fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
7 Reasons Why Rural America Matters To You Even Though You Can’t Feel it Yet
By: Cathy B. Glenn
Tags: Rural, Politics, Education, Poverty, Democracy

The people I met on the margins make choices to survive in a rural world that you could never understand if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. The choices seem to demonstrate what you’d recognize as agency on their part. Their choices draw demands for “personal responsibility,” for calls to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. But “choice” is different in a place where power is scarce.

Choosing to agree with authority so you don’t get beaten is not a choice. Choosing to supplicate — because to dissent earns a black eye and bloody nose — is not a choice. Choosing to live on your knees — because to stand means to starve — is not a choice. Choosing to cover your ears and try to ignore the screams from the bedroom — because to acknowledge and challenge means being homeless — is not a choice. Choosing to resist arrest — because to be taken into custody means an unspeakable life in a private prison — is not a choice. Choosing to numb your body and emotions so you don’t feel the gut-churning agony of enduring a life you know won’t get any better is not a fucking choice.

I know. I lived there with them. Not above them: next door. Not as research subjects: they were my neighbors. BIPOC, LGBTQ, poor and working class whites, and thousands of kids. Many white children are born and raised in families where the father holds all the power and no one can disagree without getting punished. They are invisible because the white men in authority — and the white women who’ve internalized the toxic masculinity around them and enable the men — hide the kids, shame them, steal their power, and terrify them into silence.

Those are the actualities. That’s what exists. Decades of others’ research shows it, and my research confirmed it for me. I cannot forget what I saw, forget who I met, not without killing my own soul. I can’t not-know. I can’t not-see. I can’t not-feel. I could have been them if my father and mother had had their way and moved my 5 brothers and sisters and me rural, like they’d intended. I was lucky. The people I met are not.

The people on the margins I met in Southern Oregon are like everyone else: they are human beings who want to exist, who want to live without fear, who want better for their children, who want to live indoors with a little privacy and dignity. But they are buried in conditions that make it impossible for them to imagine or dream or reach beyond their world, and they are surrounded by people who prefer to ignore, hide, and silence them.

My invisible knapsack of white privilege no longer offers insularity, no longer affords distance, and no longer takes me out of my body so I can avoid feeling, connecting, and being responsible for fellow human beings without a voice. My hope is that you’ll also feel to see, and to care.

Here are 7 ways there. (There are a bunch of other trails to connection we can walk together, later.)
Korean Oxtail Soup (Kkoli Gom Tang)
By: The Hungry Barter
Tags: Recipe, Food, Korean

Unattractive cuts of meat are often given misrepresentative culinary names. The throat, gullet, pancreas, heart, or stomach is referred to as “sweetbread”, fried bull balls as “rocky mountain oysters”, and any or everything else queasy suggested as “offal”. But ironically, oxtail hasn’t had the privilege of this gastronomic title initiation.

Oxtail is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the bony muscular tail of a cow (rarely from an actual oxen). Take a look at the Angus Beef Chart below, and the tail is located where one would expect it -behind the ass, dangerously close to the b-hole.

From The American Angus Association, 2007

Yet, the close proximity of the tail to the rectum, that dispenses nearly 67 lbs of daily shit, is a mere over-thought by many consumers. It’s a great shock value mystery, but it does help that oxtail lends itself well to a variety of cooking methods, and can be tender/delicious. Today I share a relatively common use of oxtail as the base and protein of a hearty soup like the Korean Oxtail Soup (Kkoli Gom Tang).

Oxtail Soup is very popular in South Korea -particularly during the cold winter months. The soup is most commonly made from simmered beef parts like oxtail, shank bones, and brisket complimented with aromatics like onions, green onions, garlic, and Korean daikon.

Boogie-man eats of Western palate: savory foods with gelatinous texture

The milky stock is simmered for hours, and made in massive quantities as it boasts a rather lengthy shelf life once frozen. And like most stocks, the Kkoli Gom Tang stock can be the base for a variety of other soups and stews.

The stock is also known for its alleged health benefits, especially with a quick practice in elementary chemistry to remove the fat. Properly cool the liquid, refrigerate it overnight to let the fat separate and solidify, then skim. You’re left with a freaky and gelatinous glob -consistent with a well made stock- rich in collagen, calcium, and other nutrients. In South Korea, Kkoli Gom Tang is even believed to cure common colds, fuel stamina, and contribute to delicate skin.
Everything You Need to Know About Polymorphism
By: Drew Campbell
Tags: Game Development, Software Development, Software Engineering, Programming, Coding

What Is Polymorphism?

Polymorphism describes something that takes many forms. In computer science, this refers to functions and objects having multiple forms.

Functional polymorphism

Functional polymorphism is implemented using overloading. Overloading allows functions to share the same name whilst passing in different types and/or a different number of arguments. A single function that has multiple forms.

For example, consider a function that sums two numbers. We could have a sum function that takes in two integers and returns an int, and another sum function that accepts two floats as arguments, returning a float. When we call sum passing in two numbers, the compiler will work out which method actually needs to be called based on the parameters we have passed. In either case, we can obtain different behaviour when calling methods that share the same name depending on the parameters we pass.

Object polymorphism

Polymorphism regarding objects is slightly different. This is where inheritance comes into play. For any object with a base class, say our JetpackSoldier class, whose base class is Soldier , we can instead treat it as if it was a Soldier . Any code that handles anything to do with the Soldier objects can also work with JetpackSoldier objects as well. The benefits are best shown with an example:

If we assume we have vehicles in our game and we have a class Jeep , we would like to store a reference in this class to the soldiers driving around in this vehicle. Let’s say that our jeep stores a maximum of four people; how would we do this in code? Polymorphism handles this easily.

A simple way of handling this problem is to have a reference to Soldier for each seat in the jeep, two in front, two in back. Because polymorphism enables us to treat objects as other objects, JetpackSoldier as Soldier , we can add both JetpackSoldier and Soldier objects to the Jeep class. If we add more soldiers to our game, as long as they inherit from Soldier , they too can be added to the jeep class.

Sticking with the same example as before, if we want to store different soldier types, we’d have to add additional member variables and methods to support this. We also need more checks before we can put a soldier in the jeep.
How to Create an AWS Serverless REST API in Swift
By: Andrea Scuderi
Tags: AWS Lambda, Serverless, Swift, Programming, API

How to Create an AWS Serverless REST API in Swift

Build a REST API using the Apple Swift AWS Lambda Runtime

The Apple Swift AWS Lambda Runtime is finally a reality, and it’s now officially supported (as announced May 29). The key fact that allowed this is the support for the Amazon Linux 2 with a custom Docker image maintained by Swift.

This article will show how to implement a basic REST API using the new Apple runtime to implement a serverless stack based on API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB and deploying it using the Serverless Framework.
Blinking Cursor
By: Tarrant Smith
Tags: Writing Life, Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Writing, Writers Block

I’m a romance author with two published series who enjoys the creative freedom that Medium’s platform allows. If you enjoyed Blinking Cursor, you might also like my other poems:

© Tarrant Smith 2020
Top 100 Resources For Explosive Business & Personal Growth
By: Clément Bourcart
Tags: Marketing, Startup, Entrepreneurship, Personal Development, Business

Top 100 Resources For Explosive Business & Personal Growth

A bible of useful links around business, startups, marketing, productivity and personal growth.

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

Are you looking for a definitive list of top resources to grow your business and become the best version of yourself this year?

Tired of sifting through hundreds of sources looking for quality and actionable insights?

Look no further.

Below is a compilation of top resources from a range of sources — including articles, videos, podcasts, Reddit threads and even Tweets!

You’re in for a treat…
Hi Novelists, how’s it going?
By: Julie Russell
Tags: NaNoWriMo, Nanowrimo Meta, Writing

Week two check-in.

I hope your page is more full than this one ❤ CC0 Public Domain

I’m setting a timer for ten minutes to write this post, because otherwise I’ll waste, no, use, no squander, definitely squander away the 35 minutes I have between now and 7am when I need to wake my daughter, get into the shower, get ready for work, and things that are not related to novel writing.

How are you? How are things going this year?

I do something different each November with this publication, and this year along with Medium’s product shift to Memberships and compensation model for writers, I am experimenting with the podcast-style interviews as members-only posts as a way to raise money for the National Novel Writing Month nonprofit. I appreciate your support!

This is my first time doing podcast-style interviews and I’m learning just how many times I say “um” when I am talking to people. I’m also learning that perhaps trying to write a novel and do podcast interviews during the same month was perhaps a little … ambitious.

However, each interview inspires me and gets me back to transcribing the stories from my characters. If you need a quick dose of inspiration or ideas, check out the latest by NaNo Staff member Katharine Gripp, and spoiler, the next interview is with Tim Kim who is the NaNoWriMo Program Director and an altogether delightful human.

So even though I am way behind in my word count, I show up at 6am every morning to write.

I love reading all of your posts and stories. Thank you for making this publication so supportive and welcoming to all of our colleagues participating in this audacious challenge to write the first draft of a novel in 30 days.

Click that respond button, please, and tell me how you’re writing is going. Are your characters surprising you? Is this your first year, or your tenth? How are you keeping yourself sane?
Are You A Fiber Subscriber?
By: Harper Thorpe
Tags: Milk Carton Haiku, Satire, Poetry, Collaboration, Humor

Are You A Fiber Subscriber?

That cereal

This help-you-move meal

It’s for real.

Pour this on too

Milk Carton Haiku*

Rhyming review.

Self improvement

Starting a movement

Splash cash well spent.

Time to give your

pooping performance

more importance.

Length of colon

Five to seven feet

Nature’s back street.

Want squeaky clean?

Your med prescriber

pushes fiber.

There’s no debate

It’s eliminate

or constipate.

Also noting

digestive coating

means no bloating.

West Coast voices

boast John rejoices

with alt choices.

California

cleansing formula

called granola.

When bowel brakes

Hollywood outtakes

Fruits, nuts and flakes.

Granola flop?

Use this to unstop

Snap, crackle, plop.

Champs trust this bowl

Guaranteed control

No poop loophole.

The number one

cereal to chew

for number two.

©2019 HHThorpe. All rights reserved.
What People Think About Ethereum 2.0 Market Price Effect
By: Mustafa Katipoglu
Tags: Ethereum Blockchain, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum 2, Crypto

Cryptocurrencies

What People Think About Ethereum 2.0 Market Price Effect

The upcoming Ethereum release Ethereum 2.0 — Serenity and its effects on market price.

Photo by Clifford Photography on Unsplash

Etherium 2.0 consists of a set of upgrades that provides better scalability, security and sustainability on the Ethereum blockchain.

With the Serenity release, the Etherium blockchain consensus mechanism will change from Proof of Work(PoW) to Proof of Stake(PoS).

The Pow to PoS transition enables the Ethereum blockchain to scale 100s of thousands of transactions per second.

The question is what will be the effect of the transition on the Ethereum price?

Since the effect is so unpredictable, I have felt the need to hear from different people from different backgrounds. Let’s explore what are the price expectations:

Screenshot by Author From The Trading-Education

$750 by the end of 2020

$52 by the end of 2020

$500 To $800 by the end of 2020

Screenshot by Author From Primexbt

# Lorenzo Stroe

$750 by the end of 2020

$2480 by the end of 2020

Screenshot By Author From CoinSwitch

Summary

As we can see from the predictions, average expectations for Ethereum price is in between $500 and $750 by the end of 2020.

If we keep the Today’s Ethereum Price($585) in mind, it is possible to see that $750 range is attainable. But, with the given crypto market growth, It is also possible to see the Ethereum price to go much higher in December 2020.

As the last word, I would like to predict the Ethereum price with the help of market prices movement similarity of November 2017 and November 2020.

I think it is possible to see $1200 price range as we have seen by the end of 2017.
Team Names Inspired By Victorian Women
By: Kyrie Gray
Tags: Satire, History, Humor, Books, Sports

The Denver Broncos? Get out of here with those animal names! I want something with more weight. More history! Give me some more teams inspired by Victorian women, like the ones below.

Images licensed from Rawpixel, illustrated by author

The Corseted Conquers

The Corseted Conquers are as supportive of each other as their namesake is for women’s figures. Besides some tactics in the field that leave their opponents breathless, the Corseted Conquers are fearless and will squeeze in as many points as possible during the game.

The Maids of Mayhem

They’re going to wipe the court with your blood. Then they’ll have to clean up that blood because of their station. Still, the Maids of Mayhem aren’t afraid of hard work or overwhelming odds. They’ve got nothing to lose, so they’re going all-in because they’ve dead-set on polishing that trophy.

The Debutantes

There are two kinds of matches the Debutantes love. The kind that raises them up in society, and the kind against a worthy opponent. When they come out shouting, “Wanna dance,” you better not sign your name on their card. You’re in for a whirl as they whizz about the field scoring goals faster than the spread of gossip. If you’re lucky one will drop a glove and you’ll get to introduce yourself. Which might make them more likely too hurt you a little less when they crush you.

The Grim Governesses

These Grim Governesses are here to teach other teams a lesson. IN PAIN! “Spare the tackle spoil, the opponent,” is their motto. They’ve got brains and muscles built from a life with books. If you can’t handle getting schooled in losing then you best get out of the game.

The Victorious Virgins

No one’s ever besmirched their honor or beat them on the volleyball court. A relatively new team, the Victorious Virgins are ready for some good, clean, pure sportsmanship. Don’t think their lack of experience means they aren’t a force to be reckoned with though. This team is harder to beat than the social pressure to not have sex until marriage.
JSNation 2019 slides— SSR with Quasar Framework
By: Razvan Stoenescu
Tags: Quasar, Vuejs, Quasarframework

The following slides are an introduction to Quasar 1.0 and a focus on SSR (Server-side rendering).

You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUWawfKVomw
Medical Marijuana Smackdown: Grinspoon vs Berenson
By: J. Brandon Lowry
Tags: Medical Marijuana, Cannabis, Marijuana, Health, Debate

Opening Rounds - Alex Berenson

Berenson was arguing in the positive, so he got to go first. In my preview, I said his two main strengths would be his utility with words and his ability to recall facts. Both were on display in his opening argument. His case was laid out clearly, he presented scientific data both verbally and with slides, his speech was relatively smooth and practiced. He even anticipated some of Grinspoon’s arguments and had counters ready. Overall, he looked and sounded like someone who’s been having this argument for quite a while.

However, he chose a strange place to start, referencing his Twitter spat with Grinspoon in the lead-up to the debate. According to Berenson, cannabis advocates prefer to attack a person’s character and motives rather than counter the evidence, and Grinspoon’s tweets were Exhibit A. “I rely on facts,” Berenson countered, backing up this claim by offering printouts of his book’s bibliography to the audience. I found the move somewhat effective, as it highlighted Grinspoon’s later attacks on his character. But it also had a bit of a “He’s picking on me” vibe that fell flat. To make matters worse, Berenson’s been accused of cherry-picking data and using it to draw sweeping conclusions. It’s not a good look to start off a debate by doing exactly that.

Berenson seemed to run into some issues with time. His argument rests on two points: 1) cannabis causes psychosis, and 2) psychosis causes violence. Therefore, cannabis should remain illegal. This conclusion only makes sense if both of those points are true. Unfortunately for him, he spent all of his time talking about the first point, and didn’t touch the second. This may have been a blunder of planning, but I actually think it was a tactical choice. Why make two half-arguments when you could make one whole one? Still, it’s a bit of a disappointment, especially because it was this second point that Grinspoon was prepared to argue against!
Emily in Paris: Asian Women I Know Aren’t Like Mindy Chen
By: Ellen Nguyen
Tags: Emily In Paris, TV Shows, Life, Culture, Asian American

SPOILER ALERT

Emily in Paris: Asian Women I Know Aren’t Like Mindy Chen

This Asian character might as well be played by a White actress — it would make no difference.

Source: Stephenie Branchu / Netflix — Emily and Mindy in “Emily in Paris”

Bored on a Sunday afternoon, I decided to check out the currently trending Netflix show “Emily in Paris” after reading mixed reviews about it. I was warned about all the stereotypes and (French) cliches by a Guardian critic, but it didn’t hit me fully until I was introduced to the character Mindy Chen.

If you haven’t seen “Emily in Paris,” it’s a story about Emily, an American woman who moves to Paris to take up a Marketing job. Not long after her arrival, she befriends Mindy, a Chinese-Korean woman who is a nanny and used to study in the States.

There are many questionable things about Emily, but I’ll leave her for the American viewers. This article will discuss Mindy Chen and other Asian characters on the show from my perspective as an Asian person who grew up in Vietnam and moved to London for study and know plenty of others who have similar backgrounds to Mindy’s.

The Mindy character has a cliche rich kid backstory: She runs away from her loaded family in Shanghai to be a nanny in Paris as she doesn’t want to live the life her parents plan out for her.

To mix things up a little bit, the show creators give Mindy a musical talent — which, I guess, is because Ashley Park playing Mindy has a background in Broadway. They also make her half-Korean instead of full-on Chinese — though I’m not sure what the intention of this is as Mindy comes across as much more American-born than Asian-born, let alone specifically Korean or Chinese or a mixture of both.

Source: The Observer — Peik Lin and Rachel Chu in “Crazy Rich Asians”

She reminds me of Peik Lin from Crazy Rich Asians. Peik Lin was portrayed by Awkwafina, whose performance was criticised for being attached to Black culture and is not an accurate representation of Asian people, especially those born and grow up in Asia.

Both Peik Lin (in the movie) and Mindy Chen are the Asian best friends who come from rich families and exist to encourage the main character to go out of her comfort zone. Mindy, in particular, gives morally questionable relationship advice to Emily throughout the show and, as a result, makes the American lead seem more coy and sensible in comparison.

As a relationship writer, I wanted to stop these characters at many points during the show and give them some urgent coaching sessions because, welp, they make horrible relationship decisions and are such bad friends and colleagues — there’s no likable character.

For this reason, I lost interest quickly halfway through, yet I continued to watch till the end of the season in case I might miss some crucial materials for this article. Lo and behold, later in the season, Mindy Chen meets up with her Shanghai friends at a club where these ladies act like they have absolutely no human control — I couldn’t relate to any of it.
The 10 Commandments of Self-Taught Machine Learning Engineers
By: Daniel Bourke
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Development, Data Science, Software Engineering

The terms commandments and self-taught are not to be taken lightly. One must be in charge of their own education and enlightenment. Ignore this and someone else will choose it for you.

1. Math, Code and Data are your holy trinity

Any effective machine learning pipeline leverages the crossover of mathematics, code and data. Each is only as effective as the other.

If your data is of poor quality, it does not matter how elegant your mathematics or efficient your code is.

If your data is of the highest quality but your mathematics is off, expect your results to disappoint, or worse, harm.

If your data and mathematics are world-class but your code is inefficient, you will fail to reap the benefits of scale.

Data provides you with a mining site containing the gems of nature. Mathematics is your pickaxe. And code allows you to create a fleet of pickaxe-wielding machines.

The trinity is the bridge between the inputs (what you have) and outputs (what you want) of your system.

Note: The mathematics branch of the trinity also contains statistics and probability. If you do not like this, think of the trinity as a starfish.
The Day Of The Glider
By: Aleksey Tikhonov
Tags: Automata, History, Game Of Life, Mathematics, Math

A few days ago, Pavel Gertman came to me with an interesting question. He asked if I know the exact dates when Conway’s Game of Life, R-pentomino and Glider were invited. They either already just turned 50 years old or it should happen in a few days and we wouldn’t miss the moment. Different sources give conflicting information, announcing the year of the appearance of Conway’s Game of Life, R-pentomino and Glider as 1969 or 1970, in different combinations. And the authorship (or rather the discovery) of Glider is attributed either to Conway or to Richard Guy.

From pieces, I got this picture: Conway formulated the rules of his Game of Life in the first half of 1969 in Cambridge, and at first iterated different initial patterns manually (on paper and board), but this process turned out to be difficult and boring. Therefore, he asked for help the Cambridge computer center, so Steve Bourne (the author of the first Unix shell, Bourne shell aka sh) and Mike Guy, both were working on the ALGOL 68C there at that moment, came to help Conway. They wrote a program for PDP-7, which facilitates the calculation of generations of Life, and together they began to observe the development of various combinations. At that time, they were especially occupied with r-pentomino, which demonstrates chaotic dynamics in the first 1000+ generations. Towards the end of the summer, Mike’s father, mathematician Richard Guy, joined the experiments, and it was he who, according to Conway’s memories, “at the very end of the fall” of 1969 accidentally noticed that at the 69th generation of R-pentomino development something interesting forms from chaos: a combination that moves steadily along space with period 4 and speed c/4.

Almost a year later, in October 1970, a great article by Martin Gardner about the Game of Life was published in Scientific American. This article brought great popularity on this topic, however, it did not specify explicit dates (“this month we consider Conway’s latest brainchild”), and Glider was named “one of the most remarkable of Conway’s discoveries”. Since then, in most sources, the year of the opening of the game Life, R-pentomino and the Glider is called 1970, and Conway himself is called the first discoverer of Glider.

Long story short, Pavel and I just decided that “Late in the fall of 1969” is today, hereby we declare today Glider Day (let’s celebrate the fiftieth anniversary!). And do not believe anyone, when in a year all scientific journals will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Game of Life, just know that it has already passed;)

Also, if you are too bored reading this, look at my old 3D visualizations of Game of Life generations, read about the glider on the aperiodic mosaic of Penrose or play with convolutions of one-dimensional Wolfram automata into Peano curves.
BETO: Spanish BERT
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Machine Learning, Data Science, Programming

Transformer based models are creating tremendous impact in the space of NLP as they have proven to be effective in a wide range of tasks such as POS tagging, machine translation, named-entity recognition, and a series of text classification tasks.

This year saw the introduction to a whole family of transformer-based language models such as BERT, Transformer-XL, and GPT-2, among others.

Langauge models, in general, offer desirable properties that can be leveraged in a transfer learning setting where you train a model with large-scale data to learn the properties of language in an unsupervised setting. The resulting model and weights can then be fine-tuned and be applied in low-resourced regimes to address different NLP tasks.

In particular, it’s exciting to see the use of BERT in different domains such as text classification, text summarization, text generation, and information retrieval. However, where language models and transfer learning could be heavily leveraged is in settings or research where datasets are limited. That happens to be the case for the Spanish language and many other languages.

BETO is an initiative to allow the use of BERT pre-trained models for Spanish NLP tasks. The corresponding authors recently published the library with a few results. They compare their model with recent multilingual efforts and the results are summarized in the figure below:
100 Things You Should Know About People: #67 — Anecdotes Persuade More Than Data
By: The Team W
Tags: Psychology, Anecdotes, Decision Making, Presentations

[caption id=”attachment_1839" align=”alignleft” width=”303" caption=”No Data!”]

[/caption]

Let’s say you have to make a presentation to several department heads at work about your latest conversations with your customers. You interviewed 25 customers and surveyed another 100, and have lots of important data to share. Your first thought might be to present a summary of the data in a numerical/statistical/data driven format, for example:

75% of the customers we interviewed….

Only 15% of the customers responding to the survey indicated…

Perhaps you are thinking about pie charts vs. bar charts.

Don’t present the data first — A data based approach will not be as persuasive as anecdotes. You may want to include the data in the presentation at some point, but your presentation will be more powerful if you start with and focus on one or more anecdotes, for example:

“Mary M from San Francisco shared the following story about how she uses our product: …”

and then go on to tell Mary’s story.

Why anecdotes speak louder than data — Anecdotes are in story form. They will invoke empathy, which triggers emotional reactions. With emotional reactions people will process the data and the feelings. Emotions will also trigger the memory centers in the brain.

Processing emotions is more important for decision-making than processing data — In my book Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? I explain that most mental processing occurs unconsciously. It’s easy to forget that information is coming in and being processed from many sources. It’s easy to forget that people are processing emotions too. If you want people to act on the data, then you need to couple it with emotional data.

Better yet, use video — For the most impact, don’t just tell Mary’s story in the presentation, let Mary tell the story herself, either in person or on video.

What do you think? What has happened when you’ve used emotional “data” instead of or in addition to statistics?
Why you should try Freestyle Writing
By: Ayesha Tariq
Tags: Blog Writing, Freestyle Writing, Better Content, Content Writing, Writing

Freestyle Writing is not a novel concept. It’s something that’s been practiced by writers for a very long time. But, its usefulness is often overlooked. Freestyle writing is for everyone who writes and wants to write better.

What is Freestyle Writing?

Freestyle writing is when you write whatever comes to your mind, without regard for correct punctuation, grammar or structure. It’s basically allowing your mind to flow on a topic that you want to write about.

When I wrote blog posts, I would write and edit as I went along. I’d do one review before I posted to check for any obvious errors. However, this never felt efficient and often I would just not end up writing. Other times, I would start a post that I thought would be really great, only to stop after two paragraphs because I didn’t have enough to say. I realize now that I could have probably done much better if I tried freestyle writing.

How do you write freestyle?

It’s a simple concept. Use whatever tools make you comfortable. The idea is to write as much as possible. I like a simple software called Composition for Mac. There’s no formatting, no grammar suggestions so you can write hassle-free. Nowadays, I’ve started using Google Docs because it means I can sync it with my phone, so I can write anywhere. All you need to do is resist the temptation to correct your work with the suggestions. When I’m particularly feeling blocked, I use a yellow pad and a ball point. For me, nothing beats writing by hand.

Once you’ve written out what you want without any editing, give it a break. Go back to it after an hour, maybe two or even a whole day. Then read it again to see what makes sense.

Ask yourself: Does this make sense? Am I able to successfully get my point across to the reader? If yes, great… you’re on the right track. If no, re-write.

Once you’ve reached the stage where you feel that you’ve been able to convey your central idea, start to edit your work to enhance what you have to say. May be changing a few sentences around can reinforce your point. May be cutting out a few sentences can make your paragraph more impactful. Review for spelling and grammar and you’re on your way to publishing a post which will be much better.

Benefits of Freestyle Writing

It helps you get your ideas on paper so you don’t forget them

It helps you speed up the process of writing in the long run as you don’t lose your train of thought

It helps you churn out more content

It helps you write more because you don’t have to criticize yourself while writing

It makes you better at generating ideas and writing

It weeds out your bad ideas from your good ones

The whole idea is to get your thoughts out without interruption. At first it may seem like what you are writing is gibberish. It may not seem good to you at all. But I promise you, with time you will see your writing take shape. You will feel the ideas and the words start to flow and you’ll be churning out more content in no time.
The Bone Structure of HTML
By: Akiko Green
Tags: Code Newbie, HTML

Without bones and muscles, whats hold us together?

Now for the good part! After you have defined what document the page will be, what meta data you want to use and what title you would like to display for the page. We can now talk about the body structure of our HTML page! I like to think of the <body> tags as the muscles that holds the bones together, as in, these tags are what holds all of the elements needed to really keep our html page standing strong!

Inside our <body> </body> tags there are a huge assortment of elements, we can use to create our page, but for now I want to focus on a few of the basic elements you will encounter more often than not!

Lets start off with the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 tags. They are called header tags and they vary from the largest being h1 to the smallest being h6. You would normally use an h1 tag to define your main opening heading of your html page!

HTML Heading from largest to smallest

In order to write content inside of our <body> tags we need the <p> </p> tags. These tags are simply for paragraphs that you see in every webpage. A few great things you can do to make your paragraph pop out more are:

<b> or <strong> - This gives your words a more bolder look to them.

<i> - This italicizes the words in your paragraph

<u> - Is for underlining text

<small> - this can be used to make text smaller

There are a plethora of tags you can use to give your html page a little razzle- dazzle for your user to appreciate.

If you are curious on how web pages can have links and images included, there are tags for them as well! To have an image show in your webpage you simply use the <img> tag. What’s cool about this tag is that it is self closing, so you never have to worry about and ending </img> , thats not necessary!

To properly display your image you simply copy / paste the image address into your image tags like this:

<img src=" https://i.pinimg.com/236x/01/c6/f4/01c6f460f860a0c5d6a6c22d01716951.jpg ">

Which will display as:

That face we all make when we find the missing semicolon!!

The same concept will go for a <a> tags. This called an anchor tag, this defines a hyperlink, which is used for linking one page to another like this:
Welcome to Memoirs from History
By: Fatim Hemraj
Tags: True Crime, Publication, Updates, Fiction, History

Welcome to Memoirs from History

Hello and welcome!

Photo by the author

This is an update to let writers and readers of My Crime Fetish know I’ve decided to do some re-branding and change the name of my true crime publication from My Crime Fetish to Memoirs from History for two reasons.

Firstly, I was not able to use social media to adequately market the writers' stories due to the name (basically, the internet thinks the previous name sexualized crimes, and I can’t really blame them ie. fetish) Secondly, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to broaden the publication and add two more fields I love; history and fiction.

I absolutely love writing (and reading) anything history related as well as fiction that centers around mysteries and crime. Hopefully, this change will allow us to be more inclusive. That being said, I encourage anyone who wishes to write about true crime, history or fiction to send submissions to Memoirs from History.

You can send me an email at fatimhwriting@gmail.com with your Medium handle to be added as a writer. You do not need to have a draft. You may submit drafts via the publication once you have been added.

Thank you!

Fatim
I Can’t Imagine Giving My Child Away, But I’ve Met Parents Who Have
By: Carrien Blue
Tags: Ngo, Short Story, Trafficking, Child Protection, Migrants

But I have also never faced starvation. I have never scraped the bottom of a pot to get one last scrap and known that that is the very last thing my children or I will eat until we find a way to buy more food. I’ve never scavenged vegetables at the side of the road because I have to, because there is nothing else.

I would never… because I have never been there. But what would I do, if I were her?

What could I do? Wouldn’t I ask myself that every single moment of every single day? Wouldn’t I try everything, everything I could possibly think of? Wouldn’t I use every resource at my disposal, every tool?

I look into the faces of brave women who are doing that, every day. Women who fight to change the tide, to hold on for one more day, to keep going in the face of such difficulty. I see what they do. They do laundry by hand in buckets, determined that what little their family does have to wear will be clean. They cook delicious food over open fires, using vegetables I’ve never even heard of that grow wild in a nearby ditch. They wipe noses and they scold and they take sick babies to the doctor and THEY DON’T GIVE UP! They smile when they greet me, offering a cold drink as I sit on their floor, a miracle in a hot little village that has no electricity. They are mothers. WE are mothers. They touch my growing belly and ask how many months I have left to go, grinning if the baby kicks.
Unsupervised approaches for NMT
By: Desh Raj
Tags: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Machine Translation, Naturallanguageprocessing, Unsupervised Learning

Translation is one of those tasks in language where the arrival of deep learning systems, and in particular sequence-to-sequence, has been something like a boon. In less than 4 years since the first paper on Neural Machine Translation, software giants such as Google and Microsoft have already announced that their translation systems have almost completely shifted from statistical to neural. Gone are the days when researchers mulled over complex word and phrase alignment techniques, and yet fell short on several language combinations. With the latest framework, all you need are a million parallel sentences, and your system can then translate between this pair sufficiently well.

A million parallel sentences — that’s a little constraining, though! It is often difficult and sometimes even impossible to obtain a bilingual parallel corpus for many pairs of languages. In such cases, using a pivot language for triangulation has been found to be helpful. However, even in such supervised systems, the performance is still constrained by the size of the training corpus.

Monolingual data, on the other hand, is available in abundance, and a number of semi-supervised systems do use these, but mostly for the language modeling part of translation. For example, a naive system may perform word-by-word substitution and use a language model trained on the target language to obtain the most probable word order.

Recently, there have been 2 very similar papers (both currently under review at ICLR ’18) which propose to perform completely unsupervised machine translation. In this article, I will discuss both of these papers. A similar blog is available here, but I didn’t know of its existence until I was already halfway through this post.
Best-Laid Plans (Füstbement terv)
By: Joe Váradi
Tags: Poetry, Translation, Hungary, Family, Love

Best-Laid Plans

On the coach ride home — all the way —

I pondered no other:

What words will I speak to my dear

Long-ago-seen mother?

Will I whisper sweet and tender

To greet her, in case

Her arms, that once rocked my cradle,

Offer their embrace?

Thoughts a-plenty crossed my mind

Elegant and profound,

As the time appeared to stand still,

Though the coach rushed homebound.

Stepped into the modest chamber …

My mother flew to me …

I clung to her lips … silently …

As fruit clings to its tree.
I’ve Decided
By: Nathalie Amazan
Tags: Politics, Poetry, Life, Haiti, Resistance Poetry

8:46 moment of silence and remembrance, McCarren Park Gathering, July 2020.

I’ve decided to part my lips so my mouth can echo love

the type that may warm a room up

I’ve decided this may be enough for the night

for the pleasure of the sky when it lights

and the sanity of my mind.

What is my Black if not browned skin made of mud from the finest soil there is around

on the shores called home

I have never been to Haiti, or Ayiti

name the Indigenous knew

before occupied and made bankrupt

debt of pursuing freedom and justice

Why did we think they’d treat us differently in their territory?

My Dad Black skinned

My Mom Light Brown

birthed me somewhere in the middle of it all hoping on this side of the ocean we’ll get a shot at something

maybe there’s a hidden Dream somewhere

we just gotta be lucky

What is my Black if not dropping the accent of my name I forget it’s there most days

I forget where I am

My Mother’s tongue is not foreign

It’s only lost its way finding the route to my mouth

in ginger roots

soup joumou and bouillon

My Haitian is superstitions

dreams as warnings

concoctions made tea

rub oil on the feet and chest when sick

puffed pastry patties

bannann peze

maís con ti sel

coming home and finding mama Marie-Thérèse waiting for me to feed and feed and feed.

What is my Black if not care,

if not clinging to joy when it comes around

Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala, knows it may not come easy.

I find joy on lips of a woman whose touch reminds me of Earth we come from

whose hair may curl differently,

but whose meaningful stare stresses our struggles are beyond borders

I cling to this joy,

Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala, knows it may not come easy.

What is my Black if not impulse then,

if not listening to music as empathy in rhythm

if not being the best dancer but moving like I got every answer when beat drops of Konpa, Reggaeton, Hip-Hop, R&B hopping in my duffy

melodies of Ne-Yo blasting in mornings through my little ears

as my sister gets ready for high-school in the room we shared- I think, what would it mean to get that big?

To be 16

What is my Black if not looking forward to the future

that’s what they least expect

this Black is queer is

procreating life through art to save my soul

(it may be working)

is like forgetting about time like it’s all alright if God got us in Her hands of eternity where nothing too large, too great a burden shall overcome our souls

She made my skin hard to withstand the fire of the sun and soften when wet cuz trust is all we got with each other

My Mother’s tongue is not foreign.

It is finding its way.

I’ve decided my Black is to part my lips so much my mouth will echo love

the type that can warm a whole room up

I’ve decided this will be enough for the night

for the pleasure of the sky when She turns on the dim-lights

for the sanity

sanctity of my mind

I’ve decided.
Secret Messages
By: Nanji Erode
Tags: Humanity, Dance, Microfiction, Aliens, Code

Secret Messages

Figuring out the humans

Photo by Debashis RC Biswas on Unsplash

A group dance from a Bollywood movie was playing on a large screen.

“What the hell they are doing?”

“We are not entirely sure, sir. They are moving their arms and legs in a synchronized fashion. We watched hundreds of such clips, and no one knows what it means.”

“We thought we figured them out, and now this!”

“They may be signaling something. There could be secret messages buried in their movement. Our cryptographers are looking into it to break the code.”

“Ok, good. We are invading the earth in ten days, and we got to figure this out quickly.”
I Gave Him a Gum Job- Not Your Average Blow Job
By: Ashley Hruby
Tags: Sex, Sexuality, Relationships, Erotica, Oral

I have an issue. My teeth are too long and go into my sinuses, and my entire head became one colossal infection. The only option to keep me alive was to have the whole top row of teeth extracted from my mouth.

So now I have dentures on the top of my mouth. My husband brought up a gum job once, and I thought for the longest time that it didn’t sound too…appetizing.

I finally decided to surprise him. I did my nightly routine and started to clean my teeth but decided to keep them out just a little while longer.

I crawled into bed and smoked a joint with my husband like we do almost every night. I leaned over and cuddled into the crook of his armpit and started to play with his penis. His body jerked a little bit, and a moan escaped his throat.

I smiled and kissed down his body slow till I took him into my mouth slowly and moved my lips out of the way when I pulled back, so he felt the soft and cozy texture of my gum along his shaft.

His hand gripped the back of my head, and he pushed himself back onto me.

“Woah, What the Fuck?!”

His words made me smile with his dick still in my mouth. I sucked harder and felt his pre-come start to drip into my mouth and down my throat. It turned me on the way more than usual, and I almost couldn’t get enough.

I’m not one to gag during a blow job. The lack of teeth took on its feel, and he slid easier, so control was not in my hands…or mouth.

I began to add the tongue and get more profound than ever, so I could hardly breathe. He moved his hips so he could fuck my face hard. He rammed himself almost into my chest, and I could feel my spit mixed with his juices dripping from the sides of my mouth.

The sounds seemed to turn him on more since his grip tightened, and his sounds got more animal like.

His penis slowly got larger and began to pulse hard. He pushed my face down onto his dick as he thrust upward and held himself there. I felt his come slide down my throat while my tongue tried to push it back out, creating this new gagging noise.

His body wouldn’t let him pull away because the new feeling was so intense. However, I also didn’t try to pull out either. Being the reason someone had that surge through their body was exhilarating. He couldn’t move. He didn’t want to.

Between you and me…I didn’t want him to.

I would do that again in a heartbeat. Trying new things can strengthen relationships. Sometimes, giving new items to your partner can be exciting.

Once my teeth got pulled from my mouth, I felt disgusting in a lot of ways. I lost a lot of self-confidence, and after a few years, I decided to use my newfound issue to my advantage, and it worked out great for both of us.

I’ll be gumming my way to his balls again for sure.