fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Lasso and Ridge: the regularized Linear Regression
By: Dipanshu Prasad
Tags: Regression, Machine Learning, Linear Regression, Data Science, Statistics

The Linear Regression is the classic and the simplest linear method of performing regression tasks. It brings us the power to use the raw data as a tool and perform predictive and prescriptive data analysis. But, being simple doesn’t discredit its usability in any way. Linear Regression is still a very powerful and widely deployed algorithm for the various advantages it provides:

It can be used for fairly large datasets

It is very interpretable: It is very easy to figure out why our model gave the particular output to a given input.

Features don’t need to be scaled before fitting a regression linear model onto them

No need to worry about adjusting parameters because there are none

However, as it is often said that every great thing has a flipped side, this one is no exception.

Too much simplicity of the simple linear model leaves us with no control over its complexity. It just tries to achieve a single goal and that is to reduce the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of the data using a suitable hyperplane.

The simple linear model is prone to both under fitting and overfitting.

Too much randomness in the data or a complex relationship between features and target lead to underfitting. A possible solution to this problem is to introduce “new” complex polynomial features to help the model identify the trend in the data better. You can find more about polynomial features at https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/polynomial-regression-the-curves-of-a-linear-model-bef70876c998.

Too many features to learn from and relatively fewer number of samples often lead to overfitting. We have a few elegant solutions to this problem at our disposal in the form of Lasso and Ridge Regressions. Using these tools, we intentionally decrease a model’s complexity because we wish it focuses more on generalizing well to new data rather than learning each and every data point, including the outliers.

We need to be familiar with a some terminologies before we proceed.
My Lockdown Fitness — Cleaning. How to improve your time spent at home.
By: Nikki Petrova
Tags: Mental Health, Fitness, Productivity, Self Improvement, Lockdown

My Lockdown Fitness — Cleaning

How to improve your time spent at home.

Photo by Volha Flaxeco on Unsplash

The past few months have been weird for me. With studying and working happening from home, I have never been less physically active.

I never liked going to the gym. This doesn’t mean I wasn’t active. I was doing a lot of walking, every day achieving the 10K steps goal. I also went jogging from time to time and did some home exercises. Now it’s too cold outside for jogging, and also walking around the city is not that pleasant during the winter.

Following 30-minute workout videos on YouTube gets boring after a while, so I discovered a productive way to do my daily exercise. Cleaning. For many people cleaning is a boring task they procrastinate in doing. I used to think the same way, until recently.

Turn on your favorite music and start dancing and singing while doing it. It turns into a quite fun and relaxing activity. Especially after an annoying Zoom-call.

If you want a more intensive workout - move all the furniture and clean behind it.

For a whole-body workout, deep clean your bathroom. Trust me on this. You will feel exhausted, but also satisfied with the result.

After the bathroom comes time to clean the kitchen. And I don’t mean just wiping the floor. When was the last time you cleaned your oven or the aspirator?

Don’t forget to get rid of all the things you don’t need from your closets and pantries. Donate them to people in need or sell them online for some extra cash.
Go Beyond Fixing Bugs
By: Utpal Kumar
Tags: Life Lessons, Philosophy, Personal Development, Self Improvement, Technology

Putting excess conditions affects wellbeing

Putting conditions in the evaluation of a stimulus to give a certain response may make us more mature but we should understand that excess of it can cause us to be stressed out. For instance, consider the program below:

function process_stimulus(input_Msg) { person_religion = get_Person_Religion() if(person_religion == ‘Christian’) { person_economic_status = get_Economic_Status() if(person_economic_status == ‘Rich’) { person_status = get_Person_Status() if(person_status == ‘Married’) { response = process_Input(input_Msg) return response } } } }

In the above program, ‘process_stimulus’ is the function that evaluates a response based on the input_Msg. The input_Msg can be as simple as “a smile from the other person”. A person who puts in a lot of conditions in evaluating a response may first try to get the religion of the other person. Then he may decipher the economic status and the marital status of the person and only then process the actual input. His response may be a frown or a slight smile based on the conditions he has evaluated. Thus, there is a lot of extra processing happening in the mind of the person and the outcome may not actually be good either.

A person with a lot of conditions in the evaluation of a response may need to reprogram his mind. He needs to go through the existing program and remove unnecessary conditions and replace them with a simple one. For instance, the previous program may be replaced by the below program:

function process_stimulus(input_Msg) { gender = get_Person_Gender() if(gender == ‘Female’) { response = process_Input(input_Msg) return response } }

In the above program, the person does not evaluate his response based on earlier conditions like religion, economic status, etc of the other person. He just considers if the other person is ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ and gives back an appropriate response. For instance, if the input_Msg (an input to function process_stimulus) is a smile from the other person then based on whether the other person is a male or female, his response may vary. If the other person is a male then he may give a response of a smile along with the ‘How are you doing?’ statement. While if the other person is a female then he may give a big smile but skip making any comment.
cigars.
By: Evelyn Roe
Tags: Haiku Hub, Creative Writing, Short Story, Poetry, Haiku

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On Being Asked For A “Bio”
By: Mike Essig
Tags: Poetry, Biography, Memories, Aging

Only the present speaks

with any persuasion.

An old guy, living alone

with a neurotic cat,

stringing words together,

waiting around to die.

Just what is.

Everything prior,

a half forgotten lie.
【山女孩】那幸福的一天-日本荒島岳
Tags: Mountains, 中文, Hiking, Japan, 荒島岳

in Both Sides of the Table
I’d Love To Hang Out, But Only If It’s Super Convenient For Me
By: Megan Rogers
Tags: Relationships, Friendship, Social, Humor, Satire

I’d Love To Hang Out, But Only If It’s Super Convenient For Me

Oh my gosh, I totally responded to this in my head.

Photo by Jesse Schoff on Unsplash

I’d love to hang out! Any chance we could get together between 4 pm and 4:39 pm? And can you come over to my place?

It’s been so long since I last saw you. I miss you! Can I invite my friend Molly to our get-together? She’s insufferable and only talks about her pet hamster, so you and I can silently suffer together.

Are you planning on being available to hang out on Saturday no matter what? I’m not sure what time I’ll feel like socializing, but if you want to wait around for me to maybe text you, let’s make it happen!

Hi, sorry I’m late in replying. It’s been so crazy around here. Want to come to my place and watch a movie? On the way, can you stop and get pizza and wine and laundry detergent and quinoa? Actually, I’ll just text you my grocery list :)

Oh my gosh, I totally responded to this in my head. I’m booked at the spa all day, but it would cheer me up so much if I could see you. Want to sit in the waiting room at the spa and we can hug in between my massage and my reiki session? Now that I know you’re free at this time, you can’t say no!

I was just thinking about you!!!!! Remember Chad, who I met when I took you out for drinks after you lost your job? I haven’t talked to him since I ditched you and went home with him and I’m DYING to reconnect. With him, of course. Let’s postpone our movie date and go on a bar crawl with Chad. You can be my wing woman! Chad’s friends are hideous and get worse at karaoke as they drink. It will be FUN!

We NEED to catch up. But I can’t interrupt my sunbathing schedule. Do you want to charter a helicopter and then yell hi while I tan on my private rooftop pool? I’d hate to waste one of my precious guest passes.

Girlie, I am down to clown. Hehehe. OK, but seriously, I don’t prioritize your friendship.
by Martino Pietropoli
By: Martino Pietropoli
Tags: Illustration, Drawing, Painting, Digital, Saturday

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

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Coffee Flavored Politics — The Morning Bliss
By: Manahil Masood
Tags: Philosophy, Politics, Self Improvement, Coffee, Life

Photo by @elusive_sage on unsplash

How delightful it is — blending the soul into the mist of coffee beans while reading the newspaper in the morning. At 8 am, the news, and whence the aroma spreads across the room, brightens the mood and always keeps us intact and rational.

From reading Noam Chomsky to Kim Ghattas, I’ve realized that if we keep comprehending the root purpose of everything. We would get to know more about how the dynamics and the utopia that needs to be changed. We have exercised the system that was told by Plato: can’t make sure we have the mettle to accept the obtuse.

While reading the newspaper, and my favorite book in the morning before my online classes. I make my mind that there are certain things — I need to work simultaneously. At first, commencing the day by believing how I would bring a difference in a fast-paced environment. Secondly, What aspirations could I intend to make for a distinct effect on the purpose of life, and thirdly, the notion of toil.

Politics demands all the things that perish your deposition. We need to bestow ourselves in the realms of how the change is to be alleged. Everyone has their prospects, and they ascertain after some time when the chained bonds inside their head are no more, and they have the contrive in faring things.

I consider all the efforts are extravagant, if your vision towards your life, and whereby to improve the world hasn’t been your precedence to heed. Venerate everything that comes in front of you, so you may not always look into the bright side of the exigency but the dark side too.

While drinking coffee, some like the black one, and they intend to see the bright side of the world perpetually seek into the more unpropitious side. Others, I believe, drink coffee with milk to get a clear conception and not to be sonorous all the time.

Give your brain a jerk while thinking about the dark side of politics. My intentions are not to make Politics look bane, but rather to apprehend it as an inclusive measure to look upon things with every regard.

That’s how the coffee-flavored politics feels. Primarily you need to inhale the smell of coffee to know what is going on nearby, and later dissolve your ideas with the loopholes of the society that would be eradicated by the absolute unanimity.
Reading Is Not Meant to Stress You Out
By: Axelle Gouverneur
Tags: Culture, Reading, Books, Lifestyle, Self

You cannot read it all

We are drowning in books. There are the new titles that keep coming out and the classics we haven’t found our way around yet and a gazillion book recommendations from every website out there.

Books are literally begging us to lay our hands on them. Yet, one thing doesn’t change: our time is limited.

There can be some sort of psychological distress associated with the fact that so many great books exist out there, and we haven’t read them yet.

We think that somehow we won’t have to pick between the books our friends shove in our reading piles and the books that we bought 2 years ago and haven’t read yet.

The truth is that we resist making choices because we’re afraid we’re going to miss out on a great book just by refusing a good enough one.

Yet, a simple calculation can give you a sense of how very limited the number of books you can expect to read in a lifetime is.

How many books do you read a year? If you’re an average American, you’ll read between 4 and 12 a year (12 being the average and 4 the median), according to a study from the Pew Research Center.

But let’s be optimistic and start with the number of books you read in your best year. For me, that number would be around 60, which is the max I have read so far in a year.

Then multiply this number by how long you expect your life to be. For info, the average life expectancy in the US is almost 79, as of 2019.

Being on the threshold of my thirties, I can expect to read 2,900 more books before I reach 79. But only if I can cram my max number of books in each of these years.

If I read 4 books a year, I’d only have 196 book in my entire lifetime left to read.

Now, do you still want to read that dud your aunt gifted you last Christmas?

Considering that new books will not stop being released in the meantime…you might well want to be picky about what you read because every book you didn’t like sure does take the place of another book you could have enjoyed.

Reckon with the fact that you will never be able to read it all. Let that sink in.

You have to make choices.

And that’s okay.
Welfare Reform Would Benefit Us All
By: Darren Hertenstein
Tags: Welfare, Welfare Reform, Reform

Several states in the United States are introducing legislation to limit what Welfare recipients can spend their tax-payer funded money on. Other States should follow these states example.

Maine

Governor LePage introduced a new bill to the Maine legislature to reform welfare. Maine Democrats voted down a similar proposal last year, but this year seem to be on the same page as Maine Republicans. This proposal would make it so that recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds could not spend that money on Alcohol, Tobacco, and Gambling (ex: Lottery Tickets). This comes into addition to them instating drug testing for welfare recipients that have prior drug convictions.

This is in conjunction with a measure Maine passed last year. This measure required recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to either work part time (20 hours a week), enter a vocational program or volunteer (20 hours a month) to qualify for SNAP. This brought the number of SNAP beneficiaries down from 12,000 to 2,500 in 12 months.

Kansas

Kansas lawmakers passed a bill this week that would put into law policies that Governor Sam Brownback had already imposed. This bill would make it so that welfare recipients could not use that money on Movies, Alcohol, Swimming Pools, Vacations, Getting their nails done, Tattoos, Piercings and would put a strict $25/day withdrawal limit. In fact every limitation placed within their law is meant to ensure that the funds only go for essentials, which is essentially want they’re intended for.

Missouri

A bill has been introduced to the Missouri legislature, House Bill 813. Many more progressive news sites are absolutely livid about this bill, that would limit SNAP purchases (to exclude soft drinks, energy drinks, steaks, seafood, cookies, and chips). However they fail to notice that the bill was merely only introduced to the legislature, is fairly poorly written and has had no action in just over 2 months.

Others

12 other states have considered instituting drug testing for welfare recipients. These states even include liberal bastions of thought such as New York, Connecticut, Hawaii and Minnesota.

These movements give a lot of credence to government (and individual) accountability. In times of economic downturn, those whom have tight finances should all be adult enough to limit our expenditures to what we truly need to survive. We should expect our Government and, by default, those on Government assistance to do exactly the same. Forcing the Government to “tighten their belts” and limit their expenditures as well as the expenditures of those on Government assistance is simply a logical move, should they not do it themselves.
Exact xgboost and Fast Histogram xgboost training speed comparison
Tags: Benchmark

Did you ever wanted to compare “unfairly” Exact xgboost and Fast Histogram xgboost? Here you are served.

How unfair our comparisons will be? We are using our results from our series:

This post is mainly for the “eyes” of the reader.

Comparison Setup

Hardware Virtualization

Three servers with their best cumulated runs used:

i7–3930K, 6 cores, 12 threads, 3.9/3.5GHz, VMware virtualization

i7–7700K, 4 cores, 8 threads, 5.0/4.7GHz, KVM virtualization

Dual Quanta Freedom Ivy Bridge, 20 cores, 40 threads, 3.1/2.7GHz, KVM virtualization, NUMA fully optimized

Software Setup

Exact xgboost:

gc(verbose = FALSE)

set.seed(11111)

temp_model <- xgb.train(data = xgb_data,

nthread = i,

nrounds = 50,

max_leaves = 255,

#max_depth = 6,

eta = 0.20,

tree_method = "exact",

#max_bin = 255,

booster = "gbtree",

objective = "binary:logistic",

verbose = 2)

Fast Histogram xgboost:
Copy-Paste Inc.
By: Cristina Juesas
Tags: Journalism, Social Media, Content

Open your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Stay for ten minutes watching the newsfeed as it goes by. What do you see? Aren’t you tired of reading the same things everywhere? Don’t you have the impulse of unfollowing most of the pages you like and half of your friends? I must confess that I’m tempted everyday.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about inspiration and the need for fresh ideas. This need applies not only to bloggers but also to any online publication.

We all know journalism is in crisis. In fact, it has been in crisis for decades, but now, new models imposed by the internet have increased the divide. Few people keeps on reading print editions, and they are getting older. Soon enough, nobody will buy newspapers — the way we used to know them — anymore.

While some media have adopted the online formats (some, have even stopped publishing in print), some others still whine and seem to be out of their natural habitat when you see their posts online. In other cases, what we find is even worse, as copying others contents is in vogue.

This copy-pasting of news everywhere might be caused by globalization; There are less news agencies, so every newspaper around the world buys the same news written by the same journalists everywhere. More than that, some newspapers get inspiration on the internet; so they get news out of Twitter trends, memes or whatever, just to bring on more hits to their sites.

The old motto ‘who hits first, hits twice’ is no longer true, as the success of an article will depend on the abilities of your community managers and on the number of followers you have, not on the quality of the article itself. It seems, again, that they haven’t understood the “new” scenario, which it’s been a while since it’s not that new anymore.

As an example, we can find viral videos, like this one of a girl dancing to Aretha Franklin’s R.E.S.P.E.C.T. at a recital. Uploaded to Facebook by her mother, it has more than 1M shares on that social network, and it has been reproduced on many newspapers globally.
How to Persist Transforming Logic with Swift Combine
By: Kevin Cheng
Tags: Programming, iOS, Swiftui, Swift, Combine

Scan with NSExpression

I was being lazy and trying to work around by hardcoding intialResult with 0 and following the same path with map, then simply scanning with NSExpression . Expression, in this case, can be something like %d + %d — the sum of two integers. Let’s see how that turns out.

enum TransformingOperator: Codable {

case map(expression: String)

case scan(expression: String)

}

We simply added a scan case with the same associated value as the map case:

extension TransformingOperator {

func applyPublisher<Output>(_ publisher: AnyPublisher<Output, Never>) -> AnyPublisher<Output, Never> {

switch self {

。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。

case .scan(let expression):

return publisher.scan(0) { (sum, num) in

let expressionValue =

NSExpression(format: expression,

argumentArray:

[sum, num]).expressionValue(with: nil, context: nil) return expressionValue as! Output

}.eraseToAnyPublisher()

}}

Note that we pass both parameters, sum and num to NSExpression . This seems OK until we build it:

Cannot convert return expression of type 'AnyPublisher<Int, Never>' to return type 'AnyPublisher<Output, Never>'
Mystery
By: Adam Kinyua
Tags: Silence

The Veil. In a world where you can be anything, be kind and full of love. Come, let’s read and write our sorrows away

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Apa Itu Influencer Marketing?
Tags: Digital Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Marketing

in Both Sides of the Table
Stal jsem se bafuňářem
By: Martin Pánek
Tags: Svobodní, Politika, Notes

in Both Sides of the Table
The Revenant con luz natural
Tags: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Revenant, Oscar

in Both Sides of the Table
TryHackMe- Brute It CTF Writeup (Detailed)
By: Hassan Sheikh
Tags: Cybersecurity, Tryhackme, Ctf Writeup, Information Security, Oscp

Just in a few moments we will obtain the password as well as the answer to the question. Submit it.

What is the user:password of the admin panel?

Ans: admin:XXXXXX

Moving on……

Navigate again http://<TARGET_IP>/admin

Insert the credentials and click Login

Superb!! We have obtained web flag and it answers the task. Submit it.

Web flag

Ans: THM {XXXXXXXXXXXX}

We have a link to RSA private key which we will surely check out.

Great!! So we have got the ‘id_rsa’ key but it is encrypted. No worries we will decrypt it.

We can use ‘nano’ editor to save the encrypted private key. Copy the key [Ctrl+U]and save it [Ctrl+O] and exit the editor [Ctrl+X].

We have to decrypt the SSH key and to do that we can use an awesome script that converts the ssh key into the format which john the ripper tool can understand and then brute-force the key with the wordlist to find the correct phrase or password that will allow us to login in ssh.

After we have saved the script onto the host machine it is important to make it executable by using ‘chmod +x ssh2john.py’ command.

We can execute the script, use ‘id_rsa’ file as input argument, and save the output to ‘id_rsa_key’ file

./ssh2john.py id_rsa > id_rsa_key

We will spin up john the ripper tool and use the output file to brute-force with the rockyou wordlist.

Fabulous!! We have obtained the passphrase. It also answers the question in the tasks. Submit it.

Crack the RSA key you found.

What is John’s RSA Private Key passphrase?

Ans: XXXXXXXXX

We can proceed to ssh with the id_rsa file to login in as the user ‘john’ and when prompted to input the passphrase we can use the passphrase cracked through john the ripper.

Marvelous!! We are in!!

Let’s capture the user flag.

Submit it.

user.txt

Ans: THM{XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX}

Task 4- Privilege Escalation:

We need to escalate privileges on this box to become root and capture the root flag.

We will start by looking for any commands or binaries which can be executed by the user ‘john’ as ‘root’. This can be checked by using the command ‘sudo -l’

And indeed there is. The binary ‘cat’ could be executed as root. My go-to to find commands for privilege escalation is gtfobins.

Search for ‘cat’.

We will create LFILE variable to access ‘root.txt’ flag inside the /root directory and then use ‘sudo’ to ‘cat’ the variable set. It will not make us root yet get us the root flag pretty easily.

And here we have it!! Superb!!

Let’s submit it.

root.txt

Ans: THM{XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX}

Similarly, we can also access the shadow file which will contain the root’s password hash.

We have obtained the root’s password hash. Now we need to decrypt it. I believe ‘hashcat’ tool will work like a charm and crack it successfully.

Hashcat is a superb hash-cracking tool with a lot of supported hash types. It is highly important for us to identify the type of hash we need to crack and search the correct number of mode to set in ‘hashcat’ in order to crack it.

To find the mode number for the hash we can go to the link below:
Silence
By: R. Rangan Phd
Tags: Inspiration, Psychology, Silence, Mindfulness, Poetry

Silence

A Quest

Photo by D L on Unsplash

I sit here with sounds

that surround me everywhere

I crave the silence

that I cannot find anywhere

And the quest is on.

The wisdom says

The answers are within you

The reaction insists

it must be done fast

The projection persists

that blame lies elsewhere

The action is simply

thrilled to go on.

Silence is the prize

One can only achieve when

the reaction is down,

projection is out,

the action is calm

and the wisdom shines

I think I’ll seek out my friends

Reflection and introspection

Together we will meditate

And surely we will find

a way to peace and quiet

And perhaps Silence!
Building a Hotel Recommendation System in PySpark
By: Mohammad Ibrahim Khan
Tags: Machine Learning, Recommendation System, Cosine Similarity, Algorithms, Pyspark

Introduction:

What is a Hotel Recommendation System?

A hotel recommendation system aims at suggesting properties/hotels to a user such that they would prefer the recommended property over others.

Why is a Hotel Recommendation System required?

In today’s data-driven world, it would be nearly impossible to follow the traditional heuristic approach to recommend millions of users an item that they would actually like and prefer.

Hence, a Recommendation System solves our problem where it incorporates user’s input, historical interaction, and sometimes even users demographics to build an intelligent model to provide recommendations.
2 of My 280 Posts Account for Over 20% of My Views, Reads, and Earnings
By: Tom Belskie
Tags: Productivity, Blogging, Creativity, Writing, Marketing

2 of My 280 Posts Account for Over 20% of My Views, Reads, and Earnings

And neither post resides in a major publication

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

I’ve hit publish 280 times in two years on this platform and I have very modest results to show for it.

By my count, these posts have garnered approximately 60,000 views and nearly 30,000 reads.

In total, they’ve made me $1,464.59 or about $56/month. Which, when I type it out here for the world to see, is moderately depressing considering how many hours I’ve poured into those 280 posts. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’m grateful to be able to make any money at all from my writing.

But…

Even if I only spent an average of one hour on each post (though the real number is surely much higher than that), I’m making a paltry $5.23/hr for my efforts. So, there’s that.

Nonetheless, I’ve been analyzing my numbers to try to gain some perspective on these last two years and, while they are quite pedestrian indeed, something interesting jumped out at me:

A mere two of my posts account for 12,500 of those views and 7500 of those reads. They’ve combined to earn me $466.02.

Two out of 280 equates to less than 1% of my posts and yet they’ve generated:

20% of my reads

25% of my reads

32% of my earnings

And the real kicker? Neither is published in a major publication. One was rejected outright multiple times.

Both are housed here, on my personal publication, which has a measly 357 followers at the time of this writing.

I also spent less than an hour writing each of them. I wrote both quickly, in fits of inspiration, and slapped them up there without much thought or hope that they would take off in any significant way.

So, what does this all mean?

Well, who knows really?

Your guess is as good as mine.

But here are some takeaways or lessons learned that have occurred to me after looking at these statistics.
‘Until Dawn’: An Interactive Horror Story
By: Manor Vellum
Tags: Choices, Horror, Entertainment, Videogames, Until Dawn

This opening action definitely gets to the point of the game. How will your choices be rewarded or punished? Fast forward a year and Josh wants to have another vacation at the house with the same group of friends. When they all end up splitting up into pairs, life or death situations follow them at every turn as they’re stalked by a lunatic on the mountain, as well as the same “something” that forced Beth and Hannah off the cliff.

The first third of the game successfully establishes the creepy atmosphere. Jump scares and spooky happenings are around every corner, but no one can die. The game doesn’t start to actually pick up until Jessica and Mike wander off to a separate cabin in the woods, where, of course, Jessica is taken by (presumably) a monster. This is the first event that happens post-twins where we’re not sure if a character is alive or dead. Mike follows after Jessica, and this is the first time (as far as I can tell) that your actions influence a character’s life or death outcome. If Mike is too slow to follow after Jessica, or if you miss too many QTEs, or if you take the slower path, Jessica will be dead when you find her. So then, is this really a case of driving the narrative yourself, or is it a test in being good at knowing where buttons are on the controller? I suppose, in a way, it’s both. You (playing as Mike) are making the choice to be risky for the sake of Jessica or to play it safe for Mike’s own sake. But mostly it feels like it’s out of your control as the player.
If I Wasn’t a Writer — I Would Be a Fighter Pilot
By: Timothy Key
Tags: Leadership, Writing, Dreams, Innovation, Self-awareness

This article is in response to a writing challenge posed by Sherry McGuinn answering the question — “What would you be if you weren’t a writer?” This challenge was made within the ILLUMINATION publication, but I am choosing to pull in some of those outside the publication as an extension of Sherry’s challenge. So, if you have no idea why you were tagged in this, or what in the world is going on, that is why.

Without further ado, if I wasn’t a writer, I would be a fighter pilot. But before we get into that story, I need to lead with this one:

Before I was a writer, I was a firefighter.

I spent 26 years in the fire service, two as volunteer then 24 professional full-time years. I worked in a variety of roles including firefighter, fire engine driver, paramedic, fire engine captain, division chief in charge of EMS, assistant chief over a variety of divisions and also interim fire chief. The big boss. Which, in a city fire department is really just a middle manager in the city services, but the title is cool: THE Fire Chief.

I have run into burning buildings many times. Kicked in doors, cut up roofs and walls of buildings with chain saws to ventilate them, bashed in windows, driven really fast with the lights and sirens on, blown the air horn therapeutically at drivers that wouldn’t move over, brought people back to life, watched helplessly while people died in spite of our best efforts, administered Narcan way before anyone even knew what Narcan was, paralyzed people and put a tube in to assist in breathing, stuck needles directly into peoples’ hearts, and lain awake at night at home second-guessing whether there was anything I could have done better to make a difference.

I have been on television and in the newspaper many times. Here we are cutting up some poor family’s very fancy roof after the husband caught it on fire using a propane torch to loosen up old paint under the eaves. We chased the fire around for hours as it smoldered its way through the densely layered cedar shake roof. I am in the red helmet in the ladder truck bucket.
Let’s Not Give Up On Human Connection
By: Sarah Ammoura
Tags: Friendship, Social Media, Society, Happiness, Millennials

Our generation seems to have given up on making new friends and it’s scarier than you may think.

We are so lonely, yet we find it so difficult to reach out to people and build friendships.

Is it too much work? Are we too busy? Are we simply shy and awkward?

There isn’t really one explanation for it, but one thing for sure is that millennials are the loneliest they have ever been.

While we can all agree that this period of social distancing has drastically increased our feelings of loneliness — we also need to remind ourselves that it’s only a problem that has been building for years.
Développer la participation citoyenne avec WAP Cycla Conseil
By: Diane Lenne
Tags: City Living, Citoyen, Peer To Peer, Democracy

News about peer learning and learning innovations. We help people in organizations to connect to their peers and learn from each other.

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Spotify Registers with FCC for Devices; The National, Bon Iver Launch Streaming Service; Is the Music Industry Still Rooting for Tidal?
By: Platform
Tags: Music, Streaming Music, Spotify, Music Business

Spotify Hardware Ambitions: Company Registers With FCC for Devices — variety.com

Spotify has registered with the FCC, a key step to get wireless devices approved for use in the U.S.

The National and Bon Iver launch streaming service ‘PEOPLE’, share Leonard Cohen cover — www.nme.com

The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Bon Iver have today released a BETA version of their streaming service PEOPLE.

Why the Music Industry Is Still Rooting For Tidal, Despite Chronic Payment Issues — www.billboard.com

Tidal, Jay-Z’s streaming service, has become notorious for late payments to labels, but the music industry has largely kept quiet about the matter, banking on its forward-thinking partnership deals and a higher-priced $19.99/month premium audio tier.

Spotify Offers Managers, Artists Advances to License Music Directly to Its Streaming Service — www.billboard.com

Spotify has offered advances to a number of managers and indie acts in exchange for licensing their music directly to the streaming service, sources tell Billboard.

Shazam Predicts Song of the Summer 2018 — www.billboard.com

Ariana Grande, Drake and Ella Mai are among Shazam’s picks for Song of the Summer dominance

Muzeroom launches app to deliver news for the artist you’re listening to — www.theindustryobserver.com.au

MuzeRoom, the world’s first smart content curation platform for music, has launched its app to deliver music news for the artist you’re listening to.

Jimmy Jam lands new music talk-show on SiriusXM radio — www.startribune.com

The first program on Thursday will feature guests Questlove and Terry Lewis.

Midemlab 2018 pitches: Marketing and data / analytics startups — musically.com

20 music/tech startups are finalists in this year’s Midemlab contest at the Midem conference in Cannes. This afternoon’s second session saw the marketing and data/analytics startups pitching their wares.

Amazon launches Alexa and Amazon Prime Music in France — www.digitaltveurope.com

Amazon has launched its Alexa and Echo voice-enabled assistants in France, with TV technology provider Netgem named among the companies that will integrate the technology in their devices.

Apple Music web player allows for song streaming outside of iTunes — www.cnet.com

But don’t uninstall iTunes just yet.

Midemlab 2018 pitches: Music discovery and distribution — musically.com

20 music/tech startups are finalists in this year’s Midemlab contest at the Midem conference in Cannes.
Report: CARDITELLO
By: Kapu Coin
Tags: Bitcoin, Dpos, Blockchain, Archaeology, Decentralization

Kapu’s presence at the event has been of fundamental importance: those present got to know the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

During the evening, moreover, at the Kapu corner it was possible to understand how livecoin.net — the exchange Kapu is listed in — works, and the team helped anyone who showed interest in activating their own account — through the use of computers made available by Kapu — in order to allow the purchase of our cryptocurrency in the following days.

- Written by Giuseppe Pascale -
How To Camp Sustainably
By: Wild Ark
Tags: Camping, Travel, Outdoors, Sustainability

Sitting around a campfire, falling asleep under the stars or collecting water from the closest stream — these are just some of the things about camping that make us feel whole and connected to something greater than ourselves. We are all part of the natural world, and that sense of belonging we feel when we connect with it comes with great responsibility. Responsibility to care for the environment and leave it better than we found it. With this in mind, here are five tips to camp more sustainably and respect the natural environment.

Choosing Your Camp Spot

One of the most important aspects of camping is choosing the right spot. The best experiences are the most immersive ones, you want to be surrounded by nature to soak up all the benefits. Choose a site that is close to a resource like firewood (provided you are not in a national park), water such as a river, stream or spring and shelter such as a tree or cave for shade.
Found in Translation: The Real Star of Bong Joon-Ho’s “Parasite”
By: Frances Kang
Tags: Parasite 2019, Bong Joon Ho, Film, Oscars, Korean

Interpreter Sharon Choi with “Parasite” director Bong Joon-Ho

No one is perhaps more surprised than South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho by the runaway success of his film “Parasite”. After winning the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last May, the foreign-language film has gone on to collect a bevy of international accolades and at its climax, make Oscars history by taking home best picture at the Academy Awards.

Widely acclaimed as an upstairs-downstairs drama, “Parasite” is about a poor Korean family who hustles their way into a rich household only to confront the original parasites already living there. The arrival of a lucky stone-turned-monkey’s paw sets off a chain of events that transmogrifies the story from social satire and family drama to ghost story and horror film. It is director Bong at his finest with a black comedy of errors that not only turns capitalism on its head but also explores the social breakdown that follows in its tragic wake.

Through “Parasite”, Bong has become a conspicuous fixture on the awards circuit, disarming both fans and critics with his humble enthusiasm and unexpected candor. He has also become famous in his own right by earning droll monikers like “Bong d’Or”, #BongHive, and “Bongtail”.

But alongside Bong, there has emerged another unlikely albeit inadvertent star who has been instrumental to Bong’s success. You would be wrong to guess Song Kang-Ho, the film’s protagonist and Bong’s frequent collaborator who has accompanied him on his cast interviews. Nor is it Park So-dam of “Jessica Jingle” fame or Korean-Canadian Choi Woo Shik who plays the Kim family’s son.

The most visible person in the whole line-up is none other than Bong’s translator, Sharon Choi.
Kendall Rank Correlation — Python
By: Joseph Magiya
Tags: Python, Correlation, Data Science, Data Visualization, Data

Kendall Rank Correlation using python, how??

Do you know enough about the Kendall Rank Correlation? — Hopefully, this will add on to what you know. This is a very exciting item for me to touch on especially because it helps to uncover complex and unknown relationships between the variables in your data set which you can’t tell just by looking at the data. + This saves a lot of time. Hurray! 🙌

I’ll go directly into how we can do this in python.

We’ll use the dataframe.corr(). If you need a quick intro on this — check out my explanation of dataframe.corr().
🔥Reward campaign for current Users of SIMDAQ platform!🔥
Tags: Cryptocurrency Investment, Cryptocurrency News, Startup, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Thank you for choosing SIMDAQ Platform! Your feedback is highly appreciated. Please leave your testimonial about the experience of working with SIMDAQ Platform. Testimonial form is available on the main page of SIMDAQ Platform dashboard.

The information will be used for improving our product and services. It might be published on our website www.simdaq.com, SIMDAQ Platform and other digital sources. Every participant of this campaign will get a good bonus from SIMDAQ Team!

Terms of participation:

1. “SIMDAQ Reward campaign for current Users” starts on the 21 November 2018 and ends on the 19 December 2018

2. One user can participate only with one account. In case that we note any double-registrations, duplicate accounts (except the initial one) will be permanently banned from the campaign.

3. As a reward for the “Reward campaign” activities, you will receive SMQ tokens to your SIMDAQ Platform account. Results will be declared in 3 days after the close of the campaign.

4. Every participant should fill out our testimonial form.
My Ovaries Last Performance in the Ballet of Menopause
By: Debbie Walker
Tags: Life Lessons, Health, Menopause, Mental Health, Behavior

Behavior

I’ll give you a little preview of the brain on menopause in the program of the last ballet. Our neurons have receptors receiving these highs and lows of the dancing hormones, such as oxytocin, which are derived from estrogen production.

When estrogen is decreased, our brains go into overdrive, and the result is a complete disruption in the chain of biochemical activity. The production of mood chemicals serotonin and dopamine also can go awry, and our behavior is affected negatively.

I know when all of this happens to me because I get crazy and throw a fit over nothing, or I get depressed.

Anger

Yesterday, for example, my grandson brought a cup of chocolate milk into my bedroom, spilled it on the floor, and hid the cup under my bed. As I walked into the room, I slipped and fell sideways on the bed.

I got mad, yelled, and fussed at him for five minutes, then I sat down and cried.

This is very uncharacteristic for me. My grandson was in tears, I was in tears, and everyone else thought I had lost my mind.

Well, I had. The activity of my brain ran amuck.

I recall another time when I was out of tea; I burst in tears (again) and hobbled to my room, crying that nobody cares!

Depression

I have been clinically depressed since the diagnosis in my twenty’s. However, when menopause kicked in, depression leaped high in the air and remained suspended mid-flight for about ten years.

She gracefully landed about five years ago and was ground level, or so I thought. I started feeling sad again and got depressed.

Why is this happening? I went to my doctor, and she gave me a list of things to try, along with my medications. The good news is; I noticed I felt better!

Good News

I view the items listed not as something I have to do, but something I get to do. When I express anticipation of these things, they become an adventure. I look forward to the process.

· Eat foods rich in calcium and vitamin D such as dairy and leafy green vegetables. I combine the two by eating hard-boiled eggs in my spinach salad.

· Achieve and maintain a healthy weight. This is hard for me even without menopause. I just have to make a little more effort.

· Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. I love my fruits and veggies, especially oranges and broccoli. You’ll be surprised by the delicious recipes on the web that combines these two ingredients.

· Exercise regularly. Even though I cannot walk for more than fifty feet, I still do sit down exercises in my chair.

· Eat foods that are high in phytoestrogens. Tofu, soybeans, and flaxseed are rich phytoestrogens. I guess the name speaks for itself.

· Drink enough water. I drink about four sixteen-ounce glasses a day. I always feel better after drinking a big glass of ice-cold water.
Master Using Sktime For Time Series Classification(part 2) In Just A Few Hours!
By: Mrinal Walia
Tags: Python, Scikit Learn, Sktime, Time Series Analysis, Classification Algorithms

Univariate time series classification with sktime

In the Univariate time series classification, we have a single time series variable and multiple instances of labels associated with it. The goal is to learn the relationship between time series and labels and accurately predict the label of the new time-series. In the univariate dataset, a single column can contain not only floats, integers or strings, but also the entire time-series data in the form of a pd.Series or np.array .

Load the arrowhead dataset.[The arrowhead dataset consists of outlines of the images of arrowheads. We have to do the classification of projectile points. The classes are based on shape distinctions such as the presence and location of a notch in the arrow.]

from sktime.datasets import load_arrow_head X, y = load_arrow_head(return_X_y=True)

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y) print(X_train.shape, y_train.shape, X_test.shape, y_test.shape)

X_train.head()

Univariate Time-Series Dataset

from sktime.classification.compose import TimeSeriesForestClassifier

from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score



X, y = load_arrow_head(return_X_y=True)

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y) # initialize the classifier object and fit the model on x_train and # y_train

classifier = TimeSeriesForestClassifier()

classifier.fit(X_train, y_train) #make predictions and print the accuracy score for performance

y_pred = classifier.predict(X_test)

accuracy_score(y_test, y_pred)

Output: 0.792452830188678937

Why can't we just use scikit-learn?

We can also use scikit-learn but using scikit learn can bring many difficulties. First, we need to convert the data into the required tabular format by treating time points as separate features but we need to ignore the fact that they are ordered in time, but if we change the order of features, when we fit the model and make predictions our predictions won't change at all, although this can work sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.
Job titles and mixtapes
By: Ben Ralph
Tags: Recruiting, Transformation, Product Management, UX Design, Agile

Why did we need generic job titles in the past?

Job titles were information architecture

Job titles allow employers to quickly articulate what kind of employees they are looking for. Job titles make it easier for job candidates to filter and consume job ads more efficiently.

Think back to before the internet, when you found job ads in newspapers, before we had advanced search and LinkedIn recommending jobs based on our skills and activity. Imagine having to read the full body text of each ad before ruling it relevant or irrelevant.

Imagine you’re a plumber; without titles, you’d be reading ads for electricians and dressmakers. With titles, you can skip right past those alphabetically until you make it to the Ps (for plumbers).

As a designer, I see this as a classic information architecture problem. One we can change.

You can hopefully see the similarity here with music distribution.

Back when the only way to buy music was on physical media, we were limited by how we could categorise it. It needed a band name, it needed a genre, and it needed a title.

Back before Spotify could monitor our preferences and make personalised recommendations we’d have to travel to a store, flick through 1000s of CDs one by one until we found the one we were looking for.

The cost of browsing was high and very time consuming. We needed to have ‘favourite bands’ and ‘favourite genres’ or else all the possible choices would paralyse us.

The internet has liberated music discovery. No more trips to the store; we can now sample before we buy and we have some of the smartest people in the world building better algorithms to recommend exactly the right music to us at exactly the right time.

The internet will do the same for job discovery. Jobs will be more targeted, more personalised, and they will be recommended to us so we don’t need to go hunting for them.