fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
An Indiana City Loses a Beloved Football Coach
By: Katie Couric
Tags: Obituary, Culture, Health, Family, Coronavirus

Paul Loggan had a lot of pride in what he did — both as a father, and the longtime athletic director at North Central High School in Indianapolis. “He was the most kind, caring individual,” his son Michael told us.

“My mom summed it up pretty well the other day,” he added. “We were lucky enough to call him dad 24-hours a day, but he was a father figure to a lot of students and athletes through his time.”

Paul started working at North Central in 1988, and was named athletic director in 2014. Before that, he coached two Super Bowl champions in his tenure as football coach. He “hated losing” on and off the field.

He loved spending his free time with his wife, daughter, and two sons, enjoyed a fun game of golf, and lounging on the lake. “He was big on, ‘Let’s just take the boat out, anchor down,’” Michael said. “And he might take a little nap in the sun and just relax.”

His battle against Covid-19 was a slow burn. Although school closed in early March, Paul attended one last high school football clinic around March 14, before hunkering down at home.

Around March 27th, he developed a fever. The next day it disappeared. After a series of generally mild, on and off symptoms, he decided to self-quarantine, because his family was pretty sure he had coronavirus. “He was a very healthy man,” Michael told us. “The one big risk he had was with his job. He was consistently with large amounts of people all the time.”

But on the night of April 1st, Paul woke up, his lips slightly blue, breathing as if he had just run “a marathon.” He was rushed to the hospital, where he was put on a ventilator and tested positive for Covid-19.

Paul turned 57 on April 5th, in the ICU. None of his other family members developed Covid-19 symptoms. They couldn’t visit him, but luckily, they were friends with an E.R. doctor — who was able to check in.

Paul took a turn for the worst and died on April 12th, Easter Sunday. “I mean it’s shocking,” his son Michael said. “It’s just like a gut punch and you really don’t know how to take it. It was just a snap of the fingers and it happened.”

The night after Paul passed, Indiana University, and high schools across the state, lit up their football stadiums in his honor.

“Everyone I know complains about going to work every now and then,” Michael said. “That’s the one thing he never did. He loved being with those students, the administration, the teachers. It was overwhelming to see how much he cared.”
The Future of Design Education Pt. 357
By: Tyler Hartrich
Tags: Design, UX Design, Future, Education, UX

The Future of Design Education Pt. 357

On Mosaic Rhythm

Designer differentiation

The mosaics in our life are of clear differentiation — a contrasting pattern that emerges from difference. We are but our best selves when we live a virtuousity bigger than that of our own being — through and by way of expressions of diverseness and of newness. Our designer ethos is individual and collective — indepdent and secured by way of our holistic nature.

Transitory nature

Sourcing our inner selves is a constant reminder that to be human means remaining in a constant state of self hood. Our transience will forever be a motioning towards the true nature of inner being—that is a tuning towards a more human self, but one that is never in a contant state. Rather, our human nature is calling us to be of unique formulation, hosting and guiding out truest propulsory movement.

Functional mosaic form

Form and function provide sense-making as a contrasting elemental design pattern. It is in the dichotomy that we find beauty and reasoning. Our designer virtue is built out of an expression of position — made whole and unified as a polarizing, yet deliberately placed piece in a formed pattern.

Call to action

Consider the differential you exhibit in your designer self. What positions have you yet to explore? How might you build your resounding nature in and through others to provide dynamism in your work? The perpetual practice of design is what will set us free!

Go forthward and thrive!

Timeboxed for 15 mins [ ]
The Mastermind Scientist Behind the COVID-19 Vaccine
By: Maryam I.
Tags: Covid 19, Health, Identity, Science, Education

The Mastermind Scientist Behind the COVID-19 Vaccine

Identity matters.

Photo from Unsplash @cdc

As the race for a COVID-19 vaccine heats up, the front runner appears to be the one developed by Pfizer/BioNTech.

It is already set to be used in the U.K. next week, after receiving governmental approval.

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer/BioNTech was 95% effective amongst 44,000 volunteers, and didn’t cause any serious side effects.

This COVID-19 vaccine could be the answer we have all been waiting for.
No More Basic Plots Please
Tags: Matplotlib, Programming, Data Visualisation, Python, Data Science

No More Basic Plots Please

A Quick Guide to Upgrade Your Data Visualizations using Seaborn and Matplotlib

“If I see one more basic blue bar plot…”

After completing the first module in my studies at Flatiron School NYC, I started playing with plot customizations and design using Seaborn and Matplotlib. Much like doodling during class, I started coding other styled plots in our jupyter notebooks.

After reading this article, you’re expected to have at least one quick styled plot code in mind for every notebook.

No more default, store brand, basic plots, please!

If you can do nothing else, use Seaborn.

You have five seconds to make a decent looking plot or the world will implode; use Seaborn!

Seaborn, which is build using Matplotlib can be an instant design upgrade. It automatically assigns the labels from your x and y values and a default color scheme that’s less… basic. ( — IMO: it rewards good, clear, well formatted column labeling and through data cleaning) Matplotlib does not do this automatically, but also does not ask for x and y to be defined at all times depending on what you are looking to plot.

Here are the same plots, one using Seaborn and one Matplotlib with no customizations.
Should We Have a Contest to See Who Has Suffered the Most?
By: Caroline De Braganza
Tags: Society, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Satire, Self

Should We Have a Contest to See Who Has Suffered the Most?

Playing the victim game doesn’t resolve problems

Image by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

Yes, there’s tons of shit going on — I get it.

But don’t forget the abundance of noble deeds too.

That’s how the world turns — light and dark, good and evil.

We discover we have the capacity to love and the capacity to hate.

The choice is ours — it’s not our predestined fate.

People in developed countries are angry. They’re scared. No matter which side they occupy.

Like what’s happening in the US and United Kingdom right now — headline grabbing.

I mean who the fuck cares that 9-million schoolchildren in South Africa go to bed hungry every night because the school feeding scheme which guaranteed them a nutritious daily meal came to an abrupt halt when schools closed on 27 March?

Check the skin tone of those in charge. Does it matter?

And why worry that one in three people globally don’t have access to clean drinking water?

I’m not invalidating anybody’s angst and suffering.

The point I want to make is that pain is pain.

If you render mine inconsequential because it doesn’t fit into your narrative, your agenda — that’s discrimination.
Be an Ultimate Writer with Guts, Versatility, and Connecting
By: Chris Craft
Tags: Advice, Creativity, Writing Tips, Writing

Image designed by the author

Our final entry to the Ultimate Writer series is here!

I jotted down a list of the 13 attributes it takes for someone to be the ultimate writer on Medium (or anywhere else).

This final entry closes up the four-part series, with the final three key attributes — guts, versatility, and connecting. Part 4 features great work from Nikki Brueggeman, Ryan Fan, and Sinem Günel.

https://medium.com/inspirefirst/13-attributes-of-the-ultimate-writer-part-4-of-4-1c01b69960a8

Thanks for coming along on the journey of this series!

-Chris
Why Is Everyone So Obsessed With Science These Days?
By: Emily Jennings
Tags: Spirituality, Society, Culture, Philosophy, Science

Disconnected and Meaningless

Science would have us believe that things are random, dead, and meaningless. It wants us to think a virus will have the same effect on us all, our reaction to it is random and unpredictable, and there’s nothing in our control that we can do about it. It wants us to think that particles and waves are just a building block of the universe but it has nothing to do with our day to day life.

I don’t buy it.

Science doesn’t look at the universe holistically, and I’m sorry but I can’t get on board with that. (Actually, I’m not sorry at all.)

I don’t ‘believe’ in anything that tells me that the world and my body are comprised of unrelated parts that can be studied in isolation to tell me how to live my life. We intuitively know that this is not the way. Everything is connected.

If you meditate and look within yourself, you’ll see that we are all connected to everything and we are part of a oneness. Looking at the problems in one person without relating them to other people is absurd, the same way looking at your foot problems without studying what’s going on in the rest of the body is absurd. And if you only go that far, you’re still missing the connections in the mind and soul.

I recently read You Are the Universe by Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos. In it, the world we know is explained as being full of meaning. Things aren’t random and separate, as science would have us believe. It is a conscious universe — being manifested and created by all of us. In the words of these authors:

The answers offered in this book are not our invention or eccentric flights of fancy. All of us live in a participatory universe. Once you decide that you want to participate fully with mind, body, and soul, the paradigm shift becomes personal. The reality you inhabit will be yours either to embrace or to change.

If we give in and only believe in science, we will be compelled to think that our lives have no purpose. But if we allow science to inform our spirituality or vice versa, we can begin to live our lives with rich meaning.
The Bittersweet Reason I Began Writing
Tags: Child Loss, Grief, Writing, Life, Creativity

The summer morning that I sat down with my laptop, I asked Nick to be with me and to help me let the words flow. It was difficult at first, but after a while, the words came easier. He became my muse.

At first, it was just journaling. Then it became more creative, coming up with ideas and stories, playing with new words and phrases, and digging deep into my imagination to search for new worlds.

I’m not sure if I would be writing now if Nick was still physically here. I like to think that I would. I love writing and the more I do it, the easier it becomes, and the better I get. But I know now that my writing is my tribute to him and a way to feel close to him.

I’m not suggesting that one needs to lose a piece of their heart to begin writing or embark on a creative journey. That’s just the way it happened for me. Of course, I would give up everything to have my son back. Even my writing voyage.

But it’s not an option; God had other plans for both Nick and me. I don’t have to understand it, but I do know that I will continue my writing journey. Nick would want me to.
Don’t Hold Your Dream
By: Agnes Laurens
Tags: Poetry, Dreams, Writing, Life, Creativity

Poetry

Don’t Hold Your Dream

Is everything according to plan?

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash

What is that you love to do

Makes you the one and only you

In a life that it drives through

When you say no boo

To the animals in the zoo

No one says in your dreams

What that is that you need to beams

When you are with your creams

Working together in teams

And then on to schemes

Holding onto that

Weighing flat

Got a threat

From another bread

When I let them bled
Python serverless: Coding a live playlist
By: Romain Savreux
Tags: Serverless, Music, Python, Spotify, Twitter

FIP, best radio in the world according to co-founder and CEO of Twitter:

FIP is much more than a playlist, but sometimes you need one to listen and discover something different, or just know the name of what you just heard on FIP.

I’m pleased to present FIP 100, a Spotify live playlist, i.e. the last 100 tracks played on FIP updated every minute:
Translating My Language Into Yours
By: Nicole Ivy
Tags: Language, Expression, Writing, Home, Creativity

Hiding Places by Nicole Ivy

I’m sitting in a cafe over a thousand miles from home and I’m stunned to hear on the radio the voice of musical genius and all around badass, Tori Amos:

“Sometimes I hear my voice and it’s been here…silent all these years.”

A line I resonated with enough to make it my high school yearbook quote 19 years ago! A line that leaves me feeling nostalgic for a part of myself I don’t visit as often anymore.

I’ve always been the “silent” type. I was the quiet kid in the corner watching everyone else on the playground. When it comes to face to face communication, I don’t always have an immediate response because I’m more focused on listening and observing the person I’m talking to. I jump around, leave things out, and connect disparate ideas that feel very intuitive to me, but may not make sense to others. I’m speaking in my tongue. And we all have our own.

While speaking out loud, vague feelings and sensations morph into concepts and abstractions in my mind. I stumble to find the key to decode and organize my thoughts verbally in a clear way for others. Through writing, I’m able to translate my language into something others can understand. It’s how I find the structure that others need to hang ideas onto.

That’s why Tori Amos meant so much to me growing up in the 90s, and why I was excited to hear her song on the radio today. Her native tongue very closely resembles my own. Untamed and no translation needed.

It’s also why I love music in general. You don’t have to try too hard to translate anything. You can just hum a musical phrase and people can feel something close to what you’re feeling without having to explain. It’s visceral. So easily conveyed. A universal language. Older and more pure than words.

But I do like this translation game humans play. And finding common ground and reaching for full understanding is crucial if the goal is empathy and connection, even though we may fall short. It’s the foundation for overcoming the separation we all feel and the core of all our human problems. So I will continue the attempt to untangle my inner world and translate my language into yours as best I can.
Welcome Samaipata 2.0: New brand, same soul. Always human.
By: Carmen Alfonso-Rico
Tags: Creativity, Startup, Branding, VC, Tech

Today is a big day for us all at Samaipata: after months of hard work and deep introspection, we are very excited to introduce you our new brand and our new website.

Samaipata is a word in Quechua, “sama” means to rest and “pata” at the top/edge. Kind of the feeling you have when you build something amazing and get it over the line.

We know our name is hard to pronounce (sama-i-pata), but we are very proud of what it stands for (plus we love all the different versions of the name people come up with!). Samaipata is a little town in the middle Bolivia’s jungle, set in a valley around a big rock. It’s known for being a micro world, home to more than 25 nationalities that live in peace and harmony. It’s the ultimate example of diversity and team work, two values that are at the core of what we stand for.

Our new icon is born out of the carvings on the rock and the shapes of the valley at Samaipata.

From the start of this wonderfully fun (and intense) journey of building our new brand we have known one thing: we are an early-stage fund investing in marketplaces and digital brands in Europe, with offices in Madrid, London and Paris. But the brand building process has given us the chance to take the time to think deep about who we really are — what is it that drives us — and to define who we want to be. So here we stand today, with a new brand and the same soul.

We built the brand 100% in-house (website included — respect to every product and SEO person out there) with the help of Juli — design mastermind who has been able to beautifully translate our past and our future into a brand that conveys powerful emotions, a brand we connect with. This brand is us. And our community.

To our founders and all entrepreneurs, thank you, for you have been our inspiration. This is your brand. And we hope you feel it as yours, as we feel it ours! Special thanks to Juli for her infinite patience and unlimited dedication driving a bunch of analytical geeks through a creative process. What you do is magic.

We are very excited to see how the new brand performs now that it’s out there in the wild wild world. Check out our new website to see it in action and let us know what you think (we are always hungry for feedback, bug spotting most welcome!).
5 Books to Read to Be a Better Entrepreneur
By: Anirban Kar
Tags: Business, Reading, Books, Self Improvement, Startup

The image of entrepreneurship in modern media is flashy, slick, and smooth. However, reality cannot be further from the truth.

On the contrary to popular belief, it is not as easy as going to the office and running numbers in a fancy, glassed chamber with soothing air conditioning. That part comes way later in the game.

But it starts with the fight for survival and the struggle to lift your (own) weight at the same time.

If you are a budding entrepreneur, you know what I am talking about.

If there is something guaranteed in a business venture, it is not success or failure — it will be stress. The very fabric of entrepreneurship comprises a hefty dose of chaos, unrest, and uncertainty. Therefore, you must put a special effort to keep yourself intact.

And what better way there is to do so better than reading books?

In this story, I’m listing up to five impeccable books that will not only help you to keep it together but also give you enough substance to be a better entrepreneur.
I Wrote a Pipeline to Publish the Best of Reddit to Instagram
By: Surya Shekhar Chakraborty
Tags: Programming, Software Engineering, Automation, Software Development, Python

I Wrote a Pipeline to Publish the Best of Reddit to Instagram

Here’s what I learned

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash.

If you’ve been on Instagram long enough, you’ll have seen profiles posting screenshots of interesting Reddit posts. That makes sense if you think about it: Reddit is heavily moderated. This ensures only quality posts show up on your feed.

Combine that with Instagram, a social medium with over 1 billion active accounts per month, and you have a recipe for success.

Now if you see a sample post from one of these Instagram pages, you will realize that it takes quite a bit of effort to create these posts:

A whole lot of effort

First, the owner of the page has to scour Reddit to find posts worth posting.

They will judge the Reddit posts by relevance and pick the ones worth posting. Then, they have to take a screenshot of a post and paste it on a black background to give it Instagram-friendly dimensions. They have to think of a caption that is related to the post and will drive engagement. They have to come up with hashtags to boost the visibility of the post. And, trivially, they have to remember all the posts they have made — it would not make sense to post the same content twice.

I started wondering, “Is there a way we can make their life easier through… automation?”
Did You Get The Memo?
By: Ann Litts
Tags: Life Lessons, Health, Self-awareness, Death And Dying, Illness

Photo by Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash

June 2017:

Terminal. It sounds like a stop on a journey, not a destination. Not THE destination. But that is exactly how the word is used in the medical field. It’s not a train terminal or a bus terminal. It’s the end of the line.

So often a disease is described as ‘terminal’ when it is anticipated to be the cause of someone’s eventual demise. But if you got the memo, you would realize we are all going to die of something. No one is getting out alive.

Life is a terminal event.

The thing we fight the most as a culture is the notion of our own mortality. But face it, our days are numbered. And if we succumb to a ‘terminal’ case of cancer or the flu, why do we have to clarify? Why can’t it just be cancer? or the flu? Eventually something, some one thing will be terminal.

I work with surgeons. Anyone who knows a surgeon knows they completely view death as the enemy. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a doctor say, “we saved them”. No — you didn’t. No one is ‘saved’. You bought them more time. That’s not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all, don’t get me wrong.

Time is all we have.

But this blog isn’t about dying, because we are all on the road to our deaths the moment we are born. It is our journey. It is why we are here, to fill the dash. The dash on our tombstone between the day of birth and day of death with all the stuff of our lives.

If we could just remember we are running out of tracks, we might use our time differently. We might hug our kids more, be more patient with the people we love, give more generously, show more of our Real Selves, care less about the opinions of others, fight more fiercely for the things which matter to us, care less about the stuff that doesn’t, let go of more, hold on to more. As the saying goes — buy the shoes, eat the cake, take the trip.

There was a country song a while back that urged listeners to live life “like you were dying”. Guess what?

Namaste.

Addendum: I post this as a response to the complete insanity I am witnessing as a response to Covid-19. We will all die of something. Do not let fear of death steal your life. Don’t hoard. Wash your hands. Live your life.
Should Writers be Liars?
By: August Birch
Tags: Writing Life, Fiction, Writing, Writing Tips, Creativity

Where do I stand?

I believe in loose research. I got this idea from Lee Child, who says we should do our research, but not directly related to the project we’re working on. He thinks book research done during the writing process is too fresh and will be forced into the work, because the author doesn’t want the research to go to waste.

I agree 100%.

I cannot count how many books I’ve read where the author has fire-hosed a laundry list of facts and accurate descriptions, because she just returned from a month-long fact finding mission on-location.

I believe you should SOUND like you know what you’re talking about, but you don’t have to KNOW what you’re talking about.

Save for the professionals who become fiction writers in their chosen genres, most of us make this stuff up as we go. We’re dreamers. This is our gift. We see a story in our heads. We made the whole thing up. And we bang away at the keyboard until the story makes sense.

I believe dialogue must be as real as possible.

This is HARD to do. Many authors struggle with this, including me. Real dialogue includes a lot of behavior and less explanation than many authors give credit. There’s a tendency to put a lot of explanation in dialogue to make it sound credible. But this comes across as amateurish. Here’s a story I wrote about improving your dialogue:

I believe most fictional procedures and professions should NOT match reality.

Most police work is mundane. The legal process is long and tedious, little of which takes place in the courtroom, and most of it is spent talking to clients, reading, and paperwork. Medicine is not sexy — we use saws and hammers. Surgeons play Van Halen and tell dirty jokes in the OR while we’re out-cold.

The reader wants an escape from the mundane.

We want to go on a journey. Sure, we want to learn, but we don’t read fiction to learn more about the legal system, or brain surgery. We read fiction to learn more about OURSELVES. We put ourselves in the characters’ shoes. If the writing is done well we take the journey with them. The type of grip on the pistol, or the lack of gloves on the detective rarely means a tin-shit.

Some will argue this is sloppy craftsmanship.

They aren’t wrong — but are they right? While one person has his t-shirt in a knot, because I used the wrong color paint on a squad car, 5,000 other people saw the story as an enjoyable journey.
Machine Learning Finds Just How Contagious (R-Naught) the Coronavirus Is
By: Andre Ye
Tags: Covid 19, Statistics, AI, Python, Machine Learning

The Model

Our model will have a very simple equation:

…where y is the forecasted number of cases and x is the number of days since the first confirmed case. a and b are the only two parameters that will allow changing.

a controls how steep the curve will be. A smaller a value represents a less steep curve, and a higher a value represents a steeper curve.

Graphed in Desmos.

a is also the R0 value. For each number of days x after the epidemic begins, the number of new cases multiplies by a factor of a — for every one person infected on day x, a more people will be infected on day x + 1.

This also provides another representation of what different quantities of R0 values mean. The red exponential has a base (R0) of 5 — thus, it increases. The black exponential has a base of 1, meaning that for every additional day, one more person gets infected; thus, the epidemic does not get worse or better. The green exponential has a base of 1/2, meaning that for every additional day, 1/2 the number of people on the previous day are infected.

Graphed in Desmos.

The b value controls how left or right the exponential shifts.

Graphed in Desmos.

This will provide an additional degree of freedom for the model to shift left and right to further adapt to the data.

Exponential functions usually have another degree of freedom, which is a coefficient that the entire expression is multiplied by.

However, as it might be clear by the diagram, much of this effect is already captured and can be learned by the b parameter. On top of that, if this new coefficient were to be a learnable parameter, a would not be the same thing as the R-Naught.
How I Transformed My Body in a Year
By: Yuta Morinaga
Tags: Health, Fitness, Lifestyle, Productivity, Weight Loss

How I Transformed My Body in a Year

How I Lost 40 lbs and Stay at 10–12% Body Fat

Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

I’ve lost 40 lbs and am at 10–12% body fat. I’ve never been the athletic type, and I never considered my body as being strong.

I wanted to let you know that you can reach your fitness goals with a few tips from this article.

If you’re trying to lose a lot of weight, the big number may sound scary. But, if you break your current lifestyle down, you’ll start to notice what’s impeding your goals. And no, it’s not like I starved myself to death — I know that my basal metabolic rate (calories needed to just function) is 1688 calories, and my body requires between 2000 and 3000 calories on average to stay strong and not lose muscle.

Health is the cross-section of exercise, nutrition, and recovery. Where do you score in each of the areas on a 10-point scale? What points can be improved? Why do you want to be healthy in the first place?
Semicolon e detalhes do dia a dia
By: Thiago Acioli
Tags: Sem Categoria, Curiosidades, Facebook, Fotografia, Design

in In Fitness And In Health
Interrupt the Daily Death Data
By: Aikya Param
Tags: People, Poetry, Animals, Coronavirus, Earth

Interrupt the Daily Death Data

What saves us

Simon Ortiz, photo promoting podcast — Poetry of Sacred Food Culture, The Native Seed Pod, Air date March 2,2020

What saves us in this dire time of dying —

In shock as more than died in World War II

Were seized so suddenly by COVID-19

That we do not know our national need

To grieve — ah yes, in this exact time,

Poets like Maya Angelou, Simon Ortiz,

Poet Jack Foley, Jane Hirschfeld, Kathy

Fagan, Mary Loughran, Christopher Buckley,

Cathy Dana, Paul Corman Roberts,

Judy Grahn, Amos White, Marilyn

Flower and friends, guardians making beauty

Everywhere even before they write it in letters,

People whose words reveal a wealth,

A knowing that animals are aware,

The Earth deserves more than a day,

People are more than maintained measurements,

Yet each one counts so much more gone away.

_______________________________________

Aikya Param’s mother, a registered Democrat, shared good stories and her father, a registered Republican, made art and loved science. Aikya composed poems before she knew how to write them down. For more of Aikya’s prose and poetry, click here.
Ask AppIt Ventures: Mobile App Trends in 2017
By: Appit Ventures
Tags: AI, Technology, AR, Artificial Intelligence

As a software development company, our team is always on the lookout for cool new technology and we can’t help but keep up with current mobile app trends (even if we didn’t want to keep up, there’s no escaping all the tech articles that our team members post in Slack!). We’re just a group of techie people who are passionate about technology, what it can do and where it’s going.

We have a few thoughts on what technology and mobile app trends we expect to see taking rise in 2017 — check out our latest article on mobile app trends in ColoradoBiz Magazine to get a sneak peek into what the future may hold. We’re talking about artificial intelligence (AI), automation, altered reality, and other cutting edge advancements that we can’t wait to build apps for!
Delicious, Plant-Based Spaghetti Sauce
Tags: Wellness, Food, Recipe, Health, Plant Based

PLANT-BASED EATING

Delicious, Plant-Based Spaghetti Sauce

A quick and easy recipe to throw together and it’s absolutely delicious.

Plant-based spaghetti sauce

Eating plant based can be hard at first, and it helps to have some easy go to recipes in your back pocket for one of those days where you are on the run. I love this recipe because it is quick, easy and delicious. I also love this recipe because I have a house full of picky eaters. I can make this sauce and know that even if my kids won’t eat it, they will at least eat the noodles. Everyone gets a full tummy and I am not upset about a bunch of wasted food. Win Win right?

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do!

Preparation time: 35 min

Here’s what you’ll need:

(3) 14oz cans diced tomatoes

(1) medium onion diced

(3) cloves garlic minced

(2) tsp fennel seeds

(1) Tbsp oregano

(2) tsp Basil

Salt to taste (I use at least a teaspoon)

How to prepare it:

Saute onion and garlic in 2 TBSP water until onion is translucent. Add water 1 Tbs at a time to keep onion from sticking to the pan. Add tomatoes, fennel, oregano, basil and salt.

Let simmer until sauce thickens. I usually simmer for about 30 minutes, but if I am in a hurry I take it off in as little as 15. The longer you simmer the thicker your sauce will be (some people will let this simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, I’m just not that patient.

Serve over your favorite pasta. I like this the most over spaghetti noodles or Penne pasta.

Enjoy!

Let me know your favorite recipes
What Would Make YOU Use a London Bike Share?
Tags: Data Analysis, Python, Jupyter Notebook, Bike Sharing, Machine Learning

What Would Make YOU Use a London Bike Share?

An overview of the London Bike Share usage from 2015 and 2017; the important factors and what it would mean for the future.

Introduction

London, with a population of over 9 million¹ people, it’s a city of its own. To a city of this magnitude, transportation is a vital component. The London Underground as well as the red double decker buses have no doubt, become icons of London.

London Bike Share, (or more popularly known as Boris Bikes or Santander Bikes²) is a younger icon of London. It was launched on 30th July 2010³ and we have just celebrated its 10th birthday. There are more than 750 docking stations and 11,500 bikes in circulation across London⁴, making it one of the largest bike share schemes in Europe.

Living in London, I enjoy walking from places to places, if I have to get to somewhere afar, we are always just a short walk away from a tube/bus stop. Therefore, I have never really paid much attention to the bike share schemes. However, the scheme has been going for over 10 years now, and regardless of my personal opinions, it must be important (or at least useful) to others.

Table 1. Bike shares in London per day between 2015 and 2017

Between the year of 2015 and 2017, on average, each day, there were over 27 thousand times a bike was used, with over 72 thousand times on the busiest day — that’s a lot of journeys!!

The above results comes from a dataset⁵ from Kaggle (with the raw source containing TFL data), I will be using this dataset to try to provide an unbiased macro-view of the usage as well as trying to predict bike usages for the future. I will be mainly using this dataset as it contains hourly London share bike usage between 2015 and 2017, as well as information such as weather, temperature, holidays season etc. It is perfect for providing a good overview for the London bikes.
Having Trouble with your Beloved? Stop Denying your Relationship Anxiety
By: Nishu Jain
Tags: Relationships, Mental Health, Anxiety, Health, Couples

#1. Plain Old Anxiety

The first one is some form of previously undiagnosed anxiety, most probably social anxiety. Social anxiety feeds relationship anxiety because it is rooted in fearing the judgment of others or worrying about what people think about you. So it’s not hard for this anxiety to grow into relationship anxiety.

#2. Past Issues

Relationship anxiety can be due to a breach of trust, for example, knowing that your partner had been unfaithful in the past, to you, or their previous companion. You may catch yourself constantly wondering if they have changed and worry excessively due to the distrust. This can be the cause of your relationship anxiety.

#3. Abusive Behavior or Language

If you’re facing any type of abusive behavior — physical, verbal, or emotional — that can directly lead to relationship anxiety. The most obvious is physical abuse, however, verbal and emotional abuse are serious too. They make people tortured mentally and emotionally.

If your partner routinely “jokes” about your faults or pretends to be mean more often than they are kind, you could be suffering from relationship anxiety from such type of non-obvious abuse.

#4. Unproductive Fights

Not all fights are bad. Some fights lead to transformation and betterment in someone’s life, whereas others just drain them down.

Fights, where you don’t learn anything, neither about yourself nor about your partner, ends with empty apologies only. Just empty words and nothing more. Such kinds of fights are the major cause of relationship anxiety.

#5. Looking too far into the future

All-time thinking about your future can make you rigid. “For what purpose are you going to get married? Do you want the same things out of life?”, such kinds of questions at the beginning of a relationship are harmful. And you stress too much about them, “when it’s a good time to ask these types of questions, whether it’s too early, or too late, or whether it will ever happen.”.

In short, looking too far into the future of your relationship can paralyze it and become a cause of this anxiety.

#6. Anxious Attachment

This is about people who are constantly uncertain of their partner’s devotion; which can lead to awful behaviors that have opposite effects and can actually push your partner away. So don’t cling to them constantly and give them proper personal space.

#7. The Myth of the perfect partner

Relationship anxiety mainly occurs when you constantly wonder if there is someone else better for you out there than the person you’re currently with.

Let’s make this clear, there is no such thing as a perfect partner. Nobody’s perfect. Rather than stressing and trying to find a perfect partner, focus on the ways you can make your current relationship better.
Introducing Prophecy.io - Cloud Native Data Engineering
By: Raj Bains
Tags: Spark, Data Engineering, Etl, Apache Spark, Cloud Computing

Starting in systems engineering and excited by the potential of GPUs, I moved from Microsoft Visual Studio team to become an early engineer in the CUDA team at NVIDIA, and played a key role in compiler optimizations to get high performance on GPUs. It’s a delight to see how far CUDA as come in powering deep learning and bitcoin mining. Passionate about building a startup, I moved to learn Product Marketing & Product Management, leading both functions for ClustrixDB through a hard pivot to a limited, repeatable product-market fit.

At Hortonworks, I product managed Apache Hive through the IPO. It was not fun to be in front of customers and see them struggle with Data Engineering. The Hortonworks team put in a massive effort to make Hive better & simpler — fewer configurations, faster performance, a real cost based optimizer, and a simplified stack in Hive 2.0 and beyond.

Taking the learnings of technology and the market, we’ve decided to build a product centric company with relentless focus on the customer needs and it just works! experience, coupled with a sprinkle of joy!

My co-founder Rohit Bakhshi brings strong product expertise, with the go-to-market experience from Hadoop, GraphQL Apollo and Kafka - scaling multiple Enterprise Data Engineering platform companies to unicorns.

We’re delighted to raise our seed round from SignalFire with Ilya Kirnos joining the board & Andrew Ng working closely with us. They join our existing investors Berkeley SkyDeck (Fall 2018 cohort), and friends from Enterprise software industry who invested Angel funds! SignalFire is unique - besides knowing the technology & market well, they get their hands dirty -running Spark in-house for their Machine Learning based product Beacon for locating talent!
Strategy Design Pattern | Android real-life example
By: Jehad Kuhail
Tags: Android, Java, Design Patterns, Coding, Android App Development

Strategy Design Pattern: is a type of behavioral design pattern that encapsulates a “family” of algorithms and selects one from the pool for use during runtime. The algorithms are interchangeable, meaning that they are substitutable for each other.

Check out the source code of the app to make it easier for you to follow up on the tutorial.

Problem:

In our movie app. The app fiches a list of top rated movies and TV shows from an API. The app also contains a filter options.We have 3 types of filters (genre, year, and rate).

We fetch a list of movies from the server and applying each filter via a checkbox for each one. The problem here is that we need to apply each filter without affecting the previous one, e.g. If we choose genre filter and then we choose the year filter, I need the genre list to be updated and applying the year filter on it. Also, if we remove the year filter, we need the genre-filtered list to be shown (not the original one).
Transfer Learning SOTA— Do Adversarially Robust ImageNet Models Transfer Better?
By: Mikhail Raevskiy
Tags: Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Python, Data Science, Machine Learning

Authors decide to check will adversarial trained network performed better on transfer learning tasks despite on worst accuracy on the trained dataset (ImageNet of course). And it is true.

They tested this idea on a frozen pre-trained feature extractor and trained only linear classifier that outperformed classic counterpart. And they tested on a full unfrozen fine-tuned network, that outperformed too on transfer learning tasks.

On pre-train task they use the adversarial robustness prior, that refers to a model’s invariance to small (often imperceptible) perturbations of its inputs.

They show also that such an approach gives better future representation properties of the networks.

They did many experiments (14 pages of graphics) and an ablation study.
Calm Acceptance and Clouds of Unease
By: Bridget Webber
Tags: Writing Prompts, Writing, Creative Humans, Creativity, Healing

Outside earlier today, on the street, I sensed dollops of panic, flavored with a sprinkling of resistance. Many people live in fear for themselves and their loved ones. Or they want to pretend the threat to health isn’t real and continue as if all is well.

Safe in my friendly abode, though, the atmosphere is one of calm acceptance. I watch condensation trickle down a cold windowpane and am glad to have shaken off the feeling of oddness with which I awoke this morning. It’s strange to open your eyes in the time of the Coronavirus.

The inky silhouettes of bare trees that reach crisp fingers into the gray sky are a stark contrast to the warmth here indoors.

At this time of day, I’m used to the whir of my computer, birds that chirp in the treetops, and my fingers as they tap the keyboard. Now, though, a gentle hum and snort joins them as my husband and dog sleep “until it’s all over.”

My collie, I suspect, since he knows nothing of what’s happening, joins in with his master’s nap out of camaraderie and convenience: It’s a splendid excuse to loll.

Up here in my room at the top, heat rises from radiators lower in the house to mingle with the chill. A feint scent of toasted cauliflower cheese, our lunchtime meal, drifts along with fresh coffee, and spicy aromatherapy.

Despite a measure of recognition and tranquility, the strange wave of unease drifts close by like a cloud in a breeze-less sky. And what do I taste?

A memory of this morning’s walk in the drizzle. Of yellow flowers and pink buds. Of dark ginger chocolate from my coffee break.

My heart speaks too. It acknowledges a sense of togetherness. Of people who reach out to one another. Who hold hands across the divide of nations.

I am reminded that in a crisis, humanity rises. These are times of extremes, and though some people hoard with fearful grasps, others spread their kindness wide.
The Gigantic Intergalactic Idea Alarm Clock
By: Don The Idea Guy
Tags: Ideas, Money, Action, Motivation, Creativity

Photo credit: Milos Luzanin / maskins.com

The Gigantic Intergalactic Idea Alarm Clock

Are you hitting the snooze-button on brilliant ideas?

For every Garbage Pail Kids there are twenty Trash Can Tykes.

For every Pet Rock there are fifty Boulder Buddies.

For every Candy Crush there are one hundred Sweets Smashers.

You’ve probably been sitting in front of the television and all of a sudden a commercial comes on pitching some product that made you poke the person next to you while pointing at the screen and angrily shouting “Hey! I thought of that idea two years ago!”

It’s a pretty common occurrence and it happens to people everyday. I’ve always imagined there is a Gigantic Intergalactic Alarm Clock of Ideas with individual alarms set to go off for every single idea that will ever be thought of, and when the time for a particular idea to shine is approaching, the concept starts to pop-up in the creative minds of people all over the world.

If that first group of people doesn’t do anything with the idea, then the creative clock triggers idea alarms in the minds of an ever increasing number of people until somebody somewhere finally does something with the concept and brings the idea into reality.

So, if you came up with the idea for Collectible Disk Slammers twenty years ago and didn’t do anything with it, don’t get angry at Blossom Galbiso because she didn’t hit the snooze button when the idea alarm went off in her head.

PS…

The way the article started (“You’ve probably been sitting in front of the television…”) goes a long way toward explaining why you chose to hit the snooze button (instead of choosing to take action) when the alarm went off in your head. The Gigantic Intergalactic Idea Alarm Clock does not “wait for the commercials to come on” before it moves on and triggers inspiration in someone else’s head.

—

Possessing creative powers beyond those of mere mortals, Don The Idea Guy is a Gitomer Certified Speaker helping businesses in need of customized and personalized seminars on sales, customer loyalty, personal development, and creativity. To book Don for your next event, go to www.GitomerCertified.com or contact the friendly folks at Buy Gitomer via email or by calling 704-333-1112.
What I learned from Damon Dash
By: Sheryl Garratt
Tags: Business Strategy, Focus, Creativity, Money, Entrepreneurship

In 2003, I interviewed Damon Dash for Glamour magazine.

At the time, he was Jay Z’s manager and business partner, running a successful music label, Roc-A-Fella, and one of the first big streetwear brands, Rocawear.

He’d arrived in London to launch launched a high-profile collaboration with Victoria Beckham — her first venture into fashion. At the same time, he was juggling a dizzying array of other projects: films, a new nightclub, branding on all kinds of products.

I’m not holding him up as a particularly great role model here.

After acrimoniously splitting with Jay Z in 2004, Dash has had a somewhat chequered career, his successes marred by conflict and court cases. But there was something he said, during our meeting, that has stuck with me ever since.

I was asking about his exhausting schedule, about what drove him. And he talked about how you behave when you have an early morning flight. You don’t lie in bed once your alarm has gone off. You don’t procrastinate, or get distracted. Instead you get up, you get ready, you get out and you go straight to the airport. Because you don’t want to miss that flight.

“To me everything is like catching a plane,” Dash explained. “I’m trying to get up and catch a cheque. So that’s how I think — if there’s money out there, I get up. I can’t even sleep if I know there’s money sitting on the table.”

For you, money might not be the main driver.

It might be about recognition, fame, being the best at what you do. Perhaps you want to change the world, tell your truths. To make something beautiful or useful. Or just make people happy with your work, entertaining them or evoking an emotional response.

But without a deadline, a sense of urgency, it’s easy to put off the things we really want to do. To convince ourselves we’ll start tomorrow, next month, next year. Or some vague point in the future when we’ll magically have more time, more space, more inspiration.

Whatever motivates you, it’s worth considering what you might achieve if you got up every day, and dived right into life and work as if you had a plane to catch. Or a cheque.

If you got straight to your work without hesitation, without debate, without procrastination, what could you create?
This is How I Made Over 5k My First Month on Medium
By: Hogan Torah
Tags: Humor, Writing, Music, Gag, Satire

Vape pens filled with DMT. Those are money makers. Writing? Ha. This is a hobby. My first month on Medium I wrote a few stories while waiting for clients in Safeway parking lots.

Thirty years ago maybe you could have made a few bucks on writing. Nobody wants to pay attention for longer than three minutes anymore.

Here’s how to make money online. Grease the floors and get the camera ready for grandma. Dub in some 80’s song and jog the video back and forth.

Then Tik-Tok your naan popping a hip.

Then, racks of cash.

Then, mad bitches.

Wii!
In 2021, Don’t Deprive Yourself
By: Dana G Smith
Tags: Health, Happiness, Body, Life, Science

In the Before Times, I wrote a column called Optimize Me, about the most bizarre things people did to their bodies in the name of health. Occasionally, these “wellness hacks” were scientifically backed, but more often they were misguided and even concerning at times. Some of them were efficiency tricks to get more time out of the day — using electric shocks to fast-track a workout or accelerated listening settings to consume more content. Others involved injecting substances into people’s bloodstreams and, ahem, backdoors.

Looking back on these articles now, after a year of hardship and suffering, some of these optimization trends, particularly the ones focused on deprivation, seem downright perverse.

Why would you ever intentionally deny yourself of the fleeting moments of joy life offers you? (And by the way, that’s not how dopamine works.)

Why would you commit to an all-meat diet and starve yourself of fruit and vegetables, the source of so many essential vitamins and minerals needed to maintain optimal immune health?

And what could possibly inspire anyone to stop drinking water, a literal life source?

Life is hard enough as it is. In 2021, go easy on yourself and indulge a little bit.