"The Saucy Sock Puppet of the Trump-Nominated Judge: An attorney up for a federal bench seat made his views plain while writing blog posts under a pseudonym." Eleanor Clift has this essay online at The Daily Beast
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Retired U.S. Tax Court Judge Sentenced To 34 Months In Jail For Tax Fraud Committed While She Sat On The Court
Qld ex-cop charged with 44 counts of database snooping
NSW police worker the seventh person to be charged over CTP fraud
Sweet 16 map
Costly, under-featured MyGov is just fine, says Oz national auditor
Five year march to One Login To Rule Us All still not over
ATO public servants vote yes in a landslide
The Australian Robert Gottliebsen - 19 minutes ago
It may be that the focus on creating and fulfilling a “bucket list” of experiences meant to make your life more meaningful has another significant facet: “People seek extraordinary experiences—from drinking rare wines and taking exotic vacations to jumping from airplanes and shaking hands with celebrities. But are such experiences worth having? We found that participants thoroughly enjoyed having experiences that were superior to those had by their peers, but that having had such experiences spoiled their subsequent social interactions and ultimately left them feeling worse than they would have felt if they had had an ordinary experience instead. Participants were able to predict the benefits of having an extraordinary experience but were unable to predict the costs. These studies suggest that people may pay a surprising price for the experiences they covet most.” Many our most extraordinary experiences are not planned but rather occur if we are aware and open to both giving to, sharing with and appreciating one another and the natural world.
- Cooney G, Gilbert DT, Wilson TD. The unforeseen costs of extraordinary experience. Psychological Science. 2014;25 :2259-2265. [updated 7/30/2015]
- See also Why chasing happiness could actually have the opposite effect, The World Economic Forum, June 16, 2017
White House Goes DARK: The past is not
prologue for the press
CBS News White House
correspondent Mark
Knoller is famously fastidious with all presidential
happenings. Ditto his Monday accounting of June press briefings: Five on
camera, 10 off camera, three days with none at all. And now comes a development
that's rather explicit in the headline of a piece by Celeste Katz of
Mic: "Even Donald Trump's schedule has become a victim of a
White House push against transparency."
Her opus reminds one that Trump
already parts company with the Obama administration by not making public White
House visitor logs, having Secretary of State Rex Tillerson travel without a press
contingent, holding more briefings without cameras and even threatening to stop
holding briefings.
"Some days, we'll have
'em; some days we won't," Press Secretary Sean Spicer said about cameras.
Meanwhile, the president of
India was in Washington and did not do the traditional press conference with
his American counterpart. So did one of the leaders refuse to talk to reporters
jointly? Spicer wouldn't say.
The Obama administration
didn't have a glorious transparency record. But Trump is making them look like
apostles of full disclosure.
For sure, there is a
smidgen of press whining that can be a tactical mistake. The White House
Correspondents’ Association keeps having meetings with "Sean" and
"Sarah" (Huckabee Sanders) and others, finding solace in the most
laughable small crumbs thrown their way. It tends to want to play nice, rather
than tell a president's press flunkies (and him by default) to go screw
themselves.
In this particular
instance, it's all about a White House protecting a mercurial president who
forces his spokespeople to frequently defend lies. The stated rationale of
"Sean" and "Sarah" in private meetings with the press has
largely to do with claims that the on-camera briefings have become overly
theatrical. That's a not altogether inaccurate reference to some (not all) TV
folks.
But the evolution of
the briefing into a bit of a TV show obscures the larger reality here: This
White House simply accelerates the unmistakable recent trend of administrations
of both parties much preferring to operate in the dark
'Sausage machine':IBAC hears of alleged $2.2m TAFE scam
ATO's'feared' anti-fraud squad knows the unassuming insiders who think they won'tget caught. It's not just flashy crims that anti-fraud investigators are
watching. The risk of the trusted insider — officials rationalising bad
behaviour by a self-assessment of being underpaid and undervalued, or seeking
to protect others — is very real, yet the ATO has a very low rate of
malfeasance. That's down to a solid corruption control plan.
'Sausage machine':IBAC hears of alleged $2.2m TAFE scam
The World’s Worst Countries for Workers The 2017 ITUC Global Rights Index. Handy map.Wealth should not make health. Period.Medical EconomicsTrumpmania Cools in This Pennsylvania Town Bloomberg (Re Silc). For Trump voters at the margin, he had to deliver. He isn’t.How Can a Human Justify Asking to be Paid $15 to Work? MishTalk (EM).
How do you draw a circle? We analyzed 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts Quartz
How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists LSE Impact Blog (GlennF).
How Turing’s ideas evolved over the course of his life as he tussled with this paradox is among the many profound and possibly unanswerable questions examined with enormous intellectual elegance in A Mad Man Dreams of Turing Machines, another thread of which explores how the mathematician Kurt Gödel shaped our ideas of truth. Complement this particular thread with Marcus Aurelius on mortality and the key to living fully, Mary Oliver on the measure of aliveness, and Oliver Sacks ondeath, destiny, and the redemptive radiance of a life well lived.Benton Foundation – Andrew Jay Schwartzman, June 21, 2017: “On June 19, 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States used an unlikely vehicle to expand the scope of First Amendment protection for Internet users. In Peckingham v. North Carolina, speaking for five members of the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy started with the general principle that the Court has always recognized the “fundamental principle of the First Amendment … that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more.” Then, using soaring language that will surely be widely quoted in future cases, he said While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace–the “vast democratic forums of the Internet” in general, and social media in particular. (citation omitted) The case arose as a challenge to a North Carolina statute that prohibits registered sex offenders from accessing social media sites. In 2002, Lester Peckingham, who was 21 years years-old at the time, pleaded guilty to taking indecent liberties with a 13 year-old girl. He received a suspended jail sentence and completed a term of probation. Eight years later, Peckingham was convicted of violating the social media statute after a police officer saw Peckingham’s Facebook post joyfully announcing dismissal of a speeding ticket Man God is Good! How about I got so much favor they dismissed the ticket before court even started? No fine, no court cost, no nothing spent. . . . . . Praise be to GOD, WOW! Thanks JESUS! The Court unanimously found North Carolina’s law to be unconstitutional. This is the second important Supreme Court opinion addressing the role of the Internet in American life. The first, Reno v. ACLU, was issued in 1997, during the Internet’s dial-up era. Its depiction of the Internet as a medium deserving the same high degree of First Amendment protection as traditional print media played an essential role in the legal framework for the Internet’s evolution over the last two decades.”
Caroline Scott’s article – “Data released by official agencies and government bodies provides transparency and insight, and can often highlight trends or anomalies that are in the public interest. However, some of these datasets are often difficult to access, while in other instances it is not clear whether they even exist, making it harder for journalists to find stories and collect information to provide the bigger picture. Enigma Public, a free tool built by data management and intelligence company Enigma, launched yesterday (20 June) with the aim of helping users find the data they need and learn how to improve their use of information. The 100,000 datasets from over 100 countries bring together information from international organisations and federal governments, and local and state governments in the USA, spanning subjects like building permits and fire inspection data, to things such as the contents of shipping containers, and financial contributions to political campaigns. Users get a description of the datasets, along with key use cases and related information
“We wanted to provide an interface that enabled that information to be searched, discovered, and related,” said Marc DaCosta, Enigma’s chairman and co-founder. “All the data in Engima Public will be updated regularly, from online and offline sources, and is really a work in progress to grow and keep adding to it.”
The site can be used in two main ways: to search for a specific topic, company or person and see the datasets related, or to browse through the collection and see what stands out to you individually. There are curated collections of datasets to help journalists, such as energy, health and sanctions, or they can simply work through the categorised public collections of data to find what they are looking for, and bookmark the sets they want to come back to later. Datasets can be filtered by keyword to help reporters find what they are looking for within the bulk of information, and they can be exported to save to a user’s computer…”