At Nomad PHP our goal is to empower developers in building a habit of continuous learning - and that means we have a habit of continuous improvement ourselves. Here are just some of the things we've done this year (with much more coming down the road)!
Website Redesign
We've refreshed the look and feel of Nomad PHP to better emphasize the goal of Nomad PHP - to help developers build a habit of continuous learning and grow their careers. This includes numerous usability enhancements as well as a focus on our new book library, blogs, and certification in addition to virtual meetups, workshops, conferences, and on-demand videos.
Free Meetups
As technology has advanced, more and more meetups and usergroups are able to stream their local usergroup meetings.
As our goal has always been to make technology accessible, we are proud to provide free streaming technology for local user groups, and share local user group meetings on our live virtual meetup schedule.
Student and Professional subscribers will continue to have access to our monthly conference level Pro Talks, hands on virtual workshops, and live conference streams in addition to streams by local user groups.
As our mission has evolved from being the meetup for developers without a meetup group to building an inclusive community of PHP developers where you can network, grow your skills, and share your knowledge with others - we are excited to announce our new Free Tier.
To provide the best value, we've also restructured our plans to provide professional online meetings, workshops, and conference streaming to our Student Tier. This will allow students and new developers the chance to learn from the best speakers and top practioners and obtain entry level certifications at the best price possible.
However, with the addition of PHP Books and Magazines, and in order to provide the best value while keeping the Student plan affordable, new Student subscribers will not have access to the PHP Book and Magazine Library, or advanced certifications. These will now require a professional plan.
We're excited to announce that we have expanded our PHP library. In addition to the ability to read the latest issues of php[architect] magazine, Professional subscribers now have access to read PHP and web development books online.
We're excited to announce the availability of Chris Hartjes' bookThe Grumpy Programmer's Guide to Testing PHP Applications, as well as several titles from Notes for Professionals, andUndisturbed REST: a Guide to Designing the Perfect API.
More titles including exclusive titles will be made available for online reading soon.
We've received a lot of feedback on the blog writing process, and have upgraded several aspects of our blogging software. This includes the ability to save drafts prior to publishing, and the ability to upload, edit, and crop images and videos. We've also added some bug fixes for editing and writing code.
We're also excited to share that members with Student and Professional plans can now have their ownVLOG (video blog) with the ability to screencast/ record video from your webcam within the blog.
To see the most recent blog posts, or write your own, visit the Nomad PHP Blogs.
Certification Updates
We've updated our certifications for better usability and readability. We've also reworked some of the code samples and questions in our Level 1 PHP Certification exam.
You can find our available exams, test your skills, and obtain your Nomad PHP certification here.
Team Management
Our new team manager allows you to easily add or remove team members with your Nomad PHP team subscription. You'll also find real time metrics on how your team is using Nomad PHP, who on your team is investing in their growth and streaming meetups, watching videos, reading books, and earning certifications, and the overall content value consumed by your team.
The Team Manager is available to new teams, and will be made available to existing team managers over the next several weeks.
2020 Roadmap
There's still plenty of more great things coming in 2020. Here are the items at the top of our list:
* Mobile app for offline viewing
* Desktop app for offline viewing
* Nomad PHP member only books
* PHP Level 2 Certification
* Interactive tutorials
* Better video support in blogs
* Ability to schedule blog posts
* Meeting software for local usergroups
* Improved plan management for subscribers Of course, what's most important to us is what's most important to you. Leave what you want to see on Nomad PHP in the comments below and if we're able to we'll get it added to our roadmap!
Technology is constantly changing the way we interact, research, and react. One such way artificial intelligence is impacting our daily lives, and we may not even realize it is in weather forecasting.
The forecast we usually have been receiving in our phones and in older times primarily in newspapers, was based on data collected via satellites, radar system and weather balloons. In recent times there has been the addition of IoT based sensors as well. However, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) finding its way in numerous areas, AI has taken a role in improving the accuracy of weather as well.
The Dataset expansion
A significantly enormous set of data is available - from the weather satellites in space, to the private and government owned weather stations which are gaining real-time data. IBM for instance has more the 0.25 million weather stations that help IBM collect real-time data. Additionally, as we are in the age of Internet of Things (IOT), each small device to big device- cellphones, solar panels and vehicles everything has become or is yet to become yet another data source. Companies like GE have installed IOT street lights, which help in monitoring air quality and humidity. These are some of the few sources which help us in collecting the vast amount of data necessary for building on the AI technology, in future these sources and the amount of available data would grow exponentially.
Google and Weather forecast
Using the AI technology Google is able to develop a weather forecast tool, it has been trained to predict rainfalls accurately as much as six hours before. The underlying technology on which this prediction is build upon is U-Net convolutional neural network which is originally used in biomedical research. It works by taking satellite images as input and uses AI technology to transform these images into high resolution images. The only off-set is this is not real-time prediction and the delay due to complex calculations results in using six-hour old data and hence can only predict six-hours before.
IBM and its efforts in weather prediction
The quest for IBM to venture into weather forecasting began with IBM acquiring The Weather Company. IBM plans on using the large amount of weather data available coupled with IBM Watson and the cloud platform to enhance weather forecasting. In 2019 IBM developed Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System (GRAF) in order to forecast weather conditions 12 hours prior to a greater degree of accuracy. The radius encompassed by the GRAF is also more narrowed down up to 3 kilometers as opposed to generally being 10-15 kilometers. Another of its marvel is that it gives accurate predictions down to each hour and not just daily.
Artificial Intelligence and Panasonic
Panasonic is the company behind TAMDAR, the weather sensor installed on commercial airplanes. With this advantage of extensive amount of data from in-flight sensors as well as publicly available data Panasonic developed Global 4D Weather. Proving to their claim of being the most advanced global forecasting platform globally they were able to timely predict Hurricane Irma in its early days.
Uses of Weather Forecasting
Sales
Everyday life decisions are affected by weather, it makes us choose in the way we travel, things we eat and things we buy to wear. The rise in temperature may increase sales of chilled drinks, if the company is fully aware of the forecast it would be able to manage productions as per demand. AI can help brands in maximizing sales based on weather forecasts and in minimizing waste.
Natural Disasters
The Panasonic Global 4D weather predicting Hurricane Irma is just another example where timely prediction can save millions of lives in face of situations like floods and Hurricanes. Companies like IBM combine weather forecasting data with utilities distribution network, which enables them to narrow down areas with likely outages. This enables utilities to place their workforce timely so the repair process catering to damage repairs post disasters is shortened. This in turn brings huge benefits to the overall economy.
Agriculture
The weather and agriculture have the most obvious correlation, each process in farming from sowing to reaping all depends on the weather. As farmers cultivate on huge farming lands, accurate information about each part of the land can help farmers in improving their crops and yield by manifolds. Weather conditions can lead to almost 90 percent of crop losses, 25 percent of these losses can be avoided using accurate AI prediction models to forecast weather and in turn improve the yield.
Transportation
Sea travel has always been eventful, timely prediction of storms by using machine learning techniques and hyper-local data allows companies to plan shipments accordingly and avoid severe weather conditions that usually result in delays. Tools like IBM’s Operations Dashboard for Ground Transportation equips in enhancing productivity based on weather predictions.
Another of the implementation of AI in transportation industry corelating to weather is fuel consumption. For instance, using weather prediction models to reduce airplane fuel consumption during its ascent.
To conclude Artificial Intelligence has a key role to play in weather forecasting, weather direct or indirectly impacts each sector in the economy. As the amount of information available to improve predictions increases exponentially it gives a chance to AI to improve accuracy even further. As we continue narrowing down weather conditions precise to time and location the benefits of such advancements across all industries are innumerable.
g10dra 161,322 
mike 111,257 
crocodile2u 108,853 
harikrishnanr 87,813 
christiemarie 82,373 
calevans 57,491 
HowTos 56,080 
MindNovae 55,736 
dmamontov 25,412 
tanja 
Nomad PHP
