fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
song for the mothers of children with autism
By: Kate Holly-Clark
Tags: Mothers, Fairy Tale, Poetry, Autism, Love

Eric Soons [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s a changeling

said the grandmother

your child was stolen by the fey folk

leaving this awkward-walking

nonspeaking child in its place.

See how large its eyes are?

Quick, drop it in the creek

burn salt in the fire

ask it these questions three

how ugly that it will not meet another’s gaze

it must be ashamed that

its parents left it here.

It’s a changeling

said the neighbor

the fair folk must have come out of the woods

to change it with their own

that’s why it will only eat

bread and milk

and wear only linen and not good wool.

It’s only got one question to it

when your child had many

here, pop it in the oven.

Change is as change does, sang the mother over the crib

I was given a child once. If I’m given another

then it’s still my child

still with a question

still walking if slow

change is as change does

change is as change does

I’d teach them love every day

in any case

her eyes so fiercely green

that when her child slowly became hers again

no one could tell

the difference.
Summer Fever
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Lighthearted, Real Life, Prompt, Seasons, Summer

Summer Fever

A writer’s prompt: Let’s keep it going!

(photo by my BFF on her current trip to Portugal)

Ahh, summer. The season of fireflies and smores, midnight dips and country drives.

Summer is road trips with girlfriends across the country. It’s too many drinks around the fire with lifelong friends and catching up until the buzz wears off and the sun comes up.

It’s mornings drinking coffee on the veranda, watching the world come to life under the rising sun. Evenings laying in bed with the windows open, letting the crickets serenade you to sleep.

Summer is dripping ice cream cones over sticky fingers, picnics in the park and riding bikes on the boulevard. It’s cranking your favourite tunes with the windows down, your hand riding the waves of the wind.

Living in Canada, winters can be long and harsh, and bitter cold. (When they say that we have two seasons: Winter and construction, they’re not kidding!) So although summer brings mosquitoes and intense bouts of stifling heat and humidity, I always look forward to the day when the last little patch of snow melts and the days finally get warmer — and longer. Getting to wake up before the sun and watch it coming up over the trees, colouring the sky in shades of pink. Losing track of time in the evenings because it’s still light out even though it’s nearly ten.

It’s bittersweet when the leaves begin to change — autumn is my favourite season, but it means that winter is just around the corner again, and I’m never quite ready to let go of those laidback, lazy summer vibes.
Airdrop Tokens Distribution
By: Gastroadvisor Official Ico
Tags: ICO, Blockchain, Restaurant, Ethereum, Bitcoin

GastroAdvisor will create the world’s first blockchain-certified restaurant review feature. Check our website for info about the project! https://www.GastroAdvisor.com

Follow
Manasik 1.3 — The Lost History
By: Azizi Khalid
Tags: Madinah, Islam, Saudi Arabia

“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. ”

― Michael Crichton

One of the most unfortunate thing to have inflict the Muslim ummah of the 20th century was the destruction of history in the two holiest lands in Islam. For 1400 years many of the shrines and historical sites were meticulously preserved and visited by millions if not billions of pilgrims from all walks of life from the four corners of the world. Unfortunately due to various reasons, some are religious and some commerical, many, if not all, of those sites have been demolished. The future generations will not know the birth place of Prophet Muhammad, the house where his children grew up in, the site of the first Islamic propagation and training centre, the tombs of famous companions of the Messenger and luminaries in the Islamic history, many other important historical sites.

Some may argue that the demolition of those sites is a necessity to accommodate the growing numbers of pilgrims. Others argue that expansion could be done more carefully without completely obliterating history. But whichever side you are on, we have to agree that important historical sites have been wiped out. The fear is that Prophet Muhammad will soon be like other founders of the great religions of the world — removed to being a mythical figure whose existence is argued by historians. Of all the founders of the worlds’ great religions’ Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, only Islam’s founder (I am using the term founder here very loosely), Prophet Muhammad is the only that can be proven to exist withouth a shroud of doubt.

What Can We Do?

It is easy to fall into despair since there appear to be nothing much that can be done. The destruction has happened. In most cases, those locations they only exist in the memories of the elders. And herein lies the opportunity.

At TwentyEight we build apps. And we think we could lend our hand in the preservations of this history through apps. In Manasik 1.3, codenamed ‘Taibah’, we are introducing a new feature in Ziarah – Audio Tour. If in 1.2, codename ‘Riyadh’, we introduced our umrah guide, Ahmed, in Taibah we are featuring Muadz, our history guide.

Muadz, our history expert and guide.

We begin with the one location where most of its history is preserved, but not known to many — Masjid an-Nabawi. The Masjid of the Prophet is full of historical clues worthy of a movie not unlike National Treasure. Follow Muadz around the masjid and discover the meaning of each clue that has been preserved despite the vast expansions in the past millennia. You’ll be pointed to the most blessed spot to pray in the masjid, the spot where a dead palm tree cried, Rasulullah’s favourite spot to nap while iktikaf and many more important spots in this area.
Why It’s Okay to Start Before You’re Ready
By: Boateng Sekyere
Tags: Writing, Startup, Action, Productivity, Writing Tips

Why It’s Okay to Start Before You’re Ready

You might never be fully ready

Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash

You start only when you are ready, with a clear end game, right? That’s what conventional wisdom tells us. But increasingly, I see people “blindly” follow that advice. Some of them get stuck in the planning and scheming zone when they should be starting instead.

I know this because I was once there. But I finally got out of that zone, never to return. And here is why I would suggest that you start even when you are not ready.
Enabling client independence through a custom R Shiny app
By: Civis Analytics
Tags: Product Development, R Shiny, Data Science, User Research

No one likes being dependent on someone else for their day-to-day work. It leads to inefficiencies, a cycle of endless change requests, and a general feeling of powerlessness.

Unfortunately, this type of dependency often occurs when data scientists and decision-makers are working together to tackle a problem. Data scientists hold the keys to data stored in complex databases, as well as the tool sets for analysis, so non-technical decision-makers have to send requests for new models, analyses, and visualizations that they cannot produce themselves.

At Civis, we love it when users ask data-driven questions. However, we seek to avoid the dreaded situation of dependency as much as possible by building tools that hand over data to business users and key decision-makers. They can explore trends and generate insights without depending on data scientists, providing data teams resources to improve their data pipelines, test out new models, and implement better approaches to analysis and visualization.

The Problem

My team recently found ourselves with a dependency problem. We partner with our client to conduct weekly survey research, measuring KPIs such as brand sentiment, product usage and consideration, understanding and awareness of new features, and other data for strategic decision making.

Our client is very data-driven and technically savvy, which leads them to request many complex survey questions that cannot be answered with a single static memo or presentation. Rather, Civis has developed custom analysis methods and visualizations over multiple years. Since our client could not independently explore the data, Civis Applied Data Scientists had to generate custom tables and visualizations through multiple iterations of analysis and feedback, which led to inefficiency.

The Solution

Realizing that we needed a way to give decision-makers the ability to explore the data and answer key questions quickly and directly, my team invested the past several months in building a custom application, Research Toolkit. Research Toolkit is a custom R Shiny application, hosted in Civis Platform, which has transformed the way that our team collaborates with our client.

As we collect new survey data, the responses are automatically fed into Research Toolkit, where our client can easily track key metrics and identify important trends. When we add a new question to the survey, the data is readily available for our client. They can immediately answer business questions and generate visualizations of the findings to present to key stakeholders. Rather than having the Civis team analyze the data based on our understanding of the business questions and then coming back with follow-up requests, our client now has an uninterrupted workflow of data exploration and analysis, all without writing a single line of code.
This is Why You Hate Yourself
By: Geraint Clarke
Tags: Society, Mental Health, Life Lessons, Social Media, Relationships

This is Why You Hate Yourself

Your unrealistic standards of beauty and success are bringing you down

Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

One of the strangest compliments I ever got was at a work’s party where a girl approached me and said:

“The girls and I have been talking, you’re not traditionally handsome, but there’s something about you.”

That something was substance. A non-superficial quality that made me ‘attractive’ without potentially ‘looking’ attractive. The fact that it was a talking-point always made me question it.

We, as a society, project an idealised reality through the lens of social media, advertising and programming. We even beautify phone camera images before they get shared with friends.

This ensures we subconsciously and constantly absorb these high standards and reject any flaws that we see in ourselves.

Your goal is to rationalise media and advertising’s role to sensationalise and idealise life — selling you on the idea of perfection and the products to get you there.

When you discard these arbitrary standards and start loving yourself for your character and ability to positively impact others in life, you’ll be set free.
22 Kotlin Extensions for Cleaner Code
By: Alex Nekrasov
Tags: Android, Kotlin, Mobile, Programming

22 Kotlin Extensions for Cleaner Code

Be more productive when building your mobile apps

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

I’m a mobile developer, and one of the reasons I switched to Kotlin immediately after it appeared is because of its support of extensions. Extensions allow you to add methods to any existing class, even to Any or an optional type (for example, Int? ).

If you extend a base class, all derived classes automatically get this extension. You can also override methods from extensions, which makes this mechanism even more flexible and powerful.

I use Kotlin 1.4.0 for Android in Android Studio 4.0.1. And I assume that all methods will be called from Kotlin, not Java. Even so, most of the extensions will work in other versions of Kotlin, some of them in other environments.
Looping in Python. How to use the enumerate() function in…
By: Luay Matalka
Tags: Software Engineering, Programming, Python, Technology, Data Science

Looping in Python

How to use the enumerate() function in python

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

Introduction

Let’s say that we have a list. We want to iterate over this list, printing out the index followed by the list element or value at that index. Let’s accomplish this using a for loop:

num_list= [42, 56, 39, 59, 99] for i in range(len(num_list)):

print(i, num_list[i]) # output:

0 42

1 56

2 39

3 59

4 99

range() is a built-in function in python that allows us to iterate through a sequence of numbers. As seen above, we use the for loop in order to loop through a range object (which is a type of iterable), up to the length of our list. In other words, we start at an i value of 0, and go up to (but not including) the length of num_list, which is 5. We then access the elements of num_list at the i-th index using square brackets.

However, it is important to understand that we are not actually iterating over num_list. In other words, i serves as a proxy for the index that we can use to access the elements from num_list.
On the ground
By: Lidia Almeida
Tags: Earth, Slam Poetry, Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Poem

I sat on the ground and made my place there.

As a sea that fills

empty souls

Those who wander amongst mountains,

aimlessly

They are sweeter than I am

I sat down to write and ended up waiting

Watching

The light bulb

Hammockly rocking

Seducing with promises

Vain, although honest

Naive moths

They lose their wings and still

They are freer than I am.

I sat down and the lines were no longer there

Just the moon

With its eyes laid on me

Adding disappointments and losing count

Going around

Suffering from having

And from longing

But the love-yearning moon

Does not yearn like I do

I sat down and my hands were empty

I sat alone

I sat and felt I did not belong

That the earth

Sat on me

Just as much

As I sat on it.
Psychotherapy in the Age of Facebook
By: Lauren O'Neal
Tags: Emotional Contagion, Psychology, Creepy Experiments

Many people are outraged by the ethical implications of the recent revelation that Facebook conducted psychological experiments on unwitting users, manipulating their emotions by skewing their news feeds toward positive or negative posts. But look on the bright side: now that we know how “emotional contagion” works, mental-health professionals are going to have a much easier time at their jobs.

***

Client 1: I don’t know why, but lately I’ve really been feeling down.

Dr. Psychiatrist: Hm. Well, we see a lot of people respond well to filling their Facebook news feeds with positive content.

Client 1: All right. I’ll try it out, and then we’ll meet next week to check in?

Dr. Psychiatrist: Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary. Facebook did a whole study about it, it totally works.

***

Client 2: I’m afraid I might be having another depressive episode. Every day seems pointless and gray, and I have trouble motivating myself to get out of bed in the morning.

Dr. Psychiatrist: I see. I think this situation calls for a strict regimen of positive content in your Facebook news feed.

Client 2: I’m sorry, but do you really think that will help? After four years of weekly therapy sessions and two different types of antidepressants, you think this is what will make the difference?

Dr. Psychiatrist: Yeah, see, it’s called “emotional contagion.” Facebook did this big experiment, it was actually kind of creepy, but the upshot is: you need to catch the infectious disease that is happiness. Just get on Facebook and have your friends sneeze right into your mouth, but, like, the snot is joy. When that girl who lived on the floor above you in your freshman dorm is really psyched about the weather in a city you don’t live in, I want you to pretend that’s a smallpox blanket and snuggle up.

Client 2: And the smallpox is…good?

Dr. Psychiatrist: See? It’s already working!

***

Client 3: These past few months, I’ve felt desperately unhappy. Every time I get on social media, I see one of my friends celebrating an engagement or a birth, while I’m just living my boring life. Why is it that my friends always get out of traffic tickets or score a free drink from the bartender, and why do they have to brag about it on Facebook? It makes me feel so inadequate.

Dr. Psychiatrist: I hear what you’re saying. What I’m going to recommend is that you really immerse yourself in positive content on your Facebook news feed.

Client 3: What? But that’s the whole problem. I see my friends’ perfect-seeming lives and I feel like I’m missing out on everything, like I’m living this inferior version of life.

Dr. Psychiatrist: Right, right. But what Facebook’s data says — and they have a lot of data — is that you pick up the emotions you see in your news feed, often without even being aware of it. In fact, you may be really happy right now but you just haven’t noticed it yet.

Client 3: Is there any alternative?

Dr. Psychiatrist: Well, you could just stop using Facebook. Then the data says you won’t feel anything at all.

(Original image via.)
Daily Journal Prompt — Do You React or Respond?
By: May Pang
Tags: Mental Health, Self Improve, Self, Journaling, Life

One Questions, One Quote, Every Day

Created by the author

“It’s like she’s Godzilla and a two-year-old toddler all at once! Full of rage and impossible to reason with!” “So, what do you do?” “I tell her I need to go to the bathroom!”

I laughed out loud. I was having a conversation with a friend who was telling me his strategy of surviving his wife’s hormonal rages when she was having her period.

“Works every single time! She just needs a moment to break the escalating rage.”

A light bulb when off in my head. I realized that this was something I already practiced frequently.

So, what was this magic emotional control trick?

It was simply to pause.

Society has conditioned us to think that we have to address every emotion we feel right immediately. Have a headache? Take a pill ASAP. Feel lonely? Join other lonely singles online right now! Feel hangry? Quick, eat a Snickers bar!

But this sense of urgency is unnecessary and often serves only to treat the symptom and not the cause. Not reacting works too, and it’s free from side effects, ghosting, and calories. Sometimes, all your body needs is a break from the escalating vortex of energy, and as soon as the cycle is broken, the emotion will dissipate and leave you.

Here’s the catch. I said it was simple, but I never said it was easy. Anyone who has ever been on a diet will tell you. Sometimes, not doing is harder than doing.

So, why do it?

Because there is so much freedom in knowing that your emotions do not control you. That you can choose to stop feeding them and they will leave you. All emotion is energy. The more energy we give it, the greater it intensifies.

So, give it a shot. If you don’t know how, here’s an article I wrote about how to do it.

Created by the author
Déjà vu in paint
By: Anna Kravchuk
Tags: Painting, Art

Why paint something that has already been painted? Turns out, there may be plenty of reasons.

1. Because the customer is always right

Once upon a time Manuel Godoy, a prime minister of Spain and a womanizer, ordered Goya something unusual: two pictures of a woman, first with her clothes on, second completely naked. The pictures were placed in a private room, the naked one behind the clothed one, with a special mechanism which allowed to uncover the nude version. In 1808 the naked picture was discovered by the Spanish Inquisition and Godoy and Goya were brought before a tribunal. Luckily, the Inquisition was already at its end so both the painting and the painter escaped the prosecution.
I Wish I Could Tell the Truth
By: Taryn De Vere
Tags: Feminism, Domestic Violence, Gender Equality, Metoo, Life

I wish I could tell the truth. I’d love to tell you about the people who have deliberately hurt me. The people who make my life difficult, because they want to and they can. I’d love to give you their names and addresses and print off all the correspondence between us so you could see for yourself what I live with, see what has happened to me.

I’d like to tell the truth about the man who abused me, I’d like to give you his name, address, phone number and email and work address, along with details of the things he did to me and how he continues to lie about it. How he continues in his efforts to destroy me.

I’d like to tell you the truth about the people who have bullied me for supporting victims of rape and domestic abuse. I’d give you their names and where they live and work, tell you their occupations — you’d be shocked by who these people are and where they work.

I’d like to tell you the names of the people who told me not to talk about any of these things, the ones who silenced me and threatened me, the ones who tell other people I’m crazy in an effort to discredit me and the things I’m saying. I’d love to spill the beans. The effort of stifling the injustice pains me. It froths up and wants to spurt forth, it wants to burst in every direction and touch the lives of all who have harmed me, a splash of consciousness to remind them of the hurt they caused. The damage they did.

I’d love to tell the truth but we not have a world that allows me to do that. Society, organisations and individuals would rather I just shut up. They’ve told me that, again and again. People facing me with their hands over their ears. People shouting “Shut Up” at me with spittle-flecked mouths. No one wants to know. I must just stay quiet and keep taking it. Let the bastards fuck me over again and again, because no one wants to hear the truth.

Horrible things happen to people, that much is out of our control, but how we as a society and as individuals respond to victims of trauma is in our control. When the prevailing culture encourages silence abuse is able to flourish. And flourishing it is. There are so many wounded humans, so many hurt people. Abuse it thriving in our current culture.

Every human can take responsibility for how they respond to a traumatised person, we individuals can collectively create how a society responds and force change at State level. Call out the silencing of victims when you see it, call out bullying and abuse when you see it. Help victims to be heard. Amplify the voices of the oppressed and traumatised. Support us to speak our truth.

I’m not paid for this piece, if you want you can support my work by shouting me the price of a coffee :) https://ko-fi.com/taryndevere

If you want to get to know me better & see more of my work you can join my Patreon community from $12 a year and help keep the show on the road: https://www.patreon.com/TarynDeVere

Find Me Here Also…
Doesn’t Scale Well
By: John Saddington
Tags: The Ascent, Bitcoin, Business

I was recently reminded of the challenges of presenting oneself honestly, candidly, and truthfully online via a recent thread about YouTubers in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency space who shill coins and who get paid to promote certain projects.

I was reminded of this quote via Nietzsche:

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

What I like about this particular quote is the focus on the person and the relationship, not just the lie itself.

At the end of the day we all are promoting something, whether we are intentional and explicit about it (or not). Even the shirts that we wear with the many different logos and the brand-name pants and shoes that we slap on make a statement about who we are and what we believe in.

And the more public of a figure you are, either in the real world or digitally, requires you to be even more thoughtful, because one may find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Literally.

That would suck.

But the more important thing that I’ve been meditating on and about is the relational part and the “cost” of doing this poorly. I want to keep the precious few relationships that I have in the best working order that I can.

I want them to trust me. I want to trust them. I want them to believe in me and what I do. I want to believe in them and where they are headed.

That dynamic just doesn’t really scale very well online.
#JANGANDIAM
By: Obed Nugroho
Tags: Scrapbook

in Both Sides of the Table
TOP-3 Portfolios at Tokenbox.io Platform
Tags: Portfolio Management, Trading, Tbxnews, Cryptocurrency, Tokenbox

Investors on the Tokenbox platform can buy tokens of any of these Portfolio directly from the Marketplace screen, or go to the Portfolio page to see detailed information, look at the token price chart and make a purchase.

When purchasing Portfolio tokens, digital assets will be transferred to the Portfolio and the investor will be credited tokens to the trading account or wallet. Buying and selling Portfolio tokens by investors does not affect the price of Portfolio tokens, the price of which depends only on management performance. Please note that Portfolio managers cannot withdraw assets held in Portfolio accounts to any external account, but can only make transactions for the benefit of investors.

Choose your portfolio, buy tokens and keep an eye on the performance! And have a successful investment!

Choose your portfolio now

If you have any questions while working with Portfolio Service, please contact the platform support team:

support@tokenbox.io or write a question in the platform chat room at Telegram.

️
5 Brilliant Books to Read in the Next 6 Months
By: Christopher Hanna
Tags: Book Recommendations, Readinglist, Book Review, Reading, Books

It’s (finally) the end of the year. You’ve spent a lot of time inside, and you feel like you’ve watched all of YouTube. You’ve listened to every podcast there is. You’re waiting for an award from Netflix for ‘Most Time Spent Browsing’ yet you still haven’t made a dent in that bookshelf you spent a full day building at the start of lockdown.

Or maybe you have done nothing but read for the past six months and are looking for some new books to get stuck into over the next six. No matter which of these people you are, or if you are someone in between, I have a book for any taste below.

Some of these books I read myself over lockdown, and others I have fond memories of reading while lying by the pool on a Greek island when travelling wasn’t borderline illegal.

Hopefully you’ll find one of them to be suited to your own taste, or maybe one that makes you want to find a new taste altogether.

Let’s get stuck in.
Datacast Episode 47: Math and Machine Learning In Pedestrian Terms with Luis Serrano
By: James Le
Tags: Machine Learning, Mathematics, Education, Udacity, YouTube

The 47th episode of Datacast is my conversation with Luis Serrano — a Quantum AI Research Scientist at Zapata Computing. Give it a listen to hear about his academic background in mathematical combinatorics, his work building the YouTube recommender system at Google, his passion for teaching machine learning via Udacity and Apple, his popular YouTube videos, his interest in quantum computing, his upcoming book “Grokking Machine Learning” with Manning, and more.
Confidence Vs Credible Intervals for Proportions
By: George Pipis
Tags: Credible Intervals, Bayesian Statistics, Frequentists, Confidence Interval, Statistics

A comparison between Confidence (Frequentist) versus Credible (Bayesian) Intervals for Proportions

Image by Predictive Hacks

In Frequentist Statistics we communicate the Confidence Intervals where in Bayesian Statistics we communicate the Credible Intervals.

In this post we are not going to dive into formulas and theory. On contrary our goal is to give an example of how we can calculate the Confidence and the Credible Intervals using R and to see their differences.

The main difference is that according to Frequentists the Binomial distribution follows approximately the normal distribution N∼(p,p(1−p)n) while according to Bayesians the conjugate prior is the beta distribution with shape parameters α=Successes+1 and β=Failures+1

Let’s consider the following example where the n=1000, the p=20% and we want to calculate the 95% Confidence and Credible Intervals.

# Probability 20%

p<-0.2 # sample size n=1000

n=1000 # alpha=5% since we want the 95% confidence and credible intervals

alpha=0.05 # 95% Confidence Interval

qnorm(c(alpha/2,(1-alpha/2)), mean=p, sd=sqrt((p*(1-p))/n))

And we get:

0.1752082 0.2247918

Now we are going to calculate the Credible interval:

# 95% Credible Interval

qbeta(c(alpha/2,(1-alpha/2)), (n*p)+1, (n-n*p)+1)

And we get:

0.1763924 0.2259372

As we can see the differences are quite small. Let’s see what are the density functions of the Normal and Beta of our example.
College Didn’t Change My Life… It Started It
By: Alexa Phillips
Tags: Love, Belonging

For the last eighteen years, my life didn’t feel like my own. My mother was always right around the corner with everything I did in my daily life. She was constantly telling me when to do my homework and she checked my grades every single night. But it wasn’t just school. She even learned the rules and standards of my sport so she could watch my practices and be my second coach. It’s not that I couldn’t take control of these things for myself; it is simply that my mother was always there telling me what to do before I could regulate my life for myself. She tracked me and always knew where I was and what I was doing. I didn’t even have a curfew because I wasn’t allowed to go out at night. I couldn’t spend time with my friends because my mom wouldn’t let me ride in a car with a young driver so once all my friends got cars, I was left out of the social circle. I felt as if I had no life of my own. College made everything different.

Similarly to how a mama bird kicks their babies out of the nest in hopes they would be able to fly, I left home and came to college, with no idea of how to proceed. Suddenly, I was responsible for my own homework and study schedules. I even had to learn how to make friends. Being the shy girl who never made the first move simply couldn’t work for me anymore.

I quickly discovered that friendships wouldn’t simply materialize. People wouldn’t want to talk to me if I always sat in the corner and didn’t interact with people. I realized that if I wanted to feel like I belonged here at KSU, I needed to muster the confidence to put myself out there. I raised my hand an tired to answer a lot of questions in hopes that people would see me as a smart person that they may want to make a study group with. I brought snacks to class and offered it to people with a timid expectation that people liked food and would therefore want to talk to me. And while I now known as the girl who brings CocoPuffs to class, I now have people I can talk to in class, hangout with in a social setting, and people who are willing to study with me before tests and quizzes. However, that lead to a new issue.

Now that my mother wasn’t looking over my shoulder and forcing me to stay on task with my schoolwork, I quickly discovered my tendency for distraction and procrastination. I spent way to much time on Snapchat and watching Netflix. I was shocked when I realized I didn’t know nearly enough information do to well on the pop quiz I took three weeks into the year. I no longer had the safety net of my mom looking over my shoulder. If I wanted to do well academically, I had to stay focused. So that is what I did.

In the few weeks since school has started, I feel as though I have become a completely different person. I now feel much more responsible and in control of my own life. I have gained confidence and and now more outgoing with a better social life than I have ever had. All of this was because I came to college. I didn’t simply change; I became my own person.
Guitar Meditation
Tags: Mindfulness, Flow State, Guitar, Chanting, Meditation

Guitar Meditation

My shortcut into a meditative state

Like lots of people, over the course of the pandemic, I’ve revisited old hobbies. One thing I’ve gotten back into is playing guitar.

I used to play a ton back when I was a teenager, working my way through all the classical grades, but stopped after going to uni and in the subsequent years. It’s been really fun to pick back up, and try playing all the old sheet music I could find.

Another thing I’ve tried to do more of this year is meditate. At the start of the year I was using Headspace pretty religiously, but I now just sit with a timer app for seven minutes each day.

(I’m also exercising more regularly and voice journaling (‘Sounding Off’) each day, both with the aim of investing in my wellbeing and ‘being more mindful.’)

If you’ve done any meditation at all, you already know that the goal isn’t to actively clear all the thoughts from your mind and think about nothing. Instead, it’s just about sitting and watching thoughts go by. That’s why breath control is so important — it gives you something to focus on, instead of getting caught up in a thought and following it down its rabbit hole.

This is also why audiological forms of meditation are so powerful: Vedic chanting and kirtan from Hindu and Eastern traditions; Compline services and Taizé chants from different Christian traiditons; and I’m sure many others I’ve not heard of.

A few weeeks ago, while sitting on the floor in my room with my guitar, in the spot where I usually sit to meditate, I found a really pleasing simple series of notes to play, which alternated between two chords, that could be played in time with my breathing. It’s complex enough that I can’t tune out and do it without thinking (like, say, strumming might be) — but simple enough that my fingers can play it without my mind having to be fully engaged, without having to consciously think through finger positions and timings and shifts.

When playing this passage, closing my eyes, and focussing on my breathing, I can reach a meditative state a lot quicker than just by sitting in silence.

(Most days when I meditate, I don’t hit that state. On a good day, I might hit that point seven minutes into a ten minute meditation. With guitar meditation, if I’m in the right mindset, it’s almost immediate.)

With this form of meditation, there’s no space for other thoughts to butt in. If thoughts do interrupt, your fingers jolt and stop playing and the sound reaches your ear and you instantly hear that it’s happened — leading you to quickly adjust back into the flow, so that you’re still playing the notes in time and going back to focussing on your breathing and thinking nothing at all.

If you’re a guitar player, here’s the passage if you want to try it:
Implementing a Global Authentication Interceptor
By: Siva Ganesh Kantamani
Tags: Android, Security, Programming, AndroidDev, Mobile Development

Introduction

Updating your server to SSL doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe out in the wild. Your server needs confirmation that you’re communicating with the user without any hacker interception (mostly stated as the man in the middle attack).

Quick Note: Use a certificate pinning feature to avoid man in the middle attacks in most cases. You can learn what certificate pinning is and how to implement it in Android from this article.

Although we have certificate pinning, it’s better to have some sort of user verification. There are different approaches to verify that you’re communicating with the actual user, one of which is token verification. It might be either standard JWT token or your custom logic.

If we see this token verification at a high-level, it’ll be something like this: First, you’ll perform a regular service call if the response status code is 401, which means unauthorized, it might be a hacker interception, or the actual token is expired. In which case, we have to request a new access token. If the token is generated, then we’ve to reinitialize the original request flow. If not, we should log out the user, assuming the connection is compromised.
Uncommitted Millennial? These 4 Tips Will Increase Your Commitment and Help You Achieve Your Goals
By: Eve Arnold
Tags: Inspiration, Life Lessons, Psychology, Self Improvement, Self

“What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.”

― Pablo Picasso

Yet on a cold winter’s morning, your body works against you. You know you should jump out of bed, start your day right and get to work on the stuff that you know is important. You know that. But yet the allure of the warm cosy bed hugs you into a false sense of security.

It tricks your brain into thinking this is exactly where you should be.

And just like that, another day passes where you sleep in. It’s funny because just yesterday you were telling yourself that you need to get back into a routine. You need to start getting up early so you can do those things you want to before work starts. And you know you always feel 100x better if you start your day properly.

You’ve grown tired of your own lack of commitment. By this point, you’ve had numerous chats with yourself about your goals. You say to yourself ‘you can’t expect to live the life that you want if you don’t put in the work’. You nod, in agreement with yourself, and you decide that tomorrow is the day that you start. But as tomorrow swings around the corner and the sun starts to rise your warm bed stops you and you’re back to thinking tomorrow is the day.

The simple question is, how do we finally commit to ourselves?
Sin, Grace, and a Hard-Headed Kid
By: Alan Bentrup
Tags: Family

Tuesday marked day nine in the three-week run of “Mom’s Already In Virginia So Dad Is Trying To Maintain Control.” It didn’t go well.

It started fine, with Maverick at summer camp and Goose with me. When we picked Maverick up, things went downhill fast. No nap, too much TV and a late dinner/bedtime surely didn’t help. There were plenty of tears; and the boys were plenty upset too. You see, Maverick is a redhead, through and through. Hard-headed, determined, and passionate.

And Tuesday was a banner day.

I’ll admit here that I thought, said, and texted to Elizabeth things I regret. I was a bad daddy. And a bad person.

“Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”

― O. Henry, The Gift of the Magi

It is easy in those situations, at least for me, to discount the good and focus solely on the bad. To see only the sin, and the sinner. We do that in life, as well. We see those struggling, downtrodden or different, and immediately focus on the negatives.

This past weekend my Dad and I passed a panhandler on the corner and had a good discussion about charity and first impressions. I relayed a story that played out several times over the past few years.

The trip from the boys’ previous school to St. Dunstan’s took us by a corner popular with panhandlers. And most nights I made this trip I had just picked up dinner for me and the boys. As we neared the intersection, I (usually) silently hoped the light would stay green so I wouldn’t have to confront the man on the street. Usually that didn’t happen.

If I was alone, I often averted my eyes and waited for him to pass. But on those nights when the boys were with me, I couldn’t. I’d hear the typical refrain of, “He is hungry and we have food. Let’s help him.” And if I acted like I didn’t hear the backseat pleas, that hard (red) head would start to come out.

Sure thing, Maverick. Let’s help him.

Yesterday morning was still a bit rough. However, from the moment we picked him up from camp, Maverick was:

Calm.

Compliant.

Compassionate.

He was a new kid. Rather, he was the same great kid he’s always been.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

― 2 Corinthians 5:17

I was just a new dad, and could finally see what was in there the whole time.
These Drone-Ready Robotic Grippers Can Catch Thrown Objects
By: Cameron Coward
Tags: Engineering, Robotics, Technology, Drones, Research

Most drones are designed for passive applications — such as filming or aerial mapping — instead of active applications like manipulating or carrying items. There are two reasons for that: drones have a limited payload that restricts what they can carry, and it’s difficult to achieve the precision necessary to reliably interact with the world directly. But a team of researchers from the University of Auckland have developed new robotic grippers that could make it easier for drones to grasp and carry items.

The research team has developed two robotic gripper designs, both of which are intended to be mounted underneath a typical multirotor drone. The first has a number of friction pads that hang below semi-flexible supports. A wire runs through each of those pads. That wire is wrapped around a motorized spool, and spinning the motor shortens the wire and causes the friction pads to squeeze together. This unique gripper mechanism is ideal for grabbing a wide range of objects, because the pads can conform to a variety of different shapes.

The second robotic gripper design looks more conventional, and has three fingers — two on one side of the “hand” and one on the other side. The goal of this design is speed. A distance sensor in the center of the gripper registers when an object is nearby. When that object is detected, the fingers snap shut. This is using just two actuators, but those have been geared to operate as quickly as possible. The team says the gripper can close in just 93 milliseconds. That capability makes this gripper perfect for snatching thrown objects out of the air. It even allows a drone to clamp down on structures in order to perch like a bird does. Both designs represent the potential for drones to actively interact with their environments in practical ways.
The ISW: W7 NFL 2020
By: John Culver
Tags: NFL, NFL Picks, Monte Carlo Simulation, Probability, Sports Betting

How to interpret the ISW’s New Look Tables

p (w) % = Implied win probability per team based on the results stemming from 10,000 monte carlo simulated games (e.g. NYJ won 5,156 / 10,000 simulated games → NYJ’s p(W) % = 51.6%).

Avg. Score = The average (projected) score per team derived from 10,000 simulated games.

Spread = The average point differential between the two average scores.

Avg. Total vs. Market = The average total is equal to the the sum of each team’s average projected scores. The market is what ESPN’s quoted total (‘over /under’) is.

Market Spread = The current line or spread per ESPN’s NFL Daily Lines.

p (cover) % = Estimated likelihood that each team covers the spread given the market spread based on our 10k monte carlo simulations.

p (cover total) % = The likelihood that the total (i.e. the sum of each team’s final scores) goes over ‘O:’ or under ‘U:’ the market total based on 10k monte carlo simulations.

The ISW’s Power Ratings

The ISW employs its proprietary power rating system each NFL season beginning with preseason power ratings that are adjusted weekly according to team performance against the spread (ATS) as well as margin of victory throughout the season.

The ISW’s Power Rating Spread = The difference between each team’s power rating along with a standard home field edge of 2.31 points.

Market Moneyline: The quoted moneyline per ESPN’s NFL Daily Lines.

Est. Fair Value Moneyline: Our estimated fair value price based on the net average ‘Avg p(win) %’ of our estimated win probability along with FiveThirtyEight’s traditional ELO win probability and ESPN’s FPI.

Early Sunday Slate
Rising Sun Lodge seeks Educator of the Year Nominations
By: Bob Herpen
Tags: Education, New Jersey, Freemasonry, Awards

Rising Sun Lodge seeks Educator of the Year Nominations

Non-profit organization which serves the communities of Haddonfield, Haddon Heights and Haddon Township seeks to honor those who teach

Rising Sun Lodge №15, Free and Accepted Masons, is again seeking nominations from the community for its annual Educator of the Year Award.

The Freemasons, among their other charitable and community-oriented activities, are long-time supporters of public education, and honoring our local educators is but one way we show our appreciation for their dedication and service to our youth.

The award is granted to outstanding educators in school systems in the Camden County/South Jersey region and includes a cash honorarium and an award plaque.

If you know of an outstanding teacher or administrator deserving of such an honor, please request an application via e-mail from David A. Frankel at dafrankel@comcast.net.
Waking to Swamp
By: Mike Essig
Tags: Surrealism, Satire, Poetry, Life, Aging

Bones awake groaning. Sing the body decrepit. Don’t moan, Agonize!

Neurons snap, crackle, plop. Locate head. Try to find shoes.

Dreams dismissed. Day bleeds into sameness. Relentless boredom.

Tread the doomed bog of Old with attentions. Booby traps.

Each step the future. Abandon all dope. Mortality worm gnaws.

Denentiasand sucks. Tumorgators lurk. Snappers break hips.

EDacondas slither. Limply. Lungconstrictors hide in tar. Gasp.

Peer through blurry eyes. Portage cataracts. Slow streams drip.

Lust peters out. Prostate yourself. Up becomes down. Flexile.

Shelf life gets shorter. Discard after. Only expiration Dates.

So what if life is ebbing. Reality is an unhappy meal. Ignore.

Be a clueless American. Slap on a big grin. No fears!

Pretend to enjoy the swamp of these Golden Years.
How I Got 60 Million Views on a Branded Video
Tags: Influencers, Marketing, Branded Entertainment, Branded Content, Influencer Marketing

The Brand needs to be carefully placed into the Content Creator’s world.

So, how do you get tens of millions of people to watch a chicken ad?

You make it entertaining first.

You make the chicken part almost incidental.

To clarify, the Brand isn’t incidental… but rather it meshes with the content and does not compete with it.

Edelman Digital, specifically Neil Mohan, understood this clearly. The script was massaged carefully to reflect the Brand’s message while still clearly respecting the original intent and staying true to the concept.

Fair collaboration between me and Neil (Edelman Digital) was essential.

I wish all agencies had Neil Mohans.

Sadly, I know they don’t.

I’ve worked with a lot of them and they really, really don’t.

Shareablee (www.shareablee.com) notes that my video was the Top Branded Post on Facebook in the world (video or photo) for a 30 day period based on Views and Actions (Likes, Reactions, Comments, Shares).

I posted the ‘Explaining Canada Day to America’ video on the evening of June 27th before Canada Day (July 1st).

It already had the advantage of Canadian pride. Any nation loves to feel good about itself. It provided some bragging points for Canada given directly to our much larger neighbour, America.

I firmly believe that most successful online videos are used as self-expression. e.g. “That’s so me/Dad/Aunt Jean/you”

This video was the perfect tool for that and Edelman Digital, and by extension the Brand, knew that for its best chance for success they needed to simply have the Brand “be” there in some unobtrusive manner that wouldn’t muddy the waters and get in the way of the content itself.

The Brand is mentioned three times.

I’m sitting in a huge chicken bucket chair.

However, that was still incidental enough that it didn’t get in the way of the content.

People shared it because it didn’t feel like an ad. People still approach me on the street and ask where I got the chair without realizing it was an ad.

The Brand is top of mind for them when recalling the video, but they still need to be told it was an ad.

That’s the goal with Branded Content. That’s what gets millions of views.

Brands need to learn to match themselves up with appropriate Content Creators/Influencers and then get out of the way.

The Content Creator shouldn’t get placed into the Brand’s world.

The Brand needs to be carefully placed into the Content Creator’s world.

Most Content Creators work hard every day to build their audience.

Most Content Creators would not risk all of that hard work for one pay cheque.

Brands need to find the right Content Creators and then trust them.

If Brands can match themselves with the right Content Creator and then simply let the Content Creator do what they do while putting an arm around the Brand, everyone wins.