This Week I Learned - Week #38 2023
This Week I Learned -
* Flavio Copes has a lot of useful Web development resources on his website including a curation of sample app ideas.
* Azure Developers - Python Day 2023
* Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3) on March 14, 2006. Netflix was the first to publicly make the decision to go 100% cloud in 2010.
* Designed by Google to process large image databases, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are powerful hardware accelerators specialized in deep learning tasks.
* promptfoo is a tool for testing and evaluating LLM output quality.
* GitHub Skills teaches how to use GitHub with interactive courses designed for beginners and experts.
* The IBM watsonx powered AI Draw Analysis is a first-of-its-kind tennis statistic for the US Open that utilizes both structured and unstructured data from IBM Power Index & Likelihood to Win to project the level of advantage or disadvantage of all players in the singles draw. Each player will receive an IBM AI Draw Analysis at the start of the tournament, which will be updated daily as the tournament progresses and players are eliminated. Every draw is ranked, allowing fans to click into individual matches and see the projected difficulty of their draw and potential opponents. The watsonx powered AI Commentary and AI Draw Analysis join an already expansive suite of digital fan features including the IBM Power Index, Match Insights, and Likelihood to Win. - IBM
* Silica, or silicon dioxide, is a compound of two of the most abundant elements on earth. It covers our beaches and fills mines around the world. When small amounts of impurities like boron or phosphorus are added to pure silicon, it becomes an excellent semiconductor. And although there are other materials that are naturally better semiconductors, silicon’s comparably high melting point (around 1,414°C) and ability to form strong bonds with other elements make it well-suited to be used in transistors — especially given its natural abundance. Silicon was also chosen as the go-to material to fabricate transistors because a single crystal silicon is one of the purest materials on earth.
-0-
* ...our world has been growing warmer. Varieties of grapes from southern France now grow well in Maastricht and places as far up north as Norway are starting to produce wine.
* Economists have been using night light data as a very good proxy for GDP at levels like the district (because GDP data is usually not available at disaggregated geographic levels)
* Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel [PDF] written by English author Mary Shelley (1797– 1851). Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Since the publication of the novel, the name "Frankenstein" has often been used, erroneously, to refer to the monster, rather than to his creator/father. Mary Shelley was just 20 when she wrote the book and it was the only successful book she wrote. Mary and Percy Shelley were both vegetarians. The Frankenstein 'monster' was a vegetarian.
* Mary Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821. Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a writer and feminist who wrote "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792). She died eleven days after giving birth and Mary was raised by her father. At age 18, Mary ran off with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading British Romantic poet, who she married in 1816. Percy Shelley’s pregnant wife, Harriet, drowned herself because of the shame. In 1822, Percy Shelley drowned during a storm while sailing to meet some friends. After her husband died, Mary Shelley fell into poverty. She continued to write fiction to support herself.
* Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University isolated glutamic acid as a taste substance in 1908 from the seaweed Laminaria japonica (kombu) by aqueous extraction and crystallization, calling its taste umami ("pleasant savory taste"). Ikeda noticed that dashi, the Japanese broth of katsuobushi and kombu, had a unique taste not yet scientifically described (not sweet, salty, sour, or bitter). To determine which glutamate could result in the taste of umami, he studied the taste properties of numerous glutamate salts such as calcium, potassium, ammonium, and magnesium glutamate. Of these salts, monosodium glutamate was the most soluble and palatable, as well as the easiest to crystallize. Ikeda called his product "monosodium glutamate" and submitted a patent to produce MSG; the Suzuki brothers began commercial production of MSG in 1909 using the term Ajinomoto ("essence of taste").
* The science of morality may refer to various forms of ethical naturalism grounding morality in rational, empirical consideration of the natural world. It is sometimes framed as using the scientific approach to determine what is right and wrong, in contrast to the widespread belief that "science has nothing to say on the subject of human values".
* Structural inequalities across groups defined by gender, religion, and ethnicity are seen in almost all societies. Governments often try to remedy these inequalities through policies, such as anti-discrimination statutes or affirmative action, which must then be enforced by the legal system. A challenging problem is that the legal system itself may have unequal representation. Using data on over five million court cases filed under India’s criminal codes between 2010–2018 across the country, a study finds that judges of different genders do not treat defendants differently according to defendant gender, nor do judges display favoritism on the basis of religion.
* Self-determination theory (SDT) - people have three key psychological needs: a feeling of choice and control over their actions, connection with others, and a sense of competence and achievement.
* When you are presented with a decision think about why you would agree to it. Is it because you genuinely want or need to do the thing, or because you think it will make you look good? - The Case for Mediocrity
* "Looking around me I feel that the old values of personal integrity, loyalty, liberalism, rationalism, and fair play are all completely gone. People accept corruption as a way of life, as a method of getting along, as a necessary evil. In acquiring material comforts you grow numb with placid acceptance. Maybe you resist in the beginning. But the internal and external pressures crowd to a point where you learn to overlook the moral decline they spell." - Satyajit Ray
* “The new status symbol is the waistline" - Karan Datta, former Head of Business Operations, Axis Mutual Fund
* On Flags:
Comments
Post a Comment