It can't hurt.

Tool to determine if your email address was in the Adobe data dump

After the Adobe hack was disclosed, I received some emails from concerned consumers asking if there was some way they could check to find out if their details were involved.

LastPass has set up a page where you can input your email address and LastPass checks the database that was dumped online to determine if your email address was in it. Of course, we don’t know if the data dump of over 152 million records was everything the hackers had acquired, but it might be of some help. When in doubt, reset your password and do NOT use “123456.”

Great images for any PowerPoint on Surveillance.

http://www.hugchina.com/china/stories/chinese-society/shanghai-installs-over-60-surveillance-cameras-at-one-road-spot-2013-11-08.html

Shanghai police crowd more than 60 surveillance cameras on single overhead bar watching one road; demolish most of them after media attention

Authorities in Shanghai's Baoshan District have installed more than 60 surveillance cameras on one four-lane section of Youyi Road, according to a NetEase report.

… Locals told reporters that in April, the poles only had 24 cameras attached, in the last few months authorities added an extra 36.

… Local Shanghai English news portal Shanghai Daily later on Nov. 6^th, Tuesday reported that the more than 60 cameras were installed by Shanghai Baokang Electronics Company in order to conduct equipment tests. The company removed all the cameras after attention was drawn to the apparent excessive surveillance being carried out on that one road.

Something for my Statistics students (all my Math students actually) Prepare yourselves for the horror of having Big Money offered for your Big Data skills.

http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/10/26/big-data-brain-drain/

The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble

Regardless of what you might think of the ubiquity of the "Big Data" meme, it's clear that the growing size of datasets is changing the way we approach the world around us. This is true in fields from industry to government to media to academia and virtually everywhere in between. Our increasing abilities to gather, process, visualize, and learn from large datasets is helping to push the boundaries of our knowledge.

But where scientific research is concerned, this recently accelerated shift to data-centric science has a dark side, which boils down to this: the skills required to be a successful scientific researcher are increasingly indistinguishable from the skills required to be successful in industry. While academia, with typical inertia, gradually shifts to accommodate this, the rest of the world has already begun to embrace and reward these skills to a much greater degree. The unfortunate result is that some of the most promising upcoming researchers are finding no place for themselves in the academic community, while the for-profit world of industry stands by with deep pockets and open arms.