Florida Tourism shatters another record, outpacing national trend

Travel

Photo courtesy of Fodor’s.com
MIAMI – Florida has reached a milestone in tourism, eclipsing the all-time record of 15.5 percent share of the domestic vacation market in 2024.
According to Florida Visit, the state’s tourism marketing organization, the tourism mark is nearly a one-point increase from 2023, as Florida continues to be the top destination for visitors.
It’s the 6th time Florida has broken its own tourism record since 2018.
Florida Visit said a public-private partnership that matches public funding dollar-for-dollar is driving up the state’s tourism numbers.
“Partnering with thousands of businesses across the state, it serves in a leading role within Florida’s tourism ecosystem, protecting and promoting Florida’s $142 billion vacation brand through global marketing, public relations, and travel trade efforts,” Florida Visit said in a statement.
The shopping centers, the beaches and other attractions in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties drive people to Florida.
National Everglades National Park and the wildlife are also frequented by visitors.
The state’s tourism performance also remains strong on the global stage.
In the first two months of 2025, Florida saw:
* A 0.5 percent increase in Canadian air visitation, outperforming the national trend, which showed a 2.3% decline in Canadian travel to the U.S.
*A 6.5 percent increase in overseas visitation, with notable gains from the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Argentina.
“Florida is the world’s favorite place to visit,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in a statement. “This record tourism is a result of policies that prioritize freedom, public safety, and common sense.”
In February 2025, DeSantis announced that Florida remained the top destination for travelers worldwide, welcoming a record-breaking 142.9 million visitors in 2024.
The figure represents a 1.6 percent increase over 2023, which previously held the record for the highest annual visitation in the state’s history.
The fourth quarter of 2024 also set a new milestone, drawing 33.1 million visitors, the highest number ever recorded for a Q4 period.
The surge in tourism was driven by 29.9 million domestic travelers, 2.5 million overseas visitors, and 742,000 Canadian tourists, highlighting Florida’s continued appeal across both domestic and international markets.

Chicken jockey! A Minecraft Movie is causing chaos in cinemas and debate over audience etiquette

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Official reviews of A Minecraft Movie were lukewarm at best and one-star at worst.Various headlines around the world declared the film starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, “cobbled together,” “bizarre,” a “hyperactive hot-pink mess,” a “blunt object used to beat you into submission” and “good enough — if you think that’s all kids deserve.”But the kids have spoken, and not only has the film adaption of the wildly popular video game smashed box-office records, but it’s inspired a rowdy, audience-interactive theatre trend that some observers are describing as The Rocky Horror Picture Show for children. It’s also sparked debate over cinema etiquette.Moviegoers have shared videos on social media of audiences clapping, cheering, shouting out lines and throwing popcorn during popular moments in the film, which opened Friday and had earned $163 million US in ticket sales from theaters in the U.S. and Canada over the weekend.One TikTok video with 7.8 million views ranked the top 10 movie moments in the theatre and showed the audience screaming out some of Black’s lines like, “flint and steel!” and “I am Steve,” and going absolutely feral to “Chicken Jockey!” — the latter referring to a scene where Momoa and Black have to fight a baby zombie riding a chicken.”My theater clapped every time Jack Black name dropped a Minecraft item that was in the trailers, and when he said Chicken Jockey I shit you not the entire row in front of me gave a standing ovation,” wrote one person in a viral post on X with 1.2 million views.”The whole cinema repeated Flint & Steel, I am Steve, and f–king erupted in hooting, hollering and applause after all basically yelling Chicken Jockey,” wrote someone else on X.Another described it as “the wildest theatre experience of my life,” noting that the audience — mostly preteens — were “cheering, clapping, and jumping onto the tops of seats.””Whenever Jack Black sang, the kids would get up and start dancing in the aisles. They acted like this wasn’t a movie, but a rock concert,” the poster went on.”It was a complete expression of a mix of genuine love for Minecraft and irony poisoning and the result was pure chaos for 100 or so minutes. This is probably the proper way to see this film.”Happened to overhear a Chicken Jockey moment pic.twitter.com/TUvwMqrZRq—@InsaneLoke’Rocky Horror for Gen Alpha’The phenomenon has been described online as “peak audience energy,” and reminiscent of the fandom and excitement over the Star Wars movies.The viral moments have been compared to the audience interactions by beloved cult classics The Room (where people throw spoons, among other key moments) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which has entire scripts and guides dedicated to the sport of watching the film).Online, people have said A Minecraft Movie is basically “Rocky Horror for Gen Alpha and Z.”From left, Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Sebastian Hansen are pictured in a scene from A Minecraft Movie, in this image released by Warner Bros. Pictures.

Data Science Side Quests: 4 Uncommon Projects to Elevate Your Skills

Science and Health

Image by Author | Canva 
The moment I see a house price prediction or an image classification project, I start yawning. I can’t help it. Everybody does the same projects, and it’s so effing boring!
Sure, why would you care about me, but why insist on boring yourself? What, data science should not be fun? Who said that?
There’s really no need to do the same projects everybody does and stifle your creativity. When you get creative, you can have fun while also sharpening your skills with impactful projects. It also helps you stand out from other candidates.
Here are some uncommon projects for shaking things up!
  
1. AI-Powered Art Generation
 What’s more logical if you want to get more creative in data science than using it to create art. (We’ll leave discussion about what art is to philosophers).

Project Idea: Teaching AI to Be the Next Picasso With GANs
Instead of just analyzing existing artworks, why not create new ones using GANs? Train it on a dataset of paintings and try to create images that mimic a certain style or your favorite artist.

Project Approach

Collect a Dataset: Gather a collection of paintings to serve as training data. Some of your sources could be the DELAUNAY dataset, Abstract Paintings Dataset, or ArtEmis: Affective Language for Visual Art. Always keep in mind to use a diverse dataset, with various painting styles and color schemes.
Preprocess the Data: Resize and normalize the images to ensure consistency.
Train the GAN: Select a suitable GAN architecture to learn the patterns and features of paintings. Some examples of the architecture are Deep Convolutional GAN (DCGAN), Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), Progressive Growing GAN (PGGAN), StyleGAN (Style-Based GAN), or BigGAN (Large-Scale GAN).
Generate Art: Use GAN to create new images that reflect the dataset’s characteristics.

Why Is This Useful?
With this project, you will:

Expand your creativity by combining AI and artistic expression
Learn deep learning and GANs in a practical way
Experiment with different art styles by modifying training data

2. Data-Driven Storytelling
 Raw data is useless to most people unless communicated effectively. Many data scientists lack in this department. It will set you apart from others if you learn how to use data storytelling, which will engage decision-makers and persuade them to take action.

Project Idea: What Are Musicians Really Singing About?
If your brain hurts from the banality of modern pop music lyrics, maybe you can discover why it’s so by exploring song lyrics over time. You could uncover interesting (!?) patterns in language, sentiment, and themes. In this project, you will collect, analyze, and visualize data to create a compelling narrative from your findings.

Project Approach

Data Collection: Use Python’s BeautifulSoup and requests to extract lyrics from sources such as AZLyrics, Genius, and Lyrics. You can also use APIs, such as Genius API, Musixmatch Developer API, and ChartLyrics Lyric API.
Perform Text Analysis to Find Recurring Themes: Common approaches to text analysis include sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, TF-IDF analysis, and topic modeling (LDA).
Visualize Results: Make your findings more interesting by creating bar charts, word clouds, and line graphs. Use Tableau, Power BI, or Plotly Dash to create interactive dashboards so users can explore lyrical trends dynamically, e.g., the most common words, changes in sentiment across the decades, genre comparison, etc.

Why Is This Useful?
In this project:

You identify cultural shifts in music trends over time
You reveal hidden patterns in songwriting styles
You can turn data into a compelling narrative

3. Automated Social Media Analysis
 It’s not a wild guess that you probably spend too much time on social media. That is not something I can recommend, but it’s reality. So, why not replace the brain rot with something useful? Maybe ‘brain refresh’ by automating the process of analyzing trends, sentiments, and engagement metrics on social media.

Project Idea: The Trump Tweet-O-Meter™
In this project, you could create a real-time sentiment analysis for Twitter (sorry, X) posts on Donald Trump (sorry, POTUS). Trump Tweet-O-Meter™ is a real-time natural language processing (NLP) pipeline designed to ingest, analyze, and visualize sentiment trends in those posts. It will involve employing streaming data, sentiment classification, and time-series analysis to get insights into public opinion shifts, political discourse patterns, and major sentiment fluctuations in response to real-world events.

Project Approach

Real-Time Data Ingestion: Fetch posts using Twitter API.
NLP Classification: Apply TextBlob or VADER sentiment analysis to classify tweets into sentiment categories.
Tracking Sentiment Shifts: Store tweets and sentiment scores in a time-indexed database (e.g., SQLite, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB), detect sentiment trends with time series smoothing, and identify spikes and dips after major Trump-related events (you won’t lack these, for sure).
Visualization: Generate dynamic sentiment charts, such as word clouds, heatmaps of geolocated Trump tweets, or stacked bar charts to compare Trump’s sentiment to, say, Zelenskyy’s.

Why Is This Useful?

You do a political research, but make it fun
You automate real-time public sentiment tracking
Journalists can use this for fact-based reporting on public opinion
You can predict Trump’s impeachment, “so help you God”

4. Niche Predictive Models

You see a predictive modeling project, and it will probably be about stock or house prices, weather forecasts, or customer behavior. (Yes, the sound you just heard, it was me yawning.) You can make this more niche, for example, to predict book popularity (to become a rich writer) or meme trends (to become a meme king). Simultaneously, you build your machine-learning skills.

Project Idea: Will Your Book Be the Next Bestseller or Just Kindling for a BBQ?
Build a machine learning model that predicts a book’s success on factors such as genre, title length, page number, and readers’ ratings, for example.

Project Approach

Collect Book Data: Collect the data through Hardcover API, New York Times Bestsellers API, and Amazon Books scraping.
Data Preprocessing: Clean the collected data and prepare it for machine learning.
Train an ML Model: Split the data into training and testing sets, and use a classification model (e.g., logistic regression, random forest, gradient boosting) to predict if a book will be a bestseller.
Evaluate Model: Use metrics such as accuracy score, confusion matrix, and feature importance to ensure your model is accurate and generalizable. Improve its performance through hyperparameter tuning, e.g., GridSearchCV.

Why Is This Useful?
You can:

Understand what makes books successful and will get
Avoid developing predictive models for the overused datasets
Extend it to recommend book pricing and marketing strategies

Conclusion
 Data science projects and fun are not mutually exclusive concepts. With those four project suggestions, you can learn and practice fundamental data science skills while also having fun.
The main point is to go beyond the several standard datasets and topics everybody uses. Have that in mind, and you will easily think of many more uncommon projects. As a bonus benefit, you will stand out from the crowd.  
Nate Rosidi is a data scientist and in product strategy. He’s also an adjunct professor teaching analytics, and is the founder of StrataScratch, a platform helping data scientists prepare for their interviews with real interview questions from top companies. Nate writes on the latest trends in the career market, gives interview advice, shares data science projects, and covers everything SQL.More On This Topic

8 queer books coming in April that we’re excited about

Arts & Culture, Books

We’re in a brand new month, so you know what that means – new LGBTQ+ book releases! 

There are so many great new queer book releases in April 2025, this article could easily have been a few thousand words long. Instead of listing them all, here are the LGBTQ+ books coming this month that we’re excited about. 

When the Tides Held the Moon – Venessa Vida Kelley

(Erewhon Books)

Set in 1910s New York City, Benigno “Benny” Caldera creates an ironwork tank for the famous Coney Island playground, Luna Park. The sideshow proprietor invites Benny to join the cast of the show and shares a secret: the tank will soon be home to a merman stolen from the banks of the East River. 

Benny soon gets to know the merman, Río, and despite coming from different worlds, their friendship starts to become more. But can Benny release Río and risk losing his found family, his new home and his soulmate?

Buy on Amazon

Buy on BookShop.uk

Love At Second Sight – F.T. Lukens

(Simon & Schuster Children’s UK}

Teenager Cam Reynolds is fed up with being known as the artsy oddball and decides to try and fly under the radar at his new school – which just happens to be full of kids with cool paranormal powers. All is going well until he has an unexpected vision of a murder in front of almost the entire student body.

Cam finds himself at the centre of attention and has to work out who he can trust while also trying to identify the future victim and stop the killer. 

Buy on Amazon

Buy on BookShop.uk

My Best Friend’s Honeymoon – Meryl Wilsner

(Piatkus)

Ginny has been in love with their best friend Elsie for a decade and a half. There’s just one problem, Elsie has been engaged to her college boyfriend for 18 months.

When Elsie finds out that her fiancé has planned a surprise wedding and honeymoon in just 7 days, she realises this isn’t the life she wants. After breaking things off, she jumps on a plane for her non-refundable honeymoon with Ginny instead. 

Determined to help Elsie speak up for herself and create the life she wants, Ginny agrees that for the next week, Elsie can have anything she wants so long as she asks for it. They never expected that what Elsie might want is them.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on BookShop.uk

Flirting Lessons – Jasmine Guillory

(Scholastic)

The first queer contemporary romance from best-selling author Jasmine Guillory, Flirting Lessons follows Avery Jensen as she tries to be less uptight. At almost 30 years old and fresh off a breakup, Avery decides that she wants to get a hobby, date around and flirt with everyone. The only problem is, she doesn’t know how to flirt. 

Enter Taylor, the biggest flirt in the area. She offers to give avery flirting lessons after her best friend bets her she can’t make it two months without sex. But it isn’t long before the flirting lessons start to become something more. 

Buy on Amazon

Buy on BookShop.uk

Run Away With Me – Brian Selznick

Run Away With Me is a profoundly romantic YA novel about first love, self-discovery and the magic of a summer in Rome.

Danny arrives in Rome with no expectations beyond exploring the city while his mother works at a mysterious museum. But his quiet days of wandering change when he meets a boy who first appears as a shadow. Then a voice. Then, finally, Angelo.

As the two boys spend the summer together they unravel the city’s stories while cautiously revealing their own. The boys are drawn to each other, but as their bond deepens, the fear of what comes next does too. 

Buy on Amazon

Buy on BookShop.uk

If We Were a Movie – Zakiya N. Jamal

(HarperCollins)

Rochelle ‘The Shell’ Coleman has one goal: get into Wharton. But to boost her application, she needs a job. Unfortunately, the only option is Horizon Cinemas, where her biggest rival, Amira Rodriquz, will be her boss. Working together feels like Rochelle’s own horror movie, until they begin to see each other in a new light.

But Horizon Cinema is in trouble. Strange incidents threaten to shut it down for good. Rochelle and Amira race to uncover the mystery, and their rivalry turns into something neither of them expected. 

Buy on Amazon

Where Shadows Meet – Patrice Caldwell

{Hot Key Books}

Long ago, Favre sacrificed her wings for love, only to be betrayed by the goddess she gave them up for. Now, after centuries of loss and darkness, she waits for the chance to resurrect the girl who broke her heart. No matter the cost.

A thousand years later, Leyla, crown princess of vampire nation, embarks on a perilous journey to the Island of the Dead to save her best friend. With the fierce and enigmatic seer Najja by her side, she soon realises that the path forward is fraught with mystery, danger and an ancient evil waiting to rise.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on BookShop.uk

Seven Days in Tokyo – Jose Daniel Alvior

{Unbound}

When Landon, a British expat, and Louie, a restless traveler waiting for his US visa, meet in Manhattan, one perfect night isn’t enough. In Tokyo, they have seven days to discover if their fleeting connection could be something more.

Against the backdrop of misty streets and cherry blossoms, they share stolen moments, late-night conversations and quiet intimacies. But as time runs out, Louie finds himself longing for a life that isn’t his, forcing them both to face the truth about love, longing and the beauty of what cannot last. 

Buy on Amazon

Buy on BookShop.uk

Which of these April releases are you most excited for? Let us know in the comments!

Announced: the winner of the Warwickshire Secondary Book Award 2025

Arts & Culture, Books

Watch more of our videos on ShotsTV.com and on Freeview 262 or Freely 565Visit Shots! nowYear seven and eight students from 24 different secondary schools across the county have chosen Quiet Storm by Kimberly Whittam as the winner of the Warwickshire Secondary Book Award 2025.The book is about Storm, a Year seven student who struggles with shyness and the transition to secondary school as he navigates new and old friendships.The overriding message of the book is that it is okay to be scared, and not to let fears stop you from chasing your dreams.The annual Warwickshire Secondary Book Award is hosted by Warwickshire Schools Libraries Services (WSLS) with the objective of encouraging more students to enjoy reading for pleasure through school and library settings.Four of the authors at King High School. From left to right: Tom Percival, Alastair Chisholm, S.J. Wills, Dev Kothari.The award is a spring term initiative delivered in secondary schools between January to March each year, with a reading list chosen by the experienced WSLS team alongside valuable input from several secondary school librarians.Along with Kimberley’s winning work, the shortlist of books chosen for students to read this year also included Bite Risk by S.J. Wills, Bringing Back Kay-Kay by Dev Kothari, I am Wolf by Alastair Chisholm, Kofi and the Rap Battle Summer by Jeffrey Boakye and The Wrong Shoes by Tom Percival.To participate, students were encouraged to read all six books from the shortlist and to vote for their favourite book as the winner, using the criteria that the book must be ‘a page-turner that pupils would highly recommend to others’.The initiative culminated in an award ceremony at King High School in Warwick last Wednesday (April 2) where students from secondary schools across Warwickshire attended to find out which author was pronounced the winner as voted for by their cohort.Four of the six authors – Alastair Chisholm, Dev Kothari, S.J. Wills, and Tom Percival – were able to attend the event, providing inspiration and engaging conversations about the shortlisted books as well as discussing what it’s like to be in the publishing industry.School’s wanting to take part in the Secondary Book Award next year can email the Warwickshire Schools Libraries Services at [email protected] or contact the service by calling 01926 413461.Continue Reading

Inside Celebrity Big Brother host Will Best’s life from longterm girlfriend to successful business

Business News

TV presenter Will Best is back on TV screens fronting Celebrity Big Brother, but what do we know about him away from the cameras? Take a look…TVDanni King18:00, 07 Apr 2025Will Best has fronted numerous TV shows, but he’s arguably best-known for presenting Big Brother and the celebrity edition of the reality TV show alongside AJ Odudu.Will and AJ are returning to screens on Monday, April 7 with a new series of Celebrity Big Brother, which will see a fresh set of famous faces enter the iconic house in hope of being crowned the winner.Article continues belowThose rumoured to be taking part in this year’s CBB include Ella Rae Wise, Chris Hughes, Tommy Fury, Chesney Hawkes and Trisha Goddard.As we welcome Will and AJ back to our screens, here we take a look into Will’s life away from CBB…Will hosts Celebrity Big Brother with AJ Odudu(Image:

What kind of welcome will American travelers get in Canada this summer?

Travel

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Increasingly tense relations between the United States and Canada are expected to result in a drop of Canadian visitors to the U.S. this year.What’s less clear: Whether Americans will limit their visits to Canada.Bay Village traveler Dan Davis is worried about an upcoming, long-planned motorcycle tour around Lake Superior this August.He writes, “We are a little concerned about traveling in Canada because of everything that is happening right now between the U.S. and Canada. Have you heard much/anything about U.S. citizens traveling in Canada given the current political/economic climate, and do you think it will be safe for 10 motorcyclists from Ohio to travel in Canada this summer?”It’s a good question, and one that I can’t answer with absolute certainty.Canadians, as anyone who has traveled up north has likely experienced, are some of the most friendly, down-to-earth people on the planet. I can’t imagine that everyday Canadians will take their frustrations with U.S. government policy out on American tourists, who are there to spend money and have a good time.Indeed, I reached out to Destination Ontario, the organization that promotes tourism to the province bordering Ohio’s north shore, and was told that the region would be welcoming to all.“Ontario is dedicated to supporting the tourism sector and welcoming travelers from all over the world, including our neighbors in the United States,” a spokesperson said. “Historically, Ontario welcomes 10 to 13 million U.S. visitors every year, and we look forward to continually welcoming our tourists in the upcoming spring and summer seasons.”A spokesperson for Destination Canada sent along this statement: “Canada has a long-standing reputation as friendly, open and welcoming. Global perception of Canada remains highly positive and we will continue to promote ourselves as an iconic destination, with a view to winning the hearts of even more international travelers in 2025.”In 2024, Americans were the most frequent international travelers to Canada, with 23.4 million visits. Among the top destinations: Niagara Falls, Toronto, the Thousand Islands, Vancouver and the Canadian Rockies.That same year, Canadians made 39 million visits to the United States.Read more: Will the political environment influence your summer travel plans?How many Canadians will stop visiting Ohio over Trump tariff? Tourism leaders concernedThat number of Canadians visiting the U.S. is expected to drop dramatically this year, in response to increasingly tense relations between the two countries, including talk from President Donald Trump about making Canada the 51st state. In February, now-former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians to send a message to the United States with their wallets.“Now is also the time to choose Canada,” he said, adding, “It might mean changing your summer vacation plans to stay here in Canada and explore the many national and provincial parks, historical sites and tourist destinations our great country has to offer.”But it’s not just politics that may keep Canadians away. The U.S. dollar remains very strong against the Canadian dollar, which makes traveling to the United States expensive for Canadians. At last check, one U.S. dollar was worth $1.43 in Canadian currency.If it’s expensive for Canadians to come here, the reverse is also true: It’s a great time, economically speaking, to visit our neighbors to the north.My advice to Dan Davis and anyone else pondering a trip up north: Have a great time, enjoy that well-known Canadian hospitality and indulge in lots of economically priced maple pancakes and poutine.