Sarah Parcak explains how she uses satellite imagery and data to solve one of the biggest challenges in archaeology: where to start digging. Her book is called 'Archaeology From Space: How The Future Shapes Our Past'. Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
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Python Bytes - #166 Misunderstanding software clocks and time
Topics covered in this episode:
- Amazon is now offering quantum computing as a service
- A quick-and-dirty guide on how to install packages for Python
- Say No to the no code movement
- What I learned going from prison to Python
- A real QUICK → Qt5 based gUI generator for ClicK
- Falsehoods programmers believe about time
- Extras
- Joke
The Daily Signal - Kris Vallotton on Community Impact, Culture and Political Discord
The "Bethel effect" is the term being used to describe the community impact of Bethel Church in Redding, CA. Bethel has gained national and international attention for their hands on approach to serving their city.
Pastor Kris Vallotton joins The Daily Signal podcast to explain how and why Bethel Church has chosen to love their community through action. He also explains how we can have real political impact and engage in dialogue with those who hold to different political views than our own.
Learn more about the work of Bethel Church and Kris Vallotton, check out these links:
Enjoy the show!
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Tulips
In the 1630s, the Netherlands experienced 'tulip mania' - a surge in demand for tulips from wealthy buyers, with some individual bulbs costing twenty times more than a carpenter's annual salary. Then, in February 1637, the price suddenly crashed. It's often cited as the first great financial bubble, but is that really the case? Tim Harford tries to sort fact from fiction.
CoinDesk Podcast Network - DISCUSSION: What Are Lightning Wallets Doing to Help Onboard New Users?
The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Earlier this week, the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show (Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Jonathan Mohan and Stephanie Murphy) gathered to discuss Lightning Network technology and two innovative approaches at the wallet level which simplify the new-user experience at a tangible, but seemingly minimal cost.
On today's podcast we zero in on the challenge of "Channel Management", an until-recently-mandatory part of connecting to and utilizing the still-nascent Lightning Network.
Until recently, the way Andreas sends a payment to Stephanie through Lightning is either through a direct channel to her or through a route of hops that can eventually reach Stephanie.
But if a user is brand new to the Lightning network, how do they go about receiving their first payment? - This question has been answered by both ZAP wallet and Phoenix wallet, using different techniques.
Phoenix wallet is made by ACINQ, the makers of Eclair wallet. Eclair offers more advanced/technical users a deeper look behind the hood of the inner workings with channel management being a manual operation.
With Phoenix, ACINQ has taken this away, with the aim of it being a more user friendly wallet for the end user - A more Mom and Pop style wallet.
When Stephanie, a new user of Phoenix wants to be paid by Andreas, she will create an invoice on her phone, just like any other wallet. Andreas will then scan that QR code, send the payment, and it will look just like any other Lightning transaction to Andreas.
If Stephanie currently has channels open with enough inbound capacity - Then it will complete successfully. But what happens when there is not enough inbound capacity, or no channels at all?
This is where Phoenix differs. Phoenix wallet offers no channel management to the end user, it is all done under the hood. The wallet ONLY connects to the ACINQ node, initially through a ‘fake channel’ and when an incoming payment is detected by ACINQ, the ‘routing hint’ that was contained in the QR code points to Stephanie’s wallet through this fake channel.
[Andreas → Node X → Node Y → ACINQ Node -*-*-> Stephanie]
Stephanie will then get notified that she has an incoming payment and be asked if she would like ACINQ to open a channel with her and push her the balance due (Turbo Channel). This comes at a cost though, 0.5% of the amount received. [Phoenix state that this is to cover the cost of opening the channel and allocating additional liquidity on their side]
POINTS OF INTEREST
- Is the ease of use factor worth the cost involved?
- If only connecting to the ACINQ node, will this create centralisation?
- What if ACINQ node goes down?
- Cheaper than using a Bitrefill Thor Turbo Channels?
NOTES
- Phoenix is non-custodial
- Phoenix claims to be “trust-minimized, but not trustless”
- Lightning node runs directly on the phone
- Phoenix offers no on-chain balance. All monies on the wallet are contained in channels.
- There is also the ability to send and receive on-chain bitcoin using swaps (this also comes with a fee)
ZAP takes a different approach to onboarding new users. Their aim is for users to be able to use their debit card to have bitcoin sent to them on the Lightning Network, even when they have a fresh wallet with no channels. Then the user has the ability to make payments on the Lightning Network.
The creator of ZAP, Jack Mallers has started a new services which he calls OLYMPUS. This service is standalone and can be implemented by other Lightning wallets, with there being no requirement for the Lightning wallet used to be ZAP.
Quoting from the Zap blog on what Olympus is:
“Olympus is an external service that clients make requests to. The service is responsible for the hard parts: onboarding users, processing payments, managing market risk, streaming quotes, and delivering bitcoins.”
Once payment has been received by Olympus, it will then open a Turbo channel to the user, with the pushed amount that they have just purchased with their debit card. With the use of a Turbo channel, the user is able to spend straight away. Jack Mallers has also stated that in the future Olympus will not only push the amount to the user but will also have some funds on their end of the channel. The amount to be staked by Olympus will vary depending on the users usage.
Currently Olympus is in Beta and available to only a few select users in the United States with a plan to roll out publicly and eventually to other countries
POINTS OF INTEREST
- Olympus requires KYC/AML
- If you are a business using the Olympus service will this mean that when the channel is opened to you, Olympus will open a channel with much higher funds on their end as opposed to if you are only an individual?
NOTES
- ZAP is non-custodial
- ZAP is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile (iOS and Android)
- ZAP can connect through a remote node on Mobile - On Desktop offers remote node and own neutrino node.
- Using ZAP wallet does not require KYC/AML - But using Olympus does
- ZAP has the ability to offer a version of their wallet that doesn’t contain the Olympus feature\
Want more? Catch up on 7 years of Let's Talk Bitcoin!
This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! is sponsored by Brave.com, eToro.com and Purse.io.
Mountain Stairs Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
Lightning Photo by Dominik QN on Unsplash
This episode was produced by James and featured Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, and Jonathan Mohan
Music for today's episode was provided by Jared Rubens, and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.
Would you like to Sponsor a future episode of the Let's Talk Bitcoin! show? Do you have any questions or comments? Email adam@ltbshow.com
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Unexpected Elements - Wuhan Coronavirus
The way in which a new virus has emerged in China is reminiscent of SARS, a highly infectious virus that spread rapidly. It’s so similar that Health officials demanded action as soon as its existence became known. And the Chinese authorities and global medical community have acted to try and stop the spread. Events were still developing, even as we were in the studio making this programme, new reports of suspected cases were coming in. The WHO was yet to give its view on the severity of the outbreak. This week’s edition is very much a snapshot of what we know or knew about this virus on the afternoon of Thursday January 23rd 2020.
Super-sized volcanic eruptions and giant asteroids crashing in from outer space are the stuff of disaster movies. They have listener Santosh from South Africa slightly concerned. He’d like to know what’s being done in real life to prepare for this kind of event.
Although the chance of these events occurring is low, Santosh isn’t entirely wrong to be worried: Earth has a much longer history than humans do, and there’s evidence that several past extinction events millions of years ago wiped out the dominant species on the planet at the time, as we’ve heard before on CrowdScience. The kind of extraordinary geological and extra-terrestrial hazards thought to be responsible for the death of millions of lives do still exist. So is there really any way that humans could survive where the dinosaurs – and plenty of other species – have failed?
Presenter Marnie Chesterton finds out by meeting experts who are already preparing for the remote but real possibility of the biggest disaster we could face. It turns out that in real life most things we can think of which could cause an extinction event are being watched closely by scientists and governmental agencies. How worried we should really be by the possibility of a sudden super-volcanic eruption at Yellowstone in the USA, or one of the other enormous volcanoes dotting our planet’s surface? Marnie heads into an underground bunker near the remote Scottish coast to find out if hiding out is a viable survival option. Now a museum, Scotland’s Secret Bunker, formerly RAF Troywood, is one of a network of nuclear shelters built by nation states during the Cold War. And she hears about one of the combined space agencies most ambitious projects yet: NASA and ESA’s Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment mission to crash an impactor into an asteroid’s moon to find out whether we could knock any potentially problematic collisions off-course well before Earth impact.
(Image: Wuhan Residents wear masks to buy vegetables in the market. Credit: Getty Images)
Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons - Celebrating Lunar New Year With Food and Culture
Monica Eng and Louisa Chu, co-hosts of the Chewing Podcast, talk about the history of Chinese food in Chicago, and Monica softens her stance on Americanized Chinese food.
Curious City - Are Chicagoans True Midwesterners?
Chicago is geographically in the Midwest. But many people believe that being “Midwestern” is something else entirely.
Lex Fridman Podcast - Cristos Goodrow: YouTube Algorithm
Cristos Goodrow is VP of Engineering at Google and head of Search and Discovery at YouTube (aka YouTube Algorithm).
This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.
This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.
Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
00:00 – Introduction
03:26 – Life-long trajectory through YouTube
07:30 – Discovering new ideas on YouTube
13:33 – Managing healthy conversation
23:02 – YouTube Algorithm
38:00 – Analyzing the content of video itself
44:38 – Clickbait thumbnails and titles
47:50 – Feeling like I’m helping the YouTube algorithm get smarter
50:14 – Personalization
51:44 – What does success look like for the algorithm?
54:32 – Effect of YouTube on society
57:24 – Creators
59:33 – Burnout
1:03:27 – YouTube algorithm: heuristics, machine learning, human behavior
1:08:36 – How to make a viral video?
1:10:27 – Veritasium: Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir?
1:13:20 – Making clips from long-form podcasts
1:18:07 – Moment-by-moment signal of viewer interest
1:20:04 – Why is video understanding such a difficult AI problem?
1:21:54 – Self-supervised learning on video
1:25:44 – What does YouTube look like 10, 20, 30 years from now?
More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS More or Less: Dozy Science
Anxiety around sleep is widespread. Many of us feel we don?t get enough. An army of experts has sprung up to help, and this week we test some of the claims from one of the most prominent among them: Professor Matthew Walker. He plays ball and answers some of the criticisms of his bestselling book Why We Sleep.