This Week I Learned - Week #8 2021

This Week I Learned - 

* Nice analogy: In human terms - Azure Security Center is me living a generally healthy life and watching for signs that I'm run-down. Azure Defender is my gym membership or vitamins that help improve or boost my health, and Azure Sentinel is the regular and specialists tests and treatments from my doctor, that alert me to specific signs that need investigating across my whole body, including my blood tests.

* If your organization has many subscriptions, you may need a way to efficiently manage access, policies, and compliance for those subscriptions. Azure management groups provide a level of scope above subscriptions. You organize subscriptions into containers called "management groups" and apply your governance conditions to the management groups.

* GKE users can now choose from two different modes of operation, each with their own level of control over their GKE clusters and the relative responsibilities related to GKE - Standard & Autopilot. Autopilot is a hands-off fully managed Kubernetes experience that allows you to focus more on your workloads and less on managing cluster infrastructure. 

* To date, a total of 1.3 million species have been identified. The most accurate census, conducted by the Hawaii University, estimates that a total of 8.7 million species live on the planet. 

* AI for Earth APIs allow application developers to accelerate their conservation applications with machine learning. AI for Earth Species Classification API identifies over 5,000 plant and animal species.

* As little as 5% of the actual code for machine learning production systems is the model itself. 

* A Brief History of Machine Learning Platforms - While ML platforms such as IBM’s SPSS and SAS have been around for decades, open-source data and machine learning technologies are a recent phenomenon. Modern machine learning (ML) and deep learning frameworks (for Python) have only been around for 10–15 years.

* Google Cloud's AI Platform (Unified) brings together AI Platform, AutoML, and MLOps in one complete, cohesive platform.

* JavaScript was created in 1995. It wasn’t designed to be fast, and for the first decade, it wasn’t fast. In 2008, a period that people call the performance wars began. Multiple browsers added just-in-time compilers, also called JITs. The introduction of these JITs led to an inflection point in the performance of JavaScript. Execution of JS was 10x faster. With this improved performance, JavaScript started being used for things no one ever expected it to be used for, like server-side programming with Node.js. The performance improvement made it feasible to use JavaScript on a whole new class of problems. We may be at another one of those inflection points now, with WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a way of taking code written in programming languages other than JavaScript and running that code in the browser.

* I like the new Sleeping Tabs feature in Microsoft Edge which makes background tabs “go to sleep” after 2 hours of inactivity. More than its power to conserve resources, I like how the greyed out tabs hint which tabs can be bookmarked & ditched so that I can focus on fewer things. With sleeping tabs, the activities of the tab are just suspended, so no state is lost and there is no reload necessary. After I discovered Immersive Reader, I'm already sold on Edge & it has become my default browser.

* Transfer learning is a research problem in machine learning that focuses on storing knowledge gained while solving one problem and applying it to a different but related problem. For example, knowledge gained while learning to recognize cars could apply when trying to recognize trucks. A person who knows to drive a moped can easily learn to drive a scooter.

* In its initial days, the Amazon website ran on a pair of computer servers affectionately named Bert and Ernie. The servers sat atop door desks built by Bezos. At Home Depot, Bezos looked at desks for sale and looked at doors for sale, and the doors were a lot cheaper, so he decided to buy a door and put some legs on it. As Amazon grew, a decision was made to keep using door desks as a symbol of one of the company’s core values, frugality. According to Bezos’ friend and employee number five, Nico Lovejoy,  “A lot of the things that we do are scrappy by nature. So long as the scrappy solution works.”

* Jeff Bezos’s originally planned name for his internet venture was “Relentless”. 

* Victorian icon Florence Nightingale is best known as the founder of modern nursing. She was also a statistics and data visualization pioneer who sought to illustrate that simple sanitation techniques, such as handwashing, could stop the spread of infectious diseases. Visualizations became one of Nightingale’s preferred ways of communicating about the need for sanitary reforms to save lives, a sentiment she herself expressed in a letter dated August 1857: “Whenever I am infuriated, I revenge myself with a new diagram.” 

* The new central law dismantles the monopoly of APMCs in farm produce trading. The Guntur APMC (agricultural produce market committee) which handles 25-30% of India’s red chilli production, levies only a 1% market fee on buyers. In Punjab, this is at 3% for wheat and paddy, besides a separate 3% rural development cess of the state government. In Haryana, these are at 2% each. Guntur’s 1% fee, which generates Rs 75 crore annually on a high-value crop, isn’t so high to divert trade away from the mandi. This link between the farmer and the trade is not something even large corporates can easily replace. Commission agents play a complex and important role in the agri economy. The arhtiya or commission agent isn’t a trader holding title to the grain bought from a farmer. He merely facilitates the transaction between a farmer and actual buyer, who may be a private trader, a processor, an exporter, or a government agency like the Food Corporation of India (FCI). That makes him more akin to a broker. - Indian Express

* Price Monitoring Division(PMD) in the Department of Consumer Affairs is responsible for monitoring prices of selected essential commodities. The activities of the division include monitoring of the retail and wholesale prices, and spot and future prices of selected essential commodities on a daily basis. Prices are reported daily on the website. Retail and wholesale prices of 22 commodities (Rice, Wheat, Atta, Gram Dal, Tur (Arhar) Dal, Urad Dal , Moong Dal, Masur Dal, Sugar, Gur, Groundnut Oil, Mustard Oil, Vanaspati, Sunflower Oil, Soya Oil, Palm Oil, Tea, Milk, Potato, Onion, Tomato and Salt) from 115  centers are received daily from the State Civil Supplies Departments of the respective State Governments.

* The National Data Bank of Socio-Religious categories is developed with a view to provide users access to all data, pertaining to various aspects of socio-economic life of population falling in different social/religious categories, from a single window

* James Glaisher FRS (7 April 1809 – 7 February 1903) was an English meteorologist, aeronaut and astronomer. He was a founding member of the Meteorological Society (1850) and the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (1866). Between 1862 and 1866, usually with Henry Tracey Coxwell as his co-pilot, Glaisher made numerous ascents to measure the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere at its highest levels. Their ascent on 5 September 1862 on a balloon, broke the world record for altitude but he passed out around 8,800 metres (28,900 feet) before a reading could be taken. 

* “The Aeronauts” is inspired by true events — an 1862 scientific balloon ascent in which meteorologist James Glaisher and professional aeronaut Henry Coxwell almost died after reaching more than 30,000 feet. 

* The French Montgolfier brothers invented the balloon in 1783 (or, at the very least, they were the first to make a public demonstration of the technology), and initially men dominated the art of ballooning. In Paris, the then-ballooning capital of the world, the task of sewing together the envelope of the balloon was allocated to talented women who constituted spillover labor from the city’s thriving clothing industry. - washingtonpost.com

* According to Bharat Biotech International Limited CMD Krishna Ella, Hyderabad today accounts for nearly 65% of the global vaccine supply

* The Last Raj Bahadur of Manda, Ram Gopal Singh, adopted Vishwanath Pratap Singh. He became the Raja of Manda at the age of 10. He became the 7th Prime Minister of India in 1989 and his tenure lasted for 343 days. While he was PM, the Hindus of the Kashmir Valley, were forced to flee the Kashmir valley as a result of being targeted by JKLF and Islamist insurgents during 1989-1990. He implemented the Mandal Commission’s report ensuring 27 per cent quota for the OBCs. He subsequently lost his core constituency of the upper caste middle class and failed to muster any support among the constituency for which he had taken his biggest political risk as the OBC leadership had already taken shape and those leaders were not ready to cede any ground to V.P. Singh, a ‘Thakur leader’. He left politics, started writing poetry and took to painting. 

* What I Will Miss About My Pandemic Existence - "For a lot of people, the blurring of work and private time has been a burden. But I’ve been living that way most of my life. For the last year, the rest of the world has been forced to adopt my work habits, and I am going to miss it when they return to traditional socializing....I now think of the house as more of a storage chamber and less of an entertainment venue."