Monday, May 18, 2015

How New Technologies Push Us Toward the Past


As this future unfolds, much of today’s infrastructure to provide and support information transfer proxies will rapidly become irrelevant. And our social landscapes might well revert to something more like the walkable, livable, sociable communities that urban activists like Jane Jacobs have rued the disappearance of.

 How New Technologies Push Us Toward the Past


ATO Corporate Research Centre, May 2015. Research to shape the future Small business newsroom and to understand the ability and willingness of small businesses to interact digitally with the ATO.
Also:
Small business newsroom surveys 2015


Important policies to be blogged down
PS news, 12/5/15. A new blog on important policy issues for Australia has been launched this week by two former Secretaries of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, John Menadue and Michael Keating.
*Blog -
John Menadue – Pearls and Irritations



This article brings scholarly attention to the blog posts, tweets, updates and other writing on social media that many lawyers generate and many others would consider generating, if they had the time and skill to do so. In the broadest terms, this genre of writing is “public legal writing”: writing by lawyers not for any specific client but for dissemination to the public or through wide distribution channels, particularly the Internet. Legal blogging is a good entry point into public legal writing because legal blog posts often share some analytical features of longer articles alongside conversational conventions typical of writing on social media. Legal blogging is certainly not new, but this article brings new attention to it.


The new discovery tool creates a super mashup mix tape of TED speakers expounding on any term you might want to search for. Have TED’s 2,000 Presenters Answer Your Deepest, Probing Questions With Help From IBM's Watson



Historically, corporations were expected to serve some public purpose as justification for the benefits and privileges they receive from the state. But since the 1970s, the view has become widespread that corporations exist solely to maximize profits and for no other purpose. While the shareholder-first doctrine was supposed to solve the agency problem, in fact it has gotten worse as corporate executives enrich themselves at the expense of shareholders. Moreover, the obsession with current share prices as the only measure of corporate success may be destroying long-term value as companies cut back on investment to raise short-term profits. Tax policies designed to raise after-tax profits have done nothing to reverse these trends.