fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Borders made all the difference
By: Dheeraj Nanduri
Tags: Instagram, Design, Customer Experience, UX, UI

Borders made all the difference

One of the reasons for what makes Instagram so immersive

Any app has two major criteria for measuring its attractiveness— efficiency of the code running it and the ease of using the interface.

No app can win the market without a UI that keeps the user glued to it. Perhaps, one of the greatest design elements, which aids this cause, of modern web is the infinite scrolling feature. Arguably, one of the apps that best harnessed it in the last decade would be Instagram.

Yes; Facebook, Twitter (and many other social networks) have infinite scrolling too. But, most of the content that appears on that feed takes us away from the main screen. Example: A news article on Facebook has us clicking on it and navigating to a different page after which we may or may not even continue using the app.

How has Instagram done this?

It doesn’t allow links to external pages in post descriptions

The interaction with any post is as simple as double-tapping on the content

These two points keep the Instagram experience unique and easy to use. We can also conclude from this saying that the User Experience (UX) is focused only on keeping us inside the app. From here, the next question arises, are these two sufficient enough to create something equivalently great? I don’t think so.

One more, and perhaps the most amazing, feature that makes Instagram so wonderful is its ability to provide an immersive experience. The first contributor to this is the clean background — which ensures that our attention is always drawn to the content. The second and the most important contributor is the lack of borders.

What does ‘lack of borders’ mean?
Sentence Diagramming
By: J Leblanc
Tags: Software Development, Pedagogy, Programming, Writing

I came across this article about sentence diagramming which struck a chord with me.

I’ve had software development pedagogy on the brain, it occurs to me that the practice of diagramming sentences maps very closely to the practice of writing code. In both of them, you take an idea, break it down to its smallest parts, and figure out the structure. As a leg-up into software development, this has the advantage that you’re just using language, and not language and math.

As the article points out, some kids love diagramming sentences and some kids hate it. I suspect the whole thing was killed by teachers with an axe to grind against sentence diagramming, who felt their time was better spent reading poetry.

Aside: if you hate diagramming sentences, you’re probably going to hate trying to write code.
Crochet Affirmation №34
By: Leslie Stahlhut
Tags: Affirmations, DIY, Opportunity, Crochet, Life Lessons

We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems. — Margaret Mead

Crochet is a great way to develop problem solving skills. I often see an object or design and wonder how I could replicate in in crochet.

Sometimes the solution comes to me easily and putting it all togther is a straight forward task. More often, however, I learn from a series of mistakes that eventually lead me to a solution that allows me to achieve my vision — one stitch at a time.
Hoşcakal Facebook, merhaba yaşamın her an’ı
By: Evren Yildiz
Tags: Benden, Yaşam, Sosyal Medya, Veda, Facebook

in Both Sides of the Table
7 Things You Didn’t Know about Prince’s Roots
By: Megan Smolenyak
Tags: Prince, Louisiana, African American, Genealogy, History

It’s still hard to believe that Prince Rogers Nelson — better known simply as Prince — is no longer with us, though his music and talent will linger forever. As today would have been his 60th birthday, it seems a fitting time for a modest tribute looking into his past — and by that, I mean his pre-Minnesota, pre-purple, ancestral past. Here are a few of the discoveries I found scattered in the branches of his family tree:

Among the surnames that appear in Prince’s family tree are Bonnell, Brooks, Hardy, Head, Jenkins, Nelson, Phillips and Shaw, so those sharing these names could be related.

List of Freedmen “that desire land under the provision of the homestead act” including Presley Shaw, Prince’s great-grandfather, Sept 1866, Bienville, Louisiana (FamilySearch). Please help transcribe these valuable records.

As with other gifted musicians such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Prince has a concentration of Louisiana roots. In fact, all four of his grandparents were born there, though Minnesota, Georgia, Arkansas, and North Carolina can also claim a piece of his heritage. Within Louisiana, Prince has roots in Claiborne, Webster, Bienville and Lincoln parishes. More specifically, the towns of Homer, Cotton Valley, Arcadia and Vienna, are all ancestral hometowns.

Twins run on both sides of Prince’s family. His mother was one, and there were also twins in the Nelson branch on his father’s side.

World War I draft registration for Frank Shaw in Valley Junction, Iowa (FamilySearch)

Due to the Great Migration, his once mostly Louisiana-based family dispersed to Arkansas, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey and Tennessee. His maternal grandfather, a Pullman porter named Frank Shaw, went north to Minnesota by way of Iowa. Though this might sound like a peculiar route, this same pattern can be seen in the family tree of Cory Booker, whose ancestors were drawn from the South to Iowa for mining jobs. As a result of all this meandering, one of Prince’s great-uncles is buried at Burr Oak on the outskirts of Chicago, the same notorious cemetery where one of Michelle Obama’s uncles is buried.

Prince’s paternal grandfather had 11 children by two wives over a 36-year period. This same grandfather’s parents also had 11 children, but in a more concentrated 14-year period. 22 offspring from just these two generations means that Prince undoubtedly has dozens, if not hundreds, of Nelson cousins in both Arkansas and Minnesota.

Six of Prince’s eight great-grandparents were born into slavery, and as was unfortunately so common, one of his great-grandmothers was apparently the daughter of her one-time owner.

1880 marriage of Ed Nelson to Emma Hardy, Claiborne Parish, Louisiana (FamilySearch)
Where’s That Free Will, Bill?
By: Mike Essig
Tags: Surrealism, Freedom, Poetry, Art, Creativity

The surreal is the real only more so.

Some things cannot be avoided.

If you stand still for too long

a coyote will saunter up, smile,

lift his leg, and piss on you.

It is inevitable as indigestion.

It’s the nature of the universe

and you can’t fool mother nature.

Same for ecstasy and heartbreak.

You can run but you’ll only tire.

All the dancing, feral creatures

schedule hoedowns in your head.

You can’t even choose the dates.

You have doubts about free will.

The happening keeps on happening.

Life seems a movie with no script.

A train wreck you must watch.

You are fucked in the micro.

You are fucked in the macro.

Not the fucking you had in mind.

Love leaves no mark upon the hill.

War, a video game with real blood.

All the dumb jungle birds sing jingles.

Madness has a life of its own.

Memory has suddenly been canceled.

You can only remember to forget.

All the drive ins have been closed.

The good old days never were.

People die and you can only shrug.

Boring eclipses occur regularly.

The sky is filled with doubt.

You complain incessantly, but

God is busy blessing insects.

Coyotes seem to be everywhere.

Like invisible narwhals,

some things cannot be avoided.
How to Add Clarity and Curiosity to Your Headlines
By: Cynthia Marinakos
Tags: Headline Hacks, Business, Writing, Psychology, Creativity

How to Add Clarity and Curiosity to Your Headlines

Without being a clickbaiter — my 10-point cheat sheet

Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos.

“Do you have a question about headlines?” I asked my friend and business accountability partner Tatyana recently. She told me she’s confused.

The common advice is that we’ve got to be really clear with our headline, we need to write attention-grabbing headlines, but we mustn’t write clickbait.

I agree. I’ve been researching and practicing headlines for many months. And I’ve come across plenty of confusing and contradictory information.

My head hurts!

Which headlines do you use and when? How do you write headlines with clarity that also attract curiosity? How do you steer clear of clickbait? And why should we care anyway — we write to get clicks, don’t we?

I dug through my research, reviewed lots of headlines, wrote lots more for practice, and gathered what I think will help us all sort out these headline shenanigans! I’ve included real headline examples to show you what I’m talking about.. Before we dive in, here’s my 10-point cheat sheet:
How I Wrote My Masters’ Thesis in One Week
By: S Pats
Tags: Writing, College, Productivity, Time Management, Education

Read the Theses of Other People

If I didn’t do this, I would have failed at delivering my work at a decent enough level to get a grade I was happy with. How do you find a thesis? Simply do a Google search about the general gist of your thesis and you should be able to find handful of papers. Also, it is worth checking if your university has access to websites that host academic articles such Elsevier or ResearchGate because they store a wealth of information and even if they don’t have much about what you specifically are looking for, they’ll have content that is close enough to have some value.

The benefits of looking at a thesis done by someone else are huge:

Someone has already done the research

If there was one thing I loathed about academic life, its conducting literature reviews. The tedious process of sifting though hundreds of papers, sometimes looking for just a single sentence in the middle of a 60 page paper was a small taste of hell. However, I soon realised that I don’t need to go through all that pain.

It’s extremely likely that there’s someone out there who has already written on the topic of your thesis, or at the very least, there will a thesis out there with more than 60% overlap. This means that someone has already done a lot of the research related heavy-lifting for you.

Preferably find a paper that was written less than three years ago since a lot of the references in it will be relevant and can be used to lend your paper credibility.

You’ll get a good idea of how to structure your content

A thesis is useless if the information in it is not properly structured or doesn’t flow well. One of my main mental blocks that prevented me from even starting the work of writing my paper was that I had no idea what a thesis even looked like. When I saw other works by ex-students I gained an infinitely clearer picture about what mine should look and feel like.

I was an engineering student, and there is a generally accepted way of presenting a paper in that field. So reading one or two papers, even if irrelevant to your topic, will provide a lot of information regarding tone and flow.

You don’t need to pay to know what a paper says……sort of

If your university doesn’t have access to an academic content hosting website, you can still find out if a research paper contains data that you need. If you find a thesis closely related to what you’re doing, find a page that has some information which you can use for your paper, it will usually have a few references sprinkled around. Then use those to check the bibliography for the paper they refer to and now you have a way of finding the relevant research for your thesis without having to sift through a mind-numbing wall of search results.

This is a great way to gather information if you can’t afford to pay for access to some papers. It is a bit crude however and I only used this tactic if I was desperate and couldn’t find the data I needed anywhere else.
Ask your donors for the right amount
By: Joel Shuman
Tags: Donations, Fundraising, Nonprofit, Machine Learning, Data Science

Ask your donors for the right amount

How non-profits can maximize small-dollar fundraising using machine learning

Picture this: you open your mailbox and see an envelope from the local 501(c)(3) you gave to last week. “$5, $10, $20, any amount helps” it reads. It has boxes to allow you to select your giving level. It probably offers tiers with benefits that accumulate as you increase your donation.

“$2.70 [] $5.00 [] $25 [] $100 []”: an email with checkboxes from the candidate you gave to just this morning. It asks you to make recurring donation until the election.

When a potential donor receives the mailed tiers or the email checkboxes, she is supposed to have the same reaction to it that she has seeing the wine menu at a restaurant: the urge to impress — to give big, but not too big.

Photo by Mathyas Kurmann on Unsplash

However, this approach suffers from two main faults: it is (1) not personalized to the individual donor and (2) only caters to big-dollar donors with its ever escalating tiers.

Any analyst looking at the donations from previous drives can pretty quickly create this menu of options. Many organizations will already have done so and are trying to fix the above deficiencies. To try to overcome the first fault — the lack of personalization — the fundraising department can cultivate relations with donors. People with relationships to the very top tier of donors know their preferences inside and out from years of conversations. Those donors are asked for the right-sized donation for their situation via individualized contact.

Obviously this relationship strategy cannot scale to a list of thousands of donors. It allows us to overcome fault 1 for a few donors, but not for the rest. It also further reinforces the second fault, with small-dollar donors not giving to their full potential. We need to find a strategy that will be scalable over a large list of potential donors.

Enter the machine learning model. Using machine learning we can overcome both the faults of the check box strategy for the vast majority of our donors. In this post we are going to explore how the general approach above leaves money on the table, and, how using machine learning we can create a personalized ask that rivals a peer-to-peer relationship.
A Filipino Pope
By: Vic Alcuaz
Tags: Catholic, Vatican, Pope Francis, Christian, Religion

Photo by Nacho Artiaga. Unsplash

The Catholic Church has had 266 popes since St. Peter, the majority of them Italians, with a couple of Germans, French, Spanish, Africans, one English, and the current Argentinian, Pope Francis, the very first from the Americas.

The Philippines’ Catholic faith is 5 centuries old (1521) and despite this we have never been blessed to proudly see a Filipino heading the Roman Catholic Church.

To this day and according to the archives of the Vatican, the biggest ever gatherings of Catholics in the world happened twice in the Philippines. The first when then Pope John Paul II, now St. John Paul II, visited the Philippines in 1995. There were over 5 million Catholics from all over the world but mostly from the Philippines in attendance. They were not only there for an hour or two, but for days and nights, sleeping in Rizal Park the night before the biggest scheduled event. Pope John Paul’s message Filipinos will never ever forget:

“The Filipino people are never far from my mind and my heart!” (World Youth day January 1995 Manila, Philippines)

The second time was when Pope Francis visited in 2015, an estimated 6–7 million Catholics converged in exactly the same grounds.

Every time a pope visits the Philippines, the whole country is on stand still. Everyone runs to the airport to greet him upon arrival (a very Filipino tradition), everyone fills the streets of his convoys, everyone attends all his masses and talks, and everyone one sees him off again upon departure (another deeply-rooted Filipino tradition). A pope’s visit is always the biggest ever event for majority of Filipinos.

I cannot imagine the magnitude of a pandemonium when the next papal visit will be by a Filipino Pope. Those numbers above could very easily double. Oh how I pray this will be.

Speaking of a Filipino Pope, the current highest ranking Filipino Cardinal is Luis Antonio Tagle, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Recently, Pope Francis promoted Cardinal Tagle to ‘Cardinal Bishop’ making him the first Filipino to hold this post in the over 500 years of Christianity in the Philippines.

One of my favourite quotes from the good Cardinal is:

“God speaks and the Church, as servant, lends its voice to the Word. But God does not only speak. God also listens especially to the just, widows, orphans, persecuted, and the poor who have no voice. The Church must learn to listen the way God listens and must lend its voice to the voiceless.” (XII Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, October 5–26, 2008 Vatican City)

So be it.
Typescript vs Javascript
By: Daniel Liu
Tags: Javasc, Front End Development, Object Oriented, Computer Science, Typescript

Overview

Typescript was originally developed by Microsoft .Typescript is a superset of Javascript which was developed to add object oriented features to Javascript.

Typescript Features

Typescript is not recognized by browsers so it needs to be converted to Javascript in order to run. This process is called trans-piling.

Typescript supports all Javascript libraries.

Any Javascript can be converted to Typescript by changing the file extension. You can use Javascript in any Typescript files.

Typescript is as portable like Javascript because it will be transpiled to Javascript

Differences

Typescript is an object oriented language while Javascript is a scripting language. This means that typescript supports specific typings and interfaces unlike Javascript.

Typescript has the static keyword which is used for class properties not instance.

keyword which is used for class properties not instance. Typescript has specific typings like number, boolean, and string.

Typescript has interfaces to describe objects.

Typescript file extension are .ts while Javascript file extension are .js

Conclusion

Because Typescript is transpiled to Javascript there is less of a chance to encounter run time errors. However, because it needs to be transpiled there is more of a wait to run the code unlike Javascript. Typescript is an object oriented language so the code is generally more simple, clean, reusable and consistent so it is better for bigger projects.
My Top 3 — Saturday 7th September
By: Jon Peters
Tags: Stories, Recommendations, Writing, Blogging, Creativity

My Top 3 — Saturday 7th September

My favourite three stories of the day.

Photo by Shumilov Ludmila on Unsplash

I started a new job this week. Same company, but a different location, so I’m still adjusting. But as a result of my now two-hour daily commute, I haven’t done nearly as much reading or writing as I would have liked. This is why I’m so thankful the weekend has finally arrived. So here are my three favourite stories from today.

1) Finding My True North — Craig R. Pennell

In this powerful piece, Craig discusses the changes in his life that led him to leave his corporate job and the ‘herd mentality’ behind, and emigrate to Spain in search of his true purpose. We are not on this Earth to fulfill anybody else’s dreams other than our own, which is something we could all do with a reminder of every now and again. An absolutely brilliant read.

2) My Daughter’s Back-To-School Anxiety — Tanya Storey

This one hit me right in the feels. As a parent of a little girl who has at times broken down into floods of tears at the prospect of going to school, I needed to read this. Tanya’s brutally honest account of her own feelings and frustrations is excellently written, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

3) A Silent Storm — Edie Tuck

At the time of writing, this piece by Edie is still a draft. I want her to hurry up and press ‘Publish’ because I absolutely loved this poem. I’ve never been one for poetry, so when she asked me to proofread it I didn’t know what to expect. How do you critique something that is so personal? Something created entirely from emotions and experiences, not facts or statistics. I didn’t know what to look for. But I found it. And it made me want to know more. Perfection.

Happy reading.
How to Reframe Your Work Into a More Positive Light
By: Brandon Bell
Tags: Work, Life Lessons, Work Life Balance, Self, Life

What are you working on right now? Is it a passion or is it something that you have to do right now in order to make ends meet?

The work that you do is being done by you for a reason. It may be hard to realize why you’re doing it now but there’s nobody better for the job than you, at least right at this moment.

There’s a possibility that you don’t like your job, which is fine, the world will not always be in your favor. There’s no point in really hating what you do. If you’re working on your passion but you’re in the initial phase of doing the hard work then that may be pretty depressing too.

The only thing that you can do is reframe these situations. How can you turn these negatives into positives? At times it may feel impossible to do this and it’s not going to be easy. Work gets boring, you start to lose motivation for it quickly. During the first few days of working on it is whatever you’re doing you may be ecstatic and have high energy.

Eventually, over time you get tired of the routine and want to give up. Reframing these situations will help you stay motivated and in touch with reality.

Everyone has done something that they weren’t too fond of, even some of the world's most successful people began with a job they didn’t like. When we’re at a job or working on our passions we fall into the trap of thinking that we may be wasting our time. There’s no guarantee that we’ll get a promotion at this job and there’s no guarantee that your side hustle will take off.

This is where many people give up, but not you because you’ll have the power to reframe these circumstances.
The Confusion of Deep Grief
By: Jacqueline Dooley
Tags: Mental Health, Parenting, Family, Self

When my daughter died, my love for her had no place to land. Her absence from my life precipitated a profound confusion which was, at first, so overwhelming that it was difficult for me to feel anything else.

I’ve written about this confusion many times, though I didn’t call it that. Recently a reader, Roger Persell, left me a comment. In it, he named my confusion. Roger lost his wife of 42 years last July.

Per Roger, “When I read your words, I find that in between your clear lines lies a confusion that I recognize in myself. It’s not an intellectual confusion, of course. We know that people, even children, get ill and die. It’s the ineffable confusion of waking up and finding your own sense of self has been wrenched, distorted, upended, eviscerated.”

Wrenched, distorted, upended, eviscerated…this is my life now.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Roger’s words. Confusion is the product of deep grief, the kind of grief that comes from losing a child. It’s a confusion that stretches from the terrible moment of her death through the long years that I must go on without this child who existed at the center of my life, my identity, and my reason for looking forward.
100 Things You Should Know About People: #99 — Well Practiced Skills Don’t Require Conscious Attention
By: The Team W
Tags: Memory, Muscle Memory, Errors, Music, Attention

[caption id=”attachment_2217" align=”alignleft” width=”248" caption=”Guthrie Weinschenk Playing Violin”]

[/caption]

I have two grown children. The entire time they were growing up they took Suzuki method music lessons. My son studied violin, and my daughter studied piano. After attending one of my daughter’s piano recitals, I asked her what she was thinking about while she was performing the piano sonata piece (from memory, no music in front of her). Was she thinking about the dynamics of the music? When to get louder or softer? About particular notes or passages that were coming up? Speed or tempo? She looked at me in confusion. “Thinking?”, she said, “I’m not thinking about anything. I’m just watching my fingers play the song.” It was my turn to be confused. I turned to my son and said, “Is that how you play the violin in a recital? Are you thinking?” “No, of course I’m not thinking, he answered. I’m watching my fingers play the violin too.”

Muscle memory — The Suzuki method of music instruction (and perhaps other methods too, it’s the only one I’m really familiar with) requires students to intensely practice particular skills on their instrument. In a Suzuki recital students usually do not have music in front of them. All the pieces (and quite complicated pieces) are memorized. This requires that particular passages and songs be practiced over and over. A term that is used in music instruction is “muscle memory”. The piece is practiced so often, that the muscles remember how to play it on its own, without thinking involved.

Automatic execution? — If a skill is practiced so well that it is automatic, then it can be performed with a minimum of conscious attention. If it is really automatic then it almost allows multi-tasking. I say almost because multi-tasking doesn’t really exist.

Too many automatic steps can lead to error — Have you ever been using a software application that requires you to go through a series of steps in order to delete an item? You have to click on the item you’re your mouse, then click on the delete key, then a window pops up and you have to click on the “Yes” button to confirm. You need to do about 25 of these, so you position your fingers on the mouse and keyboard in an optimal way and start pressing and clicking. Before too long your fingers have taken over, and you aren’t even thinking about what you are doing. It’s very easy in this type of situation to accidently keep deleting past where you were supposed to.

What do you think? Are there tasks you do automatically?
Planning to Execution: Flexibility is Key
By: Devon Tam
Tags: Flexibility, Design, Perfectionism, Database, UX

I am a planner. I keep notebooks for every project, sticky notes on hand, and at least two colors of pens for sketching in case inspiration strikes. But this week has been about implementing the essentials. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to get done. For a perfectionist, that is a lot to compromise. If you are like me, you spend a lot of time designing and planning a product that is beautiful. Not only does it look great, it is people-centric, and thought-provoking. As a result, it is hard to fathom that you can take pride in work that does not reflect your initial aspirations, but that is exactly what happened. In some ways, I think my app turned out even better than I hoped, and it is because I afforded myself the opportunity to stray from my initial designs. To my initial annoyance, I spent the majority of my time on a database (actually three databases — I tried three variations of Array Lists and SQLite before I settled on using Firebase) instead of the UX design. Still, this experience allowed me to learn more about back end programming. Kudos to anyone that works in this field. I am still passionate about designing the user side of technology, but I am still up to the challenge of tackling more databases in the future. Who knows? I like planning, maybe I would thrive designing data architecture.
Inspiration: Anticipate
By: Dana Theus
Tags: Inspiration, New Year, Christmas, Self Improvement, Life

Inspiration: Anticipate

Turn anxiety about the future to your advantage

A quick dose of inspiration for the holidays…

Whether you’re excited about the end or the beginning, BE excited.

It’s so easy to focus on what we lack, or what could go wrong, but focusing on what we have and hope for will always make the process of encountering the future more fun.

This works as we wait for Christmas morning or whatever joyous occasion awaits us this holiday season as well as it does in working on delivering our next work project or getting our next job.

Anticipate. Imagine your future full of good things. Savor the anticipation. I know it’s hard. But it’s more fun than the alternative.

And it works.

Try it.

Happiness may be around the corner, but that’s no reason not to enjoy it now. ~@DanaTheus

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Integrating SwiftUI With UIKit Apps for Early Adoption
By: Antoine Van Der Lee
Tags: Swift, Programming, iOS, Swiftui, Mobile

Integrating SwiftUI With UIKit Apps for Early Adoption

The early you start the earlier you’ll use SwiftUI for everything

Photo by Thom Bradley on Unsplash

SwiftUI was introduced in iOS 13 at a time when many of us have a big app built with UIKit. SwiftUI makes us enthusiastic to get started with this new framework for building apps, just like when Swift was first introduced.

When Swift was introduced we had to migrate from Objective-C to Swift. Many apps are probably still using (partly) Objective-C, as that transition can take quite some time. It’s good to know how to start the transition to make this process as short as possible. iOS 14 is getting close and you might consider dropping iOS 12 later this year, allowing you to write new views in SwiftUI. So, here’s an article explaining how you can use SwiftUI within a UIKit application.

Adding SwiftUI views in a UIKit application early on will make your future self a lot happier!
forge ahead in invisible conditions
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Drugs, Poetry, Covid Diaries, Addiction, Poem

forge ahead in invisible conditions

drugs big and small

Photo by Jaroslav Devia on Unsplash

pot is funny, you lazy hippie

booze is adult, you sophisticated exec

you working mom

xanax means you have

insurance — heroin means

you have a problem

forging ahead in invisible conditions

make some jokes about the munchies

and keep working at

losing your job

it’s not an addiction unless

you’re hookin

it’s not an addiction

if you still have teeth — all moms drink wine

haven’t you seen the mugs?

and we forge ahead in invisible conditions

don’t worry

all this whiskey is for me

to drink at home as the

pandemic rages on — don’t you worry

all this pot is for me

and i’m breaking this in half so they last

until my insurance lets me buy more.

it’s okay because you had

a stressful day at work

because you had a fight with your boyfriend

because there’s a pandemic — ugh

always

reasons, conditions. they only seem

to get worse.

and we forge ahead in lethal conditions

rehab is too inconvenient right now

with what the virus

i just hope they fire me

because of covid

and not with cause

so i can get unemployment and keep

buying pot.

it’s not a real addiction

say the gate keepers

going to tell us what real addiction is and isn’t

isn’t that what you said about oxys?

this goes up and the other thing goes down

you gave me this to cure that and now

it’s those to wean me off this?

do you even know or are you

plugging holes?

i take this with that

i look it up and laugh

taking this with that

turns your heart to cheese and your brain

smooth —

kids throw away their addys in secret

their parents pushed the drugs on them

and they’d rather be

complicated, weird. they’re

tired, they remember

wanting to run. they want to want to run.

how do i trust you

anymore? you’re there sober

through all my conditions

telling me it’s too early

telling me it’s too late

i can’t do things i used to wake up and do — say it’s

all in my head well yes, that’s the point

and the problem

it’s all in my head

it’s probably in my bones

everything is a condition

i am just that

blood drawn

a series of invisible conditions

to be overcome.
Foreseeing Environmental Collapse On America’s West Coast
By: Pixel Magazine
Tags: California, Climate Change, Water

A key part of what I want to do with this project is photograph people living on the fringes of society or in remote parts of the region, people who are already in some capacity preparing for the break-down of civilization. For me I think one of the fascinating things about climate change is that we collectively carry on with our daily lives when we really don’t know how quickly the change in climate will impact on our lives. We can easily dismiss those preparing already as eccentric or paranoid, but what if they are just well organized?

EvH: Can you please tell us about one or two of your favorite images from the project, and the situation surrounding them?

CB: There’s a picture in my project Between Two Mysteries of a man called Mike. Mike was a Vietnam veteran and 28 years into his recovery from heroin addiction. I took the picture at his house in Sweet Home, Oregon. Why I like it is because it really represents what I want to achieve in all my photographs. That is, that it’s made from spending several hours getting to know him, listening to his stories, making a connection and then taking the picture. That portrait really captures Mike for me and reminds me of playing guitar with him, picking apples in his garden and eating spaghetti meatballs in his living room. His whole life story is fascinating and if I can take a picture that somehow comes close to honoring that then I’m happy.
Extreme Ownership for Software Engineering
By: Payne Miller
Tags: Work, Agile, Software Engineering, Leadership, Ownership

1. Own Everything in Your World

The world of software is a big one. With so many interconnected, moving, pieces that are orchestrated together to provide an application, service, or tool for millions of people are going to use, it’s very daunting to hear the words “own everything in your world.” It’s near impossible to ask one mobile engineer to maintain his codebase, develop the API that the mobile app depends on, and administer the database that the API depends on. Especially with other teams depending on those resources as well! However, it is much more realistic and productive to ask that mobile engineer to ensure that his code is the best it can be and that he accounts for, and mitigates, contingencies and risks while operating with the external dependencies. The phrase “own everything in your world” really means “assume responsibility.” For example: if the API that my mobile app depends on doesn’t return reliable data or accurate status codes, then it is my responsibility to validate the data and status code for errors and present a user-friendly view to give the best possible experience. Saying “well…the API team didn’t do their job” or “the API should be implemented differently” is not practicing Extreme Ownership. Extreme Ownership is looking inward and asking myself: “how could I, as the mobile engineer, mitigate the risk of faulty API data or an incorrect status code? Did I ensure that the API team fully understood my team’s needs and the overall mission of my team? Did I validate their work with them before integrating?” Perhaps if I would have done these things the end-user would have a better experience and my mission would have been accomplished? The onus is on me to ensure I have everything I need and that all my dependencies understand my mission and how I intend to use their system.

Owning everything in your world also correlates closely with software entropy (or “broken windows” for my Pragmatic Programmer fans.) If you see:

Compiler warnings

Absent unit tests

Janky user experiences

Outdated documentation

or other items that just aren’t acceptable, then it is on you, as a leader in your team, to remedy these things and ensure that they are minimal going forward. Chances are if the rest of your team sees you fixing these broken windows they will follow suit as well.
“A Change Gon’ Come”
Tags: Poetry, Equality, Fiction, BlackLivesMatter, Racism

“A Change Gon’ Come”

Malik and Cookie head into the chaos

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

Stalking prey

Who you gon’ pray to

When we rip that badge away?

Clouds of tear gas

Hold downtown in its grip

Sure to sting

No matter your age or class

“Masks up!”

On the frontline

Despite news coverage

We align

In the streets

Screaming

“Defund the police”

Say her name

Say his

Damn, it’s a whole list

Injustice and peace

Can’t co-exist

Up all night

Driving

To our destination

Cookie in the passenger seat

Trying to find a working radio station

Worry lives in her eyes

I can’t even disguise

My own concern

Fear churns

In my stomach

All I can think

Is change is coming

Then Cookie softly asks

“What if it had been me?”
Inordinate Syllables
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Writing, Words, Reading, Poem, Thinking

Inordinate Syllables

A Poem

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

…a word is one wing of silence — Neruda

I could have shouted to make my

words heard

by my own resistant ears

Curled into the willing box

of grammar a grammar the grammar

the sounds all very heavy & precise

then spinning

fast & far from this particular

consciousness

leaving

something always stuck

to me
What Do Alcohol Cravings Feel Like?
By: Benya Clark
Tags: Mental Health, Life Lessons, Psychology, Addiction, Self

What Cravings Feel Like

When I quit drinking, I experienced a few different types of cravings, some of which were easier to resist than others.

The first type that I felt was simply thinking about alcohol throughout the day, daydreaming about the idea of relaxing on my couch with an open beer.

I think this fairly mild sensation barely fits into the category of “craving,” and it’s probably the easiest for non-addicts to relate to.

It’s the same feeling I get these days when I haven’t gone on a run for a couple of days and want to stretch my legs. It’s enough to interrupt my thoughts every once in a while, but if I ignore it, it’ll pass within a minute.

I experienced this type of “craving” even when I was still drinking. I’d sit at work, counting down the hours until I could get home and start drinking.

The second type of craving was a strong feeling that something was wrong and only alcohol would fix it. This didn’t show up until I had already spent an entire day sober.

This type of craving was much more difficult to deal with psychologically.

Through those earliest days of sobriety, I’d feel physical withdrawal symptoms and crave alcohol as a way to deal with them. Headaches, sleeplessness, and confusion all made me obsess over the idea of having a drink.

Like the old joke, I wanted to trade all of my problems for just one.

As those days continued, these cravings transformed into a third-type, which was a general yearning for alcohol. This final type of craving showed up most frequently and was the hardest to resist.

They say that if you can ignore a craving for five minutes, it will pass. What they don’t tell you is that after another five minutes, it will come back.

I felt like there was a tug on my mind, just pulling me towards a drink. These cravings were no longer directly linked with my physical symptoms — I wasn’t craving a drink to make a headache go away, so much as I was just craving a drink for its own sake.

No matter what I was doing, there was a refrain in the back of my head saying “I need a drink, I need a drink, I need a drink.”

It felt like my focus was almost never entirely on what was in front of me. Instead, it was split between thinking about what I was doing and thinking about having a drink.

I would vividly imagine how good it would feel if I could just have another sip of beer.

Sometimes the craving itself would feel almost physical — as if there was pressure being applied to my head from all sides.

Pushing through a craving felt like forcing myself to hold my breath. It starts out easy enough, but after a minute your mind is screaming at you to open your mouth and take in some oxygen. When I was going through my cravings, my mind was screaming just as loudly to have a drink.
What To Do When All Your Friends Are Shopping
By: South India Term Abroad
Tags: India, Study Abroad, International Relations, Alumni, Research

SITA recently had a semester that was comprised of equal numbers of female and male students. But that is quite atypical for us, and for study abroad in India generally, where female students far outnumber male students. In fact, during your semester you were the only male student. What would you highlight about your own experiences with SITA to persuade more male students to consider India as a study abroad destination?

S: From my experience with SITA, I think India — as a study abroad destination — provides cultural immersion and research opportunities for a wide range of students with different academic interests and backgrounds. Male and female students might have slightly different experiences, because of local customs and expectations. For example, the females in my class needed a whole new wardrobe when they arrived. While they were getting new outfits, I went out to drink coconut water! It’s great to have a variety of perspectives represented in the SITA class each semester, because students can bring those different perspectives and experiences to classroom discussions.

Rachel (George Washington University) and Anya (Scripps College), Sahil’s classmates, find time to drink coconut water . . . even with their busy clothes shopping schedule, fall 2012

What one piece of advice would you give to the new SITA students, who arrived in Madurai just last week?

S: I like to think of India as a land of extremes. You see some of the most beautiful things that this world has to offer. But at the same time, you see poverty everywhere. You also experience something new almost every day, so one of my biggest regrets was not exploring Madurai as much as I would’ve liked. Thus, my advice: no matter how tired you are, explore as much as you can!

Thank you, Sahil. We hope to see you in Madurai again soon!

Follow SITA on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Learn more and apply at sitaprogram.org.
Why I Feared Change Even When It Was Best for Me
By: Elle Silver
Tags: This Happened To Me, Mental Health, Self Improvement, Personal Growth, Self

Why I Feared Change Even When It Was Best for Me

Fear of the discomfort change would bring held me back from transforming my life

Photo by Leio McLaren

“I’m going to tell you what you have to do if you want to be happy,” my therapist, Dr. Elena, said. I sat on the edge of my seat, eager to hear her plan. I didn’t expect what she said next.

“You need to quit your job, get rid of all your friends, break up with your boyfriend and start confronting your fears about your career that are holding you back from success.”

What? Huh? I thought she was going to lay out an easy plan, such as just go ahead with life as I’d been leading it. This meant I could keep dating the same guy, keep the same friends, remain fearful of pitching the writing I so dearly wanted to get published but was terrified of having rejected, and keep my same terrible job with the same sadistic boss.

The changes that Dr. Elena proposed meant that I would spend weekends alone, I would no longer have a stable sexual partner, I would lose out on what emotional needs I was getting met by that relationship, and I would be put into financial limbo, all in hope I’d find something better. Not to mention I would embarrass myself through all the rejection I would receive by actually letting people read my work.

But I also knew that I couldn’t go on the way I was. I was miserable. I had toxic friends and a toxic job, and I was a toxic person myself. I was constantly jealous of people, constantly feeling like a victim, constantly angry or sad or resentful. That, or I felt self-important, like I was wonderful and why didn’t people realize it? Then I’d go back to feeling like a total and utter failure.

I was a mess.

I was a mess, but I was a stable mess. This meant at least I knew what to expect. I knew what to expect on the weekends with my friends and that at least I’d have a man in my life. No bother he wasn’t right for me and didn’t really love me. I didn’t really love him. It made no difference. He kept my bed warm. I could depend on whatever half-baked relationship we had together. At least I had someone.

The same went for work. At least I could depend on knowing how each day would pan out. I knew I’d get walked all over by a boss who resented ever hiring me because I hated the job and was a terrible, selfish employee. But at least I knew I’d get a pay check. That was set in stone, and so nothing would ever surprise me or throw me off balance.
Great data physicalizations, and what journalists can learn from them — Part 2
By: Alice Corona
Tags: Dataviz, Data Visualization, Dataphys, Ddj, Data Journalism

While working on Batjo, we surveyed dozens and dozens of data physicalizations. This post is the second of a series where I present an interdisciplinary selection of data objects and/or artistic installations, by focusing on projects that have potential applications/inspiration for journalism.

READ PART 1 HERE

“Social data objects”

As introduced in the first post of this series, this overview is inspired by the concept of “social objects”, discussed by Nina Simon in her book “The Participatory Museum”.

“a social object is one that connects the people who create, own, use, critique, or consume it. Social objects are transactional, facilitating exchanges among those who encounter them” ~ Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum, Chapter 4.

Such objects spark a conversation and help strangers connect, on the basis of a shared experience. Journalists too, in their service to a healthy public sphere, also perform a similar function with their reporting. This makes Nina Simon’s description of social object as good starting point to imagine ways in which journalists could use a physical medium to communicate data.

In the first post of the series, we looked at artifacts that are personal, familiar and collaborative. Here we will explore four other characteristics of social data physicalizations, by highlighting more examples of data physicalization designed to connect people by promoting interactions between participants.

Performative

In some cases we surveyed, the way in which some people interact with an artistic installation becomes part of the installation itself: the interaction of some participants provides a performance for the rest of them, with people naturally stopping by to watch. This instance is perfectly depicted by the many projects that transform the environment into a playable instrument. For example, The Sensoric Garden CLAVIER, described by Eva Hornecker and F. Wilhelm Bruns, is a walkable keyboard where light sensors detect the steps of the people passing by and converts them into sounds, soon having people improvise dances and songs to entertain others.
Bless Us, Every One
By: Nicole Cliffe
Tags: Marriage Equality, Etiquette, Weddings

Guys! Marriage equality is here, just in time to get into fights about things that someone will always manage to be offended by:

Dear Civil Behavior: I’ve been helping my daughter plan her wedding to her girlfriend and everything’s been going fine — until now. We’re about to address the invitations. The calligrapher is lined up and time is getting a bit short. Here’s the problem. My daughter insists on addressing the women with what I’d call a feminist version of their names. In other words, instead of writing “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Garcia” she wants to write: “Ms. Jane Garcia and Mr. Richard Garcia,” calling out the identity of the woman separately from her husband. I’ve explained that this is incorrect etiquette and that my friends will be confused if not offended. But she won’t listen to me. Do lesbians and gays have different rules for this sort of thing? — New York Mother-in-Law-to-Be

Do whatever you want! This is wonderful. I am genuinely happy you are having this weird, calligraphy-involving fight right now. Film it and put it on YouTube. I want the mom to be played by Phylicia Rashad, and the daughter to be played by Zoe Saldana, and the future wife to be played by a distracted and texting Reese Witherspoon. Also, I did not know anyone was still doing the Mr. and Mrs. Peter Dinklage thing on invitations anymore, but you two can sort that out amongst yourselves.