Editorial Picks on Technology Hits

I joined Technology Hits to review your stories and distribute them in our platforms. Here are the stories I adored today.

Introduction

Technology Hits is a new publication established by Dr Mehmet Yildiz recently.

Technology Hits publication covers seven key domains in technology arena. We crated personas and called them technicians, philosophers, entrepreneurs, entertainers, artists, storytellers, and futuristic leaders.

As my first editorial duty, I read the introduction to the publication.

You may have read the invitation to join the publication on ILLUMINATION.

I came across a few stories from senior editors and would like to share these extended invitations with you. These editors provide their perspectives and show their commitment to support the writers contributing to Technology Hits on Medium.

This story was submitted by Tree Langdon.

This one was by CR Mandler MAT.

The third one was by Karen Madej.

And the last one I read was by Liam Ireland.

After joining Technology Hits as an editor today, the first impression I got was about the richness of stories from various aspects of technology. I read several stories and enjoyed them a lot.

The purpose of this story is to share my reading list on Technology Hits today.

I noticed that most of the stories are curated by Medium and distributed to topics. Possibly they were distributed to technology and related topics; I have no idea how to find topics on Medium. But I will learn.

In this bulletin, I want to share links and excerpts of the articles that engaged me and gave me useful information today.

My review of the articles on Technology Hits

The first article I read was by Jason Ward. The content and style were sublime. I checked the status and noticed that Medium curated this article.

The latest change in reading and literary consumption has now been underway for a couple of decades and it threatens to be as huge a disruption as any before. The internet and devices such as e-readers, smartphones and tablets have been dramatically altering the way we consume words. The ability to access information and the written word has suddenly become more ubiquitous across the planet. This is a trend that continues to grow as more get access to the internet and mobile devices.

The second article was by Katlyn Gallo. I was glad to see this article too was curated by Medium. Kathlyn must be an authority in her domain.

In short, it seems a nation-state hacker group was able to gain access to FireEye’s network and steal tools used to conduct their business. FireEye is a multi-million dollar security company that offers a range of products and services, including endpoint and email security, and managed defense services and threat intelligence capabilities. One of their offerings, Security Validation, provides their customers with the tools needed to test their defenses.

John Teehan introduces top 5 security tips for our home. This writer explains his idea with simplicity and impact for readers like me.

Many people wake up in the morning, giving no thought to their home’s Wi-Fi security. What possible interest could a hacker have in their home network? Then, one day, they find their digital identity has been stolen, that their bank account is empty, that a webcam revealed to burglars that their home was empty, and their home computer pretty much bricked.

“Eight Ways to Identify a Fake New Facebook Friend Request” authored by Tom Handy was an eye opener for me. Tom’s first paragraph attracted my attention and captivated to read the whole story.

You just received a friend request on Facebook from someone you don’t know. The most likely thing you do is accept the friend request. The friend request was from a pretty woman who you think is harmless. Wrong! This could be an online scammer using a fake profile trying to connect with you so they could ruin your life. These days it is very easy for someone to create a fake profile and then scam you. I have figured out a few clues that I will share with you that you need to know. In my former life, I was kind of like Bond, James Bond. You know 007. All the secret missions, fast cars, high-speed devices, and hooking up with sexy women. I went through a lot of specialized training and classes. I worked in buildings with no windows.

While scrolling through the pages of the publication, I came across a remarkable article by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, Ph.D.It was articulated and engaging. No wonder it was curated by Medium.

Have you ever resented a technical manual or a sheet with instructions you got with a new device you bought? I did for many years until I got a job in Spring of 2004 where the team I was part of was responsible for consolidating the requirements and how an international standard called S1000D was implemented in a large organization. Later, I worked for a company offering consultancy and building software systems to support those who produced technical documentation adhering to this standard. Today, I am a self-employed writer and consultant, who among others, creates resources in the form of books and templates for those who implement this specification.

ZEN CHAN must be a security expert. Coming from cybersecurity background, the content from this writer resonated well with me. I love the triage concept in this article.

Preventive controls are designed to keep attacks from occurring in the first place. Controls may be automated, manual, or hybrid. Prevention is the measures that we can deploy before anything happens. I always tell my customers that Prevention is about Perfection, but Attacks are not. Attackers only need ONE single loophole/ vulnerability/ problem to obtain access to the assets. In this stage, a reliable security design would make a great difference when an incident occurs. Doing the things right pre-triage helps to reduce controls required for the later stages considerably. We are not trying to zero the attack surface but to minimize it.

Aldric Chen gave me a fascinating idea to deal with cumbersome meetings. The idea is innovative and productive. I loved his question in the title and the opening paragraph which hooked me immediately.

Remember that I used to be pumped being invited into client meetings. Many senior consultants told me that was the best way to learn about the business. Some say that is the best way to scale the learning curve. I was naïve, so I took those baits. I learned one lesson. The sucker in the meeting room is the one at the lower point of the corporate ladder. That was me (then). And that meant I assumed an important role, or so they say. I was the default meeting minutes taker. Yup, I was contributing to the information sent to various inboxes. I often wondered if my wonderful, grammatically error-free writing and immaculate note-taking ability is being taken note of. Would I be promoted for perfect note-taking? I thought I would. I was never given a pat on the back for perfect note-taking. It was not being mentioned in my performance appraisal too. That was 10 years ago.

I came across an excellent tutorial by Nil Madhab. Nil teaches us how to parse web. I will absolutely try this and it looks productive to me. This author makes a complex topic very simple for readers.

The web is full of valuable data (mostly public) that can be used for research or other purposes. Now at the age of AI and Machine Learning, data is more valuable than ever before! But most of these data are for humans to read (aka, they are presented in HTML) and not available in formats that are easier to be read by computers (e.g. XML, JSON or CSV). To collect these data for our purposes, we use scrapers that “scrape” these web pages that we are interested in. They just fetch the page, parse the HTML and extract the data (texts, images, links etc etc) from that HTML. We define hierarchies or paths (XPath) or simply use CSS Selectors to identify which part of the HTML we are interested in. In this lesson, we will create a small web app (in Flask) that serves some data on the food habit of different countries. in HTML and we will write a spider (or crawler, if you will) using the Scrapy framework.

I was not expecting to read an inspirational story in this publication. Landon Lester provided an uplifting story related to 2021 and I loved the technology context which he articulates beautifully.

Yes, 2021 can be a better year! But it will take some work. And I don’t mean this just on the individual level. First, we need to lay the groundwork for better, more realistic thinking about the future and how we can work together to start trying to solve some really complicated problems. This is not a “how-to” article on habit building or “ways to make your New Year’s resolutions stick” piece, though you can absolutely find a great many good reads like that on this site. Rather, I write to argue that institutional change remains the key to building a better future. And though that type of change can be deeply challenging, it’s not entirely impossible. The collective will can and does shift, which in turn forces necessary changes. So let’s dive right in on how we, homo sapiens, have to get our collective shit together and make this world better!

Another surprise for me was reading a technology story from finance angle. This interesting and informing story was by Dr. Preeti Singh. This challenging topic was articulated in an engaging tone. Fintech was a mystery to me but not anymore. My first impression of this story was great. I bet the author is an authority in her domain. I will explore her insights further.

Fintech has been a great boon to the stock market trading all over the world. Earlier, all trading was done on the ring or the actual place of trading. The stocks used to be traded twice a day and so trade was limited. Fintech brought in a complete change in the system of stock markets. The complete trading is now being carried out through the computer or through a mobile phone. To build this system, the first thing that was started was that stocks would no longer be distributed by corporate houses in physical form. The format was simple. Stocks were to lose their individuality. There would be no numbers on them and there was no need to save them in filing cabinets at home. An online system would be developed bringing ease and comfort in the lives of people. There would be a regulator, which in India is the Securities & Exchange Board of India.

This story by Fareeha Arshad was one of the easiest and best articulated tutorials that I read about web development. I save this story for future reference and recommend it in my circles for those who are interested in web development. This is an ideal guide for beginners.

I admit, trying and wanting to learn web development can be an intimidating process. With the information overload, the internet has to offer; we often quit before even giving it a try. If you don’t know where to get started, you have come to the right place. Through this article, I aim to guide you through the process of learning and understanding web development in simple terms. We will together take one step at a time.

Seeing an article about Python and Dominion immediately excited me. It was written by Jim McAulay🍁. It is about programming and game setup.

Dominion is a deck-building card game with 13 expansions. One of the problems with playing regularly is carting around and keeping track of over 5,000 cards every week. Fortunately, there is a computer language that helps me with the task of setting up the weekly game. I use Python to select 4 of the 13 expansions. I then ask it to select a total of 10 kingdom cards from those 4 expansions. If one of the expansions happens to be Alchemy, select 3 cards from the set and the remaining 7 from the rest of the sets. Then Decide whether or not we are going to play with Platinum and colonies. Then Decide whether or not we are going to play with shelters. Then Choose a selection of cards from landmarks, events, ways and projects. Choose between 1 and 3 of these cards. Only 1 of each type. Finally make a print out of the selected cards for the next 4 weeks. Here is the code.

One of my hobbies are video games and I found something to excite me. The story was written by Viraj Acharya.

For some reason, video games, Playstation, Xbox, etc… Well, they’ve always had a bad reputation when it comes to finding its place in the child-parent relationship. As a kid, I was lucky enough to have an Xbox, a black box with green details. In all honesty, it didn’t look far off what an alien could dream up. I’d never seen anything like it before! I was a single person type of player, the multiplayer games weren’t really my style. Naturally, I fell in love with the Need for Speed franchise and it became a huge part of my childhood. I would pretend to plug my brother’s controller into the console and tell him that he was the other cars racing me on the screen. I really do owe the game a huge amount of credit for cultivating my love for cars, in fact, the automotive scene as a whole.

I found another gem. This story was written by Agnes Laurens who explained the topic so clearly. Frankly, I haven’t seen a tutorial about SoloLearnt. This was refreshing for me.

“A girl can’t code”, people say often to me, but I think this is very presumptuous. People assume all sorts of things that might not be true. For example that men are not good for the fashion industry. Look at black people now, they have been put in corners they don’t want to be, and they don’t need to be. There are always groups that are willing to belittle other groups of people. Since a few years ago, I have been trying to learn code. Every attempt failed. So, maybe coding wasn’t for me? Well, I was totally wrong. Coding is something I truly like, but it also is hard now and then, just like that is everything in life. You need to pay attention to what you code. Also, you need to sit for it and just do it, and failing is what belongs to it, just to get it right.

Like any technology person, I enjoy improving my web traffics and SEO is a particular interest to me. It was amazing to see a story about SEO which was written by Salman Amin. Salman asserts that in the world of competition increasing website traffic is the hardest task. It takes money and too much time. So true!

Anyone who starts an online business or blog wants to be successful. This success is achieved by getting good traffic to your blog. And the best way to get traffic to your blog is through search engines, and when the web-pages of your blog don’t show up immediately when someone searches for a title, it won’t get you many results. Search engine optimization helps increase your blog’s visibility by increasing your blog’s page rank on search engines. Here are the four tips that you can consider.

Reading an article by a technologist with years of experience was an absolute pleasure. Artificial Intelligence was simplified and articulated beautifully by Dr John Rose. I am glad to see that Medium curated this precious story.

Seriously, What Do We Think When Some Say “AI”? Are we just mystified by AI or perhaps we just ignore it? Maybe some have visions of killer robots or totalitarian regimes controlling our minds? Misinformation, hype and ignorance abound and I decided to ignore all this rubbish and start with the original explanation of “Artificial Intelligence”.

As an IPhone user, I did not want to miss this amazing story which was also curated by Medium. This great story was by AJ Krow.

I see absolutely no point in purchasing an iPhone. This baffles most people I’ve met.“You own a Pixel and an iPad? Why not buy an iPhone?” My immediate answer is always the same: it’s a waste of money. Why would I spend over $500 on a phone that can’t do anything I want, when a phone below $500 can do everything I need? My biggest complaints about iPhones have always been the same. iPhones today can handle desktop-level applications, but cannot run them. Apple Inc. has upgraded their iPhones with powerful chips, but rarely if ever does any iPhone user take advantage of them. Worse still, professional users like video editors and heavy gamers have a phone that can handle heavy tasks, but is inconvenient to do so. Meanwhile, Samsung has developed a way for users to take full advantage of their phone and use desktop-level software through an app called Samsung DeX.

Data literacy is a topic close to my heart. This article explain the concept and make it compelling for the readers. The excellent story was written by Andy Teoh. I am pleased that Medium curated this useful article.

Data literacy is the ability to read, analyze, and communicate to others with data in context, including an understanding of data origins and constructs. In this golden era of digital and data, we do not need to be Facebook or Walmart to build a data lake in our company. With the advancement in both hardware and cloud-based systems, this opportunity is now readily available to every company for a modest cost. As organizations amass much more data at an unprecedented rate, it becomes increasingly important for all employees — and not just data scientists — to be data literate so that we can contribute better in our roles and help our companies sharpen their competitive edge in today’s aggressive global economy. According to a survey sponsored by Qilk, 94% of respondents indicated that data literacy is key to developing professional credibility to boost career growth.

Well, Blockchain, what can I say about it. All of us are excited about this fascinating technology and concept. But reading about the untold story about Blockchain was special experience for me. This excellent story was written by Nishant Modi, a Blockchain consultant.

As a former blockchain consultant, I have told a version of this story many a times at client meetings, industry conferences and business schools including Wharton and Columbia. In this article I’ll take you through the journey of where it all started, how it got picked up and what special ingredient it has which made it so sensational that it was more famous than any celebrity or a politician during 2017/18. While most people can learn what it is and how it works but in my experience very few seem to understand the “why”. And this is due to too many technologists and salesmen in this domain and almost all of them driven by the monetary gains. There is one other group as well, the social reform camp, who would only tell you the magical power it has to solve world hunger or what not.

I was excited to read my first short form story on this new publication. It was submitted by Rebecca Sealfon was a software developer with Google. I want to further explore and pick brains of this super technologist.

As the story is so short, I will not provide an excerpt. Her title tells a thousand words about something emerging. You enjoy it from this link.

I learned that there is a recent increase in interest in telemedicine’s potential for improving clinical trials. And the question of “but is this what patients want?” made me consume this story very quickly. It was written by Orit Rindner.

For patient appointments and the delivery of health care, telemedicine or remote visits have historically been used. The importance of telemedicine is generating a buzz today in clinical trials. What else is driving pharma’s shift toward decentralized trials with the prospect of greater access to testing and decreased attrition? At the heart of the push to carry out decentralized clinical research is patient-centricity. One of the most significant obstacles to admission and retention in clinical trials is the patient’s geographic location and/or socioeconomic status. Telemedicine tackles this while increasing the possibility of the increased diversity of patients as well. This provides a more accurate representation of a given population of diseases and how, within that population, an investigational medicinal product can function. Improving the therapeutic operating quality of new drugs makes it faster for patients.

Haucem Sadki introduces us “The Greatest Banking Apps to Manage Your Budget Like a Pro”. The subtitle hooked me instantly: “Managing the budget is an important task, but not an exciting one. Indispensable for many people, such as students, it is often forgotten when many people could avoid eating pasta on the 20th of each month.”

Doing your accounts is a particularly long and tedious task. However, a well-controlled budget is the key to better allocating expenses and avoiding difficult ends of the month. After budgets on large physical workbooks then on Excel spreadsheets, we move to accounts with mobile applications. Here a selection of apps for arranging the accounts, whether for yourself or with friends. First of all, think about installing the application of your bank and, in principle, all banks (or almost) offer one. Here, your choice will be mainly determined by the various offers offered. It’s up to you to see which one suits you best. Don’t worry, we’ll give you a little helping hand with our ultra-comprehensive bank comparator!

I came across something mind boggling. Cosmology is an interest to me and I tasted it in this fascinating story by Ryszard Skarbek. I loved the story and noticed that there was another episode of this story. I saved it in my reading list. Glad Medium allows saving stories. Look at the opening…

It all started veeery long ago. So long ago that none of the fairy tales beginning with the words “long time ago …” can describe this story. Back then, there was no one who could write, tell or listen to this fairy tale. There were no “seven rivers” and no “seven mountains” for a new story to happen. There were no forests or rivers. There was no Earth. There was no sky or air. There was no Sun, no Moon, no single planet, no star. Moreover — there was no space or time. All of this happened about 13.7 billion human years ago. Was there time then, was there anything? If so, WHAT was it? A very good question!

I came across the second short form story. It was by Terry Mansfield. What a great news. No serious side effects! Wonderful…

Within two weeks after the first shot, the COVID-19 vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech starts working, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says.

My childhood dreams come true. Computer games! More importantly about my favourite PS4. Christopher Harvey introduced great games.

The PS4 is one of the best selling consoles and it continues to impress with its great exposure and a huge range of games you can play. There are some amazing games to check out and enjoy here, and the best part is that you have so many unique mechanics and ideas. With that in mind, I’d like to go over with you some of my favorite best selling PS4 games just in case you missed them.

These trains introduced by Douglas Pilarski were remarkable. I tried them several times in Japan and absolutely fascinated.

I lived in Osaka and worked in Tokyo. I took the Shinkansen to work every week. I would leave Osaka Station at 7:07 am and arrive in Tokyo 3 hours later. I could not have done it without the Shinkansen. It is too slow to make a Tokyo to Osaka run by bus. It is too short of a distance to fly. A commercial airliner would barely get off the ground before having to land. The solution is the high-speed train known as the Shinkansen. Bullet trains offer a comfortable 3+2 seating arrangement and a single train can carry as many as 1300 passengers.

This story by Bill Abbate takes us to history and brings us back to this modern world elegantly. Reading a story about learning was productive for me. Bill articulates and has an excellent writing style hooks the readers.

I love to explore and learn new things. For a learning junkie like myself, I cannot imagine living in a better time than today. When I was young, it was far more difficult to obtain knowledge. I remember when my parents purchased a set of encyclopedias. I was in my early teens at the time. When we received the books with the wooden bookshelf, I thought I had found the font of all knowledge. I still remember opening the first pages and the smell of the new books. This was in the day when encyclopedia salesmen made door-to-door calls to sell their wares. I recall the sales pitch to my parents of having a library in our home and how much it would benefit our education. Who wouldn’t want that for their children?

I didn’t know politics and technology play well but The Maverick Files in this curated story made it possible. The title “US Elections Taught Me a Lesson About Technological Singularity” made me open this excellent story. I am glad I read it.

If AI researchers do eventually manage to make the leap to Artificial General Intelligence, there is little reason to believe that the result will be a machine that simply matches human-level intelligence. Once AGI is achieved, Moore’s Law alone would likely soon produce a computer that exceeded human intellectual capability. This is an excerpt from Martin Ford’s highly-acclaimed “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future”. It indeed, like many other parts of the book sounds truly menacing. Martin goes on to write, A thinking machine would, of course, continue to enjoy all the advantages that computers currently have, including the ability to calculate and access information at speeds that would be incomprehensible for us. Inevitably, we would soon share the planet with something entirely unprecedented: a genuinely alien — and superior — intellect. All these fears and comments sound perfectly rational in a world where we’re seeing technology grow at a rapid rate like we’ve seen never before. Google knows more about us than our better half does — what we like, what we don’t, what songs we listen to, what restaurants we most often visit, what time we work out, how we like our coffee, and a lot more.

I came across a contemporary medical story. I learned that the AI was able to detect differences between healthy coughs and asymptomatic coughs. This interesting story was authored by Eshan Samaranayake.

This could provide a noninvasive screening approach for asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19. Asymptomatic people don’t show clear signs of COVID-19, so they may not seek out testing and could unknowingly spread the virus to others. In a previous study, the researchers from MIT were developing an AI model to analyze forced-cough recordings to detect signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease, where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over a number of years. In its early stages, memory loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer’s, individuals lose the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment. People with Alzheimer’s tend to replace nouns with pronouns, and they can express themselves in a very roundabout way. The team concluded that the AI model could identify Alzheimer’s samples better than existing models. When COVID-19 took over the US, the team decided to apply their AI method to identify individuals infected with COVID-19.

I was excited to meet a biotechnologist on this publication. Kiranjeet Kaur teaches us biology of Coronavirus. This was another informative health article with technology slant for me.

Coronavirus is a newly discovered virus that causes coronavirus disease .i.e. COVID-19. Coronavirus also is known as Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2(SARS-CoV-2). It is highly pathogenic to the human population in the twenty-first century. The emergence of the COVID-19 was introduced in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Coronavirus is large and has enveloped RNA .ie.RNA virus. During genome, translation coronavirus replicate entails ribosome frameshifts. Coronavirus viral family has intensified with the causative agent of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

I read several articles by Dr Mehmet Yildiz but this one was the eye opener for me. It was a treasure trove covering free online tutorials for the topics I have huge interest. As soon as I finish this bulletin, I will enrol some of them especially the ones about deep learning, data science, and AI.

In this post, I want to introduce free learning programs by industry experts and industry skill badges offered by the Cognitive Class AI to help you boost your data science, machine learning, cognitive computing, cloud computing, deep learning, Blockchain, programming, open-source tools, and artificial intelligence capabilities online at your convenience in 2020. Continuous learning and applying our knowledge can be powerful and critical success factors for achieving our professional goals. The Cognitive Class AI offers a wide variety of professional learning paths, as free of charge, to learners globally. In this article, I provide you with some prominent learning path samples with links so that you commence achieving your 2020 professional education and career development goals.

This is it from me folks.

I am an Editor of Technology Hits.

I spent around three hours of my time in a flow state while reading these fascinating stories. I will read more and share my learning in the upcoming editorial bulletins.

Join Technology Hits and stay abreast with various aspects of technology. You may find many aspects of technology here. I loved it and hope you will too.

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Thank you for reading my selection.