More random topics that crossed my path:

• bureaucratic entropy: “…In 1987, except at private research universities, where administrators outnumbered tenure-track faculty, colleges had approximately as many tenure-track faculty as full-time administrators. By 2008 there were more than twice as many administrators as tenure-track faculty at all types of institutions.”
• Cuts loom for US science.
• Wise and Shine – UC Berkeley startup providing machine learning and big data services.
  Significant astro and time domain data analysis group.

• High Speed Trading goes berserk – morbidly fascinating anim of the rise of the robots in the markets from Tehnology Review.
  Watch the little algos start pouncing on end of day correlations and then spreading through the crash to the modern era.