fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Transgender Day of Remembrance: 3 things you can to help
By: Peter Lang
Tags: Authors, LGBT Rights, New York, Transgender, LGBT

November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR). Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a transgender woman, founded the day in 1999 to honor the death of another transgender woman, Rita Hester. Every year in the USA and abroad this day represents an opportunity for all individuals to come together and pay their respects to transgender and gender non-conforming people who have lost their lives in the past year.

On this TDoR, please let us not forget about the transgender people who have lost their lives. However, as we remember, reflect, and revere the lost lives, let us also, as a humanitarian society and culture, make a proclamation to become change agents to help preserve the lives of transgender people. In this call to action, let us do the following:

First, let us celebrate life.

Take the time on November 20th to celebrate the lives of the transgender people who are no longer with us. This is important because despite the mourning around the day, these vigils give transgender people faith, hope, and courage to keep working to eradicate the barriers of resistance and highlight the scope of transgender issues and concerns to build levels of solidarity.

Second, let us work to combat the transphobic discrimination, violence, and murders.

This can be done by joining the fight for the equal rights and protections of the LGBTQIA community, joining the fight to transform the patriarchy that festers within minority communities and cultures leading some minority men to have primacy over transgender women, which facilitates toxic masculinity, and joining the fight against interpersonal circumstances that lead to transphobic violence and murders.

And last, let us resist, resist, and resist even more.

President Donald J. Trump poses a huge threat to the human survival and well-being of transgender people. Despite former President Barack H. Obama’s accomplishments for the larger LGBTQIA community, the election and presence of President Trump and Vice-President Pence has created a moral panic within the LGBTQIA community. Both have worked to overturn some of the most substantial LGBTQIA progress from the Obama Administration. Trump’s plan to introduce sweeping anti-trans legislation at the national level will compromise the gender identity of transgender people and lead those who are anti-trans to violate their rights, protections, and ultimately, their existence as human beings.

William T. Hoston, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Political Science

University of Houston — Clear Lake

Author of Toxic Silence: Race, Black Gender Identity, and Addressing the Violence against Black Transgender Women in Houston
Space Invasion
By: Rejoice Denhere
Tags: Flash Fiction, Writing, Fiction, Fiction Writing, Short Story

Space Invasion

What’s one to do?

Image by Alexas-fotos on Pixabay

Tiny opened his eyes and blinked as he adjusted to the sunlight. The power nap had done him good. He looked around at his partners who were busy at work. Life was hard nowadays. Living space was short too as the population around them grew.

Stepping outside Tiny noticed newly assembled building equipment. New flats would soon grace the landscape.

Tiny sighed. What had happened to the good old days when one could choose where one lived? He pushed the thoughts aside. There was work to do but where does an ant go when humans invade his space?
UX or UI, where to focus?
By: Avinash Bussa
Tags: UI, User Experience, Design, UX, Product Design

UX or UI, where to focus?

Few see them separately and few see them as one. Let’s clear the air!

There are humans around the world who call themselves as UI/UX Designers and not sure who has the major stake, UX, or UI. Let’s take a look at it.

In the industry, there are UX Designers and UI Designers, and both of them have their responsibilities. Instead of comparing each other, let’s take a look at who is capable of what.

User Experience Design (UX)

A skeleton.

Yes. If we consider the human body as a product, the skeleton is what gives you stability and shape. This is what a UXD in a product does. There are other parts in the human body like heart, kidney, liver, lungs, etc. which can relate to user personas, user scenarios, competitor analysis, information architecture, task flows, wireframes, user interface, prototypes, etc.

If a body part is malfunctioning, it surely affects the function of other parts too. Similarly, one wrong step in different stages of UX Design can leave a critical impact on other stages of design. For Example, Your actual user is a 50yr old with poor eyesight, and you considered a user persona of 21yr old Rock band artist in your research. The needs of both are entirely different, and if not corrected before going to the next stage, your final product may not serve the needs of your 50yr old target.

User Interface Design (UI)

The beauty not admired is a Sin.

At some point in your life, you must’ve told yourself that “She is beautiful or He is hot”. It’s a human instinct. It happens when something tickles your eyes. Similarly, UI is what makes someone say “This is cool, awesome, smooth, or even disgusting” about a product. In the example of the human body, UI components like layouts, colors, inputs, buttons, lists, typography, etc., can relate to makeover elements like a shirt, pants, top, jackets, watches, shades, etc.

No matter how good the groundwork (UX) is, people always judge just by looks. So, UI is important. But that doesn’t mean beauty without brains will work. UX is needed too.

“You can attract users by showcasing extra-ordinary visuals in UI, but you can’t make them stay unless your product is usable.”

This makes me think of “why dribbble has so many shots that are most liked but never implemented in any apps”.

The balance of both is the key to awesomeness.

If you notice clearly, UI is a segment of the UX Design Process. And it is the medium through which you showcase your entire hard work.

As a designer, each stage of the UX Design process helps you make decisions that make a difference.
Campanhas inovadoras: qual a real importância de se diferenciar
By: Agência Bang
Tags: Empresas, Campanhas, Marketing Digital, Marketing

in In Fitness And In Health
A.I., Coyotes, and Liberals | DDIntel
By: Justin Chan
Tags: Crypto, Fintech, Technology, Startup, Blockchain

DDIntel newsletter for the week of September 21

DDI Writer Highlights

To potentially be featured in DDI Intel and on Datadriveninvestor.com, please submit with this form.

By Amit Garg

Since covid hit the US six months ago VCs and entrepreneurs worldwide have had to adapt to the new reality of doing deals without meeting in person. Building trust is the challenge…

By Vuk Janosevic

TikTok usage has skyrocketed during the pandemic, with roughly 800 million users around the world using the platform to share content. Unfortunately, that entertainment comes at a significant cost, as TikTok is being investigated by numerous governments around the world for unauthorized data usage and violation of privacy laws.

By Tal Perry

The last five years have been revolutionary for the field of natural language processing. We went from glorified ctrl-f to a machine that can write programs for us based on natural language descriptions. While the web is full of amazing technical demos, applications of NLP to the world of finance have been less vocalized.

By Maddalena Bearzi

In our attempt to put nature in order, a versatile animal teaches us an essential lesson.

By Nagaraj S Murthy

In any machine learning problem, the goal of our neural network is to do well on the new unseen data, training a deep learning model helps to achieve this goal.
Fluent Makeover: Photo Editor
By: Serena Zheng
Tags: User Experience, Design, Fluent Design System, Apps, Microsoft

Senior Design Lead Lynnette Reed and her team of designers, Ani Akopyan and Vladimir Nogan, focus on incorporating Fluent Design in third-party partner app experiences. They recently redesigned PhotoLab, a UWP sample app created by the Windows 10 documentation team, to demonstrate how to apply Fluent Design principles and elements.

“When looking for common examples of design patterns for Fluent, we often look at our internal first-party apps as a base (Microsoft Photos, Microsoft Edge, OneNote, etc.),” Lynnette explains. “We then consider the structure, patterns, and needs of our partners and look for how we can adapt and align the first-party app experiences to our third-party app partner experiences.”

With common design patterns for all app experiences, we’re able to create a cohesive ecosystem that feels natural, intuitive, and engaging — Microsoft’s Fluent Design System.

Here’s a look at the app’s complete makeover, and the team’s main takeaways about working with Fluent Design:

On controls

Vladimir: When we first saw the app, the biggest thing we needed to address were the controls, the building blocks of the Fluent Design System. A lot of the controls in the app aren’t in our library. We saw places where we could use existing controls to replace the custom code they were using. It’s easier for developers and users, who can understand what the controls do because they’re already in the Windows UX.

Lynnette: In some instances, creating custom controls can be great, but in others, it may not be the best for your end user or for development. Before creating new custom controls, see if there are already common controls within the Fluent toolkit that you can use throughout your experience. It might be best to align to the common controls that already exist.

For example, take the sliders:
Python Basics: Files and Operations
By: Abhay Parashar
Tags: Tutorial, Learning, Python, Education, Programming

Learn The Interaction Between Different Files

Welcome Guys to the series of learning Python names as Python Basics. In this Blog of Tutorial, you will learn about Files and Different Operations Related to them.

Before Getting Started if haven’t read the previous blog about functions then go and read that first.

Files

A Fille is a collection of data stored in one location or unit. These files contain some information and stored in the computer system. In General, We Divide files into two types of text files and binary files. Text files are those which contain only text data and binary files are those which contain the binary data.

We can perform different types of operations to manipulate files like opening a file, closing a file, renaming a file, and more.

File Opening

Python has a built-in open() function for opening files. There many ways we can open a file in python.

Mode Description

r Opens a file for reading

w Opens a file in writing mode

x Opens a file for exclusive creation if it is not present

a Opens a file in append

t Opens a file in text mode

b Opens a file in binary mode

💠 If You Use w as a mode and if the file already exists then it removes all the content of the file and opens as a clean file so it is better to use a or a+ when previous content in the file is important.

The syntax for opening a file is open("FILEPAHT\FILENAME.EXTENSION") for example.

f = open("data.txt") ## Opens a file in read mode by default

f = open("data.txt",'w') ## Opens a file in write mode

Closing File in python

When we are done working with our file it is important to close the file properly.

Like Open python also has a predefined function for closing a file close() Let’s see it with an example
Exponentially Weighted Average for Deep Neural Networks
Tags: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence

This algorithm is one of the most important algorithms currently in usage. From financial time series, signal processing to neural networks, it is being used quite extensively. Basically, any data that is in a sequence.

This algorithm has been mostly used to reduce the noisy time-series data. It’s also called “smoothing” the data.

The way we achieve this is by essentially weighing the number of observations and using their average. This is called as Moving Average.

Example: Temperature θt over days, calculate the moving averages

Math Notation “sub: subscript”, “sup: superscript”

Vt: Moving average value at day ‘t’

Vsub00 = 0

Vsub1=0.9Vsub0+0.1θsub1

Vsub1=0.9Vsub1+0.1θsub2

..

Vt=0.9Vt−1+0.1θt

if β = 0.9

Vt=βVt−1+(1−β)θt

What does and means

Vt: averaging over 1/1−β days (approx)

For ex. , For β =0.9, 1/1−β~=10 ;

β = 0.9 averages over 10 days (smooth curve: Red Line)

For β =0.98, ~=50 ;

β = 0.98 averages over 50 days (smoother curve: Green Line) — Not very accurate representation

For β =0.5, ~=2 ;

β = 0.5 averages over 2 days (alterations: Yellow Line) — Much more noisy

The right value of is β calculated using HyperParameter Tuning

Going backwards from V100,

Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.9Vsub99

Vsub99 = 0.1θsub99 + 0.9Vsub98

Substituting Vsub99,

Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.9(0.1θsub99 + 0.9Vsub98)

or, Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.9(0.1θsub99 + 0.9(0.1θsub98 + 0.9Vsub97))

Generalizing,

Vsub100 = 0.1θsub100 + 0.1∗0.9∗θsub99 + 0.1∗(0.9)²θsub98 + 0.1∗(0.9)³θsub97 + 0.1∗(0.9)⁴θsub96+…..

Vsub100 is basically an element-wise computation of two metrics/functions — one an exponential decay function containing diminishing values (0.9, 0.9²², 0.⁹³, ……and another with all the elements of θt.

Implementing Exponentially Weighted Average

Vsubθ: v is computing exponentially weighted average of parameter θ.

day 0: Vsubθ = 0 day 1: Vsubθ=βv+(1−β)θsub1

day 2: Vsubθ = βv+(1−β)θsub2

…

Algorithms: Vsubθ =0 Repeat: {

Get next θt

Vθ := βVsubθ+(1−β)θt

}

Single line implementation for fast and efficient calculation of exponentially weighted moving average.

Bias Correction in Exponentially Weighted Moving Average

Making EWMA more accurate — Since the curve starts from 0, there are not many values to average on in the initial days. Thus, the curve is lower than the correct value initially and then moves in line with expected values.

Figure: The ideal curve should be the GREEN one, but it starts as the PURPLE curve since the values initially are zero

Example: Starting from t=0 and moving forward,

Vsub0 = 0Vsub1 = 0.98Vsub 0+0.02θsub1 = 0.020θsub1

Vsub2 = 0.98Vsub1 + 0.02θsub2 = 0.0196θsub1+0.02θsub2

The initial values of Vt will be very low which need to be compensated.

Make Vt = Vt/1−βsupt

for t=2, 1−βsupt= 1−0.9⁸² = 0.0396 (Bias Correction Factor)

Vsub2 = V2/0.0396 = 0.0196θsub1 + 0.02θsub2 / 0.0396

When t is large, 1/1−βsupt =1, hence bias correction factor has no effect when t is sufficiently large.

Credits:

Andrew Ng
Sharing Web Site Designs
By: Pito Salas
Tags: Design, Website, Blogbridge

Recently I wanted to get feedback on one of several ideas for the design of the new BlogBridge web site. I had selected 6 product web sites that had a nice look and wanted to somehow visually compare them. Here are two free tools I used:

Papparazzi! is a free Mac utility that does one thing and does it well. It makes a screen shot from a URL of a web site, importantly, including the whole page not just the part that is visible without scrolling.

Pintrest is a free web site that facilitates sharing of images of things. Kind of like a delicious for images … or something. It’s kind of hard to describe which is why I had not used it before. But this was a perfect use of it.

With those two free tools, I was able to create this web page allowing the quick and easy comparison of the possible designs of the new BlogBridge web site.

Oh and if you care to, please weigh in on the design you like the best :)
The Float Trip
By: Ann Litts
Tags: Self-awareness, Retirement, Philosophy, Spirituality, Life Lessons

Life is a river

Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash

July 2018:

I’ve imagined My Life on several occasions as a float trip down a river. I’m sprawled out on my inner tube — fingers in the water — just making my way downstream.

Life — The River — is never the same in any two places. The water is constantly flowing, changing. Quiet, still pools to raging, angry rapids assail you on this journey. Blue skies above with wispy clouds to cast shadows across the currents. Shade — light and dark mingle and tangle the view playing tricks on your perceptions.

What’s a body to do?

Hold on. Enjoy the ride. Soak up the scenery. Breathe deep the scents. Understand that while you might not be on your own — you certainly will have your own experience of The River. No two souls share the exact same journey over the exact same water — even if they travel side by side. And know — the scenery, the water, the weather, the company, EVERYTHING about The Float Trip changes. You are always moving on — past what was — toward what will be.

Because The Float Trip is a constantly morphing adventure.

Soak it up. Drink it in. And don’t forget your sunscreen.

Namaste.
Why you must consider donating when cutting your hair next time?
By: Ons Bouneb
Tags: Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Cancer, Life Lessons, Life

Why you must consider donating when cutting your hair next time?

The feeling is amazing!

image of the author

It is weird how much a simple haircut can change your confidence!

Especially after a long year, full of ups and downs.

It’s like all the doubt and scary thoughts left with my long curly hair!

My beloved folks prefer my long hair, maybe because it’s my significant touch, and they get used to it! As the nature of the human, we hate the change. We are scared to face the new environment, the new partner, the new job.

We feel stable, and we don't want to experience the change.

My birthday is almost here, and if not after all I went through I make a huge change, then when!

So I pick a random day. I took an appointment with my favorite hairdresser and made my decision. I am donating my hair to an association that makes wigs for kids who have cancer! It’s awesome! I can't describe how this small action made me feel.

And that's why you should too:

First: it’s free:

You don't need the fortune to donate your hair! you can go to your local hairdresser and cut it.

Second: It’s significant :

Donating money is great! but donating something special like your hair is different on many levels!

Third: you will help to draw a smile on the face of kids :

You can't imagine the beauty and impact of this on kids who lost their hair during their battle to fight cancer!

Eventually, donating your hair for them is so noble. and it’s never a way to brag! you are not the hero, they are!

Peace!
It’s Going To Hurt No Matter What
By: Josh Kiev
Tags: Motivation, Emotional Health, Tiny Life Moments, Goals, Hope

A Tiny Moment of “Jumping Rope.”

Photo by Chichi Onyekanne on Unsplash

The Moment

We all struggle to stay fit. It is considerably difficult even more so in pandemic times where movement can be restricted. I feel safer training in my garage and near the house away from people. I have a heavy bag and jump rope routine which is to the point and gives maximum training with the minimum, intense time.

After each workout, I feel energized and pumped. The next day, however, my wrists and ankles are not on the same page. They have been consistently hurting the next few days after each session. I use wraps, gloves, and proper footwear. I have been modifying my diet, losing a few pounds over the past few months.

Sometimes it’s going to hurt no matter what…

The Reflection

Those of you out there dealing with loss and failing at things, I applaud you. If you struggle with weight, body type, relationships, finances, etc., then I understand your struggle. I’m sure you have experienced terrible things in your life. No one is isolated from suffering or being presented with challenges. I hope these thoughts are crossing your path at the very moment that you need something, anything, that provides you with some relief.

You are tremendous. You are unique. We are fragile and impermanent. You can be destroyed doing nothing, so sometimes you have to work around doing what appears to be challenging and be your own scientist.

Why not be everything you ever dreamed of? Layout a huge, crazy, unreachable plan. Can you imagine if you even got a tiny whiff of it? How good that would feel to train, work, and achieve even a speck of something you sought out to accomplish? I think you will find adapting and pursuing this will build into your self-worth machine.

During these seven months, things have gone pear-shaped. No one ever thought that they would be in these types of situations. No matter what you do or think, it still feels really bad. It is going to hurt, so come up with the tiniest things that might push you forward and keep on them. I’m no Yogi or Super Heavy Weight contender, but I’ve been practicing yoga and hitting the heavy bag for seven months and I can feel the difference. I have progressed at something.

You can fail at sitting still. You can fail by trying. They both can hurt, but the trying bit feels more fulfilling.

The Takeaway

Be your own scientist.

Study your results. Your choices. See how they affect you.

Tweak your evidence. Be the change.

All spiritual advancement requires risk and being uncomfortable at times.

Seek adventure. Stay the course. Don’t go for the comfortable room, the comfy couch.

Josh Kiev is an actor, chef, and thinks he can jump rope like Rocky Balboa! :)
Alfred Lin’s Fireside Chat at South Park Commons
By: South Park Commons
Tags: Technology, Startup, Community, Venture Capital

So what is SPC? We’re a self-organizing community of technologists, tinkerers, and domain experts based in San Francisco. We are building new (and sometimes unorthodox) ventures — ranging from enterprise startups and consumer apps, to open source ML and civic-tech projects. We come together, virtually and in the physical world, to learn from each other, challenge ourselves, and validate new ideas.

Our members also host a recurring events series. Our goal is to bring new and exciting ideas and technologies into the community as well as valuable learnings from those who have first-hand experience building their life’s work. In the past we’ve hosted Silicon Valley VCs and CEOs like Reid Hoffman and Mike Kreiger, leaders like CEO of U.S. Digital Response Raylene Yung and SF Mayor London Breed, and domain experts like Nobel laureate Dr. Saul Perlmutter, experimental physicist Dr. Rana Adhikari, and Howard Hughes Investigator Wendell Lim, amongst many others.

Our on-the-record talks are posted to the SPC Youtube channel. You can also sign up for our events mailing list or newsletter to stay in the loop.
6 Self-Care Practices You Can Do in 5 Minutes
By: Rajesh Vairapandian
Tags: Self Improvement, Lifestyle, Self, Mental Health, Philosophy

“Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.” — Brené Brown

While looking around, we observe that most people are moving fast in their lives, trying to achieve genuine happiness and peace of mind but fail to get.

Why?

It might be because of a lack of self-love and self-care. Let’s discuss some essential self-care lessons that you should never forget in life to maintain your sanity and wellbeing.

In this article, I would like to share six key lessons you might have forgotten about your self-care.
Introducing Bitfolio 2
By: Francesco Pretelli
Tags: Apple, iOS, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Apps

Version 2 of Bitfolio is here, it’s amazing and it’s already available for download on the App Store. 🙌

It’s not long ago that version 1 was officially released (September) but the quick adoption and the awesome amount of feedback received, gave us only one option: increase the development rate.

So here we are, we packed a lot of new features, most of them requested by you guys (and we love it!), changed almost everything in the app and I’m so happy and proud to be able to announce this new version.

Here is a quick overview of what’s changed, what’s new, and what’s coming next.

More coins 🎉

We heard you! Bitfolio now supports the top 100 coins on CoinMarketCap, and we will be able to add many more in the near future without having to submit a new release.

Redesigned Portfolio 🤩

Adding more coins resulted in having to remove the historic graph in the Portfolio tab 😔 , we couldn’t find a reliable data source for it.

We are hoping to bring it back soon hopefully.

On the other side, we now have a gorgeous pie chart displaying all of your assets, tapping on a slice it’s possible to view more informations about the coin.

New Assets screen 😍

You will love this: all your assets displayed on a beautiful single screen packed with insights and informations.

But there is more, tapping on the asset, will show the asset’ transactions.

And since we were at it, we even added gains for every single transaction and the price of a single coin paid at the time.

New Ticker pairs ✌️

When adding a new ticker, you can now select any pair supported by the exchange.

What’s next 🧐

Many new features are in our backlog including:

Exchange transactions sync

Ticker widget

TouchID / FaceID

Assets location & filtering

More coins, exchanges and language support

And much more.

Contribute 😊

Check out the Bitfolio roadmap and vote / comment on features, your input will be important to decide what next feature should be developed first.

You can also send any feedback and request directly to us via email or twitter.

Thank you ❤️

So much!

Most of this it’s been possible because of your support, please don’t stop sending feedback and feature requests.👏

Please consider sharing Bitfolio with your friends and coworkers, it would help us tremendously.

Stay up to date with crypto currencies news & Bitfolio updates:
Media Campaign to Discredit Johnny Depp Supporters Continues
By: Deborah Handover
Tags: Hollywood, Entertainment, Actors, Movies, Journalism

Again, at no point during this conversation (to the extent that is publicly available) does Abrams address the audio McPherson published on his YouTube channel, which gained more than two million views and resulted in #JusticeForJohnnyDepp trending worldwide. Instead the only thing that seemed to interest her was McPherson’s potential connection to Waldman.

The conversation apparently ended there, but soon after nearly everyone with a relationship to McPherson found themselves with a New York Times reporter on their proverbial doorstep.

“She called a state police post to contact my brother, who has no idea this case even exists,” McPherson said in a tweet. “Then me…then my wife, who doesn’t even have her identity on social media.” McPherson said that these repeated attempts to contact his family were “harassment.”

Another prominent Depp supporter known as ‘Laura B’ (@LauraBockov) added her own message to McPherson’s, claiming that, after she did not respond to Abrams’ direct message, Abrams somehow found her husband’s cellphone number. Abrams reportedly called Laura’s husband while he was at work, left him a voicemail, and texted him almost immediately after.

Laura B on Twitter.

“My husband is not on Twitter,” Laura said in a tweet, “so what could he tell her? He knows my position here, but if not how would that [conversation] go?”

Even better, almost immediately after Laura and McPherson posted the above tweets, Abrams apparently went on a following spree. I felt a jolt at the sight of a verified account (so-called “blue tick”) following me, then learned that dozens of others had experienced the same thing. She remains following me and many other users to this day, though she has never interacted with or responded to any of our posts. I can only infer that her intention is to watch.

And Abrams did not stop there. She also reportedly called McPherson’s employer asking for comment on his social media activity, and sent the below email to the employer of his brother:

Screenshot of an email reportedly from Abrams. Twitter. Via @thatbrianfella.

Given the details of these known interactions, the pattern of Abrams’ questions and general behavior is clear. She had direct access to McPherson, but when asked for the angle of her story, discontinued that contact and instead attempted to contact multiple members of his personal circle, some of whom have no knowledge whatsoever of the case on which she claims to be reporting. In other words, Abrams appears to have chosen to slide under the back gate when the front door is wide open.

Additionally, this email seems to abandon all pretense that Abrams’ reporting is focused on the developments in the Depp/Heard libel suit. Indeed, the only thing she appears interested in is the activity of Depp’s most prominent supporters and their sources of information.
I’m a Mother and Other People’s Kids Irritate Me
By: Zita Fontaine
Tags: Anxiety, Self, Mental Health, Family, Parenting

Rationally I fully understand all of them. Emotionally I am irritated and my frustration is getting out of hand.

I am fuming and it doesn’t help me or them. So what does?

It’s not just about dealing with a toddler in a closed space, it’s about a lot of things in life.

Accepting what is

It’s an impossible situation. I can’t change it. I need to deal with it, whether I like it or not. Almost every time we feel stuck in a situation, there is the possibility of removing ourselves from it — it’s more the question of a decision than anything else.

I am deciding to stay, instead of looking for another compartment — because I am lazy; because it will be over soon; because I don’t want to be rude. But I am fully aware that I could walk out — and when me staying becomes a conscious decision, it becomes more tolerable. I suddenly don’t feel as trapped as I did — knowing that I could change it. Putting myself back in charge feels empowering and my breathing starts to calm down.

Changing my attitude

The world is 10% of what is happening and 90% of how we react to it. If I am focusing on how impossible it is to work, how much it is irritating me and how helpless I feel from my increasing anxiety — my anxiety will increase further, no work will be done anyway, and I am just left with my irritation.

It is entirely up to me how I decide to react. My immediate reaction might not be the best, so I need to change my attitude — even if it takes energy and effort, because no matter how much I want the situation to magically change, it might or might not. I can’t count on changing the things that are out of my circle of control.

Noticing the positive

Then came the extremely difficult part. Deciding not to remove myself from the situation and accepting that it’s my job to change my attitude, I needed to put it into action. So, very consciously I tried to notice the positive things. It took all my energy to notice how cute the boy was, how loving the mother was and how patient she stayed during the whole train ride. I was trying to see the good in them, appreciating how great it is to have grandparents who help out and accompany them wherever they are travelling.

Accepting the learning

No matter how terrible any situation is (this train ride is not the worst thing that can happen to me) there is always something to learn from it. It takes a lot of practice to shift your negative attitude from fuming into something progressive when you are consciously looking for clues about how to get something positive out of it.

There are always learnings, wherever you go. You can learn an awful lot about yourself, about your own attitudes, and of others too.
Donut Subscription Local Delivery Service - (Idea 24 of 365)
By: Chris Mcclave
Tags: Donuts, Startup, Subscription

Work in Advertising @ R/GA (formerly). Challenging myself to come up with 365 new business ideas. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcclave

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I am
By: Jun Wu
Tags: Poetry, Mental Health, Self, Self Improvement, Poem

I am

A poem about progress

@julian unsplash.com

I am one more step

forward today for

recognizing that

my life has shifted.

The weight that long

lifted, allowed me

to gain immense

heart strength

to carry on,

despite the

uncertainties.

I no longer need to

analyze heart

situations.

I am simply the heart

that beats forward

everyday.

The memories of the

past, though tempting

to savor no longer defines

who I am today.

I am who I am today

not because of my past

but because of my future.

That future is determined

by the strong core within.

It is determined by

incremental progress

everyday.

During heavy hurricane

induced currents that

can topple ships,

I have faith in finding

my way to shore.

To savor and share these

dark experiences are as

sweet as sharing the ones

that light up the sky.

There are no shortcuts,

no compromises

for a life well-lived.
The Only Of My Profession
By: Patrick Goldman
Tags: Poetry, Writing, Short Fiction, Creative Writing, Short Story

Let’s talk shop.

People will define you based upon what you do, by what puts bread upon your table. And that’s ok. Because for what I do, I am the definition of my profession. I define the profession of my choosing in mind, body, and soul. When the title of my profession is cast into the air as spoken word, it is my face that illuminates behind the eyes on all breathing brings imaginations.

I take my profession seriously. There is no room for deviation, delay, or error. Any misstep I may take or hesitation I may have will cause undue, unrepairable, unreconcilable damage to the very fabric that makes up our past, present, and our future.

My life is my profession and my profession is my life. I am a one of only, for there are no others like me, and there shall be no others like for I am one and I am my profession.

To some my profession is cruel and consuming, leaving only a trail of pain and sorrow, and misery. Though to those who see without the Vail of ignorance and humanity, see that my profession is necessary. Necessary, is my profession, as is the sun rising in the morning, the moon high in the sky at night, or the blood that pulses and flows through your body.

My profession sustains life by taking life. For an excess of life shall unduky lead an infinite absence of life.

I am the darkness and I am the light.

I am beginning and I am end.

I am joy and I am sorrow.

I am the only of my profession.

For I am Death.
Senior Technical Expert Allen Liu Joins Vite Labs as Engineering Director of Vite International
By: Vite Editor
Tags: Startup, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Bitcoin

Allen Liu

Allen Liu

Senior technical specialist with 10 years high concurrency experience in multinational firms, Scrum expert, OCJP, PMP.

He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China as bachelor of engineering. Afterwards, he obtained his master degree in computer science in Fudan University. He joined HP as a software development lead after graduation in 2005.

In 2008, he joined IBM China lab to lead the development of IBM FileNet content engine. He served as a senior architect and a product manager.

IBM FileNet is an industry-leading enterprise content management solution which covers the entire content ecosystem of process management, user collaboration, data protection, and content transformation.

During this period, he has accumulated abundant experience in high concurrency system development and project management. He has been dispatched to the United States and Japan several times and is proficient in managing distributed teams.

He joined Vite Labs in July 2018 as the Engineering Director of Vite International, responsible for development of the engineering team overseas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Official: https://www.vite.org/

Telegram:

Twitter：https://twitter.com/vitelabs

Discord：https://discordapp.com/invite/CsVY76q
[tw]²: Nov 4–10, 2019 | #45
By: Joel V Zachariah
Tags: Techfest, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Twtw, Writeup

[tw]²: Nov 4–10, 2019 | #45

The week leading up to Excel 2019 | TWTW #60

Monday (04/11/2019)

The pressure to work for iBeTo is on. I am half-minded of quitting but I know if not now, I probably will never find the time to work on that idea. Leon is prepared to make sacrifices as well to ensure we roll out a decent project by Thursday morning. Need to decide how to proceed.

Academics is going rather poorly for me as I am not investing time in learning curriculum matter currently — last couple of weeks I was engaged with the Devsprints planning work so this was quite missed out. Yet, as a result of my months of procrastination to get the team together to work, we now have to rush and do what is possible within 48 hours.

I really wish I worked in an organic manner. To bad even a year after starting TWTW, that aspect of my nature (of not keeping things for the last minute) has not changed.

If we proceed, we plan to create just 3 basic, yet separate, units:

An application to collect 3D data of portions from the real world. A system to generate 3D data of portions on AR Application. An interface to display analytics and insights to reduce food wastage.

Part #1 would take quite a while to complete (but definitely possible), while Part #2 is quite straight-forward thanks to prior experience. Part #3, on the other hand, is a whole other dimension we are yet to venture — but the crux.

Tuesday (05/11/2019)

Spent quite some time working with Leon to attempt completing iBeTo project in the evening. Took a lot of pictures from different angles in the hopes of achieving Photogrammetry.

Finalized the research paper I wished to teach in class. Here are the relevant links.

Wednesday (06/11/2019)

Completed the presentation for iBeTo. We do not have a good prototype to show though.

Thursday (07/11/2019)

Presentation was mediocre. We figured out 3D scanning using a Photogrammetry app from Playstore. Did not win (no surprise there) but made me realize how dependent I was on others to create what I wished for — this dependence proved to be a bottle neck. Trying solo projects moving forward.

Friday (08/11/2019)

Went hometown for cousins engagement planing. Spent quite some time thinking about the Teaching Assistant Club activities that I wish to carry out in the next semester in our college.

Saturday (09/11/2019)

Today is the engagement. Good to meet family members.

Sunday (10/11/2019)

Back at home, taking rest and bracing for the multitude of work that remains at college.
Exploring the Barcode Universe
By: Arnoud Buzing
Tags: Wolfram, Computational Thinking, Image Processing, Data Science, Barcode

Exploring the Barcode Universe

A Computational Thinking Story With the Wolfram Language

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Incomprehensible by humans, but child’s play for computers and phones: Barcodes are everywhere. Every product, every package, and every store shelf has them in copious amounts. Black and white patterns, often lines and sometimes dots, provide our silicon friends with a little number that encapsulates what the object is all about.

Online services like barcodelookup.com provide databases with millions of items to turns those little numbers into a wealth of information, like product name, product category, and vendor-specific information.

In the Wolfram Language, you can read barcodes and also create barcode images. It does not come with a built-in service to interpret barcodes but in this story, I will show you how to connect to the API from the BarcodeLookup service.

Let’s start with generating barcodes ourselves. The function to use here is called BarcodeImage. It can generate the most common types of barcodes. For example, this generates a UPC barcode image:

BarcodeImage["123456789999", "UPC"]

(image by author)

Here is an example of a QR code. Most smartphones will offer to open the web page when you point the camera at it:

BarcodeImage["https://www.wolfram.com", "QR"]

(image by author)

Automatically recognizing a barcode is done with the BarcodeRecognize function. It works even when the barcode is only part of the image, although it picks up an occasional “stray” barcode. In this case, the result is correct:

(image by author)

Next, to interpret the code “04150800414” I wrote a simple Wolfram Language function that binds to the API from the Barcode Lookup service.

It can be accessed by its name:

BarcodeLookup = ResourceFunction[

"user:arnoudb/DeployedResources/Function/BarcodeLookup"

]

Now we can look up the product information. The “key” is a small alphanumerical string required and provided by the Barcode Lookup service API.

product = BarcodeLookup["041508300414",key]

And you can drill down programmatically to get, for example, the product name:

In[]:= product["products", 1, "product_name"] Out[]= "San Pellegrino Pompelmo Grapefruit Sparkling Fruit Beverage, 11.15 Fl. Oz., 6 Count"

The application possibilities are almost endless here. With these functions, it becomes easy to build applications for tracking inventory, generating reports, and automate restocking procedures.
Setup Vue.js Hello World In Visual Studio Code
By: Ryan Gleason
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, Software Development, Vuejs, Web Development

Using Git Bash in VS Code

Download Git Bash from https://git-scm.com/downloads for your specific operating system.

As you are clicking through the Git installer, I suggest using all of the default installation settings unless you really know what you are doing.

We are now going to add Git Bash as an integrated terminal inside of VSCode.

Open a new terminal in VS Code (Ctrl + Shift + `) or Terminal → New Terminal.

Open the command palette (Ctrl + Shift + P) or View → Command Palette.

Type “Terminal: Select Default Shell”.

You should see the options below:

Select Git Bash.

Select the + button in the terminal window.

You should see something like this.

Checkpoint: Type in the following command to ensure you have correctly installed Git.

git --version

Depending on what version you have installed, this should appear.
Leading-Trim: The Future of Digital Typesetting
By: Ethan Wang
Tags: CSS, UI Design, Typography, Design, Microsoft

Small change, big implications

Beyond craftsmanship and making handoff more efficient, we hope leading-trim will turn a new page for digital typesetting, eventually motivating improvements to other standards and platforms, starting with OpenType.

Leading-trim works by browsers accessing the font metrics to find, for example, the cap height and baseline. As the standard font format, OpenType specifies what metrics to include in the font file. OpenType has been jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe as an extension of Apple’s TrueType font format since 1997. While today OpenType has robust support for Latin scripts and CJK languages, it still lacks key metrics for other less commonly used writing systems such as Hebrew or Thai. As people adopt leading-trim, we hope this leads the way for us to add more font metrics of other writing systems to OpenType.

Ultimately, we hope leading-trim helps improve OpenType and its internationalization by ensuring equal typographical capabilities across the world. That’s just the start of the ecosystem. Once leading-trim becomes available in all the modern browsers, desktop applications that are built using web technologies, such as Figma, Teams, and VS Code, will also be able to utilize it.

The impact can also go beyond the web. Sketch has already added snap targets for cap height and baseline. Instead of holding down the Option key to show bounding box to bounding box spacing, you can hold down Control + Option to see baseline to cap height spacing. It makes measuring optical spacing a lot easier. More importantly, this shows the slow shift in the way people approach digital typesetting. We are hoping leading-trim can further encourage this change. And through this mindset change, beyond just snap targets, leading-trim might just become a new text rendering standard in our design tools and extend to our operating systems.
Understanding Clustering in Unsupervised Learning
By: Arif R
Tags: Machine Learning, Euclidean Distance, Unsupervised Learning, Manhattan Distance, Clustering

There are three case in Unsupervised Learning

Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction, and Association Rule Clustering : grouping data based on similarity patterns

There are methods or algorithms that can be used in case clustering : K-Means Clustering, Affinity Propagation, Mean Shift, Spectral Clustering, Hierarchical Clustering, DBSCAN, ect.

In this section, only explain the intuition of Clustering in Unsupervised Learning

Clustering : Intuition

Clustering a data based on similarity patterns into 1 groups

Clustering a data based on similarity patterns into 2 groups

Clustering a data based on similarity patterns into 3 groups

Clustering a data based on similarity patterns into 4 groups

How do we know a point has the same group as another point?

As mentioned above : based on similarity patterns

How to measure the similarity of a point to another point?

The answer is : based on distance

How to measure the distance of a point to another point?

There are several ways to measure distance

Euclidean Distance

Manhattan Distance

Minkowski Distance

Hamming Distance

Euclidean Distance

Euclidean Distance represents the shortest distance between two points.

source : Role of Distance Metrics in Machine Learning

Mathematically, we can write this formula as

Example case :

In this case, the Euclidean Distance between the points is 6.3

Manhattan Distance

Manhattan Distance is the sum of absolute differences between points across all the dimensions.

Mathematically, we can write this formula as

Example case :

In this case, the Manhattan Distance between the points is 8

Minkowski Distance

Minkowski Distance is the generalized form of Euclidean and Manhattan Distance.

Mathematically, we can write this formula as

Minkowski distance can work like Manhattan or Euclidean distance. The selected P value will determine how the Minkowski distance works

q = 1: Manhattan distance

q = 2: Euclidean distance

Hamming Distance

Hamming Distance measures the similarity between two strings of the same length. The Hamming Distance between two strings of the same length is the number of positions at which the corresponding characters are different

Mathematically, we can write this formula as

Example case :