fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
How successful have we been with vaccine development for various pandemics?
By: Faisal Khan
Tags: Health, Future, Technology, Innovation, Science

INFOGRAPHIC SPECIAL — VACCINE DEVELOPMENT

How successful have we been with vaccine development for various pandemics?

Comparing the vaccine development timelines since the earlier twentieth century

Major technological advancements made in the field of Medicine has led to a significant increase in average life expectancy. However, it is a somewhat perplexing fact for many as to why we have not been able to develop a vaccine for diseases like AIDS for 40 years, whereas multiple COVID-19 vaccinations have already been rolled out in record time. No wonder the recently developed vaccines are being closely scrutinized by the experts for their safety & efficacy.

For comparison purposes, It took approximately 25 years to develop a vaccine for the Spanish Flu which killed between 40–50 million people. Similarly, the first Ebola vaccine — an effort that took 43 years since the discovery of the virus. And we are still waiting for a cure for AIDS and yet we have an answer

Previous vaccines have saved countless lives — 10 million deaths between 2010 and 2015 alone have been prevented, according to the data from the World Health Organization. And we are hoping the case is the same for COVID-19. The infographic above looks at the timeframes for vaccine development for every pandemic since the turn of the 20th century. It also highlights the major steps involved in the development of individual vaccines.

Talking about COVID-19 vaccines, nearly 7.25 billion doses have been pre-purchased by countries and organizations around the globe — as many countries scramble to innoculate their populations. The second infographic below highlights that high & middle-income countries have hogged the purchasing process by ordering dosages according to their purchasing power.

While the hope is that a global vaccine initiative like the COVAX can bring some equality in the vaccine distribution among high-income and low-income countries, it is going to be a long road ahead towards pre-COVID normalcy. In the meantime, here is the link for the COVID-19 vaccine tracker, if you want to follow the development process for various endeavors being undertaken right now.

Image Credit: Visual Capitalist

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What I Learned Writing My First 22 Articles on Medium
By: Christopher Kokoski
Tags: Productivity, Writer, Life Lessons, Writing, Entrepreneurship

What I Learned Writing My First 22 Articles on Medium

A break down of my best and worst-performing articles so far

Image by Author via Canva

Here’s what I know — writing is hard.

There’s also nothing else on the planet that I’d rather do for a living. While I am a full-time freelancer, I am new to Medium (joined in October 2020, wrote my first article at the very tail end of November 2020).

As you probably already know, there is a steep learning curve here. I’m not the first to say it, nor will I be the last. I’ve studied my butt off in these few weeks to ramp up my knowledge on what to do (and not to do) on this platform.

The jury is still out on whether or not I’m getting it right.

However, based on what I read from successful writers on Medium, my stats are on track. They are trending in the right direction. I’m doing everything I know to do so far to make my writing valuable and to earn a nice ROI.

One of the things that have helped me tremendously is articles like this one where writers break down their stats, strategies, and earnings.

So, let’s get to it.
How Can People Be Incentivised to Solve the Climate Crisis?
By: Paul Abela
Tags: Society, Climate Change, Psychology, Policy, Environment

Incentives can change behaviour

In 2018, just over 7 million people in the UK smoked, or 14.7% of the population. That’s 5% less than in 2011, a remarkable reduction in seven years. How was this done?

People’s behaviour changed through the use of incentives.

The moral incentive encouraging smokers to stop has been well known for decades. Smoking’s terrible for your health. A smoker is 15 to 30 times more likely to either contract lung cancer or die from it than non-smokers. Advertising campaigns using shock tactics to communicate how bad smoking is have done a great job to reinforce its effects on health.

There was a time when smoking was considered good for you, and the act of smoking was integrated into everyday society. It was the norm, and laws made it easy to smoke. It’s incredible to think there was a time you could smoke on planes. We’ve come a long way since then.

Smokers are now given designated areas to smoke. You’re labeled as and feel like a ‘smoker’. An outsider, different from the rest. The convenience of smoking has now turned into an inconvenience. In shops and supermarkets, cigarettes are hidden out of sight, adding to the stigma associated with smoking.

Then there’s the financial incentive. Government tax on cigarettes is high, making cigarettes an expensive habit worth giving up. An average pack of cigarettes is £8 ($10.40), 80% of which is tax.

A combination of the three incentives has had a dramatic impact on the number of smokers in the UK. But the change could only happen with government intervention. Policies to stop people smoking have been central in driving behavioural change.
Why Your First Thoughts Make the Best Headlines
By: Cynthia Marinakos
Tags: Creativity, Business, Psychology, Headline Hacks, Writing

Why Your First Thoughts Make the Best Headlines

A simple way to write headlines and a helpful tool to help you decide

Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos.

I often drive by a little shopping precinct near my local petrol station.

One day, the most curious thing caught my eye — it was hopelessly out of place along the main road. A funny red blow-up man blowing around in the wind next to a sign. A promotional gimmick for a gym that’s hidden from the road.

I’m not in the market for a new gym, so it didn’t entice me. It did make me aware there was a gym there though.

When we think about writing headlines, it’s tempting to come up with something clever, funny, or intriguing to catch our reader’s eye.

We wonder how we can entice readers with something unusual.

In the Headline Hacks column, I’ve shared the most highly rated sensorial words and power words. I’ve let you in on proven headline formulas and templates that lead to magnetic titles. I’ve even dissected popular TED Talk headlines.

Well, today I want to break headlines down to its simplest — a quick, easy way for you to build confidence in your headlines. This is one way I come up with headlines. It’s how I came up with the headline for this article without fussing or worrying about it.

It’s this: Write headlines from the thoughts in your head.

They will be specific. And come from a real curiosity, need, or problem.

You’ll avoid clickbait because your thoughts are genuine and casual. Natural.

For instance, say you have trouble cutting down how much you eat and want some help. Maybe a nutritionist, a health consultant, the latest research, or others in the same predicament have useful tips to share. What would you Google?

Perhaps:

How to stop overeating so I don’t feel tired all the time, or

How to eat less and have more energy

Let’s check what the headline analyzer tool, CoSchedule ranks these headlines and how it breaks them down:

How to stop overeating so I don’t feel tired all the time — 74
When I Realized Writing is More Than a Passion
By: Chandrayan Gupta
Tags: Advice, This Happened To Me, Writing, Psychology, Creativity

When I Realized Writing is More Than a Passion

It’s a part of who I am

Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

In the beginning, I used to write for recreation. I’ve been told I have a vivid imagination, and I’ve always needed an outlet to express it. To pen down the stories swirling around in my head.

Back then, I lacked the skill and dedication to write professionally. But as I read more, I learned more. Once I entered my late teens, I turned my focus from writing short stories to full-length novels. Ever since I saw the name “Enid Blyton” on my first children’s book, I knew I wanted my name on a book one day. Now was my time.

But I didn’t realize one thing — writing novels is hard work. I’ve lost count of how many first drafts I started only to abandon them after the first few pages. I lacked the patience and perseverance to see it through to the end. So when I finished my first novella at the age of 19, I was elated. It was exhilarating, holding that book in my hands, seeing my name on the cover, hearing people’s plaudits and criticism about the story. It was more than everything I ever dreamed of.

Since then, I’ve written another novella and a full-length novel. Another novel is set to release in the coming few days. On top of that, I’ve written a plethora of articles as well. I write a lot, is the bottom line. Which is all well and good, but… there’s always been something nagging at me. Something I couldn’t define.

I never referred to my books as my books, just as the books. Whenever someone asked me what I did, I said I’m a law student. I completely forgot to mention I was a novelist as well. Everyone else called me a writer. Only I didn’t.

Why? What was happening?
Why You Should Read “The Future of Humanity” by Michio Kaku
By: Fahri Karakas
Tags: Creativity, Humanity, Books, Science, Space

I have started this challenge right away, as I want to gain some momentum before the new year. You can also start right away if you prefer.

The first book I have chosen is: “The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth”.

In this book, Prof. Michio Kaku shares his insights and predictions about the collective future of humanity. First, we need to overcome the hurdles of becoming a multiplanet species. Kaku cites the words of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: “The Earth is our cradle, but we cannot be in our cradle forever.” We are at the beginning of a new era: The age of space exploration. Kaku analyzes this age through three stages. First, he covers the solar system, then other stars, and then life in the universe.

Kaku reviews cutting edge technologies in robotics, nanotechnology and biotechnology that will enable us to make our homes among the stars. He reviews technologies of space travel, genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, and terraforming.

Humans need to increase their life span if they need to reach other stars, as it will normally take centuries to reach even the closest star system Alpha Centauri. Kaku says we will download our encoded consciousness in a different body or system once we can successfully beam our consciousness from one star system to another.

Kaku’s book provides us tremendous hope and imagination that can serve as our mental fuel for multiple centuries ahead of us.

Below are some remarkable quotes from this remarkable book:
The Reserve Bucket
By: Erika Sauter
Tags: Culture, Writing, Life, Creativity, Productivity

The Reserve Bucket

and why you should hold on to that lame ass story you wrote

I don’t want to write a book or a novel. It’s never been my goal. I have the attention span of a bouncy ball, or a drunk person who keeps forgetting they were in search of a public restroom. Sure I can write 50,000 to 80,000 words, just not on the same subject at one time. Maybe at some point I’ll consider publishing a collection of essays, but for now I’ll stick with writing and publishing those essays as standalones.

There are times I’ve fallen short or felt creatively drained when “Fuck it” feels the best route to take. Other times I could write three stories a day, swiftly and with grace, and at times I’m even willing to lose sleep to keep the groove going. I utilized both as the positive and negative they are.

I discovered this thing I’ve come to call my reserve bucket. It’s sort of a never empty bucket of stories and articles. It’s never ending because you regularly take stories out and put stories in.

As writers we’re going to come up with just as many bad ideas as we do good. We’ll write as many shit stories as we do perfect stories. It’s a legitimate part of the writing process. There are aspects and loopholes and all sorts of #lifehappens we weren’t prepared for, but we were prepared to keep our writing career rolling, no matter what, with our reserve bucket.

The definition of a writer is not to just sit down, pump out a story and poof our job is done for the day. That’s not how being a writer works at all, no. Just, no.

In a sense being a writer is similar to a plague. It’s 24/7/365. Generating ideas never stops nor does our power of observation. It’s more like; Dear lord, please let me take this train ride into the city without a single realization that, whoa, I just had an idea! This is the real deal. The reality of writing, writer, write. It’s a process that never ends.

There are three #major #valuable #important reasons why every writer should have a reserve bucket of stories and articles.
Android and the Importance of App Store Optimization
By: Intisar Mahee
Tags: Programming, Mobile App Development, Entrepreneurship, Learning, Startup

Android and the Importance of App Store Optimization

Optimization is a key to success in the Google Play Store

Photo by Mithun V on Unsplash

One of my closest university seniors started an app-based venture and critically failed within a year. He was bankrupt and felt compelled to shut down the company. It was a total disaster.

Born curious, I wanted to know what went wrong. I studied their business strategy and found out what they’d missed.

It was app store optimization (ASO).

They invested $100k in their venture but never thought of their ASO. They spent their maximum marketing budget in better UI/UX design, beautiful websites, SEO, and Facebook ads. They didn’t look at their app, which should’ve been given #1 priority.
Facebook AI Research Found Intersections In Popular QA Datasets
By: Mikhail Raevskiy
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Facebook, Data Science

The open domain problem of question-answer systems assumes that the model is able to answer new questions using the knowledge learned during training. In addition, the model should be able to generalize existing knowledge to answer new questions.

However, the results on the test dataset do not show the actual quality of the models. Researchers at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) analyzed the top 3 popular open-domain QA datasets. In 60–70%, the answers to the questions in the test set were in the training set. In addition, 30% of the test questions had a duplicate in the training set. The researchers then tested the state-of-the-art models. The speed of all models dropped significantly lower when it was necessary to answer a question that was not directly in the training set. The average difference in prediction accuracy between repeating and non-repeating data was 63%.

More about analysis

The datasets that the researchers analyzed included Natural Questions, TriviaQA, and WebQuestions.

WebQuestions

WebQuestions is a dataset of 3,778 training and 2,032 test question and answers pairs. The questions were pulled from the search engine and the answers were pulled from Freebase.

TriviaQA

TriviaQA is a dataset of 78,785 training, 8,837 validation, and 11,313 test question and answer pairs. Created and pinned questions and answers from quiz sites.

Open-Natural Questions

Natural Questions consists of search engine questions and Wikipedia answers. There were 79,168, 8,757 and 3,610 pairs of questions and answers in the training, validation, and test samples.

An example of overlapping questions in Open-Natural Questions. Source: Arxiv

The researchers normalized the responses before looking for overlaps in the samples. Intersections of questions were identified partially manually using paraphrase markup. You can read more about the intersection search method in the original article.

Before you go…

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Writing to Stay Alive
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Relationships, Mental Health, Writing, Self, Creativity

Five years is a long time to live stuck in your head and cut off from the world without the ability to let anyone in, or reach out to anyone.

If this sounds extreme, it’s because I’ve yet to access therapy and thus support. I have insurance but can’t afford the co-pays because my household survives on one salary already stretched to breaking point.

As a result, there are many normal things we do without. Health care has been one of them, food often is another. There is a lot of empty space in our house where furniture should be. We exist, we do not live. In five years, we’ve hardly ever had anything resembling a social life either. The so-called Holiday Season is something that has been happening to other people, rarely to us. Our marriage is groaning under the strain and has been on life support for a long time, the antithesis of joy.

Each of us feels let down, abandoned by the other. At least on this we’re on the same page. If I write so much about depression, it’s to try and instill some empathy in those who’ve never experienced it and see it as a choice. Were it a choice, it would be a very perverse one that has condemned me to a pared down existence where shelter and food are never guaranteed, never mind anything else. Why would anyone do this to themselves?

In this context, writing is a way of flipping the bird at adversity and reclaiming a little agency, a little independence.

More recently, writing has come to represent something else, too: The ability to see my family again. Unless I make this airfare happen myself, it won’t and I will forever have to live with the fact that I abandoned my father when he needed me the most. Long story short, my stepmom is undergoing treatment for stage 4 breast cancer and my 71-year-old dad is her sole carer.

This, to me, has made everything else in my life pale into insignificance. I am an only child and last saw my father in 2013, my mother in 2014. My family has never met my husband although we’ve been married for over five years. Writing this, it occurs to me how horrible it is.

Writing, you see, is a way to articulate all that has been festering within and keeping me sick.

Since my best friend died at the end of September, the page has become my only interlocutor. There are few conversations in my household. Our life isn’t conducive to trusting, open-hearted talk anymore. Instead, our exchanges are stilted, wooden, guarded. I quickly learned that anything I say could backfire. In our respective silences, you can hear the low hum of distrust and the hiss of resentment, ready to pounce whenever vulnerability arises.

I made the mistake of pretending I was strong, right at the beginning. I also made the mistake of relinquishing my assertiveness. I’ve paid for those mistakes with my writing voice and my mental health.
The 5 Attitudes That Differentiate Highly Creative People
By: Jean-Marc Buchert
Tags: Creativity, Art, Psychology, Productivity, Creative Process

Finding The Right Question Not Answer

When faced with a problem, one of the first reflexes of your mind might be to find a way to solve it.

You want to find the perfect element that might fit your situation.

Research has shown that this problem-solving attitude can stick you to a single framework of problematization while seeking solutions.

Instead of helping you find the best solution, this attitude can reduce you to a single perspective detrimental to your creativity.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his team at the University of Chicago have led experiments highlighting a more creative attitude.

Observing art students arranging diverse objects on a table into a composition, they noticed two groups of artists who had different approaches to the exercise.

The first group would quickly select the objects within their reach and immediately begin working on their composition.

The second group would take some time to examine the objects, picking them up, turning them down, even changing their arrangement while working on their composition.

The result was that the latter group produced works that were judged much more favorably by judges than those in the first group.

What made the second type of student more creative was their ability to keep their compositional arrangements open, actively seeking questions to ask instead of finding immediate answers.

Meanwhile, the first type of students, by focusing on one framework, prevented themselves from experimenting with other perspectives and finding unexpected solutions.

Like the most talented students, you may avoid getting stuck in one way of asking a question for your problem: always try to find other questions that might be more relevant to your situation.
3 Keys To Dominate Your Growing To-Do List
By: Melody Wilding
Tags: Work, Advice, Writing, Creativity, Productivity

If you’re like me, you have a growing to-do list filled with big ideas to accomplish. Yet it might often seem like the day quickly gets away from you. Meetings, emails, social media, and other distractions suck up your time, along with your precious attention.

Winning the day begins before you even sit down at your desk. Thoughtful planning and prioritization is the best way to play defense against the many tasks vying for your focus. Building in the opportunity for reflection, while difficult, is an instant productivity booster, allowing you to get more done in less time with greater impact.

On a recent episode of the Accidental Creative podcast, author Todd Henry shared a simple 10-minute method you can use to optimize your schedule and create mental bandwidth for deep, creative work.

He suggests sitting down at the beginning of the day to strategize, specifically following these steps:

Ask yourself: At the end of the day, what would have to happen for me to say, “Today was a success?”

Henry says, “Time is the currency of productivity, especially for creative professionals,” so make sure (to the extent possible) that your day effectively leverages your strengths, fulfills your values, satisfies important goals, and is filled with tasks or people that energize you.

Define the problems you need to solve today.

Answering this question allows you to work backward and create a plan of attack, ensuring that you spend your time wisely in high-impact ways. Henry points out this question will not only help you become more focused, but will also prime you to seek creative solutions for the problems you need to solve.

Block time for deep work.

If you don’t guard your time, distractions and busywork will rush in to fill the vacuum. Henry suggests creative professionals pre-commit chunks of time throughout their week to accomplish deep work — that is, cognitively demanding work that requires concentration and uninterrupted focus.

Then respect the appointments you set with yourself. Yes, that does mean you’ll have to get better at assertively saying “no” and communicating your boundaries, but overcoming that discomfort can pay off in big ways.

Liked this article? Get 3 stress relief strategies Google and Facebook execs use to manage their emotions here.
Create Your Playbook: A Solution for All Life Has to Throw at You
By: August Birch
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Self Improvement, Productivity, Life Lessons, Writing

Create Your Playbook: A Solution for All Life Has to Throw at You

The one, priceless book you must write over your lifetime

Create your own custom playbook for life’s solutions

Ever wish you had a book you could pull off the shelf and it would give you the answer to any motivational problem? I’ve got the solution here. Ever have a bad day when you can’t get started, when the world seems to conspire against you? Here’s the answer.

This is your playbook.

I got the idea loosely from the famous motivational guru, Jim Rohn, through a fantastic, self-help guy named Alexander Heyne. The basic idea is that whenever you encounter a struggle in life, you perform a deep analysis in a journal.

This project is bigger than me, but I hope to do it justice enough you find value in it. The playbook concept may be the best self-help book ever created — and you’re going to write it!

We’ll get to the how-to parts of crafting your playbook in a minute, but first I want to delve into why it’s important to make your own. We all need a playbook. My playbook is different than yours is different than hers.

Every coach has a playbook.

We don’t run into battle without a plan, or go off on a journey without a map. For some reason we repeat the same emotional battles without giving ourselves the tools to get through them.

Emotions effect our work. When we can’t pull through the darker emotional states, most of us avoid the work altogether. We hide in our caves. We take the easy way out. We escape, using things that harm us.

I need a playbook. You need a playbook. We all need a playbook.

The basic premise of the playbook is you dedicate a specific journal for the process. This is a collection of emotional states and project hurdles. You’ll ad to this collection over the course of your life. Every time you run into a wall, instead of avoiding the problem or ignoring it, you perform a deep analysis on a page or two. As time progresses, you’ll refer to the playbook for answers rather then add to it.

Eventually, you’ll repeat these problems. Now you’ll be ready.

We all have a core set of behaviors that make us who we are. We tend to repeat these behaviors every time we run into a similar problem. I know I didn’t realize how repetitive my behavior was. You may not either. When you analyze each problem in a playbook, you’ll see the pattern. You can say when I feel this way if I do this, I can make it better.

Or, if I run into this problem with my business, last year I had the same problem. This is what worked.

This story is just to get you started. This is a lifetime process of addition and analysis. Your playbook is yours alone. Although it may help others, this is a bespoke solution for your life. You will collect, take-apart, and solve some of the most-difficult problems in your life. We’ll take them apart in tiny pieces. Eventually, you’ll have priceless answers.

Let’s get started, eh?
Hungry for More — Eating to Fill the Void Inside
By: Kahli Bree Adams
Tags: Self, Mental Health, Health, Psychology, Food

How do you know if you’re comfort eating or just hungry?

So many of us suffer from food addiction that it might be difficult to understand the difference. There are some signs you can use to know when you may be eating from stress rather than from hunger. If you suspect you may be eating to fill the void inside, you can learn how to tell the difference.

Wanting specific foods

If you have a strong desire for specific food and don’t want anything else, this stems from emotional hunger. When your body is actually in need of food, the desire for what to eat is not as defined. While you might have some desire based on nutrients your body needs, if you find you want one particular food or texture then you want the taste and not the nutrients.

Eating without thinking

If you start to eat something and don’t even think about what you’re consuming or how much, this is another sign you may be emotionally eating. Mindlessly consuming an entire bag of chips is driven by the comfort of habit and not by the need for food.

Desire to eat is sudden

One of the biggest indicators that your hunger is driven by a void inside instead of a need for sustenance is if you suddenly become hungry. This is similar to how someone addicted to cigarettes will need to smoke immediately after a stressful incident. Something has triggered the feelings you’re trying to avoid. Real hunger comes on slowly and over time. It’s also regular, while emotional hunger comes with circumstances or memories that are brought up.

It leads to guilt

Food addiction will lead you to feel guilty for eating. It’s tied closely to shame and lowered self-esteem. All addictions involve these feelings, and it creates a spiral that’s hard to climb out of. You eat to escape terrible emotions and thoughts, but that eating creates more of those emotions and thoughts.

It won’t satisfy

Because of this, while emotional eating may alleviate these unpleasant experiences for a few moments, it lacks any real satisfaction. You will only end up feeling the same or worse. Because it’s not actually helping to heal that internal void, it won’t stop these emotions from just coming up again and again.

You feel it in a different way

Hunger is physical and you will feel it in your stomach as a pang or grumbling. Emotional hunger is driven by feelings. It will show itself as a craving or desire for certain foods that you can’t get out of your head. You will want tastes or textures instead of simply satisfying a physical need.
Permissionless Professors #9: David Perell
By: Gary Bailey - Monetization Manifesto
Tags: Growth, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Monetization

We believe monetization is a hidden secret. Secrets hiding in plain sight. From the psychology of anchoring, the mathematics of power-law pricing tables, the application of demand elasticity, and the market positioning of your price — your path to better monetization awaits.

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How to Initiate Innovative Business Collaboration
By: Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Tags: Business, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Technology, Writing

How to Initiate Innovative Business Collaboration

Creating synergy is one of the main goals for collaboration in transforming business environments. Collaboration is essential to create synergy in diverse teams, especially for transformation initiatives. Many businesses in this economic climate perform substantial transformative activities to stay competitive in the market.

However, collaboration sounds like a stale term posing connotations.

The term ‘collaboration’ is overused and it loses its significance, especially with the emergence of internet technologies and widespread digital transformation initiatives.

For example, some consider social media as collaborative or collaboration tool. In reality, these so-called social media collaboration tools have little to do with the actual business collaboration.

There is a tendency to consider social media tools as practical, useful, and highly valuable for business collaboration purposes. However, when we carefully examine these tools, we can see that they are more information-sharing tools rather than actual business collaboration tools.

Here is my story on how to spark innovative business collaboration in the workplace.

You can find more of these stories on my News Break profile.
How to Teach about Drinkable Rivers and Healthy Economies
By: Desiree Driesenaar
Tags: Sustainability, Rivers, Health, Environment, Economy

Some years ago, I met Li An Phoa for the first time. We share a love for Schumacher College and regenerative practices to heal our world and our economies. She wasn’t well-known then. She’s becoming rather prominent now with her foundation and citizen’s initiative ‘Drinkable Rivers’.

Li An is an activist, researcher, and university teacher. She taught me about rivers and flow and economies. And I want to share this knowledge with you. In my own way. As a tribute and teaching and experimenting ground in one.

We all need to know about water. If we don’t know, how can we find it in our hearts to care for our waters?

Water Is Life

Water is life. Up to 60% of our human body consists of water, according to USGS, Science for a Changing World. I think no one will deny that freshwater is very important to our bodies.

And there is not much freshwater available to us, humans, and other living species. According to the researchers of National Geographic, only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its 6.8 billion people and all the other species.
Research-Backed Ways to Enhance Your Pain Tolerance
By: Jordan Gross
Tags: Inspiration, Creativity, Mental Health, Psychology, Self Improvement

Research-Backed Ways to Enhance Your Pain Tolerance

Based on a trip to the dentist.

Photo by H Shaw on Unsplash

“So, we heard it’s been quite some time since you’ve last seen us.” My dentist, Dr. D, entered the room with his assistant Keisha. I double-checked if my chair was, in fact, a dental chair, because based on their ominous entrance it felt more like I was sitting in an interrogation room.

“Uhhhh yes, it’s been a little bit,” I replied reluctantly. “It’s been more than a little bit, we’d say, right Keisha?” Dr. D suggested. Keisha continued. “7 years is definitely a long time.” I had dental surgery in 2013. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of the dentist, but I haven’t been back since.

Before proceeding with my x-rays and cleaning, Dr. D concluded. “I hate to tell you this Jordan, but the next hour is going to hurt. You’re going to be in pain, but I promise you, it’ll be worth it.” But after the hour, I wasn’t in pain. During the hour, I wasn’t in much pain either. Following each procedure, Dr. D looked at me in awe. I was able to sustain extreme discomfort without being completely numb.

When he asked me how I was able to withstand the pain, I told him a few of my simple tricks. Turns out, these tricks are also backed by research and scientific studies.
Jack Kerouac’s Advice For Writers
By: Alexander Yung
Tags: Writing Tips, Self-awareness, Books, Self Improvement, Writing

“Look at all this raw talent!” Professor Smith announced to the class.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t talking about my classmates or me.

WR 150 class. Fall Semester.

We were analyzing a passage from American author Jack Kerouac’s The Big Sur. Professor Smith loved Jack Kerouac. He would always talk about Kerouac’s writing ability, his tragic-Shakespearean life, and his association with the Beats.

Despite his enthusiasm, it didn’t wear off on my classmates or me. I was thinking, “What’s the big deal about this guy? He’s like a wannabe James Joyce!” Spontaneous prose? What a load of crap! It’s more like messy writing. How’s this guy a great author?

Throughout the semester, my opinion gradually changed. And I began to see why Professor’s Smith loved Jack Kerouac. Kerouac had authenticity, style — but most importantly — creativity.

Here are Jack Kerouac’s 5 Ways To Write.
AI & Neural Network for Pediatric Cataract
By: Susan Ruyu Qi
Tags: Big Data, Ophthalmology, Artificial Intelligence, Health, Machine Learning

Researchers from China have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that can diagnose congenital cataracts as accurately as ophthalmologists.

What is Cataract?

A cataract is clouding of the natural lens of the eye. It is extremely common among the elderly population but can also affect infants at birth or develop at a young age.

“In children, cataract causes more visual disability than any other form of treatable blindness. Children with untreated, visually significant cataracts face a lifetime of blindness at tremendous quality of life and socioeconomic costs to the child, the family, and the society”- American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO).

Detecting Cataracts in Children:

The asymptomatic progression of pediatric cataracts makes it difficult for early detection. Not to mention that young kids can’t really express themselves. However, catching the disease early is critical; late diagnosis often result in poor visual outcomes.

Problems:

Diagnosis requires expertise, especially in children and neonates.

There is a relatively small number of ophthalmologists for the size of our population; with an even smaller number of pediatric ophthalmologists.

Experts are concentrated in specialized centers but their coverage is largely insufficient.

Rural areas get almost no coverage.

This lack of accessibility causes lifetime vision loss to affected children.

Solution: AI

A team in China tried to address the problem of lack of pediatric ophthalmologists by using Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically deep learning and convolutional neural networks. They built an AI machine, CC-Cruiser, that has three main functions: 1) Diagnosis 2) Risk stratification 3) Treatment suggestions.

Screening for Congenital Cataract using Artificial Intelligence

Their initial work was done on congenital cataract cases only (amongst other types of pediatric cataracts) but further studies are ongoing.

Future: AI requires Big Data

A cloud-based platform has been created for multi-hospital collaboration; Doctors at hospitals around the country can access the platform and upload patient images. More data will be collected this way, which is essential to AI’s learning and fine-tuning.

“The limited resources of patients and the isolation of the data in individual hospitals represent a bottleneck in data usage. Building a collaborative cloud platform for data integration and patient screening is an essential step.”-Professor Lin Haotian of Sun Yat-Sen University

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The Power of Habit
By: Roxanne Hale
Tags: Professional Development, Psychology, Books, Entrepreneurship, Life

The Power of Habit

Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business

The Power of Habit, published in 2014, and just around 300 pages, combines historical examples, scientific discoveries, and common sense approaches to illustrate how anyone can make and break habits.

The Habit Loop

Award winning reporter, Charles Duhigg shares useful case studies of people with extensive brain injuries to explain how and why your brain forms habits. Habits are your brain’s way of conserving energy. The Habit Loop Model of Cue, Routine, Reward is the recipe your brain uses to create a habit out of any routine in order to be more efficient.

The science of habit forming has been applied to marketing products like Febreze and even coaching NFL teams.

Even more interesting, the author retroactively applied The Habit Loop to the twelve-step AA program. It turns out those twelve steps developed over eighty years ago with no basis in science or therapeutic studies provide a powerful method for breaking alcohol addiction. While AA doesn’t work for everyone, it has helped over ten million people achieve sobriety, lending creditably to its processes.

Belief in The System

Once you have already picked up a bad habit and want to change it, according to The Power Habit, you can’t simply eliminate the habit, as perhaps many people looking to quit smoking can attest. You must replace the routine with something else while keeping the cue and reward in place.

One of the more compelling examples in the book involves a woman hoping to stop the common problem of nail biting. Her therapy began by asking her to become more aware of when she felt compelled to chew. When she felt the urge, she was asked to keep count on an index card.

Once she became more aware of the impulse, she was then asked to swap out the habit of biting with something less destructive, like rapping her knuckles on a table or rubbing her arm. Every time she managed it successfully, she gave herself a checkmark on the index card where she was recording her habit. After a week, she had minimized her nail-biting to just a few times in total.

Like anything in life, success is not possible without belief. Charles Duhigg makes his case for the power of believing with a football story about the Indianapolis Colts and Peyton Manning. Even highly disciplined sports superstars can benefit from good habit-forming.

Not to spoil the story, but they go on to win the Super Bowl but not before they began to believe in the powerful forces at work behind forming good habits.

Using the Habit Loop and Understanding Habit Formation

The more a person comes to understand habit formation, the more success they’ll experience at changing bad habits and adopting good ones. Whether you’re looking to lose weight, stop smoking, exercise, or just be better organized, the Habit Loop provides a pathway.

Just because it’s incredibly straightforward doesn’t mean it’s easy, however. The Power of Habit does a fabulous job breaking it down simply for you, but real work is up to you.
How to Be Happier
By: Sonia Diab
Tags: Happiness, Productivity, Psychology, Self, Motivation

How to Be Happier

The hedonic treadmill and why one shiny new thing won’t change it all

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

I’ve been exploring new work opportunities lately. And I’ve found myself thinking some silly thoughts.

Things like, “if I get that work, my life will be made.”

And, “This is going to change the game for me, I’m going to level up my happiness x100 if this happens.”

​

This kind of language is dangerously close to the absolutist if/then frame of happiness.​

Have you ever thought to yourself, if I could just get that promotion, I’d finally be happy…?​

Or maybe it wasn’t about work or a promotion. Perhaps it was if only I could win that award, or buy that new house, or get married, or move to that country or lose ten kilos: Some specific goal or event you identified as the critical factor to feeling whole, fulfilled, happy.

I’d guess most people have had moments like this; where they lock onto an idea and convince themselves that that, that thing, holds the final number of the combination to unlock their happiness and bring total fulfilment for the rest of their lives.​

The problem is, it rarely does.

Sure, the pay rise or award won or wedding or new car boosts happiness for a while. But eventually, when the novelty wears off, we go right back to the same level of happiness we felt before it. Then, there’s a new ‘big thing’ we strive for, in hopes that it will fulfil us in the long term.

At least, that’s the case according to the theory known as the hedonic treadmill (or hedonic adaptation).
‘Let it Go’ is Good Advice… Unless We’re Talking Creativity
By: Angela Volkov
Tags: Creativity Tips, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, Creativity

You’ve wandered away from the rest of your tribe. All alone, you hear a rustling in the Savannah; a stirring in the long grass catches your eye. Your pulse quickens as you scrutinise that one spot, your muscles tensing in preparation for ‘fight or flight’. A moment passes, nothing happens. Your heartbeat returns to normal and you move on, focusing your attention elsewhere.

Latent inhibition

Latent inhibition is the mechanism by which we are able to suppress irrelevant information, and divert attention away from stimuli previously exposed to in favour of new and potentially relevant events (Lubow 1973).

The evolutionary benefits of ceasing to pay attention to something after it has proven itself to be irrelevant is clear. Attention is a finite resource, if you pay undue attention to false alarms you leave yourself vulnerable to actual threats in your environment.

However, beyond survival — the various biological imperatives — we as human beings desire much more from life. I’m talking about the tip of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: self-actualisation and creative expression.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, User:Factoryjoe [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Latent inhibition and creativity

Reduced latent inhibition is an example of an over-inclusive and highly associative cognitive style, facilitating the generation of novel ideas and surprising connections, and as such it is linked to creativity (Burch, Hemsley, Pavelis, & Corr, 2016).

However, it is also associated with heightened risk of psychopathology, as are many of the other cognitive factors which enhance creativity (Carson 2011; Chirila & Feldman, 2012). In the case of schizophrenia, undue attention is paid to self-generated stimuli i.e. hallucinations (Frith 1979).

Your new modus operandi

Embrace “irrelevance”. Do not be afraid to forge connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, to look at the familiar and quotidian with fresh eyes.

If you are a writer, you might want to consider defamiliarisation (‘ostranenie’ in the original Russian), the act of describing the commonplace and taken-for-granted as something wholly foreign and conferring onto it a sense of wonder.
Re: “Google’s Sundar Pichai: Privacy Should Not be a Luxury Good”
By: Save Journalism
Tags: Google, Journalism, Tech, Facebook, Digital Advertising

By John Stanton • May 20, 2019

Privacy is indeed a major concern for Americans and should not be the preserve of the wealthy. But it is a bit rich to read Google’s CEO extoll the virtues of his company’s initiatives to protect privacy when it collects more data on Americans than any other company, even Facebook. Those two companies have used that data to dominate the digital advertising market, capturing more than 60% of all digital ad revenue and raking in 9 out of every 10 new dollars spent on digital ads.

The “Duopoly” has had massive effects on numerous industries, particularly journalism. Traditional publishers have been crushed and even digital outlets are being squeezed hard, a problem I know all too well. After years as a national affairs reporter and DC bureau chief, I was laid off by BuzzFeed in January and I joined the ranks of the 2,500 journalists who have lost their jobs in 2019. Google and Facebook are strangling one of the cornerstones of our democracy, the free press.

Google’s privacy reforms won’t stop its data collection practices. This Duopoly is not healthy for our economy and its not healthy for our democracy. It’s time for real anti-trust scrutiny of these massive tech giants in order to save journalism.
Journal Your Way Through Anxiety To Have A Better Relationship With Your Emotions
By: Matt Lillywhite
Tags: Anxiety, Self Improvement, Writing, Mental Health, Psychology

Journal Your Way Through Anxiety To Have A Better Relationship With Your Emotions

Ten minutes per day is more than enough to make an impact.

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

I used to be an emotional wreck. My anxiety was high, and my self-esteem was at an all-time low. Negative thoughts often got the best of me. So as you can imagine, it didn’t take long to enter an endless cycle of mental health problems, from which it was incredibly difficult to escape.

Overthinking became commonplace. I struggled to look at myself in the mirror because I was deeply ashamed of what I looked like. Frequent feelings of anxiety took over my mind, and I often struggled to go outside because I was afraid of what other people thought of me. Saying my life sucked would be an understatement.

But one day, I stumbled across the habit of daily journaling. At first, I thought it was some cliche self-help gimmick. Deep down, I was incredibly skeptical. But after trying it out for a few weeks, I noticed the incredible impact it had on my emotional wellbeing. Quoting an article published by Harvard Medical School:

“The act of thinking about an experience, as well as expressing emotions, seems to be important. In this way, writing helps people to organize thoughts and give meaning to a traumatic experience. Or the process of writing may enable them to learn to better regulate their emotions. It’s also possible that writing about something fosters an intellectual process — the act of constructing a story about a traumatic event — that helps someone break free of the endless mental cycling more typical of brooding or rumination. Finally, when people open up privately about a traumatic event, they are more likely to talk with others about it — suggesting that writing leads indirectly to reaching out for social support that can aid healing.”

If you’re anything like my past-self, you overthink… a lot. So if you want to improve your mental health and emotional wellbeing, writing down your emotions could be a great way to ease any feelings of anxiety, depression, or stress.

Here’s how to start.
Body Burdens
By: Tre L. Loadholt
Tags: Health, A Cornered Gurl, Body, Weather, Writing

This is my first attempt at what I believe to be a lovely form and I first saw it here on Medium by the Master of Brevity herself, marika bianca. By reading all of you, I am learning so much and that is priceless— “Knowledge is power.”