This Week I Learned - Week #70

This Week I Learned:

• HTTPS is now a ranking signal for Google though currently a very lightweight signal
• In November 2007, two years after Google acquired Android and five months after the launch of the iPhone, Android was announced. Lately, Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that's slower than it used to be. For the first year of Android’s commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version every two-and-a-half months.  - arstechnica.com
• ...almost 80 percent of the 1.3 million programs in the App Store are essentially unused, estimates Adjust, a market analyst...Humin is the first contacts app that processes all its data on a person’s smartphone instead of relying on servers, meaning that the company won’t ever have access to private data such as e-mail and that contacts are searchable even without a signal.  - Businessweek
• PowerPoint can be used for a photo make-over
• Of America's 48 million "food insecure"-the modern term for the hungry-more than half are white, and more than half live outside cities. In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. With junk food plentiful and often cheap, hunger and obesity are now parallel problems. For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side effect of hunger itself. - National Geographic
• In Canada, the US and most of Europe a medical insurance or a driving licence applicant is asked if he'd want to be a organ donor. In India, lakhs of potential donors never become active donors because no one ever asks them. India's effective donation rate, at 0.26 donations per million persons, is less than 1% of the corresponding rate in most developed countries.
• The Chesscademy website has video lessons, exercises, and quizzes. It also teaches tactics, tracks your performance and recommends lessons tailored to you.
• Srikakulam was earlier called Gulshanabad (Garden city) and Chicacole
• Hussainsagar lake in Hyderabad is a top spot for suicide bids. According to police records, cops rescue 10 people on average each month and after a failed suicide bid, it is not reattempted there as the dirty water of the lake horrifies them. Among the people rescued, a majority of the people attempted it either before 7 am or after 6 pm.
• A strong handshake is almost twice as effective as a weak one in transferring bacteria such as E. coli from one person to another, according to a study conducted in the UK and reported in The New York Times