Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-08

• Twitter Knows When You Sleep, and More - NYTimes.com

  Peering into its fire hose of tweets from four big cities around the world, a pair of Twitter engineers, Manuel Rios and Jimmy Lin, have discovered that the Twitter users in Istanbul don’t sleep much in August — and why would they, considering how many people are strolling along Istiklal Avenue on summer evenings. The denizens of Sao Paulo, Brazil, seem to take an afternoon siesta – tweets sharply drop off in the period after lunch.

• BBC News - Dancing robots reveal cultural cues

  Now dancing robots are helping to reveal some of the basic means by which those traditions, behaviours and ideas move, and mutate, in both human and animal societies.

  The dancing robots were performing in a laboratory at the University of the West of England (UWE) as part of a long-term project that brought engineers, philosophers and cultural theorists together to analyse what the machines revealed.

• LinkedIn Was Breached. Now What Do You Do? - NYTimes.com

  Security researchers have confirmed that a file containing 6.5 million encoded LinkedIn passwords has been posted to a Russian hacker site. LinkedIn has yet to confirm the breach, but it took to its Twitter account Wednesday to tell users it was investigating the matter.

  It is unclear whether the file represents the full extent of the breach. Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, a computer security company in San Francisco, said it appeared that LinkedIn’s user credentials had been compromised because it stored log-in information on its main Web servers instead of isolating those files on separate, secure machines whose only function was to verify log-in details.

• Who owns patient data? - O'Reilly Radar

  Ergo, neither a patient nor a doctor nor the programmer has an "ownership" relationship with patient data. All of them have a unique set of privileges that do not line up exactly with any traditional notion of "ownership." Ironically, it is neither the patient nor the provider (when I say "provider," this usually means a doctor) who is closest to "owning" the data. The programmer has the most complete access and the only role with the ability to avoid rules that are enforced automatically by electronic health record (EHR) software.

  So, asking "who owns the data?" is a meaningless, time-wasting, and shallow conceptualization of the issue at hand.

• Chronoline.js

  chronoline.js is a library for making a chronology timeline out of events on a horizontal timescale. From a list of dates and events, it can generate a graphical representation of schedules, historical events, deadlines, and more.

• The Perfect Milk Machine: How Big Data Transformed the Dairy Industry - Technology - The Atlantic

  Dairy breeding is perfect for quantitative analysis. Pedigree records have been assiduously kept; relatively easy artificial insemination has helped centralized genetic information in a small number of key bulls since the 1960s; there are a relatively small and easily measurable number of traits -- milk production, fat in the milk, protein in the milk, longevity, udder quality -- that breeders want to optimize; each cow works for three or four years, which means that farmers invest thousands of dollars into each animal, so it's worth it to get the best semen money can buy. The economics push breeders to use the genetics.

• The beauty of SimCity is in the details | Ars Technica

  The first thing that an old-school SimCity fan is likely to notice about the series' upcoming revamp, due on PCs in February 2013, is the level of detail. This includes graphical detail for sure; cities are finally rendered in full 3D, and you can twist, pan, and zoom the view to your heart's content. The graphics system uses tilt-shift effects and saturated colors to make it seem like you're viewing a tiny, living model world, an impression that is only enhanced by the satisfying thunk and cloud of dust that comes from placing buildings and objects.

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