(Photo: How to get real)

It should probably come as no surprise to you that Facebook has employees whose job it is to read private messages that have been flagged as inappropriate, particularly if they contain malicious URLs or child porn. [BuzzFeed]

Zynga's first big real-money casino games, ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino, are launching this week in the U.K. At least you'll have the potential to win actual dollars instead of spending them on virtual crops? [AllThingsD]

Apple is finally beginning iPhone production this quarter so calm down ya fanboys. [Wall Street Journal]

If you live in California, you may soon be able to know exactly what personal information your telecom company collects on you. [Ars Technica]

Happy 40th birthday to the cellphone. Oh, how far we've come. [The Verge]

Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Bollinger. (Photo: NYC Mayor's Office Instagram

This morning, the right honorable Mayor Bloomberg ventured north to the Columbia campus for what was teased on Twitter as a "big announcement." It turns out that Columbia will not be left out while Cornell-Technion and NYU Polytechnic rake in all the glory, because the Lions are getting their very own tech project, the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering.

Sound familiar? That's probably because the project is what the university originally pitched, way back in October, for its very own applied sciences campus. For those keeping score at home, that brings the city's total up to three tech campuses. Are you excited for science yet?

According to a press release, the city will provide $15 million in "financial assistance," including "discounted energy transmission costs and partial debt forgiveness." So not $15 million in cash, but that's nothing to sneeze at, nevertheless. As for what it'll create, the agreement between town and gown promises 44,000 square feet of new space for engineering and applied sciences on Columbia's campus by 2016, as well as 75 additional faculty over the next 15 years.

Says the statement:

 The focus of the new institute will be on advances in the data sciences, attracting high-caliber faculty in specific fields of study, and expanding Columbia’s research capabilities and funding, and building upon the school’s recent successes in engineering.

Mayor Bloomberg took the opportunity to submit a first draft of his mention in the history books:

“This historic partnership is newest element in the applied sciences initiative that is, by far, the largest and most far-reaching economic development effort City government has undertaken in modern memory,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “It will create tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity, and it will encourage the growth of the tech sector in New York City and solidify our leadership in the innovation economy for decades to come.”

Not to be outdone (venture too far off message), President Bollinger added:

“We know from experience that the creativity and dynamism of this new Data Sciences Institute will be ignited by collaborations that are possible because they are part of the wide diversity of intellectual excellence that defines not just a great urban research university like Columbia, but the genius of New York City itself.”

Frankly, we're starting to suspect that Hizzoner re-reads that Ken Auletta piece on Stanford every night before he goes to bed.

Lust train

You can see the amorous exchanges filtered by location—gym, coffee shop, laundromat or church. There is a terrific breakdown of which subway is most likely to result in a missed connection. No doubt the WiFi on the L train is helping love struck strap hangers to get their posts up while the memory is still fresh.

Taking a look at the map, it seems the biggest concentrations of missed connections is in Union Square. It's an outdoor space where a lot of subway lines converge. But its also the hub for New York's startup scene. Are our overworked techies too busy working to stop when Cupid's arrow strikes?

Ms. Burrington has some advice for those looking to be featured in missed connections. Make a lot of eye contact. Be attractive. If you can't be attractive, try to look distinct.

Perhaps the most interesting element is the taxonomy of terms associated with these missed connections. The number one adjective used is "cute," which breaks down further into "really cute," "super cute," "too freaking cute" and "cute as hell." That's followed by hot ("smoking," "incredibly" and "fucking").

No one startup should have all this power.

Hunch is a NY startup building a taste graph that will allow them to offer precise, intimate recommendations to users almost instantly.

When users first go to Hunch they answer a series of questions. At the end, the site delivers recomendations to them about everything from poetry to food to clothing.

To do this, Hunch has to compare a user's answers to more than 30 billion other interactions between people, places and things they have recorded in their system.

That's a pretty intense calculation to pull off, and Hunch has purchased and perfected a very special machine to do it.

As Peter Warden at ReadWriteWeb details, Hunch decided against the current trend, which is to buy an army of cheap servers and network them together to solve big problems.

Instead they went with a single super powered server which the Hunch team tweaked to optimize it for TasteGraph calculations.

"I have to admit I was surprised that he was apparently swimming against the tide by working within a single uber-machine rather than using an army of dumb boxes," wrote Warden, "but as [Hunch] explained their requirements it all started to make sense."

The Observer won't pretend to understand the finer points of IT and server deployment. But its cool to see a NY startup going against the grain and building a unique machine to power their platform.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Some of the luxurious accomodations at Google's CoHo

In the parlance of the data-center crowd, 111 Eighth Avenue is New York's premier "CoHo", or "Carrier Hotel".

The building's enormous size and position directly over an important fiber optic line make it one of the "world's choicest pieces of Internet real estate."

Wall Street caught on to this early, moving electronic trading units in back in 2001 to gain millisecond speed advantages in high-frequency trading.

But with the major exchanges transfering their computers out to Jersey, the building is more attractive to Internet firms like Google, which want fast net access, not proximity to NYSE servers.

Google will certainly be adding humans to the building as well — probably sales and marketing staff — as they go head to head in the booming business for local ads with firms like Facebook and Groupon. But don't be surprised to see more floors of this massive property dedicated to data centers.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper