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Monday, September 19, 2016

80:1 - Dark Art of Disinformation: Russia and the Old Boy/Girl Club of the toxic culture

Wherever you go these days misinformation is the new black...
~courtesy of MH - and TT (Is the cold war over?)

What Makes A Liar Lie? 

Leaked Apple emails reveal employees’ complaints about sexist, toxic work environment Mic

David Bromwich: What are we allowed to say? London Review of Books

Luke Foley calls for Mike Baird to work together to cut Eddie Obeids Parliamentary Pension

The right officers who love to borrow from other officers' resumes and share rich rumours please stand up ... the most irrational outcomes behind some of the workplace cases . Truth Perspectives To A Case Where Management Had the Best Soft Skills But the the Ill Manager came from the depth sad illness 

Creator of Transparentcalled Donald Trump an "inheritor to Hitler" after winning an Emmy Award for the hit Amazon series. Jill Soloway, who was honoured for comedy directing at the ceremony in Los Angeles, described the Republican presidential candidate as "the most dangerous monster to ever approach our lifetimes" Sad Hitler inheritor Trump
“Many have asked who’s to blame for Donald Trump and I’ll tell you who: he’s sitting right there, that guy – [Apprentice producer] Mark Burnett. Thanks to Mark Burnett we don’t have to watch reality shows anymore, we’re living in one.”

North Korea bans sarcasm because Kim Jong-un fears people only agree with him ‘ironically.’


What a juchebag. Still though, I’m having a tough time squaring this story out of the Hermit Kingdom with this recent headline: North Korea airs Saturday Night Live-style sketch show mocking Barack Obama… and the jokes are as awful as you think they are



Top comedy scientists ponder: can you have comedy without irony?


Speaking at the Kremlin in December 2014, Vladimir Putin explained that bears might prefer a quiet life, eating berries and honey instead of chasing piglets, but no self-respecting bear should let its enemies rip out its claws and fangs. Among the bears for which the Russian president’s remarks were sure to have held singular resonance was Fancy Bear.


Fancy Bear is a Russian cyber­espionage group that the World Anti-Doping Agency holds responsible for hacking into its computer systems and publishing the confidential medical data of US and European athletes. Another tech-savvy denizen of the Russian forest that likes to show its claws is Cozy Bear.

According to CrowdStrike, a California-based cyber security company, the two bears were responsible for separate attacks on Democratic National Committee servers that disrupted this year’s US presidential race.

Despite Russian government denials of involvement in these two incidents, CrowdStrike suspects that Fancy Bear is affiliated with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and that Cozy Bear may be connected with the FSB, successor to the KGB, the Soviet spy service. The two bears do not appear to co-ordinate their cyber attacks on the US and its allies. But the nature of their targets indicate that the bears dance to a powerful state’s tune. Russia's Dark Art of Misinformation ...

In the astonishingly beautiful and tenderhearted Pinocchio: The Origin Story (public library), Sanna imagines an alternative prequel to the beloved story, a wordless genesis myth of the wood that became Pinocchio, radiating a larger cosmogony of life, death, and the transcendent continuity between the two.

A fitting follow-up to The River — Sanna’s exquisite visual memoir of life on the Po River in Northern Italy, reflecting on the seasonality of human existence — this imaginative masterwork dances with the cosmic unknowns that eclipse human life and the human mind with their enormity: questions like what life is, how it began, and what happens when it ends.
Origin myths have been our oldest sensemaking mechanism for wresting meaning out of these as-yet-unanswered, perhaps unanswerable questions. But rather than an argument with science and our secular sensibility, Sanna’s lyrical celebration of myth embodies Margaret Mead’s insistence on the importance of poetic truth in the age of facts.
Pinocchio: The Origin Story, inarticulably beautiful in its analog entirety, comes from Brooklyn-based Enchanted Lion, modern mythmaker of such inspired treasures as The Lion and the Bird, Cry, Heart, But Never Break, and Louis I, King of the Sheep.


Speaking of  the Myth and Realities of  Misinformation, the recent hot topic on Yammer has been the absence of soft skills in today's workplaces...
Hot Off  the Presses - World Economic Forum – “When it comes to empathy and inclusion, which company department would you expect to see at the forefront? Your guess might be Human Resources – but bizarrely, you’d be wrong. In fact, according to many who work in the field of “soft skills” and workplace inclusion, HR departments are the least likely of all departments – more than even CEOs and board members – to take on an office empathy programme. According to data in the Global Empathy Index, the more empathic the company the higher its growth and productivity rates. Most senior business leaders understand that empathy correlates with profit. But all too often, it’s not leaders but HR departments that call meetings with diversity consultants and inclusion experts to try to explain why empathy has no place in their organization…” 

National Academies Press: “Bullying has long been tolerated as a rite of passage among children and adolescents. There is an implication that individuals who are bullied must have “asked for” this type of treatment, or deserved it. Sometimes, even the child who is bullied begins to internalize this idea. For many years, there has been a general acceptance and collective shrug when it comes to a child or adolescent with greater social capital or power pushing around a child perceived as subordinate. But bullying is not developmentally appropriate; it should not be considered a normal part of the typical social grouping that occurs throughout a child’s life. Although bullying behavior endures through generations, the milieu is changing. Historically, bulling has occurred at school, the physical setting in which most of childhood is centered and the primary source for peer group formation. In recent years, however, the physical setting is not the only place bullying is occurring. Technology allows for an entirely new type of digital electronic aggression, cyberbullying, which takes place through chat rooms, instant messaging, social media, and other forms of digital electronic communication. Composition of peer groups, shifting demographics, changing societal norms, and modern technology are contextual factors that must be considered to understand and effectively react to bullying in the United States. Youth are embedded in multiple contexts and each of these contexts interacts with individual characteristics of youth in ways that either exacerbate or attenuate the association between these individual characteristics and bullying perpetration or victimization. Recognizing that bullying behavior is a major public health problem that demands the concerted and coordinated time and attention of parents, educators and school administrators, health care providers, policy makers, families, and others concerned with the care of children, this report evaluates the state of the science on biological and psychosocial consequences of peer victimization and the risk and protective factors that either increase or decrease peer victimization behavior and consequences.”

"Here is what you have to understand, the targets of workplace bullying are not the weakest players—they are often the strongest." People become targets because something about them is threatening to the bully. Often they are more skilled, more technically proficient, have a higher EQ or people just like them better. They are often workplace veterans who mentor new hires.
“WBI research findings and conversations with thousands of targets have confirmed that targets appear to be the veteran and most skilled person in the workgroup” (quote from WBI).
Let’s say that again. The common misconception is that, like schoolyard bullying, the targets of workplace bullying are loners, or “weird” or the people who “don’t fit.” In fact the reverse is true.
Workplace bullying is frighteningly common and takes an enormous toll on our businesses. Research from Dr. Judy Blando (University of Phoenix) has proven that almost 75% of employees surveyed had been affected by workplace bullying, whether as a target or a witness.
75%. That’s huge.
75% Of Workers Are Affected By Bullying -- Here's What To Do About It 

There’s a growing interest in the UK about management styles. Many organisations want their senior staff to exhibit a strong management approach. They feel this is the only way to successfully pull through hard economic times. But strong management can easily spill over into Bullying. Not all managers realise this. They take the view that they are being abrupt and tough out of necessity.  The Fine Line Between Bullying and Strong Management

How to recognise a bullying manager in your organisation The difference between bullying and management

WSJ – Rachel Emma Silverman: “In a rather disheartening study, a team of researchers led by Darren C. Treadway, of the University at Buffalo School of Management, found that many workplace bullies receive positive evaluations from their supervisors and achieve high levels of career success, despite organizational efforts to curtail bullying. The researchers sought to study the relationship between workplace bullying and job performance. They collected behavioral and job-performance data from 54 employees of a U.S. health-care firm, and found a strong correlation between bullying, positive job evaluations and social and political skill in the workplace. The study defines workplace bullying as “systematic aggression and violence targeted towards one or more individuals by one individual or by a group.” The researchers found that many bullies thrive by charming their supervisors and manipulating others to help them get ahead, even while they abuse their co-workers. Because many bullies can “possess high levels of social ability,” they are “able to strategically abuse co-workers and yet be evaluated positively by their supervisor,” the authors write.”

Good News - The New Transparent Inclusive Management:
It was great to know that the kind of things our instincts told us would be important were high on the list of priorities for our editors, too.  We all agreed that intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces make an editor’s job better, and that being able to work quickly, and iteratively is something we care about.
Parliamentary Digital Service
‘Inside the Act Room’ - Parliamentary Archives’ Blog 

JUST like his disturbing, vengeful character in Bloodline, Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn has left the A-List audience at the Emmy Awards in shock with a surprise win. Mendelsohn, a favourite in Australia since his breakthrough role in 1987’s The Year My Voice Broke but who only burst onto the Hollywood scene in recent years, won the best supporting actor Emmy today. He upset Games of Thrones’ duo Peter Dinklage and Kit Harrington who were expected to battle it out for the prize. Mendelsohn was an 80 to 1 ... “If your show doesn’t have a dragon or a White Bronco in it, go home now.” MEdia Dragons