fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Well-Mannered Cannibal Who Politely Advertised Online
By: Kim Mia
Tags: Murder, Cannibalism, Mental Health, Human Rights, Crime

The Well-Mannered Cannibal Who Politely Advertised Online

“Looking for a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered then consumed”

Photo of Armin Meiwes

The Internet has done its fair share of good for humanity, but it’s also played a part in so many crimes over the years. The disturbing case of the German Cannibal is certainly one of the worst incidents that took place with the aid of the internet.

While he appeared to be your average computer technician, Armin Meiwes had a disturbing secret. He allegedly had been fantasizing about cannibalism since the age of twelve and had always craved human flesh.

In March of 2001, in hopes of fulfilling his life long fantasy, he placed an ad online in a gay magazine where he politely asked for a “young, well-built man who wanted to be eaten”.

He became known as the “real-life Hannibal Lecter” once the story was revealed that he had killed and eaten a victim who volunteered by responding to his advertisement.

To his credit, Meiwes never forced anyone to be slaughtered or eaten. Instead, he would kindly talk to those who responded, and if they decided to back out (often after they realized he was serious), he respected their wish to do so.

But as “compliant” as Meiwes was, the end of his story is pretty gruesome. He found a willing volunteer, Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, and the pair met on the evening of March 9, 2001.

Before getting started, the “considerate” murderer offered Brandes twenty sleeping pills with half a bottle of schnapps. Brandes then gave Meiwes permission to amputate his penis, which they both attempted to eat together but it was “too chewy” to be consumed. Meiwes then set up a bath for him as he was bleeding to unconsciousness, and went on to read a Star Trek book, while checking on him every fifteen minutes.

“I did want to eat him; But I did not want to kill him.” — Armin Meiwes

After a lot of hesitation and prayer, Meiwes did eventually kill the victim by stabbing him in the throat and hung his body on a meat hook to be dismembered and frozen in order to be consumed over the following ten months. The incident of this night was recorded on a four-hour-long videotape.

Over a year later, he was reported to the police by a college student for attempting to post more advertisements online.

Armin, now fifty-eight, was convicted in 2004 to eight years in prison which was later changed to a life sentence after a psychologist suspected that he had the potential to re-offend.

Upon his conviction, he expressed deep regret for his actions and aimed to put off anyone following in his footsteps:

“They should go for treatment, so it doesn’t escalate like it did with me”

Ironically, after he apologized for his actions he reportedly became a vegetarian while in prison!
Creative Lent #8 — Haiku
Tags: Lent, Initiating Lent, 40 Days Of Creative Lent, Nllp, Poetry

Two abnormally busy days created a perfect storm of responsibilities, so haven’t had any extended spare time to do creative stuff. Along the way though I’ve made various attempts at Haiku.

If you’re not familiar with them, Haiku originated in Japan as a form of minimalist poetry. There’s different theories out there as to the length and structure, but typically they are three-line poems. The first line contains five syllables, the second line seven, and the final has five syllables again. Their descriptive nature is normally (but not always) based in nature, with the idea that they don’t form a complete picture. They point toward something and then leave you to contemplate.

These were fun to do, so I’m going to keep writing more as the rest of Lent goes on. This first batch comes from my Gospel of Luke reading or from just being out and about:

Lifted from water

Father speaks what all long for

I am proud of You

______________________________

Weak, starved, thirsty, scorched

Make bread, His provision snubbed

I’d rather eat rock

______________________________

Late on the platform

Berwyn south to Fullerton

Lights in the distance

______________________________

Garden of the gods

Seeds grown of creative breath

One hand is tending

______________________________

Family sleeping

One thousand miles separate

7am flight

______________________________

30,000 feet

Distant tree, rock, road and home

Yet you see further

______________________________

Five point at something

Seven more expand the view

Five leave you thinking

______________________________

Lakeside skyscrapers

Concrete refuge, prided home

Beautiful city

Creative Lent #7 — Watercolors

Creative Lent #6 — Erase

Creative Lent #5 — Video of a Day

Creative Lent #4 — Ice

Creative Lent #3 — Movies

Creative Lent #2 — Telescope

Creative Lent #1 — Baylee and I made Olaf
How a Psychic Changed My Life
By: Meredith Wilson
Tags: Pregnancy, Nonfiction, Loss, Hope, Miscarriage

A few days later, I decided to venture out and get some fresh air and to get out of the house. I was in such a slump, and the new age Wiccan store, was always a place of comfort for me. I walked inside and saw the store cats. Fluffy and black, with the cutest underbites. They greeted me with a slow blink, and I breathed in the woodsy scent of the incense. Like a home away from home.

I walked over to where the books and tarot cards were. I’m an avid reader, and I love to peruse the bookshelf to see the new stock. I saw a deck of tarot cards that pictured women with beautiful pregnant bellies, and my eyes watered.

A lovely woman who sat over by the tarot reading booth came up to me and gently placed her hand on my forearm. She looked into my eyes earnestly and said, “Did you know that you had a miscarriage?”

My heart dropped to my stomach but then was instantly snapped back up and filled with relief. Finally, someone who not only believed me but KNEW! She sat down and talked with me, free of charge, but then I ended up paying her for a session because I was so grateful for her love and kindness. There was so much white light around her. Her very essence and aura made me want to stay within her healing presence.

She knew about my spirit attachment, Mollie, and gave me excellent spiritual advice. I’d share, but it is something unique and personal to me that I want to keep that to myself.

But she did tell me something interesting when I asked her if she could tell me my future. She said that there are many webs of life, and we can’t predict the path we will go on. She could advise what she sees at the current time, but I could do something that could change the whole plan. Basically, we control our own future. But if we choose happiness, we can conquer anything.

I hope she reads this one day just so she knows how special that conversation was to me. It put me on a good path to grieve and start healing healthily. I’ll see my baby in Summerland.
The Blessed Hub Award Finalists In Innovation and Business 2014
By: The Blessed Hub
Tags: Innovation, Business, Islam

LINCOLNSHIRE — Friday 1st August 2014

The Blessed Hub were shortlisted into the top three candidates for an award under “Innovation, Business and Skills” at the Living Islam Festival 2014 by the Islamic Society of Britain.

The award indentifies individuals (Sarah Javaid of MADE in Europe, and Shazia Saleem of iEatFoods) and initiatives (The Blessed Hub) that have promoted business and entrepreneurial mind-sets inclusive of the promotion of social enterprise. Creating solutions to social needs and displaying outstanding business acumen in their industry. Promoting innovation and cultures of creativity, orginiality and uniqueness.

The eventual winner was Shazia Saleem of iEatFoods. We congratulate the entrepreneur of the year for this award and on her great work in promoting halal and tayyib food. Likewise we congratulate MADE in Europe for their nomination and great work they continue to do year on year.

It was an honour and a surprise to our team to have been nominated by the public for an award. It was perhaps even more surprising that we were nominated under this category. We’d like to thank all the volunteers who have helped make The Blessed Hub community a reality. May God bless you all.

It was an excellent day, many familiar faces, surprises and much to talk about.

Future. Hope. Humanity. Prayers.

— Follow and Like The Blessed Hub on Facebook and Twitter for the latest!
Lax bros now certain they could play in the NFL if they wanted to
Tags: Lacrosse, NFL, Sports, New England Patriots, Chris Hogan

Lax bros now certain they could play in the NFL if they wanted to SportsPickle Follow Jan 27, 2017 · 2 min read

FOXBOROUGH, MA — New England Patriots receiver and former college lacrosse player Chris Hogan became an NFL star last week when he torched the Pittsburgh Steelers for nine catches, 180 yards and two scores in the AFC title game. But while he helped the Patriots, Hogan’s success has caused lax bros across the nation to be even more certain of their superiority.

“I choose to play lacrosse because it’s the best sport ever,” said Grayson Steele, a 5-foot-8 midfielder at tiny Carrolton College in western Maryland. “But, shit, yeah, Hog-dog [Chris Hogan] shows I could dominate the NFL if I wanted to. Who knows, maybe I’ll decide to do that when I’m done tearing up D-3 lax. Tell Belichick to look me up.”

Lacrosse message boards have been full of talk about how lacrosse has the best athletes in the world since the AFC Championship, and several incidents of lax bros taunting football players for being inferior have been reported at nearly a dozen campuses.

“Yeah, there was an incident here,” confirmed Syracuse athletics director John Wildhack. “Five lacrosse players said something to our football team while they were lifting and then ran off. Our backup punter quickly chased them down and locked them in a janitors closet for an hour. I don’t suspect it will happen again.”

Hogan says he did not mean to make lacrosse players even more delusional and annoying.

“Part of the reason I gave football a shot was because I couldn’t stand being around lacrosse people anymore,” he said. “Plus, I wanted to challenge myself athletically. Simply being one of the best athletes among people whose parents put them in private school didn’t feel like a big accomplishment to me. In fact, it was kind of embarrassing. Real athletes just laughed at me.”
Testing Your Components in React
By: Jennifer Fu
Tags: Tdd, React, Programming, Integration Testing, React Testing

React Testing Library

React Testing Library is built on top of react-test-renderer . Comparing the tests for snapshot, the following syntax is slightly simpler than Test Renderer:

In order to use React Testing Library, @testing-library/react and @testing-library/jest-dom are typically added to devDependencies in a package.json file.

"devDependencies": {

"@testing-library/jest-dom": "^5.5.0",

"@testing-library/react": "^10.0.2",

}

@testing-library/react provides light utility functions on top of react-dom and react-dom/test-utils .

provides light utility functions on top of and . @testing-library/jest-dom provides a set of custom Jest matchers, such as toBeDisabled , toHaveAttribute , and toHaveFormValues . These matchers focus on an element’s attributes, its text content, its CSS classes, and so on. It makes the expect sentence more declarative, readable, and maintainable.

Example

We create an example to illustrate how to use React Testing Library.

The following is the UX design for the example. Initially, the current value is 0. If the button, Add 1 , is clicked, the current value is up 1. If the button, Add 2 , is clicked, the current value is up 2. If the button, Add 3 , is clicked, the current value is up 3. If the button, Reset , is clicked, the current value is reset to 0.

Source code

We revised App.js to implement this example.

In the above code, buttons and utils are defined in separate files to simulate the real world’s complication.

AddButton.js exports a default component:

ResetButton.js uses a named export:

Utils.js also uses a named export:

Snapshot tests

We write a snapshot test for the revised App.js .

The following is the generated snapshot content, with all the DOM elements:

Then, we add mocks for AddButton and ResetButton :

Form the following generated snapshot content, we can see the content has been shortened from 34 lines to 22 lines. This is how we do shallow rendering to isolate tests. You can imagine how much time we’d save if both AddButton and ResetButton were complicated components.

Interactive tests

React Testing Library tests the code in the same way a user would use it. It provides APIs to simulate the operations. The following test case clicks Add 1 , Add 2 , and Add 3 buttons, and verifies that the result is 6 .

In the above test case, it uses getByTestId to retrieve the resultDiv . The buttons are defined in other JavaScript source, where test IDs may not be provided. getByText is used to retrieve the element.

Here, getByTestId and getByText are destructured from the render result.

In the below test case, we import getByTestId and getByText from the @testing-library/react module. Then the invocation needs to specify the exact container. This test case clicks Add 2 and Reset buttons, and verifies that the result is 0 .
抽樣與蒙地卡羅(一)：隨機數生成
By: Edward Tung
Tags: Sampling, Data Science, Statistics

數學、人工智慧與蟒蛇

Data Science is an young and composite subject, where most…
Planet Boundaries
By: Evans Kyritsis
Tags: Life Lessons, Poetry, World, Climate Change, Life

Phosphorus had a natural flow

But then we had to go for more

Ignorant we are, until one blow

One day will shake us to the core.
Beaxy Weekly Overview — #28. Beaxy Developer Shoutout…
Tags: Beaxyweekly, Crypto, Bitcoin, Beaxy, Cryptocurrency

Beaxy Supports and Learns

Beaxy has always acted like an honest and transparent exchange, instead of bashing on other projects and trying to take cheap shots on competitors when they are down they show compassion and try to learn from it.

Director of Memes

The Director of Memes at Beaxy, CryptoChimp, strikes again. This time he made a short video about his Beaxy beta testing experience.

Customer Support Portal

One of the things Beaxy stands out in is their customer support. They find it more than important to help their new customers. To help out their users, Beaxy made a customer support portal. Have a look here.

Discord 4,000 Members

Beaxy started building their community in November 2018 through Discord, since then the Beaxy community has grown quickly with all the highest security measures in place. The Beaxy community members are real and active and damn supportive.

Beaxy understands the importance of a community and that’s why its the place you get access to news, suggestions, media, team members, exciting contests and listings for projects.

With over 4,000 community members it a great place to be at, I would suggest you come over and say hi -> https://discordapp.com/invite/f47saKH

Others Show Support

Beaxy has been blessed with a lot of support by their community, but support comes from other angles as well. Beaxy is grateful for their listings to show their support to Beaxy as well. Thanks, Ubiq, 0chain and CloakCoin.

That’s it for now. All the best to everyone!

Khilone

Follow me on Twitter to get all the news right away: https://twitter.com/Khil0ne

And be sure to read all my stories on Medium over here:

https://medium.com/khilone

Other things to keep your eyes on:
GOST Protocol — Cross Chain Transactions Between Ethereum and GoChain
Tags: Blockchain, Stablecoins, Gost, Gochain

in Both Sides of the Table
Rain on New Years Day
By: Vixen Lea
Tags: Awakening, New Year, Women, Nature, Poetry

Rain on New Years Day

a poem of beginning

Photo by Lola Guti on Unsplash

She wakes up to a shower

water flowing in all her rivulets and gullies

washing away last year’s sin

street grime and soil pooling

in her hollows

before filtering down

through her tired and fallow crust

tickling the nodes of her

quenching the beginnings of her

she lets it melt her down

wet and clean and newborn

she lets it saturate into her loam

spongy and fertile and lush

she lets it carry all the dust and sadness

slick down her arching, aching back

so she may rise

glistening tomorrow

shake it off in sprays and sheets and folds

unsullied and

swollen with hope
The Swirling Embitterment
By: Jonathan Greene
Tags: Micropoetry, Self, Feelings, Society, Poetry

The Swirling Embitterment

A Micropoem

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

The swirling embitterment inside of me

is festering and rearing its ugly head

day by day, hour by hour, second by second

because society is circling the drain

and threatening to stay there

in perpetual motion, almost leaving

but actually remaining on an endless loop

of flickering home movies without me in them

a distant cast-off from a culture run amok

meditating in solitude, pushing down the bile

rising to my throat from all the bitterness
I Fly Through Time And Space: A Contemplative Piece
By: Yasmeen Elgerbi
Tags: Poem, Space, Reflections, Poetry, Universe

Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash

My being, like time, may be linear and limited

My being, like outer space, may be mysterious and full of different worlds

Though like time, my being is subject to the power of perception

And like space, my being is capable of ever-expanding, or shrinking into nothingness

But I am neither linear nor limited

I am neither expanding or shrinking

And I am not a perception too

Then who am I?

I am neither.

I recognize my being in the liminal space

In between time and space

Like time, I may be perceived as moving fast or slow

And like space, I may be going forwards or backwards

But I am neither.

Like infinite potential as the essence of space

And nonlinear potential as the essence of time

My being is a whole expressing it self in various shapes and forms

My being is not slow when it’s moving slow

And it is not backwards when it’s moving backwards

My being is just is

Like time, it can move fast or slow, but it will remain elastic

And like space, it can expand or shrink, but it will remain infinite

Like time and space, my being is infinite potential in its essence

And I conclude that I am no different than both

So when I spread my wings and fly, the whole wide universe will fly along

And together, we will create magic
Designing landing pages that counter user objections
By: Shane Doyle
Tags: User Experience, User Research, Engagement, Conversion Optimization, Marketing

This article is going to be a short one and the book “Make Websites Win” heavily influenced this article. Honestly, this is one of the best books you can read if you want to optimise your digital products.

We’ve got to change our thinking when designing websites and landing pages that we want users to convert. When creating landing pages, we should think of all the objections a user will have with our product. Then you need to design your pages so that they can counter those objections.

Think about that for a second.

If users don’t know what your product does, why would they buy it? The page needs to explain what it does clearly. A simple five-second user test will help validate if users know what your product is.

If users know what your product does, but don’t think they need it, then, why would they buy it? So you need to explain the benefits of it. Try to showcase both the features and how they benefit the user.

If users are not convinced it will do what it says, why would they buy it? So you need to add proof, you can do this by showing testimonials or money back guarantees.

If users think it is too expensive, why would they buy it? So you need to justify the price and communicate to them that it is not costly.

If users don’t trust your company, why would they buy it? So you need to show evidence that the company is trustworthy. Positive reviews and mentions of your company online will help instil trust.

If users are going to leave and think about it, why would they buy it? So you need to provide reasons why they should act now. Give them so free content that will help persuade them, maybe offer deals that are too good to refuse.

Next time you want a page to convert more users, try thinking about the objections a user will have and design to counter those objections.

This way of thinking has helped me to create digital products that counter these objections, which guides users in purchasing your products and increasing my client's bottom line.

This article was originally published on shanedoyle.io.
What is Yocto Project and why you should use it for embedded Linux development
By: George Calin
Tags: Openembedded, Yoctoproject, Embedded Linux, Bitbake, Embedded

Introduction

Yocto Project :

can build toolchains,

can build bootloaders,

can build kernels,

can build root filesystems

can generate an entire Linux Distribution containing binary packages that can be installed at runtime.

Primarily, Yocto Project is a group of recipes using a combination of:

Python shell scripts

Yocto Project includes also a task scheduler called “BitBake” that produces whatever you have configured from recipes.

A bit of history

2003 and “OpenEmbedded”

Yocto Project’s started from OpenEmbedded whose objective was to port Linux towards hand-held devices. It was developed, and continues to be maintained by an enthusiastic community of programmers.

Yocto Project’s started from OpenEmbedded whose objective was to port Linux towards hand-held devices. It was developed, and continues to be maintained by an enthusiastic community of programmers. 2005 and “Poky”

Richard Purdie, at that time a developer at OpenedHand, created a fork of OpenEmbedded, which approached with a more conservative choice of packages for the purpose of maintaining stability over a longer period of time. Richard named his version Poky.

Richard Purdie, at that time a developer at OpenedHand, created a fork of OpenEmbedded, which approached with a more conservative choice of packages for the purpose of maintaining stability over a longer period of time. Richard named his version Poky. 2008 Intel purchases OpenedHand

2010 Open Embedded and Poky combines into a new project OpenEmbedded Core (OE-Core)

Components of Yocto Project

OpenEmbedded-Core

This is shared with OpenEmbedded. This is the core metadata.

BitBake

This is the task scheduler.This is shared with OpenEmbedded.

Poky

This is the reference distribution.

Documentation

This is composed by the user’s manuals and the developer’s guides for each component.

Toaster

This is a web-based interface to BitBake and its metadata.

ADT Eclipse

This is a plugin for Eclipse.

Why would you use Yocto Project?

Many System-on-Chip (SoC) vendors provide BSPs (board-support-packages) for their devices appropriate for Yocto Project. Meta layers can also be used to create extended or just different build systems.
Racist incidents occur every day. We imagine alternate realities.
By: The Lily News
Tags: First Person, Poetry, History, Imagination, Fiction

Throughout Eve Ewing’s “Electric Arches,” a new collection of poems and short stories, she revisits the past.

She tells us about a moment when she was six years old, riding her two-wheeler down the street of her Chicago neighborhood, when an older white woman screamed, “You little n — ! You almost hit me with that bike! Go back to your n — Jesse Jackson neighborhood!”

In another instance, Ewing recalls seeing four boys getting pulled over by the Chicago Police Department. The youngest boy was nine years old.

“I asked if they were being arrested or if it was legal protocol to interrogate them without an adult present,” Ewing says. “Another officer began to yell at me, standing next to my car and shouting through my window. He told me to leave. I would not.”

In real life, these situations did not end well. They are painful memories seared into Ewing’s being. But in “Electric Arches,” the writer imagines alternate realities in short works called [a re-telling]. She whisks the older white woman up into the air to a lake, where she leaves her on a rock, alone. The boys being interrogated by the police escape into the sky, smiling and laughing.

(Haymarket Books)

“What would it be like to do a dream re-imagining?” Ewing told The Lily in an interview discussing her work. “These incidents are really upsetting, so making a [quote-unquote] happy ending would be really disingenuous, but what would it be like to imagine something different?”

Inspired by Ewing, we asked writer Everdeen Mason to re-tell experiences with racism our readers shared with us. The first part is a true story from a reader. The second part, handwritten, is an alternate reality created by Mason.

No one can change the past, but we can dream that it was different.
Why Animate Data?
By: Daniel Antal
Tags: Gapminder, Data Visualization, Visegrad Group, Economic Development, Weather Reviews

I have been thinking a lot how to explain complex processes, shaped my many forces in time and space, and a few years ago I realized that is exactly what meteorologists do every day. They make a complex model, and animate it over a map with simple pictograms, then tell their story.

I was very much inspired by the fantastic statistican and educator, the late Hans Rosling, who created the gapminder, and fought a positive and joyful fight with disinformation and prejudice.

Gapminder

Rosling is explaining very complex social and economic developments with relatively simple charts. The animation has two important advantages: the time component and the timewise change is naturally represented and ‘felt’, and data which would not fit nicely on a screen is rendered across hundreds of images.

The next choropleth, or colored datamap has no particularly interesting stroy, but it compresses information similarly to the gapminder. The time component is animated, and the passage of time is felt. The geographical element is plotted on a well-known map: well, the map of Europe’s regions. The tabular format of the same data, or even a barchart, would be very difficult to read — we have about 3000 data points on the animated choropleth.

My idea is eventually to create a ‘social weather report’, similarly to meteorologists, who explain very complex models and satellite data over a well-known map with pictograms. While my mapped example has no clear story, it already has two important components: the map and the animation.

Let me just make a further step with an obvious story, this time on a simple barchart, given that the geographical comparison is not very complex. In creating my data animation prototypes, I revisited a question that pops up every year and decade: is the real GDP gap decrease between Austria and the Visegrad Region? Or more generally, between newer, more peripherical members states of the European Union and the rich core of the continent?

If we only plot the absolute number, the gap does not seem to go away. But in fact, there is a steady catching up. However, at this rate, it may take till the end of the century to even out differences.

Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, and a large part of Poland were parts of a single polity, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The differences among the regions and the ranking have barely changed in the last 120 years, though the relative position of Hungary and Poland is different from the long-term trend. The animation shows a difference in resilience to a world economic crisis (in 2008–2010) and a different speed of catching up with the more developed and mature economy of Austria.

You can leave a comment on the Data & Lyrics Facebook Page.
We Will Survive it All
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Life Lessons, Friendship, Poetry, Hope, Life

for A.

I will not say the years have worn me well

nor that I am some paragon of joy

but I’ve survived, my chest has borne the hell

of every hurt you sing: a bright-eyed boy

who grew through granite ground to secret grief,

his heart an open wound — now scarred to naught

and shattered, forced to question each belief

whereon he build his life; take happy thoughts

each one as rare as diamonds in the sky

and pile them up, a meager house of cards,

to build a life worth living, asking “why”

as he beholds old friends in greener yards.

Our destiny: to hack and slash our way

from sorrow on to joy, to better days.
SUBtrack: Imagining a Better Subscription Management Service
By: Taylor Fletcher
Tags: Work, Design

By Abigail McPhail, McKayla Boyd, and Taylor Fletcher

In the technology revolution we’re living in, each new product draws us in with promises of an easier or even automated life. And in theory, it sounds great; so we naturally jump on board. After all, why wouldn’t we want to turn over our mundane cares to a computer?

In practice, however, too much automation can be detrimental. When we place our worries out of sight, out of mind, we run the risk of letting this helpful function blind us from problems accumulating under the surface. Our group was faced with the task of designing a solution for one such example of automation and the undesirable effects that go with it: recurring subscriptions.

The Problem

When it comes to subscriptions, the main overarching problem is that users have a hard time managing subscriptions that are either forgotten or simply never used. The basic ideas behind subscriptions are simple, and it makes sense that we would want to automate a payment that we would choose to make on a regular basis anyway. In reality, however, people often sign up for services that they either forget about or don’t use enough, but that continue to subtly drain their bank account. This results in stress and low bank accounts rather than a promised peace of mind.

Taking this problem at face value, one may think that the obvious solution is that people should simply be more meticulous about managing their finances. But when you think about the ever-increasing number of available subscription services — from business platforms to media streaming to monthly deliveries of razors at your door — how can we expect even the most financially-conscious individual to keep track of all of these small recurring charges without help? As Don Norman has noted,

“In my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account.”

Now, of course the subscription systems have taken this into account, and in some cases have been purposefully designed to be forgettable. However, in order to combat this and our intrinsic nature, we believe that the solution lies in simply being made aware of the true impact of our subscription choices.
I’m Making Way More On Medium Now — Here’s Why
By: Tom Kuegler
Tags: Social Media, Medium, Creativity, Money, Writing

I’m Making Way More On Medium Now — Here’s Why

I did a deep analysis..

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

So I held off on writing a post about the new Medium Changes last week because quite honestly, I had zero idea what would happen.

Now that I have data, I can speak on what I think.

My initial opinion?

Holy crap, it’s great.

Seriously Medium, your track record was already pretty amazing, but now I must say you’ve outdone yourself again.

I’ve basically doubled my writing income — just like Shaunta Grimes mentioned in this post.

Anyway, yeah, my writing income doubled and I went straight to the stats page to try and figure out why. Here’s a deep analysis of what I’m seeing.
La importancia de los datos en las empresas
By: Entel Ocean
Tags: Data Management, Data Science, Data Driven, Analytics, Data

in Both Sides of the Table
User Story Template With Examples
By: Songtham Tung
Tags: Communication, Startup, Leadership, Product Management, Agile

TL;DR

User Story Template

Title: <What this user story is about> Story

-----

As a <type of user>,

I want <to perform some task>,

so that I can <achieve some goal>. Acceptance Criteria

--------------------

Scenario A: <What should happen> Given that <some context>,

when <some action is done>,

then <such outcomes are expected to occur>. Stretch Goals

--------------

<optional> Notes

-----

<optional> Priority: <Highest, High, Medium, Low, Lowest, Unprioritized> Story Points: <1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ... >

—

Example (*)
Memory ~ Nwaoha Chibuzor Anthony
By: Chigozie Nelson
Tags: Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Poems And Stories, Poetry Writing

Photo by Andre Moura from Pexels

Memory is the story you were told about a city

which fell off an atlas into the hands of assailants,

who slashed the tongues of your elders,

and smothered the night with bullets and blood.

You were told that the sea was freedom

when your fathers and sons drowned with chains

into the blueness of a coulee

so that when the flames come screaming at your city,

with you behind bars

and your daughter severely injured between the laps,

you will remember the name of your mother

and the river she was lost in.

____________

Nwaoha Chibuzor Anthony is an Igbo-born poet whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Headline poetry and press, African writer, Kalahari review, Art lounge, Nantygreens, Konya shasrumi, Eboquills, Praxis magazine, Afritondo, Eunoia review & elsewhere. He lives in Orlu, a sleepy city in the Southeastern part of Nigeria.
Working from home
By: Alex Begin
Tags: Work From Home, Interview, Articles, Community

Priscilla Du Preez

Thoughts on working from home

What do you do for work? Has it been more difficult to do at home?

I’m grateful to have a job right now and I absolutely love it. Despite graduating from university as a high school Japanese teacher, I went from the front of the classroom to work behind-the-scenes in post-secondary admissions. I work in the Admission Data Services department at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada. My job is 92% processing hundreds of new applications and transcripts, 5% drinking coffee and 3% being terrorized by the campus geese, so you could say working from home has been a lot less traumatic.

Is working from home new to you?

Yes! It was a really difficult lifestyle to adjust to at first, because there’s the constant whisper from the fridge (feed, human… time for another snack) and the cat is constantly irritated by my presence. The morning Zoom meetings are a good reminder that human life still exists outside our home. Luckily, my team enjoys it when I bring my cat to our very important meetings.

How has your routine changed?

Surprisingly enough, I’ve become one of those annoying people who gets up and works out. I’ve been saying it for years, “I’m going to get up early and go for a run”, and EVERY. SINGLE. MORNING. I would snooze my alarm. But because I can literally show up to work as a hot and sweaty mess, it’s been a really easy routine to get into.

Have you picked up a new hobby or interest?

Yes! Reading! I’m a type nine on the Enneagram, and according to my number, I’m the kind of person who goes years without reading a single book but will suddenly start reading more than anyone you know. I’m currently reading The Graveyard by Neil Gaiman, and diving deeper into the biography of JC (re-reading the New Testament of the Bible). And as an avid tattoo enthusiast, I’ve started drawing again. I’m currently dappling in a study on American Traditional tattoo art.

How do you separate work life from home life now that you can’t leave the house?

I really just have to close my laptop at the end of the day, turn off my work brain, and then I’m magically in the living room.

Where do you work in your home?

At first I was working on the couch, then on the bed, but that was destroying my posture and I was vulnerable to spontaneous napping, so I cleared off our junk-ridden old desk and made it my work station. It’s right beside my cat’s favourite chair though, and he snores a lot. Like a congested old codger. I may need to relocate soon.
Daily Changes
By: Randy Shingler
Tags: Change, Philosophy, Poetry, Acceptance, Peace Of Mind

Changes evolving everywhere

Nothing’s ever same for long

Each day arrives in its own way,

Newness in it’s silent coming

Letting go of yesterday’s face.

Accepting changes that it brings

Adapting to new day’s persona

Joys and sorrows that may appear,

Knowing it’s coming, now my truth,

Accepting it with mind wide open.

Actions today part of tomorrow

Partially determining what it brings,

Other parts will hinge on fate

Powerful force hovering over life

Appearing only when times are right.

Peace of mind, states we desire,

Coming when our minds are open

Gracefully accepting daily changes .
A browser plugin for heuristics analysis
By: David Pinedo
Tags: UX Research, Heuristic Evaluation, Heuristics, UX Design, Usability

Heurio is a neat little plug-in that runs a variety analysis on websites such as Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics for user interface design to Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design. The following is a breakdown of how Heurio works while analyzing the NTS Radio Website.

Choose from several heuristic systems.

What It’s Good At

Heurio is really interesting. You can easily place comments on sites you’re analyzing and quickly tag issues with descriptions, severity rankings, and solutions.

Several comments later.

What Needs Work

Heurio boasts a collaboration tool, but I have yet to see the value of that while conducting 2 different heuristics analysis reports using Heurio. Maybe it does that collaborative function, it just wasn’t evident to me or because the heuristics work was handed off to me and there was no need to co-analyze a site on my product team. That also touches on a friction point of plug-ins in general. When does it stop being a plugin? And when does it start feeling like you’re using a platform?

Collaboration options.

It’s also buggy, sometimes it forgets to show the user heuristic principles to choose from its drop-down menu when tagging a new issue and that gets annoying as time is wasted.

Buggy. Does not show heuristic principles to choose from.

When it’s working it should look like this.

Also, finding your project to export is not very intuitive. It takes some testing and you can find a project dashboard in about 3–4 clicks. When you download a report of your final analysis, the images of the site with the tags are not displayed where it is supposed to be shown. Grey rectangles of where your image should be are shown instead, which is kind of disappointing. I had to stick to taking screenshots of my work while using Heurio, which also wasted time.

PDF does not show screenshots of specific tag or issue.

Lastly, I spent a lot of time copying and pasting the comments from the report into my own heuristics GoogleSheet. I’m wondering if these reports can be easily transferred into this format.

What I want it to Be

Originally, I thought this plug-in would be more robust and intuitive than what it actually is — that’s just wishful thinking. I was really hoping for a plug-in similar to WAVE, a web accessibility plug-in that identifies all of the issues of a webpage. I really thought Heurio could identify all of the heuristic principle issues of a site automatically, but that’s not where this product is. It would be amazing if that is the goal for this plug-in.

Besides the aforementioned drawbacks, it’s an awesome digital tool that will enhance a UX Designers workflow. I’ll definitely be testing out more of its heuristic systems in the future.

I hope these thoughts and practices can be used in designing for accessibility and inclusivity for your next design sprints. Let me know how it goes!
再談人因工程，和UX的同與不同（下）：認知工適學（上）
By: Steven Dong
Tags: User Experience, Cognition, Ergonomics, Human Factors, Signal Detection Theory

Senior Human Factors Engineer @ Microsoft. Like to write about UX, Human Factors, US life, and ACGN. 隨手寫寫關於UX、人因工程、旅美生活、以及動漫遊戲，目前於微軟西雅圖總部擔任資深人因工程師

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New feature: Create folders in which to file your events
By: Gauthier Lebbe
Tags: Polling, New Features, Education, News

Many among you requested it, so we made it happen! Start organising your events in folders today and manage them more easily.

Find out all there is to know about folders here!

Any thoughts? Share your feedback and suggestions with us!

The Wooclap Team

Get in touch:

☞ Gauthier is inbound marketing manager at Wooclap, an online platform with which to stimulate classes and measure student understanding of material. You can follow Wooclap on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.
The Seductive Lie of a Blank Page
By: Jesse J Rogers
Tags: Perfectionism, Writers Block, Writing, Writers On Writing, Inner Child

Mindset

The Seductive Lie of a Blank Page

Don’t fall prey to perfectionism

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

By Jesse Rogers

A blank canvas reveals no flaw.

Until words fall upon it there’s simply no reason to believe that the brush strokes will connect as anything other than genius.

Why wouldn’t your refrain simultaneously be as elegantly subtle and as powerfully thunderous as Mozart’s Symphony #40?

Why wouldn’t your villain be as insidious as the wicked Iago?

Why wouldn’t your hero be as tragic as Jay Gatsby, with his “extraordinary gift for hope”?

So long as a page remains white and pure or so long as the screen has nothing but a blinking cursor, the illusion of perfection remains intact. You get to hold on to your own “gift for hope”.

But slowly, imperceptibly, time betrays you. The moment stretches from the bliss of infinite potential into paralysis.

You stare at length into the glowing abyss, as it stares also into you. You can’t hide from yourself the knowledge of your inadequacy. Deep down you know that when the ink finally spills, no one will mistake it for a Jackson Pollack.

And so instead of something to build from, you end up with only a blank page. Only potential, but no achievement.

I’ve had the same problem, and I can help.

Here are a few strategies I use regularly.
Scraping & Analyzing CS:GO Game Score Data
By: Henry Rossiter
Tags: Betting, Esport, Data Science, Statistics, Data Visualization

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (abbreviated as CS:GO) is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game. Recently, competitive CS:GO surged in popularity. Gambling on CS:GO matches is also massively popular; wagers placed on CS:GO matches account for approximately 29% of worldwide esports betting volume (source).

Competitive CS:GO games follow a predetermined format: the first team to score 16 points wins the game. If both teams score exactly 15 points by the end of the 30th round, the game either ends in a tie or continues to overtime depending on the league rules.

CS:GO bettors often place wagers on the total amount of points that will be scored in a single game. Bets like this are know as over-under bets. For example, in an over-under bet, one could wager that fewer than 25.5 points will be scored. In that example, the bettor took the under and will profit if 25 or fewer points are scored.

Distribution of scraped game scores

To gain insight into statistics behind over-under bets, I scraped data from 10,000 of the most recent competitive CS:GO games from ESEA. I calculated the total points scored in each game and created a histogram to visualize the distribution of total scores.

The histogram shows that around 27% of the games scraped were 16 point games. This seems counter intuitive; why would a 16–0 game be 10 times more likely to occur than a 16–1 game?

After additional research, I decided that the overwhelming amount of 16–0 games was likely a product of disqualifications, thrown matches, or no-shows. To remove these irregular data points, I manually set the probability of a 16–0 game to be equal tot the probability of a 16–1 game. After applying that assumption, I created new figures.
How a Data Scientist Buys Extended Warranties
By: Will Casey
Tags: Extended Auto Warranties, Python, Data Science, Statistics, Poisson

How a Data Scientist Buys Extended Warranties

A Deep-Dive look at the Math of “Extended Warranties”

This is a “sort-of-second-part” to my post about using data to buy a car.

If you have not read it, check it out here.

Intro

We have all been there. We have just committed to buying that new shiny car and we are about to make it out of the building fairly unscathed.

But wait, before we can sign on the dotted line and ride off into the sunset we have one more meeting with the “finance” guy (a.k.a. last line of a long line of sales pitches).

They will offer you a whole slew of extended warranty options to protect your new pseudo-asset.

These are some of the biggest moneymakers for car dealerships and surprisingly there is a lot of math to back it up and that is what we intend to explore.

A Simple Case

Let’s say you are sitting in the finance office of your local car dealership about to close on a deal.

You are offered an extended warranty on you tires that will only cost you $7/month.

It covers everything from you running over a nail in your driveway and needing a patch to a complete blowout that requires a brand new tire.

Should you take the deal? Is it worth it? Whats in it for the dealership?

This is a game of probabilities and for the sake of simplicity, we will use some fairly reasonable expected probabilities that I made up after seconds and seconds of thinking about it.

Let’s say that in a year there is a 5% chance of having a total blowout and a 30% chance of just needing a patch.

And let’s say that the average cost of replacing a tire is $200 and the average cost of a patch is $20.

What is in it for the dealership?

To answer the question of why the dealership would offer this deal and how much money they expect to make from this we can start formulating this into mathematical equations.

Let’s say the dealership sells 1000 extended warranties in a year.

In order to figure out how much cost the dealership will incur we can use the following basic probability concept where E(x) will be the expected number of vehicles the dealership will need to repair.

With some basic arithmetic we can now get the following table:

So in one year, the dealership is expecting to make a profit of $68,000 from 1000 of these deals (no wonder the salesman are so pushy).

But so far this isn’t very interesting and looks more like accounting than data science.

This is where a data scientist would start to think about probability distributions, variances around the means, simulations, extreme cases, mathematical relationships, inflection points and on and on and on.