fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Effective Design Communication in the Time of Zoom Fatigue
By: Workday Design
Tags: Design Communication, Videos, UX Design, Design Process, Zoom Fatigue

What We Did

To start, we held a feedback session with some Sr. org leaders to work out what could be done. To start, we defined what it was that we were trying to accomplish:

“Reimagine the way the org and Design communicate by disseminating information about Design activities, offering inclusion in the design process, and showcasing the connection of Design efforts to larger business objectives.”

Along with that definition, we also determined that the best manifestation of this idea would be scalable (no more “really, another meeting?”), asynchronous (no more “oh, I missed that”), and engaging (no more “I can’t keep my eyes open”). In short, we needed to level-up our communication skills.

We first looked to others in the industry to find out more about effective design communication and found example after example — like Neilson Norman’s Storytelling to Present UX Work and Jared Spool’s Combining Our UX Metrics With Compelling, Emotional Stories — about storytelling and its inherent ability to entice and engage.

Our team then spitballed ideas about how we could realize our goal through storytelling and determined that a video newsletter would:

Let our viewers digest the information asynchronously .

. Allow us the space to create worthwhile content at scale .

. Enable us to effectively use our creative energy to create engaging content.

With the details of producing (I conveniently have a background in video production), cataloging (Google Drive), and presenting our content (Slack) figured out, we set up some calendar time and hit record.

Clearly David didn’t know we meant “Lisa Frank” when we told him this was a “Frank”-themed episode

After our boisterous first recording session, I edited down the footage, interspersed a few memes to add some lightness, and wrote a text breakdown of the video to post along with the actual recording. We posted the video on the primary slack channel for our org and we (well, maybe just me) watched our Slack notifications nervously to see what, if anything, peoples’ reactions would be.

Much to the chagrin of my inner critic, people were very into it.

Within a few hours, our post resulted in more engagement, more fresh ideas, and more questions about our Design happenings than we had ever received from our original meetings.

These are a few of my favorite reactions from that original post:

We also had multiple Sr. stakeholders reach out to show their support for the new method, we had design leaders from other orgs ping us to see how they could learn more about our process, and our management pushed us to cross-post the videos into other channels to promote the value of our org at large.

This level of enthusiasm validated that what we were trying out really was effective design communication.
Plutus Weekly Report — August 22nd 2018
Tags: Blockchain, Payments, Cryptocurrency, Report, Bitcoin

Sounds interesting, but what is SEPA?

SEPA is the Single European Payments Area system, which is a type of agreement made between several countries to simplify payment processing and bank transfers.

This makes it possible to create incredibly fast bank transfers, which theoretically can take as little as a few seconds.

When compared to the drudgery of slow painful transfers that only clear on work days, 24/7 availability makes SEPA a winning combination of comfort and convenience.

Can I use Plutus if I live outside of Europe?

Plutus is currently only available in the UK & EU.

Will you support other countries and currencies in the future?

It is our goal to expand internationally to other regions in Asia and the Americas over the coming year.

How long should my transfer usually take?

This depends on the level of SEPA support offered by your bank of choice. Typically the transfer should be instant or only take a few minutes.

If your bank does not have full SEPA support, the process may take 48 hours or slightly longer. However, this is quite rare.

We took great care to make this process as convenient as possible, so that every transfer is cleared ASAP.

What sets Plutus apart?

As a fundamental design decision, Plutus does not store or hold cryptocurrencies. This means that there is no centralised storage of BTC, which is in line with the original philosophy of bitcoin.

I have more questions. How do I use the Plutus app?

Our community support team has been working overtime to provide you with the necessary infos and materials (including helpful screenshots) to conquer any feature. Head over to our helpdesk page, and keep an eye out for new content:

Helpdesk

http://support.plutus.it

Youtube Videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-JoCOFFywSaQHSsZsExeIw

Relief has washed over the development team as the culmination of their hard work has paid off:

Finalised PlutusDEX and Plutus Tap & Pay

Plutus Tap & Pay successfully passed Apple App Store review

Approved for the Google App Store as well

Working on the release of the Pluton (PLU) rebate and reward distribution system

Preparing to scale new challenges

To address numerous inquiries on our Telegram: Due to mass media lacking confidence in the stability of Bitcoin, media and press companies are reluctant to talk about products in the early innovation stage.

However, now that we have a successfully functioning service, our possibilities for marketing and advertising have expanded immediately. Prepare to see Plutus a lot more often in the media.

In order to gain mass media reach worldwide, Plutus has successfully built some great relationships and secured global coverage, thereby increasing our engagement with the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem.

Recently: ‘Cryptocurrencies can bring stability to the UK after Brexit’, a thought leadership article, received wide coverage from many specialist outlets.
Bitcoin, When Moon?
By: Coin Observatory
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Investment

Evidently, the above section highlights our previous updates on the market with a solid track record. But what’s ahead for Bitcoin? Is the chart running out of steam, or are bulls just now waking up?

Technicals

The Short Squeeze we’ve been publishing about is underway and is in the early stages. We’re currently eyeing a resistance of $7290 on BTC. This is a crucial gap-fill, on spot exchange VPVR and CME futures.

We expect the Cryptocurrency to settle between $7,295 and $7,351 in the next 48 hours or sooner, depending on trading volume, which we’ll cover in the next section.
Divi Transaction Fees Explained
By: Geoff Mccabe
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Masternodes, Diviproject

Most other cryptocurrencies, including our predecessor blockchains (Bitcoin, Dash, and Pivx) have higher fees, based on the size of the transaction, usually measured in something like “Satoshis per Kilobyte”. Divi’s formula is different, based primarily on the transaction amount, with the size as a second multiplier. This keeps our fees cheap and makes DIVI work for micropayments such as if you were to pay for song views.

Our Fee Algorithm is as Follows

Fee = TV * TVM * TS / TSM

TV = Transaction Value

TS = Transaction Size

TVM = Transaction Value Multiplier

TSM = Transaction Size Multiplier

Other Details

Maximum Fee is 100 DIVI.

Minimum Fee is 10,000 Satoshis/KB. (0.0001 DIVI/KB)

Divi’s transaction fees are burned, not given to miners/minters.

DVS For Fees

Upon launch, we have DVS (Dynamic Value Sporks) set up for several fee algorithm variables, with the following initial settings:

TVM (Transaction Value Multiplier) = 0.0001

TSM (Transaction Size Multiplier) = 300

Maximum Fee = 100 DIVI

Minimum Fee = 0.0001 DIVI/KB

If we find that the fee structure doesn’t work, or the network is under attack, we can use DVS to nearly instantly change these values across all the nodes.

How We Picked Initial Values

TVM: We wanted to make sure our transactions were very cheap so they could be used for micropayments. So with this value, a simple transaction of around $1000 would still only cost 10 cents to send.

TSM: 300 bytes is around the average size of a transaction. Depending on how many UTXOs are used, it can grow larger. With multisig transactions and other opcodes starting to play a role in the future, the average transaction size will grow. More complicated transactions will cost more, but will still be relatively cheap. Also, notice that the way the algorithm works, a transaction that’s double the size is also exactly double the fee.

Maximum Fee: With the DIVX price at around US$1.00 at the time of this writing, and we having no idea what it will be after launch, we decided to set this to 100 DIVI so that the max fee would be approximately US$1. That means that if you send US$10,000 worth of DIVX to someone, it will probably cost around US$1. Larger transactions won’t cost more. Our intention is to keep the maximum fee at around US$1. However, if inflation becomes an issue for DIVI in the future, this is one way that it can be controlled.

Keep in mind that the Divi network is really a beta. We have a lot of technology to add in the coming months after launching our mainnet. There are many factors and tradeoffs that may bring up challenges, so expect that we may make changes. During the beta phase, which will last several months at least, the DVS values will be under centralized control by the Divi team. Once we have a stable ecosystem, we’ll be able to give control to the community by votes within governance.
US Slavery is Alive and Well
By: Gene Smith
Tags: Greed, Slave Wages, Politics, Capitalism, Truth

Slavery is a tool. It is used by those who have a burning need to control others.

It takes root in fertile ground of those who are segregated from the basic struggles the working class experience, whether they are distanced by financial circumstances, birthright, or mental illness.

The workers earn profits for the financially well-off, the more fortunate, the “people of means.” Slavery literally built America, forcing others to do the labor that created vast wealth for early landowners.

In this country, we fought the bloodiest battles over the issue, with more than 600,000 or 1 in 4 soldiers, giving their life in the Civil War. There are still those that refuse to believe slavery was the reason for this conflict.

Facts are facts.

Even the issue of “states rights” centered on slavery and this is why we have the 13th Amendment.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Cogitare

“Think” is the English word for that Latin term “cogitare.” Since the dawn of man, ignoring facts has been a diversionary tactic by the lying class. Lets see who owns that distinction today.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. This is when the call for less government was born. The South believed liberty meant government should not dictate important economic policies of the states. Less government would allow them to keep slavery as an economic source of revenue.

The South declared war, fired the first shot then lied about slavery as the reason for it all.

Today, it is that same dynamic which blames Democrats for Donald Trump and the Republicans shutting government down.

It is a centuries old wish of the come true. But all this so-called liberty comes at a hefty price. There was trash overflowing in National Parks, Tax refunds were delayed, airport security was threatened, all under the guise of “less government.”

The other side of the coin

We have been taught that slavery is wrong, people are human beings and we all deserve to life with dignity. So what is the problem?

If our educational system has served us well then this conversation would not be relevant today. Slavery was abolished 156 years ago, and a President gave his life for a cause.

It is not the multitudes that are ignorant of this. It is the well-off, the landowners, who have become captains of industry, the top 1% of earners who rake in 90% of this nation’s wealth. They fight for slavery by using Capitalism as the modern day plantation, by paying wages that are less than people can live with in dignity.

Capitalism is still running the corporate world using employees and treating them expendable. Labor is now the modern-day wage slave.

It is not good enough to end slavery. What we need is to end the system in place which allows the wealthy to exploit others. If we are to break the cycle, we must break the system.
Hilo.io Partners with Civic Technologies, Leading Blockchain Identity Technology Provider, for User Authentication
By: Monica Puchner
Tags: Press Release, Partnerships, Blockchain, Social Media, Bitcoin

Social Network Uses Civic’s Technology to Verify User Identities

San Francisco, California, June 25, 2018 — Cryptocurrency based social platform Hilo.io today announced a strategic partnership with Civic Technologies Inc., the company revolutionizing digital identity with its Blockchain-based technology. The partnership brings trusted, secure identity services to Hilo.io and enables Hilo.io to securely verify the user identities, while combating fake accounts.

“As we release Hilo to a global audience, we want to have systems in place to verify the real identities of our users. We’re excited to announce our partnership with Civic. Civic provides a way to authenticate all our community members with ease,” said Hilo CEO Monica Puchner.

“We are pleased to welcome Hilo.io to Civic’s Partner Network. This collaboration marks another milestone for Civic’s ecosystem and for on-demand, secure, and low-cost access to identity verification services,” said Civic CEO, Vinny Lingham.

Civic will help enable secure sign-On and Reusable Know Your Customer (KYC) across the Hilo.io’s platform dedicated to social discussion around cryptocurrencies. This will help Hilo.io authenticate and verify real users, preventing bad actors for creating fake accounts. Fake accounts are often used to spread spam and disinformation on conventional social platforms. This partnership will enable more trust and transparency within the Hilo community and around cryptocurrency discussions. Civic’s decentralized identity solutions will help to verify the real identities of Hilo.io users and ensure that Hilo’s crowdsourced sentiment data is coming from authentic users.

For more information about Hilo.io, visit https://www.hilo.io/.

For more information about Civic or to become a Civic business partner, visit https://www.civic.com.

About Hilo.io

Hilo.io is a social platform for crypto traders. The current fragmented landscape makes it hard for people to get into crypto. Our platform acts as a dashboard allowing for users to interact with friends, manage your portfolio, discover new coins, and catch up on all things crypto. Our token will be utilized to incentivize users, transact, and encourage wide token adoption to the average person. Hilo.io is your connection to crypto.

About Civic

Civic is a visionary blockchain identity-verification technology that allows consumers to authorize the use of their identities in real time. They are spearheading the development of an ecosystem that is designed to facilitate on-demand, secure, and low-cost access to identity-verification services via the blockchain. Civic recently introduced a Civic token that participants in the ecosystem will use to provide and receive identity-verification-related services. The company sold $33 million of its tokens during its token sale event in June 2017. For more information, visit https://www.civic.com.

Hilo.io Media Contact

hello@hilo.io

Civic Media Contact

jordan@civic.com
What is Mixin?
By: Kelly Xu
Tags: Blockchain

Mixin was coming out in late 2017, there were several words make people feel confused, such as Mixin, Mixin Network, Mixin Messenger, and XIN. People always misunderstand them, if you agree to it, please continue to read this article, you’ll find the answer.

Mixin is the name of the project and the name of the blockchain or we can say it the public blockchain, and Mixin Network is a free and lightning fast peer-to-peer transactional network for digital assets. It distributed a cross-chain solution with built-in smart contracts that facilitates instantly and secure cryptocurrency and crypto-asset transfer. It allows developers to build cross-chain DApps based Mixin Network protocol. As a TEE powered BFT-DAG network, Mixin could connect all existing blockchains with unlimited throughput. It’s now supporting Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Ripple, Sia. Moreover Mixin will support all popular blockchains shortly.

Mixin Messenger is an example to show developers how to build the DApps on Mixin Network. Users can easily access their kinds of blockchain assets only through a phone number and a 6-digit PIN code. XIN is the sole token used by many services in Mixin, especially full node collateral, the DApp creation and API calls. To join the network as a full node, it should pledge at least 10,000 XIN token to establish the initial trust. Every DApp creation will cost some XIN for one time, the cost is determined by the resources the DApp claimed to consume. The Mixin API calls from DApp may cost some XIN depends on the call type and count. All the XIN penalties and fees charged by the network will be recycled to the mining pool.

One more thing to tell you that Mixin sponsored the hack.summit() 2018, the virtual Hackathon, it will take place from July 6 to July 8 2018, we provide up to 100 XIN as prize, for more information about Hackathon challenge, please read this.
DreamTeam Token Updates, March
Tags: Esport, Gaming, Token Economy, Blockchain

Below you can check some of the key updates regarding the DreamTeam Token.

DreamTeam Token documents update

The updated DreamTeam Whitepaper is ready and can be found here: https://token.dreamteam.gg/documents/DreamTeam_Whitepaper_ENG.pdf

DreamTeam Tokenomics have been updated and can be found here: https://token.dreamteam.gg/documents/Tokenomics_EN.pdf

Listing updates

As we have mentioned in our previous report we’ve started the listing process. Below you can check the listing status on all the exchanges we’ve reached so far:

Exchange — Status

https://global.bittrex.com/ — Pending reply

https://www.binance.com/ — Submitted form for Binance Coin Vote

https://poloniex.com/ — Due to the exchange’s new organizational structure, we were advised to apply for listing in April

https://www.huobi.com/en-us/ — Pending reply

https://www.okex.com/en/ — Pending reply

https://www.kraken.com — We’re waiting for the Legal opinion to submit a letter to our contact person on the exchange

Coinbase — Waiting for the Legal opinion to be ready to submit the listing form

Bithumb Korea — Waiting for their feedback

Bitfinex — Waiting for their feedback

About DreamTeam:

DreamTeam — infrastructure platform and payment gateway for esports and gaming.

Stay in touch: Token Website|Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn|BitcoinTalk.org

If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team any time at token@dreamteam.gg. Or you can always get in touch with us via our official Telegram chat.
Morpheus Labs’ Third Update Frequency on Github
By: Morpheus Labs Team
Tags: Crypto, Blockchain, Technology

The nature of our blockchain solution is different from public blockchain projects — we are a “for-profit” company that is generating revenues from clients and intends to bolster our token ecosystem with increased business activity.

Here’s our third Update Frequency of Morpheus Labs. Once again, we would like to assure our community that our private platform repositories are being updated on a consistent basis, and there is thorough due diligence progress followed for every partner that we work with.

Below are some of the statistics that we can share from our GitHub progress;

Morpheus Labs Blockchain Platform-as-a-Service GitHub Statistics Main Figures:

Total Lines of Code: 168,769

Total Commits: 9791
Our Parents Are Spies Working for the Government
By: Valerie Rose
Tags: Family, Comics, Deaf, Spies, Sign Language

Our Parents Are Spies Working for the Government

A true-story comic by a half-Deaf woman raised in a Deaf family
Vertical Movement with vim-columnmove
By: Alex R. Young
Tags: Plugins, Motions

A reader who was also a fan of Patternjump sent in vim-columnmove, which is by the same author. This is a plugin that helps make vertical movement more convenient by providing vertical equivalents of motions like f and t .

For example, columnmove-f (mapped to <M-f> ) will move the cursor down along the current column to the next matching character.
Liquidity aggregation on Serenity Exchange
By: Serenity Financial
Tags: Forex Trading, Ethereum, Trading, Ethereum Blockchain

Dear friends!

We continue our work on Serenity Exchange with the goal of making it the most convenient and popular exchange for cryptocurrency trading.

Today, we’re glad to announce that starting from July 22nd, Serenity Exchange will aggregate liquidity from third-party exchanges.

This means that right now any user can start trading popular cryptocurrencies at best prices at the time of selling or buying. As of now, the following currency pairs are available for trading on the exchange: BTC/USDT, LTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, SRNT/USDT, ETH/BTC, LTC/BTC, SRNT/BTC, LTC/ETH, SRNT/ETH, LTC/SRNT.

Currently, liquidity aggregation runs in test mode, and trading volumes are increasing gradually. As soon as the parameters required for the maximum load are set, the system will start working at full capacity.

Serenity Exchange boasts a unique feature of connecting liquidity right at the start, it aggregates liquidity from other exchanges. In the future, large liquidity volumes will allow for lower spreads, faster trades and smaller fees for traders who work with huge trading volumes. We connect to exchanges as institutional clients and relay requests from other exchanges to our own, thus increasing the number of requests for a potential trade within Serenity Exchange. Furthermore, other kinds of liquidity will accumulate in the future, which means that our own turnover within the exchange will be increasing.

Liquidity aggregation is among the most important competitive advantages of Serenity Exchange. It allows to achieve the best possible order execution.
Knowledge Account — Update Preview!
Tags: Crypto, Bitcoin, Blockchain Startup, Blockchain Technology, Blockchain

The Knowledge Account has seen incredible growth of registered users since launching in 2018. The next major update to the Knowledge Ecosystem is full withdrawal & deposit functionality coming soon to the Knowledge Account.

The Knowledge team is proud of the growth of the Knowledge Ecosystem and is focused on deeper KNW Token utilization via the Knowledge Account.

Knowledge Account — withdrawal & deposit launch to be announced soon

By the end of May our team will be announcing a launch date for withdrawal and deposit functionality in the Knowledge Account. When the launch announcement is released, details including withdrawal fees will be additionally available to the community.

Follow our Medium for the most up to date announcements on Knowledge Ecosystem updates, or message the team directly on Telegram!

Knowledge Quicklinks

Download TriviaSpar: https://triviaspar.com/download/

Create a Knowledge Account: https://account.knowledge.io/sign-up/get-started
The Visible
By: Paul Mulliner
Tags: Poetry, Relationships, Poetry On Medium, Life, Self

Like refractions

through a prism in our mind,

or echoes of church bells in a fog,

moments of remembered experience

vibrate, pulsate and resonate,

right through the conscious ocean

of our joined awareness.

And as palm fronds

swirl and roll in complex oscillations,

possibly unknown to physics,

and warm air drifts by in a slow and steady tide,

all experience is vibrations and fluctuations,

not just of light energy

entering the eyes

of all life everywhere,

or the complex orchestration

of signals in the brain.

The world is

itself made of vibrations.

Patterns of coherent oscillations

construct, materialize and form,

every living cell and all life,

in the visible world around us.

And then, like when we met

that day, near the river,

with the water blown

into endless slow waves

and shifting motions,

causing boats to rock

and the rhythmic clank of rigging,

among the steady shimmer

of patterns of reflected light,

there are those moments,

fleeting, inexpressible and sweet

when all vibration inside us

seems joined, into the one

shared ocean of our being.
Why Everyone Is Seeing Things The Wrong Way In Crypto-Assets
By: Steve Hertzberg
Tags: Digital Asset, Blockchain

Great article. Thanks.

I also think it’s worth noting that this price volatility arose during a period where risk management tools were nonexistent or inadequate in their market fit. Virtually every major asset class incorporates comensurate hedging tools in order to project oneself against price volatility.
How to Build a Concurrent Chat App With Golang and WebSockets
By: Michael Bogan
Tags: Golang, Web Development, Redis, Heroku, Programming

Channels in Go

What developers find appealing about Go is its ability to communicate concurrently, which it does through a system called channels. It’s important to draw upon an oft-cited distinction between concurrency and parallelism. Parallelism is the process by which a CPU executes multiple tasks at the same time, while concurrency is the CPU’s ability to switch between multiple tasks that start, run, and complete while overlapping one another. In other words, parallel programs handle many operations at once, while concurrent programs can switch between many operations over the same period of time.

A channel in Go is the conduit through which concurrency flows. Channels can be unidirectional — with data either sent to or received by them — or bidirectional, which can do both. Here’s an example that demonstrates the basic principles of concurrency and channels:

You can run this example online at the Go Playground to see the results. Channels are created by first specifying the data type they will communicate with — in this case, string . Two goroutines, one and two , accept each of these channels as an argument. Both then loop five times, passing a message to the channel, which is indicated by the <- glyph. Meanwhile, in the main function, an infinite for loop waits for messages to come in from the channels. The select statement picks the channel that has a pending message, prints it, and moves on. If the channel was closed (which is important not just for memory management but also to indicate that no more data will be sent), the channel is set to nil . When both channels are nil , the loop breaks.

In essence, a receiver is waiting endlessly to receive packets of data. When it receives the data, it acts upon it, then continues to wait for more messages. These receivers operate concurrently, without interrupting the rest of the program’s flow. For this chat application, we will wait for a user to send a message to a receiver over a channel. When the message is received, the app will broadcast it to the front end so that everyone sitting in chat can read the text.
Goodbye, Target Actions. Hello, UIActions
By: Anupam Chugh
Tags: Mobile, Xcode, iOS, Swift, Programming

Goodbye, Target Actions. Hello, UIActions

iOS 14 introduces a new way to set actions on UIControls

Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash.

Up until now, iOS developers had to use the Target-Action pattern to set actions on UIKit controls. It wasn’t really a Swifty way of setting actions since selectors were born in Objective-C.

Until iOS 13, for most UIControls , you’d have to addTarget , set a selector function name, and define that function somewhere else in your code. Not only was this tedious, but it also required setting default actions for selectors when handling multiple buttons or segmented controls. This could pose problems if a UIButton or UISegmentedControl element was modified, as we’d have to address the selector handler function and ensure there was a default case.

iOS 14 changes the way we set actions on some of our UI elements by providing initializers to set UIAction . In doing so, we can get rid of event handlers, as the UIAction 's handler automatically takes care of it.

So, it’s time to say goodbye to the iOS 13 and older ways of setting target actions:

button.addTarget(self, action: #selector(test(sender:)), for: .touchUpInside) @objc

func test(sender: UIButton){...}
Music Streaming Service Churn Predictions with PySpark
By: Matej Svitek
Tags: Spark, Churn Prediction, Pyspark, Udacity

Exploratory data analysis

Let’s start this part with defining our label — and creating the churn column. As it was suggested, the Cancellation Confirmation event is what we are after. It is very important to realize that each row represents only a session, user had in a certain time. Therefore once we create the “churn” column and extract the values from the “page” field, we should spread values across all the sessions of each user. This is also the way we’ll be handling new features later in the feature engineering part. As there will come a time when we will need to get rid of majority of rows and keep only one row per user. And the time is called Modeling. And if we don’t spread the values across all the user’s rows, there is where our weeping and the gnashing of our teeth will be. And there shall in that time be rumors of things going astray and there shall be a great confusion as to where features really are …

The Time of Modeling is near!

So we found out that there are 52 occasions of churn ( out of 225 users) in the small dataset. Now is the time to explore the data in deep.

A column named page is definitely going to be one of our best sources of features. (Btw this is the column we extracted our label from). Events like “Thumbs down”, “Error” or even “Help” — they all can indicate churn.

One of the features I can think about, would also be increased or decreased number of songs played daily per user. We get this number by counting “NextSong” events per day (per user). I decided to collect these numbers into lists, split the lists into 4 ongoing quarters and compare a mean of songs played daily for each quarter. This way we ended up with 3 values per customer, which indicate whether the mean increased or decreased in the next quarter ( I stands for Increase and D for decreased) :

Even though I was expecting to have more D’s at the end of churn triplets, I will still use this feature in modeling part, because in combination with other features it can show up as a helpful one.

Another interesting field seems to be the userAgent . My first idea was to extract only the Operating system but than I decided to spent a bit more time with it and extract more details. RegexTokenizer was the tool I used initially …

My plan was to create a new feature/column for each word and use 0’s and 1’s as values in each row, based on whether the word is present in the list of tokens or not. The only problem could be perfectly correlated features. In the heatmap below — created out of the word-matrix (from userAgent word) — we can see that some of the words are perfectly correlated with other ones (yellow dots besides the diagonal). We’ll need to remove some words accordingly — as we do not want them to slow down the the whole feature engineering process and we do not want them to bias our models.
An internship in the age of COVID
By: Fsi Student Programs
Tags: Stanford, Fsi Students, Internships, Tecfsi

About the author: Amarins Laanstra-Corn ’23 is an FSI The Europe Center Global Policy Intern with the Lisbon Council. She is currently an International Relations major at Stanford University.

I began my internship at the Lisbon Council, a Brussels based social science and economic think tank, in the beginning of June. But as the majority of undergraduate students who chose to pursue internships in the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I was quickly ushered into the confines of remote work. It was a drastic shift from my original expectations of bustling offices, non-virtual meetings and the opportunity to explore a foreign country to a workspace defined by isolation and reduced novelty, also known as the dining room in my childhood home in Washington, D.C.

Initially, I was filled with doubts. First because I am a firm believer in the power of in-person relationships and interactions and second because working from home presented its own set of additional challenges such as limited networking experience, missed cultural opportunities, and most importantly, a consistent six hour time difference between Brussels and the East Coast. This meant that for more than half of my workday, my coworkers would either be eating dinner or asleep. This also resulted in taking on more responsibility than I had previously anticipated. I would receive assignments at four in the morning, meetings between my organization and collaborators would happen at five am, and there was no one to help with clarifying questions throughout the day, which meant that when I was working on a project — with usually a next-day deadline — I would have to do so fast and independently. I also knew from doing a quarter of online classes at Stanford the month prior, that I was someone who often suffered from Zoom fatigue and the burnout caused by constantly being online. However, despite my hesitation, I pressed forward and the most shocking thing occurred, I loved it. Not that my original doubts didn’t exist or cause problems, there were moments of deep frustration caused by the challenges of remote work; however, they all seemed to be subdued in the light of the work I was doing. I felt motivated and challenged by the independence and subject of my research, and even felt I had discovered new queries of interest to pursue beyond my time at the Lisbon Council. I managed to get over my zoom fatigue by having productive and meaningful conversations with my coworkers, where we included tidbits and stories about non-work related matters in order to add some laughter to the day. And even though a couple thousand miles apart, I felt I have built lasting and meaningful relationship with my colleagues. I am enjoying my time at the Lisbon Council. And although it might mean I have to wake up a few hours earlier, I am truly grateful for this experience.
From LeNet to EfficientNet: The evolution of CNNs
By: Prakhar Ganesh
Tags: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Convolutional Network, Towards Data Science, Data Science

VGG: The power of 3x3 convolutions

While all previous iterations of CNN models believed in the idea of bigger receptive fields (for example, AlexNet had 11*11 convolution kernels), VGG proposed the idea of breaking all of these down to just 3*3 convolutions. According to the VGG architecture, multiple 3*3 convolutions stacked together are capable of replicating bigger receptive fields and with more nonlinearities present in between them (in terms of activation functions), it can even perform better than their counterparts with bigger receptive fields. They even introduced 1*1 convolutions in order to further increase the nonlinearity present in the model. VGG models have become quite famous since then and are used even today in various tutorials to introduce newcomers to CNNs.

VGG-16 architecture [3]

ResNet: Tackling vanishing gradients

The general trend of simply stacking multiple CNN layers to create deeper models soon came to a halt due to a very common problem in deep learning, known as the vanishing gradient. In simpler terms, while training a CNN the gradient starts from the last layer and needs to travel through every layer in the middle before it reaches the initial layers. This can cause the gradient to completely vanish somewhere along the way, making it difficult to train the initial layers of the model. Residual or shortcut connections were introduced by the ResNet models which created alternate paths for the gradient to skip the middle layers and directly reach the initial layers. This allowed the authors to train extremely deep models that were not performing well earlier. It has now become a common practice to have residual connections in modern CNN architectures.

ResNet architecture [4]

MobileNet & MobileNetV2: Moving towards edge-friendly models

The general trend of CNNs at this stage was creating bigger and bigger models to get better performance. While the advances in computing power provided by GPUs allowed them to do so, a new range of products was also getting noticed in the ML world, known as edge-devices. Edge-devices have extreme memory and computation constraints but have opened doors to many applications that a GPU cannot be applied to.

In order to create lighter CNN models that can perform at par with the existing state-of-the-art, MobileNet was proposed. MobileNet introduced the idea of separable convolutions (which I talk about in detail in my previous blog). In simpler terms, it breaks down a 2D convolution kernel into two separate convolutions, depthwise — which is responsible for collecting spatial information for every individual channel, and pointwise — which is responsible for interaction among various channels. Later, MobileNetV2 was also introduced with residual connections and other tweaks in the architecture to further reduce the model size.
The Benefits of SEO
By: The Sdcoders
Tags: Website Design, Search, Search Engine Marketing, Freelancing, SEO

The Benefits of SEO

What is SEO and how it can help your business succeed in this online world

Today, consumers expect their favorite business and brands to connect with them digitally. Your prospective customers expect responsive 24/7 customer support, clear information on your website and exciting updates about your business. Your online presence is how most companies are discovered and their credibility is assessed.

Does your brand seem reputable?

Does your company seem knowledgeable?

Does your social media remain relevant and interesting? What reviews have past users left on your service?

Consumers ask these kinds of questions when judging you and your competitors.

Most online experiences begin with a search engine search. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine and 47% of people click on one of the first 3 listings (SEJ 2016). Internet users spend an average of 6 hours and 30 minutes online every day and 8 out of 10 US adults go online each day (Oberlo 2019). Quite simply — most people find out about your business through their search engine results and your Google, Yahoo and Bing rankings matter. Fortunately, your business’ page rank on search engines can be improved.
I Spent 13 Years Teaching Dangerous Criminals: Here is What I Learned
By: Christopher Kokoski
Tags: Personal Development, Life, Education, Teaching, Life Lessons

It’s “us” not “them”

My first lesson came quickly. Although many of these men had committed serious crimes, they were still human beings just like you and me.

They still felt emotions. They still suffered from fears. They still held tightly to their personal value systems.

They had strengths and flaws, brilliance, and talent.

Many of them were much smarter and more resourceful than me. They knew how to build cars, fix household appliances, and paint damn near anything.

They had lived and experienced things I could only imagine.

Oddly, or maybe not odd at all, this didn’t separate us. Instead, it connected us on an even deeper, more primal level. My lesson became crystal clear: We are more similar than we are different.

This makes even more sense when you consider that the Wall Street Journal reports that at least 77.7 million people in the United States alone have a criminal record. To put that into perspective, that means as many people in the U.S. have criminal records as college degrees.

Learning this lesson allowed me to teach with more intimacy and compassion.

(Almost) everyone deserves compassion

I tend to believe that everyone deserves compassion, but I threw in the “almost” because I realize certain individuals have made very poor choices that inflicted unimaginable harm on undeserving families.

I’m not here to defend anyone or to insist on compassion where it is most difficult.

I simply want to share another lesson I learned from teaching dangerous criminals for 13 years.

There are no excuses for bad decisions or bad behavior. However, most of these men grew up in families and in situations that they did not choose. Abuse, violence, and extreme poverty wove consistent themes throughout their lives.

Again, this is no excuse for the choices they made as adults. We each must accept the responsibility for our actions.

Although a big part of what I taught centered on personal responsibility and accountability, I still learned to teach at deeper levels of empathy and understanding.

“If you are still breathing, you have a second chance.“— Oprah Winfrey

These men taught me that (almost) anyone deserves kindness, acceptance, and personal validation for their suffering.

More than once, I have pondered whether or not these men would have ended up in prison if their families could have provided nurturance, gentleness, and unconditional love.

There is hope

My biggest lesson was about hope.

What kind of hope? Hope that people can change. Hope that fractured families can heal. Hope that our mistakes of the past don’t always dictate our future.

During my 13 years, I witnessed more than one man turn his life around, become a great dad to children who desperately needed him, and give back to the community.

I celebrated with men who landed their first legal job and cried with men who lost a loved one.

I also watched men fail, lick their wounds, and pull themselves up again. Hope is a powerful motivator.
Demonstration of BSN Permissionless Services
By: Kc Tam
Tags: Bsn, Algorand, Permissionless, Blockchain, Ethereum

Introduction

BSN (Blockchain-based Service Network) is the blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service for decentralized applications (smart contracts) deployment and consumption. In my previous article I showed how to deploy a sample chaincode (from Hyperledger Fabric) on the BSN Testnet for Permissioned Services. We also saw how to access the chaincode deployed in BSN through BSN specific API.

Besides permissioned blockchain platforms, BSN also provides Permissionless Services. In short, BSN provides gateway services to a number of permissionless blockchain networks. Through the gateway we can access our accounts and invoke functions of smart contracts deployed in these permissionless blockchain networks. In this article I will show how to create BSN Permissionless Service, and how to access the services through the BSN gateway.

BSN Permissionless Service

In my previous work I have introduced a quick overview on BSN itself and BSN Permissioned Service. You can refer to it for a quick introduction about BSN. Here I only make an introduction to the BSN Permissionless Service.

As we all know, there are quite many mature permissionless blockchain networks running today. BSN Permissionless Service provides gateway services to a large number of them, and gives us a single management point to access them. BSN keeps growing the list of permissionless blockchain networks supported. As of today (December, 2020), we have seen the following in the list

Ethereum (Mainnet, Ropsten)

EOSIO (Mainnet, Testnet, Mainnet-dfuse)

Tezos (Mainnet, Carthagenet)

Nervos (Mainnet, Aggron)

NEO (Mainnet, Testnet)

Irisnet (Mainnet, Nyancat)

Algorand (Mainnet, Testnet)

Solana (Mainnet, Testnet)

ShareRing (Mainnet, Testnet)

BitYuan (Mainnet, Testnet)

Polkadot (Mainnet, Westend)

Oasis (Mainnet, Testnet)

The service is quite straightforward, and uniform across these networks. For each project we select the network we wish to access. Project ID and Project Key (optional) will be received. These are the important components when we access the selected network. BSN also provides the gateway detail when accessing the service. This gateway information will be incorporated into our client applications.

Demonstration of BSN Permissionless Service

Create a Project for Ethereum Mainnet

Here we walk through how to create a BSN Permissionless Service, and perform a simple REST API access to this network. We are using https://bsnbase.io. Register an account if you have not yet. Choose a plan to fit your case. In my case I am using the free plan, with three projects and limited daily requests and TPS.

By selecting Permissionless Services in left panel you can see this dashboard.
Bi by Bi
By: Gb Rogut
Tags: Poetry, Equality, Love, Passion, LGBTQ

Pieces of me

all over the place,

hidden in plain sight.

Kept in secret,

even from me.

It took decades to put myself together,

to fix the puzzle of me.

Who am I?

Who do I cherish?

Who can I love?

Now I know,

now I understand.

How come I didn’t see it before?

I’m still the same.

The one difference?

I can recognize the whole of me,

what my heart needs and aches for,

what makes my body tremble,

what quenches my thirst.

These pieces of me,

now in their rightful place.

Bit by bit, I uncovered these fragments of truth.

Bi by bi, I embraced them.
5 simple things that will sabotage your brand
By: Pennink Productions
Tags: Branding, Content Creation, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing

You know the importance of having a powerful and compelling brand, but is your brand actually that powerful and compelling? Even if it’s up to the job, are you living your brand — day in, day out? Or are you making one of these five mistakes?

1. A vague brand identity

Your brand isn’t just some snappy extra that has little or nothing to do with how your company operates on a daily basis.

You certainly need to have a thorough understanding of your brand. And you need to actually put that understanding into practice across your firm’s entire marketing efforts. That way, not even the most casual observer will be in any doubt about what your business is about.

2. A changing message

There are several reasons why the message you communicate through your brand has to be consistent.

First, you’ll want your audience to gradually memorise your brand message.

Second, you’ll want to have a consistent reputation.

Third, it’ll help you to build longevity and market share.

You risk all of this when you can’t stop ‘switching up’ your brand message.

3. A failure to be consistent

We aren’t talking here about the consistency of the brand message your firm’s marketing efforts communicate, but instead of your employees’ embodiment of that branding message.

Your company’s brand isn’t something separate from the day-to-day running of your business.

Make your staff aware of and believe in your brand message.

It’ll be easier to ensure you’re consistently delivering on the promise your brand represents.

4. A tendency to over-promise

It’s crucial to live up to your brand’s promise. That’s precisely why you should be careful not to make ridiculous and unrealistic promises through your branding that you can’t fulfil.

Customers tend to be highly attuned to what brands promise.

They remember whether promises are kept.

It’s all too easy for them to switch to a competitor if you ever over-promise and under-deliver.

5. A non-existent USP

Whether you know it as the point of difference (POD) or unique selling point (USP), it’s something every brand needs. It’s the one positive characteristic of your business that makes it truly stand out from its rivals, which those rivals would not be able to easily duplicate.

If you haven’t even thought much about a potential POD or USP for your brand, now’s the time to start thinking about what it is that will likely — or already does — make a customer choose your business over its obvious competitors.

Whether your brand is only just being launched or you have a well-established brand that you are anxious to protect, choose PENNInk Productions as your specialists in online marketing for small business to ensure that your marketing approach lives up to your brand.