This Week I Learned - Week #204

This Week I Learned -

* Amazon Web Services 5-hour outage of S3 (Simple Storage Service) in the highly popular data centre US-East-1 region (North Virginia),  knocked offline not only websites big and small, by yanking away their backend storage, but also knackered apps and Internet of Things gadgets relying on the technology. Its own AWS status dashboard was down & the S3 downtime ('S3izure'), impacted the following: Docker's Registry Hub, Trello, Travis CI, GitHub and GitLab, Quora, Medium, Signal, Slack, Imgur, Twitch.tv, Razer, heaps of publications that stored images and other media in S3, Adobe's cloud, Zendesk, Heroku, Coursera, Bitbucket, Autodesk's cloud, Twilio, Mailchimp, Citrix, Expedia, Flipboard, and Yahoo! Mail. Other AWS services knackered in the data center include: Elastic File System and Elastic Load Balancing, Simple Email Service, Relational Database Service, Lambda, Elastic MapReduce and Elastic Beanstalk. - The Register

* "While the outage has shown the massive footprint that AWS has, it also showed how badly they need a hybrid piece to their solution." - Vineet Jain, Egnyte CEO and co-founder

* LinkedIn can create an automatic summary based on the career & professional details you submit

* The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said identity theft complaints were the second-most reported in 2015, rising more than 47 percent from 2014.

Satellite imagery is also being used to forecast “… things like poverty (by tracking building height and rooftop material), oil inventory (by looking at images of tanks and drilling rigs), and agricultural yields (by observing crops and analyzing weather data)”

* Uber is in more than 400 cities. The company, which has its headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco, has more than 11,000 corporate employees. It has many more drivers—millions of them, scattered all over the world, working as independent contractors, without the health care and other benefits typically provided to full-time employees.

* Uber driver app prompts drivers to rate passengers just as riders also get to rate drivers

* The UIDAI program now has 582 banks, brokerages and government departments listed as registered users permitted to access Aadhaar's data. The UIDAI said in a briefing this month it had shut 12 private websites and 12 mobile applications and was on the verge of closing 26 more for illegally obtaining Aadhaar numbers or enrollment details. The Aadhaar-enabled payment system is linked to 119 banks with 338.7 million recorded transactions so far.

* 86-year-old Mr. Buffett, a longtime Democrat whose shrewd investments have earned him the nickname “the Oracle of Omaha,” declared victory Saturday in his decade-long, $1 million bet that low-cost index funds would out earn more expensive hedge funds. Investors pulled a net $342.4 billion from U.S.-based actively managed funds last year, according to Morningstar, while pouring a record $505.6 billion into U.S.-based passively managed funds. The biggest beneficiary of this shift is Vanguard Group, which started the first index fund for individual investors 40 years ago. At the end of January its assets reached a record $4 trillion - WSJ

* In 2001 Venezuela was the richest country in South America; it is now among the poorest

The human skeleton is composed of around 300 bones at birth – this total decreases to 206 bones by adulthood after some bones have fused together. The bone mass in the skeleton reaches maximum density around age 20

Devendra Fadnavis was Mayor of Nagpur before he became Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Jawaharlal Nehru, C.R. Das and Subhas Bose, among others, all held mayoral office or served in municipal governance.

Lux Narayan who run's a company that focuses on future insights that marketers can derive from past data — a kind of rearview-mirror analysis analyzed 2,000 editorial, non-paid obituaries over a 20-month period between 2015 and 2016. His findings - the average age at which the famous and not-so-famous news-makers achieved things is 37. Politicians do their first and sometimes only commendable act in their mid-40s. A common word in those obituaries was "help".

* Naveen Patnaik spent most of his early days away from Odisha so he couldn't learn the Odia language. He is the only chief minister of India who does not speak the regional language of the state. He is the also the author of 4 books including The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India - Wikipedia

* "The 1962 conflict with China should teach us what happens when seemingly sound moral positions run into nations with strong force-led doctrines of expansion....To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." - Rajeev Chandrasekhar

* “I make sure every year is a hard year. That’s kind of how I roll. I make sure every year is a hard year. If it’s easy I’m not pushing hard enough.” - Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick, in a private conversation

"The internet only goes so far!"

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