fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
AirPods — How They Became One Of Apple’s Biggest Successes
By: Yash Patak
Tags: Airpods, Wearables, Apple, iOS, iPhone

Apple

Apple initially released the AirPods back in 2016 with the launch of the iPhone 7. Shortly after being announced the Airpods were mocked and ridiculed by the tech community.

Although it seemed like AirPods were going to be Apple’s next big disaster, the tables turned very quickly with Apple struggling to keep them on the shelves after they were introduced, as they became one of the most desirable products of the year. Today, they have become a status symbol. What makes this even success story even more strange is that originally Apple did not do that much marketing themselves for the product with just one small ad campaign.

So how did they get so popular?

MEMES!

One of the main reason for the success of the AirPods were the memes that appeared on all social media platforms. AirPods memes were everywhere. With google trends showing that after these memes started coming out AirPods became a much more searched term. This made the AirPods extremely hard to find as these memes became popular around Christmas time when the product was already in high demand for the Christmas period.

Due to the three-month window from when the product was announced to when the product was officially released, reviewers were given the opportunity to voice their own opinions. Despite the product's flaws of the expensive price and being very easy to lose, it soon became clear to people that not only were they a status symbol, but they were also good wireless headphones too. They have a strong battery life, they sound pretty good and they also are incredibly easy to pair and us with just one tap.

After their inception, once they had gained popularity people began to see the benefits of truly wireless headphones. Ones that did not have a wire connecting the two earpieces. After this initial popularity phase. The AirPods became a sort of status symbol. If you wanted to have the cool new headphones you had to have the AirPods, a title previously owned by one of Apple’s other brands, Beats. With the recent introduction of the AirPods Pro, this became even more relevant. The AirPods Pro offered extra functionality like noise cancellation. They have become the must-have product for people. This has enabled the company to see widespread success with the AirPods.

Thank you for reading! Find out here why Apple’s HomePod did not meet with the same success as the AirPods.
PLUTUS LAUNCHES BITCOIN AND ETHEREUM TRADING ON NEW DEX EXCHANGE
Tags: Trade, Bitcoin, Exchange, Announcements, Cryptocurrency

Today, Plutus have expanded their PlutusDEX trading platform with support for rapid Bitcoin and Ethereum trading. Members are now able to swiftly and securely deposit, trade, and withdraw Euros and cryptocurrencies.

The PlutusDEX is a purely peer-to-peer method of exchanging currencies, which means that there is no centralised storage of currencies whatsoever. Plutus never store any user balances, which means that there is no ‘vault’ to be hacked.

This exchange, coupled with the Tap & Pay app, enables Plutus users to unlock the value of their crypto to pay for anything, from high street retailers to online outlets. Users can access the platform via Plutus Tap & Pay for Android/iOS, which is already live today.

Danial Daychopan, CEO and Founder of Plutus adds “This new expansion to our trading platform will allow users to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum while taking advantage of market highs and lows. The transactions will be quick and easy, with the purchased crypto available in your account to spend all over the world.”

During the BETA programme, members of the PlutusDEX will not be charged any fees for buying cryptocurrencies. PlutusDEX facilitates fair market rates based on the current price exchange across all exchanges. This will see members making instant payments and transfers in crypto and fiat currencies for free. After the BETA stage has been completed, a tiered structure of fees will be introduced.

This new development comes shortly after Plutus announced their integration with the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), the new format for cross-border Euro-based bank transfers, that is heralded as the future of European banking.

The payment format is used across 34 countries and is already being adopted by major banks. Now members can transfer, convert and spend Crypto easily across Europe.

Cryptocurrencies are rapidly evolving, and this development continues Plutus’ position as one of the leaders in a global push for fintech innovation.
Kaggle: Instacart Market Basket Analysis
By: Jigar Parmar
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Kaggle

Machine Learning Problem

The data science team of Insta-cart here wants the Machine Learning

Engineers or the Researchers to come up with new methods to suggest the

probability of the product the user is likely to “buy again”

The dataset consists of 6 files, each containing different information of the

insta-cart. It contains the information about the products, the aisle to which

the product is kept, what product was reordered, after how many days did

the user come to shop etc.

The dataset is divided into 3 parts Prior, Train, and Test.

Prior order contains the information of the previous orders from the users, and the last order from the user is either added in Train or Test set. The number of orders from the user range from 4 to 100, there are almost 50K products and 3M orders from the users

The dataset is not balanced in terms of ‘reordered’, Neither the number of

orders of a given product are the same as others. Here there is also a

chance that the customer may order nothing from his / her previously

ordered products. So ‘None’, can also be an answer to a user’s next

purchase. Thus we should also consider None as a different product along

with others.
There’s No Such Thing As Mixed Signals In Relationships
By: Patrícia S. Williams
Tags: Dating, Relationships, Relationship Advice, Love, Life

It Always Comes Down To You

The truth is, if you put up with people who treat you inconsistently, you probably should focus on yourself and work on your self-esteem.

Why would you waste your time trying to decipher someone who’s not clear about their feelings for you? Why would you invest your energy on someone who shows interest, then drops off the face of the earth for a few weeks and repeats the same cycle?

The only reason why you keep tolerating this behavior is that you also have your own issues that you should be dealing with.

If you knew your worth, and if you really loved yourself, you wouldn’t accept being treated in a way you know you don’t deserve.

You have to learn for yourself that this is not what a healthy relationship looks like and that you’re worthy of someone that treats you right and gives you all the certainty you need.

The type of person you attract is a reflection of your deepest feelings. If you change how you feel about yourself, you’ll also change the people you attract into your life.

Do you know what this means? It means that you probably also have an insecure attachment style, and you’ll keep attracting emotionally unavailable people until you’re brave enough to face your wounds.

People with an anxious attachment style are extremely insecure, and they need constant validation and reassurance. They cling onto all the crumbs of love they get — which makes them the perfect partners for those who are emotionally unavailable.

They believe that, if they finally get their love, they’ll be worthy of love.

It’s time to be brutally honest with yourself: is this your case?
O que é NPS?
By: Ezequias Dinella
Tags: Customer Retention, Atendimento, Customer Satisfaction, Quality Assurance, Marketing

in Both Sides of the Table
Code To Express is Starting Weekly Tech Newsletters Soon…
By: Madhav Bahl
Tags: Apps, Development, Programming, Coding, Technology

CODE | CONNECT | LEARN

Want to learn something new every week?

Don’t get enough time to stay updated in tech?

No need to worry 😁

Code To Express is here for you ⭐

We are launching our weekly newsletter very soon, and the subscription is open 🤩

Perks of subscribing to us:

👉 Weekly Newsletter straight in your mailbox

👉 Our Motto: Discovering Life in Tech

👉 Curated list of awesome tech and non-tech articles

👉 Weekly news headlines in tech

And all of this is absolutely free 🤩

So what are you waiting for?

Go and subscribe now 😍

https://codetoexpress.tech/subscribe
Comparing Distributed Ledgers by Game of Thrones use case — BigchainDB
By: Paul Plessing
Tags: Tech, Bigchaindb, Crypto, Distributed Ledgers, Blockchain

To implement an application, one still needs a processing layer and a platform layer, and they can then be connected to BigchainDB. However, what you can do in BigchainDB natively, is creating assets, divisible and non-divisible. Although we didn’t look much into it, the Role-based access control supported by BigchainDB is very neat.

To see the source code of our implementation, head over to our GitHub.

Technical overview

How do they accomplish the task of storing a common agreed on state across

nodes in tables?

They do this by utilizing Tendermint for BigchainDB’s blockchain characteristics. Tendermint is an open source blockchain that uses Tendermint Core as the consensus engine and Application BlockChain Interface (ABCI) as the api between an application written in any programming language and the Tendermint blockchain. For the database part, BigchainDB uses MongoDB.

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

Basically, on one end there is Tendermint for the distribution of canonically ordered transactions between nodes, there is MongoDB for storing the shared state in tables on the other end, and BigchainDB in the middle for coordinating everything.

Implementation

We used the javascript library of BigchainDB. The realization of a sample program as described on their official website, was harder than expected. The downloaded npm module was somehow not the latest stable release, and didn’t work as expected. Fortunately, the guys from BigchainDB’s gitter responded fast (thanks to Troy McConaghy @ttmc), and told us to specify a stable release version when downloading the module.

Second issue was that in order to generate a ‘Ed25519Keypair’ some file had to be changed according to a GitHub issues. But once that was done, we were ready to go. Our game of thrones use case was again just modeling two alliances, Khalessi and Cercei, assign them different families, and transfer the membership of the families between the alliances. The syntax of creating transactions has to be followed, other than that there were not many things to watch out for.

Coding with BigchainDB is straight forward, no bad surprises. Writing and reading to the testnet is fast and works well. To test our code, we used the node testing framework mocha.js and the node assertion library chai.js.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

An actual database that is decentrally stored (not file storage like IPFS or a mishmash of transactions)

Easy to code

Fast querying

An addition to a any development stack

Cons:
How The Invention of Cooking Lead to Stories
By: Patch Drury
Tags: Meat, Stories, Cooking, Abstrction, Storytelling

Bear with me.

Early man burned a lot of calories chewing raw meat:

Once we discovered fire and cooking, we didn’t have to work as hard to eat — so evolution put the excess calories to work growing our brains:

Bigger brains meant bigger heads — at the same time that standing upright was shrinking our hips.

Maybe you can see where this is going — bigger heads plus narrower hips meant painful childbirth.

So, evolution started favoring premature births.

Which explains why some animals are walking and hunting within hours of birth and human babies just kind of lie there for months.

So, we needed a relatively fast tool for teaching, socialization, and survival skills.

That’s when our big brains started paying for themselves. Bigger brains gave us the ability to abstract — to imagine. Which lead to storytelling.

And we’ve been teaching through stories ever since!
Data Visualization and Data Storytelling.
By: Ganiyah Issa-Onilu
Tags: Data Visualization, Data Storytelling, Narrative, Data Science

Making sense of data

Remember the phrase by the British Mathematician Clive Humby in 2006:

Data is the new oil

The phrase summarizes the essence of data, similar to how important crude oil is.

It doesn't stop there.

Crude oil is an essential material that needs to be refined into different outputs like petroleum, gas, kerosene etc. before it becomes useful. Same applies to data.

Data in any form has to be processed and analysed to become meaningful to target audience e.g., business users and executives, and to solve complex business problems.

This is where Data Visualization and Data Storytelling come in.

Data Visualization and Data Storytelling

These two concepts are important processes in Data Science. With these two processes, Data Scientists can communicate hidden patterns in datasets and tell stories of insights garnered from datasets using narratives.

A Data Scientist finds data visualization easy compared to storytelling. However, it is required for a data scientist to learn the rule and skills of Data Storytelling to become an Excellent Data Storyteller.

I will go on to explain these two concepts in detail: Data Visualization and Data Storytelling.

Data Visualization

Data Visualization involves the use of graphs, charts and graphics to visualize datasets in order to communicate the findings. There are a lot of tools that can be used to visualize datasets e.g Python, Microsoft Excel, Tableau and Power BI etc after doing analyses on the datasets.

Data Storytelling

Data Storytelling, on the other hand, involves the use of narratives to tell a story of the findings from the raw data after performing analyses and creating visuals. The narratives in the form of words are added to the visuals to tell a story of how to solve the initial problem in context.

Next, I would be sharing the rules and tips in Data Storytelling and how to become a good one. Here is also a link to an online resource about Storytelling using data: https://www.slideshare.net/Kurtosys/storytelling-with-data-visualization
‘Men, Reclaim How You Sexually Project onto Her.’
By: The Good Men Project
Tags: Connection, Attraction, Relationships, Masculinity, Sexuality

‘Men, Reclaim How You Sexually Project onto Her.’

How might we reclaim that power we often give away?

Photo credit: Shutterstock

By Stuart Motola

Men, have you ever thought, “If only she’d open up to me, let me in. I’d be fine?” That’s often our story. If we’re not getting it, we feel unloved. (This one’s for the men out there; women may enjoy it as well.)

How might we reclaim that power we often give away? When sexual desire takes us over? When we mistake the physical for the heartfelt? Be it with our wife, partner, or a stranger on the street, the answer lies in the ensuing story…

Robert opens his arms. The woman’s head nestles in the crook of his neck. Her breasts press against his chest. He feels her embrace; her warm body, a place to rest in. A warm current flows through him. He breathes it in from head to toe. A river of intimacy. A gale of life force. He revels in the connection, feeling all of her.

She is an illusion, a mere passerby on the street. He imagines all this in a brief instant, as she walks by him. Her golden hair, dancing behind her. Jade-green eyes smiling. Slim body awakening his longing.

The narrative of “she could complete me” runs inside of him. Yet, he knows nothing about her. He sees the illusion, however. He does not approach her or attempt to charm her. Nor does he judge himself, a failure, for not even trying.

Instead, he goes to the energy of longing, seeing it for what it is: a desire for union, connection, and affirmation. Something he can complete within himself. An immediate gift to expand his energy, rather than deplete him. She is a blank screen that he projects his needs onto. He understands this. Through her, he would merely attempt to fill his own loneliness, his not-enoughness, his lack in life.

Instead of rotating his self-esteem around her, he does something else. He reclaims the energy of his projection, doing the hard work of feeling down into his own inherent self-worth. He savors the glow she inspires within him.

She passes, he pauses and sees in his mind the Great Feminine within himself of which the golden-haired woman is a mere subset. Only he can fill what he lacks. She cannot and never will. She can inspire him to be whole. And she does.

Maybe, he could have something of a great union with her–not just a physical thing. First, however, he must be complete without her: a great irony.

In his longing, abundant desire is awoken. The glow of the feminine, a reflection of what he seeks within himself — warmth, kindness, and love. He lays the heart-groundwork for when and if she comes into his life someday.

—

The story was previously published on The Good Men Project.
Prenez la parole en tant qu’expert dans les médias
Tags: Brand Content, Content Marketing, Public Relations, Startup Marketing, Content Strategy

in Both Sides of the Table
Jupyter Superpower — Interactive Visualization Combo with Python
By: Nokknock
Tags: Programming, Jupyter Notebook, Visualization, Python, Data Science

altair offers a lot of choice for interactive plotting. The above gif gives you a sense of how easy it could be. With just 1 line of code, you can change the behavior of the chart. Interactiveness is crucial for data exploratory, as often you want to drill down on a certain subset of the data. Functions like cross-filtering are very common in Excel or Tableau.

2. Clean Syntax and Easy to Combine charts

The syntax is a bit like ggplot , where you create a Chart object and add encoding /color/scale on it.

If you have used matplotlib, you probably try to look up the doc a lot of times. altair make great use of symbol like + & | which are very intuitive when you want to combine different charts. For example, a|b mean stacking Chart a and Chart b horizontally. a+b mean overlay Chart b on Chart a.

The ability to overlay two charts is substantial, it allows us to plot two charts on the same graph without actually joining it.

Here is an example. I have two graphs created from 2 different datasets, while they are both connected to a selection filter with the hospital name. You can find my example here. Chart A shows historical average waiting Time by hours while Chart B shows the last 30 days average waiting Time by hours.

The bottom left chart is created simply using a+b, both chars are controlled by a filter in the upper left bar chart.

3. Export is easy

Often time you just want to share a graph. You just need to do Chart.save() and share the HTML directly with your colleague. The fact that it is just JSON and HTML also means that you could easily integrate it with your web front-end.

If you want a sophisticated dashboard with a lot of data, Tableau or tools like Dash (Plotly), Bokeh is still better at this point. I haven’t found a great solution to deal with large data with altair. I found it is most useful when you try to do interactive plotting no more than 4charts, where you have some cross-filtering, dropdown or highlights.

Conclusion

These are the libraries that I tried to include in my workflow recently. Let me know what you feel and share the tools that you use. I think the interactive control of altair is the most interesting part, but it still has to catch up with other libraries in terms of functionalities and support more chart types.

I will try to experiment plotly + Dash to see if it is better. I have liked the API of altair so far but it may have less production-ready. Running altair data server may be a solution but I have not tried it yet.

Please give me a thumbs up if you think these tools are useful and don’t forget to give a star to the creators of these projects.

Reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRxahWy-ul8 (This is a really great talk from one of the altair author Brian Granger. I think altair is not just a visualization library, you can learn a lot from it’s API design as well)
How I Refactored a (Massive) MVC iOS App? (Part 4)
By: Tadeh Alexani
Tags: Refactoring, Apple, iOS, Xcode, Swift

Don’t forget to read part 3 before moving to this article.

So let’s finish up our refactoring process by refactoring our data source and delegate protocols.

Refactoring Table View Data Source/Delegate

As the easiest solution, what I did, was moving just the data sources in new classes. Why I didn’t move my delegate?

Because the delegate needs to talk to its data source and it can cause more complex code which is against refactoring our code. Also, the difference between delegate and data source functions is confusing. For example, the titleForHeaderInSection is in data source whereas viewForHeaderInSection is in delegate 🥵

So let’s refactor our data sources:

First, go to the File menu and choose New > File. Select Cocoa Touch Class from the list that Xcode offers you, then press Next. Make it a subclass of NSObject , give it the name “YourModelDataSource”, then click Next and Create.

Now move every data source functions to the new class, finally, it should look like something like this:

class ClinicListDataSource: NSObject, UITableViewDataSource { var clinics = [Clinic]() func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int { return clinics.count } func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell { let cell = tableView.dequeue(ListClinicTableViewCell.self, for: indexPath) as ListClinicTableViewCell let clinic = clinics[indexPath.row] let viewModel = ClinicViewModel(model: clinic) cell.setupWith(viewModel) return cell } func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, heightForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> CGFloat { return ListClinicTableViewCell.height } }

Not that we also moved our array of objects and make our class confirming the UITableViewDataSource protocol.

Now in your view controller file, the only 2 things you should do is first, declaring an instance of this data source class, e.g.:

var dataSource = ClinicListDataSource()

then replacing all the object model arrays with dataSource.arrayOfObject (E.g. clinics.removeAll() -> dataSource.clinics.removeAll())

And the second is assigning the new data source to your table view outlet like this:

self.tableView.dataSource = dataSource

Note: Don’t forget to remove the old data source from your table view if you connected it via storyboard or in the code itself.

Expand this for any controller in your app and you are DONE! 🙌

Bonus Part!

As you may see through the refactoring process bunch of crashes can happen from unexpected ways. I know that the best solution is writing tests for this situation but if you don’t have time or company doesn’t give you the needed resource to write tests (especially unit tests) I suggest you use at least one crash logger or reporter tools, whether it’s test flight built-in crash reporter or frameworks such as Instabug, Crashlytics or App Center by Microsoft.
TLX contract upgrade
By: Can Soysal
Tags: Telex Ai, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Telegram, Blockchain

Dear All,

The anticipated TLX token contract upgrade has been completed. We have successfully pushed our new custodial contract model to the Ethereum mainnet, which occured at block 6177787. The new contract address is 0xb3616550abc8af79c7a5902def9efa3bc9a95200.

The upgraded tokens have been distributed to the old TLX holders according to the snapshot taken at block 6160000. Thus, the old TLX tokens are now null and void. You may want to use the “burn” method of the old contract to dispose of your old tokens to prevent future confusion. Additionally, we are reaching out all of the token directories — including etherscan.io — to make sure our new contract information is accurately reflected.

Please note that, from now on, the TLX markets at Yobit are totally irrelevant to the actual token, and your TLX balance at Yobit does not represent any right with respect to the TeleX AI project. We encourage those who are interested in trading the token to use the decentralized exchange ForkDelta. You may reach the TLX/ETH market at ForkDelta at market.telexai.com.

If you think there is an error with the new TLX token distribution, please reach us at info@telexai.com. The 20th of October 2018 is the deadline for us to accept any dispute regarding the TLX balances. After that date, no refund, swap, or any other change-of-balance request will be considered.

Best,

TeleX AI Team
Diary of a Future President: Episode 1 | Disney+
Tags: Disney, Comedy, Television

Diary of a Future President: Episode 1 | Disney+

Diary of a Future President — Season 1 Episode 1 | Disney+

Come on Let’s Join:

( http://popular.online-tvs.com/tv/94761-1-1/diary-of-a-future-president.html )

Elena battles a series of curve balls at school, as she forgets to do a homework assignment for the first time ever and struggles with whether or not to keep a secret about her former best friend. Meanwhile her mom, Gabi, struggles to tell her kids about her new boyfriend, Sam.

Thanks for joining, have fun, and check out and let me know what you guys think! Feel free to leave a clap and Follow

Thanks for watching guys!! Smiling a little better a big laugh.! Have a nice day :))
What we developed: Whosewallet — Double check your wallet
By: Hadu Đặng
Tags: Lecle Project, Eos Dapp, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Whosewallet

The ability of Blockchain to make its users stay anonymous has been widely praised as a great advantage of this technology. But, it is not always great because:

A wallet is not 100% anonymous, it is pseudo-anonymous. Though you might not be able to trace the person behind an address, there are companies that you can hire to do this and the government definitely can.

There are always ways around it, for example you would be able to know that a particular public BTC address belongs to someone particular from whom you might have received BTC in past.

And the most important thing: What if We don’t even need that anonymity? Why do we have to stay anonymous and what is anonymity for?

Scammers are here and there, creating anonymous addresses, taking away people’s property and disappearing without any traces or responsibility. Is this what anonymity for? Your customers and partners are being incredulous and reluctant to send coin to your address, they are doubting: “is this address yours?”. Is this what anonymity for? And even you as a customer doubtfully send coin to an address with the fear of being scammed. This is definitely not what anonymity is for.

So don’t stay anonymous anymore, let’s claim your address on WHOSEWALLET.

What is whosewallet

Whosewallet is a wallet recognition system where you can verify your wallet as well as check who’s the owner of the unspeakable number/alphabet wallet address (public key).

Make your wallet identified to your customers by registering and verifying

Give your customers trust and peace in mind when making transaction to your address.

Prove your organization/company as an authenticated one

Level up the reliability of your organization, attract more customers

Trace the owner’s name (or nickname) behind an wallet address by inputting it in Whosewallet

Find a wallet address owner, track who’s who in the world of crytocurrency with a powerful wallet recognition system

Check a wallet balance and recent transaction

How to Verify Your Address

Create a CAN Account

Whosewallet is a Dapp of CAN — a variant mainet base EOS and a blockchain platform for community. To start verifying your address, you must have a CAN account.

Click here to register. It’ll take just one minute.

Register your wallet

Click here to add your address and your information for verifying.

Double check your wallet

You can check your wallet again by access to Whosewallet homepage, inputting your wallet address in the box. Your account name and transaction will be displayed shortly.

Also, you can check the wallet address of other individuals and organizations with the similar operation.
What 3 of Van Gogh’s Missing Artworks Tell Us About Him
By: Sophia Beams
Tags: Mental Health, Painting, Art History, History, Art

Poppy Flowers (1887)

Van Gogh’s “Poppy Flowers”, which was stolen more recently, in August of 2010

Van Gogh frequently painted poppy flowers. Because he was too poor to afford a model to sit for him, he mostly painted still-life portraits instead of people. And poppies, growing like weeds where he lived, were an easy flower to gather for a picture. He wrote in a letter that they were his favorite flower since his youth, because of their bright color.

Van Gogh would have painted Poppy Flowers about three years before his suicide. He got the inspiration for the portrait from a painter he much admired, Adolphe Monticelli, whose art show he visited while in Paris.

Already, there is a lot of emotion that van Gogh put into this portrait, and many others like it. He enjoyed painting nature in general, but flowers were his specialty. With them, he attempted to capture as much emotion as he could: he wanted all of their color and vibrancy to be translated to his canvas.

Indeed, there is a special sort of emotion captured by Poppy Flowers. Although the backdrop is dark, the flowers themselves stand out, making the painting a cheerful one. At the time, van Gogh’s relationship with his brother had just healed over — despite his brother hating him by the end of 1886, the turn of the new year saw them bonding again — and van Gogh moved to Paris, where he experimented with new art styles. In fact, his stay in Paris helped him evolve his art style to a point where it was uniquely his own, even to the point of developing a series of pieces that were deemed commercially marketable.

So, although Poppy Flowers was, in the grand scheme of things, painted fairly close to van Gogh’s suicide, it was also a very hopeful painting for him. Although his inspiration for many of his great paintings came partly from what were likely depressive episodes, making it possible that this portrait was motivated by such, the color scheme and time period make that seem unlikely. In particular, when van Gogh was with his brother (whom he was living close to when he painted Poppy Flowers) he generally seemed to be more mentally healthy, adding a new reason for why Poppy Flowers is more a sign of hope and artistic development in van Gogh’s life.
Americans Are On Our Own, and We Know It
By: Jessica Wildfire
Tags: Government, Coronavirus, Politics, News, Society

Americans Are On Our Own, and We Know It

We keep on going, because we have to.

Yesterday I came across a heart-breaking tweet from a nurse who described admitting a 5-year-old who’d “coded” for an hour before her parents finally brought her to the hospital. The nurse bewailed the parents’ ignorance and dropped a couple of sailor words while pleading with people to take the pandemic seriously and stop with the Christmas parties.

The conservative, conspiracy-barbed backlash against her was so severe that she had to delete the tweet.

They were outraged at her bad language.

In case you don’t know, “coded” means the five-year-old was in serious or critical condition. Read the rest of the thread, and you’d see the family knew their child was sick for days. Nobody wanted to leave their precious holiday gathering to take her to the ER.

As a parent, this horrifies me — the idea that someone would put their selfish need for baked ham and eggnog ahead of their own flesh and blood. That said, it doesn’t surprise me anymore. Millions of Americans are sacrificing their families in the name of freedom and tradition. The rest of us sit back and watch with bewildered awe at their reckless judgement. We tell ourselves we don’t know what they’re thinking.

Let’s be honest, we know. It just makes absolutely no sense. It never will. We’ve given up trying to reason with them.

We’re leaving them alone.
Flight 447 from a pilot’s perspective
By: Pito Salas
Tags: weather, airbus, airplane, Life

in Both Sides of the Table
Formula 1 Extends Broadcast Deal With ESPN
By: Kathryn Kuchefski
Tags: Broadcasting, Partnerships, Sports, Formula 1, Racing

Formula 1 inked a new broadcasting deal with Disney owned ESPN through 2022. The global motorsport series moved from NBC to ESPN in 2018. Since the shift, F1 states their average viewership is 671,000 across all ESPN channels, which is an increase of 24% over its final year with NBC.

“When we brought Formula One back to ESPN two years ago, we had faith that Formula One fans in the United States would support the coverage,” stated Burke Magnus, ESPN’s executive vice president of programming and scheduling. “That faith has been rewarded many times over, and we greatly appreciate how fans have responded in record numbers.”

Per the new agreement, ESPN Deportes will become the exclusive Spanish language network for all Formula 1 races beginning in 2020. ESPN will also continue to partner with Sky Sports to bring UK race broadcasts to viewers in the States commercial-free.

“We’re also delighted to add Spanish-language rights to this new deal,” stated Magnus. “This provides us with a unique opportunity to serve Hispanic Formula 1 fans across ESPN platforms in English and Spanish. We look forward to continuing the relationship with Formula 1 and working together to build the sport in America.”

The American sports conglomerate will showcase the races without any advertising on ESPN, ESPN 2 and ABC. All of the practice and qualifying sessions will be broadcast across ESPN’s network platforms, either on-demand or live.

“The US is one of our key focuses for growth and ESPN know and understand the US sports audience like no one else,” stated F1’s managing director Sean Bratches. “The combination of their dedicated coverage and Formula 1’s amazing racing spectacle is a perfect partnership for us to build on our recent success with US audiences.”

ESPN began broadcasting Formula 1 in the U.S. beginning in 1984 through 1997. Today, the ultimate key for growth is a solid understanding of the U.S. market. Formula 1’s strategic partnership with ESPN already shows growth across viewership through dedicated racing coverage.

ESPN understands sport in America and what is necessary to see growth year after year. Dedicated coverage by the top network is essential for continued development and success.
Dragonflies / Libélulas / Libellule
By: Samuel Cracia
Tags: Creative Writing, Polyglot Poetry, Literature, Surrealism, Poetry

English:

I have two dragonflies caged.

The cages: my eyeballs.

I captured them in the carboniferous

They are giant

Their wings are as big as helicopter propellers.

If they are still, they don’t bother me

But if they try to fly, I cry on the spot.

And I have to close my eyelids

To convince them that it is nite already.

I have two dragonflies caged.

The cages: my eyeballs, that are a satellite image of a hurricane, whose center is a sediment sea.

I have two dragonflies caged

And I want to let them go

Cause its flutter makes me cry

But I took them from the carboniferous.

And nowadays the weather is not favorable.
Stewart’s Theorem
By: Ceren Şahin
Tags: Stewart, Mathematics, Betamat, Trigonometry, English

Stewart’s Theorem

How does this geometry work? Have you ever thought about that? Well, there are pretty much theorems and axioms that helps Euclidean geometry work. Stewart’s Theorem is one of them. Let’s learn what it is!

Lets’s jump straight into the theorem and the proof.

Theorem

Let a, b and c be the length of the sides of the triangle ABC. Let x be the length of the cevian to the side of length a, a = BC . If the cevian of If the cevian divides the side of length a, into two segments of length m and n, with m adjacent to c and n adjacent to b, then Stewart’s Theorem states that: (mb² + nc²) / (m + n) — mn = x²

Proof

In this proof, we will be using the Cosine Theorem to handle it. In case you are not familiar with it, please check the “The Law of Cosines” article to understand this proof. Having said that, let’s start the proof.

The plan is straightforward: Say the cevian touches the side BC at point Y. We will apply cosines theorem to the triangles ABY and ACY. Let me note that ∠AYC = 180 -∠AYB. Thus, cos∠AYC = -cos∠AYB.

Let ∠AYC = θ, then ∠AYB = 180-θ. We know by definition of cosines that cosθ = -cos(180-θ). Thus we can write c² = x² + m² + 2mxcosθ instead of writing c² = x² + m² -2xmcos(180-θ). Having written the equations, now we want to get mb² + nc². In order to get that we can expand the first equation with m and the second with n. Luckily, “2nmcosθ” disappear when we sum the expanded equations. At the end we get (mb² + nc²) / (m + n) — mn = x².
Cubism
By: Danna Reich Colman
Tags: Love Poems, Poetry, Love, Cubism

Take

me

to

the

place

where

the

magical

union

of

touch

awaits

us

If you enjoyed this, please don’t forget to recommend ❤ and follow me to help support my work.
Best Fender EXP1 Expression Pedal for Mustang Amplifiers
By: Michael Henderson
Tags: Guitar Effects, Amps, Fender, And Effects

in Both Sides of the Table
Till We Meet Again
By: China Cancio
Tags: Its Complicated, Lit Up, Relationships, Love, Poetry

You pass by me

like a gentle breeze before a storm

Skipping through the leaves

like glimmers of light before sunset

Shoving the fields aside

running after you

leaves falling

wind calling

My eyes caught

that faint smile, orange skies

I’ll wait for the day when we see

ourselves in each other’s eyes

From dawn till night

till summer flies

I’ll hold on tight

Dream to dream dies

Till the showering light

opens our hearts once again

Words unnecessary

smile for we both understand
#VR now — reality catching up to Innerscape
By: A.C. Flory
Tags: Innerscape, Healthcare, Science Fiction, Future Tech, Technology

For those who have read the induction scenes of Episode 1 of Innerscape, the possibilities of virtual reality in health care should come as no surprise. But did you know that VR is already set to help real people with real problems, both physical and mental? Exciting times. :)

My thanks to @VirtualRealExt for introducing me to this article:

cheers

Meeks
2020 — The Obstacle is the Way. On the last day of the Year 2020, it’s…
By: Street Consulting
Tags: Optimism, Pandemic, Stoicism, Education, Teaching And Learning

2020 — The Obstacle is the Way

A time to reflect

On the last day of the Year 2020, it’s a time to reflect on everything we faced and think about what we’ve accomplished, what we’ve worked through, and what we’ve learned from the high points and the low points of the year. There certainly have been many in all of the categories.

As we look back over the course of the entire year, it’s impossible to ignore the fear, anxiety, and human tragedy of the pandemic. COVID-19 has had a profound effect on us all; however, the difficult times, the sadness, and the need to isolate to keep everyone safe came with many challenges. If we choose to only reflect on the hard times and not see what came as a result of the challenges, then we can’t truly be reflecting on the whole picture. Innovation, resourcefulness, and resilience were just some of the things that came as a result of the challenges of the Pandemic. Remote learning, virtual concerts, new technology tools, telemedicine, and curb-side pick up for groceries are just some of the outcomes.

Posted on social media was a high school student who climbed on the roof of his home and played his trumpet every night to his community in order to stay connected and became the “new normal.” And it was wonderful! Remote learning and teaching is challenging; however, every time a student logged into a virtual classroom, a teacher was invited into that child’s home and vice versa. The connections made through that experience can open doors to family engagement if schools are open to seeing and building on that positive outcome.

Our technology skills, our creativity, our communication skills, our embracing of being home, and our care for each other has grown immensely through 2020. And so, I will take today to reflect on and honor the memories of all the people who have suffered and lost loved ones in 2020 due to the pandemic while at the same time, I will embrace all the new things I’ve learned this year as well as the positive outcomes as a result of the challenges and obstacles of 2020.

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

— Lloyd Alexander
Our Dark Descent
By: Simon Heathcote
Tags: Life Lessons, Poetry On Medium, Journey, Soul, Poetry

Photo by Jon Eric Marababol on Unsplash

In the deserts of the soul

We walk this dusty road

Called life on Earth, which

Takes us, at last, from head to heart

We are envoys of the gods

Who come here to partake of

This darkening descent

Slake a thirst before returning

After expression and experience

Home to another cosmic dance

Gaze, profoundly, into the light

That only ever resides inside

Without our being-ness, this sense

I Am, there never is a world

All lives simply an appearance, finally

We leave the stage, returning to the night
Mar Mari Assyrian Church of the East
By: Haytham Ad-Din, The Photographic Muslim
Tags: Photography, Religion, Assyrian, Christianity, History

All photos curated were taken on a single day exclusively utilizing a wide angle lens. The exterior photos were taken over several early morning hours to capture particular vantage points with maximal light and minimal shadowing, which temporally varied based on obstructions, the orientations of the facades, and the relatively southern, seasonal path of the Sun. The interior photos were taken before and after the Divine Liturgy while showing respect for the Parish schedule.

Acknowledgments and heartfelt gratitude go to Parishioners Valentine Shamoon, Sarah Akalski, and Sooren Givargidze as well as Parish Pastor Father Adday Francis. Valentine, Sarah, and Sooren kindly shared invaluable insights about Parish history and demographics, while Sarah further informed Father Adday of what was an unannounced visit. Father Adday most graciously explained key aspects of Church history, opened the Qankeh Curtain before the Divine Liturgy to accommodate photography, and reviewed the draft of this photo-essay.
A Request for Your Feedback
By: Michelle Loucadoux
Tags: Feedback, Publication, Surveys

A Request for Your Feedback

It will only take two minutes!

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

Dear readers of The Innovation,

We have created a survey so that we can work to deliver the best quality publication to fit your needs and interests. We truly want to hear what you have to say! If you have two minutes to fill this out, we would greatly appreciate your time. (There are only eight questions!) Thank you very much.

Best,

Esat and Michelle
How I learnt the technology used to build software products, in 2 days
By: Sumanth Karanam
Tags: Software Development, Learning, Productivity, Experience, Beginner

How I learnt the technology used to build software products, in 2 days

My experience with crio.do micro experiences

Image credits: Crio.do

Most of the technology used in the software industry in building products is not available for many of the students in a regular university curriculum. We need to learn from external resources like online courses, e-books etc. Though most of these courses teach you well about the theory required, they lack a lot in practical approach.

Crio.do, as it states, is a website helps to “Build products to learn tech hands-on” by Learn-By-Doing methodology. This approach gained my attention and I started working on their free micro experiences, QReview and System Design. QReview helps us take the developer seat and build a review system for the existing QEats food ordering app. Users can also share their reviews to their social media profiles. System Design takes the game to another level by helping us build a scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant system for our own personal website right from the scratch.

Both these micro experiences are good enough for a beginner like me, with a little programming knowledge in Python. QReview helped me understand the basic work flow of a back-end server written in Django. It also helped me in learning about APIs and their usage by implementing them in the app. There’s also a section where we can make use of a third-party AI model to suggest us the tags for the picture we post as a review. We write actual code for the API requests. Little did I know, I would be able to implement a working product in real life in such a small period of time. Now, I feel I can start building a product from scratch and implement all the things I learned in this micro experience.

System Design is another interesting micro experience that helps us setup a system for our product and make it online. This, I feel, is the most important aspect that every software developer should know. The micro experience helps us to setup a virtual machine and build a web server on a cloud platform like GCP(Google Cloud Platform). And it also helps us to setup a load balancer to make the system robust. This entire life cycle of building a scalable, robust product and using it in real life is truly amazing. You can experience it only when you do it on your own (Believe me! Its worth the effort). It also has many sub tasks that helped me understand the tiny yet important things happening between querying a website like www.google.com and the webpage that is returned back to you.

These micro experiences gave me enough confidence to start working on my idea and I feel in these two days I’ve learnt much more than I had, in this entire lockdown period. I feel it would be great for all the software development beginners out there, to start with one of these. My recommendation, start with System Design micro experience first. You will learn a lot and get inspired to start working on building products.
Stop Drafting Antonio Brown in the Second Round
By: Jack Moore
Tags: Football, NFL, Sports, News, Fantasy Football

Stop Drafting Antonio Brown in the Second Round

The premier primadonna of the NFL is making news and ruining fantasy teams

French cryotherapy is not exactly what you think about as a source of injury for NFL players. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t an Onion article. One was left wondering — did the Raiders think Brown’s antics were going to shift as a result of him moving from the Steelers?

How about you, fantasy owner, are you going to allow yourself to be similarly fooled?

Brown has done what few others have, maintaining his spot as one of the top of the fantasy WR rankings these last few seasons. As such, it may be tempting to draft him high with the other 4–6 “top WRs” in fantasy (Adams, Hopkins, Jones, etc.). Don’t.

Fortunately Brown’s value has fallen out of that lofty first round range. Brown’s ADP dropped from mid-second-round to early-third-round in accordance with his helmet shenanigans, and has rebounded now that he’s back practicing. He’s still too high.

His ADP has him 6 spots ahead of Keenan Allen and 14 spots ahead of Amari Cooper, both of which are more exciting, with better offensive lines and quarterbacks.

Speaking of… Amari Cooper is the perfect example of the sort of opportunity that the Raiders offer relative to the rest of the league. There’s no reason to believe the Raiders capable of providing the galactic fuel required to keep a star like Brown’s suspended in top fantasy performer territory.

Lastly, there’s what I call the “crazy factor”. What happens if Brown decides that he doesn’t want to play for a bad team? I’m not saying that the Raiders are likely to be bad this season but… no, wait, that’s what I’m saying. That experience will be new, and he was a locker room menace even when the Steelers were winning. When you draft a starting receiver, you shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not they’re going to decide to just stop playing because of a helmet issue, or whatever next puts Mr. Big Chest in the headlines.

Overall, Brown’s a volatile player, and his value should reflect that to a greater degree than it currently does. After all, who would have guessed that Brown’s preseason would feature more French cryotherapy and hot air balloons than football?