fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Quarterly Oppressor: Good Slags Are Hard to Find
By: E.R. Ellsworth
Tags: Work, Satire, Corporate Culture, Humor, The Quarterly Oppressor

There are many people in this world who suffer from the delusion that they have value and deserve to be treated with respect. The worst of these types believe themselves to be “individuals.” If you make the mistake of employing these people, no amount of oppressive skill or trickery will keep them happy. Luckily there are warning signs you can look for to avoid hiring an “individual” or to get rid of them before their 90-day probationary period expires.

During the Interview:

A common mistake of the novice interviewer is to ask only questions related to the candidate’s professional life. These questions will help you determine the interviewee’s qualifications for the job, but qualifications mean nothing. What really matters is that you won’t have a hard time breaking their spirit.

The quickest way to pick out an “individual” during an interview is this question: “What do you like to do in your free time?” The way a candidate answers this question will tell you everything you need to know. An “individual” will invariably let slip a laundry list of creative hobbies. Unless those hobbies are “watching TV” you should be wary.

This question will also help you weed out anyone with children or other cumbersome family obligations. The last thing you want is one of those “working mothers” on your payroll. (More on this later.)

During the first 90 days:

Even with the most cunning interview strategy, it’s possible for a few of the undesirable “I deserve a living wage” types to slip through that first stage of the gauntlet. Fear not oppressive reader, for God has blessed us with the evaluation period. You have 90 days to determine if your new hire is good slag material, or if you should shovel them out the door like so much horse dung. This practice is just draconian enough to be fun, and common enough that no one will raise an eyebrow at its implement.

During this critical period you should pay close attention to the manner in which the new hire decorates their new surroundings. Keep an eye out for any signs of creative thought, such as drawings, doodles, or any other form of artwork. Photographs are sometimes OK as long as they are limited to the “this is me in front of a place of interest” variety or other simple snapshots.

Watch out for pictures of children. People with children invariably think they deserve special treatment. Children are expensive, so a parent will always feel like they need a raise to “support their family.” They’re also likely to show up late, leave early, or not come in at all, all because of one child-related “emergency” or another. You don’t want your productivity to suffer just because little Billy got his face caught in some piece of farm equipment.

If you are diligent, you should be able to catch on to any potential troublemakers before you waste too much money training them. Happy Hunting!
All About Gold Nugget Ghee
Tags: Health Foods, Food, Interview, Paleo

All About Gold Nugget Ghee

Interview with Founder Daniel Draskinis

This week we had the opportunity to interview Daniel Draskinis, Founder of Gold Nugget Ghee. Here’s what Daniel had to say about running his business, his secret recipe for ghee coffee, the ultra-marathon that transitioned him into eating paleo.
All Ye Noble Gases
By: Joe Váradi
Tags: Satire, Reader Engagement, Poetry, Chemistry, Social Media

neon

This one’s for you

The formless, the gaseous

The ephemeral and fleeting masses

The silent majority

argon

I sensed you there

Something moved the ether

Loved to have you visit, in spirit

Sad you left without a mark, barely a trace

krypton

No words?

What holds you back?

Is it the glut of opportunity?

Does the overabundance of options overwhelm?

xenon

Go on

Pick your poison

Highlight what electrified you

Respond to what made your particles collide

radon

Resist not

Give up an electron, or two

Throw me a spark, make me glow, show me some traction

Even noble gases — can have a reaction!
Welcome to My Woodland
By: Yael Wolfe
Tags: Nature, Spirituality, Relaxation, Outdoors, Stress Management

Welcome to My Woodland

Come see the place where I feel most at home

Copyright Yael Wolfe

It’s almost midwinter. The season is heading into the darkest, quietest time of the year.

Internally, I find myself retreating, too. I find myself drawing inward, pulling into the place where I feel safest: my woodland.

This place lives both inside me and around me.

It is an imagined sanctuary for my soul, with endless twisting pathways, friendly furry companions, and dark nooks hidden behind the bracken where I can warm myself by a crackling fire.

It is also a place I know in the physical world, a place I sometimes think is more real to me than any other. It is the deer paths I’ve been walking for the past 27 years. The junipers under which I’ve taken shelter. The place where I’ve watched coyotes hunting in the fields, owls preparing for their nightly adventures, porcupines climbing trees to find the perfect place for a shady summer afternoon nap. The place where I found Arthur and documented the artful process of his death.

This woodland — this real, tangible place — is one of my favorite places in the whole world. A place where I return to again and again when I feel lost or simply when I long to be with the friends who I suspect understand me more than anyone else.

Would you like to see this place? Would you like to meet these friends?

Come along with me and I’ll happily show you.

© Yael Wolfe 2020
Elemental Desires
By: Ena Dahl
Tags: Elemental, Alchemy, Sex, Sacred, Poetry

Fire, walk with me;

Swallow me whole and incinerate me

Scoop up my smoldering ashes and breathe —

Air, dance with me;

With your lips, your tongue, you entangle me

I cling to your sweaty skin and weep —

Water, drink with me;

Flood my rivers. My gushing wells

confluence with your sediments, to find shore —

Earth, lay with me;

Assemble gently my burning bones

Hold me like a broken bird in your hands —
Paper Synopsis: Unstructured Document Recognition on Business Invoice
By: Sarthak Dargan
Tags: Review, Invoice Processing, Research, Machine Learning

A Bag-of-Word approach taking account of textual and layout information for business invoice recognition.

Candidate Types -

0. ( Negative Class )

Invoice Number, Invoice Date Total Amount PO # Payment Terms Due Date Tax

Work Flow:

The approach takes scanned business invoices images generated from an internal testing library of Oracle Corporation as the input. Some of them are PDF files with hidden text and maximum are of TIFF format that requires preprocessing before feeding to PDF layout analysis tool.

After initial preprocessing files are passed to OCR and then to a layout analysis tool. Coordinates of tokenized textual groups are retrieved from the layout analysis tool.

Word stemming, Stopwords removal and Type identification(DATE, MONEY, NUMBER, TELE, and EMAIL based on Regular Expression) are performed over tokenized textual groups obtained.

For each token, feature selection is applied -

Feature Importance

Feature List -

Horizontally aligned tokens Vertically aligned tokens Nearby Tokens(Distance Threshold) Vertical Position Type

Results:

Results

Models namely (Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression and SVM) are considered. be seen from Fig. 7(a) & (b) that for almost all

Naive Bayes has worse performance than Logistic Regression and SVM in terms of both precision and recall.

Logistic Regression and SVM have similar precision in all fields of interest but PO #, Due Date, and Tax, with SVM performing slightly better.

This suggests that SVM is better than Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes at extracting the most useful features among all when making a prediction.

Speculations:

Pros- Paper talks about template independent approach. Template-dependent approaches might work well for a particular pre-defined template, but it often fails in real life scenario.

The approach in spite of taking only textual information, it also takes layout information as well.

Cons- Paper does not talk much about feature engineering. There is a space for feature engineering.

It takes some limited style of automated generated invoice images as training and test data. Not sure about the results on an actual real-life camera captured image.

Could have explored other models architecture like bagging and boosting models for comparison.

Possible Next Steps -
Deploying attacks towards machine learning-based SMS detectors
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick

Renaming that pesky little number and relearning how to use it

By Cassie Kozyrkov — 5 min read
Nuns Doing Too Much Good, Not Hating Enough
By: Mike Dang
Tags: Abortion, Nuns, Gay Marriage

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

“Hey nuns! Stop helping poor people so much, and start dedicating more time to hot button issues that won’t actually accomplish anything except remind everyone that the Catholic Church is against things! Who do you think you are, a bunch of Mother Theresas!?” — The Vatican (Photo: keepwadling/Flickr)
The Environmental Challenges in the Oil & Gas Industry & It’s Future in a Cleaner Energy Mix — By Amah Onyedikachi
By: Iccdi Africa
Tags: Energy, Agriculture, Oil And Gas, Climate Change, Women

A leading youth voice on Climate Change which seeks to build a climate-smart generation across Africa while identifying key development issues affecting population across Africa especially in Nigeria through creative dialogues and innovations.

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Ta dose crypto du mercredi 7 mars — Controverse autour de la centralisation de NEO
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Neo

US Government to Sell Over 2,000 Seized Bitcoin at Auction

2,170 bitcoins, worth more than $24 million, are up for auction as the U.S. Marshals Service plans on selling off…
Scrum – are you Serious?
By: Willem-Jan Ageling
Tags: Agile, Serious Scrum, Areyouserious, Scrum

You do Scrum, but…

Scrum – are you Serious?

A series to address the malpractices of Scrum

We, Sjoerd Nijland and Willem-Jan Ageling, recently started Serious Scrum here on Medium. Our aim is to tackle serious issues with Scrum, like anti-patterns, myths, misconceptions, outdated notions and ignorant management. We wish to show the potential of Scrum.

Most of our articles are part of a series. We are running two series up to now:

A Kick in the ScrumBut

Helping teams who don’t take full advantage of the Scrum Guide.

Helping teams who don’t take full advantage of the Scrum Guide. Road to PSM III

Deep-diving into the wonderful world of Scrum.

We are now starting a third one:

Are you serious?

The purpose of the series is to address misinterpretations of Scrum. It is aiming to help people that mean well with Scrum, but struggle to get the hang of it.

There are many items that we aim to address under this title. We have already created two stories:

More will follow. We have a lot of inspiration to make this a great series.
Resources for White People to Learn and Talk About Race and Racism
By: Nicola Carpenter
Tags: Anti Racism, Fa People, Big Idea, Advocacy, Resources

As the White Caucus Liaison at Fractured Atlas, I’m often asked about resources that the Fractured Atlas White Caucus reads and discusses. Many of these resources were gathered by Tiffany Wilhelm, the White Caucus Guest Facilitator from July through December 2017, and others were picked up from a variety of other places. This is not meant to be a complete list, but rather a jumping-off point for white people to teach themselves about Race and Racism, and to get a sense for the kinds of things the Fractured Atlas White Caucus has been reading/watching/listening.

About Caucusing

Facilitation Resources

Things to Read

These are some of the readings that the Fractured Atlas White Caucus has read.

Things to Listen

Sometimes it’s nice to mix up the media type.

Seeing White Series from Scene On Radio, a 14-part documentary series exploring whiteness in America.

Uncivil, a podcast from Gimlet Media that presents a history of the Civil War not often found in school textbooks.

Identity Politics, a podcast on race, gender, and Muslims in America.

Code Switch, a podcast that presents contemporary news viewed through the lens of race and identity.)

Things to Watch

Slavery By Another Name, PBS Documentary

13th, Directed by Ava DuVernay
It’s lonely up here
By: Lola Sense
Tags: Musings, Poetry On Medium, Poem, Poetry, Loneliness

POETRY

It’s lonely up here

On the cloud I sculpted for myself.

It’s the loneliness of the last tree standing

In a field of hay.

It’s the loneliness of taking a pregnancy test,

Of being alone with your thoughts,

The loneliness of an only child

Whose parents are only children,

The loneliness of a thousand workers

In a sweatshop making a hundred thousand

T-shirts a day.

Nothing seems to fill the emptiness —

It’s like a tank without a bottom

Where you keep pouring

Empty clicks and scrolls,

Texts that we can’t quite craft well,

Don’t quite reach others,

And render us unseen, unwanted, and forgotten.

We patch our wounds with shows and booze

And hope tomorrow’s better,

And wonder how the others cope.

What do they do, the clever?

Lola Sense
2FA/MFA: Risks & Usability
By: Andrew Sanford
Tags: Security, MFA, Sms, Yubico, Technology

Why SMS-based MFA is Still A Good Option for Most People

A lot of attention has been focused on the problems with receiving MFA* codes via text messages (SMS). In short, these codes can be intercepted, enabling hackers to get into your account. Because of this, many in the security industry are recommending that people stop receiving these codes via SMS and use authenticator apps or physical keys (e.g., YubiKey).

While abandoning SMS is the more technically secure option, it’s not usually a user-friendly option for the majority of people. When looking at the risks and usability factors involved, SMS-based MFA remains a good option for most people to use. From the perspective of a typical person, here’s why:

Remember, this is from the perspective of a typical (non-technical) person

YubiKey — FIPS, a Yubico product

While receiving MFA codes via SMS does have more vulnerabilities that a hacker can exploit than other MFA options, it is the most usable & budget-friendly way to use MFA. Combined with a good password/passphrase, it adds a layer of security that makes ‘hacking’ into someone’s account far more time-consuming and difficult than in the past.

Moving on from personal situations to organization. If you’re looking at MFA options for your organization, it’s a good idea to not use SMS. The risk of your employees being targeted in their work lives is far greater than in personal, non-work situations. This is because employees are often targets of phishing attacks, and authenticator apps or security keys will do a much better job mitigating at those types of targeted attacks than SMS (security keys are actually the best at preventing phishing.

For example, in 2017 Google required all of its 85,000 employees use security keys (and get rid of SMS- & authenticator-based codes). Since then, Google has had zero (0) successful phishing attacks. That’s a pretty good, cost-saving investment (e.g., spend $2,500 — 5,000 on security keys vs. the costs of getting phished)

Google Authenticator App (Android)

A couple of things to remember:

In order to hack into an MFA-enabled account, a user has to obtain/guess the password and MFA code Getting an MFA code usually requires a targeted attack (as opposed to mass-guessing passwords) If you’re at risk of being targeted (e.g., journalist or public figure), SMS-based MFA is not a good option for you.

*MFA (or 2FA): To those who aren’t familiar with these terms, they stand for 2-Factor Authentication & Multi-Factor Authentication. This means that when you try to log in, you have to enter your password plus another code. This code usually comes through an authenticator app (e.g., Google Authenticator or Duo), text message (SMS) or external key (e.g., YubiKey).

[Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any products/companies mentioned in this post. This post should not be considered as legal nor consultative advice. These are my opinions only.]
Beyond Weisfeiler-Lehman: using substructures for provably expressive graph neural networks
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick

By Michael Bronstein — 8 min read

In this post, I discuss how to design local and computationally efficient provably powerful graph neural networks that are not based on the Weisfeiler-Lehman tests hierarchy. This is the second in the series of posts on the expressivity of graph neural networks. See Part 1 describing the relation between graph neural networks and the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. In Part 3, I will argue why we should abandon the graph isomorphism problem altogether.
§34 A Time-Hack for the Political Junkie? *UK Version
Tags: Question Time, UK Politics, Peter Hitchens, Political Junkie, BBC

Like many political junkies living in the UK, I tune in every week without fail to watch BBC’s Question Time. Like all addicts, I know the stuff isn’t good for me. It leaves me each week part-satisfied, but also knowing I’ll need to tune in next week for more of the same.

The “questions” (put by the members of the audience), that the show claims to make “time” for, are as inane as the “answers” (provided by a panel of five, consisting of representatives of various political parties, commentators, businesspersons, musicians, comedians etc.). As Peter Hitchens (a regular panel-member) described it recently, it is the most politically vacuous and unthinking of shows that there is. Occasionally, a Hitchens or a David Starkey will drop a one-liner and defeat a political adversary, but even these are banal and par for the course (after all, as a public service organisation, the BBC’s core mission is to “inform, educate and entertain”). What’s more, if it is ‘put-downs’ that you are after, YouTube is saturated with ‘schoolings’, ‘fails’, ‘triggers’ etc. For the most part, Question Time has become (and has been for as long as I have known it) a platform for making predictable party-political points, verbal signals of personal virtue, and appeals to the demographical leniences of the programme’s host town.

Due to recent travel commitments, I have sadly missed my beloved fix two weeks on the trot. However, rather than “catch-up” through my ‘series link’ or the BBC’s iPlayer, I have instead indulged in the following:

In just three minutes, you get everything you may have missed and more. Not only that, the comedic reductionism that Enfield and Whitehouse master here is enough to wean even the most ardent political junkie off the real thing. The only question left, is whether Enfield does a better job than Glaswegian comic Limmy, whose own rendition of the programme is even shorter and perhaps reveals more about political junkies like me than those we feed off.

/Pete Watt
In-game Chart Highlights ⚽: France vs Croatia on the World Cup 2018.
Tags: ICO, Fifa2018, Betting, Betonchart, Soccer

See our chart in action 📈 in the main match of World Cup 2018! France vs Croatia — the highest scoring final in regular time since 1958.

We are the first to use the latest football innovations 🏃 to make in-play football betting not just possible, but precise and more involving than ever! Get a real profit, just because you know which team is better right now.

🚩 Change the sports betting with us now on: betonchart.com
Hot Takes
Tags: Humor, Resistance, Poetry, Resistance Poetry, Social Media

Hot takes

Hot cakes

This is what the mothers’ say:

You have to throw the first away.

Maybe a few more than one.

They’re overcooked or underdone.

Best to feed them to the dogs.

That’s how I feel about most blogs.
Egyptian man sentenced for sexual harassment
By: Afeef Nessouli
Tags: Egypt, Law, Culture, Politics, IRAP

This sounds like it shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. Let’s be honest..this shows that Egyptian courts are starting to realize that sexual harassment should be punished. When I worked for IRAP in law school, we did a lot of resettlement cases from Egypt that dealt with serious sexual harassment. One woman had literally been raped on the streets of Cairo, and no one gave a shit. Luckily, she was resettled. Now, an Egyptian court sentenced a man to 1 year in prison and fined him of 1400 dollars (EGP 10,000) for verbal sexual harassment. The man was in his twenties and allegedly verbally harassed a woman at the Dokki Metro station. The woman reported it to the local police and the report was filed with charges being laid. This is good news and reflects an improvement in the legal environment of Egypt. A Cairo court found the man guilty for attacking the modesty of the woman. Read more about the new sexual harassment law at Egyptian Streets.
Signals : marketplaces et stratégies automatiques afin d’améliorer le trading
Tags: ICO, Trading, Signals, Cryptocurrency, Crypto

L’objectif de Signals est simple :

‘“Our mission is to empower crypto traders with state of the art algorithms from the data science community, which will allow them to optimize their profits. The Signals Platform provides these tools in a user-friendly way.”
Now or never!
By: Alex Tishkov
Tags: ICO, Blockchain, Altcoins

in In Fitness And In Health
Writing a Data Science Blog
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

By Jarus Singh — 11 min read

Let’s begin with a common situation. Somebody with at least an ounce of authority, whether it be a plucky MBA marketing intern or the CEO, is faced with a difficult problem. They schedule a project kickoff meeting with various folks to brainstorm a solution, and know that it will need to be supported by data if it has any chance of being approved by their superiors.
Analyzing the Presidential Debate 2020 with text mining techniques
By: Feng Lim
Tags: Data Science, Data Analysis, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Politics

Thanks to the internet, now the world knew about the Presidential Debate 2020 that went out of control. All of the major news stations were reporting about how the participants were interrupting and sniping at one another.

I decided to put together an article that focuses on analyzing the words used in the event and see if there are any hidden insights.

This article focuses on finding out the most used words, categorized by each spokesperson, and sentiment analysis of the speeches.

Image by Author: The most used word in the first Presidential Debate 2020 — ‘People’

The first 2020 Presidential Debate overview

Between:

- Incumbent President Donald Trump

- Former Vice President Joe Biden (Democratic nominee)

Moderator:

- Chris Wallace

Topics covered:

The candidates’ political records The Supreme Court The coronavirus The economy Race and violence in cities The integrity of the election

Cleaning the dataset

In total, close to 20,000 words were used in the event. After removing names and common stop words, around 6000 words were left for analysis.

#tokenize

text_df <- text %>%

unnest_tokens(word, Text) #Remove stop words

my_stop_words <- tibble(

word = c("chris","wallace","trump","donald","joe","biden","vice","president")) #Prepare stop words tibble

all_stop_words <- stop_words %>%

bind_rows(my_stop_words) textClean_df <- text_df %>%

anti_join(all_stop_words, by = "word")

Image by Author: Total words from the Presidential Debate 2020 used in the analysis

The first Presidential Debate in short

The word correlation network graph illustrates how words are used either in the same sentence or next to each other in the debate. I grouped some of the words into networks that may be relevant to the topics covered in the debate:

The U.S. economy topic includes words such as ‘affordable’, ‘job’, ‘act’, etc.

The supreme court topic includes words such as ‘justice’, ‘reason’, ‘judge’, etc.

The race and violence cities topic includes words such as ‘peaceful’ and ‘protest’

The election topic includes words such as ‘ballots’, ‘management’, ‘mail’, etc.

Image by Author: Coocurrences of words

Classifying the debate with its corresponding part-of-speech

We can also tag each participants’ words with a part-of-speech category (noun, proper noun, adjective, adverb, etc.). This section will look specifically at the most occurring proper nouns, nouns, and adjectives used by Trump and Biden.

‘China’ is the most used proper noun by Trump

‘People’ is used by Trump and Biden for more than 60 times each in the debate

Interestingly, the most-used adjective by Trump is ‘wrong’ and ‘true’ by Joe Biden
If He Lived…
By: Victoria Ponte
Tags: Relationships, Love, Alcoholism, Death

Veit Hammer for Unsplash

If He Lived…

Writing My Own Ending to Our Love Story

My dream ending to the love story probably would have been more like a nightmare. His death was the final nail in the coffin that was our love. As sad as the ending was, it was likely what I needed to get him out of my head for good.

It was a year after I saw him last when he called me from the hospital to tell me he had end-stage cirrhosis. He sounded accusatory, as if his condition was somehow my fault.

He felt he had no other choice but to move in with his alcoholic brother following the loss of his job. He wanted to move into my house, but between his drinking problem, sharing two homes with my my ex husband, and my two grown sons still at home this was not a workable option.

He couldn’t understand why our love wouldn’t make it work. It was a passionate late middle age affair. I couldn’t imagine bringing an alcoholic with his life’s possessions into my home to live with me and my sons.

So I flatly refused to let him move in even if he had been sober for two months after he got fired from his 30 year career job.

My question to him as he was packing up to go live with his brother was whether his brother was going to get sober or was he going to relapse after he moved in with him?

I knew the answer. After carrying on with him for a year and a half, I’d concluded he was a hopeless case. His stint at a world class hospital to detox followed by a few weeks in a rehab program did nothing to convince me otherwise.

Being madly in love with him didn’t blind me to the reality of the situation.

I could see he was white-knuckling his way through sobriety. Of course it wasn’t sustainable. He had been drinking steadily since he was twelve years old.

I saw the relapse first hand when I went to visit him in the midwest. He made a feeble attempt to keep his drinking hidden behind my back.

I clearly laid things out for him at this point that my presence in his life was conditional on his sobriety. I knew he was finished. Being in love couldn’t save him from his addiction.

I was sad to know his life was over when I flew home. We kept in touch briefly until I could no longer cope with his erratic behavior.

I told him we were finished and cancelled our upcoming travel plans. It was heart breaking for us both.

There was a faint glimmer of hope that he could at least save his own life. I knew I would eventually meet someone else and carry on a healthier relationship.

His brother called with the news of his death days before Thanksgiving in 2017.

I acutely felt the tragedy of his too-short life ending so soon. My heart was broken again.
VendiCoins Joins ICOBox As Newest Client For Token Sale Launch.
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, ICO, Advertising, Cryptocurrency

BELIZE DISTRICT, BELIZE, C.A. — Vendio, the newest crypto video advertising platform powered by tokens, intended to offer one of the best advertising solutions in the market, has announced that it was chosen by ICOS token holders to be provided with services offered by ICOBox, the largest ‘new generation’ blockchain growth promoter and business facilitator, to aide in launching Vendio’s full scale token sale in the coming months.

Vendio is proud to have ICOBox as its premiere service provider for the Vendio token sale. With over $300,000,000 USD collected for token sale projects, ICOBox is the world’s leading token sale service provider, backing some of the world’s largest projects to date, including Crypterium (CRPT), coined ‘The JP Morgan of Cryptobanks’, which collected a staggering $51,000,000 during its token sale and the world’s first decentralized live streaming platform, Play 2 Live, which gained $30,000,000 during its token sale with ICOBox.

Vendio is ICOBox’s newest client. Through this agreement, ICOBox will be providing technology services along with, legal, business and marketing consulting. Early purchasers will soon be able to swap their early VendiCoins tokens for Vendio’s token sale tokens at a bonus value. Details on this token swap will soon be released.

In a statement in response to Vendio’s recent progress, CEO and Founder, Ricky Diaz said,

“With Vendio’s recent [International Crypto Integration Feasibility] study and initial private sale concluding with incredible success and positive feedback, we’ve decided to move forward and offer our platform’s tokens to the crypto community via a full fledge token sale. With the backing and support of over 75,000 new platform subscribers and the crypto industry titans over at ICOBox, I’m extremely confident that this token sale will bring about many opportunities to our users being rewarded with platform services.”

VendiCoins.com prototype demo

In preparation of the token sale, Vendio has utilized Atomic.io to release a prototype demo of it’s Video Interactive Platform (VIP), which can be seen at: https://app.atomic.io/d/YEotkFpnGG6t. Atomic.io is used by other app-driven giants like Uber and Trivago.
“Beauty, my son, is in the eye of beholder,” she said, “where you’ll also find eye gunk.”
By: Tien Skye
Tags: One Lined Poem, Poetry, Humor, Beauty

has a bad habit of referring to himself in third person point of view...and he just did it again...

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3 Reasons Why Disney Should Invest in a Dying Industry
By: Murto Hilali
Tags: Technology, Movies, Business, Virtual Reality, Economics

BYTE/SIZE

3 Reasons Why Disney Should Invest in a Dying Industry

Disney Movie Theatres™ mean: vertical integration + customer segmentation + VR = 🤑🤑

Created by Murto Hilali

In the 6th grade, I was a teacher’s pet, and it was a position I worked hard for. One winter, I was climbing up a snow hill to go sledding when my classmate David pushed me down — I barreled back to where I started.

David and I during our legendary conflict, circa. 2014

He did this every time he passed me going up the hill. When I finally got to the top, David didn’t see me. I grabbed his sled and kicked him (on the butt) all the way down to the bottom of the hill.

I laughed maniacally. Why did I feel like I could get away with this? Because I worked hard to be a teacher’s pet and I deserved SPECIAL TREATMENT, DAMMIT.
Mission 54: The Silent Station
By: Alexander Bird
Tags: Fiction, Flash Fiction, SciFi, Science Fiction, Short Fiction

Mission 54: The Silent Station

What Happened in Europa Station 202?

Image public domain, courtesy of digitalcomicmuseum.com

Anyone can have a spaceship in 2402. Colonization of the solar system is of primary importance, but space stations have only been constructed from Venus to Saturn. Initially, they were strictly for communication. Eventually they became emergency stations, storing essential goods and supplies. Now, they are equipped with food courts and fully automated services.

Most of these stations are located between Saturn and Jupiter. That part of the system is replete with resources. Plenty of water on Europa; it’s practically made of it.

Not so far from Europa, numerous calls for help emerged from a single station. Alan Clark, a 24-year-old space cadet, was nearby and arrived at the station in less than twenty minutes.

After entering through the airlock, Alan removed his helmet and instructed his AI, Nala, to start a mission log. “Nala, do you hear me?”

“Yes, cadet,” the intelligent machine answered.

Alan stepped into an enormous food court. Completely deserted, various belongings littered the area in seemingly careless abandon.

“Let’s try to order something,” Alan whispered. He walked to a self-service computer and selected a strawberry milkshake. The milkshake was delivered by a small, wheeled robot. Alan sniffed it before tasting it. It was delicious.

Then he saw a small girl, maybe ten years old — all alone — calmly eating french fries. He stepped toward her. “Hey, is everything okay here?” he asked.

“So far…,” the girl replied.

“Why there is no one here?”

“There were too many people talking. That small robot, the one with wheels, came to me and asked if I wanted something. I had already ordered fries and soda, so I said, ‘just a little bit of silence.’ The robot said, ‘for how long?’ and I said, ‘for about… 10 minutes I guess.’ Then the robot called everyone’s attention with a loud sound. Everyone covered their ears. Then it shouted, ‘Leave the station immediately, or you will die.’ A kid dropped his milkshake, a woman screamed, and everyone ran away.”

Alan stared at the little girl, puzzled.

The girl met his gaze. “That’s how I got my few minutes of silence.”
You May Fade
By: Jessica Lovejoy
Tags: Relationships, Love, Love Poems, Poetry On Medium, Poetry

You May Fade

A poem.

Photo by Matteo Catanese on Unsplash

on this rainy day

how do I explain

the angst that comes

from wanting nothing more

than to speak your name

and feel you turn

this way

or hear your voice

call out the same

down an empty dark hallway

wishing I could hear you

just one more time

I swear no more than that,

yet we know that’s a lie

for another of this

and just one more kiss

is enough for right now

but it runs out quick

as if

a tiny water droplet

trickled down my back

landing softly on the floor

into a bottomless pool

leaving puddles of

“what-ifs” and “just one more”

for when you hold me tight

where I can barely breathe

the only thing

that escapes from me

is a voice

I barely recognize as my own

one that says — don’t let me go

as if my heart speaks for the rest of me

but, I’ve come to realize

like the condensation

from your breath

on the window where you sat

you may fade

when you’re no longer warm

you may walk away

but you’ll never let me go

for I am yours, and you are mine

the rest is just white noise

© Jessica Lovejoy 2020. All Rights Reserved.
Hope is Buried Deep
By: Jonathan Greene
Tags: Life Lessons, Haiku, Mindset, Poetry, Hope

Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.

Follow
“Singing in The Reins”
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Humor, Dads, Comics, Holidays, Christmas

Written by

Daily comic by Lisa Burdige and John Hazard about balancing life, love and kids in the gig economy.
Exploring Real-Time Use Cases of Jetpack Navigation Component
By: Siva Ganesh Kantamani
Tags: Programming, Jetpack, Software Development, Android, Mobile

Deep Links

We are moving on to the second concept of this article: deep links. Instead of getting all geeky, let’s start from basics.

What’s a deep link?

Deep links are similar to the links or URLs we use daily. Each link or URL is used to navigate a user to a specific destination. For example, let’s have a look at the following URL:

https://www.examplemovies.com/avengers?part=3

Usually, on the web, this URL will load avengers part3 movie details. It’s the same in mobile applications too. In Android, we use the concept of intent filters to link a particular screen with a specific link. To learn the basics of deep links, head over to this article.

Now that we know what deep links are, let’s explore how to use them with the Jetpack navigation component. We’ll take the same example: MovieDetailsDialog . Here, we’ll create a deep link to trigger a movie detail dialog along with regular navigation actions.

We can create a deep link to a destination by using a navigation editor. Switch to the Design tab and click on the Attributes panel on the right side of the studio. You’ll then see the Deep Links option with the plus symbol to create a deep link to the destination you’ve selected:

Here, we’re creating an explicit deep link that uses a PendingIntent to take users to a specific location within your app. In this case, it’s a movie detail dialog.

You might create an explicit deep link as part of a notification or an app shortcut. Once we’ve created a deep link, the dialog destination in the graph will look like this:

To navigate to the movie detail dialog within the application, we can use navigation actions, but deep links come in handy when you need to navigate from a shortcut, notification, or some sort of external resource.
Verasity Integrates with IVideoSmart, a Large Asian Video Platform
Tags: Blockchain, Ivideosmart, Video, Cryptocurrency, Crypto

Verasity Integrates with IVideoSmart, a Large Asian Video Platform Verasity Follow Mar 10 · 3 min read

In January 2020, Verasity announced its partnership with iVideosmart (IVS), a leading B2B online video platform in South East Asia who serve over 120 million users across over 1.1 billion pages each month. IVS provides a complete online video player and monetization platform to major publishers across SouthEast Asia, including the likes of Kompas, Brillio and GMA.

Since then, and in only two months, Verasity integrated its ad stack technology into the iVideoSmart platform, with the Beta shown here and here.

Ads will now serve via the Verasity ad stack. For now, ads on IVS are for the Asian market only (no ads shown outside of Asia). Revenue derived from the ad stack will be utilized to buy back VRA & VRAB randomly on exchanges.

“We are excited to partner with Verasity for their video rewards solution and customized ad stack. Having the ability to add Verasity’s rewarding tech to our video player forms part of our strategy to focus on the fast growing e-sports publishing sector, and the tech will also be available to existing publishers who want to incentivize completed video views through their rewards platform” says IVS CEO Milan Reinartz. “We have been impressed by the level of support from the Verasity team on implementing their ad tech solution into our existing ad stack.”

Existing publishers in Verasity’s network, requiring a full-stack video player with integrated Verasity rewards, will also be able to benefit from utilizing the IVS player technology.
5 Thought-Provoking Quotes That Will Make Understanding Love Easier
By: Margaret Pan
Tags: Love, Relationships, Self, Dating, Quotes

Oh, the fascinating concept of love. I’m always wondering whether I will ever find a single person on this planet who can claim they understand love completely.

There’s a famous quote by Paulo Coelho that goes,

“The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.”

I don’t know if I’m a fool for trying to understand love, or if I will ever succeed in understanding its essence completely, but I want to get as closer to it as possible.

What always fascinated me is that there’s always something new to learn about love. We think we know everything we need about love until someone comes and changes our perception of it completely.

Whether you are with someone or on your own, reading the following quotes about love and relationships can really help you view love in a different way, gain some more wisdom about it and reaffirm your ideas about being in love.
Correlation <> Causation
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

By Cassie Kozyrkov — 5 min read

Experiments allow you to talk about cause and effect. Without them, all you have is correlation. What is correlation?

IT’S NOT CAUSATION. (!!!!!)
The Explorers
By: Dylan Higgins
Tags: Faith, Space Exploration, Christianity, Bible, Learning

I’ve heard it said (as you probably have too) that space is the final frontier. But is it really?

With the recent discovery of gravitational waves in deep space and last year’s pass by of Pluto in our own cosmic neighborhood, exploration is, once again, in the forefront of our minds. From the dawn of mankind, we have longed to seek out and discover new ideas and territories. Our checklist is relatively impressive: the seven seas, the deepest caves, the tallest mountains, the furthest edges of our own Solar System. You get the picture: Man has a thirst to know — to explore -”to boldly go where no one has gone before.” It is one of our endearing characteristics, no doubt drafted into our blueprint by the great Architect, Himself.

God has designed us to explore. But why?

Perhaps the answer is simple. Maybe the Creator has placed exploration at the core of our beings with the primary intent of finding Him. Certainly, He wants us to seek out His will and to discover, as the Apostle Paul said, “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge…” Paul didn’t stop there, though. He also said that the purpose of knowing this inconceivable love is so, “that [we] may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14–21)

When I was a child I thought that one day, when I got to Heaven, I would know everything. I had this notion that, upon entering those Pearly Gates, I would be, somehow, omniscient. All the mysteries of the cosmos made known in a split second! As great as this may seem, I no longer think I was right. Now I realize that the only one who knows it all is God. No, it seems more reasonable to think that we will eternally be exploring the characteristics of God, all the while discovering something new about Him that we didn’t know before. I think this is the primary reason we have been wired to explore.

When writing about what Heaven might be like in his final installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis spoke of a grand and endless Kingdom. As some of the characters enter this Land they travel at the speed of thought, flying across expansive plains, oceans and mountain ranges, alike, always headed ever inward. They are met with a profound understanding — that this Kingdom is, in fact, endless and that they will always be traveling “Further up and further in,” thus showing that there will always, always, always be more of God to discover! This is, perhaps, the crux of why we were created — to know God and then continually discover our Maker as we praise Him forevermore!
Morpheus Labs and TomoChain partner to bring Blockchain Agnosticism to the forefront
By: Morpheus Labs Team
Tags: Blockchain, Blockchain Technology, Blockchain Agnostic, Bpaas, Smart Contract

Morpheus Labs X TomoChain

Days ago, we welcomed CPChain as the newest addition to the Morpheus Labs family. Today, we’re excited to announce that another Blockchain Partner — TomoChain — is joining us.

Our pursuit of quality partnerships is another step towards our goal of building the world’s leading comprehensive blockchain-agnostic platform. We are happy to have TomoChain with us. Blockchain agnostic tech is needed to fulfill the evolving needs of the digital economy — and accelerate App development towards mass adoption as blockchain technology matures.

About TomoChain

TomoChain launched their Mainnet in December 2018. TomoChain is an innovative solution to the scalability problems endemic to Ethereum and other blockchains. It features a 150-Masternode architecture with Proof of Stake Voting (POSV) consensus resulting in a near-zero fee with instant transaction confirmation. Security, stability, and chain finality are all guaranteed via novel techniques such as double validation, staking via smart-contracts, and uniform randomization processes.

TomoChain supports all EVM-compatible smart-contracts, protocols, and atomic cross-chain token transfers. Scaling techniques such as sharding, EVM parallelisation, private-chain generation, hardware integration will be continuously researched and integrated into TomoChain, creating an ideal scalable smart-contract public blockchain for decentralized apps, token issuance and token integration for businesses of all sizes.
Love, What Is It?
By: Corina Oana
Tags: Suffering, Guru, Breathing, Mindfulness, Love

Is the advice of a guru love?

Teal Swan

Suffering, it’s all around us. I believe we feel ours and the collective suffering. Teal Swan, whose advice is in the image above, is one healer and leader who is a signpost for my growth.

Most days, I align and float in the flow of awareness. Most days, a few intentional breaths ground me when injustice tares at me. Today might be one of those days, I tell myself to get ready for the day.

getting ready

Then I read an article here on Medium, and I feel the suffering of writers in this community, and I want to share Teal’s advice, and I don’t. Not with this particular writer. I don’t because I don’t know if it can be supportive, more likely it will add fuel for the suffering.

breathing

Instead, I take extra intentional breaths and let my soul send the soothing power of the breaths to the fellow author who is suffering today. The message is, you are not alone. You got this, I got your back, at least energetically.
Thirty Days Reprise
Tags: Poetry

Thirty days has September

The same thing happens each November.

Do not ask me ‘bout days in June,

It and April share that tune.

August shows up — takes one more.

January, too, will hit that score.

And ugh, there’s February, what a mess,

Twenty eight? That’s just a guess.

March and May and December too,

Come in just shy of thirty two.

July is last — oh what fun!

Today it ends at thirty one!

Photo by Nocturna on FreeImages.com
Latest picks: Data Augmentation in Medical Images
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick

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MAGA-Hatted Woman
Tags: Hate, Confrontation, Trump, Resistance Poetry, Racism

Photo Credit: Amazon

Quick grocery run — dog food and batteries,

Express lane for the hurried

Flanked by women of color —

The one ahead hands me the divider

A thank you and smile from me,

You’re welcome and smile from her,

We both look ahead.

More-than-middle-aged woman in front

Pauses checking-out to look at us —

The woman in the Russian red hat,

The Make America Great Again hat,

She sneers at us both,

A haughty smirk —

Turns to face us

And insolently touches the brim of her hat,

As if to say

Look at me,

I voted for him,

The one who will

Make America White Again.

Black woman looks down

Avoiding confrontation

Like her shackled ancestors

From long ago

Like her silenced ancestors

From not so long ago.

I look hard at MAGA-Hatted Woman,

She tips her head in my direction

As if to say

Do you see what I’m wearing?

Do you see who I am?

An evil grin to me,

A stony stare at the black woman

With head bowed.

A gasp from the woman behind,

Woman the color of ripe chestnuts,

She backs up, distances herself,

Like a doe preparing to run.

Cashier catches the subtleties,

Her smile disappears,

Her body tenses —

I shift ever so slightly toward

MAGA-Hatted Woman —

A light move toward action

Unnoticed by me until

A coffee-brown finger gently touches

My hand, soft as a butterfly’s wings,

A long beseeching glance at me,

A silent plea for silence —

Don’t make waves for I will be

The one to drown,

Not white you

But black me —

Don’t, please don’t!

MAGA-Hatted Woman

Cackles her disdain

And walks away,

Turning for one last

Hate-filled stare

At us —

Us, who said nothing to her,

Us, who did nothing to her,

Us, who are shopping on an

Ordinary Sunday that is

No longer ordinary.

Woman the color of morning coffee

Mouths “thank you” —

A thank you silenced by a fear

I didn’t know

Until now.

This is America today.
Pemuda Dan Koperasi
By: Gapatma - Demokrasi Ekonomi
Tags: Pemuda, Pemuda Koperasi, Koperasi, Sumpah Pemuda

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