fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Staying Home. Let your fingers run wild over…
By: Pratik Mishra
Tags: Home, Life, Self, Poetry, Creativity

Staying Home

Let your fingers run wild over imagination’s spine in seclusion

Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash

I agree, tonight isn’t like our other weekend nights.

I, too, feel its frosty coldness.

My heart, just like yours,

isn’t pacing with excitement for impeding scenery ahead.

There is neither steering

nor a glass in these hands tonight.

I’m not wearing a shoe,

and not expecting any pre-dinner footsie too.

I agree it’s hard for us who stay alone.

Still, my dear dumbasses — stay the eff home.

Just agree to this for some time.

There will not be any first meets,

and reruns of old stories will only continue online.

There will not be a new skin under your nose

nor a familiar kiss from a lip that’s not already in your home.

There will be no warm breaths raising the heat on dance floors,

and no whispering of Manto’s line to another estranged soul.

No tousling of hair, and calling cutes.

Stay away from flights, and don’t take any Uber too.

If you are worried,

your anxieties will feel lonely without you —

get done with your laundry,

and fix your room if you’ve to.

Tonight, stay in, flirt with your memories,

and leave your fingers wild over your imagination’s spine.

If you feel you got some extra blues,

let the nib of your pen kiss its shadows over a page or two.

To my moronic friends planning their weekend escapades,

pour yourself a thick poem, or feast on a thriller if you need to.

For a little while, let’s agree —

‘mi casa es mi casa,’ it’s not for ‘tu.’
Classification with Random Forests in Python
By: Sadrach Pierre
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Python, Data Science, Machine Learning

Now let’s also look at the first five rows of data using the ‘.head()’ method:

print(df.head())

The attribute information is as follows

We will be predicting the class for mushrooms where the possible class values are ‘e’ for edible and ‘p’ for poisonous. The next thing we will do is convert each column into machine readable categorical variables:

df_cat = pd.DataFrame()

for i in list(df.columns):

df_cat['{}_cat'.format(i)] = df[i].astype('category').copy()

df_cat['{}_cat'.format(i)] = df_cat['{}_cat'.format(i)].cat.codes

Let’s print the first five rows of the resulting data frame:

print(df_cat.head())

Next, let’s define our features and our targets:

X = df_cat.drop('class_cat', axis = 1)

y = df_cat['class_cat']

Now let’s import the random forests classifier from ‘sklearn’:

from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier

Next, let’s import ‘KFold’ from the model selection module in ‘sklearn’. We will us ‘KFold’ to validate our model. Additionally, we will use the f1-score as our accuracy metric, which is the harmonic mean of the precision and recall. Let’s also initialize the “KFold” object with two splits. Finally, we’ll initialize a list that we will use to append our f1-scores:

from sklearn.model_selection import KFold

kf = KFold(n_splits=2, random_state = 42)

results = []

Next, let’s iterate over the indices in our data and split our data for training and testing:

for train_index, test_index in kf.split(X):

X_train, X_test = X[train_index], X[test_index]

y_train, y_test = y[train_index], y[test_index]

Within the for-loop we will define random forest model objects, fit to the different folds of training data, predict on the corresponding folds of test data, evaluate the f1-score at each test run and append the f1-scores to our ‘results’ list. Our model will use 100 estimators, which corresponds to 100 decision trees:

for train_index, test_index in kf.split(X):

...

model = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators = 100, random_state = 24)

model.fit(X_train, y_train)

y_pred = model.predict(X_test)

results.append(f1_score(y_test, y_pred))

Finally, let’s print the average performance of our model:

print("Accuracy: ", np.mean(results))

If we increase the number of splits to 5 we have:

kf = KFold(n_splits=3)

...

print("Accuracy: ", np.mean(results))

I’ll stop here but I encourage you to play around with the data and code yourself.

CONCLUSIONS

To summarize, in this post we discussed how to train a random forest classification model in python. We showed how to transform categorical feature values into machine readable categorical values. Further, we showed how to split our data for training and testing, initialize our random forest model object, fit to our training data, and measure the performance of our model. I hope you found this post useful/interesting. The code in this post is available on GitHub. Thank you for reading!
Student Series: How 360 Storytelling on Women & Girls Creates Empathy
By: Fovrth Studios
Tags: United Nations, Women, Student Series, Virtual Reality, Storytelling

Women & Financial Independence

Produced by Jaunt VR, Women on the Move tells the story of Fatchima’s life in Niger, West Africa where the women of her village band together to form a savings group with CARE. Fatchima is confident her granddaughter Nana will have a better life because of the work the women have done and the trust they have in each other. Jaunt calls their 360 videos “cinematic,” which shows in the quality and production style of videos such as this one. The camera positions in this experience are particularly effective at creating a sense of presence, as if they are sitting beside Fatchima, rather than peering down at her. This video expertly utilizes fade-out transitions by strategically pairing them with the narration, forcing the viewer to focus only on Fatchima’s voice in building anticipation for the next scene. While all the experiences included here fit the “storytelling” theme, the narration style and shooting of Women on the Move makes it feel especially anecdotal.

Women & Restarting from Crisis

In contrast to Jaunt VR’s style, CNN VR’s 360 videos feel less cinematic and more journalistic. Born of War focuses on the story of 17-year-old Blessing and how she fits into the fastest growing refugee crisis of South Sudanese people fleeing to Uganda. This is the only video out of the five included here that relies on a reporter to tell the story. The footage is less clear in this video — the stitch lines are more visible and the image is slightly blurry. But, because this video is not as focused on aesthetics and instead centers on telling a more “news focused” story this works. This video is unique in the way it uses real stories to humanize statistics. For example, we learn that 86 percent of the refugees are women and children — which is an impactful figure on it’s own, but it becomes even more powerful when combined with footage of Blessing and her newborn baby “War.” This video is a great example of how to respectfully honor individuals and their stories when covering human rights crises.
🌻The Best and Most Current of Modern Natural Language Processing
By: Victor Sanh
Tags: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP, Research, AI

Over the last two years, the Natural Language Processing community has witnessed an acceleration in progress on a wide range of different tasks and applications. 🚀 This progress was enabled by a shift of paradigm in the way we classically build an NLP system: for a long time, we used pre-trained word embeddings such as word2vec or GloVe to initialize the first layer of a neural network, followed by a task-specific architecture that is trained in a supervised way using a single dataset.

Recently, several works demonstrated that we can learn hierarchical contextualized representations on web-scale datasets 📖 leveraging unsupervised (or self-supervised) signals such as language modeling and transfer this pre-training to downstream tasks (Transfer Learning). Excitingly, this shift led to significant advances on a wide range of downstream applications ranging from Question Answering, to Natural Language Inference through Syntactic Parsing…

“Which papers can I read to catch up with the latest trends in modern NLP?”

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine decided to dive in into NLP. He already has a background in Machine Learning and Deep Learning so he genuinely asked me: “Which papers can I read to catch up with the latest trends in modern NLP?”. 👩‍🎓👨‍🎓

That’s a really good question, especially when you factor in that NLP conferences (and ML conferences in general) receive an exponentially growing number of submissions: +80% NAACL 2019 VS 2018, +90% ACL 2019 VS 2018, …

I compiled this list of papers and resources 📚 for him, and I thought it would be great to share it with the community since I believe it can be useful for a lot of people.
Apple Is Aiming To Release The Apple Car In 2024
By: Ghani Mengal
Tags: Technology, Tech, Business, Apple, Apple Car

Apple Is Aiming To Release The Apple Car In 2024

Apple Is Aiming To Release Apple Car With Next Level Battery Technology

Apple has a car project by the name of Project Titan. According to different online sources, apple started this project in 2014 and still is working on it. Apple was aiming to release the car in 2020 but for global pandemic and other global business reasons, they deny it. I already talked about apple’s 2020 car release mission in this article Year In Review 2020.

And now Apple Inc is looking forward to producing self-driving vehicles with its own breakthrough battery technology, reported by Reuters.

The Apple Car project has changed leadership several times and hundreds of employees have been laid off during the course of development, but it is now under the leadership of John Giannandrea, Apple’s AI and machine learning chief, who took over the reins from Bob Mansfield after Mansfield retired in 2020.
JavaScript.Linked Lists. Get last element in the list. Clear the list.
By: Yuriy Berezskyy
Tags: React, Data Structures, Linked Lists, JavaScript, Algorithms

First of all, we need to check if there is any element, if it’s not we just return null. Then we create variable node where we point to the head(first element).We create while loop to move till the last element. If the next element is null, we return the node.

getLast() method

We are using example that I was sharing with you above.

Example

Result

class Node {

constructor(data, next = null) {

this.data = data;

this.next = next;

}

} class LinkedList {

constructor() {

this.head = null;

} insertFirst(data) {

const node = new Node(data, this.head);

this.head = node;

} size() {

let counter = 0;

let node = this.head;

while (node) {

counter++;

node = node.next;

} return counter;

} getFirst() {

return this.head.data;

}



getLast() {

if (!this.head) {

return null;

} let node = this.head;

while (node) {

if (!node.next) {

return node;

}

node = node.next;

}

} } const list = new LinkedList(); list.insertFirst(“a”); list.insertFirst(“b”); console.log(list.getLast()); //returns ‘b’

Clear the list

Function → “clear()”

Directions

Empties the linked list of any nodes

Example
Standing Out With Exceptional Customer Experiences: What Works For Project Army Founder Viktor Nagornyy
By: Tara Mcmullin
Tags: Business, Podcast, Small Business, Entrepreneurship, Customer Experience

The Nitty-Gritty:

How Project Army founder Viktor Nagornyy discovered his opportunity in the website support & hosting market

The reason he decided to do the opposite of industry standards when it comes to key customer policies

How he landed on competitive pricing without having to slash expenses or sacrifice customer experience

Why prioritizing exceptional customer experiences has led to significant business growth

I’ve been building websites with Wordpress for almost 11 years now.

In the beginning, I used the cheap web hosts you’re probably already familiar with — I won’t name names, though.

I relied on the support those web hosts offered to teach me just about everything I know about name servers, MX records, cPanel, and common errors you get when screwing around in the backend of Wordpress.

I asked, they answered.

Then, something changed.

Over time, the support got less and less reliable. It got less and less helpful. It was less and less personable.

And somewhere along the line, the support started to suck.

At the same time, I started to notice I just wasn’t getting the same level of service from these companies that I had in the past. My website was down frequently. They started to tell me I needed to upgrade and then upgrade again.

That’s when I jumped ship.

Today’s guest noticed the same crap happening in the web support & hosting industry.

Instead of pursuing a marginally better solution, he decided to take advantage of the situation and use exceptional customer experiences as a way to stand out in a very crowded market.

Viktor Nagorynyy is the founder of Project Army. What started as an SEO and digital marketing consultancy has blossomed into a full-service website support & hosting company that prioritizes customer service and experience.

Viktor shares how doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing has led to big results, why customer service is so important to him, how prioritizing customer service has helped the company grow, and how he utilizes social media to offer help to anyone — even if they’re not a customer.

Now, let’s find out what works for Viktor Nagorynyy!
The Art of Getting Things Done for Developers
By: Ann Adaya
Tags: Web Development, Software Development, Software Engineering, Work, Programming

Don't sweat the small stuff

Cycling — is the new thing that I am trying to win over these past few months, not for a race, and definitely not for some pro.

Don’t get me wrong, I know this is not some developer stuff that you wanted to hear, but still here me out — because like I always said, becoming a self-taught developer isn’t just about learning how to program, most of the battles are win inside our minds.

Our ability to make good choices, our discipline and our perseverance are more important than choosing the perfect programming stack.

One of the things I’ve learned is that when you can control your mind — you will be able to do anything that you desire.

If you can control your mind, you will control your body, and eventually your environment too.

After beating myself into learning and working as a developer for almost 5 years — I know I needed a new challenge, I wanted to learn how to stop all the noises, from my legs into my body, I needed to silent them so I can focus on getting things done.

Getting things done — means you don’t stop when you’re tired, exhausted, and uninspired, you can rest, but you can’t quit, because the truth is, getting things done means you stop when you are done and not when you are tired.

Getting things done and beating procrastination is probably such a powerful combination in mastering our minds.

The more you win against all your excuses, the more you exercise that strength and being in control, the powerful you become.

After cycling every weekend outdoors since October, I decided to put into my bucket list the 100kms-ride before the 2020 ends, and last weekend, I finally did it, it was exhausting, but after a night's rest, I was in shock that my body can take on another round.

Here’s the crazy thing, days before we decided to take on the challenge I was so scared and I’ve been overthinking a lot, but after finishing the 100kms, all the things I was worried about didn’t even happen, not one — the truth is after hitting that goal, I’ve been craving for more.

The day will never be perfect, there will always be problems or noises, but it doesn’t matter because you will take it, solve it, fix it, and stand above it.

Programming, in a nutshell, is solving problems, and you should know it by now.

So stop sweating the small stuff and instead happily embrace all the challenges that are standing in your way, one after another, you will win it.
E-book : AngularJS Notes for Professionals Book
Tags: Books, Front End Development, eBooks, JavaScript, Angularjs

E-book : AngularJS Notes for Professionals Book

Download AngularJS’s E-book free by GoalKicker.com

Download Here : http://goalkicker.com/AngularJSBook/

The AngularJS Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow. Text content is released under Creative Commons BY-SA. See credits at the end of this book whom contributed to the various chapters. Images may be copyright of their respective owners unless otherwise specified

Book created for educational purposes and is not affiliated with AngularJS group(s), company(s) nor Stack Overflow. All trademarks belong to their respective company owners

200 pages, published on January 2018

Chapters
Meet The “Sinclair Broadcast Group” of Local Newspapers
By: Andrew Londre
Tags: Journalism, Politics, News, Ethics, Leadership

Meet The “Sinclair Broadcast Group” of Local Newspapers

Lee Enterprises is one of the largest owners of local newspapers in America. Their apparent indifference to the truth, ethics, and transparency, is terrifying.

Artwork by Author

Before I introduce you to Lee Enterprises: The Sinclair Broadcast Group of Local Newspapers, a little background on Sinclair…

Until July 2017, Sinclair Broadcast Group operated its media empire in relative obscurity.

Then, John Oliver used his platform as host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight to shine a bright light on the Sinclair media machine; the thesis of Oliver’s 19-minute segment on Sinclair (which has now been viewed over 19-million times on YouTube) was that behind the mask of being an innocent and impartial broadcaster of local news, the media giant — operating in the shadows and taking advantage of the public’s overwhelming trust in “local news”— is really a giant corporation operating a thinly veiled right-wing sleaze machine with little — if any — interest in and commitment to ethical, honest, fact-first reporting.

Put simply: local people thought they were getting local news they could trust, but they were getting the opposite.

What made Oliver’s comedic-expose of Sinclair so gripping, beyond the content Sinclair produced and pushed to local communities, was the immense scale of what Oliver was describing:

“We did some math, and we found out that when you combine the most-watched nightly newscasts on Sinclair and Tribune stations in some of their largest markets, you get an average total viewership of 2.2 million households. And that is a lot! It’s more than any current primetime show on Fox News!”

Indeed, an average nightly viewership of 2.2 million households is a lot!

However, “Local News” is delivered in many forms — not just television. Perhaps more influential in the local news ecosystem are “local” print publications —particularly, newspapers, which are often trusted by the average Joe and Jane even more than their local TV news stations.

Which brings us to the subject of this article, The Sinclair Broadcast Group of Local Newspapers… Lee Enterprises.
The Top 10 Python Libraries for Data Science
By: Olufunmilayo Aforijiku
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Python, Deep Learning, Data Visualization

The Top 10 Python Libraries for Data Science

Getting started in data science? Start here

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash.

Python has become the most widely used programming language today — especially in the world of data science because it is a high-performance language, easy to learn and debug, and has extensive library support. Each of these libraries has a particular focus. Some manage image and textual data, while others focus on data mining, neural networks, and data visualization. Python can be used for statistical analysis and building predictive models. When it comes to solving data science tasks and challenges, data enthusiasts, analysts, engineers, and scientists are leveraging the power of Python.

In this article, I will be talking about the top ten most useful Python libraries for data science and machine learning.

Some of the libraries have been installed if you are using the Anaconda distribution. All you have to do is import the library or install it with pip if it is not available on your machine.
Understanding the Analytic Development Lifecycle
By: Rose Day
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Software Development, Technology, Data Science

As discussed in one of my earlier articles, it is critical to understand the analytic development lifecycle. Your analytics will not last forever, and instead, become obsolete and need to be retired. As you collect more and newer data, you will need to continue maintaining your current analytics while creating new ones. It is essential to understand what you will need to do at each stage of the analytic lifecycle. As seen below, I view the analytic lifecycle as five critical components to development: R&D, Deployment, Testing & Validation, Maintenance, and Retirement. So let’s walk through each element together!

Analytic development lifecycle — image created by the author using LucidChart

Research and Development

Research and development encompass the first few steps in the analytic development lifecycle. After receiving your data, you will spend time looking it over, understanding its structure, and cleaning it. As you go about this process, you need to consider what analytic opportunities you see from the data, any business problems you are aware of, and how they overlap. As you work through developing your problem statement, you can begin to test out analytic concepts and develop your analytic.

This process varies if you are working with existing analytics. For current analytics, you will want to understand the areas that need improvement, methods you will utilize, and any subject matter expertise (SME) you have acquired to help you through these updates. Having followed up conversations with an SME will help you validate if your updates are going in the correct direction or not.

I find the research and development phase of the process to be the most interesting as it is where you can learn the most about your data. I work alongside other data scientists, data engineers, and subject matter experts daily. These individuals help in creating data sets and developing a data dictionary to understand what the data represents. I can then understand how to combine this data with other datasets to build my analyses. I want to make sure I see the larger picture and tell a compelling story before moving further down the process.
My Earth Story On ClimateTube —By @OlumideIDOWU
By: Iccdi Africa
Tags: Agriculture, Earth, Wash, Climate Change, Renewable Energy

📌What is the environmental/climate situation where you live?.

📌What are the climate/environmental impacts on your community?

📌Is there anything you have done to help your community build resilience to the environmental/climate crisis facing you?.

You can watch below:
How My Life Changed from Being Orthodox to Exotic
By: Ahsan Chaudhry
Tags: Life Lessons, Inspiration, Self Improvement, Life, Creativity

A family member of mine was visiting me once for the night. He was yawning, tired of the 5-hour drive, his eyes as heavy as a bag of potatoes with sleepiness. I suggested politely, “You can retire for the evening, you look tired, we can chat tomorrow”. “It’s only 11:00 pm” came the reply yawning.

So all this breaking away from the norms, the urge to look and do different created a culture. A way of life. That lifestyle is now followed by the majority I believe. The originality of this movement, Do whatever you want, is now lost, to say the least.

Lately, it only translates to just do opposite as much as possible to what everyone else is doing. Don’t account for your personal will only if it leans on the side of the old ways. Otherwise, it’s just fine.

How Tradition Became Exotic

Since custom has its place in our lives, the new custom was to be fashionably late for work, for meetups, and basically for everything. Be always occupied in activities not because you like them but because they are the talk of the town.

This has become the new normal. The old ways now stand unique. Since we are so enticed about breaking away from the society, we feel that being able to do the things right way (read: the old way how it was done originally before all that do whatever you want thing) exotic. It seems out of the ordinary.

This burning itch to look different has now again brought the spotlight on how to wake up early in the morning. How to live your life with discipline, how to be a gentleman. A plethora of articles are written on how to be organized, live a life of purpose. There is an entire movement with articles, apps and routines to help people wake up early in the morning.

So where do I fit in?

What was once a routine has now become a fashion. After more than two decades of my seemingly mundane, extremely boring, colourless, dull, and stock lifestyle has made me an icon of perfectionism. What adds to the personality is my ability to do it without much effort.

Still, people don’t appreciate me for what I do. They like it because it is extremely opposite to what people are normally doing. What was once a common practice, a stock, a custom has now become unique, out of the ordinary, highly customized, and against the new form tradition.

Going to bed at 10’o clock is exotic (seriously).

Being able to limit your life to a few things so you have free time seems like a fairy tale. Ironed clothes, being on time is like playing a character from a movie because who does that today? Nobody. That’s what makes it so exciting.

Rest in peace “Do whatever you want”.

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5 Things I Have Learned Using the M1 MacBook Air
By: Eric Yang
Tags: Programming, Apple, Software Development, Xcode, Macos

4. Install Homebrew

Homebrew is handy when managing packages in Macs. As a software developer, I use Homebrew to install Ruby, Python, Git, and lots of different software.

Installing Homebrew in Intel-based Macs is straightforward:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

But when running the command on the M1 chip MacBook Air, there is an error:



Rerun the Homebrew installer under Rosetta 2.

If you really know what you are doing and are prepared for a very broken

experience you can use another installation option for installing on ARM:

https://docs.brew.sh/Installation Homebrew is not (yet) supported on ARM processors!Rerun the Homebrew installer under Rosetta 2.If you really know what you are doing and are prepared for a very brokenexperience you can use another installation option for installing on ARM:

Error when installing Homebrew by Eric Yang

There are different ways to install Homebrew on ARM-based Macs.

Using the unstable, in-development ARM-based Homebrew

By following the installation documentation, we first make a separate folder to install Homebrew:

% cd /opt

% mkdir homebrew && curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C homebrew

% sudo chown -R $(whoami) /opt/homebrew

And add these paths to the environment:

% sudo nano /etc/path Add the two paths

/opt/homebrew/bin

/opt/homebrew/opt

Then restart the terminal and brew update .

Running with the prefix arch -x86_64 at ARM-based terminal

Use the following command to install Intel-based Homebrew:

And then use it by prefix with arch -x86_64 :

arch -x86-64 brew update

Running terminal from Rosetta 2

To run the terminal/iTerm from Rosetta 2, right-click on the app in Applications, then select Get Info and tick Open using Rosetta.

Then when launching the terminal/iTerm, it will automatically run in Rosetta 2 now. The command for Intel-based Macs works now!

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Create Text-To-Speech with Python and gTTS
Tags: Python, Coding, Text To Speech, Tutorial, Programming

The code

To be honest, the code is pretty straight-forward, as the gTTS library does all the heavy lifting, so I’m going to give you blocks of code and a brief explanation.

First, create a file and import two Python libraries and set our options:

Reading from a string

Now, we create the first of our functions that will read the text from text_to_read, with the language voice and a normal speed, as slow_audio_speed is false.

We create a gTTS object with the options we created at the start, we save it to the filename (that’s it, my_file.mp3). Now we are done, but we want to play the file we have just created. So, we use the os library to play the file with the name filename on the current folder.

Reading from the user’s input

Pretty much the same as before. With only one difference: Now we are asking the user to introduce some text to transform it into an audio file.

Reading from a file

This is the most complex function yet still pretty easy to understand. We ask the user to introduce the name of a file, we add the .txt extension, we open and read the text, and as always we create the mp3.

Running the script

We only need to declare which function we will use at the end of the code:

You can easily switch the function called.

Or don’t set any function and run the python interpreter, and keep asking for functions to run with “python –i NAME_FILE.py”
🚀 Reactor 2D on it’s way to Unity
By: Martin Gonzalez
Tags: Micro Frontends, Unity, Software Development, Software Architecture, Software Engineering

A new way to develop applications is coming to Unity

But first, what is an Application?

A program or piece of software designed to fulfil a particular purpose.

In Unity there is usually the concept of a single application, but for me an application can become a portion of the screen that contains logic and can work autonomously with just injecting the information it needs. But in order to achieve that we need a system that helps us. On Web there are systems such as React or Angular that work as a development platform, Unity does not provide anything similar for what I ventured to experience.

In my case I want to be able to have multiple applications that make up a context. Let’s see an example!

In the image above we can see how the User Home context is made up of a TabBarApp (Parent Application), UserFeedApp (Child Application) and StoryApp (UserFeedApp Children Applications). Each of these applications has a unique and particular task, so if we separate them each one should continue working in the same way.

The Reactor Trident

This framework was designed to be Unity’s React or Angular, from which developers can have a platform on which things become easier and accelerate the development of our products. As I said before, Reactor would handle the applications creation, navigation and communication . In this way Reactor2D offers a form of total decoupling between modules.

Reactor Applications

An application for Reactor2D is a module, for example ShopApp or UserFeedApp. The framework gives these applications independence and decoupling with other modules. Within a Reactor Application we will find everything you need to work: scripts, art, animations, etc.

To create an Application, just go to Windows-> Reactor 2D -> New Application .

This option will generate the following folder structure.
Albums of 2019: Without Fear // Dermot Kennedy
By: Sarah Turner
Tags: Review, Album, 2019, Dermot Kennedy, Music

Without Fear is the debut album by Irish singer-songwriter, Dermot Kennedy, which was released in October of this year. The album was met with notable success; success which is very much deserved.

The opening track ‘An Evening I Will Not Forget’ sets the mood for this raw and emotional musical journey. Dermot’s rich and soulful vocals do not need dressing up in any way, and in the beginning of the track he is accompanied simply by a grand piano, making it feel stripped back and exposed, while steadily building up to the powerful beat of the chorus and continuing to the end.

Dermot Kennedy manages to convey a fierce passion through his music. The meaningful lyrics scattered throughout each and every song make the listener feel as though they have stumbled upon something deeply personal, therefore making us feel all the more connected through the music.

‘Power Over Me’ and ‘Outnumbered’, are likely to be the most well-known tracks from the album, and these were released as singles prior to the album launch. ‘Power Over Me’ bursts through with irresistible energy, boasting those hard-hitting lyrics which are apparent in all of Dermot’s tracks. The tracks like ‘Outnumbered’ and ‘Lost’ share something which is raw and vulnerable.

Dermot’s strong and distinctive voice is both comforting and stirring at the same time, and the listener is able to get completely absorbed in the music. Dermot has a remarkable ability to tell a story through his lyrics, and as a result of this his honesty, passion and realism shine through.

Each track takes the listener on a personal and expressive journey and concludes with the album’s namesake.

Without Fear is 50 minutes of pure empowerment, and the success of the album is mirrored and reinforced by Dermot’s breathtaking live performances with faultless vocals.

Words by Sarah Turner
Learning Fast and Slow
By: Szymon Adamiak
Tags: Software Development, Education, Productivity, Learning To Code, Programming

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

Passive Learning

You’re learning to code for a few weeks or months. You know the programming basics, have maybe even built some apps.

You find yourself watching another course. It’s an intermediate level, but you seem to understand everything. Every step seems logical, and you know how to code it yourself. Life is good; you’ve made such big progress.

Okay, the hour passed, the course is finished. You haven’t done any coding, but why would you? You could do everything the teacher did; doing it yourself would be a waste of time.

Wrong. Passive watching or reading will not teach you anything. If you don’t make the mental effort, your brain is not making new connections and you’re not learning. You’re just fooling yourself into thinking you’re growing.

Also, looking at someone solving a problem isn’t similar to solving it yourself. You may think you know how to do it, but do you really? Only after you can solve a problem step-by-step, can you be sure you’ve mastered it.

What to do instead

Can you swim? How many books did you read about swimming? What about writing? Mathematics? We learn actively, not passively.

You should get to building your own projects as fast as possible.

But even if you’re a beginner and still need to watch or read many courses, you can get the most out of them. Change your passive learning into active learning. Listen intently and start making connections. Consider how the concepts in this lesson relate to the previous lesson. Pause to contemplate how you would explain the content to someone else.

Another way to activate your learning is not coding along with a teacher. Focus on what they are doing, and every five to 15 minutes, stop to recreate the code from memory. You’ll progress much faster.
On Being Drawn and Quartered
By: David S.
Tags: Poetry, Writing, History, Art, Life

On Being Drawn and Quartered

Song on the End of the World

drawn and quartered

limbs stretched out

joints creak and pop

horses walk four directions

toward four sugar cubes

indifferently

as bones are wrenched

the crowd more interested

in a lady passersby parasol

(Look at that, beautiful!)

than my demise

life is cheap

billions to spare

take mine, kind sir,

but kill me face up,

s’il vous plaît, executioner,

let me look deep into the blue sky

as I die.

give me robin’s egg blue mercy,

a last vision of beauty.

look, clouds!

look, up high, a bird glides!

oh god, mon dieu!

a vulture descends toward my eyes

talons out,

beak hungry.

no hands to defend.

no legs to run.

no broken-hearted

lover to chase the bird away.

today,

death is sport,

murder is industry,

no final mercy,

no bright side,

no water for the thirsty tongue

of the crucified.

the lady with the parasol whistles

a song from my youth,

prophetic tune, true

“if this ever changing world in which we live in

makes you give in and cry. . .live and let die.”

caucophonic strings crash,

vultures squawk in the chaotic symphony,

the last face I see, bald with black feathers.

the last song I hear, Paul McCartney’s tune.
7 Ways That React Native Is Better Than the Web
By: Iuliu Vișovan
Tags: JavaScript, React, React Native, Web, Programming

7 Ways That React Native Is Better Than the Web

React Native had 20 years to learn from the web. Here’s why it’s better

Photo by the author.

“It makes no sense to compare two technologies that are meant for two different things and whose initial designs are 20 years apart,” you might say. But since their end products look and feel so similar, you’d expect their ways of achieving them to be quite similar too, right?

Wrong. Having spent my last few years in the React Native world and occasionally coming back to the web, I can’t help but notice how much less sense the web makes.

One can only imagine how good the web could have been had it not been designed in mediocre fashion initially and then patched over and over throughout the years.

So, considering React Native’s 20 or so years of learning from the web’s (and others’) mistakes, let’s see what advantages it brings to the table.
Do You Need A Data Scientist?
By: Aoun Lutfi
Tags: Business, Insights, Big Data, Data Science, Data

Data Scientist is the new job of the decade. Everyone is talking about becoming one or hiring one, but the big question is do we need data scientists? To answer the question, we must first understand what a data scientist does. From what the name suggests, data scientists are scientists who work with data, they do everything from collecting and cleaning data to analyzing and modeling data. They often are knowledgeable in machine learning and thus can develop machine learning models to predict data.

So why would you need a data scientist? There are 3 major questions you can ask yourself:

Do I deal with data? Do I have big data? Do I need to make sense of data?

If you answered yes to all 3 questions then you probably should get a data scientist on board. The primary case for hiring a data scientist is the availability of large amounts of data, whether be it text, audio, video, or just numbers. Then with this data, a data scientist can help you extract trends and patterns, cluster and classify data into categories, and predict future data trends.

“Data are becoming the new raw material of business.” — Craig Mundie

Craig Mundie of Microsoft put it nicely, “Data are becoming the new raw materials of business.” This new paradigm opens up the door for new business opportunities; if done correctly, you can generate excellent stories out of data that can be offered as abusiness case. I would argue that the most important part of a data scientist’s job is actually making these stories; being able to explain the findings in a language clear and understandable by everyone and delivering value out of these findings is the key skill that distinguishes data scientists.

CRISP-DM Methodology

The main steps in any data science project is outlined in the CRISP-DM methodology, and this must be understood by everyone in the company, not just the data scientist. Essentially, CRISP-DM guides the whole process of a data science project from before data ingestion to deployment. The processes are as follow.

Understand the need for insights on data, and the business case which the project will support. Understand the data available, and update the business case accordingly. Prepare the data by removing redundancy, fixing missing data, and formatting the data. Model the data Evaluate the mode, and based on that complete the business case Finally, deploy the model to use on future data

80% of the time is spent on cleaning the data.

The process is a rather time-consuming one, particularly the data preparation, as it can take up to 80% of the project’s time. Nonetheless, the outcomes of data science projects are of tremendous value since you gain insights often unseen before. This is the new business weapon that can turn the tables on competitors.
3 Ways Data Analysis Can Make U Advance : EMV - Python + Tableau
By: Laxman Singh
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Visualization, Data Science, Python, Technology

3 Ways Data Analysis Can Make U Advance : EMV - Python + Tableau Laxman Singh Follow Dec 20 · 5 min read

Extract , Model and Visualize in Interactive Dashboard : Give Meaning to Raw Data

Data is huge around the globe and extracting the meaning from the data, visualizing that makes it appealing and easier to understand by others. Here, we will use famous Yelp Data set to do our analysis and visualization. Social networking data is growing at very rapid rate and it influences business growth in case it is utilized properly to extract meaning.

About Dataset

Yelp facilitates the platform where consumers post their user user experience about businesses, products or services through free-form text and numeric ratings of 1 to 5. A star rating of 1 to 3 means that it was not a good user experience while a rating of 4 or 5 means a good user experience.

Therefore, it is vital for businesses to focus on receiving high reviews from their customers. One important question for many businesses is whether there is a way to encourage higher ratings through targeted alterations to their offerings. Dataset contains business, review, user, check-in and tips.

Yelp dataset comprises of user reviews, business data, check-ins and tips which shorter reviews. This dataset is in Json format.

More detail about Dataset

Our Goal

To assess the public perception of restaurants on Yelp via exploratory data analysis To build a machine learning model which accurately predicts the sentiment of reviews

Let us do together in three steps : EDA, Machine Learning and Visualization

EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis)

We have following files: business

User : User data including the user’s friend mapping and all the metadata associated with the user.

Review : Contains full review text data including the user_id that wrote the review and the business_id the review is written for. Ratings are between 1–5.

Business : Contains business data including location data, attributes, and categories.

Tip : Tips written by a user on a business. Tips are shorter than reviews and tend to convey quick suggestions.

Checkin : Checkins on a business

Not considering the photos for this analysis.

B usiness and Review dataset are related with business_id field and can be joined to further analysis.

Data is spread across different reviews. Three different visualization to show more about data: 1. Review ratings 2. Review against industries 3. Geo spread of Reviews.

Data Spread as per ratings

Top Categories in Reviews
Announcing Winners — The November Writing Challenge
By: Kamna Kirti
Tags: Writing Challenge, Art, Publication, Promotion, Writing

The Collector — November Writing Challenge

Announcing Winners — The November Writing Challenge

Theme — Influence of Art on History and Culture

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

The November writing challenge yet again proved the incredible endeavors of our writers and making our publication better every day. The theme for this month’s challenge was the ‘Influence of Art on History and Culture’. The main objective was to portray an interesting fact or drama in art, interpreting the symbolic meaning of that art or if that art has left an indelible mark in history (feminism, culture, etc.)

The editors and the judge thoroughly enjoyed reading the detailed and well-researched articles from our brilliant writers. And such an amazing collection of stories not only made the competition cut-throat but gave a hard time to our judge picking the winners.

So first and foremost, you all accomplished far more than you realize.Look back and pat yourself on the back.

Winning or losing is just part of the process

The writing challenges are super fun and so winning and losing is just a part of the process. Embracing rejection and working towards the next writing goals is part and parcel of a writer’s life.

How Were the Winning Entries Selected?

To ensure complete impartiality, the shortlisted entries were anonymously sent to our challenge judge. The entries were judged on historical accuracy, references, grammar, and prose style along with the uniqueness of the topics.

Thank you note to our judge

We know we have mentioned this before, but still — we want to send a HUGE THANK YOU to our challenge judge Jhemmylrut Teng. Her swift response, skillful judgment, and brief notes to our participants will definitely help them to take their writing to the next level.

Thank you for sparing your time and efforts.

Now drumrolls for our Winner who is….
Please Steal This Ad
By: Sean Stogner
Tags: Digital Marketing, Facebook, Social Media Marketing, Freebooting, Advertising

Please Steal This Ad

How freebooting became a vital piece of “going viral”

First off, let’s define freebooting:

“The act of taking digital media and uploading it as your own without the content creator’s permission.”

At first glance (and in most instances) this is a problem. And it’s a big problem, especially on Facebook. You’ve probably watched freebooted content and not even realized it, from popular Facebook pages that don’t seem to make anything of their own, but instead share lots of other viral videos.

But while this system is detrimental to content creators,

it’s an untapped opportunity for advertisers.

Freebooting is essentially sharing on steroids. Facebook, and other social networks reward natively uploaded content. And certain Facebook pages command massive audiences, and the content that they share is distributed far beyond the reach any brand page could hope to attain.

As an example, Sandy Hook Promise recently released “Evan”. For that campaign, we simply wanted to get our message in front of as many people as possible. So, we turned to the idea of freebooting. How could we get other people to upload our video instead of trying to aggregate all of our views in one (brand-owned) place.

The results were clear. Relinquishing “ownership” of the literal mp4 file, and allowing others to upload the video was critical to it’s success.

On Facebook alone, non-brand channels drove 30x the number of views compared to the video that lived on our brand channel.

How can anyone plan for that?

You can. And you can’t.

We did take proactive steps to get the ball rolling. We reached out to Joe Hanson of It’s Okay to Be Smart, and got him to post the video natively. But Fox and Yahoo happened without our involvement. Since Joe’s video took off immediately, we think it sparked others to freeboot the video as well, as is often to case when videos take off on Facebook.

Another more nuanced aspect of freebooting is something called GIF-booting

GIF-booting consists of creating GIFs of the highlight moments from a video, and then uploading that, or creating an article with several GIFs. This raises another opportunity for content to be created to be “GIF-able”.

Overall, it’s important for brands to begin giving up control of their content, to let go of the aesthetics of the view count on their video, and instead shift their focus to the potential views that could occur beyond their channel. And as they shift that focus, to begin to take advantage of an ongoing media trend in freebooting.

If you enjoyed this brief rendezvous, why not recommend it? And check out other articles myself and my colleagues have written around the ever changing media landscape on our Communications Planning Blog.