Happy Monday everyone! ☕️
For the British readers out there, we can unanimously all agree that it has been unbearably hot this week! ☀️ ⛱️
Nevertheless, let’s get into this week's edition! 👇
What’s Been Cooking
Amazon Introduces AI Palm Scanning Payment ✋
Amazon One is a payment system by Amazon that verifies your identity using your palm instead of other typical biometric markers such as your iris and fingerprint.
Amazon used Generative AI to produce millions of synthetic palm images to train their palm-reading neural network model. What’s intriguing about this, is that it was before the current GenAI boom.
The model is also proficient at detecting ‘fake’ hands and has been used over 3 million times with an accuracy of 99.9999%. Amazon claims that it is ‘100 times’ more accurate than two irises.
This tech is planned to be released to 500+ Whole Food Markets in the US and other third parties. Soon gone are the days where we need to concern ourselves with bringing our phone or wallet to stores!
Chinese Government Workers Banned From Using iPhones 📱
This week, Beijing has told its government workers to not use their iPhones for work purposes or bringing them into the office. The ban has also hit government-backed companies and agencies.
Apple, with a market cap of ~$2.8 trillion (the highest in the world), saw its value fall by 6% after the announcement, as China accounted for 18% of the company’s revenue last year.
This appears to be another skirmish in the ‘tech war’ between China and the US. Earlier this year, America banned some of its chip exports to China, prompting retaliation in the form of restrictions on the exports of two key materials for semiconductors.
Side Dishes
Some more tasty stories this week:
Insider Insights
“The most effective way to do it is to do it.” ~ Amelia Earhart
I really like the phrase ‘Think Less, Do More.’ It often prevents me from overanalysing and excessive contemplation before diving into something. I sometimes find myself falling into rabbit holes, searching for the 'best' approach to concepts. Examples include data science tutorials ('tutorial hell'), starting a YouTube channel, and even indulging in extensive reading of productivity blogs on Medium (what an oxymoron).
However, it’s almost a universally known concept that simply doing is the primary way we learn and improve. Not to mention it makes us feel happier knowing we have actually done something instead of merely thinking about it. As a Data Scientist, I try to employ this way of thinking when getting stuck into new problems or learning a new area.
Reading, Listening & Everything Else!
🎬 YouTube - Egor Howell. I have added two videos this week on my time series course about Box-Cox transform and seasonality.
📝 Blog - Meta-Heuristics Explained: Ant Colony Optimization. It’s amazing how nature inspires mathematics and this blog walks us through how ants can be used to solve combinatorial optimisation problems.
📚Book - Putin’s People. An interesting read on the collapse of the Soviet Union and how Putin rose to power.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you 😎)