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Noon is a social learning platform making learning a more joyful, collaborative, and innovative experience. We believe technology and great people are what make Noon so successful and a unique platform for social learning. 

Loved by 10+ million students across 8 countries, we’re a diverse team of people rooted in different backgrounds but sharing the same vision and passion. Our goal is to impact 50 million students by 2023.

Noon - The Social Learning Platform

noon-academy

Critical step passed for developing agile, low-energy machine intelligence. For the first time, a physical neural network has successfully been shown to learn and remember ‘on the fly’, in a way inspired by and similar to how the brain’s neurons work.

Neural Networks Go Nano: Brain-Inspired Learning Takes Flight

MEDIA ALERT]Thai ecommerce marketplace for home products and services delivers personalized shopping experiences to 16.6 million users, drives conversion rates by up to 58% with AWS

NocNoc More than Doubles Sales Using Machine Learning on AWS

Media Partners, a Seattle-area company that builds workplace training content, has rebranded to Atana Inc., and raised

Workplace training content provider Media Partners rebrands as Atana and raises $6M

Workshops will be held from 11 a.m.-noon Nov. 10 and Dec. 8 at the Alachua County Senior Recreation Center, 5701 NW 34th Blvd.             Matheson Museum             The Matheson History Museum Fall Program series will feature live music,

Community Hospice & Palliative Care to host Hope for the Holidays workshops in Gainesville

A significant trend is growing among high school graduates in the class of 2023, with 55 percent opting out of the traditional four-year college route, according to a new survey from YouScience.

The future of game-based learning

Works from students in Dobbins High School’s Fashion Program were a part of the main exhibitions at Cherry Street, showcasing identity and self-expression through fashion. Students created clothing that responds to various social and cultural backgrounds and experiments with combining traditional and modern textile techniques.

Good news in the distict

Elon Musk's social media platform X has begun charging a $1 US fee to new users in the Philippines and New Zealand, in a test designed to cut down on the spam and fake accounts flourishing on the ...

Elon Musk's X starts testing fee for new users

The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next? There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet ...

How to fix the internet

The arguments go something like this: Social platforms encourage cruelty ... Community-scale social networks can foster learning, listening across divides, mediation between groups in conflict ...

The Internet Could Be So Good. Really.

The Biden campaign Monday joined Truth Social, the platform founded by former President Trump, pushing its message on a platform largely dominated by the former president and his followers.

Biden campaign joins Trump’s Truth Social platform

The Biden campaign Monday joined Truth Social, the platform founded by former President Trump, pushing its message on a platform largely dominated by the former president and his followers. “Well. Let’s see how this goes. Converts welcome!”

The social media platform was created by the Trump Media & Technology Group in April 2022 after former president Donald Trump found himself excommunicated from mainstream social media in 2021 ...

Biden campaign signs up for Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign launched its own account on former President Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, on Monday, as first reported by Fox News. “

Biden campaign joins Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform

President’s re-election campaign joins rightwing social media platform ‘mostly because we thought it would be very funny’ Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign has joined Truth Social ...

Biden campaign joins Trump’s Truth Social platform: ‘Converts welcome!’

Biden's campaign said in its first post on the platform. It followed that with a flurry of clips of other 2024 Republican candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former UN Ambassador ...

Biden campaign joins Trump's Truth Social platform

The 2019 Pandemic had a lot of different impacts on the education sector. The major drawback of COVID was that schools were closed, and in-person education came to a standstill. In the initial phases of the pandemic, the online systems of many different institutions were very weak. With time, however, some schools found a way to accommodate their students. They did it with the internet, ERPs, interactive programs, and with the help of reluctant parents (of course). Interestingly, online learning has been shown to increase information retention in less time. According to , more than 1.2 billion students in 184 countries are affected by school closures due to the pandemic. It's reasonable to assume that the adoption of online teaching will remain in a post-pandemic world (if we ever get there.) WeForum.Org Countries like Denmark and South Korea are still using online platforms to teach. There has been a visible improvement in online education because of this, with investments reaching up to . The overall cost of this progress is estimated to be around . US$18.66 billion in 2019 $350 Billion by 2025 Education Sector & COVID-19 Many online learning platforms provide free access to students so that they can study without roadblocks.  Many other platforms also provide subjects and classes at an affordable price to understand complex concepts with ease. Online schooling has proved to be an essential tool to sustain learning during the pandemic. Still, there are some concerns regarding online learning. New technologies have helped students gain a positive attitude that plays an important role in improving performance at school. What are the Benefits? In  ’21 the author highlights how schools need to focus on traditional academic skills and learning. Lessons for the 21 Century’, Skills like critical thinking, reasoning, adaptability, etc., are going to continue to be in demand in the future. Digitization of schools entails adopting that assists in the day-to-day academic & non-academic functions of a school. school ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software It includes e-learning management, student attendance, library and fee management, staff recruitment and salary transactions, homework management, and other administrative activities. Schools that used ERP software before the COVID lockdown witnessed a smooth and efficient transition to online mode, unlike their non-digitized counterparts, who experienced tremendous disruptions in the teaching and learning outcomes in the initial months after the lockdown. Benefits of ERP 1. Uninterrupted Learning School ERP software enables the uninterrupted continuation of teaching and learning processes in any situation with the help of cloud technology. 2. Examination and Analysis School ERP software allows teachers to maintain student reports which help in constant monitoring of individual students’ progress. 3. Easy Admission Process School ERP software helps in streamlining the admission process. Here, the candidates seeking admission register and fill the form themselves. 4. Better Quality Learning Materials Unlike traditional books, School ERP software enables teaching documentaries, audios, videos, podcasts, etc. 5. Fee Management School ERP software has automated and fast fee collection, invoice generation, reminders for remaining fees through SMS services, etc. 6. Payroll Management School ERP software can help automate salary suggestions based on teacher performance. 7. Seamless Communication Between Parents and Teachers This system uses an online notification system to ensure seamless and fast connectivity between teachers, students, and parents. 8. Management of Finances It can bring in more accountability and responsibility for the school administration by keeping track of the expenditures and earnings of the school. 9. Better Recruitment Process School management software helps the school authority in creating vacancy requisitions with the options for approval/denial. Then, candidates fill the information stored over the cloud, and customized offer letters are generated for the selected candidates. It saves effort, time, and resources and reduces the chances of clerical mistakes besides making the recruitment process fast and transparent. 10. GPS Tracking School ERP software enables parents to track the location of their children at any time and contact drivers or transportation in charge in cases of emergency. AEDU is emerging as one of the most preferred school management software in post-covid times. Equipped with different applications and portals, it provides information to all the members of the school ecosystem, namely the admins, teachers, parents/students, and accountants. Cloud-based services facilitate uninterrupted learning, admission, recruitment, assessment, and library and fee management. What makes it stand apart is that AEDU uses AI as an inbuilt performance enhancer. Its mobile-friendly features further make it one of the most favored school management systems across the world. Originally published at https://aedu.co.in on October 20, 2021.

The Future of Education is Digital

What is your current position? In Hoken Tech, an Italian startup that I co-founded, I cover the role of CTO, Chief Technology Officer. That is the first-level manager and board member of a company whose primary responsibility is to monitor, evaluate, select and suggest to the board and CEO the technologies that can be applied to the products or services a company produces. In my case, all is focused about crypto and blockchain to use and develop service upon that, mainly on EOS blockchain. How long have you been working in tech? If we go back in time to when I was little, I loved taking apart and reassembling recorders and Walkmans; but it was with the Android operating system, in 2011, that I approached and dedicated my energies to understand and develop something of my own, what aroused my curiosity and not only was being able to be the god of that application, as when in some games you enter the "god mode" command. But only with my first tablet, a Samsung P7500, I maximized my skills and experimented with various things, even the famous custom ROMs with various features as well as the ability to change the intro when it starts (a tablet that I have still on my nightstand). What is your educational background? Moving on my academic and non-academic past, I attended an Italian business school with an address for programmers (mainly studying Visual Basic as a programming language), and then I aimed instead, at university, for a legal address as there were still no advanced tools and smartphones at that time, neither Android or the blockchain. And then studying on my own, other languages ​​and systems to program on Android, and as if that were not enough, in the same time and until today, I have studied the Japanese language for 11 years now! Have you ever had a mentor? If yes, we’d like to know more about it. In the digital world, some writers and influencers from the tech world have certainly been a help for me, and I can consider them as mentors (Napoleon Hill, Robert Kiyosaki, Marco Montemagno), but if we want to talk about real mentors who have guided me personally, I certainly cannot forget to mention Amelia Tomasicchio, director of "The Cryptonomist". With commitment and dedication, she has always guided me and taught me a lot of things that I use and put into practice on a daily basis, and I am infinitely grateful to her for giving me various opportunities and believing in my abilities. And, as I once reminded her, she is a “Lighthouse for all but a mirage for some,” and for me is my lighthouse. What was the best piece of advice you got over the course of your career? One of the tips certainly concerns the one about failure, as especially with the development of applications and algorithms, errors and bugs can be really infinite. You have to check the code countless times, and despite everything when you press play on the console, there will always be an unexpected error that you did not calculate or a problem on the graphical interface that does not work properly. In these cases, I remember a piece of advice that reads "fail again, fail better.” In this case, we are talking about a failure or a small defeat that makes us fall, but once we get up, we will avoid making the same mistake. After solving it, there will be fewer obstacles until we complete our project and we have an almost perfect product. Another piece of advice that I always keep in mind is the one that Steve Jobs left us, namely the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!); in fact, this allows you to achieve something in the simplest way and without having to complicate your life. When I have to create something or experiment with a new thing, I always see the various options available, as a program, application, or other; there are 2 ways to be done, one is the difficult way starting from zero and building everything yourself, the other is taking advantage of the various pieces of codes or something like that to then assemble a new product but made in a faster and more efficient way. How relevant was self-learning to where you are today? Nobody doubts the power of courses and specializations of various kinds, but there are things that can only be learned by browsing around and experimenting; it is difficult for you to find a course dedicated only to how to import the APIs of a crypto aggregator into a spreadsheet, you can only learn from some guides or videos you find on the net, certainly not in a specialized book. So sometimes the best information is learned just by learning on your own and reading and seeing online guides rather than from super expensive courses at times. Knowing what you do now, where do you think one should start learning if they want to work in your position one day? The task of a CTO is certainly to put into practice highly technological and advanced solutions, both to simplify and speed up processes and also to produce new goods and services. Only with technological progress and the creation of new products and services can we manage to stay on the market and not fail. But it is equally true that if one does not update himself, does not document himself, and does not test the various solutions, he will hardly be able to find the ideal solution to integrate into his company. To do so, you need a lot of contamination and a news feed and channels as varied as possible - from games to art, from sports to geology, including feeds from different countries, in my case Italy, America, Switzerland, Korea, Japan, and China. There are countries that are certainly ahead of others and seeing how they do it can give you interesting ideas or introduce products that you did not think existed. What is the work-related achievement you’re the most proud of? I am not a person attached to money, so there will be no goals related to them, while instead of important goals are achieved when you create something unique and never done before. One of my first applications was a Japanese dictionary with which you can read Kanji even if you do not know how to read, a simple and effective method, now all apps do it, but at the time, there was nothing; or the recent milestone of is something that took a long time and several months of testing before something worked without problems. being able to connect a physical book to an NFT What do you think is the biggest myth about starting a career in tech? Sure, having a good foundation helps, but it doesn't mean that if you don't have an engineering degree or something. It doesn't mean you can't be a CTO. You need a lot of dedication, curiosity, and brains because, with these qualities, you reach goals that nobody teaches you. In the crypto and blockchain sector, where there are no right or wrong courses or paths, we are in the midst of experimentation. Once achieved a good personal level, you can enter the job market with your experience and sector that has deepened. For example, in the development of smart contracts or in communication at different levels such as marketing, journalism and so on, most of the people who write articles on crypto and blockchain, are not real journalists, but they write about these topics because they have experienced them firsthand and are able to tell them better than a journalist himself. On a less serious note: What do you listen to while working? Having studied the Japanese language for several years now, I prefer and have a preference for Japanese songs, and certainly, is the best I've heard in recent years; and I also recommend listening to the other various playlists that are on the same channel. this playlist Thanks so much for taking the time to tell us more about your career path. Any words of wisdom for aspiring techies? Do not allow reality to interfere with your imagination and if there isn’t what you are looking for then create it yourself.

Getting a Job in Tech: The CTO Experience

E-learning platforms like Udemy and Coursera are booming today. The demand for e-learning platforms has in the last couple of years, particularly after the Covid-19 outbreak. With the majority of schools and universities shifting to remote learning, both teachers and students have started using such platforms regularly. skyrocketed Coursera and Udemy are two of the most renowned e-learning platforms, but the question remains: which one should you choose? Which one is better? To help make this decision easier, I have chosen several factors to judge the two platforms on. Coursera vs. Udemy: Factors to Review Interface and Design Learning Approach Pricing and Financial Aid Languages Certificates Instructors 1. Interface and Design Udemy has a simple interface that is easy to navigate around. You can easily look for courses by clicking on the ‘Categories’ section. You can also find recommended courses by searching which is especially helpful considering the vast volume of courses Udemy has to offer. Coursera also provides a visually appealing design. The homepage instantly captures the readers’ attention by informing them about the various partner universities and organizations the company has collaborated with. You can browse through the partners and read about the courses they offer. 2. Learning Approach Udemy contains over , divided into 13 main sections. There are lots of filtering options as well; you can filter courses by level, duration, language and price, among other options. There are nearly 600 free courses available as well across all categories, but they don’t offer a certificate of completion. 32,000 courses Coursera, on the other hand, contains around 4000 courses across 11 categories and many subcategories. Once you pick your chosen course, the section provides lots of useful information regarding the course to help you decide if it’s the right one for you. The course content is usually free to watch and read, but users have to pay for course completion certificates. About This Course Udemy focuses on courses that are shorter than Coursera, and you can complete them in a few hours. They are precise to the topic and taught in a more practical way. Coursera, on the other hand, offers courses on harder topics and more in-depth, and they usually last for months. 3.  Pricing and Financial Aid Udemy offers a large number of courses that are , and there are many with comparatively low prices. You will also find good Black Friday and January sales for Udemy courses. Offers like these bring massive user enrollments to Udemy. However, the platform does not offer any financial aid to people looking for it. All courses on Udemy have a 30-day money-back guarantee. free of cost Coursera, on the other hand, offers mixed pricing. There are individual courses and some specialization paths which make the prices vary. Coursera also offers a monthly subscription costing from $33-$59, which you can also use to access specialization courses. Finally, Coursera offers financial aid for those who cannot afford to pay and qualify for it. With financial aid, you get access to all courses with certificates and graded quizzes and assignments. Most courses are also available as an option allowing access to course material without certification and grades. Audit only 4. Languages Udemy offers courses in 65 languages, including English, Spanish, German and Portuguese. You can easily choose your preferred language through the filter option. Additionally, you can use the transcript feature if you’re watching a lesson in any language other than your native, although this feature is not supported in the mobile application. Coursera lags behind Udemy in this regard, as it has 55 languages. However, the majority of the video lessons have an interactive transcript and this feature is mobile-friendly, unlike Udemy. 5. Certificates On Udemy, you’ll be able to earn a completion certificate once you have completed a course, provided it's a paid course. However, it will not be a formal, accredited certificate, so it wouldn’t hold a lot of weight with any potential employer. If you want an accredited certificate, you will need to pay a specific fee, depending on the type and length of the course you are studying. Coursera, meanwhile, provides verified that include the course name, instructor signature, logo of the partner institution, a statement by Coursera confirming the identity of the learner, and a verification URL allowing others to check the authenticity of the certificate. However, Coursera certificates not only require you to pay the full course fee, but also complete the course . Otherwise, you have to pay the full fee again to attain the course certificate. certificates within 180-days 6. Instructors Any experienced instructor can create courses on Udemy, as long as he/she completes the instructor identity . You can read a brief description of the instructors’ past experiences, see their ratings and reviews as well as the amount of courses they teach. You can also connect with them via social media in case of queries. verification process The instructors on Coursera, meanwhile, are professors from reputed universities and institutions. Each course is created in collaboration with its partnered institution to ensure maximum quality. An instructor rating is given in the course description, where you can also read his/her bio and prior experience. Udemy vs. Coursera, Which is Better? The final answer to the Udemy vs Coursera debate boils down to what you are looking for in an e-learning platform. Udemy’s main strength lies in its vast course availability. With such diversity in the subject matter of the courses, the opportunities for you to learn are limitless. If you have a specific non-academic interest like gymnastics or cooking, Udemy’s courses would serve you better. On the other hand, Coursera is the right platform for you if you have a particular academic interest like psychology, and want to learn it like it is taught at a university program. You’ll also earn an officially recognized certificate which holds great value.
In the end, there is no absolute answer for which platform is better; it all depends on your own needs and requirements. What did you think about both of the MOOC platforms? Let us know in the . HackerNoon Community

Coursera vs Udemy: 6 Factors to Consider

In ‘The Information’ age, learning is not restricted to classrooms or universities alone, thanks to the World Wide Web! Modern technology lends itself to e-learning as a means of enhancing and reforming the traditional education system. In that sense, it could vary from a group of students watching online educational videos to the entire course being documented online. What is an E-learning platform began a few years ago introducing televisions and over-head projectors in classrooms and has since advanced to include interactive computer programmes, 3D simulations, video and telephone conferencing and real-time online discussion groups comprising of students from across the globe. E-Learning Based on the use of the internet in E-learning, three primary applications have emerged 1. Non-Academic/Corporate Both Medium and Large scale businesses are relying on e-learning for the initial as well as the skills enhancement training process for its staff. To achieve this, companies make use of the external resources and in-house programmes developed on the intranet. 2. Academic: Virtual Learning Environments (VLE’s) Universities are increasingly opening up to the possibilities of ‘Virtual Learning Environments,’ sometimes used alongside MLE (Managed Learning Environments). 3. Websites Some institutions (and iAcademic: Educational individual academics) have preferred to develop their online educational resources and adopting pure e-learning modules as their go-to method of teaching & training. By and large, it can be said that as technology has advanced so has e-learning, and today, the possibilities of this learning platform are endless and infinite. Growth & potential of E-learning platforms On our way to heightened digitization, an educators main motto is to overcome barriers, spread the light of education and provide more access to technology across the globe! To that end, e-learning fulfills all the mentioned parameters, making learning available for everyone with a few requirements — A smartphone, a T.V, a laptop or a computer with an internet connection can open the doors to digital learning world for virtually anyone and everyone. What’s more, e-learning enables students to study anytime, anywhere they want. There is no restriction on space or time. E-learning platforms promise convenient reach of study materials and evaluation of the course that has been completed online. It also has monitoring tools in place to streamline the learning process. That means courses can be taught methodologically to ensure proper knowledge transfer. These characteristics form the foundation of its perennial popularity. Today, schools are equipped with projectors, smartboards, audio-visual aided materials that make learning more value driven and interactive. It simplifies teaching logics of math, and concepts of science, in other words, it makes learning enjoyable and straightforward. Today, e-learning has gone on to become a potential, technology aided online education source. Let’s look at the numbers, shall we? Online education industry will be a $1.96 billion industry by 2021. The paid user base will reach up to 9.6 million users by 2021′ states the research conducted by KPMG combined with google insights. ‘By 2019, 50% of total learning is going to be online.’ says Imod Education. Types of E-Learning platforms When you think of building an e-learning portal, choosing the right platform becomes a vital decision — one that you must consider carefully. There are four types of e-learning platforms and depending on what your requirements are, you can go about making a specific choice. Let’s find out which one suits best. Open-Source Learning Portals Open-Source means open to everyone for usage, modification, and customizations according to one’s requirements. Open source learning is about providing free access to online education for anyone who is keen to learn. Open Source platforms ensure growth. It enables you to add any third party add-ons making your portal up to date. Such a platform opens doors to the various community contributions, which in turn, results in growth. Open source platforms have been unanimously voted as the preferred choice as it assures advancements and continuous online community engagements. Massive Open Online Courses MOOC is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and public access via the internet. Massive Open Online Course can be centralized towards a specific area of the study or the various aspects of the research. This particular platform is commonly adopted by universities where they address an enormous number of students and offer them certificates on course completion. In ‘distance education’ especially, massive open online courses are widely researched. This platform has emerged as a favorite learning mode over time. Content Management Systems A content management system (CMS) is a software application or a set of related programs that are used to create and manage digital content. A CMS allows you to build websites & applications, and maintain your content within it. There are popular CMS’s available such as Drupal, Joomla, Magento, WordPress, Sharepoint to name a few. These allow you to customize, add components, readily integrate plugins, develop and expand functionality, aside from allowing you to customize specific features as per your need. CMS’s empower you to build a site/app and manage content within it. Web Conferencing Software Mainly relying on TCP/IP connections, Web Conferencing is an online service by which you can hold live meetings, conferences, presentations, and training via the internet. This platform allows users to connect with the conference/discussion either by telephone or by using the computer’s speakers and microphone through a VoIP connection. This feature is also used for one to one tutoring. Online lectures can be held using this mode. Features to integrate with your E-Learning solution Following is the list of features you need to consider infusing with your online learning portal. Incorporating these will ensure an up to date and innovation-led product development process. Administrative Features Following is the list of features your e-learning portal should provide. This feature allows login via different mediums. Eg. social media, mail, etc Flexible authentication methods: Allows students to choose from courses provided by category, subcategory, language, price, etc Browsing through a wide range of courses: Enables students to enroll for the desired course, and helps them create a student profile by providing a handful of necessary details. Student Profile: This feature shows a complete record of courses and the list of pursuing courses, wherever applicable, in each profile. Status Report: Notifies students for upcoming classes for the respective courses they have opted for. Notification: This feature is essential for documenting reports regarding the activities in the portal. Events such as group discussions, exchange of views or dialogues on new ideas, etc can be seen here. Reports: This feature records and updates the portal owner on candidates that have to be awarded a certificate on the successful completion of the course. Certification: A practical methodology for managing the students and the courses provided on the portal is essential, and can be set up quite easily by the portal owner. Efficient Management: Interactive Features 1. The most critical one — Voice and Video Chat: feature bridges the gap between the learner and the teacher by creating a virtual classroom feel that would eventually result in an interactive and benefitting learning session. Voice and video chat Create interactive virtual classrooms with Voice & Video Chat Modern chat integrations allow multi-media merge for creating unique messages. It helps users express their ideas. 2. Enable active learning with Group Chats: Haven’t we all experienced group studies? It is by far one of the most effective mediums of learning, isn’t it?. The integrated chats feature virtually brings this interactive communication exchange to life! Group Chats allow for a more immersive and interactive learning experience Users can create groups and indulge in group discussions, and teachers can create open, close, password protected groups based on the study. They can even manage the participants in the groups. helps in making prolonged student-teacher communities, aside from making the learning process fun and dynamic. Group chat 3. Manage user authorization with Role Based Access Control: The access control policy is an exclusive factor when it comes to the online education sector. It is implemented for securing interactions with users and fortifying it with new integrations. Restrict access to chat and its features to certain students with Role Based Access Control allows you to expose or propose certain features to a specific set of users or groups. Role-based access control 4. File and Screen sharing for a clear understanding of topics: Teachers can now directly on chat to make students understand the subject better. add images, multimedia content, and share their screen Teachers can share course material, reports, performance analysis and more within the chat platform It results in the easy availability of learning material for all the students participating in the group. 5. Enhanced interactivity with Collaborative Whiteboard: genuinely take interaction to the next level. It allows one to draw their ideas on a whiteboard in real-time chat. Collaborative whiteboards Teachers can use the virtual whiteboard like a traditional one, making the interaction easier and more fluid Teachers can solve math problems on this board or explain complex structures of science. Students can see and learn just by being a part of the conversation. 6. Broadcasting Lectures or Classes When students respond to visual content, interactivity and engagement are enhanced. can grab students’ attention. Voice and video broadcasts Broadcasts allow for engaging and a more stimulating learning experience. As the human brain is naturally wired to understand and quickly process graphical content, the involvement with voice video broadcasts results in higher retention. 7. Student-Centric, Credit-Deduction Feature The feature allows students to access course material as they please, irrespective of whether they’ve opted for Math, English, Science or simply English. Students can select courses according to the requirement by using their credits. credit deduction Credits are deducted from students accounts for accessing certain features. CometChat ropes all of the above robust features in itself to provide wings of high usability to your e-learning platform. With quality content, well-developed administrative features and course materials, your e-learning platform will be able to gather students-teachers, make them collaborate to deliver priced learning experience through CometChat. Prerequisites before creating your E-learning platform There are certain aspects you should consider while developing an e-learning portal, let us learn about those- Wireframe of the product Wireframe of the product, in other words, page schematics or screen blueprint is a visual-graphical guide that represents the skeletal framework of the site/app. Wireframes are created to achieve a productive user experience that results in a precise flow of the pages/elements on the site/app. Wireframes ensure that each page has a purpose, achieves the goals set out in the client brief, aside from helping define the logical navigation for your product. User-intuitive UI design User Interface A.K.A UI is the face of your software platform. Be it a site or app this is the first thing users come across. UI is the junction between a user and software. The interfacing elements and menus are placed in such a fashion that users effortlessly explore the site/app without having to go through any complicated structures or hidden links. That makes an interface user-friendly. Test on real users for constructive feedback Feedbacks and suggestions have been one of the most efficient ways to find out the acceptance of the product, its performance, and further development. The product wireframes can be tested by a minimum of three users. After receiving feedback from them, make sure all the necessary changes have been implemented, and requests fulfilled. Consider asking these vital questions to your users: 1. Does the product meet your expectations? 2. What features must the app have? 3. What are your takes on the ease of navigation? 4. Are there any non-required elements? Are there any missing essential elements? This refinery mechanism ensures your product has been rigorously tested and built based on a users must-have requirements. The cost to develop an E-learning application Development of an e-learning portal from scratch would demand a big chunk of money as well as time. First things first, you will need a squad of professional software developers. Planning will take time, and the product will then undergo a software development life cycle model. The same is going to cost you a fortune — Factor that in! Another solution here is to opt for a custom solution. It comparatively demands less amount of time and saves further hassles of hiring a professional team to develop the product. The total average time it would take to build an e-learning platform, considering all the planning and the SDLM (Software Development Lifecycle Model) varies from 526 to 1374 hours. Furthermore, the exact time is taken and the costs involved in building the product, precisely depend on your requirements and the features provided. CometChat and E-learning Platform. CometChat works wonders as a custom solution to your e-learning platform. CometChat empowers an e-learning platform with its exclusive feature-set. Students and teachers feel no location boundaries as Voice and Video chat functionality result in value learning and better understanding. With an audio-visual feature, virtual classrooms can be created. Group chats enable student-teacher collaboration and long-term online communities that help in segregate students based on the course selected. It brings ease of operation and maintenance of records for teachers. File and screen sharing extends the usability of Cometchat furthermore. It guarantees a clear understanding of the topics. Collaborative whiteboard ensures interactive learning experience for students. With such functionality, CometChat hence is a perfect fit for a customized e-learning solution. Conclusion Technology-driven e-learning via web further extends the credibility of education and opens new doors to a diversified, newer generation of students. Tools of e-learning magnify students potential and challenge their ability while making learning simple. Constructed on factors such as convenience, value education, and evaluation there’s no wonder e-learning is gaining such vast popularity. With the right platform, the right features and the key prerequisites in place, along with the right content and CometChat as a real-time communication provider for your user base, with second to none features viz. one-on-one chat, group chat, audio-visual communication, credit-based course selection, ability to broadcast lectures, whiteboards for enhanced collaboration, you too can deliver a reliable e-learning portal for the knowledge seekers out there So go on, spread the light, we say! Originally published at www.cometchat.com .

Building a Customized E-learning Solution: What are the factors to consider?

Introduction Not every day that somebody in the field of distributed systems, comes out and says “ ”. However, recently, Prof. Emin Gün Sirer, from Cornell University, said that he does. In this article, we are going to describe to you a new family of consensus protocols that just emerged several months ago. “Team Rocket — A pseudonymous team — with the collaboration of Prof. Sirer dropped this paper titled “ ” on IPFS. The paper builds on comprehensive low-level details and proofs that are not easily comprehended by non-academics. In this article, we will simplify and visualize the protocol for you, leaving you with an understanding of this new approach. I have a new breakthrough to tell you about Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies Two Classes of Consensus Protocols Consensus is one of the most important goals to be achieved when many distributed computers share the same task and resources. A typical example is maintaining account balances in a banking system over multiple servers. Banks don’t rely on one single database to carry their data, but many geographically distributed machines across the globe to handle these transactions. They require a method to maintain a stable view across all these machines, thereby, reflecting a consistent representation of account balances. Another example is maintaining a consistent view of Amazon’s online shopping services. In order to scale these services globally, they have to be (geographically) distributed across large datacenters. Amazon requires having a regular view of its stocked products or else, unexpected and undesired behaviour might happen, e.g., the last item can be sold twice to two different people. This has been an important problem in Computer Science for a long time. To this end, academics/engineers have been working hard over the course of the last 40 years to find efficient solutions. In the field of distributed systems there are only two existing families of consensus protocols which we describe next. Classical Consensus Protocols The first class called protocols were developed by two great computer scientists, namely, and Both of them are Turing award winners — which is the equivalent of a Nobel prize for Computer scientists. The advantages of this protocol are various including quick finality and quick guarantees about the committed transactions. However, this comes with a price: classical consensus Leslie Lamport Barbara Liskov. They do not scale well beyond 10 to 1000s of nodes. That is because they require quadratic communication costs, i.e., O(n²), among the nodes who are participating. They require everyone in the network to know all the other participants. Basically, their security comes down to the judicious overlap between a quorum of nodes that confirm seeing the same thing and go ahead commit to it. This approach is reasonable when building a permissioned , however, it is not a good foundation when you are in a dynamic environment of untrusted nodes. Therefore, permissionless chains are based on a different protocol for consensus. blockchain Nakamoto Consensus Protocol In 2009, another new family appeared on the scene. Satoshi Nakamoto came up with his new protocol family and presented his solution that was uniquely robust: We do not need to know all the nodes participating in the network. Any node can leave or join at any point in time and any miner could come up with a block and participate in the system. It can scale to large numbers of global nodes and participants. However these benefits came with a price, in particular: is very slow, on average, users have to wait about 10–60 minutes before they get confirmation that their transactions are stored on the chain. Bitcoin Throughput is also very limited. Bitcoin can process about 3–7 transactions per second which is ,of course, nothing close to handling the the task of being a world currency. Finally, Bitcoin consumes an enormous amount of energy; approximately an energy equivalent to 4 Chernobyl nuclear power plants go into powering Bitcoin. That is a lot of energy spent on bookkeeping. Avalanche Avalanche comes in and combines the best of both world’s, in particular, : That is, it takes around 2 seconds to achieve finality across the globe. This basically means that after 2 seconds, you can get your payment processed and verified. Quick finality and low latency : 1000–10,000 transactions per second. Higher throughput : The network does not need to agree on who the participants are to achieve undeniable consensus. Robust : Most importantly, the protocol is green. That means that it is sustainable, it does not waste any energy, and that there is no special ecosystem of miners with their own separate interests from the users. Quiescent protocol The Core Idea: Metastability The core idea of Avalanche is . The worst thing for a consensus protocol is to be unable to decide between two choices, i.e., you don’t want it to say either this happened or that happened you want it to fall to one of the two sides. Avalanche’s metastable protocol is designed to tip the choice towards one of the sides. metastability To explain the core intuition of the process, lets go through a simplified example, as visualized in the figure above. Consider a network of trustless nodes that want to vote for either blue or red. A single node of the network starts with picking a small number of random peer nodes, say five, and asks them to choose a color. Each peer node then responds with a which the requesting node uses to form a weighted result of all votes. In the figure above (in the first frame), from the node’s perspective the entire network is tilting towards red based on one round of polling. vote This process repeats itself for everybody else. The protocol resembles a recurring subsampled voting process. What happens here is that even if we start out in the worst possible scenario of a 50–50 split between red and blue, after one round, with high probability, the scenario will no longer hold. Furthermore, chances of that are astronomically small after two rounds, even smaller after three, and so on, i.e., it decays exponentially. The protocol is designed to tip and not stay in the middle. As it tips more and more, the network’s perception shifts to one color or the other. The speed with which we move towards one direction (nodes vote one color more than the other) is going to increase and increase and at some point we reach to the point of no-return where the entire network has agreed on a color. Notes on the protocol The protocol is lightweight and therefore admits scalability and low latency. Efficient scalability: It can tolerate a large percentage of Byzantine participants with no impact on safety. In particular, you can have up to 50% of the nodes being Byzantine, i.e., nodes that try to trick the network and keep the entire network imbalanced. However, they will be unable to do this in a way that causes two nodes to decide on two different colors. Byzantine tolerance: The avalanche protocol gives rise to an egalitarian ecosystem, i.e., all nodes in the network are born the same. There are no miners and no special privileges are given to them. Egalitarian ecosystem: If an attacker tries to spend the same money twice in two different transactions (double-spending), then the Avalanche protocol will not be able to decide between these two, causing this money to be lost. Classical consensus and Nakamoto protocols would have decided on one transaction or the other, however, the Avalanche protocol might not. This is a very interesting property for the protocol, that it implicitly and naturally punishes bad actors without any additional complications to the protocol. No liveness guarantee for conflicting transactions: The Avalanche Token: AVA AVA — short for Avalanche, resembles the new token represented by this protocol. The Avalanche protocol prevents sybil attacks through staking of AVA tokens. That means nodes stake AVA tokens to show that they have some ownership in the system. Unlike Ethereum and others, that stake is not a collateral and will never be lost. If you misbehave there is no risk of your money being taken from you. So the stake here is solely to make sure that you cannot impersonate other people. This is one of the great outcomes of the Avalanche protocol. Staking is not used for consensus, in fact, it is completely independent of it. Sybil deterrence via staking: An interesting point this whole entire system gives, is governance. The core idea introduced till now using was subsampled voting to achieve consensus. We can use that same mechanism to agree on critical parameters of the protocol itself. So for example, the network can decide to increase the minting rate if they don’t have enough stakers. On the contrary, the network can decide to reduce the minting rate to boost the price and reduce the available supply of coins. In contrast, Nakamoto had to come up with his fixed 21 million minting curve. Instead, Avalanche is essentially a crowd oracle, that replaces central banks with people who have a vested interest in seeing the coin managed properly for their own interests. Economic governance via voting: Conclusion People often talk about the consensus protocol used in Bitcoin as if it was a pure decentralized approach that determines the opinions of all network participants equally. Unfortunately it is not, in Bitcoin the decisions are mostly made by the miners. In contrast, Avalanche separates the consensus problem from the governance problem. Each one is tackled modularly and independently. Consensus is achieved via a smart combination of gossip protocols with recurrent subsampling. While, fair governance is achieved via sampling and staking resulting in a direct tie between users and their decisions. References: Cryptoconf 2018, Emin Gün Sirer talk — Snowflake to Avalanche Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies, Team Rocket, 2018 If you like this post or if you have any further questions or chart-requests, please reach out to me on or . Twitter LinkedIn Disclaimer: Information in this article is for educational purposes only and cannot be taken as investment advice.

Demystifying “Snowflake to Avalanche”

By Ben Wilterdink, Director of Outreach and Policy Research at the Archbridge Institute Believing that the next generation will generally do better than the current one is an often unspoken, but essential, piece of the American Dream. Arguably the best way to gauge the health of this part of the American Dream is to measure how much an individual earns compared to how much their parents earned at the same age. Economists call this absolute intergenerational economic mobility, and here, the United States could be doing better. In a on economic mobility, a team of researchers working at the Equality of Opportunity Project led by Raj Chetty found that 90 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents at the same age while only 50 percent of children born in the 1980s were able to do the same. Other research on rates of intergenerational economic mobility, however, paint a somewhat better picture. In the of an economic mobility series published by the Archbridge Institute, Dr. Scott Winship examines contemporary rates of economic mobility in America using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). While much of his research complements the Chetty et. al. study, Winship finds that after adjusting for changes in family size, accounting for government transfer payments, and using a different formula to measure inflation, about 68 percent of children born in the 1980s are earning more than their parents were at the same age. Despite some disagreements on the precise measurement of absolute intergenerational economic mobility, there is certainly room for improvement. landmark study first installment The Modern Labor Market While there are many factors contributing to a less-than-ideal level of upward absolute economic mobility, one factor that looks increasingly important is that participants in the labor market have not been able to keep pace with the skill set required to succeed in an increasingly advanced and global economy. The labor market encountered by those born in the 1980s is vastly different than the one facing those joining it today. One found millennials will likely hold four different jobs by the time they reach age 32. The same study noted that current workers were more likely than previous generations not just to switch jobs more often, but also to switch entire industries more often. These trends coincide with the increasing pressures of globalization and technological disruption that have dramatically changed the nature of work in a short period of time. study The transformative impact of technological change on the labor market is difficult to overstate. By far the biggest labor market disruptor appears to be automation. A 2015 from Ball State University examined job losses in the U.S. manufacturing sector and found that only about 13 percent of the job losses could be attributed to trade with the rest resulting from productivity enhancing technological advancements. According to a 2015 published in the , between 1962 and 2005 the U.S. Steel industry experienced a 75 percent decline in its workforce (more than 400,000 people) without any corresponding loss in output. report paper American Economic Review Greater automation is also reflected in the change of the American workforce from agricultural workers and tangible goods producers to primarily service providers. According to from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, 38 percent of jobs in the U.S. in 1945 were goods-producing compared with just 14 percent in 2017.While this shift has been accompanied by a rising wage premium for highly skilled workers able to capture the productivity gains provided by capital investment in automation, it also produced a decline in job opportunities (particularly well-paying job opportunities) for unskilled or low-skill workers. data Simply put, moving from a goods-based economy to a service-based economy has been paired with a shift in the need for hard skills in the labor market toward a growing premium associated with soft skills. As automation quickly replaces jobs that are routine in nature, more job opportunities are now found in career paths that place increased value on soft skills. The Growing Importance of Soft Skills Broadly referring to interpersonal skills, communications skills, and social intelligence, soft skills are sometimes non-cognitive skills, emotional skills, or non-academic skills. Loosely categorized as a broad set of skills, competencies, behaviors, attitudes, and personal qualities, soft skills enable people to effectively navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals. Economists James Heckman and Tim Kautz, of the University of Chicago, documented the importance of soft skills in a landmark 2012 , “Hard Evidence on Soft Skills.” That paper included a far-reaching survey of the literature around soft skills and found strong evidence that they were critically important predictors of future economic success. called paper Interestingly, recent evidence indicates that these soft skills may have even become a more important factor for success in the modern labor market than traditional hard skills (or cognitive skills). A 2014 National Bureau of Economic Research from Kautz, Heckman, and others found that “[Soft skills’] predictive power rivals that of cognitive skills.” Furthermore, a 2017 research examining the labor market in Sweden (often cited as one of the best performing nations in terms of economic mobility) from 1992 to 2013 found that “the labor market appears to increasingly value individuals possessing high non-cognitive relative to cognitive skills over time.” It is becoming increasingly clear that equipping workers with soft skills is the most effective pathway to their future success. That means ensuring that workers have the ability to develop and hone these skills is critical to ensuring more upward economic mobility. paper paper But it is not just economists and academics that are placing the emphasis on soft skills, increasingly employers are becoming more vocal about the soft skills shortfall in the modern labor market. In a detailed 2014 for the National Bureau of Economic Research, University of Pennsylvania professor Peter Cappelli cites one survey of employers in which soft skills were of particular importance: paper The Computer and Technology Industry Association (2012) produced an unusually detailed report, again based on a survey of employers, where 93 percent of employers responding said that they had a skills gap. Yet 90 percent also responded that they are at least “moderately close” to “where they want to be” with respect to skills, only 15 percent said that a factor in their skill problem was insufficient focus on STEM education, and only 20 percent reported that the problem was a limited pool of skilled IT workers, the essence of the STEM skill shortage argument. A large part of their perceived skill gaps had to do with “soft skills”- work ethic and motivation (almost 20 percent said that their concern was only soft skills, and about half reported that it was equally divided between “hard” and “soft skills”). The Computer and Technology Industry Association survey is hardly an outlier when it comes to measures of what employers report are their challenges in finding qualified applicants to fill job openings. According to a more recent in the article Wall Street Journal: A recent LinkedIn survey of 291 hiring managers found 58% say the lack of soft skills among job candidates is limiting their company’s productivity. In a survey of nearly 900 executives [in 2015], 92% said soft skills were equally important or more important than technical skills. But 89% said they have a very or somewhat difficult time finding people with the requisite attributes. Many say it’s a problem spanning age groups and experience levels. Wall Street Journal Furthermore, Bob Funk, Chairman, CEO and founder of Express Employment Professionals, one of the nation’s largest job agencies, sat down with William McGurn of the in September, 2017 to the modern labor market and his experience spending more than 20 years finding people employment: Wall Street Journal discuss This experience gives Mr. Funk some definite — and timely — notions about getting ahead in today’s America. Like everyone else, he talks about education and skills. But what he means by these words may be a little different from how they are used in the Harvard Business Review. Start with skills. Hard skills and experience, he says, are only half the equation, and not the important half. He shares a small brochure his company puts out summarizing a recent survey of employers. “So many people do not realize how important the soft skills are to unlocking job opportunity,” he says. In order, the survey found the top five traits employers look for are as follows: attitude, work ethic/integrity, communication, culture fit, critical thinking. While soft skills may be more difficult to measure than traditional hard skills, there is little doubt that they are of immense importance. In addition to being the most sought after skills from the perspective of employers, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests soft skills also lead to higher wages. Recent from David Deming, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, showed that over the past several decades, the labor market has been increasingly favoring social skills, particularly the ability to work well in teams. Specifically, Deming finds: research Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs — including many STEM occupations — shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills. One particularly interesting finding was the evolution of jobs that were not math-intensive but were more social. This group ranked just behind the high-math, high-social jobs in both wage growth and job opportunities. Interestingly, Deming’s research also found that from 1980 to 2012, jobs requiring high social skills (regardless of math requirements) grew as a share of employment opportunities while jobs that did not require social skills shrank as a share of employment opportunities. Building Soft Skills While there is still much research to be done into how best to develop soft skills, it is clear that development begins in early childhood and continues through adolescence and early adulthood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the best ways to develop the soft skills necessary for labor market success comes in the form of entry level employment. A 2015 from USAID concludes, “Theoretical literature suggests that adolescence and young adulthood are optimal times to develop and reinforce these skills.” Additionally, a growing body of evidence suggests that actually working, or at least being in a workplace environment, is a key indicator of successful soft skill development. In a 2005 based on a far reaching longitudinal study of 1,000 students, University of Minnesota Sociologist Jeylan Mortimer concludes the following: report book Working and Growing Up in America, … high school students who work even as much as half-time are in fact better off in many ways than students who don’t have jobs at all. Having part-time jobs can increase confidence and time management skills, promote vocational exploration, and enhance subsequent academic success. The wider social circle of adults they meet through their jobs can also buffer strains at home, and some of what young people learn on the job — not least, responsibility and confidence — gives them an advantage in later work life. Dr. Mortimer’s conclusions are consistent with more recent research as well. In a 2014 for the Employment Policies Institute titled “The Lasting Benefits of Early Work Experience,” economists Charles Baum and Christopher Ruhm “find clear evidence that part-time work by young adults — both during senior year of high school, and during the summer months — translates to future career benefits that include higher hourly wages, increased annual earnings and less time spent out of work.” But the benefit doesn’t stop in high school, the report’s executive summary states: report Most importantly, the economists find that this career benefit of entry-level work persists in the long term: Young adults who graduated high school in the late 1970s and early 1980s and worked part-time during their senior year saw a career benefit 5–10 years after graduation — and the earnings differential still existed nearly 30 years later. … Drs. Ruhm and Baum demonstrate that these future career benefits are occurring specifically as a result of the career experience that’s gained in early work experience. Bob Funk seems to these findings rather succinctly, stating in no uncertain terms, “Those low-paying, entry-level jobs are good training for the soft skills you need for upward mobility.” This view has had many champions, ranging from host to former CEO of CKE restaurants, which includes Carl’s Jr. and Hardees, . While entry level employment experience is clearly one mechanism to develop and reinforce soft skills among teens and young adults, research suggests that crucial building blocks of soft skill development begin in early childhood. summarize Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe Andy Puzder Creating an environment in which early childhood equips kids with the basic soft skills necessary for success later in life is critically important, but will require some major adjustments to our current culture. As a number of economists. including James Heckman and David Deming, quantify the importance of soft skills, and particularly their role in economic success, psychologists are leading the way in identifying factors in early childhood development that lead to their acquisition. In her much lauded book psychologist Angela Duckworth outlines the importance of childhood effort and resiliency in future academic and career success. But just as psychologists are converging on grit, resiliency, and character as the essential building blocks for successful soft skill development, the mechanisms by which children acquire these traits is under attack. Writing in , Lenore Skenazy, President of the nonprofit , and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, issue a timely warning about the cost of our culture’s intense focus on childhood safety: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance , Reason Magazine Let Grow Foundation When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened. Yet modern child-rearing practices and laws seem all but designed to cultivate this lack of preparedness. There’s the fear that everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them. And there’s a newer belief that has been spreading through higher education that words and ideas themselves can be traumatizing. According to Skenazy and Haidt, the unsupervised free play of children has been an early casualty of the excessive focus on safety. Experts recognize unsupervised free play as essential for early childhood development and, importantly, the groundwork for soft skill development. For example, Boston College psychology professor emeritus, Peter Gray, has the importance of free play in early childhood development. Skenazy and Haidt his research on the importance of free play: documented summarize In free play, ideally with kids of mixed ages, the children decide what to do and how to do it. That’s , literally. The little kids desperately want to be like the bigger kids, so instead of bawling when they strike out during a sandlot baseball game, they work hard to hold themselves together. This is the foundation of maturity. … teamwork Best of all, without adults intervening, the kids have to do all the for themselves, from deciding what game to play to making sure the teams are roughly equal. Then, when there’s an argument, they have to resolve it themselves. That’s a tough skill to learn, but the drive to continue playing . To get back to having fun, they first have to come up with a solution, so they do. This teaches them that they can disagree, hash it out, and — perhaps with some grumbling — move on. [Emphasis mine.] problem solving motivates them to work things out Teamwork, problem solving, and motivation are the exact benchmarks often discussed in the context of soft skills necessary to succeed in the labor market. These skills begin to develop early in a child’s life and our current culture of excessive safety seems to grossly underestimate their importance and undermine their development. Simply put, in order to preserve the American Dream, our culture and policies should recognize the importance of developing and sustaining soft skills. Whether it is by repealing policies that restrict entry level employment opportunities or reversing cultural norms that overemphasize childhood safety, the economic and social cost of ignoring these skills will be immense. Individuals need opportunities in their formative years to develop soft skills so that they have the most sought after skill set when they enter the labor market as adults. This will allow them to achieve higher earnings and increase absolute economic mobility as well. Much of this post builds on research from the Archbridge Institute’s forthcoming report on Economic Mobility, Skill Formation, and the Minimum Wage. The Archbridge Institute is a non-partisan, independent, 501(c)(3) public policy think tank. Our mission is to lift artificial and natural barriers to economic mobility, by producing and disseminating multidisciplinary academic and policy research, to empower individuals to thrive and strengthen civil society.

Skills for the 21st Century — Building Human Capital for Economic Mobility

The term was coined in 1956 when we didn’t have much — if any — experience in the field. Since then, novelists, journalists and optimistic scientists have fuelled and allowed the term to be misinterpreted as a system that replaces the human way of thinking. Artificial Intelligence Recently I’ve had to try and explain this concept on more than one occasion. Will it replace humans soon?When will code write itself?Will just AI take all the work off of your hands?Can we plug in AI to our system to make our product better? I also had to fight trend induced investor needs to implement AI into all the things. Such and similar questions by the dozens from all sorts of people have lead me to firmly believe that the terminology has wildly been abused and should be changed. What we refer to as AI, has nothing in common with what people believe it to be. Can it solve problems? Yes. Can it recognise patterns? Yes. Can it think? No. Is it intelligent? No. It’s a very clever mathematical tool that is used in very specific situations. It adjusts for mistakes over time to be better at the single one thing that it’s trained to do. You give it well specified inputs, and it gives you some output which you then need to make sense of. A good example is a coin machine. You throw in some coins and it knows how much you’ve put in. An “AI” is practically that, but instead of having a declarative decision programmed into it, the creators of the machine have subjected the software to hundreds of thousands of examples to adjust its decision system to a point where it sort of works. I don’t want to go into specifics, you can find a number of resources online to understand how they work. Bottom line is: an image recognition system will never develop the ability on its own to recognise music without someone actually making the sound be an image first. It cannot think! Also, it’s not plug and play. You can’t just take “an AI” off the shelf and replace your workforce. You make your workforce’s life easier with using sophisticated systems to provide extra information, but that’s about it. could So here’s where my head’s at: The name is ambiguous and misleading Doesn’t do what people think it does It’s a lot of work to create and use it People create it People train it People use it In my books, there’s nothing Artificial about it and the intelligence is within the people creating, training and working with the system. Can we start calling it: Advanced Analytics? But Meza, what about all the nice predictions it can do? For that, I have to re-iterate: The predictions are observed and recognised by the people or the systems using the output of the “AI”. You get a nice set of numbers that mean which you then have to explain and understand. something But Meza, it learns by trial and error like a human! Does it take you 2 million examples to recognise a specific coin with never 100% ratio? I know that academically the Artificial Intelligence term could be applied. I’m not questioning that. What I’m trying to discover here is how to make it less ambiguous and misleading for non-academic people. (edit) I had to get this off of my chest. Let me know if you agree or disagree. Would love to find a better term for this. Do you have any ideas?

Stop Calling It Intelligence

https://unsplash.com/photos/8COAUK8ckv8 2016 has been the most exciting, fulfilling, and productive year of my 19 years alive so far. To give you some context, here are just some of the things I’ve accomplished this year: Averaged a QPI of 3.81/4.00 (QPI is like a GPA) Helped organize 6 student-focused startup events, such as TechClash 2016 , HealthHacks 2016 , and the ASES Summit Manila 2016 . Read with my favorite being 5 Non-Academic Books, David Kadavy ’s Design for Hackers Listened to over , the #1 business podcast on iTunes 40 episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show Published , which generated , and (that’s a lot already for me!) 6 Medium posts 2423 views, 1698 reads 96 recommends Coded , with my best being ’s landing page 3 websites HealthHacks PH Watched of , motivating videos, ’s Vlogs, and NBA Highlights (probably my biggest accomplishment this year). 20+ videos DevTips tutorials Gary Vaynerchuk ’s Casey Neistat Ximo Pierto’s But accomplishments aside, what I wanted to share today was the lessons I learned this year, which was my best year in terms of personal growth and happiness. Everyone wants to grow, and I know you do too. I hope you’ll benefit from reading these lessons, so you don’t have to fall into doing the same mistakes I did. 1. Focus on creating “enduring” products. After helping organize 6 events this year, I’ve realized that Months of work is spent just to create a smooth-sailing few days for your participants. Don’t get me wrong though. Some events are still worth organizing, especially if they are value-adding to your participants (workshops, talks, conferences). organizing events is frickin’ hard. But over time, organizing events wasn’t value-adding to me anymore; I had learned everything I could about it. Moreover, I would rather have spent all that effort creating “enduring” products — such as blog posts, templates, or videos. That way, people can use your products again and again, and you could probably create dozens of them in the time it takes to create one event. So this 2017, creating enduring products is something I’m going to focus on more, and I hope you do too. 2. Don’t just take notes — take insightful and actionable notes. I heard this from my former boss at ZAP, Terence Lok. He’s developed the habit of taking useful, actionable notes from every book he reads or video he watches. Then he makes sure to act on them. This hit me hard. After all, I’ve already read so many books and listened to so many podcasts, and I rarely took any notes from them. Had I wasted all the insights and inspiration for action from all of them? That’s something I’m not going to let happen anymore, and I hope to integrate more tips and tricks from the books I read into my life this 2017. 3. Make time to share your learnings more. Over the past year, I’ve had dozens of ideas on possible articles or content I could make to help other people. And yet, I was only able to write 6 articles — 3 of which I first submitted as schoolwork (lol). I always made excuses and delayed doing any writing. I found myself wasting so much time on YouTube, time I could have spent on writing. Late this year, I got addicted to YouTube so much that I had to install this to help me stop watching unnecessary videos (it’s pretty effective!). This 2017 though, I hope to write more articles and push more content. The satisfaction I gain from hearing people liking my content is incredibly fulfilling to me, so that’s something I want to do more next year. Chrome extension 4. Find activities that are both fun and value-adding, and use them to de-stress. Aside from doing work all the time, it’s still important to de-stress and have fun. But if you’re a crazy productivity-lover like me, I’d recommend you find activities that are both fun and value-adding for you. To me, that was watching all sorts of YouTube videos, TV episodes, and documentaries that were both engaging to watch and useful, such as GaryVee keynotes and episodes of Silicon Valley. Early this year, I felt burnt out quite often, but I’ve since learned to always have time to de-stress every day. Everyone needs a break, and so do you. But while everyone else is watching some random TV series, maybe you can stay ahead by watching useful, value-adding videos. 5. Don’t forget to care for and be there for your close friends and family. This is a lesson I will probably find hard to integrate to my life, but I hope you get to integrate it to yours. In our quest to fulfill all our deepest ambitions in life, sometimes we forget to catch up with friends we used to talk to a lot. Or we forget to care and spend time with our families when they want us to. But if you truly care about your close friends and family, then you have to make time for them. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but make it enough to show that you are there for them and still care for them. A simple thank you note or late-night chat can go a long way. Connect Deeper I hope these lessons help you live a happier and more productive year this 2017. I know I’m going to make 2017 an even better year in terms of personal growth, so I challenge you to do the same. If you liked this article, please click that heart button or leave a comment below! :)

5 Lessons Learned from My Best Year of Personal Growth

I am a . I have a that records my overall health, which includes my steps, calories burned, heart rate, and sleep patterns of each day. I log my weight and everything I eat on MyFitnessPal. I also record my purchases and employment opportunities on a spreadsheet. It makes sense for such a recorder to also log grades received and the times spent on activities, studying, planning, job hunting, and work. chronicler FitBit When I was a student at UC Berkeley, I recorded the exact percentages of the grades I received in each of my classes from each assignment as much as possible. I also began a calendar diary in December 2012, inspired by James Maa’s . My calendars and event descriptions detailed when I went to sleep, took a shower, ate, or worked. I turned it into a way I could boost memory and track overall productivity. Now, I can go back to any given day and sum up all of the feelings I had that day; even though I have a poor declarative memory (episodic). So far, I’ve I don’t plan on stopping. Productivity Hacking Guide logged over 10,000 instances of time data, equating to almost four years of history. As a result of the data I’ve accumulated over my whole college career, I created a that touched upon some points I was interested in, which were: Productivity Project how a student’s grades and academic time commitment change over time, Time: whether time spent, units, specific tests, or class size and the grades received in the class have any correlation, Academic Correlation: whether time spent having fun, sleeping, activities, planning, and job hunting affects GPA, Non-Academic Correlation: and whether grade deflation is really a concept at Berkeley. Deflation: You can view the longer full analysis and background there, but I’ll share the summary of my findings here. DISCLAIMER: My findings here worked for me, but they may not work for you. Proceed with caution. Findings : How does a student’s grades and academic time commitment change over time? Time The amount of time I spent productively throughout the years looked like a : I peaked my junior year in Fall 2014, and the lowest productive times were my very first and last semester. As I continued my beginning years, I became more motivated to work, but as graduation loomed closer, I spent less time being productive. My GPA also continued to fall consistently until my final semester at Cal. bell curve The emphasis I place in certain productive categories depended highly on what period I was in my life. My first semester (Fall 2012) was all about figuring out how Berkeley classes and grades worked, and spent most of my time studying. My first semester junior year (Fall 2014) was all about how to spend time for the most good, and spent most of my time on activities. My final semester (Spring 2016) was all about how to not fail my classes so I could graduate and get a full-time job, and spent much of my time job hunting and studying. My GPA was the highest my first and last semester most likely because that’s when I was paying attention to doing well without underestimating anything. Senioritis happened to me. Not in academics, studying, or preparing for jobs, but through . While I reasoned this to weaning out of organizations to make way for new members, it also represented my lack of motivation and the increased stress with graduation requirements and job hunting. my organic decrease in activities I went through college in periods, and the category I spent the most time in showcased where I was in my life. Gradually, I grew more excited to leave this university, and thus my productive time slowly decreased when that thought loomed overhead. Academic Correlation: Are grades received correlated with time spent, units, test scores, and class sizes? I wanted to determine once and for all whether or not these factors were related to each other in some way. Did more studying result in a higher score? Does going to class or office hours result in higher grades? What about units or class sizes? I tackle each piece in my project. The following are answers to big questions I was interested in. : Surprisingly, the time I spent studying, going to class, and going to office hours and the grade actually received did not exhibit any sort of pattern. However, this is likely because classes are bimodal: some classes require lots of studying (because I don’t get the material, and thus don’t do as well) and others don’t need studying (because I already get the material, and thus do well). This also applies to studying for tests. Check out the . Does the time spent on academics relate to the grade you get in the class? graph : The good thing is that it appears the final test is a very strong influencer in the grade you get at the end. The bad thing is that there is a moderate positive correlation between the first and last test, which suggests that doing well on the final after doing poorly on the first test is very difficult to do (but still possible!). Check out the . Can you improve in the class if you do poorly in the beginning? graph (e.g. 4 units requires 16 hours a week of time): There’s a moderate positive linear correlation, which does suggest that the more units a class is, the more time you’d need to spend on it. Since it’s only moderate, it really depends on the class and potentially your understanding of the material itself. Check out the . If a class has more units, does that mean I have to spend more time in the class? graph : There’s a moderate negative linear correlation between the two, which suggests that the more people in the class, the higher tendency it is to not do so well. Check out the . Does class size have an impact on grade received? graph Non-Academic Correlation: Are grades received correlated with fun, sleep, and activities? Next, I tackled factors that were not related to the class itself, but factors that could choose throughout the semester, such as how much they wanted to have fun, sleep, participate in extracurricular activities, plan, and job hunt. The following are answers to big questions I was interested in. students : While correlation does not imply causation, it does appear that more time on fun does lower grades in some way. Check out the . Does spending time unproductively result in lower results? graph : Yes and no. When relationship data was removed, it appears to have strengthened the correlation between fun and academics and fun and GPA, but weakened in workload. This may be because my significant other was able to help me in some of my classes, and the time we spent hanging out were also times where we would work together as well. This also may be because I started dating near the end of my college career, in which I was already familiar with how to college. Check out the . Does having a significant other lower productivity and grades? graphs : Yes, and no. It appears that I took fewer units when I had more fun, but I also spent more time on fun while also spending more time on academics. Again, these are all moderate correlations, and only when I did not have my relationship. With my relationship, these numbers were stronger mostly. Check out the . Does “work hard, play hard” actually hold true? graphs : There’s no linear correlation between sleep and workload, or sleep and productivity. However, there does appear to be a moderate positive correlation between sleep and the grade received! Check out the . Does the amount of sleep you get have a relationship on the grade received, productivity, and workload? graphs : Definitely. Despite the fact that activities and workload, productivity, and grades are all strongly negatively correlated, activities made me feel better and have more fun. Check out the . Are activities a good use of my time? graphs : There doesn’t appear to be a linear correlation between the amount I planned and my GPA, so it didn’t hinder me in any way. Check out the . Is planning a good use of my time? graph : There’s a strange weak positive linear correlation between job hunting and the grade received. I don’t really know what this means, but it is what it is. Check out the . Is job hunting hindering my grades? graph Note: I also recorded categories such as exercise, cooking, eating, and moving, but exercise was such an embarrassing small category, and everything after was clumped into one, and thus all were ignored in this analysis. Grade Deflation: Does it exist? At UC Berkeley in particular, grade deflation is a major worry. After seeing the , it appears that Berkeley frequently gives lower grades than other schools across the nation. I sought to study this by comparing my grades received to the percentages that I actually received at the end of the semester, and compared predicted raw scores to that grade. For example, I assumed that a 3.0 (B)’s percentage range would be between 80% and 85.9%, while a 3.7 (A-) would be between 90% and 91.9%. Daily Cal‘s data on the higher average grades over other schools After plotting the data, the majority of my grades received were frequently higher than the percentages awarded, not lower. This suggests that professors reward higher grades depending on the averages of the class, which seems to suggest that there is . Check out the graph on my ” section. no grade deflation project’s “deflation What helped me stay on track in terms of where I was in the class was to record my grades and averages of the class, while keeping in mind my position near the mean. If the average was a B+ according to and I was close, then I figured I’d get a B+, even if my raw percentage was a 70%. As a result, I was rarely surprised at the grade that I received. ScheduleBuilder Something to keep in mind is that we’ve also discovered that class size and grade have a moderate negative linear correlation. In the grade deflation article, UC Berkeley is compared with the likes of Harvard and Stanford, both of which boast low faculty to student ratios. . Perhaps the reason for their higher grades is because they have consistently lower class sizes than UC Berkeley’s There are a lot of different factors at play when it comes to the final grades: how much time you sleep, have fun, study, go to class, test scores, etc. However, it is important to note that most likely it will not just be one of these factors that make or break your grade. They’re all important and work together to present your results at the end. Here are some recommendations I’ve found from this analysis, and perhaps you’d find them helpful: is bound to happen. Be wary of this so that nothing comes up to surprise you! Senioritis When you’re nervous about a class and prepare in advance, being able to stand on equal footing as other classmates and feeling confident about your progress and achievement is half the battle. Do as much as you can to be confident in your classes, and if this is to study beforehand or study like crazy for the final, do it. (Even if it doesn’t have a correlation with the outcome.) Confidence is important for successful academics. . Some classes use that result to curve your grade heavily, even if that assignment was only worth 10%. Do not underestimate it. For the most part, however, one assignment is not your whole grade, so do not worry if one grade wasn’t too good. Regardless of how much the final assignment is weighted, your performance on that is surprisingly telling towards how you will do in the class as a whole . While activities and work appear to be the reason why my grades were low, I wouldn’t choose to participate less simply for these reasons. I gained so much and loved what I was doing that grades were not a huge motivation for such a decrease. Do what you love Be sure to study until you understand the material, not bang your head against the wall and pretend to be studying (I promise, this doesn’t help). The time you spend studying and what you actually get at the end of the semester actually vary widely. While there’s no correlation between grades and factors such as time spent planning, job hunting, and dating; it’s important to keep other factors such as sleeping and studying to produce good results. So definitely keep the first factors at moderation, and keep sleeping and studying normally. consistent of those help keep you on track to the grade you think you’d receive. It will also keep you from worrying about grade deflation. Recording your assignment/test results and the averages Just because there’s a strong correlation between two factors, doesn’t necessarily mean you will have the same outcome, or that one semester or one class will definitely fit that pattern. ( !) Correlation does not imply causation What do you think about this data and the conclusions I’ve presented here? I encourage all comments and look forward to an open discussion. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in playing around with the data more deeply, as I am not an experienced data analyst. If you have similar data, I would love to compare and contrast with you, and would highly recommend everyone to try their hand at recording. You never know what would come of it! Edits and Updates 1/30/17: I presented these findings to a QS Meetup, and while preparing it, I realized that there was some information that was misinterpreted. 2/5/17: Here are the findings that I’ve edited. Added class size as a potential reason for grade deflation comparisons. Added correlation does not imply causation in final recommendations. Removed factors that have a correlation and those that don’t, and restructured it to answer key questions instead. Discovered that units and grades, and extra time and grades don’t have a linear correlation. Class sizes and grades actually do have a moderate negative linear correlation, so I added that back in. Edited that the “work hard, play hard” mentality is half-half. Dating does have some sort of influence with productivity, and job hunting and grades actually has a weak positive linear correlation. 4/7/18: Edited the links to link directly to the graphs.

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