Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction

… While we all weren't looking, poetry became cool | Metro News


I was born and bred at a Black Death mortuary under the Mountains ...  So this book was written  for moi... Sydney must see cemeteries

Comparative Criminal Procedure: A Select Bibliography – This expansive, comprehensive and up-to-date guide by Lyonette Louis-Jacques, Foreign and International Law Librarian and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago D’Angelo Law Library, references resources that include books, loose-leaf, online, database and e-government sites, services and resources

Amy Cuddy's TED talk on power poses — feet apart, hands on hips, head thrown back -- has been viewed 37 million times. How did such a flimsy idea become a sensation?...  Power Madness 

Adani gilded lily is far from rolled gold

Australian judge requires female Muslim witness to testify without a veil.

Africa’s agriculture projects are growing inequality, not food The Conversation

... nothing is more self-empowering than metaphorically sailing oceans, climbing mountains and crossing deserts.

Social Protection in the Age of Uber The Wire

JUSTICE: Lawyers: New court software is so awful it’s getting people wrongly arrested; Problematic Odyssey Case Manager software package is used nationwide.

The Intimate, Exhaustive Relationship Of Elena Ferrante’s English Translator To The Author And The Works

In North America, people really would like to meet the author, whoever she is. Instead, they get her English translator: “Public appearances and interviews with [Ann] Goldstein have gone a little way towards filling the void created by Ferrante’s choice to remain anonymous and do only the bare minimum to promote her books.”

New Report Exposes “Patient Advocacy” Groups as a Big Pharma Scam The Intercept

Immigration to UK at record high: study Politico 

Dutch parliament votes to ban burqa in public buildings Christian Science Monitor

Alexios Mantzarlis- Poynter Fact Checking: “Facebook is an important source of traffic for virtually all news outlets in the United States. New data, however, indicates that the social network is a far more important channel for some of the largest hyperpartisan and fake news sites in the country. Analytics company Jumpshot tracked Facebook referrals to 20-plus websites between September 11th and November 15th. It then calculated the share of unique visitors that figure represented. The data, seen by Poynter, refer to PC traffic only. Almost 80 percent of unique visitors to hyperpartisan news pages Occupy Democrats and American News came from Facebook, according to Jumpshot. Both of these websites have Facebook followings in the seven figures, and both have had several run-ins with the fact-checkers. American News, for one, peddled a Megyn Kelly hoax that fooled Facebook’s Trending section — even several weeks after it was exposed as a fake…”

MIT Technology Review – Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV We need more text and fewer videos and memes in the age of Trump. November 29, 2016.

I’m interested in how animals are connected to the internet and how we might be able to see the world from an animal’s point of view. There’s something very interesting in someone else’s vantage point, which might have a truth to it. For instance, the tagging of cows for automatic milking machines, so that the cows can choose when to milk themselves. Cows went from being milked twice a day to being milked three to six times a day, which is great for the farm’s productivity and results in happier cows, but it’s also faintly disquieting that the technology makes clear to us the desires of cows – making them visible in ways they weren’t before. So what does one do with that knowledge? One of the unintended consequences of big data and the internet of things is that some things will become visible and compel us to confront them.

And on the main question at hand:

What we are seeing now isn’t an anxiety about artificial intelligence per se, it’s about what it says about us. That if you can make something like us, where does it leave us?

Here is the full interview with Genevieve Bell

‘Hackathon’ attempts to stem proliferation of fake news Financial Times. Today’s must read. The enemies of independent sources of information are moving quickly with their plans to become the arbiters of what is and isn’t to be read

The price of being exposed as a Russian operative ...


(1) Chequeado is organizing an open fact-checking day. (2) Claire Wardle joins verification coalition First Draft News full-time. (3) Follow the money — that's what fake news writers do. (4) CJR takes a deep dive on automated journalism, included automated fact-checking. (5) Did Marine Le Pen *really* say that about Hollande? Probably not. (6) Der Spiegel fact-checks five myths about social growth in Germany. (7) A St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist defends a "tireless...courteous" fact-checker against political attacks. (8) A fact-checking app is helping voters in Ghana's elections.