This Week I Learned - Week #35 2023

This Week I Learned -

* In terms of speed and rendering quality SumatraPDF ranges at the top among free PDF-viewers since it has changed its library basis to MuPDF. PyMuPDF provides access to many important functions of MuPDF from within a Python environment. 

* Ghostscript was first released in 1991 as a freely available open source (GPL) alternative to Adobe’s PostScript. Ghostscript became highly sought after by OEMs who wanted to license it for their own products. Artifex was created in 1993 to facilitate licensing of Ghostscript under commercial licensing terms.

* The latest IMDb data is available on-demand through a GraphQL-backed API via AWS Data Exchange.

* Azure Form Recognizer is now Azure AI Document Intelligence. Azure Document Intelligence now supports Aadhaar and PAN card. Document Intelligence Identity document (ID) model combines Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with deep learning models to analyze and extract key information from identity documents. The API analyzes identity documents (including the following) and returns a structured JSON data representation

* With Python in Excel, you can type Python directly into a cell, the Python calculations run in the Microsoft Cloud, and your results are returned to the worksheet, including plots and visualizations. Python in Excel leverages Anaconda Distribution for Python running in Azure, which includes the most popular Python libraries (e.g. pandas, Matplotlib, scikit-learn, etc.), and is securely built, tested, and supported by Anaconda. Guido van Rossum, Python’s creator, emeritus BDFL and now Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, has helped define the architecture for Python in Excel. 

* Colab is a hosted Jupyter notebook service that requires no setup to use, while providing access free of charge to computing resources including TPU/GPUs. Generally, you may get a Tesla K80, or even Tesla T4, with GPU Memory of up to 16GBs. 

* Like Colab, Kaggle provides free browser-based Jupyter Notebooks and GPUs. Kaggle also comes with many Python packages preinstalled, lowering the barrier to entry for some users.

* TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) are application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) that are optimized specifically for processing matrices. A TPU is about 2 times faster than the GPU and 110 times faster than the CPU. TPUs are designed specifically for tensor operations, resulting in faster training and inference times for neural networks compared to GPUs. Energy Efficiency: TPUs are more power-efficient than GPUs, making them a better choice for large-scale machine learning deployments.

* Microsoft Research open-sourced Visual ChatGPT, a chatbot system that can generate and manipulate images in response to human textual prompts. The system combines OpenAI's ChatGPT with 22 different visual foundation models (VFM) to support multi-modal interactions. ChatGPT and other large language models (LLM) have shown remarkable natural language processing capabilities; however, they are trained to handle only one mode of input: text. Instead of training a new model to handle multimodal input, the Microsoft team designed a Prompt Manager to produce text inputs to ChatGPT that result in outputs that can invoke VFMs such as CLIP or Stable Diffusion to perform computer vision tasks. - InfoQ

* Generative AI completely obliterates the idea of individual responsibility for privacy because you can’t control these algorithms’ access to your information, or what they do with it. Tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Google Bard are trained on data scraped without consent, or even notice.  At their worst, training sets suck up vast amounts of digital information and combine it into a data slurry that serves as the raw material for generative AI. - Wired

* The AI-enhanced productivity tools, known as Duet AI, will cost $30 per month for each user, Google says. Microsoft will be charging the same price for its AI-enhanced Copilot productivity tools. 

* Disclaimer with T&C of Google Search Labs feature SGE, generative AI in Search - Don’t rely on generative AI outputs as medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice. 

* TextFX is a creative writing tool that’s powered by Google's PaLM 2

* Looker Studio is Google’s business intelligence and visualization platform. Using Google Apps Script, you can write code to fetch data from an API and visualize that data in Looker Studio.

* I am stingy and a geek, so I ...used FFMPEG on the command line instead.

* Blood relatives often share facial features. An automatic kinship classifier has been in the works at Northeastern since 2010. - Kaggle

* LIDL is urgently recalling its Paw Patrol-themed biscuits after a link on the packaging took shoppers to a Chinese site with adult-themed content.

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* When sand is heated in a furnace or kiln to 1700 degree celsius, it melts into lava-like gold. This molten sand, upon cooling, becomes glass. Glass can be recycled endlessly without any loss of quality or functionality. Broken and waste glass bits used to make new glass are called cullet. Currently, new glass is made from 30% cullet and 70% sand.

* In 1998, skeletal muscle was identified as an endocrine organ due to its now well-established role in the secretion of myokines (a cytokine produced by muscles).

* Less Muscle + More Fat = Obesity + Diabetes

* Type 2 diabetes, the most common kind, is a condition in which insulin produced by pancreas is not used by the body, as a result of which blood sugar stays in the blood instead of getting absorbed into the cells. If uncontrolled, it can result in organ damage. In contrast, Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition in which the beta cells in the pancreas do not produce any insulin and patients depend on external insulin for the rest of their lives. 

* Unicorn refers to a company which is valued at or above $1 Bn in valuation. Inc42 unicorn tracker includes Indian startups which have ever achieved $1 Bn valuation. Unicorn refers to a company which is valued at or above $1 Bn in valuation. Inc42 unicorn tracker includes Indian startups which have ever achieved $1 Bn valuation. Collectively, these 110 Indian unicorns have raised over $99 Bn.

* Established in 2016, Startup India aims to financially assist aspiring entrepreneurs — after they've gained approval from the Department for Industrial Policy and Promotion (DPIIT).

* El Nino, literally meaning the little boy, is a weather phenomenon that disrupts monsoon in India, causing droughts and crop failures. It occurs every 2 to 7 years.

* The Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) is a periodic disturbance of clouds, rainfall, winds, and pressure that moves eastward across the tropics. It takes about 30 to 60 days to complete one cycle, and it can have a significant impact on weather patterns around the world. The MJO has two phases: the enhanced rainfall phase and the suppressed rainfall phase. During the enhanced rainfall phase, there is more cloud cover and rainfall in the tropics. This can lead to flooding and other weather-related hazards. During the suppressed rainfall phase, there is less cloud cover and rainfall in the tropics. This can lead to droughts and other weather-related hazards.

* The injustice of climate change is that the people who are suffering the most—the world’s poorest—are also the ones who did the least to contribute to the problem. - Bill Gates

* Reflect on the long-term goals that get you excited. If that takes time, exploit the power of small wins and engage in activities that cultivate a state of ‘flow’. Such moments of flow are a direct antidote to languishing.

* Whenever the President’s Rule is imposed, the Parliament exercises the role of the state legislature under Article 356(1)(b) in all states. 248 laws have been passed till date where the Parliament has acted as the state legislature during the President’s Rule, including reorganisation of the state of Punjab. - Swarajya

* The National Council of YMCAs of India (NCYI) is the apex body of YMCAs across India. It was established 1891 and has its head office in New Delhi. It runs 6 hostels in India in Alwaye, Bhimtal, Kanyakumari, New Delhi, Vellore, Vythiri. 

* The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of India has its headquarters in New Delhi. YWCA of India offers accommodations through its various Guest Houses in over 10 locations across the country. 

*  The Youth Hostel Movement is the brainchild of an eminent German school teacher, Mr. Richard Schirrmann, the founder of the Youth Hostel Movement. YHAI is an associate member of the Hostelling International which has the world’s largest network of 4500+ Youth Hostels in 90 countries across the globe. In India, Youth Hostel Associations of India (YHAI)  has a network of more than 95 Youth Hostels. The first Youth Hostel was formally opened at Tara Devi near Shimla on June 9’ 1945.

* The Hosteller is a backpacker hostel chain of over 50 hostels. It started its first hostel in 2015 in Jaipur.

* It is not uncommon for characters in Indian movies to speak Hinglish or a mix a regional language & English. The Netflix's crime drama Guns & Gulaabs follows a new trend to have at least some dialogue in multiple Indian languages to make the characters authentic.