Sunday, September 13, 2015

How to Be a Grown-Up: Memories of Veda Disadvantage

Grown up - 55 albums  by Bob Dylan, 16 albums by Leonard Cohen and 34 albums by Steve Earle. That’s all I listen to. It’s the storytelling in their lyrics. Dylan’s album “Tempest” is one of his best...

Veda CEO Nerida Caesar last month. The company says: "The board of directors of Veda intends to evaluate the expression of interest and will update its shareholders and the market in due course."
Veda CEO Nerida Caesar last month. The company says: "The board of directors of Veda intends to evaluate the expression of interest and will update its shareholders and the market in due course."Photo: Jessica Hromas
Media Dragon and Equifax are eyeing Veda

How to Be a Grown-Up by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
A timely novel about a forty-something wife and mother thrust back into the workforce, where she finds herself at the mercy of a boss half her age.


New York Times Room for Debate:  Can Companies Excel Without Making Workers Miserable?:

Amazon is getting a lot of heat these days for its “bruising workplace.” Meanwhile Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer announced that she plans to take limited time away from work during her pregnancy with twins and after giving birth — a move work-life balance advocates claimed set a bad example, especially at a time when work policies and benefits in some competitive industries are finally becoming more generous.
Want to write a memoir? Success depends on being honest and vulnerable. As Mary Karr says, “One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit"  ... Cold River ... 

We author our own lives, and the narratives we tell become us. So say philosophers like Daniel Dennett. What does this ever mean? 

At ease Kangaroo at Jervis Bay Sep 2014

Joseph Roth was a virtuoso of the short-form autobiographical essay. With an eye on the minutiae of human behavior, he captured his age ... with devil is in a detail information ...



“The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images. We would be lost without them (or, at the very least, extremely confused), and yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years. What changed their minds?” BBC of mental images 

"Information" informs, entertains and instructs. It can include knowledge derived from study, experience, instruction, research or teaching. By its nature, information can thus be valuable to both the purveyor and the recipient of it.
Of course, not all information is necessarily confidential. As the author explains, "information that is confidential is necessarily a subset of all information, which in turn explains why courts often speak of the need for it to be identified with specificity."
Law of Confidentiality, GE Dal Pont, 2015, LexisNexis Butterworths, ISBN 9780409337921

Organisational culture - if you can 'see' it you can change it, Human Resources Magazine, Shaun McCarthy, August- September 2015. This article offers helpful tips for changing organisational culture to achieve successful performance. Topics covered include complexities of culture change that should consider different culture norms including the passive/defensive cultures with bureaucratic structures, aggressive/defensive cultures with faster-paced environments and constructive cultures focused on quality and innovations. Also mentioned are involving employees, reviewing job designs and skills development Kulture

Culture knocks out strategy, Patrick Willer, Innovation Excellence, 1 September 2015, Many companies have a huge gap between their culture and strategy.  Strategy


Dwarf Avocado by the falling retention wall

The glamour of writer’s block doesn’t extend to procrastination, which is all broken promises, evasions, and outright lies you tell yourself and others 
Via FT (alph order)
The CSIR in collaboration with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science.

 The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.  Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons. All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other by-products are produced.