This Week I Learned - Week #41 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Kaggle's 2023 AI Report is a collection of 20+ essays written by Kaggle community members covering the latest AI advancements and salient topics in modern ML.

* Digital Rights Management (DRM) is technology that enables online video and audio services to enforce that the content they provide is used in accordance with their requirements. This technology may restrict some of the things you can do in the browser. Many services are moving towards HTML5 video that requires a different DRM mechanism called a Content Decryption Module (CDM). 

* Firefox for desktop supports the Google Widevine CDM for playing DRM-controlled content. Firefox downloads and enables the Google Widevine CDM by default to give users a smooth experience on sites that require DRM. The CDM runs in a separate container called a sandbox, and you will be notified when a CDM is in use. 

* Lossless Cut is probably the simplest way to cut out parts of a video without having to re-encode it or use an online service. It is open source, free and available for all platforms. It is in essence a frontend for FFMPEG and cuts without re-encoding, so the results are instantaneous. Another open source alternative that has a lot more features is Openshot which is purely mouse and context-click driven.

* Australian statistician & Kaggle founder Anthony Goldbloom coded Kaggle.com in a small apartment in Bondi in Sydney in 2010 after leaving cushy jobs at Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia. With Kaggle he made data science a sport. - The Sydney Morning Herald

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* An elephants’ ears can be used to identify individuals living in the wild 🐘

* Israel and Palestine have a common national flower - Anemone Coronaria 

* “To develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.” was added as an amendment to India’s constitution. 

* The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the government-funded but operationally autonomous body tasked with producing India’s textbooks for 38 million children. Many fundamental topics like Periodic  Table, Pythagoras theorem were removed from the curriculum last year to help lighten students’ workloads during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they have now been removed from textbooks, too. NCERT says that ‘rationalization’ is needed when content overlaps with material covered elsewhere in the curriculum, or when it considers content to be irrelevant. Criticizing this move, an article in Nature magazine points out that research does not advance without a firm grasp of what came before.  It suggests using visual methods, such as videos and animation, instead of by rote learning by embedding concepts using non-fiction narrative storytelling. In the case of the periodic table, this would involve detailing how individual elements found their places in the table; the highs and lows, dramas and inflection points as researchers sought to get to the truth and be recognized for their achievements. 

* The Pythagorean theorem was known and used by the Babylonians and Indians centuries before Pythagoras, but he may have been the first to introduce it to the Greeks. Some historians of mathematics have even suggested that he—or his students—may have constructed the first proof.

* Lying taxes cognitive systems. A liar must ensure that their version of events is consistent with an event’s peripheral details and with what their interlocutor knows. Individuals with strong cognitive abilities are better equipped to lie - Psyche

* Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, mathematical statistician, former options trader, and a distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University. One of Taleb's most successful trading strategies was arbitrage — the process of buying an asset in one market and selling it in another market for a higher price. Taleb is renowned for his pioneering work in randomness, probability, and life's inherent uncertainty. He introduced the term "black swan" to describe rare, unpredictable, yet profoundly impactful events, emphasising that they were not merely random but products of complex systems beyond our full comprehension.  He advocates designing systems and institutions to be “antifragile”, meaning they can thrive in the face of adversity. He forewarns of AI-induced unemployment and social turmoil. 

* An eight-time Olympic gold medallist, Usain Bolt is the only sprinter to win Olympic 100 m and 200 m titles at three consecutive Olympics (2008, 2012, and 2016). His achievements as a sprinter have earned him the media nickname "Lightning Bolt". His "lightning bolt" or "bolting" pose consists of extending a slightly raised left arm to the side and the right arm folded across the chest, with both hands have the thumb and index finger outstretched. In his autobiography, Bolt reveals that he has suffered from scoliosis, a condition that has curved his spine to the right and has made his right leg 1⁄2 inch (13 mm) shorter than his left.

Representing Jamaica is important to me, but one of my track and field motto is: 'Do this thing for yourself first, the country second.' - photo from Faster Than Lightning: My Autobiography

* El Niño is a recurring global climate pattern that is typically linked to warmer conditions in many regions, and its impact is usually most pronounced in the few months after it peaks. The planet experienced its hottest months on record, and by a large margin. It is concerning that the planet has seen such unusual warmth before El Niño has peaked. In large cities like Tokyo, the urban heat island effect can amplify heat and trap it overnight. - NY Times

* In 1973, Pakistan's parliament created a constitution that declared the country an Islamic Republic and Islam as the state religion. 

* In 1947, India voted against the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which created the state of Israel. India recognized Israel in 1950, but it did not establish full diplomatic relations with the country until 1992.

* Getting harvested produce to market in good condition is a problem that farmers all over India struggle with. According to government figures, in 2022 India lost between 6% and 15% of its fruit, between 5% and 12% of its vegetables, and between 4% and 6% of its cereals.

* 6 high-value cash transactions that can get you flagged by I-T dept:

1. Acquisition of real estate assets valued at ₹30 lakh or higher.
2. Acquisition of stocks, mutual funds, debentures, and bonds of ₹10 lakh or more
3. Any purchase of foreign exchange amounting to ₹10 lakh or more 
4. Cumulative cash deposits of ₹10 lakh or more in one or more accounts
5. Fixed deposits of ₹10 lakh or more
6. Payments made using credit cards - cash payments totalling ₹1 lakh or more for credit card balances or settlement of credit card dues amounting to ₹10 lakh or more through any means

* The Tamil Encyclopedia or Kalaikalanjiam is a Tamil-English Dictionary of Medicine, Chemistry, Botany and Allied Sciences. The Brief History of a Very Big Book documents the creation of Kalaikalanjiam.

* "Perfection is the enemy of perfectly adequate" - Saul Goodman, Better call Saul