fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
CryptovationX: Media Coverage
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Thailand

Since CryptovationX was founded, the company has rapidly gained a widespread media coverage including TV, newspaper, online media, and press conferences.

Pondet Ananchai, CEO, was interviewed by Thai National News (TNN) on the cryptocurrency regulations in China. As the market went down and many investors had lost their fortune, we had spotted more arbitraging opportunities. By arbitraging, it does not matter if a market goes up or down, as long as there is asymmetric price on different exchange.

On February 12th, Pondet was invited to live interview on TNN24 along with Dr. Bhume Bhumiratana, technology advisor to SEC Thailand. The program involved discussions around the topic of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency on various aspects: regulations, investments, and recommendations for Thailand. (Recorded video is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BoBAoW_l94)

Three-days later, Cryptovation hosted the ICO launch press conference and introduced CXA as the cryptocurrency for Robo-advisory and ‘Wealth for All’ Initiative at Intercontinental Hotel. The event involved discussions about blockchain, cryptocurrency, ICO, Artificial Intelligence, and the future investment opportunities.

CryptovationX was also published on Bangkok Post, the leading English newspaper in Thailand, about the ICO launch which quickly gained popularity among cryptocurrency and blockchain community in Thailand. You can read the full article at https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/news/1412859/.

Recently after the cryptocurrency regulation was released, Pondet was also invited to join the live interview ‘CRYPTO Talk’. He had summarized the overall impact of this regulatory framework for crypto-related businesses. He believes that it is a positive action because this means Thailand has officially recognized the status of cryptocurrency and it became the first country in Southeast Asia that has outlined a lawful act on cryptocurrency. However, tax regulation will cause some negative effects on capital gain for both foreign investors and local investors who does not want to pay tax as much as 15%. Moreover, he mentioned that CryptovationX project will fully comply with Thai law since the company is operating in Thailand.

More Information:

Website: CryptovationX.io

Telegram: t.me/CryptovationX_CXA

Facebook: facebook.com/CryptovationX

Twitter: twitter.com/CryptovationX

Medium: medium.com/CryptovationX

Instagram: instagram.com/CryptovationX

#CryptovationX #CXA #RoboAdvisory #Airdrop

‘The Best Friend for Crypto Investors’
Our Love
By: Pawan Kumar
Tags: Storytelling, Poetry, Relationships, Dating, Love

How much our love has grown.

Your hugs, smiles, and cute face.

You make me happy than I have ever known.
Accelerator Perception Report
By: Mark Karake
Tags: Nairobi, Startup, Venture Capital, Africa, Accelerator

Accelerator Perception Report

Executive Summary

In December 2018, Impact Africa Network conducted a survey with entrepreneurs in Nairobi with the aim of understanding perceptions of, and experiences with startup accelerators. The questions we were seeking to answer were:

Are entrepreneurs in Nairobi experiencing accelerator fatigue?

2. Beyond help fundraising do entrepreneurs see any value in accelerators?

3. How well do entrepreneurs understand accelerators?

4. What are the top ecosystem gaps entrepreneurs struggle with?

Click here for the report
The researcher’s journey: leveling up as a user researcher
By: Dave Hora
Tags: Marketing, Customer Experience, User Research, UX, Design Process

I. Process mastery

At this execution-focused stage, your questions around projects will focus on the nuts and bolts:

Who? - Target audience What? - Method When? - When do you want it?

When a product manager says “we should do a usability test” or a designer “needs to talk to customers,” it’s a chance to hone basic skills. Growth comes through experience and reflection, forcing yourself to ask “why do we want to do this?”, “what are we really trying to find out?”, and “is this the right way to get there?”

II. Technical competence

Every interview in and of itself can be a hurdle, and it’s hard to see the forest (project) for the trees (each instance of execution). As a junior level researcher, you must become competent in executing on the basics:

Recruiting

Interviewing

Interview note-taking

Interview debriefing

Observation

Data collection

Surveying

User testing

Simple reporting

Research synthesis outputs are facts, incidents, and simple behavioral insights. You’re ready to move on when these basic pieces can be smartly combined and deployed to ensure a successful project.

III. Organizational influence

Junior researchers strive to empower the organization with insights, and answer on-hand questions. Your influence develops on the strength of that execution, and the sense of judgment that you hone as you learn what your users need and how they do their work:

Credible reporting

Fair, honest judgement of design and product

Interaction-level and usability authority

Failure to have an impact (e.g. aforementioned report on January 3, 2011) is especially instructive: “It’s so clear to me that X is true, and I believe we should do Y. But nobody else sees it — what’s happening?” There’s an outside-in perspective flip that precedes growth, akin to the ideas underlying the practice of service design. It’s not about the great studies that you can do, it’s about finding out what the team needs to push work forward.
Improving SEO and UX using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages with Next JS
Tags: Web Development, React, UX, Programming, SEO

A Note on Contemporary Performance Expectations (UX & SEO)

There are series of expectations when it comes to both contemporary browsing experience and site performance for search engines. While Google reports 50% user drop-off rates if the site took longer than 3s to load (TTI) 😱, the search engines too prioritise sites that exhibit blazingly fast loading times (among a list of other qualities).

Here is an example of common minimum expectations when it comes to site performance

Here is an excellent article on Incorporating Performance Budgets into the build that discusses the best practices and user expectations as well as the techniques to aid in developments towards the set performance budgets.

Consider also checking out this presentation I’ve put together for the Front-end development, where it goes into detail on how the browsers parse bundled code and translate it into pixels on screen. The distinctions help understand which parts of the process can and should be optimised to achieve blazingly fast performance!

Improving Metrics with AMP & Next JS

Here is an example of 2 Sites , one that wasn’t developed with acute performance optimisation in mind (on the left) and it’s successor re-build developed using Next.js with Google’s AMP components.

Take note of both Time To Interactive (TTI) and overall performance scores which indicate how good the user experience would be and how high the search engines might rank the page
Why Do Incompetent Managers Get Promoted?
By: Lance Ng
Tags: Management, Books, Careers, Work, Programming

Why Do Incompetent Managers Get Promoted?

Two books — 45 years apart — explain it. If you want to get ahead, it’s time to face the facts.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

In 1969, a book called “The Peter Principle” was published. It was written by Raymond Hull, based on the research of Dr. Laurence J. Peter.

Dr. Peter found that “an employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs, until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.”

He further theorized that given enough time and positions, “Every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.”

Hence you end up with a whole bunch of incompetent managers on top.

I find the first point to be especially true when managers are hired in from other companies. Most corporate HR tend to put a lot of weight on a person’s CV and their past accomplishments when hiring for senior positions. Personally I think too little consideration is put into thinking about how the person will perform in future, especially if they’re changing industries or roles.

On the second point, I’m not sure if every post will end up being occupied by an incompetent manager, but I do think when a lot of managers realized they’ve hit their peak or comfort level, they then start to focus on playing politics instead of delivering results to hold onto their position. These are also the kind of managers who would only hire people less capable than them, for fear of being replaced.
Anti-maskers Pushing for Herd Immunity Just Want Minorities Gone
By: Henner Townlove
Tags: Minorities, BlackLivesMatter, Racism, Herd Immunity, Coronavirus

They just want minorities gone

Among the minorities affected, asians are the ones least likely to die from COVID-19. However, the pandemic has affected them in other significant ways as well. Countless asian-owned businesses are closing due to the stigma connected to the coronavirus having originated from asia with Chinese restaurants taking the full brunt of the devastation. This comes as Donald trump having repeatedly called the coronavirus, the “China virus”, or in some cases the “kung flu”. There is also an increase in on-asian assaults following the start of the pandemic with some individuals being spat at while others were violently assaulted. In California, an elderly man of asian descent was attacked with an iron bar.

The core of right-wing politics, white nationalism, xenophobia — whatever you wanna call them — in this modern era are the age-old notions of race hierarchies and victimhood. It is for them, unacceptable that endearing stereotypes of some races being inferior are now being dis-proven, and that these people of color are — in fact actually capable of leading large corporations, being famous celebrities and assuming major roles in politics. It is their belief that for some reason, immigrants are “stealing” jobs that are rightfully theirs, that some businesses have no right to operate, that this virus is a “direct attack” from “the great other”. That it’s always “us against them”. This is why they don’t wear masks, this is why they keep on pushing to reopen as soon as possible like nothing is happening, because they have this illusion that this doesn’t affect them. The sole reason this doesn’t affect them is because they are shielded, shielded by the efforts of scientists and people who are still operating to make sure there is food in everybody’s plate or that there are no empty chairs at the dinner table. With a good number of these front-line workers being minorities.

But the rallies still continue, the anti-mask rhetoric is still in full swing. As of October 4, Donald Trump supporters — with no masks, mind you — have flocked the white house to cheer on their leader as he recklessly ventures out in a motorcade just to absorb those precious praise and cheers that fill up his depleted narcissistic battery. All the people directly with him in the vehicle with only N95 masks as PPE, are now to self-quarantine. People who actively participate in these rallies and push for a nationwide reopening, whether they know it or not, are encouraging herd immunity at the cost of minorities.

More people are still gonna die. On a September 30 forecast by the CDC, their model predicts a total of 219,000 to 232,000 COVID-19 deaths to be reported by October 24th. Presumably, a good number of these will be minorities.

With all these in line, this just sends a clear message: they want the minorities gone.
This Will Make You Airbnb in Boston Efficiently.
By: Gyuzala Muzafarova
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Data Science, Airbnb Data, Programming

Which neighbourhood to pick while in Boston?

Mission Hill is the most popular neighbourhood in Boston among Airbnb rentees, while the least popular area is Leather District, which has only 50 reviews against 400 of Mission Hill, having an average price of $250 per night versus $120 at Mission Hill.

There are three features we will use to examine whether the given area in Boston is popular among the visitors or not: average price, number of reviews left, and the annual availability of properties in each neighbourhood.

Figure 4. Number of reviews by neighbourhood

According to the fig. 4, the Mission Hill area has the maximum numbers of reviews, over 400. Following by East Boston and Back Bay areas with 350 and 310 reviews, respectively.

It is important to note that the number of reviews was not split for negative and positive, according to Trustpilot research (2018) the top three reasons customers write reviews are:

· to help others make a better buying decision

· to share an experience, or

· to reward a company for good performance.

Given the research outcome above, it was decided that both negative and positive reviews would be beneficial for our analysis.

Figure 5. Annual availability by neighbourhood

The fig.5 gives us more evidence to support our initial findings of Mission Hill, as the properties in that particular area available on average 50 days a year, which is the lowest availability ratio among other areas in Boston.

While the Leather District neighbourhood is the least popular according to the number of reviews and the availability ratio, with 50 reviews and is available 365 days a year.

The price wise: the Leather District (over $250) is one of the highest charging neighbourhood among the South Boston Waterfront (over $300) and Bay Village($270). The high price can evidence the lack of demand in these areas among rentees and this is also evidenced by the small number of reviews.

While Mission Hill has an average price of $120, which is more than twice less than the areas mentioned above, making the area attractive among visitors.
Communion #3
By: Dan Mccarthy
Tags: Religion, Writing, Poems, Communion, Grace Was

Communion #3

D’s Communion

One time when I was a young man

I caught the scent of the priest

Through the tannins of the communion wine.

He smelled like my father

On the morning that he buried my mother.

I had just married. My new wife

Kept two paces behind me

In the communion line.

Taking the host was still a new thing for her.

Father kept the cologne on a shelf by the toilet.

He was particular in his things.

Mother was more disorderly.

The scent made me think of Mother

As an angel. I could sense God’s love,

Even though he punished her in life.

My hand sometimes strays to my lips

As I wait in line to take the body and blood

To prepare my flesh for a sacred passage

That is a path to absolution. Father said Grace

Was given to the worthy in a tone

That bespoke confidence. I am replete

With sin.

Feb 2010
Best Practices With JavaScript Promises
By: John Au-Yeung
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, Promises, Nodejs, React

Converting Non-Promise Async Code to Promises

We can convert the non-promise async code to promises with the util.promisify() method. This lets us convert many functions with async callbacks with the signature of the form (err, res) , where err is an object with errors and res has the results of the async code.

Any function that has a promising form defined for it can also use this utility to return the promise form. As long as the promise version is stored as the value of the symbol property util.promisify.custom , we can get the promise version.

For instance, since setTimeout has a promise-based version in the standard library of Node.js, we can convert it to a promise as follows:

const util = require('util');

const sleep = util.promisify(setTimeout); (async () => {

await sleep(1000);

console.log('slept');

})()
Resources For Writers
Tags: Humor, Satire, Comedy Writing, Writing Resources, Writing

Sign up for Yapjaw

By Slackjaw

Yapjaw is Medium's #1 newsletter for all things humor, and we're sorry to say you'll only receive it a few times a month. Take a look
Building a Content Based Recommender System for Hotels in Seattle
By: Susan Li
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, NLP, Data Science, Recommender Systems

Building a Content Based Recommender System for Hotels in Seattle

How to use description of a hotel to recommend similar hotels.

The cold start problem is a well known and well researched problem for recommender systems, where system is not able to recommend items to users. due to three different situation i.e. for new users, for new products and for new websites.

Content-based filtering is the method that solve this problem. Our system first uses the metadata of new products when creating recommendations, while visitor action is secondary for a certain period of time. And our systems recommend a product to a user based upon the category and description of the product.

Content-based recommendation systems may be used in a variety of domains ranging from recommending web pages, news articles, restaurants, television programs, and hotels. The advantage of content-based filtering is that it doesn’t have a cold-start problem. If you just start out a new website, or any new products can be recommended right away.

Let’s assume we are starting a new online travel agency (OTA), and we have signed up thousands of hotels that are willing to sell on our platform, and we start seeing traffic coming from our website users, but we don’t have any users history, therefore, we are going to build a content-based recommendation systems to analyze hotel descriptions to identify hotels that are of particular interest to the user.

We would like to recommend hotels based on the hotels that a user has already booked or viewed using the cosine similarity. We would recommend hotels with the largest similarity to the ones previously booked or viewed or showed interest by the user. Our recommender system is highly dependent on defining an appropriate similarity measure. Eventually, we select a subset of hotels to display to the user or to determine an order in which to display the hotels.

The Data

It’s very hard to find public available hotel description data, therefore, I collected them by myself from each hotel’s homepage for over 150 hotels in Seattle area, that includes downtown business hotels, boutique hotels and bed and breakfast, airport business hotels, inns near the universities, motels in the middle of nowhere, and so on. The data can be found here.
NaNoWriMo Done? Or Just the Beginning?
By: Stephanie Block
Tags: Nonprofit, NaNoWriMo, Fiction, Holidays, Writing

Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel, I made it out of clay!

December, what a let down. It’s just eggnog and tinsel and dreidels now. Gone is the heady rush of November’s National Novel Writing Month! Are you having a tough time pivoting into the “joyous” holiday season? Do you wish the rule was do a word sprint if you find yourself beneath the mistletoe? Have you silently renamed the reindeer after your favorite authors? Now Dashiell, Now Faulkner! Now Christie and Dickens! On Carroll, On Kafka On Doyle and Grisham!

When the bank building gets into the holiday spirit

Maybe you freakin’ WON NaNoWriMo with your stunningly crafted 50,000 or more words? (There’s been a crazeeee club among us who do a 50,000k Weekend over Thanksgiving!) Maybe you didn’t write all but you darn sure wrote some! I am proud of my halfsies finish. If NaNo is a marathon I wrote for 13 miles. I pantsed it all the way, too, discovering stupefying revelations about my characters and their world.

Maybe you didn’t write all but you darn sure wrote some!

For instance, I killed the wrong person. That’s right. I realized it in one of those whammo shower cognitions, soap in my armpit, that I axed an old man when I should’ve bumped off a young woman. Woopsie! I fixed it — someone has been resurrected (Welcome back Rabbi Desuvio “El Mensch” Hernandez!) and someone else, well, she shouldn’t have told her best friend about the map. C’est la vie of me.

A common sight in Texas round about this time of year y’all

There’s no way I can stop now that I’ve got this momentum. November 30 might be the last official day of NaNoWriMo, but for me December 1 is just another day of write, reflect, reach for Oreos, repeat.

What about you? Are you gonna give your carpal tunneled hands a break or are you powering through? Are you hoping your writing group won’t mind reading 50,000 words this week? Does your agent expect 150-ish pages every Kwanzaa? Is it time to crawl out of your subterranean NaNo bunker and greet your family for the first time since Daylight Savings started?

Last year I flew on Christmas Eve and it was very festive

Whatever you did, whichever quantity or quality, however planner or pantser, pen and paper or laptop, on your bed or on a park bench, YOU DID IT. Especially this year of all years when everyday life became an intense psychodrama full of shocking plot twists and relentless suspense. How’d it feel to be a character someone else was writing? Horrible right? So be kind to your characters this Christmas. Just kidding — give ’em the works!

Who’s ready for 8 crazy December nights?

Oy, this NaNo was definitely one for the books, heh. See you on the bestseller list!

Stephanie

❤ NaNoWriMo Board Member since 2019, participant since 2011 ❤

Please consider donating to NaNoWriMo on Giving Tuesday. Just $25 lends novel-writing support to two community centers. And $50 provides three classroom kits to educators in high-need schools. Thank you!
An Easy Trick to Instantly Improve Your Well-Being
By: Rachid Meharich
Tags: Self-awareness, Wellbeing, Hapiness, Life, Short Story

An Easy Trick to Instantly Improve Your Well-Being

Just express gratitude with three questions:

Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash

I write this to share a trick that works for me; it will let you easily and instantly improve your well-being. You just have to express gratitude with this simple daily routine: spend 10 minutes thought, and answer those three questions:

Remember something that made you laugh or smile today.

Thought to a task, a job, or some specialty that you master (your work, a passion…), and express gratitude for this.

Finally, express gratitude for a thing you acquire those last years, something useful that positively impacts your well-being or maybe thought to a special person who had appeared recently in your life and makes it happier.

You can use a journal to write your answers, or not. Find a way and a comfortable time for you (mornings or before going to bed is better). Try this routine for some days, and you will instantly notice a huge difference in your life. You’ll gain in happiness, well-being, self-confidence, sociability, and productivity.
DIY: Apache Spark & Docker
By: Shane De Silva
Tags: Big Data, Docker, Data Science, Spark

Introduction

Two technologies that have risen in popularity over the last few years are Apache Spark and Docker.

Apache Spark provides users with a way of performing CPU intensive tasks in a distributed manner. It’s adoption has been steadily increasing in the last few years due to its speed when compared to other distributed technologies such as Hadoop. In 2014 Spark won the Gray Sort Benchmark test in which they sorted 100TB of data 3x faster using 10x fewer machines then a Hadoop cluster previously did.

Docker on the other hand has seen widespread adoption in a variety of situations. Docker provides users the ability to define minimal specifications of environments meaning you can easily develop, ship, and scale applications. Furthermore, due to its use of linux containers users are able to develop Docker containers that can run be run simultaneously on a single server whilst remaining isolated from each other. Finally, Docker provides an abstraction layer called the Docker Engine that guarantees compatibility between machines that can run Docker solving the age-old headache of “it works on my machine, I don’t know why it doesn’t on yours”.

With the rise of Big Data these two technologies are a matched made in heaven. Apache Spark providing the analytics engine to crunch the numbers and Docker providing fast, scalable deployment coupled with a consistent environment.

Prerequisites

I assume knowledge of Docker commands and terms as well as Apache Spark concepts. Therefore, I do not recommend this article if either of these two technologies are new to you. With considerations of brevity in mind this article will intentionally leave out much of the detail of what is happening. For a full drawn out description of the architecture and a more sequential walk through of the process I direct the reader to my github repo.

I also assume that you have at least basic experience with a cloud provider and as such are able to set up a computing instance on your preferred platform.
Stop Defining “There,” “They’re,” and “Their”
By: Maryjo Wagner
Tags: Writing Tips, Proofreading, Reading, Grammar, Writing

GRAMMAR | WRITING | WRITING TIPS | READING |PROOFREADING

Stop Defining “There,” “They’re,” and “Their”

Mistakes with the “T” Words Happen Frequently, and It’s Not Because We Don’t Know What They Mean

Licensed from 123RF; copyright, Lamai Prasitsuwan

Rules, explanations, and definitions of “there,” “their,” and they’re” seem to be growing exponentially. They pop often in articles about how to write and memes on Facebook.

At least 325 pins appear on Pinterest for the “T” words, including the words printed on coffee cups and t-shirts. (I was too lazy to count the pins, so multiplied uneven columns by uneven rows making my final number approximate.)

Stop Telling Us What These Words Mean. We Know What They Mean!

By now, most literate adults understand the meanings of the “T” words. The few that don’t probably won’t get it by looking at memes. And they probably don’t do much writing or consider themselves writers.

The question isn’t another meme or explanation on Facebook. It’s understanding why so many of us who are writers often make these mistakes when we know better.

It’s Your Ears’ Fault

You may not realize it, but our brains “hear” words as we type. When one word sounds like another word, it’s easy to use the wrong word.

Yesterday, I typed “hear” when I meant to type “here.” Obviously, I don’t need some grammar nerd to explain the difference between “hear” and “here.” (Just in case you’re wondering, words that sound alike are called “homonyms.”)

If you’re on a roll, inspired by what you’re writing, and going lickety-split on your keyboard, don’t be surprised if you make mistakes with words that sound alike.

Caveat: Yes, some words that sound alike aren’t common. Did you mean “horde” or “hoard?” You might not know the difference. That’s why we have on-line dictionaries.

The Solution

Proofread. Have someone else proofread for you. Read your writing out loud. Did I mention proofread?

Sadly with all that proofreading, you can still miss words that sound the same. If you know the words that you most commonly get wrong, use search and replace.

Put your story in a Word doc. Type “there” into the search box. Or “they’re.” or another “T” word. The word pops up in your text. You read the sentence and find you’ve used the wrong word. You fix it on the spot. You can type in each T word separately if you know you often use the wrong one.

Perhaps this seems like a nuisance. But it’s a small price for messing up a “T” word and having some holier-than-thou grammar freak correct you. And then feel compelled to teach you about the “T” words.

That’s how simple it is. Now you don’t have to worry about botching up the “T” words. No worries about the grammar gods coming after you.
Open Your Heart Inhaling the Moment
By: Francine Fallara
Tags: Poetry, Self Improvement, Motivation, Blue Insights, Inspiration

Always by wonder

Loving moments

Coils your world

Enchantingly

Fetching your beauty

After blow whiplashes

Mounting your head high

Calmly breathing

Open your heart

Inhaling the moment

Francine Fallara, 2020
Last Moment of Inertia
By: Jessica Lee Mcmillan
Tags: Poetry, Struggle, Life, Psychology, Positivity

I feel the edge of grief come for me

like corroding the polish of daylight

A polestar drawing its circle away,

past the last moment of inertia

shifting deficit, axis out of place

I cling, I grip trenchant line

lest the shadow overtake

Again with sliced hand,

sharp and bright,

bleed on dark margin

I quiet the atoms, I hold still

and defer the rim of night

I accept it as a lesson

and refuse the fallen orbit

Jessica Lee McMillan
Have a Heart
Tags: Nonfiction, Life Lessons, Chance Encounters, This Happened To Me, Photography

Have a Heart

a brief interlude

Photo by LB

Years ago, I was filling up my car at a gas station. Suddenly, a frantic looking woman wandered up to me, already in the middle of a sentence. She shared some legal woes and confessed she was at her wit’s end.

I wasn’t sure what to say but I stayed engaged in the conversation. She told me her son was going to jail in three days, unless she could find a lawyer ‘made outta magic’. What she said next always stuck with me.

“I ain’t got no magic. I’m looking. My son’s the good one. When he does something, he admits it. When I asked him if he did it, he told me. He said, ‘Yeah mama, I killed that guy. But at least I’m honest’. And he’s right! Doesn’t that count for something? I’ll say it the judge! I’ll say, ‘Look at my son, look at him! He knows what he did. He’s not lying to you. So, c’mon. Have a heart!’ That’s all I’m saying.”

At that point, I smiled and wished her the best of luck. She thanked me for listening. As I drove away, I could see her approach the next car. Hopefully this one had a magic lawyer behind the wheel.
Making Friends with a Cockatoo
By: Britni Pepper
Tags: Isolation, Nonfiction, Cockatoo, Covid 19, Australia

Maybe kookaburra or two

Cockie (image by author)

I’ve got a new mate. His name is Mate, as in G’day Mate, and I’m making use of my home holiday to tame him, or at least get him to eat out of my hand and maybe sit on my shoulder and poo down my back.

He’s a sulphur-crested cockatoo, a bit of a pest around here, actually, and if you’re wondering how I know his gender, it’s not that my eyesight is super keen, but that Wikipedia tells me the males have black eyes, and the ladies red or brown.

This guy definitely has black eyes, and they switch between me and his tucker. He eats parrot mix, but he prefers the sunflower seeds, which he picks out and crunches up, extracting the insides and discarding the husk, before moving on to the next one.

And, hehehehe, closer to me.

It’s a bit of a thrill to have such a large bird so close, almost eating out of my hand. I’ve known this one for a while, and I don’t know who’s training who.

Pavlov’s Britni

I have a bird feeder outside my window, and I’ll fill it with birdseed or water, depending on the season. I get a selection of wild birds, but I also get introduced pests such as pigeons or Indian mynahs.

Yes, I know, they are all God’s creatures, and should be cherished, but the pigeons are churlish and unlovely, compared to the glorious colours of the rosellas and king parrots.

“My” bird would land on the bird feeder, and if it was empty, look towards the window, and give out a screech. If you have ever heard a flock of cockatoos conversing together, it is a noisy business. I would look up, we’d make eye contact, and either I would rush outside to fill the feeder, or he would get more and more interested in me until I did, like moving closer until he was perched on the window sill and yelling into my ear.

Now, if he cannot spot me in my home office, he sits in the elm tree outside and waits until he can see me in one of the windows facing that way. Often the kitchen, where I wander in to make a cup of coffee.

Then he sits on the back porch and waits until I forget about coffee and sprinkle a trail of seeds for him to follow.

He’s a little flighty still, and the appearance of Princess Fluffypants at the cat flap will spook him. God knows why: he’s bigger than she is, and has the beak and talons of an eagle.

I’ve gotten to the stage where he will tolerate me sitting on the porch with an iPad, taking his photo from close range.

Stay tuned for more about my cockatoo.

Britni
Guidelines for Slackjaw Submissions
Tags: Humor, Writing, Satire, Submission Guidelines, Funny

Welcome Writer,

As the #1 destination on Medium for all-things humor, and think-pieces on cats, Slackjaw wouldn’t be what it is without you, High Warlock of Funny Ideas. That said, we do accept submissions from humor writers of all backgrounds and extraterrestrial lifeforms.

Slackjaw is closed to new submissions from Dec. 20 - Jan 3.

Team Slackjaw will be resting for this period and decorating a single, very large, extremely beautiful Xmas ornament. We will re-open to new submissions on Monday, Jan. 4. Happy new year!
I Love…
By: Pawan Kumar
Tags: Storytelling, Poetry, Relationships, Dating, Love

I love the way you sleep.

I love the way you play with your hair

when you are thinking so deep.
Searching for the Gothic in Ikea
By: Tommy Boon
Tags: John Ruskin, Sustainability, Consumerism, Modern Life, Architecture

Like the 19th century bourgeoisie, we have a love of the perfect and the orderly. The differences in each of Ikea’s ‘Billy’ bookshelves lie at the molecular level; a Big Mac in Paris is a Big Mac in Istanbul. Where we perhaps differ from the Victorians is that we also expect evidence of humanness in what we consume. We carry a vague nostalgia for the artisanal: for stripped back wood and chipped pottery, for a time when Sunday markets were necessary and not an ornamental feature of our week. Sometimes we find these pangs attended to in the studied messiness of the otherwise perfect. The handwritten chalk messages in the world’s Starbucks, for instance, mean that for a moment we feel like we are consuming something that is not governed by corporate policy. Likewise, the woman at the till in McDonalds smiles at you, and posters on the walls make it clear that to consume a Big Mac is to also consume friendship.

Despite what the mismatched cutlery and whimsical cocktails would lead you to believe, the hands making a hamburger in an international chain are governed by a set of procedures. The hands making our phones move in the same ‘exquisitely timed palsy’ ⁶ of Ruskin’s bead makers, and the bodies filling orders at ‘fulfilment centres’ move with a dead-eyed mania. In heavy prose Ruskin admonished 19th century Britain for allowing their love of the perfect to cauterize the noblest parts of human nature. Even though we quietly nurture a love for measured idiosyncrasies, we too expect standardised perfection. When real humanness rudely ignores the charade and tumbles into our lives, however, we are the first to be indignant. We become flushed when there is no one day delivery option, for instance, or when the coffee comes a bit too hot, or the sales assistant is bit too brusque in her replies.

‘You must either make a tool out of the creature, or a man. You cannot make both’ ⁷

I am a hypocrite to write this. My apartment is strewn with the fruits of Ikea and Habitat: flicking through images of sultry-lit lifestyle porn is its own sugary rush. I find the standardised haloumi wraps of ‘Leon’ reassuring, and I am at once cynical and appreciative of their self-referentially authentic décor. You will also find two modern versions of Thonet’s chair at my kitchen table. We should be outraged about things like the working conditions of sweatshops or the pay of fast foods workers. At the same time, we should reflect on what should be valued in work. If we are to learn anything from Ruskin, Morris, Marx, or any of those who wrote in the bawling infancy of industrial society, it is to value human imperfection over mechanical perfection. To search for the signs of deliberation: the small window in the tower or the misshapen gargoyle. To not be content by displays of humanness but to insist on the thing itself in all its brashness.
The #1 Biggest Mistake I Still Make When I Write
By: Glyn Bawden
Tags: Solutions, Opinion, Writing, Problem Solving, Writing Tips

What do you want?

I’ve been busy looking back through the articles I’ve posted on Medium since I began back in July.

Again, when I started in July, I posted things that I wanted to read and couldn’t for the life of me understand why no-one else wanted to read it.

The articles that have performed best for me and by ‘best’, I must stress, it’s all relative. I haven’t had an article ‘go viral’. I am still very much a struggling writer on this platform, trying as best I can to offer whatever wisdom I can from my own mistakes, so you don’t go out and make the same ones.

I wrote some articles that I thought were really clever, ‘What Your Satnav Can Teach You About Life’ for one. It was very existential. Who cared? Not many.

My biggest turkey was writing about my daily routine on my phone and what it says about me. I enjoyed writing it and I wish I could say that you enjoyed reading it.

You didn’t.

It got hardly any views and looking back now, I can understand why.

The minute I started talking about what apps I check on my phone on a daily basis I can almost hear the click of people switching off and moving on to another piece.

So please, dear reader, if you want to see your work up there with your name alongside it, then go ahead. Write your heart out.

But if you want to succeed as writer and make some sort of money from this platform then find out what your readers problems are and offer them a solution to that problem and if you do it well enough, then they will beat a path to your door.
Where Bluebirds Fly
By: Wendy S. Bradfield
Tags: Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Artist, Self-awareness, Creative Process

Where Bluebirds Fly

Creating and releasing your art.

Photo by Johannes Plenio from Pexels

Releasing your art into the universe is a delicate thing. But the act of creating art is something entirely different.

You wade through the brutish, clunky, elementary swamp of impulse with your minnow-fine nets. Only then to dump it all out in front of you — a heap of potential possibility — more scavenging.

A collage emerges — bits of symbology, logic, theory, hurts and curiosities.

The incubation period for your art is a critical element and deeply connected to how easily goes your birthing it. The longer you labor, the more difficult the delivery.

Yet deliver, you must. You are an artist.
Typescript Decorators in Examples
By: Artem Diashkin
Tags: Typescript, Decorators, Class, Property, Methods

1. Prerequisites

Before we start exploring Typescript Decorator examples, I’ll be using an empty Node.js typescript project with no additional packages, lints, etc.

All we will need is a typescript in our dev dependencies in the package.json file:

First, create an empty folder:

Next, initialize npm project by running npm init -y in the root dir of your empty project: ( -y flag means that you are answering yes to all npm questions)

Next, we will need to add typescript npm package to our dev dependencies:

yarn add typescript -D
Python: How to Connect to, and Manage a Database with SqlAlchemy and Pandas
By: Gabriel Harris Ph.D.
Tags: Python, Database, Sql, Programming, Pandas

Photo by panumas nikhomkhai from Pexels

This is an extension to a previous article 👀 that covers the low-level methods of establishing a connection to a SQL database and executing queries. We cover here the equivalent high-level methods in SqlAlchemy and Pandas to do the same in fewer lines of code

TL;DR: full code

Prerequisites

Install pyodbc, sqlalchemy and pandas using your preferred package manager

You might want to create a virtual environment first

Then, install the required driver for the DBMS-database you want to connect to. For example, if you want to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server-Database, you need to download and install the driver from Microsoft, after choosing your operating system

For more details on pyodbc (Open DataBase Connectivity for Python) and DBMS (Database management system), 👀 the previous article

Creating a SqlAlchemy engine 🚒

While SqlAlchemy is an Object Relational Mapper, it also offers a SQL toolkit. To connect to the Server, we first create an engine object based on a URL in the format:

Docs for engine configuration and supported databases

For Microsoft SQL Server-Database, dialect is mssql , and the driver is pyodbc . Then, we pass the URL to the create_engine method:

A common mistake is to forget to download the required driver

Establishing a connection 🔗

We can easily now use the connect method of the engine to return a connection object cnxn , which is automatically closed when used with a context manager:

Docs for connect

Executing a query using Pandas 🐼

Let’s assume that the database we are connected to has the following 2 tables T_CUSTOMERS and T_ADDRESSES :

And we would like to execute the query in get_customer_details.sql

get_customer_details.sql

Pandas can read a SQL statement/file directly into a DataFrame if given a connection using the read_sql method. We also use the text method to compose a textual statement that is passed to the database mostly unchanged:

Docs for read_sql, text

That was neat! few lines of code to connect and execute a query into a DataFrame 🙇

Executing a parameterized query 🐼❔

What if we would like to use the same query for a different customer? We could change it, but instead, we can use a parameterized query to make it accept any customer!

Simply replace the customer name in the query with a :param_name for example :lname :

get_customer_details_param.sql

We run the new query exactly as before, but pass a new argument params which is a dictionary of param_name: param_value :

You can pass as many parameters as you want as long as you have defined them in the query

What is next?

Start using Docker 🐋 for Python and learn how to create a Python requirements file 📄 using pipenv.

Happy coding!
Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developers Survey Review — Episode 002
By: Tech For Granted
Tags: African Startup, Black Holes, Podcasting, Science, Tech For Granted

Black holes are one of the strangest phenomenon on the universe and very little is known about them, but in early April, images were captured using a combination of eight radio observatories spread out along four continents, creating what MIT refers to as a “virtual, Earth-sized telescope. This is the black hole deep inside the Messier 87, a galaxy located in the Virgo cluster some 55 million light years away. It may seem underwhelming at first, but it’s one of four images of the supermassive spacetime deforming structure — marking the first time such an object has been photographed. We discuss the discovery, the conspiracy theories around black holes and how important it is for scientists.

Have a listen to the episode, and leave a comment. Enjoy!
3 Reasons to Switch to FastAPI
By: Dieter Jordens
Tags: API, Python, Programming, Fastapi, Flask

Async

The async/await syntax is something that was recently introduced in Python. Most programmers think this will speed everything up. That’s not quite true, as synchronous code is the way to go in most scenarios. Async/await is a way to write asynchronous code in a very convenient way.

In terms of API programming, this is very interesting. We see a rising need for asynchronous tasks like queuing, WebSockets, etc. Unlike Flask, FastAPI is implemented on ASGI and allows you to create both asynchronous and synchronous applications natively.

Imagine you’re writing an endpoint that retrieves pictures of animals. Every request can take some time. In the background, you might be doing some predictions based on the text and HTTP calls for pictures. Most of the time, your thread is waiting on some operation to be finished.

In the synchronous world, the following snippet would first get a picture of a cat, then a picture of a dog, and finally a picture of a bat. One after the other. Simple and easy — programming as we’ve known it for a long time.

get('A picture of a cat') // first

get('A picture of a dog') // second

get('A picture of a bat') // third

However, imagine that this API is exposed to the world and users are using it. Imagine every request that is fired takes 300 milliseconds to process. When 50 requests are sent at the same time in a synchronous world, it will take 15 seconds for the last request to be finished.

All of a sudden, your API is called slow. You can scale it up using multiple threads and stuff, but only so much. In the end, this gets complex pretty fast. Essentially, every thread taking up this task is spending 300 milliseconds waiting for nothing.

Asynchronous programming offers improvement. Asyncio allows you to wait for a process to be finished and perform some other calculations with the same thread in the meantime. No more waiting! 50 requests? No problem. We’re sending them all out, one after the other. You can see it as one single thread that has multiple call stacks.

As long as the underlying infrastructure can handle it, we’re good to go. In this extreme case, we can even reduce the waiting time to only a bit more than 300 milliseconds for all requests. Do you get it? If not, watch this tutorial.

Big warning: If you cannot handle a large number of requests, make sure you queue incoming requests at a rate you can handle. It’s possible to write code that is so fast that it will destroy an entire Kubernetes cluster. During the recent online Machine Learning conference, Carmine Paolino mentioned that you have to keep this in mind when you move your application into production. Make sure you can handle lots of simultaneous requests being sent at the same time.
The First Time Every Spice Girl Killed an Animal, in Verse
By: Rebecca Mccarthy
Tags: Poetry, The Spice Girls, Books, Girl Power

Emma “Baby Spice”

“I had a baby bird once

and my mum told me to feed it

while she went away.

Unfortunately, I’d spent all my money going out the night before,

so I fed it some of my nan’s bird food instead — only her bird is a parrot.

When I came in

the next morning

it was on its back,

I felt terrible.

It must have choked to death —

horrible!”

Mel B. “Scary Spice”

“My mum and sister

thought that I actually killed my guinea pig,

but I didn’t.

I used to kill spiders

all the time,

but nothing else.”

Mel C. “Sporty Spice”

“I used to kill flies

by snapping them with elastic bands.

One time I killed a really big bluebottle and felt guilty for weeks

because it was really big

— not just a fly, but a proper creature.

I kept having dreams about this fly’s family

attacking me while I was asleep.

I was also really worried about God being angry with me.”

Victoria “Posh Spice”

“I used to collect worms

and lay them out on a slate,

chop them up

and watch them go their separate ways.

Then I’d put all the bits in a jam jar.”

Geri “Ginger Spice”

“My brother and I were in a gang

and we used to lift up the tiles in the back garden

and pour petrol on the woodlice underneath,

set light to them

and burn them.”