fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Lusty
By: Sean Zhai
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Lust, People, Romance, Haiku

Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.

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How to Fuse Your Passion to Your Purpose and Why You Should
By: Gregory D. Welch
Tags: Inspiration, Psychology, Self, Creativity, Self Improvement

How to Fuse Your Passion to Your Purpose and Why You Should

A better understanding of passion

Photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash

Let’s be honest, life is a careful balance between the roses and the blood-thirsty thorns that carry them.

No matter what you are passionate about in life, there are going to be days when it’s going to feel like passion isn’t enough. No matter how much passion you might have for a thing in the beginning, or still yet love it in the future. Some days are going to make you question everything you’re working to accomplish.

For those days, you might take some strength from the German word for passion: “In German, the word for passion is Leidenschaft, which literally means the ability to endure adversity.” (Jon Jachimowicz and Sam McNerney, The Problem With Following Your Passion)

Isn’t that a much better way to think about passion? Not a promise of happiness or a guarantee that it’s going to work out — we have lived long enough to know better, especially after living through the Pandemic. No, passion is a question of commitment, a question of whether you’re willing to endure both the good and the bad in pursuit of the things you’re after.

In this light, passion doesn’t make promises to us, we make promises to it. That no matter what, we’re going to keep moving forward. We’re going to find a way to keep the effort going, even if we have to endure ugly days, or self-doubt and even if we have to adapt a few things. We are going to keep moving forward.

Let’s take a closer look at this and how passion and purpose can be fused into one new, empowering, whole.
Red Snow — VIFF 2019. World Premiere
By: Jennifer Hammersmark
Tags: Indigenous People, Pashtun, Review, Gwichin, Movie Review

Marie Clements is a Canadian Métis playwright, performer, director, producer and screenwriter. What an honour to view the world premiere of this fantastic film. At the festival, we were blessed to witness this opening:

I am nervous about writing this review, because this film is so beautiful, and perfect, and full of indigenous messages and metaphors that I cannot fully understand. But I must, because it was so perfect and beautiful.

The film begins with Dylan, a Gwich’in soldier from the Canadian Arctic, who is caught in an ambush in Kandahar, Afghanistan. When captured by the Taliban, he must confront tormenting memories he experienced at home in the Canadian north.

This is a story of pain, grief, bravery, trust, friendship, and survival.

One of my favourite quotes in the film is from an Afghan woman, who when asked about being dressed like a man, she replies: “If I’m going to die, I want to know what it’s like to be free.” Now there is a peek into Pashtun culture.

I do not want to share any more about the specifics of the film (not wanting to be a spoiler). Suffice to say, it is a must see. You will not be disappointed. It is brilliant, and it is playing again two more times at the VIFF festival: Sunday October 6th at 11:00 am, and Tuesday October 8th at 6:00 pm, both at Cineplex International Village.

After the film, during the Q&A, Marie Clements was asked about her motivation for the film. Her response, paraphrased: “When I was looking at images from the war in Afghanistan, the peoples looked like our Canadian indigenous peoples. It occurred to me as I noticed the similarities that the peoples from both of those cultures have survived — despite all odds.”
Word Crawls: The Best Challenge to Help Finish Your Writing
By: Kristen Poli
Tags: Goals, NaNoWriMo, Writing Challenge, Writing, Writing Tips

What is a word crawl?

A word crawl is a narrative-style challenge designed to give you small goals to make your word count soar. Many of these word crawls are based on a beloved fandom — there are plenty inspired by Disney, Harry Potter, and various video games and books — but there are plenty that are originally created by the writer.

Small goals within these word crawls help a writer boost their word count and may give them a bit of inspiration as well. The goals may be to write a certain number of words to overcome a hurdle, write within a time limit or reach a threshold in your word count.

For example, in a word crawl that is inspired by the fantasy genre, the writer may be tasked to write 100 words about a character choosing their traditional fantasy weapon — a sword, a mage staff, or a bow. Later, in the word crawl, the character may encounter some goblins — anything is possible.

Depending on their chosen weapon from earlier, you may have different writing goals before moving onto the next step. For example:

The character who chose the sword may have a steady fight and the writer must write for ten minutes.

The character who chose the mage staff may find it easy to dispatch the goblins with a fire spell, giving the writer a simple task of writing 50 words before moving on.

The character who chose the bow may find it difficult to fight in a close-range attack. The writer may have the more random task of rolling a die and writing words that are 100 times the result.

Word crawls on the NaNoWriMo forums have their own tag so we easily find them amid the Writing Challenges board. If one does not have a NaNoWriMo login to access the forums, many word crawls are also saved and converted on the organization’s Wikipedia found here.

If you do not have a NaNoWriMo login, I recommend getting one even if you do not plan on actively taking part in the NaNo challenge. It’s free and there’s a beautiful community of writers with plenty of resources to share!
Space Offer from Simcord
By: Bitbon System
Tags: Offer, Space, Simcord, Opportunity

The Bitbon System continues to expand the boundaries of opportunities for its Users, even beyond Earth. Today, Simcord, as the founder of the Bitbon System, has prepared a special spring gift for all Bitbon System Users: now each Bitbon owner can use his/her Bitbons with space benefit and purchase a land plot on Mars without much effort.

There are several options in different locations for almost every taste.

In the northern hemisphere, there are land plots on the Acidalia Planitia, formerly known as the Acidalia Sea and famous for its attractions such as “face”, “sphinx” and “pyramids”.

Also, vast areas are available on the Tharsis volcanic plateau with breathtaking views of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain on Mars and in the entire Solar System. Its height from the base reaches 27 km. In the future, Tharsis may become the industrial center of Mars and the main source of mineral resources.

Unique exotic places are limited and await their owners on the Thaumasia Planum in Arima twin craters, which have a diameter of about 50 km and are almost identical. If you buy any land plot in one of the Arima craters, you can get 60% off when purchasing the second one in the twin crater.

The most picturesque, desirable and, consequently, expensive land plots are located on the Meridiani Planum in Victoria crater with a diameter of 750 m, whose main attraction is the pattern at the bottom in the form of sand dunes. Such formations indicate the presence of water at the bottom of the crater in the distant past of the Red Planet. The territory of Victoria crater shows promise in terms of tourism development.

In the near future, the Bitbon System Users who purchased Martian territories will be able to fully use their land plots for the implementation of their business ideas through Contributing, especially considering the start of the Earth–Mars commercial cargo and passenger transit.

Happy April Fool’s Day! On behalf of the entire Simcord team, we wish you to stay positive and believe that your goals can be achieved!

We hope that this news with a touch of humor gave you a spring mood and enthusiasm for any of your undertakings. Undoubtedly, business plays an important role in our lives, but today our goal is to remind you not to forget to enjoy every moment of yours. Let’s not just build our lives around business but rather build our business so that our lives would be bright and full of meaning.
My dear old friend..
By: Anusha Murthy
Tags: Life Lessons, Poetry, Life

We grew up together, you were my lair,

The games of ours would never end!

Time flew fast and I moved away from there,

30 years later, you still haven’t moved, my dear old tree friend!
What If It Ends?
By: Scott Ninneman
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Poet, Poetry, Poems On Medium, Poem

What If It Ends?

What if this were the end?

Who would you see or call?

What if no days to come?

How would you spend it all?

What if the last sunrise

Greeted you on this day?

What if your lover’s smile

Disappeared as you pray?

What if tonight it’s done?

Tomorrow will not come

What if the timeline froze?

Your heart beat its last drum

What if the time was up?

What would you choose to change?

What if the song complete?

What would you rearrange?

What if the clock counts down?

What’d be your final act?

What if the lights go dim?

What line your final fact?

The truth is we know not

Just when our end will be

Each day must be embraced

With love and empathy

Life leaves when time runs out

The curtain falls unplanned

Take time to say what’s real

Give love without demand
Penn Engineer Boon Thau Loo on the Opportunity of Online Teaching
By: Penn Engineering
Tags: Online Education, Computer Science, Engineering, Education, Technology

Boon Thau Loo

This January, Penn Engineering enrolled the first cohort of students in its new, completely online Master of Computer and Information Technology (MCIT). Since then, Penn Engineers have been hard at work developing core courses and fine-tuning their online curriculum.

For Boon Thau Loo, Associate Dean of Master’s and Professional Programs for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the opportunity to delve into the realm of online education has changed his style of teaching both in the classroom and online.

In an article for the Penn Online Learning Initiative, Loo, who is a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, spoke with Whitney Stewart about how working with teaching assistants, instructional designers, and the new online medium benefited his teaching and his students, saying “teaching online allows faculty members to be at the forefront of a revolution in education.”

According to Stewart:

For context, Boon did not anticipate teaching online when he did. In fact, he often jokes that he ventured into the online space accidentally. When another faculty member slated to develop a core course for the Online Master of Computer and Information Technology (MCIT) realized they would be unable to teach it as planned, Loo assumed the responsibility. That pivotal decision quickly revealed itself to be an opportunity to enhance his pedagogical approach to teaching both online and on-campus.

Continue reading at Penn Online Learning Initiative, and learn more about MCIT Online at Penn Engineering Online Learning.
Introducing HODL.ZONE
By: Steven Masley
Tags: Lending, Fintech, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Btc

If this is your first time hearing about HODL.ZONE, there may be a chance you are missing out on easy profits. HODL.ZONE is designed to increase your profits if you plan on holding crypto, rather than actively trading. Like many of you, we believe in Bitcoin, and expect the price to rise. But you may not know that you can actually make your Bitcoin savings grow not only in value, but in size.

You’re saying I can make more Bitcoin with my Bitcoin?

Yes! You can do this through Poloniex’s lending system. Traders sometimes like to trade with more Bitcoin then they own. As a user, you can offer up your Bitcoin to these traders in the form of a loan, which means you collect interest. Essentially you are doing what the big banks do, but can do it on a smaller scale.

You may be wondering what the risks are, and if you hold crypto on Poloniex, there is no additional risk. As in, your BTC sitting in your Poloniex wallet, could be earning interest at no additional risk. Usually, the risk with loans comes when the borrower cannot pay back the loan and defaults. This risk is eliminated by Poloniex, by requiring collateral for the loan and automatically liquidating the margin trade if the borrowers runs short on funds.

Unlike big banks, these loans last anywhere from a few minutes to days rather than months. This benefits the lender, as your bitcoin is never tied up for very long, allowing you to pull out and act on market changes.
How to Fetch Contact Lists and Create a SearchBar in SwiftUI
Tags: Mobile Development, Programming, iOS, Swiftui, Swift

Main View (ContentView)

In our ContentView , we need to declare the three variables below:

contact will hold an array of our contact list.

will hold an array of our contact list. searchText will be used for the search text field.

will be used for the search text field. showCancelButton will determine when we are going to show the cancel button inside our view.
I wrote it
By: Maziar Ghaderi
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Poem, Writing

I wrote it

a free-verse poem about writing poems

The author. Credit: Maziar Ghaderi

I poem if I could

I’ll write it

A stone made of wood

I’ll bite it

The highs and lows

Survive on your toes

Means letting go

I know it

Left cold

Let in

Letter by letter

I wrote it

Maziar Ghaderi is a Toronto-based multimedia artist, educator, writer and director that works with film, multimedia and interactive technology. With a background in media production, Maziar strives to articulate his social commentary through metaphors, epiphanies and critiques. Follow him Medium page here.
React vs Vue.js vs Preact — Which one should you use?
By: Hong Yong
Tags: Vuejs, React, JavaScript, Technology, Web Development

React

React is a widely popular and well-maintained web framework created by Facebook. It has garnered a strong following of developers and contributors. One reason to choose React over the others would be its massive community support.

JSX is a syntax extension to Javascript, and is recommended to be used in React. This is how it looks like

const myImage = <img src={gallery.flowerUrl}></img>;

This allows developers to separate their codes into independent and reusable pieces of UI called components that contain markup and logic.

Here are the dependencies installed via npm

"react": "^16.13.1",

"react-dom": "^16.13.1",

"react-router-dom": "^5.2.0",

"react-scripts": "3.4.1"

The generated bundle had the largest size among the three frameworks, taking up 168KB. The average loading time of the website was 188.8ms, finishing in a close second place, at around 5% faster than Vue.js.

Vue.js

Vue.js is a progressive framework designed by Evan You, an ex-Google employee. It is used for building user interfaces. Vue.js is said to be easier to learn than React, as it builds on HTML which most web developers would already be familiar with.

Templates in Vue.js are written in HTML, which are the counterpart to React’s components. Thanks to this, Vue.js is more easily integrated into existing projects without too much overhead. This is how a template looks like

<ul>

<template v-for="item in cart">

<li>{{ item.itemName }}</li>

</template>

</ul>

Here are the dependencies installed via npm

"core-js": "^3.6.4",

"vue": "^2.6.11",

"vue-router": "^3.1.6"

The generated bundle had a size of 110KB, which is around 35% smaller than React. The average loading time of the website was 200.6ms, the last of the bunch and around 5% slower than React.

Preact

Preact is regarded as the lightweight alternative to React that uses the same API. Its selling point is that existing React applications can be easily converted to Preact by using preact/compat. It is a thin layer over Preact that attempts to achieve 100% compatibility with React.

Preact adds a few convenient features as compared to React, one of them being allowing arguments in Component.render()

class Foo extends Component {

state = { age: 1 }; render({ name }, { age }) {

return <div>Name: {name}, Age: {age}</div>;

}

}

The same code would not work in React, and the values will need to be passed in via state or props.

Here are the dependencies installed via npm

"preact": "^10.3.2",

"preact-render-to-string": "^5.1.4",

"preact-router": "^3.2.1"

The generated bundle only had a size of 36KB, which is a whopping 78% smaller than React. The average loading time of the website was 155.2ms, which is around 17% faster than React, and the fastest of the bunch.
“Stumbling In”
By: Luke Esterkyn
Tags: Stroke 9, Lyrics

“Stumbling In”

Lyrics to “Stumbling In” by Stroke 9

Listen free here.

I was long gone before I went away

I didn’t have what it takes

There was something in your eyes

Struck out when you walked in

Blacked out in a tailspin

I Wasn’t thinking right

that night

this won’t be the first time it’s crashing on me

I know someday you’re gonna find

a place to rest your weary mind

but when?

Now I’m standing in the light

Can’t you see the stars shining bright

for you

Standing in the light

That’s the best I’ll ever do

Well I’m not scared anymore

Like the time before

All i ever wanted were the simple things in life

nothin more, nothing more

Throttle wide open on the 442

Swallowing pills just to see what they do yah

Stumbling in -

Stumbling out-

It’s was all over when you started to shout HEY!

Are ya hearing me now?

Now I’m standing in the light

Can’t you see the stars shining bright

for you

Standing in the light

That’s the best I’ll ever do

Yah It’s all that I can scream about for a minute

Life’s what I dream about with you in it

Don’t walk away

What’s left to say
How early before a performance do bands perform soundchecks?
By: Matthias Orgler
Tags: Music, Concerts, Planning, Live Music, Music Business

Soundcheck

I am the founder of a gig planning software (gixtra.com), so I have some data on when bands plan their soundchecks.

Let me just say that it varies — depending on the band and the size of the event.

On some occasions bands have no time for a decent soundcheck. This often happens at festivals, where many artists play throughout the day. In this case, bands perform a so called “line check”, which is kind of a 10–30min stripped down soundcheck. This is usually followed by a few signs from the musicians towards the monitor technician during the first song of the set.

Most common are probably sound checks a few hours before the show. If a show starts at 8pm, doors might open at 7pm. The soundcheck in these cases ends right before doors open. So to have enough time, a band would begin soundchecking somewhere between 5 and 6pm.

If more than one band is playing, soundchecks happen in reverse order of the show. So the band opening the evening checks last, while the headliner (the band later in the main spot of the show) checks first (the curse of the headliner ;)).

In same cases, soundchecks have to happen much earlier. A typical reason for that are be TV interviews or other press events before the show. Also if a band plays at an event (like a city fair), the soundcheck might have to happen before the event opens (usually before noon) to spare visitors the soundcheck.

The data I see from bands and booking agents in Gixtra suggests, that 2–4 hours before the show is a common time to soundcheck.
The Covid-19 Virus Can Persist for Months: Why?
By: Shin Jie Yong
Tags: Health, Coronavirus, Future, Innovation, Technology

The Covid-19 Virus Can Persist for Months: Why?

Reason 3: Hiding in the saliva to evade the immune system. And what it means for immunity.

Virus clearance differs between individuals. It is also one reason why some recover from infections quicker than others. And the word recovery can be tricky, referring to either disappearance of clinical symptoms or virus elements, or both. This article will focus on virus clearance (i.e., being tested negative) rather than recovery.

Contents:

- Persistent Infection

- Reason 1: Co-existence

- Reason 2: Low Antibody Production

- Reason 3: Immune Evasion

- Reason 4: Reactivation or Reinfection

- Reason 5: Intermittent Viral Shedding

- The Good and Bad of Covid-19 Persistence

Persistent Infection

Published reports are now saying that positive diagnosis status for SARS-CoV-2 can last for months, despite being symptomless. This is a persistent infection, and they are by no means novel. “Persistent infections are characterized as those in which the virus is not cleared but remains in specific cells of infected individuals,” the Medical Microbiology textbook defined. “Persistent infections may involve stages of both silent and productive infection without rapidly killing or even producing excessive damage to host cells.”

It is not unusual for viruses to persist in the host, often without causing excessive harm.

Viruses cause most cases of persistent infections. Examples are herpes simplex virus, HIV, measles virus, cytomegalovirus, Epstein-bar virus, human T-cell leukaemia virus, hepatitis B virus, etc. Inferring from them, scientists agree that no sole mechanism underpins how persistent infection works. And the same applies to Covid-19 as well; scientists to date have come up with at least four reasons.
Fragile Flower
By: Lori Mccray
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Flowers, Love, Growth, Poetry

Photo mine, Peony ‘Norma Volz’

My soul was a hollow bone, without Love. My body as forsaken as a flower, cut off from its roots. With no way to flourish, no medium in which to grow, deprived of vital rooted-ness, I became my own enemy.

LBM 9/24/2020
Conversation Flow Using Procedural Muscle Memory
By: Mitchell Olson
Tags: Confidence, Relationships, Self Help, Communication Skills, Self Esteem

Simply said: “Once you have created a fruitful conversation, it is easier to start the next conversation.” So how do you start these conversations? Conversational Muscle Memory, Starting Small Conversational muscle memory is based on the idea that when you…
4 Popular Ways To Style Your React Components
By: Piero Borrelli
Tags: React, JavaScript, React Native, Programming, Technology

Your React applications are just that, an aggregation of components mixed together to create user interfaces and functionalities. Of course, you don’t want to leave your app sterile of colours, animations and cool stylings.

That’s why you should sincerely care about how you plan to customize and make beautiful your React components.

Following, you will find a list of the 4 most common ways to make your React applications look beautiful. But please, be careful. Because every coding solutions bring with itself the burden of the choice.

So you must be very careful about what you will choose based on what you need, your goals, and the dimension of your application.
Analyzing COVID-19 Papers with Python — Part 2
By: Ruslan Brilenkov
Tags: Programming, Python, Covid 19, Data Science, Computer Science

Regex Analysis

To use regular expressions, we have to import re module

import re

The most interesting part is to think about what information do we need to get from the scientific papers on the COVID-19 data. If we do not know what we are looking for, we will not find it. As a side note, this is also the reason for the observational bias, which means, we are more likely to find something if we have already decided to find it. So, there should be a balance between these two.

As a first thought, we might be interested in things like an incubation period. Which is the time elapsed between exposure to a virus, and the first symptoms to show up. Probably, the incubation period would contain information on the number/period of hours, or days (or maybe weeks).

In this case, we can split the text into sentences and analyze them separately. Let us also fish out those sentences with the word “incubation” mentioned specifically:

for sentence in output_string.getvalue().split(". "):

if "incubation" in sentence:

print(sentence)

Now, instead of printing this sentence, we can immediately apply our regex analysis. Recalling the cheat sheet from Part 1, we can look for integers and maybe floats using the ? modifier (match 0 or 1 repetition):

day = re.findall(r" ((\d{1,2}\.)?\d{1,2})", sentence)

For completeness, we can also add day/days in the end (but in general the time can be in hours or weeks, for example). In this example, we will be looking for only a number of days:

day = re.findall(r" ((\d{1,2}\.)?\d{1,2}) day[s]?", sentence)

If we print out all the values from this array, we will see that not every sentence that has “incubation” in it, contains numbers. That gives an empty value to the array. But some sentences contain more than 1 number, that can be a range of days, such as “from 1 to 2”, or in a format “between 1 and 2”, or maybe just 2 unrelated numbers.

Note: the output contains a pair of numbers. That is because of the double parentheses ( ) in our RegEx request. Which gives an output for each pattern between the two parentheses. There are also other possibilities of finding the float numbers in the text.

Made by Author

We can either keep all the values or limit ourselves to the first one but in this case, we will lose some potentially valuable information. Despite that decision, we do not really need the empty entries. So, we can get rid of this and also print the sentences where we actually found the numbers (for sanity check):

if (len(day) >0):

print("

Days: {}, Array length = {}".format(day, len(day)))

print("Corresponding sentence is:

{}".format(sentence)) else:

pass

To get something like that:

Made by Author

Once more, wondering about these numbers in between the lines of text, there is probably not much we can do about it. It does not look pretty but does not harm our analysis either.

Now, as we got several data points, let us append it in one array and visualize it!
What is EdTech?
Tags: Facebook, Edtech, School, Education, Parenting

EdTech is about using technology to aid learning.

Thanks captain obvious. Tell me more:

Okay, remember the days of back-breaking textbooks and spitballs? No more of that. Kids in these days can have an entire curricula on a computer and smart devices (and are able to make high powered catapults for all out spitball wars).

Single spitballs are so 1978.

The idea of Educational Technology has floated around since we started using computers to enhance learning in the eighties; but today, ‘Modern Electronic Educational Technology’ encompasses much more.

If you look below, you can see the evolution of EdTech.

A nugget of history from WebAnywhere.co.uk

From m-learning (using mobile devices to learn) to virtual education (where the students and teachers use technology to connect) EdTech is more than just the implementation of computers in school.

The study of media psychology delves deeper into ‘what defines’ EdTech, but we’ll leave the philosophy to the philosophers.

All you need to know is that this hot topic of EdTech is an ever-evolving concept, where cell phones, virtual reality, computers, and other technological devices enhance education.

Like us on Facebook for more awesome content! Did you find a piece of peace of mind? Share this on Facebook or Twitter to give a sliver to someone else :)
How to Ask Calibrated Questions That Will Help You Find a Solution to Any Technical Problem
By: Zachary Minott
Tags: Startup, Agile, Software Development, Programming

How to Ask Calibrated Questions That Will Help You Find a Solution to Any Technical Problem

Why learning how to ask the right questions is one of the best career skills to have as a developer

Photo by Alexander Popov on Unsplash.

Programming is hard.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a foreseeable future where a developer can automatically conjure up the solution to a complex requirement without having to consult Google or spend a lengthy amount of time constantly searching for the correct way to do something.

The library of what there is to know about any given programming language and its potential uses is far too large to memorize and adapt immediately. If you can manage to do that, kudos to you. You’re a legend and a savant and I commend you.

But for us mere humans, I’ve found that in order to find a solution to any problem, you have to first know what questions to ask — whether it be for the simple purpose of reversing a linked list or running a large-scale, real-time integration with a specific API that requires further algorithmic processing with the retrieved data.

Albert Einstein even had this to say about approaching problems:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

Needless to say, knowing the right questions to ask is imperative to development.

This concept drastically changed the way I approached programming and I know I will never trade this philosophy for any other.

It’s exactly what allowed me to implement such large-scale integrations in a matter of days, accomplish tasks that I had no experience doing before fastidiously, and achieve and learn more than I ever have before with relative ease and efficiency.

The real question is this: How do you ask the right questions that’ll bridge the gap between you and the solution?
7 Things Leading Enterprises Realize About The Data Tipping Point (That Might Help You)
By: Scott Gnau
Tags: Big Data, Data Science, Technology

Way way back in 2000, Malcolm Gladwell defined the tipping point as a moment of critical mass when ideas and products and messages and behaviors suddenly spread like viruses. In his case Hush Puppies and Crime rates.

Only 16 short years later, the Internet Of All Things (IOaT) and Cloud have already gone way beyond their own tipping points.

We’re now all decorated with sensors and devices on our bodies, in our homes and businesses. The amount of ’data-in-motion’ from anything that can emit data is predicted to rise from 4 to 44 zettabytes in this decade alone. Everyone writes about the tsunami of things but I predict the impact of Things and Cloud will be nothing compared to the tipping point for data. Especially the impact on the technology architectures of large enterprises who provide the services and products behind it all.

In my position, I work with the world’s leading users of data, helping them do the right things as they re-platform their data layers and architectures.

Here’s what they know about the tipping point for data that might help you.

They Design With Real-Time in Mind

We used to think that a megabyte was a lot of data to analyze. Now its not unusual to think in terms of a terabyte or even a petabyte of raw data coming from an infinite variety of self configured sources, boiled back down to megabytes or even a few kilobytes of intelligent analysis. It’s a kind of reverse funnel.

While this growth of volume of data is important, the hardest problem hidden here for data scientists is the variety and complexity of new data types, then how to capture it and realize it’s analytic value in real-time.

So volume, variety and complexity in real-time from an infinite variety from things such as self configured devices, infotainment, wearables, cybersecurity, sensors, vehicles and machines create the data tipping point for enterprises. It’s this that is accelerating changes in the IT architectures of big business and government.

What this means is that top data users now design their architecture around how to create data schemas in real time, and to be able to use that data itself as the roadmap to analytics that can differentiate their decisions and build the requirements and reports to run the business.
How I Built an Automated Text Messaging Ordering System In Less Than A Day
By: Allen Helton
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Software Development, Programming, Startup, Technology

How I Built an Automated Text Messaging Ordering System In Less Than A Day

Many people are out of a job and struggling to find work. Find it yourself and build your own business in a day.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

COVID-19 has hit us all pretty hard. Whether you’re sick, know someone who has been sick, know someone who has passed, lost your job, been furloughed, or been forced to work from home, each and every one of us has been affected at a personal level to some degree.

The US unemployment rate is the highest its been since 1940 at a staggering 13%. That means one out of every 8 people are without a job right now. Ouch.

I am a software engineer by trade, so I am lucky enough to have the option of working from home during these tough times. My brother on the other hand, does not have the luxury.

He is a chef, and unfortunately his place of work has shut down indefinitely. So he’s been left without a job. He decided to take it upon himself to stay in the service industry and start up a business where he can continue to pursue his passion and make food for people.
Sociobiology and Biophilia in Ecopsychology
By: Christyl Rivers
Tags: Environment, Science, Ecopsychology, Addiction, Green

Some of our Biophilia attractions, such as coffee, are addictive

Everyone’s favorite ant-man, etymologist E. O. Wilson coined both of these words used by nature-lovers and evolutionary psychologists alike.

Sociobiology addresses social behaviors among and between interactive species (Wilson, 1997). Biophilia is the term coined by E.O. Wilson to describe our innate human attraction to nature, landscapes, and natural resources, including social resources, which human beings are attracted to for our mutual support.

The many benefits of healing with nature have been accepted for decades now, and studies continue all over the globe that confirm the popular consensus. Nature is good for human beings, and human beings can be good for nature if they merely accept, appreciate and protect her many gifts.

Climate change, reef bleaching, pollution and so many challenges — from toxic money in politics to toxic plastic in our oceans — can be met only when our technology aligns with our compassionate love for ourselves and our planet. Ecopsychology studies all of these things, looking for the signs of how we can heal ourselves by re-aligning our interests with our self- esteem, healthier self-medicating (our addictions) and using our knowledge to protect all quality of life.

Ecopsychology seeks to identify some shared, social benefits of mindful, sensory connections to people individually and in groups. It points out that nature works in networks, and networks share intelligence in a web analogous the world wide web that allows such communication as this article.

Group cooperation is common in both clinical and non-formal gatherings, such as sports, associations, reunions, retreats and games. Sociobiology studies how plants, animals, small tribes and large nations can cooperate to improve lives. It specifically studies living beings that are social — and obviously too — biological.

Biophilia shows that our attractions to those beautiful things that also aid our survival universal and shared with the natural world. The water cycle and sunlight networks with the trees, the fruits and flesh of those trees become our food and furniture. In every conceivable way, nature and we, are wholly connected.

The biosphere may be considered a supportive aspect of a larger, whole bio-spherical society. The ecosystems which sustain life on Earth can be reviewed as societal partnerships that operate through our physical and psychological view of Biophilia.

From a sociobiological perspective, the human tendencies of both competition and cooperation are currently being more investigated and reported upon. We may have some fake news, but the need for biophilia and ecopsychology are real news. We need good news from science and education. The need has never been more crucial for humans to cooperate for the green revolution in love and technology toward which we are now moving.
Strengthening the Nonprofit Sector
By: Community Foundation H Z
Tags: Competitive Grant, Nonprofit, Philanthropy, Community Foundation

In addition to directly investing in projects and programs that benefit area residents through competitive grants, we channel a portion of our Community’s Endowment funding, totaling $82,000 in 2017, to efforts that strengthen our local nonprofit sector. These are investments in the capacity of our nonprofit organizations, individually and collectively, to maximize their impact in the community

Field Level investments are made in organizations whose roles are to improve the nonprofit sector and foster cross-sector collaboration as well as provide resources that benefit the entire local nonprofit field.

Within this space, we support the Lakeshore Nonprofit Alliance which serves area nonprofits by facilitating collaboration, leveraging resources, and providing professional and organizational development opportunities as well as Community SPOKE which enhances the quality of life for all Ottawa County residents through a strategic, coordinated, and systemic response to human service needs.

Photography by: Dan Fisher

We also invest in collaborative efforts to gather robust local data that provide critical insights into new and changing needs in our community. These include the Greater Ottawa County United Way Community Assessment and the Ottawa County Youth Assessment Survey (YAS). These tools help all of us to make well-informed, strategic choices about how to make the greatest difference with our available resources.

“The Ottawa County-specific analysis provided by the YAS has been instrumental in allowing us to make decisions that are tailored to the needs of the youth in our community,” said Dominic Aquino, Youth Advisory Committee Chair.

We believe that leadership capacity drives overall organizational capacity for our nonprofit partners and therefore our Organization Level investments are focused on staff and board leadership.

These efforts include providing nonprofit board trainings from the Johnson Center for Philanthropy to local community members and supporting our nonprofit partners with resources to navigate leadership transitions and to retain the best possible staff leaders for their organizations.

Combined, these efforts are a critical component of CFHZ’s community impact strategy. They help us maximize the value created by our community endowment dollars for our nonprofit partners and the community members they serve.
加密貨幣能否在台灣過關？
Tags: Blockchain, Taiwan, Law, Cryptocurrency

in Both Sides of the Table
One Simple Delivery
By: Dmitry Yakimov
Tags: Development, Kaizen, Kanban, Process Improvement, Agile

Let’s say you are working on some project, which has got it’s own process. And you keep wondering how much time is actually getting lost during on it. How efficient it is. How much of the time get wasted on bureaucracy and how much is actually spent on the valuable things.

Ok, what you can do is try to measure things, and that’s how you can do it. Make just one simple change and see how it goes. You can start with a real task, or you can just make it up in a sake of making it. For example if you are working with react you can add one simple component in the code.

So what can be the story of one simple delivery:

Before development:

The task has to be communicated somehow. How long does it take to create a card for it. Do you spend extra time on adding labels to it, marking certain checkboxes, moving it from column to column.

Then it is gets idle there for some time. How long does it take to get it acted upon, how long it waits in a backlog.

Development:

Let’s say developer has taken the card. How long does it takes to understand it. How long does it takes to make all the rituals before writing code: marking card as taken, moving it from column to column, updating repo, creating branch for it. How long does it takes to start the project. How long did it take to actually implement the feature. How long did it take to fix tests and linting errors, adjust project specific code style before pushing, you do that right? And then again all the rituals with the cards.

After development:

The code has been written, pushed what else is missing before it gets accepted? CI, Code review, manual testing. And then finally it reaches the main branch.

So try and measure all these numbers, and see which work is useful and which might be not. May be there is a room for optimization for your team. May be some of the practices are just bothersome.
How to register to the X-CASH monthly airdrops.
By: Paul Bugnot
Tags: Tutorial, Airdrop, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

2. How to get your XCA public address

Now that your account is created, you have to fill up some information before being able to register to the monthly airdrop or receive your “account creation” bounty.

First of all, you need an XCA public address. You will need to download our wallet at https://x-cash.org/downloads or generate an address using the paper wallet generator.
Cages Crumble
By: Robin Harwick
Tags: Revolution, Unity, Resistance Poetry, Empowerment, Poetry

Masks drop to the ground

Cages crumble down

Fear expected

yet a silent cheer

Oppression and violence never stops the brain

People struggle to stay sane

Chaos and confusion can no longer reign

Violent reactions equalling true change

The heart attack machine will not be allowed to remain

After the thunderous echos of the crumbling concrete mazes,

Peace will be restored

Madness turned to bliss

Chaos resolved

All remaining become one

Survival

Civilization — a reality

For this savage machine fueled by greed will be swept away in torrential rains

The Phoenix will Rise

Beauty Restored

H armony

Coexistence, no longer forgotten

Screeching winds calm to serenade

as the Phoenix flaps it’s wings
The Weight Of Anxiety
By: Priyanka Srivastava
Tags: Paper Poetry, Illustration, Letting Go, Nonfiction, Writing

The Weight Of Anxiety

Day 3 of letting go challenge — anxiety

illustration by Author

Today’s meditation is about the weight of anxiety which we carry within us. For the past few months, I have been on edge. Always panicking, getting restless about my parents and loved ones in India, but it didn’t help. Now, after so many months, I have realized that anxiety is just a weight that we love to carry. If we keep ourselves occupied by doing things that make us happy, it would be better for our mental health. So now phone calls have been reduced, I am trying to be busy with other things, and that weight of anxiety I have kept on the farthest shelf. I have learnt to cope quietly.
Why we need a new approach to leadership in times of change
By: Finn Jackson
Tags: Conscious Leadership, Self Leadership, Leadership, Antifragile, Antifragility

We are living through a time of unprecedented global change. Like it or not, huge changes are taking place in politics, the economy, technology, society, and the environment:

Here are just a few of the major trends that are shaping our world:

Covid-19, Brexit, America First, Belt and Road, Gilets Jaunes, austerity, the rise of the political right and left, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, fake news (blatant political lying), migration, terrorism… smartphones, drones, artificial intelligence, driverless vehicles, electric vehicles, the Internet of things, Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, Amazon, low economic growth, stock market volatility, storms, floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes, new diseases, climate change, Extinction Rebellion, and the ongoing degradation of the planetary life support system we call ‘the environment’…

Ten years ago most of these items were barely on our radars. Now they are the new normal. And although there will be many items on this list that you do not care about, there is probably at least one that is affecting you significantly.

We can’t predict exactly what is going to happen next, where, or when. But it is clear that the world is becoming more complex and unpredictable — not less so. And over the next 12 months the amount of change is set to increase, not decrease.

But this time of Churning won’t last forever — it is a transitional phase to something better, as you will understand by the time you have finished this book.

To reach that point successfully, and to deal with the changes we will experience along the way, we need new frameworks and new tools for leading ourselves and others through change.

This is Inner Leadership. This is learning to use change to become stronger.

Is the rate of change in your life today higher, lower, or the same as it was five years ago? Over the next 12 months, do you expect that rate of change to decrease or increase? Would it be useful to start learning now, ways lead yourself and others better through this time of increased change?
Applying CSS Transitions with React Hooks
By: Kaylie Kwon
Tags: React, JavaScript, Software Development, Frontend Development, CSS

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

While there are many popular libraries like React Transition Group and React Motion to animate components, one of the best ways to learn how something works is by building it from scratch. In this article, we’ll learn how to create enter and exit transitions using only hooks.

To start, here are the various transition stages in a component lifecycle.

mounted entering entered exiting exited unmounted

When a component is mounted, it means it appears as a DOM element, regardless of its style. When it’s unmounted, it means the opposite, i.e. removed from the DOM. Traditionally there hasn’t been an issue combining an animation on enter after an element has been mounted, but it’s been trickier to animate when it’s unmounted since React will remove the element before the transition. Hence we need a transitionary exited state to hide the element before its removal.

We’ll gradually build up to the full functionality, so let’s begin with a simple hook useTransitionState that will change the state from entering -> entered and exiting -> exited over the provided duration . This is enabled by the useEffect hook, which lets you perform side effects such as executing timers after the DOM has been updated. As a cleanup function, we’ll ensure that the timer is cleared to avoid memory leaks.

Next, we’ll wrap this hook in another hook useTransitionControl , that provides two callbacks for the user to toggle between enter and exit states.

Now we’re ready to use it in an actual component with fading transition. We’ll have to provide it an object of css styles to apply based on various transition states, as well as the transition property to smooth the effect.

If we want to unmount the component, we can easily add a conditional logic that returns null when state is exited . This is useful for rendering lists or other groups of components.

Here’s the end result!

Note*: Inline styles were used in this example, but in general, classes are more performant for transitions. Another alternative would be using a CSS-in-JS solution like styled-components.

Enjoyed this article? If so, get more similar content by subscribing to Decoded, our YouTube channel!
Moving
Tags: Moving, Love, Starting Over, Creative Writing, Poem

I never liked the place,

That city just wasn’t for me.

It brimmed with tourists;

Teeming crowds,

Nesting on the colored streets.

Bathing in the sun,

Drowning in the neon lights

And you know me,

Crowds make me reek.

People came there

From grey cities dissolved

In gallons of smog;

To watch rivers merge and bleed

And to view the red trees in bloom,

Or to witness the sun set

Between pointed peaks.

Yes, it was all too beautiful

But sightseeing has

never been a priority.

I, for one,

Couldn’t live there

If it rained gold instead of acid.

It lacked a certain charm

Maybe a Starbucks or a zoo,

Or maybe a little less sulfur

Would have been good too.

maybe, I could even say perhaps

The city is clean and serene

It was just that it lacked you.