TWIL- Week #54

This Week I Learned:

• Starting in March and April 2014, Google Sheets users creating new spreadsheets will be automatically directed to the new Sheets. All previously created spreadsheets will remain in the older version of Sheets for now. If you need to create a spreadsheet using the old Sheets, you can do so at g.co/oldsheets
• Google's automated systems analyze "your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored."
• S Anand's comic strip text search is very fast
• Jon Galloway has a nice PowerShell script to download Channel 9 videos.
• According to Kaspersky's Cyberthreat Real-Time Map, India is the third most infected country. Russia & Vietnam take first and second places while the US is at #4.
• According to University of Michigan researchers, more than 1 million Web servers were still vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug. They are keeping an updated tally on the website of their project, called ZMap.
• As of 2008, 90% of soybeans in the US contain Monsanto's patented gene
• The Indian Financial System Code (IFSC) is an alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies a bank-branch participating in the two main electronic funds settlement systems in India: the real time gross settlement (RTGS) and the national electronic funds transfer (NEFT) systems. This is an 11-character code with the first four alphabetic characters representing the bank, and the last six characters (usually numeric, but can be alphabetic) representing the branch. The fifth character is 0 (zero) and reserved for future use. For some banks, the last characters are same as the first three characters of an account number from that bank. The IFSC code may be found on cheques within the cheque book issued by the bank.
• When the European Union expanded 10 years ago to include Poland and nine other countries, the UK expected an influx of Polish workers, but it was caught off guard by the size of that influx. An estimated half million Poles have migrated to Britain - via HBR
• Ukraine mistakenly thought that the Soviet collapse heralded the end of Moscow's domination.So, it agreed to give up all its nukes and send them to Russia for destruction. In return, the US, Russia, and Britain signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, pledging to safeguard Ukraine's territorial sovereignty. Today, Ukraine knows it made a terrible mistake: it can no longer deter its powerful neighbour. Last month, Russia sent troops to annex Ukraine's Crimea province. - via Swaminomics
• Half of all homes in Japan are demolished within 38 years — compared to 100 years in the U.S.  
• Magic realism or magical realism is a genre where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment. Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez's “100 Years of Solitude” is an example of magical realist writing.
• A sustainable career is built upon the ability to show that you can fill a need that someone is willing to pay for.
• In conversations of any kind between humans, silences of more than four seconds become embarrassing because they imply a breaking of the thread of communication - via Superfreakonomics