This Week I Learned - Week #34 2022

This Week I Learned - 

* Zero downtime migration between a database on the AWS EC2 database and Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database service can be achieved using OCI GoldenGate bidirectional replication. Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. OCI GoldenGate provides bidirectional and unidirectional data replication. An active-active replication is used for high availability and zero downtime migration.

* Google ranks image results based on alt text

* The curse of the ninth is a superstition connected with the history of classical music. It is the belief that a ninth symphony is destined to be a composer's last and that the composer will be fated to die while or after writing it, or before completing a tenth. This superstition was hatched by Mahler. Before him, Beethoven and Schubert had died before or while writing their tenth symphonies. Upon realizing this, Mahler created the curse of the ninth and led this superstition into popularity by seemingly proving it true. 

* Not only was Beethoven not completely deaf at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in May 1824, he could hear, although increasingly faintly, for at least two years afterwards. The over an hour-long Ninth Symphony with full orchestra, chorus, and soloists is the first symphony to incorporate vocal soloists and chorus into what, until then, had been a purely instrumental genre. Words are sung in the final movement by four vocal soloists and a chorus.

* In 1897, Maria Montessori was one of the first women in Italy to earn a medical degree. She volunteered at a psychiatric clinic, where her responsibilities entailed visits to the Rome’s ghastly insane asylums. In 1900, at the age of twenty-nine, Montessori became the co-director of the Orthophrenic School, in Rome, the nation’s first training institute for special-education teachers. The trainees worked with students who were selected from the asylums or who had been unable to keep up at state schools. For two years, Montessori taught students and teachers for upward of eleven hours a day, then worked late into the night reading, writing...Some of her students or “little idiots,” as she called them, amazingly, went on to pass the same primary-school exams as their mainstream peers. She opened her first schoolroom in 1907 in a tenement in San Lorenzo, a working-class neighborhood with high rates of poverty. Her schools multiplied in Italy, then across Europe, often finding their most hospitable environments in regions with a strong socialist presence.  She published “The Montessori Method” in America, in 1912. Her schoolrooms did away with rewards and punishments and aimed to instill intrinsic motivation and self-regulation. Around the age of forty, as her schools continued to proliferate and demand for her training grew, Montessori resigned from her position at the University of Rome, hoping to focus entirely on her burgeoning educational movement...the obvious irony of Montessori’s crusade on behalf of the poorest and least powerful in society is that its most visible legacy is selective private schools for the élite. - paraphrased from an article in The New Yorker

* Susan Sontag (1933-2004) published Illness as a Metaphor in 1978, and it explores the trajectories of tuberculosis and cancer. She updated the book in 1989 by adding a section on AIDS and its metaphors.

* Airbags in a car won't activate if seatbelts are not fastened.

* Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease caused by a type of bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis that usually affects the lungs. TB sometimes affects other parts of the body, such as the brain, the kidneys, or the spine. BCG is a vaccine for TB made from a weakened strain of TB bacteria. This vaccine is not widely used in the United States, but it is often given to infants and small children in other countries where TB is common. The BCG vaccine is not very good at protecting adults against TB. You can still get TB infection or TB disease even if you were vaccinated with BCG. Vaccination of all children aged 10-14 continued until 2005, when it was decided that TB rates in the general population had fallen to such a low level that universal BCG vaccination was no longer needed. By WHO estimates, India accounts for 27% of the global estimated 10 million cases and 25% of the estimated 1.6 million deaths. Low immunity is regarded as one of the common reasons why TB infection breaks into TB disease. Left untreated,TB can kill approximately one half of patients within five years and produce significant morbidity (illness) in others. Most people with TB disease will need to take TB medicine for at least 6 months to be cured.  Tuberculosis is curable and preventable. 

* International medical graduates (IMGs) comprise one-quarter of the U.S. physician workforce. Certification by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) is the standard for evaluating the qualifications of these physicians before they enter U.S. graduate medical education (GME)

* Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) is a five-and-a-half-year undergraduate degree program focused on Ayurveda. In India, a student can go on to earn a Masters degree in the form of MD (Ayurveda) and MS (Ayurveda), a PhD, and clinical doctorate degrees in traditional and complementary medicine at the university level. BAMS graduates have been permitted to practice medicine in the state of Maharashtra. In the state of Karnataka, BAMS doctors appointed in primary health centres in rural areas can practice modern-medicine in case of "emergencies".

* Amazon, like Walmart’s Flipkart, operates a marketplace business in India due to local regulatory requirements. It’s facing a wide range of other regulatory pushback in the South Asian market. Marketplaces cannot have a controlling stake in sellers on their platform. Amazon and Flipkart have reduced their stakes in their largest sellers. Amazon had a controlling stake in Cloudtail and Appario but has reduced it to 24%. - TechCrunch

Image: Sanford C. Bernstein

* Amazon leads in core categories such as consumer electronics and has done quite well in tier-I cities with around 50 lakh Prime subscribers. 

* The term “Customs Duty” refers to the tax imposed on your goods while transported across international borders. The objective of customs duty is to protect each country’s economy, residents, jobs, environment, etc., by controlling the flow of goods, especially restrictive and prohibited goods, into and out of the country. The customs duty is a percentage determined by the total purchase value of the product paid in a foreign country and is not dependent on quality, size, or weight. India prohibits the shipping of drones or electronic cigarettes into the country.

* A family office is an entity created by high net-worth individuals to manage their money-related matters including investments, succession, taxation and legal aspects. In the Indian context, a net worth of around ₹250 crore is required for considering setting up a family office. For a family office, the salary cost would easily come to about ₹2-3crore (or the cost will be about 0.5-1% of the assets being managed) annually for good analysts. Those with a lower AUM could consider a multi-office structure, which provides similar services as single-family offices but at a shared cost, since the expenses will be distributed across multiple clients. Family offices are very forward-looking, investing in what’s going to work in the next five to seven years, not necessarily what has worked in the past. Indians UHNWIs have residential properties in places like UK, UAE and the US. There is also growing interest in investments to secure residency in a foreign jurisdiction like the US, Portugal and Dubai which have investments linked residency schemes. - Mint

Source: ICICI Orange Book

* Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. What is the opposite of Dunning-Kruger? The opposite of Dunning-Kruger Effect is the Imposter Syndrome. This is when smart, capable people underestimate their abilities. This takes a toll on people. They feel they don't deserve the job they're holding.