This Week I Learned - Week #31 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Magenta is an open source research project exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process. This Tone Transfer demo link shows how to generate audio and turn your voice into a musical instrument of your choice.  

* Joshua Lochner (original creator of Transformers.js), now at Hugging Face, has released a legendary demo that can transcribe your audio recordings super fast right in the browser powered by WebRTC and Web ML tech. - Whisper Web

* Gorilla is an open-source, Apache 2.0 licensed (use commercially without any obligations) LLM tailored to serve API calls for your stated tasks. It is trained on three massive machine learning hub datasets: Torch Hub, TensorFlow Hub and HuggingFace. With Gorilla CLI, you can simply state your objective, and the tool will generate potential commands for over 1500 APIs, including Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, and many more. 

* The Gunicorn "Green Unicorn" is a Python Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) HTTP server. 

* You can't name a sheet in an Excel file as "History". 

* The European Union (EU) adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016. The GDPR is considered the gold standard for a comprehensive regulation of data protection and privacy. The GDPR requires notification to the supervisory authority of any personal data breach “without undue delay and, where feasible”, within 72 hours of becoming aware of it unless the incident “is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons”.

* D2M (direct-to-mobile) technology allows mobile phone users to watch TV on their devices akin to watching TV through a cable or DTH connection. Over 80% of internet traffic is video, which makes the mobile a perfect candidate for broadcast delivery along with TV. - ET

* The FoodKeeper App helps you understand food and beverages storage. It will help you maximize the freshness and quality of items. By doing so you will be able to keep items fresh longer than if they were not stored properly. It was developed by the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, with Cornell University and the Food Marketing Institute. 

* Munify has built a national database with budgetary and financial information of municipalities across India. Munify has an elaborate dashboard which depicts the municipal financial performance visually and helps compare city finances on a single platform.

* According to India Report Card 2022 of Duolingo, the certification-based language-learning programme, French has the highest number of learners in India after English and Hindi.

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* Between 29th June & 2nd August 2023, 744.8 millimeters (29 inches) of rain fell on Beijing – the heaviest rain over consecutive days since records began in 1883. Mumbai on July 2, 2019 recorded 376.2 mm rainfall and Ghatkesvar in Hyderabad received the highest one-day maximum of  324 mm on October 13, 2020.

* Learning to Live with Flood Risk - Flood risk may be under stood as the product of three contributing and necessary conditions:

Flood Risk = Hazard × Exposure × Vulnerability

Flood hazard is modified mainly by structural measures (e.g., dikes, dams, and diversions). Exposure to flood hazard can be best managed by land use controls in more developed parts of river basins. Vulnerability of people and assets to exposure can be modified by a range of nonstructural measures such as flood forecasting and warning and flood mapping.

* Early morning flights are likely to offer cheaper tickets during these hours. Planes are rarely delayed at these times too. There are fewer crowds. This makes checking in, getting through security, and finding your gate much quicker. Data also shows that flights are less likely to experience turbulence in the morning compared to late flights.

* Takeoff and landing are the most crucial stages in any flight, so it’s always best to stay awake at these times. It is also necessary to avoid airplane ear, which is caused by the rapid air pressure change. It can be relieved by swallowing, but you won’t know to do this if you’re asleep.

* The most stable seats are located close to the wings of the aircraft. Sitting a little forward is also a quieter spot, best chosen for long flights.

* Hank Azaria who provides the voice for Moe & Chief Wiggum in The Simpsons started his association with the animated series when he was 24. He is 57 now.

* Futurama got its start almost a quarter of a century ago, in 1999, emerging from the shadow of The Simpsons. Created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, Futurama began before Y2K, smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence.  It was storyboarded at Rough Draft’s Glendale, California. Hundreds of artists at Rough Draft Korea did all of the "in-betweening" on Futurama, meaning all of the frames in between the key poses drawn by animators in America. The hand drawn frames are then scanned, digitally colored and combined with 3D animation and effects created at the Glendale facility. Rough Draft Studios cubicle. The studio also worked on The Simpsons Movie, which grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide. At the peak of work on both projects, they had 140 people working at the Glendale facility, and 500 working at the facility in Korea. - Wired

* Eyebrows are an animator’s best friend. Careful attention to the eyes is essential in giving our characters a wide range of emotions. - Peter Avanzino

* Baklava is a Turkish dessert made with layers of thin filo or phyllo dough brushed with butter and a flavorful nut mixture. It's baked and then drenched in syrup or honey.

* Perhaps it would be ideal to only consume foods that Michael Pollan’s great-grandmother would recognize, but the reality is that we inhabit a different world from hers. It’s a science-backed move to completely avoid sweetened beverages and obvious junk food. It’s also probably not great if most of your diet is ultraprocessed, even if you’re selecting relatively healthy versions of these foods. Beyond that, the data is muddy, so I’ll still be incorporating ultraprocessed foods with favorable nutritional profiles into my family’s diet to some extent. - Slate

* Sodium bicarbonate—the chemical composition of baking soda—has powerful cleaning, scouring, and deodorizing qualities. Both baking soda and baking powder produce carbon dioxide. Baking powder is about one quarter the strength of baking soda. Today, baking powder is often the preferred leavener for recipes that call for a low-protein flour, like cakes, cookies, and quick breads—an entire category created once people could use these fast-acting chemical leaveners instead of the slower yeast. 

* Yeast is a type of fungus, specifically a unicellular fungus

* Aspergillus oryzae, also known as kōji mold is a filamentous fungus (a mold) used in East Asia to saccharify rice, sweet potato, and barley in the making of alcoholic beverages such as sake and shōchū, and also to ferment soybeans for making soy sauce and miso. 

* Some members of the Penicillium genus of ascomycetous fungi produce penicillin, a molecule that is used as an antibiotic, which kills or stops the growth of certain kinds of bacteria. Other species are used in cheesemaking. 

* Penicillium camemberti and Penicillium roqueforti are the molds on Camembert, Brie, Roquefort, and many other cheeses. Penicillium nalgiovense is used in soft mold-ripened cheeses, such as Nalžovy (ellischau) cheese, and to improve the taste of sausages and hams, and to prevent colonization by other molds and bacteria.

* Penicillin, a drug produced by P. chrysogenum (formerly P. notatum), was accidentally discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1929, and found to inhibit the growth of Gram-positive bacteria. Its potential as an antibiotic was realized in the late 1930s, and Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified and concentrated the compound. The drug's success in saving soldiers in World War II who had been dying from infected wounds resulted in Fleming, Florey and Chain jointly winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945.

* Jigna Vora is a former Indian journalist who was Deputy Chief of Bureau of the Mumbai bureau of Indian English newspaper The Asian Age. She was falsely accused of having a connection in the murder of journalist Jyotirmoy Dey in 2011 and was booked under MCOCA. Her biographical memoir Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison (2019) inspired the 2023 Netflix series Scoop.

* Aadhaar-PAN linking on fastlane - 48 crore of the total 61 crore PAN cards now on digital identity database.

* Ratio of mutual fund AUM to India’s GDP is only 16% compared to world's average of 63%

* More than 2,000-year-old, Bhagavad Gita is part of the Mahabharata - one of Hinduism's greatest epics - and at 700 verses, the world's longest poem.

* According to the last census in 2011, 27% of Kerala's 33 million people are Muslims and 18% are Christians.

* Introduction to Indian Knowledge System: Concepts and Applications explains the ‘why’, ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of IKS.