The Ferret

 

Chinese Student in Canada

There’s a reason why Americans are tuning out of the Beijing Olympics in record numbers—with a poll last month showing 40 percent of adults oppose holding the games in China. 

Just as there are reasons why some Republicans are calling for a full boycott—athletes and all—of the iconic games. There are reasons why some athletes are decrying being silenced from speaking their hearts and minds in Beijing.

Often cited are the horrific human rights abuses taking place in a country with zero freedom. Cited are the Uyghurs enduring slave labor, torture, and sometimes murder. Cited is the poverty pervading the majority of Chinese people. 

Cited is the disappearance of a woman tennis player who dared to speak out about a CCP (Chinese Communist Party) official who sexually assaulted her.

And cited was the CCP virus that infected the world.

But one visa student from China, now living in freedom-loving Canada, who fled the CCP’s tyrannical regime in fear of being persecuted for her spiritual belief, Falun Gong, has done more than tuning out of the Olympics.

Digital animation prodigy at world-renowned Sheridan College, 25-year-old Lucy Liu shared her plight in an open letter to the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in collaboration with her student union, who are supporting her.  READ MORE...

Volcano

 

Beijing Winter Olympics

The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics began under a number of clouds last week. Covid is still raging, a Chinese Olympic official threatened foreign athletes with legal penalties should they speak out against human-rights abuses, and the Chinese government continues to commit horrific crimes against humanity that once again make a mockery of the world’s “Never Again” vows. 

But no matter. Athletes have descended upon Beijing in the thousands, American corporate sponsors have stuck steadfastly by the killers of Kashgar, and NBC is beaming the Chinese Communist Party’s grand propaganda spectacle to millions of homes across America.

These Winter Games are a story of failure — an International Olympic Committee failure, a government failure, a private-sector failure, and a collective-action failure.

In 2014, four of the six initial hopeful host cities for these Olympics withdrew their bids, leaving the Lausanne-headquartered IOC to decide between Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Despite China’s refusal to abide by human-rights assurances it had given the IOC ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics, held in Beijing — dissidents were silenced, officially designated “protest zones” were kept empty, and there was a horrid crackdown in Tibet in the months preceding the opening ceremonies that year — the IOC did not hesitate to award another Olympiad to Beijing. 

Knowing full well that Chinese human-rights commitments would be meaningless, the IOC did not bother securing any. Nor, as the scale of the genocide in Xinjiang became clear in recent years, did IOC president Thomas Bach even politely suggest that Beijing alter its course. Though he was perhaps uniquely positioned to insist on an unfettered fact-finding trip to the beleaguered region, Bach instead dismissed as mere politics the credible accusations of genocide, sexual violence, torture, and forced labor.  READ MORE...

Transform

The Minority of the ELITE

noun. \ ā-ˈlēt , i-, ē- \ 

Essential Meaning of elite. 

1 : the people who have the most wealth and status in a society : the most successful or powerful group of people. 

2 US : a person who is a member of an elite : a successful and powerful person.

The most important characteristic of this so-called ELITE, is the fact that they are always in a MINORITY...  and, if they are in a minority, then the majority should be able to exercise their collective powers and force them out-of-the-picture...

For example:

There are more Canadian Truckers than there are police or tow trucks so they have the advantage over the government who is in a minority.

There are less highway patrol people on the highways than there are drivers, so if the drivers got together and organized they could drive at any speed they wanted to.

There are more whites in America than there are blacks so why are the whites allowing the blacks to push them around

There are more workers in the USA than there are owners or bosses ...so if the workers collectively don't want to work then the workers have the power.

There are less wealthy people than there are others who are not wealthy and yet the wealthy can control our society...  they can do this because we do not collectively stand up against them.

COVID-19 has showed us that the majority once collectively joined can stand up to the elite minority...

• Parents against the VA school Board
• Canadian Truckers against the government
• Unemployed workers against companies
• Americans against facemasks
• Americans against vaccines
• Americans against government control
• Americans against lockdowns
• American against critical race theory
• Americans against being WOKE
• Americans against the cancel culture
• Americans against crime and violence

THINK ABOUT THAT

Turkey Time

 

Intelligent Apps Understand What We Want/Need to Buy

The next generation of mobile applications will be the result of multiple worlds colliding: when application development meets artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and big data analytics, intelligent apps are the outcome. 

Put simply, these are apps that continually learn from user interactions and other data sources to become even more relevant and useful.

Chatbots, virtual assistants and recommendation engines on e-commerce sites are just some examples of intelligent applications. While it’s difficult to formulate a catch-all definition of smart apps, they have a number of typical features:

Data-driven
intelligent apps combine and process multiple data sources – such as IoT sensors, beacons or user interactions – and turn an enormous quantity of numbers into valuable insights.

Contextual and relevant
intelligent apps make much smarter use of a device’s features to proactively deliver highly relevant information and suggestions. Users will no longer have to go to their apps. Instead, the apps will come to them.

Continuously adapting
thanks to machine learning, intelligent apps continuously adapt and improve their output.

Action-oriented
by anticipating user behaviors with predictive analytics, smart applications deliver personalized and actionable suggestions.

Omnichannel
progressive web applications (PWAs) are increasingly blurring the lines between native apps and mobile web applications.  SOURCE:  Delaware Consulting

Cowfish

 

Snowflake

Snowflake Inc. is a cloud computing-based data warehousing company based in Bozeman, Montana. It was founded in July 2012 and was publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode.  The company's name was chosen as a tribute to the founders' love of winter sports.

The firm offers a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed "data warehouse-as-a-service".  It allows corporate users to store and analyze data using cloud-based hardware and software. It runs on Amazon S3 since 2014, on Microsoft Azure since 2018 and on the Google Cloud Platform since 2019.  The company is credited with reviving the data warehouse industry by building and perfecting a cloud-based data platform.  It was able to separate computer data storage from computing before Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

The company was ranked first on the Forbes Cloud 100 in 2019.

History
Snowflake Inc. was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California by three data warehousing experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as data architects at Oracle Corporation; Żukowski was a co-founder of the Dutch start-up Vectorwise. The company's first CEO was Mike Speiser, a venture capitalist at Sutter Hill Ventures.

In June 2014, the company appointed former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as CEO. In October 2014, it raised $26 million and came out of stealth mode, with 80 organizations using it at that time.  In June 2015, the company raised an additional $45 million and launched its first product, its cloud data warehouse, to the public.  It raised another $100 million in April 2017.  In January 2018, the company announced a $263 million financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it a unicorn.  In October 2018, it raised another $450 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, raising its valuation to $3.5 billion.

In May 2019, Frank Slootman, the retired former CEO of ServiceNow, joined Snowflake as its CEO and Michael Scarpelli, the former CFO of ServiceNow joined the company as CFO.  In June 2019, the company launched Snowflake Data Exchange.

In September 2019, it was ranked first on LinkedIn's 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups.  On February 7, 2020 it raised another $479 million. At that time, it had 3,400 active customers.On September 16, 2020, Snowflake became a public company via an initial public offering raising $3.4 billion, the largest software IPO and the largest IPO to date to double on its first day of trading.

On May 26, 2021, the company announced that it would become headquarterless[citation needed], with a principal executive office located in Bozeman, Montana.  SOURCE:  Wikipedia

Finding Dog

 

Blockchain Technology

A blockchain is a distributed database that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. Blockchains are best known for their crucial role in cryptocurrency systems, such as Bitcoin, for maintaining a secure and decentralized record of transactions. The innovation with a blockchain is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data and generates trust without the need for a trusted third party.

One key difference between a typical database and a blockchain is how the data is structured. A blockchain collects information together in groups, known as blocks, that hold sets of information. Blocks have certain storage capacities and, when filled, are closed and linked to the previously filled block, forming a chain of data known as the blockchain. All new information that follows that freshly added block is compiled into a newly formed block that will then also be added to the chain once filled.

A database usually structures its data into tables, whereas a blockchain, like its name implies, structures its data into chunks (blocks) that are strung together. This data structure inherently makes an irreversible time line of data when implemented in a decentralized nature. When a block is filled, it is set in stone and becomes a part of this time line. Each block in the chain is given an exact time stamp when it is added to the chain.

The goal of blockchain is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed, but not edited. In this way, a blockchain is the foundation for immutable ledgers, or records of transactions that cannot be altered, deleted, or destroyed. This is why blockchains are also known as a distributed ledger technology (DLT).  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS TECNOLOGY, CLICK HERE...

Fireplace

Jay Walking Segments

 

Angry

Being A Full Stack Developer

Full stack developers are the Swiss army knives of the development world. As masters of multiple programming languages, these savvy professionals are capable of transitioning seamlessly from one development environment to the next. 

A boundless sense of curiosity drives full stack developers — it’s not enough to know that something works, they need to understand the how and why behind each functionality.

Full stack technology refers to the entire depth of a computer system application, and full stack developers straddle two separate web development domains: the front end and the back end.

The front end includes everything that a client, or site viewer, can see and interact with. By contrast, the back end refers to all the servers, databases, and other internal architecture that drives the application; usually, the end-user never interacts with this realm directly.

The easiest way to put the full stack into perspective is to imagine a restaurant. The front end encompasses the well-decorated, comfortable seating areas where visitors enjoy their food. The kitchen and pantry make up the “back end” and are typically hidden away from the customer’s view. 

Chefs (developers) gather permanently stored materials from the pantry (the database) and perform operations on it in the kitchen (the server), and then serve up fully-prepared meals (information) to the user.

Front end developers work to optimize the visible parts of an application for web browsers and mobile devices. Front end platforms are usually built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; however, they can also be made via pre-packaged code libraries or content management systems like WordPress. 

Back end developers, in contrast, refine the software code that communicates with servers, databases, or other proprietary software that conveys information to front end interfaces.

Those knowledgeable in both front end and back end are called full stack developers, meaning they are well versed in both disciplines.

The term “full stack developer” originated during the early days of the web, when websites were small and uncomplicated enough to allow a single person to tackle every aspect of site-building. But in the decades since those initial days, the web has grown ever more complex. 

The rise of machine learning, predictive computing, and responsive design has made it challenging — but not impossible! — for a single developer to handle every aspect of building and designing a site or application.

Today, modern businesses often rely on entire teams of developers to operate network equipment, work with virtual machines, and manage enormous databases. It takes time to develop a comprehensive, nuts-and-bolts understanding of all these emerging technologies. 

The developers who do so are, for that reason, versatile enough to shift fluidly between front and back end development and take on any task that their team might need them to tackle.

According to a 2020 Stack Overflow survey of 65,000 developers worldwide, roughly 54.9 percent, identify as full stack.  READ MORE...

Night Lights

 

Cyber Sercurity

Cyber security is the application of technologies, processes and controls to protect systems, networks, programs, devices and data from cyber attacks.

It aims to reduce the risk of cyber attacks and protect against the unauthorised exploitation of systems, networks and technologies.

Types of cyber threats
Common cyber threats include:

1. Malware, such as ransomware, botnet software, RATs (remote access Trojans), rootkits and bootkits, spyware, Trojans, viruses and worms.
2. Backdoors, which allow remote access.
3. Formjacking, which inserts malicious code into online forms.
4. Cryptojacking, which installs illicit cryptocurrency mining software.
5. DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which flood servers, systems and networks with traffic to knock them offline.
6. DNS (domain name system) poisoning attacks, which compromise the DNS to redirect traffic to malicious sites.

What are the 5 types of cyber security?

1. Critical infrastructure cyber security

Critical infrastructure organisations are often more vulnerable to attack than others because SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems often rely on older software.
Operators of essential services in the UK’s energy, transport, health, water and digital infrastructure sectors, and digital service providers are bound by the NIS Regulations (Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018).  Among other provisions, the Regulations require organisations to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to manage their security risks.

2. Network security

Network security involves addressing vulnerabilities affecting your operating systems and network architecture, including servers and hosts, firewalls and wireless access points, and network protocols.

3. Cloud security

Cloud security is concerned with securing data, applications and infrastructure in the Cloud.

4. IoT (Internet of Things) security

IoT security involves securing smart devices and networks that are connected to the IoT. IoT devices include things that connect to the Internet without human intervention, such as smart fire alarms, lights, thermostats and other appliances.

5. Application security

Application security involves addressing vulnerabilities resulting from insecure development processes in the design, coding and publishing of software or a website.

Canada

 

HyperAutomation

Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.

Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including:

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Machine learning
• Event-driven software architecture
• Robotic process automation (RPA)
• Business process management (BPM) and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS)
• Integration platform as a service (iPaaS)
• Low-code/no-code tools
• Packaged software
• Other types of decision, process and task automation tools

As a large-scale endeavor, hyperautomation requires careful planning and deliberation. At the same time, the potential upside and return-on-investment should enervate team members from across the organization; they have the opportunity to unburden teams from repetitive labor and potentially boost the success of their value-producing work.

While the goal of hyperautomation is to truly encompass all automatable processes, realistic implementation is more nuanced. A feasible hyperautomation strategy involves several key steps:

Assess budget and identify cost savings by highlighting existing automations. Workflows using RPA or other technologies can be expanded to other areas of the company in the course of the hyperautomation process.

Gather information on the existing processes that can be automated or otherwise must remain manual. Pay special attention to bottlenecks that maintain existing delays and can be improved through automation. One particularly effective technique for analysis is digital twinning, where an organization creates a virtual model of a process for deeper analysis and manipulation without affecting existing workflows.

Collect data. Automations are only as good as the data they run on, and the pipelines delivering the right data to the right place must be created alongside these machine-driven workflows. Creating a pipeline between these data stores and the automations that will use them is an essential step.

Identify automation tools. Project leaders may choose to begin by replicating one existing automation into another area of their operation, such as standardizing one automated approvals process for other decision makers. In fact, the automations themselves can be automated for more efficiency gains. It all depends on which tools and platforms are put to use throughout the project.

Predict outcomes. Automation for automation’s sake is even less effective at the enterprise-level and can lead to workers growing unclear on where their responsibilities lie. Outcome prediction involves setting the inputs for an automation, noting any hand-offs or human interventions, and predicting the results that arrive, as well as larger considerations like efficiency improvements and overall ROI.

Implement automations. AI tools can build the automations iteratively with human guidance to achieve consistent benchmarks. It’s this collaboration between machine learning and human intuition that drives successful hyperautomation endeavors, and creates clear guidance on the future of employee responsibilities.

Next Steps: Leveraging Hyperautomation
The key word for hyperautomation is interoperability. A single automation can be extended to processes, while an operation that once relied mostly or entirely on manual work can be enhanced through AI tools. A single document submission, for example, may OCR to interpret the text, sentiment analysis to identifying the underlying meaning, and AI to draft model responses. Each tool individually works on its own for a wider variety of tasks, with deployment made easy by successful replication and oversight from IT.  READ MORE...

Moose

Joe Rogan

DO as I SAY not as I DO

The Black Boom

Economic inequality continues to be one of the most hotly debated topics in America, but there has been relatively little discussion of the fact that black-white gaps in joblessness, income, poverty, and other measures were shrinking prior to the pandemic.

Why was it happening, and why did this phenomenon go unacknowledged by so much of the media?

In The Black Boom, Jason L. Riley—acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute—digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration. To acknowledge as much is not to endorse the 45th president but rather to champion policies that achieve a clear moral objective shared by most Americans.

As Riley argues in The Black Boom: “Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, the economic fortunes of blacks improved under Trump to an extent that was not only unseen under Obama but unseen going back several generations. Black unemployment and poverty reached historic lows, and black wages increased at a faster clip than white wages.”

Less inequality is something that everyone wants, but disapproval of Trump’s personality and methods too often skewed the media’s appraisal of effective policies advocated by his c. If we want to make real progress in improving the lives of low-income minorities, says Riley, we must look beyond our partisan differences at what works and keep doing it. Unfortunately, many press outlets were unable or unwilling to do that.

As The Black Boom notes: “Political reporters were not unaware of this data. Rather, they chose to ignore or downplay it because it was inconvenient. In their view, Trump, because he was a Republican and because he was Trump, had it in for blacks, and thus his policy preferences would be harmful to minorities.

To highlight the fact that significant racial disparities were narrowing on his watch—that the administration’s tax and regulatory reforms were mainly boosting the working and middle classes rather than ‘the rich’—would have undermined a narrative that the media preferred to advance, regardless of its veracity.”

As with previous books in our New Threats to Freedom series, The Black Boom includes two essays from prominent experts who take issue with the author’s perspective. Juan Williams, a veteran journalist, and Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist, contribute thoughtful responses to Riley and show that it is possible to share a deep concern for disadvantaged groups in our society even while disagreeing on how best to help them.

The Black Boom exemplifies the calm, rational dialogue that Americans want and need at this moment in our history to understand which public policies best promote upward mobility for everyone.  SOURCE:  GOOGLE BOOKS

Pandering Democrats

 

Misty River

 

What Does the Vice President Do?

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will be sworn in by Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Wednesday, a history-making event in which the first Black, South Asian and female vice president will take her oath of office from the first Latina justice. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


On Jan. 20, Kamala Harris will become vice president of the United States – the first woman, the first person of South Asian descent, and the first African American to do so. Harris will also become the first vice president to have graduated from a historically black college or university.


Each of these achievements is significant in its own right. However, the vice presidency itself has traditionally been a relatively insignificant position, though the office has become more influential in recent years.

The 'Most Insignificant' Office?
The role of vice president is only mentioned in the U.S. Constitution a handful of times. Article I, Section 3 says that the vice president "shall be President of the Senate but shall have no Vote" except in the event of a tie. Normally, ties are rare, but the vice president's power to break them will likely become relevant to Harris as Democrats, and independents who caucus with Democrats, are expected to control only 50 of the 100 Senate seats.


The beginning of Article II, Section 1 explains how vice presidents are elected, which was later revised by the 12th Amendment. The end of that section states that presidential power "shall devolve on the Vice President" in the event of the president's "Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office." Finally, Article II, Section 4 states that vice presidents – like presidents – can be "removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."


So, other than staying out of trouble to avoid impeachment and waiting around for the president to need a replacement, vice presidents are really obligated only to occasionally cast a tie-breaking vote. This means that the great majority of the time, vice presidents have no real job to do.


John Adams, the first U.S. vice president, once complained to his wife that the vice presidency was "the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived." However, not all have been upset about such inactivity. Woodrow Wilson's vice president, Thomas Marshall, quipped after he retired: "I don't want to work … [but] I wouldn't mind being Vice President again."  READ MORE...

Octopus

 

Why is Joe Biden so Unpopular?

It's in a two-minute TV ad narrated in authoritative and reassuring tones by none other than Academy Award-winner Tom Hanks. It was in a graphics and light display outside the White House on Wednesday night, when the Democratic National Committee showcased record job numbers and vaccination progress. It's in the avalanche of fact sheets from the administration detailing President Joe Biden's 2021 accomplishments, and it was in the sometimes-exasperated voice of Biden himself Wednesday as he pleaded his case for a good freshman year grade.

If there were an avatar to accompany the PR campaign, it would be an image of the baffled president, lifting America up by its collective lapels and screaming, "What is wrong with you people? Why don't you LIKE ME!?"

The frustration is understandable. On paper, the Biden administration has racked up some impressive achievements: more than 6 million new jobs were created, a single-year record. Unemployment dropped from 6.2% to 3.9%, another single-year first. Childhood poverty and hunger are down while average wages went up. Biden has the first majority non-white Cabinet in history and presides over the most diverse administration in history. He passed a massive COVID-19 relief bill and an expansive infrastructure package many previous presidents tried and failed to achieve.

But as polling consistently shows, American voters don't like Biden – or at least, they don't think he's doing a good job. An average of current polling shows the president with an anemic 41.7% approval rating, with 53.4% disapproving of him. And while high inflation has alarmed many Americans, Biden's slide in the polls began last August, before prices started to jump.  READ MORE...

Moving Leaves