and there is no clarity on who is in charge of overseeing the space. At the moment, both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) claim oversight of parts of the crypto market.

Regulations on the sector

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are plunging. Here's what to know about a market that just a few months ago was being touted as the future of finance.

crypto

Cryptocurrency

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Why cryptocurrencies have gone from the next hot thing to a full-on meltdown

Psychological storytelling is the story of a person’s internal and external journey to get something they want. They are the centre of the story’s universe, and without them, the story wouldn’t exist. You could say these stories look inward.The vast majority of modern stories are psychological in nature. Hollywood in particular tells almost exclusively psychological stories, mainly because by focusing on one person the story is easier to tell, easier for audiences to get invested in, and has a clear narrative path to follow with a beginning, middle, and end.

Psychological Storytelling

Sociological storytelling is the story of a system; specifically, how the system affects the people within it. Systems can be formal or informal. For instance, a family is a system; capitalism is a system; your workplace is a system; the law is a system, etc. Characters existing within the system still have internal motivations, as they do in a psychological story, but external factors are just as important as internal ones, if not more so. You could say these stories look outward.

Sociological Storytelling

<ul><li>First, you must start with the system that you can critique(have a strong opinion about).</li><li>Once you decide on the system and what you want to say about it, create characters who will test the system.</li><li>Finally, pick a character who will primarily deliver the thesis statement of your story, at least in the beginning.</li></ul>

How to Write a Sociological Story

<ul><li>Contagion: The world is not prepared for a pandemic. (system being critiqued: health care/emergency services).</li><li>Game of Thrones: There’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator. (system being critiqued: government).</li><li>The Big Short: Capitalism makes people do bad things. (system being critiqued: capitalism).</li><li>Star Trek: Humanity can accomplish great things if we work together. (system being critiqued: space exploration, as a metaphor for cultural integration).</li><li>Wall-E: Humanity can overcome the scourge of capitalism if we work together. (system being critiqued: capitalism/consumerism).</li></ul>

Movies And Series That Have Sociological Storytelling

Sociological stories have many complex characters, deep themes, and extremely detailed worldbuilding, no matter the genre. You need to think A LOT about what you’re writing and why you’re writing it. They’re “hard-mode” storytelling.  Nail the basics of psychological storytelling, and then try sociological if you have something to say about the world.

The Bottom Line

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

communication

Communication

Sociological vs Psychological Storytelling

Crowdsourcing has become a household word, with crowdfunded products, businesses, art projects, nonprofits, and even new journalism models. Citizen scientists band together virtually to find new galaxies, count birds, and monitor water quality.
But the granddaddy of crowdsourced information sites is Wikipedia, which—somewhat ironically—can tell you that the Encyclopaedia Britannica, its predecessor and former go-to source for information, published its last print edition in 2012.

Crowdsourcing

Wikipedia’s popularity as an information source with everyone from grade-schoolers to those in their golden years, led Shane Greenstein, a professor of strategy at the Kellogg School, to investigate how faithfully Wikipedia adheres to a “neutral point of view.” 
Newer articles, he has found, are less biased than ones crafted earlier in the site’s existence. But how does Wikipedia stack up against encyclopedias? Is the wisdom of the crowd more biased than the wisdom of experts?

The Popularity Of Wikipedia

As sources that aspire to provide comprehensive information, Britannica and Wikipedia face similar conflicts over the length, tone, and factual basis of controversial, unverifiable, and subjective content.
Understandably, these conflicts are “pervasive” when it comes to current events and other politically charged topics.

Bias, Tone and Slant

Britannica and Wikipedia address this problem in distinct ways. The encyclopedia uses a small group of experts and editors who engage in a back-and-forth dialogue before settling on what to publish for a given entry. 
Wikipedia goes much larger scale, depending on the virtual crowd—tens of millions of people—to generate entry information. And compared to its traditional counterpart, Wikipedia has a dramatically decentralized process for dealing with editing and conflicts. Does this allow more bias to creep into its entries?

The Resulting Conflicts

Wikipedia’s political articles are more likely to lean “mildly” Democratic—or to slant left—than Britannica’s. The extent of the bias in Wikipedia entries is greater.
Wikipedia articles with more revision in them had less bias and were less likely to lean Democratic. The largest biases and slants arise on Wikipedia articles with fewer contributions.
This is largely consistent with Linus’s Law, a principle applied to software development that claims that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

More Eyeballs, Less Bias

Longer articles were more likely to be biased than shorter ones. And Wikipedia’s articles tend to be longer than Britannica’s—partly for the obvious reason that online content faces none of the financial constraints print media does in regard to length. 
The greater availability of space enables Wikipedia’s writers to add material at will. And that means more opportunity to hear from all of the biased points of view.

The Text Is Not Alright

It is important to remember that Wikipedia positions itself as a jumping-off point rather than a definitive source. Britannica, on the other hand, presented itself as the ultimate authority.
But many people do take Wikipedia as definitive. And that is why it is important to tease out its problems, including bias, without detracting from its “marvelous achievement.”

Information Context

Crowdsourced Wikipedia entries are more biased than Encyclopaedia Britannica articles.

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

Can Wikipedia Be Trusted?

Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin, productivity—is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays.

Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient.

The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.

The paradox of limitation

It means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. <ul><li>Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default.</li><li>And it also means standing firm in the face of the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed.</li></ul>

A limit-embracing attitude to time

I’m not suggesting our troubles with time are somehow all in the mind, or that a simple change of outlook will cause them all to vanish. Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone.

Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian Parkinson wrote in 1955.And it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing.

Parkinson’s law

Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder —won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because,the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.For example: it’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s that the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more email.

The efficiency trap

The modern world provides an endless supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.The internet makes this all much more difficult because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time—so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it.

The bottomless bucket list

The point isn’t to eradicate procrastination but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.<ul><li>The good procrastinator accepts the fact that you can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. </li><li>The bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed; here, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance.</li></ul>

Procrastination of some kind is inevitable

We tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact, it’s an intense reaction to the uncomfortable reality of confronting your limited control.You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding at this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it. No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply.

Why boredom seems  aggressively unpleasant

It states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect.In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse.

Hofstadter’s law

The truth is that it’s impossible to become so efficient and organized that you could respond to a limitless number of incoming demands. It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like “enough time” on your work and with your children, and on socializing, traveling, or engaging in political activism. But there’s a deceptive feeling of comfort in believing that you’re in the process of constructing such a life, which is due to come into being any day now.

There's never "enough time"

<ul><li>Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well.</li><li>Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.</li><li>Decide in advance what to fail at. You’ll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your time and energy are finite.</li><li>Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.</li><li>Consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.</li><li>Embrace boring and single-purpose technology; choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle e-reader.</li><li>Seek out novelty in the mundane. Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane.</li><li>When presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity.</li><li>Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind—to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work—act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.</li><li>Practice being ok with doing nothing.</li></ul>

Ten tools for embracing
your finitude

Time is our biggest worry: there is too little of it. The award-winning, renowned Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman offers a lively, entertaining philosophical guide to time and time management, setting aside superficial efficiency solutions in favour of reckoning with and finding joy in the finitude of human life. The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn't enough time. We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless struggle against distraction; and we're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and "lifehacks" to optimize our days. But such techniques often just end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with "getting everything done," he introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made, as individuals and as a society--and that we could do things differently.

productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   “This is the most important book ever written about time management.”  —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get around to what counts? We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks. Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny. Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

Oliver Burkeman

Four Thousand Weeks

Having an adequate amount of sleep each night is an important part of the process for fighting burnout. There will be numerous of successful people that will tell you that they run on 5 hours of sleep, sometimes even less. However, being able to run on five hours of sleep does not work for everyone. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine suggests that everyone from the age of 18-60 needs to have 7 hours of sleep.

Get Sufficient Rest

It's okay to be hungry for knowledge and growth, however consistently having an immediate gratification mindset can lead to unnecessary stress.  Your career is a marathon, not a sprint. Learn to enjoy the process and the day-to dat skills you obtain every day. Small skills gained daily add up and are a vital part of your career growth.

Focus on your long-term career goals

Many of us find it hard to take time away from the office due to the overflowing demands of our jobs but a change of scenery is good every now and then. It's beneficial to separate yourself from the 'rat race' and vacations help us reset. Putting your self first is important and it can also help us into thinking of fresh ideas that can make us successful in the long run.

Take your vacations

The tasks in your list are not equal and often we have long-running to-do lists then feel overloaded every day. We should always be mindful to ourselves, burnout and exhaustion aren't things that happen overnight but rather slowly occur over time.  Instead of a to-do list, make a success list. This list helps hone in on the tasks that will deliver the most significant results.

The success list over the to-do list

While stress may be prevalent in our lives, extreme pressure and insufficient rest can lead to the debilitating state of burnout.

health

Health

mentalhealth

Mental Health

The Fight Against Burnout And What You Can Do About It

GetJar is one of the oldest available website to offer thousands of android apps and games for free. It is a very popular store among users and a great alternative to the regular Google Play store. Downloading from this store is pretty fast and secure too.

2.  GetJar

Mobogenie Market is another good android store to download apps and games for free. It allows the users to choose from a variety of categories and download the related apps. If you want to download an app, and it is not available in any other android store, Mobogenie market is a great place to look for.

3.  Mobogenie

SlideME is the another alternative to Google Play, which offers a wide range of free and premium android Apps from application developers all around the world.

4.  SlideME

F-Droid contains only free and open source apps. It is a non profit volunteer organisation. Anyone can join to help out or contribute funds, and there are no secret agendas or hidden methods of monetisation.

5.  F-Droid

Aptoide is an alternative marketplace for mobile applications which runs on the Android operating system. In Aptoide, unlike the default Google Play Store, there is not a unique and centralized store but each user manages their own store.

6.  Aptoide

Uptodown website is available in twelve languages, and offers localized content for each of them, providing free downloading. For this, it uses the services of <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirusTotal">VirusTotal </a>, which provides reports of all its apps based on the results of more than 50 antivirus programs. In addition to the application catalog, Uptodown has a news blog and tutorials related to the world of software, as well as an official application for Android.

7.  Uptodown

Apkupdater is designed to help you update all the Apps that you have installed on your device without using Google play. It shows you a list of all the apps that need to be updated, each one with its corresponding Apkmirror link or links to other Websites where you can Download Apks.

8.  APKUpdater  *

Amazon is Google’s biggest competitor. Amazon gives away a paid app for free every day and using Amazon’s dedicated app store is the only way to access them. Aside from great free titles, the Amazon App Store has a huge selection books, movies and songs — often at lower prices than on Google Play

1. Amazon App Store

Amazon is Google’s biggest competitor. Amazon gives away a paid app for free every day and using Amazon’s dedicated app store is the only way to access them. Aside from great free titles, the Amazon…

cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

Best Google Play Store Alternatives

Navigations and menus on mobile have always been a hot topic, especially since the introduction of the <a href="https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/" target="_self">hamburger menu</a> and the simultaneous rise of the smartphone as the leading information consumption device.&nbsp;The three-lined menu became the default navigation element in many major apps (e.g. Facebook, Spotify and Youtube) before quickly falling from grace due to its integral characteristic of hiding relevant destinations from the user’s eye.&nbsp;For iOS apps, a new kind of visible navigation was established with the <a href="https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/ui-bars/tab-bars/" target="_self">bottom tab bar</a>, which quickly became the standard navigation design.

The quest for finding suitable Android app navigations

<ul><li>Scrolling up makes the navigation fade back in.</li><li>The shifting navigation adds a playful note to switching of sections. When navigating between destinations the selected section icon is enlarged.</li></ul>

Crafting our Material Design Bottom Bar

<ul><li>Increasing user engagement: creating more Pageviews than before. Users come back more often, allowing conclusion that new navigation Resonates with them.</li><li>Important App destinations, like Bookmarks and job recommendations are now visible in the bottom NAV.</li><li>So far, neither through direct user feedback nor through App reviews, have we received complaints about the new navigation.</li></ul>

Results — What do the numbers say?

The app is targeted at the German job market so it might not have a full list of jobs for where you are. I would strongly advise exploring the opportunity of switching to visible navigation if your App is still relying on Burger navigation. You can check out the newest version of our App here.

Wrapping it up

<ul><li>Important UX &amp; product decisions in bottom navigation:</li><li>Hiding on scroll.</li><li>Shifting navigation.</li><li>Material Design look and feel.</li><li>Saving state.</li><li>Compact sections.</li><li>Lean design</li></ul>

I exactly remember what I was doing when the news broke on March 15 — we were knee deep in the concept phase for moving towards a visible tab navigation and away from a burger menu in our Android Job…

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

Bye, Bye Burger!

I do write a lot. In the month of September alone, I published 51 stories here on Medium. Down from my usual 60+, but still a shit-ton of writing.On top of that, I also created about 1,000 social media posts and 16 blog posts for my day job clients.Finally, I wrote a <a href="https://www.assemblage.blog/blog/art-is-fundamental">blog post</a> for a new site I'm contributing to and worked on a handful of drafts.

A Lot Of Writing Work

The single mom of a 4-year-old who's never been in Daycare writes for a social media startup. She was unemployed when she gave birth and began writing for a startup when she was 8 months old. Last spring the company cut her clients and she went from earning $2,200+ as a contractor to $900+. She's not on any assistance programs, has no roommates, and her ex only pays $200 a month for child support. She 's me.

If I don't write, I have no money.

I take care of my daughter, and I write. That's it. It hasn't always been so bland, but that's where things sit today. Eventually, I'll go on a date again with someone I occasionally see in Atlanta, but things have been too swamped as I've tried to adjust to my new writing life. The one where I write and hope it will be enough to pay the bills and cover extra needs as they come along.

My life mainly consists of just two things.

I rarely need to wake up before 9 am, and on many days I dont actually begin working until noon or later. I can schedule my work around most appointments. I can wear pajamas.

It's not all bad when it comes to work life balance.

Right now, I've got 429 drafts in my folder. I generally think of new stories in terms of headlines and subtitles first. Whenever one pops into my head, I start a draft with the title and topic idea. Ideally, every time I write the words would flow freely. But they don't. It's an inspiration thing. I love to write when I'm inspired, but I make myself write even when I'm not.

I never run out of ideas, just inspiration.

These days, I'm just trying to build an audience that enjoys my voice and can grow. I'm nobody special or amazing. I'm simply okay with putting myself and my flaws out there because I know my messages will resonate with somebody.

My writing is far from flawless.

It's true--I do write a lot. In the month of September alone, I published 51 stories here on Medium. Down from my usual 60+, but still a shit-ton of writing. On top of that, I also created about…

Why cryptocurrencies have gone from the next hot thing to a full-on meltdown

Sociological vs Psychological Storytelling

Can Wikipedia Be Trusted?

Four Thousand Weeks

The Fight Against Burnout And What You Can Do About It

Wendy Poole