fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
A Cry From the Soul
By: Darshak Rana
Tags: Spirituality, Faith, Poetry, Weekly Prompts, Spiritual Secrets

I embark on a new day with faith,

But I know not what lies in wait.

To be at peace, in the morning I pray,

To control my mind and win on my way.

You’ve got to enlighten the travel that I make,

And guide me along the untrodden path I take.

Bestow me with some divinity, to descry your want,

For when should I request and when should I command.

I fail to see with my tiny two eyes,

And I cannot decide where the danger lies.

So please be kind and remain my guide,

when people praise or choose to deride.

Teach me to love and know you more,

So that I can strengthen my trust from its very core.

I pledge to sing the songs of praise,

And you shall rule over my heart always.
Is the GoPro Karma drone fixed?
By: Gary Mortimer
Tags: Drones, Photography, GoPro, Dji, Gopro Karma

A strong rumour is beginning to circulate from several sources, including a large camera and tech vendor, that GoPro’s Karma drone is fixed.

I must admit that it would be a surprise to me. It would point to a software issue, one that has been solved by folks outside of the original project.

What we do know for certain now is that the autopilot used was a Pixhawk derivative. The numbers were obscured from the main processors, but other chip features allowed them to be identified. Apparently it was running the DroneCode / PX4 flight stack. That’s the same code as used in Lily, Air Dog and Hexo.

The, “I dare not mention the name”, camera vendor says that they are just waiting for the green light to resume sales. I assume with just firmware updated versions.

Is it all too late for Karma, though? DJI has managed to get another prosumer machine out the door, the Phantom 4 Professional. The camera on the P4P exceeds the capabilities of the new GoPro and the P4P also has all the detect sense and avoid smarts that Karma lacks.

Yes, Karma is cheaper, but DJI has that covered, albeit with delivery issues, in the Mavic.

Rumour control has it that 100 Mavics per day are making it into end users’ hands. So even at a production rate that is causing pre-order customers headaches, they have outstripped Karma sales. This is giving DJI a healthy lead in this Christmas consumer drone sales figures.

The GoPro Karma may well be fixed, but would it be commercially viable to try again?
Welcome to GoogleBank, Facebook Bank, Amazon Bank, and Apple Bank
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: Disruption, Fintech, Banking

How would you like to bank with Apple, Google, Amazon, or Facebook? This is the question Fujitsu has just asked a sample of some 7,000 people throughout Europe: around a fifth said they were up for it.

As the fintech environment garners an increasing number of experiences that tend to take place outside banking or insurance, and while the big tech companies push into financial products through payment initiatives, the idea seems to be gaining traction with more and more people.

What is a bank anyway? If most of the business these days is mainly about moving bits around data bases, it’s pretty clear that the big tech companies are going to have more expertise than banks that don’t see technology as part of their business and tend to subcontract it out to the big consultancies or to simply continue doing thing like they did in the 1950s.

Most banks are way behind the tech companies when it comes to dealing with clients, when it comes to their internet systems, and most definitely when it comes to analytics, as well as the assets they hold.

Banks are generally still relatively small setups, less developed, and rooted in obsolete working practices. This is reflected in key areas such as risk analysis, which lags behind the big tech companies’ use of machine learning, which in the case of outfits like Google are considered the basis for future growth.

Until now, the tech sector has thought that it wasn’t necessary to own a bank to disrupt the financial sector. But the signs are that some tech companies are increasingly taking on the role of banks. We can easily imagine a future in which these well-capitalized outfits realize that a banking license isn’t such a big deal when it comes to building a sustainable competitive advantage and that they could integrate these services in the future if people accept the idea.

The pundits have been asking for some time which sector Apple will disrupt next. The company would have no problem finding the money to meet the legal requirements, and with its history of cross selling, its network of shops and its client base, it would have few problems in becoming a powerful and profitable bank. What’s more, the smartphone and companies like Venmo, Square, PayPal, Snapcash and many others, have pretty much put paid to the cheque book and the credit card. What’s more, their target audience is the millennial generation born between 1981 and 1997, is already the majority, and have no problems in accepting disruption to the financial sector.

Let’s be honest: the traditional banks do not enjoy sufficient loyalty from their customers that they could stand up to competition from new entrants from the technology sector.

Could internet end up replacing the traditional banks? For the moment, the most proactive are buying startups and companies with interesting business models, or those who are able to fit into their traditional ways of doing things, but… will such initiatives be enough to hold onto their places in an industry in which major disruption is coming?
Designing for Television, Part 1
By: Molly Lafferty
Tags: Product Design, Design, TV, UX, UI Design

Welcome to the new Golden Age of television. Not only is there more great television being produced than ever before, but we also have more choice in how we watch our favorite shows. And while we can access these shows anywhere and anytime through our computers, phones, and tablets, televisions themselves still maintain a special place in the home of many.

But we’re no longer limited to a remote and cable box to control our TVs; we’re using Smart TVs, or streaming from set-top boxes like Roku and Apple TV, or using video game consoles like Xbox and Playstation. And each of these devices allows a user interface that’s much more powerful than your old-fashioned on-screen guide.

When compared to computers and even mobile phones, designing UIs for TV is still a relatively new area. It’s also a fundamentally different platform. Design for TV requires a unique set of considerations, including screen size and distance, technical constraints, and context of use.

This will be the first part of a series that digs into how to start thinking about interfaces for TV. We’ll also be focusing specifically on the gamepad as an input device, and the basics of using the Gamepad API. In Part 2, we’ll show how you can prototype your TV UIs & controllers together.

The Display

How televisions are different from computers, phones and tablets

The first TVs on the market were made of cathode ray tubes (CRT), a clunky technology that produced inconsistent images across TV sets. This issue was particularly bad along the edges of the screen, so to compensate, CRT TVs were subject to overscan. With overscan, the image itself is enlarged slightly so the edges are outside the bounds of the viewing area.
by Martino Pietropoli
By: Martino Pietropoli
Tags: Drawing, Abstract, Watercolor, Friday, Art

First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.

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The Unusual Story Behind the World’s Longest Table Tennis Point
By: Daniel Ganninger
Tags: People, Sports, Humor, History, World

In 1936, during a match at the World Table Tennis Championships in Prague, Alex Ehrlich of Poland and Paneth Farcas of Romania had an incredible rally that lasted 2 hours and 12 minutes, and that was just on the opening point.

Ehrlich was known as the King of the Chiselers, and chiselers in table tennis (or ping-pong if you like) are players that only play defense and just wait for their opponent to break. This was what Ehrlich wanted to do to Farcas. He wanted to wear him down from the beginning of the match. But things weren’t going to be that easy.

After 70 minutes of play, and still not a single point having been won by either man, Ehrlich had to switch his paddle (also known as a bat) to his left hand. Farcas wasn’t faring much better, but after 85 minutes, it was the umpire that was the most in trouble. He had to be replaced because his neck had seized up.

Things took an even more bizarre turn when Ehrlich had a chessboard placed next to the table. He began to tell the captain of the Polish team what move he wanted to make with the chess pieces. It was Farcas who finally succumbed to the grueling first point as his arm started to lock up. After an estimated 12,000 hits between both players, Ehrlich came away with the first point.

The incredibly long point led the International Table Tennis Federation to change the rules. They decided the longest time a single game could be played was 20 minutes. Whoever was ahead when the time elapsed would win the game. This rule stood until 1961 when the time was changed to 15 minutes. It got changed again when the scoring went from 21 for the win to 11 in 2001 to increase the excitement of each game. The time limit per game was then moved down to 10 minutes. All of these changes started because of that one, long infamous point back in 1936.

Sources: The Guardian, All About Table Tennis

Want to delve into more facts? Try The Wonderful World of Completely Random Facts series, here on Medium.
Addiction VS Recovery
By: Laura Annabelle
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Addiction, Recovery, Pyschology

Addiction VS Recovery

The difference

Whether you have an addiction, mental illlness or anything else that’s traumatic or serious: mentally, emotionally, physically; it should be taken seriously and take time in recovery.

Don’t expect recovery nor the person in recovery to be perfect. Don’t expect or assume they will do perfectly in recovery and not make a single mistake or break down.

Recovery isn’t perfect just like humans. Recovery never will be. Recovery will have it’s ups and downs, slip ups and relapses. Recovery does not take a day off. So don’t expect anything, or anyone to be perfect in any perfect way. Cuz that’s not our reality anymore.

You may think reality is all that you think it is and you think and believe that you are following along with reality as it’s changing. But your logically not in any logical way. There’s not actual real logic to back up that statement. No proof, no real solution or evidence that it is logically able to be labelled as true.
I was too much and not enough
By: American Family Insurance
Tags: Biracial, Race, Diversity And Inclusion, Inclusión, Black And White

By Danny Henderson, American Family Insurance Enterprise Claims Auto Physical Damage Assistant Vice President

I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t — at 9 years old.

It was the 1980s in St. Louis, and despite moving several times, my sisters and I rarely saw other biracial kids.

I was at new schools, trying to connect with the Black kids, but I wasn’t Black enough. Trying to connect with the white kids, but I was too Black.

They often called me a mutt. They told me I was a half-breed. My mom is white, and my dad is African American.

The Black kids called me names targeted at my white side. And, the white kids called me names targeted at my Black side. I was too much, but not enough — at 9 years old.

I didn’t want to go to school because I didn’t know who I’d have to fight each day. I didn’t want to get made fun of. I didn’t want to sit alone at the lunch table. I didn’t want to be excluded. It was a terrible feeling.

Black and white

It even got to the point where I started denying I was biracial. It wasn’t anything against my white half or Black half. I just start identifying as Black because I was tired of getting beat up from both sides. It was just easier to get beat up from one direction because then I knew which way to look.

I started noticing other kids who were different in their own way. I started connecting with them because I never wanted someone to feel the way that I was feeling.

I tried being inclusive with them and protecting them and building some type of a network — at 9 years old.

Top of mind

Although I was able to navigate that as a child, as an adult I think about inclusion a lot.

When I started my professional career in 1998, it was AmFam minority internship program. As I worked through the different offices, inclusion was always at the top of my mind.

I remembered those days of being excluded. I couldn’t be my best self.

So, the impact of not having an inclusive environment — whether it’s racial, ethnic, gender, LGBTQA — is something I know very well from childhood. Which is why I try very hard to be as inclusive as possible in my life today.

But exclusion still happens today. A lot of us have experienced it. We see it, it’s not hard to miss. If we are to be our best selves, we must be intentional about inclusion.

I have biases. Most people have biases. It’s often easier to be exclusive. It’s harder to be inclusive because it takes time to get to know people. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but it’s the right thing to do.

Diversity is what makes us different. Inclusion is honoring those differences.

We deserve it, so do our customers.
On Pause
By: Vince Ferraro
Tags: Haiku Hub, Cat, Poetry, Poem, Haiku

post-punk father of two hybrid boys & husband to an amazingly patient wife. sometimes writes about life and parenting at dadnoir.com & twitter.com/dreamanxiety

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Empowered and Impactful Product Developments Squads
By: Maayan Galperin
Tags: Development, Productivity, Product Management, Empowerment, Innovation

In this article, I share my insights as a product manager on an impact-driven product development squad.

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash

As a product manager, I have been working with a scrum development team for two years. I have noticed that in a development team that works on one product, each developer does his tasks, and there is a dependency between team members. For example, the backend developer has finished his work, and now he is waiting for the frontend developer to end as well or vice versa. I have also noticed that there is often more than one product manager in the same domain in large systems.

It made me wonder, how can we work more efficiently and quickly? I was exposed to the Spotify squad model, and then I got my answer.

I realized that working in a Squad product development team allows any product manager to be responsible and lead the team to address the company’s business goal. Besides, this structure makes it possible to promote several business goals at the same time while reducing friction and splitting of development resources.

In this article, I want to share my insights as a product manager within an impact-driven product development squad. I was responsible for certain components as part of the extensive system. Along with me on the team were the frontend developer, backend developer, QA, and a product designer.

Autonomous and empowered team

Each team is responsible for producing an impact on a business goal and/or a customer’s needs. The product manager is responsible for defining the company’s business goal, explaining what the roadmap and KPI / OKR are, and not describing the features that need to be developed. Our entire team, made up of different disciplines, think together about designing the best solution. It is an empowered team where all team members are involved in the thought process.

Moving the needle

As a product manager, my role is to direct and guide the team to invest the efforts and focus on the squad’s goal. My responsibility as a product manager is to define the top-line metrics and the business KPI, and together with the team to design the most tailored solution for this goal. The effort can be a direct solution characterization to a top-line metric. Another way to achieve this is to improve the KPI of the supporting metric, i.e., KPI that supports the primary KPI. A third way is to focus on improving metrics that enhance the supporting metric. In conclusion, at any given moment, make sure the team is focused on only one goal.

Deliver capabilities in agile iterations

Developing and releasing capabilities quickly over time, which assembles the entire system, creates a significant trust with the customers and the company’s internal teams. Our goal as a squad is to release the features and get a signal as quickly as possible. These signals prove or deny the hypothesis, whether what we have developed is correct or whether we need to change it. In summary, deliver quickly, validate quickly, and fix quickly.
An Unfortunate Incident in the Cafe
Tags: Cafe, Flash Fiction, Toes, Fiction, Short Story

An Unfortunate Incident in the Cafe

A flash fiction

Photo by Victor He on Unsplash

If he had to give a reason, he might have said it was because the man took his shoes off. But, of course, Michael did not need a reason.

Previously, Michael had entered the cafe on S. street. It was packed with local students. Nobody noticed him even though he was older than most and dressed too well in this neighborhood.

The young girl behind the counter did not even notice when he dropped his change. He sat down with his coffee and opened his book, The Master and Margarita.

Don’t you know that manuscripts don’t burn?

He glanced at the man who was sitting diagonally across him. He seemed out of place. He was neither young nor old. He was wearing a pair of dirty trousers. His hair was visibly unclean. He was tapping his foot rapidly while staring at the newspaper.

A short twenty minutes passed. The man’s eyes were still focusing on the newspaper while his right foot continued to tap monotonously. Michael noticed that the paper was yesterday’s.

Everything about him was old and unclean.

As Michael was about to go back to his book, the man removed his shoes. Without socks, the man’s toes moved individually. It was grotesque. A giant squid, tentacles wiggling. Michael started to count his toes. One, two, three, four.

Michael stood up, holding a knife in his pocket. He did not need a reason.
The Best of Health Is Yet to Come
By: Singularity University
Tags: Health, Healthcare, Health Technology, Global Grand Challenges, Digital Health

Taking care of your health is a lifelong endeavor. Even if you make all the right choices and are lucky enough to have good genes, your physical and mental health can still become compromised by insufficient access to cost effective prevention, early diagnosis, or personalized therapy.

“1 billion people lack access to healthcare services.” — United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund

Technologies and platforms are rapidly entering healthcare to address the health challenges currently faced by billions of people. These 5 exponential solutions from the SU Community are a few examples of entrepreneurs creating medical breakthroughs and helping those that need it most.

3D Printing

3D4MD makes affordable, 3D-printable medical supplies. They are building an open source digital library where people can select and download crowd-sourced files to make quality-tested, lower cost, and even personalized life-changing resources on demand, locally.

Metamason is building a healthcare-focused software platform called Scan·Fit·Print that uses 3D scans of one’s body to create individually customized, 3D-printed products, starting with custom ergonomic respiratory devices (CPAP masks) for the treatment of sleep apnea.

Smartphone Apps

CaptureProof is an intelligent medical camera that adds visual narrative to healthcare by empowering providers and patients with a HIPAA-secured photo and video tracking application. With their advanced computer vision, patient progress can be tracked with side-by-side media.

Emotional Data & AI

Beyond Verbal developed an API that decodes a patient’s voice into their underlying emotions in real-time to detect and monitor serious health conditions. These emotion analytics enable voice-powered devices, apps, and solutions to interact with patients on an emotional level.

X2AI creates autonomous intelligent assistants (AIAs). Tess, X2AI’s flagship AIA, is a psychological AI that administers highly personalized psychotherapy, psycho-education, and health-related reminders, on demand, when and where the mental health professional isn’t.
How to Identify a Suspicious Crypto “Exchange”
By: Nate Simantov
Tags: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Business, Cryptocurrency, Industry Insights

In a document filed with the United States Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), the cryptocurrency investment house Bitwise claimed that 95% of all trades on Bitcoin exchanges are not real. This was part of a presentation they made to the SEC in order to launch their Bitcoin futures products.

The presentation makes for very interesting reading but ultimately Bitwise argue that there are legitimate exchanges and illegitimate exchanges. What is more, some of the purported largest exchanges (on the basis of daily traded volume) are in the illegitimate bucket. There are three ‘tells’ that Bitwise examines:

First

If you were to look at trading volume from a normal exchange, you see random sequences of trade that are sometimes pushing prices up and sometimes pushing prices down. But in suspicious exchanges, you see a regular pattern: one trade up and one trade down.

Second

In normal exchanges, that random sequences of trade goes on throughout the day. On suspicious exchanges, there may many times of the day with no trades at all.

Third

in normal exchanges, trade volume fluctuates over the course of the day. On suspicious exchanges, it is consistent throughout the day.

Of course, each of these things would be easy to cover up and you could program trading bots to do so. For this reason, Bitwise argues you have to delve deeper.

For instance, normal exchanges have a large volume of very small trades and then taper off as you get to larger ones. Suspicious exchanges tend to have a more uniform distribution of large and medium trades and often no small ones at all.

Another pattern that arises is that normal exchanges have occasional very big spikes in volume. This doesn’t appear in suspicious exchanges whose volume, as already noted, is more regular.

Finally, the spread on normal exchanges is very small. Interestingly, in Bitcoin it is smaller than in trading for mainstream financial instruments. On suspicious exchanges, the spreads are large suggesting that markets are not operating as efficiently (if they are operating at all).

This is certainly of value to traders and also token issuers when thinking about which exchanges to trust and list on. But the problem is that most of these patterns are ones that are, at some extent, capable of being mimicked. There are limits though. To have wash trades you need fiat currency (which is why spikes may be hard to replicate). Looking for patterns that require real money to replicate is likely to be a more robust set of indicators of where it is safe to trade.

Exchanges are a critical part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Regardless if the Bitwise claims are true, an independent audit system is necessary to verify exchange-trading data.

Stay vigilant!
LGBT+ Middle Grade Novels
By: Josh Simpson
Tags: Books, Queer Theory, Lgbt Youth, Writing, Fiction

As part of my research, I’ve come across a couple of lists, published by Book Riot, of LGBT+ Middle Grade novels. I added a few to the texts I’ll be studying, but I’m still on the lookout for others — particularly books with LGBT+ characters who are even further marginalised by, for example, race or nationality. If you know of any, I’d love to hear from you.
This Is Why Sex Education Is Your Problem
Tags: Feminism, Equality, Sex, Sex Education, Education

“Only 17 states mandate that students be taught sex ed in a medically accurate way, meaning that it’s based in scientific fact and not religious doctrine.” — Gigi Engle, Sexologist

The majority of sex education classes are not based on scientific evidence. Along with this calamity, sex education is almost never a pleasure-oriented conversation.

This is a big deal. When we do not teach youth about sex through the lens of pleasure, we perpetuate rape culture. A pleasure centered conversation about sex teaches people about sexual sovereignty and body autonomy. Essentially, you have the right to experience pleasure during sex and that it is perfectly healthy for someone to say “no” during sex. Furthermore, discussions about sex that are based in pleasure teach us how to discuss sex with other people in healthy ways. All of these sex-positive concepts interrupt rape culture.

Instead, our system focuses solely on how to prevent reproduction or disease, that is, if a school is willing to go beyond abstinence-only training.

Mine was not. I went to a Catholic High School. Sophomore year was a right of passage because we finally gained admittance into a “sexual health” seminar. This introduction to sex didn’t discuss health, it discussed religious beliefs about sex, virtue, gender, and marriage.

It made me resentful of religion because I wanted to learn about sex. I expected to learn about how to prevent pregnancy, STI’s, and discover if certain myths I’d inherited as a child were true.

Instead, I learned that sex before marriage somehow always led to disease. And later that year when a girl in our grade got pregnant, I also learned about our school's sexist expulsion policy. She was forced to leave once her belly started showing. He was allowed to remain in school as if nothing was happening.
I Love Proving People Wrong
By: Brian Kurian
Tags: Life Lessons, Inspiration, Self, Life, Short Story

Want to know what one of my biggest joys in life is? Proving people wrong. For most of my life, people have told me I couldn’t do something. In sports, in school, in the working world, you name it.

Lack Of Belief From Others Has Been A Common Theme In My Life

I didn’t look the part or act the part. I wasn’t the carbon copy of someone you thought of when you imagined a successful person.

I was always the smallest kid in the group. When it came to playing sports, I was told I was too small to play. The other kids would think I was weak. I’d usually feel embarrassed and inferior but would somehow get picked at the end.

Later on in life, when I was in Junior High, I was bullied relentlessly. Kids picked on me because I wasn’t strong enough to fight back. When you’re an easy target, bad things will happen to you — if you let them.

School bored me for the most part so my grades also ended up not being great. Consequently, my family told me I probably wouldn’t get a decent job when I graduated.

Time After Time I Proved People Wrong

I started lifting weights and taking better care of myself at the age of 15. I knew I’d never be the biggest guy in the game (I’m only 5'3) but I knew I could be one of the most athletic. My strength, speed, agility, and dedication to learning proper technique were all reasons why I was able to excel in Mixed Martial Arts during my early 20's.

I was still able to get into a decent college (after I went to Community College for two years and worked my ass off to get good grades). Even though the classes were much more difficult when I went to a four-year university, I was still able to graduate with a 3.25 GPA. Not bad for a kid who graduated high school with a measly 2.6 GPA.

For the past 15 years, I’ve been able to work at several companies small and large. These companies have also been in various industries/sectors. Along the way, I’ve been able to interact with amazing people. Countless experiences, mentors, ups, and downs. It’s been a hell of a ride.

This Has Been My Life

People tell me I can’t do something. Then I go out and prove to them I can. I don’t know exactly why I enjoy proving people wrong so much. But, I’ve made a career out of exceeding people’s low expectations of me.

Is it something in my DNA?

Am I a product of the environment I was raised in?

I don’t know. Maybe, I’m just sick of people disrespecting me and not believing in me.

At the same time, there is a sense of profound joy you feel when you accomplish things nobody thought you were capable of accomplishing.

It all starts and ends with your mentality. You can either let people set low expectations on you — and you can meet them. Or you can shatter those same expectations.
Not a love story
By: Sabine B.
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Blue Insights, Love, Poetry, Short Story

Photo by qi bin on Unsplash

A girl who fell in love;

a guy who used to be her other half;

a story which has never come to end

because it never got a start.

That day they found each other

was just the day it all would change for her —

she has been waiting for her “one” what felt like ages,

and she could not allow herself to wait a minute more.

And she succumbed to his most thoughtful eyes,

his yearning for the knowledge,

she found his bitterness

to be a mere sense of clarity and a clever mind;

she let him tell her,

how she should never act against his orders —

and she would find the reasons to believe

it was for her sake to comply.

It was a game for him,

and he would choose to take it slow

to tease her

so she could never lose a bit of interest in her part.

It was a life for her,

and every time she’d find him absent,

she’d feel uneasy

of how much it would break her heart.

She stretched her arms to clutch him

in her endless stream of feelings —

he’d turn away and scold her

as if she was a little child.

She would come back to him

to share her deepest fears,

but she would see him leave

without having said goodbye.

Her deepest fear was, in fact, himself —

and losing him for good next second;

her deepest fear was seeing him

slam their bedroom door for one last time.

And since he himself once noted,

how she was such a weakling,

she has decided —

she couldn’t deal with this fear come alive.

She packed her things,

she left his odd and rare presents

and shut the door

without having said goodbye…

to someone who once meant the world to her,

who was the one she desperately needed —

but who had never found the courage to return her love…

Sabine B. 2019
27/03/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere
Tags: ICO, Bitcoin, Twitter, Regulation, Cryptocurrency

1. Kakao Confirms Blockchain Subsidiary, But No ICO

We previously reported on internet giant Kakao Corp.’s plans to launch a blockchain subsidiary, called Ground X. It was also noted that two weeks from the release of the news, more details would be released at a press conference. It has now been confirmed by the company that a blockchain subsidiary has been established. A blockchain-based platform for application developers is currently under development, with the goal of completion by the end of the year. However, the same cannot be said about an ICO. In fact, rumours about a possible launch were debunked on the same day. Kakao Corp. hopes that the move will help the company with its expansion in Asia.

2. 6000 Stores In South Korea To Accept Crypto As Payment By June

Six thousand stores in South Korea will be accepting crypto payments by June. This is due to a partnership between crypto exchange Bithumb and local mobile payment provider Pay’s. The plan is to reach 6000 outlets by June and then expand to 8000 by the end of the year. 200 franchise brands are involved in the project. This comes following previous partnerships of Bithumb with the country’s largest hotel booking provider Yeogi Eottae, and the e-commerce platform WeMakePrice.

3. Twitter Bans Crypto Ads Days After CEO Calls Bitcoin The Currency Of The Future

A week ago we reported that the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, said in an interview that he believed Bitcoin would become the main currency in 10 years, even bigger than the US Dollar. However, Twitter has now confirmed the news that it will ban ads related to crypto. The ban was implemented from today, March 27, and covers Initial Coin Offerings, along with token sales. The news comes after Dorsey announced he would deal with online scams and bots on the Twitter platform, but restricted and/or suspended the wrong accounts instead.

4. Cboe Advocates For a Bitcoin Exchange-Traded-Fund (ETF)

Cboe Global Markets Exchange Operator has penned a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) advising it not to block the development of a Bitcoin exchange-traded-fund (ETF). The letter argued that they are similar to other types of ETFs. Furthermore, Cboe President Chris Concannon stated that the current regulatory frameworks can be applied in this situation as well. The document was written following a letter by the SEC, which dates back to January 2018. The document covered the risks of manipulation, as well as concerns over the liquidity of the crypto markets. However, Cboe believes that ETFs would actually be a helpful tool, as investors would be exposed to cryptocurrencies in a clear and approachable way.

This news roundup was brought to you by BlockEx.
Home Warm with Fire
By: Joseph Brown
Tags: Haiku, Winter, Poetry, Isolation, Life

A Chain of Haiku Dedicated to Winter

Photo by Ian Keefe on Unsplash

Cold winter is dark,

A frozen desolation,

With rare signs of life.

…

Winter winds blast cold,

Unforgiving and harsh now,

But Home’s warm with fire.

…

Winter’s cold mystery,

How life lives in a wasteland?

The wolf breathes hot fire.

…

My home has a fire,

Keeps me warm here in winter,

But the wood is wet.

…

My fire needs wood,

I search out in the open,

The wolf was hungry.

…

Bleak winter poem,

But life’s just like that I guess,

Eat or get eaten.
The Girl in the Storm
By: Sylvia Clare Msc. Psychol
Tags: Weather, Photography, Self, Nature, Poetry

photo taken by subject of this poem- Sienna Anderson.

The Girl in the Storm

Standing astride the wind, high on the downs

looking across her island home

these wild places of sky, storm and sea,

she held firm, her one desire, to capture

the moment, the ending of the day.

As the wind howled around her legs

challenging territory rights of storm

over human, girl in the face of wind,

her mission to capture, the wild free tempest

a dancing partner for clouds, rain and hail.

Then she found the peaceful eye,

the sweet moment when all falls into place,

colours merge into cloud of wondrous form

the light dances its last moments of glory

as she clicks the shutters of her camera once more.
Measure of Time
By: Connie Song
Tags: Sleep, Time, Night, Sex, Poetry

The crack of thunder’s pouring rain,

disturbs slumber, as half the moon plunders time,

each tick another shovel closer to the grave.

Metronome and MetroCard, retrograde, calcified,

a taste of passion overrides

the currency of an embroidered night, raw and wild,

inhibitions banished for a little while.

Then, restful sleep, relaxed measure of time,

until eyes awaken,

hungry for the dawn.
How to Turn a Woman On According to Science
By: Kaye Smith Phd
Tags: Women, Feminism, Equality, Sex, Sex Education

What do women want?

Ah, the age-old question that kept Big Daddy Freud tossing and turning at night and has had more than a few regular dudes scratching their heads too.

It’s a big question.

And to make it even more complex, let’s narrow it down even further: What do women want sexually?

Kinsey fellow Debby Herbenick has attempted to answer just that question. She is the lead researcher on the most comprehensive study ever conducted on women’s preferences regarding genital touch. The sex research company OMGyes partnered with her and with Indiana University to develop a website that utilized the responses of 20,000 women. The information is presented online in easily digestible snippets and video format — and is arguably the most important sex-ed information on the web.

It’s a goldmine for tips on how to pleasure your favorite pussy that features videos of women demonstrating how they liked to be touched. It’s explicit, informative, innovative, and respectful. So far, there are two seasons. Season 1 looks at how women like to be touched with an emphasis on the external parts: the vulva and the clitoris; while, Season 2 looks at what women enjoy vaginally and anally.

Let’s just say, it blows porn moves, like jackhammer fucking, out of the water.

Watching both seasons, I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the idiotic maneuvers of porn and the reality of what women really want and need sexually. The gap between the two is stunning and, frankly, disturbing because porn is sex-ed for some people.

And this is really bad news for women.

No, this is not a rant against the evils of porn. But in the US, nobody is teaching kids about sex. Their parents are terrified of talking about it lest “talk” leads to “action” (FYI, this is already happening!). And schools are too hamstrung by political ideology to teach students anything but how to keep their pants on. So, where do we go to learn about this very important topic? Our friends, who don’t know any more than we do — and porn. That’s where.

Let’s face it, porn is a shitty teacher.

Mainstream porn shows little to no clitoral stimulation and a lot of acts that no woman in her right mind would want to do (just sayin’). Yes, I’m aware there are more female-friendly offerings out there, but they aren’t as popular.

Thanks to mainstream porn’s refusal to face the clitoral truth, we have a nation of iclitorate adults that can’t identify the organ on a diagram of the vulva.

That’s why I’m overjoyed to see a website like OMGyes. We desperately need info like this to counterbalance all our media bullshit. With that being said, I’m not affiliated with them in any way. I’m just grateful for their existence.

So, here are some of the tips and innovations to come out of the research so far.
Movimento #freebritney: è lei la reale Ashley O di Black Mirror?
Tags: Big Data, Report, Big Data Analytics, Trends

🚀🚀🚀 The all-in-one Digital Consumer Intelligence platform that doubles the efficiency of your marketing activities.

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Spacesuits From The Past
By: Kamna Kabir
Tags: Astronomy, Design, Space, History, Art

Spacesuits From The Past

Lunar spacesuit design from the 1940s

BIS Lunar Space Suit by H.E.Ross and R.A.Smith, 1949 and 1950

Source: The BIS

The earliest conceived spacesuit can be traced back to as early as 1949. The design principles and the ideas were documented in a paper presented by self-taught engineer H. E. Ross and artist R. A. Smith at the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) symposium.

The British Interplanetary Society (BIS), founded in 1933, is the world’s oldest organization devoted to the promotion of spaceflight in the pre-war Lunar Spaceship era.

Man hadn't landed on the moon yet and lunar missions were still a distant dream back then. To come up with a detailed specification document for the lunar spacesuits was a great challenge. Adding to the challenges were also the shoestring budget of BIS and the general lack of knowledge and awareness in the scientific community.

Also, as per British law, the BIS members were forbidden from performing any real live propellant based experiment.

The astronomy aficionados used to meet on a regular basis to discuss their passion; by 1949 Ross and Smith had published their findings on practicalities of a lunar spacesuit in the BIS hosted Symposium of Medical Problems Associated with Space-Flight.
missing what you can’t remember
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: USA, Society, Poetry, Covid Diaries, Poem

missing what you can’t remember

a poem

Photo by Falco Negenman on Unsplash

was this a

cafe or a

fusion restaurant?

i don’t

remember but

i remember i liked it

i miss it

was this graffiti

here before?

im so

confused this was

a place so familiar but

one thing changed then another

we get a free bagel with our drinks

and walk away

we couldn’t drink in the streets

i remember that

well, that can stay the same

but

was that always there?

wait, didn’t we drink outside?

so weird to think

we used to be so close together

in bars

in restaurants

some guy was

only two feet away from me

some guy

sat next to me in the subway

some guy was

standing close to me

and i told him to back up

can you believe

there was a time we didn’t

do that? can you believe

there was a time where

it was rude to tell someone

to back up?

i miss something i don’t even

really remember

i miss something i know

i’m not getting right

i miss something i’m not sure

i even had.

everyone around me

grieving memories

imagined realities

shadow people

who were really just

passing cares

the magic that

was really mom

going to the store

bars after rehab

closed offices and water coolers.

zoom calls

dead ends

no range.

did we really

wear bras and makeup every day?

see some things

i like better now but

is that a betrayal

of the past?

whose towel is this?

did we always

have those glasses?

where are the scissors?

everything changed so slowly, so insidiously —

why did we ever

go to the gym?

why didn’t we

picnic more? use the

free public spaces more?

why were we

crammed into activity holes

all the time?

kind of glad im not

going from cube to cube

when we could just be

outside.

the past seems romantic but

it is not that far away.

suddenly we are all

older, thrust into

a new world.

grieving something that we must

admit

was not so great

grieving something that

has actually

improved in some ways

grieving something that

we never really had.
Signs of Winter
By: V. Plut
Tags: Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Photography, Lit

Augurs

Close the door on September and welcome dark days when black clouds and crows call to us from the beyond of October
8 Cognitive Biases Facing Data Scientists
By: Chris I.
Tags: Software Development, Startup, Machine Learning, Data Science, Advice

1. Escalation of Commitment

Called the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” in economics.

Escalation of commitment is a human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continues the behavior instead of altering course.

-Wikipedia

It’s the tendency to continue investing resources into an existing project despite evidence that remaining costs outweigh benefits, justified by having already invested significant resources.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

After working on a new NLP pipeline for a month, I learned it would only perform marginally better than an existing model.

The new model would take another week to complete and there were other available projects requiring my skills. Despite this, I had a strong desire to finish the current project because I’d already invested so much time. This is “escalation of commitment”.

Photo by Miles Iwes from Pexels

Logically, if the marginal benefit of working on something else is higher, you should do that instead.

That said, this cognitive bias may be so well ingrained in an organization that you don’t have a choice but to finish a current project, if only for optics (aka. so you don’t look bad).
“Why Aesha Ash is Wandering Around Inner City Rochester in a Tutu”
By: Jess Brooks
Tags: Activism, Race, Black Girl Magic, Black Boy Joy, Ballet

“In 2011, she launched the Swan Dreams Project to inspire kids in the community she grew up in. The original idea was to post images of herself in a tutu all over Rochester. “I remember growing up and in the bodega you’d see images of girls in bikinis on motorbikes,” says Ash. “I wanted to replace those with photos that show women of color in a different light.”

She knew the power imagery can have: She still remembers what it felt like as a student at the School of American Ballet to see a photo of black ballet dancer Andrea Long. “That image was everything on days when I was feeling disenchanted. I’d see that picture of her, and know that the struggles I was going through, she went through them, too”
Beyond Christmas
By: Johannes Mudi
Tags: Beyond Christmas, Writing Prompts, Blue Insights, Christmas, Cultural Prompt

CULTURAL PROMPT- “WHAT DOES DECEMBER MEAN TO YOU?”

Beyond Christmas

A Poem

Photo by Rick Oldland on Unsplash

What a Covid Christmas



Masked separations in family ties



Here’s something more



Seeing the infant Christ rest in his crib



Born in a stable shut from the Inn



Like men amongst us



Without a source of shelter



Called to share the joy of



incarnation



But with hymns of hope with



a hoarse voice from the cold



In expectation of the Magi



Approaching with gifts in hands



To stoop from their abundance



And lift frail hands



Embolden smiles in lovely succour



With assurance wrapped in



never-fading gold incensed with purity



And a calming balm of spirited myrrh



They can’t wait for Santa



He’ll take too long or even get lost



They’ll need turkeys, cookies and Christmas dishes



Let happy hearts smile at life



Hoping for a merry Christmas, a happy one



To stay warm with a roof above



and a meal on board this Christmas and days beyond

Johannes Mudi
4 Ways to Get Motivation to Write When you feel demotivated
By: Mike Ortega
Tags: Writer, Blogging, Writing, Motivation, Writing Tips

1. Take Break

Photo by Joey Nicotra on Unsplash

When you are not feeling motivated, then why you are writing with force? You will complete the article, but it will stress you. We create the best work when we do it with no burden in mind.

So what to do? Just take a break, don’t write. I know it differs from writing everyday type, prolific writer advice. Taking break worth it. It rewires your nerves and makes to write on a blank page.

I have noticed many times taking a break has helped me to produce more writing work. It refreshes your intension to write again.

2. Write something but not over 200 words

Open your laptop, start typing. Write about anything. How you spent your day. Why the boss is not giving you vacation leaves. Start writing, It makes you realize; you have something to write. Why search for love in the city, if it is present at your home.

It looks foolish, but it is just like a little booster which ignites your will of writing.

3. Read Top writers’ work

When you read or listen about people you want to become like them, you get motivated. They are the main glucose-booster in your life.

3 years ago, I started $10,000 startup but failed at it, but I have no regrets. I got motivated by Steve jobs, Eon musk. You need someone in front of you to follow his path. Motivation comes behind it.

4. Start taking Actions

When I realize I should write, I open my Trello app, pickup idea from it and start writing. I don’t think more. Overthinking kills. Start putting words on the blank page. Do it after following the first 3 rules.

So, let us rewind our story

When you feel demotivated, you can

Take break Write something Read top writer’s work Start writing without thinking much

Read more work from me.