We Embrace All Type of Information - Microsoft

You can’t write a blog entry about parliamentary past in Sydney that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost ...

One idea for what to do with all those comments: Embroidery (via Linda G ;-) 

"Once Skeptical of Executive Power, Obama Has Come to Embrace It; Mr. Obama will leave the White House as one of the most prolific authors of major regulations in presidential history": Binyamin Appelbaum and Michael D. Shear will have this article in Sunday's edition of The New York Times. Also in tomorrow's newspaper, Shear will have a related item headlined "Reshaping Lives, Without Congress."

Do you ever read someone and find you are too addled to tell when the author is being funny or not, and then perhaps some of you have the temerity to suggest your confusion is the fault of the author? Well, imagine a whole novel like that, and about the hot-button topics of sex and above all power and power in the workplace and yes race too.  Helen DeWitt can in fact get away with writing sentences such as:

One man said he was not exactly disputing the points made but he did not think he could reward his top earners with titless sex.

So yes, buy this book but do not read it, for the temerity will rise in your soul.Helen DeWitt is a national treasure, yet collectively we have driven her to Berlin.  We do not deserve whatever she plans on serving up next. Via Tyler Cowen Helen DeWitt’s *Lightning Rods* 

The intrusion and surveillance tools purportedly stolen from a hacking group linked to the US NSA contains identical code to that used in the group's malware, according to Kaspersky. 

The security firm today said its analysis had shown that "several hundred tools" from the leak share a "strong connection" with its previous findings about the Equation Group. Kaspersky first linked the Equation Group to the National Security Agency in February last year. At the time it labelled the group the most advanced hacking collective it had come across.

No one ever wants to read press releases, not even journalists, and especially not when the documents are dense corporate financial updates trying to make things sound rosy to investors no matter what. You can imagine, though, that these perfunctory releases might take on a whole other significance and value to someone interested in, say, insider trading. A series of both criminal and civil cases have been going on for months now to expose and potentially punish hackers and traders who used unpublished press releases to inform their trading and make big money. Press Releases Finally Get a Devoted Readership: Hackers 

If you do nothing, you accomplish nothing — that's true — but you also haven’t expended any time and resources in the process.  But if you set out to overachieve and fail (which is what’s most likely to happen when you bite off too much), you’ve not only accomplished nothing (or close to nothing) but have used precious organizational time and resources doing so, which burns bridges and sours the organization on information management going forward — not to mention perhaps costing you and your team (and your consultants) their jobs. When Just Enough is More Than Enough 

It is not ‘freedom of the press’ when newspapers and others are allowed to say and write whatever they want even if it is completely false!” [@donaldjtrump Sunday on Twitter] 25 years ago in my stump speech on lawsuit reform I criticized Trump for his use of legal threats to silence critics. More reportage on that history, a familiar topic around here [Frances S. Sellers, Washington Post, earlier here, etc.] 

“If all beliefs about groups are stereotypes, and all stereotypes are defined as inaccurate, then all beliefs about groups are inaccurate. It is, however, logically impossible for all beliefs about groups to be inaccurate.” Truth in stereotypes

“China joins the ranks of the world’s 25 most-innovative economies, while Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Finland and Singapore lead the 2016 rankings in the Global Innovation Index, released today by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)….The Global Innovation Index ranks the innovation performance of 128 countries and economies around the world, based on 82 indicators. This edition explores the impact of innovation-oriented policies on economic growth and development. High-income and developing countries alike are seeking innovation-driven growth through different strategies. Some countries are successfully improving their innovation capacity, while others still struggle.”

Security researchers are eager to poke holes in the chip-embedded credit and debit cards that have arrived in Americans' mailboxes over the last year and a half. Although the cards have been in use for a decade around the world, more brains trying to break things are bound to come up with new and inventive hacks. And at last week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, two presentations demonstrated potential threats to the security of chip cards. The first involved fooling point-of-sale (POS) systems into thinking that a chip card is a magnetic stripe card with no chip, and the second involved stealing the temporary, dynamic number generated by a chip card and using it in a very brief window of time to request money from a hacked ATM

An ATM hack and a PIN-pad hack show chip cards aren’t impervious to fraud

Two guys in a Connecticut jail cell helped change the way America does drugs Business Insider. Dan K: “I think people need to understand crime better. Crime is not a byproduct or aberration, it’s as intrinsic to process (systems) as mutation and decay. One can’t remedy dysfunction if one can’t recognize its origins and its patterns. And moralizing is not at all helpful, shows a lack of intellectual rigor and of emotional depth.”

Healthy meals every day, and clean clothes – yes nutrition and clean clothes impact school attendance. Every child in America deserves safe public schools, good food, and clean clothes (and great teachers, libraries and librarians, music and art classes…) When did we stop considering this to be a right, not a Privilege? Via Care Counts (yes, sponsored by Whirlpool):
“Teachers around the country estimate that nearly one in five students struggle with access to clean clothes. This seemingly small barrier can have a significant impact on a student’s academic experience.

Why You Should Always Dress Up When You Go Out to Eat. “I no longer dress to please my parents, but I understand now, more than ever, the importance of dressing up.” 

Your work at work is a constant, but the margin is where you can create your own joy The Road Not Taken: Margin Call 

Embracing Future Workforce

In Embrace

The pretty lady's shapely ass distracted
The old man sitting down upon his favorite
Bench — more an aesthetic than erotic
Thrill, flesh now weak in different ways from when
He begged embrace and more, and lived
To tell about it. Over there, a starling
Struts and sparkles when the sun alights. "Wow,"
He thinks, "Nice to see at last what all along
You mostly never looked at." In The Park

“Inner life rebels against the cruelty of the external world. [That is a banality.] The great books of the twentieth century have been written against the monster by lonely people struggling with their own despair. [This is a banality worthy of Sartre, but now it gets good.] Nadezhda Mandelstam, who learned her husband’s poems by heart. George Orwell, a nonparty man among party men. Solzhenitsyn, the avenger endowed with a magnificent 
memory. The ailing Aleksander Wat telling Miłosz about Lubyanka. Simone Weil, to whom 
God revealed himself. Bonhoeffer in prison in Tegel.” Written against monster by lonelympeople

Gentle Giant,  Greg McGill, 22 year veteran as the Crown Financial Controller, and Roberts Scobles,  Microsoft Technical Evangelist, are the only two souls on this earth to share with me this Microsoft classified  top secret Spell checker suggest 'embrace' for 'Imrich' ... ;-)

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. 
~Oscar Wilde

Born Digital News Collections: New Formats, New Approaches Elisa Villanueva, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands); Jasper Faase, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), IFLA 2016. “Nowadays most newspapers (or almost all of them) have a digital version or are definitely turning to digital"

French prisoner loses license & bombarded with fines after cops take car for a ride RT. YY: “I 
thought this kind of stuff only happens in America…”

“Digital books made it possible to track the way people read and companies like Amazon and Apple could gather that data, but didn’t share it with publishers. 

Now a number of businesses have sprung up that 

specialize in reader analytics and they are sharing their findings.” Publishers

•  NPR

The Problem With Politics Today? The Opposition Must Be PUNISHED! This is what comes of confusing civil law and religion.  When your politics are your religion, those who don’t agree are evil.

Having a Baby Doesn’t Entitle You to Take Over the World

Free the mayor, he does not deserve time in jail

How states use facial recognition to sniff out driver’s license fraud.

Deep learning makes it easy and cheap to scan millions of photos for duplicates and fraud, and since it doesn’t involve any extra data collection or access — you just need to find matching entries, not link them to an identity — privacy groups see it as one of the more benign forms of facial scanning. Forty-three of the 50 states have used some form of that technology, with seven of those states adopting the system for driver’s licenses in the last three years. (The holdouts are California, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.) But while the scans are still limited, some worry those systems could be the first step toward something more troubling.
One of the driving forces behind the new DMV systems has been a new wave of federal requirements — and newly available federal money to meet those new standards. The RealID Act was passed in 2005 in response to the 9/11 Commission’s identification requirements — including the requirement that driver’s licenses be stored in digital form. States are still in charge of their own licenses, but if licenses don’t meet the new federal requirements, they’ll stop being valid for use in airports as early as 2018.

Circa 1998 - Parliamentary embezzler blows whistle on MPs Terry Charles Spence

Circa 2016 ... (blank in order to protect the guilty ;-)

“If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Looking to elevate your Foreign Corrupt Practices Act skillz? [FCPA Professor] 

Jack Townsend, The Vanishing Federal Criminal Jury Trial. ” But, the system from overcriminalization and the resulting smorgasbord of choices given to prosecutors virtually compels a plea agreement in the overwhelming number of cases that are charged.” 

Marti Hearst authored a research paper in 1999 that brought text mining to the forefront for many. In it, Hearst commented that, “The nascent field of text data mining (TDM) has the peculiar distinction of having a name and a fair amount of hype but as yet almost no practitioners.” Text and Mining 

"Does size matter? Not always, as this case illustrates." So begins an opinion that Chief Judge Diane P. Wood issued yesterday on behalf of a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit 

"Jury: A.G. Kane guilty of perjury, obstruction, all other charges." Craig R. McCoy, Angela Couloumbis, and Laura McCrystal of The Philadelphia Inquirer have this report

"At Supreme Court, Jurors' Voices Silenced": Kenneth Jost has this post today at his blog, "Jost on Justice."