fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Bokeh 1.3.0 Released
Tags: Python, Open Source, Data Science, Bokeh, Data Visualization

Before getting to the release itself, a few project announcements:

First, the next release will be the last release to support Python 2. After that, starting with Bokeh 2.0, Python 3.5 will be the minimum supported Python version. We will publish a blog post soon outlining all expected Bokeh 2.0 changes.

Earlier this month, Bokeh passed 10k stars on GitHub and is about to pass 10k followers on Twitter. Thanks to everyone for your support and interest!

The Bokeh project has assumed direct control over the CDN that publishes BokehJS resources. This includes making a new base URL of cdn.bokeh.org the primary location going forward. All existing links to cdn.pydata.org will continue to function indefinitely, but users are encouraged to use the new URL starting immediately.

As a reminder, the Bokeh project has recently launched two new sites:

A new project front page at bokeh.org

An improved support forum at discourse.bokeh.org

Both these sites are great resources for new and old users, please use and share them often!

We have also created a Project Bokeh page on LinkedIn. Anyone who has contributed to Bokeh may now list Bokeh on their own profile. There is not much content there yet, but we hope to ramp things up in the coming months.

As part of all this increased emphasis on outreach, we have had a sharp new logotype produced:

Please feel free to use this anytime you are sharing or writing about Bokeh.

Finally, the July Fundraiser is still ongoing! Although we have just recently met our original goal of 1000 USD, every bit helps offset operational costs (e.g. to keep the CDN running), so please donate if you can, or help spread the word:

THANK YOU to everyone who donates to Bokeh! We will make a wrap-up blog post about the July fundraising experience in the near future.

Now, on to new features!
Starbucks Customer Segmentation Analysis with Python
By: Tamunotonye Harry
Tags: Customer Segmentation, Data Scientist, Data Science, Data Visualization, Exploratory Data Analysis

There has been lots of talk around using data for marketing and you have probably heard about the high level applications of data usage on Netflix like the story of Cambridge Analytica in The Great Hack or more recently, Social Dilemma. This project is not as high level as that but in a way helps marketing teams understand their users and plan marketing campaign. I took on this project to understand how one could use data to inform business decisions and it was a great learning process.

Do you know Starbucks?

Starbucks is an American multinational Corporation with various chains of coffeehouses and roastery reserves. Seattle, Washington is its headquarter. With over 28,000 locations with an army of employees, Starbucks’ mission is “To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

To do this, the company has to keep making sure it targets the right customers at the right time through their customer journey. It has a diverse customer base and understanding patterns of customer behavior is a crucial need for the business. The data for this was a gotten from a software simulation of what the real customer base of Starbucks looks like and I my goal was to group customers into different demographics and then understand which offer they responded to more (offer completion).

Offer type:

BOGO (Buy one get one)

Discount

Informational

BOGO and discount comes with rewards but the informational doesn’t come with any. It’s more like a normal brand campaign on products it sells. I wasn’t interested in the most viewed offer but number of completed offers since companies are looking at sales and if they do complete the offer, that might signals that customers might want to see more of those campaigns.

Preprocessing steps

Understanding the data: This involved taking a look at the data to understand what each parameter meant, looked at data types, did descriptive analysis and check if there was any data which needed cleaning.

Cleaning: This involved removing null values, changing the structure of the data, renaming values in row and column columns and finally merging the data.

Exploratory Analysis: To see if I was missing anything, I did a quick exploratory data analysis and found out everything was good to go.

Exploratory Data Analysis

After preparing and cleaning the data (the hard part, phew!) I generally noticed that 24% of customers were people aged between 50 to 59 which is higher than all customers aged between 18 to 39 year (22%). The second largest group were those aged between 60 to 69 which accounted for 20%. Does this mean that young people don’t drink much coffee?
Social Media — Professional Marketing Tool or Gimmick?
By: Kahli Bree Adams
Tags: Marketing, Business, Freelancing, Social Media, Small Business

Social media platforms offer the following advantages:

Networking

Establishing global networks with colleagues, peers, business partners from various industries and potential clients is a marketing strategy that has already existed long before the internet but also works here.

Developing an online reputation

Anything you write online can be found by other people unless you have restricted access. This is a very powerful tool with which you can pass on your knowledge, experience and trustworthiness to colleagues and potential customers. You can use it to build a reputation around the globe and position yourself as an expert in a particular topic or subject area. Used properly, you will sooner or later be perceived as the person to go to for a certain topic.

Exchange of information

Don’t underestimate the value of information such as interesting events, new regulations and job offers that you receive on message boards or in dialogue with fellow freelancers, for example, on Facebook. This alone may justify participating in the relevant social media platforms.

Job offers

Many clients looking for professional services don’t just use online job portals, but increasingly, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter as well.

Visibility & SEO

This is the actual core of digital marketing. Potential customers should find you before they find your competitors. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and means optimising your online presence in the form of your website or profile in such a way that search engines like Google list it in a higher rank on the results page so that it is displayed above those of your competitors. Search engines use complex algorithms to generate the order in which the results are shown. These are largely based on three aspects: keywords, traffic and activity.

Keywords

Use words and phrases that a potential customer would use to find your services on your profiles, in your blog, forum posts, tweets, etc. Many freelancers write things like “freelance translator” in their profile headlines or keywords. But nobody will search for that. You have so much more to offer, so specify what makes you different from your competitors, such as your language pairs, your expertise or additional professional background information. Remember that you want to be found, and a potential client could, for example, enter “professional medical translator Italian English with experience in nutritional science” into Google. Your objective must be to be listed on page one on Google for relevant searches.

Traffic

The more hits your site or your profile page has, the higher it is rated by Google.

Activity

Google recognises when a page has not been updated for longer periods of time and will automatically list it in a lower position in the search results. A website, a profile page or blog that is updated regularly will maintain its Google ranking.
Fewer Angels
Tags: Audible Sundays, Music, Poetry, Photography, Los Angeles

Audible Sundays is a freeform series inspired by one new music release a week. Each entry is written in synchronicity to the mood of the song and the photograph. Follow the playlist on Spotify:
Array.splice and Array.slice in JavaScript
By: Kunal Tandon
Tags: Angular, JavaScript, React, Programming, Arrays

Array.splice

Splice is used to modify the content of an array which includes removing elements, replacing existing elements, or even adding new elements to an array.

Using the splice function updates the original array.

Consider the following array:

const arr = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8];

Array.splice signature:

arr.splice(fromIndex, itemsToDelete, item1ToAdd, item2ToAdd, ...);

Removing the elements

To remove elements from an array, we write:

var deletedItems = arr.splice(3, 2);

This will delete one element, starting from index 3 and returns the deleted array. As a result, we get:

deletedItems // [3, 4]

arr // [0, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Adding new elements

To add new items to an array, we write:

const arr = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8];

var arr2 = arr.splice(2, 0, 100, 101);

At 2, this will add the numbers 100 and 101. The final values will be:

arr2 // [] , since we didn't deleted an element from an array

arr // [0, 1, 100, 101, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Modifying an existing element

We can cleverly modify an existing element in an array using splice so that we delete the item at an index and insert a new element in its place.

const arr = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8];

To replace 3 with 100, we write:

var arr2 = arr.splice(3, 1, 100);

// which means - at index 3, delete 1 element and insert 100

We get the following values for arr and arr2 after executing the above code snippet:
Digital Marketing | Is it Only Hype that Sells?
By: Beacon Social Media
Tags: Marketing, Business, Business Strategy, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

Following the lead

Originally published at www.beaconsocialmedia.com

In the marketing industry using emotion or hype to sell a product or service has very much become today’s trend. In fact, the use of this so called ‘enticing’ energy has become so deeply ingrained in society, that many of us do not even realise the hooking tactics businesses and marketeers are using to ‘draw us in’, and sadly, this is what marketeers are taught in their study and training.

This ‘hooking’ method of marketing for business is not unlike fishing. You bait the hook, with something that will appeal to the emotions of your desired catch, then sit back and wait for the haul to roll in. It is a method based purely on manipulation of people wants and desires.

Stop. At what point did we drop our standards in business and in life to allow such a game to go on, for go on it does and if we truly look around us, it is not only occurring in big industry, but it has now infiltrated all industries and all sectors of business marketing.

Today’s Marketing industry has lowered its standards to become a game that plays on people’s emotions, wants and desires.

Is it possible there is an alternative approach? One that is true and in fact honouring of the people it goes out to? Is it possible we have tainted the word marketing, which should simply be a term to describe ones sharing of their business as an offering to others around them?

These are big questions, however they are questions that can be answered simply.

The answer is yes. There is another approach, and yes, we can still market our businesses, but in a way that is not imposing, hooking, or manipulating of the people.

Yes, the word marketing has been tainted, and yet is it we, the industry and the people it targets who have allowed this to occur. Equally so, it is we who can turn this around.

It is true that emotional content is something people respond to. But does that give us permission to use manipulation tactics? This is a great question to consider.

On the other side of things, what of genuineness, honesty, integrity and the like. Do these things not appeal to each and every one of us? Could it be that perhaps they hold even more appeal then the tantalising energy of excitement or drama?

We say yes. It may not seem as exciting, but what it offers is something of unsurpassed and lasting value. And that is, true relationships with the people that we serve in our business and a pure joy in knowing we hold a level of integrity that we will not drop in any case. There is no reward greater than this.

You can read more about the author of this blog (pictured below) here
Lessons From Red Bull’s Marketing
By: Kenji Farré
Tags: Red Bull, Advertising, Business, Marketing, Strategy

Marketing With a Limited Budget

1. If you can’t afford to sponsor events, create your own

Like many young startups, Red Bull didn’t have the resources to advertise on TV events, radio shows, or billboard ads. Instead, they decided to create their own event: The Red Bull Flugtag. Roughly translated as flight day, the competition consists of “building homemade, human-powered flying machines” to jump off a three-story deck with water as the landing site.

Red Bull Fugtag in Lyon, France 2019. Image by Frank Olaya on Euronews

Given the absurdity of the event, large crowds began gathering to witness the spectacle, and word quickly spread about the Red Bull brand. Since its inception in 1991, the Red Bull Flugtag has attracted huge masses, with a record-breaking 220,000 thousand people attending in 2012.

2. Guerrilla marketing

In Red Bull’s early years, they placed empty cans in crowded public areas to create the impression that the brand was popular. Given the high pedestrian traffic, this was an ingenious way to get free advertising and gain notoriety. They could even target specific groups of people by leaving cans on college campuses, stadiums, or night clubs.

While this strategy was controversial and likely unauthorized, it was probably worth the gamble given the low-cost and high potential reward.
White Blood Cell Segmentation With Keras Using Unet
By: Zarif Azher
Tags: Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Segmentation, TensorFlow, Artificial Intelligence

Convolutional Neural Networks and Machine Learning/Deep Learning in general, has been implemented in a variety of fields. Medical imaging is one of the most intriguing ones, and so I decided to use AI to approach the problem of cell segmentation in microscopic images.

The What

Consider the image below — a microscope slide that contains a bunch of cells, including one white blood cell. If a person wanted to analyze the white blood cell, they would first have to figure out which one the white blood cell, actually is. You would have to do the same thing if you were to have a computer perform analysis on the white blood cell. The problem of separating parts of an image is called segmentation. There are a variety of ways to do this, but I performed semantic segmentation — assigning each pixel in the image to a class. In this case, the classes were white blood cell and not white blood cell. To gain a more thorough understanding of semantic segmentation is, I’d recommend checking out this great article.

The How

To perform semantic segmentation, I used a popular model called Unet, which was created for medical image segmentation like this but has since been used for many other types of images as well. You can read more about Unet here, but it basically uses a CNN to generate feature maps for images, and then uses Upsampling layers to output a final image, with the same size as the input image.

Unet architecture

In my Unet, Inception was used as the ‘backbone’. Here is a look at the code for the model.

I decided to use this dataset which includes the images as well as masks (which I made binary), and resized images to 128x128, to work with the network. After training for 15 epochs, I was able to achieve an impressive 98% accuracy.

Below is an image that I tested the model on, and the image after applying a binary mask which the model generated.

As you can see, it worked pretty well! For a demo, complete code, and more information, please check out the project on Github.

Conclusion

Although the task here can be considered simple, it can actually be very helpful to medical professionals around the world, especially in third-world countries, where they may need a bit more help. It can also aid different AI’s, because it is a lot easier for analysis programs to work with a segmented image, where the main subject is clearly presented. The model can be further improved by utilizing the other features in the dataset. Although I used binary masks and only had 2 classes, the dataset actually offers masks that include the 3 classes — background, cytoplasm, and nucleus. Overall, I think it’s clear that segmentation is just another great example of how AI can be applied to real life to truly help people. Thanks for reading, and keep creating!

Look at the project on Github at this link: https://github.com/zarif101/blood_cell_segmentation_unet
Seattle Airbnb Listings — an analytical picture
By: Sukanto Mukherjee
Tags: Python, Airbnb, Pandas, Data Visualization

Apartment Listings

Apartments offer maximum flexibility to travellers who want to an experience as close to home as possible when they stay for work or pleasure in a big city, for extended periods usually. The option to cook one’s own meals is one of the biggest advantages in this regard. Houses offer a more space when it comes to this. So I decided to look specifically at apartment and house listings.

Apart from missing values and dropping/imputing them, the prices also had to be converted to integer values from strings. Yes, one listing also had 0 bedrooms in the value field.

For at least four or more guests, listings with at least two bedrooms would work. After a little cleaning up and taking into account listings that need a minimum of two nights’ stay and have at least two or more reviews per month, most apartments appear to have either two or three bedrooms, hence I treated them as categorical variables. And these listings are within the USD 150–160 per night range.

Apartment listings have major clusters in Queen Anne and Other neighbourhoods

The full map of apartment listings can be viewed here.

A little reminder is also necessary that more reviews per month can also mean negative reviews, but that didnt seem to be the case in this subset, going by the individual numerical reviews scores at least.

For apartment listings which accommodate four or more guests and have at least two or more bedrooms (but without the monthly review subsetting), around 41% listings are Downtown, while 19% are in Other neighbourhoods and around 13% are in Capitol Hill. Among these Downtown listings, majority of the listings are in the USD 200–450 range, while those for Other neighbourhoods are within USD 250-odd.

After narrowing it down to two or more reviews per month, the share of Other neighbourhoods goes up to around 30%, while Downtown is now second at around 28%. So, lower prices do tend to attract more guests, if monthly reviews is to be considered a parameter. And listings within the USD 250 upper bound also have better annual availability.

It is also worth considering that the number of bedrooms at this stage goes up again for apartments in some areas when the data is grouped by neighbourhoods, with some listings in Other neighbourhoods having as many as six bedrooms available.

With regards to annual availability, the Other neighbourhoods do well again.

As for price distribution of apartment listings with these specifications, the median is at USD 149.5
Will You Marry Me
Tags: Songs, Classic Music, Music, Blue Insights, Love

Blast From The Musical Past

Will You Marry Me

-A Song By Paula Abdul

Paula Abdul

Just girl to boy, I’d like to share this thought with you, Our love’s a joy, Two one’s have made inseparable two, Last night my heart spoke to me, And it said you’ve found that lover-friend, So, now I’ve finally got the courage just to ask you baby, ooh…..

Will you marry me boy….

A song still asking that question, a bold question, will you marry me? I’m still loving it. Timeless classic!

Check it out and have fun!
Hard to Live in Paradise.
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Fiction, Short Story, Travel, Beach, Society

Hard to Live in Paradise.

They see beaches and we see struggle.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

Let’s swim naked one more time.

Maybe it’s my fault. When other people drink, they want to fuck. When I drink, I want to commit arson and slap people. You’re the same way. We met in a nightmare inside a dream.

People see the beach and the waves. We see the edge. A life where it’s so easy to fall into drugs, debt. People see lovely photos on Instagram — and we are in the struggle.

There are so many gray areas. Gray places. Places where the soul withers and dies. Nothing is dangerous. People call customer service when they experience a personal tragedy. They want to forbid bad things. Anything that is inconvenient isn’t real. The disease isn’t real.

We bleed. We get bitten by spiders. We watch the injuries heal. We sell baked goods so we can get our teeth fixed. We don’t have insurance and we also don’t have the bullshit illusion that insurance means anything.

We are alive. That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway. We glisten in the sun. It’s shallow, maybe, but everything is shallow. You can buy into your own bullshit or buy into someone else’s. You can sell nude photos online, or you can sell your time in a warehouse and pretend the latter is more noble.

You know who wants you to believe that? The people who want you to work in the warehouse.

Morally, there is no difference between the two.

But no one knows how hard it is to live in paradise. They see glitter and sunsets and assume we must be doing something wrong. They don’t see how often we slept in sand…but they also don’t see how much we don’t mind.

We have each other. Laughing under the stars, enjoying one more drink and wondering how we’ll get the money for the next one.
5 Important Learning Strategies for Programmers
By: Dhananjay Trivedi
Tags: Software Development, Learning, Productivity, Programming, Inspiration

2. Take Breaks

Wait, what? That sounds unproductive! Actually, quite the opposite.

We all (me at the front) set aggressive deadlines for finishing up a course module in one day just to check it off our plan and progress ahead.

What we end up doing is just cramming in a lot of information in a lot less time. This is a big no!

The problem here is the same as it is with binge-watching. We barely remember what happened in all the episodes. We just remember the start and the end of the series.

Instead, if we watch only one episode per day, every day as we sit to watch the next episode, we exercise our brain trying to remember what has happened until now in the series. This way, we tend to remember those episodes for a longer period of time.

This ever happened to you?

When you are trying to fix a bug for hours and you are just tired, give up and just go to sleep. The next day when you wake up, you fix that bug within minutes!

It’s because you gave that much-needed break to your brain and regained your productivity.

Key take-away: Avoid cramming, take breaks as you learn so that your brain is able to process and remember all the important information.
The Frontline Workers Are Our Pandemic Soldiers
By: Kristy Lynn
Tags: Politics, Covid 19, Society, Pandemic, Perspective

The Frontline Workers Are Our Pandemic Soldiers

Their battle is different, but they deserve respect.

Photo by CDC from Pexels

Today marked yet another day where Americans woke up to a morning of record-breaking COVID-19 cases. Again, I saw yet another article about nurses pleading with the U.S. public to believe in the severity of the virus.

It got me thinking: would we do this same thing to soldiers fighting a war? I know there have been others to draw this parallel, but it’s powerful enough to bring it up again.

Don’t think too deeply about this, but imagine for a moment that what was happening now was not invisible. Imagine it was a war, in our country, with military personnel who were advising us to stay inside to stay safe. Imagine they gave us all simple instructions that would likely keep us protected from the enemy: wear a mask, don’t gather in groups, and stay inside as much as possible. By following these orders, we could let them do their job outside: defeat the enemy.

Do you think we would listen to them?

Well, I do! And I think you would too.

So why is this pandemic much different? Because the virus cannot be seen? Because it does not brandish weapons with bullets? Because it is quiet and not earth-shattering in its explosiveness? Because it has no voice with which to directly threaten us?

None of that makes it any less real, or any less dangerous.

Not believing in the pandemic is one thing. Not listening to the people who deal with it daily, and therefore don’t have a choice whether or not to believe in it, is a whole other thing. A whole other ignorant thing.

Continuing with the military example, you wouldn’t discredit what a soldier coming home from battle said was happening — would you? Even if you didn’t agree with the war; if you heard someone with direct experience speak about it you would respect and believe in what they were saying, right?

I would! And look, I am a person who wishes wars and violence would cease to exist. But I would still believe our military members if they came home from a battle and discussed what was happening. I still support our military members for their tremendous work and service. And I look to them with deep gratitude. After all, let’s get real, I could never do what they do!

So, why is it that we cannot apply this same sentiment — en masse — to the frontline health workers?

They are fighting for our safety, just as the military does.

They are sacrificing time spent with their families, just as the military does. They are jeopardizing their own health and wellbeing for the good of other people — people like me and you! Just as the military does.

While I know our country’s history of supporting military veterans' reintegration is far from perfect (to say the very least), I think most people give a lot of respect and recognition to them. Far more than it seems they are providing the frontline nurses and doctors who fight this pandemic around the clock.
Meetup Computer Vision Paris
By: Jean-Régis De Vauplane
Tags: Meetup Paris, Meetup, Meetup Computer Vision, Computer Vision

Sicara's blog

We build tailor-made AI and Big Data solutions for amazing…
You Need This Scheduling AI. Do you have an assistant? Perhaps you…
By: Robert Merrill
Tags: Future Of Work, Calendar, AI, Scheduling, Bots

Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash

Do you have an assistant? Perhaps you should.

In the world of bots and messengers and AI, something like scheduling and calendaring is actually something you should consider. What if 20–50 minutes a week were given back to you by a scheduling bot always helping you keep your calendar straight?

I have been watching x.ai for years now and have been a paying subscriber. It’s a valuable tool for any digital worker, leader, or executive.

You should sign up, now that the free service has expanded — don’t get left behind when the revolution comes (psst. its already here)

I do not work for or make any money from x.ai, I just like their service and know that more people who use it makes my service better.
Vue 3 vs React — Learn-by-Doing. React published a tutorial which…
By: Prasad Jayakumar
Tags: JavaScript, Vue, Beginner, React

Photo by The Nigmatic on Unsplash

React published a tutorial which creates “Tic-Tac-Toe” game for the purpose of learning by doing. I liked the way Dan Abramov explained basics of JavaScript in “Just JavaScript” series and React in “Tic-Tac-Toe” tutorial.

I have created the exact same “Tic-Tac-Toe” using Vue 3. Vue 3 code looks straight-forward than React, but I will leave the judgement to the readers 😄

The final React project created by Dan Abramov is available here The final Vue 3 project created by me is available here

💡Codepen has lot many restrictions. So both React and Vue 3 code shared has squeeze all the components into a single JS files

Screenshot of Tic-Tac-Toe

Inspecting the Code

We have three components:

Square

Board

Game

The Square component renders a single <button> and the Board renders 9 squares. The Game component renders a board.

Square Component

In the Codepen version of React tutorial, Square component has been created as functional component. In Vue 3, functional component is not recommended.

Performance gains from 2.x for functional components are now negligible in 3.x, so we recommend just using stateful components

Topics to learn

Create a simple Vue Component

Use props — please refer the guide for more details

💡Square has only one button element. So I have leveraged event bubbling and handled the click in Board (parent) component.
Can floating gardens help Bangladesh’s farmers withstand climate threats?
By: The New Humanitarian
Tags: Climate Change, Environment, Photojournalism, Bangladesh, Farming

Photographs by Zakir Hossain Chowdhury

Bangladesh’s annual monsoon rainfalls submerge lowland areas for months on end. But in the rural southern district of Pirojpur the crops rise with the floodwaters.

Farmers here sow their harvests on floating rafts made from water hyacinth plants. This traditional method — known as dhap — allows farmers to grow food even when severe floods threaten livelihoods elsewhere in the country.

Photographer Zakir Hossain Chowdhury has had a firsthand view of the contrast this monsoon season. Floods damaged at least 160,000 hectares of cropland and displaced 300,000 people across the country in July. But in Pirojpur and two other southern districts where farmers have used floating gardens for generations, families continued to grow crops even as the waters rose.

Chowdhury’s images show strips of vegetation unfurled in tidy rows over submerged land, and farmers tending to their buoyant crops in tiny boats. With parts of Pirojpur flooded or waterlogged for up to eight months of the year, farmers here say they’re entirely dependent on their floating gardens.

Climate change is making Bangladesh’s yearly monsoon rains more volatile and more intense — in some cases, severe floods have fuelled permanent migration away from rural areas. Agricultural experts say floating gardens can be one way of adapting to mounting disaster risks by strengthening food security.

Bangladesh’s government includes the expansion of floating agriculture as part of its climate change adaptation strategy, and various NGOs have set up projects elsewhere in the country. The UK-based Practical Action has worked with local groups to introduce floating gardens in Gaibandha district, in Bangladesh’s north, allowing people to grow crops throughout the year even when it floods.

But floating gardens have their limitations. The practice requires large stretches of land covered in still water through most of the year, enough water hyacinth plants — an invasive species — to build the floating rafts, and a market to make such farming profitable. And while floating gardens may be disaster-resistant, they’re not disaster-proof: it’s unclear how they’ll withstand further climate threats like drought, temperature rise, or soil salinity caused by rising sea-levels and storm surges.

In a 2013 paper, Haseeb Md. Irfanullah, the former head of the disaster risk reduction and climate change programme for Practical Action in Bangladesh, said the government and NGOs must better study climate change’s impacts on floating agriculture before promoting it as a surefire adaptation method.

“Development agencies are too mesmerised by the sheer simplicity and buoyancy of this agro-technique,” he said.

For farmers in Pirojpur, however, floating gardens are already integral to livelihoods.

“For eight months of the year, our land goes under water and then we have nothing to do,” said 62-year-old Abdul Jalil Hawladar. “We do this cultivation to survive.”

Adapting to a changing climate
Basic equations to visualize complex dependencies
By: Jan Schultink
Tags: Design, Presentation, PowerPoint, Presentation Design, Data Visualization

A question like “What happened to sales last year?” sometimes requires a complex answer. “Well, it is a bit complicated: volume went down, but then prices went up, but as a result sales were up”. A simplified mathematical equation can help you visualize this.

Sometime in the near future I will post here how to do a proper “sources of change” analysis.
Growing Your Own Vegetables at Home is Fun and Rewarding
By: Ana Gomez
Tags: Propagation, Hobby, Food, Health

Starting off slow by propagating lettuce

Propagating lettuce has got to be one of the easiest vegetables to do. Grab the remnants of a romaine heart and simply add it to a cup with water. I began to notice that the water would get murky after 2 or 3 days so that's how frequently I changed it. Also, after some days, the oxygen in the water starts depleting since the plants need it to survive so changing the water frequently is important.

My lettuce growth update

After a week, the romaine heart grew about an inch and I was ecstatic. The growth of the lettuce was exponential especially since I was diligent about changing the water and keeping it on a sunny windowsill.

Eating this lettuce was one of my proudest moments and the best part about it is that you can grow the same romaine heart over and over again.
Need to know
By: Tasneem Kagalwalla
Tags: Poetry, Life Lessons, Society, Life, Questions

Not everybody needs to know

Why I choose to walk alone?

Why I won’t stick to the norm?

Where I go?

And where I’ve come from?

Some questions that you hammer throw

Their answers are only mine to know

Let it go

For you’re on a need to know basis

And that you don’t need to know.
GOOGLE AI CONTEST
By: Aleksey Tikhonov
Tags: Почитать, AI, Rus

in In Fitness And In Health
Don’t “80/20” Your Dream
By: Niklas Göke
Tags: Work, Life Lessons, Happiness, Career Advice, Creativity

Don’t “80/20” Your Dream

For true happiness, optimize daily to-dos but not your greatest pursuit

Photo by Ethan on Unsplash

If you use the 80/20 rule on everything, you’ll live an unsatisfying life.

Ironically, Vilfredo Pareto only discovered this seemingly universal principle — that 20% of the input usually account for 80% of the output — because he outright ignored it.

Pareto obsessively tracked the output of his vegetable garden. The man counted peas in spreadsheets — in 1896! He noticed a pattern in the distribution, which he applied to land ownership in Italy. When it held up, he became famous, and today, the principle named after him is everywhere.

Vilfredo Pareto put no less than 100% of his energy into a mundane, meaningless hobby and it led to a scientific breakthrough — his actual work.

Rather than “Settle for doing one fifth of the job,” the lesson here is this: If you don’t give your best somewhere, you’ll never get to the top of anything. Or the bottom, in Pareto’s case.

If you only do 20% of the work, you’ll only get 20% of the satisfaction, regardless of the outcome. Humans aren’t designed to half-ass every day. Some days, sure, but not every day. We max out at 100%, no less.

If you never try your hardest, you’ll never know what you’re really capable of. Sure, you get the comfort of “I failed because I didn’t try,” but that only lasts so long before it decomposes into regret.

The 80/20 principle is fantastic for everything you don’t really care about.

If you walk ten minutes away from the airport before calling an Uber, you’ll save 20% on the fare. Exercising for ten minutes a day is better than nothing.

But if your finances or your health are everything to you, you don’t want to take the easy way out. You want to go all-in and go all the way.

If you want to write a bestseller, 20% won’t cut it. If you want to be rich by 40, 20% won’t cut it. If you want to be an exemplary dad, 20% won’t cut it.

Tim Ferriss wrote about the pareto principle in The 4-Hour Workweek — but he wrote about automating a company he didn’t care about. With the book, however, he left nothing to chance. He engineered every aspect of it, and that’s why it became such a hit.

When you find your unique path to greatness, walk on it. Walk all the way.

You don’t always have to exert yourself. Yes, giving 100% in an irrelevant area can help you move forward in an important one. But if you don’t go all-in somewhere, some of the time, you’ll never feel what the 80/20 rule promises but fails to deliver: “Today, I did my very best — and that was enough.”
Here are Fascinating Secrets from 3 Ancient Mystery Cults
By: Charles Stephen
Tags: Cult, Society, Culture, History, Religion

Here are Fascinating Secrets from 3 Ancient Mystery Cults

Citizens whispered about their disturbing activities

Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, Italy — Image by Public Domain

Unlike today, it was much easier to be secret and mysterious in ancient times.

Ancient societies had little or no media, and the news stories that did exist took weeks, if not months, to circulate to the general public. Therefore, it is not a coincidence that these mystery cults thrived during the first three centuries.

Common traits of ancient mystery cults

These secretive ancient cults shared many common traits:

All of them had very rigorous and prolonged initiation ceremonies, which included ritual purifications and fasting.

Secrecy was demanded of its members through vows.

They performed group rituals, orgies, meals, and dancing, which reinforced bonds among its members.

All of them emphasized a connection to the movements of the stars and planets and the seasons.

These mystery cults shared a central belief in death and resurrection. Part of their mystery was whether or not they took this literally or allegorically.

There was no written scripture or dogma as all things were based on individual experience, which added to the mystery.

All of them used mental shock, such as physical pain and terror, to induce altered states.

The challenge of learning about mystery cults

One of the biggest problems in learning about ancient mystery cults is trying to find information about them. In addition to their hiding behind a shroud of secrecy, most written ancient records have been lost. And we’re only left with scattered pieces of information to reconstruct entire ancient civilizations.

Mystery cults offered a personal appeal to certain people during those times. Keep in mind that many of them lived in societies where their emperor's worship was demanded of all citizens.

Apart from these official observances, people who desired an individual experience were perfect candidates for these ancient cults. They offered individuality and direct contact with a divine being in an atmosphere of others with like-minded goals.

Let us examine three of these ancient mystery cults.
Why I’m Coding with Emojis in Jupyter Notebooks
By: Miguel Pinto
Tags: Programming, Python, Data Science, Data Visualization, Towards Data Science

Why I’m Coding with Emojis in Jupyter Notebooks

Some of you may think this is a sacrilegious idea. I don’t plan to replace all my x, y, z with smiling faces. However, this can be a great feature to add an extra touch to your presentations

Image adapted from photo by bruce mars on Unsplash.

When I first realised that we can use emojis in code I was quite surprised. Currently, emojis can’t be used to define variables or functions in Python. They can, however, be used as strings in lists, dictionaries, pandas dataframes, plots, and so on. Other characters like Greek letters can also be used, not only in strings but also as variables! Using emojis and non-Latin symbols in the code is probably not a good practice in most contexts. However, I argue that there are several situations where they not only are acceptable but desirable.

Imagine you are a teacher introducing code to a young audience .

. Or maybe you are presenting your work to an audience without a strong programming background.

to an audience without a strong programming background. Or maybe you want to make your data plots more engaging .

. Or maybe you are implementing a paper full of mathematical expressions with plenty of Greek letters.

In situations like these, the use of emoji and non-Latin characters can be a good way to better express your code and engage with the audience.

Communicating ideas in a clear and engaging way is a very important skill for a data scientist.

Let me show you three examples!

1. Teaching code

Learning code for the first time can be a challenging experience. Making the code more colourful with emojis can be a great way to facilitate learning. The image below is just a simple example.

First, I define a list of fruits and a list of fruits I like.

Then the exercise is to print “I don’t like” or “I like” followed by the fruit icon for each of the fruits.

Example of teaching loops and conditions with fruit emojis. Image created by the author.

This example is great to teach about loops and conditions! I could use a list of the letters in the alphabet instead, but you have to agree that it would be a boring example. The motivation is very important for learning, and that’s why it matters to go a step forward in the way concepts are presented.
資視月誌：半年了，我們在做什麼？
Tags: Work, What We Do, Data Visualization, Startup, Visually Lab

To be the foremost driver that pioneers the latest technological breakthroughs to propel our society toward the perfect blend of science and art.

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House Price Prediction With Machine Learning in Python
By: Nikhil Adithyan
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Python, Programming, Algorithms

House Price Prediction With Machine Learning in Python

Using Ridge, Bayesian, Lasso, Elastic Net, and OLS regression model for prediction

Image by Markus Spiske on Pexels

Introduction

Estimating the sale prices of houses is one of the basic projects to have on your Data Science CV. By finishing this article, you will be able to predict continuous variables using various types of linear regression algorithm.

Why linear regression? Linear regression is an algorithm used to predict values that are continuous in nature. It became more popular because it is the best algorithm to start with if you are a newbie to ML.

To predict the sale prices we are going to use the following linear regression algorithms: Ordinal Least Square (OLS) algorithm, Ridge regression algorithm, Lasso regression algorithm, Bayesian regression algorithm, and lastly Elastic Net regression algorithm. These algorithms can be feasibly implemented in python with the use of the scikit-learn package.

Finally, we conclude which model is best suitable for the given case by evaluating each of them using the evaluation metrics provided by the scikit-learn package.

Why Python?

Python is a general-purpose, and high-level programming language which is best known for its efficiency and powerful functions. Python is loved by data scientists because of its ease of use, which makes it more accessible. Python provides data scientists with an extensive amount of tools and packages to build machine learning models. One of its special features is that we can build various machine learning with less-code.

Steps Involved

Importing the required packages into our python environment Importing the house price data and do some EDA on it Data Visualization on the house price data Feature Selection & Data Split Modeling the data using the algorithms Evaluating the built model using the evaluation metrics

Let’s now jump into our coding part!

Importing required packages

Our primary packages for this project are going to be pandas for data processing, NumPy to work with arrays, matplotlib & seaborn for data visualizations, and finally scikit-learn for building an evaluating our ML model. Let’s import all the required packages into our python environment.

Python Implementation:

Importing Data & EDA

As I said before, we are going to work with the house price dataset that contains various features and information about the house and its sale price. Using the ‘read_csv’ function provided by the Pandas package, we can import the data into our python environment. After importing the data, we can use the ‘head’ function to get a glimpse of our dataset.

Python Implementation:

Output:
How to fix your Angular Material input field from being broken in Safari
By: Tremaine Eto
Tags: Programming, Software Engineering, Software Development, Angular, Front End Development

How to fix your Angular Material input field from being broken in Safari Tremaine Eto Follow Mar 17 · 3 min read

I just want the fix!

I’m a developer too, so I know sometimes I just want the fix I can plug in right away — if it doesn’t work, I’ll read more to see the nuances of the solution to see if I can then figure it out. So without any more ado, here we go.

In your relevant .css file:

input {

-webkit-user-select: all !important;

}

Versions I saw the problem in

I’ve seen other people with this issue — one person was on Angular 6.0.3 and @angular/material 6.2.1, so it seems like this can actually come up in many different version variations.

What the problem looks like

In my Angular application that uses Angular Material, users saw some weird behavior — but only when they were using Safari.

An input field (using mdInput within an md-input-container ) I had in the app was not behaving at all like it should; users couldn’t actually type in it! I did some more checks, and it turns out this was in all my input fields. If users could type in them, it would only one letter or so, but most of the time all input was restricted.

Below, I made a .gif of the screen capture where I replicate the issue.

What you can’t see in the .gif is that I was typing like a madman on my keyboard trying to get any of my input to register. It wasn’t inserting at all.

Debugging the issue in Safari

In Safari, the idea of a developer console is not as easy to get to as in Google Chrome or Safari out of the box. You can’t, by default, right-click on an element on your page and then click Inspect Element . You first have to go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced and then select “Show Develop in Menu Bar”.

From Develop , you can then click on Open Web Inspector . Actually, even better, you can also right-click on elements now and click Inspect Element like you expect.

The problem

So basically, when you click Inspect Element on an offending input, you’ll see this atrocity:

The -webkit-user-select there is set to none ! This means you can’t type in that box! For some reason, Safari disables these inputs by default.

The fix

Like I said earlier, you can experiment with the different values for -webkit-user-select to see which enables the input. all , auto , and inherit worked for me, for instance, but you’ll probably want to be careful with which one you choose. w3 schools has some guidance on what some of them mean. I liked all , so that’s what I used.

input {

-webkit-user-select: all !important;

}

Note that this affects all inputs in this .css file’s scope, which I assume you want to do for Safari.

The result

Yes. Yes it is.
Disappointing Myself
By: Kern Carter
Tags: Anxiety, Self Love, Poetry, Creativity, Creative Writing

It happens every day.

Image by Sergey Safronov

I know where I want to be.

I know who I want to be.

I know who I am.

I hear the word potential and cringe.

I look back and see everyone who has dropped off on my journey and cheer.

The closer I get, the harder it feels. The closer I get, the more I feel like it will never happen.

Days and weeks and months go by. Nothing. Till I realize that those days and weeks and months are something on their own.

Disappointing myself means not appreciating my gift.

Disappointing myself means not transforming.

Disappointing myself means giving up.

CRY