lorempixel - placeholder images for every case Want to Change the World? Be Resilient. - John McKinley by John McKinley | 1:00 PM February 26, 2013 What’s the difference between someone with a good idea and a person who can transform their ideas into real impact? To tackle the world’s biggest problems, we need to be able to identify and support the people who are capable of creating lasting change. At Acumen Fund, we spend a lot of time trying to find and train aspiring and established leaders from around the world who have the right mix of talent, ideas, and passion. And what we’ve found time and again is: Resilience matters most. Resilient leaders have three key characteristics: Grit: Short-term focus on tasks at hand, a willingness to slog through broken systems with limited resources, and pragmatic problem-solving skills.Courage: Action in the face of fear and embracing the unknown.Commitment: Long-term optimism and focus on big-picture goals. Grit: Natalie Grillon, a former Peace Corps volunteer and recent MBA graduate, embodies grit. And resilience can be trained.
Treehouse Blog | Learn skills to change the world today! Accepting Speech Input in HTML5 Forms The way that we interact with computers has changed dramatically over the past decade. Touch-screen devices and laptop trackpads have enabled a much more intuitive form of interaction than is achievable using a traditional mouse. These changes haven’t been limited to just hardware. Gestures, predictive text, and speech recognition are all examples of software innovations that have improved the way in which we interact with our devices. Speech recognition has somewhat eluded innovators for decades. In this post you’ll be learning how to take advantage of Google’s speech recognition technologies to enhance your web forms. Lets get started. Enabling Speech Input Enabling support for speech input is as simple as adding an attribute to your <input> elements. When speech input is enabled the element will have a small microphone icon displayed on the right of the input. Speech Input in Chrome See the Demo View on CodePen A Caveat About Input Types Detecting Browser Support Summary
Download | PhantomJS New to PhantomJS? Read and study the Quick Start guide. Windows Download phantomjs-2.1.1-windows.zip (17.4 MB) and extract (unzip) the content. The executable phantomjs.exe is ready to use. Note: For this static build, the binary is self-contained with no external dependency. Mac OS X Download phantomjs-2.1.1-macosx.zip (16.4 MB) and extract (unzip) the content. Note: For this static build, the binary is self-contained with no external dependency. Linux 64-bit Download phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 (22.3 MB) and extract the content. Note: For this static build, the binary is self-contained. Linux 32-bit Download phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-i686.tar.bz2 (23.0 MB) and extract the content. Note: For this static build, the binary is self-contained. FreeBSD Binary packages are available via pkg: $ sudo pkg install phantomjs Source Code To get the source code, check the official git repository: github.com/ariya/phantomjs. Checksums MD5 Checksums SHA-256 Checksums Acknowledgement
Fighting the Fears that Block Creativity - Tom Kelley and David Kelley by Tom Kelley and David Kelley | 1:00 PM November 20, 2012 What does it take to spark your creativity? For Doug Dietz, the executive behind GE Healthcare’s magnetic resonance-imaging (MRI) equipment, it was seeing a little girl cry. He remembers the day vividly. He’d come to a hospital to see one of his machines in action and was initially pleased. He first shared his concerns with his boss at GE, who suggested he attend a customer-focused innovation class at Stanford’s Hasso Plassner Institute of Design, or d.school, which is where we met him. These simple changes made a big difference, significantly reducing the use of sedation for pediatric patients needing MRIs and greatly increasing family satisfaction rates. But the real proof of success for Dietz was hearing another young girl who had just been through a new Adventure Series machine ask: “Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?” Dietz was able to reinvent the pediatric imaging experience because he reclaimed his creative confidence.
Echo JS - JavaScript News Introducing the Web Speech API After receiving my bachelor’s degree, I began working in a group called NLP. As the name implies, we focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. At the time, two of the most popular technologies to work with were the VoiceXML standard and Java applets. Speech recognition has several real-world applications. What is the Web Speech API? The Web Speech API, introduced at the end of 2012, allows web developers to provide speech input and text-to-speech output features in a web browser. The Web Speech API defines a complex interface, called SpeechRecognition, whose structure can be seen here. The specification asserts that the API itself is agnostic of the underlying speech recognition and synthesis implementation and can support both server-based and client-based/embedded recognition and synthesis. Another interesting feature of the Web Speech API is that it allows you to specify a grammar object. Methods and Properties var recognizer = new speechRecognition(); Demo Conclusion
Masonry Install Download Link directly to Masonry files on unpkg. Package managers Install with Bower: bower install masonry --save Install with npm: npm install masonry-layout Getting started Include the Masonry .js file in your site. Masonry works on a container grid element with a group of child items. <div class="grid"><div class="grid-item">... All sizing of items is handled by your CSS. Initialize with jQuery You can use Masonry as a jQuery plugin: $('selector').masonry(). Initialize with Vanilla JavaScript You can use Masonry with vanilla JS: new Masonry( elem, options ). Initialize in HTML You can initialize Masonry in HTML, without writing any JavaScript. Edit this demo on CodePen Options set in HTML must be valid JSON. HTML initialization was previously done with a class of js-masonry and setting options in data-masonry-options in Masonry v3. Next Learn more about how to use Masonry: MIT License Masonry is released under the MIT License.
Frontend is a separate application Despite my experience with working on desktop applications, I've been avoiding any frontend (here meaning JavaScript/html) for years. It wasn't because I didn't know JavaScript, it's just that I am a developer who cares about code quality and JavaScript coding was far from any "quality" areas (in my mind). I felt safe with programming backends and I was more than happy with Rails. Rails is a framework that is really good at abstracting the frontend problems. Whenever I had a project that involved more JavaScript (because the UX designer required it) it was a painful experience to me. Now I love working on frontends. Why the change? I realized that my mental model of a web applications, that I had in my mind, was wrong. The View part is another application, that Rails happens to generate quite nicely. Once I realized that the JS is in fact another application it was like a whole new world of programming opened to me. A CoffeeScript (or JS) application can embrace the original vision of MVC.
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