fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The National Discussion Contributor Guidelines
By: Jonah Woolley
Tags: Contributor Guidelines, Contributor, The National Discussion

Starting today, we’re opening up The National Discussion to contributors. If you’re interested in politics and want to write about it, we’ll be happy to take anything you have and put it out there.

Below are some of the details regarding submissions to our publication and what you can write about (it’s pretty open), as well as our contact info.

Topics

With The National Discussion, you can write about virtually anything, as long as it pertains to American politics or America’s involvement in international politics. The only limit is that you shouldn’t write about something we already have an article on, but just check with us before you write an article to make sure it isn’t a repeat and you should be good to go.

We’re also looking for more opinionated articles. Factual articles have their place, but we want to be a collection of opinions so that we can serve as a portfolio of people’s perspectives and spur discussion in the community.

We welcome all kinds of opinions — liberal, conservative or otherwise. We want to have as many different perspectives as possible, and we won’t block articles just because we disagree with them.

Images

We don’t really have a hard or fast rule when it comes to images for articles. We appreciate it if you can find an image for your own article — just make sure you have the rights to use it — but if you don’t, it’s not a problem. We can always add our own image to it once it’s published.

Rules

We’ll mostly give you autonomy with the articles you write for us. To submit an article for the first time, leave a private note on this article and we can add you as a writer, then you’ll simply add your article to the publication under your Medium account.

After your first time, you can submit your article directly to us through Medium, and we’ll process it.

When it comes to submissions, we will likely take around a day to review your article and decide whether or not to publish it. If we decide to publish it, we will simply put it up on our publication, and if we do reject it we’ll leave a private note on your article explaining why, and we may let you resubmit if you fix the errors with it.

For the articles themselves, we won’t change the content within them. You can write in any way you want, just don’t do anything super inappropriate. We might make minor changes for grammar and structure, but aside from that, it will go up in the form you send it to us, so make sure you’re happy with what you wrote when you submit it.

We’ll also allow links to your own social media or other things at the bottom of your article, just don’t be excessive.
Jesus’s Worst Miracles. Even saviors aren’t perfect
By: Mark Peters
Tags: Miracles, Jesus, Jerks, Christmas, Humor

Walking on frozen water.

Curing a leper’s cold.

Teaching a man who could not speak to mansplain.

Burning a hole in his manger with his super-pee.

Showing a sick child how to sneeze hard enough to make his head explode.

Helping the blind see apocalyptic visions of horror, 24–7.

Curing a man’s cabin fever by burning down his cabin with super-savior-pee.

Multiplying the jerks along with the loaves, due to inconsistent control of his math powers.

Figuring out a tip without the help of his friend John, whose math powers were more reliable.

Making jeans into cut-offs with no scissors, thanks to his super-savior-lava-pee.

Pulling off the man-sandal look, which was actually kind of impressive.

Turning bats into vampires after drinking too much wine, dooming humanity to forever live in fear of undead monsters.

Multiplying the jerks again, this time on purpose to feed the vampires, though this just led to a new race of jerkpires.

Turning lepers into werewolves, who became leperwolves, to take care of the jerkpires.

Turning disciples into Frankensteins, who became Frankendisciples, to battle the leperwolves and jerkpires.

Turning wise men into robo-men to fight the jerkpires, leperwolves, and Frankendisciples, but Jesus was no better at robotics than math, and the robo-men just killed everybody.

Drinking enough wine to kill a dinosaur, due to grief over accidentally filling the world with monsters.

Obliterating all remaining life on Earth in a climate catastrophe, leaving it a lifeless husk, thanks to the toxic accumulation of super-savior-lava-death-pee, which increased in volume and potency the more Jesus lamented his monster-making drunkenly.

Opening a multiversal portal to another Earth after fubaring his Earth.

Arriving on our Earth as if nothing happened, whistling innocently.
Keep Calm and Carry On?
By: Reuben Salsa
Tags: Conspiracy Theories, Ideas, Brexit, Politics, Humor

The last time this poster was whitewashed in public was 1939. Produced by the British government to PREPARE citizens for the upcoming war. To raise the morale of the British public.

2.45 million copies produced but rarely seen.

Isn’t that another odd fact?

Rediscovered in a book store in 2000, only two were thought to have originally survived.

Doesn’t that also sound a little strange, a little far-fetched? 2.45 million copies allegedly made during war but rarely seen? The mythical ‘re-appearance’ of a forgotten poster.

All copies were destroyed. Reduced to pulp.

Strangely, a photograph surfaced in 2016 showing it displayed on a wall in a government laboratory during the war! A government lab!

All I’m saying is…Keep Calm and Carry On…

Further reading about this enigmatic poster can be found here and in the Guardian here.
The Federal Reserve & the Great Myth of Stability
By: Lauren Reiff
Tags: Federal Reserve, Economy, Philosophy, World, Finance

The Federal Reserve burst onto the scene in the year 1913, parading under the novel promise of “stability”. Its creation came on the heels of several banking failures which had rattled the nation, prompting a group of highly wealthy American businessmen to smell opportunity and collaborate on a solution. Their proposal? A centralized banking system.

Now, this was not the first time such an experiment had been attempted. American history at this point had already laid claim to two failed chapters of central banking, if the abandoned marble palaces lining the streets of Philadelphia were any indication.

And “stability” was an interesting thing to campaign on. Given that many Americans were suspicious of centralized control (perhaps haunted by the memory of controlling Great Britain), it was necessary for a newly proposed governmentally-entwined bank to be given a prettier face.

And thus, the case was trotted out that the nation was necessarily entitled to this seductive notion of financial stability and later persuaded that it could not be achieved by any means other than a central bank.

Conveniently, public opinion had softened around this matter following the Panic of 1907 which had triggered steep stock market declines and given way to daunting waves of bank runs and bankruptcies, gripping the nation with a a new anxiety which proved to be the perfect breeding environment for a new-and-improved central bank experiment.

Bestowed with a purposely bland title and advertised as cleverly decentralized (thanks to the largely cosmetic feature of a network of twelve, geographically-dispersed banks), the newly-created Federal Reserve lent a new sense of comfort to some citizens optimistic about its supposed stability-producing potential.

Before we go any further, allow me to let you in on a little secret: the great irony of the Federal Reserve is that it is anything but stability-producing! Keep in mind, it has had more than a century to prove otherwise. Unnervingly, greater time only results in the greater production of instability.

The general public does not notice this, naturally. They are understandably placated by the language that Fed officials use: if the Fed ceremoniously states that their actions will “stabilize the economy” then such an utterance is generally sufficient to produce confidence.

After all, the consequences of the Fed’s actions are not straightforward to parse. Instability only really rears its head when a large, system-wide failure occurs (like the ’07-’08 debacle, for example, which the Fed had a significant role in producing!) but it can remain under wraps rather well until such an event implodes on the national stage.

Instability builds in the dark, you see, until something surprising and unfortunate punctures its cover. Another way to put it: the overall product is different from the advertising, but the “product” is not readily visible to the ordinary individual and is necessarily large-scale and thus, tricky to grasp.
That’s in the next release
By: Mark Roddy
Tags: Cryptocurrency Investment, Insights, Cryptocurrency, Product Management

If you have ever worked with software, particularly that of which is in its early development you come to realise very quickly that it’s never quite what you expected. Very rarely are you surprised to the upside.

Our expectations of software are almost always higher than what we are presented with, it is not to say that software doesn’t get there eventually, it does. We are surrounded by software that works and to the average user, the concept of a ‘bug’ remains in the physical world. It’s just the reality that how we perceive software in our head to work often lacks the detail and intricacies that the developers/Business analyst are faced with whilst building. This inevitably leads to delays as these problems are solved (keyword solved).

Product releases are spent talking to product managers about why certain features were not included, why the new features don’t work properly and working out when they will be fixed. Not that those deadlines have any real significance, ultimately we are all at the hands of the developers. Almost all Cryptocurrency projects out there are exactly the same, and this ‘expectation shock’ is only further heightened by the fact that with utility tokens the lines between an investor and a customer are now more blurred.

Expectation shock

Put it this way, Let’s say you download a new app, you like it so you purchase some app tokens because you know next release they are releasing some ‘premium features’ which sound great and you think you can buy them ‘cheap’ now. Almost without a doubt the ‘premium features’ will be less exciting than you imagined….. were told? (marketing can blur the lines here too). Unfortunately, the app tokens you bought turn out to be not as ‘cheap’ and the ‘premium features’ aren’t as premium as you thought either. so what do you do?

Maybe you hold onto them… maybe you sell…inevitably someone will sell. And ultimately that selling pressure leads to a fall in price.

So what is the lesson here?

Our theory is that more often than not the upside of any ‘new feature/new release’ is already priced in, more than likely overpriced because our expectation of what we expect outweighs the utility. Chris Burniskie’s Crypto J Curve is a good analysis of this as well.

There are plenty of Mainnet launches to see if this plays out as we predict. Tron and EOS have both recently launched both with differing results. This thought process is however not limited to main net launches so take the time and analyse the price effect as major upgrades propagate through this space.
7. 알트코인에 대한 간단한 소개
By: Hyungmok Joh
Tags: Korean, Cryptocurrency, Altcoins, 알트코인, 암호화폐

At the forefront of technological innovation, the blockchain industry is constantly changing and growing in an accelerated fashion. The Ceta Network mission is to nurture this evolution by providing foundationally sound projects with visibility and community building.

Follow
Churchill was a hero and a bigot. Churchill was admired and became famous…
By: Ron Advani
Tags: Britain, History, India, Bigotry, Racism

Churchill was admired and became famous for holding his country together and urging his forces to fight the Nazi juggernaut. He is a British hero and was a magnificent leader. He often tops the list of most admired people in Britain. The reality of the man is much more nuanced. He was also a racist who did not attempt to sugarcoat his racist views or pretend he was misunderstood. He was an honest racist. He disliked the brown hordes that Britain ruled and expressed his beliefs openly dispelling any doubts about his views.

Churchill was opposed to independence for India while also saying, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He viewed Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.” He wanted Britain to intervene in and partition China saying “ I think we have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them.The Aryan stock is bound to triumph”. Some years later Hitler was spouting notions of Aryan superiority. The fact that original Aryans migrated to India from Central Asia thousands of years ago was not acknowledged by both these bigots.

Churchill was indifferent to the 1943 Bengal famine that was caused by British mercantile policies over years and the wartime shortages. He viewed the famine as “culling the population” of a people who were “breeding like rabbits”. He reportedly asked how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive. The famine killed 3 million people while the War Cabinet under Churchill did little to provide support instead diverting more resources from India to fight a foreign war. He did not see any contradiction between fighting fascism in Europe to implementing it enthusiastically in India.

Although numerous books extol his greatness and several movies have shown his leadership skills during the second world war his known racism and abject treatment of the populations of the empire is rarely presented. History has largely forgotten his faults and only lauds the heroic side of his complex character.

Obama replaced Churchill’s bust in the Oval office with that of Martin Luther King. Unsurprisingly the bust of Churchill is back in the Oval.
Well, I Love That Dirty Water
By: Corey Corcoran
Tags: Boston, City Living, Comics, Sketchbook, Travel

Spiralbound

Comics for life, brought to life by Edith Zimmerman.
Just setting up my new Medium user profile page.
By: M.G. Siegler
Tags: Blogging, Blog, Medium

Just setting up my new Medium user profile page. Unlike 500ish, my publication, the plan here is to publish interesting links and short blurbs from around the web. You know, like a late 90s/early 00s blog — less like an early/late 10s blog. When blogging and bloggers went pro.
Why I Doubt The Prophet Muhammad was a Paedophile
By: Maximus Confesses
Tags: Islam, Catholic, Aisha, Religion, Muhammad

By http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Allah.svg (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Allah.svg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Why I Doubt The Prophet Muhammad was a Paedophile

A Catholic Defends Islam

Now, for anyone who has read my work, it’s obvious I have no vested interest in defending Islam. However, I do think that in our search for truth challenging unjustified beliefs is important, and I've come to the conclusion that one often cited criticism of Islam is not substantiated. That is, I do not think there is reason to believe Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad, was a paedophile. That’s not to say he obviously wasn't (it’s understandable why many would come to that conclusion, even Muslim), but it’s not a necessity given the information that we know.

The reason many conclude that Muhammad was in fact a paedophile is from various texts which claim he deflowered his wife Aisha when she was nine years of age. Some Muslims dismiss this accusation based on the fact she would be post-pubescent, but even this is a stretch as it reads about her in Sahih al-Bukhari,

‘No, by Allah Who has sent you with the Truth, I have never seen in her anything faulty except that she is a girl of immature age, who sometimes sleeps and leaves the dough for the goats to eat. [1]

However, what does get me to call into question the age of Aisha is not what these accounts are saying, but rather the nature of these accounts. I would contend that they’re useless precisely because they’re not that reliable given their nature as propaganda.

Most of the account of Aisha were meant to emphasis her uniqueness and importance in the Islamic community amongst his wives. One of these qualities which made her important was that she was the only wife he took who was a virgin[2]. Given the variability of young ages present for her, her young age would have been used to emphasize her virginity, making it unquestionable [3].

Now, why give emphasis to Aisha, and make her qualities unquestionable? Well, if one looks to the early disputes within the Islamic community, Shia and Sunni fractions, there were disputes in how the early community viewed her, with the Shia community taking a more negative view, and Sunni Muslims have a more positive view. So, in the face of religious animosity, it would be understandable why there would be a propensity to exaggerate her youth.

Hence, on this issue, I choose to remain agnostic on Aisha’s age and side with Denise Spellberg’s analysis (whose work you can find in the end notes).

End Notes

[1]Sahih Bukhari, Book 48, Numbers 829, Link

[2]Spellberg, Denise, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: the Legacy of A’isha bint Abi Bakr, 30–31

[3] ibid, 40–42
Conceptual Character Photography by Kremer Johnson
By: Alex Ionescu
Tags: Photography, Inspiration

Kremer Johnson (Neil Kremer + Cory Johnson) is a very talented photography team based in Los Angeles, USA. He is specialized in character-based portraits and narrative-driven scenes. They are the winners of some very prestigious awards and their client list includes big names like: CBS, Proctor & Gamble, Hulu, Braun.

You can also check them out on Behance.

You may also like

Best Case Scenario Photography by Danielle Guenther
There Will Be Times in Life When It Feels Like You’re Stuck in Deep Sand
By: Ryan Porter
Tags: Ideas, Life Lessons, Photography, Short Story, Travel

There Will Be Times in Life When It Feels Like You’re Stuck in Deep Sand

A photo essay on why you should accept help if it’s offered to you

Photo by the author

My brand-new Playstation 5 arrived on my porch right as I stepped out my front door for a one night camping trip.

What was I thinking? Any sane person would spend the entire weekend basking in technological greatness. Instead, I was bound to a promise to go sleep in the dirt.

The drive into the desert was mostly uneventful. We ate at Chipotle, stopped one time at a gas station, and made it to the spot in decent time. All the while, I thought about all the game-time I was missing out on.

The time change altered the trip too. I could see the sun going down as we pulled up to the campsite. Large rock formations towered over us on all sides and we were the only ones there except for a few day-climbers who were packing up.

Our caravan pulled up to one of the two fire pits, but my friend wanted to go set up camp at the other one. I looked over, and noticed that the other fire pit was a decent distance away.

There was a sprawling rollercoaster of sandy paths between us as well. My friend’s 4X4 Toyota Tacoma would make it intact. I wasn’t so sure about my car.

It was that same friend who said it might be tough for my truck to get over there because it isn’t a 4X4. He and another from our group walked the path, and determined my truck would make it.

“If you get stuck we’ll get you out. I have a shovel and two straps.” — He said

Trusting my friend’s judgement, I didn’t think twice. We loaded ourselves back in the cars and started our journey. The journey didn’t last long.
By-mail voter registration deadlines
By: Adriana Navarro
Tags: Calendar, Politics, Voter Registration, Elections, Midterms

Grafiti

Grafiti is the first search engine for graphs & charts.
We Need To Talk About Your Christmas “Decorations”
By: Tressie Mcmillan Cottom
Tags: Christmas Decorations, Christmas Lights

Photo by Olena Sergienko on Unsplash

People who follow me on @instagram know that I dabble in home design. In a hostile world, I choose to nest as radical praxis. People who follow me on @twitter know that I recently moved into what can best be described as a suburban Disneyland. This is the first time I have encountered holiday decorating as subculture and identity. I am talking animated displays, layered twinkle lights and displays set to music.

I refuse to be caught slipping. I am wrapping my front porch footstools in big bows to match the blinking “JOY” sign. Don’t start none, won’t be none.

Some folks took, shall we say, another route. And I have questions. They begin with those inflated Christmas yard…things. They’re great if you like used car lots and these things:

Seriously, the inflatables are fine. They are aimed at children, as all decorations should be. They are big and fluffy and some of them light up. Others dance around. They’re great.

Adorable. When they’re…alive. Unfortunately, every morning I wake up to a graveyard of cheerful inflatables. It’s like a crime scene around here. Look at this:
Seller Pro-Tips Methodology
By: Jeff Chang
Tags: Fashion, Data Science, Data

Note: This post is a follow-up to Seller Pro-Tips. If you haven’t read it already, go check it out!

In this post, I wanted to shed some light on the methodology used to arrive at the final seller tips. While this was primarily a data analysis project, following a sound methodology was fundamental in being able to produce something that would actually accomplish the post’s goals.

Keep the Goal in Mind

The main goal of the Seller Pro-Tips post was to generate tips for first-time sellers. While it was tempting to immediately start digging into the data, any insights discovered would have been unusable if they were not applicable to our sellers. Instead, it was important to operate with the goal in mind, focusing only on areas that were actionable and directly relevant to sellers.

Start With the Questions

The first step I took was to place myself in the shoes of a new seller. What would I be confused about? What would make the selling process easier for me? With this context in mind, I went and compiled a list of questions that I would want answered:

How do I title my listing to attract the most buyers?

What do I need to include in my listing description?

How should I take my listing photos?

How long is it going to take for me to sell this item?

Should I hold out for a higher price offer or drop the price for a faster sale?

With this, it became much clearer where I should be looking to generate the final tips.

Be Specific, but Not Too Specific

The final step was to actually answer the questions raised in the previous step. With the questions of interest established, it was simply a matter of finding the right data and identifying the trends within.

However, having the data and statistics is still useless if it is delivered in a way that doesn’t serve the final goal. It wouldn’t be helpful to say something as vague as “long descriptions are worse than shorter ones”, but it would be just as unhelpful to be specific to the point of saying “listings with descriptions with exactly 36 words sell best”. While these would both be accurate representations of the data, they would provide little to no benefit for sellers. Thus, it was necessary that the final deliverable was presented in a form that would be understandable and actionable for sellers.
Text -LSTM(Beginner Guide)
By: Raqueeb Shaikh
Tags: Neural Networks, Embedding, Keras, Hidden Unit, Lstm

LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) are advance versions of RNN (Recurrent Neural Network). The major problem of RNN was that it could not remember long term information as such in Text,Time Series data where information relevant information from the past is to be stored for future use. This is termed as vanishing gradient descent where the weights are updated on the initial layers but as we good much farther to the initial layers of the network the weights are updated very less or none at all.

An example of the Vanishing Gradient Descent problem would be if your weights are updated by 0.0000000001 then those layers wont learn at all or will learn very slowly because of the Vanishing Gradient.

The above problem is solved in LSTM as we have Memory Unit which stores the previous information that is relevant for the network.

LSTM Cell

LSTM Cell ( Source — http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/)

Below is the representation of the internal of a Single LSTM cell and how the information flows from one Gate to another and also from one cell to another .

Forget Gate

The Used of the Forget Gate in to forget the information in the Cell State . The Forget Gate uses Sigmoid activation function which outputs values ranging from (0–1). 0 being to forget the information completely and 1 being to store the information for the next time step. An example of Forget Gate would be as follows

I live in Pune but right now I stay in Hyderabad. So you can drop the order at my present location .

In the above sentence we can see that the location Pune should be dropped in the next time step as the location is changed to Hyderabad. This is the small example of how the Forget Gate works .
Tech Communities: Definitive guides to etch a great growth curve!
By: Bala Priya C
Tags: Women Who Code, Networking, Community, Learning, Technology

Able mentorship, networking with like-minded people, sufficient peer motivation; And an eclectic combination of all the above! Sounds exciting right? Oh.. yeah! Then, It’s time to join the wonderful tech communities out there! “Divided by time zones; United by purpose” would describe them in a single phrase.

Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash

The power of networking

The impact that good networking has on us as individuals is beyond what we can ever comprehend. By signing up to be a part of these tech communities, we get to network with wonderful people from across the globe, from diverse tech backgrounds, with an equally rich variety in expertise and experience. Reaching out to the members of the community for assistance is literally just a message away! Communities like Women Who Code also offer us the option to join local chapters in our country that best suit us or even request to start one :)

Looking to start your career in tech?

How well they bring together people from all walks of life is yet another attribute that makes tech forums a great place to be a part of. If you’re a beginner or a student looking for your breakthrough into an enticing career in tech, there’s ample scope to hone your existing skill set, learn a new skill and get to know from experts in industry on opportunities. The study groups, webinars and talks collectively facilitate a great learning path.

When aspirations meet guidance

As for accomplished professionals, who’ve already scaled heights in their career, such forums are perfect platforms to share their success stories and inspire & guide many aspiring individuals. A much needed mentorship could go a long way in redefining somebody’s tech career.

Putting it all together…

Summing it all up, if you’re someone who believes in the synergy of collaborative work and coming together to succeed; if you’ve always supported Women in Tech, Diversity & Inclusion and the many ideals that hold them together, the tech communities are places where you’d see these ideals forming an integral part of the functioning; making an impact and transforming lives for the better!
ReactNative: Translucent TabBar
By: Alex Melnyk
Tags: Navigation, Tab Bar, iOS, Android, React Native

If you are an iOS user or developer, probably you have experienced that some applications have blurred translucent TabBar, like in the AppStore, Podcasts, Health, etc.

I want to bring light on how to make it in ReactNative with react-navigation TabBar.

Examples available there GitHub / Expo.

Building TabBar

As usual, if an application requires TabBar and you already using react-navigation even if not you can use createBottomTabNavigator from react-navigation-tabs to create TabBar in the basement of the screen it is very simple.

const MainTabBar = createBottomTabNavigator({

Home: {

screen: HomeScreen,

navigationOptions: {

tabBarLabel: 'Home',

tabBarIcon: ({ tintColor }) => (

<TabBarIcon name="home" color={tintColor}/>

)

}

},

Profile: {

screen: ProfileScreen,

navigationOptions: {

tabBarLabel: 'Profile',

tabBarIcon: ({ tintColor }) => (

<TabBarIcon name="user" color={tintColor}/>

)

}

},

Settings: {

screen: SettingsScreen,

navigationOptions: {

tabBarLabel: 'Settings',

tabBarIcon: ({ tintColor }) => (

<TabBarIcon name="gear" color={tintColor}/>

)

}

},

}, { ... });

We’ve built three screens and made TabBar for them with icons/labels as the result we observe white TabBar with greyed top border and greyed icons with labels except selected one.

react-navigation TabBar with default settings

Translucent me now

Once we’ve done the previous step we can start to apply translucent to the TabBar.

First of all install expo-blur or @react-native-community/blur those libraries provide blur effect view which you can use to blur all things under the view.

The expo-blur library doesn’t work Android platform instead of creating blur effect it applies opacity to it.

The createBottomTabBar function provides options to customise, one of them is tabBarComponent which we can use to replace the TabBar component. What we need it’s just using this property to override the TabBar component.

Hold On! No, we are now trying to make custom TabBar, we need to use BottomTabBar from react-navigation-tabs and place it in the BlurView.

...

}, {

tabBarComponent: (props) => (

<BlurView

style={{

position: 'absolute',

bottom: 0,

left: 0,

right: 0,

}}

tint="dark"

intensity={100}

>

<BottomTabBar {...props} />

</BlurView>

)

});

We need to pass all props to the BottomTabBar to avoid braking effects, also we should apply position absolute to snap view to the screen basement. After that, we should apply some styles to the TabBar.

...

}, {

tabBarOptions: {

style: {

borderTopColor: '#666666'

backgroundColor: 'transparent'

}

},

tabBarComponent: (props) => (

...

After applying backgroundColor “transparent” or “#00000000" you will see blurred TabBar.
An honest review of “Tigertail” from a daughter of Asian immigrants
By: Michelle Chiu
Tags: Movie Review, Netflix, Film, Media, Movies

In the last part of the film, Pin-Jiu travels back to Taiwan with his daughter to share parts of his past with her first-hand. They return to the rice fields and to his old town: time capsules that reflect parts of his history his daughter has not seen before.

When I was in high school, I too embarked on a trip with my family to revisit my father’s old village in China. Seeing the way that my dad interacted with the people that still lived nearby, listening to the depictions my grandparents told of what the now-empty buildings used to hold, and experiencing what an alternate life was like in a seemingly-distant country changed the way I understood about my family’s past. I’m sure many other Asian Americans can relate to this experience. I’m glad that Yang was able to tackle that narrative, and concluded the film with such a powerful image — panning the shot out of the window of the protagonist’s old home to frame Pin-Jiu with his daughter.

Screen grab from Tigertail (2020)

In all,

While I do believe the film could’ve built more momentum from some of the underlying themes it presented, it’s hard to neglect how Yang’s storytelling touched a soft place in my heart with the striking similarities I can mirror from Tigertail in my own life. I mean, Yang uncannily nailed down my father’s love for tea and even managed to name the character the daughter breaks up with in the movie after my ex-boyfriend. The details are there.

In film, we often place ourselves in the role of characters on-screen in some way, shape, or form. I’m glad I was able to finally see people on screen who looked like me and embodied parts of my own culture and story. Huge thanks to Alan Yang on directing this film and choosing to place more Asian Americans on-screen; your efforts do not go unnoticed.

Please take a moment to watch Tigertail if you want to better empathize with individuals of first-generation Asian families. It is a story that is even more necessary to share in the times we live in, and surely taught me to cherish my relationship with my parents and grandparents to a greater extent. Just remember to keep a box of tissues within reach.
[2020/06/26]我的資料科學家生涯旅程 — 從計量經濟學到資料科學, 從娛樂媒體產業到科技產業
By: Taiwan Data Science Meetup
Tags: Taiwan Data Science, Career Development, Data Science, Meetup, 資料科學

講者簡介

📍 Danny Wang目前擔任LinkedIn (領英)資料科學團隊主管。曾經任職於AT&T, Walt Disney, Warner Bros, Sony Pictures 資料科學部門資深主管，也曾在美國的大學任教多年, 擁有豐富的職場經驗。先後擔任過資料科學技術(Tech Lead) 與管理(People Manager)的相關職位，有機會近距離觀察美國企業如何將數據轉換為數據驅動(data-driven)的業務應用。特別專注於資料科學, 大數據分析與軟體解決方案在市場營銷, 產品與用戶的應用。美國Vanderbilt University 經濟學(計量)博士, 清華大學原子科學院(Nuclear Science)．人文社會學院(Economics)雙學士。

摘要

📍分享由大學教學研究轉換到產業界工作的心得，以及在科技業(Tech) 和娛樂媒體產業(Media & Entertainment)的實務經驗。 介紹資料科學在這些產業的應用與發展。對於想進入資料科學領域或剛起步的夥伴, 提供職涯成長建議，包含所需具備的技能, 如何準備, 資料科學家如何發揮效益, 以及在不同的資料科學職涯(career path)發展的選擇。

Meetup回顧

資料科學家的一天

需要跟很多不同的人合作, 例如產品經理, 設計師, 工程師, 也會跨部門合作, 像是與product, marketing, sales, finance, care, risk 做專案

工作上, 除了硬技能(hard skills)外, 更需要很多軟技能(soft skills), 能夠influence without authority

資料科學家的優勢是能從大量資料中找到洞察(insight), 解決複雜的商業問題, 幫忙做決策和提供建議, 給用戶帶來價值和好的體驗, 進而幫公司帶來收益

跟不同stakeholders合作要用不同的語言，問對問題，釐清大家的目標

建立對公司、產品、產業的背景知識(domain knowledge)及直覺(intuition)

用諮詢顧問(consulting)的技巧分析問題很有用

資料科學家需要很有彈性、解決不同問題用不同技術，所以要能夠快速學習新東西

理解data product 和pipeline的上中下游，最後用software solutions去解決business problems

資料科學家的養成與轉換domain

需要在多個地方耕耘 — Domain Knowledge, Hard Skills, Soft Skills, Software Solutions

每隔一陣子換個domain是一種可以快速成長的方式，幫助學習新的技能並且釐清自己的目標。這可以是在同一個公司換組或換項目。不一定要轉職，太頻繁轉換公司反而可能會令未來雇主產生疑慮, 也不容易在一份工作累積足夠的經驗

許多domain knowleage 是能在不同產業、公司和情境中通用，獲得的domain和經驗可以收斂成人生智慧庫，應付各種職場需求

舉例：在Disney Studios 的電影投資分析 v.s. ABC 電視劇的廣告預算優化分配分析, 雖然應用情境不同，但是在做分析及模組中牽涉到的影視產業生態或是行銷經驗能互相back up, 幫助建模

Danny 以自身經歷歸納data scientists所需的軟性技能

Data Science Career @ Linkedin

資料科學家在LinkedIn分成三個方向：Insight & Strategy、Inference & Algorithm、Engineering Solutions，各個方向在工作上有不同的側重，需要的技能也不一樣。

另外，Danny 也貼心的幫大家整理了面試這三個不同Tracks時所需著重的準備方向：

Meetup Q&A

By 講者 Danny

Q在轉職的過程中如何確保過去的經驗可以持續增加自己未來價值呢？會不會因為頻繁轉換跑道導缺乏每個領域中的domain knowledge？

A如果有明確的生涯目標，建議在轉職時可以思考新的工作是否有朝目標成長的機會，這可以有多個面向(dimension)去考慮，包含role (e.g., data scientist, data engineer, BI analyst), industry (e.g., tech, media, retailing), domain (e.g., marketing, sales, product), 和leveling(e.g., junior, senior, management)之間的轉換。例如你可以在同一個 domain但是轉換 industry，雖然業務和運作(business and operations)不同，但許多domain knowledge 和經驗是可以通用的，有些時候也可以在同個公司內部轉換

除非有特殊原因，不建議太頻繁轉換公司，這可能對未來的雇主造成疑慮，也不容易在一份工作累積足夠的經驗

Q對於美國碩士生找DS實習或是new grads 找DS全職似乎不是很好找，請問有什麼建議讓剛入學的人可以準備來提升自己的競爭力？對於很難找到DS工作這件事請問Danny的看法及建議是什麼？

A 建議剛入學的同學可以從下面著手

了解就業市場和所需的技能和經驗，這可以從招聘的Job Descriptions獲得，然後補足欠缺的部份和加強resume，另外也要對有興趣的industry和domain多下功夫了解，這可以和已經在工作的朋友多聊聊 盡量在校時就有做項目(data science project)的經驗，這可以是學校的項目或是Kaggle之類的項目 透過 networking/referral 推薦去增加面試的機會 充份準備面試和加強面試技巧

Q可以請你分享people management和tech lead track的pros & cons嗎？如果有機會選擇該如何考量呢？

A一般來說在科技公司(tech company)比較會有明確的managerial track 和 technical track的選擇，據我的經驗，成為people manager和tech lead 都需要累積足夠的經驗(hands-on experience as an IC)，和良好的溝通協調與領導能力 (communication, collaboration and leadership)。我認為people manager更偏重於培養團隊和發展組織(develop the organization)，而tech lead則著重於技術的發展和成長(develop the technology)，他們都需要領導團隊，但是具備的核心技能卻不同。至於如何選擇要看個人的興趣和強項，在一般非科技公司，technical track的選擇比較少，往上走基本是往management發展
Origami
By: Rachael Ann Sand
Tags: Minnesota, Nature Photography, Hiking, Origami, Self

ONE PHOTO | ONE WORD

Origami

Day one snapshot

Inspired by Dennett’s photo-a-day initiative in the Snapshots publication, I’ll be sharing photographs of sightings and scenery snapped during my daily walks. I’m grateful to live on the North Shore of Lake Superior where nature photo opps are abundant.

Sunday’s snapshot is brought to you by an urban hike along Chester Creek. Whimsical ‘found art’ hanging on a tree along the trail led me to whip out my phone camera to document the moment. Smartphone camera for-the-win!
Not Home Yet
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Driving, Poetry, Musing, Image, Home

Not Home Yet

A Poem

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Fingernail moon

a curtain on the highway

that doesn’t open for a stage

Black and gold fields

interrupted by the slash

of hills to the north

Still 10 minutes

till home

Sweating in the heat

the cold seizing my head

through the crack in my window

amazed at the audacity

of the birds

It takes forever

to begin the final climb

to home

silver and rust piece of shit

that I drive

It always takes forever

unless I’m leaving you

I don’t know how important

home is supposed to be

just a fragment on semi-flat

prairie

Nothing original

to be frightened of

just not being home, yet
Wipe that smile off your face when you are in India.
By: Open House
Tags: India, Smile, American, Weakness, Tourist

Smiling in the Indian peninsula is regarded as a sign of weakness. It seems to be deeply rooted in the Indian ethos. Probably because the life we lead is a hard and tough one, with everyone from the Government to the local newspaper boy ready to siphon out whatever meager income we receive, and where water and electricity supplies still are regarded as luxuries rather than necessities.

Foreigners, especially white Europeans or Americans, quite often have a rough time in India. Not just that they look different or affluent, but because they smile when they meet people. It is part of their culture to smile and greet passersby. But not in India. We do not even say “Thank you” when someone gives something to us. That does not mean we are disrespectful. It is simply not in our nature. Our parents and grandparents never did it. Nor did they teach us to express gratitude. Elders seem to think that they are doing a favor by accepting anything given by a person younger than them.

No sir or madam, if you are a foreigner in India, please smile only at people whom you know. Especially women. Almost every day we hear of female tourists being robbed, molested, or raped by taxi drivers and so-called guides whom they unwittingly engage to learn more about the places they visit. The more they smile, the more gullible the locals think they are.
Books That Matter:
By: Freda Savahl
Tags: Books And Authors, Liberalism, Nato, Federalist Papers, American History

In these times of Political upheaval & Discontent, my reading interest is to understand the government's historical perspectives.

What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea.

A sweeping history of Liberalism from its earliest origin to its imperiled present & uncertain future.

A book by James Traub- 2019.

Image of the book from Amazon.

Traub turns to history and theory to trace the core ideas from the age of democratic revolutions to the twentieth century's ideological struggles. The author shows that liberalism has some conflicting ideas: classical republican principles, Lockean individualism, the commitment to the sovereignty, and progressive social ideals.

In the United States, the reformist ideas of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and other progressives in the early twentieth century brought these ideas into the industrial age, but only through President Franklin Roosevelt & the New Deal did modern liberalism attain a Jeffersonian appeal to citizenship and a commitment to an activist state.

Traub states liberalism lost its way in the 1990s, aligning itself with globalization and losing its deeper commitment to a progressive vision of nationalism and the common man.

Donald Trump is the first president to regard liberal values with open contempt.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the postwar Global Order

By Timothy Sayle. Cornell University Press, 2019. Timothy Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post World War 11 era.

Image of a book from Amazon.

In his carefully researched history, Sayle writes why Nato is the longest-lasting alliance of the modern era. The shared democratic values of its members forge a unique bond with nations to manage & protect the balance of power.

NATO’S resiliency is rooted in the day-to-day efforts of this multinational corps of officials dedicated to keeping the alliance functional. Sayle is confident that the alliance's underlying rationale still holds, keeping the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Europeans together.

The Federalist Papers:

By Professor Joseph Hoffman Indiana University Maurer School of Law

Image from Audio Amazon Books -the Federalist Papers.

These 12 thought-provoking lectures on audiotape unpack the brilliant essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay that serve essentially as the American government's Bible. The Federalist Papers is an influential guide to the US Constitution. Listen to lectures on;
Delphy Monthly Airdrop — January, 2018
By: Ada Gao
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Predictions, Blockchain, Ethereum

Dear Delphy Community,

Hope you all had a good start into 2018!

It’s almost end of January and it’s time for the Monthly Delphy Airdrop. If you have been holding DPY (Delphy token) for more than a month you will benefit from our Monthly Delphy airdrop. Yes, you heard that right!

We value our community and Delphy promised to give 50% of all DPY tokens, which equals to 50 million DPY tokens in total, to our token holders in a linear distribution way within two years, for free.

By end of each month, Delphy will monitor the number of holders and the amount of tokens held by each holder at a randomly picked moment (a snapshot) decided by Delphy. This reward program has started from Oct, 2017, as said before, will last for 2 years.

The total amount DPY token to be awarded to our holders is exactly same amount every month, which is: total of 50 million (DPY) /24 (months) = 2,083,333.33333 (DPY).

For January 2018, the snapshot moment is 18:00 on 30th of January, 2018 oBeijing Time. The number of tokens to be received by a holder = the amount of token held at snapshot moment/ 27— transaction fees (which is about 0.5DPY at this moment = Gas price * Gas used/Price of DPY). (Why 27? Because, the total months for airdrop is 24, and till now, 3 airdrops have already happened .)

If you keep your DPY tokens at your accounts with exchanges, like gate.io or okex.com, you can still get the airdrop. But it will take longer time, as it will depend on the exchanges to finish the airdrop ultimately. Therefore, if you would like to get the airdrop immediately, pull your DPYs to a wallet is the best option.

Thank you for your continued support!
Ethlus.io Dapp of 2018? let’s find out
By: Ethlus Winning Machine
Tags: Cryptocurrency Investment, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Monero, Ethereum

1. Ethlus is a unique project does not look like one

2. there you can honestly and comfortably get income, though drawing and winning crypto or token

3. you can play your crypto currency there in two or three or even four times

4. everything is based on ethereum smart contracts

5. everything works with https://metamask.io

6. there is no such project and no similar

what excuse not to participate in it?

In 17 days we have more than 140 Users, and more than 10 ETH Raffle

In October-December we will add:

#binance token #bnb

#nem

#litecoin

#dentacoin

#monero #xrm

Always Yours,

Ethlus Team.

© Ethlus 2018. All rights reserved
3 Things You Need To Know Before You Train-Test Split
By: Mayukh Bhattacharyya
Tags: Machine Learning, Validation, Scikit Learn, Deep Learning, Data Science

Stratification

Let’s assume you are doing a multiclass classification and have an imbalanced dataset that has 5 different classes. You do a simple train-test split that does a random split totally disregarding the distribution or proportions of the classes. What happens in this scenario is that you end up with a train and a test set with totally different data distributions. A model trained on a vastly different data distribution than the test set will perform inferiorly at validation. Now let’s take a look, shall we?

We take the cuisine dataset from this Kaggle competition. The dataset has 20 classes (cuisine types) and is very imbalanced. We select 3 classes ( italian, korean and indian ) for our little experiment.

Now let’s try the all famous train_test_split function of scikit-learn. First, we’ll do just a normal split. Let’s check the results.

We can see variations in the distributions. Although small here, it can easily be quite large enough for smaller and more skewed datasets. The solution to this problem is something called stratification which will lock the distribution of classes in train and test sets. Let’s go to the documentation page of the train_test_split function once again.

Here it is. The very last parameter. In order to get a similar distribution, we need to stratify the dataset based on the class values. So we pass our class labels part of the data to this parameter and check what happens.

And voila! You have identical distributions. Hence your model won’t face the problem of validation against an imbalanced test set and give you a wrong sense of its actual performance. Onto the next one!
Dismantling White Supremacy Vote By Vote
By: Momentum Blog Team
Tags: Politics, White Supremacy, Racism, Election 2020, Voting

Dismantling White Supremacy Vote By Vote

Here’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center had to say about the Biden-Harris win

People react as media announce that Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden has won the 2020 U.S. presidential election during a rally for a fair vote count in McPherson Square. Photo: Yegor Aleyev/TASS/Getty Images

Several organizations sent out messages about the Biden-Harris win for the 2020 United States presidential election. The SPLC, however, specifically called out the White supremacy stoked by the presidency and what needs to happen to temper it as the nation looks to new leadership in 2021.

Here is the full statement provided by SPLC president and CEO Margaret Huang: