fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
My Parisian Food And Photo Safari
By: Linda Horton
Tags: iPhone, Travel, Paris, Food, Photography

My Parisian Food And Photo Safari

Just me, my iPhone, and my appetite

Montmartre, Paris

When I went to Paris last year, my main goal was to take pictures, and eat. I had been there briefly the year before, but this time I really wanted to dig in. Armed with my Nikon D800, a variety of lenses, and my iPhone, I was off on my adventure.

Even though I lugged my camera gear everywhere, I took most of the pictures with my iPhone, including all of those shown here.

It was a workout, schlepping through Paris carrying that heavy backpack, but ultimately worth it, as that required me to eat more delicious food. And of course I took pics of all (or most) of it, and posted them on Instagram.

I mean, I love the art and architecture and all, but for me it’s all about the food!

Welcome to Paris!
Представляем вам Сообщество Визуализации Данных
By: Natalia Kiseleva
Tags: Дизайн, Dvsintl, Визуализация Данных, Data Visualization, Dvsintro

Sign up for The 'Gale

By Nightingale

Keep up with the latest from Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society Take a look
Stripped Back
By: James G Brennan
Tags: James G Brennan, Politics, Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Resistance Poetry

Taking just four years to dismantle

more than a few lifetimes worth of work

with belligerent pride claiming benefit

for a nation held in complete disregard.

Yet there are those convinced,

rallying to the call of a most unpatriotic caustic voice.

Veneers carefully crafted over millennia

pulled apart, sanctioned by their leader

gift wrapping freedom of vitriolic words,

repeated, spewed out by those whose hearts

allowed themselves to be blackened waiting in the wings

to finally be set free.
UI/UX Design: Leveraging Value for Your Users
By: Nick Lawrence
Tags: Ui Ux Design

People do well when they can

I was first introduced to this concept when I was teaching design and programming at the Boys & Girls Club of Corvallis.

The seminar that I had a chance to attend focused on training us as youth development professionals, and giving us additional tools that allowed us to serve our students, and by extension communities, much more and far better.

The main idea that stuck in my head from that seminar was:

This is to say that no one wants to do badly, and when people aren’t doing well, it’s generally because they have a lack of tools, rather than a lack of will, to do well in a given situation.

Image by magnetme from Pixabay

For example: people may believe that a child is lazy, unmotivated, or just doesn’t care. Not true. They more than likely have an underlying issue that needs to be addressed. Generally, these children are ostracized, which further exacerbates their behavior in a vicious cycle that always ends with them not getting what they need, or developing the mechanisms that allow them to get from where they are to where they want to be.

But here’s the deal: if its an issue for kids, it is absolutely an issue for adults too, and this is what we need to recognize as UI/UX designers:
IBM Introduces Neural Voices for Arabic, Dutch, Korean, Australian English, and Mandarin Chinese
By: Rachel Liddell
Tags: Watson Assistant, Deep Neural Networks, Neural Networks, Announcements, Watson Text To Speech

Meet our newest Neural Voices! They join the Watson Text to Speech portfolio to strengthen your ability to serve customers across the globe. Neural Voices improve customer interaction with a clear, crisp, natural sound.

In this release, we have updated eight existing voices for Arabic, Dutch, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. We also added two new voices for Korean and two new voices for Australian English. All voices are available in the IBM public cloud.

Selection of Voice Samples

Here are samples from each new language added. We’ve released seven other new Neural Voices as well, which you can listen to in our catalog.

Australian English - Craig

Arabic - Omar

Dutch - Emma

Korean - Si-Woo

Mandarin Chinese - Zhang Jing

Neural Technology

These new voices sound natural because they leverage deep neural networks (already in use for other languages in the IBM portfolio). Previous training techniques synthesized speech by connecting small segments of speech, called phones, to form words. This method can lead to choppiness. Neural Voices, on the other hand, employ deep neural networks (DNNs) in their prosody and acoustic models. Deep neural networks produce more natural sounding voices, even with less training data. Neural Voices also require less customization, since they sound smooth out of the box. With this release, IBM now offers Neural Voices or Enhanced Neural Voices for all supported languages.

Below is a diagram of the steps of neural synthesis at runtime. Your text is analyzed, then deep neural networks predict the pitch and phoneme durations (prosody), spectral structure, and waveform of the speech.
Virtual Economies will be built and controlled by players
By: Henning Rokling
Tags: Virtual Worlds, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

We strongly believe that genuine virtual economies will be fuelled by cryptocurrency and the decentralised nature of blockchain. Online games have traditionally used centralised in-game stores, but by using blockchain-based virtual economies players can build and shape online economies on their own terms. This will be an enormous change from the current centralised game world administration found in existing MMO games.

New digital worlds will be blockchain-based

We’ve previously seen online economies created with aspects of activities also found in everyday life, such as working, shopping and leisure activities all taking place in virtual worlds. Introducing blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re expanding the interconnectivity between virtual worlds and the offline/real world.

Linking virtual and real-world economies

With more than 1.8 billion gamers around the world, opening digital economies and removing the disconnect between real and virtual world economies will demonstrate the usability of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology to the mainstream consumer. Blockchain-based online games and virtual worlds become linked to real-world economies when cryptocurrency exchanges offer trading between the world- or game-based tokens to other cryptocurrencies or fiat currencies.

Blockchain-based platforms are appropriate for games and worlds where there is real cash value items and other assets included. When you are dealing with items and virtual assets that have a real cash value, you are connected to the real world. Therefore, we believe token worlds will be the future of virtual worlds and online game economies.

Apply to our Whitelist to participate in the Pre-Sale

The PARSEC Pre-Sale will open on January 24th, 2018. This will be a limited sale, open to applicants who are accepted by the team. Anyone can apply, but only a select number of applicants will be chosen to participate in this phase of the sale. The whitelist process shall ensure diverse token distribution, and help mitigate market risk imposed by single large token holders.

Whitelist-approved participants will be guaranteed to contribute their specific amount of ETH in the PARSEC Pre-Sale. You will need to be a part of our Discord server.

The full details of our token sales can be found in our Pre-Sale Document.

For more information please join the conversation on our Discord or follow us on Twitter.

Also, please stay tuned for further updates from us regarding content, game design, concept art and much more to come in the next couple of weeks.
Exploring San Francisco Apartments on Craigslist with R
By: Vishal Chandawarkar
Tags: Web Scraping, R, Towards Data Science, Data Visualization, Data Cleaning

Data Cleaning

So we’ve got 720 Craigslist posts for apartments in San Francisco.

Yay!

Unfortunately, the whole reason we started this exercise is because Craigslist has a lot of noise: duplicate postings, fake posts, etc.

Never fear, we can do our best to cut through the riffraff.

Start a new R file and let’s take a look at what we got.

Import Packages

pacman::p_load(tidyverse, DataExplorer, ggplot2, data.table, lubridate, plotly, sf, ggmap, maptools, ggthemes, RColorBrewer, kableExtra)

We’ll cover different packages as we go along.

Explore Data Structure

I like to use the DataExplorer package to get a quick visual of missing values:

plot_missing(craigslist)

Okay, so property managers aren’t great about including the area of an apartment. We’ll leave that be for now.

There are 4 entries with missing locations. Let’s go ahead and remove these rows.

Deduping

Have you ever noticed 20+ postings for the same location on Craigslist, especially when you’re scanning through listings in the map view? We need to get rid of these so that they don’t unnecessarily skew our analysis.

Wow, that already brought us down to 568 rows, but we’re not done yet! Sometimes property managers will make slight changes to post title so that it doesn’t get recognized as spam by Craigslist. While the titles may come across as distinct, we can see repetition in the post URL. To prove this point, let’s sort the posts alphabetically by link and review the first few results.

craigslist %>% arrange(links) %>% select(links) %>% head()

We can use some basic regex to extract this pattern into a new vector. We’ll then extract distinct values based on that vector.

This cleared out 18 more duplicates. There are more sophisticated ways to use regex for filtering out duplicates, but this is good enough for our purposes!

Removing Locations Too Far From SF

A quick scatter plot of GPS coordinates with ggplot2 reveals there are some listings super far away from SF. I don’t want to bother with those.

Using GPS boundaries found in Google Map, we’ll filter out locations too far away from the city — 20 more rows removed.

Onward, we’ll use functions from the lubridate package to convert the posting dates into a date format. We’ll also round to the day of the posting.

Next we’ll engineer a price-per-room feature and factor the number of bedrooms. We’ll use this data to see the distribution of per-room pricing across our listings.

We can see some big outliers here. Also, I don’t care for apartments with more than 4 bedrooms. Let’s filter out apartments with room prices greater than $7,500/month (crazy!) or with bedrooms greater than 4.

The locales vector indicates the neighborhood of an apartment. Because there isn’t much consistency in how locales are entered, there are 54 different locales that appear in our data set. Cleaning up the neighborhoods is a bit of a manual process and will look different as you scrape new posts. Here’s how I simplified it down to 14 neighborhoods:

Resulting neighborhoods:
“Women and Children First”
By: Alice Corona
Tags: Titanic, Data Journalism, Data Visualization

The Rich Survived. The Poor Died.

Gender was not the only factor that influenced survival rate. Not surprisingly, first-class passengers survived at the highest rate. In fact, 62% of them were rescued and made it to New York. The survival rate dropped to 42% for 2nd-class passengers and to 25% for the third-class. Among crew, members of the restaurant staff had the lowest survival rate. Only 3 of 69 restaurant crew members made it, or 4% of all restaurant workers. Deck crew was more lucky, with 65% surviving.

Number of Titanic Passengers grouped by Survival Status

Passengers were 66% of all the people who set off on the Titanic from Southampton, England. More than half of them had a third-class ticket. Victualling staff made up most of the crew (48%), followed by engineering staff (36%). In fact, there were more food and beverage staff members than first-class passengers on the Titanic.

Number of Titanic Passengers grouped by Class / Department

Of the 1783 Titanic crew members for which we have job/role information, 40% were stewards. Firemen were the second largest group of crew members (20%). Among the passengers, the largest category was general labourers or farm laborers (258). This demographic was almost certainly of lower income status, if not outright impoverished. Of these laborers, only 12 survived. Personal maids the other hand, are the most represented (known) job category of passenger survivors. In fact, all of the 21 passengers named as personal maids were rescued. They were all women and clearly benefited from “Women and children first.”

Number of Titanic Passengers grouped by Job

Fare prices paid by Titanics’s passengers varied significantly. Some third-class members paid up to £69 for their ticket. And some first-class passengers as little as £1 10s! Of the three, fare for a first-class journey had the widest range of prices. The most expensive passage was a £512 fare. This was paid by Mr. Thomas D.M. Cardeza for the suite he occupied with his mother (Mrs. Charlotte Wardle Cardeza) and his two servants (Mr. Gustave J. Lesueur and Miss Annie Moore Ward). They all survived.

Class / Department and Fare Price

Most passengers were from the UK or U.S. But some came from as far as Lebanon.

Number of Titanic Passengers grouped by Home Country

All the data on Titanic passengers and crew members is now in Silk. Anyone can use it to ask questions and build their own data stories with maps, charts, and easy-to-filter tables (like the one below). It’s also simple to embed any Silk visualization in blogs and Web pages. It even works on mobile browsers. We invite you to explore the Titanic as a data story and show us what you learn. We’re online @silkjournalism or @silkdotco.

Titanic Passengers DB
Watching Porn at 20 Versus 30
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Humor, Satire, Porn, Sex, Sexuality

Watching Porn at 20 Versus 30

I was so naive

Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash

20: OMG. She is so hairless. She’s perfect. How did she do that? Her skin is so slippery, she literally looks like a Barbie. How can I look like that?

30: The kitty needs fur. What, like he’s never eaten a Starburst with the wrapper?
Moments of Impact
By: Sandy Gordon Frankfort
Tags: Chance Encounters, Poetry, Life, Life Lessons, Love

I convince myself that

every word

every story

has already been written

So,

I hesitate

Take a step back

Inhale

and WAIT

I come back to this

Blank page

Day after Day

in an attempt to



Connect

Make a statement

Take a Stand

Leave My Imprint



The days continue passing

and the present moment

is quickly forgotten



These thoughts

These narratives

slowly fade

into sepia toned pages

of an E X I S T E N C E



never chronicled

never shared

never read

or understood

by another

As I await

the uncovering of

these

Precious

Miraculous

Moments of Impact



I ponder this…

There will come a time

when I can no longer

remember my past

and one day too soon

I will not be here to

Express my Truth

Tell My Story.



Today is a Step.

The ink is still wet.

Please

Hold My Hand

Walk with Me

and



Listen.



♥️ Sandy Gordon Frankfort
20 Pictures to Wash Your Eyes Out With After That Debate
By: Jack Shepherd
Tags: Presidential Debates, Happiness, Humor, Life, Pets

Yikes! That was unpleasant! Let’s look at some pictures of animals being nice and also very good.

This gerbil with exquisite taste in art (especially when it tastes like cardboard).

This pup who is broken, in a good way.

This cat who barely needs any encouragement at all to be your new best friend.

These cats who apparently JUST met?

The world’s Okayest pet.

This dog who just realized it’s a two-bathtime kind of day.

This cat who doesn’t even need an audience for his jokes.

A dog with a turtle hat.

A proud, salt-of-the-earth kitty with a contempt for luxury.

A dog who has a dog of his own.

Two expert sleepers.

This door-to-door sales-squirrel.

Two best friends watching a storm.

A dog who doesn’t play by your rules.

True love from inside a jack-o-lantern.

A cat with a smile so right they made a statue of him.

Two elderly pugs having a stroller meeting.

Dog Pyramus and Thisbe.

Your new QUEEN.

And the rare but beautiful occasion that is a kitten slumber party.
Rootshop Talk: Crowdfunding Campaign Tools
By: Ethan Mevi
Tags: Blockchain, Crowdfunding, Rootproject, Ethereum

Rootshop Talk: Crowdfunding Campaign Tools

Crowdfunding Forks

As we continue developing the Roots Safe Box and Factory, we have also begun work on specifications for a set of RootProject crowdfunding campaign tools: Crowdfunding Forks.

As outlined by Nicholas Judge of RootProject, the first concept we are tackling is Crowdfunding Forks. A crowdfunding fork is a means for funders of campaigns to control the implementation details of the program. In essence, it is a decentralized fiscal governance mechanism.

The fork functionality can be enabled on our crowdfunding platform by the project initiator. A fork proposal is created when a funding threshold is surpassed by a donor(s). Upon agreement with the project initiator, a variant of the campaign is implemented. For example, if a fundraising campaign for a worker training program is undertaken, a company may want a particular skill set from workers participating in the program. They would donate, agreeing that one of several courses’ syllabi focuses on that skill set.

The goal of this tool is to give donors the opportunity to impact outcomes of the funds they donate, and incentivize increased giving as a result.

Basic Workflow

The basic workflow begins with the project initiator allowing Crowdfunding Forks and assigning metrics for fork initiation. The campaign initiator stipulates not only the amount required, but also potentially a percentage or fixed donation figure, but also the framework for the fork outcome. An example of this, which will also be our first public beta on roll-out, is a campaign to fund a blockchain development school within an existing dev school, where electives can be forked off the campaign with a certain percentage or level of donation. A project initiator may veto a proposal from a large potential donor. If they approve, the threshold-meeting donor and the project initiator agree on language for the new campaign node.

MVP and Beyond

The plan is to start Crowdfunding Forks MVP with a fairly simple feature set, but largely based around these functions:

Design a project forking UI for the initiator to enable for a campaign, with entry field for fork goals/metrics Design the UI for donors to elect to target a predefined fork, showing defined goals Design UI upon a fork creation in the campaign, and notifications for project initiator and donor Build a backend schema to associate a forked parent and child data structures.

Beyond our MVP, the concept of decentralized curation of crowdsourced funding is pretty exciting. Campaign governance models, voting rights, and game theory applied to mission-driven investing is something we (obviously) think has significant growth potential. Our plan is start with the forks, and add features as we go. Looking forward to sharing progress on this in the coming weeks and months!
Operation NEWCOMBE Explained: Peacekeeping in Mali
By: Ministry Of Defence
Tags: Terrorism, Military, Security, Peace, UK

2. What will they be doing?

UN peacekeeping operations support local political efforts to build sustainable long-term peace in the countries where they are deployed. Peacekeepers protect civilian populations, support political dialogue and reconciliation, prevent and reduce conflict, as well as promote and protect human rights.

Combat is not the objective of the deployment. The Long Range Reconnaissance Group will perform a crucial role within the UN mission. Conducting reconnaissance and patrol tasks, launched from the UN camp in Gao, to gather intelligence and engage with the local Malian people.

Information gathered will help improve the UN Mission Commander’s understanding of the situation on the ground and enable the mission to respond to threats to the people of Mali more effectively.

This is a peacekeeping operation, rather than a combat or counter-terrorism operation.

Lieutenant Colonel Robinson, the Commanding Officer of the LRRG Task Group upon arriving in Mali in Dec 2020.

The task group has received high-quality training on MINUSMA’s role in the prevention of gender-based violence and the protection of the rights of all people in conflict, regardless of gender.

The UK has also deployed an experienced specialist cultural advisor to ensure the Task Group’s contribution is the most valuable it can be.

They will work with international partners to build stronger communities, help tackle extremism and ensure the protection of civilians is prioritised.

3. Why are they going?

The Sahel is one of Africa’s poorest and most fragile regions. Marked by chronic poverty, instability and high levels of gender inequality, it is very vulnerable to violence and conflict from extremist and criminal organisations.

Mali is at the forefront of countries in Africa affected by instability. With terrorist violence and conflict between communities sharply on the rise, it is costing civilians their lives and preventing the development of one of the poorest countries in the world.

The UN mission has been operating in Mali for seven years, working towards a peaceful and prosperous future. The capability the British Army brings will both enhance the mission and strengthen our international military alliances and partnerships.

A soldier from The Royal Anglian Regiment walks across Salisbury Plain Training Area at dusk during the LRRG Task Group’s Mission Rehearsal Exercise in October 2020.

It is in all of our interests to work together to protect civilians and help build a safer, healthier and more prosperous future for the people of the region.

By helping to stabilise fragile states and tackle the root cause of conflict we help to secure people’s basic rights, as well as preventing conflicts growing beyond boundaries and causing instability in other countries.

Find out where else the UK Armed Forces are deployed here 👇
How ConnectScale Wants to Tokenise the $115 Billion Recreational Fishing Market
By: Wouter Verhoog
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Tech

What does your roadmap for the next six months look like?

Right now we are focused entirely on growing our community, continuously improving our hardware, our native apps and of course on getting everything in place to start tokenising our platform. We’re among the first OST Partners to actually mint our own Branded Token by staking real OST on Mainnet, so we’re definitely on top of things. The goal is to introduce token-backed tournaments in the first quarter of 2019.

Ben, ConnectScale has been around for three years now — are there any plans to expand into other markets?

We’re actually considering applying our experience and technology to other outdoor recreation verticals. Considering the outdoor industry is one of America’s biggest economic sectors, with nearly $900 billion in annual consumer spending, it makes sense to start exploring other markets!

Last but certainly not least, why blockchain and why OST?

That’s easy: If you want to tokenise your business with the help of microtransactions, there’s no getting around blockchain. On top of that, we believe smart contracts will pave the way for fraud-proof contests like the Catch Weigh Release Tournaments organised by members of the community.

As far as we can tell, OST is the only project offering everything you need to launch a token economy, without having to hire blockchain developers. The fact that their protocols will soon allow for thousands of transactions per second, on-chain, is exactly what we’re looking for in a blockchain partner.

We’ve been with OST right from the beginning, and I can’t wait to introduce ConnectCoin to our community of anglers!

Thank you very much, Ben!
Basicolans Newsletter Issue #18
Tags: Archive, Budget, Newsletter

Basicolans Newsletter Issue #18

From the Archives: Volume 2, Issue #6 (June-July 2014)

Perhaps one of our longest newsletters, this issue summarised the Union Budget of 2014, while getting its third design update.
Instantly Happy Nexo Clients
Tags: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Hodl, Banking, Fintech

When Nexo embarked upon its journey just a few months ago, we had a clear vision to create the world’s first instant crypto-backed loan platform.

Armed with more than 10 years of international lending and process automation experience, we set out to build the Nexo Platform from the ground up with the only goal of adding value to our users’ lives and the entire crypto community.

The first market validation came not long after with Nexo raising $52.5 million in an 11x oversubscribed Private Token Sale. Although it was elating to see our project getting off to a flying start, we had little time for celebrating. We were hard at work to launch the Nexo Platform and offer our users an instant access to liquidity while protecting the upside potential of their assets.

Less than a month after we closed our funding round, we launched the Nexo Platform, becoming one of only a handful of blockchain companies with a live product shortly after their token sale.

Fast forward to today and Nexo is providing millions in crypto loans to thousands of clients around the globe. Looking back, we are honored to see our original plans come to life.

If there is one thing that makes us proud beyond words though, it is seeing the evidence of bettering people’s lives as countless happy clients rave about the Nexo instant loans all over the web.

Here, we are sharing part of what our borrowers have to say about us:
Official Whitepaper Release
By: Your Data Safe
Tags: Ico White Paper, Cryptocurrency Investment, Tge, Crypto, Data

The Your Data Safe team are happy to announce the release of version 1.3.4

This is our official and technical document which details the Your Data Safe vision; containing the terms and conditions of our upcoming TGE (Token Generation Event)

Your Data Safe are not financial advisors and you should always do your own research and use due diligence before participating in any form of token contribution.

This whitepaper is written in the English language and shall be interpreted in accordance as such. If any translated version, into any language other than English, the English version will control and prevail on any question of interpretation or otherwise.

For further details on our upcoming TGE please follow:

www.YourDataSafe.io

Telegram: www.T.Me/YourDataSafe
Technology Update | August 2018
By: Morpheus Labs Team
Tags: Blockchain, Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Technology, Bitcoin

Dear supporters,

A lot has been happening over at Morpheus Labs. July through August, we have been doing intensive and important development steps on the Morpheus Labs BPaaS-platform. We want to ensure the platform components are optimized for rapid prototyping with pre-selected blockchain use cases.

The highlights for this month are as follows:

Blockchain App Development Lifecycle in BPaaS

We have further optimized the end-to-end app development lifecycle. By doing this, we offer a ready-to-go process for developer using our platform.

Figure 1: Example of Blockchain App Lifecycle in BPaaS

Application Library and BPaaS Subscriptions

The Application Library application fee and BPaaS platform subscription are two important revenue components of the MITx Ecosystem. Using MITx token, platform members can select different subscription plans to enable them to use different platform features such as ready-to-go CDE development stacks /blockchain runtimes and various types of blockchain networks to suit different needs in scale and purpose. Furthermore, developers can sell apps and tools; developers can receive donations and incentives for their good quality of work and contributions to the ecosystem.

Use Cases

In preparation for the beta version, we are including real-world use cases into the BPaaS. The following are examples of the use cases that have been tested and ready to use through the BPaaS:

· Ready-to-Go stack with an Application built using Spring Boot and web3j for Product Tracking and Tracing in a private Ethereum blockchain.

· Ready-to-Go stack for Product Certification using NEM blockchain

Blockchain Operations Console

The Blockchain Operations Console aggregates the operational activities required to manage the blockchain network provisioned on the platform. The operational activities include self-provisioning, monitoring health and membership management of the blockchain network. It will be used by blockchain network owners, auditors and member operators.

We are now at the final stage for Blockchain Ops (Blockchain Operations Console). The Blockchain Operation Console for Ethereum private network is targeting to be released in the BPaaS Beta version. For other selected blockchains, we foresee to release after the BPaaS beta version.

With that note, we are on track with our aggressive product development roadmap and expect to open private beta testing applications by end of this month.

Stay tuned for the next update! Thank you!

Morpheus Labs Team
Team Update
By: Your Data Safe
Tags: Blockchain, Crypto, Gdpr, Pr, Bitcoin

The Your Data Safe team has been growing steadily over the last few months and we are excited to introduce two more who have recently joined Your Data Safe.

Chris Comer — Blockchain PR Adviser

Chris is head of business development at TechForge Media, Negotiating media and marketing with some of the largest brands and companies in the world. He is also head of business development for The Blockchain Expo, The world’s largest Blockchain conference & exhibition, which tours around the world.

We are delighted to have Chris join our team to follow guidance on future partnerships within the blockchain space.

William Troup — Software Engineer

William has spent 10 years working in the software industry and has gained a wide range of technical skills. During his first years, he worked as the lead developer for new UI technologies to drive the ageing product into new directions, while providing support for SIP integration and working to improve testing tools and 3rd party support tools (working mainly in C#, Python, C++, JavaScript, HTML/CSS).

William has designed software packages for screen capturing, terminal helpers, file management software and has also developed his own programming language called ChocoloteScript.

More details on our private sale: www.YourDataSafe.io
​​TRON + EOS vs Ethereum
By: Ico, Crypto News
Tags: Blockchain, Eos, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Crypto

This year, Ethereum will have two competitors — own platforms are launched today by TRON, and June 2 — by EOS. Both tokens were created on the basis of Ethereum, but at the start they raised significantly more funds than Ethereum himself. Whether the quantity will turn into quality will be shown by the time, but for now both coins are falling, as traders are afraid of the uncertainty of the transition period.

Tron last year raised $ 70 million for ICO, EOS collected more than $ 4 billion, and “generated” their Ethereum in 2014, starting with a modest $ 15.5 million. Now Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency with a capitalization of $ 20 billion, and its The platform is used to run most startups.

Now the developers of ICO will have a choice. How this will affect TRON, EOS and Ethereum rates — we will find out very soon.

Join our Telegram channel & subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to read the latest news of blockchain and crypto industries.
Checking Stripe Connect Account’s Capabilities from your iOS platform
By: Charlie Oxendine
Tags: Stripe, iOS, Swift, Nodejs, Programming

Time to write some code!

Stripe doesn’t offer one magical “info needed” function for their accounts. Instead, you manage the information that Stripe needs and your users’ account statuses based on the capabilities you need that user to have. With more capabilities, Stripe may need more information. This is great for us because that means we only need to prompt our users when we actually need information from them, minimizing the interruptions to their experience.

You can check out more information on Stripe Connect Account capabilities here.

Below, we are creating a cloud function that takes in an account ID and checks for a user’s transfer capability. This determines whether a user can transfer money to another person on your platform or make withdrawals to their bank. You can change this to whatever capability you want to check for. There’s a list of capabilities here.

On the client-side, we use Alamo-Fire to make the call to our cloud function. If it returns false, then you should pass the user into the Stripe Connect Onboarding webform (explained in the previous article).

Side Note: You can call cloud functions directly from your app with the Firebase Framework instead of Alamo-Fire. Check it out here.

If everything is done properly, this function should return true or false (if a user’s capabilities are active). You can use this to check when the user logs in, or when the user tries to use their capability in your app. I hope this helps and suggestions are always welcome!
In Securing Agreements with Major Global Refineries, Karatcoin Has Positioned Itself as the World’s…
Tags: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Karatcoin, Gold, Cryptocurrency

In Securing Agreements with Major Global Refineries, Karatcoin Has Positioned Itself as the World’s Preeminent, Gold-Backed Cryptocurrency

Karatcoin is incredibly proud to announce that we have reached an agreement with a large European refinery to not only mint our mine-sourced gold (LMBA 999.99), but they will also store it in their global vaults in both Singapore and Switzerland. With this agreement, Karatcoin has the sufficient gold reserves to start minting our own Gold Tokens (KCG)!

I don’t think I need to tell any seasoned investor the importance of having vaults in both Switzerland and Singapore. Just as we are harnessing and integrating the strengths of precious metals and cryptocurrencies, we have strategically secured vaults in two of the most important banking and investment hubs in the world, which will ensure that Karatcoin will be integrated into both the European and Asian economies.

Karatcoin — 100g. 999,9 Fine Gold

Additionally, we will produce our collectible 100g. physical Karatcoin gold. These Karatcoin will initially be made available (free of charge) to those who reach the target set in the promotional campaigns that will be launched very soon, and which can then be subsequently purchased directly on the Karatcoin website or on our DApp.

Collectively, these agreements have positioned Karatcoin as the world’s leading, gold-backed cryptocurrency, with the global infrastructure needed to transform our investment platform and portfolio into one of the world’s most trusted and secure cryptocurrencies.

Karatcoin has always prided itself on adopting vertical integration into our business model. From our gold mines, to our storage vaults, to our KCG tokens, we take pride in offering our clients a secure and robust supply chain that will unleash both a revolution and a renaissance on to the global economy. We are seamlessly integrating the speed, liquidity, and revolutionary technological advancements that cryptos offer to modern investors with the trust, stability, and anti-inflationary store of value that gold has offered investors for thousands of years.

Would you liked to have been given the chance to invest into Bitcoin back in 2015? Well, you’re confronted with a very similar situation. The “feud” between admirers of precious metals and admirers of cryptocurrencies is a short-sighted and foolish one. As currency crises continue to plague the global economy, far-sighted cryptos will simply circumvent fiat currencies altogether and stabilize and anchor themselves on the two most trusted currencies in human history — gold and silver.

Karatcoin saw this trend long before the rest of the pack, and we’ve positioned ourselves as the undisputed global leader. We offer an outstanding portfolio of products and services that seamlessly integrate both of these assets into an investment platform that is destined revolutionize human commerce. For more information, visit us at https://karatcoin.co/
Hyperledger Sawtooth for a Beginner — Transactions and Batches
By: Blockchain Dealer
Tags: Business, Blockchain, Technology, Decentralized Web, Bitcoin

The above image is the complete breakdown of every field for both transactions and batches in the Hyperledger Sawtooth architecture.

The batch is the atomic unit of change in the system. It is a collection of transactions affecting the state of the ledger. When a batch isn’t completely processed, all transactions within it are halted. This structure simplifies the dependency mechanism, where a transaction or group of them require the validation of a prior one to properly function: those with the same or non-conflicting dependencies go in a batch together.

Both structures follow the same principles for their correct format; e.g. they both contain and are addressed by a hash of their header’s details. They also require to be signed and verified to ensure their soundness.

If you weren’t up to speed on how signing is helpful in a Merkle Tree structure, here’s what happens:

The data is a collection of fields which are added together and converted to a unique string — called a hash — through an algorithm

Fields can be deciphered with knowledge of the other fields in the hash

Changing the underlying data modifies the hash

The signature can be verified as being applied to the hash by a specific public key and a specific hash

In other words, everything is serialized to this unique string which is signed to ensure the verifiable integrity of the data. If the data changes, the signed hash decryption won’t match the raw hash and we’ll know something’s up.

Some more fluff

There’s this really cool feature that’s presented in the documentation under dependencies and Input/Output:

Partial addresses work as wildcards and allow transactions to specify parts of the tree instead of just leaf nodes.

This means there can be a given set of transactions that can be retrieved by pointing to a single address higher in the tree.

You probably weren’t made aware, but Sawtooth makes use of a unique kind of addressing format. The first 3 bytes — or 6 characters — are used to identify the namespace of the Blockchain, then subsequent pairs of characters refer to the next branch in the tree until the leaves are reached.

I’ve found this format to be particularly easily usable when designing systemic structures. It is very intuitive and presents a model which can be simply scaled. For example, the system may batch transactions by greatest common diviser and send them to the appointed validating peer. This streamlines the process of validation by establishing clear responsibilities divided across the network range of transactions.

Ok now what

I’ll be experimenting with this framework and attempting to combine my sparse programming knowledge and create interesting solutions for companies. If you’re interested in the development process of entreprise software, especially if you enjoy watching a beginner cut through thick jungle fauna, you’ll feel right at home here.

Feedback
Designing for your clients, or for likes from your peers?
By: Benek Lisefski
Tags: UI, Freelancing, User Experience, Digital Marketing, UX

Rockstar, award-winning, popular celebrity designer extraordinaire.

Is that your goal as a designer?

We all like praise and recognition. In a field that’s ever-changing, it’s comforting to get validation from your peers. It’s a great cure for imposter syndrome, or for a mild case of creative block or self-doubt. It makes us feel like we’re doing something right.

I must admit, the few times my work has won awards, I was chuffed. Of course I liked the recognition. When you’re proud of something you create, it’s only natural to want others to appreciate it too.

However, I can’t help but think that designer self-promotion has been taken over by an unhealthy addiction to eye-candy, shallow praise, and attention-seeking trickery. And what for? Does that sideshow attract better clients? I’m not so sure.

Are back-patting and thumbs-upping from random strangers across the world the kind of validation that matters? I think I’d rather get that validation from clients, when they gush to their colleagues about how I exceeded their expectations.

I’m reminded of the sorry state of politics: that elected representatives must spend half their time schmoozing and fundraising for their next re-election, which leaves little time left to get real work done during this term.

For some designers, that schmoozing time is spent crafting intricate daily Dribbble animations, or shallow, trend-driven, unsolicited redesigns. Has keeping up that social pretence become a necessity now? I hope not, because I’m not very good at it.

I focus on delivering the best design results for my clients. Whether or not that’s on-trend or popular is of little concern. If it doesn’t make for a perfect Instagram share, so be it. That was never a goal of the work, and never a metric to measure its success.

I don’t mean to say that self-promotion isn’t required. Your next client needs to come from somewhere, and for some designers, showcases like Dribbble, Behance, and Instagram are a valuable, calculated part of their client acquisition funnel. But for every success story with a hundred thousand followers and too many work enquiries to handle, there are countless other designers who mistakenly believe that this is how you have get new work. So they play the popularity game, and it usually doesn’t go well.

Here are some questionable self-promotion tactics examined:
My Word for 2020: Abandon
By: Mary Gallagher
Tags: Poetry, Word Of The Year, Words, Intentions, New Year

I’ve been letting go

Opening my hands

a little here, more there,

letting cares slip through

and expectations

fall to the ground.

Giving up the need for certainty

and approval —

the grip that’s held on far too long.

And now to abandon,

to be lost in Spirit,

found in Spirit,

open and exposed,

all pretense lost

and only freedom gained.

Abandoned to love and

free to be His.

Openly adored.
Sundays Made Me Forget I Am Biracial
By: Mary Jones
Tags: Race, Biracial, Biracial Identities, Biracial Children, Love

Many times I get confused for being Caucasian.

At first glance, you probably wouldn’t guess my biological father is black. In the same contrast, you probably wouldn’t be surprised my biological mom is white. I am one of those mixed gals; one of the girls with ‘the good hair’.

Race has always been something I’ve struggled with. As a young girl, I used to dream of having hair that was bone straight, like many of my friends had. I never knew how to identify with either side of myself. For each side, I was too much or too little of the other, and it didn’t help me make sense of anything.

Growing Up With One Side

I grew up with the black side of my family. There was hardly ever a time when we interacted with anyone on my biological mom’s side. The only person who ever did was my grandma, who because my adopted and only mom. She used to take my brother’s and I to my white grandma and grandpa’s house.

After church on Sundays, she would drive over the bridge, that symbolized a begotten part of the town for us; forbidden in the sense that lower class lived there and we were better. Being so young, I don’t remember much, but there are a few memories that never left me.

Memories At My White Grandparents House

My grandma used to have a white dog that I was terrified of. It tried to bite me once when I was reaching out to hold my grandma’s hand. It stuck with me how overprotective the dog was over her; kind of like how my family was of me. They never bit me, but they did prevent me from going anywhere, like further than around the block.

Another memory is of me holding onto my grandpa tightly as he revved up his motorcycle to make us fly past the cars on the road. The breeze was like a magic wind hitting my face, blinding me from any thoughts of racial identity that the kids continuously reminded me of at school; calling me derogitory names like ‘oreo’. He drove all the way to an ice cream shop and bought me an ice cream cone.

The First Time I Met My Biological Mom

One of the most memorable Sunday’s happened when I met my biological mom. My mom/grandma pointed her out to me. She stood nearly six feet away from me and I had no idea who she was. My mom/grandma said, “That’s your mom.”

We talked for a long time. It had to have been hours. She shared a picture she had of me as a baby folded in her wallet. She called me Shaquilla Mary Ann; the name she gave me at the hospital. I didn’t know I had another name.

She tried to give me a kitten. I desperately wanted to take it home with me. I don’t know if it was really about having the kitten or the fact that my biological mom gave it to me. I begged my mom/grandma to have one of the kittens. I found one who seemed to like me. She said no.

Sundays used to be a coming together of both of my races. It was a day where race was put aside to enjoy the company of each other. I am black. I am white. My mom/grandma said we were Cherokee Indian, too. I am many things and it took me a long time to accept who I really am.
$100 for Honesty
By: Islamic History Notes
Tags: Life, Honesty, Islam

As a child I distinctly remember my parents emphasizing honesty. I’m not just talking about ‘no lying-always tell the truth’ type of honesty, but the type that’ if you find money on the street to go and donate it’ type.

However, there was one particular time where I was especially tempted to fall into the trap of shaytaan. This trap was highly appealing due to the monetary value involved.

I was a college student and my roommate was going to the mall. I had asked her to return something for me at The Limited and in return I told her they would give me a $50 store credit.

Once she came home she handed me the receipt along with the gift card. I read over the receipt and instead of a $50 credit, it said $150 on it.

Bare in mind I was a college student and $150 was considered a jackpot for me. Actually, its still a jackpot.

So I called the number on back of the giftcard and yep it was true, I had a good $150 to spend.

As I was surfing the Limited site, Jiminy Cricket (Pinnochio’s conscious) dropped by. I forgot to mention it was the month of Ramadan therefore Jiminy Cricket was more like a Jiminy Hippopotamus.(Shaytaan is locked up in Ramadan therefore you think twice about what you do). The hippo lead me to calling my mother, and she said one thing that hit home.

“You wear hijab, you represent Islam, if you go in that store and return this card then it’ll give a good impression of Muslims”.

I instantly realized that returning the extra $100 is the right thing to do.

The next day I drove to the mall, walked into The Limited and went up to the cashier and told her what happened, her response

“So you’re telling me we gave you $100 extra on this gift card?” said the clerk.

That’s right I replied. “Well i’m gonna have to call my manager about this” said the clerk.

The manager came out and again I explained to her what happened.

“So let me get this straight,” said the manager. “We made the error of giving you $150 instead of $50 and you came back to let us know so that we can give you the correct refund?”

I nodded enthusiastically.

“I apologize for this error ma’am, but I’m really sorry you are just going to have to keep this gift card at the value of $150!” said the manager with a big grin on her face.

So, basically I got $100 for being honest, and I’m sure a good few people went home that night thinking that Muslim people are honest (and kinda crazy).

Needless to say, I did some Eid shopping at the Limited that year.

Something to be conscious about….