fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Our CEO is stepping down to start a new adventure
By: David Van Leeuwen
Tags: Agency, Founders, Founder Stories, Management, Startup

It took us eight years to grow Awkward into the digital agency that it is today. A relatively short time that had an incredible impact on us and the teams we have worked with. From day one, we had the intention to work with people who share the same passion for building great new products. Eight years down the line, it is safe to say we have managed to do just that. From founders and startups to highly admired companies, our collaborations have taught us a lot about different industries.

We have developed design tools, built templates for editorial newsletters, designed music applications, tackled payment systems and worked on many other projects. We have also gained a lot of knowledge about the working methods of other companies and how Awkward fits into that picture. It is interesting to see that there are many different ways to reach goals. Ultimately, this vision helped us to work well with companies to truly change the industry.

Occasionally founders ask themselves if they can do more. Are there opportunities to make even greater changes? As a founder, there comes a time when you have to make a decision to pursue that question and make room for something new. Kevin made that choice in consultation with Awkward, and will be stepping down as CEO. A big change for him personally and one with an enormous impact on our company. He has found himself at the helm of this company for all of these years and helped this ship reach incredible locations. Both the team and I learned a lot from him during that time.

A number of internal changes are required to guide this ship to new and inspiring locations. As of today, I will take on the role of CEO and become responsible for leading Awkward and its vision, working alongside the team to achieve our goals. We will continue to strive for change, and we will continue to validate and kickstart new products and opportunities.

It is a very exciting time for me and for everyone in the company. Starting now, we will make more room for research & development, with a focus on building software for mobile and web with partners who specialize in software and hardware products. We are bringing in new clients for the upcoming months. Send us an email if you want to work together: david@awkward.co.

Thank you Kevin, for your hard work and guidance. It was a pleasure to work with you and I can not wait to see where you stand after eight more years.
Integrating AEM With Unsplash
By: Chhavee Sharma
Tags: Unsplash, Digital Experience, CMS, Integration, Adobe Experience Manager

A guide to a fast and seamless way of adding images to your web content

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

While publishing web content, content authors often need relevant images to enhance the digital experience, resorting to sites such as Unsplash, a website with a vast collection of stock photography under the Unsplash license. Instead of having to visit the site time and again, a convenient way to lookup images saving both time and effort is to have the search availability within the content management system itself. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), is a leading content management solution for building websites, mobile apps, and forms. We can integrate Unsplash with AEM using Unsplash API and use beautiful, free, high-quality images in AEM, making the content publishing process faster and more streamlined!

Here’s How :

Step 1: Obtaining credentials for Unsplash API

For easier integration, Unsplash provides a REST API as well as Libraries and SDK (PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, iOS, and Android).

To use Unsplash developer API, you need to Join Unsplash and generate an API key. For more details about how to create a developer account and API key, read Unsplash Documentation

Note: Please read API terms and conditions and quota limits

Step 2: Add a new group to the Asset Finder to load Unsplash images

Using asset finder API, we create an asset controller and drop controller that manages drag and drop of assets over overlays. We write a sling servlet which will make a call to Unsplash API and search/fetch the images using credentials. (see https://github.com/moonraft-innovation-labs/aem-unsplash-integration)

Step 3: Create a component which allows authors to

Drag and drop the images from asset finder to the component (file upload in dialog)

2. Decide the rendition sizes, crop options, quality, and format to be used for different devices. (multifield in Dialog)

Unsplash Dialog

3. Shows attribution to the photographer/contributor of the images

Final Thoughts

Integrating Unsplash with AEM can empower authors to search from and use beautiful, relevant images for articles, blogs, etc. allowing them to create appealing content effortlessly.

Our Next Steps:

Integrate other free images services like pexels, stocksnaps, burst, reshot, pixabay Enhance code to be able to use images in all the components. If required, apply for production-level rate limits to API using guidelines. Contact us if you have any questions.

Authors: Chaavee Sharma and Raghav Chawla

Moonraft Innovation Labs helps enterprises build and deliver digital experiences through the right design and technology. Our team of AEM experts and enthusiasts create amazing and seamless user experiences for global organizations.

References
How MarTech Can Greatly Benefit FinTech
By: Terry Mansfield
Tags: Marketing Strategies, Business, Marketing, Financial Services

How MarTech Can Greatly Benefit FinTech

The big challenge of any company that has FinTech (financial technology) products and services is to find the best ways to market its offerings to potential customers. That’s where marketing technology (MarTech) enters the picture.

Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay

Meeting this challenge is no easy task and requires applying customer relationship management (CRM) in smart, effective ways to produce the best results from FinTech marketing campaigns. This where MarTech (marketing technology) comes into play.

FinTech needs to be able to not only find new customers but cultivate and retain the ones they already have. As part of this process, it is crucial to be able to personalize customer interaction. MarTech has digital tools and capabilities that enable FinTech marketers to automate needed tasks and make decisions that are data-driven thus allowing for the proper measurement of the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Failure to properly measure the effectiveness of FinTech marketing campaigns will inevitably lead to the waste of finite marketing resources. MarTech can greatly benefit the FinTech industry by helping it avoid marketing hit-or-miss guesswork that most often misfires.

So what is the “secret sauce” that MarTech brings to the table? In a nutshell, MarTech brings together three separate disciplines — Marketing, Technology, and Management — in a way that produces a powerful, holistic set of integrated capabilities that takes full advantage of what the digital world we now live in has to offer.

That digital world centers primarily on high-quality content and how effectively it is created and presented, with a special emphasis on making, in this case, FinTech companies into thought leaders whose messages speak to and resonate well with the FinTech customers they are trying to reach. What kind of content are we talking about?

There’s a wide range of content types to work with, such as webinars, website content, infographics, ebooks, social media content, videos, white papers, and podcasts.

But the key is for the content to always be high-quality and hit the right mark as far as messaging goes.

A marriage of MarTech with FinTech helps ensure that the FinTech industry — whether it involves traditional banking, emerging technology, financial institutions, or business (B2B and B2C) — gets the very best results in marketing their products and services.

__________________

Thanks for reading.
In Quarantine
By: Jean Carfantan
Tags: Shakti, Sacred Feminine, Quarantine, Prompt, Newsletter

Quarantine : Prompt

In Quarantine

The last shot of quarantine

Photo by BRUNO EMMANUELLE on Unsplash

We have been in quarantine for so long

In quarantine of oneself

in quarantine of extraterrestrial civilizations.

This current quarantine only brings to light

these quarantines that we have been going through for so long

that we are generally unaware of.

We relive these quarantines just before

regaining our higher self and

contact with those who gave us free will.
🎵Can’t Keep Me Down Now🎵
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Culture, Other, Art, Music, Life

🎵Can’t Keep Me Down Now🎵

My new song is the featured single at SaskMusic

Good news, friends.

“Can’t Keep Me Down Now,” a song I co-wrote with Brooklyn’s Doobie Duke Sims, has been selected as the week’s featured single by SaskMusic, a Canadian music industry organization. You can listen to the track here.

“Can’t Keep Me Down Now” is from the EP Cahoots, available on Apple Music and other platforms.

I hope you like the song, friends. It pairs well with a hot cup of coffee. ☕
Dafne — VIFF 2019. The VIFF festival is back! Catch some…
By: Jennifer Hammersmark
Tags: Grief, Down Syndrome, Review, Depression, Movie Review

viff.org

The VIFF festival is back! Catch some films yourself before it ends on October 11th.

My claim to fame is not a movie critic, but a therapist (and writer, and business owner, and skier…). Anyway, to the point. I write about films as I believe that as people we all learn and grow differently, and watching films can be extremely informative and cathartic. I find this especially true with the myriad of independent films that can be seen each year at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Dafne was the first film this year that I had the pleasure of viewing. WOW, What a way to kick off the festival!

Director Federico Bondi really brought the house down with this one. This is a heartwarming story of a daughter and her father, after her mother’s passing, and is nothing short of brilliant. He manages to intertwine the grief of a Down Syndrome woman (Dafne), with the depression of her father, in a way that was simply beautiful. The cinematography captures their journey, their pain, their humour, and their resilience. Very well done.

Dafne, played by Carolina Raspanti, exceeds expectations in her role. She is simple, yet straightforward, and extremely clever. She brings levity and clarity to every moment, often saying out loud what most of us are thinking.

Watch for yourself. It plays again on Wednesday October 9th at 6:45 pm at the Vancouver Playhouse.
Three Different Things: April 20, 2020
By: Sean O'Brien
Tags: Economy, Work Life Balance, Policy, Healthcare

Three Different Things: April 20, 2020

IT’S TIME TO BUILD, Normalizing Telehealth, and Work-Life Balance After the Pandemic

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.

A great essay from Marc Andreessen. We need to build many many things and the question to our politicians needs to be, “What are we building?”

2. COVID–19 is normalizing telehealth, and that’s a good thing

Insurance companies will find that this approach lowers the total cost of care since it will avoid ER visits and allow patients to access care earlier while complications may be able to be averted. Doctors will find that telemedicine is more profitable, since it eliminates a substantial amount of the overhead required to run a traditional medical office.

Since insurance companies pay the doctors, we’ll find that insurance companies will push this but that doctors won’t because doctors ultimately won’t receive a benefit… insurance companies will pay less for telemedicine to capture the profit from lower costs.

3. What Will Work-Life Balance Look Like After the Pandemic?

Executives and managers have the opportunity to choose quality work over quantity of work. They can value the creative ideas that emerge after a midday hike or meditation session, rather than putting in face time at the office. They can stop rewarding the faster response over the better response, or the longer workday over a more productive workday. They can rethink highly competitive career tracks where you make it or wash out — such as giving tenure-track scholars and partner-track lawyers the choice of a longer clock before their evaluation.

One thing I’m finding about working from home is that workdays are longer and more productive. Maybe with work from home businesses can have the cake and eat it too?
12 Million BETHER Tokens Up for Grabs: NEW Gaming Contest Now Live!
By: Michael Luchies
Tags: Betting, Bethereum, Ethereum, Contest, Esports

By joining, you will have the opportunity to wager the free points on eSports contests in addition to a wide variety of sporting events, from American basketball to football around the world.

In the previous Bethereum gaming contest, which featured over 10,000 players, 8M tokens were awarded, and I was able to finish in the top 50 to earn tens of thousands of BETHER tokens without any risk. It’s completely free to register and play and you could end win a cool 30,000 tokens as your prize.

Bethereum’s Gaming Competition: How it Works

The competition is simple. You begin with 4,000 points that you can wager on a wide range of sporting events, including eSports. Click on the team you would like to bet on and choose how many of your points you would like to wager (from 50 to 1,000 points). Based on how many points were bet on each team, if your team wins, you’ll win points and move up the leaderboard.

Dozens of sporting events will be available to “bet” on each week and there is no maximum — you can risk your points on all of them. There is a minimum number of bets to place in order to qualify for prizes, which is 15. This should be no problem to reach. The first round of the competition lasts over a month, ending April 24. The second round will last until June 1.

Bonus Points

Not only do you get 4,000 points to start with, but you can also earn bonus points for referrals and for sharing your bets on social media. For sharing a bet on your Twitter or Facebook account, you can earn an additional 500 points each. You can repeat this each week, giving you the potential to increase your points by 1,000 every seven days, increasing your firepower as you try to get into the top 50!

How to Register

Registration is simple. Visit gaming.bethereum.com or use my referral code for bonus points. Create your username and password, and then verify your email address. After those steps are completed, you will be ready to place your bets!

Prizes

Both rounds of the contest will offer significant prizes, including 30,000 BETHER tokens to the top 50 finishers, meaning you could end up with 60,000 tokens. Simply finish in the top 500 and you’ll be guaranteed at least 5,000 tokens.

What’s Coming Up at Bethereum

The newest and biggest gaming competition is just one of many things we have in store for you and bettors around the world. The inclusion of eSports has been a long-term focus and we are proud to unveil it in this competition, but there is much more to come, so stay tuned.

Visit gaming.bethereum.com to sign up today!
Bitcoin Futures: the Potential and the Risk
By: Brynn Johnson
Tags: Blog, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, News

Bitcoin Futures: the Potential and the Risk

What Bitcoin futures could mean for the crypto economy

Bitcoin Gains Legitimacy

Bitcoin continues to captivate the interest of the financially-minded as well as curious and often skeptical bystanders. Bitcoin is well on its way to becoming more than just a hot topic.

The cryptocurrency’s legitimacy, along with its price, is on the rise. This month, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that Bitcoin futures have been self-certified by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). This announcement was a significant milestone for Bitcoin because these two institutions are trusted pillars within the financial industry.

What is a Futures Contract?

Futures are contracts that receive their value based on an overall performance of an asset. That asset can be anything from oil to corn. Futures contracts are simply agreements to sell or buy an asset at a price that has already been agreed upon, at some time in the future. Futures contracts are often used for security or speculation.

In the case of Bitcoin futures, if an investor believes the price of Bitcoin will be elevated to a certain price in the future, that investor can use this prediction to their advantage. The investor can sign a futures contract for Bitcoin at a lower price than their prediction, then when the price is higher than their futures contract price agreement, they can profit from the price difference.

Futures are appealing to investors for their leverage, meaning investors can trade on multiple Bitcoins while only actually paying for a portion of them. While leverage is a benefit, it can also be dire if played wrong. In the same way that you can amplify your profit potential betting on futures, you can lose a large amount very quickly.
“The Bubble Kingdom grew and grew, and with it so did the Bubble Kings’s cruelty too.
By: Kyle Freeman
Tags: Satire, Revolution, Inktober, Webcomics, Art

“The Bubble Kingdom grew and grew, and with it so did the Bubble Kings’s cruelty too.

As bubble towers appeared everywhere, all accused of treason were poked and popped and made to disappear. As the kingdom spread to the far edges of the tub, all along the shore the bubblemen started to find drowned and upside down rubber ducks.

But soon came the day when the bubble folk had had enough, and the Bubble Kings’s grip on power burst in a flurry and a rush. The bubble mob cheered as down came his reign, gurgling in the drain.”
The only 2020 trend report a designer needs
By: Maximilian Schmidt
Tags: Design, 2020, Experience, Technology, Trends

UX-, UI-, Product-, Interaction-, Motion-, Service-, Brand- and Innovation-Designers, listen up, it is that time of year again. I am not talking about Christmas or New Year’s Eve. I am talking about trends for the next year. For the next decade. For the future.

Are you bored at work or at home?

If you are bored and do not know how to use your time, you might read all reports all across the internet. Else you might:

Finally finish your portfolio

Build lego houses with your children, nephew or niece, …

Exercise, do yoga or meditate

If you are not bored and would rather spend your time with something else, I will summarise all the trends — read: things that agencies want to sell or companies want to buy — for you and deduct the top three trend categories.

19 reports merged into one

The methodology is pretty simple. First I read a report. Then I add it to my table. Of course the table is no way near complete. Anyway, feel free to add links into the comment section with additional reports. So without further ado, here is the whole table.
Sind PR Agenturen im Tourismus bereits überflüssig?
By: Reinhard Lanner
Tags: Tourismus, Public Relations, Marketing

in Both Sides of the Table
Open Source Firmware — Why Should We Support It?
By: Christian Walter
Tags: Embedded Systems, Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Open Source

Arising Problems

A few problems arise if the market is dominated by only a couple of companies using opaque techniques:

Taken from LinuxBoot Repo

Bloatware

On the Open Source Firmware Conference, 2019 in Silicon Valley Ryan O’Leary and Gan Shun Lim showed that there were able to remove 214 out of 424 DXEs within the boot process. DXEs are drivers which get loaded at boot time within the Driver eXecution Environment(DXE) Phase.

That’s an overall reduction of more than 50%.

Normally Firmware needs to be adjusted to every single board. Due to the fact that companies like to save time (and also money) it is much easier to put everything into the firmware that might be needed. This results in more code and longer boot times.

Transparency

As already stated above, most of the Firmware on modern platforms is closed source, which means that the source code is not made publicly available for everyone. In reality, only a handful of developers actually know or have access to the source code. This also means that is not transparent what actually has been implemented and what code is really running.

We have to recap that Firmware is actually the first code that runs when the platform boots up and is capable of reading and writing everything without any restrictions — even your encryption won't save you here.

Security

There are a few major security concerns in current firmware solutions. The lack of transparency is one of those. In my honest opinion, we can not talk about reliable security, if the implementation of those mechanisms is not available in the public domain. The majority of the cryptography community actually relies on open source. Every known and sane cryptographic algorithm or protocol is publicly documented and available.

Closed Source Firmware is just a blob..

..and that is the problem. We do not know what is happening on the lowest level of the hardware — and especially what goes wrong. Writing bugs and making errors is just natural. Hiding those does not help at all. Security by obscurity is no security at all. Therefore it is no surprise that security researches tend to find new vulnerabilities every now and then in closed source firmware. There is a nice blog about firmware security-related topics which you can find here.
Do Not Let One Thing Be your Everything
Tags: 100 Naked Words, Work, Love, Work Life Balance, Relationships

Do Not Let One Thing Be your Everything

165 Cause that thing might break

In modern times when virtue can be merchandised in markets and law can be gamed with a Good lawyer do not let one thing to take whole of yourself.

Whatever it is, Career, relationships, friends or aids. That one thing might fell apart.

Such as you can loose your job all on a sudden, love the craft you are doing, but do not love your company, make great relationships with your colleagues but hate your company.

Also in love, you have certain needs, mostly physical and mental that’s why you need a person of another gender, don’t expect anything else from his/her. If she or he is destroying your mental peace, discuss what is it, if you can resolve it, try to do it, if you cannot leave his/her.

And always keep good friends of opposite gender to fill in the gap, so that you can get over his/her instantly, cause Romantic love is a dangerous illusion invented by Modern Society and even can kill you, that’s why you should not trust your feelings too.

Its also true for the other cases.
Advent 2014 — Day 7
By: Alan Bentrup
Tags: Church, Photos

Priest in The Episcopal Church. Co-founder and curator of Missional Voices. I write about mission and innovation in the Church. I root for Frogs and Rangers.

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Black Money within Blockchain !
By: Belavadi Prahalad
Tags: Finance, Security, Blockchain, Government, Bitcoin

A black money hoarder may buy bitcoins by trading his black money, but it is quite similar to buying stock with Black money except now there is this whole new layer of anonymity where the government doesn’t know who exactly to track.

Realistically, how can you track an address, transaction, Bitcoin in a world where we have bitcoin laundry, microtransactions and a highly divisible currency ?

And multiply that by the population of your country to get an approximate numerical value of what ought to be tracked.

This task of tracking transactions isn’t quite feasible for any government, but however they can track every transaction that an address ever made.

Linking a single person to an Identity might be able to compromise a whole network of Drug Dealers or smugglers as was the case with Silk road.

In fact anybody may track who and to whom they made a transaction and for how much as well.
Let’s expose a local webserver to the internet with ngrok.
By: Anjula Shanaka
Tags: Web Server, Web, Ngrok, Internet, Github

Have you ever wanted to expose your local webserver to the internet? Probably the answer is yes. I faced the same problem when I wanted to expose my webapp. Today I’m going to talk about one of the solutions that I found. First of all, let me explain my problem briefly.

As a volunteer at the Sustainable Education Foundation — SEF. I was working on a Github leaderboard which is a leaderboard for the contributors of SEF. As you can see I need to use Github webhook to get the data. The problem was when I’m working on the project locally, the webhook can’t access the local server. That’s when I had to use ngrok to expose my local webserver to the internet so that I can get the Github payload via the webhook.

What is ngrok?

Ngrok exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels.

Installation

All you have to do is download ngrok base on your OS using this link.

Expose a local webserver to the internet

ngrok allows you to expose a web server running on your local machine to the internet. Just tell ngrok what port your web server is listening on.

Let me demonstrate how it works,

I started my web server on port 9090.

localhost:9090

Then I ran the ngrok http 9090 command to inform ngrok to expose the web server that hosted on 9090 port.

As you can see ngrok has exposed the given port to the internet as https://88da17f166f6.ngrok.io/.

ngrok console

once you are done with your work you can quit the console and it will stop exposing your server. Isn’t that cool. The amazing thing is that ngrok gives us more than that. For example,

you can use ngrok to,

Run personal cloud services from your home

Demo websites without deploying

Build webhook consumers on your dev machine

Test mobile apps connected to your locally running backend

Stable addresses for your connected devices that are deployed in the field

As you can see ngrok is a great service that gives us better solutions to our problems.
How The Pulse Shooting Kept Me In The Closet
By: Marley K.
Tags: Queer, Family, LGBTQ, Pulse, Fear

It seems every time I’m at a point in my life when I’ve made the decision to start having fun at clubs, something devastating happens that shakes me to my core, causing me to rethink my choice.

The first time this happened, it was the Station Night Club fire in W. Warick Rhode Island in 2003, where 100 people were killed in one of the deadliest night club fires in the world. People went out for an evening of fun dancing and enjoying live music. Some never came home.

That nightclub fire shook me. I was still pretty young, had young kids, and I had just broken up with a long-time boyfriend. Change and celebrating was in order, or so I thought. I had so much to live for, were my thoughts. The Station Night Club fire caused me to go back and retreat once again to the mundane; I feared my life would be in danger if I went out to party.

Then came the Pulse Night Club shooting.

In 2016, I was sitting at home watching television in South Florida with my soon to be ex-husband. I’d decided that I was going to explore my life, my sexuality, and do it in a discreetly private manner. A gay night club was going to be the perfect way to do it safely, or so I thought — in a large city and away from where I currently lived.

Where I lived in Florida, there were nothing but frisky heterosexual retirees, pill popping desperate house wives, and snooty religious folks. There wasn’t even a gay scene in town.

After doing my research I discovered the Pulse Night Club. I gathered up enough courage to tell a local friend about my decision. Her daughter was a lesbian and she was totally supportive. I had convinced my confidante to go this club with me for safety.

It never happened.
Don’t Delay, Get A Bidet!
By: Danell Tenyenhuis Black
Tags: Bidet, Recommendations, Gift, Illumination, Toilet

Four months later, we found ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic. And, since we didn’t rush to the store, we were worried that we might run out of toilet paper. We decided to give the bidet a trial run.

Our bidet attached underneath the toilet seat, and it hooked into the same water supply. My husband, Bruce, quickly installed it. Although some models come with the option for warm water, ours hooked into the cold water. I was skeptical. When he finished installing it, Bruce called me in for my maiden voyage.

I sat stiffly and waited for the freezing cold water to hit my delicate parts. I was pleasantly surprised! The water did not feel as cold as I expected. And Bruce explained to me that if I leaned forward… the water would hit my lady parts!

I’m not sure why I never realized that bidets cleaned more than one area. Then I remembered the squeeze bottle the hospital gave me after childbirth and how good the warm water felt. Who knew that I would actually like a bidet?
10 Effective Ways To Leverage Tech In Education Systems
By: Mashayikh Shaikh
Tags: Finance, Linux, Technology Trends, Education, Social Media

Education is worth even more than most tangible assets in today’s world.💰

Its importance cannot be compromised yet having a plethora of institutions in our country we do lack many essential qualities.

In fact, a recent survey done by Business Insider states that by 2030 over half of the Indian students won’t possess quality industrial skills to be employed.

Hence it’s crucial that institutions optimize and update education systems to keep pace with the demands of the industry.

Here are some ways they could accomplish it.

Adopting digital resources to implement classroom activities

Technology is taking over the world at a rapid pace and so it’s the responsibility of the universities to keep their teaching methods updated to the latest trends.

Gone are the days when Professors would dictate notes or write on the blackboard.👨‍🏫

Classes can be digitized leveraging many applications available out there.

One of my favorites is Google Classroom

This app offers a great way to implement classroom tasks such as posting notes, grading assignments, marks composition and much more, taking the burden off students from having to mope around the campus just to get the above tasks done.

Many Institutions, more specifically speaking lecturers use messenger apps like WhatsApp, Telegram for this purpose which functionally works but there are limitations as these apps are made for just short to intermediate messages.

If the institution has the necessary prerequisites like Free Wifi and a server then its quite easy to implement these in the elementary classroom.

For instance, let’s take Google Classroom

It has many nifty features like

To-Do lists📜 Calendar embedded within for reminders and task-scheduling🗓 Separate directories for better organization of source material📁

and also it supports larger files to be shared over messenger apps.
How to speed up your Competitive Programming?
Tags: Programming, Technology, Competitive Programming, Interview, Software Development

Snippets

Doing a Breadth-First Search on a tree and executing in less than 25 seconds

If you don’t know what snippets are then, “Snippet is a programming term for a small region of Re-Usable Source Code,” and a lot of modern text editors like Sublime provide you a functionality to automatically write a predefined snippet by just writing a keyword.

I cannot emphasize enough on how much I think, and one can speed up their implementation by using Snippets. So whether you need to do a Breadth-First or Depth-first Search or need to use Segment Tree or want to do Matrix Exponentiation, you are just a (Keyword+Tab) away from its code.

It will not only improve your speed but, in turn, allow you to quickly try multiple approaches and switch between them whenever necessary without losing much time.

How to Add a Snippet

Adding a snippet in Sublime Text is pretty straightforward. Just navigate to Tools>Developers>New Snippet.

Base Template for Starting a Snippet

Use this as your base template for a snippet and paste the code that you want to use in your Snippet by replacing the comment and trigger Keyword.

Example: A Completed Snippet of a Fenwick Tree

I like to use Snippets a lot and the hardest part is to use them is to make them before you need them. So to ease things for you, I have created a Github Repository with some of my most-used snippets and relevant instructions. Feel free to use them and consider contributing.
Web Technology Information (@VenturaIT_) | Twitter
By: Ventura It
Tags: Ventura California, Ventura County, Ventura It Services, Ventura It, Ventura County Star

Ventura IT is one of the oldest active web design companies in Los Angeles and providing services from before the start of the Internet.

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I Was Raised Conservative. Here’s Why I Changed.
By: Alexandra Hastings
Tags: Opinion, Perspective, Case Study, United States, Politics

As the years passed by, I began to adopt more of what I called “socially liberal, but fiscally conservative” values. It was then that I aligned myself with libertarianism. I saw it as a way to reconcile the conservative ideas I’d grown up knowing as true with the progressive beliefs I didn’t see represented in the Republican party.

That lasted up until my first semester of university. Some of the girls I befriended in my dorm were self-described feminists. Until then, I had only heard feminists referred to as “FemiNazis” by my oh-so-articulate high school boyfriend, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that he and all the other conservative people in my life were wrong about the feminist movement. Again I wondered, who would position themselves against equality and social progress?

And the answer presented itself to me time and time again: conservatives.

Who bent over backward to defend George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old unarmed Black teenager? Conservatives.

Who stopped the progress of the Equal Rights Amendment in its tracks in the 1970s and later overwhelmingly voted against ratifying it after a brief revival in 2020? Conservatives.

Who supported “bathroom bills” that would force transgender people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender at birth based on unfounded fears that to do otherwise would endanger women and children, despite it being more dangerous to trans people themselves? Conservatives.

The list goes on and on.

I began to distance myself from the right more and more. I realized that to call myself “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” was to be willfully ignorant of the basic principles of socioeconomics. I came to understand that my concerns about climate change and what to do about it were never going to be addressed by a political party that continues to make excuses for inaction.

I saw that, throughout the history of this country, the people who argued against women’s right to vote, against the New Deal, against the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and countless other momentous and hard-fought movements for the betterment of marginalized groups were, by and large, conservatives (regardless of party affiliation).

I finally admitted that I had been wrong. And that meant my parents were wrong, too.
Ordinal Logistic Regression
By: Akanksha Rawat
Tags: Machine Learning, Econometrics, Logistic Regression, Predictive Analytics, Statistics

Ordinal Logistic Regression

An overview and implementation in R

Fig 1: Performance of an individual — Poor, Fair, Excellent

Can you guess what is the common link in the variables mentioned below:

Job satisfaction level — Dissatisfied, Satisfied, Highly Satisfied

Performance of an individual — Poor, Fair, Excellent

Impact of a regulation on bank’s performance — Positive, Neutral, Negative

The variables are not only categorical but they are also following an order (low to high / high to low).

If we want to predict such multi-class ordered variables then we can use the proportional odds logistic regression technique.

Objective

To understand the working of Ordered Logistic Regression, we’ll consider a study from World Values Surveys, which looks at factors that influence people’s perception of the government’s efforts to reduce poverty.

Our objective is to predict an individual’s perception about government’s effort to reduce poverty based on factors like individual’s country, gender, age etc. In the given case study, individual’s perception can take the following three values - Too Little, About Right, Too Much.

For our analysis, we’ll be using data from the World Values Surveys for Australia, Norway, Sweden, and the United States from ‘carData’ package in R.

library(carData)

library(MASS) data(WVS)

head(WVS)

Fig 2 — Dataset

Description of the data

Poverty is the multi-class ordered dependent variable with categories — ‘Too Little’, ‘About Right’ and ‘Too Much’. We have the following five independent variables

Religion : member of a religion -no or yes

: member of a religion -no or yes Degree : held a university degree -no or yes

: held a university degree -no or yes Country : Australia, Norway, Sweden or the USA

: Australia, Norway, Sweden or the USA Age: age (years)

age (years) Gender: male or female

Let’s now analyze the descriptive statistics for this dataset:
How to help your bright child find friends who share their interests
By: Johns Hopkins Center For Talented Youth
Tags: Gifted And Talented, Childhood, Gifted, Emotional Wellbeing, Friendship

By Maria Blackburn

“How do I find a group of friends ‘like’ my child, to do ‘their’ kind of ‘fun’ activities i.e. play chess, science projects, history buff, etc.” — Joan McGregor, member, CTY Parents Facebook Group

First, know that your child is not alone. Making friends isn’t easy for many children, and for academically advanced kids it can be complicated by the fact that your child’s same-age peers may not share their more academic or unique interests, says Michelle Muratori, a senior counselor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.

Here’s her advice:

Start with their interests

“Always start with your child’s interest area,” Muratori says. School may be a good place to start, but you might have to broaden your search. If your child is interested in theater, find out if there’s a local theater company where they can volunteer. A history buff might find others who share their interests at a museum or historical society. Understand that your child might meet adults as well as children with similar interests in the community and while it’s normal to have friends of varying ages, parents will need to monitor these relationships.

Make new friends and keep the old

Encourage your child to maintain friendships they formed at camp or school, whether it’s through social media and text or in person, through safe, socially distanced activities. “In the world it’s important to have friends of different backgrounds, abilities, and interests,” Muratori says. “So many things can fizzle out when you get busy, but maintaining friendships is important.”

One, two, three, go

Academic competitions can provide kids with common interests the social opportunity to get together. “Team-based competitions encourage social development as students explore their interests,” Muratori says. Find academic competitions in art and writing, history, math, science and more on CTY’s web site.

Create what you can’t find

Sometimes you need to be creative. If your child can’t find a means to connect with others who share their interests, consider creating one. Muratori says. “One of my former students created a math circle in in 6th grade that’s still going, years after they graduated high school,” she said.

Be open minded

Encourage your child to recognize that different sets of friends can fulfill different needs. Your child’s gaming friends might not have much in common with their history friends, but that’s okay, Muratori says. “Everyone brings something to the table.”
How Neanderthal Are You — Take our quiz
By: Simon Black
Tags: Satire, Stupid, Quiz, Funny, Neanderthal

Photo by Ozgu Ozden on Unsplash

Geneticists have confirmed that Homosapien DNA mixed with Neanderthal a long long time ago. But how much of this blockheaded ninny muggins do you have in you? Scientists have devised this simple five-question quiz which reliably determines how beastly you really are.

1. A driver cuts in front of you rudely with his car. What do you do?

a. Beep loudly. b. Give the finger. c. Chase him down, pull him out of the car, strangle him and then eat him.

2. A co-worker criticizes your work. What do you do?

a. Thank him for the feedback and tell him you’ll try to do better. b. Give him the finger. c. Chase him down, pull him out of his cubicle, strangle him, and then eat him.

3. A relative insults you at Thanksgiving dinner. What do you do?

a. Pretend you didn’t hear. b. Give him the finger. c. Poke him the eye with a fork.

4. The guy you’re playing tennis with calls your ball out. It was in. What do you do?

a. Say, “Are you sure?” b. Give him the finger. c. Run over to his side of the court and practice your forehand on his face.

5. At dinner, a guest says something complicated that you don’t understand. What do you do?

a. Pretend you understand. B. Give him the finger. c. Poop in your chair and then throw it at him.

Scoring:

IF you answered A lot — you’re a phony. Get real.

IF you answered B a lot — you’re childish. And lack imagination. Grow up.

IF you answered C a lot — how’s prison?
Fast Lane to Dagger2 Part — 1 : Introduction
By: Malik Motani
Tags: Dagger 2, Android, Dependency Injection

Dagger is a dependency injection framework developed by Square and later forked by Google and called it Dagger2. You might be knowing about dependency injection(DI) and might have used Butterknife for view injections but this one, It is for dependencies.

If you haven’t heard of DI yet, please don’t react this way.

We will get you informed about it, Let’s look at what it can help you with:

Benefits of Dagger

Write testable code

Decouple class and its dependency

Design maintainable and reusable structure and that’s not it, there are so many advantages of Dagger.

Here I’m going to explain a few basic things about DI

What is a dependency?

While developing real-time Apps, it may happen sometimes that our class may require an object of another class. Let’s understand this via an example.

Here Class Black needs an object from class Red, Green, and Blue, to fulfill its purpose. It implies that class Black is dependent on Red, Green, and Blue. So, Dependency is an object that can be used.
欢迎来到信用评级的未来
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Fintech, Ethereum, Bitcoin

in Both Sides of the Table
Bringing Students to Miami to Build on Bitcoin
By: Erick Pinos
Tags: Education, Blockchain, Bitcoin

This year, BEN, TNABC, and The Blockchain Center Miami came together to provide students with free conference tickets and an airbnb for the ENTIRE Miami Blockchain Week. We had 13 BEN club leaders and students travel out of state from Rutgers Blockchain, Drexel Blockchain Club, Concordia Blockchain, and Mount St. Mary’s Blockchain Club. We also had 7 more students from the Miami area (Gator Blockchain Club, Florida International University) get their tickets through BEN. Even more BEN students and alumni met us down there.

How is this possible?

Thanks to our partners (Algorand, Bytom, OpenNode, The Blockchain Center, etc), students can earn points (in BENcoin) for completing activities on the BEN website blockchainedu.org. These activities range from fundamental concept lessons like “Blockchain 101” to hands on developer tutorials like “Run an Algorand Private Network” and “Launch a Bytom Smart Contract”.

Students can then redeem their BENcoin for financial aid, flights, airbnbs, and even visa application costs.

Throughout the week, our students attended talks, networked with the sponsors, volunteered for the conferences and side events, built projects for the hackathon, and more. They even met a few blockchain celebrities along way.
Applying Pascal’s Wager to Recovering From Past Trauma
By: Zachary Phillips
Tags: Mental Health, Life Lessons, Psychology, Self Improvement, Religion

I have a massive black spot in my memory.

I remember all of the events leading up to the trauma, I remember the room, the bed and being naked. I remember pressure, and course hands and pain. Then it’s just blackness.



This could have been one event, or many, or it may never have happened, or it could have been my imagination running wild and adding to a lesser trauma. For all I know, I could be recounting a scary movie that was well beyond my years.



The fact is that I simply don’t know exactly what happened to me as a child. Beyond the glimpses and dodgy half-memories, I have little to go on. All of the people are long gone, and those that remain were not close enough to lend any new information.



This black hole of memory has left me confused and longing. I feel like if I ‘just knew’ what happened to me, I would be able to have some closure. This issue has plagued me for years.



I was able to find some solace when my psychologist asked ‘What do you think happened?’. I instantly went to the worst possible answer, filling in the blackness with the worst kinds of evil.



Her next words changed my life,

‘If you don’t know what happened, why not fill that blank memory space with something more positive?’

What a revelation!

After a long discussion, I realized that she was basically asking me to apply Pascal’s Wager to my trauma.

I have everything to gain by filling that blackness with something other than the worst possible event that could have happened. Besides, I will never know, so why not believe that the worst didn’t happen?



This approach has changed my entire outlook. Whenever my brain forces me to think back to that time, I endeavour to fill the blackness, to answer the question with an answer that is not the worst possible trauma imaginable.

Am I simply fooling myself? Maybe, but likely not. Memory is tricky, elusive and flawed. Whilst I know for certain that something happened to me that day, I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know how many times it happened either.



So I choose to believe that I didn’t face the worst possible outcomes. From this place, I can feel safer. Less violated. More in control of myself. I can better heal.



What if I am wrong?

If I am wrong, if the worst happened to me, I may never remember it.

If I do remember more, I won’t ever be able to verify those memories, so there will always be some doubt.

If I manage to resolve all that doubt, then I now have a new truth that I will work through with my therapist.



Think positive. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I share the story of my past in my first book Under the influence - Reclaiming My Childhood

~ Zachary Phillips

Website: zachary-phillips.com | Social @zacpphillips
Will We Need a Generator?
By: Samantha Lazar
Tags: Humor, Climate Emergency, Stephen King, Poetry, Politics

Will We Need a Generator?

A Poem

Photo by Dikaseva on Unsplash

How funny The Stand*

seems now that I am finally

getting around to reading it

truth, the audio book is really good

36 hours or so to hear the end of the world

Harold and Nadine light up the night!

They cause mass destruction (Power couple!) —

And then run up the hill

It’s mind control for the basic bitch

It’s mind control for the ones who think,

the never leaders, never winners, never accepted, never published

never, never, never

underestimate the need to start over

even if by accident —

people end up in cages

eating out of charitable hands

a field trip to see the animals

the ones who lived

some massive eraser

FOR BIG MISTAKES

printed on its side

sits on the dusty desk

of the phony

who ran to hide

headlong into the shelter —

that promised cellar —

deep below to find

accustomed eyes

The oppressed arrived first.
Bravman to Bucknell
Tags: Education, College

by Alex Katz

Sorry, John. Orange just ain’t your color.

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman has been selected as the next president of Bucknell University. Check out reports from Bucknell and Stanford.

Not much else to add. We’ll leave you with words from VP Bravman: