What is Folding@home?

Folding@home is a distributed computing network for performing biomedical research. Its intent is to help further understand and develop cures for a range of diseases. Their current priority is understanding the behavior of COVID-19 and the virus that causes COVID-19. This article will show you how you can get involved by donating your computer’s idle time.

Sounds cool, how do I help?

In order to donate your computational power to Folding@home, download the FAHClient package from this page. Once you’ve downloaded the package, open your Downloads folder and double click it to open. For instance, on standard Fedora Workstation, this opens GNOME Software, which prompts you to install the package.

How to start Folding@home

Folding@home starts folding as soon as it is installed. In order to control how much CPU/GPU is using you must open the web control interface, available here.

The interface contains information about what project you are contributing to. In order to track “points,” the scoring system of Folding@home, you must set up a user account with Folding@home.

Tracking your work

Now that everything’s done, you may be wondering how you can track the work your computer is doing. All you need to is request a passkey from this page. Enter your email and your desired username. Once you have received the passkey in email, you can enter that into the client settings.

Click on the Change Identity button, and this page appears:

Enter the username you gave when you requested a passkey, and then enter the passkey you received.

What next?

That’s all there is to it. Folding@home runs in the background automatically on startup. If you need to pause or lower how much CPU/GPU power it uses, you can change that via the web interface linked above.

You may notice that you don’t receive many work units. That’s because there is currently a shortage of work units to distribute due to a spike of computers being put onto the network. However, different efforts are emerging all the time.

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

Nintendo Life

Happy Bunny Day! Yep, if you’ve been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the past few weeks, you’ll know there’s been a special seasonal event where you gather as many eggs as possible and then craft them into bunny-themed items and furniture.

Today is the final day, and to go out with a bang, Zipper has returned to your island paradise. He can help you out by gifting specific eggs to complete certain DIY recipes – provided you’re willing to part with some of your other eggs. He’s also offering some extra gifts if you supply him with one of each egg (leaf egg, stone egg, earth egg, sky egg, water egg, and wood egg).

So, collect all those Bunny Day eggs and recipes, and craft them while you still can. For more information, and extra details, check out our full Bunny Day guide. Will you be booting up Animal Crossing to experience the final day of this event? How have you found it so far? Leave a comment down below.

If you’re wondering what’s going on with classification boards around the world now that CERO in Japan has been temporarily closed, it’s business as usual.

An update from IGN reveals the ESRB in America has been working from home in recent weeks. So far, it’s had no issues assigning ratings remotely. Here’s an official statement:

Thanks to a good deal of advance planning, since March 16 ESRB has been operating remotely due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We have seen no delay in assigning ratings. We will continue to assign ratings remotely for as long as required.

Over in Europe, the European games rating agency PEGI is also working remotely. The impact of the resulting measures has been minimal:

In short: yes, we are currently working remotely with minimal impact on our operations. When this situation started to unfold across Europe a couple of weeks ago, we quickly found a way to continue our daily operations by working remotely. Given that PEGI (in Brussels) works with two independent administrators that are located in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and they deal with publishers all over the world that we do not have to meet in person, cooperating remotely has always been part of our daily routine. But now it happens from homes instead of different offices.

We informed the companies using the PEGI system that, until local authorities announce a change to the current measures, we will be working like this. But until now, the impact of the pandemic and the resulting measures has been minimal.

Unless something major happens or there is a problem on the publisher or development end, games in these regions will continue to be rated.

Can you believe it? Playtonic’s unlikely duo Yooka-Laylee is now three years old! The original game of the same name was first released on the 11th of April 2017 after a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. And although it never saw the light of day on Nintendo’s Wii U, it did eventually show up on the Switch.

To celebrate this special milestone, the game’s publisher Team17 has released the following tweet, asking fans to share their favourite moments so far with these characters.

In this short time frame, Yooka-Laylee has made a cameo in the fighting game Brawlout and appeared in the side-scrolling sequel, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. If you haven’t tried out the second game yet, now is the perfect time. It’s currently on sale on the Switch eShop for just $20.09 / £16.74.

Earlier this week, Playtonic also rolled out a new update for the Impossible Lair, making it a little bit easier. A second update will follow this on 14th April, and adds in an 8-bit soundtrack.

On behalf of everyone here at Nintendo Life, happy birthday Yooka-Laylee. Share your own favourite memories of these characters and their games in the comments below.

Want to calculate the standard deviation of a column in your Pandas DataFrame?

In case you’ve attended your last statistics course a few years ago, let’s quickly recap the definition of variance: it’s the average squared deviation of the list elements from the average value.

You can do this by using the pd.std() function that calculates the standard deviation along all columns. You can then get the column you’re interested in after the computation.

import pandas as pd # Create your Pandas DataFrame

d = {'username': ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Carl'], 'age': [18, 22, 43], 'income': [100000, 98000, 111000]}

df = pd.DataFrame(d) print(df)

Your DataFrame looks like this:

Here’s how you can calculate the standard deviation of all columns:

print(df.std())

The output is the standard deviation of all columns:

age 13.428825

income 7000.000000

dtype: float64

To get the variance of an individual column, access it using simple indexing:

print(df.std()['age'])

# 180.33333333333334

Together, the code looks as follows. Use the interactive shell to play with it!

Standard Deviation in NumPy Library

Python’s package for data science computation NumPy also has great statistics functionality. You can calculate all basic statistics functions such as average, median, variance, and standard deviation on NumPy arrays. Simply import the NumPy library and use the np.var(a) method to calculate the average value of NumPy array a.

Here’s the code:

import numpy as np a = np.array([1, 2, 3])

print(np.std(a))

# 0.816496580927726

Where to Go From Here?

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