fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
God’s Green Light
By: Rhonda Skinner
Tags: Meditation, Spirituality, Healing, Guided Meditation, Shamanism

God’s Green Light

A guided meditation practice

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

Meditation is lifeforce energy. It feeds our soul. It is a space to rebalance ourselves — a place to expand our consciousness. Life is always moving, as is your energy; it ebbs and flows. Connecting to the healing power that is stillness is so vital and can be so healing. I know a lot of people struggle with stillness and quietening the mind. The world we live in is constantly feeding us information. If we forget to pay attention to our energy, we can easily get pulled off our center. Sometimes a guided meditation can help if we struggle with stillness. It’s good to remember not to put pressure on yourself to be still. Just allow it and practice. I think of balance a lot when I think about the mundane world. It does require our attention. So our meditation practice can be so vital and help us in all aspects of our lives. It is one of the first questions I ask people, are you meditating. It is at the base of any spiritual practice.

Below I have a link to a guided meditation that is focused on healing the mind, body, and spirit. It is a practice that came through my journey work and is meant to be shared.

The guided meditation I have below is to help balance the mind, body, and spirit. If you have something specific you want to bring balance to, you can pray about that before listening to this meditation or focusing on it during the meditation. I like the Law of Attraction, where we put our attention is where our energy flows. So that is how I would approach this meditation.

How to prepare:

Entering into this meditation, it is good to be open and allow what needs to come. I would smudge with sage if you have any. Pray before you start and ask for this light to flow through you naturally and in a good way. If you have an area of concern, ask for more attention in that area. Find a comfortable place where you will not be disturbed. Turn your cell phone to silent and leave it in another room if you can. Take a few deep breaths in and out. Move around and get comfortable. Squeeze the muscles in your body and allow your body to sink a little deeper where you are sitting or lying. Then have a good journey.

Let me know if you have any questions or run into anything you may need help with.

The images in this video are a few I took while staying on the mountain in Hogsback, South Africa. When we think of South Africa, mountains are not the first thing that comes to mind, but they are magical. It seems as though you are right there in the clouds with minimal interruption. The energy is quite specific, because there is nothing in the way.

https://youtu.be/aLtwK4YYCH8

Rhonda Skinner

In response to the Spiritual Saturday Prompt: “Meditation” by Darshak Rana

Thank you Darshak for the prompt.
In Presence, Find the Fruit You Bear
By: Fresh Receptive
Tags: Life Lessons, Poetry On Medium, One Line, Poetry Writing, Inspiration

Chalkboard Challenge

In Presence, Find the Fruit You Bear

A response to one-line poem prompt ‘presence’

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

The heart yearns

for that

which it has lost-

in lack,

we miss

the fruit

we bear

already

within.

Simone Maffescioni, 2020

Thank you to Bindu Lamba and the Chalkboard team for the prompt:
Fly Right Into the Story of The First African American Female Pilot
Tags: Bessie Coleman, Headlines, Entertainment, African American, Families

Fly Right Into the Story of The First African American Female Pilot Admin Follow Oct 28, 2016 · 1 min read

Bessie Coleman (1892–1926) was a woman of firsts. She was the first female African American pilot, the first female Native American pilot and the first person of African American and Native American descent to hold an international pilot license. The tales of pilots who flew in WWI inspired her, and now she is a figure that inspires. Learn her tale at a lecture on Saturday, Nov. 12 from 11 a.m. to noon at the Medford Leas Theater located at One Medford Leas Way, which is being offered at no cost.

Registration is not required. This program is funded by the Horizons Speakers Bureau of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Medford Leas is a nationally accredited, not-for-profit community guided by Quaker principles for those aged 55 and older, with campuses in Medford and Lumberton, New Jersey. For more information, call (609) 654–3000 or visit www.medfordleas.org.
What is Gini Impurity? How is it used to construct decision trees?
By: Bhuvaneswari Gopalan
Tags: Decision Tree, Machine Learning, Gini Impurity, Data Science, Towards Data Science

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

Decision Tree is one of the most popular and powerful classification algorithms that we use in machine learning. As the name itself signifies, decision trees are used for making decisions from a given dataset. The concept behind the decision tree is that it helps to select appropriate features for splitting the tree into subparts similar to how a human mind thinks.

To build the decision tree in an efficient way we use the concept of Entropy/Information Gain and Gini Impurity. To know more about Entropy/Information Gain, you may want to read my Entropy blog.

In this blog, let’s see what is Gini Impurity and how it is used to construct decision trees.

What is Gini Impurity?

The Gini impurity measure is one of the methods used in decision tree algorithms to decide the optimal split from a root node, and subsequent splits. It is the most popular and the easiest way to split a decision tree and it works only with categorical targets as it only does binary splits.

Gini Impurity is calculated using the formula,

Lower the Gini Impurity, higher is the homogeneity of the node. The Gini Impurity of a pure node(same class) is zero.

To calculate Gini impurity, let’s take an example of a dataset that contains 18 students with 8 boys and 10 girls and split them based on performance as shown below.

Image by Author

The calculation of Gini Impurity of the above would be as follows:

In the above calculation, to find the Weighted Gini Impurity of the split (root node), we have used the probability of students in the sub nodes, which is nothing but 9/18 for both “Above average” and “Below average” nodes as both the sub nodes have equal no of students even though the count of boys and girls in each node varies depending on their performance in class.

Following are the steps to split a decision tree using Gini Impurity:

Similar to what we did in entropy/Information gain. For each split, individually calculate the Gini Impurity of each child node Calculate the Gini Impurity of each split as the weighted average Gini Impurity of child nodes Select the split with the lowest value of Gini Impurity Until you achieve homogeneous nodes, repeat steps 1–3

To summarize on Gini Impurity :

It helps to find out the root node, intermediate nodes and leaf node to develop the decision tree

It is used by the CART (classification and regression tree) algorithm for classification trees.

It reaches its minimum (zero) when all cases in the node fall into a single target.

To conclude, Gini Impurity is preferred over Entropy/Information gain because of its simple formula that does not use logarithms which are computationally intensive and difficult.

Happy Decision Making!
When to Use Strong References Over Weak References in Swift
By: Arjun Baru
Tags: iOS, Xcode, Swift, Programming, Mobile

Retain Cycle

Before we start, let’s understand what the retain cycle is and how memory leaks happen.

Let’s study the retain cycle with an example:

We created objects of both the class, First and Second , and made them hold each other’s reference, hence increasing the reference count to 2 each.

When we try to deallocate memory, deinit was not called because not all the references were removed. Can we release it now? Well no, because they’re inaccessible, causing a memory leak.

So the memory leak is of the inaccessible memory, which happened when we were unable to deallocate the object.

We solve this by manually handling the deallocation:

/// 1. By manual handling object1?.secondOne = nil

object2?.firstOne = nil object2 = nil

object1 = nil

And making one of the properties weak :

weak var firstOne: First? // changing line 12 ///// 2. By Weak approach object2 = nil

object1 = nil

Great — we know how to avoid the retain cycle, but sometimes we misinterpret whether it is actually happening.
Introduction to Airflow in Python
By: Black_Raven, James Ng
Tags: Development, Data Engineering, Airflow, Workflow, DevOps

Introduction to Airflow in Python

A beginner’s guide to the basic concepts of Apache Airflow

This is a memo to share what I have learnt in Apache Airflow, capturing the learning objectives as well as my personal notes. The course is taught by Mike Metzger from DataCamp.

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

A data engineer’s job includes writing scripts, adding complex CRON tasks, and trying various ways to meet an ever-changing set of requirements to deliver data on schedule. Airflow can do all these while adding scheduling, error handling, and reporting.

I have learnt the following topics:

Workflows / DAGs / Tasks

Operators (BashOperator, PythonOperator, BranchPythonOperator, EmailOperator)

Dependencies between tasks / Bitshift operators

Sensors (to react to workflow conditions and state)

Scheduling DAGs

SLAs / Alerting to maintain visibility on workflows

Templates for maximum flexibility when defining tasks

Branching, to add conditional logic to DAGs

Airflow interfaces: command line / UI

Airflow executors

Debugging / Troubleshooting

My next steps would be:
Ujima △ Collective Work & Responsibility
By: Allison Gaines
Tags: Ujima, BlackLivesMatter, Kwanzaa, Equality, Race

Ujima △ Collective Work & Responsibility

To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together (Karenga, 1966).

Today marked the third day of the seven day Kwanzaa celebration. Ujima refers to collective work and responsibility. Within a community, every person matters. Their problems become my problems and mine become theirs. Stronger together, we can accomplish great things when we accept and honor our commitments to helping one another. Say it loud. Say it proud. Black Lives Matter.

If you want to learn more about the Kwanzaa celebration, feel free to review the meaning of the principles in the article below:
Instagram 101 — How to Gain Your First 1000 Followers
By: Nikki Petrova
Tags: Content, Marketing, Content Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Instagram

How to gain engaging followers then?

Well, I have some bad news for you - you have to put some work into it and it won’t happen overnight.

First, you have to answer some questions. What niche is your content going to be in? Is it photography, travel, business, fashion, beauty, pets, health & fitness… Which are the top pages in this niche and what kind of content are they posting?

What is your target audience? Who is going to gain something out of your content? You have to post different content, whether your audience is teenagers, entrepreneurs, pet-owners, stay at home parents, or digital nomads. What are their interests and what kind of content do they engage with?

After answering those questions you will be able to pick out better-targeted content for your page.

Be passionate about the things you post. Otherwise, you will get bored and will give up before seeing results.

You need good quality photos. Learn to do some editing. You don’t even need a computer for that. There are countless apps for your phone that give pretty good results.

You need to give your followers something valuable. Don’t just post something to achieve your posts per week goal.

Use relevant hashtags and write a good caption. It can be a personal story or interesting information about the subject of your photo. This is your chance to communicate with your audience.
四種產生 JavaScript 自訂物件的方法
By: Chao-Wei Peng
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Json, Object Oriented, Web Development

Freelancer and Web Instructor. Welcome to My Website: https://training.pada-x.com/

Follow
Neurona
By: Aleksey Tikhonov
Tags: Machine Learning, Poetry, Punk Rock, Neural Networks, NLP

Neurona is a daughter of my first NN text-generation project Neural Defence. After a success with the automated generation of Russian poetry we with a friend of mine, Ivan Yamshchikov, decided to focus on the English version of the same architecture.

the EP cover based on a draft by Pavel Gertman

We harvested ~200Mb of lyrics of classical and modern poetry in English across the web and tried to use this dataset for learning, but the quality of online poetry was so poor so we several weeks on data cleaning. After a profound filtering, we got ~100 Mb of data that was used to train a language model with hybrid embeddings (check my previous post on Neural Defence project for some more details). Using the trained model we generated a lot of lyrics, filtered it and finally got four songs.

Again Ivan wrote and played all the music on the album, but this time we decided to invite a professional singer: after several tries with some Russian singers we broadened our search so eventually, a New-York singer Rob Carrol recorded vocals for all four songs.

To give some additional old-school touch to the whole project, we have taken an original tape with Nirvana recordings and recorded the EP over it. You can listen to the whole EP on Apple Music or Google Music. We also thought that every EP needs a clip, so we made one:

Finally, our EP was chosen as an entry for NIPS4Creativity Workshop Art Gallery 2017— here it is, the last entry.

To get more details on this project you could check this Ivan’s medium post or read slides from our talk on neural network poetry generation on Berlin Machine Learning meetup.
Using Crypto for Charity? UNICEF Proves That It Works
Tags: Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Cryptocurrency, Crypto, Bitcoin

An announcement by UNICEF France is changing the way we think about humanitarian aid. According to the statement, donors are no longer limited to fiat currencies if they want to assist children in need. UNICEF now accepts nine types of cryptocurrency on its website.

In the statement, Sébastien Lyon, Executive Director of UNICEF France, said that using cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology for charitable purposes offers a new opportunity to appeal to the generosity of the public. Calling it “an innovation in terms of solidarity and fundraising,” he said that the introduction of cryptocurrency into charity makes the process more democratic.

This campaign comes on the heels of two other successful crypto campaigns — it is, in fact, not the first time UNICEF has incorporated cryptocurrencies into delivering aid to those who need it.

Last February, UNICEF instituted a global fundraising program called Game Changers, with funds collected for children who are affected by the Syrian war. The project was targeted at computer gamers — those who enjoy mining or are enthusiastic about cryptocurrency and willing to donate computing time for mining and high-end gaming — and had a special mining software application form from UNICEF’s website. The gaming PCs were used to mine Ethereum and use the proceeds to help the children. It was the first time UNICEF used cryptocurrency donations instead of money.

Then, in May, UNICEF Australia launched its own campaign, the HopePage. Page visitors were given the option of donating computing power by allowing their device to be used to process crypto transactions anytime the users were connected to the internet.

“The HopePage allows Australians to provide help and hope to vulnerable children by simply opening the page while they are online,” said UNICEF Australia’s Jennifer Tierney. For this project, users voluntarily donated their resources to aid UNICEF — and it didn’t involve fiat currencies. At the moment, 22,000 people are involved in donating and mining cryptocurrencies for UNICEF Australia.

As Asgardia prepares to brainstorm during its Economy and Finance System Workshop in Nice on 25–29 October, the possibility of using the Solar as its cryptocurrency is looking optimistic. Of course, adhering to the democratic process, all participants of the discussion will be given an opportunity to express their thoughts about the possible pathways for the development of Asgardia’s economy and the methods of the formation of its financial system. The basic premise behind the Space Nation’s existence requires an unconventional approach and new solutions — and, as UNICEF’s use of blockchain technologies demonstrates — the use of cryptocurrency might be one such solution.

Learn more on Asgardia.Space
LGBTQ World
By: Patsy Starke
Tags: Queer, Poetry, Transgender, LGBTQ, Resistance

Lesbian or gay? Same sex love, we say

Bisexual? Sex is rotational

Transgender? What’s on the agender?

Male to Female? To feminine avail

Female to Male? Masculine prevail

Non-Binary? Not Gender primary

Queer? Oh, give it up, nothing to fear!

Be who you are!

Right to Left? We’ll not have, Identity theft!

Conservative Democrat? OMG, what is that?

Liberal Republican, WTF? Political pelican? No such luck!

By the way, heed what we say,

No politicians,

To rule our conditions.

Patsy, 2017
25 Must Read Books on Leadership
By: Jennifer Aldrich
Tags: Management, UX, Books, Leadership, Design

I was recently introduced to LibbyApp and it completely changed my reading game. You enter your library card number, and boom, you have access to all of the audio books and e-books your library has to offer, right in the app.

I ripped through all of the books I had on my “I wish I had time to read this” list, and was hungry for more.

I hit up my UX, design & developer fam on Twitter and LinkedIn for suggestions, and they had so many fantastic recommendations that I decided to write this post to share them with the community. Enjoy!

Multiple Recommendations:

Additional Recommendations:

Measure What Matters: John Doerr

User Experience Revolution: Paul Boag

Moments of Impact: Chris Ertel

Rise of the DEO: Maria Guidice , Christopher Ireland

The Coaching Habit: Michael Bungay Stanier

Good to Great: Jim Collins

The Art of Stillness: Pico Iyer

Extreme Ownership: Jocko Willink

Expect to Win: Carla Harris

Shoe Dog: Phil Knight

The Manager’s Path: Camille Fournier

The Effective Executive: Peter Drucker

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: John C. Maxwell

Awesomely Simple: John Spence

Turn the Ship Around: L. David Marquet

Tribal Leadership: Dave Logan

Huge, huge thanks to all of the awesome folks who contributed suggestions to this list! You can check out the original Twitter thread here, and the LinkedIn thread here. I hope you enjoy these books and that they help you along your journey in leadership!
An Open Letter To Steve Wozniak
By: Robert D. Knight
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Steve Wozniak, Sto, Blockchain

Dear Steve,

As one of the founding fathers of Apple® and the designer of both the Apple I and Apple II you have played a vitally important role at the heart of science, computing and innovation. Your voice is one which matters and one we respect. We therefore noted with interest that in a recent interview with CNBC you spoke of bitcoin becoming the “single global currency”.

That is a deeply intriguing idea, and one which deserves due consideration.

As the world’s first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has already shown its viability as a global means of exchange without the need for a controlling central authority. As adoption of Bitcoin increases its value and importance will only continue to grow. In some respects Bitcoin may never be surpassed, but the blockchain technology on which Bitcoin is built is perhaps the greater prize; opening the door to a whole new world of decentralized networks in place of traditional structures.

Ethereum is one such example, which demonstrates exactly how blockchain technology can be developed to complete tasks beyond that of a pure currency. You already know that smart contracts on the Ethereum network allows for decentralized solutions that could never be achieved with Bitcoin. Acting as the currency and the fuel of the Ethereum network, Ether demonstrates how alternative currencies can provide us with new solutions and alternative working models.

Without Ethereum there could have been no initial coin offering (ICO) explosion and the advent of a whole range of altcoins powered by blockchain technology. This is absolutely crucial for us as we plan to use Ethereum to launch a security token offering (STO) in support of our open science platform. Our token, Helix, will be used as a currency within our network but will not be a cryptocurrency in the strictest sense like Bitcoin. Our token is designed as a security which is why we have filed under Reg A+ with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to ensure compliance. This is in stark contrast to both Bitcoin and Ether, which seem to not be securities.

Our model is tying the Helix to our company’s equity and to use these tokens to reward scientists for participation on our platform. This allows us to incentivize scientific activities, which are good for open science and by extension, good for knowledge advancement. This is just one of the many possible evolutions that blockchain technology can go through, and one of many paths that are as yet unexplored.

Like you, we greatly admire the purity of Bitcoin and the clarity of vision of Satoshi Nakamoto. We are also excited by the great many ideas and advancements which a new wave of blockchain startups and entrepreneurs have to offer. Blockchain is a truly transformative technology and one which has inspired us as much as it has you. It is perfectly suited for the role of global currency, as the first currency among many others.

Regards,

Knowbella Tech
The Link Between Creativity and Mental Health
By: Kimberly Fosu
Tags: Creativity, Education, Life, Mental Health, Writing

Writing is an Emotional Rollercoaster

Many writers are also introverted, quiet people, and find it stressful to have their work assessed publicly. This can lead to what is known as the ‘Imposter Syndrome’ where they feel like a fraud.

When people, such as an editor, readers, and reviewers tell writers that their work is not good, then naturally it is a crushing feeling.

It is very easy for the writer to get dispirited and tell themselves that the entire project they’ve been working on is hopeless, especially when they keep getting rejection slips from editors and harsh criticism from readers.

A big part of a writer’s success depends on how other people think of their work.

Writing also brings uncertain hours and irregular paychecks. It is easy for a writer to feel down when they aren’t sure how much money is coming in or how the bills will be paid.

Writers may also write late into the night, or even only at night. This can throw off sleep-wake schedules, which also may increase the chances of depression.

Lack of sleep, exercise, natural light, and connection can be a recipe for depression.

Depression Isn’t a Requirement for Creativity

Being familiar with misery, pain, and suffering may guide the process for many writers. Writers can write about suffering even if they don’t know it intimately, but some may feel that their work will lack authenticity if they haven’t experienced the things they write about.

But when you’re depressed, nothing makes sense. You are sure the article will be lousy, so what's the point of even writing it? When you are depressed you are tired and therefore have less courage, less resilience, and less capability to handle everyday stressors.

When there is little to no energy, every little feedback, every little comment, and every little rejection sends you deep inside your misery and the next thing you know it's been months since you managed to write anything or even got out of the house.
What Is The Reason For Wanting Enlightenment
By: Ramandeep Singh, न र
Tags: Self Improvement, Meditation, Spirituality, Life, Enlightenment

This is a beautiful question, a question that can come out of only a really pragmatic mind. A mind that can question everything, even Enlightenment, with the right intention is ready to reflect the light!

Now, if you analyze the question, the answer is hidden in it. It’s right before your eyes. Try looking at the question again. Can you spot the answer?

Photo by Sam Pearce-Warrilow on Unsplash

The exact reason for “Wanting Enlightenment” is “Wanting”.

One always feels at unease and incomplete within and hence is always chasing one thing or the other.

Desire is just the very nature of human mind.

Initially, the mind is outward (world) focused and wants all the luxuries of the world — super cars, big home(s), money and so on.

Once the vicious circle of wanting and gaining the world is viewed as a cause of misery, a spiritual circle starts. Mind’s focus starts turning inwards.

Now, mind is clever. Outward or Inward, the attitude remains the same — “Wanting”

The common denominator is the Desire. This is the only way Ego can survive the onslaught of Truth. This is a pure survival game.

Now that a new circle has started, Ego lives — this time spiritually!

Photo by RKTKN on Unsplash

However, this wanting is usually supported by the Awakened Ones. This is considered as the last desire — the desire that consumes all other desires.

If Enlightenment becomes the first priority, this one want burns all other wants! And, once all wants have been burnt, this last remaining desire of Enlightenment is seen as misery. As soon as this last desire is seen as a misery, it drops!

Photo by Vo Danh on Unsplash

All that is left is Life — Pure, Pristine and Untouched. This Life is True-Self, this is who you are!

Hence, Enlightenment is depicted by the Lotus. In mud of the world, one remains untouched by the filth of the mind.

Mind just becomes a tool to traverse the world.

The point in being spiritual is very simple — Till you realize True-Self, you will never feel complete and suffering will continue. If you want to cease suffering and experience bliss, then turning this wanting inwards is a good start! :-)

Love!
Redesigning the AED Department Site
By: Taylor Fletcher
Tags: UX, Work

Redesigning the AED Department Site

architecting and designing for a different brand of architect and designer

Project Description

The Architecture and Engineering Design department at Utah Valley University is one of the oldest at the school. It has a rich history, a lot of past and current success, and a ton of really cool projects (some involving drones!). You’d never guess that by looking at their website, though. In fact, their site is so bad, and they’re so embarrassed by it that they make a conscious effort to avoid telling people to visit it. It’s hard to navigate and it doesn’t even begin to tell the story of this great department. For this project, we were tasked with redesigning it. Our main goals were to increase usability and to turn this site into something the department can be proud to show off.

Planning & Discovery

To begin the design process, we met with the heads of the department to discuss their goals for the site, among other things. From this, we gained crucial insights into the project like who the site’s target demographic was, what they were hoping to see on their site, and why they wanted a redesign in the first place.

Research

Meeting with our stakeholders was incredibly informative, but there were still some pieces missing. To fill in these informational gaps, we conducted interviews with students and sent out surveys to people within our target demographic (college students, high schoolers, and parents of middle schoolers) in order to figure out peoples’ expectations for such a site, as well as more general information like what they find most fulfilling and interesting when deciding on a potential career path.

data from one of the questions on our survey

Design

Armed with this knowledge, we hit the ground running. We began by taking inventory of the information and features already on the site — Analyzing, prioritizing, and organizing.
Deploying High Availability CDN Architecture on AWS Using AWS CLI
By: Harshit Dawar
Tags: Cloudfront, Cloud Computing, Web Server, Cloud, AWS

Considering any business, high availability is the core requirement, irrespective of the type of business, if the business has to grow, then it has to be available, otherwise business can not grow if the business products are not available.

Also, in addition to availability, there is one more factor that is “how fast the services of the business can be accessed?”, this factor also plays a very important role in business growth in today’s rapid world.

For example, consider online e-commerce company “Flipkart”, if the site of Flipkart is not available then, then Flipkart can not grow, moreover it will vanish from the e-commerce market in few weeks even because it is not available. Now, coming to the speed of availability of the services of Flipkart, consider a case in which the site of Flipkart takes too much time to load, in this case even, Flipkart’s customers will stop accessing the website because they will be irritated/annoyed with this latency in the website loading.

Therefore, it can be concluded that to have a highly available business architecture in combination with low latency in the service accessibility is very much important. This blog will explain the process of creating the same architecture using a very basic example on top of AWS Cloud.

Architecture to be covered by this blog!

Creating an AWS EC2 instance.

Configuring the Webserver in the launched EC2 Instance.

Making the Webserver documents/content persistent.

Creating an object storage S3 bucket for the static content of the website.

Storing the static objects related to the business in the object storage S3.

Creating a CDN (Content Delivery Network) using AWS CloudFront(to make services available at a low latency across the globe).

Integrating Website & the CloudFront URLs.
Security and Transparency in the GLX
Tags: Currency Management, Finance, Cryptocurrency, Globcoin, Glx

Stablecoins are particularly demanding in terms of transparency. However, (and ironically) the solutions available in the market today do not follow the transparency standards that the traditional financial world is used to, as explained by our CEO Helie d’Hautefort in his piece Bringing Stablecoins to the Next Level. To be fully transparent and safe, stablecoins should offer -at the very least- transparent, open banking relationships and regular access to external auditing.

As with all Globcoin products, we take transparency for the GLX stablecoin very seriously. Here’s how we’re handling it:

Transparency in currency management

✓ You can easily check the team’s credentials and background as one of the largest currency managers in the fiat world. The Globcoin team managed up to 23 Billion USD of currency mandates for institutional clients with daily reporting, providing full transparency in all our currency management activities with Foreign Exchange banks.

Transparency in currency allocation

✓ The GLX is pegged to a currency basket of 15 currencies and gold. The currency allocation in the GLX basket is disciplined and systematic according to a very comprehensive Rulebook that will be at the community disposal upon request.

✓ We will publish on our website the theoretical value of the basket in real-time against each of its components.

Transparency in Bank Accounts

✓ Subject to regulatory agreement, Reserve Currency Solutions (a Swiss company created in 2010) will issue fiat IOUs, pegged to the bank deposits of the currencies and gold, providing a transparent, auditable, and secure protocol.

✓ These deposits will be held securely at Prime Banks.

✓ The GLX related accounts are completely separate to the RCS operating account.

Transparency in Audits

✓ Communication will be done on a regular basis.

✓ Audits will be performed very frequently by a prime auditing firm.

✓ This prime auditing firm will have direct and full access to the company’s bank accounts. They will monitor and verify these daily transactions and provide Proof of Reserves / Proof of Liabilities.

Let’s make this clear: globcoin.io
Integrating physical devices with IOTA — The Track&Trace App.
By: Hugo Gregersen
Tags: Iota, Bar Code Scanner, Python, Supply Chain, Tutorial

About the Track&Trace concept

Before we move on to the tech., lets take a quick look at the basic concept.

Lets imagine the purchaser at Hotel IOTA wants to place a new purchase order to Bob for 10kg of fresh salmon.

Together with the purchase order, a random 13 digit number is generated by the purchaser and provided to Bob to be used as a unique tracking ID for this particular order.

Why a 13 number you ask.., well one of the most commonly used bar-code systems in the world is the EAN-13 bar-code. This means that it can be read by most standard bar-code scanners out-of-the-box.

Next, Bob takes the 13 digit number and puts it into an online bar-code generator such as this one hosted by TECH-IT.

Then Bob prints out the bar-code and tapes it to the package of fresh salmon.

Finally, as Bob hands over the package to the “Trucks R Us” pickup guy, he takes out his bar-code scanner and registers an “Outbond” transaction in the Track&Trace App.

At the same time, when the “Trucks R Us” pickup guy receives the package, he takes his bar-code scanner and registers an “Inbound” transaction in the Track&Trace App.

As the “Trucks R Us” pickup guy hands over the package to the next actor in the supply chain (SeaTrans Inc.) he registers an “Outbound” transaction in the Track&Trace App.

And so it goes on with each actor in the supply chain until the package finally arrives at the Hotel IOTA warehouse.

As a result, we have now effectively created a closed loop, tamper proof audit trail of each shipment interaction that can be checked and verified by the Hotel owner, purchaser or any other 3. party actor at any time.

So, how do we prevent one actor from posing as i different actor when entering records into the system? Well, in my version of the project, each actor is provided a unique private key that is only known to them. The private key together with the unique bar-code ID is then used to generate a unique hash that will be stored inside the message fragment of each IOTA transaction. The hash can now be used to verify that the correct actor created the appropriate record.

Note!

When playing around with the Track&Trace App. you don’t necessarily have to generate and print a bar-code from scratch. EAN-13 codes are used on many everyday items you get from your local store. Just have a look in your refrigerator.
You Should Know the Number of Steps
By: Jacquelyn Lynn
Tags: Life Lessons, Safety, Health, Stairs, Injury

Do you have stairs in or around your home or workplace? For your safety, know the number of steps in each set of stairs.

According to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, more than 1 million people per year are treated in emergency departments for stair-related injuries.

You’ll be safer on stairs when you know how many steps you have to take to reach the top or bottom of the staircase.

This is especially important if you are in the dark, carrying something (such as a child, pet, laundry basket, large box, etc.) or for any other reason can’t see your feet or the steps.

Photo by Jerry D Clement; used with permission

It’s great that so many people are counting steps for fitness these days. Go one step further — count and remember the steps on your stairways to reduce your risk of falling.
Want Something Different? Try This Purple Sweet Potato Pie
By: Viggy Hampton
Tags: Food, Cooking, Dessert, Baking, Recipe

Want Something Different? Try This Purple Sweet Potato Pie

This pie is big on flavor and oh-so-photogenic.

Image: Author’s own

We’ve all heard of orange sweet potatoes, that Thanksgiving staple that also, in my opinion, makes a better French fry. Sweet potatoes are nutritious, creamy, sweet, and versatile.

But wait — have you tried the orange sweet potato’s bright purple cousin?

Purple sweet potatoes, also called Okinawan sweet potatoes, are just as delicious and versatile as the orange variety, but there is one major difference. Whereas orange sweet potatoes get their color from carotenoids, which are an important source of vitamin A and help boost immune and eye health, purple sweet potatoes get their rich jewel tone from anthocyanins, which are powerful antioxidants. Studies have shown that anthocyanins may help regulate blood sugar, improve gut health, and reduce the risk of cancer, among many other benefits.

In fact, studies comparing orange, white, and purple sweet potatoes came to the same conclusion: purple sweet potatoes have the greatest amount of antioxidants.

So, how do you use purple sweet potatoes? You can use them in much the same way you use orange sweet potatoes, whether that be in soups, burrito bowls, or even plain alongside a protein or other vegetable.

You don’t just have to go the savory route, though — the brilliant purple color of these nutritional powerhouses makes gorgeous baked goods.

If you want to bake a treat that people can’t help but Instagram, then you’ve got to try this purple sweet potato pie. Besides tasting delicious, it also fills your body with beneficial nutrients. I call that a win-win!
Raising A Family Is Still Hard As F*ck
By: Divina Grey
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Life, Love, Parenting

Today, I miss being home with my kids. I miss not working. I miss the tediousness of walking back and forth to school three times a day and seeing the sunshine on their faces mid-afternoon as they tell me about their day.

I even miss the mountains of dishes and dirty laundry.

Lately, I’ve spent so much energy on getting through the weekly routine alive. Today is the first day I started to wonder if I was doing the right thing by going back to work.

It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Especially when I hear my daughters little voice tremble at night when she says,

“Mommy, why did you have to get a job? — Daddy already has one.”

Ugh. Fuck.
Video: SSD Awesomeness
By: Robert Merrill
Tags: Geek

Helps you hire smarter, faster, and better. Let’s get to work. ConnectedWell.com; Twitter: @AskRobMerrill; People First Leadership: http://bit.ly/pplfirstldrs

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Inspiration: The Good and the Bad
By: Fatima Taqvi
Tags: Poetry, Writing, Writing Tips, Inspiration

To “inspire” = to “breathe into.”

Ancient peoples considered deities to be agents of inspiration. The sheer power of creative force pushing us to bring art into the world was so compelling, it seemed to come from beyond mortal beings. Greeks, for example, ascribed inspiration to the Muses. Muses supplied the impetus to art. They prodded and guided the hand of the writer, the lyrics of the songster.

Inspiration makes us feel like we’ve been hijacked by a higher power. It makes the writing process feel surreal and vaguely divine — for as long as the burst of inspiration lasts, anyway.

We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us. ― Jean Cocteau

The Good?

Inspiration is a blessing. Inspired writing has soul. It summons deep emotion in the reader, because it has been laboured over with passion. It almost writes itself. You can’t tear yourself away from the page.

And The Bad…

Here’s how inspiration tries to have her pound of flesh:- in the end you’ve entwined your heart within the story. Your ego has been awakened. To take something away, or to add something else, feels blasphemous.

Editing doesn’t just involve running spell check and fixing the grammar. A large part of editing involves using a scalpel. Lifting whole scenes. Removing paragraphs.

To make something work for you, you must apply it at the right time, and in the right doses.

Inspiration is an external trigger acting on the cauldron of your collective experiences up until that point, to create new configurations. Different “what ifs.”

Inspiration is not the totality of writing. Only a phase of it.
Anatomy of Gossip
By: İpeksu Durmaz
Tags: Psychology, Society, Friendship, Mental Health, Critical Thinking

Anatomy of Gossip

“Your criticism towards other people makes me feel censurable.”

I thought to myself.

Photo by James McDonald on Unsplash

I was sitting with a group of people at a bar, having a few drinks. Popular themes of our conversation were politics, arts and culture, and gossip…

My mind started moving away from that table slowly with the last theme. I started looking at our table from above, seeing the rest of the outdoor sitting at that bar. Repeating patterns of our social habits and existence through gossip… General ambience of a group of people not agreeing on something talked to me: “There’s only one way to do things.” I was one of those people, and I know I still am without even realizing my own ego talk time to time. But why did it feel so wrong at that moment? Because I was just an observer, and feeling superior didn’t interest me anymore.

I believe that criticism may be used as social practice in some situations and can be very beneficial for the person criticized. What if the person is not there with you?

Gossip taught us to cooperate and made us even more social through our evolution process.

A good amount of our everyday conversation contains gossip with personal judgements, because hurtful judgements we make about an absent third party rely on our need to feel temporarily superior. We reflect on our insecure parts that need to be exposed.

If we are sharing the same personal judgements with other people, it’s even better. We make our space in a social group stronger. Unfortunately, our attempts to not to agree with somebody else may make other people feel easily disagreeable and judgeable in some other occasions.

Psychologically, gossip is the projection of insecurity.

When we judge and blame others, we expose an unhealed part of ourselves that needs a relief. Everything wants to be seen an heard, so do our self-doubt. We can either make this unhealed part conscious, or just keep walking this inner negativity out unconsciously. Often through projection.

At an energy level, it is a sign of blocked chakra, and it spreads the news as much as the negativity.

Everything is energy, including our words. While we keep relieving our unconscious insecurities temporarily through gossip, we let it build new negative opinions on top of each other. Ripple effect of negativity spreads as fast as rumors.

How to not to be a part of this energy

With an absent third party, it’s not possible to cure the problem that is being judged. Here’s some possible answers to not to be a part of judgmental conversations, and safely end them.

Why does it interest you so much? I’d rather to talk something more positive. I don’t think we can help them right now, so maybe we should leave this conversation to some other time. Does this really matter at this moment?

I hope we all notice everything inside of us, and do not relieve them to the outside world through gossip.

Keep your words bright.

Thank you for reading.
Seeing the World Differently
By: Paul Mulliner
Tags: Mindfulness, Spirituality, Philosophy, Yoga, Eco Philosophy

The 2020 pandemic lockdown has brought us a reflective pause from life as usual, a time to maybe rethink some of what we value, and make changes to our daily life.

A chance to remind ourselves of the important things.

And ask some essential questions.

Can we find ways to restructure our way of living, recover our health and the health of our planet?

Can we visualize a green recovery, encouraging cycle use, renewable energy, electric vehicles and videoconferencing?

And can we find time in our daily life to practice mindfulness regularly, discovering the calm and peace of the conscious space inside all of us?
Basicolans Newsletter Issue #17
Tags: Archive, Newsletter

Basicolans

A community by, of and for the alumni of Shaheed Bhagat Singh College
Chalkboard Thoughts — Dec 11, 2020 — Episode 2 — The Vaccine!
By: Michael De Groot
Tags: Storytelling, Shareyourstory, Stayingaliveuk, Covid 19, Chalkboardthoughts

I’ve been observing people’s enthusiasm for the vaccine, celebrating Margaret Keenan and William Shakespeare (real name) for being the first people in the world to receive the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine. As a consequence there’s this massive optimism of being able to get back to normal, whatever that might look like, whilst many nations including us in the UK, are still witnessing very high number of infections and only last night (13th March), I heard about Germany closing down, basically for Christmas and the New Year to keep infections in check. Germany was held up as a model nation for having controlled the virus, but unfortunately they also have succumbed to this dreadful pandemic.
amor rose
Tags: Poetry, Relationships, Art, Love, LGBTQ

I rise in ‘t flush blush I radiant I glow

sparkle in the after-glory of ‘t

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ I ascend levitate cloud in it

I liv+lauf I lauf&lauf&lauf, Eliotic in it

I blued my body in it.. so deep down

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ butterfly strokes.

Maluma of it, River Phoenix of it,

ㅤㅤ I fucking eternate in it, damn it.

in response to the prompt, Ishq/love.
實踐吧！資料科學面試該如何短期衝刺
By: Meicheng Shih
Tags: Interview, Data Science, Job Hunting, Job Interview, Data Scientist

We are four passionate UXers from Taiwan, working across Asia and the U.S. We share our insights and work experiences to the community. UX四神湯是四位臺灣清華畢業的UX海外工作者所建立的內容平台，每週定期發布文章。內容涵蓋中美的工作環境與生活體驗、互聯網巨頭與新創公司的工作內容、設計趨勢、UX實務技能分享等

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Short Term and What it Means
By: Tatiana Santana
Tags: Self Worth, Life, Goal Setting, Counseling, Goals

When I think of the words long term, I often think of long-term goals or long term relationships. When I think of short-term, I think of small goals or aspirations that can be done before a week’s end. We all live our lives based on our next plan and never think of where we are only where we should be headed in life. We often strive to be somewhere we aren’t, physically or mentally.

As I have grown to be the person I am, I have realized that being in a good state of mind is so important. Growing up I was always taught to work toward reachable goals, I was taught that once you got there you could hypothetically be happy and begin your journey to the next goalpost. As I have grown I have realized that maybe humanity should rethink this though. The example I will give has been said many times. When you want a bonus at work, you work for it, when you get it you are happy until you want another bonus and the cycle repeats itself.

If we are looking at a goal this way, we will never be happy. We continue to chase temporary happiness rather than happiness that is everlasting. But why is it that most of us have not seen this “everlasting happiness”? I believe that the reason most of us have never seen this happiness is that we tend to think of things, subconsciously, as a short term solution to a cycling problem, A problem that you may not know you have, or a problem that you continue to strive for but never seem to be content with.

I believe that I have the solution to this recurring issue. Acceptance and becoming content with where you are at this moment and not the future moment. Start thinking of short-term goals and long-term goals but prioritize the short-term goals and continue to create them as you check them off your never-ending list! This will create a better mind space and allow you to become more creative, content, and accepting. Being happy allows you to be productive and the thing you need the most on this journey as you continue reaching for those short-term goals is productivity!