fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Why I think we’re at least two years away from mainstream blockchain adoption
By: Michael Yorke
Tags: Distributed Ledgers, User Experience, Smart Contracts, Trust, Blockchain

I’ve spent the last three and a bit years working on blockchain / distributed ledger technology in some way, shape or form. The article below is based on my experiences and observations; if you’ve come across anything that contradicts what I’ve written I’d love to hear about it.

Things have come a long way in the ten years since Satoshi published his / her / their revolutionary whitepaper describing a new peer-to-peer electronic cash system underpinned by distributed ledger, or blockchain, technology (DLT). We’ve seen the launch of countless new protocols from Ethereum to Neo to Tezos, corporates left right and Scentre announcing blockchain pilots almost daily, and Don Tapscott’s TED talk reaching 4m of us (and counting) around the world in three years alone.

Or have they? DLT has gone through boom and bust, hard forks and soft forks, ICOs, STOs, utility tokens, altcoins, $hitcoins, stablecoins… so why has it still not gone mainstream?

From spending the last three years both working on DLT products and reviewing platforms built by others, I’ve come across two major barriers that are holding the technology back: these are poor user experience (UX) and lack of trust.

The huge community of developers, designers, engineers, regulators and everyone else involved are solving the underlying issues creating these barriers every day, but projecting forward a rough pace of change based on nothing scientific but my own experience I think we’re at least two years away from this tech really being adopted by the masses — and by that I mean being used by a large number of people at least once a day. Large is subjective yes, but I’m talking Dropbox / iTunes levels for B2C, and Microsoft Office / AWS levels for B2B, so not exactly trivial numbers of people.

So what is it about UX and trust that is so important?

Success for a new product or technology is like a secret sauce — there’s no exact recipe to getting it right but people broadly agree on what ingredients need to go in.

UX and trust are two key elements of the secret sauce, and companies have to get these two things (amongst others) absolutely nailed to go big. Look at the likes of Facebook; great UX but massive user drop off following the Cambridge Analytica scandal leading to a huge erosion in trust (60% of Americans don’t trust Facebook). Similarly Britain’s banks have been losing customers to challenger banks such as Monzo because their UX just doesn’t stack up to what is expected by the modern consumer.

Hit that sweet spot though and you’re onto a winner; Amazon’s retail and cloud computing services are two of the world’s most trusted, coupled with a great UX and you’ve got market leadership in both areas.

Where there are challenges there are also opportunities. Below I outline some of the biggest UX and trust issues I’ve come across in the last three years, and my perspective on opportunities that exist to solve them.
AI Lesson for Teachers, Teens, and Everyone In Between
By: Mike Chaykowsky
Tags: Machine Learning, Education, Students, Artificial Intelligence, Teaching

My goal is to outline a lesson that any teacher can use in the classroom or any person interested in a very high level understanding of how AI works can walk through. This is not meant to be an exact representation of how AI truly works, but simply give intuition as to how it works. I have been a Math, SAT, ACT, ISEE tutor for close to a decade and work in machine learning research.

Pre-requisites: know what a probability is.

There are 2 sub-lessons, 1 smaller one and 1 larger one. All lessons will be under the scope of computer vision problems — object detection.

Supervised learning vs Unsupervised learning Training a machine learning model

Machine learning problems are often broken into two categories, supervised and unsupervised problems. Supervised problems are where you give the model examples of something and then expect it to be able to predict that thing later on an unseen image. Unsupervised problems are where you have a bunch of images and you try to figure out which ones are most closely related (not based on anything except what you can see) and then group them without knowing what the final class you are trying to predict actually is.

Supervised Learning

I will now show you a series of shapes and a name for the shape.

“zhags”

These shapes above are called zhags.

“flarks”

These shapes above are called flarks.

Now I will present you with an object and you tell me if it’s a zhag or a flark. There is a hidden rule that categorizes zhags and flarks. Your job is to learn that rule.

?

This is a zhag. If you guessed that, awesome! You learned a successful model.

But maybe now you get an object that doesn’t fit exactly what you thought.

?

This is a flark.

Little did you know, the hidden rule is if the shape has any curve at all it is a flark. This is why sufficient training data is so important to machine learning problems! If this was a missing training data point in an autonomous vehicle this could cost someone their life.

Unsupervised Learning

Say we have a set of images and strictly using the images and no previous knowledge we need to place them on the xy-plane where their distance between each other represents how different they are from one another.

Here are a group of images.

Images from Wikipedia

Now we are meant to place these on the xy-plane. Here’s a possible iteration of this.

So if I now said, group these into two sets you probably would do this one of two ways.
Build a Bot to Communicate With Your Smart Home Over Telegram
By: Fabio Manganiello
Tags: Python, Programming, Telegram, Home Automation, Raspberry Pi

Build a Bot to Communicate With Your Smart Home Over Telegram

The power of Raspberry Pi and Telegram

You’ve got your smart home fully set up. You regularly like to show off with your friends how cool it is to turn on light bulbs, play videos and movies with a hint to your voice assistant, make coffee, and adjust the thermostat with a tap on an app. Congratulations!

But if you’re an automation enthusiast who rarely settles, you’ve probably grown frustrated with the number of apps you’ll have to download and the number of interfaces you’ll have to master to control your gadgets.

You’ll probably have an app for the lights, one for your media center, one for your smart shades, one for your thermostat, and a Google Home app that zealously (and hopelessly) tries to put all of them in the same place.

Probably, most of these apps won’t communicate with the others, and probably many of them won’t work if you aren’t on the same network as your gadget.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could control everything from the same interface, without cluttering our phones or computers with tons of apps, through an interface that is accessible both from mobile and desktop devices as well as through external scripts/integrations, whether you are on your home network or outdoor? An interface that was both lightweight and straightforward to use?

But wait, hasn’t such an interface been around for a while, under the name of messaging or chat? After all, wouldn’t it be cool to control our house, gadgets, and cloud services through the same interface that we use to send cat pictures to our friends, and through a bot completely tailored to our needs, without all the boilerplate/frustration that usually comes with third-party bots?
How we redesigned LCL Mes Comptes on Android
By: Kamal Faraj
Tags: Android, Technology, Android App Development, Mobile Apps, Design

Q1: Theme

The first step was to customize the theme, which is the better way to reflect a product’s brand.

It was released in version 4.7.0.

Colors

We updated the color palette and removed the custom image background to make the app less disturbing and improve user productivity.

To learn how to customize colors, check out Color Theming.

Typography

We replaced Roboto and Fjalla One with Montserrat. Since these fonts have different properties, it was necessary to adjust text sizes so we defined and used standard text styles.

Thanks to AndroidX, we also switched from the legacy Calligraphy to use Fonts in XML.

To learn how to customize typography, check out Typography Theming.

Design System

We started to create a design system with a set of components that will be used during the whole graphic migration.

To collaborate between designers and developers, we used zeroheight to share these components and InVision to share prototypes. It incredibly increased the whole team productivity and happiness.
So I am very proud of myself having accomplished several things today!
By: Kim Smyth
Tags: Productivity, Work Life Balance, 100 Naked Words

My own photo of my new office space

So I am very proud of myself having accomplished several things today!

I managed to switch hosts of my domain all by myself with just some advice from my friend Grayson. I paid for another year of my blog with my own money (from my part-time real job). Found and freed my heater from under my hubby's workbench, so now I’m not freezing to death as I write from my new office space.

My own photo-found my heater!

I have longer to write because I got a reprieve from not just work, but a family obligation.

Now that I’m “cooking with gas,” let’s go!
How to land a career in UX design with zero qualifications
By: Gloria Lo
Tags: Design, Career Change, UX Design, Design Process, Careers

What should I keep in mind?

Focus on developing your skills, not your job title.

Your job will change in the future, so learn to adapt to new and emerging trends in the market. UX design was not a thing when I was at university, so don’t bet that it’s here to stay. The skills that I had acquired from when I was an auditor to digital marketer has led me to where I am now; and has in fact equipped me with the skills to inform what I currently do in my UX role.

Don’t stick to a plan; stick to a goal.

Always have a beacon of light that serves a higher purpose. Your plan today is probably not the same as it was five years ago, nor will it ever be stagnant going forward. So find out what it is that you want to do as a lifelong goal; whether that’s to help other people achieve their goals or to create products for a better future. You might not know what it is now, but your experiences overtime will shape and inform your understanding.

If you don’t like where you are, then do something about it.

There have been too many times where I’ve heard people complain about how they hate their job or how they wish they could quit sooner. In all honesty, I was once in that position too. Understandably, it’s hard to break out of the mentality that “there will never be a better opportunity after this” or that “it’d be pointless to leave now”. It’s okay to feel that way but don’t let it become an unhealthy blocker that stops you from pursuing what you really want to do. Remember, change won’t happen until you do.

Don’t give up! Learning takes time.

You’re not going to achieve everything in one go, so set yourself some goals that can be achieved within a reasonable time frame. If you’re currently unemployed and feeling disheartened, don’t give up! Use this time to invest in yourself and fill in the gaps of what you currently don’t know. Continue to build up your portfolio with new experiences using the Learning Framework and check in with a mentor or a friend to keep you on track. Good luck! :)
Overwhelmed With Expectations
By: Pretheesh Presannan
Tags: Expectations, Mental Health, Poetry, Spiritual Secrets, Anxiety

expectation poisons

my vitality

be it positive or negative;

all I get is the pain of

excitement or nervousness

expectations

be it good or bad;

blocks my vision

and keeps me dulled

expectation prevents me

from being wholehearted

and keeps me stuck

in double-mindedness

negative expectations

sucks up all my energy

in order to prevent

any negative outcomes

positive expectations

drives me crazy

with the impatient itching

towards the positive outcome

and there is no way

I could stop it

by an act of will — an act of foolishness

so I might as well

stop expecting expectations

to go away for a moment

and who knows

perhaps they are expecting

my attention to show me

a surprising insight within

after all there

is no space for surprises

in a life of expectations
Fight for Your Destiny
By: Joseph Brown
Tags: Destiny, Ambition, Motivation, Poetry, Sonnet

Fight for Your Destiny

A Sonnet to Inspire your Ambition

Photo by Juan Jose on Unsplash.

Say it with me: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

Now don’t think, just dive in and try your best.

I know, the water’s cold, the unknown’s scary,

But nothing great ever came from being wary.

You must strive and fight to clear your path,

No backward steps, pin your courage to the mast.

Then shout to Heaven to bless your voyage,

And strut bold feet on this Earthly stage.

Live not in fear and expectation of regret,

If you want the life that you truly deserve,

You can not leave opportunities unmet,

You must overcome that humble reserve.

But remember the rocks and respect the wave,

Much is lost, when reckless takes over from brave.

Photo by isaac sloman on Unsplash.

If you enjoyed this, you may also like:
The Secret of the React Render Function
By: Nguyễn Quyết
Tags: Reactjs, React Performance, Programming, Rendering, React

The Standard React Component Will Call the Render Function Every Time Its Parents Re-Render

Let’s have a look at this simple example. This is a simple counter app. Whenever the user clicks the “Up” button, the counter will increase by one and the app component gets re-rendered.

So the question is: “Does the child component get re-rendered too?”

See, it has logged child component re-render five times when we clicked the Up button five times and the counter increased to five.

So, does that mean the child component got re-rendered?

No, it’s not re-rendered. It’s only called the render function and hasn’t actually re-rendered. So, we need to distinguish between “re-render” and “called function render”. (In this case, the child component is a functional component so the render function is itself.)

The normal component will call the render function when its parent gets re-rendered. In this case, the app component got re-rendered because its state changed when we clicked the Up button, so it’s led to the child component calling the render function.

What React does under the hood when the render function gets called, is that it’ll recalculate the virtual DOM of that component and will compare that with the previous virtual DOM.

If it’s different, React will actually re-render the real DOM in our browser. If not, nothing on our browser changed. This is the main reason why React is fast.

I will show you how to test if the real DOM is updated or not.

1. Enable the Rendering tab in the Chrome console

2. Run your app and observe

Every DOM node getting re-rendered will flash in a green background color like this:

As you can see, on first load, the whole DOM got re-rendered, so the background green area shows on the whole page.

But, when we click the Up button, even the console log shows five times, but the child component (Hello text) is not re-rendered.
Ladies, Don’t Let Religion Stop You From Dating People You Like!
By: Oren Cohen
Tags: Self-awareness, Religion, Relationships, Life Lessons, Judaism

Ladies, Don’t Let Religion Stop You From Dating People You Like!

Why so many ladies back-pedal when they hear I’m religious?

“Hey Oren, I decided to be brave and send you a message when I saw your post.”

That message appeared in my message requests on Facebook today. I published I’m looking for my other half in a group on Facebook where they allow dating threads every Friday.

I answered the message, and we started chatting. Then the woman wrote the following:

“Yeah, I realized you’re religious right after I sent the message…”

This encounter is not the first time religion seems to stand between attractive girls and me. I’m Jewish and Orthodox, and I guess some women don’t like the idea of keeping Shabbat. I wrote about the many benefits of keeping Shabbat non-religiously before.

Also, I live in Tel Aviv, Israel. It’s not like I’m dating somewhere where Jewish people are scarce. This country is a Jewish country! Where else am I supposed to look?

What’s funny to me is that some women saw my picture and sent a message without reading much of the text. I wrote I’m religious in the second line of the post.

Last night I also talked with another woman who then said that my being religious doesn’t work for her.

Earlier this week, I took a woman to dinner where she talked about how her brother is getting married on November to a religious woman, and he started putting on a Kipa and keeping Shabbat because of her.

By the way, some people keep religious tenets without putting on a Kipa. Some may even be more religious than I am — and I do wear a Kipa.

When I told her I do it too, she said she is not like her brother. Their family is traditionally religious meaning they are not keeping Shabbat or holiday but do eat Kosher and do some of the religious tenets.

We ended the date with a question mark. Both she and I had to decide if we want to give this a chance.

The next morning I decided we could try and see what happens. The long-curly-haired young woman decided religion was a deal-breaker for her.

I don’t know what makes so many women reject the idea of a religious man. Here are three points I want to make that will help you deal with the idea of a religious man in your lives.
Synchronous and Asynchronous Servers With Python.
By: Ohad Gazit
Tags: Python, Multiprocessing, Asynchronous, Client Server, Async

In this article will go through two types of server-client codes.

One is over synchronous (multi process package) and the other is asynchronous (asyncore package), they do almost the same thing, the asynchronous one is more robust, and data does not get lost.

Try it out on your machine, play with settings a bit and see the synchronous server limits and data loss.
3 to read: ‘Deep fakes’ are coming | 2d & 3d subscriptions? | Behind the curtain: FB’s big fail
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: 3 To Read, Journalism, Matt Carroll, Media, Media Criticism

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Nov. 17, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

You thought fake news was bad? Deep fakes are where truth goes to die: Fake news is about to get a lot faker. Improving technology means it is getting more and more difficult to tell doctored videos from real life. Heck, even badly edited fake videos are taken for the truth — what happens when people can’t tell the difference? A chilling look a the future of fake news by Oscar Schwartz for The Guardian. Extra: World’s first AI TV news anchor unveiled in China.

How many people will pay for 2d or 3d news #subscription?: Quartz and New York mag just put up paywalls, joining a lengthening list of high-profile, quality news pubs that have done so, such as the NYT and WaPo. But how many people can afford to pay for two, three or more news sites?, asks Joshua Benton of NielamnLab. He’s pessimistic, citing research that says only 16% of Americans will pay for any news. (Myself, I’m more optimistic. As more paywalls go up, people will of necessity read fewer sites. But from the perspective of the newsrooms, they don’t care, as long as they have enough paying customers. We’ll see how it plays out.)

Delay, deny & deflect blame at others — How Facebook’s leaders handled crisis: This story will only reinforce your worst fears, if you’ve had doubts about Facebook’s ability to come up with a successful solution in the wake of the Russian election scandal and the company’s unscrupulous handling of data from millions of users. FB’s top leaders were slow to realize they had a problem, slow to realize the breadth and depth of the issues, including the anger of the public, and seemed mostly interested in wallpapering over concerns. The NYT story paints a picture of a dysfunctional platform. Not pretty, but a great read.
The Power of Functions Returning Other Functions in JavaScript
Tags: JavaScript, Web Development, React, Nodejs, Programming

The Power of Functions Returning Other Functions in JavaScript

Functions and composability

Photo by Shahadat Rahman on Unsplash

JavaScript is widely known for being extremely flexible by its nature. This article will show some examples of taking advantage of this by working with functions.

Since functions can be passed around anywhere, we can pass them into the arguments of functions.

My first hands-on experience with anything having to do with programming in general was getting started with writing code in JavaScript, and one concept in practice that was confusing to me was passing functions into other functions. I tried to do some of the advanced stuff all the pros were doing, but I kept ending up with something like this:

This was absolutely ridiculous and even made it more difficult to understand why we’d even pass functions into other functions in the real world, when we could’ve just done this and gotten the same behavior back:

const date = new Date()

console.log(`Todays date: ${date}`)

But why isn’t this good enough for more complex situations? What’s the point of creating a custom getDate(callback) function and having to do extra work, besides feeling cool?

I then proceeded to ask more questions about these use cases and asked to be given an example of a good use on a community board, but no one wanted to explain and give an example.

Thinking back, I realize the problem was my mind didn’t know how to think programmatically yet. It takes a while to get your mind to shift from your original life to programming in a computer language.

Since I understand the frustrations of trying to understand when higher-order functions are useful in JavaScript, I decided to write this article to explain, step by step, a good use case, starting with a very basic function that anyone can write. We’ll work our way up from there into a complex implementation that provides additional benefits.
The Switch
By: Lori Lamothe
Tags: Books, Fiction, Feminism, Love, Aging

The Switch

You can trade your life

Photo by Liv Cashman on Unsplash

After reading several psychological thrillers back to back, I wanted a break from murder, mayhem and madness. Beth O’Leary’s The Switch was exactly what I was looking for. It’s a fast, fun read about two women who decide to trade lives a la The Holiday.

What makes the book different is that one of the women is 79 years old. Eileen Cotton resides in a Yorkshire village and she’s got a problem — she’s lonely and a bit bored. Her husband has run off with his dance teacher and she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone. But the local pickings in the over seventy set are slim, to say the least.

Enter her granddaughter, Leena. Her problem is quite different. She’s a workaholic whose boss has just forced her to take a two-month sabbatical. On the surface, Leena’s got the perfect life.

Gorgeous boyfriend, cool flatmates, great job — and have I mentioned she’s just been given two months paid leave? But free time is not something Leena wants. At all. She hasn’t recovered from her sister’s death and she’s not on great terms with her mother, who seems to have fallen apart.

Leena and Eileen soon decide to try an experiment. Eileen will spend eight weeks in Leena’s London flat and Leena will house-sit for her grandmother. London has got to have more men — and more excitement-than Hamleigh. And Hamleigh will surely be more restful than the city.

So it begins.

Forget tea

Eileen was by far my favorite part of The Switch. I loved that O’Leary chose to feature an elderly woman as one of the main characters in this story and that she is portrayed as a real person, not some sedate matriarch whose primary function is to advise the heroine over tea.

Eileen is her own heroine and she’s interested in the same things we all are: love, sex, adventure, family, community, and friendship. By placing Eileen in this central role, O’Leary also introduces many older characters into the story, who all have their own struggles and desires. I can’t remember the last time I’ve read a book that does this.

I also liked Leena, whose attempts to adapt to country life made me smile. And I thought her struggle to overcome the pain her sister’s death caused was well done, for the most part.

Where the novel fell short for me was the flatness/predictability of the romances, in part because the split narrative made it difficult for either of them to grab my attention. On the flip side, the ending of the book was a little too much for me.

Neither of these issues was a deal breaker, though. I was looking for something upbeat and The Switch delivered. It’s a nice winter read, especially in the time of social distancing.

Much thanks to Macmillan and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

If you liked this review, you might like these suggestions as well:

Lori Lamothe’s book reviews have appeared in Mostly Fiction, Curled up with a Good Book, Daily Must Books, The Chick Lit Review and elsewhere.
VC: Visualization with Trees and Graphs
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Graph, Trees, Visualization

Graph

Do you like graphs? I really like it because it looks like a real-world for me. Didn’t you? I hope you feel the same thing. Graphs can be anything, it can be protein, human, animal, molecule, machine, and anything you can imagine. In this post, we will learn some techniques based on graphs to visualize the data.

Force-directed Graph Layouts

The goal of this technique is to place groups of strongly connected nodes close to each other, preserve the minimum distance between nodes. How can we achieve this, we will take the idea from nature. The idea is to model the graph as a spring system. Edges are modeled as springs and we need to avoid the overlaps between nodes, we model nodes to electrically repel each other. The final positions are selected by simulating the resulting forces, finding equilibrium between spring force and electrical force.

Let’s define both forces:

Spring force

The Spring force is calculated for the connected nodes. pj-pi is the vector from ni to nj. We normalize this vector and s is the natural spring length, the normal length when there are no external forces. k is the tension of the spring.

Electrical Repulsion

Electrical repulsion is calculated for every node. It is defined by the above equation. r is repulsion strength.

General Algorithm

The idea is to find out the equilibrium point where the distances of the nodes make the forces zero.

Initialize randomly the position of nodes or through a heuristic Iterate:

Sum all attractive and repulsive forces => Multiply overall force by stepsize (people call it temperature, you can think learning rate in deep learning) => Impose a maximum displacement=> move nodes => Adjust temperature(this step can be skipped)

Do this till the forces are going to zero.

Quenching and Simmering
Lazy Loading Images Made Easy in JavaScript
By: Adrien Miquel
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Nodejs, React, JavaScript

PERFORMANCE

Lazy Loading Images Made Easy in JavaScript

Improve image loading in Angular, React, or Vue.js apps with 3 lines of code

Photo by Thong Vo on Unsplash

When building a web application, we are always looking for the best performance in order not to impact user experience.

Among all the techniques to improve web performance of a website, lazy loading of images allows us to defer image retrieval. Indeed, according to the dimensions, the compression, and the quality of the images, it may impact the size of the bundle downloaded by the user’s device. Therefore, deferring these downloads offers several advantages:

Bundle size reduced

User experience improved (bundle is ready more quickly)

Controlled data consumption (only the visible images are downloaded)

In this article, I will introduce an HTML attribute to lazy load images. To go further, I will show how to use this attribute in a wider application with the three main JavaScript frameworks: Angular, React, and Vue.js
by Martino Pietropoli
By: Martino Pietropoli
Tags: Tuesday, Comics, Psychology, Drawing, Cartoon

First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.

Follow
Why Logarithms Are So Important In Machine Learning
By: Fatos Morina
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Programming

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

If you are living on the 10th floor of a building, are you going to take the stairs or use the elevator?

The goal in both cases is the same: You want to go back to your apartment after a long day at work.

Of course, taking the stairs is better if you are a busy person who doesn’t have time to go to the gym and wants to use the stairs as a simplified version of the cardio exercises. But, aside from that, you are more likely to take the elevator.

Let’s take another example.

Let’s say that you are trying to go to your workplace. It takes you 10 minutes by car when there are no traffic jams and 50 minutes walking.

You can choose to either drive or walk. You are still going to reach the same destination, but you want to save time. You go to work every workday and not just once in your lifetime. As a result, you may need to decide about this on a regular basis.

You want to be able to go to your work faster so that you can have more time in your day to stay with your family and friends. You want to start that side project. Read the book that you bought at the local book store. Watch the lectures that you always wanted.

Instead of spending so much of your time to go to the same destination, you want to take a car or a bus that helps you get there. This way, you have more time to do other things.

Examples of the benefits of using the logarithm

Using logarithm is the same: You need to find the parameters that minimize the loss function, which is one of the main problems that you try to solve in Machine Learning.

Let’s say that your function seems like the following:

If we find its first derivative, we will have the following expression in the end:
3 Reasons why Google Data Studio’s “Extract Data” Feature is a Game Changer
By: Patrick Strickler
Tags: Google Analytics, Analytics, Google, Data, Data Visualization

The Google Marketing Platform team quietly made a huge update to Google Data Studio over the past week. Analysts now have the ability to choose “Extract Data” directly from the data source selection screen. Previously, this feature was part of the new Data Blending features that Google rolled out over the summer, but now as a stand-alone feature, Data Studio’s potential as a go-to analytics tool has increased immensely. Here are the 3 reasons why this is such a monumental update:

1. Faster Load Times and Report Refreshes

It’s no secret that Data Studio can be quite slow at times, especially when you are trying to connect massive data sets together. Instead of connecting to your entire data set, you can select a small extract that will be faster to update and load in the interface for your end users.

Instead of connecting to your entire data set, you can select a small extract that will be faster to update

2. Row-Level Metric Calculations for Google Analytics Reports

This was my biggest pain-point when trying to do any advanced Google Analytics reporting in Data Studio. Typically, your most granular GA data is stored in Event tables, but the out-of-the-box GA connector does not allow you to do row-level metric calculations because metrics are auto-aggregated. For example, the following function to get a metric for just ‘button clicks’ would not work in the past, but now it does:

CASE

WHEN Event Category='button clicks'

THEN Total Events

ELSE 0

END

3. Better Data Management

The Extract Data feature also allows you to easily exclude entire sections of your original data set. If you had sensitive customer data that you didn’t want anywhere near your final report, you can choose to exclude that information in your extract. Pretty neat.

What’s Next?

I can only imagine what the next interaction of this feature will bring, but I hope it involves an even more robust version of Data Blending — similar to Tableau Prep and Power BI Query Editor.
Cat Food and Crackers
By: Denise Garratt
Tags: Humor, Mental Health, Pets And Animals, Family, TV Shows

Cat Food and Crackers

Getting Through Life With a Little Humor

Photo by Ramiz Dedaković on Unsplash

After Grandma died, Aunt Sarah sank into a deep depression and hardly ever left her bedroom. That meant Uncle Joe, and I cooked or reheated leftovers.

I listened to a lot of music and watched TV that made me laugh. Chico and The Man, Good Times, Welcome Back Kotter, and What’s Happening!! Were a few favorites that got me through the sadness at home.

Uncle Joe still dropped me off and picked me up at school every day. He’d bring the Detroit News or Free Press and read until I came out and jumped into the big blue station wagon.

“You want to stop at the store on the way home?” He asked.

“Sure, I said.”

Uncle Joe never shopped without a list. Between his grocery list and Aunt Sarah’s, shopping was an Olympic event.

“Where are we going?”

“Felice’s — my prescriptions are ready.”

We shopped at the stores with the best deals for what we needed or that doubled coupons. By the time we finished, our cart was overflowing.

Uncle Joe must have sensed Aunt Sarah was in a cycle of staying upstairs because he stocked up on TV dinners. I could gag them down when I needed to. He always bought a couple of the turkey dinners for me — the only ones I could stomach. If you put enough cranberries on the turkey to give it taste and cover up the texture and saved the cobbler until the end, it was edible.

We started shopping mostly at Felice’s because they had a pharmacy and his medication was a little less expensive. Still, he complained the food prices were higher. “So, what are you gonna do?” He liked to say.

Sometimes, we ran out of cat food before our next big shopping trip. If Uncle Joe was in a good mood, he’d also buy a box of Hi-Ho crackers.

When It was our turn at the check-out line, he’d put down several cans of cat food and the box of crackers. With a perfectly straight face, he looked at the cashier, Shrugged his shoulders, and said: “This isn’t so bad when you put it on crackers.”

He kept a straight face until we were out of the store. It took everything in me not to laugh as soon as he put down the crackers. The incredulous look on the cashier’s face was worth every second I had to keep my poker face.

It was a small thing, but it was always so good to laugh at something. Thankfully, no one ever called Child Protective Services about us.

Even now, I read or watch something funny to keep me from going too far into the darkness. I love people who have a great sense of humor and can also engage in deep, meaningful conversation. We could all use a little of that, I’m sure.
6 (more) tips to quickly improve your UIs
By: Marc Andrew
Tags: UI Design, UI, Visual Design, Design, Product Design

Creating beautiful, usable, and efficient UIs takes time, with many design revisions along the way.

Making those constant tweaks to produce something that your clients, users, and yourself are truly happy with. I know. I’ve been there many times before myself.

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

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

Let’s dive on in…
A Daughter’s Wisdom
By: Terry Barr
Tags: Family, Writing Prompts, Nonfiction, Dialogue, Pentina

“You shouldn’t blame them. It was all my fault. I knew what I was doing when I got in the car with them.”

“And you knew your mother was gone, and this was all up to me? Do you just hate me or something?”

“Anyway, I knew you’d find me.”
December 2020 Deals Recap
By: Matt Snow
Tags: Technology, Fundraising, Startup, New England, Venture Capital

As we approach the winter holidays we have a final monthly deals recap market map for you. With a new year, and a light at the end of the tunnel (vaccine rollouts), we are looking forward to a better, brighter, and healthier 2021. Things are looking bright for New England, as capital floods into biotech, deeptech, and just about all tech in the region. Again, we’re thankful for all you founders and investors continuing to move forward with your plans to make the world a better place! Now, onto the deals. [NOTE: Round info per Crunchbase reporting]
Living in Austin, Texas; Part 1— Housing Trends with Time Series Analysis
By: Vincent Musgrove
Tags: Data Science, Housing, Time Series Analysis, Austin, Exploratory Data Analysis

Downtown Austin, Texas

Anyone who has lived in Austin for more than a couple years can tell you that the real estate and rental markets here are, as we say, ¡muy caliente! (if you don’t speak Texas Spanish, that means, “really dang hot!”).

Just how hot are the Austin housing and rental markets though? And perhaps more importantly, do they show any signs of cooling off in the near or intermediate future? Having good and empirically grounded answers to these and other questions can be highly valuable for an individual participant in the housing or rental markets — it can mean the difference between getting into or out of the residential real estate market at the wrong time, or seriously overpaying for rent at an apartment with more competitive options at other proximate geographic locations.

In Part 1 of this Two Part post, I will discuss the past and current trends in the Austin residential real estate and rental markets, and perform some analysis on the available time series data to gain insights that may help a prospective buyer/seller/renter make a more highly informed decision about their plans on when and where to buy/sell/rent.

Part 2 then focuses on constructing a rent pricing model using location-based hedonic regression, which may be used to find an optimal apartment, given an individual person’s location, price, and hedonic preferences/constraints, for example.

Data Sources

To perform the analysis, I used to main sources of data: Zillow Public Economic Data (Parts 1 and 2), and results pulled from Apartment.com Listings (Part 2).

Specifically, the Zillow Data used includes:

the median home value ($) per square foot (ft²) for each US zip code from Apr. 1996 to Jul. 2019 (Zip_MedianValuePerSqft_AllHomes.csv); and

the median rent list price for 1-bedroom apartments for each US zip code from Sept. 2010 to Jul. 2019 (Zip_MedianRentalPrice_1Bedroom.csv).

Reading the Data into Python using Pandas

Lets start with reading in the median home $/ft² data at a DataFrame object using the Pandas Python library:

import numpy as np

import pandas as pd df=pd.read_csv("Zip_MedianValuePerSqft_AllHomes.csv",encoding='latin-1')

df.head()

The last line of code produces the following output:
One thing to do before signing off for the holiday
By: Cari Nazeer
Tags: Vacation, Self, Productivity, Advice, Work

✅ Today’s tip: Ease your return to work by writing your to-do list now for the first day back.

The first workday after a long holiday weekend is like a regular Monday turned all the way up to 11: You’re grumpy, you’re moving slowly, and it takes all the energy you have just to shock your vacation-sleepy brain back into work mode. It’s no wonder that, as Emily Underwood explains, post-vacation burnout is a very real phenomenon.

To lessen the re-entry pain, take some of the mental burden away from your future self: “Write a detailed, not-too-ambitious to-do list for your first day or two back,” Underwood writes. That way, when the time comes, you can just follow the steps you’ve already outlined — no need to think too hard.
7 Historical Facts That Sound Too Fake to Believe
By: Hossein Raspberry
Tags: Politics, Short Story, Culture, Science, History

Joan Pujol Garcia was a Spanish spy working as a double agent for both the British and Nazis. He first contacted the British and the American intelligence services for work, but he was denied.

After the rejection, he decided to set up a fake identity so that he could approach the Nazis. Soon thereafter, Garcia was accepted to work for Nazis, and just a little while after that, he was also hired as a double agent for the Allies.

According to the British Security Service MI5 Garcia brought the Nazis powerful information that was useless because it always purposefully arrived a little too late. However, as the results of his “hard” work for the Nazis, he was awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans. For his great service as a spy, he also received the Most Excellent Order by the British Empire.
Case Study: 4 Instagram Posts that Got Me 1,000+ Followers Each
By: Sebastian Juhola
Tags: Instagram, Growth, Social Media, Marketing, Growth Hacking

Case Study: 4 Instagram Posts that Got Me 1,000+ Followers Each

And 4 things each post have in common

Photo by Tim Gouw from Pexels

I get most of my followers through posts that reach an audience beyond my own. The usual number is in the hundreds per post, but occasionally, I manage to get everything right with the post and gain over 1,000 new followers.

There are four things to master: the photo, the caption, the commentability, and the right hashtags. Get these right, and you’ll get in front of new people. If your profile is in order, that will result in a wave of new followers every time you post.

Let’s look at the four posts — which I’ve included stats for — and the four things to master so that you can all accelerate the growth of your accounts.
HOW DATA ANALYTICS IS TRANSFORMING BUSINESS?
By: Ricardo Lourenço
Tags: Data Science, Data Analysis, Transformation, Business, Future

Data Analytics and Statistics are rapidly changing the way people used to run their business in the past. For data analytics not just helps drive performance for your business, but also gives you a competitive edge in your industry. Embracing data analytics in your business model helps create new opportunities for your business by increasing customer flow and other revenue streams. In fact, data analytics is something that gives you a chance to reinvent each and every aspect of your business altogether.

Here are some of the main industries that are using data analytics and statistics to transform their entire business model and drive growth at an enormous scale:

Retail — Data analytics has helped the retail industry to a great extent by predicting trends and demands along with optimizing costs and selling strategies for the best possible results. This is why companies and brands that have integrated a data-driven strategy for the buying and selling of their products and services have an edge over their competitors.

Healthcare — Data analytics and statistics has also made a huge impact on the health sector, by transforming the way diseases are identified and treated. This is something that has not only helped in saving more lives, but also made the treatments less expensive and more accessible to patients.

Finance — When it comes to financial services like banking and insurance, data analytics and statistics play a really crucial role in detecting fraudulent transactions and setting fairer policies in the future. In this way, data analytics and statistics are helping in the expansion of financial services by restricting any kinds of fraudulent activities that come their way.

Hospitality — Hospitality is another industry that has a lot to benefit from data analytics. More and more businesses in the hospitality industry are turning to data-driven solutions to understand customer needs to ensure the best in class service all throughout the year.

Looking at all these industries that are using a data-driven approach in their business framework, it is quite clear that data analytics is an asset to every business. Data analytics gives your business a more personalized and effective approach, targeting customers when and where they need your services. So, if you want your company to become a leading name in your field, then it is high time that you integrate a clear data analytics strategy in your overall business model.

At Quark Analytics, we are committed to help you with a fast and easy data analytics platform to get the best results for your business. We offer a secure environment to perform data analysis and get the most useful insights on your data. So what are you waiting for? Give your business a competitive edge by realizing the value of data analytics and optimizing your data to the fullest with the help of our services at Quark Analytics.

Get in touch with us to know more about our services, and we will be right there for you with the best solutions!

Originally published at www.quarkanalytics.com.
The Depero Bolted Book — a facsimile
Tags: Futurism, Design

The Depero Bolted Book - a facsimile

It's been way too long since I had something to post about, so when this arrived this week I was doubly happy. Some…
I Feel Like I’m Performing My Life
By: Judith Valentijn
Tags: Self, Mental Health, Derealization, Depersonalization, Life

Because I am not sure how to be great at being a human — humaning, I listen to people who say things with certainty.

“You need a morning routine,” they say with the greatest conviction, “because without it, you are lost.”

Not wanting to be lost, I perform scripted morning routines and pretend they are helpful until I can’t be bothered anymore.

“You need to write morning pages, first thing you wake up.” So I do. “You need to do yoga.” “Take at least 10,000 steps a day.” “Eat plant-based.” “Meditate.” “Do breathing exercises. Download this app. Buy that gadget. Read more books. Watch this documentary. Do everything Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk say. Don’t listen to gurus, except for Thích Nhât Hạnh and the Buddha.”

And so I do. I do all the things the professional humans acing at life tell me to do. Every day I check boxes and leave other boxes empty. Is that what a good human makes? Checking boxes until we die?
Are These Fears Your True Feelings?
By: Bingz Huang
Tags: Energy, Life, Mental Health, Advice, Life Lessons

Keep returning to your natural state of Joy

If your mind is fabricating these fears, then you can observe and let them unfold without needing to chase them away.

If these are your real emotions, then allow them to move through you. Let it go where it needs to go, let it move through the layers of your emotional onion if you need to. There’s no need to add more thinking to the feeling.

Either way, you will still return to your natural state of Joy!

The more you return to feeling and expressing this Joy, the easier it is for you to feel right about being joyful. Keep wondering about feeling joyful for no reason.

You don’t have to justify to anyone why you feel joyful. Allow yourself to get used to feeling joy, even if you are not perfect and that your life is filled with problems you can’t solve yet. Allow that Joy to bubble naturally from your honest, true self.

I hope this is helpful to you.
5 Years of React Native: Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started
By: Stanislav Sopov
Tags: React Native, Android, Programming, iOS, React

5 Years of React Native: Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started

TL;DR: React Native is great and I intend to keep using it. However, terms and conditions apply

When I started with React Native back in 2016, I was quite skeptical. Frameworks such as PhoneGap and Cordova had already existed for a while, yet nobody seemed to take hybrid development seriously. Everything felt like a workaround and native expertise was constantly required to do anything beyond the basics.

It took a few projects — some successful and some less so — to fully take in the advantages, caveats, and pitfalls of React Native. In this article, I will summarise these experiences and how they reflect on hybrid app development in general.

To make it more objective, I will use these system quality attributes as guiding principles: