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[University Rankings]
 
 
.au: "The Federal Government moved this week to improve safeguards around the My Health Record system ... Last year's Information Commission report reveals there have already been a number of data breaches of the My Health Record system ..." — abc [3/8/2018]. Just wait for the following to happen here.
"SingHealth's database containing patient personal particulars and outpatient dispensed medicines has been the target of a major cyberattack. About 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth's specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics from 1 May 2015 to 4 July 2018 have had their non-medical personal particulars illegally accessed and copied. ..." — Ministry of Health, Singapore [20/7/2018].
And, "Hackers breach 1.5 million Singapore patient records ..." — Healthcare IT [21/7/2018].
Some reckon that crooks like health records because they contain lots of personal information which is "good" for identity theft. And then there is blackmail.
There's more: "... the Ministry of Health (MOH) has ascertained that confidential information regarding 14,200 individuals diagnosed with HIV up to January 2013, and 2,400 of their contacts, is in the possession of an unauthorised person. The information has been illegally disclosed online ..." — moh.gov.sg [28/1/2019].
Don't forget this little slip up in .au:
"Researchers say they can identify individuals in government healthcare data that was supposed to be anonymous ... Published by the federal Department of Health in August 2016 as part of a move towards open data, the historical information included the medical and pharmaceutical bills of about 10 per cent of Australians. It was pulled offline last year after experts from the University of Melbourne [15/12/2017] were able to decrypt or decode a number of doctor ID numbers. ..." — abc [18/12/2017].
Australians had until 31 January 2019 to opt out of having a myhealth record.
And, 22 February 2019,
"Cabrini Hospital hack of 15,000 medical records shows risk to online health data ... a ransomware attack saw their medical files hacked and scrambled. ..." — [abc].
 
"Universal Architectural Concepts Underlying Protein Folding Patterns. ... dictionary of 1,493 substructural 'concepts'. Each concept represents a topologically-conserved assembly of helices and strands that make contact. Any protein structure can be dissected into instances of concepts from this dictionary. We dissected the world-wide protein data bank and completely inventoried all concept instances. ... correlations between concepts and catalytic activities or binding sites, useful for rational drug design; local amino-acid sequence-structure correlations ... An interactive site, PROCODIC ...". See [www].
 
The 'Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018' passed both Houses of the Australian Parliament, 6/12/2018 [r6195], Act no: 148, 2018. Australian IT experts and companies fear that (i) this will lead to "back-doors" around secure data transmission which criminals will inevitably exploit, and (ii) the Australian IT industry will be hurt internationally as a result.
 
"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. But the note itself. What do you deduce from it?" — Sherlock Homes, in 'Adventure I. A Scandal in Bohemia' by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Thanks to Arun K. for finding this.
 
Implemented demonstration encoding and decoding routines [click] for the Wallace Tree Code for positive integers. This is a universal code and may be used to encode unbounded integers. The end of a code-word is detected when the number of '0's equals the number of '1's plus one. The code-word lengths are odd and intermittently increase in steps of size two, 1→"0", 2→"100", 3→"10100", 4→"11000", 5→"1010100", ..., 9→"1110000", 10→"101010100", etc..
(Later: Also see [here].)
 
In 'The case against quantum computing' M. Dyakonov asks "When will useful quantum computers be constructed?" and answers, "The most optimistic experts estimate it will take 5 to 10 years. More cautious ones predict 20 to 30 years. (Similar predictions have been voiced, by the way, for the last 20 years.) I belong to a tiny minority that answers, 'Not in the foreseeable future.'" See [www].
 
Merge-sort runs in guaranteed N log(N) time but the usual implementation of the auxiliary merge procedure uses O(N) temporary work-space (and O(N)-time). However, it is possible to do the merge in-situ, that is using only constant, O(1), work-space and still in O(N)-time.
 
"Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days ... [we] searched Scopus for authors who had published more than 72 papers (the equivalent of one paper every five days) in any one calendar year between 2000 and 2016, a figure that many would consider implausibly prolific[+]. We found more than 9,000 individuals, and made every effort to count only 'full papers' - articles, conference papers, substantive comments and reviews - not editorials, letters to the editor and the like. ..." — J. P. A. Ioannidis, R. Klavans, K. W. Boyack, Nature, [www].
[+] I think we all know how this is usually achieved.
 
The selection problem is to return the member from an array of N values that has a given 'rank' in order of magnitude. A sorting-based algorithm can be made to run in O(N log N)-time – the number of element comparisons is taken to be the critical quantity. A better algorithm (Hoare 1961) almost always runs in O(N)-time, but in O(N2)-time in the worst case. Blum et al (1973) gave the first algorithm to run in O(N)-time even in the worst case.
 
"Every Australian will soon have a My Health Record – an online summary of their health information – unless they opt out over the next three months. ..." — [abc].
"There are three key ways: By visiting [www] and opting out using the online portal. Over the phone by calling 1800-723-471. Or on paper by completing a form and returning it by mail."
You may remember the recent security failure when medicare released easily identified health details. And ... "My Health Record is scrambling to put tough new restrictions on mobile phone apps that use its sensitive patient data ... Companies Telstra, HealthEngine [of the recent scandal], Tyde and Healthi already have access to My Health Record information such as Medicare records, test results, scans and prescriptions, for their app users to view on mobile phones. ..." — [abc].
 
The Proceedings of the IEEE Data Compression Conference (DCC2018) are out, including 'The Bits Between Proteins' paper, doi:10.1109/DCC.2018.00026.
 
June 2018: The UK National Museum of Computing opened a new display including the replica "Bombe" electro-mechanical machine devised by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park to break the German "Enigma" code during World War II. Also see the [bbc][23/6/2018].)
 
21 June 2018 is the 70th anniversary of the Manchester "Baby" (the "Small Scale Experimental Machine") running its first program – to find a number's highest factor. The Baby, the world's first stored program computer, was designed by Tom Kilburn and F. C. (Freddie) Williams [www]. (Also see the [bbc][21/6/2018].)
 
The 27 Club hypothesis: Is the age of 27 particularly dangerous for musicians?
Chapter 7 on 'Mixture Models' includes an analysis (§7.5) of data – collected by Kenny and Asher – suggesting that maybe there really is a 27 Club — [doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76433-7_7].
Also see 'Coding Ockham's Razor,' Springer, 2018.

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