Datasets:

bunkalab

/

medium-sample-technology

like 0

Follow

Bunka AI 4

The Ultimate Guide to Fulfillment, Pt. 3

Real life insights into fulfillment and logistics for startups and subscription box companies In Part 1 & Part 2, we shared an overview of how fulfillment works and the steps you can take to facilitate a smooth transition to outsourcing this part of your business. In this section, we’ll discuss the process of finding a fulfillment partner and drill down into how to evaluate your options. Not all 3PL’s are cut from the same operational cloth: How do you find the right partner for you? In the truest sense of the word, you are about to enter into a partnership. Your fulfillment partner will close the loop between customer purchase and delivery, and you are trusting them to do this effectively and as a representation of your business. The right partner is a valued resource that helps you grow, while choosing the wrong option can lead to dissatisfied customers, delays and countless headaches. Finding warehouses: By now, you’ve evaluated your current operations and have a keen understanding of what your expectations are for fulfillment. But what are the actual steps to finding a warehouse? Anthony Thomas, Founder of Sticker Mule has some helpful advice: “We start by contacting anyone we think can point us in the right direction. You can try connecting with product companies in your area to see who they use, and what their experience is like. They may offer guidance for other 3PLs they spoke with, and offer insight into why they didn’t go with them, and why they may be a fit for you. Search for reviews online to see how people are talking about different 3PLs. Quora can provide insights from a customer perspective, and Glassdoor can offer a look into the culture.” Other resources to look into: If you are running a crowdfunding campaign, BackerKit not only will help you to effectively wrap up your campaign, they have recommendations for several fulfillment partners. not only will help you to effectively wrap up your campaign, they have recommendations for several fulfillment partners. There are databases such as 3PLfinder and Inbound Logistics’ search tool which are helpful when searching by location, though they can be overwhelming and require plenty of tedious outreach. and Inbound Logistics’ which are helpful when searching by location, though they can be overwhelming and require plenty of tedious outreach. You can contact Chambers of Commerce to see who they recommend from their network. Search for reviews or ask other users on forums like Quora, Reddit, etc. With your list of warehouses in hand, you are ready to assess each potential partner to suss out the best fit. Top 5 considerations for your warehouse: You want a partner that is invested in your growth, after all, your success is their success. Likewise, your working relationship matters, both the business kind and the warm-fuzzy friendly type. Remember, this will be one of your most important partnerships as you scale, and you’ll want to partner with people who are both effective and with whom you like working. Anthony of Sticker Mule shares how they prioritize the human element, “I’m a big believer in the golden rule, so I look for their adherence towards it too. If I’m treating someone well and they’re not reciprocating, I move on.” What are other important factors you should be considering? For many businesses, price is a major consideration. However, the price tag does not depict the whole story. The total cost includes operational capacity, customer support, and technology infrastructure of the warehouse, which have a disproportional impact on your working relationship. The Warehouse Equation: Price = Fees + Location + Customer Service + Tech + Operational Capacity Generally, if you receive a very low price from a warehouse, you’re losing something somewhere. The cheapest option upfront may ultimately be more expensive over time (perhaps they have low per order costs, but make it up in shipping rates or maintenance fees). Let’s also consider the evaluation through another lens: What happens if you factor in your customer’s experience? How do non-monetarily based variables such as customer service come into play? In other words, cost should not be the only way to evaluate your options. Here are five important factors to review: (Shippo has an easy to use interface to quickly price compare shipping rates.) Fees: There are a variety of fees a warehouse may charge, but the most common costs are: Shipping rates: Use *Shippo *or *Easypost *to learn what your base rates should be by integrating your existing carrier accounts, or by signing up with UPS/ FedEx directly. Most warehouses charge a margin here, so you will be able to price compare with their rates. Use *Shippo *or *Easypost *to learn what your base rates should be by integrating your existing carrier accounts, or by signing up with UPS/ FedEx directly. Most warehouses charge a margin here, so you will be able to price compare with their rates. Fulfillment fees: Pick-and-pack, kitting, material costs. Buyer beware: When most people think cheapest they’re talking about these costs — Most warehouses know this and add the difference in shipping rates above. Pick-and-pack, kitting, material costs. Buyer beware: When most people think cheapest they’re talking about these costs — Most warehouses know this and add the difference in shipping rates above. Storage fees: Warehouses typically charge a holding fee per pallet/ month. These generally range from $15–30/ pallet/ month. You should ask about lower-cost storage options, such as bins, and be sure to ask about reserve storage pricing. We’ll cover additional ways to save money in Part 4. Questions to ask: What are your preferred shipping rates? Meaning: What are the true rates you get with carriers? Good Answer: We offer the following discounts and charge a slight mark-up for using our accounts and the work we put into ensuring you pay the best rates. We do allow companies to charge against their own carrier accounts, however you lose our ability to help you reduce your costs with our volumes and our teams reviewing the invoices. Better Answer: We offer a system you can use to test our rates to see if they’re better than you’re currently receiving. Bad Answer: It depends, but trust that they will be better than what you are currently getting. What are your per order outbound fees (i.e. pick and pack)? Meaning: What are all the fees I should expect to pay per order? Good Answer: We charge a flat fee of $1.25 + $0.25/ item. Better Answer: Send us some example orders and we’ll give you your pricing. Bad Answer: We charge you based on the hourly rate of our workers and every order can differs. Ali Kathari of New Grounds Foods offers some lessons learned the hard way: “Hands down the most frustrating part of working with a new fulfillment center is understanding which shipping methods or the cheapest for each respective product. Fulfillment centers don’t want to make it extremely easy to tell you which is the cheapest shipping method (because they make money on the shipping rates). It takes investigating and running reports to fully understand which methods are best for which orders. And be sure to keep revising your shipping methods — pricing changes all the time.” Other Common Fees: Accessorial charges: After a parcel carrier ships a package, there can be added fees that are charged up to several weeks later. The following are what we saw for one of our major clients: Shipping Charge Correction Residential Adjustment Fuel Surcharge Additional Handling Address Correction Ground Large Package International Shipping One-time setup charge (from a few hundred dollars to thousands) Integration fees for setting up your e-commerce integration ($125–250/hour) Manual corrections for improperly formatted CSV files, incorrect SKUs, invalid addresses, and other work that requires manual processing team Monthly account management fee (up to a couple hundred dollars a month) Repackaging items Receiving fees You can read about more common fees in Part 1 Ali continues, “With every fulfillment center, there is an on-boarding process where you have to learn all of the small rules that don’t come up in the intro meetings or contract, but instead come up when you are actually doing business with the fulfillment center.” Going forward, it is important to evaluate each invoice you receive and ask clarifying questions into what each charge is. (Source: Etsy) Location: Where the fulfillment center is located will help determine how much cost savings you can attain for shipping rates. You will want to consider warehouses that are: Near the bulk of your customers Near carrier shipping hubs (cities where major carriers have large distribution centers) Near port (where ships dock and unload freight) If you are manufacturing in the U.S., it may be helpful to have a warehouse near your production facility to minimize freight costs. It is important to understand that proximity to you is less important. We understand many entrepreneurs looking for their first warehouse want to be able to visit and like the convenience of having it close by, but the factors above will be more meaningful in the long run. Ali of New Grounds Foods explains further, “If you are doing small volume, try to find the fulfillment center that has the best shipping rates. This will ideally mean a fulfillment center that is located in the middle of the country. OR if you plan to only ship product to one region of the country, make sure your fulfillment center is in that region. Do not worry too much on the pick and pack fees, rather, worry about the shipping rates and which one can offer the best prices. Shipping rates will always increase, pick and pack fees [typically] will stay the same once they are set.” Operational Capacity: How well can your warehouse handle your orders? How predictable and consistent are they? The better you understand how your fulfillment center operates, the more accurately you can plan your back-end logistics. Questions to ask: Do you handle kitting? Meaning: Can you bundle together my products for final packaging?Good Answer: We do this upfront after we’ve received your product into the system. We’ll optimize the process for you over time. Better Answer: Depends on your needs, let’s spend some time learning more about your process. Send us some example kits or a video and we’ll work out your pricing. Bad Answer: Yes. We kit your products each time a product comes in. Is your warehouse temperature controlled (or other specific requirements your product requires)? Meaning: Can you handle the specific needs for my product? Good Answer: Our warehouse is within this temperature range: 65–75 all year-round. Our major concern is humidity, but we can keep that lower than most places because we have built into a cave and have a high-powered dehumidifier. For your product, though, we’d worry most about the following environmental conditions… Here’s how we address each of those concerns. Bad Answer: Yes, we can store your product in our office area because we keep the air conditioner on there. What is your Dock to stock time? Meaning: How long does it take to get my product from outside the warehouse to storage (and in stock so I can start selling)? Good Answer: 8 hours — 72 hours Bad Answer: It is incredibly fast, I am not sure on the specifics. What is your mis-ship rate out of 1,000? Meaning: Are they accurate, do they know how many mistakes they make? Good Answer: 99.86% if barcoded, 75% if it’s not barcoded. Our biggest gain in accuracy comes from automation systems. Bad Answer: “We don’t mis-ship here.” (Everyone mis-ships) Go in person. Do they have clean floors? Are their pallets in the aisles? Meaning: You are checking if they have consistency and organization. Good Answer: It is surprisingly clean. Bad Answer: Pallets are found in seemingly random locations and floors have discarded boxes and tape lying around. If you do happen to visit the facility, you can find visual cues for how well run their operation is all around you. For example, review how safely the forklift drivers move across the floor. If they’re speeding around and haphazardly providing audible and visual signals at intersections then it’s a poorly managed facility. However, if the movement makes you feel comfortable and seems controlled with an annoyingly high rate of honking and visual sirens then you’re in a well run facility that takes safety seriously, and indicates they’re nailing the rest of the steps. Customer Service: Your company’s reputation is now tied in part to the performance of your fulfillment company. When your warehouse provides inferior customer service or fails to deliver an order on time, it reflects poorly on you. Questions to ask: Do we get our own dedicated account representative that will be our only point of contact? Meaning: If we need to get an answer, is there someone we can talk to directly? Good Answer: You will have an account representative. Her name is Lucy. Here is her contact information. She will be your point person after we’ve on-boarded you into the system. Until then you’ll work with me and we will introduce you to her by this date. Bad Answer: You can just call anytime, someone will be able to help you out within the hours of 9–6pm. How quickly do you respond to questions? Meaning: If we need urgent help, how fast can you provide answers? Good Answer: Within 1 work day. Bad Answer: You can email our customer support and they’ll get back to you in a timely manner. (They fail to guarantee a time period). Ali from New Grounds Foods relays the importance of having a point person, “Make sure that you work with a fulfillment center that gives you a dedicated account representative, and also make sure that this will be your ONLY contact for any fulfillment rated questions you have. It was painful for us at our first fulfillment center when we had to speak to different people for different questions [which caused serious delays to get the answers we needed].” Some warehouses have outdated technology. Tech: How technically competent the warehouse is will either make your life a seamless breeze, or be a time-sucking nuisance for simple things like submitting orders. Questions to ask: How do we send our data/ orders? Meaning: How much time will it take to send your orders for them to fulfill? Good Answer: We have a Shopify plug-in so your orders will automatically be sent to our facility. Bad Answer: It’s as simple as uploading a CSV. You can email it, or use our backend to upload! Oftentimes, you will need to rearrange data in the CSV download from your eCommerce store in order for the warehouse’s system to be able to process the information. This can be a highly time intensive process that can lead to errors in data entry, causing mis-shipments, delayed shipments, or potential fees for information correction. What tech do you use? Do you have barcode scanners or a WMS? Meaning: Are you prone to human error and doing everything manually? Good Answer: Both. There are automated systems to ensure accuracy by denying pickers/packers making trivial mistakes such as wrong quantity and wrong SKUs which is enforced with our barcode scanners and Warehouse Management System (WMS). We also have human packers that will ensure your packaging and labeling looks right for your customer and is the cheapest option overall. Bad Answer: We triple check every order to be sure, by hand. Now that we’ve covered high priority items, let’s delve into some of the nuances. You will want to discuss the following before making your final decision. Additional evaluation criteria: Below are a list of questions and other considerations to discuss with your potential warehouses. Due Diligence: Check references and claims history: To gain a full picture of the compatibility between you and your 3PL provider, talk to their customers whose businesses are similar to yours. The Better Business Bureau can be helpful for searching for grievances. Glassdoor can be helpful for gleaning insight into working conditions and the culture. can be helpful for searching for grievances. can be helpful for gleaning insight into working conditions and the culture. Can you show me your liability insurance? Do you have X [industry-specific] certification (you will need to know which ones are pertinent to you)? Operations: Ask what they do best (ie., “We specialize in perishable foods and bottled beverages”). What happens during the initial set up process? How long does this take? What happens if we need to move out? How does that work? Are there fees? What type of inspections do you provide? Portfolio: Who have you worked with that are similar to us? Do you currently carry similar products? How many other vendors do you work with? What is the shipping volume of your largest accounts? Ask for examples of customers with similar needs to yours, and ask them to explain how they provided solutions to meet the company’s specific requirements. Shipping: Do you automatically rate shop for each order? When are carrier pick-up times? What are cutoff times for each carrier? How quickly are orders processed (from order upload to being packed)? Can you provide your published shipping rates? Ask about emergencies and the holidays: How would you handle orders if I begin shipping 10x? 100x? Packaging: How do you price out kitting? Can you walk me through the process of receiving, storage, order processing, picking, and packing? What packaging options do you have in house? How much are materials? What branding elements can you incorporate (Ie., inserts, stickers, etc.)? What can you not do? Technology: What eCommerce stores do you integrate with? Customer Support: Hours of operation? Help desk? How do you handle last minute order changes? Returns: What is your process for handling returns? You do not need to ask all of these questions, nor is this list fully comprehensive. Performing your due diligence will help you make a more educated decision for an important part of your business, and help suss out potential lemons. You are ready to make your decision, but this is just the start. Going forward, there are ways to strengthen your relationship and important factors to consider. General good housekeeping advice: Anthony of Sticker Mule summarizes his evaluation process into four simple steps: Ask around to get advice on a reliable potential partner. Care about being a good client that’s easy to work with early on. Continually try to build rapport and make your partner’s life easy Don’t be afraid to switch partners if it’s not working out. He reiterates that relationships go both ways: “It’s important to work on being a good client before you consider switching partners. If you’re a bad client then every partner you meet is going to seem like a bad partner.” On your end, be communicative (and civil!), provide as much advanced notice for potential issues as you can, be understanding when the inevitable mistake arises, and work with your partner to find solutions. We’ve now covered the gamut from what fulfillment centers are, to positioning your business for a smooth transition to a warehouse, and how to find a partner. // Glossary of terms: Accessorial charge : After a parcel carrier ships package, there can be added fees (for overweight, large dimension rules, stating commercial address instead of residential, additional handling charges, etc.). : After a parcel carrier ships package, there can be added fees (for overweight, large dimension rules, stating commercial address instead of residential, additional handling charges, etc.). Carrier shipping hubs : Cities around the U.S. where major carriers have large distribution centers and ship to far-reaching parts of the country. : Cities around the U.S. where major carriers have large distribution centers and ship to far-reaching parts of the country. Freight : Large volume of goods transported by truck, train, ship, or aircraft from your manufacturer to your warehouse. : Large volume of goods transported by truck, train, ship, or aircraft from your manufacturer to your warehouse. Port : Docks and distribution centers where ships unload freight. : Docks and distribution centers where ships unload freight. Receiving : The process of unloading product from the freight truck, inspecting the inventory in the dock of the warehouse, and putting product into storage. : The process of unloading product from the freight truck, inspecting the inventory in the dock of the warehouse, and putting product into storage. Dock to stock: How long does it take to get my product from outside the warehouse to storage. Tools and resources mentioned:

https://medium.com/the-chain/how-to-find-your-first-warehouse-pt-3-763ff47ca99c

['Akin Shoyoye']

2016-08-05 00:46:27.494000+00:00

['Subscription Boxes', 'Fulfillment', 'Technology', 'Ecommerce', 'Startup']

Airbnb Open Homes: Who Belongs?

Note: this article was written before the recent announcement of Airbnb.org, a non-profit that incorporates the Open Homes initiative. via Airbnb.org The words Airbnb and Global Refugee Response Manager flashed across my inbox. I would have never imagined those two words in the same sentence. Airbnb, established in San Francisco in 2008, has grown globally as a “trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world.” There are over 5.6 million active listings worldwide, with 800 million guest arrivals, and as of October 2020, over $110 billion has been earned by 4 million hosts on the platform. It’s an app that I, along with friends and family, have used numerous times when traveling to different countries and cities. So how do refugees, individuals fleeing from various forms of persecution, come to be a part of this online marketplace? The answer is Airbnb’s Open Homes initiative, officially launched in 2017, which has a mission to “connect people with a free place to stay in times of need.” Open Homes partners with various non-profit organizations including Mercy Corps, the International Rescue Committee, and the Bone Marrow & Cancer Foundation to connect their clients with places to stay. Hosts on the platform sign-up to include their listing as a part of the initiative. There are currently three types of eligibility for the program: disaster relief, medical stays, and refugee/asylee housing. In the case of disaster relief, people impacted by a disaster, including relief workers, can apply for emergency housing. However, in order to be eligible, guests are required to provide proof of address or employment during the application process. For medical stays and refugee housing, guests must be referred by a nonprofit partner. Refugee and asylee guests must be legally recognized as such by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and/or have begun the process of seeking asylum. While this initiative has good intentions to provide free access to housing, the ethical concern comes into the fairness of this initiative. Who is creating the standards for individuals who are qualified and “worthy” of having access to Open Homes? What happens to the many individuals who are most marginalized in our society, particularly during natural disasters, without any proof of an address or a job? What happens to individuals who aren’t connected to non-profits, and are in need of housing? What about the many internally displaced persons worldwide, who are without a legally recognized status? It seems that Airbnb has created a stratification system of who belongs in their program. The Open Homes initiative is one aspect of Airbnb’s intentional social impact efforts, yet the company has had many other unintended impacts. A recent study showed that in New York City, Airbnb “has increased annual rent for the median tenant by $380, and over $700 in some neighborhoods” (Bach, 2019). This “Airbnb effect,” is evident in housing markets worldwide, in taking long-term housing stock off the market and consequently driving up house prices and rents (Barker, 2020; van Doorn, 2020). It has caused cities from San Francisco to Barcelona, to create regulations surrounding short-term rentals and implement tourism taxes on the platform to offset the economic costs of Airbnb’s presence. The platform is also not created in a way to facilitate and uphold Airbnb Community Standards which emphasize “fairness” and a stance against discriminatory behavior. For one, hosts are allowed to reject guests that they are not comfortable with, without needing to explain why. In one case, Reed Kennedy, a Black tech entrepreneur and investor, reached out to Airbnb suspecting discrimination, as he was being repeatedly rejected on Airbnb (Luca & Bazerman, 2020). Hosts were not seeing anything more than his profile, which includes a name and picture. An Airbnb representative informed Reed that he could increase his chances of getting a room by including references on his profile, who could vouch for him (Luca & Bazerman, 2020). This is not Reed’s experience alone, as studies have shown there is discrimination against Black guests along with, “ documented discrimination on Airbnb against same-sex couples, against guests with Arabic-sounding names, and against guests with disabilities” (Luca & Bazerman, 2020). It is evident that Airbnb is employing the “New Jim Code,” which Ruha Benjamin defines as “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (Benjamin, 2019, p. 19). Airbnb’s stratification of eligibility for Open Homes, and the pervasive discrimination on the platform, mirrors the stratification of “worthiness” and exclusion that exists in many social service programs and our greater society at large. Taking into consideration the many effects Airbnb has on local communities and economic markets, would it even be ethical for Open Homes to continue their initiative and to expand their eligibility to include everyday individuals experiencing houselessness? Just last year Airbnb announced a partnership with San Jose State University, and a non-profit, the Bill Wilson Center, to help house students experiencing houselessness (Deruy, 2019). This is yet another example of prioritizing certain individuals, who need a free place to stay, over others. In this case, with the condition of those pursuing an education. In thinking more deeply about Open Homes, I took to my real and virtual friends on Instagram, to ask them their thoughts. In poll results, 87% respondents said they have used Airbnb, yet 93% of respondents had not heard of Open Homes before. Additionally, 88% said that there should be an expansion of eligibility for Open Homes to include everyday individuals who experience houselessness. While the idea seems beneficial, some raised the point that a company like Airbnb, which creates housing crises, should not be facilitating this process, rather it is the role of governments. Others noted that Airbnb’s growing influence in the sphere and collaboration with government entities surrounding Open Homes initiatives, would increase Airbnb’s influence and sway city regulations in Airbnb’s favor. I’ll leave you with words of Ruha Benjamin, who writes “the public must hold accountable the very platforms and programmers that legally and often invisibly facilitate the New Jim Code” (Benjamin, 2019, p. 54). It will take collective effort to hold Airbnb accountable, even as it pursues to create a positive social impact. Who is with me?

https://medium.com/@ghazalrezvani/airbnb-open-homes-who-belongs-98b78c8bf1a9

[]

2020-12-15 03:32:39.719000+00:00

['Airbnb', 'Technology', 'Homeless', 'Refugees']

The Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm

To understand how the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm works, let's have an input where n=1. The process will be the same regardless of the value of n. If all measurements of n equal to 0, the function was constant. If at least one of the measurements results in a 1, the function would’ve been balanced. In our example, since n=1, if the result is 0, the function would’ve been constant. Otherwise, if the result is 1, the function would be balanced. To implement the circuit, we need 2 qubits: the first qubit, q0 , will be our “data qubit” (x), and the second qubit, q1 , will be our “helper/ancilla qubit” (y). We then initialize the qubits with q0 into the |0> state and q1 into the |1> state (We do this by applying an X gate). Mathematically, it would look like this: Next, we need to put the qubits in a superposition by applying 2 H gates; an H gate on q0 , and another on q1 . (Ignore the ID , it’s just a placeholder so my Hadamard gates are aligned) After applying the Hadamard gates on q0 and q1 , we can expand the equation such that it looks like the following: Now, we need to implement Uₕ , the quantum oracle/unitary operation. Uₕ does 2 things: it implements the function, h(x), and outputs the XOR of the bits of h(x) and the bits of the helper/ancilla qubit. If h(x) is a constant function (h(x) = 0), we don’t need to do anything, but if h(x) is a balanced function (h(x) = 1), all we need to do is to apply an X gate to the helper/ancilla qubit. Uₕ is a lot harder to figure out for balanced functions and is more complicated when n gets larger. For our n=1 example, the oracle performs a CNOT gate, with q0 as the control qubit and q1 as the target qubit. After implementing Uₕ , the helper/ancilla qubit has a state of y XOR h(x) . This means that if the data qubit is |0> , the helper/ancilla qubit will be y XOR h(0) . If the data qubit is |1> , the helper/ancilla qubit will be y XOR h(1) instead. We can actually rewrite the states mathematically like this: And we can factor out the helper/ancilla qubit so it looks like this: We apply another 2 H gates to our qubits. We do this so the |1> terms can cancel out if h(0) = h(1) and if h(0) ≠ h(1), the |0> terms will be canceled. In other words, for the data qubit, |0> becomes |0> + |1> , and |1> becomes |0> - |1> . For the helper/ancilla qubit, if it’s a |0> - |1> , it will become a |1> . Now, with a bit more math and simplifying, we can get this:

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/the-deutsch-jozsa-algorithm-f8611e2ff3ff

['Ryan Lam']

2020-03-31 22:31:01.347000+00:00

['Technology', 'Physics', 'Tech', 'Quantum Computing', 'Computer Science']

Providing External Signals for Bluetooth and WiFi Scans on Android Devices

Providing External Signals for Bluetooth and WiFi Scans on Android Devices How we adapted to work with indoor navigation in quarantine Image from Dribbble by Folio Illustration Agency Hi there! I am from the Navigine team. For eight years we have been providing integrated positioning mobile technologies that enable advanced indoor navigation and proximity solutions. Today we want to tell you about workarounds we had to come up with to improve testing of the indoor navigation without having beacons and other devices that emit the signals we need. Let’s dive into and find out how you can use it. A necessity in public functions Quarantine continues in all parts of the world, but this does not stop us from continuing to work and find better solutions for indoor navigation and improve existing ones. Due to the fact that we continue our work remotely, we need to test our solutions for correct operation, but sometimes the absence of beacons or other devices emitting signals forced us to come up with a trickier solution. So we decided to make public methods for providing WiFi and Bluetooth signals. These solution can be useful not only for indoor navigation, but also in other cases if your technology uses bluetooth or wifi devices. It is also worth paying special attention that this method can also be used in other cases, for example, if one of Bluetooth or WiFi sensors does not work well on your device, or if you decide to test someone else’s solution, but don’t want to buy beacones. Of course, you can still use some application that emulates these signals, but this solution does not always work well, because sometimes you need a beacon of a certain type, and most applications allow you to change a very limited number of parameters. Description of function parameters When you use Bluetooth or WiFi scan, you receive signals in the scan callback and then pass the data to your function, in which a certain magic happens. But in the absence of devices emitting signals, there will be no magic, so for further testing you will have to use a similar solution when you immediately supply data to your magic function. In our case, this magic function will evaluate your indoor position. So let’s try to understand the variables we use to pass to the function. iBeacon AD structure For Bluetooth measurement data providing function Name is Bluetooth device name and address is its mac address. These fields for beacons are not so important, so we will not focus on them. Rssi is a measurement of the power present in a received signal. ScanRecord is a byte array which consists parameters like major, minor, uuid, power, etc. You can find more information about this byte array data in documentations of each beacon manufacturer. For Wifi measurement data providing function there is only one parameter. ScanResults are vector of scan results, where each scan result contains information about BSSID, SSID, level, frequency, etc. For getting more information we recommend you to read the ScanResult docs. How to use After having all these data you can provide custom signals to your function without scanning any Bluetooth and WiFi devices. And most importantly, it’s worth calling these functions with a certain frequency in order to receive data constantly and the function you need is constantly being performed, in our case it’s a navigation evaluating. So here is the code snippet, how you could run indoor navigation and provide Beacon info to it. By the way, you will need to create your own functions for generating Beacons and WiFi signals for providing to this functions, but this is another task and could be told in another article. Conclusion Of course, it is best to use real devices that emit signals and test the navigation in your location on real data. But sometimes there is a need to resort to such workarounds. This solution is quite well suited as a temporary solution for testing navigation at your location or testing other points that are interesting to you or if you do not want to purchase additional materials for this, without making sure that this is what you need. You can find more details of this solution in case of our SDK in our wiki. Also you can find Demo application in our GitHub. Feel free to ask your questions and leave your feedback.

https://medium.com/quick-code/providing-external-signals-for-bluetooth-and-wifi-scans-on-android-devices-893218faf241

['Elvina Sh']

2020-05-04 16:09:10.401000+00:00

['Technology', 'Innovation', 'AndroidDev', 'Android', 'Programming']

Apple Is Bringing iTunes Movies And TV Shows To Samsung Smart TVs

Apple Is Bringing iTunes Movies And TV Shows To Samsung Smart TVs This photo from Samsung shows the iTunes app running on one of its TVs. In a surprise announcement, Samsung announced today via press release that Apple is bringing iTunes movie and TV show content to Samsung smart TVs by releasing an iTunes app for 2018 and 2019 Samsung televisions. Prior to this announcement, the only way to watch purchased iTunes content was via an Apple device: Mac, iPhone, iPod, iPad, or Apple TV. Apple makes the vast majority of its money from iPhone sales. But it wants to have a diverse portfolio of profit centers and in recent years it’s been trying to build one in the form of services. Services is an umbrella category that includes all of Apple’s various subscription products and cloud services. iCloud and Apple Music being a couple of key pieces of its services division. The next big piece of that services picture will undoubtedly be Apple’s own answer to Netflix: an Apple-branded subscription TV service. Apple has made no official announcement about this, but it’s been an open secret for some time now. Apple has already begun producing several original TV shows and signing deals for more. There’s been a lot of questions about how this would work. Will it be free for Apple Music customers? Or free for owners of Apple devices? Or will it be a separate paid service altogether? Another important question has been whether or not you’ll have to have an Apple device to subscribe to this TV service. While today’s announcement doesn’t address that question officially, it seems to signal that Apple wants to go beyond owners of its own devices to bring in subscribers to this as-yet-unannounced TV service. What about owners of older Samsung TVs? I have a 2016 4K Samsung TV and I’d love to be able to test this app out on my TV. The Samsung press release specifically mentions that it’s coming to 2018 and 2019 TVs. I fear that means that I won’t be getting this app, though there’s always some hope. I could be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be any technical reason why this app wouldn’t run on my TV. AirPlay 2 is also coming to Samsung TVs. In addition to the iTunes Store app news, the press release also states that Samsung TVs are getting AirPlay 2, Apple’s means of letting Mac and iOS devices stream content to other devices. If you wanted to AirPlay to a TV before, you had to have an Apple TV. Now you’ll be able to go directly to your Samsung television. That’s really nice. I was a little surprised that Apple Music isn’t also coming to the Samsung smart TV platform. You may not think that makes a lot of sense, but I don’t have any kind of separate stereo any more. If I’m not listening to my AirPods around the house I’m using the Apple Music app on my Apple TV played through my TV’s sound bar with my Samsung TV serving as the “now playing” display. I have to think a lot of other people listen to music this way too. So what does this mean for Apple TV? Well, I’ve long felt that Apple TV’s biggest competitor isn’t other streaming boxes like Amazon’s Fire TV, but rather smart TVs themselves. If all most customers want is access to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, most new TVs have those built right in. Apple’s finally bringing their biggest profit center from Apple TV to the smart TV itself. It’s going to be really interesting to see if Apple makes similar deals with other TV makers. My bet is that they will, but perhaps Samsung gets some kind of temporary exclusivity. Meanwhile the Apple TV will continue to be a niche product. I still love mine and would likely continue to watch my iTunes content there even if I do eventually get the iTunes app on my Samsung TV. Samsung’s smart TV platform is actually pretty good, but there’s no one who does a better job of UI/UX than Apple. 2019 is shaping up to be a really interesting year for Apple, and particularly around its digital content. This is the first shoe to drop, but there will be others. Buckle up.

https://johnsherrod.net/samsung-tvs-will-get-an-app-for-itunes-store-movies-and-tv-shows-and-airplay-2-6ae38d4ecf1

['John Sherrod']

2019-01-06 22:26:14.461000+00:00

['Apple TV', 'Samsung', 'Apple', 'Technology', 'TV']

Why Disney+ Could Knock Netflix Off Its Perch

Disney’s marquee streaming service, set to launch later this year, could quickly become the entertainment industry leader, derailing rivals like Netflix by offering customers some of the most beloved characters and recognizable titles for a lower price. The new service, Disney+, will launch in the United States on Nov. 12 for as low as $6.99 a month, or $69.99 for the year — less than Netflix’s basic, non-HD $8.99 plan. By adding Disney+ to its existing streaming services, which include ESPN+ and majority-owned Hulu, Disney aims to dominate the shift to online platforms by ensuring consumers will have access to its content wherever they are, and for generations to come. The company projects it will have 60 to 90 million subscribers by 2024, a third of them in the U.S. While Netflix is projected to spend $15 billion on content this year to fill its subscribers’ queues with programming across all genres, according to BMO Capital Markets, Disney doesn’t need to invest as much because of its extensive library of content. With titles from Disney Motion Pictures and Pixar, and access to some of television’s most recognizable series, like “The Simpsons,” Disney already has a deep well of content that it can offer on its service in the next four years. Many will be included at launch.

https://medium.com/cheddar/why-disney-could-knock-netflix-off-its-perch-2648eaf13efa

['Michelle Castillo']

2019-04-12 18:28:12.719000+00:00

['Media', 'Streaming', 'Technology', 'Entertainment', 'Television']

Why Quantum Computers Are the Key to Our Future

For the last half-century, Moore’s Law has been steady and reliable. Every two years, the number of transistors we can fit in a chip doubles, as does the speed of our technologies. Despite these advances, the cost of production continues to decline. This has allowed tech companies to create an industry that brings in more than $200 billion in annual revenue in the United States alone. But we’re reaching a breaking point, and Moore’s Law is coming to an end. Specifically, Moore’s Law, which was first articulated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, asserts that “the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months.” Transistors are a fundamental component of all electronics. They are the tiny electrical switches that drive our devices. As they get smaller, they get faster, and they consume less electricity to operate. As a result of these technological advances, scientists have been able to create autonomous drones and pocket-sized devices that are more powerful than supercomputers that once took up entire rooms. We are asking more and more computing power from devices that are reaching their physical limits. Eleni Diamanti However, our current transistors are only 14 nanometers across. That’s just 14 times wider than DNA molecules. Ultimately, these transistors, and other electronic components, are so small that they’re beginning to bump up against fundamental physical barriers of their size. “We are asking more and more computing power from devices that are actually reaching their physical limits,” Eleni Diamanti, Deputy Director of the Paris Centre for Quantum Computing, notes. In order to make the next-generation of computational devices, we’re going to need something new. Fortunately, scientists already know what the solution to this problem is: Quantum computers. These technologies harness the power of quantum mechanics in order to remarkably increase the amount of available processing power. The secret to this power lies in the quantum computer’s ability to generate and manipulate quantum bits, or qubits. To operate, today’s computers rely on something known as bits, which are essentially a stream of electrical or optical pulses representing either 1s or 0s. All devices currently rely on these binary digits. Quantum computers’ qubits, on the other hand, are subatomic particles like electrons or photons that can represent a number of combinations of 1 and 0 at the same time. This allows them to process an immense number of potential outcomes simultaneously. Additionally, in conventional computers, doubling the number of bits doubles the processing power. However, adding extra qubits to a quantum machine produces an exponential increase in its processing abilities. This means that, while a single qubit can concurrently perform two calculations, two qubits can perform four, three qubits can perform eight, and on and on. This exponentially increasing speed means that just thirty qubits can simultaneously perform more than one billion calculations. You’ve likely heard that such quantum computers will eventually outstrip our most capable traditional computers and supercomputers — that quantum computers will be faster, smaller, and more efficient than any classical computer. However, this view of quantum computers isn’t exactly correct. In fact, it misses the mark in a number of ways. Yet, in many ways, the devices will allow us to bring a number of sci-fi visions of reality to life. In this video, which was recorded at the Boma France Festival, Eleni Diamanti explains what we can actually expect from the quantum computing revolution — the technologies they will allow us to develop and the questions they will allow us to answer about our universe — and what we can do to help ensure this revolution benefits all of humanity.

https://medium.com/bomaglobal/why-quantum-computers-are-the-key-to-our-future-6d69a201d5b5

['Boma Global']

2019-04-29 00:52:26.645000+00:00

['Boma', 'Science', 'Quantum Computing', 'Technology', 'Computers']

Data Science, Alexander of the Times Ahead

Raise your hands if you ever heard about Data Science! It has been the buzz word in the recent past. This field can retain and stay in the marketplace for a long time and provide numerous opportunities to people who add value by utilizing data. I strongly believe Data science is the place to be going forward in the next couple of years or even decades. Firstly, What is Data Science? Data science is a field that uses algorithms, processes, and models to extract knowledge and generate insights from data. To know more about Data Science, you can read my previous article here. There’s lots of data in the world. And ultimately, data is the resource that our scientists work with. If there is more data, there’s more work, and if there’s less data, there’s less work. Let’s jump straight into it. Since the dawn of time up until 2005, humans had used 130 exabytes of data. Well, this tells us absolutely nothing. What is an Exabyte? Why is this impressive? Well, let’s start from the ground up. Let’s start with one byte here we’ve got the letter A. It takes up exactly one byte of space. Now, assume we have a page of letters. Each page of letters can have between two thousand to five thousand letters. So we’ll say that half a page of text is about right for one kilobyte. Let us zoom out a thousand times, and you’ll get a book. So a book of about 500 pages that’ll take up about a megabyte. Designed using Canva Now, let’s zoom out another thousand times. And what we’ll get is a gigabyte, and a gigabyte is sufficient to fit the whole human genome. So a human genome, once it is coded (in an ideal world) can fit into a gigabyte. Source — By Elymas via Shutter Stock So you can fit an entire person onto a gigabyte if you think of it that way. But here you can counter-argument by telling that the genome of a person is not sufficient to tell you everything about that person. A person has life experiences. Different people live their lives differently. And there’s lots more to a person than just a genome. Well then, let’s zoom out another thousand times, and we’ll get to a terabyte. If you take an HD camera and you follow a person for every single day of their life for every single hour, minute, and second and you film everything that they’re doing for 70 or 80 years, you can fit all of that material onto one terabyte. Source — By Donald Tong via Pexels How about that? This seems to be pretty impressive already. So one terabyte can fit all of your life experiences filmed throughout your life for every single second that you live. And what next? This is getting better. Source — By Tom Fisk via Pexels Consider the Amazon rain forest that takes up about 1.4 billion acres. That’s 1.4 billion acres of trees. There are about 500 trees per acre, making it about 700 billion trees(Estimated). Now, if you take all of these trees and you chop them down, and you turn them into paper, and you fill that paper with letters entirely on both sides of the sheet, then that will amount to approximately some petabytes of data. Well now, if you zoom out another thousand times, you will get an exabyte, and an Exabyte is a thousand petabytes. I guess you got an idea of the abundance of data we have used. Wait! I mentioned 130 exabytes until 2005 only. What about today? How much data have we consumed until today? Designed using Canva So you can see that data in the world is growing very very quickly. Data is being generated in huge numbers as time moves on.

https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/data-science-alexander-of-the-times-ahead-1f9caa8f9c4d

['Saiteja Kura']

2020-05-06 13:05:50.337000+00:00

['Big Data', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Future', 'Data Science', 'Technology']

Veteran Culture Defines Heirloom

Weber Family Homecoming in 2005 It’s Called Military ‘Service’ Veterans know how to serve. They’re defined by their selfless military duty. Many risk their lives and deploy to hostile areas in defense of their country. Service members leave behind spouses, children, and their favorite possessions. They join forces to serve a cause much greater than their own desires. Some never return, many return with physical and mental wounds, but veterans never regret fighting for the freedoms that define their nation. Heirloom is a Business Operated by Veterans The veteran culture defines Heirloom. We embrace the concept of service above self. We’ve been granted a sacred trust and we safeguard valuable assets. We run to the problem instead of pushing it aside. We take calculated risks when they lead to a greater good. We accept responsibility for our actions. We hold team members accountable. We know what it means to lose a friend, and we rejoice when families are reunited. Veteran Small Business Week, November 2–6, 2020 The United States Small Business Administration understands the powerful effect of veterans on America’s economic engine. Over 2 million small businesses are owned by veterans. Veteran owned businesses produce $1.14 trillion in annual revenues and employ 5.03 million workers. Except for their military service, these veterans are much like you. They’re moms & dads, brothers & sisters, neighbors, and friends. Supporting veteran-run small businesses feels good, but there’s another reason many consumers keep coming back. That’s because veterans know how to serve. How Heirloom Serves Heirloom was born out of a problem common to most military families… time to move again. This normally means precious memories sealed in boxes, sometimes in storage for years. Founded by a military family, Heirloom solved this disconnectedness problem. With digitized memories on the cloud, now it’s easy to enjoy your photos and videos from any device. When you call Heirloom, you’re likely speaking with a veteran or the relative of a service member. We understand the apprehension from temporarily parting with your precious possessions, and humbly accept the responsibility to preserve your priceless memories. We also know the joy of reconnecting with family, and consider it our mission to continue serving you with our digitizing service. Geoff Weber, Heirloom CEO, Iraq Geoff Weber in Al Fallujah, Iraq John Rahaghi, Heirloom CTO, The Whitehouse John Rahaghi with President Obama Jim Weber, Heirloom Board of Advisors, Vietnam Jim Weber serving in Vietnam Nate Weber, Heirloom Digital Marketing, Hargrave Military Academy Nate Weber as Battalion Commander D-I-S-C-I-P-L-I-N-E Cadets at boot camp constantly shout: “Discipline is the instant willing obedience to orders, respect for authority, and self-reliance.” Discipline is trained so well, that a service member never forgets. It takes discipline to defuse bombs, jump from planes, guard nuclear assets, or protect classified material. It’s not the same stress, but a similar discipline is required to carefully digitize your precious memories. Further, digitizing millions of media items requires a team with skills much greater than those of one person. Heirloom operates with discipline and the precision teamwork often found in small military units. John and Geoff training in 2002 We Build Ships… Friendships, Relationships, and Partnerships Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines are always prepared for war, but ultimately seek peace. This dichotomy is also a part of Heirloom’s culture. Our mission is both defensive and joyful. We’re rather militaristic about the security of your assets. Our Secure Transfer Kit offers the safest way to ship your memories. Our digital policies ensure the highest degree of data security. However, we also like to play a small part in enhancing your relationships. With digitized media, it’s so easy to share memories at the speed of the internet. Your friends and family will cherish your thoughtfulness. Heirloom makes it easy to remember the good times with those you love. Are Your Memories Digitized? If you haven’t digitized your memories, consider letting the veterans at Heirloom serve you. Ship your memories to our digitizing facility today. We sort, classify, count, and provide an exact price quotation to digitize your entire shipment. Review digitized samples of your media for quality before paying for our service. If it’s not to your liking, we’re happy to return your shipment, but we’ll always try to make it better. Contact us if you have questions, or simply give us a ring at 800–284–9939. Otherwise, don’t delay and risk losing your precious memories forever. Get started today and experience the finest in service from Heirloom.

https://medium.com/@heirloom-cloud/veteran-culture-defines-heirloom-58cab9034abe

['Heirloom Cloud']

2020-11-06 01:54:03.035000+00:00

['Small Business', 'Veterans', 'Decluttering', 'Technology', 'Digitizing Services']

Packlink according to the 4 Keys metrics

What are the 4 key metrics The 4 key metrics are a set of (quickly becoming) de facto standard metrics for understanding where a given team or whole department (in our case) sits in comparison with “the rest of the software development world”. It was first described in the State of DevOps report, first published in 2014. Every year a new report is published, the last being the 2019 edition State of DevOps (pdf) report. I encourage you to read the book Accelerate that fully describes the scientific methods and statistics used to craft the report. Why these metrics? From time to now we have been looking into ways of having visibility on how well the team has been performing now that we were growing. What we are looking to answer Growth impact in the delivery Growing has a big impact (the bigger the smaller you are, like Packlink) in how teams perform because there is disruption in many forms: new colleagues, interviews, technical reviews, etc. That’s why you have to assume some degree of impact in either quality or frequency. Our approach has been to invest time in technical reviews and in the interviews so the last part of the process (onboarding) would be the least disruptive. With these metrics we aim to track this assumption. Visibility and Health A key difference with other type of work is how hard is to have meaningful metrics from development to share with other areas of a company like Customer Satisfaction (time to resolution, client satisfaction) or Sales (onboarded clients, churn, etc) in order to give visibility and health of the development area. These metrics are meaningful in that they show understandable and both business (% of catastrophic errors, time to fix them) and client-oriented ones (how long we take release, to how often we update our product). Since forever giving proper and meaningful visibility with KPIs other than those of features released or stories completed to non-tech people has been a challenge. I had read the Accelerate book long ago and found that these metrics could help me to have a closer language to that of those non-tech people that represent the rest of the company at the management level; as well as a high level view of how the team is doing. Gathering the data And for obtaining the figures of course you need to have the data to work with. Deploys I got the figures from Jira, it took time to be a reliable figure as we were undergoing a big change in our workflows. Lead time For the lead time, I relied on an interesting workshop run by our friends from ThoughtWorks España (Spain) with whom we work and that crafted with us the value chain for our “from PR to production” time. Fail rate & time to restore In this case, I took the time to register every rollback that was causing a major disruption in our applications. While we have other kinds of “broken in production” urgent incidents, these vary a lot in nature and can’t be counted without taking a look into them. I’m considering triaging them for the next iterations. The road to “production” During 2019 I did a first review of how they would look like. The process was quite manual and with a lot of manual data processing to have clear figures. At that moment we had no lead time, time to restore was a gut feeling and change fail rate data quality was improvable. Looking ahead is automating data gathering and even the report itself. Packlink in the light of the 4 metrics Based on them I have created a first report of Packlink tech teams as a whole, the results are quite encouraging. *Special thanks to the ThoughtWorks team that created with us our first Lead time value chain to explore where we had potential improvements. ** For now we are counting “rollbacks”, that is, new versions that for whatever reason render our applications unstable and have to be rolled back to the existing (previous) version. Conclusions With a 16% increase in team size during Q1, we have achieved a 160% increase in releases while keeping the fail rate very low (3%) from a 40% increase in incidents (2 incidents). These figures give us confidence in our selection and onboarding processes (that we improve at every opportunity), ensuring minimal development disruption and great performance of the different teams. Lead time remains a key point to address, with Packlink currently in the high performing group and eager to make progress to reach the next level. Least but not last, if you have made it here I’m sure you would like & enjoy working with and helping us to continue improving. You can go to jobs.packlink.com and take a look!

https://medium.com/packlinkeng/packlink-according-to-the-4-keys-metrics-a306fdd7ef19

['Eduardo Gulias Davis']

2020-06-29 10:25:14.436000+00:00

['Four Key Metrics', 'Technology', 'Engineering Mangement']

ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate and Professional 2019 Updates

The new updates include more RAW support for a number of cameras, new features, and improvements for Photo Studio Ultimate and Professional 2019. ACDSee Ultimate and Professional 2019 Camera Updates: Here is a list of new cameras ACDSee Ultimate 2019 now supports: Fujifilm Compressed RAW (X-T2, X-T20, X100F, X-E3, X-H1, X-Pro2, GFX 50S) Fujifilm GFX 50R Fujifilm X-A10 Fujifilm X-A5 Fujifilm X-T3 Leica C-LUX Leica D-LUX 7 Leica V-LUX 4 Nikon D3500 Nikon P1000 Nikon Z6 Panasonic LUMIX DC-G9 Panasonic LUMIX DC-GF10 (DC-GF90) Panasonic LUMIX DC-GH5S Panasonic LUMIX DC-GX9 (DC-GX7MK3) Panasonic LUMIX DC-LX100 II Pentax K-1 Mark II Sony DSC-HX99 Sony RX100 VA (DSC-RX100M5A) ACD Systems is committed to releasing regular updates to support RAW files from new camera models, as they become available. To see all cameras that are supported in RAW, please visit supported RAW formats. Photo Studio Ultimate and Professional 2019 improvements include, but are not limited to: Introduced a Facial Recognition slider to control accuracy Fixed a high DPI issue in Set Categories dialog Fixed Luminosity blending mode in Edit mode Improved Dehaze result Fixed a group selection issue in Develop mode Fixed a rare Commander crash For a full list of all improvements, RAW support, and more information please visit Ultimate 2019 Release Notes or Professional 2019 Release Notes. If you have any more questions, please leave a comment and we will do our best to answer them! Or contact our support team!

https://medium.com/acdsee/acdsee-photo-studio-ultimate-and-professional-2019-updates-3ec4916a2c4b

['Maria Taylor']

2019-04-12 15:21:01.021000+00:00

['Cameras', 'Photo Editing', 'Technology', 'Photography', 'Updates']

Phases of Naming

Phases of Naming Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash As a young programmer coming out of College with “no experience but abundance of enthusiasm” I was always focused on getting things done. The idea of making sure that my code was clean and readable for anyone else other than me never crossed my mind. Clean code, a book by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob), was something that got started me on the journey to look back at my practices and try to better them one way or another. But one principle in particular that I’m still struggling to get better at is the Convention of Naming. This article is not intended to provide instructions/solutions as to how one should go about Naming Conventions in code, but rather my own struggles with it. I’m not even sure whether everyone goes through this struggle when it comes to programming or was it just me. Though I would like to believe that everyone out there at some point in the career faced the same dilemma which is What are the proper etiquettes for naming variables/functions? Now if you go about Uncle Bob’s book, you’ll find instructions like “Focus on whether the code reads like paragraphs and sentences, or at least tables and data structure.” (I would suggest everyone to go read the book at least once) What follows below is a progression of approach towards naming conventions in my career as a programmer.

https://medium.com/@saribmahmood/phases-of-naming-c57dbf017126

['Sarib Mahmood']

2020-12-11 21:16:12.795000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Clean Code', 'Software Engineering', 'Technology', 'Developer']

What Verizon’s Move to Shut Down FIOS 1 Means for Local News

Credit: @kitsada via Twenty20 A few weeks ago, Verizon announced that it would shutter FIOS 1, its local news station in New Jersey and New York. The creation of FIOS 1 was aimed at capturing new subscribers by providing an alternative to Cablevision’s News 12. Over its ten years in existence, FIOS 1 provided vital local news coverage in communities across New Jersey and New York that would otherwise be neglected. Verizon has since announced that it will add News 12 into its packages. However, adding News 12 will not fill the void caused by FIOS 1 leaving the marketplace. Consumers will now have less choice when it comes to local news and 150 reporters, at least for the time being, will no longer be telling the important local news stories that need to be told. More broadly, the move could not have come at a more unwelcome time. Many print and digital outlets continue to consolidate, downsize or shut down in communities across the country because of financial pressures, contributing to the expansion of “news deserts.” If this trend continues, and it shows little signs of slowing, the prognosis for the health of our civic life will continue to dim. If the reaction to the impending closure of FIOS 1 tells us anything, it’s that policymakers are beginning to take notice. Several Members of Congress from New York and New Jersey sent a letter to Verizon asking them to reconsider their stance. They wrote: “Ending this contract would shut down FIOS 1, a major contributor to original programming, and threaten the robust free press that drives our democracy in New York and New Jersey…As we have seen from the cuts and consolidation in print media, local journalism is irreplaceable, and these cuts would do great harm.” In this sentiment, they are entirely correct. Local journalism is irreplaceable and so are the people who are on the ground doing the reporting. So what does Verizon’s decision to close FIOS 1 mean in the broader context of our local news ecosystem? Attention from policymakers is a great start. By recognizing that we are truly facing a local journalism crisis, we are taking the first steps towards finding a solution that includes discovering ways to innovate in the public sector to preserve and expand local news coverage. We in local news should embrace this and actively work to find areas where government can support a robust local news ecosystem. The second part is a lack of innovation. We need to continue to find ways to bring engaging, grassroots reporting to communities across the United States in a sustainable way. The third broad takeaway is that we need continued, genuine buy-in from tech platforms in supporting local news. The decline of print and, yes, even digital outlets, has at least in part been a symptom of a shift of attention to big tech platforms. A concerted effort on the part of big tech to develop fruitful partnerships that will be mutually beneficial and not lopsided will be key. As I’ve written before, local news isn’t nice to have — it’s essential. It’s essential because of the impact it has on the functioning of our democracy, from the federal level on down to our school boards. The data is clear. More people get engaged with the political process when there is robust local news coverage — including higher voter turnout. It is unequivocally bad news that Verizon is shuttering FIOS 1, but I do hope that it will serve as a wake up call that we need to do more to protect, preserve and expand local news coverage.

https://mikeshapirotapinto.medium.com/what-verizons-move-to-shut-down-fios-1-means-for-local-news-dd143f038056

['Michael Shapiro']

2019-09-17 16:25:54.838000+00:00

['Journalism', 'News', 'Technology', 'Media', 'Local News']

Apple’s Big iPhone 12 Mistake

Apple’s Big iPhone 12 Mistake Was this an intentional, or unintentional oversight? Image: Apple Newsroom. Last night, Apple announced their brand new range of iPhones in their third all-digital keynote of the year. We saw the announcement of Apple Silicon and all of the new operating system updates in June, followed by the new Apple Watch and iPad models last month; while yesterday’s keynote introduced the new iPhone 12 models and the new HomePod Mini. However, there was one big mistake with the iPhone models that Apple may have overlooked. Yesterday’s announcement revealed exactly what the online leaks had predicted — four new iPhone models that were all of different sizes. These models are now officially called ‘iPhone 12’, ‘iPhone 12 Mini’, ‘iPhone 12 Pro’ and ‘iPhone 12 Pro Max’. All of the 2020 iPhones are inspired by the shape of the iPhone 5, being a thick, boxy design that matches with the latest iPad Pro model. One of the talking points during the build up to the Keynote was the rumour of Apple removing the charging adapter and the wired ‘EarPod’ earphones that came in the box. Apple confirmed this rumour when showing that the iPhone box does indeed miss out on these accessories, which results in lower carbon emissions, as well as increasing the number of iPhones that can fit into a storage unit or a truck. Apple’s mission to become environmentally friendly has done nothing but impress me over the recent years, especially when I learned that some of Apple’s products are made from 100% recycled materials. Apple’s trade-in scheme means that components from your old phone can become the components in your brand new phone — a big step in the right direction. Apple claims that the changes that they have made with the recycled materials, smaller boxes and the removal of accessories will reduce 2 million tonnes of carbon emissions every year. The American tech-giant states that this is equivalent to removing 450,000 cars from the road a year. These changes will apply to all iPhones that are sold from this day forward — including the older versions that are still being sold in store, the iPhone 11, the iPhone XR and the iPhone SE. There is still one accessory, though, that will remain in the box with the iPhone, and this is the charging cable. This is where the issue starts. All new iPhones will now have a Lightning to USB-C cable included in the box — which is great, as only the iPhone 11 Pro included this cable last year, resulting in the ability for all phones to be fast-charged. However, Apple are removing the power adapter from the boxes, meaning only users that owned an iPhone 11 Pro last year will be able to charge their phones with their adapters. Apple’s reasoning behind removing these adapters is because the majority of people already own at least one in their house (whether it’s an Apple-branded, or a third-party adapter doesn’t matter); but they fail to realise that the vast majority of them are USB-A compatible, not USB-C. All iPhones until the 11 Pro model featured a Lightning to USB-A cable in the box, with a USB-A adapter to match it. Assuming someone that purchased an iPhone 11 last year decided to update to the iPhone 12 this year; they wouldn’t be able to charge their phone in the optimal way as their power adapter will not support the new power cables, meaning they have to buy the new power adapter separately. Sure, you can charge your phone with your existing USB-A cable and USB-A adapter that you had in your previous phone; but for Apple to introduce a faster cable that you can’t use out of the box unless you add another product to your cart doesn’t seem right to me… Image: Apple Newsroom. Was this an intentional, or an unintentional decision from Apple? Removing the power adapter and earphones from the iPhone box, theoretically, should lower the price of the new model of phone. However, this year’s iPhones are a lot more expensive than last year’s iPhone 11. The iPhone 11 would set you back £729 in the UK for the lowest model last year, and this would give you a device that has a 6.1-inch screen. This year’s iPhone 12 Mini will cost £699 for a 5.4-inch display, while the 6.1-inch iPhone 12 will cost £799. While this is not a good look in terms of value, the new iPhone 12’s OLED screens explain the rise in price, though it means that new iPhone users will be paying even more on top to buy that brand new USB-C charging adapter. I find that this completely contradicts Apple’s goal of reducing carbon emissions, as the majority of users will be forced into purchasing a new charging adapter, which puts Apple right back where they started. This system is essentially the same system that Apple had in place before, but the user now has to pay more money for a product that was once included in the box, and not saving the environment at all. To me, this was an oversight, more than it was a conscious decision. I can tell you with certainty that I do not personally own a USB-C power adapter (other than the one for my MacBook, which I don’t count as it is massive); meaning I would be one of many users that would need to purchase a power adapter if I were to upgrade to an iPhone 12.

https://joemccormick01.medium.com/apples-big-iphone-12-mistake-89d37acbb0d2

['Joe Mccormick']

2020-12-03 14:09:47.589000+00:00

['Technology', 'Marketing', 'Apple', 'Business', 'Environment']

Team work makes the dream work!

Tech Trends: Transforming Sports to a Science The best part about living in India? The diversity. There’s so much to look up to, in so many different languages, cultures, ethnicities, cuisines…I could go on, but you get the picture. What’s better than this diversity? Something that binds us all together. And what better example to take than Cricket. I can bet everyone was hooked on to their televisions two nights ago, because there’s nothing nearly as exciting as an India vs Pakistan match! Gone are the days where hundreds of people crowded together, waiting to catch a glimpse of the match. Hotstar and other streaming services have acted as saviours, and people can now watch sports on the go. Technology intervention has acted as a boon for the sports industry, and streaming services is just one piece of the pie. A step ahead of Moneyball: Rising Global Investments Spends in the global sports tech domain have only been rising in the last couple of years, and it’s not just me saying this. Since 2014, the industry has grown at a CAGR of more than 20%. Traditional sports is slowly merging with new age investment styles, and this intersection has led to many more athletes themselves becoming part of the investor community. In fact, Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance also says that the wage costs of Premier League clubs have gone up by 40% in the last five years. Predictions also point to sports tech crossing the $40 billion mark by 2024, especially in areas like Asia Pacific and Europe. The global sports tech fund ADVantage has already made its presence in India, and with the numbers doing the talking, one can only imagine the vast array of opportunities that lies ahead for us. Tech trends that matter From a time where our grandfathers would spend hours listening to the radio commentary, our generation has the privilege to even listen to what Virat Kohli says to the team while on the field! Truly amazing, if you ask me. The size of these disruptions may be tiny, but the scale at which they’ve dynamised the industry is HUGE. The BCCI already has wearable devices in place that record physical player metrics including the distance they travel, biometric rates, hydration levels and dynamic stress load. Machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence solutions have changed the competition field altogether. If you have a robust tech integration that allows you to judge player performance in real time, these capabilities can be enhanced incrementally. Predictive analytics is, in my opinion, the biggest disruptor in this space. It has enabled coaches to customize player coaching programs, focus on their individual strengths and weaknesses and train teams better. Could we have anticipated player fatigue a few years back? Probably not. Can we do it now? Absolutely, and so much more! Tracking analytics now gives coaches a real time view into the player’s health, pre-empting injuries and rehabilitation. What does this mean? There’s ample room to grow and innovate, and all tech experts will agree that we’ve not hit the nail right on the head yet. The pace of technological advancement may even be too overwhelming for some, but for the efforts to translate to fruitful results, we need to keep going. Nothing worth having comes without challenges, of course, and sports tech is no exception. Maintaining consistency in the speed of evolution, analysing changing consumer behaviour and illegal gambling activities are yet to be dealt with. On the flip side, connected athletes, improved fan engagement and derivative sports are not just trends anymore. They’re not even the future, they’re the present, and a pretty exciting one at that! E-sports is already a growing business that has crossed the $1 billion mark, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next big thing in sports turns out to be digital playing fields where players, viewers and coaches can interact through artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Can you imagine that? I most definitely can.

https://medium.com/joshsoftware/team-work-makes-the-dream-work-5f761e2833b7

['Gautam Rege']

2019-06-18 12:52:09.350000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Technology', 'Tech', 'Sports', 'Data Science']

We’re Finally Learning the Lesson of Y2K — and It’s Too Late

In the years since that New Year’s Eve, Y2K has become an enduring punchline. The whole incident is now remembered mostly as a non-issue whose overblown media hype was matched only by the massive amounts of money governments around the world deployed to solve it. That image of Y2K as a non-event persists in the cultural memory, used still to dismiss supposedly looming catastrophes in politics or technology. But Y2K wasn’t just an over-exaggerated media-fueled mass panic. Behind the scenes, as people hoarded food and water, or joined doomsday cults, programmers worked tirelessly to prevent anything from going wrong. In the months leading up to 2000, there were genuine concerns within the IT world about the Y2K bug, and a subsequent concerted effort to avoid widespread problems when ‘99 switched over to ‘00. To believe that Y2K amounted to nothing by chance alone — to believe that it was media hype and nothing more — is to “engage in a destructive, disparaging revisionism that mindlessly casts aside the foresight and dedication of an IT community that worked tirelessly for years to fix the problem,” Don Tennant, editor in chief of ComputerWorld, wrote in 2007. Y2K wasn’t just an over-exaggerated media-fueled mass panic. But the fact that so many people feel this way amounts to a kind of weird triumph: the evidence for all the work is the absence of disaster. In his 2009 retrospective on Y2K, Farhad Manjoo concluded that the success of Y2K preparations “has bred apathy” — that the lack of Y2K armageddon has made it more difficult for people to heed warnings “about global warming or other threats…the fact that we fixed it may make it harder to fix anything else in the future.” There might be yet another way to look at it. The two, combined, narratives of what transpired on Y2K — that it was strictly a non-event, or, that it was a non-event because of programmers were skilled enough to predict and avert it — actually bred something else: confidence. Whether you believe Y2K was much ado about nothing from the start, or whether you understand that it was only so because of human intervention, the lasting legacy might not be one of apathy, but trust — both in the machines we created, and in our ability to understand and control them. Either the networks and systems we had created to that point were inherently designed to be strong and secure (or even indestructible), or we were readily able to predict and avoid areas of weakness. Armed with this confidence, in the years since Y2K, we have created more and more complex networks and systems to enhance, guide, or even take over many facets of our daily lives. Whereas in 1999, many aspects of our day-to-day living remained offline, today little is left untouched by computer systems, networks, and code: Talking to friends and family, reading a book, listening to music, buying clothes or food, driving a car, flying from place to place — all of these activities depend on the network. Increasingly, the network extends to devices that, in 1999, were not considered to have much technological potential: household appliances like refrigerators or thermostats. Now, we’re discovering what a false sense of security we’ve created. Along with it should come the realization of just how little we understand about the programs that permeate our lives and the networks that link them. Unlike 20 years ago, we appear less and less capable of predicting what will go wrong, or of stopping it before it does.

https://medium.com/s/story/were-finally-learning-the-lesson-of-y2k-and-it-s-too-late-45ca0615fce1

['Colin Horgan']

2018-12-05 23:16:54.156000+00:00

['Algorithms', 'Culture', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning']

Burny Finance WhitePaper

Introduction As the crypto market has been on a massive bull run since the beginning of the year, so has there been a rise in new DEFI projects. Blockchain is taking over the world rampantly as we are in an evolutionary phase — the new internet is here, and it’s here to stay. Source: Payments Journal With an influx of coins and tokens hitting various blockchains, there have been a diverse amount of projects that are positively impacting the space. There are also other projects that have been developed that delegitimize the progress of cryptocurrencies, limiting potential for mass adoption. Getting in on the ground floor of any project is difficult and it’s much more difficult to prevent these early adopters from dumping early investments, which often yield a solid ROI in the beginning. With these thoughts in mind, we developed a cryptocurrency that aims to discourage dumping and encourage hodling for the long-term. Burny Finance is a philanthropic, deflationary token for the people. As a long-time U.S. Politician, Senator Sanders has often been criticized for his progressive ideals. We decided to incorporate some in our smart contract.The contract includes taxes contributing to transactional burns and a re-distribution to a charity wallet, solely used for philanthropic endeavors. So while you are purchasing a deflationary token, you’re also contributing to a charitable cause. We launched on the Ethereum Network, with Uniswap as our DEX of choice. While gas fees can be troublesome, there has been an increased fear of rug pulls on the Binance Smart Chain network, thus why we elected to launch on Ethereum. Source: Wikipedia Tokenomics Burny Finance launched on April 7, 2021 with 1 trillion BURNY tokens minted at genesis. 5% of supply was issued to support marketing endeavors of supply was issued to support marketing endeavors 32% to initial Liquidity Providers, the rest was added to a liquidity pool on Uniswap, locked on Unicrypt. to initial Liquidity Providers, the rest was added to a liquidity pool on Uniswap, locked on Unicrypt. 5% of each transaction is redirected to the charity wallet, and 15% of each transaction is burned. of each transaction is redirected to the charity wallet, and 15% of each transaction is burned. Burns will occur until 80% of the initial supply is burned (200 Billion Tokens remaining). Note: Due to the burn that occur on your transaction, this offsets the charitable distribution with a rise in price floor. As supply decreases, price increases. Example of a 1,000,000 buy OR sell (you should HODL though….) Transaction Amount: 1,000,000 Burned Tokens: Transaction Amount * 0.15 = 150,000 Charity Donation: Transaction Amount * 0.05 = 50,000 Tokens Received or Returned to Supply: 800,000 Roadmap — Going Forward (As of 4/10/2021) As of April 10th, 2021, we conducted our first charity event. We will post those details soon. In the future we will announce more details on future endeavors. Redesign Website and grow Social Media platforms Community Growth/Marketing/Contests Planning Future Charity Events NFTs Launch Reddit Board Launch Youtube Channel (Completed) Launch Twitter (Completed) Launch Instagram (Completed) CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, and CoinPaprika listing applications (Completed) Concluding Statements Thank you for taking the time to read this whitepaper. We welcome you to our wonderful community. If you’d like to contribute to our mission, join us on telegram and contact an admin. Talk soon! Burny Finance Join our Telegram for Discussion — https://t.me/burnyfinancetoken Follow us: Twitter — BurnyFinance Instagram — BurnyFinance Subscribe to our YouTube Page Audit — https://solidity.finance/audits/Burny/ Swap Link — app.uniswap.org/#/swap?outputCurrency=0xFEF62A8586480f794b7E6a869a9937F97f88205A

https://medium.com/@burnyfinanceofficial/burny-finance-whitepaper-c660c770ce5e

['Burny Finance']

2021-04-10 18:28:06.597000+00:00

['Bernie Sanders', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Art', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Philanthropy']

Why the iPad Mini is the tablet to buy

Why the iPad Mini is the tablet to buy All things considered, this is the killer Apple device Photo by Kenny Luo on Unsplash The best iPad to buy doesn’t have the word ‘pro’ in its title (and that’s ok) Why is it a winner? Plain and simple, the iPad mini the most handheld friendly of them all. In the same way that A5 sized notebooks and paperback novels just ‘fit’ into your flow when using them, so does the iPad mini. There will be some who need a bigger screen for specific tasks, but these are outlier tasks in my mind. As a multifunction device, the iPad mini is the sweet spot. Phones are just too small. iPads 9.7 inches and above are small laptop-sized. Only the iPad mini works as a truly handheld tablet device. Cost The mini is of the cheapest ways to access the Apple tablet ecosystem. It may not be the cheapest overall (the basic iPad 7th Gen is £349 in the UK at time of writing for 32GB ‘v’ Mini 5th Gen at £399 for 64GB) but I wouldn’t suggest anyone buying anything less than at least 64GB nowadays anyway. Simplicity It's a delight to hold and use. Simple layout with touch ID (which I much prefer to Face ID anyway) with lightning port and headphone port (charge and listen to music at the same time? Radical idea!) No need to splash on expensive Bluetooth headphones. Performance These minis have the same processors (A12) as the iPad Air, 2 generations better than the entry-level iPad with an A10 chip. This is a fast little machine. It also has a smaller battery which means it charges to 100% quickly and as the screen is smaller, the battery lasts as long as other larger devices. Win-Win. Portability Not quite jeans pocket-size but fits in my jacket pockets. Like a paperback novel, it's easy to grab and go and there's always space for it in your bag. Usability (in a crowd or small airline seat) This is where it gets really useful. Standing up in the Tube, it’s easy to hold and doesn’t give you wrist strain after 10 minutes holding it up. On a plane (likely not at the moment but soon…), there's space to stand it up without taking over the whole real estate of your minuscule seatback tray. Lightweight Not just in holding it in your hand to read from, as another electronic item in your bag, it's really light (About 300g ‘v’ almost 500g for the basic iPad model) Kindle replacement It can do double duty of a kindle for reading. I know reading on an e-ink screen is better for me (especially at night just before going to bed) but this is a good compromise. And the Kindle app on iOS has the fantastic Audible Narration feature where you can listen to the audiobook as well as following the text in the book at the same time. Gimmicky, but I love it. Uses the pencil This is new for the 5th gen mini but you can now use the apple pencil 1st gen. I had one of these already for my iPad Pro 12.9 2nd Gen and its great to simply pair it with the mini for scribbles and even lazy point and swipe navigation when my index finger is tired!!! Value for money Overall this is hard to beat. Its performance is great for entry-level price, and coupled with that you get the portability benefits of the smaller form factor. I can do anything on the iPad mini that I would normally do on a larger iPad screen. What are the negatives? Screen size When you absolutely want/need a larger screen then you need a larger device. The laws of physics will get in the way here. But I challenge you to really ask if you need a larger screen (remember you’ll lose some of those portability benefits). Lack of keyboard options This one is more pertinent I think. The mid-sized (10–11 inch) and large (12.9 inches) iPads all have great keyboard options that connect to the device physically, usually combining with a case. No such luck with iPad minis as they are smaller than an even a compact standard-sized keyboard. Solution: just buy a separate Bluetooth keyboard which is really the preferred option for those who want a high-quality typing experience anyway. In fact, I’m typing this right now on a Logitech K380. And these are massively cheaper than the proprietary keyboard/cover options. Conclusion The iPad mini is a hard package to beat. Extreme portability whilst remaining useable as a tablet-sized screen; great performance and a very reasonable cost outlay. You don’t need to spend Pro prices to have a great iPad on the go.

https://medium.com/macoclock/why-the-ipad-mini-is-the-tablet-to-buy-3f6e48282e80

['Robert Craig']

2020-05-26 05:30:12.241000+00:00

['Travel', 'Apple', 'Productivity', 'Simplicity', 'Technology']

What a Cryptocurrency Exchange? And how to get one.

A cryptocurrency exchange enables users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. The implementation of rigorous trading protocols backed by blockchain technology, making trading possible between the buyer and the seller, therefore, deleting the need for any intermediatory financial institution or central authority. The performance of smart contracts and Consensus algorithms built on blockchain help users take part in trading more securely and directly. Trades can occur in cryptocurrencies or fiat money, using wallets to store the assets. Cryptocurrency exchanges are developed while keeping in mind various needs and essentialities of the users, that are user security and their privacy and real-time updates — providing user control over their information which is to be shared in the network and what not to share — being free for any central or government authorities providing users the freedom of transaction and the latest value of their trades every moment with the open ledger. While developing cryptocurrency exchange, one must also keep in mind those users who would like to trade in cryptocurrency using the currency, thus creating a system for users who wish to buy or sell cryptocurrency in exchange for real-world money. For those users, the mechanism is simple as described- Create your profile on Cryptocurrency Exchange- Watch out for buyers or sellers willing to sell or buy in currency. If any offer suits you, you place a bid. The one intended to send the money will proceed with the transaction. Once notified of the completed transaction, the bitcoin trade will be made. At Sara Technologies Inc, we provide users with rich-functional Cryptocurrency Exchange Development, which is user-friendly, robust, highly secure, private, and provides real-time updates. Our team of developers will help you from creating a blueprint of your desired exchange model to its coding overcoming all short-comings, implementation of exchange, testing, and 24/7 support after implementation. Our cryptocurrency exchange is best suited for your needs and fulfill the following — Support of USD and other fiat currencies. Decentralized system Multi-layer Authentication. Compatible for mobile, be it iOS or Android. Secured Crypto wallet Easy Integration with other services. Tools for analysis. Customizable interface. Admin Panel and client dashboard. Suppor web exchange Other Services We Offer

https://medium.com/@sidsara1010/cryptocurrency-exchange-development-914036072350

['Sid Singh']

2021-03-03 07:17:32.251000+00:00

['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Development', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Startup']

Your Next Project Must Begin With a Vision Setting Exercise

Your Next Project Must Begin With a Vision Setting Exercise Emotions Rally the Team Towards Success Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash Sports are a snow globe scene describing everyday life in miniature. College football and basketball are an exciting example of assembling and assimilating new players into the team ecosystem. The marque, familiar ball clubs continue to produce exceptional teams season after season. Smaller schools are equally successful, but without the splashy headlines. How do coaches build a momentum of success? Simple — it starts with creating a shared vision of success. Sure every team desires to raise the conference trophy under a rain of confetti. But selling the vision is not flashing a “Champion” PowerPoint slide — it is about helping the individual see themselves as part of the picture. Each player — rookie or veteran — has to make the mental journey — growing from the athlete they are today to the athlete of their aspirations. The coach must help each player recognize working together to achieve the team vision delivers on the promise of realizing individual ambitions. Vision is an aspirational message that touches on emotions leading us to take action How do vision and coaching translate to my job as a project manager? I am a corporate, professional project leader! Welcome to the project kick-off meeting. Colleagues representing various stakeholders and departments are assembled before you are — each with their interests. Individually they wish to optimize value for their departments and their career. Your immediate challenge is channeling the team’s passions, skills, and strengths towards successfully delivering the project’s benefits. The Coach’s Playbook Take a page from the coach’s playbook. Don’t begin the kick-off meeting discussing timelines, tasks, or software. Yes, these topics are vital to executing the project plan. All projects are built upon similar activities. At the task level, there isn’t anything to distinguish your project from any other. Instead, start with a vision — the project delivers something — a solution or product that your organization deems valuable. Talk about how customers will crave the new widget; talk about finance removing the drudgery of budgeting; talk about the picture of success. And don’t sell the vision. State the facts. The stakeholders will see that they will achieve their ambitions, department, and company goals by successfully delivering the project. You have connected with the team on an emotional level. It is human nature to gravitate towards success. Now you can roll up your sleeves and talk details. Emotions build deep connections between people One more point. Your obligation as a project leader is to deliver a successful project. Your responsibility as an employee (colleague or leader) is to help co-workers succeed and reach their potential. Energize the project team, including yourself. See and achieve a shared vision.

https://medium.com/illumination/your-next-project-must-begin-with-a-vision-setting-exercise-e46e22d0775

['Marc Hadd']

2020-12-27 04:55:19.225000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Technology', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Project Management', 'Leadership']

The First Electric Car Was Invented Almost 200 Years Ago

The First Electric Car Was Invented Almost 200 Years Ago The unknown inventor Ányos Jedlik A few electric taxis in New York, 1906 (Source: Rare Historical Photos) We all see this new revolution in the automobile industry as the best innovation brought in this technological revolution of the 21st century without thinking that this isn’t actually an innovation, but something that wasn’t required many years ago when it was first developed. With the appearance of electrical motors, most machinery was automated by such motors, and also the first automobiles. Now, I know that most of you are thinking that the first official launch of an automobile was in 1886 by Carl Benz, but this does not mean that there haven’t been many unofficial launches or prototypes. The decline of our ecosystem has brought us up to this point of needing to look after our Earth, therefore using electric cars is seen as the greenest way to travel. Many people think that this predicament in which we find ourselves as humans is what brought us to the innovation of Tesla cars or other electric car brands. However, this “innovation” was brought to us many years ago, but due to its inefficiency at the time for reasons such as primitive technology and gas being a more powerful solution, it was never implemented into the automobile market. The first electric car Anyos Istvan Jedlik (Source: Wikimedia Commons) The first electric automobile and possibly the first automobile was invented by Anyos Istvan Jedlik, a Hungarian inventor and engineer who was very much interested in the power of electricity and it’s potential to make life easier. He was one of the first people to invent a very primitive, yet functioning electric motor in 1827, however, he never had a specific use for it. He just wanted to build a motor that could produce power, however, he soon thought of using the power output from the motor to power a carriage. Therefore in 1828, he invented a very primitive version of the electric car that only had a stick for steering. The invention was great but never brought much attention to the public as the motor wasn’t producing a significant amount of power for the automobile to catch a record-breaking speed (for that period of time). Most horses were still able to outrun the vehicle and the automobile itself had many flaws. The idea is that the main concept was achieved almost 200 years ago. The concept was still picked up by many inventors and engineers throughout history. In 1884, Thomas Parker had the same concept, but a slightly different idea. He saw the need for public transport as society was evolving and decided to use a more refined electric motor that could power a big box filled up with seats for passengers. These became the pillars for metro transportation, later on being applied at the start of the 20th century in Great Britain. Evolution of antique electric cars Not long after that, a private taxi company was started in 1897 that used only electric cabs in order to give their clients a better ride with less noise as well as without the smell of burned gas. The company was soon wiped by the competition as gas was much cheaper than electricity at the time. Another great example would be the Porsche P1 that also functioned only on electricity, the car was invented by Ferdinand Porsche and Ludwig Lohner in 1898. This was an electric vehicle that weighed over 500 kg (1,100 pounds)and was able to travel on a full battery 80 km (50 miles) at a top speed of 34 km/h (21 mph). Quite fast for the time. Charging station for Ford electric cars in 1913 (Source: Rare Historical Photos) What is even more interesting is that Henry Ford actually worked with Thomas Edison to produce a low-cost electric car like the one presented by Porche. During 1913 and 1914 they produced 1,000 electric cars that were similar to the Ford Model T produced in 1908, but with an electric engine. These cars were able to go around 60 km (37 miles) on a full battery, however cold weather made the batteries lose power much quicker, therefore making them obsolete to a gas or steam car.

https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/the-first-electric-car-was-invented-almost-200-years-ago-7877685bd7ee

['Andrei Tapalaga']

2020-12-19 21:03:36.852000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Technology', 'Brands', 'Cars', 'History']

How to Promote your Business on Bixex

The aim of all business owners, whether small or big business, is to continually grow and expand their business. Advancement in technology has made this so easy that as your online visibility grows, your business also grows. If you are a business owner and you have created a Bixex account, below are the steps to promote your business on Bixex. Sign in to your Bixex account. Navigate to your picture on the right side of the home page. Click on it On the options that pop up below the picture, click on your business. Next click share . You can share your business on the Bixex wall, using the same method you use in sharing a post or article. Ensure to click on the public option before posting. . You can share your business on the Bixex wall, using the same method you use in sharing a post or article. Ensure to click on the option before posting. If you want to share your business both on the Bixex wall and on your social media page, click on any of the social media platforms you want to share it on and click share. Your business would be available both on Bixex wall and on your social media platform. Anyone seeing this can easily reach out to you or refer your business to others. This way, people become aware of your business and reach out to you whenever they need your services or products.

https://medium.com/@victorialaz/how-to-promote-your-business-on-bixex-f3bfb4635805

['Victoria Lazarus']

2020-12-21 15:24:53.019000+00:00

['Technology', 'Bixex', 'Grow', 'Connection', 'Business']

How to Insert Images in Jupyter Notebook

Sometimes it is just easier to insert a picture than to explain with text or code comments. This brief article shows you how to insert images into Jupyter Notebooks! Gonzalez (2016) Markdown First, set your cell to markdown! Local Images Assuming your file structure looks like this: / +-- your_jupyter_notebook_file.ipynb +-- img +-- image_file_name_here.png Insert your image like this:  Web Image For web images, you can simply insert the url:

https://medium.com/@emekdahl/how-to-insert-images-in-jupyter-notebook-5abcb3064f0a

['Em Ekdahl']

2020-11-11 17:19:33.592000+00:00

['Python', 'Data Science', 'Technology', 'Programming', 'Jupyter Notebook']

Using TypeScript — Object Types and Intersections

Photo by Jenni Miska on Unsplash TypeScript is a natural extension of JavaScript that’s used in many projects in place of JavaScript. However, not everyone knows how it actually works. In this article, we’ll look at how to work with objects in TypeScript by creating intersection types and checking object structures. Checking Properties This means that we can’t use the typeof operator to check the type of objects. Instead, we must find better alternatives. One way is to check if a property is in the object. For instance, we can use the in operator: arr.forEach(a => { if ("breed" in a) { console.log("animal"); } else { console.log("person"); } }); The in operator checks if the 'breed' property is in an object. It checks both its own and inherited properties. And it returns true if a property is found in any of those places and false otherwise. However, this doesn’t help us if a property is in both types. Type Predicate Function We can also check if a property is undefined to check if an object is of a certain type. For instance, we can write: arr.forEach(a => { if (typeof a.breed !== "undefined") { console.log("animal"); } else { console.log("person"); } }); This is similar to in except that we used typeof to check for a property instead of using the in operator. Type Intersections We can use type intersections to define 2 object types that are combined together. A variable assigned to an object type should have all the properties from both types rather than some of them like union types. For instance, we can create an intersection type and assign it to a value by writing: type Thing = { name: string }; type Animal = { breed: string }; const animal: Thing & Animal = { name: "james", breed: "dog" }; We defined a Thing type and an Animal and combined them into an intersection type by using the & operator. This means that animal must have properties from both Thing and Animal included. If we skip one or more of them, then the TypeScript compiler will give us an error. For instance, if we have: const animal: Thing & Animal = { name: "jame" }; Then we’ll get ‘Type ‘{ name: string; }’ is not assignable to type ‘Thing & Animal’. Property ‘breed’ is missing in type ‘{ name: string; }’ We can use intersection types for introducing new properties to existing objects. For instance, if we have: type Thing = { name: string }; type Animal = { breed: string }; const thing: Thing = { name: "james" }; const animal: Animal = { breed: "cat" }; const cat: Thing & Animal = { ...thing, ...animal }; Then TypeScript compiler won’t throw an error because it recognizes that name and breed are part of the Thing & Animal type. As long as the property names and the corresponding data type match, the TypeScript compiler can figure out that it matches the structure of an intersection type. Merging Properties with the Same Type We can also merge types with overlapping properties. For instance, if we have: type Thing = { name: string }; type Animal = { name: string }; Then anything assigned to the Thing & Animal type variable would have the string property called name . Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash Merging Properties with Different Types If there are properties with different types, then both properties will be merged together as an intersection. For instance, if we have: type Thing = { age: string }; type Animal = { age: number }; const thing: Thing = { age: "1" }; const animal: Animal = { age: 1 }; const cat: Thing & Animal = { ...thing, ...animal }; Then we would get an error from the compiler since age has type string & number which no value matches. Therefore, we shouldn’t have properties with different types in the object types that we intersect. Conclusion We can create intersection types to merge object types into one type. Then when a variable or parameter has the intersection type, it must include all the properties of both types, and the data type of the property must be an intersection of data types from both types.

https://medium.com/dev-genius/using-typescript-object-types-and-intersections-23cc4dbe3b92

['John Au-Yeung']

2020-06-14 19:47:22.684000+00:00

['Technology', 'Software Development', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Web Development']

In a carefully managed release of data, QuantumScape announced that its lithium-metal battery…

In a carefully managed release of data, QuantumScape announced that its lithium-metal battery would take a car 240,000 miles and recharge in 15 minutes. The data show the cells working comparatively well in cold temperatures. I wrote in The Mobilist yesterday about how the San Jose-based battery company is playing down what it must do next: Scale up from a single-layer cell to 100 layers, make its separator without defects, and do so fast and continuously. But when discussing his own work, Elon Musk says scaling up is 99% of the effort. The prototype is just 1%. QuantumScape also stopped short of assuring rightful battery skeptics: It has offered up paid expert assessments, rather than an independent, third-party evaluation, like from a Department of Energy (DOE) lab. At these major turns, we see a furtive company rather than one intent on giving outsiders confidence.

https://marker.medium.com/in-a-carefully-managed-release-of-data-quantumscape-announced-that-its-lithium-metal-battery-a84ebd204a77

['Steve Levine']

2020-12-09 18:52:46.129000+00:00

['Electric Vehicles', 'Quantumscape', 'Tesla', 'Lithium Battery', 'Technology']

The Musk Mission: Help or Get Out of the Way

Warning: Adult language ahead Tesla unveiled the new Cybertruck this week, and it’s… well its expressive. It’s setting the stage for a new kind of canvas that 250,000 people already want to make their own work of art. We’re seeing the Cubism revolution of the truck world, and Musk is our new engineering Picasso. While I think it’s expressive, many are saying it’s hideous. It’s ridiculous, it will never sell, it looks like something from an outlandish dystopian sci-fi novel and is no doubt the creation of a lunatic at the helm of a failing company. They say Musk is a struggle pornstar, a foolish dreamer, a cult leader, and an ignorant narcissist. He’s abusive to his employees and cares only about himself. Blah, blah, blah. I want to know where this criticism come from, because I don’t hear enough about what Musk has done. Elon Musk has taken on not only the auto industry, but also the space industry and the oil companies, possibly the three most ingrained and subsidized industries in the world. What a lot of people may not know is that he was one of the founders of PayPal, and had big aspirations of overhauling the banking industry. Unfortunately, it took Satoshi Nakamoto to do this after PayPal went public and lost it’s virility to Wall Street. People say Musk is egoic. I don’t know him, I don’t know if he is. But anyone can see that he does what he does because he really believes humanity will end if these things don’t happen. He, and many others, really believe that if we don’t get to Mars and we don’t stop pumping our skies full of CO2 and smog, we humans will die. That will be the end. This is kind of important shit, here. If we don’t get it done, we are fucked. His dedication should be obvious, given his results. Tesla doesn’t seem to be going broke yet, despite the analysts predictions, and SpaceX is the leader in the new space race by a long shot. What many fail to see is this is not about stock valuations. Tesla has released its patents for any car company with half its wits about it to use and improve upon. It’s really damn hard to compete with a hundred-year-old company that has sold the same thing year after year to millions upon millions of the same people, all with the aid of subsidies, lobbying, and bailouts. Tesla is not the first electric company to come along. Just look in the middle of the California desert and see what happened to that idea two decades ago. It’s uncertain if it was the auto industry who killed the electric car, but it was probably due in no small part to the oil companies. If you think Jeff Bezos has a shit load of money, add up all the money hoarded by the oil tycoons across the world and tell me money doesn’t talk. Tesla is not just selling cars, They’re selling an ethos. You don’t believe in Ford, you’re loyal to it. If you believe in a future of progress, you buy a Tesla. That’s why they are maybe the most vandalized car out there and rednecks park their diesels in three electric charging station spots so they can post photos of it to Facebook for their friends to circle jerk over. And that’s just the auto industry. SpaceX is taking on the telecommunications industry as we write this. It already has two payloads of satellites orbiting the Earth and is working for the Air Force. By 2023, the plan is to have 33,000 satellites in the air, all this while governments throttle internet and create information silos. Good luck to Iran when the people rebel and the government shuts off the information highways yet the web is 700 miles above their theocratic heads. These are the forces Musk is up against, and I haven’t even touched on the “you rub my back, I’ll rub yours” of the government contractors that supplied NASA for decades and milked our tax dollars like we’re all Christmas cows. So no, you don’t go to work at Tesla or SpaceX for the work-life balance. You don’t tackle the military-industrial-congressional complex by making your company better to work for than the mega monopoly known as Google. Just ask all the people on Musk’s teams that are getting real shit done and building the future. The Dolphins, pre thumb-evolution If I had to take on Ford, I’d be mean too. If I had to compete against the monolith Lockheed Martin, I’d be a bit of a asshole as well. It doesn’t matter if Musk is egoic. It doesn’t matter if it sucks to work for him. What matters is that we don’t let the cancerous machine of the status quo rail humanity into the ground and bury us forever where we will rot and decompose into a sticky black tar that future opposable-thumbed dolphins can pump from the ground, and with the sludged remains of our civilization used as the rocket fuel, the dolphins will blast off to a melted Titan where they can proliferate into the universe and beyond. That’s the destiny we thought we’d have, and if we don’t stop fucking up, we’ll leave it to the dolphins. Cybertruck looks like it says, “Get out of the way.” And it does. Musk is here to get shit done. Either help, or get out of the way.

https://medium.com/@toreyseward/the-musk-mission-help-or-get-out-of-the-way-35249cc837ed

['T P Seward']

2019-11-29 22:02:30.434000+00:00

['Tesla', 'Elon Musk', 'Future', 'Climate Change', 'Technology']

The C Sharp (C#) Beginner’s Guide

Chapter 3: Hello World: Your First C# Program In this chapter, we’ll make our very first C# program. Our first program needs to be one that simply prints out some variation of “Hello World!”. It’s tradition to make your first program print out a simple message like this, whenever you learn a new language. So that’s where we’ll start. We’ll create a new project and add in a single line to display “Hello World!” Once we’ve got that, we’ll compile and run it, and you’ll have your very first program! Creating a New Project Let’s get started with our first C# program! Open up Visual Studio, which we installed in Chapter 2. When the program first opens, you will see the Start Page come up. To create a new project, you can either select the New Project… button on the Start Page or you can go up to the menu and choose File > New > Project… from the menu bar. Once you have done this, a dialog will appear asking you to specify a project type and a name for the project. This dialog is shown below: Creating a New Project On the left side, you will see a few categories of templates to choose from. Depending on what version of Visual Studio you have installed and what plugins and extensions you have, you may see different categories here, but the one you’ll want to select is the Visual C# category, which will list all C#-related templates that are installed. Once that is selected, in the list in the top-center, find and select the Console Application template. The Console Application template is the simplest and it is exactly where we want to start. For all of the stuff, we will be doing in this book, this is the template to use. As you finish up this book, if you want to start doing things like making programs with a graphical user interface (GUI), game development, smartphone app development, or web-based development, you will be able to put these other templates to good use. At the bottom of the dialog, type in a name for your project. I’ve called mine “HelloWorld.” Your project will be saved in a directory with this name. It doesn’t really matter what you call a project, but you want to name it something intelligent, so you can find it later when you are looking at a list of all of your projects. By default, Visual Studio tries to call your programs “ConsoleApplication1” or “ConsoleApplication2.” If you haven’t chosen a good name, you won’t know what each of these does. By default, projects are saved under your Documents or My Documents directory (Documents/Visual Studio 2019/Projects/). Finally, click the Create button to create your project! After you do this, you may need to wait for a little bit for Visual Studio to get everything set up for you. A Brief Tour of Visual Studio By this point, you should be looking at a screen that looks something like this: A Brief Tour of Visual Studio Depending on which version of Visual Studio you installed, you may see some slight differences, but it should look pretty similar to this. In the center should be some text that starts with using System;. This is your program’s source code! It is what you’ll be working on. We’ll discuss what it means, and how to modify it in a second. We’ll spend most of our time in this window. On the right side is the Solution Explorer. This shows you a big outline of all of the files contained in your project, including the main one that we’ll be working with, called “Program.cs”. The *.cs file extension means it is a text file that contains C# code. If you double click on any item in the Solution Explorer, it will open in the main editor window. The Solution Explorer is quite important, and we’ll use it frequently. As you work on your project, other windows may pop up as they are needed. Each of these can be closed by clicking on the ‘X’ in the upper right corner of the window. If by chance, you are missing a window that you feel you want, you can always open it by finding it on either the View menu or View > Other Windows. For right now, if you have the main editor window open with your Program.cs file in it, and the Solution Explorer, you should be good to go. Building Blocks: Projects, Solutions, and Assemblies As we get started, it is worth defining a few important terms that you’ll be seeing spread throughout this book. In the world of C#, you’ll commonly see the words solution, project, and assembly, and it is worth taking the time up front to explain what they are so that you aren’t lost. These three words describe the code that you’re building in different ways. We’ll start with a project. A project is simply a collection of source code and resource files that will all eventually get built into the same executable program. A project also has additional information telling the compiler how to build it. When compiled, a project becomes an assembly. In nearly all cases, a single project will become a single assembly. An assembly shows up in the form of an EXE file or a DLL file. These two different extensions represent two different types of assemblies and are built from two different types of projects (chosen in the project’s settings). A processing assembly appears as an EXE file. It is a complete program and has a starting point defined, which the computer knows to run when you start up the .exe file. A library assembly appears as a DLL file. A DLL file does not have a specific starting point defined. Instead, it contains code that other programs can access on the fly. Finally, a solution will combine multiple projects together to accomplish a complete task or form a complete program. Solutions will also contain information about how different projects should be connected to each other. While solutions can contain many projects, most simple programs (including nearly everything we do in this book) will only need one. Even many large programs can get away with only a single project. Looking back at what we learned in the last section about the Solution Explorer, you’ll see that the Solution Explorer is showing our entire solution as the very top item, which it is labeling “Solution ‘HelloWorld’ (1 project).” Immediately underneath that, we see the one project that our solution contains: “HelloWorld.” Inside of the project is all of the settings and files that our project has, including the Program.cs file that contains source code that we’ll soon start editing. It’s important to keep the solution and project separated in your head. They both have the same name and it can be a little confusing. Just remember the top node is the solution, and the one inside it is the project. Modifying Your Project You should see the main text editor, containing text that should look identical to this: Visual Studio Editor In a minute we’ll discuss what all of that does, but for now, let’s go ahead and make our first change — adding something that will print out the message “Hello World!” Right in the middle of that code, you’ll see three lines that say static void Main(string[] args) then a starting curly brace ( ‘{‘ ) and a closing curly brace ( ‘}’ ). We want to add our new code right between the two curly braces. Here’s the line we want to add: Console.WriteLine(“Hello World!”); So now our program’s full code should look like this: C# hello world program We’ve completed our first C# program! Easy, huh? Try It Out! Hello World! It’s impossible to understate how important it is to actually do the stuff outlined in this chapter. Simply reading text just doesn’t cut it. So follow through this chapter, one step at a time, and make sure you’re understanding the concepts that come up, at least at a basic level. Compiling and Running Your Project Your computer doesn’t magically understand what you’ve written. Instead, it understands special instructions that are composed of 1’s and 0’s called binary. Fortunately for us, Visual Studio includes a thing called a compiler. A compiler will take the C# code that we’ve written and turn it into binary that the computer understands. So our next step is to compile our code and run it. Visual Studio will make this really easy for us. To start this process, press F5 or choose Debug > Start Debugging from the menu. Besides you can start the process without debugging by pressing Ctrl + F5 for faster processing of the results. Compiling Hello World Program There! Did you see it? Your program flashed on the screen for a split second! (Hang on… we’ll fix that in a second. Stick with me for a moment.) We just ran our program in debug mode, which means that if something bad happens while your program is running, it won’t simply crash. Instead, Visual Studio will notice the problem, stop in the middle of what’s going on, and show you the problem that you are having, allowing you to debug it. Hurray!!! So there you have it! You’ve made a program, compiled it, and executed it! If it doesn’t compile and execute, double-check to make sure your code looks like the code above. Help! My program is running, but disappearing before I can see it! Approach: Put another line of code that makes the program wait before closing the program. You can do this by simply adding in the following line of code, right below where you put the Console.WriteLine(“Hello World!”); statement: Console.ReadKey(); So your full code, if you use this approach, would look like this: using System; namespace HelloWorld { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Hello World!"); Console.ReadKey(); } } } Using this approach, there is one more line of code that you have to add to your program (in fact, every console application you make), which can be a little annoying. But at least with this approach, you can still run your program in debug mode, which you will soon discover is a really nice feature. Try It Out! See Your Program Twice. A Closer Look at Your Program Now that we’ve got our program running, let’s take a minute and look at each of the lines of code in the program we’ve made. I’ll try to explain what each one does so that you’ll have a basic understanding of everything in your simple Hello World program. Using Directives using System; The first few lines of your program all start with the keyword using. A keyword is simply a reserved word or a magic word that is a built-in part of the C# programming language. It has special meaning to the C# compiler, which it uses to do something special. The using keyword tells the compiler that there is a whole other pile of code that someone made that we want to be able to access. So when you see a statement like using System; you know that there is a whole pile of code out there named System that our code wants to use. Without this line, the C# compiler won’t know where to find things and it won’t be able to run your program. Namespaces, Classes, and Methods Below the using directives, you’ll see a collection of curly braces (‘{‘ and ‘}’) and you’ll see the keywords namespace, class, and in the middle, the word Main. Namespaces, classes, and methods (which Main is an example of) are ways of grouping related code together at various levels. Namespaces are the largest grouping, classes are smaller, and methods are the smallest. Methods are a way of consolidating a single task together in a reusable block of code. In other programming languages, methods are sometimes called functions, procedures, or subroutines. Right in the middle of the generated code, you’ll see the following: static void Main(string[] args) { } This is a method, which happens to have the name Main. I won’t get into the details about what everything else on that line does yet, but I want to point out that this particular setup for a method makes it so that C# knows it can be used as the starting point for your program. Since this is where our program starts, the computer will run any code we put in here. When one thing is contained in another, it is said to be a member of it. So the Program class is a member of the namespace, and the Main method is a member of the Program class. Classes are a way of grouping together a set of data and methods that work on that data into a single reusable package. Classes are the fundamental building block of object-oriented programming. In the generated code, you can see the beginning of the class, marked with: class Program { And later on, after the Main method which is contained within the class, you’ll see a matching closing curly brace: } Program is simply a name for the class. It could have been just about anything else. The fact that the Main method is contained in the Program class indicates that it belongs to the Program class. Namespaces are the highest level grouping of code. Many smaller programs may only have a single namespace, while larger ones often divide the code into several namespaces based on the feature or component that the code is used in. Looking at the generated code, you’ll see that our Program class is contained in a namespace called “HelloWorld”: namespace HelloWorld { ... } Once again, the fact that the Program class appears within the HelloWorld namespace means that it belongs to that namespace, or is a member of it. Whitespace Doesn’t Matter In C#, whitespace such as spaces, newlines, and tabs don’t matter to the C# compiler. This means that technically, you could write every single program on only one line! But don’t do that. That would be a pretty bad idea. Instead, you should use whitespace to help make your code more readable, both for other people who may look at your code, or even yourself, a few weeks later, when you’ve forgotten what exactly your code was supposed to do. But as an example, compare the following pieces of code that do the same thing: Approach #1: static void Main(string [] args) { Console .WriteLine ( "Hello World!" );} Approach #2: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Hello World!"); } Semicolons You may have noticed that the lines of code we added all ended with semicolons (‘;’). This is often how C# knows it has reached the end of a statement. A statement is a single step or instruction that does something. We’ll be using semicolons all over the place as we write C# code.

https://medium.com/c-sharp-language/the-c-beginners-guide-6a14af03ed85

['Manish Kumar']

2020-12-18 11:49:35.056000+00:00

['Programming', 'Beginners Guide', 'Dotnet', 'Technology', 'Csharp']

$5000 Google IDOR Vulnerability Writeup

Hey amazing Hackers! its Raidh_Here After many month, I decided to write writeups regarding my bounty from Google of worth $5000. So without wasting any time, lets begin the story! The Story : After getting many duplicates and N/A from H1 & Bugcrowd, I decided to write about my journey and started searching for VDP programs. I got many bugs and reported to them but till then no reply . Finally, I decided to start hunt on google. Started searching google subdomains using Google dorks. I know its piece of a shit but never mind. I found few domains and nothing work for me. So finally, I decided to test on google cloud. While scrolling down in the google cloud market place I found an interesting application called Dialogflow again you need to clean up your mind raidh…. I started searching more about the application. Dialogflow is a natural language understanding platform used to design and integrate a conversational user interface into mobile apps, web applications, devices, bots, interactive voice response systems and related uses. I started searching common bugs like xss,sqli,htmli.. etc. But it didn’t work! :( After doing a lot of search, I got an interesting Option and started creating the phone gateway :) It also has a delete option. I turned on my proxy and started intercepting the requests and I found a request like this . its easy to create a wordlist for that random number of strings and able to do brutforce to exploit the vulnerability :) How i did the wordlist for bruteforcing the random string ? i send the request to burp intruder and added the points to some strings and created a-z character in the payload section. but it is very hard to get a hit. while checking the dialoglfow cx i saw the same Phone Gateway. we can see there is a area code option to get specified phone numbers for that particular area. i selected the area code 205 so i got the active list of numbers belongs to 205. we can select all available area codes and able to fetch the all active random strings to create a word list. I sent the request to burp repeater and replace the phoneNumbers/<randomstring> to the victims <randomstring> and submit the request. BHOOOOOOOM!. The victim number got deleted and created a poc and reported to Google. But they closed the report as intended Behavior. Then, I was like ??!! intended Behavior After explaining the attacking scenario and impact, they reopened and accepted the bug. Whooo hooo! and rewarded with $5000. Timeline May 4, 2021 06:28AM — Reported May 4, 2021 04:19PM — Status: Won’t Fix (Not Reproducible) May 7, 2021 06:30PM — Status: Won’t Fix (Intended Behavior) May 12, 2021 09:10AM — Status: Accepted (reopened) May 18, 2021 04:20PM — Rewarded $5000 bounty Aug 28, 2021 01:29AM — fixed.

https://medium.com/@asterfiester/5000-google-idor-vulnerability-writeup-c7b45926abe9

['Raidh Ĥere']

2021-09-15 07:31:42.596000+00:00

['Bugs', 'Cybersecurity', 'Information Technology', 'Infosec', 'Bug Bounty']

Is Intel getting under estimated ?

Well the short answer is no , Intel is still a market leader and highest gross revenue earner among chip makers. Intel has the R&D capability and cash flows to bounce back as a formidable player. In 2019, Intel was the №1 chipmaker by revenue, research firm Gartner said. It regained the top spot after Samsung took the lead in 2017 and 2018. Intel had 15.7% market share last year, compared with 12.5% for No2 vendor Samsung. Intel’s chip revenue slipped 0.7% year over year to $65.8 billion amid a semiconductor industry downturn. Meanwhile, total worldwide semiconductor revenue fell 11.9% to $418.3 billion in 2019. Recently the focus of the investors and the industry has shifted to its rivals like Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm. But all is not lost for Intel ? Intel is trying to refocus itself from its personal computer business segment to Data centre,5G ,Artificial intelligence and Autonomous vehicles. It was true that its been late on the mobile front and lost the chip competition to AMD and Qualcomm ,but on AI Intel is gaining a head start. Intel Chief Executive Bob Swan is working to change the company’s focus to pursuing 30% of the total semiconductor market, rather than maintaining 90% of the market for central processing units, or CPUs. Swan also has been selling off non-core assets. On Oct. 20, Intel announced a deal to sell its NAND memory unit to South Korea’s SK Hynix for $9 billion. Gaming Intel focus on shifting to gaming is aimed at taking NVidia heads on.Check out the link below. 5G Intel Atom P5900 will start being deployed this year as a key component of 5G base stations. Intel has the opportunity to be the leader here as Chinese players have been sidelined because of data security concerns. Data centre Intel has been a leader in this segment with most of the data centres running on its Xeon chips. Intel detailed the future of its Xeon Scalable platform at its Data-Centric Innovation Summit. Autonomous driving Intel recently aquired MobileEye further augmenting its capabilities in this area. Overall Intel seems to be rightly focussed on all the future tech and growth drivers ,what needs to be seen is how far it can capitalise and monopolise these markets as it did with the personal computer market. What intel is facing today is intense competition and not being formidable enough to kill the competition , but having said that intel is still the only company with the cash balance and R & D to invest in emerging tech areas. Intel should be on watch list !

https://medium.com/@sreekumar-pg/is-intel-out-of-the-game-ce0943b3c7be

['Sreekumar Pg']

2021-01-01 03:27:28.358000+00:00

['Silicon Valley', 'Intel', 'Semiconductors', '5g Technology']

Asus Announces Tinker Board 2 and 2S Single-Board Computers

The Raspberry Pi gets some fresh competition from Asus’ new boards, with 1.5x performance promised. By Matthew Humphries Single-board computers have grown in popularity over the last several years thanks to the Raspberry Pi. Asus introduced a competitor called the Tinker Board back in 2017, and now we’re getting a second-generation board with two model options. As NotebookCheck reports (via French publication Clubic), the Tinker Board 2 and Tinker Board 2S are exactly the same except for one feature: The 2S includes 16GB of eMMC storage and a Micro SD card slot, whereas the Tinker Board 2 includes only a Micro SD card slot. Both boards use the Rockchip RK3399 64-bit system-on-chip, consisting of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A72 running at 2GHz and quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 running at 1.5GHz. The GPU is an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 running at 800MHz, and 2GB/4GB dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM options will be available. There are plenty of connectivity options on these boards (which measure just 85mm by 56mm), including: 1x HDMI 2.0 (4K-capable) 1x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-C (OTG & DisplayPort 1.2) 3x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A 1x 22-pin MIPI DSI 1x 15-pin MIPI CSI-2 1x RJ-45 Gigabit LAN 1x Wi-FI 802.11 AC and Bluetooth 5.0 1x 40-pin GPIO header 1x DC fan header 1x RTC battery header 1x Power and recovery headers 1x 12 V — 19 V DC-in barrel connector The expected performance gain over the original Tinker Board is 1.5x, and Asus is supporting Debian 9 Linux and Android 10, although Android support isn’t expected until Q1 2021. We don’t know pricing or an official release date yet, but the first Tinker Board cost $60, and it seems likely Asus will try to hit a similar price point again, especially considering the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 costs $75. Meanwhile, the latest product carrying the Raspberry Pi name is a keyboard with a Raspberry Pi 4 inside and offering everything you need except a display for under $100, or just the keyboard on its own for $70.

https://medium.com/pcmag-access/asus-announces-tinker-board-2-and-2s-single-board-computers-de32b19bf9ef

[]

2020-11-24 13:56:02.464000+00:00

['Raspberry Pi', 'Technology', 'Computing', 'DIY']

Anyone Involved In Iowa Caucus Disaster Should Be Out On Their Ass

Iowa Anyone Involved In Iowa Caucus Disaster Should Be Out On Their Ass And stop telling us to “calm down!” There isn’t time or margin enough for further error. Is it really that big a deal that Iowa results were delayed for a few days? (Looks like Mayor Pete and Bernie came out on top). Maybe, maybe not. Is it a big deal that Democrats kick off one of their most ambitious and crucial primary seasons ever by looking like they completely don’t know what the hell they’re doing? Do we have to even answer that? Is it completely humiliating for DNC Chair Tom Perez, to throw up his hands days after the caucus and call on Democrats in Iowa to immediately begin a recanvass? Only to have those same Iowa Democrats indicate they are most likely going to completely ignore him? There are not going to be multiple Presidential elections in November. All you get is one chance. So everything’s got to be done right the first time. The time to fix things and make sure they worked was from 2016 until about a week ago. Starting now is too late. We want to emphasize before we go any further, our column today comes from a place of deep love for, and faith in the American electorate come this fall. (Just not wiseacres who think they know better.) Part of the reason maybe, we’re reacting to the Iowa meltdown so viscerally, is the approach we’ve seen on the part of the people who seem to be responsible for it, evinces folks we encountered in the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016: smug and self-righteous and completely impervious to the idea that anybody but them might have valid alternate ideas about anything or be even a scintilla wrong about anything. They just smiled enigmatically and looked at us with an air of amusement as we crazily drove back and forth to the middle of Pennsylvania because we thought there was a good chance Trump was going to win. Something we wrote about in blogs that preceded the launch of this newsletter. We are happy to say the attitude at Clinton HQ was not carried to the local level, and proud to this day that although Hillary did not win Pennsylvania, she won the area in which we and many unsung heroes of her campaign canvassed. While all the while her most direct minions sat on their smug little tuchases in New York waiting for the inevitability of her win, which would rocket them to stardom. Hillary Clinton campaign field office in Reading, PA, 2016. Where people actually worked hard and didn’t take things for granted. (Our photos.) Here’s what we’d say to Shadow and ACRONYM (both those names are too clever by half anyway, then again, so was Cambridge Analytica). And maybe even Groundbase and maybe even PACRONYM and certainly even some of the top people at the DNC who apparently advised Democrats to invest in and buy some of these developers’ and organizationsproducts in the first place. Also, to some or all of the people those groups and organizations and companies represent, and whomever else was out there and helped create this abject and historic mess that isn’t even close to being figured out. Also, finally to the people who could’ve stopped this disaster from happening but didn’t: We do not need endless explanations and excuses and apologies and promises to do better. We just need you to stop. And let someone else do what you intended to do who is capable of actually doing it. And those people and organizations and companies are out there. They may not be as well-connected as you, and therefore not as well funded. (And unfortunately many of the people throwing money at you do not understand how what you’re trying to do works, which is why they didn’t know it wouldn’t. And might not now know where else they can turn.) But they already know how to do what you’ve already shown you don’t. So shut down and give whatever money you’ve got left over to them. No more making promises about the future you have no way of knowing you’ll be able to keep. You can make amends by showing up and voting on Election Day and encouraging anyone else you can to do the same. And that’s it! Don’t get us wrong: we have no doubt your heart is in the right place, just that it doesn’t matter. The recent history of technological innovation in this country is littered with unnecessary failures and lessons learned, mainly because many of those failures and lessons learned had already been learned and solved by previous generations of innovators. But the newer folks just didn’t know or didn’t care. So they repeated mistakes they didn’t need to make. That’s true on the investor side too. Because a lot of otherwise very smart people have no idea what they’re financing when it comes to tech or as Trump would call it “the cyber”. They just want to be involved and don’t want to be left out. Sometimes that mix, after a few resets, does manage to produce powerful companies and products. Sometimes it crashes and burns. Right now Iowa looks unequivocally like the latter, and even if it isn’t, there’s a high probability that any time spent trying to determine whether the entities involved can recover, and recover stronger will be wasted time. Too high a probability in our view. We are not just saying this to be critical. We are saying this because we know people out there who — if they’re interested — can do better and already know how. And time would be better spent seeking those people out than attempting to resurrect something that’s already in ruins. We are big believers that mistakes do make you stronger. If you’ve got time. We’re out of time. Get out of the way.

https://ericjscholl.medium.com/anyone-involved-in-iowa-caucus-disaster-should-be-out-on-their-ass-d87ed8690f4e

['Eric J Scholl']

2020-02-07 13:01:01.396000+00:00

['Politics', 'Technology', 'Democrats', 'Elections', 'Apps']

Why Cryptocurrency is the Next Operating System for Capitalism

Money won’t last forever — that is guaranteed It didn’t exist when exchange evolved to become a feature of humanities first economic system, nor will it persist when there is no advantage to using it. That time is approaching far quicker than traditionalists care to admit. The reality is that our evolution to a largely cashless society is almost complete. I rarely have money on me physically, I can count on one hand the number of times I have had cash in my wallet in the last 3 years. Paper cash and metallic coins are prehistoric. That is what those who carelessly brandish Crytocurrency a bubble fail to comprehend. Money doesn’t care what you think. It is simply a means of exchange. When it’s utility is replaced by something more efficient it will become extinct. Right now it is a protected species with a few purists trying to revive it. Unfortunately, the poachers are pulling down each pillar which underpinned the system one by one. Soon it will fall. With Fiat valuations no longer tied to any commodity — with it’s price being entirely independent and it’s valuation contingent on what we collectively believe it to be — give me one sincere and serious argument which convinces me fiat isn’t also a bubble. Give me a coherent reason why that if we stopped believing in the value of paper money today it would be worth anything tomorrow. Without resorting to the argument of historical precedent, the size and scale of central banks or the promise these institutions have made to maintain a certain valuation what do you have to argue against it?Fundamentally it is still a question of trust and belief. This forces you to consider that there might be a technological solution which forces a level or trust and believe that is inconceivable in a human led system. You argument might still be that cryptocurrency is a bubble, but I raise you the perspective that all money is. It is a product of our beliefs married to our hope that it’s value will remain. Ditto stocks, shares and bonds. Money is, and has been for the last 30 years, an intellectual construct centred on humanities trust in Governance — but trust in these institutions is at a historical low. We don’t trust the reasons they give for the decisions they make, they’re incentives to act in our best interests or their ability to deliver a better future. Cryptocurrency isn’t just the future because that is what a committed band of dreamers would have you believe. It is the future because it is a new operating system for a decentralised world. It is the future because it takes back control of the things we are most dependent on for us to subsist. It is the future because it is already here making a difference to how we act. Bitcoin has enabled a whole generation of Venezuelans to have an alternative to crippling inflation left unchecked by corruption. No longer do we have to trust a government to reign over us and carelessly prescribe dangerous monetary policy which we must accept. No longer must we accept situations of austerity forced upon us due to government intervention in a financial collapse where there was no punishment for any of the individuals who caused it. No longer is our future dependent on the whims of governments. You can make any argument you like about Cryptocurrency being over valued, about it being manipulated, about it not being a viable medium for high frequency transactions to occur. That’s fine but what price do you place on control? What price would you put on trust programmed in to an immutable ledger where those participating hold the keys to how the platform develops. Unilateral arbitrary decision making is replaced by consensus. If you don’t understand the implications of that you’re not paying attention. If you don’t understand how fiat money works, you’re not qualified to judge whether cryptocurrency will be successful or not, period. Equally, if you don’t understand the mechanisms for mining, the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrency or the economics of scarcity you aren’t qualified to tell anyone why it is a revolution. So educate yourself and understand why things are changing, appreciate the technology underpinning the revolution. They you can positively impact the progress this new system can make. Otherwise you’re just another uneducated quack speculating to make a buck doing more damage than good. With all that being true, if you believe in Crypto let the market come to you.Understand that the success of the system is contingent on an unwavering belief that throughout history innovation has always disrupted what currently exists. If a system is better, exponentially so, then nothing will ever be able to stand in the way of progress. For the same reason Google destroyed Yahoo, and Facebook vanquished MySpace, Bitcoin and Ethereum will destroy money. In the same way Amazon has brutalised physical retail, Cryptocurrency will eradicate banks. If you don’t see this coming you aren’t paying attention. Let the non-believers have their day, but the moment central banks pushed the button on quantitative easing they signed the death warrant of capitalism operating system that monopolised the world. Capitlism isn’t going anywhere though. Cryptocurrency is simply a more efficient vessel which allows for its manifest destiny to be realised. Progress is relentless. Cryptocurrency is simply an upgrade

https://chrisherd.medium.com/why-cryptocurrency-is-the-next-operating-system-for-capitalism-8120de08a81d

['Chris Herd']

2018-07-06 08:16:11.622000+00:00

['Technology', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Future', 'Bitcoin']

C Estates’ Chief Technology Officer

“Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence and inspiration. Impact involves getting results. Influence is about spreading the passion you have for your work, and you have to inspire teammates and customer” — Robin S. Sharma This was Gerald’s objective and then achievement after 26 years of career in Financial Software Industry, and today, strong of his past experience, he is leading the innovative and high potential C Estates Technology Team. It doesn’t stop here; Gerald also provides Agile Training and Coaching, either onsite or remotely, helping companies around the world to implement and perform better using Agile Methodology! Gerald graduated from Université du Havre France with the course Technology and Accounting Bachelors Degree. He started his career working for a Financial IT Consulting firm in 1992 at Apside SA as a Programmer Analyst. Joined AtosEuronext in 1995 as Trading Business Analyst, where he served in this capacity for over 10 years. His responsibilities included advising exchanges on market models based on the features and functionalities of the Euronext Trading System. He subsequently joined Bursa Malaysia Bhd as the Head of Infrastructure Planning in the Global Market Strategy and Program Director. He was responsible for improving market access and the implementation of new trading technologies in line with market trends. In 2015, he then joined Standard Chartered Bank as the Program Manager for Wealth Management and led the global implementation of a new Bancassurance Platform across 9 countries. He then left Standard Chartered Bank mid of 2017 to provided companies and start-ups the following services: CTO as a service Agile Coach Atlassian Suites Consultant Gerald was also the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Swoop Inc, Philippines from 2018 to 2019.

https://medium.com/@cestates/c-estates-chief-technology-officer-1caecb9ac2e1

['C Estates Inc']

2020-02-20 07:04:34.474000+00:00

['Cto', 'Chief Technology Officer', 'C Estates', 'Tokenization', 'Blockchain']

What $50 Buys You at Huaqiangbei, the World’s Most Fascinating Electronic Market.

We’re building the Model 01, a hackable ergonomic keyboard with mechanical keyswitches, programmable RGB LEDs, opensource firmware, and a gorgeous hardwood enclosure. We expect to ship later this year. You can pre-order one today at https://shop.keyboard.io. The discount code “BOXOFCRAP” will take fifteen bucks off your order. Last summer, we ran a pretty successful Kickstarter campaign for our first product, the Model 01 keyboard. Since then, we’ve been hard at work getting the first run of a few thousand keyboards manufactured. It’s been a bit more of an adventure than we’d expected, but things are proceeding apace. Unsurprisingly, setting up manufacturing has meant that Jesse’s been spending…rather a lot of time in Shenzhen. Mostly, his days at the factory start at 9:30 AM and wrap up somewhere between 8 and 10 PM. But on Sundays, he’s been at loose ends. This trip, he decided to do something about that. We’ve long been fascinated by the Huaqiangbei electronics market area of Shenzhen. (Hereafter, we’ll just call it HQB.) If you need some bit of electronics or a phone accessory, you can find it in HQB. There is an entire multi-floor shopping mall that sells nothing but phone cases. There’s one that specializes in smartwatches. There’s a mall that sells cellphones wholesale. There’s one just for surveillance cameras. And then there are the component markets. Need a chip? Or 250,000 chips? Somebody there can get them for you. Seeed Studios’ map for makers is probably the canonical English-language reference for the HQB area. You can download a free PDF of it here: http://www.seeedstudio.com/document/pdf/Shenzhen%20Map%20for%20Makers.pdf While most vendors in the markets will (grudgingly) sell you one of something, that’s not really why they’re there. HQB is where you go to buy new products in volume. The price for one of something is…a little bit higher than the unit price if you’re buying a bunch of something. Up until now, we’ve had only the vaguest sense of what volume purchase in the markets was really like. We, of course, were never going to be in the business of buying smartwatches, drones, or SD cards in volume. Or were we? About a month back, Jesse asked friends on Twitter if they’d pay fifty bucks to get a box of random crap from Shenzhen. It quickly became clear that we weren’t going to have any trouble finding customers for this one. Once in Shenzhen, Jesse enlisted the help of his friend Helen Tan. They made a plan to spend Sunday in the market and Jesse posted the following product listing to the Keyboardio store: We’ll send you a box of worthless amazing crap from the electronics markets in Shenzhen, China. We’ve got some idea of what will get thrown into your box, but we won’t know for sure until after we’ve gone shopping. It’ll probably include some computer or phone accessories, maybe an input device or actual phone or something if we see something weird and cool and crappy enough. If you have specific requests, send them to @obra on Twitter. To maximize the amount of dreck we can send you, slow-boat shipping to anywhere in the USA is included in the price of the box. Expedited shipping and delivery to addresses outside the USA are not available at this time. None of this stuff comes with any warranty. It’s exceeding likely that the box will contain items known to the State of California to cause cancer. Limit: one to a customer. Not really being sure what we were getting ourselves into, we limited this run to 25 boxes. Jesse tweeted about the new product offering and we sold out in less than an hour. Sunday rolled around and Jesse and Helen met up to go shopping. We didn’t really know what we were going to be buying. Our initial budget was that we wanted to spend about $30 on crap, $10 on shipping and take home a $10 profit. Things didn’t quite work out like that, but it gave us a decent framework. We started off in the phone accessories mall. iPhone Repair Stencil $0.60 (Compare at $4.39 http://amzn.to/2dqmQPw) Our first purchase was a soldering stencil for doing chip-level repair to an iPhone 6S+. In the west, we generally treat a phone’s logic board as a single component. If it’s fried, it’s fried. Just toss it out and replace it. In Shenzhen, it’s not uncommon for a phone-repair tech working in a tiny little market stall to perform incredibly fiddly chip-level repairs to a mobile phone. This is the tool they would use to apply new solder paste when replacing individual chips on an iPhone’s logic board. There was no volume discount for buying the stencils. The shopkeeper thought we were a little bit odd for buying 30 copies of the same stencil, rather than a kit of different stencils for a variety of late-model phones. The shop we bought the stencils from sold a variety of tools and supplies for electronics repair. That included the regular stuff like tweezers and solder, but also a bunch of weirder stuff. One of the items we really wanted to buy for the boxes was a set of *cough* unofficial iDevice repair manuals. These books each weighed at least a pound and featured detailed documentation of every chip, screw and component of a given Apple device. They walked through how to remove, test, repair and replace each chip, with detailed photos. iRing $0.60 (Compare at $14.99 http://amzn.to/2duxF1C) Our next stop was the iRing store. The iRing is a curious item. It’s incredibly popular in China and something almost nobody in the US has. The concept is really simple. It’s ring you stick to the back of your phone. You can use it to hold your phone or as a cute little integrated stand. We decided to splurge and buy the version that had reusable adhesive and an included hook for hanging up your phone. (We still don’t really “get” the hook, but the ring is amazing enough on its own that we’re sure we’ll fall in love with the hook.) There are four or five shops that sell nothing but iRings in HQB. The one we ended up at had a selection of probably over 1000 designs, ranging from simple unbranded rings with single-use adhesive to rings studded with fake gems to rings with pictures of your favorite Disney characters, NBA teams and multinational brands. The cheapest rings went for $0.37. The most expensive topped out at nearly $2. USB Fan $0.45 (Compare at $6.99 http://amzn.to/2dqlnZP) We knew there was no way we could ship the boxes of crap without a selfie fan. What is a selfie fan you ask? Why, it’s a fan to give your hair a nice windswept look when you’re taking selfies. The model we chose is especially interesting because it features a combined USB+MicroUSB connector. That means that it will work great with your Android phone or with your USB powerbank. Everybody got a blue fan, except for one lucky individual. That person got a true box-of-crap experience. Their fan is missing the blade. If they write to us, we’ll drop the blade in the mail. Later in the day, we found ourselves in a slightly more remote part of HQB and asked another vendor what they’d charge for these fans. Turns out, we’d been ripped off. This second vendor only wanted $0.38 cents per fan. USB Light $0.11 (Compare at $6.99: http://amzn.to/2dQ0EfW) The next product in the box of crap is a cute little bendable USB light. You plug it into a USB port and it lights up. If you happen to have a USB powerbank, you now have a somewhat unwieldy flashlight. “32GB” MicroSD card $2.13 (Compare at ???) It’s a MicroSD card. It is marked as being a 32GB card. If you stick it in your phone or computer, it will report that it is a 32 GB card. But it’s not. It’s an 8GB card with trick firmware. You should always be able to get at the last 8GB you wrote to the card, but….don’t try it with any important data or in any important device. It was a lot easier to buy guaranteed fake cards than we expected. We had to go to one of the slightly seedier electronics malls. We had to go up to the second or third floor. We had to look for one of the vendors who didn’t have a prominent flash chip testing machine on their counter…and that was about it. There was some discussion of how much “real” storage we wanted in the cards. We asked about getting cards with only 2GB of real storage, but the vendor said 8GB was the lowest she could go. After the sale was finalized, the salesperson admitted that she would have charged us the same amount for the “256GB” cards Interesting fact: The card can be modified to report any amount of storage as being available. The vendor said that she couldn’t do it at her booth and that she didn’t have a data sheet, but that if we wanted, she could send the cards back to the factory to be reprogrammed for us. For a bunch of fascinating technical detail about fake SD cards, check out this post and this post from bunnie. Stickers $0.06 (Compare at ???) We’d hoped to include some genuine fake Apple and Samsung “Do Not Tamper” stickers in the boxes of crap, but couldn’t find any for sale at the first few sticker booths we stopped at. We briefly considered sending “QC OK” or “Inspected by 13” stickers, but fell in love with these warning stickers. And hey, they didn’t exactly break the bank. Lunch break On our way to lunch, we totaled up how much we’d spent during our morning shopping spree. A whole $3.95. We knew we were going to have to up our game after lunch or we weren’t going to have nearly enough stuff to make our customers feel like they got their money’s worth. Programmable LED Name badge $4.20 (Compare at $13.06: http://amzn.to/2cQTN3P) After recharging ourselves with spicy noodles, we set out for HQ Mart. Specifically, we set out for the top two floors of HQ Mart, which may well house the world’s greatest concentration of LED vendors. It’s a mix of LED sign vendors, RGB LED strip vendors and LED factories. We considered buying RGB LED strips and wireless controllers. We gaped at gorgeous LED-base reproductions of old-fashioned lightbulbs. We got headaches from giant walls of some of the brightest LEDs we’ve ever seen. We recoiled in horror when we realized some of the glowing LED strips we were handling were plugged directly into 220 volt AC. And then we stumbled on an LED sign vendor selling cute little programmable LED name badges. They seemed about right for the box of crap, but, at $4.20 for their cheapest model, the price felt a little high. We took the vendor’s name card and went wandering around to try to find another source. After talking to another three or four vendors selling the same badges for $5 or $6, we circled back to the original vendor and made the purchase. While they were counting out the 30 units, we noticed that the giant screen behind the vendor’s desk appeared to show her sitting there counting out product. With a little bit of pantomime and a little bit of translation by Helen, they explained that it was actually an interactive wall that they’d built around a Kinect sensor. The vendor made me sit down at her seat and practice AR bowling and taking snapshots with a handwave gesture. The LED badge comes with a MiniCD with Windows drivers on it, but you can download the same software from the manufacturer’s website: http://www.minileddisplay.com/en/download/ (Trivia: it looks like the LED sign has a more powerful CPU than the Keyboardio Model 01.) H6 Smart Watch $9.74 (Compare at $24.99 http://amzn.to/2dpnxLo) Inside each box is an H6 Smart Watch. There is no brand name on it, nor anything that points to the name of the factory. That’s not too surprising, because there’s a fruit company in Cupertino who might have some issues with their industrial design. We’d actually done a bit research during the week before we went shopping. We knew we wanted to get a smartwatch or a drone into the boxes. We figured that either was likely to run us $15–20 and were pleasantly surprised when the first few vendors we talked to quoted us prices in the $12–15 range. Wandering around the smartwatch mall on the ground floor of the “SEG Factory Store” building, we saw the same products in every shop. Except each had a different build quality, model number, and a slightly different firmware build. Some vendors needed to show us two or three sample units before one would turn on. Each time, we’d ask them to quote a price for 30 pieces. Prices hovered around $12. (If we knew then what we know now, we probably would have skipped both of them and gone for more crap without Lithium Ion batteries.) Yes. The device looks a lot like an Apple Watch, but the functionality is a little bit different. Sure, it has a pedometer and a sleep tracker. If you pair it with your phone, it can act as a bluetooth speaker and microphone. What sets this device apart is what you’ll find when you pop off the battery cover and remove the tiny little battery. There’s a SIM slot and an SD card slot. If you drop a SIM into the watch, you can make calls and surf the web. If you drop an SD card into the SD slot, you can use the phone’s camera to shoot grainy, low-resolution photos from your wrist. The vendor assured us that the watch would last about 3 days on standby. Unlike the Apple watch, you can’t change watch bands. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the GSM antenna is integrated into the molded silicone rubber band. Inside the watch is either a MediaTek chipset or a local clone of one. The watch is, we believe, running Nucleus, MediaTek’s watch operating system. The watches are running Mediatek Nucleus. Its version numbers are…somewhat opaque. The watch vendor was very clear with us that the devices only came with a six month warranty. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that it cost less than ten bucks and the fact that we described the contents of our box as “useless crap”, we are not passing that warranty on to our customers. The economics of how to make a watch phone for $9.74 were completely bewildering to us. If we could get the price down to 65 CNY just by buying 30, how much could they possibly cost to make? As it happens, a friend of ours in Shenzhen has a friend who is a salesperson at a smartwatch factory. We talked him into calling his friend and asking her what she knew about watches like the ones we bought. She asked for photos….and then told us that her factory sells an identical model. She told us that next time, we should just deal with her directly, as we could have saved a lot of money. If we bought 30 watches directly from the factory, they would only cost us $7.49 each. So, the reseller made about $67 profit on us. If the factory sold the watches for $7.49, how much could they possibly cost to make? That’s a question that can be awfully hard to get answered. Not really expecting an answer, we asked our friend to ask his friend. She was happy to tell us: $6. Six dollars. Six dollars for: a GSM chipset, a CPU, an LCD screen, a battery, a PCB, a metal housing, a molded silicone watch band, a MicroUSB cable, and a box. And the labor to assemble and test all of that. At this point, we were still feeling really good about our budget. We had ideas and set off in search of a cheap drone store that had been recommended to us. Qi Charger & Charging adaptors $3.38 (Compare at $30.97: http://amzn.to/2dqvePn, http://amzn.to/2dQciYx, http://amzn.to/2dHCRP4) On the way to the drone store, we cut through a back alley and saw a small shop selling wireless chargers and little flexible circuit boards. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that the flexible circuit boards were Qi-compatible wireless charging adaptors for phones that didn’t support wireless charging out of the box. You just stick them on the back of your phone (or inside your phone case) and thread the connector into your charging port. On a lark, we asked what these things might cost. We were told that the wireless charging adaptors were $0.94 each if we bought 30, and that the charging bases were $1.35. We hadn’t been planning on throwing a wireless charger into the box, but it sounded like a good deal, so sure. Why not? As soon as we said ok, the vendor admitted that they didn’t have 30 of the inexpensive chargers. We’d have to go up to the next cheapest unit. It cost 10% more. What did we get for that extra $0.15? Well, the space-ship like charging base had an additional embossed marking on it: “NCC-1701” Sold. Lightning / MicroUSB cable $0.75 (We couldn’t find them on Amazon) The first drone store we visited was a total bust. Their cheapest option was a budget-busting $14.99. Asking around, we were told that there might be another drone store down the street that had more affordable options. As we made our way down the street, we ran across a cable vendor selling…what may be the most wonderfully wrong cable we’ve seen in years, a combined lightning and MicroUSB cable. Not one of those cables that splits and has a lightning connector next to a MicroUSB connector. Not one of those cables that has a MicroUSB connector and a lightning adaptor. A cable that has a regular USB connector on one end and a reversible connector on the other end that fits inside a MicroUSB port and also fits inside a lightning port. It violates the MicroUSB spec. It violates the Lightning spec. It’s wrong. Yet, somehow, it’s also incredibly right. It should not work. Yet, somehow, it does. When we showed one to a friend who works for Apple, it pretty much reduced him to distraught gibbering. When we visited Shenzhen in July, we found these cables at one or two shops. Now, they are everywhere. We’ve seen five or six different variations on the connector design. Some are pretty well made. And some will probably fall apart after only a few uses. When we asked how much, we were told they were about $1.50 each. As we explained that we wanted thirty, the price came down to a more reasonable $0.75. The vendor experience wasn’t the best. These folks were the only vendor the entire day who didn’t seem to appreciate our business and who didn’t provide us with a receipt. Even the woman who sold us three dollars worth of LED lights gave us a receipt. At this point, we probably should have stopped, declared success and headed off to the DHL office to package up the boxes of crap. But if we could find a drone cheap enough, we wouldn’t completely blow our budget. Mini Drone $9.74 (Compare at $18.99: http://amzn.to/2dQduel) A thirteen dollar iPhone-controllable camera drone. We finally found the “other” drone stores. The first one didn’t have anything under $20. Not expecting much, we walked into the drone store next door and Helen asked them what they could do for an order of 30 units. They said that their cheapest drone was $10.19, but that it was really worth it. The shop was pretty cramped, but it was live demo time. They found us seats, handed us bottles of water and as we got comfortable, they put a very cute little drone up in the air. As someone who we’re pretty sure was the owner’s son demoed the drone’s abilities, they talked up its features and what great reviews their drones got on Amazon. Helen managed to talk them down to $9.74 per drone. Jesse splurged and bought himself one of their nicer mini drones. You can control it over WiFi from your iPhone or Android phone. It has a built in camera that can stream video in real-time. Sadly, at $14.99, it was just a little bit too expensive to add to the boxes of crap this time around. At this point, we were really done shopping, so we headed back to the shipping broker’s office to split up the loot into 30 boxes. On our way, we narrowly avoided a run-in with a vicious street gang. Shipping $28.46 There’s a whole street in HQB known as “Shipper’s Alley.” It’s a mix of express shipping offices and packaging vendors. Thankfully, Helen was able to recommend a shipper she’d worked with before. We brought our bags and boxes in at about 6pm, just as most shops started to close. We’d planned to use Hong Kong Post’s weight-based shipping option for the boxes of crap. It was inexpensive (About 12 USD per box) and relatively quick. After a bit of discussion with the shipping agent, we realized we had a bit of a problem. She’d noticed that the smartwatches had Lithium Ion batteries. Hong Kong Post’s rules don’t allow shipping of Lithium Ion batteries. The agent suggested that the most cost effective solution would be to split the shipments up — The watches would go by DHL and everything else would go by the less expensive HK Post service. In retrospect, we think it would have been cheaper to just send everything by DHL. (Astute readers might guess that the drones and LED signs also have embedded LiIon batteries. The shipping agent did not.) So, off we went to buy boxes for the HK Post shipments, while the shipping agent started work on address labels. The boxes cost $0.12 each. Initially, the shipper thought that the watches could be shipped without a separate shipping box, but later reconsidered. They ended up giving us those boxes for free. We handed the shipping agent a USB stick with a spreadsheet containing everybody’s addresses. She got to work filling out shipping labels. Jesse borrowed a computer from the shipping agent to write a brief letter to our customers and ran off 30 copies. Helen and Jesse sat down and started to fill up 60 boxes with worthless crap. Turns out, kitting and packing boxes is fairly time consuming. It probably took us an hour. The professionals are…a lot faster. They are truly wizards with tape guns. You should watch this video, even though Jesse shot it in the wrong orientation We ended up sitting around for another hour while the professionals wrapped each of our boxes in an impregnable tape barrier and the shipping agent continued to work on address labels. We ran into a small snag when she discovered that not all of our customers had provided a delivery phone number. We got around this by using Jesse’s US cell number for all of the missing customers. About three days later, he started to get…rather a lot of status update SMSes from DHL. Because of the battery SNAFU, shipping ended up coming out to a lot more than we’d expected. The DHL boxes each cost $16.49 to ship and the HK Post boxes each cost another $11.85. We tried hard to convince the shipping agent that we’d be fine with everything getting put on a boat and showing up some time in November, but she told us that we’d need to be shipping a lot more stuff for the economics of ocean freight to even begin to make sense. This was a one-day project, but it was a pretty long day. Summing up Every box-of-crap recipient got $31.76 worth of stuff at Shenzhen prices. If they’d bought everything on Amazon, they would have paid over $130.36. (We couldn’t find the fake SD card, flippable cable or stickers on Amazon.) Those Amazon prices aren’t always the cheapest option, but represent at least a little bit of bargain hunting. That maps pretty closely to how hard we fought for deals in HQB. Because of the shipping issue, we lost $10.22 per box. Over all, though, the experiment was a success. We got to learn a little bit about “volume” purchasing in Shenzhen, found out some interesting details about things we’d seen in the markets before and learned about some of the headaches of shipping packages from China to the US. (There’s a reason we’re paying professionals to help us ship the Model 01.) Based on this first experiment, we’d be willing to do another set of boxes the next time we have a day to kill in Shenzhen, but might try to find someone to help us pack and ship boxes a bit more…efficiently. If you think you might want a box of crap next time around, follow us on Twitter or sign up for our mailing list. We’re building the Model 01, a hackable ergonomic keyboard with mechanical keyswitches, programmable RGB LEDs, opensource firmware, and a gorgeous hardwood enclosure. We expect to ship later this year. You can pre-order one today at https://shop.keyboard.io. The discount code “BOXOFCRAP” will take fifteen bucks off your order.

https://medium.com/newco/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei-the-worlds-most-fascinating-electronics-market-f0384d9fca32

[]

2016-10-14 19:40:36.309000+00:00

['Technology', 'Shopping', 'Shenzhen', 'Culture', 'China']

Vuetify — Progress Display. 2 ways to display loading progress.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash Vuetify is a popular UI framework for Vue apps. In this article, we’ll look at how to work with the Vuetify framework. Progress Circular We can add a circular progress display with the v-progress-circular component. For example, we can write: <template> <div class="text-center"> <v-progress-circular indeterminate color="primary"></v-progress-circular> </div> </template> <script> export default { name: "HelloWorld", data: () => ({}), }; </script> The indeterminate prop makes it display forever. And the color prop sets the color. Size and Width The size and width props let us change the size and width of the circular progress display: <template> <div class="text-center"> <v-progress-circular indeterminate color="red" :width="3"></v-progress-circular> </div> </template> <script> export default { name: "HelloWorld", data: () => ({}), }; </script> The width changes the width. The size changes the radius in pixels of the circular progress display: <template> <div class="text-center"> <v-progress-circular indeterminate color="red" :size="50"></v-progress-circular> </div> </template> <script> export default { name: "HelloWorld", data: () => ({}), }; </script> Rotate The rotate prop lets us customize the v-progress-circular component’s origin. For instance, we can write: <template> <div class="text-center"> <v-progress-circular :rotate="360" :size="100" :width="15" :value="value" color="teal" >{{ value }}</v-progress-circular> </div> </template> <script> export default { name: "HelloWorld", data() { return { interval: {}, value: 0, }; }, beforeDestroy() { clearInterval(this.interval); }, mounted() { this.interval = setInterval(() => { if (this.value === 100) { return (this.value = 0); } this.value += 10; }, 1000); }, }; </script> to display the value inside the circle and also set the progress bar’s fill color according to value . Progress Linear In addition to a circular progress display, Vuetify also comes with the v-progress-linear component to display progress in a line. For example, we can add one with: <template> <div class="text-center"> <v-progress-linear v-model="valueDeterminate" color="deep-purple accent-4"></v-progress-linear> </div> </template> <script> export default { name: "HelloWorld", data() { return { valueDeterminate: 50, }; }, }; </script> The v-model sets the progress value. color has the color of the bar. Indeterminate Bar We can add the indeterminate prop to make it animate forever: <template> <div class="text-center"> <v-progress-linear indeterminate color="yellow darken-2"></v-progress-linear> </div> </template> <script> export default { name: "HelloWorld", data() { return {}; }, }; </script> Buffer We can add a buffer state to represent 2 values simultaneously. For example, we can write: <template> <div class="text-center"> <v-progress-linear v-model="value" :buffer-value="bufferValue"></v-progress-linear> </div> </template> <script> export default { name: "HelloWorld", data() { return { value: 10, bufferValue: 20, interval: 0, }; }, watch: { value(val) { if (val < 100) return; this.value = 0; this.bufferValue = 10; this.startBuffer(); }, }, mounted() { this.startBuffer(); }, beforeDestroy() { clearInterval(this.interval); }, methods: { startBuffer() { clearInterval(this.interval); this.interval = setInterval(() => { this.value += Math.random() * (15 - 5) + 5; this.bufferValue += Math.random() * (15 - 5) + 6; }, 2000); }, }, }; </script> We have the bufferValue which is higher than the value value. v-model has the progress value and buffer-value has the 2nd value, which is bigger than the v-model ‘s value. Conclusion We can add a circular or linear progress display with Vuetify’s components. Enjoyed this article? If so, get more similar content by subscribing to our YouTube channel!

https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/vuetify-progress-display-74de80e785f3

['John Au-Yeung']

2020-12-29 18:19:56.307000+00:00

['Technology', 'JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Web Development']

How Soviet Engineering Led to Modern Day Cotton Slavery

If you open up a current list of the world’s largest lakes, you will immediately see some familiar names like Lake Michigan, Lake Malawi, and Lake Superior. You will not find the name of the Aral Sea on this list. In the recent past, the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest lake by area in the world. At its peak, it was larger than Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, stretching over 26,300 square miles. Now it is almost gone. In place of the lake arose a system of forced labor, a booming cotton industry and the hubris of men. While there are many people alarmed over the rapid disappearance of one of the world’s largest lakes, many people are connected to this region, not by an ecologic crisis but rather by the clothes on their backs. This is a tragic two-fold story that highlights humanity’s ability to rapidly destroy our planet and the specter of slavery which still stalks cotton fields around the world. The great irrigation project 1936 map of the USSR, note the Aral Sea in the bottom left. (Public domain) The Soviet Union (USSR) fell nearly thirty years ago and sometimes it is easy to forget that, at the height of its size and power, it was a venerable modern empire. The USSR was not much different from many of the other great empires of history. It encompassed a massive amount of territory, held a great number of different peoples in it and committed great atrocities in the name of the empire. Like the Romans, the Soviets also engaged in massive and often unprecedented engineering projects that used their ample manpower to great effect. Maintaining control over such large swaths of territory that often featured many disparate and varying landscapes was no easy task. The Soviets had often struggled with food production and agricultural output quotas were a large part of many people’s lives during the communist era. In order to boost agricultural output, engineers were eyeing the area around the Aral Sea as a potential source of water for irrigation. The Aral Sea was a massive body of water fed by two large rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya. The Soviet Union went to work on digging massive irrigation trenches from the feeding rivers to the Aral Sea in order to divert large amounts of fresh water from their natural course, into the irrigation system in an attempt to make formerly arid land fertile for crops. The goal was to flood land that had formerly been desert pasture in an attempt to create suitable fields for rice and cotton. Rice to feed the people and cotton to serve as a cash crop. The trenches were dug, the switches and levees rose, and soon the titanic flood of the water that poured out of the mountains was being redirected to places it had never been before. If you think such an outlandish proposition was doomed to fail, you would be wrong. The Soviets approved a plan of water distribution that flooded the deserts of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan creating ample opportunity for new agriculture to blossom at the expense of the Aral Sea. Land which had only been able to support small family farms and grazing herds rapidly transformed into centrally planned, communist mega-farms which quickly began growing tons and tons of rice and cotton. The plan had been a success. At least for now. The demise of the Aral Sea The Aral Sea in 1989 on the left, 2014 on the right (Credit: NASA / Public domain) It did not take long for the massive redirection of water to begin to affect the terminus. The Aral Sea, which had been around for thousands of years before, immediately began to shrink. The Soviet government had not approved a moderate amount of redirection of water, but rather, nearly the entire volume of water that had previously flowed into the Aral Sea. In the ten years between 1960 and 1970, the lake began to fall at a rate of around eight inches per year, a rate which would begin to increase exponentially. In the 1970s, the water began falling at an astounding two feet per year. In the 1980s, the water was falling at nearly three feet per year. The shrinkage was noticeable and soon, everyone knew the lake was doomed to die. The Soviets were not stupid, they knew that the lake would vanish over time, they just didn’t care. Any engineer with a modicum of knowledge or experience could look at the amount of water being directed away from the Aral Sea and quickly do the math. What is more astounding is that the Aral Sea was not a barren or lifeless body of water. It was a vibrant part of the geologic landscape which was critical to the region. Just before the irrigation project began damaging the lake’s integrity, it was home to a massive fishing industry. According to a New York Times article from 2002, the fishing industry in the Aral Sea employed nearly 40,000 fishermen and countless local trappers. One in six fish caught in the Soviet Union for consumption was caught in the Aral Sea. Yet, the lake was sacrificed in the name of agriculture. What could be so important to destroy one of the world’s largest bodies of water and destroy tens of thousands of jobs? Cotton. White gold. The rise of Central Asian cotton Early 20th century cotton field (Credit: Library of Congress) One of the main goals of the Politburo was not only to create a more sustainable food source for their Central Asian peoples but also to create a valuable export crop that they could profit off of. The target for this plan was cotton, which is still one of the world’s largest cash crops. Cotton fields were ordered and planted and soon, vast swaths of previously unused land were now growing large amounts of raw cotton. The plan was a good one in terms of location. China and India both had large and growing textile industries that required massive amounts of cotton in order to keep running. If implemented properly, the Soviets would have a constant supply of the fiber, that would always be in demand. Instead of having to export the materials halfway around the globe, they could easily export it to their close neighbors. The plan worked at the expense of the Aral Sea. From 2000–2004, Uzbekistan was listed as the world’s sixth-largest cotton producer behind familiar names such as the United States, India and China. A small arid nation had been transformed by the vision of the Soviet government into a cotton powerhouse. Cotton at a cost Under communism, people were assigned to work at certain cooperatives and farms during certain periods of time. Strict quotas were introduced and regional governors would push their people to the breaking point in order to bring in the required materials to please the central planning boards of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union fell in 1991 but their legacy of forced labor, harsh quotas and a robotic demand to meet them did not. As independent nations, many of the former soviets nationalized their primary industries. The quotas remained in place and in order to fill them, without the vast resources of the Soviet Union, they turned to child labor and worse in order to continue the production. Cotton slavery is often seen as a relic of the past, tied forever to the bloody American Civil War, but is still happening today. In 2012, the popular clothing chain H&M came under fire for using Uzbek cotton which had been harvested by child labor. A brief but glaring spotlight was thrown onto the Central Asian cotton industry and the results were disturbing. Children as young as five were forced to pick cotton, by hand, alongside dozens of other men and women every year during the harvest. The international outrage was loud and, in response, Uzbekistan officially banned the use of children in the cotton fields. That was in 2012. The Uzbek government was not eager to damage one of their only profitable exports and instead they turned to a system of forced labor. Since the cotton industry is controlled by the government, they feel that it is in their right to press other government employees into the fields during the harvest. The result is a system of forced labor that befalls all government employees in Uzbekistan during harvest time. Usually from October into November, everyone from teachers, doctors, government accountants and others, are forced into the fields to pick cotton by hand. Each person is given a daily quota, some reportedly up to 60 kilograms, and turned out into the fields at the crack of dawn, not being allowed to stop until they have turned in their assigned amount. It doesn’t matter if you are a fifty-year-old teacher with asthma or a sixty-year-old doctor with a bad back, everyone is required to participate. The official punishment for refusing is dismissal from your job but many say that the real punishments can be much more severe including prison time, torture, and or exile from Uzbekistan. Despite some companies trying to take a stand against the use of Uzbek cotton, many tons of the fiber still make it into the factories that spin our clothes today. It is almost unfathomable to think but it is true. Cotton slavery is alive and well. A destructive legacy A propaganda map showing a web of military deterrence against the USSR 1961 (Public domain) Ronald Regan called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. As we continue to peel back the atrocities, intended or otherwise, committed by the Soviet government it is not hard to see why he said that. From the late 1950s into the early 1960s, a simple idea led to a complete transformation of a region. Diverting all of the water from two of the regions largest rivers dried up one of the largest lakes in the world in mere decades. What was once a lush and fertile lake is now a lifeless salt pan. The destruction of the Aral Sea has been called one of the greatest ecological catastrophes of all time, and it was caused entirely by man. Now, unless something dramatically changes, the Aral Sea will be completely gone in a few short years. In its place, a new industry rose. Hundreds of new cotton farms appeared and consumed thousands of acres. The harsh quotas imposed by the Soviets combined with the world’s insatiable demand for cotton led to demeaning and dangerous working conditions that did not disappear. Children were used in the fields. Now, adults are conscripted into forced harvests. The ex-Soviet nations are still fighting over the rapidly diminishing water resources of the Syr and Amu rivers. Many fear that their consumption and environmental mismanagement will create problems that last a generation or longer. Sadly, it is very likely that there is an item, or many, of clothing in your possession which was spun from cotton picked by children or by forced slave labor. Yet, many have no clue. When you begin to mess with the natural order of things on such a titanic scale, the results are often unpredictable. That is how an idea hatched by the Soviet Politburo led to an unprecedented irrigation project which, in turn, led to the creation of an artificial cotton state which now shelters a modern-day example of slavery and forced labor. The more you know.

https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/how-soviet-engineering-led-to-modern-day-cotton-slavery-c5c4d4c4943d

['Grant Piper']

2020-09-15 19:41:30.174000+00:00

['Technology', 'Slavery', 'World', 'History', 'Industry']

Branch Technology Raises $11M to Expand Capabilities for Enterprise Partnerships

Chattanooga, TN, December 8, 2020 — Branch Technology, a disruptive technology company at the forefront of construction-scale 3D printing, is excited to announce the closing of an $11M funding round led by EquipmentShare, with oversubscribed support from Brick & Mortar Ventures, Chattanooga Renaissance Fund, and other previous investors. The Branch Leadership Team “We are excited about the addition of EquipmentShare to our strategic team of investors and partners,” said Platt Boyd, Founder-CEO of Branch Technology. “Together with past investment from Brick & Mortar Ventures, Bonaventure Capital, LaunchTN, and Metaprop, we are collectively revolutionizing the construction industry.” Branch Technology’s Advanced Design and Manufacturing Facility Including the Series A round raised in 2018, Branch has raised more than $22M with strategic investors to create a world-class team, the largest fleet of construction scale 3D printers, and multiple product lines, all within their 40,000sf digital manufacturing facility. This new investment will allow Branch to continue the growth of its team with additional industry experts focused on building science, software development, and engineering, as well as expand the capabilities and scale of its robotic production fleet. Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union Design Miami Pavilions The construction industry as a whole has been analog for far too long, and Branch is focused on creating next-generation construction material for the digital age. Mitch Lewandowski, the Chief Commercial Officer for Branch Technology, mentioned that “This funding supports several enterprise relationships that will officially launch in 2021 and accelerates new joint capabilities that will serve the broader construction market.” As additive manufacturing proves its ability to transform the construction industry, Branch has seen a sharp increase in strategic and developer partnerships. As the company expands, so does its capacity to develop more advanced offerings for its industry-leading Cellular Fabrication (C-Fab®) composite 3D printing process. C-Fab® combines industrial robotics, sophisticated geometric algorithms, and a novel “Freeform” printing technique that allows material to solidify in free space. This technology is used at construction-scale to produce 3D printed building cladding, optimized composite products, and off-world construction; the applications are increasing every day.

https://medium.com/@branch-technology/branch-technology-raises-11m-to-expand-capabilities-for-enterprise-partnerships-eed4bb00bffd

['Branch Technology']

2020-12-10 15:11:10.207000+00:00

['Robotics', '3D Printing', 'Investing', 'Technology', 'Construction']

Leading the change in security communications

How limited WFP seed funding grew the Telecommunications Security Standards (TESS) project into a powerful inter-agency service By Emma Wadland On a sun-baked hill overlooking Kigali, Rwanda, workers from dozens of humanitarian agencies set up telecommunications repeaters side by side, dotting the drumlin with equipment. It was 1994 and the country was embroiled in genocide. Despite the heightened security risks, there were no defined security communications standards or procedures keeping humanitarians safe. In fact, it was typical to see United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations show up to emergencies, as they did in Rwanda, with their own equipment and protocols, working in parallel. “Without guidelines and uniform standards, all the technology is useless,” says Peter Casier, Telecommunications Security Standards (TESS) Senior Programme Manager for the World Food Programme. He was also on that hill in Kigali. Checking to make sure security communication is up to TESS standards in the Central African Republic, 2020. Photo: WFP/ETC The TESS project arrived on the scene in 2018, fuelled by seed funding from the World Food Programme (WFP) and a belief that clear procedures and standards can stop the humanitarian sector from repeating security communications mistakes and duplicating efforts at enormous cost. Mobile phones, for example, are used more and more in field operations but there were no criteria for employing them as a security communications tool. UN radio rooms, now known as Security Operations Centres (SOCs), never had clear guidelines for what is expected from them even though they provide a critical security service, managing complex data, systems, and applications. “These people are core to operations: but it was never clear what we expect from them?” Peter says. Starting with missions in Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal in 2018, TESS demonstrated that proposed upgrades to VHF radio networks were unnecessary and wouldn’t improve efficiencies. And just in these three countries, this observation led to savings of about US$ 1.2 million. Beyond savings, TESS became synonymous with “inter-agency collaboration” tackling complex technical and procedural issues in technology and security. In a whirlwind over the next two years, the TESS project –supported by WFP’s Fast IT Telecommunications Emergency and Support Team (FITTEST) and in close collaboration with the WFP Technology Division and the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC) — standardized security communications infrastructure designed for humanitarians in an astonishing 62 countries, saving the common UN system a tenfold of the annual TESS costs. Burkina Faso is one of these countries. When terrorist insurgencies increased there in 2019, the UN system opened five new field offices, where under the guidance and support of TESS, the interagency team coordinated by WFP put the new TESS standards to work. Each of these field offices would have their local Security Operations Centers run from Ouagadougou, the capital city, rather than in field locations. This not only saved the common UN system about US$ 35,000 per month, but also improved efficiency and reduced the number of required field staff. A watershed moment in June 2020 saw the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) and the Interagency Security Management Network (IASMN) asking TESS to lead an interagency working group that eventually, in less than a year, defined all the UN’s security communications procedures, guidance and standard operating procedure (SOPs). Suddenly, TESS went from a purely technologist service provider role into a position to contribute a critical part of UN security policies. In another first, TESS and its interagency partners were one of the initial parties to conduct satellite testing of the new Starlink network with SpaceX, well before this service became publicly available. Equally, TESS partnered with other key security telecommunications providers, to help design and test prototype equipment and services, keeping abreast of all newer technologies. Cargo planes, technicians, logistics and time are all needed to set up communications connectivity in an emergency. This new technology, which TESS is testing, will “dramatically change how we will provide connectivity to operations, and drastically reduce the costs of communications,” Peter says. Imagine, for instance, being able to pack a satellite the size of a pizza in your suitcase and set up the self-configured solution in a matter of minutes? While for the first two years, TESS was financed by WFP seed funding, as of January 2020, TESS services have been fully covered by interagency security funds, managed by UNDSS. Based on TESS’ success, UNDSS and the IASMN requested to convert the project into a permanent service called {TESS+}, which started in January 2021, keeping one eye on field security and the other on innovation and agility. In addition to being the definitive source on interagency compliance with UN security communications standards, {TESS+} saves WFP US$ 1.76 million per year on investment. The priceless bottom line, though, are the humanitarian lives protected in operations all over the world by smart security protocols and standardized equipment. As {TESS+} has proven, a little bit of seed funding can go a long way. To learn more about TESS, go here.

https://medium.com/@wfpinnovation/leading-the-change-in-security-communications-af3a373810e

['Wfp Innovation Accelerator']

2021-07-02 08:25:37.897000+00:00

['Security', 'Technology', 'Telecommunications', 'Humanitarian', 'Wfp']

Terminal Team Values in Action

The following post was contributed by Terminal’s VP of Marketing, Elisabeth Hawkins Something magical happened last week. All of the Terminal employees, both remote and those spread across six different offices in the US and Canada, descended on our flagship office in Kitchener-Waterloo. This was the first time in our company’s history that every single Terminal employee was in the same place at the same time. We had a ton of fun meeting teammates face-to-face and changing up the day-to-day we usually spend on Slack and Google Hangouts collaborating across vast distances, but one of the best parts of bringing everyone together was our time spent at The Food Bank of Waterloo Region. This was a special experience for a few reasons, not the least of which it was the most genuine example I’ve ever encountered of a company living out all of its values in a single exercise. Company values are something that we’ve all encountered, but more often than not, they feel like they are about as genuinely intended as one of those posters in a stressful workplace with a cat barely clinging onto a tree branch that says “Hang in There.” Put another way, corporate values typically feel like an afterthought or a band-aid fix for a lack of a strong culture. I can vouch that Terminal is not in that camp. Our values are very intrinsic to how the company was built and the way in which we approach the communities of which we’re privileged to be a part. Terminal Values 1. Win as a Team. 2. Awesome Standard. 3. Own it. 4. Global Citizen, Local Champion. 5. Agents of Growth. 6. People First. With one of our main offices in Kitchener-Waterloo, our commitment isn’t just to participate in the tech community; rather, it’s to make an impactful contribution to the community as a whole. So with bringing the entire team together, it was a priority for us to spend a good chunk of that time demonstrating and reaffirming that commitment. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, I’m going to turn it over to the photos to speak to how Terminal’s values came to life. Win as a Team. We broke into small cross-functional groups and raced against one another during one of our Food Bank activities to see which group could pack the most bags of potatoes. There may have been individual teams that stood out, but collectively we all got a Win as a Team participating together. Awesome Standard. We were lucky enough to be the first group to use the new food prep facility at the Waterloo Food Bank (and got to set an awesome standard) by breaking down squash with the goal of preserving as much of the edible portions as possible so that it could be frozen and preserved beyond its season. Own it. Can’t do food prep without owning hygiene! Co-founder Luke Finney and Sourcer Graham Rath were up to code and up to the task of preparing squash to be sliced and diced. This wasn’t a task either Luke or Graham are used to “owning,” but they definitely took the value to heart and got the job done for the team. Global citizen, Local Champion. Becky from The Waterloo Region Food Bank taking us on a tour of their massive facilities and showing our global group all of the local entities that they support with food distribution. Agents of Growth. This is only a small portion of the results from our potato-bagging competition. Starting with thousands of unorganized potatoes, our team worked together to play our small part in fueling the growth of the Food Bank’s new farm donations program. Each bag of potatoes will be distributed to organizations in the community that need them most. People First. At the end of the day, that’s really what it is all about. These statistics, that hang in the sorting room of the Waterloo Region Food Bank, are a stark reminder of what a community can do when it comes together. Think 680,000 lbs of community-sourced food donations, and the recipients of those donations — 37% of whom are children.

https://medium.com/the-terminal-input/terminal-team-values-in-action-58114d9d23db

[]

2018-11-15 19:43:34.507000+00:00

['Startup', 'Remote Team', 'Canada', 'Technology', 'Team Building']

Robinhood Opens Crypto Trading for New Yorkers

Robinhood Opens Crypto Trading for New Yorkers Customers can now invest in seven cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and ethereum, and track price movements and news for 10 other crypto assets. Source: Robinhood Robinhood Crypto is set to launch for residents of New York State Thursday. The New York launch comes five months after Robinhood, which was initially founded as a free consumer stock-trading app, received a virtual currency activities license (aka the BitLicense) and a money transmitter license from New York State. “We’ve introduced millions of people to equity investing on Robinhood, and want to do the same for everyone interested in crypto, so launching in New York is a crucial next step,” Josh Elman, VP of product, told Cheddar by email Wednesday. Robinhood has been adamant about its plans to “democratize access to the American financial system” — something of a chorus among fintech startups. Operating in New York is obviously an integral part of achieving mainstream and institutional adoption, with 20 million consumers and the largest financial hub in the world. Historically, New York regulators have been more rigorous in their approach to cryptocurrency businesses than other states, an unpopular approach among many in the crypto industry. But industry leaders, including Robinhood, Square, Circle, and Coinbase and others, hope that by complying with New York’s requirements, they can bring crypto closer to the incumbent financial system. New York has granted BitLicences to 18 companies since introducing the license in 2015. When Robinhood first introduced its zero-commission cryptocurrency trading service in January 2018 it became something of a gateway drug for users who would then move on to other Robinhood products like equities and options. “We heard from lots of our customers that they want crypto to be a part of their investment strategy,” Elman said. Robinhood Crypto customers can currently invest in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, Dogecoin on Robinhood Crypto and track price movements and news for 10 other crypto assets. The fintech startup is valued at $5.6 billion, after its last funding round which closed in March 2018. Robinhood has raised $539 million in capital to date and last fall revealed it’s preparing for an eventual IPO. The company now boasts six million users in the U.S. across the platform, compared to four million this time last year. Crypto trading is available in 39 states, compared to 16 last year. The company declined to specify how many of its users are active on Robinhood Crypto.

https://medium.com/cheddar/robinhood-opens-crypto-trading-for-new-yorkers-d56d2eac8a18

['Tanaya Macheel']

2019-05-23 15:35:50.272000+00:00

['Cryptocurrency', 'Business', 'Fintech', 'Technology']

Crypto Adoption on the rise in Major Industries

We read a lot about how cryptocurrency and blockchain technology will radically transform major industries in the not too distant future, but what about now? There are in fact, many key organisations, industries and brands that have already adopted the cryptocurrency revolution! Below are a few examples of those that have embraced the crypto world to help solve business problems and enhance their consumer experience. Bitcoin for Charity In recent years charities have seen a significant fall in donations and a lack of trust due to frequent reports about the misuse of funds. A recent report showed that in 2017 charity donations in the US were down 11% in the past 7 years, while the 2017 CAF World Giving Index reported that the UK fell out of the ‘top 10 most generous countries in the world’ list. Recognising the need to improve their public image charities such as Breast Cancer Support, Save the Children and The Water Project have started to accept donations via cryptocurrency. This allows these charities to reach a larger international audience and helps to appeal to younger donors by making it as easy as possible to donate. Accepting donations in cryptocurrency provides peace of mind to the donors that part of their donations are not being spent on timely transaction fees. Earlier this year it was reported that donors contributed nearly $70 million in cryptocurrency to their favourite charity — Bitcoin giving is on the rise! Crypto Restores trust in Entertainment The entertainment industry is one of the most profitable industries in the world . As an industry where a high percentage of their target market are millennials, the adoption of the cryptoverse is vital to the continued success of this space. This is something that production and distribution studio Lionsgate, famous for bringing the likes of Hunger Games and Twilight to the big screen recognised back in 2015, when they integrated cryptocurrency into their online payment system. Although they have not yet made it possible to purchase cinema tickets to movie premieres via crypto, the company did offer a 25% discount on a selection of TV box sets and movies to those choosing to pay via crypto at the launch of the crypto initiative. One company that is offering the option of paying for cinema tickets via crypto is Thailand’s major cinema chain, Major Cineplex Group . Cineplex group will use Thailand’s government accepted online payment system Rapidz Pay, which uses blockchain technology to accept all payments in crypto. Another company looking into the possibility of crypto as a payment option for tickets is Ticketmaster. Ticker fraud is a big issue around the world, one that is very difficult to combat and has resulted in the loss of trust for many online ticket sales companies. The use of decentralised technology will help to eliminate counterfeit tickets, will help to restore trust and will ensure that the younger generation of music fans are able to purchase their ticket with ease, peace of mind and higher security. Accepting cryptocurrency as a payment option offers greater choice and accessibility to the next generation of online customers and marks an acceptance of cryptocurrency within the entertainment industry, which is a huge accomplishment! Crypto for the Greater good in Retail Recognising that cryptocurrency payments are the future for global trade, renowned vegan cosmetic skincare giant Lush now accepts online payments in Bition. This allows customers around the globe to pay the same price for their products without incurring currency fluctuations and transaction fees. Lush is committed to ethical practice and as part of their digital currency initiative, they also plan to develop new ways of working with charity groups across the world and are exploring blockchain technology possibilities for building an ethical viewpoint — we are looking forward to reading more about this! Another renowned company that has seen the crypto light is US retail giant Walmart who are in the process of developing a system that will allow customers the opportunity to manage their electricity bills with cryptocurrency — an initiative that they believe will lead to lower energy costs. Walmart is also experimenting with blockchain technology to help to eliminate the chances of contamination from produce exports by tracking all of its produce from the farm or factory to the customer. This not only emphasises it’s quality of fresh fruit and vegetables but provides a tamperless system that will be vital when it comes to identifying certain items in the case of a contamination issue. Energy Giants Embrace Blockchain The oil and gas industry is considered to be one of the biggest sectors in the world, one which is no stranger to technology innovations. And so, it comes as no surprise that the world’s largest energy suppliers including BP, Shell and Statoil have partnered on a new blockchain based trading platform set to be fully operational by the end of this year. The partnership follows a number of experiments that have taken place where blockchain has been used to track energy trading and has proven that it can improve the efficiency and reliability of the trading process while reducing administrative risks and costs. Blockchain technology will allow energy firms to redefine and improve today’s system while increasing profitability. Now that the big players have placed blockchain on the map, it is only a matter of time before we see the whole oil and gas industry adopting blockchain technology and perhaps even cryptocurrency in the not too distant future. Cryptocurrency Whisky Investments Whisky is one of the biggest industries in the UK, as the most traded spirit in the world it faces some big challenges, such as the issue of ‘Counterfeit whisky’, where illegitimate spirits are being bottled and sold as quality scotch around the world. This issue is not just damaging for this industry but it has potentially deadly consequences for the consumers. This has been a long-standing problem that has been difficult to overcome until the dawn of blockchain technology this is! By using blockchain technology it is possible to trace each whisky bottles journey from the distillery, to the supplier network and on to the customer, helping to ensure authenticity. This is something that independent distillery, Ardnamurchan recognised when they became the first whisky distillery in scotland to use the technology to trace it’s bottles enabling a new era of product authentication. The trial was a huge success and the distillery are continuing to use the blockchain technology this time for the promotion of their latest Whisky in partnership with Edinburgh distiller, Fusion Whisky. We are also starting to see cryptocurrency adoption from within the whisky sector. Earlier this year CaskCoin announced the world’s first whisky investment fund with cryptocurrency. Each purchase of a CaskCoin gives investors a share in every cask in the CaskCoin whisky collection which includes a selection of ages malts from some of the most renowned scotch whisky distillers including the Macallan, Dalmore, and Glenlivet distilleries. Essentially the more coins you invest in the more whisky you will own! By marrying the age old tradition of distilling with the innovative revolution of cryptocurrency and investment these companies are setting an example of how a traditional industry can be taken to the next level and appeal to the digital age. Crypto for Craft Beer The craft beer revolution transformed one of the world’s favourite drinks, changing the way people see and drink beer. Now we can choose from tropical flavours, spicy undertones and colourful bottles, something that has proven popular with millennials as a generation who appreciate innovation, quality and variety. In the UK alone there are over 2000 craft breweries with one of the most notable being Brewdog, which recently launched the very first cryptocurrency bar in London! The cashless bar based in Canary Wharf accepts BTC and BCT for all drinks, the price of which will depend on the price movements for that day, which is displayed on a large screen above the bar. move for a brand that’s customer base is predominantly millennials, a generation that is embracing the cryptocurrency revolution at a fast pace. These are just a few examples of companies that have already recognised the power of the cryptocurrency revolution and blockchain technology. We are excited to see how more businesses will make use of this powerful new world in the coming months! As a consumer, it’s important that you take the time to learn about this technology now and keep up to date with advances from within the space. If you don’t you risk being left behind! If you would like to learn more about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, download B21Life, our free cryptocurrency education and training app. It all starts with education!

https://medium.com/b21official/crypto-adoption-on-the-rise-in-major-industries-168f33475dde

['Rhea Craib']

2018-11-16 14:27:21.992000+00:00

['Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto']

A Brief Introduction to PEACH

A Platform for Enhanced Analytics and Computational Healthcare? Let me tell you a bit about it. What exactly is PEACH? PEACH is a unique collaboration between the Computer Sciences Department at University College London (UCL) and University College London Hospitals (UCLH), investigating the overlap of traditional healthcare, IT and data sciences. The founders are Dr. Dean Mohamedally from UCL and Dr. Navin Ramachandran from UCLH. Our projects aim to tackle problems in different areas of Healthcare IT, ranging from information modelling systems, through realtime analytics, workflow management and user interfaces. Why did we choose that name? Well it makes for a good acronym, which is a fine start. The name is also wide-reaching in its scope, which matches our own ambitions. What are we currently working on? We will hopefully tell you a lot more about the projects in the coming weeks. But as an overview, we currently have 27 students and their overseeing teaching assistants, working on: An open source medical data store, compliant with the openEHR specification. A design guide and UI library based on modern frontend frameworks, optimised for healthcare data. Reusable workflow components to support rapid prototyping of future applications. A messaging platform for both healthcare workers and patients. A chatbot to explore the use of conversational UI when engaging patients. A cancer health record and patient pathway manager (a prototype combination of multiple sub-projects). A clinical trials database. A realtime cloud analytics platform based on a kappa stream/batch architecture. A data anonymisation/generation tool. An augmented/mixed reality platform for exploration of imaging and dashboard data. Where to from here? The current projects are all exploratory in nature. But we are getting some really interesting results, which we hope to share with you soon. We learn from our mistakes and build on our successes - iteration at its best! If you want to join us on our journey, please get in touch! Navin

https://medium.com/ucl-peach/a-brief-introduction-to-peach-2d2023dd5c

['Navin Ramachandran']

2017-01-29 00:22:10.372000+00:00

['Healthcare', 'Cancer', 'Augmented Reality', 'Health Technology', 'Conversational UI']

Checklist while selecting a POS

POS is fast becoming an important tool for the success of an business. It gives the exact picture of the business, helps you avoid fraud, improve efficiency and eases management of the store. If the POS goes down even for 10 minutes the business would reach a standstill. You need to be meticulous when choosing the POS. You can’t really change it everyday. Once bought you are stuck with the POS for sometime, due to fear of change. Below is our checklist that you can use while selecting a POS. Ease of use Getting intelligent employees is getting tougher by the day for an brick and mortar store. Employees also leave jobs frequently. The POS needs to be as simple as possible, so that a person with minimum skills can use the POS. The speed of billing also improves with a simple POS. A complex POS would mean that lot of features are not used in spite of them being available. Customer database Knowing your customer is paramount. After all customer is god. Right now promotions are sent to all customers, we don’t know if a customer is buying lesser from the store or if he no longer buys from you. All of these have to change for a store to sustain business and grow. Go for a POS that helps you collect customer details and helps you analyze it. This will help in better serving the customer and also collect the invaluable customer data. All the billion-dollar valuation of e-commerce stores are based on their customer database. Get ready to compete with them. Go online Locally installed POS’s are becoming the thing of the past. Monitoring and updating a local POS remotely is not possible. Any bug or update in the POS means a technician needs to come to the premise. You never get the latest features of the POS meaning you might be still stuck in stone age while others are moving forward. Go online and keep yourself updated on the status of the business. Using the latest technology available means you are improving the business everyday. When going online it is important the POS works fine when the internet disconnects. We at SlickPOS have built a solution that works seamlessly both online and offline. Customer support The POS falls in the critical path of any business. Reliability of the POS is the most important criteria while selecting a POS. Reliability means the system should be stable. But issues tend to happen with any software product. The key metric is how long it takes to get the issue fixed. Even if there are fewer features and the POS is little pricey, go for it if the product has good support. Avoid POS’s done by one person, because you never know when they would shut down. Customer support also becomes questionable. Try to go with a trusted vendor. Reports Lot of us underestimate the power of reports. Business owners get a POS to make day-to-day operations easier. But they ignore the valuable insights that can be gained from the data collected. If a business owner gets intelligent reports from the POS it can improve the efficiency, save cost and even improve customer satisfaction. The reports can be as simple as sales pattern of an item, customer segmentation etc.. The POS you choose should have a good reporting platform, if not an intelligent one. Integrations Choose solutions that integrate with other tools you use for the business like accounting, delivery management etc… This avoids rework and error. With the technology available these things have become easier. Automation reduces a lot of headaches for the business. Vend is one such POS that provides a lot of integrations for your business. We are working hard to make SlickPOS check all the items in the checklist. To know tips and tricks to grow your retail business, follow us on Facebook or Twitter. This article was originally posted on my own site.

https://medium.com/slickpos/checklist-while-selecting-a-pos-645e3a8022f0

['Saravanakumar Cp']

2017-05-04 05:26:19.246000+00:00

['Retail Industry', 'Retail Technology', 'Retail', 'Point Of Sale Software', 'Point Of Sale']

2020! Shameless Hall of Shame: Ian & Mickey: Daddy Issues #Specials | (Showtime)

➕Official Partners “TVs” TV Shows & Movies ● Watch Shameless Season Special Episode 2020 Eng Sub ● Shameless Season Special Episode 2020 : Full Series ஜ ۩۞۩ ஜ▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭ஜ ۩۞۩ ஜ ஜ ۩۞۩ ஜ▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭▭ஜ ۩۞۩ ஜ Shameless — Season Special, Episode 2020 || FULL EPISODES : Debbie loses track of Franny, while Frank and Franny have a day of weed runs and adventure. Ian and Mickey question who is the “man” in their relationship. Carl gets a new training officer. Lip and Tami help Brad and Cami with their baby. . Shameless Specialx3 > Shameless SSpecialxE3 > Shameless SSpecialE3 > Shameless TVs > Shameless Cast > Shameless Online > Shameless Eps.Special > Shameless Season Special > Shameless Episode 2020 > Shameless Premiere > Shameless New Season > Shameless Full Episodes > Shameless Season Special Episode 2020 > Watch Shameless Season Special Episode 2020 Online Streaming Shameless Season Special :: Episode 2020 SSpecialE3 ► ((Episode 2020 : Full Series)) Full Episodes ●Exclusively● On TVs, Online Free TV Shows & TV Shameless ➤ Let’s go to watch the latest episodes of your favourite Shameless. ❖ P.L.A.Y ► https://www.ontvsflix.com/tv/34307-0-3/shameless.html Shameless Specialx3 Shameless SSpecialE3 Shameless TVs Shameless Cast Shameless Online Shameless Eps.Special Shameless Season Special Shameless Episode 2020 Shameless Premiere Shameless New Season Shameless Full Episodes Shameless Watch Online Shameless Season Special Episode 2020 Watch Shameless Season Special Episode 2020 Online ⭐A Target Package is short for Target Package of Information. It is a more specialized case of Intel Package of Information or Intel Package. ✌ THE STORY ✌ Its and Jeremy Camp (K.J. Apa) is a and aspiring musician who like only to honor his God through the energy of music. Leaving his Indiana home for the warmer climate of California and a college or university education, Jeremy soon comes Bookmark this site across one Melissa Heing (Britt Robertson), a fellow university student that he takes notices in the audience at an area concert. Bookmark this site Falling for cupid’s arrow immediately, he introduces himself to her and quickly discovers that she is drawn to him too. However, Melissa holds back from forming a budding relationship as she fears it`ll create an awkward situation between Jeremy and their mutual friend, Jean-Luc (Nathan Parson), a fellow musician and who also has feeling for Melissa. Still, Jeremy is relentless in his quest for her until they eventually end up in a loving dating relationship. However, their youthful courtship Bookmark this sitewith the other person comes to a halt when life-threating news of Melissa having cancer takes center stage. The diagnosis does nothing to deter Jeremey’s love on her behalf and the couple eventually marries shortly thereafter. Howsoever, they soon find themselves walking an excellent line between a life together and suffering by her Bookmark this siteillness; with Jeremy questioning his faith in music, himself, and with God himself. ✌ STREAMING MEDIA ✌ Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream refers to the procedure of delivering or obtaining media this way.[clarification needed] Streaming identifies the delivery approach to the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies especially to telecommunications networks, as almost all of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio tracks CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the web. For instance, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of this content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content. Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, an activity in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user may use their media player to get started on playing digital video or digital sound content before the complete file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can connect with media other than video and audio, such as for example live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are considered “streaming text”. This brings me around to discussing us, a film release of the Christian religio us faith-based . As almost customary, Hollywood usually generates two (maybe three) films of this variety movies within their yearly theatrical release lineup, with the releases usually being around spring us and / or fall respectfully. I didn’t hear much when this movie was initially aounced (probably got buried underneath all of the popular movies news on the newsfeed). My first actual glimpse of the movie was when the film’s movie trailer premiered, which looked somewhat interesting if you ask me. Yes, it looked the movie was goa be the typical “faith-based” vibe, but it was going to be directed by the Erwin Brothers, who directed I COULD Only Imagine (a film that I did so like). Plus, the trailer for I Still Believe premiered for quite some us, so I continued seeing it most of us when I visited my local cinema. You can sort of say that it was a bit “engrained in my brain”. Thus, I was a lttle bit keen on seeing it. Fortunately, I was able to see it before the COVID-9 outbreak closed the movie theaters down (saw it during its opening night), but, because of work scheduling, I haven’t had the us to do my review for it…. as yet. And what did I think of it? Well, it was pretty “meh”. While its heart is certainly in the proper place and quite sincere, us is a little too preachy and unbalanced within its narrative execution and character developments. The religious message is plainly there, but takes way too many detours and not focusing on certain aspects that weigh the feature’s presentation. ✌ TELEVISION SHOW AND HISTORY ✌ A tv set show (often simply Television show) is any content prBookmark this siteoduced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are usually placed between shows. Tv shows are most often scheduled well ahead of The War with Grandpa and appearance on electronic guides or other TV listings. A television show may also be called a tv set program (British EnBookmark this siteglish: programme), especially if it lacks a narrative structure. A tv set Movies is The War with Grandpaually released in episodes that follow a narrative, and so are The War with Grandpaually split into seasons (The War with Grandpa and Canada) or Movies (UK) — yearly or semiaual sets of new episodes. A show with a restricted number of episodes could be called a miniMBookmark this siteovies, serial, or limited Movies. A one-The War with Grandpa show may be called a “special”. A television film (“made-for-TV movie” or “televisioBookmark this siten movie”) is a film that is initially broadcast on television set rather than released in theaters or direct-to-video. Television shows may very well be Bookmark this sitehey are broadcast in real The War with Grandpa (live), be recorded on home video or an electronic video recorder for later viewing, or be looked at on demand via a set-top box or streameBookmark this sited on the internet. The first television set shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within an extremely short range from the broadcast tower starting in the. Televised events such as the 2020 Summer OlyBookmark this sitempics in Germany, the 2020 coronation of King George VI in the UK, and David Sarnoff’s famoThe War with Grandpa introduction at the 9 New York World’s Fair in the The War with Grandpa spurreBookmark this sited a rise in the medium, but World War II put a halt to development until after the war. The 2020 World Movies inspired many Americans to buy their first tv set and in 2020, the favorite radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “Mr Television” and demonstrating that the medium was a well balanced, modern form of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The firsBookmBookmark this siteark this sitet national live tv broadcast in the The War with Grandpa took place on September Special, 2020 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in SAN FRAShameless CO BAY AREA was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets. ✌ FINAL THOUGHTS ✌ The power of faith, love, and affinity for take center stage in Jeremy Camp’s life story in the movie I Still Believe. Directors Andrew and Jon Erwin (the Erwin Brothers) examine the life span and The War with Grandpas of Jeremy Camp’s life story; pin-pointing his early life along with his relationship Melissa Heing because they battle hardships and their enduring love for one another through difficult. While the movie’s intent and thematic message of a person’s faith through troublen is indeed palpable plus the likeable mThe War with Grandpaical performances, the film certainly strules to look for a cinematic footing in its execution, including a sluish pace, fragmented pieces, predicable plot beats, too preachy / cheesy dialogue moments, over utilized religion overtones, and mismanagement of many of its secondary /supporting characters. If you ask me, this movie was somewhere between okay and “meh”. It had been definitely a Christian faith-based movie endeavor Bookmark this web site (from begin to finish) and definitely had its moments, nonetheless it failed to resonate with me; struling to locate a proper balance in its undertaking. Personally, regardless of the story, it could’ve been better. My recommendation for this movie is an “iffy choice” at best as some should (nothing wrong with that), while others will not and dismiss it altogether. Whatever your stance on religion faith-based flicks, stands as more of a cautionary tale of sorts; demonstrating how a poignant and heartfelt story of real-life drama could be problematic when translating it to a cinematic endeavor. For me personally, I believe in Jeremy Camp’s story / message, but not so much the feature. FIND US: ✔️ https://tinyurl.com/y78865yl ✔️ Instagram: https://instagram.com ✔️ Twitter: https://twitter.com ✔️ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com

https://medium.com/@sh-o-p-st-r/2020-shameless-hall-of-shame-ian-mickey-daddy-issues-specials-showtime-d3ca2a83d2cb

['Sh O P St R']

2020-12-27 04:29:15.215000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'Technology', 'Politics']

Only superheroes accepted in this team

IT Asset Managers have a new bar to clear. When Liz Reich realized that in order to conquer IT Asset Management in a large organization like MasterCard she needed to take a different approach, there was only one decision to make: how to call this group of federated experts around the world and across different areas of the business. Well, there were many decisions, but that’s a one we liked to showcase here. Liz is the VP of The Global League of IT Asset Managers, which applies a new federated concept to an old practice, making it more effective and likely to succeed in certain organizations. We talked to Liz for our series of podcasts — Rockin’IT, where we interview IT leaders to share their success, ideas and passions to inspire us all. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Anchor. Her opinion is that the organization needs to federate the management of IT assets so you can have active material control while embracing the value of different specialty areas that own, know and buy technology. Instead of trying to centralize ITAM power and control everything from within four walls, she enables the business and technology owners with best practices like data capture, lifecycle management, training and assessment opportunities so that they can answer typical questions of their assets with certainty and agility. “Don’t ask a lawyer a question if you don’t want a legal answer” she says — “Bring in the experts on the areas that they run. When we federate asset management we bring that business knowledge to work, plan and allocate resources based on vetted and reviewed data that is curated by the owners” A point that we found very interesting on how this came to be, is the influence that Liz’s background had on her current role. She spent a long time at Monsanto leading their IT sourcing department and that background has helped a lot in evolving her work, where she advocates for a close relationship between sourcing and asset management throughout the whole lifecycle. “If you are buying a car, the time to get a deal on oil changes is when you are buying the car, not later.. so, a better maintenance program, special support and improved lifecycle for technology need to be negotiated at the time of sourcing, baked into the contract and as part of the negotiation strategy” On complexity and maturity In this interview, Liz also talks about the challenge of collating data from Hardware and Software from within your organization, with other not-so-classic things like facilities, IP addresses, HVAC controls, and other assets that become part of the business delivery that are not typically tracked in traditional IT Asset Management but offer better ways to manage as a whole to present better decision making opportunities. But we believe that this approach is not for everyone. Not all organiations are this complex, or have gotten to this level of maturity for whatever reason. Liz argues that — “Many companies build their programs based on what they are selling, what they offer today to the market, but when they grow more complex across regions and functions, Spreadsheets and one person-shop don’t work. No longer it’s easy to crowdsource solutions and you need to have repositories, knowledge locations and informed people across the organization”. At that point, you need people, processes and buy in from management and Liz recommends that in order to gain this, you need the right tools to bridge the gap in situations like a software audit. On partnerships MasterCard is a user of Flexera, a global leader in IT asset management and a sponsor of our podcast. We asked her about the value that it provides for her program: “After a highly regimented sourcing process, Mastercard decided to partner with Flexera to be able to achieve opportunities to meet audit requirements. That was instrumental, by and far.”. She also highlights what seems to be a mantra for her on efficiency and value quantification: “now that we have the tool to remediate this audit, what else can we do with it?. Flexera solved a huge problem for me, but the potential was much bigger than that problem, so we looked at what we were trying to solve” MasterCard and the League could answer questions about their assets, like Do I know how old it is? Can I prove I own it? Do I know the products that this asset supports? Can I tie this asset to a contract How are we consuming it And this is crucial and powerful information in the right communities, which she recognizes quickly as a driver for a federated model: “If I have a tool that can centralize this information in one place, but only have a handful of people that can use this information, we have an inefficient way to distribute knowledge. Creating a federated system allows people to self-serve and be effective at leveraging the aggregate data” “Everybody in the role of technology has a role to play in Asset Management […] SAM is both strategic and tactical” Liz chose Tom Petty as her rock band for the episode we recorded. On SaaS “SaaS is a brilliant idea. It allowed people a lot of freedom to acquire and develop services” — but Liz asks herself — “what have we given up with this freedom?, because I still need to track it, and without control you are moving the soap around the tub. We have a fiduciary responsibility to take a stance on our responsibility to track these investments.” This is a great way to communicate the problem that many face with the rise in unsanctioned (shadow) SaaS and Cloud spend. In one hand flexibility and agility are important for innovation, but there are countless terror stories of organizations that have no visibility on their spend, and risk, given the lack of governance for these architectures. On leadership Liz is a recognized Leader. She’s been a champion of creating communities. If you want to contribute value to the organization, you got to know the cost (material, human, financial) before you talk about a value statement when you are looking to make decisions and build cases. It’s all about good quality data. We closed the interview asking Liz about advice for young women and girls that want to get into IT and be successful. “You need to ask the difficult questions. Nobody should be told ‘no’ just because of your nature, gender or how you ask questions”. Liz is a rockstar of the IT world, and we enjoyed this time a lot. We have three asks of you:

https://medium.com/rockinit/only-superheroes-accepted-in-this-team-930784e689c5

['Alejandro Lavie']

2020-12-27 05:44:39.669000+00:00

['It Asset Management', 'Information Technology', 'Software Asset', 'Leadership', 'Asset Optimization']

7 Tips To Help You Spend Less Time On Emails

1. Automate your responses Many professionals receive dozens of emails daily. The thing is, many of them usually require similar responses, such as “Thank you,” “Got it,” “Awesome!” “Will look into it,” etc. That’s one reason why G-mail offers reply suggestions when you set out to respond to a message in your inbox. In addition to these suggestions, you can set up your own canned responses to make it easier and quicker to send replies. To do this in G-mail, here are the steps: Click on the settings gear found at the top right of your email page 2. Select the “Advanced” tab 3. Look for and enable the “Templates” option from the list of items displayed 4. Save changes and exit settings 5. Go ahead and compose a new email 6. Type the message you want to use as a canned response 7. Once finished, click on the three dots located at the lower right of the compose window. 8. Select “Templates” then “Save draft as template” 9. Give your template a name 10. Repeat the process until you have the desired amount of canned responses When you are ready to use a canned response, you only need to click on the three dots on the compose window, select “Templates” and then select the appropriate template name you want to use.

https://medium.com/illumination/7-tips-to-help-you-spend-less-time-on-emails-849e999ddcaf

['Casey Botticello']

2020-12-15 01:47:54.170000+00:00

['Productivity', 'Technology', 'Email', 'Time Management', 'Writing']

Quantum Physics and Technology is that the new world to maneuver.

So i feel learning quantum technology can become progressively vital as time goes on, thus quantum physics, quantum computation, loads of these problems have traditionally been the type of factor that’s loads of elementary study, it exists inside the workplace but not very ample else outside of that. As years of gone on it is obtaining progressively near to being one thing that really starts to make impact within the globe and because it will, you are going to own to begin group action it with actual systems that exist already. Stuff that is historically lived in additional of the engineering type of apply things like telecommunications, applied science, machine learning, all that sort of stuff and then the quantum school are regarding delivery that existing type of basic base technology. Group action it with stuff that is already reasonably around in engineering and learning the way to use them each along. You use physical science each single day as you approach your life one thing you most likely do not realize as a result of once folks observe physical science together with American state, we tend to tend to emphasize a lot of crazy aspects of it, like particles that may be separated by the scale of the universe and still communicate with one another instantly or once particles may be in multiple places directly or multiple positions, and this tends to form physical science. appear to be this very strange abstract crazy reasonably physics that does not have a lot of to try and do with our everyday lives however this could not be beyond the reality thus this can be an inventory of 5 ways that, we tend to use physical science each single day? Number one on the list is that the complete basis of the modern world it’s pcs and computers wouldn’t exist if It wasn’t for our understanding of quantum physics? The essential component of computer is that the electronic transistor that could be a little very little switch. it is very helpful as a result of it does not have any moving elements in it that is allowed America to miniaturize it and have billions of them on one chip all change a billion times per second. Transistors use the special electronic properties of semiconductor that will be a semiconductor and so the principles of semiconductors square measure settled by natural science and by the quantum technology. Now electrons in a very semiconductor will solely be in sure energy states and you’ll use these energy states to make on on-off switches. currently you cannot do an entire ton with simply pure atomic number 14, you wish to engineer these materials by adding in additional components like element or atomic number 5 to create materials with totally different energy levels associated by combining those materials you’ll be able to make a junction wherever commonly electrons do not flow till you apply a voltage then electrons can flow and that is however you create an on and off switch. For more read Please Click on the link https://besttechnologysite.com/quantum-physics-and-technology-is-that-the-new-world-to-maneuver/

https://medium.com/@prashantpanchole420/quantum-physics-and-technology-is-that-the-new-world-to-maneuver-1e7fed26f64c

['Prashant Panchole']

2021-05-03 18:03:42.944000+00:00

['Quantum Computing', 'Quantum Mechanics', 'Technology', 'Quantum Physics', 'Quantum']

The Secret of Simple Code

Is there a shortcut to becoming a 10x developer? Is there some magical secret that — if you only knew it — would unlock a whole new world of software development mastery and productivity for you? This is where the doubters are thinking “There are no shortcuts! Everybody needs to practice to get good!” And that’s true enough, but what are the experts of software productivity practicing, and is there one key thing that can make a huge difference? Yes! There is! But even if I share it with you — even if I give it away and spell it out for you in detail— it might take you 10 years to grow into and fully appreciate the simplicity of it. At least, that’s what happened to me. It was spelled out to me in plain English by my high school programming teacher. I was walked step-by-step through the process of applying it using some example code. And it didn’t really sink in until 10 years later. But now, with the benefit of experience, it’s a lesson I appreciate profoundly, and even though I know it’s a lesson you can’t truly appreciate at first glance — I’m going to share it with you. This secret is a key difference between average productivity and 10x productivity. Using the leverage that this secret provides, you can be orders of magnitude more efficient. You can write code that is more reusable and less likely to break when new requirements are introduced and things change in the surrounding code. The secret to being 10x more productive is to gain a mastery of abstraction. A lot of developers treat “abstraction” like it’s a dirty word. You’ll hear (otherwise good) advice like, “don’t abstract too early” or Zen of Python’s famous “explicit is better than implicit,” implying that concrete is better than abstract. And all of that is good advice — depending on context. But modern apps use a huge amount of code. If you printed out the source code of modern top 10 applications, those stacks of paper would compete with the height of skyscrapers, and software costs a lot of money to maintain. The more code you create, the more it costs. Abstraction is the Key to Simple Code The right abstractions can make code more readable, adaptable, and maintainable by hiding details which are unimportant for the current context, and reducing the amount of code required to do the same work — often by orders of magnitude. “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” ~ John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity Abstraction is not a 1-way street. It’s really formed by two complementary concepts: Generalization — Removing the repeated parts (the obvious) and hiding them behind an abstraction. — Removing the repeated parts (the obvious) and hiding them behind an abstraction. Specialization — Applying the abstraction for a particular use-case, adding just what needs to be different (the meaningful). Consider the following code: There’s nothing inherently wrong with the code, but it contains a lot of details that may not be important for this particular application. It includes details of the container/transport data structure being used (the array), meaning that it will only work with arrays. It contains a state shape dependency. It includes the iteration logic, meaning that if you need other operations which also need to visit each element in the data structure, you’d need to repeat very similar iteration logic in that code, as well. It forces repetition which could violate DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). which could violate It includes an explicit assignment, rather than declaratively describing the operation to be performed. It’s verbose. None of that is necessary. All of it can be hidden behind an abstraction. In this case, an abstraction that is so universal, it has transformed the way modern applications are built and reduced the number of explicit for-loops we need to write. “If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh Using the map operation, we can reduce the code to a one-liner by removing the obvious (the parts we’re likely to repeat in similar code), and focusing on the meaningful (just the stuff that needs to be different for our use case: Junior developers think they have to write a lot of code to produce a lot of value. Senior developers understand the value of the code that nobody needed to write. Imagine being the coder who popularized the use of the map operation in programming languages like JavaScript. Map abstracts away details such as the type of data you’re mapping over, the type of data structure containing the data, and the iteration logic required to enumerate each data node in the data structure. It’s improved the efficiency of every app I’ve built in the past decade. Jeremy Ashkenas made several such operations popular in JavaScript, and paved the way for many of the great syntax shortcuts we take for granted now in JavaScript by pioneering their use in CoffeeScript. He made Underscore, which spawned Lodash (still the most popular functional programming utility belt in JavaScript), and Backbone, which popularized MVC architecture in JavaScript and set the stage for Angular and React. John Resig made jQuery, which was so popular and influential, it formed the biggest collection of reusable, encapsulated JavaScript modules (jQuery plugins) until standard Node modules and ES6 modules appeared several years later. jQuery’s selector API was so influential it forms the basis of today’s DOM selection APIs. I still benefit on a nearly daily basis from jQuery’s selection API when I unit test React components. The right abstractions are powerful levers that can impact productivity dramatically. Abstraction is not a dirty word. Modules, functions, variables, classes — all of these are forms of abstraction and the entire reason any of them exist is to make abstraction and composition of abstractions easier. You can’t build complex software without abstractions. Even assembly language uses abstractions — names for instructions, variables for memory addresses, code points to jump to for subroutines (like function calls), etc. Modern software is a layer cake of useful abstractions, and those layers give you leverage. “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” ~ Archimedes The key to simplicity: The secret we’re after — is how to reduce the mountain of code we’re producing — how to get a lot more done with a lot less. When you master that, you will be a 10x programmer. I guarantee it.

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-secret-of-simple-code-a2cacd8004dd

['Eric Elliott']

2020-08-27 20:04:15.930000+00:00

['JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming']

8 New Tools I Learned as a Data Scientist in 2020

8 New Tools I Learned as a Data Scientist in 2020 Making the move from Docker to Live Deployments While 2020 has been a challenging year, I was able to use the transition to remote work to explore new tools to expand my data science skill set. It was the year that I made the transition from data scientist to applied scientist, where I was responsible for not only prototyping data products, but also putting these systems into production and monitoring system health. I had prior experience with tools such as Docker for containerizing applications, but I didn’t have experience with deploying a container as a scalable, load balanced application. While many of the technologies that I learned in 2020 are more commonly associated with engineering rather than data science, it can be useful to learn these tools in order to learn to build end-to-end data products. This is especially true for data scientists working at startups. Here are the technologies I learned in 2020: MLflow Kubernetes NoSQL OpenRTB Java Web Frameworks HTTPS Load Balancing Logging I’ll cover each of these topics in main detail below. The main motivation for getting hands on with all of these different tools was to build a research platform for programmatic advertising. I was responsible for building and maintaining a real-time data product, and needed to explore new tools to deliver on this project. MLflow MLflow is an open source framework for model lifecycle management. The goal of the project is to provide modules that support the development, serving, and monitoring of ML models. I starting using two of these components in 2020: MLflow tracking and Model Registry. The tracking module enables data scientists to record the performance of different model pipelines and visualize the results. For example, it’s possible to try out different feature scaling approaches, regression models, and hyperparameter combinations, and review which pipeline configuration produced the best results. I used this within the Databricks environment, which provides useful visualizations for model selection. I also started using the registry module in MLflow to store models, where a training notebook trains and stores a model, and a model application notebook retrieves and applies a model. One of the useful features in the model registry is the ability stage models prior to deployment. The registry can maintain different model versions and provides the ability to revert to a prior version if an issue is detected. In 2021, I plan on exploring more of the modules in MLFlow, including model serving. Kubernetes Kubernetes is an open source platform for container orchestration. It enables data scientists to deploy containers as scalable web applications, and provides a variety of configuration options for exposing services on the web. While it can be quite involved to set up a Kubernetes deployment from scratch, cloud platforms offered managed versions of Kubernetes that make it easy to get hands-on with this platform. My recommendation for data scientists that want to learn Kubernetes is to use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), because it provides fast cluster start up times and has a great developer experience. Why is Kubernetes so useful? Because it enables teams to separate application development and application deployment concerns. A data scientists can build a model serving container and then hand this off to an engineering team that exposes the service as a scalable web application. In GCP, it also integrates seamlessly with systems for load balancing and network security. However, with managed services such as GKE, there’s less of a barrier to using Kubernetes and data scientists should get hands-on experience with this platform. Doing so enables data scientists to build end-to-end data products. NoSQL While I’ve used a variety of databases throughout my data science career, it wasn’t until 2020 that I first explored NoSQL databases. NoSQL includes databases that implement key-value stores with low latency operations. For example, Redis is an in-memory database that provides sub-millisecond reads. This performance is useful when building real-time systems, where you need to update user profiles as data is received by a web service. For example, you may need to update the attributes of a feature vector that describes user activity, that is passed as input to a churn model and applied within the context of a HTTP post command. In order to build real-time systems, it’s essential for data scientists to get hands on with NoSQL databases. To learn technologies such as Redis, it’s useful to use mock libraries to test out the API prior to deploying to the cloud. OpenRTB OpenRTB is a specification for real-time ad auctions and ad serving. The specification is used across exchanges such as Google Ad Exchange in order to connect publishers selling ad inventory with buyers that want to serve advertisements. I used this protocol to implement a research platform for programmatic user acquisition. While this specification is not broadly applicable to data science, it is useful for data scientists learn how to build systems that can implement a standardized interface. In the case of OpenRTB, this involves building a web service that receives HTTP posts with JSON payloads and returns a JSON response with pricing details. If you’re interested in getting up and running with the OpenRTB specification, Google provides a protobuf implementation. Java Web Frameworks I decided to author the OpenRTB research platform in Java, since I have the most experience with this language. However, Rust and Go are both great alternatives to Java for building OpenRTB systems. Since I selected Java, I needed to select a web framework for implementing the endpoints for my application. While I used Jetty library over a decade ago to build simple web applications with Java, I decided to explore new tools based on benchmarks. I started with the Rapidoid library, which is a lightweight and fast framework for building web applications with Java. However, as I started adding calls to Redis when responding to web requests, I found that I needed to move from the unmanaged to managed approach for serving requests with Rapidoid. I then tried out Undertow which supports blocking IO and found that it outperformed Rapidoid on my benchmark testing. While data scientists aren’t typically authoring in Java, it can be useful to learn how to try out different web frameworks, such choosing between gunicorn and uWSGI for deploying a Python web service. HTTPS Implementing the OpenRTB protocol now requires serving traffic over secure HTTP. Enabling HTTPS for a web service involves setting up web services as a named endpoint via DNS and using a signed certificate for establishing the identity of the endpoint. Securing endpoints on GCP hosted in GKE is relatively straight forward. Once the service is exposed using a node port and service ingress, you need to set up a DNS entry for the service’s IP address and then use a GCP managed certificate to enable HTTPS. It’s useful for data scientists to learn about setting up HTTPS endpoints, because of some of the subtleties in securing services. If end-to-end HTTPS is not required, as in the case of OpenRTB, where HTTP can be used internally between the load balancer and pods in the Kubernetes cluster, then deployment is easier. If end-to-end HTTPS is required, such as a web service that uses OAuth, then the Kubernetes configuration is a bit more complicated, because the pods may need to respond to health pings on a separate port from the port that serves web requests. I ended up submitting a PR to resolve an issue related to this for Plotly Dash applications using OAuth. Load Balancing To scale to OpenRTB volumes of web traffic, I needed to use a load balancing to process over 100k web request per second (QPS). Kubernetes provides the infrastructure to scale up the number of pods serving web requests, but it’s also necessary to configure the cluster in a way that evenly distributes requests across the cluster. Kubernetes has an open issue that causes uneven load across pods with using long-lived connections, which is a recommended configuration for OpenRTB systems. I used the container native load balancing feature available in GKE to alleviate this issue. Getting hands on with load balancing is not common for data scientists working in large organizations, but it’s a useful skill set to build for startups or teams that own end-to-end data products with high request volumes. Logging Deploying a web application also involves setting up monitoring for the system, to determine if any issues are occurring. When building applications with GCP, StackDriver provides a managed system for logging messages, reporting custom metrics, and setting up alerts. I was able to use this system for monitoring uptime, and firing alerts to Slack and SMS when incidents occurred. It’s useful for data scientists to get hands on with logging libraries, to make sure that systems deployed to the cloud are operating as expected. Conclusion In 2020, I learned several technologies that are typically associated with engineering roles. As a data scientist, I learned these tools out of necessity, in order to build and maintain an end-to-end system. While many of these technologies are not broadly applicable to data science, the growing role of applied scientist is creating demand for data scientists with broader tech stack experience.

https://towardsdatascience.com/8-new-tools-i-learned-as-a-data-scientist-in-2020-6dea2f847c32

['Ben Weber']

2020-12-30 21:04:12.623000+00:00

['Technology', 'Cloud Computing', 'Data Science', 'Programming', 'Web Development']

Yet another report on the drive to destroy security by removing passwords

How naïve security professionals can be? An answer is found in this report — “Passwords begone: GitHub will ban them next year for authenticatingGit operations” https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/17/github_bans_passwords/ Aren’t they actually offering a ‘solution’ that can be compared to the ATM that rejects PIN (numbers-only password) and dispenses cash upon the presentation of only a bank/credit card? Ref: “Bizarre Theory of Password-lessAuthentication” The theory is “A ground force can be easily defeated by air attack. Then, removing the ground force from our defense will make our defense securer”. Replace ‘ground force’ with ‘password’, ‘air attack’ with ‘password theft’ and ‘defense’ with ‘cybersecurity’ and we realize that this is what happens when ‘insufficient’ is mixed up with ‘harmful’ in cyberspace < References > Summary and Brief History — Expanded Password System Image-to-Code Conversion by Expanded Password System Proposition on How to Build Sustainable Digital Identity Platform External Body Features Viewed as ‘What We Are’ History, Current Status and Future Scenarios of Expanded Password System Negative Security Effect of Biometrics Deployed in Cyberspace Removal of Passwords and Its Security Effect Availability-First Approach Update: Questions and Answers — Expanded Password System and Related Issues (30/June/2020) < Videos on YouTube> Slide: Outline of Expanded Password System (3minutes 2seconds) Demo: Simplified Operation on Smartphone for consumers (1m41s) Demo: High-Security Operation on PC for managers (4m28s) Demo: Simple capture and registration of pictures by users (1m26s) Slide: Biometrics in Cyber Space — “below-one” factor authentication < Latest Media Articles Published in 2020 Spring> Digital Identity — Anything Used Correctly Is Useful https://www.valuewalk.com/2020/05/digital-identity-biometrics-use/ ‘Easy-to-Remember’ is one thing ‘Hard-to-Forget’ is another https://www.paymentsjournal.com/easy-to-remember-is-one-thing-hard-to-forget-is-another/

https://medium.com/@kokumai/yet-another-report-on-the-drive-to-destroy-security-by-removing-passwords-b95cf6832430

['Hitoshi Kokumai']

2020-12-24 07:53:11.575000+00:00

['Passwords', 'Security', 'Authentication', 'Digital Identity', 'Technology']

Naval Ravikant Will Make You More Intelligent with These Tiny Quotes Full of Incredible Wisdom

Your worldview is your world. If you think the world is screwed, then that’s a problem you own. The good news is you can change it. The difference between sounding smart and being smart is “I don’t know.” Ever been in a meeting where every go-getter pretends to have the answer? They didn’t get the memo. The loudest person in the room or the person with the answer isn’t going to win a career prize or climb the ladder to nowhere faster. If you can’t decide, the answer is no. It’s an easy way to make a decision and feel a lot less regret. It’s okay to have no idea and just say no. You can always change your mind, too, and change your no into a yes. Subtract incentives from advice. Follow the trail of incentives. If you want to become a puppet then listen to experts who charge you money, and then be blind to the irony. The ability to stay calm during conflict is a superpower. Reacting to every damn thing shows a lack of discipline. You don’t have to have the answer straight away when chaos breaks out. You can just sleep on it, wake up tomorrow, and see how you feel. Solutions find you while you sleep and when you relax more. The modern devil is cheap dopamine. The game, Candy Crush, is the best example. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are other great examples. The allure of the shiny red notifications is messing up your dopamine levels. You’re craving dopamine without realizing it. Study what cheap dopamine is. Do a dopamine fast to hit the reset button. You may not be tired after all; you might just be exhausted from playing dopamine tennis with your brain. Internal happiness is reward from being in flow. — Create, meditate, love, play. It clears the mind & leaves us in peace. Worship habits you do in flow. Do them more often. Notice flow. Practice flow. Get into flow. Feel the sense of fulfillment you get from doing the work and putting in effort, without chasing shortcuts that lead nowhere. Notice the timeless feeling of your flow states too. Every single tweet [social media post] costs nothing and has the potential to reach the entire world. — It’s the best lottery ever made. Creating content is a lottery. You never know who you will reach and how you’ll change the world. Anyone can be a content creator — even you. Get started creating content by sharing your thoughts in the form of videos, audio, writing or images. I don’t have time is just saying it’s not a priority. Notice when people say that to you. Don’t be angry. Take a look back at your pitch and see if you thought deeply about them in your ask. Chances are if you’re getting this answer a lot that you didn’t think about the person whose time you want. Smart money is just dumb money that’s been through a crash. Recessions show you the danger of hype and overconfidence. As fast as you can make a million bucks, you can lose the lot. Study recessions. See how important psychology is when it comes to investing and managing your money. Focus on fundamentals not inflated stock prices or sensationalist headlines. Money doesn’t buy happiness — it buys freedom. Freedom to do what you want when you want. Freedom to use your time doing work you enjoy, rather than work you do to pay off debt, for stuff you probably don’t need. You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough. Staying power is the best competitive advantage. Many people give up way too soon. Keep going when everyone else has stopped. Keep going when everybody else is looking for hacks that don’t exist and shortcuts that don’t produce the results they promise. There is no shortcut except doing the work. It’s the mark of a charlatan to try and explain simple things in complex ways and it’s the mark of a genius to explain complicated things in simple ways. There are entire industries built on adding complexity so that companies can charge money to decode the complexity puzzle. The world doesn’t have to be complex. You get to choose to embrace simplicity. Mute the nitpickers, block the outraged, like the kind, follow the insightful. This is how to use social media in one sentence. Treat people well online and offline and you’ll attract all the right people into your life. The world doesn’t need another outraged social media profile run by a person who hasn’t had a nap. A Personal Metric: How much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? A feeling of obligation to go to an office and do some form of work is soul-crushing. Do your best to find work you enjoy. If you can’t find it right away then at least choose work you enjoy as a side-hustle, first. Then see if you can make that work your main source of income.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/naval-ravikant-will-make-you-more-intelligent-with-these-tiny-quotes-full-of-incredible-wisdom-223ca32c8a64

['Tim Denning']

2020-09-15 12:01:01.796000+00:00

['Money', 'Technology', 'Life Lessons', 'Naval Ravikant', 'Startup']

How Technology is Changing Customer Service

Customer service today looks vastly different than it did even ten years ago. Ten years ago, mediocre customer service was almost the expected standard, with long wait-times on phone calls or help emails that wouldn’t be returned for days. And sometimes, even if the customer service wasn’t great, you’d still stay on as a customer. Now, though, technology has changed customer service in so many different ways. As a result, it’s also morphed customers’ expectations, with over 54% of customers across the globe saying that their customer service expectations have risen even over the past few years. Businesses are adapting, which is largely why 40% of American consumers have noticed that more businesses are turning their focus to customer service. We’re seeing more immediate and omnichannel support for higher-quality service than ever before, and this isn’t just a unique perk of great service; it’s an expectation. And while customer expectations are paramount, the underlying cause and solution is one and the same: Technology. How Technology Has Changed Customer Service Technology has undeniably changed customer service in multiple different ways. There are four changes, however, that most significantly impacted customer service: Integrated CRMs leading to more personalized service Live chat functionality offering instantaneous response times Accurate reporting gave insight into needed areas of improvement Mobile features allowed for remote access & improved service Download our free eBook to learn more about how these technological advances have impacted customer service teams and customer expectations all over the globe, and how your business can prepare for the future.

https://medium.com/@patlive/how-technology-is-changing-customer-service-5ba6577d2101

[]

2020-12-16 18:14:39.378000+00:00

['Digital Transformation', 'Customer Service', 'Small Business', 'Technology']

Glossary of Geospatial Terms

Glossary of Geospatial Terms Do you find it hard to find one, cohesive place to understand the fundamentals of the geospatial domain? Well, you’re not alone. I am here to make it happen for you in very simple English — a glossary of some of the most complicated aspects of the geospatial genre. Spatial vs Geospatial Spatial means space, so it is related to space and the position, size, shape, etc. of a particular object (any object, not only on the Earth’s 🌍 surface). Geospatial means the distribution of something in a geographic sense; it refers to entities that can be located by some coordinate system 🌐. Geospatial is that type of spatial data which is related to the Earth’s surface and/or near Earth’s surface. Vector data vs Raster data Vector data is used to present generalizations of objects or features on the Earth’s surface. There are three main types of vector data: points, lines, and polygons. Raster data is the data taken from satellite 🛰images or any other aerial device images. In addition to raster and vector data, there is also LiDAR data (also known as 3D data). 3D data is data that extends the typical latitude and longitude 2-D coordinates and incorporates elevation and or depth into the data. Vector geometry objects a) Point: It is the exact positioning of a real-world geographical area and is represented by a pair of longitude and latitude collectively known as coordinates. Example: [77.59199, 12.99864] Point geometry object (Grey) b) Multipoint: Two or more points in space are called multipoint. Example: Multipoint geometry object (Grey) c) Line string: Connecting points create lines that can be used to represent roads, railway tracks, etc. Example: Line string geometry object (Pink) d) Multiline string: Two or more line string in a space is called Multiline string. Multiline geometry object image (Black) e) Polygon: Connecting lines that create an enclosed area create a polygon. Example: Polygon image f) Multi-polygon: Two or more polygons in space are called Multi Polygon. Multi-polygon image Point in Polygon analysis Let us consider a point, p and a polygon, P. If the point p is inside polygon P then this type of analysis is called Point-in-Polygon analysis. This is how Footfall, Foot Traffic, or Visitors counts are done. Example: Point in Polygon Image Geofencing It is the technique of creating a virtual boundary also called a Geoboundary on the perimeter of any real-world geographical place. For example, consider a racecourse in Bangalore, India that has been geofenced below: Image representation before geofencing the racecourse Image representation after geofencing the racecourse Coordinate Reference System (CRS) or Spatial Reference System 🌐 CRS helps you to precisely relate 2D (coordinates) with real-world places on Earth. CRS is that reference system that helps you flatten the Earth’s surface (3D) to a 2-dimensional surface. Horizontal accuracy This type of accuracy represents the radius of the margin of error that the given coordinates’ measurement can be in meters. Let us say that the horizontal accuracy of a device ID is 500 meters. This means that the device is somewhere within a 500-meter radius from the stated location observations (latitude and longitude). The smaller the horizontal accuracy, the more precise the observation 👍. GeoJSON and Shapefile GeoJSON is a wrapper over a JSON file, which includes spatial attributes as an add-on component to it. You can try creating your own geoJSON file by geofencing any of your favorite locations at geojson.io. Shapefile is a common format file used to store vector data. One cannot edit the shapefile directly as it is not a text file. Mapshaper is an online free web tool to convert GeoJSON to shapefile and vice versa. Global positioning system (GPS) It is a satellite system that helps you get location and time observation of any place 🏨, mobile device 📱, or any GPS-enabled package. Example: Data dictionary of GPS data Topology Topology expresses the spatial relationships between connecting or adjacent vector features (points, polylines, and polygons).

https://medium.com/loctruth/glossary-of-geospatial-terms-8de33a89377

['Manideep Ganji']

2021-05-07 11:29:12.999000+00:00

['Location Intelligence', 'Geospatial', 'GIS', 'Technology', 'Data']

How AI Could Have Prevented the “Great Google Outage”

How AI Could Have Prevented the “Great Google Outage” The Black Mirror-esque Google outage. Still from Black Mirror. Google went down for millions, if not billions of people on December 14th, 2020. Using a Chromebook, I was locked out of my laptop, and couldn’t access any Google services on my phone. In attempts to recover my accounts, I was told that none of my Google accounts existed. As it turns out, the Great Google Outage impacted many countries. For many, this was a wake-up call to how dependent we are on Google. Without access to the Internet, it feels like that Black Mirror episode where people can be locked out of society at the click of a button. Why Outages Happen Outages are nothing new — it’s just surprising when it happens to a behemoth like Google. That said, Google suffered a 5-minute outage back in 2013, causing Internet traffic to drop by 40%. Most of the outage was solved in just 1 minute. Before then, one of the last outages was in 2009. There are many potential causes of outages, including: Server power supply failures. Hardware problems like overheating. External actions like malware. How AI Can Prevent Outages Google is an enormous network, with literally millions of servers around the world. It’d be impossible to have manual oversight into the status of these servers. At that scale, automation is needed to predict outages and monitor server status. Machine learning is great at finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Given historical server performance data, including a column on outages, you could train a machine learning model to predict outages, allowing companies to reduce maintenance costs and prevent these catastrophes. With automated machine learning tools like Obviously.AI, companies can build and deploy AI systems in minutes, rather than the months it would traditionally take. Google’s Great Outage could indeed be used by Google as “training data” to make predictive AI models more accurate. AI finds patterns in data, and with more historical data to look back on, it can more accurately find patterns. Binary Classification This is an example of a binary classification task in machine learning, as you’re predicting a binary outcome: Server live, or server down. This has been commonly used for tasks like predicting power grid outages, and the same concept applies to servers. Potentially predictive data attributes include processor usage, memory usage, disk read/write, latency, throughput, network bandwidth, and more.

https://medium.com/dataseries/how-ai-could-have-prevented-the-great-google-outage-3b493c1537d9

['Frederik Bussler']

2020-12-15 11:33:21.723000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Google', 'AI', 'Servers', 'Information Technology']

5 Ways ASMR Boyfriend Videos Made Me More Affectionate

5 Ways ASMR Boyfriend Videos Made Me More Affectionate “You know me; I’m just full of compliments for you” Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash I was worn down, feeling about as sensual as a rusty old rake. (But don’t worry, I was about to discover ASMR!) I wrenched my clumsily-taped broken car key from the ignition and went to check in. Motel 6 — Paso Robles, California. “Just one night please,” I told the attendant. Lola the Toyota Corolla had been my home for the past 2+ years. It was not the most conducive environment for conducting “personal business.” I’d scrunch up a sleeping bag in the driver’s seat. I’d pray no cop would come by as I masturbated under cover of darkness. (Not that I had much to get off to anymore. Achieving orgasm felt like coaxing a cat into frigid bathwater!) Tonight, things would be different. Tonight, I would slide into that pearly white, forgotten plush paradise called a bed. And I would be free. It was there, floating on queen-sized clouds, that I discovered my very first ASMR video. I know, I’m making it sound like I discovered anti-gravity or something. But those ASMR videos changed me. They made me more sensual, more relaxed, and above all, more affectionate. I have Ricky Odriosola to thank. Let me explain 5 reasons why.

https://medium.com/sexography/5-ways-asmr-boyfriend-videos-made-me-more-affectionate-abd61b586141

['Phoenix Huber']

2020-10-13 16:32:16.847000+00:00

['Technology', 'Self Improvement', 'Love', 'Inspiration', 'Relationships']

TechNY Daily

TechNY Daily Keeping the NYC Tech Industry Informed and Connected 1. NYC’s Paxos, a blockchain infrastructure company, has raised $142 million in a Series C funding. Declaration Partners led the round and was joined by Mithril Capital, PayPal Ventures, RIT Capital Partners, Ken Moelis, Alua Capital and Senator Investment Group. Paxos powers PayPal’s cryptocurrency services. (www.paxos.com) (Coindesk) 2. NYC’s The Drivers Cooperative, a ridesharing app owned by NYC cab drivers themselves as a co-op, is set to launch. The co-op hopes to compete with Uber and Lyft by offering drivers a larger share of fares and negotiating to obtain lower prices on gas and insurance. Any remaining profits will be distributed to drivers as a dividend. (www.drivers.coop) (TheseTimes) 3. NYC’s Ramp, an Amex and Brex competitor, has raised $30 million in a Series A round. The funding as provided by D1 Capital and Coatue Management. Ramp provides companies with cost saving features by identifying things such as duplicative purchases or lower prices offered by other sellers. (www.ramp.com) (Fortune) 4. NYC’s Arthur, an A.I. monitoring platform, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding. Index Ventures led the round and was joined by Acrew, Plexo Capital. Homebrew, AME Ventures and NYC’s Work-Bench. The company’s platform monitors A.I. model accuracy. (www.arthur.ai) (TechCrunch) 5. Brooklyn’s Runway, an A.I. powered video and photo editing platform, has raised $8.5 million in a Series A funding. Amplify Partners led the round and was joined by Lux Capital and Compound Ventures. Runway operates like an app store-like hub that hosts dozens of editing tools created by independent developers, and users simply pay for cloud computing time to run them. (www.runwayml.com) (AdWeek) _________________________________________________________________ Small Planet partners with the world’s most innovative companies to create inspired apps and websites. Development, UX design, monetization strategies, user acquisition, and more. Contact us. (Sponsored Content) _______________________________________________________________ 6. NYC’s Hibob, developers of the “bob” HR platform, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding. The round was co-led by SEEK and Israel Growth Partners, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Eight Roads Ventures, Arbor Ventures, Presidio Ventures, Entree Capital, Cerca Partners and Perpetual Partners. Bob, which has users such as Fiverr and VaynerMedia, provides basic HR functions (payroll, benefits and onboarding), as well as features related to performance and company culture. (www.hibob.com) (TechCrunch) 7. CNET has taken a look at the Battle of the New York Bikes: Soul Cycle vs. Peloton. Both bikes are around $2,500 and sell subscriptions to streamed live and recorded classes for about $40 a month. (www.soul-cycle.com/at-home) (www.onepeloton.com) (CNET) 8. NYC’s LeafLink, an online marketplace for the cannabis industry, has raised $40 million in a Series C funding. Founders Fund led the round and was joined by NYC’s Thrive Capital, Nosara Capital and NYC’s Lerer Hippeau. The company estimates that 32 percent of U.S. wholesale cannabis orders flow through its marketplace. (www.leaflink.com) (Ganjapreneur) 9. NYC’s Deduce, a platform that prevents account takeover fraud, has emerged from stealth and raised $7.3 million in seed funding. True Ventures led the round and was joined by Ridge Ventures. Deduce’s platform draws data from 150,000 partner websites to generate a user risk score based on fraud-related behaviors. (www.deduce.com) (Crunchbase News) 10. NYC’s Hydra Studios, a network of wellness studios, has raised $3.8 million in a seed round. Investors included Slow Ventures, Company Ventures, Courtside Ventures, CityRock Venture Partners, Hatzimemos/Libby and Fifth Wall. (www.hydranewyork.com) (PR Web) We have special sale pricing on TechNY Daily sponsorship and advertising opportunities. For information, contact: [email protected] ____________________________________________ TechNY Recruit Jobs Job Postings are on sale. Contact us at [email protected] Lukka (new) We are a SaaS solution that makes crypto accounting easy. We are a trusted, blockchain-native technology team that is passionate about digital asset technology. Our team is continuously collaborating and designing new products and initiatives to expand our market presence. Technology and customers are at the center of our universe. We dedicate our energy to learning, building, adapting, and achieving impactful results. Customer Success Specialist Senior Front End Engineer Senior Software Engineer Software Test Engineer Third-Party Risk Manager or Director Account Executive SaaS and Data Sales Team Leader Circle (new) Circle was founded on the belief that blockchains and digital currency will rewire the global economic system, creating a fundamentally more open, inclusive, efficient and integrated world economy. Solutions Engineer Director, Account Management Enterprise Sales Director (Banking and Financial Services) Senior Software Engineer, Frontend Manager, Software Engineering Agilis Chemicals Transforming chemical industry with modern commerce technology Full-stack Engineer Business Development Manager — Enterprise SaaS Marketing Director — Enterprise SaaS LiveAuctioneers Awarded for four consecutive years as one of Crain’s 100 Best Places to Work in NYC, LiveAuctioneers is the largest online marketplace for one-of-a-kind items, rare collectibles, and coveted goods. Product Marketing Manager Senior Marketing Manager Summer Summer’s mission is to help the 45 million Americans burdened by student debt save time and money through smart, algorithm-based recommendations. Summer combines policy expertise and innovative technology to serve student loan borrowers across the country. Back-End Engineer Logikcull.com Our mission: To democratize Discovery. Enterprise Account Executive The Dipp A personalized subscription site for pop culture’s biggest fans. Director of Engineering Ridgeline Founded by Dave Duffield (founder and former CEO of Workday and PeopleSoft) in 2017, Ridgeline’s goal is to revolutionize technology for the investment management industry. We are building an end-to-end cloud platform on a modern infrastructure using AWS, serverless technologies, which up to this point hasn’t been done in the enterprise space. Software Engineering Manager, UI Simon Data Simon Data is the only enterprise customer data platform with a fully-integrated marketing cloud. Our platform empowers businesses to leverage enterprise-scale big data and machine learning to power customer communications in any channel. Senior Front-End Engineer Product Designer Director, Enterprise Sales Full Stack Engineer Vestwell Retirement made easy. Senior Fullstack Engineer Package Free Package Free is on a mission to make the world less trashy though offering products that help you reduce waste daily. We source our products from individuals and brands with missions to create a positive environmental impact and since launching, have diverted over 100 million pieces of trash from landfills. Head of Operations Hyperscience Hyperscience is the automation company that enables data to flow within and between the world’s leading firms in financial services, insurance, healthcare and government markets. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in New York City with offices in Sofia, Bulgaria and London, UK, we’ve raised more than $50 million raised to date and are growing quickly. We welcome anyone who believes in big ideas and demonstrates a willingness to learn, and we’re looking for exceptional talent to join our team and make a difference in our organization and for our customers. Machine Learning Engineer Senior Security Engineer Braavo Braavo provides on demand funding for mobile apps and games. We offer a flexible and affordable funding alternative to the traditional sources of capital like working with a VC or bank. We’re changing the way mobile entrepreneurs finance and grow their app businesses. Our predictive technology delivers on demand, performance-based funding, without dilution or personal guarantees. By providing non-dilutive, yet scalable alternatives to equity, we’re helping founders retain control of their companies. Business Development Manager VP of Marketing Head of Sales Yogi At Yogi, we help companies decipher customer feedback, from ratings and reviews to surveys and support requests. Companies are inundated with feedback, but when it comes to turning this data into actionable business decisions, most companies fall short. That’s where Yogi fits in. Full Stack Software Engineer Ordergroove We’re passionate marketers, engineers and innovators building the technology to power the future of commerce. We’re a B2B2C SaaS platform helping the world’s most interesting retailers and direct-to-consumer brands remove friction from the customer experience to deliver recurring revenue through subscriptions programs — shifting their consumer interactions from one-and-done transactions to long-lived, highly profitable relationships. Data Scientist Upper90 Upper90 is an alternative credit manager based in New York City that has deployed over $500m within 18 months of inception. Investor Relations Analyst Upscored UpScored is the only career site that uses data science to connect you with jobs suited specifically to you while automatically learning your career interests. Its AI-powered platform decreases job search time by 90%, showing you the jobs you’re most likely to get (and want) in less than 2 minutes. Data Engineer Senior Frontend Developer Senior Backend Developer Frame.io Frame.io is a video review and collaboration platform designed to unify media assets and creative conversations in a user-friendly environment. Headquartered in New York City, Frame.io was developed by filmmakers, VFX artists and post production executives. Today, we support nearly 1 million media professionals at enterprises including Netflix, Buzzfeed, Turner, NASA & Vice Media. Frontend Engineering Manager Sr. Swift Engineer Lead Product Designer Attentive Attentive is a personalized text messaging platform built for innovative e-commerce and retail brands. We raised a $230M Series D in September 2020 and are backed by Sequoia, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and other top investors. Attentive was named #8 on LinkedIn’s 2020 Top Startups list, and has been selected by Forbes as one of America’s Best Startup Employers. Enterprise Account Executive Sales Development Representative Senior Client Strategy Manager Director of Client Strategy KeyMe NYC startup revolutionizing the locksmith industry with innovative robotics and mobile technology. Customer Experience Representative Inbound Phone Sales Representative Systems Software Engineer Button Button’s mission is to build a better way to do business in mobile. Enterprise Sales Director — New York Postlight Postlight is building an extraordinary team that loves to make great digital products — come join us! Full Stack Engineer Deliver your job listings directly to 48,000 members of the NYC tech community at an amazingly low cost. Find out how: [email protected] ____________ NYC Tech Industry Virtual Event Calendar January 14, 2021 Galvanize NYC: Data Science Demo Day Contact Us for Free Listing of Your Web-based Events Send us your events to list (it’s Free!) to: [email protected] Did You Miss Anything Important? Read Our TechNY Daily Past Editions TechNY Daily is distributed three times a week to 48,000 members of NYC’s tech and digital media industry. Connecting the New York Tech Industry Social Media • Mobile • Digital Media • Big Data • AdTech • App Development • e-Commerce • Games • Analytics • FinTech • Web • Software • UX • Video • Digital Advertising • Content • SaaS • Open Source • Cloud Computing • AI • Web Design • Business Intelligence • Enterprise Software • EduTech • FashionTech • Incubators • Accelerators • Co-Working • TravelTech • Real Estate Tech Forward the TechNY Daily to a friend Not a Subscriber to TechNY Daily, Click Here Copyright © 2020 TechNY, All rights reserved.

https://medium.com/@smallplanetapps/techny-daily-4e64d045e525

['Small Planet']

2020-12-21 21:28:06.532000+00:00

['Startup', 'Technology News', 'Tech', 'Technews', 'Venture Capital']

Is the Algorithm Broken?

Is the Algorithm Broken? I wrote a story that traveled around the world … to all the wrong people A few weeks ago, I wrote a story I thought would help content creators, like myself. I’d made a mistake thinking I had the right to use an image I did not have the right to. I wrote about my journey — and ultimate defeat — by a “copyright bot.” I prefer stories with a happy ending, but such was my luck. Though the post had the words “bot” and “algorithm” in it, my story was not at all intended for an audience of technology professionals. However, that’s precisely where it went — around the world to a bunch of people I don’t think will benefit from it at all (except, maybe, from a user-experience perspective). I submitted it to three different publications, none of which accepted it. (I didn’t understand that. Copyright infringement is a big deal for content creators, and not everyone understands this. I might argue most people don’t.) So, I gave up and published it on my own, sure it would be a flop. The next morning, I woke up to a note of congratulations. Medium’s editors had picked it up as a featured story. I think Medium’s algorithm has some machine learning to do The morning after I published it, it had 755 views. It has continued to get reads every day for the last few weeks. I’m new to Medium, so this has been a big deal for me. Today, the story is closing in on 3,000 views. I was happy it would be shared widely. I like to think my stories might help people, and this was a terribly expensive, totally avoidable mistake. But what I’ve found, over the course of the story so far, was that content creators, for the most part, weren’t seeing my story at all. Neither, it appears, were many of my small group of followers. Instead, I gained fans and followers from all over the world with these interests (which is a little ironic, since technology was the bad guy in my story): Screenshot: Author The tags I usually write for are writing, content creation, religion and spirituality. Some people have followed me who were interested in mental health, which didn’t seem that much of a stretch. But the results these last few weeks have surprised me. I keep watching and digging into who is reading and clapping. I’ve had fans in India, Nigeria, Croatia, Romania, and a gamer from NYU. There was one Australian, two Italians, a few Indonesians, one Czech and a researcher from the horn of Africa. There were programmers and Cloud analysts, data scientists, software engineers, two theoretical physicists, a hedge fund guy, an astral projector, a tree scientist, and a cannabis expert who writes from Mexico. (Straight from their profiles. I’m not making this up!) These are some interesting people! One day, everyone who engaged with my story worked some kind of tech job in Brazil. This leaves me with some questions: If this story makes it around the world, I’m hoping some of my new tech friends will help me with a few questions. 1. Why didn’t the article get to its intended audience? I used the right tags: content creators, marketing, copyright, photography, and technology. (My original story didn’t say “Content Creators” in the title. I added that later, but I’m sure it was in the sub-headline.) Was I relying too much on the curators to read and understand who I was writing for? 2. Why did Medium’s algorithm send my story around the world? I actually love this. I’d love to know how to make it happen again. I just wish it had reached content creators. (If you know one, maybe you can share it.) 3. Why didn’t my followers see my article? Only one person I follow (and follows me), who creates content — and writes in the same categories I do — clapped. (Thank you Joseph Serwatch.) Medium has said much about followers being more important since the recent updates, but their actions don’t seem to back up this bold statement. 4. What can I write for these people who probably have little in common with me? The most complex technologies I use are my iPhone and WordPress! If you’re one of my new techie readers, maybe I can take your request. What does a programmer in Brazil want to know about religion and spirituality or good writing? 5. Is the algorithm okay? Is it broken? Dr. Mehmet Yildiz recently pointed out something similar to my #3 above in this article. (He has a lot of followers and math skills I don’t have — so his calculations may help one of you smarter than me to figure this out.) He worked to build an audience of followers and cultivated that group of readers by giving them more of what they wanted to read. But with the new updates, he’s no longer reaching them. He’s not the only one I’ve read who says this. He just made the most compelling case. Another piece to the puzzle — The curators are not to blame As I was writing this story, Zulie Rane published this article about how to find out which categories your post was curated into. (Thank you, Zulie!) I immediately went to my Copyright Bot story to see if the problem was with the curators. Did they curate the story in technology? Was that the reason it went to data nerds worldwide? Image: Author’s screenshot Looks like the curators did exactly what my tags told them to do with this story. They did everything right! Yet my story did not get to writers, creators of media, and marketers. The mystery remains unsolved. Hey — I’m not complaining. I feel grateful, actually. The story made me a little money, and it seems people are still reading it every day, a handful of them actually writers. It’s just strange. Medium belongs the former CEO of Twitter, “the third largest social network in the world” (according to Wikipedia). It seems that, of all the blogging platforms, this one should be most able to laser focus on audience segmentation. But it’s also been suggested that algorithms take on a life of their own. Maybe this is a bot even Ev can’t control.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/is-the-algorithm-okay-68769a00ab6

['J F Turner']

2020-12-08 00:26:00.023000+00:00

['Data', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Algorithms']

Can we build artificial brain networks using nanoscale magnets?

From nano-magnets to neural networks BRAIN NETWORKS: Examples of synchronized activity can be found many places in nature — for example fireflies starting to flash in unison, or humans breaking into rhythmic applause after a concert. Examples can also be found in the brain, where synchronous electrical activity has been found between neurons in distinct brain regions. Research has shown that this activity might play an important role in performing cognitive tasks and in forming memory. Fireflies starting to flash in sync (Source: smokymountainresorts.com) Although these phenomena might be interesting, what do they have to do with nanoscale magnets? As it turns out, these various phenomena share a common denominator in that they are connected via “the mathematics of synchronization”. Even though they are vastly different, these phenomena can actually be described remarkably well using the same mathematical equations, all connected by the common concept of synchronization. Interaction: The key to complexity We are now getting closer to our initial question, “Can we build artificial brain networks using nanoscale magnets?” Crucial to achieving this is to understand what happens when you put a lot of these magnetic oscillators together and allow them to interact with each other. These oscillators measure only a few hundred nanometres. In comparison, a human hair has a thickness of approximately 100,000 nanometres (one nanometre is 0.000000001 meter, so they are pretty small!). Fabricating such nanoscale oscillators is tricky, and as a result they will all be slightly different from the fabrication process. Due to this, they tend to oscillate at slightly different frequencies. This is bad news for several of the interesting applications mentioned previously, where the ability of the oscillators to synchronize is crucial. As a means to solve this, one can try to put several of these oscillators closely packed together, allowing them to interact and ”talk” to each other. By doing this, they tend to adjust their individual frequencies and ”agree” on a common rhythm with their neighbors: i.e. they become synchronized. This kind of synchronization transition is similar to something you have probably experienced yourself: when a theater audience spontaneously starts clapping in unison. The audience ”talk” to each other and interact via the clapping sounds, where people tend to slightly adjust their own clapping rhythm to that of the surrounding audience. This can sometimes spontaneously result in the well- known rhythmic applause. The crucial ingredient here, is that they are able to interact by hearing the clapping of the neighboring audience. Without this kind of interaction, it is highly unlikely that everyone in the audience spontaneously start clapping at exactly the same pace. This is similar also for the magnetic oscillators: In order for them to ”agree” on a common frequency, they need to be able to interact with each other. In their case, the interaction is of course not through clapping, but through the magnetic fields produced by the individual oscillators. This means that by putting several of them closely packed together, the interactions among them could result in a collective behavior of all the oscillators. This is where things get interesting: Understanding the behavior of a single oscillator is not that hard (although it can be complicated enough), it is the collective behavior when you put a lot of them together which is the real challenge to understand. The study of such phenomena belongs to what scientists refer to as “complex systems”. The main consideration is that in these systems, ”more is different”, and the collective behavior cannot be derived simply from the behavior of the individual elements. Putting a lot of ”simple” elements which are well understood on their individual level together and allowing them to interact, it gets very complicated and non-intuitive to understand how they will behave collectively. At the same time, this complicated collective behavior is also what makes these systems interesting. A mathematical model This leads us to one of the main questions we wanted to address in our research: What happens when you closely pack a lot of these oscillators together, allowing them to interact? Will they synchronize to a collective rhythm, or might some other interesting effects occur? Image: Vegard Flovik We studied this by using mathematical equations we could solve on our computers. One of the more well-known mathematical models used to study synchronization is the Kuramoto model. The Kuramoto model has been used to describe the essential features of oscillations in a vast set of biological and physical phenomena, where an oscillator in this sense is any system that shows periodic behavior. A swinging pendulum, for example, returns to the same point in space at regular intervals, where these intervals correspond to the oscillator’s frequency. Inspired by the successful use of the Kuramoto model in describing a vast set of different phenomena related to synchronization, we wanted to see if a similar “simple” mathematical model could be found for a large number of interacting magnetic oscillators. The short answer here is yes, we think so. In our previous research, we show how this mathematical model could be used to describe the collective behavior in large networks of these magnetic oscillators. Then we presented an analogy between systems of interacting oscillators, e.g. in neuroscience, and these magnetic oscillators, as they both can be described by similar mathematical equations. Possible to build So, returning again to our initial question: building an artificial brain, in the sense of a human brain, might be difficult. However, being able to build artificial neural networks that perform computations inspired by how the brain performs cognitive tasks is a more likely outcome. Source: Shutterstock Part of the puzzle in achieving this goal is to identify suitable elemental building blocks. In this context, nanoscale magnetic oscillators show promise for implementing neural networks based on neuron-emulating nanodevices. Recent work has now been able to show experimentally the use of nanoscale spintronic oscillators for computing, and demonstrate that they can achieve spoken digit recognition with accuracies similar to state of the art neural networks. However, with many issues yet to overcome and problems to solve, only continued hard work over the coming years will show whether such devices will become a reality in the future. Taking the important leap from lab experiments to mainstream applications might still be a few years away. In the meantime, we are just excited to contribute our small piece of the puzzle to this field of research.

https://medium.com/predict/can-we-build-an-artificial-brain-network-using-nanoscale-magnets-1c0a925973ab

['Vegard Flovik']

2020-02-15 07:51:07.321000+00:00

['Artificial Intelligence', 'Science', 'Neuroscience', 'Technology', 'Neural Networks']

Staking Counos X (CCXX)

Counos X is the first bankable coin offered by the Swiss Blockchain company, Counos Platform. In the first stage of offering this coin, about 18,300,000 coins have been mined. The total number of Counos X coins that can be mined are 21,000,000. As mentioned above, Counos X is the first bankable coin. Counos Platform is the first company to create a coin that can be bought directly with your local bank. No matter where you are in the world, you can purchase Counos X through your bank or directly with your broker using the Swiss ISIN number. Among other advantages of the Counos X (CCXX) is that if you hold Counos X in the staking wallet longer than a year, you will receive a 5% staking. If you keep Counos X longer than 6 months, your coins will increase by 2%. In order to start staking Counos X (CCXX) at the staking wallet there are several investment plans to choose from: If you choose a daily plan, you will be able to withdraw your profits on a daily basis. You can cancel a daily plan anytime you want; keep in mind you will not receive any profits if you cancel. The balance in your daily plan wallet cannot be less than a certain amount. This amount is specified for each daily plan investment. If you choose an annual plan, you will be able to withdraw your profits on a yearly basis. You can cancel an annual plan anytime you want; keep in mind you will not receive any profits if you cancel before the surrender period. But perhaps one of the most exciting and important things about Counos X is the upcoming update in its roadmap. Some features and changes are planned to be added to Counos X and its Blockchain network, which will make this coin even more valuable than before. When the latest update of the Counos X roadmap is fully rolled out, these features will be added to this coin: Counos Layer: Counos Layer protocol will be added on top of the Blockchain of Counos X. The source code of Counos Layer is forked from the source code of Omni Layer. This protocol will allow the creation of crypto assets such as tokens and other custom digital assets on top of the CCXX Blockchain network. Counos Layer is a software layer that can be built on top of the Blockchain network. Certification System: with the help of this certificate issuance system, CCXX Blockchain can be used to issue all kinds of certificates such as university degrees, customs documents, transportation documents, identification documents, etc. In this certificate issuance system a piece of a Counos X coin can be used as the certificate with all of the data and information entered recorded in it, and in this way no duplicate of the certificate can exist. Election System: this feature will allow for elections and voting mechanisms to be based on the Blockchain Counos X. Using the CCXX Blockchain network will enable elections to take place in the most reliable and transparent way possible. In this election system a piece of a Counos X coin can be used as the voting ballot, and since it is registered in the Blockchain network, no duplicate ballot can exist. Copyright System: with the help of this system, the Blockchain network of Counos X will be used to register all types of copy rights and patents. This feature can be used to register and store all types of patents, invention patents, intellectual property rights, music rights, and any other type of copyrights. This system used a piece of Counos X coin to issue the certificate for the copyrighted material, then records the data in the Blockchain with the exact data number and date. Decentralized Finance (DeFi): based on this decentralized finance system, assets can be gathered in a crypto pool. As such a very reliable system is created in which assets can be stored and more importantly loans can be given out. This loaning process is based on the reliability and dependability of the CCXX DeFi system. All of these technologies and capabilities are based on Counos X coins. Since all these features need Counos X to function; for instance voting ballots, certificate documents, transactions fees for the Omni Layer protocol, and all of these systems and feature require Counos X. Thus a significantly high demand is created for Counos X. In turn, this creates value and wealth, not even counting the mere transactions and payments made by Counos X. If we take into accounts the tokens that will be created based on the Blockchain network of Counos X, a formidable financial system will be created based upon Counos X alone. So take advantage of this amazing opportunity, and head on to the staking wallet to start staking Counos X.

https://medium.com/@counosplatform/staking-counos-x-ccxx-9c1df3aeaca6

[]

2020-12-15 13:14:28.296000+00:00

['Counosplatform', 'Banking Technology', 'Blockchain Startup', 'Staking', 'Investing And Trading']

Blockchain Application Outlook Brief Report 2020

Since the birth of Bitcoin, the development of blockchain technology has gone through 12 years. From the initial payment concept to the comprehensive exploration and combination of “Blockchain Plus Initiatives” in all industries and sectors today, we have seen the technological iteration and commercial development of “from point to surface” and “from surface to Multidimension”. The PBC’s DCEP pilot program, the implementation of Ubin in Singapore, and the update of the Libra white paper all prove that an era with the blockchain is coming. Technological innovation must be accompanied by the intervention of capital, and the impetus of capital is destined to induce bubbles. But under the bubbles, we clearly see that data/information is automatically circulating, sub-packaged, and packaged on different chains with diversified consensus mechanisms. The tide recedes,the technology rises. In this report, we will focus on the application of blockchain in different fields and explore the new business model and value of “Blockchain Plus Initiatives”, including but not limited to: Auto, Insurance, Medical care, Government affairs, Smart cities. And we will gradually release special reports on various industries. BLOC: www.bc-tt.com Contact: [email protected]

https://medium.com/@blocoffical/blockchain-application-outlook-brief-report-2020-33c2c7f99880

[]

2020-12-23 06:41:21.626000+00:00

['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Development', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Application']

MacBook Air Finally Becomes a Good Contender (My Opinion)

MacBook Air Finally Becomes a Good Contender (My Opinion) DISCLAIMER: This is not a sponsored writeup, so I’ll be giving my honest opinions. Hi guys, Howard here. So I went to the Apple Store at Orchard again, but for the Macs with M1 chip and iPhone 12’s bigger and smaller siblings (coming soon in another writeup). Several YouTubers have been encouraging their viewers to head down to an Apple store to really get a feel of how great the new Macs are with custom Apple Silicon chips. This time, I was smart enough to book an appointment so that I don’t need to wait longer to enter the store (the Marina Bay Sands store is still not available for booking an appointment…). DISCLAIMER 2: I’m not the most tech savvy dude out there, so I’ll be giving my thoughts in the most layman way as possible. MacBook Pro (M1) and MacBook Air (M1) side by side. TL; DR: If you want a laptop for basic uses or school assignments, the MacBook Air with M1 chip makes a great choice! The MacBook Air with M1 chip is so blazing fast that it puts other Intel ultraportable laptops to shame. People buying Apple’s cheapest laptop won’t need to compromise on performance anymore, and that should only attract more people to buy it. Also, this version of MacBook Air ditches the fan (which was useless on the predecessor anyway) for a silent experience. Think of it as an iPad running a desktop operating system. If the iPad can already run well without any fan, so can this MacBook Air. However, since the M1 chip is only a few weeks old, not many apps will run to its full potential as they’ve yet to be written for Apple Silicon. There’s something called Rosetta 2 which makes most apps just work. If most apps can run effortlessly under Rosetta, won’t that put app emulation for its rival Surface Pro X to shame? P.S. People can choose between the 7-core and the 8-core graphics versions, but most people should be fine with the former. Fun Fact 1: I used to own a Windows PC that runs on a mobile processor back when I was in elementary school. It’s called the Surface RT (1st generation) and I thought it was so revolutionary that I begged my parents to get me one. That was when Windows 8 was touted to be the modern PC operating system and mobile processors on PCs were all the hype. Turns out it could only run apps made for Windows Store (now Microsoft Store); it couldn’t run any desktop app at all! I quickly ditched the Surface RT when I had to migrate to macOS for middle school usage. Now, even entry level Macs are running on a mobile processor which can easily run desktop apps! What actually makes the M1 version of MacBook Air a good contender in my opinion is the screen. It finally has a wide colour gamut (previously exclusive to MacBook Pro) so that I can edit photos pleasantly. All its Intel predecessors either had a horrible low resolution TN screen or an average standard RGB screen which used to be a dealbreaker for me. Who cares if the MacBook Air shares the same design as its predecessor and is slightly outdated as compared to some Windows ultraportable laptops? If the 2018 redesign of the MacBook Air is Apple’s vision of a good ultraportable laptop, then they’ve finally fulfilled that vision using the M1 chip. The MacBook Air with M1 chip also retains what Apple calls the Magic Keyboard from its predecessor, which is a good thing. It still feels pleasant to type on, but it’s way better than the ever so despicable Butterfly Keyboard. Props to Apple for retaining that Magic Keyboard. The MacBook Air also retains physical function keys for the Touch Bar haters out there. It now also has a globe icon on the fn key so that one can send emojis easier. Where are my keyboard brightness keys??? However, I have this one gripe against this version of physical function keys; WHERE ARE MY KEYBOARD BRIGHTNESS KEYS??? Those and the Launchpad key were all replaced with a Spotlight Search, Dictation and Do Not Disturb keys (F4, F5 and F6 keys respectively). I actually used the Launchpad key, it’s just so convenient… I won’t even see myself using these new keyboard shortcuts even if I own this MacBook Air! EVERYTHING WAS GOOD UNTIL THEY TOOK AWAY THE KEYBOARD BRIGHTNESS KEYS!!! I know of some people that won’t be happy that M1 Macs at this moment are only capable of hooking up to no more than one external monitor. Come on, most people will probably be happy with the built-in screen and will most likely only need to hook up to one external monitor if necessary. Even I also only need to hook up to one external monitor at most. Also, people are complaining that two USB-C ports aren’t enough. Come on, the MacBook Air is Apple’s entry level laptop so people shouldn’t expect a lot, though putting one port on each side would’ve been a wiser choice if not for the design constraint. 16 GB memory as the maximum? Regular users should be fine with 8 GB of memory though 16 GB is for the kiasu users. This is just a regular laptop! And that 720p webcam? Not like you or your caller can get a consistently good internet connection so you should expect a low-quality image most of the time, unless you’re vain enough to use the laptop’s webcam as a selfie cam then I can’t comment any further. Just use your phone’s selfie cam for video calls if you think the webcam is unusable! What people should look for the most are the performance and battery life. No matter how sexy other ultraportable laptops are, the performance is more important so that people can assure themselves a snappy laptop for a few years down the road. For my use case, performance and display quality are more important for photo and video editing which I do sometimes. I don’t mind paying more for upgrades as long as I can get the performance. A decent battery life is also welcomed. Design would probably be the last thing I’m looking for. MacBook Air (M1) demo unit running Oceanhorn 2. Getting my hands on the MacBook Air demo unit in the Apple Store reaffirms my impression about the ultraportable laptop. It indeed has the processing prowess, and the user experience was not bad either. The laptop does lag a bit when I tried typing a few sentences in Microsoft Word running under Rosetta 2. But when it runs apps compiled for Apple Silicon, this is where it shines as I was able to play an optimised role play game (Oceanhorn 2) on the demo unit, smooth like butter. Sadly I can’t run benchmarks, test its battery endurance, or use different kinds of apps because it’s a demo unit, so whatever that is available to test is tangible until I get it for myself. I also didn’t try out its audio setup or its instant sleep/wake function, so I can’t give much comments about it. A good performance, good keyboard, good screen and stellar battery life in a thin and light body makes a recipe for the perfect ultraportable laptop; and the MacBook Air with M1 chip does that at a reasonable price. It appeals to an average user but will especially be perfect for students since they need to carry around a machine to do their work for almost the whole day with minimal compromises. Fun fact 2: I used to own a retina MacBook Pro over the non-retina MacBook Air for middle school usage back in 6 years ago (both are mid-2014 models) for its high-resolution screen and better specifications at the cost of a higher price. Now that the current version of MacBook Air with a similar configuration comes down to a lower price in a smaller package, the middle school me will appreciate this version of MacBook Air more if it were to be 6 years ago. I’m sure present day middle school kids looking for an ultraportable will also greatly appreciate its existence. If they die die must use a Mac for education, they should avoid the Intel models as much as possible. I have nothing but praises about this ultraportable. The MacBook Air with M1 chip has the right ingredients for a perfect ultraportable laptop, though having 5G connectivity would maximise the laptop’s capabilities now having a mobile processor. If iPhone 12 is the default phone to get, then the MacBook Air with M1 chip is the iPhone 12 of Macs. Turns out the YouTubers’ advice to go to an Apple Store to get my hands on the demo units is a good one. You really have to go down to an Apple Store to try out the Apple Silicon Macs to feel how revolutionary these mobile chips are. Even I, who own an Intel MacBook, am jealous of this small yet powerful chip in just Apple’s entry level systems. This is a sign that Apple’s higher end systems will only be more powerful than ever. Would I even give up my current Mac system for a MacBook Air with M1 chip? The specialist advised me not to, as my current system is perfectly usable. Howard out!

https://medium.com/@howardthewriter/macbook-air-finally-becomes-a-good-contender-my-opinion-bc39ae0a4dc5

[]

2020-12-10 10:02:31.558000+00:00

['Opinion', 'Technology', 'Apple', 'Mac']

I Listed My House For Sale — And Immediately Started Receiving Brochures From Moving Companies

I Listed My House For Sale — And Immediately Started Receiving Brochures From Moving Companies Targeted advertising in the real world Photo by Ranurte on Unsplash I recently listed my apartment for sale online. After my realtor posted it through our local multiple listing service, it was re-posted across the local net by various eager real estate agents. A few days later, I started receiving brochures in the mail from moving companies. At first, I was confused. How the heck did they find out so fast that I was planning to move? I felt uncomfortable and spied upon. And then it struck me — they track online real estate listings to identify warm leads. Of course! If you’re a moving company, wouldn’t you do the same? If someone has listed a home for sale, chances are that they are planning to move. Even if the home is an investment property and occupied by renters, they may still need your services if the new owner asks them to vacate. After my initial discomfort, I thought — this is genius! What a creative way to market your services. Regardless of what business you’re in, the internet has made it remarkably easy to reach new customers. The days of sending out mass-mailed brochures to an entire neighborhood are gone. This is not a very effective strategy anyway. Mass-mailed brochures are impersonal and most end up in the trash, sight unseen. Instead of mass mailing, why not leverage the power of the internet to identify only the people that may need your services and reach out to them directly? Yes, it requires more effort, but your Return On Investment (ROI) would be much greater. Websites like Google do it all the time through targeted online advertising. I’ve never searched for a cocktail dress online without being teased with ads for clothing retailers planted in every unrelated website I subsequently navigate to — days and sometimes weeks after. Even smart home devices like Google Nest and Amazon Alexa do it. A friend was recently telling his wife he had a headache. Unbeknownst to him, the silent sentinel, his Google Nest, was listening. Soon after, he started receiving targeted advertising online for Advil, Tylenol, and Aleve.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/i-listed-my-house-for-sale-and-immediately-started-receiving-brochures-from-moving-companies-dd533774bb2f

['Hurriya Burney']

2020-10-20 13:45:14.190000+00:00

['Real Estate', 'Advertising', 'Business', 'Technology', 'Marketing']

4 Reasons to Use Kubernetes in the Serverless Era

4 Reasons to Use Kubernetes in the Serverless Era Is serverless a replacement for Kubernetes? Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash. Serverless is cool and has taken the tech world by the storm. It is evolving quite a bit and growing at a tremendous pace. The reasons for its success are its developer-friendliness, ease of running microservices, and lower infrastructure overhead. Serverless, or FaaS (Functions as a service), is a technology that helps you run code within dynamically managed abstracted servers. The cloud provider provides a provision to run your stateless event-triggered system without worrying about the underlying infra. Some of the popular serverless offerings are AWS Lamba, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. Built for scalability, it allows multiple parallel invocations of your functions, and you pay for the number of executions instead of allocated resources. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is an open-source, robust, widely used container orchestration platform that allows you to run your applications on the scale. It is a hybrid between IaaS and PaaS and allows you to standardise your applications to run the same everywhere by using containers. Kubernetes runs on servers, and you or the cloud platform manage the underlying infrastructure. Therefore, there is some infrastructure administration overhead. That makes serverless a great proposition. It solves a variety of problems that we never thought about before, and it has its use cases and customer base. But before you think that this is going to change everything in IT, think again. It is not a one-size-fits-all technology. Kubernetes, for its part, looks promising in its ability to cover almost everything. Let’s find out how.

https://medium.com/better-programming/4-reasons-to-use-kubernetes-in-the-serverless-era-cf77ea3b018b

['Gaurav Agarwal']

2020-08-13 15:38:03.639000+00:00

['Technology', 'DevOps', 'Programming', 'Kubernetes', 'Serverless']

The World From An Outsider’s Perspective

It is important to conduct research based upon the analysis of peers in order to peek in their perspective of the task at hand. Hence, I would like to share my fellow Medium classmate’s findings on technology as a whole. Although my topic is centered on the virtual workplace communication part, it is vital to note the general public’s reaction to the technology shift within the past 2 decades. Thankfully, my classmate and Medium blogger Moris Goldstein has published in-depth data on the public’s response to technology. Pre-quarantine group discussions: In-person but already actively using technology Goldstein focused on the results from his primary data, indicating that his mother and father had conflicting opinions towards technology. His mother believed that technology would “benefit everyone, expand the opportunities for jobs and allow people to explore more than ever before” (2020). This outcome implies a forward-thinking middle-aged person who views the world optimistically. Instead of seeing technology as destroying current job positions, she viewed it as an opportunity for new positions to arise. This is directly related to the ease of working from home. The door to virtual video calls has opened up communication, granting easier access to online jobs. However, Goldstein’s father believed that “Only bad things could come out of the new technology, worsening our mental health and social skills,” (2020). According to the father’s response, it can be induced that he is of an older generation which has lived in a life without wireless accessible information. His beliefs are similar to the higher-tied workforce of current CEO’s and board of directors. I agree to his point about people’s mental health suffering from the social isolation, but this is a current struggle with a future solution. The health and human services departments will undoubtedly introduce new methods of coping with the isolation, regardless of how long this pandemic will last. There is a high chance that people will be staying home even after the quarantine policies have been lifted, simply because of the evolving remote work environment. In short, mental health has been and will be a serious issue for the future. But given time and resources, this burden will be alleviated. More people to interview: Apart from his parents, Goldstein interviewed his friends to find a different age demographic’s perspective. According to his article, his friends though that “Technology in the future would have its limits, benefits and disadvantages, but would still open many opportunities for individuals,” (2020). This reflects a rather neutral but optimistic stance towards the information age. Because of the recent changes in society, it is difficult for the young leading generation to pinpoint specific feelings towards this new era. The only way to go through this historical present day is by putting faith into the betterment of our world. Goldsein’s blog post holds valid points in reference to the new age of technology. If you are interested in the quick three-minute read, the link is below. From his interview activity, it is crystal clear that people hold a wide variety of opinions towards the future. Nevertheless, these changing times will most-likely move to a remote telecommunication society. As the next generation, we should embrace the new change with open arms and find solace amidst the uncertain. Reference Goldstein, M. (2020, October 4). Future of Technology Through Research. Medium. https://medium.com/technology-the-future/future-of-technology-through-research-e5d7bb48d6a5

https://medium.com/business-of-the-21st-century-virtual-or-live/the-world-from-an-outsiders-perspective-113633880026

['Mary Renee Katriel Agregado']

2020-10-17 22:45:45.962000+00:00

['Technology', 'Computers', 'Data', 'People', 'Telecommunication']

5 Simple Smartphone Habits That Will Improve Your Photography Now

Most of us carry a smartphone in our pocket and when we see a once-in-a-lifetime event, we grab for our smartphone. Frantically, we try to put the phone into camera mode and capture the moment before it’s gone. We look at the results after the moment’s gone, only to discover we that we cut off the head of our subject, or it’s blurry because we didn’t hold the camera still. Have you experienced that? Most of us have, so here is a simple checklist that will help you take better smartphone pictures. When you develop the right habits, your photography will look better than a smartphone. Your friends will think you bought a new camera.

https://medium.com/photography-habits/5-simple-smartphone-habits-that-will-improve-your-photography-now-12b0b8ccb2d1

['Gary Mcbrine']

2021-01-06 22:08:37.801000+00:00

['Art', 'Photography', 'Smartphones', 'Technology', 'Creativity']

Summary of the book “The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous” in 133 quotes | The KoinOK Blog

Here are 133 important quotes from this must read book: 1. “Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties” 2. “While Bitcoin is a new invention of the digital age, the problems it purports to solve — namely, providing a form of money that is under the full command of its owner and likely to hold its value in the long run — are as old as human society itself” 3. “People’s choices are subjective, and so there is no “right” and “wrong” choice of money. There are, however, consequences to choices” 4. “I like to call this the easy money trap: anything used as a store of value will have its supply increased, and anything whose supply can be easily increased will destroy the wealth of those who used it as a store of value” 5. “For something to assume a monetary role, it has to be costly to produce, otherwise the temptation to make money on the cheap will destroy the wealth of the savers, and destroy the incentive anyone has to save in this medium” 6. “The monetary media that survived for longest are the ones that had very reliable mechanisms for restricting their supply growth — in other words, hard money” 7. “The choice of what makes the best money has always been determined by the technological realities of societies shaping the salability of different goods” 8. “Human civilization flourished in times and places where sound money was widely adopted, while unsound money all too frequently coincided with civilizational decline and societal collapse” 9. “Whether in Rome, Constantinople, Florence, or Venice, history shows that a sound monetary standard is a necessary prerequisite for human flourishing, without which society stands on the precipice of barbarism and destruction” 10. “History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours” 11. “Some of the most important technological, medical, economic, and artistic human achievements were invented during the era of the gold standard, which partly explains why it was known as la Belle Epoque, or the beautiful era, across Europe” 12. “World War I saw the end of the era of monetary media being the choice decided by the free market, and the beginning of the era of government money” 13. “Government money is similar to primitive forms of money and commodities other than gold, in that it is liable to having its supply increased quickly compared to its stock, leading to a quick loss of salability, destruction of purchasing power, and impoverishment of its holders” 14. “[About WW1] With the simple suspension of gold redeemability, governments’ war efforts were no longer limited to the money that they had in their own treasuries, but extended virtually to the entire wealth of the population” 15. “Had European nations remained on the gold standard, or had the people of Europe held their own gold in their own hands […], history might have been different. It is likely that WorldWar I would have been settled militarily within a few months of conflict” 16. “The cause of the Great Crash of 1929 was the diversion away from the gold standard in the post-WWI years, and the deepening of the Depression was caused by government control and socialization of the economy in the Hoover and FDR years” 17. “All spending is spending, in the naive economics of Keynesians, and so it matters not if that spending comes from individuals feeding their families or governments murdering foreigners: it all counts in aggregate demand and it all reduces unemployment!” 18. “In essence, Bretton Woods attempted to achieve through central planning what the international gold standard of the nineteenth century had achieved spontaneously” 19. “Hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government money. There was never an example of hyperinflation with economies that operated a gold or silver standard” 20. “With government money, whose cost of production tends to zero, it has become quite possible for an entire society to witness all of its savings in the form of money disappear in the space of a few months or even weeks” 21. “Hyperinflation is a far more pernicious phenomenon than just the loss of a lot of economic value by a lot of people; it constitutes a complete breakdown of the structure of economic production of a society built up over centuries and millennia” 22. “Even if the textbooks were correct about the benefits of government management of the money supply, the damage from one episode of hyperinflation anywhere in the world far outweighs them” 23. “Hanke and Bushnell have been able to verify 57 episodes of hyperinflation in history, only one of which occurred before the era of monetary nationalism, and that was the inflation in France in 1795, in the wake of the Mississippi Bubble” 24. “The constantly increasing supply means a continuous devaluation of the currency, expropriating the wealth of the holders to benefit those who print the currency, and those who receive it earliest. This is termed the Cantillon Effect” 25. “Whether it’s because of downright graft, “national emergency,” or an infestation of inflationist schools of economics, government will always find a reason and a way to print more money, expanding government power while reducing the wealth of the currency holders” 26. “It is ironic, and very telling, that in the era of government money, governments themselves own far more gold in their official reserves than they did under the international gold standard of 1871–1914” 27. “A sound money makes service valuable to others the only avenue open for prosperity to anyone, thus concentrating society’s efforts on production, cooperation, capital accumulation, and trade” 28. “The twentieth century was the century of unsound money and the omnipotent state, as a market choice in money was denied by government diktat, and government-issued paper money was forced on people with the threat of violence” 29. “Sound money is an essential requirement for individual freedom from despotism and repression, as the ability of a coercive state to create money can give it undue power over its subjects, power which by its very nature will attract the least worthy, and most immoral” 30. “Sound money is a prime factor in determining individual time preference, an enormously important and widely neglected aspect of individual decision making. Time preference refers to the ratio at which individuals value the present compared to the future” 31. “Economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains that once time preference drops enough to allow for any savings and capital or durable consumer-goods formation at all, the tendency is for time preference to drop even further as a “process of civilization” is initiated” 32. “While microeconomics has focused on transactions between individuals, and macroeconomics on the role of government in the economy, the reality is that the most important economic decisions to any individual’s well-being are the ones they conduct in their trade-offs with their future self” 33. “The better the money is at holding its value, the more it incentivizes people to delay consumption and instead dedicate resources for production in the future, leading to capital accumulation and improvement of living standards” 34. “The move from money that holds its value or appreciates to money that loses its value is very significant in the long run: society saves less, accumulates less capital, and possibly begins to consume its capital” 35. “Civilizations prosper under a sound monetary system, but disintegrate when their monetary systems are debased, as was the case with the Romans, the Byzantines, and modern European societies” 36. “What matters in money is its purchasing power, not its quantity, and as such, any quantity of money is enough to fulfil the monetary functions, as long as it is divisible and groupable enough to satisfy holders’ transaction and storage needs” 37. “The best form of money in history was the one that would cause the new supply of money to be the least significant compared to the existing stockpiles, and thus make its creation not a good source of profit” 38. “Had government money been a superior unit of account and store of value, it would not need government legal tender laws to enforce it, nor would governments worldwide have had to confiscate large quantities of gold and continue to hold them in their central bank reserves” 39. “The fact that central banks continue to hold onto their gold, and have even started increasing their reserves, testifies to the confidence they have in their own currencies in the long term” 40. “Sound money is money that gains in value slightly over time, meaning that holding onto it is likely to offer an increase in purchasing power” 41. “Unsound money, being controlled by central banks whose express mission is to keep inflation positive, will offer little incentive for holders to keep it” 42. “With unsound money, only returns that are higher than the rate of depreciation of the currency will be positive in real terms, creating incentives for high-return but high-risk investment and spending” 43. “Savings rates have been declining across the developed countries, dropping to very low levels, while personal, municipal, and national debts have increased to levels which would have seemed unimaginable in the past” 44. “One of the most mendacious fantasies that pervades Keynesian economic thought is the idea that the national debt “does not matter, since we owe it to ourselves” 45. “Only a high-time-preference disciple of Keynes could fail to understand that this “ourselves” is not one homogeneous blob but is differentiated into several generations -namely, the current ones which consume recklessly at the expense of future ones” 46. “The twentieth century’s binge on conspicuous consumption cannot be understood separately from the destruction of sound money and the outbreak of Keynesian high-time-preference thinking, in vilifying savings and deifying consumption as the key to economic prosperity” 47. “It is an ironic sign of the depth of modern-day economic ignorance fomented by Keynesian economics that capitalism — an economic system based on capital accumulation from saving — is blamed for unleashing conspicuous consumption — the exact opposite of capital accumulation” 48. “Capitalism is what happens when people drop their time preference, defer immediate gratification, and invest in the future. Debt-fueled mass consumption is as much a normal part of capitalism as asphyxiation is a normal part of respiration” 49. “The only cause of economic growth in the first place is delayed gratification, saving, and investment, which extend the length of the production cycle and increase the productivity of the methods of production, leading to better standards of living” 50. “This move from sound money to depreciating money has led to several generations of accumulated wealth being squandered on conspicuous consumption within a generation or two, making indebtedness the new method for funding major expenses” 51. “As H. L. Mencken put it: “Every election is an advanced auction on stolen goods”” 52. “As politicians sell people the lie that eternal welfare and retirement benefits are possible through the magic of the monetary printing press, the investment in a family becomes less and less valuable” 53. “The majority of the technology we use in our modern life was invented in the 19th century, under the gold standard, financed with the ever-growing stock of capital accumulated by savers storing their wealth in a sound money and store of value which did not depreciate quickly” 54. “The contributions of sound money to human flourishing are not restricted to scientific and technological advance; they can also be vividly seen in the art world” 55. “In times of sound money and low time preference, artists worked on perfecting their craft so they could produce valuable works in the long run” 56. “Modern artists have replaced craft and long hours of practice with pretentiousness, shock value, indignation, and existential angst as ways to cow audiences into appreciating their art, and often added some pretense to political ideals, usually of the puerile Marxist variety” 57. “As government money has replaced sound money, patrons with low time preference and refined tastes have been replaced by government bureaucrats with political agendas as crude as their artistic taste” 58. “The Use of Knowledge in Society, by Friedrich Hayek, is arguably one of the most important economic papers to have ever been written” 59. “In a free market economic system, prices are knowledge, and the signals that communicate information” 60. “Prices are not simply a tool to allow capitalists to profit; they are the information system of economic production, communicating knowledge across the world and coordinating the complex processes of production” 61. “Any economic system that tries to dispense with prices will cause the complete breakdown of economic activity and bring a human society back to a primitive state” 62. “The fatal flaw of socialism that Mises exposed was that without a price mechanism emerging on a free market, socialism would fail at economic calculation, most crucially in the allocation of capital goods” 63. “In an economy with a central bank and fractional reserve banking, the supply of loanable funds is directed by a committee of economists under the influence of politicians, bankers, TV pundits, and sometimes, most spectacularly, military generals” 64. “Creating new pieces of paper and digital entries to paper over the deficiency in savings does not magically increase society’s physical capital stock; it only devalues the existing money supply and distorts prices” 65. “Only with an understanding of the capital structure and how interest rate manipulation destroys the incentive for capital accumulation can one understand the causes of recessions and the swings of the business cycle” 66. “The business cycle is the natural result of the manipulation of the interest rate distorting the market for capital by making investors imagine they can attain more capital than is available with the unsound money they have been given by the banks” 67. “Contrary to Keynesian animist mythology, business cycles are not mystic phenomena caused by flagging “animal spirits” whose cause is to be ignored as central bankers seek to try to engineer recovery” 68. “Economic logic clearly shows how recessions are the inevitable outcome of interest rate manipulation in the same way shortages are the inevitable outcome of price ceilings” 69. “Monetary history testifies to how much more severe business cycles and recessions are when the money supply is manipulated than when it isn’t” 70. “A capitalist system cannot function without a free market in capital, where the price of capital emerges through the interaction of supply and demand and the decisions of capitalists are driven by accurate price signals” 71. “The central bank’s meddling in the capital market is the root of all recessions and all the crises which most politicians, journalists, academics, and leftist activists like to blame on capitalism” 72. “Imagining that central banks can “prevent,” “combat,” or “manage” recessions is as fanciful and misguided as placing pyromaniacs and arsonists in charge of the fire brigade” 73. “Central planning of credit markets must fail because it destroys markets’ mechanisms for price-discovery providing market participants with the accurate signals and incentives to manage their consumption and production” 74. “It is typical of the Milton Friedman band of libertarianism in that it blames the government for an economic problem, but the flawed reasoning leads to suggesting even more government intervention as the solution” 75. “Only when a central bank manipulates the money supply and interest rate does it become possible for large-scale failures across entire sectors of the economy to happen at the same time, causing waves of mass layoffs in entire industries” 76. “In a free market for money, individuals would choose the currencies they want to use, and the result would be that they would choose the currency with the reliably lowest stock-to-flow ratio. This currency would oscillate the least with changes in demand and supply” 77. “It is an astonishing fact of modern life that an entrepreneur in the year 1900 could make global economic plans and calculations all denominated in any international currency, with no thought whatsoever given to exchange rate fluctuations” 78. “The combination of floating exchange rates and Keynesian ideology has given our world the entirely modern phenomenon of currency wars” 79. “Hard money, by taking the question of supply out of the hands of governments and their economist-propagandists, would force everyone to be productive to society instead of seeking to get rich through the fool’s errand of monetary manipulation” 80. “Under a sound monetary system, government had to function in a way that is unimaginable to generations reared on the twentieth-century news cycle: they had to be fiscally responsible” 81. “For those of us alive today, raised on the propaganda of the omnipotent governments of the twentieth century, it is often hard to imagine a world in which individual freedom and responsibility supersede government authority” 82. “The fundamental scam of modernity is the idea that government needs to manage the money supply. It is an unquestioned starting assumption of all mainstream economic schools of thought and political parties. There isn’t a shred of real-world evidence to support this contention” 83. “Having the ability to print money, literally and figuratively, increases the power of any government, and any government looks for anything that gives it more power” 84. “By placing a hard cap on the total supply of bitcoins, Nakamoto was clearly unpersuaded by the arguments of the standard macroeconomics textbook and more influenced by the Austrian school, which argues that the quantity of money itself is irrelevant” 85. “Societies with money of stable value generally develop a low time preference, learning to save and think of the future, while societies with high inflation and depreciating economies will develop high time preference as people lose track of the importance of saving” 86. “With sound money, the government’s war effort was limited by the taxes it could collect. With unsound money, it is restrained by how much money it can create before the currency is destroyed, making it able to appropriate wealth far more easily” 87. “Unsound money is a particularly dangerous tool in the hands of modern democratic governments facing constant reelection pressure. Modern voters are unlikely to favor the candidates who are upfront about the costs and benefits of their schemes” 88. “Unsound money is at the heart of the modern delusion believed by most voters and those unfortunate enough to study modern macroeconomics at university level: that government actions have no opportunity costs” 89. “It is no coincidence that when recounting the most horrific tyrants of history, one finds that every single one of them operated a system of government-issued money which was constantly inflated to finance government operation” 90. “Unsound money makes government power potentially unlimited, with large consequences to every individual, forcing politics to the center stage of their life and redirecting much of society’s energy and resources to the zero-sum game of who gets to rule and how” 91. “In the world of fiat money, having access to the central bank’s monetary spigots is more important than serving customers. Firms that can get low-interest-rate credit to operate will have a persistent advantage over competitors that cannot” 92. “Banking has evolved into a business that generates returns without risks to bankers and simultaneously creates risks without returns for everyone else” 93. “In a world where central banks allocate credit, the larger firm has an advantage in being able to secure funding at a low rate which its smaller competitors cannot get” 94. “Bitcoin was the first engineering solution that allowed for digital payments without having to rely on a trusted third-party intermediary. By being the first digital object that is verifiably scarce, Bitcoin is the first example of digital cash” 95. “Whereas in a modern central bank the new money created goes to finance lending and government spending, in Bitcoin the new money goes only to those who spend resources on updating the ledger” 96. “Difficulty adjustment is the most reliable technology for making hard money and limiting the stock-to-flow ratio from rising, and it makes Bitcoin fundamentally different from every other money” 97. “Bitcoin is the hardest money ever invented: growth in its value cannot possibly increase its supply; it can only make the network more secure and immune to attack” 98. “The security of Bitcoin lies in the asymmetry between the cost of solving the proof-of-work necessary to commit a transaction to the ledger and the cost of verifying its validity” 99. “The Bitcoin ledger of transactions might just be the only objective set of facts in the world” 100. “Bitcoin is the first example of a digital good whose transfer stops it from being owned by the sender” 101. “As the digital age has introduced improvements and efficiencies to most aspects of our life, Bitcoin presents a tremendous technological leap forward in the monetary solution to the indirect exchange problem, perhaps as significant as the move from cattle and salt to gold and silver” 102. “Without a conservative monetary policy and difficulty adjustment, Bitcoin would only have succeeded theoretically as digital cash, but remained too insecure to be used widely in practice” 103. “Bitcoin’s volatility derives from the fact that its supply is utterly inflexible and not responsive to demand changes, because it is programmed to grow at a predetermined rate” 104. “As the size of the market grows, along with the sophistication and the depth of the financial institutions dealing with Bitcoin, this volatility will likely decline” 105. “As long as Bitcoin is growing, its token price will behave like that of a stock of a start-up achieving very fast growth. Should Bitcoin’s growth stop and stabilize, it would stop attracting high-risk investment flows, and become just a normal monetary asset” 106. “Bitcoin is the cheapest way to buy the future, because Bitcoin is the only medium guaranteed to not be debased, no matter how much its value rises” 107. “The strict digital scarcity of the Bitcoin tokens combines the best elements of physical monetary media, without any of the physical drawbacks to moving and transporting it. Bitcoin might have a claim to make for being the best technology for saving ever invented” 108. “Any person who owns Bitcoin achieves a degree of economic freedom which was not possible before its invention” 109. “For the first time since the emergence of the modern state, individuals have a clear technical solution to escaping the financial clout of the governments they live under” 110. “Bitcoin, and cryptography in general, are defensive technologies that make the cost of defending property and information far lower than the cost of attacking them” 111. “If Bitcoin continues to grow to capture a larger share of the global wealth, it may force governments to become more and more a form of voluntary organization, which can only acquire its “taxes” voluntarily by offering its subjects services they would be willing to pay for” 112. “Contrary to popular depictions of anarchists as hoodie-clad hoodlums, Bitcoin’s brand of anarchism is completely peaceful, providing individuals with the tools necessary for them to be free from government control and inflation” 113. “The invention of Bitcoin has created, from the ground up, a new independent alternative mechanism for international settlement that does not rely on any intermediary and can operate entirely separate from the existing financial infrastructure” 114. “Bitcoin can be seen as the new emerging reserve currency for online transactions, where the online equivalent of banks will issue Bitcoin-backed tokens to users while keeping their hoard of Bitcoins in cold storage” 115. “Bitcoin’s advantage is that by bringing the finality of cash settlement to the digital world, it has created the fastest method for final settlement of large payments across long distances and national borders” 116. “Bitcoin can be best understood to compete with settlement payments between central banks and large financial institutions, and it compares favorably to them due to its verifiable record, cryptographic security, and imperviousness to third-party security holes” 117. “Bitcoin, having no counterparty risk and no reliance on any third-party, is uniquely suited to play the same role that gold played in the gold standard. It is a neutral money for an international system that does not give any one country the “exorbitant privilege” of issuing the global reserve currency” 118. “If Bitcoin continues to grow in value and gets utilized by a growing number of financial institutions, it will become a reserve currency for a new form of central bank. These central banks could be primarily based in the digital or physical worlds, but it is becoming worth considering if national central banks should supplement their reserves with Bitcoin” 119. “The first central bank to buy bitcoin will alert the rest of the central banks to the possibility and make many of them rush toward it. The first central bank purchase is likely to make the value of Bitcoin rise significantly and thus make it progressively more expensive for later central banks to buy it” 120. “While central banks have mostly been dismissive of the importance of Bitcoin, this could be a luxury they may not afford for long. As hard as it might be for central bankers to believe it, Bitcoin is a direct competitor to their line of business, which has been closed off from market competition for a century” 121. “The modern central bank business model is being disrupted. Central banks now have no way of stopping competition by just passing laws as they have always done. They are now up against a digital competitor that most likely cannot be brought under the physical world’s laws” 122. “If the modern world is ancient Rome, suffering the economic consequences of monetary collapse, with the dollar our aureus, then Satoshi Nakamoto is our Constantine, Bitcoin is his solidus, and the Internet is our Constantinople” 123. “Should it achieve some sort of stability in value, Bitcoin would be superior to using national currencies for global payment settlements, as is the case today, because national currencies fluctuate in value based on each nation’s and government’s conditions” 124. “Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized digital currency which has grown spontaneously as a finely balanced equilibrium between miners, coders, and users, none of whom can control it” 125. “After years of watching altcoins get created, it seems impossible that any coin will recreate the adversarial standoff that exists between Bitcoin stakeholders and prevents any party from controlling payments in it” 126. “It is high time for everyone involved in Bitcoin to stop concerning themselves with the question of the identity of Nakamoto, and accept that it does not matter to the operation of the technology, in the same way that the identity of the inventor of the wheel no longer matters” 127. “No single altcoin has demonstrated anything near Bitcoin’s impressive resilience to change, which is down to its truly decentralized nature and the strong incentives for everyone to abide by the status quo consensus rules” 128. “Contrary to a lot of the hype surrounding Bitcoin, eliminating the need for trust in third parties is not an unquestionably good thing to do in all avenues of business and life” 129. “A non-Bitcoin blockchain combines the worst of both worlds: the cumbersome structure of the blockchain with the cost and security risk of trusted third parties” 130. “It is no wonder that eight years after its invention, blockchain technology has not yet managed to break through in a successful, ready-for-market commercial application other than the one for which it was specifically designed: Bitcoin” 131. “The most common potential applications touted for blockchain technology — payments, contracts, and asset registry — are only workable to the extent that they run using the decentralized currency of the blockchain” 132. “All blockchains without currencies have not moved from the prototype stage to commercial implementation because they cannot compete with current best practice in their markets” 133. “Any application of blockchain technology will only make commercial sense if its operation is reliant on the use of electronic cash, and only if electronic cash’s disintermediation provides economic benefits outweighing the use of regular currencies and payment channels”

https://medium.com/koinok/summary-of-the-book-the-bitcoin-standard-by-saifedean-ammous-in-133-quotes-the-koinok-blog-83da7c775223

['Team Koinok']

2018-08-03 06:23:00.631000+00:00

['Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain']

Micro-grid for Kalbarri in Western Australia!

As exciting as Elon Musk’s bet, and subsequent giant battery may be, there is a hell of a lot more going on in Australia that never gets a mention. Not sexy enough I suppose. Well, I think micro grids, renewables and batteries are very sexy so have a look at this: This is the proposed plan for a micro grid in Kalibarri, WA. Kalibarri is a rural community which relies on power coming in via the Geraldton Feeder. Just one single source of power. When that power goes down, Kalibarri goes dark. Kind of hard to run homes, not to mention businesses, without power. But all that will be a thing of the past once the micro grid is up and running. It will include power from the windfarm as well as power contributed by individual homes running solar panels. All that power will charge a 2 MWH [megawatt hour] battery, and the Geraldton Feeder will be there as well. All that equates to power security for a community that has had anything but. On a national level, the Kalibarri micro grid is also an example of what Australia can do in spite of the idiots in Canberra. You can read the whole story here: And now a big thank you to Dawn who found out about this development and sent me the URL. Dawn is a Silversmith who loves cheering people up. She would call this a cheeryuppy story and I couldn’t agree more! Keep smiling, only four more days ‘till the weekend. :D Meeks

https://medium.com/tikh-tokh/micro-grid-for-kalbarri-in-western-australia-91339c4651f5

['A.C. Flory']

2018-03-07 00:09:37.579000+00:00

['Technology', 'Farm', 'Dawn Gill Designs', 'Grid', 'Kalibarri']

3 Ways Data Analysis Can Make U Advance : EMV - Python + Tableau

3 Ways Data Analysis Can Make U Advance : EMV - Python + Tableau Laxman Singh Follow Dec 20 · 5 min read Extract , Model and Visualize in Interactive Dashboard : Give Meaning to Raw Data Data is huge around the globe and extracting the meaning from the data, visualizing that makes it appealing and easier to understand by others. Here, we will use famous Yelp Data set to do our analysis and visualization. Social networking data is growing at very rapid rate and it influences business growth in case it is utilized properly to extract meaning. About Dataset Yelp facilitates the platform where consumers post their user user experience about businesses, products or services through free-form text and numeric ratings of 1 to 5. A star rating of 1 to 3 means that it was not a good user experience while a rating of 4 or 5 means a good user experience. Therefore, it is vital for businesses to focus on receiving high reviews from their customers. One important question for many businesses is whether there is a way to encourage higher ratings through targeted alterations to their offerings. Dataset contains business, review, user, check-in and tips. Yelp dataset comprises of user reviews, business data, check-ins and tips which shorter reviews. This dataset is in Json format. More detail about Dataset Our Goal To assess the public perception of restaurants on Yelp via exploratory data analysis To build a machine learning model which accurately predicts the sentiment of reviews Let us do together in three steps : EDA, Machine Learning and Visualization EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis) We have following files: business User : User data including the user’s friend mapping and all the metadata associated with the user. Review : Contains full review text data including the user_id that wrote the review and the business_id the review is written for. Ratings are between 1–5. Business : Contains business data including location data, attributes, and categories. Tip : Tips written by a user on a business. Tips are shorter than reviews and tend to convey quick suggestions. Checkin : Checkins on a business Not considering the photos for this analysis. B usiness and Review dataset are related with business_id field and can be joined to further analysis. Data is spread across different reviews. Three different visualization to show more about data: 1. Review ratings 2. Review against industries 3. Geo spread of Reviews. Data Spread as per ratings Top Categories in Reviews

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/3-ways-data-analysis-can-make-u-invincible-emv-5ebaa6b89733

['Laxman Singh']

2020-12-28 10:27:44.187000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Technology']

Next big thing in Agriculture: Precision Farming

Photo credit: Freepik Agriculture is the most important activity in the world to support the ever-growing population growth and feeding the hungry world. In a few decades, the population is going to reach a number that can no longer be supported by the farming techniques we have today. The technology we have now in most of the agricultural farm isn’t accurate one way or another. The efficiency of our farms will no longer be capable of supporting the entire population. If we are running a farm, growing crops, we need to collect the data, the accurate ones; anything that is related to the crop growing- soil, water, air, weather, climate, etc. Any mistakes can lead to crop damage and economic loss. Now, humans are not much of an accurate being, mistakes are often, and to minimize or if possible, prevent the losses due to these mistakes, machines can be used. Crop farms, as we know have undergone a drastic change within the past few decades. We have large tractors instead of bulls or horses pulling the plow, big combined harvesters performing everything at once instead of the tedious multiple hand operations, and many other techniques. These things have now taken over most of the farms. Now, let’s talk about the precision, perfection in the farm activities we perform. Precision on the farm is when we carry out the activities on the farm wherever and whenever we want. The level of precision or perfection depends on the fact of who is carrying out the activities. We sure have achieved a higher level of precision in the past few years by the use of machines but still, they are operated by us, one of the many imperfect things on the farm. What about more precise farming? What if this imperfection we have is replaced by automation and tools like GIS, GPS, Satellite imaging, thermal imaging, drones, cameras, and farm power? Automation technology and precision tools combined together give an exactly perfect farming system if external factors don’t limit. We can achieve these things nowadays on our farm, increase or even multiply the precision we perform in farming and subsequently increase the production. In fact, one example we can take in precision farming is the Farmbot designed by an engineer Rory Aronson, which performs the agricultural operations precisely with the help of scanners and cameras, treating each plant position as co-ordinates and memorizing them for further intercultural operations with a robotic arm. However, this technology comes on a small scale, for backyard farming and to produce organic food at home but a similar concept can be used for large farms. We can use similar structures on a large scale and achieve the same precision this machine has achieved. We can literally create a farm with robotic farmers that can produce foods in more quantity, more organic foods, and can feed the hungry world of the future. That technology, that idea, is the next big thing in agriculture and the future of the world.

https://medium.com/@anjandhungana/next-big-thing-in-agriculture-precision-farming-63a4dd45a0cb

['Anjan Dhungana']

2020-12-15 18:15:40.637000+00:00

['Food', 'Agriculture', 'Farming', 'Technology', 'Precision Farming']

TensorFlow is dead, long live TensorFlow!

If you’re an AI enthusiast and you didn’t see the big news this month, you might have just snoozed through an off-the-charts earthquake. Everything is about to change! What is this? The TensorFlow logo or the letter you use to answer tough True/False exam questions? Whatever it is, we’re celebrating TF 2.0’s full release! Last year I wrote 9 Things You Need To Know About TensorFlow… but there’s one thing you need to know above all others: TensorFlow 2.0 is here! It is out of beta and officially yours to enjoy as of September 30, 2019! The revolution is here! Welcome to TensorFlow 2.0. It’s a radical makeover. The consequences of what just happened are going to have major ripple effects on every industry, just you wait. If you’re a TF beginner in 2019, you’re extra lucky because you picked the best possible time to enter AI (though you might want to start from scratch if your old tutorials have the word “session” in them). In a nutshell: TensorFlow has just gone full Keras. Those of you who know those words just fell out of your chairs. Boom! A prickly experience I doubt that many people have accused TensorFlow 1.x of being easy to love. It’s the industrial lathe of AI… and about as user-friendly. At best, you might feel grateful for being able to accomplish your AI mission at mind-boggling scale. You’d also attract some raised eyebrows if you claimed that TensorFlow 1.x was easy to get the hang of. Its steep learning curve made it mostly inaccessible to the casual user, but mastering it meant you could talk about it the way you’d brag about that toe you lost while climbing Everest. Was it fun? No, c’mon, really: was it fun? You‘re not the only one — it’s what TensorFlow 1.x tutorials used to feel like for everybody. TensorFlow’s core strength is performance. It was built for taking models from research to production at massive scale and it delivers, but TF 1.x made you sweat for it. Persevere and you’d be able to join the ranks of ML practitioners who use it for incredible things, like finding new planets and pioneering medicine. What a pity that such a powerful tool was in the hands of so few… until now. Don’t worry about what tensors are. We just called them (generalized) matrices where I grew up. The name TensorFlow is a nod to the fact that TF’s very good at performing distributed computations involving multidimensional arrays (er, matrices), which you’ll find handy for AI at scale. Image source. Cute and cuddly Keras Now that we’ve covered cactuses, let’s talk about something you’d actually want to hug. Overheard at my place of work: “I think I have an actual crush on Keras.” Keras is a specification for building models layer-by-layer that works with multiple machine learning frameworks (so it’s not a TF thing), but you might know it as a high level API accessed from within TensorFlow as tf.keras. Incidentally, I’m writing this section on Keras’ 4th birthday (Mar 27, 2019) for an extra dose of warm fuzzies. Keras was built from the ground up to be Pythonic and always put people first — it was designed to be inviting, flexible, and simple to learn. Why don’t we have both? Why must we choose between Keras’s cuddliness and traditional TensorFlow’s mighty performance? Why don’t we have both? Great idea! Let’s have both! That’s TensorFlow 2.0 in a nutshell. This is TensorFlow 2.0. You can mash those orange buttons yourself here. “We don’t think you should have to choose between a simple API and scalable API. We want a higher level API that takes you all the way from MNIST to planet scale.” — Karmel Allison, TF Engineering Leader at Google The usability revolution Going forward, Keras will be the high level API for TensorFlow and it’s extended so that you can use all the advanced features of TensorFlow directly from tf.keras. All of TensorFlow with Keras simplicity at every scale and with all hardware. In the new version, everything you’ve hated most about TensorFlow 1.x gets the guillotine. Having to perform a dark ritual just to add two numbers together? Dead. TensorFlow Sessions? Dead. A million ways to do the exact same thing? Dead. Rewriting code if you switch hardware or scale? Dead. Reams of boilerplate to write? Dead. Horrible unactionable error messages? Dead. Steep learning curve? Dead. TensorFlow is dead, long live TensorFlow 2.0! You’re expecting the obvious catch, aren’t you? Worse performance? Guess again! We’re not giving up performance. TensorFlow is now cuddly and this is a game-changer, because it means that one of the most potent tools of our time just dropped the bulk of its barriers to entry. Tech enthusiasts from all walks of life are finally empowered to join in because the new version opens access beyond researchers and other highly-motivated folks with an impressive pain threshold. One of the most potent tools of our time just dropped the bulk of its barriers to entry! Everyone is welcome. Want to play? Then come play! Eager to please In TensorFlow 2.0, eager execution is now the default. You can take advantage of graphs even in eager context, which makes your debugging and prototyping easy, while the TensorFlow runtime takes care of performance and scaling under the hood. Wrangling graphs in TensorFlow 1.x (declarative programming) was disorienting for many, but it’s all just a bad dream now with eager execution (imperative programming). If you skipped learning it before, so much the better. TF 2.0 is a fresh start for everyone. As easy as one… one… one… Many APIs got consolidated across TensorFlow under Keras, so now it’s easier to know what you should use when. For example, now you only need to work with one set of optimizers and one set of metrics. How many sets of layers? You guessed it! One! Keras-style, naturally. In fact, the whole ecosystem of tools got a spring cleaning, from data processing pipelines to easy model exporting to TensorBoard integration with Keras, which is now a… one-liner! There are also great tools that let you switch and optimize distribution strategies for amazing scaling efficiency without losing any of the convenience of Keras. Those distribution strategies are pretty, aren’t they? The catch! If the catch isn’t performance, what is it? There has to be a catch, right? Actually, the catch was your suffering up to now. TensorFlow demanded quite a lot of patience from its users while a friendly version was brewing. This wasn’t a matter of sadism. Making tools for deep learning is new territory, and we’re all charting it as we go along. Wrong turns were inevitable, but we learned a lot along the way. It’s not a matter of sadism. Deep learning was uncharted territory. The TensorFlow community put in a lot of elbow grease to make the initial magic happen, and then more effort again to polish the best gems while scraping out less fortunate designs. The plan was never to force you to use a rough draft forever, but perhaps you habituated so well to the discomfort that you didn’t realize it was temporary. Thank you for your patience! We’re not giving up performance! The reward is everything you appreciate about TensorFlow 1.x made friendly under a consistent API with tons of duplicate functionality removed so it’s cleaner to use. Even the errors are cleaned up to be concise, simple to understand, and actionable. Mighty performance stays! What’s the big deal? Haters (who’re gonna hate) might say that much of v2.0 could be cobbled together in v1.x if you searched hard enough, so what’s all the fuss about? Well, not everyone wants to spend our days digging around in clutter for buried treasure. The makeover and clean-up are worth a standing ovation. But that’s not the biggest big deal. The point not to miss is this: TensorFlow just announced an uncompromising focus on usability. It’s an unprecedented step in AI democratization! AI lets you automate tasks you can’t come up with instructions for. It lets you automate the ineffable. Democratization means that AI at scale will no longer be the province of a tiny tech elite. Now anyone can get their hands on the steering wheel! Imagine a future where “I know how to make things with Python” and “I know how to make things with AI” are equally commonplace statements… Exactly! I’m almost tempted to use that buzzword “disruptive” here. The great migration We know it’s hard work to upgrade to a new version, especially when the changes are so dramatic. If you’re about to embark on migrating your codebase to 2.0, you’re not alone — we’ll be doing the same here at Google with one of the largest codebases in the world. As we go along, we’ll be sharing migration guides to help you out. We’re giving you great tools to make your migration easier. If you rely on specific functionality, you won’t be left in the lurch — except for contrib, all TF 1.x functions will live on in the compat.v1 compatibility module. We’re also giving you a script which automatically updates your code so it runs on TensorFlow 2.0. Learn more in the video below. This video’s is a great resource if you’re eager to dig deeper into TF 2.0 and geek out on code snippets. Your clean slate TF 2.0 is a beginner’s paradise, so it will be a downer for those who’ve been looking forward to watching newbies suffer the way you once suffered. If you were hoping to use TensorFlow for hazing new recruits, you might need to search for some other way to inflict existential horror. If you’re a TensorFlow beginner, you may be late to the AI party, but yours is the fashionable kind of late. Now’s the best time to arrive! Sitting out might have been the smartest move, because now’s the best time to arrive on the scene. This article was written just after TensorFlow 2.0 was released in alpha (that’s a preview, you hipster you), but as of September 30, 2019, the full release is available to you in all its glory! If ever there was a time to dive in, this is it! TF 2.0 is a beginner’s paradise. Following the dramatic changes, you won’t be as much of a beginner as you imagined. The playing field got leveled, the game got easier, and there’s a seat saved just for you. Welcome! I’m glad you’re finally here and I hope you’re as excited about this new world of possibilities as I am. Dive in! Check out the shiny redesigned tensorflow.org for tutorials, examples, documentation, and tools to get you started… or dive straight in with: pip install tensorflow==2.0.0-alpha0 You’ll find detailed instructions here.

https://medium.com/hackernoon/tensorflow-is-dead-long-live-tensorflow-49d3e975cf04

['Cassie Kozyrkov']

2019-10-04 05:19:46.055000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'TensorFlow', 'Hackernoon Top Story']

The Metaverse as the new frontier of capitalism

Baudrillard’s work from1981, Simulacra and Simulation is premonitory in many ways. It is contemporaneous in the most insightful form — as it notices the first signs of our ever-increasing fictional world and describes it on its totality. Another work that is premonitory, without using any word, is the 2002 film Naqoyqatsi of Godfrey Reggio (with music from the giant Phillip Glass). Using only images, animations and music, this film shows the non-stop shift from a material world to one of bits and bytes, zeros and ones, immaterial matter — the real turned non-real — as the negatives of cities and nature transposed into data. How to make sense of the times we live? If everything in 1981 already seemed a complete simulacrum to Baudrillard — (power, money, politics, TV, pornography, means of production and even the idea of nuclear annihilation), 2021 has elevated the simulacrum to new heights. Our means to escape it are ever more reduced. There is no space for dissidents — on the sense of a possible system that goes back to the real instead of continuing the illusions. Pointing out the fictional nature of our whole society is possible, but it changes nothing. Two of the biggest bestsellers of the 2010 decade, Sapiens and Homodeus from Yuval Noah Harari clearly point out all our historic collective fictions. It is as if we are slightly aware of our condition — but changing it is impossible. As many said, our current trajectory is much less of an Orwellian 1984 type of domination but more of a Brave New World Huxley one. People are ‘happy’ and not even aware of any domination — the system triumphs over the individual when the individual loses the capacity to imagine other possibilities out of it — nothing is worth fighting anymore. 2021 is opening up the new frontier of capitalism — why only market and sell things on the real/material world if many other virtual ones are possible to be exploited? This was already possible in a fringe (soon to be the main) sector of capitalism — gaming. A growing number of people, majority men — same as the metaverse proponents, already spend vast sums on in-game purchases. In 1971, money lost any left connection to the real (the end of Bretton Woods System). In the 2010 decade, the crypto currencies gained the world. When it seemed that money (and the ‘things’ it can buy) could not get any more fictional, the internet transformed it into a “simulation of a simulacrum”, if updating Baudrillard is even possible. Nevertheless, money and gaming are only the first of being completely pushed into a new all encompassing ‘reality’ of its own. Our ever more complex societies seem doomed to a common collective future where the real and the fictional are one — from our joint consciousness to the most basic bodily sensations. 2021 also popularized the Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) — private property transferred to virtual reality. If on a first level a photo or film keep certain relation to the real, a NFT is a second level of dematerialization of our world and perceived ‘reality’. It simulates, in a virtual world (per se already a simulacrum), the simulacrum of an image/photo/video — and, as if magically, it acquires ‘value’ and it is deemed proprietary. So we get to the Metaverse — since a few months ago, it is not anymore a fiction or dystopian view presented in sci-fi books or films. It is openly THE next frontier of capitalism. Facebook (now naturally called Meta) was the first to be vocal about it, as it is desperate to keep its relevance. Besides Facebook/Meta, the whole system has fast enough noticed that the material world is too small for their ambitions. If capitalism main drive is continuous growth — how to keep growth happening in a material world — by definition, scarce? The internet, gig economy and never ending governmental quantitative easing’s have kept the system afloat since the financial crisis of 2008. Now, the technology is catching up to make the impossible possible — eternal growth. From now on, our history might be separate into two — one of the virtual, where all possibilities are abundant, and one of the abandoned ‘real’, where pain and scarcity still exists. The future decade’s pressures are more and more on the deterioration of what is left of the real world — climate change, pandemics, automation of work, decreasing populations (first in the West, then in the rest of the world), and scarce resources. The work that produces material things were/are the first to be automated — first in agriculture, then manufacturing and now finally services. In such a decadent material world, continuous growth would not be possible anymore — but with virtual ones, duplicates — perfected forms of our real realm — eternal growth is not only possible, but in essence, the norm. However, how would this metaverse be? We all had to laugh when we saw the ridiculous avatar of Mark Zuckerberg introducing the concept to the World. This is probably the version 0.1 of this next frontier. If we think a bit more, we already have the whole world mapped by satellite pictures, Google Street view, 3D maps of cities (over and underground), all human knowledge and trillions of pictures/videos willingly uploaded by the public. Naqoyqatsi poetically shows all this flow of data being transferred from the real to the virtual. The Metaverse would be the organizational platform of all this flow of data — the internet does it in some sense, but does not integrate it sufficiently. Today, there are multiple AIs doing some work with this data. In a fully developed metaverse, this virtual reality will become reality — or an ‘ameliorated’ problem free version of it. It would not be surprising if still on this decade we have ways to evade our real bodies and live in a ‘simulated simulacrum of reality’. The logic of capital unequivocally leads to this virtual world, where growth is still possible. Soon enough, many of us will have a VR headset, with special glasses and headphones. It will permit us to go to the museum or cinema from our beds or sofas — in a 3D simulation. After it, new appliances will come by — a treadmill so you can safely walk in the metaverse from inside your home. Why would you go for a walk around the block if you can put your glasses on and walk with your friends on a simulated New York City, or Rio de Janeiro, if you want a tropical experience with a bit of a thrill? All while seeing some advertisements of products to buy in the virtual and ‘real’ worlds. That is just the beginning… One that we can still imagine and deem as highly possible. But the more data there is, the more the virtual realm can grow and replace the material one. Data is the immaterial flow of this non-stop capitalistic drive — the end goal, in a sense that not even capital ever was. There is never enough data. More and more will be produced, processed and stored. The capabilities are more or less there — super fast internet (5G), increasing data centers, quantum computing, health trackers on human bodies, machine-brain interfaces, internet of things… The goal is for the AI to know how to reproduce material things in a virtual setting — it will replicate a fridge or a microwave by the ways of the data the ‘real’ appliance transmits. Moreover, this metaverse will be updated to know exactly our body sensations — our heart rates, blood pressure and breathing when walking or having sex. Then the texture, smell and taste of food. Perhaps even the feeling of a warm sunrise in a tropical beach. The more we transmit, the more it can render the virtual as real. In no time, it can reverse engineer those sensations. Soon many would not want all the burdens of dressing up to go outside in an ever more unpredictable climate. From the comfort of home, we can ‘enjoy’ all there is to enjoy. And even have the best orgasm of our lives — free of contact to another one and the risky air or bodily fluids contaminated with a new pandemic pathogen. Pandemic — who would have imagined its consequences and the level of alienation it brought us? The COVID-19 pandemic probably accelerated this ‘metaversing’ of reality in many years. Overnight, being distant was a demonstration of love and communal fraternity. Office work, already immaterial and immeasurable, became ever more ethereal. The home became our offices — time and place for work and for anything else became one and only. We fear engaging with other human beings, so the communal aspects of our lives moved even more online. It is no surprise that the metaverse was announced in 2021 — it comes as a savior for all anxieties of an unsafe and contaminated world. It will simulate life, and it will market itself as the ‘happy and fun’ ‘life’ (Zuckerberg is already trying it) — if the outside world is dangerous and unclean, the metaverse is its opposite — the Promised Land: free of all adversity, viruses, bad feelings, pain or even death… Since we humans started to organize labor outside the limits of mere survival (since we stopped being hunter-gatherers), we have been moving to an ever more ‘fictional’ world. It seems as if intelligence, language and an organized society natural path are toward living its own joint fictions. Any economic system is a fiction in this sense — it only exists because we humans imagine it. At some point, the fiction seems to have its own life — it lives and multiply not because of its actors — it is more than the sum of its parts, it is a total new entity on itself. Capitalism has been such for a couple of centuries. We now reach a level that all the incentives, a word that economists love, are towards perpetuating growth at all costs. It does not matter whether a big part of this growth is also a fiction — return on investments made with money created overnight by a central bank to avoid a new crisis. As long as we believe, we shall be redeemed by the duality of capital/data. If not Facebook, any other would step in to build the metaverse — actually, it will be a multitude of actors doing so. The economy wants to make the metaverse possible — and it wants people to engage with it endlessly, making our social media feeds become entirely our social media lives. If all the mighty of human intelligence and the incipient artificial intelligent is to make growth a normality — more productivity, more resources, more people (it has been such for millennia until now) — duplicating our material world in the immaterial realm is the way forward. An immaterial realm that is monetized, in a similar way to our material one. Why one would own only real estate in our decadent material world if we can buy a perfected version of it in the Metaverse? Not to talk that real state in this world depreciates — in the Metaverse, it can only perfect itself with never ending updates. Rents can be charged, ads can be shown, consumption can continue unbothered on ever more ‘simulated simulacrum’ of experiences. Baudrillard’s Hyperreal giving place to a Hyper-unreal, a Hyper-unreal that only exists because we believe. With work in the ‘real’ world being more automated, meaning shorter working days attainable in the next decades, one would turn to the metaverse for ‘producing’, for entertainment and to escape the ‘real’ — devoid of the material boundaries and its suffering. Baudrillard would say that we already do it for decades with our TVs. In the metaverse, it will be the complete triumph of the simulated — maybe many will even sleep plugged in the metaverse, so to have a minimum interaction with this ‘real’ realm and its problems. This is the first of two essays on capitalism, metaverse and the idea of living in a simulation. On the next one, I will explore more the consequences of the metaverse on the very philosophical question of ‘are we a simulation’? If we are ever to produce conscience in a virtual setting (an AI that reaches intelligence levels comparable to a human) — this duplication of consciousness would be only possible through immense flows of data — something that only a metaverse constantly fed by billions of humans could assemble.

https://medium.com/@connectingtotheworld/the-metaverse-as-the-new-frontier-of-capitalism-639c9494634

['Connected World']

2021-12-30 11:11:46.533000+00:00

['Simulation', 'Technology', 'Metaverse', 'Baudrillard', 'Capitalism']

Creating Good UX for Better AI

Creating Good UX for Better AI How to design a product that benefits both the user and the AI model As you’ve probably noticed, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are here to stay and will continue to disrupt the market. Many products have inherently integrated AI functions (i.e., Netflix’s suggestions, Facebook’s auto-tagging, Google’s question answering), and by 2024, 69% of the manager’s routine workload, will be automated, as Gartner forecasts. A lot of work has been done around designing products that make AI accessible for users, but what about designing a product that improves the AI model? How does UX approach the development of better AI? I’ve always been very excited about AI, and for the past couple of months, I’ve been working on the Product Management and UX of several highly technical and advanced AI products. In my experience, bridging the gap between the science behind Machine Learning(ML) and the end-user is a real challenge, but it’s crucial and valuable. Humans have a huge responsibility when it comes to teaching the different models — it can either turn into something great or go horribly wrong. In this article, I will focus on the two sides of an AI product, and then combine them into one approach that will benefit both the end-user and the ML model. So, first, let’s focus on the two sides of the experience: User-centered design Model-centered design After becoming familiar with these, I’ll combine them into one Machine Learning Experience — Model-User Design. User-Centered Design — Creating a good product User-centered design is the shared goal of everyone interested in UX. If the product is centered around a real user’s needs, it is far more likely to create a product-market fit and generate happy customers. AI is pretty new to people. Many people are afraid of it for many reasons — from giving false predictions to taking away their jobs (not to mention their lives, but that’s some Terminator stuff). That’s why creating a good experience for the user is crucial. There are a couple of tools we can use in order to create a good experience in AI products. We’ll cover some of them, including finding the right problem to solve in order to provide value, how to explain the model running “under the hood”, keeping the user involved in the learning process and preparing for mistakes. Find a good problem to solve The basic rule of product-market fit, which applies to all other products, applies to AI. For the product to succeed, a real problem needs to be solved. If we create the most complicated state-of-the-art AI product that predicts the flying route of a fly, that would be a great model, but no problem is being solved and no value is being created. AI should add value to users and optimize the way they work. “The only reason your product should exist is to solve someone’s problem.” — Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder of Instagram Explainability Explainable AI explains what AI does to the user. The user has the right to understand why the algorithm predicted something. Explaining the why creates a more reliable connection and a feeling of trust. There are many examples such as product content suggestions on Netflix and YouTube — “Because you liked X:”, or “Based on your watch history:”. These sentences make you understand why Netflix suggested Ozark — because you watched Breaking Bad! You should also be aware that it’s not just about the experience, but that it’s a regulation ‘thing’. GDPR includes the right of an individual to ask for a human review of the AI’s prediction, to understand if the algorithm has made a mistake. Control & User feedback We should keep in mind that the model doesn’t always know what’s best for the user, and that users should feel they have the power to affect the model and “teach” it. For example — create opportunities for the user to provide feedback if the prediction is right or not. These types of messages enable feedback from the user, which will eventually help the prediction improve. Prepare for mistakes An AI algorithm won’t be 100% correct all the time. That’s why the algorithm should be able to project its confidence in a prediction —if a prediction isn’t very confident, the user should know about it and take it with a grain of salt. Also, be ready to handle mistakes and errors. The user is more likely to accept mistakes in AI if they are followed with an explanation of why the model came to its prediction (as mentioned before — explainability!). This statement should also be followed by information on how to improve the model in the future. It’s really important to remember AI has a huge impact on people’s lives. That’s why AI models’ predictions and mistakes have a colossal effect on people’s lives — wrong predictions may be highly offensive to the user (e.g., Google’s horrible false classification) or cause physical damage and even death (e.g., accidents made by self-driving cars). Model-Centered Design — Creating a good AI Now that we’re aligned about what user-centered design is, let’s talk about how to make the design centered around the ML model — how to improve the model and make the learning process as efficient and beneficial as possible. When we talked about user-centered design, our goal was to make the model understand the user. Now, let’s try to make sure the user understands the model. To make this generic and straightforward, let’s establish a very high-level flow of the machine learning process: In order to think about Machine Learning Experience, let’s forget for a second what we know about user interface components. Let’s talk about the process and how it meets humans. Training a model The training part of the ML model is essentially taking a lot of data and uploading it so that the algorithm can learn from it. Let’s say we want to train a model to identify lemurs in pictures. A training process can include uploading 1,000 images, some labelled and some not. Then, waiting for the model to learn. At the end of the process the model will be trained and can identify a lemur! As users, we’d like to make sure the algorithm learned. That’s why it’s important to visualize and clarify the training process — things like the accuracy of the model, the number of epochs that it took for it to learn, etc. Also, if we want to make sure the model works as we want it to, we can move to inference phase. Inference In this part, we’d like to test the understanding of the model. Inferring, to put it in very simple words, is pressing the “run” button on the AI model, with a given input. If we take the lemur example from before, at this point, we would upload a picture and check that the model understands what a lemur is and what isn’t. After seeing the result, the user should have the ability to provide feedback, so the model will learn and improve. Monitoring In order to make sure the model is performing well, monitoring is needed. It’s essential to understand the relevant metrics in order to monitor the model well. For a deeper understanding of the subject, I highly recommend reading this article: Model-User Design — Creating a good AI Product Now, when we know both sides of the AI-Product equation, we’re able to identify the guidelines for creating a good AI product: When thinking about the product’s users, we need to take into consideration the ML researcher who will feed and train the algorithm. With that in mind, we have some key takeaways: Quality Control — Help the user understand the model To give good predictions and provide an actual value, the top motivation for the ML researcher is to make sure the algorithm is as accurate as possible. For that to happen, we need the user to have comprehensive understanding of the model’s inputs and outputs. e.g., users should understand the importance of labelling training data and giving feedback to the predictions. The better users understand the important metrics of the model, the better they’ll be able to improve the model and get better results. In other words, in order to improve the model, users need to understand the “needs” of the model. Feedback Feedback Feedback — Help the model understand the user In order to improve the model, it’s important to make the user’s feedback as intuitive as possible and make it a big part of the user flow. There’s only so much an algorithm can understand about human needs without actual human input (imagine expecting a baby to learn how to speak without teaching it what’s right and what’s wrong). Make it personal Making users feel like they’re taking an active part in a product’s functioning is highly beneficial, for two reasons: If the users feel their contribution is making the model’s improvement, they will be much more invested. The more the users feel the model knows them and understands their needs, the more they will enjoy the effects of the model, get precise predictions, and trust the model. Extra reading on the subject can be found on this great post about the IKEA effect: Learn from the best (inputs) It’s a shared motivation for the model to learn from the best quality of input. A good design can encourage the user to upload high-quality inputs and remark when and why low-quality inputs aren’t good enough. e.g., a message saying the input image’s quality is too low in a way that the user understands and “believes”, therefore, wants to upload better images.

https://medium.com/beyondminds/creating-good-ux-for-better-ai-fefae1d9ac2f

['Omri Lachman']

2020-10-01 07:50:46.432000+00:00

['AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'UX', 'Machine Learning']

Blockchain and Decentralization

What is Blockchain? Blockchain is a cryptocurrency blockchain explorer service, as well as a cryptocurrency wallet and a cryptocurrency exchange supporting Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum. They also provide Bitcoin data charts, stats, and market information. What is Decentralization? Decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Decentralization in Blockchain In blockchain, decentralization refers to the transfer of control and decision-making from a centralized entity (individual, organization, or group thereof) to a distributed network. The whole idea is about decentralization issue which first give the benefit by making sure no entity will be able to make any changes to the transaction once its done and approved and added to the chain ,this leaves no need for them . Bitcoin Bitcoin was the first example blockchain implemented on , so Bitcoin is just an example to start with and it’s not the whole idea of blockchain , blockchain will be used for all sectors at the end for example in the medical field now there are some researches to use blockchain to be benefit from for patients , researchers and the government or insurance companies at the same time . Importance In a decentralized blockchain network, no one has to know or trust anyone else. Each member in the network has a copy of the exact same data in the form of a distributed ledger. CAN IT BE HACKED??? On the surface, blockchain seems to be a solid and transparent system immune to fraud or deception. In reality, MIT reports that hackers have stolen nearly $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency since 2017. The methods for the thievery varies, but a technique that points to a theoretically weakness in blockchain is know as a “51% Attack.” Smart Contracts A multi-university report says Smart Contracts can be vulnerable. Smart Contracts are used to assure transparent and secure interactions in the blockchain. They run a program that executes items related to contract agreements. For example, there might be an if then statement that releases to another person money if a form is signed. The exchange is controlled by a set automated process. The contracts are integrated into the blockchain to ensure transparency. However, even Smart Contracts are vulnerable. Bugs can exist in the code, either intentionally or inadvertently. The errors cause incorrect actions to occur in the contract. These errors have led to over $70 million in loses in recent years. There is no accurate tools available for testing and detecting these vulnerabilities. No system is perfect. Knowing the fallible nature of technology frameworks can give users the insight to look out for errors and be vigilant.

https://medium.com/@keyurdasarwar12/blockchain-and-decentralization-8f11ddcb6ee4

[]

2021-06-08 09:19:42.913000+00:00

['Decentralized Exchange', 'Hacking', 'Blockchain', 'Decentralization', 'Blockchain Technology']

Top 5 Uses for Transformation Technology in 2021

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we should expect the unexpected. And be prepared to adapt when it hits. So, as the year winds down, we’re exploring the Transformation Technology Trends we think will shape 2021. This past year has been nothing like the one we predicted in December 2019. Then again, very few people were prepared for a pandemic and wave after wave of social and political turmoil. But looking back at what we DID accomplish this past year can be a surprising motivator for what’s to come in 2021. In spite of fear and uncertainty, millions of people across the globe overhauled their lives and sacrificed important things from social interaction to personal comfort or financial gain. And as a collective, we did all of that to keep larger economies and infrastructures — rolling in some way — during a time when nothing could go on as normal. We’re not on the other side of our troubles just yet, but we think it’s worthwhile to take a moment and marvel at our collective capacity to bounce back. What is Transformation Technology? We define any hardware or software that creates organization-wide or systemic advancement as a form of Transformation Technology. For example, a proprietary labour tracking application paired with the latest headsets to facilitate conversion to a home-based organization. Or a collaborative professional social platform paired with secure cameras and video streaming software to replace a conference — these are the ways we define technology being specific to a transformation plan. 2020 saw a lot of these processes begin, but as in the nature of a process, they are changes that will be implemented over time, carried into the future as simply a new way of doing things. 1. Remote Work From the beginning of the pandemic, we heard a lot of chatter (some of it hopeful, some deeply unhappy) about how Transformation Technology would make the shift to working from home permanent for many. At Stambol, we’re a bit biased on this topic. Much of our growing team has always worked remotely, since our inception in 2016. Our team is all over the map, literally, because we decided to prioritize our interpersonal synergy over the viability of all traveling to the same physical office. So, while we think it’s unfortunate that a lot of knowledge and service workers who didn’t want to were forced to move home, we want to focus on the positives and talk about how remote work can be a win-win going forward. We love that working from home is great for the environment. It also saves money on transportation and food. For parents, the additional childcare costs of longer daycare hours or before and after school care are reduced as well. 2. Health at Home If you had asked us at this time last year whether the future held doctor’s visits over the phone, we would have discarded the prospect with a laugh and a head shake. But here we are. And it’s working surprisingly well. The Transformation Technology making virtual health care possible is a broad web of products and services. From video chats to improved interactive websites, we’re seeing medical professionals who take it very seriously now that patients are Googling symptoms, diagnosing themselves, and coming up with their own treatment plans. This self-medicating trend was a problem before, but now it needs unprecedented attention. The initial results from an increase in remote medicine are positive in many respects. Not waiting in a doctor’s office or clinic lobby limits exposure to other illnesses. For a sick person, waiting for a call back at home is infinitely more comfortable than sitting in a cold, hard guest chair. Parents of sick children don’t want to take the sick child (along with siblings) to a waiting room where they get to manage both symptoms and behaviour — while hoping not to pick up a new bug. Being evaluated in person for many symptoms will continue to be necessary. Physical examinations will be required as well. But we think the benefits of retaining a good portion of the remote model of health care outweigh the challenges so much that we can’t possibly revert entirely back to the way things were. 3. Zoom Room It’s a catchy phrase, but we think the idea of a Zoom Room represents so much more. It’s a lifestyle change and a new way of incorporating living and working into the same space. One of the reasons the Transformation Technology is enabling this trend is that many people already had a computer room or a dedicated gaming space when they were called upon to use it for remote work. Staging a workspace to be visually suitable for FaceTime or Skype was already a practice when Zoom entered the scene. If you didn’t have a dedicated space, you likely had a visual in your head and an idea of what changes you needed to make. Likewise, perhaps your computer room or gaming space or entertainment room wasn’t exactly a dream setup because you relied on movie theatres, public arcades, or similar businesses. The closure of those spaces was the right opportunity to look at how home entertainment could be better. Purchases that improve the quality of viewing, gaming, and experiencing at home won’t simply be discarded once the pandemic is over. We anticipate that people will continue to spend more time socializing remotely, engaged in more entertainment at home, not just to justify their financial investment, but because a year’s worth of hiding from people and avoiding common spaces is bound to create lasting aversions to these things for a large chunk of the population. Image Credit: DC Studio / Adobe Stock 4. Experiences Over Goods We all have to admit that having the latest trendy gadget or fashionable outfit falls a bit flat when there’s nobody with you to appreciate it. Some of these goods purchases are made as part of a social contract that recognizes either good taste or achievement in terms of financial means. When you make purchases strictly for personal enjoyment rather than impressing peers, your decisions shift to investing in experiences themselves, even if the purchase is an item that facilities an experience. Investing in an experience can resemble anything from purchasing a game, content, a movie, a piece of hardware or equipment, or your favourite food, along with the tools to prepare it. Access to a gallery or an aquarium — more expensive during pandemic restrictions — would sell out quickly because patrons wanted to use their limited funds to have an experience rather than to buy an item. And when consumers do make physical purchases in 2021, how they’re treated, and how they ‘feel’ about both products and companies will be a variable much more critical than in the past. Experience Transformation is a trend, businesses were already exploring when the pandemic hit. Some of this type of transformation is a mind-frame reset or a commitment to new priorities. Some changes are the incorporation of new technology. Either way, in 2021, we can expect consumers to retain high standards for how a transaction makes them feel. If that feeling isn’t good, it’s not likely to be repeated. 5. Upgrading to Online Models Some companies were able to pivot quickly and easily to working from home, selling online, or otherwise doing business remotely. For many though, the transition to meeting health and safety regulations, or incorporating a viable digital model, has been a struggle and it isn’t over yet. Retailers, for example, who had made the decision to operate solely with a storefront and to have a website for information purposes only, faced a tough choice. Operate on a cripplingly limited basis (particularly true for remote locations with little walk-in traffic or urban storefronts with exorbitant rents) or begin the process of moving inventory online. We’ve seen real estate, health care, counseling, teaching, and training all pivot to digital models that were previously thought to be inappropriate or unworkable. Your Transformation Partner We want everyone reading this post to look at 2021 as an opportunity to recover, catch up, and rebalance. If you made changes in 2020 that aren’t working, or if you’re still trying to figure out what your lasting changes should be, it’s never too late to ask for help. Because one thing is for sure, a lot of what’s happened in the past year are more than just trends. At Stambol, we like watching patterns in industry and consumer behaviour because we think it pays to be prepared. We carry this practicality — along with decades of development and creative expertise — over to each and every custom solution we create for our clients. Look through our portfolio to see the kinds of visual solutions we’ve crafted in the past. But keep in mind that much of the assistance we offer our clients happens behind the scenes. If it involves technology, we can either make recommendations or take the task off your hands entirely. Ask our team of disruptors and innovators how we can help your company achieve a transformation that positions you not just for 2021, but for whatever the coming decade throws your way.

https://medium.com/stambolstudios/top-5-uses-for-transformation-technology-in-2021-147820171bb4

['Christine Hart']

2020-12-21 17:04:06.999000+00:00

['Work From Home', 'Remote Working', 'Remote Healthcare', 'Transformation', 'Technology']

Top Common Application Security Risks

www.datanextsolutions.com In today’s world, an online presence is not only required but a necessity for any modern business but going online also comes with many challenges, any loopholes in application security can lead to various cyber-attacks thus ruin the reputation of any organization. OWASP The Open Web Application Security Project is an open-sourced, community that is dedicated to providing organizations around the world with free, practical resources to support application security. One of the main projects of OWASP is to monitor top security risks that exist in today’s world. In this post, I will summarize them as a quick overview, In my future posts, I will share how to actually mitigate these risks in the AWS cloud (coming soon). Security Misconfiguration Probably the most common issue, potentially result of insecure default configurations, incomplete setup, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, or exposing sensitive data such as PII or PHI in logs. In order to prevent security misconfiguration issues, organizations should not think of it as a one-time affair, it is more like a continuous practice by keeping an eye on the configurations, patching systems, updated OS and software in a timely fashion. Injection The injection was used to be called SQL Injection but now not limited to SQL but NoSQL, LDAP, OS, and others. Basically, any loopholes in the application code or logic that allows the hacker to access data without authorization. Using proper query techniques such as using bind variables, firewalls and other configurations could help to avoid injection issues in the application. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) XSS is more like an injection into a webpage, XSS occurs whenever an application includes untrusted data into a webpage without proper validation. XSS allows hackers to update an existing page by injecting their own HTML or JavaScript code into the application, which could potentially hijack user sessions, deface the website, or redirect users to malicious sites. Using proper firewalls and configurations you can avoid XSS issues in your applications. Broken Authentication Broken authentication is one of the biggest issues these days. It allows hackers to compromise passwords, IDs, keys, or tokens and gain access to your data. Using Multi-Factor Authentications (MFAs) and other techniques you can improve the authentication process, even your primary authentication process is weak. Data Exposure Many applications do not properly protect sensitive data from being exposed, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), financial and other sensitive data. Attackers may steal or modify sensitive information to conduct cyber crimes such as credit fraud, identify theft, and others. Implementing strong encryption, security, authentication, and authorization controls could protect sensitive data from being unintentionally exposed. Insufficient Logging and Monitoring Insufficient logging and monitoring could allow hackers to continue to attack the system without even getting noticed. Attackers are continuously looking for any loopholes in web applications any delay in detecting the data breach could be very harmful to any organization. By implementing logging tools setting up baseline analysis and continuously monitoring could prevent any delays in detecting security breaches. Broken Access Control In many organizations, authenticated users have more access than they are required. For example, in the cloud computing world, having developers' administrative access to the account could provide an opportunity for attackers to damage the infrastructure or applications in case of any security breach. I saw, once a developer uploaded AWS access keys to GitHub and in a few hours, there were 100+ instances running bitcoin mining on their account. By applying the principle of least privilege access controls, we can prevent potential damage to the security of the IT systems. Known Vulnerabilities Most data breaches happen due to vulnerabilities that were left open. Frameworks, libraries, and other modules run as same privileges as the application. If the vulnerability is exploited attackers could expose sensitive data or take over the system. By keeping systems up to date with patching and configurations, enable logging and monitoring, organizations can control vulnerabilities issues that could potentially cause a data and security breach. Insecure Deserialization Deserialization is a process to restore byte streams to form an original object. Insecure deserialization is when user data is deserialized by an application. This potentially enables an attacker to manipulate serialized objects in order to pass harmful data into the application and execute remote code to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. XML External Entities (XEE) And the last one from the OWASP Top 10 list, is XML External Entities. XEE is a web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to interfere with an application’s processing of XML data. Often older or poorly configured systems allow attackers to see or access internal files such as file systems or server configurations using the URI hander or other methods. Conclusion Hopefully, you find this post useful and are now familiar with the top common security risks, that exist in today’s world. If you have any questions feel free to contact me on my LinkedIn or Twitter. About DataNext DataNext Solutions is a US-based system integrator, specialized in Cloud, Security, and DevOps technologies. As a registered AWS partner, our services comprise of any Cloud Migration, Cost optimization, Integration, Security, Compliance, and Managed Services. Visit our website www.datanextsolutions.com for more info.

https://medium.com/datanextsolutions/top-common-application-security-risks-f2698c9bc757

['Zeeshan Baig']

2020-12-26 01:38:10.016000+00:00

['Security', 'Data Security', 'Information Technology', 'Application Security', 'Technology']

Earthlings and The Oxpecker Paradox

Your Planet Called Earth, Is A Life Sustaining Habitat. Strong And Powerful Are It’s Internal And External Forces Of Nature, Yet, For All It’s Amazing Wonders, Still Untapped Resources, Beauty And Splendor, Earth has a fragile exterior atmosphere. I liken Earth to a large living breathing Mammal and Earthlings, I liken them, to the small bird called the Oxpecker. The Oxpecker, Both the English and scientific names arise from their habit of perching on large Mammals (both wild and Domesticated) such as; Cattle, Zebras, Impalas, Hippopotamuses, or Rhinoceroses and Giraffes , eating Ticks, small Insects, Botfly larvae, and other Parasites. However, just One Tiny Peck! of a little Oxpecker that’s been some how infected with a deadly virus in a open wound of even the largest of Mammals Will inevitably lead to that large Mammal’s eventual death. The LIFE FORCE Of a planet is it’s LIFE SUSTAINING ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITION. (L.S.E.C) The introduction of harmful emissions, chemicals, substances, reactions, waste, all have a negative impact on Earth’s Life Sustaining Environment. I have been tasked with informing Mankind of the errors in their current ways of understanding and interacting with their current L.S.E.C. I will be posting periodically, data and images of New Technology that will forever change the Earthling’s Interactions and Hopefully, Understanding of the Fragile Earth’s L.S.E.C in which they all thrive. A few of These Existing Technology Breakthroughs Can Be Seen Along With Detailed Data Here: http://MastersEnergy.US/ and http://www.mastersenergy.us/depe-kits.html

https://medium.com/@mastersenergy1/earthlings-and-the-oxpecker-paradox-506e3deba665

['Secret S Revealed', 'Energy-Tech Breakthroughs.']

2019-05-06 21:17:47.585000+00:00

['Technology', 'Energy', 'Efficiency', 'Environment', 'Science']

Satellites: Unlocking New Boundaries

The role and impact of satellite technology in everyday life! Space agencies and services companies spend millions each year to send new satellites into our orbit. But is it actually necessary? And what could be the reason behind this amount of expenditure? Are we wasting time and effort? The space race began when the Russians took a leap of faith with the Sputnik 1. These new satellites were meant for military purposes; predominantly to establish radio communications. Unfortunately, the Sputnik 1 burned up after completing 1440 orbits around the Earth — a huge achievement, and marking the beginning of “The Monitoring Era.” The word satellite means ‘companion’ from the Latin word ‘satellium’. Obviously, since the moons were planetary companions, we started calling them the natural satellites. And ones we launched, we called them artificial satellites. A fun fact: the word Sputnik also stands for ‘companion’ in Russian. So if the Sun is accompanied by Earth, must not Earth be a satellite as well? Satellites are classified into a boatload of varieties factoring on size, type of orbit, altitude, inclination and eccentricity. But, just by focusing on the type of orbit, we can analyse the various functions a satellite performs in a typical day. Following Sputnik, many attempts were made to establish communications over the radio, by both the USSR and the US. However, the first non-probationary satellite, called the TIROS, was sent into orbit by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It was meant to test the Television (TV) capabilities and the worldwide meteorological satellite information system, or in short, the weather monitoring. By the 1980s, the North Americans and many European countries had successfully installed TV and communications satellites. These are what we call Geostationary satellites. Geostationary satellites are very far from the ground and are stationary relative to the Earth’s rotation. They basically hover directly over a specific spot on the Earth. This is also the reason why all the TV antennas or receiver dish in a locality focus in the same direction. They’re all aiming for the same satellite. Another important application of a satellite is, of course, weather monitoring. There are multiple types of orbits that these can follow. However, the geostationary orbit is optimal because the weather is reported continuously for a given region. Working of a GPS system. Credits: Mocomi Global Positioning System or GPS is one of the highly used and important functionalities of satellites. However, the way they work is a bit complex. It would make sense that a GPS satellite is geostationary since one can always connect their GPS device at any time of the day. But the fact is that GPS does not use a geostationary orbit. A GPS satellite uses, what is called, a medium Earth orbit (MEO). This is a great article from NASA explaining the MEO. In short, a GPS satellite can only stay reachable from a given spot on Earth for a configured time (generally 12 hours), after which another such satellite replaces it. Similar to MEO, we have the LEO or the low Earth orbit. It is much closer to the Earth (a factor of 20 to 40 times) than the previously discussed orbits. This is where the International Space Station orbits the Earth. Satellites also find use when one needs to communicate from areas with no reception. Special devices have been made which are used in expeditions, scientific exploration sites, and even by the military where information can be remotely accessed or a mayday call can be made. A very important application of satellites that comes into the picture here is a relay. A relay satellite is one that communicates with different satellites in orbit and acts as a medium of transfer. This way, we can even access the satellites which are on the other side of the Earth! Image of a shark trying to eat away your ability to read this article. Credits: WIRED Believe it or not, the Internet wouldn’t cease to function if there weren’t any satellites. The Internet actually works by cabling the connections and not wireless transfer. Yes, these cables go over the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans too! As human endeavours expanded, so did the technology. As we further explored the various possible applications of satellites, we discovered its true potential. New types of orbits were used to satisfy different needs. An interesting concept was that of the Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). A satellite using this type of an orbit would be stationary with respect to the movement of the Sun on the Earth. This means that the satellite would pass over the same place, at the same time, every day. This is useful in certain weather monitoring applications as well as ‘spying’ applications. We have explored all kinds of applications, but one remains — telescopes and imaging satellites. These satellites may have varied orbits, depending upon the application. The Hubble telescope is fairly close to the Earth (at ~570 kilometres and has a circular orbit. However, newer telescopes are aiming at the Lagrange-point orbits, which are more than a million kilometres away! These will help the telescopes avoid the distortions created by the Earth’s atmosphere and possibly help us detect the objects that have never been detected before. So many companions in the sky. Credits: Graphique Whatever the case, the exploration of satellite technologies has led to the creation of various other technologies. These have formed an integral part of our lives and will continue to play even bigger roles. Satellites have been one of the major factors in advancing technology. Not only this, but they have also created various new industries. This only goes to show; satellites are pushing new boundaries and will only continue to do so.

https://medium.com/pragyan-blog/satellites-unlocking-new-boundaries-e9c6f73e79cd

['Pujan Yadav']

2020-10-07 14:00:24.325000+00:00

['Science', 'NASA', 'Space', 'Technology', 'World Space Week']

Difference Between Generative And Discriminative Classifiers

Difference Between Generative And Discriminative Classifiers Using the examples of Naive Bayes, MaxEnt (Logistic Regression), HMM, and CRF Photo by Tianyi Ma on Unsplash There are a few types of classical supervised machine learning algorithms: Naive Bayes, MaxEnt (also called Logistic Regression), Decision Trees, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), Support Vector Machines, Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), Neural Networks, and some others. The top n list may differ depending on the field they are used in. Most of those types have a few sub-types based on the kinds of tasks they are designed for and implementation approaches they leverage, for example, Bernoulli Naive Bayes, linear-chain CRFs, etc. Models built using four of those main algorithms — Naive Bayes, MaxEnt, HMMs, and CRFs — can be split into two groupings, generative and discriminative (also called conditional). Let’s see how they differ and how they correspond to each other. Naive Bayes Naive Bayes is one of the most basic algorithms. It produces a generative model and this model captures the joint probability p(y, x) — so having y, you can generate a random vector of x. It makes a couple of simplifying assumptions, hence it’s “naive”. The most important one is that all input variables are conditionally independent of one another. It also assumes that the position of the variable doesn’t matter. So, based on Bayes’ theorem, we’ll model posterior as follows: Naive Bayes p(x) — the probability of the feature vector across the dataset — is going to be the same for either class. So for practical reasons, we can drop it and assume that: Naive Bayes In any case, p(x) is extremely difficult to model, especially for named entity recognition (NER) tasks with proper names, because x will most probably never occur in the training set. At the same time, p(y, x) = p(y) p(x|y), thus it models the joint probability. Using the chain rule, the previous formula can be re-written as: Naive Bayes Naive Bayes is easy to implement and is known to perform well for certain tasks, including text classification, and may be preferred under certain conditions, for instance when the training data is scarce. However, it’s not very robust. One of the issues is, for example, “double counting” — such a model doesn’t take into account how often certain words co-occur together in the same class, for example, ‘CEO’ and ‘sales’ in ‘Business’. 2. MaxEnt The MaxEnt algorithm models the conditional probability distribution directly from the data and allows to address some of the issues with Naive Bayes. Such a model learns to discriminate one class over the other based on the input. It learns to do so by computing the weights Θ for each feature for each class. However, in practice, instead of learning different weight vectors for every class, one can build a common set of weights for all classes and use feature functions that activate the weights if the feature is present in the instance, and return 0 otherwise. Thus, one way to describe such a model is: MaxEnt Where Z(x) is a normalization constant. The weights are effectively the posteriors that are learned by iteratively computing the deltas between the empirical and expected counts of the feature occurrences using a set learning rate as a step until the deltas are as close to 0 as possible. This would mean that the best weight values have been achieved. There is no closed-form, unlike Naive Bayes, so the tricky part is in fact-finding the best weights and deciding when to stop. Training a MaxEnt model is also a lot more involving compared to Naive Bayes because you need to compute p(y|x) for each feature. Logistic Regression is used to solve an extensive range of problems. If you’re interested in more details, there is a really good paper by Andrew Ng and Michael Jordan comparing the motivation and performance for Naive Bayes and MaxEnt. 3. Hidden Markov Models Both Naive Bayes and MaxEnt cope well with predicting a single class variable. However, some tasks involve sequence modeling. The two classical algorithms that can solve such problems are Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and Conditional Random Fields (CRF). The HMM algorithm also produces a generative model, similar to Naive Bayes. However, it alleviates the independence assumption of Naive Bayes - it models the linear sequence and captures the information about the previous label. Therefore, it can be described as: Hidden Markov Models In practice, it’s also comparable to Naive Bayes in that it normally uses very few features. Otherwise, an inference can quickly become intractable. HMM also makes a few simplifying assumptions, for instance, that being in a particular state t only depends on the previous state t-1. Also, it assumes that the conditional distribution over the next state given current state doesn’t change over time (the stationary assumption). HMM is often used for tasks like part-of-speech tagging in natural language processing or analyzing RNA secondary structures in computational biology. 4. Conditional Random Fields The CRF model is a discriminative one, similar to MaxEnt, but also captures the sequence and the information about the previous states (labels), similar to HMM. It can be described as: Conditional Random Fields CRFs were designed to address issues with generative models not allowing to introduce non-independent features, for example, capitalization and affixation in natural language data. Since CRFs capture more of these richer features, they handle better such tasks like sentence segmentation and named entity recognition.

https://medium.com/swlh/overview-of-generative-and-discriminative-classifiers-323aa13912ba

['Anna Astori']

2020-07-07 18:49:37.682000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Women In Tech', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Technology']

How to Reveal The Real Root of Change Resistance

A small utility company was rolling out mobile workforce management software to its linemen in the field. The project team had actively engaged the linemen as a key stakeholder group throughout the effort: they had collaborated with the linemen regarding how they would leverage the new system, they had actively listened to their feedback, and had worked to overcome their concerns. But heading into go live, resistance from the linemen to the new software was not only fierce but also at an all-time high. Hadn’t the project team done everything right? How had it gone so wrong? In the current state, the linemen reported to the office each morning to collect their work orders for the day; they then used this information to load the right equipment onto the truck and to complete their assignments accordingly. With the new software, the linemen, now armed with a laptop, would receive their assignments from a dispatcher while in the field. From the beginning of the project, there was strong resistance from the linemen to the new software. If they were unable to pull all of their work orders in the morning, how could they efficiently plan their routes? How would they know what parts to pull to load onto their trucks? The project team worked closely with the linemen and overcame these concerns, only to have the linemen not only continue to resist, but also to escalate their concerns to the level of safety risks. If they were to get into an accident, could the laptop become a projectile? Would laptops in the trucks be a distraction to safe driving? After months of going around and around, enduring increasing frustration and tension as well as project risk, a project team member was finally able to uncover the root of the resistance. Through a trusted personal relationship and delicate questioning with a lineman, the project team member had uncovered that at the core of the resistance was fear. In this case, the fear of being exposed. The linemen did not know how to use computers. Resistance to change can often be traced back to ego, a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance, and self-preservation. The root or real resistance behind the resistance. For the linemen, who would want to be the first to admit that they did not know how to use a computer? Exposing that could be embarrassing, shameful, or even scary. Once the real cause of the linemen’s resistance was uncovered and openly discussed, some of the linemen shared the fear of job loss; the new system required a skill that they did not have and they did not see a path for obtaining that new required skill. At another utility, a project team was facing resistance to a move from traditional office spaces to an open office environment. The project team had successfully anticipated and addressed the fact that at this company, attaining an office instead of a cubicle was a cultural sign of achievement, however, resistance remained unexpectedly high. Employees with offices seemed unduly upset, even angry, that they would be moved into an open office environment. Further delicate and focused questioning revealed the true source of the resistance: overlooked was the memorabilia that some employees had accumulated over decades of service: the several hardhats from different projects, the collection of annual branded toy trucks, and the diplomas that were displayed in these offices, all cultural signals of their experience, knowledge, and wisdom that prompted more junior team members to look up to them, and which were a real source of pride. Again, the root of the resistance was related to ego and self-preservation. The resistance wasn’t really about “losing an office,” rather it was about losing a place to display personally important cultural symbols of a long and productive career. But the new open office environment provided no place to display them. Are you facing resistance to your change program, but unable to identify the root cause? Take a closer look at what drives your stakeholders’ self-esteem, self-importance and instinct for self-preservation. Many times, the stated reasons for resistance are not the real reasons, because people are hesitant to share feelings that relate to perceived threats to their self-image, organizational status, or financial well-being. Some may even be unable to articulate that one or more of these things is the real cause of their anxiety and resistance. In many environments, admitting “I’m afraid I will look stupid in training, “I won’t be able to learn the new software,” or “I’ll lose my job” is not a culturally accepted response to change. In order to effectively overcome resistance, we have to understand the root of that resistance, which can be very different than the stated cause. Through established trust, delicate questioning, and careful preservation of human dignity, we can uncover the root of resistance, and then work together with our stakeholders to overcome the real resistance in order to achieve change. Contact ChangeStaffing to learn how our organizational change management consultants can help your organization discover the real root of resistance. A special thanks to Lesa Lozano, organizational change management coach and consultant, for her thought leadership and for collaborating with us on this blog.

https://medium.com/@changestaffing/how-to-reveal-the-real-root-of-change-resistance-642b290f8d7c

[]

2020-12-22 16:15:14.401000+00:00

['Staffing And Recruiting', 'Resistance', 'Organizational Change', 'Change Management', 'Technology']

A Weekly Web Design Roundup via Solodev

Every day new HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tutorials are posted to the growing Solodev Web Design Blog! Here is a list of what was added the week of February 27th! By creating a demo video you can streamline your sales process, save money, and automate your lead generation initiatives. But where does the demo video go? You still want to capture prospect and lead information so just placing it on your website won’t do. That’s where this landing page design comes in. Not only does this design and functionality streamline your sales process, you still collect lead data, and you can give thousands of demos a minute without having to pool any internal resources to do so. Enjoy. Learn More

https://medium.com/web-design-by-solodev/a-weekly-web-design-roundup-via-solodev-67bf70267e2d

[]

2017-05-16 12:55:15.910000+00:00

['Tech', 'Web Design', 'Web Development', 'Technology', 'SEO']

Sports and event tech on the fast track

Aussies sports innovation on point The startups demonstrated just how diverse the sports and event tech landscape really is here in Melbourne, which is not surprising given the city’s self-appointed title as the sporting capital of Australia and indeed the world. Here are the startups we heard from on the day: Blinxel is a democratized augmented reality content and creation platform where anyone can record, distribute and view realistic 3d content. Fantasy Esports is a non-wagering fantasy esports platform for the global gaming community. Friends of Mr Ed is a new racing app designed by owners for owners. A personalised way to see all your horses in one view, chat with other owners and share the fun of ownership. Signmee is an online forms platform that provides signing solutions through response data, summary report, and authentication. Sportspass powers the platform behind loyalty, rewards, and sponsorship activation programs for sporting clubs and associations. Weyoume is a decentralized social media platform, based on blockchain technology. It enables freedom, transparency and community to flourish at a global scale. Humense is a volumetric video company solving the capture and display of humans for augmented reality and virtual reality. LetsTrainMe matches the right trainer with the right pupil, bringing personal trainers and customers together. TidyHQ is a membership management software used by groups, organsations of all sizes that makes membership administration simple for the entire board or committee. Treiner is a football coaching marketplace service providing players of all skill levels the opportunity to increase their abilities, learn new skills and become better players both on and off the field. Ultra Sync Sports is an app that connects all fans all around the world, so the team can see the huge support which extends far beyond the sport arena. Intix is a ticketing technology solution business for the event, entertainment and sports industries that allows anyone to create, share and attend events of any kind including music festivals, exhibitions, sports events and local club functions. Changing the game plan Despite the massive disruptions caused by the coronavirus, Ollie and the rest of the SBC team were able to complete their global scouting tour. Applications for the program closed on 27 March, and with the program starting on 25 May, Ollie and his colleagues at SBC have the unenviable task of selecting 20 startups from around the world to pitch at a Selection Days event for the final 10 spots in the accelerator program. In the words of the great India batsman, Sachin Tendulkar “Success is a process. During that journey sometimes there are stones thrown at you, and you convert them into milestones.” Normally the SBC Selection Days event would be held in Melbourne but of course, in these times, it swiftly — and seamlessly — pivoted to a virtual event being held in May. If you’re interested in talking to us about our work with startups or the Startupbootcamp Sports and Event Tech Accelerator Program, please get in touch.

https://medium.com/@dius-au/sports-and-event-tech-on-the-fast-track-d4403cbc54e7

[]

2020-06-23 08:40:27.911000+00:00

['Sports Tech', 'Event Technology', 'Startup Accelerators', 'Innovation', 'Startup']

Decentralizing Trust

In the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) an anonymous developer or group of developers, known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, invented the blockchain technology. The first fully distributed database combining peer-to-peer networking, public-private key cryptography and digital signatures. Nakamoto used blockchain technology to build a decentralised digital global currency — Bitcoin — that completely removed the need for intermediaries and allowed individuals to send and receive any transaction amount across any geographic region in near real-time. As opposed to relying on banks, clearinghouses, or foreign exchanges to facilitate transactions, Bitcoin relied exclusively on the blockchain protocol to execute transactions and establish trust between the transacting stakeholders. Over the past 10 years, blockchain technology has been used to develop a whole host of new cryptocurrencies. From Ethereum to Litecoin, Ripple and Zcash, cryptocurrencies have started coming out of the ‘tech-evangelist’ world and into the commercial one. However, as the Financial Times reporter Sally Davies pointed out, currency is just one of many different applications that can be built using this technology. “Blockchain is to Bitcoin what the internet is to email. A big electronic system, on top of which you can build applications. Currency is just one.” — Sally Davies, technology reporter, Financial Times. When Nakamoto developed blockchain and built Bitcoin atop its infrastructure he did more than simply create a new currency, he created a system upon which valuable and important information could be transferred securely and reliably among a peer-to-peer network. The information being transferred is almost irrelevant, in so far as it can be whatever a network of blockchain users (nodes) want it to be. What’s important is that they can share it, interact with it and derive real-world results from it in a way that guarantees trust without requiring third-party monitoring. Understandably, this new way of interacting has many different groups across all levels of society both anxious and excited. Understanding blockchain The exclusively social network In order to understand blockchain, you need to think of the technology as an information storage tool. In its simplest form that’s all blockchain is; a technology that helps users store information. Interest in blockchain doesn’t lie so much in the fact that it can store information, but rather in how that information gets added, validated and sealed. When we talk about technologies that house information, we usually refer to them as databases. Schools have databases filled with details on their students, parents and teachers; businesses have employee databases filled with salary information, next-of-kin, bank account details and reporting structures. When your employer pays you your salary, they’re transferring payment information from one database (payroll) to another database (your bank account) via an intermediary (a bank). While there are many different databases that store different types of information, up until now, most successful databases have had one crucial element in common — they’ve all been owned by someone. Other than what we can physically possess, everything else that we own is done so on rented space. When you pay account handling fees, you’re paying rent to the bank for securely storing your financial information, likewise, when you upload your holiday pics to Facebook, you’re paying rent — in the form of advertising data — for the joy of having your friends know how great your life is. With the advent of cloud computing, most of us store close to all our personal data on someone else’s centralised database. As perfectly illustrated by recent Facebook scandals or the utterly disastrous Equifax cyber attack that took place last year, the biggest risk associated with centralised databases is that they provide a single point of attack for malicious actors. Once a database is breached, it’s fairly easy for information to be stolen, altered or fabricated. Sometimes these breaches are easy to detect, other times, however, due to the amount of trust a database owner might have built over a long period of time (think Bernie Madoff) these breaches can go undetected for years. This, in essence, is the problem blockchain aims to solve. How do you make a database that is reliable and secure, yet doesn’t rely on the competence or goodness of any one single individual or organisation? The answer lies in the decentralised nature of the blockchain database. Rather than one single entity being responsible for the accuracy and security of information, blockchain distributes that responsibility among a vast multinational network of computers and users. Every single individual that joins a blockchain (a database) is given a copy of the entire ledger, i.e. the entire historical information stored in the database. Because everybody using the blockchain owns a complete copy of the database, no one does (if all of us are Spartacus then none of us are). Thus, if any discrepancies come about between my version of the ledger and yours, you know something’s gone terribly wrong almost immediately. Blockchain’s transparency is why it’s referred to as a decentralised public ledger. It’s available to all on the blockchain and verifiable by anyone with an internet connection. Everybody on the blockchain owning a copy of the ledger only goes so far in explaining how this technology reliably and securely stores information. The other two components are public-private key cryptography and the mechanism by which consensus is achieved. While the technical backbones of public-private key cryptography are incredibly complicated, the way to understand how they are used is not. Take, for example, a scenario in which Matilda wanted to send sensitive information across to Matthew. On the blockchain, each individual is given a private and public key. Think of these keys as email addresses; the public key is your email address which everyone on the blockchain can see and the private key is your unique password that only you can see and use to access those messages sent to you. When Matilda wants to send information across to Matthew all she has to do is encrypt that information by using her private key and Matthew’s public key. When Matthew receives the encrypted information, he can access (or rather decrypt) it by using his private key. Put simply, when Matilda encrypts a message with Mathew’s public key, only Matthew’s private key can decrypt it, likewise if a message is encrypted with Matilda’s private key, only Matilda’s public key can decrypt it. This mixing of public and private keys not only ensures information gets sent to the right person securely, it also acts as a digital signature. Simply being able to send information back and forth securely, however, doesn’t stop someone on the blockchain from sending the same bit of information to various people over and over again. If we’re sending cryptocurrency ( C ), for example, Matilda could send Matthew 10C and then send that same 10C to Jenny. Both messages are sent securely, but instead of Matilda honestly stating that she’s actually spent 20C, Matthew and Jenny will check their ledger and think Matilda has just spent 10C. This problem is called double spending, and it’s one of the most important issues organisations like banks and financial services providers, like Visa or Mastercard, regulate. You can’t take that to bank With blockchain, rather than a bank or a financial services provider regulating double spend, it’s the network itself that regulate this issue. How? By broadcasting every transaction that takes place to the rest of the network every time a transaction happens. In the case of Bitcoin, for example, because everybody on the network has the entire history of transactions, everyone’s ledger is updated with new transactions as soon as they take place. If Matilda only had 10C to begin with, and she spends that 10C twice to pay both Matthew and Jenny, the entire network will see both transactions, notice that Matilda has spent 20C and not 10C and know that that particular transaction is invalid. So, after every transaction has been signed, members of the blockchain network verify its validity and update their ledgers. All transactions are available to be viewed or audited by anyone within the network. Now that we’ve added and validated the information on the blockchain, we need a way to seal that information so it cannot be tampered with weeks, months or years into the future. If you’ve read anything about Bitcoin or blockchain you’ll know its key feature is that it’s immutable. The way information is sealed on a blockchain is what gave rise to its name. If we continue using Bitcoin as the example, every transaction that takes place is time-stamped and stored in a block. Every single block is connected to the previous block (leading all the way back to the very first block, i.e. the genesis block) creating a chain of blocks. In Bitcoin, it’s the transfer of cryptocurrencies that gets stored in the block, however, it can just as easily be any other type of information, such as someone’s will or a contract. To maintain the integrity, chronology and validity of each block, three pieces of information are stored on it: a hash, which can be thought of as a unique identifier, such as a barcode or a fingerprint, the hash of the previous block and the actual transactional information, in our case, the 10C Matilda sent to Matthew. So, for the sake of ease, think of it like this: Suppose Matilda’s and Matthew’s interaction is the first to take place on the blockchain, thus it’s the genesis block. Their block’s hash will be hashABC123, and won’t be linked to any previous block because it’s the first one. Now that Matthew has the 10C from Matilda, he sends that along to Jenny. This new block now contains three pieces of information: 1. The hash (unique identifier) of Matilda and his transaction: hashABC123 2. The information of the transaction: Matthew sent Jenny 10C 3. A new hash (unique identifier) for this transaction: hashBAC312 Now, Jenny wants to send 5C to Matilda. This block will also contain three pieces of information: 1. The hash (unique identifier) of Matthew’s and Jenny’s transaction: hashBAC312 2. The information of the transaction: Jenny sent Matilda 5C 3. A new hash (unique identifier) for this transaction: hashCBA213 Because the hash is the primary identifier of a transaction, how a hash is generated is incredibly crucial to the overall security infrastructure of a blockchain. Bitcoin, for example, makes the task of generating a hash incredibly difficult by using highly complex mathematical problems in which solutions can only be achieved by trial and error. In order for the problem to be solved, vast amounts of energy, i.e. computational power, must be used, making the solving (commonly referred to as mining) incredibly laborious. Those that are using their computers to solve/mine hashes are typically referred to as miners. The blockchain protocol has it so that the more miners there are, the more complicated, and therefore the more computational power needed, to mine a hash. This is one of the crucial way blockchain ensures that a takeover of a network is as difficult and costly as possible. In order to encourage miners to expend time and energy in mining hashes, miners are rewarded with newly generated cryptocurrency that isn’t taken from existing users’ accounts but rather is ‘printed’ by the blockchain itself. Once a solution has been found, i.e. a minor has a valid hash, this hash is broadcast across the network to every single user so they can validate the result using a simple calculation. Once validated, a block is added to the chain, the ledger is updated and copies of the exact same ledger are sent to every single user (it’s important to note that in the blockchain, users are often referred to as nodes). This process of mining is the mechanism by which a blockchain’s network achieves consensus. By virtue of the fact that every single block carries with it its own unique hash, as well as the hash of the block that preceded it, once a block has been sealed, it is near impossible to tamper with the contents of a block. Doing so would result in a malicious actor generating a completely new hash for whatever block was tampered with. So, if the block that contained Matthew and Jenny’s transaction of 10C is tampered with, a new hash will be generated for that transaction, say hashBAC223. However, because the transaction immediately following Matthew and Jenny’s transaction already has in it the original hash — hashBAC312 — nodes on the network are able to see that an error or attack has taken place. In order for a malicious actor to get away with an attack, he or she would have to alter the hash of every single block that came after Matthew’s and Jenny’s transaction. A feat that is almost impossible due to the computational resources required to generate a single hash and the fact that a network is made up of multiple miners. The only possible way for an attack to be carried out successfully would be if a group of attackers were able to obtain a 51% majority in a network so they could then approve subsequent transactions at a faster rate than the rest of the miners on the network. All this, in its simplest form, is how blockchain technology works. To recap, then, Blockchain is a decentralised database that stores information (transactions, assets etc.) across a distributed network (aka a peer-to-peer network) in a secure, immutable and transparent manner. And then there were smart contracts In the middle of 2015, a then 21-year old Vitalik Buterin launched the Ethereum blockchain to the world. Incorporating all the cryptocurrency functionality of Bitcoin (the currency on Ethereum is called an Ether), Buterin introduced another revolutionary component to the blockchain technology, the smart contract. A smart contract and a good old-fashioned written contract share many similarities. At their core, each is a binding contractual agreement that stipulates how two separate parties are to interact with one another in regards to a particular transaction. Prior to drafting the final version of a contract, both parties must voluntarily come to an agreement and once satisfied, they memorialise said agreement in order to reduce the likelihood of confusion, forgetfulness or breach. Where smart contracts and traditional contracts differ is in the language used to memorialise the terms of the agreement and how parties are made to comply with those terms. Rather than using natural (albeit oftentimes confusing) language and arbitration by a trusted third party (say, a judge), smart contracts memorialise and enforce contracts entirely through autonomous code. The simplest way smart contracts are often explained is to think about how a vending machine works. If you want to get a chocolate bar you need to meet one condition and perform one action: insert money into the vending machine and input the number that corresponds with your desired chocolate bar. Another example could be a writer submitting a piece to their editor. A smart contract can exist between both writer and editor whereby due date, word count and plagiarism (or originality) are memorialised in the smart contract’s code. Let’s say the conditions of the smart contract are as follows. In order to get full payment for their weekly column the writer need to: • Submit by 17:30 every Thursday • Meet the 800–1200-word count Submit material that is original and not plagiarised A protocol could be built into the code of the smart contract whereby these three requirements have certain conditions attached to them, for example: • For every hour after 17:30 that the writer delays submitting a piece payment is reduced by five percent. If they fail to submit by 00:00 payment is completely withheld. • A penalty of 25 percent is taken from the writer’s pay if they go under or over the world count • If the smart contract conducts a plagiarism verification scan on the internet and finds the writer’s work to not be their own payment is immediately withheld Anyone who’s ever worked as a freelancer — be they a consultant, designer, carpenter or writer — will be familiar with the general theme of the above scenario. They’ll also be intimately familiar with the tedious and drawn out process of submitting invoices and waiting weeks, if not months for payment, along with the painstaking process of chasing that payment if it fails to come. The worst-case scenario is when a freelancer is forced to bring legal action against the contracting party because payment never materialises. Smart contracts, however, remove these risks entirely. Following on from the above example, the writer’s article and payment can be in escrow until all conditions are validated by the smart contract. For example, the editor may not be able to access or download the document until payment for the article has been deposited into the writers Ethereum wallet, just as the writer cannot receive full payment if they go over or under the world-count. Rather than waiting weeks, sending invoices and following-up with endless emails and phone calls, the whole process is entirely automated and executed by code. The fact that blockchain only allows for information to be added with the consent of the majority of a network, validates transactions with an almost impossible to penetrate consensus mechanism requiring huge computational power, makes information immutable once added and, combined with smart contracts, provides a mechanism whereby behaviour and actions can be incentivised and mediated has resulted in various public and private firms wanting to explore the use of this technology in more quotidian ways. From health care to voting and everything in between All your information at the tip of a doctor’s fingers Once you understand the underlying principles of blockchain and smart contracts, it’s not difficult to imagine how the technology can be used to fundamentally change the way certain industries work. Take health care, for example. In the United Kingdom, there’s been much talk in regards to the National Health Services (NHS) incorporating blockchain technology to improve the overall patient experience and operational efficiency. Talk of this isn’t new, in fact, the government has been contemplating the idea since as early as 2016. The thinking goes that doctors would have greater and quicker insights into a patient’s health record by having their entire medical history accessible via blockchain. All surgeries, X-rays, blood-tests, allergies and any other conditions/consultations could be stored and owned by a patient on a blockchain and registered health professionals could access and upload information to the blockchain as and when it’s needed. If this usage were to go beyond the U.K. and be implemented globally, a patient who gets sick or injured while travelling could go to any legitimate hospital and be treated by a medical team that instantaneously understood their medical history. With voting too, blockchain is being explored as a potential way for societies to move from paper-based voting to electronic voting. Earlier this year, in the United States, West Virginia successfully trialled using blockchain to help military services personnel and selected absentee voters to participate electronically in the state’s 2018 primaries. The electronic voting was administered by an application called Voatz, which used a scan of voters’ thumbprints to authenticate their identity, while also providing a publicly verifiable ledge that maintained their anonymity. Once voting completed, electronic voting results were available immediately. The above examples rely on the same technology that facilitated our hypothetical interaction between a writer and their editor. In the case of health care, a patient’s ‘Medical Block’ would be completely encrypted so that medical and other personal details would remain inaccessible to the public or unauthorised nodes on the network, and a smart contract would govern who got access to what information. When a doctor adds information to a patient’s ‘Medical Block’ the information is encrypted using private-public key cryptography, however, the transaction would still be validated by the network to confirm it was a legitimate doctor/medical institution x transferring information to patient y. The same would go for voting. All registered voters would have their biometric identifiers uploaded to a voting blockchain, the network would validate the transaction, i.e. the vote, yet the vote itself would be encrypted. Governments would be able to tell who voted but not how they voted, and nobody would be able to tamper with the votes as each block would have its own hash, as well as the hash of the block before it. Of course, it doesn’t stop with voting or health care. There are literally hundreds of applications being explored using blockchain. Unintended consequences “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” — Melvin Kranzberg Blockchain is still a nascent technology that is narrowly understood by the general public if it is said to be understood at all. Before we start migrating all of our most critical institutions onto it, we need to have a serious and open discussion about what trust means to us as individuals and a society. Further to that, we need to understand that trust-imbued institutions have lasted as long as they have for a reason and if we are to introduce technology that could very seriously upend these institutions we need to consider what if anything might take their place. Some of the blockchain’s greatest strengths are also its greatest weaknesses. For example, while blockchain transactions are generally pseudonymised so that an individual’s personally identifiable information isn’t disclosed, ingenious cyber operatives still have the capability to combine blockchain’s metadata with other types of analysis to extract the identity of an account holder. Once an individual account holder is identified, while previous transactions may not be altered, one could well imagine a cleverly crafted phishing campaign designed to obtain that individual’s private key, thus giving hackers control over that individual’s account. While transparency on blockchain keeps everyone in check, it also it also leaves everybody exposed. You could, of course, go to the other end of the spectrum and use a completely anonymised blockchain cryptocurrency, such as Zcash or Monero. This type of cryptocurrency would only record that a transaction has taken place, however, all other information — including who made the payment and where — would be completely anonymous. This is great for conducting private transactions so governments and hackers alike can’t track your every payment, yet it also allows for drug dealers and child pornographers to transact with ease. The incorruptibility and inaccessibility of Zcash or Monero would render law enforcement completely useless. No warrant or technical workaround could shut down the system. The distributed nature of blockchain would mean that even if the F.B.I were to shut down all U.S. operations, so long as there were enough nodes outside the U.S that wanted to carry on with the network it would continue without a hitch. Think too about how blockchain could affect a social-networking site like Facebook or Reddit. While on the one hand, it could help safeguard user’s data so Cambridge Analytica type scandals don’t happen again, it could also further fuel the fake news phenomenon where conspiracy theories could thrive. Social networks hosted on blockchains full of Sandy Hook or Pizzagate type conspiracies would be impossible to shut down unless law enforcement could gain a 51 percent majority and take control of the network (an almost insurmountable feat due to the mining protocol incorporated in blockchains). Smart contracts too come with their own problems. While smart contracts in principle may be conceptually easy to understand, the underlying code that runs them isn’t. Smart contracts are far more binary than traditional written contracts. Human nuance and ambiguity are not easily translated into code, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see where a self-executing contract might go wrong. Unless it’s explicitly written into a smart contract’s programming language, smart contracts are final. People make mistakes, smart contracts don’t. A peer-to-peer decentralised network might sound like the answer to all our problems until you realise that all of us rely on others to guide and advise us. Bank’s don’t simply hold our money and help with transferring payments, they also provide financial advice and investment into community project. True, this could still happen under a system completely run on the blockchain, but then to claim that blockchain will be the death of all intermediaries is silly — other’s will simply take their place. Just like certain banks have higher trust scores than others, so too will certain blockchains over others. But how will they be structured? Who will help those that sit outside the digital economy to navigate these new systems? Someone will clearly have to. How current institutions incorporate blockchain into their governance structure needs to be clearly and loudly debated. A business that relies on a blockchain protocol to run its operations might be exceptionally efficient but frighteningly unempathetic. Society doesn’t operate in isolation, individuals learn and grow from one another. At the heart of the blockchain debate should be a fundamental and continuously asked question: do we want a society that trusts human-run institutions or do we want one that trusts computer code? Add to this the improvements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its integration into blockchain and we may find ourselves with a system that makes decisions on our behalf without us necessarily understanding its rationale. If AI itself becomes a node in a network, there would be virtually no way of shutting it down. None of this is to say that it couldn’t work. Blockchain and self-executing smart contracts might just be the best way forward, we humans tend to make a mess of things; yet we also have the ability for abundant amounts of compassion and generosity. Perhaps blockchain won’t take over as much as crypto-enthusiast predict. It’s good perhaps to think of this technology the same way most of us think about self-driving cars. It would be great to live in a world where no drunk, distracted or tired drives caused another fatality on our roads, yet before we hit the ignition, we need to understand in full the programming code that’s driving the car. There are millions of variables that come into play when one is driving, some that are totally based on instinct and would be near impossible to programme. If you need the car to break through your garage door because your house is on fire, there should be enough nuance in the code or a reliable kill switch in place so that you can save your life in a situation no programmer could ever have imagined. The views expressed in this article are my own and do not reflect the opinions of any of the companies for which I am employed to write.

https://medium.com/reformermag/decentralising-trust-on-blockchain-and-its-potential-to-change-the-way-we-trust-one-another-3b60e9707044

['Camilo Lascano Tribin']

2018-08-07 14:28:25.866000+00:00

['Trust', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Technology']

It’s Time to Urbanize Technology

London by night, Source : NASA An AI world tour One year ago, I went on an artificial intelligence (AI) world tour. This journey aimed to answer one question: can AI help us build sustainable cities? In other words, inclusive and dynamic cities respectful of the environment. To answer this question, I explored 12 cities and met 130 entrepreneurs, scientists, and experts around the world [1]. Some people I’ve been lucky enough to meet during my world tour. From left to right starting from the bottom : Alia Al Mur, Yoshua Bengio, Luc Julia, Joy Bonaguro, Alex Pentland, Nigel Jacob, Monique Savoie and Yutaka Matsuo During this project, I gradually understood the huge potential and the risks of AI for our cities. But as my encounters and explorations progressed, unexpected questions came to me: What if the way we dwell in cities could show us how to build better social media? What if our built environments could reveal how to better design technologies? What if urban wanderings could tell us how to explore the web? Indeed, it’s remarkable to observe the resilience of cities in the face of the political, social and technological disruption that have taken place throughout our history. Cities have not only resisted this perpetual change, they made it possible and liveable. They succeed in what Hannah Arendt called one of the main challenges of humanity: creating a common world for different generations [2]. In a nutshell, cities support and empower our civilizations for centuries. This success, how imperfect it may be, should help us better design the digital world and new technologies. Social contracts for digital spaces First observation from those who look at a city is that it’s a space where people live peacefully together. Citizens cohabitate, collaborate and share infrastructures daily. Thus, millions of singularities interact harmoniously in a remarkable way. Now let’s imagine a new kind of city. A city where people would insult and injure you at any time, where some group of men could steal from you or force you to work for free just because they are stronger, where some people could enter your “home” and steal anything they want from as there are no property laws. It would be a “war of all against all”[3] rules by the only law of the stronger. Actually, such a city would not even exist as men and women couldn’t gather. Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan by Abraham Bosse As surprising as this description looks, this is what’s currently happening in our digital spaces. Hate speech are increasing on social media, we have no ownership of our data and we do not even have access to our digital footprint (which, however, generates a huge economic value for others). It looks very much like what Thomas Hobbes called a “state of nature”. What Hobbes taught us is that the first step to get out of the state of nature and towards a society is the creation of a social contract. To trust each other, people must agree around a political common project. For Hobbes, this political project must lead to a monarchy but for other philosophers, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, social contracts can establish a democracy. What will be of interest here is not so much the political outcome as the deliberative process by which a people agree on a mode of governance. This agreement begets some laws and customs which are the cement of the social fabric. Only then, people can become citizens who will construct what Richard Sennett calls, using a french world, a “cité”[4]. A cité ‘ doesn’t represent a city’s built environment (this is what Sennett calls the “ville”) but its uses and people. In other words, a cité is a common space coined by people who share interests and values. We could say that a cité is the materialization of a social contract. So here’s our first urban lesson: before building a city we must create a cité. And before creating a cité we must agree on a social contract. Ancient Agora in Athens, often used to illustrate the concept of cité. Source : greeka.com We can easily see that very few digital spaces follow this principle. Most of the platforms and social media we’re using are following rules that have been decided unilaterally. You can accept them or leave the digital place. But that’s not how a social contract or even a cité works A cité is built from “an accumulation of small interventions that contribute to a feeling of “this is also my city”” (Saskia Sassen). If we transpose this logic to digital spaces, we obtain open-source softwares, contributory platforms (as Wikipedia) and decentralized social media (as Mastodon) which are the closest current examples for a kind of social contract around technology. In these places where the hacker ethic prevails [5], contributors can say “this is also my digital”. Materializing data through interfaces In Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Richard Sennett unveils that cities work as long as the “ville” echoes the“cité” and vice versa. In other words, when our built environment embodies our history and embraces our customs. This idea has also been beautifully expressed by Saskia Sassen when she describes ’’the capacity of the material to make itself visible”. We could say that a material is visible as long as it tells us a kind of truth, no matter its nature. It can be historical, personal, or even philosophical. For example, it’s happened when you see a place which expresses a piece of your country’s history, a bench that reminds you of your first kiss with your partner or a statue which illustrates the human condition. This urban dialogue between the city and its inhabitants make it readable and, most of all, liveable. The Weight of Oneself (Elmgreen & Dragset), in Lyon (France). Source : Onlylyon Technologies as sensors and algorithms are functioning in the opposite way. They are all invisible. In order to create a frictionless and user-friendly experience, technologies have been designed to be imperceptible. While in a city the built environment is telling something to you, with invisible sensors/algorithms you’re the one who’s unintentionally telling a personal truth (your political preferences, sexual orientation, localization; etc.). This dehumanising relationship between digital infrastructures and citizens has something of Valdrada, the city imagined by Italo Calvino in his Invisible Cities: “Thus, the traveller, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the façades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms’ interiors, with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes. Valdrada’s inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image, which possesses the special dignity of images, and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness” Similar to Valdrada, our behaviors and personalities are reflected in a lake — a data lake. With the significant difference being that we have no access to our reflection. Following the urban dialogue principle, sensors and algorithms should be at least visible. Instead of creating frictionless technologies, we should make interactive ones which empower our singularity. For example, by having access to some of the knowledge that algorithms have about us by aggregating our data. This means that we’re not only asking to see what’s behind the algorithm (or the sensor), we also want to make it readable. This principle emphasizes the necessity to work on interactive and visible interfaces between human beings and technologies. Interfaces which materialize data and make them sensible. From wandering to deviating algorithms When you succeed in merging harmoniously the cité and the built environment, you have a city. Such a city is characterized by its ability to produce liberty, at least on an individual level. Streets, squares and public spaces in general are spaces of encounters and exploration. Encounters with other individuals and explorations of new cultures. Whether through street performances, shop windows, monuments or even just a face [6]… the city dweller is constantly under the temptation to deviate, in the literal sense of diverting from a trajectory. And, much like the epicurean clinamen [7], this deviation gives rise to freedom. The freedom to amble and roam new imaginary worlds. The freedom to undertake and break free from social determinism. The freedom to interact with unexpected people. This is why cities are lands of opportunities. They give you the possibility to evolve, to become who you are. Fitler Bubble as described by Eli Pariser in his 2011 TED Talk Social media and platforms are functioning in a radically opposed way. The more you use them, the more you’re locked in an echo chamber (or filter bubble). This is not only dangerous by polarizing our societies, it’s also alarming as you can no longer explore new possibilities and ways of thinking. Deviating behaviours, that make the evolution of societies and species possible, are standardised by optimised algorithms. That’s interesting to notice that these over-optimised algorithms are making wandering impossible in cities. Mesmerised by their smartphones, individuals turn into “smombies”[8] impervious to their environment. This phenomenon is so important and dangerous that some cities, such as Seoul, have even been forced to build lighting infrastructure to encourage “smombie” to bring back the attention to the street. Warning sign to inform of the presence of “smombies”. Source : CHRISTOPH SCHMIDT / DPA / AFP Following the wandering principle, we should create deviating algorithms. It means algorithms that would show you contents in contradiction with who you are and what you believe. Not always, but just enough to give you the possibility to explore something else than yourself. This principle can be generalized to almost all industries which are using recommendations to show you contents and products or to suggest you some connections. We would probably stay less time on such platforms, but it would enable us to become better human beings and more empathetic societies [9]. Urbanizing technology I’ve tried to synthesize how some urban properties could help us make liveable digital spaces and humanist technologies. We could call this process of exporting urban principles towards the field of digital and new technologies, “urbanization of technologies”. If social contracts, urban dialogue and wandering can lead to urbanized technologies[10], many others are to be discovered: Eli Pariser recently wrote an article about online parks, French think tank hérétique raised awareness about the dangers of our smartphones by representing them as a city called “Algoville” and architect Pierre Bernard imagined how Baron Haussmann could inspire engineers and designers. Initiatives are growing and we are just at the beginning of this tech urbanization. “Algoville” by hérétique Obviously, this urbanization process has limitations as digital gets their own specificities. This is why it’s not about building “digital cities” (which would be nonsense), but taking inspiration from the history of the cities and urban planning to make our technologies liveable. This urbanization is more than ever necessary as digital is threatening our social fabric while new technologies are making our cities uninhabitable. People and territories are increasingly morphing into data to serve algorithms. It’s time to reverse this paradigm. The challenge is huge, but we have with us hundreds of generations to succeed. [1] : The insights and discoveries of this project are freely available in URBAN AI Report. [2] : An idea mainly developed in Between Past and Future [3] : Leviathan, T.Hobbes [4] : Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, R.Sennett. Using the French language, Sennett distinguishes two urban realities : cité (people and their customs) and ville (the built environment). [5] : The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, Pekka Himanen [6] : The theme of the face as an invitation to stroll in the city has been developed by Louis Aragon in Aurélien [7] : In Epicurean physics, clinamen refers to the deviation of atoms from their vertical fall into the vacuum. This clinamen breaks “the laws of fatality” (Lucretia), generates the meeting of bodies and gives birth to freedom [8] : Suitcase word formed from smartphone and zombie to refer to city dwellers who are constantly looking at their phones [9] : Alex “Sandy” Pentland also showed that algorithms that enable exploration improve economic efficiency in Social Physics and in Beyond the Echo Chamber [10] : The concept of “urbanized technologies” initially from Saskia Sassen who developped this idea in here contribution for URBAN AI Report : Urbanized Technology

https://medium.com/swlh/its-time-to-urbanize-technology-141fa5580574

['Hubert Beroche']

2020-12-17 18:59:36.844000+00:00

['Innovation', 'Digital', 'Technology', 'Urban Planning', 'AI']

Cool Off Your Raspberry Pi 4 with Pimoroni’s Heatsink Case

The Raspberry Pi 4 packs a powerful Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 (Arm v8) 64-bit SoC, and as a result, runs hotter than previous Raspberry Pi boards, especially under load. The Foundation does offer a PoE (Power over Ethernet) HAT with built-in fan to cool things down, although it does run on the expensive side at $20. There are other options, such as iUniker’s Raspberry Pi 4 Case that is also outfitted with a fan to keep things cool, coming in at a cheaper $8.99; however using fans for cooling tend be on the noisy side. Pimoroni’s anodized aluminum heatsink case is purported to decrease temps by 10°C to 15°C under load from passive cooling. (📷: Pimoroni) Pimoroni has a solution to the noise problem by offering a passive solution with their aluminum heatsink case that the company states can lower temperatures by 10°C to 15°C while the Pi is operating under full load. “This anodized aluminum heatsink case will protect your Raspberry Pi 4 and give you the best passive cooling we’ve seen in our extensive testing. It’s great for situations where you want completely silent cooling, like home media centers.” The aluminum case comes with a top and bottom that is connected using a series of hex screws. (📷: Pimoroni) The case features an anodized aluminum top and bottom that are connected using a set of hex screws, leaving cutouts for all the ports and I/O pins for easy access. It comes with a thermal pad as well that provides contact between the SoC and case to transfer heat loads. Pimoroni notes that you can use HATs with the case, but only if they are low profile without any bulky components underneath them. The Aluminum Heatsink Case is now available for about $15.

https://medium.com/@CabeFSAtwell/cool-off-your-raspberry-pi-4-with-pimoronis-heatsink-case-3f6aa61daddf

['Cabe Atwell']

2019-09-14 18:41:05.806000+00:00

['Technology', 'Pimoroni', 'Hardware', 'Raspberry Pi']

TINA Turner: Elon Musk’s Favorite Badass Beat

TINA Turner: Elon Musk’s Favorite Badass Beat Photo by Artem Bryzgalov on Unsplash The acronym TINA, which stands for There Is No Alternative, is often used by investors to explain a less-than-ideal portfolio allocation. The boring part about TINA? It’s a phrase that originated with the Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer and later became a slogan for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The awesome part about TINA? For Tesla shareholders, it’s been a party with the sound of Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the best’. People like Ron Baron, one of the biggest and earliest investors in Tesla, have to be proud of his ability to believe in Elon Musk and his dream. In 2014, Baron’s fund bought 1,006,000 shares at an average price of $219. Well, this was pre-split. So, I’m gonna let you do the math, for you to feel the real impact on numbers when you invest on the right horse. 7 months ago, in a CNBC interview, Chamath Palihapitiya was facing a graphic on Tesla stock where it was down 27% that day. The price was $270 pre-split. The journalist was looking for blood and asked a question to put him at a dead end. Chamath made a pause and shared his feelings about Elon and Tesla. If you want to take a step back, in a 3 to 5 year-view, and say where can I compound my money? and particularly with the converts, what’s so beautiful is that they are downside protected because it sets on top of all the equity and the other dept. So, if you have any concerns about liquidity issues, they get paid first. To me, it was a riskless option on the Edison of our generation. Let me underline this phrase again, cause it’s remarkable. It was a riskless option on the Edison of our generation Tesla is currently valued at $650B. It’s 18.5 times price/sales. 78 times price/gross profit. And 203 times price/EBIT. Ok, I know what you’re thinking. Warren Buffett would have an aneurism if he saw these numbers a few decades ago. I get it. But that’s where comes TINA. Forget about the party, it’s not ‘Simply the best’ Tina. It’s about There Is No Alternative TINA. If you think about it, there’s a deep philosophical issue within TINA and money itself. What is money today? Money can be interpreted as a technology store of value over time. Elon Musk would call it an allocation system for labor. If labor is all on technology for the future 10 to 20 years, technology can and probably will be a store of value. And I’m not even talking about Bitcoin. Let Bitcoin be quiet for a second.

https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/tina-turner-elon-musks-favorite-badass-beat-f9db62805a7f

['Nuno Fabiao']

2020-12-14 18:19:21.088000+00:00

['Elon Musk', 'Bitcoin', 'Asset Management', 'Tesla', 'Technology']

Ebooks, Audiobooks Are Popular, But Print Books Remain King

According to the Pew Research Center, 65 percent of Americans have read a print book in the past year, while 25 percent have read an ebook and 20 percent have listened to an audiobook. By Rob Marvin We spend most of our time at PCMag talking about the endless wave of technological innovation changing society for better and for worse, but that doesn’t mean the old world just stops. My favorite example of this is reading. While more and more Americans get their news from social media and do most of their reading on ebooks, tablets, and smartphones, the majority of adults still read old-fashioned print books. According to a study from Pew Research Center, print books continue to be significantly more popular than ebooks or audiobooks. Around 72 percent of US adults told Pew they’ve read a book in some format in the past year, and 65 percent of those respondents said they read a print book. That’s compared to 63 percent in 2015, though the last two surveys show a drop from 71 percent in 2011. Only 25 percent of respondents said they read an ebook, which is down 2 percent from 2015. The share of Americans who listen to audiobooks has also risen, from 14 percent in 2015 to 20 percent in 2019. For most respondents, though, it’s not one or the other; it’s a mix. While 37 percent of readers said they read only print, 28 percent read both print and ebooks or audiobooks, and only 7 percent read in digital formats. That said, about a quarter of respondents haven’t read a book in the past year at all. Personally, I’ve tried ebooks and audiobooks. While I read most of my news via digital media outlets these days, when it comes to books, I’m still exclusively print. In a world where so much of our day is spent staring at one screen or another, one of my favorite feelings is putting my devices out of reach and picking up a paperback.

https://medium.com/pcmag-access/ebooks-audiobooks-are-popular-but-print-books-remain-king-7f0d94bf14ea

[]

2019-12-13 20:01:01.360000+00:00

['Technology', 'Books', 'Reading', 'Gadgets', 'eBooks']

Beyond Bitcoin: 2022’s defining crypto trends

Beyond Bitcoin: 2022’s defining crypto trends As economies around the world continue to pivot to the crypto market, there’s no doubt that 2022 will see the innovation stakes raised even higher. Kristjan Kangro, CEO and founder of Change, a European cryptocurrency investing platform for retail investors, explores the defining cryptocurrency trends to come in the year ahead. Top Business Tech Dec 22, 2021·4 min read As economies around the world continue to pivot to the crypto market, there’s no doubt that 2022 will see the innovation stakes raised even higher. Kristjan Kangro, CEO and founder of Change, a European cryptocurrency investing platform for retail investors, explores the defining cryptocurrency trends to come in the year ahead. To say that 2021 has been a big year for the crypto market is an understatement. Cryptocurrency has now become more than just the choice of the ‘digitally savvy’ but a pillar of popular culture. Crypto is now not only recognised by major institutions but embedded within more leading businesses than ever before. Earlier this year the capitalisation of the market saw a threefold increase to an all-time high of $2.5 trillion, and this is just beginning. Amid the rising case for a more transparent, digitalised approach to global finance, the crypto industry continues to evolve rapidly — going beyond its early Bitcoin origins, to effectively transform the face of finance as we know it. The result is an abundance of opportunity for the investor in-the-know to grow their portfolio and unlock new profit potential. But, with so many different crypto trends on the market, where to begin? The DeFi Disruptor One of the most important and exciting innovations to gain ground in the past twelve months is without a doubt decentralised finance. For those less familiar, decentralised finance (DeFi) is the concept of moving power and control away from traditional financial institutions, such as banks and brokerages, and into the hands of people like you and me. It brings to life a world where financial transactions and products are all run on a public blockchain without a middleman. Effectively creating a more transparent, open and free financial system by reducing complicated procedures and costly checks associated with traditional finance. Applied en masse, it will result in a truly global economy; an economy where anyone, irrespective of the financial infrastructure or controls in their own country will have the same access and opportunities as everyone else. Given that many millions of people are currently ‘underbanked’ or ‘unbanked’ it could help play a big role in tackling poverty too. For those already in the traditional financial world, the improved transparency and accountability makes the financial system as a whole more stable, meaning scenarios like the 2008 financial crisis would become far less likely. Over the course of 2021 we’ve seen more companies and countries look at ways to embrace DeFi. Scores of DeFi projects have been launched and according to accountancy giant EY — the value of assets locked into DeFi grew from less than $1 billion in June 2020 to more than $98 billion in September 2021. This trend looks set to dominate in 2022 as new DeFi coins, projects and innovations continue to come to the fore. More than a Token Movement Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are another incredibly exciting area, although NFTs are predominantly used in art, music and sports, they have recently expanded to include other types of digital property, including digital real estate. As the world becomes more digitalised and connected, the opportunity for fraud, identity theft and other cyber security breaches is on the rise. NFTs can play part of the solution. Due to the way each asset is minted uniquely as an NFT on a blockchain, it offers the ultimate decentralized and immutable verification. In the future this could help everyone from brands, insurance companies and banks through to institutes and governments across the world. How? By speeding up all the types of application and identification processes through the ability to verify and trust the same single code. One example might be a designer shoe brand which uses NFTs to verify its products — where each serialised pair of shoes has a unique ID embedded in the physical product which can be scanned by companies and consumers to prove its authenticity. In this way, in the future NFTs won’t just be confined to the big-tickets items like art, but instead could be used for everything from your cinema ticket and gym subscription through to your car key. Crypto choices As Bitcoin is the most established and widely used crypto asset, it is understandable why it may be the obvious first investment choice. However, in the next few years we’ll see other areas of the crypto world really start to take hold. Some great current examples include Cardano (ADA) & Polkadot (DOT). Both offer an interesting play to hedge against Ethereum as potential competitors for the best smart contracts platform. Solana (SOL) is also worth a mention, it’s one of the fastest growing blockchain ecosystems and offers a great way to scale user friendly apps. Uniswap (UNI) is another one to watch. As the world’s largest decentralised exchange, Uniswap by market capitalisation, it’s a key player in its field and a driving force behind a lot of crypto innovation happening today. Alongside the wider DeFi movement, the public are going to see plenty more DeFi assets and services come to the forefront too and make themselves more known in the mainstream. We know this because in Change, over 90% of our community stated a clear interest in getting to know more DeFi assets alone last year. Read More: As we look to the year ahead, there’s no doubt that we’ll see a continued increase in market acceleration as more and more people turn to crypto. In this way, taking the time to keep on top of the market and joining a crypto community, or two, online could pay dividends. Click here to discover more of our podcasts For more news from Top Business Tech, don’t forget to subscribe to our daily bulletin! Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter

https://medium.com/tbtech-news/beyond-bitcoin-2022s-defining-crypto-trends-6bb138ce9e8d

['Top Business Tech']

2021-12-22 15:16:15.006000+00:00

['It', 'Technology', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Business', 'Fintech']

JavaScript Best Practices — Spaces, Objects, and Strings

Photo by Mr.Autthaporn Pradidpong on Unsplash Like any kind of apps, JavaScript apps also have to be written well. Otherwise, we run into all kinds of issues later on. In this article, we’ll look at some best practices we should follow when writing JavaScript code. No Mixing Spaces and Tabs for Indentation Mixing spaces and tab for cause issues for text editors. Therefore, we shouldn't mix them. Instead, we use 2 spaces and convert tabs to 2 spaces automatically. No Multiple Spaces Except for Indentation We only use 2 spaces for indentation. In all other locations, we should use one space to avoid wasting space. No new Without Assigning the Return Object to a Variable If we create a new object with new , then we should assign it to a variable so we can use it. For instance, instead of writing: new Dog(); We write: const dog = new Dog(); Don’t Use the Function Constructor We shouldn’t use the Function , it takes strings for the function code and returns a function. It’s a security hazard to run code in strings. Also, it’s hard to debug and optimize since the code it’s in a string. For instance, we shouldn't write: const add = new Function('a', 'b', 'return a + b'); Instead, we write: const add = (a, b) => a + b; Don’t Use the Object Constructor We shouldn’t use the Object constructor since it doesn’t give us benefit over the create them with object literals. It just makes the code longer. For example, instead of writing: let foo = new Object(); We should write: let foo = {}; No new with require We shouldn't have new and require together. It may create confusion between: const foo = new require('foo'); and: const foo = new (require('foo')); Therefore, we should avoid these expressions. Don’t Symbol as a Constructor Symbol is a factory function. It’s not a constructor. Therefore, we shouldn’t write: const foo = new Symbol('foo'); Instead, we write: const foo = Symbol('foo'); No Primitive Wrapper Instances We shouldn't use functions like String or Boolean as constructors. This is because they return values of type 'object' , which is confusing. Also, the code is longer. Therefore, we shouldn’t use it. For instance, instead of writing: const message = new String('hi'); We write: const message = 'hi'; Literals are shorter and eliminate any confusion that can arise. Don’t Call Global Object Properties as Functions We shouldn’t call global object properties as functions. They aren’t mean to be called. For instance, we shouldn't write: const math = Math(); No Octal Literals We shouldn't write octal number literals. They are almost never useful in JavaScript and since they start with a 0, we may confuse it with decimal numbers. For instance, we shouldn't write: const octal = 042; Instead, we write: const decimal = 34; No Octal Escape Sequences We shouldn't have octal escape sequences in our code. They aren’t useful and it’s probably a mistake to have them. For instance, we shouldn't write: const foo = 'foo \251' Instead, we write: const foo = 'foo'; No String Concatenation When Using __dirname or __filename We should use path.join to join paths so that we can use the path in all operating systems correctly. For instance instead of writing: const pathToFile = __dirname + '/foo.js' We write: const pathToFile = path.join(__dirname, 'foo.js') Don’t Use __proto__ The __proto__ property isn’t mean to be accessed directly as indicated by the __ characters. Instead, we should use the Object.getPrototypeOf method to get the prototype of an object. So we shouldn’t write: const foo = obj.__proto__; But we should write: const foo = Object.getPrototypeOf(obj); Don’t Redeclare Variables We shouldn't redeclare variables in our code. We’ll get an error if we declare 2 variables with the same name in the same scope. Instead, we should reassign a new value to the existing variable with the same name. For example, instead of writing: let name = 'james'; let name = 'joe'; We write: let name = 'james'; name = 'joe'; Photo by Behzad Ghaffarian on Unsplash Conclusion We shouldn’t declare variables with the same name in the same scope. Also, we should use getPrototypeOf method to get the prototype of an object. We should also be mindful when spacing out our JavaScript code.

https://medium.com/dev-genius/javascript-best-practices-spaces-objects-and-strings-7b9bcdea342f

['John Au-Yeung']

2020-06-30 18:49:17.245000+00:00

['JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Technology', 'Web Development']

Are you Looking for a Forklift Battery Charger? Navigate on the Top Tips Before Buying

Are you Looking for a Forklift Battery Charger? Navigate on the Top Tips Before Buying Rhyl Tech Jan 14, 2020·2 min read Do you want to avoid paying a double amount for your battery charger? Then don’t do such mistakes which most of the buyers do. Buyers often pick cheap batteries having no warranties, this not only wastes their money but costs valuable time. So, before you spend your money on a custom forklift battery charger, take some time to learn how to choose the right kind of battery for your forklift charger. The first step while buying a charger is to collect some peculiar data about your charger. It would be easy for you to find the right kind of battery with the right specifications. Most of the forklift chargers are either 48 volt or 36 volts. So before buying make sure that what your lift truck can handle. It otherwise can cause serious damage to your device. Checking the battery dimension is another important point to consider while buying your next charger. Although the manufacturer’s batteries should fit, it’s better to check whether they are compatible with your chargers are not. You can also buy from a manufacturer or supplier that offers custom forklift battery chargers. You need not check anything with these suppliers, just tell them your specification and they will provide you the same. You need not check anything with these suppliers, just tell them your specification and they will provide you the same. Incompatible amp hour rating leads to sulfated batteries. So, it is necessary to check the amp hour rating before buying. If you want maximum power and run time then choose the highest rated amp battery that can fit in the truck’s compartment. Don’t buy from such manufacturers who are not providing any warranty or service life. Only purchase from those who are offering a warranty- the longer the better. Ask how they will handle warranty issues and do you need to send the battery away for the service. Some battery chargers require distilled water after five to ten charges. This water saves the active material in the battery and if the water level drops too low then the material dries out and gets brittle. This can damage the battery permanently and shorten its life. So before buying check whether the battery requires water. In the end, if you are looking for the right forklift charger at reasonable rates then it is best to buy from a wholesale forklift battery charger supplier. RHYL is a renowned supplier of high-quality forklift chargers. We offer right battery charging solutions to our clients at a wholesale rate.

https://medium.com/@rhyltech/are-you-looking-for-a-forklift-battery-charger-navigate-on-the-top-tips-before-buying-fc49107fe693

['Rhyl Tech']

2020-01-14 05:27:04.907000+00:00

['Battery', 'Technology', 'Forklift Charger', 'Charger', 'Warehouse']

Functional JS: Creating a Command Loop

Alright that wasn’t so bad. Now we have the pieces we need to create our Sum Type constructor. Let’s do that now: Defining the Sum Type constructor. More heavy duty stuff. Let’s break it down once more. register_type is an internal function that modifies the REGISTERED_TYPES object to include the names of variants registered to a specific type. SumType is a special constructor that builds extensible Sum Type variant objects and registers their names to the central registry. SumType is fairly complicated so let’s go through it in detail. SumType takes two parameters, the name of the type that we’re creating, and the constructors object which will hold the definitions for our Sum Type variants. The first thing that we do in the SumType function is declare a few const type variables. T will be our result’s namespace. Each variant constructor that we create will be placed inside of T , which will eventually serve as the return value of SumType . tags is an object which simply aggregates the tag names for each variant to make it easy to pass them to register_type . We deconstruct our constructors object with Object.entries . Then we iterate over the results. This is the bulk of the SumType function. We place the tag name of the constructor into the tags object (aggregating the tag names). Then we create a constructor function called result to serve as the real constructor that gets called when we instantiate a variant of a Sum Type. It’s this result constructor function that we mix-in Matchable to, allowing us to sink the private data from our constructors definition into the final instance MATCH call. Finally, we place a function at T[tag] that returns a new result and set that function’s prototype to result 's prototype. Phew! Let’s see how we use it to create Sum Types! The Result Sum Type. Finally, we can build a Sum Type that has match ing capabilities. Now we can see the beauty of what we’ve just enacted. We can construct our Sum Types using our newly defined SumType function. We specify the shape of our variants’ data with simple arrow functions that return objects. Then when we call match , that private data is injected into our pattern’s selected function. Way back at the beginning of this article I was discussing impurity in code. Let’s imagine a Sum Type whose variants represent the impure actions that we can take in our code: The Command Type. I call this type Command. It consists of variants to represent things like getting and setting local storage (Retrieve, Cache), generating a Random number, sending an asynchronous request (Fork), and receiving a Response. We also have the ability to set an Interval and perform a general side Effect (like logging to the console). This guy is going to be the backbone of our Command Loop. Let’s finally start thinking about how to define the Command Loop. There are two aspects to account for — sending and receiving. We will want a way to push Commands into the loop, and a way to subscribe to the responses of the loop. We have defined some internal functions for our command loop, two of which will be available on the returned object ( command and subscriptions ). command — this function is a part of the Command Loop’s exposed interface. It allows us to push a command into the internal queue and trigger a call to process the queue. It accepts a Pair of [tag, cmd] which are a string and Command object respectively. — this function is a part of the Command Loop’s exposed interface. It allows us to push a command into the internal queue and trigger a call to process the queue. It accepts a Pair of which are a string and Command object respectively. subscriptions — the other publicly exposed function of Command Loop. It allows us to pass a configuration object to define what types of responses we will be listening for on the ‘pure’ end of the application — the other publicly exposed function of Command Loop. It allows us to pass a configuration object to define what types of responses we will be listening for on the ‘pure’ end of the application process — this function is internal only and is the meat of the Command Loop’s functionality. It pulls the last item off of the internal queue and sends it through an internal constant, the CMD_PATTERN which we have yet to define. CMD_PATTERN will be the pattern that match will match our Command instances against. When the match is complete and has yielded a result emit is called, letting the listeners know that their request has been answered. — this function is internal only and is the meat of the Command Loop’s functionality. It pulls the last item off of the internal queue and sends it through an internal constant, the which we have yet to define. will be the pattern that will match our Command instances against. When the is complete and has yielded a result is called, letting the listeners know that their request has been answered. listen — sets up the internal listeners object with an entry. When emit is called with a tag that’s registered on listeners , the function located at that key will be called with emit’s data parameter. — sets up the internal object with an entry. When is called with a that’s registered on , the function located at that key will be called with emit’s data parameter. emit — iterates through listeners at the provided tag and calls registered functions with result . We’re getting close to our goal now. But we have another hurdle — we still need to define the match pattern CMD_PATTERN that we’ll be sending our Commands through. Remember Result that we defined earlier? We’ll be using it heavily here. Cache and Retrieve are simple enough to implement. We just call the impure code as we normally would. Except its all neatly separated on it’s own impure track. Everything that we return is neatly wrapped up in a Result type. We also handle the default case using _ . Now let’s implement some others Interval Random and Effect are all very simple as well. Interval sets an interval and returns a function to clear it. Random gets a random number and gives it back to our application. Effect takes any impure, non-returning function and calls it. Now the tricky ones, Fork and Response . We’re going to have to go back to the drawing board for this one. Let’s define a type to encapsulate an Asynchronous action: I’m not going to explain Async in detail because it’s beyond the scope of this article, but know that it’s like a Promise, except to make it start its internal process, you must call its .fork method, providing an on-error function and an on-success function as parameters. You can use chain to wrap other Asyncs into the call or transform the expected result with map . I’ve also included a function called fetch that wraps an XMLHttpRequest into the Async’s internal fork . That’s the function that I’m concerned about for implementing our Fork Command. Now we will be expecting that the data passed into Fork will be of the Async type. We can now fork it, calling command again to send the value back to the pure side of the application as a Response variant. Since we’re wrapping the result of our Async call in a Result (look how we have Response(Ok(x)) and Response(Err(x)) for the success and error paths of .fork ) we can just return the result. Response only gives us a convenient way to give back the result of our impure asynchronous code to the pure side of the application in a controlled fashion. Now the moment of truth. Will it work?! We isolate our impure actions within the configuration object passed to subscriptions . The keys of the object correspond to the tag passed to command . When emit is called internally, it passes the result of our impure code (if any) back to our pure application, where we can handle it within subscriptions . As seen in the Interval example, you can nest commands within commands. IntervalIter will log to the console and increment iterations using Effect . In the subscriptions portion, we can check when iterations is beyond a certain point and respond to it by cancelling the interval call. Using the Fork Command, we can make an asynchronous HTTP request, and on the subscriptions side, we can respond in the Response function. In this case we fire a new Effect command to log the results. Notice how we omit the String parameter of the (String, Command) pair using the , . We can do this for commands that we don’t care about subscribing to — they simply wont emit a result. Now whenever we want to separate our effects we can use this tiny bit of code to do so. It doesn’t seem that tiny, but I call it tiny because we’ve managed to include all this functionality, including the Async type and several others, in just about 200 lines of code. That’s really not a lot considering how useful match and SumType can be together. Using just this code and vanillaJS we could accomplish a pretty polished separation of pure and impure code. But since it just separates side-effects from your code, we could probably toss the Command Loop into something like a React application, too. Here’s a pen to hack at: Hope you enjoyed another Functionally oriented article, and until next time FP on!

https://medium.com/swlh/functional-js-creating-a-command-loop-f82b12a1fbdb

[]

2020-10-26 06:13:49.046000+00:00

['Technology', 'JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Data Science', 'Programming']

Parents & Educators: Do You Follow Proper Netiquette Rules?

It seems like everyday, I witness a conversation online between two people that makes me cringe. Sometimes it involves family and sometimes you can tell there is an “elephant” on the page. DID YOU KNOW THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPS MEANS YOU ARE YELLING!?Most of us adult social-networking users have never really had a course on “netiquette” or formally learned how we should be behaving online. I mean, would you act that way if the person were right there in front of you instead of hiding behind a computer screen? One thing’s for sure, face to face communication with eye contact, tone and empathy will never be a better alternative to typing an email or leaving a comment on someone’s page. As adults, educators, parents, grandparents, WE are responsible for setting a good example for children and for students while we are online communicating. The future of social media is now, and it is simply not going away. Whether it is Facebook, AIM, Twitter, Google+, cell phone texting or any other social networking device or site, we need to stay highly educated on the do’s and dont’s, and frequently share that knowledge with children of all ages. For teachers and parents in a home-school partnership, netiquette is nothing short of vital. A simple netiquette blunder could lead to hard feelings, a lack of communication or misinformation, trust issues and a high anxiety level for all parties involved. In the end, one person suffers- the child or student involved. Please pass this along to those around you. Our children deserve to not only have great role models physically, but also while we are online. Below is a video found on youtube.com which, in under 3 minutes, delivers some tips to help us groom our “netiquette.” A Google Doc version has been provided here. Curiosity Fix: Check out how young Korean students are learning about Netiquette below.

https://medium.com/leadlearners/parents-educators-do-you-follow-proper-netiquette-rules-b241586862f8

['Joe Mazza']

2016-12-17 05:38:03.482000+00:00

['Social Media', 'Parent Leadership', 'New Teachers', 'Leadership', 'Technology Integration']

Top 10 Blockchain Trends of 2021

The blockchain is thought to be a technology that is the counter-part or better-half for the cryptocurrencies, it is certainly true, but what people are big-time missing on is it is a backbone for several other modern services. To proceed further, let us understand first what blockchain technology is. What is Blockchain? It is a transparent database that stores data in the form of blocks. Each blockchain has a hash id, directly derived from the data inside the block, and the previous block’s hash. Thus the tampering in the data through hacking will modify the hash and the chain of blocks will fall down as the next block’s previous hash id does not get changed. Although this technology has gained the momentum predicted for it, but it has certainly created regional markets for it in Israel, China, Korea, and the Pacific region. Let us have a deep look at the developing trends in this field throughout 2020; The hype over Practical Starts 2019 left us on the corner where there was much hype about blockchain technology, but no one was really ready to implement the technology and get the best out of it. With the wake of 2020 on the horizon, many implementations and practical manifestations of the technology has been seen in the plethora of industries. These industries range from the agriculture, insurance sector to the government agencies and bodies. Now the overarching questions like “Will the technology work for us?” and “How can we make technology work for us?” have stopped threatening the proponents of the technology. The world has to start reaping the benefits of beneficial technology. Identification of Piracy and Misleading Information The identification of the piracy i.e. repeated identical information in the ledgers is very simple as every transaction by all of the stakeholders is completely transparent. So, the users can identify the repeated records in less than a second. Moreover, these transparent databases have very limited users with the authority to write the database. The structure of the block-chain does not allow the tampering of the data. But if any adept hacker makes it to successful tampering of the data (whose proximity is nearly impossible), the recording of the same transaction in the ledgers of all of the stakeholders immediately helps in recognizing the misleading information. People think that block-chain is rendering successful services only in the financial sector, so piracy and misleading information can be eliminated only in that field. This is not fully true, as the blockchain services are not limited only to the financial sector as it is rendering services in every arena of life including international politics, supply chain management, and social media interactions. Governmental Bodies Using Blockchain The Korean peninsula, Vietnam, and China have decided to take the technology one step upward by inducing it into the government machinery and making it the most crucial element in worldwide digitization. Even countries like Thailand and Vietnam are using it for digital contracts keeping in mind the massive storage space of the blockchain technology to store the documents and massive amounts of information with no risks associated with being pirated, tampered and hacked. It is predicted by many IT gurus that the process of online voting can become trustworthy, speedy, and transparent. There is no other solution than blockchain development to make online voting a fair process. Emerging Platforms The new platforms have emerged for exceptional blockchain development. During 2019, the platforms were in their probation period or the naïve period when they had no much prior experience of meeting the user expectations and resolving these problems. The prominent names of these platforms are Ethereum, Hyperledger, Hedera graph, Ripple, and Quorum, etc. The 2019’s blockchain development platforms were enabled to give the core features only, the enhanced features can be developed and craved using the new versions of the aforementioned platforms. Increased Adoption Rate A plethora of industries has adopted the use of blockchain technology. This adoption has also diversified the reasons for which these technologies are being used. The adoption of this technology in the medical and health sciences has made the best influence on his history. The data transparency, speed of access, immutability, traceability, and trustworthiness can provide the information necessary for life-altering decisions. The pharmaceutical supply chains have been at the center of much experimentation in the past 12 months. Another important area of interest, confirmed also by the World Economic Forum and World Bank, is the digitizing of the health records to give rise to self-sovereign identification. The highest share has been contributed by the sector ‘Technology, Media and Telecommunication’ with the percentage 49% of the total share and the lowest share has been contributed by the ‘Retail, Wholesale, and Distribution’ with the percentage 21% of the total share. Block-chain Consortia The blockchain developers have started consuming their energies in the streamlined direction to form blockchain consortia or the ecosystem. For this to achieve, collaboration with the third parties is pertinent. Some of the major features of the blockchain consortia are Goals of Collaboration, Responsibilities of Involved Parties, Contribution, Intellectual Property, Technology Consideration, Confidentiality Agreement, and Legal Entity, etc. Rise of Tokens In simple words, the token is the encrypted string of data that does not contain the data without actually pointing to the data ostensibly. The tokens are reported to be the new “digital assets”. The digital asset is anything to have possessed the intrinsic value. Examples of digital assets include land, goods, certificates, identity, works of art and literature, rewards, and even currency, among many others. Still, there are many industries in which the digital tokens are not being used, reserving the billions of euros as the illiquid able reserves. Increased Legislation 40 bills have been passed by the American congress regarding the block chain development in the area of crypto and blockchain development. India, Thailand, China, and Korea have also done it rigorously. This is a subtle development towards legitimizing blockchain development. No Market Disruption The trilemma of blockchain development service revolves around decentralization, security, and scalability. Systems failure often causes issues with the functioning of an entire market. A single breakdown can lead to a chain reaction taking down all the other systems with it. With the use of blockchain technology, this damage can be limited to that particular system and prevent it from spreading and causing a disruption. Since decentralized blockchains do not require a central authority, and multiple users must verify each transaction, there is minimal chance of complete and extensive failure.

https://medium.com/@kryptomind/top-10-blockchain-trends-of-2021-cfd66b1c635e

[]

2020-12-24 05:50:55.906000+00:00

['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain Startup']

BIC Writing Contest — Pitch Live

Blockchain in Chicago is an event happening February 22nd, 2018 at Venue 610 in Chicago. This writing contest will be decided by the likes and shares you give to the article along with a little weight from the judges (Hannah, Joe, and Danny). The point is to get a little extra marketing out there for the event. Sure there is a fully decentralized way to do this, but as a community organization we are simply having fun experimenting with a new technology. Payments will be posted on the 28th with transaction ID and addresses. For info on the event check out blockchaininchicago.com For info on us check out chicagoblockchainproject.com And now an article from a community member: Chicago’s Cryptocurrency Wealth Begins with Community Engagement. Cryptocurrency access and wealth building begins with human capital and no other group get’s the formula than the Chicago Blockchain Project. “We have just broken the 100 attendees mark about 2 weeks out,” says Joe Hernandez, on the upcoming event Blockchain in Chicago Kickoff to 2018. Its organizer, crypto enthusiast nicknamed “Disruption Joe,” is looking forward to featured speakers including Current CEO Dan Noaves and Blank Build CEO Kim Parnell. The A/V team will be “filming pro quality raw video including backstage interviews,” says Joe. The kickoff event was organized to cater to the needs of Chicago’s growing crypto community of enthusiasts and professionals who would like to get involved. “Crypto is the dessert that attracts people to learn more,” he says, “It is our job to feed them their decentralized vegetables.” The first half of the event, will focus on the growing business community who would like to leverage not just digital currencies but also blockchain technologies. The second half, participants will dive deep into cryptoland with workshops set up for learning and engagement. Organizing the Crypto Community The community that inspired the the Chicago Blockchain Project is a 1,600+ member meetup group by the same name. From traders and developers to consultants and private equity, members attended 50+ events and retweeted 200+ Tweets, with hash tags ‘#buidl’ and ‘#ChicagoHodl.’ “We wanted to become a resource for the community meaning, hosting mostly free meetups for our members to show off products and ideas.” The Blockchain model for Business The idea of cryptocurrencies and the application of it is made possible by systems like the Blockchain that allows transaction history to be public. Record keeping will be open. Whereas throughout history, ledgers had been kept private. It is an innovative concept, where a block is a transaction…chained to all prior blocks, so hacking becomes difficult. In peer-to-peer networks, transactions can be limited between just as few parties inside of organization, within an ecosystem, or on the public web. Take the financial service industry, where millions of transactions are handled in any day, taking days to settle. Not with blockchain. It takes minutes. As more cities adopt meetups and telegram groups modeled after the Chicago Blockchain Project, cryptocurrencies and the blockchain will continue to flourish. Credit Pitch Investors Live for the article and picture.

https://medium.com/chicagoblockchainproject/bic-writing-contest-pitch-live-80ff8f012534

['Disruption Joe']

2018-02-19 17:43:41.501000+00:00

['Investing', 'Entrepreneur', 'ICO', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain']

Trust in Online Medicine

Be Cautious, Not Straying Online Here are listed the most popular adversary of valid information sources: One of the most available sources is online forums, discussions on social media . To this category sources that are opened for editing (e.g., “Wikipedia”) also can be related. . To this category sources that are opened for editing (e.g., “Wikipedia”) also can be related. Another source is advertising materials advice from which sometimes can be addressed to the mass audience invisibly, though they have to be moderated before publishing. advice from which sometimes can be addressed to the mass audience invisibly, though they have to be moderated before publishing. In addition, publications without references are unfounded and are more likely to provide fake and unverified recommendations. The named above sources can be truly obvious in terms of a lack of reliability. According to doctors’ opinions, clinicians are prone to expect worst-case scenarios as the published advice tend to delay actual treatment even in urgent situations, worse the current state and well-being, as well as violate privacy and jeopardize expertise in general (Benigeri & Pluye, 2003). Speaking precisely and taking forums as an example, it should be mentioned that more frequently they are organized by a group of users; some time is passing, and a community of people with common interests and alike stories is formed. Life experience, which can sometimes be embellished or completely falsified, becomes the basis a key to start or continue a virtual conversation. In the case of health, it can be fraught with the fact that people, especially in case of comparing themselves with others who have similar experiences or symptoms (Widyanto et al., 2011) and being motivated to find out answers to personal questions (Das & Faxvaag, 2014), will tend to use the same methods of treatment to cure, without taking into account the peculiarities of the body, its structure, and biological nature. In addition, expert or at the worst common-sense advice are rather rare met than tips and recommendations given by a word of mouth or rumor. Although people trust experts and their closed circle more (Fig. 1), there is no guarantee not to meet the discussed above web-services in online space and unconsciously become its active and trustful reader. Fig. 1 Consumers’ trust in information sources-EU wide (source: Etienne et al., 2018) The upgrowing trend of social media usage and their development divert people from traditional sources and approaches to health and cure. Although tracing linkages in online networks allows to find out the initial source, hardly every user will do that. Moreover, the absence of traditional hallmarks challenges network and social media scientists that is why a user is responsible for its personal information consumption (Westerman et al., 2014). Also, it should be remembered that the original source is also referred to something, and there is still a risk of a verification scarcity.

https://medium.com/@healthy-spacer/trust-in-online-medicine-b018ee34f774

['Healthy Spacer']

2020-12-16 19:00:16.615000+00:00

['Medicine', 'Information Technology', 'Healthy Living', 'Health']

Applying Artificial Intelligence Intelligently

Applying Artificial Intelligence Intelligently Creating valuable and ethical applications from core research: A conversation with Anna Koop, Managing Director of Applied Science at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute Faun Rice Follow Nov 24, 2020 · 17 min read Artificial Intelligence (AI) is advancing in the private sector, the public sector, and computer science departments around the world. However, transforming AI research into a working application for your average business is easier said than done. In this conversation, Anna Koop, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) Managing Director of Applied Science, speaks with ICTC’s Faun Rice about Amii, its place in Canada, and its team. In addition, Anna and Faun talk about the challenges that businesses face in applying AI solutions, as well as the degree to which researchers in academia are responsible for considering the social impact and eventual application of their work. About Amii: Founded in 2002, based in Edmonton, and affiliated with the University of Alberta, Amii is one of Canada’s three artificial intelligence hubs. Amii has drawn partners such as DeepMind (Google) to Edmonton. The institute pursues fundamental research, business partnerships, training programs, and talent-matching. The work at Amii has contributed to famous achievements in computing science, such as AlphaGo, the first program capable of professionally playing Go (traditionally viewed as the most challenging classic game for artificial intelligence). Amii’s researchers into AI and gaming have also created the first program to outplay professional no-limit Texas Hold’em players, while the robotics lab has made significant advances in the use of intelligent prosthetics. Photo by Alicia Paydli on Unsplash Faun: Thank you very much for joining me today! I’m from Edmonton and look forward to learning a bit more about the work going on at my former university. Let’s start by talking a bit about Amii. Can you give us a taste of its origin story? Anna: Absolutely. As the not-for-profit organization it is today, funded as part of the CIFAR Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Amii was born out of a research lab at the University of Alberta. The Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning existed way back in the Heritage Fund days of the early 2000s. We had a really strong research group in AI for games. When they were putting together the Centre of Excellence plans, a group of professors in the computing science department got together to propose a Centre for Machine Learning Excellence. Through that grant and that centre, we grabbed some amazing talent. We managed to snag Richard Sutton, who’s the major leading light in reinforcement learning, Dale Schuurmans, and Michael Bowling. So we built up this strong cohort of researchers — and this was during one of the AI slumps when AI was still thought of as “pseudo-science.” It’s funny participating in this field because it goes through real ebbs and flows. Then, when the deep learning revolution hit — this latest wave of super-high interest in AI and machine learning — we actually had this really strong cohort of professors doing phenomenal research, attracting really amazing grad students. When the CIFAR Pan-Canadian AI Strategy was announced, it was natural for Edmonton to be one of those centres of excellence because Montreal and Toronto had some of the founders of the deep learning revolution, and we had this really strong cohort across the breadth of machine learning and especially in reinforcement learning. Faun: If we can take a quick sidebar here, would you mind giving your elevator pitch version of what “reinforcement learning” means as a part of machine learning? Anna: Reinforcement learning is specifically learning by interacting with an environment. That’s a high-level definition with lots of caveats. AI is a big field, and it encompasses all the things we do to try to make computers behave more intelligently, or to do things that don’t have to be directly programmed in. In other words, we don’t want to tell it the path through every maze; we want it to be able to find a path through any maze. With machine learning, you’re specifically using data for a computing agent to learn from. Data can be past experience or labelled examples, and the machine learning piece is figuring out the connection between that and the problem at hand. Then within machine learning, there are three subfields. Supervised learning is what most people think of when they think of machine learning. You feed in an image, and you get told there’s a cat in the image. You’re given an example, and you’re told the label or the value or the prediction about that specific example. In order to train those systems, you actually have to have a really big dataset of those labelled examples. Unsupervised learning is looking for patterns in a more general sense. So, how do we take all the posts on Twitter and categorize them? We could look at that as a supervised learning task if we’re saying, “Is this about sports? Is this about news?” Or, we could look at it as, “What patterns emerged, how many are there, and what do they consist of?” Finally, reinforcement learning adds the time dimension: a computing agent is interacting with the world, choosing actions, and getting observations back. Most of the time, there are also special reward signals. So, we don’t tell the agent what it needs to do, but we do say “Good job!” or “Bad job!” It’s the computing agent’s job to figure out what that means in terms of, “Did I choose the right actions? Is that why I got a ‘good job’ or did I just get a ‘good job’ because it’s a nice day and everybody’s happy?” A simple representation of a reinforcement learning system (licensed under CC0 1.0). Faun: That’s really helpful, thank you. Back to Amii, could you talk a little about what sets you apart? What would you say the core difference is between organizations like Amii, MILA, and the Vector Institute? Anna: Toronto has the Vector Institute, led by Geoffrey Hinton. Their real core is deep learning, and being in a major business centre, they have a lot industry supporting fundamental research on a big scale. MILA’s research excellence is a combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning, and they have some talent-matching programs like ours. Then Amii has a lot of breadth. We cover a lot of ground with the expertise in our faculty, including reinforcement learning, and we’re a very collegial group. Students who interact with us are always flabbergasted when our Fellows are readily available to chat with them at conferences. We also have a very “boots on the ground” approach to working with industry in Alberta. Throughout our history, we’ve been concerned with how we can help industry and how we can help diversify Alberta’s economy. A lot of new businesses know that they should care about machine learning but oftentimes have no idea where to start. It’s really expensive to get started if you come at it from a perspective of, “OK, I need to hire a PhD graduate with machine learning expertise” and somehow turn that into business value real quick. It’s a massive change! A lot of companies are still struggling to digitize data and then actually look at it. So to go the next step and use predictive models or more advanced techniques is kind of overwhelming. Faun: Do you work only with businesses who are totally new to AI? Anna: Amii now has what we call the “machine learning adoption spectrum.” We look at where a company is on this readiness scale, from “just heard of machine learning” to “I know it’s important but don’t know what to do with it or what the first steps should be,” all the way up to companies like DeepMind, where you have an advanced elite research team that is working on problems and pushing boundaries. We have a range of services to cover the entire breadth of machine learning readiness. “In the academic world, you’re looking for something people haven’t done before. You’re looking for gaps in understanding and trying to fill those gaps. Most of the time in the business world, you’re looking for something that adds business value, and the gaps are not the most comfortable place to be.” On the more advanced end, we rely heavily on our research Fellows. On the introductory end, we have a heavy emphasis on education, and I’m especially proud of the program we’ve built out. The Machine Learning Technician I Certificate is designed for people with a somewhat technical background but who are new to machine learning, like petroleum engineers or data analysts from other fields. The machine learning technician course gets you up and running in a responsible, thoughtful implementation of machine learning models. It’s really needed because while there’s lots of tutorials online, and you can learn all kinds of things on your own, there are particular issues that we see over and over again that arise for companies trying to implement ML. Our early stage educational materials address those common issues: What are the things we’ve seen that really trip companies up, and how can we equip them to not make those mistakes? Then we also have a complement to the technician course for the management and executive level called “AI for Strategy and Management.” It’s what you need to know about machine learning in order to make informed decisions. You don’t need to know how to program neural networks. You don’t even have to know how to write Python code in any sense. But you do need to understand what models are. What is this thing we’re building? What do we need to build it? How does it relate to business value? And how do I tie it back and make sure everything’s on the right track? Technical and Executive training programs offered by Amii. From https://www.amii.ca/training/, accessed November 17, 2020. Then in addition to those two programs, we have three other major arms: Coaching Services, where we pair companies up with scientists and project manager teams to, depending where you are on the adoption spectrum — push your first proof of concept forward or take what you’re doing and push it to the next level. Then Talent Advisement is the third arm. That first hire can be really difficult. It’s difficult to access talent these days because it’s in high demand and the hype is high right now. It’s also difficult to know what talent you need, especially if you are not already a machine learning shop. Then how do you distinguish good candidates? So we provide a kind of suite of services to help. Then the fourth arm is our core, which is Advanced Research. Faun: Before we move on, let’s talk a bit about Advanced Research — what is your own background academically and your area of interest in AI? Anna: My research background is reinforcement learning. I got pulled into the field listening to Rich Sutton, Dale Schuurmans, and Michael Bowling talk about the amazing, interesting question “What does it even mean to be intelligent?” and “What is different about biological systems and artificial systems?” A lot of my more recent work is on learning within changing environments. When we think of the real world, if I walk outside today, I have to interact differently with the environment than I did four months ago or six months ago because the environment is constantly changing. We’re really good at adapting to changes, but we don’t know how that works. So this is kind of the undercurrent in all my research: how do we adapt after all? Finally, with Amii, I’m the managing director of the Applied Science Team, which means I get to work with the scientists who are directly interacting with client companies and our partners. A lot of the work that the science team has done is around defining the difference between a research problem and an industry problem. One of the two primary differences that we’ve highlighted between the academic approach and industry approach is this: For one, in the academic world, you’re looking for something people haven’t done before. You’re looking for gaps in understanding and trying to fill those gaps. Most of the time in the business world, you’re looking for something that adds business value, and the gaps are not the most comfortable place to be. You can do some really innovative things in there, but first, start with known tools, right? Tried-and-tested things. There’s a ton of value still to get out of those. Even the most basic machine learning techniques can still unlock so much potential. I think of the science team as doing this shift from academic goals to industry goals: How do we use all the tools and great stuff we’re developing academically and actually put them in the hands of people doing business day by day. Faun: That’s a great overview and very relevant to my next question. We’re talking about industry applications of AI, so let’s pivot to a recent set of events. As I understand it, NeurIPS, one of the leading AI conferences in Canada, recently added a requirement to include a social impact statement in conference proposals, and that kind of sparked a bit of a conversation in the discipline. So, blank slate, what has your experience been with the inclusion of social impact assessments in publishing and conferences? Reddit r/Machine Learning Discussion of NeurIPS 2020 Impact Statement. Screen capture taken November 17, 2020. Anna: Yeah, it’s a really thorny issue, actually. And I am 100 percent on board. We have a really serious responsibility to understand how the technologies we develop are being used and the impact they’re having in the world. On the one hand, I think the person who “invented electricity” — well, no one person invented electricity — but my point is that Thomas Edison is not responsible for every electrical device that comes after him. On the other hand, the models we release on the world have impacts and it’s just kind of a basic human-decency thing to understand the impact your actions are having. One of the ways that has translated into academic publishing is now several conferences have impact statements. You have to ask, “What are the ethical implications of your work?” For a long time, we’ve gotten away with not having to worry about the ethical implications in some sense: there are very strict ethical guidelines for experiments on humans or animals in the biological sciences. That aspect hasn’t been as relevant in computing science because it’s just us sitting at our computers doing our thing. But now that technology is being adopted really widely, there are a lot of unintended consequences as well as a lot of misapplications. I think we have responsibilities on a couple of fronts. First, I think we should know how the technology is impacting others. So deep fakes, for example, come out of a lot of totally legitimate research into how we parse images and how we fill in gaps. And, yes, people can then take that technology and turn it into, “How can I put words in someone’s mouth, or how can I put people in compromising videos?” I’m not of the school that we shouldn’t explore those technologies because they have potentially bad outputs. But I think we need to make sure people know about the technology and how it works, which is one of the things I love about Amii’s education programs: we have to focus on levelling the playing field, giving everyone we can an understanding of this because we’re all impacted. “How you communicate your research to the public is at least as important as what you’re researching.” I’m on the fence with the impact statement for a couple of reasons, mostly because most of them that I’ve read are not that impactful. Even with some of my work, I’ve struggled. I’m doing experiments on an incomprehensibly small environment. I’ve got five situations, and the agent has to choose between two actions. It bears no resemblance to any real thing because I’m testing out concepts. On the other hand, my body of research is about learning in changing environments. That ultimately does have a significant impact on real-world applications because the real world is changing. It’s a tough question, though. What are the ethical implications of one plus one equals two, right? That definitely gets used in a lot of situations, but there’s a lot of steps between the math and the application. On the other hand, I’m sure we rely on that too much. Recommendation systems are an example of an application where we should have been able to anticipate the impact. There’s a kind of obvious implication in recommendation systems in general, and the various social media platforms have gone through having to confront this directly. The most well-known case study is YouTube’s recommendation engine, which for a while there, drew people very deliberately toward extremist views on any side. But because it’s based on its human behaviour, you’re attracted to what’s energizing, whether it’s positive or negative. And so the recommendation systems were basically creating extremes in the marketplace as a natural output of the “one plus one equals two” algorithm running behind the scenes. Optimizing engagement does not necessarily create the ideal world. “Imagine I handed you a box that can, say, classify exactly the probability that a person is going to stay at your company for two years. I’m going to hand you that box. What are you going to do with it? How does that fit into your process? There is no perfect connection between the metrics we use and the actual things we care about.” In short, when publishing, do you have an application? Then there’s no excuse not to think about the potential ethical implications, and to do that, well, you have to actually enlist experts in other fields. We actually need to be talking to sociologists and civic engineers and keep everybody involved in that specific application because there is no way I am going to be able to consider everything. Secondly, there are misapplications. We talked about understanding the consequences of our work, but the other thing is communication: how you communicate your research to the public is at least as important as what you’re researching. For example, there was a Twitter flurry about one application that was marketed as being able to “show a trustworthiness rating based on a picture.” And we’ve been through this in history. You cannot judge characteristics like trustworthiness well, based on appearance, and of course you’ll never guess what kinds of biases work their way into those kinds of systems. So even though the paper itself, at various points, tried to make it clear it was “user-rated trustworthiness” — so reflecting what people think, rather than reality, when you say things like, “This is a trustworthy index” — people will say, “OK, then that means I can put a picture in and get a trustworthy rating out.” It’s so many steps from what it’s being called that it’s an irresponsible way of talking about the technology. Faun: What I’m hearing, and tell me if I’m wrong, is that it’s very challenging to identify potential negative social impacts at a very abstract pre-application phase. But then there comes a point when you should be able to start anticipating impacts and misapplications, and being very careful about how you describe your work to the public. Where in the research process do you see that point occurring? Where is it appropriate to start asking researchers to start considering those outcomes? Anna: We probably, as a field, have to enlist ethicists and sociologists to answer that question. We’re bad at gauging that. I think it would be interesting to study that very explicitly because it’s clear on the application end. I mean, when you do trials of machine learning systems with human participants, you have to go through the ethics approval for human experimentation, at least in a university setting. So obviously, at that point, there’s implications that are arising. But some of the stuff that we’re poking at — like what behaviours are created by different reward functions — we’re seeing the results of different optimization criteria. The fact that optimizing for click-through creates very extreme content actually comes out of the math. It’s literally doing what you ask it to do. So I think you can push that anticipation a little earlier. It’s extra important the closer you are to directly impacting other people, or animals, or anything, the more you should be devoting at least some time to thinking about impacts. But I think also we need to have a more concerted effort of understanding what impacts look like, and the whole “build something/fail fast/break things” mentality is part of the problem — even though I’m a fan of agile development, and I really think you should get prototypes out there and get them tested and see the implications. But that’s a really important piece. You should be testing implications because there’s going to be a lot of unintended consequences once it’s out there in the real world. “If we put a system out there, we need to get some people who are used to thinking about the impact of systems on society, make sure they’re in the loop, and then listen to recommendations from them.” For example, an exercise we do with clients sometimes is this: “Imagine I handed you a box that can, say, classify exactly the probability that a person is going to stay at your company for two years? I’m going to hand you that box. What are you going to do with it? How does that fit into your process?” And then once they’ve actually spent some time thinking about that, then what about if I say, “but it’s only accurate 80 percent of the time?” What are the implications of that? Or, “it’s accurate 100 percent of the time, but remember that it’s only telling you the probability they’ll stay at your company for two years, not that they’ll be a good employee, not that they’ll contribute positively to your culture.” It’s telling you that one little fact, which we hope is correlated with other things, but it’s often not. Photo by Headway on Unsplash So you really have to always be coming back full circle. And it goes back to our discussion earlier about linking the business value to the actual question. There is no perfect connection between the metrics we use and the actual things we care about. The things we care about are fuzzy and really, really hard to express. I know because I spent eight years trying to explain the concepts of “table” and “chair” to a computing agent repeatedly. So, yeah, forget explaining “value.” Everything is more complicated than we thought. We have to do the same thing in the ethical sense. If we put a system out there, we need to get some people who are used to thinking about the impact of systems on society, make sure they’re in the loop, and then listen to recommendations from them. And all of this has been a critique of the researcher putting a little paragraph about the ethical implications of their paper. We’re bad at that, which should not absolve us from the responsibility for thinking about it and looking at it and watching how we communicate. But it does mean we need a concerted effort and we need to work together on it. Faun: I really like the analogy you use with clients, the HR box. Before we close, is there anything you’d like to add that I didn’t think to ask you about? Anna: A really, really essential message these days is don’t be afraid of technology. A lot of these things are going to be developed. We want to make sure that they are developed with the right intentions and with the right thought put into it. And like I said, that takes a concerted effort. We have to actually be working together on this. And that means give and take, in a lot of cases. Maybe sometimes you shouldn’t publish results because they’re too easily misinterpreted. Don’t be afraid of machine learning. Under the hood, it’s math, and you can understand it quite well without understanding math at all. So do read about the ethical implications and do read about how decision making is integrating it. And the final thing is we’re all contributing data to these systems. So, who we’re following on Twitter, what we’re watching, all of that is actually being fed back into the system about what is being shared. What’s being recommended? There’s a little piece of everybody contributing to this, so let’s all look at how we can do our part, trying to make the world a better place, even in the tiny things we do by choosing what to consume.

https://medium.com/digitalthinktankictc/applying-artificial-intelligence-intelligently-14f3e5c1d461

['Faun Rice']

2020-11-25 04:07:55.484000+00:00

['AI', 'Social Impact', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning', 'Reinforcement Learning']

How the Acceleration of Technology will Impact the Business World

by Andrew Kirima The future is here! Mankind is embarking on a new age. A new paradigm supported by the irreversible growth of technology. “Technology is accelerating”, as said by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns”, has convinced entrepreneur’s Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, that the convergence of technology within the next decade will lead to a colossal change in the way we live our lives. As technology accelerates, the business world will respond in fashion This enormous growth in technology will entirely reconstruct the business world as we see it today. Enterprises that take advantage of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D printing, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, Nanotechnology, AR/VR, Robotics, etc. will have the most dynamic growth in this decade. As these technologies converge and grow together, businesses that implement these tools will become more efficient and save a lot of capital that could be invested elsewhere. This all starts with the comfortability of their employees as they adopt the capability to work from anywhere they want. Working remotely Due to the Covid-19 pandemic a lot of companies needed to switch to remote working immediately. Companies such as Zoom and Microsoft have developed platforms for employees to collaborate from a remote location. Many companies, especially in Big Tech, have had great success with remote working as they have found that physical interaction is unnecessary. As a result, many companies are working to completely integrate a remote working lifestyle for their employees. Remote working would greatly decrease the number of workers that come into the office. Ultimately, this means less space and utilities are required by the company to build a positive work environment. This will heavily decrease expenses for the company and time spent commuting by the employees. As technologies converge to optimize VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality), businesses will be capable of giving employees the ability to work, collaborate, or train remotely from anywhere. With VR and AR, you can create simulations that will be immersive experiences to train a candidate, be in a virtual meeting room with other employees, and interact with customers. There are a lot of positions in a business that do require in-person presence, but as technology grows so does the ability to perform remotely. Healthcare from afar A prodigious movement in the healthcare industry that started the past decade was the practice of remote surgical operations. Doctors have performed surgery by controlling robotic arms with a remote and a 3D view of the patient they are performing on. With the convergence of AI and robotics, we could potentially develop more complex robotic arms, which could entirely decrease the number of errors in surgery. It is conceivable to believe that these robotic arms could be integrated with sensors to pick up something that the doctor doesn’t see, which can be followed with a warning message on the doctor’s graphical view of the patient. Then, the doctor has the authorization to allow the arms to mitigate the risk. Now, this practice of robotic arms is practical for patients on Earth but what if the patient isn’t on Earth? Companies such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc. have popularized the initiative of space travel. An initiative that requires a more immediate solution than building hospitals for surgical operations. To accommodate the space exploration industry, specialized medical pods that can fit on spacecraft will become necessary. In the past, there was the idea of using Trauma Pods “a semi-automated telerobotic surgical system”, to perform surgical procedures on a wounded soldier. As the initiative for space exploration gains more traction, new industries will emerge to create or refine similar complex surgical systems with the convergence of AI and robotics. If pods are fully developed, the technology also has the potential to deliver emergency medical and surgical care for astronauts during space flights. Trauma Pods can also converge with 3D printers to be able to print out bone or tissue required for a procedure. When it comes to the optimal delivery of medicine for Pharmaceutical companies, the utilization and adoption of nanotechnology is necessary. Nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the atomic and/or molecular level, has shown to be capable of interacting with cells in ways current medicine cannot. Nanotech can impact pharmaceutical companies everywhere by decreasing the amount of medicine they would have to manufacture. The use of nanotubes to transport drugs to specific cells would produce medication and vaccines that would be way more effective than anything seen before, which could be essential to eradicating a plethora of terminal illnesses. As more people are born, more effective healthcare strategies are required and the same can be said for agriculture. Farming without farming Farming is already an expensive and daunting task, but it is a necessity that will become ever more difficult as the world population continues to grow. “By 2050, there’s going to be nine billion people on the planet … and to feed those people…we probably need to increase current production [of food] by 70%”, as said by Terry Pickett, manager of advanced engineering for John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group. As the workload rises, farmers will need to set in place more automotive solutions for the cultivation of their crops. Companies such as Waymo and Tesla have already developed AI models for self-driving cars, so these same models can be assimilated to build self-driving tractors. John Deere has established a “goal [to] use automated driving technology, computer vision, telematics, and cloud-based mobile applications to help farmers.” With the convergence of these technologies, farmers can rapidly increase the efficiency of yielding their crops without as much strenuous activity as required in the past. A multitude of manufacturing companies that reside in the agricultural industry will follow in kind to help in the endeavor to feed the world as the world grows, but as the world grows so do concerns of security. Quantum security Quantum Supremacy, a major distinction that big tech companies will fight to achieve over the coming decade. Quantum computers, computers that perform quantum computations through the theories of superposition and entanglement, have enormous potential to be one of the most revolutionary technologies known to mankind. This was proven by Google in 2019 when their quantum computer completed a complex computation in 200 seconds. If the same calculation was performed on some of the most powerful supercomputers it would approximately take 10,000 years to finish. These powerful machines will be monumental in introducing a new way of thinking about what is possible. Quantum computers could be the answer to developing unmatched firewalls to combat growing concerns of security. The quantum computers that have already been constructed can run simulations to produce an unthinkable number of outcomes, which means at the same time, they could be used to build virtually unbreakable encryption. For any kind of company that has a database that stores some kind of personal information of their customers, this level of encryption would build a wall that even the developers who built it couldn’t climb. IT companies could consider integrating firewalls built by quantum computers into their cloud infrastructures, by adopting such tactics they could bulletproof confidential information of their customers. With this new sense of cybersecurity, financial services can take full advantage of digital currency. Financing through a chain As more and more wealth is generated and dispersed in the world, FinTech (Financial Technology) companies are growing at a fast pace by providing solutions that can improve and automate financial services amongst businesses and other customers. Blockchain technology, a decentralized platform that can maintain the integrity of digital assets, is accelerating FinTech by keeping track of the data footprint and set value of any financial transaction. This would allow digital assets such as cryptocurrencies to be fully submerged in the financial services industry. Such technology can make the banking process a much more robust and effective experience, which will save money and protect the finances of large institutions and their customers. These new developments in the financial service industry will spread opportunity to more people all over the world, so that they may take advantage of what the future has to offer. The future is here, take advantage The acceleration of technology is a vast plain that will augment many industries. Healthcare, agriculture, security, and financial services are just a few sectors that will be extricated by these advancements. Every day, entrepreneurs, innovators, and futurists are developing technology that will revolutionize the way humanity will continue to live. This metamorphosis of civilization between man and machine cannot just progress with a small group of idealists, but yet it requires an enormous group of young innovators and entrepreneurs who want to build a better world. It is imperative to realize with these immense changes people must continue to learn and grow as the world shifts. It’s time for younger generations to take advantage of all the tools and resources that have and will continue to accumulate.

https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/how-the-acceleration-of-technology-will-impact-the-business-world-976b72122921

['Andrew Kirima']

2020-12-05 01:28:29.940000+00:00

['Accelerating Returns', 'Healthcare', 'Technology', 'Business', 'Remote Working']

Debunking the Empty Block Attack

It’s amazing how much effort critics expend on ways in which Bitcoin could not work. Few people ask about the vulnerabilities of USD for instance, which has a far greater impact globally yet in order to FUD Bitcoin, the same “concerns” are brought up again and again as if they were novel to “warn” people away from Bitcoin. The latest salvo against Bitcoin is the idea of the empty block attack, something made popular by Michael in his debate with Pomp. To be clear, I already wrote about mining centralization scenarios, which covers the empty block attack 3 years ago. But as we’ve seen with Bitcoin critics, their forte seems to be in bringing up concerns that were addressed long ago as if they’re new during each bull cycle. Honestly, I’m pretty sick of the FUD and having to explain the same things over and over again, but given that there’s a good number of new people coming into the space, I’m going to refute the specific attack in this article. What is the Empty Block Attack? The empty block attack is one where a majority of mining power would be directed at mining only empty blocks and rejecting non-empty blocks. These miners would essentially execute a soft-fork where all non-empty blocks would be rejected. Given that they have a majority of hashing power on the network, so the thinking goes, they will eventually get the longer chain even if other miners were to mine non-empty blocks. If only empty blocks are being mined, all activity on the network would stop and so, the thinking goes, Bitcoin would be killed. Who would execute such an attack? The usual villain in this scenario is China, who apparently has a majority of hashing power within its borders. The thinking goes that they would seize control of the hash power one way or the other and execute this attack on the network. This is not a bad first-order approximation of what would happen, but the problem with this scenario is that the Bitcoin critics don’t believe that there would be any resistance whatsoever. This is about as naive as thinking that a nuclear strike on a populated city wouldn’t provoke some sort of response. So let’s take a look at some of the countermeasures that the Bitcoin network can perform. There are two scenarios for an empty block attack: direct and indirect. The direct one is acquiring 51% of the mining equipment and executing the attack. The indirect one is compelling pools to only mine empty blocks. Let’s take the more realistic second scenario first. Pool-based Majority is a Non-starter Most mining power is gathered into pools and each pool operator competes with other pool operators for the business of mining equipment owners. If China were to somehow be able to take control of pools and execute this attack, most mining equipment owners would simply leave. Why? Because the pool mining empty blocks will generate less revenue than a pool mining normal blocks. Currently, the block subsidy is 6.25 BTC and fees are around 0.75 BTC. Using a pool outside of China (such as Slushpool) would give them 11% more revenue. In other words, they would have to give up 11% of revenue in a thin-margin business, a non-starter. The pools would thus have to subsidize the mining equipment owners by at least 11%. But if they are being subsidized, equipment owners will know that they’re part of an empty-block attack, in which case there will be a significant premium for their loyalty. The pool would have to give them much more than the 11% revenue they’re losing. The pool also has no easy way to compensate these miners with BTC with empty blocks, which don’t allow transfer of BTC. The pool, by executing an empty block attack, is essentially hoping to obsolete the very businesses that these mining equipment owners created. The premium given to these mining equipment owners would have to cover not just the opportunity cost of mining in an empty block pool but the value that they place on their entire businesses. In other words, it’s not going to be cheap. They’re going to have to spend at least the amount of money that covers the value of all these businesses and probably significantly more than that. Direct Mining Equipment Acquisition is Really Hard The other scenario is direct acquisition of the mining equipment. This, again, is not a cheap scenario. There are two ways a government can get their hands on mining equipment, either seizing it or producing it themselves. How would a government go about seizing the mining equipment? One major feature of mining equipment is that they are portable and it’s well known that this equipment is moved in bulk all the time to chase the cheapest sources of electricity. How would the government even know where they are? They would have to require registration and movement of the mining equipment and require a vast bureaucracy just to keep track. In addition, there’s the problem of seizing such valuable property from their owners without arousing suspicion. This is very difficult as the mining equipment is extremely valuable, especially in an empty vs. normal block war. As we’ll see, equipment that’s mining normal blocks in the minority will get a significant amount of fees. Thus, in such a war, every mining equipment owner will want to sell their equipment abroad and smuggle it out as quickly as possible. Thus, the operation can’t just be a slow and steady seizure of one mining facility after another. They all have to be seized at once and with significant force. Anyone that has even a hint of what’s coming will get their equipment out of the country as quickly as possible. Even something like a prelude, like having to register mining equipment with the government would likely cause a mass exodus of all but the most unprofitable pieces of mining equipment. Thus, this operation requires a lot of man-power, lots of secrecy and lots of coordination, probably requiring the military and a lot of violence. How about buying the equipment from the market? A huge government buyer is going to add a significant demand to the mining equipment market. As prices go up, so do profit margins bringing a lot more manufacturers into the market. Such a government would thus have to outrun the natural market dynamics of supply increasing with demand and gather not just the majority of world-wide mining equipment at one particular moment in time, but forever going forward. If at any time they stop having the majority of the hash power for any significant amount of time, their empty block attack is lost. How about manufacturing the equipment themselves? Manufacturing it themselves would be similarly hard as they would have to compete along the entire supply chain of parts that are needed to manufacture such equipment. They would increase the profit of these parts, making it more profitable and creating more supply, ultimately creating more mining equipment manufacturers that will compete with them. In other words, they would have to outrun the free market process for equipment manufacture and that will not only require a lot of money, but a lot of technical and business competence which governments typically don’t have. What happens if a Country has Majority Hash Rate But let’s leave aside this concern and give the Bitcoin critics the advantage here. Suppose a country somehow manages to get 51% of the mining hash power, whether through manufacturing it themselves,buying or seizing it on the market. What would happen then? They would start the empty block attack to halt the entire network. What would the rest of the network do? They would likely be upset that only empty blocks are being mined and would see normal blocks get wiped out. The rest of the network would rightfully see the empty blocks as an attack on the network, identify it as such and not accept such blocks. This is very easy on any full node implementation. There’s an RPC command called “invalidateblock” which essentially says “do not accept this block or any block that builds on top of it”. The entire branch that the nation-state attacker worked so hard to create can be invalidated by any node with that single command. This would have to be done by each individual node, but given that there’s literally no transactions being processed on the empty block chain, node operators would be incentivized to run it. For the minority of the hash power that’s getting their blocks overridden by the empty blocks, they would clearly want to run “invalidateblock” as otherwise they would make no money. From a game-theory perspective, a large portion of the network is economically incentivized to enter a new minority consensus. In other words, a decentralized subset will form against the clearly centralized majority because of economic incentives. Empty vs. Normal Chain War At this point, Bitcoin would fork: one empty blockchain and one normal blockchain. The normal one would have transactions but less hashing power, so would run slower. The empty one would have no transactions but more hashing power so would run faster. They would be separate chains and every economically significant node would follow the normal blockchain as it’s the only one that’s actually processing transactions. Not only that, but because of the backlog of transactions due to reduced hashing power, fees would go up making mining on this chain significantly more profitable. As a result, there will be economic incentive for more hashing power to come on the minority side. This may include new equipment being manufactured, old equipment coming online and even defections (stolen or smuggled) from the majority side. In the meantime, the majority side would have to keep a majority through the new equipment manufacture, old equipment usage and defections on the minority side to continue their attack. If at any point the normal blockchain has more proof-of-work than the empty one, the empty blockchain would be wiped out and the attack essentially thwarted. But even if the normal blockchain has less hashing power, it will chug along happily while the empty blockchain will continue adding blocks uselessly. No one will be able to buy or sell on the empty chain as there’s no way to send to or receive from any exchange. Such a chain will not affect what everyone else will consider the real Bitcoin and few are going to pay it much attention. Conclusion Given all of these realities, a nation-state would have to weigh out these scenarios and determine if it’s worth it. Even with unlimited money, which they don’t have, and majority control of new mining equipment manufacturing world-wide, which is highly unlikely, the probability of failure, that of a decentralized minority forming, is really high. Make no mistake, a failure of this magnitude would be a massive black eye to their reputation and prestige at home and abroad. This is the sort of humiliation that government officials avoid at all costs. That said, I personally would welcome such an attack as I think it would be great for Bitcoin. Not only would we test ourselves against a nation-state enemy, but an authoritarian government that does this is likely to legitimatize Bitcoin significantly to its enemies and after Bitcoin wins, to themselves.

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/debunking-the-empty-block-attack-10513858b3f8

['Jimmy Song']

2021-03-29 16:22:02.518000+00:00

['Blockchain', 'Technology', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Bitcoin', 'Game Theory']

Don’t Get Used to The Good Times in Tech, They Might Not Last

We are at a peak in the tech industry: we are paid more than ever before, most of us get equity while valuations are at an all-time-high (unless you work at Uber or Lyft) — and many get ridiculous perks. This is not normal. This was not the case some years ago, but we have a very limited memory and get used to the good stuff quickly. This is specially true for newcomers to the industry who just got their first job and think it has always been like this. Thus, it’s in our best interest to take stock of our situation and realize that it’s a product of the demand of technical talent being much higher than its supply. That’s it, pure and simple. It’s not because we are better or special, we, “techies”, just happen to have the right skills at the right time, and there is absolutely no guarantee that this will go on forever. This realization lead me to reflect about what can we do to hedge ourselves against possible worst times ahead. This article is the result. I hope these words of temperance reach some of the 22-year-old, oat-milk-drinking kids making $120K plus equity in their first job after college for whom the prospect of losing their job is anything but impossible. When you worry about this minutiae, you don’t have actual problems — @overheardsanfrancisco Don’t get me wrong, I do think that tech is the future and that the industry will do well in the long run, but no one knows what will happen before we get there. Tweaking and adapting your mindset now — when times are good — will proof savvy if things go south, just like it’s a good idea to prepare for an earthquake, even when you’re not hoping for one to happen. Taming our insatiable crave for more We humans have an exceptional capacity to adapt to the circumstances of our environment in a process called hedonic adaptation. That’s why we keep falling for thoughts like “when I get that [car/promotion/job], I’ll finally be happy”, failing to see that when and if we get it, we will adapt to the better circumstances and take that new state as our new baseline for happiness. But it gets worse: it’s much easier to upgrade — i.e. adapt to better circumstances — (a raise, a better house, a better commute) than downgrade. Practically speaking, the hedonic treadmill spins only one-way, so we better think twice before we spin it. “I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid “only” $1.5 million.” — Sam Polk, from “For the Love of Money” article in the NYT This is not a new problem by any stretch. Philosophers have been grappling with this problem for thousands of years and recent psychological studies confirmed it’s an actual phenomenon. From Steve Cutt’s magnificent short: Happiness The Stoic Philosophers recommend a technique called negative visualization to overcome this inherent adaptation to the pleasures of life and actually appreciate what we already have (emphasis mine): “Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this — that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have. […] The stoics […] recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value — that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would.” — William Braxton Irvine. “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.” Some people think negative visualization is eerie because they think people who practice it are pessimists or that they are “calling for bad things to happen”. I don’t think that’s the case. For me, the realization that what you have (including your life) is ephemeral and that it might go away at any time makes me appreciate the present and the things I have so much more than if I just thought they’ll be there forever. Know what you can control, and what you can’t Taking the Stoic line of reasoning a little bit further, it follows that we make our happiness more robust the less we tie it to things outside of our control. Take your job, for example, we certainly control many factors that influence our employment: what we study, the companies we interview at, how much initiative we display, etc. But the reality is that we are far from in control — just ask anyone who has been laid off recently. Nassim Taleb contrasts the hidden risks that employees have with the volatility but visible risks of Artisans: “Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes (a very, very old profession), carpenters, plumbers, tailors, and dentists, have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan, one that would bring their income to a complete halt. Their risks are visible. Not so with employees, who have no volatility, but can be surprised to see their income going to zero after a phone call from the personnel department. Employees’ risks are hidden.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “Antifragile” While Taleb’s point is very valid, not everyone can be or wants to be an Artisan. What can we do then? Think of your fears, imagine the worse happens — again, negative visualization — then triage what can you do to hedge or prepare against what you can’t control. Focus on what you can control and work on it: learn that new language or skill, start having a side gig as a freelancer, start eating healthier. Whatever it is, it’s better than doing nothing and worrying about what you can’t control. If your fears come true you’ll be as ready as you can be, and if they don’t, you’ll feel at peace knowing that you are more prepared than most, shall the worse happen. Live below your means and adapt slowly Living below your means minimizes the misery you’ll experience if you have to retreat to a lower standard of living in the future. It will also allow you to build up some savings you can tap into to maintain your lifestyle if bad times come. No one knows how long the party will last in tech. It may last one more year or it may keep going on until we retire. Either way, the worst you can do is expect the party will go on forever and live beyond your means. If you want to optimize even more, to derive maximum “satisfaction” from the same amount of cash, try to adapt to a better financial situation slowly instead of all at once. In other words, advance the hedonic treadmill slowly and without skipping any step: Instead of buying that Lambo the second you cash out your RSUs or your crypto, spend that money gradually in smaller, incremental things. Actually, it’s even better if you spend on experiences: maybe a slightly more luxurious trip than the last one, or start frequenting better restaurants every now and then, you should even try giving some of the money away — the satisfaction we get by helping others is much more lasting than the one we get from material possessions. Or even better, don’t spend it, save it! Again, we will eventually adapt to the best of circumstances and this adaptation is mostly one-way, so if you jump from the bottom of a hierarchy (Honda Civic) all the way to the top (Lamborghini) you are skipping a bunch of “satisfaction” to be enjoyed. In nerdy terms, the satisfaction we derive from the sum of visiting all levels of a “luxury hierarchy” is greater than the one we get if we skip any levels. I hope you enjoy my awful handwriting Choose your reference point wisely TL;DR: Don’t count your RSUs before they hatch It’s very easy to subconsciously account for your equity and bonus as guaranteed, given that even recruiters include those in the Total Compensation — implicitly assuming that stock prices and the market context will stay stable (or go up!) until your options or RSUs vest. There is one big catch though: equity and bonus are far from guaranteed to keep their value, they are very much variable (yes, even in public companies). Assuming they are as good as cash has only psychological downside. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Taversky taught us as much with Prospect Theory, which tells us that we tend to evaluate things in terms of gains and losses against a reference point (emphasis mine): “For financial outcomes, the usual reference point is the status quo, but it can also be the outcome that you expect, or perhaps the outcome to which you feel entitled, for example, the raise or bonus that your colleagues receive. Outcomes that are better than the reference points are gains. Below the reference point they are losses.” — Daniel Kahneman. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” Not only that, but losses sting more than gains satisfy us. Also, from Kahneman: “The third principle is loss aversion. When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains. This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative expectations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.” — Daniel Kahneman. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” Putting those two together: given the same payoff we can feel good or (very) bad about it depending on what reference point we initially chose. Imagine you just signed an offer with a privately held transportation startup that includes equity valued at $500k. At that point in time you have two choices: as the startup is set to lead one of the biggest IPOs in history soon, you can mentally account for those $500k (or more!) as if they were already yours, or you could make a conscious effort to try to “forget” about that money, as it’s just illiquid paper money. If you don’t make the mental effort to delete the equity from your mental accounting and go the easy path down to assuming you are already $500k wealthier, you will probably feel pretty miserable when, 3 years later, you experience a perceived loss of $200k when the company IPOs and your stocks are “only” worth $300k (before taxes!). tears of why, or how some Uber employees must be feeling right now On the other hand, if you had never accounted for that money, the same situation would feel like a $300k gain. Note that the outcome is exactly the same: you are $300k wealthier, the only difference is that you consciously chose the reference point to be zero — expect nothing. Ok, it’s not as easy as it sounds and you can never completely forget about a huge chunk of paper money, but doing the effort will go a long way towards increasing your satisfaction when the payoff comes. downside completely hedged by setting reference point to 0 — tears of win Sniff for smells Some might wonder what brought me to write this article, so I will close with some open-ended questions you can reflect on. The same way we look for code smells in our programs, I like to find and ponder on “reality smells” to keep a healthy level of skepticism. Just like code smells, they are not proof that something is necessarily amiss, but I think it doesn’t hurt to reflect on them for a minute.

https://medium.com/hackernoon/dont-get-used-to-the-good-times-in-tech-they-might-not-last-4534a55043fc

['Joan Gamell']

2020-06-04 03:32:36.549000+00:00

['Happiness', 'Tech', 'Philosophy', 'Technology', 'Life']

How (and Why) Block Chain Works (and Doesn’t)

The fallacy of ‘no agent.’ You have to understand the basis for a unit (block) (chain) before you can analyze block chain (decide whether it ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t work’). In ‘other’ ‘words,’ you have to dig deeply into the circular relationship between ‘how’ and ‘why’ anything ‘works.’ It starts with complementarity, and looks like this: Zero and one. Dependent on circularity: Circumference and diameter. Meaning the number ‘two’ (exactly 50–50) is ‘constant:’ One and two. Giving us the correct ‘analysis’ (analyses) for ‘block’ and ‘chain:’ Block. Chain. Which is, always, the correct ‘analysis’ (analyses) for ‘how’ and ‘why:’ How and why. Where the number ‘two’ is dependent on the number ‘one,’ and the number ‘one’ is dependent on the number ‘three.’ One. Two. Three. Where the ‘agent’ relationship is, again, dictated by zero and one (one and two) (two and three). Agent. Meaning, block-chain does not eliminate the ‘agent.’ At all. In any way. Block. Agent. Chain. Because the block and the chain, like any individual and group, share a mandatory circular (complementary) relationship. Meaning the individual is a group (and vice versa): Complementarity. Circularity. Where a ‘distributed’ ledger, is, after all is said, and done, an ‘agent’ for a transaction and a transactor. Therefore, all we have done by moving to a block chain system, is, transfer the agent from zero to one (and vice versa). If zero, then one (if one, then zero). Meaning, block chain systems are man’s amorous relationship with both zero, and one. And, vice versa. Man. Zero. One. Where, no matter what you call it, a three-state-system, is constant (more accurately depicted ‘two-state-system’). Meaning, you can’t get away from the ‘agent.’ Circularity (the basis for zero and one) is, always, no matter what ‘system’ you prefer, the ‘agent.’ Block chain systems assume we are all on the same block. And, in the same chain. Which, technically, is true. And, not-true. No matter what system. True. False. Based on the diagrams above, there will have to be ‘two’ systems. To fight it out. Etc. One ‘block’ chain. The other ‘no-block’ (no) chain. Again, etc. You can do the ‘math.’ This takes deep thinking. Abstract thinking. Technologist-type ‘thinking.’ Why is ‘deep, abstract, technologist-type’ thinking necessary? Conservation of the circle is the core dynamic in nature.

https://medium.com/the-circular-theory/how-and-why-block-chain-works-and-doesnt-work-b01a80dca8b3

['Ilexa Yardley']

2018-06-21 14:17:56+00:00

['Blockchain Startup', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Application', 'Bitcoin', 'Venture Capital']

Software Engineering is different from Programming

Knowing how to program does not make you a software engineer. Anyone can learn to program. It’s easy. Anyone can create simple programs that work for them on their machines but that would not guarantee that the same programs will work for others. My favorite analogy about this is that everyone can sing and entertain themselves in the shower, but when it’s party time you do not play recordings of yourself singing. You go with the pros. More analogies? Sure: We learned Math and Writing in school but that did not make us Mathematicians and Authors. Most of us can easily learn to cook but when it’s time to feed a lot of people we hire a Chef. You do not call the neighborhood handyman to build a house from the ground up. The main message I want to share in this article is that simple programs are much different than engineered programs. The act of programming, in its simplest definition, is giving computers instructions to do something with some input in order to produce some output. The act of engineering software is about designing, writing, testing, and maintaining computer programs with the purpose of solving problems for many users. It is about creating robust and safe solutions that will withstand the test of time and will work for some of the unknown problems around the original obvious ones. Software engineers understand everything about the problems they solve, the solutions they provide, the limitations of those solutions, their privacy implications, and their security implications. If someone does not understand the problem, they should not be allowed to program a solution for it. The Solution Mentality Software engineers do not think of their career as just writing programs. They think in terms of satisfying needs and solving problems. This is important because not every problem needs a program. Some problems can be solved by existing programs or by putting together multiple programs. Some problems can be totally prevented by acting early. Designing good programs often involves planning to prevent future problems. “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them. “ — Albert Einstein Complicated problems usually require writing multiple programs. Some problems need programs that run in parallel while others need the programs to run sequentially. Some problems can be solved by educating users. Before writing a program, a software engineer asks the questions: What problems am I trying to solve? What else besides writing code can be done to solve them? What can I do to make these problems easier to solve with code? Code Quality Great programs are clear and readable, they can be easily extended, they work great with other programs, and maintaining them is not a nightmare. The quality of the code is not a negotiable thing, using sloppy shortcuts because of a deadline or emotion is never acceptable. One of the most important aspects of engineering software is to design anything from the ground up ready for extendibility. Modifying software is a fact of life. Users will demand more features and easier ways to use software. A piece of software is usually not very useful on its own. Useful software features start when multiple pieces of software communicate with each other, exchange their data, and collaborate on the task of presenting data and interfaces to users. Programs have to be designed with that in mind. What messages do they accept? What events are monitored? What messages are emitted? How do we authenticate and authorize communications? Another important aspect of great programs is the clarity of the code, not how many tests there are or the number on the test coverage report. It is the simple question of is this code readable to someone else? Or better, would I, the writer of code today, understand this code a few weeks from now? “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” — Phil Karlton Code readability matters a lot more than you think. Unfortunately, there are no good metrics for code clarity. Memorizing good software patterns and practices might help but are often not enough. Good software engineers just develop an eye for code clarity with experience and intuition. The writing metaphor here is perfect: just knowing a big list of words will not help you write concise and clear content. “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.“ — Mark Twain Things will go wrong with programs. Being able to easily fix them when they do is a key attribute of good software. Errors happening in programs should have clear messages and be logged centrally somewhere to be monitored. When a new error is reported, the person who needs to fix it should be able to debug that error. They should be able to hook into the system and read information about the execution context at any point in time. They should be able to easily verify expectations about any part of the system. Environments and Testing When software engineers write programs, they make sure their programs will work in many different environments, on differently-resourced machines, and at different time zones. The software needs to work on many different screen sizes and orientations. It also needs to handle being forced to use limited memory or processing power. When creating software for a web browser, for example, it needs to work in all the different major browsers. When creating desktop software, it needs to work for Mac and Windows users in most cases. When creating applications that depend on data, the software needs to work for the case when the connection to retrieve that data is slow or completely off for a while. To write a piece of software, software engineers try to think of every possible scenario they can imagine and they plan to test these scenarios. This starts with what they call the happy path where nothing unexpected happens but more importantly they document every issue that is likely to happen and plan a test for that. Some software engineers start by writing code, which they call test cases, that simulate these scenarios. They then write the desired code that passes all these test cases. Software engineers understand software requirements which are usually ambiguous and incomplete. The unique skill of a talented software engineer is not about how to write the solution but rather about identifying what should go in the solution. Cost and Efficiency Software engineers can solve problems fast in most cases. If you think that hiring experienced programmers means higher costs, think again. The more experienced the programmer you hire is, the faster they can provide robust, accurate, reliable, and maintainable solutions. This means lower costs overall in the long term. You need to also consider the cost of running the program. Every program will use computer resources and those do not come free. Software engineers will write efficient programs that do not use computer resources unnecessarily. For example, caching frequently-used data is one strategy that applies here, but it is only one of maybe thousands of tools and variations that can make a program faster and more efficient. A beginner programmer might give you a cheap solution, but running that solution might end up costing you and your clients a lot more than if you had an experienced programmer create an efficient solution in the first place. Usability Good programs are designed with the User Experience (UX) in mind. Human-computer interaction is a big topic with countless research studies and findings. The more these findings are embraced, the better the software would be. Let me give a few examples here just for you to get a taste of this big domain: When designing input forms where users are expected to enter data, such as, their email address, a good receiver program would ignore the letter case used for the email address. It would also trim any extra spaces around it. Do not give the user a hard time because their CAPSLOCK key is on, an email is unique in its lowercase format. If the program is accepting new email addresses, validate that early to give the user a clear message that they probably used the wrong address. This includes obvious validation problems like not having an @ sign but it should also include the not so obvious validation problems like using a misspelled “gmail. ocm .” .” When redirecting a user to do something, a good program would remember their original location and redirect them back to that location when they are done. A good program would also remember any already-defined data and interactions that need to be associated with future steps the user is asked to do. For example, let’s say you have been searching for flights as a guest on Expedia. You then decided to create an account. All your previous search would be saved into the new account and you could access them from entirely different machines. A good program is designed with user scenarios in mind. Put yourself in your users’ shoes. Don’t just add features! The other day I booked a United flight forgetting to include my frequent flyer number. After I got the confirmation, I went to the United website to add my FF# to the flight and it took me a good TEN minutes to figure that out. There was no obvious path so I had to explore all links that could lead to that feature. I visited the page where the feature was available and I could not see it the first time because it was buried deep in a big form. It turned out that I had to edit traveler information, scroll past about 20 input elements on that form, select the type of FF# I wanted to use, and also enter the required phone number to make the whole form submit. This is an example of a program that was not designed by thinking from the point of view of the user. Reliability, Security, and Safety These are probably the most important points that set software professionals apart from the amateurs. They know they are responsible for writing safe and secure solutions. A piece of software has to be resilient to bad input, bad states, and bad interactions. This is VERY hard to accomplish and it is the main reason why we hear stories about people dying because of software mistakes. Users are going to use the software with bad or wrong input. Some will do that intentionally to try to break software and hack into resources represented by that software. The person who was allegedly responsible for the recent Equifax fiasco was accused of not doing their job, which is to engineer resiliency to bad and malicious input in all software that is publicly exposed. The security story is also not only about bad and malicious input but sometimes normal input as well. If users forget their passwords, how many times can they be allowed to try? Do you lock them out after? What if someone else is trying to get them locked out? Do you allow your users to submit their password over a not-encrypted connection? What if an attempt to login to an account came from an unusual place? What do you do if the login seemed automated? What do you do to protect your users from cross-site scripting and request forgery, man in the middle attacks, and simple social phishing? Do you have a backup strategy if you get a DDoS attack on your servers? These questions are just to name a few of the many concerns to be planned for. Secure programs do not store sensitive information as clear text but rather as one-way encrypted data with very-hard-to-break algorithms. This is a backup strategy in case the program and data get compromised. Hackers would find encrypted data that is mostly useless to them. The software will go into bad states and will need to be corrected. Unexpected problems will occur to the best of programs. If you are not aware of that and you are not planning for that, you are not a software professional, you are just a writer of unsafe programs. Software defects are invisible. Our intellectual ability to predict and prevent known defects are limited. This is why software engineers understand the value of good tools that can help them write correct and safe software. Embracing Tools There is no doubt that we need more and better tools. Tools make a big difference and they are often under-appreciated. Imagine if we still need to FTP files to deploy! Imagine debugging network and performance problems without Chrome DevTools! Imagine how inefficient it would be today to write JavaScript without ESLint and Prettier! If you are a JavaScript developer and, for some reason, you are forced to pick only one plugin for your code editor, you should pick ESLint. Any tool that shortens the feedback loop while you write code should be a welcomed addition. Bret Victor’s argument about inventing immediate visual representations to what we create was an eye-opener for me. Embracing and improving tools is one way to get us to that bright future. Go watch Bret’s talk right now if you have not seen it before. When I find a great new tool, my only regret is not using that tool earlier. Better tools will help you be a better programmer. Find them, use them, appreciate them and, if you can, improve them. The choice of language matters. Type-safety matters. The best thing that has happened to JavaScript is TypeScript (and Flow). Code static analysis is a bigger deal than you think. If you are not doing it you are basically making yourself vulnerable to future unknowns. Do not code without a static typing system. If your language of choice does not have static typing, either change languages or find a transpiler for it. Transpilers today are smart enough to work by just reading comments in code, which I think is the future of type-checking for languages that do not support it natively. The Evolution of Software Engineering No one can learn software engineering in two months, or six, or even a year. You do not learn to be a software engineer in a bootcamp. I have been learning for the past 20+ years and I am still learning today. I became confident enough to call myself an experienced programmer only after about a decade of learning and after designing, building, and maintaining applications that are used by thousands of users. Software engineering is not for everyone, but everyone should learn to solve their own problems with computers. If you can learn to write simple programs you should. If you can learn to use generic software services you should. If you can learn to use open-source software you will have a lot of power. Problems evolve and so should software engineering. The future of this profession is to enable regular computer users to use their computers without needing to study five years to do so. Enable users to solve the easy problems on their own with easy-to-use tools. Software engineers would then move on to create better tools, solve bigger known problems, and do their best to prevent unknown ones. Thanks for reading.

https://medium.com/edge-coders/software-engineering-is-different-from-programming-b108c135af26

['Samer Buna']

2019-02-25 19:17:29.028000+00:00

['Technology', 'Programming', 'Software Development', 'Web Development', 'Coding']