fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Tether Prints $50 Million, Nearly Catches Bitcoin in Trading Volume
Tags: Crypto, Usd, Bitcoin, Exchange, Tether

After issuing 300 million USDT tokens in March of this year, Tether has printed an additional 50 million in the past few days.

Tether, the USD backed stable coin, reportedly issued 50 million tokens valued at $1 each over the weekend. According to the Tether block explorer OmniExplorer, the tokens were sent from the TetherUS account on August 11, 2018. The last major USDT token release came in March of this year when Tether minted a whopping 300 million tokens.

Tether’s Market Cap is Down, Trading Volume is Up

Interestingly, the recent token issuance comes at a time when the Tether market capitalization has dropped considerably. In the past three weeks, it has lost $300 million and is now valued at 2.4 billion, making it the ninth most valuable cryptocurrency on the market. As for daily trading volume, it ranks second, trailing Bitcoin by a tiny bit. Coinmarketcap estimates that the total trading volume in a single day is around $4.8 billion. With that much trading volume, it should come across as no surprise that Tether is alone responsible for one quarter of all crypto trades.

Tether Controversy

Despite its successes, Tether has been caught in the middle of controversy for quite some time, with many alleging that the company does not have sufficient USD in reserve to back all the tokens it has issued so far. While many in the cryptocurrency community have been asking Tether to conduct independent audits, a full-scale audit has yet to materialize so far. In fact, the single attempt made by Friedman LLP to conduct an audit was scrapped by both parties after Tether felt that the process would ‘take too long’.

Earlier this year though, Tether announced that it would be providing a transparency update in conjunction with law firm FSS that viewed a snapshot of the company’s financials. In a blog post, Tether wrote,

To address allegations head on, we wish to make a few things clear: All Tethers in circulation are fully backed by USD reserves…In the face of some recent coverage, we have stood by the fact that all circulating USD Tethers are backed by USD reserves, and we are pleased to be able to present independent verification of this.

Disclaimer: information contained herein is provided without considering your personal circumstances, therefore should not be construed as financial advice, investment recommendation or an offer of, or solicitation for, any transactions in cryptocurrencies.
2020 Slackjaw Humor Writing Challenge
By: Alex Baia
Tags: Comedy Writing, Contests, Humor, Writing, Satire

Slackjaw is Medium’s most-read humor publication — with more than 107,000 followers — and we want your funny writing! We also want to support humor writers, and aspiring writers, everywhere.

Our 2019 Humor Writing Challenge was a big success, with 380 people completing the Challenge. So we’ve decided to bring it back for 2020.

Challenges need awesome prizes, and we’ve got more than $2,450 in cash prizes for the winners, plus the chance to get your work in front of our judging panel of comedy writers for NBC, The Onion, and The New Yorker.

We don’t just want any old humor. We want sharp, well-crafted writing where you follow a proven formula:

Generate multiple ideas and use only the funniest.

Get outside your own head by sharing your rough draft with another writer.

Sharpen your draft based on feedback.

These principles are practiced religiously at places like The Onion and taught in top comedy writing schools like The Second City.

In this Challenge, we’re going to have you follow a precise idea-generating and re-writing formula to craft a hilarious humor piece. And we’re going to give you the support of our Slackjaw writing community, so you’re sure to get the help and feedback you need.

On to the prizes!
La conferenza del lancio di GAIA
By: Sabrina Masiero
Tags: Esa, Gaia

in Both Sides of the Table
The return of/to Kabako by Segametsi Gaobepe
By: Jomba, Contemporary Dance Experience
Tags: Art, Dance, Storytelling

The talented Faustin Linyekula brings a whole new experience to JOMBA! The artist beautifully links storytelling, music, text and movement into one language to communicate his personal story that takes us on a journey of spirituality and rituals that are sacred.

His rigorous movements on stage indicating a deconstruction of both traditional African ritual forms as well as contemporary dance form s— offering a beautiful tension between history and modernity in his work. As a solo work, Linyekula provides layers to his performance through the use of technology — literally bringing his family on stage with him, through a slide show presentation that is shown to the audience in the performance. Le Cargo is an intriguing an blend of technology and African Storytelling with an aesthetic sensibility towards minimalism; Linyekula effectively tells us stories about war and crises and how “people needed miracles to believe in their own lives”. In breaking the fourth wall Linyekula offers an astonishingly personal story, allowing the audience to join him on his journey of self-discovery and the simultaneous joy and frustration of being and creating art within the greater African context.

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Find the Minimum Number of Steps in an Infinite Grid
By: Teiva Harsanyi
Tags: Programming, Coding, Java, Arrays, Algorithms

Problem

Minimum number of steps in an infinite grid: InterviewBit

You are in an infinite 2D grid where you can move in any of the 8 directions:

(x,y) to (x+1, y), (x — 1, y), (x, y+1), (x, y-1), (x-1, y-1), (x+1,y+1), (x-1,y+1), (x+1,y-1) You are given a sequence of points and the order in which you need to cover the points. Give the minimum number of steps in which you can achieve it. You start from the first point.

Solving Process

Traversal Solution

We need to iterate over each point and compute each time the number of steps between two points.

The first idea which may pop into our mind to do this computation is to iterate from an existing to a target position:

4 | | | | |B|

3 | | | |x| |

2 | | |x| | |

1 | |x| | | |

0 |A| | | | |

0 1 2 3 4

In this case, to go from A to B, we need 4 steps because we made 4 iterations:

From (0, 0) to (1, 1)

From (1, 1) to (2, 2)

From (2, 2) to (3, 3)

And from (3, 3) to (4, 4)

In Java, we can translate it this way:

The space complexity is O(1) but the time complexity is O(n*s) with n the number of points and s the number of steps between each point. So, it is a quadratic time complexity which is not really a good sign.

Computation Solution

We are obviously obliged to iterate over each point so the optimization has to be done on the way to compute the number of steps between two points.

Can we simplify this computation without having to iterate over each step? Yes, we can.

Let’s check the following example and see how to compute the number of steps between A and B.

4 | | |B| | |

3 | | | | | |

2 | | | | | |

1 | | | | | |

0 |A| | | | |

0 1 2 3 4

As we can move diagonally, the result is simply Max(distanceX, distanceY). This means we can get the number of steps in a constant time.

In Java:

The space complexity is O(1) whereas the time complexity is, this time, linear.
sun-flowering
By: Crooked Little Flower
Tags: Plants, Photography, Hiking, Ground Up, Black And White

somewhere in the middle of nowhere CKS

ground up

liquid of my eternity

beckon my name

raise me up like Lazarus

call me clean like rain.

CKS

paint much love, always, C
Last left turn before the end of the night
By: Alessandra Pereyra
Tags: Love, Short Story

Cruising the brick-layered walls of Boston, a starry night in the sky, Jazz flows through the drivers car and fills the distance between you and me. The lights outside dim and die and brighten again. Alive. There’s life out there, in the city. There’s that sense of adventure; of opportunity. And we are witnesses — silent ones at that, since mirrors of technology try to catch our glimpses, and the music surrounds our other senses — that words, voice, would damage that moment, would — somehow — make it real, and in this night, this particular night, the surrealism of the Boston scene is enough. It really feels like it.

A right turn brings us to another square and a left to another, the city caught on that idle moment, too late to go to sleep and yet to early to wake up. That fleeting time when moonlight touches all and yet the yellow in every streetlamp caresses the empty spots; a gliding touch. And the people, walking, stirring, smiling. We see couples gently touching their hands. We see newcomers striding through the streets, trying to get a familiar sense of where they came. A feeling I know since I’m one of them too. I see a passage of buildings and night and for a second I’m in other place, back at my origins. And the silhouettes match up as the drive goes on, and memory takes control of my expectations. Trees and people and billboards somehow are merging in the mind and things seems to coincide. Till they don’t, and the restaurant that promised to appear next doesn’t, and a bridge takes its place. And it’s fine, since I’m back to the seat, another hand over mine and the moving night of Boston outside the window, staying “Welcome back, we’re still here and here we’ll remain”.

Our souls arrive home, somehow bigger and grander, having just had dinner; inner souls filled of memories, of shadows; of the lights that now are off, of people going on parties, and drinks, and cigarettes; of the ideas of what next, the fears; of change, so much change to come.

We get up on the street, leaving the car, facing the house where we’ll sleep and leave our bags for one of the last times till you have to fly away, and we breathe for one second more the air, the mixture of oxygen with life. And we cross the street, not quite the same people that left this place a mere hours away, nor the ones that will go on before sleep, and will order a pizza and watch tv. For that moment, for that speckle of time in the history of our lives, we are we, trapped in the middle between before and after.

And on that night, that singular night, that’s all we can really ask for.
Breaking in Between
By: Sydney J. Shipp
Tags: Darkness, A Cornered Gurl, Depression, Poetry, Poem

Breaking in Between

A poem about dawn breaking

by Caroline Angelo on Flickr

I surround myself

in the inky blue shroud

of dawn and try

to disappear within it

I pull it up

around my ears

with the blankets to block

the songs of birds

and the noises of traffic

that herald the unbearable light

that comes between night and day,

just bright enough to show your age

but too dull to blind you

from the lines detailed

by too many days spent in the sun

I don’t dare to uncover

what the night has concealed

It’s not oblivion I fear

but what the morning brings:

this blinding awareness

breaking everyday
Hurt
By: Patrick M. Ohana
Tags: Poetry, Hurt, Love, Ground, Haiku

Medical writer who prefers to read and write fiction and some nonfiction, though the latter may appear at times as the former. patrickmohana.wordpress.com

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Embrace Your Awkwardness
By: Stark Raving
Tags: Life Lessons, Confidence, Personal Development, Self, Love

Embrace Your Awkwardness

It’s what brings us together.

Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash

I’ve been human-ing for 25 years now and have yet to master the subtle art of saying hello and goodbye. You’d think it would be ingrained by now, but no. Every time a greeting situation is on the horizon, my mind goes through an anxious rigmarole of “when can I break into the conversation to say I’m leaving?” “At what distance should I make eye contact?” “How do I begin?” “What amount of physical contact is appropriate?”

The French have come up with a relatively practical solution to all of this — kissing everyone on both cheeks. It does at least bring a formality to greetings, and avoids the whole “how-long-should-a-hug-be” dilemma, but it does mean that you are forced to kiss people you don’t necessarily want to kiss, and that it takes half an hour to leave a party, or to reach your desk on reaching office. Also in winter colds spread like wildfire, which helps to get a sexy french smoker’s voice, but is otherwise a definite negative.

Why is it that greeting people — seemingly the simplest of interactions — should be so hard?

Why am I so awkward? as part of my brain asks the other, at least twice a day. Those times when I say weird things that I immediately regret, and internally shake my head in disgust. For a long time, I had the feeling that I must have skipped class the day they taught everyone to be normal.

Turns out, everyone is awkward. It makes no sense, but that is life, and awkwardness is funny as hell if you think about it. It’s like watching a baby elephant try to eat, hitting itself in the face because it can’t control its trunk properly.

It is adorable, endearing and something that should bring us all closer together — a shared experience common to us all.

The problem is, we struggle to be vulnerable. We don’t want to laugh at our awkwardness because we want to push it down and pretend it isn’t there, pretend that we are perfectly at ease in all situations.

But no one wants others to be flawless. It would be annoying, and very boring. Little moments of awkwardness, from seeing someone in the street and worrying about when to start waving, to an unfortunately timed queef, are vital for society.

Plus, when you think about it, they are just damn funny.
Boosting Visual Literacy in Our Systems-Design World
By: Kingsley Harris
Tags: Design Thinking, Design, Enterprise Design, Design Process, Product Design

Some books had an outsize influence on me, including Designing the Editorial Experience, by Juliette Cezzar and Sue Apfelbaum, which explains the anatomy of editorial design, typography, layout, and scanability. How to See by George Nelson was similarly influential, as was Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler.

Though I haven’t worked in the print medium for a while, I still call on the fundamentals I learned along the way and apply them to the work I’m doing now. One quick example: constraints. Editorial design operates within the constraints of the format, including the size of the page and the length of the text. This principle holds true for website and apps, it’s just that the constraints are different. Another example: the interplay of copy and visuals. This is fundamental to print, video, and many other graphics, but it’s just as fundamental online as it is in any other medium.

In addition to books, I also learned by observing the world around me. I engaged with anything and everything I could in the course of developing of my visual literacy. From photos to ads to magazine layouts to museum paintings, I sought out anything graphic, and over time I started to see. I paid attention. I got in tune with what I saw repeated, what I saw was working. I’d learned fundamentals like hierarchy and composition, but I consciously looked for them in context. I intentionally exposed myself to graphics, and I was then intentional about taking them in and storing them with the expectation of later recalling them and putting them to use. In this way, I started to get to solutions much faster.

In search of well-rounded designers

As I met my new peers at Facebook, I learned many had come from companies like Oracle and Intuit and, in the course of their careers, been exposed to much more systems design than I had. But despite my initial anxieties, it didn’t take me long to catch up with my colleagues. Now, with a few years under my belt, I’m fully caught up on systems design.

The result is that I’m now in a position to ask: What gets lost when we focus solely on systems design? How can I help preserve the culture of craft?

Now that I have been able to pick up a new visual language, I see an opportunity to boost the understanding of, what I consider are, core design principles amongst designers. Designers who may have learned computer science or human-computer interaction, but did not learn the key fundamentals of graphic design as I did.
Organizing your Xcode Swift Code with Local Packages
By: Luca Angeletti
Tags: iOS App Development, Swift Package Manager, Ios Developer, Xcode, Swift

What Problem Does a Namespace Solve?

Let’s add some context to the problem. Every type we define in our Xcode project must have a unique name.

Example: we want to create a model struct to represent all the information of the Person entity as shown below.

struct Person {

let id: String

let firstName: String

let lastName: String

}

Next, we want to create a View to show the information of a Person







} class Person: UIView { @IBOutlet weak var firstName: UILabel! @IBOutlet weak var lastName: UILabel!

Photo by Jens Johnsson on Unsplash

And boom! We get the following error!

Invalid redeclaration of 'Person'

Of course, we cannot assign the same name to 2 different types because in that case, it would no longer be clear which type we are referencing when we use the Person word.

This is so obvious in the Xcode universe that many developers don’t even try it. In fact, for years the community adopted one of the following three workarounds.

Option 1: Adding a postfix (or prefix) to the type name

struct PersonModel {

let id: String

let firstName: String

let lastName: String

}





} class PersonView: UIView { @IBOutlet weak var firstName: UILabel! @IBOutlet weak var lastName: UILabel!

In this case, we just refer to the 2 types as PersonModel and PersonView . This is the simplest workaround. I don’t like it because completely ignores the idea of a namespace.

Optional 2: Simulating namespace nesting the type into an enum

enum Model { }

extension Model {

struct Person {

let id: String

let firstName: String

let lastName: String

}

}





} class Person: UIView { @IBOutlet weak var firstName: UILabel! @IBOutlet weak var lastName: UILabel!

In this case, we refer to the 2 types as Model.Person and Person . Things are getting better but we cannot benefit from the visibility modifiers. For example what if I want to add an init to Model.Person which is only visible to the Factory class? I can’t.

Option 3: Creating a new project

The idea is to create a new Xcode Project only for the Model and then adding it to the main workspace. Now I can finally use the visibility modifiers. This is a good solution but having a different project for each Module of your app may be overkill.

Swift Local Packages to the Rescue! 📦📦📦

With Xcode 11 Apple is suggesting its own official solution to this old problem. The idea is simply to leverage the power of Swift Packages to wrap our code into lightweight easy to use modules.

This solution fixes all the issues seen previously:

✅ The name of the Type can be the same used by another type outside of the package. ✅ We get a namespace so now we can use the visibility modifiers to expose something to the whole package ( internal ) or to the whole project ( public/open ). ✅ This is way easier to manage than creating a whole new Project just for grouping similar types.
Top Revenue Drivers for Local Food Producers
By: Erika Block
Tags: Local Food, Farmers, New Food Economy, Data Visualization, Agriculture

Local Orbit supports 12,000 buyers and suppliers across North America who do business in 85 local markets. As our CTO Andy Bass has written, “Local Orbit generates millions of transactions on a daily basis, across all aspects of the order to cash process — from selecting suppliers, to managing products, to placing orders, tracking the delivery process, and so on. Each of these activities contains tiny pieces of information, that when taken together as a collection, add up to valuable insight to industry trends and customer habits.”

Understanding the data they create helps businesses make better decisions and, ultimately, transform and sustain local supply chains. We’ll be sharing high-level insights from our network on a regular basis to help people understand what’s happening in this growing space.

Top Revenue Drivers for Food Producers across the Local Orbit Network — May-July 2016

Whole animals — grass-fed cows, heritage breed hogs, and pastured chickens — were the top-selling items across the country in the past 90 days, driven by markets in the Northeastern US and Canada.

When you break down sales by region, they get more diverse. Strawberries, asparagus, and peaches drove the most revenue to farmers in the Western US and Canada. Pastured eggs, lettuce mixes, and artisan bread topped the list in the Midwest.

Understand the Story of Your Organization’s Data

If you’d like to dig deeper, we’ve just launched a custom dashboard and visualization service that enables food buyers, suppliers, and regional partners to measure what they’ve done, track where they’re going, and plan for the future. Dashboards can help you establish benchmarks; track progress toward local/sustainable procurement goals; forecast demand and sales; develop pricing strategies; analyze network capacity; assess impact; and more.

The data service works as either an add-on to Local Orbit’s sales and business management tools, or as a standalone dashboard to connect and visualize data from any source.

Talk to Us About the Beta.

Map icons by Clockwise, Creative Stall, Yair Cohen, Franc, Jarem Frye and Christopher Scott from thenounproject.com
Expanding the world of products available on decentralized exchanges
By: Phil Elsasser
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Decentralized, Blockchain

One issue with the existing decentralized exchange (dex) ecosystem is the limited offerings that are available to participants. Confined to the ERC20 world, traders must transition to a centralized service if they would like to gain access to cross chain assets (ETH/BTC for example). Additionally, there is no path for anyone to gain exposure from crypto to real world assets, like AAPL/USDT, even from a centralized service. Usually, traders are looking to gain price exposure to an asset and do not care about actually taking custody of that asset. For instance, if a trader thinks bitcoin will rise in value and wants to make a profit, they don’t actually need or perhaps even want to hold bitcoin, rather just earn profit from its price appreciation.

MARKET Protocol allows dex’s to extend their product offerings to both of these asset types. By using an oracle solution to create a derivative contract, we can allow for a diverse universe of products all tradeable with ERC20 tokens as collateral in a decentralized fashion. Imagine going on to your favorite dex, and seeing pairs like ETH/BTC or ETH/Monero and being able to easily trade these products. Additionally, contracts can now be created to gain exposure to real world assets, trading AMZN/DAI (a stable coin) now becomes a reality while never leaving the Ethereum blockchain.

Existing decentralized exchanges can leverage much of their existing infrastructure, UI and customer base from their spot trading into a new revenue stream with extended product offerings. Traders, who previously had to overcome significant hurdles to gain short exposure are now able to do so without a third party lending facility to borrow those assets from. Now, true hedging of utility tokens also becomes possible without having to lock the tokens themselves. By searching already deployed MARKET contracts, users are able to start trading easily with their peers. If the needed contract doesn’t exist yet - using our dApp - users can define their desired contract, deploy it to the Ethereum blockchain, and immediately begin trading on their favorite dex.

Derivatives are fast on their way to being traded on the Ethereum blockchain and MARKET is leading this effort. To learn more about our project, ask questions or speak directly with our founders, please join our telegram and check out www.marketprotocol.io
Two Meteor Showers Could Light Up Skies This Week
By: James Maynard
Tags: Meteor Showers, Science, Space, Solar System, Earth

A pair of meteor showers could dazzle observers around the globe this week. Here’s what to look for, and how to find this spectacle of shooting stars.

Two meteor showers — the southern Delta Aquarids and the Alpha Capricornids — could light up skies Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Neither of these meteor showers is usually the most dramatic of meteor storms, but together, they may put on a dazzling display for skygazers. Together, observers should be able to see between 15 and 20 meteors per hour, astronomers suggest.

Photo by Alan Chen on Unsplash

The Alpha Capricornids are usually the weaker of the two meteor showers, but this display is also known for producing bright fireballs that can light up the sky. These colorful display last longer than usual shooting stars, and can glow in a variety of colors.

“Vivid colors are more often reported by fireball observers because the brightness is great enough to fall well within the range of human color vision… Reported colors range across the spectrum, from red to bright blue, and (rarely) violet. The dominant composition of a meteoroid can play an important part in the observed colors of a fireball, with certain elements displaying signature colors when vaporized,” the American Meteor Society reports.

Between five and 10 percent of all Delta Aquariid meteors produce persistent trains, glowing trails of ionized gas that can glow for several seconds after the meteor passes.

A shooting star seen from the International Space Station by Ron Garan, Expedition 28 flight engineer. Image credit: NASA

“If you trace all the Delta Aquariid meteors backward, they appear to radiate from a certain point in front of the constellation Aquarius the Water Bearer, which, as viewed from the Northern Hemisphere, arcs across the southern sky. The radiant point of the shower nearly aligns with the star Skat (Delta Aquarii). The meteor shower is named in the honor of this star,” EarthSky reports.

Meteors are (usually) small pieces of rock and metal that burn up as they pass through the atmosphere of Earth, typically 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the surface of our planet. Many of these regular showers are the result of debris left behind by a passing comet. The source of debris for the Delta Aquariid shower appears to be the comet 96P Machholz, discovered in 1986. This comet orbits the Sun once every six years, and will make its next pass around our parent star on January 31, 2023.

Astronomers are uncertain about origin of material for the Alpha Capricornids display.
Serializing Ecto Changeset errors to JSONAPI in Phoenix
By: Kurt Nelson
Tags: Phoenix, Ecto, Elixir, Jsonapi, Ember

It took me a good while to figure out ecto’s format for changeset errors. It turns out that if you have certain types of validations, each error message returned is in the format %{"should be at least %{count} characters", [count: 8]} . Unfortunately, you have to do string replacement to make it human readable.

The view below is enough to render errors properly in Ember but could be improved to provide more of the fields available in the spec.

defmodule App.ChangesetView do

use App.Web, :view



def render("error.json", %{changeset: changeset}) do

errors = Enum.map(changeset.errors, fn {field, detail} ->

%{

source: %{ pointer: "/data/attributes/#{field}" },

title: "Invalid Attribute",

detail: render_detail(detail)

}

end)



%{errors: errors}

end



def render_detail({message, values}) do

Enum.reduce values, message, fn {k, v}, acc ->

String.replace(acc, "%{#{k}}", to_string(v))

end

end



def render_detail(message) do

message

end

end

Thanks to Jose Valim for pointing out to me that a templating language is not needed to solve this problem
Evaluation Metrics for Clustering
By: Jagandeep Singh
Tags: Clustering, Machine Learning, Data Science

In Data Science, Clustering is the most common form of unsupervised learning. Clustering is a Machine Learning technique that involves the grouping of data points. Unlike Regression and Classification, we don’t have a target variable in Clustering. Since Clustering is unsupervised, we cannot calculate errors or accuracy or any of those metrics. In this blog, I will talk about different metrics to evaluate Clustering algorithms.

Clustering is evaluated based on some similarity or dissimilarity measures such as distance between cluster points. If the algorithm can unite similar data points and separate the dissimilar data points well, then it has performed well.

Some common metrics for Clustering are:

Silhouette Score

The silhouette score is a metric to evaluate a clustering algorithm. The silhouette score is calculated from two scores, a and b. a is the mean distance between a sample and all other points in the same cluster and b is the mean distance between a sample and all other points in the next nearest cluster. The silhouette score for a sample is calculated by the following formula:

The silhouette score for a set of samples is the mean of the silhouette scores for each sample. The silhouette score can range from -1 to +1. A silhouette score of -1 means incorrect clustering and +1 means correct and highly dense clustering. A silhouette score of 0 means the clusters are overlapping.

Davies-Bouldin Index

The DB index is another metric to evaluate a clustering algorithm. The DB index captures if the clusters are well spaced from each other and if the data points in the clusters are dense enough. The DB index is calculated by the following formula:

where n is the number of clusters and σi is the average distance of all points in cluster i from the cluster centroid ci.

Dunn’s Index

Dunn’s Index is another metric for evaluating a clustering algorithm. Dunn’s Index captures the same idea as the DB Index. Dunn’s Index is equal to the minimum inter-cluster distance divided by the maximum cluster size. A higher DI implies better clustering. It assumes that better clustering means that clusters are compact and well-separated from other clusters. The Dunn’s Index can be calculated by the following formula:

where i, j, and k are each index for clusters, d measures the inter-cluster distance, and d’ measures the intra-cluster difference.

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Those Useful Insights
By: Bridget Webber
Tags: Insights, Suspense, Poetry, Fiction, Short Story

Those Useful Insights

A micro-story

That grinding sound as the axe fell into coarse bone and the head didn’t roll reminded him to sharpen his kitchen knives.
The Future of Big Media — No More Breaking News — Interactive Fiction — Motion Design & UX — The Market for Short Films
By: Ben Johnson
Tags: Advertising, Television, Media

The Future of Big Media — No More Breaking News — Interactive Fiction — Motion Design & UX — The Market for Short Films Ben Johnson Follow Apr 5, 2016 · 4 min read

Gruvi Weekly Digest #23 — A weekly catch up on what we found interesting at Gruvi.

The future is not exactly in the future, but in the making on a daily basis. The pace of change has accelerated and adapting to it means you require a large degree of flexibility in your approach, rather than wasting time dwelling on the past. From big media, to interactive fiction, to news and short films, adapting to change and building ‘the future’ is what we’ve read about these past weeks.

Ben, CEO

Matthew Ball has been publishing some really interesting and insightful research on Redef. His latest series of 3 articles on the status quo for television offers a very sobering reality check.

Matt, Operations Lead

“The Times” is soon transitioning to a ‘digital edition’ online offering, where they no longer provide coverage of breaking news and live events. Breaking News is a free commodity thanks to other news sources. Behind a paywall since 2010, the digital editors know people come to them (and pay for) longer form content and analysis.

Johnny, Lead Developer

Interactive fiction is capable to mix the fascination of games with that of literature in a hybrid form that’s producing some interesting results while it’s finding its way.

Franco, Digital Designer

Motion design can play an important role on interface design. When used correctly, it helps the users to achieve their goals easily. This article gives a good understanding on how to integrate animation into the UX workflow.

Mirona, Gruvi’s Go Getter

Short films is where filmmakers start, but is there more to it? What are the terms at play in the market for short films? It looks like making it available for free and getting it seen is far more valuable than being paid a couple of hundred bucks to have it on a dedicated VOD platform.
Understanding Global Flows
By: Fsi Student Programs
Tags: Internships, Fsi Students, Stanford

About the author: Adrian Scheibler ’22 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with the European Council of Foreign Relations. He is currently an International Relations major at Stanford University.

The work for the European Council on Foreign Relations has been progressing well and I am excited about where the project is headed. I have become increasingly comfortable with searching the relevant databases of international organizations to access information for the project and with creating engaging visualizations. One of the most rewarding parts of the internship is the incredible amount of freedom that I am given with the research; although there is a general outline of the goals, I am able to use my own judgement to determine the areas that need to be researched and the type of output that is created. This makes the project even more exciting, adds a personal touch to the work, and has allowed me to learn more from the project than originally intended.

One of the most difficult aspects of the internship has been adjusting to working from home. Learning how to remain productive and maintain balance with all of the potential distractions around becomes very important and requires changing habits and routines when it comes to work. The most challenging part of the adjustment for me was creating boundaries between work and personal life in order to keep the two separate and to find ways to escape the house for some fresh air during my daily breaks — this included going for walks with my two dogs in Colorado and going out to purchase the ingredients for my lunch meal here in Brussels.

The work goes on and I am excited for what lies ahead.
GameStore Jackpot Tournament: Tinbo Dash
Tags: Gamestore, Gaming, Cryptocurrency

It’s one of our most popular games in GameStore, so Tinbo Dash is making a welcomed return to our Jackpot Tournaments. Who will manage to top the leaderboard and win $$$s in VRA?

3 Day tournament with 10 winners!

We’re giving you another 3 day Jackpot Tournament to run from Thursday 23rd July 8pm (UTC) until Sunday 26th July 8pm (UTC). There will be 10 winners with prizes to be:

The Tournament:

Players can enter at any time during the tournament period.

Don’t forget, the more players that join the tournaments; the larger the Jackpot! All Jackpots are displayed in credits and 1 credit is worth $0.02.

Please note that you will need to pay for entry each time you play in the tournament. 1 game credit is worth $0.02

Feedback:

Thank you to everyone who has given us their feedback and suggestions. Your ideas are valuable and help us to improve our Jackpot Tournaments each week. Keep them coming in via the GameStore questionnaire form and GameStore Telegram Group.

Entry Criteria:

Register on GameStore

on GameStore Must have an active GameStore subscription or buy a subscription with VRA using your VeraWallet

or buy a subscription with VRA using your VeraWallet Have a VeraWallet registered to the SAME email address as your GameStore registered email. Failure to have the same email address for both the VeraWallet and GameStore means disqualification!

Please note that you will need to pay for entry each time you play in the tournament. 1 game credit is worth $0.02

Winners and Prizes

The winners will be the top 10 names on the Tournament game leaderboard.

Verasity will be topping up the Jackpots so there will be 10 winners in the tournament:

1st place receives 100% of the Jackpot value in VRA, to be added to their VeraWallet. 1 credit is worth $0.02 .

of the Jackpot value in VRA, to be added to their VeraWallet. . 2nd and 3rd place receive 50% of the Jackpot value in VRA, to be added to their VeraWallets

of the Jackpot value in VRA, to be added to their VeraWallets 4th-10th places receive 10% of the Jackpot value in VRA, to be added to their VeraWallets

Winners will be notified by Verasity, within 3 working days of the tournament end date, and VRA deposited into their VeraWallet email address.

Terms & Conditions

1. Winners will be notified within 3 working days of the end of the tournament.

2. Verasity team has a right to eliminate a competitor if there is evidence of cheating or fraud.

3. Rules of the tournament can’t be changed after the start of the weekly tournament.

4. Every competitor has to join Verasity GameStore Telegram group, follow RJMark and VerasityTech on Twitter.

5. Join the Verasity mailing list

6. Leaderboards will be audited at the end of each tournament.

7. Participants must have an active Verasity GameStore subscription

8. Participants must use the same email address for the GameStore as for their VeraWallet

9. Help & Support is by joining the Verasity GameStore Telegram group

10. Rules can be changed after the end of each tournament

11. Any decisions with respect to Winners/losers will be made by Verasity and are final
日記毎週アップデート #20
By: Noah Coin
Tags: Japanese, Coronavirus, Updates, Project News, Noah Project

CREATING A BORDERLESS WORLD. Noah Coin is one of the cryptocurrency that supports economic growth through blockchain technology. info@noahcoin.org

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WACATE2019冬 ２日目
By: N Fujinaka.
Tags: Testing, Japanese, Wacate, Quality Assurance, Workshop

Our mission as a data empowerment company. Dramatically expands data utilization possibilities, from operational reforms to social issue solutions.

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§36 In Praise of “good, mean, Trotskyists”
Tags: Jesuit Formation, Peter Hitchens, Hunter S Thompson, Politics

In a recent interview with James Delingpole, Peter Hitchens gave some fascinating insights into the broad range of his personal, moral, religious and political convictions. Some were well-known, others may surprise you. Of note is the serpentine nature of his curriculum vitae, and how this now appears in the concentrated form of his rhetorical shapeshifting.*

Like his late brother and many others who occupy contrarian positions on ‘the right’ (conservatives and libertarians alike), Hitchens began his political life as a Trotskyist, and in doing so was disciplined through a totalising worldview indebted to a close and specific interpretation of Marxist writing and thought.

Later in the podcast, Delingpole wittingly suggests that it is perhaps this background (based on the necessary immersion in the literature of revolutionary socialism) that has formed his position today, because this background provided a form of training akin to that of a Jesuit under what is known as the ‘Jesuit formation’.

There is a parallel here that was known to the late Hunter S Thompson, who once said that he liked nothing more than arguing with a “good, mean Jesuit“:

In the short segment above, Lettermen never let Thompson elaborate on why he loved arguing with “good, mean, Jesuits”, which is why Delingpole’s hour with Hitchens is so revealing. The fact is that Trots and Jesuits have done their reading, and in having done so argue from a position of disciplinary rigor and certitude that makes them worth sparring with. In Thompson’s experience, the fact that the Jesuits are “as smart as they are mean” allows intellectual combat to be a means of refining one’s own arguments and sharpening one’s duelling tongue.

To paraphrase a written elaboration from his Kingdom of Fear (2003):

Smart boys from […] the Society of Jesus are always fun for this kind of banter, and I am always on the lookout for these people, but rarely for anything except as sparring partners. There is nothing like a corrupt Jesuit […] to sharpen up with. And some are even wise in their own shrouded way (Thompson 2003, 16).

/Pete Watt

References and Footnotes:

Thompson, Hunter S., Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century. (London: Simon and Schuster, 2003)

* At one point, Delingpole likens Hitchens to an eel, and on another occasion recalled a time of betrayal when Hitchens sacrificed his potential political allegiance with Delingpole to win an argument outright.
The Spiritual Practice of Opening My Legs
By: Yael Wolfe
Tags: Relationships, Self, Sex, Howl By Yael Wolfe, Sexuality

“Put yourself in the shape of what you desire,” a yoga teacher once said during class.

At the time, she was instructing us on how to practice the harder poses. When working toward liftoff in bakasana, for instance, she showed us how to get into the position, with our feet still on the ground and keep practicing the position until we were strong enough to lift up.

I wholeheartedly believe in this concept — put yourself in the shape of what you desire and that desire will come to you. It’s training your body and mind in preparation.

I’ve started practicing this in a more sexual way. I realize that this might sound ridiculous, but to me, the practice I need to take on is opening my legs.

Yes, I mean that quite literally.

Most often, that means stretching throughout the day, focusing on hip openers in my yoga practice, and even just sitting with my legs open.

But I am also turning this into a targeted practice. Every day, I take off my clothes, lie down on my bed, and open my legs.

Somehow, this feels as vulnerable to me as if I had a lover hovering over me, seeing me like that for the first time. It is hard for me to be naked even by myself. It is hard for me to look at my own body and see all the flaws I perceive.

And after all the conditioning I’ve taken into my body around female sexuality, it is insanely hard for me to open my legs when I’m naked. There’s something about the act of revealing what’s between my legs that feels indecent. I can hear my mother yelling, “For god’s sake, keep your legs together!”

I think about the way my nephews, when they were very young, regularly ran around naked, seeming to have no shame around their penises. Thankfully, my 6-year-old niece seems to have inherited her older brothers’ complete lack of shame. A few months ago, my sister asked her if she had put on her panties, and my niece, not looking up from the book she was reading, lifted up her leg to reveal that, no, she had not put on panties that morning.

That story still makes me laugh, but also makes me sad. I was a pretty wild child, but I can’t imagine ever feeling comfortable enough to flash my vulva to my mother in response to a question about whether or not I was wearing panties. I already felt shame around my body even at 6 and knew that what was between my legs needed to stay hidden.

My first visit to a gynecologist took forever because she literally had to talk me into relaxing my legs apart. And my first sexual experience was almost humorous, had I not been so scared — I literally ended up with bruises all up and down my inner thighs because even when my lover had maneuvered himself between them, I tried to keep them as closed as possible, squeezing them hard around his bony hips (and not in a sexy way, let me tell you).

It’s literally an effort for me to practice opening my legs without shame — and to let them remain open.
Funded Vs Bootstrapped SaaS startups, Part 2: self-funded off-road buggy
By: Benoit Hediard
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Startup, SaaS, Founders

A boostrapper profile

A bootstrapper cannot start out with ideas of world domination and ambitions to “shoot for the moon.” Bootstrappers need to hit a feature set that resonates with their audience quickly by focusing like a laser on building only the features that directly address customer pain points.

Unless someone pays for the product, a bootstrapped startup is dead. That’s one of the main reasons why most of self-funded businesses start at the bottom of the market, selling subscriptions targeted at SMBs instead of enterprises which require a longer sales cycle and a heavy sales process.

Another founders’ top concern is talent acquisition. This is why most self-funded businesses can’t be bootstrapped in the Valley — it’s impossible to compete with local VC-backed companies to grow their team.

Bootstrapped SaaS startups usually have a strong company culture of trust and transparency (https://baremetrics.com/open) and operate with distributed remote teams. Each team member is relatively autonomous and free to choose the way they want to work.

Funded companies can acquire new customers quickly by burning cash to experiment with paid channels. Bootstrapped startups don’t have this luxury. They prefer to rely on the most capital efficient channels: virality and organic inbound marketing. This is great for sustainable growth engine, but there is a down side: it will require a good amount of time and patience to get initial results.
Apple One, Everything You Need To Know
By: Yash Patak
Tags: Apple One, Apple, Apple Tv Plus, Apple Music, Icloud

Apple

At this year's September Apple Event, Apple announced some exciting updates to its hardware and services. We got a new iPad, watches, Fitness+ service as well as the Apple One subscription.

Users will be able to choose from three different plans and can bundle six of Apple’s services into just one subscription.

The current subscriptions that are available in Apple One include Apple Music where you can stream or download over 70,000,000 songs completely ad-free. This is available for $9.99 a month. Next is Apple TV+ where you can watch critically acclaimed Apple original shows and movies; in their first year of service, Apple received 18 Emmy nominations. This service, on its own, costs $4.99 a month. Next is Apple Arcade, where you can download and play over 100 games with no ads or in-app purchases. These games are all exclusive to Apple Arcade. This is also available for $4.99 a month. Next is iCloud storage which comes in three different storage plan options. Apple News Plus gives you access to leading newspapers and magazines for $9.99 a month. Their latest service is Apple Fitness+ which launches in late 2020 and lets you stream workouts and track your progress with your Apple Watch. This will cost $9.99 a month individually.

The first plan is the individual plan, this gives you access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 50GB of iCloud storage. This plan cannot be shared with anybody else and will cost $14.95 a month. The plan will save users $6 a month.

Next is the family plan. With this plan,you get Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud storage. This will cost $19.95 a month and will save users $8 a month

The final plan is the Premier plan which will only be available in some countries. You get access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple News+, and 2TB of iCloud storage. You can also share this with up to five people. This plan will save you $25 a month.

Once you have subscribed to a plan you will be able to use the services on any platform they are available. This includes the web app for Apple Music and Apple TV+. Any services that you are not already subscribed to will be free for the first month. After that, the plan renews as a monthly subscription. There is no commitment, you can cancel your plan whenever you want. If you need more iCloud storage you can purchase it separately to supplement the plan that you are on.