TWIL - Week #48

This Week I Learned:

• Udacity had 1.6 million students registered with it but just about 10% of them actually finished the course they enrolled for. And of those, about 5% qualified for a passing grade.
• According to one study, the most popular TED presentations shared three basic principles. Ideas that spread are emotional, novel, and memorable. TED talks are memorable because no speaker is allowed to talk for more than 18 minutes on the TED stage.
• The first two stanzas (out of six stanzas) of Vande Mataram were given the official status of the "national song" of the Republic of India.  Fearful of the potential danger of an incited Indian populace, the then ruling British Government at one point banned the utterance of "Vande Mataram" in public forums.
• Constables consitute 92% of the India's Police force.
• According to the Union finance minister, P.Chidambaram rice is not an "agricultural produce" since it undergoes processing in a rice mill to convert it from paddy to rice. Service tax is planned to be levied on "non-agricultural produce"
• According to the last census (2011), India had 736 million people under 30, and 121 million in the ages of 18 and 30.
• With 70 billionaires, India is home to the fifth largest group of billionaires in the world. India has higher number of these super rich individuals than Germany, Switzerland, France and Japan. 
• On 11 May 1661, the marriage treaty of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal, placed the islands constituting Bombay in possession of the British Empire, as part of Catherine's dowry to Charles.
• Marie is one of the fastest-growing biscuit categories along with cookies and creams, growing 17%-18% a year whereas the overall biscuit industry is growing at 7%-8% rate. Today, the category in the organised biscuit market is worth around 3,500 crore with Britannia dominating the category. Marie, created by the London bakery Peek Freans in 1874 to commemorate the marriage of the Grand Duchess of Russia to the Duke of Edinburgh, became hugely popular in Europe. In Spain, Marie biscuit became a symbol of the country's economic recovery after the civil wars in the 1930-40s with bakeries producing mass quantities of Marie to consume surplus wheat. Source - Economic Times