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Author(s): (1) Gopal Yadav, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology & Chennai Mathematical Institute. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Brief Review of Wedge Holography Emerging Multiverse from Wedge Holography Application to Information Paradox Application to Grandfather Paradox Conclusion Acknowledgements and References Acknowledgements The author is supported by a Senior Research Fellowship (SRF) from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Govt. of India. It is my pleasure to thank Aalok Misra, who motivated me to work on the entanglement stuff, and for his blessings. We would also like to thank Juan Maldacena, Andreas Karch, Kostas Skenderis and Tadashi Takayanagi for very helpful discussions and comments. This research was also supported in part by the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) for the program “Nonperturbative and Numerical Approaches to Quantum Gravity, String Theory and Holography” (code:ICTS/numstrings-2022/8). Various conferences/workshops; e.g., Mysteries of Universe-I (Institute Lecture Series) and Indian Strings Meeting 2021 at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India; Applications of Quantum Information in QFT and Cosmology at the University of Lethbridge, Canada; Kavli Asian Winter School (KAWS) on Strings, Particles and Cosmology (Online) at International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) Bangalore, India (code:ICTS/kaws2022/1); Reconstructing the Gravitational Hologram with Quantum Information at Galileo Galilei Institute for Theoretical Physics, Florence, Italy; Quantum Information in QFT and AdS/CFT-III at Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India; helped me to learn about the information paradox and related stuff. I am very thankful to the speakers and organizers of these conferences because I learned about the subject from these conferences. References [1] S.W. Hawking, Particle Creation by Black Holes, Commun. Math. Phys. 43, 199 (1975) Erratum: [Commun. Math. Phys. 46, 206 (1976)]. [2] D.N. Page, Information in Black Hole Radiation, Phys.Rev.Lett. 71 (1993) 3743-3746 [arXiv:hep-th/9306083 [hep-th]]. [3] J. M. Maldacena, The Large N limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity, Int. J. Theor. Phys. 38, 1113-1133 (1999) [arXiv:hep-th/9711200]. [4] Y. Ling et al, Reflected entropy in double holography, JHEP 02 (2022) 037 [arXiv:2109.09243]. [5] C. Krishnan, Critical Islands, JHEP 01 (2021) 179 [arXiv:2007.06551[hep-th]]. [6] E. Caceres, A. Kundu, Ayan K. Patra and S. Shashi, Page Curves and Bath Deformations [arXiv:2107.00022 [hep-th]]. [7] E. Caceres, A. Kundu, Ayan K. Patra and S. Shashi, Warped information and entanglement islands in AdS/WCFT, JHEP 07 (2021) 004 [arXiv:2012.05425 [hep-th]]. [8] A. Bhattacharya, A. Bhattacharyya, P. Nandy and A.K. Patra, Islands and complexity of eternal black hole and radiation subsystems for a doubly holographic model, JHEP 05 (2021) 135 [arXiv:2103.15852[hep-th]]. [9] A. Bhattacharya, A. 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Krishnan, Dirichlet baths and the not-so-fine-grained Page curve, JHEP 08 (2021) 119 [arXiv:2103.17253[hep-th]]. [37] G. R. Dvali, G. Gabadadze and M. Porrati, 4D gravity on a brane in 5D Minkowski space, Phys. Lett. B 485 (2000) 208 [hep-th/0005016]. [38] C. Krishnan, V. Patil and J. Pereira, Page Curve and the Information Paradox in Flat Space, [arXiv:2005.02993[hep-th]]. [39] A. Almheiri, T. Hartman, J. Maldacena, E. Shaghoulian and A. Tajdini, The entropy of Hawking radiation, Rev. Mod. Phys. 93, no.3, 035002 (2021) [arXiv:2006.06872 [hep-th]]. [40] C. Krishnan and V. Mohan, Interpreting the Bulk Page Curve: A Vestige of Locality on Holographic Screens, [arXiv:2112.13783[hep-th]]. [41] I. Akal, Y. Kusuki, T. Takayanagi and Z. Wei, Codimension two holography for wedges, Phys. Rev. D 102, 126007 (2020) [arXiv:2007.06800[hep-th]]. [42] R. X. Miao, An exact construction of codimension two holography, JHEP 01 (2021) 150 [arXiv:2009.06263[hep-th]]. [43] S. Choudhury, S. 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Multiverse in Karch-Randall Braneworld: Acknowledgements and References

FTC v. Amazon Court Filing, retrieved on Sep 26, 2023, is part of . You can jump to any part in this filing . This is part 1 of 80. HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series here A. Amazon's First-Party Retail And Third-Party Marketplace Business Units 67. Amazon's First-Party Retail And Third-Party Marketplace Business Units Amazon began as an online bookstore in 1994 and rapidly expanded into new product categories: first DVDs and CDs, then electronics and toys, and then nearly everything. In 2020, Amazon sold almost (redacted) unique products across virtually every conceivable category to U.S. consumers. 68. Amazon originally sold goods to shoppers by purchasing items wholesale and reselling them on its website. Amazon calls its wholesale suppliers "vendors." Today, Amazon continues to sell a wide range of products through this type of vendor-retailer relationship, from laundry detergent to sports equipment. 69. Amazon also sells its own private label goods. These range from devices like Amazon's Kindle e-reader or Ring doorbell, to consumer products like batteries sold under the "Amazon Basics" label, to products without any clear· Amazon affiliation, such as dietary supplements sold under the "Revly" label. 70. These two components, vendor-retailer and private label, make up Amazon's first-party retail business unit, which Amazon refers to collectively as Amazon "Retail." 71. Amazon also runs what it calls its "Marketplace," where other companies can sell products directly to shoppers through its online store. Amazon calls third-party companies that sell on Amazon "sellers," and refers to sales by sellers as "Marketplace" sales. 72. Amazon charges sellers four primary fees to sell on its Marketplace. First, Amazon requires sellers to pay a selling fee, which can be a monthly fee or a fee for each item sold. Second, Amazon charges all sellers a commission or "referral fee" based on the price of each item sold on Amazon. Third, Amazon charges sellers for the use of Amazon's fulfillment and delivery services. Forth, Amazon charges sellers for advertising services. While Amazon also charges sellers. As a practical matter, most sellers must pay these four fees to make a significant volume of sales on Amazon. 73. Amazon estimated that in 2022, it would take (redacted)% of all sales revenue earned by sellers who use its fulfillment service. 74. The Marketplace accelerated Amazon's growth by allowing it to exponentially expand the selection of products on Amazon without having to carry the risks of unsold inventory. Sellers, who range from small businesses that offer a single product to multinational firms that sell thousands of products, ultimately bear that risk. As of the first quarter of 2021, there were over (redacted) active sellers on Amazon's U.S. Marketplace. 75. Amazon touts to its investors that sellers on the Marketplace are "a key 20 contributor to the selection offered" to Amazon shoppers. Sellers offer a huge variety of items for sale, from laptop computers to harnesses for walking pet chickens, complete with bowtie. In 2020, sellers offered more than (redacted)% of the unique items available for sale on Amazon. Sellers' products make up a growing majority of Amazon unit sales- 60% in the second quarter of 2023, up from 55% in 2021. 76. Amazon's online superstore unites its Retail and Marketplace rums, with products intermixed and presented to the public simultaneously and side-by-side. To a shopper browsing on Amazon, there are no obvious differences between the types of listings, nor is there a way to regularly shop for products sold only by Amazon Retail or Amazon Marketplace. 77. Amazon has achieved unprecedented scale. In 2021, goods worth more than (redacted) were sold through Amazon's U.S. online store. That amount is larger than the 2021 gross domestic product of (redacted) countries. 78. Amazon achieved this astonishing scale in part by combining its Retail and Marketplace arms. Amazon's product selection includes popular· and frequently pm-chased items and a "long tail" made up of an immense variety of less-frequently purchased products. Products offered by sellers on Amazon's Marketplace contribute substantially to that "long tail." More generally, Amazon’s sellers dramatically increase Amazon’s product selection, which draws more shoppers to Amazon, which, in turn, attracts more sellers. 79. Sellers have also made the Marketplace enormously profitable for Amazon. Amazon's internal documents show that profits from its U.S. Marketplace totaled more than (redacted) in 2021-nearly (redacted)% of its total reported net income for that year. Continue Reading . Here About HackerNoon Legal PDF Series: We bring you the most important technical and insightful public domain court case filings. This court case 2:23-cv-01495 retrieved on October 2, 2023, from is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. ftc.gov

A Closer Look at Amazon's Growing  E-commerce Monopoly

THE APPOINTMENT TO THE 'BEAGLE.'

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . PREFACE PREFACE I have stated in the preface to the first Edition of this work, and in the Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, that it was in consequence of a wish expressed by Captain Fitz Roy, of having some scientific person on board, accompanied by an offer from him of giving up part of his own accommodations, that I volunteered my services, which received, through the kindness of the hydrographer, Captain Beaufort, the sanction of the Lords of the Admiralty. As I feel that the opportunities which I enjoyed of studying the Natural History of the different countries we visited, have been wholly due to Captain Fitz Roy, I hope I may here be permitted to repeat my expression of gratitude to him; and to add that, during the five years we were together, I received from him the most cordial friendship and steady assistance. Both to Captain Fitz Roy and to all the Officers of the Beagle I shall ever feel most thankful for the undeviating kindness with which I was treated during our long voyage. 10 This volume contains, in the form of a Journal, a history of our voyage, and a sketch of those observations in Natural History and Geology, which I think will possess some interest for the general reader. I have in this edition largely condensed and corrected some parts, and have added a little to others, in order to render the volume more fitted for popular reading; but I trust that naturalists will remember, that they must refer for details to the larger publications which comprise the scientific results of the Expedition. The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle includes an account of the Fossil Mammalia, by Professor Owen; of the Living Mammalia, by Mr. Waterhouse; of the Birds, by Mr. Gould; of the Fish, by the Rev. L. Jenyns; and of the Reptiles, by Mr. Bell. I have appended to the descriptions of each species an account of its habits and range. These works, which I owe to the high talents and disinterested zeal of the above distinguished authors, could not have been undertaken, had it not been for the liberality of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury, who, through the representation of the Right Honourable the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have been pleased to grant a sum of one thousand pounds towards defraying part of the expenses of publication. I have myself published separate volumes on the 'Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs;' on the 'Volcanic Islands visited during the Voyage of the Beagle;' and on the 'Geology of South America.' The sixth volume of the 'Geological Transactions' contains two papers of mine on the Erratic Boulders and Volcanic Phenomena of South America. Messrs. Waterhouse, Walker, Newman, and White, have published several able papers on the Insects which were collected, and I trust that many others will hereafter follow. The plants from the southern parts of America will be given by Dr. J. Hooker, in his great work on the Botany of the Southern Hemisphere. The Flora of the Galapagos Archipelago is the subject of a separate memoir by him, in the 'Linnean Transactions.' The Reverend Professor Henslow has published a list of the plants collected by me at the Keeling Islands; and the Reverend J. M. Berkeley has described my cryptogamic plants. I shall have the pleasure of acknowledging the great assistance which I have received from several other naturalists, in the course of this and my other works; but I must be here allowed to return my most sincere thanks to the Reverend Professor Henslow, who, when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, was one chief means of giving me a taste for Natural History,—who, during my absence, took charge of the collections I sent home, and by his correspondence directed my endeavours,—and who, since my return, has constantly rendered me every assistance which the kindest friend could offer. DOWN, BROMLEY, KENT, June 9, 1845 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. Charles Darwin (1997). The Voyage of the Beagle. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/944/pg944-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 www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.htm l.

PREFACE

Noom helps you lose weight. We help you get a job at Noom. In today’s article, we’ll show you one of Noom’s hard SQL interview questions. We’re getting into the habit of choosing the hard for you. That’s probably not bad. If you manage to get through these questions, then the medium and easy level questions will be a piece of cake for you. data analyst interview questions A piece of cake we’re not discouraging you from eating. That’s Noom’s business as a fitness and weight loss subscription-based app. Our mission here to make you fit but only in terms of your SQL coding skills. is The interview we will cover is an excellent example of using and in a more advanced way, which includes writing subqueries. JOINs aggregate functions We’ll go through all the explanations step-by-step to make them easy to understand. If things get too complicated, you can always help yourself with our video tutorial that tackles the same question. https://youtu.be/5Lpbw71xR3o Noom Data Analyst Interview Question Here’s the question we’ll show you how to answer: Link to the question: https://platform.stratascratch.com/coding/2033-find-the-most-profitable-location To find the most profitable location, the business wants to compare the average sign-up duration and the average transaction amount for each location by taking a ratio between the two. They expect you to provide a table outlining each location, the average duration, average transaction amount, and ratio. The result should be sorted from the highest ratio to the lowest. Now, it wouldn’t be wise to just jump to writing a code and hope you’ll get to the solution somehow. Strategy is important, the same as your SQL knowledge. The strategy here includes a framework for solving this and other SQL data analyst interview questions. Solution Approach Framework to Solve (Noom) Data Analyst Interview Question We will use the three-step framework that will help you to take a complex problem and simplify it into few steps. If you’re our regular reader, you’re probably familiar with it. For those of you who are new to this or need a refresher, the three steps are: Exploring the dataset Writing out the approach Coding the solution First, you need to understand the dataset. This means understanding columns in the tables, their data types, and what the data really represents. Also, watch out for the traps hidden in data which could lead to considering the edge cases when writing the solution. When you’re done with this step, you should outline the steps you will take to solve the problem. No, you’re not coding yet! You’re only writing out your approach as sentences or pseudo code. What you do here is create a skeleton for your solution, and the code will add flesh to it. And the last step you probably hardly waited for is: start coding! It’s time that we showed you how this framework works on the Noom data analyst interview question. 1. Exploring the Dataset You’re given two tables: and . signups transactions The first table is a record of the sign-ups and has the following columns. Some of the important things to note are: column signup_id – we will assume this is the table’s primary key columns signup_start_date and signup_stop_date – formatted as datetime column plan_id – represents the plan type and is formatted as an integer column location – shows the city of the user, and the values can repeat You wouldn’t normally have a possibility to preview the data in the interviews. But since we do have, why not use this option? Here’s sample data from the first table. It is not that clear what the sign-up start and end date mean. Are they the dates when the customer registered on the platform/left it or the date when they subscribed to a plan/ ended the subscription? When in the interview, this is the perfect chance to pose these questions in the interview. We don’t have this possibility, so we’ll assume the start and the end dates show when the customer subscribed and canceled their plan. The second table, , contains these columns. transactions We can take up the following from this. column transaction_id – the table’s primary key column signup_id – the same column as in the first table, which means this is a foreign key column transaction_start_date – this date is, too, formatted as datetime column amt – should be an amount relevant to the transaction Take a look at the table’s preview. How do the two tables work together? Understanding this will basically unveil how Noom works. When the customers sign-up, they are assigned a unique signup ID (column signup_id), and an entry is recorded in the table. This record also includes the dates they signed up for their plan and canceled it (columns signup_start_date and signup_stop_date), the type of plan they subscribed to (column plan_id), and their city (column location). signups As Noom provides its services to the customer and the customer pays it, the transaction occurs. This transaction is logged in the table. There, each transaction gets a unique id (column transaction_id) that references the customer’s signup ID from the first table (column signup_id). There’s also a date (column transaction_start_date) and the amount charged for the transaction (column amt). transactions For subscription-based businesses like Noom, the customer is typically charged on a regular basis, e.g., monthly. What does this mean for the records in the question dataset? You should expect multiple transactions per signup. In other words, there is a relationship between the and the table: one customer can have multiple transactions. signups transactions Check this with your interviewer! The counterpart to the interviewer on our platform is writing a simple code to check what we just said. Run the code to see that there are multiple entries per signup ID. SELECT 
    signup_id, 
    COUNT(transaction_id) AS num_transactions
FROM transactions
GROUP BY signup_id
ORDER BY 2 DESC; Going back to how the subscriptions work, when the customer decides to end their subscription, this is reflected in the update of the column signup_stop_date in the table . signups 2. Writing Out the Approach This Noom data analyst interview question asks you to show the location, average duration, average transaction amount, and a ratio of these two averages. Now, the averages are not immediately available to you. So before showing the final output with a ratio, you should calculate the average duration and transaction amount per location. Here are the steps to do that and get to the solution. 1. Calculate average duration per location Duration is the difference between the sign-up start and end date. In business terms, this is a customer’s lifetime. You can find all the columns for this calculation in the table. signups 2. Calculate the average transaction per location To calculate the average transaction per location, you’ll need to use both the and table. transactions signups These two tables can be joined via the common column signup_id. 3. Join the two calculated tables You need both averages in the same table to calculate the ratio. Using the INNER JOIN is safe because both calculated tables will have the same locations. 4. Calculate the ratio Now that all the required data is in one table, you can calculate the ratio. The formula is: 5. Sort the results from the highest to lowest ratio To sort the output, use the ORDER BY. It is recommendable to think about the edge cases while writing out the coding approach. For this question, the edge case might be how to account for the active users, i.e., those who haven’t ended their Noom subscription. How do you write such a query, and does this edge case impact the interpretation of the results? To answer that, it’s crucial to uncover how the system records the sign-up stop dates for active customers. There are two possibilities: 1. The sign-up stop dates are blank for active customers. If this is the case, the steps written above would be erroneous. To avoid this, you should first filter rows where the sign-up stop date is not null, then do the calculations. That way, you’re restricting your analysis only to customers with an established lifetime. 2. A proxy date is used for the active customers’ stop date. If the current date is set up as a proxy date, then the sign-up stop date is updated daily. In that case, the average duration also changes daily because the duration of the active users increases. This is problematic because a customer who signed up yesterday will have a duration of one day, which is a misrepresentation of the customer’s lifetime. We recommend you restrict your analysis to current customers or a historical performance to avoid misrepresentation. Now that you have all the steps written out, the edge cases considered, and everything checked with the interviewer, you can start coding. We see from the table preview that the sign-up stop dates are there for every customer. So we’ll write the code assuming the table contains only the historical data. signups 3. Coding the Solution This framework part simply translates the above steps into an SQL code. 1. Calculate average duration per location First, find the difference between the start and stop dates. Then, use the AVG() function to get the average duration per location. SELECT location,
       AVG(signup_stop_date - signup_start_date) AS mean_duration
FROM signups
GROUP BY location; Remember that we noticed both dates are in the datetime format. That’s why we can directly subtract them. This query’s output shows all the customers’ locations and the average duration for each location. 2. Calculate the average transaction per location This step doesn’t require pre-calculation. All data is already available; you only need to join the two tables. SELECT location,
       AVG(amt) AS mean_revenue
FROM transactions t
JOIN signups s ON t.signup_id = s.signup_id
GROUP BY location; These are again locations, but with the average revenue instead of duration. Now that you have these two averages, you can build your target output. 3. Join the two calculated tables These two tables will be two subqueries joined by INNER JOIN in the FROM clause of the main SELECT statement. SELECT dur.location,
       mean_duration,
       mean_revenue
FROM
  (SELECT location,
          AVG(signup_stop_date - signup_start_date) AS mean_duration
  FROM signups
  GROUP BY location) AS dur
JOIN
  (SELECT location,
          AVG(amt) AS mean_revenue
  FROM transactions t
  JOIN signups s ON t.signup_id = s.signup_id
  GROUP BY location) AS rev 
ON dur.location = rev.location; The code output has almost everything you need in the final output. You have all the locations and averages in one table. Now you have to use them to calculate the ratio. 4. Calculate the ratio The ratio is simply the average revenue divided by the average duration. Additionally, convert the division result to a float to get the decimal numbers. SELECT dur.location,
       mean_duration,
       mean_revenue,
       mean_revenue/mean_duration::float AS ratio
FROM
  (SELECT location,
          AVG(signup_stop_date - signup_start_date) AS mean_duration
  FROM signups
  GROUP BY location) AS dur
JOIN
  (SELECT location,
          AVG(amt) AS mean_revenue
  FROM transactions t
  JOIN signups s ON t.signup_id = s.signup_id
  GROUP BY location) AS rev 
ON dur.location = rev.location; The output is the same as in the previous step, except this one has a ratio per location. Now the output only has to be sorted the right way. 5. Sort the results from the highest to lowest ratio The question tells you to sort the output in descending order by ratio. Just add the ORDER BY clause as the last row of the above code. SELECT dur.location,
       mean_duration,
       mean_revenue,
       mean_revenue/mean_duration::float AS ratio
FROM
  (SELECT location,
          AVG(signup_stop_date - signup_start_date) AS mean_duration
  FROM signups
  GROUP BY location) AS dur
JOIN
  (SELECT location,
          AVG(amt) AS mean_revenue
  FROM transactions t
  JOIN signups s ON t.signup_id = s.signup_id
  GROUP BY location) AS rev 
ON dur.location = rev.location
ORDER BY ratio DESC; By writing this, you’ve written the solution to Noom’s question. Your analysis shows that the highest revenue per day comes from Rio De Janeiro. The lowest ratio is in Luxembourg. Also, you can see the highest revenue is made in Mexico City, but it is spread out over a longer duration. Conclusion We hope you enjoyed solving this Noom data analyst interview question! We believe it really showcases how interviewers like to use familiar SQL concepts, such as data aggregation and JOINs, to make questions more difficult. Once you internalize the steps for solving the SQL questions and realize that you should use subqueries in this case, writing code becomes more manageable. All the heavy lifting has been done when analyzing the given dataset and formulating your coding approach. If you liked this Noom question, you could also try and solve another similar problem by Noom here → . Noom SQL Interview Questions Also published . here

Solving Noom's Data Analyst Interview Questions

Founders at Work: 150+ YCombinator Founders’ Stories

[Photo by on ] rawpixel Unsplash A repeatable sales model builds the platform to scale, but it can take experimentation and intensive research before you hit on one that’s truly sustainable. Here’s how to do it. If your business-to-business (b2b) company’s revenue generation is built on converting a few random cold calls into prospects and/or selling the same stuff to the same customers over and over again, it’s time to do something different. You’ll know that you’ve created a scalable sales model when: You can add new hires at the same productivity level as the entrepreneur or the sales leader. You can increase the sources of your customer leads on a consistent basis. You have a sales conversion rate and revenue that can be forecasted consistently. The cost to acquire a new customer is significantly less than the amount you can earn from that customer over time. Customers get the right products in the right place and at the right time. The harsh reality is that the average U.S. company loses about 50% of its customer base which means creating a path forward that must include a plan for repeatable, sustainable b2b sales is no longer a luxury — it’s a must-have. every year, Here are four ways to start doing this today: Define and design your authentic purpose. Every company needs to pin down “why we do what we do.” That’s the company’s North Star, guiding every aspect from recruitment to customer management to product development and sales. A strong purpose drives growth and profitability. For instance, an investment in the (a list of the world’s 50 highest-performing companies) over the past 10 years would have been 400% more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Stengel 50 In order to achieve sustainable success, companies must repeatedly reexamine their sense of purpose and make sure the organization serves it well. An authentic and inspiring purpose allows for: A constant, consistent sense of focus A strong emotional engagement both within the company and with its customers and partners Continuous, pragmatic innovation Sales and marketing experts often talk about “unique selling propositions,” or “USP,” which as the “factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason that one product or service is different from and better than that of the competition.” defines Entrepreneur A company’s authentic purpose gives rise to its USP. When a business has a clear vision, it’s easier to create products and services of value. Revlon founder Charles Revson, for instance, always used to say that he sold hope, not makeup. Start right now by examining your USP. Differentiation comes from packaging your know-how (i.e. your intellectual property) into repeatable products and services that solves critical customer problems. Take an honest look at your current sales process. “You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken,” is a quote found on motivational posters and mugs, and it’s very relevant for B2B companies that want repeatable sales, but that don’t know how to go about getting them. Take an honest look at what you’re doing now, including the last 7–10 deals that closed. Where did the customer come from? What steps were taken to close the deal? How did the customers interact with your company? How long did it take? How much time elapsed between each of those steps? Use the answers to analyze your process and ferret out the gaps (i.e., a lead nurturing and closing process that takes too much time, or not enough regular customer touchpoints). Then, come up with a plan that addresses these issues as a first step in the right direction. Start right now by assessing your current sales process, asking yourself the above questions, and honing your process in a way that better meets customers’ needs while also contributing to your firm’s bottom line. Energize your customer renewal and order upsell process. B2B companies have a stable of customers that they sell the same stuff to over and over again. In many cases, customers don’t even knowthat they could be buying more (and different products/services) from you because they have Unless he’s visiting your frequently-updated (uh-hem!) website on a regular basis, for example, that electrical contractor probably doesn’t realize that your distribution firm recently added kitting services to its lineup. Someone has to tell him, and that step should be part of your firm’s order upsell approach. no idea that you carry them. An often-overlooked aspect of the sales cycle, upsells and renewals are both strategic sales processes that help you grow revenue and gain more market share. Ignore this aspect of your B2B business and it will quickly fall prey to the statistics (50% of buyers exiting annually) and a host of competitors that are pretty good at bundling products, switching up their offerings, and upselling goods and services. Start right now by coming up with a list of additional products and services that can be upsold to customers who are already buying from your firm on a regular basis. Show-and-tell customers that you care about their businesses. Every B2B company is operating in a world where just “providing” products and services isn’t enough to create a sustainable sales channel. Where companies in the past may have been able to get away with putting their needs (e.g. revenue growth) ahead of their customers’ needs (e.g. current state and readiness), this attitude just doesn’t cut it anymore. To truly become your customers’ trusted advisor and partner — and to keep them coming back for more and referring your firm to others — you have to care about their business as much as you do yours (if not more than). When clients pick up on this, their loyalty levels rise exponentially and everyone wins. Start right now by reaching out to a handful of customers to ask them what their biggest pain points, and then think of three ways to either directly or indirectly help them address these issues. Copyright © 2018 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved. . . . . . I am an . Founder of and other companies. Shadoka enables entrepreneurship, growth, and social impact. Author of “ ” (McGraw Hill) and “ ” (Motivational Press). Follow me on Twitter @ . entrepreneur and author SHADOKA Everything Connects — How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability Survive to Thrive: 27 Practices of Resilient Entrepreneurs, Innovators, and Leaders Faisal Hoque Use the Everything Connects leadership app and Suvvive to Thrive resiliancy app for free.

How To Make B2B Sales Sustainable

AdBank Introduction With the, almost, global adoption of the Internet, digital marketing has greatly surpassed traditional methods and has now become of one of the fastest growing industries in the world. The huge expanse of the worldwide web and sheer number of ad spaces available make the system prone to fraud and abuse. In order to combat these issues AdBank uses blockchain technology to provide complete transparency for transactions carried out on digital advertising platforms. In an industry worth an estimated $223.74 dollars, as much as 20%-50% (with some sources even estimating up to 75%) of that money is taken by middlemen, in this case those who operate search engines, ad networks, ad agencies, brokerages, affiliate programs, and media conglomerate. This system exists because publishers have no direct contact to advertisers, and collectively the two parties have no leverage over the middlemen. With very few concrete ways of validating views claimed by ad networks, the opportunity to commit ad fraud is not only tempting, it’s extremely easy to avoid detection. And because these anti-fraud detection systems are relatively easy to evade, there is little inventive for ad networks to spend valuable resources to tackle this issue. Most ad fraud occurs when owners of websites, social media channels or a popular public profile purchases views and likes. Bots trick websites into identifying them as a human user so they can manipulate the viewing figures, without being detected. This practice occurs on a remarkable scale, with companies such Google and Facebook even turning a blind eye to suspicious activity that may indicate bots imitating humans to commit ad-fraud. The current fraud detection systems must struggle to fight a constant battle against hackers who continually update their code to evade exposure. AdBank, however, utilizes its powerful AI to uncover abnormal behaviour that might indicate fraud, and take the necessary steps to shut down the malicious programs behind these hit inflation attacks. As technology improves so too does the intricacy of scams developed by fraudsters. New platforms such like the infamous Methbot developed by Russian hackers Ad Fraud Komanda (AFK13), which was created from the ground up to evade detection, can use unique approach to avoid the authorities. AFK13 did this by creating a network of over 250,000 URLs spread across 6,000 fake domains to rack up between 300,000 and 500,000 fake videos views in just one day. The AdBank platform would have easily detected the Methbot, and saved both advertiser and publisher millions of dollars. AdBank Overview. How it works… AdBank is an advertising ecosystem built on Ethereum. The open source technology and publicly available API will allow third parties to build custom modules that will contribute to a secure universal platform designed to manage online advertising services funded by the AdBank token. In addition, the adoption of blockchain technology integrated with intuitive AIs, allows for heightened security protocols that promise to greatly reduce the instances of ad fraud. Traditional fraud-detection systems are only designed to operate within the network it was developed for. AdBank’s system will utilize the blockchain, together with ad databases, ad images, user logs and even the rendering of web pages, to provide the most advanced supervised and unsupervised artificial intelligence with enough data to detect behaviour typically associated with fraudulent advertising activity. Once an anomaly is detected a case is raised and sent for inspection by human analysts to confirm if the transaction/s is fraudulent. The technology is able to detect a wide range of fraud techniques, below are just a few: Webpages failing to render all expected ads Catch unexpected shifts in traffic Mass selling of tokens, and selling profits quickly Fraudulent app and other digital products The system logs the necessary meta data of transaction and makes them available to the anti-fraud systems and analytics. The ecosystem consist of several layers, each powered by the AdBank (ADB) token. The core services will be developed as an interface between the systems to allow the products and solutions to be constructed in transitional ways. The ADB tokens will each represent an ad, or group of ads. Publishers then sell the ads through real time bidding, charging the highest bidder for their services in ADB tokens. Publishers can then chose to store the tokens, cash out, or use them for the purchase of the analytics package. And because all transactions on the blockchain are accessible by any/all users, the figures presented in the analytics are guaranteed to be genuine. Tokens can also be purchase outright. Users can also participate in reviewing fraud reports by signing up for the End-User Program through which they will be reimbursed for their time in tokens. Another useful feature allows users to download and install a browser plugin that suppress ads on their favourite sites for a small fee. In this case, the fee covers the cost an advertiser would have paid them, should an ad have been displayed. By offering a way to suppress ads, something that most people general hate, AdBank believes the public, as well as advertisers and publishers, will be more likely to adopt the technology quickly., Due to the tremendous scale of converting all ad networks to use AdBank tokens, the company will execute an innovative roll-up strategy to acquire existing ad networks. Acquiring the ad networks, creating the analytics package and anti-fraud system will be the first stages of development before the product is rolled out to the public. The team aims to launch the AdBank Network Ad Platform in March 2018, and acquire existing networks in May 2018. Valuable Information Adbank (ADB) Coin Name : 1,000,000,000 Total Supply : 510,000,000 Circulating Supply : 1 ETH = 7,500 ADB Pre Ico Price : 1 ETH = 7,500 ADB, 1 ADB = 0.0465 USD (0.00003 ETH) Ico Price : Who can use and benefit from AdBank technology ? AdBank digital advertising ecosystem stands to benefit both the advertiser and the publisher by connecting them via the blockchain platform and removing the need for expensive middlemen. As a result anyone using the Internet will also benefit from the system as it gives them some control over the ads displayed on their screen. The system also serves as a useful tool for companies that are now, after receiving disappointing results from pay large sums to ad networks, cutting digital marketing budgets and creating its own team to bring the process in-house. Paid likes and views and provide a the quickest and easy way to compete with companies that have a larger digital footprint, and thus the demand for ad networks is high. But despite the demand, venture capitalist are still cautious to invest in the development of ad networks because they too are afraid to compete with Google. AdBank offers a solution to this problem; publishers get paid in tokens to display ads, advertisers pay in tokens to have an ad displayed, but since the middlemen are removed from the process, the rates are much better. Some companies may also wish to hire the middlemen as an in-house team to manage their ads through AdBank. Team Jon Gillham, Founder & CEO Jon has co-founded a successful digital asset acquisition firm and has over 10 years of digital marketing experience. He has owned over 6,000 advertising websites, and has a depth of knowledge from both the advertisers and publishers sides in the digital media space. Jon previously held the position of Project Manager at Exxon Mobil (Imperial Oil) based on his background in mechanical engineering. Chiron Bramberger, Co-Founder & CTO Chiron has had over 17 years of experience deploying tech-focused client solution implementations and has worked with many Fortune 100 companies. Through the creating exclusive portfolios worth over 2 million dollars, and developing software such as creating General Motors’ first fully integrated vertical marketing platform, his previous clients include Toyota, Google, NASA, FBI, and Groupon, among others. Chiron is highly experienced in technologies such as : Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, SQL, SEO, CVS, SVN, GIT, Mercurial, Electronic Engineering, CNC / CAD / CAM. Development: C, C++, Objective-C, iOS, PHP, Java, .Net, ASP, ActionScript, MySQL, Python, Ruby, HTML/XHTML/CSS/AJAX, JavaScript, jQuery, RFC, Web Apps, Mobile Apps, AWS, OpenStack, Visual Basic, Fortran, COBOL, 6502 Assembler, Neural Networks Training, and SR&ED. Kelsey Cole, Co-Founder & CBO Kelsey is responsible for the brand’s image and oversees areas such marketing, advertising, design and PR. Prior to co-founding Adbank, Kelsey was named one of the Top 30 Under 30 during her time as head of PR at Revlon. She has also launched and worked with many high profiles brands such as Bill Tai, Richard Branson’s Extreme Tech Challenge., L’Oreal, Garnier, Red Bull, Juicy Fruit, Tesla, and TIFF. Leon Pereira Co-Founder & CCO Leon provides support to a wide range of stakeholders including employees, shareholders, influencers, the Adbank and crypto communities, and the wider public. He oversees the overall strategy as well as the execution of customer service and community management. Prior to AdBank Leon cofounded the XRP Exchange, Vietnam’s first exchange for buying and selling Ripple, and as a result became known as the ‘God Father of Ripple’. Angelo Dodaro Co-Founder & CMO As a successful marketing agency owner (Multivitamin Media) with experience personally running campaigns that earn tens of millions of dollars for his clients, Angelo brings an advertiser’s perspective to the tea, and is responsible for brand management, marketing communcations in advertising and PR, market research, sales management, product development, distribution channel management, pricing and customer service. Before joining AdBank he has created digital assests for Tesla Motors’ launch of the Model X in Canda, and as also collaborated with pulishers such as Elle Magazine and Canadian Living. , Himanshu Pandey Lead Developer Senior Blockchain Developer A blockchain developer with expertise in ethereum, bitcoin, and smart contracts. William Carrol UX / UI Designer Oversees the design for the Adbank platform and user dashboard. Narcis Bejtic Industry Outreach Coordinator Handles all token purchase coordination, SAFT agreements, accounts receivable and payable and oversees all administrative duties at Adbank. Natalie Slaven, CPA, Office Manager Brian Park Director of Business Development Rahul Singh Smart Contract Security Expert Shikhar Srivastava Smart Contract Developer Malaya Tripathi Full Stack Developer & Server Security Ravi Arya Full Stack Blockchain Developer / Security

AbBank An Advertising Ecosystem Built On Ethereum

Creating long-term value with limited resources is a huge challenge for entrepreneurs, but it’s hardly a novel one. My grandmother, who lived in a remote village in Bangladesh, was barely five feet tall, skinny as a rod, and very soft-spoken. She could barely read or write and never had a formal education, yet she successfully managed a farming and sharecropping business, overseeing a network of farmers, merchants, and seasonal workers, all while raising nine children and keeping a household in order. To do that, she needed to create long-term value from the work she directed without exhausting the finite resources at her (and her community’s) disposal. Even though circumstances are very different for modern entrepreneurs, the fundamentals of sustainable growth remain the same. Here are seven of them. AUTHENTIC PURPOSE Every company needs to pin down “why we do what we do.” That’s the company’s North Star, guiding every aspect from recruitment to customer management to product development and sales. A strong purpose drives growth and profitability. For instance, an investment in the (a list of the world’s 50 highest-performing companies) over the past 10 years would have been 400% more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Stengel 50 In order to achieve sustainable success, companies must repeatedly reexamine their sense of purpose and make sure the organization serves it well. An authentic and inspiring purpose allows for: A constant, consistent sense of focus A strong emotional engagement both within the company and with its customers and partners Continuous, pragmatic innovation Sales and marketing experts often talk about “unique selling propositions,” or “USP,” which as the “factor or consideration presented by a seller as the reason that one product or service is different from and better than that of the competition.” defines Entrepreneur A company’s authentic purpose gives rise to its USP. When a business has a clear vision, it’s easier to create products and services of value. Revlon founder Charles Revson, for instance, always used to say that he sold hope, not makeup. A POWERFUL BRAND If you want to create a scalable business, you have to understand how crucial it is to build brand equity and emotional connections with customers. It’s those attachments that link customers to your products and will keep them returning to you. Building a brand is about developing and sustaining those relationships over time. Here are some basic rules to with your products and brands: connect, shape, influence, and lead . The surest road to product failure is to try to be all things to all people. Choose your target audience . Make your audience feel an emotional attachment to your brand that’s grounded in confidence in your products. Connect with the public . A simple, inspirational message is far more influential than one that tries to highlight too many product features, functions, or ideas. Inspire your customers No marketing plan can rescue a brand identity that isn’t fully formed. Don’t have much marketing budget to speak of? Create compelling content for publisher and social media sites to start generating awareness among target customer bases, and build up. PARTNERSHIP AND COLLABORATION Doing everything yourself can be tempting in the beginning when funds are few and ambitions high. While there’s nothing wrong with a hands-on approach, taking on more than you can handle, especially in areas where you lack experience, can be damaging. In the era of the global freelance economy, it isn’t difficult to find talented expertise, but you have to know where to find them. There are now dozens of that provide specialized resources from design, development, and sales to finance, legal services, and banking. The best part is that you can try small projects at low investments. The trick is knowing exactly what you want done and putting resources towards accomplishing tangible goals. websites and online marketplaces CUSTOMER RETENTION As Emmet and Mark Murphy write in their book , acquiring new customers can cost an organization around five times more than retaining current ones. In fact, a 2% increase in customer retention can have the same effect as decreasing a company’s costs by 10%. To put it another way, reducing customer defection rates by just 5% could by 25% to 130%, depending on the industry. Leading on the Edge of Chaos increase profitability According to the and the : U.S. Chamber of Commerce U.S. Small Business Administration The average business in the U.S. loses around 50% of its customer base every five years. Companies are four times more likely to do business with an existing customer than a new customer. The likelihood of selling to an existing customer is 60–70% whereas it’s just 5–20% for a new customer. Successful retention starts with the initial contact a business makes with a customer and continues throughout the lifetime of the relationship. that for certain industries, a 10% increase in customer retention is roughly equivalent to a 30% increase in a company’s value. Bain Capital has even estimated COMMUNITY A business ecosystem is an economic community of organizations and individuals that interact in countless ways. These ecosystems encourage companies to evolve their capabilities competitively. Sometimes an ecosystem can sprout up around a product, like the range of cases, headphones, and other paraphernalia for mobile devices. Similarly, ecosystem thinking has become a cornerstone of web publishing — a broad swath of unpaid contributors create content for popular outlets in exchange for growing their own readerships and developing personal brands. Ecosystems are crucial to sustainable growth because they provide the structure that surrounds and supports the businesses within them. They spread “stakeholdership” out from the business and into society, like it did for my grandmother with her farming community. REPEATABLE SALES Creating a unique product and brand isn’t enough. It takes repeatable sales processes to create a scalable business. It’s one thing to sign up a few customers; it’s another thing to design and implement sales processes that can be successfully deployed again and again at ever greater scale. You’ve created a scalable sales model when: You can add new hires at the same productivity level as the entrepreneur or the sales leader. You can increase the sources of your customer leads on a consistent basis. You have a sales conversion rate and revenue that can be consistently forecast. The cost to acquire a new customer is significantly less than the amount you can earn from that customer over time. Customers get the right products in the right place at the right time. A repeatable sales model builds the platform to scale. But it can take a lot of experimentation and intensive research before you hit on one that’s truly sustainable. FLEXIBLE, ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP To continue growing, entrepreneurs, managers, and business owners must become the leader the business needs for each particular stage of growth. And since a company’s needs change at each stage, its leaders need to keep evolving at the right pace. That requires introspection, self-awareness, and a keen sense of strategy — both in the short- and long-terms. I believe that an comes from being mindful. Our individual, adaptive, flexible leadership style interpersonal, and working lives are all interconnected. By being mindful, we understand those relationships and how best to utilize them to create, innovate, and lead. And that allows us to arrange our lives and our organizations in a way that leads to long-term value creation. Indeed, the most sustainable way to create value is to continually invest in our capabilities, both as individuals and as organizations. [Photo: Flickr user Ekaterina ] Original article @faisalhoque.com and @FastCompany . Copyright © 2018 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved. I am an . Founder of and other companies. Shadoka enables aspirations to lead, innovate, and transform with its accelerators and solutions. Author of “ ” (McGraw Hill, 2014) and “ ” (Motivational Press, 2015). Follow me on Twitter . entrepreneur and author SHADOKA Everything Connects — How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability Survive to Thrive: 27 Practices of Resilient Entrepreneurs, Innovators, and Leaders @faisal_hoque

The 7 Fundamentals Of Sustainable Business Growth

Most of you have heard the term info-tainment. This is what passes as news nowadays. The goal of the news agencies is to keep us on the edge of hysteria all the time. Add to this that most news agencies globally are owned by a very limited number of corporations, and then you get a situation where, what should be news, is actually a game of smoke and mirrors, or disinformation, or outright lies. But, netizens, what if we could change the narrative? We could conceivably start a decentralized autonomous organization, where we could bring uncensored news. Following the simple question: qui bono, or in plain English: who stands to gain. In other words, whenever something happens, or the focus of the 'normal' news in on one thing or other, we should ask ourselves, what are they trying to keep our attention away from. And of course, always, follow the money. There would have to be some kind of peer consensus between contributors on what to actually publish. We wouldn't want our journalists to write about how aluminum protects you from spying from government agencies. And we would have to figure out how to establish such a consensus, but it could be done. And we should of course reward our investigative reporters with an at least equitable remuneration. Which means that we would all have to chip in at least a small sum. But, tall numbers are what makes the world go round. Furthermore, against every big 'Qui Bono' story, we could feature a number of DAO member stories, who are living through the consequences of the cause of any given piece of interest, a kind of interactive reporting, if you will. And we could invite our members to suggest topics for investigation. The possibilities are legion!

The News DAO?

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests. Hi, I’m Reggie and at the moment I’m working as Document Manager for a Forensic Accounts firm. I’m also an oil painter, specializing in portraits and in painting people who are doing their thing. Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about? My Last HN story was about smart contracts within another smart contract and adding an extra seed phrase to a crypto wallet to accommodate this. Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about? I have a creative mind that skips from topic to topic. I would really like to get hired by either business or science professionals to bring my unique mindset to bear on solving whatever problems they are dealing with. Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?) I usually come up with my ideas while walking to or from work. Solvitur ambulando Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing? My biggest problem is where to start because I have a comprehensive map of a brand new metaverse in my mind that all hangs together. But this has taken most of three years to achieve and it’s hard to explain in a few words or even know where to begin, What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career? Hopefully early retirement! ;-) Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice? Smoking tobacco that I roll myself. Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it? Art. What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next? That remains to be seen. Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words? I wish some coders would take the time to communicate with me.

An Interview with an Oil Painter Writing For HackerNoon 

Say someone has an IRA (Individual Retirement Account) set up as a smart contract. Where he/she or their employer or both deposit a certain amount of money into it every month, the contract is set to pay out on their 65th birthday, or on proof of death. But due to unforeseen circumstances, they need money now and would like to break/sell the smart contract. If we make a new contract that changes the ownership, then the old owner would have to hand over the seed phrase to their wallet to the new owner, but the old one would still be able to access it. However, we could code the wallets in such a way that, in addition to the access seed phrase, the owner of any given wallet could set up an added security inside the wallet with their own seed phrase, and could change it at will. In this way, the only manner to get money out would be if you know the inside security codes. There are some additional concerns. What if the first party changes jobs and money stops coming in? We could add some kind of insurance for such an eventuality. Or both parties could agree that only the sum in the contract at the moment of sale would become available at the stipulated time. In the case of the currency in the account being Bitcoin, for instance, this might grow to be more valuable over time, which would turn this into a kind of futures contract, like in the stock market. Food for thought? Let me know what you think! Share your thoughts in a blog post with this opinion writing interview.

Musing About Concepts: Is a Smart Contract Within a Contract, Smart?

This is not an article about the NSA or some such spying on every citizen on the planet. This is about search engines and how they gather your data to form a profile on you, but more specifically, how they seem to be incapable of giving you the information you are looking for. Instead, you are inevitably directed towards sites that have paid to be number one on the list and want you to either invest something or buy something from them. There was a time, long long ago, when academicians decided they wanted to create a universal platform to disseminate and share relevant information between themselves. Hence the birth of the world wide web. Since then, this platform has been abused to share pictures of pussycats and selfies galore. But if a person is in need of some relevant information, zip, zilch, bupkes! It is practically a given that everybody knows that the Google search engine is in it solely for the money. This is why discerning readers of HacherNoon's articles have switched to Duckduckgo, hoping to get better results. There is one positive side to this and that is that the aforementioned search engine does not store your data and does not keep a profile on you. However, inquiries always seem to lead back to paid-for advertisers, who are more interested in selling you things you do not want or need, instead of providing the goods. The question that begs to be answered: is no one person or group of persons brave or mad enough to create an algorithm and search engine that disqualifies any paid-for results and focuses solely on getting the user what he or she got online for? Such an intrepid enterprise might only be used to start with by two or three persons who genuinely seek to be enlightened by some sought after wisdom or cold hard facts, but it may grow to an audience of a dozen or more, given a century or two of implementation and maintenance. For those of you who are inept when it comes to the appreciation of sarcasm, I apologize profusely and promise to never foul up this site with such decrepit nonsense again, at least not until my next article. That is, should this one be accepted by the powers that be.

Are You Sick of Big Brother's Search Engine Results?

Basically, this is a blueprint for a secondary economy that would start with a grassroots movement, which injects any profits back into its own organization, because its shareholders are community members or co-owners to the tune of the value they put into it, and where everyone has just one vote. The aim is to re-establish the proud worker and middle classes and turn them into valid members of our society, who by virtue of the solid wages and dividends we pay them are again able to buy homes, cars, and computers and generally provide for their families in a very comfortable way. An integrated ecosystem will be created that will be comprised of a number of organizations that feed each other. The A.C.F. would serve as an umbrella organization for the pillars of said community. The first one of these is a partly decentralized financial and business institution that is also member-owned and features a stablecoin, a fluctuating coin, and an investment arm with a corresponding business portfolio. The second will be a non-profit cultural foundation that would build first online and afterward physical museums, and that would also benefit culture in general and member artists in particular. The third is a trading platform for some of our digital currencies, for creatives' commodities, non-creative job shares, and much more. The fourth is a blockchain creatives' homeworld, with a visitors side for all things creative and entertainment in general, and a members' hive/colony where a multitude of projects would always be ongoing. These four to start with, more to follow. We would start as a sort of global credit union, but offering much more. Each region would have its own federation that works in conjunction with all the others. We work on the principle of inclusion as opposed to division. By Ourselves, For Ourselves (BOFO) After ascertaining where our traditional economy falls short, we proceeded to come up with ways where we could do better by doing it ourselves and making the software automatically distribute funds to where they are needed and to all the participants in any given project on a more equitable basis then is the case today. We are a capitalist organization with social benefits immutably built into our system. We will however have to devise a means of punishing those who would take advantage of our goodwill or commit fraud against their fellow member-owners. In each federation, an triumvirate in charge of policy will serve for five years maximum, and that will start readying its successors after three years. This body will decide policy changes if need be. However, the founding principles can not be changed. Policy guidelines will be built into the software and members of a given region will be asked to provide and vote on possible investments that follow those guidelines. Operational control issues and voting on new investments and planning for the future will be decided by all members, always taking care to adhere to the founding guidelines and possible tweaks of the governing rules by the triumvirate. If a given project proves fruitful, it will be carried over to other federations for scaling. We would create federations more or less per country and later maybe amalgamate per continent to provide a counter balance for the working and middle classes opposite the large corporations. Key Methods Key Methodology #1: P.I.F. (Paying It Forward) The financial institution called the Values Bank would pay forward twenty percent of each member's input for further job creation, and this NOT taken from the member's account but as a double issue of the digital stablecoin. This would be the singular driving engine of our addition to the existing economy. The more people can get a comfortable income, the more is spent, the more we grow. In effect, the reverse of the trickle-down philosophy, which has effectively been proven not to work for anybody but those at the very top. Key Methodology #2: Stablecoin Against Inflation The stablecoin (called Vebes) will be tethered to a spectrum of the most solid commodities available, and if one or more should fail, then the coin would simply switch to the remaining ones, this to avoid a wipe-out in case of inflation or hyperinflation. The Vebes (short for ValueBytes) will be created by adding value through a sale, where 1. the fiat ($,£, etc.-) or commodities such as gold will underwrite our currency as securities, 2. the goods go to the customer and 3. the digi-coin goes to the seller. We do not use cash, but instead focus on either paying securely online or via an app on people's phones for ambulant purchases. The securities for these stable-coins will be held indefinitely in a multitude of branches in tax havens all over the world, this to avoid impounding by dictators and so as to not put all our eggs in one basket. Taxes due the respective governments will be paid in fiat until such time as they accept our currency as payment. Every member's Vebes would be held privately in an electronic encrypted fob (e.g. Trezor), or may be put in a smart contract as a way of securing them until a later date, or can also be held in a digital encrypted account with the Vebes Bank. To the Values Bank will be attached an Investment Arm that uses (to begin with) part of the securities as seed capital, but after acceptance of our currency by the establishment we would use Vebes. Also attached will be a Business Platform for all the companies that start up using our investments, or joint project initiatives by our creatives. We should also start a micro-credits department Key Methodology #3: Decentralized Green Coin In addition, we will create a decentralized coin (called FluxCoin) for HODL (holding/saving) and trading purposes. The value of this coin will fluctuate according to demand and the markets' situations. The mining of this coin will occur in a green manner. Key Methodology #4: Host of Member Incentives. The Alliance of Credit Federations will feature a host of incentives for its members, such as an automatic double-issued IRA (Individual Retirement Account) of 5 % of the monthly input, 20 % double-issued donation of the monthly input to the Museums Foundation which would be tax-deductible. A 5 % double-issued donation of the monthly input for micro-credits to reinforce 'likes' of artworks on the Creativity Home Chain and would thus supply extra income for the artists. Members could get a credit line in the order of 20 % of their annual input and mortgages virtually at cost, with maintenance and improvements to the properties by ACF members who work in construction and would use materials manufactured by the ACF. Key Methodology #5: Our Coins as Legal Tender Key players in the traditional economy will be asked to accept our coins as legal tender. For these we will need large numbers of members who can massively petition the big players in turn until they surrender. In return; they will get all the benefits of any other member, but no additional voting rights. We could, for instance, double issue 20 % of their profit that was converted to Vebes as payment for extra wages for their employees, which is always one of the biggest operational costs for any enterprise. In case they refuse, we would have no choice but to create our own alternative to their operations. Key Methodology #6: Museums & Culture Foundation The Museums & Culture Foundation (MCF) will start by creating online museums per major city. The artworks for these digital museums will be purchased from member creatives who in turn will be asked to hold these works in trust until such date as physical museums have been built. The building of these museums will be carried out by member construction workers and designed/embellished by member creatives. Key Methodology #7: Artists' Creabyte as Commodity Each creative will offer a CreaByte which consists of their annual spare time for sale as a commodity at twice their going rate. The MCF will buy these in return for those members' labor in the museums under construction, or just to hold in reserve for use on a mutual project, or as payment for artworks, or as straightforward patronage. These CreaBytes will of course be available for purchase by the general public for future creative services, or as payment for their artworks, or as patronage for the artist Key Methodology #8: ' Culture & Entertainment World' on the Blockchain For the public part, we would start with a pilot culture and entertainment index of one major city and later iterate/scale that to everywhere else. This index would list all the museums, theaters, operas, cinemas, art galleries, member open studios (optional) with info and links to these and a planner for a morning, afternoon, evening or day out. (This list is not exhaustive!) A section for art news, such as ongoing exhibits in museums, galleries, etc. Feature stories for new projects or introducing member artists and their work. And anything else culture-related we can think of. ArtBook (like FB but for art) with member postings and links to their personal websites with the possibility for likes for artworks coupled to donations of micro-credits. We will have to find ways to make it interactive and make any visit addictive. For example Daily caption, polls, bingo?, chess club, coding club. We will let some think tanks come up with the rest! And for the private member part, we would start with an index of cultural branches and their corresponding members. A section of group members deals in art materials straight from the manufacturer. Member discounts with museums, etc. Think tanks. Forums but according to the Slack format. The Development Colony/Hive for joint projects. Directory with project files and offshoots. Peer co-marketing initiatives. Business offshoots from joint projects with links to the Investment Arm of the Values Bank.

Can There Be An Alliance of Credit Federations? 

Join us down the rabbit hole to a place of suspense, of dastardly motives, of spies perhaps, and of lobbing off of thumbs, or gauging out of eyes. Imagine you are either a government agency that requires absolute security of their defensive and other systems or a corporation that would not look favorably on their latest research being purloined by third parties. I'm talking about them keeping tabs and making certain that employee A is in actuality where his or her password, fingerprint, or eye-scan says he or she is located and working on station Z. Passwords are sometimes comprised of birthdays or names of loved ones, and they get written down on pieces of paper that may fall in the hands of cads bent on mischief, or wily hackers may lift them from their hiding places. Fingerprints can be copied or fingers removed and other body parts as well. Now, I shall take us back to the period of World War 2 or of the cold war, where morse operators could easily identify their counterparts by their 'hand', or by the frequency and manner of hitting the key. If we now transpose this hack to the present where most of us use a keyboard in our workplace, whether for coding or for the writing of prose. Is it not conceivable that an Artificial Intelligence program could track the typing of all the employees and identify their specific 'hand' for security purposes? Maybe coupled with the geolocation of their mobile phone? And from there compare the 'hand' with the password of the operator and see if they are one and the same? I do hope I'm not too late and this is already being done routinely every where, as has been the case on numerous occasions!? Or if it is not, then is it not about time someone saw to it? ;-)

Are You Where You Say You Are? - User Verification Based on Typing Patterns

What if we could program in 3D, find a way to give values to small building blocks in a cube and string them together? Envisage a cube of 9 by 9 by 9 and I do not use zero for this thought exercise. We end up with row one which has 1 till 9, row two which has 11 till 19, until row nine which has 81 till 89. The side of the cube facing us is side A. Flip the cube clockwise and we get sides B, C and D. Top side is side E and bottom side is side F. This is a matrix however, which has little cubes inside the larger cube. We can now start from any field on any of the six sides of the cube and work our way inside, where we can go straight, up, down, left and right. and in reverse, or even in a diagonal manner. Why limit ourselves to one cube? We could have a 9x9x9 cube for every facet of interaction. Let us take color, for instance. The A-side could be red and the opposite side-C cold be green. Side-B blue and side-D orange, which leaves us with the top side-E yellow and bottom side-F purple. We can have gradations of red from one till nine, mixed with gradations of its opposite green from one till nine. Or we could go side ways and have mixes of red with blue, etcetera. The possibilities are not endless but are astronomically high. Alternatively, for a different aspect of interaction, we could start on field A35, go inwards and any one of the smaller cubes inside could have one of its 6 sides turned on or off. We can give a value to each face and design a language that uses these. Thoughts anyone?

Solid Geometry: Thinking In 3D

People tend to equate an artist with a hobbyist who daubs paint on a canvas or plays around with lumps of clay of a Sunday. Or someone who really keeps at it, never gives up and maybe will make it, if he or she is lucky enough to encounter the right key person to open the doors to that art market where the big collectors reside. And there is that, but also oh so much more. Because an artist's creative drive is on all the time, always considering new angles to simple and complex things and situations. Artists do not think outside the box, for artists there is no box. If you put an artist in a box, you kill them, or at least their creativity and probably their spirituality. But I won't go into that any further. My point is that if you have a problem that needs a solution, you should ask an artist to participate in the problem-solving process. It's what we do. Making art is making thousands of decisions about a million things every moment of its inception and creation. The only thing you need to do is put your problem in layman's terms and let an artist offer you a thousand solutions. One of which will almost certainly make sense. And the simple act of putting your problem in simpler terms may get you halfway towards your problem, and let you see things from a different perspective and solve it yourself. And if none of the suggested solutions make sense, then maybe part of one will set you on a path that will lead to a Eureka moment. The second thing I would ask you to look at, if you have a conundrum that seems insurmountable, are the basic premises on which your model is founded. If one them is flawed, or if you compare apples to pears, then you will have to rethink your whole concept. Remember, there are no problems, only solutions. I think you get the gist of my argument. If you are stumped, and this goes for whichever field you are active in, then invite one or more artists for a creative consultancy session. The benefits will surely outweigh the cost. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution." - Albert Einstein. If you won't take my word for it, take it from him. :-) #for artists there is no box #problem solving 101 #creative consultancy #basic premises #there are no problems #creative drive is on all the time

Imagination Split The Atom

Authors:
(1) Jianzhu Yao, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology;
(2) Ziqi Liu, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology;
(3) Jian Guan, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology;
(4) Minlie Huang, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Related Works DIALSTORY Dataset Proposed Tasks Methodology Experiments Discussion Future Work Conclusion Limitations and References 2 Related Works Story Understanding and Generation Recently there have been various tasks proposed to assess the ability of story understanding and generation such as story ending selection (Zhou et al., 2019), story ending generation (Guan et al., 2019), story completion (Wang and Wan, 2019), story character identification (Brahman et al., 2021), story generation from prompts (Fan et al., 2018), titles (Yao et al., 2019) and beginnings (Guan et al., 2020). Another line of work focused on controllable attributes in story generation such as keywords (Xu et al., 2020), outlines (Rashkin et al., 2020), emotional trajectories (Brahman and Chaturvedi, 2020), styles (Kong et al., 2021) and characters’ personalities (Zhang et al., 2022). Different from them, we emphasize the importance of dialogue in developing characters and maintaining the story’s coherence. Dialogue in story The dialogue context is comprised of a variety of messages from users and the system, determining the conversation topic and the user’s goal for the conversation(Serban et al., 2017). The dialogue in the story makes this feature more apparent. Recently, like AI Dungeon, some text adventure games focus on players and machines co-creating stories. Li et al. (2022) proposed the idea that players can play the role of the chosen character and chat with others through the dialogue, while Xi et al. (2021) presented an AI game where players can explore different ways to reach the plot goals. In contrast, our tasks focus on both the understanding and generation of dialogue in the story, and they can be easily generalized to more complex AI interactive games. Character Representations Dialogue unfolds in a story around several inter-related characters. Accordingly, it is essential to capture the traits of different characters for dialogue modeling. Ji et al. (2017); Clark et al. (2018) proposed to update characters’ representations dynamically based on previous hidden outputs to track their states, which does not apply to the parallel architecture of Transformer for training. Azab et al. (2019) derived character representations from their corresponding dialogue turns. In contrast, we learn character representations from story plots, which then serve to understand and generate dialogue. Authors: (1) Jianzhu Yao, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; (2) Ziqi Liu, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; (3) Jian Guan, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; (4) Minlie Huang, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology. Authors: Authors: (1) Jianzhu Yao, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; (2) Ziqi Liu, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; (3) Jian Guan, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; (4) Minlie Huang, The CoAI group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology. Table of Links Abstract and Intro Abstract and Intro Related Works Related Works DIALSTORY Dataset DIALSTORY Dataset Proposed Tasks Proposed Tasks Methodology Methodology Experiments Experiments Discussion Discussion Future Work Future Work Conclusion Conclusion Limitations and References Limitations and References 2 Related Works Story Understanding and Generation Recently there have been various tasks proposed to assess the ability of story understanding and generation such as story ending selection (Zhou et al., 2019), story ending generation (Guan et al., 2019), story completion (Wang and Wan, 2019), story character identification (Brahman et al., 2021), story generation from prompts (Fan et al., 2018), titles (Yao et al., 2019) and beginnings (Guan et al., 2020). Another line of work focused on controllable attributes in story generation such as keywords (Xu et al., 2020), outlines (Rashkin et al., 2020), emotional trajectories (Brahman and Chaturvedi, 2020), styles (Kong et al., 2021) and characters’ personalities (Zhang et al., 2022). Different from them, we emphasize the importance of dialogue in developing characters and maintaining the story’s coherence. Story Understanding and Generation Dialogue in story The dialogue context is comprised of a variety of messages from users and the system, determining the conversation topic and the user’s goal for the conversation(Serban et al., 2017). The dialogue in the story makes this feature more apparent. Recently, like AI Dungeon, some text adventure games focus on players and machines co-creating stories. Li et al. (2022) proposed the idea that players can play the role of the chosen character and chat with others through the dialogue, while Xi et al. (2021) presented an AI game where players can explore different ways to reach the plot goals. In contrast, our tasks focus on both the understanding and generation of dialogue in the story, and they can be easily generalized to more complex AI interactive games. Dialogue in story Character Representations Dialogue unfolds in a story around several inter-related characters. Accordingly, it is essential to capture the traits of different characters for dialogue modeling. Ji et al. (2017); Clark et al. (2018) proposed to update characters’ representations dynamically based on previous hidden outputs to track their states, which does not apply to the parallel architecture of Transformer for training. Azab et al. (2019) derived character representations from their corresponding dialogue turns. In contrast, we learn character representations from story plots, which then serve to understand and generate dialogue. Character Representations

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