Smarter Data

“A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.”
~Georges Clemenceau, Clemenceau, The Events of His Life as Told by Himself to His Former Secretary, Jean Martet

Dmitri Mendeleev on Smarter Google Doodle 

Bryan Cranston ( not related to Michael Cranston) brings Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to Sydney Harbour on hot Sunmer night  ... Is there any other paradise on earth like Mrs Macquarie Chair ... Swim at Andrew Boy pool, watch fireworks and enjoy the food and wine before open air screening of Trumbo 

The future of renewable energy in Australia has been given a significant boost with the first residential Tesla Powerwall being installed in a Sydney suburb.

Australia isn’t known as a ‘sunburned country’ for no reason. The sun-drenched continent is the perfect place for solar power generation. For some time, the land down under has boasted the highest rate of residential solar panel installations, but it’s been lagging behind in the development of large-scale solar projects. All of that is set to change as two solar power plants have officially opened for business

Former Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Peter Shergold said the Australian public service needed the "Hollywood model" of employment.   Hollywood 
model of work

CLSA Expects the Year of the Monkey to Be Unpredictable even for Smarter Data Bloomberg

A Sydney man will have to pay a hefty penalty after the Australian Taxation Office discovered he was falsely claiming thousands of dollars on work-related expenses for items such as 39 packets of Monte Carlo biscuits and cheese in a can.
 Gary Ogden was previously employed as a salesperson for IBM Australia. ATO catches salesman who tried to claim “disgraceful” work-related expenses

Robert Wood, Perfectly Legal Tax Write-off? Lawyer Fees — Even $1,200 An Hour



What do you mean, IBM doesn’t stock the vacuum tubes anymore? IRS Systems Outage Shuts Down Tax Processing (Accounting Today)

Russ Fox, Maryland Suspends Processing Tax Returns from 23 Liberty Tax Service Locations:

For consumers, the advice that Maryland noted in their press release is accurate: “Taxpayers should carefully review their returns for these issues and should be suspicious if a preparer: deducts fees from the taxpayer’s refund to be deposited into the tax preparer’s account; does not sign the tax return; or fails to include the Preparer Taxpayer Identification number “PTIN” on the return.” I’ll add, if you don’t own a business and see business income on your return, there’s a problem.

Focus On Identity Theft & Tax Fraud Remains High At IRS   

UK Cyber-thieves hack the taxman

NICK Xenophon is insisting all his party candidates across Australia back Adelaide for three multi-billion dollar defence shipbuilding projects, as The Advertiser reveals details of the major parties’ election-year assaults aimed at smashing his extraordinary popularity Revealed: Labor and Liberal strategies to smash Nick Xenophon’s electoral success

How a centimeter of clay in a 1,300-foot layer of rock in Italy explains one of the most important days in the History of life   

The KGB’s Dumbest Double Agent 

Samuel Reshevsky, age 8, defeating several chess masters at once in France, 1920

Feeling smug about your solar rooftop? Not so fast PhyOrg

Coles and Woolworths caught up in toxic lettuce recall Tip of the Iceberg ...

New York Times:  Girlfriend, Mother, Professor?, by Carol Hay (UMass-Lowell):

I’m not their mother. And I’m not their girlfriend either.

I’m their university professor. At times I encounter students, both male and female, who don’t quite grasp this, and I consequently find myself in a whole host of awkward situations, trying to subtly remind them that I’m neither going to make their bed nor go to bed with them.

The problem is that my students lack the cultural scripts to know how to deal with our teacher-student relationship. In 1925, Sigmund Freud coined the idea of the “Madonna-whore complex,” according to which men are able to see women only as their saintly mothers or their sexual playthings. Whatever one thinks of Freud, we can all recognize some truth to this insight.

If I were to serve as their mother, I’d have only compassion and unconditional acceptance to offer, not intellectual lessons. And being their sexual plaything isn’t an option either; playthings aren’t generally accorded the kind of respect needed for effective teaching and learning, not to mention the respect I deserve after more than a decade of postsecondary education.

My male colleagues don’t have these problems. There’s no shortage of roles they can avail themselves of in trying to reach their students.

David Segal writes about Mappers of Google in NYT article No wonder Google stands out:

"...Google deploys a little-known army of volunteers, called Mappers, many of whom are engaged in a contest that takes wit and stamina. These are people around the world who propose and approve edits to Google Maps, with an assist from Google employees, all in the interest of refining the product and fighting spam — a term that in this context means anything fake and misleading.

It may seem bizarre that people would work gratis for one of the world’s richest companies. But many Mappers turn the job into a calling. For Dan Austin, who lives in Olympia, Wash., it was more like an addiction.

A former truck driver for DHL, he became a Mapper after he was laid off from his job and started fixing mistakes he had noticed on Maps while on the road. By the fall of 2011, Mr. Austin had discovered locksmith spam and was soon spending 10 hours a day, seven days a week, deleting it from Maps.

The goal of lead gens is to wrest as much money as possible from every customer, according to lawsuits. The typical approach is for a phone representative to offer an estimate ]for locksmith work] in the range of $35 to $90. On site, the subcontractor demands three or four times that sum, often claiming that the work was more complicated than expected. Most consumers simply blanch and pay up, in part because they are eager to get into their homes or cars.

Here is another bit from the middle:

Mr. Alverado said those fake buildings were necessary because getting to the first page in Google results now took ingenuity and cunning.

“You have no idea,” he said, sounding a little weary when asked about competition. Israelis were his toughest rivals, he said, and they had instilled a kind of awe in him. “I can tell you point-blank, they are freaking smart,” he said. “I really admire them.”

… Why too much gym can be bad for your love life - Telegraph

... Why moving to Thailand will not make you wiser or smarter  Tongue-Thai’ed – A woman’s (supposed) worth in a military man’s world Asian Correspondent

In a blistering attack on a succession of "incompetent" NSW governments, one of Australia's most successful entrepreneurs has lamented the death of Sydney's night-time economy at the hands of leaders whose "moralistic crusade" has turned the city into an "international joke".
Matt Barrie's essay, Would The Last Person in Sydney Please Turn The Lights Out, has gone viral, with more than 200,000 readers in under 24 hours, a global ranking of No.1 on LinkedIn and most-read on Sydney's reddit site

“We’re very, very frustrated. None of us have had any trouble. The police are painting us all with one brush,” co-owner Marco Ambrosino said.  Sydney - Paddo Italian Bars A Source Of Heavy Drinking and Evil 

This guide provides links to selected sources of financial assistance to community groups. It does not include links to smart scholarships, fellowships or research grants.
Community grants: a quick guide to key internet links