fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
How Big Data & Analytics is solving problems in the Banking and Finance Industry
By: Ella William
Tags: Insurance, Banking, Machine Learning, Data Science, Big Data

Modern companies want to know everything about their customers. They want to know where they are going, who they are meeting, what they are eating and of course what they are buying. They are one step ahead of the potential customer, knowing what she’ll do before she does herself. This, of course, only a distant dream just a few years back, is a reality today. The reason behind this is Big Data & Analytics which is changing the way businesses function.

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Bill Maher Gave Me the Best Advice by Way of Josef Stalin…Sort Of
By: Elisabeth Ovesen
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Inspiration, Mental Health, Advice

No Person, No Problem

I was crying. I usually called Bill when I was crying. Twenty-two years my senior, he was old enough to be my father. Though there was nothing paternal about him, he was never shy about dispensing compassionate, sometimes fatherly advice that would turn my tears into a laugh and my laughter into a good day.

On this particular afternoon, someone had broken my heart. Bill and I ended our relationship the year prior, and I was still reeling from the finality of it all. I still loved him but was doing my best to move forward. In the interest of full transparency, I have since dated and married nothing my losers, abusers, and straight-up crazy people since Bill and I split, so he has often been called upon to ease my tattered spirit –– and he has always answered that call.

I sobbed as I recounted the events of my personal life and the crushing weight of all that had gone wrong. Bill listened before he spoke, and when he did, what came out changed my life.

“No person, no problem,” he said. “They say Stalin said it, but that doesn’t make it any less true,” he continued as he chuckled in his trademark way.

And it hit me like a ton of bricks.

A brief search of this famous quote. which has been largely attributed to Josef Stalin, the former Premier of Russia, uncovered that, “No person. No problem,” isn’t the exact quote and that it hadn’t derived from Stalin at all!

Russian author Anatoly Rybakov wrote the original quote in his novel Children of Arbat. In this fictional account, Stalin is speaking about an army officer’s execution in Tsaritsyn and says, “Death solves all the problems. No man, no problem”.

Yikes.

Taken out of context, “No man, no problem,” or rather, Bill’s version, “No person, no problem,” has solved alot of conundrums for me throughout the years. Naturally, I wouldn’t wish death on a man just because I’m sick and tired of looking at him, nor do I think “death solves all problems.” However, what Bill helped me realize that day is all my heartaches were attached to other people, and once I got rid of those people, the hurt would go away.

After all, I’m not out here breaking my own heart.

So, to this day, when I find myself in a situation the makes me feel unhappy, I remind myself that even though I cannot control others' actions, I can control mine and other people's proximity to me. I can walk away. I can put space between the source of my discontent and me. I can get rid of the person and with them goes the problem. I don’t have to try to solve or resolve it. There is often no working it out, and that’s okay!

Once I’ve removed someone from my life, I always feel lighter. I feel refreshed and renewed. The arguments stop, and so do those long-drawn-out conversations where nothing gets resolved. Gone are those fake understandings we agree to just so the other person can shut the fuck up. It’s nice not feeling drained from having to talk to them or from complaining about them when they’re not around. It’s lovely not to commiserate.
Choices
By: Josh Petersen
Tags: Microfiction, Writing, Short Story, Fiction, Short Fiction

Choices

21st — Writing Prompt

The decision weighed heavy on him.

“Take the blue pill and forget everything. Every bad memory gone…

Take the red pill and remember everything. Retain every bit of information, but… that includes bad memories.”

A woman’s voice, “Seriously Frank? Quit dinking around and take the damn Advil.”

“Tylenol it is!”
Istinomer fact-checked COVID-19 and the Serbian national election at the same time. Here’s how.
By: Tara Kelly
Tags: Misinformation, Journalism, Media, Fact Checking, Case Study

Istinomer fact-checked COVID-19 and the Serbian national election at the same time. Here’s how.

Fighting misinformation about the virus during the run-up to June’s boycotted election was an arduous task for this small Belgrade-based outlet. Now it’s thinking about how to use its readers as an early warning system.

Image: Istinomer

This case study is part of Resilience Reports, a series from the European Journalism Centre about how news organisations across Europe are adjusting their daily operations and business strategies as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.
7 Historical Facts That Are Too Weird and Crazy to Believe!
By: Hossein Raspberry
Tags: History, Science, Short Story, Culture, Feminism

There are many things in history that make sense. However, many historical incidents and stories seem insignificant and unknown when compared to major events such as the world wars. Those things are crucial parts of history, but they’ve got nothing on these wacky facts we dug up.

This is part of a series about historical facts, you can also read the following:
Cloud Cost Optimization | Save $ on your cloud infrastructure | Get your Template
By: Cuelogic Technologies
Tags: Cloud Optimization, Cloud Storage, Cloud Services, Cloud Computing, Cloud Solutions

Cloud Costs are rising? With a combined experience of more than 22+ years between them, Sunu and Vikrant helps you on your cloud cost optimization journey, without compromising on development and user experience.

We break down tips, ticks, hacks and best practices to keep costs in check. We are talking about Network, Storage, Compute, CDN, Human Factor, Devops and pretty much the entire spectrum on cloud cost optimization.

This video is all you need to watch to know where to look to save costs and how to do it. We cut down the theory and share this with you based on our real, practical experiences.

We’ve saved Millions of $ for our clients (some of which are Fortune 500). We’ve also advised startups to set it right so they get more done out of cloud. Share this #cloudcostoptimization video with your network and start saving.
Understanding Dice Loss for Crisp Boundary Detection
By: Shuchen Du
Tags: Deep Learning, Loss Function, Computer Vision

Dice Loss

Dice loss originates from Sørensen–Dice coefficient, which is a statistic developed in 1940s to gauge the similarity between two samples [Wikipedia]. It was brought to computer vision community by Milletari et al. in 2016 for 3D medical image segmentation.

Fig.3: Dice coefficient

Fig.3 shows the equation of Dice coefficient, in which pi and gi represent pairs of corresponding pixel values of prediction and ground truth, respectively. In boundary detection scenario, the values of pi and gi are either 0 or 1, representing whether the pixel is boundary (value of 1) or not (value of 0). Therefore, the denominator is the sum of total boundary pixels of both prediction and ground truth, and the numerator is the sum of correctly predicted boundary pixels because the sum increments only when pi and gi match (both of value 1).

Fig.4: Dice coefficient (set view)

Fig.4 is another view of Fig.3 from the perspective of set theory, in which the Dice coefficient (DSC) is a measure of overlap between two sets. For example, if two sets A and B overlap perfectly, DSC gets its maximum value to 1. Otherwise, DSC starts to decrease, getting to its minimum value to 0 if the two sets don ‘t overlap at all. Therefore, the range of DSC is between 0 and 1, the larger the better. Thus we can use 1-DSC as Dice loss to maximize the overlap between two sets.

In boundary detection tasks, the ground truth boundary pixels and predicted boundary pixels can be viewed as two sets. By leveraging Dice loss, the two sets are trained to overlap little by little. As shown in Fig.4, the denominator considers the total number of boundary pixels at global scale, while the numerator considers the overlap between the two sets at local scale. Therefore, Dice loss considers the loss information both locally and globally, which is critical for high accuracy.
Avoiding jagged edges on gradients.
By: Mandy Michael
Tags: CSS, Web Development, Design, Front End Development

A really common design pattern I see come up a lot are those angled blocks of colour in the bottom of containers, you’ve probably come across it, it looks something like the image below.

Angled colour block inside a square

This happened to turn up on one of our projects and rather than implementing with an image or SVG we decided to use a linear-gradient, the benefit of this is that it’s really easy to change the angle, colour etc within the CSS. The problem we had was that the angle of the gradient in the space available caused a really horrible jagged edge.

Figure 2: jagged edged angled gradient

The real life example looked like Figure 2, as you can see the jagged edge is quite prominent.

Luckily, there is a really simply way to solve this problem! Normally when you want to create a sharp line in a linear gradient you’d create your gradient like the code below.

background:

linear-gradient(176deg, white, white 75%, black 75%, black 100%);

This basically ensures that from 0–75% we have a white colour and then from 75% on, it’s black! This creates a really nice sharp line. Unfortunately, depending on the angle, and the size of the container you can end up with the ugly zig zag.

Fixing this requires a very small change — add a decimal to the second percentage which will create a slight blur on the gradient. This will need to be adjusted depending on your use case to ensure the blur isn’t too prominent — but visually it will result in a smoother gradient!

background:

linear-gradient(176deg, white, white 75%, black 75.3%, black 100%);

Side by side example of the jagged vs smooth gradient.

Update:

Several people comment to me on twitter about using calc, this is also an option which can be achieve by doing something like the following:

background:

linear-gradient(176deg, white, white 75%, black calc(75% + 1px), black 100%);

The Codepen example:

Hopefully this helps with your issues in the future!

Enjoy!

Mandy
A User Authentication Android App made in Android Studio
By: Harsh Kudtarkar
Tags: UI, Android App Development, Rest Api, Java

After some processing time, the Android Studio main window appears.

Now take a moment to review the most important files. First, be sure the Project window is open (select View > Tool Windows > Project) and the Android view is selected from the drop-down list at the top of that window. You can then see the following files:

app > java > com.example.userauthentication > MainActivity

This is the main activity. It’s the entry point for your app. When you build and run your app, the system launches an instance of this Activity and loads its layout.

app > res > layout > activity_main.xml

This XML file defines the layout for the activity's user interface (UI). It contains a TextView element with the text "Hello, World!"

app > manifests > AndroidManifest.xml

The manifest file describes the fundamental characteristics of the app and defines each of its components.

Gradle Scripts > build.gradle

There are two files with this name: one for the project, "Project: User Authentication" and one for the app module, "Module: app." Each module has its own build.gradle file, but this project currently has just one module. Use each module's build.gradle file to control how the Gradle plugin builds your app. For more information about this file, see Configure your build.

Before you run your first app, get your smart phone and enable USB debugging by following the instructions over here. After, enabling USB debugging, connect your smart phone to your PC and you are ready to go.

In Android Studio, select Run > Run ‘app’ or click the Run icon in the toolbar.

Congratulations on creating your very first app. But you are far from what we have to achieve. Next we need to create the rest of the applications.

Setting up the files:

Lets start with app > res > drawables. This is the directory where we will be storing all the graphical elements for our application. We are going to store three different categories of graphic elements.

Images. (filename: background.jpg, image.png)

Icon elements. (filenames: account.xml, email.xml, eye.xml, eye_off.xml, lock.xml)

Custom graphic file. (round_button_2.xml)

The images used here are for background and a logo in the logged-in session. You can use any image you like but be sure to use the same file name for the next part where we will be coding the back-end and creating activity layouts.

Icon elements are XML files for vector graphic icons used in our application. You can find and download these files from here.

The custom graphic file here is used for creating a rich look for our buttons in the application. It’s an XML file containing various tags and attributes specifying the properties that the button will have for its appearance.
Stories of Greener Grass and Bluer Skies.
By: Jacobo The First
Tags: Storytelling, Mindfulness, Poetry, Nature, Poem

As I walk barefoot on the green lands,

Feeling the wetness and the freshness of the grass.

I looked up to the blue sky,

to those beautiful clouds sliding in mind.

And I wondered,

is this all there is to be discovered?

My mind slipped between senses of sight and touch,

flipped to those beautiful harmonics sung by birds as such.

And I wondered,

is there better music?

Nature itself can be so exclusive.

I walked and walked,

not being able to fill my gap,

when wonder overcame my mind.

Imaging things and moments

not happening now,

filled with omens and poets around.

Picturing characters

with different situations,

from all nations.

Only then I realized,

I was smiling for the first time.

I was so surprised.

My happiness was so great,

as I thought what a beautiful affair,

is to create something from thin air.

This is why I was born!

In so many categories,

I was brought to this great world to share stories.

Stories of greener grass and bluer skies.

Pictures in my mind,

of humankind.

Predesigned,

to serve a purpose,

bigger than life combined.
The 90's Trend Hits the World Wide Web, Again.
By: Kiki Schirr
Tags: Web Development, Design, Humor

An ode to the 90's fad?

The 90's are back, in a big way.

Girls with false nostalgia for an era they were conceived in are rocking velvet dresses, tattoo necklaces, and yes, flannel.

But did you know that some sites are beginning to pick the 90's look back up again, too?

Right now it’s mostly limited to the stores that sell 90's clothing, or the personal webpages of Instagram darlings, but watch out — soon you might be asked to code something with scrolling or blinking text!

Here are a few examples from around the web:

Happy Monday’s store site (note the scrolling text!)

Shop Jeen’s store site, complete with music video autoplay and a custom tie-dye cursor.

O Mighty’s store page, with scroll, blink, and pig glitter.

And if that’s not meta enough for you, check out these clothes:

Windows 95 chic. From O Mighty, shown on the DollsKill website.

90's graphics galore! From DollsKill clothes.

From Happy Monday, the “Hot Butt Shirt”

Shop Jeen even named its line of risqué clothing Netgear90:

Tubular — NOT!

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, and one that shouldn’t be ignored while building.

So to all you designers out there, dust off your HTML3 skills and figure out your Lisa Frank hexadecimals because there’s a new trend in town.
For All Mankind Season 2 Coming Soon To Apple TV+
By: Yash Patak
Tags: Netflix, Apple TV, TV Series, Apple, Streaming

For All Mankind — Apple TV+

Apple has recently announced that their critically announced sci-fi drama series will be renewed for a third season ahead of the release of the third season which will premiere globally on February 19, 2021.

The series explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended. The series presents a world where the USSR beats the US to the moon, and we follow a group of NASA astronauts, engineers and their families through their extraordinary lives in this alternate history timeline.

Apple has already released some details about the storyline for the second season. We have been told that the season will pick up a decade later in 1983. This is a time where tensions between the USSR and the USA are at their peak, as it is the height of The Cold War.

The series takes place with Ronald Reagan as President and the increasing expansion of space exploration is under threat as the US and the USSR to control different sites on the moon.

Season 1 stars Joel Kinnaman, Michael Dorman, Sarah Jones, Shantel VanSanten, Wrenn Schmidt, Jodi Balfour, Krys Marshall, and Sonya Walger will all reprise their former roles from the first season. There are also some new cast members that will be joining the series will include Cynthy Wu, Coral Peña, and Casey W. Johnson.
The RSI-MACD Technical Indicator — A Python Study.
By: Sofien Kaabar
Tags: Trading, Finance, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence

The strategy does not seem to perform well. Apparently, there is not much to do when it comes to combining these two indicators. After all, not much good can come from applying a lagging indicator on another lagging indicator.

One thing to mention before we end the discussion is that the hit ratio presented may seem confusing. How can such a high hit ratio give us mostly negative results?

Well, as I have mentioned in my previous articles, the hit ratio does not mean anything without the risk-reward ratio. We can notice that for all the pairs, the risk-reward ratio was extremely low (around 0.28).

Sure, a 70–80% hit ratio on your trades is great. But what if you are risking $1 each time to earn $0.20 (20 cents)? Well, then you will lose money and get wiped out because your risk reward will be 0.2. If you make 100 trades where you always use the same position sizing and you get your 80% hit ratio which translates to 80 profitable trades with each gaining $0.20.

This gives you a profit of 80 x 0.2 = $16. Alright, not bad but let us see the remaining losing 20 trades which have lost $1 each. This gives you a loss of 20 x 1.0 = $20. Your net profit is therefore -$4.00. Hence, by getting it right 8 out of 10 times, you have managed to lose money. Be careful from high hit ratio strategies which are generally quoted first when people are selling you theirs. Always check the risk metrics.

Here is the same strategy but with a theoretical risk-reward ratio of 2.00. This means for every trade, the stop will be 1x ATR and the target 2x ATR. Financially speaking, this is how risk management should be at its most basic form.
Nobel Prizes 2020: Roger Penrose and Black Hole Formation
By: Oxford Academic
Tags: Black Hole, Physics, Science, Oxford University Press, Nobel Prize

Sir Roger Penrose, author of the award-winning The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (part of the Oxford Landmark Science series) and his own six-part series of collected works, has been jointly awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.

Announcing the Prize, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote of the “ingenious mathematical methods” used by Penrose in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, going on to state that “his groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.”

Sir Roger shares the award with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, who have been recognized for their discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy

If you would like to understand more about black holes and their place within physics, take a look at our reading list:

Roger Penrose, Oxford Landmark Science series

Clifford M. Will and Nicolás Yunes

John W. Moffat

Nicholas Mee

Alvaro De Rújula

Katherine Blundell
Spyder IDE and Command Line: The Basics
By: Angel Mariano
Tags: Python, Command Line, Spyder, Data Science, Programming

Learning the basics of Spyder and Command Prompt has got to be an essential step for your Data Science Journey. So, it is best to get an in-depth knowledge of at least 2 Data Science tools because it will surely step up your game! To learn more about these available analysis tools in the market, you might want to check the article below:
How To Get People To Do Stuff #6: Hot drinks, soft pillows & heavy objects
By: The Team W
Tags: Decision Making, Research, Persuasion, Influence, Psychology

Joshua Ackerman and John Bargh (2010) conducted research where they had candidates for job interviews hand in their resume one of three ways. One candidate handed in her resume on regular printer paper. Another candidate handed in her resume on regular printer paper, but had it clipped to a light clipboard. A third candidate handed in her resume on regular printer paper, but had it clipped to a heavy clipboard. Then they had interviewers rate which candidates were the best for the job. The interviewers gave higher ratings to candidates whose resume they were reading while the interviewer was holding a heavy clipboard.

Holding a heavy object while looking at a resume makes a job candidate appear more important. In fact, any idea you’re considering while holding something heavy (for instance, a book) you will deem to be more important. The metaphor of an idea being “weighty” has a physical corollary.

There are two terms that are used for this. Sometimes it’s called “haptic sensation” and sometimes you will find it referred to as “embodied cognition.” We are very influenced by the meaning that our sense of touch perceives.

You may be surprised to find out all the ways that these haptic sensations affect our perceptions and judgments. Besides the effect for a heavy object, people also react to these other haptic sensations:

• When people touch a rough object during a social interaction, for instance, if they’re sitting on a chair with coarse wool upholstery, they rate the interaction more difficult than if they touch a soft object.

• When people touch a hard object, they rate a negotiation as more rigid than if they touch a soft object.

• When people hold a warm cup (for example, a warm cup of coffee), they judge the person they’re interacting with to have a warmer personality than if they’re holding a cup of cold liquid.

You can use these haptic sensations to get people to do stuff. If you want people to have easier interactions with others, then you might want to have soft furniture, not hard chairs, in your conference room, and use a soft fabric covering for them rather than a scratchy tweed. If you have an important client coming to your office, and you want her to feel warmly about you, get her a cup of hot coffee or tea in a mug that will transmit the heat before you start.

Ackerman, Joshua M., Christopher Nocera, and John Bargh. 2010. “Incidental haptic sensations influence social judgments and decisions.” Science. 328 (5986): 1712–1715. DOI: 10.1126/science.1189993
Crush!
By: Pawan Kumar
Tags: Crush, Storytelling, Relationships, Poetry, Love

He still remember his school crush.

He talked her a lot.

Without even speaking a single word.
“It is just an animation”
By: Jan Schultink
Tags: Design, Presentations, PowerPoint

“It is just an animation”

Many junior analysts are struggling to sell their minimal slides to a boss who is insisting on combing slides 2, 3, 4, and 5 into one “to save time”. Here is one line of thought you can try: convincing here that slides 2, 3, 4, and 5 are in fact already one and the same slide, it is just an elaborate animation that you spread out over a couple of pages to make editing easier. “The audience will perceive it as one slide”.

You can make your argument more credible by making sure that there are connecting elements on your slides that stay the same as you switch pages.
Understanding Kubernetes Multi-Container Pod Patterns
By: Gaurav Agarwal
Tags: Technology, Kubernetes, DevOps, Containers, Programming

Ambassador

The ambassador pattern derives its name from an Ambassador, who is an envoy and a person a country chooses to represent their country and connect with the rest of the world. Similarly, in the Kubernetes perspective, an Ambassador pattern implements a proxy to the external world. Let me give you an example — If you build an application that needs to connect with a database server, the server configuration, etc, changes with the environment.

Now, the official recommendation to handle these is to use Config Maps, but what if you have legacy code that is already using another way of connecting to the database. Maybe, a properties file, or even worse, a hardcoded set of values. What if you want to communicate with localhost, and you can leave the rest to the admin? You can use the Ambassador pattern for these kinds of scenarios.

So, what we can do is create another container that can act as a TCP Proxy to the database, and you can connect to the proxy via localhost. The sysadmin can then use config maps and secrets with the proxy container to inject the correct connection and auth information.

Ambassador

For the demo, we will use a simple NGINX config that acts as a TCP proxy to example.com. That should also work for databases and other back ends.

If you look carefully in the manifest YAML, you will find there are three containers. The app-container-poller continuously calls http://localhost:81 and sends the content to /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html .

The app-container-server runs nginx and listens on port 80 to handle external requests. Both these containers share a common mountPath . That is similar to the sidecar approach.

There is an ambassador-container running within the pod that listens on localhost:81 and proxies the connection to example.com , so when we curl the app-container-server endpoint on port 80, we get a response from example.com .

Let’s have a look:
I’ve Only Taken One Photo With The New Nikon D850. And It’s Love.
By: The Art Of Photography
Tags: Creativity, Nikon, Photography, D850, Art

My judgment on the quality of an image is not about what it looks like in its raw format, it’s about the subtlety and flexibility with which I can make changes to it in Lightroom. In fact, from a “straight out of the camera” aspect, my cheapest camera (the Fujifilm XT2) is far and away the best of the lot. I don’t need to touch a Fujifilm image — and as odd as it sounds, their in-camera film looks are absolutely stunning. But when it comes to the nuanced work of post-processing, there’s just nothing like working on a Nikon file. It’s truly transcendent. Until you’ve done it, it’s hard to appreciate it. Watching the image adjust ever so slowly as you slide your shadows up, for example, offers a seemingly endless range of control and subtlety that no other file I’ve worked with does as well. And for some reference, I was a Quantel Paintbox artist for years, doing high-end photo retouching.

I’ve been using the Nikon D800 since it came out, but have been looking forward to advancements announced in the D850 (backlit sensor, higher pixel count, articulated screen, wifi, higher frames per second, to name a few). I finally got the call, rushed down to Samy’s Camera and grabbed it. By the time I got home, it was dark and I couldn’t take a photo — instead, I just slowly attached the new grip, my leather Tanner strap and downloaded Nikon’s SnapBridge app and paired it to the camera. Needless to say, sleep was difficult.

There’s a lot to know about the camera — and I’m happy to get into it, if anyone cares to hear the same info that is on a few hundred other sites from my perspective — but all I really cared about was getting a decent image into Lightroom and playing around with it. We are beginning some construction in our back yard, so I took the thing with a 24–70mm f/2.8 on there out to the back. It’s a perfectly overcast day here in L.A., so light was perfect. I just wanted one shot. As usual, I was cautiously underexposed — my priority is always to keep my ISO way down for the purest image possible. I grew up shooting ISO 100 film, so I’m always starting there. This was at 160. Wide open at 2.8 (it’s probably worth noting that the image would be even sharper at f/5.6), to let the most light hit that backlit sensor and a middling 1/500th of a second. My meter showed that I was underexposed, but I had a feeling it was all there. Here’s how the Raw file looked:
MuZero 101: a brief introduction to DeepMind’s latest AI
By: David Pereira
Tags: Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deepmind, Reinforcement Learning

MuZero 101: a brief introduction to DeepMind’s latest AI

After several breakthroughs such as AlphaGo or AlphaZero, researchers from DeepMind have published their latest effort, MuZero. What is it all about?

Back in 2016, DeepMind introduced AlphaGo, the first computer software able to defeat professional Go players, included the world champion. The games between Lee Sedol (18 Go world titles) and AlphaGo were even immortalized in a documentary, available now in Youtube.

Why was AlphaGo so relevant? Until then, computer programs were only able to play Go at an amateur level, as traditional Machine Learning methods such as search trees were simply not capable of evaluating all possible moves, board positions strengths, etc. Actually, Computer Go is described as the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to creating a computer program that plays the traditional board game Go, and Go programs exist since 1968.

AlphaGo combined search tress with deep neural networks, with the intention of capturing the intuitive aspect of the game, as its creators confirm.

AlphaGo is based on two deep neural networks:

One for evaluating the policy: which should be the next move?

which should be the next move? Another one for evaluating the value: predicting the winner of the game

By using reinforcement learning, AlphaGo began learning from its own mistakes while playing against different versions of itself, until finally being able to beat the world champion 4 games to 1. Also, it demonstrated that by using those two deep neural networks, AlphaGo was able to come up with policies that seemed bad when watched from a human perspective, but turned out to be maximizing the value, as in the famous move 37 against Lee Sedol:

In order to achieve its performance level, AlphaGo was feed with human data, domain knowledge and a known set of rules.

Following Deepmind research results, AlphaGo Zero (2017) and AlphaZero (2018), improved the original algorithm by learning to play on its own, without any human data or domain knowledge, or even by mastering three different games (Go, Chess, Shogi) with only one algorithm being only provided with the known set of rules.

Now, December 2020, Deepmind has published its latest research paper in which they present their latest computer program, MuZero, capable of mastering four games (Go, Chess, Shogi, Atari). So, what is the big difference between AlphaZero and MuZero? It might seem like a simple evolution of the former which has been able to “just learn” another game, but there is one big difference. MuZero has learnt to master these games without being provided known rules.

DeepMind claims that MuZero is a big step forward towards general-purpose algorithms. And they think so because they have introduced a novel method to approach planning in unknown environments, a very relevant problem to AI.
Dear Neighbors, Please Don’t Judge Me By The Condition of My Yard
By: Jacqueline Dooley
Tags: Life, Outdoors, Parenting, Mental Health, Family

When we moved into this house 19 years ago, the yard was in pristine condition. The former owner — her name was Marie — lived here for 30 years.

The older couple (now long gone) who lived next door told us that Marie spent most of her time outside working on the yard because the house was crowded with three generations of her family, plus several elderly tenants that Marie took care of.

It’s no wonder Marie took solace in the yard. The inside of the house was dark, cluttered, and neglected. We didn’t love the house, but it was large and cheap and had potential. There was room for my husband’s drum studio and, with a bit of hard work, up to four bedrooms for our growing family.

I was eight months pregnant with the baby who would die almost 16 years to the day that we moved in.

Marie had planted flowering bushes randomly around the yard, all of them covered with sturdy, unyielding thorns. My husband, haunted by the image of our baby toddling into one of those bushes, took it upon himself to remove them one by one. That was pretty much the extent of the yard work we accomplished that first year, beyond a few feeble attempts to mow. The baby arrived on May 16th, about a month after we moved in. Both of us were exhausted.

The lawn had looked wonderful during the first few weeks of spring, but quickly became overgrown. Our property is just under half an acre. It may not seem that large, but when you are tired, unused to owning your own home, and trying to figure out how to take care of a new baby, yard work becomes a low priority task.

We bought our first lawn mower soon after we moved in (we’re now on our third) and barely used it. I have a vague memory of two neighborhood kids offering to mow the overgrown yard and giving up halfway into the task, defeated by the many obstacles (mostly thorns) that made their job nearly impossible. We paid them $20 anyway.
5 Things You Should Know About the Evolution of Books
By: Violet Daniels
Tags: History, Books, Reading, Education, Culture

5 Things You Should Know About the Evolution of Books

There was once a time when books couldn’t be purchased by everyday people, this is how they have evolved

Photo by Natalia Y on Unsplash

Nowadays, when it comes to books, we’re very lucky. At the click of a button, we can buy books at a reasonable price and have them conveniently delivered to our door.

And that’s not all. With 2,320,318 books published this year alone, we’re never short on choice. Books are now available in every genre you can imagine.

And after all that the digital age has thrown at us — books are still big business. But they have a more humble beginning than you probably think.

Here are 5 things you should know about books and how their long history influenced their current form.

Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll never take a book for granted again.
Technology is a tool, not a human barrier.
By: Aldric Chen
Tags: Self Improvement, Productivity, Life Lessons, Thinking, Technology

Technology is a tool, not a human barrier.

Technology, like bows and arrows, exists to make our lives easier. They help to improve the quality of our lives.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

We should not view technology as a firewall between human interaction.

As our productivity level increases, we need to make a conscious effort to spend time with the people we care about.

That should be the way.
We present the first project of Crypterium Family — InstaChange
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Mobile App Development, Exchange, Technology

To bring mass adoption of cryptocurrencies closer, Crypterium is creating the whole range of products that fundamentally change the cryptocurrency usage experience. We are on the way of making any crypto-related activities easier, more secure, and accessible. This week, we’ve launched the first of many coming services. It allows anyone to buy crypto at best rates within seconds. Without further ado, please meet InstaСhange.

From the beginning, Crypterium has been comprehensively addressing the issues making anything related to crypto a bit of a pain. Today, everything is so complicated, time consuming and expensive, that only very tech-savvy people can find their way around.

We want to change that, by building a whole new ecosystem, that we like to call Crypterium Family, and that is making any operation with crypto easy. From buying crypto and exchanging it to spending crypto it in everyday life and pledging it to get loans — we’re building satellite products that will make dealing with crypto at least as easy as with traditional financial products.

The first project we’d like to introduce to you is called InstaChange. It offers you the easiest and most convenient way of entering the crypto world. The idea is simple: before you can start using crypto in everyday life, you need to get some crypto. InstaChange lets you buy Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin or Tether straight from your bank card or bank account — instantly and with minimal fees.

Crypterium Family concept

Crypterium is currently working on a bunch of new products that would ideally fit in the world’s first cryptobank ecosystem — Crypterium Family. They won’t immediately go inside the Crypterium App — we’ll first run them in parallel and properly test them — but eventually, they’ll be merged together.

“We are going to do a lot of additional services, and within that range of services we have an Innovation Team that is working on launching new products and one of them — InstaChange — is finally launched” — says Austin Kimm, COO at Crypterium.

Maybe it’s time to give our first satellite a try while crypto prices are the lowest they’ve been for a whole year. To make the deal even sweeter, we offer you 0% for any purchases made by November 25. Let’s celebrate the first CF project together!

About Crypterium

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

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

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Star Wars Symbology: The Plot Twist George Lucas Kept Secret For Forty-Five Years
By: Brian Deines
Tags: Philosophy, Star Wars, Cinema, Storytelling, Film

Of All Things, Why No Force Flight? A Theory.

Why? My theory explaining why we haven’t seen canonical Force Flight yet, is that we simply haven’t seen a Jedi powerful enough yet.

Hard to believe considering what Luke pulled off in The Last Jedi.

But in The Last Jedi, we were exposed to “The Prime Jedi.”

The Prime Jedi shown in the mosaic on the floor of the Jedi Temple on Ahch-To depicts a Jedi that is equal parts light and dark. Like a yin and yang.

This surprised some Star Wars fans, myself included, considering that we were told all along that it is a battle of Light versus Dark — not the integration of Light and Dark.

But we know that the Star Wars Canon has a precedent called the Gray Jedi.

The Gray Jedi was “a term used by Jedi and Sith to describe Force-users who walked the line between the light and dark sides of the Force without surrendering to the dark side.”

There is a strong indication from the trailers that The Rise of Skywalker is heading toward the Gray Jedi.

Rey’s survived the darkside’s call to mirror cave in TLJ, but will it be enough dark to balance her light?

And when we analyze the symbolism of the Gray Jedi it makes sense.

True power comes not from naively cleaving to the notion of Good given to us by other. That form of Good is said to be a form of cowardice.

True power comes from knowing your own capacity, as a human, for malevolence, evil and destruction — but choosing to be an agent for Good instead. Some may argue that that choice, that free will, is what Life is about.

This is the core essence of “strength in balance.” The Gray Jedi will be the most powerful we’ve ever seen. Part of his power will be from his self-belief.
Garden of Eden Revisited
By: John Horan
Tags: Life, Change, Christianity, Poetry, Mental Health

Hey you

Demon days are over

Relax

Stop looking over your shoulder

It’s okay now

I know it’s hard to trust

A change that’s been so long coming

And let go of the fears

That were so long plumbing

The depths of the subconscious

But really they were just monsters

Of your imagination

Time to let them go

And explore the rest of creation

This world is the garden of Eden

It’s all just a matter for perception

Just adjust your focus

And let the light

Play on your pupils

and rest.
Where Everybody Knows Your Face
By: The Nib
Tags: Racism, Privacy, Comics, Capitalism, Amazon

Sign up for Taking Stock of COVID: New comics from The Nib

By The Nib

New comics from Matt Lubchansky, Keith Knight, and Niccolo Pizarro. Plus How Seniors Are Living With COVID-19. Take a look
Remove duplicates from two Pandas DataFrame
By: Muhammad Irfan
Tags: Python, Data Science, Remove Duplicates, Pandas

During my research on Indeed for classifying the job types, found an issue regarding multiple labels for the same job i.e. temporary and part-time are assigned to the same jobs. I used the following code to remove common descriptions of jobs with different labels.

import pandas as pd part_time = pd.read_csv("part_time.csv", index_col=0)

temporary = pd.read_csv("temporary.csv", index_col=0) # find common jobs using description column with isin() function.

# A intersection B

A = part_time[part_time.description.isin(temporary.description)] # remove common elements from both part_time and temporary jobs.

# temporary - A

# part_time - A temporary = temporary[~temporary.description.isin(A)]

part_time = part_time[~part_time.description.isin(A)] # now concat these two data frames and save.

total = pd.concat([temporary, part_time])

total.to_csv("indeed_jobs.csv", index=False)

Hoping it will help those who have the same issue.
numpy.random — Generating Random Numbers In Python
By: Om Rastogi
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Numpy, Python, Random

Random number have lots of application like, cryptography, game and Neural Network. Here we’ll discuss and identify different methods for generating random numbers in NumPy module in python.



import numpy as np



numpy.random.random (size)— Return random floats in the half-open interval [0.0, 1.0), ie 1.0>x≥0.0

>>>np.random.random((2,2)) array([[ 0.66032591, 0.91397527],

[ 0.63366556, 0.36594058]])

numpy.random.randint(low, high, size, dtype=int) — Return random integers from low to high from the “discrete uniform” distribution.

>>> np.random.randint([1, 3, 5, 7], [[10], [20]], dtype=np.uint8) array([[ 8, 6, 9, 7],

[ 1, 16, 9, 12]], dtype=uint8)

numpy.random.randn(d1,d2,..dn) — Return a sample/s from the “standard normal” distribution, for given dimension.

>>> np.random.randn(2,2) array([[ 0.6762164 , -1.37066901],

[ 0.23856319, 0.61407709]])

numpy.random.rand(s1,s2,..sn) — Random values in a given given dimension and ranges between (0,1).

>>> np.random.rand(3,2)

array([[ 0.14022471, 0.96360618],

[ 0.37601032, 0.25528411],

[ 0.49313049, 0.94909878]])

random.rand and random.randn are similar function, both in functionality and syntax and can be confused easily.

random.rand — Returns sample according to standard normal distribution.

random.randn — Returns numbers ranging between (0,1)

numpy.random.normal(loc=0.0, scale=1.0, size=None) — Draw random samples from a normal (Gaussian) distribution.

loc : Mean (“centre”) of the distribution

scale : spread or “width” of the distribution >>> np.random.normal(3, 2.5, size=(2, 4))

array([[-4.49401501, 4.00950034, -1.81814867, 7.29718677],

[ 0.39924804, 4.68456316, 4.99394529, 4.84057254]])

These are the most methods used for creating random number. More details can be searched in documentation. To get broader knowledge on numpy check my article.
You Don’t Have to Know Everything; You Just Have to Know Where to Find It
By: Sinem Günel
Tags: Books, Knowledge, Education, Innovation, Learning

You Don’t Have to Know Everything; You Just Have to Know Where to Find It

“Just-in-time learning” can make your life a whole lot easier. Here’s how to make use of it.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

In 1921, an interviewer asked Albert Einstein about the speed of sound. Einstein replied that he didn’t know because he didn’t carry such information in his mind. Instead, he’d look it up in textbooks where the answer is available anytime.

If Einstein lived today, he’d probably memorize even less because the internet enables us to find answers to most questions within seconds.

Yet, education systems all over the globe still force students to learn information by heart regardless of the relevance.

That’s not only ineffective but also worthless as knowledge itself isn’t worth much. The saying knowledge is power might have been true a few decades ago. Today, only applied knowledge is power.

In the 21st century, you can learn almost any skill for free if you know how to browse the web and take enough time.

That’s a blessing and a curse at the same time because most people don’t know how to find relevant information. Yet, that’s one of the most powerful skills of the 21st century.

If you know how and where to look for information the moment you need it, you can master almost any problem with ease.

Instead of wasting your brainpower on memorizing information, you should try so-called just-in-time learning.

“Just-In-Time means learning something only when/because you actually need to use it.” — Kathy Sierra

Learning on the job is also called embedded learning and becomes increasingly relevant. More and more organizations switch from traditional education systems to just-in-time learning because of several reasons.

In the past, companies invested in random educational programs to equip their employees with additional skills. Today, most businesses don’t want to waste time and money on programs teaching random skills that will never be used anyway.

Typically, if you learn a skill without applying it, you’ll forget what you learned pretty quickly. When you need the skill after a few months or even years, you’ll need to relearn everything and realize that the first time was a waste of time.

And as time is our most valuable resource, we shouldn’t waste it on learning skills and memorizing information if we don’t need it.

Instead, leading organizations encourage their members to apply just-in-time learning. That way, employees can educate themselves in real-time when they actually need a skill.