fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
💭DRAWING: Jung💭
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Art, Drawing, Mental Health, Psychology

Artist’s Note №1

For synchronicity’s sake, here’s my drawing of legendary psychoanalyst Carl Jung. When I think of Switzerland, I first think of chocolate — then I think of Carl Jung. It’s probably pathological.

Artist’s Note №2

This drawing will earn no money (Medium recently all-but-demonetized poetry, cartoons, flash fiction and other short articles). Please consider buying me a coffee. More coffee=more drawings for you to enjoy.

Artist’s Note №3

This drawing is brought to you by the letter “D.” “D” is for Dr. Franklin’s Staticy Cat and Other Outrageous Tales, my collection of humorous stories and drawings for children.

Artist’s Note №4

My new one-man Medium magazine is called — Rolli. Subscribe today.

Artist’s Note №5

From now on, I’m letting my readers determine how often I post new material. When this post reaches 1000 claps — but not before — I’ll post something new.
Beautiful Intelligence
By: Rachel Romano
Tags: Microsoft, Design, AI

Mark Rothko used color to paint abysses deep enough to lose yourself in. Prince used his voice to conjure images of raspberry berets and oceans of violets in bloom. Break dancers and ballerinas use the body in motion to express everything from love to fury.

We instinctively engage with color, sound, and motion from the time we’re born. These universal forms of expression take us places the written word sometimes can’t go, viscerally animating ideas and providing context.

But people often associate these communicative tools more with the arts than with corporate spaces, which is perhaps why we haven’t traditionally seen these elements in digital productivity ecosystems. Color, sound, and motion fell by the wayside in a world of suits and ties and black and white documents.

That world is increasingly antiquated.

Even in offices where you may still have to cover tattoos and remove piercings, people are starting to welcome gifs and emojis in professional content. And why not? Whether your desired aesthetic feels more Bauhaus or more pop, moving beyond letters and numbers makes productivity more authentic, beautiful, and resonant.

In Microsoft 365, we’re blending art and science to create a library of high-quality content that leverages our powerful AI. From creating original work in-house to commissioning designs from artists worldwide, we’ll be rolling out a curated array of new illustrations, looping videos, photography, fonts, animations, stickers, and much more, beginning primarily within Office.
How CRY makes money
By: Kern Carter
Tags: Creativity, Ghostwriting, Education, Money, Writing

I realized that we’ve never taken the time to fully explain all that we do at CRY, including how we earn revenue. It’s fairly simple but does warrant some discussion.

First, we are a three-person team. It’s hard for me to give you titles because, for the most part, all of us do a little of everything. At our core, we are content creators. Whether it’s here on CRY Mag or our We CRY Together celebration, our goal is to create or curate stories that are in line with our vision of elevating emerging artists, building a connected creative community or navigating the emotional aspects of what it means to be a writer or artist.

How we make money

As much as we love what we do, we need money for our business to work. And yes, we are a business. As much fun as we have doing this, we’re actually very focused on driving revenue because we know that’s what it takes to give us the freedom to keep creating.

Ghostwriting

Our main source of revenue comes from ghostwriting. We help people write stories of accomplishment, overcoming some kind of obstacle, memoirs, or family histories that people want to capture. This means someone contracts us to write an entire book. The cost for this is tens of thousands of dollars so it’s reserved for those who are committed to telling their story and have the finances to do so. Not everyone who chooses this option is “rich.” You’d be surprised how resourceful people can be when they’re motivated.

Proposals (story structures)

We definitely understand that not everyone can afford for us to write their book in full. As a separate offering, we write proposals. A proposal can have different meanings, but for CRY, it’s more like an outline for your book. If someone who is not a writer has an idea for a book, it’s actually really difficult for them to understand how to get the idea out of their head on onto the page. That’s where we help. We provide structure, a succinct synopsis, chapter by chapter summary, along with other outputs so by the time we’re finished, our clients know exactly what to write and how to format their story. We do this for anywhere between $2,000-$3,000, depending on a few variables.

Editing

Sometimes, clients come to us with hundreds of pages of blog posts, journal entries and loose notes. We take those pages and turn it into a real book. The cost for this varies depending on the amount of work we have to do, but typically comes in around $6,000 — $8,000.

Why are we sharing this?

Because it’s important to be transparent about money. There shouldn’t be this secret around how revenue is earned, especially if it can help inform or educate someone who is trying to do something similar. We love what we do at CRY, and earning revenue through these streams allows us to create and curate content. We definitely have plans to expand our offerings, and when we do, we’ll be sure to share another update!
Exploring Google Cloud Vision API and Feature Demonstration With Python
By: Ulku Guneysu
Tags: Google Cloud Platform, Python, Machine Learning, Programming, Computer Vision

Features of Google Cloud Vision API

1. Face detection

The Vision API can perform feature detection on local image files and remote image URLs. DETECT_FACES and DETECT_FACES_URI functions can perform multiple-face detection within an image, along with the associated key facial attributes, such as emotional state and headwear.

2. Image attributes

Detects general attributes of the image, such as dominant colors and appropriate crop hints.

3. Detect labels

The Vision API can detect and extract information about entities in an image, across a broad group of categories. Labels can identify general objects, locations, activities, animal species, products, and more.

4. Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Detects and extracts text from images. TEXT_DETECTION and DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION annotations support OCR.

5. Web Detection

Web Detection detects web references to an image. Searches the web for the best guess label and pages with full and partial matching images.

6. Detect multiple objects

The Cloud Vision API can detect and extract multiple objects in an image with Object Localization — a module that identifies information about the object, the position of the object, and rectangular bounds for the region of the image that contains the object.

7. Detect explicit content (SafeSearch)
How Kanye West Built A Multi-Billion Dollar Sneaker Brand
By: Kiran Jain
Tags: Marketing, Fashion, Celebrity, Business, Startup

How Kanye West Built A Multi-Billion Dollar Sneaker Brand

What made the brand successful, and what can potentially kill it

An Adidas Yeezy. By andreimihaiducu from Pixabay

The chances are pretty high, that you’ve already heard of The Yeezy. It’s the sneaker brand of Kanye West in collaboration with Adidas, and now Gap.

To grab these babies, people across the U.S. would camp outside shoe stores in dead cold winter, hire taskers to wait in line on their behalf, and even deploy sneaker-buying bots to nab a pair online before they sell out.

Those who are unable to purchase these within the few precious seconds before they sell out, end up spending thousands of dollars over the market value to purchase them in the resale market.

The man behind all this craze is Kanye West.

He has successfully created one of the most hyped sneakers of all time. However, there are some potential roadblocks in the way ahead, that he must navigate through to help the company stand the test of time.
There Are Only 3 Things A Writer Must Do Every Morning
By: Linda Caroll
Tags: Creativity, Self, Advice, Habits, Writing

There’s no shortage of people telling you what you “must” do in the morning if you want to change your life.

You know exactly what I mean, too. Wake up early. Have a cold shower. Meditate. Exercise. Plan your day. Set your priorities.

Blah, blah, blah. I call bull.

Those tips have been around for decades. Centuries, probably. Despite all the well-meaning advice, most of us are still tired, overworked, underpaid, disorganized and wishing we knew how to get it together.

It’s an easy slide into self blame.

But it’s not your fault. It’s faulty information.

Know why all that stuff doesn’t work? Because it’s like trying to eat the proverbial elephant. Too much. That is not how the human brain works.

The human brain is infinitely malleable. Change is possible. For all of us and any of us. But mass rebuild works better for cars than people.

We have to change in small increments. Tiny steps. Even more important? Our brain needs to buy into what we’re doing. If your brain doesn’t buy it, your body isn’t going to follow through. Simple as that.

You can say affirmations about how “rich” you are until the cows come home, and your brain is saying yeah? Well then why is my bank account dry?

Know what I mean?

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, there’s only 3 things you need to do every morning. Not big cataclysmic changes. Just 3 tiny things.

1. Take a few minutes for you

In his book, Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod says how we wake up each day dramatically affects us all through the day. Even more so, it affects the level of success at everything we do all day.

Ever have one of those mornings where the alarm doesn’t ring, or you turn it off and when you wake up already late? You’re rushing around trying to get out the door, and forget stuff, and traffic sucks.

And somehow, the crazy morning just affects the whole day. Know what I mean? We’ve all been there.

The opposite is true, too.

When I was caring for Dad at the end of his life I learned that the hard way. It was hard work, and that’s the understatement of the year. Juggling work and caring for a dying parent would test the patience of a saint. I am not a saint.

If I started the day bolting out of bed to him calling me? By the end of the day I felt like something the cat dragged in.

I learned to wake up early enough to take a few lazy minutes for myself and it made all the difference. Doesn’t even matter how you spend it. Watching the sun rise or feeding the birds. Reading a book, playing solitaire.

You get to pick how much time and how to spend them. But do that for yourself. So every day starts with your needs, not someone else’s.
A More Strategic Way to Delete Your Emails
By: Ross Mccammon
Tags: Inbox, Google, Email, Productivity

Photo: JohnnyGreigg / Getty Images

For all the ways that G Drive has made our lives run better, it makes getting rid of those memories kind of complicated. The most intuitive way to delete messages in Gmail is scrolling and clicking. Forever.

So technology columnist Angela Lashbrook tried to find another way, a journey she writes about in Debugger, Medium’s new publication about consumer technology.

Turns out you need a two-part system: Let an app clear out most of the junk. Then employ search-and-destroy strategies to find groups of emails to delete all at once. Her tips are surprising but easy and effective.

The best approach, however, is the simplest: daily maintenance. “That means deleting all the emails you don’t need as you receive them so you don’t get caught up in the mess I spent the last several days cleaning up,” Lashbrook writes.

And in that way, your inbox is like any important relationship: Pay a little attention every day so you can focus on the present, not thousands of pieces of baggage from the past.
My Doctor Is a Gardener
By: David B. Clear
Tags: Humor, Health, Covid 19, Comics, Coronavirus

Want more? No? Okay. Nevermind. But in case you change your mind, subscribe to my newsletter to get notified whenever I publish something new.
You are Music
By: Elio D'Anna
Tags: Beyourself, Musicians, Communication, Inspiration, Music

Image courtesy by John Mosca

Music awakens, inspires and elevates humanity

Everyone should play his own music — chat, write and communicate through art, music and images. Words are not anymore sufficient to transfer one’s own thoughts and feelings.

Words are obsolete, poor and a very slow way to convey one’s own invisibility to others.

That’s why music is becoming the new language and a new way of communication for the new coming,post-human civilisation.

Let’s make this world beautiful. ‘You are Gods’ who have forgotten to be such. Music is the forgotten language through which the Gods used to talk to each other, and transfer their will to men.

Music is the way that allows every man to return to his own peaceful creative nature, and be able so, to communicate in all directions and to all human beings, the original, powerful language of democracy, joy and beauty.

Music is a declaration of life that gives equal opportunities to all of its members. Within music, races, nations, politics and religion dissolve. Music is the only law, and creativity, its order.

It doesn’t matter wheather your Music is happy or sad, loud or soft, weak or strong, harmonious or not, it comes from You; and whatever it is, it’s your Music, it’s always projecting your aliveness, your uniqueness, your Dream.

The origin of your Music is more important than the Music itself,

because YOU ARE MUSIC.

Music is the most simple, powerful way to spread out all over the world, democracy and love, is the manifest of a new humanity, free from divisions and conditionings . Without nation, without religion, without politics, a humanity endowed with infinite creativity, free from discriminations and conflicts, tending towards peace, unity, love.
Round in Circles
By: Aarish Shah
Tags: Writing, Photography, Inspiration, Poetry, Creativity

Photo Credit — Me! Greenwich, London

The anticipation has my heart racing

All I want to do is pick up the pace and move forward

keep on going keep on growing

in this life plant the seeds I've been sewing

reap the rewards of the knowing and the learnings from past endeavours

Cross a million Bridges over rivers

This spoken word s*** has me thinking keeps me writing stops me sinking

this spoken flow is how I show the world

just who I am

Not just who I am but

what I can

do

can you

imagine where this life will take us

Just what this life will make us

ain't no one gonna forsake us

because it's up to us how we move forward

This better life we're moving towards

and our Horizons are filled with bright light

our Horizons eradicate trite spite

get rid of all the hate that sits within us the debates they try to spin us

round in circles instead of straight lines

We'll create our fate and we'll be just fine.
Keeping a Distance — From Friend and Foe Alike
Tags: Mental Health, Health, Comics, Trump, Covid 19

Written by

Almost famous cartoonist who laughs at her own jokes and hopes you will, too.
Artistic Voronoi Diagrams in Python
By: Frank Ceballos
Tags: Python, Math, Art, Design, Voronoi

Making a Voronoi Diagram

Let’s start by importing all the libraries we need.

Script 1 — Importing libraries.

If you get any ModuleNotFoundError let’s take care of them using Anaconda to install the missing packages. I will only go over the less common packages, since it’s likely you already have Pandas, Matplotlib, and other widely used packages installed.

Open Anaconda Prompt and navigate to the desired conda environment.

To install PIL a Python package used for image processing:

conda install -c anaconda pillow

Now let’s define the helper function that will do the bulk of the work:

Script 2 — Helper function that makes the Voronio diagram. You can find the original Python script here: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram#Python.

You can read the doc string to understand the parameters the function takes. Click here to see some of the color palettes you can use.

To create the Voronoi diagram, sites are randomly drawn from a 2D Gaussian distribution. Then, each site is assigned a random color from one of the two palettes. Finally, the diagram is created pixel by pixel and then saved.

Now we are ready to make a cool looking diagram.
Joyful Exercises for Contributing to Low-Fat, Lean Muscles, and Dense Bones
By: Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Tags: Self Improvement, Fitness, Writing, Health, Technology

Joyful Exercises for Contributing to Low-Fat, Lean Muscles, and Dense Bones

Fitness is a passion for me. I do it as a ritual at home nowadays.

I used to go to the gym and love the rituals. However, nowadays, it is difficult for me to go to the gym. Not going to the gym does not mean giving up fitness goals. I created a customised gym at home for my specific needs.

I perform a wide variety of workout regimes. As I get older, the type of exercises changed a lot. I used to do a lot of cardio when I was younger. My main focus is weight training, resistance training, callisthenics, high-intensity interval training (HIIT), and mild cardio.

The purpose of this post to share with you three joyful exercises I perform a daily basis to keep my lean muscles, bones density, and low-fat percentage.

Even though I passionately work out, my approach to exercise is gentle. For example, instead of using too heavy dumbbells, I prefer using my body weight. It is natural and produces the required outcomes for me.

Let me introduce you the three simple exercise I do almost every day to maintain my low-body fat percentage, lean muscles, and dense bones.

Apart from a few hundred push-ups, I use the pull-up machine every day.

Here are the three joyful exercises; enjoy.
The Perfect Micro-Workout For Writers That Won’t Kill Your Flow
By: Erin King
Tags: Health, Lifestyle, Writers Life, Self, Writing

Recently we bought a treadmill, but sadly I’m not using it as much as I’d hoped I would. I enjoy it but finding a time in my day to devote to exercise has been problematic.

Our house is small and the basement is my daycare so we don’t have the kind of extra space that most people have in their homes.

The treadmill lives in our bedroom, which is right beside our daughter’s room and it’s also over the daycare.

That means that I can’t use it in the mornings when my daughter is sleeping (I probably could, but I’m not a jerk) or when the daycare kids are sleeping. So that rules out the two best times for me to exercise.

Also, I write in the morning, so exercising at that time would waste my best, most focused energy. When the daycare kids are sleeping, I’m eating my lunch and editing usually.

After work, I’m getting dinner ready, and I’m not an evening person.

Image by author via Canva.

I know people who go to the gym or a yoga class after dinner, but we don’t eat until around 7:30 so that’s not going to work. By 8 pm, I’m in my jammies, on my computer again doing courses, writing more, or getting caught up with my favorite Medium writers.

Even though I want to exercise, part of the problem is finding the right opportunity during the day.

Finding a time to exercise can be the trickiest part of getting your workout done, even if you don’t dread it.

I think this is why I’m always most successful when getting my exercise incidentally.
Direct from the investor: 5 lessons for entrepreneurs in 2021
By: Marco Antonio
Tags: Investing, Entrepreneurship, Business, Technology, Productivity

Direct from the investor: 5 lessons for entrepreneurs in 2021

The end of the year is good for balance. And it’s also good for, who knows, tearing up some manuals.

Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash

I consider myself a start-up adviser and investor for beginners. Great apprentice, modesty aside, but with a lot to learn.

Having been an administrator for over 04 years, I reinvented myself in the business world by doing M&As. And, six months ago, I immersed myself in this world that excites and fascinates me as a startup advisor and investor.

At 24, all right. It’s not too bad to feel like a boy. It tastes good. And so, I follow and I will continue to learn.

That said, here are my five boy cents for you, the entrepreneur, to start 2021:
Is the New Instagram Update a New Form of Dark Pattern?
By: Mariana Vargas
Tags: Visual Design, UX, Creativity, Design, Technology

Image by natanaelginting on freepik

In the last days, the most recent Instagram update has been in the news for the worst reasons. Many users and influencers have publicly spoken out their dissatisfaction, namely James Charles, who, in a rant video, advised his followers not to update their apps.

At the center of these negative opinions is the new layout, where the basic Instagram options — camera and notifications — have been removed from the bottom menu bar and instead are displayed in the upper-right corner of the home page, next to the direct message button.

Author/Copyright holder: Instagram. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.

The new bottom menu features the “Reels” (mimicking Instagram’s competitor TikTok) and “Shop” button. This means that these two options are now easily accessible on every screen, while the camera and the notifications button are inaccessible in some tabs.

Instagram is very explicit with its intentions on its blog: to prioritize Reels and its e-commerce platform over traditional posts.

The company states that this change was taken in order to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of technology use patterns. However, this approach seems to be forcing the users to have new intentions when using the app and not otherwise. It even makes me wonder if we are facing a new type of dark pattern.

In my recent post about Dark Patterns, I showed how Instagram uses the Roach Motel pattern. Indeed, we already know this company has no problem in resorting to dark patterns to reach their goals. However, if Instagram is being honest about its intentions with this update, we cannot consider it a dark pattern, right?

The issue is the new bottom menu layout takes advantage of years of muscle memory developed by the users, who now have a high probability of accidentally clicking on the Reels or Shop button when looking for the app’s traditional features.

Certainly, Instagram has a competent UX Team who is able to understand the real users’ needs and motivations. It’s very possible they knew users are not interested in the same features the company is aiming to promote. Maybe this is the reason why Instagram’s official blog post seems to be anticipating users’ disappointment:

Author/Copyright holder: Instagram. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.

What about you, what do you think about Instagram’s new update? Do you also consider it unfair for users or do you find it a good business decision?
How To Get Hired At Your Dream Job In Just 11 Lines Of Python Code
By: Filippos Dounis
Tags: Business, Entrepreneurship, Programming, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence

How To Get Hired At Your Dream Job In Just 11 Lines Of Python Code

A complete newbie-friendly guide on how to use Machine Learning to be hired at your dream job

“ There has literally never been a time in the history of humankind where this short article could have been more relevant. “

In the U.S. alone an estimated 47 million jobs are predicted to disappear in the post-COVID19 world. To put that in perspective, a staggering 32% of the population might become unemployed. Similar statistics can be found for almost all countries across the globe. What does this mean?

The majority of these people are under no circumstance going to simply accept such a fate. Governments around the world have pledged relief-funds to their citizens. Although such funds have been quite generous in many countries, under no possible point of view are they enough to feed the millions of people who are soon going to be left without a fixed source of income.

It thus becomes obvious that the majority of the ones affected are going to try to find a new place of employment.

In other words, if you considered the job market prior to COVID-19 of being extremely competitive, finding an occupation in 2020 will prove to be exponentially more difficult as the competition is going to be significantly higher than what it was in the pre-COVID19 world.

Taking into consideration the above-mentioned, the aim of this article is to walk you through the complete process of creating a beginner-friendly machine learning model which is going to almost guarantee that you are accepted at the job of your dreams.

If you like this article and are interested in receiving exclusive monthly content for free, subscribe to my exclusive mailing list at the end of this article (can be also accessed directly from here).
4 Uncommon Python Tricks You Should Learn
By: Devin Soni
Tags: Programming, Coding, Software Engineering, Python, Technology

1. Multiple Assignment

When you want to give several variables the same values, you will often see code that repeats the assignment statement for each variable.

It may look something like the following code, which uses one separate assignment per variable:

a = 1

b = 1

c = 1

In Python, we can simplify this, and assign to every variable at once.

a = b = c = 1

# a == 1

# b == 1

# c == 1

After doing this, every variable was assigned to the right-most value in the chain. Since it just takes the right-most value, we can also replace 1 with a variable.
Create Interactive Dashboards with Panel & Python
Tags: Python, Dashboard, Data Visualization, Data Science, Panel

Do you want to create flexible and powerful dashboards with Pure Python?

In this tutorial, I will go through creating a simple and interactive dashboard with Panel . We will use Jupyter notebook to develop the dashboard and will serve it locally.

Panel is an open-source Python library that lets you create custom interactive web apps and dashboards by connecting user-defined widgets to plots, images, tables, or text.

Basic Interactions in Panel

The easiest way to create interaction with any dataset or plots in Panel is to use the Interact function. It automatically creates an interactive control and also can be a flexible and powerful way to create dashboards.

Let us see a simple example using panel Interact . Here we create a function that returns the product of a number, and we call Panel to interact on the function.

import panel as pn def f(x):

return x * x pn.interact(f, x=10)

Panel Interact

Now, we have an interactive control, where we can drag a slider, and the product changes as we change the x values.

Panel interact function is easy to use and works well with controls, data tables, visualization, or any panel widget. As this is a high level, you do not see what is going on inside, and the dashboard layout's customization requires indexing. However, it is a clear and robust starting point.

If you want to have more control of your dashboards and customize it entirely, you can either use reactive functions or callbacks in Panel. In our dashboard, we will use depends more powerful function.

Panel Components

Before we go through creating the dashboard, let us see the three most essential components in Panel that we will use in this dashboard:

Pane: A Pane allows you to display and arrange plots, media, text, or any other external objects. You have almost all Python plotting libraries functionality here so that you can use your favorite plotting library (Matplotlib, Bokeh, Vega/Altair, HoloViews, Plotly, Folium). You can also use markup and embed images with Pane.

Widget: Panel provides a consistent and wide range of widgets . You have different types of widgets, including options selectors for single and multiple values (i,e. select, radio button, multi-select, etc.) and type based selectors (i.e., slider checkbox, dates, text, etc.).

Panel: A Panel provides flexible and responsive customization to dashboard layouts. You can have either fixed-size or responsive resizing layouts when you are building dashboards. In Panel, you have four main types:

Row — for horizontal layouts

Column — for vertical layouts

Tabs — selectable tabs layout

GridSpec: for grid layout.

In the next section, I will create a Dashboard with interactive controls, data visualizations, and customizing the dashboard layout.

Flood Dashboard with Panel

In this example, we will use a global flooding dataset — Global Active Archive of Large Flood Events — from the flood observatory unit in Dartmouth. Let us read the data and explore first before we begin constructing the dashboard.
Pattern Recognition With Machine Learning
Tags: Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Programming

Components of a Pattern Recognition System

A pattern recognition system needs some input from the real world that it perceives with sensors. Such a system can work with any type of data: images, videos, numbers, or texts.

Having received some information as the input, the algorithm performs preprocessing. That is segmenting something interesting from the background. For example, when you are given a group photo and a familiar face attracts your attention, this is preprocessing.

Preprocessing is tightly connected with enhancement. By this term, researchers understand an increase in the ability of a human or a system to recognize patterns even when they are vague. Imagine you are still looking at the same group photo but it is 20 years old. To make sure that the familiar face in the photo is really the person you know, you start comparing their hair, eyes, and mouth. This is when enhancement steps into the game.

The next component is feature extraction. The algorithm uncovers some characteristic traits that are similar to more than one data sample.

The result of a pattern recognition system will be either a class assignment (if we used classification), or cluster assignment (in case of clustering), or predicted values (if you apply regression).
Three Types of Business Opportunities with Machine Learning
By: Robbie Allen
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Business, Entrepreneurship, Technology

In practice, of course, a given ML application may fit more than one of the above impact categories. An ML algorithm that can analyze documents, for instance, might be reasonably said to increase employee efficiency by helping them process documents faster. But it might also be viewed as a breakthrough since it allows the company to offer new document analysis products it never could before.

Or consider a machine learning algorithm that detects security threats (like guns or knives) in an image generated by a baggage scanner. It may reduce costs by reducing the need for a person to watch a screen constantly. It may increase efficiency by finding more threats. And it may represent a breakthrough by finding threats that humans may have never been able to detect.

Furthermore, “breakthroughs” need not necessarily be associated with new products. What if the breakthrough enables a new kind of insight for the C-suite? Such reporting may lead to strategic choices that ultimately lead to increased revenue or lower costs, even if the immediate impact is not as clear.

Business impact thinking is not meant to rigidly constrain the way you think about machine learning projects. Think of it instead as a useful guide. You should certainly be aiming in the direction of at least one business impact — but you should be flexible enough to know when you need to change the way you communicate your goals and frame your success.

It’s not unheard of for a machine learning project to begin with a goal of reducing costs by automating away entire jobs. But this isn’t always easy. Even if 80% of an employee’s work can be eliminated, the remaining 20% may be stubbornly un-automatable. This doesn’t mean the project was a failure. If the humans can focus on their 20% of the task while being free of the other 80%, they can take on new business. This could represent a massive business efficiency gain — a huge win when the business impact is viewed properly.
Understanding Cosine Similarity And Its Application
By: Richmond Alake
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Computer Vision, Data Science

Utilisation

Cosine similarity has its place in several applications and algorithms.

From the world of computer vision to data mining, there is lots of usefulness to comparing a similarity measurement between two vectors represented in a higher-dimensional space.

Let’s go through a couple of scenarios and applications where the cosine similarity measure is leveraged.

1. Document Similarity

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A scenario that involves the requirement of identifying the similarity between pairs of a document is a good use case for the utilisation of cosine similarity as a quantification of the measurement of similarity between two objects.

Quantification of the similarity between two documents can be obtained by converting the words or phrases within the document or sentence into a vectorised form of representation.

The vector representations of the documents can then be used within the cosine similarity formula to obtain a quantification of similarity.

In the scenario described above, the cosine similarity of 1 implies that the two documents are exactly alike and a cosine similarity of 0 would point to the conclusion that there are no similarities between the two documents.

Here’s an example:

Document 1: Deep Learning can be hard

Document 2: Deep Learning can be simple

Step 1: First we obtain a vectorised representation of the texts

Document 1: [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0] let’s refer to this as A

Document 2: [1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1] let’s refer to this as B

Above we have two vectors (A and B) that are in a 6 dimension vector space

Step 2: Find the cosine similarity

cosine similarity (CS) = (A . B) / (||A|| ||B||)

Calculate the dot product between A and B: 1.1 + 1.1 + 1.1 + 1.1 + 1.0 + 0.1 = 4

Calculate the magnitude of the vector A: √1² + 1² + 1² + 1² + 1² + 0² = 2.2360679775

Calculate the magnitude of the vector A: √1² + 1² + 1² + 1² + 0²+ 1² = 2.2360679775

Calculate the cosine similarity: (4) / (2.2360679775*2.2360679775) = 0.80 (80% similarity between the sentences in both document)

Let’s explore another application where cosine similarity can be utilised to determine a similarity measurement bteween two objects.

2. Pose Matching

Gif from https://github.com/CMU-Perceptual-Computing-Lab/openpose

Pose matching involves comparing the poses containing key points of joint locations.

Pose estimation is a computer vision task, and it’s typically solved using Deep Learning approaches such as Convolutional Pose Machine, Stacked hourglass, PoseNet etc.

Pose estimation is the process where the position and orientation of the vital body parts and joints of a body are derived from an image or sequence of images.

In a scenario where there is a requirement to quantify the similarity between two poses in Image A and Image B, here is the process that would be taken:
My Life Has Been Derailed by my Health. I Want to Get it Back.
By: Grace Moore
Tags: Mental Health, Health, Chronic Pain, Chronic Illness, Life

My Life Has Been Derailed by my Health. I Want to Get it Back.

But everything feels so slow.

How I’ve spent the better part of three months, except less artfully. Photo by Yuris Alhumaydy on Unsplash

The headache started on a Friday night.

It was different from my usual headaches. More sudden, for one, and spread out from in front of my right ear to the back of my skull, when I typically get migraines centered over my eyes. Being an anxious person, I immediately assumed the worst, but the pain wasn’t bad enough for me to truly believe something was Really Wrong. I took some ibuprofen and went to bed.

The pain was still there the next day, and the next. I went to the doctor, then I went to the doctor again. New symptoms started to emerge: the right side of my face felt a little numb. I was getting more headaches all over my head. My neck and shoulders hurt.

Theories were thrown around: Your ear is too clogged with wax, and it’s causing a headache; your Eustachian tubes are blocked, that’s what’s making your face numb; maybe you have a specific kind of migraine, try this medication.

Nothing worked and no diagnosis felt right.

Then I started getting pain on my left side too, in the same area, in front of my ear. My headaches were daily and often got in the way of functioning normally.

I ended up in the emergency room at one pint, where I had a CT scan. They found an unspecified “anomaly.”

I thought that must be the source of the pain, but then I had an MRI. Great news, your brain looks fine! There’s nothing abnormal! You’re not dying!

Then why do I feel so awful?
AWS Lambda Event Validation — from Zero to Hero
By: Ran Isenberg
Tags: AWS Lambda, Python, Validation, Software, AWS

So, you’ve started your serverless journey. It’s new and exciting and there’s lots to learn. You begin with your first AWS Lambda function. Everything looks fine and it just works, your Lambda gets an input event and produces output.

However, problems tend to arise when unhandled exceptions and failures are encountered. These prove to be rather expensive, when not dealt with properly, as they can cause unexpected bugs, security issues and costly Lambda retries.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how to parse event schemas correctly and how to handle event validation exceptions. I’ll focus on Python, but these guidelines & tips are applicable to any other programming language.

Problems? What problems?

Let’s observe the Lambda handler below.

The Lambda receives the event parameter, which is a Python dictionary.

If at this stage you access the dictionary without checking its validity, for the majority of Lambda invocations you will be fine. However, in some cases, the event dictionary might not have the ‘input’ key or a list, or the list won’t have at least 2 items (we check for index #1). An exception will be raised, and it won’t be caught.

The first problem is when an exception isn’t caught in Lambda, AWS triggers Lambda retries by default (5 times by default), which will fail again and again. Since you pay for execution times, this can really add up.

The second problem is in cases where an exception isn’t thrown, but the values are invalid. Your program could suffer from “minor” side effects, like invalid program integrity, undefined or invalid behavior bugs and even security issues.

The third problem is that events are updated or changed by services regularly (especially AWS services) and the event dictionary can contain values which your Lambda didn’t expect.

Your code will fail, and that’s ok, but it should fail in the “right” way.

What if I told you that you can solve all three problems by combining validation and input constraint checks with one simple library?
How to Master the Art of Storytelling as a Data Scientist?
By: Saeed Ahmad
Tags: Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Careers

How to tell a story?

We do hear and see a lot of stories around us. More or less, stories have 3 things in common. You have characters, conflict, and conclusion in every story.

For a data scientist, there are 3 fundamental parts of a story:

Identifying the problem:

First of all, it’s necessary to identify the problem for your audience. You need to tell them how you are going to collect your data, what are the different sources for that, or maybe you need to check that if there are some ready-made data that you can use to experiment with.

Alongside that, you need to make sure that your data is not skewed or biased or something like that. Also, you must have documented strategies to remove bias or remove other anomalies in the actual collected data.

“Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.” — Charles Babbage

It is necessary for you to outline a clear line-of-action for the audience at this stage so that they can actually understand both the problem and a roadmap for the solution.

Presenting the solution:

After you’ve identified and explained the problem to your audience and stakeholders, you’ll need to present the solution.

Your audience may ask you different questions about the data collection process, exploration or how did you model the problem depending on the competency level of the audience.

“Invite your Data Science team to ask questions and assume any system, rule, or way of doing things is open to further consideration.” — Damian Mingle

If they are technical they will be more focused on the engineering side of things. However, if they are non-technical they might be interested in knowing the solution which is more cheap, quick, and easy to understand.

Impact of the solution:

One of the important part of the storytelling as a data scientist is the ability to relate your solution to the final impact.

There can be various impacts of a solution. It may be some predictions that can save revenue for a company, or it can be finding an optimal path for a user to reach a certain place. It can also be an analysis of a climate change issue using Machine Learning that can help in the conservation of the environment.

“Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change the life of a patient, or change the world.” — Atul Butte

Actually, it depends on the type of problem that you are solving and the impact it can have on the life of different actors in the scenario. Actors are the people who are directly or indirectly impacted by your solution in one or more ways.
A Weary Nightingale
By: Lark Morrigan
Tags: Mental Health, Spirituality, Future, Poetry, Sonnet

My heart sings like a weary nightingale

with a rhythm I can never refine,

but I carry within a mournful tale

and yearning for dreams that were never mine.

By the mountains, in search of peace to grieve,

I seek respite from the years filled with scorn,

yet no one had a reason to believe

I could ever fulfill what I had sworn.

But it is the calling of the sublime

that leads me to search for rapturous heights,

even against the bitter foe of time,

I will not lower where I set my sights.

But against all odds, can my soul ascend

or am I stuck with wings I cannot mend?
The Seduction of Perfect Memory
By: Craig Brett
Tags: Life, Technology, Future, Self, Science

Did you forget anything recently?

Your keys maybe. Or someone’s name.

You’re in good company. A typical person forgets about 4 things a day. Most are minor lapses but then there are the big ones: a third of us have forgotten a partner’s birthday, and 1 in 5 Dads has forgotten to pick up the kids from school.

A couple years ago, I experienced one of the big ones. I forgot to call my Dad on his birthday. We live in different countries so that call is really important. He expected me to call. And I didn’t. If I close my eyes I can see the disappointment on his face when he went to sleep that night wondering why his eldest child had forgotten about him on his birthday.

Makes me nauseous just thinking about it. The thing is that I had been making constant mental notes about his birthday in the days before, but on the day itself my brain just took a holiday. There was a complete erase of the most dominant thought in my mind.

This act of forgetting, no matter how unintended, feels like a betrayal of the bond between father and son.
Inspiration is absolutely everywhere.
By: Melinda Crow
Tags: Ideas, Writing, Creativity, Football, Goals

Inspiration is absolutely everywhere.

But you have to train your brain to look for it everywhere. It’s a necessary skill for travel writing. You don’t fly across the globe to get one story. If you want to make a living, you scrutinize every detail of the trip, the destination, and the people you encounter, always looking for another story to add to the stack.

Today my inspiration is Thursday Night Football. Are you taking three shots at every goal you set? (Hmm, maybe that’s my title.) Once I saw it clearly, the story began to write itself.

What’s inspiring you to write today?
You Probably Are a Terrible Writer, but Don’t Let That Stop You
By: Adam Rains
Tags: Creativity, Creativity Tips, Writing Tips, Writing

What if You ARE a terrible writer?

Sometimes there is worth in assuming the worst. At least insofar as it can be clarifying. Apart from the question of being terrible, I had to consider what it would mean if I was correct in my suspected terribleness. This self-examination led me to conclude that ultimately, I did not care. You shouldn’t either.

It turns out that rejection is not so bad. Or at least, it is extremely survivable and not as bad as you think. If you are rejected for a publication, you can write more and submit again. If you self-publish your work and it does not gain an audience, you can write and publish more until you do find an audience.

In either case, your family and friends will still love you, and your prospective readers will still be out there. The worst that will happen if your work is terrible is that no one will read it. That’s it. Nothing else will happen. No one will cut you off. There will be no grassroots campaign to keep you from your keyboard.

If you are a terrible writer, you can either give up or get better.

I vote for getting better. The only way to accomplish this is to write more. Also, you have to start letting people read your work. If you have a chance to submit a story, do so. If you have an article you want to publish, do it. Even if you are terrible, hiding your words from the world won’t help. Writing and publishing more will.

The internet can help you improve as a writer because there are nearly endless opportunities to get your work out there. Your work will either be viewed, or it won’t. This equates to real-world, real-time feedback. If you keep at it, you can use this to drive your progress.

But please stop keeping all of your written work to yourself. This is the only action that will keep you from improving. Now, let me tell you something you’ve been afraid to hear:

You are a terrible writer.

See how easily you survived? Now, please write and share your work. I know I will.