fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Stabbed in the Back for a Lost Cause
By: Nicolas Carteron
Tags: Society, Fascism, Trump, Election 2020, Politics

Stabbed in the Back for a Lost Cause

The similarities between Trump’s election narrative mirrors both Nazi and Confederate rhetorics

The Nazis came to power, in no small part, because of a conspiracy theory that is known to History as the Stab-in-the-back myth. Not only did the Nazi promote and distribute the theory, but they also made it an integral part of their lore.

1919 Austrian postcard. Unknown author — Wikimedia

According to Hitler and other proponents of this theory, Germany was on the verge of winning WWI on the battlefield (spoiler alert: it wasn’t) when it was betrayed on the home front by a cabal of Republicans and Jews.

The Nazis referred to the government officials who had signed the Armistice as the November criminals and depicted the surprisingly modern and liberal Weimar Republic (who saw the emergence of the first gay rights movement) as

a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest ‘national opposition’ — fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks’

Wikipedia

This perceived and propagandised persecution of the honest national opposition can also be found at the core of another historical myth, that of the Lost Cause.

According to this revisionist view of the Civil War, the war waged by the South was heroic and morally justified. In this view, slavery was presented as just; a necessary social construct for the South’s prosperity.

More to the point,

Lost Cause narratives typically portray the Confederacy’s cause as noble, and its leaders and armies as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, whose defeat by the Union armies was because the South’s greater military skill and courage was overwhelmed by the North’s numerical superiority and immense industrial power.

Wikipedia

Rooted deep in both rhetorics is the idea of an unfair situation being forced upon a willing, noble, and well-intentioned group of patriots. This unfairness springs either from underground networks operating against the well-being of the State (a deep state) or from unfavourable odds (the election is rigged).

Trump’s appropriation of both these rhetorics poses a grave danger to the American society, the American population, and the global balance of power. It will justify and support the survival of Trumpism whatever happens in the next two months.

Should Trump succeed in stealing the election and depriving Biden of his term, he will have done so by claiming (as he is now) that for 4 years, the Democrats and the so-called deep state had been undermining him and his legitimacy, stabbing him in the back.

Should Trump fail and Biden become president in January 2021, he will undoubtedly promote a form of lost cause rhetoric around him and his administration, telling whoever will listen (and there will be many millions) that his fight was the right one, a just and noble cause doomed to failure, faced with insurmountable odds (the Democrats had an unfair advantage).
Content design for user onboarding
By: Jason Fox
Tags: UX Design, Onboarding, Product Design, Ux Writing, Content Design

When I first saw this experiment, I wondered:

What made it successful?; and Was it written specifically with onboarding in mind?

The writing in the original as well as the experiment is thoughtfully constructed. They use a verb + object construction. They’re both clear, economical, and they define a clear potential subsequent state.

So why the lift? To work our way toward an educated guess, we need to review some of the behavioral models and usability frameworks that might be at play.

When language leads to action

There’s one behavioral model that’s caught its fair share of traction in the UX writing world: The Fogg Behavior Model. One reason for its popularity might be the following equation (because writers love fake equations):

B = M A P

Behavior = Motivation, Ability, Prompt

This framework holds users will perform a target behavior when there’s a confluence of motivation and ability.

Motivation is the willpower to take action.

Ability is the capacity to take action.

Prompt is the push or nudge that we design to spark the behavior.

The behavior action curve

The higher the motivation and the higher the ability, the more likely it is that a prompt will succeed in sparking a target behavior.

When motivation, ability, or both are low, people will drift aimlessly in the realm of inaction. This inactive state is harmful to a healthy onboarding experience.

While it’s acceptable to allow users to learn a product at their own speed, they should never be left in a position where ability and motivation are lacking. In addition to contributing to product abandonment, inactive states represent a huge opportunity for competitors to slip in and motivate folks in their direction.

Designers can use language to push or propel people through that action curve. Whether that’s through well-written tooltips, economical support documentation, actionable empty states, or whatever else we can get our pens on, we writers have a lot of power when it comes to behavioral levers.

B=MAP in a signup experiment

In a recent experiment at Atlassian, we focused on social proof bolstered by clear use cases to create a confluence of motivation, ability, and prompt. Other signals, like trial length and product qualifiers, were removed.
New Jobs for NYC Apartment Brokers
By: Adam Campbell-Schmitt
Tags: Humor, Satire, New York, Real Estate, Comedy

Brokers gonna broke.

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

In an eleventh-hour move, the New York City Council recently passed legislation essentially banning the city’s notorious real estate brokers from charging unwitting tenants a fee for their unrequested services. It could potentially bring equity to an out-of-control rental market while wiping out an entire industry of enterprising middlepeople.

But brokers gonna broke. So here are a few new gigs NYC’s out-of-work real estate brokers should consider:

Uber Broker

Anyone who has opened a rideshare app in NYC knows it’s almost always surge pricing, and in such a competitive market, drivers are far too busy harassing or otherwise making their current riders feel uncomfortable to figure out who they’re picking up next. When a customer hails an Uber, a broker arrives at the same time as the vehicle to verify the rider’s star rating and open the car door.

Fee: 30x what taking a yellow cab would have cost.

Starbucks Mobile Order Broker

Starbucks staff are far too busy restocking cake pops to field dozens of extra orders coming in via the app. A broker accepts multiple orders (with $75 application fee, each) and, based on Experian credit scores, prioritizes the customers most likely to actually show up to pick up their coffee.

Fee: $1,000 per shot of espresso.

Breakup Broker

Breaking up from a crummy relationship is difficult, but disaffected lovers are far too busy internalizing the feeling that things aren’t working out to actually go through with it. Before cuffing season hits, a broker arrives to facilitate uncoupling, not by communicating any terms or requests or actually delivering the breakup message, but by making the restaurant reservation under their own name and briefly meeting the soon-to-be exes at the coat check. (Subject to multiple “can’t make it, must reschedule” text messages.)

Fee: 15% of all emotional investment in the relationship or $6,000, whichever is greater.

Baby Broker

Hospitals are far too busy billing patients by the square for toilet paper to figure out whose baby is whose. Once a newborn is delivered, the broker arrives to receive the baby in the nursery and holds it there until the parents supply proof of identification, 12 months of pay stubs, and bank statements indicating they can afford the good diapers. If not, the baby will be given to the next most eligible parents.

Fee: 12% of the child’s 4-year private school tuition upfront.

Sex Broker

Loners and sex addicts are far too busy replying to critical tweets about Joker to find a lover. When a lonely person gets aroused, a broker arranges for a sex worker to show up via the (newly-refocused) Street Easy app and leaves a key to the customer’s apartment in a lockbox out front (code: 1234).

Fee: 300% of bail when the broker is arrested for pimping.

Landlord

Collect money from tenants for doing absolutely nothing? This one should come easily.

Fee: Literally whatever you want to charge.
Energy consumption per capita. Country Ranking
By: Solar Dao
Tags: Ecology, Green Energy, Climate Change, Solar Dao, Solar Energy

From 2000 to 2013, global energy investments have increased by 100%. It’s not just about popularizing renewable energy since the lion’s share of electricity needed of the population is generated as earlier — from fossil energy sources. Besides the rapid growth of global energy consumption, mankind has to face the increase of harmful emissions and environmental worsening.

To visually show the responsibility’s share of each person and to note which countries should try to reduce electricity consumption or accelerate the green energy transition, let’s look at the World Bank’s report on the energy consumption per capita in different countries:

Energy consumption per capita, 2015

For the sake of clear result, consumption is calculated in fuel equivalent — the amount of oil needed to provide a certain level of energy.

Top 10 Leaders in Energy Consumption:

Necessary to know

To really understand how important it is to care for the environment, we want to show how “expensive” electricity is.

Take for example an ordinary home light bulb with a power of 100 watts. Let’s leave the lights on throug the whole year (sure, you will need to replace the bulb several times, you know :)).

Let’s make a simple calculation:

24 hours a day = 8760 hours per year.

0.1 kW multiply by 8760 = 876 kW/hour.

In order to ensure the operation of one bulb during the year, we need to:

Burn 320 kg of coal (1 ton of coal approximately gives 2500 kW/hour)

(1 ton of coal approximately gives 2500 kW/hour) Spend 2 hours for a wind turbine with a capacity of 1.5 MW, 25% of efficiency.

with a capacity of 1.5 MW, 25% of efficiency. Take 35 minutes for a solar power plant with a capacity of 1.5 MW (an area of ​​about 3 hectares, imagine!).

with a capacity of 1.5 MW (an area of ​​about 3 hectares, imagine!). Decay 16 grams of Uranium.

Spend 2.5 hours of a hydro-electric turbine operation, with a capacity of 339 kW.

We wanted to show clearly that any extra consumption of electricity is detrimental to ourselves. Please, love renewable energy and save resources.

Do you have other examples? What resources does the electrical device work cost? Put in the comments, we will be glad to discuss!
What is a deployment pipeline and how does it help software development teams?
By: Walmyr Filho
Tags: Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, Deployment Pipelines, Continuous Integration, Software Development

Deployment pipeline is a concept for avoiding waste in the software development process, and it is used for providing quick feedback to the team during deployment. It works in the following way: the software deployment is divided in different stages, where tasks are run in each of these stages. In the same stage, tasks can be executed in parallel, for helping on the feedback loop. When all tasks in a stage passes, the tasks in the next stages can start (this can be triggered manually or in an automated way).

In the below image I tried to visually show you an example of a deployment pipeline, where after a developer pushes his/her code to a remote repository, the deployment pipeline starts. First building the application, then running code analysis, unit tests, and integration/API tests (all in parallel). If all the tasks in this stage of the pipeline passes, then a smoke test suite is triggered, and if the smoke test also passes, it triggers the regression test suite and the visual regression test suite (executed in parallel), and then, if this final stage passes as well, then we have a release candidate that can be promoted to production, so that users can enjoy.

Deployment pipeline example — designed by Walmyr Filho

The importance of using this approach, as already mentioned, is about avoiding waste. This means that if, for example, one or more tasks in some of the stages fail, it automatically fails all the deployment, and no time is waste running the other tasks unnecessarily.

Another important point about using deployment pipelines is that we can separate tasks that take longer time to execute from tasks that run faster. An example of this is a comparison of the time spent on executing a suite of unit tests versus a suite of end-to-end regression tests.

Last, but not least, a deployment pipeline can be used to show the value stream map of all the deployment workflow. This can be a powerful and valuable artifact for making non-technical people understand what is necessary to deliver high-quality software, and then having their help on providing the necessary resources to make it happens.

I wish you have enjoyed the article and I'll be happy to hear what you have to say about deployment pipelines, in the comments.

Have a great week and start thinking on your deployment pipeline!
The importance of process documentation in a UX project
By: Ryu Sakai
Tags: Documentation, User Experience, Product Management, Product Design, Design Process

Why document your process?

Here are the reasons why I think it’s important to keep up with process documentation based on my experience:

1. It helped me see a bigger picture of a project.

While I am deep in a UX process, I focus on my current task in front of me, and I tend to lose sight of where I am from a larger context. Documenting my process allowed me not to lose a high-level perspective of a project because glancing at the documented version of my work always gave me a slightly more objective view of my project.

2. It helped me keep track of what changes I made based on what reason.

When I made design changes, I experienced many times that I couldn’t remember exactly how that happened. Things got lost in transition, and it was always hard to pinpoint later whether a change was made based on a user research feedback, or a comment from a stakeholder meeting/etc. Keeping up with a process documentation really helped me stay organized, so that I didn’t lose sight of all these cause and effect relationships that occurred over the course of the design process.

3. It made a project almost portfolio-ready.

A process documentation to me is a critical artifact and a record of a project. This was extremely useful when I wanted to put together an in-depth case study of my project for an in-person job interview type of occasions. Of course I had to create a more simplified version to be used effectively for any particular interviews that I had, but the foundational information was already there in my process documentation, which made it super easy to do so. No need for further digging or trying to remember what happened when I was actually working on that specific project a few years ago.
The Box
By: Jane Woodman
Tags: Poetry

Inside, it’s crowded, noisy with talk-

Magic walls, transparent from out here,

Curve space, distort vision from within-

Warmth envelopes everyone inside

Lulls them to sleep at brightest noon

Eases questions into slurred dreams

Quickly forgotten in the swamps

Of faceshandswordsnoiserules,

Shaping of the box invisible

Even as its walls grow tighter

Stronger from eating the breath,

The confusion of all those crushed inside.

There are doors-lots of them on all sides

But most underfoot or overhead

Not in the normal, expected spaces-

They lead only to the outer air,

No paths wind around the feet of those

Who slip out through any door

To twist and pull them back inside.

No door opens inward to the squirming space

No knob offers from the outside.

Once you’re out, you don’t get back in-

Whether you like the cool space or not,

Whether you’re alone in your freedom or not.

The syntax of space, invisible inside

Paints its own patterns out here

But the paths mostly lead away

Into farther hills and brighter skies

Where breathing is easier without the fear

Of tight spaces that leaks quickly

Away from the minds and hands of those

Who walk or dance or fly away– free!

But some turn and watch the shadows

Still reeling, writhing inside the box

Twisted into grotesque shapes and shadows

Those who turn and watch are left to describe

Bridges between what was and what comes next.
Article: A Sidelined Wall Street Legend Bets on Bitcoin
Tags: Articles, Bitcoin

Michael Novogratz was in a good mood. It was the thirtieth reunion of Princeton’s class of 1987, and the on-again, off-again billionaire was getting a lot of respect. “I want to hit you up about something,” a two-star general said. “Those are the freshest kicks,” a young bro in a dressing gown observed, complimenting Novogratz’s black patent shoes with orange piping and matching tassels. (“It’s all about peacocking,” Novogratz later told me, of his sartorial extravagance.) He huddled with Joseph Lubin, a former roommate and one of the co-founders of the hit cryptocurrency platform Ethereum. It was a warm June day, last year, and the Princetonians were amiably crushing cans of Bud amid chants of “Tiger, tiger, tiger, sis sis sis, boom boom boom”.
A Special Night
By: Mark Starlin
Tags: Humor, Not Santa Claus, Childhood, Christmas, Zeppelin Adventures

It was Christmas Eve.

Of course, the child couldn’t sleep,

tucked in bed at his Grandma’s house.

He arose and went to the window.

The sky was awash with a million stars.

Scanning the heavens, he could hardly believe his eyes.

A bright light was shining in the distance.

Brighter than any star.

Could it be?

It grew closer and closer.

He thought he saw red.

Yes, he was sure of it.

A red light was approaching the house.

His heart jumped with excitement.

He began to wave frantically.
Punk London, 1977: Thrilling Photos of a Subversive Era
By: Derek Ridgers
Tags: Rock, Music, The Bookshelf

These were just kids that were joining in with the punks, rather than punks themselves. They were walking up and down the King’s Road. There were going to be fights between them and the rock & rollers and bikers. In actuality, it never happened. It was written up in the newspapers and there was quite a heavy police presence. There was a lot of punks and punk hangers-on. A few arrests were made, but I don’t think there was ever any fighting. It was all posturing. You can see somebody being arrested. The photo of the four friends walking down King’s Road is from that same day. One of those guys is Gary Holton in the white dotted coat. He died some time ago, but he was an actor and a singer in a band called the Heavy Metal Kids. They weren’t really punk either, but they came up in the time of punk as well.

It was a terrible miserable wet day, and I think it was a day that everybody thought was going to be a big punch up between the new punks and the mods or the bikers. But it never was, it was just something dreamed up by the media. It was a lot of punks and an assortment of young people just walking up and down in the rain all day. In these kind of social situations and moral panics, there seldom are any fights. Sometimes a big group of people would chase a group of others, but there was never usually more than that. Ever since the police were called out a bit in the 60s and early 70s after the riots at the carnival in Notting Hill, they would police these things quite heavily, following the groups of people up and down the road, forcing them to leave.
Begin Again and Again
By: Christine Salkin Davis
Tags: Life Lessons, Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Women, Spirituality

Today’s Focail do a Chara

Photo Credit Christine Salkin Davis

Your core strength is vulnerability,

tinged with passion and compassion.

Let joy ignite in your heart, yes, but you still must

overcome your own hell with endurance,

beginning, returning, beginning again

and again.

Take your chance to receive the promise, and remember

reason and goals are overrated.

Listen:

your desires are a heartbeat away.

© Christine Salkin Davis 2017
Once upon a time… React memo, useCallback, and useMemo
By: Nitai Aharoni
Tags: JavaScript, React Native, Performance, Front End Development, React

Once upon a time…

Our story begins with 26-year-old John and 25-year-old Jane, two programmers of the app ״User Details״, and good friends as well.

So the situation is this, Jane’s and John’s details are displayed inside a component called UserComponent, which gets the user’s information as props.

John is the lucky first. With the click of the button, Jane wins the right to be displayed and stays there (no matter how many times the button is clicked).

It is important to note that the UserComponent console.logs a message on every render.

Since our story deals with the performance management of the app, please pay attention to the console in each of the following examples. Try to see how many times UserComponent has been rendered in each case, when the “Change User” button is clicked (try to click more than once).

*Note that the component prints at least once in its initial rendering.

The naive case

So here we begin our story. At first, everything was simple, the state of the component App was concise and contained only the current user’s first name.

As mentioned, John is displayed first, and with the click of the button, the name switches to Jane.

By clicking the button several times you can see that the component is only rendered twice and everything is efficient, good and nice.
Perv caught lifting up woman’s skirt on shopping mall escalator to take pictures
Tags: China

Perv caught lifting up woman’s skirt on shopping mall escalator to take pictures

Summer is almost here. Ladies in skirts, beware!

While perverts on elevators have been making headlines in China in recent months, it’s worth remembering that escalators can be dangerous places as well.

On Sunday, a man riding an escalator in a shopping mall in the Anhui city of Wuhu lifted up the skirt of the woman in front of him while secretively snapping a photo without her noticing.

However, it turns out that the man was not secretive enough as his perverted actions were all caught by the cell phone camera of a Good Samaritan shopper who then reported the incident to the police.

Officers arrived quickly to the scene and arrested the man. On his phone, they found numerous other photos and videos of a similar nature.

As usual, the man has been detained for 10 days. Something tells us he won’t be the only such upskirter put briefly behind bars in what has already been an unusually creep-filled year.
Primeval punk recordings from Northern Ireland — #2 ‘Big Time’ by Rudi on Good Vibrations records
By: Jim Mccool
Tags: Music, Punk Rock, Punk, Belfast

The very first release on Belfast’s famous Good Vibrations label was the punk classic Big Time by Rudi. A modest pressing of 3,000 copies sold reasonably well, but didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Unlike the Undertones, who came along a little later, Rudi were unlucky and didn’t get the radio airplay they needed to get picked up by a major label.

And that was a real shame, because Rudi were among the very best of the punk bands to come out of Belfast, and Big Time is an absolute cracker of a single — far, far better than most of the tuneless punk dirges of the time.

Rudi were the stars of the very first punk gig I went to, in Belfast, February 1978. The Adverts, a second-division (although very well regarded) English punk band were the headliners — and Rudi completely blew them off the stage. Even though the Adverts had a chart single and had even been on Top of the Pops, Rudi were so obviously the better band. Rudi could play really well, looked great, and had a fantastic attitude, looking like they were enjoying every second of being on stage, unlike the Adverts who either looked pained, or scared shitless.

The crowd absolutely loved Rudi — and so did I. And I bought Big Time just as soon as it came out.

It’s survived since 1978…

Rudi later came to my home town of Armagh as part of a Good Vibrations package tour in April 1979, which also featured the Outcasts and the Tearjerkers. The locals still favoured heavy metal cover bands, and there were very, very few punks in the audience (just me, I think) but Rudi still played an amazing set. It was a wild night.

Info on Big Time on Discogs: https://www.discogs.com/Rudi-Big-Time/release/1998206

Band info: http://rudi77.free.fr/index.htm
What would Jesus do?
Tags: Community, Jesus, Christianity, Religion, Faith

The following is a guest post by Jade Nicole Neverdon Merritt, founder of Mikey’s Miracle Foundation, Inc. Learn more about the Imagining Justice in Baltimore series.

What Would Jesus Do?

Do you remember the bracelets?

Popular in the 90s, I owned several bracelets, in various colors, etched with the letters, WWJD, abbreviated for “What Would Jesus Do?’ Worn by many Christians and what some have called a cultural revolution, the bracelets were very popular accessories intended to serve a symbolic reminder for Christians to act in a manner that would demonstrate the actions of Jesus Christ. Particularly, the WWJD was a prompting of how to act in a manner reflective of Jesus when confronted with conflicts or moral dilemmas. While Jesus is referenced in many sacred texts and considered to be one of the most influential people in the world, for Christians He is Savior and one’s life we who seek to model.

While I no longer wear the bracelets, as a Christian woman, I still often find myself asking the question “What Would Jesus Do?” as I strive to live a life which is reflective of my Savior who loves all. While I’m not a perfect person, I do seek to live in a manner where there is peace, love and kindness towards others.

Throughout my time as an ICJS fellow, we examined a case study from the 2016 Department of Justice report as it relates to the mistreatment and false arrest of African-American males in Baltimore City. It is through this cohort that we explored religion as it relates to social justice issues and how we as leaders in business and various religious communities could come together to drive the change our city so desperately needs.

Each session, we explored the case study through different sacred texts and the question of ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ always came to my mind and more specifically, do we have a moral obligation to respond to injustices that plague our city? For me, the question is yes. While this country was built upon Christian principles and a moral obligation to do just by others, I would argue that we have lost our way. In today’s political and social climate, specifically in the city of Baltimore, we have failed greatly. We have failed to respect the lives of our black and brown brothers. We have failed to acknowledge that law enforcement continues to abuse its power and that the system has been designed to oppress certain races and classes.

I think about how different things would be if those individuals in law enforcement power had adornments such as the WWJD bracelets to serve as a physical reminder to think differently before they respond in certain situations that seek to harm or oppress others with no valid reason. We are made up of a country of various faiths and while it may not be Jesus for all but who or what would be the symbolism to prompt one to act in a space of love and peace towards another. While there is, and will always be debate over moral character, and what is considered just, I believe we should all aspire to live with the standard to do the right thing. For me, that is what Jesus would do.
Simple data visualisations in Python that you will find useful
By: Zolzaya Luvsandorj
Tags: Seaborn, Matplotlib, Data Visualization, Python, Data Science

📍 2. Bar plots: sns.barplot() and sns.countplot()

Most people are familiar with bar plots. In bar plots, one axis tells us the categories while the other tells us the numerical value associated with that category. Therefore, it’s useful for visualising categorical variables. When working with certain types of machine learning algorithms, looking at feature importance of the model gives us insights on what features the model deems more important. Let’s use it to see feature importance of the simple random forest model that we have built in the previous section:

# Map feature importance to variable names

importances = pd.DataFrame(model.feature_importances_,

index=X_train.columns,

columns=['importance'])

importances.sort_values('importance', ascending=False, inplace=True) # Plot feature importance

plt.figure(figsize=(10, 4))

sns.barplot(data=importances, x=importances.index, y='importance')

plt.title('Feature importance');

If there are many features and/or the name of the features are lengthy, using this format leads to overlapping feature names in the x axis making the plot hard to read. One simple solution is to swap the x and y axis mappings:

plt.figure(figsize=(8, 4))

sns.barplot(data=importances, x='importance', y=importances.index)

plt.title('Feature importance');

In our next example, we will use two bar plots to get different insights for each categorical variable. The first bar plot will show the frequency of categories. This is helpful to see the overall distribution of the variable, including if there are any dominant or rare categories. For this, we will use sns.countplot() which is a categorical equivalent of histograms. The second bar plot will show the average value of target by each category in a variable. This is helpful to inspect if certain categories is more or less likely to associate with a particular class in the target variable. To illustrate, we will add a random binary target, treat species as a feature and plot the two bar plots for each categorical variable using a for loop:

# Import package

import numpy as np # Create random target

np.random.seed(123)

df['target'] = np.random.randint(0, 2, df.shape[0]) # Create list of categorical column names

categorical = list(df.select_dtypes(exclude='number').columns) # Plot counts for non-numerical variables

for var in categorical:

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(14, 3.5))

sns.countplot(x=var, data=df, ax=ax[0])

ax[0].set_title(f"Counts of each category in {var}")



sns.barplot(x=var, y='target', data=df, ax=ax[1])

ax[1].set_title(f"Mean target by each category in {var}");

Visualising categorical columns this way is really useful when first looking at the data during exploratory analysis and trying to gauge which variables are potentially more useful for a model. The charts on the right will also work if you have a numerical target.
We would like to remind you that our Pre-Sale ends in less than two weeks
By: Casper Api
Tags: ICO, Cryptocurrency, Money, Investment, Token

However, you still have time to become a Casper API investor by purchasing CST tokens at a favourable price of $0.12

Today we would also like to remind you about important rules of our project so your token purchasing experience goes smoothly.

So:

- CST tokens can be purchased only on the official website at https://casperproject.io

- For quick support visit the official Telegram chat of the project https://t.me/CasperProjectENG

Here you can ask all the questions you may have as well as talk to the team.

All the real administrators have a star next to their names in the chat member list:

@crypto_nur

@nodramalama

@Mark_administrator

@Maelstrom_s

@liutetskaia

@Julia_administrator

IMPORTANT!

Our administrators NEVER send you a personal message out of the blue.

Our administrators NEVER send custom payment addresses for purchasing tokens.

We NEVER send personal offers from personal mail.

- All the official social media links can be found on our website

NEVER click unknown links that you get from strangers — these can be fraudulent.

Before making any decision about investing in Casper API do your own research and ask any questions you may have to the team or the community.

By following these simple rules you can prevent your money from falling into the fraudulent hands of scammers and instead purchase CST tokens safely, quickly and easily so in the future you get to get returns on the investments you made today!
The Python Standard Library — modules you should know as a data scientist
By: Amanda Iglesias Moreno
Tags: Programming, Python, Python Standard Library, Data Science, Coding

The Python Standard Library — modules you should know as a data scientist

with usage examples

The Python Standard Library contains a wide range of modules to deal with everyday programming and is included with the standard version of Python, meaning no additional installation is required. It provides modules for such tasks as interacting with the operating system, reading and writing CSV files, generating random numbers, and working with dates and time. This article describes 8 modules of the Python Standard Library that I am sure you will come across when programming in Python. Let’s get started! 🙌

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

1. Zipfile

The zipfile library provides tools to easily work with zip files. It allows you to create, read, and write zip files directly in Python, without being necessary to use an external program.

Read a zip file

To open a zip file in Python, we use the zipfile.ZipFile class, providing as input the file path and the opening mode. Since we want to open the file in reading mode, we provide mode=’r’.

The ZipFile constructor returns a ZipFile object which we assign to the variable myzip. Then, we use the .extractall(path=None, members=None, pwd=None) method to extract all members from the zip file to the current working directory. To extract not all, but some members of the zip file, we can provide their names to the argument members.

After running the code above, we can open the current directory to check that the files were correctly extracted. Alternatively, we can use the os.listdir() function (defined in the os module) to obtain a list with the entries contained in the working directory.

Finally, we close the zip file using the .close() method. It is important to remember to close all files when we no longer need them to avoid running out of file handles.

Since it is easy to forget to close a file when working in Python, we can use the with statement which automatically closes the zip file after the nested block of code is executed.

If we want to obtain a list of members contained in the zip file without extracting them, we can use the .namelist() method as follows.

Write a zip file

We create and open a new zip file in Python using the zipfile.ZipFile class in writing mode mode=’w’. After creating the zip file, we call the .write() method to add a file as follows.

The code above creates a new zip file (new_file.zip) in the current working directory, containing two .txt files (file_1.txt and file_2.txt).
Earbuds are on the verge of a major functionality transformation, says Romit Roy Choudhury, PhD, a…
By: Robert Roy Britt
Tags: Tech, Wearables, Earbuds, Earables, Technology

Earbuds are on the verge of a major functionality transformation, says Romit Roy Choudhury, PhD, a professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois.

“The leap from today’s earphones to ‘earables’ would mimic the transformation that we had seen from basic phones to smartphones,” Choudhury said in a statement earlier this month. “Today’s smartphones are hardly a calling device anymore, much like how tomorrow’s earables will hardly be a smartphone accessory,” he says. The future devices will “continuously sense human behavior, run acoustic augmented reality” (whatever that is) and “have Alexa and Siri whisper just-in-time information.”

Great, I suppose.

Whatever, Choudhury isn’t the first to tout the promise of “earables,” a word that’s been around for years and which I hope doesn’t stick. Meantime, for many people, the promise of next-gen earbuds is more urgent and practical, as I wrote recently:
Exchange Announcement
Tags: Bitcoin, Dimcoin

DIMCOIN Listing News



As you are aware, most governments are trying to find ways to regulate the cryptocurrency environment. This influences the way in which the market behaves when it comes to coin transactions, and most importantly, exchanges that are not affected by government regulations experience high volumes of new coins and investors.



This increased volume has caused an unforeseen problem of exchanges declining new coins, and worse yet, denying new investors the opportunity to participate on their platforms. This hinders our listing process — putting us in a position where DIMCOIN needs to ensure that it is placed on exchanges unaffected by such coin and investor volume regulations.



We have taken investors interests into mind and have, in the last 3 months, really pushed to have DIMCOIN listed on more exchanges by approaching 44 new exchanges. However, between DEPOTWALLET and NEM Mosaics, all of the Developer teams are having issues integrating DEPOTWALLET into their systems.



While we approach exchanges that already have NEM Mosaics listed like Yobit and Cryptopia, these exchanges are also experiencing difficulties with the wallet integration. This does not mean that it is impossible to list DIMCOIN but rather that it will take longer than we expected.



DIMCOIN representatives are also in current talks with exchanges which offer traders stability but will require the community to vote. We would like to encourage our investors to vote for our coin to be listed on these platforms by following the links that we will be providing. Once of these exchanges is C-Cex and we will require you to vote on top of our BTC listing donation to get us on top of the list. The link will be provided sometime this week once we have made the payment.



After the experiences with HitBTC, the decision was made to negotiate with more exchanges in order to accommodate the coins circulation and drive demand. This is why we wish to put extra time and effort into the listing and testing. Once DIMCOIN has a stable trade volume, the vision for 2018 will be on track. This year, we plan to have DIMCOIN listed on many more exchanges.



For more information, please contact: info@dim.foundation
Finding organic clusters in complex data-networks
By: Graph Commons
Tags: Design, Machine Learning, Storytelling, Network Science, Data Science

A common task for a data scientist is to identify clusters in a given data set. The idea is to simply find groups of objects that have more connections or similarities to one another than they do to outsiders. In the study of networks, we use clustering to recognize communities within large groups of connections.

Typically, a force-directed layout algorithm organizes a network map, makes patterns visually comprehensible, but it cannot identify and mark the clusters. Furthermore, in large network maps, the high level of detail overwhelms our senses. To be able to precisely examine its patterns, we need quantitative views of the data contained in the network. While there are a variety of data clustering methods in machine learning, the Louvain Modularity algorithm works well particularly for large data-networks. It detects tightly knit groups characterized by a relatively high density of ties. Beyond the visual realm, you can use a Louvain clustering algorithm to partition a many million-node online social network onto different machines.

Clustering the network map of an ecosystem in Graph Commons

Once the network clusters are detected, the identified groups of nodes can be given distinct color and names, so they are clearly differentiated and together provide a summary of the larger network. We can label a cluster based on the commonalities of its nodes or the most central nodes found in the grouping.

In Graph Commons, you can use clustering on your data-networks using the Analysis bar. You first click on the “Run Clustering” button, then set the resolution of how much granular clusters the algorithm should identify. Once the clusters are found, they are automatically labelled based on the most connected node in the cluster. However, we strongly recommend that you to rename these communities yourself to highlight what these communities specify in your context. Finally, you can view the list of all the nodes that belongs to a certain cluster and download it as a CSV file.
Pibble Klaytn Mainnet Exchange and Token Swap Guide
By: Bryan High
Tags: Tokenswap, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Cryptocurrency Exchange, Pibble

<Translated from the original:> https://coinone.co.kr/talk/notice/detail/723

Hello from Coinone.

Coinone has scheduled the facilitation of PIB Klaytn-mainnet swap.

During the mainnet swap, token deposit and withdraw will be suspended. Please see below for more detailed information.

Schedule

1. Suspension of Withdraw/Deposit: Thursday, July 25th, 12pm KST

2. Token swap: Friday, July 26th

3. Withdraw/Deposit Reopen: After monitoring mainnet status (future announcement)

Token Swap Information

All PIB tokens held on Coinone will be exchanged to the Klaytn mainnet at a 1:1 ratio.

Notice:

1. Any coins deposited after the suspension of deposit/withdraw will not be swapped

2. After suspension of deposit/withdraw, you can use token transactions as usual.

3. Since the transfer wallet address will be created after the mainnet swap, please remember to create a new payment address.

4. Important: After the mainnet swap, sending tokens to a wallet or cryptocurrency address that does not support Klaytn mainnet tokens can result in coin lose. This means your coins could be unrecoverable.

Coinone is in close consultation with the project team to protect your assets.

Thank you.
Beyoncé’s “Countdown” Video
By: Edith Zimmerman
Tags: Music, Beyonce, Music Videos

Spiralbound editor. Formerly at The Hairpin. Also now making a newsletter: https://drawinglinks.substack.com

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Claire Abernathy, Ph.D.
Tags: G21c Contributors

Claire Abernathy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stockton University and a Corresponding Fellow with the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability at Ohio State University. Her research focuses on how members of Congress develop their understanding of constituent opinion and how constituents’ preferences and priorities inform their legislative work. Her current work focuses on the role of technology in facilitating member-constituent communications. She also has ongoing research projects focused on civic education and assessment. Her research has been featured in Legislative Studies Quarterly, Congress & The Presidency, and the Journal of Political Science Education.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Vanderbilt University in 2015.
Fear of NOT Flying
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Humor, Flying, Motherhood, Airports, Comics

Getting to college is hard, especially when the TSA is involved.
Blame The Muse.
Tags: Poetry, Writing

Blame the muse.

For what’s a writer’s use?

Certainly, not to thrill and amuse.

But rather, to violently abuse,

Letters, words and literary tools.

Till tired, aching and confused

They refuse to move.

Blame the muse.

For what’s a writer’s use?

Certainly, not to display wit and flair,

But rather to capture and share,

His dreams, wishes and fears.

And lay these bare.

Look, a writer,

Ridicule’s willing volunteer.

So blame the muse,

Not the writer that it chose to use.

For we merely convey,

The aroma from life’s cooking pot to you.
Susan Orlean on the beautiful ephemerality of digital books:
By: Eliot Peper
Tags: Media, Writing, Publishing, Digital Life, Books

Susan Orlean on the beautiful ephemerality of digital books:

“Ebooks reduce the experience of the book to something almost vaporous, a whisper, as if the book traveled to you on the wind. Oddly, that makes them more like where the whole undertaking of storytelling began, with oral recitation.”
Are You New Here?
By: Rose Bak
Tags: Writing, Self Help, Romance, Biography, Yoga

Are You New Here?

Check out some of my most popular stories.

Photo by Christina Murphy, shirt courtesy of My Girl Murphy

Hello and thank you for following me. My name is Rose Bak. I am a writer based in Portland, Oregon.

I am a dedicated multipotentialite which means I have a wide array of interests and creative pursuits. I write about everything from yoga and mindfulness, business, personal finance, self-help, animals, humor, aging and so much more.

In addition to my work here on Medium, I am a published author of romantic fiction, I teach accessible yoga and I work in social services.

Here are some of my most popular posts for you to enjoy. Thanks for reading!

Business and Personal Finance

Animals

Self-Help and Life Lessons

Humor

Health
A Coding Bootcamp Gave Me Career Direction
By: Pitchsinee Veerakajorn
Tags: Careers, College, Programming, Women, Education

A Coding Bootcamp Gave Me Career Direction

I believe that Código Ecuador will start a movement that will encourage and inspire youth and women to take control of their future

Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

Let’s face it: My college years were a series of mistakes centered around my inability to face my fear of being outside of my comfort zone. I‘ll be honest with you and say that I’m one of those people who liked to stick to what I know in college. If only I had been more adventurous, I would have discovered how much I like web development sooner.

I stuck to the people who were close to me in high school, ate a lot of the food I already know, and was dead set in my dream of beginning a career as a surgeon with golden hands.

Of course, as any story goes, things popped up: beautiful things that I didn’t expect, like how I got my first taste of coding.

Coding opened my mind to new possibilities

It was in a statistics class later in my college years that I was introduced to R Studio and saw its potential with data visualization. From there, I joined HackCville, a coding bootcamp that teaches people in the community technical skills like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The organization exposed me to the beautiful world of computer programming and changed my mind about my career goals.

Now, as someone who has gotten a chance to delve deeper into coding within the last few months, I can’t imagine a world where I hadn’t been introduced to web development. Through coding, I have met a broad spectrum of people and learned new skills and life lessons like how to work in a team.

I’m incredibly grateful for these people, and I hope to give the same experience to those who don’t have access. Nonetheless, I wished I had gained more exposure to coding through a coding bootcamp at an earlier time.

Its impact on my life and the movement that the organization will start in the community is why I am excited to take part in Código Ecuador.

Nonprofit technology education will promote self-discovery

Código Ecuador is an organization on a mission to help youths and women realize their potential in the field of technology. As a part of this organization, I can support others to discover themselves, preferably without all the hoops I went through.

In today’s tech scene, coding has become one of the most sought-after skills. Through Código Ecuador, youths and women will be able to explore the technology field with more support and fewer risks. They will have the opportunity to have a look at what could potentially be their future occupations.

I believe that Código Ecuador will start a movement that will encourage and inspire youths and women to take control of their future. These skills will allow them to not only better themselves, but their family, community, and nation.

Read more about the global potential of nonprofit coding camps