fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
4 Tips for Stunning Social-Media Visuals (Infographic)
By: Larry Kim
Tags: Marketing, Digital Marketing, Graphic Design, Infographics, Social Media

4 Tips for Stunning Social-Media Visuals (Infographic)

Engage your social audience across networks with more compelling visuals.

Images are critically important in social media marketing strategies across just about every platform. While networks like Instagram and Pinterest are obvious, most of the other major networks have made changes to their platforms to make visuals more prominent and give images more space.

People process visual information 60,000 times faster than text, which explains why 93 percent of the most engaging posts on Facebook include images.

In fact, Facebook led the charge, with wider, taller images in their Newsfeed design, though Twitter and LinkedIn weren’t far behind.

Wherever you are on social, visuals are your opportunity to stand out and get noticed.

How can you make your social visuals more compelling?

The Media Octopus put together an information-packed infographic on the importance of social visuals. It contains a lot of great advice and creative ideas for marketers looking to up their visual game, including these four tips for visual social success:

Be consistent with color. Show personality through typography. Choose the right imagery and filters. Don’t overlook positioning.

Learn more about each of these tips in the full infographic below:

Image credit: The Media Octopus

Originally published in Inc.com

About The Author

Larry Kim is the CEO of Mobile Monkey and founder of WordStream. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Creating a Planetary Nervous System
By: Planet Os
Tags: Climate Change, Sustainability, Open Data

Dear Friends,

In 1998, former U.S. vice president Al Gore introduced a concept called Digital Earth, a virtual planet that is georeferenced, connected to the world’s digital knowledge. In the past 15 years, we have witnessed a quiet revolution in the deployment of sensor networks acquiring atmospheric, oceanic and terrestrial data.

Sadly, this public data is hard to find, access and use.

In 2012, I founded marinexplore.org. Starting with a handful of Estonians, we built a search engine for public ocean data and a community for ocean professionals. We got data from 35 organizations and 40,000 instruments worldwide, with 8,000 excited community members asking for more. We learned that unless we expanded beyond oceans, our unique approach would not make a difference in the world. That’s why Planet OS was born.

Planet OS is a new revolutionary search engine designed for the next generation of Digital Earth delivering access to public data without moving it. Combined with Planet OS Toolkit, software developers can work with domain experts and create bespoke applications that solve some of their most pressing problems.

How much data is out there? Nobody knows for sure, but we know that our new system has indexed more data in 3 months than we had in the past 3 years. We hope that in not so distant future we will deliver it to your fingertips.

What would you solve with better Earth data?

Imagine all planet Earth Data interconnected available to the creativity of the best minds of our time, from researchers to software developers, but also the curious child who is just starting to explore the world?

Planet OS can provide solutions in affordable & clean energy, combating climate change, and protecting marine ecosystems. For example, Planet OS is being used to develop:

a real-time dashboard for increasing power output of sustainable wind energy. This happens by combining public weather data with turbine data in one system; replace spreadsheets with real-time environmental monitoring for the offshore and maritime industry; and use sound field analysis to help to reduce man-made noise in the oceans.

Al Gore said we need a Digital Earth. I think what we really need is a Planetary Nervous System. Help us to build a resilient, interconnected network which allows us to truly understand our Planet, and take action for a sustainable future right now.

Thank you!
How to Reckon With Climate Denial
By: Danny Schleien
Tags: Connection, Fear, Climate Change, Psychology, Climate Denial

How to Reckon With Climate Denial

What does it say about our world when a well-educated and well-traveled military veteran spews blatant climate denial?

Source: Anonymous Climate Denier In My DMs

Signs of the depths of the climate emergency abound all around us. The most active hurricane season ever just ended. Wildfires are setting areas like California and the Amazon ablaze in unprecedented fashion (unprecedented in recent times). Global temperatures are setting records left and right.

It seems we have more evidence than ever just how bad things have gotten and how dreadful they stand to get as we continue to pollute our planet.

And it seems more people understand the realities of the climate crisis.

But despite all of that, climate denial still exists aplenty.

If you want, scroll through the comments on my articles here in Climate Conscious. Climate denial is alive and well there.

Or take a look at a DM I recently received on Twitter (see above).

I’ll take this man at his word and assume he does have a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. I’ll assume he spent 13 years in the US Navy. I’ll assume he’s traveled the world.

If you’re hoping to read me put this guy on blast, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Instead, I want to expand on what I think motivates people like Anonymous Climate Denier and propose two points to emphasize to people like him to possibly convert climate deniers.

Because what does it say about our society that someone so well-educated and well-traveled, who has ostensibly been exposed to as much information and as many different kinds of people as anyone, can deny basic science and spew such mistruths?

A lot, I’m afraid.
Weekend Prompt: “I Honor How I Want To Feel”
By: 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊.
Tags: Newsletterandprompts, Creativity, Emotions, Energy, Short Story

Joy of joys, it’s weekend!

Time flies when you’re having fun! Or, as my oracle cards say, “the Universe works fast when I am having fun”. I find both to be equally as true! It is way too easy to overlook or mistake the subtleties of the Universe’s refined language for randomness.

My challenge for what’s left of this year is to adopt and maintain a childlike aura and look at everything in awe and wonder: synchronicities, events, people. We’ll see how that works out…Still, I shall honor how I feel!

Speaking of which, when was the last time you truly honored how you chose to feel? I’m not just talking “positive” emotions, rainbows, cookies and all. I’m talking moodiness, misery, boredom, frustration and everything else we shy away from experiencing. Well?

This weekend’s prompt is all about that! It happens to fit perfectly with Wednesday’s prompted question as well, so in case you forgot to submit something in response to that one, you’ve got today and tomorrow to nail the challenge.

As always, be creative! Let that inspiration flow through you. Have confidence in your words, for they hold the power to heal!

Wishing you all a peaceful, reflective Saturday followed by a chilled, blissful Sunday. Take care!
Even in a Pandemic, Fatphobia is Alive and Well
By: Rachael Hope
Tags: Body Image, Health, Equality, Culture, Covid 19

In a couple of my Facebook groups centered around fat bodies, body acceptance, and support, this has become an ongoing conversation. As we’ve shared our feelings about these jokes and memes, we’ve talked about how much energy it takes to try and ignore them. One woman described overhearing a coworker who constantly complained about gyms being closed, saying “I’m not going to let this virus make me fat!” Even in the midst of a public health crisis, these are the things people are worried about.

It’s not just about weight gain, either. The commentary starts there, but then gets tied in to bodies and body changes in general, and our good old friend, the false assignment of morality to food choices. Photos of people’s grocery carts are accompanied by judgement about which foods were chosen. One photo I saw was accompanied by commentary about how the shopper should be less worried about Covid-19 and more worried about diabetes.

All of these supposedly lighthearted, funny comments can be extremely triggering to people who have struggled with real food insecurity, poverty, food restriction, and eating disorders.

These comments leave no room for consideration of people’s income levels or allowance for the amount of fear that’s been rampant. There’s no mention of the fact that folks are trying to buy foods that are shelf-stable, and yes, that maybe comfort food is a legitimate coping mechanism to some degree. I’ve seen at least a half dozen Facebook posts where people are worried about themselves or their children snacking all day, and how to prevent it.

Then there’s the opposite end: jokes about the “coronavirus diet” from people worried about not having enough food on hand because of grocery store shortages. All of this can be extremely triggering to people who have struggled with real food insecurity, poverty, food restriction, and eating disorders.

On her Instagram page, Megan Crabbe aka Bodyposipanda wrote:

Hey internet, how about we DON’T make people feel shitty about their body changing when weight fluctuations are an entirely natural reaction to our lives being a little bit different right now 🙃 it’s okay if your body gets softer in the stillness. It’s okay if perfect intuitive eating isn’t your number one priority right now. It’s okay if all the people sharing fatphobic memes & at-home-weight-loss-boot-camps are making you want to scream into the abyss. We will not blame our bodies for changing during this time. I repeat: WE WILL NOT BLAME OUR BODIES FOR CHANGING DURING THIS TIME. They’re doing the best they can. 💜💙💚🌈🌞

Instead of fearing weight gain, what if we all recognized how lucky we are to have enough food in our homes to even gain weight during a global pandemic? With quarantines increasing, social distancing, and difficulty getting necessities, we are still able to eat. Our hospitals are full, but so are our cupboards. How can we complain or assign negativity to that?
AI-Powered Code Completion Is Amazing… and Scary Sometimes
Tags: Coding, Technology, Vs Code, Productivity, Programming

Auto-Suggestions Across Multiple Files

My main benefit here isn’t even the fact that it makes suggestions but rather that it allows me to work across multiple files that don’t even have to follow any known syntax. In fact, TabNine works for regular writing as well and will give you automatic suggestions even while typing normally.

This comes in really handy while working with RenPy, a game engine built on top of Python that allows the developer to split their script into multiple files for structuring, meaning your variables file is separate from your chapter1 or whatever. TabNine can still give you suggestions here — so well, in fact, that it will also suggest the right variable types and most commonly used default assignment.

Most users will probably encounter this with path completion and using HTML variables inside their code as you write replace statements for them.
How Should We Determine the Ordering of Our Microservices?
By: Edward Huang
Tags: Programming, Microservices, Distributed Systems, Architecture, Software Development

How Should We Determine the Ordering of Our Microservices?

A look at strategies when thinking about distributed systems and microservices

Photo by the author.

Microservice architecture can help teams develop applications asynchronously. Teams can deploy their code base, creating a faster iteration and development process overall. However, with flexibility, there also comes complexity in developing distributed systems. Many of our assumptions in a single system don’t work in a distributed system, and we need to reevaluate how we approach our design in distributed systems.

One example of this is time ordering. I recently wondered how you can ensure the services you created are in the right order.

Imagine you created an event-driven architecture with two microservices: a Product service and Order service.

The Product service will be responsible for managing products, and Order services are reliable for managing orders. The Product service can emit a CreateEvent and UpdateEvent , and based on the event, the Order service consumes the messages through a queue and updates its local data store.

How do you ensure that CreateEvent can always be before the UpdateEvent ?

One simple solution is having the subscriber do a check. If product A doesn’t exist, we can push the value again to the queue, assuming that the CreateEvent is out of order.

However, if the subscriber received two UpdateEvents on the same product out of order, that will cause a problem.

We might think that we can create a timestamp on each event, and based on that timestamp, we can determine whether or not to do an update on the time. However, this approach might not be correct either.
Pet Shop Boys Singles, 1985–2010
By: The Awl
Tags: Columnists, Music, Chris Randle

by Chris Randle

46. “London”

45. “Together”

44. “Numb”

43. “Beautiful People”

42. “Integral”

41. “Did You See Me Coming?”

40. “Absolutely Fabulous”

39. “Minimal”

38. “Was It Worth It?”

37. “Home and Dry”

36. “Yesterday, When I Was Mad”

35. “Miracles”

34. “Single-bilingual”

33. “I Get Along”

32. “Jealousy”

31. “I’m With Stupid”

30. “Somewhere”

29. “Before”

28. “I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Anymore”

27. “Suburbia”

26. “Love Etc.”

25. “DJ Culture”

24. “Love Comes Quickly”

23. “Liberation”

22. “New York City Boy”

21. “Heart”

20. “Flamboyant”

19. “It’s Alright”

18. “It’s a Sin”

17. “Se a Vida E”

16. “Paninaro ‘95”

15. “West End Girls”

14. “A Red Letter Day”

13. “Where the Streets Have No Name / I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”

12. “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing”

11. “So Hard”

10. “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk”

9. “Domino Dancing”

8. “Can You Forgive Her?”

7. “Go West”

6. “Opportunities”

5. “Left to My Own Devices”

4. “Being Boring”

3. “Rent”

2. “Always On My Mind”

1. “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”

Chris Randle is a writer from Toronto and a member of the group blog Back to the World. He recently sang “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” at karaoke with a friend dressed up as Dusty Springfield.
3 React Patterns That Can Be Anti-Patterns
By: Ian Ker-Seymer
Tags: JavaScript, Reactjs, React, HTML, Web Development

1. Not Using Forms for GET Requests

I see a lot of React components which do a ton of unnecessary state management to keep track of information. Oftentimes, these complicated queries can be simplified by using a powerful feature of HTML forms: <form action="GET"> .

When you use a form, the browser will handle all of the state management and URL encoding for free. Using this trick will make your React code simpler, more maintainable, and easier to read. 🙌

Next time you find yourself managing a ton of state for a form, see if you and get away without using Javascript at all for managing state, and instead use HTML forms and your router of choice.

2. Never Using Class Components

If you are not aware, hooks are the new hotness in React. They are incredibly useful for handling state in functional components and oftentimes make React code simpler, and easier to read.

One pattern I have seen in React apps is using hooks and functional components for absolutely everything.

“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 🔨

In my opinion, sometimes class components can be easier to comprehend and quicker to write.

Let’s be honest here. Which of these two examples do you find easier to read?

If you are like me, Example 1 is something I can glance at and immediately understand what it does. However, in Example 2, I had to reference the docs and a couple of blog posts to remember what useCallback does.

I’m not saying that you should never use hooks; in fact, I use React hooks all the time! But in certain cases, class components make your code more readable and maintainable.

If you have a functional component with a lot of helper methods or confusing hooks, consider using a class component to see if it is easier to understand.

3. Not Using CSS When It Makes Sense

Since React has such powerful JS functionality, sometimes it is easy to forget about traditional CSS styles.

One anti-pattern I have seen a lot is what I call over-reliance on conditional rendering. For example, it is incredibly easy to hide a component in 2 lines of JS in React:

However, this can often lead to jarring user experiences since components pop in and out of existence instantly. Instead, I prefer to use conditional classnames and CSS to create a smoother UX.

In this pattern, instead of hiding a component using an if statement, you can add a className prop which will hide the component using an animation.

Pro Tip: Check out Animate.css for some awesome, “just add water” CSS animations to use with this pattern.

Summary

Overall, I’d encourage all React developers to learn about all of the powerful features that the Web Platform has to offer. Oftentimes, they will make your components simpler, more maintainable, and more robust. Your team (and your customers) will thank you! ❤️

Bonus: Study Materials
POMprompt # 18
By: Christina M. Ward
Tags: The Pom, Creativity, Pomprompt, Poetry, Writing Prompts

POMprompt

POMprompt # 18

‘I don’t belong here.’

Image by Prawny from Pixabay

Ravyne Hawke Reminded me today that I have not done a POMprompt in a while, and she is RIGHT. It’s been since July. My goodness.

I guess you could say I have been busy. Life came along and turned me upside down and I have not quite recovered. But I have learned how resilient I am. How strong I am. And just how much poetry and my poetry community lift me up each day. For that, I am so grateful.

So here I sit. Where — you might ask?

On the couch belonging to the ex-boyfriend, who I LEFT back in July.

With my little doggie sleeping at my feet and my fluffball cat sleeping next to me. (They still live here — I do not.)

And I do not belong here.

The ex took off for a few days to another state. He let me know as he was pulling out of the driveway here and since I want my pets to be cared for while he’s gone, I packed a bag and came over here to stay for a few days. It was all very sudden and I do not do well when shoved out of my comfort zone. I prefer to take my own mental health risks, thank you.

And I really, really do not belong here. This is not my home anymore. Things look so different yet still the same. Everything smells different. I couldn’t find the remote. I don’t want to bathe here. I don’t want to eat the food or use the toilets or loiter for too long in any one spot. It is going to be a stressful few days. I may not sleep. I may sleep the whole time.

So I ask you, dear poets — when is the last time you found yourself in a place you did not belong? Perhaps you have felt this way before? What was it like? Put yourself there for a moment and tell me what you see. How you feel. What does it smell like or sound like? Let your reader FEEL this space and your discomfort. Let your reader sit with you in that moment and empathize, connect, understand.

This time you won’t be alone.

Your poetry prompt for POMprompt # 17 is “I don’t belong here.” Now, let’s see that deep, meaningful work!

For those of you who have never done a POMpromt, you can find the previous ones on the POMprompt tab of The POM publication. Here is the link for the post that tells how to participate — PLEASE follow the directions and save our editorial staff the eye-rolls and sighs :) We have so much to do it gets hard making all the corrections and messaging — just re-read the rules part ok? It’s about halfway down the page:

Thanks y’all — and wish me luck and all that for the next few days. I really am quite uncomfortable. 🙁 I guess I’ll sleep here on the couch? 😬

Poetically yours,

Christina M. Ward, EIC of The POM
Pull Request Etiquette for Reviewers and Authors
By: Meng Taing
Tags: Tips, Software Development, Programming, Startup, Process

Pull Request Etiquette for Reviewers and Authors

Be careful with those LGTMs

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

A pull request (PR) is a process when new code is reviewed before it should be merged to develop a branch or master branch in a Git repository like GitHub.

The author creates a PR, while a reviewer reviews a PR. A PR could be time-consuming, annoying, or even nerve-racking if done wrong.

Common PR issues are:

The PR is too long. The PR is left open. No one reviews the PR.

The reviewer keeps nitpicking minor mistakes. The author keeps repeating the same mistakes.

The conversation is not responsive. Discussion becomes steamy. Nothing is resolved.

To nurture a healthy PR process, both author and reviewer should have a mutual understanding of common dos and don’ts in PR review.

Purely based on personal experience, the following 16 etiquettes could be used as guidelines for PR review in your team or organization.
The Smarter Way of Scaling With Composer’s Airflow Scheduler on GKE
By: Roy Berkowitz
Tags: Airflow, Etl, Composer, Data Engineering, Gke

We love Airflow At StoreMaven. Being a super Data-Driven company, we run hundreds of daily tasks transforming, loading, and monitoring data in production using Airflow on top of Google’s managed Composer environment.

The basic deployment of the Composer environment looks like this:

A managed GKE cluster is deployed with 3 x n1-standard-1 nodes and a single default-pool as expected.

airflow-worker workload deploys on all available nodes, and the airflow-scheduler together with Redis and other workloads are deployed randomly on one of the nodes.

The Managed Composer Environment doesn’t officially support VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaling) nor horizontally autoscaling the number of nodes in the default-pool yet. Meaning, as your business grows and the number of jobs to be done increases, the monitoring and re-allocation of resources to the cluster is your responsibility.

Since we adopted Airflow about 2 years ago, we have been creating our own operators and constantly expanding our ‘DAG Bag’ to do our everyday work so we have more time to enjoy life!

We “grew” to run on a 7 node cluster with 2 CPU cores each to allow relatively high parallelism (A good benchmark for parallelism == worker_concurrency*num_of_nodes, where worker_concurrency is 6–8*num_cores_per_node).

Things got interesting when we started constantly utilizing over 100% CPU on one of the nodes — the one the airflow-scheduler was deployed on, alongside the airflow-worker. Since the scheduler had to queue and sync so many tasks, it constantly consumed roughly 60% of the available CPU on that node. And guess what, when the actual tasks were kicked-off to run by that node’s airflow-worker, the CPU utilization went wild.

Needless to say, this is a risky situation to be in, as pods could get evicted and the environment starts to suffer from periodic downtimes.

What do we do? Scale up the default-pool as a whole to work with stronger machines? on large clusters, this upgrade might cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars more, MONTHLY. Just so the airflow-scheduler and airflow-worker could live in harmony on the same node? nah.. no way.
The fall.
By: Jason Chatfield
Tags: Comics, Art, Fall, Mental Health, Illustration

🇦🇺 NYC Cartoonist/Writer for @NewYorker and stand-up comic. Syndicated daily in 34 countries. President of The National Cartoonists Society. #BlockedByTrump

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Silicon Valley Is Using Our Own Intelligence to Make Us Obsolete
By: Douglas Rushkoff
Tags: Silicon Valley, Technology, Book Excerpt, Robots, Future

Silicon Valley Is Using Our Own Intelligence to Make Us Obsolete

How workers unknowingly train their robot replacements

Photo: Donald Iain Smith/Getty Images

In the future envisioned by Wall Street and Silicon Valley alike, humans are just another externality. There are too many of us, asking for salaries and health care and meaningful work. Each victory we win for human labor, such as an increase in the minimum wage, makes us that much more expensive to employ, and supports the calculus through which checkout workers are replaced by touchscreen kiosks.

Where humans remain valuable, at least temporarily, is in training their replacements. Back in the era of outsourcing, domestic workers would cry foul when they were asked to train the lower-wage foreign workers who would shortly replace them. Today, workers are hardly aware of the way digital surveillance technologies are used to teach their jobs to algorithms.

This is what all the hoopla about “machine learning” is really about. The things we want our robots to do — like driving in traffic, translating languages, or collaborating with humans — are mind-bogglingly complex. We can’t devise a set of explicit instructions that covers every possible situation. What computers lack in improvisational logic, they must make up for with massive computational power. So computer scientists feed the algorithms reams and reams of data, and let them recognize patterns and draw conclusions themselves.

They get this data by monitoring human workers doing their jobs. The ride-hailing app on cab drivers’ phones also serves as a recording device, detailing the way they handle various road situations. The algorithms then parse data culled from thousands of drivers to write their own autonomous vehicle programs. Online task systems pay people pennies per task to do things that computers can’t yet do, such as translate certain phrases, label the storefronts in photos, or identify abusive social media posts. The companies paying for the millions of human micro-tasks may not actually need any of the answers themselves. The answers are being fed directly into machine learning routines.

The humans’ only real job is to make themselves obsolete.
Production ready Architecture for fetching websites screenshots at scale
By: Rishabh Garg
Tags: Microservices, SaaS, Software Development

Snapshot service

Snapshot service is a light-weight flask app that runs for 24x7 with mainly two end-points: /url and /html endpoint.

The /url endpoint accepts a URL in the post request along with many parameters like the time for which the driver has to wait for the page to be rendered.

First, we tried out just opening the given URL in a headless browser without doing much and then capturing the snapshot of the page. But it didn’t go as per expectations. Here, are some of the problems that we encountered and how we solved them:

a) Some of the websites didn’t get opened at all. Why? Websites were blocking us because they know it’s the code that’s requesting the resource and not the human. So, we used user agent to solve this problem.

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options chrome_options = Options()

chrome_options.add_argument('--headless')

chrome_options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')

chrome_options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage') user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.100 Safari/537.36' chrome_options.add_argument('user-agent={0}'.format(user_agent))

b) After using the user agent, we encountered another problem and that is the resultant page isn’t getting rendered in the way we want. Why? Single page apps. This revolution of building single-page apps using frameworks like Vue and React is being very common in the web development industry. The driver needs some time to assemble all of that heavy javascript that server returns to render it as a full page.

Solution: Wait for some seconds to get the page rendered in the browser.

Single-page app: working flow (Client-side rendering)

c) Blocking or removing the popups:

Nearly every website that we visit flashes out some popups as soon as you visit them. It can be an offer that’s running on, or just an embedded page to subscribe to their newsletter. We also need to remove them before capturing the screenshot.

Solution: Pass the required parameters along with website URL in a post request related to popups like the Xpath of popup and class name of popup so that the popup element can be captured by chrome driver and then we can use click function to remove it.

from selenium import webdriver

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC driver = webdriver.Chrome() element_present = EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, popup_xpath)) WebDriverWait(driver, time_delay).until(element_present) driver.find_element_by_xpath(popup_xpath).click()

d) Capture the full height and width of the page:
The Bad Habits That Became a Lifestyle — and How to Avoid Them
By: Ibrahim K
Tags: Habits, Lifestyle, Life Lessons, Health, The Masterpiece

Our technology-dependent modern lifestyle is far from the classic life that our parents and grandparents lived. It’s common for us to link getting older with weakness and being more vulnerable to getting sick. Unfortunately, this situation has shifted to the younger age of our generation.

The number of young sufferers, who are weak in the foundation and at risk of getting chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity, is increasing each year. Relying on junk food and staying confined at home or office most of the time without physical activities are highly responsible for that.

Moreover, the number of people who suffer from anxiety and depression is escalating. One of the primary factors responsible for this is the long exposure to social media and computer screens that isolate us from our surroundings.

A recently published documentary on Netflix, ‘The Social Dilemma’, also showed how social media is controlling us psychologically and robbing our attention.
Showing off the new (free) Google Data Studio, with reddit April’s gilded comments for Sanders/Trump/Clinton in BigQuery
By: Felipe Hoffa
Tags: Analytics, Bigquery, Data Visualization, Reddit, Big Data

The Google Analytics team just announced Data Studio: their free, new, Data Visualization Product. Read their post for more details, but since I just got a new load of reddit comments from /u/Stuck_in_the_Matrix loaded in BigQuery, I’m eager to show you how to connect both.

The first surprise with Data Studio: It’s really easy to connect it to BigQuery:

Add a data source, choose BigQuery. To work with open data that others have shared, choose “shared projects”. Try adding mine, to find reddit comments: ‘fh-bigquery’. Select the dataset and table you want to work with.

4. If this is your first time using BigQuery, you might need to create a new “billing project”. Don’t worry, just create a GCP account and don’t worry about billing (yet): BigQuery gives you a free terabyte for querying every month, no credit card required. Then come back to Data Studio to complete the previous steps.

5. Note that when querying and sharing, this will be the project being billed for the underlying BigQuery queries.

Data Studio now displays your chosen table columns (it could have been a query too), and allows you to choose the credentials to use when sharing the report (yes, you can share). You can choose either your credentials (will allow you to share the reports with anyone) or have the report ask for the viewer credentials (to keep the underlying data viewable only by authorized parties).

And now comes the fun part: Start dragging and dropping to create visualizations and interactive reports:

To put all of this together, I created a visualization to compare how many comments for Trump/Sanders/Clinton got gold on reddit during April 2016. As shown in the following video, it’s super easy to share the results.

The shareable report: https://datastudio.google.com/open/0ByGAKP3QmCjLWFpxU1R4WU9WR0k

For more stories like this, follow me on twitter.com/felipehoffa, or subscribe to reddit.com/r/bigquery.

PS: Now globally available!
TokenSoft Integrates with Leading Trading Platform OpenFinance Network
Tags: Bitcoin, ICO, Future, Blockchain

Providing Issuers with Easy and Direct Access to a Compliant Secondary Market

TokenSoft is pleased to announce a software partnership with OpenFinance Network (OFN), the leading trading platform for alternative assets.

OFN, which has years of experience working closely with hedge funds, private equity firms and other alternative asset managers, recently launched the first ever U.S.-based regulated security token trading platform. Our partnership will enable our issuers to apply to list on OFN directly through the TokenSoft platform, immediately after completing their respective token sales. Our goal is to provide all of our issuers with easy and direct access to a compliant secondary market, opening up near-instant liquidity and avoiding the need to list on less trustworthy or unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges. The OpenFinance trading platform also has direct integrations with broker-dealers, custodians and transfer agents, and will seamlessly connect issuers with buyers.

The partnership is a testament to TokenSoft’s deep commitment to providing the highest level of technology and compliance support to its issuers — a commitment that now continues well after an issuer’s token sale has concluded. More information on OFN can be found here, and you can stay updated by following their social channels:

Telegram — t.me/openfinancenetwork

Twitter — twitter.com/OpenFinanceIO

Medium — medium.com/@openfinance

About OpenFinance Network

OpenFinance Network is an open source, trading, clearing, and settlement service for the alternative asset industry. The platform serves as a conduit between issuers, investors, and industry stakeholders, offering streamlined access to liquidity and asset transfer efficiencies. The team has over fifty years of combined experience in financial markets, exchange technology, and finance law and has operated together since 2014. For more information on OFN and the need for trading, see www.openfinance.io and Medium posts here, and here.

About TokenSoft

TokenSoft is the market leader in launching and supporting compliant security token sales through its white label, SaaS token sale platform. TokenSoft’s mission is to provide issuers with peace of mind by offering a compliant, secure and stable token sale experience, unmatched expertise and easy-to-implement software. TokenSoft enables compliant issuance of security tokens in over 50 countries, and serves a wide range of clients — including startups, enterprises, funds and investment banks.

Disclaimers

This release is for informational purposes only, does not constitute an offer or solicitation to sell securities, and shall not be construed as legal advice in any jurisdiction. Certain information set forth in this release contains “forward-looking statements” under applicable securities laws. TokenSoft undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management’s estimates or opinions should change, except as required by applicable securities laws.
Will You Ever Feel Normal After an Abusive Relationship?
By: Estrella Ramirez
Tags: Lifestyle, Relationships, Self, Mental Health, Trauma

It’s been a long day. Work was hell, and the day dragged on forever. You cleaned up the disaster in your house, and you finally are getting the opportunity to unwind with your favorite book and a generous glass of wine.

You wait for the calm and relaxation to wash over you, but it never comes. In its place, you’re agitated, unsettled, and anxious. You feel your pulse in your ears, the silence is deafening, and you physically tense up, unconsciously forming a fist.

You’re on the verge of a full-blown panic attack — for no reason what so ever.

Welcome to what life feels like after leaving an abusive relationship.

For weeks, months, or years, you have been walking on eggshells, hoping to not send your abuser off on another rampage. You do all that you can to not provoke them. You do your best to stay even-keeled, not too happy, and not too sad. Because any influx in your mood rouses suspicion in your partner.

Now that you have escaped that volatile relationship, what reason do you have to feel agitated, unsettled, and anxious? Our minds and bodies have a strange way of protecting us from catastrophic events in our lives.

Make no mistake, being in an abusive or toxic relationship counts as catastrophic.

We often talk about how one can safely escape a relationship like this, but today we will explore what the aftermath of surviving this trauma can feel like.
The Only Step-by-Step Guide You’ll Need to Build a Web Scraper With Python
By: Angelica Dietzel
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Data Visualization, Data Science, Programming

We need to figure out what distinguishes each of these from other div containers we see.

You‘ll notice the list of div elements to the right with a class attribute that has two values: lister-item and mode-advanced .

If you click on each of those, you’ll notice it’ll highlight each movie container on the left of the page, like above.

If we do a quick search within inspect (press Ctrl+F and type lister-item mode-advanced ), we’ll see 50 matches representing the 50 movies displayed on a single page. We now know all the information we seek lies within this specific div tag.

Find all lister-item mode-advanced divs

Our next move is to tell our scraper to find all of these lister-item mode-advanced divs:

Breaking find_all down:

movie_div is the variable we’ll use to store all of the div containers with a class of lister-item mode-advanced

is the variable we’ll use to store all of the containers with a class of the find_all() method extracts all the div containers that have a class attribute of lister-item mode-advanced from what we have stored in our variable soup.

Get ready to extract each item

We’re missing gross earnings! If you look at the second movie, they’ve included it there.

Something to always consider when building a web scraper is the idea that not all the information you seek will be available for you to gather.

In these cases, we need to make sure our web scraper doesn’t stop working or break when it reaches missing data and build around the idea we just don’t know whether or not that’ll happen.

Getting into each lister-item mode-advanced div

When we grab each of the items we need in a single lister-item mode-advanced div container, we need the scraper to loop to the next lister-item mode-advanced div container and grab those movie items too. And then it needs to loop to the next one and so on — 50 times for each page. For this to execute, we’ll need to wrap our scraper in a for loop.

Breaking down the for loop:

A for loop is used for iterating over a sequence. Our sequence being every lister-item mode-advanced div container that we stored in movie_div

loop is used for iterating over a sequence. Our sequence being every div container that we stored in container is the name of the variable that enters each div . You can name this whatever you want ( x , loop , banana , cheese ), and it wont change the function of the loop.

It can be read like this:

for <variable> in <iterable>:

<do this>

OR in our case...

for each lister-item mode-advanced div container:

scrape these elements

Extract the title of the movie

Beginning with the movie’s name, let’s locate its corresponding HTML line by using inspect and clicking on the title.
Six Principles for Designing Any Chart
By: Manuel Lima
Tags: Design, Data Visualization, UX, Material Design

In August 2017, a group of passionate designers, researchers, and engineers at Google came together to create a comprehensive set of data visualization guidelines — covering everything from color, shape, typography, iconography, interaction, and motion. The success of this collaboration sparked the formation of Google’s first fully dedicated Data Visualization team, which kicked off in May 2018.

Over the last year, we’ve continued to work on understanding the needs, requirements, and desires shaping how people visualize and interact with information. Now, we want to share our insights with creators everywhere. We’ve launched detailed public guidelines for creating your own data visualizations, and distilled our top principles and considerations. Below, six strategies for designing any chart.
How to download apk: The best way to download apk
By: Ali Haider
Tags: Smartphones, Android App Development, Entrepreneurship, Android, Coding

The method which I am going to share needs the following things:

PC Chrome browser

First, you need to go to the chrome store and there search for an extension called APK Downloader for Google Play Store.

source: I took this screenshot myself

After you have added it into your chrome browser you will get an icon at the top right corner of your browser window.

Now you have to go to the desktop site of PlayStore which you can reach with a search in google, once there search for the desired app

source: I took this screenshot myself

Now you need to click on the android icon on the right and it will redirect to a new page.

source: I took this screenshot myself

You can see the app version and the supported CPU Architecture, now just click on download and then copy it in a USB to install in your android tv or directly to your smartphone and browse the file with any file manager.

Voila, you have you apk ready to rock and roll.

There may be many other methods out on the Internet but believe me, it is one of the best if not the best, rather than randomly googling for apk. I have been downloading apk for past 4 years and this is the best experience I have found.
5 Key Skills That Help Little Girls Grow Into Confident Women
By: Samantha Blake
Tags: Parenting, Feminism, Education, Family, Society

When I was little, my mom walked in on my grandfather trying to convince me that men were superior to women. I believed him, because at the time I didn’t know better. But she did.

And after that, my mom didn’t allow him to be alone with me anymore.

Like many from his generation, my grandpa is very traditional, and very conservative. To him, men are supposed to be strong and smart, and women are expected to be nurturing and feminine.

Thankfully I have parents who believed otherwise, and who took the time to teach me the skills I needed to make my own way in the world. If they hadn’t, my life would look very different today.

In a world where women are still viewed in many cases as less-than, setting them up for success when they’re young has never been more important.

More girls need to be taught how capable they can be, so they grow into confident women who don’t necessarily have to depend on other people.

No one is perfect. But if you don’t teach her, you’ll be setting her up to always rely on someone else. Making the effort to start teaching girls, whether you’re her parent, aunt, uncle, teacher, or friend, the skills to live the life that she wants, can change her whole world.

These skills can potentially save her from pain and danger, help her cope with the struggles of life, and set her up for success.
How to Ace the Most Underrated Certification for Data Scientists
By: Nicole Janeway Bills
Tags: Data Management, Machine Learning, Data Science, Data Engineering, Technology

Everything I recommend doing to study for the CDMP

📘 Buy the DMBOK 2nd ed. right now. The exam is open book and the DMBOK is legitimately super useful as a reference for Data Management work. The DMBOK occupies a prime position on my desk — I frequently find myself referencing my highlights and sticky notes to address clients’ questions.

❓ Buy the CDMP exam right now. You have an unlimited amount of time to schedule the test date, and paying for the exam gives you access to a test bank of 200 questions that simulate the real exam.

🔖 Highlight and sticky note the DMBOK. Okay, this one’s obvious for an open book test. You’ll definitely want to use a highlighter and sticky notes to indicate key concepts. I put all sticky notes on one side of the book for easy referencing. I also recommend orienting your writing sideways on the tabs so they don’t stick out of the book as far.

❗️Indicate the start of each chapter. Use wide sticky notes or notes of a specific color to mark the start of each chapter. This was invaluable during the test to quickly find content associated with a specific topic.

🔨 Work with the chapter framework. All the chapters of the DMBOK follow the structure Introduction, Activities, Tools, Techniques, Implementation Guidelines, Governance, Works Cited / Recommended. Focus your studying on the overview and technical sections that get more play on the exam relative to implementation and organizational sections.

💙 Read in order then review by priority. The topics of the DMBOK are arranged in an intuitive order — the sequence you might assess these topics during a Data Management engagement. However, the proportion of each of the 14 topics tested on the exam ranges from 11% for foundational areas such as Data Governance to 2% for advanced activities such as Big Data. On your second reading of the DMBOK, I recommend studying in the priority order covered in this post.

⭐️ Join the CDMP Study Group. Use this community to compare notes, ask questions, and find study partners.
Re:form — A Reclaimed Drinking Water Concept by Erik Berger Vaage
By: Earthly Matter
Tags: Climate Change, Eco Friendly, Sustainable Design, Packaging, Design

In many parts of the world fresh drinking water grows scarcer by the day, with global warming an ever growing issue a solution is needed now rather than later. It is estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa between 300–800 million people live in a water-scarce environment and a horrendous 115 people die every hour from diseases linked with poor sanitation, poor hygiene or contaminated water. As climate change takes hold we could see these numbers rise and hit areas even closer to home within western civilisation. We must act and we must act now.

Bill Gates came up with a great solution via The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they created what they call the Janicki Omniprocessor which breaks down human faeces to power the machine which manages to produce fresh drinking water. Bill non-judgmentally drinks the effluent water in the Netflix original ‘Inside Bill’s Brain’.

The biggest issue relating to effluent water throughout Western Civilisation is the fact of where it comes from, therefore people tend to turn their noses up at it. This is where Erik Berger Vaage stepped in with his fashionably viable packaging solution.

“One of the main challenges was to find a visual language that by the use of color and material feels both technical and sterile while also honest and natural.”

The grey board used for packaging the water is 100% recyclable and the shape helps make the item easier to transport as it can be neatly stacked which is a much more productive alternative to stacking plastic bottled water.

If designers such as Erik can continue to design well branded packaging for items such as Effluent Water then we together can all cause change in the world for future generations and keep the human race alive and thriving.