Wickow Good News is a podcast available on https://wicklowgoodnews.buzzsprout.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/Wicklow-Good-News-108171104170251/ to tell the good news stories coming out of Wicklow as Irish people rise in solidarity with front line workers to help their neighbours. Wicklow Good News was set up by Jillian Godsil and Marlena Murphy. Over the coming weeks they hope to speak with the many heroes who shine despite the terrible times. We will overcome and we will overcome together. The first guest to speak on the show was Michelle Lynch Power, audiologist and activist based in Greystones but working in Tallaght Hospital. Michelle was previously on the Wicklow This Week radio programme on East Coast FM which I presented until COVID19 put a stop to all that. On that occasion, the subject of the interview was her daughter Grace who was only 5 years of age. Two years prior Grace has seen a picture of a child with no hair undergoing cancer treatment. She was very upset, even as a three year old, and wanted to do something to help. Her response was to grow her hair so that she could donate it to a charity. Two years later with lots of tears, as tangles were […]
Continue readingAuthor Archive: Jillian Godsil
Before the Surge
Today as we enter lockdown here in Ireland we are also waiting for the surge. So many new terms for our condition; social distancing, cocooning, washing hands, not touching our face, and of course the surge. In a matter of days my perception of the world has changed. Daily, I search online for news, mostly news of deaths, across the world. Nightly, I wait for our own account of new cases and new deaths. And recently when watching television, I shuddered when I saw a normal gathering of people – too close too close I thought – and I physically recoiled when two people hugged on screen. Suddenly two metres is the new norm. As a young teenage I loved history and studied it in Trinity. I particularly loved World War 1 for many reasons including the innocence, the heroism, and the misplaced notions of patriotism. In a war fought over a tiny principality the reality was far from any notion of fighting for good, whatever that might mean anyway. I studied stories in the trenches, about the boredom and then the going over the top. I read one story of a young captain who brought his football to the […]
Continue readingJonha Richman – where in the world is Jonha Richman?
In February of this year I interviewed the lovely Jonha Richman. The article is below – it is a gentle article that spends more time on another podcast – Planet Money – than her story but I liked it well enough. Right now I am trying to get in contact with Jonha. I have a question to ask her. If you know her or perhaps live on the same street or maybe go to the same cafe would you mind asking her to give me a buzz. And the question I want to ask is – Are you okay Jonha? Thank you Jillian Godsil Jonha Richman – and the five year bet Sometimes people can be lighthouses – and shine light onto other topics rather than themselves. This was the case when I interviewed Jonha Richman who explained to me about a famous NPR podcast, or rather two podcasts, recorded five years apart. This is the story of the future of money. January 2014 and NPR’s Podcast Planet Money was witness to an unusual bet. Hosts Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum were talking about predictions. Jacob said that he disliked most predictions as they were often ‘weaselly’ by which he […]
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Kleros – The Justice Protocol Explained
CCN Every so often a blockchain project that comes along that knocks your socks off and Kleros may be just the that one. Steeped in intellectual concepts, Kleros delivers a decentralised organisation that promises fast, affordable and transparent justice for all. Given that we live in a time were justice is perceived to the preserve of the rich, this platform may very well change the world. Let’s start with the name and philosophical origins. Kleros derives from the Greek. Jury duty was much sought after in Ancient Greece and moreover paid. Citizens wishing to be picked for jury duty would submit tokens, called pinakions, into an allotment machine called a kleroterion. A justice officer would use a dice on the side of the machine eliminating random names with the remaining people selected. Fast forward into more recent history and consider the work of American economist Thomas Schelling. He set up an experiment where he asked students to rendezvous in New York without giving either party a time or place. The most popular choice selected was the information booth in Grand Central Station at noon. This introduced the concept of the Focal Point, often called the Schelling point, where people can […]
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FundRequest, Aiming To Monetize Open Software
CCN The open software community is a very special space. People are committed to open source as an ideology, a way of collaborating and a way of being. For many it is also a pastime or hobby to jump onto a platform like GitHub and start solving other people’s issues. There are downfalls, of course, sometimes solutions can be a long time coming. Waiting six months for a bug fix is not really ideal in a commercial operation. There is also the possibility of getting bad fixes or inelegant code. Given the open nature of the community it is hard to police and hard to determine quality. Having said that, the open source community has come on a long way in the past twenty years. Nowadays many commercial operations use multiple elements of open source in their overall systems. The overall quality is as good, if not better than proprietary software (think of all those super brains fixing common issues) and it is typically robust and secure. FundRequest is a project looking to propel open source to the next level – without compromising the core ethos of the community. The concept was originated by Karel Striegel, a Belgium IT entrepreneur. […]
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Xtrade And Gimmer Form Trading Partnership
CCN Xtrade.io’s vision is to bring Wall Street Trading to the emerging Cryptocurrency markets. Before Christmas CCN interviewed Alexander Kravets on his new idea. An experienced trader with more than 20 years in the business, Kravets understood that for cryptotrading to be successful, it had to somehow mirror traditional trading. Today Kravets announces a new partnerhship with Gimmer, an existing decentralised automated cryptocurrency trading platform. XTRADE.IO will be bringing their expertise to further develop Gimmer’s back end systems. This will include building a unified FIX API to allow Gimmer users to execute strategies across multiple exchanges automatically as well as aggregated liquidity. Kravets says, ‘Gimmer is a pioneer in the retail algorithmic crypto market space and an ideal partner for leveraging XTRADE’s institutional grade infrastructure, single-portal API, and multi-market connectivity for market data and execution. By partnering with XTRADE.IO, Gimmer and their clients can expect higher fill rates, deeper liquidity across exchanges, greater opportunities for arbitrage, longer uptimes, and reduced latencies for multi-asset crypto execution’,’ he says. Using AI, Gimmer’s trading bots can execute deals quickly at the best possible price. Gimmer already has a working beta version and a crypto trading bot app that has been downloaded over 10,000 times. The […]
Continue readingCreating A Safe Haven For Crypto Investors
CCN The X8Currency ICO closed early. It reached its hard cap of €3.4million on Saturday, a full week before the closure date. Founder and CEO Gregor Koželj, whose voice is worn out through speaking so much, is very happy. His project, an ultimate safe haven for crypto investors, is a way to provide an alternative to the current financial system. ‘I don’t want to replace the traditional financial systems,’ he explains. ‘Replacing systems always involves too many hurdles, I want to transcend the current financial system – to offer a real alternative.’ Currency and its fluctuations played a big part on Koželj’s upbringing. Living in Slovenia, he witnessed the deflation of his native currency, the tolar – as a child his savings to purchase a bike were downgraded to only a tyre when the tolar lost its value – and he remembers the value of foreign currency when given as a present by visitors. ‘As a result I have always been fascinated by currency,’ he says. As a grownup he followed his passion and worked in trading and investment. As head of asset management for a major brokerage he started to notice some unusual results. ‘When working with large […]
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Blockchain And Traditional Industries – Where Is The Overlap?
CCN Everyone knows that blockchain is transformational but sometimes it is hard to get one’s head around how it can transform a traditional industry. Kyle Forkey, CEO of Ethmint, thinks he may have the answer. ‘Blockchain at its most simple has a very simple value proposition,’ he says. ‘It is a way to show ownership and can be a way to raise capital. That makes sense.’ He has a point. He is currently advising for Moria, an asset backed, ICO. The asset in question is a real life gold mine based in Colorado, US. The project, billed as the world’s first decentralised investment platform for the extraction of precious metals, looks to reward investors with annual premiums far in excess of normal investment terms, but maybe not as much as traditional crypto investors might wish for. Given the week that is in it, with the spectacular crashes in value across bitcoin and its alt mates, this might not be a bad thing. The mine is located in Colorado and is part of the ‘Gregory Lode’ once said to be the richest square mile on earth. Called the Bates Hunter Mine it extends over 35 acres of ground cover and consists of a […]
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Learning More About NEO, The Chinese Ethereum, Malcolm Lerider Explains
CCN NEO offers the possibility of both Public and Private blockchains in the same ecosystem Zalando, located in the heart of Dublin’s Silicon docks, was the venue for the first meetup of NEO – dubbed the Chinese Ethereum – in Dublin. It was also the kick start off for a European tour with the NEO stars heading off to London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Zurich before ending January with a large two-day DevCon in San Francisco. The Meetup was oversubscribed twofold with many developers disappointed not to make the gig. The main speaker was Malcolm Lerider, senior R&D manager for NEO. His talk covered off the key components of NEO, namely that it was designed with business in mind. Lerider spoke of the main features promised by NEO including speed. ‘We can cope with thousands of transactions per second,’ he said. ‘That is pretty impressive but I have to warn you that there are other projects suggesting they can offer multiples of that – I ask you to listen with a degree of scepticism. Claims like that are all using off-chain scaling mechanisms, which are technologies just as easily applied NEO. In the end, the on-chain single core processing speed is […]
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Trying To Inspire Socially Responsible Trading, Bobby Bhatia, TrakInvest
CCN Bobby Bhatia has worked in finance his entire career, much of it based in Asia, working for some of the biggest names in banking and trading. In his sector, he observed the way the world was changing, in particular for millennials and their careers. ‘The world went from too little data to too much data almost overnight,’ he says. ‘And there was little or no curation. Artificial Intelligence was added in and all of a sudden the challenges facing millennials in their careers were huge.’ ‘I saw an opportunity to teach trading as a life skill, proving a primary or even a second income.’ ‘In Institutional trading the odds are stacked against the little guy,’ he says. ‘I felt there had to be a way to close the gap and also to head towards a social responsible trading concept.’ Not normally terms associated with trading but Bhatia is on the money in terms of his timing. He first set up TrakInvest in 2014. It was a free to use, gamified trading platform with phantom money. It was also a world first. Mirroring the top ten equity exchanges across the world, people could set up accounts and learn to trade […]
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