fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
BTS Nominated For A Grammy’s Award
By: Jenny Nguyen
Tags: Kpop, Korean, Bts, Kpop Charts, Music

BTS at the Americans Music Awards on October 9th, 2018. Photo Credits: Getty Images.

The 7 member K-POP boy band, also known as Bangtan Boys, just recently received their first Grammy’s nomination. The group consists of Kim Namjoon (group leader), Kim Seokjin, Min Yoongi, Hoseok Park, Park Jimin, Kim Taehyung, and Jeon Jungkook. Their album Love Yourself: Tear album was nominated for the best recording package alongside with their branding company Huskyfox for impressive visualization. In May, the album was debuted as No. 1 on Billboard 200. The event of their nomination has not only driven joy to the BTS members and ARMY (BTS fanbase), but has marked a significant moment for the appreciation and inclusion of Korean pop music in the United States.

BTS and their team’s recognition for a Grammy award is only the beginning incline of their success. Fans recently witnessed one of their greatest performances at the South Korean Melons Music Awards, where they contributed the beauty of their Korean cultures and dances into their performance set during their hit song Idol. Along side with their performance they were crowned 7 MMA awards. Fans have boasted their 3 series album Love Yourself of similar themes expressing youth, love, passion, and heartbreak. BTS fans have supported them through sold out shows and merchandises worldwide. Millions of BTS fanbase accounts have taken over Twitter to unite together and boost BTS to be as successful as their can through award shows voting, story publications, BTS online support, etc. The K-POP group was most tweeted about on Twitter in 2017 and 2018.

Although fans have witnessed their greatest accomplishments throughout their first debut album 2 Cool 4 Skool to their most successful album Love Yourself: Tear, the world is only beginning to witness the growth BTS is continuing to forgo and change the pop industry internationally forever.
Subscribe to the Window’s Dimensions With React Hooks
By: Norberto Cáceres
Tags: Reactjs, React Hook, Programming, React, JavaScript

Subscribe to the Window’s Dimensions With React Hooks

Have you ever needed to read the window’s dimensions as state inside a component? Well, this hook can do the trick

Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti on Unsplash.

Note: This code was written in TypeScript.

Let’s start by defining the piece of state we ultimately want the hook’s consumers to receive. We define it with a shape of { x: number; y: number } and set the default values to the window’s current (at the time the hook was first called) inner width and height, respectively:

Below, we define a function responsible for setting the state to the window’s current inner width and height:

Now let’s create an effect responsible for subscribing to the resize event so we can run our arbitrary function whenever the DOM dispatches it:

In the cleanup of the effect, we remove the listener by passing the same reference to the function we subscribed with in the first place. Finally, we return dimensions .

Note: Had we not wrapped eventCallback inside useCallback , the dependencies of the useEffect hook would change on every render.

Also, passing identical anonymous functions to both the adder and remover of the resize event listener will not remove the listener! Do not do as shown below:

The final file looks like this:

An example of consuming our hook:

The result:

That is all. Thanks for reading!
Reading: CBAM — Convolutional Block Attention Module (Image Classification)
By: Sik-Ho Tsang
Tags: Convolutional Network, Artificial Intelligence, Image Classification, Deep Learning, Object Detection

The accuracy improvement of CBAM comes with a negligible parameter overhead, indicating that enhancement is not due to a naive capacity increment but because of the effective feature refinement.
NaNoWriMo Reboot
By: Legitimate Geek
Tags: Entertainment, Authors, Novel, Writing, Virtual Reality

One of the dangers of writing fiction is that you eventually realize you are emptying your words into a literary black hole of no return. That’s not a fun thing to realize, but it’s important. You need to know when to reboot your work.

I’m sad to say I came to that conclusion so early in this month but I am excited about what comes now. My Project has changed, and with it comes a whole new ballgame. It likely means I won’t make the NANOWRIMO guidelines though if it leads to a project I’m going to finish I am better off. I spent today thinking about how to change my story and I want to share where I am now.

Title: Lifers

Nine years ago the Monolith Corporation announced the world’s first Virtual Reality based platform “Alternate Simulated Home” which became known as the world of Ash. Shortly afterword, the digital colony of Terra Alpha was opened.

Terra Alpha was created primarily to assist children with physical and intellectual disabilities preventing them from communicating or living a normal life. The patients are kept and treated at a physical location while they are in a VR capsule where specialized software serves as a bridge to resolve difficulties impairing them. They awaken in a living, breathing, 3D world that gives them a freedom they never had.

Parents found themselves able to actually communicate and interact with their kids. Some even go so far as to basically move into the colony themselves. Many of the patients have parents who spend time in the real world on a job, but every remaining moment is in a VR capsule and living life with their kids.

The world still isn’t perfect. Medical Science still isn’t able to resolve the physical problems that impact many of the patients and the system is designed to allow the avatars to age naturally. When their body fails them the children do leave the game permanently.

The colony itself is run by a group of employees who serve in various capacities; working as teachers, counselors, doctors and a digital police force to keep the peace. One day the captain of the digital police force finds himself visited by a young girl who reports that her physical body actually died three days ago.

Which leaves the question of how she is still online.

Investigating further it’s found more instances of it occurring. As the patients pass on, they remain online. The thought sends shockwaves through both the real and digital world.

Some parents of patients begin to question whether it truly is their child they are communicating with. Throngs of people who are unhappy with their lives take another tact and attempt to login full time to recreate the digital mortality that seems to have been gifted to these children who have become known as “Lifers”. The game has literally become their life.

In a unanimous resolution the United Nations Security council labels the program a potential danger to world peace. As a result the digitial police force of Ash is given 60 days to explain what’s going on or te entire program will be shut down.

This is just a high level overview. I’d love thoughts on the subject.
Euclidean Distance and Normalization of a Vector
By: Rohan Paul
Tags: Python, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Data Science, Statistics

Euclidean distance

Euclidean distance is the shortest distance between two points in an N-dimensional space also known as Euclidean space. It is used as a common metric to measure the similarity between two data points and used in various fields such as geometry, data mining, deep learning, and others.

It is, also, known as Euclidean norm, Euclidean metric, L2 norm, L2 metric, and Pythagorean metric.

Consider two points P1 and P2:

P1: (X1, Y1) P2: (X2, Y2)

Then, the euclidean distance between P1 and P2 is given as:

Euclidean distance in N-D space

In an N-dimensional space, a point is represented as (x1, x2, …, xN).

Consider two points P1 and P2:

P1: (X1, X2, …, XN) P2: (Y1, Y2, …, YN)

Then, the euclidean distance between P1 and P2 is given as:

Furthermore, we can carry on like this into 4 or more dimensions, in general, J dimensions, where J is the number of variables. Although we cannot draw the geometry any more, we can express the distance between two J-dimensional vectors x and y as:

There are quite a few distance measurement techniques, e.g. few other popular distance measures include:

Hamming Distance: Calculate the distance between binary vectors (Wikipedia).

Manhattan Distance: Calculate the distance between real vectors using the sum of their absolute difference. Also called City Block Distance (Wikipedia).

Minkowski Distance: Generalization of Euclidean and Manhattan distance (Wikipedia).

Euclidean is a good distance measure to use if the input variables are similar in type (e.g. all measured widths and heights). Manhattan distance is a good measure to use if the input variables are not similar in type (such as age, gender, height, etc.

Manhattan distance is used only if the points are arranged in square format and that too the distance between each of the points should be a multiple of the length of the side of a square. We rarely come across this kind of scenarios in realtime and the mostly used metric is Euclidean distance as we prefer it when working on completely numerical data. When we work on the text data, the cosine distance is an appropriate metric.

For different norms, the red lines indicate the set of vectors with norm 1. Left: Manhattan norm; Right: Euclidean distance.
The making of the First Great Episode
By: Henrik Ståhl
Tags: Podcast, Audio, Donald Trump, Logic Pro, Journalism

Check Your Facts is up and running! After launching a 4-minute teaser last week, we published the (as Donald Trump would say) First Great Episode of the podcast on Thursday.

Since me and David Tvrdon first met each other in the Digital Journalism Rocks community, choosing our first guest was a no-brainer. And here’s what Lina Timm, founder of the DJR community, has to say about digital journalism, innovation, and communities for journalists:

“We journalists who are deeply interested in innovation and technology should collaborate more and exchange our best practices and views, because in this way innovation can accelerate and have a broader impact.”

That’s just one of many interesting insights shared by Lina (or should we call her Lean Left Him?) in the first episode.

We’re not going to spoil it for you — go check it out yourself if you haven’t already!

With that being said, let’s move on to the main topic of this story: the Whats and the Whys and the Hows.

Voice/video call application

Conceptually, we had already paved the way with the teaser episode (and, of course, many key decisions were made prior to that, but let’s save that for another story). Technically as well.

Neither me nor David Tvrdon is a fan of Skype, but it proved robust enough during the recording of the teaser. Therefore, we decided to stick with it for the recording of the first real episode as well.

Call recording software

When I managed a few podcasts at Aftonbladet (two as host and five as editor) some years ago, I used the software Soundflower with great results. However, the Soundflower software hasn’t been properly upgraded for a couple of years, so we decided to look elsewhere.

There’s a bunch of tools for recording Skype calls out there, and we considered both eCamm’s Call Recorder and Kanda Software’s Callnote. Of these two, the latter was a better fit since it lets you record both Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook, and Viber.

Ultimately, we didn’t choose any of those two though. The winner, with quite a large margin, was instead Audio Hijack.

Audio Hijack is an extremely versatile software that allows its user to record any application’s audio,

including VoIP calls from Skype or FaceTime, web streams from Safari, Google Chrome, Opera Neon, or Vivaldi (the latter two being my personal browsers of choice), and practically anything you can think of.

Audio hardware

With video call application and call recording software being all set, we also needed a good hardware setup.

My microphone of choice is a Røde NT-USB, while David Tvrdon acquired a Samson Go Mic, which is a portable USB condenser microphone.

Lina Timm, on the other hand, had nothing but an iPhone headset at her disposal.

Audio editing software

Being an amateur musician, I had been using Apple’s Logic Pro for quite some time and was thus familiar with the application.
A Big Gay Royal Wedding!
By: Stu Laurie
Tags: History, LGBTQ, Society, Weddings, Royal Family

A royal wedding. Photo by @tumisu

Part of me feels that this news has kind of gone under the radar (unless you follow gay news, of course), but it was announced recently that there is going to be the first gay wedding in the British Royal family. Isn’t that exciting? Gay royals getting married, who knew?

Lord Ivar Mountbatten (Best. Name. Ever), who came out in 2016, is the Queen’s cousin (though one could argue he is the true Queen) and is set to marry his partner James Coyle down in Devon this summer. I expect my invitation will be here soon. I have a list of hats waiting on my Amazon Wish list.

A live photo of me at the wedding. Photo by @kingschurchinternational

Now, there has already been one EPIC Royal wedding this year that you may have heard of, and quite frankly this one probably hasn’t had the press that one had because it isn’t Prince Harry (sad face) or a member of the immediate family (is there any other than Harry?). However, I think it’s important to acknowledge how important this is, even if it is a third cousin twice removed of a friend of a Queen’s aunty who once shared an umbrella with the Queen’s hat designer. I may be exaggerating in my excitement.

There was much said about how acceptance and prejudice had improved in response to Harry marrying a non-Caucasian, non-British woman, and the same can be said for Lord Ivan’s marriage to his beloved. Having spent much of his life in the closet, hiding his true self behind his wife (who is giving him away at the wedding, now that’s modern) and children it’s beautiful to see that he can now find the courage to live his truth.

#LoveTrumpsHate

Regardless of how little attention this gets in the widespread media this is a milestone in terms of LGBTQ history. Many people look to the royal family for their moral compass, for their inspiration and etiquette on how to feel about, and react to, issues. Harry and Meghan have been forthright with their support of the LGBTQ community and here’s hoping this is the first spark of a more diverse extended royal family, and a wider acceptance because of it.

Photo by Monica Volpin via Pixabay

Stay tuned for news of which hat I choose when my invite arrives.
Acing the Coding Interview Even If You Can’t Solve the Problem
By: Brett Fazio
Tags: Coding Interview, Startup, Programming, Computer Science, Software Development

Identify Pain Points

As you begin coding, you should continually verbalize everything you are doing for the interviewer. If you’re making a method to ensure you’re not getting an IndexOutOfBoundsError , tell them that. Don’t just make a random method stub without telling them what it is for.

If you know the solution completely, you may get to the end of the interview without a problem — but what should you do if you get stuck while coding? Or get to the end and don’t have passing test cases?

What you shouldn’t do is frantically panic (I know I’ve fallen victim to this once or twice) and try to thrash your way to a working solution. You should instead verbalize your difficulties. Not only will this give you a specific thing to fix in your code (instead of thrashing around the whole thing) but also your interviewer now knows your plan to fix your solution and can help guide you as you go about it.

If you finished the problem and are failing test cases, saying “I think that this portion of the code could be causing the test case to fail, so I think I will read over that for a second” is a perfect thing to do. It gives you a clearly defined goal — read over lines X-Y. It tells the interviewer exactly what you are doing so they can scroll to that portion of the code as well. And your interviewer could give you insight into whether that code block has any effect on your failing test cases.

If you haven’t finished the problem but are just experiencing difficulties getting to the finish line, you should verbalize exactly what your pain points are. Maybe they are language-specific or maybe they are problem-specific.

If you are using a language you are not 100% familiar with, it’s perfectly acceptable to say to the interviewer “I know I can do this in Java using Comparable, but I’m not sure how to do it in C++.” Now that the interviewer knows that it is a language-specific problem that you understand the scope of, they can give you tips on how to do it in the language you are currently working in.

If your pain point is more problem-specific, you can verbalize that you are having trouble completing this specific portion of the problem. The interviewer can take a look at what you are doing and help to guide you to complete that part or guide you to a more correct solution.
Libraries.io is joining Tidelift
By: Benjamin Nickolls
Tags: High Fidelity, Software Development, Sustainability, Open Source, Librariesio

In my last two posts I rejected the notion that open source projects are a public good. I then identified some of the challenges that open source projects have to navigate and charted some of the courses projects have taken to become sustainable. I signed off with the simple question:

Can we do better?

Can we build a future where open source maintainers can choose to leave the work they do for the work they love without having to become a sales team, a SaaS provider, and a support desk all at once? Can we build a network of open source software that users know will continue to provide for them in a year, maybe even a decade? Where projects are able to commit to big goals, make brave decisions, and own their project roadmap?

Maybe. Yes. Maybe.

I’m not about to tell you I have the solution.

These are difficult problems to solve. Problems that we have known about for decades and have fought to bring to the attention of the world for years.

At Libraries.io we have been building software that creates a stronger, more informed open source ecosystem. At Dependency CI we have been building tools that lower the barriers to using and maintaining open source software. But our role in solving the bigger problem has been only as an enabler, helping others prioritise their work and understand their impact. This is about to change.

Today Andrew and I are joining Tidelift to tackle this problem head-on, and we’re bringing Libraries.io and Dependency CI with us. Tidelift is a new company, with a mission of making open source software work better for developers and users. You can read a little more over on the Tidelift blog.

Now as part of Tidelift, we will continue our work with our new colleagues and supporters. Libraries.io will remain an open source project, we’ll continue our open data program, and we’ll continue to collaborate with partners in the open source and research communities. And we’re excited to take Dependency CI to the next level, with an eye to supporting both creators and users of open source.

We hope you’ll continue to support us, our new colleagues and each other as we move toward a more sustainable future for open source software.

Because difficult problems are easier to solve together.
Down the Middle
By: Grant Reynolds
Tags: Pain, Memoir, Health, Comics, Emergency Room

Spiralbound

Comics for life, brought to life by Edith Zimmerman.
React select dropdown tutorial using react-select.
By: Manish Mandal
Tags: JavaScript, React, Axios, React Select

In this tutorial, I will explain how to use the react-select library to create a select dropdown in your react app. For the data, we will be using API from JSON placeholder

Requirements

Open your project directory and install react-select and axios.

npm install axios react-select --save

2. Now open your app.js file. We will be using class component so first, create a constructor and initialize some state.

3. Now create an asynchronous function with the name getOptions and use axios to fetch users data from JSON placeholder API. After getting the response, loop through the array using the javascript map function and create an object with value and label and then change selectOptions value using setState.

4. Now call the above function inside componentDidMount lifecycle method.

5. Now if we console.log our selectOptions inside our render function we will see the options required for react-select.

6. Now import react select in your file import Select from 'react-select' and call that inside return and then pass selectOptions as options inside select tag. After that refresh your browser and see the changes

7. Now let us create a function that will handle our selected value. Create a function with the name handleChange and take e as a parameter and after that change the value of id and name using the setState function

8. Now assign your handleChange event on onChange method inside select tag and bind it.

Here is the final app.js code.

isMulti

Now it’s time to create multiple options.

Add isMulti inside the Select tag.

2. Now remove id and name from step 2 above and add value as a blank array.

2. Now inside handleChange function set value state as e using setState.

3. Now loop through value inside render using map function to display all our selected options. We are also checking the value whether it’s null or not using the ternary operator so that we don’t get any error by removing the last selected option.

That’s it for today here is the git repository and live code.
The Butterfly That Caught My Eye
By: Tre L. Loadholt
Tags: Nature, Poetry, Music, A Cornered Gurl, Photography

The Butterfly That Caught My Eye

A Narrative Poem

My mom's voice slaps my ear

in giggles. Over the phone,

it's not captured as well as it

is in person.

I spot a thing of beauty

circling around my head.

It lands and rests.

It lands and rests.

I take this opportunity to

snap its 3D’d flirtations.

I tell my mom of its importance —

the necessity of butterflied

wings as a still-life.

She shushes herself —

quickly, I lean over

nature’s gift and collect a

small token of art for myself.

We walk in peace.

We walk in peace.

Jernee is nosy but keeps

her distance.

We've accomplished a small feat

and now . . .

I am happy.
The Importance of Emotional Awareness and How to Build It
By: Jamie Logie
Tags: Self Improvement, Relationships, Self, Health, Love

3. Always Use the Power of the Pause

When you take a pause before you speak, you give your brain a breather. Give space to your thoughts by taking a pause. This is important for a few reasons: the first is it helps you avoid an instant reaction, and the second is it gives you a moment to consider different options. It will also help you to avoid rambling, which won’t allow you to share how you really feel.

When you’re confronted with emotion — create a pause in your mind. The normal response is to react right away when we experience a feeling. This is often when you get that simplistic emotional response of anger, sadness, or even lashing out physically. These instant reactions will not help you and reveal a lack of emotional intelligence.

Take a pause after you experience an emotion to create better emotional awareness and better control of your response. How often have you immediately regretted an immediate reaction to a situation when you didn’t take a moment to think about it first?

It’s not that you’re preventing yourself from feeling a powerful emotion — you’re learning to observe it and not let it control you. This is an important point to become more emotionally aware. There is strength in observation and this lets you become better in tune with yourself and how you feel.

Emotions are always in flux; how you feel in one moment differs from another. When you observe, pause, and see your feelings from an outside perspective, you improve your emotional awareness.

My Own Experience With This

This is one of the biggest things I’ve had to learn over the years, and I found out how powerful the pause can be. I’ve always been quick to react — and immediately regret what I’ve said or done. I wondered why this was causing strains in my relationships — and I realized it was my fault.

If you find yourself in the same position; realize that this change does not happen overnight. After talking to a counselor, I learned how important it is to take that pause and not react right away. It can be as simple as taking a deep breath or counting slowly in your mind. I learned that this momentary pause lets you collect your thoughts — and not say something you’ll immediately regret. Sometimes, it can just mean walking away.

Again, walking away is another hard thing for me to do, but removing yourself from an explosive situation is often the best move. I still have those moments where I speak without thinking, but it helps to reinforce how important it is to not be so reactive and blurt out something hurtful.

These days, when I’m faced with a situation where I feel an immediate emotion coming on, I remind myself of how awful it feels saying something reactive, instead of processing the moment first. You may think you are being smart and witty in the moment, but trust me: you just come across as a jackass — and hurt the people you care about.

Use the power of the pause.
Livejournal archives
By: Orion Nebula
Tags: Music, Tribute, Baroc

in In Fitness And In Health
VJ Loop | Hexa Star Receding
By: Michael 'Myk Eff' Filimowicz
Tags: EDM, Flair, Design, Technology, Art

This blog takes the broadest conception of sound design possible including visual effects because audio likes video. Over 90,000 views annually.

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How to Build Your Biceps: “21s” With a Twist
By: Zack Harris
Tags: Self Improvement, Health, Life, Bodybuilding, Fitness

Photo by Pikx By Panther from Pexels

There’s a classic biceps exercise known simply as “21s”. The execution is simple enough: you perform 7 half-curls stopping halfway up, 7 half-curls stopping halfway down, and finally, 7 curls through a full range of motion — 21 total reps, using the same weight all the way through, with no rest in between.⁣ It’s an old classic that’s a great way to finish off your arms at the end of an upper body workout.

⁣

Clearly, 21s smoke your biceps — however, you’re only hitting them from one angle. The range of motion might change throughout those 21 reps, but the general movement itself is the same.

If you want to make things a little more interesting — while improving your overall arm development — you can slightly modify the exercise by splitting the reps up into three totally different curl variations altogether.

This modified version of 21s does just that: Instead of standard biceps curls all the way through, we start off with 7 reverse curls, followed by 7 standard biceps curls, and lastly, 7 hammer curls. This way, you’re not only stimulating biceps growth, but you’re also hitting the often overlooked muscles surrounding the biceps that give your arms an overall full, developed appearance.

21s With a Twist:

1st 7 Reps: Reverse Curls

By curling with a pronated (palms down) grip, reverse curls do the best job of focusing on the brachialis — a muscle that actually lies beneath the bicep. When developed, it make the biceps appear more “full” by pushing the biceps and triceps further away from one another, which makes for a wider looking arm.

2nd 7 Reps: Standard Bicep Curls

Of course, the standard, supinated (palms up) dumbbell curl directly activates the biceps muscle itself the most out of these 3 curl variations, and is mostly responsible for building that sought after biceps “peak”.

3rd 7 Reps: Hammer Curls

Hammer (neutral grip) curls will heavily target the biceps, the brachialis, and the forearms (brachioradialis) all at once. That’s why these are deliberately performed last: that added contribution from the forearms typically allows you to handle heavier weights with hammer curls than reverse or standard biceps curls. Utilizing hammer curls at the end will allow you to keep the set going — even after reaching the point of exhaustion on the first 2 variations.
Compete in the #NightingaleCityVizChallenge and Check Out Our New Vertical
By: Isaac Levy-Rubinett
Tags: Cities, Design, Data Science, Programming, Data Visualization

In other news, Nightingale is excited to announce our new Sports Viz vertical. Data visualization in sports is vibrant and thriving, as fans, journalists, and analysts alike use data viz tools and techniques to uncover insights about their favorite sports and teams, and we will highlight many of these efforts on Nightingale.

If you’re not sure or are curious to learn more about how data viz can be applied to sports, check out this article from this week, “So You Want to Make a Hockey Viz,” in which Megan Hall and Sean Tierney share stories about their processes and experiences creating data visualizations with NHL data. They focus on Hockey, but that doesn’t mean you have to—their conversation and strategies can be applied widely.

Also from this week, don’t miss the final part of Dave O’Donovan’s series on building fully responsive D3 charts in React.

Ryan Huang wrote about Alexander von Humboldt, who you may know as an explorer and scientist but may not know as a sort of infographic pioneer. His work—and his approach to that work—is a timeless reminder of why data visualization is so powerful.

Lastly, Michael Yi from Chartio’s Data School wrote a guide for “How to Choose Colors for Your Data Visualizations.” We all know color is a critical component of data viz work, but it can be hard to know which ones to use. No longer! This article has tips and guidelines for getting the most out of your color selections.
Quick Geographical Visualization of Your Customer Base
By: Ali Javaid
Tags: Startup, Data Analytics, Customer Data, Data Science, Data Visualization

In my previous article, I explained how young startups can easily utilize their data without the need to hire a Data Analyst. Data can help you in your decision making even when your database is of modest size.

In this article, I will guide you through a simple geographical visualization of your customer base that you can code in a few minutes and can be used for Sales and Marketing decision making.

Getting the Data

I have used mock data for GROM’s customer base within the APAC region. Data extraction and storage depends on your database infrastructure. In this example, I extracted the location for each order in the prescription data and stored it in an Excel file. I used the Pandas library on Python to read the data into a dataframe.

Sorting the Data

If your data is of modest size, it’s easier to manually clean it on the Excel file. Otherwise, use python for data cleaning. To obtain the number of orders in each city, I used the pivot table function to group the data by city and created a new dataframe.

Adding Longitude and Latitude for each City

This code uses Basemap which requires longitude and latitude values for each location. I used Geopy’s geolocator to create longitude and latitude values for each city and append them in the dataset under new columns.

Creating and Plotting Basemap Figure

To geographically visualize the data, I created a scatter plot of the longitude and latitude values of each city on a world map and changed the size of each scatters according to the number of orders.

This visualization gives a rough image of where our customers are based and to what extent they contribute in the total order volume. It can be used for decision making particularly for Sales and Marketing. Should we allocate more resources in emerging markets to increase the volume or in current markets to decrease churn? Is it worth putting in time and money in smaller, isolated markets like Mongolia? Is it the right time to enter completely new markets like Australia?

At GROM, we listen to our gut and verify with data. Perhaps, that’s why we have observed up to 172% YoY growth over the past year. This approach does not prevent you from making mistakes, but it certainly makes the uncertain journey of any startup more certain.
Infinite border
By: Nuno Ricardo
Tags: Poetry, Sonnet, Relationships, Society, Culture

Fear hides quietly within voiceless lies

it grows into an exquisite addiction

warm like home as it burns you alive

defacing hope while shackled to submission

Intimacy cuts through veiled lies

unlacing bonds of bodacious dissent

it can unravel an improbable disguise

of morality dressed as half-hearted intent

No scale exists to weigh the heart of lies

when allowed by clamoring machines

to turn nostalgic prisons into lullabies

with windows onto lands harboring dreams

Soul maps chart boundless territories

their changing borders retell ancient stories
When You Need a Vacation from Your Business
By: Gillian Sisley
Tags: Business, Success, Self Improvement, Entrepreneurship, Work

I had reached an impasse.

My business was coming up to its third year of operation, and I looked at it one day and realized — well, sh*t, the spark was gone.

I had fallen out of love with my business.

So what the hell was I supposed to do? This was my livelihood. I had planted the seeds and watered this hustle until it blossomed into the successful company it is today.

My startup was one of the 10% to survive when the other 90% failed. I had finally scaled back from 10+ hour days to 6 hours days, while still maintaining my income. I‘m lucky enough to run my business from the comfort of my own home, and make an equivalent income as my classmates who graduated with me three years ago.

So what the f*ck do I have to complain about?

Sound like something your inner voice is also telling you these days?

Well, you’re not alone if that’s the case.

Every entrepreneur has moments when, regardless of how much they love their business, they feel a need for a little break from it, because the love and passion for it which once was there is just, inexplicably… gone.

And that’s entirely okay! We all need a break sometimes from our work. That’s necessary to the overall balance.

However, if a vacation is not feasible and you can’t stop because you have bills to pay but need a solution for this problem NOW, here are some of my personal practices for working through any apathetic feelings towards my business with continued passion (or at least enough to get me through the day content):
Once We Identify the Zero and the One, We’re Done
By: Ilexa Yardley
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Circular Theory, Data Science, Virtual Reality, Eclipse

Sign up for Rethinking 'Reality'

By The Circular Theory

Conservation of the circle is the core, and, therefore, the only dynamic in Nature. Meaning, pi, in mathematics, is the technical name for, what a human labels, 'mind.' Take a look
In Memoriam: Other Music
Tags: Music, Independent Record Stores, Demdike Stare, Features, Other Music

BEANS

I was a Sales Clerk at Other Music when my daughter was born, around the time the store first themed. This band that I was in at the time (Antipop Consortium) was just starting to make a little noise, so I used my position at work to talk to customers and try to sell them our music.

Trust me, it worked.

Not only did my position advance my own purposes, I learned infinitely there and discovered so much music. The education at Other Music was invaluable and will stay with me, personally and professionally, forever.

I heard some great music while working in that store. I can still recall the first time that I heard Muslimgauze, when I fell in love with Kompakt and Autechre, and how elated I was when I first discovered Krautrock.

Other Music opened me up and allowed me the chance to meet all of the fantastic people who shopped and worked in the store. Many of those established relationships are still maintained to this day.

I can’t thank you enough, Chris and Josh, for employing me and feeding my musical expansion. I truly love Other Music and there will be never be another like you.
Jonn Hart Releases ‘Hammertime’ Exclusively on REVOLT
Tags: MC Hammer, Music, Revolt, Press Release, Jonn Hart

Jonn Hart channels an MC Hammer classic in his ‘Hammertime’

Los Angeles, CA / New York, NY — Friday, September 15th, 2017 — With a sound as infectious as his spirited ambition, Jonn Hart is turning heads — and ears. The young Bay Area singer/songwriter, premiered his new video for “Hammertime” exclusively on REVOLT today.

When asked about the song, Jonn Hart detailed, “I’ve had the idea to make a song called HammerTime for some years now. When I was in the studio with my producer Clayton William and we flipped “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer, the rest was history. I left the studio that night with a Crazy SLAP paying homage to MC Hammer and The Bay.”

With “Hammertime” Jonn gives us a vibe while we still have a bit of summer to enjoy it. With features from Nef The Pharaoh and Clyde Carson, and a cameo by MC Hammer himself, this truly is the Bay personified.

Watch Jonn Hart’s “Hammertime” here.
Beth & Aleph
By: Elle Rogers
Tags: Dance, Music, Poetry, Relationships, Love

As the chords draw close,

baritones

crescendo

deeper and

exquisite

friction of the scales

glissandos from here to

heaven’s gate and higher still

into air we mortals cannot breathe.

Just outside the realm of

kindled

love, this

music meets with

new triumphant song,

opening the

portals of our

quintessential

rites,

stripping every

taboo

undertone of

victory’s

wonder and

expanding

yearning for this

zealous symphony.
White Paper: Social Media in the Middle East (2019 edition)
By: Damian Radcliffe
Tags: Middle East, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Facebook, YouTube

For the past eight years, I’ve produced an annual study tracking trends in social media in the Middle East. The latest report was published in January 2020, highlighting key trends and developments during the previous 12 months.

The study — Social Media in the Middle East: 2019 in review - was written in conjunction with University of Oregon (UO) PhD student Hadil Abuhmaid, and designed by another UO student, Kelly Kondo who recently graduated from our Advertising and Brand Responsibility Master’s program.

Here’s a link to the press release, published in English and Arabic.

Selected Media Coverage

You can see pick-up for the report in a variety of places, including:

Articles

Hadil and I have also written a couple of short analysis pieces, summarizing key elements of our research:

Report Sections

During the past few months, I’ve also atomized the report by breaking up each chapter and posting it separately on Medium. You can read these individual sections, by clicking on the links below.

Full Report

You can also read and download the full report in various places online:

Social Media in the Middle East: 2019 in review, by Damian Radcliffe and Hadil Abuhmaid. Download, or view online, via the University of Oregon Scholars’ Bank, Scribd, SlideShare, Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

Infographic
Why I decided to write my own media hosting service in Vue and Node.js
By: Thomas Underwood
Tags: Nodejs, Vuejs, Side Project, Programming, Front End Development

Where did this idea come from and why would I attempt such a thing?

Good question. In light of the past few years regarding data privacy and data security, I have increasingly been moving my data (files, media, etc.) off of large cloud platforms such as Google Drive and the like, in favor of self-hosting my data. See below resources.

Self-hosting has worked far better than I could have expected due to an increase in internet bandwidth, faster computers and mobile phones, better networks, and many affordable self-hosting solutions.

With that in mind, I found Nextcloud. This particular solution seemed to meet most of my needs. After using Nextcloud for almost a year, I can say that in a lot of ways it’s just as reliable as Google Drive and has many of the same features you would expect. However, I would also add that the UI and desktop apps are fairly dated. Their UI and some of the syncing functionality is questionable at best. For instance, the menu bar on Chrome has been broken for over a year.

Nextcloud UI broken in Chrome

Nextcloud Dated Desktop UI

I also noticed that the app and UI are unresponsive or extremely slow for large amounts of pictures and media. Finally, the kicker is that everything is written in PHP. I had thought about contributing to the project, but PHP was a major turn-off for me. I really appreciate their efforts and what they bring to the community, but for me, the hit and misses of the product left both me and my wife wanting a better solution for us. That is where Eikona comes into play.

Eikona 2,500+ photos demo

Currently, without any major optimizations, I’m able to load 2,500+ photos almost instantly without any caching. As I continue to add optimizations including streaming of images and infinite scrolling (a form of pagination), I expect that Eikona should easily be able to load photo collections on desktop and mobile with 100,000+ photos without buffering or waiting for thumbnails to load.

Right now, the only optimization that’s done is reducing the size of each image by creating thumbnails that are 250x250. That makes them about 1/10 the size of the original file. This allows, at least locally, thousands of thumbnails (photos) to load almost immediately. When you click the thumbnail, the full resolution file loads. A 12 kb thumbnail then loads a 120kb photo. Even for large JPEGs, the thumbnail is 12kb while the actual photo may be 705kb+.

16kb thumbnail

287kb full resolution JPEG

New updates coming soon including a post on how I maxed out the new Apple silicon M1 processor and 16GB RAM while doing image processing. I will post my results with code, screenshots, and optimizations to improve the processing of tens of thousands of photos.
Tableau Ask Data
By: Santhavathi S
Tags: Business Intelligence, Data Visualization, NLP, Tableau

Simplifying analytics with natural language

With Ask Data, anyone can easily ask questions of their data regardless of expertise. It is available at no extra charge as part Tableau’s newest release, Tableau 2019.1.

Ask Data interprets the intent behind ambiguous and vague questions to give you accurate results. You can continuously refine your question as you explore your data, then share the findings with others as a Tableau workbook.

It is a Self service analytics available for both Tableau Server and Online, for both live and extract that throws out a visualisation when you ask a question, empowering every individual in an organisation with the ability to ask questions and get quick answers and make better, data-driven decisions. It is as simple as select a data source and type in a question and no setup is required.

Easy Powerful Analytical Capabilities

Start your analysis with a simple statement or question

Iterate with additional questions by adding follow-up queries

Ask Data enriches the semantic model with metadata about the field — when you ask “net sales atleast”, it is able to pick the right column that represents net sales. Metadata also contains the most commonly occurring string values, it internally builds this metadata through a continuous learning process form our usage patterns.

Use Global synonym enrichment across data sources — For eg. an attribute called “sales” you can directly add other synonyms such as revenue, income, earnings. This enables users to use more natural language in their questions.

With Smart Analytics, it is able to decipher context, and also understand underspecified or ambiguous statements

It incorporates data visualization best practices, it is able to pick the right visualisation for you based on the question you ask, but you also have a choice of changing it.

Curate data sources for a successful user experience, this includes having proper column names, adding synonyms/aliases for your columns, having all related data as one datasource, etc.

It provides an easy path for Business people in going from data to decision

Continue reading -: https://blog.avmconsulting.net/posts/2019-03-11-tableau-ask-data/

Check out our best AWS deal:

https://www.avmconsulting.net/well-architected-review
The Silent Bells Of Medium
By: John O'Neill
Tags: Humor, Community, Ｍedium, Creativity, Médium

The Silent Bells Of Medium

It’s All About The Bells That Shine

Writing on Medium is like riding a roller coaster that has many twists and turns, and big highs, and really depressing lows. The mechanisms that create the thrills and spills are ingenious creations of some marketing gurus. There are the “claps” that certainly are very much appreciated. The “highlighting” that gives you a nice rosy feeling. The “responses” are awesome, which allow you to encounter new friends and which even make platonic relationships possible. But those “bells”, the ones on my page that light up only for me, they are what get my juices flowing.

Each morning, before breakfast, before reading my favorite newspaper, I faithfully log onto my Medium account. My top priority is to see if I have any bells. The number of reads comes next in importance. The earnings from the previous day are a distant third for me since the amount is always going to be inconsequential and quite small. During the day, I admit to checking in frequently to see if there are any more bells. When there are none, my spirits sink,” they don’t love me any more”, my crushed ego laments. Ah, but when there are double digit bells and they prove to be a mix of claps, responses, and highlights, “God is in heaven, all is right with the world.”

These bells have such power over me. As an incentive, it really works, both ways. It can raise me up, or bring me way down. .On an otherwise good day, little interest generated in one of my pieces can even make me more determined to turn things around with the next article or poem that I will write.

Then there are the bells that deceive. You know the ones to which I’m referring. Those where the bell has a number such as 83 on it(This actually happened to me recently), and on clicking on it you find that there were only three readers. But two of those fans highlighted almost every line of a piece including the title. Of course the Medium algorithms being of limited sophistication treat every line as if it were done by a separate discreet individual.

Receiving only a few bells on a piece that you really liked can be a blow to your ego. For me, it has also made me at times think of no longer writing on Medium. That quickly fades away when overnight readers from other continents come through and/or new readers clap for a poem and start following me. Then my spirits soar anew. Taken together it is like hitting on a sweepstakes-winning lottery ticket. It is a gamble that I will continue to take for the foreseeable future, or at least for the next week or so.

So you light up my bells, and I’ll light up your bells. A devil’s pact that I’m happy to make.