fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Man Who Lost His Ability To Read Numbers
By: Simon Spichak
Tags: Research, Education, Science, Psychology, Neuroscience

R.F.S. is a geologist in his 60s who suffered an acute neurological injury in 2010, affecting the parietal lobe of his cerebral cortex. This part of the brain is responsible for visual and spatial awareness. R.F.S. first experienced headaches, amnesia and tremors, but his condition unfortunately deteriorated. In 2011 he lost the ability to read and recognize the digits 2 to 9 though he had no problems with any other stimuli.

Fascinatingly, he could discern between the digits 0 and 1. Since 0 and 1 are cognitive concepts conserved across species (bees, mammals, frogs and birds) and similar to shapes in nature, perhaps they are encoded elsewhere in the brain.

R.F.S. retained his proficiency in mathematics, still understanding numbers written as words or Roman numerals. He even continued working as a geologist for a few years, using surrogate digits for calculations.

In a video, R.F.S. holds a figure eight. He describes the round, curved shape while his fingers move about the edges. This is too strange for words, he exclaimed before laughing nervously. When he turns the figure-eight 90°, he is asked what he sees.

It looks like a mask.

Turning it back 90° he describes that the object does not look how it feels. This indicated to researchers that R.F.S.’s experiences are limited to numbers. He is still perfectly capable of recognizing shapes but somehow, he cannot perceive these numbers.

When presented with pictures of digits with images embedded within them, he could easily read 0 or 1 and correctly identify the embedded image. However, he could neither recognize the digits 2 to 9 or images or objects/faces embedded within them.

Interestingly, researchers noticed that higher-level brain processing was occurring, despite this lack of awareness. The authors posit that though his brain discriminates and identifies these digits, he is not consciously aware of them.

Damage in one region of the brain involved in spatial processing disrupted specific aspects of awareness.

These data support the possibility that extensive visual processing, up to and including activation of identity, can occur without resulting in visual awareness of the stimuli. — Schubert et al., PNAS (2020)

These findings contribute to the mystifying literature aimed at describing the neural correlates of consciousness. Despite higher level processes in the brain firing, this study supports the notion that this information is not immediately made conscious. What parts of the brain are important for visual awareness and consciousness?

This study suggests a role for the parietal lobe in certain aspects of visual awareness!
Do you have a Creative Bucket List?
By: Jun Wu
Tags: Life Lessons, Writing, Work, Productivity, Creativity

Maybe it’s time to create one.

@thejournalgarden unsplash.com

I have a flood of creativity these days. I don’t know where to put it all. I haven’t been a true creative for 20 years. Now, I’m pouring buckets.

This morning, I read this post by Stefani Vader. She has a great suggestion for making a list of all the creative projects that she would like to pursue.

So, I started my list.

Last week, my to-do list was completely shoved aside. I was on a writing rampage on Medium. It was driven by sheer force and the creativity that was pouring out of me.

As I grow in my creative endeavors, I need to look at my to-do list as opportunities to create.

Projects on my to-do list have to be actual line items on my Creative Bucket List.

Otherwise, when I go through one of my creative rampages, all my to-dos on my to-do list become lost in my creative process.

I know, you are thinking that I’m over managing my creative life.

Well, as an analytical person and a creative person, I don’t know how else to manage this “Creative Beast” within myself. I need her to at least acknowledge the fact that being creative is great. But, we also need to channel this creativity into other endeavors such as Marketing, Editing and Communication.

This way our work will actually end up in front of our audience.

Now, I’m going to give some love to my blog and my social media accounts today.
13 Attributes of the Ultimate Writer (Part 4 of 4)
By: Chris Craft
Tags: Writing, Writing Tips, Creativity, Inspiration, Journalism

The Ultimate Writer Series Idea

If this is the first article that you’ve read in this series, allow me to give you the scoop on the idea. The Ultimate Writer series was created from a daydream on how I would create the Ultimate Writer based on 13 core writing attributes. I believe that these attributes are the most important to being an excellent writer. You don’t have to be good at every attribute, but excellence in a few of them would do wonders for your writing skills and career.

The 13 attributes for the Ultimate Writer are:

Soul

Creativity

Intelligence

Voice/Presence

Communication/Delivery

Vocabulary

Sense of Humor

Heart/Empathy

Work Ethic

Stamina

Guts

Versatility

Connecting

As you read this list of writer attributes from top-to-bottom, you will notice that I’m covering the all-encompassing eternal aura with all the way down to the Ultimate Writer’s “feet” with Connecting (with your readers by building a community).

Today, in Part 4 of this series, I’m focusing on the attributes of Guts, Versatility, and Connecting.

Let’s end this fun series on a strong note!

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Guts

When I think about writers having guts, I think about writers who aren’t afraid to cover difficult topics. There’s a certain class that I appreciate when writers cover sensitive topics. I considered all of these things when picking the writer for this attribute.

Nikki Brueggeman is my choice for a writer that exemplifies classy courage or Guts. There are some heartbreaking and controversial true stories from history. Nikki is an excellent oral historian who does a good job of writing about the little-known stories behind historical events. Many of Nikki’s stories touch on racial injustice in the United States. I really appreciate her work and all of the research that goes into her stories.

A story by Nikki that highlights her guts to cover tough and controversial topics: How Minnesota Reminds The South It Was Bad At Rebellion.

It’s a good story about the capturing of the Confederate flag during the U.S. Civil War and how it is still held in Minnesota to this day. The Confederate flag is always a controversial topic, and Minnesota’s holding on to the flag signifies that the Union won and that they won’t allow Confederate sympathizers to gloat over the flag’s return.
How My 45 Year Old Diary Started My Writing Career
By: Iva Ursano
Tags: Motivation, Writing, Freelancers, This Happened To Me, Entrepreneurship

I had my first diary at age 13. Didn’t all girls? Mine was pink. I loved it so much. I protected it like a momma bear watches over her babies. Touch it and you die. No questions asked.

I wrote about boys mostly. Jamie Jones. I’ll never forget him. He was the cutest boy in the neighbourhood. All the girls loved him. Especially me. The only problem with that was all the girls were so much prettier than I was.

He would never give me the time of day.

Dear Diary. Why won’t he look at me? Why do I have to be this ugly? I hate Jennifer. She’s such a bitch and she’s so phoney. I love him so much and want to marry him. It would be so beautiful. If only I was pretty like all the other girls.

I was 13. And my writing career was born. And I had no clue.

I wrote all the time from that moment on.

Dear Diary…I hate my life. I want to die. I hate boys. And I especially still hate Jennifer. I want her to die. She’s so pretty.

As I got older, my diary writing turned into journal writing. Dear God. Dear Universe. Dear Iva. Following that, I poured my heart out. I wrote almost everyday.
Short Literary Fiction: Superfood for the Digital Soul
By: Edie Meade
Tags: Writing, Mental Health, Education, Art, Psychology

Short Literary Fiction: Superfood for the Digital Soul

Why Short Stories?

There is a place in this digitally-driven world for literary fiction.

The internet has changed the world, including the world of literature. Arguably, people are reading more than ever thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and social media.

But reading more does not necessarily mean people are more literate.

Does declaring a difference between the two make me a snob? Perhaps so. But multiple studies connect heightened empathy with reading literary fiction.

Specifically, the “act of transportation into the story and identification with the characters can lead to substantive changes in perception and worldview.”

In part, this may be because “literary representations of emotion may be ‘purer’ than those encountered in real-life, and thus have the power to enhance individuals affective empathetic responses.”
Lessons from a $7000 Budget Movie That Made over $2 Million
By: S Pats
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Productivity, Startup, Entrepreneurship

Anyone Can Be Ok at Anything

Rodriguez had to learn a lot of tough skills to make his movie such as editing, sound capture, set design, organising a crew etc. These ain’t skills you learn the usual way by being a good student at school, it’s what you learn by getting down and dirty doing something you really want to do.

We all have projects and ideas that we would like to act upon, but the skills gap between whats needed and what we have can be daunting. Do not let it fool you.

Let’s think of this mathematically. You, the person reading this, are likely an average human being (but probably above average since you’re reading the The Ascent 😉). So that means you can get up to an average level in 90% of the domains of human achievement, which leads to a lesser-known fact :

You can only tell if you’ll be successful at something when you get to being OK at it.

There’s a great lesson hidden here:

You can’t say ‘I’m not good enough’ until you’re OK enough.

This fear that ‘I might not be good enough’ is one I’ve felt and given into far too frequently, and one that’s killed more dreams than any other. But you can only have that fear when you’re at an average level, so get there first, then worry.

You will almost never be as good as you want to be on the first attempt at something worthwhile, but thats not the point of first drafts. All you need to be first is OK-ish, only then can you find out if you’ve got what it takes.

So, if you have an idea for a business, show, career — get yourself to a point where you’re OK-ish and then get good.
Masks, Protection, and Our National Character
By: Angie Rasmussen
Tags: Covid 19, Health, Public Health, Science, Coronavirus

Masks, Protection, and Our National Character

Public health is inherently unselfish; why aren’t we?

A man wearing a cutout mask gathered with hundreds of others at a “Hazardous Liberty! Defend the Constitution!” rally to protest the stay-at-home order on April 19, 2020, in Olympia, Washington. Photo: Karen Ducey/Stringer/Getty Images

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance around mask-wearing to say that masks protect the wearer as well as others around them, presumably to encourage mask-wearing. This is notable for what it says about our national character.

For context: Fabric masks are not N95s, which we know offer substantial protection to the wearer. Cloth or surgical masks provide some limited protection against larger droplets, and as Dr. Saskia Popescu points out, this is variable.

Most of the data for this protection is from health care settings, which can be very different from using them in the real world. The primary function of wearing cloth and surgical masks is source control, and the primary benefit they offer is to others.

It says a lot about our priorities that the CDC has to issue guidance appealing directly to an individual’s self-interest to overcome the resistance to employing easy-to-implement, safe public health measures.

To me, this also says a lot about how deeply divided we are as a nation. If we can’t convince millions of Americans that they should wear masks for the benefit of others rather than to benefit themselves, it suggests that we no longer value being one nation, indivisible.

I think of myself as a patriot, and of course I deeply value freedom, including individual freedom. But I also value my community and my people as a nation. We can only fight this pandemic by unifying as a nation and by caring about others.

It says a lot about our priorities that the CDC has to issue guidance appealing directly to an individual’s self-interest to overcome the resistance to employing easy-to-implement, safe public health measures.

I was on the fence about masks early in the pandemic (as critics love to point out), but the data persuaded me that they are an important tool for reducing community transmission. So I have been wearing masks in public for months now because it’s not about me.

Public health is inherently unselfish, so I’m saddened and disappointed that the greater good isn’t sufficiently motivating to get everyone on board and we have to put critical guidance into a selfish context.

We all need to do our part. At the end of the day, I hope this encourages people to wear masks. I just wish we didn’t have to encourage people to care for their communities by appealing to individual interests.

This is pulled and lightly edited from my November 11 Twitter thread.
The Failure that Led to Sigmund Freud’s Success
By: Herbert Lui
Tags: Creative, Motivation, Failure, Psychology, Creativity

The Failure that Led to Sigmund Freud’s Success

Why Even a Dead Page can have Purpose

In 1895, Sigmund Freud started Project for a Scientific Psychology, a monograph where he tried to explain all neuroses under a single framework. The ambition and expectation of the task brought trouble of equal magnitude. In Creating Minds, Howard Gardner writes that Freud “reveals his own despair at the magnitude of the task, the meager tools at his disposal, and the seemingly contradictory mission of laying bare what the psychic censors have withheld from introspection or consciousness.”

And yet, as Gardner highlights, Freud’s breakthrough work The Interpretation of Dreams can be seen as the successor to Project for a Scientific Psychology. The editorial note in Project for a Scientific Psychology agrees, “The immediate continuation of the ‘Project’ among Freud’s published writings is to be found in The Interpretation of Dreams.”

It was only after Freud finished Project for a Scientific Psychology, that he felt the doubts of it, “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I concocted the psychology,” he writes in a letter. He didn’t end up publishing Project, and it wouldn’t see the light of day until a decade after he passed away.

New creative work can always be built at the tail end of a creative failure. In Freud’s case, The Interpretation of Dreams wasn’t an immediate success either; only years after publishing did it cement itself as something that would change the fields of social science and establish the domain of psychology.

There are lots of reasons for us to do things that won’t work out well, especially because there’s a possibility that they lead to something that will. It’s possible, of course, that Freud could have come up with Interpretation without Project. But in practice, and in actuality, he made a monograph he couldn’t bring himself to publish, before he made the one that would cement his legacy.

Writers sit on both sides of this, and I’m sure people in creative work of all sorts do as well. Mark Manson doesn’t force his writing when he knows it’s not good; why waste the time re-writing? But Danielle Steele advocates writing dead pages, knowing she’ll have something to work with after and that re-writing is easier than getting blocked.

Not every piece of work is meant to see the light of day; but maybe that wasn’t its purpose. The decision is yours to make.
People first: Valentin Grigoryevskiy (AIFORSE Community)
By: Aiforse Community
Tags: People, Software Engineering, Software Development, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

What is the most complex technical task you have ever solved?

There are different Criteria of Complexity for Tasks we need to solve from day to day. A task may be Complex by tough Timelines, by Communication Issues within the Team or with a Customer, by Lack of Resources and finally, by it’s Nature. I experienced all the mentioned Cases, but sure, when I’m thinking of really Complex ones, the last Category comes to my Mind first.

For me as for a Software Engineer, the most complex and at the same time the most interesting Tasks were related to Coordination of Functionality of different directly and indirectly related Modules of Enterprise-Level Software, which altogether should work as a Single Solution and cover End-to-End Scenarios.
Why Creative Blocks Happen
By: Rosie L
Tags: Creativity, Self Improvement, Productivity, Life Lessons, Writing

In The Dynamics of Creation, psychoanalyst and psychologist Anthony Storr attempts to understand what motivates people to dedicate themselves to creative work. Considering that creativity is a difficult endeavour and often carries few rewards, it has to be about more than fame or money.

Storr believed that for some people, creativity could substitute for unmet needs in the real world. Individuals who fail to find satisfaction in relationships and the like turn more to their internal worlds.

Writing, music, painting, and other forms of art can be a way of communicating with others on your own terms. It can feel safer than doing so through conversation because the whole situation is under your control. You don’t need to fear other people tricking you into revealing more than you wish.

For those who struggle to maintain a solid sense of self, creativity can be a means of self-assertion.

It’s a way of expressing your thoughts and emotions with minimal pressure to confirm. Some creative people gain self-esteem from their work, as opposed to their concrete selves. Equally, making stuff is a form of escapism. It takes you out of yourself for a while.

Storr goes on to write that some people put more of themselves into their creative efforts than they do into their social lives. Those who feel unable to reveal their true selves to others in relationships can end up feeling their art is the sole real expression of their identity. Storr writes:

‘Great artists are seldom great talkers; and when they are, like Oscar Wilde, one has the impression that they would have produced more work of lasting value had they talked less. This needful secrecy, however, means that creative people very often reveal less of themselves in company than ordinary people, and thus may not experience the reinforcement of the sense of identity which comes from a true exchange of one’s ‘real self’ with the real selves of others.’

Taken too far, you end up hyper-sensitive about your art because any criticism of it is an attack on your fundamental self. Taken even further, making anything becomes impossible. Finishing a project and risking exposure is too dangerous.

Caring too much about your art can prevent you from actually making anything.

Conversely, creating in order to attain necessary doses of self-esteem can make you too eager to release your work as often as possible, to make it visible to as many people as possible, to get as much of what’s in your mind out as you can. Needing that reassurance is a barrier to spending a long time working on a bigger, more complex, or more developed thing.
5 Helpful Resources That Will Transform the Way You Write
By: Itxy Lopez
Tags: Creativity, Writing Tips, 5 Tips, Books, Writing

There are a number of online classes, articles, and books to read on writing, which is why it can be difficult to figure out where to begin. You want to improve your writing skills, but you feel intimidated by the amount of information there is, so you do what all sane humans do: you avoid it.

To make it easier for you, I’ve compiled a list of five resources for writers of all levels who want to grow and tell better stories. There’s nothing on this list that I haven’t taken or read myself.

These resources are actually the ones that were most helpful to me — even to this day. I’ve no doubt you’ll learn a thing (or thirty) from them yourself.
I’ll fall in love with your beautiful health story
By: Katie Mccurdy
Tags: Design, Health, Storytelling, Healthcare, Data Visualization

I’ll fall in love with your beautiful health story

I can’t help it, I fall in love every time.

As I get started up with Pictal Health, I’ve been working with patients 1-on-1 to help gather, distill, and visualize their health stories. This process involves talking together, prioritizing what’s important, and creating some kind of visual to help patients communicate with their care team — usually a visual timeline, and sometimes other types of visuals. My goal right now is to learn from these interactions and iterate toward a viable business model.

As I sit at my computer deeply focused on creating a timeline for someone, it inevitably happens: I sit back, look at the colors and shapes that are emerging, and get that warm, falling feeling.

Partly because my friends at Make New helped me pick a set of complimentary colors that work well together on these timelines, but the love is really about what the shape and texture of the visual tells me about each person’s story. Below are some de-identified examples, with all words replaced with lines.

I often see overlapping periods where many symptoms are co-occurring; this usually represents a hard time in the person’s life. Or as one of my clients put it, their ‘dark period.’ (Which is interesting, because the overlapping colors create darkness.) It also reminds me of a mountain range.

What looks like a hazy setting sun in the below graph represents a scary hospitalization.

Large yellow circles, which I’ve been using to indicate life events and stress levels, might mean death, divorce, or stressful jobs. They also look like warm suns.

Thin spiky needles can show severe flare-ups that happen intermittently.

The contrast between visual representation and content is striking: beauty vs. fear, elegance vs. chaos and stress, hope and relief alongside tragedy. I think this is why I love it. Each little shape and slope is brimming with emotion.
Do I Need to Code in My Free Time to Be a Good Developer?
By: Maxim Chechenev
Tags: Programming, Productivity, Development, Startup, Software Development

“But Hey, I Love to Write Code and I’m Passionate About It”

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind if someone codes in their free time. It makes a lot of sense in different situations, like with junior developers who obviously need to learn and practice. Or when you need to learn a new language or a new technology. Or when you’re preparing for an interview (especially for big companies). Or when you just like coding and it’s your hobby. Or when you work on your own projects. And so on. All these situations and reasons are wonderful and great, so there is no reason to argue.

My question is a bit different: Why do some people expect that I will code in my free time if my circumstances are different?

Just to give a bit of context about myself, it happens that coding is not my hobby, although I do like it and do my work at a high level. I really enjoy it when I see the result of my work. It’s an amazing feeling to see how people interact with interfaces that I’ve built. And I love it even after eight years of developing.

But I spend eight hours per day for work, and a third of a day goes to sleeping. As a result, I don’t have that much time left for something else. What about my hobbies? Family? My friends? I need a lot of time for all these. I need a balance. I don’t want to tell my wife something like, “Yeah, I will be right there, just finishing one more small bug” when she asks me to join the family dinner. Because I know, in that case, I will have dinner alone and will eat something cold. I don’t want to miss really important moments in my life.

My hobbies are slightly related to computers. I do like practicing yoga. I enjoy bicycle trips. I like baking (even though I’m not very good at it). I’m trying to learn how to play the harmonica. I want to try new things and new hobbies, and I want to feel the life outside of these computers. And how can I find enough time for all these hobbies when I have so little time left in the evenings?
NLP — Zero to Hero with Python and More!
By: Towards Ai Team
Tags: News, Artificial Intelligence, Science, Future, Technology

NeurIPS, the largest conference in artificial intelligence, is currently underway, and it has over 20k people registered. If you are not registered and would like to access their goodies, please visit this public access version of the NeurIPS website.

If you are into deep learning, we recommend you to check out this phenomenal tutorial by David Duvenaud, Zico Kolter, and Matt Johnson, which makes use of many tools such as Anderson acceleration, differential equations, neural nets, convex optimization, Jax, automatic differentiation and others, presented on NeurIPS.

Next, we recommend you to check out this article titled “We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says” by Karen Hao from MIT Technology Review, which gives a very insightful overview of what caused the departure of Timtit Gebru, co-lead ethical AI researcher from Google Brain.

For those interested in natural language processing, Carnegie Mellon Professor Graham Neubig just published 23 class-lectures on multilingual natural language processing, including two guest lectures by Pat Littell and Orhan Firat. The video playlist can be accessed for free on Youtube.

Last but not least, Paul Liang and Misha Khodak from ML@CMU published a post containing all of CMU’s submissions to NeurIPS 2020, with many goodies, from papers to code, and much more.
6 Powerful Headline Principles Inspired by Claude Hopkins
By: Cynthia Marinakos
Tags: Headline Hacks, Business, Creativity, Startup, Writing

6 Powerful Headline Principles Inspired by Claude Hopkins

42 Headline examples and practical tips you can use immediately

Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos.

Claude Hopkins was one of the world’s greatest copywriters and advertising men. He is credited with ad techniques such as market research, money-back guarantees, sampling, and trials. His techniques are as powerful now as back then. His book, Scientific Advertising, captures foundational principles of advertising and copywriting.

We don’t spend time creating and testing headlines because we want our articles published quickly. We neglect our readers because we’re too absorbed in writing what we want to write, the way we want to write it. We get tunnel vision from the products, services, and ideas we want to sell.

This book reminds us we’re here because of our readers. So shift the focus back to them.

It covers headlines in one chapter, yet so many of the principles can be applied when creating headlines. I came up with six key learnings from analyzing Hopkins’ headlines while at the same time studying his classic principles.

Address your target reader Aim for clarity Appeal to people’s desire to avoid pain Show credibility Focus on your reader’s interests Spend time creating and testing headlines

You’ll see examples of his headlines, a discussion of his approach, how it can be applied to our own headline, and examples of headlines we can create from the techniques. Let’s dig into these, shall we?
Increase Your Reach 10x by Turning Blog Posts into Videos
By: Esat Artug
Tags: Writing, Social Media, Marketing, Productivity, Money

Increase Your Reach 10x by Turning Blog Posts into Videos

Video receives more engagement than text and other mediums

Photo by Jackson Hayes on Unsplash

Producing and publishing great blog posts is not enough to grow your views and reads. You also need to promote those blog posts to attract visitors.

Don’t stop at sharing a link on Facebook and Twitter, you can also turn that blog post into a video to get more traffic from YouTube.

With over 1.5 billion monthly active users watching 1 billion hours of video content per day, YouTube is one of the most effective platforms you can leverage to generate traffic and promote your business online.

You spend days writing and crafting the best content for your blog. Yet most of those blog posts often go unnoticed. Repurpose those old blog posts by turning them into videos and easily get started on a video marketing strategy.

There’s no need to buy expensive video camera equipment or invest in video production agencies. You can create videos all by yourself. I’ll show you how.
Taking Your Anger and Frustration Out on Others Might Be Killing You
By: Audrey Malone
Tags: Mental Health, Health, Psychology, Abuse, Anger Management

Stop Killing Yourself Little by Little with Positivity

There are some habits you need to break and some gratifications you need to rechannel, if you want to be healthier and not cut your life short.

Make a conscious effort, everyday, to be more positive.

Here’s 6 ways to start:

You can do this by consciously practicing restraint when you feel the urge come upon you to lash out at somebody, for whatever reason.

One way to do this is to catch yourself and redirect your thought patterns and thereby rechanneling the negative energy vibrations into positive vibrations. You will transform from operating in a lower vibration to a higher vibration. You just need to shift your mentality.

Worked for me!

For example:

If someone cuts you off in traffic, when you feel the urge to hang heavily on your horn, flip them the bird, yell and allow anger to well up in you, instead consciously use that moment as a reminder to produce a positive thought or say something positive out loud to yourself. Send out blessings instead of curses whenever someone does something rude, stupid, inconsiderate, selfish, etc. If you usually treat people mean just because you’re being a jerk, then go back and apply the concepts in #1 and #2 above.

You can change how you choose to act or react. You choose how you treat others.

The Takeaway

Be kind to yourself by being kind to others.

Now, granted, sometimes people just get on your last nerve and sometimes you will still lash out.

But, if you choose the higher vibration most of the time, you will eventually reach your goal of not being someone who takes out your frustrations on others all the time and become more of that better person that you want to be.

That is if you really want to be better— of course.
Why reading more makes us better at our jobs
By: Ivana Markovic
Tags: Books, Reading, Creative Thinking, Productivity, Creativity

I’m passionate about talent management and culture. My objective is to make Osedea the best workplace for our team.

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Two Surprising Ways Collecting Data on Myself Transformed My Life
By: Adam Rains
Tags: Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Work, Productivity, Creativity

Two Surprising Ways Collecting Data on Myself Transformed My Life

For real growth, go deeper than an app on your smartphone

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

If you haven’t tried collecting data on yourself, you need to start right now.

Until you do, you may have trouble understanding your own actions.

Since I started doing so, my life has changed in multiple ways. By collecting data on myself, I finally understood the habits and behaviors that held me back from achieving my goals.

I attained a new level of focus in both my personal and professional lives. Ultimately, my work performance improved drastically, and I was selected for an important (and unexpected) promotion.

None of this would have happened if I hadn’t started recording information about myself in an old-fashioned notebook. The idea had been suggested to me by a friend, but I ignored the advice until things got terrible, and I felt lost.

I changed course while in the midst of a months-long rut. I had a falling out with my boss and an argument with my wife on the same day. This was not like me! I (mostly) get along with people!

I knew something was wrong. I always had the best of intentions but was failing to deliver on multiple fronts. I did not understand what was happening.

Then I decided I had to figure out why...

That’s when I turned to data. I work with it every day, and I am very aware of its business uses, but I was unsure about using data personally. I was aware of data for personal use via fitness and dieting apps and smartwatches. I had seen many get results using them. However, fitness and diet were not my issues.

Could I possibly collect anything actionable? I could, and I did, and I will show you how.

Quick notes:

You don’t need a fancy app or smartwatch for this to work.

I am advocating the use of manual data collection of a personal nature.

For the last two years, collecting data on myself has allowed me to improve my life in several areas.

Following, I will explain what I did and what the results were, along with some ideas on how you might use personal data in your own life.
The Race Is On to Find the Holy Grail of Covid-19 Antibodies
By: Emily Mullin
Tags: Health, Covid 19, Coronavirus, Science, Antibodies

The Race Is On to Find the Holy Grail of Covid-19 Antibodies

Lab-made antibodies could be our best hope against the pandemic — and future ones

A nurse handles Covid-19 blood samples. Photo: Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images

Carl Hansen was in the middle of running a pandemic simulation at AbCellera, the Vancouver biotech company where he is CEO, when the first reports of a mysterious respiratory disease trickled out of China.

It was mid-January, and the Canadian company was testing how quickly it could find promising antibodies against the coronaviruses that cause MERS and SARS. Its goal was to identify and reproduce these antibodies — proteins produced by the immune system in response to an infection — within 60 days. But when the first U.S. case of Covid-19 was detected on January 21 in Washington state, Hansen cut that simulation short to focus on the new threat.

“Then the missing piece was to find a blood sample,” he tells OneZero. After AbCellera got its hands on a small vial of blood from an early U.S. Covid-19 patient on February 28, Hansen and his team immediately started looking for antibodies in it.

Now, he and other scientists are racing to find potent antibodies in the blood of human Covid-19 survivors, in lab mice, and in other animals. The hope is that the most effective ones — known as neutralizing antibodies — could be used to both treat people who are sick with the disease and also act as a kind of temporary vaccine for those who are at high risk of contracting it. Though one drug for Covid-19, remdesivir, was granted emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, experts say it’s not a knockout punch against the virus. With a vaccine at least a year away, more treatments will be needed.

In the absence of a vaccine, some think lab-produced antibodies that mimic the real thing are the best hope for beating back the coronavirus, as well as any new infectious pathogens that could emerge in the future. When the body detects a foreign invader, like SARS-CoV-2, it mounts an immune response and starts making a host of antibodies that are specific to the invader. Neutralizing antibodies are particularly good at helping the body fight off infection.

Scientists want to use one or a few of these neutralizing antibodies as a drug to help those hospitalized with Covid-19 recover more quickly, or prevent people who are exposed to the virus from getting sick in the first place.

The trick, though, is finding the right antibodies. Singling them out and analyzing them used to take years of research. But new technology is speeding up the process so much that it now takes days or weeks. Now, a handful of companies are already manufacturing SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and plan to start testing them in people by summer.
6 Morning Habits to Help You Seize the Day, Every Day
By: Laura Izquierdo
Tags: Work, Productivity, Success, Creativity, Psychology

6 Morning Habits to Help You Seize the Day, Every Day

Your morning routine is the single most constructive part of your day — invest in it.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

There are days where I manage to check everything off my to-do list. And there are days where I don’t even come close. You’ve probably experienced that feeling. It gets to about 4:00 pm and you realize there’s no way you have the energy left to complete everything you have to do today. You’ve had a slow day.

The truth is that you might be setting yourself up to ‘fail’ from the very start of the day without even realizing it.

A series of small, counter-productive habits at the start of your day can have a big impact on your mindset. Instead of giving you the energy you need for a productive day, they’re eating away at your motivation.

Carving out time first thing in the morning to get yourself in the right frame of mind, could be the single most constructive thing you do all day. And the best part is, that these small, seemingly insignificant acts can reap huge rewards.



In time, you’ll benefit from the compound effect. As Darren Hardy explains:

“Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE” — The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success’

The more you practice the same morning habits, the easier they become. They become habitual; you’ll soon start to do them without much conscious effort. They’ll form part of a healthy morning routine that sets you up for the day on the right foot.

So here are 6 simple morning habits that have been tried, tested, and adopted by several highly successful people.
Answers to the Important FAQs About KNN Algorithm
By: Laxman Singh
Tags: Machine Learning, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Python, AI

In KNN, K stands for the number of nearest observations considered for predicting the class of new observation. e.g, There are two classes to predict i.e, 0 or 1. Now there are 5 neighbors near to the given observation and the class of those 5 neighbours is 1,1,1,0,0. It means new observation belong to the class 1. I hope this makes it clear that how important is the value of K in this algorithm. Again, like K in K means algorithm, KNN also allows to predict the correct value of K by iteratively trying all the values of K and see the best performance using technique like elbow method.

There is a little caveat here to the value of K. And, I feel this is the right time to put light on the concept called bias variance trade off. We can have one separate discussion for this topic. Just overview, high bias leads to under fitting of the model and high variance means complex model which could lead to overfitting. Most of you would have understand where am i heading to. Conclusion is that we need to have correct value of K to avoid overfitting and underfitting in this algorithm. e.g, We keep value of k is 1 then it is high biased and if value of K is N the it is high variance. You have to decide best option and value of K to get the best results.

Most of the time interesting question comes to mind, and it would have come to your mind too. It happened to me too. What will happen in case of DRAW (No winners). So, answer is quite simple, we always keep the value of K as odd, we don’t want to deal with conflict and give more complexity to the simplest model.

Advantages

1. Simple to implement

2. Very robust. Capable of handling non linear and linear solution both

3. low cost algorithm and easy to visualize too

Disadvantages

1. Expensive algorithm. It calculates distance at runtime for the test observation with all the existing observation to get given k values. Yes, of course, we have methods to overcome this approach and tune this.

2. Very sensitive to the given data. Noisy or unbalanced data. Wrong observations and outliers could make this algorithm perform worst. It needs perfect data to perform well which is almost requirement of every ML model. Common use cases : Forecasting, data compression or prediction etc.
What If Apple, Google or Amazon Accepted Bitcoin?
By: Daniel Cawrey
Tags: Amazon, Apple, Ripple Labs, Google

Apple

Known for its lineup of Mac computers, the iPhone and iTunes, Apple has been ranked the most valuable brand in the world.

The company is trying to compete with bitcoin through its mobile payments product called Apple Pay.

“Apple would not have as strong of an impact compared to Amazon or Google.”

— David Moon, co-founder of Spelunk.in

Unlike the other two companies here, the likelihood of Apple accepting bitcoin and the subsequent effect it would have might be smaller.

Google

Google makes 95% of its revenue from ads, a business model it knows is unsustainable for the long term.

This is why it has expanded into things like mobile devices, self driving cars and drone-based delivey systems.

“If Google AdSense and YouTube started to pay out in bitcoin, I think that would be very impactful.”

— Valerian Bennett, creator of theprotocol.tv

Google’s interest in digital currencies is high. Its Google Wallet platform hasn’t done well and it invested in digital currency startup Ripple Labs.

Amazon

Amazon is the largest online retailer in the United States. It exerts a lot of influence on the digital economy.

Many consumers buy things regularly via Amazon. Because of this, Amazon’s impact on bitcoin, if it were to accept it, would be gigantic.

“All are great companies, but I buy 20–100x more from Amazon than Google or Apple.”

— Jason Chroman, Enthusiast

Startup Purse.io does most of its business just being a broker for bitcoin transactions on Amazon. They help users save up to 30% on Amazon.
Draw your goals
By: Katie Mccurdy
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Startup, Drawing, Productivity

Working alone (mostly in my house) as the solo founder of Pictal Health, it’s hard to get anything done. I find myself tossing a load in the laundry, wiping down counters, and getting into the weeds with home office organization. Before I know it, multiple hours have disappeared, my house is sparkling, and I am disappointed in myself because I haven’t accomplished anything.

In my prior work as a User Experience Designer, I collaborated closely with people who were counting on me to get my work done; accountability to others has always been my top motivator.

Now, in this accountability void, I’ve been adopting various strategies for staying focused and making progress. Drawing my weekly goals has been an important part of my regimen, and I’m going to show you in a minute exactly how I do it.

But first, why did I decide to draw my goals?

Last year I took an online class called RESET with Jocelyn K. Glei, which I highly recommend; the class is described as ‘a cosmic tune-up for your workday’ and it’s intended to help people ‘work in a way that is intentional, energizing, and inspiring.’ Throughout the course, Jocelyn encouraged us to work in analog (e.g., on paper) and to find creative ways make our progress visible, which helps provide a feeling of momentum.

At the same time, I was working with a coach who encouraged me to draw out my goals for the company. Finally, a good friend was starting a company at the same time as me, and for awhile we met weekly to share our progress. I started drawing my weekly goals for her, and I never looked back.

How I draw my goals

Each Sunday, I have a recurring appointment on my calendar to sit down and draw my goals for the following week — usually 5 or 6 larger tasks, plus a few scattered to-dos. Using my trusty Sharpie Fine pen, I draw outlines of shapes for each item on a regular piece of 8.5x11 printer paper.

I use outlines so that as my week progresses, I can start to fill in the shape with colored pencils. I like to add some sassy flair to make my shapes more fun to fill in. Every day or two I color in my progress on each of my goals. I also fill in the word ‘Goals’ as I make my way through the week; it’s like an overall progress indicator.

It’s calming and satisfying to shade in the outlines with various colors and patterns. There is actually research supporting the benefits of coloring — adult coloring has been shown to reduce anxiety, stress, and depressive symptoms (source). Hey, I’ll take it. Life as a solo entrepreneur can be weird and lonely.

I find it motivating to see how my page is filling up over the course of a week. It’s an at-a-glance reminder of the progress I’m making — progress that would normally be invisible, since nearly all of my work is computer-based. I’m better able to see and celebrate ‘small wins’ on this long journey.

I’ve done this each week since 2/25/19, and I keep the stack of completed goals on my desk; it’s nice to see it grow increasingly tall, another measure of progress.
[原來根本搞錯問題] 從模式選擇談壞味道識別
By: Yu-Song Syu
Tags: Design Patterns, Coding, Development, Code Smells, Software Engineering

Kuma老師的軟體工程教室

Welcome to the Kingdom of Software Engineering
AI for Software Engineering — Industry Landscape (03/Oct/2017)
By: Valentin Grigoryevsky
Tags: AI, Software Engineering, Software Development, Artificial Intelligence, Landscape

Columns Semantics

The Primary Criteria to categorize Solutions is the SDLC Phase. Independent on which Software Development Methodology you use, size of your team or type of your Product, you need to go through these Phases. We took the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) Knowledge Areas and merged some of them by few reasons. The main reason is that it is not always possible to unambiguously define which Solutions fall into which Category. Also, few of the SWEBOK Knowledge Areas were eliminated as not common and not related directly to SDLC.

Rows Semantics

Rows represent Maturity Level of the Solutions (highest row — most mature). The classification was made based on next criteria.

B2B Ready : there is a website for the Solution with at least one of the next information: Pricing, Customers, Testimonials.

: there is a website for the Solution with at least one of the next information: Pricing, Customers, Testimonials. B2C Ready : the same as “B2B Ready”, but AI is applied to SE indirectly: not through Tools for Software Engineers, but directly to Products, used by end Customers.

: the same as “B2B Ready”, but AI is applied to SE indirectly: not through Tools for Software Engineers, but directly to Products, used by end Customers. Academic Research : there is an extended description of the Solution in a Paper either in a Demo, but there are no known commercial applications.

: there is an extended description of the Solution in a Paper either in a Demo, but there are no known commercial applications. Landing Page: there is only a web page with a description of a Solution, but with no information about Pricing, Customers or Testimonials.

Companies List (alphabetically)

Acellere | AppAchhi | Appdiff | Applitools |Codebeat |Codebots | Codota | DecibelInsight |Deckard AI |DeepCoder |DiffBlue |Fedr8 |Firedrop |Logz.io |Memorio.io |NARCIA |Near AI |Prodo.AI |Qualicen |RainforestQA |Re:infer |React VT |ReTest |RobustFill |RUBRIC |Sourcegraph |Stepsize |Talla |The Grid |UCDD |Uizard |Windmill |Wix |Zeenflow

Instead of Conclusion

You may have already counted that there are only 13 Solutions presented in the “B2B Ready” Category, which is the Core of the Industry. That’s not much, but there are other 13 Solutions in the “Landing Page” Category, and most of them were created in 2017.

One more challenge is related to that there are Solutions, which are created and used inside of Software Companies, but information about which is not available publicly. We would like to call such Companies to endorse the experience sharing to intensify the Industry development.

Forecast. Our forecast is that by the end of 2019 there will be 400 Solutions, falling into the ‘Ready for B2B’ Category.

AI for SE is new Machine Tools. Find out why in our next Article (follow the Publication to not miss it).