#Does anyone understand quadratic functions? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fukurodaze · 5 years ago

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if i ever get lost

pairing/s: third year!haiba lev x gn!reader genre: fluff, romantic tension aka best and softest tension word count: 3.2k warnings: like, one curse word this was also requested by anon! “3rd year Lev w a reader who’s struggling to pass all their homeworks, projects and quizzes (bc they piled up their works ;;) while thinking of how should they study for college/uni entrance exams?”

special thanks to nat @natszoo and ellie @lcnelyinthesky for beta reading and helping me w this!!

LISTEN TO: somebody loves you - jeremy zucker; glitter - benee

lowercase intended!

you throw your head back when you forget the term written on the flip side of the flash card haiba lev is holding. it’s a friday night, far past anyone’s bedtimes, but final exams for the first semester start on monday and you’re not sure where to start. haiba lev, being the person who has nothing better to do, agreed to come over and flip cards with random kanji, english, and biology terms on it.

lev might also be here because it’s an open secret that he’s liked you since first year, and you’ve never answered to his feelings, but you’re thinking friends for now - until you memorise all of this semester’s kanji, english vocabulary, and biology terms, that is.

“the phospholipid bilayer is made up of...”

lev gives you time to think, his wide eyes going between the answer on the card and your thinking face.

“shit, uh, the phospholipid bilayer is made up of two layers of phospholipids?”

“makes sense, but no.” lev answers, flipping the card to show you.

“the phospholipid bilayer is made up of a polar, hydrophilic area containing a phosphate group bound to glycerol, and a non-polar, lipophilic area containing fatty acids...” you read aloud, trying to memorise what’s currently going out your mouth, in one ear, and out again through another ear.

“you know, your flash cards are pretty comprehensive.”

you raise an eyebrow, “is that... a good thing?”

“i mean, yes and no,” he takes another sip of the tea your mom had insisted to bring to guests, “it’s harder to memorise, but it’s better for details. but-”

“but?” you watch as he takes another sip.

“i think if you really don’t know where to go, just understand the basic concept of everything. for one - what is the function of the bilayer?”

“why do you sound smart?” you question, tilting your head jokingly.

“hey! i am smart! most times! with tests like these that have essay questions, you just gotta learn the basic concept of each term and connect them.” lev advices, recounting his former volleyball captain and nekoma high school alumni, kuroo tetsuro’s, words when lev himself was barely scraping past his first semester finals when he’d just transferred.

“easier said than done in two nights,” you slouch your head on your desk, “plus! it’s not just biology. or exams.”

if memorising all these terms in the span of two days sounds bad enough, you’re still crushed with the supplementary course work and projects due next week as well.

you let out a deep groan. you’re so tired. it’s like biology information only comes up when you’re studying for english, biology only coming up for modern literature, and mathematics somehow being inserted into the little unknown kanji in modern literature. it’s all too much at once.

“it’s all too much at once, huh?” lev places his head on your desk, only a few inches away from your face. normally, you’d push him away, pull your head back up, or maybe even give him a light slap on a bad day, but today you welcome him.

you nod, quiet. you haven’t been able to get a breather. it’s essay this, quiz that, lab report here, test there. your mind is blank.

now, lev sits back up on the extra chair from your dining room, “have you eaten dinner?”

“why are you asking... it’s like, midnight.”

“the question still stands.”

you sigh, “nope.”

lev hums. he takes a pen, then twirls it, like his fingers possessed polar magnets that somehow let the pens never fall from his hands. but it does eventually, and when it falls with a plastic click on your wooden desk, lev visibly takes a big breath and says, “do you want to get ramen?”

you exhale through your nose and smile. “are you asking me out, haiba?”

“is it inappropriate to ask you out now?”

damn this tall dork. come to think of it, he’s never actually asked you out despite the obvious ways he’d vouch for your attention in the past. you’re quite surprised, frankly, as he’s always been so loud in the ways he’s wanted to be with you but never really made it seem like anything was going to happen.

but, hey, it’s late enough for you to put down your doubts about him away. after all, he’s been in your room for four hours, just helping you study. he wasn’t even studying himself - he just sat there, doing almost nothing. and for a guy like him, you wonder how he’s managed to keep there for so long.

“sure.”

lev’s eyes widen. “wait, really?”

“yeah,” you begin to set aside all your study materials, “we can go to a twenty-four hour place in the city, too.”

“alright! let me get you your coat!”

“my coat?” you raise an eyebrow when he hands you the coat you wear the most, feeling both flattered and slightly surprised that he recognises it straight away from your messy room. the boy comes to retreat his coat as well from one of the hangers in your room, and he even offers to get you your socks and boots.

“alright, alright, you don’t have to be that ready to go,” you joke.

he makes sure there is no noise when you two walk out of your house, through the suburbs of tokyo and to the nearest train to the city.

“aren’t you two a bit young to be here so late?” the shopkeeper, an old lady, mutters under her breath. you catch it through her croaky voice when you and lev enter the place together, but you pay no attention because all you care to focus on is the smell of broth and your empty stomach.

“for two, please,” lev says, undoubtedly hearing the woman’s remark, but answering with a smile. she smiles too, and so do you, and it makes you remember all the times he’s smiled and you’ve wanted to either punch him or hold his hand.

today just happens to be one of those days where you want to hold his hand. you shake the thought off.

when you two are seated at the ramen bar, your head falls onto your palm, tilting back to face lev, his chin covered partly by his usual maroon scarf. you had whispered to him earlier on the train what you wanted to order, and lev quickly speaks to the waiter as your tired gaze rises from from the squiggly wooden patterns embedded in the polished wooden table to the boy that’s sitting right next to you.

at first glance, you remember haiba lev’s face to be satisfying to look at. you remember when he had just transferred to your class in the first year, and you developed the annoying habit of looking forty-five degrees to the right every time you were bored in class, as you thought his face was much easier on the eyes than complex quadratic equations or japanese history.

for a while you wondered if it was because he certainly looked different - not only was he practically a giant, but he had eurocentric features that stood out from the majority of the student body as well (it also didn’t help that he quite literally and figuratively filled any room he was in). though, maybe, after a while, when everyone got used to the sight of a new face, you kept your line of sight at a forty-five degree angle, just peering above his cheekbones. the same way you’re looking at him right now.

and really, the only word for it is handsome. dashing. good-looking. you’ve always known that, but now that you put it into words in your head, you notice the chiseled jaw, pointed nose and emerald green eyes feel a bit more-

“what you staring at?” his baritone voice cuts through your thoughts cleanly.

you don’t like where this conversation will go. “haiba, are you doing any college entrance exams?”

lev cocks his head to one side, thinking, before nodding, “i think i am. why?”

“how are you studying for them?”

lev clicks his tongue, and it brings you to surprise, “get your mind away from studying! we’re not here in the city at, like, one in the morning to talk about college entrance exams!”

you sigh, “okay, fine. but, still, answer my question?”

“i just do practice problems for twenty minutes every day,” lev shrugs, “okay, now, can we move away from studying?”

you hum lazily, watching as two bowls of ramen arrive at the bar. he had ordered what you told him you wanted to order, both bowls almost identical in smell, shape, size, and content. almost, because lev didn’t have any spring onions in his bowl.

“haiba,” you call, earning a quick call of your name in response, “do you not like spring onions?”

lev nods so obviously that he seems proud. his chopsticks mix the entire bowl together before picking up the half-boiled egg and eating the slice whole. when he swallows it down, he asks you, “you noticed.”

“i mean, yeah,” you reply, “why do you not like them? they’re like, essential.”

lev takes a slurp of his noodles, and then a spoonful of the broth, “i just never liked their texture - which is funny, since my entire family loves adding spring onions.”

now it’s your turn to slurp into your ramen, one bite turning into two, and two turning into the entire content of the bowl. lev seems to eat twice as fast, seemingly having a strategy to cooling down the hot noodles on his spoon while simultaneously folding a piece of pork charsiu in between the loops of each spoonful of noodles, making sure that the little wrap is bathed in a little bit of broth. you find yourself smiling at his act, almost like he has a system of his own when it came to eating ramen - well, he usually had a system of his own when doing just about anything.

the meal is quiet for the most part, with little mumbles of how your tea needs a refill and the ruffling sounds between sheets of tissue to wipe off the broth around your lips. it’s fulfilling, and the look on lev’s face says he’s happy too.

when you two make it out of the ramen bar, 1am feels the same as 9pm. somehow, you’re no longer the kind of sleepy you were when you were flipping through flashcards on your desk, and instead, you’re almost dreading to go home. you think it might also be the neon lights, but there’s some kind of electricity you’re not yet willing to let rest for the night.

luckily, lev doesn’t feel the need to rush. although his steps are big and his voice is loud, he takes his time when you two make the silent agreement to make the walk to the train station as long-winded as possible. his voice is lower, and softer, this time, and when he speaks to you about his friends from his old school, you convince yourself it’s the most interesting topic in the world - because it is. because it’s lev.

when he stops in his tracks, you stop too, watching him go into a small trinket shop you’ve always seen but never had the means to afford to go in. you reckon you might own something from this store, though.

“haiba, you like little trinkets?” your eyes scroll through the shelves of delicate and virtually useless items, eyes landing on a small lion cub made of clear resin with a small blob of gold floating in the middle of its clear body. you’re not usually drawn to any animal trinkets, as you’ve gotten used to decorative objects like bows or feathers or lace, but today you think about the lion cub. despite it looking severely overpriced, you take it in your hand anyway, not noticing lev’s figure coming right behind you.

“do you want that one?” you yelp in surprise when he says that, turning around to find yourself so close to him you could smell the dried raindrops on his padded coat.

“i’m pretty sure it’s overpriced. trinkets are usually overpriced anyways.”

“wait, let me check it,” you hand lev the trinket, “how much is your keychain?”

you furrow your eyebrows, “what?”

“you know, the keychain on the bag you bring to school.”

“oh,” you try to remember the time you had saved up for that keychain, “i think it was about three thousand yen? it’s overpriced. definitely.”

“well, this one’s only two thousand and five hundred. i’ll get it for you.”

“wha- lev!” you whine, “you’re going to make me feel bad- wait what’s wrong?” you see the boy freeze up in front of you, a big smile creeping onto his cheeky face.

he doesn’t reply for a bit, and you’re faced with raised cheekbones and a wide mouth. you try again, “was it something i did? or said?”

“you called me lev,” oh, you did.

now his smile spreads from ear to ear, and it’s spreading to you. “you never call me lev.”

“huh, well.” you bite the inside of your mouth, “i guess now i do.”

it’s enough for you to let him spend over two thousand yen on a single trinket. you watch as he waits for the trinket to be wrapped neatly in pretty paper and put in a pink cardboard bag, its motif pretty enough to be its own product in the store.

you stand by the doorframe of the store, mouth ready to open with the words ‘i’ll pay you back’. but it seems like lev had heard you from the future, and before you could do anything, he tells you, “don’t pay me back. this is my gift to you.”

“for exams?”

he grins. “you know, lev means lion in russian.”

the bell of the store rings as you two make your way out, this time really going back to the station. you answer with a ‘really?’ at his fun fact but you keep it to yourself that you’ve known ever since he first transferred and everyone had asked him about it.

“yeah, and the thing’s a lion cub, so, it’s like you have me all the time!”

you giggle, walking up the steps to the train platform. “you’re really something, lev.”

lev stretches his arms out, with long limbs you swear ghost your shoulder. you get that feeling again, in your hands, where you just can’t seem to understand why you want to take his hand in yours so bad, so you ask the boy if you can hold onto the bag with your trinket. lev passes it to you, and you hate how you would’ve liked for your thumb to graze over his thumb for longer. you hate it even more when he motions you onto the train, and in a blur, you take his arm, leading him to corner seats on the train. you feel your face heat up.

ah, so that’s how it is.

now you’re conflicted. not that lev had ever made you feel uncomfortable - no, never - but you had never known how to return his obvious feelings. he would act on them, as always, and one day, as you fell asleep one day after final semester exams in the second year, leaning back into the plastic seat of a suburban tokyo metro rail (which lev thought was very dangerous), lev had muttered in the quietest and most subtle manner, ‘what do i do with my feelings?’

then, in a haze, with eyes barely open, you had moved your head from your seat to his shoulder, painting his cheeks red - dumbstruck. he thought you forgot about it the next morning, and you barely remember, so nothing happened afterwards. yet, when you think of him, you think of hues of orange peeling the sky into purple; of freshly washed school uniforms; of heads leaning on shoulders and fingers intertwined. you don’t know how to answer him.

with lev, there is chatter and laughter and blunt remarks that almost get him slapped in the face. still, there is a box, bigger than the bag your trinket is in, that contains words that you don’t think you or lev have ever said in pure daylight and wake.

“hey, lev?”

you want to open that box.

“yeah?”

but you don’t know how to do it yet.

“the phospholipid bilayer is made up of a polar, hydrophilic area containing a phosphate group bound to glycerol, and a non-polar, lipophilic area containing fatty acids.”

lev exclaims a series of ‘oooh!’s in delight.

“was that correct?”

“um,” lev gulps, “i think so? i mean- i think so.”

but you will open it, sooner or later, and it rings in your head when you step off the train and walk into the neighbourhood. right now, nothing is different - the air is not heavier, his eyes do not sparkle like love interests do in the movies, and you do not look through a rose-coloured lens. monday is finals, and the weekend is studying. you tell yourself this.

lev stops at your doorstep, and you almost feel a sear in your chest at the thought of him leaving for the night.

“so, good luck with next week, y/n.”

you nod, trinket bag in your hands, “you too, lev.”

you find that your arms are opening up, a small pout on your face as lev comes to wrap his arms around you, coats shuffling against each other as you hold each other at three in the morning.

when you pull away from the hug, you start to ramble a bit, scrambling for new topics to bring up in hopes of just a few more seconds with him - that, and trying to stop yourself from your newfound want to cup this boy’s face in your hands and kiss him square on the lips. you wonder if he would be good at kissing, and you wonder how much you’ll regret having these thoughts tomorrow.

but even conversation dies when you know it’s getting too cold, so you bid your sweet goodbyes and promise him not to overwork; he reminds you that it’s better to do short but frequent study sessions than fewer and highly intensive ones. you nod, your boots heavy on your doorstep, the hushed sound of keys in doors slowly becoming the only sound you hear as you assume lev’s left already.

until he calls your name.

your head spins fast towards the boy, watching as he makes long strides to stand at your doorway once again, scarf prodding the tip of his nose, so close to your face. he’s red.

“during exams, or tomorrow, or studying for entrance exams- if you ever get lost-” he pants, and unties his scarf from his neck.

“you’ll find me, okay?” the scarf comfortably hangs around your neck now, covering your mouth. he pats your head twice. it’s warm - literally.

you barely get the chance to say anything before he darts out of your house with a quick goodbye. you’re left confused, flustered, and excited at once, and this time, you think you might have the words as to why.

you like to imagine you taste sweetness, see eyes that sparkle, and feel butterflies in your stomach.

“it might not be so bad,” you whisper, looking down at the pretty little bag containing one unnecessarily expensive item lev had bought you.

right; you have feelings for him too.

then you make up your mind: you’ll tell him next friday. and if your finals stand between tonight and next friday, then, all the more motivation to get through them, right?

you make sure to set an alarm for seven in the morning, kanji textbooks lined up for tomorrow.

#haikyuu x reader #lev haiba #lev x reader #haiba x reader #haiba lev imagine #hq x reader #haikyuu!! x reader #haikyuu fluff #haikyuu scenarios #lev scenarios #haiba scenarios #lev fluff #haiba lev #haiba lev x reader #lev haiba x reader #hq fluff #nekoma x reader #nekoma fluff

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a-forgotten-spirit · 5 years ago

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Love Isn’t An Illusion (5)

Pairing: Todoroki x Bakugou, Todoroki x Reader x Bakugou, VERY SLOW BUILD

Summary: Studying, exams and lead up to the practical exam

Words: +-6600

Warnings: Anxiety, stress, overthinking, feelings of pressure, over working, unhealthy habits, over studying, not eating, not sleeping, getting thinner, (aggressive) caring Bakugou, Monoma, angy boom boom boy, fear of failure, swearing

Tagged: @kittycatspervertedheart @lemorrite @gwendlynn @marleps @thicctati2 @saitamastamaticsoup @succulent-momma @aurorahoneybuns @imjusttireddudes @misconceptualised @ochabby @katsukisuwus @gayverlinq @star-witchs-blog @fallbb123

A/N: I wrote this for the fans. I do not own My Hero academia or the characters, I don’t own most of the plot for this story, I had watched the show and re-written the dialogue and plot as if the reader was the main character. Everything is centred around the reader. Please comment, makes me happy. Ask if you wish to be tagged. I’m thinking of making a patreon for exclusive fanfics and commissions, comment/ask/message your thoughts.

Masterlist

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4

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Chapter 5 Y/N P.O.V

Once Aizawa left the room Kaminari and Mina were yelling within seconds “It’s true we haven’t had much free time” Tokoyami but in. I’ve had heaps of free time, you just cut out sleep and boom like 9 hours of studying ready for you. I had come first in the midterms so I couldn’t fall behind now.

“As someone who ranked in the top ten I'm not that concerned” Mineta smiled spinning in his chair. It was quite often my brain ignored that he was athletic and semi-decently smart. Though his personality ranked quite low in the class so overall he wasn’t doing exceptionally well.

“What you’re tenth in the midterms” both Kaminari and Mina yelled out in unison. They were the bottom two, I couldn’t imagine the stress of that. I can’t deal with being first not to mention being last. I think I was going to faint, just thinking about it sent shivers down my spine.

“Ashido, Kaminari. We still have time to study and we’ll all get to go to the training camp together” he had ranked fifth I had completely forgotten about the camp far too focused on not failing I must have excused that from my memory. I was glad Midoriya brought it up, now I was forced to converse with my parents at a later date. “Right” he questioned with a smile, hands clenched and happy.

“Yes, as class rep, I have hopes we will make UA proud” Iida was in third place in the class. How was he holding it together, I wanted to ask him for his secrets. To give me guidance. I needed the help, I needed to train. I had so little time.

“It’s pretty hard to fail if you just pay attention in class, isn’t it” Todoroki’s voice was so bland and he spoke, his words were true. Like there was no way I could fail, right, right? I could feel my heart beating so quickly. Todoroki had ranked sixth in the class, how was he being so calm. I was stressing beyond belief.

“Why you gotta cut me down like that” Kaminari was holding his chest, kneeling on the floor. I nodded, I felt the same. Everyone in the top ten seemed to calm and here I was in first place having a small crisis. I thought I had gotten over my nerves but not at least not for my education.

“Hey don’t worry you two, I can catch you up to speed on certain topics if you want” Yaoyorozu was so nice, maybe I would ask if I too could join. She ranked second, I needed to ask her as well as how she wasn’t stressing. Was it the fact she wasn’t number one? Was it something else? Did she not care? Anyone give me an answer. I had study sessions but they slowly died down with the class. I was collapsing and I needed support. Mina and Kaminari took her up on the offer. “I’m afraid I won’t be any help when it comes to the practical though” she sulked, an aura radiating off her from the corner of the room as she sat down in her chair.

“I’ve been studying but can you help me out too, I’m having some trouble understanding quadratic functions,” Jirou asked holding up her book. I too had struggled with them, a whole night of rewriting them, listening to a youtube video about them and then reading about them had solved that issue. Jirou ranked eighth in the class.

“Tutor me please, classical Japanese is killing me” Sero had his hands above his hand in a ‘praying’ formation, he ranked eighteenth. Classical Japanese was a lot of work but again some videos and all-nighter. I think I had got it to a T, though what if I had missed something… My lord what if I had missed something.

Ojiro walked over his shoulders slouched and hand in the air like he was volunteering “Is their room for one more, I’m falling behind a little” at least he was honest. Ojiro ranked ninth so he was still in the top ten but I could see his stress. I was listening in from my desk as my hands shook.

They all asked in unison for help and Yoayarozu looked stunned for a moment, her hands coming to her lips as her eyes sparkled “This is wonderful” she shouted, her seat moving back as she jumped up, hands in the air happily. How could she be happy at a time like this? “Yes let’s do it, ok we can hold a study session at my residence over the weekend” she smiled hands clasped together.

“Seriously, I can’t wait to see your fancy digs” Mina smiled as she bounced over. Yaoyarozu looked so happy, a blush forming along her cheeks, hands fisted near her face. Her smile was beautiful, she was beautiful. How could she be smart and pretty?

“I must call mother and ask to set up the great hall, it’ll be the perfect spot” Did she just say great hall, she was joking right. She didn’t have that kinda space just laying around. “What kind of tea does everyone like, I'll make sure we are stocked” everyone looked about as shocked as I was, sure I knew she was rich but this was just wow. She continued to go on about what her family drank and that if it wasn’t to your liking she would buy some. Such a good host and we were still at school.

“Sounds like I should be studying with her” Kirishima smiled at the group forming at the back of the room, he was ranked sixteenth. I couldn’t blame him, she seemed so confident and wise. How was she so happy, how was she able to make time for other people when she too had to study. Sure I could do it a few weeks ago but right now? A week before the exam, how was she doing it?

“Think I don’t know enough, maybe I should beat the lessons into your skull” Bakugou growled out, he ranked fourth. He was another I forgot was smart. He was always so loud and angry but he did care dearly for his education and becoming the best so it made sense why he was like that. Bakugou looked so angry teeth grit and eyes wide, was he mad that Kirishima even suggested going with someone else.

“I'm counting on it,” Kirishima smiled and nodded happily to the seething Bakugou. I don’t often see Kirishima without a smile, he was always so happy. Give me tips, please. I was on the verge of passing out, whether it be from stress, sleep deprivation or the four cups of coffee wearing off I wasn’t sure. “God I wish I was Y/N. Not a care in the world” Kirishima sighed and I watched as everyone turned their attention to me shaking at my desk.

“Yeah I know right” Sero agreed his head down, I heard a few more agree. Lord if only they knew how fast my heart was beating at the thought. “I don’t know how you can even get 100%” there was so much pressure, my head was spinning as I felt faint.

My hand rose, shaking as I shook my head “I am very stressed” I stuttered and everyone stopped turning to my shaking figure as I went to stand and my legs wobbled. “I think I’m about to have a heart attack,” I said calmly and sighed out unevenly.

“What, why, you’re so smart. Our study sessions were like you were a teacher. I don’t know how you find the time” Mina jumped to my desk as I stood up straight, my hands coming to rub my cheeks the end of my sleeves dragging along my skin.

“Yeah, you are incredibly smart” Kaminari agreed. “I could never come first” he sighed and everyone slowly walked over. I was rubbing my face still, slowly and shakily. They all thought I was so smart, I had so much pressure. “How do you have time?” he asked.

“I don’t sleep” I looked up, my eyes baggy and black. I might as well have been a walking corpse. “I studied over 300 hours for the last test. I can’t even imagine the time I’ve put into this one” I shivered and saw wide eyes and feared looks. “Am I allowed to the study sessions as well?” I asked slowly.

“I think you need some sleep” Yaoyarozu spoke and came to rub my back calmly. I could fall asleep to this, I could fall asleep standing I was so tired. “But if you want to come you are more than welcome” she smiled nodding. “I’ll make you some nice calming tea”

I grabbed her hands bowing my head “Thank you” I whispered and looked up seeing her happy face smiling, she was pretty “If I could marry you, I would” I whispered and she flushed as I heard some laughter. “I’m not joking, the idea of studying with calming tea is marriage material and no one can tell me otherwise” I bowed again. She blushed more and bowed back.

Then came lunch, we all walked to the lunchroom and sat down. We all sat at one big table and when I sat down I brought out my notes books and pens. This was half an hour I got to study, the lords are truly smiling upon me. As I began to write I could feel eyes on me.

“Are you not eating?” Mina asked slowly pointing down to my book “You can take a half an hour break to eat Y/N” I looked down to my book, I was hungry. When had I eaten last? I wasn’t sure yesterday, maybe. The day before. I was far too stressed and busy to eat.

“Well it’s an extra half an hour” I answered and saw the looks I was getting. “I have to do my best you know” I clicked the lid of my pen to the bottom of it and began to write again.

“When was the last time you ate,” Bakugou asked and I turned, we were sitting next to each other. He had asked me last time as well. He took a lot of care for his body, his athleticism was proof of that. Why was everyone so worried for me?

“Um,” I paused and tried to think about it “I had some rice, Saturday” I questioned and shook my head “I’m fine though, really” I smiled but even that was using energy my body didn’t have.

“Are you kidding?” Kirishima asked and I looked down shaking my head “I could never” he whispered and looked over my body. I too looked down, was I getting smaller? I pulled on my UA jumper and then flattened it to my body. There was a lot of excess fabric but I liked my jumpers bigger.

I saw a bowl placed in front of me as books were moved out of the way “Eat” Bakugou demanded and I looked down to the bowl of rice with soup and noodles, odd but it looked good. I shook my head and smiled about talking when I was handed some chopsticks. “I said to eat” he growled.

My stomach growled loudly, I hadn’t noticed just how hungry I was “Thank you” I whispered and placed my hands together in a thank you for the food. Picking up the bowel I began to eat and saw him eating something else he had brought. A few mouthfuls and I placed it down. “Thank you again” I went to grab my book but my hand was stopped.

“Eat it all” he ordered and moved the bowl back “You look dead” he added and took another bite of his food. I touched my face, did I look that bad. The noodles had a nice spice to it and were about to shake my head once more when I was glared at. Giving up I continued to eat until a loud banging was heard.

“Oh sorry, your head is so big that it’s hard to miss” it was the preppy boy from 1-B, the one who was a real jerk ward. I lowered Bakugous’ bowl and watched how this would play out. He was rude and had a grudge against 1-A. Maybe he hadn’t gotten in or maybe he just didn’t like us.

“You’re the kid from class 1-B. Um. Monomo right?” Midoriya asked rubbing the back of his head with wide eyes. Had he hit him, from the sound I thought it was the table, it was quite loud? Why was he talking to our class again? “That hurt” Midoriya yelled as he continued to rub the tender area at the back of his head.

“You guys stumbled across the Hero Killer” Now I was more interested in the conversation, the whole table was. “Just like in the sports festival, class 1-A isn’t happy unless they are the centre of attention but you know you aren’t in the spotlight because people think you’re good heroes, right?” even his voice was annoying. Did he only come here to make fun of us, was that it? “It’s just that you keep getting into so much trouble. Here’s food for thought someday the rest of us might get caught up in your mess and then we will all become victims as well” his smile was wide and menacing. He did have it out for us. “What kind of horrible villain will you bring down upon us?” he continued.

“Are you done?” I asked my eyes slowly looking over to him, too slowly to not be creepy. He seemed to sense it too. “I’m not in the mood to deal with your insecurities right now” I continued and he looked offended. Wait, did I say that out loud?

“Excuse me” his eyes widened and he huffed turning his eyes towards my own, trying to explode my head, or maybe he was constipated. I rose and eyebrow in confusion as some of my fellow class chuckled. “Say that aga-” he was cut off.

I watched as the redhead walked up, slapping him upside the head within a second he was on the floor holding the spot, now he knows how Midoriya felt. “That’s not funny Monoma, you heard what happened to Iida, chill out”

“Kendo” Iida called out his hand up about to respond again. She seemed to be everywhere the little rascal blonde went. I was about two seconds away from sticking him in an endless cube for twenty minutes.

“I apologise for him. I’m pretty sure there’s a hole where his heart should be'' she began, he should apologise for himself. Though when I looked down I should see him dangling in her grasp, did she knock him out? “So I was listening about what’s going to be on the big final practical. I heard it’s going to be combat against robots like the entrance exam” everyone straightened up now far more intrigued with the new information “One of my friends who is a few grades up filled me in. You know, cheating but oh well” I could beat them, right. I got in on recommendation so I didn’t know but I fought them in the festival and they seemed pretty easy.

Midoriya began to mumble to himself as I picked the food back up and looked down to my notes, the book was closed seconds later. Bakugous’ hand retreating as he pointed to the food in my bowl. I continued to eat, he did care about people in strange ways but still cared nonetheless.

“What kind of idiot are you Kendo” so the preppy boy was awake again. My eyes rolled by themselves this time. “You just gave away our whole strategic advantage” he whispered angrily his head rising, eyes wide as his smile. Was he ok? “This was our chance to finally pull ahead of that class full of idiots” another slap to the back of the head and he was out, being pulled out by Kendo who was calling him an idiot. A true saviour to class 1-A. Before lunch ended I made sure to give Bakugou his bowl and chopsticks back, thanking him again and asking if I could come to his study session. He agreed, a shrug but still agreed.

After lunch, everyone was talking about how the practical would be easy. It was only the exam they were now worried about. I was still stressing about every second but that was my problem. “It shouldn’t matter whether it’s robots or actual people, why are you morons so excited” the question was directed to Kaminari and Mina, they were offended by what he said but their words died down when he began to shout “Shut up” he got angry so quickly, I don’t know how he did it. “You need to learn how to control your quirk, you got it” I had to admit he had a point, they did need better control and out of everyone in the class, I think he was in the top for harnessing his quirk. “Hey Deku” his voice growled, this was the most I had heard him talk in a while. “I wanna know what’s going on with your power. I saw the way you’re using it now and I want you to know it’s seriously pissing me off” his eyes were narrowed and hands in his pockets. The training exercise, just like how he moved, had he been bottling this up for a few weeks? “I won’t have another half-ass fight, like the festival, we will be getting individual scores in the upcoming finals. New rankings” his teeth grit and his hand rose quickly pointing to the scared looking male “So we will all know exactly where we are standing. I’ll show you how much better I am and Todoroki, I’ll kill you too” with that he walked from the room, the door slamming shut.

My hands came to my cheeks once more “Am I not seen as a threat” I whispered and saw a few faces at my stress. “Oh my, does he not see me as a threat” I whispered “I was the one who beat him” I added and sighed “Although not through physical strength” Bakugou didn’t see me as a threat. I fell into my seat, my head on the desk. “Oh no,” I sighed my forehead against the wood.

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen him that worked up,” Kirishima told the class then walked over and I felt a hand on my back “I’m sure he sees you as a threat, the other two are just” he paused and I rose my head slowly “people he doesn’t like” my head came crashing back to the table.

When the weekend rolled around, a group of us met at Yaoyarozus’ place, it was massive. Sure, I knew my house was big but this was something else entirely. We stood in awe, I had managed to get some sleep the night prior, regretted it in the morning but I had a bit more energy for the day ahead which I didn’t regret.

“I knew her family had cash but I didn’t know she was this rich” Kaminari voiced all our thoughts, we all nodded in unison. It looked like her house went on for acres, and I didn’t doubt it did.

Moving forward to press the bell a voice came through and the gates were open. All six of us walked to her house, large and beautiful. I didn’t understand the need for space but I could appreciate it. We were moved into the ‘great hall’ and we all sat down. Jirou, Kaminari and Sero on one side and Mina, Ojiro and I on the other books ready and awaiting our host.

It was strange seeing the others in normal clothing and I looked down seeing the baggy jumper, black ripped jeans and boots I wore on my days off. Though the boots I had to imagine, taking off our shoes before entering the house. I wouldn’t want dirt in here either.

“I could not feel any more out of place right now” Ojiro voiced and I nodded and Sero agreed verbally. It was a beautiful house and well taken care of. I couldn’t believe this is what Yaoyarozu came home to every day.

She walked in pushing a tray of tea, she was wearing a red shirt and white shorts. Even though they were ‘normal’ clothes she still looked proper in every way. She was so nice to let us over to study, honestly a gift to my week. Hours of studying went by and I got ahold of everything, I needed to do more. I was given calming tea as I shook and stressed.

“Marry me” I turned my eyes wide and hopeful. Yaoyarozu was a goddess in the body of a human. She had laughed and continued with the lesson. Over the weekend I met with that group of a day and Bakugou and Kirishima at night. A little over twelve hours of study with other people a day and then my study at home.

“How are your notes so neat?” Kirishima asked leaning over to look at my notes in the booth, having met in a cafe. I looked down, my notes were mostly colour coded for different things, having many pens and highlighters.

“I have a fear of failure” I stated and he nodded. I helped the two organise by colour coded and it seemed to help Kirishima get the hang of a few things “Look, cover, write, check” I wrote down on a posted note for him, sticking the paper to his book neatly. “The motto I live by, or just keep doing it until it’s engraved in your brain for eternity” I smiled and Bakugou nodded in agreement.

“So manly” he nodded and started my technique, this went on for a few hours until we parted ways and I let him borrow one of the study books I was done with having memorized it. He looked about ready to cry “I owe you my life” he bowed and I laughed.

Going home, eating something and then back up to my room to continue studying. Every day this week I had worked on my quirk. Expanding my area, how long I could do it for, how many things I could create, size, density. Everything had to be perfect. I worked night and day to be the best. I was going to stay in the top spot. I could do this. I hoped, begged.

The weekend went quickly but the night before the exam I slept more hours then I did the whole week, waking up I felt ‘refreshed’ and ready. I practically sprinted to school my head high and my mind ready. I had an illusion of the answers beside me, to make sure I didn’t forget anything. Answers I had studied and worked my ass off. The first exam was long and I powered through the answers, seeming to know every single one. I didn’t stop writing for the entire time, I was proud of myself.

The third day was finally over, I felt my heartbeat again “Alright pencils down, the last person of each row bring the answers to me” My page was collected and I felt a weight off my shoulders. I was breathing again, was oxygen always this good?

Yaoyarozu was then bombarded with Kaminari and Mina thanking her, I said it but I wouldn’t bet she could hear me over them. They had answered every question which was good to hear. They gave it a go. Later that day Kirishima had asked why I thanked Yaoyorozu and then the class was surprised to know I went to both sessions with the groups and then studied more at home.

The practical was still to come, I looked down at my hands. Was I ready? I had trained so hard every day, was I ready for this? I shook my head then nodded, yes, I was. I had gone up against villains, murders, Nomus and won. I can beat a few robots… There were no robots.

We were all in our hero costumes standing in front of the teachers. I was shitting bricks, to say the least. “Now then, let’s begin the last test, remember it’s possible to fail this final. If you want to go camping, don’t make any stupid mistakes” Aizawa warned. I was petrified, were all the teachers going to watch us?

“Why are all the teachers here?” Jirou questioned, good now I didn’t have to talk, a small sigh left my lips in relief. I thought it would only be Aizawa, maybe All Might if we were lucky not all of them.

“I expect many of you have gathered information and believe you have some idea of what you’ll be faced with today” I froze, we weren’t fighting robots were we? Of course, it would change for our year, why wouldn’t it?

“We’ll be fighting those big metal robots” Kaminari shouted leaning back as if to allow as much sound from his body as possible… he most likely did do that. His hands were out and Mina joined in happily smiling.

I watched as Aizawa’s scarf ruffled then Principal Nezu popped out “This year's test has been changed for various reasons” he smiled, I felt my heart sink. I was right, I was too right. Why was I right, why couldn’t we just fight the robots? “The test now has a new focus” he lowered himself with Aizawa's’ scarf and the help of No.13 “It’ll be hero work of course but also teamwork and combat against actual people. So what does that mean for you, your students will be in pairs and your opponents will be one of our esteemed UA teachers. Isn’t that fabulous” I was going to throw up. My hands were shaking as I put my hand over my mouth to try and get myself together.

“Additionally your partners and opponents have already been chosen” I was mad at that. If I lost because of my partner I was not going to be impressed. “They were determined under my discretion based on various factors including fighting style, grades and interpersonal relationships” this wasn’t going to end well. I was so sure, I was going to win but the idea of having to not only watch myself but someone else was a lot of work. “First Yaoyorozu and Todoroki are a team” he smiled pulling his scarf up “Against me. Then we have Midoriya paired with Bakugou” they turned to each other and I could feel the tension circle our group. “And their opponent is”

A loud bang and there was All Might in all his glory suited up and ready to fight “I am here” his fist was out and my heart fluttered in fear. I was so glad I wasn’t them. It was good to know I wasn’t going to be fighting the top hero and a little insulting knowing I was the first by grades and in the festival. I tried not to take it personally… I took it personally. “To fight” first Bakugou and now the teachers. “You’re going to have to work together boys, if you want to win” his smile only grew with a chuckle.

Teachers P.O.V (third person)

The teachers began to talk about the exam, explaining why it needed to be changed and how. Some teachers were against the idea but the topic of the league of villains attacking once more quickly changed their minds, why wouldn’t it? The heroes in training need to be ready if anything ever happens. Hero Killer Stain may be gone, but for how long, how long until someone takes his place? Everyone was now on the same page about the students fighting the teachers.

“Right, now let’s talk about the teams” Aizawa held a pile of papers in his hand, looking down at the first team “First, Todoroki, he’s doing quite well generally speaking but relies too much on brute force. Yaoyorozu is an all-rounder but lacks the ability to make spur of the moment decisions and apply them. Therefore I’ll erase their quirks and take advantage of their weaknesses” with the simple explanation all the teachers had agreed happily. It was fair, one liked to take control while the other feared to make decisions by erasing their quirks they would have to work together. “Next for Midoriya and Bakugou I’m leaving them to you All Might,” said male looked confused a little taken back by the conclusion of his pair. “In this case, I didn’t pair the two based on ability or classwork, I went with relationships. I know you’ve got a soft spot for Midoriya, please ensure that they learn something” Aizawa pointed out and.

“I will do my best” All Might nod in affirmative. It would be hard for the number one Hero, he did have a soft spot for the green-headed successor but he also had a soft spot for the explosive teen who loved to cause damage. He was nervous but would do what he needed.

“The next group is Anyama and Uraraka, I picked this pair based on relationships as well. I have never seen them talk and in the hero world you will need to pair with random heroes, they need to learn to pair with whoever” Aizawa explained then looked to No. 13 “I have paired them with you, both their quirks will be easy to fend off with your own and they will need to think outside the box”

“I see” No 13 pondered then nodded “I look forward to facing them, I hope they can work well together” she concluded with the other teachers agreeing. As she was given the papers to learn more about them and how their quirks worked.

“Forwarding on, Ashido and Kaminari this pair is based purely on grades. They are the lowest in class but seem to work well together. They both need work on their quirks so this is why I'm pairing them with Nezu. They need to think outside the box and quickly as well as together” Aizawas’ eyes turned to Neku who was smiling and quite happy to take the pages of the two students' information.

“Very good thinking” Nezu nodded his eyes growing narrowed and smirking “I am quite excited to face these two in the exam” everyone knew Nezus’ past and his slight dislike for the human race.

“Moving onto Tsu and Tokoyami both strong quirks but both are long-distance fighters, preferring to stay back. Relying heavily on their quirks. So Ectoplasm” Aizawa’s eyes moved to the Pro who nodded indicating he was listening. “Your clones will provide close combat as well as distance. They need to work on thinking quickly as well and not relying on their quirks”

“Understood” his creepy voice spoke out into the room, a man of few words as many knew him. The pages were handed over easily and his eyes began to scan the information. Sure all the teachers had taught them but any extra information was useful.

“The next pair is based purely on fighting style and speed, Ojiro and Iida. They work well in teams and can talk to anyone, they rely on speed and technique. This is why I'm pairing them with Power Loader because they will have to move faster, think as one and make sure they watch what is going on around them all at once” another explanation down.

“This will be interesting” Power Loaded nodded and Aizawa knew he had a smile on his face even though this headgear was stopping most from seeing. Aizawa had spent a lot of thought and time working on these pairs.

“Kirishima and Sato are with Cementoss, I paired them on strength and they have close grades as well as their quirks are both short term. Both friendly and enjoy working in teams. Let’s see how they fare against Cementoss who can change the location outlook in a matter of seconds” Aizawa smirked to the fellow Pro who thought for a moment and then nodded.

“I wouldn’t hurt them as much as the other students if I go for a hit and they need to work on speed and agility. A very good pairing Eraserhead” Cementoss nodded and took the papers. He too began to look through the information provided, he had taught them and only saw Kirishima at the festival using his quirk.

“Koda and Jirou are with Mic as they both rely on sound to use their quirk, it’ll be hard to use sound when someone is yelling over the top of them” this pair was easy to see the potential for a fight. “Koji will be required to talk more and build teamwork, Jirou will be tasked with helping him”

“Yo yo that sounds awesome Eraserhead. Perfect pair for me indeed” the loud hero smiled and nodded bobbing to music that wasn’t playing as he grabbed the papers and put them down in front of him with ease.

“Shoji and Toru will be placed with Snipe. Their quirks are stealth-based and with someone shooting at them it will be hard to stay quiet and move in silence” Aizawa conducted putting the two pages together and hitting them against the table to make them even before handing them over to the hero who only nodded.

“That leaves just me” Midnight smiled and placed her head atop her hands, her smile turning into a smirk “With Mineta and Sero am I correct,” she asked licking her lips.

“Correct. I put them with you as Mineta can get” he paused shaking his head “Distracted while Sero is mostly speeding. Both with different fighting styles and outlooks on being a hero plus I found out they both look up to you” Aizawa answered with ease handing over the last pair of pages.

“I do look forward to breaking them” licking her lips again she nodded and sighed out. Placing the pages down “Are we done? So soon” she questioned, that was a short meeting but if the pairs were decided it was to be expected.

“No, there is one more student” Aizawa sighed and everyone was paying full attention “Y/N” he breathed out and everyone nodded. “Her quirk can be used in any situation and against any quirk, plus they can become physical. She could simply put an illusion of herself and no one would know the difference” he looked down to the paper seeing her face in the picture “I don’t know what to do” he answered honestly “She was first in the festival and first grade-wise, I heard the other students. She hadn’t slept in days to study for the test” the teachers all nodded.

“Her quirk is a problem, she could easily get past any of us” Cementoss nodded adding his input into the conversation. Everyone sat in silence as Aizawa looked down to the paper with all her details. She was a perfect student for UA.

“She athletic as well” everyone turned to Snipe, the teacher who had taken her as a sidekick for a week. “She beat me in hand to hand” that stopped the teachers. “Her quirk works on thinking, she showed me something that” he paused and shook his head and licking his lips behind his mask “She had a conversation with me while also talking to a coworker at the same time. Her mind was doing two different things simultaneously while also keeping up the illusion”

Midnight shook her head “That takes extreme power, in the festival her illusion looked so real. I believed it” She added nodding her head, a hand coming to her chin to think. Cementoss agreed.

“She doesn’t rely purely on her quirk but also does. No matter who she went against, if it was a formal and acknowledged physical fight, if someone managed to beat her, I would be quite impressed” Snipe nodded as the other teachers agreed. Snipe was the only one who knew of her ‘weakness’ but he would never tell and even if he did it wouldn’t matter she knew everyone here.

“I have an idea” Principal Nezu spoke up thoughtfully and all the teachers were open ears for the suggestion “What if we all went against her at once. It would prove she’s been working on her quirk, how many things she can create at one given moment. How quickly she can think and act” it was a good idea but the idea of it was unfair. “It may seem unfair to the child but we don’t have another option” all the teachers agreed, though some not looking as determined as others. “Though she has one rule” why would she have a rule and no one else, her test was already quite unfair. “She must show at least one teacher her true self during the exercise, she needs a challenge” the teachers felt bad but it was for her good. They had to test her as hard as they could. Even if she took down two maybe three teachers they would be impressed.

“Then it’s decided, Y/N goes against all of us, at once”

Y/N P.O.V

Once all the names were called out with their pairs I looked around and was confused. I was guessing they put a group of three, had they forgotten about me? Was I not seen as a threat that much that they just excluded me? “Um” I put my hand up and the class stopped talking turning to me. “I wasn’t paired,” I said slowly smiling as I did, an awkward smile and I could see the confusion of my peers.

“You’re a special case Y/N” Aizawa looked me dead in the eyes and I nodded slowly, my eyebrows drawn in confusion as I waited for an answer pursing my lips. “You will be fighting” I nodded and smiled, OK, so I wasn’t getting kicked out or something.

“OK” I nodded slowly and looked around “Am I joining a pair or something” I looked around and saw pleading faces for me to join groups. I had to be joining a group, there was no other way to complete the test or was someone going to have to do it twice, would I do it alone?

“You will be competing alone” Aizawa added carefully and I felt my hands shake slightly, I could beat them. I nodded still confused. All the teachers were taken. What weren’t they telling me?

“Am I getting a teacher brought in or something or is a teacher doubling up?” I asked looking over everyone before landing back on Aizawa for the answer. Everyone was silent as the teachers waited for the answer and my peers listened in.

“You are very strong” Aizawa began, this didn’t sound good. Bakugou and Midoriya already had All Might who was the top hero. Was I going to be fighting Endeavor or something, Best Jeaniest maybe? I felt my heart begin to race “After some talk and decision making we decided that you” he paused and then looked straight at me with a smirk “Will be fighting us all at once” I felt my eyes grow wide and gasps were heard behind me as my heart sank.

I was going to be fighting them all… at once. Alone. Someone catch me. ________________________________________________________________

Chapter 6

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tongueselect1 · 4 years ago

Text

Arbitration As Well As Related Processes.

What Is The Proof That Mediation Works In Child Security?

Content

The Four Vital Principles Of Kid Inclusive Arbitration:.

How Does A Court Decide About Our Kids?

A Public And Also Bitter Divorce Battle, There Is One More Means.

Kids.

We Make Arbitration Help You

The events retain ownership of the disagreement, as well as do not hand power to the moderator. Our arbitration solution offers a quick and also cost-efficient way of settling all kinds of sporting activities disagreements where it is necessary for the resolution to remain private and for the relationship in between the events to be protected. The Moderator will typically make contact with the experts to talk about independently the best use of the day or days reserved for the arbitration. In some cases it will be helpful to prepare a preliminary conference with the mediator before the arbitration, sometimes prior to there is also arrangement on a timetable.

But if you wish to go to court over a household problem, you have to show the court that you have met with a mediator initially as well as thought about mediation. In method really couple of instances end up in a court hearing, and for good reason.

The 4 Key Concepts Of Child Comprehensive Arbitration:.

This paper also advises you that the arbitrator can not provide lawful guidance which the web content of the arbitration discussion is confidential, it can not be used in any type of future processes or procedures that you might be associated with. These concerns are talked about and if you reach an arrangement the moderator will compose it down for you as well as ensure it claims what you both desire it to claim. Everyone signs the contract and also you decide that else, if anyone, should see a copy.

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As component of this process our conciliators' backgrounds implies that they are appropriately knowledgeable to reality test the celebrations' instance thus aiding the celebrations to determine the staminas and also weak points of their case. Our participants use their histories as successful civil and also business professionals to offer a remarkable solution as mediators in all areas of technique. We have moderated disagreements in a wide variety of areas including business disputes, building, residential property damages, insurance policy as well as reinsurance, professional negligence, injury as well as professional oversight. Landlords as well as occupants have disagreements which sometimes wind up in court. Going to court isn't the only method to settle issues as well as is commonly pricey and also takes some time. A totally free mediation solution is available to personal property managers and occupants to aid reach agreement.

Exactly How Does A Court Make A Decision Concerning Our Children?

Subsequently, we believe that most of the times arbitration will certainly be most reliable if only parties to the argument are involved with the moderator. There may, however, be great reasons why you feel you require to bring an agent to the arbitration as well as you should review this with Human Resources as well as the appointed conciliator before you start the procedure. It is essential that all those included know beforehand that will certainly be participating in and also what their duty will be. The mediator overviews the people via the procedure as well as assists to them to identify the real concerns and develop concepts to boost points.

Experience shows that where the suggested option originates from individuals associated with the conflict, it is far more likely to stick than one imposed from outdoors by, for instance, a court or tribunal. Conciliators do not establish the end result in a conflict but rather encourage parties to comprehend the problems at stake, solve their distinctions and also manage any conflict in order to get to an equally beneficial result. An arrangement reached in mediation will usually be taped in a binding negotiation agreement, or if Court proceedings are currently in progress in an authorization order. Mediation is significantly made use of as an alternative technique of dispute resolution. St John's Chambers offer very experienced moderators, in any kind of type of dispute, to aid events reach an agreeable option to their trouble, nevertheless complicated or evidently unbending, without the risk and also cost of going to test. The idea of a joint conference with the individual you are not quadrating can be stressing, however, mediation is much less tough and also time-consuming than experiencing an official process, and also it functions. It works because it assists people find functional options that really feel fair to everyone.

A Public And Also Bitter Divorce Fight, There Is One More Means.

To make the most of such a meeting it typically requires to take place at the very least six weeks ahead of the mediation. Time spent by doing this is seldom lost and also is typically very handy. With the assistance of the conciliator, the parties with the conflict decide whether they can deal with points as well as what the remedy ought to be. The conciliator will certainly make sure that both events get a possibility to state their case, listen to the opposite side, overcome the concerns that are important to them and make an arrangement. To work as a household moderator, you'll require experience in sustaining children and also grownups with numerous concerns. Functions in social care services, health and wellness person advocacy or family members law technique are useful.

Does a mediator decide the outcome?

Unlike a judge or an arbitrator, the mediator won't decide the outcome of the case. The mediator's job is to help the disputants resolve the problem through a process that encourages each side to: identify the strengths and weaknesses of their case.

The mediator's duty in this joint conference is to assist you have a different sort of discussion with each other in a risk-free space, as well as to help you focus on what you need. The conciliator holds both of you to the ground rules and sees to it you have equivalent time to speak and also to pay attention per various other. Typically there are just 2 people entailed, though occasionally there are numerous, you will certainly know that you are meeting with. The procedure does not enable lawful representatives, union representatives or any kind of other agents to be existing during the specific or joint meetings. At the beginning of the mediation you are asked to authorize a Confidentiality and also Responsibility Contract.

Youngsters.

You have to wait quite a long period of time for court procedures as well as for many people it sets you back a tiny lot of money - so it is neither fast neither very easy. If you are not eligible for lawful aid it normally is considerably more affordable to mediate. But it does depend on whether you have the ability to pertain to a contract or not, and also if so how promptly. If you can settle on some issues relatively quickly as well as narrow the factors of disagreement you will certainly have saved money. If you can not concern a contract or have just settled on some points, you have to spend for the mediation and also for whatever solicitors and court costs it takes to obtain the remainder of the matter arranged. You can ask the court to make the contracts about funds you have actually arrived at throughout arbitration right into a court order so that they are legitimately binding.

If you are thinking about litigating you require to have had an initial conference about mediation first. Most people after that need between 2 sessions to concur concerns around the children as well as 4 sessions to agree economic problems, each lasting 90 mins. Several conciliators bill people according to their revenue, so if you get on a low income you may pay ₤ 120- ₤ 150 per session and if you are on a high earnings you might pay more like ₤. Some arbitrators likewise charge a higher cost for sessions at night or at weekend breaks. A lawyer is a lawful expert who will certainly give you legal advice and also prepare court records for you. A lawyer can likewise manage settlements in your place to reach an agreement with your ex lover, either about youngsters's plans or funds. One option is to satisfy together with your ex lover and an arbitrator, that has actually been properly educated to assist you put your sensations apart and focus on the useful issues that require to be figured out.

We Make Arbitration Work For You

They do this mostly by asking questions yet if you find it handy they can use their experience to make tips. The people included will make a decision to they intend to use up these ideas. Bothe sides can talk to the mediator freely due to the fact that the conciliator will not hand down anything said without the contract of the person that said it. Those entailed with the arbitration will certainly be given a composed copy of anything that is concurred. If you accept participate in arbitration, Human Resources Solutions will certainly choose a mediator. The events to the mediation will not have the ability to choose an arbitrator or challenge the chosen arbitrator. Occasionally people have the concept that litigating is what you must do.

Mediation is a way of resolving problems directly with the aid of a conciliator.

It is a private and totally volunteer procedure which includes a collection of conferences in between the pair and also a conciliator where, with each other, they try to get to an agreement.

Our arbitrators are additionally family legal representatives therefore have a specialist understanding of the problems included.

Or the search on Resolution's site, clarifies in the outcomes the length of time the conciliator has actually been a household regulation lawyer.

( Not all great family arbitrators and solicitors show up on Resolution's search, just their participants).

( If you wish to do it anyway, you can.) If you want a mediator who is likewise a solicitor, make use of the search on the Family members Mediation Council's website and also examine what it says on the arbitrator's web site regarding their history.

A parent or young adult can request for dispute resolution any time during the SEND process.

They can not provide you lawful suggestions however they are required to tell you if you are about to make an agreement that is really various to what a court would certainly buy.

Individual concerns may require a household or counselling-led conciliator, whereas lawful and expert conflicts will call for a mediator with work or industrial understanding. Actually, arbitration can happen any time in the dispute, as long as the events agree. Some occur before court proceedings, some take place whilst the trial, or settlement, is occurring. No, people commonly participate in mediation without an attorney yet may well have actually listened from one before doing so. mediators Ireland ex pats is likewise readily available from some organisations run systems for a particular industry and some deal pro-bono or fixed-rate costs, especially on the lower-value conflicts. We offer functional, effective and easy to use conciliators that are experts and lead the way in energetic mediations, leaving behind the traditional passive arbitration layout. The energetic procedure is rapid moving as well as dynamic and the celebrations as well as mediator interact to swiftly identify as well as accomplish alternatives for negotiation.

Uks Leading Mediation Chambers.

Bear in mind this is most likely to cost you approximately an added ₤ 600 for the necessary solicitors and court charges. If you assume your ex-spouse will certainly lie concerning their funds you might want to think about using a lawyer instead of arbitration. Some people feel that it's simpler to conceal the true economic picture in arbitration than if a lawyer is a lot more included. But if you intend to go to court over a family members problem you have to show the court that you have met a conciliator initially as well as considered mediation. mediationeurope.net’s accounting software is due to the fact that the government assumes with great reason, that it is normally much better that you decide these points in between yourselves if you can, as opposed to the court telling everyone what to do.

A mediator can provide you lawful information but they can't offer you lawful recommendations. The arbitrator will certainly be neutral as well as can not inform you whether the settlement is fair. They will certainly likewise help with preparing an official contract that can be included into a court order. Conciliators will certainly always advise that you obtain legal guidance together with the mediation procedure and our family members lawyers here at Stowe are trained to support you with this process. As soon as the concerns have actually been agreed, they will be laid out in a "Memorandum of Understanding". At this point your attorney will certainly provide their advice on the outcome, as well as create the lawful documentation.

The mediator won't take sides or decide what is reasonable for you - they exist to help you reach a decision that you think about fair. Arbitrators don't offer you lawful recommendations as well as can't formulate official records, so it is typically wise to see a solicitor as well - the arbitrator can tell you when that is required. It is vital that one party not be able to control another or unilaterally determine the outcome of mediation.

Why Virtual Mediation Is Here to Stay The Legal Intelligencer - Law.com

Why Virtual Mediation Is Here to Stay The Legal Intelligencer.

Posted: Tue, 05 Jan 2021 16:15:39 GMT [source]

At the very same time, remember that mediators are trained to evaluate power discrepancies and also can typically intervene to stabilize injustices. The presence of lawful advise or use of independent lawful consultants is one way to develop negotiating equal rights. Dominic as well as Ruth have a therapeutic, rather than a lawful, background. The service is complimentary, personal as well as offered by certified moderators. The conciliators do not offer any kind of recommendations or at all talk about the conflict as well as they will not recommend any solution or course of action. Rather they aid you a solution that solves the disagreement which finest fits the demands of everybody involved.

The conciliator is constantly a neutral third party that assists the participants to generate their very own remedies. It enables people to inform each various other just how they feel about the dispute, to share the impact it is having on them and to make ideas and also compromises which lead to a solution.

Don’t want any vicholiya: Farm unions on Nanaksar sect head’s mediation offer - The Indian Express

Don’t want any vicholiya: Farm unions on Nanaksar sect head’s mediation offer.

Posted: Sat, 09 Jan 2021 05:41:26 GMT [source]

Mediation is commonly most successful when those really in conflict straight work with the mediator to resolve it-- particularly when you need to collaborate in the future. Experience of mediation reveals that you are the most effective individual to discuss how you feel. An open as well as frank discussion of the concerns, which is managed by the arbitrator to make certain justness and also suitable practices, can be key in sorting out problem.

If you are uncomfortable with sharing the joint contract with individuals who are not in the room after that a decision is made concerning what, if anything, to show the person or individuals who referred you to mediation. The College of Southampton is committed to the principles of mediation as well as is keen to promote an alternate conflict resolution service for people that selected to look for a casual method of solving their conflict. Mediation motivates functioning in the direction of unified practical relationships which will certainly have a positive impact on personnel as well as pupil health and wellbeing and also efficiency. Worldwide Arbitration supplies cost-efficient, efficient as well as private mediation as well as argument resolution solutions for a broad range of individual or specialist disputes. As arbitrators can't use lawful guidance you may intend to choose this choice if you have a great deal of intricate legal issues to settle.

#mediation service #mediation service UK #mediation service United Kingdom #Best mediation service #best mediator #family mediation service #chile mediation service #divorce mediation service #Best mediation service UK #best mediator UK #family mediation service UK #chile mediation service UK #divorce mediation service UK

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bnhabadass · 6 years ago

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BNHA Halloween Day 3 - Lightning/Thunderstorm

@bnha-halloween2019 | Day [3]: [Lightning.Thunderstorm] / [Kaminari x Reader] | [Teen] | [N/A]

The soft rain outside was a pleasant view from inside the coffee shop. You always loved the aroma of coffee beans, freshly baked scones and tea, but the soft whiffs of rain that entered your nostrils every time the door opened tied it all together. You loved the rain. It was a calming force in your otherwise stressful life.

“Hey babe. Sorry I’m late.” You heard the voice of none other than your boyfriend as he spotted you at a small table, coffee in hand and textbook open. You made sure to take a deep breath in before the door closed.

“No worries,” you said, smiling happily. Kaminari took off his jacket and set it over the back of his chair. “So,” you said, watching as he sat himself down. “Quadratic functions.” You couldn’t help but laugh at the groan your boyfriend let out.

Like the rain outside and the smell of coffee, you loved your dunce of a boyfriend. It was taking Kaminari ages to ask you out, so you said screw it and asked him yourself. Everyone was surprised to hear that you, one of the smartest students in class 1-A, fell for the dumbest.

“You’re going out with who?” Momo asked. All the color had drained from her face when you told her. And all you could do was laugh. You would be lying if you said it didn’t get on your nerves, the way people overreact when they hear you two are together. There have been many times when boys in your class and in others who are smarter than him have told you to leave him for someone smarter. They always mean themselves.

“Come on, (L/n),” they would say. “Kaminari can’t even hold a pencil upright without messing up. Could a guy like that really take care of your needs?”

What needs? You’re in high school. Besides, seeing your man smile at you, the electricity coming off of that smile just as powerful as the electricity from his quirk, fills you with light. He cares about you, and that’s all you really care about.

“So if ‘y’ equals two x squared plus three x plus seven,” Kaminari said, taking you out of your thoughts. “Then the vertex is here?” He pointed at a spot on the grid and you nodded, excited that he was finally starting to understand precalculus.

He smiled one of those electric smiles at you and your heart skipped a beat. You love him. You love seeing him happy and you love watching him succeed.

But every relationship has a strain. The strain on your relationship with your dunce face boyfriend happens to be, well, your dunce face boyfriend. It’s not that he’s doing anything wrong, it’s just that his… Kaminari-isms kind of put a strain on you at times.

The light rain outside had quickly progressed into heavy storm. The lightning in the sky appeared periodically and thunder could be heard every five or so seconds.

“Perfect time for a storm,” you said as you gathered your belongings. It was seven o’clock and curfew was at eight. The sun outside had set for the most part, but it was hard to tell when the sky looked so gloomy.

“Here take my jacket,” Kaminari said. You took it with gratitude and began walking out into the storm. The train station was only a three minute walk away, so you weren’t too worried about catching a cold, but it was nice getting to wear his oversized jacket. It made you feel secure.

He slid his arm around you as the two of you walked out of the cafe, warm beverages in hand. However he quickly retorted his arm to hold up his backpack as an umbrella. The two of you ran into the darkness towards the train station. You both laughed at times when the other’s foot splashed in a puddle, making the other person wet.

The station wasn’t too far away, but Kaminari grabbed your arm and pulled you towards him, kissing you. The rain wasn’t letting up and there you stood, kissing in the rain like you were the main character in a cheesy romcom. When he released the kiss he smiled down at you. “What would happen if I activated my quirk during a thunderstorm?”

And there it was. That strain on your relationship. It was time to start the process of talking him down from his “genius idea.” Step one: laugh it off.

You laughed and poked him in the chest. “I think you’d electrocute yourself and you’d die.”

“Wait wait wait,” he said. “I don’t think I would.” Here it goes again. Your face faltered as he continued on with his stroke of genius. “If I’m struck by lightning while I activate my quirk wouldn’t it become stronger. I mean think about it. It would be just like in a comic book!”

“But this isn’t a comic book. This is real life.” You still tried to keep up that happy smile, but your voice shook. You love his stupid creative side, but more often than not it puts him in danger. You worry about that every day. And when he’s so persistent with his ideas you can’t help but cry because maybe, just maybe, that might be the last time you ever see him again. There was only one time when you admitted feeling like that to anyone.

“Why don’t you just leave him for someone who cares about you enough not to be a complete idiot?” Momo asked. “We could help you find someone better!”

“And smarter,” Jiro added.

But you didn’t want anyone else. You wanted Kaminari to care about his well being and the others around him at that.

“Are you crying?” he asked.

“Hmm?” You quickly wiped the tears away. You thought that maybe he wouldn’t notice since it was raining so hard.

“(Y/n) you know I’m only joking right?”

“Are you though?” You didn’t mean for your voice to break. You didn’t want it to break because you didn’t want to worry him, but here you were standing in a puddle, your shoes soaked, crying just about how much you care for him. “You do this all the time, Denki. I want to be there for you a-and I want to be with you, but I worry all the time about whether or not I’ll see you again the next day because you keep putting yourself in danger.” You look up from the puddle you’re standing in and look into his eyes. The sound of the thunder rumbled softly in the distance. “I love you. I love you so, so much. But I’m scared you’ll really mess up and might not come out of it alive.”

You hated the look on his face in that moment. He looked so full of regret. Regret for not listening when you told him that he was being an idiot, and regret for not noticing how much it hurt you sooner. He pulled you into a tight squeeze and you cried even harder.

He really does love me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry I’ve been hurting you. I’m so sorry I didn’t see it sooner.” He tightened his grip to the point where you couldn’t breathe.

You choked out another sob and latched on tightly to him. “We should go,” you said. “We’ll miss the train.” But neither of you let go. You never wanted to let go ever again.

You didn’t separate until a loud crack of thunder caused you to yelp and jump back. There was a short moment where neither of you knew what to do, so you just laughed, but this time it wasn’t because it was the only thing you could do. He joined in, and soon enough you two were sitting on the pavement laughing your asses off in the middle of the storm.

By the time you got back to the dorms you were both shivering messes. Iida and Momo both scolded you for not taking better care of yourselves. You would both be sick by morning no doubt.

Everyone else saw it as the aftermath of another one of Kaminari’s stupid ideas. Everyone else gave you sympathetic glances as you were no doubt sick because of him. But the two of you knew that it didn’t matter because you had made it out of that storm stronger than ever before.

#bnha-halloween2019 #bnha x reader #denki kaminari #kaminari x reader

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illumoux · 7 years ago

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IB ➞ Art school???

I’ve gotten some PMs with questions about taking the IB Programme in high school and how it’s now affecting me in art school now so I thought I would finally do a Post(TM) about it. Again, everything I’m about to talk about is based on my personal experience but please feel free to talk with me if you have any concerns about this post. I want to put myself out there and help others if I can since I had so much support getting to where I am now. If you have any other questions about art college or the likes, please feel free to shoot them my way 💘

WHAT IS IB?

The International Baccalaureate Programme (aka. IB) is a “fast paced” program for middle and high school students that’s supposed to promote students to think independently and critically. At my school, there was a set courselist, with one or two elective choices. Some courses were Standard Level (SL) and some were Higher Level (HL), which certain post secondary schools allow to swap out for first year credits. IB is different in different schools and different countries though, but overall, It’s meant to be an alternative and more challenging high school experience.

IB + ME:

I can’t say I had the most positive time in IB or anything since I was also REALLY struggling with mental health at the time and had hated every moment I was in high school. But upon reflection, there really were things to be gained from the experience. Pros and Cons.

I was in full IB until second semester grade 10. At that point, I was already thinking about studying art after high school, but was afraid to commit to it entirely because there was so much pressure from my parents and peers to go into a “respectable” career and get a “high paying job in science or math or business” or something. So I dropped to partial IB as a compromise and took IB math, Art and HL English, as well as regular Ontario Uni level Physics, Bio, CompSci, etc etc etc.

DO YOU USE ANY OF THE STUFF YOU LEARNED IN IB CLASSES IN ART SCHOOL?

No.

I have an official credit for Grade 12 Advanced Functions but the most math I do now is occasionally multiplying by 12. Could I solve a quadratic equation now? Don’t even know what that is anymore.

BUT! You never know what could inspire you. I was so interested in quantum physics, I’m literally writing a story about parallel universes. Learning is almost always good.

LET’S TALK ABOUT IB ART FOR ONE HOT SECOND:

I did find IB Art incredibly applicable and helpful because it taught me how to keep a sketchbook and understand the creative process, neither of which you actually directly get graded on in the animation program at Sheridan but is personally tremendously beneficial for developing ideas and creating pieces. Now I draw thumbnails for everything I do. And I appreciate them!

Even if you walk away from IB Art with the most garbage collection - no sweat, it’s only high school and it’s learning the process of creating art that is so so important! When I applied for Sheridan Illustration (the same year I was accepted into Sheridan Animation), I basically repeated a simplified version of the IB Art process and was accepted into the program with a portfolio score of 80, with 9/10s in Process/Ideation, Media Exploration and Sketchbook, which you REALLY focus heavily on in IB Art.

I would highly recommend taking IB Art if you are thinking about doing art after high school, or doing art in general.

BEING AN ART STUDENT IN IB:

I hate that Art Kids(TM) have a bad rep. People always assume that art is a dead end career and we all starve and we’re all morally questionable people but that’s not true at all!

But being that Token Art Kid in IB (outside of IB Art class) actually made me feel awful back then. I was always kind of an odd one out. That’s not to say that people weren’t nice or anything. But there was so much pressure to not go into art. Ever since I was a kid, I’d always wanted to be an “artist when I grow up” but I found that in high school, I’d often say that I was “interested in art but was also thinking of pursuing an alternative career in this and that” because I was afraid of being looked down on in an environment where everyone around me wanted to do something “brainy”. Admitting that I wanted to do art almost felt self depreciating because everyone else was actually going to get a “real job” and live “better lives”. But that’s totally not the case! I ended up spending a lot of time taking a bunch of science and math courses I didn’t really like to maintain my twenty thousand irrelevant Back-Up Plans.

IB AND LEARNING SKILLS:

I think no matter what you do, having good organization and time management skills is always going to be so so important!

Sheridan Animation is such a loaded program, you really have to try to schedule your time well. I used to complain about the IB courseload but I honestly feel like Sheridan Animation is so much more laborious. We had 8 courses + an elective last semester, each about 2 to 3 hours a week, plus all the time you had to put into doing homework and living life and sleeping.

Even though IB is meant to keep you busy to force you to learn good work ethics, I don’t think forcing someone to work harder necessarily means that they are going to learn how to manage their time. I was 100% unmotivated and depressed and self destructive in high school. I was in IB for four years but I always studied the night before an exam up until the very last one. And when I graduated and moved out, I realized that I was a mess and I had to change, and it was that self realization was what motivated me to learn how to slowly put together my life back together. Only then did I start taking steps to curate my life and learn how to plan ahead and schedule my week and get! stuff! done!

So all in all, maybe IB does put you in an environment where having good learning skills will benefit you, and maybe that will motivate you to learn how to maintain a good work ethic. But I really do think skills like how to study and learn and live life is something that you have to be aware of as an individual and want to work towards. Being in IB may help with those things, but it isn’t going to suddenly grant you powers to study two weeks in advance and keep track of all your assignments in a way that works for you. You have to learn to do that yourself.

HL CREDITS (AT SHERIDAN):

Not all schools acknowledge HL credits. Sheridan claims to. I know people in Sheridan Animation who have used their HL credits at other universities before coming to our school but I’ve never spoken to anyone at Sheridan who has used them in a Sheridan program.

This is lowkey a call out post @ Sheridan, but I have tried applying for advanced standing with my IB HL credit to replace my electives twice, but neither time went through. They claimed to not have the proper paperwork, and when I paid for IB to send my transcript to Sheridan, it was never found (despite there being a confirmation email from IB that it had been sent to the right place) so I was unable to get it processed due to a lack of paperwork. And when I tried to follow up through email, I was ignored.

(If you have successfully gotten your HL credit request to go through at Sheridan, please PM me and tell me how :’^))

I do know for a fact that even if you could, in theory, replace some electives at Sheridan with your HL credits and as long as you still had enough courses a semester to consider you a full time student, you would still pay the same amount of tuition. You would just be less busy.

SHOULD I TAKE IB THEN?

Honestly, it’s up to you and your own life!

I know I rambled on for so long only to give the most passive and watery advice but I think you should do what you believe is best for you! Just be aware that whatever you choose is going to lead you to a different future and all your actions will have consequences (good or bad or either) and be okay with that.

Sometimes, I wish I didn’t do IB so I could have more free time to draw. Maybe if I drew more in high school, I would have gotten into Sheridan Animation a year earlier. But if I did that, I wouldn’t have learned how to paint in Art Fundies and have the friends I do now and live with people I love. Everything I’ve ever done up to this point has brought me here and I wouldn’t change a thing about the past so all I can do is work on making my future, you know :))

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Good luck!

#sheridan help #sheridan animation #ib program #ib #art school #high school advice #ib advice #block text #long post

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nsfmc · 7 years ago

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A checklist for computer science undergrads

influenced by john regehr's 'basic toolbox' post about this topic, i thought i would throw my hat into the ring given that my experiences have been different than john's and seem to be at odds with what i have observed from working with many competent developers.

As i was leaving grad school, a friend of mine suggested to me that a winning strategy in Industrial Design had been to pick some medium that you worked well in and focus on doing all your work with that. The rationale here was that starting anew each project with a new medium invariably impacted the execution of the final deliverable distracting your prof/critic/peers from the high-level feedback you actually wanted on your work, creative vision, etc.

The advice there is to focus less on the tool and more on using a tool efficiently to communicate your ideas. In most cases it does not matter what the tool is as long as you can deploy it to solve problems in your domain.

Much of the tooling that exists in CS is directed at very specific users: working programmers. using these tools correctly as an undergrad is aspirational, but often their execution is distorted in academic contexts.

Every lab or workplace should expect to bootstrap new hires on internal tooling/workflows and almost none of them should assume prior knowledge. Depending on the aims, the only hard requirement should be ability to program in a language or framework similar to the one being used.

Core skills

A single programming language

You do not need to be ultimately proficient in every language, you just need to be able to sketch out and implement a solution to most problems you encounter in one language you enjoy working in. Which language you pick does not matter. If you are in john's classes, however, you should probably ensure that you know two languages: a compiled/systems-ey one (rust, go, c, java, swift, clojure, etc) and a scripting language (python, ruby, javascript, clojurescript, elm, mathematica, anything goes here as long as it has a repl or runtime that you can use to hammer out solutions to problems).

If you're not one of john's students, typically the scripting language will suffice (although it is generally rare to finish a cs program being exposed to only one language).

s/Text Editor/Touch Typing/i

The advice to be familiar with a text editor is largely a request from others who expect you to competently pair-program with them at their pace. The point of knowing an editor is much the same as knowing at least one language passably: it should not be something that gets in your way.

More essential than being comfortable with a specific editor (it honestly does not matter which one as long as you like using it and you are productive with it) is being comfortable touch typing. In the event that slack or other IM platforms have not made you a better touch typist, it is well worth investing time if only so that the act of writing anything is no longer a major time hinderance.

At some point, you may find yourself bored or in need of procrastination and decide you want to customize your editor: that is a perfect time to try something like sublime or atom or vi or emacs.

rough shell experience

you should be able to navigate around a filesystem, make directories, read directory listings and read the cli help documentation for most commands.

you absolutely do not need to know the details of your shell's preferences around glob expansion or how to write legible shell scripts. you can learn that, but after a certain point, all the obscure functionality ends up beng more "dev-ops" style knowledge that rarely pays any dividends except when developing commercial developer-facing internal tooling.

incidentally, getting students past the hurdle of commandline BS is almost certainly a job of an advisor (or postdoc). Ignoring it helps nobody and if a research project's documentation (q.v. below) is poor or nonexistent, the PI only has themselves to blame for this ongoing time commitment.

reading documentation

this is probably the weakest skill i have seen from folks coming out of undergrad. nobody expects you to know all of a language, all of its quirks, etc etc. what you are expected to know is how to find the answer to any reasonable question around your language or toolchain of choice.

A useful skill: you should be able to, given a stylized block of shell commands, paste those into your terminal one-by-one in order to bootstrap some project i.e. ./configure && make && make test. nobody should expect that you understand autoconf unless your research project is specifically devoted to it in some obscure way (i'm sorry if this is the case).

Specifically, you do not need to know how to parse an excel-formatted csv, but you should know where to look (or be able to find a solution) in order to do that in a reasonable amount of time. You do not need to know what an ideal runtime serialization format is for your language, you only need to call back on the terms you learned in your cs classes: marshalling, serialization, persistence, writing data, etc. although it can be useful at the extremes, be skeptical of the amount and quality of programming language trivia you know offhand.

writing documentation

no, this is not technical writing. this simply means you should be able to write a plain text file for each project that outlines

how to build some program

what its implicit dependencies are

what its arguments are

what the exposed/public api is

aside from being useful to others, in roughly six weeks or half a semester, this will invariably be of use to future-you as well.

a good acid test here is pointing a friend to the project and asking if they can build it and understand how they might use it. at some point you will embed this knowledge into a Makefile, shell script, or some other dsl, but until then it is infinitely more useful to write down the steps.

html

unless this is your job (or you intend it to be) you only need to know how to make an academic-level webpage which requires only the most basic knowledge of semantic html: h1, h2, ul/ol li, p, a, img, pre, strong, em (optionally hr, dl dd & dt). avoid css. if anyone gives you shit, you can invoke "Default Systems" giving you a perfectly valid excuse to stop devoting any more attention to design after you have mastered those tags.

reproducing errors

it is unclear when you are an undergrad or novice if you have encountered a truly exceptional case or if you simply have no idea what you're doing. Make a habit of reproducing and then writing down steps to reproduce edge cases you encounter and share them with people you ask for help from.

above and beyond, if you can identify the specific step (or code or whatever) that you invoke that (seemingly) causes the error, you will have an easier time teasing apart the nature of bug as you are telling someone else about it.

the most basic of data visualization skills

all this means is that nobody is actually good at doing this and everyone thinks that two hours peeking at ggplot2 has made them wizards at communicating the complexity of some dataset or results. it hasn't.

in many cases it suffices to be able to graph something from mathematica, R, d3, mathplotlib, or google sheets / excel. again, nobody cares how you do it as long as you do it and it doesn't take you all day. if your lab or workplace has some in-house style for doing this, they will need to train you how to do that anyway.

nonlinear spider-sense

the single reason "big o" notation is taught in school is so that at some point you can look at a performance regression and say "ha, that almost looks like a parab—o.m.g." the ability to recognize code or performance that appears nonlinear (or pathologically exponential) is probably one of the core things that i think undergrads should try to hone because during almost no other time will you be asked repeatedly, and at length, to explain the space/time complexity of arbitrary blocks of code.

computers are fast enough that you can usually be blasé about performance but eventually you'll start looking. being able to recognize something that is accidentally quadratic is often the most practical day-to-day application of cs theory—hone this spider sense.

Nice to haves

Version Control

there is a large chasm between "git for one" and "using git as a team" and that harsh valley is almost certainly due to the large amount of human communication and coordination required to work on a project as a team. Most people stress learning git, but this is largely useless advice because most of git or hg's corner cases and weirdness only come up when you're trying to integrate your work successfully among your teammates. It is good advice to perhaps become vaguely competent using git or mercurial or rcs, that experience will almost certainly pale in comparison to the massive flail when you are trying to set up multiple worktrees to create integration branches that contain the contents of multiple prs (each likely with their own rebase/merge/squash quirks).

to that end, you should learn to, say, create a commit and push your work, but everything else beyond that is almost certainly guaranteed to be complicated by whatever your team's workflow is (github prs, phabricator, gerrit, etc). i have rarely met people outside of professional or open source contexts that are capable of producing sensible chained commits or sane pull requests, it is simply not a skill that is required outside of contributing to open source or working on a commercial application. When people ask for git experience they secretly crave this flavor of professionalism that it took months to acquire at each of their prior jobs or internships.

A Presentation Tool

the baseline here is very low, you only need to be able to make a presentation and in all likelihood if you are still an undergrad, you easily have ten-plus years of doing this already. worry about fonts/design/transitions/etc once your content is solid.

most people produce terrible presentations making the needed baseline here quite low—it is more important that you know how to practice giving a presentation than it is to actually create the slides for it.

debugger knowledge

i have met many successful professional working programmers that have little to no idea how their language's debugging tools work. if you are a gdb wizard this sounds shocking on its face but lots of developers make do just fine without them. This is not to say that you should be willfully ignorant of debuggers or eschew them (especially if this is part of your curriculum), but nobody should look down on you if you learn (or are taught this) On The Job.

many of these tools are technically robust but have a ui only moderately less hostile than an opaque box of loose razorblades and chocolates. much like git, most developers internalize some form of stockholm affection for these tools despite their poor design, nonexistent editor integration, and often incomplete terminal support.

you should understand roughly what a debugger is and what it can (and can't) do, but it's almost certain that you won't need to have mastered debugger internals straight out of college.

build systems

this is honestly a "top of maslow" need. This is great knowledge if you are planning to distribute code or need it to build dependably/reliably on others' computers, it is absolutely inessential for an undergrad to understand to do this level of orchestration except as documentation for others to evaluate that your project actually builds etc etc. if your advisor or boss asks you to learn something like make or whatever, then by all means.

You should know what a make tool is for and when it is necessary, but you should not expect that to apply to the lion's share of work you do in school.

working for a period of time before asking for help

although this should be a core skill many adults are incapable of doing this effectively. there is a tradeoff between "i'm learning" and "i'm being unproductive." In an academic lab, arguably much of your experience will appear to be some quantum state that simultaneously inhabits both extremes but your goal should be attempting to independently arrive at a solution and after some time cut-off (which you should negotiate with your advisor/postdoc/pi/whatever) you should say "i tried $A, $B, and $C to accomplish $GOAL and was unable to make any progress because $ERR_A, $ERR_B, and $ERR_C."

even the act of noting down "what i am trying to accomplish, how i tried, what went wrong" may in itself lead you to a correct solution, but without having done that due dilligence and outlined those aspects, it will be difficult to receive good feedback from somebody that is trying to help you.

unit/integrated/etc testing

if you find that something like TDD is useful for you as a productivity or refactoring tool, keep doing that! most working software people cannot even agree on what the point of testing is, so it feels unfair to burden undergrads with this. in a professional context, you will be in a codebase with some established testing norms, you need only mimic those until you have determined what works for you.

there are lots of sane and sensible resources for writing tests or thinking about tests. understand that everyone does testing slightly differently so your best bet will be to figure out how testing plays a part wherever you go. in most cases, that codebase will have a specific incantation to invoke tests, your best bet is to ask how they do things there are just go from there if the setup is not obvious.

understanding scope

most academic projects are poorly managed because they have inconsistent pressure to be profitable beyond whatever funding inspired them. simultaneously, many academic advisors are not trained well to manage or lead a team (remember, most were hired to write grants and produce research papers (or possibly to teach)). management is something an advisor is literally picking up "on the job".

If you are unsure what exactly you are supposed to do, you should clarify as soon as possible what deliverable is expected and when it is due. This seems obvious, but because communication is complicated you may end up assuming you need to, for instance, resolve outstanding cli argument parsing bugs rather than only needing to add support for a new one. Understanding the scope of a project you've been assigned prevents you from doing redundant work or opening prs that will never get merged.

language idioms

If you are cozy with a programming language, the natural evolution here is to begin learning what idiomatic programming is like for it: what are common libraries, do people tend to program it functionally or imperatively, for or map?, what patterns are awkward or hard to read, what are common tools in its toolchain, how do people use it to write web services, how do people use it to avoid shell scripting, what are its peformance pathologies, etc. this is the extension to knowing how to read the documentation: it is developing intuition about the language to avoid doing counterproductive work in the future.

Many developers learn one language and become fluent in its quirks then proceed to apply those to every language they see later on. if you encounter this as a novice, it may appear that they are simply Better Programmers and not, instead, people who are speaking a pidgin-python with a heavy haskell accent.

To recap

It is something of a mistake to hope that a cs student will have the gradually developed and refined skills of a professional tradesperson. Graduating cs students often do not have strong professional software development experience (this is what internships are meant to accomplish) but are good at thinking about design/architecture. if, at the very minimum, as an undergrad you can churn out some ruby and have the runtime execute it, you're usually in great shape.

most cs programs do not train students to develop tightly crafted applications with industry-tested documentation/syntax/structure/workflows etc. bootcamps, however, do stress this sort of thing, which causes a confusing periodic wave of "college is dead, long live bootcamps."

when looking at job descriptions or other checklists, it's useful to try to gaze back at the abyss and ask "why was this listed here?"

John's research is compiler-focused, deals with undefined behavior, and often invokes llvm, c, and other "low level" toolchains. a strong undergrad cs student will be able to intern with john productively because the core of his research focus is mostly general to computer science: correctness, compiler behavior, etc. someone with deep knowledge of C, llvm, compiler design/internals, etc is almost certainly in a position to become one of his graduate students or postdocs. I think john's list is interesting, but i think it emphasizes details that are often foreign to developers at all skill levels.

finally this list is biased itself, so take it with a grain of salt: all my work experience is in design and frontend/backend web development and the skills listed here represent the qualities i've observed from successful interns and developers i have interviewed and worked with in the past ~ eight years. my experience is clearly n=1, but among the things i've noticed is that it's easy to get people to learn git, but it's hard to get somebody to internalize recursion, nonlinear growth, or canonical architecture patterns within the same time period. i'm not saying it's impossible, but if you're a cs student, this is 100% what the point of most cs programs is.

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dorcasrempel · 5 years ago

Text

A data-driven response to a pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to challenge how societies and institutions function at macro and micro scales. In the United States, the novel coronavirus has affected everything from the economy to elections — and has raised difficult questions about MIT’s capacity to reopen in the fall.

To help policymakers at MIT and beyond make informed decisions, the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) has formed a volunteer research group, Isolat, that provides analysis of pandemic-related data.

“This pandemic has energized the broader IDSS community to bring crucial skills to bear,” says IDSS Director Munther Dahleh, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). “Probability and statistics are tools for measuring uncertainty, and we have expertise within IDSS in using scientific information to impact policymaking.”

The IDSS COVID-19 collaboration (Isolat) consists of MIT faculty, students, and researchers from different departments, as well as partners from around the world. Isolat members are statisticians, epidemiologists, data modelers, and policy researchers.

“There is strong IDSS representation in Isolat, from the Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC) to the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS),” says Dahleh. “This effort is driven by our community’s sense of social responsibility, both within IDSS and across MIT. And it’s given us a way to connect and build community in a time when we are far apart.”

Real time, noisy data

While there are a lot of data available related to Covid-19, there are also many questions about how complete or useful that data really are. The Isolat group is careful to identify the limits of what existing Covid-19 data can do. “Data is always useful, even if it’s noisy,” argues Dahleh.

All the same, without widespread, randomized testing, it’s difficult for anyone to know the full extent of coronavirus spread. “We need to ask better questions that the data can answer,” adds Anette “Peko” Hosoi, an IDSS affiliate who is both a professor of mechanical engineering and associate dean of engineering.

The Isolat group formed teams around three primary needs, each determined in consultation with stakeholders at MIT and the broader community. The Prediction team uses data on time-dependent variables to forecast infection growth rates and when the incidence of new cases should peak. The Intervention team strives to understand and quantify the outcomes of various policies and model “what-if” scenarios in order to make effective recommendations. The Data Infrastructure team gathers, organizes, and shares relevant data — early on they built a “data lake” to consolidate important datasets that are kept updated with Python scripts.

Isolat meets every weekday via teleconference to discuss and vet projects and findings, which are published twice a week to the Isolat webpage. This kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration is typical of IDSS research, but the real-time dissemination of findings is a departure from academic methodology.

“This is a different way of tackling the problem,” says Hosoi. “Everybody throws their contribution into the ring. We need answers today.”

All the same, the group is mindful that the need for urgency does not eliminate the need for accuracy. “Quantification of the uncertainty in our results is key to providing actionable outcomes,” adds Hosoi. “We look forward to engaging the larger scientific community to make these findings more precise.”

IDSS has also mobilized policy expertise to support Isolat researchers as they work to make their findings useful to MIT leaders and local governments. “We can help researchers think more critically about the ways in which their research is relevant to decision-making, when and with whom to engage, and what questions to ask” says Noelle Selin, a professor with IDSS and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences who is director of TPP.

Under their Research to Policy Engagement Initiative, TPP has begun hosting discussions with IDSS and LIDS faculty who are engaged with local communities to help them refine the kinds of questions they can answer for policymakers.

Policy evaluation and what-if scenarios

The available data on Covid-19 infection rates and deaths can indicate how fast those rates are changing, and it can indicate which interventions are more or less effective. This means Isolat researchers can not only measure the effectiveness of current policy, but forecast the potential impact of new policies or policy changes.

To that end, Isolat researchers have designed and applied a method to predict policy impact that they call “Synthetic Interventions.” Leading this project is Devavrat Shah, an EECS professor and member of LIDS who directs the SDSC within IDSS.

“Having a clear understanding of the trade-offs between interventions is crucial in charting a path forward on how to open up various sectors of society,” says Shah. “A key challenge is that policymakers do not have the luxury of actually enacting a variety of interventions and seeing which has the optimal outcome.”

Based on a statistical method called synthetic control, the Synthetic Interventions method is a data-driven way to perform what-if scenario planning. The method leverages information from interventions that have already been enacted across the world, and fits this information to a policymaker’s setting of interest.

For example, to estimate the effect of mobility-restricting interventions on the United States, Shah and his team used daily death data from countries with more extreme mobility restrictions to create a “synthetic low-mobility U.S.” and project the “counterfactual trajectory” — what could have happened — if the U.S. had applied similar interventions.

“The good news,” says Shah, “is that so far our models suggest that moderate, precise restrictions in mobility, in particular at retail and transit locations, could play a key role in flattening the curve.”

Are curves flattening?

Another use of Covid-19 data is to model the growth and spread of the disease and predict when curves will flatten — when cases of the coronavirus will slow their exponential growth.

At first, Prediction team researchers looked at disease spread in U.S. states. But the availability of case count data at the county-level in the United States allowed Isolat researchers to model growth more granularly by fitting an exponential of a quadratic function to the cumulative number of cases reported in each county.

“This analysis gives us a sense of how the epidemic spread varies within a state,” says Hamsa Balakrishnan, an IDSS affiliate who is both a professor and associate department head of aeronautics and astronautics. “A state or the nation as a whole may not be homogeneous in how the epidemic spreads.”

Northern and southern California, for example, present two different pictures of spread when looked at county-by-county, suggesting that state officials should not necessarily apply one-size-fits-all policy solutions across the state. Similar differences can be seen in Massachusetts as well; Suffolk, Middlesex, and Norfolk counties all show a longer time to plateau than other counties in the state.

Adds Balakrishnan: “Considering the influence of factors such as population density, demographics, neighboring counties, geography, and mobility can provide insights into the spread of Covid-19.”

Impacting policy

With daily meetings, two new posts per week, evolving groups and subteams, and new members joining each week, Isolat is a dynamic and uniquely MIT approach to the coronavirus crisis. But the group remains oriented around its purpose: to inform policymakers with data-driven recommendations.

As Isolat researchers apply different approaches to seek answers to questions at larger scales, the group is also exploring questions related to reopening the MIT campus, and sharing information with others at MIT including the Team 2020 planning group and the We Solve For Fall project. The Isolat group has applied control theory to the problem, looking at the campus as a dynamic network.

“Ultimately, the ingredients of control will be testing, distancing, and quarantining,” says Dahleh. “Testing is huge. If we don’t have a cure or a vaccine, testing and quarantining is the only way we can control the spread of infection.”

Isolat researchers are informing MIT leaders, as well as building connections with local and state governments, advising groups abroad, and coordinating with engineers who are designing apps and solutions to pandemic challenges. They will continue to share their findings on the Isolat webpage.

A data-driven response to a pandemic syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

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mathematicianadda · 6 years ago

Text

That which we call an identity

I’m grateful to Jemma Sherwood and Rob Low for reading an early draft of this and for their comments thereon. All opinions are, of course, my own.

This post is inspired by something that I see crop up now and again in discussions with other Maths teachers. It usually manifests itself as a rallying cry to use ≡ in place of = in identities and reserve = for equations. My standard response is to mutter something about identities being equations and leave it at that. But in the latest round, Jemma Sherwood challenged me, in the nicest possible way, to explain a bit further. This is that explanation.

Although I’m going to state my case here, I’m well aware that there are different opinions. In matters of opinion, such as this, agreement and disagreement is less important than that all sides think. So if what I write seems to you wrong, that’s fine so long as it makes you think about why you think that it is wrong.

I’m actually going to give two answers to the question “Should we use ≡ for identities?”. Both are “No”, but for different reasons:

No, because it is trying to solve the wrong problem.

No, because, in the words of Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

The second answer is the one that I usually mutter about when I come across this idea of using ≡ but it’s the first that is the important one.

In preparation for writing this I posted a poll on Twitter with four mathematical statements and asked which of them were identities. The four statements were:

$\sin (180 n) = 0$,

$a^{2} + b^{2} = c^{2}$,

$ (x + y)^{2} = x^{2} + 2 x y + y^{2}$,

if $2 x + 6 = 10$ then $x = 2$.

You may wish to ponder what your answer would be before continuing.

For Some Values of True

From the discussion that ensues whenever anyone posts about ≡, the rationale for insisting on it would seem to be that students find it difficult to distinguish between identities and equations so using notation to clarify the difference would be a good idea.

Seems reasonable. But to my mind, it’s trying to solve the wrong problem.

In the comments around my twitter poll, someone linked to the Wikipedia entry on Mathematical Identity which starts (emphasis mine):

In mathematics an identity is an equality relation $A = B$, such that $A$ and $B$ contain some variables and $A$ and $B$ produce the same value as each other regardless of what values (usually numbers) are substituted for the variables.

Another person gave a similar criterion for an identity which involved, as I understood it, putting “$\forall x$” at the start (or whatever unbound variables existed in the expressions).

The poll wasn’t long published before someone made a comment that slightly let the cat out of the bag. They queried the $\sin (180 n) = 0$ and said that it would be okay if $n$ was an integer but that I hadn’t made that clear. (Actually, they also queried the fact that I’d written $180$ rather than $180^{\circ }$; I must confess that one was due to me not being bothered to hunt down a unicode degree symbol but it really just underlines my point.) After that, some others remarked that they wanted to change their vote as they hadn’t noticed that.

So just putting $\forall x$ or $\forall n$ in front of an expression and seeing if it is still true isn’t a valid test of anything. We have to provide a context for the variables, and that allows me the freedom to make any of my equations into an identity or not.

$\sin (180^{\circ }n) = 0$ is an identity with $\forall n \in \mathbb{N}$ but not with $\forall n \in \mathbb{R}$.

$a^{2} + b^{2} = c^{2}$ is an identity with “$\forall a,b,c \in \mathbb{R}$ where $a$, $b$, $c$ are the sides of a right-angled triangle with $c$ the hypotenuse”, but is not an identity with just $\forall a,b,c \in \mathbb{R}$.

$(x + y)^{2} = x^{2} + 2 x y + y^{2}$ is an identity with $\forall x,y \in \mathbb{R}$, but is not an identity with $\forall x, y \in M_{2}(\mathbb{R})$, the space of $2 \times 2$–matrices.

“If $2 x + 6 = 10$ then $x = 2$” might surprise you: it is actually an identity with $\forall x \in \mathbb{R}$ since it then asserts that for any real number $x$, if $x$ satisfies $2 x + 6 = 10$ then $x = 2$. However, it is not an identity in $\mathbb{Z}/12\mathbb{Z}$ since both $2$ and $8$ satisfy $2 x + 6 = 10$.

To be a valid mathematical sentence, an identity requires a context. My contention is that the real problem behind the equation vs identity debate is that students are filling in the missing context for themselves and often getting it wrong. And once the context is made explicit, we no longer think of the identity as anything special and no longer need special notation for it.

I would also contend that the distinction between a double and triple line is not sufficient. If someone is having difficulty with the difference between an equation and an identity then an extra horizontal line will not make it clear.

None other than the great Don Knuth once said that in a mathematical document it should be possible to replace all the bits of maths by “blah” and for it to still make grammatical sense. I strongly suspect that my students do the opposite and replace all non-maths by “blah”. For example, fill in the “blah”s in these two questions and consider how the different possibilities would lead you down different routes to an answer:

Blah $x^{2} + 5 x + 6 = 0$

Blah $x^{2} + 5 x + 6$

Then add in the fact that a novice learner is likely to overlook the fact that the second doesn’t have an “$= 0$” in it and try to “solve” that quadratic.

If we make the context clearer, we are lessening the work that the student has to do to understand what they are being asked to do. And this is not an artificial weakening: context becomes more and more important the deeper one goes into mathematics. In school, certainly pre-16, it is a safe assumption that the context is “numbers”. It is only later that students learn that the context could be vectors, functions, matrices, sets, objects, morphisms, groups, rings, fields, manifolds, sheaves, schemes, … if I missed your favourite, I apologise.

But even a context of “numbers” can be misconstrued. How many students look at an answer with extreme puzzlement when it turns out to be a fraction? They were expecting a whole number.

And wouldn’t it set up expectations for quadratics and trigonometry much better if we consistently said “Find all (real) numbers $x$ for which …” instead of just “Solve”? And “Show that for all real numbers $x$ …” instead of just “Show that”?

The language doesn’t even have to be that formal, we don’t need $\forall $ or $\exists $ in Y7, but it should make clear the context. It can even be something like “I’m thinking of a real number, call it $x$; it satisfies $2 x + 6 = 10$. What is it?”

So What, Exactly, is an Identity?

I have very few memories of my own time at school, but one that I do recall very vividly is my A-level Chemistry teacher announcing at the start of the course that everything we’d been told up to then had been a lie. “Sodium,” he declared, “doesn’t want to lose an electron. It doesn’t want anything.”

It was dramatic, I’ll give him that, but it did make me lose a bit of faith in Chemistry. For all I knew, everything I was going to be told in A-level would also be a lie (spoiler: it was).

I try my utmost not to do the same in my own teaching.

Of course, I can’t tell my students the whole truth. When teaching about negative integers, for example, I don’t set up an equivalence relation on pairs of positive integers and prove that the operations of arithmetic descend through the relation. What I aim for is the following thought experiment: suppose that one of my students did go on to do a mathematics degree, possibly even further, and encountered some fancy part of mathematics that recast something that they’d learnt in school. What I would hope is that they would feel that the recasting fitted in with the story that they already knew. That if they ever came back to visit, they’d say, “Now I understand why you told the story that way.”

So when I consider something like identities, I think about how the concept is used later on and try to use that to inform how I talk about it in school.

And that’s a bit tricky with identities because, in my mathematical experience, they all but disappear. The Wikipedia page does rather give the game away when it says (emphasis mine):

In other words, $A = B$ is an identity if $A$ and $B$ define the same functions. This means that an identity is an equality between functions that are differently defined.

Thus once we are happy talking about functions, the need for the word identity disappears.

When I think of the word identity, the first concept that springs to mind is the identity function (or, rather, the identity functions since there are rather a lot of them), which might happen to be representable by the identity matrix. There’s also the identity element in a group or ring.

The closest I get to the concept of identity under discussion here is in a topic called universal algebra. Very briefly, this is the area of mathematics that studies operations like $+$ or $\times $ in the abstract. Such operations satisfy relations which are sometimes called identities. These are things like $x + y = y + x$. The catch is that in this area, the identities are imposed. They don’t occur by accident but by design.

This idea of imposing identities also chimes with where I see the ≡ sign used. I don’t think of it as “is identically equal to” but as “is equivalent to in this context”. The classic situation is in modular arithmetic, where I will happily write things like $4 \equiv 1 \mod 3$, by which I mean that in the context where I ignore multiples of $3$ then I can view $4$ as equivalent to $1$. In the wider context of integers then I know that $4$ and $1$ are different, but in the smaller context of modular arithmetic then I can consider them equivalent.

So I feel that I should exercise caution in using the term “identity” to refer to what is an equality of functions, and where the term is used differently later on. Particularly because, as I argue above, using ≡ is unlikely to solve the underlying issue of establishing context.

from The Aperiodical https://ift.tt/2rwuGAm from Blogger https://ift.tt/2DlXWwn

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theinvinciblenoob · 7 years ago

Link

Outside the crop of construction cranes that now dot Vancouver’s bright, downtown greenways, in a suburban business park that reminds you more of dentists and tax preparers, is a small office building belonging to D-Wave. This office, squat, angular, and sun-dappled one recent cool Autumn morning, is unique in that it contains an infinite collection of parallel universes.

Founded in 1999 by Geordie Rose, D-Wave company worked in relatively obscurity on esoteric problems associated with quantum computing. When Rose was PhD student at the University of British Columbia he turned in an assignment that outlined a quantum computing company. His entrepreneurship teacher at the time, Haig Farris, found the young physicists ideas compelling enough to give him $1,000 to buy a computer and a printer to type up a business plan.

The company consulted with academics until 2005 when Rose and his team decided to focus on building usable quantum computers. The result, the Orion, launched in 2007 and was used to classify drug molecules and play Sodoku. The business now sells computers for up to $10 million to clients like Google, Microsoft, and Northrop Grumman.

“We’ve been focused on making quantum computing practical since day one. In 2010 we started offering remote cloud access to customers and today, we have 100 early applications running on our computers (70% of which were built in the cloud),” said CEO Vern Brownell. “Through this work, our customers have told us it takes more than just access to real quantum hardware to benefit from quantum computing. In order to build a true quantum ecosystem, millions of developers need the access and tools to get started with quantum.”

Now their computers are simulating weather patterns and tsunamis, optimizing hotel ad displays, solving complex network problems, and, thanks to a new, open source platform, could help you ride the quantum wave of computer programming.

Inside the box

When I went to visit D-Wave they gave us unprecedented access to the inside of one of their quantum machines. The computers, which are about the size of a garden shed, have a control unit on the front that manages the temperature as well as queuing system to translate and communicate the problems sent in by users.

Inside the machine is a tube that, when fully operational, contains a small chip super-cooled to 0.015 Kelvin or -459.643 degrees Fahrenheit or -273.135 degrees Celsius. The entire system looks like something out of the Death Star – a cylinder of pure data that the heroes must access by walking through a little door in the side of a jet black cube.

It’s quite thrilling to see this odd little chip inside of its supercooled home. As the computer revolution maintained its predilection towards room-temperature chips, these odd and unique machines are a connection to an alternate timeline where physics is wrestled into submission in order to do some truly remarkable things.

And now anyone – from kids to PhDs to everyone in between – can try it.

Into the Ocean

Learning to program a quantum computer takes time. Because the processor doesn’t work like a classic universal computer you have to train the chip to perform simple functions that your own cellphone can do in seconds. However, in some cases researchers have found the chips can outperform classic computers by 3,600 times. This trade off – the movement from the known to the unknown – is why D-Wave exposed their product to the world.

“We built Leap to give millions of developers access to quantum computing. We built the first quantum application environment so any software developer interested in quantum computing can start writing and running applications — you don’t need deep quantum knowledge to get started. If you know Python, you can build applications on Leap,” said Brownell.

To get started on the road to quantum computing D-Wave build the Leap platform. The Leap is an open source toolkit for developers. When you sign up you receive one minute’s worth of quantum processing unit time which, given that most problems run in milliseconds, is more than enough to begin experimenting. A queue manager lines up your code and runs it in order received and the answers are spit out almost instantly.

You can code on the QPU with Python or via Jupiter notebooks and it allows you to connect to the QPU with an API token. After writing your code, you can send commands directly to the QPU and then output the results. The programs are currently pretty esoteric and require a basic knowledge of quantum programming but, it should be remembered, classic computer programming was once daunting to the average user.

I downloaded and ran most of the demonstrations without a hitch. These demonstrations – factoring programs, network generators, and the like – essentially turned the ideas concepts of classical programming into quantum questions. Instead of iterating through a list of factors, for example, the quantum computer creates a “parallel universe” of answers and then collapses each one until it finds the right answer. If this sounds odd it’s because it is. The researchers at D-Wave argue all the time about how to imagine a quantum computer’s various processes. One camp sees the physical implementation of a quantum computer to be simply a faster methodology for rendering answers. The other camp, itself aligned with Professor David Deutsch’s ideas presented in The Beginning of Infinity, sees the sheer number of possible permutations a quantum computer can traverse as evidence of parallel universes.

What does the code look like? It’s hard to read without understanding the basics, a fact that D-Wave engineers factored for in offering online documentation. For example, below is most of the factoring code for one of their demo programs, a bit of code that can be reduced to about five lines on a classical computer. However, when this function uses a quantum processor, the entire process takes milliseconds versus minutes or hours.

Classical

# Python Program to find the factors of a number

define a function

def print_factors(x): # This function takes a number and prints the factors

print("The factors of",x,"are:") for i in range(1, x + 1): if x % i == 0: print(i)

change this value for a different result.

num = 320

uncomment the following line to take input from the user

#num = int(input("Enter a number: "))

print_factors(num)

Quantum

@qpu_ha def factor(P, use_saved_embedding=True):

#################################################################################################### # get circuit #################################################################################################### construction_start_time = time.time() validate_input(P, range(2 ** 6)) # get constraint satisfaction problem csp = dbc.factories.multiplication_circuit(3) # get binary quadratic model bqm = dbc.stitch(csp, min_classical_gap=.1) # we know that multiplication_circuit() has created these variables p_vars = ['p0', 'p1', 'p2', 'p3', 'p4', 'p5'] # convert P from decimal to binary fixed_variables = dict(zip(reversed(p_vars), "{:06b}".format(P))) fixed_variables = {var: int(x) for(var, x) in fixed_variables.items()} # fix product qubits for var, value in fixed_variables.items(): bqm.fix_variable(var, value) log.debug('bqm construction time: %s', time.time() - construction_start_time) #################################################################################################### # run problem #################################################################################################### sample_time = time.time() # get QPU sampler sampler = DWaveSampler(solver_features=dict(online=True, name='DW_2000Q.*')) _, target_edgelist, target_adjacency = sampler.structure if use_saved_embedding: # load a pre-calculated embedding from factoring.embedding import embeddings embedding = embeddings[sampler.solver.id] else: # get the embedding embedding = minorminer.find_embedding(bqm.quadratic, target_edgelist) if bqm and not embedding: raise ValueError("no embedding found") # apply the embedding to the given problem to map it to the sampler bqm_embedded = dimod.embed_bqm(bqm, embedding, target_adjacency, 3.0) # draw samples from the QPU kwargs = {} if 'num_reads' in sampler.parameters: kwargs['num_reads'] = 50 if 'answer_mode' in sampler.parameters: kwargs['answer_mode'] = 'histogram' response = sampler.sample(bqm_embedded, **kwargs) # convert back to the original problem space response = dimod.unembed_response(response, embedding, source_bqm=bqm) sampler.client.close() log.debug('embedding and sampling time: %s', time.time() - sample_time)

“The industry is at an inflection point and we’ve moved beyond the theoretical, and into the practical era of quantum applications. It’s time to open this up to more smart, curious developers so they can build the first quantum killer app. Leap’s combination of immediate access to live quantum computers, along with tools, resources, and a community, will fuel that,” said Brownell. “For Leap’s future, we see millions of developers using this to share ideas, learn from each other, and contribute open source code. It’s that kind of collaborative developer community that we think will lead us to the first quantum killer app.”

The folks at D-Wave created a number of tutorials as well as a forum where users can learn and ask questions. The entire project is truly the first of its kind and promises unprecedented access to what amounts to the foreseeable future of computing. I’ve seen lots of technology over the years and nothing quite replicated the strange frisson associated with plugging into a quantum computer. Like the teletype and green-screen terminals used by the early hackers like Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak, D-Wave has opened up a strange new world. How we explore it us up to us.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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fmservers · 7 years ago

Text

D-Wave offers the first public access to a quantum computer

Inside the box

And now anyone – from kids to PhDs to everyone in between – can try it.

Into the Ocean

Classical

# Python Program to find the factors of a number

define a function

def print_factors(x): # This function takes a number and prints the factors

print("The factors of",x,"are:") for i in range(1, x + 1): if x % i == 0: print(i)

change this value for a different result.

num = 320

uncomment the following line to take input from the user

#num = int(input("Enter a number: "))

print_factors(num)

Quantum

@qpu_ha def factor(P, use_saved_embedding=True):

Via John Biggs https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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dorcasrempel · 5 years ago

Text

A data-driven response to a pandemic

Real time, noisy data

“This is a different way of tackling the problem,” says Hosoi. “Everybody throws their contribution into the ring. We need answers today.”

Policy evaluation and what-if scenarios

Are curves flattening?

Another use of Covid-19 data is to model the growth and spread of the disease and predict when curves will flatten — when cases of the coronavirus will slow their exponential growth.

Adds Balakrishnan: “Considering the influence of factors such as population density, demographics, neighboring counties, geography, and mobility can provide insights into the spread of Covid-19.”

Impacting policy

A data-driven response to a pandemic syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

0 notes