It Takes a Village to Make a Smart City: Water Runs Downhill

If we cannot make globalisation work for all, in the end it will work for none.  ~Kofi Annan

“I believe my greatest service to honest men is to warn them against the imbeciles and bastards who cynically exploit their deepest fears.” 
– Georges Bernanos    

The wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell

John King, covering his eighth presidential race, is a big winner amid what Bruce Springsteen might call a pants-dropping, house-rocking, earth-quaking, booty-shaking political stunner.

A great journalist chum calls it a "dystopian nightmare." At minimum, it was precisely that for the Polling-Survey Industrial Complex whose errant ways were laid bare during King's night-long tour de force. It was a "big middle finger" to the political and media establishment, said "Morning Joe's" Willie Geist this morning. The media was in full meltdown. (Vanity Fair)

Nobody foresaw what both The Washington Post and The New York Times this morning headlined, "TRUMP TRIUMPHS," with the New York Daily News going with a landscape shot of the White House and "HOUSE OF HORRORS." The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib's analysis: "‘Deplorables’ Rise Up to Reshape America." The media melted down in real time last night

 

How did Shenzhen become China’s innovation capital?

Fortune: Silicon Valley and Disruption of The Trump Village

Being smart creates a challenge for all governments. Many government services are rightly (at times) a monopoly. To be smart means providing the community with the data from resources and letting them make a choice on how best to use that resource. Rather than providing broad, comprehensive information, citizens are coming to expect a two-way conversation and information to be tailored to their individual circumstances.
Technology alone doesn’t make a smart city. Digital advances have enabled people to be empowered and realise community benefit, but government’s stewardship role is as critical as ever 


You Don’t Need Big Data — You Need the Right Data 
Masses of social, weather, and government data are being leveraged to predict supply chain outages. Enormous amounts of user data are being harnessed at scale to identify individuals among a sea of website clicks. And companies are even starting to leverage huge quantities of text exchanges to build algorithms capable of having conversations with customers It is not about Big or Small

ing to declare? Arrested Australian hands over bag containing baby koala Guardian

National Geographic’s nature photographs

Building Character Skills – What Works?

The traditional focus of policymakers on academic achievement as a marker of people’s talents can cause them to miss the importance of non-cognitive skills, also called character skills. There is now growing evidence that these skills – which include things like conscientiousness, motivation, and creativity – predict an array of important life outcomes in areas like employment, earnings, and health. They can even contribute to academic performance above and beyond the effects of cognitive skills

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Sex Is So Good

We’ve all started a sentence with the phrase “Won’t it be great when…” (I go to college, fall in love, have kids, etc.). Similarly, we often hear older people start sentences with this phrase “Wasn’t it great when…”

Think about how seldom you hear anyone say, “Isn’t this great, right now?”

Morava River's Freud and the (Un)happiness Industry

Study: Male Creativity Is Different From Female Creativity. Here’s How

The results suggest men are more likely to produce radical breakthroughs, but women are more likely to be highly creative in a different but equally important realm. As one writer puts it, “adaptive creativity is incremental in nature and tends to work within existing structures or processes. Adaptive creativity is focused on process improvement or unique strategies to carry 

out a routine objective.”

 Like MEdia Dragon, GIF Site Giphy Is Valued at $600 Million

Rogoff predicts that future cash registers will include scanners that log purchases with plastic bills, blending elements of digital and physical currencies.” Link here, that is a Jeremy Bentham idea, basically

White House probes centralized cyber capabilities

Part of that rallying cry is powered by people using social MEdia Dragons to share what’s making them excited, frustrated, and anything in between. Consider city residents who commute to work by train. If the train breaks down, passengers can use social media to give attention to the issue at hand and vendors can tap into those conversations Tand send a mechanic out immediately to try to fix the problem It takes a village to make a smart city 

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived as fully,” Proust wrote in contemplating why we read, “as the days we think we left behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favourite book.”And yet childhoods come in varied hues, some much darker than others; some children only survive by leaving the anguish of the real world behind and seeking shelter in the world of books

Inside Higher Ed: “Former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren on Monday provoked the ire of academic librarians after she suggested their institutions are “vanity projects” and that the services they provide — from acquiring scholarly journals and serving as a starting point for research to preserving materials and training faculty members and students — “are on our smartphones.” Van Susteren, who until this September hosted the weeknight current affairs show On the Record, made the comments at 6:28 a.m. in response to a Yahoo Finance article showing tuition rates increasing both at private and public colleges. In subsequent tweets, she criticized colleges for building “hugely expensive new buildings” and passing the costs on to students instead of renovating existing ones…”

Gambler and MONA creator David and Goliath Walsh ruffles feathers again ... Antipodean Sigmund Fraud

Bathrooooom Quote: “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

Anton Chekhov was better at managing such things. In 1898, Alexi Peshkov, soon to be Maxim Gorky, sent Chekhov a selection of his stories and asked for his judgment. Chekhov opens with praise and encouragement:

“What do I think? You talent is not to be doubted, and it is a genuine major talent to boot. It manifested itself with extraordinary power, for instance, I love your story, `In the Steppe.’ I actually felt envious at not having written it myself. You are an artist and an intelligent man.” The shortcomings of tall tree and tower

Being an agent in Hollywood isn't a job, it's a lifestyle. Those who make it display greed and genius, clairvoyance and an aptitude for both ... ass-kissing and obstinacy

Quartz: “The techniques of propagandists work for good reason. Studies show that the more often we hear a statement, the more likely we are to believe it is true—regardless of the underlying facts.Tom Stafford, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Sheffield and author of For argument’s sake: Evidence that reason can change minds, wrote in the BBC that the “illusion of truth” is created from frequently hearing a statement repeated. Stafford points to a 2015 Vanderbilt University study  showing that this illusion works even when the person hearing the statement is aware of a contradictory fact.”

Hong Kong money laundering and terrorism financing reports hit record high SCMP 

Cabinet ministers have been told to improve the cyber security of their departments after it was found inadequate safeguards risked government agencies becoming the "honey pots" of secret information in cyber espionage. ... "This isn't an issue where we need to sit quietly and not be transparent..." "We need to make sure people are aware of the threat and the evolving nature of the threats." Cabinet told to lift their cyber game

I know that this is an old story ...

Shakespeare dramatized conflicts between fictional characters. One may marvel at his genius, his characters and his stories, but we must keep in mind that his was a fictional world inhabited by fictional beings.

Shakespeare certainly knew the difference. When he bade adieu to the theatre in The Tempest, he had Prospero speak these great lines:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Australian Taxation Office is fuming after cyber-criminals ruined the finale of Tax Time 2016 with an attack on the government's web portal myGov.
The troubled myGov portal, which handles traffic to most federal government customer service sites, had to be taken offline on Monday as it came under the same sort of attack as the one that took down the census in August.
ATO fumes after cyber criminals attack myGov portal during last days of Tax Time 2016

Hamlet was fortunate not to be an employment lawyer or human resources professional. Following a recent Queensland case, the question of whether or not to investigate employee misconduct is more vexed than ever. Public and private sector employers now find themselves walking a tightrope where a misstep in either direction can lead to litigation and liability.

Allegations in the workplace: to investigate or not to investigate?