Monday, November 07, 2016

6066 MEdia Dragon Posts: Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men."
~ Mary Ann Evans

We love our readers. But not unconditionally ... ;-) Some thank me for the comfort our blog offers, the assurance that if we got through all of that, which was so much worse, we can certainly get through this ...   What’s it like to live in Jozef Imrich's Book... Charitably,  a reader noted "I read Cold River  but I sure never want to live in that totalitarian environment and period ... even the music was bad..."

For a hundred and thirteen years, it should be said, all of us have died at night, in our family. That explains everything ... And it also explains every night storytelling and linking  ( Trends: Storytelling will become a key part of any debate  / Debate Keynes v Hayek ~ The Economist ;-) 

Social media is moving at breakneck speeds and what was yesterday’s latest craze is today’s “That is so 2015.” In order to stay on top of your social media game, you need to know what’s going on in this ever-evolving social world. Knowledge is power, and the more social media knowledge you have, the less likely you’ll be hanging out on MySpace when everyone else has moved on to Snapchat and Periscope...


Economists Forgot Smith and Darwin’s Message: Society Cannot Function Without Moral Bonds Evonomics


Various bohemian thinkers console themselves with the thought that there is always the Revolution. As the saying goes, the Revolution cometh. And if you don’t agree you have an orgasmic deficiency, because don’t you see the pun in the word: come?


We do better to recall Shakespeare’s  words:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.





What’s the best day to post a blog entry? Sunday, says a new blogging report released Oct. 27, 2016.  The “How to Build a Better Blog Than Your Competitors: 2017 
Blogging Report by integrated marketing analytics software company TrackMaven has found that 3 p.m. EST is the best time to publish blog articles.
What’s surprising is the study finds longer posts are more shareable. In fact, posts that  are 1200 to 1400 words long perform best in terms of shareability, with an average of 428 social shares per post

But what’s not surprising is that blogs that are standard to fairly easy to read get more shares. Unsurprisingly, posts with a readability rating of “very difficult” perform the worst, with an average of 64 social shares per post
Whom to Trust: Why We Persistently Get It Wrong
By Jeffrey Butler, Assistant Professor, Louisiana State University; Paola Giuliano, Associate Professor of Economics at the UCLA-Anderson School of Management; and Luigi Guiso Axa Professor of Household Finance, Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. Published at 
Assessing the trustworthiness of others is a ubiquitous and fundamental process. If these trustworthiness assessments translate into trusting behaviour, understanding how ‘trust beliefs’ are 
formed is consequential. The current US presidential election may hinge on voter assessments of the trustworthiness of candidates. The victims of the US investment fraudster Bernie Madoff are reminders of the potentially severe financial consequences of misallocated trust. ( .. In taxing jeff we trust ...


Kenneth Arrow (1972) famously asserted that trust is a prerequisite for most economic activity. A large and lively body of research in economics focuses on trust and its aggregate economic consequences, documenting strong relationships between general levels of trust between nations and everything from GDP growth to cross-country trade patterns (Knack and Zak 2001, Knack and Keefer 1996, Guiso et al. 2004, Tabellini 2008, Algan and Cahuc 2010, Guiso et al. 2009)

First discovery of 50,000-year-old human settlements in Australian interior Ars Technica

Australian democracy is in very serious jeopardy MacroBusiness

What does the great newspaper squeeze of 2016 mean for investigative journalism?



 

Bill Gates and Working Out Loud Week, November 7–13
Work out loud on Yammer—7-day challenge



After months of hard work and collaboration with some of the type industry’s leading foundries, today we’re proud to launch Typekit Marketplace — thousands of fonts completely new to our catalog, and a new way to find and buy type

Last week, Patrick Lagacé -- a columnist for the Quebec paper La Presse -- revealed that the Montreal police had gotten a secret warrant to spy on his phone calls and text messages and collect the location data from his phone, seemingly in an attempt to discover which police officers were the source for stories in La Presseabout police corruption (confusingly, Lagacé wasn't involved in these stories)  It is better to be talked about and spied on then to be left alone ...
·        The Typekit Blog

“In finance? Not partnered with MEdia Dragons? You’re in trouble”

If you were designing a nation from scratch, it would look something like Australia. A Eurasian people, boring politicians, and an economy that virtually runs itself. Powering Australia’s Economic Surge ... (via BC in NYT)

Extensions of prediction markets, and when they work well


“Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier’s servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it   desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it . . ."
  ~ Pascal (Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter, 1931) on the subject of vanity


Thank you Google for sharing the links and observations of the sole survivor of the Iron Curtain Crossing so generously ... Do Not Do Evil  slogan rocks in my part of this fragile world ...

This site [have i been pwned] came often did post-breach analysis of user credentials and kept finding the same accounts exposed over and over again, often with the same passwords which then put the victims at further risk of their other accounts being compromised. The FAQs page goes into a lot more detail, but all the data on this site comes from publicly leaked “breaches” or in other words, personal account data that has been illegally accessed then released into the public domain. Have I been pwned? aggregates it and makes it readily searchable..”

For years, I’ve wanted to create something that would capture the sense of helplessness I feel in the face of horrific onscreen images, the kinds of clips that 24-hour news programming seems to specialize in. ... read more



If your various news feeds present a reality you don’t recognise, and scrolling through them leaves you desensitised, this documentary goes some way in offering the explanation you’ve been seeking. Bitter Lake director Adam Curtis’s latest film looks at how “we have retreated into a simplified and often completely fake version of the world”, and the various social, political and cultural agents that have landed us in this seemingly hopeless world situation. It initially seemed a shame that HyperNormalisation was to be resigned to BBC iPlayer, but, in retrospect, it was absolutely vital. Programming that respects the viewer’s intelligence is rare in the UK these days, particularly when it comes to 
documentaries and their fairly recent Stacey Dooley-isation, and by avoiding a primetime broadcast slot, Curtis was able to deliver a thoroughly uncompromising film, which clocks in at two hours and 46 minutes and carefully and purposefully charts our descent into synthesis. Hypernormalisation review A masterfully dark dive

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk“I knew about the Berlin Wall, of course. I grew up with Berlin being in the news all the time and I had the childhood trauma of fallout shelters, air raid drills and duck and cover. My favorite movie was Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

A Primer on Darknets  
Natural Leadership for Human Herds

Design Is Never Done - Articles  

The Man Who Lit The Dark Web (Aug 2016) Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a banking Black Hawk helicopter.
 via http://www.popsci.com  ( "The Man Who Lit The Dark Web " - Cached )  


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