fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Monochrome Days
By: Stephen M. Tomic
Tags: Flash Fiction, Work, Mental Health, Fiction, Short Story

The tired man felt exhausted. He worked long and difficult hours and the soles of his feet hurt. A vague sense of dissatisfaction ate away at him, as if his daily efforts were in vain. He thought often of the tale of Sisyphus, that poor soul doomed to roll the same damn rock up a hill for eternity. His story didn’t even have the good decency to have an ending. The monotony of life stretched on and on indefinitely. Not even the mirage of a holiday did much to soothe his parched soul. The salve of love and friendship had dried up long ago.

The tired man came home late in the evening feeling much too worn out to cook a proper meal. The cupboards were sad and empty and covered with a layer of dust. Grease-soaked pizza boxes were stacked on the kitchen table. Fruit flies flew above the remains of their departed kin, fated soon to join them. The bananas were no longer yellow. Squirming larvae slipped down the sides of the overflowing trash can. The disgust the tired man felt at his own situation nearly surmounted his aching need to sit down and relax.

The tired man slipped off his shoes and stripped down to his underwear. He plopped down onto the recliner and turned on the TV. The pizza he had ordered was delivered and he guiltily ate all of it. Afterwards, he added the empty box to the stack on the kitchen table. He could still remember a time when he had the energy to actually do things worth doing, to engage in a life worth living. As he sat there watching millions of red, green, and blue pixels rearrange themselves into recognizable shapes, his heavy eyelids slowly closed the curtains on his monochrome day.

The tired man awoke in the middle of the night feeling parched. Netflix asked him if he still wanted to continue. It seemed at that absurd hour to be the most profound of existential questions. He went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water from the tap, downed it in one shot, then made his way to an unmade bed.

When the alarm rang a few hours later, he waved a hand across his bleary eyes and dragged himself to the shower. He finished brushing his teeth before realizing he had forgotten to eat breakfast. But then he recalled the state of the bananas and shrugged. After dressing, the tired man sat there leaning forward in his recliner, socks in hand, motionless and unthinking, waiting for the last possible moment before he would have to leave for work in order to start another long day.
Foundation
Tags: Bazaar Of The Bizarre, Bboy, Poetry, Music, James Brown

Sign up for Wandering Weird Worlds of Wonder

By The Bazaar of the Bizarre

It is the fantastic and the bizarre that hold the imagination captive by captivating the soul. Take a look
Where Can I Find The Words?
By: Samantha Lazar
Tags: Poetry, Sky Collection, Writing, Writers, Poets

Where Can I Find The Words?

Sky Collection — Poem 10

Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

I figured out words would fall on me

like heavy blankets

thesaurus sounds extinct

but that was some endangered assumption

me, as writer

searching the low horizon clouds

for how to come home

I trusted language to lead me

towards the rare earths

with more moons

than we have around here

I searched the eyes of poets

but they were also searching

as far as they could run

and here I am with just one

tool the same as yours and hers

I believed in vocabulary

and I still long for

linguistic determination
Think Like A Villain.
By: Nicole Sudjono
Tags: Life, Entrepreneurship, Business, Education, Life Lessons

Photo from Unsplash.

As we grow older, we tend to realize that we are drawn more to the villains than the protagonists. Joker, Loki, Darth Vader, etc, they are admired by a lot of fans. Darth Vader is a great example of this, the mascot of the Star Wars Universe. I am a fan of him, so what? It doesn’t make me a bad guy.

There is something in him that we are drawn to, and it’s their determination to see change.

Most movie protagonists lack this. They were mostly introduced first as happy-go-lucky until they were forced to experience bad things. The villains, however, took a different approach. They want to see their dreams come true, so they are determined to make it happen. We are drawn to be people who are determined, why?

Change isn’t easy.

There is no way that this is easy, if it were, everyone would do it. It takes a lot of time and effort to see change, it’s a whole lot of going back to scratches again and starts everything from the beginning.

Businesses find this frustrating, especially when they re-brand their company. They must create and follow another different rule, just as they were comfortable with the ones they used to use, then they must make sure everything is in place as they do trial and error, do a trial and error to see what works and what don’t, taking a lot of time, and a whole lot of reasons why change is a difficult progress.

However, the results will be fruitful. People who endured this long process will reach to the top.

And that’s what the classic villains are known for. They would go through hell to get to where they are, and they would stop at nothing to get there. This is why we are drawn to these people, Darth Vader is the perfect example of determination to see change no matter what.

He wants to save Padme in a different approach, turning against the Jedis because their ways won’t work. Even when he lost his friends, mentors, and limbs, that didn’t stop him to build an empire he wanted. Became the most powerful Sith lord.

See here? Darth Vader is determined, so are the successful people out there. None of them ever said that when they wanted to create a company, they were encouraged by everyone. Just like Anakin, they were denied from the ‘council’ and to create a new empire.

They had to do it with their own effort and see that it happens.

Now you don’t have to be a Sith lord to be successful. You just need their determination. The best example for the protagonist who have this is Tony Stark. I made a discussion of him here:

But so far, the best example is to, think like a villain. They are the ones who put the trouble first because they want to see change, that’s why we are drawn to them.

“When I left you I was but the learner. Now I AM the Master.”- Darth Vader, Star Wars.

See? We can’t hate him after seeing how he is now.

So…embrace change…think like a villain.

I hope it helps!!
We’re going through strange times.
By: Ramona Grigg
Tags: Politics, Covid 19, Writing, Newsletter, Activism

Photo by Jules Bss on Unsplash

An unprecedented pandemic, racial and social upheaval, schools and businesses closed, unemployment at astonishing, terrifying rates — we’re witnessing it all, and here at Indelible Ink our writers are on it.

Indelible Ink started out as a creative writing publication with stories that always resonate but don’t necessarily call us to action. But I’m an armchair activist myself so it should be no surprise that I would want more stories now about how we’re all being affected by the turmoil. Our writers are pros at this kind of thing and they didn’t disappoint.

Along the way, they’re telling other stories and we need that respite, too. Stories that charm us or surprise us or make us think. Stories that stay with us.

Here are a few recent stories:

Erin Hall writes about how a single song is helping to heal in COVID-bombarded hospitals in Detroit.

Aabye-Gayle F. sees that racism is easy. How prejudice has poisoned our country.

In In the year Larry Kramer Kissed Me, Matthew Riutta pays tribute to the gay playwright who eased his own fears and gave him courage.

Lourdes Follins looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting homeless kids.

Anangsha Alammyan takes us to India as she writes essays in two parts about the shame of menstruation in her native country.

I look at the politics of emotion — and how those who play on it want it that way.

And Jessica Carney takes a lighter look at cooking during Covid.

There are many, many more wonderful stories on our pages. I urge you to spend a little time with us and read what we have to offer.

I’ll be sending this newsletter every Friday with all new stories. We need community now, a sharing of our distinct voices, and that’s what we at Indelible Ink are trying to do here. I hope you’ll sign up for our newsletter and come along with us each week as we witness and explore and create indelible pictures of life as we know it and live it.

*Writers, if you’re interested in writing at Indelible Ink, please see our Submission Guidelines. We welcome more voices.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.

As ever, Ramona
Chaucer and Hank Williams Jr
By: Terry Barr
Tags: Marriage, Friendship, Short Story, Music, Stories

Chaucer and Hank Williams Jr

The one love they have in common

Photo by Pablò on Unsplash

As my wife and I were driving through the lonely mountain back roads of Bath County, VA, heading toward my daughter’s house, David Allen Coe’s “You Never Even Call Me By My Name” rippled through our speakers, courtesy of “Willie’s Road House.”

“Every time I hear that song it reminds me of a letter a girl wrote to me while we were in college,” I said. “She wasn’t a girlfriend yet, though I had hoped she would be soon. I was living in DC, and she was back at our school, dating someone else.”

“So what happened?” my wife asked.

“She was a musician, and much of her letter spoke of music and this music store she found where she was in “Harriet heaven” playing banjos and guitars and mandolins.”

“Harriet heaven?”

“Yeah, that was her name. Anyway, she didn’t say too much about “us,” only wondering when I might be coming back and what I might be doing in the summer. She signed the letter, and then at the very bottom, wrote this line:

‘So I’ll hang around as long as you will let me…you don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’. But you never even call me by my name.’

I didn’t know where that line came from back then, in 1977, because I didn’t listen much to country or bluegrass music like she did. A year later, I discovered it was by David Allen Coe, whom I also discovered wrote the radio hit ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ for Johnny Paycheck.”

“You got a lot of information fast,” my wife said, “But what happened to the girl?”

“Somehow, after I returned from DC, she slipped away. I thought she liked me, and I remember once when we sat together on the curb by the street in front of Montevallo’s only movie theater. She started telling me that something wasn’t right. I thought we were about to be together, but it didn’t happen.”

“It sounds to me like she wanted it to, but you were too passive. But it turned out for the best, right?”

“Definitely.”

“It’s a good thing you weren’t passive with me!”

I reached over to caress her leg then.

A very good thing.
Compressing Puppy Image Using Rank-K Approximation
By: Jenn Greene
Tags: Machine Learning, Algorithms, Python, Programming

Wait a Second. What Do We Mean by Compression?

Before digging into the algorithm and math, let’s get an intuition for the problem we are solving. What does it mean to compress a matrix? Or in this case, what does it mean to compress an image?

The key idea of approximation is to find a matrix/image that is “similar” to the original matrix/image and takes up less space. (We’ll define “similar” later on. For now, we just need an intuition.)

Let’s start by imagining that we have a 500 x 500 gray image. In this case, we need to store at least 250,000 data points in order to display the image.

Here is the question: If a compressed image should take up less storage, does that mean we will have to shrink the width and height of the original image to get to a compressed image? If we shrink the width and height, it’s not really compression, is it? That’s image cropping. Hence, is it possible to store fewer data points and still keep the same image size (500 x 500 in this case)?

This is where it gets mindboggling. If we still want the compressed image to be 500 x 500, that means we still need 250,000 data points for display. How do we store less than 250,000 data points, but still end up with 250,000 data points in the end? It sounds contradictory!

The final compressed image still has the same number of pixels as the original image.

Toy Scenario

Let’s think of a toy scenario that would make matrix compression easy.

For simplicity, let’s say we have a 3 x 3 image matrix M .

At first glance, it seems as if we have no choice but to store a total of nine data points. Yet there is something special about this matrix that only requires a total of six data points for storage. Do you see it? (Don’t scroll down for the solution yet.)

If we look at the three column vectors of M, we realize that they are linearly dependent on each other. In other others, the column vectors are multiples of each other.

This means we can decomposite the matrix M into one column vector multiplying three scalar multiples:

In this case, an image that would originally take up nine data points now only takes up six data points. All we have to do is to perform matrix multiplication on these two vectors and we can get the original nine data points. Hooray, compression at work!

If only all images had similar properties as above…
A New Experience for Spotify for iPad
By: Spotify Design
Tags: Product Design, Spotify, Design, iOS, iPad

The learnings gave us a better understanding and an area to focus on. At Spotify, we follow the approach to build, test, and iterate — which helps us prioritize areas and help define an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). After a discovery workshop, the team agreed to three principles as a guiding rule throughout the project:

Establish a baseline: For a better tablet experience within our technical constraints.

Design for the form factor: Rearrange what we have today and present components in a way that makes sense to the form factor.

Feasibility: A feasible solution to implement the change.

An experience for everyone

We at Spotify want billions of fans to enjoy and be inspired by creators and their content; that’s why designing an inclusive and accessible experience is so essential to us. We take this mission seriously at Spotify, that’s why we paired up with our inhouse accessibility guild to receive support and consultancy. They helped us to prioritize and implement improvements for both design and technical accessibility. Adaptivity and design for multi-orientation was, therefore, the right decision.

Following standards and looking beyond

First, we got familiar with the landscape of all iPad device models to ensure a framework that works for adaptivity. Working closely with engineers, we followed the Apple size classes standard on iOS. In principle, the system defines two size classes, regular and compact, which describe the height and width of the view. Using these size classes helped us not only to follow platform standards but also to design an adaptable interface that provides a more enjoyable experience in any situation.

To afford a better experience on the tablet device, we looked outside of our field of expertise and studied how book and magazine designers work. Due to its larger screen size and form factor, the user needs are much more similar. A grid system and composition play an essential role in providing a fluent rhythm to the reader. The appropriate line length for sentences helps readers keep focus and digest content naturally. So we translated this guidance to the digital environment and readjusted the readable content guide property to our content view.
About Me — Don Simkovich. Writing was my way of heading into the…
By: Don Simkovich
Tags: Authors, Writing, About Me, Introduction, Writer

I was in early grade school when the NBC Nightly News splashed videos and images of the Vietnam War across the television screen. My parents were typically busy upstairs while I watched in our basement’s family room.

What intrigued me was how journalists could cover fights in the jungle and even American POWs being marched through the streets of Hanoi. A desire to help struck me along with marveling over this unusual role of relaying information.

My mother showed me another way of being in the action as a reporter. She wrote for our town’s newspaper and we were eating in a local diner when the fire alarm went off at the volunteer fire station.

We packed up our food, she hurriedly paid the bill and off we went behind the fire truck, watching the men battle a small brush fire.

News wasn’t the only outlet that captured my attention. Broadcasting interested me, especially sportscasting.

In 1970s Pittsburgh, I was treated to the colorful play by play of Bob Prince with Pirates baseball and Myron Cope with Steeler football, among others.

Watergate hit when I was moving from fifth grade into sixth and that marked my first attempt at writing a news story on a piece of notebook paper, scribbling down the events as I saw them.

I had radio internships in Pittsburgh during university and then my first job was in radio broadcasting in State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State. My faith was a large part of my life and belief system to the point that I left my coveted position and traveled to Pasadena, California where I wrote for a small magazine with a Christian perspective on cultures around the world.

That turned into a radio spot series produced with a co-worker and led to a 22 year run of one minute daily spots and two-minute to three-minute holiday features that aired on over 700 nonprofit stations across the U.S.

I got married and my wife and I adopted our children out of foster care and I transitioned into a role with a grassroots nonprofit to recruit and serve foster and adoptive families in Los Angeles County and Southern California.

For the past few years, I’ve been writing blogs and books for professionals and growing businesses while co-authoring the Detective Tom Stone crime-thriller series.

We now have five novels on the market and a few short stories.

On Medium, you can find me at:

Hey, Don: The Days of Don Simkovich

So Cal Live Work Play

Stone Cold Crime Stories

I’ve also written many articles covering everything from writing, crime and marketing to highlights as an adoptive dad. My favorites include:
How To Stay Together
By: David Heatley
Tags: Relationships, Advice, Marriage, Psychotherapy, Psychology

Sign up for Let's Watch Stuff

By Humungus

Humungus' newsletter is pretty self-explanatory. Sign-up, and get funny/thoughtful/spicy essays about pop culture sent directly to your inbox. Take a look
Data Mining Friends for Fun & Profit*
By: Daniel Mcnichol
Tags: Machine Learning, Electronic Music, Python, NLP, Data Science

Web Scraping with Python, Selenium & Beautiful Soup

(Note: This section is indebted to this Udemy course I idly completed a few months back)

As a tribute to aforementioned friend on their birthday, I thought I’d mine some of their public internet activity & then… do stuff with it.

So first things first, I fired up the following python libraries:

To avoid getting sued into oblivion, code examples use a hypothetical social network, let’s call it … faceplace.com. (Any resemblance to actual social network behemoths, living or deceased, is purely coincidental. And let’s just pretend the actual faceplace.com isn’t…whatever it actually is).

Some exploration revealed that pretend faceplace.com’s mobile site (m.faceplace.com) was the most amenable to scraping, due to its streamlined layout. Also, all posts in a given year could be isolated via the url structure https://m.faceplace.com/daniels_friend/year/2017/ .

But only a limited number of posts load at first, then more are revealed when the user scrolls to the bottom of the current page. For this reason (& some pesky login requirements) we can’t simply scrape the page source. Instead we have to simulate a browser & user actions before collecting the on-page code. I won’t explain those steps in detail, but the aforementioned Udemy course does if interested.

It ends up looking like this:

…which will give you a bunch of markup nonsense that starts like:

Somewhere in all that mess will be things like:

As you might notice, the only human language of interest takes place between the <p></p> tags, so I’d like to extract just those bits, discard the rest & move on with my life. Beautiful Soup makes this trivial, & the arcane sorcery known as regular expressions allows us to remove the enclosing tags & any (most) remaining html:

this left some stray html & long hashes in the data for some reason, but was adequate for my weird purposes so I didn’t attempt to improve

I then had a set of plain text posts from my friend’s timeline.

Time to do stuff.
I Wish I’d Known My Mother Couldn’t Be Trusted When I Was Young
By: Shannon Ashley
Tags: Family, Life, Mental Health, Life Lessons, Parenting

My days are spent writing and caring for my nearly 5-year-old. It’s a little bit awkward lately because my mother has been living in our living room since the end of November.

Close quarters doesn’t really begin to describe it. It’s more than that.

My mother spends her days sitting in a folding chair, staring at her tablet, and playing some random tablet game. My mother calls me lucky for being a single mom supporting herself. For building a better life. But I don't waste my hours playing games. She insists these games help sharpen her brain, but whenever she wanders through YouTube, I have to remind her not to believe every video she sees.

Just like I have to fact check the articles she tells me she’s read and clearly taken for news.

The other night, my mother wanted me to watch a video on Youtube depicting a woman flipping out in a bookstore. My mom thought it was a real event caught on camera.

I struggled with the best way to tell her that it was fake. Great entertainment, but nothing real.

“How did somebody know to film her?” I asked. “If it wasn’t a setup, they wouldn’t have known this customer was going to turn out to be volatile.”

“That’s what people do today,” my mother spoke as if she had insider information.

“Do what?”

“They tape strangers. Society is terrible today.”

I couldn’t help but sigh before changing my approach. “Well, the thing is… this is posted by a channel named Underground Theater. And the writer she’s talking about is a Stephen King character. Not a real writer. This is a skit.”

I pause. It’s awkward because I don’t want to embarrass my mother. I don’t want her to get upset with me and complain that she can’t talk to me about anything.

Thankfully, she doesn’t get upset this time. Instead, she claims that the more she watched the video, the more she thought it was fake.

Okay, sure.
The 10 Browser Extensions I Can’t Live Without
By: Omar Sharaki
Tags: Programming, Google Chrome, Browsers, JavaScript, Productivity

A suspended tab

How many tabs do you have open on your browser right now? It’s OK, I won’t judge. We all succumb to Infinite Tab Syndrome every now and then.

The only problem is that as the number of open tabs mounts, so too does the amount of memory the browser hogs, leading to a potentially slower experience. Enter The Great Suspender. This extension will periodically — you guessed it — suspend inactive tabs so they no longer consume memory.

It also notices which tabs are playing media and excludes them from being suspended — an essential feature if you’re listening to music in one tab while working in another. What’s more, you can also manually exclude tabs.

Now you can open as many tabs as you like without feeling guilty!

Cost: Free

Supported browsers: Chrome

*UPDATE: Recent unknown changes to the extension have raised concerns of potentially malicious behavior. Until it’s known what exactly these changes do, it’s advisable to disable or uninstall it.
How to Be a Responsive Leader for Your Team
By: Jessica Donahue
Tags: Self Improvement, Leadership, Business, Work, Entrepreneurship

I can still remember one particular afternoon early in my career when I was interrupted by an unexpected visit from a leader I supported.

“I want her gone today,” he said.

One of his managers had just had an unprofessional outburst directed at her team and her boss had had enough. He stood in the doorway to my office, clearly angry and growing impatient. He wanted her fired, and he wanted it done immediately.

He was reacting. And, like falling dominoes, his reaction set off mine. Having taken on his frustrations with this employee as my own, I made a bee-line for my boss’ office. “So, can we just terminate her?” I implored.

Luckily for me, I worked for a responsive leader at the time.

Unlike reactive leaders, who jump straight into fight-or-flight mode when presented with a problem, responsive leaders take the time to calmly digest the situation at hand before making their next move.

One issue with reactive leadership is that simply reacting to a problem doesn’t leave you room to seek understanding. And you can’t effectively solve a problem that you don’t have a complete understanding of.

Below are a few ways to slow down, create space for understanding, and be a more responsive leader for your team.
CALL FOR TEAMS AND PROPOSALS: The GovLab, AFD, and Expertise France Launch New #Data4COVID19 Africa Challenge
By: The Govlab
Tags: Data, Development, Covid 19, Data Responsibility, Data Collaborative

CALL FOR TEAMS AND PROPOSALS: The GovLab, AFD, and Expertise France Launch New #Data4COVID19 Africa Challenge The GovLab Follow Dec 15 · 2 min read

From now through February 5, 2021, l’Agence française de développement (AFD), together with Expertise France and The GovLab, is soliciting innovative proposals (re)using data in a collaborative and responsible way to provide actionable intelligence for decision-makers and people to respond to COVID-19 and future pandemic challenges across Africa.

CONTEXT: The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact, killing over 1,600,000 people around the world and leading to global economic disruptions. Though the effects on countries like the United States and France has been well-observed, considerably less attention has been given to the African continent. Early estimates suggest COVID-19 will result in a 1.4% decline in GDP across the continent, with smaller countries facing significant contractions. An estimated 250 million primary and secondary children are out of school due to disease control measures.

FOCUS: To help local decision-makers address these and other effects, the French Development Agency (AFD), together with The GovLab and Expertise France, is seeking ideas and proposals that (re)use data to provide actionable insight on COVID-19 in Africa. Focusing on the three domains of public health, social, and economic issues, the challenge aims to spur data collaboratives that can provide actionable intelligence for decision-makers and people to respond to COVID-19 and future pandemic challenges across Africa. The challenge looks specifically for proposals that make use of alternative, non-statistical data and involves participants operating in Francophone Africa.

HOW TO APPLY: Applications are open today through February 5, 2021. Successful applicants will receive up to EUR 100,000 in funding to pursue their proposal. We encourage interested applicants to review the full requirements and apply at the challenge’s dedicated website: https://datachallenge.africa/.
All You Need To Know About CSS-in-JS
By: Indrek Lasn
Tags: CSS, Programming, React, Web Development, JavaScript

You’ve probably heard terms like CSS-in-JS, Styled Components, Radium, and Aphrodite, and you’re left there thinking, “Why is this relevant to me? I’m perfectly happy with CSS-in-CSS (CSS in .css).”

I’m here to shine some light on why this is relevant, and hopefully, we will at least understand the concept, and understand why it’s relevant. With that said, please feel free to use CSS-in-CSS. You are not obligated to use CSS-in-JS. Whatever works best for you and makes you happy is hands down the best solution, always!

CSS-in-JS is a delicate and controversial topic. I’m advocating having an open mind, and considering if this makes sense to you. Ask yourself, “Will it improve my workflow?” In the end, the only thing that matters is to use tools that make you happier and more productive.

I’ve always felt awkward having to maintain a huge folder of stylesheets. I would like to try different approaches. I’ve seen many people asking if there are new styling ideas. CSS-in-JS is, so far, the best concept.

Let’s give CSS-in-JS a shot.
BIG Change at The POM — Please Read
By: Christina M. Ward
Tags: Poetry, The Pom, Submission, Newsletter, Writing

BIG Change at The POM — Please Read

We have new submissions guidelines and more news!

Author’s screenshot

This newsletter pertains to:

ANYONE who writes for The POM

ANYONE who WANTS to write for The POM

Samantha Lazar and I have been hard at work behind the scenes to make sure The POM runs smoothly. We are a growing family and it is too hard to keep reminding people not to overstep editorial boundaries — people keep approving articles and poems that are not their own. The easiest solution is to centralize and move all non-editors that have editorial status over to writer-only status. If you HAD editorial status and you had submitted a draft in the last few days, but for some reason had not published (was leaving it to the editors to do) then you must check to be sure your draft is still pending for The POM. Look in your draft and it should say at the top if it is submitted.)

From this point forward, our editorial staff — that means myself and Samantha — must approve all posts.

We have all new submissions guidelines which all writers for The POM are expected to read.

Thank you all for making this a GREAT space for poetry!

Poetically yours,

Christina and Samantha
Start to See Things Clearly Through Basic Statistics
By: Lucas Nunes Fernandes
Tags: Books, Data Science, Statistics, Data Analysis, Recommendations

Ceteris paribus

This is an expression from Latin, which means “other things being equal”.

All the examples based on the hypothesis test relies on conducting “a controlled experiment in which the variable of interest is the only thing that differs between the experimental group and the control group.” Once again, let’s use a book practical example.

In Chapter 1, Charles raised: “Does smoking cigarettes cause cancer?”. What would you say? Yes, right? Me too. However, as further explored, “the process of answering it was not nearly as straightforward as one might think”. Why?

That’s because “smokers and nonsmokers are likely to be different in ways other than their smoking behavior”. Such as? Smokers are likely to have other habits that contribute to the development of cancer later on, such as less exercising, bad food habits, and drinking heavily. Hence, of course, smoking is an important element to be analyzed when your outcome of interest is causes of cancer, but you shouldn’t try to explain the causations of cancer simply in terms of smoking and nonsmoking habits only.

There’s no way of thinking about data and don’t think about COVID-19 nowadays. Of course, it’s straightforward that studying a new epidemic as it evolves and, simultaneously, taking important decisions is a very difficult task for authorities, from all over the world, to do. However, have you tried to think why?

One of the reasons is exactly what we are exploring here. Not only countries themselves, but also specific regions within countries show very different realities between each other, in several aspects. That’s the reason why you probably heard someone on some news vehicle saying that social-health policies should be applied considering the reality of each region. Each region is going to present a specific infection rate, death rate, intensive therapy units (ITUs) occupation rate, population isolation rate, population size, demographic distribution, and lots of other differences. For this reason, authorities' decisions shouldn't be an one-fits-all decision for the entire country, as there’s no ceteris paribus reality.
ILA Medellin 2019
By: Melissa Oliveira Costa
Tags: Ila19, Interaction Latin America, Ixda, Design

The Tarot Cards Of Tech

We hope the Tarot Cards of Tech helped you gaze into the future of your product and consider the impact of what we…
Grafana Relative DateTimes in table views (from SQL)
By: James Read
Tags: Sql, Microservices, Grafana

BEFORE and AFTER: What you will get from this blog post

I had a Grafana dashboard that monitored a group of microservices for their last updated time. If they’ve not updated in the last couple of minutes, that is bad — it probably meant that a service crashed or something like that. Therefore tracking the DateTime of the last update is important, Seeing DateTimes in table widgets isn’t often that noticeable or actionable. Here’s what it looked like;

The original table view of DateTimes pulled directly from a SQL database. Not that noticeable for actionable.

The data source was SQL, with an identifier for the service name, and a DateTime field for the “last updated”. Those DateTimes are accurate, sure, but my objective here is to know when something isn’t updating. Here are the problems I had with a simple DateTime field shown in Grafana;

Nothing stands out, one of those values is a month out of date, but it’s not immediately obvious. Before reading the list, I need to check today’s date… and time!

I tried hunting around in the Table settings in Grafana, but I could not find anything like a “relative” DateTime, or calculation. It took me a little while, but I figured — why am I doing this in the display/view (Grafana), I can do this at the data source level instead and get Grafana to display the result.

Making changes to the Data Source (SQL)

Knowing that [My]SQL is perfectly capable of manipulating dates and times, I changed my query to make use of the timestampdiff function.

This outputs the minutes since each last updated time — much better already!

Making changes to Grafana

The number values now jump off the page! 300475 minutes since the last update. That sounds bad. Let's make it even easier to spot that badness too with some threshold formatting, and most importantly — units that make it human-readable;

Summary

When you’ve made changes to the query, and on Grafana’s table view, this results in something that looks like this;

Oh, that is so much nicer. Relative DateTimes with a table that are humanly readable — much more noticable and actionable.

Notes

Note: I used MySQL, just because that is where the data comes from in my environment. This technique should be possible with most other data sources too. From a quick search, here is a Postgres implementation, and I think the same for MsSQL.

Note: Make sure that the data source SQL query is set to output table and not time series in Grafana. For me, the table widget did not accept a Time Series data source.

Format as “Table” was needed for me to get the table widget working correctly.

Note: If using the SQL method above, the time unit (minute used in this post) from the SQL query obviously needs to match up with the unit used in the Grafana view for the relative times to make sense.
Design from Storytelling to Story-listening
By: Lillian Tong
Tags: Storytelling, Design Research, Research

Why are there more people wearing black in New York City than other cities? Why do many people walk around in circles when they are on the phone? Why are some people’s apartments full of useless things?…

Those small rituals, preferences, habits and gestures all coalesce to tell personal stories and reveal who we really are inside.

Designers are known as storytellers through form, whether it is through graphics, products or garments. They are forms that effectively convey ideas and fulfill market needs.

However, while the challenges designers face today become more and more complex, it is extremely crucial to be able to identify the most pressing pain points before creating more desired solutions. The root of any company, program or organization’s problems can be found in a nurse, a teacher, a customer’s experiences. It really requires designers to not only be storytellers, but more importantly be story-listeners. After all, we do not need just another creation, but a better solution for both the business and customers.

But how?

For us, the answer is designing tailored research tools to engage people and allow them to tell their own stories which might even be neglected by they themselves. Below are a few tools we leveraged in our previous work. These tools and their descriptions are excerpts from our “Matter–Mind Studio: Tools” catalog.

Object interviews

An adaptation of a traditional interview where participants use a relevant personal object as the topic of the interview.

Design-led reflection

A collection of Playmobil sets, mad-lib poems, blank diagrams, and stickers for participants to reflect on and capture a moment.

Speculative services

Studying the explicit and unspoken ‘rules’ we live by and creating a speculative service those rules.

With Extrapolation Factory

Future report

A hypothetical final report written as if the new proposal were to have run its course. This is useful for envisioning long-term outcomes and goals.

Stories are the capsules of emotions. Through them, we extract unstated emotions which often provide invaluable insights and lead to rich design opportunities.

At Matter-Mind Studio, we believe that designing to be listeners empowers us to enter various intimate spaces, identify unique opportunities and create unconventional solutions for how it feels to a patient, a student, a son, a neighbor.
Contemplating the Zen of Python
By: Chaitanya Baweja
Tags: Programming, Software, Data Science, Python, Software Development

Contemplating the Zen of Python

A brief analysis of the 19 guiding principles for Python design

The Zen of Python by Tim Peters

While reading an article last week about the PEP8 Style Guide for Python, I once again came across the Zen of Python. For those who haven’t seen it before, you can easily conjure it by casting this spell in your Python interpreter:

import this

Long-time Pythoneer Tim Peters penned down the BDFL’s [Benevolent Dictator For Life, a nickname of Python creator Guido van Rossum] guiding principles for Python’s design into 20 aphorisms. This poem has served as a mini style-guide for Python coders for over a decade.

Mysteriously, only 19 of the guidelines are written down. Guido van Rosum reportedly said that the missing 20th aphorism is “some bizarre Tim Peters in-joke.”

This article contains my interpretation of these aphorisms, including examples and applications.
A Guide to Neural Network Layers with Applications in Keras
By: Andre Ye
Tags: AI, Keras, Neural Networks, Image Recognition, Convolutional Neural Net

Core Layers

Dense

The Dense layer is a standard neural network layer that outputs —

— where ‘activation’ is the activation function passed in through the ‘activation argument’, ‘kernel’ is the weights matrix created by the layer, and ‘bias’ is a bias vector created by the layer. This can be adjusted with a parameter ‘use_bias’ which can be set to False.

# as first layer in a sequential model:

model = Sequential()

model.add(Dense(32, input_shape=(16,))) # now the model will take as input arrays of shape (*, 16)

# and output arrays of shape (*, 32)

# after the first layer, you don't need to specify

# the size of the input anymore:

model.add(Dense(32))

Activation Layer

An activation layer applies an activation function to the output. This can be done in Keras with…

keras.layers.Activation(activation)

…where the parameter ‘activation’ is to be filled in with the name of the activation functions to use, like ‘sigmoid’ or ‘relu’.

Dropout Layer

The Dropout layer, used to prevent overfitting in neural networks, randomly sets a fraction ‘rate’ of input units to 0 at each update during training time.

This simplifies the neural network and decreases training time. A Dropout layer can be implemented in Keras with…

keras.layers.Dropout(rate, noise_shape=None, seed=None)

…where rate represents a float between 0 and 1 representing the fraction of input units to drop, noise_shape represents a 1-dimensional integer tensor representing the shape of the binary dropout mask that is multiplied by the input, and seed represents a Python integer to use as a random seed.

Flatten Layer

The Flatten layer converts multi-dimensional data into a single vector to be processed. For instance, a 28 by 28 image would become a 784-number long vector after the Flatten layer was applied. The Keras implementation is…
Marvel & Paste
By: Andrew S Allen
Tags: Design, UX Design, Prototyping, Product, Strategy

The fastest path from idea → prototype → strategy deck.

Copy & paste to add Marvel prototypes directly to Paste slide.

The Rise of Rapid Prototyping

Marvel has been the simplest tool for anyone needing rapid design and prototyping for the last 5 years. They’ve proven that you don’t need professional design software to jump in and create an interactive app in just minutes that you can share and test with real people. You can even take photos of your hand-sketched ideas using their mobile app and transform them into interactive paper prototypes.

From Prototype to Strategy

Paste instantly turns your rapid prototypes into beautiful, presentable mockups and provides the space to tell your story be it your team strategy, feature proposal, product roadmap, or pitch deck.

Paste takes advantage of Marvel’s customizable embed player so adding a prototype is as simple as pasting a Marvel link directly into a slide. Add words for context and wrap it in Paste’s new frames—beautiful 3D mockups of your app or website in a phone, tablet, or window. When all is ready, it’s easy to share a link with your team or client to try the prototype and offer fast feedback.

How to Add a Marvel Prototype to Paste

Paste the link to your Marvel prototype into a slide. You can try this one: https://marvelapp.com/27h0b8j

2. Add a Frame. Select the magic wand and try the Phone

3. Done! You have an interactive prototype ready to share!

Push ideas further

What used to take days, now takes minutes. Such is the power of web-connected creativity tools that work together to keep you focused on what matters most—your ideas!

Give Marvel & Paste a try.
Ombudscycle: Abnormal behavior/ clinical psychology is subjective and must be authoritative care, only.
By: Jiska Hachmer
Tags: Psychiatry, Ombudscycle, Abnormal Behavior, Psychology, Dsm

Science seeks the true functioning in nature.

Science seeks the true nature in things, and is a process that finds the absolutes over time, which are the scientific laws. Only scientific laws are absolutely true, and these fit in the total absolute truths, that will make us understand the world we live in. Theories are not true yet, theories are like religions, and beliefs, we belief so, for now, or it might be true, but it is not yet the truth.

It violates human rights to judge on others, care must be authoritative, also it must be ethical, all the care we do is only for the wishes of the person, themselves, also all files we create (Валерия Николаевна Петров, N.D.), but then it can be someones choice, like a religion, to solve their “problems” the way they want, and the DSM and the therapies can be one of them. This must be without forces, interferences, and influences. There is right to join, not to force (Ruggiero, et al., N.D.).

All the books say the same, it is subjective what one finds abnormal, also the person can be abnormal themselves, finding others abnormal, it says nothing about the truth in the other person. We can use scientifically “proven” tests and see if we like the therapy fitting the outcome of the tests if one was “abnormal” according to these tests.

All the books have different ideas about what would be aspects of being abnormal, we do can understand it is something like not like all the others. At the same time everyone is born unique, authentic and the goal is to develop the self, the way the person truly is. Being authentic and autonomous is well-being (Santos, N.D.).

All people live within themselves, guessing. This is because we have the senses in between our brain and the outside world, thus we can never be sure if all we receive through our senses is true (Purves, N.D.). So, people being “the same” is magical, as no one can truly know what is true. We should wonder why people can be alike, when they are not sure what the world is, nor who they are.
COVID-19 News for State, Local, and Tribal Leaders, 11/20/20
By: Harvard Ash Center
Tags: City Government, Covid 19, Local Government, Coronavirus, Government

A quadcopter camera drone in flight. (Josh Sorensen)

Welcome to our weekly roundup of articles and resources for state, local, and tribal leaders creating policy to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic as well as steering the social and economic recovery for their communities. Postings below do not convey endorsement of any particular organization or opinion contained in links.

The health and wellness wearable company plans to use the award to partner with the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research to expand testing of its internally developed algorithm.

The relief package in March was inadequate to meet the scope of the tragedy brought about by the pandemic.

The United Nations urged civic leaders to build more liveable urban centres better for public health, society, and the environment.

Coronavirus tests are free, yet data show some wealthy neighborhoods are testing at nearly four times the rate of poor neighborhoods. Why?

The US has a long history of abusing minorities for pharmaceutical profit. Messaging for a Covid-19 inoculation will have to overcome that past.

Recent trial programs looking at the efficacy of testing wastewater to detect COVID-19 outbreaks have yielded important insights about how this method of testing can be used to improve public health, including providing an early indicator of infection that can be used to trigger advisories and recommendations.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there’s been a lot of discussion about digital equity in U.S. public schools. But the virus has drastically expanded another gap that is key to children’s learning and wellbeing: out-of-school enrichment.

Authorities in Melbourne, Australia will deploy high-tech surveillance drones to catch people outside of their homes who are not wearing masks as well as to scan for vehicles that are in violation of curfew by being more than two miles from home. The drones will also be used to ensure skate parks and playgrounds remain empty.

Recognizing city leaders whose dedication and creativity have shined through the pandemic and continue to inspire.

When cities implemented social distancing measures to stop the spread of COVID-19, local officials around the world experimented with virtual engagement to reach residents and gather input. But with a gaping digital divide in many communities, doing so effectively isn’t easy. Aarhus, a municipality in Denmark of more than 300,000 residents, found success by building on a foundation of digital inclusion.

Bloomberg CityLab invites readers to create a map of their domestic life, neighborhood or broader surrounding that reflects how their world has changed since COVID-19 began.