Thursday, May 11, 2017

… Shoot the Messenger: Future of Journalism

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.
 
Isabel Allende


“Anybody else but me would have left. He would have shrugged off these strange twists of fate and left. But I chose to stay. A chain of coincidences. God creates them, but lets you decide how to live through them.”
~ Bathroom quote



Written with latitude ... "Silence does not suggest condoning something. Failing to respond to everyone who wants to pick a Twitter or Yammer war doesn’t equate to unethical behavior. Wasn’t it Falstaff whom Shakespeare had say that discretion is the better part of valor?"

ABC, Facebook, Google face federal inquiry after push by senators

 
“The future of journalism will increasingly depend on consumers paying for the news directly, as content distributors like Facebook and Google take up the lion’s share of digital advertising dollars. The Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, has undertaken what we believe is one of the largest efforts ever to understand who subscribes to news, what motivates them, and how creators of journalism can engage more deeply with consumers so more people will subscribe. This, the first report in that series, is based on in-depth formative interviews with news consumers in three cities and a nationally representative survey, informed by those interviews, of 2,199 American adults conducted between February 16 and March 20, 2017. The study finds that slightly more than half of all U.S. adults subscribe to news in some form—and roughly half of those to a newspaper. And contrary to the idea that young people will not pay for news because information on the internet is free, nearly 4 in 10 adults under age 35 are paying for news…”

Senate inquiry to grill Australian media executives and examine ...

 

The role of the ABC in rural and regional journalism as well as the role of ... by the Select Committee on the Future of Public Interest Journalism.


Robin Hanson on TED talks

The Library of Congress has one of the largest early porn collections

Doctors, lawyers, IT folk ... all lost in time, like tears in rain...  Rise of the Machines Ball-gazers* at Gartner reckon robots could replace doctors, lawyers and IT workers in the next five years. Panic, all ye faithful. We are assured that Gartner's balls are crystal, not hairy.
Rich professionals could be replaced by AI, shrieks Gartner


Here are Hasan Minhaj’s 27 best jokes from the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner

I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it! isabel _allende

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop. 


19% of all people at work in the UK don't make enough to pay tax 



Robert D. Flach, TAX REFORM – DOING AWAY WITH DEDUCTIONS AND LOOPHOLES. “I have always strongly felt, and continue to do so, that the tax return should not be used to distribute government social welfare and other program benefits.”

What We Can Learn From The Laboratory of Literature: Two Great Thinkers
Ruling out tax rises would be unwise for any party, warns Institute for Fiscal Studies 

High-end backup kid Datos IO embraces relational, Hadoop data


Big data, big funding?

Stephen Ellis, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime, is one of the better books on that country: “…there are even private colleges in Lagos offering courses in credit card fraud and advance-fee fraud.”
Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion, is a series of essays on society and theology from one of the Mormon “grandmasters.”
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, collects many essays on the Piketty book and also on the topic more generally.

Time to factor in some realistic pessimism

Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses of Early Islam, “…the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact.”  Ahmed, a brilliant scholar at Harvard, passed away in 2015, here is a short appreciation.  If they wrote books for me, someone would be working on “Islam and Strauss” right now.
Pew – May 3, 2017: The Future of Jobs and Jobs Training – “As robots, automation and artificial intelligence perform more tasks and there is massive disruption of jobs, experts say a wider array of education and skills-building programs will be created to meet new demands. There are two uncertainties: Will well-prepared workers be able to keep up in the race with AI tools? And will market capitalism survive? Machines are eating humans’ jobs talents. And it’s not just about jobs that are repetitive and low-skill. Automation, robotics, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent times have shown they can do equal or sometimes even better work than humans who are dermatologistsinsurance claims adjusterslawyersseismic testers in oil fieldssports journalists and financial reporterscrew members on guided-missile destroyershiring managerspsychological testersretail salespeople, and border patrol agents. Moreover, there is growing anxiety that technology developments on the near horizon will crush the jobs of the millions who drive cars and trucks, analyze medical tests and dataperform middle management choresdispense medicinetrade stocks and evaluate marketsfight on battlefields,perform government functions, and even replace those who program software – that is, the creators of algorithms…”

One of life's bittersweet things is if you live long enough, many people you love, like, and admire will predecease you. That is the way it always was and, for the time being at least, the way it must be...

In 2016, U.S. fact-checkers drew record traffic — but the Pants-on-Fire candidate still became the Pants-on-Fire president. This complicated reality could have led to big changes to the ways fact-checking is conducted in America. Yet the formats, tone and methods adopted by fact-checkers have barely changed since Trump's inauguration. Read about the first 100 days of Trump's presidency from a fact-checker's perspective.  

RANDWICK mayor Noel D’Souza has said his decision to not vote along party lines was akin to those made by “men of conscience like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela”. Randwick Mayor Noel D'Souza says resignation from Labor Party akin to choices made by Mandela, Gandhi