fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
My Ex Had Borderline Personality Disorder, But the Doctors Didn’t Tell Us
By: Lee G. Hornbrook
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Self, Relationships, Life

Because of her BPD, Andie and I were in and out of counseling for much of our 15 years together. But neither of us had ever heard of it.

The counselor and psychiatrist couldn’t talk to me about Andie’s BPD because of privacy laws. They had failed us.

She asked me about it right after she fired her counselor. We were separated, still sharing our one car, and she picked me up to take me home after work. The conversation went something like this:

“Do you know what Borderline Personality Disorder is?” she said.

“No idea. I’ve never heard of it. I can look it up when I get home,” I said.

“My counselor said I have it. But I think that’s what Demi has.” Demi was my step-daughter. “I’m going to call her and tell her she has BPD.”

“But you don’t know that. You’re not a doctor,” I said.

She waved me off and dialed her cell while driving.

“Demi, are you sitting down? My counselor just told me that you have Borderline Personality Disorder.”

Always so dramatic.

Demi didn’t, doesn’t have BPD. She had a rough adolescence (I was father figure number 3 and her mom had BPD, so do the math). But Demi grew to be a responsible young woman out of necessity, fending for herself, putting herself through college, supporting herself, and setting reasonable career goals.

I looked up BPD when I got home. The message in the first forum I found about it said, “If you know someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, RUN THE FUCK THE OTHER WAY!” Startling introduction. But too late. We had been married for 14.

I approached Andie with care the next day.

“Andie, I looked up BPD. This is bigger than us. We can address this. We can solve this.”

We were only a few weeks into our separation, but even at that early date, it was too late.

A few months before she fired her counselor, everything was fine. We had had an enjoyable trip away for our 14th anniversary. We returned to discover that her mother was in the hospital from a car accident. She left immediately for a week-long trip from California to Virginia to visit her mother.

When she returned, it was like a switch had been thrown. She didn’t want to be kissed or touched. “I love you” had turned to “I hate you,” for no discernible reason.

Alcoholism and BPD took over her functioning for the last 9 months of our marriage until she birthed our divorce.

The counselor and psychiatrist couldn’t talk to me about Andie’s BPD because of privacy laws. They had failed us. I asked my own counselor why they didn’t tell us or even tell Andie. My own counselor could only speculate. She said, “Maybe they didn’t want her to live up to the diagnosis.” My counselor knew stories about Andie.
Sex with God
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Life, Feminism, Sex, Christianity, Religion

We Protestants didn’t talk about the book of Sirach, maybe because the Catholics liked it? It’s in the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the ‘scriptures’ as Jesus knew them.

Jesus seems to quote or works off Sirach, including in the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Can it be dismissed?

To turn to the usual text of Sirach 51:13–30, admittedly, there isn’t anything too sexy. Here is the Greek version of v.19–20:

My soul has grappled with her,

And in the performance of the law I was exacting.

I spread my hands on high,

And I thought about ignorance of her,

I directed my soul to her,

and in purification I found her. (NETS)

In the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, a version in Hebrew—the sexual version—was discovered. What to do?

T. Muraoka, the great scholar of Hebrew, notes his puzzlement in a 1979 paper, “Sir. 51, 13–30: An Erotic Hymn to Wisdom?”

“The Greek is totally innocuous and puritan in spirit, entirely free from any signs of offensive, obscene language,” he says.

Is the sexual version ‘offensive’ and ‘obscene’? A phrase like “my hand forced open her portals,” he notes, “could hardly be understood otherwise…”

I love the idea of a vagina as a portal—here to Wisdom, to mystic insight of God, and of fellow humans.

Muraoka adds even more sexual suggestion. The phase translated, in v.19d, “never weary of extolling her,” might be, he thinks: “in the moments of her exaltation [i.e. orgasm], I will not let up…”

Wisdom is orgasmic, but the spiritual seeker doesn’t stop. He wants God to remain in that heightened state, and he develops the skill to keep her there?

Spiritual insight and understanding continues to flow from their coitus.
Hello from the other side.
By: C. Duhnne
Tags: Love, 100 Naked Words, Poetry

Hello from the other side.

Your fingers are tiny daggers, stabbing.

You are a survivor and a fighter, and sometimes, at night, when you’re in the quiet of your room, cocooned in blankets and cradled by your pillows, you cry.

You cry because your thoughts are finally allowed to stop. You cry because you’re finally able to take a breath and to let go of the mask that you wear. In this silent darkness, you are not a fighter. You are not a warrior. You are not somebody’s daughter or son. You are simply here, in the moment.

You live for these quiet times.

The quiet that allows you to disassemble, that you may re-arrange yourself, for tomorrow.

When you were younger, you wished for someone who could’ve told you that life was hard. You want to say that nobody told you growing up was going to be hard work. You want to say that nobody told you there would be days with grief overwhelming, but you don’t.

You bite your tongue and you press your lips tight, because it doesn’t matter.

It never matters.

What matters is how you keep going. And that you keep going.
I Spent $50k For an Ultra Fancy Degree — Was It Worth It?
By: Niharika Sodhi
Tags: Future, Study Abroad, Higher Education, Education, Life

Have you been contemplating about getting a degree from a top university/university abroad?

Let me paint a picture of your state of mind.

You’ve been brought up with the notion of getting a university degree to land a high-paying job at a good company. If you are an executive, you’re contemplating a Masters which will accelerate your career.

You look at Linkedin and see that most top professionals come from great universities.

But, it also costs a bomb!

Lately, you’re reading about how degrees do not matter and skills do. You’re seeing people online make a six-figure income by doing what they love. And you don't need a fancy degree for that.

But a little part of your soul also craves for a safety net. Get a great job, meet intellectuals, have your medical covered and secure your retirement.

Moreover, not everybody hates their corporate job. Some really do thrive in it.

However, the pandemic has left millions unemployed. The world is moving to a digital segment.

Which again makes you think, is it worth it?
Bowie State University offering a Hip-Hop Minor Program
By: Brian E. Young
Tags: Music, Creativity

One of the things I loved the culture and curriculum at Bowie State. For Fine and Performing Arts majors, we had to take courses on the history of people of color, women, subcultures. For a creative, surrounding yourself with as many different perspectives as possible. I attended Bowie State in the early 2000s. Imagine a time when Wikipedia was brand new. Information on minority history was difficult to find anywhere on the internet.

The new Hip-Hop Minor offered at Bowie State will be a great opportunity to expand on the school’s current academic focus:

“Three new courses developed by Bowie State faculty will explore hip-hop’s roots in African and African-American culture and its societal impact, while developing projects that span multiple academic disciplines. Melchishua designed a hip-hop studio course focused on visual arts design. Renowned hip-hop scholar, musician and author Dr. William Smith created a course exploring black contemporary music and its impact on society. Helen Hayes Award-nominated playwright, director and actor Greg Morrison will teach a hip-hop theater course he developed to introduce students a unique form of musical theater.”

When I attended, professors knew their students, our goals, and dreams. Especially in Fine and Performing Arts where they’re full time professors as well as being artists in their own right. They were proud to be there. I had professors of various races and backgrounds. It’s hard to explain such a welcoming culture other than to say it’s common among HBCUs:

“In 2015, a Gallup poll was released showing students at HBCUs had a higher sense of well-being in five areas (purpose, social, financial, community, and physical) compared to students who did not attend HBCUs.” “HBCU grads were substantially more likely to say that they had professors who cared about them and mentors who helped them pursue their goals”

The program emphasizes learning a lot of history in context. We’d learn abuut Bach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Monet. We’d study Cab Calloway, Zora Neal Hurston, and Henry Ossawa Tanner in the same breath.

There’s whole history of minority artists that is mostly ignored in our culture. I think that’s one of the biggest things I learned. That it’s possible that I’m not going to be surrounded by images of successful people like me in popular culture and history. You still gotta go out there and do your thing.
Should I Be Ashamed of My Insecurities?
By: Yael Wolfe
Tags: Relationships, This Happened To Me, Self Improvement, Self, Self Love

I’ve always tried to be honest about my insecurities. I think humans, in general, are insecure creatures, and most of the time, I don’t feel ashamed of my own.

Who among us doesn’t feel insecure sometimes about the way we look? Our bank accounts? Our careers? How other people see us? Our intelligence? Hell, our very loveability? Isn’t that part of the human experience?

I make no secret of the fact that my insecurity about my looks runs deep and affects everything I do and everything that I am. Sorting through the shame and fear and discomfort I have around my body image has been excruciatingly painful, scary, and difficult. I still don’t know how to “fix” it (or even if it can be fixed) but I believe it’s best to face it head-on, to take action in spite of my insecurity, and to be very honest about it so other people might feel empowered by my determination.

I’m insecure about my intelligence. I know I’m smart and highly educated (and I paid out the nose for that education) but I’m not smart smart. My brother is a full-on genius and I always wanted to be smart like that. To be able to figure stuff out with only two seconds of thought. To be able to solve high-level mathematical equations and build anything that catches my fancy and know how to code and… I often worry that people look at me and my obsession with crystals and chakras and spiritual practices and think that I’m a dumb hippy (which I’ve been called countless times).

I’m insecure about my life. Deeply, deeply insecure. I know there are many people who see me as a failure (both as a human and as a woman) because I didn’t get married or have children. I didn’t make those choices — it just kinda turned out that way — but I know there are people who think I’m incapable of being in a relationship, people who think I’m not sexy or worthy enough to have a husband, people who think I’m selfish because I didn’t have kids… I also know that there are people in my life who don’t think I am a competent caregiver because, having never become a mother I “just don’t get it.” This is a very sensitive area for me — a bruise on my soul that never quite heals.

And guess what? I’m insecure about my basic worth as a human being. I constantly worry that I’m not worthy of other people’s love. I constantly tally up the things that I do for others and only ever see myself falling short. Surely, I don’t do enough to earn the love of the people I love. And if I mess up? If I lose my temper or fail to be there when someone needs me… What then? That feels like something I can’t recover from. Too big a transgression. If I’m barely enough as I am for people to love me, there’s no room for mistakes.
Demystifying Blockchain in the Age of Disruption
By: Janine Mapa
Tags: Ledger, Finance Management, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain Technology, Bitcoin

It seems like blockchain and cryptocurrencies are hot topics these days. I have friends who have Bitcoin — one even gave me 0.1 BTC as a Christmas present! I’ve also heard of other cryptocurrencies/coins in the past — other than these, I wasn’t very familiar with the concept. I have to admit that I knew little about blockchain and crytocurrencies until I attended MAP’s general membership meeting last July 4, 2018.

Mr. Tom Menner, director for Solution Architecture in Asia for R3 Singapore, was the day’s speaker. I will not claim to be an expert after just an hour’s session on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but it definitely made me less confused than I was before I went in!

Here are my key takeaways:

1. It all started with a white paper.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto (just a pseudonym) wrote a white paper entitled Bitcoin — a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which explained that Bitcoin makes transferring value automatic, anonymous, and digital. While anonymous, these transactions still have to be recorded in a ledger that cannot be changed. It was in this white paper that two concepts were introduced: cryptocurrency and blockchain.

Credits: Janine Mapa

2. Blockchain and cryptocurrency are two different concepts.

At first I thought that blockchain was synonymous to cryptocurrency — but I was wrong. According to Tom Menner, blockchain is “a distributed ledger that records transaction data between multiple distrustful parties automatically and in a verifiable and immutable way.” Basically, it’s a growing list of entries or “blocks” that is secured using cryptography. This ledger delivers one immutable version of the truth. Once a block is added, that block cannot be modified.

Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is “a digital asset system designed to work as a peer-to-peer medium of exchanging value and that uses cryptography to secure transactions, control creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. The value of cryptocurrency is set by scarcity, utility, and supply and demand.”

Credits: Janine Mapa

3. Is crypto and blockchain the future? We don’t know yet!

This technology is relatively new. While there are solid use cases for it, it also has its limitations. For one, it cannot replace credit cards and other payment systems yet. Visa, for example, can handle over 5,000 transactions per minute — blockchain isn’t designed to do that. At the same time, the value of this currency is still fluctuating and it’s still too early to tell if investing in cryptocurrency will yield actual results. It’s still a maturing space, but a very exciting space to watch as well.
Weekly Machine Learning Research Paper Reading List — #6
By: Durgesh Samariya
Tags: Machine Learning, Academia, Learning, Research, Reading

Authors: Hoang-Vu Nguyen, Emmanuel Müller, and KlemensBöhm

Venue: Big Data Research

Paper: URL

Abstract:

In many real-world applications, data is collected in high dimensional spaces. However, not all dimensions are relevant for data analysis. Instead, interesting knowledge is hidden in correlated subsets of dimensions (i.e., subspaces of the original space). Detecting these correlated subspaces independently of the underlying mining task is an open research problem. It is challenging due to the exponential search space. Existing methods have tried to tackle this by utilizing Apriori search schemes. However, their worst case complexity is exponential in the number of dimensions; and even in practice they show poor scalability while missing high quality subspaces.

This paper features a scalable subspace search scheme (4S), which overcomes the efficiency problem by departing from the traditional levelwise search. We propose a new generalized notion of correlated subspaces which gives way to transforming the search space to a correlation graph of dimensions. We perform a direct mining of correlated subspaces in this graph, and then, merge subspaces based on the MDL principle in order to obtain high dimensional subspaces with minimal redundancy. We theoretically show that our search scheme is more general than existing search schemes. Our empirical results reveal that 4S in practice scales near-linearly with both database size and dimensionality, and produces higher quality subspaces than state-of-the-art methods.
5 Marketing Pitfalls for Creatives and How to Avoid Them
By: Allegue Wessim
Tags: Business, Marketing, Art, Social Media, Creativity

5 Marketing Pitfalls for Creatives and How to Avoid Them

Create a modern strategy and get close to your audience

Photo by Erico Marcelino on Unsplash

You’ve probably noticed the demand for creatives within the job industry is on the rise these last few years.

We’re also witnessing a diversification of jobs in the creative industries.

This growth can be mainly attributed to the technological advances we’re experiencing. The internet and mobile started it, and now we’re seeing a whole new economy on the rise.

Nowadays, not only traditional artists (musicians, painters, dancers, stylists, etc.) are required to promote themselves and their art, but all the new era of creatives (UX designers, streamers, content creators, AR/VR designers, etc.) are also forced to market themselves. It allows them to stay relevant and to grow their revenue.

So what does it mean concretely for creatives?

On one side, having all these new technological tools at our disposal makes it easier for us to get our content out there and monetize it. On the flip side, it became really hard to stand out

Since everyone is unique and has their own story and qualities, I’m going to share with you the most common mistakes artists tend to make when it comes to marketing and how to avoid them — in hopes that you can avoid them and succeed at your own craft.
Why Worry and Imagine the Worst?
By: Caroline De Braganza
Tags: Mental Health, Life Lessons, Friendship, Love, Life

I wrote this story three weeks ago in which I said I’d reached out to two friends with whom I’d lost contact. Having turned 69 the previous week, I wanted to reconnect before my time is up.

I wrote if it didn’t work out, I’d be proud that at least I’d tried.

What I did not expect was the anxiety of waiting for a reply.

Will she?

Won’t she?

What if she doesn’t?

What’s wrong with me?

The first reply

The friend, with whom I’d spent a fantastic holiday in Lesotho way back in 1959, replied to my email within two days.

She now lives in Guatemala but her late husband was Spanish. The family lived in Spain raising a family of four kids. Long story short — if I’m ever in Madrid, I can stay at the house she still has there.

Well, that’s great. But kind of superficial, if you know what I mean. I’d told her, without whinging too much, of my financial circumstances, so making me an offer I’m unlikely ever to accept is not what I was looking for.

I wanted connection. This kind of felt like a polite brushoff.

The second reply

Now here’s where the lesson lies.

We’d been close friends in high school, getting up mischief together — bunking school to go to movies or sneaking off to smoke on the hockey field. And lots of laughter!

She went off to Art School and me to Secretarial College.

(I’d wanted to go to university to do a BA in Drama but had been told in no uncertain terms that now I’d finished school I should get a job and pay my way — so much for family love).

She and I hung out together on weekends, shopping together for cool music such as The Mothers of Invention, and Blues and Soul music and going to mixed race parties (against the law in the days of apartheid), where the wine flowed, and the air was thick with marijuana smoke.

But we drifted apart. She left for the UK, and I got married at 19.

(I thought I was so grown up! I’d left home when I received my first pay check at 17 — and bought my first guitar!)

Anyhow, through another classmate tracking me down in 2016 for the 50-year reunion of our graduating class, I connected with her again. Neither of us attended the reunion as we’d been rebels at our private posh school and had no wish to retrace our steps.

My life had crashed again, and I didn’t want her to know my woes.
Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo 2020 参加レポート Day2
By: Yasuko Naito
Tags: Agile, Leadership, Japanese, Scrum

Lost in Translation: The Manager's Role in Agile - Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo 2020

Your organization has moved to autonomous, self-organizing teams. Everyone is trained and coached on their new role…
Where are residents struggling to breathe?
Tags: Smart Cities, Green Energy, Urban Planning, Sustainability, Public Health

The answer to this question will surprise you.

In a recent Strong Towns blog, writer Stephen Hardy referenced an MIT study directly attributing air pollution to 200,000 premature deaths in the U.S. every year. According to Hardy’s research, that’s more deaths than murders (16,100), automobile fatalities (32,700), and deaths from strokes (128,000) combined.

Pinpointing areas in your community where residents are struggling to breathe and coming up with solutions to remedy air quality, has never been more important.

The first step in approaching this issue is discovering where it exists. Below is a map of Tampa that shows the Respiratory Hazard Index. This index shows the risks for multiple air toxins with similar adverse health effects combined to create a hazard index. Note that a higher index score is bad. A higher score means there is a higher concentration of toxins in the air relative to the rest of the country.

Where are residents struggling to breathe in Tampa? (Use your mouse to interact with this map and explore the charts that include additional data in the toolbar)
What Happens When You Love a Child Sex Abuser?
By: Toni Tails
Tags: Mental Health, Sexual Assault, Parenting, Relationships, Child Sex Abuse

Susan* arrived home early unsettled to find her back door unlocked. She heard a noise inside, and quietly tip-toed down the hall to investigate. She peeked through a crack in her bedroom door. She could see her husband was naked and talking softly to someone on the bed.

Susan was heart-broken that her husband was cheating on her. She was deeply in love with him and thought he felt the same way.

Susan threw open the door, ready for a confrontation. What she saw horrified her. Her young son was lying naked on her bed. Her husband stood over their son in an aroused state.

Susan grabbed her son and called the police. Over the next several weeks, Susan learned more about the sexual trauma her son experienced. She became increasingly depressed and was plagued by nightmares.

What Susan experienced is called secondary traumatization. Secondary traumatization occurs when a secondary victim experiences the effects of trauma similar to the victim. In Susan’s case, knowledge of her son’s sex abuse caused her to experience the ripple effects of trauma.

Mental Health Study

The Australian Institute of Family Studies did a study based on interviews with 11 women.¹ These women attended a support group for mothers whose children had been sexually abused. Like Susan, in each case, the husband/father was the abuser.

In the study, the mothers all experienced the following;

Guilt

The initial reaction from mothers of children sexually abused by their partners was guilt and failure. They felt that they should have known about the abuse and prevented it.

Mothers also felt guilty for loving a person who would hurt their children. They felt that their love blinded them and was a defect in their character.

“I used to have nightmares about one of my kids being sexually abused. I didn’t know that the nightmare was a reality. When I found out, it was more devastating than I could ever have imagined. I failed to protect my babies.” — mother of 2 sexually abused children

Anger

The mothers felt angry and betrayed by their partner, who was supposed to help protect their child.

“I was angry at him, yeah. I wanted to kill him. I hated him.” — mother of a sexually abused child

Depression

The mothers all experienced varying levels of depression. They felt that treating their depression would help their children cope.

“When I found out my husband, the man that I loved, had raped our daughter… I wanted to die.” — mother of a sexually abused child
A Saturday Morning Experience
By: Sam Adekunle
Tags: Opportunities, Feminists, Bossy, Features

I know we’ve been talking about giving women opportunities while encouraging us to be bold for change but last Saturday, I had the most bizarre encounter with a fellow woman.

So a friend invited me to participate in the filming of a business series as one of the panellists. It was to take place at 10am prompt and by 9:30am, the cameramen and all the panellists were ready but that’s when the whole drama started.

The anchor or moderator who was a young woman, considered to be a financial expert and fully paid for her role in the filming refused to show up at 10am and then began making a series of inordinate demands.

First she said she needed clothing options and the organisers had to run around looking for fashion stylists.

Next she requested for a hair stylist and me, with my Ghana weaving sat right there, watching the producers commence the hunt for a hairstylist.

Time check, 12:45pm

The moderator was STILL missing only for her to request for a make up artist to come beat her face up in her house because she’s unwilling to step out without make up.

REALLY??

?

Of course it was only a matter of time before this woman became a standard against which other hardworking and respectful women were measured. The other panellist and everyone soon began making comments about how it was difficult working with a woman, how a man would never have asked for a barber or even a fashion stylist…

At that point, I’ve had enough. I couldn’t believe I deprived myself of a good Saturday’s sleep, left my husband’s birthday and my 11 months old son to go meet up with a spoilt lady throwing tantrums…

As I left the venue, I kept on thinking about the failed filming, the celebrity anchor and my experience. Three lessons came to mind:

1. If you are fortunate enough in life to achieve a little success, never ever think you are better than others. Help others succeed because it is the right thing to do. It does not take God more than a second to put down one and lift up another.

2. People make people and respect for others is not even negotiable.

3. A little bit of success or progress has a way of changing people and letting them have a huge disconnect to the past realities they have lived. The fact that you are now called a queen by everyone doesn’t mean you are the queen of England. Don’t even deceive yourself.

To thy own self, be true…
3화 민서는 자란다 : 제안의 통로에서 시민의 공론장으로
By: 성예슬 쩨리
Tags: 민주주의서울, 시민공론장, 서울시가묻습니다, 공론장

in Both Sides of the Table
Arsenal de Ferramentas de UX: quais os seus instrumentos de trabalho?
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Design, Tool, User Experience, Arsenal De Ferramentas, UX

Get this newsletter By signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices.

Check your inbox

Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription.
C# SDK Bounty
By: Lin Li
Tags: Bounty Program, C Programming, Web Development, Cryptocurrency

There are already many SDK created by the community of Mixin Network, such as Go lang, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby. Five SDK writers have already received 50 XIN tokens as the contribution award.

Mixin network need C# SDK now. The best C# SDK provider will receive 50 XIN tokens which worth about $5000.

Application developer resources

Send email to lilin@mixin.one or download Mixin Messenger and find me by searching Mixin id 31367.
How to Dex: Sparkdex 66% cash back referral explained
Tags: Trading, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Referrals

Sparkdex is offering 66% cash back when you refer a user.

How to Dex articles are tailored to cover everything from how to trade, how to create your own coin and other epic features one can do on the Sparkdex.

Today we look into how to get 66% cashback on transactions fees on Sparkdex.

This will be a short tutorial as it is an easy process.

Those who refer get paid from the transaction fees of the user who used their link. The referrer needs to be a Life Time Member aka LTM for eligibility.

Allocation of the transaction fee is as follows :

66% to the referrer — You

20% to the network — BitShares

14% to the faucet — Spark

Becoming a Lifetime Member

When logged in, go to menu, expand and find membership section.

Basic member on Sparkdex

To get 80% cashback on transaction fees buy a lifetime subscription by clicking the blue button “Buy Lifetime Subscription”.

Paying for Lifetime Membership

Make payment and confirm to upgrade to LTM.

Referring Users

(Membership page on Sparkdex)

Once you are a lifetime member you are given your referral link.

Share your referral link to new users to sign up and earn 66% cashback on transaction fees every time they transact!

Edit : This article has been corrected from 80% to 66% for the cash back mechanism for Sparkdex referrals.

Want to learn more ?

Read how to create a Sparkdex account

Read how to deposit bitcoin or ethereum to Sparkdex

. . .

Thanks for learning how to withdraw bitcoin and ethereum from Sparkdex.

If you have any questions reach out to our growing community!

Website — Newsletter — Twitter — Telegram — Reddit

By joining or subscribing to the links above you will only get Sparkdex specific content.
Difference Between Java Monitor and Lock
By: Vaibhav Singh
Tags: Programming, Semaphore, Java Concurrency, Mutex, Java8

This Story Was Originally Published on my Blog@linqz.io here.

As we all are aware, in Java programming language each object in Java is associated with a monitor, which a thread can lock or unlock.

Every object, in addition to having an associated monitor, has an associated wait set. When an object is first created, its wait set is empty. Elementary actions that add threads to and remove threads from wait sets are atomic. Wait sets are manipulated solely through the methods Object.wait , Object.notify(Notification Action) , and Object.notifyAll(Notification Action) .

Only one thread at a time may hold a lock on a monitor (i.e at any point only one thread can enter into critical area which is decided by Java Scheduler based on some criteria (e.g. FIFO)). Any other threads attempting to lock that monitor are blocked until they can obtain a lock on that monitor (i.e remaining threads wait in the Wait Set block of the monitor. If the current thread is suspended for some reason, then the thread is moved back to the wait -set area and later rescheduled to acquire the critical area).

Relation between Object and its monitor

As explained in my blog about Object’s House Keeping information(Java Primitives vs Wrapper : Which one to use) every java object contains lock information.

If any thread want to access instance variables of that object; then thread must “own” the object’s lock (set some flag in lock memory area). This is the critical area or lock memory area which holds the lock related information.
How Machismo Hounded a Pop Culture Icon, a Murderer, and Everyone in Between
By: Hanmin Lee
Tags: Culture, Mental Health, Music, Masculinity, Life

How Machismo Hounded a Pop Culture Icon, a Murderer, and Everyone in Between

Frank Ocean and Elliot Rodger seem like polar opposites, but both are products of the same plague.

Rory, via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Because of his rare public appearances, sporadic music releases, and ghostlike social media presence, many regard Frank Ocean as an enigmatic figure. He’s a bohemian in today’s fame-obsessed culture — one that values men by aggression, financial riches, and hypersexuality. These ideals are the touchstones for masculinity in the digital age.

For much of my teenage years I took them as threats to my self-worth; it was as if I needed physique, and money, and women to be someone. Frank Ocean, however, is the antithesis of this coming-of-age struggle.

I only started following his career a few years ago after Blonde’s release, but I proudly call myself a devotee. It is one of the first things I’ll say to people when introducing myself: I am a Frank Ocean fan. I admire Ocean for how he preserves his rough edges when crafting his portraits of humanity; his music forgoes the bravado of elusive perfection, instead searching for growth through bare vulnerability.

“There Will Be Tears,” a song from Ocean’s mixtape nostalgia, ULTRA., is a glimpse into his tumultuous boyhood. Ocean sings about the heartache he suffers from his deadbeat father. He also sings about the death of his grandfather, who was the only father figure he ever had. The lyrics describe Ocean hiding his crying face to his friends, who grew up fatherless as well:

Hide my face hide my face

Can’t let em see me crying

‘Cause these boys didn’t have no fathers neither

And they weren’t crying

My friend said it wasn’t so bad

You can’t miss what you ain’t had

The song ends with Ocean beseeching questions about why his father abandoned him. There’s no one to answer Ocean though, so his grief remains unattended.

Most men would consider what he did as social suicide; we instinctually bound our emotions to preserve a red-blooded image. Ocean’s friends, despite also not having fathers, mask themselves with apathy, which makes Ocean believe he does not have permission to cry. When coping with anything heavy, reticence is a man’s primal defense mechanism — one that is bridled by the terror that others will lacerate us more for revealing our tears and cuts.

There is a pervasive untruth among us that the man who cries will crumble. Holding back tears may protect our pride, but the show eventually ends, the armor rusts away — and when all that remains is pent-up turmoil, the side-effects are destructive. Kanye West had a public meltdown because of it. Mac Miller and Juice Wrld lost their lives because of it.
ContinualAI: a Non-Profit Research Organization on Continual Learning for AI
By: Vincenzo Lomonaco
Tags: Continual Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Community, Research

Humans have the extraordinary ability to learn continually from experience. Not only can we apply previously learned knowledge and skills to new situations, we can also use these as the foundation for later learning. One of the grand goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is building an artificial “Continual Learning” agent that constructs a sophisticated understanding of the world from its own experience through the autonomous incremental development of ever more complex skills and knowledge.

ContinualAI is an official non-profit research organization and the largest open community on Continual Learning for AI. We aim at connecting people and working better together on this fascinating topic we consider fundamental for the future of AI!

Fig. 2: Growing interest in CL as shown by the number of papers published each year on the subject. Based on Scopus indexed papers, limiting the category to Computer Science and searching for the exact keywords in the legend.

ContinualAI is also a striving effort to make research in continual learning and AI more open, collaborative, democratic and transparent. We support open science at every level. Everything made at ContinualAI is open and freely accessible but maybe more importantly, all the projects are open-source and collaborative since the beginning (especially in the decision processes) and reflect the needs and the ideas of the entire community, rather than an handful of elite groups.

ContinualAI: From 1 to 400+ Members!

Fig 3: ContinualAI, an non-profit research organization and open community on Continual Learning for AI.

ContinualAI was started in January 2018 by Vincenzo Lomonaco and made possible with the early contribution of Keiland Cooper and Martin Cimmino, who were finding very difficult to collaborate and discuss with other researchers working on the same topic. Information were also hard to find and gather in a single place!

Now, we are very excited to see our community grow so fast and steady, even reaching and exceeding the number of 448 members! 🔥 😮 We are always happy to add new members and get some help with our open projects or simply discuss about CL, so join us today!

Fig 4: ContinualAI slack channel statistics.

Board Members and Top Contributors
What does GDPR mean for you?
Tags: English, Privacy, Gdpr, People Power, Personal Data

The 25th May is here, and that (for the team at people.io at least) means one thing — the General Data Protection Regulation comes to LIFE. Recently, you may have noticed emails piling up from all sorts of brands asking you to accept their future communications. This has been prompted by GDPR and its tougher rules around consent. But what is this legislation and what does it mean for you?

GDPR has been brought about to replace previous data privacy legislation, which at over twenty years old is looking pretty ancient in this fast changing digital world. The new legislation is more detailed, more comprehensive, more current, and protects the data of all EU citizens, wherever the company collecting the data is based (the UK government is currently working on a bill that will mirror the provisions of GDPR post-Brexit).

We’ve broken down three of the most important changes for you:

Your personal data will be better taken care of

GDPR will ensure companies can no longer just hoover up as much of your data as they can find, or sell it to other companies without your consent. They will also need to be far more careful about how they store any data they do hold on you. So in theory at least, companies will be storing less data, more securely. Plus, if there does happen to be a data breach, they’ll need to inform you sharpish (within 72 hours) so you can take necessary precautions.

You will have more control over what data is collected

Pre-ticked boxes will no longer fly under GDPR, and companies will need to have your explicit consent to collect your data. The privacy policies will also need to be written in a clear and understandable language (you may have noticed a lot of the emails you’ve been receiving concern updates to privacy policies). Hopefully this means you better understand what data is being collected and why, so that you know what you’re agreeing to upfront.

You will be able to find out what information is being held about you

You will now be able to contact companies to learn what data they hold on you. You can also ask them to delete it (rather aptly named the right to be forgotten), or correct it if it’s wrong.

In a world where data is becoming one of the most important currencies, it needs to be well protected. GDPR represents a big shift for companies (who’ll be keen to avoid the hefty fines involved), and has been created with consumers at its heart. The 25th May is a day to celebrate when it comes to data privacy.

At people.io we’re working with companies to show them they don’t need to own and store large amounts of personal data — we can create value for both sides of the data relationship, while keeping people in complete control.
My experience migrating our projects to .NET Core 3
By: Jan Fredrik Drabløs
Tags: Aspnetcore, Net Core, Microsoft, Azure, Net Core 3

ASP.NET Core 3 project

There have always been some changes you need to do in your code when migrating to newer versions of .NET Core. The steps are listed here. We have a few web sites and web APIs in our project, hosted in Azure and on-prem VMs. If you plan on migrating to a new version of .NET Core soon after it’s released, you need to publish your applications as self-contained on Azure, as it usually takes 3 weeks before the new runtime is installed. You can see that status on .NET Core on Azure here. Migrating to .NET Core was straight forward except for the following issues:

System.Text.Json

One of the changes in .NET Core 3 is the new System.Text.Json namespace. It is meant to replace the Newtonsoft.Json library. You can read about it here. There are some pros and cons with this and I decided not to use it in most of our projects. Newtonsoft.Json is a library we use extensively and there is quite a bit of refactoring required to make the code compile. But it’s not enough to make it compile, as there are some differences in the behavior. There are also some basic features missing, like JObject. It doesn’t support serialization of types with inheritance (properties in the base class are all null). My advice is not to use System.Text.Json in most scenarios as it’s not mature enough. It shouldn’t be the default choice yet in my opinion. Luckily, it’s easy to configure the project to use Newtonsoft.Json. First you need to instead reference the following NuGet package: Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.NewtonsoftJson. Then update Startup.ConfigureServices to call AddNewtonsoftJson:

services.AddControllers()

.AddNewtonsoftJson();

Silently adding environment variables in the Web.config

The other issue I had, was that it silently added some environment variables in the Web.config in one of the projects. By default, you don’t have the Web.config file in your ASP.NET Core project, but we had added it some time back. The environment variables in the Web.config overrides the settings in the Azure portal. One of them was this:

<environmentVariable name="ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT" value="Development" />

This caused some strange behavior when I deployed it to Azure, as it would always read the appsettings.Development.json file and the following if statement in Startup.ConfigureServies was always true:

env.IsDevelopment()

UseWebpackDevMiddleware is deprecated

One of the projects is calling the now deprecated method app.UserWebpackDevMiddleware() in Startup.ConfigureServies when debugging. I haven’t found a replacement for this other than this post. This is only used when debugging, so it’s not a major issue to still use this deprecated method.

One of the things I also updated was the RC version 5 of Swashbuckle.AspNetCore. It has a nicer looking UI and uses the new Open API Spec v 3.
Why Proof-Of-Stake Systems Can Benefit From External Oversight
By: Tal Kol
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Identity, Bitcoin

The objectivity property is unique to PoW (and similar methods like VDFs) but missing from most PoS implementations, leading to the circular trust weakness of a closed system.

Why is the lack of objectivity painful in PoS networks? The core offering of these networks is trust. As clients of the network, we should be able to verify the correctness of the relevant state and transactions. Verifying the correctness of data requires knowledge of the elected validators, since they are the ones allowed to sign blocks. In order to verify the elected validators, one can attempt to verify the election calculations. However, the calculations and the votes reside on the chain itself, signed by the same validators that we’re trying to verify in the first place. This cyclic dependency prevents the client from objectively verifying the correctness of their data. There are workarounds like trusting one of the validators, but these solutions are suboptimal. When our core offering is trust, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.

If we could add objectivity to PoS, this will provide us with the missing external oversight — and give us a PoS implementation that is much more trustworthy. This will also give a pretty good answer to Lubin’s fears that the elected nodes in the system can collude and censor (particularly regarding the voting process that elects them).

So, is it possible to use PoW for this purpose without affecting the efficiency of PoS? There is a straightforward way to do this and it’s actually pretty simple. All you have to do is store the votes externally — preferably on a different decentralized network that is based on PoW.

Going back to our Westeros example, this would mean that the voting booths where the ballots are stored, will no longer be under Lannister control. The voting booths will be controlled by somebody else (external to the Game of Thrones universe) that will guarantee the sanctity of the elections. Once the elections have been made, whichever king is elected, is free to rule inside Westeros without external involvement.

The last part is important. If we are to maintain the efficiency of PoS, the rest of the network operation — mainly executing smart contracts on the PoS network, storing the state under consensus, doing everything a blockchain does — must not rely on PoW anymore. The only thing PoW will provide is an external guarantee of objectivity that will let any observer confirm that the PoS network is not colluding and has indeed been purely elected.

This is how this approach is different from layer 2 solutions. Second layers delegate all security and trust to the base layer. The base layer can overturn smart contract results, for example, or override state modifications made by the second layer. Our approach will still make the PoS system retain its own security and trust and thus hold value of its own.
Industry Office Hours with Tenaris: Emerging technologies for traditional industries
By: Berkeley Master Of Engineering
Tags: Industry, Capstone, Career Advice, Data Science, Energy

Adonis Ichim, Technical Sales Engineer

What interests you and/or your company about working with MEng students?

“We believe that addressing some of our industry’s challenges through this capstone project partnership will create some synergy with future engineering leaders who can tackle our topic from a technical and economic standpoint. I am eager to interact with and learn from students outside of my core area of expertise (petroleum engineering) while getting a fresh view of our standard approach.

What does it mean to be a technical sales engineer?

I help customers by providing products and services through engineered, value-based solutions. Working in a fast-paced setting, I see different aspects of the energy and manufacturing industries, from designing a product or a process for a specific need to manufacturing and deploying it. Most times, the question we answer is: What is the optimum approach that will maintain safety and environmental stewardship while reducing cost and increasing efficiency?

What is your vision for the data science industry in the next 5–10 years?

In the energy industry, specifically oil and gas, we have historically stored colossal amounts of data that, for various reasons, were not processed and interpreted to their full potential in terms of value creation. These data stem from the exploration phase, or are recorded during drilling, completion, and production, so they may span over several decades. Since we now have more power to store, analyze and draw conclusions from large data sets, the industry will spend more time creating models and educating itself based on it. I hope that domain knowledge will prime the future developments and enable traditional engineers to focus on solving other issues or creating new processes/tools. With this approach, we can also better automate physical processes to gain efficiencies and reduce risks.

I hope that domain knowledge will prime the future developments and enable traditional engineers to focus on solving other issues or creating new processes/tools.

What advice do you have for the next generation of engineers? What skills should they focus on learning in grad school?

I think that independent of your research area, as a graduate student you should always keep an eye on the big picture. A good way to do so is through networking. Gaining niche expertise is important, but being open to learning from others is just as rewarding.”