fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
street-sense
By: Deb Ewing
Tags: Mental Health, Poverty, Homelessness, Poetry, A Cornered Gurl

I learned in this life

how to cling to the bottom rung

lift my feet before dragging

climbing up’s for better-fit

boots will catch you topside

best mind your place

if someone wants you to have

they will give it to you

my father’s legacy

dog-paddled frustration

set of unequal measures

a hand offered pulls back

when you’re too suspicious

expecting to get slapped

street sense is self-fulfilling prophecy

that life isn’t meant for the rest of us
Infinite Love
Tags: Love, Poetry, Aninjusticeprompt, Nonfiction, Hope

love.

entangled in his arms

&

lost to his soft lips.

wishes dreams and aspirations

no longer just for me.

desire, my new favourite drug.

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

she brought me to life

&

gave me hers.

can mere words entail

the love i bear for the woman i call

Amma.

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

when my emotions fail me

&

i lose faith in who looks back

in the mirror

Appa’s little words and gestures

set the flames of hope to my soul.

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

i walk past her nervously

&

yet again my heart skipped a beat.

maybe she knows how i look at her or maybe she doesn’t

tell me which is worse

i just want to see her smile.

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

the grand entrance with a grand smile

&

spoilings with infinite gifts

the grey hair never tainted the spirit

with endless woven tales of their time

endless tireless love for us all.

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

Unfazed she has stood, to share my tears

&

joys,

as we explore the dalliance of adolescence together

the untold promise of a friend

to be by each other's side. forever and ever.

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

imperfections

&

flaws, so vivid in the mirror.

beauty never took me into his embrace

i just don’t care anymore

for i know that im beautiful

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

when the sky wears the colours of my flag

&

pride swells my chest

grateful i am to my motherland.

and those who serve her with

blood and sweat.

if this isn’t love

tell me what is.

so much love for all of us

and so much more.
A Framework for Configuring Cross-Account Access in AWS
By: Camin Mccluskey
Tags: Technology, AWS, Programming, Software Development, Infrastructure As Code

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

For the most part you probably keep most of your AWS infrastructure under the ownership of a single account. However there are situations where you may need to grant a resource or a user, in a different account, access to one or more of your resources. This might be because an external client or vendor needs direct access to your infrastructure or because your company has infrastructure deployed across different accounts. Indeed, AWS recommends using multiple accounts, as best practice for scaling your cloud environment. As it provides billing and security isolation, and allows flexibility.

Still, granting access cross account can be tricky. It certainly took me a while to grok the pattern I needed to follow, to consistently set up a trust relationship between AWS accounts.

In this article I’m going to explain a simple recipe that you can follow, to make sure you set up the correct permissions to allow cross account access to your AWS resources. The bulk of the example will be in CloudFormation, but the principle applies whether you use the AWS console directly or utilise Infrastructure as Code, using CloudFormation or Terraform.
How to Install Scala and Apache Spark on MacOS
By: Jose Marcial Portilla
Tags: Spark, Scala, Big Data, Data Science, Machine Learning

Here is a Step by Step guide to installing Scala and Apache Spark on MacOS.

Step 1: Get Homebrew

Homebrew makes your life a lot easier when it comes to installing applications and languages on a Mac OS. You can get Homebrew by following the instructions on it’s website.

Which basically just tells you to open your terminal and type:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

There are more detailed instructions on installing on the project’s GitHub page. Installing everything through Homebrew should automatically add all the appropriate PATH settings to your profile.

Step 2: Installing xcode-select

In order to install Java, Scala, and Spark through the command line we will probably need to install xcode-select and command line developer tools. Go to you terminal and type:

xcode-select --install

You will get a prompt that looks something like this:

Go ahead and select install.

Step 3: Use Homebrew to install Java

Scala is dependent on Java, you may or may not need to install it. The easiest way to install it is to just use HomeBrew:

In your terminal type:

brew cask install java

You may need to enter your password at some point to complete the java installation. After running this Homebrew should have taken care of the Java install. Now we can move on to Scala.

Step 4: Use Homebrew to install Scala

Now with Homebrew installed go to your terminal and type:

brew install scala

Step 5: Use Homebrew to install Apache Spark

Now with Scala installed go to your terminal and type:

brew install apache-spark

Homebrew will now download and install Apache Spark, it may take some time depending on your internet connection.

Step 5: Start the Spark Shell

Now try this command:

spark-shell

You should see a flood of text and warnings but eventually see something like this:

Welcome to

____ __

/ __/__ ___ _____/ /__

_\ \/ _ \/ _ `/ __/ '_/

/___/ .__/\_,_/_/ /_/\_\ version 2.0.1

/_/ Using Scala version 2.11.8 (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, Java 1.8.0_102)

Type in expressions to have them evaluated.

Type :help for more information. scala>

You can confirm that it is working by typing the scala code:

val s = "hello world"

Congratulations! You’re all set up!

Common Issue: Setting PATH in bash.

Homebrew should have taken care of all of this, but in case you need to add spark to your PATH, you’ll want to use:

export SPARK_HOME=/usr/local/Cellar/apache-spark/2.0.1/libexec

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/Cellar/apache-spark/2.0.1/libexec/python/:$PYTHONP$

Just type that straight into your terminal.
Python: if __name__ == “__main__”
By: Fabio Motta
Tags: Python3, Coding, Software Development, Python, Programming

If you have been programming in Python for a bit it is probable you came across the code if __name__ == “__main__” and that you, like me and many others before, had no clue of what it means. Below a short explanation of how I understood it. Hope it helps!

The main function is essentially where any Python program starts. The Python interpreter (= program, which reads and executes code) sequentially reads the source file (= module) and executes the code. Remember, the main function can only be processed if the interpreter reads it as a Python program! Otherwise, it is ignored.

This is why the following code will not return anything:

def main():

print(2+2)

It is seen as a module and hence skipped! Essentially, the function is just defined, and not yet called.

Solutions:

In Python 3 (or later) an easy solution would be to easily call the main function at the end of the code for the function:

def main():

print(2+2)

main()

This calls the main function and executes the code.

Another solution is to call the code in the main function we want to run if the “special” variable (see below) __name__ is equal to “__main__”:

def main():

print(2+2) if __name__ == “__main__”:

main()

Why does this work? Before executing code, the Python interpreter reads the source file and defines a few “special” variables. The variable __name__ is one of these and evaluates the name of the current module.

If the Python interpreter is running that module (the source file) as the main program, it sets the special __name__ variable to have a value “__main__”. The if statement allows checking whether a function is run from the current script or if it has been imported from another one.

If it is imported from another module, __name__, will be set to that script’s name!
This smart AI creates pictures of people who do not exist
By: Mark Farragher
Tags: Deep Learning, Nvidia, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

Have you heard of Generative Adversarial Networks, the hottest development in machine learning right now?

GANs are made up of two competing neural networks: a generator that tries to create an image, and a discriminator that tries to detect which images are real and which images are fakes created by the generator.

Both networks compete with each other during training, until eventually the generator becomes smart enough to create spectacular images that fool the discriminator every time.

You can use GANs to create virtually any kind of image…

Like for example these stunning pictures of people:

All these pictures were generated by a machine learning app hosted at NVIDIA, the company famous for its high-performance graphics cards.

But none of these people actually exist!

The GAN is simply conjuring up new images, based on what it has learned about human faces. And after millions of training iterations, the generator has become so good at drawing faces that it manages to fool the discriminator every time!

NVIDIA has now opened up their GAN to the public. Just click the link below, and you’ll be rewarded with a new face every time:

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com

See if you can find mistakes in the generated faces. Can you do a better job than the discriminator?

So if you’re super excited right now and want to experiment with GANs in C# yourself, I totally understand.

And guess what? It’s actually very easy.

I wrote a small C# app that runs a GAN to generate pictures of frogs. Here’s what that looks like, this is the code that sets up the convolutional- and deconvolutional parts of the GAN:
Introduction to Keras & Transfer Learning for Self Driving Cars
By: Prateek Sawhney
Tags: Self Driving Cars, Data Science, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence

GoogleNet

In 2014, Google published its own network in the ImageNet competition and in homage to Yann LeCun and LeNet, Google named their network, GoogLeNet. It’s spelled like GoogleNet but it’s pronounced GoogLeNet. In the ImageNet competition, GoogLeNet performed even a little better than VGG: 6.7% compared to 7.3% percent, although at that level, it kind of feels like we’re splitting hairs. GoogLeNet’s great advantage is that it runs really fast. The team that developed GoogLeNet developed a clever concept called an Inception module, which trains really well and is efficiently deployable.

Do you remember inception?

It’s called an inception module. It’s going to look a little more complicated. The idea is that at each layer of your ConvNet, we can make a choice, have a pooling operation, have a convolution and then we need to decide, is it the one by one convolution or a three by three or five by five. All of these are actually beneficial to the modeling power of our network. So why choose? Let’s use them all. Here’s what an inception module looks like.

The Naive Inception Module. (Source: Inception v1)

Instead of having a single convolution, we have a composition of average pooling followed by one by one, then a one by one convolution, then a one by one followed by a three by three, then a one by one followed by a five by five and at the top we simply concatenate the output of each of them. It looks complicated but what’s interesting is that we can choose these parameters in such a way that the total number of parameters in our model is very small, yet the model performs better than if we had a simple convolution. The inception modules create a situation in which the total number of parameters is very small. This is why GoogLeNet runs almost as fast as AlexNet. And of course GoogLeNet has great accuracy. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s ImageNet error was only 7%. GoogLeNet is a great choice to investigate if we need to run our network in real time, like maybe in a self-driving car.
K3s Installation in Raspberry Pi k8’s Cluster.
By: Fabio Fernandes
Tags: Homelab, Raspberry Pi, Kubernetes, K3s, Cluster

Before starting with Kubernetes installation, let’s do a quick recap about our raspberry pi cluster and hardware architecture.

This article can be applied to any computer cluster, bare-metal, on the cloud, or virtualized with the virtual box or docker in docker.

In my case I decided to create a bare-metal cluster based on Raspberry Pi computational units, you can check how to do it here.

At this moment, we have a 4 node raspberry pi configured and communicating with each other via fixed IPs. We also configured other details like timezone and firewalls to start to install our cluster.

The picture below is a reminder of what we have configured so far, except the NFS part (it will be in a future article).

Install K3s

The only script I used here is the official k3s installation script, found at https://get.k3s.io.

Everything else was configured manually. After learning how to do it manually, it’s easy to automatize the process with one of the several tools available in the market.

Ssh to the primary node (pi-zeus in my case):

$ ssh pi@192.168.2.101

K3s supports command flags or environment variables for the customizations; I used environment variables to have a “clean” command.

In the master node, the only one needed is the access configurations:

$ export K3S_KUBECONFIG_MODE=”644"

After that, just run the install script via curl, without any additional parameters:

$ curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -

After a few seconds, you will be able to see the first node created:

$ kubectl get nodes -o wide

The master node is up and running, but there is another thing to do before starting with the workers.

To install the nodes, we need 2 pieces of information from the master:

The network address — That’s the IP of the host plus the port 6443. In this case (https://192.168.2.101:6443) The node-token — To get this one, we need to read the file inside k3s installation

$ sudo cat /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/node-token

Take note of this information and start with the worker's installation

After ssh into the node, export the environment variables:

$ export K3S_KUBECONFIG_MODE=”644"

$ export K3S_URL=”https://192.168.2.101:6443"

$ export K3S_TOKEN=”K10db5dc4…6f2b0" (put the entire token value here.)

Then, run the same script you ran into the master node:

$ curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -

After a few seconds, you can see the nodes connected to the master running the kubectl command:

$ kubectl get nodes -o wide

Here are some extra useful commands at this phase:

→ check the status of the master node

$ sudo systemctl status k3s

→ check the status of worker nodes

$ sudo systemctl status k3s-agent

→ uninstall k3s on the master

$ /usr/local/bin/k3s-uninstall.sh

→ uninstall k3s on workers

$ /usr/local/bin/k3s-agent-uninstall.sh
Vow To Make Each Day Special
By: Natalie Frank
Tags: Writing Prompts, Poem, Mindset, Psychology, Spring

Response to Promposity May Challenge

Vow To Make Each Day Special

Decide that you will find at least one small thing that makes each day special that puts you at ease or gives you a sense of freedom even to restore a sense of wonder to your life.

Credit: May Day Central Park by Mauric Pendegrast on Wikimedia Commons (CC0 Public Domain)

There’s no denying it’s been a rough couple of months. Where I live the shelter in place order has been strengthened as the case number and death toll has risen at an ever increasing pace. Thought to have leveled off a few weeks ago, this was shown to be false hope and it seemed the coronavirus was just gathering it’s forces to attack even more fiercely than before.

The pace of new people testing positive for the coronavirus has seemed to have picked up despite the social distancing, quarantine and other protective measures that have been put in place. Police now patrol the streets stopping pedestrians to ensure they are only doing what is necessary, defined as stocking up on food or filling prescriptions they can’t obtain any other way.

I was stopped on my first foray outside my apartment after being ill and again the second time. Even though I was legitimately just going to pick up a few things at the convenience store down the street, the experience of having a police car pull up next to me so they could question my destination and purpose was an unnerving experience.

After it happened the second time I didn’t leave again for more than two weeks. When I did it felt furtive, as if I was in fact, on my way to commit some kind of crime, that being picking up a prescription and some instant coffee.

Though I’ve tried to stay positive, I can’t even say I’m watching life through my window as the streets are empty, there are no more children calling to each other as they get off the school bus and the beach itself has finally become empty of picnickers and birthday parties attendees.

But this morning, upon waking, I realized it’s May Day. Although it’s not something I’ve ever celebrated or even taken notice of, this year looking for anything to mark the progression of time in a positive way, I vowed to find something about the day to make it special. This poem is my response to that effort.

For May Does Bring

Outside my window all shakes off

Polished shower of gypsum white

The cruel formation of winters rage

Which churns the depths to muddy red

The waves atop the rusted stretch

No longer pounds beleaguered shore

Instead the careful blossoms peek

Behind the newfold leaves protect

A few more weeks to find their pluck

To then emerge like blushing cheeks

Like princesses just come of age

First suitors do they entertain

It matters not this year I watch

From window panes which separate

The perfumed scented air to dance

Amidst the warmth so long did wait

For nature’s grace transcends supreme

To travel into false filled breathes

To sanctify with Spring’s delight

And light and loosen tightened chest
Insights from customer ratings on Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal
By: Raviteja Govindaraju
Tags: Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal

Thanks to the tremendous response for my previous article on #GoogleNow, I am now motivated to write more and finish off those drafts pending for a long time. Here goes one.

This weekend, I did some research on customer ratings on 3 popular ecommerce websites of India: Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. I wanted to record the ratings and see if I can deduce any interesting patterns. Before starting this research, I did not really have an objective. I was not sure if I would get anything interesting out of this or not. It was more of an experiment than anything else.

Firstly, I could see that electronics and books had the most number of ratings. So, most of my recordings were focussed on these two segments so that I have enough data to validate.

Ratings Pattern

One strikingly interesting thing I observed: For any good electronic product with decent no. of ratings, the shape of the ratings almost always is like this:

Peculiar shape emerged for customer ratings of electronic products from Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal.

For almost every product, no. of 5 star ratings were more than 4 star, followed by 3 and 2 but there is an increase in 1 star ratings.

This kept me thinking… I wanted to plot this data on some graphs.

Electronics: Happy Customers & Pissed off Customers

For each product, lets say,

X5 = No. of 5 star ratings X1 = No. of 1 star ratings t = Total ratings Percentage of really happy customers, C1 = X5 / t Percentage of really pissed off customers, C2= X1 / t

I plotted C1 and C2 of different products across the three websites.
Crafting Software With Care
Tags: Software Development, Coding, Startup, Technology, Programming

Testing Isn’t Optional

Want to hear my two cents on pushing untested code?

Don’t do it.

It physically aches me to approve a PR without tests. In my experience, I’ve seen developers with a decade of experience do it, too. Don’t lower your standards and allow bad practices to creep in.

Imagine you were asked to just write a few features initially and you thought the project was never going to come back, so you delivered a product without tests. Unfortunately, one day, the project did come back. Now, you have no documentation because it was done in a hurry (happens almost all the time) and can’t rely on your memory to remember what the requirements were, so basically you’re in soup.

Tests are the single most effective way of documenting business requirements.

Ideally, your code should be ironclad with tests, including tests that verify the business logic, integration with APIs and persistence layers, and UI/acceptance tests.

You can’t always cover 100% of the codebase with, tests but the least you can do is make sure you add unit tests to cover most of the business logic. When code changes or tests break, you’ll know what changed and be able to rewrite the tests according to new requirements.

Test-driven development is how you can be certain your code is doing what you were asked to do. It can be treated as the official documentation of the codebase. This is also how you save yourself from trouble during long-term maintenance.

If your code has no tests. Get it to a state in which you can write some tests for important logic.
3d Game Programming With Java and libGDX — Setting Up a Model With Blender
Tags: Blender, Libgdx, Game Development, Java

Step 1 —Delete the un-necessary components

Which is to say pretty much everything :). On the top right of the window, you will see the objects within the ‘Collection’.

From this area, delete the ‘Camera’, the ‘Cube’, and the ‘Light’, as they will not be used, and do not need to be exported. To do this, either:

Right click on each item to get the contextual menu up and select the ‘ Delete ’ option, or,

’ option, or, Just left click and press the ‘X’ key to delete.

Step 2 — Find (or create) a model

The cube is not the most exciting of models, and easily UV unwraps, and consequently doesn’t go through some of the problems that you may come across with other more complex models. So, either create your own model (which is an advanced topic) or download a model from a 3d model site (for example GrabCAD) — but do be careful of licensing restrictions on your model.

The example used here is the Rhombic Dodecahedron which looks like the following:

Rendering of a rhombic dodecahedron

When downloading a model, ensure that it is easily importable into blender — the file formats that are supported:

Collada (.dae)

Alembic (.abc)

Motion Capture (.bvh)

Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)

Stanford (.ply)

Stl (.stl)

FBX (.fbx)

glTF 2.0(.glb/.gltl)

Wavefront (.obj)

X3D Extensible 3D (.x3d/.wrl)

Never fear, if you cannot find a model in any of the above formats, there are free online format converters which will do this for you.

Step 3 — Convert the model (if required)

A lot of the models on GrabCAD models are made with SolidWorks — which are in an .SLDPRT file format. The AnyConv.com site can easily do the conversion from .sldprt to .stl. As a side note, AnyConv supports a wide range of format conversions, all of which are enumerated here.

It is a simple process, all done online, no sign-up needed:

Drag the file onto the box or click on the ‘CHOOSE FILE’ button, Click on the ‘CONVERT’ button Wait for it to finish… Download the converted file

Step 4 — Import the model

Screenshot of blender option to import an .stl file

Once the model has been imported, you will be presented with the following screen:
The Sound Nearest to Silence
By: Carolyn Riker
Tags: Self-awareness, Winter, Nature, Silence, Poetry

In near silence

the frost grew

until each crystal wing

profusely became

the sound of joy

inside of belly’s laughter

translating their creative souls

into orbs of pristine profundity

‘til the morning blessed

each crystal infusion

with the rays of seven suns.
The age of empathy, Slack groups, designing with AI and more UX links this week
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Product Design, UX Design, Design, Hot This Week, User Experience

The age of empathy, Slack groups, designing with AI and more UX links this week

What’s hot in UX this week.

If you like the links, don’t forget to 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

There’s something I’ve realized lately, that’s making my user interviews go smoother and getting deeper, more nuanced insights. The key is this: relax.

Take a step back, for a moment. What is a user interview? If yours are like mine, it’s essentially sitting down with a complete stranger, asking them quite personal questions about their life, and hoping they’ll answer truthfully and openly enough that you can use what they say to design your product. It’s kind of weird, really.

Essentially, you’re fast-forwarding a relationship in just a few minutes, from first meeting to sharing life truths. How do you get there? How do you get them comfortable enough to talk to you and really share their truth with you?

By Nicola Rushton.

Continue reading →
Best Open Source Tools For Developing IoT Applications
By: Yugasa Software Labs
Tags: IoT, Smart Home, Internet of Things, Android App Development, Mobile App Development

Internet of things are being embraced by more and more companies. Today we can see that it is growing at a fast pace. For developing IoT applications, availability of open source tools in the market is plenty. A Developer needs the right tools and well-connected infrastructures to use the technology. In this article, you’ll be able to read and compare between the best IoT tools available for developers.

Arduino

This development kit offers both hardware and software to the developers. It is an open-source prototyping platform, which is one of the best platforms. Using the integrated development environment (IDE), the Arduino language has to be coded in by the developers. The biggest advantage of Arduino is that it can be learned and used by the beginners in a short period of time and then they can keep upgrading themselves.

Home Assistant

Google home and Amazon play are slowly becoming a part of our everyday lives. If ou are a developer trying to bring about the next life-changing home assistant product here is all that you need to know. The python-based coding system makes this open source platform work. It can also run on Raspberry Pi and Python 3. Best for developers, who seeks increased connectivity between internet and people. Home assistant can be controlled with desktop browser and mobiles as well. It gets updated after every 2 weeks and easy to setup.

Eclipse IoT Project

Eclipse is a blessing in disguise for the java developes.It allows you to promote and develop the IoT technologies. It helps to manage and connect devices in IoT solution. Many different projects, that revolve around the IoT, has been sponsored by Eclipse such as the projects,Paho, Mihini and Koneki.

Thing Speak

Internet of Things wouldn’t have been where it is today if not for the thing speak tool which is considered as the oldest cloud platform. It is operated by the renowned MathWorks team. It is considered one of the best and the most effective tools for crating magnificent IoT applications. All you need to do to access this great tool is just sign into MathWorks and/or login to start working on your non-commercial projects. If you are also doing a project related to locations, then also thing speak can be of great help. It can work with most of the other open source tools. Like the icing on top of the cake, thing speak also has web services which lets it collect and store data. The data can be stored in the cloud. Thus, making it easier to create IoT applications.

From the above discussion, it is evident that developers who are looking for open source tools for creating IoT applications have a good number of choice. They can choose the one that best suits their need and starts their applications with ease.

Originally published at yugasa.com on October 10, 2018.
The Clapping Hour
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Healthcare, Humor, Gratitude, Comics, Coronavirus

Thank you to the health care workers putting their lives on the line, and the essential workers whose jobs bringing us food and other services puts them and their families at risk.
Weavers and Wishers
By: Alicia Mejia
Tags: Admiration, Communication, The Message, Death, Storytelling

I didn’t know her very well. But she left an impression on me. Her stories told around a crackling fire. A lazy breeze toying with cottonwood leaves high above our heads. Inky water lapping against the dock. The way her body fully occupied the wooden log. Her enviable lips, slightly parted as she held our gaze across dancing flames. Sandy swimsuits forgotten, bug bites left half scratched as we stared at her, wondering what words she could possibly form next. Cotton candy spun in the moonlight.

She left me awestruck.

I knew she had a gift and because of her nature, I tucked her image away in that special place in my heart reserved for such people. When I grew up and strangers would ask my name, I would try hers on for size. A verbal pen name, an homage to her craft. Wobbly shoes I prayed one day would fit. A thousand years and a lifetime later it suddenly became urgent that I thank her.

That day.

It could wait no longer. She had to know and I had to tell her. Two phone calls and a Google search later I was on the side of the road, sobbing. I was too late. Everything I wanted to tell her, thank her for. The special place in my heart I held for her. She had given me a gift, the love of story and a deep regard for those who could weave them, and I had never thanked her. Did she know what she meant to me? I slowly banged my forehead against the steering wheel.

Several hours and a panang curry later, my daughter stopped mid-sentence and passed me her napkin. My fortune cookie in two pieces and my hand clasped over my mouth, she didn’t understand why I was crying. I handed her the tiny white slip of paper, took a shaky deep breath and began to tell her the story of the great aunt she’d never met.
#WHHSH: What Happens Here Stays Here
By: Steve Isaacs
Tags: Las Vegas, Creative Direction, Marketing, Portfolio, Digital Marketing

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s “What Happens Here Stays Here” advertising campaign is much more than a series of TV spots, it’s become a part of the American lexicon. Their longtime ad agency R&R Partners wanted to relaunch the brand on digital and social and partnered with my team at bpg to create a digital 360 campaign based around a hashtag version of their classic ad tagline, “#WHHSH.”

After a series of strategy meetings, and a ton of white-boarding sessions, we dreamed up a metaphor for Las Vegas, and central campaign theme that we could rally around – the “Mystery Box.” Inspired by J.J. Abrams’ TED Talk, where he describes the value of anticipation of not knowing as potentially more vital to generating excitement than actual experience, we searched for ways to make Las Vegas the ultimate Mystery Box.

The six-month campaign was divided into three phases: Tease, Reveal and Continuity, all centered around debuting the box, opening it, then revealing at what was inside – everything you can become while shedding your “normal self” when you visit the city. We found power in the idea that Las Vegas, more than any other tourist location, inspires visitors to let go and become a version of themselves they can only be while in the glow of those singular neon lights.
4 Reasons I Love Disney Pixar’s SOUL
By: Ryan Dejonghe
Tags: Self, Mindfulness, Movies, Disney, Mental Health

The movie Inside Out helped get me through 2020. Its themes spilled out into my journal and carried into my therapist’s (virtual) office. Two takeaways from that film that changed my life:

We win by embracing all our emotions. Ignoring emotions makes things worse. Blended emotions make life colorful and beautiful. It’s not only possible, but it often is better to have simultaneous emotions.

Soul is the latest film from Disney Pixar and is now streaming on Disney+. Jaimie Fox is the voice of Joe; Tina Fey is the voice of 22. (Yes, the character’s name is 22. You’ll see!) I was pleasantly surprised to hear the voice of Rachel House, who’s comedic prowess features in several movies, including Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Thor: Ragnarock.

Pete Docter has his hands all over Soul, both as a writer and director. You may know Doctor from his smaller, lesser-known movies: Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Up, and Inside Out. You should know what to expect from Docter by now: happy tears. Lots and lots of happy tears.

That’s one of the reasons I love Soul.
NANOWRIMO Tips and Tricks (Day Eighteen)
By: Chris Price
Tags: Novel, NaNoWriMo, Writing Tips, Writing

The Hero Loses Everything

This is the day that we are 3/5 of the way through with the novel. You are doing a great job, wherever you are.

Today is also the day where the hero is really close to losing everything. This is the day when he must find his way through a place in the storm and he must be ready to go. The winds are kicking up, the tiny boat is being rocked about in the stormy waves, there is no navigation or sonar anymore, the lights don’t work, the water is cold, there are sharks in the water, and the storm is going to get even worse in a few hours. It already looks terrible, but it is going to get worse.

The hero may even get to a place where he is about ready to commit himself to death. This is not the dark moment, this is not quite the end of the end, it is just the beginning of the worst time in the story for the hero. He can’t seem to get anything right and he is definitely ill-prepared for what is to come even though he (and maybe the audience) thought he was. It is bad news everywhere.

The hero should also become very concerned, so much so, that he might not be able to really know what to do or where to go next. He is forgetting his training with the mentor. He is not remembering what he learned, and he is not even using basic instincts to guide himself and his team through the treacherous dangers. This is terrible news for audience. The audience might even be screaming at the screen or screaming at the book at this point.

The hero is in trouble, big trouble, and nobody can seem to save him. This is a great time for a cliffhanger ending to the chapter where then we cut to the villain making his preparations to totally destroy the hero.

Whatever you do, make it terrible for the hero at this point. It still needs to get worse and it will, but it should signal to the audience that things are going bad…really bad.

At the end of the day, we should be at 30,000 words. This is a huge deal. You are doing great and you are really moving along. I am proud of you!
Importance of Sampling in the Era of Big Data
By: Suraj Thatte
Tags: Big Data, Analytics, Politics, Data Science, Machine Learning

At the same time, George Gallup was able to predict the winner by carefully obtaining a sample of about 50,000 people.

What can we learn from this?

Even if the data that you have is very “big”, it might represent only a part of the population and may not be representative of the whole!

In Literary Digest’s case, their mailing list was derived from telephone directories, magazine subscriber lists, club membership rosters and so on. Well…in the 1930s, telephones were a luxury, the country had been rattled by the Great Depression and economic issues were dominant theme of the campaign for a reason! There was a clear indication of selection bias against the lower income groups.

In machine learning, sampling bias will affect the performance of your model. In the training and testing phases, it’s important to ensure that the data sample reflects the same underlying distribution you’re trying to model.

Throwing computational resources (or money for that matter) at a problem may not always solve the problem

Time and effort spent on choosing appropriate sampling technique was more efficient rather than a brute force data collection of the entire accessible population. The focus should not be on increasing the sample size but reducing the sampling bias or other errors.

Sometimes, less is more!

It’s easier to control the quality of data when you have a limited amount of it. Spending time in getting to know your data and the context in which it has been collected is very important. Visualizing and examining data for outliers or missing values are important before running it through models. Also, its easier to catch errors in misclassification.

Which statistical concepts do you think are even more important in this time as we sit on more and more of data everyday? Feel free to comment below..

References :
To Be (On Time) or Not To Be
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: New York, Humor, Theater, Cómic, Television

To Be (On Time) or Not To Be

Don’t let the curtain rise without us!
Case Study: FUTURE READY SCHOOLS — Custom Educational Software
Tags: Content Marketing, Development, Developer, Tech, Education

Custom educational software for executive administrators to plan students’ learning environment.

Project Summary

The Future Ready Schools Interactive Planning Dashboard is a reporting & planning tool for our nation’s Superintendents and their teams.

Challenge

With about 30 days notice, hit a hard deadline to deploy an interactive planning tool that:

Automates retrieval of data from a 3rd party survey system API from Verint

Enables administrators to define report logic

Provides administrators a CMS for general website content

Delivers users a sophisticated reporting system that summarizes survey responses

Enables users to create action plans in response to the reports

Solution

With highly focused and organized project management, coordinate a team of 4 developers in an agile process, to build interdependent components of the system in parallel, gluing them together and rapidly refactoring through a series of weekly sprints.

Flex with the client as requirements rapidly evolve… work nights and weekends if you have to… near immediate responsiveness.

Results

A delivery right on the money, of the highly functional system as originally imagined, in time for the initial convention. A warm reception from stakeholders, and many satisfied users.

Interact with Us! → Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

See our latest and most read stories on our new Medium publication, Endertech Insights !
The Luxury of Sadness
By: Cynthia Giles
Tags: Poetry, Self, Philosophy, Mental Health, Essay

January

The luxury I’m thinking of is to be sad without having to explain — to yourself or to others. To be sad without needing to justify the awareness of a feeling that is always just beneath the surface of other emotions.

Poet Richard Wilbur observed . . .

“When art is morose, we want to know why, but joy requires no reasons.”

And the same is true of everyday life — which is its own kind of art in a way, though we aren’t trained to think of it that way.

So if you seem happy, people rarely ask why. If you seem sad, they will wonder “what’s wrong with you.”

If you seem sad without an obvious reason, and it lasts for more than a day or two, people will begin to suspect that you are “depressed.” And you may begin to worry about that yourself. Depression seems like a dark and slippery slope — easy to slide down, hard to climb up.

If there’s no obvious reason for your sadness, you will likely be alone with it. Socially approved grief is shared, even admired; but unexcused sadness often goes unacknowledged and unrespected.

As with many subtle things, the Japanese have an expression that lends dignity to unexcused sadness: mono no aware. It is sometimes translated as “pathos” or “awareness of impermanence,” but there is no explicit definition, no attribution to a cause. It’s just a quality of feeling that sometimes surfaces, not only in literature but in one’s own sensibility.

The ancient Romans seem to have known such a feeling also. This famous passage from Virgil’s Aeneid has been given many translations, but here is a nearly literal one:

sunt lacrimae rerum

et mentem mortalia tangunt

there are tears of/for ordinary things (rerum)

and human things (mortalia) touch the mind

In part, the passage is about impermanence, the inevitable passing away of all things. So in that sense it is very close to mono no aware. But in the context of the Aeneid , as the protagonist gazes upon the depiction of a historic battle, it is also about the things humans do to one another, in love and in war.

There is much sadness about being human. If you are not grieving something today, that’s lucky — but there’s always tomorrow. And if you don’t grieve something for yourself tomorrow, there’s always the opportunity to share in someone else’s grief.

As Madame de Florac observes in Thackerey’s 1854 novel The Newcomes:
I Wrote About My Toxic Family, Then My Toxic Family Found Out
By: Faith Ann
Tags: Family, Self, PTSD, Relationships, Storytelling

Then my dad found my Medium and a hell-storm rained down. I received pages upon pages of accusations and attacks on my character. False assumption after false assumption. Narcissistic rage carefully crafted into polished emails and text messages. I received thinly veiled threats, with promises many members of my family shared his beliefs.

He vilified anyone who trusted me at my word, either I had manipulated them into supporting me or they were feeding me appalling advice. Apparently, all of my articles were elaborate lies to gain fame, notoriety, pity, or money. I was compared the Rachel Dolezal’s of the world.

So I stopped writing anything meaningful. I kept up with the publication I owned and penned a few pieces about movies or films, but I avoided writing anything personal. I couldn’t find it in myself to write for myself. I couldn’t even convince myself to write for people who looked for articles like mine. I couldn’t cope with more emails or letters than I was already receiving, I knew writing would just add fuel to the fire. I was scared, on some level I’m still scared.

My family is a parasitic force, the negativity is astounding. After a year of actively healing, I found myself sucked back in. Even though I kept away and stayed true to my therapists’ instructions to stay grounded, my thoughts were consumed by my father’s cruel words and the promise that other members of my family felt the same way.

I spent hours doubting my truth, doubting events I 100% knew happened. And then I spent hours guilty and ashamed of backtracking on the hard-earned progress I had made.

I grieved, thoughts constantly swirling around my tired brain. How could someone who’s supposed to love and care for me treat me like this…how could anyone treat anyone like this? I have loved my family with conviction and compassion, this is my pay off?

I regretted I hadn’t written more about my family, after all, I had written about milder events from my youth and young adulthood. If I was going to be attacked, I might as well be attacked for more than 15/160 articles. I was bitter and sad. After he read my pain and triumphs alike, the only response worth sharing was one of selfish spite?

I was lost. Medium and writing online was no longer a place of comfort, healing, and community. Just the thought of publishing something made me nauseous, I didn’t even try. My therapy sessions consumed with ways to find my footing, find myself again.
Not All “Successful” Medium Articles Go Viral
By: Casey Botticello
Tags: Viral Marketing, Google Search, Writing, Content Marketing, SEO

Many writers on Medium tend to aim for viral success within Medium’s platform. They focus on how to get curators to select their articles, how to get published in major publications, and how to optimize their article key words. There is nothing wrong with this strategy, and I have even written about my experience with articles gaining massive Medium views.

But for many writers, it can be discouraging to see your Medium article An Intro to Stochastic Calculus receive just 25 views while the article featured on the Medium’s home page, Five Unexpected Truths I Discovered From Bedazzling My Vajayjay with Swarovski Crystals, received 25,000 views.

Sample Clickbait/Buzzfeed-like Article

However, many of these attention grabbing/click-bait articles only thrive for a relatively short time, and most of the traffic is generated through the Medium platform itself.

Even if the Medium curators/internal search algorithm “fails” your article, it is still possible to obtain large amount of views and have your content shared with a large audience.

To illustrate this point, I’m going to show you the analytics behind two Medium articles I published. An article that essentially went viral and had a very brief, but massive surge in views, Uber’s Latest Scandal: Vomit Fraud and an article that grew in momentum months after being published, How to Bypass Virtually Every News Paywall:

The viral article achieved massive traffic over a few days, and I imagine this is the trajectory of many articles that are selected by curators on Medium. And this makes sense because Medium’s algorithm places an extremely high emphasis on the recency of articles. The Medium analytics for this article underscore this trajectory:
Three Useful Computer Keyboard Tricks You Can Use While Typing a Story
By: Michael Burg
Tags: Humor, Writing, Médium, Funny, Writing Tips

Three Useful Computer Keyboard Tricks You Can Use While Typing a Story

What happens when you touch this one?

Photo by Aryan Dhiman on Unsplash

Maybe you know this already, but it was news to me.

Hitting various keys while typing a Medium story will magically produce useful options you can use to spice up your story. Who knew?

Keep in mind we’re not just talking hit the “a” key and an “a” will appear. Even I know that, and I’m a techno-moron.

@

Typing the @ symbol followed by typing a name allows you to insert Medium member’s names. Most of you know this. Sarah Paris or Aimée Gramblin are two people who won’t mind if I “tag” them for illustrative purposes. Right, you two?

BTW — don’t abuse this privilege. Tagging a million people just so they’ll read your stuff isn’t recommended unless of course you’re the next Shakespeare and you’re just getting started. But if perchance thou art the next immortal Bard of Avon, taggeth not one’s fellow scriveners. They shall likely knoweth of your acclaim in a freakin’ trice.

: and a letter

: followed immediately by a letter brings up a vast emoji menu.

For example, I inserted this one 😫, the tired-face emoji, by hitting “:” then a lowercase “f.” Many other options were presented to me by doing that simple action. I chose the tired-face from the drop-down menu. Cool, and easy.

😁 This one came my way similarly. I hit “:” then followed it immediately with a lowercase “g.” Again a drop-down menu presented itself and I chose “grin” over “grimace” and a host of others I could have selected.

Please note that I work on a PC. If you’re a Mac user you may have to play with this one a bit.

Actually here’s the Mac answer courtesy of a writer friend.

Control + Command + Space bar. Holy level up, Batman! 🤩

The mysterious little “chain” thingy

This one’s not a computer keyboard trick but a Medium formatting trick.

Highlight some text in a story you’re writing and a short menu of options will appear. From left to right you’ll be given the option to bold or italicize or “chain” your highlighted text. If you select the “chain” thingy (I don’t know what else to call it and feel like an idiot doing so, but I’m still dazed from my discoveries, so please forgive me.) your selected text will be underlined. Then, once your story is published, readers can click on the underlined text and be automatically taken to a vast array of web links about the underlined text. (Maybe “link” is the correct term, but I still like “chain thingy” so I’m sticking with it.)

You can also edit stories you’ve published to include the “chain” thingy by going to those stories, using the edit mode, highlighting the desired text and selecting the “chain” thingy icon.