fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Understanding Customer Churning using Spark for Big Data
By: Erick Ramírez
Tags: Machine Learning, Udacity Nanodegree, Spark, Churn Prediction

The demand for audio streaming services has been increased, the offer for these services has increased too, and the competence is fierce. Customer loyalty to a specific app or service is crucial for this model business.

photo by https://unsplash.com/@blocks

Sparkify is a fictional popular digital media service created by Udacity, similar to Spotify or Pandora; many users use their services every day. It also has two modalities: using a free tier or a premium subscription model on which a user is free to upgrade, downgrade or cancel the service as they will like. It is important that the user likes the service to be loyal to Sparkify.

We track each event; if a user plays a song, visits a specific page, or gets an error, it generates a lot of data that will easily scale up to GB of data. Fortunately, for large amounts of data, we can use big data technologies like Spark, and we can analyze and predict customer churn to avoid that they leave.

What is customer churn?

Is when a user stops using our company’s product, in this case, the Sparkify service. It is a metric that helps if the business is growing or not, and it is important because normally it costs more to acquire new customers than it does to retain the existing ones. To reduce customer churn, Sparkify has decided to analyze the data and offer incentives to keep the customers.

Project definition

It is a realistic dataset with Spark to engineer relevant features for predicting churn. Using Spark MLlib to build machine learning models with large datasets. The full dataset is 12GB ( s3n://udacity-dsnd/sparkify/sparkify_event_data.json) , of which you can analyze a mini subset 128MB( s3n://udacity-dsnd/sparkify/mini_sparkify_event_data.json )

The code for this project is in the Github repository.

create a spark session:

# create a Spark session

spark = SparkSession \

.builder \

.master("local[*]") \

.config("spark.ui.port",3000) \

.appName("Sparkify") \

.getOrCreate()

Load and Clean Dataset

for the mini subset of data, it is a small dataset for Machine learning; it contains 286,500 rows and the following columns:

list of columns of the dataset

there are missing userIds, normally the cookies are disabled, or we cannot track that specific user, then the data related to them has been removed. There are 225 unique users, which has the following distribution:

Customer count free/paid distribution by gender(F/M) and Churn (cancelled)

Exploratory Data Analysis

We have defined as churn the visit to Cancellation Confirmation page and the data have been evaluated according to it if the user has churn or not.

23.11% of users have canceled the service, and the user interactions about the visit pages are the following:
GrabaMeal Advisory Board: Shashank Yalamanchi
Tags: Peer To Peer, ICO, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin

We at GrabaMeal are privileged to extend a warm welcome to Shashank Yalamanchi, who joins our Advisory board.

Shashank is involved into extensive research on Blockchain, IOT and Cryptography and it’s impact on privacy, ownership, control and automation. He has adequate experience in working with Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchains, fundamentally understanding the utilization of the same in areas where the use of Blockchain can be effective.

Shashank has been currently working on Voting mechanism on Blockchain for privacy and Anonymity.

GrababMeal is creating world’s first decentralized peer to peer meal sharing platform on blockchain.

Shashank’s in-depth experience in blockchain fundamentals and it’s application will exponentially advance the development of Grabameal network.

To know more about GrabAMeal world or if you have any questions, look them up in our website: https://grabameal.world/ico/ or

FAQ https://grabamealworld.freshdesk.com/support/home

or

send us a support ticket

https://grabamealworld.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new

or

feel free to email us at: contact@grabameal.world

To Stay updated on our company updates and announcements,

follow us on:

Telegram,Twitter, Facebook, Medium

Read Our White Paper and One Pager

Subscribe GrabAMeal Channel For latest updates and Press Bell Icon for updates :
MAKE THE WORLD MORE VISIBLE!
Tags: Crytocurrency, General, Blockchain, Bitcoin

MAKE THE WORLD MORE VISIBLE!

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to summarize and mention about our prototype and introduction video about TEMCO!

As we all know, TEMCO is developing a Supply Chain Data Management Platform utilizing the blockchain technology.

In light of expanding the horizon and to show that how TEMCO’s dApp will work, we’ve recently premiered our prototype video!

Also, please check out our introduction video to get a grasp on the overview of TEMCO!

Our prototype video shows the transfer from a manufacturer to a consumer, uploading and sharing information in TEMCO’s Supply Chain Data Platform.

TEMCO team has been organizing information and developing technology based on what we stand for: Transport, Enterprise, Merchandise, Customer, Organization.

We’ve organized the video to assist everyone in understanding the concept of TEMCO’s ideal goal.

As mentioned previously and many times before, our Business Intelligence tool and Consumer application will be developed so that everyone can conveniently access!
SHP — Listing on Qryptos Exchange 23 June
By: Sharpe Capital
Tags: Crypto, Exchange, ICO, Shp, Bitcoin

We’re pleased to announce that SHP will be listing on QRYPTOS on Saturday, 23rd June. After spending the past six months developing the Sharpe Centuri platform, expanding our team, and continuing to deliver value to our dedicated community of users, we are delighted to be partnering with Qryptos to provide increased exposure and liquidity to SHP.

As discussed in one of our previous posts, we always wanted to take great care when choosing where to list our tokens to ensure we delivered a high quality exchange for our community and token holders. After speaking with the team behind Qryptos, Quoine, and hearing about their plans, we were particularly impressed with a number of the aspects of their business and operation.

Qryptos are one of a handful of exchanges to meet our stringent requirements of security, regulatory compliance, and user experience. We were particularly impressed with the approach Qryptos takes in securing user funds, utilising cold-storage BTC multi-sig wallets coupled with dedicated private servers, effectively mitigating security concerns that plague many other exchanges. We are also satisfied that that the order matching engine and user analytics provided are best-in-class, providing a highly streamlined user experience during trading. The company behind Qryptos, Quione, is the first global FinTech company to be fully-licensed by the Japanese Financial Services Agency (JFSA).

In order to ensure that the community’s liquidity needs are met, Sharpe will be deploying state-of-the-art market making solutions to ensure that sufficient liquidity depth exists for a seamless trading experience. For community members that are unfamiliar with the QRYPTOS platform, you may learn how to deposit tokens on the exchange by watching this video.

Get Sharpe Centuri

You can use the Centuri alpha at centuri.sharpe.capital. SHP tokens are required to register.

How Can I Buy SHP?

Until June 23rd, we recommend purchasing SHP using the Bancor Protocol, requiring just 5 clicks! SHP is also available through IDEX and ForkDelta.

Talk to the Team

The best place to reach out to the Sharpe team is through Telegram, at t.me/sharpecapital. Alternatively, please feel free to email us at hello@sharpe.capital.
I would like a take rest for all saturday but today I can’t do that.
Tags: Work, Diary

I would like a take rest for all saturday but today I can’t do that. Because I have to work on a meeting with my customer. I was always confident in my presentation, but it didn’t happen today. I felt a need for suspense.
The Sacrifice of Time Spent Elsewhere
By: Science Inc.
Tags: Data Visualization

There are 7 billion people in the world. You won’t be the first or the last to have your idea, and if you want to be first to market, you need to devote yourself fully to building it fast. As an entrepreneur, you have to make sacrifices to make your work happen. The more time you devote, the quicker you can bring your idea to life. The longer you take, the more time you give to both known and unknown competitors.

On the pie chart on the left, shade in how you’re currently spending your time. Say you spend 6 hours a day sleeping — that leaves you with 126 hours a week. Think about how much that time is spent with friends, family, your day job, hobbies and your startup idea.

Then fill in the pie chart on the right. Keep in mind you’ll want to spend about 80 hours a week working on your startup. From there, figure out the kinds of sacrifices you’ll need to make to commit to your idea.
Children
By: Patrick M. Ohana
Tags: Poetry, Death, Blue Insights, Love, Children

Pic by Margaret Weir on Unsplash

Children

Some Other Life

I never wanted children

worried you could die

giving birth to someone

who’ll eventually die

You never wanted children

worried they would die

giving me all your love

I was also your child

We never wanted children

thinking life was hard enough

yielding to our pleasures

living together as one
Police Raid on a Berlin Mosque
By: Virtual Mosque
Tags: Berlin, Mosques

Some UK news media have carried a news item stating that ‘Berlin Mosque’ has been raided by the German police searching for terrorists.

The name ‘Berlin Mosque’ is synanomous with the first mosque to be built on the continent. The headquarters of this organisation, now located in Lahore in Pakisan, built this mosque in 1924. Throughout its existence the Berlin Mosque has preached peaceful co-existence.

The news item itself contained the name of the area where the mosque that was raided is located and the name of its imam. However, the heading creates the impression that it is ‘The Berlin Mosque’ which was raided by the police as opposed to a mosque in Berlin.



Shahid Aziz, President of the UK branch of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Associations for propagation of Islam, said:-
6 Rhyming Haikus About Being Stuck Inside
By: Kane S
Tags: Isolation, Poetry, Haiku, Rhymes, Humour

1.

I’m going outside

But first the rain must subside

Sucked you in I lied

2.

Sitting in my room

Making a damn call on Zoom

Behind screens we loom

3.

Please let me do more!

TV has become a bore

So has connect 4!

4.

Oh great, time to clean

For the fifteenth time I mean

The place better sheen

5.

Crap, the evening news

It really gives me the blues

But watch it I choose

6.

Home again tonight

At least we can laugh at Dwight!

That’s the plan alright
Embryology
By: Elizabeth Helmich
Tags: Childhood, Individuality, Wonder, Embryology, Chance Encounters

When your body was preformed

and unborn in your microscopic sac,

was there a gene to dictate how you’d

scale the walls of your crib too soon,

because even as a baby

you had FOMO?

Or one that granted the ability

to translate “No!” into “Yes!”

as pumpkins of kings

and paupers alike

landed at your feet?

I can’t say for certain,

but every firing neuron believes

in one that gifted a cat’s curiosity

along with nine lives, and a dog’s

confidence to leap castle walls,

lick the prince

and have him offer the throne

based solely on how your eyes

reel in the moon to hover above

the treetops and gently scold

the silver river

not to ripple too much,

please, because we need to see

how the autumn leaves

paint by number.
The Unofficial Weekly Stratis Retrospect #16 — Khilone
Tags: Stratis, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Stratisweekly

Hey everyone,

It’s time for The Unofficial Weekly Stratis Retrospect #16.

For anyone wanting to read my previous blogs, you can find them all here.

Disclaimer: Never take anything I say (or anyone else on the Internet says) to be investment advice. Consult with a professional, and extensively do your own research before ever investing into anything.

Online identity Khilone

For a while, I have been thinking of a new identity for ‘Khilone’. Today is the day I finally can share it with all of you. I hope everyone likes it.

Stratis Presents Blockchain Delhi

On March 7, 2018, Mahesh Chand from C# Corner announced the Blockchain Delhi 2018 Conference, which is presented by Stratis.

Blockchain Delhi is a full-day conference of blockchain learning that includes blockchain software applications development, a focus on Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrency, and ICO basics.

Some of the conference speakers include Chris Trew, founder and CEO of Stratis Platform, Mahesh Chand, founder of C# Corner, and several other notable blockchain developers and experts.

The full announcement can be read over here.

Stratis Team Expanding

Stratis blockchain Developer, Jeremy Bokobza, gave an update on the Stratis Development team. The team seems to be expanding every day lately. He shared this picture with us, with the text “Apart from Dan and myself, everyone on this picture is new, talented and hungry to get up to speed.”

Stratis Head of Communications, Krushang Patel, added a comment, as well.

Dan Gershony, CTO of Stratis, also shared a picture on his Twitter. It’s one of the new testers.

Video by Crypto Connection

Crypto Connection released their video “Stratis review and analysis”. You can view their video over here.

GLUON

GLUON announced their ICO a few weeks ago, which will be the first ICO to launch from the Stratis ICO platform. This week, GLUON released new information about their project.

Beyond Global Trade

Beyond Global Trade (BGT) announced their ICO, which will be the second ICO to launch from the Stratis ICO platform. This week, BGT also released new information about their project.

And so another week has passed! Thanks for applauding and sharing this blog in advance, and I look forward to seeing you all again next week.

Cheers,

Khilone

Follow me on Twitter to get all the news right away: https://twitter.com/Khil0ne

And be sure to read all my stories on Medium over here:

https://medium.com/@khilonecrypto
The Hidden Sound
By: Paul Mulliner
Tags: Poetry, Self, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Life

Our thoughts can drift

like echoes of forgotten moments

lost in the wind,

or passing clouds

making shadows in our heart

on a summer day.

And when our thoughts dissolve

into the conscious silence

of the inward sky,

we find the spacious intelligence

of the inexpressible,

the hidden sound of the garden.

Like a song unheard by our ear

playing soundlessly

in an experiencing sky

at the heart of the Universe,

the intelligent presence

of the boundless

is living through all of us

everywhere.

It’s the unheard sound

known to lovers,

the hidden sound of the garden.
As A Transman, I Don’t Want to Just Write About Transness
Tags: This Happened To Me, BlackLivesMatter, LGBTQ, Life Lessons, Transgender

378 days. A year, a week, and 6 days. That’s how long I’ve been on testosterone. In April of 2019, I left the southern small town I’d lived in my whole life just to be able to live freely. Now, I’m over 1,000 miles away and everyone calls me Brian without batting an eye.

Today, I stare in the mirror and see a handsome man impatiently waiting on a full beard to grow. For now, I smile at the facial hair I do have. When I first started this writing journey, I was still trying to figure out who I was. I mean, I knew I was Brian — but who was that? How far would he go to be able to live 24/7?

All I wrote about was LGBTQ issues and fiction. However, I’ve grown away from that. When I was writing sad or angry LGBTQ news all the time, it took a toll on my mental health. Now, I avoid it whether I realize it or not. Sometimes I can’t even read them.

I know about our high suicide attempt rate. I know our life expectancy sits at around 35. I know we’re likely to be poor, homeless, and extremely lonely. I can’t help but know about unsupportive parents, ignorant school teachers, and cruel classmates. I lived through a lot of it.

I don’t want to write about it anymore — or at least not as much. The problem is, I don’t know what kind of writer I am if I strip that away. I mean, I’ve written about other topics before but I haven’t really dived headfirst into another niche. I wrote about America’s homeless epidemic a couple of times. I’ve dipped my toes into sports and technology. Honestly, I don’t even know if I want to write full time anymore.

When I was growing up, I could see myself in an office writing for a magazine or some kind of publication. I told myself, eventually, I’d get a book published. I didn’t see myself doing anything else. I didn’t know what being transgender was at the time.

I’m a transman, but that’s not all I am. I’m black. I’m chronically ill. I’m an avid reader and gamer. Caffeine lives in my system and my friends think I’m pretty nice — or at least, that’s what they keep telling me.

Does this mean I’m done using my platform and my voice to speak up for my trans and nonbinary siblings? Absolutely not.

Every once in a while, I hop on Reddit and dedicate some time to answering questions or giving support on the FTM subreddit. If I see something on another social media platform, I’ll respond to it if I have an answer.

By only writing about trans-centered issues, I feel like I’m putting myself in a box — an unhappy, enraged box. I don’t want to live my life like that. I may be trans, but I don’t want to just write about transness.
“And Here’s To You, Mrs. Robinson”
By: Tree Langdon
Tags: Self Improvement, Business, Series, Fiction, Landlord

The next tenant in the Dragon House was recommended to us by a casual acquaintance.

Janet was a single mom, with a good rental history.

You bet we checked her references carefully. Her current landlord told us she was always on time with her rent and they had positive things to say about her at the convenience store where she worked. That seemed good so we accepted her application.

She ended up being our worst nightmare.

The den mother to two teenaged boys, she wanted to be their best friend instead of their parent. As far as we could see, there were no rules. The cool mom, she wanted to hang around with their friends, to the point where it was seriously inappropriate.

It reminded me of the movie The Graduate, where a young college graduate has an affair with an older married woman. Only in this case, the young men were in high school.

*Spoiler alert: this trailer summarizes the entire movie.

YouTube Trailer — The Graduate

Janet’s parenting style, if you could call it one, was to open her doors to all the kids in town and let them do what they wanted.

Our beautiful little house turned into a party house. The neighbors would call to tell us that there were kids on the roof in the middle of the night, drinking and throwing bottles. The police became very familiar with the family’s antics.

So did we. Each time there was a complaint, we would take our official clipboard and visit Janet. After a review the rental rules,we would give her an ultimatum that she had to stop causing problems with the neighbors or we would evict her.

It was an empty threat.

The Landlord-Tenant Act in our Province is very lenient toward tenants. We couldn’t serve her notice because of noise complaints from the neighbors. The complaint had to be from another tenant in a building we owned.

The town didn’t have a noise bylaw, so we were unable to use that as a way to get her out. The only way we could remove her was non-payment of rent, or if she did something illegal.
Our programming and design school: reducing the high school dropout rate, a bit (and a byte) at a time!
By: Ivana Markovic
Tags: Technology, Learning To Code, Community, Education, UX

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

Follow
A piece of Mud in the Gutter
By: Vaghawan Ojha
Tags: Poetry, Living, Poetry On Medium, Art, Life

Image Source: here

Sometimes the mud in the gutter,

Would dream of flowing

With the young rain,

Dwelling between the dull walls,

Ever in a dream,

To submerge in the rain’s stream,

Alas,

its fragments,

Slowly scattered

In each rain,

Years of dismantling,

In the rains,

Ever so its dream

The mud no more

Dwells, nor it flows;
Medium Publication Sections
By: Casey Botticello
Tags: Publication, Write, Format, Medium, Section

Medium publication homepages are based on sections. You can add as many sections to your publication and customize how many stories they should contain and how they should behave.

Managing sections

Step 1

Go to your publication homepage and click your publication avatar in the top-right corner of the page.

Step 2

Click Homepage & settings.

Click the Homepage tab.

Add new section

To create a new section, click the + on the toolbar:

Section titles

Add an optional title for the section.

Number of stories

To change how many stories appear in a section, click - or + .

Choose a source

To change which stories show up in a section, click the down arrow
How to Show Download Progress, Kotlin-Style
By: Siva Ganesh Kantamani
Tags: Mobile, Android, Programming, Kotlin, Software Development

Introduction

Before diving into the process, let me tell you what we’re going to use. If you’re unfamiliar with any of these things, I’ll leave a link below them for a detailed explanation. I highly recommend having a basic knowledge of these concepts before going any further.

Ktor

We’re using the Ktor Android client for networking purposes. Ktor is an open source framework for building asynchronous servers and clients in connected systems using the powerful Kotlin programming language. It runs on coroutines and is made by JetBrains.

Sealed classes

We’re using sealed classes as an effective state management tool. Per AndroidStudy,

“A sealed class allows you to represent constrained hierarchies in which an object can only be of one of the given types.”

That means we have a class with a specific number of subclasses. What we have in the end is very similar to an enum. The difference is that we only have one object per class in the enum, while in the sealed classes, we can have several objects of the same class. This difference will allow objects from a sealed class to keep state. — AndroidStudy.com

Kotlin extensions

Kotlin provides the ability to extend a class with new functionality without inheriting from the class or using design patterns such as Decorator. This can be done with a special declaration called extensions. For example, we can write new functionalities to a class in a third-party library that can’t be modified and use them as the class’s actual functions. These functions are called extension functions. – Kotlin Docs

Kotlin Flow

We’re using Kotlin Flow as a mediator between networking and UI.

The Flow API in Kotlin is a better way to handle the stream of data asynchronously that executes sequentially. With Flow, coroutines turn out to be an alternative to RxJava in Kotlin projects.
Students will be able to (SWBAT)
By: Amanda Oliver
Tags: Reform, Poetry, Education

To the people

who speak about American education

like they know

how it feels to ruffle the curls

of a boy who

was kept in an oven

before they sent his father to jail

Who ask me why I sit

on carpet, concrete, ground, floor

before standing above a child

Who think thrown money

is something a child would bother to catch

when they’ve just read their first book

I bought for a quarter

at a secondhand store

For my students

covered in grease burns

from working the night shift

at their family restaurants,

who keep half their lunch

smashed in their pocket

for supper,

who ask for hugs

even though I am not supposed to

touch them

For my students

who translate for their parents,

explain softly

that the red dot

means far below proficient

Who love simple things

like new words,

their own cup of paint,

a sticker, a fist bump,

Monday mornings

and a chance to say

the announcements in a system

they keep

from being broken

small voices

small bodies

small hands

able to
My Crime Fetish Weekly Newsletter Nov 01–07, 2020
By: Fatim Hemraj
Tags: Publication, Newsletter, True Crime, Murder, Crime

My Crime Fetish Weekly Newsletter Nov 01–07, 2020

Our first Newsletter is here!

Photo created by the author

Hello and welcome to My Crime Fetish’s first weekly email newsletter! We’ve been alive for exactly one week, with 8,091 views at the time of this writing, 20,853 minutes read, 53 followers and six writers signed on.

With seven days into November, we already have six fantastic curated by Medium articles!

Screenshot of My Crime Fetish pub stats by the author

Okay enough chatter, let’s get right into the juicy stuff.

Liz Jin wrote this eerie and amazingly well-written article about a woman whose body was found in a barrel along with her baby’s fetus. I don’t want to give too much away, but trust me, it’s worth a read. It’s one of those spooky true crime stories that make your eyes bulge out of your head, but you still can’t look away.

I’d get a bag of popcorn ready for this one.

Swati Suman gives her take on the Casanova killer, a man who, although may not be as well known as Ted Bundy, was even more vicious and brutal than him. I particularly enjoyed this piece because I had never heard of him before, not to mention, the writing is fantastic.

Luna Laz wrote this piece about two teenage girls who were injured in a hit and run and left on the road to die. Luna gives us insight into how law and justice work in Slovenia.

Well done to Liz Jin, Swati Suman and Luna Laz, thank you for contributing and I can’t wait to read more of your stories!

Below are my curated stories for the month:

She was murdered while out on a run six years ago. She bit her attacker so hard, her teeth shattered.

Lauren Giddings’ was murdered nine years ago. Her murderer was being interviewed by a local news media outlet when he found out her body had been located. The reporter had no idea she was face to face with a killer.

A British couple studying in Hong Kong was brutally murdered thirty-five-years-ago. A cruel senseless crime that shocked the people of both Hong Kong and Britain.

This piece is particularly close to my heart. It is about the tragic life and murder of Polish surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński. I myself am a huge fan of his work and was even lucky enough to visit his gallery in Poland earlier this year, (I use some of my own photos in this piece.)

I wanted to write this piece not only to bring awareness to his tragic murder but also to his work. He was a fantastic artist that, unfortunately, in my opinion, is not as widely known these days as he should be.

That’s it for this week!
What Happened to The Man Who Refused to Salute Hitler?
By: Jayden Yugie
Tags: War, Nazis, Politics, History, Germany

What Happened to The Man Who Refused to Salute Hitler?

One of the bravest men in Nazi Germany

Picture Source: Wikipedia

This is perhaps one of the most impressive photos in history. In it, you can see a group of Nazi enthusiasts raising their arms and performing the Roman salute. However, if we look at the circle of the photograph, in the upper right part, we can see a man with his arms crossed, maintaining a challenging pose, which contrasts with the rest.

Who was this person who, by not performing the seig heil before Hitler, was risking his life? For what reason, knowing the risks that the gesture entailed,

did he refuse to do it? The snapshot was taken on June 1936 in an act carried out by the Nazi Party for the baptism of a new German Navy ship at the Blohm+Voss shipyards in Hamburg.

All workers and family members were doing the official greeting, either for political convictions or for fear of the vigilantes that were in the surroundings, except August, who had more than enough reasons to not give the Nazi dictator that satisfaction.

The Love Story

August Landmesser was a worker at the company Blohm+Voss who in 1931, had joined the Nazi party just to get a license with which to work in the shipping company. However, in 1933 something happened in his life that changed everything. That year he met a woman named Irma Eckler and he had fell in love with her, even though she was Jewish. August didn’t care and, defying the race laws of Nuremberg, they became a couple, having a daughter in 1935, named Ingrid. As a result, he was expelled from the Nazi Party. Hence the anger and the gesture of defiance that appears in the photo of the following year.

Fleeing Germany

In 1937, seeing the anti-Semitic and radical turn of his country under Hitler’s leadership, he decided to flee to Denmark with his family but they were detained at the border. He was prosecuted and charged for the crimes of “dishonoring the race ”and“ racial infamy ”and, in 1938, he was informed that he was going to be acquitted if he broke off his relationship with Irma. August did not accept and was sentenced to spend three years in a concentration camp while his wife, who was pregnant, was also arrested and taken to another field where their daughter Irene was born. There, they separated Irma from her daughters and finally ended her life in an extermination field.

When August was released he did not know where his wife or daughters were, and immediately he was enlisted and brought to the front where he probably died since they never found his remains. This story of defiance and death could have ended anonymously, like many others in that time of death and pain, but this time it was not so. In 1996 this story of human dignity by refusing to salute the Nazi came to light thanks to the work of August’s daughter Irene.
Jerry Seinfeld’s Method for Writing Jokes Changed My Life — Here’s How
By: John Mashni
Tags: Personal Growth, Writing Tips, Leadership, Self Improvement, Life Lessons

Jerry Seinfeld’s Method for Writing Jokes Changed My Life — Here’s How

It is not through the humor

“Groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas.” — Frans Johansson

There is a tension that I have noticed in achievers. This tension involves what is more important: the idea or the execution of the idea.

Some argue that the idea is more important. Execution cannot occur without an idea first.

Others argue that the idea does not matter as much. A poorly executed idea is practically worthless. But a good idea executed well is priceless — and rare.

I am not writing to settle this debate. But I will state this: you cannot execute an idea that you do not have.

I often wonder how great writers, artists, and creatives can be so prolific. One of my law school professors has written dozens of books, articles, and scholarly papers. Another friend of mine has written multiple books on top of running successful businesses. And then I think of writers that I know of, who write one or sometimes two books a year. Others produce even more.

How do these creators produce great content? How do they generate the ideas that allow them to become so prolific?
How to Integrate SwiftUI With UIKit
By: Mahmud Ahsan
Tags: Swiftui, Swift, iOS App Development, Software Development, Programming

After a long wait, I have been working to update one of my existing iOS game app “Word Search”. I developed the app using UIKit. I wanted to update some parts, and one of the modules I want to update is my other portfolio apps UI. So basically,

I want to integrate my other app’s SwiftUI based module in my existing UIKit based app.

Our Apps Module is developed using SwiftUI

In this demo, you see from the main screen, I go to another screen, and then finally the “Our Apps” screen, which is created using SwiftUI for my other app Onedic.

It is very easy to integrate SwiftUI within UIKIt using UIHostingController class. But to integrate that first import SwiftUI in your UIKit based module.

import SwiftUI

Then add code like the following:

When you create an instance of UIHostingController just pass the SwiftUI view name, in this case PortfolioScreen as the rootView of the UIHostingController.

That’s it. 👍
What the heck is GDPR, and why am I getting all these emails?
Tags: Internet, Data, Gdpr, Privacy

It’s impossible not to notice: any agency that holds customer data (at at any scale beyond the most local) and especially online marketers are in a crisis of seemingly inconsistent permissions and notification emails. We’re all getting emails to double opt-in to email lists we don’t remember signing up for in the first place.

The emails flooding our inboxes.

Even though these regulations were approved two years ago, some companies outside of the EU are scrambling, such as the major US newspaper the Los Angeles Times, which has blocked all its content to European viewers.

📰😂

Let’s get this all straightened out:

So, what is GDPR?

GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, is the new European Union law protecting the personal data of EU residents. While GDPR is a European regulation, it impacts anyone dealing with data of EU residents, wherever the company is in the world. The law has some teeth behind it, and can mean big fines for companies found to be mishandling user data.

What exactly does GDPR regulate?

GDPR regulates almost all personal data, including indirect identifiers (like names, but also IP addresses) and includes special protections against the storage of “sensitive personal data,” like religious identity. The law also dictates consent to make it much more transparent. This is probably the reason for much of the accessible language flooding your inbox. As Nabeena Mali clarifies:

… the GDPR refines the principle of consent, requiring: - The explicit consent of individuals. - The elimination of blanket consent, consent by default, and consent as a condition of sale, service, or general terms and conditions. - The ability for individuals to easily withdraw consent.

In general, consumers and users now have many more stated rights regarding the use and erasure of their data, and companies have to be clear and accountable with their processes and intentions about data collection. Consent needs to be recorded, and this is why so many companies are now emailing to ask users to resubscribe and resubmit their data. Another important element compels companies to notify users of data breaches.

You can read much more about GDPR in general here, and we’ll be following up this blog post soon with our take on how this impacts the tech and blockchain space.
Why Choose Laravel over other PHP Frameworks?
By: Jaymine Shah
Tags: Framework, Hire Laravel Developer, Laravel Development, PHP, Laravel

Laravel has been launched just 7 years ago but has taken over the whole development field. Laravel is the only one such framework which has made PHP even more useful than it was earlier by introducing various latest advancements in the PHP platform.

PHP has always been a very dynamic language but since the arrival of Laravel, it has even become more powerful, faster, simpler and secure. With every new release, it seems to make a certain advancement in the PHP framework. The major and foremost aim behind the Laravel development was to prevent faults that happens in the coding and security of the development. This Laravel framework was built with a purpose to strengthen security, database migration with lower data loss in order to make the entire development process quite easy.

Let’s look into more benefits of Laravel over other PHP Languages:

Benefits:

Composer based dependency manager

Eloquent ORM

Artisan command with sample codes lines interface.

Faster Caching

Database Migration

Easy Unit-Testing

Blade template engine

Offers incredible development features such as security, user-friendly interface, and maintenance.

Rich Add-ons

More secure than other frameworks

Artisan command with sample codes lines interface.

IoC Container

Drawbacks:

Pretty slow

Uses only PHP 7+

Some of the methods included in the reverse routing are complex

Upgrades might be problematic

Laravel has quite more benefits when compared to other frameworks of PHP. Contact Laravel Development Company to develop your Business app with elegant design. Contact us to Hire dedicated Laravel developer today or reach us at inquiry@techcompose.com for any assistance regarding laravel development requirement.
Australia: Where, How, and What you can buy for bitcoins
By: Kript Team
Tags: Guides And Tutorials, Bitcoin

Somewhere cryptocurrencies are legal, somewhere — not. The Kript team decided to figure that out and started making a new series of reviews: we tell you where, how, and what you can buy with bitcoins.

Country: Australia

The most popular way to pay bills by cryptocurrency in Australia is BPAY — the Australia’s largest crypto payments gateway. BPAY is offered through Australia’s leading financial institutions and there are over 45 thousand Billers that already accept BPAY in Australia (Australian Bill Payment System). More than 100 thousand bills have already been paid through BPAY since 2014.

What you can pay for

With bitcoins in Australia, you can pay for a utility bill (electricity, gas, and water), bills for the Internet and telephone, loans, taxes, fines, rent, insurance, and more. You can also pay a bank account and a credit card with crypto.

How to pay

The website Living room of Satoshi enables you to pay by cryptocurrency any bill that has a BPAY logo and a Biller Code. The service operates throughout the country 24/7 and allows making payments not only in BTC but also in Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, PIVX, Ripple, Monero, Zcash, Ethereum Classic, Nem, Lightning, Bitcore and Dogecoin. Payments in Bitcoin currently take around 60% of all payments made in cryptocurrency.

You can pay for bills without logging in, but if you want to see your bill payment history, you still have to register. By the way, you won’t need to create a password — each time you will receive a one-time password by email — two words that will be changing every time you log in.

Payment flow

You need to enter the BPAY reference code, transfer bitcoins from your wallet to the specified address, and receive the confirmation (it should happen within a few seconds).

If you paid on a working day before 5 pm, the payment would be processed within the next business day. If you paid after 5 pm, on weekends or holidays, the service would receive your payment within two working days. If something goes wrong, email them — you can find their contacts on the website.

Limitations

Yes, they call it transactions totals. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) allows individual transactions only up to $1000. If you need to pay the bill that is over $1000, you have to create several bills with the same details.

And one more pleasant addition, there are no separate fees for transactions.
Tuning Your Keras SGD Neural Network Optimizer
By: Kyle Kieser
Tags: Keras, Neural Networks, Gradient Descent, Deep Learning, Stochastic Gradient

Momentum Optimization

Vanilla Gradient Descent vs Gradient Descent with Momentum, Source

Momentum optimization is an improvement on regular gradient descent. The idea behind it is essentially the idea of a ball rolling down a hill. It starts slow but picks up speed over time. The gradient for momentum optimization is used for acceleration rather than speed like in regular Gradient Descent. This simple idea is very effective. Think of what happens when regular gradient descent gets closer to a minimum. The gradient is small, so steps become really small and can take a while to converge. However, with momentum optimization, convergence will happen quicker because its steps utilize the gradients before it rather than just the current one.

Gradient Descent goes down the steep slope quite fast, but then it takes a very long time to go down the valley. In contrast, momentum optimization will roll down the valley faster and faster until it reaches the bottom (the optimum).*

Implementing momentum optimization is Keras is quite simple. You use the SGD optimizer and change a few parameters, as shown below.

optimizer = keras.optimizers.SGD(lr=0.001, momentum=0.9)

The momentum hyperparameter is essentially an induced friction(0 = high friction and 1 = no friction). This “friction” keeps the momentum from growing too large. 0.9 is a typical value.
Finding My Way as a Sex-Positive Parent
By: Rachael Hope
Tags: Sex Positive, Kids, Teenagers, Parenting, Sex

The night I opened the browser on my eight year old son’s tablet and came face to face with a video whose thumbnail prominently featured an enormous set of fake boobs was one of the most shocking moments of my parenting journey so far. When I looked in the search history, there were DOZENS of searches for naked kids, naked kids under 9 years old, full naked kids, etc.

After full-on panicking for a few minutes (I am human, after all), I pretty immediately suspected that he hadn’t made the searches. Regardless of that, because there was even the minute possibility he HAD done these searches, we both felt that I had to talk to him about it.

I sat down with him and gently told him that I’d seen some searches on his tablet and wanted to ask him about them. He admitted doing a few searches about having a crush- and I’m going to be honest, finding the search “what to do when you have a crush on someone” is pretty adorable if it hadn’t been followed by everything else. He told me he has a crush on someone but wouldn’t tell me who and I told him that was okay, and that my first crush wasn’t until 5th grade.

I asked him several times about different terms (naked people, naked 2nd graders, girls mooning, a page with a picture of a lady with big boobs) and he was pretty matter-of-fact and not overly defensive. He told me he loved me and didn’t get upset or embarrassed like I would have expected him to even if he hadn’t done the searches.

I told him that if he is ever curious about girls or boys or bodies or sex or butts or anything that is okay and cool and we can get a book or something. I told him the internet is not a safe place to look for that kind of thing because there is a lot of crazy stuff on the internet and searching for that kind of stuff will probably show him stuff he didn’t want to see and that wouldn’t really answer his questions. I told him I know it can feel kind of embarrassing to talk about that kind of stuff but that it would always be okay to talk to me or Dad or his other Moms, because we have all had those sorts of questions, and had crushes, and have lots of experience and knowledge.

I was incredibly nervous going into the conversation, but in the end I felt proud of how I had handled it.

The last thing I wanted to do was to make him feel bad or embarrassed or ashamed, or close any doors on his ability to talk to us about sex or bodies.

After everything, we came out of it confident that he hadn’t made the searches. I talked to my older son about whether his brother had mentioned anything, and he said he hadn’t. Between all of the information we had, the times of the searches, and the conversation I ended up having with him, his other parent and I came to the conclusion that he’d gotten hacked or gotten a virus. We wiped the tablet, and the issue never reoccurred.
Jmeter performance testing with different grant types offered by WSO2 APIM — Part 5 (Refresh_token grant Type)
By: Chamindu Udakara
Tags: Grant Types, Jmeter, Wso2 Api Manager, Refresh Token, Performance Testing

2. Click the “GENERATE KEYS” button and extract the consumer key and consumer secret.

Get keys with the updated app.

3. Add if Controller to previously created Jmeter with the “Client Credentials” thread group.

Create if controller (Client Credentials>Add > Logic Controller> If Controller)and add the following parameters.

Expression to check as If condition : $!{JMeterThread.last_sample_ok}

4. Create Request to generate Token inside the If controller.

To achieve this task, the following steps need to be completed.

Create an HTTP request using Jmeter GUI (If Controller>Add > Sampler> HTTP Request) and rename it as “Refresh Token Request” In the HTTP Request window under the “Basic” configurations window following configs need to be provided.

Protocol: https Server Name or IP: localhost (Or Whatever the hostname of Gateway node) Port Number: 8243 (Or authorized port number of the server) HTTP Request Method : POST Path : /token

3. Then Using GUI add the following parameters and their respective values.

grant_type:refresh_token refresh_token: [Refresh token generated with initial access token for the client -credentials grant type]

5. Add the required headers using the Header manager.

Add a header manager to the Above created “Refresh Token Request” HTTP request (Refresh Token Request > Add > Config Element> Header manager) and provide details as follows.

Content-Type : application/x-www-form-urlencoded Authorization: Basic ${encoded_ClientCredentials}

**This ${encoded_ClientCredentials} part is the output of the Beanshell processor script and that value will be automatically assigned here.

6. Add response assertion and token extractor.

1. Add a response assertion to the Above created “Refresh Token Request” HTTP request (Refresh Token Request > Add > Assertion> Response Assertion) and provide details as follows.

Apply to: Main samples only Field to Test: Response Headers Patterns to Test: HTTP/1.1 200

2. Add a Regular Expression Extractor to Above created “Refresh Token Request” HTTP request (Refresh Token Request > Add > Post Processor> Regular Expression Extractor) and provide details as follows. Rename that extractor as follows for clarification when running these tests.

**The values extracted here will be a required body parameter for the next request to be made.

7. Using this extracted token now the user can create a request to invoke APIs in order to perform Jmeter performance testings.

References

https://jmeter.apache.org/download_jmeter.cgi. (Follow the https://medium.com/@cudakara/how-to-install-jmeter-in-ubuntu-20-04-7e4d30c42551
Mobile-Friendly Table
By: Allen Kim
Tags: Web Development, CSS, HTML, JavaScript

To make a long story short, these things what I do when it is mobile device.

hide <thead> change <td> from table-cell to flex Add a pseudo element td::before with the contents of label attribute value.

Simple, eh? The following is CSS representation of the above #1, #2, and #3



table thead {

display: none;

} @media screen and (max-width: 600px) {table thead {display: none; table td {

display: flex;

}



table td::before {

content: attr(label);

font-weight: bold;

width: 120px;

min-width: 120px;

}

}

To make all to work, your table must be well structured with thead and tbody , and each td must have attribute label attribute.

You may think having label attribute on all td tags are too much coding, and I also think so. If you want to set label attribute with Javascript run the following small function.

window.setMobileTable = function(selector) {

// if (window.innerWidth > 600) return false;

const tableEl = document.querySelector(selector);

const thEls = tableEl.querySelectorAll('thead th');

const tdLabels = Array.from(thEls).map(el => el.innerText);

tableEl.querySelectorAll('tbody tr').forEach( tr => {

Array.from(tr.children).forEach(

(td, ndx) => td.setAttribute('label', tdLabels[ndx])

);

});

}

The above function does;

Find header texts from thead Iterate through all td and set attribute with value found from #1

Simple, isn’t it?

You can see the full demo here.
Queer in Istanbul
By: Beldan Sezen
Tags: Turkey, LGBTQ, Human Rights, Sex, Women

Editor’s note: Beldan Sezen is a visual storyteller. In 2011, she was awarded the Three-in-One Chapbook Contest Prize for her graphic short stories “Fear City,” “Girls,” and “Demons.” Her first graphic-murder mystery, Zakkum, was installed at the Frauenmuseum Wiesbaden. Institutional collectors of her recent books include The New York Public Library, Stanford University, and the Library of Congress. Watch Beldan’s animated short ‘From the Diaries of Two Breasts’ here, or visit her website for more.