Not an infographic today.

Free online classes, discounts on software, extended trial periods, free online data sources, etc. as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the Organizer for the DFW Data Visualization Meetup Group, I've started this publicly viewable Google Sheet for the local DataViz community listing various resources that companies are making available during the pandemic. Turns out, these are valuable to DataViz designers everywhere, not just DFW, so I'm sharing the link with all of you.

I’ll continue to update this list as I learn about new resources during the pandemic. Please use the submission link in the spreadsheet if you know of any DataViz-related offers or deals I should add!

-Randy

Center for Biological Diversity Press Release WASHINGTON – Four commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides can harm bees and other pollinators, according to a new analysis by California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation. The study found that current approved uses of the “neonics” … Continue reading →

Andrew Rickmann posted a photo:

Le Chips: Food of the sportsman.

By The Conversation While it’s true that Earth’s temperatures and carbon dioxide levels have always fluctuated, the reality is that humans’ greenhouse emissions since the industrial revolution have put us in uncharted territory. Written by Dr Benjamin Henley and Assoc … Continue reading →

By Jill Richardson Other Words If environmental solutions aren’t systemic, living green will always mean going against the grain — and usually failing. Every year around Earth Day, I’m reminded of papers I graded in an environmental sociology class. The … Continue reading →

Are you a logical individual? Do you carefully consider all options before making a decision? Are opinions shaped primarily through facts and reasoning? If you answered yes to these questions, you’d be wrong. We are all emotional beings, and our emotions are the root cause of our thoughts and behaviors. Our logical, conscious thoughts simply […]

The post Fight or Flight: Which Emotion Does Your Website Evoke? appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

When I first started designing websites in the 1990s, I focused most of my attention on creating striking visuals. In my defense, I was typically designing gaming website with only the occasional local business… but my goal was always to design a site that looked “cool.” In the early 2000s I stumbled across a website […]

The post Does your website need to be beautiful? appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

You’re homepage is beautifully designed. It’s clear all the ways you can help. You’ve articulated why someone should hire you. You’ve validated your claims through case studies and testimonials, yet… You’re not getting the volume of leads you need. Sure they trickle in every month, but it’s not enough to grow your business. What are […]

The post Why Your Website Doesn’t Generate Leads (and how to fix it) appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

You have less than one second to make the right impression. Almost immediately after landing on your website users will make an uninformed, mostly subconscious judgment about what type of organization they’re interacting with. This initial judgment will largely be influenced by layout, design, and visual tone. It will not only influence the rest of […]

The post Hooked: How to engage your website audience in one second or less appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

It’s a new year, a time of reflection and goal setting. Whether you subscribe to new years resolutions or not, 2020 should be the year you stop neglecting your website. Regardless of how performant your website currently is, it can be do better. You might already know this. You probably realize you should dedicate more […]

The post 10 Ways to Get More From Your Website in 2020 appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

Serves as our daily workout area and golf simulator for game nights and winter practice.

Are you looking for a good staging plugin to test your experiments before it goes live? A staging site is a replica of your website where you can experiment with new features, plugins, and updates before you push them to your live website. That way you can find and fix bugs without having to worry […]

The post 9 Best Staging Plugins for Your WordPress Website (Compared) appeared first on IsItWP - Free WordPress Theme Detector.

Whether taking classes online or finding a seat in a lecture hall that makes you feel safe, Adam shares ideas for vets with TBI and PTSD returning to school.

Managing money is complicated, especially for people with a brain injury who may have trouble remembering what they spent or creating a budget. Adam shares some tips from online banking to keeping a spending journal.

Adam shares a message of hope to those diagnosed with TBI and/or PTSD: Your life may be different, but you are still the driver and in control.

Adam says that like drill and ceremony and calling cadence, which start with a first step, so does recovery from a brain injury and/or PTSD.

Adam shares an inspiring story about a friend with TBI and PTSD who almost ended his life but instead found the courage to ask for help — even though at the time he may not have known what that help looked like.

Including version 4.6 it was quite difficult to add custom bulk actions to the WordPress admin pages. In version 4.7 […]

Experiencing intense flashbacks, nightmares, irritability, anger, and fear? In the face of a traumatic event like the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s common to feel this way.

For many veterans’ spouses, we’ve watched our partners struggle not only with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but with other mental health conditions, as well. Around 80 percent of people with PTSD wrestle with at least one other co-occurring mental health condition in their lifetime.What many people don’t see is the impact PTSD and comorbidity have on vets’ spouses.

By Rachel Cernansky Ensia When the Clean Air Act of 1970 became law, members of the business community in the United States responded with opposition. Such regulations are a drag on growth, some economists say, for individual businesses and for … Continue reading →

Brace yourself for a TRULY powerful episode with the bestselling author and creative genius, Elizabeth Gilbert. Although best known for her memoir Eat, Pray, Love–which went on to sell over 12 million copies and became a film staring Julia Roberts—she’s also one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world… The whole world. Spend some time with her in your ears on today’s podcast and you’ll know why in under a minute…   In this episode, we cover How Liz considers mental health her full time job, and writing / being a professional creator is a hobby.  How the only way out of pain is through honesty. Liz shares her experiences working through the loss of her partner to cancer. The things we won’t even admit to ourselves will cause us pain, even to the point of mental and physical breakdown Her latest INCREDIBLE novel called City of Girls (…a “delicious novel of glamour, sex, and adventure, about a young woman discovering that you don’t have to be a good girl to be a good person”) Why mercy is the foundation to any creative endeavor. How creativity and writing can be a tool to slow the mind during hard times. And […]

The post Elizabeth Gilbert: The Art of Being Yourself appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Back in 2012, budding photographer Ben Von Wong stopped by my photo studio in Seattle to say hello. Fast forward to present day and he’s making headlines working with some of the world’s largest brands like Nike and IBM, create work that combines art & activism. His work has been featured numerous times on Buzzfeed, Gizmodo, Mashable and the Huffington Post to name a few. So when he stopped by the CreativeLive studios not too long ago, I wanted to pick his brain one of the most common questions I get on how to stand out and build a personal brand. In this episode: Put work in your portfolio you want to be hired to do. If you shoot weddings and also muscle cars, consider separate sites. One of Ben’s main considerations for helping his project spread? Create with the headline in mind. Ben shares a little about his process to discover his unique style and thumbprint to his work. Enjoy! FOLLOW BEN: instagram | twitter | website Listen to the Podcast Subscribe   Watch the Episode  This podcast is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world’s largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, […]

The post How to Build Your Brand /w Ben Von Wong appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Debbie Millman is one of my dear friends, a powerhouse creative and someone who inspires me every day. When I was developing my online companion class to the Creative Calling book, of course I had to ask Debbie to join me on stage for a conversation around designing our life with intention. Debbie’s insight is pure gold. AND – this is just one of the segments from the class. If you already have my book, you can access the entire class for free. All you need to do is visit www.creativelive.com/creativecalling and sign up there. Enjoy! FOLLOW DEBBIE: instagram | twitter | website Listen to the Podcast Subscribe   This podcast is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world’s largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, craft/maker, money/life and the ability to make a living in any of those disciplines. They are high quality, highly curated classes taught by the world’s top experts — Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy Award winners, New York Times best selling authors and the best entrepreneurs of our times.

The post Design Your Life with Creative Calling + Debbie Millman appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Cheri has been a student and teacher of Zen for over 35 years. She is the author of over 20 books on Zen, and founded the Mountain View Zen Center and the Zen Monastery Peace Center. Cheri also founded a non-profit dedicated to transforming lives and ending suffering, Living Compassion, whose primary work is the Africa Vulnerable Children Project in Zambia. Ashwini co-facilitates and creates workshops with Cheri. She runs the operations of the two nonprofits that Cheri founded. Her eclectic background includes degrees in physics, business, and computer science to working in advertising, an investment bank, a social enterprise, and several technology startups in the Silicon Valley. Cheri and Ashwini have co-written multiple books, including their latest Don’t Suffer, Communicate. Today’s episode isn’t just about awareness practice, it’s about a framework for navigating life. A few highlights: Zen isn’t just the practice of keeping things nicely organized, it’s also a spiritual practice largely focused on awareness and where you direct attention. Self-improvement is an endless diss. The very nature of saying we need improvement implies we’re not enough. Cheri and Ashwini share some useful tools to redirect the attention, such as using a recorder to access the wisdom, love, and compassion that is […]

The post You Are Not Your Ego with Cheri Huber and Ashwini Narayanan appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Very excited to have my friend, truth-teller, and Bestselling Author, Glennon Doyle back on the show. Her newly released book, UNTAMED, is a powerful memoir and wake-up call about being forged in the fire of anger, heartbreak, and discontent to finally finding yourself. In this episode, we’re coming to you LIVE from our living rooms to chat about how to listen to the inner voice and take control of your life. If you’re not familiar with Glennon’s work, she is the bestselling author of many books including LOVE WARRIOR, which was selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, as well as the New York Times bestseller CARRY ON, WARRIOR. An activist and thought leader, Glennon was named among SuperSoul100’s inaugural group of “awakened leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity.” She is the founder and president of Together Rising, an all-women led nonprofit organization that has revolutionized grassroots philanthropy – raising over $20 Million for women, families and children in crisis. She lives in Florida with her wife and three children. Enjoy! FOLLOW GLENNON: instagram | twitter | website Listen to the Podcast Subscribe   Watch the Episode This podcast is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive […]

The post How to Find Yourself with Glennon Doyle appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Whether you have created a brand new company, or you’ve been around for a long time, if you do not already have a website, you are going to have to put one up as soon as humanly possible. According to the website Mashable, online shopping accounted for $231 billion in sales in 2012. This means …

Building Your Website All Alone Read More »

Being a photographer with some spending money and a bad habit of lusting after gear, I have amassed a lot of photo gear. Due to that I am often carrying at least two lenses and also prefer zoom lenses versus […]

It has been a month since we launched our first online workshop and, to be honest, we really didn’t know whether people would enjoy them — or if we would enjoy running them. It was an experiment, but one we are so glad we jumped into! I spoke about the experience of taking my workshop online on a recent episode of the Smashing podcast. As a speaker, I had expected it to feel very much like I was presenting into the empty air, with no immediate feedback and expressions to work from.

In these strange times when everything is connected, it’s too easy to feel lonely and detached. Yes, everybody is just one message away, but there is always something in the way — deadlines to meet, Slack messages to reply, or urgent PRs to review. Connections need time and space to grow, just like learning, and conferences are a great way to find that time and that space. In fact, with SmashingConfs, we’ve always been trying to create such friendly and inclusive spaces.

Aputure’s been coming pretty thick and fast on the announcements lately, and now they’ve announced their new Light Storm 60D daylight and 60X bi-colour adjustable focusing LED lights. As the name suggests, these are 60 Watt LEDs, and everything is built inside the head, meaning there’s no external control unit to have to deal with. […]

The post Aputure announces new LS-60D daylight and LX-60X bicolour LED lights appeared first on DIY Photography.

Are there still folks among you who, like me, prefer handwriting to typing? If you’re in this group, you’ll love this new feature on Google Lens. The app now lets you scan your handwritten notes, copy them, and paste them straight to your computer. I gave it a spin, and I bring you my impressions […]

The post Google Lens now copies handwritten text and pastes it straight to your computer appeared first on DIY Photography.

Photography Life has just contributed to the selection of online courses that you can take for free. While their premim courses are normally paid $150 per course, you can now access them free of charge. The founders have released them on YouTube, available for everyone to watch. The Photography Life team came to the decision […]

The post Photography Life makes all their paid premium courses free appeared first on DIY Photography.

St-Donat, Bas-St-Laurent, Québec

The article is devoted to the expansion of iterated Stratonovich stochastic integrals of arbitrary multiplicity $k$ $(kinmathbb{N})$ based on the generalized iterated Fourier series. The case of Fourier-Legendre series as well as the case of trigonotemric Fourier series are considered in details. The obtained expansion provides a possibility to represent the iterated Stratonovich stochastic integral in the form of iterated series of products of standard Gaussian random variables. Convergence in the mean of degree $2n$ $(nin mathbb{N})$ of the expansion is proved. Some modifications of the mentioned expansion were derived for the case $k=2$. One of them is based of multiple trigonomentric Fourier series converging almost everywhere in the square $[t, T]^2$. The results of the article can be applied to the numerical solution of Ito stochastic differential equations.

We study a class of fourth order nonlinear parabolic equations which include the thin-film equation and the quantum drift-diffusion model as special cases. We investigate these equations by first developing functional inequalities of the type $ int_Omega u^{2gamma-alpha-eta}Delta u^alphaDelta u^eta dx geq cint_Omega|Delta u^gamma |^2dx $, which seem to be of interest on their own right.

We use the classical Fourier analysis to introduce analytic families of weighted differential operators on the unit sphere. These operators are polynomial functions of the usual Beltrami-Laplace operator. New inversion formulas are obtained for totally geodesic Funk transforms on the sphere and the correpsonding lambda-cosine transforms.

In the present paper by the Fourier transform we show that every linear differential equations of $n$-th order has a solution in $L^1(Bbb{R})$ which is infinitely differentiable in $Bbb{R} setminus {0}$. Moreover the Hyers-Ulam stability of such equations on $L^1(Bbb{R})$ is investigated.

In 1978, Dwight Duffus---editor-in-chief of the journal "Order" from 2010 to 2018 and chair of the Mathematics Department at Emory University from 1991 to 2005---wrote that "it is not obvious that $P$ is connected and $P^P$ isomorphic to $Q^Q$ implies that $Q$ is connected," where $P$ and $Q$ are finite non-empty posets. We show that, indeed, under these hypotheses $Q$ is connected and $Pcong Q$.

The quantum Fourier transform brings efficiency in many respects, especially usage of resource, for most operations on quantum computers. In this study, the existing QFT-based and non-QFT-based quantum arithmetic operations are examined. The capabilities of QFT-based addition and multiplication are improved with some modifications. The proposed operations are compared with the nearest quantum arithmetic operations. Furthermore, novel QFT-based subtraction and division operations are presented. The proposed arithmetic operations can perform non-modular operations on all signed numbers without any limitation by using less resources. In addition, novel quantum circuits of two's complement, absolute value and comparison operations are also presented by using the proposed QFT based addition and subtraction operations.

Human visual attention is a complex phenomenon. A computational modeling of this phenomenon must take into account where people look in order to evaluate which are the salient locations (spatial distribution of the fixations), when they look in those locations to understand the temporal development of the exploration (temporal order of the fixations), and how they move from one location to another with respect to the dynamics of the scene and the mechanics of the eyes (dynamics). State-of-the-art models focus on learning saliency maps from human data, a process that only takes into account the spatial component of the phenomenon and ignore its temporal and dynamical counterparts. In this work we focus on the evaluation methodology of models of human visual attention. We underline the limits of the current metrics for saliency prediction and scanpath similarity, and we introduce a statistical measure for the evaluation of the dynamics of the simulated eye movements. While deep learning models achieve astonishing performance in saliency prediction, our analysis shows their limitations in capturing the dynamics of the process. We find that unsupervised gravitational models, despite of their simplicity, outperform all competitors. Finally, exploiting a crowd-sourcing platform, we present a study aimed at evaluating how strongly the scanpaths generated with the unsupervised gravitational models appear plausible to naive and expert human observers.

The total influence of a function is a central notion in analysis of Boolean functions, and characterizing functions that have small total influence is one of the most fundamental questions associated with it. The KKL theorem and the Friedgut junta theorem give a strong characterization of such functions whenever the bound on the total influence is $o(log n)$. However, both results become useless when the total influence of the function is $omega(log n)$. The only case in which this logarithmic barrier has been broken for an interesting class of functions was proved by Bourgain and Kalai, who focused on functions that are symmetric under large enough subgroups of $S_n$.

In this paper, we build and improve on the techniques of the Bourgain-Kalai paper and establish new concentration results on the Fourier spectrum of Boolean functions with small total influence. Our results include:

1. A quantitative improvement of the Bourgain--Kalai result regarding the total influence of functions that are transitively symmetric.

2. A slightly weaker version of the Fourier--Entropy Conjecture of Friedgut and Kalai. This weaker version implies in particular that the Fourier spectrum of a constant variance, Boolean function $f$ is concentrated on $2^{O(I[f]log I[f])}$ characters, improving an earlier result of Friedgut. Removing the $log I[f]$ factor would essentially resolve the Fourier--Entropy Conjecture, as well as settle a conjecture of Mansour regarding the Fourier spectrum of polynomial size DNF formulas.

Our concentration result has new implications in learning theory: it implies that the class of functions whose total influence is at most $K$ is agnostically learnable in time $2^{O(Klog K)}$, using membership queries.

In this paper we revisit the deterministic version of the Sparse Fourier Transform problem, which asks to read only a few entries of $x in mathbb{C}^n$ and design a recovery algorithm such that the output of the algorithm approximates $hat x$, the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of $x$. The randomized case has been well-understood, while the main work in the deterministic case is that of Merhi et al.@ (J Fourier Anal Appl 2018), which obtains $O(k^2 log^{-1}k cdot log^{5.5}n)$ samples and a similar runtime with the $ell_2/ell_1$ guarantee. We focus on the stronger $ell_{infty}/ell_1$ guarantee and the closely related problem of incoherent matrices. We list our contributions as follows.

1. We find a deterministic collection of $O(k^2 log n)$ samples for the $ell_infty/ell_1$ recovery in time $O(nk log^2 n)$, and a deterministic collection of $O(k^2 log^2 n)$ samples for the $ell_infty/ell_1$ sparse recovery in time $O(k^2 log^3n)$.

2. We give new deterministic constructions of incoherent matrices that are row-sampled submatrices of the DFT matrix, via a derandomization of Bernstein's inequality and bounds on exponential sums considered in analytic number theory. Our first construction matches a previous randomized construction of Nelson, Nguyen and Woodruff (RANDOM'12), where there was no constraint on the form of the incoherent matrix.

Our algorithms are nearly sample-optimal, since a lower bound of $Omega(k^2 + k log n)$ is known, even for the case where the sensing matrix can be arbitrarily designed. A similar lower bound of $Omega(k^2 log n/ log k)$ is known for incoherent matrices.

We design and implement the first private and anonymous decentralized crowdsourcing system ZebraLancer, and overcome two fundamental challenges of decentralizing crowdsourcing, i.e., data leakage and identity breach.

First, our outsource-then-prove methodology resolves the tension between the blockchain transparency and the data confidentiality to guarantee the basic utilities/fairness requirements of data crowdsourcing, thus ensuring: (i) a requester will not pay more than what data deserve, according to a policy announced when her task is published via the blockchain; (ii) each worker indeed gets a payment based on the policy, if he submits data to the blockchain; (iii) the above properties are realized not only without a central arbiter, but also without leaking the data to the open blockchain. Second, the transparency of blockchain allows one to infer private information about workers and requesters through their participation history. Simply enabling anonymity is seemingly attempting but will allow malicious workers to submit multiple times to reap rewards. ZebraLancer also overcomes this problem by allowing anonymous requests/submissions without sacrificing accountability. The idea behind is a subtle linkability: if a worker submits twice to a task, anyone can link the submissions, or else he stays anonymous and unlinkable across tasks. To realize this delicate linkability, we put forward a novel cryptographic concept, i.e., the common-prefix-linkable anonymous authentication. We remark the new anonymous authentication scheme might be of independent interest. Finally, we implement our protocol for a common image annotation task and deploy it in a test net of Ethereum. The experiment results show the applicability of our protocol atop the existing real-world blockchain.

MineRL 2019 competition challenged participants to train sample-efficient agents to play Minecraft, by using a dataset of human gameplay and a limit number of steps the environment. We approached this task with behavioural cloning by predicting what actions human players would take, and reached fifth place in the final ranking. Despite being a simple algorithm, we observed the performance of such an approach can vary significantly, based on when the training is stopped. In this paper, we detail our submission to the competition, run further experiments to study how performance varied over training and study how different engineering decisions affected these results.