fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Whose second half can you influence?
By: Bradley Charbonneau
Tags: Coaching, Parenting, Inspiration, Second Chances, Motivation

He even missed the backboard in the first half.

Twice.

Once from the right.

Then from the left.

It wasn’t pretty.

The Team

At the half, he came to me. “Coach, I shouldn’t play in the second half. I can’t make a shot. I’m terrible.”

I shot back quickly. “Yep, you were awful,” and I hit him in the arm and laughed. He was surprised, but laughed, too.

I kept going, “But you missed from the right then you missed from the left. The next ones are going straight down the middle and into the basket. You had an awful first half, but that first half has nothing to do with the second half. The first half is in the past and the second half is in the future.”

It seemed like he was listening. Which was nice. So I kept going.

“The team needs you in the second half. Things are going to turn around for you, you’ll see.” There was hope in his eyes.

“Now go grab a sandwich and get some water and we’re going to turn this around, OK?”

“OK, coach,” he ran off to the bench to get a sandwich.

On the first play of the second half, he put up an off-balance shot and it went in.

You could practically feel the electricity in the stadium go from negative to positive–as clear as the two sides of a battery. It was all coming from him.

He turned to me and gave me a full-toothed smile and big thumbs up. He hopped like a bunny to get back on defense and I’m not sure he knew he was still part of this earth.

He made a few more shots soon in the second half and his world was right again.

His defense was on, he had loads of energy, and he was smiling during it all.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

Words can hurt us. They can also help us.

Who do you know who’s had a rough first half and could use a lift heading into the second?

Pull them up. Extend your hand. Give them a lift.

It might cost you a minute of your time and it might mean the difference between a “1” in the win column, a smile for the rest of the day, or dare I go out on a limb and say that it could be the beginning of the second half of something much greater that turned around because of one moment in one day and something you said to help them, to make a difference.

According to the laws of the universe, we weren’t supposed to win last week. But we did.

According to the laws of the universe, that player was supposed to have a bad second half. He didn’t.

Whose second half can you influence?
How to increase app rating in AppStore?
Tags: Programming, App Development, iOS, Mobile App Development, Swift

How to increase app rating in AppStore? Sayler8182 Follow Nov 13 · 2 min read

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Many magnificent apps have a problem with very few ratings in AppStore. The main reason is that users have no incentive to do it or even don’t know how to do this. An application can ask users for their opinion about the App, but it should be done at the right moment. No one will rate five stars right after the first launch. To gain best feedback user should use the app a couple of days, and be able to postpone our question.

How to code it?

What app should do? We need to make some assumptions:

- save first launch date

- count each app launch

- ask about review under certain conditions

- force app asking about a review (eg. “Rate app button”)

Now we can define interface:

Let me show you complete code implementation it lets you better understand my explanation.

We are using UserDefaults to save data shared between app session:

- application’s first launch date

- application’s launch count

- last asking date — user can postpone the review

Our micro-service is also parametrizable:

- minimum launch number after which popup can be shown

- minimum time after which popup can be shown

- minimum interval after which popup can be shown after postpone

Available methods:

- save first launch date

- increase count number

- force popup presenting

- presenting popup only when conditions are met

Along with the release of iOS 14, amendments to the version were introduced. From now on we can show popup on the chosen scene — only in iPad and Mac. We can add feature support to our code:
Ram Dass Inadvertently Declares Autism as Natural Enlightenment
By: Kelsey Jean Marie
Tags: Spirituality, Self, Psychology, Mindfulness, Autism

Mental Processing

Since many people are looking for a cure for autism they think it is a misfortune, a blemish, a disease, or a disorder, yet it is none of the above.

In a society set up to prioritize intellectual capacity and override bodily wisdom, it’s not surprising that sped-up thought processing is also an aspect of autism – being highly sensitive, aka absorbent of the general intellectual-priority orientation of our times.

Photographic memories and savants skills are fawned over, but the fast processing required is a general feature of the autistic mind – it’s a matter of does the mind has space to flourish or is it bombarded by a sea of strong NO’s being ignored or refused?

Give the person a sea of full-bodied YES ‘s and watch what they can do.

This is true for anyone. Most of us are not trained to follow or even allow full-bodied YES’s.

And, with the sped-up cognitive processing of the general psychedelic trip participants — aka autistic people (is the argument I’m making) — ultimately the absorbing and reflecting happens at a radically increased rate given compassionate activation versus traumatic stress.

If the results within each person are reflective of the person’s expectations (set up by early years conditioning, no doubt) as well as their current environment, then conditioned beliefs and behavioral patterns must be attended to consciously.

When not attended to consciously the person is likely to attract or choose environments that reflect major aspects of their original environment where the conditioning took root.

It can be a negative feedback loop where a person can be stuck at this first rung on the ladder of experiences overwhelmed in hypersensitivity and hyperactive mind…

unavailable to harness it happily.
Clinging on the Unknown
Tags: Self-awareness

Clinging on the Unknown

or how to be by yourself, first.

‘You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?’

Habits are what keeps people sane of which 2 are certain in any case: sleeping and waking up. So we structure our lives around our biological needs. Eat, don’t eat, just breathe.

Lately, the need of being alone has increased. Aloneness as a habit/ fact of life. How can we ‘give’ when we are alone? To whom? We become self-absorbed, artists of our own egocentrism. No more objectivity, no more science. Just us as our own center of the universe. And everything goes around.

I ran away from authority only to be yearning for structure anyway. Like a leaf in the sky, I tremble in my own insecurities colored by the night. Darkness scares me because I cannot see in- the future. The light reminds me of the possibilities of the days wasted. I am in between completely. And the world, the same. We run on experiments, perhaps, and what’s a year’s time frame in the infinity of space? Just a little bit of content.
Medium Publication Followers
By: Medium Formatting
Tags: Medium, Writing, Publication, Followers, Social Media

Tips for Increasing Your Medium Publication Followers

1. Mention your publication in your Medium profile. Your Medium profile is one of the best ways to promote your Medium publication. Make sure that you include a URL linking directly to your publication.

2. Pick a well defined niche. Aiming to become your own mini “Medium within Medium” is not a good strategy. Pick a niche. Something that you are passionate about and have the desire to explore. State in your description what types of topics you cover, and which topics you don’t.

3. Market your publication shamelessly. Getting people to actively follow a Medium publication is surprisingly difficult. One of the biggest reasons is because many readers are confused by Medium’s overly complex layout. Readers might think they are following your publication when they follow your profile, but this is not true. Similarly, their is no way to add readers as followers to your publication. This means that even a reader who opts into a writer’s external newsletter or mailing list would have to separately follow a publication. So make sure you ask readers to follow your publication specifically! The Startup does this well:

4. Make sure that your publication is listed in all the essential aggregated lists for Medium publications — Some places you can list your publication are directly on Smedian, on the comments of related niche content (outside of Medium), and on social media pages that help readers become writers for your publication.

5. Include a CTA at the end of your articles. Even if your article is about an unrelated topic, readers are typically curious about the other projects writers are involved with. Here is an example from one of my CTAs:

6. Make sure that you fill out all of the relevant search tags, under your publication settings. These tags play a major role in helping viewers discover your publication in internal Medium search results.

If readers can’t find a publication, chances are they won’t follow it.

For example, for my publication, Digital Marketing Lab, I utilize the following five search tags: Digital Marketing, Strategic Communication, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, and Branding.

You want to make sure your publication tags are broad enough that readers will search for them (digital marketing is broad enough) but not too broad where your publication will have to compete against larger publications (marketing may be too competitive of a tag to make it worthwhile for this publication).

7. Do not send too many letters to your publication followers — I have seen many publications do this. Just because you can reach all of your followers with ease is not a reason to send excessive messages. After all, followers can choose to stop receiving your letters (while still remaining followers) or they could choose to unfollow your publication altogether. I would generally suggest not sending more than 1 letter per week.
Spring Boot OAuth2 Login With GitHub
By: Maroun Maroun
Tags: Java, Spring, Security, Oauth2

Spring Boot Code

To enable Spring Security OAuth 2.0, we need to add the following starter:

compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-oauth2-client'

or for Maven:

<dependency>

<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>

<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-oauth2-client</artifactId>

</dependency>

Now, we’ll need to modify our application.yml :

spring:

security:

oauth2:

client:

registration:

github:

clientId: ${GITHUB_CLIENT_ID}

clientSecret: ${GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET}

The GITHUB_CLIENT_ID and the GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET are environment variables that hold the values that you get back once you register your application on GitHub (same for Google, Facebook, or any other provider).

Now let’s configure our security:

@EnableWebSecurity

public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override

protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {

http.authorizeRequests()

.anyRequest().authenticated()

.and()

.oauth2Login();

}

}

In the above code, we want every request to be authenticated. We add oauth2Login in order to configure authentication support using OAuth 2.0.

Now if we try to access localhost:8080 in our browser, we’ll be forwarded to the GitHub sign-in page:

So what happened here?

When a request is made to localhost:8080 , Spring security will try to find an authenticated object, but eventually, it fails to. So it redirects to:

http://localhost:8080/oauth2/authorization/github

Internally, this request is getting handled by OAuth2AuthorizationRequestRedirectFilter , which uses implements doFilterInternal that matches against the /oauth2/authorization/github URI and redirect the request to

the above redirect_uri contains the same value we put when we registered our application.

After we successfully authenticate against GitHub, the user will be redirected to login/oauth2/code/github with the authentication code in the request parameters. This will be handled by the OAuth2LoginAuthenticationFilter , which will perform a POST request to the GitHub API to get an authentication token.
[誰准你沒驗測過就來Demo的？] - 談Potentially Shippable
By: Yu-Song Syu
Tags: Scrum, Software Engineering, Agile, Potentially Shippable, Testing

Kuma老師的軟體工程教室

Welcome to the Kingdom of Software Engineering
Meta-Programming in Python
By: Saurabh Kukade
Tags: Metaprogramming, Python Programming, Programming, Functional Programming, Python

Meta-Classes

Now that we’ve seen decorators, they are for decorating functions. But there is more to meta-programming than decorators, such as meta-classes.

Meta-classes are special types of classes, rather than ordinary classes in Python. Where an ordinary class defines behavior of its own instance, a meta-class defines the behavior of an ordinary class and its instance.

A meta-class can add or subtract a method or field to an ordinary class. Python has one special class, the type class, which is by default a meta-class. All custom type classes must inherit from the type class.

For instance, if we have class Calc , with three class methods, and we want to provide debug functionality to all the methods in one class then we can use a meta-class for this.

class Calc():

def add(self, x, y):

return x + y



def sub(self, x, y):

return x - y



def mul(self, x, y):

return x * y

First, we need to create a meta-class MetaClassDebug , with debug functionality, and make the Calc class inherit from MetaClassDebug .

And, when we call any method from the Calc class, it will get invoked with our debug_function .

def debug_function(func):



def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):

print("{0} is called with parameter {1}".format(func.__qualname__, args[1:]))

return func(*args, **kwargs)



return wrapper





def debug_all_methods(cls):



for key, val in vars(cls).items():

if callable(val):

setattr(cls, key, debug_function(val))

return cls





class MetaClassDebug(type):



def __new__(cls, clsname, bases, clsdict):

obj = super().__new__(cls, clsname, bases, clsdict)

obj = debug_all_methods(obj)

return obj





class Calc(metaclass=MetaClassDebug):

def add(self, x, y):

return x + y



def sub(self, x, y):

return x - y



def mul(self, x, y):

return x * y





calc = Calc()

print(calc.add(2, 3))

print(calc.sub(2, 3))

print(calc.mul(2, 3))





**************** output ****************



Calc.add is called with parameter (2, 3)

5

Calc.sub is called with parameter (2, 3)

-1

Calc.mul is called with parameter (2, 3)

6

Bingo! In the above snippet, we created a meta-class MetaClassDebug and wrote a new method which is responsible for creating an instance of class and applies our decorator function debug_function to the object (instance), which will get created for every class that inherits MetaClassDebug .

Calc is inherited from MetaClassDebug , hence every method has been decorated by debug_function from debug_all_methods .

This way, we can add new behavior to all the methods within a class and also control the instance creation of a class using a meta-class. We can achieve a lot with a meta-class, such as adding a method or field to class, removing a method or field from a class, and many more.

I wanted you to have a quick look at meta-programming in Python, so I wasn’t able to cover all the things in this post.

I hope that this article has helped you to familiarize yourself with the concept of meta-programming. Criticism is always welcome!
The Augmented Bollinger Bands.
By: Sofien Kaabar
Tags: Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Trading, Finance

The above curve shows the number of values within a number of standard deviations. For example, the area shaded in red represents around 1.33x of standard deviations away from the mean of zero. We know that if data is normally distributed then:

About 68% of the data falls within 1 standard deviation of the mean.

About 95% of the data falls within 2 standard deviations of the mean.

About 99% of the data falls within 3 standard deviations of the mean.

Presumably, this can be used to approximate the way to use financial returns data, but studies show that financial data is not normally distributed but at the moment we can assume it is so that we can use such indicators. The issue with the method does not hinder much its usefulness.

Hence, the Bollinger bands are simple a combination of a moving average that follows prices and a moving standard deviation(s) band that moves alongside the price and the moving average.

GBPUSD (in black) with its 20-period Bollinger Bands. (Image by Author)

o calculate the two Bands, we use the following relatively simple formulas:

Image by Author.

With the constant being the number of standard deviations that we choose to envelop prices with. By default, the indicator calculates a 20-period simple moving average and two standard deviations away from the price, then plots them together to get a better understanding of any statistical extremes. This means that on any time, we can calculate the mean and standard deviations of the last 20 observations we have and then multiply the standard deviation by the constant. Finally, we can add and subtract it from the mean to find the upper and lower band.

Clearly, the below chart seems easy to understand. Every time the price reaches one of the bands, a contrarian position is most suited and this is evidenced by the reactions we tend to see when prices hit these extremes. So, whenever the EURUSD reaches the upper band, we can say that statistically, it should consolidate and when it reaches the lower band, we can say that statistically, it should bounce.
Can bad students give good feedback?
By: David Kofoed Wind
Tags: Feedback, Edtech, Teaching, Science, Education

A modern approach to teaching and learning is to use peer feedback. The idea is to let students give feedback to each other, both as a way to ensure that students get more feedback, but more importantly because students learn a lot from giving feedback to their peers (Sadler 2006, Liu 2006).

When discussing the concept of peer feedback with teachers and students, the most common response is:

What if my students don’t understand the material? Will the less well-performing students be able to give feedback?

It is natural to think this way, that students that are not high performers academically are not able to provide useful and constructive feedback to their peers. But as Habeshaw (1993) writes, all students “.. are in the best position to know what their difficulties are and to judge what kind of feedback is helpful”.

Studies show that feedback needs to be rational and supported by suggestions (Kim 2005) and that receiving ‘justified’ comments in feedback improves performance of students (Gielen 2010).

Teachers love data ❤️

Let’s look at some actual data!

To try and answer the question, we have dug into our data at Peergrade to see if we can get a clearer picture. By reviewing data from more than 10.000 students across 500 courses, we looked at the correlation between the quality of feedback a student provides (as evaluated by the receiving peer) and how well they performed on their own assignments.

The horizontal axis shows each student’s academic performance which is the average of their score relative to other students for each assignment. The vertical axis shows the average feedback score of feedback they gave to their peers.

When we look at the data, we see that there is a very weak correlation (r = 0.11, p-value = 0.0007) between how good students are at giving feedback, and how good their own work in the course is. Surprisingly, students who perform significantly worse than their peers in the assignments, are usually able to provide great feedback to others.

All students learn from peer assessment

The important takeaway is that all students are able to learn from peer assessment, and that it is possible to use it as a pedagogical tool even when teaching classes where students are not all on the same level.

If you are interested in trying peer assessment for yourself, head over to Peergrade and give it a go — it is totally free for teachers!

The content in this post is part of a submitted research paper to the 12th International Conference on E-Learning)
Introduction to Istio Service Mesh
By: Pavan Kumar
Tags: Istio Service Mesh, Istio Service Tutorial, Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy Proxy

Istio Architecture

The Istio Service Mesh is divided into two components called data plane and control plane. All the envoy proxies come under the data plane. All the communication between microservices in your Kubernetes cluster happens through these proxies. The traffic between these Envoy Proxies is known as data plane traffic. The control plane components configure how the traffic is routed by the envoy proxies. In the earlier versions, the control plane components are deployed as Individual pods, with reference to Istio version 1.6 all these components are deployed as a single pod called istiod.

Some of the tasks performed by istiod

It is responsible for converting the istio based YAML files into the configuration understandable by envoy proxies It is responsible for propagating these configurations to the envoy proxies at run time It is also responsible for managing and generating TLS certificates to allow Mutual TLS connections between envoy proxies in the data plane.

Some Important Features of Istio Service Mesh

Traffic Routing Features

a) Request Routing

b) Fault Injection

c) Traffic Shifting

d) Ingress

e) Traffic Mirroring

2) Security

a) Certificate Management

b) Authorization and Authentication

3) Observability and Visualization of your Service Mesh

a) Kiali Dashboard

b) Grafana

c) Prometheus
Attention Please: Document Classification
By: Jon-Ross Presta
Tags: NLP, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Featured, Machine Learning

So, how does attention work? It’s one thing to look at a given sentence and say which words are important. However, this model obviously is useless if it’s not generalizable, so it needs to somehow learn the properties of words, as well as how these properties interact and which interactions result in significance.

Mathematical Depiction of Described Steps

Step One: Represent each word in the vocabulary as an embedding vector of N dimensions. This is a super common approach in NLP, more information here.

Step Two: Send each sentence of embedding vectors through a GRU. The GRU is going to have a hidden state in between each word. Typically for prediction, we only care about the final state, but for this model, we want to keep track of each intermediate state as well. Let hᵢ be the vector that represents the hidden state afterword i. Note that, while likely, not necessary, I followed the paper in using a bidirectional GRU. This means that the model runs through the sentence forward and backward. Each word i then have hidden states hᵢᶠ and hᵢᵇ, and we simply concatenate these two vectors into hᵢ and proceed.

Step Three: Feed each of the hᵢ through a fully connected linear layer, including a bias term. The paper recommends that the output size have dimension 100; I have not yet explored the efficacy of tweaking this hyper-parameter, although I think that could be an interesting research area. For each element in the resulting vector, take the tanh. Call this new vector uᵢ, again corresponding to word i.

Step Four: Send each of the uᵢ through another linear layer, this time without a bias term. This linear layer should have a scalar output, so now we have a single scalar value associated with each word i. Then apply the softmax function for each sentence; the scalars will sum up to one for each sentence. Let the scalar for sentence i be called αᵢ.

Step Five: We’re almost at prediction time. We now have for each word i in a given sentence, a vector hᵢ, and an importance scalar αᵢ. It’s crucial to understand here that these hᵢ vectors are different from the original word embeddings, as they have memory of the sentence in both the forward and backward directions. We take an element-wise weighted sum for all vectors in the review, call this review vector s.

Step Six: The function applied to s differs based on the objective of the model, but because this model is interested in document binary classification, I applied a final linear layer to the vector s, which returns a singular value p, the probability of belonging to class 1.
Article Crash Investigation
By: Ali Q
Tags: Work, Writing, Personal Development, Success, Writing Tips

Article Crash Investigation

Deconstructing My Latest Writing Failure

Photo by Tanja Zöllner on Unsplash

“Thanks so much for sending this story our way. We have to be really selective at the moment, so we’re going to have to pass on this occasion.”

I appreciated the editor taking the time to let me know my story had been rejected. But it didn’t make the rejection sting any less.

One of the first things I read on Medium when I joined the platform two months ago were articles from writers, writing about writing, for other writers.

Most common threads in these articles were that you must develop a thick skin and learn how to handle constant rejection. So I actually went into my Medium writing career fully prepared to face endless rejection.

And then something weird happened.

Things went well for me.

Within the first couple of months, I was published thrice in a couple of major publications and got curated for those articles as well, under fairly big topics such as ‘Work’, ‘History’, and ‘Relationships’.

Now let’s keep it real — I’ve only made about $30 from my writing so far in two months on the platform, so it hasn’t changed my life. Yet. However, I’ve had enough encouragement from people’s responses to my writing to think that this is something worth taking seriously.

So last week I resolved to work on my craft even more and level up.

And that’s what made this particular rejection even worse — I worked harder on this article than any other article I’ve written so far, even more than the one that has had the most success and delivered the majority of my Medium earnings to date.
I’ll Never Be Less Than Me
By: Stephenie Zamora
Tags: Self-awareness, Relationships, Love, Happiness, Self Improvement

By all accounts, I am “too much.”⁣

Complicated, as a dear friend has often called me. Too driven, too intense, too feeling. Too wild, too free, too deep. Unable, if not incapable of, settling into the ways of being most people expect or desire.⁣⁣

⁣I am too much.⁣⁣

I am complicated.⁣⁣

I am intense.⁣⁣

⁣⁣

I am someone who many people do not want all parts of (I know this, because they’ve told me). What makes me who I am is not fully desired or welcome in relationships and spaces of all kinds. Because it’s triggering and different and chock full of emotion. It’s uncomfortable and consistently challenging to all that is familiar and known.⁣⁣

⁣⁣It has taken years, but I can finally say to you with my whole heart: I’m at peace with my too-muchness, and I hope that you are too.⁣⁣

The problem isn’t that we’re too much, friends… but rather, that we decided to agree with the ones who said it as if it was bad and wrong. We decide to give those people and their opinions more weight than they deserve, rather than responding with, “yes, and?”⁣⁣⁣⁣Of course you and I are too much. That too-muchness is all things necessary to being who we’re here to be and doing the work we’re here to do. It is needed right now in a way that we’re only just beginning to understand and appreciate.⁣⁣⁣⁣

My too-muchness is my gift, just the same as yours. And I, for one, will never allow someone to throw it in my face as if it’s bad or wrong again. Maybe it’s unwanted or unwelcome, and that’s okay. It’s simply not for them. But I will never be less than who I am for the sake of someone else’s comfort again. Not ever.⁣⁣

I hope you won’t either.
How We Can Prove Nature Codes Reality
By: Ilexa Yardley
Tags: Circular Theory, Universal Relativity, Universal Circularity, Technology, Science

Everything depends on light.

Zero and one.

Light is the constant in the reality we live. At present. We know, if the light goes out, we’re dead. This means, we can prove that nature codes reality.

If you live in Florida, and you move from south to north, on the eastern coast, you will notice, different kinds of lizards. The lizards are all the same. Except as you move north, on the coast, they change. This is basic evolution. Co-evolution, to be exact. The lizards change their shapes, and colors, depending on their environment. Proximity to the sun. Water. And water’s relationship to the sun.

Hydrogen, when burned, produces water. Explaining anger and depression, over change. Water moves as hydrogen moves, meaning, everything moves, according to its relationship to light. This throws everything off, as far as timing, where southern Florida is on one clock, northern Florida, and, also, east and west, is on a slightly different clock.

We know about the subtle change in timing, as it comes to, and from light. We call this ‘time zones.’ Explaining the relativity of light (and time).

Meaning no two anything’s share a time zone. This you get to with your abstract (version of) intelligence. Meaning, this is something you automatically know, without ‘knowing it.’

So, the idea light is the (only) constant is not completely correct. Light is a line. A line is the diameter, and circumference of a circle. Meaning, we have two constants. Zero and one. Energy and light. Time and space. Any X and-or Y. Any zero and-or one. Zero is dependent on one, and vice versa (making everything dependent on everything else).

This explains why technology is now taking over everything, and will determine, eventually, if we even have an ‘earth.’ Light. Sun.

Conservation of the circle is the core dynamic in nature.
Don’t Waste Your Life Trying to Prove Yourself
By: Zach Arend
Tags: Work, Leadership, Self, Mindfulness, Productivity

There it is again, that feeling that I’m not enough. The belief that if I don’t prove that I’m a competent leader, I’m going to get found out.

I just received an email requesting that I update my board on sales performance.

“That’s it,” I think to myself. “I’m going to get found out. At some point, everyone’s going to see that I’m a fraud. They don’t trust me. Everyone is thinking that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m being called out and better get my shit in order”…and on it goes.

Even though it’s Saturday morning and I have a full day planned with my family, I start obsessing over how I should respond.

I’m thinking I should go type an email response, and that my kids can wait.

Everyone must know that I’m doing my best and working hard. So, I’ll prove it to them by responding immediately.
Astronomers Have Detected a Planet’s Radio Emissions 51 Light-Years Away
Tags: Space, Science, Astronomy, Exoplanets, Aliens

Astronomers Have Detected a Planet’s Radio Emissions 51 Light-Years Away ExtremeTech Follow Dec 21 · 3 min read

by Ryan Whitwam

Astronomers have detected thousands of exoplanets, but there’s only so much we can know about them from light-years away. A new study from Cornell University could help shed light on the conditions of exoplanets by analyzing radio emissions connected to their magnetic fields. The researchers claim this marks the first time an exoplanet has been detected in the radio bands.

This project started with the study of Jupiter, which has a hugely powerful magnetic field. Several years ago, study lead author Jake Turner conducted an analysis of Jupiter’s magnetic field. In the new study, that data becomes the basis for hunting exoplanets. The team processed the Jupiter data to simulate the radio frequency signal from a distant gas giant.

The results became a template for similar planets that might be 40 to 100 light-years away from the observer. Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), the team scanned several nearby solar systems that are known to host exoplanets. If the signals from one of these stars matched the template, that would indicate they’d found an exoplanet’s emissions in the radio spectrum.

It took more than 100 hours of observational time, but a star known as Tau Boötes 51 light-years distant exhibited exactly the kind of signal the researchers were hoping to find. Turner and his colleagues even used other radio telescopes to repeat the analysis, and the signal is still there. And that makes sense — Tau Boötes has one known exoplanet, a gas giant called Tau Boötes b that orbits very close to the star.

The LOFAR radio telescope.

According to the researchers, the signal is understandably very weak. There were several other stars with radio pings that could have been planets, but the one in Tau Boötes was much more significant. The team is now calling on other researchers to confirm the findings — data on an exoplanet’s magnetic field could be invaluable, but it’s still possible the signal is coming from the star or some other local source rather than the planet.

The researchers say that the magnetic field of a planet can offer hints of composition and habitability. For example, Earth’s magnetic field is a product of the planet’s iron core, and the field helps deflect dangerous radiation that can harm living things and strip away a planet’s atmosphere. Mars’ lack of a magnetic field is believed to be one of the reasons it’s so inhospitable. After confirming and refining Turner’s results, astronomers might be able to learn about distant worlds by scanning for radio frequency emissions.

Now read:
Making a Stand Alone Executable from a Python Script using PyInstaller
By: ওয় স, Wasi
Tags: Executable, Py2exe, Make Exe, Python, Pyinstaller

Making a Stand Alone Executable from a Python Script using PyInstaller

This article is also available in English. Please, click here to read the English version.
2019 Annual Data Visualization Survey Results
By: Elijah Meeks
Tags: Design, Data Science, Data, Data Visualization, Dvsintro

The results maintain a theme seen in last year’s survey that, at least among respondents, we are seeing a real youth movement in the profession. Half of the responses indicated 3 or fewer years of experience. Gender diversity still skews dramatically toward men, who outnumber women practitioners 2 to 1.

There’s an interesting detail in the questions that posed a few standard phrases about data visualization and asked how strongly the respondent agreed or disagreed with them. One question asked whether respondents were on the lookout for new tools. The answer was one which we might expect, with a significant agreement that new tools and techniques are important to success.

But if we examine the results of a related question, we see that respondents don’t think the tools themselves are keeping them from being successful. Rather, more respondents thought it was their skills, not their tools, that held them back.

Annual Survey Visualization Challenge

This overview will soon be joined by more robust and interesting deep dives into the data. That’s because the Data Visualization Society is running a competition, with celebrity judges and cash prizes, for the best data visualization made with the survey results. I’m sure the results of that challenge will provide great insights for our community using this rich dataset. You can see the full description of the challenge here.

I didn’t want to dig too deeply into the data, beyond what was necessary to clean it and provide a simple overview above, but I noticed that there was a theme to the responses I saw that was summarized by another of these questions.

Time.

If we look closely, it goes beyond this question and shows up throughout the free-text responses. For instance, what are our biggest frustrations?

In 2018, the theme among responses was most decidedly that the data visualization community felt like it needed to improve its design skills. It was clear, regardless of whether you considered yourself a scientist, engineer or designer, that respondents wanted to invest more in learning design than new tools or techniques. I wrote about this in the context not only of the overall community but also with a specific focus on responses from R users.

This year, time is a clear theme in the data. Throughout the responses, whether asked specifically about how much time they have to make data visualization or just generically what they needed to make better data visualization, the community responded with “time”.

So… time to do what?
Venture capital is going to murder Medium
Tags: Startup, Venture Capital

It’s a crying shame, really. I love Medium. It’s the best writing environment on the web, and they sweat the details like nobody else. The community too is just peach. This could have been a love story for the ages.

But I don’t think we’ll grow old together, Medium and I. I suspect it’ll end quite tragic, actually. $132,000,000 is a lot of money after all, and that’s how much venture capital Medium has been dipped in. Before having a prayer or a song about how to turn into that multi-billion-dollar business it must to satisfy the required rate of return.

The clock started running three years ago when $25,000,000 of Series A growth dynamite was rigged. That means they’re about half ways until the bomb explodes, and so far the company doesn’t seem much luck finding the code that’ll disarm.

All the vanity metrics are up, but it’s clear that there’s no idea how to turn that into actual moolah model. Well, short of following the same brain-dead advertising extraction scheme that Medium was specifically founded to counter. So credit to Ev, at least that strategy seems out — for now.

And credit to the whole Medium team for building that better typewriter. Seriously. That’s hard! There were a bunch of big typewriter makers out there already, and how much can you improve that mousetrap anyway? But improve they did.

It’s just that in Silicon Valley, you can’t merely make a better typewriter and sell that at a profit. No, you have to DISRUPT. You have to REINVENT. Well, at least you need the appearance of that, while you squeeze eyeballs until they pop out enough advertising dollars to give the VCs that 10x return.

So what is Medium going to do now, after axing a third of their staff? They’re going to essentially think about how they should fulfill the mission they were founded five years ago to pursue:

So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day. It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like.

Wut? Five years is not enough time to think about how we should make any money in a way congruent with our founding values? That just doesn’t compute. But the convoluted language and indirection does, and the ticker is spelling S. H. I. T!

This is tragic, but also expected. Medium rigged that VC bomb and is failing to disarm. And just like most other VC bombs, it too will explode and take with it the prospect of a lovely, smaller, important typewriter business.

The web, of course, will go on, if murder is indeed what she’ll write. Especially for anyone who moved to Medium but hedged their bets by keeping their own domains. A quick dump and nothing will break — except our hearts. Again.

Cheers to none of this actually happening, and Ev finding a diamond in the rubble before it’s too late. But if you’re a publisher on Medium, I’d dust off the contingency plans none the less.
Latest picks: In case you missed them:
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

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When the world doesn’t take you seriously
By: Jessica Wildfire
Tags: Work, Professional Development, Life Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Self

When the world doesn’t take you seriously

You don’t need respect from everyone in order to succeed

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

“She barely looks old enough to drive, but she’s a professor.” That’s how one of our deans liked to introduce new faculty at the fall convocation every August. Especially when we were fresh out of grad school, or didn’t have enough facial hair.

Plenty of us have had this kind of problem. Either you look too young, too female, too small, too heavy, or too…something. Whatever it is, not everyone recognizes all the respect or authority you deserve.

They don’t take you seriously. Maybe they never will.

Other people might go a step further, and undermine you constantly. Maybe they don’t do it on purpose. I’m sure the dean was just joking when he suggested I or other young people didn’t look like real faculty. But it’s a little tone deaf these days to introduce a professor as if she were your teenage daughter. Maybe, just a little bit?

This happens to me more than I’d like. Despite everything, people interrupt me during conversations and talk over me during meetings. Not all the time, but enough to get on my nerves. They don’t mean to act that way. But when they look at me, their first instinct is to ask where my parents are — not my thoughts on budgets or job candidates.

My favorite thing is when someone does pretend to listen for a while. Then they cut me off, and repeat everything I’ve just said back to me, with a little twist that enables them to take credit for the ideas.

I’ve considered trying to grow a beard to remedy this situation. Maybe a tasteful goatee. Dying my hair grey. Or maybe toting a briefcase around instead of a messenger bag.

Anything to enhance my gravitas.

A monocle might be overkill. Then again, I’ve always wanted to look like Mr. Peanut. One day, I’m going to live my dream.
Put a Tie on and Stop Swearing so Much
By: Mark Groulx
Tags: Small Business, Startup, Leadership Development, Business Strategy

While I was out running today I got thinking about an Inc. Magazine article I read years ago written by a business consultant who would go into large corporations and tell the executives to take their ties off and start swearing more. This same consultant would tell small business owners to put a tie on and stop swearing so much.

Anyone who has worked for both large and small companies can fully appreciate how well this “tie” anecdote captures the differences that exist between the big and the small.

Borrow the “Good Things”

Those of us in small business tend to view large corporations as lacking pace and passion. Mostly we are right. However, logic says the “bigs” can’t be all bad or they wouldn’t have gotten big.

The trick for a small business owner is simple — — borrow the “good things” from big business and run away from the “bad things “ as fast as you can.

For example, large corporations tend to be somewhat formal while small businesses tend to be somewhat informal. Most corporations have a written procedure for almost everything while most small businesses have written procedures for almost nothing.

The lack of formality in small businesses is one of the things that let them move fast.

Unfortunately, it is also what may prevent them from achieving their full potential.

Don’t Stop Swearing

I would never suggest that you put a tie on nor would I suggest that you stop swearing. However, I would suggest, “winging it ain’t working it”.

A lack of formality hinders a businesses’ ability to improve. Failing to formalize (document) best practices for critical processes means an organization will likely never be best-in-class and for certain will never be world-class. Identifying, documenting and continuously improving critical processes is one of the “good things” all small businesses should borrow from corporations.

Run Far Away

One of the “bad things” small businesses should run away from is the annual corporate planning ritual. Boy do they love their annual plan. What a waste of time. The crazy thing is they know it is a waste of time and they still do it.

Don’t get me wrong. You need a plan. You need a strategic plan. You need a real plan for how to create a real unfair advantage over your competition. What you don’t need is a bunch of spreadsheets with a bunch of numbers.

One Last Thing

If you grew up in a large corporation and now own a small business, you already know how to sort out the good and bad. However, if you have never worked in a large company you should consider hiring a senior manager who has. Big companies have a lot to offer your business. Just remember to sort through the “good” and “bad” carefully.

Finally, if you ever do decide to wear a tie, be sure to warn your team first. Otherwise you may freak them out. They’ll think you’re selling the place. Or going to court. Or …
Rethinking “Stress Relief”. axe-throwing is out; rage rooms are in.
By: Riley Dewaters
Tags: Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Stress Management, Trends, Rage

Furthermore, in a recent study, Richard Schonberger’s research on “frustration-driven processes” outlines an elaborate system (meant to be used by businesses) to provide individuals with a “positive outlet for frustrations” (within the workplace)…

Despite the article’s initially narrow scope, I think that its findings can, and should, be applied in a much broader sense: to the masses; the general population — i.e., well beyond just “within the workplace.”

In terms of identifying and defining common stressors, Schonberger writes: The term ‘frustration’ is especially enabling and advantageous in that it captures personal motivation: We humans don’t like frustrations, and are positively inclined to see them eliminated.

It should go without saying that we don’t always choose to go the best way about handling, or “eliminating,” those frustrating stressors that we constantly face in our day-to-day lives…

However, this extreme inclination to remove those negative barriers can have silver-linings by: leading us down certain avenues that (ultimately) help to increase our self-awareness; guiding us to find our own creative outlets, thus teaching us how to effectively express ourselves; introducing us to new and unexpected activities which allow us to ‘let go’ of whatever is bogging us down by means of physical exertions (like smashing things).

As cited in Oppong’s article, physical activity has been correlated with lower cortisol levels, thus amounting to lower amounts of stress and frustration.