This Week I Learned - Week #166

This Week I Learned -

* When a web app goes down, you can visualize data points in a few seconds by using the appLens tool for the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service.

* A Continuous WebJob runs under the scm (kudu) site which, unless "Always On" is enabled, will not start when the site starts

* If you have an application deployed to Azure App Service that's using PHP 5.4, you have to upgrade or use a custom runtime as support for PHP 5.4 ends in October 2016

* India is home to 130 million of Truecaller's 200 million users. Truecaller claims that two out of every three smartphones in India have the Truecaller app. The Truecaller service allows users to find out the owner of any phone number from its database, which is created by crowdsourcing contact details from users’ address books. So, even if you’ve never used the service, your name and number could be on Truecaller’s database, if at least one of your contacts has shared it. The app has an integrated caller ID service which automatically searches for contact details when a user receives a call and also helps with call-blocking. The utility of the service in blocking spam has made Truecaller the third most downloaded app in the country after Facebook and WhatsApp.An average Indian user makes over 12 calls a day and receives more than 10 calls, according to Truecaller’s data. 

* Truecaller's TrueSDK service allows third party apps to verify users with their Truecaller profile and a substantiated phone number, instead of the commonly-used email address.

* Microsoft researchers, Dr. Eric Horvitz, both a computer scientist and a medical doctor by training and Dr. Ryen White, chief technology officer of health intelligence in a recently created Health & Wellness division at Microsoft, and John Paparrizos, a Columbia University graduate student have reported that they could identify from 5 to 15 percent of pancreatic cases with false positive rates of as low as one in 100,000 using health-related data generated from web search histories

* According to the Web Performance tests of the world’s top 50 e-Commerce sites by Pingdom Royal,  78% of the top 100 retail sites had a load time of under 3 seconds, while only 6% took 5 seconds or longer to load. Among the fastest websites the average homepage was 1.70 MB in size, while among the slowest sites the average size was 2.65 MB. According to the HTTP Archive, benchmark for page size as of May 2016, is 2.46MB and overall 42% (21 of 50) of the top 50 sites succeeded in keeping their homepage’s size below it.

* The $2 iOS American-made app Ummo is useful for those preparing for public speaking. With Ummo, you take a prepared speech, tap the microphone icon, wait for the countdown, and then talk. As you speak, the app listens and automatically logs the words, the number of pauses and the use of pesky filler words like … you know, like, right? data like how many words were spoken and how often words were reused. It also displays your pace in words per minute, how loud you were, whether your volume was consistent and so on. The data is presented in easy-to-read graphs, and if you tap on a point in the graph, you can see the words in the speech transcript at that moment. The idea is to learn when in the speech you faltered so you can practice and fix mistakes.

* EMV chip technology is becoming the global standard for credit card and debit card payments. Named after its original developers (Europay, MasterCard and Visa), this technology features payment instruments with embedded microprocessor chips that store and protect cardholder data. Payment data is more secure on a chip-enabled payment card than on a magnetic stripe (magstripe) card, as the former supports dynamic authentication, while the latter does not (the data is static).

* India is the world’s third-largest carbon emitter

* There are 3.5 million Indian-Americans, and they are a highly successful immigrant group with both wealth and deep community connections, making them sought after by politicians. In just one example, some 40 percent of hotel rooms in the United States are owned or managed by Indian-Americans, according to Arun K. Singh, India’s ambassador to the United States - NY Times

* Around the world, 50 types of animals, 3000 types of plants and 2000 species of edible insects are eaten

* India consumes the most Rum in the world, not Jamaica while Whiskey is consumed most in Singapore (not Ireland)

* In The Complete Far Side, Gary Larson says that his greatest disappointment in life occurred when he was at a luncheon and sat across from cartoonist Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family. Larson was not able to think of a single thing to say to him and deeply regretted the missed opportunity.

* Baron-Cohen, who is based at Cambridge University, and mathematician Ioan James of Oxford University assessed the personality traits of Newton and Einstein to see if they exhibited three key symptoms of Asperger syndrome: obsessive interests, difficulty in social relationships, and problems communicating. Newton seems like a classic case. He hardly spoke, was so engrossed in his work that he often forgot to eat, and was lukewarm or bad-tempered with the few friends he had. If no one turned up to his lectures, he gave them anyway, talking to an empty room. He had a nervous breakdown at 50, brought on by depression and paranoia - New Scientist