This Week I Learned - Week #3 2019

This Week I Learned -

* Azure Firewall, now generally available, is a cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. With Azure Firewall you can centrally create, enforce, and log application and network connectivity policies across subscriptions and virtual networks.

* Az is a new cross-platform Azure PowerShell module intended as a replacement for the AzureRM.Netcore and AzureRM modules. Az currently ships in Cloud Shell

Google’s engineers exist in a Great Chain of Being that begins at Level 1. At the bottom are the I.T. support staff. Level 2s are fresh out of college; Level 3s often have master’s degrees. Getting to Level 4 takes several years, or a Ph.D. Most progression stops at Level 5. Level 6 engineers—the top ten per cent—are so capable that they could be said to be the reason a project succeeds; Level 7s are Level 6s with a long track record. Principal Engineers, the Level 8s, are associated with a major product or piece of infrastructure. Distinguished Engineers, the Level 9s, are spoken of with reverence. To become a Google Fellow, a Level 10, is to win an honor that will follow you for life. Google Fellows are usually the world’s leading experts in their fields. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are Google Senior Fellows—the company’s first and only Level 11s - The New Yorker

* In the past thirty-five years, about half of the Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine have gone to scientific partnerships.

Cheap hardware and the growth of Web services and connected devices had led to a deluge of data, but few companies had the software to process the information. Two engineers who’d been struggling to scale a small search engine called Nutch—Mike Cafarella and Doug Cutting—were so convinced of MapReduce’s importance that they decided to build a free clone of the system from scratch. They eventually called their project Hadoop, after a stuffed elephant beloved by Cutting’s son. As Hadoop matured, it was adopted by half of the Fortune 50. It became synonymous with “Big Data.” Facebook used “Hadoop MapReduce,” as it’s often known, to store and process user metadata—information about what was clicked, what was Liked, and which ads were viewed. At one point, it had the largest Hadoop cluster in the world. Hadoop MapReduce helped power LinkedIn and Netflix. Randy Garrett, a former director of technology at the National Security Agency, remembers demonstrating the technology to the agency’s director, General Keith Alexander. Hadoop performed an analysis task eighteen thousand times faster than the previous system had. It became the foundation for a new approach to intelligence gathering which some observers call “collect it all.”

* Our hunger doubles up with the whiff of high-calorie foods. So in case you are trying hard to refrain from pizza but finally end up grabbing a slice, then we have a useful piece of advice for you.  Researchers suggest that smelling high-calorie foods for longer than two minutes can make you feel satiated. The study showed that ambient food scent can directly satisfy the belly because the brain does not necessarily differentiate the source of sensory pleasure.

* As per the Economic Survey of India 2016-17, there are over a hundred million migrant workers in India, of which most are circular migrants. The great migration wave was east-bound in the 19th century; west-bound in the 20th, and appears to be south-bound in the 21st century. Surat has been one of the world’s fastest growing cities of the past four decades, with annual population growth rates exceeding 6%, and over 70% of the city’s workforce today is sourced from outside.  Like the Nepalese import into Ratnagiri, over two million north Indians now work in Kerala to fill the void in segments of the labour market left vacant by upward mobility. In a recent Malayalam film, Njan Prakashan, a character laments that with Gulf-bound international emigration, the Keralites have lost the art of farming and their songs. The Malayali film then breaks into a full-length Bengali song—Badi Badi Bar—showing scenes of rice cultivation with Bengali labour in Kerala. -  Chinmay Tumbe (author of India Moving: A History of Migration)Mint

Sellers downloading their monthly financial reports (data of their sales through Amazon.in) were served with those of other vendors, leading to a breach of competitive businesses data.

* Amazon India has 150 million registered users and around 4 million merchants sell on its platform.

* The recent drone scare at Gatwick airport has exposed the lack of preparedness against drones not just in the UK but also in countries like India which have just legalised the use of unmanned aerial vehicles. According to industry estimates, there are over 500,000 illegal or smuggled drones in India.

* Airtel has acquired a strategic stake in Juggernaut Books

* Pawan Kumar Chamling, the fifth and incumbent Chief minister of the Indian state of Sikkim is currently the longest serving Chief Minister for any Indian State after independence

* "We  (ABN AMRO)  were the first bank in the country to adopt the Finacle platform and helped Infosys customize it and introduce it in many parts of the world. This software is now the backbone of the Indian banking system" - Meera Sanyal in The Big Reverse: How Demonetization Knocked India Out

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