fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Blockchain Revolution: Part One
By: Abhishek Sengar
Tags: Blockchain, Disruption, Technology, Bitcoin, Revolution

Blockchain Revolution: Part One

Understanding blockchain and its application

Blockchain is an exhaustive topic and therefore we have decided to run a cycle of articles under this series named ‘Blockchain Revolution’. From understanding the concept to building your own ERC20 token, we will be covering most critical and functional aspects of blockchain technology. Our aim is to help our readers understand the concept of blockchain and its application across sectors, build simple blockchain applications, and understand smart contracts and how they are powered. This is the first post of the series that introduces blockchain and its applications.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word blockchain? — Bitcoin? Wrong, it’s a misconception that blockchain is bitcoin. Bitcoin is cryptocurrency that is built on the blockchain technology.

Blockchain is one of the most talked about subject right now. While the integration of this technology is in its nascent stage, industry leaders believe that blockchain is set to transform the economic and social system in years to come. The global blockchain technology market which is at over $500 million now, is predicted to grow to $2.3 billion by 2021. Let’s break it down and understand what is blockchain technology, how it works and its application across sectors.

What is blockchain

“The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.”

Don & Alex Tapscott, authors Blockchain Revolution (2016). To put it simply, blockchain is a distributed ledger which anyone, anywhere can access over the internet. As the name indicates, blockchain is a sequential chain of records called blocks.

Let’s understand what a block is. It is just a record of any data. Each block contains mainly three elements — data, hash of the block and hash of the previous block.
A Morning Story
By: Dana Sanford
Tags: Culture, Poetry, Storytelling, One Line, Imagination

A Morning Story

A short story-poem

An ancient image:

the silver sloop of the dawn moon

sails near Orion

and through the island-clouds

soon to be overtaken by the Sun.

Dana Sanford

2019
Hope
By: Shipra Gupta
Tags: Poetry, Love, Memories

Photo by Vignesh Moorthy on Unsplash

At 8, he sat on the station again,

In the hope that she might catch the same train
Gratitude
By: Robert Faron
Tags: Poetry, One Line, Chalkboard, Family, Love

Photo by Lee Luis on Unsplash

The sun shines like gold through the clouds,

The warmth melts the fog on the trees,

The mist parts and you are there;

I am grateful.

© 2020 Robert Faron

Thanks to Sherry Kappel for the thankful prompt “Gratitude”

https://medium.com/chalkboard/in-eternal-gratitude-36a5c6f8fc62

And thanks to Kathy Jacobs, Harper Thorpe), and the entire Chalkboard team.
每日幣讀 0423
Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Sevencoin, Blockchain

in On The Couch
Review: Shake-Shake Regularization (Image Classification)
By: Sik-Ho Tsang
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Image Classification, Data Science, Deep Learning, Machine Learning

Review: Shake-Shake Regularization (Image Classification)

Concept of Adding Noise to Gradient During Training, Outperforms WRN, ResNeXt and DenseNet.

In this story, Shake-Shake Regularization (Shake-Shake), by Xavier Gastaldi from London Business School, is briefly reviewed. The motivation of this paper is that data augmentation is applied at the input image, it might be also possible to apply data augmentation techniques to internal representations.

It is found in prior art that adding noise to the gradient during training helps training and generalization of complicated neural networks. And Shake-Shake regularization can be seen as an extension of this concept where gradient noise is replaced by a form of gradient augmentation. This is a paper in 2017 ICLR Workshop with over 10 citations. And the long version in 2017 arXiv has got over 100 citations. (Sik-Ho Tsang @ Medium)
Stochastic Gradient Descent
By: Gary Chang, Chih-Chun
Tags: Gradient Descent, Optimization, Machine Learning

Cost Function?

To begin, we formulate a “Cost Function”(or called loss function) to evaluate how bad the parameter set of the neural network is, represented as C(𝛳). We have to find out the 𝛳* which minimizes the cost C(𝛳*).

𝛳* = arg min C(𝛳)

For example, we use the defined function in the handwritten digit classificatoin. The number of the given training data x is R(1,…, r,…, R) and y is the correspondent ground truth. Our goal is to minimize the C(𝛳*).

How to find the minimum?

Imagine that dropping a ball somewhere, we can then get the local minimun where the ball stop moving just as the picture show.

So, we repeat the calculation of the gradient at different places, until the gradient approach to zero. Suppose that 𝛳 has two variables {𝛳1, 𝛳2}.

Learning Rate

𝜂 represents the learning rate, meaning that “how far” the distance between the before point and the next one calculated. If we pick a small learning rate, it might takes longer time to reach the local minimum while if we set a larger one, we will miss the minimum.

Stochastic Gradient Descent

To calculus the cost, we have to sum all the examples in our training data because of the algorithm of gradient descend, but if there are millions of training data, it takes much time. To simplify, we use stochastic gradient descent.

Pick an example x, we assume that all example have equal probabilities to be picked.

http://cs231n.github.io/optimization-1/ while True:

data_batch = sample_training_data(data, batch_size=1)

weights_grad = evaluate_gradient(loss_func, data_batch, weights)

weights += step_size * weight_grad

If you like this article and consider it useful for you, please support it with 👏.
Harvesting Wishes
By: Tarrant Smith
Tags: Poetry, Nature, Witch, Magic, Witchcraft

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Harvesting wishes in the

dandelion garden,

as a calico cat

windowsill-watches

and fairies dressed

in red and black suits

race to perch upon

yellow-petaled stools.

Before wind or

careless breath

can snatch their

starry-hope,

I bottle the fragile

snowflake-dreams

and stopper them

up tight—

Just a single

puff of faith

and the spell is cast.

Childhood witchery.
Super-Slim Docker Containers
By: Nassos Michas
Tags: DevOps, Software Development, Development, Programming, Docker

Normalise Your Image Layers

The maximum number of layers an image can have is 127, provided your underlying storage driver supports it. This limit can be increased if really needed, but then you narrow your choices of where this image can be built (i.e., you need a Docker engine running on a similarly modified underlying Kernel).

As discussed in the section on Docker image layers, above, because of UnionFS, whatever file resource goes into a layer stays in the layer even if you rm that file in a subsequent layer. Let’s see that with a sample Dockerfile :

FROM alpine

RUN rm /tmp/10MB.zip RUN wget http://xcal1.vodafone.co.uk/10MB.zip -P /tmpRUN rm /tmp/10MB.zip

Build the above image:

Building a sample image with wasted space (Image by the author)

And inspect it with dive:

Image is only 34% efficient (Image by the author)

An efficiency of 34% signifies that there is quite a lot of space wasted in our image. This results in longer image fetch times, additional consumed bandwidth, and slower startup times.

How can we get rid of this wasted space?

Commands merge

Have you ever seen a Dockerfile with an extremely long RUN directive where multiple shell commands are aggregated with && ? That’s commands merge.

By merging commands, we essentially create a single layer out of the result of this single long command. Since no intermediate layers exist where files are added and later removed in another layer, the final layer will not use any space for such ghost files. Let’s see that by modifying the above Dockerfile :

FROM alpine RUN wget http://xcal1.vodafone.co.uk/10MB.zip -P /tmp && rm /tmp/10MB.zip

Now we have an optimised image:

A 100% optimised image with commands merge (Image by the author)

When you finish building your Dockerfile , inspect it to see if you can merge commands to reduce possible wasted space.

Squashing the image

An alternative approach to commands merge, especially when using someone else’s Dockerfile that you don’t want or can’t modify, is to build your image with Docker’s squash command.

Unless you’re on a very old Docker version (<1.13), Docker allows us to squash all our layers into a single layer, effectively removing all ghost resources. We can still use the original, unchanged Dockerfile with the many individual commands, but this time we execute the build passing the --sqash option:

docker build --squash .

The resulting image is, again, 100% optimised:

A 100% optimised image with image squash (Image by the author)

An interesting point to notice here is that since our Dockerfile created a layer to add a file and then created another layer to remove that file, squash is clever enough to realise that no layers need to be created (we only have the 9ccd9… layer from the base image we’re using). Extra kudos to squash then. However, take into account that squashing your layers may prevent you or the users of your image from taking advantage of previously cached layers.
Puffin 全雲端上網隔離：概念介紹
By: Cloudmosa
Tags: Cybersecurity, Cloud, Web Development, Cloud Computing, Remote

CloudMosa’s mission is to empower the world’s phones through cloud computing and make them universally powerful and useful.

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Trading Journal for 12/17
By: Vinson Chuong
Tags: Day Trading

6:22AM: SPX futures are up 0.5% to 3712. OCG is gapping up 183% on no news. It doesn’t look great pre-market. I’ll be waiting out of the open for any stocks to open up.

6:40AM: SCPS and WNW, recent IPO stocks are moving higher. They’re a bit too risky to trade; so, I’ll probably just sit on the sidelines and watch the action.

6:52AM: More IPO stocks are starting to move higher.

6:56AM: +$3.31/share on SCPS as it resumes from halt.

I’m looking for IPO stocks continue to move higher.

7:10AM: Both SCPS and WNW are currently halted going up, but OCG is halted going down. So, I hesitate to buy at resumption.

7:12AM: SCPS dipped at resumption, but both SCPS and WNW ended up continuing higher and are halted again. In terms of risk, if I were up $10/share instead of $3.31/share, I’d be a little bit more comfortable taking more trades.

8:40AM: YGMZ, a recent IPO, has been moving. It’s a Chinese stock with no news, currently up 202%. The other IPO stocks weren’t looking too hot; so I didn’t think YGMZ had a good chance of continuing higher. But, it just broke above high of day.

8:47AM: YGMZ gapped down and tanked at resumption.
What do employers expect from UX designers?
By: Nadya Tsech
Tags: Careers, Product Design, UX, Designer, Research

I went over 150 job offers in order to determine the most valuable UX skills and traits in 2017.

Professional knowledge

How do you select the most relevant experience to highlight in your portfolio? Most employers look for experience in visualizing ideas and user testing.

Accessibility isn’t one of the often required competencies.

👉 0 % of these job positions require copywriting skills

What do industry surveys and reports say?

Data from UXPin enterprise UX industry report.

This correlates with job descriptions. Visualising, testing, and researching are the most important skills for UX designers.

Soft Skills

What soft skills do I need to improve to be a better designer?

70% of companies expect UX designers to have excellent collaboration skills. Roughly half require strong presentation and communication skills.

Surprisingly, analytical thinking and problem solving are mentioned in only 14% of ads. It probably goes without saying that a UX designer should be a problem solver.

Tools

No surprise here. There is no one leader among UX tools. Most companies don’t require specific software knowledge. Rather, they expect designers to be familiar with any wireframing and prototyping tools.

What do industry surveys and reports say?

HackingUI asked over 1,000 participants what design tools they use. Designers prefer Sketch and InVision.
Permission CEO Appears On CNN And News Stations Across The Country
Tags: Privacy, Cryptocurrency, Advertising

Permission CEO Appears On CNN And News Stations Across The Country

The Permission Marketplace was featured in a story about blockchain innovators recognizing the value of data and compensating consumers who create it.

We’ve been receiving messages from people all over the country who are curious about the watch and earn experience on Permission.io.

“Data has tremendous value,” says Permission CEO Charles Silver. That is the understatement of the year.

General consumers are finally expanding their awareness to realize the unprecendented access that Silicon Valley has to their personal data. Collectively, people are fighting back by using blockchain backed platforms such as Steemit and Permission.io. These are platforms that recognize the value of trust and compensate users for contributing their data, content, or participation to the network.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me821HyAiVI

Click above to view the full segment from CNN and WDTN.
Callback in Javascript
Tags: Developer, Callback Function, JavaScript, Programming

Callback in C#

What is callback?

A callback is a piece of executable code that is passed as an argument to other code, which is expected to call back (execute) the argument at some convenient time.

In simple terms, callback means that we pass this code (Function A) into another code (Function B). At some point, Function A will be called back by call B (callback).

Do you still not understand? Ok, when I heard the teachers who taught this, I didn’t understand anything =))). I would like to give a simple example that is easy to understand below.

2. Example of a callback. Application in jQuery

You have a business trip. You tell your wife, during your time, if anyone gives you gifts, bring them to your cute neighbor. Function A here is giving gifts to the neighbor:

function Givegift(gift) {

return console.log(“gave” + gift);

}

Function B is here that your wife is at home. We pass A function as an argument for function B, at some point, function B will call function A (ie your wife brings gifts to her neighbor).

function AtHome(wife, Givegift) {

var gift= “love you”;

Givegift(gift);

}

As you can see, function A is passed as an argument. You know jQuery can use many callbacks without knowing it. Consider the following example, showing a pop-up when clicking on a button.

https://jsbin.com/potivubifi/1/watch?html,js,output

Here, the showPopup function is function A, and $ (‘#btn’).click() is the B function. Function B will call function A when you click the button. You write jQuery often using the method below but don’t understand the nature of what you’re doing.

3. Application of callback

As I said, Javascript is a quite appropriate language to introduce callbacks. We can pass a function directly into another function because in 1 function javascript is treated as an object. In other languages like C#, we have to use delegate to pass a function to another function (Remember this sentence carefully, I’ll say more in the next article).

Some of you will say: I do not use callback often? Actually, in the process of code you can use callback without knowing it (eg, jQuery code, or call a function when a user clicks on a button in WinForm, ASP.NET).

Callback has many applications as follows:

Call a function when there are a number of events occurring. For example, when clicking on a button we call function A when the window is off we call function B, etc. v.

LINQ is built on the concept of callback and lambda expression. With callbacks, we can perform operations such as: Find an element in the array, filter the element in the array, sort the array, … become extremely simple and convenient. I will tell you more about LINQ in the next articles.
HHS Raises National Gravity 8.9%
By: Paul Fidalgo
Tags: Journalism, Satire, Science, Fake News

The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday that it would adjust the nation’s gravity by 8.9 percent, the highest adjustment to the country’s gravitational pull in fifteen years. Normally averaging approximately 9.80665 meters per second squared, or “1 g,” HHS officials said they would make the required modifications that would raise the rate of acceleration to the Earth’s surface to approximately 10.68 m/s².

Despite the relatively significant adjustment to American gravity, and the abruptness with which it was announced, administration officials characterized the adjustment as “minor.”

“The vast majority of Americans will probably not even notice that anything has changed,” an HHS spokesperson told Free Lies. “At worst, they might feel like it’s a little harder to get out of bed right away, or that they maybe had too much to eat. We’re confident that everyone will quickly acclimate and carry on with their lives.”

HHS did release guidelines for Americans working in industries such as construction, aerospace, and professional sports, warning that the increase in gravity may have an impact on normal business operations.

Officials did not immediately address questions as to why the national gravity was being raised, nor how long Americans could expect to be living under the increased strain. Some analysts have speculated that the adjustment may be related to ongoing trade negotiations with the European Union.

Americans looking to escape the burdensome increase in gravity might be hoping that a vacation to Hawaii would offer some relief, but the HHS spokesperson made clear that this would not be the case.

“While a vacation to a tropical island would be great, no matter how hard we’re being pulled to the planet’s surface, noncontiguous parts of the country will be placed under the same average gravitational increase,” said the spokesperson. “We’re one country, and we live under one law, and one g. Or, in this case, 1.089 g’s.”
Aragon 0.6 is live on Mainnet. “Aragon 0.6 is live on Mainnet”…
By: Tatu Kärki
Tags: Blockchain, Ethereum, Dapps, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

We released Aragon 0.5 seven months ago. Since then, more than 2,500 organizations have been created with it. Counting all Aragon versions, the total number of Aragon organizations now adds up to 15,000+.

That’s more than the number of businesses created yearly in Austria, Malta and Luxembourg combined. Decentralized organizations are here to stay.

Yet all those organizations were running on Ethereum testnets, with no real world implications. Today, that changes. Today, decentralized organizations get real.

Using Aragon 0.6, named Alba, you can now create Aragon organizations on the Ethereum Mainnet. This is a new era for human collaboration. New kinds of organizations that we haven’t even dreamed of before can be now created.
NYE Superstitions
By: Danita Hall
Tags: Poetry, Superstition, Pandemic, Pom

NYE Superstitions

Trivial during a pandemic year

Photo by Mohammed Shamaa on Unsplash

Leaving my purse on the floor

doesn’t mean I’ll go broke

Walking under a ladder

doesn’t mean I’ll start to choke

Getting my feet swept

doesn’t mean bad luck

Not eating collard greens

doesn’t mean my life will run a muck

Not carrying an empty suitcase

doesn’t mean I’ll be home all year

Crying on New Years Eve

will not bring a year full of tears

Superstitions during a pandemic year

seem unimportant

Because the beauty of another day

seems way more important

Danita Hall is a human by day and a Humor, Parenting, Lifestyle, Ranting, Poem Writing Blogger by night. Click here to read past blog posts and stay connected on Facebook and Twitter
HTML Forms vs Bootstrap Forms
By: Tanu N Prabhu
Tags: Web Development, Bootcamp, Forms, HTML, Programming

Implementing Forms using HTML and Bootstrap

So let’s do some basic frontend coding using HTML and Bootstrap. Now to make this easier, I have implemented two simple forms both with two input fields: Full Name and Date of Birth. Both of the forms have one thing in common, i.e. the base code for both is HTML, but the other has a Bootstrap framework associated with HTML tags with it as shown below.

HTML Forms

Implementing a simple HTML form is relatively trivial. All you have to do is use a form tag and for the input fields, you need to use input tags inside the form tag itself. The type of the input tag is very important. Use it according to your preference. To know about the input types refer to the article below.
Successful card design in 3 steps: UX, UI, and Framework
By: Brenna Grey Mickey
Tags: UI, Visual Design, Product Design, UX, Design Thinking

Introduction

I’ve worked on various ed-tech products over a few years in my current position as a product user experience designer. We’ve updated the designs to existing codebases, and we’ve architected new interfaces from the ground up. In user experience design solutions should revolve around your user's needs, stakeholder’s priorities, and production realities. Despite all of those aspects being different for each product team I was on, one specific feature continued to be a piece of the larger design languages that we created. Cards.

Was it because they fit our need for displaying heavy metadata in a digestible fashion? Or was it because I was subconsciously pushing them as a solution because I realized their value? Maybe. Whatever the reason, the contextual metadata displayed in these bite-sized chunks successfully displayed the right information, in the right context, for various types of platforms.

Cards resemble physical cards and are a classic example of a usability heuristic — matching the system to the real world.

They provide organization to an interface, creating a mini and sometimes super complex design language within a larger system. I’m going to walk through how we successfully designed cards in three steps: information architecture (or UX, or wireframing), visual design (or UI) and framework (or environment). I’ve also listed out some questions to consider in each phase, because the more intuitive and curious you are about the problem you’re trying to solve, typically the more successful the design will be.
Three Reasons, GrabAmeal is a profitable meal sharing platform for you!
Tags: ICO, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Peer To Peer, Cryptocurrency

GrabAmeal is a peer to peer meal sharing platform that is blockchain empowered and here cooks and culinary artists like chefs, food enthusiasts, etc. can enlist and service providers for sharing home cooked meals for food buyers who have booked their meals by placing online orders.

For obvious reason GrabAmeal is offering cooks and chefs, willing to join this meal sharing platform, an amazing business opportunity with three unique benefits.

Recognition as a registered food seller with trust and transparency

GrabAMeal is a global food marketplace where food sellers can enlist their names as cooks. This is done when the sellers can describe their culinary skill or their passion for cooking tasty meals for their buyers against their online placed orders.

When registering on GrabAmeal, sellers have to record all the relevant data, KYC details, etc. which will be recorded in GAM Blockchain. Depending on the buyers’ review and assessment, sellers can upgrade their profile from normal to premium category.

Earning money by using sparing time and passion for cooking

GrabAmeal offers immaculate scope to turn a cook’s passion for cooking quality foods into a legitimate business that earns respect for the seller as well as it helps in earning money. On GAM platform all earning will be in GAM crypto token, which owners can convert into fiat currency.

Like Airbnb home concept, GrabAMeal can help you in opening home based restaurant where food buyers will get to enjoy quality homemade foods at cost efficient price.

Immaculate advantage to earn extra by joining dispute resolution protocol of GrabAmeal

GrabAmeal runs on three protocols: dispute resolution is one of them. In this process, food sellers can help in resolving disputes between buyers and a specific food seller if any. The food seller can cast a vote and help the editors in finding an amicable solution for the dispute. The seller can earn GAM token for his/her participation in this dispute resolution.

Besides selling fresh homemade meal, by joining and nurturing the food community on GrabAmeal platform both food sellers and buyers can earn GAM token in their GAM wallet. For food buyers this is a unique scope of earning extra and for food sellers, it is an unique way to enhance the authenticity and trust factor integrated to his sellers’ profile.
Typowe nieporozumienia dotyczące gier typu Free-to-Play
Tags: Free To Play, Gamemine, Games, Video Game News

GameMine is the future of mobile gaming. We offer our customers up to 1000 ad-free premium games via a single subscription access point.

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China Will Use Facial Recognition Technology to Remove Beautiful People From Factories
By: Matthew Pike
Tags: China, Surveillance, Technology, Facial Recognition, Satire

If you’re at a travel hub or a large event in China, chances are you’re being watched. With facial recognition technology, police have the ability to scan large crowds to find if there are any political dissidents, known troublemakers or even wanted criminals. While most of the attention surrounding facial recognition has been focused on law enforcement, Chinese labor authorities announced this week a strange new use for this controversial technology.

“With this program, China is set to become a world leader in beauty allocation,” said Mr. Gao Fu Shuai, Chairman of Labor Stuff, speaking to foreign press in Beijing. “Too many attractive people are wasting their talents doing the work of ugly people. Beautiful people should be seen, and now, thanks to facial recognition technology, we have the tools to plan our economy accordingly.”

According to a press package released by the Ministry of Labor Stuff, the first trials will check the photo database for state issued identification cards. Citizens deemed sufficiently attractive will be relocated and trained for positions where their innate talents are better suited — jobs such as weather reporters, salespeople and karaoke hosts.

The exact dimensions and characteristics for what the Ministry has deemed an “Ideal Communist” are classified, but leaked reports indicate that — in addition to classic metrics like symmetry and proportions — scientists have isolated the features most prevalent in those with submissive personalities, which is the most attractive personality trait for a Chinese citizen, according to the Ministry of Labor Stuff.

“This new program is not going to simply be a recruitment tool to find fashion models,” said Mr. Gao Fu Shuai. “This program will facilitate a culture where ugly people are kept together, away from attractive people. Workers naturally resent colleagues who are more beautiful, so by lowering the average attractiveness in our factories, mines and construction sites, we aim to increase the overall happiness of our society.”

This latest attempt at social engineering comes as human rights groups continue to attack China for its treatment of workers, claiming that many are subjected to slave-like conditions in its enormous factories.

“This is a big step toward eugenics,” said Lindsay Hornrim, spokesperson for Humans Are People, Too. “China already has problems with income disparity and class divide, and this will only exacerbate those issues. This is just another move to make life easier for the ruling elites. To manage their power, they must quantify and objectify the working class. In a world where factory workers can see the Instagram profiles of the idle rich, these kinds of societal control mechanisms become even more important.”

When The Lazy News contacted China’s Ministry of Labor Stuff for a comment on these concerns, their spokesperson replied with, “Sounds like something an ugly person would say.”
NEM Ventures will support the Tutellus Blockchain Demo Day
By: Miguel Caballero
Tags: Nem Blockchain, Nem, Blockchain

NEM Ventures has confirmed that Dave Hodgson, Co-Founder of the fund that invests in projects built on the NEM blockchain, will support the Blockchain Demo Day in Madrid and NEM Ventures will reward the winning projects. Tutellus has prepared this event to launch the projects built during the Masters in Blockchain, most of them on NEM.

“We are excited to have with us NEM Ventures this special day; we always try to work closely with the NEM ecosystem, and having Dave with us on April 10th is another step to make the blockchain ecosystem bigger”, says Miguel Caballero, CEO of Tutellus.

Tutellus & NEM Ventures will create awards for the best projects:

5.000€ in services for the winner.

3.000€ in services for the second.

2.000€ in services for the third.

Services will consist on consulting hours to focus, empower and connect the different projects with the needs they have now. NEM Ventures operates globally from Gibraltar, holding strong connections in the blockchain and venture fund industry.

“We are delighted to be invited to support Tutellus in their first demo day, both organizations place great importance on developing the next generation of blockchain entrepreneurs and companies. This is a fantastic opportunity to help that happen” says Dave Hodgson, Director of NEM Ventures.

The Tutellus Blockchain Demo Day is the first event where the winners will be selected through a decentralized & public voting process, again with the NEM voting service. Attendees will decide which project should win, and the voting process will be in real time. The Demo Day will be celebrated in the Madrid Google Campus installations on april the 10th, 2019.
Focusing on the Needs First
By: Jason Wallingsford
Tags: Startup, Productivity, Focus

How to focus as a startup…

As a startup, it’s imperative to narrow your focus to the things that will get you to market with a usable product the quickest. There are a lot of things that need to be done in order to be successful, but as you are in the beginning stages you must eliminate fluff and deliver the framework so that you have a reference point on how to move forward.

Prioritize. Plan. Progress.

This is why we have adopted the Agile Method. We set priorities for two weeks at a time. Plan the stories to help us accomplish it. A key to the planning process is estimating how long it will take us to knock out a given task. This is helpful for our team because we have a somewhat limited amount of time we can work daily. Then at the end of the two weeks, we test what we’ve finished and if we met our priorities.

Then the process begins again. It’s important to keep in mind that each time we do this, our priorities are in line with the ultimate priority of delivering the app to market. No one wants to work on tasks that don’t help them reach their end goal.

Focus is a Choice.

Being focused is not something that happens naturally. We must make the choice every day (and sometimes multiple times a day) to focus on what needs to get done. Some things we have found helpful is to break the development and business processes into smaller chunks that are easier to manage. Then when it’s time to work, we are able to devote smaller amounts of time while still moving toward the priorities for the given week.

We’ve also had to set up some boundaries with our family that will allow us to be able to work without being distracted. For example, my family knows that most days between 8:45 and 9:30 I’m going to be in our spare bedroom working for the day. I also try to make use of other downtime to help the team reach it’s goal for the sprint.

Focus Together.

Perhaps the most important element of focusing on a startup is making it a team effort. I grew up playing sports and the team mentality has been ingrained into me. In my eyes, we are successful when we move and work together as a team.

A couple ways we focus together include: agreeing as a team what the priorities for the next two weeks will be. Sometimes there are minor disagreements, but we all eventually agree and are better because of it. We also typically have a video conference during the evening to work together. We do this because we have found the evenings are when most of us work and it helps to feel connected even though we are all working remotely. We are always looking for ways to improve; how are you focusing together as a team?
Measuring Traffic Speed With Deep Learning Object Detection
By: Rohit Sharma
Tags: Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Machine Learning

Object Detection

Object detection means locating the object in the image or a video frame. The input to object detection is a clear image of an object. This image is passed to the software which outputs the position, or a bounding box surrounding the input object. The picture below shows bounding boxes for the traffic on a city street.

Vehicle detection on a city street

Traffic Vision

In this article, we use Yolo-v2 neural network as the basis for our software trafficVision for vehicle detection. We augmented Yolo model (converted to MIVisionX model for higher performance on AMD GPUs) with vehicle speed estimation and vehicle direction capabilities. The picture below shows a high level design of the app.

high level modules for traffic vision app

Detected Box Speed Calibration

Box speed calibration is simply a mapping of box-speed in pixels/sec to vehicle-speed in miles/hr (or km/hr if you happen to follow SI system).

Here is the algorithm for detecting up/down speed:

1. Get a sample video with up-down traffic in the frame.

2. Collect box locations and compute center y-coordinate of each box

3. Draw the histogram for the y-coordinate (see histogram)

4. Find the y-range within which majority of detected vehicles are passing.

5. Remember to exclude regions where vehicles could be stationary.

6. Find average speed between frames in y-range.

7. Calibrate center-pixel-distance/one-frame-duration between two consecutive frames to known speed limit of the road.

Vehicle Center Point Histogram with Data Extracted from YoloV2 Detection on a Live Traffic

The picture above shows the center point of detected vehicles as boxes. It is easy to draw the region (shown as blue rectangle) covering most vehicles. One can use ±½σ, ±σ or ±2σ as a metric to draw the region. Left and right side of this rectangle is y-range. In our example (shown in picture), this range is 167, 232.

Location Scale Factor

Remember, you’ve calibrated only small part of the frame. This calibration must be scaled to rest of the frame assuming most vehicles are traveling at the speed limit (statistical inference). Collect estimated speed of area beyond the calibrated region and divide it by statistically estimated speed of the calibrated region to find scale factor based on location. In our example, the location factor graph is shown below.

pixel travel distance between two consecutive frames

Summary

We used the techniques mentioned above to calibrate the street. This calibration is used in estimating the speed as shown in the video below.

References
Riot Alone
By: A Story Each Day
Tags: Fiction, Short Story, A Story Each Day

It shakes me when I learn that simple words can summon thousands of people all across America out of their homes and out of their closets. One voice announcing one decision possesses them to break things and throw things and form a kind of mindless hive. They swarm and scramble. They riot, because something in the hive mind has been lit on fire.

But for me, it only exists on a screen. It’s like watching ants in an ant farm, or a YouTube video of a hornet’s nest. Newspapers make more money with each headline, with each shot of tear-gassed crowds.

It’s happening all over the country. New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Oakland. But not where I am. Not in Madison.

Madison remains somehow exempt from this voice. This supreme jury doesn’t reach Madison the same way as it reaches New York, or Los Angeles. No fires erupt, nobody swarms from their homes. Not in Madison.

My eyes glued to my computer screen, I watch years of imprisoned anger and rage spew out, preceded by hashtags. One fire starts another, and that one starts another. I watch that fire spread without logic or reason.

In any other city, people look out of their windows and see their angry brothers trying to raise their voices to be heard. The sounds form a broken chorus. But not in Madison.

I open my mouth, but no voice erupts. No sound. No voice. No chorus. So I step outside onto my porch; still, no voice erupts.

I wonder how far I might need to go for my voice to be heard. I step off my front doorstep, into my street, and scream at the top of my lungs. But no one hears, because no one is there.

A car passes by.

The night drips by slowly.

I walk to the bridge, overlooking the lake, and there’s no one there, either. No hearts have been summoned; no mind has been formed by fire. I scream over the bridge, and no one hears me.

So I walk to the highway, where even though it’s late, cars are still whizzing by. Each car carries a person trying to get somewhere else; they pass me by, as fast as they can. All the images and live-streaming videos of people across the country flash in my mind, and I step out onto the freeway.

I wave my hands.

If I were in New York, or Los Angeles, or Oakland, or Seattle, I would do this exact same thing, along with a hundred other people. We would all raise our hands and run and scream and wave and rush out onto the roaring highway.

But it’s just me. There’s no one to join me.

Not in Madison.

And maybe one of those people in the cars driving past me will whip out their phone, and take a video of me, and upload it, and someone in another small town will realize that I’m just like them. And they’re just like me.
“Tomato Envy”
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Food, Cooking, Comics, Humor, Gardening

Even when the summer sun is bright, the darkness can creep in.
Illegal Exotic Animal.
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Creative Writing, Poetry, Pets, Poem, Death

Illegal Exotic Animal.

A poem.

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

After battling alcoholism and drug addiction for decades

he died of the flu — sober.

He had gotten a fever that went

up and up and up. He was survived by his parrot,

who was older than he was.

The parrot was an illegal animal in a red cage.

He sang ambulance noises. The parrot had been a gift

from his mother. He had never mourned her death.

He said it all the time.

“I was working on my marriage

then I had to get a new job when we got divorced,” he said.

“There was never

time to grieve.

There was never

time to be sad.”

He imagined that he needed

a large amount of time to be sad. A revelation.

Some kind of realization. His mother would appear in a cloud

and say something profound.

The answer was in a drug, maybe. Some right

combination of zapping and pulling his brain.

He didn’t have time to be sad.

He had to work. Everyone had to work, right?

That was not an option. He had no time to be sad

because he had to do this and that and

the other thing.

What would happen to the bird?

The animal was not a legal pet.

But now, he was too old to be free.

Rehabilitated.

Too old to be rehabilitated.

Too old to…be anything more than what he was.

Wasted.

Would he be remembered for that?

For his exotic animal

the bird that made ambulance sounds?

That was cruelly kept

in an apartment full of

dirty carpeting and cigarette smoke?

His mother had gotten that bird as a gift.

Where would it go now?

To a sanctuary, to be cared for,

to live with its own kind,

to feel trees and wind instead of smoke?

To have time

time to grieve?

It sounded nice. It sounded nice.
How the Best Problem Solvers Crack the Code
By: Matthew Royse
Tags: Self Improvement, Inspiration, Writing, Productivity, Reading

What’s the Secret to Great Writing?

Hint: It’s the easiest way to get over your writer’s block.

Photo by jules a. on Unsplash

The secret to great writing is becoming a dedicated reader.

Your writing is a culmination of everything you have read over time. The voices. The styles. The headlines. It’s everything you have picked up along the way. If you want to become a better writer, you need to read more.

To improve as a writer, you can’t neglect reading. A writer who doesn’t read is like an athlete who doesn’t watch his or her own sport or a movie producer who doesn’t watch movies. Even if you are a natural storyteller, you still need to read.

Let’s dive into how reading improves your writing skills.
Abuse Culture Highlight: Toxic Motherhood
By: Michon Neal
Tags: Abuse Culture, Parenting, Life Lessons, Minorities, Love

Uuuuuuugggggggghhhhhhhhh how dare that woman contact me and my family! How dare she! "I hope you're well."

Fuck you.

You told me I was going to Hell when I came out to you as bi at 14. I never bothered telling you shit else or coming out to you as everything else I am.

You told me there was nothing I could do when, at age 13, I finally told you I'd been raped by the son of your horrible ass boyfriend every night for eight months when I was only 12. I was an adult before I realized I could have pressed charges, but by then, the statute of limitations was up.

You had the man I willingly had sex with at age 15 arrested and charged.

You left me in charge of caring for mentally ill family members.

If you ever heard, you certainly didn't care about all the nights I cut myself and cried myself to sleep.

You sent my best friend away, repeatedly, over petty shit all because you couldn't stand that she was a better-looking and decent version of you.

You abused us because we preferred one another to you.

You lied to the police when they came to investigate, after we called them because we were tired of going to bed hungry.

You sat there and ate in front of us, despite knowing we were starving.

You forced us to go to church with you, despite not actually giving a shit about our relationship with God.

You brought sexual abusers into our home, maybe on purpose, but they didn't abuse you so you didn't care.

You stole money from us again and again.

You stole child support money, over 2 grand a month, that damn well never went to care.

You left us alone for weeks at time, but most notably for the first 5 years my life, you couldn't account for my whereabouts. Where the fuck was I and why can't I remember? I have memories from when I was 2, so I know something traumatic had to have gone down.

You slut-shamed me, tried to force me to get married, and worst of all, when my worst nightmare came true - when my son was hurt - you said it my fault and then tried to take my kids away, as if you fucking know how to parent. You actually went to the people who hurt him and told lies about me to the court!

You do not get to return to my life and continue to hurt me. I saw through your shit from day one. I just bided my time until I could escape your clutches.

You ain't got shit to say but "hope you're okay"?

Fuck. OFF!
Los pasos para alquilar una oficina
By: Diego García
Tags: Emprendimiento, Empresa, Spanish, Consejos Inmobiliarios, Economy

in On The Couch
A Tail of Love
By: Tito Varghese
Tags: Poetry, Scrriblings, Life, Thoughts, Love

There are so many stories of the dead..

Oh haunted houses, wizards and how people bled..

Some names even are not mentioned out loud..

Like Voldermont, every Harry has a dark looming cloud..

My girlfriend of old had her pet scare..

A mouse so tiny, glimpses were rare..

But i hate that little ball of fur..

It has often kept me from her..

She would see it when it wasnt there..

and cling on me while i smelled her hair..

But one day the mouse made me mad..

It stole from me the kiss i never had..

We were so close our noses we touching..

When with a squeak, havoc it did fling..

She forgot the kiss and everything else..

The moment passed and never came thence..

I wonder what could kill that rat..

Hit it on the head with a brick bat..

But all the plans i hatched fell flat..

When she adopted the creature and called me fat..

Now i sit and wonder what went wrong..

How did the tune change to my song..

All eggs in one one basket crushed to the ground..

I ponder when love will visit me next time round..
Take a Break
By: Simran Kankas
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Letters, Spiritual Tree, Spirituality

“The six best doctors, Sunshine, Water, Rest, Air, Exercise and Diet.” — Wayne Fields

Dear Readers and Writers,

I hope you are having a good time reading and writing on Spiritual Tree. What’s new on your plates this week? I am learning to take a break from busy life, spending less time on digital media, and more time with myself. Not only my body needs it, but my mind must be calm as well.

I can’t speak for you, but I definitely don’t want to know what is going around in the world. So, I am allowing myself to rest. The pain levels are still unchanged but I am happy because my ‘goodnight sleep’ is back. God knows I needed that.

Just like watering the plants is necessary in order to keep them from wilting, we need to take good care of our bodies. Of course, you know that already, but sometimes we shift our priorities. So, a quick reminder won’t hurt, right? No matter how busy our Life gets, we must always remember to keep the balance of body, mind and soul.

Keep smiling with your soul.

“The soul is smart enough to heal itself. Get out of its way and let it do its job.” — Simran Kankas

See you next Wednesday for the weekly letter.

Thank you 🙏

Stay Blessed Stay Healthy

©️ Simran Kankas 2020. All Rights Reserved.

Prompt for Sunday, October 4th, 2020
Boris Johnson Is a Mirror of the UK, Elected by the Majority
Tags: Politics, Equality, Social Media, Zuva, World

When I’m upset, I either fall into a dark depression, or I become over-productive. It seems as if the latter is in play today. Following the results of the election, I have slept two hours and written four articles (this makes it my fifth).

Of the four I wrote, only one was “political”. I needed to write out my frustration to process. Then I needed to avoid anything about politics to help me process some more. It’s as if I am going through the stages of grief.

When I first saw the results, I was in suspended disbelief. I couldn’t believe it. In my mind, I could not compute how Labour could lose so spectacularly. I was hoping at the minimum for a hung parliament, but a majority win of 76 seats just seemed… wrong?

I spent most of the night on twitter checking for the official results. As I wrote in my essay last night, I was hoping they would be different from the exit poll (even though exit polls are notoriously accurate).

Then I was angry. How could so many millions of people choose themselves when lives are at stake? How could they prioritise Brexit over our NHS? How could they trust this government after Grenfell? I didn’t understand the lack of empathy, which is when I wrote my piece. And then I fell into sadness. And I tried to sleep off my despair and hopelessness.

Two hours of sleep later, I dedicated myself to my work. I used all my feelings as fuel. I am exhausted, but I had to use my rage. I had to distract myself.

I would say now that the initial shock has worn off I am firmly in acceptance. This is what the people voted for, and this is what they want. I have lived in England pretty much my whole life; I have seen a lot of intolerance and polite racism to tell me this result isn’t that shocking. This is a country that invaded 90% of the world’s countries. It is full will stolen treasures.