fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Improving Employee Well-Being at the Core
Tags: Management, Leadership, Execution, Employee Well Being, Strategy

We live in an age where our people are deeply valued, yet we overwhelm them with non-stop demands feeding their ongoing sense of overwhelm. So, what are we doing to solve this problem?

Today’s organizations are trying to provide more health and well-being programs than ever with the corporate wellness industry totaling $50 Billion last year and growing rapidly. While employee well-being is a prominent focus for many leaders today, with companies providing programs such concierge services and yoga, not much is being done to help the root causes of lack of well-being and ongoing stress.

This stress is magnified at the management levels (top 30% of an organization) as the demands and complexity of their roles continue to increase. These valuable and influential leaders direct the effort that is expended every day in every organization. Yet too often, leaders and managers are operating in reactive mode with demands and deadlines from all directions. It is a challenge to focus through the noise and often feels like a job that is never done. This is a major contributor to stress at work leading to many of the health issues we experience.

It is vital that organizations address some of the root causes of stress, such as lack of clarity and lack of focus at the collective and individual levels. Building an organization where there is an ongoing collective commitment to identifying, connecting to and focusing on what matters most will get to the heart of solving this pervasive problem. We must give clear direction and support a culture where every leader and manager is empowered to make the choices necessary to focus on the essential. This focus and clarity will contribute significantly to decreasing stress at work. Doing this consistently, across an entire organization, will create one of the greatest well-being programs you can imagine!

Read Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter CEO Daily newsletter. highlighting the importance that CEO’s must place on this critical issue. It reinforces the fact that employee wellness cannot be outsourced to HR. It must be an integrated priority for all leaders across an organization.
The Vandalist
By: Winslow Thornhill
Tags: The Junction, Graffiti, Fiction, Short Story

Photo by Fleur on Unsplash

“It doesn’t need to look perfect,” she said. We turned left at the light and headed down that street where I used to live when I was… don’t remember. I think I remembered the low brick ranch with the carport on the left. My head craned as we went by. I fabricated a memory of me pushing Gabby down the swooping driveway, full run speed over and over again. I told myself I remembered the bounce of the suspension system. Big rusty springs.

My memory hit a possible snag. Where’d we find that thing? There was no possiblitly. Dad? Not an English speaking guy. Kept to himself mostly. Mom stayed in the back. Everything we had came through the store or we’d found it somewhere. Nothing was brought with us. But still, my brain was drawing a vivid picture for me complete with honeysuckle smells and the warmth of fresh spring with damp wafts of just opened sticky flower buds. I resolved that it had all happened. I ended with the crack of a bat, the sound she made when the carriage collapsed and her baby skull hit the slab. The sound brought my mother and father worried onto the porch. They looked at me. I ran.

Amy made another turn and there lay Susie that afternoon in the drainage ditch. I’d found her while walking Jocko. The rest was lights and lots of raised voices and eyes and questions I had no answers for. Maybe that’s why we moved. I don’t recall being down this road since then and that was many years ago.

We pulled into a gravel driveway. Amy rolled down the window and shut off the engine. She grabed the pack of Camels on her side of the dashboard and lit one.

“It doesn’t need to look perfect,” she said again. I didn’t respond. I just looked out the windshield at the side of the barn. “Paint’s in the back.” she said reaching down to release the trunk. She’d paid me already so what was I waiting for? She was going to smoke her cigarette and watch.

I got out and went around to the back of the car and caught her eyes in her rearview mirror watching me. I lifted the trunk. Inside were the spray cans and blue throwaway gloves I said I needed.

“Make it big,” she said. I want that bitch to see it every morning.

I got to work.
The New-Look Cavs and Their Playoff Hopes
By: Tristan Kwok
Tags: Sports, Cleveland Cavaliers, NBA

Jordan Clarkson and Lebron James (VIA: lebronwire.usatoday.com)

In the NBA 2017–2018 season trade deadline, the Cleveland Cavaliers pulled off an insane trade to help give them the boost they needed to once again be at the top. By trading away Isaiah Thomas, Derrick Rose, Jae Crowder, Channing Frye, Iman Shumpert, and Dwayne Wade, the Cavs were able to trade away old players for younger bench scorers. Jordan Clarkson, Larry Nance Jr., Rodney Hood, and George Hill were all traded to the Cavs.

It has been seen in the last 2 games that the new Cavs are looking like a championship contender. A new-found team chemistry is there, and the players are starting to get fired up entering the All-Star weekend. In their last 2 games, the Cavs faced 2 championship contenders; the Boston Celtics and the Oklahoma City Thunder. They blew out the Celtics, and beat the Thunder in 8. With those 2 wins, the Cavs have yet again solidified themselves as a championship contender, but we have to see if this chemistry carries it’s momentum through the All-Star weekend, and throughout the NBA playoffs.
The #TeachRecyclingEarly Manual Project [TREM]
By: Iccdi Africa
Tags: Schools, Environment, Education, Climate Change, Recycling

Improper Waste Management is a major challenge in Nigeria. Lagos which is the most populous state in the country currently emits an estimated 30,000 tons of waste every day.

Teach Recycling Early Manual Project [TREM]

Large scale migration to the state has led to a scramble for scarce resources and space which in turn has led to increased man-made activities such as landfilling and construction of infrastructures to meet the need of the diverse population.

These have subsequently led to an increase in its environmental challenges such as waste accumulation, flooding, among others which are detrimental towards the conservation /survival of the biodiversity, natural landscape, environment, and even human lives.

Now, scientists and climate enthusiasts alike beckon to everyone for urgent solutions to these detrimental factors which plague our societies today and directly or indirectly leads towards climate change.

In the wake of these negative conditions, International Climate Change Development Initiative (ICCDI), a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and currently a leading youth voice on Climate change saw the need to develop a short, basic and concise manual on the practices of Recycling called Teach Recycling Early Manual (TREM) and the Teach Recycling Early Project (TREP) to reduce waste (especially plastics) emission to the barest minimum.
Consumed
By: Eashan Reddy Kotha
Tags: Poetry, Love, Fire, Haiku, Life

Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.

Follow
The Friday Fix Story Prompt for August 7th, 2020
By: Justin Deming
Tags: Writing Prompts, The Friday Fix, Creativity, Writing, Fiction

The Friday Fix Story Prompt for August 7th, 2020

Theme: Absence & Presence

Photo by Akshar Dave on Unsplash

First off, I hope all is well! Secondly, thank you for reading this and for supporting The Friday Fix.

For the month of August, let’s take a look at opposites and use them as inspiration to write some microfiction.

In your story responses, you’ll need to think about two specific words and consider which one provides a stronger pull. You’re even allowed to blur the lines and write about both. Don’t worry, there’s no right or wrong approach here — no incorrect path to take.

With that said…which one will you choose?

Story Prompt for Friday, August 7th, 2020

Our first opposites are absence and presence.

Prompt: write a fifty-word story that does one of the following:

ties into or relates to the idea of absence

ties into or relates to the idea of presence

involves both ideas (absence and presence), somehow

As long as your story lands in the ballpark, it will be considered for publication on August seventh.

As always, please leave a comment or question if you need anything.

More importantly, have fun — and happy writing!
Celer Network 66th Weekly Project Progress Report (12/2–12/6)
By: Celer Network
Tags: Celerweekly, Celernetwork

Dear Community,

Happy Weekend! 🙌 Here is our 66th weekly project progress report on our community building and technology development! Meanwhile, you can also follow our Twitter account for more updates from Celer Network.

CelerX now has its own social media accounts!

Follow us at Twitter (@celer_x), CelerX Facebook Page, Instagram (@celerx) and CelerX YouTube!

Past Events:

1. CelerX Holiday Lucky Draw

Thank you all for participating in #CelerX holiday lucky draw!! The campaign is officially over. Please stay tuned! We will announce the lucky winners soon. Hooray! Happy holidays!

2. The Binance Nigeria AMA Series with Celer Network

Our co-founder Mo did an AMA at Binance Nigeria telegram group with the Nigeria community. Thank you all for joining us and asking questions!

Technology:

Mobile:

Finalizing the tournament feature for internal testing next week

Added flow to allow users to update the username

Studied industry’s best practice and made prototypes for releasing game-style apps and a gaming SDK

Backend:

Deployment & testing of new payment and reward features

Continued development of Q4 OSP features

Continued SGN end-to-end integration testing

Community:

Twitter: 18,574

Telegram: 23,936

Wechat: 9,797

Thank you for reading our 66th weekly report! Please join our telegram group to stay in touch and ask us questions!! We will see you next week! 🙌

Download CelerX now!

Follow Celer Network:
Motion Layout in Android
By: Jay Patel
Tags: Animation, Constraintlayout, Motionlayout, Android App Development, Android

Motion Layout is a layout that helps to create an animation and motion in your app. It is a subclass of Constraint Layout. This layout has complete declarative attributes in the XML, and that’s all — no complicated math for creating animations.

TL: DR;

The fundamental idea behind this is an object moving from one point to another in the given flow of time can be a source of animation which means the object must have some starting and endpoints.

We can see some of the critical features of the Motion Editor, which are similar to “Adobe After Effects”.

Requirements

Firstly and most importantly, the constraint layout which are used right now in the beta version, can’t be used for production use. Still, you can download the latest developer preview of Android Studio 4.0 Canary for this purpose with loads of several updates. You can always have the option to install two Android Studio for keeping your production and beta install separately. You can download it from here and follow the installation in a different folder and change the name of the folder “Android Studio Preview.” Check out this link for keeping multiple versions of Android Studio.

Create an Empty Project.

Importing the constraint layout 2.0 version to your build.gradle file.

dependencies {

implementation ‘androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.0.0-beta3’

}

To create an animation, we must have a start and end layout XML with a Motion Scene XML.

Add the following code in the layout XML file activity_main_start.xml

Layout for the starting position.

and activity_main_end.xml

Layout for ending position.

Lastly, create an XML directory and inside it create a layout for your Motion Scene, activity_main_motion_scene.xml

Basic motion scene.

Well, we just created a Basic Motion Layout.

A basic animation with Motion Layout.

Motion Scene consists of Transition, Constraint Sets, Constraint, and Custom Attributes of the layout.

Transitions carry the basic motion properties like start and end constraint set. The duration is in milliseconds.

The Motion Scene has OnSwipe and OnClick events to control the event by swipe or click.

At a more advanced level, when we want a path alteration between the start and endpoints, then we can use the Key Frame attribute with the positioning of keys. The keyframes are also identical to that of After Effects.

You can find out more in the Motion Layout Examples with XML files.

Some of the GIFs.

Custom Attribute in Motion Layout

Changing the keyframe position.

Keyframe position

This example uses <KeyFrameSet> to alter the Y position of view during motion.
Mobile Game Marketers Share Video Ad Strategies for 2018
Tags: Press Release, Advertising, Marketers

Mobile Game Marketers Share Video Ad Strategies for 2018

What are the emerging video ad formats that mobile game publishers should be aware of this year? Tapjoy’s Sarah Chafer chats to [a]list daily.

What are the emerging video ad formats that mobile game publishers should be aware of when allocating their budgets for the upcoming year? Several industry leaders, including Tapjoy’s own VP Performance Sales, Sarah Chafer, share their thoughts with [a]list daily.

According to Chafer, while “YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are excellent sources of user acquisition”, they are “inherently different environments than mobile games”, explaining that rewarded ads placed in other games often offer developers the best opportunity for discovery.

Why? Because in a game, players clearly understand that they’re watching videos in exchange for in-game currency, boosts or other benefits. “Not only does this defined value exchange generally drive greater advertiser return on investment, but studies have shown that consumers are in a more relaxed and open state of mind when playing mobile games than when engaging with social networks, so they are more receptive to hearing advertising messages,” she added.

This relationship means that video ads within mobile games have better engagement, higher completion rates and ultimately bring in better quality users. There are no wasted impressions when it comes to using mobile games because publishers know that the audience is already interested in gaming.

To learn more, read the full article on [a]list daily.
Trying Not To Be A Starving Artist
By: Lauren Tashiro
Tags: Chasing The Dream, Mental Health, Journey, Depression, Recovery

Trying Not To Be A Starving Artist

“You should get a stable job in a science field.”

It was a common phrase in my home. I grew up hearing it every time I expressed my dream to make it as a writer. Both my parents are scientists, each with their own ideas of being a creative. Neither of them are creatively-inclined.

Somehow two scientific people made a creative person: me.

Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash

The constant berating and comparison in my childhood has stuck with me even now. I compare my art to others’ and feel inadequate. There has never been a moment when I’ve felt like something I’ve done was good enough.

So they pushed me to take science-based classes all through high school and into university. And honestly, it made me miserable. Even though I took art courses and writing courses, the work I had to do was draining.

I wrote as much as I could in high school and university, but at the end of it all, I felt burnt out. Like there was no creativity left in me. Trying to complete a NaNoWriMo during university didn’t help either.

It’s been 5 years since I graduated university.

It’s been 5 years since I lost the will to write.

It’s been 5 years since my plans to teach in Japan were dashed by a failed interview.

I’m just starting to recover now. I owe it to my husband for pushing me to write.

Currently, I work in a bakery. I took a baking program after my goals were crushed by the JET interviewers. Everyday I push my body to get food out to the public and I feel rewarded. But I come home and feel exhausted. Mentally and physically taxed. I struggle to write after work.

Knowing how competitive the book market is doesn’t help with motivation.

That’s why I took a Technical Writing Program. It brought me back into using my voice while trying to use the lessons I learned taking university writing courses. It’s writing for catering to others’ wants and voices.

Technical Writing is a stable job. There are always jobs for Technical Writers. They make good money as long as they find a job. The work can be quite dry, having to write manuals or operations guides. The work can be interesting, depending on the field you go into.

But I want to be an author.

At 27, I’m nowhere near achieving my goal of publishing a novel. My career as a Technical Writer is at a stand-still, because of my lack of experience. But I need experience to get a job.

So I keep plugging away.

I keep trying to write.

I keep trying to find a stable job.

Writing for a living isn’t an easy go. It’s good to have a backup plan. I’m currently on the back-up of the back-up plan. I’ve picked up other hobbies to keep my creativity going. Even though I’m not writing every day, I’m trying to do something creative.

Like most people — and me, I’m sure that your path to your dream won’t be straightforward. It’s okay to take your time to figure out who you are. I’m still working on figuring that out too.

I’m just hoping that my hard work will pay off eventually.
About Felicia C. Sullivan
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Freelancing, About Me, Felicia C Sullivan, Marketing

The Details: It’s About Experience…And Being Human

A data-driven marketer and storyteller for over two decades, who has straddled the agency and client-side fences, I deliver simple solutions to complex problems. I care about customer lifetime value over campaign ROI.

My 3-step brand-building method — where your customers are the hero of the story — sets me apart from the pack. Customers aren’t a line item on a P&L — they’re discerning and overwhelmed by choice. We live in an era where problem-solving isn’t enough. Values are no longer a tagline.

Being decent is not a campaign.

I help businesses build better brands for customers that demand we be better humans.

My experience has cultivated an enviable reputation for delivering the wow factor, backed by a sound brand and storytelling strategy that drives long-term business results.

I’ve been telling stories since I was six and I haven’t shut up since.

TL;DR: I make marketing simple.
Unanswered
By: Samantha Lazar
Tags: Trauma, Family, Loss, Sky Collection, Poetry

My mother writes a letter

at five in the morning.

To ask for why she

Still cannot tell us

Everything

The letter cannot be mailed

Of course to ghosts

Gone before spilling

What was already swept

Before my mother was old enough to peek

On the fashionable fixing the early fifties

With a Crown on ice

Before heading out to wager

the generation two horizons away

What happens when

Carried to tee off

or boated through fog

Is left debt

Lost?

Perhaps a game —

the King and Queen

Pushed aside

To leave behind

Legacies of lies

And now the secrets

Still left unspoken

Barely between

Broken men

Who must have choked

Down the clue?

Unwoven by the women

Will be

Our family truth.
This Is What It's Like To Write Through Mental Illness
By: Shannon Ashley
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Depression, Self, Writing

Writing through mental illness is a lot like loving to sing but being unable to control your pitch. Your can feel your voice crack at the worst times. It's awkward and deflating, and the cracking sometimes happens for no particular reason.

In my case, I brood and write into a diary:

Nothing remarkable happened today. My daughter, Sophie and I went to Chattanooga with her Nana, where I picked up some clothing, and then we stopped at the local Walmart.

We came home, I made Sophie lunch, and I actually ate pretty healthfully myself. Which is kind of a huge accomplishment for me these days. Sophie played with toys, and I wrote. But nothing I wrote felt right.

Nothing I wrote felt good enough.

Nothing I wrote flowed.

To be honest, I worked on 10 different stories that went nowhere.

And I don’t know why.

I try to trace my off-kilter feelings back to their origin. But it’s hard to say when I know that part of the issue comes down to old fashioned depression and anxiety.

Oh, that’s right — I am mentally ill. I actually forget about my mental illness lately — mostly because I’ve been doing so well.

In addition to depression and anxiety, I’ve got borderline personality disorder. So in the past, I used to remedy my low moods by getting my validation from other people.

Other people meaning men.

Men meaning broken, immature, and unhealthy men.

Whoops.

But I don’t do that anymore.

It’s an odd thing when you recognize the habits which used to bring out an old you. And when you watch yourself make yet another decision that you don’t want to be that person anymore.

I don’t want to be a nearly forty-year-old woman who gets her validation from anybody else. Not just the wrong guys. But anyone.

Is this growth, I wonder? To run smack dab into a day where I can’t write… but at least know what dark alleys of my past to avoid?

I can’t figure out if writing is good for my mental health, or if my mental health has improved because I’m doing something I love. Something I’m good at.

Except for today, of course. I am not a decent writer today.

So what does that make me?

On days like these, my mind swims with labels determining who or what I am. Or are the labels swimming through my mind?

At any rate, my mind feels like it’s swimming to stay afloat.

Ex-wife.

Mother.

Daughter.

Ex-mistress.

Baby mama.

Distant friend.

Sister.

Aspie.

INFP.

Ex-everything.

Survivor.

Fat.

Writer? Nope, not today.

See, nothing remarkable happened today. Nothing bad.

Yet all day, I find myself on edge. Wondering how I’ll ever write coherently tomorrow.

Praying that mental illness will not swallow me up and eat me alive.

How do writers get through these slumps where we suddenly know nothing at all?

I suppose we write anyway and write until the words flow and feel right again.

Nothing remarkable happened today. I don’t expect anything remarkable to happen tomorrow.

But I always hope to find my voice again.
Javascript 暱名函數
By: Bambe Chen
Tags: Anonymous Function, Front, JavaScript, HTML, Jquery

in Both Sides of the Table
Can Google catch up to Apple and Spotify in the music streaming wars?
By: Simon Owens
Tags: Music, Tech, Google, Streaming, Spotify

This is an exciting time if you work in the music industry, because for the first time in years it’s starting to see actual growth.

That’s mostly because of the rise of music streaming apps like Spotify and Apple Music. Collectively, they generated over $2.5 billion in the first half of this year. Streaming revenue now makes up 50% of all music industry revenue.

But while YouTube has been a major player when it comes to free, ad-supported streaming, it’s lagged behind Apple Music and Spotify when it comes to the more lucrative paid streaming.

We recently learned that Google is working on a new music streaming service called Remix, and it’s currently negotiating with major music labels.

Will this finally allow Google to compete with Apple and Spotify?

To find out, I interviewed Sam Gutelle, a reporter at Tubefilter who covers the online video streaming market. Watch our interview below.
Banana Gate - The banana that make the web go crazy!
Tags: Social Media, Blog, Bigdata, Analytics Tool, Analytics Platforms

Imagine to go to a grocery store, buying a banana, sticking it to a wall with a duct-tape and selling it for 120k bucks.

This is what Maurizio Cattelan has done, an Italian artist who certainly needs no introduction.

His new work, called “Comedian”, was shown at Art Basel in Miami Beach. It has been a huge success, so much so he sold two bananas.

But when we thought that everything would be over there, David Datuna, American artist of Georgian origin, takes a banana from the wall and eats it.

However, neither the artist (Cattelan) nor the museum will proceed to court.

So, what people are thinking about it?

The topic has literally exploded through Twitter from 12/4/2019 to 12/11/2019, in just 3 days 33.641 users generated almost 215,000 interactions and every day these numbers grows more and more.

With much surprise (even by this writer) it has shown that Comedian is well liked by 63% of users, while the other 37% has a deep feeling of disapproval (69%) and anger (15.3%).

Going further into the research we can also state that:

Pro Bananas:

The 93.7% lives between U.S. and UK while 6.3% are Italians .

lives while . They are within 18 and 34 years old .

. The 61% are male and 39% are women .

and . The prevailing interest is Art, especially in Photography.

Cons Bananas:

The 74,1% lives between U.S. and UK while 25,9% are Italians .

lives while . They are within 25 and 44 years old .

. The 65% are male and 35% are women .

and . The prevailing interest is Politics, especially Trump supporters (and of Salvini for the Italian ones).

Summarizing the infos that coming out from these Data we can say that:

Who speaks well about Bananas knows Art and has an age that suggests a more mature critical thought.

Normalizing the data, the”Comedian” is absolutely appreciated abroad the Italian country, while in Italy people discuss almost exclusively about its price.

Let’s see now to the “David Datuna” phenomenon:

The 74% of users liked David’s action, he gets a huge success that is slowly overcoming the Cattelan’s work.

There are those who have decided to name his performance “The Hungry Artist” and those who are ready to start a crowdfunding campaign if someone will decide to charge to Datuna his expensive breakfast.
Part 2 — The Math Behind Optical Flow
Tags: Computer Vision, Self Driving Cars, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Autonomous Vehicles

Part 2 — The Math Behind Optical Flow

Part 2 of GPS Denied Navigation

This is Part 2 in a series on building software for GPS Denied Navigation in advanced aerospace robotics.

In Part 1 of my series in GPS Denied Navigation I showed some simple code on how to detect features from video using opencv.

Now that we can recognize features between image sequences, we need to know how to use them.

Optical flow is the apparent motion of objects, surfaces or edges based on the relative motion of the camera. There is actual math behind this. Let’s take a look at how we track a single pixel first:

The diagram below shows a pixel that has moved from (x,y)(x,y) at time tt to (x+u, y+v)(x+u,y+v) at time t+1t+1.

Pixel Correspondence Problem

From this picture, it’s easy to figure out the velocity vector (u,v). But when we look at two real images, we’d first need to solve what’s called the pixel correspondence problem. That is, we need to know which pixels in image 2 correspond to which pixels in image 1.

To solve this problem we make two assumptions.

Assumption 1: the motion is small: this means we can look in the vicinity of where the pixel was to try to determine where it now is.

Assumption 2: the appearance doesn’t change from t to t+1: this assumption is best expressed mathematically.

This relationship is known as the brightness constancy constraint.

If we drop the time index and do a Taylor series expansion of the right hand side of this equation, we find the following:

We can plug this back into the brightness constancy constraint and reorganize some terms to find the following:

It is common to use a subscript to denote derivatives, so this is how it looks with simplified notation:

This equation says that any change in the appearance of a pixel over time has to be explained by spatial motion induced by the camera movement.

Note: I(x,y,t) gives the intensity of the pixel at location (x,y) at time t. If this is a gray-scale image, this intensity would be a single number corresponding to the darkness of the pixel. If this were a color image it might be a 3-vector with values giving the amount of red, green, and blue in the image.

In Part 3 I’ll explain the difficulty of solving this equation and what we can do to estimate a solution.
These Hands
By: Wild Flower
Tags: Life Lessons, Wisdom, Thoughts And Feelings, Assemblage, Poem

These hands,

holding more

than a glass of

divine wisdom

of zest between

thumbs of

solace.

These hands,

they carry a world

and harness a life

for themselves,

an era of new

of rediscovering

and uncovering

layers from within.

These hands,

with master plans

of becoming,

of owning

all that I am,

of reaching

and teaching

myself to

s h i m m e r

alone.

These hands,

an important

part of me

and my

forever reminder

of what is

possible

with

these hands.
Anti-Trans Health Care Discrimination Already Happens Here: Daniel’s Story
By: National Center For Transgender Equality
Tags: Health, Healthcare, Transgender, Discrimination, LGBTQ

Daniel’s Story

Stories about trans people being turned down for treatment specific to gender transition, like hormone replacement therapy, are unfortunately common. However, trans people can be denied access to all kinds of health care that health care providers would give to someone who wasn’t trans without thinking about it.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Bryant-Gawne

Daniel Bryant-Gawne is a transgender man who has struggled with a variety of health issues, from ovarian cysts to tumors in his chest. Just after coming out, Daniel began pursuing care to resolve these health issues. Despite enrolling in a hospital system with three progressive gender clinics, Daniel faced a plethora of discriminatory situations.

While seeking health care, Daniel encountered receptionists who forced him to announce his “dead name” — the name he went by before transitioning. Doctors with little or no training around trans issues attempted to prescribe him hormonal birth control as a solution to his health issues, even though this would be medically inappropriate for him.

He was also treated differently from other patients with the same health conditions. He was forced to undergo repeated invasive and extensive tests to confirm his illnesses and was even denied for a mastectomy to remove a 10-year-old tumor in his chest tissue.

Despite the fact that cisgender women are routinely referred for surgical intervention for tumors that may potentially lead to breast cancer, Daniel’s request was ignored with insufficient review. Without even examining any medical records or scans, the clinic he conferred with told him that he would be denied surgical intervention due to the assumed harmlessness of the tumor.

Daniel had to go through a series of discriminatory interactions with the specialist who had been assigned to treat him, leaving him with anxiety about seeking health care. And he is not alone. Out of respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey who had seen a health care provider in the year prior to taking the survey, one-third reported at least one negative experience, such as being harassed or refused treatment.

With the help of a local trans health advocate, Daniel was eventually able to have his health concerns addressed. He was finally able to have the mastectomy he had originally been denied access to. In addition, he received the first gender-affirming reconstructive chest surgery performed within his hospital system.

However, with the proposed HHS regulations looming, Daniel is terrified of continuing to be refused care or mistreated because of who he is. A Christian himself, Daniel finds the idea of turning away people in medical need by using religion as an excuse to be both wrong and frightening.

These proposals could put more people like Daniel in situations where they are denied appropriate treatments, prescribed inappropriate treatments, or dismissed by health care providers, simply because of who they are.
The Water Mule
By: S.F.N. Cook
Tags: Flash Fiction, Futurism, Quick Reads, SciFi, Dystopia

The Water Mule

They cursed the thing that kept them alive

Image public domain, courtesy of comicbookplus.com, modified from original.

The mid-summer heat boiled the sweat off their backs as they dug a trench along an old, eroded highway. They used the tools of their ancestors: shovels and axes. The people, like their tools, were cheap and replaceable. A self-governing trencher could prepare this same half-meter-deep ditch quicker and of better quality. But it would have to be leased, transported, insured, and maintained, which made it vastly more expensive. Humans, by contrast, only needed to know where to show up and when, then they would transport themselves and see to their own needs. They were each paid a small sum of money and one gallon of water per day.

The water mule trundled along at half-walking-speed behind them. It balanced a sloshing, hundred-gallon tank above two massive wheels. As it approached them, the people set down their tools to extract a brief respite from its many spouts.

To the syndicate who owned the water mule it was a means to an end, but to the people it watered it was a humbling life-giver, a deity. They adorned the mindless machine with gifts and incense, touching it and mumbling thanks in their many tongues. They glued religious figurines to it, taped plastic coins, and painted the names of their ancestors on its large, white plastic surface. They draped cheap beads across the spouts that had failed them last time and kissed a hand to touch its wheels that had once broken years ago. They implored it with their superstition to keep moving and keep giving them water. They needed very little else while they worked. The otherwise mundane visage of a simple industrial cart was transformed into a gaudy, jangling tower of trinkets and streamers. A palanquin that transported not royalty but water.

But the water mule was a mindless robot and had only a few simple rules by which it conducted itself: roll back-and-forth and deliver one-gallon of water to each person. It rationed their water by identifying their faces and shutting off the spout with a polite beep-beep-beep. It was these moments that the person’s affection was most likely to spin instantly into wrath. They spat on the spouts, hurt their hands hitting its metal frame, and impotently pushed at its tires that could not be deterred. They tore off the talismans and stomped on them, revoking their tithing and replacing it with cursing and damnation.
WFP delivers
By: Zerina Karup
Tags: Hurricane Maria, European Commission, Dominica, Humanitarian, Emergency

One of UNDP’s implementing partners, Caritas Antilles, is repairing and rebuilding houses of those most affected in Grand Bay, which has been badly hit by the hurricane. In a country where more than 90% of the roofs were damaged or destroyed, there is a lot of work to be done for organisations such as UNDP and Caritas Antilles. In Grand Bay, Caritas Antilles is helping at least 58 families build a new home and 160 further families will be assisted with building repairs using the building material delivered by WFP.

Mike (Head of Operations, Caritas Antilles) and Luis (Logistics Officer, WFP) at the distribution of building material in Grand Bay. Photo: WFP/Zerina Karup

After arriving in Dominica only three days after the hurricane, Mike, Head of Operations at Caritas Antilles, explains that they had faced logistical issues in assisting their beneficiaries. He says: “I don’t want to say WFP was Godsent, but WFP has really helped us a lot.” Particularly early in the emergency response, there was a lack of coordination as well as major congestion at the port, which has been improved with the help of WFP’s logistics team. This allowed Caritas Antilles and other partners to reach their beneficiaries in the midst of the emergency.

IsraAid reroofing a house with material delivered by WFP. Photo: IsraAid/Debra Mailman

As time is moving on, relief organizations are speeding up reconstruction efforts for those in need. In collaboration with UNDP, the IFRC is constructing a total of 400 houses across the country. IsraAid is also on the ground in collaboration with Digicel whereby Digicel is reconstructing schools and IsraAid is reroofing some of the students’ homes in Atkinson, Castle Bruce, La Plaine, Salybia and Concord. By assisting these partners in storage, operational support and distribution, WFP is making sure that they receive the material needed to provide shelter to those most affected by the hurricane. Jonathan, Team Lead and Programme Manager at Americares, explains that WFP is assisting them in the distribution of building material and emphasized the efficiency and reliability of collaborating with WFP. Americares has reconstructed two primary health care facilities and is currently rebuilding five additional primary health care facilities as well as one central medical store.

Inasmuch as the implementation of a project is important, so is its logistical handling. In an emergency, collaboration between UN agencies, NGOs, the Government and private sector is key. In the case of Dominica, it has materialized into a rapid and successful response to the impacts of Hurricane Maria. This has only been possible thanks to the support of WFP’s donors: European Commission’s DG ECHO, CERF, DFID, Facebook, the Government of the United Arab Emirates, USAID, Google, Sealed Air, Nielsen, Luxemburg, Canada and Cisco Foundation.
Schooled
By: Sara Harvey
Tags: Teaching, Humor, Comics, Funny, Beer

Who among us has not been shushed?
How to Scrape Business Data from Yelp [for FREE]
By: Hiren Patel
Tags: Yelp, Web Crawler, Data Extraction, Web Scraping, Scraping

When you want to go outside and want good facilities for your better experience, you will check the other people’s experience and their reviews or ratings for particular places. For that, you can visit yelp which will provide you all this information. Yelp provides reviews of local businesses so that consumers will reach the best possible information before making a decision about where they want to spend their money.

Yelp contains information about individual locations, such as restaurants, schools, hotels, where yelp users can submit a review of their experience and services. Businesses can also update contact information or add special deals. Users can also react to reviews or plan events. You can also reserve restaurants or hotels through features provided by yelp. Thus, Yelp provides a one-stop platform for consumers to discover and connect with local businesses of all sizes by making it easy.

If you are interested in creating a huge business database which is the same as yelp then you can use a web scraping tool.

Web scraping tools will help you to scrap particular data which is most needed for you.

But as a new user, you may have some questions,

How to use a web scraping tool for yelp?

In which format data will be stored?

How will a web scraping tool be helpful to you?

These questions will be raised if you have not used a scraping tool before. But with a Web scraping tool [like ProWebScraper], this process will be easy.

In this tutorial, we will setup yelp scraper which will scrape the following fields, from the Yelp product page:

Title Price Range Cuisine Opening Hours Address

Below is a screenshot of the data which we will be scrapping.
3 best-read blogs in Angular Weekly #84
By: Jexia S Editorial Team
Tags: Angular, Typescript, JavaScript, Software Development, Programming

medium.com

2 minutes — And I am not going back. By Alessia Amitrano.

perjerz.me

11 minutes — The story behind this blog is that I saw a Chrome Dev Tools error in my coworker’s screen. By Siwat Kaolueng.

nirisarri.github.io

3 minutes — In my last project, the UI team decided not to host its Angular app in Docker. I started looking into it, as probably for other projects this will be necessary. By Nicolas De Irisarri.

About Angular Weekly

Angular Weekly is a mailing consisting of the finest blogs and tools curated for Angular pros. I’m Andrey, your curator, working from Kharkiv (Ukraine) to help building a Dutch serverless functions platform called Jexia.

Feel free to contact me via andrey at angular-weekly.com.
你會是哪種加密貨幣投資人呢？
Tags: Investment, Chat, Cryptocurrency, Sevencoin, Marketing

in Both Sides of the Table
Language shattered into a multiplicity
By: Dan Mccarthy
Tags: Ideas, Essays

To put it even more bluntly: whereas one would have expected that a crisis of literacy would have called for a greater appreciation of the multiplicity of functions that language performs, the foremost of which is the ability to code and transcode experience and to provide cultural directions for its interpretation, handling and elaboration, one finds a further instrumentalization of language, where the latter is shattered into a multiplicity of autonomous, unrelated languages, with the competence to be acquired restricted to just one of them. The Culture of Literacy, Wlad Godzich

We speak and we speak and we speak.

We talk of our jobs. We talk of people who make us feel frustrated. We talk of our indignation at perceived slights. We talk of our excitement at a beautifully struck kick on the soccer pitch. We talk of our rude desire for a stranger passing by.

We talk about what we have heard from others. We talk about the way an insult makes us want to strike out. We talk about the way an angry word makes us want to slink away.

We talk about the way that two cells won’t tie out in a spreadsheet that our boss is making us finish too soon. We talk about fudging numbers to make the outcome look better.

We talk about how bad people need to be forgiven, about how circumstances make it impossible do what we said we would do, about what stupid things our adult children have done and how we never get to see them, about how we are feeling impatient with things that we’ve tolerated before, about how we would have been something else if our partners hadn’t made us give up our dreams, how we don’t like the way old people smell in the grocery line, about how we’ve had a tingling feeling in our right arm that ends up someplace in our chest, but our insurance won’t cover a visit, so we’re waiting until the new year to make an appointment.

We talk about how things are being done to us. We talk about how ragheads and towelheads and dotheads and believers and unbelievers and sinners and the insolent want to do things that shouldn’t be allowed in a country like ours.

When we write down the things we talk about, we write from the left to the right, we go from the top of the page to the bottom, we pick from 24 letters to make our words, we use periods to signal full stops. We write down what we talk about and we realize that we don’t have a fucking clue what we really mean, and neither does anyone else. But we feel it. Man, we feel it.

You better feel it too.
Important information!
By: Casper Api
Tags: ICO, Token, Investing, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain

Dear friends!

We have to inform you that our ICO is postponed for an indefinite period

Since our company is incorporated in Zug, Switzerland, we have to get the green light from FINMA (The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority) that has not given the necessary approval to conduct the sale on the dates we have planned. We will continue working on resolving this issue so that in the future no legal conflicts can arise.

All the funds contributed by investors will be returned to the wallets you have transferred the money from.

After calculating all the results the tokens will be put in a single spreadsheet and sent to your wallets on the ICO launch day.

As part of the Pre-sale we have attracted fiat investments in exchange for a share in the company so the work on Casper API will be continued, and you can track our progress on github. We will come back to conduct an ICO after gathering the necessary approval and releasing as minimum an alpha version of the product.

We are extremely grateful for your support and we hope that our decision will be taken in the right spirit. Besides, this will allow our potential investors to contribute to a project that already has real world utility.

You still can communicate with team and community here https://t.me/CasperProjectENG , we ll you keep updated.
Pitch Deck Teardown: Coinbase
By: Nicolas Carteron
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Startup, Pitch Deck, Teardown

Pitch Deck Teardown: Coinbase

The crypto company is reportedly eyeing an IPO. Before they do, let’s revisit the pitch deck that helped them raise $600k in 2012.

Coinbase is in the news at the moment, with people discussing at length the company’s CEO latest blog post on corporate culture and the company’s mission.

Whatever side of the debate you’re on, what I’m sure we can all agree is that Coinbase is an incredible success in the crypto industry. Born three years after Bitcoin itself, Coinbase has survived through the many highs and the many lows of the industry.

Today, Coinbase is the go-to platform for people wanting to invest in crypto the easy way.

While the company reportedly prepares for its IPO, it’s a good time to revisit the original deck used by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam to raise $600k of seed capital in 2012.

It should be noted that this is not properly a pitch deck. These slides were first presented at the Y Combinator demo day and later used by the team in their discussions with investors.
Creating animated charts in R using gganimate
By: Sanjeev Kumar
Tags: Machine Learning, Animation, Data Science, Data Visualization, R

This is follow up blog to Gold returns over different periods. In this blog I would like to show how to create animated charts with facets in R.

Install the following libraries and load them into R:

ggplot2 for creating the plots, ggthemes for customized themes zoo for creating rolling means gganimate to create animations in the chart.

Download the excel file for Gold prices and read the dataset into R as a dataframe. The dataframe should contain the Year column through which we want to analyse and the annual change in price(y column). type column is to mention one year rolling mean.

1 Year rolling mean

Now we need to calculate the rolling means for the windows 5, 10 and 20 years. Create separate dataframes and use the roll mean function in zoo library to create the rolling means and assign the type column to be 5 Years, 10 Years, 20 Years respectively.

Bind the dataframes rowwise using rbind the columns to get the final dataframe which should contain rows like the following:

5 Year rolling means

10 Year rolling means

20 Year rolling means

Create a change column with labels negative and positive based on the y column.

Once the dataset is ready we can plot. First create a geom_bar plot using ggplot function. Use facet_grid function to create the facets of type vertically stacked. To color the bars in the plot provide the change column as fill and assign the colors to the plot using scale_fill_manual function. I have provided red and green color to negative and positive change respectively.

Now comes the animation part. Use the transition_states method which can be added the ggplot chart to animate the plot. Provide the Year column to the transition_states function to animate the change in each Year. This transistion splits the data into multiple states based on the provided column(Year in our case) and animates between states. shadow_mark function makes it leave a shadow along the trail which will have previously animated states. Without the shadow_mark you would just see the chart animating one frame at a time.

You can modify the easing of the animation using ease_aes function.

I have applied Highcharts JS Theme using theme_hc function available from ggthemes library and also set custom font sizes and spacings in the chart.

Finally to export the chart I have used anim_save function which is a analogous function to ggsave. anim_save saves the chart as gif. By default the method anim_save save the plot with very low resolution which cant be used for showcasing, so I have added the width and height in pixels to get the best resolution.

Here is the final animated chart