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Bunka AI 5

Parsing XML Data in Python

Extensible Mark up Language (XML) is a mark up language that encodes data in a human and machine readable format. XML is used in a variety of programs for structuring, storing and transmitting data. Python contains several interfaces for processing XML data. In this post, we will discuss how to use the ‘ElementTree’ module in the python ‘xml’ library to parse XML data and store the data in a Pandas data frame. Let’s get started! For our purposes we will be using a sample ‘xml’ file, ‘books.xml’ ,which can be found here. The file contains information about a variety of books, such as titles, author names, and prices. To start, let’s import ‘parse’ from the ‘ElementTree’ module in the python ‘xml’ library: from xml.etree.ElementTree import parse Now, let’s take a look at the file tags in ‘books.xml’: We can define a parsed ‘XML’ document object by passing the file name into the ‘parse()’ method: document = parse('books.xml') If we print the object we see that we have an ‘ElementTree’ object at a specified memory address: print(document) Let’s take a look at the methods and attributes available to this object using the built-in ‘dir()’ method: print(dir(document)) Let’s use the method ‘iterfind()’ to return a generator that we can use iterate over in a ‘for-loop’. We will need specify a path argument in the ‘iterfind()’ method. Let’s select the ‘book’ path: for item in document.iterfind(‘book’): print(item) We see that we have several ‘Element book’ objects stored at various memory addresses. We can extract the information from these objects using the ‘findtext()’ method. Let’s extract the information in the ‘author’ tags: for item in document.iterfind('book'): print(item.findtext('author')) We can also extract titles: for item in document.iterfind('book'): print(item.findtext('title')) Let’s also look at prices: for item in document.iterfind('book'): print(item.findtext('price')) Next, we can initialize lists that we can use to store these values: author = [] title = [] price = [] And within the for-loop we can append the values: for item in document.iterfind('book'): author.append(item.findtext('author')) title.append(item.findtext('title')) price.append(item.findtext('price')) We can then store these lists in a data frame. Let’s first import the Pandas library: import pandas as pd Next, let’s define a data frame that contains the ‘title’, ‘author’ and ‘price’ for each book: df = pd.DataFrame({'title': title, 'author':author, 'price':price}) Next, let’s print the resulting data frame: print(df) We can add the ‘genre’, ‘publish_date’ and ‘description’ to the data frame as well: genre = [] description = [] publish_date = [] for item in document.iterfind('book'): ... genre.append(item.findtext('genre')) description.append(item.findtext('description')) publish_date.append(item.findtext('publish_date')) Now that we have all of the information in a data frame we can do things like convert the ‘price’ strings into ‘float’ and calculate the mean of the ‘price’ column: df['price'] = df['price'].astype(float) print("Mean price: ", df['price'].mean()) Let’s also convert the ‘publish_date’ into a ‘datetime’ object and pull year, month and day values: df['publish_date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['publish_date']) df['year'] = df['publish_date'].dt.year df['month'] = df['publish_date'].dt.month df['day'] = df['publish_date'].dt.day print(df.head()) We can also use the ‘Counter()’ method from the collections module to look at the distribution in authors and genres: from collections import Counter print(Counter(df['author'])) print(Counter(df['genre'])) I’ll stop here but feel free to play around with the data and code yourself. CONCLUSIONS To summarize, in this post we discussed how to parse XML data using the ‘xml’ library in python. We showed how to use the ‘iterfind()’ method to define a generator object that we can iterate over in a ‘for-loop’. We also showed how to access element tag information using the ‘findtext()’ method. We then stored the XML information in lists which we used to define a Pandas data frame. I hope you found this post useful/interesting. The data and code from this post are available on GitHub. Thank you for reading!

https://towardsdatascience.com/parsing-xml-data-in-python-da26288280e1

['Sadrach Pierre']

2020-05-07 01:57:07.920000+00:00

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

Nazis and cryptocurrency: the evolution of Telegram

Nazis and cryptocurrency: the evolution of Telegram How a tiny technology company became a platform for the far right, challenged authoritarian governments, and invaded the cryptocurrency world. On March 24, Timothy Wilson, a 36-year-old white supremacist who had been on federal law enforcement’s radar for at least seven months, died in an exchange of gunfire with an FBI tactical team in Belton, Missouri, about 20 miles south of Kansas City. Wilson, according to federal agents, was attempting to create a car bomb to use on the regional hospital in Belton, which he assumed was caring for coronavirus patients. If you’re wondering what white supremacists see in the pandemic that might advance their cause, Wilson made it clear in a post on the messaging platform Telegram: “If you don’t think this whole thing was engineered by Jews as a power grab, here is more proof of their plans…Jews have been playing the long game we are the only ones standing in their way,” he wrote under the name “Werewolfe 84”, in a post uncovered by The Informant, a website that reports on hate groups. Timothy Wilson (Source: Facebook) When you’re posting a selfie or sharing a cat video, Telegram probably isn’t the first social app that comes to mind. Unless you’re a true member of the digerati, you probably haven’t even heard of it. But Telegram has an estimated 300 million users worldwide — the vast majority not white supremacists — and is growing. It may never become your favorite social media platform, but there’s a lot to like about Telegram. It’s completely free and, unlike other social media, doesn’t vacuum up private information and bombard you with ads. It has also taken the right side in privacy fights with oppressive governments like Russia and Iran. But there’s also the fact that the more unsavory groups banned from platforms like Facebook and Twitter — ISIS, Nazis, the far right conspiracy group QAnon — have all found a home on Telegram. The extremists have been so at home on Telegram that some refer to it as “Terrorgram”. Telegram’s open door policy for extremists has long been known to law enforcement, journalists and academics. But Telegram may now be on the way to becoming a cryptocurrency trading platform, which could open up new avenues of financing for those very same hate groups. And that’s something new and potentially troubling. “Telegram has become a petri dish for extremism,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino. “The introduction of crypto currency can create a whole lot of networking that wasn’t previously there,” Levin said. “If propaganda is the motor oil of extremism, financing will be the gasoline.” The Telegram story Telegram founder Pavel Durov (Source: LinkedIn) In 2006, Pavel Durov founded the Russian social network VKontakte, often shortened to “VK”, which was so successful that it became known as “the Russian Facebook.” By 2014, after repeated disputes with the Russian security service, the FSB, VK had been targeted for acquisition by two companies with ties to President Vladimir Putin. Durov lost control of his company, but ended up with a nice payout. According to the Moscow Times, he sold his 12 percent stake in VK for $300 million. And Durov had a surprise. He and his brother Nikolai, a math and computer science whiz with expertise in cryptography, had been working on a new encrypted messaging service: Telegram, which was specifically designed to thwart the prying eyes of government security services. Sometime around 2014, the Durovs and the Telegram team departed Mother Russia. In 2018, after refusing to provide encryption keys to the FSB, Telegram was banned by Russian government Internet censors. The ban was never entirely successful. Telegram adopted a strategy of hopping from one proxy server to another, staying a step ahead of Russian censors. It remained available for most Russians and was even used by members of the government. Last month, the Russian government lifted the ban on Telegram, effectively admitting that it had been defeated by Telegram’s hide-and-seek strategy. “The Digital Resistance movement doesn’t end with last week’s ceasefire in Russia,” Durov wrote on his personal Telegram channel. “It is just getting started — and going global.” Over its short life, Telegram has become known for two policies, both grounded in Durov’s bedrock libertarian philosophy: A refusal to cooperate with snooping by governments all over the world (Russia, Iran, Indonesia, Bahrain, China, Pakistan, India), resulting in it being banned in many countries. An open door policy to groups like ISIS, Nazis, and white supremacists, along with the far-right conspiracy group QAnon. Many of the groups landed on Telegram after being banned from platforms like Facebook or Twitter. “I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” Durov said at a conference in 2015. But there’s more to Telegram than Nazis, terrorists and conspiracy theorists. Pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong use Telegram to share information on abusive police officers. It has also become a popular messaging platform for the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community. And respected news outlets like The New York Times, Bloomberg and Forbes magazine use it to promote their content, much as they do on Twitter. Like many tech entrepreneurs, Durov has become something of a celebrity. In 2017, Bloomberg News reported spotting him “half-naked” on the hookup site Tinder. In March, he shared wellness and lifestyle tips with his followers on Telegram. “In the last 15 years, I’ve had no alcohol, no caffeine, no meat, no pills and no fast food,” he wrote, adding that he limited his diet to nothing but fish and seafood. To “improve will power,” Durov swims in the icy waters of Finland or Switzerland every winter. “If you ever faced the necessity to stay in a lake with a thin layer of ice on top for a few minutes, you are less likely to procrastinate when it comes to starting on a boring but necessary project,” he wrote. When you sign up for Telegram, you get the following greeting: “Telegram is free and will always be free.“ It carries no ads. And some tests that I ran detected no personal data being sucked up for sale to advertisers. All of which is laudable. But it raises the question of how, exactly, Telegram stays afloat and continues to grow. Monetizing 300 million free users It’s not easy to determine where Telegram is actually located. In addition to the server hopping strategy that defeated Russian censors, corporate records and statements by the company have linked it to locations in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Singapore and Dubai. Currently, its corporate office appears to be in London, with an operations center in Dubai. Durov is a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis, which is part of the British Commonwealth. Telegram is not a publicly traded company, which means it is not required to publicly disclose its finances. But there are hints about what keeps it afloat, the first being the reported $300 million payout Durov received when he sold his stake in VK. “Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we will introduce non-essential paid options to support the infrastructure and finance developer salaries. But making profits will never be an end-goal for Telegram,” the company said in a statement on its website. There’s also the fact that Telegram appears to run lean and agile. The corporate analysis site Crunchbase estimates that it has somewhere between 11 and 50 employees. And it’s not known for burning piles of cash acquiring other companies and products. Since its rollout in 2014, Telegram has remained laser focused on its core business: secure, private messaging. Finally, and most interestingly, there’s Telegram’s cryptocurrency venture, rolled out in 2018, known as the “Telegram Open Network” or simply “TON”. The TON idea was to sell a blockchain-enabled crypto currency, much like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but known as “Grams”. Visual representation of the “Gram” (Source: Bitcoinwiki.org) Users would be able to buy, sell and invest in Grams. And — most important — each of Telegram’s 300 million users would have an online “wallet” that could be used to buy and sell goods and services with the cryptocurrency. If “User A” wanted to transfer funds to “User B”, it could all be done seamlessly using Grams and the Telegram platform. The practical effect of offering the groups who populate the darker, extremist corners of Telegram easy access to cryptocurrency may be best illustrated by a white supremacist group known as the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM). RIM, which seeks to re-establish a Russian monarchy, offers paramilitary training to extremists from Russian and other western European counties. In 2016 and 2017, two members of the far right Nordic Resistance Movement, who had been trained by RIM, carried out a series of bombings in Sweden. The targets included two sites housing asylum seekers. In April, the U.S. government designated RIM a terrorist organization and placed sanctions on it, including a ban on any material support of the organization. But if that support were to come in the form of cryptocurrency, it’s likely that the transaction would already be complete by the time it was detected. The sanctions would be defeated. And RIM, as it happens, is already on Telegram. It maintains an active recruiting channel, which is updated several times a day and has 487 subscribers. Through analysis of blockchain data, it is sometimes possible to identify an account holder with “a high degree of mathematical certainty, “ said Hans-Jakob Schindler, a senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, an international policy organization that studies the extremist ideologies and financing. “However, there is still a legal question whether such an analysis would be admissible in a court of law.” Cryptocurrency ventures are often funded by an “initial coin offering” or ICO, which is much like the initial public offering that comes when a new stock goes on the market. The difference is that investors are buying coins, in this case Grams, instead of stock. For the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Telegram ICO was in fact exactly like an IPO, except that the offering had not been properly approved and registered for sale with federal regulators. And for the SEC, that made it illegal. By the time the SEC went to court in October 2019, seeking an order to halt the ICO, Telegram had already raised $1.7 billion from early investors. And according to the SEC suit, Telegram would soon be able to “flood” U.S. markets with Grams. “Once Grams reach the public markets, it will be virtually impossible to unwind the Offering, given that many purchasers’ identities will be shrouded in secrecy, and given the variety of unregulated markets where Grams may be sold, including platforms that promise anonymity and encryption capability to mask transactions,” the SEC suit alleged. A federal judge in New York blocked any further sale of Grams, which might have put an end to the prospect of Telegram’s 300 million users — white supremacists and QAnon among them — having easy access to encrypted financial transactions. Or maybe not. On April 30, Telegram announced that it would not be issuing Grams. But the software developed for selling Grams, including the “wallets” for every Telegram user, had already been made widely available by its developers on the open source sharing platform GitHub. Within a month, at least three new initiatives based on the software developed by Telegram had appeared. And one, the TON Chinese Community, claims among its members companies offering a “TON mobile wallet” and an “open source client for Telegram.” Telegram already offers a feature called “Bot Payments”, which allows developers offering goods and services to attach a “Pay” button to the bottom of their messages. When users tap the button, they are prompted for credit card and shipping information. “Then you get what you paid for. Voila!” according to the Telegram promotion. “Telegram is an open platform, so bot developers can implement the necessary APIs and accept payments from users starting right now, without lengthy approval dramas,” according to the promotion. It is uncertain at this point whether the open APIs that Telegram already offers, in concert with the TON software, could be used by independent developers to offer cryptocurrency transactions to Telegram users. But a TON whitepaper published by Telegram said: “All these services can be integrated with third-party messaging and social networking applications, uniting the centralized and decentralized worlds.” Telegram says it has no involvement in efforts to revive TON. As for the $1.7 billion that Telegram took in from initial investors, it agreed to repay $1.2 billion to investors as part of its settlement with the SEC. It also agreed to pay an $18 million fine to the SEC. “We look forward to continuing to pursue our other projects and avenues for innovation, and we hope the regulatory environment for blockchain technology in the US becomes more favorable for others in the future,” Durov said in a statement. Far right groups On June 21, the FBI and federal prosecutors announced that Ethan Melzer, a U.S. Army private stationed in Italy, had been charged with using an encrypted messaging application to share sensitive information about his unit’s upcoming movements with the Order of 9 Angels, also known as “O9A”. O9A is described in court papers as a “Satanic anarchist organization” believing, among other things, that “Adolf Hitler was sent by our gods to guide us to greatness.” According to the court papers filed against Melzer in Manhattan, he confessed that his goal was to “to facilitate a mass casualty attack” on his Army unit. The charges against Melzer do not mention Telegram specifically, but there are indicators pointing to Telegram as the platform used to pass the information to O9A. First, the charges state that Melzer used the alias Etil Reggad. A check of Telegram shortly after the charges were announced turned up a user named Etil Reggad, pictured wearing a black ski mask. Etil Reggad user information on Telegram. (Source: Telegram) Second, the charges state that some of the planning for the attack took place on a messaging channel used by a neo-Nazi group known as the RapeWaffen Division, whose members promote rape as a weapon in race war and have connections to O9A. The RapeWaffen Division also has maintained presence on Telegram, although its public channel is no longer accessible. Archived posting on the RapeWaffen Division’s Telegram channel (Source: ADL) Telegram’s basic messaging features place it pretty much squarely in the same space as other encrypted services like Signal. But it has steadily added security and privacy features, such as end-to-end encryption of secret chats and the ability to easily delete messages across devices. All of Telegram’s security features, however, don’t help white supremacists in their plotting if they aren’t careful about who they communicate with. And in at least two recent cases, they haven’t been. The charges against Melzer state that while plotting the mass casualty attack on his Army unit, he was actually communicating with an FBI informant. Timothy Wilson, the white supremacist killed in a shootout with the FBI while planning an attack on a hospital in Missouri, had also been in touch with an FBI informant. Levin sees the aggregation of extremists on Telegram as a tradeoff. “They’re obviously easier to track when they’re all on a large platform. But it’s also a bigger pool for them to recruit from,” he said. In 2015, Telegram added a feature known as “broadcast channels”, which allows users to broadcast messages to unlimited numbers of followers, much as they can on Twitter. That feature is a benefit for groups seeking to recruit new followers. “For clandestine radical right extremist groups, these public Telegram channels are indispensable for spreading their memes, forwarding content from similar channels and attracting new recruits,” wrote Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who tracks radical right activity online. Telegram offers other benefits to its users, including the ability to store and share books, instruction manuals, videos and other content. A study by the Combatting Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy found that the file sharing feature had been particularly useful to the Islamic State and its followers. “Telegram has changed the landscape of instructional material distribution by developing a platform that combines extensive file sharing capabilities in multiple file formats with lax regulation,” the study found. Last year, Telegram apparently decided that when it comes to ISIS, there are limits. Europol, which acts as an information exchange for law enforcement agencies in the European Union, reported in November that it had collaborated with Telegram on the removal of terrorist content from the platform. The Europol statement didn’t mention ISIS. But the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks radical right and jihadi groups online, reported that ISIS channels and accounts were in fact disappearing from Telegram, along with the accounts of many administrators of the channels. “It’s unclear how Telegram’s removal algorithm worked, specifically, but it was far more targeted than anything the company had employed before,” SITE founder Rita Katz wrote in WIRED last month. On June 23, there was further news about Telegram that might be alarming to extremists. The Russian news site KOD.RU reported that a database with information on several million Telegram users had leaked and been posted on the dark web. No discussion of extremist groups on Telegram would be complete without touching on QAnon, the conspiracy minded group best known for spreading the theory that Democratic party leaders and government officials are members of an international pedophilia ring. QAnon channel on Telegram (Source:Telegram) QAnon and its followers, like other extremist groups, have been tossed from Facebook and Twitter. And like the others, they found a home on Telegram. QAnon maintains a channel called “Q Alerts” with 6,397 followers. Its on that channel that new statements from the group and its anonymous leader “Q” are announced to followers. The FBI, in a law enforcement bulletin last year, described QAnon’s beliefs as follows: “An anonymous government official known as ‘Q’ posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.” It may sound ludicrous, but the FBI found that such theories from the political fringe are likely to “motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.” A QAnon follower with more than a dozen knives was arrested by New York City police in April after threatening in social media posts to kill former Vice President Joe Biden. A month earlier, a Staten Island man, said by his lawyer to be influenced by QAnon, was arrested and charged with the murder of a Gambino crime family underboss. Recently, some of the best known far right channels have been removed from Telegram, including “RapeKrieg” and “Terrorwave Refined.” It’s not clear whether Telegram is launching the sort of board cleanup effort that it used against ISIS, or is simply targeting a few of the worst offenders. “It’s worth noting that there are several other channels still up that are part of the ‘Terrorgram’ network, which raises questions about why those were not removed,” Joshua Fisher-Birch, a research analyst with the Counter Extremism Project, wrote in an email. “In short, this is a first step, but it’s unclear what happens from here.”

https://medium.com/the-innovation/nazis-and-cryptocurrency-the-evolution-of-telegram-10b30681c240

['Ray Robinson']

2020-07-20 18:10:35.586000+00:00

['White Supremacy', 'Telegram', 'Social Media', 'Cyrptocurrency', 'Technology']

4 Best Methods to Search Data in Your JavaScript Arrays

4 Best Methods to Search Data in Your JavaScript Arrays Photo by Amit Lahav on Unsplash “What’s the best way to do this?” This is a question I’m sure you have asked yourself a hundred times using JavaScript. And that’s because this language has so many different ways of doing anything. If you’re working with arrays, you will often have to search through them. But what’s the best way to do that? What if you need to know if a value is present in an array? What if you want to filter something out of your collections? Turns out that in this sea of information, JavaScript has 4 amazing methods to do anything you may need when searching through your arrays. Let’s start. Use includes() The includes() method returns a boolean telling you if the passed-in parameter exists or not in an array. In my example, I’ve used this method to ask the question: “Hey array, do you contain this value, yes or no?” An extra important thing to note about this method is that it doesn’t implicitly perform type coercion on the value you pass in. So basically, it won’t modify the type of parameter you pass in to confront values. As you can see, a strict comparison is performed here, so the number 4 won’t be converted to the string '4' to test the condition.

https://javascript.plainenglish.io/the-4-best-methods-to-search-data-in-your-javascript-arrays-d845f4432bdd

['Piero Borrelli']

2021-05-17 16:47:03.418000+00:00

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

Healthcare Fraud Detection With Python

What Is the Purpose of EDA? The purpose of this EDA step is to provide support for later more in-depth analysis. In a recent post, we discussed the concept of agile data science, not so much as a strict process but as a framework. This is one of those steps where, when you are doing the analysis, you can bring up points that are interesting using charts and metrics that might help move your business case along. Note: In this example, we have already joined all the data sets together for easy use. You can find the code for that here. For example, in our questions above we are looking to support the idea that it is worth looking into fraudulent providers. So let’s look at how they play out. We are running this all in SaturnCloud.io because it is easy to spin up a VM and run this analysis as well as to share it. In this first part, we look at age. It’s usually a great place to start because it is a natural place you might see some patterns in the data. So we can use the histogram function in Pandas to analyze this. However, once we look at it, it seems to break down at a pretty even distribution. This means there is a pretty similar sample across both sets of data. The next question we wanted to answer was focused on spending. First, we wanted to look at spending in general. Initially, when analyzing the gross amount, nothing sticks out, as seen in the charts below. Total Monthly Spending for Fraud Claims vs. Total Monthly Spending for Non-Fraud Claims Overall, the months seem to line up, except that the total amounts month over month seem to be much higher on the fraud side. So we wanted to look into this. A better way we can look at this is this. First, let’s look at the average claim cost per month. Per Claim Costs for Fraud Claims vs. Per Claim Costs for Non-Fraud Claims We can see here that there is a drastic difference in the average cost per claim. In the case of providers that are likely to commit fraud, they often charge two times what the non-fraud providers charge. (It would require more analysis into what the claims were to support this). Another great metric used in healthcare is PMPM. This stands for Per Member Per Month. This is a great metric to see how much a patient is costing per month. So instead of looking at the average claim costs, we will look at the average patient cost per month. Technically, we should be looking at this by calculating whether or not a patient has valid coverage for the month. However, due to the data set, we don’t really have that specific data. So, for now, we are using the proxy of the patient’s ID. It’s not perfect, but it is what we will use for now as seen in the code below. Per Patient Per Month Costs for Fraud Claims vs. Per Patient Per Month Costs for Non-Fraud Claims Looking at this, you will notice that an insurance provider that is likely to have fraudulent claims also charges two times per patient more than the non-fraudulent providers. Now, why is it important that we have done this exploratory analysis before diving into model development? The reason is that this provides a solid business case to sell to your stakeholders for why you would like to invest further in this project. You already have a business reason that would intrigue any business partner. Based on the monthly spend charts, your provider could be saving upwards of $750,000 USD a month, or several million dollars a year, if you were able to crack down on this insurance fraud. In addition, you are already seeing some tendencies of fraudulent providers. But you can’t stop analyzing the data just yet.

https://medium.com/better-programming/healthcare-fraud-detection-with-python-5a7a6738b5b2

[]

2019-11-07 13:01:02.142000+00:00

['Technology', 'Healthcare', 'Data Science', 'Programming', 'Python']

Why Your I.T. Strategy is Ineffective

Photo by ahmad gunnaivi on Unsplash An I.T. strategy is more than just a plan for upgrading your technology. Yet, it lays out how your business will use I.T. for overall growth and development. Think about it this way. Technology plays a role in every aspect of your business. From HR, Marketing, R&D, Operations, Strategy, Accounting, Customer Satisfaction/Interaction, and so on. With all of the overlap, it’s important to have an effective I.T. strategy to see that success across the board. Without one, growth can be halted because needs are not met and visions are misaligned. Alright, let’s dive into five reasons why your I.T. strategy may be ineffective. I.T. and Business Leaders are Disconnected When there is a disconnect anywhere, things don’t go as planned. And oftentimes, the leadership team and I.T. department are not on the same page. This could be caused by communication barriers, not sharing the same vision, misunderstandings, and unrealistic expectations. For example, the way I.T. professionals talk and communicate is much different than the CEO. Your tech pros are going to communicate in a technical way, using jargon, which could be unclear to the CEO who thinks in terms of revenue, cost, and necessities. Another example of the disconnect comes when business leaders make decisions without including I.T. Without insight from your I.T. department, setting goals and making plans could be unrealistic. Is your current technology able to support and scale what you have planned? Not sure? Your I.T. department would know. While you don’t have to include I.T. in all your strategy meetings, it’s important to regularly check-in to ensure you’re on the same page, working towards the right goals. No Defined Strategy or Objectives A key component of business planning is having defined goals and objectives. From there you can determine your key performance indicators (KPIs), which are quantifiable measurements to gauge performance. When KPIs are hit, you know what’s working or what led you to success. When KPIs are not met, you know what you need to adjust to meet your goals. “What gets measured, gets done.” — PETER DRUCKER Without knowing what objectives you needed to hit, you’ll be all over the place. Just working on the tasks you think you need to work on, want to work on, are the easiest, or that you feel most comfortable with. When in reality, those tasks don’t match up with what was expected of you. Without a defined strategy and clear objectives, there is no direction. No direction creates failure because a defined strategy outlines what you need to do or not do and without one, you don’t know what you need to do or not to do. No I.T. Strategy in Place Anything within your business operations that does not have a plan is likely ineffective. Without a plan or strategy in place, there is no direction. No goals being met because there are no goals. Nothing being measured because there are no KPIs to measure. No objectives being hit or missed which can help you evaluate what to do next. No strategy means you have nothing to plan, execute, achieve, measure, and evaluate. There is no clear direction for the use of your technology. If part of the larger picture is to implement new software, does your technology allow for this? Or if you plan on adding new hires to your team, will there be money in the budget for the hardware needed for them? No Budget for Technology There are many areas of the business to consider when determining your budget for the year, which is why I.T. often gets thrown to the backburner. It’s deemed as less important than other areas of the budget. However, that’s not a great idea when almost half (43%) of cyberattacks are targeted towards small to medium-sized businesses. And that is the sole reason for SMBs becoming an increasing target to hackers — A lower I.T. budget means lessened security and an easier chance for hackers to be successful. Without a sufficient budget for I.T., you can kiss your goals and objectives goodbye. Now, I’m not saying you need to allocate all your resources here, just enough to realistically meet your goals. Take the examples from the previous section. If your plan is to deploy new software, but the hardware you currently have is not compatible, then you need to account for updated hardware in your budget. The same goes for the new hires. You’re Not Using an MSP Developing a successful I.T. strategy can be a lot to handle, especially if you don’t know where to begin. Luckily, partnering with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can get you on track and stay there. From conducting third-party audits to ensure all of your partners are aligned with your goals, having a dedicated client success team on your side, to the actual strategic road mapping of your technology and processes. Not to mention, when you partner with an MSP, they are with you every step of the way. By thoroughly understanding your I.T. infrastructure, every decision made will be well-informed rather than just an unrealistic expectation set by business leaders who are disconnected from your I.T. department. And with the help of an MSP, aligning your technology with your business goals has never been easier. With both your technology and goals on the same page, you’ll be able to accurately plan for the future and ensure a smooth execution to reach success.

https://medium.com/@gordonmonica96/why-your-i-t-strategy-is-ineffective-3f47084da9a

['Monica Gordon']

2020-12-21 22:07:53.839000+00:00

['Strategy', 'Business Strategy', 'Information Technology', 'Strategy Execution', 'Strategy Planning']

How we are going to get everyone flying

Atlas: Watfly’s single-seat VTOL aircraft Flight is the most effective means of transportation. That is why the President flies around in a helicopter, celebrities in private jets, and why critical patients are flown in air ambulances. Still, personal flight remains a luxury, and for the rest of us, transportation means roads and soul-crushing traffic. To democratize flight, we need flying cars. That is, an aircraft that is similar to a car: affordable to most, as easy to pilot as cars are to drive, as safe as commercial air travel, and with convenient, practical use. Said aircraft would eliminate aviation’s existing barriers to entry, and would do to aviation, what the automobile did for personal transportation. Today, only a tiny group of people enjoy access to cheap and small recreational aircraft, ranging from power gliders and ultralights, to experimental airplanes. The thrill of flying these aircraft is huge, but they are statistically less safe than commercial aircraft, require substantial aeronautical ability, and hundreds of hours of flight training to pilot. Why is flying the future? Fixed-wing flight requires little infrastructure other than runways, but vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) further reduces this to near zero. Using this technology allows you to take off wherever you are and land where you need to be, without the need for a last mile solution. In the air, there are no traffic lights, and no bottlenecks, meaning we can achieve higher sustained travel speeds and efficiency, leading to shorter travel times and allowing us to cover longer distances. How are you making flight affordable? Making air transportation affordable requires both affordable vehicles and affordable operational costs. The first is achieved by: Reducing development timelines and certification costs. A commercial airliner takes over 5 years and >$500m to certify. However, a small aircraft can be certified in under a year, leading to shorter development cycles which allows us to bring cutting edge performance to market, faster. Reduced complexity: this goes hand in hand with aircraft price. Replacing internal combustion engines and jets with electric powertrains will reduce part count by 2 orders of magnitude. Economies of scale: There is currently no flying vehicle being produced at automotive volumes. This has kept the prices high and limited the manufacturing techniques available. A small, electric VTOL aircraft such as Watfly’s would be the first aircraft to be produced at automotive volumes, drastically reducing the manufacturing cost. Operational affordability: by replacing the cost of carbon fuels with electricity, the flight operating cost (FOC) is fractionated. The much simpler drivetrain — with fewer parts to fail/maintain — further reduces ground operating costs. The other high cost of operating an aircraft today comes from pilot certification and training costs. Bringing flight to people at an automotive scale would increase the need for pilots beyond the current number of pilots in existence. In order to avoid this bottleneck and reduce the cost of flying our vehicles, Watfly will develop Autonomous Flight (AF) which will substitute human pilots and fly the aircraft from take off to landing. State of the VTOL Industry There are 100s of VTOL prototypes in development, with new projects emerging every week. Most of these are not designed to be flying cars, but rather more efficient helicopters. Truth is, no one looks at these 3 ton, 5 passenger, multi-rotor aircraft and thinks “I would like to buy one,” or “I could see myself flying that” and much less “I wonder if that fits on my driveway.” They are creating flying busses, not flying cars. Our Master Plan Our initial product will be a single-seat recreational aircraft under 254 lbs, priced as a luxury vehicle. It will fall within the most open aircraft category in the United States: ultralights. This means our vehicle will be pilotable without the need for a license or airworthiness certificate — although our aircraft will be built to meet or exceed those requirements. We will bring VTOL, an electric power-train, and computer assisted controls to the ultralight market for the first time, eliminating the need for runways, making flying as easy as flying a drone, and providing improved safety features. This first luxury single seater — while revolutionary in its category — will not be a full fledged flying car. Ultralight aircraft can only fly in Class G airspace (~80% of the USA), ruling out flying in urban environments, thus reducing practicality. At the same time, a single seat, a high price tag, and a limited travel range all fall short of the flying car promise of an aircraft for the masses. In automotive terms, this will be our Model N, the model Ford produced prior to the first mass-produced car: the Model T. All revenue generated will be directed towards the R&D of subsequent products, therefore, sales of our first luxury recreational aircraft will pay for the development of the ultimate flying car. The second product will be a two-seat aircraft — and without giving away too much — it will be certified to fly above regulated air spaces. Each iteration will lead to enhanced AF, longer range, and make the vehicles more affordable. Get ready to fly. Learn more at www.watfly.ca or drop me a line [email protected]

https://medium.com/@getmeflyingcars/how-we-are-going-to-get-everyone-flying-ea96fc959f38

['Gonzalo Espinoza Graham']

2020-02-21 16:51:45.375000+00:00

['Future', 'Technology', 'Flying Cars', 'Aviation', 'Watly']

The “masses” are not the ones who live the lives they dreamed of living. And the reason is because they didn’t fight hard enough. They didn’t make it Toledo vs Eastern Michigan live stream free

The “masses” are not the ones who live the lives they dreamed of living. And the reason is because they didn’t fight hard enough. They didn’t make it Toledo vs Eastern Michigan live stream free Toledo vs Eastern Michigan Live Tv Nov 19, 2020·5 min read Life is a journey of twists and turns, peaks and valleys, mountains to climb and oceans to explore. Good times and bad times. Happy times and sad times. But always, life is a movement forward. No matter where you are on the journey, in some way, you are continuing on — and that’s what makes it so magnificent. One day, you’re questioning what on earth will ever make you feel happy and fulfilled. And the next, you’re perfectly in flow, writing the most important book of your entire career. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/285027 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/285028 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/285029 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/285030 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/285031 What nobody ever tells you, though, when you are a wide-eyed child, are all the little things that come along with “growing up.” 1. Most people are scared of using their imagination. They’ve disconnected with their inner child. They don’t feel they are “creative.” They like things “just the way they are.” 2. Your dream doesn’t really matter to anyone else. Some people might take interest. Some may support you in your quest. But at the end of the day, nobody cares, or will ever care about your dream as much as you. 3. Friends are relative to where you are in your life. Most friends only stay for a period of time — usually in reference to your current interest. But when you move on, or your priorities change, so too do the majority of your friends. 4. Your potential increases with age. As people get older, they tend to think that they can do less and less — when in reality, they should be able to do more and more, because they have had time to soak up more knowledge. Being great at something is a daily habit. You aren’t just “born” that way. 5. Spontaneity is the sister of creativity. If all you do is follow the exact same routine every day, you will never leave yourself open to moments of sudden discovery. Do you remember how spontaneous you were as a child? Anything could happen, at any moment! 6. You forget the value of “touch” later on. When was the last time you played in the rain? When was the last time you sat on a sidewalk and looked closely at the cracks, the rocks, the dirt, the one weed growing between the concrete and the grass nearby. Do that again. You will feel so connected to the playfulness of life. 7. Most people don’t do what they love. It’s true. The “masses” are not the ones who live the lives they dreamed of living. And the reason is because they didn’t fight hard enough. They didn’t make it happen for themselves. And the older you get, and the more you look around, the easier it becomes to believe that you’ll end up the same. Don’t fall for the trap. 8. Many stop reading after college. Ask anyone you know the last good book they read, and I’ll bet most of them respond with, “Wow, I haven’t read a book in a long time.” 9. People talk more than they listen. There is nothing more ridiculous to me than hearing two people talk “at” each other, neither one listening, but waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can start up again. 10. Creativity takes practice. It’s funny how much we as a society praise and value creativity, and yet seem to do as much as we can to prohibit and control creative expression unless it is in some way profitable. If you want to keep your creative muscle pumped and active, you have to practice it on your own. 11. “Success” is a relative term. As kids, we’re taught to “reach for success.” What does that really mean? Success to one person could mean the opposite for someone else. Define your own Success. 12. You can’t change your parents. A sad and difficult truth to face as you get older: You can’t change your parents. They are who they are. Whether they approve of what you do or not, at some point, no longer matters. Love them for bringing you into this world, and leave the rest at the door. 13. The only person you have to face in the morning is yourself. When you’re younger, it feels like you have to please the entire world. You don’t. Do what makes you happy, and create the life you want to live for yourself. You’ll see someone you truly love staring back at you every morning if you can do that. 14. Nothing feels as good as something you do from the heart. No amount of money or achievement or external validation will ever take the place of what you do out of pure love. Follow your heart, and the rest will follow. 15. Your potential is directly correlated to how well you know yourself. Those who know themselves and maximize their strengths are the ones who go where they want to go. Those who don’t know themselves, and avoid the hard work of looking inward, live life by default. They lack the ability to create for themselves their own future. 16. Everyone who doubts you will always come back around. That kid who used to bully you will come asking for a job. The girl who didn’t want to date you will call you back once she sees where you’re headed. It always happens that way. Just focus on you, stay true to what you believe in, and all the doubters will eventually come asking for help. 17. You are a reflection of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Nobody creates themselves, by themselves. We are all mirror images, sculpted through the reflections we see in other people. This isn’t a game you play by yourself. Work to be surrounded by those you wish to be like, and in time, you too will carry the very things you admire in them. 18. Beliefs are relative to what you pursue. Wherever you are in life, and based on who is around you, and based on your current aspirations, those are the things that shape your beliefs. Nobody explains, though, that “beliefs” then are not “fixed.” There is no “right and wrong.” It is all relative. Find what works for you. 19. Anything can be a vice. Be wary. Again, there is no “right” and “wrong” as you get older. A coping mechanism to one could be a way to relax on a Sunday to another. Just remain aware of your habits and how you spend your time, and what habits start to increase in frequency — and then question where they are coming from in you and why you feel compelled to repeat them. Never mistakes, always lessons. As I said, know yourself. 20. Your purpose is to be YOU. What is the meaning of life? To be you, all of you, always, in everything you do — whatever that means to you. You are your own creator. You are your own evolving masterpiece. Growing up is the realization that you are both the sculpture and the sculptor, the painter and the portrait. Paint yourself however you wish.

https://medium.com/@toledovseasternmichiganliveonn/the-masses-are-not-the-ones-who-live-the-lives-they-dreamed-of-living-68566f1c23ea

['Toledo Vs Eastern Michigan Live Tv']

2020-11-19 00:03:09.376000+00:00

['Technology', 'Sports', 'Social Media', 'News', 'Live Streaming']

NLP: Text Processing In Data Science Projects

NLP: Text Processing In Data Science Projects Learn The Data Science Techniques To Process Text To Use For NLP Projects In Python Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text. It is important to ensure the text is standardised, the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights. It’s important to note that the cleaning and processing of text is highly dependent on the nature of the NLP project. As an instance for your project, numbers might be important. This article aims to explain the steps we can perform to clean the text for NLP projects. Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash Article Aim I will explain following key techniques: Convert Text To Lowercase Tokenise Paragraphs To Sentences Tokenise Sentences To Words Remove Numbers Remove Punctuation Remove Stop words Remove Whitespaces I will demonstrate how we can achieve the goal by using the NLTK library in Python and the regular expressions. We can install NLTK library using: pip install nltk The first task is to normalise the paragraphs of text. 1. Convert Text To Lowercase The key concept here is to reduce the number of words, in particular if they are same. We can change the casing of the words to ensure every word is in lowercase. As an instance, “Article” and “article” can be represented as “article”. We can use the lowercase() function of Python to change the casing of the text. text = 'This is an NLP article of FinTechExplained' lower_case_text = lowercase(text) print(lower_case_text) #This will print: #this is an nlp article of fintechexplained The text we extract from the sources such as documents, are usually represented as groups of sentences (paragraphs). The next task is to break the paragraphs into sentences. 2. Tokenise Paragraphs To Sentences I highly recommend the NLTK library in Python to perform tokenisation. We can use PunktSentenceTokenize. It is a pre-trained model of the NLTK library that can perform sentence-level tokenising by determining punctuation and character marking the end of sentence. import nltk from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize text = 'FinTechExplained aims to explain how text processing works. Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text. It is important to ensure the text is standardised and the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights.' list = sent_tokenize(text) print(list) #----output---- [ 'FinTechExplained aims to explain how text processing works.', 'Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text.', 'It is important to ensure the text is standardised and the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights.' ] We can see from the code snippet above that the paragraph has been tokenised into sentences. NLTK supports punctuation and sentence endings for 17 European languages. Once we have a list of sentences, we need to break the sentences into words. 3. Tokenise Sentences To Words We can use the TreebankWordTokenizer class of the NLTK library in Python to tokenise the sentences into words. from nltk.tokenize import TreebankWordTokenizer tokenizer = TreebankWordTokenizer() text = 'FinTechExplained aims to explain how text processing works. Once we have gathered the text, the next stage is about cleaning and consolidating the text. It is important to ensure the text is standardised and the noise is removed so that efficient analysis can be performed on the text to derive meaningful insights.' print(tokenizer.tokenize(text)) #This will tokenise the sentences into words 'FinTechExplained', 'aims', 'to', 'explain', 'how', 'text', 'processing', 'works', '.', 'Once', 'we', 'have', 'gathered', 'the', 'text', ',' 'the', 'next', 'stage', 'is', 'about', 'cleaning', 'and', 'consolidating', 'the', 'text', '.', 'It', 'is', 'important', 'to', 'ensure', 'the', 'text', 'is', 'standardised', 'and', 'the', 'noise', 'is', 'removed', 'so', 'that', 'efficient', 'analysis', 'can', 'be', 'performed', 'on', 'the', 'text', 'to', 'derive', 'meaningful', 'insights', '.' Photo by Clément H on Unsplash If you want to read on how to gather the text from various sources for your NLP project then read: The next task is to remove the numbers of the text 4. Remove Numbers This is highly dependent on the project. One of the common tasks is to remove the numbers from the text as numbers are not usually important to text analytics. We can use the Regular Expression to achieve the goal: import re result = re.sub(r'\d+', '', '909FinTechExplained9876') print(result) # 'FinTechExplained' Next remove all of the punctuation 5. Remove Punctuation We also need to remove the punctuation from the text. import string punctuation = string.punctuation words = ['You','Are','Reading','FinTechExplained', '!', 'NLP', '.'] clean_words = [w for w in words if w not in punctuation] #it will return clean_words = ['You','Are','Reading','FinTechExplained', 'NLP'] We can then do a “ “.join(clean_words) to return a clean sentence (if required). Remove the noise that stop words are adding 6. Remove Stop words There are many stop words in English as an instance “a”, “an”, “the”, “and”, “but”, “if”, “or”, “because” are some of the common English stop words. We can remove the stop words by using the NLTK library: from nltk.corpus import stopwords text = 'FinTechExplained is an important publication' words = nltk.word_tokenize(text) stopwords = stopwords.words('english') clean = [w for w in words if w not in stopwords] print(clean) #This will return an array where stopwords have been removed. #'FinTechExplained' , 'important', 'publication' Finally remove the whitespaces 7. Remove Whitespaces Lastly, I want to demonstrate how we can remove whitespaces such as space, tab, carriage return, line feeds. We can use the split() along with join() function of the Python programming language. It returns a list of the words in the string. ’’.join(FinTechExplained Is A Publication. This is about NLP’.split()) #This will return 'FinTechExplained Is A Publication. This is about NLP' Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash Summary This article explained how we can clean the text once we have gathered the text for our NLP project. It explained following key techniques: Convert Text To Lowercase Tokenise Paragraphs To Sentences Tokenise Sentences To Words Remove Numbers Remove Punctuation Remove Stop words Remove Whitespaces Hope it helps.

https://medium.com/fintechexplained/nlp-text-processing-in-data-science-projects-f083009d78fc

['Farhad Malik']

2019-07-30 10:32:53.457000+00:00

['NLP', 'Technology', 'Programming', 'Fintech', 'Data Science']

The Consequences of Ignoring the Best Practices in Design

The Consequences of Ignoring the Best Practices in Design An exercise to better understand why UX Design Patterns matter Image created by vectorjuice, available on freepik You must have heard about solving design problems through design patterns, their implementation steps, and some problems that can arise from them. But do you realize the impact these patterns have on the user experience? A few weeks ago, I didn’t at all. After finishing the UX Nanodegree by Udacity and landing a new role as UX Engineer, I decided to continue with my education on the matter. So, I decided to join the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) which offers several online courses with certification at a very affordable membership price. Disclaimer: This post contains one affiliate link however, this is not a solicited post by the Interaction Design Foundation. I am just a regular member who paid for his membership and since I am very satistfied with their resources, I decided to recommend them by my own will. So when it was time to chose which course to enroll in, I decided on the UI Design Patterns for Successful Software in order to get deeper into the right approach to solve common design problems affecting user interfaces. User interface (UI) design patterns are reusable/recurring components which designers use to solve common problems in user interface design. For example, the breadcrumbs design pattern lets users retrace their steps. Designers can apply them to a broad range of cases, but must adapt each to the specific context of use. — Source: IDF During the lessons, I was challenged to complete several exercises exploring the structure of visual frameworks, content organization, navigation, data entries, and so on. One exercise, in particular, was so insightful I considered it worthy to share. This exercise consisted of selecting one website of my choice to perform something that seemed to be very strange at first: sketching one version without any navigation design patterns. Then, I had to select one task for a user to perform when visiting this website, this time, without any design pattern he could reach for. From this experience, I should take some notes and considerations to better understand users' perception of design patterns and how they are essential for the designer work. If you are curious about how this exercise came up, please continue reading. Reddit App Author/Copyright holder: Reddit. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use. I chose Reddit app to work on. My choice was simply because this is a website I visit often and I knew most of my friends — who I would have to ask to test my prototypes — would be familiar with as well. On Reddit’s main page I identified the following design patterns for navigation: - Search Box; - Global Navigation Bar; - Site Map Footer (not visible in the screenshot) The “Pattern-Free” Solution I sketched how Reddit’s main page would look like without this design pattern and reached the following solution: My sketch of the Reddit app without design patterns User Testing I asked a friend of mine, who is a frequent Reddit user, to accomplish the main feature on Reddit: Login and create a post. His immediate reaction was to ask me if I have forgotten to include some buttons on the navbar so he could log in. I was not surprised by his question. UX Design Patterns create interactions the users are familiar with, so they usually do not have to think about how to accomplish mundane tasks, as is the case of a Login. After I explained to him the navbar was correctly designed to not include the authentication buttons, he wondered how was he supposed to find the Log In button then. I found it funny to see how making just a simple change could create such confusion in the user's mind. He decided to click on the “+ Join” button of one of the posts on the screen, expecting he would be redirected to a Login page. I gave in the sketch for the resulting interaction, which is the Sign Up page, instead. This is exactly what happens in the real Reddit app. A — Sign Up Screen; B —Login Screen; C — Main Page after user login He knew what to do on this screen (Fig. A): to click on the “Log In” link to be redirected to the Login screen. However, at this moment he sighted and was visibly tired from having to go through this extra step to accomplish such a simple assignment. On the Login screen (Fig B), he was able to perform the desired task by inserting his credentials and clicking the “Log In” button. After this, he was finally able to view the “Create Post” field in the Home Screen and continue to the post creation (Fig. C). Lessons Learned In this exercise, I turned the design process upside down by taking an implemented design and remove all the design patterns I could find on it. This experience was very insightful about the real importance of design patterns, both for the user and the designer. For the user: Design Patterns, as is the case of global navigation, are familiar solutions for frequent problems. If a user has to think about how to accomplish mundane tasks, he gets frustrated and tired easily. For the designer:

https://medium.com/swlh/the-consequences-of-ignoring-the-best-practices-from-the-design-field-baf056bb0d48

['Mariana Vargas']

2020-12-03 13:13:14.653000+00:00

['Programming', 'Creativity', 'Visual Design', 'Technology', 'UX']

Smart Contract Developer in Gwalior +919870635001 Nadcab Technology

Direct Whatsapp- https://bit.ly/2op0VQr Website Visit- https://bit.ly/2nJJwBV Smart Contract Development Process Of course, let’s look at the blockchain documentation from the developer’s point of view. This is not a tutorial on how to develop blockchain smart contract development services, but general information to understand the step-by-step operation. You can also use this guide to choose the right technician for your project. smart_contract_developer Plan Just as investigating to understand the project’s goals, developers conduct their own investigations to gather up-to-date information about smart contracts for similar purposes. The code is open source and changes daily. That’s why keeping track of the news is very important. Development You already know what security means on the blockchain, so give the developer time to get all the details of the smart contract right and set all the nuts and bolts in the right place. Testing They say that off-the-shelf smart contracts are like spacecraft. Once fired, there is no way to reverse it. As we know in web development, all bugs are temporary and can be handled quickly by experienced technicians. Blockchain Smart Contract Development Company is not the same. It cannot be changed upon request. The final product should be fully armed and ready to respond to malware attacks. This is the main reason there is so much talk about the security of smart contracts. Initially, the developer checks the product through the local blockchain. Deploy to Testnet Testnet is another level of protection for smart contracts. Here, the developer can double-check everything and see if the contract is ready or not while playing with real cryptocurrencies. For Ethereum, this is a principle that can be used by a team hired by Robstens or Rinke by. Here the developer works with Testnet Ethernet. You can get it for free on the platform. Deploy to Production The blockchain smart contract development services should only be activated after all necessary verifications have been completed. If the developer needs more time for testing, it’s okay. This can help reduce gray hair later. When everything is ready, the contract is deployed to production. It is the last step in this procedure How does Smart Contract Development Work? Smart contracts work in a very simple and fair process. It mainly follows three steps: · In the first step, the contract is written in code for several parties and published on the blockchain platform. · Second, events are triggered by contract execution. · In this case, the contract is executed. Upon completion of the process, both parties will receive funds, tokens or assets as promised. If the conditional protocol is not met, the smart contract returns the product to its owner. In addition, the smart contract ledger stores complete details and impose immutable functionality. In other words, once the data is saved, no one can change/change it. To create an ICO blockchain smart contract development services you will need: ICO Contract Subject: The software needed access to goods, services, etc. to lock or unlock automatically. Digital Signature: All participants of the contract must sign a digital signature with a private key. Contract Terms: A sequence of actions required to execute a smart contract. In addition, all participants must sign. Smart Contract Development Smart Contract Development Company is a virtual contract built using a blockchain platform for stability and privacy purposes. This smart contract can be concluded between two parties without the intervention of a third party, and the terms and conditions are drawn up according to the authority. Once these terms and conditions are met, funds are automatically transferred from one party to another. Smart contract data is stored on the ledger to enhance security. These enticing qualities not only make smart contracts stand out from the box but also garnered attention from various industries. Nadcab Technology, a leading smart contract, provides a comprehensive range of smart contract development, security audit services, and solutions based on customer requirements. Complete blockchain smart contract development services architecture and code-based evaluation to ensure the security of smart contracts. Our team of experienced developers has the expertise to develop all types of smart contracts across a variety of blockchain platforms including Ethereum, Hyperledger, EOS, and Corda, as well as languages ​​like Solidity, Golang Vyper, Truffle, and more.

https://medium.com/@nadcabofficial/smart-contract-developer-in-gwalior-919870635001-nadcab-technology-f78c031ea7a4

['Nadcab Software Development']

2020-12-24 12:03:46.223000+00:00

['Smart Contract Blockchain', 'Smart Contracts', 'Nadcab Technology', 'Blockchain', 'Tron']

Adventures in deploying Static Website on Cloud

Wondering if you should use PCF, AWS or Azure for Static Website? Read to find out more about the pros and cons of each. Although web pages in today’s world are becoming powerful and extremely interactive, there is no replacement for a brilliant static website. With technological improvements such as introduction of MFEs and SPAs using ReactJS/Next.js, static websites these days do a lot more than just displaying relevant content to the user. In this article, I would like to take you through my journey of deploying a static website for an enterprise, built using React on PCF, AWS and Azure and comparing some of their different aspects, and outlining the Blue-Green strategy for each method, which enables zero-downtime deployment. For the sake of brevity, I won’t be delving into overly technical details. Also, for the sake of simplicity, let us consider a bundle named app.zip which is the final build to be deployed and has the directory structure below. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF): Steps: Create the project repository as required and then add ‘manifest.yaml’ in the root folder. Sample content for manifest.yaml is present below. 2. Configure your pipeline to create build using ‘npm run build’ command and add a file named ‘Staticfile’ in the build directory of the app with the content. 3. Once this is done, the pipeline should navigate to the appropriate app folder and perform ‘cf push’ command. 4. You should now be able to access the website with the route generated Blue-Green Deployment: The Blue-Green Deployment when using PCF to host static website can be done with the following steps: 1. Create a new app similar to existing app 2. Deploy the files 3. Test the application using new route URLs 4. Point your DNS to new route URLs Pros: 1. Ability to auto-scale 2. Monitoring and deployment is easy 3. Applications run stably and smoothly 4. Excellent use case for deploying applications dealing with data such as PI or other critical information and cannot be deployed onto public cloud 5. Dynamic Routing and Infrastructure security 6. Integration with external logging components such as ElasticSearch and Logstash Cons: 1. Integration with external tools is a little tedious 2. User Interface navigation needs improvement 3. You need to take care of the security and access control 4. The maintenance of SLAs is to be done by you 5. PCF will create a route at the time of deployment, and it can be customised but there is no readily available DNS Service or CDN Service along with PCF 6. Automatic encryption and rotation of keys is now dependent on the underlying hardware 7. Automated Cost alerts for your application is not available out of the box 8. Setting up of infrastructure to meet compliance requirements is now to be done by you 9. As applications grow, the cost of infrastructure becomes an overhead Amazon Web Services (AWS): Steps: 1. Create an S3 Bucket with desired configurations — this activity can be done manually or by automation with a CloudFormation Script via AWS Console/AWS CLI/AWS SDK 2. Create an SSL Certificate using AWS Certificate Manager for the Route53 domain name and add relevant CNAMEs as required 3. Create pipeline to deploy to S3 bucket — do note that this requires updating the bucket policy to allow access from your deployment tool 4. Create a CloudFront distribution — Shown below are the sample settings that can be done on the CloudFront distribution. You can also restrict access to your bucket only from a certain origin or country (Geo-Restriction) by updating CloudFront OAI settings 5. Deploy the application and enjoy the access Blue-Green Deployment: The Blue-Green Deployment when using AWS S3 to host static website can be done with the following steps. 1. Create a new bucket with the same configuration as existing bucket 2. Update the pipeline to deploy files to the new bucket 3. Create a new CloudFront distribution for the new static website set up 4. Test the application using CloudFront URLs 5. Point your DNS to new CloudFront URLs Pros: 1. AWS WAF can be attached to the CloudFront distribution to enhance security of the website 2. Granular control of objects in bucket can be achieved by updating bucket and object access policies 3. 99.999999999% durability across regions and 99.99% availability over a given year without the headache of maintaining infrastructure 4. Storage auto-scales and is available in abundance 5. Compared to traditional hosting, bandwidth is cheap 6. Leverages the Edge Location Caches by using CloudFront distributions, reducing the transfer costs associated with the access of files 7. Take advantage of object lifecycle policies to save cost 8. Meets regulatory and other compliance requirements — such as deploying files only in a certain region or performing cross region replication 9. Multiple encryption options are available to secure the bucket content such as SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C 10. Logs can be enabled on the bucket for monitoring and audit purposes 11. CloudFront and S3 allow you to configure the CORS settings, caching behavior, Caching rules, Redirection rules for each type of file Cons: 1. Blue-Green deployment requires creation of new S3 bucket and CloudFront distribution 2. If Route 53 or DNS is not used, then website name would be non-user friendly 3. For bigger file sizes, the cost of maintaining them on the bucket increases 4. There is no hosting package or service for static website. To know the approximate cost for S3 based static website, one has to make use of the AWS Total Cost Calculator Application 5. You might be required to add another CDN on top of CloudFront to reduce the costs further 6. Initial configuration of services is tricky. For example, to use existing domain name instead of static website domain name, you will have to set up redirection rules on the server or CDN to point to the end URLs 7. The bucket name has to be globally unique even though it is created under your account in a region High level Architecture of Enterprise Static Website hosting on AWS Microsoft Azure: Steps: 1. Create a Blob Storage container — first create a storage account and then create a container. This activity can be done manually or using Azure Resource Manager via Azure Portal/Powershell/Azure CLI/Azure SDK 2. Create an SSL Certificate using Azure App Service for the Route53 domain name and add relevant CNAMEs as required 3. Create pipeline to deploy to blob container — do note that this requires updating stored access policy to allow access to container from your deployment tool 4. Create an Azure CDN — You can also restrict to allow access to your container only from a certain origin or country (Geo-Filtering) by updating Azure CDN settings Blue-Green Deployment: The Blue-Green Deployment when using Azure Blob to host static website can be done as below. 1. Create a new container with same configuration as existing container 2. Update the pipeline to deploy files to the new container 3. Create a new Azure CDN for the new static website set up 4. Test the application using CDN URLs 5. Point your DNS to new CDN URLs Pros: 1. Caching behavior and caching rules can be controlled in Azure CDN 2. Azure WAF can be attached to Azure CDN to enhance security of the website 3. 99.99999999999999% durability and 99.99% availability with Geo Redundant Storage (GRS) enabled over a year without the headache of maintaining infrastructure 4. Storage auto-scales and is available in abundance 5. Compared to traditional hosting, bandwidth is cheap 6. Leverages the Azure CDN cache, reducing the transfer costs associated with the access of files 7. Take advantage of Object lifecycle management to save cost 8. Meets Regulatory & other Compliance requirements — such as deploying files only in a certain region or performing replication to other regions 9. Blob content can be encrypted by using Customer-Managed Keys or Microsoft-managed Keys 10. Logs can be enabled on the container for monitoring and audit purposes 11. Your storage account serves as unique namespace for the container Cons: 1. Blue-Green deployment requires creation of new container and CDN distribution 2. If DNS is not used, then website name would be non-user friendly 3. For bigger file sizes, the cost of maintaining them on the container increases 4. Azure Static Web Apps Service allows you to build and deploy full stack web apps but there is no hosting package or service for just static files. To know the approximate cost for blob storage based static website, one has to make use of the Azure Cost Calculator Application 5. You might be required to add another CDN on top of CloudFront to reduce the costs further 6. Initial configuration of services is tricky. For example, to use existing domain name instead of static website domain name, you will have to set up redirection rules on the server or CDN to point to the end URLs High level Architecture of Enterprise Static Website hosting on Microsoft Azure Conclusion: Below is a comparison table I have created of various aspects involved in deployment of static website using PCF, AWS and Azure. In terms of ease of deployment and ease of set-up, PCF fares better than AWS and Azure. However, AWS provides better access control and security, global reach, monitoring and compliance. Azure lies between PCF and AWS with respect to all the factors. In my personal experience, if you are willing to spend a little more, AWS is the best pick to host static websites. Which is your go-to place to host static websites? N.B: The information present in the above article is based on personal experiences & knowledge and in no way should be considered as an expert advice/opinion Appendix: Below are the abbreviations used in the article.

https://medium.com/dbs-tech-blog/adventures-in-deploying-static-website-on-cloud-759e56e1daf5

['Gunjan Joshi']

2021-07-23 12:06:36.560000+00:00

['AWS', 'Technology', 'Website Development', 'Cloud', 'Azure']

How to Choose a 21st Century Career

How to Choose a 21st Century Career Or: how to work with robots rather than against them How many times have you heard a sentence that started with the words “I wish I had…”? College graduates wish they had understood how the world works before they chose their majors (or, indeed, whether to attend university at all). Middle-aged men and women wish they had chosen this industry over that. Everybody has 20/20 hindsight, but peering into the future is a completely different animal. For my young readers, there is no better use of your time than to try to understand two things: Which industries will blossom in the coming decades Which skills will be required within those industries When trying to imagine the future today, the keyword is automation. You don’t want to be the guy training to drive a horse carriage the year before cars are invented. Once you start considering the implications of automation, your mind might swirl, and with good reason. But, is there an algorithm that can help us tackle this problem? The answer is yes. For example, let’s say your first thought is: I want to build websites for a living. That’s great. Now, will web development be automated soon? It already has been, to a great extent. There are plenty of ways to build a web store, presentation, or landing page without writing a line of code. So, what opportunities will arise from that? If you learn to use a good website building tool better than most people, you can excel and get a lot of projects done quickly. Add to that some coding skills and some design knowledge, and you have yourself a decent career in the making. But, can you do better? Yes, you can, by focusing on what can’t be automated. For now, solving complex problems with code can’t be automated. A website builder can generate a web page, but it can’t generate, for example, a stock market analysis platform. Even if artificial intelligence grows so clever that it can code anything, it will still need to first understand what it is that the client wants to build. “Build a stock market analysis platform” is not a viable command for a machine. You need to provide exceedingly detailed project specifications before even the smartest robot can begin to comprehend what it needs to do. Even then, it’s not enough. If there is one thing experienced software developers know, it is this: no project spec is ever good enough. Every specification document needs to be discussed, revised, revamped, refactored and, sometimes, tossed out to be replaced with something that makes sense. So, where does that bring us in our career quest? Project management, creativity, and communication are more things that are difficult to automate and therefore have a future. But wait, the rabbit hole goes deeper. What if computer-brain interfaces become very advanced in the next couple of decades? This could spell the end of the middle-man. The moment thoughts can be translated into code is the moment that programming dies. The good news is, I highly doubt that this will be a problem for your generation. If and when it does, it will open some amazing doors — new possibilities, new products, new ideas, and entirely new modes of living. Jobs will never disappear unless the economic need for people to work disappears.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/how-to-choose-a-21st-century-career-14062ab6a64

['Jovan Cicmil']

2020-09-17 12:12:54.047000+00:00

['Technology', 'Automation', 'Work', 'Business', 'Future']

Introducing CryptoTab: A Google Chrome Extension for Tracking Cryptocurrencies in Every New Tab

Introducing CryptoTab: A Google Chrome Extension for Tracking Cryptocurrencies in Every New Tab jordangonen Follow Sep 15, 2017 · 1 min read Image via https://www.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/bitcoin-chip-1.jpg With all the buzz around cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, Shiv and I thought it’d be a good idea to launch a simple web app / chrome extension to keep you informed about the top coins: It is super simple! Get the chrome extension here. We are also on Product Hunt: Thanks for the support!

https://medium.com/hackernoon/introducing-cryptotab-11c2231723eb

[]

2017-09-15 17:55:55.895000+00:00

['Chrome', 'Cryptocurrencies', 'Google Chrome', 'Cryptotab', 'Technology']

You Want to Design an App for That, But Should You?

Below we will dive into each of these buckets further to identify how they can help you determine what kind of app (if any) you need. Who are my users? While this may seem obvious, it is the most common step I see missed in the software design process. To truly understand who your users are, I recommend you break this task down into two main buckets: segmentation and engagement If you are an impact organization, your customers may be very diverse with unique needs and in fact, you may target those especially diverse or niche needs specifically. As you consider the questions above, I recommend you start with why customers engage with your organization specifically and that will lead you to what attributes your customers share. If you are an impact organization, your customers may be very diverse with unique needs and in fact, you are ready to move on to understanding what tech solutions your organization can provide. What are my organization’s strengths and capacity? While customers may be asking you daily why you don’t have an app, understanding what your organization can actually manage and support is just as important as understanding what your customers want. Some key considerations here are: Is an app consistent with your brand and the experience you want to generate for customers? Does your organization have the technical know-how to support an app? Does your organization have the capacity to provide customer support for the app? Who will your customers call when they need help? Can your organization afford an app? Let’s look at these considerations in detail: Is an app consistent with your brand and the experience you want to generate for customers? Brand image is a critical asset for any organization and can quickly be eroded by a negative experience. While apps can make engagement easy and convenient, they can also feel impersonal and reduce the opportunities you have to provide excellent customer service. Think about if you are making a major investment and purchasing a complex piece of equipment. While an app may let customers browse at their convenience, it would be very difficult to replace a helpful, knowledgeable, and available sales representative. Any new technology you decide to release to consumers must be consistent with the experience you want to create for customers. 2. Does your organization have the technical know-how to support an app? One common thread I have heard when implementing technical solutions, is an assumption that they can hire contractors or get volunteers to technically support the app. Unfortunately, apps require frequent management and updates, and inconsistent people working on coding or updates can lead to increased issues and a Jenga tower of code. I have specifically seen this with impact organizations who engage volunteers on a project basis to manage the app, but when the volunteer leaves, so does the knowledge. Even if you will not want to add functionality to your app, there will still need to be updates as phone operating systems, security standards, and other connected technologies evolve. Your organization will need to be able to clearly articulate the structure, code locations, logins, etc. as you onboard anyone new to the app, and a contractor who leaves may not provide you the necessary documentation. Even if you do not have a highly technical coding level expert, you will, at a minimum, need someone who can onboard each new person working on the app, which requires time and technical capacity. 3. Does your organization have the capacity to provide customer support for the app? Who will your customers call when they need help? The other common fallacy I have heard surrounding app launches is the mentality that once it is launched, the workload on the organization will decrease and will not require ongoing attention. Aside from the continued technical support discussed above, you will also need resources for customers who are struggling with the app. Even a well-designed app that is intuitive for users will still generate login issues, download or update questions, and, depending on the functionality of the app, even more issues such as refunds for transactions that did not process correctly, questions about security or hacked accounts, and more. Your organization will need to have a plan in place for how to support these users, clear communication to users on how to reach you, as well as sufficient manpower to address them. Image source: Unsplash 4. Can your organization afford an app? The final false belief I hear commonly is that they went online and found a site where they can develop an app for around $200. If you do a quick google search on “cost to develop an app” you will see figures ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 or even $1,000,000. This is very dependent on the type of app you want, who you want to build it, and what quality you expect. Here is the honest truth… building a good app takes time. Not just time to write the code, but also time to understand the requirements, develop an approach, create the architecture, perform testing, fix any issues, document the design, and more. These are all just the basic element of launching any app. This does not include if you want users to login (or even more expensive, login through a shared service like Facebook), connections to payment systems, an excellent and clean user experience, or geolocation. Someone will need to document and design every page a user could land on within your app. In addition to the basic cost of just building the app, there are also extra costs like adding the app to the app store, integrations, and data storage. In order to add an app to the app store, someone in the organization (or perhaps the contractor creating the app) will need access to the app store, with a yearly license at $100 for just the Apple App store. Integrations are the other piece which can exponentially drive costs up. While you may not think you need any integrations, think about any system from which you need to pull data (checking order status, getting a user’s history of logins or purchases, locations of stores), as well as any system to which you need to add data (someone places an order, provides feedback, accepts a request). All of these will require some method to communicate this data to or from the app and will cost extra. Finally, any information you want users to be able to access in the app will need to be stored somewhere. Think about a simple app that retrieves your order status. That app will need to know who the user is, connect that to some system that has information about what they ordered, and where it is in the process. All that data has to live somewhere that the app can access, such as Google, Amazon Webservices, or Salesforce. While this may all seem like a “Debbie Downer” perspective, being able to manage and support an app once it is launched is even more critical than getting it initially set up. I have seen many projects fail because they didn’t think about the maintenance and could not support the app long-term. Considering these factors early will set your organization and your app up for success. What is my organization’s true need? Alright, so you’ve worked through the above. Your customer segments would love an app and can use one. Your organization can support an app through their brand, technical and support capacities, and financially. Now what? My final question is .. do you truly need a custom app to meet this need? There are absolutely some strong benefits to building a custom app, such as that it can meet your users needs exactly without extra functions and the app can be branded beautifully to meet your customer expectations. However, there are other options to consider before building a custom app. The first is purchasing an existing app and adapting it to your use. In an outside IT context, think of this as buying a pre-built house and remodeling or going with a builder model and customizing everything down to the color floors. With a pre-built you know the structure is solid, the general design is good, and most importantly, you are relying on the expertise that comes from building thousands of homes. In the app context, think about if you were a restaurant and wanted to create your own app so customers could order delivery. While there are some perks to this, it would likely make more sense to partner with an organization which already has an app, such as GrubHub or Doordash. Sure, you lose some flexibility and profit, but if something breaks, you aren’t on the hook either. In general, purchasing an existing app takes much of the burden off of the organization in terms of enhancements, maintaining the security standards, and designing an app from scratch.

https://medium.com/ross-impact-studio/you-want-to-design-an-app-for-that-but-should-you-26756414cba7

['Glenn Bugala']

2020-12-21 22:05:06.118000+00:00

['Isteaching', 'Technology', 'Design Thinking', 'App Development', 'Isinsights']

Leaders Series: Maja Vujinovic @ General Electric

Leaders Series: Maja Vujinovic @ General Electric Issue 24— March 28th, 2017 This series highlights the unique stories of leaders from various communities across the growing digital currency and blockchain technology industry. The goal is to showcase the fantastic work these leaders are all doing at different levels of their respective organizations, and to encourage more people at all stages of their careers join the revolution we’re creating, together! Maja Vujinovic is working on Emerging Technologies at GE — Digital She’s been working in infrastructure finance and strategy for the past 15 years, and has been focused on blockchain technology for the last four years. How did you get into the bitcoin and blockchain industry? While working with mobile technology and payments in Africa and Latin America, I was exposed to the white paper in Bitcoin, which peaked my interest and I saw tremendous market opportunity in this space. Once I moved back to NYC after working in several different countries for a number of years, I was recruited into the network of leading investors and researchers in blockchain space and have been involved ever since. I currently lead our blockchain development and piloting across GE, within my broader role of looking at new technologies such as AI, VR, AR, 3D printing, etc. My main focus is to drive productivity and increase efficiency across our businesses. What did you do before you got into this? After getting my law degree, I started in mobile tech in Africa and then moved into infrastructure finance and project development globally. I lived and operated across 5 continents before coming to New York. What’s been the most interesting experience you’ve had in your role so far? One of the interesting experiences has been something that I came across in frontier markets in mid 2000’s- when a revolutionary idea comes to the market, an initial reaction is for people to reject it, as it signals change. However, just because people are not “used to it” and its never been done before, doesn’t mean it can’t work. More importantly what is interesting to see and necessary to have, is a strong leap of faith, courage and an ability to bring people with you on the journey. As you think about the evolution of the bitcoin and blockchain space, what is one thing you think the business ecosystem or community is missing today? What is missing is security and human imagination, the two far ends of the spectrum. We seem to try to stick “blockchain” into any problem that we may have, but the reality is that this is a different type of thinking that requires us to marry creativity with technology and strategy. We almost have to start backwards- imagining another way of operating and simply letting go of the old ways. What do you think is limiting the growth of the space? People simply do not understand it. I don’t mean they do not have capability to but they simply do not have the time. We are all so bogged down by our daily work that even the most creative people are tangled in processes and “making the quarter” that they can’t unleash their creativity. But I am working on this change together with my colleagues. As you think about this industry, what do you think will happen in the short term that will blow people’s minds? I think that by 2020 we will see some successful transactions/commercial use cases globally. Because of possible implications of blockchain and the speed that it will provide to our transactions, if we are not hindered politically in the next five years, what will become very surprising and provide some anxiety is the speed of change and what’s required to keep up. That’s why my focus will be on the interoperability of various technologies, automation and the adoption rate that humans are able to do or not do. What do you think will be disappointing? If we try to adopt any new technology without adapting to the new ways of thinking and working that are required to use the technology in our benefit and use it well. This is scary as many fear losing jobs- but this is where leaders have to step in and re-imagine the workplace, re-train the workforce and re-position growth. What changes do you think bitcoin or blockchain will accelerate in our world? It will accelerate the way we transact and the way we learn with our customers. This will have a direct effect on what goods and services we provide, how fast we are able to bring it to market and where and how do we scale it. Additionally, I am fascinated with AI functioning on something like Blockchain and the repercussions of AI owning itself, which is the whole different topic.

https://medium.com/the-future-collective/women-in-blockchain-maja-vujinovic-general-electric-397b4ecc42e3

['Meltem Demirors']

2018-02-20 14:24:57.958000+00:00

['Bitcoin', 'Technology', 'Women', 'Blockchain']

Why AI won’t take all of our jobs

History shows that human ingenuity will generate new industries One of the growing concerns of the 21st century is that artificial intelligence will take over jobs. AI has become one of the most hotly debated subjects. People are talking about it on all ends of the spectrum: from AI having limitless potential, to it bringing the complete destruction of mankind. Many people are under the assumption that it is inevitable that AI will take over all jobs, causing a massive unemployment crisis across the world. But AI replacing jobs is just another phase in the evolution of mankind and is no different than the many revolutions in labour we have faced in the past. The industrial revolution and the information revolution were both deeply transformative and unsettling. During the industrial revolution, many believed that technological innovations would displace many people’s jobs. They were absolutely right, jobs were replaced. Goods and people were transported by train rather than by animal. Cars replaced horses, and more people started travelling by air than by water. Although jobs were replaced, a new set of jobs was discovered. There was more demand for train conductors, pilots and engineers that knew how to deal with new equipment and technology. Mechanical engineers are the ones that work in many of these newly-created fields, and it’s now one of the most in demand engineering disciplines in the labour force. Without the industrial revolution, some of the fields such as auto and aerospace wouldn’t be as successful today. Again, during the information revolution, people were afraid that computers, data management programs and software would replace jobs. And again, we can see the same pattern. Some jobs have been lost, but they have been replaced often manyfold by other careers. Many of the world’s richest people have made their money from technology companies that capitalized off the development of computers and the Internet. Not only that, the Internet has produced many more jobs that wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago. Jobs in fields such as software engineering, computer science, app development, drone technology, Internet content, marketing and more. The rise of the robots is now being termed the “robotic revolution” by many. It is now considered a given that autonomous vehicles will eventually replace many taxis and truck drivers. But because of the robotic revolution, there will be new jobs and fields that haven’t been discovered yet. Eventually, professional institutions will offer robotic engineering as part of their engineering programs to teach a new generation on how to be employed in this new era. Because of the many technological innovations mankind has made in the last two centuries, it’s hard to believe that the robotic revolution can cause massive unemployment. H istory has proven time and time again that human inventiveness continues to triumph. However, we shouldn’t always assume that a past technological shift is directly comparable to a future technological shift. That being said, mankind has always found a way to find new jobs once the old jobs have gone. Many people say: “this time it’s different”. And yes, there is a slight possibility that this revolution is an outlier compared to the others and is the end of jobs. We’ll just have to wait and see.

https://medium.com/lassondeschool/why-ai-wont-take-all-of-our-jobs-bb77b7340d8a

['Fawaz Khan']

2018-04-11 15:44:21.811000+00:00

['Robotics', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Automation', 'Technology', 'Industrial Revolution']

How Digital Transformation is driving Disruption in Wealth Re-Distribution

I spent yesterday evening talking to my friend and leading wealth coach in Nigeria, Abiola Adekoya on her maiden edition of Disruptors with Abiola Adekoya, an IG LIVE series focused on Disruptors, Industry Trends, Wealth Creation and how to navigate the 21st century with all it’s quirks and kinks. Our topic was How Digital Transformation is driving Disruption in Wealth Re-distribution and if I do say so myself it was an hour and half packed with lots of insights, opportunities, industry trends and information that will help CEOs, Entrepreneurs and Investors navigate the current situation. COVID-19 and the current global economic crisis has forced us to test our readiness for the 4IR (4th Industrial Revolution) and reshape our habits as individuals and businesses. Here are some of the key takeaways that we covered during the LIVE session: 1. Consumer Behaviour is Changing There is a massive shift happening globally as consumers are changing their habits during COVID-19. Some of these behavioural changes are: People connecting with friends and loved ones across the globe on the Houseparty app, having virtual dinner parties or company TGIF sessions and engaging in fun games and banter. Children attending class online and parents being more involved in class activities People taking part in virtual exercise and dance classes, DJ sessions and live cooking activities using LIVE. Thought leaders and subject matter experts using digital video streaming apps and webinars to engage People working from home at scale — this is not something we are used to in this part of the world and as employers and employees forcefully navigate the WFH (Working from Home) culture, this may be something many Nigerian employers adopt going forward, especially if infrastructure challenges are solved. People becoming content creators on platforms like Tiktok — we will surely see the next wave of tween content creator millionaires post COVID-19. People getting used to having meetings via video conference calls, this may become the new normal — especially in cities like Lagos where 1 meeting can take 4 hours out of your day due to the heavy traffic. My guess is post COVID-19 we will see a significant reduction in pointless face-to-face meetings and will use technology to be more efficient in client interactions. These new habits and experiences will lead to changes in consumer behaviour and increase the demand for businesses, educational institutions and Governments to deliver their services virtually. They will also lead to more computing power and bandwidth being needed as more and more businesses move their operations into the cloud to further enable remote work. We will begin to see a rise in VR (Virtual Reality) Experiences, e-sports and other immersive experiences. I also think that the pandemic will lead to global digital literacy rates going up as more and more people come online in order to ensure that they are up to date and able to connect with their loved ones. 2. There are BIG Winners despite COVID-19 A lot of businesses are closing down, letting employees go or paying 50% salaries to staff as they struggle to stay alive, however there are some clear winners that have emerged on a global scale: Big winners are online supermarkets and groceries delivery services. UK Online supermarket Ocado had a virtual queue of over 400K people. Walmart hired over 150,000 casual staff to ensure that they could meet demand. They saw daily surges of demand that exceeded over 160% UK Online supermarket Ocado had a virtual queue of over 400K people. Walmart hired over 150,000 casual staff to ensure that they could meet demand. They saw daily surges of demand that exceeded over 160% Other big winners are streaming services . With the increasing demand for digital content, an analysis published by Forbes has shown that streaming has jumped by at least 12%. Streaming services like Netflix, Youtube and Amazon have also had to reduce streaming quality from HD to standard to reduce the bandwidth being used. While the pandemic is at its all-time high, Disney+ services just launched in most European countries. . With the increasing demand for digital content, an analysis published by Forbes has shown that streaming has jumped by at least 12%. Streaming services like Netflix, Youtube and Amazon have also had to reduce streaming quality from HD to standard to reduce the bandwidth being used. While the pandemic is at its all-time high, Disney+ services just launched in most European countries. Collaboration Cloud Services are another clear winner with millions of people around the world working from home collaboration tools and file sharing has become more important. A report by Reuters suggests that Microsoft Teams has had a 500% increased usage in China since the end of January; Zoho is jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of Zoho Remotely, a suite of web and mobile apps to help teams collaborate remotely. are another clear winner with millions of people around the world working from home collaboration tools and file sharing has become more important. A report by Reuters suggests that Microsoft Teams has had a 500% increased usage in China since the end of January; Zoho is jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of Zoho Remotely, a suite of web and mobile apps to help teams collaborate remotely. Video Conferencing & Chats are closely related to collaboration cloud services as video conferencing and chat usage has skyrocketed as work teams, families, friends and colleagues use it to connect. A report on Tech Crunch shows that between March 14–24, WhatsApp had a 40% increase in usage; Reuters reports that since early January, Zoom’s daily active user base has increased by 67%. These are businesses that will continue to deliver value as we plunge into a global post COVID recession. 3. There are great Opportunities for Investors As a Wealth Coach Abiola is always thinking about investment opportunities and prior to this session we had long conversations about opportunities in the global markets and I kept saying….TECH TECH TECH….and I think I have convinced her to jump on my bandwagon…here are my top technology stocks and reasons why I think they will do well….please note that I am in NO way qualified to give any investment advice. This analysis is simply based on my predictions of a post COVID world: Disney — You may think of Disney as a traditional brand, but they spent the last decade rapidly investing in Digital and are the poster child for Digital Transformation — you can read The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger to gain more insights on why I say so. They also recently launched Disney+ across Europe and the UK and have seen a surge of new subscribers. I think they will continue to invest in their Digital and win big post COVID. AMD & Intel — As the demand for computing capacity increases and we see more and more demand for cloud and quantum computing chip makers will become more and more relevant and both AMD and Intel have invested heavily in the next generation of chips. They also have solid balance sheets and I think we will see them win big in the post COVID era. Netflix — streaming in general has jumped up by 12% globally and people who have never done Netflix and chill are suddenly online. I think this will be a stock that will remain stable throughout the crisis and beyond, however it may be close to it’s max. Zoom — Everyone is doing meetings on Zoom all of a sudden and all my non-techie friends are talking about it like it’s some new tool 😂😂😂 and I am more than delighted because this means it will be easier to get clients to do Zooms post COVID. Zoom has also gained 67% new subscribers daily since the start of the pandemic and keeps growing. Rationale behind the success of this stock is same as for Netflix. But apart from stocks there are many many other ways to invest in technology — Angel investing is one of them. There are many awesome Angel investing networks in Nigeria and across the continent. I belong to Rising Tide Africa — a women only Angel Investment network. Abiola said it so well when she said — take risks and invest early to make sure that you stand the chance to gain big as well. I think angel investors should focus on local companies that are building platforms that enable remote work, elearning, streaming etc., as well as in companies that create the content that will be consumed. Another big area to invest in is the talent pipeline and here is why: Post COVID-19 many companies in Nigeria and globally will accelerate their Digital Transformation and will be looking to automate processes, build e-commerce platforms and digital channels to deliver their services, as well as integrate AI, VR, AR and big data into their service delivery platforms and solutions. Innovation, disruption and Digital Transformation will win this fight in the long term and this means that we will need lots of technology talent — devs, product managers, data scientists etc. to build solutions that will help businesses and Governments dig themselves out of the post pandemic inevitable recession. Areas that need to be invested in in order to leapfrog our talent pipeline are: Learning resources and platforms: Virtual reality for example offers a huge potential to teach practical skills without heavy investment in infrastructure / labs or equipment, however VR developers are very very rare. Virtual reality for example offers a huge potential to teach practical skills without heavy investment in infrastructure / labs or equipment, however VR developers are very very rare. Training schools: also need support as most learners cannot afford the fees which means that we are seeing less and less talent being churned out. Funding mechanisms are key and these can reach from student loan initiatives to corporate funds that help sustain the pipeline. Post COVID we will all need to come to the table to ask ourselves how we will build our human capital, so that it in turn can build our nation and continent. 4. Business Owners & C-level executives need to think about Digital Transformation For businesses that are struggling to stay alive my advice is: Don’t give up! You can and will make it through this. My client and friend Ayodele Olajiga wrote a great article with some useful tips on having the right mindset to get through this. You can and will make it through this. My client and friend Ayodele Olajiga wrote a great article with some useful tips on having the right mindset to get through this. Assess your runway: Understand how long your reserves can carry you if you do not earn anything and figure out what that means for your team. Understand how long your reserves can carry you if you do not earn anything and figure out what that means for your team. Rethink your business strategies and if you haven’t thought about the role Digital plays in your business, now is the time. I urge business owners to use the time they have now to reflect deeply and to learn as much as possible about taking their businesses on a Digital Transformation journey — a great book I can recommend is The Digital Transformation Playbook by David L. Rogers. This is the time to strategise and plan your comeback post COVID-19, keeping in mind that we will plunge right into a recession. and if you haven’t thought about the role Digital plays in your business, now is the time. I urge business owners to use the time they have now to reflect deeply and to learn as much as possible about taking their businesses on a Digital Transformation journey — a great book I can recommend is The Digital Transformation Playbook by David L. Rogers. This is the time to strategise and plan your comeback post COVID-19, keeping in mind that we will plunge right into a recession. Invest in Data — it’s the new oil: Start thinking about how you can use data to make better decisions. What are the tools you need to collect data, what are the tools to interpret it and how do you use it to make data driven decisions? Regardless of what sector you are in or who your target demographic is there are always ways to collect the right data, interpret it and use it to optimise your business. — it’s the new oil: Start thinking about how you can use data to make better decisions. What are the tools you need to collect data, what are the tools to interpret it and how do you use it to make data driven decisions? Regardless of what sector you are in or who your target demographic is there are always ways to collect the right data, interpret it and use it to optimise your business. Build your Brand Equity: Apart from planning your Digital Transformation journey this is the time to actively invest in building brand equity by investing in CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives that you can amplify online and by investing in your digital content, knowledge sharing & content marketing. If you need help thinking through Digital Transformation or how to use Digital to build your brand equity — let me know — my team at Futuresoft helps businesses think through their Digital Transformation journeys and guides them with regards to strategy development as well as execution. We are also currently working on a series of training courses for board members and CEOs on Digital Transformation Strategies and how to deploy Digital as a resilience strategy so watch this space! My amazing Digital Marketing Team can also help you think through building your brand using Digital.

https://medium.com/inside-futuresoft/how-digital-transformation-is-driving-disruption-in-wealth-re-distribution-2149fabd58f1

['Nkemdilim Uwaje Begho']

2020-04-02 10:21:06.223000+00:00

['Technology', 'Wealth', 'Disruption', 'Digital Transformation', 'Digital Marketing']

Dyson Lightcycle Morph Review — An Enlightening Life Changer But Is It Seriously Worth Your Money?

Dyson Lightcycle Morph Review — An Enlightening Life Changer But Is It Seriously Worth Your Money? | Hitech Century Kevin Tan Just now·11 min read We’ve gotten our hands on the Dyson Lightcycle Morph that has just arrived in Malaysia for testing to see if an LED lamp that costs as much as an upper-tier smartphone is worth the money. Here’s our Dyson Lightcycle Morph review after putting it through its paces. What is the Dyson Lightcycle Morph task light? To recap, the Dyson Lightcycle Morph is the second generation smart LED lamp that made its global debut last year in Europe and the US. It has just been launched in Malaysia several weeks ago at the time of this writing and we jumped at the chance to field test their latest offering. Its predecessor, the first Dyson Lightcycle was launched earlier in 2019 and arrived in the same year on our shores. The older Lightcycle and the newer Lightcycle Morph are functionally similar in terms of the quality and customisability of their LED lighting but the newer Lightcycle Morph improves things with a more sophisticated 3-point revolve mechanism that lets you maneuver the light fixture around for more precise angling of the light beam and the option to use it in a host of different ways that include employing it as as ambient or indirect lighting. It also has a unique feature where you can shunt the light beam into its stand, which has hundreds of tiny perforations to use it a soft ambient light with an appearance that’s a cross between a lava lamp and a lightsaber. To offer direct illumination, the Lightcycle Morph incorporates six LEDs, three of them cool white and three of them warm yellow with the collective ability to serve up to 850 lumens of brightness using 11.5W with a Colour Rendering Index (CRI) of at least 90/100. On average, 450 lumens are needed for a typical desk lamp tasked for reading and writing duties while precision tasks that require intricate work and more focus like building a model or fine needle work will need on average a much higher 800 to 1,000 lumens of brightness. For the uninitiated, CRI is an indicator of how faithfully a light source is able to show colours that are true to life in comparison to natural daylight. If you’re a traditional content creator like a painter, graphic artist or modeler working indoors, this is considered essential and with a CRI of 90/100, the Lightcycle Morph is able to illuminate colours close to what you see under natural sunlight. For the average user who just needs enough light indoors so they read a newspaper or to stop them from stubbing a toe in the dark, this sounds like an insane amount of overengineering for a desk lamp but as with all things Dyson, there’s a reason for all this and the Lightcycle Morph has been built to last a lifetime. Officially speaking, Dyson has rated the Lightcycle Morph to be able to last for over 60 years of usage which is astronomical by any measure of the word. Unboxing the Dyson Lightcycle Morph Getting the light out of the box is a relatively straightforward task. Our Dyson Lightcycle Morph review sample is the desktop version which means it has a shorter stand. The floor standing version has a stand that stretches all the way up from the base all the way to about waist height while maintaining the same micro perforations all along its length for the Morph’s unique ambient lighting mode. Functionally speaking, both the floor and desktop versions emit the same light intensity and quality so you’re primarily paying for the increased length of the light emitting stand. The flexible 3-point revolve mechanism for both models are identical. The various components all arrive nestled in cardboard trays and assembling it isn’t very hard though the base is heavy which you’ll have to hold up one-handed halfway through assembly. You essentially pop the light and stand which is one complete piece into the base, add in an additional plastic piece to lock the stand into place and then finally plug it in. The plug point terminates in a UK-style 3-pin plug and sidles under the stand through a neat cutout to hook up directly underneath the light stand itself. Beyond these components, there aren’t any other optional bits and bobs in the box beyond the obligatory user and quick start manuals. Dyson Lightcycle Morph Review — Specifications The Dyson Lightcycle Morph comes with the following official specifications and prices for Malaysia. Bar the difference in height between the floor-standing and desktop versions, there are no other subvariants of the Lightcycle Morph. Dyson Lightcycle Morph design and setup — Most enlightening Our review unit comes in a stylish shade of matte black though you can optionally get it in white as well. The finish itself is fingerprint resistant which is a blessing as you’ll likely be moving the light armature itself quite a bit as you use it throughout the day. To date, it’s taken Dyson close to 5 years and needed 90 engineers to create it and it shows in the intricacy and robustness of its design. The base itself is weighted and rather heavy at over 3kg; necessary as it acts as a counterweight for the whole light stand assembly. Attached to the base is the ambient light stand itself which has hundreds of tiny holes — all 16,740 of them to emit a soft ambient light once you dock in the armature to the stand. Interestingly enough, the base of the light stand has a USB-C port with 1.5A charging that lets you slow-charge a phone or laptop. It’s a thoughtful feature to have though USB-C to USB-C charging cables aren’t common yet except on super flagship phones like the Galaxy S21 series. Having a USB-A port and wireless charging would have been fantastic but it doesn’t really affect its raison d’etre. The 3-point revolve mechanism itself is arguably the most well crafted aspect of the Morph that consists of two 34cm long-interconnected pieces that let you rotate the whole affair almost 360-degree radius around the stand itself. The tip of the mechanism itself houses the LED lights along with a series of touch sensitive controls. You can also rotate the light end aka the ‘Intelligent Optical Head’ as Dyson calls it almost 360-degrees as well so you can aim it straight up to the ceiling if you deign to do so. What really makes this a marvel of engineering is that the entire mechanism is so smooth and so well balanced that you can maneuver it around with just one finger. In order to ensure that the LED’s last over six decades, Dyson has integrated a unique copper heat pipe into the mechanism that shunts heat away from the LED lights and ensures it continues working at top efficiency over its lifespan. Two touch sensitive sliders at the top let you control the intensity and the warmth of the light from a deep yellow akin to sunset that won’t affect your night vision to an intense, cold white light akin to broad daylight for precision work. The underside also hosts a series of sensors that toggle three important modes. The first is a ‘daylight resync’ button that lets you automatically change the light intensity and brightness based on where you are located on the planet and time of day. The second button activates a motion sensor that turns the light off if it doesn’t detect motion for five minutes to save on power. Last but not least is an ‘auto brightness’ button that adjusts light output constantly so that if background light suddenly changes, the light output is adjusted so that it remains at a constant level. Assembly aside, the toughest part to setting it up is perhaps pairing it with the Dyson Link app though in actual fact, it’s a relatively fast process. Once you set up an account with Dyson, you then input the location where you’ll be using the Lightcycle Morph, select a few simple settings and you’re done. Dyson Lightcycle Morph Malaysia: Performance — Let there be light! Since the pandemic hit, I’ve been primarily working from home, repurposing an unused store room as a home office. Needless to say, the situation isn’t perfect and I’ve kludged together a modest setup with a laptop, a study desk with an accompanying chair and an old LED reading lamp. There isn’t much natural light where my desk is located and even in the daytime, things can get pretty dim as the nearest window doesn’t even get direct sunlight except in the evening. After sundown, the lamp becomes a necessity for visibility as there’s no overhead lighting at all. I deployed the Lightcycle Morph into this mess on my desk and over the course of a week, I noticed subtle but tangible improvements in my workflow. After two weeks, it proved its worth. One of the interesting questions that the Dyson Link app asks you is your age on setup. This is on account of an interesting fact — the older you are, the more light you need. According to Dyson, a 60 year old needs 4 times more light to see versus a 20 year old. The app is able to tell the Lightcycle Morph just how much light a user needs and in my case, I apparently didn’t have enough in my workspace and where I previously needed to squint with my dinky old lamp, the Lightcycle Morph was able to cast out an even flicker-free glow that made reading text both in hardcopy and onscreen a more relaxed experience. The ability to angle the light fixture in any direction and also alter the intensity and colour of the lighting on demand made for a real game changer. There’s no flickering and the light even on the weakest settings is still bright enough to read and work by as a reading lamp which is its primary function. With the ability to angle the light fixture any way I saw fit, I tested it by angling it upwards to the wall as ambient lighting and it worked marvelously, brightening up the room with an even light. The ambient mode where you dock the light into the stand itself makes it emit a softer glow throughout the length of the stand without messing with my night vision as it filters out blue light, making it ideally suited as a night light. Where the Lightcycle Morph earns its eco-friendly credentials is the fact that it’s not only Energy star compliant, it is also able to intelligently turn itself off if it doesn’t sense motion for five minutes. Granted, it does happen when we’re fixated on reading a page or two of text when it inadvertently shuts off but a simple wave of the hand turns it back on. More importantly, this feature eliminates wastefulness especially if I forgot to turn it off when leaving the room. Over the course of my Lightcycle Morph review, I found that its myriad features offered subtle quality of life improvements, gradually becoming the cornerstone of my home office setup which is somewhat poetic from a certain perspective seeing as light, or rather good quality lighting ought to be the cornerstone of any effective work setting. While I didn’t quite appreciate it at first, thinking it as ostentatious frippery, I gradually found that its ability to deliver customisable lighting with the ability to swap colour warmth and intensity on the fly as well as its exceptionally flexible armature grew on me across the two plus weeks I was testing it. Over time, my old desk lamp which had watched over me hammering out hundreds of pages of text since the MCO hit lies forlorn in a corner, the inevitable technological detritus of superior technology like how a shiny modern Tesla supplants a horse-drawn wagon. Dyson Lightcycle Morph review — Is it worth buying? As far as performance is concerned, the Dyson Lightcycle Morph does what it sets out to do — delivering superior, consistent light that is customised for your age and current geographic location. It won’t immediately improve your productivity overnight but its subtle array of quality of life improvements will contribute to it over time. Of course, that still leaves the biggest problem — it’s price tag. The Dyson Lightcycle Morph costs quite a bit more than the average LED desk lamp with the desk version costing RM2,499 while the floor standing version clocks in at a substantial RM2,999. To date, this is so far one of the most expensive LED lamps in the market. To put things into perspective, the average LED desk lamp on Shopee costs about RM150 or so with the cheapest costing about RM30 or so, coming in different form factors, light intensities and build quality. The price seems to be a flying Godzilla kick to the wallet, but the fact remains that the Lightcycle Morph doesn’t cost that much if you take a long term perspective as its cooling system means that it will continue working for 60 years. If you divide the cost over the years, you’re literally paying cents per day — 0.11MYR to be exact — for bright, quality lighting for most of your life. The Dyson Lightcycle Morph is indubitably an innovative and premium lighting solution that breaks new ground that no other brand has attempted before. It’s not for everyone but for those who appreciate and need quality lighting — all the more so seeing the fact that we’re mostly working from home these days — it’s less of an expense and more of an investment. If you are looking to upgrade your home office to the next level and invest in the quality of your lighting , the Dyson Lightcycle Morph is the definitive choice. Dyson Lightcycle Morph review unit courtesy of Dyson Malaysia. Available for purchase online at all Dyson experience stores nationwide and online at the official Dyson online store at https://www.dyson.my/dyson-lightcycle-morph-desk-light-white-silver Dyson Lightcycle Morph

https://medium.com/@tan.kevin/dyson-lightcycle-morph-review-an-enlightening-life-changer-but-is-it-seriously-worth-your-money-81cc95fd83bc

['Kevin Tan']

2021-09-13 07:42:21.179000+00:00

['Lighting', 'Reviews In English', 'Technology', 'Work From Home', 'Dyson']

The US Postal Services and Blockchain

The US Postal Services and Blockchain By NOWPayments on The Capital There is almost no area left that has not been affected somehow by blockchain technology. Almost every industry is harnessing the potential of blockchain and cryptocurrency to kickstart things so that they move beyond digital. Possibly anything and everything can be secured with the blockchain. From finance to the business industry, there is a lot that is currently dependent on blockchain for so many things. Each day innovations are being brought into the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain. Digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin are being used for making digital transactions everywhere. Recently, we have come across some interesting facts about the United States Postal Services, introducing a secured voting system with the help of blockchain. So, let’s discover what it entails for the government and the US citizens. Read this article in the NOWPayments blog!

https://medium.com/the-capital/the-us-postal-services-and-blockchain-c47f48e38499

[]

2020-09-04 12:13:37.809000+00:00

['Postal Service', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Technology']

TechNY Daily

TechNY Daily Keeping the NYC Tech Industry Informed and Connected 1. NYC’s Kustomer, a CRM platform, is being acquired by Facebook. The purchase price is reportedly $1 billion. Kustomer has raised a total of $174 million from investors including Coatue, NYC’s Tiger Global Management, Redpoint, Canaan Partners, Social Leverage, Battery Ventures and Cisco Investments. (www.kustomer.com) (New York Times) 2. NYC’s Loadsmart, a digital platform for freight shippers, has raised $90 million in a Series C funding. BlackRock and Chromo Invest co-led the round and were joined by TFI International, Maersk, Perry Capital and Bramalea Partners. The company’s platform uses AI to analyze hundreds of data sources to automate truckload booking with a goal of maximizing efficiency. (www.loadsmart.com) (TechCrunch) 3. NYC’s Obligo, a platform which enables tenants to rent apartments without a security deposit, has raised $15.5 million in a Series A round. Investors included 83North, 10D, Entrée Capital, and Viola Credit. Obligo’s platform, which was developed in collaboration with Silicon Valley Bank’s New York City FinTech team, is designed to replace the customary residential security deposit with a credit-based model. (www.myobligo.com) (Crowdfund Insider) 4. NYC’s Reposite, a software developer for the travel industry, has raised $2.5 million in a funding round. Liberty City Ventures led the round. The company’s platform provides tour operators and event planners with a central repository of travel vendor information and is working with large organizations such as Madison Square Garden, MoMA, Guggenheim Museum and American Museum of Natural History. (www.reposite.io) (Phocuswire) _________________________________________________________________ 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) _________________________________________________________________ 5. NYC’s Spring Health, a provider of personalized mental health solutions for employees, has raised $76 million in a Series B funding. NYC’s Tiger Global led the round and was joined by GingerBread Capital, Operator Partners, Northzone, Rethink Impact, William K. Warren Foundation, Work-Bench, SemperVirens, Able Partners and True Capital. The company’s platform matches each employee to the most effective care for them. (www.springhealth.com) (PR Newswire) 6. NYC’s Verbit, an AI-powered transcription and captioning platform, has raised $60 million in a Series C round. Sapphire Ventures led the round with participation from Vertex Ventures, Stripes, HV Ventures, ClalTech and Vertex Growth. Verbit’s platform uses machine learning and natural language processing to transcribe audio supported by a team of over 22,000 human freelancers in over 120 countries who then edit and review the material. (www.verbit.ai) VentureBeat) 7. Duolingo, an NYC and Pittsburgh-based language learning app, has raised $35 million in a Series H funding. The financing, made at a $2.4 billion valuation, was provided by Durable Capital and General Atlantic. Since 2019, Duolingo has ranked as the highest-grossing education app. (www.duolingo.com) (TechCrunch) 8. Jersey City’s Apprentice.io, an intelligent software platform for life sciences, has raised $24 million in a Series B funding. Insight Partners led the round and was joined by Pacific Western Bank, Pritzker Group, GFR Fund and The Venture Reality Fund. The company’s platform performs tasks such as accessing complex procedures, visualizing 3D demonstrations, and intelligently capturing or tracking data using computer vision. (www.apprentice.io) (AIThority) 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] 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 Lukka 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 Third Party Risk Manager or Director Sales Proposal Manager Great Jones Great Jones brings ease and performance to rental ownership and living, starting by reinventing property management for the several trillion (!) dollars in rental homes owned by small-scale investors. Director of Analytics 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 B2B2 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 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 Not a Subscriber to TechNY Daily, Click Here Copyright © 2020 TechNY, All rights reserved.

https://medium.com/@smallplanetapps/techny-daily-b354f2ff8f76

['Small Planet']

2020-12-02 21:18:10.286000+00:00

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

Hi, We Are AOT Technologies.

In the last year, we have experienced transformative growth — culminating in being named one of Canada’s fastest growing companies by Canadian Business Magazine and Maclean’s. With a new strategy focusing on intelligent integrated systems and predictive analytics, a growing team that is dedicated to our organizational success and a keen desire to keep evolving as a company, we are excited to see what comes next. It’s at this moment, as we stand on the threshold of a new chapter for AOT, that we feel the need to hit pause and reflect on the last 8 years. The story of AOT begins when our two co-founders, George and Praveen, decided to go out on a limb and start their own venture. Both had technical backgrounds, and recognized that they had a passion for building things — why not build something of their own? This desire, to own their fate, and a $15,000 loan is how AOT Technologies was born. As any entrepreneur can testify, it is a difficult, scary, and brave move to decide to go out on your own, with no safety net or assurances that everything will work out. Nevertheless, George and Praveen persevered. As they put it: In the early days, we took any work that came our way; we have met some of our most loyal clients this way. The beginning was challenging, but worth it. As we became more established, we started searching for people who aligned with us; driven, ambitious, and relentless in their pursuit of excellence. After outgrowing office after office, we have finally settled into our new home on Douglas Street, in the Sayward Building — just in time, too. In 2019, we welcomed twenty new employees, bringing our total head count to just over fifty. Recently, George and Praveen decided that our strategy will be shifting to focus on Integration and Analytics solutions. This is a time of metamorphosis for us, and we have recognized that we want to do some things differently as we evolve and grow from a “start-up” to a “stay-up.” For some time now, AOT has had a blog, but it has never been given the attention or the strategic focus that it needed. As we change our orientation as a company, we recognize that the blog similarly needs to change; our old content doesn’t resonate with who we are now. We are excited to reintroduce ourselves to the world and to speak about things that truly matter to us. Our new blog and website will be launched in the new year, but in the meantime, we will be keeping you in the loop via Medium. Why now? This is a question that has reverberated around our office many times over the last few months. Around our new conference table, we have discussed, explored and debated the age-old questions: “Who are we? What is our purpose? What will be our legacy?” As entrepreneurs, and specialists in the provision of digital solutions, we believe we can bring something to the market that doesn’t presently exist, particularly for firms in the $20 million to $1 billion range in revenue — the efficient translation of data into actionable management information that drives competitive advantage. So, hello world. We are AOT Technologies. Everything we do is based on trust, and we believe our actions enhance the lives of our people, the clients we serve and the world in which we live. We strive to bring real value to our clients by delivering excellence in every situation; no shortcuts, no excuses. This is who we are. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Let’s keep in touch.

https://medium.com/@aottech/hi-we-are-aot-technologies-dfc6fccb724

['Aot Technologies']

2019-11-14 21:47:32.884000+00:00

['Startup', 'Predictive Analytics', 'Technology', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Innovation']

Voyage of the DeFi universe: decentralized marketplaces

If you look at the DeFi ecosystem through a wider lens, you can see that decentralized finance projects are working and developing in roughly twelve directions. Attempting to shift to a decentralized form of almost everything related to the traditional financial system also means trying to move as quickly as possible to new types of interactions with financial instruments and decentralization of these interactions. This is the first article in a series, looking at promising projects in each of these areas, talking about the advantages and disadvantages of these projects, and reflecting on their prospects and opportunities. In today’s article, we will talk about the direction of decentralized finance development in the context of decentralized trading platforms (DeFi Marketplaces), where participants can conclude transactions directly through p2p networks. Decentralized markets According to a recent study by The Block, the DeFi ecosystem involves more than 160 start-ups and protocols working in all areas of decentralized finance. On the Ethereum platform in the Marketplaces segment, four solutions have been built and are currently running: Rare Bits, District0x, Origin, and OpenSea. Out of the total number of DeFi projects on Ethereum, marketplaces have only a 1.8% market share. Since there are more such projects outside Ethereum (according to defiprime.com, there are seven promising protocols and marketplace projects on the market), we will not limit ourselves to a single platform. We will touch upon independent solutions for p2p trading and decentralized markets. The absence of intermediaries and, as a result, relatively low prices make p2p markets attractive and more popular day by day. An ecosystem free of control from centralized structures is what the world of blockchain and smart contracts can offer. Despite the fact that the decentralized markets are still too young, the potential that lies within them is enormous. OpenBazaar OpenBazaar is one of the oldest decentralized online trading platforms, which was launched in April 2016, long before DeFi became popular. This platform is a free and open-source, decentralized social marketplace. The project gained its popularity thanks to the ability to pay for goods with cryptocurrencies. The developers have made a thoughtful and convenient interface, slightly reminiscent of eBay and Aliexpress. Trading on the platform is not regulated in any way; there are no commissions and restrictions on categories of goods. The trust between users is based on the classic mechanism depending on the reputation, which is calculated depending on the results of evaluations for completed transactions, carried out by various parameters. When making a purchase, depending on the goods, three payment options are offered: direct, moderated without dispute, moderated with the dispute. This approach expands the possibilities of rendering services, for example, when it is impossible to make payment directly due to personal funds’ security reasons. We could describe the platform’s possibilities, but it makes no sense because it is quite simple to try it out for yourself if you have an Internet connection and at least a few satoshis. Cryptocurrencies are valuable because they can be spent on goods and services, and the more common the trade is, the higher their value. District0x District0x is a decentralized marketplace operating on Ethereum, Aragon, and IPFS platforms. The platform provides the opportunity to create personal decentralized markets using Ethereum smart contracts. Trading platforms and communities are decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) in the District0x network. In 2017, a decentralized labor exchange — Ethlance — was launched, which connects merchants and customers to provide various services paid with ETH. Currently, developers are working on two new projects: a p2p platform for the exchange of registered names through ENS (Ethereum Name Service) — ENS Bazaar, and a platform for creation, release, and exchange of rare digital collectibles on Ethereum blockchain — Meme Factory. In the area of decentralized labor markets, the GitCoin platform is also being developed and expanded as a market where freelance developers can interact with each other and with clients for remote open source projects. OpenSea OpenSea is the largest marketplace for digital goods such as collectibles, game items, domain names, digital art, and other assets called NFT tokens — goods or assets only in digital form, where each such token is unique. The platform has a special interface that allows you to create smart contracts and showcase the OpenSea store without programming knowledge. For example, a Parisian artist Pascal Boyart creates digital collectible items based on his street art murals, which are original creations, one of which was sold for 25 ETH. A similar project in the direction of creation, exchange, and sale of NFT tokens is the Rare Bits platform, which in 2018 attracted $6 million to support the market of collection items and unique digital tokens. Origin The Origin platform and two internal applications based on this platform, Marketplace, and Dshop, provide a decentralized p2p platform for trading. One of this platform’s main features is the ability to pay for goods and services with USDC Circle and DAI MakerDAO, and any ERC-20 token when talking about the contract development level. OGN internal token is already integrated with other large DeFi platforms. Liquidity pools such as ETH/OGN are already available on KyberSwap, Uniswap, and Balancer. A few weeks ago, Dshop partnered with Uphold to open the Uphold Store based on Dshop, and the latter, in turn, was added to Uphold’s application directory for use by 1.7 million members of the network, which operates in more than 184 countries and accepts over 30 types of assets. In September 2020, Origin developers launched their own OUSD stablecoin, pegged to the USDT, USDC, and DAI basket. Origin manages stablecoins’ farming in the Compound protocol among the others, and the resulting profit is distributed proportionally among all OUSD holders. LocalCryptos Since 2017, LocalCryptos has been the platform for p2p Ethereum trading — LocalEthereum, but after rebranding in 2019, the buying/selling and exchange of BTC, ETH, LTC, and other cryptocurrencies in more than 130 countries became available on the platform. LocalCryptos’ decentralized marketplace is LocalBitcoins’ direct and closest competitor while remaining free from regulatory agencies. Transactions on the platform are carried out directly through smart contracts and escrow, and entry and exit fees are paid only to miners. If there are any controversial situations regarding the transaction, the smart contract can be accessed by a third party arbitrator, who will decide on the outcome of the transaction. It should be noted that private keys to a wallet belong to users, which also makes this site more attractive and censorship-resistant. The future of decentralized markets Decentralized markets eliminate the need for a third party to carry out the transaction, which in turn leads to minimum commissions or their absence. Another factor that affects the interest in such platforms is the lack of data provision and the possibility of anonymous payments with the cryptocurrencies. Despite the low acceptance level, decentralized markets are gaining popularity both among users and investors in such projects. Blockchains and decentralization can help build truly censorship resistant markets and platforms where transactions can be made with cryptocurrencies or any other digital asset.

https://medium.com/@3commastutorials/voyage-of-the-defi-universe-decentralized-marketplaces-c3dc51c8e83c

[]

2020-10-27 15:09:01.080000+00:00

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

How Messaging Has Changed Human Interaction

In the early ’90s, five Israeli developers realized that most non-Unix users had no easy way to send instant messages to one another. The terminal was reserved for power users, and well-designed software applications with a user-friendly GUI were still rare. They got together and started working on a cross-platform messaging client for Windows and Mac and gave it the catchy name ICQ (“I seek you”). It didn’t take long before early versions of ICQ had most of the features we take for granted in today’s instant messaging apps: ICQ Version 99a With ICQ 99a, the platform featured conversation history, user search, contact list grouping, and the iconic “uh-uh” sound that played whenever you received a message. Within a very short time, ICQ amassed millions of users during a time when global internet traffic was a fraction of what it is today. One of the critical challenges during this period was that users weren’t online at all times. During the age of 56K dial-in modems, chat rooms could feel like hanging out at an empty bar. The team came up with an ingenious and deceptively simple concept for users to let others know when they were available to chat: the online status. Rise of the online status The online status was the first widespread instance in digital communication of users giving up a tiny bit of privacy to make a service more engaging and useful. It all started as a seemingly win-win situation: By turning your online status into something that’s shared and visible to everyone in your contacts, it made your computer a less lonely place. When you signed on to the service, your friends would immediately get notified. As a result, most users found themselves chatting to someone within minutes. The product’s engagement increased, and the issue of lonely chat rooms soon became a thing of the past. While ICQ was taking the internet by storm, others quickly took notice and an array of messaging platforms started popping up. MSN Messenger on Windows XP The most infamous alternative to ICQ was MSN Messenger. Microsoft Messenger included all the features that defined ICQ’s success. The press release even emphasized the online status as one of its key features: “MSN Messenger Service tells consumers when their friends, family, and colleagues are online and enables them to exchange online messages and email with more than 40 million users.” In 2001, Messenger became the single most used online messaging service in the world. With over 230 million unique users, the platform’s quick rise soon led to new challenges. How transparent do we want to be? As the MSN user base increased, more users lamented that they didn’t feel like they were in control. Upon logging on to the service, they immediately got pinged by people they didn’t necessarily want to talk to. The problem of lonely chat rooms was effectively replaced with a new problem: How can users be in control of who they want to talk to? For many, not replying wasn’t a viable option as they felt guilty about ignoring incoming texts. It soon became clear that the automatic sign-in and public online status wasn’t without its flaws. Microsoft’s response was to introduce a new feature that enabled users to “appear” offline. With this small change, users gained back some level of control over how openly they shared their online activity. It wasn’t all perfect, though. Every change involving micro-privacy has a counter-reaction that can go from barely noticeable, to harmful, to downright problematic. In its wake, the offline status left behind a trail of paranoia that gave rise to tools that allowed users to screen whether friends had blocked them. These third-party tools encouraged anyone to become a cyberspace Sherlock Holmes and check in on their contacts’ statuses. As we will see, this is a common chain of events in the realm of messaging. Every change involving micro-privacy has a counterreaction that can go from barely noticeable, to harmful, to downright problematic. So what is micro-privacy? Micro-privacy in everyday products When I say micro-privacy, I’m referring to the small nuggets of information that reveal something about a user’s online activity. What characterizes micro-privacy is that a minimal amount of information can have huge repercussions on product engagement, user behavior, and well-being. In simple terms, design teams can build more engaging products by reducing privacy on two ends: either between the provider and its users or among the users themselves. We spend a lot of time worrying about the former, but almost completely neglect the latter. Let’s have a closer look through another example that might feel strangely familiar. Are you still there? Microsoft was in trouble. Their platform gained a lot of traction but one of the things that kept plaguing the early versions of MSN was flaky internet connections. When two users talked to one another, you could never tell whether the person you were talking to was still there, whether they went away, or whether their connection had simply timed out. Sometimes sending a message felt like sending it into a vortex. You never knew whether you were going to get something back. In order to better set expectations, the chat community developed a linguistic toolbox to let others know when they might not respond immediately. As a result, chat rooms of the early 2000s were full of acronyms like AFK (away from keyboard) and BRB (be right back). Then a team of engineers at Microsoft came up with a genius micro-interaction that would redefine the psychology of messaging as we know it forever. In order to set expectations and make conversations feel more engaging, the team introduced what they called the typing indicator. Every time users started writing a message, it sent a signal to the server that would in turn inform the person on the other end that the user was typing. This was a massive technical bet considering the cost of server space. Around 95% of all MSN traffic was not the content of the messages itself, but simple bits of data that would trigger the iconic dots to show up and disappear! Karen is typing… From an engagement model perspective, the typing indicator flipped all the right behavioral switches that got people hooked. Every time someone started typing, it created anticipation followed by a variable reward. Today, this is a well-researched area in psychology that serves as a foundation for anyone attempting to build addictive products. The typing indicator elegantly solved what the team had set out to solve. But it also did a bit more than that. Apart from increased engagement, it also single-handedly introduced a whole new level of emotional nuance to online communication. This seemingly small detail inadvertently conveyed things no message by itself ever could. Picture this scenario: Bob: “Hey Anna! It was so great to meet you. Would you like to go out for a drink tonight?” Anna: Starts typing… Anna: Stops typing… Anna: Starts typing again… Anna: “Sure!” How convinced is Anna really? You might have experienced it yourself: The angst of prolonged typing indicators followed by a short response or even worse—nothing! Bob might have been happier if he hadn’t observed Anna’s typing pattern. But he did. And now he wonders how such a tiny animation can have such a profound impact on how he feels. It turns out, Bob isn’t alone. It didn’t take long before users started coming up with strategies and hacks to regain control over their micro-privacy and online activity, from typing their message into a document and then copy/pasting it over, to first thinking hard before even attempting to write something. This problem gets further exacerbated in modern applications that involve group chat, always-on messaging services, and dating apps. But this was still before the iPhone came along to change the internet as we know it. Today, typing indicators are ubiquitous. And while we can’t argue that it made messaging more useful, it also made it more addictive by playing an innocent but powerful sleight of hand: We were handed an exciting pair of cards, at the cost of someone observing us from the other side. Of course, this wasn’t the last time we happily played along. Where have you been? Divorce lawyers in Italy know something that you and I don’t. But it first took a shift in technology for them to get to that insight. That shift kicked off in late 2007, when we went from a type of internet we used at home and at the office to the type of internet that was with us at all times. The introduction of the iPhone marked a technical leap that affected every aspect imaginable in computing and with it, every aspect of society. When former Yahoo! engineers Brian Acton and Jan Koum tried the iPhone for the first time, they immediately saw huge potential in the device and its App Store model. They started working on a new type of messaging app that included an online status as part of the core messaging experience. They gave it a catchy and memorable name — WhatsApp — to sound like the colloquial “what’s up?” everyone is familiar with. Growth was relatively slow and the two almost decided to give up on their venture. That changed when Apple introduced a new service that almost instantly catapulted their brainchild to the top of the App Store: the push notification system. With that, their user base shot up to 250,000 in no time. There were a couple of things that made WhatsApp different and attractive. First, it sent messages over the internet so users no longer had to pay for every single SMS. Second, it reintroduced the online status that had originally been developed during a time of chat rooms and flaky internet connections over a decade earlier. And third, it featured the infamous typing indicator we’ve all come to love. All these things combined made WhatsApp feel lightyears ahead of any traditional SMS application of its time. Today, WhatsApp has more than a billion users and it’s the preferred way of sending messages in many countries all around the world. One of those countries is — you guessed it — Italy! According to Gian Ettore Gassani — president of the Italian Association of Matrimonial Lawyers — WhatsApp messages sent by cheating spouses play an integral role in 40% of Italian divorce cases citing adultery, writes Rachel Thompson from Mashable. The thing that often led to those deeply troublesome insights? The “last seen online” indicator. Unlike the traditional online status of the early 2000s, “last seen” added a new level of insight to written chat: The exact time someone last used WhatsApp. Last seen online indicator (WhatsApp illustration) Like any service that turned the knob on micro-privacy, the outcome was predictable—high user engagement at the cost of reduced user-to-user privacy. What does it mean when your spouse was last seen online at 4:30 in the morning? Why would someone not pick up the phone minutes after they had just been seen online? How come your secret crush and your best friend always seem to be online at the same time—coincidence? Coincidence or not, users decided to start doing something about it to get their micro-privacy back. In very little time, the internet lit up with tons of articles and tutorials both through written and step-by-step video instructions. These tutorials ranged from creating a fake last-seen status, to freezing the time display, to disabling it altogether. The last seen “feature” had such strong psychological impact on users that some started referring to it as Last Seen Syndrome (LSS). In her research about how WhatsApp impacts youth, Anshu Bhatt notes “This app has been found to be highly addictive, which leaves a trace that becomes difficult to control.” The myriad of articles offering advice on how to control privacy, limit time spent in the app, and outsmart the last seen indicator further offers a glimpse into the challenges many users are facing today. And just when it seemed there wasn’t any more micro-privacy we would willingly disclose, there was still one tiny area that went largely overlooked… Now you see me! Replying late to incoming texts or emails used to be simple: A short “only saw this now” was good enough to get back to someone without any feeling of guilt or fear of retaliation. Today, we’re all in need of a better alibi. It was again a seemingly small “detail” that deeply reshaped our experience and expectations toward one another. Like many of the ideas we’ve discussed so far, this one too can be understood as loosely inspired by technology that was invented decades earlier. In this case, it was email. Manually entering an email address was (and still is) an error-prone process. The idea of sending messages digitally was both novel and hard to grasp. Upon hitting the send button, users had very little information as to whether their message was delivered, pending, or aborted. To offer more transparency and make email more understandable, Delivery Status Notifications (DSN) were introduced. Through DSN, users gained more insight into what happened to their message after hitting the send button. Fast forward 30 years and the industry keeps solving similar problems, but in a slightly different context and a slightly different moment in computing history. In 2011, Apple introduced iMessage. What made iMessage different from its predecessor was that it seamlessly migrated users from sending messages through the traditional SMS protocol, to sending them over the web. This set the foundation needed for iMessage to evolve beyond a simple text messaging app. Among the many newly introduced changes was an inconspicuous “feature” that quickly became known as one of the most contentious and controversial moves in the messaging space: read receipts.

https://medium.com/swlh/the-loss-of-micro-privacy-baa088f0660d

['Adrian Zumbrunnen']

2020-02-14 21:33:34.228000+00:00

['Ideas', 'Technology', 'Design', 'Privacy', 'Social Media']

Why You Can’t Survive Falling Into A Black Hole

Why You Can’t Survive Falling Into A Black Hole Why You Can’t Survive Falling Into A Black Hole If you tried jumping into a black hole, then you’d be ripped apart long before you could find out what’s on the other side. But to fully understand why you can’t dive into a black hole, you must first understand the basic properties of these gravitational goliaths. What Is a Black Hole? Simply put, black holes are places where the gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Black holes are aptly named because they usually don’t reflect or emit light. They’re only visible when they’re feeding on stars or gas clouds that stray too close to their boundary, called the event horizon. Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity. This is where the laws of physics as we know them to break down, meaning all theories about what lies within the singularity are just speculation. Types Of Black Holes There are a few different types of black holes, so if you were to jump into one, your exact fate would depend on which sort of black hole you chose. At the simplest level, there are three kinds of black holes: stellar-mass black holes, supermassive black holes, and intermediate-mass black holes. Stellar-mass black holes form when the largest stars exhaust their fuel and collapse in on themselves. Supermassive black holes live in the centers of most galaxies, and are thought to grow to their extreme sizes — up to tens of billions of times more massive than our Sun — by consuming stars and merging with other black holes. Intermediate-mass black holes are still mysterious, and only a few suspected examples have been discovered, but astronomers think they may form through a similar process of accretion, just on a smaller scale. 1: Falling into a stellar-mass black hole Stellar-mass black holes are puny in comparison to their bigger cousins, but they actually boast the strongest tidal forces of any type of black hole. That’s because smaller black holes actually have a more intense gravitational gradient than larger ones. That means you only have to get slightly closer to a small black hole to experience an extremely noticeable difference in gravity. As you floated through space toward a stellar-mass black hole, you’d be stretched in some directions and squished in others, a process that scientists call spaghettification. This is because the black hole’s gravity compresses your body horizontally while pulling it like taffy in the vertical direction. So, if you jumped into the black hole feet first, the gravitational force on your toes would be much stronger than that pulling on your head. Each bit of your body would also be elongated in a slightly different direction. You would literally end up looking like a piece of spaghetti. 2: Falling into an intermediate-mass or supermassive black hole In contrast to falling into a stellar-mass black hole, your experience plunging into an intermediate-mass or supermassive black hole would be slightly less nightmarish. Although the end result — a horrible death — would still be your fate, you might actually make it all the way through the event horizon and manage to start falling inside the singularity itself while still alive. In this case, at least in theory, you could see out into surrounding space. But no one would be able to see you once you passed beyond the event horizon. Even if you were holding a flashlight and tried to shine it out, the light would fall back down into the singularity with you. Meanwhile, you’d see that everything within the event horizon was warped by extreme gravitational forces, thanks to an effect astronomers call gravitational lensing. (Not to mention the wild time dilation effects. Death By Black Hole Of course, no matter what type of black hole you plunge into, you’re ultimately going to get torn apart by its extreme gravity and die a horrible death. No material that falls inside a black hole could survive intact. Unfortunately, because nothing can escape a black hole’s event horizon — not even information — we’ll never know for certain what happens when matter falls past the point of no return. So, even if you do find yourself with the opportunity to take a cosmic cliff dive into a black hole, for safety reasons, you probably should resist the urge.

https://medium.com/@fahadahmd-bs/why-you-cant-survive-falling-into-a-black-hole-8bfbdb6d5aca

['Fahad Ahmad']

2020-12-17 16:30:13+00:00

['Astronomy', 'Space', 'Black Holes', 'NASA', 'Technology']

The Secret to saving your staff from- Training troubles, Manual Madness and more…

We start every new year with a list of resolutions for ourselves personally and professionally. And if you are an entrepreneur with a drive to push forwards or a team lead committed to improve productivity and performance in the new year that means your resolutions would include your business or job as well. Especially since the massive job cuts in companies limiting your resources and pushing you into walking the tightrope between having efficient and overworked employees. Whether it is a new year resolution or a forced reorganization of teams due to job cuts you and your staff are going to have to use time that you don’t have on trainings and in the case of some of your staff, they might not even like it or be too preoccupied on how bad if feels to not have Tara at the receptionist smile at them anymore to pay attention to it. There’s the added trouble of making sure all your staff are in the same room at the same time AND paying attention to the whole session from beginning to end. If its service oriented and you end up outsourcing it to someone you’ll end up paying money that could have gone into something else while praying that your staff imprint into their memory everything this sales or service “guru” said while trying to recall some of it yourself. And all of that is only scratching the top layer of the training madness without even going into the bedtime stories that companies like to call manuals, how many people read those anyway??? We at De Lune IT, may actually have the solution to the multiple problems with training that you’d like to keep away by miles, and here’s how it works. It’s COMPLETELY online and accessible at your own time: Staff will not have to make time off important meetings to go through their training. And since it is completely online, staff can go through their training even on their commute to and from work . It is easy to access and has a very similar layout to popular social media platforms: You DON’T need training to use our platform. It is very straightforward and highly user-friendly. It can be easily mastered by anyone using popular social media platform, Facebook as it has a very similar layout. Completely white-labelled: This platform is completely white labelled to allow your company to customize it to look like it’s entirely company owned thereby making your staff feel included and motivating them further to be involved. You will be able to monitor if the staff have been keeping up to date on their trainings: There is a sure shot way in to knowing how involved each of your staff is in their training without being a nagging boss as you will have access to an administrative perspective with all the information you need on the training of the staff. Has the right tools to motivate staff to spend more time bettering themselves at their jobs: Our platform combines game dynamics, peer-to-peer learning, and social features to make corporate training for white-collar and blue-collar staff, interactive, easy and engaging. We do our best to really make sure employees actually enjoy their training. Here is a list of how we do it. Responsive designs Interactive course content Social media and gaming Mobile learning and convenience Continuous Updates and Development We even have our own rewarding system. From points and badges to actual certificates each employee receives some kind of reward for each course they complete. And rewards are posted proudly and publicly to enable healthy competition and allow staff to feel recognized for the work they do. Want to know how to get to this miracle product? Click here to contact us .

https://medium.com/@deluneit/the-secret-to-saving-your-staff-from-training-troubles-manual-madness-and-more-6075cc15be9d

[]

2020-12-23 06:40:16.442000+00:00

['Coronavirus', 'Information Technology', 'Services', 'Training And Development', 'Training Courses']

How to make height of collection views dynamic in your iOS apps

Table views and collection views have always been an integral part of iOS app development. We all might have came across various issues related to them. In this article, we’ll discuss one such problem statement related to collection views. Problem Statement Let’s assume we’ve a UICollectionView in a UITableViewCell and around 20 UICollectionViewCells that we need to render in it vertically. We can definitely implement that in the blink of an eye with the given data source. Now comes the actual problem statement — we need the UITableViewCell to adjust its height dynamically according to its content. Also, the UICollectionView must be such that all the cells are displayed in one go, i.e. no scrolling allowed. Long story short: make everything dynamic… Fixed and Dynamic Height Collection View Let’s start coding A view in iOS calculates its height from its content, given there is no height constraint provided. Same goes for UITableViewCell . For now, we’ll keep a single collectionView inside our tableViewCell with its leading, top, trailing and bottom constraints set to 0. View Hierarchy Since we haven’t provided any height constraint to the collectionView and neither do we know the its contentSize beforehand, then how will the tableViewCell calculate its height? Solution Dynamically calculating the collectionView’s height as per its contentSize is simply a 3 step process. 1. Subclass UICollectionView and override its layoutSubviews() and intrinsicContentSize , i.e. Code Snippet — 1 The above code will invalidate the intrinsicContentSize and will use the actual contentSize of collectionView . The above code takes into consideration the custom layout as well. 2. Now, set DynamicHeightCollectionView as the collectionView’s class in storyboard . 3. One last thing, for the changes to take effect: you need to call layoutIfNeeded() on collectionView , after reloading collectionView’s data, i.e. func configure(with arr: [String]) { self.arr = arr self.collectionView.reloadData() self.collectionView.layoutIfNeeded() //Here..!!! } And there you have it! Sample Project You can download the sample project from here. Further reading Don’t forget to read my other articles: Feel free to leave comments in case you have any questions.

https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-make-height-collection-views-dynamic-in-your-ios-apps-7d6ca94d2212

['Payal Gupta']

2019-02-27 13:18:24.213000+00:00

['Tech', 'Programming', 'Technology', 'Swift', 'Data']

How to Install Linux on Windows

Install Ubuntu Bear in mind that these steps can be completely different depending on the distro you are installing. For example, Debian is not as straightforward as Ubuntu. So if you are installing another distro, be very careful and find another article dedicated to installing that distribution. The first screen should show you two options: Try Ubuntu and Install Ubuntu. It is recommended you try it first, testing that your hardware integrates with Ubuntu as expected. Once you’ve finished testing, go back to your home screen and click Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (or whichever version you are installing). This will take you through the installation process, including a few important steps (alongside many minor tweaks such as setting the keyboard layout, current location, etc.). Those important settings include the following: Updates and other software Minimal/normal installation: Here I go with minimal to reduce software bloat from media players, etc. However, this is not necessary — go with what you prefer. Whether to download updates while installing Ubuntu: This can help us reduce the time spent manually installing updates later, which can be useful. Whether to install third-party software for graphics and other items: I would recommend this to help Ubuntu better integrate with our hardware without manually installing/updating drivers. Installation type The “Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 10” option must be shown — this is how we install Ubuntu without wiping Windows. It is very important that you are able to see the “Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 10” option — and that you choose this. Do not choose “Erase disk and install Ubuntu” if you already have an OS you would like to keep because everything will be wiped with this option. If you cannot see the “Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 10” option, you most likely need to change where you are booting from. Two options should be available: booting from UEFI or from BIOS (which can be changed from the BIOS menu). There are several suggestions on Ask Ubuntu for fixing the problem of Ubuntu installer not detecting Windows. Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 10 The final important step is to decide how much space to allocate to Ubuntu and Windows. The left box represents Windows and should say Files, whereas the right box represents Ubuntu and should say Ubuntu accordingly. Install After a few more simple steps, you should be given the option to “restart now”. Do this to begin the final part of your dual boot setup.

https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-install-linux-on-windows-9f63cfc98f21

['James Briggs']

2020-12-26 09:48:13.183000+00:00

['Programming', 'Linux', 'Windows', 'Technology', 'Software Development']

A Letter to our Future CTO

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash Hello! It’s nice to meet you. We’re Tribute, a peer-to-peer mentorship platform for the workplace that enhances team collaboration, learning, and productivity through on-demand knowledge sharing. What that really means is that we recognize an organization’s two most important assets are its people and their knowledge. And not just their skills-based knowledge, but the knowledge they’ve gained from the wisdom of experience. Using the ancient art of storytelling, combined with modern technology, we inspire employee connections for the moments that matter. We know that sharing wisdom and knowledge from our lived experiences not only informs more meaningful connections, it helps create inclusive and trusted workplaces that employees love. We often say there are some things you simply cannot know until you’ve lived through them, with the battle scars to prove it. We aim to create a world where those battle scars become beacons of hope, inspiration, and collective knowledge that help us navigate our dynamic careers in this new world of work. So why are we writing this letter? The truth is, we’ve been looking for you for a while now. We’ve been fortunate to secure early enterprise customers like Microsoft, Zillow, and Remitly to name a few. But we need your strategic oversight and technical expertise in order to propel us to the next phase of growth, and to help more companies make the transition to hybrid work, moving away from ineffective spreadsheet driven mentoring programs to digital-first learning cultures. We aspire to be the world’s first and best peer-to-peer experiential learning platform, and we’ve got what it takes to get there. So far, we’ve pre-sold our product and bootstrapped our way to hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual recurring revenue (ARR) without any in-house engineers. Impressive as this may be, we know we cannot achieve our next level of success without you. Together, we can accelerate our path to $1MM ARR and create a more meaningful future of work for everyone. We realize that it’s hard to make a decision like this when you don’t know much about us, so here are 8 things that you should know about us: We’re a seed-stage B2B enterprise SaaS startup looking to disrupt the future of work We’re post-revenue with an initial product-market fit We’re female-founded and believe that inclusive cultures not only attract the best talent, but bring out the best in everyone We’re curious creators passionate about learning, adult education and the power of human connection. We follow the customer discovery process religiously, and believe in progress, not perfection We work remotely, and put family, health, and well-being first Everyone here has a voice Our CTO position will be employee #4 If you’re a technologist and builder at heart who cares deeply about the future of work and wants to help us shape it, Tribute might be the place for you. If you are motivated by purpose, autonomy, personal growth, engineering excellence and don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty, we’re pretty sure you’ll fit in well here. If you’ve built rich web and mobile apps, deployed APIs and apps to either Azure or AWS, consider yourself a strong cross-functional leader, and have always dreamed of being a founding member of a fast-growing startup, you might just be exactly who we’re looking for. And finally, if you’ve ever had a mentor who has fundamentally changed the course of your life, inspired you to be more than you could have ever dreamed for yourself, then you might just be exactly who we need. We know you’re out there, so if you’re reading this now, send us an email at [email protected] and let us know you’re ready to help us shape the future of work. And if you’re reading this but don’t feel like you’re our future CTO, share our message with someone you know who comes to mind. We’ll be eternally grateful you sent them our way as well as every enterprise employee who benefits from the future of work we build together. Sincerely, Team Tribute

https://medium.com/tribute-mentorship-redefined/a-letter-to-our-future-cto-1bb4769020a0

['Sarah J. Haggard']

2021-07-06 21:08:36.866000+00:00

['Human Resources', 'SaaS', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Learning And Development']

Metal 3D Printing Reimagined: DesktopMetal

By Bilal Zuberi Team = Check Technology = Check Market = Check That’s why Lux Capital chose to invest in DesktopMetal’s Series A alongside NEA, KPCB, and other smart investors. DesktopMetal plans to revolutionize metal 3D printing. Current state of the art is…cumbersome. State of the art metal 3D printers are expensive, bulky, need complex setup including heavy use of inert gases, and are relatively slow. We know because we have studied this space well, and have invested in the broad 3D printing space multiple times now (e.g. Shapeways and Sols). Shapeways in fact uses the best of the best technology for their metal printed products and even they would argue much better is needed. The space needs to be ‘disrupted’ with a complete re-imagination of how metal 3D printing might work for broad usage. DesktopMetal team aims to bring a revolutionary new printer technology to the market for both prototyping and production use. I am sure Ric will share a lot more in months/years to come. I have known Ric Fulop for many years now. We are both MIT alums. We were both entrepreneurs in Boston at the same time. We love geeking out over technology. We have taught the same classes before at MIT. We helped start a company from scratch (GridCo), and we have invested together in the past. He is the crazy guy who gave me my first ride in a Tesla Roadster (likely among the first owners of a Tesla in the Boston area). I have an incredible amount of respect for him as a most curious, creative, and resourceful entrepreneur. Ric, Yet-Ming Chiang, Chris Shuh and other members of the team are also well known to the entire Lux team. So when Ric called to tell us what he was doing, it didn’t take us long to agree to become his partners. At Lux we love entrepreneurs like Ric who take on challenging technical problems — and where the reward maybe off the charts in case of success. They are dreamers and crazy enough to believe they can succeed. We are proud to join Ric and the team in this journey to help, support, and cheer. Go team!

https://medium.com/lux-capital/metal-3d-printing-reimagined-desktopmetal-9ec2bd4cf31b

[]

2015-11-19 20:45:10.076000+00:00

['3D Printing', 'Technology', 'Entrepreneurship']

Photos of the Far Side of the Moon

Photos of the Far Side of the Moon Photo by NASA on Unsplash The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, which means that it is always the same half that faces the Earth. Because of this, the far side of the Moon thus remained mysterious for thousands of years and out of reach until the beginning of the Space age. The Moon’s diameter is 3,476 km, yielding a lunar area of about 38 million square kilometers in size. An additional nine percent of this area was uncovered by exploiting lunar libration — slight changes in perspective that make the Moon “wobble.” As such, an area roughly equivalent to the size of South America was almost completely unchartered. The Moon orbits around the Earth on a slightly elliptic orbit, with an average distance of roughly 384,400 km. The closest and farthest distances between the Moon and the Earth differ by approximately fifty thousand kilometers. Reaching the Moon, even with a small spacecraft, is a remarkable challenge and it was at the centre of the Space Race. The Space Race begins The Cold War, which started right after the Second World War, is symbolized by the nuclear arms race, numerous proxy wars, espionage, and general technological competition. Tensions between the Eastern and Western Bloc led to the development of more destructive weapons, improved telecommunications, and brought humankind into space. While space exploration was first seen as a convenient side benefit of the development of ballistic rockets, it soon became one of the central rivalries between the Soviet Union and the United States. The inauguration of the Space Race took place with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957. This first man-made object that orbited the Earth shattered the ostensible technical advantage of the West. Similar to the development of the atomic bomb, the surprise of this Soviet achievement was further compounded with the utter destruction of a large portion of the Soviet Union’s industry. It was hard to imagine that the latter would support the development of high technology. The ripples of Sputnik’s impact led to the restructuring of the emergent US space program and eventually led to the formation of NASA. The Red Moon and the early “Luna” space program Mikhail Tikhonravov, a Soviet rocket engineer, had already hinted towards the possibility of reaching the Moon in 1951. In the communist youth’s newspaper, he reasoned that humans could fly to the Moon within the next ten to twenty years. Tikhonravov wrote A report on an artificial satellite of the Earth in 1954 in which he outlined more concrete technical aspects of a spacecraft capable of reaching the Moon. Together with the chief engineer Sergei Korolev, Tikhonravov wrote another proposal, On the launches of rockets to the Moon, which outlined the Soviet Lunar program. This was the first program to outline the missions beyond the Earth's proximity and represented a formidable technical challenge. Scientifically, successful missions to the Moon would offer unprecedented insights into the origins of the Moon-Earth system. The program proposed several different missions. Impactors were to hit the moon, while orbiters and flyby missions were to collect the data from the distance. Even more ambitious were the soft landers, followed by the rovers and sample return missions. Launches were secret and only the successful ones were given the “Luna” (Russian for “the Moon”) designation and revealed to a broader audience. This selective reporting of attempts skewed the perception of the ease with which the Soviets were approaching the exploration of the Moon. Nonetheless, several successes arose from the program. The “First Cosmic Ship” — later named Luna 1 “Dream” — resembled the Sputnik 1 but carried several scientific instruments (magnetometer, meteoroid, cosmic ray, and gas component detector). Its mission was to impact the near side of the Moon. Tracking revealed that it would pass near the Moon but would miss it. Besides measuring the Van Allen radiation belts, it measured the solar wind (flow of ionized plasma emitted from the Sun) for the first time. It also detected no significant magnetic field near the Moon and a general lack of micrometeorites. The second successful mission of the Luna program was the “Second Cosmic Ship” (later Luna 2), which carried similar equipment as Luna 1. It successfully impacted the Moon as the first man-made object to do so, while transmitting the data until less than sixty kilometers above the Moon surface. Its measurements indicated that there is a limit for the reach of the Earth’s plasmasphere and that the solar wind exists also outside the Earth’s magnetic field. The next milestone of the program was to send back the photographs of the Moon. For the first time, the far side of the Moon was to be revealed. Luna 3 spacecraft The “Automatic Interplanetary Station” that was later named Luna 3 was a complex machine. It weighted nearly three-hundred kilograms and was roughly cylindrical (about 1.3 m in height and between 0.95–1.2 m wide). The sealed container maintained the pressure and temperature for the optimal performance of the equipment. A replica of Luna 3 spacecraft. (CC0, Wikimedia) The spacecraft had an imaging system, transmitter, solar cells, electric batteries, a cosmic ray detector, and a micrometeoroid detector. It sported a three-axis stabilization system that oriented the probe for taking images and radio transmission. The spacecraft oriented itself by locating the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon. The system was developed by the team of a Soviet physicist and engineer, Boris Rauschenbach, who designed many subsequent space-flight control systems. The camera module of Luna 3 — called Yenisey 2 — had two camera systems with different focal lengths, which allowed both close-up and coarser images. Cameras were fixed and their orientation was determined by the position of the spacecraft. The photography system autonomously took pictures, developed the film, and scanned it at a resolution of 1,000 lines by the cathode-ray television system. Curiously, the film used in the photography was originally from CIA spy balloons — made by General Mills, a company known for producing Cheerios — used in the Project Genetrix. This photography film had the required radiation hardening and temperature stability necessary for the mission. The design of electronics for Luna 3 made extensive use of transistors in place of vacuum tubes. While it was Explorer I that used the transistors in a satellite for the first time and Sputnik 3 already used transistors in its electronics, the transistors formed the basis of Luna 3's. The transmission speed stood at fifty or 0.8 lines per second for fast and slow mode, respectively. The mission and its impact The launch took place on October 4, 1959, exactly two years after Sputnik I. The Department of Applied Mathematics of Steklov Institute planned the trajectory as a highly excentric high-Earth orbit (48,280 km by 468,300 km), thus omitting any orbit insertion maneuvers. The trajectory made use of the Lunar gravity assist, which made the orbit elliptical. Soon after launch, problems began. The probe started to overheat. Scientists turned off several systems, which alleviated the overheating. Two days later, on October 6, the spacecraft passed the Moon above the south pole. The following day, Luna 3 was above the sunlit far side of the Moon and photography began. Within forty minutes, the spacecraft took twenty-nine pictures at different exposure settings. This photography took place at altitudes between 65,200 and 66,700 km above the Moon’s surface. After the session ended, the attempt to send the pictures to the Earth failed. In this attempt, a single picture of poor quality was received. A more successful transmission took place as the spacecraft sped towards the Earth. On October 19, the spacecraft was near the Earth and above the Soviet Union. To improve the reception of the transmission, radio silence was ordered over the Black Sea. Finally, seventeen pictures were received, covering about 70% of the far side of the Moon. Soon after, the Soviet authorities released the first-ever images of the Moon’s mysterious side. One of the first images of the far side of the Moon. (public domain, NASA NSSDC) The far side of the Moon looks quite different from the familiar near side. It is mountainous and sparkled with craters of various sizes, and has fewer lunar maria (darker areas of volcanic origin) compared to the near side. This apparent asymmetry between the near and far sides of the Moon is crucial for the understanding of the lunar origin, and supports the so-called “giant-impact hypothesis.” This hypothesis suggests that the Moon formed after a Mars-sized object impacted the Earth’s predecessor. The impact debris subsequently coalesced into the young Moon. The scientific and historical impact of the mission was profound. It showcased the prowess of the Soviet space program to the world. The mission and the probe were technically refined and went far beyond Sputnik’s ones, merely two years before. Television stations and printed media distributed the images of the far side of the Moon across the globe, forever cementing the mission into the history of space exploration. The first lunar atlas was released in 1960. Because the Soviets were the first to image the far side, their academics had the opportunity to name the features of the lunar surface: Tsiolkovsky crater, Mare Moscoviense(“Moscow sea”), and Mare Desiderii (“Sea of Dreams”, named after Luna 1), to name a few. Subsequent high-resolution images led to the renaming of some of these features. Further exploration Several missions followed Luna 3, carried-out by both the US and Soviet Union. The race for the first human landing on the Moon accelerated after Kennedy’s famous speech in 1961. Ranger 7 — launched in 1964 — was the first American spacecraft to acquire images of the Earth’s satellite. Later, the Soviets achieved the first soft landing on the Moon with Luna 9. A few months later, the spacecraft of the American Surveyor program landed on the lunar surface, tiling the road towards landing a man on the Moon. One of the most spectacular moments of space exploration occurred when the crew of Apollo 8 entered into orbit around the Moon. For the first time, humans could see a portion of the lunar far side. Breathtaking pictures from this mission also signaled an approaching end of the race for the first human landing on the Moon. As Neil Armstrong stepped on the lunar surface, the Space Race came to a symbolic end.

https://historyofyesterday.com/photos-of-the-far-side-of-the-moon-4ae2ec9ca4f9

['Bor Kavcic']

2020-10-28 18:01:02.346000+00:00

['History', 'Moon', 'Space', 'Space Exploration', 'History Of Technology']

Automating Labs with DevOps Tools (+ Github)

TLDR: We set up a small windows lab with Vagrant. In the last article we spoke about Infrastructure as Code and DevOps practices to simplify the creation of virtual machines and automate the provisioning process. In this article we’ll actually get our hands dirty and create a test environment using Vagrant, Ansible, and VirtualBox. So the first thing we need to do is download the required software: https://www.vagrantup.com/ https://www.virtualbox.org/ (Insert your favorite text editor here; I’ll be using Atom) Installing Vagrant isn’t too difficult, just follow the wizard and it’ll add it to your path by default. Same goes for VirtualBox, it should all work right out of the box.

https://ldvargas.medium.com/automating-labs-with-devops-tools-github-66100ef3264

[]

2020-12-07 04:27:15.738000+00:00

['Information Technology', 'Windows', 'Automation', 'Infrastructure As Code', 'DevOps']

What is Blockchain? — Management Perspective

The million-dollar question that is bothering the C-suites at the moment. A wise friend I know said “it’s like high-school sex, everyone talks about but no one knows how to do it!”. So allow me to share my understanding of blockchain and what it really means from a decision-maker perspective. Warning: Treat this as a super-simplified version of a rather complicated concept. Enough to make you appear smart in front of your BoD or investors. Not enough to fool everyone, and … haters are gonna hate anyway. What is Blockchain? TL;DR: It’s a new type of database. Period. The long explanation is of course more complicated than that. Blockchain is a new decentralised distributed database technology. The most fundamental and disruptive attribute of blockchain is that it stores data in append-only fashion. Once the data is written, it lives forever, it cannot be deleted, cannot be modified. So how do you change something? Think of it as a chained equation. In the first ‘block’ you write A=1 and A will forever has the value of 1. Unless you append a new part of the equation ‘+1’ which makes it become A=1+1, means 2! i.e, to change something you must chain up the modifier to the previous value. Hence “block-chain”! And to simplify things, everytime you append something, you pay fees to miners. Miners are basically server nodes that run the blockchain software, distributed and technically all nodes are equal. A bit like the bit-torrent days, remember? Now you know what it is, the next million-dollar question you will have to answer to your bosses is: Should I use blockchain in my organisation? If you ask this most likely you won’t have a need to so soon: Blockchain is a new database, why do you need a new one when the old works just fine for past couple of years. Do you even know how database works? You probably have never heard of an incident regarding databases since the day you took your current job, unless some idiot accidentally wiped the entire production customer database thinking it’s a test one. Unfortunately for me, it happened to me more than I wish to remember. Blockchain database is slow. Low through-put. Expensive to store transactional data, fees are applied per write-operation. Does it sound completely contradicting to the hype out there? That’s why it is a hype! Why is there a hype?! Because of Bitcoin. Blockchain is merely a technical concept, it is not a tangible platform one can use. The version 1.0 of blockchain concept materialised in the form of Bitcoin platform. It is the very first world-wide ledger platform that stores how much virtual credit one owns. Because of the nature of blockchain, the trust and security is built-in. If the ‘network’ says person A has 2 units of BTC, then A actually own 2 units of BTC and no one else can change or deny that fact. If then say A transfer 1 BTC to person B and it is recorded ‘on-chain’ then the truth became A owns 1 BTC and B owns 1 BTC, plus the fact that the transaction happened will forever live on the network. So blockchain hype is because of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin ≠ Blockchain. Is Ethereum just another Bitcoin? No. Again blockchain is just a technical concept. After Bitcoin platform was born, zillion other implementations of blockchain concept came to life. Most notably is Ethereum platform, which is by popular opinion, deemed as blockchain 2.0 technology. Bitcoin was pretty dumb, you can’t do anything on it except recording the transactions. On the other hand, you can do a lot more with Ethereum. You can write code, store basic text data, make applications and enforce business logics that are permanently unchanged once deployed on the network. It allow zillion other organisational Tokens to be created on top of it. Here come the crypto flood. Is blockchain = crypto currency? No. Perhaps you can guess that each Token, or crypto currency, was created for a purpose, each token is organisation-specific. So the need to exchange values to/from the ‘grandfather coin’ BTC organically sparked the crypto race. Suddenly everything was hyped up. You probably know the rest of the story since then. Should I hold Bitcoin / Ethereum / Other coins? Yes. Now that you have done a good job showing off to your board. You start to wonder when might be the right time to visit the topic again, if at all. There’s no other technology in the past decade that is as game-changing as blockchain; and judging by the hype, its applications definitely will be quite something. Think of investing in blockchain as a long-term investment, if you do, you are actually investing in the future infrastructure of the world’s technology. Just like the Internet back in the 90s. In my opinion, Bitcoin might lose its value, same go for Ethereum. However the applications that were already born on-top of those platform have sparked the next Internet-like evolution and they will be around for a pretty far foreseeable future. A clarification here, you can’t exactly invest in “blockchain” as a ticker, you could only invest in its applications. If you decide to jump in the game now, do your homework carefully and pick projects that align with your interest, just like picking the right stock. Choose wisely and good luck! What’s next? There is another real game-changing concept grew out of this hype. The Smart Contracts. Follow me and look out for my next article, in which, I’ll explain in details Blockchain 2.0, aka, Ethereum and why it’s going to change the way we live. … or buy my time and I’ll teach you what to say to your bosses.

https://medium.com/anatics/what-is-blockchain-management-perspective-43de6e0d3463

['Kent Nguyen']

2018-07-04 14:47:33.208000+00:00

['Management', 'Technology Strategy', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin']

Cross the River by Feeling the Stones

There is a saying in China, 摸着石头过河, that translates to “cross the river by feeling the stones”. It is generally attributed to Deng Xiaoping, who used it as a metaphor to describe China’s approach towards the reform and opening (改革开放）which kicked off at the end of the 1970s. On one side of the river was China’s closed, Marxist, centrally-planned economy. On the other was an open, liberalized, market-driven one. China hadn’t crossed this river before, and so would need to do so slowly, thoughtfully and carefully, by feeling the stones. Today, just over forty years later, it’s clear the approach has been hugely successful. So successful, in fact, that internet and software entrepreneurs across the world need to employ a similar strategy if they are to cross the river the other way, by successfully navigating the strongest cultural, linguistic, regulatory and technical rapids we’ve seen in recent years. This makes success more tenuous, but rewards perhaps more precious for those who can still find a way to incorporate the modern day Chinese behemoth into their supply chains, their user bases or their cap tables. To that end, we were humbled to host an event at our Balderton offices recently that tried to shed light on how foreign internet entrepreneurs might best engage with China. We were joined by David Sullivan, Founder of ADG China, one of the top cross-border technology advisory firms focused on China. We were also lucky to have with us Joanna Shan, a Beijing-native and Peking University graduate who works on the Partnership team at Facebook, and Balderton’s own Jodi Yang, Head of Investor Relations, who has extensive experience both operationally on the ground and managing cross-border capital raising processes with China. Below I’d like to share a few summary takeaways from our wide-ranging conversation. + Entering the Chinese market is better done wholeheartedly, with substantial resources and sufficient time allocated to the effort, or not at all. To consider China just another market on the path towards global leadership is to grossly underestimate the scale of the undertaking. Even companies with tremendous resources (see Facebook, Google, Uber) can fail in their efforts. + Partnering with provinces and local governments and cutting deals at the regional level can be a more sensible approach. These provinces often have the size and population of large European countries. China has more than twice the population of the 28 countries in the EU divided across 23 provinces (and 11 municipalities and special administrative regions). For example, Anhui province has roughly the same population as Italy, the Beijing and Shanghai municipalities each have more people than the Netherlands, and Guangdong, Henan and Shandong each have populations substantially larger than Germany’s. + Allocating 6 months to 2 years from start to finish is sensible in terms of a realistic timeline for getting a deal done with a local partner. It will also mean either regular trips or the establishment of a permanent office in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou or Hong Kong. Too often foreign companies have set up a great schedule of meetings on a first trip and not returned to follow up, and so getting boots on the ground (or hiring them via an organization like ADG) is often a prerequisite to kicking off deals in earnest. + In negotiations, remain transparent, firm and pragmatic. Your negotiating partner will expect you to. Also, until the final deal is signed you can expect issues you thought were previously agreed to still be in play, as they might be used to bargain or trade for the outstanding terms. + The playing field in China for foreign firms is not level. Foreign companies need to obtain a specific license to be able to sell and deploy cloud software for example. + While China has in the last five years started to leapfrog the West in the sophistication of its social media, e-commerce, telecommunications and mobile payments infrastructure, b2b and enterprise software has lagged behind on a relative basis. That is changing, and fast. Expect increased local competition and more headlines proclaiming massive new enterprise software companies born and bred in China. + Given the degree of competition and scale of the 800M internet users in China, startups sometimes have to prioritize strategy above product. Particularly when the companies trade in substitutable goods (like ridesharing or delivery services). Making sure you are employing appropriate go-to-market strategies is critical to success + Some of the high growth areas where foreign firms can still offer differentiated services in China include outbound travel and world-leading healthcare, both of which the Chinese have an insatiable demand for but have only been accessible to most relatively recently. It is a charged time, thirty years to the week after Tiananmen Square, forty years after the launch of reform and opening. With trade tensions rising steeply and newspaper articles highlighting how Chinese and American governments are working to keep critical components away from each other’s military supply chains. This is a scary time. It is times like these that private citizens and businesses can continue to work together to increase mutual understanding, to engage each other with openness and respect. We hope the above has helped you a little bit with a toolkit to help you do that.

https://medium.com/balderton/cross-the-river-by-feeling-the-stones-%E6%91%B8%E7%9D%80%E7%9F%B3%E5%A4%B4%E8%BF%87%E6%B2%B3-73c0b55dea17

['Colin Daymond Hanna']

2019-06-06 14:08:25.656000+00:00

['Trade', 'Internationalization', 'Technology', 'Strategy', 'China']

Smart Speaker Sales Soar as Owners Buy Multiple Devices

More people are buying smart speakers — and one of the reasons the numbers have risen so high recently is that many owners have purchased more than one device. By Jason Cohen Business is booming for smart speaker manufacturers. After initial concerns among consumers about devices listening to our every word, sales have rocketed from $900 million in 2016 to $12 billion in 2019. And the industry is projected to be worth $27 billion by 2022. One major reason behind this incredible rise is our buying habits and how they have changed. The big jump came in 2018, when the percentage of US households with a smart speaker jumped from 12.5 percent to 28 percent. That number increased to 35 percent in 2019 and is estimated to reach 75 percent by 2025. Now it’s been reported that 60 million Americans aged 18 and older owned at least one smart speaker by the end of 2019. While that’s just a small percentage of the total population, what’s most interesting is the total amount of smart speakers said to have been sold in the past year. According to a report from NPR and Edison Research, there are 157 million smart speakers in US housholds today. Taken into consideration with the much smaller number of total smart speaker owners, you can conclude that a large swath of buyers are living with more than one device. The report estimates that most US households contain 2.6 smart speakers, on average, showing that many people have made the tradeoff between privacy and convenience.

https://medium.com/pcmag-access/smart-speaker-sales-soar-as-owners-buy-multiple-devices-df3ed9e1f090

[]

2020-01-23 14:13:55.619000+00:00

['Technology', 'Smart Speaker', 'Smart Home', 'Gadgets', 'Privacy']

Understanding Genetic Algorithms

DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS Understanding Genetic Algorithms Solving a Battleship board game as an optimization problem Battleship: The board game. Photo: Amazon¹ A genetic algorithm is a prime example of technology imitating nature to solve complex problems, in this case, by adopting the concept of natural selection in an evolutionary algorithm. Genetic algorithms, introduced in 1960 by John Holland,² extend Alan Turing’s concept of a “learning machine”³ and are best-suited for solving optimization problems such as the traveling salesman.⁴ To intuitively understand the practical implementation and fundamental requirements for employing genetic algorithms, we can set up a toy problem and solve the board of the classic guessing game, Battleship, first released by Milton Bradley in 1967. But rather than calling a sequence of individual shots, let’s ask our genetic algorithm to make a series of guesses of the entire board. Setting Up the Board Genetic algorithms can be applied to problems whose solutions can be expressed as genetic representations, which are simply arrays of ones and zeros. Each binary element is called a gene, while an array of multiple genes is referred to as a chromosome. The optimal solution of a given problem is the chromosome that results in the best fitness score of a performance metric. A Battleship board is composed of a 10 x 10 grid, upon which we can randomly place five ships of varying length. Our fleet includes a carrier (5), a battleship (4), a cruiser (3), a submarine (3) and a destroyer (2). We can express the board as a binary representation simply by denoting the squares occupied by our ships as ones and the unoccupied squares as zeros. We can randomly position each of our ships by following a few simple steps: Position the head of the ship with a random two-dimensional tuple. Orient the heading of the ship with a random cardinal direction. Locate the tail of the ship based on its head position, direction and length. Check that the tail of the ship remains within the boundaries of the board. Check that the ship does not overlap with any previously positioned ships. Repeat the process if the ship fails either of the two assertion tests. Python functions to generate a random Battleship board and evaluate candidate fitness. Source: Author⁵ This results in a two-dimensional binary matrix, which must be transformed into a one-dimensional array that conforms to the genetic form. We can reshape the board by stacking the rows to create a chromosome of 100 genes. Since each gene in the board solution can either be a one or a zero, our toy problem could have been arranged in 2¹⁰⁰ or 1.27e+30 possible ways! Board Solution in Genetic Form 00001110000000000000000001111000000000000000010000… 00010100000001010000000101000010000100001000000000 Binary representation of Battleship board with 5 ships occupying 17 squares (red 1). Image: Author Guessing the Entire Board We can randomly guess the entire board by generating a chromosome with any combination of 100 genes. By guessing that each gene has an equal probability of being occupied (red) or unoccupied (blue), a random sample should be expected to contain 50 occupied squares. By overlaying the guess and the solution (ones & zeros), we can visualize how well they match. Random chromosome with 51 occupied squares (red) and 49 unoccupied squares (blue). Image: Author The fitness of a chromosome can most simply be assessed by counting how many genes correctly match those in the genetic solution (green) and then dividing by the total number of genes (green & red). This accuracy rate of our random chromosome is already 52%! Even though there are only 17 occupied squares, any binomial distribution will approach a median accuracy of 50%. The genetic algorithm can now learn from this fitness metric to suggest an even higher performing chromosome. Fitness functions can be as sophisticated as desired to provide more informative feedback. For instance, we could calculate a confusion matrix,⁶ commonly used in classification problems to account for false positives and false negatives, to return precision and recall. Accuracy rate of random chromosome with 52 matches (green) and 48 mismatches (red). Image: Author Now that we know how to create a random chromosome and assess its fitness, let’s create a generation or gene pool of 10 random guesses and observe how well they do. We can sort the chromosomes by level of fitness and label the top performers, which are 57% accurate, as elite. Even though we have only a small sample, the median fitness of the sample distribution is still 52.5%. Fitness of 10 random chromosomes in generation 1. Image: Author Creating Descendent Generations Now that we have established our gene pool, we can use the natural selection concept of survival of the fittest to create a new generation from an old one. The first step is to select the elite chromosomes from the old generation to be parents of the new generation. These parent chromosomes can then create children via two popular genetic operators, known as crossover and mutation. Elitism The fittest chromosomes from the former generation that are selected to be parents of all of the chromosomes in a new generation. Crossover Two chromosomes can be spliced at a random crossover gene and recombined to create two children, sharing gene chains from both parents. Mutation Random genes of one chromosome can be inverted with bit flips to create a single child that exhibits a small genetic variation from its parent. Let’s create a second generation of 10 chromosomes with a 20% elite rate (two parents), a 20% crossover rate (one pair of spliced children) and a 60% mutation rate (six mutant children). Our bit flip rate is 1%, such that mutants vary from their parents by one gene on average. We can once again sort our generation by fitness and find that our two elites are now 58% and 60% fit! Fitness of 2 elitism, 2 splice pair and 6 mutation chromosomes in generation 2. Image: Author What happens if we iteratively repeat this process to create new generations? With each successive generation, we only retain the highest performers and discard non-optimal solutions. By carrying over elites, we guarantee that generational peak performance can potentially increase and never decrease. After 155 generations, a chromosome reaches the solution with 100% fitness! Fitness of 2 elitism, 2 splice pair and 6 mutation chromosomes in generation 155. Image: Author Converging to the Genetic Solution We have fixed the size of each generation to be 10 chromosomes, but the genetic algorithm incorporates randomness in many areas, from our random chromosomes to the crossover genes to the bit flip rate. Statistics of the first 10 generations show how natural selection gradually improves the population fitness, while dispersion is highest in the first random generation. Fitness distribution statistics for generations 1 to 10. Image: Author Statistics of the last 10 generations show that each population is extremely fit with the least fit chromosome scoring 95%. As a high fitness chromosome approaches the genetic solution, it becomes more likely that its fitness can only improve by mutating a single gene. Thus, high mutation rates and low bit flip rates give fit generations the best chance of achieving the target solution. Fitness distribution statistics for generations 146 to 155. Image: Author We can visualize the performance of the genetic algorithm by plotting fitness statistics across generations. Any random binomial distribution will empower the first generation with 50% fitness. Elitism guarantees that generational peak performance will be monotonically increasing, while crossover promotes substantial initial improvements and mutation pushes them to the top. Convergence of the gene pool towards the optimal solution over 155 generations. Image: Author Tuning the Model Parameters The randomness of the genetic algorithm means that its performance and efficiency will vary over a series of repeated trials. By solving 1,000 games and plotting the distribution of total chromosomes created over all generations, we see that our genetic algorithm will typically find the optimal solution after creating only about 1,700 chromosomes out of 1.27e+30 possibilities! This performance distribution is specific to the hyper-parameters of our model, which are 10 chromosomes per generation, a 20% elite rate, a 20% crossover rate, a 60% mutation rate and a 1% bit flip rate. In the future, we could optimize the efficiency of our genetic algorithm for this problem by minimizing the convergence rate with respect to these feature parameters. Performance metric of a genetic algorithm with fixed model parameters over 1,000 samples. Image: Author The source code written for this analysis is available on GitHub,⁷ which includes a random generator of a Battleship board, implementation of a genetic algorithm and the examples presented in this article. While there are many more details in mastering genetic algorithms, we should feel confident that we understand the fundamentals of this optimization algorithm. References

https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-genetic-algorithms-cd556e9089cb

['Adam C Dick']

2020-12-22 02:32:47.909000+00:00

['Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Programming']

How IoT market is affected by the Growth of CoVID-19?

IoT Solutions — itobuz.com Major Customer Challenges Meeting customer expectations in terms of optimizing the processes Easing security concerns due to various connected networks Keeping IoT hardware updated Overcoming connectivity issues Waiting for government regulations The outbreak of the COVID-19 has been so strong that it has halted all operations across verticals Several industries are struggling to cope up with the rising challenges of personnel lives. As a result, countries have either shut down several operations for now or are running industries at 25% capacity. The majority of the countries across the globe have provided work from home facilities for employees amid the COVID-19 outbreak. According to a survey released by the International Trade Union Congress, 65% of countries are promoting the model of working from home. Complying with the same, almost all organizations have stopped all business-related travel, and approximately 80% of organizations have provided work from home to their employees across the globe. To manage employees working from home, companies are relying extensively on remote-based monitoring of the workforce, which is enhancing the demand for IoT solutions. This helps bring transparency, provide real-time tracking, improve safety, and ensure meeting government compliance. Below are the impacts of CoVId-19 on IoT technology:- Ongoing projects are paused IoT networks largely unaffected Technology roadmaps getting delayed Cyberattacks increase and hackers are changing their strategies Privacy gets re-evaluated Additional focus on security Fewer opportunities in the IoT industry due to Coronavirus outbreak Vendors are providing free products/ services to their customers Incorporate A Combination of IoT, AI and Edge Computing To Building Future Capabilities with Itobuz Technologies. To read more, visit: http://bit.ly/2TodDec Questions??? Contact Us Today (033)-4601 4045 or visit https://itobuz.com/contact to schedule a “5-minute call”. #IoT #IoTSolutions #ItobuzTechnologies

https://medium.com/@tanoy2020/how-iot-market-is-affected-by-the-growth-of-covid-19-41235a0e986d

['Tanoy Chakraborty']

2020-06-15 13:06:48.739000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'IoT', 'Technology News', 'United States', 'Busineß']

Predictions 2020: How’d I Do?

From the Department of Didn’t See THAT Coming… Yes, it’s true: Last year, I did not predict a global pandemic in 2020. COVID is a gravitational force that warps everything it touches, so I approach this annual ritual of self-grading with trepidation. As I start, I honestly don’t remember what I predicted twelve months ago…but regardless, I’m expecting a train wreck. I’ll read each one in turn, repeat the headline prediction, and then free associate some thoughts on what actually transpired. Grab a glass of your favorite beverage…and here we go: Facebook bans microtargeting on specific kinds of political advertising. OK, Facebook did NOT do this — well, not exactly. What the company DID do was ban political advertising altogether — but only in the week before, and a short period after the US election. Of course, you can certainly say that by banning all political advertising, the company ended up banning microtargeting as a result. So that’s one argument for giving myself a “Nailed It.” If that’s too weak an argument, let’s go to the fine print in my original prediction: “The pressure to do something will be too great, and as it always does, the company will enact a half-measure, then declare victory.” And that is exactly what the company did. I mean, exactly. I also wrote: “The company’s spinners will frame this as proof they listen to their critics, and that they’re serious about the integrity of the 2020 elections. As with nearly everything it does, this move will fail to change anyone’s opinion of the company. Wall St. will keep cheering the company’s stock, and folks like me will keep wondering when, if ever, the next shoe will drop.” Yup. Nailed it. Netflix opens the door to marketing partnerships. This prediction requires a bit of clarification. I was not claiming Netflix would open the door to advertising on its platform, but rather that it “may take the form of a co-produced series, or branded content, or some other “native” approach, but at the end of the day, it’ll be advertising dollars that fuel the programming.” What I didn’t realize when I made this prediction was that Netflix was already deep into product placement deals for its Netflix Originals, and that it had already made sure the money changed hands somewhere else (such as between a production company and a brand). There is no doubt that marketing money positively benefits Netflix’s bottom line — and the practice absolutely accelerated in 2020, as did everything streaming-related during COVID. But there was not a significant shift in Netflix policy related to marketing that I can find, so I’m going to say I whiffed on this one. CDA 230 will get seriously challenged, but in the end, nothing gets done, again. This is exactly what happened. In fact, it’s happening as I type this — Trump just vetoed a veto-proof defense funding bill because it doesn’t repeal 230, and Biden has already indicated he plans to rethink 230 next year. But even though tens of millions of American citizens became familiar with Section 230 this year, nothing came of all that noise. Nailed it. Adversarial interoperability will get a moment in the sun, but also fail to make it into law. OK I have GOT to stop writing predictions about obscure academic terminology. I mean, what the actual f*ck? What I was trying to say was this: In 2020, there would be a robust debate about the best ways to regulate Big Tech, and the ideas behind “adversarial interoperability” would get a rigorous airing. This did not happen, and just like Jeffrey Katzenberg, I blame COVID. Exactly no one wanted to debate tech policy in the middle of a global pandemic. Making things worse, toward the end of this year multiple governmental agencies decided it was time to go after Big Tech, and they went batshit with proactive lawsuits — the DOJ and a majority of states sued Google (three times, no less), the FTC sued Facebook, and I’d put money more suits are coming (looking at you, Apple and Amazon). The suits revolve around antitrust law, so the debate will now be dominated by whether or not the government can prove its case in court. This effectively postpones intelligent debate about remedies for years. I find this state of affairs deeply annoying. But a grade must be given, and that grade is a whiff, unfortunately. 2020 will also be the year “data provenance” becomes a thing. Literally stop me from ever writing predictions after hitting the flash evaporator, OK?! This was another policy-related prediction, and if I was going to miss #4 above, I’m certainly going to whiff here as well. In the very rare case you want to know what I was on about, this is how I described the concept: “The concept of data provenance started in academia, migrated to adtech, and is about to break into the broader world of marketing, which is struggling to get its arms around a data-driven future. The ability to trace the origin, ownership, permissions, and uses of data is a fundamental requirement of an advanced digital economy, and in 2020, we’ll realize we have a ton of work left to do to get this right.” Well, in fact, if you believe Google Trends, “data provenance” did have a marked lift in 2020. Does that qualify it for “becoming a thing”? I have no f*cking idea. And again, thanks to COVID, marketers were not exactly focused on public ledgers and blockchain in 2020. Note to self: Stop predicting that something will “become a thing.” Inane. Whiff. Google zags. Oh man, oh man, I feel so close on this one. I mean, there are still a few days left in 2020, right? I honestly think this is about to happen. Here’s how I explained it one year ago: “Saddled with increasingly negative public opinion and driven in large part by concerns over retaining its workforce, Google will make a deeply surprising and game changing move in 2020.” Google’s problems with both public perception (hello, three government lawsuits!) and an unhappy workforce only deepened this year — the Timnit disaster was just the most public of its struggles. But so far the company hasn’t produced a dramatic “game changing” move. Sure, the FitBit acquisition finally closed, but if that proves material, I’ll … start using a FitBit again. I firmly believe that Google must make a game changing move, and soon, if it’s going to keep its mojo. But….it certainly hasn’t happened yet. So…sigh…Whiff. At least one major “on demand” player will capitulate. Just weeks into 2020, I was well on my way to a “Nailed It” here. The tide was turning on the entire category: Uber was in trouble and badly below its IPO price, GrubHub was a falling knife looking for a buyer, PostMates had shelved its IPO dreams. And then…COVID reordered the universe, making on demand everything an essential part of quarantine life. The entire category was supercharged — I mean, DoorDash at 19 times sales?!?! — and yet another of my predictions bit the dust. F U, COVID. Whiff. Influencer marketing will fall out of favor. Well, if ever there was a year to be sick of influencer marketing, it’d be this one. But no, with sports and entertainment programming suspended for the majority of the year, all that marketing budget had to go somewhere, and lord knows it wasn’t going to support news (despite that being the most engaged and highest growth category of all). So…brands threw in even more with influencers. In my explanation I predicted that influencer fraud would be a huge problem — and by most accounts it is (the last figure I could find was 1.3 billion in 2019 — which was roughly 20 percent of the overall market!). But…influencer marketing did not fall out of favor, Charlie D’Amelio is making $50K per post, and damnit, I whiffed again. Information warfare becomes a national bogeyman. Finally, a slam dunk. Man, I was starting to question myself here. “Deep fakes, sophisticated state-sponsored information operations, and good old fashioned political info ops will dominate the headlines in 2020,” I wrote. Yep, and true to form, 2020 saved the scariest example for the end of the year. Nailed it. Purpose takes center stage in business. Here’s one prediction where COVID actually accelerated my take toward a passing grade. The year began with BlackRock’s stunning declaration that it would make investment decisions based on climate impact. Once COVID and the George Floyd murder came, nearly the entire Fortune 500 began recalibrating their communication strategies around racial, gender, and climate equity issues. Last year I wrote “I expect plenty of CEOs will feel emboldened to take the kind of socially minded actions that would have gotten them fired in previous eras.” Whether it was P&G on climate and race, Nike saying “Don’t Do It,” or nearly every major sports league standing with the Black Lives Matter movement, companies have taken previously unimaginable stands this year. Nailed It. Apple and/or Amazon stumble. Sure, Apple did pay up to half a billion to bury its “batterygate” scandal but let’s be honest, you forgot about that, right? Even the publication of a terrifying expose of worker conditions in iPhone manufacturing plants failed to dent the company in 2020. But what you likely will remember is the Epic Fortnite story — and to me, that’s the stumble that tips my prediction to a “Nailed It.” Apple’s response to Epic was ham fisted and short sighted. The company misread regulators’ appetite for antitrust, deeply injured its reputation amongst developers, and exposed the iOS App Store — the source of its most important growth revenues — as a pristine monopoly just begging for a Federal compliant. Meanwhile, while Amazon profited handsomely from COVID, the company’s reputation has only worsened in 2020. A drumbeat of negative press about unsafe working conditions, union busting, and anticompetitive practices culminated in a broadside from one of its own — Tim Bray, a respected technologist (and early reader of Searchblog) who penned a damning Dear John letter to his former employer in May. Despite the strength of both companies’ stock prices, I think it’s safe to say that both Apple and Amazon stumbled in 2020. Nailed It. Next week I’ll be writing Predictions 2021 — let’s hope this is the start of an upward trend…

https://medium.com/@johnbattelle/predictions-2020-howd-i-do-f9755752eaf2

['John Battelle']

2020-12-23 23:23:49.079000+00:00

['Predictions', 'Business', 'Technology', 'Marketing']

Should the creation of low income jobs be considered as Social Entrepreneurship?

Should the creation of low income jobs be considered as Social Entrepreneurship? Research on entrepreneurship has undergone a transition from a traditional to a modern approach on entrepreneurship, which introduces more liberating ideas, other than the conventional views that classify entrepreneurial activities as a financial emancipation. Early research defined entrepreneurship as a strong-willed activity to initiate a profit-oriented business. As theory developed, researchers recognized the importance of social and societal aspects involved in entrepreneuring and started to bring entrepreneurship more in line with social and societal considerations. However, theory on social entrepreneurship limits change potential of entrepreneurship given that it intends a particular approach of social change. Through their literature, scholars argue that social entrepreneurs and social businesses have limited change potential. When researchers or practitioners talk about social entrepreneurship, they usually talk about improving the lives of minorities or people in developing countries or green energy solutions that tackle environmental issues. However, not only social entrepreneurs contribute to tackling social needs. A new wave of researchers argue that all entrepreneurial initiatives generate socio-economic value, and should be studied and understood accordingly. As the discussion on the change potential of entrepreneurship continues, I would like to suggest an expansion of the general understanding of social entrepreneurship. As an illustrative case I would like to argue whether or not the creation of low jobs should be considered as social entrepreneurship, given the concern that technology could produce a social disruption by creating scarcity for this particular class within the workforce. The emerge of technology has precipitated a similar scenario to the industrial revolution as it initiated a social disruption by increasing severely the gap between low and high income class. Given that workers at the bottom of the labor force structure or low-wage jobs will be most immediately affected by technological displacement, researchers urge for the need to start thinking about compensating them for this social disruption caused by automation. There is far-reaching concern that new technology will fundamentally alter the future of work by displacing traditional jobs. While some argue that technological development will generate more jobs than it destroys, others claim that that technology is destroying jobs faster than it is creating them. According to the World Economic Forum, 7 out of the 10 emerging roles by 2022 are jobs that require a high technological affiliation. These include Data analyst and Data Scientists, AI and Machine learning specialists or Big Data specialists. Among others, roles that are declining until 2022 include jobs such as Accounting and bookkeeping, Assembly and factory workers and postal service workers. As stated by Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, emerging technologies have made their way from science fiction movies into the mainstream economy and will encounter millions of truck drivers and call center agents around the world. In the United States, while GDP has risen in the last years, median income has not, while inequality has grown. As a result of great productivity, although technology companies offer disruptive solutions, they do not create jobs. Whatsapp only employs approximately 50 people, although it counts over one billion active monthly users. Although controversial, Uber is a factual example of a high-tech company that has been producing low income jobs in the recent years. Uber is used in this case as it is a hot topic and up-to-date. Various other cases from the sharing economy and beyond could be used upon further research in order to illustrate the above mentioned ideas. According to Uber, in 2017, the company “contracted” around 2.7 million drivers in the world, which are low to middle income jobs depending on whether drivers choose Uber as their main source of income or as a supplementary income source. Research further suggests that total employment expanded in cities where the Uber platform was adopted and that there are no evidence of adverse employment impacts on traditional taxi drivers, as their number also increased by 10%, according to the research. Uber is not classified as a social enterprise if we stick to definitions on social entrepreneurship suggested by researchers. To be classified as a social enterprise, theory suggests that a company needs to prioritize meeting social needs. Generally, this definition is too limiting, given the change potential of business entrepreneurs in general. Uber illustrates a case of a company that is expected to prioritize profit. The company is sensitive to economic matrices as revenues, net income or the trend of monthly active users, that it needs to monitor, to satisfy investors. Being backed by numerous investors makes Uber an economic driven company that yet has an socio-economic impact in the cities where it deploys its platform by offering a solution to the scarcity of low income jobs. The case of Uber illustrates how a company that not necessarily falls within the current definition of social entrepreneurship can have an impact where it is operating. Given the scarcity of low income jobs in the future, as suggested by research, precipitated by emerging technologies, and the precarious definition on social entrepreneurship, the case of Uber should initiate a discussion, peculiarly among scholars, in order to expand their definition on social entrepreneurship as it limits change potential of entrepreneurs.

https://medium.com/@dillon.berjani/should-the-creation-of-low-income-jobs-be-considered-as-social-entrepreneurship-463785478831

['Dillon Berjani']

2018-11-26 13:15:53.959000+00:00

['Social Enterprise', 'Social Entrepreneurship', 'Uber', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Technology']

On #BigIdeas2021

Among the #BigIdeas2021 should be a truly valid solution to the ubiquitous and generations-long password predicament. Humans have not evolved to be capable of remembering many of hard-to-remember text-only passwords, as yet again demonstrated in this report — “After police raid onCOVID-19 whistleblower, it’s revealed password was publicly posted on Florida Department of Health’s website” https://grahamcluley.com/covid-19-florida-password/ On the other hand, sharing the same visual sensation with other animals over hundreds of millions of years, humans are very good at recognising visual objects such as images, especially when the images are emotionally linked to our own episodic memory. By the way, logic tells that authentication products that have to rely on a default/fallback text-password can never solve this password predicament but can only spread a false sense of security. Distractive false ideas need to get debunked for a truly big idea to get recognised all over the world, as discussed below. What we would like to see debunked in 2021 are these two globally-spread false observations - 1. Better security can be achieved by removing the ‘indispensable’ password from digital identity 2. The password can be displaced by ‘password-dependent’ biometrics. How to debunk these unfounded views is outlined below. - “Bizarre Theory of Password-less Authentication” - “Why are we so persistent in the efforts to bust thefalsehood of biometrics?” When these misperceptions have evaporated, we will see “Identity Assurance by Our Own Volition and Memory” pervading the world. - “Image-to-CodeConversion by Expanded Password System” < References > 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 Availability-First Approach Questions and Answers — Expanded Password System and Related Issues < Videos on YouTube> 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/on-bigideas2021-35ba59e7928d

['Hitoshi Kokumai']

2020-12-24 07:43:34.491000+00:00

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

Figma prototyping: now with transitions

Design involves far more than just the designer these days. Engineers, marketers, project managers, and other stakeholders collaborate until the best product emerges. To do this efficiently, teams rely on prototypes — high-fidelity representations of an app — to communicate about a mockup before it’s shipped to engineers. The feel of an app can be completely changed by something as fundamental as the animation between frames. Without those details in place, stakeholders are at risk of becoming thrashed with incessant back and forth. Who has time for that? Learn how to prototype in Figma with these two videos That’s why we’re excited about today’s news: We’re introducing transitions for Figma prototyping. As you build a clickable prototype of your design, add a dissolve, slide, or push effect to link frames to each other. This will make the prototype’s transitions feel more realistic to the viewer, whether that person is a developer, prospective client, or a relative who still doesn’t understand what you actually do for a living. Want to “slide” from one frame to the next over a duration of a few milliseconds? Now you can. Need to mimic the animated motion of an iOS app to bring it to life and impress a new client? Handled. These transitions are essential for getting your ideas across, and you have been clamoring for them with a flood of feedback via Spectrum and Twitter. Our community has requested this functionality nonstop since we first announced Figma 2.0 with prototyping. As we promised back then, we will continue to build prototyping in Figma to meet the needs of everyone involved in the software development process. What makes Figma prototyping faster and easier? For the unfamiliar, Figma prototyping has super powers that other tools lack (💪). Live design: Because we’re a web-based platform, your prototypes automatically stay up to date. They’re tied to your designs, so when you make a few tweaks to your frames, there’s no need for you to re-export them to your prototype. Figma TED talk: You can use your phone’s web browser on Android and iOS to navigate presentations via mobile. It’s Figma TED talk— allowing you to casually walk around the room guiding the demo from your phone. This is particularly useful during client meetings. Stakeholders can click your avatar in the Figma prototype (observation mode), then follow along with your design flow from their own laptops. Components + prototyping: Use Figma components in your prototypes to save a ton of time. When you set a navigation from a component once, it will automatically populate through all instances. For example, your home button will always bounce you back to your home screen. In addition to the existing prototyping features, we hope our new transitions will add an extra layer of polish to your work. You can choose the duration of the animation, and play around with how one frame will ease into another. This means you have control over when an animation is slightly faster at the beginning, or at the end. Lastly, the prototyping toolbar has a preview box, so designing the transitions between frames is a snap. (Or a slide.) Be sure to check out this video to learn the basics of prototyping in Figma. And when you’re ready to introduce transitions to your prototypes head over here. What’s next? We hope this continuation of our prototyping tool helps designers communicate their vision easier, faster, and with more joie de vivre. Much like with our recent workflow launch of @mentions and file sorting, we’re constantly noodling on how to save all team members time. Have an idea for a new Figma feature? Give us a shout over at Spectrum or on Twitter. We’re always listening. And stay tuned for more prototyping announcements. 😉

https://medium.com/figma-design/figma-prototyping-now-with-transitions-197f817ae7a8

['Rudi Chen']

2018-05-01 00:36:18.740000+00:00

['UX Design', 'Technology', 'Tech', 'UX', 'Product']

Trying Out Apples Stock Apps

Calendar vs Fantastical When it comes to my Calendar I will be completely honest and say that if Fantastical went away tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t be that upset. Not that Fantastical isn’t great and I do prefer it over the Calendar app overall. When I got my iPhone 11 Pro last year I decided to setup it up as a new phone and not restoring from a backup. I then took my time in installing apps back on my phone and one of those apps I didn’t reinstall right away was Fantastical, I used the Calendar app for awhile not really caring that it didn’t have some of the features Fantastical provides. But then it was something I either heard on Connected or Mac Power Users that made me realize how much I missed the natural language typing of an event allowing you to have every detail of the event setup without the need of flipping any toggles or using scroll wheels. In one sentence I could add an event on a day, at a specific time frame, and on the exact calendar I wanted. Besides the natural language component the other thing I really love about Fantastical compared to the Calendar app is the views that it provides. Like the screenshot I am showing above, I love the ability to see an entire month then scroll through my event below telling me any events in that month or any upcoming months, allowing the month to change as I scroll to the next months events. The design is also a little more polished, I know I sound like a broken record here, but I do love and appreciate Apple’s minimalist design aesthetics. I think something that these third party apps are showing is that you can still have a minimalist design but it still be functional, I feel sometimes Apple’s apps falls more on the side of design than function and think that could be the reason I don’t find myself using them. Outlook vs Mail I, like many others, have tried a variety of different mail apps on my iPhone, iPad, and even Mac. But every time I do I end up back in the stock Mail app. The main reason I do this is losing emails. Some of these apps provide additional filtering which throws some of my mail into Trash or Junk without me realizing it. I currently have an iCloud, Gmail, and Techuisite email address that I use for all different reason. iCloud is used for more personal things like financial or family uses, my Techuisite account is for more “business” related needs for my writing, and everything else goes to Gmail — and I mean everything. Every newsletter, random website that I need to create a required account for that I will never use again, or an email to just give out for me to random people that need to contact me that are not that close. The reason I treat Gmail this way is because I use a service called Sanebox to help me filter and remove any emails I no longer want to receive or block. It provides an additional filter than just the Spam one that Google provides and puts them in a SaneLater folder for me to go through and either allow to come to my Inbox or move it to the SaneBlackHole where I will never see it again. All that being said, I have a system already that lets me filter my emails and allows me to see the things that I need to see flow through each email address. So for a email client, I just need a place for all those emails to come through. For the most part Mail has always provided that to me without fail. Other email clients like Outlook or Airmail I feel they try to provide a different experience with email that I just don’t find useful. For instance, Outlook has a Focused and Other toggle in the app. This is supposed to provide you a way to see the emails you must see instead of seeing all of them at once. On paper this seems like a good idea. A lot of times emails that you actually need to get to quickly get lost in the long list of emails and you might miss it. Outlook is trying to remove that issue and give you all the emails you need to look at right now and then provides a toggle for you to see the rest whenever you need. My problem with this is I don’t know what emails Outlook thinks needs to be in Focused or Other and a lot of times I ended up forgetting switching over to other thinking that an email just hasn’t come yet. Again, this is another filter or barrier that an email client thinks is useful but for me just gets in the way. Mail just gives me my emails and I like it that way.

https://medium.com/techuisite/trying-out-apples-stock-apps-b8e6a7611049

['Paul Alvarez']

2020-06-13 15:19:09.243000+00:00

['Gadgets', 'Apps', 'Review', 'Technology', 'Apple']

How Does Overwolf Make Money?

How Does Overwolf Make Money? We often get asked — if building apps on Overwolf is free for creators, and using apps is free for gamers — then how does Overwolf make money? Here’s the TL;DR — 85% of our revenue comes from in-app ads and subscriptions 70% of that is passed on to creators We don’t sell any data The deep dive It feels appropriate to open this discussion with the way some people think we make most of our money - collecting user data and selling it to the highest bidder. Well, actually, we DON’T and we won’t sell any data. With that cleared up, it’s worth noting that in the past, we had a deal with NewZoo — a trusted research agency that publishes reports on the gaming market. NewZoo used aggregated usage data from Overwolf to create reports like “the top 20 core PC games”, or the most used hardware. No personal information, just aggregated stats like the ones you’d find on the Steam software and hardware surveys. This partnership accounted for under 1% of Overwolf’s revenue in 2019 — so even back then this was definitely not where our money came in from. In June 2020 we realized we’re not comfortable sharing any data with anyone, not even a research agency. So we ended that relationship and amended our privacy policy to reflect that. We’ve also added ways for users to opt-out from data collection done by the Overwolf client to personalize your experience and analytical purposes, which you can find on the “Privacy tab” on Overwolf settings. So how DO we make money then? The TL;DR is that Creators on Overwolf can add “in-app ads” or subscription plans to their apps. Whenever developers choose to monetize their apps we get a 30% cut — kind of like the Apple Appstore. A little over 85% of Overwolf’s revenue this year has come from these ads and subscriptions, with about 70% of which being passed on to app creators. For mods and addons, 70% of the revenue generated by CurseForge is distributed to authors based on mod usage, in a similar way to how Spotify pays artists. Considering how big ads are in the revenue pie, they’re probably worth explaining. A lot of people think Overwolf is the one that places ads in apps, but that’s not actually the case. Overwolf is an engine for building apps, just like Unity is an engine for building games. And just like Unity has a “Unity ads” service for game devs, Overwolf has, well, an “Overwolf ads” service. We allow creators to add “in-app ads”, which are muted videos or static banners shown inside the app window. Many app creators choose not to include ads in their app, but creators who do must comply with Overwolf’s dos and don’ts — meaning no intrusive ads, no popup ads, no ads that run when the app is minimized, and more. Basically, nothing that interferes with the gaming experience. The remaining 15% So what about the rest of our revenue? The next 11% came from the brands that run marketing projects and special activations on Overwolf — Like the Intel Gaming Access loyalty program, or The 2020 Alienware Games. We like working on these activations because we get to design fun and engaging activations that make sense for the brands, we get paid for it, and we also share amazing rewards with the community. In the past year, alone gamers won over 600,000 game keys, $100,000 in in-game currency, and other amazing rewards like Alienware PCs and peripherals. The last 3% came from mobile ads, originating from Overwolf’s mobile apps — most notably Brawl Stats and Stats Royale. And that’s the big picture And that’s it, that’s the big picture. We hope this video and post helped shed more light on how Overwolf makes money, and how much of that money is actually passed on to creators. If you’d like to see more deep dives and videos like these from us, please share your feedback at ideas.overwolf.com.

https://medium.com/@giltovly/how-does-overwolf-make-money-856d8cc28041

['Gil Tov-Ly']

2020-11-30 12:26:33.314000+00:00

['Gaming', 'App Development', 'Technology', 'Esport', 'Startup']

Introducing Gardener, our homegrown Ethereum oracle

Before we get into the Ethereum oracle, and the blockchain oracle problem, let’s start with a metaphor that I think captures what oracles do. Imagine a big, beautiful garden with lots of plants. But they’re not everyday plants. Instead, they can talk to each other and they thrive on information. Unfortunately, the garden is surrounded by a high wall, so no one inside can see over it. Lucky for the plants, there is a gardener, who comes in to take care of them — and fill them in on what’s happening outside. The plants trust everything that the gardener says, and he also feels the responsibility since the information he passes to the plants is their only version of the truth about the world beyond the walls. Sometimes the plants get suspicious and want the gardener to prove what he says. Let’s say they want to know if any apples grow outside. They want to see an apple from the other side. Of course, the gardener has to bring an apple with him in order to convince the plants that he’s telling the truth. The gardener knows he can’t lie. If the plants demand proof and discover he’s lying, they would never trust him again and he would lose all his friends in the garden. Living in a state of symbiosis, the plants need the gardener to get information about the outside world and the gardener needs the plants’ trust to keep his job. Now switch the walled garden for the blockchain oracle problem, the plants for smart contracts, and the gardener for the Ethereum oracle. The blockchain oracle problem Even though it may sound like the plot of a children’s book, our fictional garden demonstrates a few key things about oracles and the problems they address. An oracle in blockchain terminology is an off-chain solution, which acts as a trusted user for a smart contract, which can feed it with data it needs — just like the gardener. For a deeper dive into the Ethereum oracle topic, you can read my previous article here. During multiple blockchain development projects at Espeo Blockchain, we hit the same problem. Smart contracts can cooperate with each other but they have one serious limitation — the blockchain oracle problem. Like the plants in the walled garden, they can’t fetch anything from the world outside of their own blockchain. Do you need to check the current price of bitcoin in an Ethereum smart contract? Sorry, nope. Weather in London? Forget it. In most of our projects, we lacked a good tool to do it. So we built a solution. In the blockchain ecosystem, there are already a few solutions to the blockchain oracle problem. The most popular is OraclizeIT, which our team found really useful. It supports many different data sources (e.g. URL, IPFS, random, computation). It met our expectations in terms of functionality and we used it in our first implementations. Another very promising solution is Chainlink. It’s flexible and capable of providing almost any input data to the smart contract and generating an output for other blockchains, payments, etc… The biggest problem, however, is that it only lives on a test network and isn’t ready for production use quite yet. TownCrier is another solution from Cornell University developers. Their strong academic background results in a completely different approach using Trusted Execution Environment — Intel SGX in particular. This approach guarantees that no one can alter data during processing, because the whole process lives in a safe enclave, which isn’t accessible from any other process or area. A drawback of this solution is that it has very limited functionality and hasn’t been updated for a while. Chainlink recently acquired TownCrier so it seems things may start to move forward but most probably we’ll still need to wait for a fully functional production-ready solution. Of course, these solutions are only available as SaaS products and the code isn’t open-source or free for the community. Espeo Blockchain places transparency among its core values, which is especially important for blockchain solutions as that’s one of the key blockchain advantages. That’s why we decided to create our own Ethereum oracle product, which would be free and open-source for the community. In parallel to implementing current projects with OraclizeIT (to deliver them quickly), we started working on a replacement. That’s how Gardener was born. Current state Today we are happy to say that we have a working version we can share with you. The product is in its early days but we successfully use it internally and can’t wait to challenge it with your use cases. What we have now: Ethereum smart contracts for the oracle Ethereum libraries for integrating the oracle into your contracts Off-chain server written in Node.js Simple monitor web application for watching what happens with the requests Documentation hosted at gardener.readthedocs.io A GitHub organization with MIT-licensed open source repositories ready to be cloned Summing up, so far we’ve delivered everything you need in order to fetch any data from any public API into Ethereum smart contracts. Roadmap What we have for now is limited but fully functional and ready to use. However, it’s not enough for us. We have big ambitions and a plan on how to improve our solution greatly. First, we would like to add an ETH and ERC20 based fee model. This would give Gardener instance owners the ability to decide who should pay for the request to the Ethereum oracle — them or the users creating requests. Also, it would allow instance owners to add a profit margin, if necessary. Next, we will focus on accepting more data source types and formatting options. This step will include parsers for unstructured (binary) data, access to IPFS, random data source and access to closed APIs in a secure and safe way. We will also want to incorporate heavy computing calculation using container-based approach. All of these will give users great flexibility and no constraint in the matter of data type and source. Later, we will focus on providing proofs to our solution, specifically Intel SGX. It will guarantee data immutability during fetching and parsing processes. Finally, we want to move on to blockchain integrations other than the Ethereum network. We will support EOS, Hyperledger Fabric, Corda and Hyperledger Sawtooth. The above goals are something we want to focus on the first place but we don’t exclude other improvements. If you see a particular feature lacking please drop me an email or raise an issue in our Github. Stay tuned Effective blockchain projects need oracles to get data from the outside. We’ve launched the first open-source solution to the blockchain oracle problem. This is the first article from the series on the Gardener project and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback. All the code is MIT-licensed and you can find it on GitHub. If you have any questions or would like to get help with incorporating Gardener in your project don’t hesitate to reach me by email: [email protected]. Hope to hear from you soon!

https://medium.com/@espeo_software/introducing-gardener-our-homegrown-ethereum-oracle-8d9f4f5f8ed7

['Espeo Blockchain']

2019-02-13 14:50:53.547000+00:00

['Ethereum Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain', 'Software Development', 'Open Source']

Better Products, Stronger Teams: Why Diversity and Inclusion Took Center Stage at Adobe Design Summit

“Accessibility [is sometimes used as] a metaphor for compliance, of just getting by, of doing the minimum that everyone can agree to. What people with disabilities want is not to be complied with — they want to be designed for. Designing is including,” said Matt May, Adobe’s head of inclusive design, who was one of several speakers that stressed that the time is now to rethink how designers create products with diversity and inclusion in mind. “We have a role to play in enabling people to be creative and do their jobs,” he said. Disability isn’t tragedy — it’s a creative way to live Often, designers that create products neglect diversity and inclusion principles until the end of their processes. The assumption is, if you create a strong product first and then make adjustments to accommodate for diversity of ethnicity, ability, and gender, you’ll tick all boxes on effective design. At Adobe Design Summit, the emphasis was on rethinking this process, focusing squarely on how companies build and operate design teams. Disability activist and photographer Anthony Tussler speaks at Adobe Design Summit 2018. Photo credit: Alnie Figueroa. Photographer and disability activist Anthony Tusler took the stage and pushed the audience to rethink inclusivity. He stressed that having a disability is not a tragedy, and talked about the creative ways he’s found to adjust to the environments that aren’t designed for him. Rosa Lee Timm, a deaf performance artist, shared the stage with Anthony, and had a strong message for those building products and product design teams. “Get a [disabled] person, like myself, in on the ground floor, at the beginning of the process, so then it becomes organic. And then when it’s done, it’s designed readily with easy distribution from the start,” she said. “You don’t have think about afterthoughts and revisions. You don’t want those ‘uh-oh’ moments where you have to invite someone in as your consultant, and then dismiss them after that. You want to have them included in the process and be a member of the team. And who knows, some of us may have some new inventions and ideas and creativity that you wouldn’t think about.” Deaf performance artist Rosa Lee Timm on stage at Adobe Design Summit 2018. Photo credit: Emma Salom. The sentiment taps into Adobe’s own diversity and inclusion strategies. Creating products and services, built from the ground up with diverse groups of users in mind, is both good for business and a moral responsibility. Just as non-accessible environments (like stairways and bathrooms) have the ability to disable a person, so do our own products. “If Adobe is creating products that are central to people doing their job, and those products are not accessible, it means that an employer cannot hire an employee because the software doesn’t work for them. That’s where the tragedy is,” said Anthony. Matt May made it clear that Adobe is listening, and making conscious decisions to better design for people with disabilities with its current and upcoming products. “If you’re under the impression that diversity is just about shades of brown, you’re not paying attention.” While it’s important to incorporate people with diverse backgrounds of all kinds in product teams, it’s simply not enough to hire for their perspective without acknowledging their greater culture and experiences. Farai Madzima is the UX lead at Shopify, and he said companies that design products could be doing a much better job at helping their “diverse hires” integrate with teams and unleash their true creative potential. “If you’re under the impression that diversity is just about shades of brown, you’re not paying attention. If you think diversity is just about gender or ability, then you’re not paying attention. You need to work with people who don’t walk, think, and talk like you. You need to have those people be a part of how you’re working,” said Farai. From speaking up in meetings, to attending work events, to making decisions, and giving feedback, it’s not enough to just assume all people will work in the exact same ways in harmony. Culture and background need to be considered at all times, and while that may sound like more work, it comes with a potential payoff. Shopify’s UX Lead Farai Madzima delivers a keynote address at Adobe Design Summit 2018. Photo credit: Emma Salom. “This sounds like a difficult thing, on top of solving the problems of designing a product, but it is absolutely critical. The challenges that we see in society are born of the fact that we have not seen what the world needs from our industry. We have not understood what our colleagues need from us and what we need for ourselves, which is this idea of being much more open-minded about what is different in the world,” he said. Designing for the world (and taking advantage of global opportunities) starts by not only with building a diverse team, but also fostering their ability to work together. This forms a key part of Adobe’s own diversity and inclusion strategy. “Great design doesn’t mean the same for everybody. There’s no such thing as universal design,” added Dan Gebler, director of product for adobe.com. Smart global design starts at home. The golden age of creativity, for all There were many other topics explored at Adobe Design Week, from the future of design strategy and ethics, to Adobe’s efforts to create a dynamic new design system, to the hobbies and habits designers do to refill their creative tanks. But at the core of the company, and in the hearts of many of its designers, it was this message of inclusivity that resonated most. That’s why Adobe is launching Interaction Design Day on September 25, a global celebration of interaction design’s ability to improve the human condition — with presentations, workshops, and design showcases from all over the world centered around the theme of diversity and inclusion in design. “It used to be enterprise software was about the back office, then it moved to the front office, now it’s about the customer. There’s nothing that the customer wants more than good design and creativity,” Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, told the crowd of designers. ]Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen on stage with Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice-president. Photo credit: Troy Church. “I really believe everybody has a story to tell, and if you can help people tell that story through technology, then that is a way in which we can have an incredible impact,” he said, adding that we’re living in a golden age of creativity, one where anyone with an innovative mind and a desire to create deserve to be empowered to achieve their greatest level of potential.

https://medium.com/thinking-design/better-products-stronger-teams-why-diversity-and-inclusion-took-center-stage-at-adobe-design-3350d8b15962

['Patrick Faller']

2018-08-20 16:06:01.488000+00:00

['Technology', 'Inclusive Design', 'Diversity', 'Inclusion', 'Design']

Singapore businesses test the use of digital health passports to check the results of the COVID-19 test for travelers

Digital health passports have been developed by Singapore companies that can check the COVID-19 test results of travelers, as the country is steadily reopening its borders with safe management measures in place. Affinidi said that it is working on trials for inbound travellers with government agencies and private sector partners, while two other companies said they were involved in pilots for the Singapore-Hong Kong air travel bubble, which was expected to launch on Nov 22, but has since been postponed. Digital health passports allow clinics and hospitals, using technologies such as blockchain, to securely exchange healthcare data across borders. Developers issue a QR code with the test result, which travelers show to immigration authorities, after prospective travelers take their COVID-19 test at a healthcare provider operating with these applications. Officers may see information when scanned, such as whether the laboratory is on the whitelist of the destination country, what type of test was taken, and whether it was completed within the timeline necessary. “According to Mr. Quah Zheng Wei, co-founder and CEO of Accredify, “We actually work directly with clinics, hospitals and laboratories, where they securely send us data either through an API or through our cloud-based solution, and we take that data, make it into a verifiable document, and put it in the individual’s hands in their digital health passport. This is to ensure that test reports have not been tampered with, while ensuring that only those with which the consumer wishes to share confidential personal health data are shared. This contrasts with alternatives such as opening up centralized medical records systems to countries around the world, which poses data privacy concerns and may potentially target cyberattacks by healthcare providers. Accredify, through collaborations with private healthcare providers such as Parkway Pantai and Raffles Medical Group, has 80 laboratories and clinics in Singapore and Hong Kong on board. It aims to expand its network next year to approximately 440 clinics in Singapore that have been approved to offer COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction tests, and as research gets ramped up, it expects more to come on board.

https://medium.com/@tasianaffairs/singapore-businesses-test-the-use-of-digital-health-passports-to-check-the-results-of-the-covid-19-f7a17fab7a1

['The Asian Affairs']

2020-12-21 17:04:40.740000+00:00

['Asean', 'Singapore', 'Travel', 'Flight', 'Technology']

JavaScript Basics — Generators and the Web

Photo by Krzysztof Niewolny on Unsplash JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. To use it effectively, we’ve to know about the basics of it. In this article, we’ll look at how to define and use generators and web communication. Generators Generator functions let us create functions that can be paused and resumed. It’s indicated by the functuion* keyword. For instance, we can write: function* random() { while (true) { yield Math.random(); } } We defined a random function which keeps generating random numbers as many times as we call it. It’s paused when yield is run. We can have an infinite loop since the loop only runs when we run the returned generator explicitly. To use it, we can write: const ran = random(); console.log(ran.next()); console.log(ran.next()); Then we get something like: {value: 0.6168149388512836, done: false} {value: 0.7733643240483823, done: false} We called our generator function and the call next on the returned generator ran . Also, we can create an iterator object to return a an array of numbers sequentially. For instance, we can write: const obj = { *[Symbol.iterator]() { const arr = [1, 2, 3]; for (const a of arr) { yield a; } } } We have the Symbol.iterator method, which is a generator function that yields each item of arr . It’s paused when yield is run. Then we can use it with a for-of loop by running: for (const o of obj) { console.log(o); } The async function is a special type of generator. It produces a promise when it’s called, which is resolved or rejected. When it yields or awaits a promise, the result of the promise or the exception value is the result of the await expression. Event Loop Async programs are run a piece by piece. Each piece may start some action and schedule code to be run when an action finishes or fails. The program sits idle in between the pieces. Async actions happen on its own call stack. This is why we need promises to manage async actions so that they run one by one. JavaScript and the Browser JavaScript is used to build almost all browser apps. Browser users the HTTP protocol to communicate with the Internet. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Every time we run something in the browser, we make an HTTP request. We make them download web pages, send data to servers, and many more. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a protocol is the common protocol of the Internet. It lets computers communicate with each other by having one computer listen to data and one computer sending it. Each listener has a port number associated with it. If we want to send emails, we use the SMTP protocol, which communicates through port 25. We have a 2-way pipe for communication. One piece of data can flow from one computer to the other. The Web The browser communicates via the world wide web, known as the web for short. We can communicate on the web by putting our computer on the Internet and listen to port 80 so we can communicate with HTTP. For instance, we can make a request to http://example.com , which is a URL that tells us where to make the request to. A URL is just a piece of text in a fixed format to let us locate the resources that we need. The URL first has the protocol, which is http , then the server name, which is example.com . It can also have a path, like http://example.com/foo.html . foo.html is the path in the URL. Photo by Nicolas Picard on Unsplash HTML HTML stands for the Hypertext Markup Language. It’s the document format for storing web pages. It contains text and tags that we can use to give structure to the text. We use it to describe links, paragraphs, headings, and more. For instance, we may write: <!doctype html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>hello</title> </head> <body> <h1>Hello</h1> <p>Read my work <a href="http://example.com">here</a>.</p> </body> </html> All HTML documents start with <!doctype html> to indicate that it’s an HTML document. Then they have the head tag which has some metadata like the title and meta tags with extra metadata. The body tag has the main content. It has heading tags like h1 and p tag for paragraphs and a tag for links to other pages. We can change HTML with JavaScript dynamically. Conclusion We can create generators to create functions that can be paused and resumed. JavaScript is useful for creating web apps. They communicate via HTTP, which communicates over TCP. JavaScript In Plain English Enjoyed this article? If so, get more similar content by subscribing to our YouTube channel!

https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/javascript-basics-generators-and-the-web-f30f0a1d2602

['John Au-Yeung']

2020-06-16 21:45:03.330000+00:00

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

Things to Do Before Your Next Technical Interview

Things to Do Before Your Next Technical Interview Show how prepared and interested you are Recently, I’ve had the chance to take part in technical interviews, as the recruiter. To be on the other side of the table, analyzing how candidates perform, is a great experience! My role was to prepare assignments to give to the candidates, perform the selection of those who did a good job, and interview them on-site. I only have a short experience in interviewing candidates. But, what I can say is that more than the technical knowledge, what I appreciated the most is to see how candidates present themselves, what they know about us, and how motivated they were to join our team. It is quite easy to see if someone has prepared the interview or just came because the door was open. Being good at coding is cool, that’s of course the main thing that we are testing. However, if the candidate doesn’t show a bit of interest in what they will be doing, doesn’t make us want to work with them, it makes the interview very boring. Recruiters do a lot of interviews. Candidates need to think about a strategy to stand out from the crowd. I was more interested in candidates being super enthusiastic about presenting themselves, what they know about the company, and asking questions than the actual technical knowledge. It is still important, of course, but not in the first part of the interview. That said, here is a collection of things you can do before going to your next job interview…

https://medium.com/better-programming/things-to-do-before-your-next-technical-interview-d107a349204d

['Thomas Guibert']

2020-02-05 02:03:12.434000+00:00

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

A Love-Hate Relationship with Photorealism

It’s a recursive loop. Audiences demand photorealism because it’s easy on the eyes, and audiences demand shooters and survival games because of their accessible primary loop and ease of playing with friends. Not to say that all photorealistic games are of the lowest common denominator: the Dark Souls series, Red Dead Redemption 2, and God of War have demonstrated that a market for storytelling and original gameplay still exists. For an industry that puts profit first, though, there is no reason to hop back into a dated style when photorealism pulls in the most money. Years of tasteless but pretty games that still turn a profit have proven so without a doubt. Pairing styles with gameplay is an axiom of video game design, and breaking this rule doesn’t often work well. Yet when a style is overwhelmingly preferred, we not only see a flood of games that look the same but also play the same. Other looks that cost just as much, like Cuphead’s hand-drawn animation, are thrown away along with the new ideas they inspire, in favour of photorealism. Games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla look phenomenal, but will arguably fail to make as much of an impact on the general course of video games, even within their genre, due to their lack of departure from conventions already established. As jumps in graphical quality become smaller and smaller each year, simple technological improvements are no longer part of the artistry like the jump from 2D to 3D was. In order for something to break new ground nowadays, it needs to innovate creatively instead of technologically. Miles Morales, Godfall, and Horizon Forbidden may be next-gen titles, but their refusal to deviate in any major way visually is a worrying sign. The past generation of games have improved graphically, but have rarely departed from photorealism. Source: Victor Li. Should we all buy indie early access games and fund Kickstarters then? For a consumer with a budget, probably not. The inherent unpredictability associated with indie developers means every game could be a masterpiece or a fluke, with the odds heavily stacked towards one side. Venture capital funds are starting to look at video games as a respectable medium, and more money is flowing into the industry than ever. However, this brings the same creative restrictions that AAA companies face, as the kind of games that get funding are almost always mass market-friendly. Certain groups may be interested in more unique games, but they are far and few in between. In a way, the entire industry is facing a creative block. Video games have grown into the largest media industry in the entire world, and are expected to rake in around $153.9 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. Absolute creative freedom is a luxury that only smaller developers can have nowadays, with massive studio projects like Halo Infinite and AC: Valhalla reeking of focus group testing and marketing department influence. Even relatively auteur directors like Hideo Kojima behind Death Stranding and Neil Druckmann behind TLOU2, both quite expressive and idiosyncratic works, are still arguably restricted somewhat in how they approach their creations due to budget and executive limitations. Did Kojima really want Sam Porter to slam down a Monster Energy every time he takes a break? The forces at play behind the works of art that people make always create conflicts of interest, and we are arguably seeing them more than ever before — their overwhelming preference for a certain visual style is just one of them. Watch an in-engine cutscene from any current-gen game, and you’ll still see lips fail to match up with the words, along with stiff movement that demonstrates that the technology isn’t perfect just yet. With how much money and resources the industry dedicates to the development of photorealism, it’s unlikely for them to stop when they are just about to hit the apogee of their capabilities. It certainly has a place in the pantheon of tools used to create evocative games; it’d just be nice if they could make room for others sometimes.

https://medium.com/super-jump/a-love-hate-relationship-with-photorealism-df9d364fbc6d

['Victor Li']

2020-11-25 06:30:59.724000+00:00

['Design', 'Gaming', 'Features', 'Technology', 'UX']

Technology • Innovation • Publishing — Issue #94

Innovation Google’s Read Along taps AI to improve kids’ reading skills Google launched Read Along, an app that uses speech recognition and natural language processing to provide kids feedback on their reading skills. venturebeat.com • Share TikTok is coming after Snapchat with a new augmented reality ad format The “AR brand effect” ad will allow TikTok users to add interactive visual effects from advertisers to their TikTok videos that interact with the physical environment around them. A car could zoom the length of the kitchen table, or the creator could interact with an advertiser’s mascot as it bounces around the room, for example. The ads will be clickable and feature music that plays as the user shoots their video. digiday.com • Share Millions of historic newspaper images get the machine learning treatment at the Library of Congress A new effort from the Library of Congress has digitized and organized photos and illustrations from centuries of news using state of the art machine learning. Newspaper Navigator collects and surfaces data from images from some 16 million pages of newspapers throughout American history. Newspaper Navigator, the code behind it and all the images and results from it are completely public domain, free to use or modify for any purpose. You can dive into the code at the project’s GitHub. techcrunch.com • Share Publishing McGraw-Hill, Cengage Call Off Merger The inability to reach an agreement with the government about which divestitures the publishers needed to make to allow the merger to move forward led to the deal being canceled, the companies said. www.publishersweekly.com • Share Bookstores, Authors, Musicians Band Together for “Bookstock” Fundraiser Concert RT @ABAbook Peace, Indie Bookstores, & Music! Driftless Books and Music in Viroqua, WI, is hosting #Bookstock2020, a two-day virtual book & music festival! The festival will bring together artists to connect with fans and raise funds for bookstores. www.bookweb.org • Share To Engage with Audiences, Publishers are Reimagining Content RT @EditorPublisher E&P takes a look at the various ways media companies are entertaining and engaging with consumers and speaks with those who are finding success with redefining their content to meet the habits of today’s audience. www.editorandpublisher.com • Share The impact of COVID-19 on reading, part 2 RT @ThadMcIlroy @BookNet_Canada released new data about the impact of COVID-19 on reading. www.booknetcanada.ca • Share Coronavirus: Italy’s Literary Agents Form ADALI, Their First Association Offering a ‘360-degree view of the potential, Italy’s agents are organizing ADALI during the ‘critical situation’ imposed by COVID-19. publishingperspectives.com • Share Paper Magazine halted its print issues wwd.com • Share Business Amazon is said to be circling AMC Theatres, the world’s largest cinema chain www.thisismoney.co.uk • Share Twitch Is Developing Talk Shows and Dating Programs for Gamers finance.yahoo.com • Share Square launches Online Checkout to take on PayPal Square is introducing a new Online Checkout tool designed for small businesses looking to rapidly transition to ecommerce. venturebeat.com • Share Comedy Central, BET, Nickelodeon coming to YouTube TV www.latimes.com • Share Resources Free School Library Journal Day of Dialog Virtual Event for Educators and Librarians 5/27 RT @sljournal Join Laurie Halse Anderson, Derrick Barnes, Matthew Cordell, Shannon Hale, Tiffany D. Jackson, Erin Entrada Kelly, Ibram X. Kendi, Nina LaCour, Grace Lin, Meg Medina, Jason Reynolds at SLJ’s first-ever virtual Day of Dialog. www.slj.com • Share Graduate Together: America Honors the High School Class of 2020 The one-hour, commercial-free show will be carried on ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC as well as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube on Saturday, May 16 at 8 PM ET. www.businesswire.com • Share Submit a Video to PRH Library’s Librarian Commencement Speech #teamPRH RT @PRHLibrary Dear Librarians, you’re invited to speak to the Class of 2020! Submit a video with your message and it could be included in our librarian commencement video! Submit your videos using this link www.booksontape.com • Share Researching COVID-19 misinformation? The IFCN has opened a call for research proposals Today, the International Fact-Checking Network and the 88 fact-checking organizations that have been working together since Jan. to fight mis/disinformation about COVID-19 call for research proposals on the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance database. IFCN now invites academics to take a deep dive into a database that has gathered more than 5,300 debunked hoaxes about the new coronavirus — pieces of content that have been debunked in 74 countries and in 43 different languages. www.poynter.org • Share Have you lost someone to coronavirus or do you work with victims’ families? Help us remember New Yorkers felled by COVID-19. Share their story with THE CITY. RT @MarkLevineNYC Of the 20k+ NYers who’ve died, only 5% have had staff written or paid obituaries. New project by @THECITYNY looks to change that, by putting as many names, faces & details to the numbers as possible. If you know a NYer who’s died, share their story here docs.google.com • Share Women’s Media Group Tricia Brouk’s The Art of the Big Talk Last chance to sign up for this free webinar May 14, noon EST www.womensmediagroup.org • Share By Kathy Sandler The latest in technology, innovation, and publishing curated by Kathy Sandler. I work at Penguin Random House. Opinions expressed are my own. Tweet Share If you would like to subscribe to this newsletter, click here.

https://medium.com/@ksandler1/technology-innovation-publishing-issue-94-9f89568dd57e

['Kathy Sandler']

2020-05-11 19:26:45.450000+00:00

['Technology', 'Publishing', 'Resources', 'Innovation']

How Drones Are Luring Young Chinese Back to the Countryside

How Drones Are Luring Young Chinese Back to the Countryside Drone technology is shaking up Chinese agriculture. Meet the young pilots trying to make farming “cool” again. The first time I saw Zhao Pengfei use a drone for farmwork was on a sweltering summer day in the grape fields of Weinan, a city in northwestern China’s Shaanxi Province. I remember watching Zhao as he sat comfortably in the doorway of a little shed, tinkering with the settings on his remote control. “OK, we’re ready for takeoff!” he shouted, and I soon heard the frantic whirring of a propeller springing to life nearby. A moment later, I spotted the drone as it soared into the air and flew off toward the vineyard, where it would spray pesticides along a preprogrammed route. Zhao has been a professional drone pilot since 2015, when he gave up his life as a migrant laborer and returned to his hometown to work in the country’s nascent drone industry. Although he is only 23 years old, Zhao is already a veteran of sorts in this emerging field. When I asked him what exactly had attracted him to the job, he talked about how drones have the potential to make agriculture “cool” again. “Even though I am from a rural village, I never wanted to be a farmer,” he said. “It was only my interest in drones that persuaded me to take this job. Now I can spray an entire field without so much as breaking a sweat.” Zhao is not the only young pilot drawn to agriculture because of an interest in drones. Although most of these drone enthusiasts hail from the countryside, they have generally spent time living in the city and have since adjusted to urban life. Unlike older generations, few of them have sentimental attachments to the land or the will to spend their lives toiling on a farm: Only the advent of new, semiautomated farming techniques has convinced them to return to their rural roots. In today’s China, the word “farmer” — nongmin — carries connotations of poverty, backwardness, self-centeredness, and ignorance. Due to the workings of China’s household registration system — which divides the country’s population into rural and urban households and also limits the former’s access to urban social programs and opportunities in the process — farmers are commonly treated like second-class citizens. Even the word “farmer” can be pejorative, and so they receive little respect for the work they do. Since the reform and opening-up policies were rolled out in the late 1970s, young people from the countryside have moved in droves to China’s cities in search of work. As a result, agriculture has become an industry dominated by those over 45. According to the 2010 census, 47.1 percent of Chinese agricultural workers were over 45 years old that year, compared with the 24.8 percent in the service industry. This phenomenon has given rise to two problems, the first of which is a rural labor shortage. In 1978, 82.1percent of Chinese lived in the countryside, whereas in 2016 that figure was just at 43.2 percent. On the rural outskirts of Weinan, agriculture has not yet been fully mechanized, and cash crops — such as apples — are still being harvested by hand. In recent years, a skilled laborer’s daily wages have surged from 70 to 120 yuan (currently $10.50 to $18), but during busy periods farmers still struggle to find seasonal workers willing to take on these backbreaking jobs. Unable to afford labor costs, many small farms have decided to skip applying pesticides to their crops altogether. The second problem is generational: Fewer and fewer young people think of farmwork as a vocation, and so valuable rural knowledge is being lost as these able-bodied workers move to the cities. Many older farmers see their labors as means to give their children better-paid, more socially respectable futures, and so hope that their kids won’t follow in their footsteps and remain in the countryside. According to a 2017 report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 49.7 percent of young migrant workers have never done agricultural work. Meanwhile, in southern Henan, a province in central China, almost one quarter of arable land now lies fallow. If more young people cannot be convinced to go into farming, it could spell disaster for Chinese agriculture. The latter issue is a source of increasing concern for the Chinese government. Although in 2008 the Communist Party announced initiatives to accelerate the pace of agricultural mechanization, the upshot has mainly been an increase in the supply of large agricultural machinery at the ground level — even as the average age of machine operators continues to rise. The application of drone technology to agriculture hints at how the rise of semiautomated farming techniques and new forms of information technology might resolve China’s rural labor shortage. Smart devices like drones exert powerful pulls on many young Chinese, who see them as science fiction come-to-life. “Drones have turned my childhood fantasies into reality,” said Li Dong, who, like Zhao, has found work piloting drones in the countryside. Of course, drones alone cannot resolve the imminent agricultural labor shortage. According to Zhao Fuming, a general manager of the prominent drone manufacturer XAG, the total number of agricultural drone pilots in China is only in the tens of thousands. Nonetheless, their deployment is a significant step toward making agriculture “smarter.” For example, drones can be used to carry out topological surveys, watch over crops, and compile data about property boundaries and the kinds of pests prevalent in a given area — all of which can be then uploaded into the cloud. This information can then be shared with outside financial institutions, allowing them to make more informed decisions regarding credit transactions. The prospects of smart agriculture and its guaranteed higher wages — according to news reports, experienced drone operators can make more than 10,000 yuan ($1,530) a month — are already attracting young capital and talent back to the countryside. After finishing his army service, 25-year-old Shi Yufeng moved back to his native Weinan to take over his father’s farm supply company. Shi’s passion for flying helped him cultivate a partnership with XAG, and he has since assembled a drone-centered crop maintenance team. Using data provided by XAG, Shi claims to be able to provide farms with an array of accurate information on everything from “ploughing, sowing, maintaining, harvesting, and storage” — information that could help boost productivity. His farm currently has over 40 employees — the vast majority of whom are people in their 20s and 30s who were lured back home to the countryside by tales of the high wages offered to drone operators. Although drones are encouraging young people to return to their rural roots, many returnees are only interested in working in the semiautomated side of the agriculture sector to specialize in advanced agricultural services, or to try and become capital investors. Meanwhile, jobs with more menial tasks such as pruning and packing remain difficult to fill. Still, Shi is optimistic about the potential impact of technology on rural life. “We have a responsibility to farmers, and forcing them to expose themselves to pesticides while robotically carrying out the same menial tasks over and over is inhumane,” he said. “Our goal is to end backwardness in the countryside.” Smart agriculture may be the future of farming, but it is also a vision that revolves around the usage of drones giving huge leverage to the kinds of large-scale companies that are able to invest in, gather, and process big data. In this sense, new technology may not necessarily liberate individual farmers who are toiling on the bottom rungs of production — in fact, the introduction of new technology may even further exploit them. If left unresolved, this fundamental conflict — one that is central to all forms of automation — may end up actually deterring more young people from going into farming. Translator: Lewis Wright; editors: Lu Hua, Matthew Walsh and Kilian O’Donnell. This article was funded by the Sixth Tone Fellowship. In 2018, Sixth Tone sponsored eight young scholars to come to China for a six-week research trip to conduct fieldwork in eight provinces all over the country. (Header image: An agricultural drone sprays herbicides in a field, Zhumadian, Henan province, April 21, 2018. Shi Yangkun/Sixth Tone) Originally published at www.sixthtone.com on June 27, 2018.

https://medium.com/sixth-tone/how-drones-are-luring-young-chinese-back-to-the-countryside-809f759c0f2

['Sixth Tone']

2018-06-29 02:52:21.874000+00:00

['Drones', 'Agriculture', 'Technology', 'China']

Falling Down — The Reality of Developer Burnout

Preventing Burnout Burnout is not considered to be something that has a permanent effect on life because it can be managed. Most people get through it but it can take time to figure out. Here are some strategies to try. Rest, exercise, and health Try to exercise at least two or three times a week and eat more healthy food like fruit and vegetables. Drink plenty of water and make sure you are getting a full quota of sleep. Meditation is another good way of managing stress and resetting your mind. Apps like Headspace can really help with this. Be open about your burnout to friends and family as their advice and support can be crucial in getting you back on track. Another strategy is to become an early riser if you are not already. Getting up early can make you more productive while maintaining energy and mental sharpness. You could exercise before work or have a more productive day as a freelance developer. Getting your work done earlier to free up your evenings for leisure is a positive move. Take time for other interests According to Coderhood, it’s important to make time for doing things that you like doing. This can include spending time reading books, attending conferences and meetups, listening to development podcasts, or starting a personal blog about the things you enjoy the most. Writing can also be excellent therapy for helping your mind and mood. Hobbies are another great way to combat burnout. Knowing when to take a break and do something else is an important way to manage yourself. If you feel work is becoming too much to manage, set some time aside to do the enjoyable things that you have been putting off. It may be that you like gaming, sport, or photography. It’s easy to deprive yourself of the fun things in life. Don’t do that. Fun activities generate energy and that is what you are looking for to create a better life balance. The main point is equilibrium. There is a time to work, time to sleep, and time to enjoy life with family, friends, and hobbies. Split your time up wisely and you will be a far more content person. Be sure to self-reflect According to Towards Data Science, an excellent strategy is to take the time to self-reflect at the end of each day. This can be done using a written journal or an online resource like Evernote. You could even send emails to yourself. The point is that you take time to look back at what you have achieved that day. This can include passive and active events. Passive events are when something happened without you actually doing anything, such as bumping into an old friend and enjoying a good long conversation. An active event is when something has been done as a direct action from you. This can be in the form of completing a task on your to-do list such as downloading some software or walking the dog. The point of self-reflection is to look back at what you achieved but realize that things can happen that you have no control over. These things may have shifted your schedule and set you back. The trick is to understand that you don’t have full control over everything in life. Things can happen out of the blue, but that’s OK. It’s important to accept that it happens, so don’t let frustration burn you out. By reflecting you can see what is happening in your daily life and learn about how to adapt your plans as you go.

https://medium.com/better-programming/falling-down-the-reality-of-developer-burnout-59c9079446ef

['Rob Doyle']

2020-11-27 13:36:54.433000+00:00

['Software Development', 'Mental Health', 'Technology', 'Work', 'Programming']

Merry Christmas

Hello everyone, greeting from BioPassport Team. There’s no greater gift than spending time with you! ^^ Wish everyone Merry Christmas! Thank you! #BioPassport #Blockchain #BIOT #Biotechnology #health #healthylifestyle #BIO #merrychristmas #christmas #바이오패스포트 #건강관리 #개인건강관리 #블록체인 #의료건강 #개인건강 #코로나 #코로나19 #바이러스진단키트 #메리크리스마스

https://medium.com/@biopassportofficial/merry-christmas-1b38b1d587c0

['Bio Passport']

2020-12-23 02:48:02.003000+00:00

['Biotechnology', 'Christmas', 'Biot', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Biopassport']

WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY || IMPACTS ON OUR WORLD.

Technology is the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation.The best definition of technology is the study and transformation of techniques, tools, and machines created by humans. Technology allows humans to study and evolve the physical elements that are present in their lives. The term “technology” rose to prominence in the 20th century in connection with the Technological revolution.In 1937, the American sociologist Read Bain wrote that Technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them. There are many components of information Technology but the first three components of technology systems — hardware, software, and data.Hardware(This is the physical technology that works with information).Software(The hardware needs to know what to do, and that is the role of software).Data(process of facts and figures, called data). Knowledge, Process, Science, Engineering, Skills, Tools….. etc are also the components of Technology.In my point of view,Knowledge is the main component of Technology.Without knowledge,we cannot do something. Technology plays an important role in society today. It has positive and negative effects onthe world and it impacts daily lives.Technology affects the way individuals communicate, learn, and think. It helps society and determines how people interact with each other on a daily basis. Now days, many ICT gadgets are used in our life and they facilitate with mobility thus used anywhere and anytime. These gadgets operate for Information, Speed, and Communication and reduce the physical and mental human work load. By that principles, modern day gadgets truly helped mankind in daily life.We find that while some of these impacts are beneficial, like improvements in education, health, innovations, government service delivery, and participatory democracy; others are pervasively detrimental to the society as a whole,dissemination of offensive images by foreign and local media. Islam is supportive of scientific research that brings benefit to humankind. Many Muslims appreciate technology and respect the role that science plays in its creation. As a result, he says there is a great deal of Islamic pseudoscience attempting to reconcile this respect with other respected religious beliefs. Technology has changed the way people live their everyday lives. It’s present in almost everything you do, from how you communicate to how you perform your day-to-day tasks. Thanks to technology, it’s now easier to go to work or perform household chores. I also make a website in which i publish about technology and science bloges.Link is https://teebom.blogspot.com If you are intrested in technology and science news, then visits to our website.Also follow me for more latest information about technology, science and other articals.

https://medium.com/@laibaseemabahmed/what-is-technology-impacts-on-our-world-a89608de4e07

['Laiba Seemab Ahmed']

2021-05-08 19:46:33.616000+00:00

['Science', 'Science Communication', 'Technology', 'Bill Gates', 'Technology News']

Creative Healthcare Mobile Apps Ideas for Development

Healthcare applications are high in demand; therefore, you have made the right decision to build a healthcare mobile app. Now, check out any of these creative healthcare app ideas that have come to mind after I read your question. · Medical training app- Fuel it up with augmented reality to deliver an immersive experience. This type of app can help medical professionals to train the interns on various procedures without performing them on a human. · AI personal trainer app- An app that provides personalized fitness training to individuals where AI will help to check their posture. · Diet planner app- You can develop a diet planner app so that people can get a personalized diet chart to meet their nutrition requirements. · Healthcare app only for women- You can think of developing a healthcare app dedicated only to women. · Hospital finder app- This type of app can help people to find specialized hospitals for the treatment of various diseases. · Run and earn- Developing an app where people will get money by doing exercise is definitely a motivation for those who cannot stick to the fitness routine. · Health recordkeeping app- With this app, you can help people to keep a record of their medical history. Choose any of these ideas and build your app today. I wish you all the luck! you may contact us to convert your idea into reality. Email: [email protected]

https://medium.com/@apptechblogs/creative-healthcare-mobile-apps-ideas-for-development-6413367cc8ab

['App Tech Blogs']

2021-02-02 12:23:20.353000+00:00

['App Development', 'Healthcare', 'Healthcare Technology', 'App Development Company']

Carbon capture and storage works ­– and these projects prove it

The UK continues to be a global leader on climate action, pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 68% on 1990 levels by the end of this decade. And carbon capture technology has been recognised as one of the key elements of the UK’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution to get us there, launched by the Prime Minister last month. Drax Power Station is already trialling Europe’s first bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) project. Combining sustainable biomass with carbon capture technology could remove and capture millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year and put the power station at the centre of wider decarbonisation efforts across the region as part of Zero Carbon Humber, a partnership to develop a world first net zero industrial cluster in the North of England. But who else is making carbon capture a reality? Snøhvit & Sleipner Vest Who: Sleipner — Equinor Energy, Var Energi, LOTOS, KUFPEC; Snøhvit — Equinor Energy, Petoro, Total, Neptune Energy, Wintershall Dean Where: Norway Sleipner Vest offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant, Norway Sleipner Vest was the world’s first offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant. Active since 1996, it separates CO2 from natural gas extracted from beneath the sea. Snøhvit, in Norway’s northern Barents Sea, operates similarly but here natural gas is pumped to an onshore facility for carbon removal. The separated and compressed CO2 from both facilities is then stored in empty reservoirs under the sea. As of 2019, Sleipner had captured and stored over 23 million tonnes of CO2 while Snøhvit stores 700,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Petra Nova Who: NRG, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, Inc. (MHIA) and JX Nippon, a joint venture with Hilcorp Energy Where: Texas, USA In 2016, the largest carbon capture facility in the world began operation at the Petra Nova coal-fired power plant. However, the 240-megawatt project was interrupted in July 2020 when falling oil prices meant that Petra Nova was unable to find an economically sustainable way to deploy coal-based CCUS at scale.

https://medium.com/drax/carbon-capture-and-storage-works-and-these-projects-prove-it-d98c0e11ec8f

[]

2020-12-10 16:08:28.939000+00:00

['Carbon Emissions', 'Carbon Capture', 'Climate Action', 'Innovation', 'Technology']

Hardware Spotlight: CVP-13 by Bittware

by FPGA Guide Hi Miners! It’s been a long time since our last hardware spotlight article. The hardware we are reviewing this time is an FPGA mining board that has been around for a long time in FPGA crypto mining community. It’s the CVP-13 by Bittware! Without further ado, let’s get started! Introduction CVP-13 CVP-13 is an FPGA mining board produced by Bittware . CVP-13 is one of the most powerful FPGA board available. It's using VU13P chip which is a huge FPGA chip with 1,728,000 LUTs. However, with great power comes to a great price tag 😅, alas, the CVP-13 is priced at $5,495‌. CVP-13 by Bittware Datasheet Xilinx Ultrascale+ Virtex Chip Mining and Profitability Currently, CVP-13 can mine 17 different algorithms. Three developers are working on this board: Zetheron Technology🔥 , All-mine⛏ , and Dedmaroz🎅🏻 . The most exciting one is X16R by Zetheron . Zetheron has released the first version of X16R, but it's still unprofitable since it's still an uncompleted version. Check out the complete list of algorithms here. CVP-13 also comes with a handy tool called Bittworks II Toolkit . You can monitor your FPGA status and change the core voltage using the Bittworks II Toolkit . You'll get this tool for free if you purchase CVP-13. This tool is available for Linux and Windows (Lite version). You can get it by registering in developer.bittware.com and follow the registration process. Bittwork II Toolkit Lite — Windows We also did some tests on the CVP-13 by ourselves. Here are some test results: * based on online profit calculator per Sep 12th, 2019 Note: The testing result is not that similar to the claimed hashrate because of the setup. We didn’t fully optimize the CVP-13 (better cooling, voltage settings, and frequency settings). But, some people in the FPGA Discord Community has reported a similar hashrate with a better setup. We also did some testing with Zetheron's X16R . It's still buggy, so we ran it for 9 hours but still got no shares. Hopefully, the working version comes soon! Update 9/16 - We got the Zetheron's X16R working on our CVP-13! You can see more details on our test results here. Pros 🐘 Powerful VU13P Chip. VU13P is 46% bigger than VU9P. It’s able to fit more cores into the chip, which means it can produce more hashes than BCU1525, BTU9P, and other VU9P boards. VU13P is 46% bigger than VU9P. It’s able to fit more cores into the chip, which means it can produce more hashes than BCU1525, BTU9P, and other VU9P boards. 👨‍💻 Developers Working on CVP-13. A lot of renowned developers like Whitefire , Dedmaroz , and Allmine are working to make bitstreams for this board. There's an upcoming X16 algorithm for CVP-13 coming soon! A lot of renowned developers like , , and are working to make bitstreams for this board. 💧 Built-in Waterblock. CVP-13 is ready to be water-cooled. CVP-13 is ready to be water-cooled. 🛠 Tools for Monitoring. You can use Bittworks II Toolkit Lite or Bittworks II Toolkit to configure voltage and monitor the CVP-13 . This tool is convenient for monitoring and controlling the CVP-13 . You can use or to configure voltage and monitor the . This tool is convenient for monitoring and controlling the . 🤝 Trusted Manufacturer. Bittware has been around for over than 25 years. Cons 🔬 Unoptimized Bitstream. Most of the available bitstream for CVP-13 is unoptimized, so the device hasn’t reached its maximum potential yet. Most of the available bitstream for CVP-13 is unoptimized, so the device hasn’t reached its maximum potential yet. 💸 Long ROI Time. As mentioned before, most of the available bitstreams are not at the maximum hardware potential. Resulting in a long ROI time for this device. As mentioned before, most of the available bitstreams are not at the maximum hardware potential. Resulting in a long ROI time for this device. ↔️ USB Connection Issue. Some CVP-13 users experienced some issue with the USB connection. Error rates are higher than expected because the USB serial buffer of CVP-13 is smaller than VU9P boards. Future bitstream builds are supposed to fix this issue, or you can use a shorter and better quality USB cable. Hardware Specification CVP-13 Board Specification: Virtex UltraScale+ VU13P 2Gbit Flash memory for storing FPGA bitstreams 2 DIMM sites PCIe interface x16 Gen1, Gen2, Gen3 USB interface: BMC, FPGA UART, FPGA JTAG 4 QSFP28 cages 2 UltraPort SlimSAS Board Management Controller Liquid-cooled The external 8-pin power connector More details: CVP-13 Datasheet Company Background Bittware is headquartered in Concord, New Hampshire, United States. For over twenty-five years, the company has designed and deployed high-end board-level solutions that significantly reduce technology risk and time-to-revenue for their OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) customers. The company provides enterprise-class accelerator products by leveraging the latest industry-leading FPGA technology from Altera and Xilinx. They are based upon industry-standard COTS form factors including PCIe, VPX / OpenVPX, AMC, XMC, and FMC (VITA 57). Bittware provides modified solutions and licensed designs when it is not possible to use industry-standard boards. These programmable products dramatically increase application performance and energy efficiency while reducing total cost of ownership. Bittware serves customers of many sectors ranges from commercial, broadcast and video, government, financial, mil/aero to instrumentation. Currently, The company is penetrating the cryptocurrency mining market through CVP-13 boards featuring Xilinx VU13P FPGA chip. Test Result Screenshots Veriblock Mining Performance Veriblock Mining Pool Side — vbk.luckypool.io 0xBitcoin Mining Performance 0xBitcoin Mining Pool Side — 0xbtc.tosti.ro Nexus Mining Performance Nexus Mining Pool Side — nexuspool.ru X16R on CVP-13 Test Result from Zetheron — Sep 12 FPGA.guide Testing Zetheron’s X16R on CVP-13 Originally published at news.fpga.guide on September 14, 2019.

https://medium.com/fpga-guide/hardware-spotlight-cvp-13-by-bittware-ed03807ee64c

['Fpga Guide']

2019-09-18 09:54:05.567000+00:00

['Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Programming', 'Technology', 'Hardware']

Operation Night Watch

An Unparalleled Restoration “The Operation Night Watch research team use the very latest technologies and continually push the boundaries of what was thought possible.” — Museum Director Taco Dibbits The research phase of Operation Night Watch kicked off in 2019 with the construction of an ultra-transparent glass chamber, designed by French architect Jean Michel Wilmotte. Once the painting was secure inside the chamber, its frame was removed, and advanced imaging techniques were administered to learn what secrets were contained within. Using macro X-ray fluorescence scanning and hyperspectral imaging, The Night Watch was scanned millimeter-by-millimeter to analyze chemical elements in the paint and pigments used. A total of 56 scans were performed — each requiring 24 hours to complete — in order to cover the entire surface of the painting. This type of equipment is crucial to a project like this because in being able to break down the elemental composition within the paint, the museum can determine the best way to preserve the painting. The macro-XRF scans also yielded important details within the painting. It was determined that the chemical elements present are lead, iron, and calcium. The iron scan also uncovered feathers on a helmet of one of the background characters that Rembrandt painted out that cannot be seen by the naked eye, nor were they visible in the X-radiographs that were taken in the 1970’s. It was also discovered that Rembrandt used an arsenic-based pigment for some areas, such as gold embroidery on the clothing, that at the time was mainly used for paintings of still life, such as fruit and flowers. Using a macro X-ray Powder Diffraction scanning process, the museum was able to break down pigment composition within the elements to an even further degree than the maco-XRF scans. By deflecting and reflecting radiation as it detects a pigment, the macro-XRPD identifies different crystalline structures of pigments at an atomic level, and makes it possible for Operation Night Watch to map the degradation conditions within the layers of paint. In order to see the buildup of paint layers and to determine how the paint has changed over time, the researchers chose very specific areas to extract samples measuring around 200-micrometers, (1 micrometer is 0.000001 meters) too small to be seen by the naked eye. Once extracted, the sample is embedded in a small block of resin, then polished and photographed to be examined using microscopic techniques. Probably the most incredible part for the followers of Operation Night Watch (so far) occurred in May, when the Rijksmuseum published a massive, 44.8 gigapixel image of The Night Watch, comprised of 528 different still photos. According to the museum, “The 24 rows of 22 pictures were stitched together digitally with the aid of neural networks.” The photo is so enormous, that zooming in allows the viewer to see individual brushstrokes and flecks of paint. Currently, researchers are using a robotic camera to take more than 8,400 photos at a resolution of 5-micrometers. To put that in perspective, Rijksmuseum Senior Scientist Robert Erdmann explains, “A human red blood cell is 8-micrometers wide, so it would take a 2.2 array of our pixels to hold one human red blood cell.” Once all the photos have been taken, they will be digitally assembled to form a single image, allowing researchers to view individual pigment particles and aid in preservation. While COVID-19 has slowed Operation Night Watch to the point that the restoration phase, which was originally to begin shortly following summer 2020 has been pushed back to early 2021, the study of the painting has continued both virtually as well as in-person, albeit with greater social distance. Aided by advanced technology, as well as a remarkable team of experts, the Rijksmuseum has taken monumental strides that will not only guide them through the process of restoring and preserving The Night Watch for generations, but will also assist them in learning more than ever before about Rembrandt’s magnum opus.

https://medium.com/art-direct/operation-night-watch-d00882e032c2

['Josh Burleson']

2020-08-19 09:13:22.922000+00:00

['Technology', 'Innovation', 'History', 'Art', 'Museums']

Porting Backyard Flyer Project to Crazyflie

Udacity Flying Car and Autonomous Flight Engineer (FCND) nanodegree starts out with basics of autonomous flight and provides a broad overview of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and their history. The first project called the Backyard Flyer is designed mostly to understand ways to interact with the simulator though event-driven python code. Event-driven programming deals with asynchronous nature of a drone where the state of the system changes over time and our code should respond to these state changes as they occur. FCND simulator is a valuable tool used to control and fly a drone in a virtual 3D world. Simulations are critical for UAVs/robotics as they provide a no-risk environment to develop and test out algorithms before deploying them on hardware. Once deployed on hardware, we run the risk of damaging the done or even worse risking the safety of people around the hardware. For a complete description of the project and the solution, you can refer to the code here. Here is the outcome of the drone flying a predetermined square path on the simulator. Backyard Flyer project working with FCND simulator In this post, I will focus on porting this project to work with Crazyflie. Udacidrone API abstraction used to develop this project to work with the simulator supports Crazyflie as one of the platforms. Udacidrone API provides a protocol agnostic API to control a drone in the FCND simulator or other supported hardware such as PX4 powered drone or Crazyflie. So, any code written to work with the simulator should also work for Crazyflie. Udacidrone and associated tools For a detailed description of Udacidrone, you can refer to their getting started guide. Here, I will emphasize on essential steps to get basic setup working for communication with Crazyflie. Software Clone the repository Create a virtual environment and activate This project is tested to work with python 3.6.8 and I recommend using pyenv to manage your python versions if you are using MacOS. python3 -m venv fcnd source fcnd/bin/activate Install all dependencies pip install git+https://github.com/udacity/udacidrone.git Hardware It’s assumed that you have followed instructions on setting up Crazyflie2.1. Ensure you have Crazyflie2.1 PA radio plugged-in and the Crazyflie2.1 is turned ON. Configuration Launch cfclient (while the virtual environment is activated). You will see the cfclient UI where you can search and connect to your Crazyflie. Connect to Crazyflie using `cfclient` UI Once connected, it is recommended to change the connection bandwidth from 250k to 2M . Change bandwidth of Crazyflie connection to recommended `2M` Programming paradigm When writing software using Udacidrone, event driven programming paradigm is leveraged for its ability to capture asynchronous operations. For example, if we would like the drone to take action depending on its position, we would first create a listener to position observations. When position observations are made the position listener is invoked. The position listener can read the current position and decide on its action. One such example in this project is we check if current altitude is “close” to the desired altitude. If so, we start navigation to waypoints. Simulator to Crazyflie These instructions were provided as part of the porting instructions in the project. However, for others, who may not have access to the course content, here is the project that works with the simulator. To port backyard_flyer.py to Crazyflie, following modifications are to be implemented: Launch crazyflie_backyard_flyer.py script with the PA radio plugged in to your laptop and Crazyflie switched ON to see it fly a rectangular trajectory. > python crazyflie_backyard_flyer.py Logs/TLog.txt Creating log file Logs/NavLog.txt starting connection Connecting to radio://0/80/2M Connected to radio://0/80/2M Waiting for estimator to find position... Closing log file takeoff transition filter has converge, position is good! waypoint transition waypoint to navigate to: [0.75 0. 0.5 ] 0.75 0.0 0.5 the delay time for the move command: 2.7578634101417574 vel vector: (0.19966524161618923, -0.01156681850591479, 0) waypoint transition waypoint to navigate to: [0.75 0.75 0.5 ] 0.75 0.75 0.5 the delay time for the move command: 4.019526425683314 vel vector: (0.03779849779012415, -0.19639570658446173, 0) waypoint transition waypoint to navigate to: [0. 0.75 0.5 ] 0.0 0.75 0.5 the delay time for the move command: 4.781339464967377 vel vector: (-0.19740196558339365, -0.032131977589508295, 0) waypoint transition waypoint to navigate to: [0. 0. 0.5] 0.0 0.0 0.5 the delay time for the move command: 4.743249739164866 vel vector: (-0.03620927863315014, 0.19669491132428135, 0) waypoint transition landing transition manual transition Crazyflie in action Crazyflie flying a square trajectory of side 0.75 meters Conclusion Udacidrone API allows us to write software once and deploy to work with multiple target environments such as FCND simulator, Crazyflie, or any PX4 drone. The tooling is quite mature and thanks to the documentation of Udacidrone API, the project instructions, and Crazyflie setup documentation — you can start making your ideas fly relatively quickly. Also published on https://pramodatre.github.io/2020/11/06/backyard-flyer-project/

https://medium.com/@pramod-atre/porting-backyard-flyer-project-to-crazyflie-2dfc6fb3f296

['Pramod Anantharam']

2020-12-23 00:14:26.180000+00:00

['Uav Technology', 'Autonomy', 'Drones', 'Drones Technology', 'Uav']

Ice, water, steam: reflecting on the language of agile teams

Ice, water, steam: reflecting on the language of agile teams How to move to a fluid state, so you can adapt to uncertain times Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash Lately, I’ve been thinking about what we need to do to continue our journey towards world-class engineering, and perform at that level over the long term. I’ve also been thinking about how Xero’s next stage of growth is going to look nothing like our last stage of growth. In fact, I believe it’s less about growth itself and more about transformation. A transformation akin to turning ice or steam into liquid water. Let me explain. The language of agile organisations Have you ever noticed that when describing the ideal state of most modern organisations, we use the language of liquid? The properties of water are much like the properties of an organisation that can adapt to changing and uncertain times. It’s ‘fluid’ and ‘dynamic’ and ‘responsive’. It can be channelled and controlled, and has a constant and controlled force built up behind it. This aspirational language is common in large, traditional, long-standing corporations the world over. These organisations have heard about agile methodologies and operating models like the oft-referenced Spotify model of tribes, squads, chapters and guilds. And recently, they have started listening to the people and consultants who have told them for years that they needed to ‘get agile’. When we talk about organisations like this, you’ll notice that there is a tendency to (not always kindly) use the language of ice: ‘middle management permafrost’, ‘frozen in time’, ‘moving at a glacial pace’. So when they say they want to become more agile, what they’re really saying is they want to transform their organisation from ice to water. Now, if I recall my high school physics correctly, there are two ways to do this: we can increase pressure, or we can turn up the heat. You can see this in the way digital transformation projects are run in many large organisations. They try and get everyone to go, go, go! They put pressure on with hard deadlines and high expectations, hoping that the momentum will cause that solid block of ice to move and flow, like water. They’re trying to chip away at that ice and heat things up. Which is all very well if you’re an old-school organisation that wants to be more agile. But what if you’re a newer SaaS or tech company? Channelling the steam of innovation When it comes to the tech sector, this liquid language still describes our ideal state. But the current state of many of these companies is probably better described with the language of steam (yes, I’m taking this analogy as far I can!). You often hear about start-ups that are experiencing ‘explosive growth’ and under ‘high pressure’. You hear about things ‘heating up’. And inside those companies, you often hear things like ‘it’s hard to see clearly’ and maybe even ‘it’s a bit foggy!’ Everyone is trying to channel that energy, but they don’t have time to think about it too deeply, because there’s a vent of steam over there to try and control. No wait, there’s another one over there. No, wait! Another one! You hopefully see where I’m going with this. You have organisations with massive growth, fuelled by the ‘steam’ of innovation and the fact their product is taking off in the market. That may be okay for the first few years, but it’s also very opportunistic. There’s little time to focus on turning all of that into something that is sustainable and that will endure in the long-term. When we do get the opportunity to think about what’s next for companies like this, we also don’t want to slow things down so much that they turn into a slow-moving corporate with no ability to adapt. So how do we get this balance? How do companies like Xero or Facebook or Google become 100-year old companies, without freezing up? (Because the dark side of playing with steam is that you can get burned; it’s not too smart or sustainable in the long term.) Well, how about we start by reducing the heat and the wrong kind of pressure. Cooling things down (but not too much) I had a lot of people approach me when I started at Xero because they were worried about Xero becoming ‘too corporate’. So I asked: what do you mean by that? Because if you don’t want to be bureaucratic and political and slow-moving, then I totally agree! But, if what you’re saying is that you don’t want any kind of consistency, any kind of clear and repeatable way of doing the right things, or a set of best practice standards to work towards, then I’m probably less aligned to agree with that point of view. We need to take the best bits of long-standing organisations to cool things down (like a bit of ice in our glass) but not enough that we become frozen too. It’s a tricky balance, because if we cool things down too quickly — implementing too much structure and too many processes — we could end up with a cultural disaster. We don’t want to lose that energy, we just want to transform it into something that is more sustainable. So we need to do this gradually. A great example is the technology we use. We want teams to think about solving the problem, not necessarily what tool they use to do it. So we encourage diversity in technology. Cooling it down might look like reviewing all those tools and thinking about which ones are truly adding value, so we can condense down our list and make better use of the stuff we already have. Another example is tech debt — spending more time paying off some tech debt definitely reduces the pressure on teams, and thereby reduces some of the heat they can feel from unplanned outages and constraints on releasing quickly and often. Thoughts on transforming your team If you’re a people or team leader, I think you have an opportunity to reduce the wrong kind of pressure for your team. You don’t need to wait for a big strategic review either — you can start right now. Deal with ambiguity I’m not talking about the real ambiguity in our lives (hello, COVID-19!) that we need to deal with through things like fostering resilience, providing support and being empathetic. No, I’m referring to the ‘manufactured’ ambiguity that often results from not communicating clearly or consistently and where people don’t know what you expect of them or how they should operate. In those situations, it’s your job to deal to that ambiguity. By being clear about what the team’s focus should be, focusing on the important rather than the urgent, and limiting work-in-progress, you’re reducing the pressure on your team. Ask yourself this: are you clear on what you’re expecting from your teams? How clearly have you made those expectations known? What simple messaging have you used to outline what needs to be achieved? And what support are you putting in place to help them achieve those outcomes? Use the support model Speaking of support, I’m a big fan of the idea of reframing traditional reporting lines (as shown on most org charts) into ‘supporting lines’. If you’re not familiar with this concept, it is designed to better illustrate servant leadership in action. Those who are closest to the customer are placed at the top of the chart, who are then supported by the managers beneath them, supported by the executive team, and so on down to the CEO as the ‘ultimate supporter’ at the base of the chart. It’s a good reminder that we’re here to support our teams — the people ‘on the ground’ should feel supported by all these people, not pressured by the weight of a structured reporting model. Reduce cognitive load The average person has a certain amount of cognitive load they carry on any given day. Getting out of bed and starting your day, sending the kids to school… all these routine activities still take up a certain amount of your cognitive capacity. When you finally get around to starting to work, you are already not operating at 100% available cognitive capacity. And when a global pandemic happens, you are operating with even less! So as leaders, we need to consider the cognitive load that the work environment brings and think about what we can do to reduce unnecessary pressure. At Xero, we have #human as a value of ours, so we are encouraged to frequently check in with the people we support and our colleagues and find out how things are going. We also have a number of initiatives in our engineering practice that are geared towards reducing the cognitive load that an engineer faces each day — things like clear standards, education, tooling and support from other engineers with some of the trickier problems they are facing. Focus on the next thing There are so many things that you cannot legitimately control about the operating context you and your organisation are in. So why spend all your energy on those things when you can instead focus on what you can control. Think about the things that won’t change: your purpose, your long-term vision, your values. And focus on the next thing you can do to work towards those, no matter how small that next thing is. That’s why at Xero we tend to talk in 10-year language. Things may change in the short-term, but if we are clear about what we’re trying to achieve, who we are trying to help, and what we want to be as an organisation, then that can help orient us to what is important (over what is simply just urgent). At Xero, we’re in the business of making people’s lives better. That’s not something we can do overnight, and it’s not something we can do if we burn people out. It is our enduring purpose and it requires endurance. So we’re working hard to make sure that we have the right amount of support and clarity to balance out the heat and the pressure so that we continue to innovate in a sustainable way. Part of that work is encouraging our teams to be agile in the true sense of the word — fluid, dynamic, responsive — and sustainably so. By doing this, instead of leaping on every opportunity or getting bogged down reinventing the wheel, they can focus on the real work of solving customer problems. So next time somebody talks about being agile, maybe think about what state your team is in and whether you just might need a different style of transformation.

https://medium.com/humans-of-xero/ice-water-steam-reflecting-on-the-language-of-agile-teams-81c18d097c07

['James Bergin']

2020-08-31 00:48:20.454000+00:00

['Engineering', 'Agile', 'Team', 'Organizational Change', 'Technology']

Augmented Reality helps your Start-Up growth.

AR is long on promises, short on delivery. The tech for AR Glasses is just not there yet I think everyone would basically agree that we do not have the science or technology today to build the AR glasses that we want. We may in five years, or seven years, or something like that. But we’re not likely to be able to deliver the experience that we want right now. — Mark Zuckerberg Abstract Augmented reality (AR) is considered as a technique that combines a live view of various things in real-time with virtual computer generated images, creating a real-time ‘augmented’ experience of reality. It has been one of the biggest sector of research for decades by the modern scientists. Augmented reality actually seems like the technology of the near feature. AR is going to change the shape of commerce thoroughly shortly. The core advantage for business in augmented reality development for smartphones and tablets is that the hardware is available, and the usage is intuitive and understanding. Augmented reality can be applied to various industries as and when required. Introduction Augmented reality has been a hot topic in software development circles for a number of years, but it’s getting renewed focus and attention with the release of products like Google Glass. It’s true that AR is still entwined with games like Pokemon Go and fun activities like using Snapchat filters. But however, the potential benefits of Augmented Reality in the business world adds to the list and it can be seen that AR is not confined to these entertainment providing domains only. The different applications of AR can become the backbone of the start-up and small scale industry to transform themselves into large scale business. Apps are being developed which embed text, images, and videos, as well as real–world curriculums. By using augmented reality, we will be able to contribute to the business applications of AR Kit and create a couple of concepts to grow our business market. Boosting Start-ups with Data Science: https://medium.com/coderdojo-thanjavur/boosting-start-ups-with-data-science-ca796fc73706 AR in Business There are over 200 different meanings for the acronym “AR,” and in this era of tech-speak, we want to make sure we know exactly what everyone’s talking about when we hear startling statistics like the fact that “68.7 million people will use AR at least once per month in the U.S.” or that the global AR market is expected to grow to about 198 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. The AR technology has entered into different business verticals and has turned out to be successful in giving a drastic transformative look. It has proven to be a perfect weapon to taste success in the present competitive market. Recently, a research carried out to investigate success factors for Augmented reality business models. The research is divided into three parts, the business aspect, user aspect, and technology aspect. Music and concerts were considered one of the best areas where immersive augmented reality would bring most value to consumers. The survey was conducted across the world in 2019 and it was found that 55 percent highlighted these two areas. Sports and movies was next with around 50% voting in favour of them. A ripple effect of which can be seen from the fact that the AR market size, which was of USD 67.5 million in 2019, is anticipated to reach USD 1848.9 million in 2025 along with a CAGR of 28.6%. But, I know as a beginner in the start-up sector, no doubt you know what is AR, you are still clueless about the benefits of Augmented Reality (AR) in business spectrum, mainly for the successful growth of your start-up. This article is going to be a good read for you and the best guide to help you out. Here, I will help you to get an understanding of the role and impact of Augmented reality in various sectors and processes. And this way, aid you to prepare your start-up for a ‘digitally augmented reality’. Before we begin to know how augmented reality can really help us to boost our startup, let’s get our basics clear and try to understand what Augmented Reality (AR) technology is and the working of AR. So that we do not get swayed by the misconception that there’s no difference between AR and VR when we hear these same rhyming words. Both Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are presented via 3D high detention video and audio. And both technologies stem from the same idea of immersing users into a digital environment. But while VR is completely immersive, AR only partly overlays virtual objects over the real world. The latest data suggests that Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality hardware unit shipments are estimated to be around 25.3 million units in 2024! AR shipments by themselves are predicted to reach 24 million units! Hence, the future is going to be kind to the AR market. Why Augmented Reality is beneficial to us? Though not at its full bloom, augmented reality has a lot many advantageous characteristics to offer the business domain. Due to its high — demanded features, it is considered to be more appealing to the market than virtual reality. According to Digi-Capital’s recent report, AR applications can reach 3.5 billion installed base and up till $85–90 billion within 5 years. Meanwhile, VR’s numbers are 50–60 million installed base and $10–15 billion. Augmented Reality can provide a number of key benefits to startups, their brands and the organisation too. Let’s see some of the specific benefits. Benefits: It attracts a broader audience as there is no need for additional devices. Brands have access to detailed analytics enabling them to truly understand their audience. It is mobile and personal and, therefore, hugely accessible to a rapidly growing smartphone market. It is a buzz worthy and noticeable technology. It makes the user experience through its application memorable. It results in increase of engagement and interaction and provides a richer user experience. It creates personalized content to improve engagement. Research has shown that AR increases the perceived value of our products and brands. Well implemented AR activity conveys innovation and responsiveness from forward thinking brands. It is an inexpensive alternative to other media platforms as no specific media needs to be purchased. AR in Startups $542 million amount of funding was achieved by an AR startup called Magic Leap. Just like its name, the funding leap was made possible by contributors such as Google, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Andreessen Horowitz. So, not just large companies, but AR start-ups can also scale big with a good idea! Now, as we have come to know the main concept behind AR and its beneficial characteristics, let’s uncover how this technology is used in start-up businesses across different industries. This would surely help us to plan how to come up with interesting augmented reality business ideas and eventually, gain higher profits for our start-ups. When discussing the industries in which AR has entered, gaming, retail, food, and travel & tourism are on the top of the list. However, the use cases of AR are not confined to these business verticals. Augmented Reality technology has helped Entrepreneurs address core challenges and make better profits in various other industries. Some examples of industry specific applications are as follows: 1. Automotive AR in car dashboards helps to provide drivers with a wide range of technical and travel information. It acts as a virtual instructor for everyday maintenance (i.e., changing oil, checking tyre pressure) 2. Consumer/Retail It benefits driving product sales through activating additional brand content (i.e. music videos, TV footage). It activates virtual product demos using AR enabled packing. 3. Education It increases engagement in learning by augmenting historical and cultural locations. It helps to provide augmented induction processes for new HE students in a campus environment. 4. Manufacturing AR can facilitate and accelerate the building processes at the factory. Project managers can monitor work progress in real time through AR markers on equipment. Besides, it can save a ton of time using digital maps and plants. Pointing a device into location shows how the piece of a machine will fit the final construction. 5. Financial Geo tracking AR can be used to locate nearest bank facilities. AR activated bank cards can be used that allow us to check account details (i.e. balance, savings, latest transactions). 6. Tourism and Heritage Displaying augmented exhibition content for premium museum/gallery visitors. It gives virtual tour guides for specific city tour (i.e. culture, food and drink, historical) How to integrate Augmented Reality into your startup? 1. Do market research Rather than going with the hype, the foremost requirement is that we dive ourselves deeper into your business market and target audience; and finally try to understand the potential of technology. It is a must that we invest most of our effort into augmented reality market analysis along with competitive analysis to see what can AR be used for, what is its future, and how the technology has helped to build a different image in the marketplace. 2. Examine internal business challenges While getting familiar with how others are making profits from AR will help us to frame our AR-based strategy, it is crucial to understand the limitations of your traditional businesses processes. That implies exploring the different segments of your business and bringing the individual teams on board to get a clear picture of what challenges they are facing. And later, discuss on how to build augmented reality apps for Android or iOS. 3. Bring Business and People together We should make AR implementation in such a way that it bridges the gap and creates opportunities for businesses to reach their target audience in real-time. This means customers can experience the products or services as they are meant to be in a much user friendly and effective manner. AR should be used as a powerful form of marketing to connect with the consumers meaningfully and creatively. This new form of marketing is not only effective but it is also budget-friendly as compared to traditional forms of marketing. 4. Train Employees Training and educating the employees using AR can be a highly immersive and interactive method of learning and familiarizing the employees the AR techniques. Trainees can run through AR scenarios as many times as they want to thoroughly understand a concept or a procedure. Furthermore, using AR for training creates an interactive and immersive experience across multiple senses, which can help the trainees perceive things better and learn faster. 5. Allow Customers to try before they buy The common people normally have the tendency to try various products before buying them. Products which include cosmetic samples of women, and then doing automobile test drives are few things which makes customers go crazy to try and then choose the best item to buy based on their test and effectiveness of the sales strategy. To make this try and buy system a better one for customers, augmented shopping plays an important role here by allowing them to taste the products before they buy. The applications of augmented reality in this sphere have already begun to multiply as more businesses have started to realize the benefits of its presence. For e.g.: Brands like Sephora, L’Oréal and Perfect Corp have created the facility to allow their customers to see how makeup would look on them digitally with the help of augmented reality technologies. 6. Augment Branding Materials Augmented reality has the power to take branding materials like business cards, pamphlets, leaflets and brochures to a high level of advertising and publicity by implementing the virtual component. Customers can now easily scan printed materials with their mobile devices in order to access a range of features and giving them more information and options to connect themselves with the product. For instance, a user can scan a brochure in the right spot to bring up a video highlighting some aspect of the information being conveyed, bringing a dynamic element to the static text on the brochure. Augmented reality is more than just a novelty or a new frontier in startup world for entrepreneurs. It stands to be one of the driving forces behind sales and marketing innovations over the next decade. Using AR, forward-looking businesses will be able to upgrade the experience they offer to their customers, leading to increased business opportunity and sales. Some AR Start-ups 1. WayRay — Holographic Navigation Systems In order to pay constant attention to the road and gather out all the necessary information about various locations and mapping is only possible with the help of augmented reality through holographic navigation systems. They do so by integrating the virtual world into the real world to provide ongoing localization and mapping. For example, Swiss startup WayRay adds augmented reality to the route to show drivers the exact direction which can be adjusted simultaneously during the vehicle’s movements and interaction with other cars. It uses holographic optical elements that result in the AR projection on the windshield. 2. Continental — Warnings and Alerts Augmented Reality in the mobility sector is very crucial for the safety of drivers, which is why providing immediate warnings and alerts is a feature of most AR devices. On analysing the situation of the road and calculating speed limits, they provide an immediate warning if a driver is about to leave the lane. For example, German Continental’s subsection startup works on an Augmented Reality device that combines intelligent adaptive cruise control (ACC) with the sensor head-up device, which in combination computes the distance between cars, their speed, and their driving manner to warn the driver if abnormal behaviour on the road is detected. 3. Yeppar — Driver Experience Augmented reality in automotive sector not only affect the driver’s experience, but it can turn out to be just a useful tool for passengers — providing them with relevant surrounding information via various Augmented Reality interfaces. For instance, Indian startup Yeppar develops an Augmented Reality display on the front screen of a car that shows important information regarding upcoming traffic conditions, weather forecast, map navigation, and driving controls. 4. Creaxt: The Enlightening Union of Education & AR It believes in creating insanely great products which redefines the traditional infrastructures and stereotypical systems which we are following from ages. As it stands, Creaxt Inc. has been able to tie up with 18 kids stores in the city of Pune where products manufactured by Creaxt Inc. are in a state of regular delivery owing to the increasing demand of the products. 5. Grib Grib is for 3D modeling with no need for 3D software skills. We can easily grab the app and start modeling. All we need to have is a pen, a paper, and your mobile. It gives a whole new experience to build upon primitive shapes and/or simple 2D sketches, create 3D parts, put them together, modify and make even complex models. At the end, we can share, import, or print our work. So it’s just said, “Grab your phone and start grabbing!”. 6. Oho Cards Oho Cards makes the best application of augmented reality technologies to design beautiful and realistic looking greeting cards. It also allows the customers to send greeting cards that play video in Augmented reality. Oho lets us order augmented reality cards right from our phone with a simple click. We make it simple and fast for our customers to make high-quality cards that our friends and family will love. 7. Figurama Figurama is a 3D Media Platform where artists create the end product and sell it directly to the end users. Artists don’t need to build a software or sell their art to companies who do. They can build 3D scenes with speech bubbles, create life-like situations with low production costs compared to other 3D products. We take the idea of Comics into 3D. Conclusion Of course, the augmented reality technology is a bit crude yet and still in its infancy. But we foresee its fast development and evolution because of some key drivers as an increasing number of phones and tablets and their extended functionality or increasing internet speed. Today is the best time to get started with an app that will draw your customer’s attention to the product or can become a part of a brilliant marketing campaign. The possibilities of AR are almost endless. They will enter into almost all areas of our life starting with social networks and ending with electronic commerce. However, it will go much further than that, and soon we will see many surprising applications of AR. Moreover, it has a bright future in the world of business and will revolutionize how you interact with the world. Grow your Small Business by reading this article: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/data-analytics-for-brick-and-mortar-store-34182b3ae835 Company managers that don’t have AR as part of their business strategy may regret as there are endless possibilities in this new technology. AR will enter almost every sphere of our life beginning with social media and ending with e-commerce. Once it arrives, Augmented Reality will be everywhere! AR will scale cultural experiences… The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. Please share this Article with all your friends and hit that ♥ button below to spread it around even more. Also add any other tips or suggestions that you want to convey below in the comments!

https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/augmented-reality-helps-your-start-up-growth-37255f30b3b4

['Eshita Nandy']

2020-07-12 18:34:46.125000+00:00

['Augmented Reality', 'Business', 'Boost', 'Technology', 'Startup']

Importance of having a sound warranty management system

A large number of brands consider their warranty management process to be merely a cost and drain on revenue. And not many companies have invested in the warranty to improve customer satisfaction and cut costs. You will be surprised to know the functions a sound digital warranty management system can perform for your business. What’s even better? You pay for one solution, i.e., warranty management, and get a whole bundle of solutions for free. Let us take you over the benefits! Saves Cost - According to a recent survey by IBM -On average, warranty costs for electronics companies are close to 3 per cent of revenue. Of that 3 per cent, less than 1 per cent is spent on repair or replacement. For a one-billion-dollar company, that’s USD 20 million in processing and administration costs across the repair cycle. A digital warranty system can help you reduce Money spent on customer communications, processing costs and identifying duplicate claims. Improve Customer Experience - In 2022, a study from Gartner shows that 81% of companies will be competing completely on customer experience. Hence it becomes vital for brands to provide an unparallel customer experience. A smooth warranty claims process is one of the most important post-sales services you can offer your customers. A well-executed Warranty process reinforces customers’ faith in your brand because they feel taken care of even after the purchase. Leverage Data-Driven Decision Making - A digital warranty solution can bring you inbuilt reports and analytics, enabling you to track customer behaviour and make insightful business decisions. Take better business decisions with relevant insights from Smart Dashboards to manage product sales across geographies, markets and demographics. Bring Customers Online - In 2020, goods bought online globally grew by 24%, while at the same time, store-based sales declined by 7%. Online is the next normal in retail sales, and your ability to convert your offline customers into online customers will define the future of your business. NeuroWarranty is a digital warranty solution that brings all your existing offline customers online. Assuring a smooth transition, NeruroWarranty also gives you access to valuable customer data, enabling you to retain more customers and increase revenues. Get Customer Data - If customer data is a goldmine, a digital warranty solution is your pickaxe. No matter how good your remarketing and upselling messages are, without knowing who your end customers are, all those remarketing efforts will not bring in any results. In-depth Customer Data such as Names, contact details, time and place of purchase and other details help your marketing teams personalize and segment your marketing messages. It also allows you to track product life cycle and remarket effectively in a hyper-personalized manner, creating an overall experience tailored specifically to match your customer’s needs. The way your brand handle warranty claims sends a clear message to your customers about the importance you give to make sure they have a satisfying experience. Manual warranty processes leave customers wanting, and can even lead to serious data security breaches or fraudulent claims. NeuroWarranty is a digital warranty solution that offers several solutions at no additional cost, along with a super-efficient tool to manage your warrant system. Built-in CRM, customer data, cross-selling opportunities, independent identity, direct communication with the customers, and the pathway to grow and increase turnover are just some of the tangible benefits.

https://medium.com/@riyaasachdeva/importance-of-having-a-sound-warranty-management-system-4f5c1b722413

['Riya Sachdeva']

2021-12-13 11:48:12.720000+00:00

['CRM', 'Warranty Management', 'Technology', 'Software', 'Crm Software']

S1,E2 || Lovestruck in the City (Series 1, Episode 2) Online 1080p-HD

⭐ Watch Lovestruck in the City Season 1 Episode 2 Full Episode, Lovestruck in the City Season 1 Episode 2 Full Watch Free, Lovestruck in the City Episode 2,Lovestruck in the City NETFLIX, Lovestruck in the City Eps. 2,Lovestruck in the City ENG Sub, Lovestruck in the City Season 1, Lovestruck in the City Series 1,Lovestruck in the City Episode 2, Lovestruck in the City Season 1 Episode 2, Lovestruck in the City Full Streaming, Lovestruck in the City Download HD, Lovestruck in the City All Subtitle, Watch Lovestruck in the City Season 1 Episode 2 Full Episodes Film, also called movie, motion picture or moving picture, is a visual art-form used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound, and more rarely, other sensory stimulations.[2] The word “cinema”, short for cinematography, is ofNETFLIX used to refer to filmmaking and the film Lovestruck in the City, and to the art form that is the result of it. ❏ 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 process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner.[clarification needed] Streaming refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies specifically to telecommunications networks, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs). There are challenges with streaming conNETFLIXt on the Internet. For example, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the conNETFLIXt. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain conNETFLIXt. Live streaming is the delivery of Internet conNETFLIXt in real-time much as live television broadcasts conNETFLIXt over the airwaves via a television signal. Live internet streaming requires a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the conNETFLIXt, a media publisher, and a conNETFLIXt delivery network to distribute and deliver the conNETFLIXt. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is. Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the conNETFLIXt before watching or lisNETFLIXing to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to start playing digital video or digital audio conNETFLIXt before the entire file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can apply to media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered “streaming text”. ❏ COPYRIGHT CONNETFLIXT ❏ Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[2][2][2][2][2] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is inNETFLIXded to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[2][2][2] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States. Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is ofNETFLIX shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][2][1][1][1] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[1] Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not exNETFLIXd beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsisNETFLIXt.[1] Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 1 to 2 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[2] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration. It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[1] ❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏ Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[2] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and exNETFLIXsible to a large group of unrelated people. The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is exNETFLIXded by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower. ‘Lovestruck in the City’ Challenges Asian Americans in Hollywood to Overcome ‘Impossible Duality’ NETFLIXween China, U.S. NETFLIX’s live-action “Lovestruck in the City” was supposed to be a huge win for under-represented groups in Hollywood. The $2 million-budgeted film is among the most expensive ever directed by a woman, and it features an all-Asian cast — a first for productions of such scale. Despite well-inNETFLIXtioned ambitions, however, the film has exposed the difficulties of representation in a world of complex geopolitics. NETFLIX primarily cast Asian rather than Asian American stars in lead roles to appeal to Chinese consumers, yet Chinese viewers rejected the movie as inauthentic and American. Then, politics ensnared the production as stars Liu Yifei, who plays Lovestruck in the City, and Donnie Yen professed support for Hong Kong police during the brutal crackdown on protesters in 122. Later, NETFLIX issued “special thanks” in the credits to government bodies in China’s Xinjiang region that are directly involved in perpetrating major human rights abuses against the minority Uighur population. “Lovestruck in the City” inadverNETFLIXtly reveals why it’s so difficult to create multicultural conNETFLIXt with global appeal in 2020. It highlights the vast disconnect NETFLIXween Asian Americans in Hollywood and Chinese nationals in China, as well as the exNETFLIXt to which Hollywood fails to acknowledge the difference NETFLIXween their aesthetics, tastes and politics. It also underscores the limits of the American conversation on representation in a global world. In conversations with seLovestruck in the Cityl Asian-American creatives, Variety found that many feel caught NETFLIXween fighting against underrepresentation in Hollywood and being accidentally complicit in China’s authoritarian politics, with no easy answers for how to deal with the moral questions “Lovestruck in the City” poses. “When do we care about representation versus fundamental civil rights? This is not a simple question,” says Bing Chen, co-founder of Gold House, a collective that mobilizes the Asian American community to help diverse films, including “Lovestruck in the City,” achieve opening weekend box office success via its #GoldOpen movement. “An impossible duality faces us. We absolutely acknowledge the terrible and unacceptable nature of what’s going on over there [in China] politically, but we also understand what’s at stake on the Lovestruck in the City side.” The film leaves the Asian American community at “the intersection of choosing NETFLIXween surface-level representation — faces that look like ours — versus values and other cultural nuances that don’t reflect ours,” says Lulu Wang, director of “The Farewell.” In a business in which past box office success determines what future projects are bankrolled, those with their eyes squarely on the prize of increasing opportunities for Asian Americans say they feel a responsibility to support “Lovestruck in the City” no matter what. That support is ofNETFLIX very personal amid the Lovestruck in the City’s close-knit community of Asian Americans, where people don’t want to tear down the hard work of peers and Lovestruck in the City. Others say they wouldn’t have given NETFLIX their $1 if they’d known about the controversial end credits. “‘Lovestruck in the City’ is actually the first film where the Asian American community is really split,” says sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, who examines racism in Hollywood. “For people who are more global and consume more global news, maybe they’re thinking, ‘We shouldn’t sell our soul in order to get affirmation from Hollywood.’ But we have this scarcity mentality. “I felt like I couldn’t completely lambast ‘Lovestruck in the City’ because I personally felt solidarity with the Asian American actors,” Yuen continues. “I wanted to see them do well. But at what cost?” This scarcity mentality is particularly acute for Asian American actors, who find roles few and far NETFLIXween. Lulu Wang notes that many “have built their career on a film like ‘Lovestruck in the City’ and other crossovers, because they might not speak the native language — Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Hindi — to actually do a role overseas, but there’s no role being writNETFLIX for them in America.” Certainly, the actors in “Lovestruck in the City,” who have seen major career breakthroughs tainted by the film’s political backlash, feel this acutely. “You have to understand the tough position that we are in here as the cast, and that NETFLIX is in too,” says actor Chen Tang, who plays Lovestruck in the City’s army buddy Yao. There’s not much he can do except keep trying to nail the roles he lands in hopes of paving the way for others. “The more I can do great work, the more likely there’s going to be somebody like me [for kids to look at and say], ‘Maybe someday that could be me.’” Part of the problem is that what’s happening in China feels very distant to Americans. “The Chinese-speaking market is impenetrable to people in the West; they don’t know what’s going on or what those people are saying,” says Daniel York Loh of British East Asians and South East Asians in Theatre and Screen (BEATS), a U.K. nonprofit seeking greater on-screen Asian representation. York Loh offers a provocative comparison to illustrate the West’s milquetoast reaction to “Lovestruck in the City” principal Liu’s pro-police comments. “The equivalent would be, say, someone like Emma Roberts going, ‘Yeah, the cops in Portland should beat those protesters.’ That would be huge — there’d be no getting around that.” Some of the disconnect is understandable: With information overload at home, it’s hard to muster the energy to care about faraway problems. But part of it is a broader failure to grasp the real lack of overlap NETFLIXween issues that matter to the mainland’s majority Han Chinese versus minority Chinese Americans. They may look similar, but they have been shaped in diametrically different political and social contexts. “China’s nationalist pride is very different from the Asian American pride, which is one of overcoming racism and inequality. It’s hard for Chinese to relate to that,” Yuen says. Beijing-born Wang points out she ofNETFLIX has more in common with first-generation Muslim Americans, Jamaican Americans or other immigrants than with Chinese nationals who’ve always lived in China and never left. If the “Lovestruck in the City” debacle has taught us anything, in a world where we’re still too quick to equate “American” with “white,” it’s that “we definitely have to separate out the Asian American perspective from the Asian one,” says Wang. “We have to separate race, nationality and culture. We have to talk about these things separately. True representation is about capturing specificities.” She ran up against the Lovestruck in the City’s inability to make these distinctions while creating “The Farewell.” Americans felt it was a Chinese film because of its subtitles, Chinese cast and location, while Chinese producers considered it an American film because it wasn’t fully Chinese. The endeavor to simply tell a personal family story became a “political fight to claim a space that doesn’t yet exist.” In the search for authentic storytelling, “the key is to lean into the in-NETFLIX. weenness,” she said. “More and more, people won’t fit into these neat boxes, so in-NETFLIX. weenness is exactly what we need.” However, it may prove harder for Chinese Americans to carve out a space for their “in-NETFLIXweenness” than for other minority groups, given China’s growing economic clout. Notes author and writer-producer Charles Yu, whose latest novel about Asian representation in Hollywood, “Interior Chinatown,” is a National Book Award finalist, “As Asian Americans continue on what I feel is a little bit of an island over here, the world is changing over in Asia; in some ways the center of gravity is shifting over there and away from here, economically and culturally.” With the Chinese film market set to surpass the US as the world’s largest this year, the question thus arises: “Will the cumulative impact of Asian American audiences be such a small drop in the bucket compared to the China market that it’ll just be overwhelmed, in terms of what gets made or financed?” As with “Lovestruck in the City,” more parochial, American conversations on race will inevitably run up against other global issues as U.S. studios continue to target China. Some say Asian American creators should be prepared to meet Lovestruck in the City by broadening their outlook. “Most people in this Lovestruck in the City think, ‘I’d love for there to be Hollywood-China co-productions if it meant a job for me. I believe in free speech, and censorship is terrible, but it’s not my battle. I just want to get my pilot sold,’” says actor-producer Brian Yang (“Hawaii Five-0,” “Linsanity”), who’s worked for more than a decade NETFLIXween the two countries. “But the world’s getting smaller. Streamers make shows for the world now. For anyone that works in this business, it would behoove them to study and understand Lovestruck in the Citys that are happening in and [among] other countries.” Gold House’s Chen agrees. “We need to speak even more thoughtfully and try to understand how the world does not function as it does in our zip code,” he says. “We still have so much soft power coming from the U.S. What we say matters. This is not the problem and burden any of us as Asian Americans asked for, but this is on us, unfortunately. We just have to fight harder. And every step we take, we’re going to be right and we’re going to be wrong.” ☆ ALL ABOUT THE SERIES ☆ is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[2] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and exNETFLIXsible to a large group of unrelated people. The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is exNETFLIXded by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower. ‘Hausen’ Challenges Asian Americans in Hollywood to Overcome ‘Impossible Duality’ NETFLIXween China, U.S.

https://medium.com/lovestruck-in-the-city-series-1-episode-2-4khd/s1-e2-lovestruck-in-the-city-series-1-episode-2-online-1080p-hd-ad37576a2f54

['Alice Jennings']

2020-12-25 18:03:14.978000+00:00

['Technology', 'Lifestyle', 'Coronavirus', 'TV Series']

Top Data Analytics Companies

Technology has brought several transformative solutions to the world of business. In this age of data, irrespective of size, many organisations view data analytics as an indispensable tool to optimise business operations, get actionable market and customer insights to help business leaders make calculated decisions. Advanced data analytics solution providers are offering tailor-made data analytics solutions to help companies ingest and analyse massive data sets at lightning speed. Further, artificial intelligence-based reasoning is being utilised to understand and predict complex outcomes and also prescribe the best possible action. Merely acknowledging the capabilities of data analytics is not sufficient. Any business wishing to accelerate their digital transformation efforts must consider the way data analytics is evolving. The development of business intelligence to analyse and extract value from the numerous sources of data at a vast scale has brought with it a set of errors and low-quality reports. Enterprises need a reliable partner with the expertise to unlock the disparity of data sources and data types which add more complexity to the data analytics process. This edition of CIO Applications Europe features some of the most prominent enterprises in the industry that solve challenges by implementing the current technological trends in the space. Through this special edition, we present to you Top 10 Data Analytics Companies -2019. 2S Consulting is a data and analytics focused consulting firm with a 100 percent successful track record of increasing efficiency and profitability for clients since 2003 across Europe, the US, and Asia. The uniqueness of 2S Consulting resides with the experiences of its clients; the company engages with most of its clients over a long-term collaboration and works closely with them, offering industry relevant insights. The company boasts an in-depth subject matter expertise in the digital and data arena, which in turn helps the team attain a greater understanding of the requirements of the client www.2sconsulting.com Established in 2004, BI4ALL is a leader in consulting services with expertise in Analytics, Big Data, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Visualizations, CPM and Software Engineering. Through a unique experience and extensive knowledge of the various business sectors and functions, BI4ALL helps organizations of all sizes thrive and improve the way their business operates. BI4ALL adds real value to organizations through the expertise and mastery of powerful solutions that enable them to have a competitive advantage by consolidating data from different sources of information into a single vision, providing valuable metrics by turning data into insights www.bi4all.pt Biotron Labs is a data analytics solutions provider that offers location intelligence to petrol retailers and municipalities of smart cities through data collected by their Mobile SDK. The end to end data management solutions of the company allows clients to monitor, analyze and synthesize data that helps to create and improve products, services, and revenue streams in a privacy-compliant manner. Bio has two indigenous analytics solutions, namely — Mobilyze for cities and Petrolyze for petrol retailers. The Mobilize solution helps municipalities make data-driven decisions based on the real-time analysis of movement patterns of people. On the other hand, the Petrolyze solution helps petrol retailers to gain insights into their business process biotron.io The ITrust Flash Audit provides a comprehensive and cost-effective view of potential intrusive risks and their implications for strategic data, infrastructure risks, its operations and internal organization, issues related to legal obligations including profession and the overall strengths and weaknesses of the information system. ITrust’s IKare automates the implementation of security best practices and vulnerability management. The tool provides you with a simple network monitoring solution, as well as easy management and control of key security factors. IKare automates the management of IT vulnerabilities and good security practices, and facilitates corrective actions with relevant and targeted alerts. IKare analyzes computer networks and detects improperly configured equipment itrust.fr Klarrio is a one-stop-shop that provides cloud-based streaming solutions for businesses with complex integration requirements and exceedingly large volumes of bidirectional data flow. The firm leverages concrete services and effective strategies to offer highly relevant business strategies. Klarrio utilizes the core technology and services to offer a blend of scalability, agnosticism, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness. Leveraging past investments and embracing a digital transformation enables Klarrio to dictate a realistic union of enterprise, legacy, and cloud-native open source components. The firm works with clear data strategies, determining how to monetize the new economy klarrio.com A consulting firm providing Analytics Solutions to enterprises looking to fortify their business processes through data. A certified Gold IBM Business Partner with Support and Solution Provider status, PREDICTA caters to private organisations in Telecom, Banking, Insurance and Retail, across countries such as Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and the overall CEE territory. PREDICTA’s solutions have also found application in the wider public sector, including the utilities domain, among companies that deal with water, energy, renewables, oil and gas. To build analytical models, and to predict future outcomes of businesses, PREDICTA leverages a six-step approach, a propriety methodology titled Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) predicta.gr Findwise emerged as the Gazelle-company and bagged Employer of the Year in the European Business Awards. These are just some of the firm’s achievements in the last ten years. The goal to be an amazing place to work and creating a creative space for its employees has proven to be highly beneficial for Findwise. Over 1700 successful projects, more than 450 happy customers, and a strong annual growth confirm that Finwise can assure a sustainable AND successful growth for the businesses. Findwise is a part of EVRY but functions as its own organization, with its own brand Open Analytics is a consulting firm that specializes in supporting the data analysis process of its customer, end to end. The company provides products and services to support this process using open technology. The teams at Open Analytics comprises of highly-trained and talented experts in statistics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science. By focusing on the analytical expertise and supported by a time-tested consulting methodology, Open Analytics is able to solve problems in a very broad range of applied fields and across industrial sectors. The firm’s offices and data center are located in Antwerp (Belgium), but it provides services across industries and geographies Founded in 1999, Oraylis supports implementation of individual BI solutions focusing on data warehouse, enterprise reporting, BI portals and corporate performance management. Oraylis provides professional and consulting support during the concept phase and works with clients to develop an innovative data strategy tailored to their corporate goals. Oraylis also specializes in business intelligence audit, tailored business intelligence startergy, cloud migration strategy and implementation prototypes. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, ORAYLIS specializes in Microsoft’s BI products to provide its customers with the greatest possible investment security. ORAYLIS is directly involved in the development of new products Established in 2004, Webtrekk support marketers and data analysts in understanding and analyzing the behavior of their website and app users across all channels and help to utilize this information specifically for marketing purposes. Webtrekk’s platform helps marketers and data analysts capture, link and leverage anonymized user and marketing data across all devices for highly personalized marketing campaigns. Webtrekk’s flexible solution platform empowers mid-sized, enterprise and agencies to manage their digital transformation and optimize their business activities across all relevant online channels

https://medium.com/@cioapplicationseurope/top-data-analytics-companies-b8f00a9981df

['Cio Applications Europe']

2020-08-20 05:08:26.040000+00:00

['Europe', 'Solutions', 'Technology', 'Data Analysis', 'Startup']

In the Room with Amy Nelson

Madison McIlwain and Claudia Laurie with guest, Amy Nelson This week, we sat down with Amy Nelson, CEO and founder of The Riveter, a digital and physical community for women. Spending 10 plus years in corporate law, Amy never thought she’d be a founder. However, after the 2016 election, she took a closer look at what mattered most to her — The Riveter was born. While it’s been a challenging year for physical spaces, Amy has gallantly persevered by building a growing digital space proving our belief that “the room” is more than four walls. In today’s episode, we’ll explore insights and themes such as how political and venture fundraising have more in common than you might think, motherhood in the workplace, and core product pivots. Listen to the episode here. Let’s open the door. Key Theme 1: Political and Venture Fundraising Leverage Similar Skill Sets Amy worked on political campaigns in her home state of Ohio before becoming a lawyer. There, she leveraged her naturally direct nature to raise funds and inspire votes on her candidate's behalf. Raising venture capital dollars requires a similar level of commitment and belief, however this time it’s on behalf of yourself and your vision for a better future. “You have to be willing to ask everyone for everything all the time.” — Amy Nelson, CEO of The Riveter While the world of politics and technology might seem mutually exclusive, the skills one learns across business, law, and politics translate well into being a founder. Amy applied these when looking for her first check for The Riveter, and the persistence paid off! tldr: Apply the skills you’ve learned in other contexts to excel in the entrepreneur journey. Key Theme 2: Raising a Family in Community As a mother of four daughters, Amy is no stranger to the unique challenge of balancing motherhood and being a full-time founder. On The Room, she shared openly about her personal and professional goals of building a better future for her own daughters. The Riveter lifts up its community members through a collaborative and compassionate support system. Amy likely learned the power of familial support through her own mother, who can often be found visiting with her in Seattle helping take care of Amy’s daughters. While not everyone has a mother like Amy’s, The Riveter is a community empowering all women to have the support they need at work so that they might have the personal life they desire. tldr: Seek out authentic communities that support your professional and personal milestones Key Theme 3: Pivoting your Core Product Well (in a pandemic) In a year of distance everything, The Riveter community was no different. Amy and her team were forced to re-invent what community living and working looked like amidst a digital-first world. Offering virtual events such as “How to Deepen Social Connections While Social Distancing” and “The Working Mom You Want Your Kids to See”, The Riveter has rapidly transitioned to offering targeted events meeting the unique stresses of this (almost over!!) year. It’s challenging to pivot your core product in normal times, but exponentially more challenging when your core product was a physical space and the world falls into a pandemic. By asking her community what they needed and re-building for the evolving needs of her core customer, Amy has been able to pivot The Riveter’s core product. tldr: listen to your customers first when your business needs to pivot

https://medium.com/@theroompodcast/in-the-room-with-amy-nelson-9ca624dd1435

['The Room Podcast']

2020-12-22 18:45:08.208000+00:00

['Founders', 'İnnovation', 'Theroompodcast', 'Technology']

Enabling Health Systems to Communicate Digitally During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Over the last few weeks, most of us have received an unprecedented amount of email, SMS, and other digital communication on the subject of COVID-19 from brands we have relationships with — whether we remembered having those or not. So much so, that some of the largest email service providers (ESPs) have had massive system outages as they try to keep up with the volumes hitting their servers. For example, our team has received related emails from across nearly every industry — bagel shops, barbers, airlines, athletic companies, our 401k provider, accounting firms, etc. Some very rightly should be emailing us during this time. Some are rather inappropriately using a crisis as an excuse to perform irrelevant outreach. In contrast, very few of us have received communication via any channel from a health system that has our mobile number, email address, or mailing address. In further conversations with family, friends, and investors, our experience seemed to suggest this is the norm versus the exception. Those that had received communications were kind enough to forward them on from their providers (IU Health, UCHealth, OneMedical, etc.) While it is incredible how the world has united across the public and private realms to create awareness, the most reputable source of information for many communities and the place where most individuals and their families think of when they think of care… the health system… has been lagging behind. Why health systems have a key role in communication Firstly, we must be incredibly empathetic of health systems during this time. They are deploying emergency preparedness plans at a scale and speed that few had ever really foreseen. They are needing to coordinate with national, state, and local governmental parties, in many cases, on an hourly basis. Executives and clinical leadership are working to implement new protocols, rapidly reallocate staff and budget, collate data, and procure the necessary equipment. Doctors, nurses, and others on the front lines of care are serving a worried patient base, while, also, worrying themselves about being properly equipped and staying safe. However, it is for these reasons, not in spite of these reasons, that we believe this is such a critical time for health systems to communicate with their communities about managing the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Second only to the CDC and major governmental agencies, healthcare providers are uniquely positioned to be the most trusted and accurate source of information for their constituents. They should be providing regular, prescriptive communication regarding prevention, symptoms, treatment, and best courses of action to keep the community-at-large safe, but, also, their staff and providers. This communication does not need to differ from that coming from governmental partners. Instead, it should be tightly coordinated and provide specific guidance for those patients seeking care at the health systems. We have already seen adverse outcomes when this does not happen. For example, there have been many examples, especially during the onset of the pandemic domestically, in which symptomatic patients were arriving at their primary care doctor’s office, urgent cares, and emergency rooms — putting themselves, other patients, and health system staff at greater risk. Enabling health systems Today, digital communication and the tools to enable it, are still new to the health system environment. Those organizations that have invested in these strategies and technologies (examples mentioned in the introduction) have been using them to email their patient base and communities with key information and direct them to a COVID-19 related information section on their website that is updated regularly. Unfortunately, for the majority of health systems, this type of rapid communication distribution is not possible given that the underlying technology is not already procured or implemented. And, while sending out an email to a large group may not seem challenging, those industries that have been using email as a channel to communicate with their customers for years know that it is a more complex process than it may seem. From a technical perspective, domains need to be set up appropriately, IP addresses need to be warmed to ensure deliverability is optimal, contact information must be pulled securely from the EMR via the source data stores, amongst other complex considerations. From an operational perspective, content and creative assets need to be available, review and approval processes need to be established or adhered to… not to mention, a litany of other possible stakeholders who may need to be involved. As healthcare technologists focused on helping health systems create meaningful, lasting relationships with individuals and their families via enterprise-scale Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), we have been thinking critically about how we can help out in this time of need in a way that is valuable, timely, and relevant to support our health system clients. As a result of this brainstorm, we worked with our email service provider (ESP) technology partners to produce a solution for rapid digital communication because we strongly believe that health systems should be at the forefront of providing information to their communities and their staff during this time. This solution will allow healthcare providers to: Send email communications at scale Use prebuilt communication templates that contain relevant information from the CDC and are broadly applicable Quickly and easily customize communication with your branding and your coronavirus resource pages and protocols Deploy the solution in ~1 week Deliver the solution at little to no cost Ensure domain reputation and deliverability remain as optimal as possible

https://medium.com/cured-healthcare/enabling-health-systems-to-communicate-digitally-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-e98253d79f9e

['Ashmer Aslam']

2020-04-01 04:23:47.479000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'Healthcare Technology', 'Digital Marketing', 'Healthcare', 'Technology']

Rise of the Full Stack Developers- Why it is Best for your Project?

Reasons for the Rise of the Full Stack Developers and Benefits. Rise of the Full Stack Developers- Why it is Best for your Project? Here, everything you need to know about the Full Stack developers. For all of us, it is common to hear frontend developers and backend developers, client-side, and server-side. Right! Now, in the new generation technology era and the startups are mostly demanding Full Stack developers for the project. They delivered efficient and next-generation kinds of applications that are high performing and advanced. You can say that apps are the best fit for future growth. Full Stack developers are the jumbo package for your project. You required the specialized persons for your project who is knowing multiple programming languages. Hiring more people working in the project, it is costlier for the companies, especially for startups. Communication and discussion are quite complicated, and it is more time spending. To reduce the complexity and fulfill all these needs now, the rise of the Full Stack developers is high in the market. So, What is Full Stack Developers? The perfect definition of the Full Stack developers is not there. Full Stack developers are work with multiple domains. In web development, web developers are work with all various technologies. Similarly, in mobile development, mobile developers are working with all mobile technologies. We can say that the definition of the full stack developers depending on technology on which they are working on. Front-end Development + Back-end Development + DevOps + Design Skills make Full Stack Developers Excellent: Fullstack web developers are the peoples who work on both client-side and server-side efficiently. They have a fundamental knowledge of JavaScripts, frontend frameworks, Node.js and backend frameworks, HTML, CSS, SQL, API calling tool familiar, and many more. They have browser, server, and database program knowledge. They are more capable of providing the best and fast solutions. Why is Full Stack Developer Best for your Project? You can reduce the cost of the project:- The significant and attractive thing to hire Full Stack developer is cost-efficient. To hire frontend and backend developers separate for your one project, it is costly. You can invest your money in other business core activities. You can benefit from all aspects of new and upcoming technologies:- Full Stack developers are updated with the market trends. They always suggest and provide new and latest technology features which are more beneficial to you. In the advanced technological world, it is necessary to adopt new features that are possible with a Full Stack developer. Reduce the time used for team communication in the project:- Especially for large projects, it is quite challenging to communicate and manage. May the errors occur at the development time due to the lack of communication and interaction. You can save time and errors at development time by hiring a Full Stak developer. Vast experience:- Full Stack developers are having enormous experience knowledge other than specializing knowledge. They gather this experience from working with different clients and different types of projects. They have more depth knowledge and more ideas and solution for your project. Performed web or app developers:- Full Stack developers are work with the 360-degree angle in your project. They are more capable of solving the problems; also, they have enough knowledge and capable of addressing the issues and no need to rely on expertise. Project delivery to be faster and better:- Full Stack developer delivered a valuable, creative project which is more reliable, advanced, and has high potential growth in the market. There is less development time due to this; they are more able to deliver large projects fastly with high client satisfaction. Note: Also, I wrote another blog that is based on the Advantages to hire Full stack developer for your project. Please check it out for more details. Future Scope of Full Stack Developers: The technological world is expanding with that the future scope of the full stack developers is also growing more and more. Companies are getting more outstanding advantages by hiring full-stack developers. The job opportunity as a Full Stack developer is more because of rising more demand in the market. (Image source: Google Trends) The trend of a Full stack developer is also high. It increases day by day developer as compared to front end developer and backend developer. Final Thoughts: Full Stack developer is the complete package and everything that you want for your project. The demand, Opportunity, and trends are more for front end developers also day by day increasing. They are popular to deliver the fast, creative, amazing high performing project. They are generating more user-friendly products. If you are planning to hire full stack developer for your next project, it is smart and the best decision by which you can achieve all your business goals.

https://medium.com/devtechtoday/rise-of-the-full-stack-developers-why-it-is-best-for-your-project-34e3185e60bd

['Binal Prajapati']

2020-04-29 12:28:52.744000+00:00

['Fullstack Development', 'Full Stack', 'Development', 'Technology', 'Business']

Google Ads and React.js: Delivering Ads with a Great UX

How to run on-site advertising that provides a seamless experience leveraging your company’s component libraries. Since the inception of online advertising, users have always complained about the design and relevancy of ads. With the nature of business being to aim for maximum visibility, there is always a dissonance between attention and readability of a website’s content. As we all know, contrary to print media, there are virtually no technical limitations on the web when it comes to the visual appearance of an ad. Display units in specific have reached a state where some are so extremely annoying that certain committees are even discussing standards for acceptable ads. Native Ads to the Rescue Our generation has mastered the art of ignoring such content and the industry has largely caught up on that. Native ads is one of the least invasive measures that fit a publisher’s web experience. The idea is stunningly simple: Instead of marketing out differently styled content on your website (with overlays and blinking banners probably being the most annoying manifestation of their species), you get to decide what an ad unit looks like. It is then up to the advertiser to provide a copy, among other creatives. Not only is it visually less disturbing — by sharing your app’s look and feel, but a native ad is also very likely to exhibit a better click-through rate. Native Ads: A Quick Example To give a quick peek on what Omio’s ad product looks like, have a look at the screenshot below. The ad is distinguishable from the rest of the content both by bearing the “sponsored” label and less functionality compared to the remainder of the result cells. But it shares the same style and is built using the same frontend components as the rest of the page. The native ad is intuitive and blends with the entire user experience of the product. If the “sponsored” text wasn’t present, you’d never recognise that result as an ad. 5 Reasons the Status Quo wasn’t enough for us. Generally speaking, serving ads is implemented by following a pretty standard procedure. If you’re running a website, adding a small piece of javascript code is more than enough to get you up and running. If you want to spice things up a little you can use an ad manager to enjoy sophisticated targeting rules. Initially, this was pretty much the path we chose to go down as well. Our baseline setup contained an ad slot in our React frontend which was remotely managed by Google AdManager. With as little as some HTML & CSS and some targeting rules based on the user’s search terms, our team was able to run ads on page. Even though this worked for our first iteration, it just didn’t feel right for a number of reasons. 1.Crafting Pixel Perfect Designs Building pixel-perfect designs isn’t a superfluity or after-thought. It is to serve the user. This core value is etched deeply into every product we develop — and the implementation of native ads by mixing some basic HTML and CSS in a confined editor seemed to be doing an injustice to our design philosophy. Our design team has spent countless hours running user research and building a design system that serves as a common language for all teams in the company. This keeps the entire organization (with a diverse group of teams) on the same page. By leveraging our design system, teams can move faster, communicate better and ultimately increase the speed at which products are released without compromising pixel-perfect designs. Dotty — our internal design system. For engineers, a big part of a design system is a library of frontend components. It is more challenging to create perfectly designed native ads without taking advantage of an already established library of components built to reflect a consistent representation of our brand message. A component library not just provides us with pixel-perfect designs, but greatly increases the speed at which we ship ads without having to reinvent the wheel. More so, when everyone speaks the same language, things get done faster. As a company, a component library lets us speak the same language. Yes, with gruesome engineering hours, we might end up re-creating near-perfect Ads with a WYSIWYG editor, but by completely neglecting our component library, we would be disconnected from speaking the same language as everyone else in the entire company. To sum up our thoughts on creating pixel-perfect designs, our goal here was to build ads with a great user experience and to do so without breaking the internal means of communication we hold highly within the company — a consistent design system built to promote pixel-perfect designs. This means reusing our frontend component library and delivering a consistent user experience across the entire user funnel, every single time. 2. Speed of Iterations Iterative and user-data-driven development of software is highly encouraged here at Omio, and as such we’ve built pipelines and processes that enable teams to move fast across the entire company. Delivering highly performant ads require a lot of tests and iterations to run successful campaigns. For example, if we went with using the typical WYSIWYG solution, a simple A/B test fostered by a change in design will require communicating with our Ad ops to implement the new design and also tweak the ad campaign set up. This isn’t very efficient. A more solid approach would be to let our frontend engineers take care of the design implementation, connect this with our A/B test service and letting our Ad ops focus solely on managing the ad campaign. This breeds a division of labour and specialization among the engineering and ad ops teams. All engineering efforts are centralised within the engineering team and the planning, execution, tracking and analytics of the ad campaign is managed solely by the Ad ops team. This sort of separation of concerns weeds out unnecessary dependencies between teams, a common source of friction when building any product. This leads to faster ads development and release cycles. 3. Versioning and Using a Single Tech Stack With a WYSIWYG editor, your options are limited. You write some HTML and CSS, and for writing Javascript, you’re confined to writing scripts within the script tag of an HTML panel. What if your team had spent time building a thriving ecosystem around a specific modern tech stack? A stack that includes release pipelines, preview functionality, modern development experience, and embraces a set of standards and best practices? As a company, our frontend stack relies on React for creating delightful user experiences. No engineer should be forced to write HTML, and CSS in a WYSIWYG editor when we’ve built a solid infrastructure around our tech stack. The benefits you get from using a modern tech stack likely outweighs what’s offered by WYSIWYG editors in an ad manager. Now consider versioning, an integral process in the way software is developed today. When you have multiple developers working on a single application, as is the case in most notable projects, it’s almost impossible to prevent developers from overwriting code changes and breaking each other’s code without a solid versioning system. With modern versioning systems, a developer can download the current version of the project, work locally and merge their changes without stepping on another developer’s toes. This is important as you can deploy varying versions to different environments such as QA and production, and also work locally in confidence that you’re aren’t jeopardising your colleague’s efforts. These were strong considerations while designing and planning our native ads implementation. It doesn’t matter what technology stack you use, these concerns remain potent. We believe that building well-implemented native ads doesn’t mean kicking your current tech stack and development processes out of the window or compromising on a simple yet integral process such as versioning. 4. Internationalization When building a global brand, the internationalization of your products is important. It could very well influence the acceptance of your product offering. If your app / website is available only in English language, you will be cutting off the opportunity to tap into potentially larger foreign markets. 86% of localized campaigns have been found to outperform English campaigns in both click-throughs and conversions. Internationalization is not a trivial requirement. You need correct translations (preferably by experts/natives), and you need to create a process for which your engineers and copywriters can stay in sync on these translations. For most companies, a process has been tested and currently serves the need of your website/app Internationalization. Here at Omio, we’ve built a process that leverages PhraseApp service which provides us with instantaneous updates. With internationalization being a core requirement for our product offering, it goes without saying that this was a huge requirement for our native ads as well. How do you make sure that copywriting and translations are seamlessly integrated into the ad development experience? How do you also ensure that instantaneous updates are received as soon as translations are updated? Most ad manager editors just don’t provide the same level of confidence, communication and reliability you get from a standardized internationalisation process. Regardless of your current internationalization process, you’ll most likely spend ample engineering hours if you tried to replicate this within the confines of an ad manager. 5. Sharing context between the Ad and the Website Naturally, most ads do not interact with the page itself. They either open a new window or perform a whole page reload once being clicked on. Hence, one requirement we put on ourselves was: If our ads are created treated with the same standards as the rest of our product, they should behave like it. This in turn would mean: They are capable of interacting with the page they are placed on, thus providing a seamless user experience. Sharing context between a native ad and a parent window sparks interesting engineering challenges.The scope of this article doesn’t permit a full-blown discussion on all the problems encountered and our technical solution to them. However, the crux of the challenges stems from the fact that native ads powered by an ad manager are typically rendered within an Iframe, and an iframe possesses inherent security limitations set by every browser. A common clause you’d hear within the tech community is: “use the right tool for the job”. While “the right tool” is sometimes subjective, in some cases the choice is based on the ease the tool provides for solving certain engineering challenges. For our native ads implementation, we decided we’d have a greater chance of solving this challenge if we used the same tools and services available to us in our day-to-day development processes. The reason this was important for us is that our native ads aren’t just made of static images and text. They were designed to be highly interactive with the host page, and this poses even more challenges. Doing this outside the comfort of a standard development process would mean solving difficult engineering challenges with unfamiliar tooling provided by an ad manager. While this may not be the wrong call for everyone, in our case, our judgment was based on reusing the tools we already have in place and making sure we were ready to tackle the challenges that’d come from implementing highly interactive native Ads. The “right tool for the job” in this case was sticking to tried-and-tested tools we already leverage every day in our day-to-day development. Without going into too much detail, we leveraged the window.postMessage browser API and wired it up with existing redux actions on the frontend. This allowed us to establish a 2-way communication between the iframe and parent. We will post a deep dive into our technical solution in the follow up article. What’s next? So far we have seen great initial results which have proven that our users really like interacting with our native ads. Seeing that our tech and product work has paid out is encouraging for us as a team and we will see how we can scale the approach from hereon. In the next segment we will shed more light on the technical details and the overall setup of the system, so watch this space for the next segment of ads with a great UX! ~ Enjoyed the read? Omio is hiring! If you would like to be part of our team and solve great problems, make sure you visit our jobs page and follow us on Medium.

https://medium.com/omio-engineering/google-ads-and-react-js-delivering-ads-with-a-great-ux-c18406ee71ee

['Ohans Emmanuel']

2019-12-09 15:21:40.022000+00:00

['Technology', 'Tech', 'Reactjs', 'Native Advertising', 'Software Development']

Apple Should Have Gone For The iMac’s Chin

Apple Should Have Gone For The iMac’s Chin While the new M1 iMacs are blazing fast, those chins turn me off Antony Terence Follow Apr 21 · 3 min read Source: Image created by the author on Canva. Apple’s aptly named Spring Loaded event on 4/20 revealed a couple of neat products with the usual cinematography that an Apple keynote revels in. Its 23.5" iMacs are its best yet, with Apple’s custom M1 silicon no longer restricted to MacBooks and the Mac mini. 85% faster CPU performance and up to 50% better GPU performance are claims that are no longer within the realm of fiction. The new Mac’s seven vibrant hues remind me of the original candy-colored iMacs that pushed Apple’s fortunes forward. Equipped with a 4.5K Retina Display with 11.3 million pixels, Apple managed to cram a productive workhorse with a tidy screen into a 11.5 mm thick system. P3 1B color support and True Tone tech in addition to a beast of an audio system (six speakers and two pairs of force-canceling woofers) round out the impressive yet svelte package. And yes, there’s an ever-important 1080p webcam sitting above that gorgeous display. But what’s below that fine screen is what’s bothering me. Apple’s brand-new iMacs. Source: Apple. White bezels and an airstrip for a chin? That first part still makes little sense to me. Black bezels have been the de facto standard on displays since time immemorial. Even Apple’s own swanky Pro Display XDR plays by that rule. As for the chin, there’s a good reason why it still exists. Chins made sense back when technology wasn’t as advanced as it is today and when bezel slaying wasn’t a national pastime. In 2021, the 23.5" iMac looks woefully outdated next to its 32" sibling launched two years ago. Sure, Apple’s Pro Display XDR cost $5000 at launch and doesn’t have to stuff in a meaty processor. But I don’t remember the last time someone bothered about monitor thickness. I’d have rather had a thicker display without that highway of metal at the bottom. Judging by the device’s critical reception, I’m not the only one who expected a smaller version of Apple’s excellent Pro Display XDR. No one complained about it being 27 mm thick despite not having a processor inside. During the presentation, an image showed that most of the internal space in the new iMac was empty, save for the chin packed with components. This allowed Apple to drastically reduce the device’s thickness. But at what cost? Does Apple still have its chin in the game? A thicker M1 iMac without the chin would have been heralded as a step forward for the Cupertino giant. While chins gave a sense of identity to smartphones, Apple didn’t hesitate to drop TouchID in favor of slimmer bezels. They could have done it the way Microsoft designed its Surface Studio, by placing the power-sipping components in a small enclosure at the base of the monitor. Perhaps Apple is saving the inevitable chin trim for a successor. And with its chips getting more powerful and efficient with time, I suppose it’ll happen sooner than later. But for a major redesign, the first major one since 2012, I expected more. Apple can’t just keep its chin up this time.

https://medium.com/macoclock/apple-should-have-gone-for-the-imacs-chin-2d503d9b3949

['Antony Terence']

2021-04-21 06:44:43.425000+00:00

['Makers', 'Apple', 'History', 'Technology', 'Gadgets']

Integrating Education and Technology

The Educational System is catching up with the rapid pace of the digital world, as it adapts to the fast development of technology. While there are some who contend that the implementation of EduTech tools and applications may potentially be a distraction to the system, and are therefore not a good idea to integrate into schooling, it is still evident that they possess great potential in improving the educational niche as a whole. And, with proper understanding and integration, outlined with proper guidelines, it is possible to completely allow technology into the world of education. If applied correctly and implemented correctly, technology can make the teaching life easy. To ensure that students understand each lesson taught to them, teachers are tasked with preparing concepts and approaches to keep their lessons clear. Before computers and projectors, teachers would painstakingly write important points on Manila Paper and create 2D props as visual aids, while at the same time, keeping the students entertained. Now, with technology in place, teachers may create presentations for their lessons and use projectors to show them in class. The Importance of Integrating Technology into the Education Industry Despite skepticism over the approach, integration of technology into the Education Industry provides beneficial and reasonable arguments as to why this has to be implemented. At the top of the list, is that technology provides transparency across the system. The existence of technology provides the students with immediate access to learning materials and their own performance data. This allows the students the opportunity to access as much of the source material as the World Wide Web is able to provide, helping them to gain greater knowledge and understanding tailored to their needs. It also allows the opportunity for collaboration. With the help of technology, it is now easier to collect and record data and store it in the cloud. Both students and teachers are also able to access this data and implement changes and updates in real time. Most importantly, it encourages planning, reasoning, and critical thinking on the part of the students. With all of their resources available, the students are encouraged to read through the materials, assess the credibility of the gathered sources, and determine the appropriate tools to use in order to aid them in their learning tasks. Continuous Room for Improvement The present debates and arguments around technology’s effectiveness in the education industry reveals continuous opportunities for improvement in the area of Education Technology. It is therefore important for students and teachers alike to embrace new change, and contribute in the improvement of the niche. Opet fully embraces and guides students in better learning and integration of technology. Taking advantage of technology, Opet integrates Artificial Intelligence to assist students in conducting on-point research to better achieve the output and results they need to aid them in their studies. Feel free to contact Opet for more information on how our services may support your needs. To find out more about Õpet, be sure to visit our social media sites below: Official Website: https://opetfoundation.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/opetfoundation Telegram: https://t.me/Opetfoundationgroup Medium: https://medium.com/@opetbot Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3735418 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OpetFoundation LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/opet-foundation/

https://medium.com/%C3%B5petfoundation/integrating-education-and-technology-829299974cd5

[]

2018-06-05 05:12:34.917000+00:00

['Edutech', 'Education Technology', 'Education']

Functional JavaScript — Closures. Inner functions are useful.

Photo by Frame Harirak on Unsplash JavaScript is partly a functional language. To learn JavaScript, we got to learn the functional parts of JavaScript. In this article, we’ll look at how to use closures. Closures Closures are inner functions. An inner function is a function within a function. For example, it’s something like: function outer() { function inner() {} } Closures have access to 3 scopes. They include variables that are declared in its own declaration. Also, they have access to global variables. And they have access to an outer function’s variable. For example, if we have: function outer() { function inner() { let x = 1; console.log(x); } inner(); } then the console log logs 1 because we have x inside the inner function and we access it in the same function in the console log. The inner function won’t be visible outside the outer function. We can also access global variables within the inner function. For example, if we have: let global = "foo"; function outer() { function inner() { let a = 5; console.log(global) } inner() } Then 'foo' is logged since inner has access to the global variable. Another scope that inner has access to is the scope of the outer function. For example, we can write: function outer() { let outer = "outer" function inner() { let a = 5; console.log(outer); } inner() } We have the outer variable and we access it in the inner function. Closure Remembers its Context A closure remembers its context. So if we use it anywhere, the variables that are in the function are whatever they are within the original context. For example, if we have: const fn = (arg) => { let outer = "outer" let innerFn = () => { console.log(outer) console.log(arg) } return innerFn; } Then the outer and arg variable values will be the same regardless of where it’s called. outer is 'outer' and arg is whatever we passed in. Since we return innerFn with fn , we can call fn and assign the returned function to a variable and call it: const foo = fn('foo'); foo() We pass in 'foo' as the value of arg . Therefore, we get: outer foo from the console log. We can see that the values are the same even if we called it outside the fn function. Real-World Examples We can create our own tap function to let us log values for debugging. For example, we can write: const tap = (value) => (fn) => { typeof(fn) === 'function' && fn(value); console.log(value); } tap("foo")((it) => console.log('value:', it)) to create our tap function and call it. We have a function that takes a value and then returns a function that takes a function fn and runs it along with the console log. This way, we can pass in a value and a function. Then we get: value: foo foo logged. The first is from the callback we passed in. And the 2nd is from the function we returned with tap . Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash Conclusion Closures are inner functions. They have access to the outer function’s scope, global variables, and their own scope. We can use it or various applications.

https://medium.com/dev-genius/functional-javascript-closures-ffa520f13f6f

['John Au-Yeung']

2020-11-14 20:27:29.989000+00:00

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

Will The PS5 Be The Next Revolution in Gaming?

As we look forward to the release of the next PlayStation, what comes next? Photo by Teddy Guerrier on Unsplash The latest PlayStation the PS5 is due for release later this year. So what do we know about the most anticipated console release in years? On the 25th anniversary of the original will it revolutionize the way we game? Only time will tell of course, but the signs are good. The teasers from Sony point to a new machine with a whole bunch of new tech. Stuff like 4k and HDR TV compatibility will change the game. The graphics are set to leap forward. Things like depth of color and individual rays of light on the screen are going to be possible. That’s not only going to make games seem more lifelike. It’s also going to give us a feeling of deeper game immersion. The processors are also going to move the game on. Quicker gaming, quicker loading, and downloading. Adaptive triggers in the control and what they call a 3d soundscape. Will make us feel like we are in the game. All sounds good and once again the PlayStation represents a pivotal moment in gaming. The revolution is here, long live the PlayStation!

https://medium.com/@dodwalker1/will-the-ps5-be-the-next-revolution-in-gaming-5a84ca441769

[]

2020-07-10 10:27:21.335000+00:00

['Electronics', 'Gaming', 'Culture', 'Games', 'Technology']

instagram founder name

Instagram, the image sharing app created with the aid of using Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom from Stanford University, spins the story of achievement capitalized the proper manner. Launched manner again withinside the 12 months 2010, Instagram nowadays boasts of seven hundred million registered customers, with extra than four hundred million human beings touring the webweb page on a everyday basis. Out of the seven hundred million customers, round 17 million are from the UK alone! When the 2 founders began out speakme approximately their concept, they quick realised that they’d one purpose in mind: to make the biggest cell image sharing app. However, earlier than Instagram, the 2 had labored collectively on a comparable platform referred to as Burbn. For Instagram to work, Krieger and Systrom determined to strip Burbn right all the way down to the naked necessities. Burbn became pretty just like Instagram and had functions which allowed customers to feature filters to their pictures. The social networking webweb page Instagram reached 1000000000 energetic customers in 2019. The US-primarily based totally video and image-sharing app is a achievement tale that has spread out because its release in October 2010 with the aid of using Stanford University college students Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. Systrom majored in control technological know-how and engineering, at the same time as Krieger studied symbolic systems — a department of pc research mixed with psychology. When the 2 founders met, they began out discussing their concept for a brand new app and realised they shared a purpose: to create the world’s biggest cell image-sharing app. Budding entrepreneur Fellow college students recalled Systrom as being clearly gregarious and a budding entrepreneur from a younger age. He in short ran a market that became just like Craigslist for fellow Stanford college students. Krieger had exclusive capabilities and one in all his college tasks were designing a pc interface that could gauge human emotions. Prior to Instagram, that they’d collaborated on a comparable platform referred to as Burbn. They determined to strip it down and use it as the premise for Instagram. Burbn had functions that enabled customers to feature filters to their photographs, so the duo studied each famous image app to peer how they might development further. Eventually, they determined it wasn’t operating and scrapped Burbn in favour of making a totally new platform. Their first attempt became Scotch, a predecessor to Instagram, however it wasn’t a achievement, because it didn’t have sufficient filters, had too many insects and became slow. Once Instagram became launched for Android phones, the app became downloaded extra than 1,000,000 instances a day. Interestingly, the web social media platform became ready to get hold of an funding of $ 500 million. Furthermore, Systrom and Zuckerberg had been in talks for a Facebook poised takeover. In April 2012, Facebook made a proposal to buy Instagram for approximately $ 1 billion in coins and stock, with the important thing provision that the enterprise could continue to be independently managed. Shortly thereafter and simply previous to its preliminary public offering, Facebook received the enterprise for the whopping sum of $ 1 billion in coins and stock. After the Facebook acquisition, the Instagram founders have completed little to alternate the consumer phase, sticking to the simplicity of the app. The remarkable upward push of Instagram’s recognition proves that human beings agree with in actual connections as opposed to the ones primarily based totally on simplest words. Since the acquisition, Instagram’s founders haven’t made many adjustments to the consumer experience, who prefer to paste to the app’s simplicity. Its upward push in recognition proves that human beings revel in the manner the app works and just like the image-primarily based totally connections it provides. One of the maximum essential instructions of Instagram’s achievement is that the founders didn’t waste time seeking to keep their authentic concept, Burbn. Once they determined it wasn’t going to work, they moved on quick and invented Instagram. Systrom stated its call became primarily based totally on “immediate telegram”. The app became released at simply the proper time — and with simplest 12 personnel initially, the consumer base had increased to extra than 27 million earlier than Instagram became offered to Facebook. Today, maximum celebrities use it as a platform for promotions and with 1000000000 customers, it keeps to head from power to power.

https://medium.com/@sfame-raya-55/instagram-founder-name-5363220452cb

['Sfame Raya']

2020-12-17 11:40:41.191000+00:00

['SEO', 'Instagram', 'Technews', 'Technology', 'Success Story']

Marvel’s Avengers Game Review

Marvel’s Avengers Game Review Ten hours of brilliance meets an endless supply of tedium! Xbox screenshot captured by the author. The main story campaign in Marvel’s Avengers, the new game from former Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics, is excellent. Sure, it doesn’t have any of the likeness rights for the actors from the movie universe that it’s kinda-sorta aesthetically based on, but it still tells a thrilling comic book narrative with more polish and care than I was expecting. It even gives several of the characters room to have well-developed emotional arcs, with long cutscenes featuring surprisingly good performances. There’s an excellent turn by Sandra Saad as Kamala Khan, and Troy Baker puts in amazing work to fully embody Bruce Banner. As you may have seen in the many other reviews that went up sooner than mine, Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel takes center stage in the plot line here, as the circumstances of the story push her into a world-spanning adventure to reunite Marvel’s legendary superhero team after things have Gone Very Wrong. So yes, it’s the millionth story about superheroes learning to work together as a team to fight evil, but Kamala’s earnest enthusiasm and teenager-into-adulthood character arc give it exactly the right emotional heft to make it feel new and interesting all over again. When you’re not watching the lavishly-produced and lengthy story sequences, (rendered with some of the best graphics that have appeared on current platforms), you’ll be playing a competent third-person action RPG that borrows plenty of gameplay tropes from Crystal’s Tomb Raider games and throws in a handful of Warframe for good measure. All of the characters play the way you’d want them to, although I didn’t have as much fun with Iron Man as with the rest. He relies mostly on fiddly flying abilities which are cumbersome to use inside the tight corridors of the various interiors present across the game’s expansive world. They also allow him to skip all of the exterior environments entirely and miss important gear and leveling opportunities. Xbox screenshot captured by the author. You’ll have the chance to play as every character throughout the campaign, and each one has a little bit of story attached to introduce their unique moves. There’s also a big old map table full of side missions that also serves as your gateway into the multiplayer/endgame portion of the adventure, which I’ll get to in a minute. Each character has a large skill tree of varied abilities spread across several categories, and they all feel genuinely different to play, so leveling-up a character does make them feel much more powerful. Unfortunately, the loot progression isn’t that great at all. While there are some cool cosmetic costume options to unlock for the grinders or real-money-spenders among you, the actual loot items don’t have a dramatic effect on gameplay. Instead, they contribute to a universal Power Level a la Destiny and present no cosmetic changes whatsoever. Your Power Level helps determine game difficulty, with each mission being at a fixed level and your individual Power determining how much you’ll have to wail on bad guys before they explode. Ninety percent of the game’s enemies are robots, so they’re always exploding. As a system, it’s not nearly as interesting as the layers of difficulty or loot options in something like Diablo III, and you’ll quickly stop looking at what unique power bonuses each gear item grants in favor of just picking the one that makes your power numbers go up the most. The campaign is mostly devoid of distractions, so if you just want to blast through the wonderful story, you can. The second-to-last mission requires a little grinding for items to build new suits for the heroes, and the last boss fight requires you to use every hero to complete a different objective. This was unduly difficult for me because I spent most of the game playing as Ms. Marvel and Black Widow and everyone else was under-leveled, so you might want to do some grinding before heading into the final encounter. Xbox screenshot captured by the author. After you’ve finished the campaign, the “Avengers Initiative” mode fully opens, and this is the real meat of the game. It presents a massive map full of different zones where you can take on missions with up to three other players or challenge them on your own alongside harebrained AI teammates. These missions have very minimal story trappings, and although this mode does have a few additional cutscenes to unlock that round out things from the main story…it’s mostly an excuse to make you endlessly play the game and grind out new content in the hopes you’ll spend some money in the cash shop. The lack of enemy and objective variety stands out more once you unlock the endgame, and you’ll realize that most of this game is just fighting the same eight soldiers and robots and then occasionally opening a door or defending a terminal. Sometimes you’ll even blow up the same four turbines in a generator room. The lack of new objectives in the endgame really hurts the mode, though the promised new content packs that are supposed to slowly drip out over the next year or so might help this. The worst design mistake in Avengers is that you can’t replay its excellent main story. That’s right, once you’re done with the campaign, that wonderful content is locked away forever unless you decide to completely delete your save file or Crystal Dynamics decides to patch in a new game plus. There’s also no option to have multiple save files, so if someone else in your house wants to play the game they’ll need their own online account on your system of choice. Glitches abound on a standard Xbox One. Here, Thor is inside of Hulk. Xbox screenshot captured by the author. I played the game on both an Xbox One S and One X. The One X version is breathtakingly gorgeous through most of its runtime, with options for both 30 and 60 frames per second and resolutions that scale accordingly. On the One S, you’re limited to a slightly blurry picture at 30 frames per second, and every other cutscene had glitching shadows and flickering ambient occlusion artifacts. Still, it performed fine on the weaker console right up until the last two missions and the endgame…where it then dips continuously into the low twenties and upper teens. Yikes. I loved the main story in Avengers enough that I’d happily recommend paying sixty dollars to see it for any Marvel fans out there…except I’ll never be able to play it again unless I destroy all my progress or buy the game again on a different platform. That’s so mindbogglingly stupid given the quality of the work here. I urge you to avoid this game until they patch in an option to see that content again. I’ve spent over 1500 hours playing Diablo III, and a big chunk of that was running through the campaign before they added adventure mode. Even now I’ll still revisit that story from time to time. I would have loved to make Avengers my next Diablo III, but the endgame pales in comparison to most other loot games on the market and to its own story that gets locked away in purgatory upon completion.

https://xander51.medium.com/marvels-avengers-game-review-5c833830086e

['Alex Rowe']

2020-09-18 02:42:39.202000+00:00

['Online', 'Marvel', 'Review', 'Gaming', 'Technology']

She Says These Technologies Fight Our Existential Crisis and Breed Trillion-Dollar Opportunities

On Climate Tech and Investing K: Climate tech is a broad concept. Can you help us unpack it? H: The word “climate” encompasses two key objectives of this industry: Mitigation: reducing greenhouse gas in the air to minimize climate impact, whether through emission control or carbon capture; Adaptation: reducing negative consequences of climate change already underway, such as weather hazards. While 1. used to dominate public consciousness, 2. has also captured attention over recent years, as extreme climate events grow more frequent and severe. Facing threats like the Californian wild fires and Hurricane Sandy, we have to prepare and protect ourselves, especially our underprivileged communities, which are also the most vulnerable. Photo by Marcus Kauffman on Unsplash The word “tech” in “climate tech” represents a key piece of the solution, but it cannot exist alone. Innovations in business models, funding mechanisms, policies, and regulations are all crucial in catalyzing tech-centered initiatives to fight climate change. K: Which parts of society are seeing the greatest transformation by climate tech? H: While changes are ubiquitous, these five major areas are most impacted: electricity & power, transportation, buildings & construction, industrials & manufacturing, and agriculture & food supply chain. K: Any major tech trends worth highlighting? H: Rather than a few mega-themes, we are seeing numerous individual innovations that target specific problems facing different industries today. It goes to show how ubiquitous climate impact is, but fortunately so are solutions. Here are a few examples: Methane capture and storage for coal mines : even after being retired and sealed, coal mines can continue releasing this powerful greenhouse gas for another century. [Keyi note: Methane has a global warming potential (GWP) 84 times that of CO2 for a 20-year horizon.] Technologies are evolving to more effectively capture such emissions and either utilize or safely store them away on a quasi-permanent basis. [Keyi note: for anyone wanting to geek out over this subject, this paper does a technical deep dive.] : even after being retired and sealed, coal mines can continue releasing this powerful greenhouse gas for another century. [Keyi note: Methane has a global warming potential (GWP) 84 times that of CO2 for a 20-year horizon.] Technologies are evolving to more effectively capture such emissions and either utilize or safely store them away on a quasi-permanent basis. [Keyi note: for anyone wanting to geek out over this subject, this paper does a technical deep dive.] Advanced thermal insulation technology: cutting-edge material science is being deployed to provide effective thermal insulation, from the packaging for temperature-sensitive food and medical products to windows in energy-efficient buildings. cutting-edge material science is being deployed to provide effective thermal insulation, from the packaging for temperature-sensitive food and medical products to windows in energy-efficient buildings. Garment manufacturing from sustainable materials: advanced engineering is replacing petrochemical-based fabric ingredients with unexpected natural alternatives, such as milk and mushrooms. This would help reduce the climate impact of what we wear. Photo by Amanda Vick on Unsplash K: Why did the industry’s last boom cycle in the late-2000’s, the “Clean Tech Wave 1.0”, go bust? H: The way I see it, the №1 culprit was the mismatch between the software-oriented traditional VC model and hardware-focused climate tech startups, which were the majority at the time. The quintessential software model centers around low upfront cost, rapid and numerous iterations, and fast scaling. It can go to market quickly with a minimum viable product (MVP) and release updates based on customer feedback in a matter of days. Many climate tech startups, particularly hardware businesses, are just the opposite — they have very few shots (if not just one shot) at survival, and each attempt can cost tremendous capital and time. An MVP alone might take years, and if it flops, there might never be a second chance. As a result, when VCs piled into the space in mid-2000s with their conventional “software” playbook, it didn’t work. The risk-return profile, investment horizon, and capital needs of most clean tech startups at the time called for a different type of capital, but VC was — for the most part — the only game in town. [Keyi note: this podcast proposed another contributor to the bust — the “commodity” nature and low barrier to entry of major technologies pioneered by “Clean Tech 1.0” startups, such as solar and wind power generation. The fields were quickly swamped by competitors, including those benefiting from existing scale, manufacturing experience, supply chain advantages, and/or low-cost capital (another manifestation that VC wasn’t the optimal funding in such cases). The surge in supply set off ruthless price wars and drove most startups out of the market.] K: What are you seeing with respect to the growing second wave for climate tech today? How is it different from the last one? H: We’re seeing two major differences: A greater share of software and business model innovations (which are more often VC-friendly than hard tech solutions), thanks to existing climate tech infrastructure. We have a massive stock of climate tech hard assets today, such as solar panels, wind farms, and EVs, which did not exist in “Clean Tech Wave 1.0”. [Keyi note: the EV boom took place mostly after “Wave 1.0” and went well beyond the startup ecosystem with significant participation from incumbent carmakers.] On top of them, software and business model innovations can now flourish and help optimize the underlying hardware operations. For example: Drones and computer vision technology are being deployed to quickly and cost-effectively assess building rooftops for solar panel suitability and detect installed panels that need maintenance [Keyi note: DroneDeploy is one of such providers]; Software can help commercial operators of EV fleets optimize fleet operations and charging schedules to achieve maximum productivity and minimum energy use. Picture of rooftop solar panels taken from above; Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash Make no mistake — innovations in “hard science” fields are crucial and still happening. But the landscape of climate tech has evolved to be more diverse, and VCs today are finding more investment opportunities that align with their business model. 2. Deeper involvement from a broader group of stakeholders. While the first wave was largely fueled by investor enthusiasm and certain renewable energy policy incentives, we are now seeing governments, large corporates (even fossil fuel incumbents), and non-profit organizations play a much more active role. [Keyi note: a good example of the powerful role governments play is how China grew its EV industry from near non-existence to the world’s largest by sales and production over the last decade.] There is growing consensus that climate change is an existential crisis for mankind and deserves a societal-wide response. These stakeholders provide complementary capital solutions: government grants and corporate investments are generally more patient and cost less than VC funding, which makes them crucial to those startups not fit for VCs as we discussed. In addition, these stakeholders provide critical ecosystem support, such as corporate partnerships and enabling policies. K: In November 2019, Google announced an accelerator program for climate tech startups. In June 2020, Amazon launched a $2 billion climate pledge fund to invest in climate tech. Why are tech giants like them particularly active? H: Apart from being good corporate citizens and contributing to a major cause most of their people care about, the tech leaders have multiple strategic rationales to double down: Demonstrate leadership in new territories. As major industries get reshuffled, they may discover new market opportunities to potentially lead in by acting early. For example, Shopify has launched a carbon offset platform, where its merchant partners can purchase credits (generated by third party carbon reduction projects) to offset the climate impact of their emission-heavy package shipping process. Shopify offers the Offset plugin that allows its business customers to track and offset emissions from package shipping 2. Nurture key future customers. For tech giants that sell advanced B2B computing tools (e.g. cloud and machine learning services), climate tech startups are much more likely to become customers than their often slow-to-move incumbent competitors. By partnering with these startups and helping them scale, these tech behemoths will be expanding their own future revenue pipelines. 3. Optimize energy usage. The largest tech companies are also gigantic energy users. Many including Google, Amazon and Microsoft (who are already among the biggest corporate buyers of renewable energy worldwide) either claim to have achieved a “100% renewable” energy portfolio or net zero emission, or pledge behind such goals. As a result, they actively invest in and partner with climate tech startups that can help them manage carbon footprints and potentially save hundreds of millions in energy bills. 4. Commercialize in-house energy expertise. The tech giants are accumulating significant proprietary knowledge in optimizing energy consumption, leveraging their own scale. Such knowledge could eventually be commercialized and marketed to third parties. In other words, a well-run cost item may set the stage for a future key revenue stream. [Keyi note: recall that AWS was born out of Amazon’s in-house initiative to optimize its own computing infrastructure utilization.] K: Is climate tech a more localized or globally connected industry? Why? H: The technology is definitely globally relevant. Just like search engine algorithms, once you figure out something that works well, you can apply it everywhere. That said, localization matters tremendously in applying the technology, given unique local laws and regulations, industry ecosystems and so on. Overall, you see more global consolidation upstream vs. downstream in the industry value chain. A few upstream players may possess the best technology and demonstrate economies of scale in production. These leaders may have a global production footprint to gain easy access to source materials, customers, etc. In addition, the founder universe of climate tech is more international and decentralized than that of software startups. First, you see a high percentage of immigrant founders among US climate tech startups, especially those built around technological breakthroughs spun out of universities and national labs. This naturally extends from the high percentage of international students and scholars in STEM fields of the US higher education and research system. Second, you also see founders in every corner of the world applying the latest climate technologies in their respective communities, relying on their localized knowledge of the regulatory and market environment.

https://medium.com/@sophiekeyiwang/she-says-these-technologies-fight-our-existential-crisis-and-breed-trillion-dollar-opportunities-6950c8d4ccfa

['Keyi Wang']

2020-12-22 02:49:19.553000+00:00

['Startup', 'Climate Change', 'Technology', 'Venture Capital', 'Immigration']

Tally Launches App That Rewards Saving, Not Spending

Tally Launches App That Rewards Saving, Not Spending The debt management startup is now incentivizing consumers to save the same way credit cards lure them to spend. Tally cofounders Jason Brown (left) and Jasper Platz Tally has launched an automated savings app that lets users earn rewards points for saving, as opposed to incentivizing spending like most rewards systems do. The standalone app, called Tally Save, is separate from its initial product, a debt management app that automates credit card payments. Tally Save is designed to motivate users to save by letting them earn points they can redeem for gift cards to 50 of the largest U.S. retailers including Amazon, Whole Foods, Target and Starbucks as well as services like Uber or Airbnb. As the product grows, Tally will continue to add ways for people to redeem their points, Tally CEO Jason Brown told Cheddar in an interview Wednesday. “There’s no place that rewards you for saving,” Brown said. “You get that instant gratification when you buy something and also get points, whereas with savings, you put it into this black box and it’s going to kick out 25 cents at some point, but it’s not really concrete.” Users also have the option to donate their rewards through a partnership with charity: water. High-yield savings and hybrid cash accounts have recently emerged as go-to customer acquisition strategies for consumer-facing fintech startups, including SoFi, Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment and Affirm. A rate of 3 percent or even 2 percent is an attractive offer to many compared to the rates of the top four U.S. banks: Chase (0.04 percent as of May 23), Citi (0.04 percent), Wells Fargo (0.01 percent), and Bank of America (0.06 percent). “If you have a lot of money, then that’s something that motivates you. But most people who have hundreds or maybe $1,000 in savings are just not motivated to get, you know, 20 cents of interest,” Brown said. “What is way more important is to make the habit of saving fun and almost addictive so we designed an experience that gives you points for the habit of saving.” The cash-back craze even extends beyond banks and savings accounts: The rewards app Drop, which gives users points for shopping and gift cards to redeem with them, raised $21 million in Series A funding last year and the banking startup Zero launched its debit card with a cash-back feature. Rakuten, the “Amazon of Japan,” advertises its cash-back shopping platform to U.S. consumers as part of the rebranding of Ebates, which it bought in 2014. Financial services firms tend to have difficulty doing the right thing for consumers’ financial health because of the need to do the profitable thing. Many fintech companies, and automated savings apps specifically, caught consumers’ attention with free services that provided value to them, but many have begun employing a subscription model to continue the service. Digit charges $2.99 per month for similar automation services to Tally and pays users a 1 percent bonus every three months for saving; Qapital’s membership starts at $3 per month but goes as high as $12. “As we thought about our roadmap to getting to complete financial automation, we knew the first step was doing a really hard financial job for people that’s fundamental to helping people build financial health, but also had a strong business model and revenue model attached to Tally so we can have the flexibility to actually innovate aggressively on the product side,” Brown said. The company thinks of its offerings in terms of goal-oriented jobs consumers need to do and uses artificial intelligence to optimize each of those financial tasks, separating the benefits of financial responsibilities from the burden. Tally makes money through its core product, the credit card pay-off app. It offers a low-rate line of credit that users pay monthly; that payment covers the minimums on each linked credit card. Cash-back and rewards incentives are expensive for financial services firms, but Brown said Tally’s savings product is completely free with no strings attached. “It’s all about giving this one job away for free, there are other financial gaps that we’ll get paid for, he said. “The first one that we automated, paying off your cards, we get we do get paid for and we can use that to subsidize some of the financial jobs we do for free. We are rolling out this year and into early next year the next couple of financial jobs that will be automated, and some of those we’ll also get paid for. We don’t have to make money on every single job we do. But, you know, something like this is truly fundamental to financial health.” Next, Tally will look to help consumers pay down other types of debt next, including mortgage and auto, Brown said. For now, its focus is on helping them pay down debt and build up an emergency savings fund; eventually it could expand into investments, retirement and tax management and payments. The core Tally app is now managing “hundreds of millions” of dollars and grown 10x in the past year, Brown said. It has a 99 percent monthly retention rate and is now available to more than 80 percent of Americans, compared to almost 50 percent this time last year, based on state licenses, according to Brown. The app is still only available to people with at least a 660 FICO score, but the company plans to expand the service to people with a lower-than-660 score within the next couple months. “We started with the first automated job of paying off credit cards and aligned the actual revenue model so we only make money when we save people money, and now we’ve saved people tens of millions of dollars in interest,” Brown said. “Now we’ve really got that automated job nailed, we can then rinse and repeat that as we do more financial jobs for people and help them be better off financially. It’s all part of our broader plan to get to complete financial automation.”

https://medium.com/cheddar/tally-launches-app-that-rewards-saving-not-spending-96d5859a8f0

['Tanaya Macheel']

2019-05-30 17:43:39.789000+00:00

['Fintech', 'Business', 'Banking', 'Technology']

Adaptive Single Window Systems For Investor Delight

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash The concept of electronic National Single Windows started at the break of this millennium. Countries like Ghana, Singapore and Senegal were the early adopters of these ICT platforms in early 2000. Later, more nations leapt the bandwagon to implement paperless, automated systems for Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) and trade facilitation. ASEAN, for example, was the first economic bloc to come up with a Regional Single Window Project. Technology has acted as the force multiplier in strengthening Single Window solutions that take care of an entire project investment cycle- from conception to implementation and beyond. ‘Single Windows’ for future can be more seamless where an investor can access everything from land to water and electricity and get all approvals through ‘click and scroll’ on a unified portal. Windows beyond Trade Facilitation Globally, the Single Window System for foreign trade has been the key concept for trade facilitation across borders. The WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement encourages all its members to set up a Single Window. When implemented efficiently, Single Window projects can spell a multitude of benefits- enhanced revenue, faster clearance times and improved transparency & governance for the economy. But do Single Windows only mean less bureaucracy and faster approvals? Figures on costs say they have a lot more to offer. The World Bank has estimated that automating customs processes can save as much as $115 per container in seaborne trade. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), automating processes can trim trade costs by 2.4 per cent for low income economies, 2.3 per cent for upper middle-income economies and 2.1 per cent for lower middle income economies. The Customs Service of the Republic of Korea estimated that introducing a Single Window System in 2010 brought $18 million in benefits. Closer home, implementing Single Window systems as part of Business Reforms Action Plan (BRAP) soared India’s EoDB rankings by the World Bank from 142 in 2014 to 63 in 2019. From Multiple Silos to a Single Window: The many-layered challenges Usually, the government data is unstructured. A single window platform can overcome silos by digitizing all documents. But the migration to this unified platform can be a cross-functional challenge as the World Bank articulates in a 2016 report: “A Single Window solution is not just an IT solution but an organizational challenge with a fundamental need to put in place a multi-faceted service organization that is authorized and enabled to meet the needs of all its clients, public and private alike”. GovTech for Agile Single Windows GovTech can catalyze ‘Next Gen Single Window Systems’ for an ever changing business landscape. Think of one integrated platform where investors can access info on spatial and geographical land data, register their units, apply for all approvals ranging from environment clearance to No Objection Certificate (NOC) and building plan approvals, get permits for electricity and water and to top it all, check status ‘real time’, Sounds like all goodies stacked in a single bucket offering? This is how Single Windows are designed to deliver for Industry 4.0. A seamless government platform with the sprinkling of niche technologies like Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Take for instance Singapore, UK, Belarus and Estonia- they all have leveraged Blockchain powered land registry to cut turnaround time. Another epoch in digital transformation is the emergence of ‘Virtual Data Rooms’ to create ‘Golden Records’ for industries. As procedures get easier, the government machinery faces a deluge of data to process. This is where agile RPA bots can come in handy to substitute mundane and error prone human functions like scrutiny and validation of applications filed by industries. Powered by ground breaking applications, GovTech can make ‘Single Windows’ deliver more for EoDB and create an immersive investor experience. Businesses are evolving. And, so are technologies. Governments can spot and sustain this synergy.

https://medium.com/@nanupany/adaptive-single-window-systems-for-investor-delight-646891476b7c

['Priyadarshi Nanu Pany']

2020-11-23 06:42:18.900000+00:00

['Technology', 'Investors', 'Single Window System', 'Govtech']

What is StarLink broadband?

HIGH SPEED INTERNET ACCESS ACROSS THE GLOBE With performance that far surpasses that of traditional satellite internet, and a global network unbounded by ground infrastructure limitations, Starlink will deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable. Starlink is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021. Image Credits: Starlink KEEPING THE SPACE CLEAN Starlink is on the leading edge of on-orbit debris mitigation, meeting or exceeding all regulatory and industry standards. At end of life, the satellites will utilize their on-board propulsion system to de-orbit over the course of a few months. In the unlikely event the propulsion system becomes inoperable, the satellites will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere within 1–5 years. SpaceX now has more than 400 flying routers in orbit, with plans to more than triple that number in the coming months. While it has the go-ahead to launch more than 12,000 satellites in the coming years. Musk said in a tweet that a “private beta” test of the service is about to begin, followed by a public beta for testers at northern latitudes.

https://medium.com/illumination/what-is-starlink-broadband-5eb59bd53841

['Lakshay Budhiraja']

2020-07-16 18:18:11.359000+00:00

['Technology', 'Future', 'Internet', 'Elon Musk', 'Spacex']

I Wore the Fitbit Sense 24/7 for Two Months. Here’s What I Learned.

I Wore the Fitbit Sense 24/7 for Two Months. Here’s What I Learned. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images For the last two months, I’ve worn the Fitbit Sense smartwatch 24/7, only taking it off to charge it. Living with the watch on a daily basis, I’ve experienced its quirks and strong points and seen how it performs in the real world. I’ve taken it along on a grueling workout, used it to manage my pandemic stress, connected it to my microwave, and let it perform medical tests on my heart. Here’s what I’ve learned. As I shared in my first-look review, the Sense ($329.95) is Fitbit’s most advanced smartwatch to date and the best health-oriented watch on the market. True to its name, the watch is riddled with advanced sensors, including a heart rate tracker, accelerometers, an altimeter, a blood oxygen (Sp02) sensor, a skin temperature sensor, and an Electrodermal Activity (EDA) sensor that measures stress levels and also serves as a medical-grade ECG. All of these sensors feed data into Fitbit’s analytics algorithms, where they’re transformed into easily digestible metrics, graphs, and logs, all of which you can access on your phone (some are also available on the watch itself). The Sense knows how effective your workout was, how well you slept last night, how you’re coping with stress — even if you might have Covid-19. At its core, the Fitbit Sense is a fitness product, and most users probably buy one to get more active. So I decided to start my extensive experiments with the Fitbit Sense by testing its workout-tracking features. Or rather, I mistakenly stumbled into such a test. When I first ordered the Fitbit Sense, I told my personal trainer about it. He got a kind of gleeful look in his eye, and said “Great! I’ll design a workout that really puts it through its paces!” I immediately began to question the logic of telling my personal trainer that I had ordered the Fitbit Sense. The next time we connected, my trainer delivered on his promise. Our workout began with stretching, then a five-minute sprint around a track at my local park. I then did three sets of a circuit consisting of weighted box-squats, lunges to step-ups on a concrete planter with a 12-kilo kettlebell, overhead presses, and burpees. The workout, my trainer told me, was designed to test static stretching, cardio, weight-bearing exercise, pushing/pulling, and explosive movements, so we could see how the watch handled each. Normally you’d focus on one of these types of exercises per workout session. In the name of science (and to the chagrin of my body), we did all of them at once. The Fitbit Sense can track a variety of workouts, from walking to kickboxing. You initiate a workout on the watch itself through the Exercise app and select the kind of workout you plan to do. Depending on what you choose, the watch will use a different set of sensors to track and document your movements and will display stats tailored to the kind of workout you’ve chosen. If you’re going on a hike, for example, you can select the Hike setting, and the Sense will show how many steps you’ve taken and the distance you’ve traveled. It will also use its onboard GPS to track where you go and provide you with a map afterward in the Fitbit app. Mapping a hike on the Fitbit Sense. If you select a static workout like weightlifting, on the other hand, the watch will disable its GPS and tell you about your heart rate zones and calories burned instead. For a workout like mine with multiple components, I selected Circuit Training. This is a good general setting to track a workout that blends multiple elements. The watch monitored my movements throughout the approximately 45-minute session and provided summary statistics and charts in the Fitbit app on my phone when I was done. A chart of my heart rate shows how the watch captured my workout. My heart rate stayed steady during stretching, before rocketing up during the sprint to a max of 180 beats per minute, which is just below my personal peak of around 195. It drops as I cool down from the sprint (with a little bump as I jog back to my starting point), before going progressively higher as I do the box squats and lunges to step-ups. It then drops again as I do overhead presses (a strength-based pushing exercise that’s less cardio-intensive). Finally, it jumps again as I do the murderous, cardio-intensive burpees. The pattern repeats almost exactly for each of my three sets — you can clearly see the three sets as nearly identical patterns of heart rate changes on my graph. Reviewing the graphs and stats, my trainer and I agreed that the watch did an admirable job of tracking my workout. We also agreed that we hated the experience of exercising with a smartwatch. To me, workouts are all about being present in the moment, developing a better understanding of what you’re able to do physically (and ideally expanding that over time), and focusing intensely (almost meditatively) on the basics of movement, form, and flow. It’s about training your mind just as much as training your muscles. It’s hard to achieve a flow state when you’re constantly futzing with a tiny screen on your wrist. Wearing the Sense, I found that I was always stopping to check my heart rate, shift the watch around so the kettlebell wouldn’t crush it, and investigate mysterious buzzes and vibrations that it seemed to send out at random as I exercised. I also found that the Sense mostly told me things I already know. Sprints are cardio-intensive. Burpees are hard. Moving burns calories. I don’t need a $329 gadget to tell me those things. Where the watch was most helpful, I found, wasn’t for formal workouts — it was for the days where I didn’t do structured exercise. The Fitbit Sense monitors your movements 24/7. There were plenty of days during my testing where I’d glance down at my wrist in the evening and realize I’d only done 3,000 steps for the day. That provided the motivation (or electronic guilt trip) to stand up and move more, getting closer to my 10,000-step goal. That’s the biggest advantage of a fitness watch like the Sense--you’re getting “credit" for all your movements throughout the day, not just the times you’re actually working out. Increased mindfulness of your movements (or sloth) can be a powerful motivator to take the stairs, park farther away, and otherwise add more steps into your daily routines. Fitbit even has a feature that reminds chair-bound remote workers to stand up and walk around once per hour, which feels like a very 2020-friendly feature. The Fitbit Sense adds some other pandemic-friendly features, too. Most notably, the watch includes a suite of advanced sensors and features to measure stress, which it tracks as a daily Stress Management score between 0 and 100. Fitbit’s stress tracking takes a holistic approach, factoring in sleep data (more on that later), exertion balance (whether you’ve exercised too much or not enough), heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and your own self-reported stress levels. It also includes readings from the watch’s onboard electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor, which measures tiny changes in your skin’s conductivity to determine how physically stressed you are. EDA readings don’t happen automatically — you have to decide to sit down and take one. To do so, you place your hand on top of the watch (the EDA sensor is embedded in the bezel around the watch face) and keep it there throughout the EDA session as the Sense takes stress readings. Sessions last a minimum of two minutes, but you can go for up to 60 if you want. The session begins with the advice to “Calm your mind and just breathe.” When I first tested the watch, that really pissed me off. Calm my mind? Breathe?? It’s 2020. There’s a damned pandemic on, wrist computer! Somehow “just breathing” doesn’t seem sufficient to address the collective, bizarre challenges 2020 has wrought on the world. Wired’s Adrienne So felt the same way, noting the irony of being told to breathe while in the midst of historic wildfires, which made California’s air quality among the worst in the world. I was also confused by the format of the EDA results. I was expecting some kind of metric for stress levels, but the results are shown as a bar graph of EDA “responses.” Over time, though, I’ve come to really enjoy the Sense’s EDA sessions. I realized that Fitbit’s goal is not to show a snapshot of your stress levels at a specific point in time. Instead, they’re focused on giving you tools (like meditation, mindfulness, and yes, breathing) to reduce your physical stress — as well as metrics to show how effective those tools have actually been. I like meditation, but I often find it boring. And I sometimes wonder whether it’s actually doing anything, or if I’m just sitting there and visualizing a glowing lotus flower for the hell of it. With feedback from the EDA sensor and the Sense’s heart rate tracker, you can set aside a few moments to meditate or relax in whatever way works for you (both pranayama breathing and progressive muscle relaxation have science behind them), and immediately see how effective your session has been. If you’re physically relaxing, you should see a decline in the number of EDA responses on your bar graph over the course of your session. You should also see a drop in your heart rate — the Sense displays your starting and ending heart rate whenever you complete an EDA session. From my testing, I’ve found the sessions very effective. If I notice that my heart is racing (or especially if I’m having trouble sleeping), I’ll do a quick two-minute EDA session. I like that the Sense allows you to initiate these on the watch itself — if I had to pull out my phone to do a session, I know that would just add to my stress. If I focus on it, I find that I can reduce my heart rate by 20 beats per minute or more during a short session. I often see a noticeable decline in my EDA responses, too, though this seems to depend more on how I’m feeling overall on a given day than on what I do during the session itself. I’ve even come to enjoy the little fortune-cookie mantras Fitbit displays after each session. I will ask myself one thing I’m grateful for right now! Thanks for suggesting that, watch! Yes, I understand the irony of applying metrics to a process like meditation, which is supposed to be all about letting go. But for me, knowing that my meditation or relaxation sessions are actually helping provides the motivation I need to do them consistently. The Fitbit Sense adds other functions for tracking your overall health, too. The back of the watch includes a large conductive plate that measures your skin temperature while you sleep. In the Fitbit app, you can see if you’re above or below your temperature baseline each night, and track how your skin temperature changed throughout the night. Fitbit says in the app that skin temperature can change based on “room temperature, bedding, circadian rhythm, menstrual cycle or the onset of fever.” My air conditioner unexpectedly died during California’s heatwave in October, so I can confirm that room temperature indeed causes changes to your resting skin temperature. For several nights in a row, my room reached 86 degrees at night, and this reflected as a 2.2-degree increase in my average skin temperature. My AC died, and my skin temperature went up. For users who are biologically female, Fitbit likely uses skin temperature to assist with tracking fertility (the watch also allows you to manually input core temperature readings). And skin temperature is useful for something else, too — telling you if you might have Covid-19. Combined with data from the watch’s onboard blood oxygen sensor (SpO2) and other factors, Fitbit says that its watches are showing promise as tools for the early detection of Covid-19 infections and other illnesses. At the moment, Fitbit isn’t making these capabilities publicly accessible, but the company is working on further studies, with funding from the U.S. military. One aspect of the watch is medically cleared, though — the Sense’s electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor. Using the same hardware as the EDA sensor, the Fitbit Sense allows you to take an ECG reading right on the watch. This function was only approved by the FDA about a week after the watch began to ship in September, so the ECG app isn’t installed on the watch by default. To get it, you have to take a questionnaire and then install it from the Fitbit app on your phone. Taking ECG readings on the Sense is even easier than taking EDA readings. You open the ECG app, place your thumb and forefinger on opposite sides of the bezel, and sit perfectly still for 30 seconds. The watch measures your heart’s electrical activity, and tells you whether you had a “normal sinus rhythm,” an “inconclusive” result (usually because you moved or spoke), or evidence of a potential heart arrhythmia. You can download a PDF showing a raw trace of your ECG results to send to your doctor, along with a description in medical jargon explaining why on earth you’re sending them a PDF generated by a watch. For people with undetected heart conditions, the feature could be life-saving. Fitbit’s main goal with the feature is to detect atrial fibrillation (AFiB), a heart rhythm condition that can be hard to diagnose, in part because it can be intermittent, and doesn’t always show up on ECGs taken at your doctor’s office. By tracking your heart at home — especially if you notice a heart-related symptom, like fluttering or missed beats — you might be able to detect a hidden AFiB that your doctor missed. Thankfully, all my own ECG readings have been normal. The inclusion of a real FDA-approved medical device on a smartwatch is a big deal for Fitbit. The company has been courting FDA approval to use the SpO2 sensors on its watches in order to detect sleep apnea for years. The Sense allows you to see your nighttime SpO2 reading using a special watch face, as well as in the Fitbit app. Mine generally stays between 92% and 96% at night. The feature isn’t medically approved yet, but now that Fitbit has gotten FDA approval for one feature, you can expect to see FDA-approved sleep apnea detection on the watch within a few years. In my testing, I tried out several apps on the Fitbit Sense. They’re not great. Fitbit has always excelled at fitness and health tracking, but the company has never developed a large ecosystem of apps for its watches. The New York Times app is neat, but isn’t sized properly on the watch, so headlines get cut off. Fitbit Pay, which allows you to pay via the watch, is helpful when it works, but I’ve found that it only works about half the time on all the Fitbits I’ve used. Many users were upset when Fitbit removed the ability to load MP3s onto the watch — to use your Fitbit Sense for music, you now need to use either the Deezer, Pandora, or Spotify app. The best non-fitness feature on the Fitbit Sense is the watch’s integration with voice assistants. Initially, the watch only supported Alexa. But with Fitbit’s recent acquisition by Google, the watch now supports the Google Assistant as well. Speaking to your watch seems gimmicky, but it’s actually extremely helpful. I often find myself adding an item to my Alexa shopping or to-do list from the Sense when I’m on the go. It saves having to take out my phone, unlock it, find the Alexa app, and load my list just to make a simple note. The watch’s Alexa integration also allows me to start my Amazon Smart Oven using my voice, from across the room. Saying “Alexa, microwave tea” into your wrist and having your microwave start up feels very futuristic, even if it isn’t terribly practical. Integrating Alexa with my office lights and switching them off from the watch is neat, too, and can actually save a bit of time — especially since I don’t have an always-on Alexa device in my office, for privacy reasons. As Google completes the process of acquiring Fitbit, the company’s devices will almost certainly get more and better apps. Google brings both oodles of cash and a robust developer community to the table. Once Fitbits are a Google device, the company will almost certainly pour resources into building out a more complete app store — if for no other reason than to compete with the Apple Watch. The acquisition also means that Google will have access to all the data (medical and otherwise) your Fitbit Sense is gathering. This has privacy researchers, like those at the Mozilla Foundation, concerned. According to the Foundation, “Google is in the process of buying Fitbit. What does that mean? We don’t know quite yet.” Google’s control of your Fitbit data might be a positive thing since Mozilla says Google has robust privacy and security procedures in place. But if the company uses health data to target ads, that may make some users uncomfortable. Google’s impending takeover of Fitbit is, at the very least, something to be aware of if you’re buying the watch or gifting it to others. Overall, I’ve been extremely pleased with my Fitbit Sense during the two months I’ve spent wearing it. I probably won’t use it to track formal workouts. But if it gets me out of my chair a few extra times per day, that’s a win. I find its stress tracking useful, and have come to really love the EDA sessions. In 2020, anything that helps to manage stress — or even make you more mindful of the stressors you’re experiencing — is a positive. The watch’s medical monitoring functions seem well-developed, and it’s comforting to know that real medical organizations like the FDA have signed off on the efficacy of features like the Sense’s ECG. If you’re looking for a fully-featured smartwatch with tons of useful apps, the Fitbit Sense isn’t that. But if you’re looking for a watch that’s genuinely helpful in tracking (and improving) your fitness and overall health (both mental and physical), the Sense is the best product in Fitbit’s lineup, and the best watch on the market right now.

https://debugger.medium.com/i-wore-the-fitbit-sense-24-7-for-two-months-heres-what-i-learned-49a639e4f3c9

['Thomas Smith']

2020-12-22 06:33:13.983000+00:00

['Gadgets', 'Wearables', 'Fitbit', 'Technology', 'Fitness']

Canon Launches The Canon PIXMA TS7440 Series Printer

Canon Europe today has announced the launch of the Canon PIXMA TS7440 series, a mid-level, three-in-one A4 home printer with four colour FINE ink cartridges and Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). Packed with innovative features such as voice command and a LED status bar to check print levels, this versatile and affordable printer combines ease of use with high-quality printing. With built in Wi-Fi and PIXMA Cloud Link capabilities alongside voice functionality, users can simply connect to an array of devices, such as a smartphone or tablet, and make the most of third-party solutions like Google Drive, Dropbox or Google Classroom [2] for a seamless workflow. Speaking on the launch of the printer, Amine Djouahra, Sales and Marketing Director at Canon Central and North Africa said that, “Quality, functionality, and convenience are essential when bringing people and technology together. This was key for our Canon Pixma TS7440 Series printer as a perfect all-in-one solution for productive home working and creative use. The printer’s intuitive technology, like voice command, is in tune with modern trends and supports our customers’ ever-evolving needs and lifestyle”. Feed your productivity .The Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) allows users to scan or copy up to 35 pages at a time without manual assistance, while the two-way paper feeding system enables simultaneous loading of varied paper types and sizes without manual operation during printing and scanning. This feature is beneficial for home workers who require a variety of documents at one time, such as a teacher preparing lesson plans and class resources. This smart device can also automatically detect paper size and adjust its functionality accordingly, allowing automatic two-sided printing as needed. The high-quality XL FINE cartridges hold a larger volume of ink with fewer cartridge changes required, perfect for printing lengthy contracts or documents at home. The Inspiration Station The printer can hold a wide variety of media types using the rear paper feed. Capable of printing everything users need to get their side hustle off the ground or to pursue new hobbies, the Canon PIXMA TS7440 series can create borderless photos, transferable prints for fabric and personalised labels. The PIXMA TS7440 series is also compatible with Canon’s Creative Park , a free online platform with thousands of creative 3D patterns and templates. The ‘Easy Set-Up’ function reduces the time required from getting it out of the box to full use; while the simple QR Code Direct Connection means users can instantly connect to their smartphone. To optimise productivity and drive efficiency, the Canon PIXMA TS7440 series also has an easy-to-use interface. Featuring a 1.44” OLED display and new LED status bar, users can check print status, spot errors or see the need for replacement cartridges at a glance. Connectivity Compatible with a suite of handy apps and a range of devices, users can print easily from Mac, iOS or Android devices, connect to cloud services and discover artistic inspiration. With PIXMA Cloud Link, available via the Canon Print App, Canon PIXMA TS7440 series users can access and print documents directly from third-party services like Google Drive, Evernote and Dropbox, as well as the new Google Classroom, ideal for working remotely and keeping important documents organised. These printers are voice-enabled with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility, making it quicker and easier than ever to use the device, whether it be activating printing or checking status levels. ‘The PIXMA Chat Print feature also allows users to share and print images from Facebook Messenger — perfect for those wanting to print treasured memories directly from social media. When printing from a smartphone, Canon PIXMA TS7440 series users can also utilise Apple AirPrint and and Mopria, without the need for additional apps or installation

https://medium.com/@digitaltimes-2020/canon-launches-the-canon-pixma-ts7440-series-printer-66844ee98be6

['Digital Times Africa']

2020-11-02 16:52:56.819000+00:00

['Printing', 'Canon', 'Technology', 'Technology News', 'Tech']

Teaching a Self-Driving A.I. To Make Human-Like Decisions

In this situation, both the optimization-based and machine-learned models within our behavior planner had determined that the right course of action in this instance was to yield to the static pedestrian in the roundabout. This was a safe action, but something a rider in our robotaxi would not be pleased to wait for. A human driver would undertake them on the right albeit slower than usual. In High-Quality Decision Making, we teach our self-driving A.I. to navigate this situation—and importantly, others that resemble it—by adding “rich” data to our dataset. This rich data has two components: The recorded driving data of the event. Explicit instructions on what our self-driving A.I. did well (an affirmation) or where it needed to improve (a correction) in that event. In the above instruction, a member of our data team took a look at the recorded driving data and codified—explicitly—the actions they would have taken if they were in the driver’s seat. In this case, the author says we should have navigated the vehicles and the pedestrian on the right, and that we should have done so slower than usual. What’s special here—and what makes this data rich—is that other machine learning approaches (e.g., end-to-end) may feed recorded driving events with just subtle signals (i.e., driver take-over) into their model, without also feeding explicit detail on was right or wrong in the event. It is then up to the machine-learned model itself to infer exactly what the self-driving A.I. did right or wrong, with the theory being that with enough data, it will figure this out by itself. Our approach explicitly feeds our machine-learned model detailed instructions—interpretable by both machine and human—on exactly how a human would have handled the situation. With this smaller, richer data—and by bounding what the machine-learned model is tasked to do—we have achieved great results. After training the machine-learned model with our newly added rich data, our self-driving A.I. can now navigate the scenario. The yellow ghost car that gets stuck is utilizing the behavior planner before re-training. After training, our robotaxi navigates the situation with ease. It’s important to note that this situation being handled correctly after adding the explicit instructions is not what’s exciting (it is a form of overfitting, after all), but rather how we are seeing the machine-learned model generalize from a relatively small dataset to other situations. With now thousands of pieces of rich data—similar to the above example—fueling the machine-learned model in High-Quality Decision Making, we are now regularly observing our self-driving A.I. making human-like decisions. These decisions are often not wow-worthy, but it’s the sum of many subtle driving interactions—like nudging for a pedestrian or slowing down appropriately—that makes for a human-like ride. Here are a few examples of those subtle decisions made by High-Quality Decision Making. Our self-driving A.I. slows down before nudging right to give the pedestrian more room. Our self-driving A.I. yields for the crossing pedestrian, but doesn’t wait for them to exit the road before making the unprotected turn. Our self-driving A.I. slows down to understand if the overtake can be made without interfering with the pedestrians. Our self-driving A.I. makes a cautious overtake with multiple pedestrians around us. Our self-driving A.I. overtakes pedestrians cautiously on a curve.

https://news.voyage.auto/teaching-a-self-driving-a-i-to-make-human-like-decisions-a9a9597dd156

['Oliver Cameron']

2020-12-23 20:03:20.042000+00:00

['Self Driving Cars', 'Autonomous Cars', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning', 'Startup']

HyperX CloudX Flight Wireless Gaming Headset Review

HyperX CloudX Flight Wireless Gaming Headset Review Photo taken by Alex Rowe HyperX’s CloudX Flight is a new wireless gaming headset designed exclusively for Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 computers. It’s a re-imagining of the original Cloud Flight, adding native Xbox Wireless support, game/chat balance buttons, mic monitoring, and green LED lights. It costs more than the original non-X model thanks to the expensive licensing associated with making an Xbox headset, and it has no backup wired connection option. If you’re a die-hard Xbox user, it still manages to just barely clear the bar. GENERAL OVERVIEW The HyperX CloudX Flight (official product page) is a wireless-only, closed-back gaming headset that sells for $159. It includes a detachable mic, a USB dongle, and a short micro-USB charging cable. I bought mine for full price from Best Buy, the main brick-and-mortar retail partner for this headset in the US. Here’s my review policy. In order to work with Microsoft’s consoles, wireless headsets need special tech licensed from the platform holder, unlike the PS4 and Switch which will both output stereo audio to many generic USB devices. Xbox wireless headsets often cost more than others on the market, because of the extra licensing and hardware costs involved. The connection uses a Microsoft-proprietary variant of Wi-Fi Direct. Peripheral companies employ one of two different designs for their official Xbox headsets. They either incorporate an Xbox Wireless chip directly into the hardware, or use a licensed USB dongle that the console thinks is a wired controller. The CloudX Flight uses the latter option. They’re near-identical in terms of audio quality and latency performance. However, the integrated chip method lets you turn on the console directly with your headset and see how much battery life remains, both features I missed here. On the plus side, the CloudX Flight’s dongle means it’ll work on Windows 10 PCs without the need to buy an Xbox controller adapter. In a vacuum, the higher $159 price point makes some amount of sense against the $139 price of the non-X Flight. However, that older model works wirelessly with PS4, Switch (docked), PC, and Mac, and has a wired backup connection for use with all other devices…though in wired mode the mic doesn’t work. The standard Flight also regularly goes on sale for $99, making the price of this CloudX variant seem all the more silly. SOUND QUALITY The CloudX Flight has a natural, balanced sound profile, with the same clean consumer-friendly sound that other HyperX headphones are known for. It has some extra oomph in the mid bass, a vibrant midrange that’s more cold and prominent than some might like, and a bump in the treble that adds a little extra sparkle and should help you pick out small footstep noises. It compares favorably sound-wise to the Cloud Alpha, one of my standards for headset audio. The Alpha sounds richer and warmer, and less clinical. Both are within the same general ballpark for sound quality. I think the Alpha’s punchier sound will appeal more to most gamers, but on certain days I prefer the extra bite of the Flight’s midrange and treble. Since the headset only uses a wireless connection to the dongle, it’d be bad if the compression killed the sound quality. Fortunately, the dongle pumps out solid-sounding audio with no noticeable lag or interruptions. I had to walk to the other end of my apartment, about 40 feet away, before the connection died, and the sound quality was great till I got there. Other competing Xbox Wireless headsets have built-in selectable EQ modes. You can find this feature on the Astro A20, the Turtle Beach Stealth 700, The RIG 800, and the Arctis 9X Wireless, just to name a few. It’s a shame HyperX didn’t include this option here, given the high price point and the locked-down nature of the headset. If you don’t like the default sound signature, and you want to kick up the bass impact or warm up the mid range a bit…you can’t. Photo taken by Alex Rowe COMFORT True to its name and its legacy, the HyperX CloudX Flight is a comfortable headset. It’s a bit tight the first time you wear it, but the clamp relaxes after a session or two. The ear pads use a slow-rebounding memory foam, though they’re more compact and thinner than the pads on the Cloud Alpha and Cloud Mix. The interior foam is soft in case your ears bump into the back wall of the cup, and the odds of that happening are higher than on many other HyperX products as the inner walls aren’t angled. I have minimal contact in there, but it’s still fine. Up top, the headband pad is thinner than I’d like. It gets the job done, and at 288g the headset isn’t too heavy, but the headband pad isn’t as dense as I’d like, and it doesn’t use memory foam, squishing flat with the lightest force. Adjustment range shouldn’t be a problem for anyone. I only have to extend it about halfway through its eleven click range, and I have a larger head. The cups also have ample rotation and tilt both vertically and horizontally, so finding a good seal is easy. DESIGN/BUILD The industrial design here is identical to the original Cloud Flight, but now with “Xbox Green” LEDs. Even the light inside the USB dongle is green. In spite of its plastic frame, the CloudX Flight feels robust. The hinges feel pleasant, and during two weeks of regular use I’ve noticed zero creaks, squeaks, or pops. The plastic has a nice matte finish to it, and feels just premium enough for the price. Most of the controls reside on the side of the left ear cup, but the buttons feel premium thanks to a soft touch finish. This sort of finish tends to wear out over time as it’s exposed to dirt and finger oil, but I still think it’s a good design choice. The cable running between the two ear cups is exposed (and bright green), but fortunately it’s tucked into a channel and reinforced with thick rubber, so I don’t think it’ll get damaged at all. FEATURES/BATTERY HyperX rates the battery life at 30 hours, when using a medium volume and no lighting. That seems right in my testing…though as mentioned above, the integrated battery meter on the Xbox can’t read battery life from dongle-based headsets like this one, so you’ll have to rely on the headset’s power light to warn you when your juice is low. If you turn the green lights on, battery life drops to around 12 hours, and you can squeeze out 18 if you toggle to “breathing” mode. Changing the lighting mode requires you to short-press the power button while the headset is on, and sometimes this didn’t respond correctly and I had to push it again. I spent most of my testing process with the lights off. The game/chat balance function has ten different steps to it, and a beep indicating the middle. The integrated digital volume wheel on the back of the right cup is nice and smooth. In Windows, setting the OS volume control doesn’t do anything. Your system will pump out max volume no matter what, and you’ll have to set your desired volume with the wheel on the headset. I wish that HyperX had thrown one of their trademark cloth bags in the box, considering the inflated price . They could have even put a bright green HyperX logo on it. MICROPHONE The microphone is a solid performer. It has some noticeable digital compression to it, but it cancels out background noises well. When I reviewed the original Cloud Flight in 2018, I didn’t like the aggressive noise gate applied to the mic. The noise gate is still present on this model, but toned down, which is great. I didn’t have to shout to get the microphone to respond. You can activate a side tone feature by holding down the mic mute button on the left ear cup, and it sounds great. In fact, the side tone sounds better than the final mic output. Here’s a quick mic test I recorded. Photo taken by Alex Rowe FINAL THOUGHTS If you must have a wireless Xbox headset from HyperX, this is your only choice. I wish it offered more for its slight price premium over the standard model other than Xbox functionality, side tone, and green lights. It’s also up against some stiff competition. The Astro A20 sells for about $119, and copies its feature set blow-for-blow, losing only the removable mic. It also has different EQ modes and larger, softer ear pads. And that’s just one of the many compelling alternatives to this. The HyperX CloudX Flight is a thoroughly competent product that is exactly what it claims to be, and nothing more. It’s neither exciting, nor extremely flawed. The price is probably too high, and just a couple more features would have pushed it to the top of the pile. If you’re a HyperX fan and you want their best Xbox-specific offering, well, here you go. But you can use any of their other headsets wired to an Xbox controller, and either save some money or get more features in the process. A hypothetical CloudX Stinger Wireless, with Xbox support integrated into the hardware and a $99 price point, would excite me more in today’s crowded market.

https://medium.com/@xander51/hyperx-cloudx-flight-wireless-gaming-headset-review-e1f5af91bce3

['Alex Rowe']

2020-02-12 19:24:39.758000+00:00

['Gaming', 'Xbox One', 'Gadgets', 'Headphones', 'Technology']

Running GUI Apps on a Docker Container

Running GUI Containers on docker in 5 easy steps Step 1: Install Docker To be able to launch a container you need to first have Docker installed. On your host OS (preferably Linux) get Docker installed and then move on to the next step. Step 2: Pull an image Download a container image of your choice from Docker Hub. In this blog I am using CentOS image. To pull the image from Docker Hub type docker pull centos docker images This command will show you the images you have in your local system. Step 3: Create the container Method 1: Launch a container using docker run command docker run -dit --name centos_gui --env=’Display’ --net=host centos:latest Here, the run subcommand is used to launch the container, -i to make it interactive, -t to get the terminal, and -d to daemonize it. We use --env to set the environment variable DISPLAY and --net to connect the container to the host network. Method 2: Set the DISPLAY environment variable on the host OS with your network: set-variable -name DISPLAY -value YOUR-IP:0.0 And then finally launch the container using docker run -dit --env=DISPLAY=$DISPLAY Here we have manually set the environment variable. docker ps This command shows running containers Step 4: Install GUI application inside the container Attach the container to go inside the container’s terminal. To do so, type: docker attach centos_gui Now you are inside the container’s terminal. Next, install a GUI application using a package manager. In our case since we have CentOS, we will be using the yum command. yum install firefox Step 5: Running the application As we have already specified the DISPLAY environment variable while launching the container, now all we have to do is just run the app normally. firefox In a while, the GUI of the app will show up something like this. We have successfully launched firefox GUI over a docker container! Feel free to contact on my LinkedIn.

https://medium.com/@bhaveshs6/running-gui-apps-on-a-docker-container-51448e352407

['Bhavesh Kakrotra']

2021-06-01 16:49:41.978000+00:00

['Linux', 'Containers', 'Graphics', 'Docker', 'Technology']

[S1 — E1] I Am… Series 2 Episode 1 (Full Episode)

⭐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 2021 Summer OlyBookmark this sitempics in Germany, the 2021 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 2021 World Movies inspired many Americans to buy their first tv set and in 2021, 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 1, 2021 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in SAN FRAI Am… 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://onstream.club/tv/91605-2-1/i-am.html ✔️ Instagram: https://instagram.com ✔️ Twitter: https://twitter.com ✔️ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com

https://medium.com/@iam-s02-e01-episode1/s1-e1-i-am-series-2-episode-1-full-episode-56dc65534d02

['I Am...', 'Episode Full Series']

2021-08-05 02:53:23.025000+00:00

['Plitvice Lakes', 'Covid 19', 'Technology', 'Plise Sineklik', 'Politics']

Rule-Based Bots vs AI Bots of RFX

Trading bots are best defined by Stefan Tittel as software programs that automate trade executions based on an underlying set of rules. While bots have changed the markets, they are still restricted by their reliance on human intervention. Traders still need to use the knowledge they have obtained in their past experiences in trading as well as the judgments of market experts. However, not all trading bots necessarily use Artificial Intelligence. Efforts have been made to harness the technology, but these attempts have fallen short of the expectations. Regardless, it is undeniable that AI has a more positive impact on the financial services sector than ever before. One of the best examples of how AI is shaking up traditional finance trading is seen in the crypto market. AI-based algorithms have also provided opportunities to trading successfully and safely in such nascent and speculative markets. Naturally less predictable and different in numerous ways to traditional financial markets, the cryptocurrency market’s value is prone to wild volatile fluctuations. In this rapidly changing world, data analysis and AI are the key to unlocking the dynamics of the market and ensuring overall success for investment. While humans are liable to letting emotions cloud their judgement, AI bots simply do not face this issue and, as a result, work more efficiently. With their capabilities to recognize trading signals that are nearly impossible for humans to detect, machines are much better suited to trading in volatile markets. Harnessing AI algorithms provides a number of advantages for the traders, including enabling them to avoid high risk margins and inefficiencies that invariably arise with human-influenced trading, counteract market manipulation by identifying and analysing any anomalies in the market when in they are still in their infancy, and finally replacing intuition with facts, artificial and data-based intelligence, which streamlines the whole trading process. Artificial Intelligence has fundamentally transformed the way in which the financial industry trades, increasing efficiencies and higher returns on investments. While open-sourced trading-bots have existed for a number of years, only a handful of companies like Red Fort Exchange are making sophisticated AI algorithms accessible by the general public so everyone can have the strategic benefit when trading.

https://medium.com/@rfexchange08/rule-based-bots-vs-ai-bots-of-rfx-c71c68ff714f

['Red Fort Exchange']

2020-01-14 02:51:52.738000+00:00

['Bots', 'Digital', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Red Fort Exchange', 'Technology']

Dear business owners, stop asking me to get a fax machine

Dear business owners, stop asking me to get a fax machine It’s 2020, update your B2B and B2C technology Photo credit: PickPik “There are three groups who you never want to make an enemy of — the IRS, the Social Security Office or hospitals,” my mother says. So for her own protection, I will confirm that I was born from immaculate conception and Gwen doesn’t know who I am. Why? Because I’m about to make an enemy out of all three groups. All three are hell bent on using fax machines for everything. Earlier this week, I needed to get a 147C form from the IRS and none of the representatives would budge. No emails. No scans. No third-party fax owners (i.e. the woman who doesn’t know me, mentioned above) who I could trust to receive my fax and pick it up later that day. The IRS reps were determined that I must be in front of a secure fax machine to receive the form, as if this was perfectly normal in 2020. In a faxZero world where sending forms is free and emails have scan attachment options, why on Earth would I want to pay $26.95 for eFax? How many people am I going to send faxes to once I get off this call, who don’t already have printers, scanners, smartphone cameras or even — yep, I’m saying it, postage stamps. For the love of all things in the 2000s, stop making people get fax machines. Do you still blow air into Nintendo cartridges to make Super Mario Bros play? Have you punched the black tab out of your VHS tapes so “no one records over your shows”? Do you still put plastic on your furniture? Have you braided your Cabbage Patch dolls’ hair today? Do you still wear leg warmers and headbands to match your outfit? Are you elated to see fanny packs making a (horrendous) comeback? Do you have pencils set aside to roll your cassette tape ribbon back into place when it jams in your radio cassette player? Are you plotting on how to get the stair-step high-top fade cut when COVID-19 ends? Have you started dog-earring magazine pages for your next A-symmetrical haircut? Do you wear Hammer pants (or worse, these panda pants)? When you win at something, do you yell out “Get over here” and then “Fatality”? Does your ironing consist of creased Karl Kani or Cross Colour jeans? Is your snack of choice Bubble Tape gum? When you want to safely socially isolate but ask someone on a date, do you stand outside of the window with a boombox? Do you keep unfolded cardboard boxes in your car so you can windmill at a moment’s notice? Are you still driving to Best Buy for curbside pickups of your favorite new CDs? When you saw Earth, Wind and Fire perform on “A Late Show,” did you wonder why Verdine White doesn’t have an afro anymore? If all of these things sound absolutely preposterous to you, that’s what it sounds like when I get ultimatums to find a fax machine I can stand in front of. My local librarian told me she doesn’t even know a library in all of Chicago that accepts and sends faxes. Do you know how bad it is when you have to leave the cool kids’ table because the librarians are more hip than you? My gawd, businesses, upgrade your programs. Until then, I’ll be over here, judging you while you walk by with your light-up Skechers.

https://medium.com/tickled/dear-business-owners-stop-asking-me-to-get-a-fax-machine-f346b82d8aca

['Shamontiel L. Vaughn']

2020-06-24 01:17:09.706000+00:00

['Humor', 'Irs', 'Eighties', 'Technology', 'Fax Machine']

Guide for build plan for STO marketing: Security token

Guide for build plan for STO marketing: Security token How to market your STO In the current scenario, the most common or essential component for the technological sector is blockchain & cryptocurrency. It has been seen that ICO is growing very fast all over the globe. In fact, most of the businessman wants to invest in this technology through which they will attain advancement stage in their business. It’s a long time now since the introduction by ICO & there is many people who know about it & its related conceptualization. The further stage for every industry is STO marketing & the predominant strategy is ICO. Enhancement in the cryptocurrency market cryptocurrency market The market of cryptocurrency has risen in present scenario after 2017 December, the overall capitalization of the cryptocurrency market was 326.5B $, but after the 1 January, the gap was reduced & enhance to the 629.5B $. The graph of the market was enhanced recently and huge investors have been seen in the year 2018. Introduction to STO marketing STO defines as the next trendsetter in the industry of cryptocurrency which mainly defines value, voting rights, a stake in the specific organization. STO can be elaborated as Security Token Offering. Tokens seem to be essential for an asset as they can act as money or gold and with the tokens, you can easily change things. Hence, the token’s security is also an important platform, so STO is introduced, & this seems to be the advanced step from the ICO. They are overall backed by the assets of the real world. Marketing of STO STO marketing services Marketing of STO does not seem to be an easy task & even though SEC which stands for Securities & exchange Commission allows the issuers to broad the solicit & advertise all offer which also consists of some factors that can be defined as: Sellers of the token should verify all buyers & cross-check about their status. All process of buying in offering should give out the profit credits to the particular investors. There are some other conditions related to Regulation D that should be maintained and followed. Overview of the regulation D Regulation D is defined as section 506 © which stated that token selling is banned & as per this section, users are not permitted to advertise like ads in radio, seminars, newspapers, and many more. This doesn’t allow for any type of advertisement. This system also banned the organizations to conduct the meetings which organized issuer who invited by general advertising. Now you are thinking that all of the marketing ways are getting close but it is not. There is a number of mediums of marketing of STO which can be: your security tokens also have an appealing look but the investors have to attempt by themselves. How your research for marketing should be? For STO marketing, there should be appropriate planning & planning work mainly has three pillars & seems to be the backbone of every successful marketing. These three pillars can be defined as: Research for STO market Consulting for STO market Planning for STO market Various ways for STO marketing Various ways of STO marketing can be defined as: 1. Target to the appropriate customer 2. Deal marketing 3. Proxy marketing 4. Networking 5. Appropriate partner exchanges Read more: How Change the Automotive Industry 1. Target to the appropriate customer It seems to be essential to attain & target the correct people or customers. Your point of a target should be the correct and appropriate audience. In order to attain the successful sales rate of security tokens, this step plays a vital role to target the appropriate group for income. 2. Deal marketing In order to sell out the token, there is a requirement to have full documentation & you also have to enable the reports to respond frequently. Some most common steps seem to be important in dealing that can define as: Properly reach out to the audiences Always keep and maintain the documentation of confidential information. Prepare a generic teaser that completely covers all important things in short. Appropriate database related to the potential investors & buyers. 3. Proxy marketing Proxy marketing seems to be the best solution for security marketing because their marketing cannot be done directly. So, you are not able to do direct marketing and the best way is proxy marketing. This trick can be used in form of an appropriate feature whether online or offline depends on the organization’s requirement. They can also mark all presence through magazines & newspapers. 4. Networking Networking seems to be the important part for the tokens selling as according to this; buyers prefer their reference and this will lead to avoid the unwanted mess. In this, the linking of networking plays a vital role. For better publicity, you have to go and attend the events of crypto, seminars & also be crypto members which seem to be an imperative part. 5. Appropriate partner exchanges Appropriate partner exchanges The blockchain medium has simplified the way of security tokens. Mainly, it seems that with the name of tokens investors which scared off by partner name as they are also scared of massive type of theft that deals with the commitments. In a bottom line In the case of blockchain marketing, its presence is not tough because it comes up with cryptocurrency technology but this software works very precisely and smoothly. Blockchain seems to be a secure platform & it is also used to record the data of transmission. All marketing can be done as per the use of products & there is no foundation for software promoting. With the advancement in technology and time, there are several companies based on blockchain & people are also searching to hire a blockchain app development company that will offer the advanced & effective feature in order to make compatible as per the market. If you are also looking for a blockchain app development company then contact us at Mtoag technologies. We have the best-experienced expertise that offers the best client services and all deal with the marketing industry.

https://medium.com/@mtoagtechnologies/guide-for-build-plan-for-sto-marketing-security-token-e58d06732896

['Mtoag Technologies']

2020-12-15 13:23:09.565000+00:00

['Security Token', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Blockchain', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Blockchain Development']

What is a design system? Key things to know.

What is a design system? A design system is a set of principles, methods, and tools that enable the consistent and rapid delivery of digital products and services. Design systems encompass a broad array of inputs, including brand, UX guidelines, UI components, design principles, style guides, and more. Design systems are created to provide a shared language for a team to create products and services that are more consistent, predictable, and discoverable. Design systems are built upon a core framework, which is often modular, allowing teams to only include the components they need. Design systems often include a visual language, which provides a common language for designers to communicate across products and teams. What’s included in design system? a) Values and principles Values and principles are the core set of ideas and values that help define the mission and purpose of a company. They are the common denominator that gives every team the same shared understanding of the company’s vision, culture, and goals. Values are a set of beliefs and principles that are central to the way a company or team operates. They are usually defined from the top-down by the company’s leaders and may include words like “always do the right thing” or “be agile”. These values have a more aspirational quality and are meant to guide teams in the right direction. b) Brand identity Brand identity is the system of elements that establish a visual presence for a brand. This includes all the marks that represent the brand such as logos, typefaces, and colors. Brand identity defines the personality of a brand. It gets to the core of what a brand stands for and how it is going to be perceived by users. It’s not limited to visual elements like logos and color palette but also includes the words and voice of the brand. c) Components and patterns A component is a piece of a design that can be used in multiple places. For example, a button is a component that can be used in any number of places. A pattern is a combination of components that are used in a consistent way. For example, a button that is part of a system of buttons. d) Documentation Documentation is a set of documents, templates, and assets that describe how to use a product. It includes things like sitemaps, style guides, and interactive tutorials. Documentation helps make a design system consistent and usable. A style guide is a set of standards for how to use a design system. For example, it would include things like how the brand should be used, how to properly handle colors, how to show hierarchy, and so on. A style guide is a static document. It is not meant to be an exhaustive reference. It exists to help designers make consistent decisions about the brand. It is not meant to dictate how to use the brand in every single instance. Guidelines are documents written for designers early in the design process. They are like mini-style guides that focus on a single topic. Types of design systems a) Loose A loose system is one that does not enforce strict rules, but leaves it up to the designer to decide how to implement the elements. It is based on individual interpretation. For example, a designer might use a button in a different way than another designer, even though they work at the same company. b) Strict A strict system has strict rules about how to implement elements. It is not up to the designer to decide how to interpret it. It is based on consistency of implementation. c) Modular Modular systems are a combination of loose and strict systems. d) Integrated This means that every single component within the system is interrelated and affects each other. Some elements in one module will affect the implementation of elements in another module. These systems are difficult to create, but are necessary if the brand is going to have a lot of consistency. Examples of the best design systems Salesforce is a very successful company that has a design system that has evolved with the company. The designers at Salesforce have an understanding of why the system exists. Most importantly, the knowledge of the system is passed down to everyone who joins the company. Airbnb is another example of a company that has had great success with design systems. They have a very large one and have been able to expand their company without breaking it. Google has a very large, successful design system. The reason that their system has done so well is because they are able to communicate it to all types of designers. They have a lot of documentation and have been able to share it effectively. Should you hire a designer in-house for creating a system? There are many reasons why you might choose to hire a designer to join your team and work on your design system. You might be looking for someone who can take the load off of you. You might be looking for a more specific skill set. You might be looking for more of a ROI. Shellye Archambeau, the VP of Design at Slack, says that the decision to hire a designer depends on the company, the product, the needs of the customers, and the expertise of the individual designer. She feels that designers should have an understanding of how the design system works and how they can make it work for them. Kate Kiefer Lee, the executive design director at MailChimp, says that her company uses design systems as a way to hire designers. They like to hire designers that have experience with design systems because they know that their new hire will make the most out of their investment. If the designer can grow with the help of the design system that MailChimp has created, that is a positive. Conclusion Design systems are a necessary part of any system structure, though they can be time consuming to make. To create an effective design that moves well and can be easily updated you need to get everyone on board with the same system. Design systems agency is an essential part of every professional experience, it allows elements to be used with the right context, making the experience consistent for users.

https://medium.com/theymakedesign/what-is-design-system-de33ae4ec7c6

['They Make Design']

2021-01-02 07:02:43.422000+00:00

['Design', 'Marketing', 'Business', 'Technology', 'Design Systems']

Apple Caving on Hong Kong Shows the Limits of Security as a Sales Tool

Apple Caving on Hong Kong Shows the Limits of Security as a Sales Tool PCMag Follow Nov 7, 2019 · 4 min read Security expert Max Eddy explains how Apple banning an app used by pro-democracy protesters shows how even the best consumer security polices fail when there’s a lack of will to enforce them appropriately. By Max Eddy There’s a saying that the biggest security vulnerability is located between the keyboard and the chair, highlighting human fallibility. It’s true, we’re easily tricked, and we’re lazy as a rule. Human failings also bring down perfect systems of security and privacy, which is why clear, moral codes are required to protect those systems. When Apple agreed to remove the Hkmap.live app from the App Store under pressure from the Chinese government in Beijing, it illustrated just how tenuous even the most robust security and privacy systems can be. What is security and privacy without morality? It’s just a selling point. The Frontlines of Code For those who missed the story, pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong have been using an app called HKmap.live to warn other protestors about police moving through the city. Apple first approved the app, and then banned it, claiming that it was being used to perpetrate crimes. Given the increasing violence amidst an intense government crackdown, it’s easy to assume that protestors have an even more existential concern regarding the app’s availability. This reminded me how, not long ago, Apple squared off against the full force of the FBI and DOJ as the US government pushed for the company to grant it access to an iPhone belonging to the San Bernardino shooters. In that case, Apple refused. While the company had cooperated with law enforcement in the past, the request to essentially build a special backdoor into its operating system so the law enforcement could examine a device was more than Apple could bear. Apple, along with a host of other companies, didn’t budge on the issue. They even got support from former NSA types. In the end, Apple won out and the FBI ended up paying a third-party company a rumored one million dollars for a way into the phone. It wasn’t Apple’s security practices, encryption systems, or engineering prowess that stood between investigators and the data within an iPhone. It was Apple’s laudable willingness to stand by its stated beliefs and refuse to cooperate. The company could easily have stepped aside, but by choosing not to, it protected its devices and its users. How could Beijing pressure Apple so effectively? NPR reports that last year, Apple sold $52 billion of products in China that last year. Maybe that has something to do with it. Defending the Walled Garden Along with the code and the engineering that goes into protecting iOS, the App Store is the other mechanism Apple has for ensuring the safety and security of its users. Apple is able to extend security and privacy protections through its hardware and OS, but it’s by managing its app store that it has the biggest impact on users. If any app attempts to circumvent Apple’s privacy protections, it can be removed. Conversely, Apple can also choose to keep apps available despite controversy. The App Store supports many encrypted messaging apps, whose data cannot be read by law enforcement or even Apple itself. Unfortunately, the company has a more mixed record on this front. Apple has used its ban hammer to protect its walled garden from apps that slurped your personal information, unfairly tricked users, or were outright malicious. These actions have kept users safe, and encouraged good behavior among developers. The company has also made controversial decisions about which apps to ban. It has kicked out apps that too closely replicate functions of the iPhone, that track drone strikes, or that grant access to so-called “adult content.” This last one has always struck me as particularly odd, considering that the best app for porn on an iPhone is Safari. Now imagine that it wasn’t a crowd-sourced map that Apple banned at the behest of a government, but Signal or any other encrypted messenger apps, or the Tor app, or VPNs. (Actually, Apple has banned some of those apps in China before.) Those tools can also be used for bad things-in fact, that’s always law enforcement’s argument against such apps-but they also protect individuals from harm, and afford them the privacy they desire. Morals Required I won’t call Apple’s decision to remove the HKmap.live the company’s first, or even its greatest, moral failing. There have been others before this, and there will likely be more to come. It’s also not the only company to have similarly failed. Google was criticized for removing a game where you played as a Hong Kong protestor, and various social media platforms are embroiled in roiling controversy over how they present information to users, and for what lengths they are willing to go to appease the Chinese government in exchange for access to its markets. Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking to any for-profit corporations to fight our moral battles for us-but I digress. What this sad drama does highlight is the tenuousness of privacy and security. A company can earn a sterling record of protecting its users and fostering exactly the kind of environment that makes people safer and allows them the freedom to speak their minds without fear of reprisal. Our connected devices, we’re told by companies, aren’t just products; they’re supposed to make the world better. But even when a company, or an individual, uses all the right code and follows all the best practices, none of that matters if there aren’t unwavering morals to back that up. It’s deciding what is right and using the code to enforce those decisions that makes it all work. I argued that the feds should let math be math. That’s true as far as mechanics go, but it also a firm moral stance. Without the courage of your convictions, math is meaningless.

https://medium.com/pcmag-access/apple-caving-on-hong-kong-shows-the-limits-of-security-as-a-sales-tool-a1cd2fe2ece0

[]

2019-11-07 17:01:02.953000+00:00

['Politics', 'Apple', 'Technology', 'Apps', 'Cybersecurity']

Why Every Company Should Be Developing Internet Of Things Technology — And How To Do It

Why Every Company Should Be Developing Internet Of Things Technology — And How To Do It JC Grubbs Jun 17, 2019·5 min read The internet of things is here, and it isn’t going away. For those unfamiliar, IoT is exactly what it sounds like — a network of physical items connected digitally, constantly collecting data and communicating. The term encompasses everything from smart coffee makers to state-of-the-art Boeing jet engines that send operational status back to headquarters every other second. Right now, we’re only seeing the tip of the IoT iceberg. Early adopters across industries are implementing IoT technology. But soon, IoT is going to drive an entire revolution in the way businesses operate. And not just in tech industries, or even the industries we think of as “tech savvy.” IoT is changing waste management, for example. Traditionally, garbage trucks go throughout a city on a regular schedule, emptying every dumpster on their route. But that’s not the most efficient method, because trucks end up emptying dumpsters that are far from full. Forward-thinking waste management companies are installing weight sensors and even cameras in dumpsters to help optimize their routes. With these sensors, they know exactly which dumpsters are full and which ones aren’t. As a result, they can send out fewer trucks, make fewer stops, and sometimes even skip entire areas. Agriculture is another great example. There are myriad areas where IoT is changing farming. Digital devices in soil deliver data to farmers about hydration, pH, and nitrogen levels, which helps optimize fertilization, water usage, and seed selection. Other IoT technology can help farmers predict how many ears of corn a field will yield well before harvesting. So the question is: How might IoT be able to help your business? As the CEO of a design and technology innovation firm, I’d love to see more companies — from all industries — thinking about this. Because I’m sure they’d be excited and surprised by the many unexpected ways IoT is about to change business operations on a grand scale. And those who embrace the huge potential of IoT devices will stand to gain a serious competitive advantage. Yet some are hesitant to consider the impact of IoT in their industry. They think it doesn’t apply to their sector (when it’s going to impact every industry), or that the technology is still too new. Here’s what I tell hesitant clients: The first thing I tell them is to start small. There are degrees to implementing this type of tech. You don’t have to take a huge risk or invest millions of dollars to get in on the action. In general, the hardware for IoT devices is generally cheaper than people think, especially because the sensors and components used have become so much cheaper in recent years. While large-scale manufacturing does have up-front capital requirements, the cost of prototyping has decreased dramatically. Simple, relatively inexpensive IoT devices that fall into this “start small” category can still dramatically streamline business operations. For example, a client of ours, a medical company, makes a pretty simple, mechanical patient monitoring device. It doesn’t have much “smarts” to it. But it interacts with patients, which means keeping track of how that device is used can produce valuable clinical data. That’s where IoT tech comes in. The data the device collects becomes part of the medical record and adds value to the process of care. But it’s very simple. It doesn’t connect to the open internet, just to the nurses’ smartphones via bluetooth. The client doesn’t have to invest tens of millions of dollars in hardware and software that monitors everything and controls the universe. Here’s how to identify the areas where IoT could improve your business processes: I like to think of IoT devices as fitting into two broad categories: data collection and directing action. Sensors can collect and relay enormous amounts of data, helping you to better understand and optimize your processes and functions. On the action side of things, much of the potential for optimization lies in remote control. IoT-connected devices can unlock doors, adjust thermostats, or turn on sprinklers in greenhouses remotely, for example. So IoT opens up a world of optimization in many areas, such as: Anywhere there’s friction in your process, either internally or with clients/customers. For example, we’re working with the Department of Defense to redesign and optimize the military enlistment process and software. Enlistment centers are a lot like DMVs, with a series of stations and a less-than-streamlined process of bouncing between them. To logistically improve the process, we’re exploring the use of RFID badges, which log and physically track applicants. That way, with a single click, staff can see that a particular applicant has completed their medical exam and background check and is currently waiting to receive their security clearance. When there’s an elusive, ideal piece of data that could benefit your business. Ask yourself: If you could have any single piece of data, what would it be? Because IoT technology may be able to open up access to it. For example, if you either produce or use cold storage containers, sensors could tell you the exact temperature and humidity of any container, anywhere in the world, anytime. Any process you could improve with remote control of machinery or technology. If you could control any part of your business from anywhere in the world, what would it be? Because IoT technology may be able to make that happen. For example, the press of a button could halt a malfunctioning piece of machinery at a factory thousands of miles away, preventing it from damaging other machines. Or you could connect a series of machines that work together in such a way that if the first machine fails, the second and third stop processing. This could prevent many headaches in factories with complex machinery with high rates of failure or errors. Some of these solutions seem unrealistic, or too good to be true. But a lot of the time, these possibilities are already very real. So in order to fully understand the capabilities of IoT — and how it could benefit your business specifically — you have to rethink your whole company and all its processes and parts from a very broad, abstract perspective. In other words, picture a blank slate. Now, draw your ideal company on it, fully optimized and comprehensively controllable. The IoT could very well make this a reality. Don’t underestimate the impact IoT is having and will continue to have on the entire business landscape. It will change every industry — including yours — quite drastically in the coming years. So if you’d like to get one step ahead of the game, start researching. If you’d like to get two steps ahead of the game and begin implementing IoT at your business now, here’s a quick rundown of the steps you should take:

https://medium.com/@jcgrubbs/why-every-company-should-be-developing-internet-of-things-technology-and-how-to-do-it-fa24f33b7a77

['Jc Grubbs']

2019-06-17 23:48:19.543000+00:00

['Internet of Things', 'Hardware', 'IoT', 'Custom Software', 'Technology']

Notify with Python

The Code All of the functionality above filters from a single script called notify.py . We will use Outlook in our example code. However, translating this to other providers is incredibly easy, which we will also cover quickly at the end. There are two Python libraries we need here, email and smtplib . email — For managing email messages. With this we will setup the email message itself, including subject, body, and attachments. — For managing email messages. With this we will setup the email message itself, including subject, body, and attachments. smtplib — Handles the SMTP connection. The simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) is the protocol used by the majority of email systems, allowing mail to be sent over the internet.’ MIME The message itself is built using a MIMEMultipart object from the email module. We also use three MIME sub-classes, which we attach to the MIMEMultipart object: MIMEText — This will contain the email ‘payload’, meaning the text within the email body. — This will contain the email ‘payload’, meaning the text within the email body. MIMEImage — Reasonably easy to guess, this is used to contain images within our email. — Reasonably easy to guess, this is used to contain images within our email. MIMEApplication — Used for MIME message application objects. For us, these are file attachments. In addition to these sub-classes, there are also other parameters, such as the Subject value in MimeMultipart . All of these together gives us the following structure. Let’s take a look at putting these all together. This script, for the most part, is reasonably straightforward. At the top, we have our imports — which are the MIME parts we covered before, and Python’s os library. Following this define a function called message . This allows us to call the function with different parameters and build an email message object with ease. For example, we can write an email with multiple images and attachments like so: email_msg = message( text="Model processing complete, please see attached data.", img=['accuracy.png', 'loss.png'], attachments=['data_in.csv', 'data_out.csv'] ) First we initialize the MIMEMultipart object, assigning it to msg . We then set the email subject using the 'Subject' key. The attach method allows us to add different MIME sub-classes to our MIMEMultipart object. With this we can add the email body, using the MIMEText sub-class. For both images img and attachments attachment , we can pass either nothing, a single file-path, or a list of file-paths. This is handled by first checking if the parameters are None , if they are, we pass. Otherwise, we check the data-type given, is it is not a list , we make it one — this allows us to use the following for loop to iterate through our items. At this point we use the MIMEImage and MIMEApplication sub-classes to attach our images and files respectively. For both we use os.basename to retrieve the filename from the given file-path, which we include as the attachment name. SMTP Now that we have built our email message object, we need to send it. This is where the smtplib module comes in. The code is again, pretty straight-forward, with one exception. As we are dealing directly with different email provider’s, and their respective servers, we need different SMTP addresses for each. Fortunately, this is really easy to find. Type “outlook smtp” into Google. Without even clicking on a page, we are given the server address smtp-mail.outlook.com , and port number 587 . We use both of these when initalizing the SMTP object with smtplib.SMTP — near the beginning of the send function. smtp.ehlo() and smtp.starttls() are both SMTP commands. ehlo (Extended Hello) essentially greets the server. starttls informs the server we will be communicating using an encrypted transport level security (TLS) connection. You can learn more about SMTP commands here. After this we simply read in our email and password from file, storing both in email and pwd respectively. We then login to the SMTP server with smtp.login , and send the email with smtp.sendmail . I always send the notifications to myself, but in the case of automated reporting (or for any other reason), you may want to send the email elsewhere. To do this, change the destination_address : smtp.sendmail(email, destination_address, msg.as_string) . Finally, we terminate the session and close the connection with smtp.quit . All of this is placed within a try-except statement. In the case of momentary network connection loss, we will be unable to connect to the server. Resulting in a socket.gaierror . Implementing this try-except statement prevents the program from breaking in the case of a lapse in network connection. How you deal with this may differ, depending on how important it is for the email to be sent. For me, I use this for ML model training updates and data transfer completion. If an email does not get sent, it doesn’t really matter. So this simple, passive handling of connection loss is suitable. Putting it Together Now we have written both parts of our code, we can send emails with just: # build a message object msg = message(text="See attached!", img='important.png', attachment='data.csv') send(msg) # send the email (defaults to Outlook) Jason Farlette pointed out that those of you using Gmail may need to ‘allow access for less secure apps’. Steps for doing so can be found in this Stack Overflow question.

https://towardsdatascience.com/notify-with-python-41b77d51657e

['James Briggs']

2020-06-03 08:13:56.870000+00:00

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

Big Data Is Big Business

Technology and music has become so synonymous with each other in the modern age, to the point where algorithms are being developed to create playlists for consumers. One would assume that companies like Apple and Spotify are in the music business, I would argue that this isn’t the case and that their actually in the business of big data. Firstly, what is big data? According to searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com it is “is an evolving term that describes any voluminous amount of structured, semi structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information. Big data is considered to be the one of the most valuable assets that a company has. While in its raw form, its considered to not be very useful but when mined it can be used to plan the trajectory of the company, project profit and losses (when mined) for example 1 million people listened to Ghetts new album. With that he can use that information to plan a tour (FREE PLUG GHETTS IS GOING ON TOUR IN JANUARY 2019). Spotify are a data driven company. They use data as a means to train their algorithms to create uniquely curated playlists for each consumer which birthed their most popular feature, discover weekly. As mentioned in a previous article, they also use the data as a means to curate unique fan engaged events for artists. Artists such as Kylie Minogue and Stormzy are examples of this. Speculation time! As mentioned in a previous article, Spotify are on the way to being a conglomerate and apart of that would be to establishing a record label, however I do not believe they will like to be labelled as such but I do believe its coming and there are many examples to back my claim, Drake’s shameless promo of his latest album all over Spotify, their focus on fan engagement, their investment on Distrokid and many others. Apple made their intent on big data very apparent with their latest purchase, Shazam! It was confirmed in December of 2017 that the acquisition was happening, but what does this mean? Its reported that it has been downloaded over 1 billion times and is used over 20 million times per day (The Verge) the information that can be mined can be used to another stream of income for instance, the powers that be at Apple music may be able to identify trends that gives them a clearer idea of ‘popular’ or ‘rising’ stars, maybe even sign them… Whilst human curation is still very much a thing and will continue to be, the rise of data driven playlists and recommendations is here to stay in the music business. With information like this, what’s stopping companies like Spotify, Apple music, Deezer and others from set up record labels and signing artist based on their analytics?

https://medium.com/notes-and-numbers/big-data-is-big-business-38f77220bb65

['Notes']

2018-12-02 20:25:15.447000+00:00

['Music', 'Technology', 'Big Data']

Interesting AI/ML Articles On Medium This Week (Dec 12)

Some adults know Santa Claus isn’t real. But that doesn’t stop deep fake Santa Claus from making an appearance this Christmas. Thomas Smith explores an AI video generation tool that produces deep fake Santas. These synthetically generated Santas can utter words from provided scripts. Jair Ribeiro visualises a future where his daughters experience the comfort and efficiency of automated driving cars. Also, If you are a fan of Game Of Thrones, then Sajid Lhessani’s unique take on the association of programming languages and GOT characters is an article you have to read. These are just examples of the interesting articles I came across this week. Feel free to scroll through my compiled list of AI/ML/DS articles that are sure to provide some form of value to ML practitioners.

https://towardsdatascience.com/interesting-ai-ml-articles-on-medium-this-week-dec-12-59ffa32f1a5f

['Richmond Alake']

2020-12-12 01:04:01.633000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'AI', 'Data Science']

Santander Digital Trust Hackathon — Among the Winners

It appears that our proposition is one of the 31 winners out of 268 submissions according to https://santander.devpost.com/project-gallery?page=2 Assuming that you find our discussion relevant and compelling, your support to our project would be very much appreciated. Incidentally, I have recently come across this article — “Santander’s aspirations to be your trustedidentity custodian” — https://diginomica.com/santanders-aspirations-be-your-trusted-identity-custodian We made an entry into the Digital Trust Hackathon on @SantanderDevs’s invitation under the title of ‘Digital Identity for Global Citizens’ as per https://devpost.com/software/digital-identity-for-global-citizens Irrespective of how we get ranked in the contest, we are very pleased that, with this entry, we were given an excellent opportunity to present our proposition of Expanded Password System in a much easier-to-grasp format such as - Inspiration - What it does - How we built it - Challenges we ran into - Accomplishments that we’re proud of - What we learned - What’s next You might hopefully be interested to have a quick look at it, desirably along with this 90-minute video — https://youtu.be/916VFMmQHYU < 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/santander-digital-trust-hackathon-among-the-winners-f871535786cf

['Hitoshi Kokumai']

2020-12-27 00:37:39.942000+00:00

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

Image Creation for Non-Artists (OpenCV Project Walkthrough)

Image Creation for Non-Artists (OpenCV Project Walkthrough) An attempt at exploring how computer vision and image processing techniques can allow non-artists to create Art The end result This project stemmed from my predilection of the visual arts — as a computing student, I’ve always envied art students in their studios with splodges of colors and pristine white canvases. However, when I’m faced with a blank canvas and a (few) bottle(s) of paint, I don’t know where to start. Without the hours of training Art students have, I simply can’t go very far unless I’m following some Bob Ross tutorial. That’s why I’ve decided to explore and see if I can code something that will enable me to create art “automatically”. I did this project a looong time ago for my final year project when I wanted to create some software program that can allow its users to sketch something stickman-like on a pre-selected background, select the category of what was drawn, and the programme will intelligently figure out which image to poisson-blend in. After that, the user can also select a neural transfer style to be applied on the image. So in this article I will be giving a brief walkthrough of this project. Because there are many parts to it, I won’t be going in-depth with the technical implementations. However, if you’d like me to do so, leave a comment and let me know! :) Part 1 — Selection of the background image Because I wanted the user to have a range of images to choose from, I’ve coded a python script that acted as an image search engine. If an image is selected as the user browses through a range of available background images, similar looking background images would be retrieved. The similarity is calculated based on colour histograms in the HSV colour space. A more detailed explanation can be found here. Here’s the result. If a user selects this background image: Similar looking images would be retrieved: Part 2 — Start drawing! This is the fun part! The program seeks to match whatever you’re drawing with the set of images in the database. So if you draw an image with the wings spread out versus if you draw an oval (for example) the retrieved results would be different. Additionally, because the programme is not as robust, the user would have to specify the category (for example bird or boat, or car). For this particular project, I have six categories. The drawing function is also coded in Python with openCV. Once the outline is drawn, the list of coordinates would be saved. 100 sample points (the number I used for my testing, this can vary — the more points the more accurate but the programme would take longer) was taken from this outline of the drawing. The drawing did not have to be this specific, it could be just a stickman bird figure too (or stickbird lmao) Part 3 — Comparing the sample points with pre-processed image descriptors Initially, I spent a very long time trying to figure out how to use image segmentation methods to get a clean cut of the target image objects so I could crop them out of their original images, figure out which one(s) matched my sketch the most, and them poisson-blend into my result image. However, this was really tricky to do and OpenCV’s image saliency techniques only worked well with certain types of images. For example, For these images, clean masks can be obtained However, if the background gets a little complicated or if the subject is not as clear, this happens: Hence, I decided to use the COCODataset instead. These are some of the masks of the “birds” category With these masks, I can use the outline of my sketch to compare against the shape context histogram descriptors of these masks. How it works can be broken down into four steps: Step 1: Finding the collection of points on shape contour Step 2: Computing the shape context Step 3: Computing the cost matrix Step 4: Finding the matching that minimizes total cost BY THE WAY, shape context is another fun topic to discuss that’ll take a full article by itself, so I shall not be discussing it here — but do let me know if that’ll be of interest! Here’s some results: So it works OKAY. The problem with the Hungarian matching algorithm is that it is extremely time costly — its O(n³)! This is also the part where I’m thinking of implementing some ML/DL techniques to speed up the process. Part 4 — Blending the closest match into the selected background image The last part of this project (after using the target mask to “crop” the image out) is to use poisson blending to blend the image into our initially selected background image. Poisson blending is one of the gradient domain image processing methods. Pixels in the resultant image are computed by solving a Poisson equation. For each of the final pixels: if mask(x,y) is 0: final(x,y) = target(x,y) else: final(x,y) = 0 for each neighbor (nx,ny) in (x-1,y), (x+1,y), (x,y-1), (x,y+1): final(x,y) += source(x,y) - source(nx,ny) if mask(nx,ny) is 0: final(x,y) += target(nx,ny) else: final(x,y) += final(nx,ny) All masked pixels with a non-zero value affects each other’s final value. The matrix equation Ax=b is solved to compute everything simultaneously. The size of vectors x and b are both number of pixels in the target image — vector x is what we are solving for and contains all pixels in the final image while vector b is the guiding gradient plus the sum of all non-masked neighbour pixels in the target image. These non-masked neighbour pixels are the values of pixels at the mask boundary and the guiding gradient defines the second derivative of the final mask area. Matrix A is a sparse matrix and computes the gradient of the final image’s masked pixels. The equation for x is solved to get the final image. If the guiding gradient is zero, we are just solving a Laplace equation and the values at the mask boundary are blended smoothly across. With the gradient of the source image as the guiding gradient, the mask area takes on the appearance of the source image but is smoothly blended at the boundary. OpenCV’s seamless clone function is an implementation of the algorithm mentioned above. Some results: The birds were not in the original background image — they were “blended” in Part 5 — Applying neural style transfer on the image with pre-trained models I did a separate article on this here! Do check it out if interested. But in a nutshell, what it does is it takes the image above and apply some cool art style to it. There is of course a range to choose from and the range largely depends on which pre-trained neural models you use. Here’s some examples:

https://medium.com/swlh/image-creation-for-non-artists-opencv-project-walkthrough-d56ee21db5b6

['Ran', 'Reine']

2020-08-15 18:07:23.112000+00:00

['Python', 'Art', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Computer Science']

Better Software Without If-Else

DESIGNING BETTER SOFTWARE Better Software Without If-Else 5 Ways to Replace If-Else. Beginner to advanced examples Let me just say this right off the bat: If-Else is often a poor choice. It leads to complicated designs, less readable code, and may be pain inducing to refactor. Nevertheless, If-Else has become the de facto solution for code branching — which does make sense. It’s one of the first things any aspiring developer is taught. Unfortunately, lots of developers never advance to more suitable branching strategies. Some live by the mantra: If-Else is a hammer and everything’s a nail. The inability to determine when to use a more suitable approach is among those that distinguishes juniors from seniors. I’ll show you some techniques and patterns that’ll put an end to this horrific practice. The difficulty will increase by each example. 1 Entirely unnecessary else blocks This is perhaps one of those junior developers are most guilty of. The example below is a prime illustration of what happens when you get beaten into thinking If-Else is great. Simple if-else It can be simplified by just removing the else ` block. Removed else More professional looking, right? You’ll regularly find there’s really no need for an else block. Like in this case, you want to do something if a certain condition is met and return immediately. 2 Value assignment If you want to assign a new value to a variable based on some provided input, then stop the If-Else nonsense — there’s a more readable approach. Value assignment with if-else Despite the simplicity, it’s awful. First off, If-Else is easily replaced with a switch here. But, we can simplify this code even further by removing else if and else altogether. If statements with fast return Take away the else if and else , and we are left with clean, readable code. Notice that I’ve also changed the style to be fast return opposed to single return statement — it simply doesn’t make sense to continue testing a value if the correct one has already been found. 3 Precondition checking Most often, I find that it won’t make sense to continue executing a method if it’s provided with invalid values. Say we have the DetermineGender method from before, with the requirement that the provided input value must always be 0 or 1. Method without value checks Executing the method without value validation doesn’t make any sense. So, we’ll need to check some preconditions before we allow the method continuing its executing. Applying the guard clause defensive coding technique, you’ll check method input values and only move on to executing the method if. Check preconditions with guard clauses At this point, we’ve made sure the main logic is only executed if the value falls within the expected range. The IFs have also been replaced with ternary now that it doesn’t make sense to have a default return of “Unknown” at the end any longer. 4 If-Else to Dictionary — avoid If-Else entirely Say you need to perform some operation that’ll be selected based on some condition, and we know we’ll have to add more operations later. One is perhaps inclined to use the tried and true, If-Else. Adding a new operation is simply a matter of slapping in an extra else if. That’s simple. This approach is however not a great design in terms of maintenance. Knowing we need to add new operations later, we can refactor the If-Else to a dictionary. Readability has vastly increased and it’s easier to reason about this code. Note that, the dictionary is only placed inside the method for illustrative purposes. You’d likely want it to be provided from somewhere else. 5 Extending applications — avoid If-Else entirely This is a slightly more advanced example. Let me also clarify something real quick… This is a more “enterprisy” approach. It won’t be your typical “lemme just replace that if-else” scenario. Now, read on. Know when to even eliminate Ifs entirely, by replacing them with objects. Often, you’ll find yourself having to extend some part of an application. As a junior developer, you may be inclined to do so by just adding an extra If-Else (i.e. else-if) statement. Take this illustrative example. Here, we need to present an Order instance as a string. First, we only have two kinds of string representation, JSON and plain text. Using If-Else at this stage is not a big issue, tho we can easily replace else if with just if as demonstrated earlier. Knowing we need to extend this part of the application, this approach is definitely not acceptable. Not only does the code above violate the Open/Closed principle, it doesn’t read well and will cause maintainability headaches. The correct approach is one that adheres to the SOLID principles — and we do this by implementing a dynamic type discovery process, and in this case, the strategy pattern. The process to refactor this hot piece of mess, is as following: Extract each branch into separate strategy classes with a common interface Dynamically find all classes implementing the common interface Decide which strategy to execute based on input The code that’ll replace the example above looks like this. And yes, it’s way more code. It requires you to know how type discovery works. But dynamically extending an application is an advanced topic. I’m only showing the exact part that’ll replace the If-Else example. Take a look at this gist if you want to see all objects involved.

https://medium.com/swlh/5-ways-to-replace-if-else-statements-857c0ff19357

['Nicklas Millard']

2020-08-18 14:31:38.904000+00:00

['Best Practices', 'Software Development', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming']

AnyLog: Taming the Complexities of Unified IoT Data Processing

AnyLog: Taming the Complexities of Unified IoT Data Processing AnyLog Follow Aug 16 · 6 min read Written by: Faisal Nawab — Assistant Professor at UC Irvine The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the huge amounts of data that they are projected to produce pose unprecedented challenges for data management systems. A key question that needs to be answered is how can we process and utilize this huge amount of data. Big Data management in the last decade enabled us to answer this question for cloud applications. However, these solutions do not provide the complete answer to IoT data. IoT data processing involves many complexities and requirements that often lead to contradictory design decisions. The first complexity is that IoT data, often times, requires being processed at the edge of the network. This can be due to many reasons ranging from real-time processing requirements to the need to optimize edge-to-Internet bandwidth costs and performance. This requirement alone makes cloud solutions — and the ability to utilize powerful compute nodes — infeasible. Design requirement 1: the IoT data infrastructure needs to be deployed at the edge The second complexity is that IoT data is produced in many different locations around vast geographical areas. To enable utilizing data from geographically-dispersed devices, the data processing infrastructure needs to be geographically distributed to retain the real-time, bandwidth-efficiency aspects from design requirement 1. Design requirement 2: the IoT data infrastructure needs to be geographically distributed The third complexity is that IoT data is diverse. An application may utilize data from IoT devices with different features, data structures, and schemas. The ability to utilize the data from diverse — but related — IoT devices will provide an opportunity to generate better insights and analytics. Design requirement 3: the IoT data infrastructure needs to enable integrating data from diverse IoT devices Deploying big data workloads at the cloud or data center requires IT expertise. These expertise are essential as big data brings multiplicity of challenges involving High Availability, scaling, security, recovery, removal of unneeded data and many more. Companies deploying Edge solutions may find themselves in a state that rather than supporting a centralized data center, they need to support thousands of distributed small data centers near the edge. In this type of setup, the needed IT expertise may exceed the IT resources available. Design requirement 4: the infrastructure deployed at the edge needs to be self managed Until recently, designing a system with these four design requirements is infeasible with existing Big Data technologies and current edge computing models. The first two design requirements lead to the need to control an infrastructure of powerful compute nodes that are distributed close to IoT devices across large geographic regions. This type of infrastructure is not available today and current cloud and edge computing technologies do not provide the foundations needed for such an infrastructure. Cloud and edge computing still require ownership of the infrastructure within a single or few control domains. However, the scale of such massive, geographically-distributed infrastructure is not feasible with this ownership model. As for the third design requirement, current solutions include data integration solutions that aim to find similarities and connections between data from different sources. These solutions, however, remain to be limited and often require extensive manual intervention or complex data processing. The fourth design requirement is not supported as current solutions are not self managed. One reason that makes it hard to develop a self-managed system at the edge is the fact that there is no unification of the way data is managed. The data management at the edge is based, in most cases, on proprietary projects — different types of data are treated differently creating not only silos of data but also setups that require significant proprietary and non-uniform knowledge. Self management, on the other hand, requires a unified process across all the functionalities deployed. AnyLog — A Decentralized IoT Network AnyLog is a startup that aims to provide a solution to the complexities above and provide a unified data infrastructure for IoT data processing. In AnyLog, it was observed that the restrictions standing between us and the four design requirements above have been limits of the underlying technologies that are used for data processing, whether on the cloud or the edge. However, this is now changing with the advent of blockchain technologies. AnyLog shows that by utilizing Blockchain technologies, we can finally provide an answer and a solution that combines the four design requirements above. The AnyLog Network is a collection of nodes (a node can be a small device or gateway and up to the largest server) with the AnyLog software. The software supports p2p communication between the nodes of the network as well as read and write access to a shared metadata layer. The metadata layer is represented on a blockchain. What is special about blockchain systems is that they enable combining decentralized coordination — through smart contracts — and compensation — through a cryptocurrency, in a unified framework. This provides the opportunity to build a data processing infrastructure that brings together decentralized compute nodes that are able to process data as a single machine. For AnyLog, decentralization provides the ability to process data where the data resides using independent nodes that can work autonomously. At the same time, the nodes share the metadata (which is published as a set of policies on the blockchain) and can exchange messages allowing the nodes to operate in sync and share and query in real-time any needed data or state. The fact that a large centralized database is replaced with many small distributed databases at the edge provides significant advantages: First, queries are processed concurrently on multiple nodes (per query, AnyLog identifies the nodes with relevant data and deploy a MapReduce type of process). With this approach, performance tuning is automated as with more data, the distribution of the data is increased leading to additional nodes participating in the query process and less data on each node. Secondly, it is much simpler to automate HA with a small database vs. a database supporting complex big data operations. AnyLog leverages the fact that a small database is simple to replicate and when an edge database is updated, one or more mirrored databases are updated concurrently. With this approach, if a node fails, one of the mirrors kicks in without downtime and a background process will either recover the failed node or create a new copy of the data. Unified schema and data view AnyLog unifies the treatment of the data and provides a unified data view. For the user or application, data is treated as if it is organized in a single unified relational database. However, physically, the data remains in-place, distributed at the edge of the network. This is done using virtualization, allowing users and applications to be serviced by a unified data plane. When AnyLog Nodes receive data, they will identify the structure of the data. This structure determines a schema and with the identified schema the node proceeds with one of two options: If the schema is an existing schema (it is published on the blockchain), the node will host the data using the schema. If the schema is new (not available on the blockchain), the node will publish the schema on the blockchain such that a different node that will need to store the same type of data will use the same schema. This approach creates, automatically, a unified metadata layer across all the nodes of the network. From here, a user and application can be offered with the list of tables (using a lookup to the blockchain data) and for each table they can view the columns and data types that make each table. This process allows to formulate queries in the exact same way that queries to a centralized database are formulated. With this approach, a query to any table can be handed to any node in the network. Self managed processes One value of the AnyLog approach is the fact that the data is treated in a unified way. Regardless of the type of data, the same processes apply — leading to a published schema and a MapReduced query process. This uniformity makes the self-managed feature doable — as explained HA is automated and processes like data partitioning, distribution of data, removal of data, are all automated. The ability to decentralize high-performance and self-managed computation with the ability to utilize diverse IoT devices and data has the potential to open new opportunities and applications. These applications would create richer experiences due to the performance characteristics and unification of diverse IoT devices. This approach gets us one step closer to the future of IoT where the silos between IoT applications are broken. For more information, read the research paper: http://cidrdb.org/cidr2020/papers/p9-abadi-cidr20.pdf

https://medium.com/anylog-network/anylog-taming-the-complexities-of-unified-iot-data-processing-a95ee80a4982

[]

2021-08-16 22:01:17.246000+00:00

['Blockchain Technology', 'Smart Cities', 'Industrial Iot', 'Smart Grid', 'Iot Edge']

One Simple Trait That Will Advance Your Software Career

Software engineering can be an absolutely thankless job. Oh sure, it has its perks. You get to be creative and solve problems, and there is a beauty and elegance in well written code sometimes that can be hard to describe to those that don’t speak the language. Where we were once portrayed almost universally as pocket-protector-wearing, tape-on-the-glasses nerds, Hollywood now depicts us as elite hackers that can sit down at a never-before-seen terminal and instantly predict the passwords to any government agency in the world, and find a way to copy and then delete their entire database onto a USB drive in under 60 seconds. I wish. I don’t think I could hack my own laptop let alone anyone else’s, and some days it can take me more than a minute just to copy some Word documents to my USB drive. The reality of being a programmer is a bit less sexy than our Hollywood counterparts however. Our bosses and co-workers don’t give a damn about how elegant our code is. They don’t understand that we are asked every single day to estimate how long it will take to code features and fixes that we have absolutely no idea about until that very moment. Frankly, we’re often asked to do things by people that have no idea what they are even asking us to do! Our worth is often measured by our ability to crank out code at a record breaking pace, and our willingness to work insane amounts of hours doing so. Impossible deadlines are common. Work/life balance can often be non-existent. And as we all know, one “aww shit” can wipe out volumes of “atta-boy’s”. At the end of the day, it’s your job to produce, and unlike sales-people and executives, going above and beyond doesn’t often net you a trip to the Bahamas, a gold watch or a profit-sharing check. In fact, working harder usually only ends up raising others expectations of you, and when you fall short of that new bar you just set, you end up looking and feeling like a slacker. We all look at people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and think that if we were just more talented, more creative and more driven that we’d be more successful at our jobs. We stay up until the wee hours of the morning learning the latest new frameworks and technologies, spend entire weekends refactoring our core libraries to be faster and more efficient, and in many cases we end up neglecting our own needs, friends and families in the process, and for what? I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve bent over backwards to get my code done and checked in, only to be met with frustrations and complaints from my bosses and co-workers, rather than the kudos and rewards I was hoping for. “Why did it take you so long to code that new feature? Why did QA find bugs in your code? Didn’t you even test anything? And why aren’t we using <insert latest beta technology here> in our app?” It’s easy to get defensive when people call our babies ugly, and when our hard work and sacrifice is rewarded with negativity and a lack of appreciation. Even when dealing with team members, sometimes simply pointing out an overlooked issue in code, or requesting a small additional feature can net an aggravated and sometimes accusatory response from the person who coded it. It’s not a personal attack however. It’s just business. When the widget doesn’t “widge”, and the “foo” is missing a “bar”, it’s not the fault of the person that found the problem, nor does it constitute an attitude problem on the programmers part. How we respond to the questions and complaints of others, our co-workers and clients alike, will have a huge affect on how our value to the company is perceived, and ultimately, how far we can go in our careers.

https://toddhd.medium.com/one-simple-trait-that-will-advance-your-software-career-7a88bd505f59

['Todd Davis']

2018-03-31 04:50:17.941000+00:00

['Technology', 'Programming', 'Business', 'Productivity', 'Self Improvement']

Borderlands 3 Next Gen Review

Borderlands 3 Next Gen Review Now featuring a beautiful framerate, fast load times, and more fun! Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author. In a console launch period light on traditional “exclusives,” the next gen upgrade of Borderlands 3 was secretly my most- anticipated release. I loved the game when it first came out last year, but it was clear to me from its questionable performance on the PS4 and Xbox One that it was built as a PC game first, and then crammed onto consoles. That didn’t stop me from playing dozens of hours of the game across all three platforms, and heck I even bought it on sale on Stadia to try out there. Still, the second rumblings of next gen upgrade patches started, I hoped Gearbox would take a second coding run at their long-awaited sequel, and fortunately those hopes paid off. Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author. Borderlands 3 Next Gen is a free upgrade for existing owners of the game, and the currently available digital bundles were also updated with a slightly different pricing structure and some new DLC. Some games require users to buy the game all over again, so I’m super thankful that Gearbox didn’t go this route. I don’t think they could have gotten away with it, as the core content here is exactly the same as in the previous versions… Except now it runs like a dream. All next gen versions of Borderlands 3 have been reoptimized and tweaked to lock to at least 60 frames per second, and have new more robust split screen play options, thanks to the much faster CPU’s and more modern GPU’s featured in the new consoles. I’ve been playing on an Xbox Series S, which means my display resolution hovers between 1080p and 1440p. PS5 and Xbox Series X top out at 4k, and have an optional lower res performance mode that can push framerates even higher. Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author. The Xbox One X and PS4 Pro had 1080p60 “performance” modes…but the Series S crushes them both in terms of consistency. Much has been made about how the Series S is a 4 teraflop machine just like the PS4 Pro, but the Series S’s more modern components run circles around the Pro in this particular game. Teraflops don’t always compare one-to-one, and in this game it’s easy to see that’s the case. The older Sony machine struggles to maintain a framerate in the mid 40’s during intense combat moments, but the Series S is rock solid all the way through. I haven’t had a single graphical hitch in hours and hours of play across many of the game’s environments. Loading times are dramatically improved in the next gen edition as well, to the point of hilarity. The opening of the game features an infamously long load where the series’ trademark robot Claptrap dances across the screen as the game caches shader data. This could take well over a minute on older machines, with Claptrap making numerous trips across the frame, giving the player enough time to leave and make a proverbial sandwich. On the Series S, he makes it across about one and a half times. Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author. Levels load in around 12 seconds or less, down from just over half a minute on my older machines. The level loads and combat performance also compare quite favorably against Stadia, in spite of the powerful GPU on offer on Google’s cloud platform. Claptrap makes three trips across the screen during the initial load on Google’s platform, and levels take just over 20 seconds to load. My 3 year old PC performs similarly. It’s clear from all this that Gearbox put some work into actually re-optimizing this game around the newer hardware, instead of just porting over the existing PC version or tweaking the old edition of the game. I’ve never had as much fun with this game as I have had on the Series S. The physics-heavy combat shines now that the framerate doesn’t dip, and the lighting and textures are still a dramatic step up from the earlier titles in the series. Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author. The sound mix is also still wonderful, and I’ve had a better time using spatial audio with it on the Series S than on my old One X. I’ve had some issues over the years with spatial audio on the older platform, where games would drop back to their stereo mixes for no apparent reason. But on the new machine, the soundscape is wonderfully rich and detailed, and Dolby Atmos for headphones gives it a new sense of positional awareness and depth that it couldn’t quite muster on my older Xbox. With this next gen patch, Borderlands 3 has finally found a good home on consoles. It’s no longer a PC-focused game struggling to run on 7 year old low-powered CPU’s, but a brilliant loot-based combat game that’s relentlessly paced and generous with its content. The speed of gameplay and load times combine to overhaul the pace of the whole game, and I went from being unsure about finally playing its DLC packs to suddenly eager to check out every expansion, both old and new. Every single complaint I had in my old article has been fully solved. Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author. This is the definitive way to play Borderlands 3, and giving it away free to existing owners is a true class act from Gearbox. It’s good enough that it deserves to overshadow Gearbox’s highly divisive other recent release of Godfall. If you were put off by the many reports of Borderlands 3 being janky, the time has come to give it a serious look. In a light launch period, Borderlands 3 is also a perfect “second game.” It’s huge and jam packed with content, and you can likely find an old disc on sale if you have a console with a drive. If not, it goes on discount digitally all the time, and I imagine the new generation won’t change that. It has transformed from a struggling game on the old machines into one of the best games that the next generation has to offer, and is an excellent case study for the improved performance of the new systems.

https://xander51.medium.com/borderlands-3-next-gen-review-539e32d85575

['Alex Rowe']

2020-12-01 20:55:30.127000+00:00

['Tech', 'Ps5', 'Gaming', 'Technology', 'Xbox']

Recovered Covid-19 Cases Still Show Brain Anomalies 3 Months Later

Infection | Brain Recovered Covid-19 Cases Still Show Brain Anomalies 3 Months Later First data that neurological signs and brain structural changes persist in Covid-19. But can the brain self-renew with time? Image by rawpixel.com Science knows that the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, can replicate in human neurons and brain organoids. Brain damage and neurological symptoms are also not rare in Covid-19 cases. Whether such brain insults are long-lasting, however, remains uncertain. And a new study published August in The Lancet, “Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in COVID-19 Patients — An MRI-based 3-month Follow-up Study,” that casts light on this topic. Persistent Neurological Symptoms In this study, researchers at the Huashan Hospital in China recruited 60 Covid-19 patients that had recovered for over three months (mean age: 44.10; 56.7% males) and 39 non-Covid-19 controls (mean age: 45.88; 56.4% males). Both groups of participants were matched in terms of age, sex, and the prevalence of smoking, alcohol consumption, and underlying comorbidities. During Covid-19, over two-thirds of these 60 recovered Covid-19 patients had neurological symptoms. Other common Covid-19 signs were fever (88.33%), cough (56.67%), and gastrointestinal distress (13.33%). Treatments used were antivirals (96.67%), oxygen therapy (61.67%), antibiotics (35%), and interferons (15%). And 78.33% of them had mild, 20% had severe, and 1.67% had critical Covid-19. Even mild and not-so-old cases of Covid-19 may suffer compromised brain functions that are long-lasting. Three months later, over half (55%) of these patients still had neurological symptoms. Only the frequency of mood alterations and fatigue decreased significantly (blue asterisks) from 41.67% to 16.67% and 26.67% to 6.67%, respectively. Other neurological symptoms (see figure; such as headache, impaired mobility, numbness, myalgia, memory loss, etc.) persisted for over three months. And the fact that 78.33% of these patients initially had mild Covid-19 is also concerning as it means that persistent neurological symptoms can affect mild Covid-19 cases as well. Blue asterisks (p <0.05) indicate statistically significant changes that are due to chance. No blue asterisks (p > 0.05) mean changes are not statistically significant. Source: Lu et al. (2020). Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in COVID-19 Patients — An MRI-based 3-month Follow-up Study. The Lancet. Persistent Brain Structural Changes Next, the researchers used two brain imaging techniques: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that captures cortical brain areas as a whole and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) that detects microstructural brain changes. Results revealed that at three-month follow-up: Covid-19 patients had higher overall brain diffusivity and white matter volume — which further correlated negatively with memory loss — than non-Covid-19 controls. Covid-19 patients had greater grey matter volume (GMV) in the right cingulate, left Rolandic operculum, left Heschl’s gyrus, hippocampus, and olfactory cortices — which further correlated negatively with memory and smell loss, fatigue, and numbness — compared to non-Covid-19 controls. Among the structural brain changes, only cingulate gyrus correlated positively with Covid-19 severity during hospitalization. The cingulate gyrus is involved in attention, motivation, decision making, and learning. Put it another way; it also indicates that even mild Covid-19 cases may face persistent brain structural changes. Notably, all brain regions are examined except the brainstem due to technical limitations, which is unfortunate given that the brain’s cardiorespiratory centre resides in the brainstem. Other study limitations, the authors admitted, were the small sample size and participants recruitment from one hospital only. On the other side, the human brain displays a remarkable capacity to self-renew with time, such as following stroke or traumatic brain injury. Notwithstanding these caveats, this study showed that recovered Covid-19 patients had increased brain diffusivity and enlarged white and grey matter at three-month follow-up. These indicate the brain is undergoing heightened metabolic activities. Why? The academics posited that these are ‘functional compensations’ where the brain is trying to repair itself from the insults Covid-19 inflicted. “In this prospective study, volumetric and micro-structural abnormalities were detected mainly in the central olfactory cortices, partial white matter in the right hemisphere from recovered Covid-19 patients, providing new evidence to the neurological damage of SARS-CoV-2,” the study authors concluded. “The abnormalities in these brain areas might cause long-term burden to Covid-19 patients after recovery, which was thus worth public attention.” Can the Brain Self-renew? To sum up, this August study in The Lancet showed, for the first time, persistent neurological symptoms and structural brain alterations in Covid-19 cases. Also, note that the majority of participants in this study were middle-aged (mean age of 44) and had mild Covid-19. It seems terrible news; even mild and not-so-old cases of Covid-19 may suffer long-lasting poor brain functions. On the other side, the human brain displays a remarkable capacity to self-renew with time, such as following stroke or traumatic brain injury. “Although the central nervous system (CNS) has been considered for years as a “perennial” tissue,” explained neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge. “It has recently become clear that both physiological and reparative regeneration occur also within the CNS to sustain tissue homeostasis and repair.” Brain renewal is driven by neural stem cells in the hippocampus and subventricular zone that remain active for life, which catalyzes neurogenesis and neural outgrowth to other brain areas. Even the August study proposed ‘functional compensation’ at play in the brains of the recovered Covid-19 patients. Brain scans revealed increased metabolic activities and enlarged structures in those patients. Plus, those Covid-19 patients also showed less neurological symptoms at three-month follow-up. Perhaps, more time is simply needed for Covid-19 brain complications to pass.

https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/first-data-that-brain-changes-and-neurological-signs-persist-in-covid-19-4e204554c85b

['Shin Jie Yong']

2020-08-14 14:43:05.546000+00:00

['Covid 19', 'Mental Health', 'Technology', 'Future', 'Psychology']

history of kashmire issue

history of kashmire issue history of kashmir issue Since the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, the Kashmir dispute has been an intractable one between them. They fought three wars over it in1948, 1965, and 1999, but have not been able to resolve it. The partition left the fate of over 550 princely states undecided. They were required to accede to either of the two states on the basis of the geographical location and wishes of their people. The state of Jammu and Kashmir should have acceded to Pakistan because of its Muslim majority population and geographical location, but this was not happened when Mahraja Hari Singh seek military assistance from India to resist the Pakistani tribal’s attacks and ultimately signed the ‘Instrument of Accession’ with India. Eventually Indian forces intervened and captured the state of Jammu and Kashmir. From that day Kashmir dispute has been the core issue between both Pakistan and India, which also had kept the security of entire South Asia at stake because of their extensive nuclear capability. So, the Kashmir issue has been a major bone of contention from the day of independence, resulted in three wars, numerous conflicts between India and Pakistan and severely rigid diplomacy. The United Nations Security Council had tried to resolve the dispute by declaring that the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan should be decided through the democratic method by holding a free and fair plebiscite but India had rejected any mediation which opposed its claim regarding Kashmir. Kashmir’s strategic importance lies in the fact that its borders meet with China and Afghanistan and also is close to Russia. Almost all the rivers which flow through Pakistan, originate from Kashmir, that’s why both the countries ignore stepping back claiming of this territory. The failure of diplomacy to resolve the Kashmir issue attracted international and regional attention to it. After the wars of 1948, 1962 and 1965, determined efforts were made to resolve this issue. In 1948, the United Nations became deeply involved but India didn’t show flexibility. After the India-China border War of 1962, there were intense but fruitless American and British efforts to bridge a gap between India and Pakistan. The end of 1965 war saw Soviet Union as a regional peacemaker. The Soviets did manage to promote a peace treaty at Tashkent, but this could not establish peace in the region and soon Indian involvement in East Pakistan led to her separation in 1970–71.

https://medium.com/@rashidkashmire415/history-of-kashmire-issue-c2bb2f239a2a

[]

2020-12-24 18:44:21.064000+00:00

['History', 'History Of Technology', 'Covid 19', 'Life', 'Blogger']