fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Flavor Your Experience in a New Destination with Food and Beverage Tours
By: Melinda Crow
Tags: Travel Tips, Food And Drink, Foodies, Travel, Food

So, I’m not really a tour sort of person. The word generates images of smelly busses and bored college-age tour guides with little knowledge to share.

Gary and I lean heavily toward independent exploration in most cases. I know, I know, some of you non-cruising people that know how much we love to cruise are wondering why I don’t count cruises as one big floating tour. That’s a topic for a whole other story, but the short answer is that we are boat people, so simply being onboard a cruise ship is fun for us.

I can actually name only a handful of group tours I’ve been on that wowed me unless you add in the food and beverage tours.

And those rarely disappoint. Whether it’s drinking beer and eating sausage sandwiches from what may very well be one of the oldest fast-food restaurants in Regensburg, Germany, or sipping wine deep in a stone cellar in Alsace, there are tours that have shaken me from my travel complacency.

Qualities of a good food tour

The tour guide is often the key. Questions to ask before you book include whether the guide is a local and how many tours they have led.

I’ve been on incredible food tours with only one stop, but multi-stop tours would definitely have the edge. More stops mean more opportunities to try new foods and less likelihood that at least some of the stops are to your liking. More stops also usually indicate more time learning tidbits about the community you are exploring.

Variety is also important. Will there be a mix of sweet and savory stops? (Although I’d sign up for an all chocolate tour in a heartbeat, how about you?) I also like tours that include food and at least one adult beverage, although too many drinks and the tour begins to feel more like a crawl.

Does the tour center around foods and restaurants where locals eat? If your goal is to meld into the destination, the last thing you’re looking for is a tour that includes touristy stops or too many upscale eateries.

The size of the group can make or break a good food and beverage tour. Intimate groups afford more opportunities to ask questions of your guide as well as spend time actually conversing with your hosts.

And finally, it’s wise to ask about portion sizes. The goal would be large enough portions so that you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth, but not large enough to induce a food coma.

My favorite food tours of all time:

Street tacos in Puerto Vallarta — not for the food timid, but this walking tour of the city in the evening is both delicious and cultural.

Winery tours in Johnson City and Fredericksburg, Texas — I may be partial since Texas is my home stare, but the tours offered here tend to be both educational and tasty in this traditional German-influenced community.

South Florida Food Tours — the charm of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and its inhabitants shines through the stops on this lunch tour.

Any food and beer tour in Germany — literally, any one.
Did You Actually Think That Polyamorous Relationship Would Work?
By: Aliya S. King
Tags: Sex, Sexuality, Dear Level, Polyamory, Relationships

A few years ago, a man and his wife wanted to inject a little excitement into their sex life. They decided to add a third party — a woman who was interested but was also married. They made arrangements for both couples to have a few meet-and-greets over drinks. Things clicked, and one night, that foursome met up at an area hotel, where they all had sex. A few weeks later, it all went down again.

There were never any conversations about the rules of engagement. It was simply two couples that were attracted to each other having some fun.

I heard about this arrangement for months. It was all about this spicy new sex, which made their challenging adult lives — soul-crushing jobs and raising young children — more bearable. My friend called it a polyamorous relationship, but I knew better. Polyamory is often about much more than just sex; it’s an actual relationship. I kept my thoughts to myself, though, mostly because I wasn’t asked.

Over time, the two couples’ relationship morphed from strictly sexual to something more. The women set up poker nights with friends on the weekends and met at Starbucks for the occasional post-yoga coffee. The two men went to sports bars and watched gaming events often. The four people enjoyed each other’s company in and out of the bedroom. Eventually, they all began to attend their children’s sporting events and school activities together.

That’s the part that made me raise an eyebrow.

Within a year, the love square was one big, happy, poly family. Aside from the sexual foursomes on the weekends, during the week, the couples took turns picking up the kids from school and babysitting if necessary. I watched this poly relationship grow over time, and I wondered to myself, did they ever set any boundaries? Turns out, they had not.

One day, the two dudes got into a minor tiff over a golf game. They stopped speaking and expected their wives to follow suit — but the wives had no intention of doing such. They lied to their husbands and began sneaking around to hang out. Eventually, the weekend sex continued… without their husbands.

In time, the shenanigans came to light. They all went into therapy to set boundaries, but it was too late. Both couples divorced.

Kicker: The two wives are now in a relationship together.
Human Shapes #2
By: Markus Russin
Tags: Depression, Humanity, Poetry, Reflections, Solitude

© Markus Russin

the sky collects

distorted lamps

from down here

they seem ghostly

their journeys

through an endless black

mysterious

remote

from catalogues

of wasted years

collected in the distance

a note

attached

without remorse

‘for you here

there’s no future’
Oh Big O! (Part 3)
By: Suzy Nakayama
Tags: Big O Notation, Coding, Programming, Development, Algorithms

Oh Big O! (Part 3)

Hi! 👋 I’m Suzy and you can find a little bit about me here!

Lucille Ball — I Love Lucy gif from Giphy

Hello again! This is part 3 of the Big O series! If you didn’t see part 1 and 2, please check it out here and here! 👀

Today we are going to put our knowledge to test! We are going to go through a problem and figure out the Big O together. Let’s tackle this! 💪
What if success is……
By: Emma Gannon
Tags: Success, Startup, Life Lessons

my book THE MULTI-HYPHEN METHOD out now. My podcast Ctrl Alt Delete is available on iTunes and has been nominated for a Webby Award.

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7 Steps to Become the Mozart of Coding Before the Lock-down Ends
By: Krupesh Raikar
Tags: Creativity, Programming, Logical Thinking, Software Development, Analytical

7 Steps to Become the Mozart of Coding Before the Lock-down Ends

Will you create the next great symphony?

Created from Creative Commons Image

If you are reading this then I assume that you are interested in programming or probably already a programmer. And most likely, you are also stuck home right now with a feeling of time being wasted. The days are sunny, but you cannot go outside, other than perhaps to buy groceries or toilet paper (yeah, I’m tired of the memes too!).

Looks like a better time than any to improve your skills, to do that long overdue online web development/programming/etc. course that you couldn’t before because you were doing something, uh, other things (duh! busy life from a seemingly distant past).

After all, some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs and spectacular works of art were created during lock downs and crisis: If Newton wasn’t confined to his home during the Great Plague in London, he would never have noticed the apple falling that led to the Theory of Gravity! Shakespeare churned out King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra under similar circumstances! And Mozart wrote Die Entführung when he was confined too..uh well, OK, the last one is definitely not true. But hey, that shouldn’t stop you from being on your way to be the Mozart of Programming!

I read a lot of articles these days on how to be productive (and ironically, wasted a lot of otherwise would be productive time reading them). But it did get me thinking about the several questions that I get asked about software and programming in general. I am far away from being an expert programmer myself, but there are a few important steps that one needs on this journey from what I learnt, along with all useful resource links.
What type of Introvert are you?
By: Mr. Curiosity
Tags: Self Improvement, Personality, Mental Health, Self-awareness, Love

Social introverts

Social Introverts be like

A social introverts are both the most outgoing and the most private of the four types.

They don’t feel shy or anxious in social settings and may even enjoy them but they feel emotionally drained if they stay out for too long, while social introverts like spending time alone, they still want few close friends they can depend upon and they tend to be the most social when they are among this group of friends.

Someone who doesn’t know them might even assume that they’re an extrovert if they meet them. When they’re hanging out with their close friends but social introverts won’t share much about themselves to anyone

other than their closest friends

Thinking Introvert

Thinking Introverts be like

Here, you can evoke the image of the daydreaming wallflower.

Thinking introverts also don’t mind socializing but they rarely do so because they’re lost in their own little world. They often find themselves daydreaming and may seem aloof to those who don’t know them. Thinking introverts are also very introspective and therefore more in tune with their feelings than the average person.

Other people may have a hard time connecting with thinking introverts because they have a unique thought process and prefer to experience their thoughts rather than taking the time and energy to explain them to others

Anxious Introverts

Anxious Introverts be like

Perhaps! A better label for the anxious introverts is the shy introvert.

Do you know someone who might replay social encounters in their head and think about what they said or did and what they could’ve done differently? To differentiate anxious introversion from anxiety disorders Anxious introverts crave solitude even when they’re with their close friends.

They are extremely uncomfortable in new or large social situations and analyze or ruminate on their behavior whenever they’re in public. But it is important to look out for social anxiety disorders and not have the two mixed.

In extreme cases, this aversion to social situations may develop into social anxiety although any personality type, introverts, extroverts or ambiverts can experience social anxiety or other anxiety disorders.

But if you avoid necessary social situations because you have strong physical relations such as shaking increased heart rate or nausea during them, it is a sign of social anxiety and not shyness and requires professional attention

Restrained introverts

Restrained Introverts be like

Now this is your introvert next-door kind of type.

They get uncomfortable if they feel rushed into situations specially social ones. Restrained introverts are reserved thoughtful and don’t like change. They’ll go out if they have planned or it far enough in advance but they would rather be relaxing by themselves. Binging on their favorite shows, reading or doing yoga.

Restrained introverts find comfort in their routine and may also find it difficult to get their mind and body moving right after they wake up. They thrive in their routine and appreciate ample forewarning.
We Need to Talk About Makeup and Empowerment
By: Jane Harkness
Tags: Feminism, Self Esteem, Beauty, Empowerment, Makeup

I initially started wearing makeup because I had “problem skin.”

In elementary school, my chin began breaking out with nasty zits every few weeks. I begged my mom to help me cover it up, and she let me wear a little concealer. As the years went on, a few pimples turned into cystic acne all over my face. And although society has never been kind to women with a few extra pounds, there was plenty of room in the body positivity movement for girls of all body types. But I personally found no one to represent the girls who spent hours crying at their bare faces in the mirror, wondering what magical cure would clear up their skin. There were no women with acne in the pages of magazines or on TV screens. Every time I sought out information on acne, I only learned how to cover it up or make it go away. Even the models in skin care ads didn’t have acne.

The message came through loud and clear: I looked disgusting. I should hide my face. I should be ashamed. There was Something Wrong With Me.

All I wanted was someone to tell me to love myself anyway, to stop feeling so much guilt over something I could not control. But those words never came.

Those feelings of low self-esteem didn’t stay confined to my skin. Soon, I was frustrated with my entire body. My teeth were too crooked, my eyes were too small, my nose was too big, my body was too hairy, my eyebrows were too thick. Everything was wrong. But luckily, I had something that could help me fix that: makeup.

Makeup felt like my shield against criticism, my guard against a world that I knew was looking down on me. Instead of trying to love myself for who I was, I tried to hide behind creams and powders and glitter. I waged a war in front of my mirror, and my makeup collection was my arsenal.

The only times I saw myself without makeup was after I first woke up and right before I went to bed. Even that felt like torture.

I was disgusted by my reflection. I wished I could see someone else looking back at me.
Devの次の成長へ向けて
Tags: Blockchain, Ethereum, Token, Development, Oss

Founder FRAME00 and Mother 1-year baby 👶 Entrepreneur since 2011 and started Dev with family in 2018. Develop the creative universe 🌝

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Breaking the Glass Ceiling Before Entering the Building
By: Sarah Beth Doncals
Tags: University, Leadership, Diversity, Ladiesthatux, Women In Tech

This story begins at my summer internship at Uber. I met some amazing people and witnessed the strong female empowerment presence there.

I was sitting in on a panel discussing women in leadership. The talk emphasized how important it is to start recognizing issues at a junior level. The design field might look even from a high level, but most leadership positions are held by men. I was sitting there thinking why aren’t we talking about this in school?

I knew why this conversation had not been started at SCAD. We are a group of students that have not faced these issues. I am a believer in being proactive rather than reactive. We should be talking about these issues before we even enter the workforce. I knew this is something I wanted to bring back from my internship.

I pitched the idea to FLUX, the SCAD UX Club, and they were more than happy to give me the platform. SCAD trains us to be great designers with hard skills. In my opinion, soft skills are just as important. I thought this would be a great opportunity to bring soft skills into the picture.
The Hair-Raising Feeling of Sending a Crypto Payment
By: Gil Hildebrand
Tags: Freelancing, Technology, Business, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Photo by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash

For companies in the blockchain/crypto industry, it’s a constant challenge to pay team members in cryptocurrency. Every month, developers, marketers, and other freelancers submit timesheets along with their wallet addresses and the currency they wish to receive (we’ve found Ethereum to be the most common). This is especially true for companies that have ICO’ed and have a global workforce where it’s impractical to pay in a single fiat currency.

The main problem they face is keeping track of wallet addresses and conversion rates, which leads to fear about sending potentially large payments to the wrong place. Today, their best option is to maintain a spreadsheet with all of the details, but of course, manual input is prone to error and takes up too much time.

With the crypto industry growing larger each day, and with a global workforce becoming more and more connected, the problem will only get worse over time.

If only there was an easier way to manage invoices and payments to be paid in cryptocurrency, companies would have a much better experience with paying in crypto, ultimately leading to greater adoption of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in the workplace.

With thousands of companies now entering the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, there is a clear opportunity to meaningfully impact a huge number of people and usher in a new era of cryptocurrency adoption.

Introducing Gilded: Crypto Invoicing for Freelancers
It’s Time to Vote… On a Book Cover!
By: Michael Murray
Tags: Jesus, Christianity, Religion, Spirituality, Faith

Hi friends!

I am coming to you on a Saturday to ask for your help. Yesterday, I got back some cover mockup designs for my upcoming book Nobody Left Out: Jesus Meets The Messes.

Since it’s election season anyway, I figured I’d put it to a vote! :) I would love to get your opinion on these. Here are the options:

Cover #1:

Cover #2:

Cover #3:

Cover #4:

Cover #5:

So, what do you think? Let me know which one you like best!

Thanks!
‘Getting into the flow’: what does that even mean?
By: Frank Van De Ven
Tags: Creativity, Skills, UX, Teamwork, Startup

Everybody knows that feeling. You seem unstoppable, everything seems to be going naturally and time is standing still (or is flying, depending on how you see it). You started working at 4pm but after a quick look at your watch you realize it’s getting more closer to 4 am now — the next day. If you recognize yourself in this, you might be familiar with the concept of ‘getting into the flow’: achieving a state of mind in which everything seems possible and you’re just… rocking it.

Flow, also known as the ‘zone’, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity (source: Wikipedia). Interestingly, one literally loses sense of time and space: you’re so caught up in your work or project everything else disappears (including your SO — yes, you know what I mean).

In 1975, a guy named Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (what’s in a name?) came up with this fantastic scheme to put the concept of ‘flow’ in a bit of context:

I love this matrix, because it makes a beautiful connection between mental state of mind and Abilities (or Skills) versus Challenges. It shows why it’s so important that companies in general, and more specifically managers, bosses, product owners (and all other leading professionals) have to make sure that whatever they do, is challenging, but takes into account the relevant skillset of the team involved. Without these two factors, don’t expect miracles, creativity, fun or groundbreaking, innovative concepts from your folks. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, is a well-known saying in the digital world, strengthening this: you have to create the right circumstances for people get into the flow, a feeling of control, arousal, etc.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

– Peter Drucker

So when you start a new project, consider your team and ask yourself:

How can I make the task at hand challenging? Are we pushing ourselves enough? Are we adding the most value for our client? What is each team member’s challenge and does it fit him or her? Which skill sets are required for the task at hand? Who is doing what? Will they need to learn and expand their skills in order to tackle the challenge at hand?

I’ve seen this go wrong too many times. Everybody knows that one guy that’s waaayyy to relaxed (high skillset, low challenge) or that one person that is constantly walking on eggshells because he or she is not equipped to face the complex challenge at hand (low skillset, high challenge). Both are unhealthy and undesirable for the workplace.

That all being sad, finding the lazy person in the room can pay off, as Bill Gates articulates beautifully:

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

– Bill Gates

I wonder if he was talking about the designer of this poster:
SUGAR, VOL. 1 — A SWEET NEW ROMANCE FOR FANS OF SWING AND SUNSTONE (+Preview Pages!)
By: Mike Gagnon
Tags: Comic Books, Romance, Comics, Press Release, Image Comics

Image/Top Cow tease preview pages

PORTLAND, OR, 07/13/2018 — Writers Matt Hawkins and Jenni Cheung team up with artist Yishan Li for an original graphic novel companion to SWING and SUNSTONE in the romantic and sexy, SUGAR, VOL. Image/Top Cow tease preview pages from the first of the graphic novel series, which will launch this July.

In SUGAR, a couple embarks on a relationship that starts off as more of an arrangement, but ends with them falling in love — at a cost. Neither has ever done anything like this before, and the emotional swings they face threaten to undo what could be a perfect match in this companion book to both SUNSTONE and SWING.

SUGAR, VOL. 1 trade paperback (ISBN: 978–1–5343–0641–7, Diamond Code MAY180085) will hit stores on Wednesday, July 25th and bookstores on Tuesday, 31st. It can be ordered on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, IndieBound, and Indigo.

###

ABOUT IMAGE COMICS

Image Comics is a comic book and graphic novel publisher founded in 1992 by a collective of bestselling artists. Image has since gone on to become one of the largest comics publishers in the United States. Image currently has six individuals on the Board of Directors: Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, Jim Valentino, and Eric Stephenson. It consists of five major houses: Todd McFarlane Productions, Top Cow Productions, Shadowline Comics, Skybound Entertainment, and Image Central. Image publishes comics and graphic novels in nearly every genre, sub-genre, and style imaginable. It offers science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, crime fiction, historical fiction, humor and more by the finest artists and writers working in the medium today. For more information, visit www.imagecomics.com.
Hitting Rock Bottom.
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Short Fiction, Fiction, Drugs, Short Story, Addiction

Hitting Rock Bottom.

A short story on addiction.

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

“The addicts I work with need to be fired,” he said. “They need to hit rock bottom, so they can get better. They need to hit rock bottom faster.”

Dana was surprised to hear Eddy say this. He was a heroin addict working on his recovery. He had just gotten a job in a restaurant. She had expected…something softer. More empathy.

Dana raised her eyebrows and thought of the addict in her life — a distant older aunt who didn’t come to family parties anymore.

She always had a job. She always seemed to be well-connected enough to get prescription drugs. And so decades had passed and she still had a job…just part-time, but still…and a mortgage, and a car, and all the things that suggested a person was fine. She had never stolen anything to pay for drugs…not that Dana knew, anyway. She had never been to jail.

She never hit any rock bottom, and probably never would. There were no interventions. She would just abuse pills until she died, probably. She was going to retire soon. What would happen then?

So maybe there was some truth in what Eddy said. Maybe, in some way, a rock bottom was necessary.

Dana didn’t want to think about it too much. Because then she would have to think about the fact that her family never had an intervention, never acknowledged the addict right in front of them, never did anything except talk about her behind her back about what a shame it all was, how smart she had been, how she could have had kids if she had kicked the habit.

That realization lifted her out of her body a little bit. Filled her with shame.

Because in-between thriving and rock bottom was this other area, this whole spectrum of grey…of a life sort of lived, a life that revolved around drugs but was still cushioned with suburban, first-world comfort.

Something about that hurt in a funny way, like hitting your elbow, or when your foot fell asleep.

Eddy had hit rock bottom. He had gone to jail. Lost friends. Stole. Broke trust with relatives. But now, he had a determination. He seemed more awake. He had begged for forgiveness. He had begged his friends, his family, and many gods. Something deep inside him had changed.

Dana’s aunt had just stopped coming around. She had faded away. There were no clear lines of despair or of progress. There was just a slow and steady drift into a premature grave. A slow and steady drift toward a life of solitude, a life that would only revolve around the next prescription. She had decided, somehow, long ago, that she was going to medicate herself into a comfortable death.

Her own family was hesitant to use the word “addict” because, to them, that word implied criminal behavior, and everything she had done was legal. That word implied poverty, and they were middle-class. That word implied brownness, blackness, otherness, and they were white.

Not everyone ever hits rock bottom, Dana thought. They just drift, they just barely function, they just shuffle through, and because they don’t need help, they’ll never get it.
MediatR behaviors to validate API Resource existence
By: Niklas Engberg
Tags: Csharp, Aspnetcore, API, Dotnet, Clean Code

MediatR logo borrowed from https://bit.ly/2N4Jz6S

When building robust APIs it it really important with validation and descriptive error messages and status codes.

In this post I am going to show you how you can get rid of duplicated code in your Request Handlers by adding MediatR behaviors to take care of validation for resource existence.

MediatR is an in-process messaging library in .NET that supports requests/responses, commands, queries, events etc. Go check it out if you haven’t.

In MediatR there is something called behaviors which allow you to build your own pipeline for requests. I use them for cross cutting concerns such as logging and validation of requests parameters.

Recently when some endpoints were developed for a microservice I struggled with duplicated code in my Request Handlers that was necessary to have in place.

To give you an example lets start with a couple of API endpoints, and also the implementation of the Request Handlers with the duplicated code.

The endpoints in this example are:

PUT /groups/{id}

POST /groups/{id}/users

The controller:

Both endpoints need to verify that the id-parameter actually matches a given group to be able to update a group / add user to a group (in my example I’m using EF Core as persistence, but you can safely ignore that).

As you can see there is an if-check for group existence in both the handlers.

How should we get rid of this duplication? Wouldn’t it be good to use some sort of “validation” here as a pre-step, so that the Request Handlers could look like this?

Thank behaviors for that! Let’s introduce an interface that both the requests: UpdateGroupRequest and AddUserToGroupRequest implement.

Then create a behavior implementation class with generic constraint to the interface defined above so that the behavior only applies to requests implementing the IGroupRequest interface.

And a registration example using Autofac:

Now we can rewrite our Request Handlers without the if statements, but still get the benefit of validation!

Lets imagine we now add a couple of more endpoints:

GET /groups/{id}

POST /groups/{id}/permissions

Add the IGroupRequest interface to your requests and you will get this feature out of the box. Pretty simple! I find this kind of approach really useful. What do you think?

We have to keep in mind that there are both some cons and pros to this approach. What I’ve found out is:

Cons

Multiple roundtrips if you have a database that you validate the existence against.

Validation as a separate class which might confuse some of the developers

Pros

Cleaner code in the actual request handler

No duplicated code scattered all over all Request Handlers that need to validate an entity’s existence

If you liked this post. You know what to do! 👏
12 Questions on the Future of Film
Tags: Kickstarter, Sundance, Independent Film, Film, Filmmaking

Stanley Nelson: I don’t know if there is one particular person I can identify, but I do think we are witnessing an important moment in documentary film with four black filmmakers — Ava Duvernay (13th), Ezra Edelman (O.J.: Made In America), Roger Ross Williams (Life, Animated), and Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) — on the Oscars’ Best Documentary shortlist.

Penny Lane: Joshua Oppenheimer. He blew the whole thing open with The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, truly one of the great one-two punches in the history of film.

Andrew Ahn: Nonprofit film organizations like Sundance, Film Independent, Visual Communications, Outfest, and Pacific Arts Movement are worthy of recognition and praise. These organizations make a huge impact on up-and-coming filmmakers and instill a sense of community.

Elaine McMillion Sheldon: Laura Poitras, A. J. Schnack, and Charlotte Cook, executive producers of Field of Vision. Field of Vision has played a role in helping to support and distribute creative short nonfiction films about contemporary topics.

From The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, directed by Stanley Nelson

Pamela Yates: I could say Ava Duvernay, Laura Poitras, Joshua Oppenheimer, or Ezra Edelman. It has been a rich few years for nonfiction films that have roiled the body politic. But I believe it’s Mexican director Tatiana Huezo and her film Tempestad (Tempest). The film is the most beautiful, meditative, intimate, and cinematic conveying of the paralyzing power of fear — fear as a form of social control directed towards women.

Dan Schoenbrun: As much as I’d like to give this honor to an artist working at the top of his or her game, a Barry Jenkins or Kelly Reichardt, I’m pretty sure the real answer is either Mark Zuckerberg or Reed Hastings — i.e., the people in charge of the algorithms that determine what shows up on your feed.

Kel O’Neill: If I take my field to mean VR — which would make sense since I spent most of 2015 and 2016 making VR — you’re looking at a community that’s building a medium from the ground up. It’s not one or two leaders and a bunch of followers. It’s more like a loosely aligned, global coalition of creators.

Dawn Porter: Probably Lisa Nishimura at Netflix. They are continuing to explore all formats and giving filmmakers green lights and freedom to work.
Primer on GPS Data with Strava and Python
By: Ryan Richbourg
Tags: Strava, Gps, Python, Cycling, Data Science

First we are going to import a Python library called gpxPy to parse the XML-schema tree. To install this library I ran ‘pip install gpxpy’ in my terminal. https://pypi.org/project/gpxpy/

After opening and parsing the GPX file, we get a GPX object containing tracks, segments, and points. We are only interested in using the points data right now, so after indexing it down we’ll end up with a list of tuples containing GPS updates (this example has 7273 points).

Next we simply take the list of tuples and put them in a Pandas dataframe with columns for longitude, latitude, and elevation. Finally we can plot the latitude by longitude with Matplotlib to get our first visual look at the route.

Where things get really interesting is mapping our route over Google Maps using a different Python library called gmplot. The easiest installation lines for your terminal are ‘pip install gmplot’. https://pypi.org/project/gmplot/

With gmplot, you’ll want to set up the center coordinates for your map display, instantiate a new GoogleMapPlotter object, fit it to your data, and draw the map onto an HTML file.

Voila! I hope you enjoyed this short tutorial example on visualizing GPS data.

N.B. My friend used a Garmin cycling computer to record this route instead of his cell phone. The two differences I noticed between my own GPX data and his are that 1) timestamps were not included by his Garmin in the GPX points, and that is probably because 2) his GPX were updated exactly once per second (7273 points for 2:01:13 elapsed time (121.2167 minutes * 60 seconds / 7273 points = 1.00 seconds per GPS point)). This is advantageous compared to GPX updates from my cell phone which are not as precise because they rely on the connection strength between my phone device & cellular network provider. Therefore one way to assess your more realistic average speed on a bicycle is using a cycling computer instead of a cell phone.
Tableau學習二部曲 | 數學運算、彙總計算、表計算，Tableau一次搞定你的資料運算需求
By: Alex Chang
Tags: 資料視覺化, Data Visualization, Tableau, Data Science, Data Analysis

Tableau表計算(Table Calculation)- 特定維度運算

於Tableau表計算中，選擇「儲存格」的計算方式時，Tableau會僅在你所指定的維度內運算，例如，在以下維度視覺效果中， [Month of Order Date] （訂單日期月份）和 [Quarter of Order Date] （訂單日期季度）為定址欄位（因為它們已選定），而 [Year of Order Date] （訂單日期年份）為分區欄位（因為該欄位未選定）。因此計算將跨一年內的所有季度轉換每個月的差異。對於每一年，計算會重新開始。請注意，如果選取了所有維度，則整個表都在範圍中。
Machine Learning in the Cloud using Azure ML Studio
By: Ranganath Venkataraman
Tags: Azure, Azure Ml, Azure Machine Learning, Deployment, Azure Ml Studio

Context

As evident in my previous posts, my self-taught journey to date focused on building predictors and visualizations using machine learning algorithms with Python. My interface was the Jupyter notebook, and my work lived on my laptop. As I was getting ready to practice and learn deploying models, I started the Nanodegree that — among other concepts — covered the deployment of models in Azure.

How this article is organized

Topics covered in this article about Nanodegree’s Capstone project are:

Purpose

Setting up for the project.

Development — HyperDrive and AutoML

Deployment

Conclusions

Throughout this article, I’ll discuss points that were good learning opportunities for my fellow students and me.

Purpose

The capstone project is the culmination of training on various concepts; therefore, it tested our ability to:

run a HyperDrive experiment to comb through the hyperparameter search space to find settings that maximize the performance of a pre-selected scikit-learn algorithm on a problem of choice

use AutoML to find the best algorithm that maximizes performance on the aforementioned problem

deploying the best performing model as an active endpoint that can be queried by anybody — getting the product out of my laptop so anybody can use it

Setting up for the Capstone project

The first step was to select a problem and dataset: I chose the problem of predicting vehicle fuel efficiency with the Auto MPG dataset from the UCI repository. Since I was familiar with this dataset from a prior post, I could focus on the mechanics of Azure’s Machine Learning (ML) Studio.

Microsoft and Udacity provide a virtual machine for the capstone: Standard DS3V2 with 14 GB RAM that can provide up to 4 CPU nodes. After launching a workspace that uses this virtual machine, the next setting-up step is to upload and register the dataset, which currently is a .csv file on my desktop.

Once completed, AzureML provides the user with the necessary code to consume the registered dataset, as seen in Figure 1 below. The line declaring the Experiment is my own and not necessary to consume a registered dataset.

Figure 1: consuming registered dataset

With the dataset ready for use and a workspace launched on a running virtual machine ‘compute,’ we are ready to develop the project.
Why its important to update your TYPO3 Websites on a regular basis!
By: Nitsan
Tags: Upgrade, Security, CMS, Typo3, Update

Most websites today run on content management systems and just as the content of a website needs to be regularly updated so is the case with CMS. They too need to be regularly updated as this is a necessary part of website maintenance. CMS regularly release newer versions every few years or so and although sticking with the version of a CMS you’re already using may seem like the easier option, it can be very risky. The story is no different with TYPO3.

Statistics show that 22% of the top one million websites worldwide are running on outdated infrastructure. Updating your TYPO3 based website to the latest version is important not only for enjoying the latest added features but for numerous performance and security based reasons as well.

Read more at http://www.nitsan.in/blog/post/why-its-important-to-update-your-typo3-websites-on-a-regular-basis/
Twice as Many Appointments in Mali
By: Charity
Tags: Clean Water, Africa, Hair

Umu Bouare isn’t the only hairstylist in her village, but she has to be the most likable. Sitting on the quiet, well-shaded porch of her home, she welcomes customers in with an infectious smile; it’s no surprise that she has multiple appointments each day.

For women in this community, coming to see Umu isn’t just about having their hair styled for an event or a feast — they also come to relax.

“I do their hair and we talk together,” Umu explains, laughing.

“Because of the water taps, we have time to earn money and do other things — even take a rest. We didn’t think this day would ever come.”

That’s the part of her job she loves: the social aspect.

Sure, it provides income that she can use to buy clothes, food and shoes for her family, but the real highlight is the chance to connect with other women in the community, to make them feel beautiful.
Fixing a common problem with a Git Merge
Tags: Programming, Web Development, Development, Github, Git

Fixing a common problem with a Git Merge

“Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary”

I recently finished working on this article on how to create a blog with Netlify as a CMS. While working on this article, I tried to make a merge and ended up not being able to. I had this message:



# Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary,

# especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic branch.

#

# Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts

# the commit.

~

~

"~/Documents/Projets/medium/netlify-cms-medium/.git/MERGE_MSG" 6L, 297C Merge branch 'master' of https://github.com/marieqg/netlify-cms-medium # Please enter a commit message to explain why this merge is necessary,# especially if it merges an updated upstream into a topic branch.# Lines starting with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts# the commit."~/Documents/Projets/medium/netlify-cms-medium/.git/MERGE_MSG" 6L, 297C

It’s not the first time I had it, but it was sure the last time. And I was stuck there for a while again. They are a few methods to go out of this depending on the editor that you are using.

Step 1: Understand why

Firstly, let’s try to understand why we got this message.

There a few options :

This happens when a commit was made to the branch you are working on (you try to push a commit: git push) before pulling the changes ( git pull)

You updated your git client

You never had a local branch which was ahead of the remote before

Your git config was changed recently

You should have done git rebase or git pull --rebase instead of a merge
Review: U-Net+ResNet — The Importance of Long & Short Skip Connections (Biomedical Image Segmentation)
By: Sik-Ho Tsang
Tags: Image Segmentation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Deep Learning

Review: U-Net+ResNet — The Importance of Long & Short Skip Connections (Biomedical Image Segmentation)

A Very Deep Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), With Both Long & Short Skip Connections

This time, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), with both long and short skip connections, for biomedical image segmentation, is reviewed.

Last time, I’ve reviewed RoR (ResNet of ResNet, Residual Networks of Residual Networks) (It is a 2018 TCSVT paper, if interested, please visit my review.) In RoR, by using long and short skip connections, the image classification accuracy is improved. And the effectiveness of using long and short skip connections has been proved by the experimental results.

This time, rather than just showing the experimental results, authors also provide a way to show its effectiveness by analyzing the weights within the network.

Thus, despite the purpose of this work is to have biomedical image segmentation, by observing the weights within the network, we can have a better understanding of the long and short skip connections. And it is published in 2016 DLMIA (Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis) with over 100 citations. (Sik-Ho Tsang @ Medium)
Introduction to Hierarchical queries
By: Dilshan Pathirana
Tags: Database, Sql, Data Science, Oracle

Most of the scenarios we see in our lives are associated with hierarchies. Such as

Organization hierarchy

Product hierarchy

class hierarchy

The hierarchical data model is used to model data with hierarchies. In a hierarchical data model, data is organized in a tree-like structure. The main character in this data model is that it includes entities that have relations with the same entity type. As an example, if we take the below two tables which store data about employees in an organization, the manged_by table includes relations between two employee entities. If we analyze the structure of the managed_by table we can see that the “ReportsTo” column (Relationship column) denotes the relationship between two employee entities. The employee denoted in the EmpNo column (Child element) reports to the employee denoted in the Reports column (Parent Element).

Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash

Hierarchical queries are a special type of SQL query that is used to manipulate hierarchical data. In this article, I will use the oracle database and the following two tables to introduce hierarchical queries.

managed_by

Oracle has three main keywords that are used in hierarchical queries. They are

CONNECT BY

START WITH

ORDER SIBLINGS BY

CONNECT BY

Connected by keyword is used to specify the relationship between the parent and the child instances. If we take the Organization hierarchy as an example connected by can be used to specify the relationship between the employee and the manager.

The Connected by keyword cannot be used to query data with cyclic relations. If it’s used the following error will occur.

“ORA-01436: CONNECT BY loop in user data”

In order to mitigate this error, we can use NOCYCLE keyword as a CONNECT BY condition.

START WITH

It’s common to have a root element in most of the hierarchies. The specialty of the root element is that it doesn’t have a parent element. Different people use different methods to denote the root element such as.

Adding a special string to the relationship column of the root element.

Keep the relationship column of the root element empty.

START WITH keyword is used to specify a root row for the hierarchy. In the above example, the root node is Director.

ORDER SIBLINGS BY

ORDER SIBLINGS BY keyword is used to specify the method of how to order the query result.

REFERENCES:
Sharing a Cached Layer Between Docker and Docker Compose Builds
By: Aleksa Vukotic
Tags: DevOps, Programming, JavaScript, Docker, Docker Compose

Docker Compose Is a Great Dev Tool

We used docker build and docker run commands to build/run our application from a Docker image locally. If we had a project with multiple components (e.g., a client and a server), building and running each can quickly become cumbersome and inefficient. Luckily, there’s Docker Compose — a CLI tool designed for running multicontainer applications.

Docker Compose is completely separate from Docker but uses the Docker engine internally to orchestrate the building and running of multiple containers. An overview of Docker Compose and the installation instructions can be found on the official website.

While each component will still have its own Dockerfile describing how the image should be built, we now also have a docker-compose.yml file — a YAML descriptor of all containers that need to be run together and its runtime properties.

Note: You can get more in-depth details on how to use Docker Compose during development here.

Let’s have a look at how a docker-compose.yml would look for our example (which is fairly simple, as we only have one component):

We simply define a service named hello-world-react-docker , set the build context to the directory that contains the Dockerfile, and expose the relevant ports — as we did when using docker run to start the container

Note: stdin_open: true is a workaround for an open bug with react-scripts 3.4.1 at the time of writing, where React’s npm start command exits with status code 0 as soon as the development server is up.
Over-fitted and Under-fitted models.
Tags: Deep Learning, Statistics, Data Science, Machine Learning

Like my article? Do give me a clap and share it,as that will boost my confidence.Also,I post new articles every Sunday so stay connected for future articles of the basics of data science and machine learning series.

Also,Do connect with me on linkedIn.
3 things you have missed in the Cryptosphere
Tags: Bitcoin Mining, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency

Did you read latest updates on Mastercard Blockchain patent? And what about Barclays one for storage?

Welcome to the weekly Blockchain updates, where we inform our community about crypto news and blockchain updates of the Week.

Barclays files patents on digital currency and blockchain

Barclays, the UK’s biggest bank, has applied for two patent for Blockchain applications in the US.

The first patent creates a system for transferring digital currency. The second patent is related to blockchain data storage.

Barclays was also the first bank in UK to open an account for a cryptocurrency exchange, reaching an agreement with Coinbase.

World’s First Bank-Owned Cryptocurrency Exchange Opens to the Public

Not only Barclays. SBI Holdings, Internet giant, has now opened to the public its cryptocurrency exchange VCTRADE, according to an official announcement.

During its preliminary launch last month, VCTRADE announced it will initially support trading of Japanese yen against XRP. Later on, VCTRADE also added support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH/JPY) and Bitcoin (BTC/JYP),

Mastercard introduces a patent to manage cryptocurrencies

Mastercard has been granted a new Patent for Payment System to link crypto transactions to fiat currency, by US Trademark Office.

“The use of traditional payment networks and payment systems technologies in combination with blockchain currencies may provide consumers and merchants the benefits of the decentralised systems. ” Mastercard wrote.

Even if some details are still to be clarified, this feature could speed up blockchain payments and make them more secure, by allowing cardholders to pay for things on their credit card.
SNL Season best in years — but why does Christopher Walken not rehearse?
By: Pito Salas
Tags: Snl Saturdaynightlive, Life

Saturday Night Live is having the best season in years. Consistently much funnier than last year or the year before. Last night, Christopher Walken again was extremely funny: the writing was funny and his delivery was funnier.



But. It is extremely distracting that Mr. Walken doesn’t even try to pretend to appear to be addressing his counterpart in the skit. He so obviously is reading cue cards that no matter how hard I tried to suspend disbelief, all I could notice was how he was looking in the wrong direction.I wonder how that happens. Did he not rehearse? Is it, for some wacky reason, on purpose? Can he just not remember his lines?



It all doesn’t add up, because the way he delivers his lines is right on the money: funny, quirky — perfect.



For example, check out this post Saturday Night Live: Christopher Walken/Panic! At the Disco — VIDEOS from TV Squad:

“[snip…] Seriously, think about it. His delivery is jaunty and weird, and when he’s not awkwardly staring into the middle distance, he’s just glaring directly at the cue cards. All these elements combined should throw him in the realm of the crappiest hosts.[…snip]