TWIL - Week #20

This Week I Learned:

• A good way to setup Development, Staging and Production environments for a Azure cloud application is to have either three separate Cloud Services, or even 3 subscriptions. The benefit with the different subscriptions is (a) you can control/restrict access to only those that should have access, and (b) it provides an easy way to view costs for each environment (since billing is done at the subscription level).
• Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure offers the lowest price at $0.12 per hour. However, Windows Azure performs much better than EC2 in one study (approximately 3 times).
• Worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that Google's services were offline last week.
• Patrick Juola, a computer linguistics expert figured that JK Rowling, not Robert Galbraith, was indeed the author of The Cuckoos Calling using a program called JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program). JGAAP does a mathematical analysis of the degree of similarity across a huge number of features, far too many for any human analyst to keep track of. JGAAP can keep track of every word in a set of encyclopedias. According to Juola, Stylometry or the study of writing style, is much less reliable and accurate than DNA...a DNA match simply means that the person of interest or someone with similar genes, possibly a family member, was involved. Anonymouth helps authors disguise their writing.
• The origin of Luddites - When the Industrial Revolution began in England in the 19th century, a group called Luddites started wrecking textile machinery because it displaced traditional hand-spinners and weavers.Luddites saw industrialization as a recipe for pauperization of artisans of all sorts.They couldnt see how industrialisation would transform living standards.
• What is the driver that stimulates adventure-seeking behaviour? The answer, it turns out, is quite unglamourous. It is a simple organic chemical called dopamine, released by nerve cells to send signals to other nerve cells. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It controls motor skills, but it also helps drive us to seek out and learn new things as well as process emotions such as anxiety and fear. It also drives risk-taking behaviour. Motivation is driven by the dopamine system. Dopamine is often confused with adrenaline, which drives thrill seekers. The latter is triggered when the brain perceives a threat, and stimulates the body to better respond to the threat. Once the threat has passed, adrenaline creates a feeling of exhilaration. (Source: Times of India)