This Week I Learned - Week #6 2021

This Week I Learned - 

* Starfield effect using vanilla JavaScript

* PowerShell Core is the edition of PowerShell built on top of .NET Core (sometimes simplified to “CoreCLR”). PowerShell Core is cross-platform, available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, thanks to the cross-platform nature of .NET Core. PowerShell Core is launched as pwsh.exe on Windows and pwsh on macOS and Linux

* Azure Security Center Labs

* Common Data Service, the sophisticated and secure backbone that powers Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, has been renamed to Microsoft Dataverse.

* According to the Kaggle 2020 edition of the State of Machine Learning and Data Science survey, Scikit learn is the most popular machine learning tool, Tableau and PowerBI are the most popular business intelligence tools. Jupyter-based IDEs continue to be the go-to tool for data scientists while Visual Studio Code is in the second spot.

* Kaggle Learn & Fast.ai offer free courses on data science 

* The presentation of data science to lay audiences—the last mile—hasn’t evolved as rapidly or as fully as the science’s technical part. A data science team needs six talents: project management, data wrangling, data analysis, subject expertise, design, and storytelling. He outlines four steps for achieving that success: (1) Define talents, not team members. (2) Hire to create a portfolio of necessary talents. (3) Expose team members to talents they don’t have. (4) Structure projects around talents. Data science shouldn’t be thought of as a service unit; it should have management talent on the team. People with knowledge of the business and the strategy will inform project design and data analysis and keep the team focused on business outcomes, not just on building the best statistical models. ”the key skills for data scientists are….the abilities to learn on the fly and to communicate well in order to answer business questions, explaining complex results to nontechnical stakeholders.” ...in HBR’s landmark 2012 article on data scientist as the sexiest job of the 21st century, the role is described in explicitly unicornish terms: “What abilities make a data scientist successful? Think of him or her as a hybrid of data hacker, analyst, communicator, and trusted adviser. The combination is extremely powerful—and rare.”  - HBR

* Chart Wizard, Microsoft’s innovation in Excel, introduced “click and viz” 

* The software company Tableau ranked the infusion of liberal arts into data analysis as one of the biggest trends in analytics in 2018. 

* Drones can be hacked from as much as a mile away. Hijacking the command and control signal between the operator and the drone can deliver full control of the drone and its systems to the hacker.

* Cognizant has over 75 per cent of its 2.90 lakh employees working in India. Cognizant’s offshore utilisation excluding trainees increased to 87 per cent in December 2020 quarter as against 85 per cent in the September quarter. 

* Three decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee devised simple yet powerful standards for locating, linking and presenting multimedia documents online. He set them free into the world, unleashing the World Wide Web. But now, Mr. Berners-Lee, 65, believes the online world has gone astray. Too much power and too much personal data reside with the big tech giants. Fueled by vast troves of data they have become surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation. His answer to the problem is technology that gives individuals more power through “Pods” - personal online data stores. The idea is that each person could control his or her own data — websites visited, credit card purchases, workout routines, music streamed — in an individual data safe, typically a sliver of server space. Mr. Berners-Lee’s vision of personal data sovereignty stands in sharp contrast to the harvest-and-hoard model of the big tech companies. He began an open-source software project, Solid, and later founded a company, Inrupt, with John Bruce, a veteran of five previous start-ups, to kick-start adoption. - NY Times

* A single bitcoin is currently trading at $49,500 on cryptocurrency exchanges.  Digital money  is currently neither banned nor legalised in India. China and India, are looking to introduce their own digital currency.

* Some 60% of Indians depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their living, yet the sector accounts for barely 16% of India’s GDP. The top 3 sectors are software, automobile and pharma.

* Koo is a Twitter-like micro-blogging platform which allows users to post multimedia content, including audio clips. It was founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna (who founded online cab booking service TaxiForSure that was later sold to Ola) and Mayank Bidawatka. It supports multiple languages including Hindi, Telugu and Bengali, among others. It was also one of the winners of the Aatmanirbhar Innovation Challenge introduced by the government last year. Koo has a yellow bird as its mascot while Twitter has blue-coloured "Larry" (inspired by popular basketball player, Larry Bird) representing the brand. 

* Amusia is the technical term for tone deafness. Tests have shown that some people with bad singing voices hear music just fine. Amusics are a smaller group with a perceptual problem: They can't pick out differences in pitch or follow the simplest tunes.

* While the exact cause of colon cancer is unknown, a combination of factors like excessively consuming spicy and outside food, consuming tinned food and beverages, excessive consumption of red meat, alcohol and the presence of pesticide residue in agriculture produce are responsible. While people above 35 should check for occult blood and, if possible, undergo colonoscopy every two years, those having colon cancer in the family should start tests at 30. Colon cancer has now moved into the 6th or 7th position among cancers