fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Singularity and Macroeconomics
By: Martins Untals
Tags: Economics, Automation, Elon Musk, Singularity, Paul Krugman

At first, looking at the past. Since ancient times technological innovation has caused economic displacement (“destroyed jobs” in newspeak). Over time, this newly created labor surplus (“unemployed people”) has transformed into new types of jobs filling in new types of needs paid for people who benefited from the initial job destruction. And then sometime later, it happens again. And every time, it is a harrowing process for those people losing jobs and can cause genuine damage to livelihoods of entire cities and generations of people.

First, farming became more productive due to various agricultural innovations — animal husbandry, plow, setting aside fields to rejuvenate, better crops, etc. This allowed farms to become more productive, and one farmer could finally support much more than one family. This led to the rise of towns and cities and various tradecrafts — shoemakers, tailors, brewers, jewelers and so on could start to create their wares much more efficiently now, once they were focusing on one skill, and trading with farmers, instead of doing it as an extra chore to farming. Everybody was better off.

The same cycle repeated multiple times, with professions with a large number of workers becoming more and more productive and requiring less and fewer workers to produce the same amount of goods and services. Farmers were first, then various other trades. And each time, one large profession was minimized and replaced by multiple smaller professions completely unrelated to the minimized job but paid for by the productivity gains of that change.

One of the most famous cases when such a large change happened during the industrial revolution, where large parts of the jobs done by workers involved in the textile industry were replaced by mechanisms driven by water and steam energy. This lead to the movement epitomized by John Ludd, that were fighting against the change. They become known as Luddites, and they were crushed by the army and by the unstoppable force of history.

This is most often one example cited by many economists that ridicule fears of “robots taking all the jobs.” And note that nobody could ever predict what professions would appear to fill the void, which leads directly to a similar prediction nowadays — when some industries are robotized, some new, yet unknown, jobs will pop up, and the world will go on.

And history does prove this happening even relatively recently. For example, we see the traditional ad-driven media industry shrinking in size and new professions like online marketing specialist, native advertisement management, and social media influencer taking appearing to fill the void. And none of those things had a name twenty years ago.

One of the most famous economists ridiculing those who worry about automation is Paul Krugman (New Youk Times, Twitter). Brilliant scientist, worth every second of time you spend listening to him and reading his work. His views on automation can be heard in five minutes here.
Explaining Expressible Literals in Swift
By: Antoine Van Der Lee
Tags: Swift, Xcode, Programming, iOS, Mobile

Explaining Expressible Literals in Swift

Enrich your custom types by initializing them with a String, Array, or other types

Photo by Zuzanna Adamczyk on Unsplash

Expressible literals allow you to initialize types by making use of literals. There are multiple protocols available in the Swift standard library, the chances are you’ve already been using one.

An example is the ExpressibleByStringLiteral allowing us to initialize a String using surrounding double quotes instead of using the String(init:) method. We can all benefit from the fact that Swift is built through these protocols by adopting the protocols in our own defined types.

What’s a Literal?

A literal is a notation for representing a fixed value such as integers, strings, and booleans. Literals in Swift are made possible by several available protocols. Standard types conform to these protocols and allow us to initialize values as follows:

var integer = 0 // ExpressibleByIntegerLiteral

var string = "Hello!" // ExpressibleByStringLiteral

var array = [0, 1, 2] // ExpressibleByArrayLiteral

var dictionary = ["Key": "Value"] // ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral

var boolean = true // ExpressibleByBooleanLiteral

Those are the most commonly used ones but there are a few others. They’re worth exploring and while you do, you might run into a special protocol called ExpressibleByNilLiteral .

The ExpressibleByNilLiteral is used to make it possible to initialize optionals using nil :

var optional: String? = nil // ExpressibleByNilLiteral

This protocol is used for optionals only and should not be used for custom types. Basically, just ignore this one.
Backporting the latest Google Cloud operators in Apache Airflow and Cloud Composer
By: Israel Herraiz
Tags: Apache Airflow, Google Cloud Composer, Etl, Kubernetes, Data

Photo by Raul Cacho Oses on Unsplash

The Google Cloud operators for Apache Airflow offer a convenient way to connect to services such as BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, from your DAG. If you are not in the latest Airflow version, you might be stuck with a set of operators that don’t bring the latest available functionality.

With the fast pace of evolution of cloud services, this can become an issue that prevents you from leveraging the latest Google Cloud features in your data pipelines. In this post we show how to backport the latest version of the Google Cloud operators, with a focus on Cloud Composer (the Google Cloud’s managed version of Apache Airflow), so you can use them without being forced to upgrade your Airflow version.

For this post, let’s assume that you are using Airflow 1.10.6. The latest available version of Airflow with Cloud Composer is 1.10.10. So in this example, the Google Cloud operators that would be available by default in your system are the ones that were shipped with Airflow 1.10.6.

For instance, the latest version of the DataprocSubmitJobOperator has an additional option that is handy if the Airflow web UI restarts. You can either reattach to an existing job or launch it again (see AIRFLOW-3211).

What if you are in an older version of Airflow and want to use that behavior? How do I update Composer to bring those operators to my current environments?
What If
By: Rhonda Skinner
Tags: Time, Illusion, Spiritual Secrets, Poetry, Spirituality

What If

A poem

In the Garden, Photo by Author, Copyright All Rights Reserved

Could you take a ride on a teardrop

Could you see the earth sing in a child’s eyes

Could you feel my heartbeat in the moons’ light

What separates us

If you hurt, I hurt

If you sing, I sing

The breath you take feeds your soul

The breath I take keeps me moving in a world without end

The moments we have are what we have at this very moment

The life you live touches those around you

Without fail, without end

There is only this time

There is only this space

We can grab each moment without hast

For you are right where you need to be, and the same is for me

Time is the illusion they sell on a wrist band piece

But it is continual without a breath does it take

Be well, my friend, and know that you are held

By beauty and light

You are loved without end
#FFXIV — why I can’t leave
By: A.C. Flory
Tags: Gaming, Games For Big Kids, Furnishings, Ffxiv, Final Fantasy Xiv

I’ve written some pretty unhappy posts about Final Fantasy XIV over the last few months, but no matter how angry I get, one thing keeps me playing. And this is it. My house in Mist:

[caption id=”attachment_8467" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

From the outside[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_8468" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

The front door[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_8469" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

Warmth and books[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_8470" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

And a place to cook :)[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_8471" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

Going downstairs…[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_8472" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

…into…[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_8473" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

…the bedroom![/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_8474" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

with its own oriental ensuite![/caption]

And finally the best feature of all — the view.

[caption id=”attachment_8476" align=”aligncenter” width=”490"]

Dawn breaks in Mist[/caption]

Yet as pretty as this scene is, it still doesn’t convey the eerie sense of reality I get when I sit here, staring down at the beach and watching the waves come in. Yes, there are waves and breakers and they move, seemingly at random.

But the waves are not the only things that move. Birds fly overhead, casting a shadow, or the quality of the light changes due to time of day or weather, or off on the horizon you see the dim outline of a ship with massive sails, majestically sailing out of sight…

No prizes for guessing where a lot of my ideas for Innerscape came from.

Have a lovely Sunday,

Meeks

p.s. most of the furnishings are crafted. If anyone is interested, I can tell you what each piece is, which craft makes it and what level recipe it is. Let me know in comments.
Optimize Build Speed in webpack 4
By: Mitsuya Watanabe
Tags: Webpack, JavaScript, Programming, Node, Nodejs

Speed ​​Verification With Multi-Core

The file compression plug-in uglyfy-webpack-plugin on the official webpack page supports building with multiple CPU cores. This plug-in is supposed to be included in webpack by default in v1.0.0, but now it needs to be manually installed via npm.

npm install --save-dev uglifyjs-webpack-plugin

The plug-in reference has the following annotation:

Parallelization can speedup your build significantly and is therefore highly recommended.

It is highly recommended to increase the build speed. In order to apply multi-core on building process, it is required to enable the parallel property or specify the number of cores. The code is as follows.

Result

Conclusion

In terms of getting a faster build speed, it is effective to set parallel properties for multi-core processes. Especially, when building large projects, this function is super helpful.

Although my laptop doesn’t equip a quad core, I tried to set the number of cores to four and measured. As a result, it seems to be slightly faster than the dual core, but since my laptop doesn’t support quad core, it must have been measuring with dual core. The difference in build time between the dual core and quad core is probably the range of tolerance.

Indeed, on the webpack side, the setting of the number of cores is used in the following code, and it seems that the number of cores to be used is determined by looking at the number of cores of the OS.
FAA’s drone policy is having ‘impermissible chilling effect’ — News Media
By: Tow Center
Tags: Drones, Research, Faa

Top American journalism organizations have filed court documents saying the Federal Aviation Authority is chilling free speech and restricting a free press.

Sixteen companies, including the New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, the Tribune group, Hearst, Gannet and The National Press Club filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief saying that the “federal government has deprived its citizens and a free and independent news media of the opportunity to participate in the rulemaking process”, and should “move forward with the development of polices that protect, rather than hinder, freedom of speech and of the press.”

The statement was submitted as part of the court battle between the FAA, who has regulatory responsibility for the USA’s airspace and Raphael Pirker, a drone pilot who was paid to fly his small remote controlled aircraft taking video and photos of the University of Virginia campus.

The full brief runs to thirty-four pages, quoting examples of what the authors say are inconsistent enforcement actions by the FAA, beneficial drone uses by news media, and a unjustifiably slow rule-making process.

essay-outline.com/

www.my-mebel.net

www.forex-top.com
Introducing the Nomad Navigators
By: Nomad Health
Tags: Career Advice, Careers, Doctors, Healthcare, Nursing

Navigate your clinical career with help from the Nomad Navigators

We are thrilled today to introduce the Nomad Navigators! The Nomad Navigators are a newly formed superteam within Nomad Health that is here to provide concierge-level support to all doctors, nurses, and medical employers.

The Navigators are here to support all healthcare professionals in navigating their careers in healthcare, or finding great clinical talent. The team is also here to help those who are new to Nomad and are interested in learning more about how our recruiter-free healthcare jobs marketplace works.

The Navigators will help guide you throughout your clinical job search, triage any problems you encounter, and make sure your journey to finding the perfect job (or the perfect hire) is smooth.

Meet our Nomad Navigators (including our naviGator below!):

Here are the 100% complimentary benefits of the Nomad Navigators:

We are here to help you not only find your next clinical job, but also, plan your future. Since we are all extensively trained in the clinical search process and we talk to doctors and nurses like you everyday, we are happy to share our informed recommendations. Whether you’re an experienced “Locum Pro” seeking help perfecting your resume, or a resident searching for your first job, we are here to guide you. Are you a nurse interested in traveling for the first time? We’re here to answer all your questions and suggest jobs that would be a great match for your preferences.

No question is too big or small. As you’re getting started, ask us about how to search for jobs on Nomad, complete your profile, or set up the perfect Job Alert. See a job you’re on the fence about? Let us know and we can offer candid advice on the pros and cons. Not every job is “perfect” for all clinicians. We want you to have a smooth experience on the Nomad website that extends into your life in a new job.

Let us know how we can improve your experience. No doctor, nurse, or employer has the same ideal path in mind, and we believe you should not receive the same support. Can you think of a medical employer you’d love to work for that isn’t already on Nomad? Tell us! We are happy to work our magic. Want to uproot and move across the country? We will pay for your new license once you score a job on Nomad. We are here to listen to any and all requests.

The Nomad Navigators are excited to hear from you!

Need help with your job search, or have a few questions about how to use Nomad? The Nomad Navigators are ready to chat with you!

Here are some ways to reach us:

Schedule time here!

Email us at hello@nomadhealth.com

Shoot us a message through the blue chat bubble on the website.

Call 866-OK-NOMAD (866–656–6623)

Interested in texting? Email us and we’ll get you set up. Never lose another opportunity in your email inbox!

We’re very excited to take your clinical job search experience to the next level. Our Nomad Navigators are looking forward to helping you and we hope to connect with you soon!

Warmly,

The Nomad Team

nomadhealth.com
How we sent ETH to the wrong address and successfully recovered them
By: Anton Bukov
Tags: Smart Contracts, Security, Ether, Ethereum, Eth

But it was just the beginning of the story. My collegue asked me if I had a private key for the address 0x9c86825280b1d6c7dB043D4CC86E1549990149f9. I had sent him a private key for address 0x231A3925A014EF0a11a0DC5c33bF7cdB3bd9919f, which was used to deploy a contract to the first address. We discussed the issue and decided it was not possible to recover this money 😔

Every contract deployed to Ethereum network has a specific address, which looks random, but I discovered exactly how contract address is generated on deploy: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/761/3032. Simply it is just hash of transaction sender address and nonce number (equals to number of transactions by this sender):

deployed_address = sha3(rlp.encode([sender, nonce]))

This gave me an idea to use the original wallet (the one I used in TESTNET previously) to deploy several new smart contracts to MAINNET. I developed a simple wallet smart contract, which would allow me to display and reclaim lost funds:

contract SimpleWallet is Ownable { function () public payable {

} function weiBalance() public constant returns(uint256) {

return this.balance;

} function claim(address destination) public onlyOwner {

destination.transfer(this.balance);

}

}

Then I found a transaction which deployed contract in TESTNET: 0xc4c32a3d97dbd691eb3646e4c0c404e899a632010bc48d7182d75bef6803b7bc and discovered that nonce field was equal to 13. So I sent 0.03 ETH to this wallet in MAINNET and started to deploy a simple wallet smart contract to MAINNET multiple times, until nonce had reached value 13. And thats it, I got smart contract deployed to the desired address! Here are 2 transactions with nonce equal to 13, which deployed 2 diffrerent smart contracts into 2 different networks to exactly the same addresses with 5 days difference 😎:

Funds were successfully claimed by calling the claim method of a freshly deployed simple wallet smart contract 👏👏👏

Also you may notice that this contract in MAINNET was deployed two days later, after it had been funded 🤗:
clean escape . . .
By: Fox Kerry
Tags: Stay Your Course, Poetry, Fiction, Those Moments, Flee Or Fight

what was she doing, in this place, why at this time so sacred?

For 20 years he’d moved away, and purged of her so fragrant.

Was he hypocrite stew, naked before men, was all that he’d accomplished undone?

How did this thread of painful past and awkward knots so run?

If disappearing were a holy act, he’d push that button at once

and yet a part of all his growth demanded to forego such punts.

But how to focus on heaven’s bread, when there in the rows was his thorn?

and what a vice her soul so nice, a million hungers re-born.

And so he did what you’d half-expect, he picked up the pages of Bible

and sermonized that very day of a change in heart none could libel.

He looked at the Cross; he looked at the Mother, He looked at the Oil so prayed for.

And as he concluded the homily of his life, he looked out to the message she’d not stayed for.
A 9-Minute Lesson in Environmental Literacy
By: Allie Lowy
Tags: Environmental Issues, Climate Change, Water, Sustainability, Environment

A 9-Minute Lesson in Environmental Literacy

Seven Tidbits To Put Things in Perspective

In my 20 years, Environmental Science is the most complexly fascinating, interdisciplinary issue I have come across to date. Using data from biology, chemistry and the Earth Sciences, we draw conclusions to write policy that will shape economies, have ethical implications, and influence food, water, human health, and lifestyle choices for all of humanity for all of the foreseeable future. Because of its breadth, the subject merits pop-science explanations, especially to emphasize the dire straits in which we find ourselves and the urgency of taking strong, deliberate action. The following — a collection of tidbits learned from my semester at UVa — is an attempt to do just that.

1. By 2030, half of the world’s population will live in areas of high water stress.

California is in the driest 20 years of the past 1,200.

In 2030, 1.8 billion people will live in areas of absolute water scarcity, and water demand will exceed supply by 40 percent.

Although the world’s freshwater is declining, the population is vastly growing, and humans will need more water to survive on a hotter, drier planet. Limited water can threaten access to cleaning and sanitation services, reduce crop yields, create food insecurity, and have disastrous human health impacts.

Up to 80% of illnesses in developing countries stem from poor sanitation conditions. Globally, about 1 in 8 people lack access to clean water. With variable precipitation and drier arid regions, climate change will diminish crop yields, particularly in the low-latitudes.

Africa is arguably the continent least responsible for climate change, but most vulnerable to its effects — already afflicted by droughts, extreme heat events, and declining agricultural yields.

The mechanism: When greenhouse gas emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, they warm the air, increasing the amount of water the atmosphere can hold. This can lead to heavier bouts of rainfall once the air cools. Heavier rainfall expedites the movement of water from the atmosphere to the (saltwater) ocean, reducing our capacity to use it. A warmer planet also means more evaporation, which means drier, even desertified land (a particularly dismal consequence for agriculture).

With climate change, precipitation is more likely to come in the form of isolated, extreme weather events, often followed by long dry periods. This means stronger storms — causing flooding — sandwiched between seasons of drought and water scarcity. Industrial pollution, run-off from chemical fertilizer, and over-extraction of groundwater can also deplete freshwater resources.
Things To Note When Practicing Trading
By: The Blockchain
Tags: Trading, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Cryptocurrency Investment, Bitcoin

You can not improve trading if not through the practice. Not only the newbie, but even the high players also practice. Instead of risking real money with your school using an unclear method, use a demo for testing. Exercise is not risky (mainly demo), but to really be effective you should note the following:

1. Observe all the principles of the war

Practice with demo is quite boring because there is no risk, making the training process is relatively bland. For that reason, sometimes we break the discipline to create some excitement like hand-to-hand, irregular instruction, etc. All these actions have absolutely no financial impact. , so we do not mind doing anything.

However, the unpredictable consequences lie behind these actions. You are in the process of training, all you do will affect the trading process later. These lack of discipline will create a habit when you touch real money. When the market becomes boring (eg sideways, no signal, …) you will be able to hand all.

2. Practice long enough to see the results

If you enter 3 commands, all three win, and you think it’s time for war, then that could be a mistake.

Firstly, according to the theory of probability, with the number of short trade, the results do not say anything. You may even be lucky to win 10 trade even more. While the actual winning rate is much lower.

Do not rush to practice when you have not trade demo long enough, sweat training, the battlefield less bloodshed.

3. Do not stop updating knowledge, theory

Practice is practice. Is the process of transforming learned theory into action. The theory is definitely drier and less interesting than practice. But do not ever stop updating your knowledge. The more read you read, the more knowledge you have to put into practice, the more you make, the more successful you will be in the war.

Happy Trading

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

WEBSITE

=> https://kriptoa.com/

TELEGRAM

=> https://t.me/KriptoA_com

FACEBOOK

=> https://www.facebook.com/KriptoA

INSTAGRAM

=> https://www.instagram.com/kriptoa_com

TWITTER

=> https://twitter.com/KriptoA_com

REDDIT

=> https://www.reddit.com/user/KriptoA_com

MEDIUM

=> https://medium.com/@KriptoA
StableCoins — The Future of Crypto?
By: Shane Moser
Tags: Crypto, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Altcoins, Bitcoin

The crypto space is constantly evolving, and it can be difficult to keep up with all the developments that are happening. There is an almost constant flow of mergers, partnerships, new coins, new exchanges, regulatory pushback and development, price fluctuations, and everything in between.

So what does that mean for the future of all cryptocurrency? Will the evolution continue on as we have seen so far at its current pace, or will crypto inevitably arrive at a place where things can’t evolve any more? Is there an ideal destination for crypto as a whole?

These are big questions, as no one initially saw cryptocurrency coming, or had any idea of the impact it would have on the world’s existing financial infrastructure. Now that the world has a rough idea of what they are dealing with when it comes to crypto, what does a realistic future look like?

The most popular time for cryptocurrency was arguably back in May of 2017. This period of time was the golden era for everything crypto as the price of Bitcoin started to skyrocket, fanning the flames of a budding global industry. Cryptocurrency went from being on the fringes of society to front page news in a very short period of time. People everywhere were suddenly asking one another what a Bitcoin was, what blockchain is, and so on. In that time ICO’s were plentiful and countless people were raking in profits as cryptocurrencies burst with value.

Now that the landscape of crypto has changed will there be a push for more stablecoins? As these assets trade at a fixed value it begs the question to why anyone would use them at all, wouldn’t it basically be the same as using traditional currency?

It all comes down to actual value. On the surface stablecoins suggest that their values are exactly 1:1 with that of their pegged currency, but we see that this is in fact not the case. The value of a stablecoin seems more so based on the investors perception of risk over whichever company created the stable coin in the first place. Trust once again enters into the equation between buyer and seller.

Stablecoins then are the band-aid solution to the problems of days old, when crypto was experiencing record hills and valleys. For now it seems as though stablecoins offer a more approachable and perhaps more enticing answer to weary investors, but only time will tell if the future for cryptocurrency has room for them.
“White Men Behaving Sadly”
By: Jess Brooks
Tags: Film, Race, Gender

“Why are white men so sad? Well, in this film, they are sad because women are fucked up shrews and alcoholics who drag them down, give them heart attacks and, for god’s sake, try to talk to them and offer them food. They are also sad because they work for very little money and do the worst jobs in the world. They clean other peoples’ toilets, fix their showers and live in small garrets alone and with very bad furniture. Poor sad white men. This sad white man also has to take on the burden of parenthood after his brother’s death. His brother left his only son in Lee’s care and Lee and the boy tussle about girls, sex and authority until Lee learns to see the boy as his heir, as another white man who should enjoy his adolescence because soon everything will be taken from him too…

While critics fall over themselves to give this film an Oscar, we should ask what the film is really about. If this film is an allegory then it is a perfect symbolic landscape of the territory that ushered Trump into office — the film sees the world only through the eyes of working class white men. It sees such men as tragic and heroic, as stoic and moral, as stern but good. The film knows that the tragedy from which the white man suffers is of his own making but nonetheless the film believes that the tragedies that they have created happen to them and not to other people.”
What is a TRAK token? How will it be used and how will investors benefit?
Tags: ICO, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Token Sale

What is a TRAK token? How will it be used and how will investors benefit? TrakInvest Follow Jan 1, 2018 · 3 min read

TrakInvest Token (‘TRAK’ token) is a utility token that will be utilized to perform 3 major activities on the Platform

1) Tokenizing reputational system- Under this, when a trader on TrakInvest performs well and gets a high TI score, he or she automatically moves to the top of the leaderboard as a top trader (trader to follow). So when a novice trader comes on the platform and has no idea how to trade, he/she can simply follow the top traders recommended by our AI tool and get to know the trading insights by following the techniques of an expert trader. To do so, the learner or the novice trader pays the expert a token fee for accessing his/her trade ideas. This creates a rewarding peer-to-peer learning ecosystem that benefits both the novice and the expert traders on the platform and motivates them to perform better.

2) Tokenizing of Certification- The GOTC (Global online trading certificate) is an initiative of TrakInvest to help spread financial literacy and awareness while connecting mass talent with mass opportunities. The GOTC program certifies the user to several high-level standards and benchmarks set by TrakInvest industry experts, so the user can use these as a proven track-record in their career. Earning the certificate demonstrates your capability and confidence in equities trading and investment management. Users can provide this certificate as a proof of their trading performance and skill-sets to showcase their trading history on the platform to employers for jobs or internships, or for gaining entry to college and university courses. So with tokenizing, students can pay for this particular certificate in TRAK tokens and earn the certificate as a smart contract that is non-tamperable, secure form of awarding a degree.

3) Tokenizing data ownership- With 1,00,000+ users trading on the TrakInvest platform, they generate huge amount of trading data and insights that can be fed as inputs to research firms for generating predictive analytics. With tokenizing of data ownership, users will be paid in TRAK tokens, whenever their data is used.

The demand for TRAK token is connected to the demand of the services offered by TrakInvest as each of these services will be paid for in TRAK tokens. TrakInvest offers certification programs and social trading features which will require users to pay for in TRAK tokens. As the number of users on TrakInvest increase, the demand for TrakInvest rises creating a rising demand for TRAK tokens. The rising demand for TRAK tokens benefits the investors as the supply is limited, creating a price rise.

Partcipate in our Pre — ICO sale, visit our ICO website at www.trakinvest.ai , download our whitepaper and read our FAQs to find out more. For questions, write to us on support@trakinvest.com. To engage with our management team, join us on telegram here.
How To Achieve Higher Frequency Customer Service
By: Nate Rutan
Tags: Business, Humanity, Positivity, Customer Service, Encouragement

How To Achieve Higher Frequency Customer Service

Encouragement is the ultimate humaneness

Over the last ten years, we’ve had many cantankerous customers. These are the kind that will send multiple emails in a short amount of time, demanding a refund, or pointing out some small error on your website. They are generally nit-picky and might say things that hurt your feelings.

On multiple occasions, we’ve had customers that email or leave a voicemail with words that cut deep, probably not aware that there is a team of human beings on the other side of the screen or message.

If you’ve launched a business that sells directly to the public, there’s a good chance that someone, someday will be critical of your hard work in a way that hits a nerve.

I’ve had times when I’ve just finished putting in multiple, sleep-deprived days, eyes burning, tiny veins bulging, only to find an email from a customer the next day talking about how a kindergartner might have designed the changes I’ve made on the site.

Or something to that effect. It doesn’t happen all the time, but these experiences do add up over a decade.
St Hilda of Whitby: A Cantata
By: Oxford University
Tags: St Hilda, Cantata, Music, Anniversary, Life In Oxford

St Hilda of Whitby: A Cantata

Celebrating the 125th Anniversary of St Hilda’s College

St Hilda’s College opened as an Oxford Hall for women 125 years ago, in 1893.

We will start our anniversary celebrations in style on 18 February, with our choir and orchestra performing at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. The concert will include an international debut. ‘St Hilda of Whitby: A Cantata’ has been created especially for our anniversary by our alumnae and award-winning artistes, the poet Wendy Cope (History, 1963) and the composer, Nicola LeFanu (Music 1965).

It was an ambitious project, as Nicola said, to ‘compose something that would be fun and stimulating to sing, even though it would be a challenge to learn a new work in a short time… what helped was the pleasure of working with Wendy Cope.’ Wendy agreed that it was a ‘pleasant and easy collaboration.’ Nicola felt that Hilda must have been a very strong, well-educated and remarkable person to have been held in such esteem by the leading men and women of her day. As the work progressed, Wendy provided more text for Hilda, so that the Cantata would be clearly focussed on her.

Our founder certainly chose well when she named our College after St Hilda (614–680), who was head of Whitby Abbey, the leading house of education of her time. Miracles were associated with Hilda and the serpent on our College coat of arms represent the snakes that she is said to have changed into stone, to protect the Whitby nuns. Like Dorothea Beale, who fought to create opportunities for women in the latter half of the 19th century, St Hilda was a great educational force. She is considered one of the patron saints of learning and culture, including poetry. This is largely due to her patronage of Cædmon, an illiterate stable hand. St Hilda persuaded him to become a monk at Whitby after the miracle that enabled him to sing in honour of God the Creator, using words that he had never heard before. The resulting Cædmon’s Hymn is the oldest recorded English poem.

In common with most monastic houses at that time, Whitby was a mixed community, with nuns and monks working and worshiping together. Under Hilda’s guidance, it became a cradle for many of the great saints and scholars of the Church. According to the Venerable Bede’s History of the English Church and People, her patronage produced no fewer than five bishops. Fittingly, we will perform this musical tribute to St Hilda when we remember not only our foundation, but the 10th anniversary of welcoming the first male students to our College in 2008.

The concert also includes ‘Zadok the Priest’ and Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’ from ‘Tristan and Isolde’.

The evening will begin with a pre-concert talk at 4.45pm. The performance starts at 5.30pm, to be followed by a drinks reception in the Church.

Book tickets: https://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/content/st-hilda-whitby-cantata
Government Vacation Rewards: What are They, and How Do They Work?
Tags: Traveling, Travel, Travel Tips, Military, Veterans

Booking a vacation is all fun and games — that is, until it comes time to type in your credit card information. When did travel get so darn expensive?

At Government Vacation Rewards, we don’t think prohibitive costs should prevent families from traveling together. That’s why we’re committed to helping military service members fulfill their travel dreams at an affordable price point. If you are an active duty military service member, retired veteran, government employee, civilian contractor, or family member of a military service member, you are eligible for deals and savings from Government Vacation Rewards.

Those who sign up gain instant access the best travel deals on the market. So pack your bags, grab the sunscreen, and learn more about how you can save on your next big trip.

Read the full story here!
The Case Against ALL Voter I.D. Laws
By: Edward Robson
Tags: Justice, Law, Elections, Republican Party, Politics

The Case Against ALL Voter I.D. Laws

They are unnecessary, discriminatory, and antidemocratic.

Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

Ever since the wave election of 2010 gave the Republican Party full control of numerous state legislatures, one agenda many of them have aggressively pursued has been to pass restrictive voter I.D. laws.

The stated reason for requiring voters to prove their identity is to safeguard the integrity of our elections by preventing voter fraud. This seems reasonable — elections can be close, and everybody wants to know that every ballot has been cast by a bona fide citizen of the community.

The stated reason, however, may not be the most important one. It certainly does not explain why it is always the same party agitating for these measures.

High turnout in American elections tends to favor Democrats. It therefore behooves Republicans to keep the turnout low by making it more difficult to vote.

President Trump acknowledged this on Fox News on 3/30/2020 in his comments about the voting provisions in the Democrats’ COVID stimulus bill: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

I think it’s safe to say that’s an exaggeration. There is no reason to believe the GOP is incapable of nominating candidates who can win honest majorities in fair elections.

But the principle is valid nonetheless. The Republican Party traditionally favors the wealthy and business owners. The Democratic Party champions protections for the poor, minorities, and the working class — a far larger constituency. If everybody voted their interests, which party do you think would win?
Acknowledge Death
By: Rj Reyes
Tags: Note To Self, Death, Improvement

What can you do today that would make you feel ok to die tomorrow?

Not knowing how much time you have left is an advantage. The countdown will only tempt you to rush through life. And when you rush, you don’t get to enjoy the process.

There will always be a list of things you wished you could’ve done. That’s how it should be. Accomplishments lead to contentment. But staying in contentment can make you stagnant. That’s when boredom makes you wonder: Is this all there is to it?

Life is not a checklist but a series of problems need to be solved. Problems turn you into the person you should be. Face it with courage.

Having the intent to do solve problems weigh nothing. You must take action. Thinking it only relieves you from internal guilt but no one else benefits from it (including yourself).

There is more to gain in failing than in winning. Failure gifts you with lessons, not embarrassment. Critics may embarrass you but thank them for showing who you really are to the world.

Strive to be the best version of yourself. The better you are the better you can serve others. But don’t use that as an excuse to avoid doing what you really want. The people you serve also want you to be happy. Spare them the burden of feeling guilty for holding you back.

If you don’t think you’re gonna die today, then do something that would make things better than yesterday.
Introducing Belacam’s New 10–10 Referral Program
By: Tyler Marx
Tags: Referral Marketing, Crypto, Growth Hacking, Bitcoin, Erc20

Our referral program has always been a core pillar of user acquisition for Belacam.com — over half of our 325,000+ users joined through someone’s referral link. In fact, our top referrers earn as much as $50 per day promoting the site. We’re now improving our referral program to give it our referrers true limitless and continual earning potential.

With the new referral program, we pay a bonus when you first bring aboard a new user through your referral link, and then you can continuously earn more from that same user as they take our paid surveys at Belacam.com/surveys. Our top survey takers earn as much as $5 per day—if they were referred by you, you would be earning $.50 per day as they take surveys. These referrals are paid out in real-time: continuously and immediately after they finish their surveys.

Do I earn 10% survey earnings from old referrals?

Yes! We are grandfathering in all past referrals to this new plan. If you referred someone a year ago and got your 10 BELA bonus from them back then, you can encourage them to take surveys now at Belacam.com/surveys, and you will get paid when do so.

How do I get a referral link?

Go to Belacam.com/referral/dashboard to apply for a referral link. Your referral link application will be processed within 48 hours. Once approved, share your link with as many people as you can to maximize your earnings.

What if surveys aren’t available in my country?

Belacam’s paid surveys are currently available in 54 countries. If you aren’t in an eligible country, you can’t take surveys yourself, but you can still recruit referrals from other countries for a share of their survey earnings.
Google Glass คืออะไร?
By: Suranart Niamcome
Tags: Google Glass, News

in Both Sides of the Table
Time for Motor and e-Sports
Tags: Crypto, Dani Clos, Blockchain, Motor, E Sports

Globatalent launched two new tokenization campaigns, one with former F1 Driver Dani Clos and the other exclusively for the Gaming community.

After the success of the first two campaigns -David Vega and Zentro Basket Madrid, both still ongoing-, Globatalent launched another pair of possibilities for the Token Holders and everyone who wants to get involved in the world of sports.

Dani Clos, former Formula 1 Driver, will participate in the 24 hours of Le Mans and all of the Le Mans series in 2020 and is looking for fans to give financial support on this new challenge.

How to be part of this campaign? Just register in our Marketplace! The minimum purchase of a Token is 20 USD and the Spaniard is willing to offer in return, among other benefits, 10% of the awards he gets during the next year.

But that’s not all! Globatalent also brings you the first decentralized e-Sports Team. The goal is to give everyone the chance to participate on which players to sign, which uniform to wear and which games our team will play.

Click here and join the campaign for only 5 USD! Globatalent will distribute, between all the supporters, 10% of the annual revenue and, most important, 40% of the team will belong to our users community!

There’s room for improvement and we will continue to grow our two passions: Sports and Technology. Join us and be part of this fantastic adventure!

By Federico López Frey.

Do not forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Telegram!
Understanding OpenPose (with code reference)— Part 1
By: Peter Tanugraha
Tags: Machine Learning, Object Detection, Pose Estimation, Computer Vision, Neural Networks

Human 2D pose estimation is the problem of localizing human body parts such as the shoulders, elbows and ankles from an input image or video. In most of today’s real world application of human pose estimation, a high degree of accuracy as well as “real-time” inference is required.

OpenPose, developed by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University can be considered as the state of the art approach for real-time human pose estimation. The code base is open-sourced on github and is very well documented. Openpose is originally written in C++ and Caffe.

Throughout the article, I may also be referencing some code from here , an accurate Tensorflow implementation of OpenPose. Use this article as a starting point and read the full paper afterwards as I have left out some specific details from the paper to conserve space.

This article is split into three different parts. The first part will analyze the overall setup of OpenPose; the main neural network architecture and common notations used throughout the paper. The second part will go into detail regarding confidence maps and part affinity maps. The third part of the article will discuss how the key points are finally assembled correctly from the outputs of the neural network by viewing the problem as a Graph matching problem.

Before we go into the details of OpenPose, it is worth noting that there exists two versions of the paper this and this. The first original paper was submitted on 24 Nov 2016 and the most recent one was submitted on 18 Dec 2018. There are a couple minor differences such as the neural network architecture and some post processing aspect resulting in an improved speed and accuracy. However, the general idea and overall pipeline is still the same. For more details on the differences, you can find it in the 1st section of the most recent paper here. In this article, we will explore the original version of the paper since at the time of writing this article, most implementations on github are still using the steps described in the first paper.
All over the place
By: Joseph Emmi
Tags: Discipline, Self-awareness, Productivity, Self Improvement, Focus

All over the place

The importance of discipline and the benefit of last-minute panic

There are day s like today when one thing changes everything. One action changes the course of the day, sometimes for good, sometimes not so much. Today feels like the latter, although expectation were like the former.

And when I look back, more than 12 hours later, it all goes back to routine and repetition. It always starts my day in a certain way, there are a series of steps that I follow religiously everyday and prompt me into action; and although I can do things, either way, I can’t deny the lack of order I sense over a day when these steps have not been in place.

It’s like starting a computer and getting the operative system loaded.

The problem is that, it’s not until it is too late that I end up realising what the issues and what do I need to do to “restart”.

It’s not a great feeling seeing most of your day going by without even knowing at time where did the time go and why I’m still in the same place.

However, what I came to learn is not to dwell and let this day follow its course and reach its conclusion, focus on the one ahead. Dwelling will only delay things more with the same results, if not worst.

I have also learned to embrace and make the most of the focus that comes with last-minute panic. Yes. Because when time becomes scarce, we immediately prioritise better, focus on the important and act upon it.

That focus tends to show a couple of available options, from which I tend to work upon or plan ahead. This is the case of this post.

I could have finished a document from work or write this pice. I already know I can only choose one, so I decided this.

Finishing the document could have taken me a similar time that writing this and it was meant to be done today, however, the receiver is not going to review it until tomorrow morning, meaning that I can finish the details on the train on my way to the office. In addition to this, I’m committing myself to write every day again, so if going to the document this piece would have rather cancelled for today or done after the document, which then will jeopardise my sleeping time, and by consequence possibly compromising my awaking time.

See how obvious it is to make this decision based on the fact that the document is not going to be used today? All this rationale happened in a matter of seconds, probably the same amount it would take me in normal circumstances. The problem on a daily basis is exactly that, finding focus.

That’s why booting my operative system at the beginning of every day is so important. It does not except me from distractions or bad habits, but at least sets me in a good direction to be less prone to it, or at least one in where a sense of a lack of structure will not be permeating the day clouding judgement, and ultimately, focus.