This Week I Learned - Week #6 2023
This Week I Learned -
* Much like code, IT architecture design is also prone to technical debt. Technical debt includes the cost of additional work required later as a consequence of choosing easy solutions instead of better approaches. The primary objective of creating technical debt is to prioritize delivery over proper design principles.
* Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law.
* Google's Bard has an advantage over ChatGPT and other chatbots by accessing the web for updated information.
* Now anyone using Immersive Reader, with any content they choose, can go to the Reading Preferences pane, enable Reading Coach to practice reading out loud and receive focused practice exercises. When the Reading Coach switch is enabled, the Play button in the Immersive Reader changes to a Microphone button. Students can select the Edit button near the Reading Coach toggle to customize parts of the coach inluding the voice, feedback style, and more. When the microphone button is selected, a dialog pops up that encourages the student to prepare to read out loud. Reading fluency is composed of three pillars – speed, accuracy, and expression (prosody). With a forthcoming Expression update, Reading Progress will automatically identify students’ performance on aspects of prosody including monotone reading, long pauses, not pausing for a period or comma, voice inflection for question marks or exclamation points, and even the stress of multi-syllable words.
* Pixel 6 phone has a feature powered by machine learning and advances in computational photography called Magic Eraser that can remove distractions from photos. Magic Eraser can detect distractions in your photos, like people in the background, power lines and power poles, and suggest what you might want to remove. Then, you can choose whether to erase them all at once or tap to remove them one by one. You’re not limited to newly captured photos — you can clean up all your photos, even those taken years ago or on non-Pixel phones.
* Truncate Silence feature in Audacity automatically reduces the length of passages where the volume is below a specified threshold level. Silences are detected if they remain below the specified threshold for at least the specified time duration. Detected silences are then made shorter by deleting a section from the middle of the silent region. This can be accessed from the menu option Effect > Truncate Silence...
* When Hugh MacLeod was a struggling young copywriter, living in a YMCA, he started to doodle on the backs of business cards while sitting at a bar - “I started drawing on business cards because they were very portable. And I lived in a very small New York apartment. It was sort of a minimum viable art.” Those cartoons eventually led to a popular blog - gapingvoid.com - and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures. MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of his main subjects is creativity.
* Restaurants do not rely on farmers markets. They have suppliers, trucks who deliver all those ingredients. Kitchens never have so much space. The rule number one of kitchen staff is that they hire the scumbags to work in the kitchen, fat, poor, handicapped people that the labor market rejected. My chefs had always immigrant wives, mostly from working class, because any other woman would consider kitchen staff below them. - a professional cook
* Dill (Anethum graveolens) is an annual herb in the celery family Apiaceae. Like caraway, the fern-like leaves of dill are aromatic and are used to flavour many foods. It is called Soa-Kura in Telugu and Soa in Hindi. It is considered to have very good antiflatulent properties, so it is used as mukhwas, or an after-meal digestive.
* Victims of earthquakes have been found to survive for more than two weeks trapped under rubble if they have access to water. However, search and rescue attempts are usually halted around a week after a disaster if no-one has been found alive in the previous day or two. - Reuters
* ASL or American Sign Language is single-handed, whereas most variations of Indian sign language are derived from British sign language that uses two hands.
* Lip-reading (sometimes called speechreading) is the ability to understand speech by carefully watching the lip patterns and movement ofthe tongue and face ofthe person speaking.
* Lipreading is, in the deaf community, sometimes referred to as an “oralist” technique. Oralism refers to the emphasis on trying to interpret speech rather than on creating an alternate form of communication, namely sign language. Most developed countries have experienced a push to move away from oralism and toward sign language; there are now dozens of different sign languages around the world.
* Lipreading involves much more than the lips: The entire face, the head, even the rest of the body provide critical information. If someone is not very expressive, they can be hard to read.
* Lipreading is considered to be about 30 percent accurate.
* About 40% of the sounds in the English language can be seen on the lips of a speaker in good conditions — such as a well-lit room. Normal speech is too fast to lipread easily. Many speech movements are not seen. Many speech patterns are similar, leading to confusion and doubt. Some words look alike, even though they sound different. Lip reading can be cognitively exhausting.
* SRAVI (acronym for 'Speech Recognition App for the Voice Impaired') is a mobile app that enables automated lip reading for the voice impaired. It can be used for communication without sound - especially for people with speech difficulties. It records a video of you mouthing a phrase & then converts your silent lip movement into text for a carer or family member to understand. It can currently recognise about 40 English phrases by analysing your lip movements via AI. SRAVI claims to read lips with 90% accuracy.
* Many languages around the world are tonal, meaning that they rely on pitch to convey meaning, almost like a song. English is barely tonal at all (though we do raise the pitch at the end of a sentence to convey questions), but some languages have large numbers of complex tones that are vital to understanding them. Tones are produced by the larynx, and may not require any perceptible motion of the tongue, lips, cheeks, or jaw.
* Indian languages — mainly Hindi, Tamil, and Gujarati — are among the most difficult to decipher for lip-readers. South Asian languages have the hardest-to-decipher phonemes (distinct sounds of a language) — specifically “th” and “d”. These phonemes, including “g,” “n,” and “k,” do not require the speaker to move their lips a great deal, which throws off a lip-reader. Anything else that conceals the lips would also prove to be an impediment to lip-readers — in the case of India, mustaches.
* In Japan, the difficulty in lip-reading arises not from the pronunciation of the language, but people’s body language while speaking it. Japanese people tend not to display much emotion while speaking; they make less eye contact, which can otherwise help a lip-reader gauge tone or emotion, and tend to cover their mouths (especially women) while laughing.
* Babylon Berlin tell us about how life was under the Weimar Republic (the democratic regime in Germany between 1919 and 1933. It is not a true story in that its main characters are not real people who actually existed. Yet, the show is based on a series of historical fiction books that attempt to describe what the Germany capital was like during this troubled time period.
* The Danube (pronounced da·nyoob) is the longest river of the European Union and the second-longest river in Europe (the Volga in Russia is the longest). Originating in Germany, the Danube flows southeast for 2,850 km through central and southeast Europe, covering ten countries (more than any other river in the world), namely Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova. The Danube is over twice the length of the Rhine, the main river in Germany.
* Budapest is called the “Queen of the Danube,”
* Written in 1866, 'The Blue Danube' ("An der schönen blauen Donau”) is Austria's unofficial national anthem.
* The Seine River crosses several important urbanized areas of France. With a length of 754 km, it originates near Dijon, flows through Paris, and discharges to the English Channel.
* Bangladesh has the highest number of rivers and is known as the 'land of rivers'.
* India is the world's largest milk producer contributing 24 pc of global milk production.
* Most of India’s camels are in Rajasthan and represent a key part of the indigenous Raika pastoralists’ cultural identity. They were widely sold as draught animals until the state in 2014 declared the camel its official animal, introducing measures to protect them and preventing their sale to other states in India – which hit local communities economically. Herders then started to sell camel milk, which is considered healthier than cow’s milk and used to treat various diseases such as tuberculosis. The temperatures which reach as high as 52 degrees Celsius (126 degrees Fahrenheit) regularly used to spoil it before they could sell it to the local dairy. With solar-powered chilling units, the same sun that would sour litres of camel milk now chills and preserves it. The chillers can store between 500 litres-1,500 litres of milk each, and cost Rs 9,00,000 ($11,030) for the smaller units and Rs 1.4 million ($17,289) for the largest. The machines are designed to extend the shelf life of milk by at least three days if it is stored at 4 degrees Celsius, and longer if it is frozen. The systems have been customised to operate in challenging weather conditions and local young people have been trained to clean the solar panels and units. The average household incomes have quadrupled. - Scroll
* Chittaranjan Cancer Hospital in Calcutta was inaugurated by Marie Curie on January 2, 1950 and named after Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, as a tribute to and in acknowledgement of the enormous donation of his land and property for the cause.
* Hyderabad's climate is a local steppe climate. The temperature here averages 25.9 °C | 78.7 °F. The month of highest relative humidity is September (77.78 %). The month with the lowest relative humidity is March (36.74 %). The month which sees the most rainfall is July (0.93 days). The driest month of the year is February (16.93 days).
* According to former RTC board director M. Nageswara Rao HMRL, which ferries about 3 lakh passengers daily in their Metro Rail services, were granted Rs 2,500 crore in the Telangana State Budget while the public utility service TSRTC, which transports over 32 lakh people daily, received only Rs 1,500 crore Budgetary allocations.
* Dharani was launched as a one-step solution for land-related issues in 2020. Earlier, people had to go to the sub-registrar’s offices, which are located in 141 locations, for land registration. With Dharani, registration is now at the citizen’s doorstep and can be done in 574 mandal headquarters. Earlier, after registration, people had to run from pillar to post for mutation of their land in revenue records. Now, mutation is done instantaneously and e-pattadar passbooks are sent within seconds by SMS while physical pattadar passbooks with 18 security features are delivered by post within a week. After Dharani’s launch, opposition parties have repeatedly pointed out that the portal was being used as a land-grabbing tool. They have alleged that the system was plagued with inaccuracies and farmers were at the receiving end.
* The Telangana AI Mission (T-AIM), in partnership with Capgemini, has announced the launch of an academic grand challenge, for college students, to foster innovation to mitigate risks of climate change. Under the challenge, student teams from colleges across India are expected to build solutions to predict heat wave occurrences and air quality index (AQI) for five cities in Telangana – Adilabad, Nizamabad, Warangal, Karimnagar, and Khammam.
* GVK has many firsts to its credit - it set up India's first private power plant in 1996, India's first six-lane toll road project in Rajasthan in 2004, and India's first private airport project in Mumbai in 2006.
* Internet advice - "Post Covid, most of these aggregator sites have dispensed with human interaction on their helplines. One has to go thru a tiring IVR menu, or write an email and... wait. That's why I switched to booking directly on airline websites. I use aggregator sites to choose my flights."
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