TWIL - Week #32

This Week I Learned:

APIs

• The World Bank offers free and open access to data about development in countries around the globe via multiple APIs. Many data series date back 50 years, and can be used to create interesting applications. It provides a useful API Query Builder. World Data Test Drive is an interesting mashup referenced on the IE Blog that uses this API along with  JavaScript ECMAScript Internationalization APIs

Browsers

• In Windows 8+, F12 developer tools is only accessible while browsing a website in Internet Explorer for the desktop. It is not available if you're browsing in the Internet Explorer in the Windows UI (earlier called Metro mode)

India

• Education is the most favored philanthropic cause in India receiving 80% of the cumulative contributions, followed by health care sectors.
• HDFC Top 200 is the biggest fund in the country with a size of around Rs 9,765 crore as of August 2013...the largest fund is less than 0.2 percent of the market capitalisation! The total size of equity mutual funds, at nearly $27 billion (Rs 1.78 lakh crore on September 6, 2013) is just 2.7 percent of household financial assets. Rupee depreciation is positive for the profitability of S&P BSE Sensex companies. It is also generally negative for the economy as it increases inflationary pressures and puts additional pressure on the fiscal deficit by increasing the import parity prices of oil products, fertilizers, etc. A weak economy, in turn, is indirectly negative for banks.

Quotes

• I’m obsessively opposed to the typical - Lady Gaga
• Honest is the best policy - when there is money in it  - Mark Twain

Everything else

• I liked the way Coursera, a site which offers online study courses, shared a course completion plan calendar. Creating a calendar of events to share it with others or importing a calendar with Google Calendar takes just a few steps.
• Unlocking a phone became illegal last year when the Librarian of Congress decided to remove it from a list of valid exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA is the stringent, massive 1998 law that governs a great deal of how copyright works online. To unlock a phone is to alter a phone’s firmware (firmware is the program that controls how the software in a device talks to its hardware) and that firmware is copyrighted by the major carriers. Because the DMCA prohibits changing any device’s copyrighted firmware, the DMCA prohibits unlocking a phone. It’s funny to think that tinkering with a device you bought breaks copyright law, of all things, but, hey: That’s America.(Source:The Atlantic)
• The word "innovation" is over-used - The Wall Street Journal did an analysis sometime back where it counted the number of times the word innovation appeared in the quarterly and annual reports in the United States in 2011. They counted more than 33,000 times.