fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
[Community] MediBloc at QTUM Dapps Seoul Meetup
Tags: Ethereum, Qtum, Healthcare, Blockchain, Medibloc

[Community] MediBloc at QTUM Dapps Seoul Meetup

QTUM Dapps, Building healthy blockchain ecosystems together

Last Friday(3/9), MediBloc team participated in QTUM Dapps Seoul Blockchain meetup.

Wookyun Kho, CEO from MediBloc, presented MediBloc’s vision and current progress with global blockchain experts at this meetup.

The global blockchain experts, including founders from QTUM(Combining a modified Bitcoin Core infrastructure with an intercompatible version of the Ethereal Virtual Machine), INK chain(building a blockchain based infrastructure for the Creative Industry), Qbao(building a social network with digital currency wallet, exchange, payments), and QTUM Dapps, discussed the current landscape of Korean Blockchain Industry.

MediBloc and many global blockchain leaders expressed their passion in improving blockchain technology during this meetup. MediBloc is actively interacting with QTUM Dapps to build a healthy blockchain ecosystem and will strive to do our utmost to frame a solid blockchain industry.

—

MediBloc is a team of medical professionals, data architects and blockchain technologists. Both founders are computer scientists turned to medicine, turned entrepreneurs.

If you have any questions regarding the MediBloc Project, please contact us through the following channels.

👉🏻MediBloc Official Website: https://medibloc.org
Sports Betting Research Will Become Easier When Blockchain is Adopted
Tags: Data, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Sports Betting, Blockchain

Modern sports betting is considered a grind since the average research time required to even flirt with being a successful bettor has increased exponentially in recent years. Simply put, there is too much data to analyze without computers. Common bettors can only realistically make decisions using slivers of data of the larger total state of global sports information.

When I was a kid in the 80’s, sports betting data was collected from newspapers. My dad and his friends would have the odds, a box score of yesterdays game and their collective group opinions gathered from watching games at home.

In 2018, we have market state and game state data that can be accessed on the fly. Bookmakers have this data as well, but just at an asymmetric scale and speed compared to the average bettor.

From 2019 onward, the blockchain will start to take over as the medium for storing, retrieval and monetizing valuable sports betting data. As the world opens up to transparent and integrity protecting distributed ledgers, sports data usage will proliferate like never before. Data yearns to be free.
Batting Performance & Captaincy — Tests
By: Amol Desai
Tags: Data, Analytics, Data Science, Cricket, Sports Analytics

It turns out that it is hard to distinguish between their performances as captain/non-captain; which is what our individual level results also said. But, if we did not look at their later stint as non-captain, we may have concluded that they are better batsmen when they lead the side.

Finally, let’s look at Joe Root who has been under recent scrutiny.

Root did not have a gradual ramp up like the one we saw above with Kohli, Smith and Rahim. Moreover, his average was settling down to a more stable longer term average after a couple of extraordinary seasons even before he took on captaincy and has since been quite stable. So, the alarm bells seem unwarranted.

These are all interesting to look at, but how do we analyze the temporal effect more generally? For this, I looked at the batting averages of batsmen in the remainder of their career for each innings and compared that to their average up to that innings. I did this for the captain pool from above as well as for a group of batsmen who never led a side, who batted in at least 100 innings and who mostly batted at number 5 or above to ensure they were solid batsmen with substantial careers. Comparing the two groups helps us get some perspective around what usually happens with batsmen’s careers when they are not asked to lead ,and thus, forms a relative baseline for analyzing the captains.

What we see here, is that if the captaincy switch happens before about 75 innings, as it mostly does, and assuming that the captains don’t switch back to a non-captain role, their overall averages as captains and non-captains would be the same as they would be if they did not take up captaincy at that point. However, most captains do switch back to a non-captain role and the careers of captains are slightly longer than careers of players who never take up captaincy (see graph below). The former, tend to hang around for a ramp down in performance. This means that for captains, both the ramp up and the ramp down happens during non-captaincy days, reducing their average as non-captain. Moreover, captaincy does seem to put some extra wind in their sails that results in them hovering above the 0 mark with some improved performances mid-career. Non-captains seem to have a more stable mid-career run (I haven’t put this through formal rigour & so this should be taken with a pinch of salt).

Leading Under Pressure

Since we are examining captaincy for its popular characterization as a burden, let us look at how captains fare under pressure. Now, pressure is a hard concept to quantify. So, let us look at the batting performance of captains under three scenarios a) Home/Away b) Across Innings c) In Wins/Losses.

Starting with some of the individuals we have been looking at, we see that Kohli is much more consistent in differences at home and away while Smith as captain abroad doesn’t quite differentiate himself from Smith as non-captain.
Unwanted.
By: Richie Crowley
Tags: Travel, Guns, Love, Trump, Fear

The Fire Department didn’t want me on their couch.

The Church didn’t want me in its pews.

The pool didn’t want me in its water.

The people of Marshall didn’t want me in their homes.

I arrived to Marshall, Illinois while the sun was still high. I was riding deeper and deeper into rural Illinois and wasn’t ready to chance it, so this town of 4,000 was going to be home for the night.

When I get into a town my first priority is shelter. Am I camping? Am I couching? Am I in a home? I’ll pop into local shops, bars, cafe’s, I’ll talk with the police and fire departments, putting feelers out to anyone that may want to shelter me for the evening.

In Marshall, I was unwanted.

And I get it. I’m a complete stranger asking to stay in their home on a weeknight. I’m unfamiliar to them. My personality, my language, my mission. It’s all foreign.

In Marshall though I was the one with fear.

I had visited a bar inside of a liquor store that also had a drive-thru, and was delivering my spiel. “I’m biking across America and looking for a place to stay the night.”

It was 6 pm and a few locals had slow eyes with redness. They were on their way to being drunk. Or high. The bartender and store manager confirmed this to me later on.

They all asked me what I was carrying. I told them clothes, chargers, food, tent, and a sleeping bag.

They laughed.

“No son, carrying, what you got for protection?”

“Nothing” Fuck, why would I say that out loud to a group of strangers.

They sipped away and warned me that “these parts have a lot of folks on meth and I should want to be protecting myself.” They also stared at me before their finals sips and laughed as if they drew pride or joy from instilling fear in me, even if it was untruthful.

“Them men like to tell tales” the bartender told me after they left “this is a safe town, just don’t go up the road to Paris.”

What happened the rest of that night is unimportant and since I am writing this you know I am safe. But that experience did surface a truth:

Fear comes from the unfamiliar.
UX e Desenvolvedor trabalhando juntos, ao mesmo tempo
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Desenvolvimento, Metodologia, Ágil, Developer, User Experience

Get this newsletter By signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices.

Check your inbox

Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription.
Docker and Its Internals
By: Shivanshu Goyal
Tags: Containerization, Virtualization, Docker, Dockerfiles

Before we start talking about docker, we need to understand the problem which is solved by Docker efficiently and economically. Before Docker gained popularity, Companies used to use virtualization for running multiple applications as the different applications might need different sets of libraries and OS to run.

Why do organizations prefer virtual machines instead of provisioning actual servers to host their applications?

Better response time. Virtualization can improve application performance, and the provisioning of virtual machines takes only minutes, rather than weeks. At progressed levels of implementation, self-provisioning by users is even possible. Improved application availability. When physical servers have problems, need routine maintenance, or require upgrades, the result is costly downtime. With virtual servers, applications can be readily moved between hosts to keep everyone up and running. Virtualization allows for more efficient use of IT equipment and labor resources.

Virtual machines run on a host machine using the hypervisor. A hypervisor (or virtual machine monitor, VMM, virtualizer) is computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called a host machine, and each virtual machine is called a guest machine

Virtualization also has some shortcomings. Suppose, we need to deploy one application that requires a different OS with a set of configurations. It requires us to provision a new guest OS in order to run the application. Also, Running multiple Virtual Machines in the same host operating system leads to performance degradation. This is because of the guest OS running on top of the host OS, which will have its own kernel and set of libraries and dependencies. This takes up a large chunk of system resources, i.e. hard disk, processor, and especially RAM. Boot up process is also a long process that takes a minute time to boot up which becomes critical in case of real-time applications. There is one more big issue with virtualization as it requires a fixed RAM size to allocate to a VM which leads to unused blocked memory of the host machine. This blocked memory cannot be allocated to a new VM. Here, Containerization comes to rescue us from all these shortcomings.
The Winter Hike
By: Matthew Donnellon
Tags: Short Story, Relationships, Fiction, Life, Love

He got up early that morning.

The air had a chill and the ground was covered in frost. The sun was just starting to rise

There were small clouds trailing from his mouth and nose with each step he took. The cold was more bone chilling that he thought it would be. He had a worn brown leather coat to cut the wind, but only a light sweater underneath and winter’s icy fingers were clawing down to his bones. He wore jeans too which did not work well in the cold, and his leather boots leaned to the fashionable side rather than functional.

He hope it would get warmer as the sun came up. If not it would make for a long day.

He walked along the old country road, now mostly frozen, but there were still loose stones that scraped and tumbled as he walked. Before too long he ducked off the road onto a connecting trail. There were cracking sounds as he made his way over two old frozen puddles, the thin veneers giving way to the slightest touch.

He heard a rustle in the trees and immediately regretted leaving his bear spray at home.

His fears were assuaged when a big bodied buck lumbered out of the woods, his huge rack of antlers above his head like wilderness royalty. He saw the beast a thought how clever it must be to have survived so many hunting seasons.

The deer looked at him, as if waiting to see if he posed any threat, and then quietly wandered off as casually as she strode in.

The man kept going, delighted that the rising sun had indeed removed some of the chill.

Finally he saw the break in the trees that signaled his destination.

The old cemetery in the woods originally gave him an eerie feeling the first time he came across it while hiking, but his curiosity got the better of him and he checked it out, and he was rewarded for his interest.

A young woman was waiting for him when he arrived.

“Hey there,” he said.

“I was beginning to think you weren’t going to come,” she said playfully.

“Oh there was no way I’d miss out. Though dates are usually at night.”

“I’m not your usual girl.”

“I’ll say.”

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” she said doing her best to fake anger.

“Just this is a rather grim place to meet up.”

“Well I sort of like the seclusion. Besides you can’t beat the company,” she said gesturing to the grave markers that filled the little cemetery.

“Are you sure they won’t mind?”

“I don’t think they’re listening.”

“Well that’s good. I’m nervous enough around you I don’t need an audience.”

She laughed, “Why would you be nervous?”

“For obvious reasons.”

“Such as?”

“I think you know.”

“I know. I’m so adorable it’s disarming.”

“I’ll say.”

“Did you bring the stuff for the picnic?”

“Of course.”

“No are you sure you’re okay having it here?”

“Do I really have a choice?”

“Well seeing how ghosts can’t leave no you really don’t.”
Family Home
By: Terry Barr
Tags: Nonet, Challenge, Family, Dogs, A Cornered Gurl

On a summer night, behind our house,

the woods go still. Green turns to black.

Our dog, alerted to what?

looks past our screen, waiting.

Then, even we hear

the sounds he knows:

Coyotes.

Old howls.

Kin.
5 Great Facebook Groups for Medium Writers
By: Nina Quist
Tags: Freelancing, Social Media, Entrepreneurship, Facebook, Writing

5 Great Facebook Groups for Medium Writers

Join them to grow your Medium earnings.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

It was only after writing for a few weeks on Medium that I discovered all the great Facebook-communities where Medium writers gather to support each other. I decided to join a few and was blown away by the level of activity and the helpful attitude.

I would encourage everyone writing on Medium to join a few groups like this.

Not only is it a great way to promote your work and get feedback from other writers. It’s also a great place to ask all your Medium-related questions, whether they relate to the partner program, getting curated or how to be featured in Medium publications.

Just make sure to read the rules for each group before you start interacting. They differ quite a lot, and if you don’t follow them, you risk getting thrown out.

Below are the 5 groups I’m active in at the moment, and they’re all great in different ways.

1. Medium Writers and Bloggers

This is one of my personal favourites, and where I hang out the most. It’s very easy-going, and you’re allowed to post your own work. Everyone is super supportive, and the members represent a wide variety of different genres of writing.

2. Medium Writing

This group is excellent for anyone trying to figure out how to best leverage Medium and turn it into an income stream. It’s hosted by the Medium Blogging Guide (a must-follow for Medium writers) and administered by Medium expert Casey Botticello. Definitely worth joining!

3. Medium Writers Lounge

This is another lovely group where you can ask questions and get useful information and tips on how to maximize your time on Medium. You’re allowed to share your own stories on daily content sharing threads.

4. Medium Dreamers

Here you can share your own stories in the Daily Share Threads, and if the topic of your story is about helping other writers succeed, you’re allowed to make a specific post about it as well. Great community and atmosphere.

5. Medium Mastery

This group is also very friendly and helpful. Here you can share your work in daily share thread, and big wins kan be shared in the thread Win of the Week on Fridays. Don’t try making your own posts; they will be deleted.

Those are the five groups I’ve tried so far. Maybe we’ll meet in one of them!

Are you interested in other ways to grow your audience and maximize your Medium earnings? Check out this article about how to use automation on Twitter to get more followers and grow your Medium income!
GoldStoneV1.2.0 released supports BTC, easily managing all chain assets by a mnemonic word
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Erc20, Ethereum

GoldStoneV1.2.0 released supports BTC, easily managing all chain assets by a mnemonic word

On August 7, GoldStoneV1.2.0 version was released. Let’s see what surprises the new version brings to us.

Three major optimizations:

▪️Increased support for BTC, and has supported BTC, ETC, ETH and management of all ERC20 token assets;

▪️Multi-chain asset management fully follow the BIP44 guidelines, a mnemonic word can manage the assets of each chain, and is a true multi-chain purse.

▪️Add the market support for the FCoin exchange, at present it can support adding market quotation of Binance, FCoin, Huobi, Okex, Bitfinex, etc.

Two experience optimizations:

▪️Now support the creation and management of a subsidiary account in a wallet account, making it easier for you to store your assets in different addresses; thus, it has more privacy.

▪️The multiple wallets switching function is moved in “settings-wallet management”, and adopts a beautiful card format, which can display more detailed wallet information, the total asset value of each wallet is at a glance, with more beautiful and friendlier interface.

Detailed introduction of key optimization functions

1. Goldstone becomes a wallet, which can hold BTC and ETC, ETH and all ERC20 tokens.

The Goldstone Wallet supports all the standard ERC20 Tokens on ethernet mainnet, and we conservatively estimate that Goldstone has supported more than 80,000 Tokens. The next version will support BCH and LTC, followed by the EOS common chain.

2. Goldstone technology development follows the common standards BIP32, BIP39,BIP44 and ERC681 in Blockchain, which means that all wallets which are compatible this specification can be smoothly imported and exported on Goldstone.

3. Engineers have conquered technical difficulties of Bitcoin and Ethereum’s, and achieve the use of a mnemonic word to manage multi-chain assets, as well as balance relation between security and product experience.

4.We have implemented the support for the exchange market of FCoin, Huobi, Okex, Bitfinex, Upbit and others. Users click to enter the “market quotation”, search tokens which they want to know, and then the real-time market quotation of the above exchanges can be viewed.

About Goldstone download

1．We recommend that Android users take the following download methods:

Download through the Goldstone official website

Download from Google Play store— Android App

2.iOS version will be online, please look forward to it.

Contact Us

Contact us in the following ways if you have questions to feedback:

Website:https://www.goldstone.io/

Twitter:https://twitter.com/goldstoneio

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/GoldStoneio

Medium:https://medium.com/@goldstoneio
The Fact That You Write Is Incredible
By: Sean Bennett
Tags: Freelancing, Motivation, Inspiration, Self Confidence, Writing

My wrist is currently in a bandage.

That’s an odd way to start an article about writing, I know, but bear with me.

As I write this article, I have just come to the end of a roughly 14 hour day of doing freelance writing jobs in which I have little to no control over what I write. Some of them are underpaid, most of them don't offer me credit, and all of them I took on because I need to earn money to avoid starvation.

Go and be a writer, they said…

The bandage? That’s my hastily thrown together home-remedy for what I think might be an oncoming RSI. It appears that my decision to work with words is now taking its toll on my body as well as my bank account.

Here’s the thing, though.

I love being a writer. And you should too.

Sure, there are some jobs that I hate, be it because of the topic or the workload, and I regularly come across people who think offering $5 for 3000 words is perfectly reasonable, but that still doesn't put me off the trade.

Because I still earn a living by writing.

So many people spend their lives saying that they want to write. They talk about how they would have loved to try journalism or how they’ve always had this idea for a book that they want to publish, but they almost never do anything about it.

We did.

We are writers.

We are the ones that did.

Without descending into a kind of pseudo-Braveheart style speech about the brilliance of writers and writing, I do think that the improbability of our position is something we should try to remember.

You don't have to earn a living as a wordsmith to call yourself a writer. You don't even have to earn any money at all. You just have to write.

One of the reasons freelance writers get hired is to do the work that other people can't or won’t do. That might seem obvious, but it’s key.

In general, people don't like writing. They’ll tolerate the odd email and they’ll text their friends and loved ones, but actual writing? Like essays and articles?

‘No thanks’

Even those people who say they wish they had tried, those wannabe journalists and authors from before, clearly didn't want it enough.

With that in mind, the fact that you write at all, let alone writing for money or a living, sets you apart from almost everyone else. It makes you special. (Cliched, I know, but still true.)
How we build products at Everoad. Part one: Insights.
By: Benjamin Chino
Tags: Product Design, Startup, Product, Product Management, User Research

Part one. We generate insights. All the time.

A former boss of mine used to yell constantly ‘Data & Anecdotes, Ben. Data & Anecdotes’. He couldn’t have been more right. Insights are crucial for what we do. Our industry, the Freight industry is a complex one, ruled by specific mechanisms, behaviors and filled with a broad range of stakeholders. None of the 25 people constituting the Tech team comes from a road transportation background. As such, generating relevant and impactful insights is essential for us. So here’s how we collect them.

Data analysis. In our three-year lifespan, we have managed to build a powerful data warehouse containing hundred millions rows of data, leveraged thousands of times per day by our teams. This helps us derive precious data points to determine which features are working well and where we could focus more. As an example, using data, we were able to isolate operational frictions with one of our business lines that were resolved and resulted in significant margin improvements.

One of our automated queries destined to measure on-time shipments to see how we can improve this metric.

User behaviors. To truly understand how our users interact with our interfaces and help improve the experiences we provide them, our team relies on Fullstory. This allows us to navigate each of the 50+ experiences we have built and explore them in a very granular way. Our Freight Search engine for carriers was built on insights derived from this tool. The next step for us here is to integrate quantitative data points identified by Fullstory into our data warehouse to help further automate user research.

The behavioral page of one of our Shipper Experience (Load management)

Feature requests. With only four Product managers, our quest for insights can’t be as comprehensive as we’d like. This is why we look to each employee of our 120-people startup as an extension of ourselves. Encouraging them to provide us with feature requests feeds us with more ideas while including them in our Product strategy. Using cool automation between Gsheets & Slack, we collaborate in a very transparent way, thus increasing trust between the Tech Org and the rest of the company.

Nice automation between our feature requests form & slack threads with the relevant stakeholders

Customer anecdotes. On the less statistically representative side of things, there are customer meetings. We know they only provide a partial and single view, but they are powerful tools to engage with our audience, hear their pains and discuss strategic opportunities (caveat: run away from doing bespoke things). Several discussions with one large Enterprise customer of ours have oriented our team to build a Facility feature to ease load requests but also provide metrics and insights on facility operations.
Inside Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s Wildly Destructive Track Record
By: Jesse Prentice-Dunn
Tags: Politics, Oil, Trump, Public Lands, Conservation

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt joined the Trump administration after a lucrative career as a lawyer and lobbyist for drilling and mining companies. In office, he has raced to enact the policy priorities of the oil, gas, and mining industries at the expense of vulnerable communities across the country. Such blatant favoritism has required bending laws and ethics rules, all of which has led to Bernhardt’s dismal record in the courts.

An analysis by the nonpartisan Institute for Policy Integrity found that more than 80% of Interior Department actions challenged in court have not been upheld by federal judges. For example, a federal judge recently invalidated an Interior Department legal opinion that would allow oil companies to inadvertently kill migratory birds without penalties. In another case, a judge ruled Secretary Bernhardt had illegally kept acting Bureau of Land Management director William Perry Pendley in office, thereby invalidating new policies he had a role in crafting.

As Bernhardt takes years of anti-conservation baggage and blatant contempt for Indigenous communities back to the private sector, the next administration will face the tall task of undoing the damage. Here’s a brief look inside Bernhardt’s destructive track record:
April Fool, but this isn’t funny
By: Andrew Webb
Tags: April Fools, Education

Today is April Fool’s day, so why is there precious little to laugh about?

To launch our new Medium publication, we could have done a silly story. We could have spent time concocting a semi-believable, gadget-based gag that you probably would have spotted was a fake, and probably wouldn’t have shared.

We’re not doing that today.

We’re not doing that because it’s hard to laugh when some teachers in the US are working not two, but six jobs, just to make ends meet. It’s not funny when schools are hoodwinked into spending precious budget buying ‘snake oil’ IT and STEAM equipment that’s has no interoperability, little educational value and locks them into one poorly designed ecosystem for good.

It’s hard to giggle when schools in the UK are facing a recruitment and retention crisis and staff are being hounded out of the profession by stress and under funding. Big belly laughs are certainly in short supply when some kids in deprived schools are pocketing food from the canteen, simply because they might not eat later, and where teachers are washing school uniforms while the kids do PE.

It’s no joke when rich parents game a broken system with dollars to ensure their kids get into college as the expense of actual people with talent. And it’s difficult to smile when the pressure of testing in India forces one student an hour to commit suicide.

Makes difficult reading doesn’t it?

Well, we live in difficult times. For some, there’s the temptation to recoil and simply accept the status quo, after all, there’s a comfort in that. But it’s cold comfort, not change. But for many others, there is genuine anger at these injustices; not the anger of hopeless rage, but the anger that hopes for change.

Not the anger of hopeless rage, but the anger that hopes for change.

At pi-top, we have a saying, we make the future. But that isn’t we the company, it’s we the movement. That movement starts with you, with your students, in your classroom, your club house or your community centre.

The problems we’re facing locally and globally are difficult, but not impossible, to solve. In many cases we actually have much of the technology and capacity to begin to address them. What we lack as a society, is the will, the funding, the drive and the leadership to do so.

So let’s try and fix things together. It’s time to get angry, get active, get engaged. We’re not joking…
[ANN] Partnership with Stellar Lumens
By: Pundi X, Writers
Tags: Pundix, Stellar Lumens, ICO, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin

Hi everyone,

We are happy to announce that Stellar Lumens and Pundi X will be formulating a collaboration between both parties.

Stellar Lumens is an open-sourced, distributed payment infrastructures, built on the premise that the international community needs “a worldwide financial network open to anyone”. Stellar Lumens is connecting individuals, institutions, and payment system through its platform.

In this collaboration, Pundi X will work with Stellar Lumens for the settlement in Indonesian local currency (IDR) in the future and together we want to build a better crypto-world.
Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Freelancer?
By: Kahli Bree Adams
Tags: Freelancing, Small Business, Entrepreneurship, Remote Working, Business

Drive

The first thing you need is the drive and motivation to persist and ultimately succeed as a freelancer. It’s all well and good having great business skills and talent in your craft, but if you lack self-motivation, you are likely to fail.

If you are new to freelancing, it will come as a shock that there is nobody to tell you when to turn up for work, what to wear, when to take a break, how many days’ holiday you can take, when to invoice for your work, and so forth. And that can be a scary prospect. Suddenly, you’re responsible for everything!

You’ll need to be prepared to take on this responsibility from day one. If this prospect scares you or makes you uneasy, please take a few minutes to write down what you think you will enjoy about the freelance lifestyle, and which aspects worry you. Then jot down the steps you can take to deal with these worries.

If the list of worries and concerns is significantly longer than that of benefits you expect from freelancing, you may want to reassess if a career in self-employment is for you. The last thing you want to do is put in a lot of time and resources if you know in your heart of hearts that it’s not really for you, and you prefer the structure and security of an employed position.
Day 22 of ‘A Photo A Day For 30 Days Challenge’
By: Divina Grey
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Relationships, Life, Photography

I took this photo along that road I was talking about in my last post. You know, the path I cycled on that led up to the clubhouse where I said “I Do” fifteen years ago.

I stopped pedaling halfway up the road that day, planted both my feet on the ground, and took a big swig of water from my hydration pack.

I looked to my left and saw this majestic site staring back at me.

I took a few deep breaths, smiled, and started pedaling again.
Academia Is the Alternative Career Path
By: Mark Humphries
Tags: Politics, Education, Psychology, Science, Mental Health

Academia Is the Alternative Career Path

Why pretend otherwise?

Source: pixabay.com

Pretend for a moment you were a young academic, a graduate student or postdoctoral researcher, pursuing the subject of your dreams. The mad dance of the fireflies, or the solar wind. The underground Protestant resistance of Bloody Mary’s reign, or the influence of Cockney folk music on early 20th century neo-classicism. The genetics of lopsided earlobes, or how the brain can tell the difference between Coke Zero and Diet Coke (tip: it can’t).

Here’s the thing. If you don’t have a permanent job in academic research by now, in all likelihood you never will. And it’s not your fault.

The leading institutions of academia in North America and Europe — the journals (Nature, and Science), the funders, the academies — have spent the last few years fretting publicly about the need to equally value careers outside academia. Much has been written about the need to train PhD students in generalisable skills, for them to experience work environments outside the laboratory or the library. In short, to prepare young researchers that they may, possibly, potentially need to pursue alternatives to academia.

I’ve grown tired of this approach, for this wording is dangerously wrong. It still frames the problem as one of finding alternatives to academia. Yet the vast majority of graduate students and postdocs can never reach a permanent job in academia, because those jobs do not and will not exist. Supply vastly outstrips demand.

Instead we need to be clear: Academia is the alternative career path.
A New Leaders Guide to Thriving: Lesson 2 — You Know Less Than You Think
By: Leon Purton
Tags: Self, Work, Success, Growth, Leadership

A New Leaders Guide to Thriving: Lesson 2 — You Know Less Than You Think

And it’s okay not to know

There is a fantastic rush that comes with being recognised as a great contributor at work. A warm internal glow that comes with the acknowledgement that you’ve done something valuable.

I remember the feeling of earning my first promotion. Within my work, I had some time-based advancements, but a few of them were competitive promotions.

Within the Military, each job category gets ranked each year, and a small number of employees in that category with sustained high performance (over the last few years) are identified for promotion. I was fortunate to be on this list. It is reflective that several bosses in several different jobs recognised my potential for the next rank.

However, even though they realised my potential, there were several things that I still needed to learn. A few months ago, I wrote an article on The First Three Things You Need to Do When You Get Promoted. The first of them was on how essential it is to write a to-stop list as a new leader.

This article is the second in a three-part series that expands on the original article and deconstructs each of the first three things you need to do when you get promoted to leadership.
A Good Book
By: Shawn Forno
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Illustration, Poem, Books

A good book is a spool of

bootlace licorice.

GOBBLED up and GULPED

at first, but soon

you savor every bite.
Where will housing turnover occur in the next decade?
Tags: Smart Cities, Housing, Housing Crisis, Big Data, Urban Planning

One house, two house, red house, blue house! Predicting the future of these homes and this neighborhood may not be as complicated as you think.

Did you know that data can be used to help identify places in your city where housing turnover is likely to occur? By combining information like the age of local residents with owner-occupied homes, it’s easier to locate specific areas where housing is likely to change ownership. Change in housing leads to demographic shifts in neighborhoods and has a deep impact on city planning efforts. The silver lining: Predicting the future of your neighborhoods may not be as complicated as you think.

The evidence behind this logic points to amazing stability in the housing market until right around the age of 80. At that point, turnover is dramatic. If we know that boomers will be leaving their homes around the age of 80, and we know where those homes are, we can predict which parts of a community will be most dramatically impacted. Below is an example.

Potential Housing Turnover in Indianapolis, Indiana (Use your mouse to interact with this map and explore the charts with additional data in the toolbar)
DreamTeam Final Token Sale Has STARTED!
Tags: Investment, Gaming, Dreamteam, ICO, Blockchain

Join thousands of esports fans in supporting the largest infrastructure platform and payment gateway for esports and gaming!

Starting today until May 19th, 2018. This way you can help DreamTeam evolve the esports industry and create a unique ecosystem that offers a variety of solutions based on blockchain and smart-contracts to the esports enthusiasts and casual gamers.

On April 18th, the team management announced a decrease of the project’s total Token Sale hard cap from $45 million to $21 million due to the recent investment by Mangrove Capital Partners, a major European venture capital firm.

DreamTeam Token Crowdsale Info:

The DreamTeam Crowdsale Phase #2 starts on April 19 and continues through May 19, 2018.

Crowdsale Start: April 19th, 2018 (12:00 PM NYC, 17:00 LDN, 19:00 MSK, 00:00 HKG)

Crowdsale End: May 19th, 2018 (12:00 PM NYC, 17:00 LDN, 19:00 MSK, 00:00 HKG)

Exchange rate: 1 ETH = 1600 DREAM

Min. contribution: 0.1 ETH

Currency: ETH, BTC

Crowdsale Bonus:

Days 1–3: 10%;

Days 4–6: 5%;

Days 7–9: 3%.

Don’t miss the opportunity to be a part of the world’s most evolutionary esports project!

About DreamTeam:

DreamTeam — infrastructure platform and payment gateway for esports and gaming.

DreamTeam is the ultimate teambuilding and skill-growing platform that solves problems for hundreds of millions of gamers who want to build, grow, manage and monetize their teams. And with the unlocking of blockchain and smart contract technologies, DreamTeam is building a one-of-a-kind payment gateway for players, teams, tournaments and sponsors.

For more information on DreamTeam and its ICO, please visit https://token.dreamteam.gg/

Stay in touch: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn |BitcoinTalk.org
7 Innovations in Audio Storytelling
By: Jeremy Caplan
Tags: Audio, Podcasting, Radio, Podcast, Journalism

1. The First Podcast Feeds—2003

Digital audio files were generally distributed through Web pages in the days of “webcasting” that preceded podcasting. In late 2003, Dave Winer began wrapping audio in an RSS feed and Adam Curry created an RSS to iPod script. These and other related developments paved the way for the growth of “podcasting,” a term first used in this Guardian piece in 2004.

2. Embedded Audio—2008

Before podcast players were commonplace on smartphones, Soundcloud launched in 2008 and made it easy to distribute audio with the first widely-adopted embeddable audio tool. It was free and easy to use. Here’s an embed example, from the debut episode of our Tow-Knight podcast.

3. In-Line Audio—2013

Five years later, in 2013, Northwestern’s Knight Lab developed Soundcite, a terrific tool to make it easy to integrate sound snippets inline, right in the soul of a Web story. When you explore Soundcite examples, like the Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, you hear a small bit of sound bring a piece of text to life.

Soundcite provides an easy and elegant way to integrate audio into Web text

4. Social Audio—2018

A decade after Soundcloud launched and five years after Soundcite, Anchor.fm has taken audio embedding a step further. Anchor enables anyone to create a short video out of any audio clip that’s under three minutes. That means you can easily share audio in a visual way on social platforms like Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. Entrepreneurs have tried numerous times to create an “Instagram for audio” (witness the defunct French startup Bobler, for example), but this is the first time there appears to be traction.

5. Democratizing Audio Publishing—2018

Anchor has also made it easy for anyone to create and distribute a podcast. Others have focused on democratizing various aspects of the audio creation process, but Anchor is the best-designed service for novices that I’ve seen and the easiest to use. It’s also free.
Divi Project Smart Contract Token Sale Audit
By: Divi Cryptocurrency
Tags: Solidity, Ethereum, ICO, Cryptocurrency, Smart Contract

Divi Project Smart Contract Token Sale Audit

Today we are publishing a summary of the steps we have taken to ensure our Smart Contract code for the upcoming public Divi Token Sale has been thoroughly checked and audited.

The code for our smart contract is currently published and available for peer review here https://github.com/Divicoin/Smart-Contract/blob/master/contracts/DIVXToken.sol

After our team developed our Smart Contract, we hired an outside contractor to review our code and check for security issues as well as all known Solidity exploits.

We received the results that our code was good and covered all known existing issues. It was then recommend that we could add a simple redemption-call feature to help in the redemption process in the future. Although it was not necessary, we decided to add the extra feature in our code.

We then sent our Smart Contract code to another independent contractor to check over the changes and functionality. Everything checked out.

At this point we decided we were ready to send our Smart Contract to a security consulting company for a full source code review. We sent our code to https://securelayer7.net/ to do a full analysis that took about one week.

We received the result, and to the credit of our development team were even complimented on how well the code was written. The security company only pointed out 2 minor nuances, that we were able to work out during the review period.

Although steps like this significantly reduce the risks of smart contracts threats, they cannot warrant bug-free code.

A bounty program remains open with a reward of US $5,000 for discovery and responsible disclosure of issues that represent a tangible realistic security threat.

We are very excited to move forward with the Divi Project Token Sale on Oct 12, 2017 at 07:00 UTC.
THE CHILD & THE SERVANT
By: Tdj Enterprises
Tags: Destiny, Empowerment, Td Jakes

Part 12 of 18

Time Stamp: 20:26–22:10

Your Creator has endowed you with His power and will. In addition, He has even sanctioned the fruition of your destiny and you walking in it. Your future requires that you walk in the authority granted unto you. However, there are some pitfalls along the way. You will encounter some setbacks, but none are more deadly than your own, childish thinking. We have previously spoken about this subject, but I want to delve just a bit deeper into it with a scenario.

Imagine being the child of a King that has granted you an immense inheritance. As the next in line to the throne, you are the prince or princess. Supported by the King, your word will move the entire kingdom. The only reason it does not, at this moment, is the fact that your father still sits on the throne. In the meantime, your father has instructed all the teachers, sages, counselors, and learned scholars to teach you the ways of the kingdom you will rule and the world you inhabit.

All of this is wonderful. You are learning from the top minds of your kingdom. You are being prepared to step into the role you were born to occupy. Your inheritance is not only the kingdom, but also the wealth of your father — the King! Though all of this is good and fine, your status as the prince or princess has not changed. Besides your father, the King, you are the ruler of everyone who comes to see you. I really need you to get that.

YOU ARE THE RULER OF EVERYONE WHO COMES TO SEE YOU.

Though you are learning from all these people, you rule over them. Though they are teaching you, you rule over them. Though you obey their instructions, you rule over them. The only thing stopping you from fully realizing your destiny is your age or immaturity! It is your underdeveloped mentality that keeps you from fully walking in the ruling position granted to you by your father!

As it is in this story, so it is with you! Your Creator has granted you an enormous inheritance that will allow you to rule in your destiny. Though you are ruler over all that come your way — understand that this is an analogy; don’t think you rule other people — you are being hindered by the childish processing you have not put away in favor of grasping that which has been left to you.

God charges us to put away harmful, childish ways and perceptions as if we have a choice in the matter…and we do!

Your destiny requires it!

You can put it away. Make the decision now. You can put it away.
Hear How I Talk and You’ll See I Am Not Just a Rock
By: Jacobo The First
Tags: Storytelling, Poetry, Nature, Desert, Philosophy

A blazing desert scorches my toes.

Lost as the wind blows,

I walk without clothes.

Searching for a way out,

I scout.

“Hey you.”

I hear a whisper.

I look around,

cactus and sand in the background.

To the blue sky, I turn.

Only the wind feels my heartburn.

“Hey you, down here.”

Another whisper, I hear.

I look down,

a rock I see around.

“Do you know what I am?”

A rock? My eyebrows cram.

“No.”

“Look at my surface,

look at my pores,

my angles, my color.

Hear how I talk

and you’ll see I am not just a rock.”

“I’m so much more like your core.”

Me?

A lost soul searching for a key

in this dead sea?

I’m just trying to flee.

“You maybe be lost

with your heart frost.

But the place you seek

is not for the weak.”

“First, to the sacred palace you must coerce!”

Where is this sacred palace I must go with my affair?

“You have two eyes, yet you don’t see.

You have a skin, yet you don’t sense.

The sacred palace is immense!”

“Search within yourself,

find all the answers you seek,

and realize — you are unique.

Like myself!”

“Not only you’ll conquer the desert,

but so the world, you’ll assert.”
Sounds of Change
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Creative Writing, Poetry, BlackLivesMatter, Resistance

When there is brief silence,

we are all but still.

Our will, immune to human havoc and riot,

catches the shrill of lightning before it quiets,

the rattling of change pulsing through our voices,

bearing witness to the seismic shifts awaiting us.

An ancient yet familiar sound erupts,

from a subtle growl, unrecognizable at first,

amplifying swiftly into awe-inspiring thunder.

Feeling into our vocal cords, humming strongly in unity,

birthing strength to endure this mighty earthquake.

Awakening uncharted paths buried in the echo of our brains,

new vibrations fill in the holes of our history’s creaks and whispers.

Through the noise we ask questions, cutting away the static so innate,

our choices no longer fall on deaf ears, instead multiply and reverberate.

A perfect pause before that stirring beneath history’s shaky crust,

soft and slow for a seeming eternity. Then, the long awaited crescendo.

Roaring, an explosion so sudden and screaming,

Dawning sweet music conducted by the voices of infinity.

Speak loud, speak strong.

Our biggest mistake is to not speak at all.

Changes have begun, can you hear the sound?

Choosing not to shout and sing is simply to succumb to silence.

The music won’t wait, what we’ve created cannot be undone.
[BLOG] TEMCO Development and Business Progress
Tags: Blockchain, Guhada, Announcements

Market business status report

As of Jan. 13, the average number of monthly visitors since the market opening is about 300,000. The total number of registered products is about 270,000, and the average number of maintained products is about 100,000. Currently, about 40% of sellers have entered the luxury market based on the target.

Since the end of October, monthly orders have increased significantly. November orders increased 478% compared to October, and December orders increased 1,256% compared to November.

We are preparing for beta service that applies blockchain technology to our platform. Also, we are in a process to upload customs clearance, product purchase and distribution history to blockchain, and to receive A/S through NFC card. We will continue to expand the beta service by the end of January.

TEMCO team is making continuous efforts to stabilize the blockchain application and the whole project. We will endeavor to become a sustainable project with weekly development status and monthly business status.

Thank you for your support.
《返校》數據行銷：你是忘記有數據了還是害怕整不起來？ — 謝佩芳 Nicky
By: Ling Lee
Tags: 數據行銷, Wids2020, 返校, 行銷案例, Wids

We aim to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and support everyone in the field.

Follow