Tokens of the week #3: Plasma.io, Neural Networks, Dr. Julian Hosp

in #life7 years ago

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It has been a while since the last tokens of the week. This is definitively a disappointing point of my Steemit Career. I was planning to have this series every week. Somehow I couldn’t keep up with this promise. Anyhow, now a new version.

What is Tokens of the week?
During the week, we consume massive amounts of content. However, often we see something that is cool and than we either forget about it or it is already replaced by the next cool thing.

For me this cool stuff is not necessarily just a cool video. It is something that either can bring some value to you and me, makes you think or wonder about something or just inspires you to do something new. It would be amazing, if you pause for a second and contemplate what was interesting for you last week and share it in the comments below. So, are you ready? Let's jump in then.

Innovation I am excited about: Plasma.io

A couple of days ago, a new project was announced by Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin. As far as I understood it, it is a combination of Joseph’s Lightning protocol and Ethereum. The two write on the simple website plasma.io:

Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide

Further they write:

Plasma is composed of two key parts of the design: Reframing all blockchain computation into a set of MapReduce functions, and an optional method to do Proof-of-Stake token bonding on top of existing blockchains with the understanding that the Nakamoto Consensus incentives discourage block withholding.

Currently, I am reading the whitepaper and I try to come up with an article regarding this topic. I think it could be an interesting project that helps to get rid of some of the issues Ethereum has. That will be super interesting…

Article I enjoyed reading: Demystifying Deep Neural Nets by Rosie Campbell

During my studies, one topic that was quite complex to comprehend for a guy whose background is more on the business side was convolutional neural networks. This article by Rosie really helped me to wrap my head around and her examples in the end were even brought up by our professor which I realized after reading it. I really recommend it to understand the opportunities but also the limitations of neural nets. She also illustrates it very nicely like seen below.

Screen Shot 2017-08-13 at 3.23.32 PM.png

YouTube Channel I enjoy watching: Dr. Julian Hosp

The cryptoconomy is probably one of the fastest changing ones I dealt with. After just not paying attention for three weeks, due to exams, I felt my knowledge was already completely outdated.
Dr. Julian Hosp, co-founder of Tenx and an absolute cryptoconomy expert, always helps me to stay up to speed and to understand the basics of new concepts. His video about IOTA was amazingly simple and I understood the concept, the opportunities, limitations and the future implications within just 30 minutes. I highly recommend checking him out. He is also on Steemit by the way.

Quote that inspired me: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” By M. Scott Peck

I have been reading “The Road less traveled” the last few days and while this book will be reviewed at the end of the month like other stuff I read, I liked this quote. I always believed that love is not a feeling but a verb. Peck shows very vividly that we choose to love and that we have to differentiate this love from the classical “falling in love”. The book was sold over 7 million times according to some versions on Amazon and it is a good read in my opinion, even if it is outdated on some parts.

#QOTD: What did you find interesting in the last week?

Please leave a comment with your thoughts and ideas.
My series of posts is about making you think a little deeper about every day concepts. So please, if you liked it upvote this article. It would mean the world to me, really!

Peace!

Twitter: @tkronsbein

Instagram: @tizian_kronsbein

Website: www.tiziankronsbein.com

References

Hosp, Julian (2017). IOTA vollständig & einfach erklärt: Was ist es? Wie funktioniert's? Investieren Ja/Nein? On YouTube. Available at:

Peck, M. Scott (1978). The road less traveled Free Press.

Poon, J.; Buterin, V. (2017). Plasma.io Available at: http://www.plasma.io

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