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Since I live in the woods I get to forest bathe everyday! I do feel completely different living in a forest than I did living in a city. There’s something to be said about this. Forest bathing involves none of those things. “Just be with the trees,” as Ephrat Livni describes the practice, “no hiking, no counting steps on a Fitbit. You can sit or meander, but the point is to relax rather than accomplish anything.” You don’t have to hug the trees if you don’t want to, but at least sit under one for a spell. Even if you don’t attain enlightenment, you very well may reduce stress and boost immune function, according to several Japanese studies conducted between 2004 and 2012. ...

I stood at the beginning of the Camino de Santiago at the Montserrat Monestary. It’s a life long dream of mine to walk it one day. Better get moving because I ain’t getting any younger! Though many more walk el Camino de Santiago for other than religious reasons. Many say that the Camino is time to reset their life. It is an incredible experience and opportunity to disconnect and experience a slower daily life with few modern interruptions. - via Camino Adventures ...

Neat infographic on where you can drink tap water in the world. This is handy when you travel because I almost made the mistake of drinking from the tap in Macau. Source: Reddit

The Biden administration, equipped with $39 billion in subsidies to distribute, is spearheading an ambitious effort to ramp up production of the tiny chips that power everything from smartphones to computers and cars. The effort is at the center of Mr. Biden’s goal to reduce America’s reliance on foreign countries: Although semiconductors were invented in the United States, only about 10 percent of the world’s chips are made domestically. Via NY Times ...

From The NY Times email newsletter. On Friday, the National Association of Realtors, the industry group that has enforced the rules that led to the 6 percent commission, agreed to change its behavior as part of an agreement to settle several lawsuits. The settlement is important in its own right. Americans now spend about $100 billion a year on commissions. That number will probably decline by between $20 billion and $50 billion, Steve Brobeck, the former head of the Consumer Federation of America, told my colleague Debra Kamin. ...

I wrote an article about Microsoft integrating Python in Excel. I love the idea and I think it’s going finally get machine learning into the hands of Excel users. Check out this tutorial on how to use SciKit-Learn in Excel from Anaconda. The new Python in Excel integration by Microsoft and Anaconda grants access to the entire Python ecosystem for data science and machine learning. Thanks to its direct connection to Anaconda Distribution, we can leverage built-in functionality with packages like NumPy, pandas, Seaborn, and scikit-learn directly within our Excel workbooks. ...

An older link from April 2017 that I believe became AutoGluon. AutoGluon is fantastic for time series and a host of other AutoML use cases. So, what models do we include in our ensemble? Pretty much any reasonable model we can get our hands on! Specific models include variants on many well-known approaches, such as the Bass Diffusion Model, the Theta Model, Logistic models, bsts, STL, Holt-Winters and other Exponential Smoothing models, Seasonal and other other ARIMA-based models, Year-over-Year growth models, custom models, and more. Indeed, model diversity is a specific objective in creating our ensemble as it is essential to the success of model averaging. Our aspiration is that the models will produce something akin to a representative and not overly repetitive covering of the space of reasonable models. Further, by using well-known, well-vetted models, we attempt to create not merely a “wisdom of crowds” but a “wisdom of crowds of experts” scenario, in the spirit of Mannes [6]. ...

It looks like the old LibSVM library is still kicking around and being updated. Last release was a bug fix on July 2023. Version 3.32 released on July 9, 2023. We fix some minor bugs. Plus changes how to use in Python: > pip install -U libsvm-official The python directory is re-organized so >>> from libsvm.svmutil import * instead of >>> from svmutil import * Via Webpage

Source: Reddit

An oldie but goodie. Regular Expressions are a must for anybody using Python, doing Data Science, or just ETL’ing data. Regular expressions (regex) are essentially text patterns that you can use to automate searching through and replacing elements within strings of text. This can make cleaning and working with text-based data sets much easier, saving you the trouble of having to search through mountains of text by hand. Via Dataquest ...