This Week I Learned - Week #25 2022

This Week I Learned - 

* Microsoft uses Azure Speech for many scenarios, such as captioning in Teams, dictation in Office 365, and Read Aloud in the Edge browser.

* Google Cloud provides the following NoSQL database services:

  • Cloud Firestore—a document-oriented database storing key-value pairs. Optimized for small documents and easy to use with mobile applications.
  • Cloud Datastore—a document database built for automatic scaling, high performance, and ease of use. Behind the scenes, it stores data in Google Bigtable.
  • Cloud Bigtable—an alternative to HBase, a columnar database system running on HDFS. Suitable for high throughput applications.
  • MongoDB Atlas—a managed MongoDB service, hosted by Google Cloud and built by the original makers of MongoDB.

* App Engine's Datastore became its own product in 2013, Google Cloud Datastore, and is now accessible to developers outside of App Engine. The following year, Firebase was acquired by Google. At the time, it was known for its real-time database. Over the next few years, the Firebase and Cloud Datastore teams worked on integrating some of the Firebase features into Datastore. As a result, in 2017, the next generation of Cloud Datastore was released. To reflect inheriting some Firebase features, it was rebranded as Cloud Firestore. Cloud Firestore became the default NoSQL storage mechanism for Google Cloud projects. New apps can use Cloud Firestore natively, while existing Datastore databases were converted to Firestore under-the-hood and now operate as "Firestore in Datastore mode" to preserve compatibility with Datastore operations. Cloud Firestore represents the latest, scalable, highly-available, NoSQL datastore with features from the Firebase real-time database.  Cloud projects can use either Datastore or Firestore but not both.

Cartoon People feature in Office lets you mix & match preassembled artwork and tell stories using a diverse set of characters and scenery

* The Coverage tab in DevTools will also tell you how much CSS and JS code in your application is unused. Not all libraries can be easily broken down into parts and selectively imported. In these scenarios, consider if the library could be removed entirely. Building a custom solution or leveraging a lighter alternative should always be options worth considering. However, it is important to weigh the complexity and effort required for either of these efforts before removing a library entirely from an application.

Read Along (formerly Bolo) is a free and fun speech based reading tutor app from Google designed for children aged 5 and above. It helps them improve their reading skills in English and many other languages (Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Spanish & Portuguese) by encouraging them to read aloud interesting stories

* Bitcoin long ago died as a digital currency, becoming nothing more than an empty speculative asset with its value most recently plunging from $60,000 to less than $20,000. Meanwhile, as those same hypesters now promote a mystical Internet world called Web3, India is racing ahead and implementing what the crypto crowd had promised—with its Unified Payment Services (UPI). The best indication of its usefulness is that UPI has grown wildly popular. The Reserve Bank of India expects payments running via UPI to comprise 8% of the country’s total GDP in 2025 - Fortune

* US customers accounted for three-fourths of Cognizant’s $18.5 billion revenue in the year ended December 2021. - Mint

* The “Turing test” became a benchmark for machine intelligence. Over the decades, various computer programs vied to pass it using cheap conversational tricks, with some success. In recent years, wealthy tech firms including Google, Facebook and OpenAI have developed a new class of computer programs known as “large language models,” with conversational capabilities far beyond the rudimentary chatbots of yore. One of those models — Google’s LaMDA — has convinced Google engineer Blake Lemoine that it is not only intelligent but conscious and sentient. We don’t need to worry about LaMDA turning into Skynet, the malevolent machine mind from the Terminator movies, anytime soon. The Turing Test’s most troubling legacy is an ethical one: The test is fundamentally about deception. The Turing test could serve a different purpose in an era when machines are increasingly adept at sounding human. Rather than being an aspirational standard, the Turing test should serve as an ethical red flag: Any system capable of passing it carries the danger of deceiving people. - The Washington Post

* Adding software to a broken process doesn't make you digital. The biggest challenge is reimagining process, not writing software. - Aaron Levie

* A pelican crossing, or archaically pelicon crossing (PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled), is a type of pedestrian crossing with traffic signals for both pedestrians and vehicular traffic, activated by call buttons for pedestrians, with the walk signal being directly across the road from the pedestrian.

* Orthorexia nervosa (OrNe) is a pattern of disordered eating behavior characterized by excessive preoccupation with overvalued ideas about healthy eating. Healthy orthorexia (HeOr) refers to a non-pathological interest in healthy eating and nutrition.

* The lyrics of the National Anthem of South Africa employ the five most populous of South Africa's eleven official languages – isiXhosa (first stanza, first two lines), isiZulu (first stanza, last two lines), seSotho (second stanza), Afrikaans (third stanza) and English (final stanza).

* The "Hymn to Liberty", or "Hymn to Freedom", is a poem written by Dionysios Solomos in 1823 that consists of 158 stanzas and is used as the national anthem of Greece and Cyprus. It is the longest national anthem in the world by length of text. It officially became the national anthem of Greece in 1865 and Cyprus in 1966. "Hymn to Liberty" has been performed at every closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, to pay tribute to Greece as the birthplace of the Olympic Games.

* The "Marcha Real" ("Royal March") is the national anthem of Spain. It is one of only four national anthems in the world, along with those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, San Marino and Kosovo — that have no official lyrics.

Jana Gana Mana was composed in a literary register of the Bengali language called Sadhu Bhasha, which is heavily Sanskritised. Jana Gana Mana is sung in the raga Alhaiya Bilawal.

* The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of any country.  United Kingdom has no defining document that can be termed "the constitution".

László Polgár (born 1946) is a Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist. He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second-best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered to be the greatest female chess player ever as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Zsuzsa became the Women's World Chess Champion. He is considered a pioneer theorist in child-rearing, who believes "geniuses are made, not born". Polgár's experiment with his daughters has been called "one of the most amazing experiments…in the history of human education." He has been "portrayed by his detractors as a Dr. Frankenstein" and viewed by his admirers as "a Houdini", noted Peter Maas in the Washington Post in 1992.

* Deepak Shenoy, an engineering graduate and the founder of Capitalmind, turned his blog into an ₹800 cr portfolio management service (PMS)  - Mint

Margo, the neem oil based soap has been around for more than 100 years! The soap was created and manufactured by the Calcutta Chemical Company under the stewardship of its founder, K.C. Das, and was launched in 1920. Khagendra Chandra Das and his fellow Indian classmate, Surendra Mohan Bose were the first Indians to graduate from Stanford University in 1910 with B.Sc degrees in Chemistry.  Noted columnist and Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta is the grandson of K.C. Das.

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