Lambda Labs Face Recognition API

Lambda Labs Face Recognition API

Authenticity

from HBR.org by Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins:

 

Authenticity — what is it, who has it, and how do you get it? Most people associate authenticity with being true to oneself — or "walking the talk." But there's a problem with that association; it focuses on how you feel about yourself. Authenticity is actually a relational behavior, not a self-centered one. Meaning that to be truly authentic, you must not only be comfortable with yourself, but must also comfortably connect with others.
Take one of our coaching clients, Mark, the COO of a private equity firm. One hour into our kick-off meeting, he asked what we thought of him. It was a risky question to answer so early in the process — yet a very important one given what we had observed thus far. Here was our response: "Clearly you are intelligent, ambitious, and passionate about the work that you do. You seem to always have the 'right' answer to our questions — yet we get the sense that they aren't your 'real' answers. It feels like you're telling us what you think we want to hear. We'll be curious to find out if others in your organization are experiencing you the same way." This response was foreboding — Mark's 360 review bore low marks in integrity and trust, and follow-up interviews with his peers and boss drove the point home.
Mark's colleagues didn't trust him because they were never sure if what he said was truly what he meant. To have leadership presence, others need and want to know where you stand — they don't want to have to guess or be blindsided midstream. While there isn't a quick fix or a one-size-fits-all solution to increasing one's authenticity, there are several focus areas that will certainly help:
Point of View: Having a point of view is critical to being authentic. Being open and willing to engage in exchanges on that point of view accentuates your leadership and demonstrates both strength and flexibility. By articulating his point of view on firm issues, challenges, and disagreements, Mark became more comfortable speaking his mind.
Positioning: While taking a position is important, over-positioning yourself is detrimental. Know the difference between navigating the political waters of your organization and actually becoming the politics itself. Get support for your initiatives but be transparent about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how you are doing it. Rather than working primarily behind the scenes, Mark became more forthright in his efforts to implement change in his organization.
Personal History: At the core, you need to connect with your personal history and identify the key events, messages, and people that shaped who you are today. Mark grew up in difficult, under-privileged circumstances that he learned to navigate. When he was sent to elite schools at a young age, the message he got was "to survive this system, you need to watch your back and not rock the boat." While that message might have served him well then, it was no longer serving him in the corporate leadership world. Exploring your personal history will often surface messages that are worth reexamining in order to truly express your authentic self.
As Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones point out in their book, Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?: "To attract followers, a leader has to be many things to many people. The trick is to pull that off while remaining true to yourself." While it's easy to sniff out who's authentic and who's not, it's not so simple to recognize it in ourselves.

Canon HF G20 knowledgebase

follow this link to the Canon online knowledgebase for VIXIA HF G20.

6 ways to stand out

6 ways to stand out (from lifehack.org):

1. Attitude. Be enthusiastic. Be positive. Be engaging. Be passionate. An upbeat, professional attitude stands out. No matter what the workday brings, it’s important to show that you can stay confident and upbeat. People generally enjoy working with other people who are pleasant, encouraging, and constructive, rather than complaining, negative, rude and destructive.
2. Engagement. Be friendly. Let your personality show through. Be approachable. Build relationships and trust. Engage others and show a genuine interest in their lives, and their thoughts. Find a mentor to help you get to know people. A knowledgeable, connected mentor can be a huge resource to help you build relationships and connects with others in your field.
3. Communication. You might think excellent professional communication skills are a given, but you’d be mistaken. Many very competent people lack effective, professional communication skills. Pay careful attention to how you express yourself, not only in formal written communications, but also in e-mails, on the phone, and in face-to-face conversations. Be confident, respectful, and clear in all of your communications. Learn to be a better listener as well. Give your full attention, maintain eye contact, and try to really understand and absorb what people are saying.  An attentive, respectful listener is a rare commodity. Developing stellar communication habits goes a long way towards differentiating yourself.
4. Contribution. Dedication and involvement stand out. Be more prepared than everyone else on the team is. Do your homework, gather your resources, and show up prepared and ready to work. If you’re actively engaged in the work process and make a significant contribution to the team, it will be noticed. You also might want to volunteer to contribute beyond your mandatory workload and offer to take part in charity events or be a part of other committees.
5. Creative Thinking. Think creatively. Don’t be afraid to express your creativity and look for innovative solutions. Ask intelligent and useful questions. Ask questions that no one else is asking. It’s often not the answers you provide that make an impression, but your ability to ask insightful questions. Not only will you demonstrate that you can “think outside the box,” but that you can use your creative skills in a way that benefits the entire work team.
6. Results. Results speak…very loudly. People pay more attention to what you do, than what you say. What do you do exceptionally well? Can you learn to do it even better? Strive to be the go-to person whenever that skill is needed. Your skill expertise doesn’t have to be odd or complicated; it’s actually better if it’s a simple, often required, skill that you do better than others. And don’t hesitate to toot your own horn occasionally. There’s nothing wrong with letting people know when you’ve achieved something significant, as long as you’re careful not to be annoying. Achievement stands out and drives career advancement.
7. Take-Aways. They key is to decide what’s different about you, and then learn to capitalize on it. Pay attention to what you do best, what you bring to the table, what’s special about you. Be memorable or unique. Be remarkable and talented. Be professional and reliable. Be creative and interesting. Let what’s different about you be visible, work on cultivating that “specialness” and you will get noticed.

Shark (Hive on Spark)

Shark is a large-scale data warehouse system for Spark designed to be compatible with Apache Hive. It can answer Hive QL queries up to 100 times faster than Hive without modification to the existing data nor queries. Shark supports Hive's query language, metastore, serialization formats, and user-defined functions.

Spark

Spark is an open source cluster computing system that aims to make data analytics fast — both fast to run and fast to write.
To run programs faster, Spark provides primitives for in-memory cluster computing: your job can load data into memory and query it repeatedly much more quickly than with disk-based systems like Hadoop MapReduce.
To make programming faster, Spark provides clean, concise APIs in Scala, Java and Python. You can also use Spark interactively from the Scala and Python shells to rapidly query big datasets.

Tachyon distributed file system

Tachyon is a fault tolerant distributed file system enabling reliable file sharing at memory-speed across cluster frameworks, such as Spark and MapReduce. It achieves its high performance by leveraging lineage information and using memory aggressively. Tachyon caches working set files in memory, and enables different jobs/queries and frameworks to access cached files at memory speed. Thus, Tachyon avoids going to disk to load datasets that are frequently read.

MLbase user-friendly machine learning

MLbase is a user-friendly system for distributed machine learning from the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack.

Aloha Editor Javascript widget

Aloha Editor is a semantic Rich Text Editor framework written in Javascript with best support of xHTML5. You can integrate it in a CMS, blog, wiki software or any other project where you need to edit content with a web based tool. Use it like a supersonic textarea. You can edit almost any DOM element with this supersonic textarea, but you need to care about configuration and storage.

visualizing.org is a community of creative people making sense of complex issues through data and design.

Eyeo Festival

Eyeo Festival assembles an incredible set of creative coders, data designers and artists, and attendees -- expect enthralling talks, unique workshops and interactions with open source instigators and super fascinating practitioners.

Ben Fry

Ben Fry is a leading data scientist and the creator of Processing.

top 20 data viz tools

See this great list of the top 20 data visualization tools by .net magazine.

create a fat jar in gradle

How to create a fat jar in a gradle build:

// this task builds a fat jar which includes the runtime dependencies in the jar
jar {
   dependsOn configurations.runtime
   from {
      configurations.runtime.collect { it.isDirectory() ? it : zipTree(it) }
   }
   exclude 'META-INF/*.DSA', 'META-INF/*.RSA', 'META-INF/*.SF'
   manifest {
      attributes('Main-Class': 'com.example.MainClass')
   }
}

Class-Path is also a valid manifest attribute, and '.' can be its value to specify the current directory to find other jars to search. This allows to use other jar files since the classpath

using a local Ivy repository with gradle

How to use Groovy Grape to populate a local Ivy repository:

@echo off
REM this batch file executes Groovy Grape install to populate the repository
REM given the group, module, and version as commandline parameters
REM files are cached in REPO\.groovy\grapes

set GROOVY_HOME=C:\tools\groovy-2.0.5
set REPO=C:\tools\repo

%GROOVY_HOME%\bin\grape --verbose -Duser.home=%REPO% install %* 

Then use the following in a gradle build to access the repository: 

repositories {
   ivy {
      ivyPattern "C:/tools/repo/[organization]/[module]/ivy-[revision].xml"
      artifactPattern "C:/tools/repo/[organization]/[module]/jars/[module]-[revision].jar"
   }
}  

Bintray open source repository

Bintray is a social service for developers to publish, download, store, promote, and share open source software packages. With Bintray's full self-service platform developers have full control over their published software and how it is distributed to the world.

See the Postgres Guide for tips.

postgres array_agg function

Postgres has a flexible and robust array datatype that comes with a variety of functions, including array_agg, which gathers values into an array.  See this blogpost by Craig Kerstiens.

jQuery Zoomer iframe scaling

jQuery Zoomer provides scaling support for iframes.

JQWidgets Javascript widgets

JQWidgets is a Javascript widget set with a nice-looking tabpane.

Gridster Javascript dashboard grid

Gridster is a jQuery plugin that allows building intuitive draggable layouts from elements spanning multiple columns and rows on a webpage. You can even dynamically add and remove elements from the grid.

EmergentOne cloud database REST API generator

EmergentOne is a cloud service taht generates a REST API for a database.

Hammer.js multi-touch gestures javascript library

Hammer.js is a javascript library for multi-touch gestures, supporting Tap, DoubleTap, Swipe, Drag, Pinch, and Rotate gestures.

PrimeUI Javascript widgets

PrimeUI is a collection of rich javascript widgets based on jQuery UI WidgetFactory, including a decent tabs panel, growl notifications, and other nice effects.

Firebase real-time webapp synchronized datastore

Firebase is a real-time webapp synchronized cloud datastore which lets you create fully interactive apps with just frontend code.

Angular JS toolkit

Angular JS is a Javascript toolkit for extending HTML for webapps. Also has associated widgets at Angular UI for Angular JS and AngularModules

PhantomJS headless WebKit browser

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.

Jasmine Javascript BDD test framework

Jasmine is a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code. It does not depend on any other JavaScript frameworks. It does not require a DOM. And it has a clean, obvious syntax so that you can easily write tests.

Karma Javascript test runner

Karma Javascript test runner brings a productive testing environment to developers. An environment, where they don't have to set up many things and rather just write the code and get an instant feedback.

SkyPhrase natural language interface

SkyPhrase makes it extremely easy for developers with no experience in linguistics or artificial intelligence to create natural language interfaces.

Ziptask cloud-based project management outsourcing

Ziptask is a layer of cloud-based project management that sits atop any and all other freelancer platforms. No longer would you need to entangle yourself with the nuances and challenges of personally managing freelancers. Ziptask allows you to achieve better results, and avoid the hassles and headaches of outsourcing.

NVD3 pre-build D3 charts

NVD3 is an attempt to build re-usable charts and chart components for d3.js without taking away the power that d3.js gives you. This is a very young collection of components, with the goal of keeping these components very customizeable, staying away from your standard cookie cutter solutions.

Paperkit graph paper generator

With Paperkit you can easily generate online the exact type of graph paper (grid paper) that you need. Use the toolbar to adjust the settings. You have full control over spacing between grid lines, margin size, stroke color and width as well as paper size. A live preview will help you evaluate your design. There are five formats available: A4, A3, legal, tabloid and letter. You can use units that you are comfortable with (millimeters or inches).

Tincr edit and save local files in Chrome Dev Tools

The idea behind Tincr is that you can save changes to your original source file from within Chrome Developer Tools. In addition, Tincr does auto-reloading of JavaScript and CSS changes made in other editors.

Cubism Javascript time series

Cubism.js is a D3 plugin for visualizing time series.

DataTables Javascript data grid

DataTables is a plug-in data grid for the jQuery Javascript library.

hawtio browser dashboard

hawtio is a lightweight and modular HTML5 web console for managing your Java stuff. 
hawtio has lots of plugins such as: a git-based Dashboard and Wiki, logs, health, JMX, OSGi, Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel, Apache OpenEJB, Apache Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss and Fuse Fabric

Voice Actions Jeannie

Jeannie (Voice Actions) is a virtual assistant with over two Million downloads, now also available via API. The objective of this service is to provide you and your robot with the smartest answer to any natural language question, just like Siri. This service provides an interface to the standard functions that users demand of modern voice assistants. For example chatting, looking up information, creating messages and much much more. It also provides useful metadata such as sentence analysis and entity extraction that goes beyond simple chatting and voice commands. Over 2 million users have already been in contact with this API: http://www.voice-actions.com/

TimeAPI natural language datetime API

TimeAPI is an API to get dates/times from natural language queries based on Chronic.

APIhub

APIhub is the best way to publish, discover and consume APIs.

10 links on data visualization

10 links that will help you get started understanding different aspects of this fascinating discipline.

1. Bitsybot is a really cool site by GfK Custom Research’s data wiz Bitsy Hansen.
2. The good folks at O’Reilly Media have an extensive collection of data visualization resources.
3. Information is Beautiful is by “data journalist” David McCandless. The name says it all.
4. There is a LinkedIn Group dedicated to data visualization in market research called Market Research Data Visualization.
5. I Love Charts presents humorous made-up charts which often manage to communicate real lessons about the presentation of data, whether intentionally or not.
6. Chart Porn…’nuff said.
7. ChartChannel from iCharts has interactive charts you can clip and use in your blog.
8. Visual Complexity focuses on the representation of complex networks.
9. Into maps as well as data? Strange Maps has you covered.
10. Flowing Data has lots of great visualizations.

Enjoy!

Postgres in the cloud

Postgres is available in the cloud at:

• Engine Yard (500 free hours)
• Heroku
• Cloud Foundry
• EnterpriseDB (on AWS)

Picozu online photo editor

Picozu Editor is an online drawing and photo retouching application based on HTML5 and CSS3. The application provides you with an easy yet complex way to edit your photos, draw using various brushes, filters, layers and explore various editing tools such as color fill, magic eraser, freehand selection, cropping, selections and more.

mashape API marketplace

The mashape API marketplace allows you to easily consume multiple API's.

Usher mobile authentication

Usher is a mobile identity network that enables enterprises to render digital credentials, or “badges,” on users’ mobile devices. Usher increases enterprise security and safety by allowing organizations to:

• Issue digital identification badges to employees on their phones
• Validate and ensure the identity or credentials of any individual
• Replace physical keys and access cards with software keys
• Replace passwords with time-limited access codes
• Securely sign, store, and share digital documents and media
• Use analytics to understand employees’ actions and locations

Thermacell mosquito repellant

Thermacell makes battery-powered mosquito repellant products.

Codenvy browser-based IDE

Codenvy.com is a browser-based IDE with support for cloud PAAS.