fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
An exciting journey begins for 40 young journalists in European newsrooms
By: Paula Montañà Tor
Tags: Innovation, Newsroom, Journalism, Fellowship, Updates

In less than two months, over 800 students applied for the GNI Fellowship in Europe, which offers summer placements in a wide range of media organisations across 11 countries. The European Journalism Centre (EJC) was thrilled with the enthusiastic response. Today we are proud to announce the recipients of the 40 fellowships.

When we announced the launch of the GNI Fellowship programme earlier this year, we explained why we wanted to connect young talent with leading news organisations in Europe. In order to embrace change, news organisations must learn how to best use technology and integrate young professionals into multidisciplinary teams.

The GNI Fellowship provides fellows with the chance to step into the professional world in a highly competitive job market. All positions will be paid. Fellows will be embedded in some of the most innovative newsrooms in Europe and, at the same time, these newsrooms will benefit from their energy and new ideas.

The selection process carried out by each host organisation was hard-won and we were awed by the motivation and richness of experience of many candidates.

Meet the 40 GNI Fellows of 2019

The group is a diverse pool of aspiring journalists with backgrounds that range from design and engineering, to computer science and economics. They will soon join their selected newsrooms to explore the intersection of journalism and technology.

Here are the names of the 40 fellows and the areas of work they will be focusing on:

Data journalism and visualisation

“This is the first time I get the chance to be a valuable part of a journalistic project — instead of just being the young intern. Also, I am finally able to apply my knowledge and creative ideas to a ‘real-life’ environment.” Lea Weinmann

Design and product development

“What fascinates me most about journalism is its unstoppable speed. As a designer it is absolutely necessary to follow, and to be ahead. How to master this challenge is nowhere better to learn than in journalism.” Nicola Ritter

Audience engagement and digital storytelling

“Having a strong record in local journalism, I want to learn how to apply new means of researching, telling and displaying stories to this sector of news — because local stories tend to affect people more.” Anna Klein

Fact-checking, verification and investigative journalism
[Python][Selenium] 人生苦短，把麻煩的 Chrome Browser Driver Version Mapping 自動化
Tags: Selenium, Windows, Chrome, Automation, Python

Packages matching selenium

Chocolatey is software management automation for Windows that wraps installers, executables, zips, and scripts into…
Blood Moving Fast
By: Shannon Mastromonico
Tags: Canadian Poet, Poetry Community, Writing, Writer, Poetry

©Shannon Mastromonico 2020

Me from yesterday. Pacific

Masking pain with too much

eager

puppy

Today I am feline

Keen, barbed wire boundaries

Breathing

Eyes on watch. Today

I am a tempest

Blood moving fast

Governing my own galaxies

and gravities

Electric

Vast
AWS CDK and Typescript: Using the New ApiGatewayV2
By: Enrico Gruner
Tags: Typescript, Aws Tutorial, Aws Cdk, AWS Lambda, Api Gateway

Using the new API Gateway V2 is a 3-steps-process:

Create an integration.

Define an HTTP API.

Add Routes.

Note that there’s still no easy way to use WebSockets.

Create an integration

The integration is used to tell API Gateway where it should send incoming requests to. In the most simplistic case, this would be your Lambda handler. But Load Balancers or an HTTP Proxy are also possible. What might be strange is that this comes in its own package @aws-cdk/aws-apigatewayv2-integrations .

const httpApiIntegration = new LambdaProxyIntegration({

handler: fn,

});

Define an HTTP API

You have to create an HTTP API that will hold all of your routes. This instance is the equivalent of the LambdaRestApi from V1, but it has a different API.

const httpApi = new HttpApi(this, "MyApi");

There’s also a third parameter for options, such as a CORS configuration or the default integration.

Add Routes

With routes, you can specify which integration will be triggered depending on the path that has been entered or the HTTP Method that has been used.

httpApi.addRoutes({

path: "/",

methods: [HttpMethod.ANY],

integration: httpApiIntegration,

});

Bonus: Add Cloudfront

Putting a Cloudfront in front of your API Gateway V2 is luckily not that different from V1.

const feCf = new CloudFrontWebDistribution(this, "MyCf", {

defaultRootObject: "/",

originConfigs: [{

customOriginSource: {

domainName: `${httpApi.httpApiId}.execute-api.${this.region}.${this.urlSuffix}`,

},

behaviors: [{

isDefaultBehavior: true,

}],

}],

enableIpV6: true,

});

Done. If you want to create an Output to your console to get the Cloudfront Domain Name, you will have to use distributionDomainName now, instead of domainName .

new cdk.CfnOutput(this, "myOut", {

value: feCf.distributionDomainName,

});

That’s it!

Thank you very much for your attention; I hope that this was any help for you.
The Literally Literary Weekly Update #2
By: Jonathan Greene
Tags: Writing, Blogging, Ll Letters, Publication, Publishing

One Last Note

We have 27,365 followers at Literally Literary. We have approximately 200 writers. Even with these tremendous numbers, most of the submitted works get less than 20 views. Why? Algorithms.

How do we combat this and support each other? Bookmark our homepage and once a day, come here and see what you missed. The only way we can be the kind of community we all want to be is to support each others’ works by reading them.

Our homepage has a Top 25 that is updated every single day with new works published in the last month. Below that, you will find our latest works and then trending ones that you may have missed. Be a participant and read works from amazing writers that maybe you don’t follow yet, but might want to.
Constraints
By: Joseph Emmi
Tags: Personal, Constraints, Self Improvement, Life, Productivity

Constraints by definition are not normally considered as something positive, they mean limitations or restrictions. For me, are a necessity.

Is not amazing how constraints can help to realise how much time you waste?

Cleaning the house just in time before your parents get home.

Finishing the suitcase just int time to go straight to the airport.

That assignment that has been half-way done for three weeks, but is sharply completed on the final day just few minutes before the deadline.

Living on a tight budget. Taking care of other on a minimum wage.

Constraints are a powerful thing and we should expose ourselves more to them.

I’ve been preaching for a while, and probably have it as a personal motto: “Excess of resources are also a problem”.

For businesses.

For people.

For start-ups.

And even for governments.

The more you have of x, the more you waste.

Time, money, you name it.

The trick for me, is to realise it, not punishing yourself about how much have been wasted, but learn from it, aiming to maximise those constraints in your favour.

tHow to create those constraints, that will allow you to work at max, with less, while getting (in most of the cases) the best possible outcome.

For me is all about time, wasting and management. I’m always impressed of how much I’m able to do in short periods of time when pressure is involved.

This is post is just a clear example of me taking advantage of the circumstances when possible.

This have been written in about 5 minutes (aiming to edit later). I’m in serious rush, I’m very limited on time; having to leave the flat in 30 minutes, not before completing two other tasks.

The idea just came to my mind and immediately thought it was worthwhile to write about it. I had two choices.

1 — Leave if for later, miss the momentum and inspiration; meaning I will probably pick up the subject later, will have more time to work on it, increasing the the possibilities of abandoning it until my next bright moment.

2 — Embrace the limitations and just get it done. Write it down as draft, but put it all out there, looking for the best possible outcome, like it’s going live right away.

This, is a clear exercise of number two, and have to admit I’m very pleased. Not necessarily my best piece, but certainly not my worst either. And it’s done.

What is your constraint and how does it work for you?
[Java-201a] The Hidden Dangers of Scanner
By: Jack Boyuan Xu
Tags: USC, Viterbi, Programming, Java

Don’t Close Scanner!

When we use Scanner and leave it open, our IDE may complain that we have a resource leak. Even if the IDE does not complain, usually it’s a good idea to close something if we don’t need it anymore. The intuition, then, is to simply close it… Right? Consider the following code snippet:

public class Main {



public static void getInput1() {

Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);

scanner.nextLine(); // Ask for user input

scanner.close();

}



public static void getInput2() {

Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);

scanner.nextLine(); // Ask for user input

scanner.close();

}



public static void main(String[] args) {

getInput1();

getInput2();

}

}

At a glance, there is nothing wrong with the code. We create a new Scanner, close it, create another one, and close that one. However, if we try to run it, this is what we get:

ss

Exception in thread "main" java.util.NoSuchElementException: No line found

at java.util.Scanner.nextLine(Scanner.java:1540)

at com.usc.csci201x.Main.getInput2(Main.java:17)

at com.usc.csci201x.Main.main(Main.java:23) Process finished with exit code 1

I typed ss .

What’s going on here then? Observe the constructor of Scanner when we instantiated it: we gave it System.in . That’s an okay thing to do. However, it has an implication that may not be obvious: when we do scanner.close() , we are closing System.in as well.

What is System.in ?

System.in is the system input stream opened up by the JVM. Normally it stays open throughout the lifetime of the program so we can capture user input. However, if we close it prematurely, we will not be able to capture user input anymore. Hence, when we try to read input with System.in again, it tells us No line found .

The Solution

Just don’t close Scanner.

If you must close Scanner, you can wrap System.in inside of a FilterInputStream and override the close() method:

Scanner scanner = new Scanner(new FilterInputStream(System.in) {

@Override

public void close() throws IOException {

//don't close System.in!

}

});

And now it is safe to call scanner.close() as it will only close FilterInputStream instead of System.in .

If your application is single-threaded, consider making Scanner static. Maybe like so:
3 to read: The trouble with platforms & newsrooms | ‘Darts & Laurels’ goes monthly | Planning a…
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: Journalism, Cuny, Media, Data, Data Visualization

3 to read: The trouble with platforms & newsrooms | ‘Darts & Laurels’ goes monthly | Planning a data story

By Matt Carroll <@MattatMIT>

A good week: Platforms vs newsrooms; ‘Darts & Laurels’ goes monthly (yeah!); and some help for writing data stories.

Get notified via email: Send note to 3toread (at) gmail.com

“3 to read” online

Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab.
Exploring New York City Event Permits with Vega-Lite
By: Cameron Yick
Tags: Open Data, D3js, Vega Lite, Engineering, Data Visualization

By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a sort of information map. And when you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful. - David McCandless (Journalist and Information Designer)

You’ve landed on one of the tens of thousands of datasets in Enigma Public, the world’s broadest repository of public data, and are interested in exploring it visually. Given the infinite range of visual forms that are possible to represent any dataset, the options may feel overwhelming. A good tool helps to constrain this vast design space, and gives the user a solid set of principles to build upon.

Vega-Lite is a layer of abstraction on top of d3.js. Developed at the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab, it is a web-based “grammar of graphics” that gives users the power to rapidly experiment with different visual encodings for their data. As a web based tool, it lets the user create both static and interactive data graphics, making it an excellent item to have in any data explorer’s toolbox.

Click to read my interactive tutorial on exploring data with Vega-Lite!

Never heard of Observable Notebooks before? Read on!

Data scientists and journalists alike love using “notebook”-style tools such as Jupyter (in contrast to plain text editors) for many reasons, including

Ability to present text, code, and graphics side-by-side

Ability to run and iterate on code one section at a time through “cells”

A better overall coding experience

Observablehq is a free, web-based notebook for data science, founded by a team of folks with roots in the open-source data visualization community (Mike Bostock, Tom MacWright). Unlike Jupyter, readers can view and run Observable notebooks without needing to install anything, making it an ideal tool for sharing reproducible and interactive analyses.

_______________________________________________________________

Interested in solving complex, unique problems? We’re hiring.
Marketing lessons from ‘The Jetsons’
By: Shamontiel L. Vaughn
Tags: Technology, Marketing, Advertising, Space, Inventions

Marketing lessons from ‘The Jetsons’

What can a 58-year-old TV show teach us about modern sales?

Image via Mark Anderson on Flickr

In 2020, there’s no way to deny that technology is taking over — it’s cleaning your floors, monitoring your home for burglars, paying for your groceries, allowing you to eavesdrop on live-in guests, and controlling your television and computer viewing. Mostly it’s convenient and fun to use. Other times it can be creepy.

But fans of the ’60s (or ’80s) “The Jetsons” managed to make their tech-savvy businesses and home life more cool than it is invasive. There were no Echo users who had recorded conversations sent to someone’s employer. Hackers weren’t breaking into Amazon Ring to harass small children. Alexa and Google Home weren’t targeting users for phishing out unauthorized password changes.

But if you look closely enough, the Jetsons had to do their fair share of marketing cleanup in a tech-crazed world too. Here’s how I saw them do it.
Stay The Course
By: Matthew Woodall
Tags: Challenge, Health, Data, Life, Covid 19

Image courtesy of the Toronto Star

This is a chart from the fine folks at the Toronto Star, using information from Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 dashboard. This information represents the growth in a variety of countries around the world.

That green line that represents China finally starts to make the bend around the middle of February, when they finally ease the growth of COVID-19. This is approximately a month after the city of Wuhan was first quarantined and isolated from the rest of China.

It is also approximately a month before the easing of the physical distancing and quarantine restrictions in Wuhan.

It takes roughly two months of serious self-isolation, physical distancing, and quarantine measures to get this pandemic under control.

We aren’t out of the woods yet, folks.

Most of us in North America are only a couple of weeks into serious self-isolation and quarantine measures, and the numbers are incredibly different in US and Canada.

Look at the bright orange line that represents US cases of COVID-19. It shows no sign of relenting in its ever-increasing numbers. It is a very ugly line that should be sparking fear in every American, especially those that don’t have access to adequate and affordable healthcare.

Now, look at the red line that represents Canada. While the US cases have increased on a sharper curve than any other country (including China), Canadian cases have increased on a much slower rate.

Here in Canada, we have taken physical distancing seriously, and enacted it early. The results are showing in our numbers and our much slower rate of increase. This isn’t to say that there aren’t Americans who are doing everything they can, just that it appears to have been more successful in Canada to this date.

The bigger story from this chart? We’ve got a long way to go. Until we start to see consistent change in the rate of daily increase, we can’t even begin to think about resuming daily life. The World Health organization said in its March 30 briefing that the data being reported now represents the situation two weeks ago. We won’t know about today until two weeks from now.

So, it doesn’t matter how restless you are, nor how much you miss your loved ones. We have to stay the course and stay isolated until we are told otherwise.

We have done hard things before.

We will do hard things again.

This is just one more hard thing, and we can do it.

But we have to do it together.
Singlism Is Officially in the Dictionary Now
By: Renata Gomes
Tags: Relationships, Love, Life Lessons, Psychology, Lifestyle

Singlism Is Officially in the Dictionary Now

It defines the stereotyping and stigmatizing of people who are single.

Photo by Edgar Gomezon Unsplash

Coined by Dr. Bella DePaulo, the word singlism has just been officially added to the Cambridge English Dictionary. The definition in the dictionary reads as follows:

Singlism: unfair treatment of people who are single (= not married).

The word has appeared in Dr. DePaulo’s work since at least 2005. Much has been said about how singles are perceived in a society that values marriage and life-long partnerships so highly, but having a word like “singlism” in the dictionary highlights how important it has become to address the negative bias against people who are single and their lifestyle.

Author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, Dr. DePaulo has long been an advocate of singles. She defends that the single life isn’t devoid of happiness and fulfillment like so many tend to believe, but that it’s instead a valid lifestyle choice that fits some people even better than marriage.

Dr. DePaulo also highlights the importance of minding microaggressions against singles. She recognizes the problem isn’t as damaging as microaggressions rooted in racism or sexism, but she points out that the bias against singles can be just as pervasive — only we’re too used to ignoring and thinking of it as “normal,” or “just the way things are.”

Many singles can definitely relate to examples of singlism in their daily lives. From being asked why are they still single to having people assuming their lives are easy and free from any complication due to not having to work things out with a partner on a daily basis.

While the impact of microaggressions is still the subject of debate, there’s no denying our culture at large often implies that there’s something wrong with people who are single and that the anxiety over the social pressure to partner up can be draining on a person’s mental health. Understanding singles anxiety through the lens of singlism can help find new solutions to fight it, including broader validation and social acceptance of the single lifestyle.

Having singlism included in the dictionary may not solve any issue of prejudice or negative bias by itself, but having a word that defines that issue is an important tool in discussing it. Despite people like Dr. DePaulo dedicating their life’s work to it, it’s a discussion that still has a lot to develop in the future.
Forms with Formik & Yup
By: Sufiyaan Mitha
Tags: React Native, Technology, Software Development, React, JavaScript

Overview

Capturing data from users is important when developing mobile apps and websites. When we are building a react website or a react-native mobile app, one hurdle people always encounter is picking a reliable forms library to facilitate capturing information and managing it — the UI components might be easy to build but capturing the input; providing validated & meaningful feedback and submitting the form is a lot to think about.

Formik is a library that has taken into consideration all the downsides of any previously built libraries and introduced an easy way to handle forms without any ‘magic’. There is a small learning curve, but once we pass this, the library makes form state management a breeze!

This article will focus on creating a simple login page using Formik with code examples to reference. By the end of this article, the mentioned learning curve should be addressed. For context, the structure will be:

1. General Setup

2. Validate inputs and provide meaningful feedback to the user

3. Understand how to submit a form

UI Set Up

React-Bootstrap comes with a lot of basic components to make a decent form— not super flashy, but the set up is as below, the following code is the UI setup only and has no logic implemented yet.

Note: You can use any UI library, some have special Formik plugins — with react-bootstrap we can use the Formik library directly.
Coping with Trauma During the Holidays
Tags: Mental Health, PTSD, Holidays, Trauma, Family

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD is defined as a condition that includes flashbacks and memories of a traumatic event, avoidant behaviors, anxiety, and depression. The holidays can be filled with triggers for those who suffer from PTSD. Whether you are spending more time with family* or social distancing in your own home, the holidays can provide its own set of challenges. Your triggers do not define you and there are ways to cope with them when you experience them. Below is a list of ways you can have a safe and healthy holiday season.

Join a group therapy session or sign up for one on one therapy sessions

Group therapy can be helpful to show you that you are not alone. Many people can share their different experiences and coping skills that may be able to help you through this stressful time. One on one therapy is another option that can assist you in sorting through and coping with uncomfortable feelings and memories. There can be community programs in your area which may provide these services at little to no cost.

Find some “Me Time”

If you are spending a lot of time with your family, find a moment that you can spend doing an activity that will improve your mental health. Go for a walk, meditate, work on a craft or hobby, make sure you find some time, especially if you are feeling anxious or overwhelmed. Exercise is another way to find that “me time.” Exercise has also proven to help with the symptoms of PTSD. You can go for a jog, watch a tutorial on YouTube for yoga, ride your bike, there are many ways to relieve that stress.

Reach out to others

It isn’t unusual for someone who is suffering from PTSD to cut themselves off from their support system and isolate. Isolation, however, can worsen PTSD symptoms. Reach out to trusted friends or family members who may be able to help you through any depression or anxiety.

Set boundaries with others — and yourself

When spending time around family during the holidays, it is important to address any boundaries that you may have. Setting up boundaries can help you cope with trauma and sort through feelings in your own way. If it is safe to do so, talk to a trusted family member about what your boundaries are and what they look like. For example, If you need extra “me time,” communicating with a family member that you are living or staying with, can help open up dialogue and communication so that you can get what you need without any conflict.

You can also set up boundaries with yourself as well. You can give yourself permission to not engage in a discussion that could be harmful to your well-being, set up boundaries with yourself with stress eating and drinking, and also not allow yourself to feel pressured to buy a lot of gifts. Do what you can with what you have, and the sentiment will shine through.

Overall, remember to be gentle with yourself. At the end of the year, we may need to be even kinder to ourselves as we process all that we have been through. Just remember that you are worth feeling better.

*The CDC recommends only celebrating with those in your own household.*
Learning SQL the Hard Way
By: Rahul Agarwal
Tags: Sql, Data Science, Programming, Machine Learning, Productivity

Joins in SQL

Till now, we have learned how we can work with single tables. But in reality, we need to work with multiple tables.

So, the next thing we would want to learn is how to do joins.

Now joins are an integral and an essential part of a MySQL Database and understanding them is necessary. The below visual talks about most of the joins that exist in SQL. I usually end up using just the LEFT JOIN, and INNER JOIN, so I will start with LEFT JOIN.

The LEFT JOIN is used when you want to keep all the records in the left table(A) and merge B on the matching records. The records of A where B is not merged are kept as NULL in the resulting table. The MySQL Syntax is:

SELECT A.col1, A.col2, B.col3, B.col4

FROM A

LEFT JOIN B

ON A.col2=B.col3

Here we select col1 and col2 from table A and col3 and col4 from table B. We also specify which common columns to join on using the ON statement.

The INNER JOIN is used when you want to merge A and B and only to keep the common records in A and B.

Example:

To give you a use case lets go back to our Sakila database. Suppose we wanted to find out how many copies of each movie we do have in our inventory. You can get that by using:

SELECT film_id,count(film_id) as num_copies

FROM sakila.inventory

GROUP BY film_id

ORDER BY num_copies DESC;

Does this result look interesting? Not really. IDs don’t make sense to us humans, and if we can get the names of the movies, we would be able to process the information better. So we snoop around and see that the table film has got film_id as well as the title of the film.

So we have all the data, but how do we get it in a single view?

Come Joins to the rescue. We need to add the title to our inventory table information. We can do this using —

SELECT A.*, B.title

FROM sakila.inventory A

LEFT JOIN sakila.film B

ON A.film_id = B.film_id

This will add another column to your inventory table information. As you might notice some films are in the film table that we don’t have in the inventory . We used a left join since we wanted to keep whatever is in the inventory table and join it with its corresponding counterpart in the film table and not everything in the film table.

So now we have got the title as another field in the data. This is just what we wanted, but we haven’t solved the whole puzzle yet. We want title and num_copies of the title in the inventory.

But before we can go any further, we should understand the concept of inner queries first.
7 (more) tips to quickly improve your UIs
By: Marc Andrew
Tags: UI, Product Design, Design, UI Design, Visual Design

Originally published at marcandrew.me on October 22nd, 2020.

Creating beautiful, but practical UIs takes time, with many design revisions along the way. I know. I’ve been there many times before myself.

But what I’ve discovered over the years is that by making some simple adjustments you can quickly improve the designs you’re trying to create.

In this follow up article (Here’s Parts 1, 2, and 3), I’ve once again put together a small, and easy to put into practice selection of tips that can, with little effort, help improve both your designs (UI), and the overall user experience (UX).

In this part I’ve focused primarily on Typography because I know how beneficial a good understanding of type can be when it comes to producing beautiful, practical designs.

Let’s dive on in…
GitHub Sponsors & Gitcoin Grants =❤️ 🤖
By: Kevin Owocki
Tags: Open Source, Ethereum, Gitcoin, Sustainability

GitHub Sponsors & Gitcoin Grants =❤️ 🤖

Support your OSS Work with Gitcoin Grants on Github’s new Sponsors feature

The Gitcoin team was thrilled to see today that GitHub formally launched Sponsors, a way for users of GitHub to find ways to financially support their favorite projects through a variety of platforms of their choice.

This is what it looks like in GitHub’s UI:

We’d like to invite users of Gitcoin Grants to set up GitHub Sponsors on their repos. Here’s how to do it:

Go to the repository associated with Gitcoin Grants. Click ‘Settings’.

3. Scroll down to “Features’ and check “Sponsorships” and then “Set up Sponsor Button”

4. A text editor will appear on the next page that allows you to enter information about how to sponsor your repository. Paste the following text into the text editor:

custom: <gitcoin_grants_url>

and replace <gitcoin_grants_url> with your Gitcoin Grants URL.

Success!

Users will now see a “Sponsor” button on your repo:

Grow Open Source

GitHub Sponsors shows that open source sustainability is a real priority for GitHub and for Microsoft, and that’s something we’re very excited to see. We’re also excited that we’re able to engage with them on this initiative and look forward to seeing how their work on open source sustainability evolves moving forward. Here’s to a brighter future for open source software.

To learn more about Gitcoin, click below. We welcome you on our journey to grow open source while changing the way we work.
Medium’s New Icon Has A Hidden Meaning?
By: Robert W. Locke
Tags: Writers On Writing, Medium Icon, Humor, Writing, Ｍedium

Humor

Medium’s New Icon Has A Hidden Meaning?

It’s time for a change, again.

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

I was shocked when I opened my Medium page this afternoon ( 564 times so far today!) The old comforting, solid, and stolid M logo/icon had gone!

Was this a prank or a joke? Well, it’s not April 1st. It must be something else. Is it related to a conspiracy theory, deep state, or the swamp?

My partner asked me why I was so upset. She was on the phone trying to comfort me.

“As far as I can see, it’s three circles. Starting with the biggest one, then a Medium one and finally a small one which seems to be hiding behind the corner. It’s weird, disconcerting and downright upsetting.” “Maybe it just means Large, Medium and Small to cater for all sizes”, my partner said. “You know, the big fish in the pond, then the medium ones like you and finally the small one for beginners who are just dipping their toes in the water.”

We chatted away for a while and I told her that this was just one of the major changes at Medium. The claps had all gone. They were still there but it was like clapping in an empty room. One clap was the same as 50. They did not count at all, so why not just put a Like as on Facebook and be done with it.

I must say my forefinger on my right hand will enjoy the break because holding it down for 50 claps was very tiring. I bet many readers will be glad too and they will stop being criticized as being too mean and miserly.

I feel sorry for Roz Warren who used to have great fun adding the right number of claps to make a nice round number. I mean 500 is so much more impressive than 481. I hope she can find a new hobby soon.

Curation is gone. You will be lucky now if you get “distributed.” That word is so cold and impersonal. There is no indication either where your article is being sent and under what topic. It sounds like a courier delivery.

I know that thousands and thousands of writers have been released from curation jail and are celebrating — all keeping their distance, of course. Must be such a relief after being in jail all that time cooped up with cranky and frustrated writers.

Then all the earning algorithms have been changed. It’s all based on being “relational.” I don’t like that word at all. I believe it means scratching each other’s backs (reading each other’s stories).

Medium delights in changing their featured articles every 5 minutes or so. This is to make sure that you have more than enough to read and can dedicate your entire life to Medium. Makes sense, I suppose. I mean they are paying us a pittance.

We have to forge relationships. Read and write basically. That’s all it takes. Sounds like elementary school.

I bet there will be new rules on responses soon. How many claps to give? How many words?

My partner logged into the Medium app on her phone and I heard her shout with joy.

“The new logo is so pretty — I just love it!” she whooped.

If you need more laughs check out my new book The Brits Are Bonkers
How I Make Steady Money Daily On Medium
By: Shamar M
Tags: Advice, Money Management, Writing, Money, Writing Tips

1. Publish regularly.

Duh! As I said, none of my articles has hit it big. The most views I have is 305 with a 60% read ratio. I have to publish regularly to make sure I keep up income.

I publish 4 times a week and do my best to avoid weekends, but sometimes it can’t be helped. There’s the myth that publishing on weekends is not as effective, which I have to tell you I have noticed that this is true. Publishing between Monday-Thursday is probably best.

2. Spread your work on socials.

This is not the key to getting a good amount of views/reads, but it does help. There’s a lot of Facebook groups out there that I am part of that are extremely interactive and you can publish links to your work on there;

Medium Writers Lounge

Medium Magic

Medium Writers Boost

There’s also Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter and whatever else you use to promote your work.

As well as promotion, being interactive in general will only do you well. Clapping for other writers and reading successes does bring me joy.

3. Write about writing.

I have noticed that my articles focusing on writing are the most successful. This is probably the niche I should follow. But this isn’t me as a writer. I like the talk about everything and anything, so if I have an idea, I’ll write about it.

You do not have to follow one particular niche. I most certainly do not, but I have noticing that writing about writing does draw people in.

4. Submit to publications

Submitting to publications means that many others will naturally come across your work on the publication homepage, generating more views and reads thus making you some dollars/cents.

Saying this, there have been cases where people have self-published and editors have reached out asking if they can publish it.

At the end of the day, a good piece of writing is a good piece of writing.

5. Practice your writing.

I haven’t really taken time to focus on bettering my writing. I tend to just write, run it through Grammarly and Microsoft Word and if nothing is red or blue, Thunderbird is go.

Being six weeks into Medium, I can see the improvements from when I first started to where I am now. This does not mean that improvements cannot be made and I know that sooner or later I will have to focus on this.

I want to make my content engaging. I want to make it a good, beneficial read for someone. I want someone to just enjoy my work. The only way to do this is to improve.

6. Check your stats everyday.

Many people probably advise against this, but I don’t. Every morning, check your stats even if you haven’t published. That’s ONCE a day, by the way. Becoming obsessed with stats isn’t good and it doesn’t make the numbers increase.

You want the dollar signs to go up, not down or stay stagnant. My advice is to make a note per day of how much you have and just work out the difference a day, then work out the average (divide by how many days in that month) of how much you earned that month.
Review: ParseNet — Looking Wider to See Better (Semantic Segmentation)
By: Sik-Ho Tsang
Tags: Convolutional Network, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning

1. ParseNet Module

ParseNet Module

Actually, ParseNet is simple as in the figure above.

Normalization Using l2 Norm for each channel

At the lower path, at certain conv layer, Normalization using l2 norm is performed for each channel.

At the upper path, at certain conv layer, we perform global average pooling of those feature maps at that conv layer, and perform normalization using l2 norm. Unpooling is just replicating that values of that global averaged pooled vector to be the same size with the lower path so that they can be concatenated.

Features are in different scale at different layers

The reason of having the L2 norm is that, because the earlier layers usually have larger values than the later layers.

The above example showing that the features at different layers have different scales of values. After normalization, all features will have the same value range. And they are all concatenated together.

And a learnable scaling factor γ for each channel is also introduced after normalization:

3. Results

3.1. SiftFlow

SiftFlow Dataset

By adding and normalizing pool6 + fc7 + conv5 + conv4 using ParseNet module to FCN-32s, 40.4% mean IOU is obtained which is better than FCN-16s.

3.2. PASCAL Context

PASCAL Context Dataset

By adding and normalizing pool6 + fc7 + conv5 + conv4 + conv3 using ParseNet module to FCN-32s, 40.4% IOU is obtained which is better than FCN-8s.

We can also see that, without normalization, it does not work well for the ParseNet module.

3.3. PASCAL VOC 2012
How to Get Back in the Habit of Reading Books After Graduating from University
By: Matt Karamazov
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Reading, Education, Books

How to Get Back in the Habit of Reading Books After Graduating from University

Since leaving university, I’ve read 883 books

Image by <a href=”https://pixabay.com/users/stocksnap-894430/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2593394">StockSnap</a> from <a href=”https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=2593394">Pixabay</a>

School may have killed your passion for the printed word, but it can be brought back to life.

You have not been condemned to some kind of a bookless desert-future where you’ll never read anything longer than 140 characters ever again.

There’s a spark left where your love of books used to be, and I’m going to help you find it, and re-ignite it into a Guy Montag-sized flame.

Since leaving university, I’ve read 883 books (I counted lol), and my, shall we say, “Passion for Proust,” my “Hankering for Hemingway,” my “Desire for DeLillo” (sorry), remains undiminished.

Now, if you haven’t even looked at a physical book since you last closed your final exam booklet; if you used to love reading, but you can’t get excited about books any more because of all the required reading you’ve had to do for school; or if it’s been so long since you’ve had your life changed by a book that you weren’t forced to read that you’ve resigned yourself to your bookless fate — then this article’s for you.

If you’re a really hard case, we may have to resort to some extreme measures, but as Kafka said, reading great books is like taking an axe to the frozen sea inside us. So what we’re going to do is thaw you out a little bit, and welcome you back into the warm, inviting world of books and literature.

But first, some really good news:

You’re way ahead of most people already.

See, a lot of would-be readers struggle with some pretty nasty confidence issues resulting from a lifetime of non-reading. Books have never really been a big part of their lives, and thus the so-called Great Books take on this sort of mythical quality that can be quite intimidating.

I’ve even felt it before, and I’m no stranger to the Classics. I mean, I swear I’ve never even heard of James Patterson (I’m kidding; I’m not actually a snob, I just play one on the internet).

But people like you and I probably got into university because we loved to read.

We were pretty damn good at it, ahead of most of our classmates probably, and I bet that, in the beginning, no one had to force you to pick up a book instead of a remote.

You were (are) a reader. Reading was just what you did.

Half the battle is simply realizing that your reading instincts have never really left you in the first place. They may have been dormant for a little while, but they’re still there. Books can become a part of your life again. Here’s how.
Huellas del Coronavirus
By: Isaac De La Peña
Tags: Covid 19, España, Venture Capital, Portugal, Coronavirus

in In Fitness And In Health
Why What React? & Its basics…
By: Bhavishya Negi
Tags: React, Reactjs, Web Development, Programming, India

React from Facebook

HELLO FRIENDS!!!

In this article, we are going to learn and answer the below-mentioned questions…

1. What is React?

2. Why React?

After that, we will be taking a look at the basics of React.

What is React

React.js is an open-source JavaScript library that is used for building user interfaces specifically for single-page applications.

React allows us to create reusable UI components. React was first created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer working for Facebook. React first deployed on Facebook’s newsfeed in 2011 and on Instagram.com in 2012.

React allows developers to create large web applications that can change data, without reloading the page.

This corresponds to the view in the MVC template. It can be used with a combination of other JavaScript libraries or frameworks, such as Angular JS in MVC.

React JS is also called simply to React or React.js.

In simple words,

React is a library to build UIs which are fast, scalable and simple.

It uses different components to build a single full-fledged app.

This whole process can be easily understood as a puzzle that is to be solved and to solved we need to put the correct component at the correct place once all the components are placed in the right place the app gets completed.

But the catch is that the components are to be built by the developers.
Epic App Update! Send crypto anywhere in the world in seconds
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Finance, Technology, Mobile App Development

You have probably heard the news that Crypterium is now running the fastest crypto transactions in the world.

Crypto transfers in 1 second to people who don’t even have crypto wallets? It’s a reality now.

Send crypto to your mom, your friend, your ex-girlfriend from Iceland. You can even give crypto as a present to someone’s birthday.

Download Crypterium App in Apple Store or Google Play!

About Crypterium

CCrypterium is building a mobile app that will turn cryptocurrencies into money that you can spend with the same ease as cash. Shop around the world and pay with your coins and tokens at any NFC terminal, or via scanning the QR codes. Make purchases in online stores, pay your bills, or just send money across borders in seconds, reliably and for a fraction of a penny.

Join our Telegram news channel or other social media to stay updated!

Website ๏ Telegram ๏ Facebook ๏ Twitter ๏ BitcoinTalk ๏ Reddit ๏ YouTube ๏ LinkedIn
Designing for accessibility is not that hard
By: Pablo Stanley
Tags: User Experience, Accessibility, UX, Design, Design Thinking

Designing for accessibility is not that hard

Seven easy-to-implement guidelines to design a more accessible web ❤️

Digital accessibility refers to the practice of building digital content and applications that can be used by a wide range of people, including individuals who have visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities.

There’s a myth that making a website accessible is difficult and expensive, but it doesn’t have to. Designing a product from scratch that meets the requirements for accessibility doesn’t add extra features or content; therefore there shouldn’t be additional cost and effort.

Fixing a site that is already inaccessible may require some effort, though. When I used to work at Carbon Health, we checked the accessibility of our site using the AXE Chrome Extension. We found 28 violations that we needed to solve on the home page alone. It sounded complicated, but we discovered that these problems were not that hard to correct; it was just a matter of investing time and research to solve them. We were able to get to zero errors in a couple of days.

I want to share with you some of the simple steps we took so you can also make your sites more accessible. These principles focus on web and mobile accessibility.

But before we get started, let’s talk about why that’s important.

Why designing for accessibility? 🤔

As designers, we have the power and responsibility to make sure that everyone has access to what we create regardless of ability, context, or situation. The great thing about making our work accessible is that it brings a better experience to everyone.

There are over 56 million people in the United States (nearly 1 in 5) and over 1 billion people worldwide who have a disability. In 2017, there were 814 website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal and state courts. These two pieces of data alone should convince us of the importance of designing for accessibility.

There is also a strong business case for accessibility: studies show that accessible websites have better search results, they reach a bigger audience, they’re SEO friendly, have faster download times, they encourage good coding practices, and they always have better usability.

These seven guidelines are relatively easy to implement and can help your products get closer to meet level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), and work on the most commonly used assistive technologies — including screen readers, screen magnifiers, and speech recognition tools.

1. Add enough color contrast 🖍
The Toughest Essay
By: Krishna Betai
Tags: Love, Writing, Poetry, NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Month

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

Write an essay about the one thing you love,

Was the toughest assignment I ever got.

To compartmentalise you into

Introduction, body, and conclusion

Was not possible —

You needed no introduction,

The largest part of the essay

Was too small to describe you,

And I’d hate our love to have a conclusion.

I would require a lifetime

To write a narrative essay

That would tell our story

Without missing the minutest of details.

Our love was too vast

To paint a picture through

A descriptive essay;

It simply wouldn’t fit the canvas.

To write an expository essay

Was an onerous task.

Facts, statistics, and numbers

Wouldn’t be proof enough of the way I felt.

Only a fool would need sound reasoning

In the form of a persuasive essay

To make our love look convincing;

Our love was never debatable.

I could write a thousand words about you,

But only three would matter the most.
Take Out — Out Take. * Extra-long comic!* When you’re afraid…
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Humor, Anxiety, Comics, Quarantine, Coronavirus

* Extra-long comic!*

When you’re afraid ordering in will lead to your last supper.
We Need to Destigmatise Taking Antidepressants
Tags: Borderline Personality, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Culture, Zuva

I met up with my mom the other day. I haven’t seen her in years, and it was nice to spend some time with her. I was a little worried about whether I’d be able to make the trip, but luckily I was having a good day.

While eating, she asked me about my mental health. For some background, I’ve had issues my whole life, but it was only this year I opened up about my struggles. Mental illness is stigmatised but even more so in the Black community. Many of us are children to immigrants who rose from nothing, so for us to be depressed “over nothing” is seen as an insult.

To my surprise, she was very understanding and supportive. She understood my hesitation to tell her and promised that when it came to university, she would ensure everything was taken care of. She would also arrange a therapist.

She is great; however, one thing she has been a little iffy over is me taking antidepressants. She mentioned on the phone how she wished I didn’t need to take them. Then over our meal suggested I stay off them and see how I do.