fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
How can we make Bright Now better?
By: Johns Hopkins Center For Talented Youth
Tags: Gifted And Talented, Surveys, Gifted

We want to hear from you, Bright Now readers!

We’re always working to improve Bright Now for our readers, and your feedback will help us decide what changes and enhancements we should focus on during the coming year.

So tell us what you think! This short reader survey only takes a few minutes to complete, and your input will help make Bright Now even better.
One-Lined Poem Chain: Friendship
By: Tre L. Loadholt
Tags: Friendship, Life, Collaboration, One Line, A Cornered Gurl

A challenge — to one-line a theme as a form of community building and with words cloaked in venom, stinging to the touch, you answered like it was your calling.

You asked and I replied, but the answer was more than the sum of two parts.

Timers set, brevity brought forth from a mind eager to send others swirling, like clockwork, you appeared.

I got hungry for the extra, the challenge that was natural because you offered it without expectation.

Fast forward to homemade soup, fussy dogs, Jernee taking over your home, and families becoming one.

Solitary lines wrote trust all over our days, and our words became easy paragraphs filling spaces that existed just for us.

Never is there a day where laughter doesn’t search my soul for residence at the sharing of your own.

We learned the people in each other’s lives, the solace and fulfillment in a beautiful meal, the pecking inconsequences of every trifling day, the stretch and fold of care nurtured by time, the tectonic groan of our buried truths,

from one line, asked and answered.
Should you worry about bad reviews?
By: Pennink Productions
Tags: Protect Your Business, Digital Marketing, Endorsements, Business

No business owner likes to receive a negative review — no matter how much we might regard business matters as being different to personal ones. The truth is that business is personal, and if you see criticism of your business online, it’ll probably always feel like a kick in the teeth.

Well, actually, that’s not necessarily completely true.

The truth is that it’s possible to adopt a rather more positive attitude to online reviews, or at least soften some of the anger that you feel about them.

How? Here are some of the things about bad reviews that should make you feel thankful.

They’re a free source of feedback

Forget all of those email surveys and user experience tests — sometimes, attracting useful customer feedback can be as simple as claiming your business profile on a reviews platform such as Google My Business or Yelp, and then just watching the reviews roll in.

After all, the customers who do provide negative feedback in the form of an online review are those that genuinely care about your business. They were motivated enough to leave a review in the first place, so their concerns are likely to be very real.

So, take the time to read carefully and use those concerns to improve your business offerings.

A bad review is better than no reviews at all

Not only can you learn something from a bad review, but so will prospective customers reading that review — and what they learn won’t necessarily be all bad.

The presence of a few bad reviews helps to give your business’ overall review profile a sense of legitimacy — we’re sure that more than a few times in the past, you’ve wondered whether a given company or product with nothing except gleaming five-star ratings was actually for real.

Past studies have actually indicated that people trust and use businesses with one-star reviews more than those with no reviews at all.

Plus, a bad review presents you with a great opportunity to show off your customer service by directly responding to the disgruntled customer. Who knows — they may even respond in turn by changing their previous negative review to a positive one.

So, about that snotty review…

In truth, for all of the gloom that a bad review may bring to your day as soon as you see one, it can also be great for your business — if you want it to be.

The effective management of online review profiles is just one more part of the most effective Internet marketing for SMEs.

When you get in touch with our team here at PENNInk Productions, you can manage your own company’s online image more effectively — however many good or bad reviews you may receive.
RL Course by David Silver (Lectures 5 to 7)
By: Cédric Bellet
Tags: Biffures, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning

RL Course by David Silver (Lectures 5 to 7)

This is day 45 of my 60-day reinforcement learning challenge, and we continue the series of lectures by Deepmind’s David Silver.

The lectures draw from and complement Sutton and Barto’s book, Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which is available for free on Rich Sutton’s site, http://incompleteideas.net/.
The Public & Unsolved Murder of Elizabeth Barraza
Tags: True Crime, Unsolved Murder, Unsolved Mysteries, Crime, Texas

Photo by Maximillian Conacher on Unsplash

A Tomball, Texas, woman’s murder was caught on camera outside her home, but her murderer has not been brought to justice.

The Shooting

Elizabeth Barraza (29) and her husband, Sergio Barraza, were huge fans of the Star Wars franchise. In fact, they often dressed up in costumes to visit children staying at the hospital.

On January 25, 2019, Elizabeth and Sergio placed signs advertising their yard sale around their neighborhood. They planned to use the money from the sale to celebrate their fifth anniversary in Orlando two days later. Their bags were already packed.

At 6:48 a.m., Sergio left for work. Within four minutes, Elizabeth was shot.

At 6:52 a.m., a vehicle pulled up to her home. Somebody got out and walked toward Elizabeth. Within eight seconds, the shooter fired three times. Elizabeth fell to the ground, and the suspect stepped over her body to fire one more shot.

How do we know this? Investigators were able to compile footage from neighbors and nearby businesses.

The entire shooting occurred very quickly, and it appeared to be planned. Michael Ritchie, a Harris County homicide investigator said, “It was very quick, it was very calculated, very cold-blooded of how it was done.” Ritchie suspects more than one person could be involved.

What Do We Know?

There are a few things we do know about Elizabeth’s murder. First, the vehicle in the video has been identified as a dark-colored Nissan Frontier 4x4. The truck was apparently seen in the neighborhood the night before the murder and then later after Elizabeth was shot.

Also notable is the fact that Elizabeth and Sergio had not posted their yard sale on social media. They told friends, co-workers, and family members about the sale, however. Sergio has since sold the home the couple shared.

We also know that investigators are not considering robbery as the motive. Nothing was apparently taken from the scene.

The murderer could be a man or a woman, but many suspect the figure dressed in the robe was a woman with long hair (or a wig).

Case Updates

In January 2020, a warrant was issued in the case. Ritchie hinted that it could bring forth new information about a suspect in the case. Some Internet sleuths speculate that this warrant is linked to a cell phone tower.

Of Elizabeth’s murder, her father Bob Nuelle said, “We know it’s not random. So the family waits, and when we learn who did it, we may learn why, but the why will never make sense.”

This case is similar to the case of Missy Bevers in that both cases have video footage of the assailant, but there is still not enough information to solve the case. Yet.

A reward of $20,000 is available for anybody who can help identify a suspect in this case thanks to a donation from Peter Mayhew’s foundation. Call Crime Stoppers of Houston at (713) 222-TIPS if you have information about Elizabeth Barraza’s case.

Sources:
Crossing the Streams With Azure Event Hubs and Stream Analytics
By: Abhishek Gupta
Tags: Stream Processing, Azure, Azure Event Hub, Messaging, Cloud

Overview

Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time analytics and complex event-processing engine designed to analyze and process high volumes of fast-streaming data from multiple sources simultaneously. It supports the notion of a Job , each of which consists of an input , query , and an output . Azure Stream Analytics can ingest data from Azure Event Hubs (including Azure Event Hubs from Apache Kafka), Azure IoT Hub, or Azure Blob Storage. The query , which is based on SQL query language, can be used to easily filter, sort, aggregate, and join streaming data over a period of time.

Assume you have an application that accepts processed orders from customers and sends them to Azure Event Hubs. The requirement is to process the “raw” orders data and enrich it with additional customer info such as name, email, location etc. To get this done, you can build a downstream service that will consume these orders from Event Hubs and process them. In this example, this service happens to be an Azure Stream Analytics job (which we’ll explore later of course!)

high level architecture

In order to build this app, we would need to fetch this customer data from an external system (for example, a database) and for each customer ID in the order info, we would query this for the customer details. This will suffice for systems with low-velocity data or where end-to-end processing latency isn’t a concern. But it will pose a challenge for real-time processing on high-velocity streaming data.

Of course, this is not a novel problem! The purpose of this blog post is to showcase how you can use Azure Stream Analytics to implement a solution. Here are the individual components:

1. Input data source

Azure Stream Analytics jobs connect to one or more data inputs. Each input defines a connection to an existing data source — in this case, its Azure Event Hubs.

An individual order is a JSON payload that looks like this:

{ "id": "42", "custid": "4", "amount": "100" }

2. Reference data

Customer information is provided as reference data. Although, the customer information is likely to change (e.g., if the customer changes her phone number), for the purposes of this example, we’ll treat it is static reference data stored in Azure Blob Storage container.

3. Query

This is the workhorse of our solution! It joins (a continuous stream of) orders data from Azure Event Hubs with the static reference customers data based on the matching customer ID (which is id in the customers data set and id in the orders stream)

4. Output sink

Simply put, an Output lets you store and save the results of the Stream Analytics job. In this example, to keep things simple we continue to use Azure Event Hubs (a different topic) as the output.

Now that you have a conceptual overview, it’s time to dive in. All you need is an Azure account. If you don’t have it already, just grab one for free.
CARTOON: Immortal
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Humor, Life, Comics, Cartoon, Food

Cartoonist’s Note №1

After 25 coffees, I’m not sure if I just feel divine — or really am.

Cartoonist’s Note №2

Like this cartoon? You can now buy the print (or get it on a coffee mug, t-shirt, etc).

About the Artist

Rolli is the author of four books for adults and children, including The Sea-Wave and Kabungo. His cartoons and illustrations have appeared in Reader’s Digest, The Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Evening Post and other top venues. Visit Rolli’s website, follow him on Twitter, and subscribe to his new one-man Medium magazine, Rolli.

HELP!

Medium’s unexpected new change in the way it compensates members of its Partner Program rewards creators of long, padded articles, and essentially demonetizes shorter content. As nearly all of my posts are poetry, cartoons, or efficient fiction/essays, I’m faring very poorly under this new system. Since the change was implemented, my Partner Program earnings have plummeted by 90%, and hundreds of others are in the boat. If you want to help, send an email to Medium CEO Ev Williams (ev@medium.com) and/or to yourfriends@medium.com expressing your displeasure with the changes. Slowly re-reading this post 100 times would also help enormously ;) So would buying me a coffee.

If you enjoyed this cartoon, you might like these ones, too:
Sometimes Kids Don’t Grow Up
By: Jacqueline Dooley
Tags: Family, Life, Grief, Life Lessons, Parenting

School is the focus of childhood, but it’s supposed to be a temporary stop in the trajectory of a long, full life. Of course, that wasn’t the case for Ana. She attended school for thirteen of her fifteen years (if you count daycare which she started at the age of two) — fully 80% of her short life.

We’d pulled Ana out of public school in the middle of first grade. She’d been struggling for months — bored, unable to sit still, a perennial window gazer who frustrated her teacher to the extent that she was always in trouble, always feeling as though she were bad.

One morning when Ana was six, she said she wished she would get run over by her bus rather than go to school. She’d been growing increasingly depressed. She’d stopped drawing, stopped singing, stopped looking forward to getting up on weekday mornings.

She’d been so filled with anxiety that she’d been writing notes to her teacher, letters of apology that said things like, “I’m sorry I was bad. I’ll try harder.”

It was December, just a few weeks before winter break, when I spoke to the Head of School at High Meadow.

“She’s smart,” I explained. “But they don’t get much time for recess. They’re not allowed to run outside or touch the snow, much less play in it. She hates sitting still for hours, filling out dittos or writing the same exact letters over and over again. She can already read and knows all her letters. She’s musical and artistic. They punish her when she doesn’t pay attention. I think she just needs more breaks, more time to play.”

“Bring her here for a day to see how she likes it,” the Head of School had said. “They get three breaks for recess. We don’t do dittos. There are no tests. She sounds bored out of her mind.”

So that’s what I did — after reading (obsessively) about progressive education and visiting the school myself. We couldn’t afford private school, not by a long shot, but we made it work somehow.

Ana started at High Meadow in January of that same year. When I told her old teacher that she wouldn’t be returning to school after the break, she’d replied, “I think that’s for the best.”
Reminiscence
By: Urvi Karani
Tags: Poetry, Past, Feelings, Memories, Nostalgia

I was made fun of; I laughed.

I felt the same chain of emotions for everyone.

Ignorance in the beginning,

resentment in between,

rage to answer back,

and giving up in despair.

I was broken; I cried.

It made me

close old doors,

erase some people,

tear past chapters every passing day,

hoping they never come back.

I was loved; I laughed.

I felt the same chain of emotions for everyone.

Butterflies, in the beginning,

the fights in between,

efforts to hold on,

and the sorrow of letting go.

I was broken; I cried.

It made me

open new doors,

invite new people,

write down every passing day

as it silently exited through the window.
Kineticex Exchange and its Virtues
By: Kineticex Support
Tags: ICO, Smart Tokens, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Exchange

There are many exchanges out there, but there are only a few exchanges that offer security even when they run on a centralized platform. The major complaints associated with Centralized exchanges are

Easy Hacks

Liquidity

Missing USP

Kineticex exchange uses the cryptocurrency conversion based on a single aggregated exchange rate. It is fully automated and in control of purchase or sale of cryptocurrencies. Merchants can initiate trade requests and exchange through the unlimited number of crypto instruments along with new ICO tokens.

Liquidity Aspect

Every trade request needs to be met, and this results in the exponential rise of altcoins. Kineticex exchange is fully equipped to meet the trade requests. The Kineticex platform can handle millions for transactions simultaneously.

Lowest Transaction Fees

It has been the curse associated with centralized exchanges that they charge an obscene amount of fee for each transaction. Centralized exchanges charge exorbitant transaction fees, however small the transaction may be. Kineticex is a centralized exchange that doesn’t charge exorbitantly for the transactions. There is a nominal transaction fee, and merchants can put up trade requests for any altcoin they desire.

A word about the upcoming ICO

Customers and merchants can get their hands on KRC tokens and start using Kineticex ecosystem as an alternative for payment processing solution that is both reliable and secure for any volume of trading.

Kineticex offers something unique

Margin trading is something that has been brought in by Kineticex to enhance the overall process of exchange. Margin trading is a method of trading that involves borrowing funds. It allows you to trade more than you’d be able to trade using your funds. Kineticex.com currently offers margin trading with 1:5 leverages on BTC/USD, BTC/EUR, ETH/BTC and ETH/USD pairs and many added then.

With such virtues presented by Kineticex exchange, there is no denying that Kineticex is easily the best exchange with lesser transaction fee and faster process management.

Know more:

Exchange: https://kineticex.com/

Follow us in Twitter: https://twitter.com/KineticexE

Like and share: https://www.facebook.com/kineticex.io/

Join us Telegram: https://t.me/kineticexexchange

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kineticex-revolution-ltd/
Cryptonews — the largest aggregator of news from the world of cryptocurrencies has been launched
By: Tomasz Przybycien
Tags: Fintech, Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Trading, Bitcoin

Cryptocurrency News Aggregator — Cryptonews by app.algory.io

Katowice, Poland, July 28, 2018 — Algory is delighted to announce the launch of the largest news system for investors and crypto-traders on the cryptocurrencies market — the Cryptonews aggregator. We are pleased to announce that one of our flagship products is live and that we have succeeded.

Check our Cryptonews: http://app.algory.io

The Cryptonews system will enable users to track all information from around the world affecting the volatility of the price of cryptocurrencies.

Cryptonews filters information coming from thematic websites, blogs, companies focused on the cryptocurrency industry, companies focused on the blockchain technology industry. It also analyzes data from social media, which have a significant impact on volatility in the cryptocurrency market.

Cryptonews in action

At current moment, we have connected to the system the top 1,000 of various types of news sources from the world of cryptocurrencies. Speed is important in trading. Our system provides traders with a solution such as “all cryptonews in one place”, thanks to which they will no longer have to browse dozens of other websites or tools. And soon our next product will appear on the market — Cryptoscanner.

Tomasz Przybycień, Co-founder of Algory

The best place for cryptoheads to stay up to date

Users of the platform will have the option of creating dedicated workspaces. The platform’s customers will be able to sort the news according to their needs, the cryptocurrencies or the news category of their interest. There will also be archival data available, thanks to which investors from the cryptocurrency market will be able to assess which sources of information had the greatest impact on the volatility of exchange rates.

Currently, access to the news platform is offered for free. In the future, a premium version will be launched, in which, for a fee, users will get access to the VIP features.

Algory Cryptonews is now one of the most competitive major crypto news aggregator in the world. However, we want to remind you that this is only the beginning, there is a lot more work to be done. So subsequent announcements about new tools will follow.

About Algory

Algory is a startup based in Katowice in Poland. Algory offers tools for active crypto traders. The flagship products include an advanced cryptocurrency scanner, called Cryptoscanner, and a crypto news aggregator, which was designed for the most active traders.

Official website: https://algory.io
Pitfalls When Transitioning from an Individual Contributor to a Technical Manager
By: Paul Chiu
Tags: Management, Leadership, Career Advice, Engineering Mangement, Programming

The Responsibility Virus

In Alan Watkins’ book 4D Leadership¹, he cites Roger Martin’s (2003) writings about ‘the responsibility virus’. The responsibility virus is a phenomenon where someone promoted into a leadership position, in an attempt to improve outcomes, becomes involved in work that should instead be delegated. The viral aspect of this phenomenon is the impact such actions have on all parties involved.

Imagine the following scenario: You are promoted from programmer to technical manager. You are presented with a deadline that concerns updating an area of the system only you can deliver within the target deadline. You then step-in to fully deliver the changes for the team. You are hailed as a hero by upper management. The project is deemed a success and the team moves on to the next problem. Unfortunately, this is the beginning of the technical manager practising ‘over responsibility’.

If over responsibility only impacted the manager practising it, that may be acceptable in the short term. However, the viral aspect of this phenomenon is that the team may become complacent, informally decide that area of the system is not their concern, or perceive that they are not to be trusted with working on that area of the system. Any of the aforementioned possibilities may result in members of the team being less likely to take responsibility the next time a similar change is needed.

Should the practice of over responsibility not be addressed, the manager will find themselves dealing with more issues on top of their actual responsibilities leading to effects highlighted in Watkins’ pressure performance curve:

Pressure Performance Curve (source: Watkins¹)

The pressure performance curve shows that although the manager may find themselves feeling more productive than ever — their heroic performance not only brought about success but also reinforced that they still technically have ‘it’ — eventually the manager will become overworked and overwhelmed. Even more concerning is that such behaviour can be encouraged by upper management as it demonstrates the technical manager going ‘above and beyond’ the call of duty.

If the responsibility virus is to be avoided, a manager must refrain from yielding to the business’ requests and instead negotiate a more realistic timeline whereby the coaching and training of the team to complete activities themselves can be achieved. Allowing time for training and handover should be a natural part of transitioning an individual contributor to a manager. The team may also realise that they are actually short on resources and need to hire a new engineer. Identifying such issues and having a discussion within the broader organisation will help highlight constraints that may hinder the team’s ability to meet the organisation’s expectations, with the ideal outcome being receiving support from the organisation to overcome said constraints.
AVERAGE ART
By: Aleksey Tikhonov
Tags: Face, Painting, Neural Networks, Portraits, Art

AVERAGE ART

Averaged faces from classical paintings

TLDR: I took a subset of 18.5K portraits from a dataset of the Kaggle competition, Painter by Numbers, and arranged them by style and gender. Then I used the Facer library from John W. Miller to build average faces based on these portrait groups, as well as a time-lapse of average faces from the portraits dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Check out my society6 page for prints of these portraits.

Details

I used metadata from the Painter by Numbers dataset, where the subset of portraits was less than 20%. The metadata is quite detailed and convenient, including authors, styles, titles, and years of creation. After filtering, I had about 18.5K paintings declared as portraits. However, my attempts to build average faces by artistic style without additional data cleaning produced strange sexless faces.

Therefore, I had to break these portraits down into categories: group, male, female, child, and other portraits. The “other” portraits were those where I wasn’t able to determine the character’s gender, e.g. some of the Cubist paintings. Note: This creates a bias towards more human-like faces, which is more significant for abstract types of art.

I used only male and female portraits, as there were too few of those of children. From my experience, I knew that Facer needed at least a dozen faces to produce stable results of acceptable quality, so I subdivided the portraits by style, then picked 24 styles that contained enough pictures of both genders to use for averaging. The results are available on a github project (as well as a table with gender labels).

Finally, I averaged portraits for every 50 years from 1500 AD to 2000 AD in 10 year increments, and compiled a time-lapse video. Due to the overlap of 40 years between every two adjacent frames, the video turned out to be quite smooth and nice:

Also, as an experiment, I uploaded some of these pictures to a society6 page, where prints, mugs, and clocks featuring these images are available.
I Just Went To Olive Garden For The First Time Ever, And I Actually Felt Like Family Again
By: Brett Cb
Tags: Family, Restaurant, Economy, Humor, Life

Since this was 1990’s suburbia, eating out was still a special occasion back then. And by special occasion, I don’t mean authentic (insert any culture other than ‘Merica here) cuisine. I mean my father exclaiming “I found this booklet of Applebee’s coupons in the neighbor’s trash. Free appetizers for everyone, on them!” Yet for all the caloric yet soulless discounted meals at Chili’s, TGI Fridays, and Denny’s, there was always one chain that we never got coupons for. One premier chain destination that our family did not reach before my parents’ bitter divorce and the explosion of our family.

Olive Garden.

I’ll admit that I never thought about them much growing up. Maybe it was my antipathy towards anything familial that drove my indifference. Or it was my terribly low expectations for pasta in general. Buy 7 Get 1 Free Ragu sauce and 4 for $1.00 16 oz. store-brand spaghetti was the median Italian meal in the CB Household after all.

But as I persist into my mid-30’s, everyone on not only my Facebook feed, but my 90-person department is buying a house, getting married, or having a baby on a daily basis. Me? Oh, I’m keeping busy with getting ghosted on Bumble and my MAGA mother firing off walls of texts with insanely out-of-context Bible verses before presenting the dissolving of our relationship as a sacrifice to her almighty ex-President but forever-Orange Lord. Sure, he’s a family man, but I bet he’s never used a coupon in his life. On top of all that, we’re butt-deep in a global pandemic where any and all human contact is a deadly risk. I finally got good at being alone and by myself in the past few years, but it’s not as fun when you have to be alone. For the first time ever(at least consciously): I’d like to feel like family.

And then life dangles me a discount.

SWEET SALTY SALVATION

Oddly enough, although it was massive charge card debt that helped tear my family apart in the first place (as my mother managed to run up a six-figure bill on a QVC card with no cap), it’s Amex bringing 2/3 of the dysfunctional CB nucleus together. Since each Amex point is worth ~2 cents a piece (if transferred to an airline partner at a 1:1 ratio), we’re talking effectively 10% back here (potentially more if booked at the right time). Having said that, if you had this offer on your Amex and easily spend the full $1000 to get the max 5000 points, comment below because I really want to hear what your experience was like.

With impeccable timing, my father calls me and asks if we can get together before the probable winter lockdown coming. I vigourously reply “Dad, leave your Entertainment Coupon Book in the glove compartment, because where I’m taking you to lunch, we’ll feel like family. I mean, we’re definitely family genetically, but I’m talking Dominc Teretto FAMILY.”

“Huh?”

“Just meet me in South Bay Plaza at 12.”
Shift news: focusing on the core business
By: Shift Crypto
Tags: Harware, Wallet, Crypto, Apps, Bitcoin

Shift Crypto will be focusing the company efforts on the open source BitBox02 hardware wallet and its companion BitBoxApp. We have decided to go to our roots and put all our effort into delivering a best-in-class hardware wallet.

What does this mean?

Our main goal has been to empower and bring independence to users, making it easy and secure for you to take self-sovereign control of your money. This mission still stands today.

We want to go back to the core of why we started building a hardware wallet in the first place. From now on, we will be focusing our efforts on the BitBox02 and the BitBoxApp.

Given our focus on the core business of hardware wallets, the development of the BitBoxBase full node will be on pause. The project is of high interest to us, and we hope to jump in when the timing is right. We’ll publish more details on this in the coming days. The BitBoxBase has been community developed and open from its beginning, and we encourage and support this continuing. Additionally, the development of BitBoxTep, the tamper evident packaging solution, has indefinitely halted.

And what does this mean for you?

Nothing is changing for BitBox hardware wallets users. We are committed to delivering, improving, and supporting the BitBox02 and the BitBoxApp, as well as building strong partnerships around them. Since our focus will be targeted only on those products, we’ll be able to direct our efforts into making them even more powerful, easier, and safer to use.

Should you have any questions, you can always reach our customer support at support@shiftcrypto.ch. This applies also to users of the BitBox01, which we plan to support until at least November 2020.

What’s next

Our mission is to equip individuals with hardware and software tools that allow them to achieve financial independence. And to accomplish this we want to keep our users at the heart of our product development. We want to continue to improve how we deliver secure and simple usability.

There are different ways you can help with our product development: we always welcome contributions to our open source software, as well as direct feedback via support@shiftcrypto.ch. We are also working on questionnaires to collect your feedback and we plan to publish the first one in the coming weeks. Additionally we encourage you to sign up to our mailing lists, one focussed on BitBox02 and BitBoxApp news and features, and a second dedicated to security, including release notes and bug fixes.

We are very excited to work on improving the BitBox02 and the BitBoxApp. We plan to announce new features and integrations very soon and many more are on the roadmap for 2020 and beyond.

Thank you for your continued support.

Shift team
Crossing Social Media Lines
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Friend Request, Creepy, Social Media, Unfriend, Block

I have to say, I’m starting to feel like a bit of a celebrity and not in a good way. I’ve always been a friendly person, and some would even say ‘too trusting.’ So when I began receiving an increasing number of friend requests on Facebook from members of Medium, I felt obliged to accept.

Only I’m not even sure if they’re all really Medium folks anymore, or just ‘friends of friends.’ In the last few days, I’ve been getting upwards of thirty requests per day, and was accepting most of them so I wouldn’t seem ‘rude.’ I have a bad habit of caring too much about what people think of me.

Until this morning when I woke up to several private messages from random people I don’t know, and strings of notifications about likes and comments on my personal posts and photos. Even on photos of my daughter. I’m sorry, but no! That’s creepy and stalker-like behavior.

So at the risk of sounding ungrateful for the opportunity I've been given to help and support my fellow writers — an opportunity I absolutely cherish! — I have to draw a very real line in the sand.

Let’s make one thing very clear: I may be friendly to everyone (until I have a reason not to be), but I am definitely not everyone’s friend, nor do I wish to be. There have to be boundaries!

So I have now deleted most of those recently added ‘friends’, and even blocked a few at the suggestion of a real friend. I will no longer be accepting friend requests from group members unless we already have a friendly rapport. And all message requests that come off as creepy will absolutely get you blocked.

Have some respect for your fellow group members, and know where to draw the lines.

Don’t be a creep!
25 Thoughts I Had While Giving a Hand Job
By: Ms. Part Time Wino
Tags: Humor, Sex, Dating Advice, Dating, Satire

first of her name. writer of nonsense. queen of drinking wine. creator of thedirtygirlsguide.com

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How Becoming a Software Tester Changed My Fairytale for the Better
By: Samantha Judd
Tags: Career Development, Careers, Testing, Learning And Development, Software Development

It was then August 2017 when I began to work out what I was interested in pursuing as a career. At this point, I knew I enjoyed working at Trade Me, I liked the people that I worked with, and I’d seen the company support people moving into other roles. So I thought, why can’t I do that too?!

I set about having a big think about what role I could potentially move into at Trade Me. I wondered if I could move into a Design role as I’ve got a degree in design and I really enjoyed the graphic design aspect of my studies. Or could I be a Business Analyst as I’m a great knowledge builder, I like to know all of the business rules, and how things work. Or could I be a tester because that ‘Testing for non-testers’ workshop that I went to at work was pretty fun and it’d mean that I’d get to resolve the issues that users always complain to me about in my CSR role.

With my list of potential careers in hand I had a big chat to the Head of Customer Service. He was super into supporting development opportunities even if it was to move out of Customer Service and to somewhere else within the company, which was perfect for me! We popped Software Tester at the top of the list and got started on talking to the right people about the next steps.
Statistical Modeling of Time Series Data Part 1: Data Preparation and Preprocessing
By: Yashveer Singh Sohi
Tags: Machine Learning, Statistical Analysis, Time Series Analysis, Web Scraping, Time Series Forecasting

Extracting Relevant Series

In this series of articles, the Close prices of the S&P 500 market index are analyzed. Here, we extract the series we’re interested in:

Extracting the required series from the collection provided by yfinance

Since the data is stock market data, we will not observe any value for the weekends. Thus, the time interval between 2 successive observations is 1 day even if the 2 observations are recorded on a Friday and then on a Monday. To convert our dates to follow the business days format (5 days a week), we use the asfreq() method of pandas with “b” as the argument.

Handling Missing Values

Next, let’s see whether this data has any missing values. This is an important preprocessing step, as the way we fill these values can have a huge impact on the tend.

Checking Null values, statistical description, and imputing the null values of the series

Output for the cleaning_spx.py code block

In the code cell above, data.spx.isnull().sum() takes the dataframe ( data ), extracts the column ( spx ) and applies the function isnull() to it. This results in a boolean array with True for every Null value encountered. The sum() function takes the sum of these boolean values. Since, True is represented as 1 and False as 0 , this gives the number of missing values in the spx series. The describe() function gives a few statistical measures of the series.

The number of null values ( 233 ) is clearly very small as compared to the count of observations ( 6459 ). Thus, a simple imputing function from pandas will be enough for this case. The fillna() function fills the missing values with the values encountered just before the missing value. This behavior is governed by the “ffill” (front fill) argument passed to the method argument. Click here for more information on other arguments for method .

Deriving S&P Returns and Volatility

Now that the data is cleaned, it can be used to build some other useful series that helps us to understand the market trends better. These are: Returns and Volatility.

Returns: The percent change in a stock price over a given amount of time. In this case, the returns over each day are calculated and stored in the column spx_ret .

Volatility: The volatility in a market index refers to the fluctuations in its returns. To gauge the fluctuations or stability in the market, sometimes the magnitude of returns or squared returns are chosen. In this series, the magnitude of returns is chosen as the measure of volatility. The Volatility of spx is stored in the column spx_vol

Thus, Returns are a measure of the gain (positive returns) or loss (negative returns) of a market index, and Volatility (magnitude of Returns) is the measure of stability in the index.
by Martino Pietropoli
By: Martino Pietropoli
Tags: Monday, Social Media, Art, Graphics

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

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Blockchain Report Generation and Resilience Assessment
By: Drew Gipson
Tags: Security Services, Blockchain Startup, Blockchain, Bitcoin

Blockchain Report Generation and Resilience Assessment

A look at potential methods of security appraisal.

As Team Mufasa nears the end of the third week working on our current project, there is a palpable sense of excitement (albeit tinged with anxiousness) surrounding our efforts. Since our last post, we’ve added a new tool to our workload, and have refined some of our existing codebase.

We’ve cast the foundation and much of the legwork for our two blockchain-centric tools (both still nameless) and are currently in the process of finalizing our schedule for the rest of the improvements we plan to implement. The clock is ticking, and we have narrowed down our shortlist-of-things-to-do to what we believe to be the most desirable and usable features.

For our blockchain report generation tool, we’ve solidified our email functionality and are outputting selected and up-to-date user specified information into a CSV. We’ve also implemented the IBM X-Force Intelligence API so that we can provide a wider range of information to users, and have plans to integrate some source of information regarding social engineering attacks on blockchains. After this, we plan to create an HTML object using the CSV with our curated information and send this out as our email report.

Our CSV format…
Beneath the Layers
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Self Discovery, Masks, Self, Self Love, Authenticity

A Journey to Self-Discovery

Beneath the Layers

Who are you when the masks come off?

How many personalities do you have? And don’t say just one, because if you can’t be honest with yourself…

We’ve all got them. Whether we want to admit it or not, we become different versions of ourselves in different situations, and with different people. With our parents, we’ll be The Good Child. Respectful, polite, and of course not, mom, I’ve never smoked weed!

With friends, we become The Extrovert, even if we’re not really — we’re more open, adventurous. Don’t want to be left out or left behind. Don’t want to be uncool.

At work, there are typically two personalities that come out: The Dedicated Employee and The Empathetic Complainer. We’ll put in our hours, be diligent in our tasks, and do it all with a smile on our face or a frown of concentration whenever the boss is around. And this might very well be your authentic self, but then you turn into the empathetic complainer when the boss shuts his door and your co-workers start to nag and complain. I mean, you have to work with them, so better play along, right?

With strangers, we’re usually the closest version to our most authentic self, because we just don’t care what they think — we’ll never see them again. But it’s still not 100% — we might lose some inhibition and become more assertive than you normally would be, or go in the opposite direction and become shyer and more reserved. I guess it depends who the stranger is.

But who are you when the lights go off?

What does your internal dialogue sound like? Is it like any of the personalities listed above? Something completely different? Or does the real you come out of hiding once you’re the only one around to judge?
One Nature to rule them all — Letter #1
By: The Other Day I Thought Of
Tags: Nature, Letters, Religion, Philosophy

Dear Ricardo,

How are you? I hope all is well with you and your loved ones.

I wanted to write you this letter because the other day I thought of an amazing topic and I was curious about your take on it.

Have you ever noticed how different our world must feel from the raw, untouched world the first humans encountered? All these materials, textures, colors, drawings, symbols, designs, forms, technologies… All new, products of generations. It’s somewhat cool to say one wants to take a step back, reunite with our animal roots and with nature. But what would be of us if these creations were not the product of our generations? Isn’t this result inevitable? Aren’t we innovators by nature and, thus, innovating and making civilization more different from what it was thousands of years ago are, in fact, the ways to be in constant touch with nature?

As if nature isn’t everything. Literally, every single thing that exists must be natural. A salad that mixes different types of vegetables and fruits doesn’t become less natural because it’s a mix of different elements. A cooked fish isn’t less natural because it went through the industrial process of cooking. It’s all part of the same nature; and not just elements of the periodic table and amazing processes that you can learn in a Physics class, but actions too. Actions are nature, because they derive from an organ and are executed by our body. There’s nothing about our actions that’s unnatural. Hence, the consequences of our actions are all part of nature, too.

This to me means that we should spend less time constantly evaluating the fitness of everything into this abstractly defined concept of Nature, judging our way into some kind of promised Heaven, where we’d finally be one with Mother Nature, our God.

Of course, one of the benefits of religion or religious thinking is the sense of meaning that it gives. If everything is natural and every act is a natural act, in the absence of traditional religions, what holds the souls of these people?

Anyway, sorry if it feels nuts or confusing, but I had to share it with someone. As I said, I’m curious to read your thoughts on this.

All the best,

Francisco

Read Ricardo’s response here.
WRX Unlock — 31st May 2020. Starting 31st May, 2020, we’ll start…
By: Wazirx Bitcoin Exchange
Tags: Cryptocurrency News, Blockchain, Announcements, Cryptocurrency, Crypto

Namaste Tribe! You — our community and early WRX adopters — have always been at the forefront of every new feature decision we make. In fact, thanks to your support, we have grown WazirX and taken WRX to millions!

Patience and hard work pay off! WRX token release is our way to reward you for trusting us. On Day Zero of WRX listing, we had unlocked 10% of your WRX tokens (with a maximum limit of 5000 WRX). This was followed by unlocking one-third of your locked WRX tokens which can be used to pay trading fees. Now, starting 31st May, 2020, we’ll start WRX token unlock for ‘Fixed periodic vesting’ and ‘Volume-based vesting’.

Fixed periodic vesting : Starting 31st May 2020, one-third of your locked WRX tokens will be unlocked equally over a period of 24 months (2 years)

: Starting 31st May 2020, one-third of your locked WRX tokens will be unlocked equally (2 years) Volume-based vesting: Based on your trading volume, a maximum of one-third of your locked WRX tokens will be unlocked starting from 31st May 2020. The token amount unlock will happen quarterly — divided into 8 quarters, i.e., 2 years.

Read more about WRX release schedule announcement.

From WRX IEO in February 2020 till today, we have come a long way and grown by leaps and bounds in these 4 months.

Keep BUIDLing

WRX — the first Indian exchange-backed token to IEO on Binance

Coinmarketcap listing for $WRX

Log in to WazirX via Binance

14 new trading pairs listed

₹25,00,000 INR worth prizes were given in trading contests

WRX on Binance DEX & FTX

TradingView Charts

Zero withdrawal fee

Support those who BUIDL — Blockchain India Fund

Our goal has been to involve everyone in the blockchain revolution. This also means providing the ecosystem members with knowledge and resources to move ahead. Binance and WazirX have created a $50 Million ‘Blockchain for India’ fund to support Indian entrepreneurs building in the crypto and blockchain space. As we educate and onboard more users, we can also see the community taking it further.

We Listen

Many may not know this but we have had users giving us feedback and working with us since 2018. We have had hundreds of users and thousands of community members who help us build the trusted platform that brings crypto to India.

Right from amazing charts to simple-looking options like a Favorite button, we have heard and our community has loved us back.

Utility

Exchange tokens become the fuel of an ecosystem. Our community has been HODLing and using $WRX to pay reduced trading fees as well as supporting the market by providing liquidity. This is a win-win.

The fact that ₹1.7 Crore INR worth of $WRX has been used to pay trading fees proves how much our community believes in it. This utility only increases as the number of users and volume grows on WazirX exponentially. A virtuous cycle has been started. And that juggernaut is difficult to stop. We’ll continue to innovate and provide the best product to all our users in India and across the world!

Jai Hind 🇮🇳
백준 1463. 1로 만들기-DP
Tags: Dynamic Programming, Algorithms, 백준, Dp

in In Fitness And In Health