K's Learning Diary

Personally, I find it quite exciting that some of the technologies that I used to imagine are now making their appearances into reality. Things like real-time translation, image and face recognition, voice command interaction, these are all now possible and improving vastly with the increasingly powerful supercomputing capabilities over the cloud, where the heavy-lifting is done remotely by large machines elsewhere and the result is sent directly to your mobile devices with minimum delays. In this new era, there may be a new currency emerging -data. The collective data we all give away by using these free services may be even more valuable than any money that we would be willing to offer. Is this a fair price to pay? It seems that most users think so when they use Google (or Apple, or Yahoo, Or Facebook, Twitter...).

Have you ever thought about owning shares of those mighty US corporate giants, such as Microsoft, Cisco, or Apple and benefit from their global success? (well, provided that you get them at a good price..). If you are British and live in the UK, it is actually quite easy to do. Simply call your stock broker and ask to activate your dealing account for US trading. You will be asked to fill in an Individual Investor declaration form which takes about 10 minutes (asking questions such as status of employment, do you trade professionally or for a company...etc.). The form is renewed annually to keep the record up-to-date.  And.. that is it really, you are ready to go. Bear in mind that there are also currency exchange and tax considerations to think about. As a foreign person, your stock broker can also provide you with a Form W-8BEN , to reduce the amount of withholding tax that you are required to pay if you receive any dividends. Here are more advices from the Telegra

If you do some searches online and read on the subject of vision correction, you will soon find that other than the mainstream lens prescriptions, Specsavers. contact lenses, laser eye surgeries, there is another group of people that believe the eyes can be trained to 'correct' vision. And it's not a recent theory either, the methods promoted by Dr. Bates has been around for more than 100 years.  Based on personal experience, the theory seems intuitive. The habitual incorrect use of the eyes can lead to poorer vision over time (i.e. still trying to see when the eyes are tired). When this happens, we usually get glasses to try and compensate for the incorrect focus. However, in doing so the eyes accepted this new poorer vision as the 'normal' state and therefore are not exercised or challenged to even try and restore to its previous state. From that point, the vision can only get worse if the habitual incorrect use of the eyes persist. The system therefo

I have been following an online course lately. A bunch of different programming languages were thrown in as part of the syllabus. However, after completing about 1/3 of the course, I can't help but wonder if I should invest more time perfecting these languages, or if those were merely taught to demonstrate the concepts and ideas. So which programming languages should you learn? Among others, website Dev/Code/Hack suggests a different question - what is the problem that you are trying to solve? In other words, your intended application. The popular languages today are: Ruby, Python, PHP, Objective-C, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, .Net, C/C++. Oh, they even included handy summary tables of what each of the languages are typically used for - very useful. Personally I don't know enough about the industry to comment on which language specialists tend to be higher earners, but author of the blog seems to suggest: Python, Objective-C, JavaScript, HTML, CSS. You'll als