This Week I Learned - Week #28 2019

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft Azure now allows users to bring in their 32-bit Windows Operating systems over to Azure.

* The Azure Service Bus Relay service enables you to securely expose services that run in your corporate network to the public cloud. You can do so without opening a port on your firewall, or making intrusive changes to your corporate network infrastructure.

* Microsoft's answer to the integrated on-premises and cloud development story is to go with an Azure Stack system. Similarly, the folks at Amazon want you to buy their hardware and run a clone of AWS in your data center. Google thinks you can get what you need by running GKE On-Prem on top of VMware vSphere on existing hardware with Anthos at significantly lower cost than either AWS or Microsoft.

Two ways to think about and categorize the machine learning algorithms - by their learning style, by their similarity

* British Airways has been fined more than £183 million after computer hackers last year stole bank details from hundreds of thousands of passengers. The fine is equivalent to 1.5 percent of British Airways' turnover in 2017. European Union tightened data protection laws with the so-called General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which establishes the key principle that individuals must explicitly grant permission for their data to be used. Until now, the biggest penalty was £500,000, imposed on Facebook for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. That was the maximum allowed under the old data protection rules that applied before GDPR

* The core concept of time-lapse relates to time compression. We're taking a relatively large amount of time, and compressing it down into a relatively short video.

Hotstar scaled a new global peak in concurrent viewership, with 25.1 million users tuning in during the 49th over of the Cricket World Cup semi-final between India and New Zealand. The ICC Cricket World Cup is being streamed across six languages: English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada.

* In the last two years though, global streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have disrupted the subtitling scene in India. Netflix currently provides subtitles in over 25 different languages. Their Indian original series called Sacred Games based on writer Vikram Chandra’s eponymous novel was dubbed in four languages but subtitled in 24. Two out of every three Sacred Games viewers were from outside India. All this subtitling demand has prompted companies to shape themselves as Language Service Providers or LSPs. Average industry rate for subtitling a new Hindi movie into English is in the range of Rs 1-2 lakh. Subtitlers get a laundry list of guidelines to adhere to. The first of those include fitting every subtitle per frame in a ‘42 into 2’ format, which means ‘only 42 characters in each line, and only two lines, per frame’ - ET

* Author and filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir has done English subtitling for over 700 Hindi movies, including some of the most popular movies of last year such as Andhadhun and Mulk.

* YouTube's automated captions (YouTube algorithm-generated translation of audio) which can be activated by clicking the ‘CC’ icon, are now available in 10 languages for over a billion videos.

* The Telangana government has invested in creating high-quality physical infrastructure - T-Hub, an incubator and co-working space, inaugurated in November 2015, IMAGE incubator, the WE Hub, aimed at women entrepreneurs, and T Works for hardware engineering. T-Hub was built within the campus of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH), but a larger facility, T-Hub Phase-2—built at a cost of ₹300 crore, and expected to be the world’s largest such facility—will be open for business by the end of this year - Forbes

Jatin Singh’s  Skymet is India’s largest private weather forecaster with over 6,500 observation centres that provide real-time data on rainfall, thunder and heat. Skymet has beaten the country’s 144-year-old public weather forecaster, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), on six occasions in accurately predicting the monsoons. Singh was earlier a journalist with television channel Aaj Tak. His father worked as a vendor of computers and instruments for IMD. Dev Raj Sikka, former director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, widely known as ‘monsoon man’ for his role in helping scientists develop better prediction systems, had figured out a way to accurately predict the monsoons as early as 1980, by studying over 100 years of data, but IMD never made use of it. With Sikka’s guidance, Skymet also made its first prediction in 2012.

* Fibonacci, also called Leonardo of  Pisa, popularized the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in the Western World primarily through his composition in 1202 of Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation). The Swiss architect Le Corbusier's faith in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series. Arrangements involving consecutive Fibonacci numbers appear in a wide variety of plants. While the aesthetics and symmetry of Fibonacci spiral patterns has often attracted scientists, a mathematical or physical explanation for their common occurrence in nature is yet to be discovered.

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