fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
What we’re reading, watching and thinking about at Nuclei
By: Ankur Joshi
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Payments, Reading, Startup

Few interesting pieces we came across last week.

In 2007, in an effort to transform black-market work to white-market work, the government introduced tax deductions for domestic services like home repairs, baby-sitting, laundry and so on.

This meant that people did not need to keep cash to pay for these services. It led to a dramatic drop in the need for cash. In 2012, we got our mobile payment app Swish, which was introduced by a group of Swedish banks along with the central bank. In 2015 to 2017, Sweden replaced its existing notes and coins with new ones. When this happened, cash was deposited into accounts but not all of it was taken out. All of these different reasons have contributed to Sweden becoming a cashless society. More and more stores in Sweden are putting up signs that they do not accept cash. I would not be surprised if we become cashless as early as 2020.
Overwatch League Extension Available Now
By: Emily Halpin
Tags: Esport, Extension, New Features, Overwatch, Twitch

Twitch and Overwatch League have added even more ways for you to get deeper into the game. We have partnered with our friends at Muxy to create the ultimate Overwatch League extension — packed with rosters, stats, player information, voting, and more right on the channel — and it’s available for everyone to use right now!

To activate the extension, simply roll your mouse over the video player on twitch.tv/OverwatchLeague or any of the regional language channels to see the blue Tracer silhouette appear in the upper left portion of the video player. Click it to reveal the extension.

From here, check out the schedule for the day, team stats, and even individual stats for players during the live match.

You can also discover his or her overall performance for the season, learn more about each team and their players, and follow the Twitch Channels of your favorite players!

During each match, vote for your favorite player and see who the community thinks is best.

The Overwatch League Extension is available to everyone watching the League right now — just mouse over the video and click the blue Tracer silhouette on the left to open it!
Territory, not Problem Space
By: Adrian Galvin
Tags: Science

Territory, not Problem Space

Where I am

My Not Problem Statement

For the work of this thesis, I firmly reject the framing of a problem space. A problem space a priori implies brokenness. If something is broken, it causes problems. Those problems need to be fixed. Once fixed, the problem space will no longer be broken, and success will have been achieved. This is how much of design is viewed: problem identification, problem framing, designing, solutioning, and in the end the problem will be deemed solved. In this context, it is vitally important that a designer be able to understand and express the problem space, because their endpoint of design depends on the clarity of their understanding. I do not denegrate this approach.

But, this is not what I am doing.

Further Differentiation

I am exploring a new territory at the intersection of visualization design and scientific knowledge creation. This is not a pristine, un-tread territory for designers, we have working with scientists for years. However, the character of this historical or status quo relationship is fundamentally different from what I am trying to do. Most designers who work in the field of science do so primarily as translators and external communicators of fully resolved scientific knowledge. Recall the announcement of the Higgs-Boson particle discovery. For decades, physicists pried into the inner workings of particle interaction. Finally, researchers at CERN, ATLAS, and CMS felt confident that they had irrefutable evidence of the long sought after particle, and it is at this moment that the work of design was initiated. Communication designers made graphics, charts, maybe even a few sexy 3D renderings of the moment itself. Designers were brought on specifically to translate and visualize this novel discovery, package it into a highly readable, polished form for the public and transmit it to them. This relationship, much like the relationship I describe in case study 0, my time as a medical illustrator, is linear. A direct transmission of fully formed scientific knowledge, secondarily polished and packaged by designers, consumed by the reading public. I aim to be at the lab helping scientists to make discoveries, and I aim to use the skills of design to accomplish this task.
Enjoy Running in the Dark
By: Zen Chan
Tags: Running Tips, Running, Trailrunning, Darkness, Self

“What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.”

― Rumi

Running in the Dark

Finally, I resumed my running at night. Living in a concrete forest with the highest population density globally, it can sometimes not find a better way to give yourself a moment of tranquillity. Thank you to my friend who brought me there — a running trail with total darkness.

I stopped running for 6 months. Part of the reason is the pandemic. Another one is because of my experiment. I will explain my result in another article about integrated exercise.

A nice evening.

Although Hong Kong is so packed with buildings, a friend of mine from the US told me once we also have several country parks that are the closest to the city area. I agree; now I tried this path that is 3 minutes walk from the MTR (our underground transit) station.

It is called the Mount Parker Trail. An uphill trail next to a living area. I met my friend at the sports center, and we ran up after the change. I saw they bought some gears with them. As this was the first time I joined them here, I prepared nothing but my normal running tracksuits and watch.

Photo by Diane Leber form PxHere

It was a delightful evening with clear air. The sky was clear, too. We met some acquaintances along the path. There was a guy who was feeding cats and felt like he comes here often. And there were wild boars with a few of their little one. I saw the long teeth and became alerted when passing by. (It was common in our country park).

I said hello to anyone passing by.
A Sans and Serif Meet-cute
By: Sneha Sankar
Tags: Graphic Design, Typography, Fonts, Tiptoptypetips, Visual Design

Historically, one of the pillars of good visual design is contrast. Contrast creates hierarchy, in this case, typographic hierarchy, that helps distinguish elements from one another. This in turn, directs the reader’s attention through the content with intent and enhances the visual appearance.

So naturally, pairing serifs and sans serif might be the oldest rule in the book. Stylistically, they establish very clear contrast through their forms. Emotionally too, serifs feel older and more mature, while sans are perceived to be more contemporary and youthful. Typeface combinations pairing sans serif for the header with a serif body or vice versa are a dime a dozen, across print, web, and apps. A classic combination, almost impossible to get wrong.

So, what’s special or unique here?

It’s how alike and seamless they’re made to look. Almost competing or merging with each other. It’s the anti-contrast.

Let’s break it down

Different typefaces have different x-heights, even at the exact same point size. Shown here: Founders Grotesk by Klim Type Foundry and IBM Plex Serif by IBM and Bold Monday.

To understand what’s going on, we first have to talk about x-height. It is exactly what the name suggests— the measure from the baseline to the top of a lowercase x.

Adobe Fonts has a good tool to help filter by x-height, and also font weight.

One of the key commonalities in all our examples is similar x-height in the choice of sans serif and serif fonts. This is the first thing that tricks us into reading through the words seamlessly, especially when appearing in larger blocks of text. Mixing typefaces with similar x-heights feels harmonious. There’s a lot of other decisions at play here, including but not limited to optical matching of weights, similar ascender (part of a letter that extends above the level of the top of an x) and descender (part of a letter that extends below the baseline) heights, but matching x-heights is an important one.
Introduction to BridgeInTech
By: Maya Treacy
Tags: Anitab Open Source, Google Summer Of Code, Gsoc 2020, Open Source

Benefits to the Community

BridgeInTech serves as a talent pool that is recognized by the industry:

2. Organizations can use it as a starting point to look for a potential employee and ensure that the person will meet the skill sets they need for similar jobs within their own organization.

3. IT Professionals can use it as a chance for a career enhancement, for widening their professional network, even a possibility to gain some financial benefit (if any)

4. Graduates or other job seekers can use it as a way to gain hands-on learning to a variety of skill sets that are desirable by the industries.

5. BridgeInTech promotes equal opportunities by encouraging organizations to give priority in their mentoring program to people that fall within the minority based on the following categories: gender, race, age, sexual orientation, physical/mental ability, education, work experience, socio economic, and religion.

6. Supporting AnitaB.org Mentoring System by providing industry involvement to the Mentoring Program. Organization involvement can be in a form of (but not limited to):

offering a small project (that is too small for the organization to make them hire a new person but will be too expensive for them to outsource because of the lack of talent out-there to do the job.

providing resources needed (such as software, hardware, etc) for the Mentor/Mentee to work in the program so as to save them from having to use their own money when working on the program.

providing financial incentive (stipend), even though volunteering option is also available.

Offering support throughout the whole process of Mentoring Program by assigning a staff member to be the contact person for the program. They can even assign their own staff member to be the Program Mentor.

This type of collaboration between the organization, mentor and mentee will likely to bring the tech skills gap closer.
3 Easy Ways to Come Up With Content Ideas
By: Catherine Mcnally
Tags: Ideas, Writers On Writing, Content, Content Marketing, Writing Tips

Brainstorming ideas usually goes one of two ways: it’s a crashing wave of exciting ideas or painful hours spent hoping the paint will dry and an idea will magically appear.

I’m still pretty new to writing content on my own, but even with a full team behind me at my full-time job, devising new content isn’t always a smooth ride. And this task becomes more daunting if you don’t have coworkers to bounce ideas off of.

So what to do when your idea faucet turns from a steady stream to a slow drip?

I regularly use these three strategies when I need to get my content generation machine going.

1. Give yourself permission to write

Photo by Krismas on Unsplash

Sometimes, in order to get to the good ideas, you have to get the crap out on the page.

But who knows, some of those crap ideas may flip a switch and let you mold them into great ideas. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens enough that it’s worthwhile to write down every idea, start every sentence, and just get all those kernels of ideas out of your head.

“Give yourself license to write. Who knows, your crappy ideas may turn into great ideas when you revisit them later on.”

The other benefit to giving yourself permission to just write is mentioned by Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird. In it, she says that “one of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer. You start seeing everything as material.”1

Once you start seeing everything around you as potential topics, you’ll end up with far more ideas to work with than if your mind is closed off and your vision is obscured.
When I Said I’d Even Eat Your Baby Fat
By: C J Eggett
Tags: Poetry

I’ve been spending some time with Kaveh Akbar this week. I usually pick at whatever he has out there in the world, but I’ve finally dived into Calling a Wolf a Wolf after buying it for a friend (and buying myself a copy, of course).



The collection explores Kaveh’s escape form addiction, and as such has the kind of pleading that he does throughout a great deal of his poems. Many poems express a wish to escape, and also the equality of perspective that comes from this his addiction.



He explores how understanding the rot at the centre of human experience levels things out. Through understanding that humanity is a kind of barely twitching carcass of whims, we understand the equality with nature and the freedom that brings. It cuts through the usual layers of society and class that we get caught up with. It is without pantomime (although, of course, still a little camp every now and again).



It’s not that Calling a Wolf a Wolf isn’t performative in some way, but it feels personal in a way that a lot of collections don’t. It’s a cliche to even say that, but this is the refreshing part of it — that every kind of post-modern edge that you apply to the surface of the book slips away, dangerously.



Lines like:

“Are you going to finish that tongue my love? / I’ll chew it up and spit it down your throat”

should be a threat, really — and would be elsewhere, but the mode of Kaveh’s writing isn’t one where violence has power. Here you are lead to different interpretations, because the writer comes to you as victim of himself: ideas of feeding as birds do, freedom from the burden of healing with speech, for example.



Here’s the poem that above is from, No is a complete sentence:

Naturally, the book is filled with lines that will haunt me until I plagiarise them in a draft: “it’s been January for months in both directions” and “look under the bandages — and entire saint!” stand out, along with the long loved motto “here I am dying at an average pace”. Not to get to excited, but this is the kind of thing we come to poetry for often — the utility of expressing something we have experienced in word that are new. Turning language it’s its proper purpose of letting us experience the world, rather than just recording it.
Development Update on Verge #9
By: Swen Van Zanten
Tags: Blockchain, Privacy, Development, Technology, Cryptocurrency

During the last two week since our last update, we have integrated a wallet service which provides you the following advantages:

faster response time

balanced globally for easier adoption

better user experience while using the wallet

better import/export of keys if needed including mnemonic support

Some features were changed while integrating the new wallet services which we discussed in a previous dev. update. This feature was a single point of access for the wallet (aka. Login). We wont go in too much details, as we would like to give you the more important reasoning behind the “why” we switched to a single login.

Explanation

Simply said, we wanted to have the best user experience when using our new wallets, to do this, the wallet will physically store a copy of your encrypted private key as well as the mnemonic (also known as /wallet.dat/ file). These keys, including the mnemonic, are permanently encrypted once they have been created. While starting up the new wallet you’ll be forced to enter a password which will logically store the decrypted private key for the duration of its need. When the wallet becomes inactive, disconnects or shutdowns, the wallet will be erased from the computer memory without any further notice.

This will basically enable you to make transactions, sign messages, create addresses to your hearts desire; with only one downside, while your wallet is running, you are vulnerable to malicious programs. These programs could in theory access your computers memory and copy your private keys.

Visit my stack-exchange question, if someone is willing to contribute to that one. I would be really happy to receive some advice in this matter.

Further Changes
Di Papua, kami juga belajar tentang 65
By: Harun Ona Rumbarar
Tags: Papua, Ingat65, Tragedi 1965, Pembantaian Massal 1965, 1965

in Eudaimonia and Co
The latest cool presentation app
By: Jan Schultink
Tags: Software, PowerPoint, Slidemagic

I saw this Tweet by Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen):

I agree fully, and as the CEO of an aspiring presentation app (SlideMagic), I am not contradicting myself. SlideMagic is of course cool, but not because it adds spectacular features. It makes you design slides in a very strict grid so that your slides look good regardless of your design experience. Try it yourself.
Exploratory Visualization for Data with Categorical Variables
By: Shahzeb Akhtar
Tags: Categorical Variable, Data Visualization, Word2vec, Data Science, Embedding

Exploratory data visualization allows us to get an idea of the data, before starting any modeling. Usually scatter plot is a good choice to visualize data with numerical features which allows us to see relationships/ patterns within the data.

The challenge starts when the data set includes Categorical variables (e.g., Country, Gender, Race). How do we visualize such a data set to understand patterns?

The answer lies in embeddings, which is a vector representation of textual data. We can use Embedding layer in keras or gensim Word2Vec module to get the embeddings. In this article, I have visualized a set of multi dimensional categorical data using Altair library in Jupyter notebook.

The data set can be downloaded from UCI Machine Learning Repository. It was donated by Ron Kohavi and Barry Becker, after being published in the article “Scaling Up the Accuracy of Naive-Bayes Classifiers: A Decision-Tree Hybrid”. The data presented below is a cleaned version with the removal of 'fnlwgt' feature and records with missing or ill-formatted entries. Below are first few rows of the data set.

Figure 1: Top rows of data set

There are 8 categorical features in the data set — workclass, education_level, marital-status, occupation, relationship, race, sex, native-country. In order to create training data for Word2Vec, I created a new column, which holds an array of all categorical values for the record. For example, the new column for row 0 above would hold [‘State-gov’, ‘Bachelors’, ‘Never-married’, ‘Adm-clerical’, ‘Not-in-family’, ‘White’, ‘Male’, ‘United-States’] . Then I created a 32 dimension categorical embeddings, by passing the values of newly created column as training data to Word2Vec model. I appended the numerical features to the embeddings and then reduced the dimensions using t-SNE. All code and instructions can be accessed in my GitHub repository.

After performing the steps mentioned above, I was able to visualize the data set with 8 categorical variables in a scatter plot. By hovering over a data point, the values for different features appear as a tooltip.

Figure 2: Scatter plot of the data set. See interactive version

Further, I visualized the scatter plot along with bar charts for categorical variables. By clicking on the bars, data in the scatter plot is updated to help in understanding relationships among the variables.

Figure 3: Data points with gender ‘Female’ highlighted in scatter plot. See interactive version

Figure 4: Data points with Marital status ‘Married-civ-spouse’ highlighted in scatter plot. See interactive version

Figure 5: Data points with Education Level ‘Bachelors’, ‘Masters’, or ‘Doctorate’ highlighted in scatter plot. See interactive version

I created a dashboard to filter data points in scatter plot by all variables and another dashboard where users can select data points in the scatter plot and bar charts for all variables get updated according to selection.
A Psychopath’s Response To Egotistical Injury.
By: Samantha Clarke
Tags: Mental Health, Personality, Criminal Justice, Relationships, Psychology

Deconstructing Phase.

Not all those who are high on the scale of narcissism, including those with Narcissistic Personality disorder will be a psychopath, but many psychopaths have narcissistic traits, and often antisocial traits particularly in those who become abusive and violent.

There are often overlaps when it comes to personality traits and the biological foundations of the psychopath’s brain structure and function. Many of who have experienced the affects of such overlap from the victim’s seat have called their abusers “malignant narcissists.”

Many of the mysteries surrounding personality disorders come from the unsolved dilemmas in understanding the contributions and interactions between biological traits or environmental learning. Regardless of what you call it, the behaviors aren’t that much different when it comes to response to egotistical injury in those who are susceptible.

Undoubtedly, if you do understand how psychopathic people operate and are able to make a counterattack to every one of their tactics, they will start to perceive you as a threat…and they will start to deconstruct. What exactly do I mean?

They have a protocol that usually follows a distinct pattern when confronted. If you are holding them in a conversation, this might count as a confrontation — as they are usually flighty anytime they’re given opportunity to evade.

If you push back and give resistance, they will feel pressured when talking to you. Eventually, this pressure will make them either try to avoid you or they’ll get angry with you. If you strike them just right on one of their soft points, they’ll consider this an “injury to their ego.”

This deconstruction usually happens relatively quick, from a few seconds to a few minutes — and it’s what is usually seen right before an escalation of violence in many cases when dealing with a psychopath.

Here are some specific sub-phases of the deconstruction process to recognize during a response to perceived injury to the ego of a narcissistic psychopath.
Falling
By: Ulf Wolf
Tags: Buddhism, The Past, Time, Meditation, The Present

a Wolfku

Once you have fallen

through all ages past

You find yourself

back in Now

© Wolfstuff
Use The German Concept of “Sehnsucht” to Help Chase What You Long For
By: Jordan Gross
Tags: Self Improvement, Inspiration, Creativity, Life, Life Lessons

Use The German Concept of “Sehnsucht” to Help Chase What You Long For

Try thoughtful wishing rather than wishful thinking.

Photo by Fineas Gavre on Unsplash

His mouth contorted in a way that mixed excitement with confusion. “You know, it’s like, ummm. How can I explain this in English?” He gesticulated fervently and then put his thumb to his chin. “There is not really a good explanation. It’s like trying to describe English curse words to a non-native speaker. They just kind of mean what they mean, you know? They mean more of a feeling than they do a direct translation.”

Have you ever tried to explain a concept to somebody in a different language, but there was no exact way to define it? This is the case with the German concept Sehnsucht. The Hungarian stage director and author Georg Tabori considered Sehnsucht “one of those quasi-mystical terms in German for which there is no satisfactory corresponding term in another language.”

Sehnsucht is a compound word, originating from an ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht). However, these words combined don’t paint an adequate picture of the term’s true meaning.

The Journal of Research in Personality describes Sehnsucht as thoughts and feelings about multiple aspects of life that are unfinished or imperfect, combined with a desire for ideal alternative experiences. It is demonstrative of an individual’s search for practically unattainable experiences, which can lead to emotional ambiguity. The purpose of this piece is to use Sehnsucht in order to feel positive about your future experiences.
PixelsMarket Cool Websites #25
By: Alex Ionescu
Tags: Inspiration, Inspirational, Cool Web Designs, Web Design, Cool Websites

Once again we present you a round-up of beautiful and inspirational website designs.

This is a weekly series of articles we publish on Sunday and includes a selection of amazing website designs created by top designers.

If you know a beautiful website you would like to see in our next round-ups, send it to us via the Submit Inspiration form or via our Twitter.

In case you missed the previous issue: PixelsMarket Cool Websites #24

Today we have for you a selection of these cool websites: Phillip Young, Rise, Table Plus, Teambit, Upperquad.

Phillip Young

Online portfolio of Philip Young, a multi-disciplinary designer and full stack developer from Jakarta, Indonesia.

Visit website

Rise

Rise unifies HR + Benefits + Payroll into a simplified, personalized, all-in-one People Platform.

Visit website

Table Plus

Modern, native, and friendly GUI tool for relational databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite & more.

Visit website

Tembit

Teambit helps teams create a high performing culture with regular feedback.

Visit website

Upperquad

Upperquad is an independent creative studio in San Francisco.

Visit website
Cusp
By: Mark Olmsted
Tags: Poetry

Cusp

“Cusp,”

I would have said,

had you asked me

what my favorite word was.

(But of course

these are the kind of questions

I only ask you.

That is the nature of us.)

But now that you’ve brought it up

let us discuss

why cusp

is the best word ever.

Because we are on one,

all the time.

When have you not been

in a place

both transitory

and anticipatory?

Go ahead,

get your tarot read,

mine your state of mind

with a medium.

You will hear the words

“you are on the verge”

every single time.

I live in the hyphen

in between in-between,

on the move

from here to there,

on the spine of an arrow

flying to a target

it never quite reaches.

Vive le detour, mon amour.

And such is us.

Endlessly fiancéd,

wary a destination

is also an ending.

We’d rather live

in perpetual pending.

Never say hi

Never say bye

That’s how we roll.

Cause a cul-de-sac

Is also a circle.
Suspension of New Writership
By: Christina M. Ward
Tags: Poetry, Newsletter, Writing, The Pom, Reading

Suspension of New Writership

Don’t worry — it is temporary.

Author’s graphic

Dear readers of The POM,

We appreciate you. We hope the poetry we publish for you enriches your life, bends your mind toward inspiration, and makes you want to come back to The POM again and again. I cannot tell you how many have reached out to me to let me know how much they enjoy reading The POM. We work hard to hone our voices and our craft so that our words may inspire others to feel, to think, to explore…and we welcome your readership.

Thank you to all our The POM writers and editors for making this publication so successful! Please take the time to read a bit of work from some of our talented writers. Here are a few you may have missed.

POETRY

Odd Socks by Terri Deno

On Creating a Mother by Michelle Marie Warner

Time by MDSHall

Overdone by Shubhrika Dogra

Seven Ways of Ending a Life by Jay Sizemore

Haiku at Night by A. Christine Myers

Awakening by Lilac India

POETRY ARTICLES

Poets, Lift Each Other Up by Samantha Lazar

Poetry: Revising your Drafts for Depth by Melissa Coffey

Dear writers and editors of The POM,

Occasionally, we editors need a bit of a rest. Just to take a deep breath and knock out some of the long-unchecked boxes on the To-Do list. So, I am temporarily suspending applications for new writer and editor status on The POM. For the rest of the month of September, The POM will not be taking on new writers. This is temporary. Submissions for new writership will resume in October 2020.

You may continue submitting your work to The POM as usual if you are already a writer/editor for the pub. There have been some glitches for people trying to submit their work to both of my publications — I do not know how to resolve this. Please contact yourfriends@medium.com if you are having trouble submitting or publishing your work.

FROM THE EDITOR

I have shared this widely with you but it bears repeating. This will help with preparing a polished and publishable piece for The POM or other publications. It is one you may want to bookmark for quick reference — along with the submission guidelines/POMprompt guidelines for The POM .

Christina M. Ward

Editor in Chief
A Terrible Joke
By: James G Brennan
Tags: Poetry, Government, Mean, Jokes, Resistance Poetry

POETRY

A Terrible Joke

A very British Government Poem

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It’s a terrible joke

The worst joke

I have ever heard in my life,

It’s so bad I can’t believe

It’s actually been told.

The author of this gag

Should be imprisoned

For coming up

With this perversity,

Only the most disturbed mind

Can come up with such a joke.

There are those around

This awful joker

Who laughed a hearty laugh

As they passed it round

Among their kind

Then passed it on to us!

No decent person

Is laughing at this sick

And twisted joke.

A nation in

Anger and disbelief

As the vile unhinged Government

Give themselves pay rises,

More ill-gotten subsidies,

While underfunded

Health workers

Risk their precious lives.
Package & deploy Microservices
By: Nico Meisenzahl
Tags: DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, Containers, Microservices

We had another successfully Docker Rosenheim Meetup yesterday evening. This time in cooperation with Azure Rosenheim Meetup. We had two talks, one from Daniel Meixner, who gave an introduction to Kubernetes, and the second from me talking about packaging and deployment of Microservices.

My talk was intended to show the different possibilities using three examples:

How Kaniko can help you improve your automated docker image pipeline?

How Compose and Helm can help you roll out and/or deploy your application?

What can you expect in the future? A brief look at Helm 3.0 and CNAB.

The code of my demos is available in this public repository. My slides are available on Slideshare.

Thanks again to our sponsors panagenda and white duck.

For all of you who are interested in this topic but are not located near Rosenheim and therefore are not able to join our last meetup, we (panagenda) decided to also schedule a webinar on February 21. You can signup here.
Gospel for Vagabonds
By: Joy Cohen
Tags: Relationships, Travel, Short Story

Gospel for Vagabonds

Something about impermanence.

I know what it’s like to wish to move constantly. To believe that motion brings comfort and that journeying is your meditation, your most significant nutrient, and the definition your very core. There is stability to be found in the purchasing of bus tickets, the neverending museum lines, the wearing down of your favorite boots from too many cobblestone streets and dirt paths, the constant weight of a backpack on your shoulders, and beers shared between strangers.

That was me, until two years ago. I stumbled upon a person whose presence put my anxieties to rest. The very anxieties which had for years caused me to shake in my Nikes and throw my MasterCard at the Amtrak ticket window. Fight or flight, right?

I found calmness and satisfaction in standing still with them, and that’s not to say that we have not shared many adventures. However, for a short while, I had convinced myself that the life I had once imagined for myself was not what I wanted entirely, anymore. And there is nothing wrong with changing your mind. I am still only 21 years old. I have plenty of time to figure these sorts of things out. Love can show you things that you had never before even imagined wanting. In a way, it was my newest adventure. And it isn’t over yet, but in my time away (in Morocco, in case you’re new here), I learned a lot about impermanence.

I took a risk in leaving, but it was one I had to take — for myself, for my relationship, for the sake of my education, career, and future etcetera. I reaffirmed that motion and travel makes me inexplicably happy. That opportunity can flee.

People talk a lot about unconditional love, but maybe that’s where we’re wrong. Maybe in demanding that the weight be carried no matter the strain is what prevents us from truly being happy. It’s important to remember how to take care of yourself, even while maintaining the love you have for others. Taking it day by day and riding out the adventure is more often than not the remedy when people, such as myself, invent problems and let their anxieties get the best of them.

I’ve come to learn that adventure is still my sustenance and that this relationship is an adventure all its own. However, I mustn’t forget that I am still me, and that requires constant redrawing of my life itinerary.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn On the Magical Power of Art
By: Ed Newman
Tags: Ideas, Power, Art, Literature, Meaning

ON LITERATURE

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn On the Magical Power of Art

For what purpose have we been given this gift?

Public domain.

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, I found myself impressed by the caliber of those who preceded him. Like many, I read his Nobel Lecture and found it inspiring. I then went on to read some of the Nobel Lectures by others whom have been so honored.

It’s an uncommon opportunity not to be taken lightly. Many of the best literary minds of the past century have distilled their best thoughts into something others can read and be inspired by.

Kudos to the Nobel committee and this catalog of wisdom and achievement that is preserved for us and available online to any and all.
Center Explores Engineering with Interactive Exhibit
By: Gwinnett Magazine
Tags: Education

Invent, design, create and build with the Gwinnett Environmental and Heritage Center’s (EHC) newest special exhibition Tech City, on display beginning Sept. 29, 2014.

The Tech City exhibit — developed by the Sciencenter and Cornell University with funding from the National Science Foundation — explores the many ways the challenges of urban life are met and solved by engineers and the engineering process. The exhibit will be the largest traveling exhibition the EHC has hosted since its opening.

The multiple interactive stations in the exhibit have been designed to address the common human needs of those who inhabit a typical city. Presented with various challenges, visitors will solve real world problems engineers face every day. The exhibit also exposes visitors to the many different fields that engineering encompasses and encourages them to consider engineering as a possible career path.

Designed for families and family learning, the interactive stations in Tech City include activities like damming a creek, designing a plaza, testing a building against an earthquake, providing clean water and building a bridge. Throughout the exhibit, participants unravel these and many other challenges using the engineering method.

“STEM (science — technology — engineering — math) continues to be a priority in today’s school curriculum,” said Jason West, the EHC’s director of programming. “This exhibit helps students connect to engineering principles by presenting engineering simply as a problem solving process which balances goals with constraints.”

Tech City will be at the EHC until January 5, 2015. The exhibit is sponsored locally by Holtkamp Heating and Air Conditioning and the EHC Foundation. Entry to the exhibit is included in the price of admission. For more information about the exhibit and the EHC, visit www.gwinnettEHC.org.
Stablecoins - The Future of Crypto?
By: Official Hedge Trading Blog
Tags: Crypto, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

The crypto space is constantly evolving, and it can be difficult to keep up with all the developments that are happening. There is an almost constant flow of mergers, partnerships, new coins, new exchanges, regulatory pushback and development, price fluctuations, and everything in between.

So what does that mean for the future of all cryptocurrency? Will the evolution continue on as we have seen so far at its current pace, or will crypto inevitably arrive at a place where things can’t evolve anymore? Is there an ideal destination for crypto as a whole?

These are big questions, as no one initially saw cryptocurrency coming, or had any idea of the impact it would have on the world’s existing financial infrastructure. Now that the world has a rough idea of what they are dealing with when it comes to crypto, what does a realistic future look like?

The most popular time for cryptocurrency was arguably back in May of 2017. This period of time was the golden era for everything crypto as the price of Bitcoin started to skyrocket, fanning the flames of a budding global industry. Cryptocurrency went from being on the fringes of society to front page news in a very short period of time. People everywhere were suddenly asking one another what a Bitcoin was, what blockchain is, and so on. In that time ICO’s were plentiful and countless people were raking in profits as cryptocurrencies burst with value.

Now that the landscape of crypto has changed will there be a push for more stablecoins? As these assets trade at a fixed value it begs the question to why anyone would use them at all, wouldn’t it basically be the same as using traditional currency?

It all comes down to the actual value. On the surface, stablecoins suggest that their values are exactly 1:1 with that of their pegged currency, but we see that this is in fact not the case. The value of a stablecoin seems more so based on the investor's perception of risk over whichever company created the stable coin in the first place. Trust once again enters into the equation between buyer and seller.

Stablecoins then are the band-aid solution to the problems of days old, when crypto was experiencing record hills and valleys. For now, it seems as though stablecoins offer a more approachable and perhaps more enticing answer to wary investors, but only time will tell if the future for cryptocurrency has room for them.
The Art of Thinking in Other People’s Heads
Tags: Culture, Thinking, Experience, Technology, Philosophy

The complaint that technology and media have distorted our culture, politics, our very understanding of reality is by now well-worn.

A ruthless critic who regularly excoriated the press in his magazine The Torch, Kraus blamed German newspapers for the outbreak of World War I. He reserved a special hatred for the feuilleton section of the paper, which included, along with art, literature, and reviews, short impressionistic pieces about city life and culture.

Baudelaire’s poems, forebear of an evasive genre scholar Andreas Huyssen has termed the “Modernist miniature,” were somewhat out of place in the feuilleton section, like stumbling on an art film while channel surfing.

Whereas Baudelaire’s feuilletons tried to capture in language the experience of flânerie, the popular feuilleton transformed flânerie into a saleable commodity in its own right.

In a note from the Arcades Project, which contains Benjamin’s unfinished notes on late nineteenth-century Paris, he writes of the three main ingredients of the French newspaper: “On information, advertising, and the feuilleton: the idler must be furnished with sensations, the merchant with customers, and the man in the street with a worldview.” Thus was born a style of writing one might call, repurposing a phrase of Bertolt Brecht’s, “The art of thinking in other people’s heads.”
NJCEED Program offering free mammograms
By: Melissa Riker
Tags: Health, New Jersey

NJCEED Program offering free mammograms

Women ages 40 to 64 qualify.

The NJCEED Program at Virtua offers free mammograms for uninsured or under-insured residents of Burlington and Camden Counties. Women ages 40 to 64 qualify. To sign up, call (856) 247–7388.

The mobile mammography van will be at the Tabernacle Baptist Church, 150 E. 2nd St, Burlington, NJ on Feb. 21, March 21 and April 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Women who complete their mammograms will receive a $20 Walmart or Wawa gift card.

Follow them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/VirtuaFreeCancerScreenings/
Writer’s Block
By: Tejas Suresh
Tags: Poetry, Imagist, Micropoetry, Writers Block, Self

A poetry publication brought to you by Assemblage to capture all of your disconnected thoughts and let them find their form.

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Making ‘True Blue’
By: Eliot Peper
Tags: Art, Creative Process, Creativity, Design, Fiction

Making ‘True Blue’

How we integrated story, illustration, and design to create an internet public art project.

A few years ago, I received an email from my friend David Cohen, “I’ve had an idea for a book for a while. I thought I’d send it to you because I sure as hell am never going to write it.” David went on to present a thought experiment: What if your future was determined by the color of your eyes?

Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret. If you start writing books, your friends will start sending you ideas. Strangers too. You’ll get very good at letting people down easy. After all, you have your own dreams to bring to life.

But David’s premise stuck with me, lurking in the shadows of my subconscious and rearing its head when I least suspected. It would visit me as I took the dog on a walk or did the dishes. It made me think of my opa whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis and my oma who risked her life every day to fight in the Dutch Resistance. Every time the idea resurfaced, it took on weight and texture, building up creative momentum until I had no choice but to write it.

True Blue became a story about being true to yourself even when the world turns against you, a story about standing up instead of standing by, a story about finding the courage to stop caring what other people think.

When True Blue was originally published on Kindle, readers started reaching out to say what it meant to them and share their own stories, many of which were profoundly moving. It made me wonder whether there might be a way to let True Blue grow beyond its four thousand words of prose. What could it mean to tell a story in a format optimized for its content, to use illustration and web design to further the narrative, to make the entire project, and the creative process behind it, a piece of public art on the internet?

So I wrote David an email of my own that expanded this question into a proposal, and he offered to support the experiment with a small grant.
Hadoop speculative execution
By: Not A Data Scientist
Tags: Big Data, Data Science, Hadoop

You can found a good description about speculative execution at Wikipedia. Here are the two properties to configure the use of this feature:

mapred.map.tasks.speculative.execution

mapred.reduce.tasks.speculative.execution

Or if you are using Hadoop 2.x:

mapreduce.map.speculative

mapreduce.reduce.speculative

Most time it is useful but in some scenarios disabling it will make a big difference.

source
Building Satoshis Games #2. The second article of a development…
By: Carlos Roldan
Tags: Blockchain, Lightning Network, Lightning, Bitcoin, Games

The second article of a development blog series

#Devblog-1

https://medium.com/satoshis-games/satoshis-games-devblog-1-d960238d02c7

Hello👋!! I am Carlos, creator of Satoshis.Games. On these development blog series, I will be summarizing the most important updates, challenges and ideas that lead Satoshis.Games development.

TL;DR

2 New games: The Legend of Satoshi & Bcraft⛏️📝

Iframe for an indexed gaming experience🎮

New leaderboard design📊

Lightning-powered games coming (super-bro)⚡

Games

The Legend of Satoshi

This game is a minimalist text adventure based on the creation of Bitcoin. This game is forked from the open sourced game A Dark Roomhttp://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com. We have not implemented any lightning feature yet, as it does not have any competitive feature. The aim of this game is enjoying the story, and find easter eggs and clever jokes hidden in the course of the game.

The Legend of Satoshi — Starting the game

The Legend of Satoshi — Gameplay screenshot

Bcraft

Bcraft — Startup screen

Bcraft — Gameplay

BCraft is a crafting game forked from PCraft from NuSan. You wake up on a deserted island, with no crypto, and you have to survive. Gather materials and build your tools. Explore the area and find the Satoshi’s cave. Will you find a way to escape the island full of fiat & zombies?

Iframe

We are using iframe to display enable gaming from the same page. By doing so, links to redirect to subdomains will no longer be necessary. Therefore, the gaming experience is dramatically improved by providing every needed option easily accessible.
On Location: San Francisco
By: Rough Edit Inc.
Tags: Branded Content, Production, Corporate, Bts, Cinematography

On Location: San Francisco

Some stills captured on the iPhone 6 while shooting Branded Content on location in San Francisco.

In November of last year, we had the fortunate opportunity to work on the behind of the scenes Branded Content production for Big Hero 6 entitled, The Origin of Big Hero 6: Hiro’s journey. This blog post follows a visual journey through the streets of San Francisco in order to capture the inspiration that the animation used in building San Fransokyo. This was the B-Roll day we had following the shoot with main talent Jamie Chung.

Time-Lapse Morning

Started out the day shooting time-lapse and B-Roll of the Golden Gate Bridge. Love this angle in the morning.

Quick Stop at the Hotel

The view from my hotel room. Couldn’t complain.

Streets of San Francisco
dry Monku — 4th Precept: Deception
By: Dry Monkey Philosophy
Tags: Buddhism, Poetry, Lies, Haiku, Poem

This is a collection of haiku-ish poetry as told by a Dry Monkey. They are loosely structured 5–7–5 — 3 lined stanzas. Each telling a story of its own, while collectively narrating a progressively realized ideal — Hope you enjoy!

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