fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Steps We Take
Tags: Short Story, Fiction, 100wordstory, Flash Fiction, Writing

FICTION

The Steps We Take

I went down. I didn’t come back up.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

I have a friend, his name is Luke.

Luke and I have been friends since I was 8, and no one else can see him.

At first, my parents found it cute. They didn’t find it as cute ten years later, so I stopped talking to them about him.

Luke and I share everything, and he only has one secret. I can’t follow him to where he sleeps, which is my closet.

But one night, restless and wide awake, I opened the closet door.

I saw steps, going down and down.

I went down.

I never came back up.
The Annual Climate Change Deniers Conference Must Change Venues Again
By: Rory Mcnab
Tags: Satire, Culture, Humor, Climate Change, Environment

11/01/2036 UPDATE

We hope you’re all getting excited now that our AGM is only three months away! However, I’m sure it comes as no surprise to those of you following the news to hear that, due to the unseasonable record rainfall that has been ravaging Phoenix, we will be changing venues. The Phoenix Convention Center has unfortunately been almost entirely submerged by floodwater.

While there had been hopes that it could be repaired in time, the sheer volume of large snapping turtles that have taken up residence in the floodwaters in the various auditoriums have hindered the efforts of engineers. As such, we are pleased to announce that Toronto’s Metro Convention Center will play host to our AGM!

The surprising disappearance of winter snow and ice, while allegedly devastating for Canada’s flora and fauna, has proved nothing short of a boon to their ability to host international conferences throughout the year, and we look forward to seeing you at the MTCC on 1 February!
The Most Curatable Tags On Medium
By: Roz Warren
Tags: Parody, Writing On Medium, Humor, Tags, Malarkey

The Most Curatable Tags On Medium

These Tags Are Curator Catnip!

Photo by Ramiz Dedaković on Unsplash

Everyone knows that the secret to being curated on Medium is to choose the right tag. Your post may be brilliant but if you burden it with a humdrum or too-popular tag?

No curation for you!

But choose just the right tag? Doesn’t matter if your story is dreck — instant curation!

As a public service to my fellow Medium writers, I’ve spent hours of painstaking research to compile this sure-fire list of the most curatable tags on Medium.

Just apply one of these tags to your post and you’re good to go:

SELF-CRASHING CARS

THIS HAPPENED TO YOU

SHATTERED DREAMS

OUT OF FOCUS PHOTOGRAPHY

BIGGER ON THE INSIDE

QUID PRO QUO

INHUMAN PARTS

BLOCKCHAIN AT THE DISCO

BALLS

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS

THESE AREN’T THE DROIDS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

DULL LITTLE POEMS

ZOMBIE BATMAN

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REST OF THE PIE?

SEX IN SPACE

MAGIC HAMSTERS

DOOM

AVOCADO TOAST

OKAY BOOMER

If you’re aware of any other curation-friendly tags, please post them in the Comments section. If they’re outstanding I’ll add them to the list (and cut you in on a portion of the 47 cents I’m going to earn for this post.)

As for me? I’ve started tagging most of my posts MALARKEY. It doesn’t help me get curated but I enjoy it.

( Roz Warren, FBTA, is the author of two collections of library and book-related humor, Our Bodies, Our Shelves: A Collection of Library Humor, and Just Another Day At Your Local Public Library, both of which would make great gifts for your favorite librarian or other bookish friend. If you enjoyed this post by Roz Warren, you might enjoy this one too.)
World Premiere Listing of DCC — 320,000 DCC to be given away!
Tags: Trading, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Listings, Blockchain

DEx.top is excited to announce that we will list DCC and open it for deposits on June 22nd, 2018 12:00(HKT).

DCC/ETH trading pair will be opened on June 22nd, 2018 16:00(HKT)

320,000 DCC will be distributed between June 22nd 12:00 (HKT) — June 28th 16:00 (HKT).

There are three events you can be part of for the 320,000 DCC giveaway.

Registration reward of 100 DCC is limited to first 500 binded users.

2. Users who net deposit over 500 DCC, will be airdropped 200 DCC on a first come first serve basis

3. The top 20 traders will be ranked based on trading volume (buy+sell, wash trading not included) over 5 ETH and prize of 200,000 DCC will be split as follows:

1st — 35000 DCC

2nd — 30000 DCC

3rd — 20000 DCC

4th — 15000 DCC

5th — 10000 DCC

6th-10th — 8000 DCC

11th-15th — 6000 DCC

16th-20th — 4000 DCC

For more information, please refer to: https://dextop.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006067014

Note:

1) All rights reserved by DEx.top.

2) For all users, one account only has one chance to win a reward for each event.

3) Rewards will be sent out within 3 business days after the end of the event to the binded ETH address of users on DEx.top (not to personal wallet address).

4) DEx.top reserves the right of explanation to disqualify accounts with malicious trading activity (such as wash trading).

5) During our event, we will check the trade frequency of users; we will increase the trading fee for users who makes over 30 traders per hour.

June 22nd, 2018

DEx.top
Never Known in November
By: Christine Graves
Tags: Poetry, November, Fantasy, Winter, Rhyming Poetry

Never Known in November

So begins the season of the Ice Queen

Image public domain, courtesy of rawxpixel.com

The ice queen comes on whispered wings

I hear her at the door

As the veil of dark and light

Begins to close once more

Her face the color of death and doom

Her eyes in shades of grey

Her breath as cold as frozen fire

Her touch is black decay

She’ll soon possess the hills and dales

And blanket them in snow

She’ll strip the trees and fields alike

And freeze the ground below

She’ll shun the sun within the sky

She’ll fill it full of clouds

She’ll make the moon the brightest boon

Within the misted shrouds

Though Samhain has come and gone

I pray you will remember

How long before the spring returns

Is never known in November
В Украине зарегистрирован проект Закона «О токенизированных активах и криптоактивах»
By: Bitbon System
Tags: Cryptoasset, Ukraine, Digital Asset, Blockchain, Law

The Bitbon System is a large-scale infrastructure project, which represents a decentralized platform for Contributing. https://www.bitbon.space/en/home

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The Awkwardness of The Global Persecution of Christians
By: Alex Rowe
Tags: Christianity, Current Events, Spirituality, Theology, Faith

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The Awkwardness of The Global Persecution of Christians

10 May, 2019 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe

We in England woke on Easter Sunday a couple weeks ago to the awful news of the Sri Lanka attacks; eight suicide bombs, targeting Christians and westerners. At the time of writing, the number reported dead stands at two-hundred and fifty-three, including thirty-eight foreigners, and more than five-hundred injured.

What follows is not a piece of special pleading for Christians. We must still mourn the tragic and fatal mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, that took place only weeks ago. But I do want to point out how the events of Sri Lanka suggest that we need to learn to think differently about Christianity, whether or not we believe.

Theresa May’s tweet might reflect this country’s awkward feelings toward Christianity: “The acts of violence against churches and hotels in Sri Lanka are truly appalling, and my sympathies go out to all of those affected at this tragic time.” But as Allison Pearson rightly pointed out, in her column for the Telegraph, the targets of these bombings were not buildings but bodies, not churches but Christians.

It seems odd for us to think of Christians as persecuted, as some papers have recently reported (here and here, for example). One version of Western history would have them in the reverse role, as the true persecutors. There is no denying that all manner of horrors have been perpetrated in the name of their God. But presently in secular England, Christianity is treated little more than a system of belief outmoded and irrelevant and from whose historic shackles we must shake ourselves free. Annoying, but mostly innocuous.

Christianity, a matter of life or death? Surely, this is only the hyperbole of the street-preacher whom we pity and mock as we stroll silently by? You’d think that way, in this country. Especially when the image of church leaders broadcast to the nation is The Vicar of Dibley’s bumbling Geraldine Granger. But Christians do die for their faith. Christianity, at least globally, is persecuted. The results are in: Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, according to figures reported from the Pew Research Centre.

Though Christianity in England is in decline, in many countries and nations around the world the faith is simultaneous flourishing whilst facing discrimination and persecution. We must keep this global perspective in mind. If you want to ignore Christianity as an irrelevance, the global church phenomenon should cause you to pause and think again before discounting it. If you call yourself a Christian, you would do well to remember that while you might fear the raised eyebrow, our brothers and sisters around the world fear the raised fist.
How to Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2)
By: David Littlefield
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Science, Programming

Glossary:

The Dev Channel is meant for technical users who want to access the latest features and updates in Windows 10. It’s not always stable and may require some workarounds but it lets members try out new features long before the general public. This includes features like the NVIDIA CUDA driver in WSL.

[Return]

The Shell is an interpreter that presents the command-line interface to users to let them interact with the kernel. It lets them control the computer using commands entered from a keyboard. It also translates the commands from the programming language into the machine language for the kernel.

[Return]

The Interpreter is a program that reads through programs that are written

in human-readable programming languages and executes the instructions

from top to bottom. It translates each instruction to a machine language the

hardware can understand, executes it, and proceeds to the next instruction.

[Return]

The Command-Line Interface (CLI) is also known as the terminal or console. It’s a program that accepts text input from users to execute commands on the operating system. It lets users configure the computer, install software, and access features that aren’t available in the graphical user interface.

[Return]

The Kernel is the program at the core of the operating system that controls everything in the system. It’s responsible for memory management, process management, disk management, and task management. It also facilitates communication between the programs and hardware in machine language.

[Return]

Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) is a program that can prepare, modify, and repair the operating system. It’s used to fix issues with startup, performance, and errors that can’t be resolved. It’s also used to enable or disable features in the operating system from the command-line.

[Return]

Debian is one of the most established Linux distributions. It’s an operating system that’s used to build operating systems that meet the needs of specific user groups. It’s well known for being free, reliable, and supportive of users.

[Return]

The Binary Package is an archive file that contains the files and directories needed to make its containing program work as expected. It’s stored in a repository that contains other packages for a specific Linux distribution. It also needs the Linux package manager to download, extract, and install it.

[Return]
Yapsody Launches 2 New Feature Updates
Tags: Event Planner, Events, Instagram, Event Marketing, Event Planning

At Yapsody, we’re always looking to improve our user experience — whether it is for the event presenter or ticket purchaser. This week, our feature updates focused on convenience; convenience in viewing, promoting events on created on our online ticketing system.

Update 1 — Language Selection Option in the Online Store for Mobile Devices

Online ticket store visitors can now select the language they would like to view the events in through their mobile devices. As of today, Yapsody supports 15 prominent languages from across the globe. This makes it easier for Non-English speaking users to

Read event information

Understand instructions

Purchase tickets and

Generate tickets in their language

Until today, the feature was available only on desktop view.

Apart from Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, event presenters can now add their Instagram profile links to their online ticket store. Should a ticket purchaser want to visit the presenter’s Instagram profile, they will now be able to without having to look up the profile on the Instagram app. Along with this, event presenters also have the ability to request Yapsody to promote their event on our social media.

With these updates, we’re hoping to cut down on minutes of wasted time for all Yapsody users. We have plenty of new updates coming along in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

What has your experience with Yapsody been? Let us know in the comments below.
Garden of Ice
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Poem, Poets On Medium, Poems On Medium

Image courtesy of the author.

Why is it so

That I never get the prize

Always left behind

In this garden of ice
Microsoft, I forgive you!
Tags: Tech, Forgiveness, Microsoft

Microsoft is different now. The evil masterminds are all retired. No more Ballmer jumping around screaming for developers, developers, developers. No more Gates plotting monopoly schemes for world domination. They’re both finally out, and the new guy in charge isn’t making us wince.

The company seems to be finding its groove again. Seems being the operative word. Lots of cool stuff that’s actually shipping, but whether it’ll make a dent in the world remains to be seen. Yet at least there’s some promise and optimism back. The ghosts of “cutting off the air supply” and IE6 have finally been vanquished.

Just look at the latest Microsoft Event recap. This is not Ballmer’s bouncy castle anymore. This is good. This is fun. This is promising.

Besides, the company just isn’t scary any more. Or tone-setting. Or, in many areas of past glory, even relevant. And perversely enough, that’s exactly what is setting it free to try harder, try again, and make an impression with a crowd that’s no longer dispositioned to reject the effort because Microsoft is the big bad wolf.

There’s no more wolf any more. It’s more like a puppy. Or a Golden Retriever at best. Nobody is afraid of Microsoft. So since they can’t rule the roost through fear, they’re trying the long route of — let’s not get ahead of ourselves and kid about LOVE — intrigue. And frankly some hope.

The two titans of integrated hardware and software are Apple and Google. And they’ve divided the spoils of the world just a little too neatly between them. It’s bizarre, but I actually want to see a resurgent, strong Microsoft. If for nothing else, to take the smug confidence of both titans down a peg.

I’m hoping real hard that either the Surface or the Hololens or SOMETHING out of Redmond is an honest-to-god big hit with the general public (outside of gaming). Not another cool demo or R&D plaything. But something that ships and in quantity.

I’ll be honest and say I held a grudge. For a long time. And that axe wasn’t getting buried until that hopping, jumping, dancing buffoon was out the door. But now that he is, and Gates is busy spending his loot curing the planet, do you know what? I can forgive.

Yes, I know they’ve been pining for it, so here it is: Microsoft, I forgive you. And I’m actually excited for the work you’re doing. ✌️
My Toddler’s Chauffeur
By: Cindy Shore Smith
Tags: Humor, Children, Memoir, Family

We were in a Robin Hood phase

Three year-old: “Mommy, my car has a black driver.”

Me: “What?!”

3yo: “A black driver. That’s what my car has.”

Me (thinking). . . OK. He’s got an imaginary friend. There seems to be a racial component to this but stay calm.

Me: “Is your black driver here now?”

3yo: “Yes!”

Me: “Does he have a name?”

3yo (looking confused): “No.”

Me: “Can I meet your black driver?”

3yo (laughing): “Mommy, you’re silly!”

Me: “Can you see your black driver?”

3yo: “Not right now. It’s in the garage.”

Me: “Will I see him if I go out there?”

3yo: “Yes! Come on!”

My baby leads me to his Little Tikes car and proudly points to the steering wheel.

3yo: “See, Mommy? My car has a black driver!”
Blogging the dream fantastic
By: Ben Edwards
Tags: The Web, Blogging

I would be remiss today as both a blogger and a friend of Jason’s not to mention his new endeavor (and the talk of the “blogsphere” today): full-time blogger at kottke.org Inc. I wish Jason the best and hope he is successful with this. I encourage everyone who has enjoyed Jason’s site in the past to donate a small sum. In fact, don’t think of it as a donation as much as an advancement of the art of blogging. I for one can’t wait to see what it is he is going to unleash on the blogging world next.
I Never Thought I’d Write About Sex On The Internet
By: The Editorial Team
Tags: Welcome, Hello, Introduction, About, Have A Nice Day

I wasn’t always brave enough to share my knowledge about sex on the internet

In 2012 I arrived at UC Berkeley to study English. I’m a bonafide book nerd and my goal was to study literature so that I could one day put my fantasy novels next to names like N.K. Jemisin, Octavia Bulter, and Garth Nix.

But I wasn’t a regular student. During high school, my mother’s battle with cancer escalated to stage four: a death sentence. As a result, I almost failed out of school. After taking some time off, I decided to give academia another try. I enrolled in community college and worked my butt off to get into my dream school. After two years of studying English, I arrived at UC Berkeley underwhelmed to find that I’d be required to study Shakespeare (again).

Then I had a gut reaction. I was not in the right scholarly field. In my spare time, I found myself interning with my school’s Gender Equity Resource Center. I began learning about holistic and mystic forms of sexual healing. I dove deep into feminist porn to research consent and BDSM. I even trained to be a dominatrix when the opportunity presented itself.

From an early age, I realized I was different when it came to my relationship with sex and my sexuality. I felt entitled to nourish my curiosity and I would not apologize for that. Finally having the resources to educate myself, my entire specialization changed, and I became a sex + sexuality scholar.

Today, you can often find me in my home office, ginger hair in a power ponytail, as I use my nerd powers for good.

I’m mainly known for being a feminist optimism junkie (say that three times fast). Though my friends would describe me as being open-minded and eccentric.

If I’m not busy writing, that means I’m rushing towards a new adventure, with a laptop in my bag and a bow in my hair.
RxJava: Where did my exception go?
By: Dmitry Si
Tags: Android App Development, AndroidDev, Android, Rxjava, Unit Testing

Suppose we’re using RxJava in our Android app, and we cover it with unit-tests. Does it mean the same code that passes the test won’t crash the app in production on the same input data? No! But why?

Let’s check the simplified example. The waitAndFail function emulates some background work and then it throws an exception. In theory, this test should fail, in practice, it prints an error message to the console and finished successfully. The same function used in the Android app will crash it.

But we’ll see something like that in the console



at io.reactivex.internal.functions.Functions$OnErrorMissingConsumer.accept(Functions.java:704)

... io.reactivex.exceptions.OnErrorNotImplementedException: The exception was not handled due to missing onError handler in the subscribe() method call. Further reading: https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava/wiki/Error-Handling | java.lang.IllegalStateExceptionat io.reactivex.internal.functions.Functions$OnErrorMissingConsumer.accept(Functions.java:704)...

The reason is that ART (and Dalvik) virtual machine, that runs the app, and local JVM, that runs the tests, have different uncaught error handlers. In Java, each thread has one, and when the exception happens in the thread, JVM calls this thread’s handler. The default behavior for Android is to log the exception and terminate the process, while the default desktop JVM’s error handler prints the exception and ignores it. But if we get the exception in the test function it should fail, shouldn’t it? Yes, but RxJava doesn’t rethrow exceptions it captures and calls the tread’s handler directly, instead.
Curriculum App Release Notes #011
By: Louise Swift
Tags: Self Improvement, Education, Learning, App Development, Community

Curriculum App Release Notes #011

November 2019’s updates to Curriculum, an app for creating a study plan, choosing the best learning resources & tracking your progress through them.

This month’s updates are pretty exciting. Get ready!

Discover new learning resources

(This is the update I’m most pleased with.)

You can now browse for new learning resources by subject or type (book, article, online course, etc). The top-rated resources will show first.

There is some UI and performance roughness that I’ll be polishing up next, but I wanted to get this feature out for everyone to try ASAP.

It’s such useful and interesting information to browse through!

Discover some new learning resources now ➡️

Follow your friends

If you know someone who has a public Curriculum profile, you can now follow them to see some of their recent study activity on your dashboard.

I’m hoping this will provide a sense of community, as well as showing useful tidbits of information when you login.

Start by following me, if you like ➡️

Rate your learning resources

We need to rate our learning resources in order to benefit from the discovery feature described above.

So you’ll find that you can now quickly and easily add ratings to resources (and see what ratings have been given by others), whenever you like.

Head over to your Curriculum dashboard to add some ratings ➡️
Christmas Hope
By: Esther Spurrill-Jones
Tags: Poetry, Hope, 2020, Tradition, Christmas

The tree in the corner has never

Slept ‘neath a new-fallen snow;

Its branches can no way remember

The moon or the sun — they don’t grow.

There is no heat from the fire;

It lights, but can’t warm anything.

Just tiny bulbs on a wire:

A flickering fairy light string.

A rainbow of presents and ribbons

Waits under the tree for the dawn,

And curled in my lap naps a kitten;

She stretches and lets out a yawn.

This year has been awful, no question,

But Christmas can always bring hope,

And I find a faithful expression

In ritual, practice, and rote.

No matter the shadows around us,

The problems that tried hard to drown us,

This is a truth of profoundness:

Faith, hope, and love are boundless.
The Fruit of Failure
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Life Lessons, Poetry, Life, Poem, Grief

It’s easy, love, to let your fingers slip,

to swallow all defiance at a glance

so full of ice and horror you may skip

a breath or heartbeats — and you lose the chance

that you have built with weary industry,

a thousand sacrifices, little joys

deferred until hard labor sets you free.

And then you fail. The sacrifice was noise

and empty air — like Orpheus with love,

returned from Hell with nothing but your grief

and you would curse the heavy skies above

if broken hearts could hold some true belief

in empty gods who swallow glory, praise,

the toil of your best and brightest days.
Handling Remote Push Notifications from OneSignal in React Native
By: Spencer Carli
Tags: JavaScript, Push Notification, Mobile Development, iOS App Development, React Native

Two weeks ago I published a post covering every step you have to take to set up push notifications, via OneSignal, for React Native (iOS and Android). But the post stopped at the point of delivery — what if you want to do something for the user when they open the app up via the push notification? What if they opened the push notification while in the app? That’s what I plan to cover today.

Before proceeding with this post be sure to have OneSignal set up for your platform(s).

Accessing the Notification

Before we can actually do anything with the notification we need to access the content of said notification. When using react-native-onesignal we’re going to leverage the opened event, which we can listen to by using OneSignal.addEventListener. Make sure you remove the listener as well!

We get a host of information on the notification, including:

Whether or not it was shown to the user

The pull message payload (title, body, badge number, etc). This is where the things you’d be interested in would be located.

How the message should be displayed

Whether the notification was silent or not

Let’s actually do something with those…

Handling the Notification

Let’s say we’ve got a chat app where a user can be in multiple rooms. Whenever the user is mentioned a push notification is sent to them to notify them. If the user is not in the app then we’ll defer to the device’s normal push notification (displaying, at least, the title and the message). However, if they’re in the app they won’t see this notification but we do want to show them the title and message. How would we go about that?

Also, as one more requirement, if the user opened the app by pressing the push notification we don’t want to show them that notification in app AND we want to route them directly to that room.

First let’s format the message so we know what we’re working with.

So now we’ve got an idea of what the data will look like. Let’s write some code. We’re going to use react-native-root-toast to show the notification in the app. Here’s the plan:

We’re making use of isActive to determine what experience the user should have.

Active Experience

Let’s add in the “active” experience since it’s a bit easier. We’re simply going to show the user the the notification.

Inactive Experience

So what if the user clicks the notifications when our app is in the background? I’m going to proceed as if we were using react-native-router-flux (I’ve got a tutorial on how to use it). So looking back to our spec we know that in this instance we don’t show the user the message (they already saw it from the notification) but we do want to bring them to the proper room.

You can see that it’s very simple to access the custom data we’re passing from our push notification to give the user a custom experience and save them time.
The Girl Who Inspired The AMBER Alert
By: Cat Leigh
Tags: True Crime, Technology, Crime, Mystery, History

Amber Rene Hagerman was born on November 25, 1986, in Arlington, Texas. Amber belonged to the girl scouts and had a younger brother, Ricky, with whom she was very close.

Amber and Ricky / Youtube

On the afternoon of January 13, 1996, Amber (9) and Ricky (5) were visiting their grandparents Glenda and Jimmie Whitson. They rode their bicycles, as they always did while visiting their grandparents, to East Abram Street.

The children went to a parking lot of an abandoned grocery store, a former Winn-Dixie, where there was a bike ramp. After a while, Ricky decided he wanted to leave. Amber wanted to stay a bit longer so Ricky left by himself and headed home — about a block away from the parking lot.

Moments after Ricky left, Amber was kidnapped by a man. According to 78-year-old Jim Kevil, a white or Hispanic man forcibly put the girl in his dark blue pickup truck, while Amber screamed and kicked.

Kevil, who could see the parking lot from his backward, is the only known person to have witnessed the event and immediately called the police.

In the meantime, Ricky had safely arrived home. He told his grandfather that Amber had stayed behind. When she was taking a long time, their grandfather began to worry so decided to walk down to the parking lot to check up on her.

As he was arriving, he saw police at the scene. His granddaughter was missing and all that was left was her bicycle.
How food can help solve the climate crisis
Tags: Diet, Climate Change, Food, Environment

We need clean air and water for a sustainable future. We also need healthy land. Climate change doesn’t just alter the health of our land but is also affected by how we use it. The bad news is that the way we currently manage our land is contributing to the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The good news is there are solutions and, central to them, is how we produce and consume food.

The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land, which is due to be approved in Geneva next week, will explore the relationship between climate and land. It is expected to set out the contribution of our food systems to the climate crisis, as well as the transition we need to see in how we produce and consume food if we are to meet the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement.

We already know that our land surfaces are warming faster than the global average. This puts them in are at severe risk, and their deterioration will lead to decreases in crop yields, increases in droughts and wildfires, and even more carbon pollution which will accelerate further warming. At the same time, rapid warming is largely driven by our land-use — agriculture, forestry and other uses contribute between a fifth and a quarter of net global greenhouse gas emissions. We are using more land than ever before, and population growth will only fuel demand unless we tackle our consumption, including for food.

There are two ways we can use our lands to both improve their health and productivity, and to limit their impact on global warming. We can reduce the amount of emissions from land and we can use land to draw down carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

With regards to reducing emissions, we can only do so if we transform our food system.

Firstly, it’s necessary to decrease deforestation and natural habitat conversion. Agriculture has caused nearly three quarters of all deforestation but, alongside forests, it also affects other types of landscapes — in fact more than 50 per cent of habitat destruction from food production happens in grasslands and savannas. Businesses have begun to show commitment to eliminating deforestation and conversion from their supply chains, but they must act with more urgency and at a much larger scale, following the principles, definitions and guidance of the Accountability Framework Initiative (AFI). Governments meanwhile must implement stronger policies to protect nature and halt conversion.

Secondly, we need to change our diets. Too much of what we eat, from red meat to rice, is contributing to the increased amount of emissions released. Worse, in many places we eat more of these foods than needed for nutrition. To enable change, alongside nutritional needs and improved health, official guidance needs to account for the environmental impacts of different diets. As more countries evolve their guidance, there needs to be a concerted effort to drive implementation, with assertive promotion of standards and the integration of multiple sectors of society. We need to jointly enhance human and planetary health.
WFP leaves no one behind in Lebanon
By: Dana Houalla
Tags: Lebanon, Covid 19, Schools, Children, Coronavirus

Hanan opens up the large cotton bag and the scent of thyme fills the air. This is a scent that would take the majority of Lebanese back to their childhood; homemade breakfast, family and simply…home!

In this house, however, the smell of thyme carries a different meaning. Hanan collects and picks the culinary herb herself and sells it to a local tradesman for a modest amount per kg — barely enough to cover her family’s needs.

The mother of six lives with her family in the farthest district in the North of Lebanon, Akkar. Like many in that area, Hanan and her family were struggling to make ends meet as rural and marginalized Akkar offered few opportunities. Lockdown measures following the spread of the coronavirus and the ongoing economic crisis only made things worse for the family.

“My husband had a hip injury a couple of months ago and our living conditions have deteriorated quickly since then,” says Hanan. “My son is in the army, but his paycheck is barely sufficient to support him alone.”

This family lives in a one-story home next to a stone factory. They recently moved mold made their old house unlivable.

Her husband’s injury forced Hanan to become the family’s bread-winner. Her goal, like any mother’s, is to make enough to support herself, her husband and her children. She also works to ensure that her children are in school to get the education she and her husband never received.

“For some time now, I have been growing, collecting and picking thyme and other herbs to support my family with what little I can,” she explains.

Hanan’s children attend a public school in the northern district of Akkar where the WFP’s school snack programme had been running prior to the closure of schools due to the coronavirus. After that, Hanan’s family received WFP food packages to cover their needs for two months — July and August.

Thanks to funds from Italy, Canada and Ireland, WFP was able to help the most vulnerable school children and their families meet their food needs while preserving the linkages between them and their schools.
Second RubyConf in Uruguay — 11th and 12th November
By: Blog Moove-It
Tags: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Uruguay, Rails, Rubyconf

We are sponsoring one of the greatest technology events here in Uruguay. The Second RubyConf taking place within less than two weeks, the 11th and 12th November 2011, where many IT experts from all over the world get together in order to be immersed in this dynamic world and and up to date get with the latest trends of Ruby and Agile methodologies.

RubyConf Uruguay 2011

We are hungry for knowledge and refreshment, and we all want to be on the same train.

Please welcome all the new members to this awesome community. And help spreading the news, but even more important, do not miss the opportunity to meet the experts, discuss the future of RoR, and be Rail!
Islam under threat if Putrajaya buckles at Geneva review
By: Virtual Mosque
Tags: Islam, Threat, Malaysia

Islam will come under the threat of apostasy and secularism if Putrajaya caves to pressures from civil rights groups during its human rights review in Geneva this month, the Malaysian Muslim Lawyers Association warned today.

In a statement here, association president Datuk Zainul Rijal Abu Bakar urged the government to ignore the demands of Comango or the Coalition of Malaysian NGOs in the UPR (Universal Periodic Review), which had recently issued its list of recommendations ahead of the October 24 review by the Human Rights Council.

According to Zainul, the coalition of over 50 NGOs had recommended far-reaching proposals purportedly to improve the country’s human rights record but this would also effectively usurp Islam and Malaysia’s sovereignty.
“Spring” by Ali Smith finds a light in the darkness
By: Rebecca Whitaker
Tags: Book Club, Books And Authors, Climate Change, Refugees

Hope can be hard to come by when mass shootings have become a common occurrence. When parents and children are being shipped away to detention centres because they weren’t born on the right side of an imaginary line. When heat waves are killing hundreds of people who can’t afford air conditioning, and air conditioning is contributing to heat waves. When the Amazon is burning.

But Ali Smith believes hope springs eternal.

She weaves a tale of hope from three frayed characters all experiencing doubt and suffering in present day England. Spring is the third part in Smith’s seasonal quartet after Autumn, and Winter, although the books can be read out of order and stand up on their own.

In typical Ali Smith style, Spring is filled with references to art and literature and split into seemingly disparate parts that eventually connect. Although Spring’s third act may be over-convenient, it feels complete when the two distinct parts are woven together.

Part one follows Richard, an old man now, but once an active and passionate filmmaker and TV director. He loses his best friend and unrequited love and having also lost his wife and daughter, feels very much alone in the world. He is researching for his next film about an imagined love connection between short story writer Katherine Mansfield and poet Rainer Maria Rilke toward the end of their lives in the 1920’s. He is disillusioned by modern Hollywood style movies that have no regard for truth or social conscience.

Part two follows a guard at a detention centre for illegal immigrants. She feels hard done by. She couldn’t afford school and has to make money to support herself and her mother who sits at home watching the news all day. She becomes numb to the other guards making fun of the prisoners, aka the “deets”. Brit meets Florence, a young girl who somehow sneaks her way into the detention centre and convinces the manager to clean up the washroom facilities. Florence inspires Brit with her confidence and optimism, despite lacking any obvious reason to be hopeful.

The two parts come together in the third and final part, where it is revealed that Florence plans to reunite with her mother, who is being held in a detention centre. The two accompanying characters, Britt and Richard, react in very different ways. One rising to the occasion, the other turning in fear.

After I finished reading Spring, I started watching the BBC One drama “Years and Years”. A family drama set in a Black Mirror not-so-distant future, this show shares many of the same themes as Spring. There is so much to worry about, many of the characters turn inward, with a me-first attitude, only adding to the suffering and turmoil already happening in the world. If we can all turn outward instead, like Florence, and have hope for the future and the goodness in others despite our own suffering, can we believe in hope?
75 different processes
By: Hiut Denim Co
Tags: Creativity, Business, Ideas, Photography, Jeans

The above was an excerpt from Hiut Denim Co. — YearBook 3. We only printed 2000. They have all sold out. But you can get a free digital version of YearBook 1 when you sign up for our newsletter here.
An Intro to Framer Motion
By: Jon Middaugh
Tags: JavaScript, Animation, Transitions, Programming, Framer Motion

Animation Stacking With a Bouncy Ball

The core of Framer Motion is two things: animate (the what to do) and transition (the how to do it).

You can stack animations and transitions to occur simultaneously. Alternatively, you can give the illusion of consecutive animations, like below with this bouncy ball:

(Choppiness with the animation is due to CodeSandbox overhead. Framer Motion animations are super smooth.)

The below array values are interpreted as a series of key frames by Framer Motion and will be animated in sequence.

This three-part bounce is created by animating the y, width, and height of the ball. However, the width and height don’t actually change until the final key frame. At that point, the y only changes to give the impression of the squish at the bottom of the bounce.

<motion.span

style={ballStyle}

transition={{

y: transitionValues,

width: transitionValues,

height: transitionValues

}}

animate={{

y: ["2rem", "8rem", "10rem"],

width: ["5rem", "5rem", "6rem"],

height: ["5rem", "5rem", "4rem"]

}}

/>

Let’s take a look at transitionValues :

const transitionValues = {

duration: 0.8,

yoyo: Infinity,

ease: "easeOut"

}
Favorite Holiday Songs. A Special Christmas Playlist to enjoy…
By: Roxana Anton
Tags: Music Voices, Music, Holidays, Playlist, Christmas

My shopping list is mostly done for this year, as I tried to stay away as much as possible from shops and crowded places, because of Covid restrictions.

All I have left to prepare for the Holidays is: decorating, cooking, packing presents, maybe invite someone in (we’ll see if it’s going to be possible, with late rules).

I’m also preparing some reviews for a few special Christmas movies, and on my shelf, in a place of honor wait Selma Lagerloff’s books, that in my opinion are perfect for this time of year.

Going back to a Holidays Playlist, here’s what I listen a lot to while decorating, cleaning, cooking, and even writing and working on the computer.

Some of these suggestions are very unique, very special, very heart-felt, as Christmas is -most of all — a spiritual feast, a feast of family and celebration. The music we listen to should reflect all that.
DeveloperWeek 2018 report
By: Hogne Titlestad, Co-Ceo, Founder, Friend Software
Tags: WebOS, Blockchain, Developerweek, Cloud Computing

For the three days we were at our booth in DeveloperWeek, we had multiple visitors engaging in discussions with our staff without pause. The time is right for a new cloud based operating system, and people interested in tech could appreciate the impact of our technology in a wide array of industries. We had conversations about medical applications, support use cases as well as integration solutions. The conference itself generated about 200 leads, which is a new milestone for our company.

Growing global interest

We are now receiving enough interest from developers so that we can form open source teams that can cluster around our main global regions, the US, Scandinavia, the UK and Europe. This will allow us to grow our community internationally, and enable us to host meetups in cities around the world.

It is an exciting time to work on our platform, and we see a great future of our technology. With the increasing momentum and interest in our platform, we are getting good feedback and good clear signs that Friend is viable in the marketplace, and that users can find clear applications of our technology in their own projects.

Links:
Do You Know the Followers Hack?
By: Sarene B. Arias
Tags: Personal Growth, Blogging, Tips, SEO, Writing

On a relational Medium, building relationships with your followers is crucial

Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

In his blog announcement of the 2020 Medium shifts, founder and CEO Ev Williams gave a concise history of blogging and Medium, explaining:

“The internet has changed media consumption along a spectrum that you might call relational to transactional… as [Medium] evolved…our distribution mechanisms became more transactional and less relational over time. More concretely, while you can build followers on Medium, our algorithms have played a bigger role in what gets distributed. As a result, readers have been less likely to follow writers because it doesn’t have a huge effect…So that’s the big thing that’s changing with this new app (and soon on the web). Our goal is to create the best of both worlds: An open and simple platform where anyone can publish — once or occasionally — that also allows for deeper connections between readers and regular writers.”

Medium has been clear that the pivot to relational means that followers are everything.

On the desktop interface, the real estate on which the writer-follower love story must unfold is a 3'x2' rectangle with space for eight images or logos, along with a banner icon tallying the number of new posts by their favorite writers.

On the new Medium, that little box is the Promised Land! Show up there and you have a chance to connect with your followers. Don’t and, well…

The company has announced that they’re removing as many barriers as possible between readers and the writers they love. For example:

Partner Program and non-Partner program stories will be distributed equally, so that readers are not limited in access to those they follow.

The top few we follow are prominently featured on the desktop and mobile interface.

Screenshot courtesy of the author

Look Roz Warren, Casey Botticello, David Price, Carolyn Riker and Gayle Kurtzer-Meyers. Today, you’ve made my homepage!

Making it to the Promised Land

So, how does a humble writer make it to the new Medium Promised Land?

By writing good content, of course. But there is more to it than that.

Our work makes it into our followers’ “Latest From Following” when a follower consistently engages with it. Each clap, scroll and comment factors into the Medium algorithm, rating their satisfaction with our content. Satisfied customers are served up more. Those that are not will be offered content from someone else they follow, in the hopes of Medium winning more of their prized attention.
Beijing makes self-driving vehicles a priority
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: Cities, Autonomous Cars, Self Driving Cars, China, Taxi

IMAGE: AutoX

AutoX, a Chinese autonomous vehicle startup, has announced the launch of a fleet of 100 self-driving RoboTaxis in Shanghai’s Jiading district, where it will be competing with Didi, which began operating there at the end of June. Other companies, such as Pony.ai, Baidu or WeRide are already running self-driving taxi fleets in other Chinese cities, many of which can be booked through mapping and mobility apps such as AutoNavi or LetzGo.

AutoX runs another fleet in the centric district of Nanshan in Shenzen, where it is based, and now has a license to road test in California, and has long announced its intention to launch its services in Europe through a partnership with NEVS, the company that acquired Saab’s assets. AutoX CEO Jianxiong Xiao, known as Professor X, is convinced of the suitability of NEVS’s electric vehicles for stand-alone taxi services and their potential contribution to reducing both pollution and the number of vehicles on the streets of our cities.

China’s autonomous driving sector has more players and has attracted more investment than the United States, which is still largely controlled by pioneer Waymo, whose vehicles have been circulating without a safety driver in several cities for some time now.

The Chinese government has designated autonomous driving, along with 5G and artificial intelligence, as one of the strategic technologies to counteract the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, boosted by state investment fund that has breathed new life into the ecosystem.

The development of autonomous driving systems depends on the availability of advanced mapping, and several companies in both the United States and China are vying for leadership in this area. For the moment, when a service is requested through an app that includes this type of service, it checks that the origin and destination are within its scope, and users are asked if they wish to be picked up by an autonomous vehicle. Very soon, depending on the regulation and development of technology, this type of service will become the norm, thanks to its lower operating costs. Whether that will happen first in a city in the United States or in China is yet to be seen.
Gentle Reminder
By: Silvia Killingsworth
Tags: For My Eyes Mostly, Reminder, Music, Spelling, Lana Del Rey

Editor of The @Awl and @thehairpin. Patron Saint of early bedtimes.

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