fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Melissa Rapp
By: Arin Segal
Tags: Music, Melissa, Rapp

Melissa and I chatted about her music and she answered a few questions for me.

Q: What is your biggest aspiration as a singer/songwriter?

A: Playing one of the most breathtaking venues in the world…The Gorge at George (Washington State)! Or a world tour…whichever comes first. Other than that, continuing to write, record and perform songs that I believe in. I love knowing that whatever music I create will be around long after I’m gone. It motivates me to work at the craft and keep improving. I’d love to leave behind a body of work that can inspire people and leave a legacy.

Q: What was it like to be on Platinum Hit?

A: It was a real adventure! I’ve always approached the craft of songwriting in a more organic way. To be put in situations where we had to create on demand, with strict time limits and a cast of characters with diverse backgrounds — it was definitely a challenge. Aside from that pressure, it was a lot of fun. Songwriters are always surprising and idiosyncratic people. We were kept in very close quarters and spent all of our time together. Let’s just say, we laughed a lot. It got pretty crazy at times!



Q: Would you say that you became friends with any of the other contestants?

A: I did! Particularly Blessing. He’s not only a talented musician who brings amazing vibe to his work, but also is a very wise and intuitive guy. His wisdom and reflections about our TV show filming experience were invaluable.



Q: Who is an artist you have always aspired to write with?

A: Well, a lot of my favorite songwriters do most of their writing on their own, but it would be wonderful to write with artists like Norah Jones, Patty Griffin, Jason Mraz, or Jack Johnson. Jason and Jack have a real ability to fill their compositions with an organic groove, intimacy, and positivity, which I love. It would also be great to write with some the top pop and country acts right now: Christina Aguilera, Ke$ha, Carrie Underwood, Beyonce and Rihanna. These women have such strong identities and voices.



Q: What are your plans now that you are done with the show?

A: I’m performing a lot and promoting my newest album “Just Like That,” which you can find at itunes.com/melissarapp. I’m also in the studio recording a new album to be released this fall. We have some excellent musicians playing on it — Jimmy Paxson (Stevie Nicks), Lige Curry (George Clinton and P-Funk), and Jason Orme (Sarah McLachlan). These new tracks have some serious soul! Keep a lookout for new songs and news up at my website: melissarappmusic.com

Q: Do you support any charities or plan to work with any?

A: Yes, definitely! I have worked with The Breast Cancer fund for years, playing several of their events and fundraisers. I have a lot of respect for the work they do, as well as environmental organizations like the National Resources Defense Council.



Q: What social networks do you have and use to communicate with fans?

A: You’ll find me on Facebook and Twitter the most:

Facebook

Twitter
Para-kaya-pravesh
By: Prajakta Unknown
Tags: Poetry, Literary Impulse, Self, Literary, Spirituality

Actually, just Prajakta. I am an economist-turned-educator writing about my insights from travel schooling my family for over a year and counting.

Follow
Guide to register to AidCoin ICO
Tags: ICO, Blockchain, Charity, Bitcoin, Token Sale

With the AidCoin ICO fast approaching, we are getting more and more queries on how to register, so here is a quick guide to help you through the process.

AidCoin ICO starts January 16th at 12 pm CET.

Here is how you can register to the ICO for the token that allows you to donate transparently.

First go to: https://www.bitcoinsuisse.ch/aidcoin/

Create an account

If you are logging on for the first time, choose the tab labelled Sign up.

2. Type in your email and create a password.

3. Click sign up.

4. Go to your email host and verify the email with the link that has been sent to you.

When you see the below page, you have successfully created an account

Now you need to get approved for participation in ICO’s by submitting the required documents.

Personal Information

ID verification

1.upload a scan of your passport or ID

ID needs to be a valid and official ID (complete with name, date of birth and date of expiry)

- ID needs to have a recent picture on it

- The ID needs to be in Latin letters otherwise it needs to be translated and notarized.

2. on The Selfie ID your whole face needs to be visible and the whole ID/passport needs to be visible and readable.

The ID on your Selfie ID, has to be the same as the approved ID.

Proof of Residency

Here you need to upload a proof of residency.

This needs to be in Latin Letters or translated and notarized.

It needs to be with the address where you live, not work address or place of birth.

Approved documents:

✓ Utility bill (with your current address on it)

✓ Bank statement (with your current address on it)

✓ Residence permit (with your current address on it)

✓ Valid id (with your current address on it)

✓ Official Residency Affidavit

✓ Tax statement (with your current address on it)

Form A & 1A

The last documents you need to upload are the Form A & 1A.

All registrations need to have both forms filled out, signed and approved.

All mandatory fields need to be filled out and all the information needs to be correct.

Form A includes your personal data previously filled out, so you can simply print it out, sign by hand and upload it.

Form 1A

Both form A and form 1A need to be signed by hand — otherwise they can not be approved.

You can now download the form 1A, print it, sign by hand and upload it to the platform.

Once everything is submitted you will see a small grey box with your mail stating that your request is awaiting approval.

If you have followed all the steps correctly, then your submission should be approved within a few days and an email of approval will be sent to your mail account.

When your account has been approved, you will be able to sign up to partake in ICO’s through Bitcoin Suisse.

We hope this quick guide was helpful, but please feel free to contact us for any further queries.

Join the growing AidCoin community to discuss the project. Get involved and spread the word with your contacts and favorite charities!

Telegram Twitter Facebook
Chasing Casper and Getting Gold
By: Selim Selim
Tags: Work, Choices, Goals, Mindset, Dreams

Chasing Casper and Getting Gold

A means to my ideal goal, to a dream beyond!

Image by Guvendemir, from istockphoto

Very recently, I began taking on my wildest dream and chasing it vigorously on a daily basis. It’s been the best time of my life and waking up has never been easier and lighter than before.

What is this dream of mine?

My dream is to make people’s lives just a little bit better.

How?

By building communities, by entertaining and causing laughter, by helping those who remember to forget through belonging and feeling loved and cared for.

My goal for the future is to be able to support myself, and what family I have, through twitch streaming. A lot think it to be unrealistic, and I sort of agree with them because the field has now become so competitive that it’s saturated with thousands and thousands of others trying to do the same thing.

However, there’s one thing that makes me different from those thousands.

What is it?

My intent: I’m not doing this for the money, reputation, or any worldly thing of the same ilk. I’m doing it because I love gaming, I love getting people together, and I absolutely love making people laugh and smile.

It’s been a part of me my entire life. Ever since I was young, I would imitate and parrot my family members perfectly. Mimicking people always came super easy to me, and it also became clear why that is.

It’s because I’m an entertainer by nature. I am a person whose purpose, or part of it at least is to sit down with you and, before having you leave, get you to feel some sort of positive emotion.

Whether that emotion is from a productive conversation, a good joke, or a therapeutic moment is all good to me, and hopefully you!
Node.js is Good; Go is Better
By: Roger Chapman
Tags: Nodejs, Microservices, Golang, Performance

SafetyCulture has a microservice architecture deployed on Kubernetes (AWS EKS). When we started this architecture all our services were written, predominantly, in Node.js.

In the early days of our product, Node.js was great; it allowed teams to build services quickly and share a lot of common libraries. Data structures were stored as JSON, and Frontend/Backend development could all be done in a common language: JavaScript.

As time passed, our codebase grew, as well as our Engineering team. Cracks started to appear under the fast-paced growth of the company, product and our microservices. Schema-less JSON in a document store, once our friend, became hard to reason with; and flavours of JavaScript (CoffeeScript, ES5, ES6/7, TypeScript) added a lot of technical debt.

By no means a silver bullet, we decided to try Go, along with other technologies (Postgres, Protocol Buffers and gRPC). You can read more about this decision on: Why Go is a good language for microservices.

Refactor

Comparing a Node.js service to a Go service can be subjective, as no two distinct services have the same API, SLAs, network traffic, workload etc… unless it’s exactly the same service.

To improve the maintainability of one of our services; we decided to refactor the service from Node.js to Go. The API would have a new gRPC endpoint (for newer clients) but would still expose the existing HTTP/JSON API for backward compatibility.
Cyberpunk 2077 and the ‘Best Immersive Sim’ Experience
By: Joshua Gad
Tags: Gaming, Rpg, Simulation, Cyberpunk, Game Development

Although Cyberpunk 2077 was announced nearly 8 years ago, the hype around the game and what it represents has reached an all time high. CD Projekt the developer of hit 2015 action role-playing game The Witcher 3 will be trying to outdo themselves, and just about every single player RPG. Even with the recent delays to the games release, the importance of delivering an experience with truly open ended gameplay and story is possibly the most precious and sought after idea for gamers and developers.

For those that don’t know what an immersive sim is, it is a type of game that puts players’ choice at the forefront of the experience and delivers on that through emergent and open-ended gameplay situations, coupled of course with story and characters that react to your choices in a believable world (simulation). It is often thought that through the achievement of a perfect immersive sim, players will become fully invested and absorbed into their new believed self and world.

With past immersive sim games, the story and gameplay choices, or even upgrades were always somewhat disconnected. Take one of the early entries in the genre, Thief, or even Oblivion or Skyrim, you can have gameplay variety in customization, and even include emergent gameplay systems. However, the story and missions were always the same for the most part.

Now even though the game is releasing on consoles and PC, and not VR, this does not discredit it as an immersive sim. But I do presume one day CD Projekt will release a VR mode. But that is secondary to providing what could be one of the biggest traditional game releases to date.

You see Cyberpunk is not just a game it is an entire genre of science fiction dystopias. Something that a lot of people especially in 2020 want to explore and escape to, because in Night City, you can make sense of it all. The capitalists, criminals, celebrities, and street rats all can exist in this future of body modification, customization and crime. But don’t make me tell you about the game, you can watch the trailer.

With a star like Keanu Reeves in the cast, and CD Projekt’s track record, it’s hard not to have high hopes for the game, especially after what was probably 8+ years of development. As a developer, I am definitely looking forward to what Cyberpunk 2077 has in store for it’s players.
Subway Diary
Tags: Humor, Ideas, Alienation, Philosophy, Aphorisms

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they’re worn out and at times — and this is the worst of all — before we have new ones. — Lichtenberg

I’m tired of being tired of work; of Mondays. I’m tired of that ‘give us this day our daily dread’ feeling. Above all I want something new and exciting — I want to look forward to my work.

The longing for ‘the new’ however, I admit, is deadly: ‘the new’ is just another phrase for a fantasy; for the fantasies that life in a commercial society demands.

The hardest thing to do is to admit that our lives will probably not change; that the slog does not abate. Fantasy — the fantasy of escape from work-a-day reality — is analogous to sugar: a heady rush that cripples our body’s ability to adapt and flourish.

Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash

The question of, ‘How can I get out?’ is less philosophically interesting than ‘Why can’t I get out?’

We learn more about ourselves by admitting that we’re stuck; we deceive ourselves in thinking that much can change.

The American myth of robust individualism conceals how brutal and de-individualizing American-style capitalism is. The constant hunger for self-improvement, for climbing the ladder — the fantasy of a perfect life — is integral to the functioning of this economic system.

Symbols underpin material reality. Symbols are safety pins, holding our economic system together.
Google Sheets Social Media Editorial Calendar 2021 for Your Personal Brand or Small Business (Free template)
By: Gracia Kleijnen
Tags: Social Media Marketing, Social Media Management, Google Spreadsheets, Spreadsheets, Google Sheets

Use cases

You want to build your personal brand and grow your audience. You do that by sharing your work with the world. If “the audience” finds your work valuable, they might stick around for more.

You can post something on the spot when inspiration hits you. But to keep your posting up consistently, you’re going to need a system. You won’t feel “inspired” all the time. Waiting for inspiration is a trap and can have you feeling like you’re always running behind.

Beat the clock by planning ahead.

For a small business or freelancing clients

To take one client as an example, I:

Select an image from a massive image database

Write a caption and, where needed, get it approved and/or translated (translations take longer because the person after me won’t start working on it the split second I ask them to)

Schedule the posts across Social Media and barely touch the account the rest of the month

I go through this process once a month. I don’t need to take chunks of time out of my day every day. This reduces lost time from unnecessary task switching. I “get it over with” and don’t have to worry about what to post today, because I already planned this out one month earlier. Yay, I can now worry about other or more important things.

How far you want to plan ahead may depend on your or on your client’s needs.

For myself

When I go crazy with projects and posting across multiple channels, I need to somehow maintain an overview. I also want to prevent myself from sitting down at the computer and wasting time deciding what to work on. That should be done beforehand. If I plan ahead, I eliminate this issue.
What is a Delivery Lead?
By: Ian Schuyt
Tags: Agile, Programing, Project Management, DevOps, Software Development

A Delivery Lead’s role is to enable the successful delivery of a portfolio of initiatives or features for a particular team or product area. They’re an enabler; they think strategically, and they provide leadership.

The Delivery Lead works with a software development team and throughout the Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC). The most important touch-points for a Delivery Lead are the beginning and the end of the lifecycle; specifically the planning & requirements and deployment and operations management.

At the beginning, they work with the team to ensure initiatives are well-defined and ready to work on. Near the end of the SDLC, they work with the team to ensure completed features get into a production environment and into the hands of stakeholders—with confidence and ideally with minimal manual intervention.

Delivery Leads also work to enhance communication and continuity across teams by assisting their particular team or product area to better communicate and co-ordinate initiatives with that of other teams or product areas.

Photo by Jay Wen on Unsplash

A Delivery Lead is also an enabler for a software development team. They have a solid understanding of software delivery methods, Agile principals and methods, and classic Project Management approaches. They use this brew of knowledge and provide insights and make decisions that help to elevate a team, ultimately building more productive and resilient teams to achieving more impactful and transparent outcomes.

A Delivery Lead often also has acquired knowledge of best-practices in software integration and delivery. This could include best-practices in testing, continuous integration/delivery, and cloud-native engineering, to name but a few. Applying this knowledge — along with their own experience, background, and insights — Delivery Leads are well-positioned to identify practices that are well-suited for a given team to further elevate teams to achieve successes.

Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash

Delivery Leads also provide key insights to stakeholders — Product Managers, Software Delivery Leads, Executives, and Stakeholders — on the progress of an initiative or feature from inception to delivery and into production. They keep stakeholders informed by enhancing the visibility of development efforts and providing regular insights through metrics, charts, and status report. This allows key stakeholders to stay informed and enables them to make better business and product decisions.

Delivery Lead is also a strategic and leadership role. Delivery Leads are actively involved in helping to define and shape the features and products they’re working to deliver, almost always alongside a Product Manager and frequently a Software Manager too.
【妊娠22～23週目（6か月）】急激に大きくなり始めたお腹と肌トラブルの数々
By: Aya Satoh Hoshina, ほしなあや
Tags: 日本語, 妊娠, Diary, Pregnancy, 日記

in Both Sides of the Table
They Will Only Be This Little Today
By: Matthew Kent
Tags: Life Lessons, Love, Children, Parenting, Life

This morning just as I as about to tell my family it was time to leave for work and give them hugs, my three year old daughter asked me to read a book to her.

I said that it was probably time to go to work, but sure, I’d read it to her, so I scooped her up and put her on my lap.

My wife, watching this happen, wisely observed “she’ll only be this little today.”

The world is marked by relentless change. You need to take the time to appreciate the preciousness of impermanence.
Tauntful
By: Terry Mansfield
Tags: Humor, Haiku, Poetry, Teaser, Poem

Hi! I’m Terry Mansfield and I Specialize in Eclecticism

Here are some things about me you probably don’t know (and maybe don’t even care to know; sorry about that).
Come Home
By: Lorissa Sapien
Tags: Relationships, Poetry, Love, Flash Fiction, Microfiction

Photo by Kipras Štreimikis on Unsplash

He has a ginger beard

And freckles to boot

I kiss him

Freckles and all

My lips part

Softly — gently

Hands behind my back,

untying my apron

Dinner’s ready!

I am June Cleaver

Or Lucy

His jaw clenches

He has to leave

His wife is calling

And I’m alone again
‘Paddington’: D. “Paddington: The Man Behind the Bear”
By: Shain E. Thomas
Tags: Paddington, Television, BBC, Michael Bond, Documentary

Eric Haynes’ Paddington: The Man Behind the Bear, featuring specially filmed readings and narration by Paddington film franchise actor Hugh Bonneville, celebrates children’s book author Michael Bond and his most famous character.

With a combination of archival footage, animation, interviews and some surprising encounters, the documentary tells the tale of how a little Peruvian bear found his home in the British Isles.

The Man Behind the Bear, including interviews with the author’s family members, sees famed celebrates and actors Simon Farnaby, Stephen Fry, Bernard Cribbins, Jeremy Clarkson, and Valerie Singleton.

Animated sequences based on Peggy Fortnum’s original illustrations also help bring this captivating story to life.

Bond’s own life, from his personal encounters with refugees during the war to witnessing the arrival of the Windrush generation in postwar London, influenced the values and character he gave to Paddington.

Following Paddington’s rise to become the world’s most recognisable, well-loved bear, the film sees how Paddington worked as a Unicef children’s champion and, with the help of cast and crew, follows his unstoppable career in the movies.

Paddington: The Man Behind the Bear, coming to BBC One on Christmas Eve, will be televised 21:00 (GMT). The documentary will also be available on the BBC iPlayer.
Toronto’s Strong Blockchain Community
By: Nat Chin
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum

STACK’s Booth at the Boost Blockchain Job Fair yesterday.

Yesterday, the STK team was at the Boost Blockchain Job Fair at the Globe and Mail Centre. We were there with a variety of different Blockchain-based companies from cryptocurrency exchanges to projects, including Huobi Global, Shyft Network, and Aion Foundation. Thank you to Blockchain Ambassadors (big shoutout to Amy and Aaron) to the awesome event!

Seeing the diversity of different companies was really eye-opening. There were companies that have solutions built on the blockchain, some facilitating the mass adoption of blockchain, and some researching the newest up and coming technologies. All of these companies are largely involved in taking a massive step forward to revolutionizing blockchain.

The diversity of tech talent at the event was also enlightening. Back in April, CBRE, a company that ranks Tech Talent in North America put Toronto in fourth, surpassing New York City. The three preceding us are San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington — which all things considered, puts us very far ahead. In the top 10, Toronto is the only Canadian city to hit the list. This is a radical change. Many Canadian University students landed internships in the Bay Area — and would not come back, until they were ready to settle down.

In the past few years however, the tech talent in Toronto has been consistently rising. New graduates and coop students are much more willing to stay in the area and keep the talent here. In 2017 alone, the employment rate increased 13.6% from the year previous.

The number of blockchain and cryptocurrency-based solutions in Toronto are also significantly rising. Services that are used to be run and dominated by monopolies are changing — and blockchains are moving these archaic technologies into a trustless system. In the end — all of these companies are moving a step forward to a world where blockchain can be used and adopted by the masses.
WirePOLITICS: EMILY’s List supports Naughton
Tags: Planned Parenthood, Kevin Strouse, Andy Warren, Politics, Scott Petri

Tom Waring, the Wire

EMILY’s List, which supports pro-choice female Democratic candidates, is backing Shaughnessy Naughton in the 8th Congressional District.

“As a small business owner who grew up in a working family that struggled to make ends meet, Shaughnessy Naughton has what it takes to fight for economic policies that give all Pennsylvania families a fair shot,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY’s List. “In Congress, she’ll use her unique background as a scientist to stand up for women’s health and to hold Republicans accountable for their attacks on the environment. Pennsylvania’s Eighth District is one of the most competitive districts in the country, and the EMILY’s List community of over three million members is excited to have the opportunity to help a Democratic woman as dynamic as Shaughnessy win this open seat.”

Naughton, a scientist and owner of a family publishing business, faces state Rep. Steve Santarsiero in the primary.

Naughton ran in 2014, but lost in the primary by 817 votes to Kevin Strouse, who had most of the party behind him. Strouse went on to lose to Republican Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, who is not seeking another term.

“Right now, when Planned Parenthood funding is under attack by Republicans, I’m glad to have the support of EMILY’s List members who believe we need more women and more scientists in federal office to protect critical funding for breast cancer research and preventive care like mammograms.” Naughton said. “As a woman, a small business owner and a scientist, it’s shocking to watch Congress deny climate change and ignore significant advances in medical research. We need to be focused on creating jobs, growing the economy and making education a priority– not turning back the clock on women’s rights. I’m running for Congress because I know that we need to turn our country in a better direction, and I am honored to have the full support of EMILY’s List to get the job done.”

The 8th Congressional District consists of all of Bucks County and a small portion of Montgomery County.

Former Bucks County Commissioner Andy Warren is seeking the Republican nomination. Other rumored candidates include state Rep. Scott Petri and Tom Manion, a retired businessman and Marine Corps colonel who ran for the seat in 2008.
The Slow Death of Mainstream Church
By: Matthew Woodall
Tags: Christianity, Community, Family, Faith

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

I grew up in houses of worship…literally. My father was a minister with a mainstream protestant denomination in Canada. Many days of my youth were spent playing in church gyms, exploring nooks and crannies of century-old buildings, and trying to be “helpful” to my dad and the church secretary.

In my teens, my mother went back to school in order to make the jump from teaching to ministry as well. This meant two churches, two congregations, two places in which I was surrounded by people with certain expectations of the minister’s kid. Sometimes the expectations of others are worse than the expectations of your own family.

Through my teens, I experimented…a lot. Oh, there were no drugs, sex, or anything like that. Can you imagine the scandal in the church community if the minister’s kid got caught with some pot? This was the nineties, when the war on drugs was still raging.

No, I experimented with church. Different denominations, different worship styles, different beliefs, I tried a bunch of them. Always too worried about what other people thought to just let myself be who I wanted to be.

Throughout this time, I was a regular attendee at regional church meetings. We met once a year to discuss the work of the church on a larger scale, and about once a meeting I would stand up and speak on something or another. This experience gave me a healthy respect for not only debate, but the process of achieving consensus instead of majority.

I spent my summers working at summer camp, though my beliefs began to evolve and I ended up rejecting the small, petty beliefs of exclusion that they espoused. In their own terms, I love the believers and hate the beliefs.

I owe a lot to those formative years, they have shaped me in ways that I never would have chosen.

I famously fell asleep during a prayer at the end of an all-day planning session with the leadership team.

As I moved out of my teens and into my post-secondary years, I found myself drawn towards leadership in different organizations. I worked as a volunteer youth minister in my denomination, serving in a couple of different local and regional roles. I also served in leadership with a non-denominational group on my university campus.

Though in retrospect, my heart wasn’t totally in that one. I famously fell asleep during a prayer at the end of an all-day planning session with the leadership team. In my defence, I had worked an overnight shift the night before.

I have worshipped in arenas, in tiny chapels, around fires with a small group of friends, while walking solo through a labyrinth, and while riding wind-driven waves in a canoe. I have also worshipped in cathedrals, with hundred-plus voice choirs, from the pews, from the choir loft, and from the pulpit.

Church has never been about worship.

I don’t believe that worship is limited to certain buildings.

I don’t even believe that worship is limited to certain religions.

Church is not about worship.
Episode 8: Howard Rheingold and Tom Serres Discuss Fake News and The Real Politics of Technology
By: Tom Serres
Tags: Tom Serres, Howard Rheingold, Journalism, Fact Checking, Politics

Right now there are 400,000 bots creating around 20% of all Internet chatter. How are we meant to determine the authority of the online content we read if there are now robots and non-humans generating such a large percent of it? In Episode 8, Howard Rheingold — critic, writer, teacher, and one of the earliest pioneers of the Internet — and Tom Serres discuss Fake News and the Real Politics of Technology.

Howard has always been ten-years ahead of everyone else, and was writing about social media way back in the 90s. He has written various books on the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media, cementing his status as a leading thinker in social media. In this episode we look at the issues of fake news and Internet literacy.

There are various things that have an effect on the way we experience tech, from the type of political environment we are into our own individual knowledge of certain technology. So the best way we can currently improve our use of tech and the Internet is to ensure we have the best fact-checking tools and sites at our disposal. But then, who’s fact-checking the fact-checking sites?

Howard also discusses the need to control our own attention. As the web was created by people, the way we think of it affects how it evolves. If we only use the web as an echo chamber, we only reinforce our own opinions, which makes it incredibly difficult for people to look beyond what they believe. For the Internet to continue being valuable, we need to figure out how to give people the tools and desire to fact-check.

Would you like to learn more about Blockchain technology? We’ve launched an education course “The Basics of Blockchain”. Discover the fundamentals and terminology basics of Blockchain, explore Blockchain from an economic perspective and get the lowdown on how this changes how we exchange value. We also will teach you the technology behind Blockchain — from infrastructure to application — and we will deep-dive with further use cases and discover just how Blockchain is being used in today’s business climate.
孕婦媽媽可以使用哪些精油？香草魔法學苑的精油推薦嗎？
By: Tony Zeng
Tags: 美妝, 生活, 保養, 精油, 香草魔法學苑

in Both Sides of the Table
Anatomy of a Burnout in Progress
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Culture, Freelancing, Media, Writing, Mental Health

When I pluck up the courage to step on it, the scale confirms what I already know.

Within a week from coming back from Amsterdam, my clothes already felt looser as I had dropped weight without even trying. Almost three weeks later, it’s worse.

I wasn’t even overweight to start off with.

And yet, I eat but only because my family is French, I’m staying with them, and dinner time is sacred; skipping more than one meal on occasion would raise questions.

It would also be disrespectful.

Every night, I sit down in front of a delicious dinner lovingly prepared by my stepmom, who insists on cooking despite being always exhausted. She has always been happiest in the kitchen, this is how she expresses her restless creativity; food is her love language.

And every night, I honor her hard work despite having no appetite and great difficulty swallowing.

For however long it takes us to have dinner, I empty my head and focus on my parents who are struggling with the daily reality of stage 4 cancer.

Struggling is a euphemism for the innumerable physical and mental ignominies of chemotherapy that don’t allow my stepmom any respite.

Whatever I’m going through, my parents don’t need to know; what’s more, it would be indecent to burden them with it.
Data Stewardship in Action: Seeing the Forest for the Trees in Finland
By: Andrew Young
Tags: Data Stewardship, Data Collaboratives, Environment, Data Stewards, Examples

Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

“Finland’s model in utilising forest data” is a new report analyzing the “background, implementation, and future prospects” of Finland’s private forestry data pooling platform, Metsään.fi. The report was developed by the research center Pellervo Economic Research PTT in partnership with the Finnish Forest Centre, a state-funded organization under the guidance of Finland’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

The Metsään.fi platform provides a compelling view into the public value of increasing the availability of data collected from Finland’s privately owned forests. As described in the report, these private forests are important components of the country’s ecosystem and economy. They represent around 60 percent of Finland’s forest land and provide roughly 80 percent of the domestic wood used by the country’s forest industry.

Through Metsään.fi, the Finnish Forest Centre pools and makes accessible remote sensing data drawn from these many privately-owned forests. The data is collected through aerial photography, laser scanning, and sample plot measurements, among other mechanisms. The free platform is especially targeted at forest owners, government representatives, industry actors, and others whose decision-making could benefit from access to up-to-date situational analysis on the country’s forests.

The report’s analysis of the platform and survey of users demonstrates the value of this data for regional forest planning and for lowering transaction and operating costs associated with forest management, harvest planning, wood use assessments, and other such activities. In order to make these benefits possible, data stewards at the Finnish Forest Centre strategically bundled useful and relevant data into a single data pool. These stewards are also focused on ensuring the data provided on the platform remains relevant and up-to-date over time, a key requirement from the demand side of this data collaborative.

Read the report here.
Prioritize Your Tasks and Master Productivity Using The Eisenhower Matrix
By: Prakash Joshi Pax
Tags: Productivity, Time Management, Personal Development, Self Improvement, Prioritization

Often times, we have too many things on our to-do list and have no idea of where to start. Emails that you have to respond to, call for a meeting, go grocery shopping, and many more.

With all these multiple tasks competing to get your attention, it’s hard to start doing any single task. It feels like being stuck in a place of uncertainty and not knowing where to begin.

Also, know as task paralysis, this happens to most people. Procrastination and task paralysis are similar beasts that will take off your productive time. So, how do you overcome them? Here’s a trick.

Use the Eisenhower Matrix.

What is The Eisenhower Matrix

Eisenhower matrix is popular time management and task prioritization strategy. Also known as the urgent-important matrix, it helps you to decide on tasks based on their importance and urgency.

It is named after the 34th president of the United States Dwight Eisenhower. Before becoming president, he was a five-star general in the Army, served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and was responsible for planning and executing invasions of North Africa, France, and Germany.

He had to take tough decisions every day on what needs to be done and what not to be. Therefore, he developed the Eisenhower matrix. Using this task management strategy, he was able to sustain his productivity for a long period of time.

This task management strategy used by Dwight Eisenhower was later popularized by Stephen Covey through his most popular book “The 7 habits of highly Effective People”.

As a result, the Eisenhower matrix became of the most used task management and decision-making strategies used by hundreds and thousands of people in businesses world and their personal life.
How To Create Appealing Designs For Social Media
By: Funmi Agbana
Tags: Online Solutions, Digiengage, Design, Social Media, Digital Marketing

We’re all attracted to the beauties of life; whether they be sleek cars, beautiful women, gorgeous homes, or an aesthetically pleasing image on social media. This is because as humans, we are visual beings. We’re led by the things that we can not just hear but see, which is why people are glued to their phone screen for countless hours a day, scrolling through their social feed to see and share interesting content and designs for their friends to see.

What then does this mean for the business owner? To get the right dose of shares, clicks and engagement on your social media content, you have to create designs that are not just attractive and easy on the eyes but also relevant. Why? Because image is everything! Your social media content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media when paired with a relevant image. Facebook posts with a design get 3 times more engagement and tweets with images have up to 150% engagement!

So, how do you improve on your social media designs with no form of expertise? Here’s how.

Pick a tool you’re comfortable with. Whether it be Canva, Photoshop, Corel draw, etc. pick a design tool and learn its nitty-gritty thoroughly. This is your first and major step towards creating impeccable designs. Stick with the guidelines. Every brand has its unique guidelines and it is important that you learn and adhere to them. Non compliance to guidelines will have your designs without a form of direction and strewn all over the place. Plus, not only do sticking to brand guidelines make for easy identification but it also creates a strong top of mind awareness for your brand. Case in point, GT Bank. Get the right dimensions. Each social media platform is different in its presentation and layout. What works on Facebook may not fit well on LinkedIn. Get the right dimensions for posts, cover designs, etc. so parts of your designs are not cut out or at most rejected. Learn the lingua. When designing for digital assets, there are quite a number of terms you’ll come across and it is important that you learn them and know where they fit in on your design. E.g : CTA, Body copy, etc. Use the right images. Plagiarism is a huge no-no and you certainly wouldn’t want your brand caught in the web of plagiarism so from the get go, you need to know what kinds of images you would be using; whether stock photos, templates, or photography.

For further guidance, on how to create appealing designs for social media, be sure to download our graphical guide to creating social media designs right here and if all of this sounds like a tall order to you or you’re simply swamped by wearing many hats, we would love to meet your every design needs and more by taking the stress of creating designs off of you. So be sure to get in touch with the relentlessly creative humans at Digiengage Nigeria
MvRx with Dagger2
By: Łukasz Chromy
Tags: Android, Mvrx, Mvvm, Dagger 2, Software Development

On the other hand, we have Dagger 2 — the most popular DI tool for our platform. It’s very commonly used in most of the projects in my company, Miquido.

When I played with MvRx for the first time, I wasn’t expecting any major problems between these two… But it wasn’t a piece of cake either.

When you type: MvRx + dagger in Google, you will eventually find this issue on GitHub:

There is a lot of knowledge in this conversation, but not everyone has time to read all these comments, code snippets, and smart ideas, just to setup MvRx with Dagger2. So I have decided to create a sample project to present how easy and fast it can be done.

Before we jump to the code, let’s talk a little bit about other tools we will use for this purpose.

Dagger 2 Android Injector

With Dagger 2.10 we got major API changes related to how dependencies are injected in Android.

Before these changes, to inject dependencies into an activity we would do something like this:

As we can see, our activity knows quite a lot about how it is initialized with its dependencies, which violates the principle of Inversion of Control:

The client delegates the responsibility of providing its dependencies to external code (the injector). The client code does not need to know about the injecting code.

After we take advantage of the new dagger.android , our activity will look a lot cleaner:

To read more about Dagger 2 Android Injector please visit the official docs at https://dagger.dev/android.

Assisted Injection

In MvRx we will need to manually inject dependencies from outside of our graph to the ViewModel. Assisted Inject comes to our aid for this. To learn more details about how it works please read an article by Fred Porciúncula: Dagger 2 on Android: Assisted Injection.
Like a Lover of Yore
Tags: Poetry, Blue Insights, Lovers, Love, Nostalgia

Like a lover of yore, knocking at my door with an innocent, troublesome face,

Like a nostalgic song from childhood, reminiscent of naïver times,

Like an alien from the strange land of my own heart,

You came to me quietening my worry, disrupting my peace.

An uninvited guest that pleasantly surprises the guest,

Bringing me delight unbounded.

Stay with me forever,

And light up the dark sky of my heart.
Tudo o que você precisa saber sobre Design System
By: Jonatan Zylbersztejn
Tags: Ux Translations, Product Design, Product Development, Design Systems, UX

Design Systems Repo

This is not a comprehensive list of every design system that I have come across. Rather, it’s a collection of ones that…
Binance Reporte Mensual: Mes 15
Tags: Binance, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Latin America, Bitcoin

Binance Exchange provides cryptocurrency trading for fintech and blockchain enthusiasts globally, with multilingual support over a variety of services.

Follow
A Gentle Introduction to Divide and Conquer Algorithms
By: Brandon Skerritt
Tags: Python, Computer Science, Programming, Algorithms

What is divide and conquer? 🌎

Divide and conquer is where you divide a large problem up into many smaller, much easier to solve problems. The rather small example below illustrates this.

We take the equation “3 + 6 + 2 + 4” and we cut it down into the smallest possible set of equations, which is [3 + 6, 2 + 4]. It could also be [2 + 3, 4 + 6]. The order doesn’t matter, as long as we turn this one long equation into many smaller equations.

Let’s say we have 8 numbers:

And we want to add them all together. We first divide the problem into 8 equal sub-problems. We do this by breaking the addition up into individual numbers.

We then begin to add 2 numbers at a time.

Then 4 numbers into 8 numbers which is our resultant.

Why do we break it down to individual numbers at stage 1? Why don’t we just start from stage 2? Because while this list of numbers is even if the list was odd you would need to break it down to individual numbers to better handle it.

A divide and conquer algorithm tries to break a problem down into as many little chunks as possible since it is easier to solve with little chunks. It typically does this with recursion.

Formally the technique is, as defined in the famous Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein, is:

Divide

If the problem is small, then solve it directly. Otherwise, divide the problem into smaller subsets of the same problem.

2. Conquer

Conquer the smaller problems by solving them recursively. If the subproblems are small enough, recursion is not needed and you can solve them directly.

Recursion is when a function calls itself. It’s a hard concept to understand if you’ve never heard of it before. This page provides a good explanation. In short, a recursive function is one like this:

I’ll fully explain the code in a second.

3. Combine

Take the solutions to the sub-problems and merge them into a solution to the original problem.

With the code from above, some important things to note. The Divide part is also the recursion part. We divide the problem up at return n * recur_factorial(n-1) .

Specifically, the recur_factorial(n-1) part is where we divide the problem up.

The conquer part is the recursion part too, but also the if statement. If the problem is small enough, we solve it directly (by returning n). Else, we perform return n * recur_factorial(n-1) .

Combine. We do this with the multiplication symbol. Eventually, we return the factorial of the number. If we didn’t have the symbol there, and it was return recur_factorial(n-1) it wouldn't combine and it wouldn't output anything remotely similar to the factorial. (It'll output 1, for those interested).

We’re going to explore how divide and conquer works in some famous algorithms, Merge Sort and the solution to the Towers of Hanoi.
The Divorced Mom Chronicles
By: Divina Grey
Tags: Divorce, Writing, Self Improvement, Parenting, Life

The Divorced Mom Chronicles

Day 4 — “In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” — Sir Francis Bacon

©2020 Divina Grey

Day 4

I cried all night and fell asleep with my glasses on. I cried in the morning intermittently when the kids weren’t around or when I wasn’t distracting myself with making them pancakes.

I sent text messages to my husband through my anguish and tears, trying to explain how much he has hurt me.

I took the kids to the park, where I caught a break from the reality of my disintegrating marriage and dissipating family life.

I felt the warmth of the sun shining on my face.

I looked up at the blue sky and saw it smiling through the redwoods at me.

Even though I cried a lot today, there was more time between breakdowns than there was yesterday.

I’ll take it.

I’ll take it one day, one paragraph, and one ray of hope at a time.

I’m utterly broken.

(But not so broken that I can’t see the sun shining through to the other side.)
Okay, It’s Not All Bad
By: Melissa R. Mendelson
Tags: A Few Words, 2020, Listicles, Happy Holidays, Memoir

Okay, It’s Not All Bad

I’m not a fan of Listicles

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

I might be a Grinch. I might complain about things being bad or not working out the way that I had hoped, but okay, it’s not all bad. And I’m not a fan of Listicles. To me, it sounds like licking icicles, but I do want to list a few things that made me happy this year in 2020:

1. New Friends/Contacts — A lot from Medium here. :)

2. Acceptances/Publications — There will be two short stories of mine that will be published in Anthologies next year in 2021.

3. Writing Boom — The writing continues, and there are publications on Medium that have given my writing a great home. I haven’t finished working on my Horror novel yet, but I know I will at some point.

4. Not happy about being a Frontline Worker, but even that is not terrible. We’re now on a flexible schedule, where I’m home one day and in the office the next day.

5. My father went through a real frightening rough patch this year, where he had multiple surgeries and had to be rushed to the Emergency Room a few times, but Thank God, that is now behind us. He is devastated over the loss of his dog, Fifi, but I’m trying to be there for him and keep his spirits up.

6. I won’t mention Trump. After my last political article regarding Biden and Harris, I promised to step away from that, and I’m trying. Can’t promise that I won’t be completely quiet until January 20th.

7. I like the number, 7. Maybe, because I was born in 1977, year of the snake. Also, two sides of a coin. Positive — Star Wars. Negative — Son of Sam. Maybe, that’s why it’s so easy for me to switch gears, going from light to dark and back again.

8. Lastly, I’m still here, thank God, and I’m dealing with things. But that’s life. It’s a bitch, but I’m still here. And so are you. I hope all of you have a great holiday and Happy New Year. :)

Side Note: I think Jack Black is hysterical!