fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Gastropod Gossip
By: Conservancy Of Swfl
Tags: Wildlife, Environment, Florida, Education

When exploring the Dalton Discovery Center here at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, one of the most popular attractions is the Touch Tank. Several of the resident animals are quite memorable and noticeable without much explanation; however, some of our other denizens are often left underappreciated by guests. One of these is a collective group that actually makes up the majority of the population of the exhibit: gastropods!

Gastropods are a class of mollusks and they represent 80 percent of the mollusk phylum (Myers & Burch, 2001). Snails and slugs fall into this category, and they are extremely widespread, occurring in every ocean and on every continent except for Antarctica!

Gastropod anatomy follows a general body plan, with variations that have allowed them to adapt to almost every ecosystem on Earth. Through their natural history, several groups have lost one of the main characteristics of a gastropod: a univalve shell.

Shells come in all shapes and sizes, and the animal makes its shell larger as its body grows by secreting different protein/mineral complexes through the mantle, (the membrane that lines the inside of the shell) Most gastropods also have a tongue-like appendage that is used for eating that is called a radula.

Radula viewed using a Scanning Electron Microscope. (Martín & Negrete, 2007)

Radulas are covered in small chitinous teeth, similar to a cheese grater, and can be highly specialized to fulfill specific needs. For example, many people keep freshwater snails in aquariums because they use their radula to scrape algae off of the glass and decor. Others use their radula paired with an acid to bore through shells of bivalves, like clams, to eat them.

In order to use this radula, however, gastropods have to be able to move around, which they do by using a very muscular “foot.” Fused to the top of the foot is aa structure called the “operculum.” It is positioned in such a way that when the animal twists and rotates back inside its shell for protection, the operculum fits over the opening in the shell, effectively sealing off the vulnerable body from predators.

Next time you visit the Touch Tank, look around for our multiple gastropods, and remember that even though they are slow, they are a very interesting set of animals!

Read more from the Education Department
TOUCH
By: Anto Rin
Tags: Touch Prompt, Happiness, Poetry, Love, Poem

A faint touch to the lapels of my soul,

Feathery,

Hardly perceptible,

Havoc across my incoherence.

I try to see through the restraints of the hypnotism,

Soon to fail,

That cloud my words,

Leaving my tongue in a tango of its own,

Making me fall short of my senses

I must need to hold myself, and gasp for breath.

I can’t.

I won’t.

I fall short desperately.

The touch I know about,

The touch that makes me know,

Diffident in its standing,

Yet materialising beyond my grief,

I am coaxed out of my misery.

Unsure in my pushing,

With hands used to daub tears,

The fervor of the touch

Comes as light to my ignorance,

Pertinence to my illusions.

The purported jargon

Of the touch

Creeps up my nerves,

Clicks below my conscience;

Its anchor will hold in my soul.

For my soul the touch must hold dear

To effect this dawn upon my emptiness.

The noise of the touch,

The feel of its prelude,

Makes me shiver.

Makes me want.

Touch me.

Touch me and you will know

How I feel,

How I rake through my days

In slots of desperate loneliness,

How my chasms are big,

Getting bigger each day;

That I believe you,

That I believe in you.
Day 37 with Bitconnect
By: Alex Muresan
Tags: Crypto, Bitconnect, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Investing

Today I’ve earned a total of $25.47.

Day 37

For tomorrow, I’m expecting a pending interest of 0.96%. This interest will be applied for the initial investment and the 4 reinvestments I’ve done so far. So, for tomorrow, I’m expecting a total return of (0.96%+0.1%) * 1280 + 0.96% * 100 * 4 = 13.57 + 3.84= $17.41.

Pending interest for 11.01.2018

For those who are new to this publication, I made an initial investment of 1280$ in Bitconnect to try this system and I’ve committed to keeping you up to date every day with the evolution.

If you want to start investing, register here with me (aleximuresan) as a sponsor and I will give you a 5% bonus on the initial investment.

See you tomorrow. Ciao.
We’re Launching! And this is just the beginning
By: Nate Simantov
Tags: Business, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Updates, News

Letter from Daniel Peled, Orbs President and Co-Founder:

For over a year, we have been working tirelessly to create a blockchain infrastructure that can help the technology live up to its vast promise. Watching a team of exceptionally talented developers commit themselves so strongly to this mission has been incredibly inspiring to watch, and we are very proud of what is being released. Read this post to see the full breakdown of what we’re launching.

Yet, to properly explain why this launch is such a big deal, we need to begin with the initial vision we had. For Orbs, blockchain offered a powerful potential to redefine the way systems work together. By providing a series of guarantees, public blockchains reduce the friction to collaboration and turn open source development into a distinct and powerful competitive advantage. In the coming days, our Co-Founder Tal Kol will be releasing a series of posts that break down these ideas, but suffice it to say it is not a small feat.

For us, this is a game changing concept.

It means that new types of relationships can be developed between people, businesses, economies and more. It means that products that could never have existed in the past can come to fruition. It means that concepts like transparency and openness can come to the center stage.

But, in a sector that has been beset by hype at the expense of delivery, we must go beyond words. And this is why the launch is so important. For the first time there is a product on the market that can leverage the public blockchain to solve some of the core questions the industry has grappled with. From fee structures and interoperability to the blockchain stack and a new approach to the private vs. public divide, Orbs is the first product to address some of the core challenges that have limited public blockchain usage.

And while this has been a massive endeavor, it is only the beginning. Because today our collaboration with you becomes more important than ever.

This platform is now public and in the hands of the entire community. It is now possible to begin the process of building a robust yet open ecosystem around our technology. We encourage you to take a close look at our code. We encourage you to join our ecosystem and take an active role in maintaining the network, securing it and giving it the necessary decentralized nature to make it trustworthy.

Today we are proud to release a massive leap forward for this project, but even more excited to be working together with our community to drive its future.

Daniel Peled

President and Co-Founder, Orbs
Amerika’da Freelance Ailesi Kuruyoruz
By: Mustafa Gerdan
Tags: Freelancing, Türkçe, Wolony, Aile, Amerika

Get this newsletter By signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices.

Check your inbox

Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription.
Bus Rides Through NYC
By: Dipali Gupta
Tags: Culture, Travel, Diversity, Lessons, New York City

I am taking a bus in NY, that goes from my neighborhood to Flushing. The bus makes several stops across various neighborhoods. I start from the first stop waiting in line with three other people. It is a sunny and warm day outside, so waiting for the bus does not seem to be as awful as it usually does. Its 4:25 pm and the elderly, white woman in front of me, comments on how the bus is late, I promptly check the “Transit” app on my phone and track the location of the bus. I tell her that the bus is around the corner and is just waiting at a stoplight.

The bus comes in two minutes and we are welcomed to an empty bus. The street is very busy with many cars and other buses. We make it to the next stop which is in front of a Starbucks and several people walk in with a Starbucks drink in one hand and their phone in the other. A group of high school girls who must go to the Catholic school within the neighborhood, walk-in with a frappuccino and dressed in the same uniform. They are all laughing really loud as they make their way to the back of the bus to commandeer the back row.

The bus starts to move and you can hear the high schoolers laughing again. Outside, I can see a variety of small cafes and Greek restaurants. A few stops later, we entered another neighborhood. The bus stops and Hispanic women and her 3 young children get on. They are all carrying bags filled with groceries. The woman speaks to her children in Spanish. Outside, you could see the Hispanic neighborhood with many small stores and Delis with Hispanic names. There is some graffiti within the neighborhood and a lot of kids playing soccer on the sidewalk outside of the apartment buildings.

The next stop the bus makes three elderly Asian women get on. They seem to be arguing about something in Chinese. The young couple that was sitting in the front stand up and offer their seats to the elderly women.

The bus now is on the freeway and the bus does not make any stops for a while. As I am riding on the bus, I see City Field. It is the stadium that now stands where Shea Stadium used to be. The ads are playing on the electronic billboard in front of the stadium. I also see a homeless man with a sign asking for money. One driver rolls down his window and gives him some cash.

We finally reach Flushing and the setting has changed completely. There are several people walking outside and so many cars that it is hard for the bus to move. The restaurants and stores are all labeled with Chinese characters. There are a variety of bakeries, shops, and malls.

The bus finally makes it to the last stop and everyone has to get off. I see the high school girls who now have the empty frappuccino container in their hands walk out, still laughing. The three Asian women are in front of me and they seem to have stopped bickering. Once I get off, I am immediately bombarded with the smell of meat that is being made in the food stand on the corner.
Tracking the spread of the Corona Virus using Geospatial Analysis
By: Anubhav Pattnaik
Tags: Tracker, Corona, Dashboard, Geospatial, Disease

Tracking the spread of the Corona Virus using Geospatial Analysis

A look into how geospatial analysis lets us predict how Corona Virus spread

Locale Corona Virus Dashboard

Our Open Source Dashboard to Track Corona Virus

First things first.

This weekend, our team at Locale took up a small project to build a non-apocalyptic, friendlier, minimal and easy-to-use visualization Covid19 dashboard. This dashboard helps you track the outbreak of the coronavirus in real-time as the outbreak unfolds. The dashboard can be accessed here. The data source for this project can be found here and the tech stack we used for this project was Vue.js, MapboxGL, DeckGL, Node.js.

The best part is that we have made the code open-source (so feel free to contribute).

A Brief History of Corona

Coronavirus (CoV) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV). The WHO recently declared novel coronavirus as a pandemic already spreading to at least 114 countries and killing around 4,600 worldwide.

A brief timeline of the spread of the novel corona-virus is here below

December 2019

China alerted WHO to several cases of unusual pneumonia in Wuhan, in the port city of 11 million people in the central Hubei province. The virus was unknown.

January 2020

Positive cases of coronavirus started arising in China. The first death in China was of an old man who had come in contact with the seafood market in Wuhan. By the end of January, China reported 7711 positive cases and 170 death cases. The novel coronavirus also spread to Thailand, Japan, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

February 2020

The deadly corona-virus (COVID-19) spread to many more countries. The global death toll surpassed 4,600 with the number of positive cases exceeding 126,100 cases. WHO declared the novel coronavirus as a pandemic affecting all continents except the Antarctic. Health experts all around the world are working round the clock to find a cure for this unusual pneumonia-causing coronavirus.
Introducing RewardMe Beta!
By: Mdt Blog
Tags: Beta, Cashback

Love Rewards? How about Double Rewards?

https://reward.me

After months of waiting, a new app of the MDT ecosystem is born. RewardMe is an app that helps users to earn extra cashback on top of what they have already earned.

Get rewarded with over 100 brands while still earning your every-day cashback or credit card programs.

It’s cashback, with double rewards, and double fun.

SIGN UP now!

The RewardMe Beta Testing Program

Sign up today to become one of the first group of users of the RewardMe App!

Here is a general timeline and more details about the close beta testing program:

October 26th — First Sign Up

Join today to be the very first group of RewardMe’s beta users. The first 50 users to sign up will be able to earn the“Early Adopter” points right from the app when they first signs in!

November 1 — November 15 RewardMe Features

We will send out confirmation emails to all the participants(with eligible email accounts). Participants will receive another email on how to download the beta version on their iPhone/or Android phones in the following weeks.

During this period, we will publish a series of educational blog posts/videos to help early adopters to get familiar with all the features and functions of the RewardMe App, and its double reward rules.

November 16— November 25 The User Research

We will send out invitations to selected participants to join the user research where users get to share detailed feedback and suggestions to the team. All user research participants will be able to receive a gift.

November 26 The Public Beta

On November 26th, the beta version would be public to all users.

Sign up today to become one of the first group of users of the RewardMe App!

Website: https://reward.me

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheRewardMe
5 Mistakes That Engineering Managers Make
By: Isabel Nyo
Tags: Work, Programming, Management, Leadership, Software Development

5. They Steer Away From All Kinds of Processes

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash.

In my article Four Things I Wish I Knew as the New CTO of a Startup, I wrote that not all processes are evil. It’s true. More than a decade ago, as a young and novice CTO, I ran an engineering department at a startup with no formal process for a year. Not having any kind of process meant it was hard for us to know if we were working efficiently. A lot of tasks couldn’t be shared because there was no way for a different person to know how to even begin doing something. Documentation was nonexistent. I was lucky that there was no staff turnover in the year that I was there. Otherwise, handover and onboarding new people would have been quite expensive — not to mention chaotic.

Another problem with not having any kind of process is that I felt like I was a gatekeeper for many things. I couldn’t scale myself.

Before deciding to dismiss all processes, engineering managers should widen their perspective, think, and learn about how a process could help or hinder them in creating high-performing teams.
The Best Jobs for Your Personality Type
By: Larry Kim
Tags: Jobs, Life Lessons, Psychology, Self Improvement, Life

Everyone has different strengths, weaknesses, and traits that lend to their success in different areas.

Personally, I love the analytical, data-driven nature of my work. And, not to blow my own horn, but I’m not bad at what I do!

But if you put me in another setting — say, a daycare center, or a nursing home — I just can’t see myself thriving as a caretaker, charged with the health and well-being of others.

We all have our strong suits.

Recognizing what type of personality you have is incredibly helpful in determining just what it is you should be doing with your life.

I found this recent study on the impact of personality on career achievement really interesting. While you very well could get involved in any career you choose, it’s important to realize that your personality type greatly influences your professional success and happiness on that path.

According to this infographic, there are four dimensions of personality:

Energy Style: introverts (51%) and extraverts (49%);

Thinking Style: sensors (73%) and intuitives (27%);

Values Style: feelers (60%) and thinkers (40%); and

Life Style: judgers (54%) and perceivers (46%).

Determining your personality type and thus settling on an ideal career is all about knowing how you fit into each dimension.

Calculating your personality type begins with identifying which of the two types in each of the four personality dimensions best describe you. For example, maybe you are an ESTJ (extravert, sensor, thinker, judger). Once your selections are made, you are led to one of four career categories:

Pragmatists: enjoy using logical systems to generate results;

Caretakers: enjoy work when they can do things that help others;

Theorists: interested in careers that allow them to think outside the box; or

Empaths: enjoy careers that make the world a better place.

Some people try over and over again to find the right career, but always seem to feel like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.

With an ESTJ personality, a career as a chef, loan officer, or general manager is right up your alley. Trying your hand as a home health aide (ISFP) or teacher (ESFJ) is not likely to yield a positive response and long-term career.

This infographic from Truity explains the common personality types and which careers are best for each.

Image credit: Business Insider

Originally published on Inc.com

About The Author

Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
water painting
Tags: Photos, Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Photography, Poem

The base of it slips out from under you.

The harder down you press, the faster it all slips away.

You hold air in your tight closed fist.

You keep water in your pocket.

Some things weren’t meant to be contained.
Imitating Thoreau
By: Brendan Marshall
Tags: Writers On Writing, Nature, Poetry, Philosophy, Self

For many years, I have savored time spent in the woods, alone to walk with nature and my thoughts. Perhaps, at times, with a canine companion or some distant Podcast, but rarely accompanied by any spouse, sibling, or even close friend.

The ritual provides inner peace and mental clarity — a form of moving meditation. If my mind is a puzzle, the woods has a particular way of finding the edge pieces to complete the frame.

Before moving to Massachusetts, I began reading about Henry David Thoreau and his famous Walden Pond. As I write this, the place where he began many of his best-known musings is just 10 miles away. Thoreau’s body of work and connection to nature, the simplicity and beauty injected into daily life, feels as natural to emulate as running into the ocean on a hot beach day.

And so I do my best to flatter him through imitation. The feature image and conjoining poem were both created while sitting, resting, reflecting, observing, and listening to the fertile scene around me. Breathing in the flora of a spring day, I feel rejuvenated, sharpening my mind for the many tasks at hand.

In the early days of learning about Thoreau, I stumbled upon this quote:

“His weakness in the eyes of the society of Concord was, in reality, his enduring strength and, in being so resolute to follow his own star, he succeeded in leaving his permanent mark on the culture of the world.” — On Henry David Thoreau

It stays with me, inscribed on public and private profiles alike, as a reminder of the inevitable resistance that we all face on the road to our destined place. Until that day comes, another long walk in the woods beckons.
In pivoting to paid, publishers run into tech headaches
By: Save Journalism
Tags: Updates, Digital, Advertising, News

Max Willens’ piece in Digiday explains how small and local news publishers are trying to adapt to a digital landscape where the rules have already been decided by giant tech companies.

While the digital advertising ecosystem is constantly changing, its list of dominant players and tools is largely settled, which compels vendors to build products that play well with key ad tech products. The consumer revenue space is different, with only a few 800-pound gorillas setting the rules for how publishers might build or manage relationships with consumers.

These tech giants are rolling out digital tools to help newspapers, magazines, and publishers, but their solutions are not one-size-fits-all.

What’s even worse? By providing these tools, tech giants get to take even more revenue from small and local newspapers.
Scalable Jaccard similarity using MinHash and Spark
By: Schaun Wheeler
Tags: Machine Learning, Spark, Data Science, Statistics

Scalable Jaccard similarity using MinHash and Spark

A simple algorithm makes it much easier to calculate similarity matrices at scale.

It occurred to me a little while ago that the Jaccard similarity coefficient has probably cropped up in my work more than any other statistic except for the arithmetic mean. If you have two sets of things (words, parts of words, attributes, categories, or whatever), you can take the number of things in the intersection of the sets and divide by the number of things in the union of the sets. The resulting metric is a meaningful measure of similarity that has the added virtue of being pretty easily explainable to non-technical folks.

Jaccard similarity gets a little difficult to calculate directly at scale. If you have a really large list of entity-attribute pairs, and you want an entity-by-entity similarity matrix, you basically have to do an inner join, group by entity and count, then do an outer join, group by entity and count, and then join the results of the two joins together. If your workflow uses Spark, as mine does, that’s a whole lot of shuffling. It’s expensive.

A while ago, a colleague pointed me to something that I feel like I should have known but didn’t: MinHash. For each entity, randomly permute the attributes, then hash them (convert them to integers), then take the minimum. Do that a bunch of times, then calculate the percentage of times the MinHashes from identical draws for two entities match. We can interpret that metric the the same way we would interpret the Jaccard similarity between those two entities’ attribute sets. So it brings the problem down from huge numbers of attributes to small numbers of hashes; but even better, it brings the problem from variable numbers of attributes — with all of the pains of key skew — to the same number of MinHashes across all entities.

Most everything from lines 36 through 52 in the following code snippet comes from Patrick Nicholson, the colleague who told me about MinHash, who adapted the hashing algorithm from Spark’s spark.ml.feature.MinHashLSH implementation. I built the join logic to turn the MinHash results into actual Jaccard similarities, and wrapped the whole thing in a function to make it more portable.

The function requires a Spark DataFrame, a string indicating the column of the DataFrame that contains the node labels (the entities between which we want to find similarities), and the column that contains the edges (the attributes we will hash). The function outputs a data frame with the two columns of node labels — each with a suffix as stipulated by the suffixes keyword argument — and the Jaccard similarity.

The Jaccard similarity becomes more precise with more draws. One hundred draws (the default in the code below) gives precision up to 0.01. Five hundred draws gives precision up to 0.005. One thousand draws gives precision up to 0.001. You get the idea.

This little thing has saved me a lot of time and headaches over the last several months. I thought it was worth sharing.
You are Not Powerless.
By: C. C. Francis
Tags: Life Lessons, Philosophy, Personal Development, Personal Growth, Politics

You are Not Powerless.

Build a brighter tomorrow, one act of kindness at a time.

Photo by Emery Meyer on Unsplash

Today’s politics are emblematic of today’s problems.

Modern American leaders exhibit incompetence straight out of a Mike Judge movie. But instead of coming together, we shrug. We point fingers.

It will never end — or so the Orwellian media/big tech billionaires lead us to believe.

It’s easy to give in right now. The world is on fire. Things feel hopeless. What can anyone do?

As it happens, a lot. We are each more powerful than we know.

Each of us is more than an individual. We are nodes in a global network, connected to a thousand others — each of them connected to another thousand. So on. So forth.

Think about that for a second.

Two degrees off from each of us is a million people. Three degrees? One billion people.

Marginally change one person, & you fundamentally alter thousands of lives. Eventually, millions.

Your actions change the course of time. One way, or the other. The beauty and terror of it is that you’ll never know what you’ve done. Not really.

So, own every day.
Share The Love 12
By: Martin Rushton
Tags: Writing, Short Story, Poetry, Fiction, Stlweekly

Share The Love 12

Have you had your five a day? Five poems, not fruit and veg!

Image by pasja1000 from Pixabay

Healthy eating has started and trying to keep track of the five a day is going fairly well. So with the extra exercise at work and the healthy eating, I should be back to being slim and fit soon :).

Have you noticed though how most concentrate on getting their diets sorted and an exercise regime that will make them fit and strong? What happened to the mental exercise and wellbeing.

As you are reading this you have made the first step to a healthier brain. Dr Rushton (I’m not really a doctor) prescribes you a five poem a day reading exercise.

In the last week, we saw Share The Love hit 300 followers and 114 writers. The quality of the work submitted is getting better and better.

Over the course of the next few days, our home page and layouts will change slightly. Hopefully it will allow more visibility for your work. As of this week, we are now limiting writers to 1 published piece a day. If you submit more they will be scheduled for the next day etc.

Welcome to our new editor Kendra Lavelle

I am pleased to announce that Kendra has now joined us as an editor. She joins Melissa Speed, Neha Sandhir S, Victor Sarkin and Martin Rushton.
The 3 Achievable Steps To Gaining Confidence
By: Geraint Clarke
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Lifestyle, Beauty, Self

Step #1 — Lie To Yourself

Photo by tony hernandez on Unsplash

We’ve all heard the saying “Fake it, til you make it”. I will fully stand behind that. With success comes confidence, which breeds more success.

In the beginning you need to lie to yourself. Putting a mask over your own insecurities and just taking the actions that confident people would.

I’m not saying lie to others, I’m saying keep a lid on your own fears short-term.

In 2006, when I was 16 years old I confided in a Manager I had at the time called Steve Robb. “You can definitely trust a man who has two first names” I thought.

He seemed to have it all. He used to walk out on lunch and come back with £300 cash from a few hands of Blackjack, drinking an ice cold Pepsi.

He was always going on new dates with beautiful women and always had the right thing to say.

One Friday evening after work, we went to a local bar for a drink where he spilled the beans on confidence and set me a challenge. I had to get a girls number before 7pm, without saying a word. The clock was ticking.

The closest I’d come to success before that was winning an award in school for best haircut, which thinking about it now, was definitely a joke.

Without knowing it, Steve had set me this task to teach me to never fear rejection. When I was successful I was euphoric, elated and proud. Every time I wasn’t, I knew I had to try again to win.

This small challenge changed my life and I’d like to thank Steve for that.

Although I never pursued any of those numbers, by the end of the night I understood the point wasn’t for them to like me, it was for me to start to like me.

Not everyone will like everyone. Rejection in job interviews, relationships and social situations is just a part of life. You can’t let it affect your mental balance.

If you’re a good person, it’s okay to be knocked back, as long as you remember to never take it personally.

The only thing you can expect from yourself is your best. As long as you’re giving that, you can be even be proud of a failed attempt.

In life, there will always be plenty of people who are better than you… and plenty of people who are worse.
Skewed Merkle Tree
By: Seulgi Kim
Tags: Blockchain, Codechain, Skewed Merkle Tree, Merkle Tree

in Both Sides of the Table
Love Is Blind, but Not the Neighbors
By: Amy Culberg
Tags: Self-awareness, Pandemic, Women, Self, Pandemic Diaries

My workaholic neighbor, Rachel, hadn’t been home in years. She was a badass at work. 18 hour days! Meetings during her commute. Then, came the pandemic and she was landlocked. That what she calls it. “Absolutely friggin’ landlocked.”

“At first I was bored,” she confessed. “After a few weeks, it was Charlotte Gillman ‘Yellow Wallpaper’ shit. “Now, I’m I’m Norman Bates fake-mom behind the curtain crap.”

What shocked Rachel the most was seeing people during the day.

A workman on her neighbor’s roof was perfectly positioned to look into her kitchen window while he took his cigarette break. At first, it bothered her, as he blindly stared in her direction as she washed the dishes. After a week, she started to pretend she was in a play. “I was an actress in college,” she told me. “I won awards. Broadway could’ve been my life.” She said started to wash her dishes more dramatically. “I extended my arms more,” she said. “I spread out my fingers. I used more soap to ensure he could see the bubbles from so far away.”

One early morning, when Rachel awoke to see the sunrise, she saw her neighbors making an at-home porn in their bathroom. “They have amazing bathrooms,” she said. “If I did one remodel during the pandemic, it would be to triple the size of my bathroom, so I could have a sauna and a hot tub. “They made some great design choices over there. I’m like, ‘Did they know a pandemic was coming?’”

Another fun discovery was her dowdy neighbor who lives in the coach house next door. “She dresses up as a Hello Kitty while she cleans,” Rachel said. “I think she made that costume herself. The talent of these people!”

Something not-so-great, was discovering the unknown neighbor who loved singing opera at all hours. “I wish I knew which house that noise was coming from,” she said, briefly removing her noise-canceling earphones. “I would leave a gift certificate for singing lessons. It’s just sad.”

What Rachel is most disappointed about is that she hoped she’d catch more neighbors cheating. “I’ve never been home for the day-to-day naughty stuff. When you work as much as I do, you don’t really know your neighbors. I was hoping during the pandemic I’d find out what everyone was up to. I think I’ll sleep in shifts to see when the weird stuff happens. I just don’t feel like this is an honest depiction of how my neighbors live. Somebody has got to be a murderer. Or, at the very least, an adulterer.”

The last time I saw Rachel, she looked great. I think she’s taking the washing dishes persona really seriously. She’s in full 50's housewife attire all the time now.

For her sake, I hope the pandemic ends soon and she can go back to work.

Truth is, I’ve been keeping my eye on her lately, and she’s one bubble short of a broken teacup.
Our Interview Process, And Getting Hired
By: Elyse Wyatt
Tags: New Zealand, Hiring, Recruiting, Software Development

Our company is made up of some of the brightest minds in New Zealand software development, and we believe life at Propellerhead is very rewarding.

We care deeply about our work, and are building software for some of the largest ideas in Government, Commercial and Non-profit Institutions in New Zealand.

Check out our recent work with Auckland Museum on their Linked Open Data Platform.

Because we live and die by the quality of the people we hire, it will probably come as no surprise that we’re discerning when it comes to hiring. But, we’re unique with what we’re looking for.

A baseline of skills and experience is important, but what we value above all else is your problem-solving ability, emotional intelligence, integrity, and team fit.

Interested in joining us? We’ve put together a few points on what to expect from our hiring process below. Also, make sure you check out current vacancies, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates.
Coming Soon: “In Corpore”
By: Shain E. Thomas
Tags: In Corpore, Film Releases, Sarah Jayne, Coming Soon, Ivan Malekin

In Corpore, co-directed by Sarah Jayne and Ivan Malekin, becomes available on digital platforms Saturday, 26 December 2020.

A sensual, sex-positive exploration of contemporary relationships, shown through four anthological stories set in Melbourne, Berlin, Malta, and New York.

In Corpore delves deep into the gray areas of relationships, exposing the consequences associated with love and lust, commitment and infidelity, traditional expectations and self-gratification.

Image Credit: IMDb.com

The film, made by the Nexus Production Group, stars Clara Francesca Pagone, Naomi Said, Kelsey Gillis, Sarah Timm, Frank Fazio.

Video Credit: Nexus Production Group

The same production house was responsible for Mirror of Filth, Anniversary, Life Improvised: Our Lady, Choir Girl, and the much acclaimed Friends, Foes & Fireworks.

In Corpore premiered in Australia on Thursday, 26 November 2020. Canada and these United States will see In Corpore released on digital platforms Saturday, 26 December 2020.
[Week #4— Rock or Not? ♫]
By: Defne Tunçer
Tags: AI, Machine Learning, Music, Data Science, Neural Networks

Logistic regression is a technique from the statistics field and provides a probability score for observations. It is a go-to method for binary classification problems, however for our multiclass problem, we applied Multinomial Logistic Regression through the one-vs-rest (OvR) scheme with a loss function.

Normalized Confusion Matrix

Support Vector Machine is a supervised learning method that can be used for classification. SVM works efficiently with high dimensional features even if the number of dimensions is greater than the number of samples. We preprocessed the data before applying Linear SVC using standard scaler to represent standard normally distributed data. Apart from Logistic Regression, SVM uses one-against-one approach for multi-class classification. This method is consistent, which is not true for one-vs-rest classification.

Since we have an unbalanced data, we were expecting our non-normalized confusion matrix to be appeared as this. We considered that having an unbalanced training and test data as reflecting the population, we would also be able to model the probability of appearing in real life situations.

As we observe our normalized confusion matrix, we figure out that as we are trying to preserve the percentage of the population we also accidentally miss-predicted most of the minority genres. As a future work we consider building genre-specific models for minority genres.

Furthermore, we are also planning to expand our implementation with Neural Networks and improve our current models.

Linear SVM, Logistic regression and KNN appear to have difficulties in capturing the non-linearities of the data, thus they achieve less accuracy than expected.

As for the related works, we view various research papers and real-word applications. Most of the studies done by exploring the timbre texture, the rhythmic content, the pitch content, or their combinations.

Among these, we have a curious report on the properties of the auditory human perception system proposed as a music genre

classifier.

DeepSound has done a music genre recognition system using visual representations of frequency distribution over time — a Convolutional Neural Network. Image processing on audio! We may also be interested in that topic in the future!
Blockchain to the Rescue
By: Adam Shoemaker
Tags: Blockchain, Fintech

Blockchain to the Rescue

For Once, a Poll That Has Nothing to Do with Trump

In another signal of the growing importance of blockchain technology, the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) recently polled its members seeking information about their plans to use the technology, and came up with some surprising results.

The WFE is the trade association of publicly regulated stock, futures, and options exchanges.

The WFE’s poll showed that more than 84 percent of members were either investigating or actively pursuing blockchain initiatives. The expected time for rollout of the technology ranged from less than three years to an indeterminate evaluation period. The results demonstrates the industry’s focus on gaining efficiency in new areas through its use, but also the obstacles that may slow adoption, primarily regulatory uncertainty.

WFE chief Nandini Sukumar characterized the results of the survey as positive, noting the “overwhelming number” of respondents who are already progressing work with distributed ledger technology. In its report, WFE acknowledged that blockchain’s usefulness is still uncertain, given “such as risks of maintaining security standards across a decentralized database, legal and regulatory uncertainty, and concerns around scalability.” Nevertheless, blockchain has the potential to allow for the combination of trading, clearing, and settlement, which are now separate steps (and are regulated as such).

Just think: If any of our presidential candidates had an 84% approval rating, they could take that to the bank in November.
Docker Express: Running a local SQL Server Express
By: Maarten Merken
Tags: Docker, Sql Server

In this <very brief> article, I’ll show you how to run a local, disposable SQL Server Express instance.

Prerequisites

Docker (for Windows)

The easiest way to ‘install’ a SQL Express, is to run a Docker container from the mssql-server-linux image. You can start one by running the following command from cmd or powershell.

docker run -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" -e "SA_PASSWORD=MyPass@word" -e "MSSQL_PID=Express" -p 1433:1433 -d --name=sql microsoft/mssql-server-linux:latest

This will start a background Docker container named ‘sql’. The SA password is MyPass@word and it should be available through the connection string:

Server=localhost,1433;Initial Catalog=MyDb;Integrated Security=True;User Id=sa;Password=MyPass@word;

The Docker container exposes the container port 1433 to the localhost on 1433, this can conflict with any possible SQL instance you have running on your machine. To fix this, either stop the running SQL instance via services.msc or run the container on another host port.

docker run -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" -e "SA_PASSWORD=MyPass@word" -e "MSSQL_PID=Express" -p 1439:1433 -d --name=sql microsoft/mssql-server-linux:latest

The command above will run a SQL Express instance on port 1439, your connection string needs to be altered as well:

Server=localhost,1439;Initial Catalog=MyDb;Integrated Security=True;User Id=sa;Password=MyPass@word;

Connecting via SSMS should be fairly straightforward:

Starting and Stopping the sql container

Normally, when your machine boots up, Docker for Windows starts up any containers it had running when shutting down. If, for some reason, your sql container is down, or malfunctioning, you can start and stop it manually.

docker start sql docker stop sql

Backing up data

The running sql container can be seen as a volatile entity, if you remove the container, the data is gone with it.

docker rm -f sql

To keep your data, you’ll need to mount a Docker volume.

A Docker volume maps a folder from inside a container to a path on the host. In the sample below, we’ll map the C:\mount\sql folder on our Windows host to the data folder from the mssql-server-linux container, on path /var/opt/mssql/data

docker run -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" -e "SA_PASSWORD=MyPass@word" -e "MSSQL_PID=Express" -p 1439:1433 -d --name=sql -v //c/mount/sql:/var/opt/mssql/data microsoft/mssql-server-linux:latest

Now, you can backup your database using SSMS and copy the .BAK file from the C:\mount\sql folder.
Jump: a faster way to open your GitHub repos
By: Dave Gaeddert
Tags: Software Development, Electron, Open Source, React, Github

A couple months ago, I realized just how much time I spend doing this:

Open Chrome

Cmd+T for a new tab

for a new tab Start typing the name of a repo

Backspace because it’s not showing up in my Chrome suggestions

Type it a little differently

Backspace all the way and start with https://github.com/dropseed/...

Finally see the one I’m looking for, arrow down and hit enter

Once we really started proliferating repos, especially for dependencies.io, it became really obvious just how painful this was getting to be.

So, as a developer would do, I “developed” some shit.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to try Electron for a while (I’m a “try new things I don’t fully understand” kinda guy). After some recent (good) experiences with Create React App, I thought that might be a good place to start. That actually did work ok for a little bit, but eventually I hit the point where it felt like I had to “eject” it to get what I needed done. All of the sudden I had a whole bunch of extra scripts and config files, with very little idea of what was really happening and a cluttered repo to boot. Someday maybe I’ll dig deep into JS and figure those things out, but it’s not what I use everyday and didn’t want to take the time. A bunch of bumbling around and I re-landed on Electron Forge and now have what feels like a manageable setup with the parts I understand and care about in front of me, and the rest abstracted away. All of that is to say, if you’re starting an Electron app for the first time and don’t want to get bogged down in all of the details, I highly recommend taking a look at electron-forge.

Anyway, the point is that I now have an ultra-streamlined workflow for opening my GitHub repos.

It looks more like this:

Cmd+J to open Jump (no matter what application I’m in currently)

to open Jump (no matter what application I’m in currently) Type 3–4 characters of the repo name (p.s. fuzzaldrin is pretty handy for filtering this kind of thing)

Hit enter

And it literally looks more like this:

Not bad, right?

It is by no means perfect, but it does in fact do the job. And by, “do the job”, I mean that I use it 30+ times a day and shudder in disgust if I’m at a computer where it isn’t installed and realize I have to go back to, “the old way of doing things.”

You can download the latest release of it here: https://github.com/dropseed/jump/releases/latest

Pull requests are very, very welcome!
Benchmarking xgboost fast histogram: frequency versus cores, many cores server is bad!
Tags: Benchmark

If you have no idea about what topology to use… if you want a balanced server performance good for memory heavy workloads (like fast histogram xgboost):

You may notice our Dual Xeon has some issues… let’s clear it out here:

By changing the CPU topology, you are changing how the memory is allocated and shared.

For insurance if you have 2 NUMA nodes from 2 socket CPUs with 10 cores each and 256GB RAM evenly spaced, each CPU can access a maximum of 128GB locally, and 128GB remotely via a slower QuickPath Interconnect (QPI).

If you tell the operating system to use a 20 socket with 2 core each topology, you are saying to the guest scheduler “we have 20 memory banks of 12.8GB each”. Therefore, you are playing with lower memory banks, but very confined addresses in memory which will speed up when not using much RAM (ahem Cinebench R15), but fail very hard when using memory bound programs (ahem xgboost fast histogram). Hence, 40 socket and 20 socket failing hard in performance.

But for the case of 2 socket and 20 cores, the guest scheduler is putting the work not evenly because it cannot see it should not attempt to schedule to hyperthreaded cores. The host scheduler itself will try to fix it, causing again a slowness and wrong memory assignments. But for the 1 socket system with 40 cores, you just schedule as is and let the host scheduler do your scheduling job, so you get efficiency in allocating RAM at the right spots out of the box.

As the 1 socket 40 cores, and the 2 socket 10 cores 1 thread are similar, they perform similarly well: on 40 cores you do not have time to lose by scheduling on the virtual server, because the host can schedule “by itself” correctly and fast. Meanwhile, for our 2S/10C/1T topology, the guest scheduler is doing the work of attempting to schedule correctly, and will get it right most of the times (leaving the host scheduler with not much to do other than listening to the jobs appropriately requested).
Open-sourcing Teletraan, a code deployment system
By: Pinterest Engineering
Tags: Teletraan, Code, Deployment, DevOps, Open Source

Baogang Song | Pinterest engineer, Infrastructure

Teletraan is a code deployment system we built to deploy hundreds of our internal services. It supports tens of thousands hosts and has been running in production for over one year. Teletraan empowers engineers to deliver their code to Pinners quickly, safely and reliably, at scale. As shared in a previous blog post that details Teletraan’s features, we’re proud to announce Teletraan as our latest open-source project. Check out GitHub for all the code and documentation.

The benefits of using Teletraan

Teletraan is designed to do one thing — deploy code. Not only does it support critical features such as zero downtime deploy, rollback, staging and continuous deploy, it also has convenient features, such as displaying commit details, comparing different deploys, notifying deploy state changes through either email or chat room, displaying OpenTSDB metrics and more. Teletraan doesn’t support container-based deploy yet, but it’s on our roadmap to support in the future.

How to integrate with Teletraan

Teletraan is designed to be a flexible building block. It’s highly configurable and not opinionated on the programming languages your applications use. You can plug Teletraan into existing release workflows, if the following requirements met:

Run Deploy Agents on each host through your provisioning process

Add Deploy Scripts into your applications

Publish build artifacts to Teletraan in the end of each build

For additional information, check out our detailed documentation.

What’s next

We use Teletraan heavily. Currently we have about 500 deploys per day, including the auto deploys. Teletraan is constantly under active development to make it even better. This year, among other features, such as finer deploy velocity control, sharing common deploy scripts, we’ll add support for container-based deploys. Stay tuned for future development.

Acknowledgements: Teletraan was built by Jinru He, Nick Dechant, Linda Lo and Baogang Song from the Cloud Management Platform team, a subteam of the Infrastructure team that drives reliability, speed, efficiency and security for Pinterest and its infrastructure.