Ripoffs: Highly Cited Korean Secrets

“In 1906 I indulged my temper by hurling invectives at Neo-Darwinians in the following terms. “I really do not wish to be abusive [to Neo-Darwinians]; but when I think of these poor little dullards, with their precarious hold of just that corner of evolution that a blackbeetle can understand—with their retinue of twopenny-halfpenny Torquemadas wallowing in the infamies of the vivisector’s laboratory, and solemnly offering us as epoch-making discoveries their demonstrations that dogs get weaker and die if you give them no food; that intense pain makes mice sweat; and that if you cut off a dog’s leg the three-legged dog will have a four-legged puppy, I ask myself what spell has fallen on intelligent and humane men that they allow themselves to be imposed on by this rabble of dolts, blackguards, imposters, quacks, liars, and, worst of all, credulous conscientious fools.” 
                   ~George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methusaleh: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1921)

Democrats push anti-Russian campaign at “tax day” protests WSWS This is pathetic. These people do not understand what is in a tax return. They won’t find the sort of information they are screeching will be there.

This is Most Dangerous Moment in U.S.-Russian Relations Since Cuban Missile Crisis

Six times the world faced nuclear disaster

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AS tensions between North Korean and the US heighten fears of a nuclear war, here are the times the world has come perilously close to annihilation only to be saved by smart diplomacy, incompetence or good luck.

FRONTLINE shines a light on the hidden world of the North Korean people, revealing how ordinary citizens are resisting one of the world’s most oppressive regimes

Secret State of North Korea highly cited by BC

457 Visas: targeted jobs 'rarely if ever' are brought into Australia

Trump to overhaul visa program for high-skilled workers  The Hill. A handwave. Studies are a way to kick the can down the road. They also allow vested interests to weigh in.

Trump Will Take Aim at Tech Outsourcing in H-1B Visa Review Bloomberg

 Democracy Now!

Tiny, family-run newspaper wins Pulitzer Prize for taking on big business Poynter Institute. Well worth a read for Iowa’s complexity.

Threatened Himalayas: What do we know? The Third Pole 

Are Jan Dhan bank accounts actively used? Live Mint

Thuy T. Pham, U. of Sydney. “This post updates a previous very popular post 100 Active Blogs on Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, Data Science, Machine Learning as of March 2016 (and 90+ blogs, 2015 version). This year we removed 26 blog sites from the previous list that does not meet our active criterion: at least one blog in the last 3 months (since Oct 1, 2016). We also added ten new relevant blogs to the list. All blogs in this list are categorized into two groups: very active and moderately active. The former often have several entries each month while the latter may only have one post for a few months recently. We also separate blogs that do not involve much in technical discussions as in a Others group. Within each group of blogs, we list in alphabetical order. Blog overview is based on information as it have appeared on its URL as of 1-1-2017.”

Federal public service travel bill nears half a billion dollars in 2016

Tom McIlroy

How the Government Is Turning Protesters Into Felons Esquire

Artificial Intelligence and Law: 
A Six Part Primer – Professor Daniel Martin Katz,  Chicago Kent College of Law (Updated Version 03.17.17) – PowerPoint Presentation – 271 slides.


Rachel Whetstone leaves Uber because of “lack of appetite for… drama” (LOL) Pando Daily  “Head of Communications and Public Policy

More Evidence That Charter Schools Are a Taxpayer Ripoff That Delivers Poor Results

A damning new report from California shows that charter schools are a grift that profits investors at the expense of taxpayers and children.

 Lending libraries in everything, including umbrellas, hand-knit shawls, and fishing poles

April 5th, 2017John Quiggin40 comments

Like most people, I don’t like being suckered. But I was well and truly suckered by Aaron Patrick of the Australian Financial Review today. Patrick wrote to me saying he was doing a feature article on penalty rates and I gave him a long interview setting out my position. In particular, I made the point that, if (say) a 10 per cent reduction in wages produced only a 1 per cent increase in hours of work demanded by employers, the average worker would end up doing more work for less money. This is a standard point in the analysis of minimum wages.

As it turned out, I was wasting my breath. All Patrick wanted was the concession that lower wages might produce some increase in employment, thereby justifying the Gotcha! headline ‘Even union economists accept cutting penalty rates creates jobs’.

Given my history with the Fin, I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess. But my general experience, even since Michael Stutchbury became editor, has been that most AFR journalists are straightforward professionals.

Also, most journalists these days understand that the game has changed with the rise of blogs and social media. Twenty years ago, the only response to a shoddy smear like Patrick’s would be a letter to the editor, which might or might not get published long after the event. Now, I can respond here and on Twitter, Facebook and so on. My readership might not be as big as the measured circulation of the AFR, but, after you deduct all the people who only look at the business pages, it’s not that different. 

In any case, Patrick and the Fin are on a hiding to nothing with this one. Most people work for a living, and most have worked out by now that when the bosses talk about flexibility and productivity, they mean “work more for less”.

Via Science – Dalmeet Singh Chawla – “…the Initiative for Open Citations(I4OC), a project aiming to make citation data free to all, formally announced today by six organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher Public Library of Science, and the open-access journal eLife. So far, the initiative has partnered with 29 journal publishers to enable anyone to access citation data from about 14 million papers indexed by Crossref, a nonprofit collaboration that promotes the sharing of scholarly information. And more publishers are likely to sign on, says Mark Patterson, executive director of eLife, in Cambridge, U.K. Conversations about opening up citation data initially took place this past September at the eighth Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing,in response to a report that found that just 3% of almost a thousand publishers depositing data on Crossref were making citation data open. In practice, that meant that citation data were available for just 1% of the roughly 35 million papers on Crossref, says Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, California…”

Kristine Tidgren, Summary Judgment Narrows Issues for First Syngenta Trial (Ag Docket)

Lew Taishoff, DE NOVO MEANS DE NOVO. “Or as a much finer writer than I put it, ‘A lawyer is not to tell what he knows to be a lie: he is not to produce what he knows to be a false deed; but he is not to usurp the province of the jury and of the judge, and determine what shall be the effect of evidence—what shall be the result of legal argument.'”

Former intel chiefs fear future election hacks

As investigations continue into Russian interference into the 2016 presidential elections, former top intelligence officials said they worry it's only the beginning of a long, insidious fight.

 
I was always taught that an honest search for the truth would lead to God. If an atheist is searching for truth then he/she is on the same journey we all are.
Anthony Horan Campbelltown