New data analysis competitions

  • If you are in Madrid, this will interest you: Madrid's City Hall, in collaboration with Medialab-Prado, has started two competitions related to data analysis and data journalism: 1, 2. Be sure to check them out.

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  • This is a very nice story with a quite straightforward lesson: set your PRNG seeds. Source 1, source 2.

    When Pixar wanted to release its 2003 film Finding Nemo for Blu-ray 3D in 2012, the studio had to rerender the film to produce the 3D effects. The studio by then was no longer using the same animation software system, and it found that certain aspects of the original could not be emulated in its new software. The movement of seagrass, for instance, had been controlled by a random number generator, but there was no way to retrieve the original seed value for that generator. So animators manually replicated the plants’ movements frame by frame, a laborious process. The fact that the studio had lost access to its own film after less than a decade is a sobering commentary on the challenges of archiving computer-generated work.

    Thanks to the cryptography mailing list for this link.

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