This Week I Learned - Week #4 2021

This Week I Learned - 

* Azure Purview aids in managing and governing your on-premises, multi-cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) data efficiently.

* Great talk by Scott Hanselman on how he migrated 17 years of infrastructure to Azure.

* In 2000, Amazon's biggest expense was datacenter - expensive Sun servers. Amazon spent a year ripping out Sun & replacing with HP/Linux, which formed the foundation for AWS.

* 5 situations where you should not invest in AI

• When you have simpler alternatives
• When you don’t have enough data. Most AI algorithms require a high volume of data to spot patterns and gain intelligence.
• Where a specific area of AI works well only in carefully controlled scenarios. 
• When costs exceed the business benefits
• When a business scenario needs human understanding and empathy

* Sunbird is an open learning infrastructure that is configurable, extendable, and highly modular. It is a set of core microservices which have been unbundled from the functionality or the solution inside of it, to provide very critical core functionality, related to learning, registries, content, attestations, data and so on. Sunbird is built with micro services thinking, it is not a pre-packaged learning management solution. 

* Colab is Google's implementation of Jupyter Notebook. 

* Playwright enables reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps.

* The Hype Cycle is a graphical depiction of a common pattern that arises with each new technology or other innovation. The Gartner Hype Cycle (curve) combines two attributes (hype level and engineering or business maturity) and adopts five key phases of a technology's life cycle: innovation trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity. Organizations that can predict major shifts in behavior — such as the major turning points on the Hype Cycle — can take advantage by being ahead of the crowd. 

* Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Variants of leet have been used for censorship purposes for many years; for instance "@$$" (ass) and "$#!+" (shit) are frequently seen to make a word appear censored to the untrained eye but obvious to a person familiar with leet. Words ending in -and, -anned, -ant, or a similar sound can sometimes be spelled with an ampersand (&) to express the ending sound (e.g. "This is the s&box", "I'm sorry, you've been b&", "&hill/&farm"). It is most commonly used with the word banned. An alternate form of "B&" is "B7", as the ampersand is with the "7" key on the standard US keyboard. Sandbox could be spelled as &box or even &[]

* Drone swarms are getting too fast for humans to fight. Such swarms are likely to synchronize their attacks so the assault comes in all directions at once, with the aim over overwhelming air defenses. If AI-controlled weapons can defeat those operated by humans, then whoever has the AIs will win and failing to deploy them means accepting defeat. 

* Among the Covid-19 vaccines currently in use, mRNA vaccines (like those developed by Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech SE) have had the highest efficacy rates during late-stage testing. The Messenger RNA (mRNA) technology had never been approved before the pandemic.  Sinopharm's vaccine relies on the traditional vaccine approach: prompting immune defenses against a dangerous virus by injecting a defanged version of the pathogen. AstraZeneca Inc.’s vaccine and Russia’s Sputnik V shot deliver immune prompts with the help of common, harmless viruses. - WSJ

* Tantalum is a chemical element with the symbol Ta and atomic number 73. It is named after Tantalus, a villain from Greek mythology. Tantalum is a rare element in high demand. To control tantalum is to control a key part of the 21st-century supply chain: Half of all tantalum mined goes into electronic capacitors, which store an electric charge. 

* Linus Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize (the others being Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger). Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.

* Peter Brook's stage adaption of The Mahabharata "did nothing less than attempt to transform Hindu myth into universalized art, accessible to any culture". Using an elaborate-yet-minimal set and multi-racial cast from 16 different countries for the film, Brook’s Mahabharata stood in contrast with the “opulently religious melodrama” of the 94-episode BR Chopra version of the Mahabharata which aired a year before the Brook-Carrière adaptation appeared on TV.

* Some writers in the English-speaking world continue to use adaption as an alternative spelling of adaptation, but adaptation is the preferred standard form.

*  Kamlesh Kumari is the first policewoman to be given the Ashoka Chakra. 

* Parkour is a training discipline using movement that developed from military obstacle course training. Practitioners, called tracers or traceurs, aim to get from one point to another in a complex environment, without assistive equipment and in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Parkour includes running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, plyometrics, rolling, quadrupedal movement (crawling) and other movements as deemed most suitable for the situation (not to be confused with freerunning). Parkour's development from military training gives it some aspects of a non-combative martial art. David Belle is considered the founder of parkour. His group put themselves through challenges that forced them to find the physical and mental strength to succeed. Examples included training without food or water, or sleeping on the floor without a blanket, to learn to endure the cold. During their training no one was allowed to complain or be negative. Few excuses were allowed. At the same time, everyone was required to have knowledge of their own limits.

* Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. Go begins with an empty board. It is focused on building from the ground up (nothing to something) with multiple, simultaneous battles leading to a point-based win. Chess is tactical rather than strategic, as the predetermined strategy is to trap one individual piece (the king). This comparison has also been applied to military and political history, with Scott Boorman's book The Protracted Game (1969) and, more recently, Robert Greene's book The 48 Laws of Power (1998) exploring the strategy of the Communist Party of China in the Chinese Civil War through the lens of Go. In China, Go was considered one of the four cultivated arts of the Chinese scholar gentleman, along with calligraphy, painting and playing the musical instrument guqin.

* "All warfare is deception" - Sun Tzu, The Art Of War