This Week I Learned - Week 43 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* AWS supports more than a third of the 100,000 busiest websites in the world.

* AWS experienced a significant global outage that disrupted various online platforms, including social media, gaming, and financial services for about 8 hours. The company traced the issue to a DNS resolution problem in the US-EAST-1 Region, caused by an error in Amazon's EC2 internal network. This affected services like DynamoDB, SQS, Amazon Connect, and others. According to Amazon’s service status page, 37 AWS services were impacted, including prominent tools like AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon EC2, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Security Token Service, Amazon Connect, and Amazon VPC Lattice.

* US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia is the oldest and largest site for AWS. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020.

* The AWS outage disrupted several online services for hours, affecting platforms like Amazon, Alexa, Duolingo, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Canva, Coinbase, Robinhood, Epic Online Services, and more.

* The issue emphasizes the growing interconnection of everyday digital services and their heavy reliance on a handful of global cloud providers, where even a single glitch can disrupt businesses and daily routines.

* With a free GitHub account, private repositories can have unlimited collaborators, and only those you invite (including yourself) can access the code. No one else can see it, and you can revoke this access at any time. Free accounts support this since 2019. 

* Kaggle Competition Problem Statements -

Scientific Image Forgery Detection: Scientific images are central to published research, but not all of them are honest. Copy-move forgery—where regions of an image are duplicated to fabricate results—is one of the most common and damaging types of scientific misconduct. These forgeries can mislead researchers, waste time and funding, and undermine trust in entire fields of study. Help protect science from fraudulent image manipulation by building models that can detect and segment copy-move forgeries in biomedical images.

Digitization of ECG Images - Electrocardiogram (ECG) images are used to diagnose and guide treatment for heart disease. They exist as physical printouts, scanned images, photographs, or time series. Medical-grade ECG software currently works best on time series. Tools for extracting time series from ECG images can help convert billions of ECG images collected globally over decades into data for training better diagnostic models to improve clinical outcomes. Build models to extract time series data from ECGs 

* finepdfs is the largest publicly available corpus sourced exclusively from PDFs, containing about 3 trillion tokens across 475 million documents in 1733 languages. The finepdfs dataset is available on HuggingFace.

* Isometric maps are a type of graphic that represents three-dimensional depth on a flat, two-dimensional surface, often used in gaming, design, and education.

Image - NYTimes.com

Ad for an upcoming skyscraper in Hyderabad

* Food Commodity Price Dashboard tracks daily retail prices of 22 essential food commodities across India. It allows users to visualize and analyze price trends by commodity and by state, making it a valuable tool for researchers, journalists, policymakers, and the public interested in understanding shifts in food prices across India.

* 70 percent of emissions are created by just 100 companies. These large corporations have battled against laws and regulations intended to curb emissions.

In general, wealthy, industrialized countries create the most greenhouse gas emissions but feel the smallest effect of climate change, while low-income, developing countries produce the lowest emissions but are the most at risk. 

The entire continent of Africa contributes less than 4 percent of global greenhouse emissions but has already experienced extreme consequences of climate change. 

Tourism supports around 30 percent of the Maldivian economy. Sea-level rise may sink all 1,200 islands of Maldives. Maldives only contributes 0.003 percent of the world’s emissions but faces complete destruction due to the emissions of other countries.

Maldivians eat more fish per day than any other population in the world. The supply of fish in Maldives is being threatened by rising ocean temperatures, which has occurred as a result of the oceans absorbing the excess heat caused by global warming. When water temperature rises, particular types of fish leave for cooler waters, and food sources, such as coral, die.

Climate change has happened many times since Earth was formed billions of years ago. Global warming is the most recent period of climate change. This term refers specifically to the increase in Earth’s average temperature as a result of rising levels of greenhouse gasses. Climate refugees belong to a larger group of immigrants known as environmental refugees. - Nat Geo

* New Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution. Each winter, Delhi is blanketed in acrid smog, a toxic mix of crop-burning, factory emissions and choking traffic. Levels of PM2.5 – cancer-causing microparticles small enough to enter the bloodstream – have surged to as much as 60 times WHO limits. 

...a growing tribe of Indian parents are fleeing the deadly air pollution that envelops the country's metros. These 'pollution refugees' have found that Goa's palm-tinged villages and sunny climes are kinder to their lungs. - ToI

* 60% of long-distance travellers across Telangana & Andhra Pradesh commute via private travel buses.

* In 2010, while constructing a foot over bridge in Kukatpally, Hyderabad, Uday Krishna Peddireddi faced a decision: cut down 16 trees or find another way. Choosing the latter, he relocated the tree, 13 of which survived. This act sparked the inception of Vata Foundation in 2015, co-founded by Uday Krishna Peddireddi with Jyoti Konda. VATA Foundation has chronicled 125 ancient trees worldwide.