fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
4 Reasons Design in Marketing Matters More Than You Think
By: The Incubator
Tags: Branding, UI, UX, Marketing, Design

Here are 4 ways design can be used to better market your business.

1. Creating a Connection

Your logo and how you represent yourself online can help tell your story, even to those who have never heard of you. Your logo is often the first thing potential customers see, so use the opportunity to make a good first impression and say a little bit about yourself.

2. Building Trust

Everyone can tell the difference between a website that has been done properly and one that was created in a rush, even if they don’t know anything about design. A well-done website helps inspire confidence in your customers; not only because it looks professional, but also because it shows that you care about every detail — like the experience your customers are having online.

3. Showing Authenticity

Your brand should reflect your business, not the other way around. When making design decisions, focus on what sets you apart from your competition, and you could use this to represent your business authentically in your branding.

4. Creating Consistency

Make sure your business is represented consistently, be it on your website, business cards, or Facebook cover photo. Pay attention to details, especially the language you use online. If your business has a friendly tone, make sure it’s consistent on every page of your website. Lastly, remember the importance of design. Think of your branding as an outfit that your business wears. It tells a lot about you. Imagine a job interview. Even if you are the most qualified person for the job, dressing or representing yourself poorly might just be the reason that you don’t get the job. I hope that helps. Now let’s get designing!

“Think of your branding as an outfit. It tells a lot about you. Even if you’re the most qualified person for a job, if you dress poorly for an interview, you might not get the job.”

— Alborz Heydaryan, UX, The Incubator

What does your visual branding say about you? Book a complimentary consultation with one of our specialists. Emailhello@theincubator.io or call 1–888–713–2826 to get started.
The only shortcut to success…
By: Yann Girard
Tags: Life Lessons, Writing, Life, Entrepreneurship, Poetry

Is to show up every single day.

And if you can’t show up every single day, try to show up more than anybody else in your industry, field, niche or whatever.

This is the only shortcut to success.

That’s the only way to hack the learning curve.

That’s the only real growth hack you need to know.

While others write one book, try to write 3 books.

While others record one song, try to record 4 songs.

While others shoot one video, try to shoot 5 videos.

While others give one talk, try to give 6 talks…

But what about quality?

Quantity leads to quality…
The Pros and Cons of Trying to Find Your Passion
By: Ayodeji Awosika
Tags: Productivity, Psychology, Self Improvement, Advice, Life Lessons

Why Trying to Find Your Passion is Dangerous and Counterproductive

You can’t eat passion. Passion doesn’t pay your bills. You can’t enter “finding your passion” into an application for medical assistance. Passion doesn’t keep the circumstances that affect your life at bay — the economy, politics, personal traits that negatively affect you, etc.

Who the hell are these millennials with no life experience to be telling you how to find your passion and live your bliss? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Someone has to wash the dishes, haul the garbage, do your accounting, construct your roads, and wait your tables. The world spins because of people who don’t follow their passion. On top of that, finding your passion is all good and well until it doesn’t work. You can waste a lot of time and energy trying to find it only to get zero tangible results.

Again, there a ton of people like this who follow self-improvement advice without doing anything about it. In the search of finding their passion, they waste time doing a half dozen side hustles that never work. Then, because they have an entitled mindset, they never quite understand what real work ethic means.

If that wasn’t enough cold water splashed on your dreams, here comes the tidal wave: focusing on your passion doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it comes with a poor underlying assumption. The assumption is that your level of love dictates how dedicated you’ll be to the journey. You think that once you find that ultimate passion, things will fall into place, and you’ll do the work necessary to succeed. This is backward.

In reality, you don’t find passion until you get good at something. When you develop competence in something you enjoy, you build more confidence to help you tackle larger challenges, and you continue to grow, which fuels more passion to repeat the process.

Most people want the results without the effort. They want passion to fall in their lap. You shouldn’t chase or seek your passion because that means it’s trying to evade you. Often, you’ll end up chasing your own tail, running on the advice treadmill, and making no progress toward building a life you love.

Passion is for the birds. Do your job, be thankful you have a roof over your head in the first place, and stop being so entitled.
When ‘Being’ Brings True Happiness
By: Ash Luchmun
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Wellness, Happiness, Mental Health

When ‘Being’ Brings True Happiness

1.3m steps later, I had reached an unintended destination

The work of Samy Benmayor, at La Galería Gabriela Mistral de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile in March 2017

I conquered over 1 million steps in May 2018. After issuing myself with an even greater challenge, I ended up walking nearly 1.3 million steps the following month.

However, it all came to a sudden stop. On July 1st, I woke up and I could not walk. I had sprained my right foot.

I felt a sense of deflation, almost anger because I had been actively pushing myself to a place that was high on the ladder of ambition. What was I going to do now?

I then realised that whilst it was a great thing to have on my resume of life (to have walked 1,000km+ in 30 days) everything in life needed to be in moderation, even something as fulfilling as completing 7+hours of walking spread out though the day, resulting in around 30k+ steps every 24 hours.

I’m settling back in to walking 10k steps a day

Being able to accomplish something like this, came with a great sense of achievement. It was amazing, but it ended on that one Sunday morning when I woke up, and I couldn’t put my right foot flat on the ground.

I was not forced to stay at home, but I had made it a choice. Instead of spending so much time outdoors in the parks that I had grown to love, I was now mostly inside, choosing to be between the garden and the kitchen. And this prompted me to start looking closely into my living environment inside.

It’s the one place that I had not been taking notice of, for some time. I found how interesting it was, that I allowed myself to get used to the unconscious ways of the surroundings I had created, choosing to buy and have more of everything, as I fell back safely on cupboards and wardrobes as my ‘safe places’ to bury my life in.

A few months ago, I started to undo that cycle of clutter. It all stemmed from the first Audible audio-book I ever bought, ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying’ by Marie Kondo on February 2nd 2017. The British narrator brought to life in great, yet relatable details the KonMari method™ that Marie had developed.

I listened attentively and started to learn that, in the midsts of everything that I had collected and stored over many years, the majority of it did not have any meaning or purpose anymore. Their time had passed, so why was I still choosing to live in that time?

I could live without 95% of it, to be honest. As nothing lasts forever, no-one needs to keep everything forever. So, I bravely took the decision to re-start my de-cluttering and elimination exercise on a grand scale. I chose to be aware — of the need to clear up, and of my bad foot.
6 Tips for Developers to Handle Imposter Syndrome
By: Thomas Guibert
Tags: Programming, Technology, Imposter Syndrome, Startup, Software Engineering

6 Tips for Developers to Handle Imposter Syndrome

The things that worked well for me

“Every one of my successes is no big deal and due to luck.”

“I feel like a fake because I still don’t know [xxx].”

“Every failure is due to my lack of expertise and I should give up.”

“I’m lacking experience in that topic, I better keep my mouth shut.”

Hi! You are not alone… I went through that also and a lot of developers suffer from the imposter syndrome too! I will be honest with you. It took me more than a year to endorse the job title of developer.

During my first year of employment as a developer, I’d never felt more of a fraud than ever before. Even though I had my share of knowledge, of course, every developer around me felt like they were way more talented than me.

Which is a problem when you constantly try to compare yourself to others. Everyone seems better than you. By respecting my coworkers, my feeling was that I was not deserving of that title yet.

How many days did I go home feeling like a fraud? A lot.

Was it justified, at least once? Nope.

Remembering this today really seems absurd. What was I thinking? Just because I don’t have the same expertise as they do, does it make me a fraud?

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Today, I feel way better about my knowledge. I’m fine with my current expertise, my learning curve, and don’t punish myself when I don’t know something.

Here are some tips that helped me to overcome the imposter syndrome and I hope you find them interesting and helpful!
[Chapter-1] The Machine Learning Landscape — Part-1🧙🏻‍♂️
By: Vishvdeep Dasadiya
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Data Science

When most people hear “Machine Learning” or “Artificial Intelligence”, they imagine a robot: a deadly Terminator. But Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence is not futuristic fantasy. By the way most people do not know that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence is not the same, Machine Learning is subset of Artificial Intelligence domain.

So, let’s start with the term definition…

What is Machine Learning? 🤖

Machine Learning is the science and we can say art also of programming computers so they can learn from data.

More of general definition

[Machine Learning is the] field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

— Arthur Samuel, 1959

And this is more of engineering-oriented one:

A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some task T and some performance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.

— Tom Mitchell, 1997

The examples that the system uses to learn are called the training set. Each training example is called a training instance (or sample). In this case, the task T is to flag spam for new emails, the experience E is the training data, and the performance measure P needs to be defined; for example, you can use the ratio of correctly classified emails. This particular performance measure is called accuracy and it is often used in classification tasks.
Observing
By: Sean Zhai
Tags: Growth, Poetry, Mental Health, Psychology, Programming

Sign up for American Haiku Steamship To Writing History

By American Haiku

Writing takes practice. American Haiku is a great way to put your words from your fingers to your piece of paper. Don't quit, you can do it. Take a look
A “Historic Week” on Nightingale
By: Isaac Levy-Rubinett
Tags: Design, History, Information Design, Political Cartoons, Mapping

A “Historic Week” on Nightingale

Well, historic in the sense that we published some amazing history-themed content.

Olivia Vane wrote “Strange Times: Visualising the Oddities of Time Data” which builds upon her experience visualizing museum collections and dives into the unique challenges of working with historic objects and data. So often, temporal data is inexact, uncertain, or inaccurate, which raises tricky questions for practitioners. This article covers some of these situations as well as the strategies designers can take to either conceal or expose gaps in data.

Attila Bátorfy analyzed political cartoons from communist-era postwar Hungary in “The Imperialist Dogs Bark, But The Communist Graph Goes On.” Charts were an important part of the communist regime, used as data-based evidence of skyrocketing production and efficient social programs, and they were a powerful tool for information warfare between the communist government and its enemies.

Additionally, Nightingale was proud to publish an excerpt from Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s upcoming book, Data Feminism, about two different maps of Detroit. One map stems from the racist and discriminatory practice of Redlining, and the other, “Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track,” was created by community members to shed light on the city’s inequality.

Where these pieces look back at historical moments in time, Stephen Spiewak’s piece looks back on a timeless moment: Super Bowl LIV. When it comes to Super Bowl tickets, price is probably the first data point you’ll want to know. But if we look deeper, there’s a hidden data point that can tell a much more compelling story. At Vivid Seats, they’ve developed a metric that has accurately predicted the last five Super Bowl winners based on ticket sales.

One of the main goals of looking to the past is understanding where we are headed. So naturally, Allen Hillery’s ongoing series on the future of BI was a fitting way to close the week. Allen spoke with Duncan Clark, the founder of Flourish, about his winding career path, data journalism vs. data storytelling, and Talkies!

As always, if you are interested in writing for Nightingale, please contact one of our editors or write to us at pitchnightingale@gmail.com. We are always looking for new writers and open to exploring new ideas, and we encourage you to get in touch!
Dear writers, stop pinning your stories on Medium!
By: Aj Krow
Tags: Self Improvement, Writing, Advice, Ideas, Design

Dear writers, stop pinning your stories on Medium! I noticed while browsing through some profiles I am unable to find the newest pieces. When a writer posts new content, Medium provides a notification to the reader on their homepage. When the reader clicks on a writer’s picture, it leads the reader to the writer’s profile. However, the reader has to scroll past many pinned stories until the user finally reaches the article published a few hours ago. The more pinned stories you have, the more a reader struggles to find your newest content when viewing your profile. I encourage writers not to pin more than one story, whether it is your most-read story or the one you are proud of the most. Remember, writers should provide a simple user interface for readers to find the newest content. Keep it minimalist and clean!

Photo by Philipp Berndt on Unsplash
Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make While Pitching via Email
By: Edgaras Katinas
Tags: Marketing, Email Marketing, Sales, Startup, Enterpreneurship

Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make While Pitching via Email

Avoidable mistakes that made you lose a potential customer

According to DMR Business Statistics, we send and receive 121 emails every day — that’s about 15 emails in an eight-hour working day. Indeed, the number is more significant if a person has more authority and responsibility in an organization.

This is why attracting someone’s attention with an email sales pitch has been becoming harder and harder. Especially nowadays, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where everyone is desperate to make sales and email remains the most reliable option to engage with your audience.

Every morning I come to the office to at least 40–50 new emails. These can be newsletters to publications that I subscribe to, meeting invitations, internal email correspondence, invitations to events, awards, or other activities, and some of them are also random sales pitches from other companies that try to offer their solution to my company.

I noticed that COVID-19 had brought more of the sales pitches than usual. No doubt, the easiest way to connect now is via email. Also, many companies lose clients due to budget cuts, and they still need to sustain their business. Thus, they are looking for new clients. All normal, as expected.

However, what is astonishing is the quality of the email sales pitches that I’ve been receiving. By all means, I’m not an expert in pitching, but here are some examples of what to avoid.
Don't be Digital-Only.
By: Alex Mitchell
Tags: Product Management, Marketing, Startup, Tech, Digital Marketing

When and How you Should Go Physical

Oversized Burn Down Chart

Here’s something you’re probably surprised to hear a Director of Product at a tech startup say: Digital isn’t always the answer.

How can it be?

Technological Progress = Digital, right? Everything must be faster, more integrated, more automated, and less physical!

Not true.

In a world of never-ending Slack messages, a smartphone that you check over 200 times per day, and screens everywhere you look (literally!), physical has regained a LOT of power to attract our limited attention.

5 Powerful Ways to Leverage Physical

There are many simple ways to leverage the uniqueness and attention-grabbing nature of physical today.

Here are 5 easy (and powerful) ways you can leverage physical for your startup, company, and personal life.

Handwritten Thank You’s: At Upside Travel, we’ve been doing handwritten thank you’s since we started and they have had an incredible impact on our customer’s experience with us!

Even better, handwritten notes have a 3–4x open rate compared to form letters, which makes the time creating them well worth it.

(http://www.digitaldogdirect.com/handwritten-mail-and-direct-mail/)

Handwritten Thank You’s FTW!

Add swag for a +1!

Don’t have time to write the notes yourself?

No problem, check out these sites for affordable help with handwritten notes:

https://www.handwrytten.com

2. Oversized Physical “Demos”: Are you working on something digital that can be represented physically? I’ve found that by making an oversize physical “demo” of your digital product, you can keep what you’re working on top of mind with your coworkers and tap into their collective creativity.

One recent physical demo we built at Upside was of the new home screen for our iOS and Android apps. You can pull off the “cards” in the feed section of the homepage, rearrange them, add new ones, and even create cards of your own, all thanks to the magic of Velcro!

This demo has already helped us collect more than 20 ideas for new “cards” that can be added to the Upside app home feed.
10 Ways To Find Unicorn Content
By: Larry Kim
Tags: Self Improvement, Content Marketing, Marketing, Content, Entrepreneurship

The infographic shows some of the most effective ways of finding the best unicorn content.

See Content From Top Performing Facebook Pages

Check the Tops From Relevant Subreddits

Mind Quora for FAQ

Use Medium To Follow Your Interests

Find Great Video Inspiration From YouTube and Vimeo

Subscribe To Relevant Industry Blogs

Follow Hashtags on Instagram and Twitter

Tap Into User Generated Content

See Top Performing Posts From Pinterest

Repurpose Your Unicorn Content
Does Being an Author Change How You Read Novels?
By: Chandrayan Gupta
Tags: Self Improvement, Writing, Advice, Reading, Books

The Negatives

The bad part of all this studying is, of course, the constant detection of even the tiniest errors. There are books which I read from start to finish in a state of immersion and suspended disbelief, and even though there are errors here and there, I know they’re made on purpose because their strict, grammatically correct counterparts would destroy the flow of the prose. So, even though I detect these errors, I don’t care about them and they disappear from my mind seconds later.

But then there are stories I don’t find engrossing to begin with. The errors in these stories completely pull me out of the immersion. The kind of errors I’m talking about are perhaps not too irksome to everyone. But they’re as annoying to an author as they would be to a chef who has to consume food he knows he could’ve prepared better. I’ll give you an example from this article itself —

Do they employ short chapters which end on cliffhangers, like Dan Brown…

If there were no comma after “cliffhangers”, it would imply Dan Brown is a kind of cliffhanger. Once you learn these little nuances, reading becomes an entirely different experience. You start reading a book, and while it doesn’t blow your mind away at the beginning, it’s a solid read. You’re just starting to get immersed in the story when you spot a mistake like the one I mentioned above. Your immersion is immediately broken. Sighing, you check the time and decide to do something else instead.

That book might have turned out much better had you kept on with it. But now you’ll never know, and it’ll be just another book you started and never finished. That’s been my experience. I’ve lost track of the number of books I’ve begun reading only to abandon fifteen minutes later because my immersion kept getting broken.

Examining novels to improve your own writing is good, but I take it too far. The number of books in my discarded pile is proof of that.
The First Time I Killed My Little Darlings
By: Nicole Chardenet
Tags: Editing, Books, Fiction, Advice, Writing

Who wrote that ridiculous rule? I’d bet it wasn’t Stephen King, Master of Doorstops!

(Never mind how Carrie was 60,000 words.)

Anyone ever heard of Margaret Mitchell? Gone With The Wind! 418,000! (FIRST AND ONLY!)

Okay, okay, that was like seventy years ago. But hey, look at this, Miss Snark! A DEBUT NOVEL about vampire librarians (yes, you read that right) just came out and it’s 240,000 words!

So yeah, you can have a debut novel thicker than a grilled cheese sandwich!

(It sucked. Torturous.)

Yah sure, mine’s still longer — I’ll bet I could whack it down to 240,000. And it definitely doesn’t suck!

Miss Snark begged to differ. She listed the literary sins of the wannabe novelist’s first effort: Too many characters; subplots that go nowhere; too many useless words; too much description (especially settings); too-long-too-graphic sex scenes; plots that sag in the middle or lack dramatic tension.

Her annoying list nagged me like a persistent pet demanding attention when I had more important things to do. I pushed it away but it kept throwing its paws in my lap.

Maybe 300,000 words was too long for a debut novel, today.

Other, better writers got away with these crimes in the past but maybe longer novels were best left to the pros. She was right. Stephen King I ain’t.

Then again, Stephen King wasn’t Stephen King, either. I felt IT could have been pared down by about a quarter to a third. Having read even heavier doorstops since then, I’m done with Stephen King until some brave editor goes Freddie Krueger on every work over 100,000 words and slashes them down to Abridged.

Better writers than the King and I had committed these many sins.

Too many characters: Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy.

Subplots going nowhere: J.R.R. Tolkien.

Plots without dramatic tension: Jules Verne

Not knowing when the story ends: Tolkien again, and King’s Rose Madder.

Too many useless words: Every Victorian writer. And Tolstoy.

Too much description, especially of settings: Tolkien again. Tolstoy — farming.

Too-long, too-graphic sex scenes: Every novel written since 1980, until, I guess, 2005. Although I happily cut my 10-page orgasm down to his slipping his hand under her halter top and ending, “I arched my back, abandoning myself.”

Stories sagging in the middle: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. I’ve half-read it twice and he loses me after the aliens reveal themselves.

They’d all broken Miss Snark’s One Blog Tip To Rule Them All: Kill your darlings.
A Website without Email Marketing Is Like a House with No Roof
By: John W Hayes
Tags: Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Marketing, Amazon

Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I had a difficult conversation again last week with an online retailer who was struggling with the high acquisition costs of selling via online marketplaces (eBay, Amazon, etc.) but not putting the time and effort into his own site because it hadn’t generated enough sales.

He’d given up on expensive paid search marketing, could never find the time to promote new products on social media and — the ultimate sin — never even considered email marketing.

The little traffic he did generate came from affiliate partners — although much of this came from price comparison sites, which meant most sales were based on a strategy of heavy discounting and wafer-thin margins.

No Relationships

In short, the online retailer had no real relationships with his customers — their loyalty was with the online marketplaces and affiliate sites, and he only picked up the crumbs because he fought hard to be the cheapest. While this is a common business strategy for many online retailers, it’s not an easy or very lucrative path to success.

Note: Volume sales, if not managed correctly, can be incredibly expensive. The more you sell, the more staff you need to pick and pack, the more warehouse space you need, and the more costs add up and squeeze those tiny margins.

Acquisition vs. Retention

The online retailer had thrown all his marketing eggs into one strategic basket and focused his efforts entirely on the acquisition, with nothing on retention.

Note: Acquisition marketing is always more expensive than retention marketing.

The retailer had two options:

Continue down the same path and hope his competition would allow him the space to make a decent margin on a higher volume of sales (he worked in an incredibly competitive space, so this wasn’t likely to happen). Start looking at a strategy to retain and grow his own-site sales — yep, you’ve guessed it — through email marketing.

Start Small and Build

Even though sales via his site were limited, every customer engagement gave him the opportunity to build a potentially lucrative relationship and increase his margins by bypassing those expensive acquisition costs.

Note: Too many online businesses believe they have to have a substantial list in order to start email marketing. To the contrary, if you have a handful of customers, you have enough people to start marketing to. They have already made a commitment to your business, so why would you ignore them?

Insulate Your Business

Think of email marketing as insulation for your business. Like a roof on a house, it traps the heat (cash flow) inside a business and prevents the rain (unwarranted expenses) from coming in.

You wouldn’t build a house without a roof, so why would you build a website without email marketing?

How have you used email marketing to build relationships and take ownership of your business and its profits? Share your comments below:
Use BIRT to generate reports from CSV
By: Easily Simplify Data Processing
Tags: Report, Big Data, Analytics, Visualization

If you achieve data from CSV or other types of flat files in BIRT, you can s use Flat File Data Source. If you generate a dynamic parameter report, you can create a second dataSet to use the parameter and filter the original dataSet. If you use the Unformatted CSV file as a data source and produce the report, you need to implement Scripted Data Source to bring the data in. How can we query data and create a dynamic parameter report as SQL does with flat files? How can we use a simple and easy way replacing Scripted Data Source? How can we process the flat files all in one? The answer is using esProc in Birt.

Let’s take an example to introduce the implementation process:

In this example, employee sales information is stored in sale.csv, and employee information with dates greater than 2015–03–02 needs to be queried based on input parameters.

sale.csv data are as follows：

userName,date,saleValue,saleCount

Rachel,2015-3-1,4500,9

Rachel,2015-3-3,8700,4

Tom,2015-3-2,3000,8

Tom,2015-3-3,5000,7

Tom,2015-3-4,6000,12

John,2015-3-2,4000,3

John,2015-3-2,4300,9

John,2015-3-4,4800,4 userName,date,saleValue,saleCount

Rachel,2015-3-1,4500,9

Rachel,2015-3-3,8700,4

Tom,2015-3-2,3000,8

Tom,2015-3-3,5000,7

Tom,2015-3-4,6000,12

John,2015-3-2,4000,3

John,2015-3-2,4300,9

John,2015-3-4,4800,4

userName,date,saleValue,saleCount

Rachel,2015-3-1,4500,9

Rachel,2015-3-3,8700,4

Tom,2015-3-2,3000,8

Tom,2015-3-3,5000,7

Tom,2015-3-4,6000,12

John,2015-3-2,4000,3

John,2015-3-2,4300,9

John,2015-3-4,4800,4 userName,date,saleValue,saleCount

Rachel,2015-3-1,4500,9

Rachel,2015-3-3,8700,4

Tom,2015-3-2,3000,8

Tom,2015-3-3,5000,7

Tom,2015-3-4,6000,12

John,2015-3-2,4000,3

John,2015-3-2,4300,9

John,2015-3-4,4800,4

Here we show how to use parameters for CSV data source in birt.

The integration of BIRT with esProc is not introduced here. Please refer to How to Call an SPL Script in BIRT.

Step 1: Add an esProc JDBC data source.

Step 2: Add the dataset and write the SQL query CSV file directly.

Query text：

Report parameter：

Set dataset parameters and link them to report parameters:

Step 3: Create a report

The report is designed as follows:

Step 4: WEB preview, input parameters, preview results:

（1）input parameter：Date 2015–03–02

For more examples, procedure text files refer to the following Structured Text Computing.
A Comprehensive Guide To Genetic Algorithms — The ELI5 Way
Tags: Programming, Python, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Technology

Genetic Algorithms are based on Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and are often used to solve problems in research and machine learning.

In this article, we’ll be looking at the fundamentals of Genetic Algorithms (GA) and how to solve optimization problems using them.

What are Genetic Algorithms?

Genetic algorithms were developed by John Henry Holland and his students and collaborators at the University of Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is a subset of evolutionary algorithms, and it mimics the process of natural selection in which the fittest individuals survive and are chosen for cross-over to reproduce offsprings of the next-generation.

The natural selection process also involves the addition of small randomness to the offsprings in the form of mutation. This will result in a new population of individuals with mixed fitness.

But only the fittest individuals are chosen for reproduction, and the fitness is improved consistently over generations.
Principal Components Analysis (PCA), Fundamentals, Benefits & Insights for Industry
By: Pierre-Louis Bescond
Tags: Dimensionality Reduction, Data Science, Machine Learning, Python

The intuition behind the dimension reduction

Let’s start with a very simple example where the 3 features of a dataset (x, y and z) are displayed in the 3D space below (code below):

Original dataset displayed around x, y and z axis.

You can easily notice that despite having 3 dimensions, the scatter plot is mostly spread around “y” and “z”; the variation around the “x” axis is quite low.

Should we had to model this dataset, how important the “x” dimension would be in comparison with “y” and “z”? Probably not that much!

So, instead of using 3 coordinates [x, y, z] to identify one dot within this 3D space, [y, z] might already be a good indication of where this dot is. Isn’t it?

We could even go further and imagine a 2D plan following the alignment of dots along the x-axis and designating the dots’ positions with only 2 coordinates according to this plan! That would probably look like this:

Original dataset with a possible 2D reduction plan

Thanks to this red 2D plan and its two corresponding vectors, we only need two coordinates to identify accurately the position of each dot.

Obviously, we are losing some information regarding the “depth” of each dot according to the original x-axis but this is a risk we are willing to take!

If you got this example right, you know what dimension reduction is!
Pickyourtrail, a self-service platform that lets travellers create, customise and book international vacations
By: Kevin Hart
Tags: India, Planning, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Travel

Pickyourtrail has raised $3M in total. We talked with its co-founders Hari Ganapathy and Srinath Shankar.

How would you describe Pickyourtrail in a single tweet?

Pickyourtrail is a self-service platform that lets travellers create, customise and book international vacations in a jiffy.

How did it all start and why?

Pickyourtrail began as an attempt to break how vacations are currently been planned and booked by travellers. At our very heart, we want to create happiness and not sell packages. The seed to all this began in August 2012 when co-founders — Hari & Srinath went on a Europe trip.

Ardent travellers themselves, the duo had put in more than 2 months to fully craft their vacation. This included planning end-end, bookings, and visa processing. It was during their trip they stumbled upon fellow travellers who were all on packaged tours. Interacting with them, Hari & Srinath understood they were literally rushed between destinations and their urge to discover new experiences wasn’t fulfilled. The travellers, on the other hand, were amazed to see the flexibility Hari and Srinath had in their itinerary and that piqued their interest.

Once back home, the duo was bombarded with pings asking for details on how they went about planning the entire trip. These interactions slowly multiplied and this lead to an idea that will forever change their career roadmaps!

What have you achieved so far?

We have been growing 80% YoY. And aim to grow 5X over the next 2–3 years.

Products: http://pickyourtrail.com — our website | https://apple.co/2mBMqI0 — our mobile app for travel concierge.

We have had about 15,000+ travellers who have planned their dream vacation with us in the Free Independent traveller segment.

We are currently a team of 185 members.

What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

Broadly 3–4 things we would be focusing on, one obviously acquire more customers on the digital medium, try and build you know our own digital acquisition channel that’s number 1.

Number 2 is you know on tier 2- tier 3 towns where digital penetration is still not very high but still there is a significant amount of people taking trips out there, how do we go to that audience and become top of mind for that audience, So if you look at it audience wise the digital-first audience is what we want to capture and then tier 2- tier 3 towns.

The next focus is on beefing up the tech team and overall tech capabilities. how do we ensure that our product innovation efforts continue to be one of the best in the industry?

There is also a larger focus on taking this product global. End of the day there is a European going to the US or an Australian going to Bali and the product is suitable even for them. We also want to try and understand what it takes to build traction in those markets.

While all this may not be possible in the next 6–10 months but this is the broad themes we want to focus and kind of drive over the next 2–3 years.
How I Build Machine Learning Apps in Hours… and More!
By: Towards Ai Team
Tags: Technology, Innovation, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Science

How I Build Machine Learning Apps in Hours… and More!

What is new in the AI world, the release of our book, and our monthly editorial picks

If you have trouble reading this email, see it on a web browser.

Happy Monday, Towards AI family! To start your week with a smile, we recommend you to check out “Superheroes of Deep Learning Vol 1: Machine Learning Yearning” by Falaah Arif Khan and Professor Zachary Lipton, an exciting, hilarious, and educational comic for everyone who is or has worked with data in the past.

If you are into research, NeurIPS recently posted its findings during the 2020 paper reviewing process, with some insights on the submission and historical data on primary subject areas, acceptance rate, ratings, and so on for the past two years.

Next, if you have a Ph.D. and you are in the job market for a faculty position, we recommend you to check out the faculty openings in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon. They currently have multiple tenure track and teaching track opportunities for you researchers out there!

If you are into tinkering with data and you are interested in forecasting epidemics (specifically COVID-19 in this case). We recommend you to check out this post by Kathryn Mazaitis and Alex Reinhart on how to access COVIDcast’s Epidata API, which provides freely available data to CMU Delphi’s COVID-19 surveillance streams.

📊 For a limited time, we are taking discounted pre-orders on our book “Descriptive Statistics for Data-driven Decision Making with Python” — a guide to straightforward, data-driven decision making with the help of descriptive statistics. Ordering our book also gives you access to any future updates made to it — support Towards AI’s efforts and help us improve to provide you with better content. 📊
How To Send Images Into Flask API via URL
By: Burak Şenol
Tags: Programming, Python, Flask, Image Processing, API

After a little introduction, let’s start our project without wasting time. First of all, we will need some Python libraries to do our operations.

pip install Flask pip install pillow

After installing the necessary libraries, let’s design an API endpoint that will take as a input the image URLs with the HTTP-POST method.

By using the “<path:url>” specifier, we ensure that the string that will come after “send-image/” is taken as whole.

If you run this script and test it on your browser, the result will be as follows.
Your Emotions Are Not Your Own
By: Jordin James
Tags: Spirituality, Life, Mental Health, Psychology, Life Lessons

Whenever you are visited by an emotion, the emotion comes to you as a teacher and a guide. The emotion is guiding you to a part of yourself that needs attention and love. Not “healing” or “fixing” or “getting rid of.” Just attention and love.

These emotional guides often show up in the form of your child self, pulling on your sleeve until you look at them. And when you look at them, when you finally give them the attention they need, the attention you need, they will only ask one question,

“Am I okay?”

You see, this is the only question children are ever really asking. This is the only question your heart has ever really asked.

“Am I okay, Mommy?”

“Is it okay to be feeling the way I feel right now, Daddy?”

Perhaps you had parents that reflected your okay-ness back at you, or perhaps you had parents that implied or explicitly said, “No, you are not okay. It is not okay to feel that way,” or perhaps you had parents that left you with only a resounding silence.

Either way, it is your job to learn how to be your own parent, now. It is your job to turn toward every emotional archetype that pays you a visit and say,

“Yes, love. You are okay. It is okay that you are here right now. Stay as long as you’d like.”

When an emotion pays you a visit, it is an indication that there is a part of you in need of loving attention, nothing more. It does not mean you are faulty or you are going backwards, it means you are being led deeper.

“Deeper into what?” you ask?

Yourself, love.

Yourself.

It’s only all you’ve ever been looking for.
I Took On 10 Projects at the Same Time, Here’s What I Learned
By: Agustinus Theodorus
Tags: Productivity, Self, Opinion, Self-awareness, Project Management

An exact explanation of what I did

Before I start, I want to elaborate that being in 10 projects at once does not mean that you would be doing it yourself. On the contrary being on 10 projects at once should help you to do the exact opposite. The things I did might sound unbelievable (or believable depending on who you are). But, if people like Elon Musk can do the things he does, I don’t see a reason why I can’t.

I am by no means comparable to Elon Musk, but I honestly look up to him and he is one of the inspiring figures I strive to be. Managing chaos is such an interesting thing. A project can equate to chaos because it can go wrong unexpectedly in a multitude of ways.

What kind of projects did you do?

Some software engineers reading this might be thinking, “this guy is lying no way he did so many things in one fell swoop”. Well, let me explain the projects then. I handled a project to integrate an existing application to a certain online video communication service, and I initiated a project to make a custom code generator because my office has a custom design pattern. The library I helped maintain was for the custom design pattern I mentioned previously. Because this was part of my full-time job, I worked on these projects 7–8 hours a day.

Lastly, I was the project manager for a learning management system (LMS). The LMS project required me to review code, and lead meetings about 3–4 hours a week depending on the work.

As for the other things I did. I am writing my thesis is for my bachelor’s degree, with a team of three. We have occasional meetings three times a week with a total of 11–15 hours. The academic paper I wrote required about the same amount of 11–13 hours a week.

I was selected as a soft skills trainer for University students on my campus, I have been volunteering to share my experiences for almost two years now. As for the TEDx event, I was the project manager. I had a team of course. My commitment to the TEDx event was about 4–6 hours a week in a span of 4 months, and that includes the meetings.

That explains what I did exactly. Now here is what I learned from this experience.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick [Book Summary PDF]
By: Daniel Morales
Tags: The Mom Test, Summary, Pdf Book, Books, Startup

Here are 3 simple rules to help you. They are collectively called (drumroll) The Mom Test:

Talk about their life instead of your idea Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future Talk less and listen more.

The questions to ask are about your customers’ lives: their problems, cares, constraints, and goals. You humbly and honestly gather as much information about them as you can and then take your own visionary leap to a solution. Once you’ve taken the leap, you confirm that it’s correct through Commitment & Advancement.

Avoiding bad data

There are three types of bad data:

Compliments Fluff (generics, hypotheticals, and the future) Ideas

Sometimes we invite the bad data ourselves by asking the wrong questions, but even when you try to follow The Mom Test, conversations still go off track. It could happen because you got excited and started pitching.

Asking Important questions

In addition to ensuring that you aren’t asking trivialities, you also need to search out the world-rocking scary questions you’ve been unintentionally shrinking from. The best way to find them is with thought experiments. Imagine that the company has failed and ask why that happened. Then imagine it as a huge success and ask what had to be true to get there. Find ways to learn about those critical pieces.

Pre-plan the 3 most important things you want to learn from any given type of person (e.g. customers, investors, industry experts, key hires, etc). Update the list as your questions change. Your 3 questions will be different for each type of person you’re talking to. If you have multiple types of customers or partners, have a list of each.

Don’t stress too much about choosing the “right” important questions. They will change. Just choose whatever seems murkiest or most important right now. Answer those will give you firmer footing and a better sense of direction for your next 3.

You might get answers 1–3 from customer A, answer 4 from customer B, answers 5–7 from customer C. There’s overlap and repetition, but you don’t need to repeat the full set of questions with every participant. Your time is valuable: don’t feel obligated to repeat questions you already have solid data on. Pick up where you left off and keep filling in the picture.
Learn From Your Mistakes If You Want to Find Your Version of Success
By: Jason Weiland
Tags: Writing, Mental Health, Success, Failure, Mistakes

Learn From Your Mistakes If You Want to Find Your Version of Success

It is possible to build a business or career despite hurdles and challenges like a mental or physical illness

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

I would blame my failure to stay focused this past week on the election, but the deeper I overthink the mystery, the more I see it’s the nature of who I have been in life that threw me for a loop.

I tend to jump from one thing to another, which has been a significant problem for me.

Take the last week, for instance.

Do you notice that I often write about my mental health? It is only because my illness’s severity keeps it top of mind. Here I am writing a book during NaNoWriMo about blogging by finishing an essay or article per day. More often than not, I’m writing about how illness makes it difficult to complete anything.

I intended to have a central theme where I would talk about the business of blogging and create a timeline that lasted two months through the end of December 2020. It would outline the rise or fall of my writing and blogging business as I push myself to find the success that eludes me.

But I find I want to talk more to the many people who follow me for one specific reason.

Many of you are so much like me that it’s scary. You battle illness daily, whether it be the horror of diabetes or the pain and fear you get from depression and anxiety. I have people who write to me with PTSD and OCD, which are debilitating, and they find writing almost an impossibility.

I find I want to talk more about building a writing or blogging business when you have too many challenges to mention. What about those who have to push themselves to produce and have to somehow find a way to focus when demons are dancing on their Medulla Oblongata?

I am figuring out that a more interesting book I could write would exist to help people with mental or physical challenges build a business and find success, whatever our definition of that word is.

The problem is that I jump from thing to thing, and I don’t want to waste any more of my valuable time spinning my wheels if I can help it. I’ve learned that if I want to be successful at anything, I have to stick with one thing and focus.

Why am I like this?
“Everything is Copy”- Nora Ephron
By: Michelle Monet
Tags: Grief, Writing, Writing Tips, Productivity, Writing Life

Taylor Swift quoted writer Nora Ephron the other night. “Everything is Copy” meaning: Every single thing that happens to us can be used as creative fodder.

I think we all know this as writers.

This is great news.

Yes. Every damn thing that happens to us can be a story.

I want to embrace this thought again.

I want to do what I’ve always done, which is write about it ALL.

The good

The bad and the ugly

The confusion

The scary shit

The humiliations

The sorrow

The joy

All of it. Not just the good stuff.

Oh, how boring it would be if writers only wrote happy fluffy bunny stories. lol. I know I cant relate to those writers much honestly.

I want to write about:

1. The fact that my fingers and brain haven’t been working well lately and for some reason I couldn’t write for over a month (after writing steadily for years).

2. The fact that my brain has never felt this overloaded — with family stresses, financial uncertainties, confusions in my creative life, and of course the insanity of the world.

3. The fact that my dad is dying and I don’t feel like talking to him or interact with him anymore.

4. The fact that I’m scared shitless sometimes that my boyfriend of over 24 years will drop dead (because he has some very serious health problems lately) and that I might end up a homeless bag lady with 4 cats on the side of the road holding a sign that reads:

“Homeless Artist/Writer/Musician will Work for food!”

5. The fact that while interviewing my mom for my Memoir recently she revealed some horrible unexpected family secrets about my dad, out of the blue, that spooked me to my core. This has been super hard to process.