Articles of the Week
Pubbies of the Week
Data Science - A Promising Discipline in the 21st Century
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received:
10
Data Science is not only a well paid career nowadays, but also evolves into the architecture of lots of other disciplines. As an engineer in traditional civil and environmental engineering disciplines, I recently started to learn data science because my job needs it as well. In many engineering applications, decisions need to made, not by human any more, but by machine. Think about a simple application: should a disinfectant dosing pump be turned on or turned off for water disinfection at a water treatment plant? During this COVID-19 crisis, the management at the plant might say, let's keep the pump running so that there will be enough disinfectant to kill the virus. However, too much disinfectant dosing can also have side effects on human health, which increases the amount of the carcinogenic disinfection byproducts. This is a kind of decision that grows complicated and needs backup based on data analysis. Machine learning is a branch of data science that uses techniques of regression, supervised clustering, etc, to predict the future, or the consequences, in this case, what will happen if the pump is turned on and what will happen if it is turned off. A wise decision is therefore can be made, which can ensure public health and even save people's lives. I could give millions of other examples that depend on all kinds of correct decisions made by machine based on the processing of tons of environmental data. The Tesla autopilot and the recent success of SpaceX rocket launch are one of them. Python - a coding tool, is indispensable for data science learning and applications, and actually falls into the discipline of data science itself and can aid learning. The following image shows the relationship of data science with other closely-related disciplines. You will know your hard-working direction if you want a well paid job and good career!
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Is It ’S-Q-L’ or ‘Sequel’?
Categories: General, Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 0
Many coders use this extremely useful tool in their projects. It’s called Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. However, many people still struggle with just how to pronounce the term SQL. Is it “S-Q-L” or is it “sequel”? Now you might not think that this is a big deal (and it isn’t), but to sound more professional and knowledgeable during interviews and other “showing off” moments, you need to know the best pronunciation. The standard says that ‘S-Q-L’ is the appropriate way of speaking SQL. However, many English-speaking database professionals still use the nonstandard pronunciation “sequel.” So which one tops the other? Unfortunately, that’s hard to say, but I will tell you my opinion. So first, we will talk about how to sound intelligent. Let’s say you’re at a conference and a person insults you. Would you just insult them back just by calling them “stupid”, or is there a more sophisticated way of doing this? Of course, there is. When you are certain you have some spectators, you can tell them that they “have no intelligence” or “lack an effective brain” or some other response that sounds longer and uses higher vocabulary. All of these options will surely be more superior to just calling them “stupid”. The better approach of insulting someone back is to lengthen your response so you sound wiser. And the same goes for expressing your understanding of a topic. When someone asks you which coding languages you know, it will sound better by saying that you “have a deep understanding of Hypertext Markup Language, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and S-Q-L”. This would also be the right time to pronounce SQL as “S-Q-L” because it’s longer to pronounce so you will sound more intelligent. Use “sequel” whenever you’re speaking quickly or just discussing code with your friends. Since there’s no one to impress, “sequel” would be the better option in this case. Personally, though, I prefer to use “sequel” just because it’s easier to say, but that’s just my opinion. ... Read more
Jupyter Notebook - A Must-Have Editor for Those Who are Both Programmers and Educators
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 10
In this article titled "Sublime Text vs. Pycharm, Which One is Better?", I mentioned Jupyter Notebook as one of well-known Python IDEs. I do see a number of YouTubers use it for demonstration and education purposes, and thought it is cool and practical to use during learning and teaching. However, I think it cannot replace Sublime Text for development of a series of complicated and connected coding files. The reason Jupyter Notebook is superior for education is that it is featured with multiple interactive code blocks that can be easily added or deleted. You can run one single code block or multiple code blocks to see the results instantaneously without executing the whole py file. The shortcuts are just like other editors: ctrl z for undo, ctrl / for comment, and the like, and you can edit those if you want. Of course, Jupyter Notebook also has downsides. I summarized two, and now only have one left. The No. 1 downside I had before was the default white background appearance, as I prefer a dark theme. It is now no longer a downside, as I've figured out how to change to a dark theme manually. The other downside is it runs on a terminal window just like a web application built on flask, and actually uses two of your computer resources simultaneously: a browser window + a terminal window. For some old computers, it will not be running as fast as Sublime Text, because Sublime Text is an editor stands on its own. It does not need you to run in command line unless you want to test the code you've written. However, as an educator and researcher, I would use Jupyter Notebook as well to produce some reproducible code snippets and save as .ipynb files for future references. With that said, here are some instructions for you to install Jupyter Notebook and apply a dark theme as I did.
Open a terminal window, enter:
pip install notebook
pip install jupyterthemes
jupyter notebook
In a Jupyter Notebook code block, enter
!jt -t monokai
Note: "monokai" is the name of a dark theme I'm using.
Restart Jupyter Notebook in the command line, and the dark theme is ready to go. ...
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Problem and Solution
Categories: General, Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 0
I came across this problem while I was coding, and it bugged me for a very long time. After the launch of stocks on our website, it is possible to find a loophole when one is purchasing shares of stock. You see, when you purchase a share, the input fields with the stock information are disabled so you can’t modify the price. However, while I was testing the URL for the site, I noticed that a user could just simply change the price of the stock in the URL and instantly get rich if they make each stock one dollar. So this was a serious problem and I got to work right away. Beforehand, I passed the stock price through the URL and used that price in the form. I tried to fix it by hiding the numbers in the URL. That didn’t work. After many attempts, I thought of another method. Why couldn’t I just use the price from the previous page, the page that listed all of the stocks? I queried the dictionary and found the real price and used that in the form. Now even if a sneaky user tried to bypass the price of the stock by changing the URL, once they hit submit, it will show an error because the price in the URL didn’t match the price I had in the dictionary. The important lesson I learned from this experience was to consistently attack a bug in all sorts of perspectives until one worked out. When one try didn’t work, I didn’t give up and thought of a new plan.... Read more
The Ring Camera
Categories: Tech | Pubby Cash Received: 0
Are you afraid of robbers who may try to steal things from your house? Well, the Ring camera can help prevent those tragic things from happening. The Ring camera is efficient and helpful. First, it is efficient. This camera and be used just by plugging it into a wall socket. You can use your phone to check on it at any time you want. It also gives you notifications when it detects motion. Also, this product is helpful. After all, it does more than just to keeps burglars away. You can use it to connect it with your Alexa and tell in things like what is going on in the backyard. All in all the Ring camera is a very great product and is worth buying. ... Read more