fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
A Comparative Analysis on Decision Trees, Random Forest and XGBoost
By: Shahbaz Hasan Raja
Tags: Classification Algorithms, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Data Science, Neural Networks

Machine Learning and AI has continued to be a growing and expanding field of interest and work for several years. It has continued to gain a lot of attention and has seen an influx of many undergraduates / working professionals to join and explore. So, if you are a beginner and need help with Decision Trees and their family of Ensemble methods, this story is for you.

Introduction :

The aim is to correctly classify the types of Glass, based on the number of elements (like Ca, Mg, etc.) they contain and their Refractive Index.

Data Frame

As you can see above, we have 214 rows and 10 columns. The first nine columns are the Features / Independent Variable. And the last column ‘Type’ is our target variable and describe what is the kind (class) of the glass

Count-plot for the Number of Examples of each Class

We have six classes in our Data-set. Also, it can be seen that there is a high class-imbalance, i.e. the number of examples we have isn’t the same. This could lead to some loss in accuracy for our model, as our model might be biased towards one class.

In cases where we have more than two classes, it is better to use a Classifier that has a non-linear decision boundary so that we can have more accurate predictions. Some examples of Non-Linear Classification Algorithms are Kernelised — Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees, and even a Logistic Regression model with Polynomial Features.

After some data-preprocessing and train-test split, we will be creating our Models. We will be using the same training and test set for each of the models.
9 Things to Leave Behind in 2020. Leave the things that don’t serve you
By: Yousuf Rafi
Tags: Regret, Hope, 2021, Covid 19, Life

You’re better off without these people. Leave them and look forward to meeting some kind souls. Keep the ones that mean the world to you and do everything to keep them who bring the best out of you. These are the people that you need to worry about and take care of, leave the toxic people behind.

4. Memories That Make You Sad

I was diagnosed with COVID-19, and the isolation period was grievous. If someone lends me a million-dollar to relive that period, I would happily deny it.

Specific memories make you sad. Make a promise to yourself that the next year will not have any of these memories.

Write down all the bad memories, cry on them, contemplate on them, and get over them. Once you’ve done that, tear the paper off and get ready for a brighter year.

5. A Fixed Mindset Even if that Worked for You

Humans evolve with time. Progress is the only thing that keeps our soul alive. And a fixed mindset won’t aid you in any way.

Every human is filled with unlimited potential. To make a mark in the world, you need to get out of the fixed mindset mentality.

“Don’t die with your music still in you.” ~Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Look at things from a growth mindset. If something doesn’t work out, find the reason behind it and work on yourself. Develop the skills that can help you overcome the obstacle.

6. Stop Thinking & Start Executing

2020 might be the year when you planned things but never dared to execute. It’s time that you get healthy and execute those beautiful dreams, ideas and aspirations.

Let 2021 be the year that brings change — a year where you’ll try out things that you’ve been thinking.

It’s a year to venture into unknown territory and surprise yourself. Make a list of goals and plan out how you’ll achieve them. Enough of thinking, it’s time to execute.

7. Loving the Wrong Person

You are worthy of love. Don’t drain and waste your love for anyone who doesn’t give a damn about it. Indeed, some people will love you back. Don’t worry about loving a person and not getting love in return.
Australia’s richest woman wants to sell thousand yuan steaks to China
Tags: Beef, China, Steak, Food, Australia

Australia’s richest woman wants to sell thousand yuan steaks to China

Gina Rinehart to beef up Australian cattle bound for the mainland.

Coming soon to a steakhouse near you: more fancy Australian beef, if the richest woman from Down Under has her way.

Australian beef producer S. Kidman & Co., which is owned by billionaire Gina Rinehart, wants to export more premium steaks to the mainland by increasing their cattle herd by 25 percent to around 200,000 cows within two to three years.

“The big market opportunities are in China,” said Kidman board member and former Australian trade minister Andrew Robb. “Australia stands in a good position to cater for the premium end of that grass-fed market.”

According to Robb, premium steaks sell for as much as A$360 (¥1,780) in China and Kidman wants to sell directly to high-end restaurants. He’s not wrong; at the recently-shuttered Roosevelt Prime Steakhouse in Shanghai, a 300g, full blood Wagyu grade M9+ ribeye sold for ¥1,750. Over at 1515 West Chophouse & Bar, a 350g, Kiwami Wagyu Pedigree striploin was ¥1,688.

Kidman currently has cattle stations covering an area almost as big as Austria, or 80,000 square kilometers, and they span across four Australian states and territories. They plan to increase their stations’ capacity mainly by bringing more water to the herds. Kidman is also establishing premium brands to distribute its grass-fed beef overseas.

Australia is currently the world’s third-largest beef exporter, and exports to China are predicted to rise about 17 percent to 122,000 metric tons by June 30 this year, according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural & Resource Economics & Sciences. The increase is driven by a burgeoning middle class and Chinese beef production can’t keep up with consumption.

Rinehart bought Kidman in 2016 for A$386.5 million (¥1.91 billion) in partnership with Shanghai CRED Real Estate Stock Co., which controls about a third of the company.
Node.js Nedir? Ne İşe Yarar?
By: Mete Bükük
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Yazılım, Nodejs, Software Development

in Both Sides of the Table
Survival Tips from a Wildlife Photographer
By: Pixel Magazine
Tags: Photography, Nature, Travel

EvH: Wildlife photography is different from other genres in several ways, but first of all the viewer imagines that the photographer possesses some survival or wilderness skills — can you share any anecdotes or interactions from the course of this project (or your career more generally) that put those skills to the test?

CF: Nerves of steel do help, but they are not an absolute necessity. A cool head and good decision-making skills are much more important. Most of the time, when photographing, I tend to avoid undue risk. It’s typically downtime that can get you. Last year, eating breakfast around the camp fire, we had a male lion chased through camp by a much larger male lion, they crossed about 50 feet from where we were eating. A few days later I woke up to a hippo leaning up against our canvas tent. I have had two brown bear mock charge me when I was 18. Each of these situations could have ended much worse if panic had set in. Having a very healthy respect for wildlife is absolutely essential, but knowing not to fear them is almost more important. Fear makes you do stupid stuff; respect helps you make good decisions.

Understanding the conditions you are photographing in and how to prepare for that is likely one of the more difficult ones that wildlife photographers or nature photographers deal with. Often when planning you both have to know the terrain as well as how close you can anticipate getting to a particular subject. Gauging these helps you pack the appropriate gear but does not promise that the subject cooperates. And you always need to be ready for changing conditions be it snow, rain, heat, dust, mud, animal mood changes . . . they are all challenging and can prove costly to both time and gear if you don’t anticipate and plan accordingly.
Behind the Lens: 2016 Year in Photographs
By: The Obama White House
Tags: Presidency In Review, Photos, President Obama, American History, White House

For the eighth and final time, I am presenting my annual Year in Photographs.

All of them were taken either by me or a White House photographer on my staff. For many of the images, I’ve included the backstory behind the image to provide further context or to share why that image was particularly important to me.

As always, the editing for this project is both subjective and personal. Yes, there are some historic moments included but mostly I was looking for behind-the-scenes moments that give people a more personal look at the President and First Lady. And I’ve included a few that I thought were just cool photos.

I hope you enjoy this final Year in Photographs of the Obama administration. It’s been the honor of a lifetime to be a witness to history these past eight years.

— Pete Souza, Chief White House Photographer
Back to School Time is Different Now That My Youngest Child is in High School
By: Jacqueline Dooley
Tags: Grief, Parenting, Family, Self

As summer winds down and my youngest child prepares to start her second year of high school, I’ve found myself feeling melancholy, even wistful.

“It’s the beginning of the end,” my mind keeps whispering. “In three years, Emily will officially be an adult.”

When Emily graduates, she will (presumably) have hit the final milestones of her childhood. They will involve, among other things, college acceptance, going to prom, getting her driver’s license, and turning 18.

Emily will do these things without benefiting from the guidance of her older sister, Ana, who would’ve (should’ve) started college this year. Ana died two and a half years ago at the age of 15.

Had Ana lived, I might be experiencing a different type of wistful melancholy — one with a silver lining, I presume. I’d still be sad this back-to-school season, but also proud and maybe even content. I would have the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child to adulthood and is beginning the next phase of mothering.

But Ana didn’t get that far. She died in the middle of her 10th grade year. Now there is only emptiness where these other feelings should be.

Emily, gearing up to start the grade that marked the final year of her sister’s life, has no compass to help guide her.
She and She
By: Danna Reich Colman
Tags: Life Lessons, Short Story

~She~

I can’t take it anymore, Velma. I just can’t. Do you realize that there hasn’t been a single day since you started this job — and it’s been five and a half months — that I haven’t received a call from you with an excuse about how you’re going to be late or that you’re not coming at all? On your very first day, the day most people are concerned about making a good impression, you were two and a half hours late! The next day you arrived forty-five minutes late, and the third day you didn’t come at all. Yes, I know you said you had your period and your back hurt, but every month you get a period and a backache. Your second week here you called Monday morning and said your head hurt and you were too dizzy to drive. Then Wednesday you called to tell me you weren’t coming because your sister couldn’t take care of your son because she was going to Disneyland with her two children. Yes, I’m sure it was a good opportunity for her and her kids, but it was an awful inconvenience for me! I had to cancel all my plans that day! And I never know when to expect you. Yes, of course I appreciate your calling, but I’d be much more appreciative if you’d just show up. You said you wanted to work a five-day week. There hasn’t been one week when you’ve worked more than four, and lately it’s been three. Last week you called to say you had the flu on Wednesday. On Thursday you said you couldn’t come because your car was locked up in your garage and your husband took the key, and Friday — Friday your son had a bad cough and an ear infection, and you took him to the doctor. You don’t want a job, Velma. Go back home and take care of your son, your house, and the rest of your problems.

~She~

I can’t take it any more, Missus. I just can’t. Every day when I come to work, you are in the bed. Almost sometimes you stay in the bed until two and make big mess of my day. Very bad is the day I change the sheets. And how am I to clean your room when you are sleeping until two? How am I to change the sheets when you are still in them? And when I am to clean the bathroom, you tell me you need go in the shower. And on the days when you wake up early, you go to the shops and come home with many clothes and want for me to cut all the tags and fold the bags and put away. The Missus’ closet look like the big store with all the clothes matched before I leave. I am to be home with my son by four o’clock and need to meet his bus. How can I be there to meet him when you not finished applying makeup and diffusing the hair? And when you know I am waiting outside the door for you, you talk on the phone to your friends about which manicurist you like and what car is better between a BMW and a Range Rover to drive for the carpool. And yes, I know that you not happy when I need to stay home to take care of my son last Wednesday, but Missus, the plans you complain about canceling are only eyelash fill and botox appointment.
First Kisses
Tags: Sex, Poetry, Kiss, Love, Love And Sex

Our first kisses

were a taste

of things to come,

champagne bubbles

that simply

couldn’t be

kept inside.

Our eyes met.

Our lips met.

We hugged.

We kissed again.

Our next kisses

began the feast

we had dared to

imagine, as

typed words of

hope leaped

from our fingers.

Your hands reached

my waist.

That first taste

was sweet.

More kisses

came and went.

So did I.

But I’ll be back;

for more.
Hope Dies
By: Nadia Davidson
Tags: Emotions, Frustration, Mental Health, Poetry, Depression

Thank you for reading! My Name is Nadia Davidson. As a practicing artist, I enjoy writing about art and other creative pursuits as much as I enjoy painting with words and crafting stories. Creating juxtapositions and connections between disparate ideas is what informs most of my work. Please visit my website at www.moltenimaginings.com for inspiration.
窺探鋼鐵人:伊隆馬斯克
By: Yuan Ko
Tags: Elon Musk, 中文, Review, 讀書心得, 心得

Mess up

We are nobody and we always mess up.
Photowalk: The Conservatory of Flowers, Golden Gate Park
By: M. H. Rubin
Tags: Black And White, San Francisco, Photography, Photohaiku, Flowers

Living a creative life, a student of high magic, and hopefully growing wiser as I age. • Ex-Lucasfilm, Netflix, Adobe. • Here are my stories and photos.

Follow
EVERY DREAM IS VALID
By: David Atilola
Tags: Ali, Articles, Dream, Features, Gates

The man who dream is a man who wants more out of life. It is important that we all dream, dream is a gate way to all greatness. Having a dream give birth to all good things, because we all dream good dreams for ourselves and our loved ones.

The dream is a spirit on it own, it is a spirit that motivates you when you are in the process pursuing your dreams, the dream is a spirit, because only you can see it for yourself.

Do not let anybody tell you that your dreams are not valid, no matter how big or how small it may be, your dream is hundred percent valid.

All greatness starts with a dream, look at the most successful people in the world, look at the greatest country I’m the world. Look at Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Muhammed Ali, these are men who had big dreams for their life.

The greatest country in the world achieve their greatness first by dreaming, America has the American dream, look at Dubai they have a dream for their country, look at Britain, they all have a dream.

The poorest countries in the world have no unique dream, the worst countries in the world do not have a dream. It is ironic.

Some people will argue that you should only have goals, I am telling you that all this things work together, dreams, goals, vision, purpose, ambition, they are all important and every man who seeks success need to understand it.

Muhammed Ali said he was the greatest boxer in the world, before he became the greatest boxer. You have to see it, people who dream visualize it. It will not happen until you see it, it does not work that way. No one will see it for you if you don’t see it for yourself. And it is nobody’s fault if you do not see it.

The dream is significant to your success as a young person, young people have more advantage to dream more than the adult, because we are young and we have the strength to do.

It does not stop with having a dream, you need to “work your ass off.” You need to work very hard, all those success stories you read about, you were not their for the last 20,30 years they’ve waking up early building their dream, working hard to make sure it comes alive.

If you want your dreams to come alive, hard work is the number one rule. If you can’t work hard, you can’t have it.
The Illustrated Interview: Jennifer Hayden
By: Edith Zimmerman
Tags: Spiralbound, Jennifer Hayden, here, Illustrated Interview, Comics

Every week on Spiralbound we ask one of our featured artists: How do you make comics? This week we spoke (emailed) with Jennifer Hayden, of “Up in Smoke.” (Check it out if you haven’t already! And see here for our full interview archive.)

So, Jennifer, how do you make comics? (Text from Jennifer, drawings by Edith Z.)
Memoization in JavaScript
By: Lance Watanabe
Tags: Memoization, Javascript Tips, JavaScript, Javascript Development

What is memoization? It is a concept in JavaScript used to cache results of expensive or long-run operations so that we can reuse these results without having to rerun the operation.

How does memoization work? Let’s imagine that we are using the Google Maps API to find the coordinates of a city. Without memoization, each time there is a request to find the coordinates for ‘Los Angeles,’ we would need to make an HTTP request to the Google Maps API. HTTP requests can be unpredictable or slow. With the concept of memoization, we store/cache the results of the first request so we can reuse these results if the same information is requested. So, the first time a user requests the coordinates for ‘Los Angeles,’ we would make an HTTP request to the Google Maps API then store the resulting coordinates in a map. The next time a user requests the coordinates of ‘Los Angeles,’ we would immediately return the result that is stored in our map instead of making an HTTP request.

In the example below, we create a function called getCoordinates which returns the coordinates of a given city. In this function, we check to see if the city already stored in our map. If such a city already exists, we immediately return the result without making an HTTP request. If the city doesn’t exist, we make an HTTP request using the getGoogleCoordinates() function. Then, we store the result in our map. As you can see, after we call our function to find the coordinates for ‘Los Angeles,’ the map contains Los Angeles’ coordinates: [ 34.0522, 118.2437 ].

const getGoogleCoordinates = (city) => {

if (city === 'los angeles') {

return [34.0522, 118.2437];

} else if (city === 'new york') {

return [40.7128, 74.006];

}

}; let existingCoordinates = new Map();

function getCoordinates(city) {

if (existingCoordinates.has(city)) {

return existingCoordinates.get(city);

}

let result = getGoogleCoordinates(city);

existingCoordinates.set(city, result);

return result;

} getCoordinates('los angeles');

console.log(existingCoordinates);

//Map { 'los angeles' => [ 34.0522, 118.2437 ] } getCoordinates('new york');

console.log(existingCoordinates); /* Map { 'los angeles' => [ 34.0522, 118.2437 ], 'new york' => [ 40.7128, 74.006 ]} */

What’s the purpose of memoization? We are trading performance for memory.
LeCI QUEST Focuses on Men Taking Responsibility
Tags: Life Lessons, Prison, Education, Government, Faith

Volunteers from Crossroads and The Four-Seven held a one-day retreat at Lebanon Correctional Institution (LeCI) called “Quest” focusing on the roles and responsibilities of men and the role faith plays in that process.

Throughout the day, men took inspiration from Brian Tome’s book “Five Marks of a Man” and Stephen Mansfield’s “Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men”. Topics such as fatherhood, friendship, relationships, community, responsibility and more were discussed as volunteers shared their experiences and stories with the men in attendance.

“I’ve made a lot of bad choices, and I’ve let a ton of people down,” one participant shared. “This event, along with our Thursday night Crossroads meetings, continues to help me better understand my role as a father, husband, son and friend. I had no idea what it really meant to be a man, and because of that I dropped the ball with everyone I knew. Today, I’m taking the steps needed to be someone different — someone better that can be relied on.”

“Quest” is an eight-hour program that is structured with community-building group discussions and Christian-based teachings. The day concluded with baptisms of seven men, as well.

Crossroads and The Four-Seven provide inside education at LeCI through weekly programs such as Crossroads Anywhere, Building Success: Personal and Professional, The God Experiment, Undivided, Getting It Right and more.
EncryptoTel launches groundbreaking secure VoIP on Waves
By: Waves Tech
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin

The telecommunications project’s crowdfund is under way — one of several major initiatives to launch on Waves this quarter.

There have been a number of new projects to launch tokens on Waves in the last few weeks, with more to come. One of the more interesting is EncryptoTel, a secure VoIP and communications platform.

EncryptoTel’s team have come from the telecommunications industry — they met whilst working at the same firm — as well as having a strong background in blockchain technologies and development. Whilst working together, they discussed the concept of a secure VoIP system. The ideal would be to use existing softphone applications, but to ensure that all calls were properly encrypted, and also that secure payment systems were used. Increasingly, surveillance (whether by governments, corporations or malicious hacker groups) harvests ‘metadata’, that is, information that goes beyond the content of the call or message itself and encompasses data like location, call length, identities of participants, financial information, and so on. For companies as well as individuals, this kind of surveillance represents a major vulnerability, since it can lay bare the network of relationships that exists between a business and its suppliers, consultants, employees, management team, and so on.

IP-PBX

EncryptoTel’s offering goes far beyond secure audio and video calling, though. The team are experienced in deploying public branch exchanges (PBX): the internal phone networks used within most offices, which now use both internet infrastructure and a link to the external telecommunications system. In this way, internal calls can be free, and external calls can use a limited range of numbers. Their Internet Protocol PBX (IP-PBX) would be secure, easy to roll out, highly scalable, and would need no new hardware beyond a PC or web-enabled device. Cryptocurrency payments would ensure financial privacy.

For a crypto crowdfund, EncryptoTel has relatively modest targets. They hit their minimum viable amount, $100,000, shortly after launch, and their second target of $250,000 within hours. This enables them to complete their working beta and integrate an improved encryption system. Reaching the $1 million mark would allow them to purchase their own telecommunications licence, which would enable them to issue numbers directly to customers, and to market their product aggressively within the sector. Given that nothing like this currently exists, it’s a very promising proposition. It’s also a major new use case for the Waves platform, bringing transaction volumes and publicity at a great time, when things are really starting to take off.

To participate in the EncryptoTel crowdsale, register at EncryptoTel.icotech.me. If you have any questions, ask us on the Waves platform Slack or EncryptoTel Slack, or our bitcointalk thread. For more information, visit www.EncryptoTel.com.
Better visualizing tensors thanks to cities
By: Pierre-Louis Bescond
Tags: Arrays, Towards Data Science, Numpy, Data Science, Data Processing

The sky is the limit!

Depending on the complexity of the dataset you need to deal with (for example, the time dimension can be integrated and add complexity), you can play with the different scales of a city to help you mentally visualize the data you are manipulating:

Floors

Houses/Buildings

Streets

Neighborhoods

Cities

etc.

Let’s conclude with a simple example for the ones not familiar with arrays: you have two single-colored pictures in the form of 5 x 5 arrays (5 pixels x 5 pixels x 1 color layer):

array_1 = np.random.randint(1,10,(3,3))

array_2 = np.random.randint(1,10,(3,3)) print("array_1:

",array_1,"

")

print("array_2:

",array_2) array_1:

[[7 4 2]

[7 4 6]

[8 6 3]] array_2:

[[1 8 5]

[7 4 5]

[5 4 8]]

And you are not too sure of how to merge them into one array: “Should I put the new axis of the array at the beginning or at the end?”

If you consider these two arrays as single-storey houses, you need to merge them into one street (one street being a bigger scale than houses), leading us to a (2,5,5) shape.

array_3 = np.zeros((2,3,3)) #Street creation for 2 houses

array_3[0] = array_1 #First location for array_1

array_3[1] = array_2 #Second location for array_2

print(array_3) [[[7 4 2]

[7 4 6]

[8 6 3]]

[[1 8 5]

[7 4 5]

[5 4 8]]]

That’s all folks! I hope this tip will help you better navigate in tensors and arrays in the future!
Dawn Finds Dwarf Planet Ceres is a Water-Rich World
By: James Maynard
Tags: NASA, Space, Astronomy, Science, Ceres

Facula Faculae… Facula Faculae…

The Dawn Spacecraft seen in orbit around Ceres. Image credit: The Cosmic Companion / Created in NASA’s Eyes Visualization.

When Dawn arrived in 2015, Ceres became the first dwarf planet to be visited by a spacecraft. As it approached, Dawn discovered two bright white areas, named Cerealia Facula and Vinalia Faculae.

In addition to these regions, Occator Crater on Ceres was found to be home to conical hills, similar to small mountains of ice called pingos found in Arctic regions of Earth. Similar structures have also been spotted on Mars, but this recent finding marks the first time they have been seen on a dwarf planet.

Researchers found the density of Ceres becomes greater toward its center, suggesting salt and mud are settling into the center of this diminutive world.

By the time Dawn ended its mission in October 2018, the observatory had seen Ceres from heights as low as 35 kilometers (22 miles) above the surface. These images revealed details never before seen in the distinctive shiny patches found on the dwarf planet.

“Scientists had figured out that the bright areas were deposits made mostly of sodium carbonate — a compound of sodium, carbon, and oxygen. They likely came from liquid that percolated up to the surface and evaporated, leaving behind a highly reflective salt crust. But what they hadn’t yet determined was where that liquid came from,” NASA officials describe.

A flight over the dwarf planet Ceres. Video credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Analysis of data revealed the sodium carbonate — commonly known as soda ash — was deposited on the surface of the dwarf planet by salty water lying beneath the frozen surface. Researchers theorize the material percolated up from below before freezing dry on the surface, leaving behind bright white patches. Analysis showed this mighty ocean likely reaches 40 milometers (25 miles) deep — roughly four times greater than the deepest ocean trench on Earth. What’s more, this briny body of water stretches for hundreds of miles under the icy surface of Ceres.

While some icy moons in our solar system take advantage of tidal heating caused when they orbit large planets, Ceres is devoid of any such warmth. Still, these watery deposits resemble, in several ways, water moons throughout the solar system.
8 Miraculous Ways to Bolster Your React Apps
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Web Development, Nodejs, React

1. Love Your Identities

The first way to bolster your React apps is to love your identities.

It’s important to remember that you can wrap variables and functions with React.useMemo as you can grant them the ability to memoize themselves so that React knows they remain identical for future renders.

Otherwise, if you don’t memoize them, their references will disappear from future renders. This might hurt their feelings, so you can show them that you love them and would like to keep them by memoizing them.

If you love them, they’ll love you back by making sure they take care of you and your app by helping to avoid wasteful operations for the situations they’re in.

For example, let’s pretend that we are making a custom Hook that takes in a list of urls as arguments so that it can accumulate them into an array of promises to be resolved with Promise.all .

The results will be inserted to the state and passed to the App component as soon as it's finished. Our promises list will map over the urls array which contains four different URLs to fetch:

Our task was to fetch data from these four links, so, ideally, only four requests should be sent out.

But, if we take a look at the network tab inside Chrome, the truth is that it sent out eight requests.

This is because the urls argument does not retain the same identity as previously because, when App re-renders, it's instantiating a new array every time, so React treats it as a changed value.

Computer programs sometimes think they can outsmart us and get away with this lousy behavior.

To fix this, we can use React.useMemo so that the array of promises doesn't recompute itself on every render as long as the array containing the URLs does not change.

Let’s refactor our code to apply this concept:

If we run this now, it will still send eight requests. That’s because, although we memoized the urls array, we also need to memoize the promises variables inside our Hook because it also instantiates itself whenever the Hook runs:

Our code should now only send four requests when we run it.
Medium Publication Stats — Unique Daily Visitors, Views, and Minutes Read
By: Medium Formatting
Tags: Médium, Publication, Statistics, Blogging Guide, Writing Tips

Views

Views represent the total number of views your publication has received on all posts and pages.

This metric is similar to the views metric found on your individual profile. The key difference between the to “Views” metrics is that the publication views metric includes pages.

Featured pages are a major part of many publications, and the number of views of these pages is not captured in the data from your individual Medium profile.

Minutes Read

Minutes Read is the total amount of time spent reading your publication.

Prior to October 2019 (when Medium changed how members of the Partner Program were compensated), Minutes Read was an interesting statistic, but not that useful. Now that Total Member Reading Time is essentially the sole determinant of MPP earnings, this statistic is more important.

Still, this statistic can be misleading since it includes both internal and external traffic sources (meaning both unpaid views and paid member views are counted together).

Unique Daily Visitors

Unique Daily Visitors is the average number of unique daily visitors who have visited your publication. Each visitor is counted once per day, even if they view multiple pages or the same page multiple times.

In my experience, Unique Daily Visitors is the best of the three statistics for gauging the success of your publication over time.

This is primarily due to the fact that this metric essentially controls for repeat readers, and as a result, is a better proxy for your publication’s ability to continually reach new readers.
A paper on how to optimize the role of technology in open and distance learning.
By: Kola A.
Tags: Elearning, Tec, Education, Nigeria, Africa

I have been asked to speak about the deployment of appropriate ICT components in Open and Distance Learning (ODL).

So to start with, and speaking from the perspective of someone who is both an entrepreneur and investor in ICT enabled businesses, I will first point out some personal encounters with Open and Distance Learning; and then we shall focus on some key learnings; and then we shall further explore some next steps we might take as a country to strengthen higher education through ODL- making it attractive to the students, investors and all other stakeholders.

Years ago, I was fortunate to start a company called Emerging Platforms that later went on to build Nigeria’s largest educational learning platform — supporting over 150,000 students within a really short time. While we were still engaged, we made the required capital investment and then our fantastic team (of mostly young Nigerian’s) went on to train and on-board 100’s of tutors. We supported lecturers to produce and publish thousands of hours of rich audio visual materials; then set up a user support center with round the clock access. Very quietly, we rolled out a truly interactive virtual learning environment called NOUN iLearn!

This, by far has been one of the most rewarding career highlights for me, and we remain grateful to the National Open University of Nigeria and the National University Commision for the opportunity to serve at that time.

There are media reports that last year the 1.8 million candidates who registered for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) jostled for about 850,000 admission spaces (this number was far worse six years ago). And so it is quite clear that Open and Distance Learning must play a very important role in Nigeria’s education mix. Leveraging ICT presents an opportunity to expand borders, improve quality and maintain standards.

Today, across the length and breadth of Nigeria, universities like, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, University of Nigeria Nsukka and University of Ibadan to name a few are leveraging ODL to expand and enrich conventional higher education in classrooms. With the robust support of the regulator — the National University Commission, this very positive trend is catching on and in no little way is changing the face of education in Nigeria. This is remarkable, and we are all grateful to the National University Commission for its leadership in this regard.
A New Visualization IDE for Machine Learning
Tags: Developer Tools, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Data Visualization, Data Science

Upgrade your ML workflow from tinkering with matplotlib to automatically generating interactive charts straight from your ML training script. I’ll show you how to:

Log custom charts with just 3 lines of code Play with the code that generates the visualization Save custom presets to use from your script

Log charts in 2 minutes

In your Python script, specify a table of data to visualize. The columns can be anything you like, and you’ll use them later in the chart to specify the different features. For example, for a scatter plot you would want to specify an x and y axis, as well as an optional color axis.

To follow this tutorial, open this Google Colab and run the cells. Re-run the script multiple times to get data you can compare across runs in the dashboard.

Play with the notebook →
Civis Joins Amicus Briefs In Support of Constructive, Empathetic Immigration Policies
By: Civis Analytics
Tags: Journal, Immigration, DACA

Civis Joins Amicus Briefs In Support of Constructive, Empathetic Immigration Policies

By Rich Lee

We care a lot about immigration policy at Civis; many of us are immigrants or have partners, parents, friends, or neighbors who came here to make America their home. Living and working with people from all walks of life is a fundamental part of the American experience, and the unique perspectives and traditions they bring enrich our lives and the lives of those around us.

To better understand the extent to which immigration plays a role in the lives of Civis staff, we surveyed our team and here’s what we found:

About two-thirds of respondents reported that they or someone in their family was born in another country and immigrated to the US:

And eighty-two percent of respondents reported that they interact daily with someone who immigrated to the US:

Not to mention, immigrants are massive contributors in our fast-growing field of analytics and data science: Individuals such as Daphne Koller, Andrej Karpathy, Fei Fei Li, Andrew Ng, Robert Tibshirani, Sebastian Thrun, Sergey Brin, and Jerry Yang continue to provide leadership and insight that benefits all Americans and our economy.

We have a personal stake in defending and encouraging practical immigration policies, and the significance of immigration in nearly all of our work and personal lives is why Civis signed onto an amicus curiae (“friend-of-the-court”) brief with 160 other leading companies earlier this year opposing the discriminatory and divisive travel ban. It’s also why we recently signed on to another amicus brief with 107 other companies opposing the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program

Some notable facts from the brief:

Over 90% of Dreamers are employed and earn wages commensurate with their skill levels.¹ Dreamers are entrepreneurs: in one survey of Dreamers, 8% of respondents 25 years and older reported starting their own business — considerably more than the 3.1% for all Americans.² A large percentage of Dreamers are pursuing, or have completed, college degrees — including STEM degrees.³

Dreamers make significant contributions to our society, and as the brief notes, DACA allows them to continue their work without constantly looking over their shoulders: “the intangible benefits of the DACA program are undeniable and substantial: nearly 800,000 young people (Dreamers) who were brought to this country as children and know only this country as home may for the first time live in America and participate fully in all aspects of our society without the constant and crippling fear of deportation.”

Civis strongly supports the amicus brief opposing the rescission of DACA; for us, constructive, empathetic immigration policies positively affect the lives of all Americans. We ask you to add your voice (here or here) in support of such policies, and we heartily encourage those hearing the cases to recognize and safeguard these policies that make our country so innovative, optimistic, and welcoming.

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Blockchain-less technologies — Too good to be true?
By: Yacine Achiakh
Tags: Directed Acyclic Graph, Iota, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Knowledge

1. What DAG fuck?

Let’s start with what it’s NOT. A DAG, is not:

However, a DAG is:

Directed: All links (vertices) between different nodes (edges) of the graph have a direction (eg: going from one node to another and not the other way around).

All links (vertices) between different nodes (edges) of the graph have a direction (eg: going from one node to another and not the other way around). Acyclic: One node cannot reference itself through any path

One node cannot reference itself through any path Graph: A collection of edges (nodes) and vertices (link between the nodes)

As we can see, the Graph in the Figure 2 is:

Not Acyclic: A can reference itself by going through B, C, D, E, F vertices

A can reference itself by going through B, C, D, E, F vertices Not Directed: D & E are linked by a bidirectional vertex

2. Blockchain vs DAG: Is DAG really the future?

One obvious advantage of DAG vs blockchain is that at any point of time a DAG can have an infinite number of tips (nodes at the very limit of the graph that are not yet referenced by other nodes), if we assume these nodes are transactions, it means an infinite number of transactions can be added to the graph at any point of time and can therefore be validated simultaneously if the network is large enough.

In contrast, a blockchain only has one tip at any point of time which is the latest block that has been validated and therefore a blockchain scalability is tied to the number of blocks that can be added per second and the number of transactions a given block can contain.

Recap of Blockchain vs DAG strengths & weaknesses:
The Mystery of the Phantom Handprint
By: Nicole Henley
Tags: Paranormal, Unsolved Mysteries, History, Supernatural, Chicago

As tragic an event as that was, the story did not end there. Supposedly, the day after the fire, one of the crew members at Engine Company #107 noticed a peculiar sight. In the middle of the half-washed window that Leavy never got to finish cleaning was a handprint. Even stranger was that all subsequent attempts at removing the handprint failed. As the story goes, from that point onward, no one could clean the mysterious handprint off. Not with soap. Not with water. Not with ammonia. Or with acid. Even razor blades were said to fail. Now running out of options, the Pittsburg Glass Company was called in to assess the puzzling sight, but that did not work either.

Eventually, the handprint was no more when the window it was on was broken by a newsboy throwing a paper through it. While most accounts say, this happened in 1946, at least one version has said this took place in mid-April 1944, which would have otherwise marked 20 years since Leavy’s passing. That said, that last account could be considered a mere rumor.

Before the fire at Curran Hall, Francis Leavy’s colleagues described him as a pleasant man who always had a smile and was happy to lend a helping hand. However, his demeanor supposedly changed the day of the fire, and he allegedly did not crack a smile or look or talk to anyone. After several minutes, he was said to have announced a strange, foreboding feeling. It was at that moment that the company got the call.

The fire that day ultimately left eight dead, including a civilian who passed away while trying to help the trapped firefighters, and left more than twenty others injured. A ninth firefighter reportedly died eight days after the fact. In the aftermath of the blaze, six of the firemen lost that day came from Engine #12. In contrast, another crew from Engine #5 lost two of their crew members, and finally, Engine #107 lost Leavy.

With everything said and done, a squad of firefighters not only lost one of their own, but his death left behind a puzzling mystery. The mysterious handprint supposedly left by their fallen comrade also left behind a whole slew of questions that would ultimately never get answers.
Adventure awaits
By: Anja Vidrih
Tags: Travel, Experience, Blockchain, Review, Adventure

What a dreadful scenario, right? Just imagine how different things could go if you would only be lucky enough to choose the right restaurant on your first try. Or if you could make your own luck by choosing a restaurant on a travel app which is tracking the world of tourism in real time with up to date high quality reviews, where you could instantly gather a taste of an experience you are about to have. Well, we are here to give you exactly that — with the launch of our travel review platform Futourist, you will always instantly be provided with verified recommendations for nearby places to eat or things to do, all equipped with trustworthy recent photos and videos of costumers’ experiences to ensure you the quickest and the most accurate decision process possible. For you to easily imagine how Futourist works, let’s go over the before mentioned story once more, but this time with the Futourist app set and ready on your phone.

After Futourist: The world is your oyster

So, as we were saying, you are in a foreign city, feeling extremely hungry and having no clue whatsoever as to which restaurant is the best for your food and budget preferences. As you open up the Futourist app, you suddenly breathe a sigh of relief as you see a big “food” category button. You eagerly click on it. A number of incredible looking places in your near distance pop up. As you watch the latest video reviews from a budget friendly 5-star rated burger joint just around the corner, your mouth starts to water. You take this as the final sign that this is the right place to visit. Just a few minutes later, you are already posting a video review on Futourist of you taking a bite into your burger. Your satisfied grin speaks for itself. As if your day couldn’t get any better, just a little later, you receive a reward for your posted review. The world is yours to conquer.

As you watch the latest video reviews from a budget friendly 5-star rated burger joint just around the corner, your mouth starts to water.

Whether feeling like mixing things up in your home town or exploring a completely unknown city for the first time, Futourist is here to help you find the perfect place for your wants and needs at any given moment. Looking for the closest burger joint? The best bar in the area? A fun and unique way to spend your afternoon? With Futourist, all your desired experiences are always just one click away. Let the good times roll!

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What is WAX?
By: Meredith Davis
Tags: Crypto, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Wax, Cryptocurrency Investment

WAX (which stands for Worldwide Asset eXchange) is where cryptocurrency and blockchain technology meet online gaming. To many, online gaming seems like a niche market, but in the last year, over 400 million gamers purchased $50 billion in virtual items worldwide. The fragmented nature of the marketplace meant that scams, lost or stolen items and exorbitant transaction fees were rampant. That’s a big problem in such a huge industry.

Like Amazon.com did for goods, WAX has created an online virtual asset repository containing a real-time catalogue of all in-game items available for sale worldwide. The platform and use of blockchain technology solves problems like fraud, settlement execution and user interface, product and seller reviews, standardized product catalogues, and supply and demand matching.

There’s lots of digital supply and demand out there, and the WAX ecosystem provides the centralized marketplace this industry needs. And bonus: digital products don’t create a cache of cardboard boxes in your garage large enough to pack up a small country.

WAX tokens are utility tokens that allow online video game players to collect, buy and sell in-game items. The decentralized platform runs on smart contracts and a Guild system for verification, providing instant payments, security and trust services.