TWIL - Week #42

This Week I Learned:

• Flickr Camera Finder  is a crowdsourced tool that uses the “Exif” data from all images uploaded to the service and creates analytical tools based on that information.
• The brain behind Duolingo (the free language learning site/app) is Luis von Ahn, 34, a boyish-faced computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Sometimes called the father of crowdsourcing, he’s best known for inventing the CAPTCHA....Google bought his company, reCAPTCHA, and uses your free labor to verify hundreds of millions of words from books that its scanners can’t parse. Source - Forbes
• While Duolingo offers free language (currently five) courses, the Government of India funded Central Institute of Indian Languages offers paid courses covering 3 languages - Kannada, Tamil & Bengali, through their badly designed website. Duolingo expects not only to cover its $500,000 in monthly costs but also to book its first profit this year. With around 8 million monthly active users and growing, it’s now the most popular language app, with six languages on offer and Russian, Japanese and Chinese on the way. The mission of Central Institute of Indian Languages is "to co-ordinate the development of Indian Languages, to bring about the essential unity of Indian languages through scientific studies, Promote inter-disciplinary research, contribute to mutual enrichment of languages, and thus contribute towards emotional integration of people of India." 
• Yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task. Phrased differently, yak shaving is all that stuff that you need to do to solve some problem
• A sustainable career is built upon the ability to show that you can fill a need that someone is willing to pay for.
• Be bigger and more powerful than FOMO - fear of missing out - Janell Burley Hofmann, in a mother's code of conduct for her teenaged son
• Traditionalists are those born prior to 1946, Baby Boomers - born between 1946 and 1964, Gen X -  born between 1965 and 1976, Millennials - born between 1977 and 1997, Gen 2020 - born after 1997.

Image from HBR

While on the topic, here is a funny image from my newspaper - You know you are middle-aged when....(click to enlarge image)