We are developing robots that can smoothly help workers inside the retail stores in terms of transportation of stocking shelves

MUSE

muse

Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 by Various, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . A MUSEUM OF ART AND NATURAL HISTORY. here A MUSEUM OF ART AND NATURAL HISTORY. Our recent articles on "Scientific Destitution in New York" and "The Scientific Value of the Central Park," have called forth numerous letters from correspondents, and have been extensively noticed by the press. We now learn that the legislature of the State has taken the matter in hand, and there is some prospect, with an honest administration of the appropriations, of something being done to relieve our city of the opprobrium that rests upon it. A bill is pending, before the Senate, authorizing the Park Commissioners to build, equip, and furnish, on Manhattan Square, or any other public square or park, suitable fire-proof buildings, at a cost not exceeding $500,000 for each corporation, for the purpose of establishing a museum of art, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and of a museum of natural history, by the American Museum of Natural History, two societies recently incorporated by the Legislature. This is a million dollars to begin with, and an ample site, without cost, to the aforementioned corporations. Manhattan Square extends from Seventy-seventh to Eighty-first streets, and from Eighth to Ninth avenues, and spans about eighteen acres. Until it was set apart by the state Board of Commissioners, for the purposes of a Zoological Garden, it was proposed, by a number of enlightened citizens of New York, to devote it to the uses of four of our existing corporations, giving to each one a corner, and an equal share in the allotment of space. The societies were, "the Academy of Design," for art, "the Historical Society," for public records and libraries, "the Lyceum of Natural History," for science, and "the American Institute," for technology. These have been incorporated for many years, and are known to include the leading artists, men of letters, science, and the arts, of the city, on their lists of members. The committee went so far as to have plans of the building drawn by competent architects; but, like many other well-meant schemes, want of money compelled the originators of the plan to abandon any further attempts. In the meantime, the Legislature chartered the American Botanical and Zoological Society, and gave the Commissioners of the Park authority to set apart a portion of it, not exceeding sixty acres, for the use of the Society, for the establishment of a zoological and botanical garden. This society was duly organized under the act, and Mr. Hamilton Fish was made its president, and considerable sums of money were subscribed. But, according to the sixth annual report of the Board of Commissioners, "the society never manifested its desire for an allotment of ground." It appears to have died, and made no sign. Some of our citizens, fearing that the Central Park would go the way of every other public work in the city, made strenuous effort to revive the Zoological Society, for the purpose of obtaining a perpetual lease of a suitable site, on which to establish a zoological garden, similar to those in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Cologne. Their object was to remove this part of the Park beyond the reach of political intrigue. Subsequent events have shown that the fears of these gentlemen were well founded. The Legislature of the State, on the 25th of March, 1862, gave ample powers to the New York Historical Society to establish a Museum of Antiquity and Science, and a Gallery of Art, in the Central Park. They have submitted designs for a building, but, for some reason, no decisive steps have been taken towards its construction. The Lyceum of Natural History was also negotiating with the Commissioners, for the use of the upper rooms of the arsenal for its collections, and there is no doubt that an arrangement to this effect would have been made, if a fire had not destroyed the entire collections of the Lyceum. The Lyceum made great effort to raise money to purchase a new collection, but without avail; and, although this is the oldest scientific society in New York, and has inrolled in its list of members, nearly every professional scientist of the city, it is probably the poorest, in income and resources, of any academy of sciences in the world. We do not know that the Academy of Design has ever applied for a home in the Central Park; and we cannot speak for the American Institute, nor for the Geographical Society, in this particular. As we stated in our former article, the old Board of Commissioners appears to have become weary of the unsuccessful attempts on the part of numerous societies to divide up and apportion the Central Park, and they applied to the Legislature for authority to conduct matters in their own way. An act was duly passed, authorizing the Board "to erect, establish, conduct, and maintain, on the Central Park, a Meteorological and Astronomical Observatory, a Museum of Natural History, and a Gallery of Art, and the buildings therefor, and to provide the necessary instruments, furniture, and equipments for the same." Here would seem to be ample power for the establishment of museums of science and art, but nothing is said about the manner of raising the money. One would suppose, however, that, by means of the "Central Park Improvement Fund," abundant means could have been raised. The bill now before the Legislature puts matters in a new light. If it does not conflict with previous enactments, nor destroy vested rights, it has the appearance of being a thoroughly practical way of solving the question of art and science for the city. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History are in the hands of the most respectable citizens of New York. It would not be possible to find a body of men of more unimpeachable integrity and greater worth, than the gentlemen who have founded these two societies. It is impossible that they should lend their names to anything that will not bear the closest scrutiny; hence the proposition, now before the Legislature, to put up buildings for them, at a cost of a million dollars, must attract unusual attention. If the State would appropriate the money to these corporations, giving them the control of its expenditure, we should have considerably more confidence in its honest administration than, we are grieved to say, we can feel under the present circumstances; and if we knew what other institutions are to have the remaining portions of Manhattan Square, it would be a great relief to our minds. "We fear the Greeks bringing gifts," but are willing to accept the gifts, if the officers of the two organizations are certain that it is all right. The need of a Museum of Natural History, and of a Gallery of Art, in New York, is so pressing that there is some danger of our accepting the appropriations without a proper regard to consequences. The Court House is not yet finished, and the foundations of the Post-office are scarcely laid. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Various (2006). Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/19180/pg19180-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

A MUSEUM OF ART AND NATURAL HISTORY

Art has always been a potent medium for communication and self-expression. Today, in the era of artificial intelligence, we are witnessing a captivating evolution in the world of art – AI Art. In this blog post, we will explore how to use and give due credit to mesmerizing art pieces from the . HackerNoon AI Image Gallery What is the HackerNoon AI Image Gallery? At HackerNoon, we highly value the power of technology and its transformative effects on all aspects of life, including art. The is an intersection of AI and human creativity. This space showcases AI-created images stimulated by human imagination. It stands as a testament to the exciting potential of human-machine collaboration with the objective of inspiring and provoking thought within our community. HackerNoon AI Image Gallery In our gallery, you can view all the AI images created by our users, the prompts used, and even reuse these Stable Diffusion creations. Test it out for yourself: browse through all the designs or search for a specific prompt using the search bar. Keep an eye out for this message "💁 " at the top left corner of your screen on /gallery. This link opens a new draft with the uploader set to the stable diffusion prompt, as shown below: Try text to image here How to Use Images from the Gallery While these images are free to use, there are some usage guidelines you need to adhere to: : Remember to give credit by linking back to the prompter, the individual or group who inspired the AI to create the image, and to HackerNoon. This acknowledgment recognizes the creative process and supports our community of innovators. Accreditation : The images are ideal for personal or educational use. If you intend to use them commercially, please get in touch with us for more details and information. Non-Commercial Use : Let's maintain respect and decency. Please do not manipulate the images or use them in any offensive or disrespectful manner. Remember, a real person contributed their creative input to each image. Respect for the Art Feel free to appreciate the art, give credit where it's due, use the images responsibly, and thoroughly enjoy exploring the gallery! Other AI Improvements Apart from our gallery, there have been numerous other enhancements to our AI-generated image features. Starting with the ability to add AI-generated images throughout your story instead of just as a featured image, this tool allows you to enhance your text with art. Just click the + button on Editor 3.0 and select "Image" to access the image selector board and all the image-uploading options, including . Stable Diffusion Here’s a quick demo: Another noteworthy feature is our new AI image generator model, Kandinsky 2, which uses visual embeddings as an intermediate representation in the generation process to produce vivid and artistic creations, like these: On the topic of Stable Diffusion, have you noticed the option in the image below? That's a new feature! It allows you to instruct the AI about what you don't want in your generated image. negative prompt That's all for now. Enjoy browsing!

The HackerNoon Museum: AI Image Art Gallery

হ্যাকারনুন মিউজিয়াম: এআই ইমেজ আর্ট গ্যালারি

Das HackerNoon Museum: AI Image Art Gallery

Museo HackerNoon: galería de arte de imágenes de IA

Le musée HackerNoon : galerie d'art d'images AI

हैकरनून संग्रहालय: एआई इमेज आर्ट गैलरी

The HackerNoon Museum: AI イメージ アート ギャラリー

HackerNoon 박물관: AI 이미지 아트 갤러리

HackerNoon Müzesi: Yapay Zeka Resim Sanat Galerisi

Bảo tàng HackerNoon: Phòng trưng bày nghệ thuật hình ảnh AI

HackerNoon 博物馆：AI 图像艺术画廊

This Museum Was Built on Native American Burial Mounds: What to Know About the Dickson Mounds Museum

As more and more artists and collectors turn to are starting to take notice. Digital artworks offer museums new opportunities and new challenges. NFTs - museums MONETIZATION There are a few ways for museums to monetize, including gift shops, though they often rely on donations to support their operations. While some mind that selling world-famous masterpieces as NFTs is a copyright infringement, we should take a closer look into museums’ gift shops where those masterpieces are displayed on pens, umbrellas, and notebooks. Museums can use NFTs to monetize their collections or create new revenue streams. And NFT mints can help them expand their global audience. PRESERVATION There are some concerns in terms of the preservation of NFTs at museums. One of the primary issues is ensuring the long-term stability and accessibility of the NFT artworks. Because NFTs rely on blockchain technology for their authentication, it is important to ensure that the blockchain remains secure and accessible over time. This is a young technology that is still working on its standards, so the liability issue might take some time to circumvent. EXISTING SCENARIOS OF NFTs IN MUSEUMS of modern and contemporary art, acquired from 13 renowned French and international artists, including Bruce Nauman and Bill Viola. This marks the first NFT acquisition by a major French public museum, with support from the French Ministry of Culture and Pompidou’s director, Xavier Rey. France's Centre Pompidou adds 18 NFTs to its collection , each a reproduction of the masterpiece, at the time for €1,850 or 0.65 ETH. Each tile is an inimitable piece of the painting, with NFT certificates showing the exact part purchased. Vienna's Belvedere Palace Museum sold 10,000 digital tiles The joins this growing list with a notable collection of 22 digital artwork pieces Among the pieces is the highly sought-after CryptoPunks NFT #3831, previously sold for $2.1 million worth of ETH in 2021. Los Angeles Country Museum of Art donated by well-known Twitter personality, Cozomo de’ Medici. Last but not least, sold NFTs of its art to raise funds. An encrypted Michelangelo painting of the holy family, Doni Tondo, sold for €140,000. Each piece includes a signed certificate of authenticity by the museum’s director, Eike Schmidt. Florence's Uffizi Gallery Ultimately, the integration of NFTs into museum exhibitions is an exciting and transformative development that has the potential to bring art to new audiences. We can look forward to exploring this rapidly evolving art in museums!

How Museums are Using NFTs to Monetize and Preserve Art 

Traditional digital art is experiencing a real revolution thanks to the use of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) where these unique and non-editable tokens are changing the way art is sold, preserved, and valued. But How Do NFTs Affect Museums and Their Ability to Conserve and Enhance Digital Art? What Is an NFT? An NFT is a unique and unchangeable digital token, created through a smart contract, which represents the ownership of a digital artwork. Thanks to blockchain technology, NFTs guarantee authenticity (when it comes directly from the museum itself) and ownership of digital artwork (as I can know who owns that NFT), making it possible to sell and keep it safe and transparent. Museums and Digital Art Museums have always faced the challenge of conserving and enhancing art, but with the advent of NFTs, this challenge is becoming easier and easier. On the one hand, NFTs offer museums the ability to create and conserve works of art safely and transparently, and on the other hand, they can monetize the same NFTs created in multiple copies, allowing museums to bear their maintenance costs. Conservation of Art in Museums To conserve art adequately, museums have to face various challenges, such as correct cataloging, having adequate spaces, and also qualified personnel who can allow a correct and adequate process to current legislation. Not to mention conservation where often, due to lack of suitable space in the museum, the various works of art are kept on shelves in old warehouses, waiting to be exhibited and show off their splendor. The Promotion of Art in Museums The enhancement of art in museums is still an underexplored and fragmented territory, as not all museums follow the same logic or have the same means, and let us not forget that most museums do not even have a good website or update. But with the advent of NFTs, museums can begin to see the opportunities offered by this new form of communication, valorization, and even monetization given that, as we have said, NFTs dedicated to sale can be created. The Opportunities Offered by NFTs to Museums NFTs offer museums many opportunities to enhance and promote art innovatively and these are some possible and viable examples: Sale of digital lithographs - NFTs allow museums to sell authentic digital lithographs to visitors, offering them the possibility of becoming the owners of a limited series digital lithograph, also allowing them to resell it at a later time, by circulating the digital lithograph hand in hand and all over the world. Virtual exhibitions - NFTs allow museums to create virtual exhibitions of works of art, offering visitors the opportunity to admire art from anywhere in the world, as digital lithographs only need a monitor where they can be displayed. Online presence - Thanks to the creation of NFTs, real online pages are also created where users can admire and purchase these digital lithographs. And among other things, any user in the world can view these pages, thus allowing to reach more people in the world who are interested in art. Immersive experiences - NFTs can be used to create immersive experiences for users from all over the world, offering the possibility of interacting with digital art in a new and innovative way, such as a blockchain video game playable on any platform and from home. Digital art is experiencing a revolution thanks to the use of NFTs, and museums have the opportunity to take advantage of this change. From the safe and transparent conservation of art to the options to enhance it in innovative ways, NFTs offer museums many opportunities, as we have seen, to explore and promote art in a new and engaging way. Here is a small summary video that I made: https://youtu.be/dpXAnCmp4Y4?embedable=true Also published here

How NFTs and Museums are Creating A Digital Art Revolution

A Short History of the World, by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA Before the time of Alexander Greeks had already been spreading as merchants, artists, officials, mercenary soldiers, over most of the Persian dominions. In the dynastic disputes that followed the death of Xerxes, a band of ten thousand Greek mercenaries played a part under the leadership of Xenophon. Their return to Asiatic Greece from Babylon is described in his Retreat of the Ten Thousand, one of the first war stories that was ever written by a general in command. But the conquests of Alexander and the division of his brief empire among his subordinate generals, greatly stimulated this permeation of the ancient world by the Greeks and their language and fashions and culture. Traces of this Greek dissemination are to be found far away in central Asia and in north-west India. Their influence upon the development of Indian art was profound. For many centuries Athens retained her prestige as a centre of art and culture; her schools went on indeed to 529 A.D., that is to say for nearly a thousand years; but the leadership in the intellectual activity of the world passed presently across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, the new trading city that Alexander had founded. Here the Macedonian general Ptolemy had become Pharaoh, with a court that spoke Greek. He had become an intimate of Alexander before he became king, and he was deeply saturated with the ideas of Aristotle. He set himself, with great energy and capacity, to organize knowledge and investigation. He also wrote a history of Alexander’s campaigns which, unhappily, is lost to the world. Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make a permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in Alexandria which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum of Alexandria. For two or three generations the scientific work done at Alexandria was extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes who measured the size of the earth and came within fifty miles of its true diameter, Apollonius who wrote on conic sections, Hipparchus who made the first star map and catalogue, and Hero who devised the first steam engine are among the greater stars of an extraordinary constellation of scientific pioneers. Archimedes came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study, and was a frequent correspondent of the Museum. Herophilus was one of the greatest of Greek anatomists, and is said to have practised vivisection. For a generation or so during the reigns of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II there was such a blaze of knowledge and discovery at Alexandria as the world was not to see again until the sixteenth century A.D. But it did not continue. There may have been several causes of this decline. Chief among them, the late Professor Mahaffy suggested, was the fact that the Museum was a “royal” college and all its professors and fellows were appointed and paid by Pharaoh. This was all very well when Pharaoh was Ptolemy I, the pupil and friend of Aristotle. But as the dynasty of the Ptolemies went on they became Egyptianized, they fell under the sway of Egyptian priests and Egyptian religious developments, they ceased to follow the work that was done, and their control stifled the spirit of enquiry altogether. The Museum produced little good work after its first century of activity. Ptolemy I not only sought in the most modern spirit to organize the finding of fresh knowledge. He tried also to set up an encyclopædic storehouse of wisdom in the Library of Alexandria. It was not simply a storehouse, it was also a book-copying and book-selling organization. A great army of copyists was set to work perpetually multiplying copies of books. Here then we have the definite first opening up of the intellectual process in which we live to-day; here we have the systematic gathering and distribution of knowledge. The foundation of this Museum and Library marks one of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It is the true beginning of Modern History. ARISTOTLE From Herculaneum, probably Fourth Century B.C. Photo: Dr. Singer Both the work of research and the work of dissemination went on under serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader and the artisan. There were glass workers and metal workers in abundance in those days, but they were not in mental contact with the thinkers. The glass worker was making the most beautifully coloured beads and phials and so forth, but he never made a Florentine flask or a lens. Clear glass does not seem to have interested him. The metal worker made weapons and jewellery but he never made a chemical balance. The philosopher speculated loftily about atoms and the nature of things, but he had no practical experience of enamels and pigments and philters and so forth. He was not interested in substances. So Alexandria in its brief day of opportunity produced no microscopes and no chemistry. And though Hero invented a steam engine it was never set either to pump or drive a boat or do any useful thing. There were few practical applications of science except in the realm of medicine, and the progress of science was not stimulated and sustained by the interest and excitement of practical applications. There was nothing to keep the work going therefore when the intellectual curiosity of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II was withdrawn. The discoveries of the Museum went on record in obscure manuscripts and never, until the revival of scientific curiosity at the Renascence, reached out to the mass of mankind. Nor did the Library produce any improvements in book making. That ancient world had no paper made in definite sizes from rag pulp. Paper was a Chinese invention and it did not reach the western world until the ninth century A.D. The only book materials were parchment and strips of the papyrus reed joined edge to edge. These strips were kept on rolls which were very unwieldy to wind to and fro and read, and very inconvenient for reference. It was these things that prevented the development of paged and printed books. Printing itself was known in the world it would seem as early as the Old Stone Age; there were seals in ancient Sumeria; but without abundant paper there was little advantage in printing books, an improvement that may further have been resisted by trades unionism on the part of the copyists employed. Alexandria produced abundant books but not cheap books, and it never spread knowledge into the population of the ancient world below the level of a wealthy and influential class. STATUETTE OF MAITREYA: THE BUDDHA TO COME A Græco-Buddhist sculpture of the Third Century A.D. (From Malakand, N. W. Province, now in the India Museum) So it was that this blaze of intellectual enterprise never reached beyond a small circle of people in touch with the group of philosophers collected by the first two Ptolemies. It was like the light in a dark lantern which is shut off from the world at large. Within the blaze may be blindingly bright, but nevertheless it is unseen. The rest of the world went on its old ways unaware that the seed of scientific knowledge that was one day to revolutionize it altogether had been sown. Presently a darkness of bigotry fell even upon Alexandria. Thereafter for a thousand years of darkness the seed that Aristotle had sown lay hidden. Then it stirred and began to germinate. In a few centuries it had become that widespread growth of knowledge and clear ideas that is now changing the whole of human life. THE DEATH OF BUDDHA Græco-Buddhist carving from Sivat Valley, N. W. Province, probably A.D. 350 India Mus. Alexandria was not the only centre of Greek intellectual activity in the third century B.C. There were many other cities that displayed a brilliant intellectual life amidst the disintegrating fragments of the brief empire of Alexander. There was, for example, the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily, where thought and science flourished for two centuries; there was Pergamum in Asia Minor, which also had a great library. But this brilliant Hellenic world was now stricken by invasion from the north. New Nordic barbarians, the Gauls, were striking down along the tracks that had once been followed by the ancestors of the Greeks and Phrygians and Macedonians. They raided, shattered and destroyed. And in the wake of the Gauls came a new conquering people out of Italy, the Romans, who gradually subjugated all the western half of the vast realm of Darius and Alexander. They were an able but unimaginative people, preferring law and profit to either science or art. New invaders were also coming down out of central Asia to shatter and subdue the Seleucid empire and to cut off the western world again from India. These were the Parthians, hosts of mounted bowmen, who treated the Græco-Persian empire of Persepolis and Susa in the third century B.C. in much the same fashion that the Medes and Persians had treated it in the seventh and sixth. And there were now other nomadic peoples also coming out of the northeast, peoples who were not fair and Nordic and Aryan- speaking but yellow-skinned and black-haired and with a Mongolian speech. But of these latter people we shall tell more in a subsequent chapter. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). A Short History of the World. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11870/11870-h/11870-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE MUSEUM AND LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA

Earlier this year, I created a really fun project that I called "Brain to the Cloud" where I saved my brain data to the cloud while playing Call of Duty so that I could analyze the relationship between my cognitive function and video game performance. I wrote up a three-part blog post series and created some fun videos to summarize my findings on that project. If you'd like to check those out, you can refer to the links at the bottom of this post. A few months after I published that project, I started working at Twitch as the lead Developer Advocate for Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) - a fully managed solution for creating live, interactive video streaming solutions (check out to learn more). The next step of my "Brain to the Cloud" project was obvious - I needed to my brain. this series live stream Broadcasting My Brain Before we look at the code, let's see the final product. There are 2 views for the application: a broadcasting view, and a playback view. In the broadcasting view, we can preview the live video, start the broadcast, and connect the Muse headband to stream the brain data obtained from the headband. In the playback view, we display the live stream with a element, and chart the brain data in real-time <video> Project Overview There are 5 steps to this project: Broadcast live stream Capture brain data Publish brain data as timed metadata within the live stream Playback live stream Listen for timed metadata and render brain data in a chart in real-time If you prefer graphical depictions of such things, here's how this looks: Building the Project I used React for this project. Why? Well, I've got plenty of experience with Vue and Angular, but I'm probably one of the last developers on earth to try React. I figured it was about time to figure out what all the hype was about, and I knew that this would not be a difficult project to build with it. Due to my lack of prior experience, I'm not what you'd call an "advanced" user of the framework, but I have to say that I'm pretty happy with what I see so far. I found the process enjoyable and did not find myself "fighting" with the framework. But this blog post isn't about my opinion on JavaScript frameworks, so I'll save that for a future post. Instead, let's talk about how I broadcast my brain! The Hardware In my original "Brain to the Cloud" project, I used a "vintage" EEG headset called a MindFlex to capture my brain readings. It worked fairly well but required me to "hack" the device by adding an ESP-12 microcontroller in order to pull the readings off of the device and send them to the cloud. This time I reached for something slightly newer - and something that I could use with no modifications. After a bit of research, I settled on the . Thankfully, there is a really awesome open-source library called which lets me access the brain readings directly in a web browser with Web Bluetooth (in supported browsers, of course). Muse S Headband muse-js The Live Stream Broadcast Until recently, live streaming with IVS required us to use a third-party client to broadcast our streams as RTMPS. But we recently launched a game-changer: the . As the name implies, this SDK gives us the ability to broadcast our live stream via WebRTC directly from a web browser. Clearly, this was a perfect fit for live streaming my brain since it means that I can create an "all-in-one" solution for broadcasting my brain data along with my live stream without relying on third-party software or external scripts. Amazon Amazon IVS Web Broadcast SDK Adding Web Broadcast to the React App We're not going to look at every single step required to utilize the Web Broadcast SDK in this post. Instead, we'll look at the highlights to get a general idea of how it works. Don't worry - I've got another post coming soon where we'll dig into the "step-by-step" process for using the Web Broadcast SDK, so stay tuned for that. That said, let's take a quick journey to see how I used the SDK in this project. My first step was to use a web broadcast to install the module. Using your favorite package management tool, run: amazon-ivs-web-broadcast $ npm install amazon-ivs-web-broadcast Next, we need to import it into our component. In my Broadcast.jsx component, I added: import IVSBroadcastClient, { STANDARD_LANDSCAPE } from 'amazon-ivs-web-broadcast' ; We can create an instance of the IVSBroadcastClient with the desired stream configuration and ingest the endpoint from our Amazon IVS channel and set it into our component's state. })
}); this .setState({ broadcastClient : IVSBroadcastClient.create({ streamConfig : STANDARD_LANDSCAPE, ingestEndpoint : this .state.ingestEndpoint, Now that we've got an instance of the client, we can add our camera to the client. For this we use . navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia() }, },
    },
}); const streamConfig = STANDARD_LANDSCAPE; const videoStream = await navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({ video : { deviceId : { exact : this .state.selectedVideoDeviceId }, width : { ideal : streamConfig.maxResolution.width, max : streamConfig.maxResolution.width, height : { ideal : streamConfig.maxResolution.height, max : streamConfig.maxResolution.height, this .state.broadcastClient.addVideoInputDevice(videoStream, 'camera1' , { index : 0 }); Adding the user's microphone to the client follows a similar pattern. },
}); const audioStream = await navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({ audio : { deviceId : this .state.selectedAudioDeviceId this .state.broadcastClient.addAudioInputDevice(audioStream, 'mic1' ); Because of the browser security model, we need to get permissions to access the user's camera and microphone. Refer to the for more information on this, and to see how I captured a list of devices and presented them in a dialog to allow the user to choose the broadcast device if multiple options are available. Note: project source on GitHub Now we can add a live preview to the page so that we can see what our viewers will ultimately see on the player side of things. <canvas ref={ this .previewRef} id= 'broadcast-preview' ></canvas> And attach the preview to the : broadcastClient this .state.broadcastClient.attachPreview( this .previewRef.current); To start the broadcast, add a button to the page, and in the handler for the button call on the (passing the necessary ). onClick startBroadcast() broadcastClient streamKey this .state.broadcastClient.startBroadcast( this .state.streamKey); Obtaining My Brain Data As I mentioned above, I used the library, which provides the ability to connect to the headband and pull the raw data. However, does not calculate the absolute band powers for the EEG data. For this, I needed to reach for : . muse-js muse-js another library eeg-pipes The first step is to add and import the libraries. $ npm install @neurosity/pipes $ npm install muse-js import { zipSamples, MuseClient } from 'muse-js' ; import { powerByBand, epoch, fft } from '@neurosity/pipes' ; Next, I added a button with a click handler. In the handler, I connect to the headset, start listening for data, and subscribe to the stream. zipSamples(client.eegReadings)
  .pipe( powerByBand(),
  )
  .subscribe( }
); const client = new MuseClient(); await client.connect(); await client.start(); epoch({ duration : 1024 , interval : 250 , samplingRate : 256 }), fft({ bins : 256 }), ( data ) => { const ch0 = [data.delta[ 0 ], data.theta[ 0 ], data.alpha[ 0 ], data.beta[ 0 ], data.gamma[ 0 ]]; const ch1 = [data.delta[ 1 ], data.theta[ 1 ], data.alpha[ 1 ], data.beta[ 1 ], data.gamma[ 1 ]]; const ch2 = [data.delta[ 2 ], data.theta[ 2 ], data.alpha[ 2 ], data.beta[ 2 ], data.gamma[ 2 ]]; const ch3 = [data.delta[ 3 ], data.theta[ 3 ], data.alpha[ 3 ], data.beta[ 3 ], data.gamma[ 3 ]]; const meta = [ch0, ch1, ch2, ch3]; //publish metadata Publishing my Brain Data as Timed Metadata Now that I've got a handler that collects my brain data from the Muse headband, it's time to publish that data as timed metadata in the live stream. The awesome thing about is that it is directly embedded in the video stream, and remains a permanent part of that stream. That means that it exists even in recorded versions, meaning that even in on-demand playback we can listen for and respond to the events. timed metadata The Web Broadcast SDK does not support publishing timed metadata from the client side, so we'll have to use ( ) via the . For this, I created an AWS Lambda function. putMetadata docs AWS SDK for JavaScript }); }, }; } } } } }; } response.body = err.stack; }

}; const AWS = require ( 'aws-sdk' ); const ivs = new AWS.IVS({ apiVersion : '2020-07-14' , region : 'us-east-1' exports .send = async (event, context, callback) => { // response object const response = { 'statusCode' : 200 , 'headers' : { 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' : '*' , 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' : 'OPTIONS,GET,PUT,POST,DELETE' , 'Content-Type' : 'application/json' 'body' : '' , 'isBase64Encoded' : false // parse payload let payload; try { payload = JSON .parse(event.body); catch (err) { response.statusCode = 500 ; response.body = JSON .stringify(err); callback( null , response); return ; // validate payload if (!payload || !payload.channelArn || !payload.metadata) { response.statusCode = 400 ; response.body = 'Must provide, channelArn and metadata' ; callback( null , response); return ; // check payload size let byteLength = Buffer.byteLength(payload.metadata, 'utf8' ); if (byteLength > 1024 ) { response.statusCode = 400 ; response.body = 'Too big. Must be less than or equal to 1K' ; callback( null , response); return ; // putmetadata input let params = { channelArn : payload.channelArn, metadata : payload.metadata try { await ivs.putMetadata(params).promise(); response.statusCode = 200 ; response.body = JSON .stringify({ 'published' : true }, '' , 2 ); callback( null , response); catch (err) { response.statusCode = 500 ; callback( null , response); return ; To publish my brain data as timed metadata, I created an Amazon API Gateway to invoke the function and modify the method above to call the AWS Lambda function. subscribe() .pipe( powerByBand(),
  )
  .subscribe( fetch(LAMBDA_URL, { }, })
        });
      }
    }
  ); zipSamples(client.eegReadings) epoch({ duration : 1024 , interval : 250 , samplingRate : 256 }), fft({ bins : 256 }), ( data ) => { const ch0 = [data.delta[ 0 ], data.theta[ 0 ], data.alpha[ 0 ], data.beta[ 0 ], data.gamma[ 0 ]]; const ch1 = [data.delta[ 1 ], data.theta[ 1 ], data.alpha[ 1 ], data.beta[ 1 ], data.gamma[ 1 ]]; const ch2 = [data.delta[ 2 ], data.theta[ 2 ], data.alpha[ 2 ], data.beta[ 2 ], data.gamma[ 2 ]]; const ch3 = [data.delta[ 3 ], data.theta[ 3 ], data.alpha[ 3 ], data.beta[ 3 ], data.gamma[ 3 ]]; const meta = [ch0, ch1, ch2, ch3]; // put metadata if broadcasting if ( this .state.isBroadcasting) { 'method' : 'POST' , 'mode' : 'no-cors' , 'headers' : { 'Content-Type' : 'application/json' , 'body' : JSON .stringify({ channelArn : this .state.channelArn, metadata : JSON .stringify(meta) Building the Live Stream Playback and Charting My Brain Data Once the live stream with brain data broadcast view was complete, it was time to create a playback experience that would display the live stream and chart the brain data in real time as it came in via timed metadata. Creating The Live Stream Player We can use the IVS Web Player SDK via NPM, but since it uses WebAssembly . To avoid that trickiness, I find it easier to use the web player via a tag and I added that to my in my React app. things can get tricky <script> index.html <script src= "https://player.live-video.net/1.12.0/amazon-ivs-player.min.js" ></script> In my component, I grab a reference to the player and some necessary elements. Playback.jsx const { IVSPlayer } = window ; const { create : createMediaPlayer, isPlayerSupported, PlayerEventType, PlayerState } = IVSPlayer; const { ENDED, PLAYING, READY, BUFFERING } = PlayerState; const { TEXT_METADATA_CUE, ERROR } = PlayerEventType; For playback, we use the native tag. <video> <video ref={ this .videoRef} controls playsInline></video> And to initialize the player and start playback: this .playerRef.current = createMediaPlayer(); this .playerRef.current.attachHTMLVideoElement( this .videoRef.current); this .playerRef.current.load(STREAM_URL); this .playerRef.current.play(); Listening and Responding to Timed Metadata Now that we're playing the live stream, we can listen for and respond to the incoming brain data. this .playerRef.current.addEventListener(TEXT_METADATA_CUE, this .onPlayerMetadata); Set the brain data into our component state: });
  });
}; onPlayerMetadata = ( e ) => { //console.log(e); const data = JSON .parse(e.text); this .setState( state => { state.ch0.datasets[ 0 ].data = data[ 0 ]; state.ch1.datasets[ 0 ].data = data[ 1 ]; state.ch2.datasets[ 0 ].data = data[ 2 ]; state.ch3.datasets[ 0 ].data = data[ 3 ]; this .chartReferenceCh0.current.data.datasets[ 0 ].data = state.ch0.datasets[ 0 ].data; this .chartReferenceCh1.current.data.datasets[ 0 ].data = state.ch1.datasets[ 0 ].data; this .chartReferenceCh2.current.data.datasets[ 0 ].data = state.ch2.datasets[ 0 ].data; this .chartReferenceCh3.current.data.datasets[ 0 ].data = state.ch3.datasets[ 0 ].data; return ({ ch0 : state.ch0, ch1 : state.ch1, ch2 : state.ch2, ch3 : state.ch3 And render it with a bar chart (with Chart.js): options={
    { }, } 
    }
  } /> <Bar data={ this .state.ch0} ref={ this .chartReferenceCh0} aspectRatio : 1 , title : { display : true , text : 'Channel: ' + channelNames[ 0 ] }, responsive : true , tooltips : { enabled : false legend : { display : false The visualization is cool, and certainly provides a fun way to see my brain data while I'm live streaming a game, but doesn't provide a ton of context. So I figured it would make sense to include some calculations to give insight into what the data actually means. For that, I found some calculations in the which included some formulas that can be used to calculate factors like relaxation (alpha divided by delta), and concentration (beta divided by theta). Another a way to derive fatigue ((theta + alpha) / beta). I wrapped these calculations up in a handy, reusable component. muse-lsl project on GitHub great blog post I found highlighted </Col> </Row> <Row className= 'mb-2' > { /* Delta: 0 Theta: 1 Alpha: 2 Beta: 3 Gamma: 4 */ } <Col xs={ 12 } xxl={ 4 } className= 'align-items-center mb-2 mb-xxl-0' > < Badge className = 'fs-6 w-100' bg = 'info' > Relaxation: < span className = 'fw-bold' > < NumberFormat value = {this.props.dataset.data[0] ? ( this.props.dataset.data [ 2 ] / this.props.dataset.data [ 0 ]) : 0 } decimalScale = {2} displayType = { ' text '} /> </ span > </ Badge > < Col xs = {12} xxl = {4} className = 'align-items-center mb-2 mb-xxl-0' > < Badge className = 'fs-6 w-100' bg = 'info' > Fatigue: < span className = 'fw-bold' > < NumberFormat value = { this.props.dataset.data [ 3 ] ? ( ( this.props.dataset.data [ 1 ] + this.props.dataset.data [ 2 ]) / this.props.dataset.data [ 3 ] ) : 0 } decimalScale = {2} displayType = { ' text '} /> </ span > </ Badge > </ Col > < Col xs = {12} xxl = {4} className = 'align-items-center mb-2 mb-xxl-0' > < Badge className = 'fs-6 w-100' bg = 'info' > Focus: < span className = 'fw-bold' > < NumberFormat value = {this.props.dataset.data[1] ? ( this.props.dataset.data [ 3 ] / this.props.dataset.data [ 1 ]) : 0 } decimalScale = {2} displayType = { ' text '} /> </ span > </ Badge > </ Col > Summary In this post, we looked at how I created a React application to live stream my brain data with Amazon IVS. If you'd like to learn more about Amazon IVS, please check out the series here on dev.to. If you're interested in trying out the application or just checking out the full source for the application, check it out on . Your comments, questions and feedback is always welcome, so leave a comment here or connect with me on Getting Started with Amazon Interactive Video Service GitHub Twitter Links Brain to the Cloud - Part I - Project Intro and Architectural Overview Brain to the Cloud - Part II - How I Uploaded My Brain to the Cloud Brain to the Cloud - Part III - Examining the Relationship Between Brain Activity and Video Game Performance Project Source Code First Published . here

How I Live Stream My Brain with Amazon IVS, a Muse Headband and React

Cómo transmito en vivo mi cerebro con Amazon IVS, una diadema Muse y React

Comment je diffuse en direct mon cerveau avec Amazon IVS, un bandeau Muse et React

मैं कैसे अपने दिमाग को Amazon IVS, एक सरस्वती हेडबैंड और रिएक्ट के साथ लाइव स्ट्रीम करता हूं

Amazon IVS、Muse ヘッドバンド、React を使用して脳をライブ ストリーミングする方法

Como eu transmito meu cérebro ao vivo com o Amazon IVS, uma bandana Muse e React

Cách tôi phát trực tiếp bộ não của mình với Amazon IVS, Muse Headband và React

我如何使用 Amazon IVS、Muse 头带和 React 直播我的大脑

How are museums using NFTs, and perhaps just as intriguing, why are they using NFTs? Because it’s more than just a revenue stream to make money. In fact, if museums just think of museums in terms of dollars and cents (or, in this case, crypto), then they will most likely fail to make a real and lasting impact. For hundreds of years, museums are institutions that collect, protect and interprets object, artifacts and other material evidence of human history, as well as of nature and make them available to the general public. The rise of NFTs has coincided with the spread of the pandemic. While wasn’t the only reason for the popularity of NFTs and blockchain technology, it shows just how fast the industry is growing and how many people are embracing NFTs and their potential implications. COVID While celebrities, brands and sports companies have been early adopters, museums are generally slow to take on anything new. However, the shutdown of tourism and world travel has forced them to think outside of the box. NFTs are the perfect opportunity and have all but fallen into the laps of those looking to not only raise funds for museums but offer a new experience to patrons and museum-lovers who can’t travel. Last year, the British Museum in London converted Japanese painter Hokusai's famous works into NFTs. And recently, the museum announced that it is extending its partnership with LaCollection to digitize . William Turner's artworks The idea is that users get to purchase these digital tokens, which represent the artwork. These can then be displayed on digital walls as an NFT. A portion of the proceeds from these token sales will go towards the museum itself. In this way, they fundraise and generate income without resorting to selling physical assets. So how are museums using NFTs and perhaps just as intriguing, why? Because it’s more than just a revenue stream to make money. In fact, if museums just think of museums in terms of dollars and cents (or, in this case, crypto), then they will most likely fail to make a real and lasting impact. The Revolt Against Tradition Manhattan's New Museum was one of the first to adopt the technology by announcing a program of events meant to open discussions about the prospect of transitioning to the digital world. While the museum, in itself, is already a symbol of change in the art industry, this new program is a showcase that it's willing to break tradition. According to the museum's website, the initiative is a call to action for artists, technologists, and other cultural producers to consider how they might work together to create new structures for supporting the production, dissemination, and collection of art in the digital age. This is a revolt against convention. At the forefront of this shift are NFTs, the most significant technological innovation in the art world since the internet. The rise of NFTs has led to a new way of thinking about value, authenticity, and ownership. It has also called into question the very idea of an art object and what it could be. Virtual Experiences Many prominent museums have been offering making it possible to visit Paris, New York and Florence from your computer. These include online tours, 3D renderings, and even augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) simulations. virtual experiences But there's more they can do than just upgrade a visitor's virtual experience. For example, the world's first-ever full-time NFT museum, the Seattle NFT Museum, opened its doors early this year, intending to explore the potential of this technology. The museum hosts exhibitions and events that feature a variety of NFT-based artworks. These include everything from audio recordings and videos to 3D-printed sculptures. The museum's "Climate Conversation" exhibit features artworks sold as NFTs with the option of being printed in physical form. Fundraising But of all the motivations for embracing NFTs, nothing is more apparent than the fundraising potential. The possibility of creating a new revenue stream is too great for museums to ignore. Russia's Hermitage Museum leads the way in this regard – at least before the sanctions. The institution minted a substantial portion of its massive artwork collection (including a Da Vinci) into and sold them in their digital form. Driven by the instinct to survive, the museum may have even defied its country's long-standing aversion toward anything that resembles crypto. NFTs Fundraising through NFTs makes sense on many fronts. For one, it allows museums to generate income without selling any of their assets. Likewise, it also allows them to engage with a new and growing community of art collectors and enthusiasts. And it's not merely about the money. Embracing NFTs through a new platform for marketing their collections to a wider audience. With the help of blockchain technology, these NFTs can be authenticated and tracked. This gives rise to a new level of transparency that can help build trust between the institution and its supporters. fundraisers efforts To Educate Perhaps even more noble than making a new revenue source is the fact that some museums are opening their doors to help educate the public about NFTs. It brings about a sigh of relief, knowing that a historically traditional industry ultimately gives in to change for the betterment of all. In May of last year, the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum conducted a comprised of entrepreneurs, artists, and curators to talk about the impact of NFTs in the art world. The focal point was the question of whether NFTs are a fad or will it be the art's future. panel discussion In the same month, the Brattleboro Museum invited prominent author Anne Spalter along with a few local artists and academics, to discuss the in the art market while also exploring the potential of new art forms brought by this change. impact of NFTs When museums take the initiative in exploring the implications of NFTs, it says a lot about how this revolution will eventually unfold. Preserving Culture NFTs are indeed the complete opposite of how traditional art and museums operate. But it doesn't mean they can't find a way to co-exist. Museums are some of the most important cultural institutions in the world. They preserve and promote art, culture, and history. In a rapidly changing world, museums are more important than ever to stay relevant. And one way they're doing that is by embracing new technologies like NFTs. NFTs offer a way for museums to collect, curate, and exhibit art by engaging with the public in a new platform and educating them about the ever-changing art world. NFTs also allow cultures to protect what is lost. During the war in Ukraine, there is a massive amount of destruction. The World Bank has estimated at least of damage has been done so far. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know how much art has been lost (and perhaps we’ll never know the full extent) but it’s safe to say a significant amount will never be seen again.  In 2012, several buildings in Timbuktu, including 14 priceless mausoleums which were part of the World Heritage site, were . These are just two recent prominent examples. There are many more. While nothing can replace the physical buildings and works of art, at least if they are preserved through NFTs, they might be part of the new metaverse so it can be enjoyed by future generations. $60 billion worth destroyed by war Last Thoughts There are many reasons museums should be embracing NFTs but perhaps the most important is they are the future. NFT technology is here to stay and will only get adopted by more people, brands, and institutions. It won’t be long before people can hop into the metaverse and visit all their favourite museums from the comfort of their own living room. This should be something that all museums should be moving towards. By Hussein Hallak

NFTs Are More Beneficial to Museums than You Think

The very question that NFTs might someday replace museums seems like something nobody would ever utter out loud. Museums are the bedrock of some of the most famous cities in the world. There’s no way that something that boils down to a piece of code will ever replace the experience of walking down the long hallways of the Louvre or the Smithsonian – the feeling of your feet against the tile floors, mingling with the other tourists and staring in awe at the magnificent works of art. Or will it? But it wasn’t that long ago that museums were thought of as a complete waste of space. It was preposterous to think that artworks could be appreciated by the average person. Kings and queens thought art was not for commoners. To think otherwise was simply beyond belief! Beautiful art was created for the nobility, and as such, art was kept in private collections, away from anyone except the most discerning eye. In fact, the world’s most important museums didn’t start opening until the 18th century. The British Museum opened in 1753. The Louvre in 1793. The in 1819 and the Metropolitan in New York in 1870. Museo del Prado In this light, museums aren’t the eternal institutions that most people think of them as, and therefore there could be potential disruption as new technology becomes wildly adopted. And no other technology has had the type of impact that have had on the art and collectible space. Blockchain-based collectibles are completely shifting how society values ownership. NFTs A Whole New Digital World The initial reaction most people have when looking at NFTs on their phone is: ‘I’d rather see the real thing.” And I get it. Who wouldn’t want to see the Statue of David in person as opposed to a picture of it on the phone? It takes only two seconds to Google a picture, yet people line up for hours to get a glimpse of it in real life. The Googled picture doesn’t strike awe, wonderment, or take away one’s breath. But standing in front of the chiselled features, David’s eyes staring into the distance, one can’t help but feel something that goes beyond the boundaries of time and beauty. But people who think that this is the only way to view art don’t understand where blockchain, AI, and NFT technology is heading and how the metaverse will shake up how we interact and operate in the world to the core. Let’s flip the question for a moment and imagine a Star Trek-like future. Why would you want to travel somewhere, line up, and purchase a ticket to see something that would take you only a few moments to see inside the metaverse? The experience would be exactly the same. There would be literally no difference. In fact, the metaverse experience might even be better as you would be able to touch the Statue of David or even put it in your bedroom. Already there is an arms race to control the untapped metaverse. And whether Mark Zuckerberg, , the or someone else will build and control it, NFTs will certainly be a prominent part. You’ll be able to view huge lifelike collections of NFTs just as you might view the Statue of David. NVIDIA Winklevoss twins You will be able to jump into the metaverse, pay for entrance to a virtual space with cryptocurrency and view some of the most famous NFTS that helped shape the space and have come a part of NFT history. (Image seeing a collection of Bored Ape Yacht Club on display as part of the rise of NFTs?) Detractors of NFTs say that the artwork is nothing special. To some, it’s like seeing an original Pollock – because let’s face it: the difference between a Pollock and paint splatter can be interpreted as only being Pollock himself. The thing is that art is open to interpretation and if someone can find value in a , why cannot one find value in an NFT? Jackson Pollock painting No matter which side of the fence you sit on, we are only at the very beginning of blockchain technology and who can tell where it will lead us or how it can turn out? Nobody knows – not even Mark Zuckerberg, but I for one, am excited to find out. Museums Can Survive by Embracing NFTs and the Metaverse Museums don’t need to be obsolete. They can use blockchain technology to their advantage. In fact, a few renowned art collections and have already taken the initiative. museums The in Florence recently sold a digital version of Michelangelo's "Doni Tondo" as an NFT; Saint Petersburg's Hermitage Museum announced its plan to auction its collection of masterpieces as NFTs, while the British Museum hopes to sell over a hundred of its Hokusai artworks as NFTs. Uffizi Gallery These examples show that some can see the potential and opportunity presented by NFTs – even for older institutions. The key for museums to adapt to this new landscape is taking advantage of NFTs' unique properties – provable scarcity, ownership, and provenance. Doing so allows these institutions to better showcase their collection for both patrons and art enthusiasts. More importantly, it allows art museums to thrive amidst the uncertainty of a digital future by embracing the technology changing it. It’s not a matter of whether NFTs will become as big of a draw for art enthusiasts as museums but when. The art world is changing, and with it, the way that museums operate must change. NFTs provide a way for these institutions to embrace the digital world while still holding onto their traditions. By using NFTs, art museums can create new experiences for their patrons and give art enthusiasts a better understanding of their collections. They can then monetize their collections in ways that were not possible before. Final Thoughts Instead of sticking to a risk-averse approach, museums will survive the threat of getting upended by NFTs and the metaverse only by embracing what blockchain technology has to offer. Gone are the days when museums are the sole keepers of our artistic heritage and culture. NFTs allow for a complete digital experience that will allow art lovers to feel deeply connected to the artwork as if it was right in front of them in the physical world. The art world is changing and these venerable institutions must as well if they are to survive. Hussein Hallak

A Whole New Digital World: Are Museums Dead? 

Un mundo digital completamente nuevo: ¿Están muertos los museos?

Un tout nouveau monde numérique : les musées sont-ils morts ?

एक पूरी नई डिजिटल दुनिया: क्या संग्रहालय मर चुके हैं?

まったく新しいデジタル世界: 博物館は死んだのか?

Todo um novo mundo digital: os museus estão mortos?

Một thế giới kỹ thuật số hoàn toàn mới: Các viện bảo tàng đã chết?

一个全新的数字世界：博物馆死了吗？

Sometimes we are not in the right mindset and end up doing some crazy things. In this slogging thread, our random channel had the opportunity to discuss the latest news about vandalism in an art gallery. We discussed what were some foolish things we had done and pondered: what if someone "bored" out of their mind decided to vandalize your work? This Slogging thread by Sara Pinto, Abeer, Mónica Freitas, Limarc Ambalina and Jack Boreham occurred in slogging's official #random channel, and has been edited for readability. Sara Pinto Feb 10, 2022, 12:25 PM What if someone "bored" out of their mind decided to vandalize your work? https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/10/russian-painting-vandalised-by-bored-gallery-guard-who-drew-eyes-on-it Sara Pinto Feb 10, 2022, 12:33 PM It was the first day on the job, and this security guard at a gallery decided it was a good idea to draw on Anna Leporskaya’s Three Figures which was painted between 1932 and 1934, and had been insured for 75m roubles. Fortunately, the damage is repairable, but it would cost around 250,000 roubles. "This is not the first time a painting has been vandalized in Russia: in 2019 a man was sentenced to two and half years in prison after attacking a painting of Ivan the Terrible in the Tretyakov, tearing it with a pole from the barrier protecting the work. The same work was also attacked in 1913 by a mentally ill man who slashed it with a knife three times." Sara Pinto Feb 10, 2022, 12:38 PM I cannot help but find this a little funny, given that the piece displayed figures with no face, and the guard decided to go with some eyes. However, it's someone's work, and in this case, a valuable piece as well. I have to ask, what's your take on this? :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: 1 Sara Pinto Feb 10, 2022, 12:39 PM Limarc Ambalina Mónica Freitas Jack Boreham Abeer Abeer Feb 13, 2022, 6:47 AM Sara Pinto This is hilarious but man, do I feel bad for the artist. That’s one of the dumbest reasons to have your painting vandalized. I suspect his “lapse in sanity” was probably him being drunk or under the influence on the job and his employer trying to manage their PR after the incident Sara Pinto Feb 14, 2022, 12:28 PM The most bizarre part is that it was his first day, and he just screwed up in the worst possible way. I'm glad that they can repair the damage of this dumb action. What's the most foolish thing you did at work? Abeer Mónica Freitas Feb 14, 2022, 1:16 PM Sara Pinto I'm not going to lie. It's a bit funny how he went about it 😂 yet, it's obviously not right... It's a great piece of art, after all Limarc Ambalina Feb 15, 2022, 6:19 AM Sounds like something that would happen in a sitcom 😄 Limarc Ambalina Feb 15, 2022, 6:20 AM "The vandalism was first noticed on 7 December by two visitors who raised the alarm with a gallery employee. The painting was removed from the exhibition and returned to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which had loaned the painting." Imagine being the people who noticed Jack Boreham Feb 15, 2022, 9:55 AM If it was good art, I would accept it 😂 😂 1 Sara Pinto Feb 15, 2022, 12:32 PM Mónica Freitas Exactly! It's difficult not to find it funny, but it's still pretty bad of him to have done it. Have you ever done something silly on your job just because you were bored? Sara Pinto Feb 15, 2022, 12:34 PM Limarc Ambalina If it was me and I didn't know the piece previously, I would just think it was something more abstract haha. Like the artist decided to go with a pen to make a statement or something Sara Pinto Feb 15, 2022, 12:38 PM Jack Boreham That sounded like you are the type of guy who would buy a piece of art and then shape it to your liking just like this security guard 😂 Mónica Freitas Feb 15, 2022, 2:07 PM Sara Pinto, silly? Does my thesis count? 😂 Sara Pinto Feb 16, 2022, 10:11 AM Mónica Freitas, no 😂 It has to be something in the lines of this security guard haha Mónica Freitas Feb 16, 2022, 10:21 AM Sara Pinto then no... I'm far too responsible 😅 Mónica Freitas Feb 16, 2022, 11:01 AM Sara Pinto have you? Abeer Feb 17, 2022, 11:39 AM Sara Pinto I think the most foolish thing I did when I was bored at work was a long long time ago when I worked at a McDonalds. My friend I haven’t seen in a long time came by the drive-through. There was no one around and I haven’t seen him in so long so we ended up catching up at the drive-through. 😂 As you can imagine, we lost track of time and before we knew it, there was a line of cars waiting behind him in the drive-through honking for him to take his food and go! 💀 Sara Pinto Feb 23, 2022, 4:25 PM Mónica Freitas, I don't have many foolish work stories, but I do have some from college. My friends and I have a history of entering places we are not supposed to be and leaving the places where we have to be. So, one time, we decided to leave our class, and enter a classroom that wasn't ours. We discovered that we were in a design class, so we decided to stay and draw for giggles. Surprise, surprise, the teacher caught us. We tried to pull the Erasmus student card, it would be more normal that way that the teacher didn't recognize us. it didn't work, we were "yelled" a little and left running haha

A Russian Painting was Vandalized by Bored Museum Security Guard

A creative person is one, who enjoys, above all, the company of his own mind. Anything done well, from baking a souffle to putting together a winning stock portfolio is creative. Denise G. Shekerjian, Uncommon genius "The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful thing to say about is, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then settle down to work with it for a good long time. Everyone has an aptitude for something. The trick is to recognize it, to work with it… The problem is that the things you’re good at come naturally. And since most people are modest instead of arrogant sobs, what comes naturally you don’t see as a special skill. It’s just you. It’s what you’ve always done." In his fascinating book , shares fabulous insights into the lives of some of the most creative people. For example, wrote in the family sitting room, “subject to all kinds of casual interruptions”. Her sister Cassandra oversaw the running of the house, to the great relief of Jane. Daily Rituals Mason Currey Jane Austen , the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, remarked: “I am not able to write regularly”. She worked a day job, an editor for Random House, taught university literature courses and raised her two sons as a single parent. Toni Morrison “It does seem hectic. But the important thing is that I don’t do anything else. I avoid the social life normally associated with publishing. I don’t go to cocktail parties, I don’t give or go to dinner parties. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can’t afford to brood. I brood, thinking of ideas, in the automobile when I’m driving to work or in the subway or when I’m mowing the lawn. By the time I get to the paper somethings’s there – I can produce.” Her writing hours varied across decades, working on her fiction in the evenings in the 1970s or ’80s and switching to the early morning hours in the ’90s. Like many other creatives presented in the book, she woke up every day at 5 am. wrote in lunch breaks, “taking advantage of this pure, blissful hour of freedom”. Nicholson Baker had a “schedule so regular it was practical Pavlovian and I loved it”. Francine Prose wrote only half an hour a day. “If you write half an hour a day, it makes for a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half an hour a day.” Gertrude Stein took writing as a task “which I performed in spells and bursts. I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired to write. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter. ” Agatha Christie Some artists made the time, some stole it when their schedule allowed it. Some practised deep work for the same constant number of hours, some did not stop until they hit their target of x words per day. Some woke up before their family and others wrote in the slivers of time, taking half-hours here and there. These people transformed their creative spark into a creative discipline. They made time to visit their own depths of thought. "Don’t wait for the muse…Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon. Or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up." Stephen King, On Writing Your job is to make sure the muse knows where to find you. By applying mindfulness (deliberate single-tasking), consistency and deep meaning, epiphanies will find their way back home to us. Because what made us come alive was always there, beneath the skin. Ready to be shown, used, transformed. We owe it to ourselves to recognize and honour this talent. There are children to raise, jobs to work, bread to win, houses to build or keep, battles to fight, diseases to survive, people to become. A million little things outside. Just do not forget about the million little things inside. . Previously published on my blog

Find Your Creativity Muse Amidst the Noise of Life

It's no secret people love to collect: shoes, watches, cards, cars, tinder matches? In some cases, countries. This year, Covid turned some of us into toilet paper collectors. Nearly all of us have some kind of collection. Most notably for me growing up, were cards, Football, Pokémon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: the Gathering. Trading in the playground was a daily routine. Some of the earliest recorded collected cards were baseball cards found in cigarette packets! Intended initially for advertisement, smokers quickly began collecting them. Below is considered to be one of the rarest and most valuable baseball cards ever produced. It depicts Honus Wagner, one of the era's greats. The card was issued by American Tobacco Company from 1909 to 1911 as part of the T206 series. He refused further production, either because he wanted more compensation, or didn't want children buying cigarettes to access his card, I'd like to think the latter. The Resurgence of Pokémon Cards In the last 90 days, the world has seen a huge resurgence in interest in Pokémon cards. Perhaps because we're bored at home, or perhaps a mania led by influential YouTubers and Superstars, maybe a mix of both. Google Trends shows that just last week, we reached an almost 5-year high in worldwide interest in Pokémon Cards. Cards have made headlines, as YouTube and Music stars race to "open packs" on stream and on video - hoping for a valuable card. This drives further speculation, especially amongst young people, but adults are no strangers to collecting as we've explored above. The record for the most expensive Pokémon card to be auctioned, an Illustrator Pikachu, went for $233,000. It's a big part of all of our lives at some stage, it just evolves. Now we are witnessing a change in the way that we collect. Collecting is (slowly) going digital. Portals to New Worlds (VR)? Or Just Windows (AR)? With the evolution of technology we've seen many attempts to break through to Digital Collectibles. Digital Collectible was estimated as a$1.3bn market back in 2013. But they never really took off. People seem to prefer physical cards. But Digital Collectibles? Or 'Digibles' show more potential with the emergence of Augmented Reality. Card Games Augmented Reality (AR) collecting saw it's first real boom in 2017 when Pokémon Go, an AR collecting game took the world by storm. Reaching 60 million monthly users soon after launch in June 2017, 12 million of which were using the app daily. But numbers definitely dropped off slowly. A slow release of Pokémon meant it was hard or even impossible to fill your Pokédex, and you had to play consistently over a long time. As player numbers reduced, it became harder to find groups for "legendary raids" and therefore numbers fell more aggressively. The most popular region remains extremely active in the world of Pokémon Go - Asia Pacific. Seeing year on year growth since 2016, with over 310 million users at present. AR Collecting is alive and well, but Virtual Reality (VR) is lagging behind. Likely due to the fact VR is for the few rather than the many and we're very early in the technology. It's more immersive, but more expensive, and has a bigger learning curve. We'll dive more into VR later as we go down the technology rabbit hole. 'Digibles' in Deep Tech & Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Blockchains and other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) - like Ethereum - set precedent for a new way of collecting and also tracking digital assets, they offer tools to create scarcity, prove authenticity, and offer the foundations for fair and effective collecting systems, and as we move forward, systems too. displaying & sharing CryptoKitties are Ethereum based collectibles that you can breed. The below, named 'Dragon', sold for a record breaking $170,000, which, if you recall from earlier, isn't far off the the Illustrator Pikachu. Assets like CryptoKitties that are issued on a blockchain are paired with a token that represents the item's uniqueness. This token stores important data like history of ownership, also known as provenance. Traditional collectibles don't benefit from this. These particular tokens, and in the following case, Kitties, are called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT's). CryptoKitties was likely an onset of the Bitcoin Mania and Cryptocurrency Bullrun of 2017, but we shouldn't ignore it. It had all the elements of a great collectibles game; a mix of chance & luck, and driven by a cost requirement. People love "unboxing" and "unwrapping" - and this is why breeding made the winning combo. Unfortunately for Cryptokitties, Ethereum just wasn't mature enough - and the barriers to entry into cryptocurrency are still covered with razorwire.  It was good for people comfortable paying a lot of money just to interact with Ethereum, and people who already understood cryptocurrency, but absolutely nobody else. As improvements are made to Ethereum, and onboarding and user experience becomes easier, we can expect another resurgence in CryptoKitties - but we're a way off. Horse Racing, Anyone? Zed Run is another notable collectible ecosystem that recently migrated to NEAR Protocol (a protocol similar to Ethereum, with much cheaper and faster transactions) to ensure that when users do come, they aren't put off by a clunky experience. Zed still sits into that niche crypto-collector community, but I do expect it'll have its upside one day. Zed allows the breeding and of digital horses. It's a game likely aimed at an older generation of players and gamblers alike, that offers large prize pools ($80,000 at the time of writing) and rare horse coats that can fetch tens of thousands of dollars, particularly during peaks in speculative cycles. racing Collecting 'on-chain' isn't just a fad. We've explored collectibles like cards today, but there are many other use cases for digital collectibles and NFT's. If you understand even at a very high level of how a blockchain works, and I did a half good job of explaining what an NFT is, you should now understand that merely copy and pasting an image of the famous CryptoKitty, Dragon, (or any other image) does absolutely not give you ownership... ...Just like reprinting the Illustrator Pikachu card doesn't mean you can sell it for $233,000. People love Scarcity. Certification. Clout. We explored that earlier, and it's at the heart of human history, since 12,000 years ago when we formed our first settlements, we've been collectors. With the parabolic growth and evolution of the internet, there are new ways to provably track, exchange and monitor both physical and digital assets. This is proved by industry leading auction houses that now use blockchain to verify provenance of luxury goods, like jewellery and art. And it sets precedent for more blurred lines between the real world and the digital world... The Evolution of Web and The Metaverse - And How Collecting Will Finally Go Digital Spaces Something that you should find interesting is the emergence of the Metaverse. all That's where you'll be collecting things soon, if you aren't already. The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. Nevermind websites, we're quickly entering a world full of . I wrote about that . "Fortnite, Animal Crossing, and the Metaverse." webspaces here Web spaces, areas that make up the open metaverse, can be any area of the internet we connect digitally that might resemble the real world, or encourage behaviour similar to the real world. In the article above, I used the example of Animal Crossing & Fortnite. These are areas of the metaverse because they allow human like interaction and encourage us to behave similarly to how we would in real life. You collect skins to show off, instead of clothes. Some webspaces are likely to replace websites - areas we can browse freely, and even purchase real & digital items while we do so. If you wrap in other areas of technology, like augmented and virtual reality, you create a really interesting way for people to connect with brands, artists, and eachother. A remarkably successful example of a digital webspace built on Blockchain technology is . The first ever world owned entirely by its users. When you buy land in Decentraland, you really do own it. The native currency to the virtual world is called MANA. A plot of land named "The Secret of Satoshis Tea Garden" was sold for over $80,000 equivalent in MANA tokens. Decentraland I hopped into Decentraland to explore, after heading over to the Museum District, I was naturally drawn toward this exhibition, for some reason. Decentraland is by any standard, a breathtaking example of decentralisation in action - owned by its users, and highly immersive, It shows great potential in the ability to buy and monetise a world through NFTs. After raising $24m for it's native Ethereum based token, MANA, back in 2017, it's had an impressive climb and built a cult like crypto userbase. It's extremely easy to log in and get started if you have a Metamask wallet (a web based wallet for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain) and very easy to move around in, but it feels overwhelming and lacks the tools to direct the users to the right place - but perhaps that's the idea? A vast, open, decentralised world to explore for the first time. Where it falls short, however, is that it feels massively ahead of its time. While I expect it has the ability to mature like a fine wine, particularly graphically, it just doesn't get the love or recognition it deserves. Decentraland is also yet to support VR, and is failing to draw the real user numbers it needs to hit the mainstream. Decentraland sits at that niche intersection between Virtual Reality and Blockchain, and will probably remain there, and there is nothing wrong with that. The Evolution of Augmented & Virtual Reality is right now at a turning point - and largely accelerated by Covid19. It's also complimented exceptionally by other areas of deep tech that we've explored, like Blockchains and NFTs. So where do all these concepts come together? Terra Virtua's Web Spaces offer some examples; a highly-immersive platform for Licensed Digital Collectibles. (beta) is a Mobile, PC, & Web based Platform & Ecosystem for Digital Collectibles that supports Virtual & Augmented Reality. They're not the first digital collectibles platform to use DLT, or NFTs, but the way they uniquely combine elements of collecting, trading, fandom and merch with unique webspaces makes the potential for them to emerge as the global standard of digital collectibles very possible. Terra Virtua The Ecosystem itself is made up of a number of areas. A marketplace for buying and selling licensed assets, an art gallery, "fancaves" (that resemble a house for displaying your collections), the Terradome (that resembles an exhibition centre)  and an AR mobile app that is not yet released. The Terra Virtua team exhibit a deep understanding of the emerging Metaverse and virtual shared spaces; they've bought together collect, share display, but in a way that funnels the users to the right environment. It also encourages mass market participation through standard dollar pricing models (rather than in cryptocurrency), and partnerships with big licensed brands. and Terra Virtua is built on Unreal Engine and operates in its current form as a Desktop Application. It feels smooth, offers a high definition viewing experience and feels like an immersive, first person game. The Marketplace is a little bare in its current state, particularly on the collectibles side. That said, there are plans to add many more digital collectibles, and that is demonstrated by the awarded partnerships and licenses. For me to really want to build collections in Terra Virtua, there need to be more assets that really resonate with me, and I expect this is the key to winning the mass market. One thing I did find, was a beautiful piece from , which I bought to display in my Terra Art Gallery (bottom right) Amrita Sethi The Art Gallery does what it intends. It feels (and sounds) like a real life gallery, minus the glass of champagne. Soon, you'll be able to go and visit other galleries, and in the not so distant future, I expect to be showcasing digital versions of their art in webspaces like Terra Virtua.  I'm looking forward to lending out this piece. real-world museums The Fancave (pictured above) looks and feels like a house. You can decorate it with assets purchased in the Marketplace, when I entered, a movie trailer for Top Gun was playing on the Television - likely an indication of some upcoming Top Gun collectibles and memorabilia, I was a little disappointed I couldn't go upstairs, but I am sure that will be added in the future. The Terradome is unique in that it's a much wider, open space, ideal for showing off your larger collectibles, that won't fit in the house (fancave). Think spaceships, aliens, and even sculptures. The AR mobile app isn't live yet, but I'll make sure I report back when I can use it. I expect it to work similarly to Pokémon Go in some respects, but replicable for any brand, artist or asset. A world where you can collect on the move, unlock discounts, even secret flash sales. The Fancave even had records on the wall, and I can't help but imagine myself rushing to buy a limited edition Kendrick Lamar album to play in the Metaverse. As the world moves more online, so do all elements of our day to day lives. From movies to music, the world, and our collections, are going digital. Now, you can even try shoes on in AR. How long before you can wear them in shared web spaces? , and I have no shortage of ideas on how it can scale. Terra Virtua feels like a unification of most of the technologies I've been exploring since I entered the DLT wormhole back in 2016 The trick, of course, will be educating the mass market to this emerging asset class, and doing so by speaking to that part of us that creates, collects, and shares with others. It's a tall order, but one I can get behind. Disclaimer: I am the owner of Pokémon Cards, CryptoKitties, Zed Horses, MANA tokens, and most recently a proud advisor to the Terra Virtua team.

The Evolution Of Collectibles: From Cardboard To Museums In The Metaverse

MuseScore is a popular digital sheet music brand known for two big products. The first is an open source desktop app that allows users to create high quality scores. The second is MuseScore.com, which contains the largest collection of sheet music on the internet. Today there are more than 1,000,000 scores uploaded by users, with 1,000 new scores uploaded daily. Since the launch of MuseScore.com, an upload limit of five scores was imposed on users with basic (non paid) accounts. One consequence of this restriction was that many users were forced to make older scores private in order to publish new work, and as a result, an ever increasing portion of the overall catalog has been made unavailable to the public. To rectify this issue, as of the 19th of February, MuseScore is announcing that it is lifting the 5-score limit for all accounts. Users can now . save all their scores online and share them publicly About Musescore is the most popular free music notation software in the world with more than 200,000 downloads per month powered by open source community. Over 20,000 unique scores are uploaded to by professional and amateur composers every month to increase its online catalog of publicly available scores. The audience of the product is growing by 30% each year.

MuseScore Removes Upload Restrictions on Scores

Musescore has just announced the latest version of Musescore 3, which includes work by Martin Keary (aka: Tantacrul), who joined the team as the Head of Design in November. He has been collaborating with the community and internal team on a design plan to make Musescore faster and more intuitive. This release is the first step towards that goal. Musescore 3 features refinements that aim to improve first-time experience without disrupting the workflow of existing users. The most notable of these improvements is the new 'Palettes' menu, which allows users to edit and rearrange individual palettes (as well as hundreds of individual elements). This push towards increased customization allows users much greater freedom in determining their own workflow. Another company's goal is to start making small ‘under the hood’ improvements to existing features in each release. In Musescore 3, enhancements have been made to the interface for applying accidentals so that it is more context-aware, providing nuanced options that speed up workflow. The team has also made subtle changes to how notes can be placed on the score, allowing users to click directly on note durations to apply them without activating the ‘Note Input’ toggle first. This is a standard convention in most other notation apps and will potentially remove friction for new users as well as those migrating from other programs. ACCESSIBILITY There have been multiple improvements to accessibility in Musescore 3, thanks to the contributors' community work, Peter Jonas and Marc Sabatella in particular. For the first time, the palettes panel has been made accessible to keyboard control. Navigation has been made easier too, requiring fewer keystrokes to find and add elements. Accessibility has also been optimized in the Score View, where screen readers are now able to describe more elements while using fewer repeated words to do so. This will vastly improve the experience for users who are blind or visually impaired. LOOKING TO THE FUTURE Musescore is now planning to build a comprehensive understanding of its audience by collecting more information on how the software is being used while increasing its commitment to 1:1 user-testing. By doing this, the company aims to target its redesign efforts on the most underperforming aspects of the application. Speaking of the intricacies of design planning, Martin Keary said "We are acutely aware that our future plans have the ability to disrupt the experience of users who have spent time learning existing conventions in Musescore. Balancing the gain that new designs will bring against this potential disruption is one of the trickiest aspects of managing an app of Musescore’s complexity. To help with this, we will often be releasing design videos as well as beta builds for users to digest so that we can minimize disruption as much as possible. We don’t believe in the ‘breaking eggs to make an omelette’ approach. We are much more interested in making gradual improvements and being as transparent and collaborative as possible." ABOUT Musescore is the most popular free music notation software in the world with more than 200.000 downloads per month powered by open source community. Over 20.000 unique scores are uploaded to by professional and amateur composers every month to further increase the biggest online catalog of publicly available scores. The audience of the product is growing by 30% each year. musescore.com

Musescore 3: Faster, Easier to Use, Yet Powerful and More Customisable

I first read the by Tim Ferriss back in 2012 and six months later I set up my first FHWW muse attempt . Four Hour Work Week iPanorama Prints Yup that’s me At the time the thing that held me back six months was the emphasis on creating your own product along with spending the $500 or so that Tim recommended on ads. This was to see whether ad spend would be profitable sending traffic to a sales page you created for the product you are testing (for the audience you understand and belong to). That $500 was just too much of a psychological barrier at the time as a new entrepreneur in the freemium only mindset. However, the book changed my perspective on what was possible online more than any other I’ve read and this post is therefore no criticism (I am a big fan of Tim), however I think it’s hard for new entrepreneurs to: Create a product (even an info / digital product) Build a sales page Learn paid ads (such as Google Adwords or now Facebook) What I think is easier for new entrepreneurs is to ; businesses who have already created their own converting sales pages or product pages for you to send your traffic to. simply sell other people’s products as an affiliate This way you don’t need to have a paid ad budget. You can simply generate traffic by creating your own content, in whatever medium you are comfortable with, getting it to rank in Google and promoting on platforms you are familiar with whether that’s Twitter or forums. Tim actually mentioned in the tools and tricks section of ‘Income Autopilot I Finding A Muse’ experimenting with products through affiliate networks such as Clickbank and Commission Junction as a proof of concept to find your own products to create. . In this post I argue that it’s easier and better to simply market other people’s products as an affiliate without the intention to create your own In this article you will learn: Why I believe building a content “authority site” is the best strategy for generating enough monthly passive income to replace a full time salary. The three best business models / monetization methods I know for achieving this. How to set up marketing funnels to generate leads and convert into customers. Muse Math — Defining The Challenge Our goal is to build a web based business that generates the average US personal income as quickly as possible with less than 4 hours of the owners time involved per week. According to wikipedia, the which works out at $3709/m. Let’s round that figure up to a target of $4k/m (or Total Monthly Income as Tim states). average US personal income is $44,510 As mentioned I feel that a $500 ad budget is mentally too much for new entrepreneurs to throw at something. To make this challenge interesting to experienced online entrepreneurs as well I’m going to say we only have an initial budget of $50/m to invest in generating that $4k/m. So what is the best option in 2019 for achieving $4k/m passively month on month as soon as possible with a starting budget of only $50/m? As Tim mentioned in the book, when building a muse online business you want to . make sure you are entering a market that is big enough With my first muse attempt I failed to do this. I bought a domain focussed purely on printing panorama photos that people took on their iPhone rather than a larger site focussed on say iPhone photography. I was limited to the type of content I could create, the types of products I could offer and therefore the amount of keywords (search phrases people were using) I could focus on. , and just couldn’t get revenue above $1500/m. To better understand the difference between niche sites and what is authority sites there’s a , a and an . For example a niche site would be however an authority site would be . I had built a niche site rather than an authority site great post on nichepursuits.com discussion on authorityhacker.com argument on empireflippers.com Family Tent Center Outdoor Gear Lab The income from the print business wasn’t enough to live on but I did end up on Empire Flippers for a couple of years of profit (nowadays you would get closer to 3 years of profit). selling it in 2016 Engineering a Muse in 2019 Back when Tim wrote the book, clicks on Adwords for were typically 5–15 cents and you could generate a 3–4x return on ad spend right off the bat by sending cold traffic to a sales page. Tim mentions doing this with his BrainQuicken supplement in his addition to the book. buying intent keywords muse math The thing is in 2019, clicks are typically at least 10x more expensive and making buying intent clicks instantly profitable for anyone who isn’t an Adwords expert is incredibly hard. Instead you need to extract more money out of every visitor using methods such popups, and marketing funnels to cover your acquisition costs. email marketing automation Fortunately Facebook ads and funnel software have filled this gap but require a different strategy to what was in the book. Cost per click on Facebook is in my experience less than half that of Adwords and you can target niche audiences with their tool in ways which are impossible on Google. audience insights However, people are not in a buying state on Facebook and you have to attract their interest through great informative content that then leads to product review style content. How to Build An Authority Site For those new to building content sites, here’s a quick top 10 list of how to get started. Pick a niche, one you understand and can write at least 50 pages of content on (even if you are ). This niche should be a two or three word phrase such as “women’s snowboarding”. not the one who ends up writing it Buy a for your niche that does not limit you. You want to start focussed on a sub niche but be able to add additional sub-niches to become the authority — I use as I’m a Brit but also . brandable domain 123 Reg Godaddy Then do keyword research to find a sub-niche within the niche that is ideally a three or four word phrase. Use a tool such as to look for “best” keywords such as “best women’s snowboard”. These phrases should be relatively uncompetitive but should have at least a few hundred search phrases. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer Buy hosting — I use a shared account to get going then spin out profitable websites to their own managed hosting. Dreamhost Install and pick a theme, free is fine to start, I tend to use for my sites. Wordpress Thrive Themes Create a account and grab the code and install a to add the code Google Analytics tracking code wordpress plugin Install the to optimise your content for the keywords (search phrases) people are searching for who could purchase the products you want to promote as an affiliate Yoast SEO Plugin Write individual for the top products in your sub-niche and also a comparison post that compares them to each other. product review content Find the best for your sub-niche keywords using or . informational content buzzsumo.com Ahrefs Content Explorer Write and and through to websites that linked to the existing content. better content promote on social channels email outreach How to Make Money From Authority Sites For me it comes down to one of three options. 1) Amazon Affiliate The easiest way to get going is to write content that mentions products that are being sold on Amazon. As you can imagine that’s not very restrictive being the world’s largest online marketplace. You simply sign up for an and then grab an affiliate link for the products you want to make commissions for (typically around 6%). Amazon Associates account This is made really easy using the that appears at the top of Amazon after signing up where you can grab a simple text link, image or both. Amazon SiteStripe For a full explanation Authority Hacker have a . great guide Pros Super simple to monetize Cons Requires a lot of content and traffic to get to $4k/m Tung Tran is an amazon affiliate expert and on his excellent blog he is running a challenge to get to $10k/m from one authority site — . In he mentioned it had taken a year to get to $4k/m which required over 150,000 visitors a month generating over 50,000 clicks through to Amazon a month. cloudliving.com thankyourskin.com one of his updates Looking the site up in google at the time(site:thankyourskin.com) it had 170 pieces of strong content (has over 500 now). What’s super interesting to see is that Amazon product pages converted for him at over 6% — a good conversion on your own ecommerce site would be 2%. shopify 2) Clickbank To potentially achieve quicker results, promoting other people’s digital products on is worth looking at. Clickbank is one of many performance marketing networks that offers a wide variety of ebooks, online courses and memberships in a large number of niches. clickbank.com For example if you are into Paleo you could promote a cookbook: The way to make money is by sending people to a sales page on clickbank that’s optimized so that a certain % of people will purchase. In our example the sales page is and shown below: here However you will first want to make sure you collect the emails of people before sending them over to someone else’s page and offer. How this works is you create awesome content then offer what’s called a within the post which offers more information about what they’ve just consumed in exchange for leaving an email. Once people optin you can either send directly to the offer on Clickbank but typically you will need to send them to what’s known as a bridge page where you congratulate them for opting in, introduce yourself or brand and then recommend that they also check out the offer on Clickbank. content upgrade Once you have someone’s email address you need to setup an autoresponder to nurture that lead into customers. Typically less than 2% of people you bridge over to the offer will end up purchasing so you need to try and convert the remaining 98% through a series of emails that gives value and reintroduces the offer. Also through creating a longer sequence you can add in multiple offers on clickbank which will dramatically increase the lifetime value of a lead however this is hard to track. I recommend and use for this which now has a $0 free plan and I wrote why I moved from . Drip Mailchimp to Drip Clickbank Affiliate Marketing Funnel Structure Content > content upgrade (lead magnet) > bridge page > clickbank offer. The thing with this approach is that a couple of great pieces of content that convert into leads is all you need to get to $4k/m. The guys at got one of their blog posts on their authority site to $2500/m through this type of funnel as mentioned in . authorityhacker.com healthambition.com this podcast episode Pros Only need a few pieces of great content to get to $4k/m Cons Need to maintain traffic to maintain sales month on month, hard to work out customer lifetime value 3) Recurring Software Commisions The reason why Software As A Service (SaaS) businesses have high valuations is their predictable business model of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), high margins and high lifetime customer value (LTV). Due to this, software companies can pay generous recurring commissions to affiliates to sign people up to their platform. I’ve been doing this for years for and and all the other companies on my but it wasn’t until I actively started such as affiliate programs with my previous business that I realised I could make a full-time living doing just that. Leadpages Drip tools page promoting software such as clickfunnels Funnel Engine Pros Affiliate income builds every month, you’re building an asset with a much higher multiple. I sold Funnel Engine for . over $50k Cons Somewhat limited to the make money online space unless can be creative and target niches who can benefit Closing Thoughts I think the easiest business model to understand and get going with is amazon affiliate, writing content and linking to products on Amazon and there are some . excellent AMZ courses If you already have experience with funnels then Clickbank can be a good way of monetizing your traffic. However for me there is nothing easier than simply writing about the web & marketing software you are already using and earning commissions by linking to them. You can read more about why I prefer to promote software . here

How to Build an Authority Site ‘Muse’ in 2019

⚡️View the hottest state management libs for React Why? This is to serve as a Rosetta Stone of state management systems. A basic packing list app was built in: setState React 16.x Context Redux — by Dan Abramov MobX — by Michel Weststrate unstated — by Jamie Kyle MobX-State-Tree — by Michel Weststrate again Apollo GraphQL with Amazon AppSync setState + react-automata — by Michele Bertoli Freactal — by Dale while at Formidable ReduxX — by Mikey Stecky-Efantis pure-store — by Arthur Gunn AND MANY MORE! Surely you’re familiar with one or more of the aforementioned systems, and now you can leverage that knowledge to better understand many others. It’s your chance to see what all the buzz is about, and honestly, how similar all these state systems really are. To portray these systems in a terse and understandable form, the chosen app is a simple packing list app with only the ability to and . add clear Simple as it gets app (Native and Web) To illustrate state jumping the wire, the ADD/CLEAR is one component, and the LIST is a secondary component in all examples. Even the two main components (adding/listing) have been abstracted to an imported library, leaving only fundamental code in order to emphasize state choice(s). The code is meant to be minimalistic. Welcome to the React State Museum! The code for each of these systems can be found in React and React Native. https://github.com/GantMan/ReactStateMuseum Use the above repo to personally dive into each of those systems and check them out! 🔥 Also: Watch the talk from Connect.Tech here: _"Use redux, don't use redux. Use mobx, but don't use mobx. Hell just use setState! Don't worry, the new Context will…_www.recallact.com React State Museum | recallact.com Personal Notes on Each Solution: If you want code, check the GitHub, if you want opinions, continue into this very long description below. Here I jump into the differences between each item in the museum, and that which makes it unique. If you’ve got some strong opinions, or experiences, please share them in the comments. I’m also interested in giving this report as a fun-filled conference talk. setState Here’s the most basic structure of state management, it depends only on the fundamental understanding of components and their encapsulation. In many ways, this is a great example for beginners in React. Explicitly raising state to a root component that all components are children of identifies the props vs. state relationship. As an application grows, explicit connections down into components would be more and more complex and fragile, which is why this is not commonly used. The Code: | React React Native React Context https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html There’s been a lot of buzz about the updates to Context. In fact, the final form of Context in 16.x feels a bit like a state management system itself. For simplicity, the context allows for and a . All children of a provider will have access to the values applied there. All non-children will see the context defaults. The following graph explains such lineage. provider consumer Only children inherit On a second, and very opinionated note, I’m not a fan of the consumption syntax structure. Clearly, it’s a function that is the child of Consumer, but it feels like it violates JSX while mega-overloading all use cases of braces. A pedantic issue, but the readability of code should always factor into API, and on this front, Context starts to feel a bit dirty. The Code: | React React Native Redux https://github.com/reactjs/react-redux I’ll dare say at the time of this writing Redux is the most popular state management tool, and therefore the most attacked. Writing a solution in Redux took many files, and almost double the lines of code. But to Redux’s defense, it’s simple and flexible. If you’re unfamiliar with Redux, it’s a functional approach to state management that provides time-travel and clean state management in a form like a reducer function. Dan Abramov’s video explaining redux has been watched times. many In short, it’s like having someone shout commands in your app (Actions) which are projected via Action Creators. Data managers in your app (Reducers) hear those shouts, and can optionally act on them. I love my pirate ship analogy, so shouting “MAN_OVERBOARD” can tell your crew counter to subtract the staff by one, the accountant to re-split the treasure, and the guy swabbing the deck can just ignore it because he doesn’t care. I like this analogy, because shouting is a powerful way to manage all corners of your app, and in larger applications, noisy. Combine this with no way to handle side-effects and the need to glue on an immutable structure to make it all work, Redux is the bill-by-hour developer’s friend. The Code: | React React Native MobX https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-react MobX is one of the EASIEST state managers to get started with. Open the readme, and follow along and you’ll have things running in no time. It feels like mutable JS, and it really kind of is. The only part that might throw you for a loop is the decorators like on classes. Though odd, they kind of clean up the code a bit. @observer @observer is like an automatic `mapStateToProps` + `reselect` if you’re used redux things — Steve Kellock Be sure to checkout Nader’s blog post highlighting some more advanced topics on switching to MobX. _In late 2017 I worked on a React Native project with a team that had used MobX as their state management library. I had…_medium.com Ditching setState for MobX - Nader Dabit - Medium In summation, MobX was one of the smallest and simplest tools to add! The Code: | React React Native Unstated https://github.com/jamiebuilds/unstated Unstated was as easy as MobX. Much like MobX felt like mutable JavaScript, Unstated felt like adding more React code. I actually feel that Unstated feels more like React than Context did. It’s simple, you create a container, and inside that container, you manage state. Simple known functions like exist inside the state container. It’s not just an apt name; it’s an apt React based manager. setState I’m not sure how well it scales or handles middleware etc. but if you’re a beginner to state management MobX and Unstated are the simplest tools to get up and running! The Code: | React React Native MobX-State-Tree https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx-state-tree Yes, this is VERY different from vanilla MobX. It’s a common misconception. Even my co-workers try to shorten the title down to “MobX,” and I’m always pushing MST as an alternative instead. With that being said, it’s important to note MobX-State-Tree sports all the great features of Redux + reselect + Side-effect management and more all in one opinionated bundle with less code. In this small example, the only thing that’s obvious is the terse syntax. The lines of code are barely bigger than our original MobX example. Both share that succinct decorator syntax. Though it takes a bit of time to really get all the benefits out of MobX-State-Tree. The most important note is that if you came from ActiveRecord or some other kind of ORM, MobX-State-Tree feels like a clean data model with normalized relations. This is a great state management tool for an application that will scale. The Code: | React React Native Apollo GraphQL and Amazon AppSync https://github.com/apollographql/react-apollo https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/ If you haven’t jumped on the GraphQL train, you’re missing out. Apollo GraphQL + AppSync is a great way to manage your state, AND handle offline, AND handle fetching API, AND handle setting up a GraphQL server. It’s a serious solution. Many have projected GraphQL to effectively “solve” the state debate. In a lot of ways that’s easy, and in a lot of ways, that’s hard. Not everyone is ready to use a GraphQL server, but if you are, then AppSync is an easy way to handle all your data in your DynamoDB. It takes more time/energy to get this up and running, but with clear benefits. In my example, I don’t really use all the bells and whistles. You can see the delay as the data awaits from the server, and I’m not using subscriptions to get updates. This example could get better. But it’s as simple as wrapping the config with the components. Tadaaaaa! The rest is history. Please be careful what you put in the packing list in this example, as it’s shared. Special note: The Code: | React React Native setState + react-automata https://github.com/MicheleBertoli/react-automata This is a strange one in the group. In many ways, you’re wondering how setState is involved, and the answer is simple. The idea of breaking state down into a state-machine is very different from most state management systems. By creating an machine config, you handle how state gets passed, called, and identified. Therefore, you must identify ALL states your app can be in, and ALL ways it can move from one state to another. Much like dispatching an action in Redux, you have to to another state on a given event. xstate transition It’s not a full state management system; it’s merely a state-machine for your state management. Here’s the chart created by our statechart Exciting benefits come from using statecharts. Firstly, you can be protected from transitions you don’t want. For instance, you can’t transition to “loaded” state without first typing text. This stops empty adds to our packing list. Secondly, all transitions of state can be automatically generated and tested. With one simple command, multiple snapshots of state are generated. : On React Native I had to to satisfy some unused import in a dependency. This was a sneaky gotcha for native only CAVEAT yarn add path The Code: | React React Native Freactal https://github.com/FormidableLabs/freactal/ Of course, we’ll feature the awesome work of Formidable Labs. Freactal is a very advanced example and states it can replace , , , , , and more. [redux](https://redux.js.org/) [MobX](https://mobx.js.org/) [reselect](https://github.com/reactjs/reselect) [redux-loop](https://github.com/redux-loop/redux-loop) [redux-thunk](https://github.com/gaearon/redux-thunk) [redux-saga](https://github.com/redux-saga/redux-saga) Though this was probably the most difficult one for me to setup, I still see it has great value. More examples would have helped. Special thanks to who agreed to answer any questions I had while reading through the docs. Ken Wheeler The final code is succinct and straightforward. It feels a bit like the Context syntax in the end. I especially like the use of name-spacing separately from , and though there’s not much stopping you from taking this convention to other libs. effects state computer The Code: | React React Native ReduxX https://github.com/msteckyefantis/reduxx ReduxX, while probably having a bit of trouble in SEO, is still a pretty cool name. “Why is it you can add X to something to make it cool?” — Gant X ReduxX reads pretty well as in some ways it reminds me a bit of the charisma from Unstated, as we’re using verbiage to set and mutate state. One aspect that might seem alien, is the state is retrieved with as a function. This feels a bit like keychain access, and I wonder if there could be some certs/crypto mixed in easily? Food for thought. I see there’s which will swap keys out for GUIDs. Security-wise this library might have some interesting advantages. react-styled getState obscureStateKeys: true As for how to use it, Set and Get via keys. That’s it! If you’re not worried about middleware, and you’re familiar with keychain globals, you already know ReduxX. Special thanks to the author Mikey Stecky-Efantis for providing this example! pure-store https://github.com/gunn/pure-store 100% test coverage, MIT licensed, TypeScript backed mini-library for state management. This library feels the closest to “Just use globals”. As a matter of fact, if you identify that takes the signature of then you’re looking at a global state in a singleton. update setState Special thanks to Arthur Gunn for contributing this example! The Missing State Example? I’m sure there are other state managers out there which are being sorely under-represented here, and if you know them, please send a PR to the public repo. I’ll happily accept contributions so that we can all benefit. I’ll even update this blog post as new systems are added. So please, file tickets, and more importantly contribute! The museum thanks you 😆 Since this writing, many people have contributed!!! I’m especially thankful and happy that in some cases, people used this library to learn that their state system did not work with React Native, and the fixed it upstream!!! UPDATE: To get a full listing of state systems visit the repo . In Summation: You can get pretty far with setState and Context! Why bring in a dependency at all? If you’re not sure your app will need it, try to ship without an external lib. You might be able combine Context with something simple like react-automata to round out a clean and testable result! Do you want no dependencies? **Do you want simple?**unstated, reduxX, and pure-state are easy and simple. They have slight opinion differences, and small differentiating benefits for each. MobX is also easy, but shows up with some decorator syntax you have to accept. If you do, then the code stays readable and optimized, with a TON of docs/stackoverflow help. VERY **Do you want scalable?**If you’re sure your app is going to need all the bells and whistles, it’s time to break out the big guns. This is where Redux shines. You’re forever a mechanic when you implement Redux, so you know you can adapt. MobX-State-Tree shows up with all the powers of MobX + opinions, state, optimizations, and more. It’s not something you can comprehend in a single sitting, but each time you learn more about it, you’re empowering your application. There’s no doubt that GraphQL is catching fire in the technical space. Now if you’re using it with AppSync for networking, or if you’re simply using to manage your local data, you surrender some fine-grained control, but gain power in return. Be sure to keep an eye on these libraries as they evolve. It’s likely that many of the state-systems above will have to adapt to accommodate GraphQL in the near future. Do you want the future? apollo-link-state is Chief Technology Strategist at , published author, adjunct professor, worldwide public speaker, and mad scientist in training. Please clap/follow/tweet or just say hi to him . Gant Laborde Infinite Red at a conference Credits Header graphic thanks to: https://unsplash.com/photos/uqMBLm8bAdA Special thanks to who has since this blog post was originally released! Juan David Castro contributed extensively Have a minute? Check out a few more: _The Pitfalls of Remote Work + Proposed Solutions_shift.infinite.red 5 Things that Suck about Remote Work _Add Solidarity to your project for multi-machine peace of mind_shift.infinite.red Solidarity — The CLI for Developer Sanity

⚛ The React State Museum

Yesterday, my co-founder and I put together the “ ” to showcase the evolution of popular websites. Since we’re both front-end design lovers, it was fun to put the project together and inspiring to see the humble beginnings of today’s tech giants. In this post, I’ll share three learnings from browsing the historical design trends of the web’s most popular landing pages. Museum of Websites One: More media and bigger images As the world has moved towards smaller screens, websites have made their images larger. Increasingly, media (images and video) take up more real estate than text. See , , . Reddit Product Hunt Amazon Two: Banner ads Having a single splash ad across the top of the website, usually with visuals and color, seems to be an increasingly popular design choice. Check out , , the . Airbnb Yahoo New York Times Three: Logos change Generally, I think of logos as static, an unchanging stalwart that grounds the website in a brand. Actually, most (all?) of the biggest tech companies have changed their logo, and most have changed it several times. See if you recognize the original not-so-iconic logos of , , . Twitter Yelp Pinterest Thanks for reading! Check out Kapwing’s Museum of Websites for more design learnings.

3 Trends in Web Design from the Museum of Websites

Open source software is increasingly being used in schools all over the world. I’m not just talking about the classical computer science lessons (if there is one…), but also outside of it. There are some very good open source apps that you can use in maths, physics or music lessons. Nevertheless, in my experience, there are still great reservations about open source programs in the classroom. The reasons for this are manifold and I can often understand them. There is now a very wide range of (learning) software available and only a few of the applications are open source. But yes, they do exist. That’s why I would like to introduce several open source programs and apps in the coming months, which are very suitable for teaching. The first one is . MuseScore What is MuseScore? MuseScore is a scorewriter program with a WYSIWYG editor that allows you to play the entered notes and import and export them into a wide range of file formats. The program runs under Linux, Windows and macOS; for Windows there is a portable version, which can be started without installation from a USB mass storage device. The user interface as well as the input options of the notes are similar to known fee-based scorewriter programs such as Finale or Sibelius. However, MuseScore is open source and licensed under a GNU General Public License. ( Wikipedia ) MuseScore is a program that I recommend to every music teacher or musician. When we switched to , this program was a real win for our music teachers. With MuseScore you can set notes very quickly and easily. But MuseScore can do so much more. Open Source in our school a few years ago Features It is hardly possible to list all features of MuseScore, because it really can do a lot. Here is a selection: graphical score input and presentation (WYSIWYG) Any number of note lines Easy and fast note input via mouse, keyboard or hardware MIDI connection Sequencer and FluidSynth software synthesizer integrated Playback of the score includes individual settings such as speed and volume via a virtual mixing console Automatic transposition, e. g. with or without key change Inserting images into the score Multi-line lyrics various file import and export options and much more! Installation You can download MuseScore from . It is available for almost any operating system and platform. If you have installed (starting with Ubuntu 16.04 by default), you can install MuseScore with the following command: the project’s website snapd $ sudo snap install musescore Alternatively, you can also install it from the package repositories or a PPA. Installing with snap has the advantage that even in older Ubuntu versions you always get the latest version without setting up a PPA. Instructions and Links There is a in several languages. It covers the most important themes, from the first score to advanced themes such as fretboard diagrams. If you have been working with the program for a while, you are amazed at what it can do. The plethora of instruments that are supported, as well as the infinite possibilities of the composition of the score, are very impressive. manual for MuseScore To get started with MuseScore I highly recommend the official “MuseScore in Minutes”. This briefly and succinctly describes the most important functions, so that you can easily find your way around MuseScore (or the students) afterwards. There are also subtitles available in many different languages. multi-part video series This program will certainly be mainly used in music lessons and by music teachers or musicians in general. However, other areas of application are not excluded, e. g. choirs music workshops instrument teaching … Conclusion You can use MuseScore for the preparation of your own lessons as well as directly in the classroom. It is also possible to adapt existing scores. On the project’s website you can download and edit many scores. Which open source apps and programs do you use in class? Which open source software should be installed on a school computer? This article was first published on openschoolsolutions.org . Sign up to our newsletter to get access to a FREE PDF with more great open source apps for your classroom or follow @OpenSchoolZ on Twitter.

Stories, News & Mentions about MUSE

Muse’s Stories on HackerNoon