Author: Rauf Aliev

May 29 2017, 10:11

Also, around 95% of official telephone numbers of various organizations begin with IVR (interactive voice response). For governmental ones, it’s all of them. Interestingly, this is done for the convenience of the organizations themselves, regardless of what the voice on the voicemail says. IVR does not simplify but rather complicates the lives of customers, no matter how “smart” it is. It’s just cheaper for organizations to use it. But there’s no talk of a “new level of automated service” – it’s simply inconvenient. Sometimes, it’s impossible to reach a live operator.

Example from yesterday. I decided to call my insurance to find out if clinic X is their partner (in-network). If yes, we pay 40 bucks. If no, it might cost us a thousand. There’s a difference. So, I call. The IVR asked me for my policy number, date of birth, and something like an SSN, and at the end, it told me, “it’s Sunday, call back on Tuesday”.

It should be noted that here IVR can recognize voices. Almost everywhere, this is implemented. For example, if you respond “find a provider” to “what do you want”, the system correctly classifies the call. Perhaps if I had said that there’s a pedestrian lying here all bloody, for instance, the IVR might not have switched to the “we’re closed” recording. But that’s just speculation.

It would be better to have a voicemail managed by Indians, who could provide written responses to SMS or call back in the case of an urgent request. It would be much cheaper, and the service would be top-notch. Such a system could be introduced for practically any service provider.

May 29 2017, 10:00

In America, natives are very sensitive to accents. They might simply not recognize a word if its stress is slightly altered. Those who travel or have dealt with foreigners have gotten somewhat accustomed. And with them, it’s not so bad. But sometimes you just don’t understand how they can’t recognize something like stArbucks or AmwAy by those familiar with stArbucks (everyone) or Amway (many)? Yet, they don’t. Then you correct the stress, and – “Ah! Starbucks!”. These aren’t the best examples, but still.

May 27 2017, 11:40

Little Moishe comes into the store.

— I need three liters of honey, — he hands a jar to the shop assistant.

She fills up the jar.

— My dad will come and pay tomorrow.

— No way, — the shop assistant takes the jar back from him and pours the honey back.

Moishe steps outside and looks into the jar:

— Dad was right, this is enough for two sandwiches.

May 26 2017, 20:31

A very interesting lecture on how the LHC works. Simply out of this world https://habrahabr.ru/company/yandex/blog/329132/

“That’s 40 terabytes of data per second. At the moment, we cannot process such a flow, although technically we are already approaching the capabilities.”

“You can imagine the size of a camera’s sensor. Here, it’s about 200 square meters of sensor. (..) The coolest thing about these experiments is their speed. They shoot at a rate of 40 million frames per second. (..) We can’t record that much; in reality, we record about 200–500 frames per second, but that’s still quite good.”

“The matter and energy that we observe is about 5% of what we measure through various gravitational observations. It’s like having a 20 square meter apartment, and you receive a heating bill for 1000 meters, and it’s correct, somewhere the extra square meters are being heated, only you don’t understand where.”

“We have about a million illuminated cells in the detector, which are recorded at a speed of 40 MHz. That’s 40 terabytes of data per second. (..) In 10 ms, you need to classify the data into interesting and not very. This is a typical classification task. We are now actively applying machine learning methods. We save one event out of a million. The remaining events are lost irretrievably. So it’s very important that this selection has good efficiency. If we lose something—it’s already irrecoverable.”

“For this, we need sufficiently powerful computer resources. High-energy physics uses distributed computer resources. On this slide, to give you an idea of the quantity, for the CMS collaboration, 120 thousand cores and around 200 petabytes of disk capacity are used.”

“CMS article, characterized as the discovery of the Higgs boson. (..) 36 pages. Half of them are the article, 136 references to scientific research and three thousand authors.”

“As an analogy: what we are trying to do is see a snowflake of a certain unseen shape in the light of a camera flash during a snowfall against a backdrop of a large snowy field. And honestly, I think the task with the snowflake I described is significantly simpler.”

May 26 2017, 16:07

Today was an eye-opener for me on how cheaply one can now buy an IoT kit. 37 sensors and a computer (NodeMCU) cost just 11 bucks on AliExpress, and just the NodeMCU with onboard WiFi costs 3.5 bucks. You can access it via terminal, and from there – the full power of Lua.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/37-IN-1-BOX-SENSOR-KITS-FOR-ARDUINO-HIGH-QUALITY-FREE-SHIPPING-Works-with-Official-Arduino/32444038088.html

Here they are with a description: https://piandmore.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/37-arduino-sensors-nodemcu/

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/V3-Wireless-module-NodeMcu-4M-bytes-Lua-WIFI-Internet-of-Things-development-board-based-ESP8266-esp/32647542733.html

Oh, if only I had the time for this. I’m really itching to buy it and give it a try 🙂