fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
4 Ways a Simple 2-Letter Word Can Improve Your Life
By: Moreno Zugaro
Tags: Communication, Advice, Productivity, Success, Self Improvement

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett

When I was a kid, Buffett would’ve been proud of me. If I didn’t want something, I said no — a very clear, loud, and unmistakable no. My mum once tried to make me wear a hat for a photo and since a few screamed nos didn’t do the trick, I simply ripped the string of the hat and threw it into a corner. I was a lovely kid to have.

However, Warren Buffett’s advice seems to work — all the nos have gotten me somewhere. Today, I do what I love for a living, have more money and possessions than I want, and enjoy a great relationship and awesome friends. Still, there are plenty of distractions every day I have to resist to keep my life that way. But saying no isn’t always easy.

You know you should use these two letters more often. When your boss hands you a stack of papers even though you’re already drowning in work, when your friend asks you to join a party you know you won’t enjoy, or when your mum asks if you liked the sweater she got you for Christmas so she can get you another one. You don’t say no although you know you should. But why?

Often, you’re afraid of offending someone and use a little white lie to avoid confrontation. Sometimes, your desire to be helpful overrides your other instincts. In both cases, saying no can save you time, energy, and some serious stress down the line.

No is efficient — it’s the word with the highest power per letter. Here are four reasons why it will save you stress and regret and how to draw the line without feeling bad about it.
The Story of Goldie: How SurveyMonkey’s Logo Became an Icon of Curiosity
By: Rovana Lee
Tags: Logo Design, Brand, Surveymonkey, Design, Curiosity

I remember the first time I traveled internationally by myself for work. I was in my mid 20s, still paying off my school loans, and working for a small product design studio in San Francisco. The trip was off to a rocky start from the get-go. I started the journey by missing my flight entirely; misreading my flight time and thinking 12:31 am was the following day. When I finally arrived in Hong Kong, I was greeted with a typhoon that wanted to say hello. I remember sitting in the car with my co-worker as we drove through a veil of rain that suddenly lifted away and revealed sunny blue skies on the other end of the freeway. It was surreal.

A few days into the trip I began feeling homesick. I had just said goodbye to my co-worker after a long day, but wasn’t ready to turn in yet. I began exploring the late night market when something familiar caught my eye… glowing yellow arches. Instant emotions of comfort came my way. For a moment, I didn’t feel so far from home — and I knew a Happy Meal had my name on it. Let me clear the air: This post is not sponsored by McDonald’s.

That’s the power of a logomark — it can transcend language barriers, acting as a bridge to quickly connect you to all the experiences you’ve ever encountered with the brand.

A logomark, also known as the brandmark, is an icon-based logo that doesn’t spell out the business name. It can be an incredibly simple visual form. It has the ability to help companies communicate their identities and how they differentiate from one another with no words.

Here are three examples of instantly recognizable logomarks:
Lichen Life
By: Michael Woronko
Tags: Philosophy, Life, Science, Nature, Life Lessons

“They [lichen] simply exist… testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake.” — David Attenborough

As humans, we’re inclined to believe that we have some sort of all-encompassing purpose. That life, itself, must have some sort of point. We’re innately designed to pursue our ambitions and we’re both mentally and physically constructed to achieve remarkable things.

But, as Bill Bryson had once asked, what’s life to a lichen?

“Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button… It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence… … Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t…” — Bill Bryson

It can be argued that every minute bit of matter in our universe serves some sort of purpose, even if that purpose consists of filling the empty (though not really empty) voids of space around us.

“Living” organisms are naturally given more credence than, say, inanimate objects. We can see that they, like us, grow or reproduce or consume energy. Underlaying all of this are the numerous laws of the natural world which seem to infuse everything, inanimate or not, with some kind of mysterious effervescence, one that prompts us to realize that there is much more at play so long as we zoom in close enough.

Many thinkers, today and throughout history, have held firm in their proposition that something more exists within the spaces that hold together each individual atom; that, whatever it is that binds together the assembly of atoms and molecules which constitute an object or a living being, it is something woven into the fabric of overall meaning and purpose.

Now, what does any of this have to do with lichen?

It can be argued that even the most primal and seemingly one-dimensional of life forms contain some sort of inexorable sense of vitality. An irrefutable and intoxicating sense of existence that we share in common with all of matter.

This is where things get more interesting.
Newsbreak: Transparent Feedback After 10 Days
By: Auriane Alix
Tags: Work, Writing, Money, Writer, Newsbreak

Newsbreak: Transparent Feedback After 10 Days

I’m losing faith in humanity, but my wallet is fine.

Photo by Jonathan Francisca on Unsplash

I’ve been experimenting on Newsbreak for exactly 10 days. It’s not much to give feedback, but some things deserve to be said. Everything seems to go at the speed of light on this one.

To make a long story short, I don’t know yet if Newsbreak will be a sustainable source of income for me. It will certainly not replace Medium, whose content quality and friendly community I appreciate. I like the way the writing is magnified here, which is something I don’t find on Newsbreak.

If I had to sum up my experience in one sentence, it would be this: I’m losing faith in humanity, but my wallet is fine.
Creating a Human that Never Existed
By: Dickson Wu
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Gans, Programming, Neural Networks

What would you do with a humanoid robot? Get it to go to work for you? Create the next trillion-dollar company? Or take over the world?

(Un)Fortunately, our technology isn’t advanced enough to create those robots. But we can definitely make progress toward it! One start is the physical appearance of the robot — and with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) we can create hyper-realistic faces.

Take, for example, the image below. There are 3 humans and 1 generated human. Which one is it? (Scroll slowly)

Which one is the fake human?

So which one is it?

Are you confident?

I lied. All of them are fakes! The images were so realistic that you couldn’t even tell! That is the power of GANs!

Whoa there — Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What even are these Generative Adversarial Networks?
Perfect is the enemy of done and get out of your own way
By: Skipper Chong Warson
Tags: Principles, UI, Design, Product Design, Careers

Two of the four principles by which I best work, having come up as a designer and leading as a design director — one of two articles

When I first started writing this article, I thought I would start with the idea that we all have a reptilian brain and get into how we make bad choices because we’re unduly motivated by instincts of survival — flight or fight, reflexive behaviors, reproduction, and other methods of regulating our bodies. And then I found out it wasn’t true. Well, not exactly.

A selection of search results for “lizard brain”

I began by searching for “lizard brain”. I found some interesting images, some disturbing photos, and a variety of message board threads. And then, I learned that this concept of a brain with three parts was developed in the 1960s and eventually appeared in American physician/neuroscientist Paul MacLean’s book, The Triune Brain in Evolution in 1990. But this notion of a brain having three parts gained traction in 1977 with a wide audience through Carl Sagan’s book, The Dragon of Eden. It won a Pulitizer Prize the following year. But this specific idea of the human brain being a triune brain — the distinct parts being reptilian, old mammal, and new mammal — is no longer espoused by most comparative neurologists these days. This means there is no reptilian brain, not in the way that there are separate and discreet parts of the brain. So, there’s that. No lizard brain.

Through this, I discovered more about the limbic system. Sometimes referred to as our emotional brain, this is absolutely the reactive part of us that initiates the “fight or flight” response to danger among others. These functions are generally mapped to the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus — although many other parts of the brain lend a hand.

And so I spent a few hours a week ago last Sunday trying to decipher a number of dense scientific papers and texts to understand these concepts as a way to set the context for how designers let their inner perfectionist and critic simultaneously stand in the way of getting work done.

Finally, I gave up and I went on a short run. And that’s when I remembered Steven Pressfield.
Cómo entender el Big Data
By: Gabriela Nova
Tags: Español, Tecnología, Medios, Redes Sociales, Big Data

in In Fitness And In Health
Cleaner Monte Carlo Simulation graphs
By: Zachary Lim
Tags: Matplotlib, Portfolio Management, Monte Carlo Simulation, Data Visualization, Graph

A quick guide on presenting the outcome of a 1000 simulations

A while ago, I was running some Monte Carlo simulations on portfolio allocations and trying to figure out how to make the graphs look better. Now, I’m not some graph expert of visualization master but I did figure out ways to make it look better and this will just be a short article to share that with you!

As mentioned, I ran a number of Monte Carlo simulations in order to figure out what my portfolio could look like in 30 years. If you’re interested, this is a snippet of the code (but the full code can be found on my github). I essentially had three different funds that I simulated over the next 30 years (using their mean and standard deviation). I weighted these funds differently and then ran 1000 simulations on them.

As you can see from the initial plot, it was not useful in the slightest. All 1000 outcomes had been plotted in full colour and there was really no useful information that could be gleaned from this. I could tell the rough range of outcomes but other than that, it wasn’t really particularly useful.

I decided that the most important portfolios to visualize would be (a) the 75th Percentile, (b) the Median, (c) the 25th Percentile, and (d) the base portfolio (i.e. pure savings without investing in the market)

In order to get the position of the 25th, 50th, and 75th Percentile portfolios, I combined the quantile and index function, converting them to strings so that I could use their column names later when plotting

When drawing the plot, I set all the plots to color grey. This would make them fade into the background and would allow me to highlight important portfolio outcomes (as per the aforementioned important ones)

Obviously nothing to write home about but now at least we have an empty canvas to work on!

The list of quantiles were all strings. This allowed me to easily call the particular portfolio with .loc and refer to the exact portfolio. I also created a list of colors to use as well as labels. I also added a legend to show the labels. With that, this was the final product!

Compared with the initial plot, the final result looked so much better. It gave the same background information (the rough range of possible outcomes) but also highlighted the important portfolios. What could perhaps have been even better would have been to remove the outlier outcomes. However, for the purposes of my study, I wanted to show the full range of outcomes and hence left it in there.

Data visualization is such an important part of the data story. While we can have the coolest results and findings, a good graph that sends a clear message is also vital especially in today’s graphic-intensive culture.
4 Reasons Why Now Is the Best Time to Start With Quantum Computing
By: Sara A. Metwalli
Tags: Quantum Computers, Technology, Science, Computer Science, Programming

4 Reasons Why Now Is the Best Time to Start With Quantum Computing

A field that’s very welcoming for newcomers

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash.

Today's major companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) are racing towards building a fully functioning quantum computer. Quantum technology has gained so much attention in recent years, even though quantum computing’s origins go back to the early 1980s.

This major attention has led companies and universities to build and develop resources for those curious to get into the quantum realm. Moreover, those curious souls have formed groups on different platforms to share knowledge and support each other in their learning journey.

As a person who recently joined the field (about two years ago), I can assure you that now — despite everything else — is the absolute best time for you to join this exciting, rapidly developed field.

In this article, I will give the four reasons why I think that now is the best time to jump in and start your quantum journey.

Let’s get right to it.
What got GROUT thinking this week… March 16, 2018 Contributors: Erin Fairbanks, Matt McFarlane…
By: Grout Projects
Tags: Science Fiction, Podcast, Sustainability, Cooperatives, Bitcoin

Holding Beautiful Things Together — At GROUT, we assemble resources to develop action plans for social impact that might otherwise be rejected as impossible.

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Why I Love Running — it’s My Moving Meditation
By: Darren Matthews
Tags: Self, Mental Health, Meditation, Personal Development, Self Improvement

I was at it again this morning — running — well trying too anyway.

It’s only five kilometers I tell myself.

By the time I finish, I’m a big sweaty mess. As I perspire, it runs into my eyes, blurring the door before me. With the key in hand, I try desperately to stop shaking, the deep rapid breaths making it mission for me to open the door. Once inside I down a cold glass of water instantly slowing my breathing. I remove my woolly hat; sodden from the fluids I’ve lost.

I know I’m going to feel the pain from this run for the rest of the day. No doubt I’ll be hobbling to bed later sore from my exertions.

So, why do I do it?

It is a question I ask myself as I stagger down the road this morning.

The wind was blowing hard in my face stealing every breath I tried to take. The continuous force doing everything it could to push me back. Every step was a real effort such was the relentless power of the wind.

I kept going though convinced the wind would ease eventually.

It didn’t.

I gasped for breath again slowing to walk in the hope my air intake would improve. It was bitterly cold as well despite my running kit, leggings, hat and gloves. They were no defensive to the northwesterly wind whipping around me.

To be honest with you, none of it mattered to me. Because I was in my headspace. I was doing my moving meditation as Tony Fadell titled it.
Gazetelerin Hikaye Merkezli Dünya Görüşünü Değiştirmesi Gerekiyor — (Çeviri)
By: Sadettin Demirel
Tags: Veri Gazeteciliği, Journalism, Data Journalism, Gazetecilik, Haber

Yazar: Adrian Holovaty

Çeviren: Sadettin Demirel

Asıl yazı: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/

*Bu çeviri için yazının sahibi Adrian Holovaty’den izin alınmıştır

Yazıyı referanslayan kaynaklar:

Bounegru, L. (2012) ‘Data Journalism in Perspective’, in Gray, J., Bounegru, L., and Chambers, L. (eds) The data journalism handbook: How journalists can use data to improve the news. O’Reilly Media, Inc, pp. 17–21.

Cairo, A. (2017) Nerd journalism: How data and digital technology transformed news graphics, TDX (Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa). Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10609/66768 (Accessed: 3 April 2018).

Howard, A. (2014) ‘The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism’, Tow Centre for Digital Journalism — a Tow/Knight Report. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004.
Review: RoR — ResNet of ResNet / Multilevel ResNet (Image Classification)
By: Sik-Ho Tsang
Tags: Machine Learning, Image Classification, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Deep Learning

1. Concept of RoR (Residual Networks of Residual Networks)

Original ResNet (Left), RoR (Right)

Original ResNet is shown at the left above, numerous Residual Blocks are cascaded together and form a very deep network.

Within a Residual Block, there are two paths:

Convolution path which perform convolution to extract the features

which perform convolution to extract the features Shortcut Connection path to directly transmit the input signal to the next layer.

With Shortcut Connection paths, gradient vanishing problem can be reduced because error signal can be propagated to early layers easier during back propagation.

RoR shown at the right above, proposes that we can also have shortcut connection across a group of Residual Blocks. On top of this, we can also have another level of shortcut connection across a group of “groups of Residual Blocks”.

Authors argue that:
Cats vs Dogs —Your second end-to-end CNN Classifier in 5 minutes
By: Vidisha Jitani
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Neural Networks, Deep Learning

Model 1 — Basic Model

Result: ~74% Accuracy

This is exactly similar to our previous classification model. There are some changes based on the nature of the problem though. Lets briefly discuss the same.

Data Preprocessing

You have images, but models work on matrices! Right! So, this a step that will be needed in almost all CNN-based models. Most of these things were discussed in the last article, so not covering them again. So:

1. Load the images

2. Decode the JPEG content to an RGB grid of pixels.

3. Resize the image to 150*150 pixels (to reduce the size of it).

4. Rescale the pixel values (between 0 to 255) to the interval (0, 1] interval

Keras ImageDataGenerator

Usually, I don't go into implementation logic, but this one needs a special mention. The above section might look like a lot of work, right?! But, this beautiful construct of Keras really helps you in getting your work done.

It works on Python generators. If you arent familiar with it would highly recommend doing so. In simpler words, the Generator is a special kind of iterator that works lazily. Unlike lists, these do not store their content in memory but yields them when needed. So, these are iterators that don’t block your memory but use it when needed. Amazing stuff, right?

Convolutional Layer++

Someone might say — no the model is not the same as earlier. It has 3 more layers of convolution. Guilty as charged! Yes, can you think of a reason?

Our handwritten classifier had [28 * 28] matrix size, whereas here we are dealing with [150 * 150] matrix size. So, since we dealing with much larger images and a much more complex problem, we tend to add more layers. This is primarily done to reduce the size of input while it reaches the Flatten layer.

Also, as you move more into the convolutional layers, the model can detect much more complex patterns. So, this augments the capacity of the network as well.
Baseline
Tags: Typography, Design, Paperposts

I was digging through my library and found four issues of Baseline. I’d forgotten how good it was! The issues are from 1999, 2004 and 2 from 2005 (# 27, 44, 46, 48) and all have ‘poster’ cover wraps which make them feel oh-so-special.

Looking back on them there’s so much to love (which I think I missed back then). The larger format gives the designers lots of space to play with, and they aren’t afraid of white space either! It’s also way quirkier than I remembered.
Python Dictionary: access values without knowing key names
By: Fabio Motta
Tags: Python, Technology, Optimization, Data Science, Programming

Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash

A python dictionary is an unordered set of key:value pairs, in which the elements (values) are indexed by the keys — that have to be unique within a given dictionary. Accessing values of a Python dictionary when knowing the name of the matching keys is quite straightforward (example below). However, how do you do it without knowing the structure of the dictionary or/and not knowing the key names (e.g. incoming API messages)?

# access dict value with known key names

# (keys are the ones in brackets: a, b, c, d. Matching values after # the ':') my_dict = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3, 'd': 5}

print(my_dict['a']) ---

output:

1

If you are used to working with lists you might think about accessing the first element of the dictionary with my_dict[0]. However, this will not return the first element (it will return an error).

If we do not know the exact key names we can first get these as a list and then use the list elements to access the values of the dictionary. Here an example:

# imagine that 'dict' is an incoming dictionary which's key names we do not know # get key names as list:

keys = list(dict.keys()) # now we can access the elements of the list 'keys' containing all the keys of 'dict'. Example: first_value = dict[keys[0]]

Attention! Do not to forget to convert the output of dict.keys() to the data type ‘list’! Otherwise it remains a ‘dict_keys’ object, which is not subscriptable and hence you will not be able to access the values stored in the variable ‘keys’ by indexing.

It is also possible to directly access the values with a similar method. Instead of the function ‘.keys()’ we can use the function ‘.values()’. This stores all the values of a dictionary in a list.

values = list(dict.vaues()) first_value = values[0]

Hope this short article helped and allows you to write more flexible code in which you do not have to change key names or get confused while using them!
Flashback Christmas Eve, 1998; The Day I Lost My Science Career Due to My Credit Score
By: Markus Scorelius
Tags: Christmas, Credit Score, Science, This Happened To Me, Covid 19

The day America murdered my faith in humanity.

I was on a two-week high going into that Christmas. A few months prior I was laid off after six years. Early that December I got a new job. I was to start in the new year. I was hopeful and looking forward to the new beginning, the security, and to the challenge the work would provide me.

I felt free. I felt valued. I felt respected. But only for a moment.

I would be able to put the micromanaging of my last boss who timed my bathroom breaks out of my mind. I would regain my dignity and my self-confidence. I would be able to catch up on my bills again and be a real productive member of society.

It was sometime that afternoon on Christmas Eve 1998 that I received a phone call from the Human Resources department of my new employer. As my phone rang, I felt the black cloud and panic overtake me. My previous life experiences had conditioned me to expect the worst for no reason.

Even though I was still under 30, people had already found a way to torture my psyche. They seemed to get some sick pleasure out of it.

I told myself not to panic as I answered the phone. I had no reason to believe that anything could possibly be wrong. The Human Resources harpy who would have thrived as an assassin or even just a common serial killer informed me that “the company” had to renege my job offer.

The shoddy reason she gave was that my credit score wasn’t high enough for the position. It was not a position handing money. It wasn’t in finance or accounting. It was in science. I just wasn’t born into the right class.

After being laid off because I was human and needed to urinate on occasion, I was unable to keep up on all my bills and had damaged my credit. I would never have thought that an employer would take back a job offer due to recent bad credit. Did they think they would be helping me to improve my credit score by denying me the ability to make a living? Did they think that not having a salary would improve my credit score? It was madness.

What kind of sick, stupid, punitive society takes away someone’s ability to pay their bills because they have been unable to pay their bills due to unemployment? What kind of fucked up twisted mindset does someone have to accept to do this to a decent person?
To the little girl who ruined my ‘me time’ walk
By: Shamontiel L. Vaughn
Tags: Extrovert, Storytelling, Funny Story, Antisocial, Children

To the little girl who ruined my ‘me time’ walk

Social isolation is helping kids pick out the cool adults

Photo credit: Create Her Stock

I strutted down the street, mouthing the lyrics to the best I-understand-women-completely rap song that wasn’t created by Drake. (It’s “Foldin’ Clothes” by J. Cole, and he deserves a Grammy for it. It’s been my ringtone for so long I have no idea what it was before 2019.)

I wore snug black capris (that surprisingly still fit after all the sundae cones I’ve demolished during social isolation), a pink wraparound sleeveless top, a color-coordinated face mask and my “Hollywood” sunglasses that my mother makes fun of. In my opinion, I looked pretty decent for someone whose attire is yoga pants and sports bras six days out of the week. I’m dressed for the public and feeling myself.

After the building inspector emergency, I’m diving back into social isolation and my antisocial extrovert ways: Stay away from family and friends, especially older ones, for both of our safety. Talk via email more than in person. Stay six feet away from everyone. Make excuses to stay off Zoom and UberConference so I don’t have to wear a shirt. (They’re overrated.) Wear a mask when a random condo owner knocks on my door throughout the day. (Reluctantly put on a shirt over the sports bra.) And try to get in a little Kukuwa dance in between working on my couch. I’m trying to be productive and enjoy life in my own little cocoon. But sometimes I just need to enjoy my 10,000 steps with the public. So off I walked today.

Then here she came, staring at me in the middle of the sidewalk. I saw her sizing me up as I walked closer, with her mother’s back to me. But I was too busy rapping along to “I never thought I’d see the day I’m drinking almond milk” to really pay attention.

She pointed right at me and yelled out, “Where are your friends?!”

I paused my Spotify playlist and looked down, laughing.

I told her, “I’m rolling solo today.”

Her response, “You don’t have any friends?”

I laughed again, and turned to her mother, who looked mortified.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “She’s been asking that every single time she seems somebody walking alone.”

I smiled and said, “Man, if I didn’t have any friends, I’d feel really bad about myself right now.”

Her mother nodded. “I know, right!”

I strolled on, with the little girl’s eyebrow still raised at me. Kids say the darnedest things indeed. The next time I walk down this block, I’m going to find one of these people who keep knocking on my door, ringing my bell and emailing me at all hours of the day. I’ve been out of high school for 19 years. I never thought I would have to prove how cool I am to people under three feet, but here we are.

Tomorrow I’m dodging that block. She won’t catch me slipping. I can just hear her now, “You still don’t have any friends with you, huh? Mmph, mmph, mmph.”
How to Accelerate Your Learning by Taking Better Notes
By: Benjamin Ebuka
Tags: Education, Books, Learning, Reading, Personal Development

Handwrite your notes

So, there has been this long-lasting debate about what medium fosters effective note-taking. Should you go techy style or remain old fashioned pen and paper?

Scientists, entrepreneurs, and professors have been evaluating various methods of note-taking. Therefore, the straight answer is old school Pen and paper.

Ditch the laptop

Though taking your notes using a laptop might seem accurate to the eyes, it doesn’t to the brain. To speed up the learning process ditch the laptop and take your notes the old school way — pen and paper.

An experiment tested both groups of note-takers (pen and laptop users) exactly half an hour after the lecture, which left them without the opportunity to review. The psychological scientists decided to explore this concept further and conducted a second experiment in which these students would be given a week to review for the exam.

Even after a week of review, the students who took notes in longhand were found to do significantly better than the other students in the experiment, including the fleet typists — those who transcribed the lectures.

Overall, it seems those who type their notes may potentially be at risk for “mindless processing.” The old-fashioned note-taking method of pen and paper boosts memory and the ability to understand concepts and facts.

As research has proven, handwriting is better for retaining what you write, but first, you need the right tools.

While taking notes with your hand, paraphrase them into your own style, make them easy for you to grasp and understand under short periods.

Draw your notes and make them colorful

Now I know you might be thinking that drawing on paper is for little kids. But it might sound silly but research shows if you draw something you’re more likely to remember it later.

During a study, partakers were given a series of words that were easy to draw (for example, “apple”) and were either asked to draw the word or write it down. To guarantee partakers consumed the same amount of time either writing or drawing, they were given 40 seconds for each word and asked to fill the entire period. So they could write or draw the item over and over.

When partakers were later tested on how many words they remembered, drawing helped them to remember twice as many as writing.

Designer Mike Rohde popularized “sketchnotes” with his books The Sketchnote Handbook and The Sketchnote Workbook. Rohde uses the term sketchnotes to describe the way he draws shapes and pictures among his notes to help him better take in the main ideas from conference talks, rather than trying to note down every little point.

To improve attentive listening and effective retention, make use of different bright colored inks for headings, and subheadings when taking notes. Purple is always aligned with the left margin line, a yellow highlighted box is always used for summaries and important equations or quotes, etc.
Join the BitGreen Ecosystem v0.1 Beta Program!
Tags: Social Good, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Sustainability, Impact

The BitGreen community was created in 2017 with the intention of making good on the potential Blockchain has for global amelioration.

With the launch of our V0.1 ecosystem, a closed beta for members of the community, we’re taking a proud step forward on this path of laying the foundations for BitGreen as a global impact currency. And we’re extending the invitation for you to join us!

As covered in the updated Whitepaper, BITG is a currency backed by the goodwill and actions of our community. Our ecosystem offers members opportunities to earn BITG for everyday impactful actions, such as: recycling, volunteering computing power, changing to renewable energy sources, and more. Not only are members able to earn for doing good, but can also spend their earnings in a way that is no less impactful, by purchasing goods and services from participating vendors, donating to participating charities, and offsetting with participating partners — all of whom both accept and reward customer loyalty with BITG.

The entire ecosystem, along with all the basic wallet functions you would expect, will be made available in the BitGreen mobile app. But we didn’t want to wait. Members of the BitGreen community are already earning on their impactful work with our Folding@Home Initiative. Partnering with leading volunteering platform Golden, the core team is hard at work onboarding new earning opportunities, as well as both vendors and charities to spend with, and we’re excited to begin testing the waters with a pilot program.

So we invite you to sign up as a beta-user of the v0.1 BitGreen Ecosystem, where you’ll get to explore our impact opportunities and our ecosystem partners, earn and spend good, and perhaps drop us notes on how to improve and whom to partner with. Just follow the directions below, and please don’t forget to invite any other change heroes in your community to sign up and earn BITG for their impactful actions.

If you do not yet have a BITG Address, make one here: https://webwallet.bitg.org

Golden Signup Steps
Use Python’s Built-In Module Glob to Simplify File search
By: Imran Ali
Tags: Python, Python3, DevOps, Data Science, Programming

So, What’s the Use Case?

Ok, we have an idea about the module now but what about the use case? Where might you be able to use this and potentially avoid using a blob of code and instead use glob’s built-in functions to achieve the same task in possibly a single line of code? Let’s take a look.

Use Case: Finding files with a certain extension inside a directory on a filesystem

This is a very common task that can find its use in almost every Python program out there. Let’s say we want to find files with extension .jpeg inside a directory for an image processing task. Let's try doing that without using glob and then with using glob and see if it's any better.

Without using glob

It’s too much work to create a simple list of file paths. First, create an empty list then iterate over the paths and find the jpegs.

Using glob

It’s really as simple as that. One line of code!
Hadoop Performance Benchmark Results Comparing On-Premise S3 vs. HDFS
By: Gary Ogasawara
Tags: S3, Hdfs, Prestodb, Hadoop, Big Data

Introduction

A challenge for Hadoop deployments is to scale storage in sync with the compute requirements because the storage and compute are co-located on the same hardware nodes. A more flexible and cost-effective solution is to scale storage independently of the compute by separating the storage nodes from the compute nodes. Implementing the storage layer using S3 storage software (in this case, Cloudian HyperStore software) and using an S3 connector instead of HDFS, we can achieve the separation of storage and compute layers. But what is the performance impact of using S3 across a network instead of using HDFS?

This work done by Tatsuya Kawano (@tatsuya6502) aims to answer that question by examining the performance of different combinations of query type and storage type:

Hive+HDFS Hive+S3 (Cloudian HyperStore) Presto+HDFS Presto+S3 (Cloudian HyperStore)

We used HiBench’s SQL (Hive-QL) workloads with ~11 million records (~1.8GB) and TPC-H benchmark with ~866 million records (~100GB).

CDH5 (Cloudera Distribution Hadoop v5.14.4) was used for the Hadoop and HDFS implementation.

For S3 storage, we used Cloudian HyperStore v7.1 that implements the Amazon S3 API in a software package that can be deployed on Linux.

Based on the aggregate of the benchmark results, the relative performance from best to worst was

Presto+HDFS (BEST) Presto+S3 Hive+HDFS Hive+S3 (WORST)

Both Presto configurations substantially outperformed the two Hive configurations (roughly by a factor of 10). And the Presto+S3 combination showed very similar performance results to the best Presto+HDFS combination.

Infrastructure Setup

We created separate CDH5 and HyperStore 7.1 clusters on Amazon EC2. We deployed them in the same Amazon VPC subnet.

CDH5 Cluster (6 + 1 nodes)
How to Generate Random Text CAPTCHAs Using Python
By: Siddhant Sadangi
Tags: Code, Python, Programming, Security, Cybersecurity

Creating the Canvas

First, we need to import the ImageFont , ImageDraw , and Image modules from PIL:

from PIL import ImageFont, ImageDraw, Image

Now, we have to create a blank image object. For this, we first need to create a three-dimensional (for the three color channels) numpy zeros array:

import numpy as np

img = np.zeros(shape=(25, 60, 3), dtype=np.uint8)

This gives us an array where each element represents a pixel of the image, the size of the image being 60x25 pixels:

To create an image from this array, we call Image ’s fromarray() method:

The image is black because each pixel has a value of (0, 0, 0) , which corresponds to the brightness of the red, green, and blue pixels. Brightness has a value between 0 (darkest) and 255 (brightest). To get a white image, just add 255 to the image array:

Since we need a white background, we’ll use the last canvas.
“It’s getting dark” — A Short Story
By: Erios De Kir
Tags: Fiction, Short Story, Flash Fiction, Horror, Writing

“It’s getting dark” — A Short Story

They didn’t know if they would get out of there.

Photo by Simon Wijers on Unsplash

She was cautiously looking outside the window. Something wasn’t right. They had arrived at the vacation house two days ago for a quick weekend getaway. But something had happened. By the sound of it, it seemed that all the animals had gone crazy. All you could hear was constant growling and howling. Julie was afraid to even go outside by herself. A couple of times she had even seen some wolves lurking around.

When she was little, she spent most of her summers there, playing with toys outside. Back then they were always hoping to see some animals as it was a rare thing to happen. Today it was different.

“Jake! Come take a look!” She shouted out. “They are here all over again.” He dashed down the stairs. “What’s going on?” The wolves were dragging plants from the ground, clawing at trees and the shed. Some were even climbing on their car.

“What the hell is happening? What are we going to do, Jake?” she asked nervously.

“This is not right. Something has happened to them. We need to get back to the city,” Jake answered.

“How are we supposed to do that?”

“Check your phone. Do you have service?”

“No.. P…Po… Power is also out.”

“That’s not good. We need to get to the car before they scrap it.”

It had gotten very dark already. It was hard to see anything outside. Some blurry silhouettes of creatures were the only thing their eyes could separate. The sounds were getting worse.

“There must be a lot of them,” she uttered.

“I’m gonna get the flashlight. We must hurry or we’ll be here forever, “ mentioned Jake.

“They are scraping the door already. I’m scared to go outside. “

“I understand. I’m also not so thrilled about it. But it’s the only way to get out,” Jake answered. “But we must use the back door.”

Suddenly they heard glass shattering. “That can’t be good.” It was a modestly small house. They could hear the animals moving around the house. Some steps sounded way too heavy.

“For sure, these aren’t only wolves, ” mentioned Jake. “But let’s move. Let’s take the back door.”

They ran through the living room until they reached the small lobby at the back. “It seems quiet.” Jake pushed the door open a little and peeked outside. “I can’t see anybody. But it’s really dark. Do you have the keys?”

“Yep.”

“Let’s go. Carefully.”

They heard a loud roar extremely close.

“Something’s moving there,” said Julie.

“It’s coming closer! Quick, inside!”

They managed to jump inside, while the monster was left behind clawing the door. They dropped to the ground breathing heavily. “What was that?”

“No idea. It can’t be good. There’s no way we are going back out there. Maybe it’s better to wait for the morning.”
dApp Builder at community meetup in Seoul on May 17
By: Dapp Builder Team
Tags: Development, Technology, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin

The dApp Builder team in Korea has presented the Platform at its meetup in Seoul on May 17

The has spoken on a topic “dApp Builder: Blockchain App Store and Smart Contracts Marketplace” at the meetup. They also explored how dApp Builder plans to establish a community reviewed smart contract marketplace and make it in a way where anyone can make an Etherium dApp.

What is dApp Builder

dApp Builder is a platform to create Ethereum dApps from prebuilt smart contracts (no coding) and instantly deploy them to blockchain.

dApp Builder establishes a community reviewed smart contract marketplace.

dApp Builder exists to make it so that anyone can start an Etherium dApp.

dApp Marketplace will enable anyone to create, customize, and deploy their decentralized applications.

If you are interested in trying the released functionality please go here https://dappbuilder.io/ and sign up.

Stay in touch for updates via
This House Is More Than a House
By: Susannah Mackinnie
Tags: Poetry, Life, Fantasy, Childhood, Storytelling

I know most would laugh scornfully at the thought of a house changing its structure or a dictionary as a devoted watchdog. But I’ve lived here for most of my life. This house and the objects within have strange and capricious natures.

Bedrooms appear and disappear. Stairways go everywhere and nowhere. For the favored few, the house sees into their hearts and fulfills their needs.

I want to make it clear that doesn’t include me. I tend to it with respect and the house plays no tricks on me. But that’s all.

Susannah is a different story. House has dearly loved Susannah from the moment I brought her through the door. Within its confines, it and the faithful Merriam Webster are her fiercest protectors and, unfortunately, her greatest influences.

Grandmother Iline
How To (Happily) Read More Books
Tags: Books, Habit Building, Reading

I outlined this post a few weeks ago but stopped without finishing it. My impostor syndrome crept in and reminded me of the superficiality of my views: what do I have to offer on this topic?

But I do! I do! I do because I went from hardly reading any books other than school requirements to enjoying reading so much that I will pick up a book whenever I have time. Aha…I am a happy avid reader!

There are things I consciously did that helped me become who I am now. If sharing them would help those who have every intention of reading more but are struggling a bit, I should share.

So here we go — how to (happily) read more.

Don’t finish every book

You don’t need to finish every book you read, and you shouldn’t feel guilty if you don’t (other than academic books). In fact, it was my misbelief that I needed to that threw me off my reading habit on my first couple of tries. I came across a book I didn’t like, I dreaded finishing it but I had to finish that one to move on to the next one, so I stopped reading altogether.

You are not going to learn from every book you read. You are not going to like every book you read. If you like everything you read, I can’t take you that seriously. If you’ve learned one thing from a book, you’ve got your money’s worth even without finishing it.

To not waste money through, you can read the first few pages on Amazon before buying or get recommendations from people with similar interests to you.

Adam Grant’s tweet on this topic

A couple of pages every day

Like exercise, you need to get moving regularly to form the habit. Like exercise, we tend to say we don’t have time for it, but can honestly squeeze out time if we want to.

I found reading at least a couple of pages every day, whenever I have the time, is extremely helpful to form the reading habit. It will train your brain to crave reading; so eventually reading becomes a natural part of your day, and you don’t need to make extra effort to reach for books.

Mix it up — one for every mood

If you have a full-time job or have other things you spend the majority of your time on during the day, it’s often hard to focus and read a ‘serious’ book after a day’s work. During the weekend, however, you tend to be more focused to be able to learn something new.

Depending on your mood or energy, your book preference is likely to change from day to day; and you should tailor what you read to that, instead of forcing a book on yourself at the risk of stop reading altogether.

To make sure I still read something every day, I usually have 2–3 books started at the same time. During the weekend, I usually read non-fiction or more technical books. During weekdays, if I can, I prefer fiction or memoir to take my mind somewhere else at the end of the day.

Share what you’ve learned

Sharing is a great way to record what you’ve read, to gauge your personal growth through reading, to spark conversations, and to form communities.

Regularly sharing things you’ve learned from books through posts or videos online or offline can create a virtuous cycle, a positive feedback loop, to make you keep reading:
Mathematics for Machine Learning
Tags: Machine Learning, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Deep Learning

Mathematics for Machine Learning

An online book that provides foundational knowledge about the mathematics behind machine learning concepts.

A new online resource appeared this week which gained much attention on Twitter. Just take a look at the engagement below:

Not everyday a resource like this comes by, actually this project, according to the authors, took roughly two years to complete. I thought it was a good idea to share it with our community. This will be archived under the “Learn” tab of this publication, which is intended to highlight useful educational resources and material to learn about concepts related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and deep learning.

The resource I am referring to is the online book called “Mathematics for Machine Learning” by Marc Peter Deisenroth, A Aldo Faisal, and Cheng Soon Ong. I share this book here because it’s free and it contains a great introduction to the mathematics behind some of the most pervasive machine learning techniques. Some concepts include Analytic Geometry, Vector Calculus, and Continuous Optimization, among others. The summarized table of contents looks as follows:

If you ever need a place to start learning about the maths behind machine learning, then this a highly recommended book.

Besides the book itself, the open project also provides easy to follow python notebooks that include code walkthrough of concepts like Maximum Likelihood and PCA, which are all important techniques in machine learning.
Submission guidelines
By: Sai Krishna Kothapalli
Tags: Guidelines, Information Security, Bug Bounty, Publication, Writing

Welcome to Infosec Writeups. This publication has been created with the intention of being your go-to place to find a collection of awesome write-ups from best hackers in topics ranging from bug bounties and CTFs to vulnhub machines, hardware challenges and real life encounters which are published on Medium. It aims to help people in the InfoSec community to share and discuss new ideas and methodologies and learn from each other.

Many readers are unaware of this but you can clap 50 times on any post. So, if you like something don’t think twice, leave some more claps.

Before you proceed with the article, here is our submission guidelines (with a few quick formatting tips) in video format (featuring our editor Anangsha Alammyan):

Tips: