PopSci

1. Transporting prototypes

The idea of the DO-RA project originated in March 2011 after a nuclear disaster on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. This gadget was conceived as a personal dosimeter/radiometer working with eponymous software (DO-RA.Soft) on mobile platforms (iOS, Android, WP) as well as on desktop platforms—Windows/Linux/MacOS.

At the end of 2017, a tourist from China brought in his backpack ten long-awaited prototypes from the DO-RA.Q test batch. They were manufactured in China based on our design documents and then transported from Shenzhen to Moscow. By the way, the development of design documents was assigned to the largest Design Centre in Eastern Europe—the PROMWAD company. The documents were clear and plain—prepared in IPC format and written in proper English—to enable the automated production of electronic devices in a foreign country.

Inspiration sometimes arrives in strange ways. Here is the story of how a dirty disposable diaper led to the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) solution to help rid the world’s coasts of massive amounts of waste and garbage.

Indibiome is the new black, following the steps of electric and computer engineering industries, we are foreseeing indibiome design bureaus able to solve unmet needs in healthcare, agriculture, food production, industrial applications.

Indibiome is discussed in my previous paper in Russian (link). Shortly indibiome is indigenous microbiome, like indigenous people, term is used below in the meaning «inherent to the media, localised and optimised for sustainable existence»).

Microbes have always been there, however technologies allowing efficient microbes manipulation and accumulated genetic and experimental data on variety of microbial communities has been on the rise only last decade. Below is my concept of interdisciplinary «indibiome bureau» and you are most welcome to give feedback.

Why is Elixir/Phoenix achieving such a high rate of adoption in the software development industry? What are the best use cases of this language? Are there any drawbacks when using it? We talked to Sergiy Kukunin, a full-stack developer at Spotlight and an Elixir expert, to find answers to these and other questions.

From idea to implementation: modifying the existing elliptic curve signature scheme to be deterministic and providing functions on it to obtain verifiable within the blockchain pseudorandom numbers.

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Quick links

— The Road to Version 12
— First, Some Math
— The Calculus of Uncertainty
— Classic Math, Elementary and Advanced
— More with Polygons
— Computing with Polyhedra
— Euclid-Style Geometry Made Computable
— Going Super-Symbolic with Axiomatic Theories
— The n-Body Problem
— Language Extensions & Conveniences
— More Machine Learning Superfunctions
— The Latest in Neural Networks
— Computing with Images
— Speech Recognition & More with Audio
— Natural Language Processing
— Computational Chemistry
— Geographic Computing Extended
— Lots of Little Visualization Enhancements
— Tightening Knowledgebase Integration
— Integrating Big Data from External Databases
— RDF, SPARQL and All That
— Numerical Optimization
— Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis
— New, Sophisticated Compiler
— Calling Python & Other Languages
— More for the Wolfram “Super Shell”
— Puppeting a Web Browser
— Standalone Microcontrollers
— Calling the Wolfram Language from Python & Other Places
— Linking to the Unity Universe
— Simulated Environments for Machine Learning
— Blockchain (and CryptoKitty) Computation
— And Ordinary Crypto as Well
— Connecting to Financial Data Feeds
— Software Engineering & Platform Updates
— And a Lot Else…

I decided to make an interview with one of my American friends — Rob Vugteveen. He was working as a FORTRAN programmer back in 1980s, so it's quite a unique experience.


Rob Vugteveen, Carson City, Nevada, USA

K: Hi Rob. I've heard you were working as a Fortran programmer many years ago. Is that right? How the industry was looking back then?

R: Good morning, Kirill.

In the 1980s I made my living as a FORTRAN programmer in the mining industry, primarily in the processing of exploration data and presenting it graphically. We were using VAX minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation. This was a time when desktop PCs were growing in popularity, and procedural languages like FORTRAN were being challenged by object-oriented languages. Also, graphics display systems were shifting away from character-cell terminals to X-window-based displays.

FORTRAN (“FORmula TRANslation”) was built for computationally intensive programs, and it did not have its own graphic libraries to display information. There were companies that sold large FORTRAN subroutine libraries to provide that capability. These were not yet designed for the growing popularity of X-window technology.

When we were forced to move from expensive VAX computers to cheaper PCs, we had to write hybrid programs using FORTRAN for computations and C++ for display. It was a bit messy at first. I left that job for something completely different (building a mining museum) and haven’t really done any programming since.

FORTRAN is still used today in scientific research for computationally intensive work, but I’m sure it’s been adapted to work with graphical display systems through external subroutines written in object-oriented code.

Today’s taxi market is crowded with ride-sharing apps like Uber, Ola, and Lyft. They are giving serious competition for upcoming ventures. These on-demand apps have initiated the radical shift in the taxi industry enabling the smooth transition from conventional taxi hailing to booking a cab through an app. Customers are opting for hailing taxis through the app because of its reliability to get a taxi and ensuring a much better cab booking experience. Thus, the taxi market is ripe for the taking, and this is the right time for entrepreneurs to make use of the opportunity.

Statistics on the Taxi Industry

The traditional taxi industry is still stuck with inefficient phone call bookings, competitors and they stand to lose at least $20 million on an everyday basis just because customers couldn’t find a cab. Another statistics survey tells us that almost 80% of the commuter prefer Ola and Uber over regular taxis and that Uber has completed nearly 2 billion rides since its inception. The profits soared over $20 Billion in the process. What made Uber and Ola successful ventures is the sound business strategy they employed. So if you are going to establish your venture then understanding the market is imperative.

Saluting my LED lamp fans!

Today we will talk about the palpitating and extremely popular subject in recent years — filament LED (Light-Emitted Diode) lamps. Numerous articles have been published here on Habr (1, 2, 3) and on the web, but none of them tells us a word about in-depth analysis of the lamps (what is actually inside) and comparison of their temperature characteristics. Therefore, especially for you — my dear LED-lovers — I conducted a detailed analysis of such lamps from different manufacturers, including temperature measurement of LEDs themselves.

Afterwards we will try to answer the question: are filament lamps as good as marketers present them to us?

Disclaimer: this is my very first attempt to translate and adopt an article from Habr into English, so I will ask you to give a fruitful feedback and correct some mistake if any present.

With the recent progress in Neural Networks in general and image Recognition particularly, it might seem that creating an NN-based application for image recognition is a simple routine operation. Well, to some extent it is true: if you can imagine an application of image recognition, then most likely someone have already did something similar. All you need to do is to Google it up and to repeat.

However, there are still countless little details that… they are not insolvable, no. They simply take too much of your time, especially if you are a beginner. What would be of help is a step-by-step project, done right in front of you, start to end. A project that does not contain «this part is obvious so let's skip it» statements. Well, almost :)

In this tutorial we are going to walk through a Dog Breed Identifier: we will create and teach a Neural Network, then we will port it to Java for Android and publish on Google Play.

For those of you who want to see a end result, here is the link to NeuroDog App on Google Play.

Web site with my robotics: robotics.snowcron.com.
Web site with: NeuroDog User Guide.

Here is a screenshot of the program:

Three years ago, ASCON, the parent company of C3D Labs, invited cosmonaut and Hero of the Soviet Union Aleksandr Laveykin to its Partnership Conference. As a guest speaker, he told the audience of Russian IT companies about his 174-day spaceflight and answered questions posed by conference attendees.

Up to now, the Q&A had not been translated into English. We post them for upcoming International Day of Human Space Flight (or Cosmonautics Day in Russia).

Aleksandr Laveykin flew to space in 1987 and worked as a flight engineer on board the Mir Space Station, orbiting the Earth for six months. He completed three spacewalks lasting a total of eight hours and 48 minutes.


Image: TASS

The last decades the world economy regularly falls into this vortex of financial crises that have affected each country. It almost led to the collapse of the existing financial system, due to this fact, experts in mathematical and economic modelling have become to use methods for controlling the losses of the asset and portfolio in the financial world (Lechner, L. A., and Ovaert, T. C. (2010). There is an increasing trend towards mathematical modelling of an economic process to predict the market behaviour and an assessment of its sustainability (ibid). Having without necessary attention to control and assess properly threats, everybody understands that it is able to trigger tremendous cost in the development of the organisation or even go bankrupt.

Value at Risk (VaR) has eventually been a regular approach to catch the risk among institutions in the finance sector and its regulator (Engle, R., and Manganelli S., 2004). The model is originally applied to estimate the loss value in the investment portfolio within a given period of time as well as at a given probability of occurrence. Besides the fact of using VaR in the financial sector, there are a lot of examples of estimation of value at risk in different area such as anticipating the medical staff to develop the healthcare resource management Zinouri, N. (2016). Despite its applied primitiveness in a real experiment, the model consists of drawbacks in evaluation, (ibid).

The goal of the report is a description of the existing VaR model including one of its upgrade versions, namely, Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR). In the next section and section 3, the evaluation algorithm and testing of the model are explained. For a vivid illustration, the expected loss is estimated on the asset of one of the Kazakhstani company trading in the financial stock exchange market in a long time period. The final sections 4 and 5 discuss and demonstrate the findings of the research work.

The “winner takes all” principle seems to be less relevant to a startup business model than to a corporate business. Why so? The thing is that a cumulative advantage inherent in a contemporary globalized economy when the bigger you are the more chances you have for a further growth works beyond poorly regulated environments to which startups belong. The startup phenomenon in general and the IoT startups in particular are too immature in terms of a business-model history. In contrast to corporations, startups feel good in a Black-Swan-friendly uncertainty of emerging innovations. They operate in risky fields, they gamble oftentimes. But an immense focus on their own topics is what helps them survive. Indeed, dedication is an antidote to risks.

Originally article was posted here — 5 IoT startups in Logistic

Laziness moves the world. And today we have more and more robotic vacuum cleaners that are saving our time for something more pleasant than just vacuuming.

The robots were marketed as internet/Bluetooth/smartphone connected devices with a speaker and camera to report and explore the environment. They also have different sensors to dodge barriers and such. But that’s only some ordinary stuff everyone knows about the robotic vacuum cleaners.
But the most interesting thing about them is their software. The owners can reprogram these devices and implement different settings as well as voice acting that has a huge number of options, including funny ones. And all you need to “upgrade” your vacuum cleaner is a PC, an internet connection, and a smartphone:

I’m going to have a guess and say that everyone whose friends or family have ever flown on a plane, have used Flightradar24 — a free and convenient service for tracking flights in real time.



In the first part the basic ideas of operation were described. Now let's go further and figure out, what data is exactly transmitting and receiving between the aircraft and a ground station. We'll also decode this data using Python.

Liza Alert search-and-rescue team has existed for eight years. It’s a volunteer organization, the fellowship of the ones who care, that searches for missing people effectively collaborating with the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Liza Alert collects the entries on missing people; they conduct various educational events, search management and search operations themselves. The team isn’t involved in any business activities, doesn’t have a checking account and doesn’t accept monetary donations.

Mail.Ru has recently provided Liza Alert with a free platform for services, extensively used for search-and-rescue operations. We decided to talk to Sergey Chumak — the head of Liza Alert IT branch — about the work of the volunteer emergency response group and how high-tech solutions aid them.

Google loves easter eggs. It loves them so much, in fact, that you could find them in virtually every product of theirs. The tradition of Android easter eggs began in the very earliest versions of the OS (I think everyone there knows what happens when you go into the general settings and tap the version number a few times).

But sometimes you can find an easter egg in the most unlikely of places. There’s even an urban legend that one day, a programmer Googled “mutex lock”, but instead of search results landed on foo.bar, solved all tasks and landed a job at Google.


The same thing (except without the happy ending) happened to me. Hidden messages where there definitely couldn’t be any, reversing Java code and its native libraries, a secret VM, a Google interview — all of that is below.

At Microsoft, we’re investing in helping our customers as they move to the cloud. We see an opportunity to help support companies in this changing environment by bringing our security, privacy, compliance and intellectual property assets and expertise to bear in order to help them be more successful. We’re excited to now take an additional step that expands innovation protections.

Today, we are pleased to announce the expansion of the Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program to include new benefits for Azure IoT innovators and startups. We first announced Azure IP Advantage in February 2017, to provide comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks for our cloud customers. A trend we saw at the time – and one that continues today – is a growing risk to cloud innovation from patent lawsuits. Last year, we joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) and the License on Transfer (LOT) Network to help address patent assertion risk for our customers and partners.

This article in our blog.

Web application firewall

Web application firewalls (WAFs) are a type of intrusion detection and prevention system and might be either a hardware or software solution. It is specifically designed to inspect HTTP(s) and analyse the GET and POST requests using the appalling detection logic explained below. Web application firewall software is generally available as a web server plugin.

WAF has become extremely popular and various companies offer a variety of solutions in different price categories, from small businesses to large corporations. Modern WAF is popular because it has a wide range of covered tasks, so web application developers can rely on it for various security issues, but with the assumption that this solution cannot guarantee absolute protection. A basic WAF workflow is shown below.



Its main function is the detection and blocking of queries in which, according to WAF analysis, there are some anomalies, or an attacking vector is traced. Such an analysis should not make it difficult for legitimate users to interact with a web application, but, at the same time, it must accurately and timely detect any attempted attack. In order to implement this functionality, WAF developers usually use regular expressions, tokens, behavioural analysis, reputation analysis and machine learning, and, often, all these technologies are used together.



In addition, WAF can also provide other functionality: protection from DDoS, blocking of IP-addresses of attackers, tracking of suspicious IP-addresses, adding an HTTP-only flag to the cookie, or adding the functionality of CSRF-tokens. Each WAF is individual and has a unique internal arrangement, but there are some typical methods used for analysis.

I like PHP for development speed and excellent portability. It's great to have such a tool in your pocket, always ready to solve problems.

For me it was quite sad that there was no Waves Platform SDK for PHP when i first met this nice blockchain. Well, I had to write such kit.