fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Introduce Yourself to Everyone!
By: Quy Ma
Tags: Writing, Hello, About Me, First Post, Introduction

Pin Your “About Me” Stories in Your Profile!

With the recent changes with Medium users’ profiles, many writers noticed the new profile format is now a long-form view. This gives more exposure to the top parts of the profile. A few writers decided that they could write About Me stories and pin it to the top of their profiles for more visibility.

However, with the changes comes downsides. Since the profile is long-form, it may take a while for your followers to scroll down to the articles you want them to see. Realistically, you can’t expect your followers to continuously scroll down your profile to find your articles. An About Me story provides the ability to give your followers shortcuts to your favorite stories.

I wrote up a quick About Me story, published, and pinned it to the top of my profile. This allows my followers to quickly access some of my content via my About Me since I provide links to my top-performing or personal stories in my About Me story.

Top writers on Medium like Zulie Rane and Danny Forest highly recommend every writer whipping up an About Me story.

Additionally, About Me Stories is a natural fit for the changes that are happening with Medium, especially with their emphasis on a more “relational Medium.” It helps humanize the writers more, putting more dimensions behind your favorite people on Medium!

Lastly, About Me stories can be advantageous to those who are seeking to build their following on the platform and expand their personal brand.

You can pin your story by going to your profile, scrolling to the story you want to pin and click the “…” at the bottom right of the story. Click “Pin Story”.
Amazon Go: Redefining Shopping
By: Bharat Sachdev
Tags: Amazon, Technology, Tech, Amazon Go, Shopping

Amazon officially opened its first Amazon Go store in Seattle to the public on January 22nd. The store uses technology such as ceiling cameras and electronic sensors to track each individual customer’s purchases as they shop. To enter, customers scan their smartphones loaded with the “Amazon Go” app on turnstiles similar to those in a subway.

Once inside, they can then choose from a wide range of items and put them in their shopping bags. As customers pick up items, they are added to their Amazon Go account — and removed when placed back, with the help of the advanced shelve sensors and ceiling cameras.The receipt is issued once the customer exits, and their account is automatically billed.

The store has been open for Amazon employees since 2016, though Amazon was hesitant to open to the public as there were — and are––a few issues. For instance, misplacing an item onto the wrong shelf can cause the billing system to misread it when picked up by others. Amazon are also hoping to incorporate this technology into Whole Foods, the chain they acquired for $13.7 bn last year.
Don’t Touch Me, I’m Sleeping
By: Kayla Grant Coons
Tags: Kids, Storytelling, Mom, Parenting Stories, Motherhood

Don’t Touch Me, I’m Sleeping

Tired out, touched out.

Sleep. We all talk about it, think about it, and many of us don’t get enough of it. Parents, in particular, lament the lack of sleep associated with having newborns and infants. All day they work, either at home or a job outside of the home, and then all night they are on call to answer the mews and cries of their children.

It’s tiring. I know; I am a mom to a toddler. I work from home as an editor during naps and down times, but when she is awake I tend to my little girl. She requires a lot of attention, as all toddlers do. Aside from the usual cooking and cleaning, playing and reading, I do a lot of touching. A LOT of touching. We hold hands, hug, snuggle, she sits in my lap while I read. She holds my leg while I wash dishes. I wear her in baby carriers on walks and grocery store trips. I walk around with her in my arms, singing her to sleep. That is a lot of physical contact day after day, all day long. Don’t get me wrong, I soak it in.

I relish the short amount of time that she still wants to hug me, to hold my hand, and to sit in my lap. Before long she will no longer reach up for me. But for now, we touch all day long.

When my husband gets home, even more physical contact begins. We too, hug and hold hands. He likes for me to scratch his back when we watch TV at night. Not to mention any sex that might occur. As a wife, and a mom, I often become “touched out” by the end of the day.

When I drop into bed at night I once again become autonomous. I cocoon myself in my jersey sheets and my down alternative comforter. I roll to the edge of the bed and I exile myself from touch. My husband respects my sleeping boundaries. He understands that at the end of the day I would rather not spoon or rest my head on his chest.

I used to wonder if I was alone in this. Is something wrong with me that I don’t want to be touched? Does everyone else just want to get in bed and snuggle their spouse every night? Yet, here I am, putting imaginary boundaries between my husband and me when I collapse onto our mattress.

Yet if I have learned anything in my time talking with other moms, it is that I am not alone in this. Sometimes all of the touching becomes too much and we just need a time and place to be alone. For our bodies to once again be our own. We need this time so that when the alarm starts ringing we can get out of bed and welcome a hug from over the rails of the crib with smiles on our faces.
Using Twitter to forecast cryptocurrency returns #2 - Mining Cryptocurrency with CoinGecko API
By: Huifang Yeo
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Data Mining, Python, Coingecko, Use Cases

Using Twitter to forecast cryptocurrency returns #2 — Mining Cryptocurrency Data with CoinGecko API

Gearing up for returns forecasting with VAR

Screen grab from CoinGecko

After going through Tweets mining as explained in my first article, gathering cryptocurrency returns wasn’t difficult at all. I had decided to use pycoingecko, which is a Python wrapper around the CoinGecko API.

The key 2 things to note are:

You need the id of the cryptocurrency in order to download the market data

the granularity of the data is automatically determined by the number of days you are downloading for

Getting id of cryptocurrency

Go to the CoinGecko API and execute the “/coin/list”.

Get the ids of the coins required. In my case, I have the list below:

Downloading historical market data

I used get_coin_market_chart_by_id, the wrapper around “/coins/{id}/market_chart” to get my historical market data. The granularity of the data returned depends on the number of days we are getting:

minutely data for duration within 1 day

hourly data will be used for duration between 1 day and 90 days

daily data will be used for duration above 90 days

Since I do not have the luxury to collect hourly data beyond 90 days, I can only stick to daily market data. The code snippet below returns 300 days worth of historical market data against USD. I’m only going to store the prices returned for the given timestamp.

Let’s convert the timestamp into a user friendly format:

Let’s align the data into a format that is more generic:

Now, that was not too bad right? The only confusing part during data collection was the granularity of the data as I overlooked the API method definitions. My notebook is available in the atoti notebook gallery for your reference.

Now, let’s take a breather before I start performing my time-series analysis.
What an Astronaut’s Mental Breakdown Teaches Us About the Dangers of Snap Decisions
By: Nabil Alouani
Tags: Decision Making, Self, Psychology, Advice, Life Lessons

SELF-IMPROVEMENT

What an Astronaut’s Mental Breakdown Teaches Us About the Dangers of Snap Decisions

And what you can learn from her tragic mistakes.

Illustration provided to the author by Tauland Sinani

Lisa knew that if she wanted to drive 950 miles in less than 15 hours, she had to forgo any pit stops — so she brought diapers.

Diapers weren’t the weirdest thing Lisa took before hitting the road. She loaded her car trunk with a steel mallet, a buck knife, a BB gun with ammo, latex gloves, tape, garbage bags, and pepper spray. Fortunately, Lisa managed to use only the latter in her kidnapping attempt.

Lisa’s criminal adventure started with a discovery from the day before. When she found out her boyfriend had left her for another woman — Colleen Shipman, the emotional impulse to react was too hard to resist, even for an intellectual-elite like Lisa.

Lisa’s brain had earned her a master’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering. She later served as a pilot in the US Navy before securing a spot at NASA as an astronaut. Yes, Lisa Nowak was an established astronaut. Except, she decided to throw away her successful life path and go from exploring outer space to inhabiting a jail cell.

As much as we can relate to the anger, disappointment, and frustration Lisa felt after being dumped for someone else, her response was everything but appropriate. So, we ask: Where did Lisa go wrong, and what could she have done otherwise to prevent her downfall?
A shot of coffee IS a shot of whiskey at 8am.
By: Toni Crowe
Tags: Coffee, Writing, Short Story, Relationships, Friendship

A shot of coffee IS a shot of whiskey at 8am. At least to me. I love it; coffee energizes me, I can think free drinking it; I’m nicer to everyone. If that is not a whiskey effect I don’t know what is.
On Managing Your To-Do’s and Hobbies Effortlessly
By: Rajat Dangi
Tags: Self Improvement, Productivity, Lifehacks, Personal Development, Hobby

1. Be specific on your To-Do list

To-Do list is not a lost game — After all, it is a widely used productivity tool.

To-Do lists do work if you use them the right way. I’ve been making personal To-Do‘s for last 4 years, I use Google Keep app for it. Mine are not daily To-Do’s, but they are flexible.

Whenever you are making a To-Do list:

First thing to aim for are three characteristics —

One task per bullet

Quantifiable

Actionable

If every item in your list is a single task, which is quantifiable and actionable, that’s a good beginning.

Second, put the deadline as the title of that list.

Third, keep the duration short. How short? A week is just right.
A Lesson in Satire (and Romance)
By: Divina Grey
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Satire, Writing, Life

A Lesson in Satire (and Romance)

According to a Seventeen-Year-Old

May 10, 1999

I want to start this paper by letting everyone know nothing is more exciting than writing a three hundred and fifty-word essay. I can’t imagine doing anything more useful for a mind-splitting headache than writing a paper for English class.

My favorite thing about people, guys, especially, is how they play little mind games with me. It is positively stimulating never to know what people will do or never knowing how they feel.

Having an unpredictable relationship like that, to the point where I can’t tell a dream from reality, is such great joy for me. Never knowing the truth about how someone feels about me or where exactly our relationship stands are what I call living on the edge.

There is no doubt that I’m talking from personal experience. This someone does exist in my life. Let’s call this someone Mike. I get so much joy out of Mike’s mood swings and how one day he is so great to me, and the next day we are total strangers.

I get so much pleasure out of only sometimes knowing who he is! Mike and I will spend our Saturdays together but only when he can fit it/me into his busy schedule, and I especially love it when he has better things to do and would rather be somewhere else than with me. One of the best things has to be only on rare occasions does Mike call me, and I get more joy out of this than you will ever know!

My other favorite thing is how Mike and I will get so close, have such deep conversations, and share such deep stuff that no one else knows on the weekends and then during the week, he will act like nothing ever happened!

I think it would only be right to conclude this paper by telling everyone the most delightful and adorable thing that Mike does; he will treat me like a princess, kiss my hand like royalty, and make me feel like I am so incredibly special to him.

Then I turn the corner, and he is doing the same thing to some other girl.

Addendum: This is one of the most random things I’ve ever posted on here. Get used to it guys — I am letting loose at thirty-eight! This is a paper I wrote when I was a Senior in High School. I cringed when I read it (and again when I typed it out). Rediscovering this paper leads me to believe two things: 1.) my writing has improved a little, and 2.) I’ve settled for less than I should have in my relationships.

No more.
HDFS Write & Read
By: Jaydeep Deshmukh
Tags: Programming, Hdfs, Hadoop, Big Data, Spark

One of the most important and most basic thing to know in hadoop-distributed world is how HDFS write/read operations are performed. To understand how different components work in hadoop ecosystem, its very important to know basic hdfs concepts. Before going into hdfs write/read, let’s list down the key players involved in this -

Client : interacts with the cluster, initiates write & read

NameNode : Master daemon responsible for orchestration and delegation

DataNodes :Slave daemons, handles actual data storage

HDFS Write Operation :

Client breaks input file into chunks of block size,example 2013-apache-logs.txt is of 500MB and hdfs block size is 128MB then file would be broken into four blocks blk0, blk1, blk2, blk3. Client sends number of blocks(#4) & replication factor(RF=3) to NameNode and request to initiate write operation. NameNode responds with pipeline of DataNodes DN_A, DN_B, DN_C(no. of datanodes would be equal to RF) to perform write. Client contacts DN_A to write first block blk0, then DN_A contacts DN_B to write same block and DN_B contacts DN_C.Thus same block blk0 got written on three data-nodes.Along with data checksums will be written on each data-node which will be validated during read operation. Then reverse acknowledgement will be sent from DN_C →DN_B →DN_A →client. Client tells NameNode that blk0 is written to these locations and requests for blk1 pipeline. NameNode updates memory & disk representation offile(refer below image Steps 1 to 7) Repeat steps 3 to 7 for remaining blocks. Successful write of all blocks looks like something shown in image(after Step-9)

Steps 1 to 7

After Step-9

HDFS Read Operation :

HDFS reads are writes in reverse. Client contacts NameNode to read any file, NameNode repsponds with read pipeline of datanodes. Client then reads each block from datanodes in pipeline and in the end after successful read, client closes the file.

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Does the Moderna Vaccine Prevent Transmission?
By: Alexandra Sifferlin
Tags: Covid 19, Coronavirus

Does the Moderna Vaccine Prevent Transmission?

It’s likely, but still unknown

Credit: SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images

An open question about the Covid-19 vaccines available — and soon to be available — is whether they prevent a vaccinated person from getting infected with the virus and spreading it to another person, even if they don’t have symptoms. Experts say the vaccines likely will reduce transmission, but it’s not confirmed yet.

Similar to Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine, the Moderna vaccine data presented to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expert advisory panel on Thursday revealed a vaccine with high effectiveness at protecting against mild, moderate, and severe Covid-19 disease. This means the vaccine appears to prevent symptomatic disease very well. But does it prevent transmission of the virus? Could someone who has been vaccinated still contract the virus and spread it to another person even if they don’t have symptoms?

While Moderna is not able to definitively answer the infection question yet, the company provided some data to suggest that the vaccine might prevent asymptomatic cases and transmission. Moderna gave Covid-19 tests to all trial participants between their first and second dose of either the company’s vaccine or a placebo. Among people who tested positive for Covid-19 without symptoms, there were 14 people in the vaccine group and 38 in the placebo group (there were over 14,000 people in each group). These are small numbers, but they suggest that the Moderna vaccine might prevent asymptomatic infections. Overall, the number of people to test positive for Covid-19 was higher in the placebo group than the vaccine group, especially after the second dose.

Knowing whether the vaccine prevents transmission is important. If it doesn’t, then people will likely need to continue prevention measures like masks and distancing around unvaccinated people. The good news is that Moderna and the other companies with vaccines are studying this, and will hopefully have more insights on the transmission question soon. Again, experts predict the vaccines “will likely reduce transmission, but we don’t yet know, so use caution for now.”
Reasons to Reject and Refuse work Opportunities
By: Merle Van Den Akker
Tags: Life Lessons, Work Life Balance, Productivity, Work, Time Management

I think the reasons I’ve mentioned so far are good reasons. Your time is limited and if it’s something that won’t further your goals, it’s just not worth it. Unless of course, you are massively interested in it. Yes, love and passion do matter, so those would be a massive reason NOT to reject work opportunities.

But even then. It’s good that you’re passionate, and maybe even have the time, but what about reimbursement for that passion and time? I have heard quite often that exposure and experience are used as ways to pay someone. As if those will pay the bills…

Internships are a great example of this: they are often unpaid and used to get you into a paying job. No. Just absolutely no. Think of opportunity costs: if it’s not something you really want to do and you could be doing something else that would pay, which one should you be doing (hint, it’s the latter)?

Even if you really want to do it, at least try to negotiate some type of payment. Your time and effort should be worth at least fighting for! If it turns out they really don’t want (or maybe can’t) pay you, that is in itself a good reason to refuse an opportunity. You need to eat too!

It’s also been said (and there is research backing it up) that if you start on a lower wage, you’ll remain on a lower rage (relative to your colleagues/peers starting on higher wages) for quite a while, if not always.

This is because if you accept low to no wage, in the beginning, you have undervalued yourself and have sent the signal to others that you can be undervalued. You tell them that it is okay to do so, and as such, they are likely to continue to do so. Don’t. If you feel like a work opportunity is trying to undervalue you, your time, your expertise and your effort, you can very politely tell them to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine…
Libido Cannot Exist in a Vacuum
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Relationships, Sexuality, Mental Health, Sex, Self

Few things are as surprising as feeling randomly horny on the yoga mat.

Especially if your marriage has been a dead bedroom for years, you’re in the throes of major depressive disorder, and your life is as empty as can be.

Back when I was still practicing yoga daily, sexual urges would occasionally taunt me, an unwelcome reminder of the dearth of human warmth in my life. They’d happen out of the blue as a tingle in the nether regions that would soon dissipate but not before sowing confusion.

While it would be easy to blame mental illness for killing my sex drive, this isn’t the whole story.

Because my being ill had grown into a constant source of resentment at home, any attraction I initially felt toward my partner vanished. You can’t be drawn to someone who begrudges you an illness that is constantly threatening to kill you because they think you just want an easy life.

They didn’t seem to like me much anymore or have any interest in me as a fellow human, wife, or indeed sexual partner so sex eventually became an abstract. It turned into a conceptual notion I set aside in the hope I might revisit it some day, perhaps.

And if not then not. When sex departed from my life, I didn’t run after it, all the more as I had had an interesting, varied, and satisfying sex life before I got married.

It was just another of the many things that fell by the wayside and contributed to the slow and steady erosion of the self.
An End to End Introduction to GANs
By: Rahul Agarwal
Tags: Programming, Towards Data Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

Generator architecture

One of the main problems we face with GANs is that the training is not very stable. Thus we have to come up with a Generator architecture that solves our problem and also results in stable training.

The preceding diagram is taken from the paper, which explains the DC-GAN generator architecture. It might look a little bit confusing.

Essentially we can think of a generator Neural Network as a black box which takes as input a 100 sized normally generated vector of numbers and gives us an image:

How do we get such an architecture?

In the below architecture, we use a dense layer of size 4x4x1024 to create a dense vector out of this 100-d vector. Then, we reshape this dense vector in the shape of an image of 4x4 with 1024 filters, as shown in the following figure:

We don’t have to worry about any weights right now as the network itself will learn those while training.

Once we have the 1024 4x4 maps, we do upsampling using a series of Transposed convolutions, which after each operation doubles the size of the image and halves the number of maps. In the last step, though we don’t half the number of maps but reduce it to 3 channels/maps only for each RGB channel since we need three channels for the output image.

Now, What are Transpose convolutions?

In most simple terms, transpose convolutions provide us with a way to upsample images. While in the convolution operation we try to go from a 4x4 image to a 2x2 image, in Transpose convolutions, we convolve from 2x2 to 4x4 as shown in the following figure:

Upsampling a 2x2 image to 4x4 image

Q: We know that Un-pooling is popularly used for upsampling input feature maps in the convolutional neural network (CNN). Why don’t we use Un-pooling?

It is because un-pooling does not involve any learning. However, transposed convolution is learnable, and that is why we prefer transposed convolutions to un-pooling. Their parameters can be learned by the generator as we will see in some time.

Discriminator architecture

Now, as we have understood the generator architecture, here is the discriminator as a black box.

In practice, it contains a series of convolutional layers and a dense layer at the end to predict if an image is fake or not as shown in the following figure:

Takes an image as input and predicts if it is real/fake. Every image conv net ever.

Data preprocessing and visualization

The first thing we want to do is to look at some of the images in the dataset. The following are the python commands to visualize some of the images from the dataset:

The resultant output is as follows:

We get to see the sizes of the images and the images themselves.

We also need functions to preprocess the images to a standard size of 64x64x3, in this particular case, before proceeding further with our training.

We will also need to normalize the image pixels before we use it to train our GAN. You can see the code it is well commented.

As you will see, we will be using the preceding defined functions in the training part of our code.
We’ve Got to Start Believing in Our Own Greatness
By: Gillian Sisley
Tags: Life Lessons, Writing, Success, Work, Inspiration

In the last few months, I’ve stunted my ability to dream of the next big milestone for myself.

My heart and soul have been trying to wander and explore, and I’ve been resigning them in, telling them they need to be realistic.

I have a business to run. We’re making sh*t happen for our clients. Whether you like it or not, we’ve got to sit down and do the damn work.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that it didn’t take long for this poor attitude to really take its toll.

I started getting restless, and antsy, and nervous that the current way my business stood

I want more for myself — if only I have the courage to make it happen.

Because the truth is, I’m afraid of my own greatness.
When will I be okay?. What goes through my head when I’m…
By: Emily Lane
Tags: Loneliness, Mental Health, Blue Insights, Sadness, Poetry

It shouldn’t hurt this much

Just to be alive

I shouldn’t cry every day

I shouldn’t always hurt inside

It doesn’t make sense

Why am I always in pain?

Why do I always hurt

Why am I fighting my own brain?

Why do I have to live

Below a mental state

That is acceptable for life

Why am I so irate?

Why am I so absent

From my life and those near me?

Why am I the supporting character

In my own story?

When will the time come

For me to shine and thrive?

When will I have the strength

To do more than just survive?

How long before I leave

This poisoned state of mind?

How many times do I have to lie

And say “no really, I am fine.”

How much longer do I stay and wait

Before I’m happy again

How much longer do I hate myself

Will someone please tell me when?
The Art of Feature Engineering
By: Young Park
Tags: Data Science, Polynomialfeatures, Python, Scikit Learn, Statsmodels

One of the easiest ways to experiment with feature engineering is by using PolynomialFeatures available through Sci-Kit preprocessing module.

There are two important parameters to be aware of with PolynomialFeatures.

degree = you have the option of setting to which n degree of features you want to engineer. For instance, setting the degree = 2 means that the PolynomialFeatures will multiply each features by itself and against every other features. I personally find that interactive terms to the 2nd degree is sufficient when running linear regression but you can certainly explore by putting in a pipeline so you can GridSearch to find the most optimal n hyperparameter value. include_bias = You want to set this to False when using regular LinearRegression. Setting this to True essentially includes the y-intercept column which you do not want to do when running a regular LinearRegression out of sci-kit’s linear_model module.

One of the downsides of using PolynomialFeatures is the fast expansion of columns if you have a lot of features to begin with. One of the measures that you can take to reduce the number of features is by measuring the R2 score against the target variable. This way, you can quickly eliminate features that do not have strong predictive power.

Another method that I like to visit is to run the OLS summary using statsmodels.api module, which is another way you can run OLS in Python.

With OLS, unlike sklearn’s LinearRegression, you just have to remember to manually add in the y-intercept. After you fit the data, you can run the summary() method which produces the summary below.

P>|t| column provides the p-value of each features which can also can be used to determine the statistical significance of each features. So if you have features with p-value > 0.05, you can eliminate those from your feature selection and those with p-value < 0.05, you can keep them as part of features for your model.

Feature engineering is an exciting way to enhance your model performance and definitely requires some good discernment and experience to become more intuitively better at this. In many ways, it truly is an art. It requires some level of creativity, willingness to experiment, and explore features from many different angles.

As we all strive towards becoming better data scientists, I hope we all continue to develop and hone our skills in feature engineering.
50-year-old Cybernetics questions for an ethical future of AI
By: David Pereira
Tags: Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, Ai Ethics

50-year-old Cybernetics questions for an ethical future of AI

Norbert Wiener, one of cybernetics pioneers, envisioned AI ethics problems way ahead of us

“43081” by Tekniska museet is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Ethics has definitely become a trend in the field of Artificial Intelligence. It seems clear that AI faces a lot of challenges if we want it to have a positive impact for our society. Nevertheless, it is not the first time that researchers warn us about the risks of this kind of technology. Norbert Wiener, cybernetics pioneer, wrote this somehow prophetic piece back in his book God & Golem, inc, back in 1964:

It is relatively easy to promote good and to fight evil and good and evil are arranged against each other in two clear lines, and when those on the other side are our unquestioned enemies and those on our side our trusted allies. What, however, if we must ask, each time and in every situation, where is the friend and where is the enemy? What, moreover, when we have to put the decision in the hands of an inexorable magic or an inexorable machine of which we must ask the right questions in advance, without fully understanding the operations of the process by which they will be answered?

Quote taken from God & Golem, Inc — Norbert Wiener, 1964.

It is mesmerizing to think that this was written more than 50 years ago and that somehow it reflects so well some of the main challenges we are facing for ensuring a truly ethical future for AI. Let’s break down Wiener’s written piece.
Bleary and Blind then Blam
By: Zachary Thacher
Tags: Quarantine, Memoir, Coronavirus, Relationships, Ghosts

5/6/2020 — Carlisle, Massachusetts

You’re in a room for one. You’re in a house for a few. You’re in a cabin in the mountains where your only company are trees as slender and silent as women in fashion illustrations. You’re in a city in a box stacked and arranged like Jenga with countless other city boxes. Your view is an empty sidewalk in the suburbs that now seems more prison than escape from the city box you came from. You watch a field fringed with a green that’s so slow moving it seems frightened, as if the emerging vegetation will decide, we’re done. Let’s shelter in the damp and dark.

Vacancy has come to define you more than your personality, because what use is personality when you’re alone?

You’re with people related or legally bound to you whom you’ve now seen so often and so exclusively they have become like water on the stone of your heart. Their tics and utterances and demands are the drip drip drip that the vacancy has become on those of us who are truly alone. What had felt like a meaningless pleasant waterfall of time to yourself or time with those you love most is now an erosion. It never ends. You can’t shut if off, it will bore through you until you’re hollow.
craven
By: Rebeca Ansar
Tags: Life Lessons, Storytelling, Poet, Poem, Poetry

cowards love it

when you carry

their weight

grateful eyes are a tactic

tacit disregard lines the look

the traveler throws her

keepsakes off the caravan

until she looks back

push the ponderous stone

off your heart and rummage

through your wrecked belongings

there must be something left to salvage.
The Depth I: Stereo Calibration and Rectification
By: Ali Yasin Eser
Tags: Stereo Camera, Opencv Python, Opencv, Python, Depth Map

Hello everyone! Today we will talk about what is stereo camera and how we are using it for computer vision. By using the code I wrote for you, I will explain how we are calibrating the camera for stereo cameras and calculate a disparity map. I won’t go into mathematical details, you can read some OpenCV documents for that. Let’s start!

This is the magic we’ll cover today!

The reason we can perceive the depth is our beautifully aligned eyes. If you noticed, when we look close objects with one eye, we’ll see a difference between both perspectives. But when you look something far away, like mountains or buildings kilometers away, you won’t see a difference. These differences are automatically processed in our brain and we can perceive the depth! Animals that have eyes aligned far right and far left can’t perceive depth because they don’t have common perspectives, instead they have a wide-angle perspective. Some of them, like ducks, shake their heads or run fast to perceive depth, it’s called structure from motion. We won’t cover this concept, for now, let’s focus on a system like our eyes.

Simplified stereo vision. You see how an object P is observed from two cameras. The object's position is different in both images.

If two cameras aligned vertically, the observed object will be in the same coordinates vertically(same column in the images), so we can only focus on x coordinates to calculate the depth since close objects will have a higher difference in the x-axis. But to achieve that, we need to calibrate the cameras to fix lens distortions. After the calibration, we need to rectify the system. Rectification is basically calibration between two cameras. If we calibrate and rectify our stereo cameras well, two objects will be on the same y-axis and observed point P(x,y) can be found in the same row in the image, P1(x1,y) for the first camera and P2(x2,y) for the second camera. From there, it’s the only difference between the pixels and depth calculations.

Respectively, upper left and right images are rectified left/right camera images, lower left is their combination to show the difference, lower right is the depth map.

First, mount the stereo cameras to a solid object(ruler, wood or hard plastic materials, etc.) so that the calibration and rectification parameters will work properly. If you have Intel Realsense or zed camera, for example, you can skip all the parts because Realsense has auto-calibration and zed is already calibrated as factory-default. The next step is the calibration of both cameras separately. You can follow my calibration guide for that, it’s highly recommended for the next steps. Stereo cameras required the single calibration first since rectification requires these parameters. Use a chessboard image for the calibration and use at least 20 images for good calculation.
Being Human
By: Katherine Grace
Tags: Self Improvement, Meditation, Consciousness, Self-awareness, Self Love

A Quote & A Question

image by author

Dear One,

I am consistently amazed both at how hard it is to be human, and how many different ways there are to go about this human experience.

Today, please ask yourself, what is something about being human I am at peace with, and what is something I am working to improve or change?

Much love to you,

Kate
Strengthen Your Gym’s Social Media Strategy This Fall
By: Main Street Hub
Tags: Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Wellness, Small Business Marketing, Gym

Strengthen Your Gym’s Social Media Strategy This Fall

Follow these social media content strategies to bring in new customers this season

By: Samantha Koontz, Content Editor

As green leaves turn golden, school bells chime to announce a new semester, and your favorite team tightens their laces for kick-off, we can only assume one thing: Summer is turning into fall. For small business owners, this means the time is right to grab the attention of new customers and strengthen your relationships with your loyal fans.

As summer winds down and people are adjusting their fitness goals this fall, your gym has the opportunity to bring in some fresh faces. Traditionally, gym memberships slow down after the first quarter of the year, with only 8.3 percent of members joining in each of the autumn months compared to 12 percent in January. However, with the right strategy, you can show potential customers that a visit to your gym or studio is something they will fall for this season.

With these three content tips at the ready, you can deepen relationships with your online community to make your customer base stronger than ever:

1. Show off your specials

If your gym has a special or discount running, now’s the time to shout it from the rooftops. Fifty-seven percent of consumers will make a first-time purchase if they can take advantage of a special, so whether you’re offering student discounts on new memberships, a BOGO special on Zumba classes, or a free two-week trial for personal training, let your audience know! They’ll be more likely to stop by and try out what you have to offer.

You might consider taking a tip from this gym, which put the important details of their special in a graphic:

2. Run a contest on Instagram

Contests are an incredibly effective and fun way to drum up excitement about your business. They’re so effective, in fact, that 94.2 percent of social media users admit that online contests influence their awareness of new businesses. By incentivizing users to tag a friend or share your post, you’re spreading the word about your gym quickly and getting the chance to reward a few lucky participants. So, next time you’re planning out your content, throw a contest into the mix! A little healthy competition is good for your pages.

This gym decided to do a giveaway for their contest — the winner and their BFF received a bundle of their performance wear. Here’s how they advertised the contest on Instagram:

3. Highlight your team members

Sometimes, trying out a new gym can be intimidating, especially if you’re taking the first steps by yourself. Featuring your team members on your social pages is a subtle way to extend a virtual handshake and show potential customers some of the friendly faces they might run into at your gym.

Below, you’ll see how one gym used an image of their teammates on Twitter to show off the welcoming, family-like atmosphere they’re proud to show off.
[Video] Islam and the Environment
By: Virtual Mosque
Tags: Chapter 55, Environment, Islam

The Holy Quran reminds people of the creation and says that Allah created everything that is on this earth so that man “may not exceed the measure”. But humans ignore this instruction and misuse the bounties of Allah. Although the question Allah asks “which of my bounties will you deny?” is rhetorical the answer is that by misusing Allah’s bounties man is denying them.
When A Computer Goes Bust
By: Floyd Mori
Tags: Success, Writing, Computers, Medium, Christmas

When A Computer Goes Bust

It throws a kink in things

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

This was not supposed to happen

The computer was not that old and should have lasted for a few more years. The battery had gone out and was replaced. It was anticipated that the computer had some good life still in it.

It was just before Christmas that our laptop computer went out. Something happened to the battery which was less than six months old. The computer guys said it was a defective battery. It basically burned up the computer so that it would not work and was dangerous to turn on again.

Time for a new computer. It became our Christmas present, which we were forced to purchase right before Christmas. It would take a few days, they said, to get the computer after they took off the information from the old computer and installed it on the new one.

No writing on Medium for a few days. It meant a break in the chain, and nothing could be submitted for several days. Not that it mattered a whole lot. It is not like Medium has been lucrative or has paid off for the time spent. Without the computer, it was time off from the daily grind to enjoy the Christmas holidays without some of the pressure.

The new computer was ready a day earlier than expected. We picked it up the day before Christmas instead of the day after Christmas. Although it was basically the same computer as the old one, trying to get used to it was a bit cumbersome. The keyboard touch was different so it took some getting used to it. Always punching the right keys did not happen readily.

Now it is the day after Christmas. It is time to get back on track.

Keep writing and keep trying to find some success.
Tonight’s comic used to feel bad about being weird.
Tags: Weird, Psychology, Comics, Depression, Friendship

More from rstevens Follow

I make cartoons and t-shirts at www.dieselsweeties.com & @rstevens. Send me coffee beans.
Android Espresso for Beginners
By: Siva Ganesh Kantamani
Tags: Programming, Mobile, Tdd, Android, Software Engineering

Usage

Let’s say we have an application with an activity and its layout contains a view with id tv_hello . Our goal here is to find whether the view with the id tv_hello is displayed on the screen. Have a look:

First, it’ll start searching a view with id tv_hello , and once it found the view using check function, it’ll verify the visibility through isDisplayed() .

We can also use multiple constraints to narrow down the view search, as shown below:

In this test, while searching for a view, it will consider two constraints: withId (with a specific id) and withText (with a specific text in the view).

Actions

Now it’s time to perform actions on the narrowed views. To execute actions, we have to invoke a perform-function on onView with the desired action, as shown below:

We can also pass multiple actions as parameters to the perform function, as shown below:

In this test first, it’ll type “Hello” on the view and then perform the click action. Only if both actions are executed without any error will the test succeed.

Lists

We’ve completed basic testing with the standard layout. What if we have complicated views, like a list? To write test cases on lists, we have another function called onData , similar to onView .

Let’s say we have a list with a string ArrayList , and we need to find the item with text Kotlin and perform click functionality on that particular item. Have a look:
#MakeoverMonday2019 — Week 2. Press Freedom dark’s horizon
By: Pat Vu
Tags: Makeovermonday2019, Tableau, Visualization

#MakeoverMonday2019 — Week 2

Press Freedom dark’s horizon

Original report

Original interactive viz

What I like about this viz:

All

What i don’t like:
Interesting AI/ML Articles You Should Read This Week (Sep 19)
By: Richmond Alake
Tags: Technology, Towards Data Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

“GPT-3 impressively explains the origin of everything”

Kirk Ouimet article is a dialogue between himself and GPT-3, which is referred to as ‘Wise Being’.

The content of the dialogue is around the origin of the Big Bang and other associated topics such as time, space and the Universe.

I was truly expecting to be bored or at the very least be a little bit impressed by the output of the ‘Wise Being’ in the dialogue.

After reading the entirety of the dialogue and article, I would have to admit that the responses from the ‘Wise Being’ felt almost human-like, and surpassed my initial expectations. The responses were well put together and had some form of logic, well as much logic as possible when answering questions that are outside the realms of human imagination.

The key takeaway for me from this article is that the GPT-3 language model is clearly very robust and can mimic creativeness. It also has the ability to draw upon the relevant source of text from its training data to provide some decent responses.

Although it should be noted that GPT-3’s responses are not actually unique and is not generated as a product of reasoning. Not for now, anyway.

An excellent read for:
Dear Poets, Comic Artists, Humorists, Flash & Micro-Fiction Writers
By: Mark Starlin
Tags: Writing, Essay, Medium, Money, Partner Program

The news that Medium is switching to a “read time” metric to reward stories in the partner Program has many up in arms. I write mainly one-minute humor, comics, micro-fiction and poems. So the news is relevant to me.

Let’s face it; Medium has never favored creative writing. They prefer current event essays and confessional writing. We have always been the “second-page” categories. This has not changed. There is no Medium Poetry publication. Or Humor. Or Fiction.

Will the new system affect us? Of course. For good or bad? We will see. I encourage you to wait until the new system is in effect before you revolt.

Honestly, I am not getting rich on my humor, poetry, and micro-fiction. Or my long fiction either. Does anyone actually make decent money publishing creative writing on Medium? Why haven’t you written an essay on how? Everyone else has. I want to read it. I typically post daily, and my monthly earnings are still meager. If they go lower… What’s below meager?
Let’s Make Your Articles and Presentations Look Pretty
By: Marat Levit
Tags: Tools, Presentations, Articles, Design, Makeover

Let’s Make Your Articles and Presentations Look Pretty

Seven tools to make your articles and presentations look professional and consistent.

Great presentations flow, tell a story, and in general, look appealing. Similarly, well-written articles are accompanied by nicely designed graphics, imagery, and high-quality photos.

Your writing style is your own, and that I can’t and won’t be able to help you with. However, I can try to improve the look and feel of your articles and presentations with a little help of a few popular toolsets.

Let’s begin.

Stock Photos

I’ve seen and created my fair share of professional presentations, and there’s always one aspect that’s common to them all… one-liner impact statements. Whether it’s to drive a point home, scare the crap out of you, or quote a loosely related article or study, more often than not, these one-liners appear alongside a beautiful stock photo that by some stretch of the imagination is associated with the one-liner itself.

Unsplash is my first choice for beautiful free photos.

Before 🙄

I don’t believe this number

After 😱
Don’t Fear the Reaper — Your Keyboard is Not Contagious!
By: Lon Shapiro
Tags: Collaboration, Writing, Mystery, Toilet Paper Caper, Humor

Don’t Fear the Reaper — Your Keyboard is Not Contagious!

Thirty-Five followers… 35 followers... 30+5 followers. That may not seem like much to some writers on Medium, but it means a whole hell of a lot to the editors of Out of Ideas, Out of Time.

This is me at a Zoom business meeting. Notice I have protected my ears as well as my nose and mouth from any external toxins

We are also Out of Our Minds, because only 10 members of our group have written a chapter, and, unlike so many writers, we can subtract.

Thirty-five minus ten is… (checking calculator on phone)… 25!!

Twenty-five of you haven’t dipped your virtual toes into the collaborative waters of the current Stark mystery.

While we extend our hearty congratulations to Michael Stang, Elle Fredine and Laura Johnson who all popped their literary cherry in our current saga, “The Toilet Paper Caper,” to the rest of you, we say “courage!”

Add your voice to this cacophony of collaborators chasing comedy catharsis to combat the cold, creepy, and cruel combination of Covid-19 and Cornholavirus-45 currently contaminating our country.

When I look at the heavyweight literary talent in our mailing list, only one thought enters my mind…

Why haven’t they unsubscribed yet?

But seriously, why haven’t we had more submissions?

Roy, just send us a cartoon where you mention Stark. One. Lousy. Panel.

Is that too much to ask?

Tre, how about a short poem that Stark mumbles to himself?

Tommy, you can’t squeeze out a single rule-of-three humorous reference?

If you people don’t have the time to write a 3–5 minute chapter, send in a joke or a paragraph or an idea.

Even a hand-drawn picture would help.

Give us anything, and we’ll build the plot around it.

Heaven knows, there’s no real plot at this point; nobody would be the wiser.

Stay safe and keep laughing.