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Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Blockchain World: Benefits of regular exercise are greatest for those aged 45 and older

I saw Sisyphus at his endless task raising his gigantic stone with both his hands. With hands and feet he tried to roll it up to the top of the hill, but always, just before he could roll it over onto the other side, its weight would be too much for him, and, without pity, the stone would come thundering down again onto the plain below. Then he would begin trying to push it up hill again, and the sweat ran off him and steam rose from his head.
~ [Odyssey, Book 11]

Good News for Recycled Teenagers – Benefits of regular Darling Harbour Walks and other exercise are greatest for those aged 45 and older  Emotional Benefits of Exercise Greater for Older Americans – Gallup-Sharecare Wellbeing Index: “The amount of exercise that Americans get is closely linked to their level of optimism about their lives. However, this relationship is much stronger among older adults than it is among younger adults. U.S. adults aged 65 and older who report exercising regularly (30+ minutes at least three days the prior week) are 32% more likely than those who say they did not exercise at all to have high optimism. This compares with a 6% bump for those younger than 30 who exercise regularly.”


Seattle Sperm Bank categorizes its donors into three popular categories: “top athletes,” “physicians, dentists and medical residents,” and “musicians.””  Link to MEdia Dragons  Donorship is Linked to all three Categories 

Via LLRX – Stay Up To Date With These Legal Technology Blogs – Attorney, legal tech expert, blogger and author Nicole Black suggests reading and subscribing to subject specific blogs to both stay abreast of growing changes in legal technology and to meet attorney ethical obligations specific to 28 jurisdictions.


Special Report: Blockchain World – When Bitcoin was unleashed on the world, it filled a specific need. But it wasn’t long before people realized the technology behind Bitcoin—the blockchain—could do much more than record monetary transactions. That realization has lately blossomed into a dazzling and often bewildering array of startup companies, initiatives, corporate alliances, and research projects. Billions of dollars will hinge on what they come up with. So you should understand how blockchains work—and what could happen if they don’t.”

GCN.com – “As more government agencies investigate the potential for blockchain technology, ACT-IAC has put together a primer, Enabling Blockchain Innovation in the U.S. Federal Government. Including thought leaders from government and industry, ACT-IAC’s Blockchain Working Group was created in May at the request of the General Services Administration. Jose Arrieta, director of the Office of IT Schedule Contract Operations at GSA, and Todd Hager, vice president of strategy innovation and equality at Macro Solutions, discussed GSA’s blockchain progress at a recent ACT-IAC forum on the technology. “With Jose Arrieta’s challenge put before us to craft a government blockchain playbook, our group set out to create a blockchain primer, the first step in helping agencies to build the foundational understanding,” Hager told GCN via email. “Now that the primer is published, we have begun work on the blockchain playbook, which will help agencies to explore blockchain-appropriate use cases and provide guidance on building an agency-specific implementation strategy… However, the primer does acknowledge the confusion around how blockchain technology works and what is needed for it to succeed in the government space…”

Mastermind of Heathrow 'Thomas Crown Affair' £7m heist jailed


What Does the Latest F-35 Data Breach Teach Us About Defense Industrial Espionage? The Diplomat. Resilc: “Maybe it is a fake plane used solely for disinformation. Can’t be a real plane it’s so bad


Shaping the future of work in Europe’s 9 digital front-runner countries
McKinsey  Our research shows significant value in embracing AI and automation for Sweden, but sees a requirement for new skill sets among employees and a policy response around education, training and the social contract


“SHOCKED” OR “SHOCKED, SHOCKED?” Judge shocked to learn NYPD’s evidence database has no backup.

As part of an ongoing legal battle to get the New York City Police Department to track money police have grabbed in cash forfeitures, an attorney for the city told a Manhattan judge on October 17 that part of the reason the NYPD can’t comply with such requests is that the department’s evidence database has no backup. If the database servers that power NYPD’s Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS)—designed and installed by Capgemini under a $25.5 million contract between 2009 and 2012—were to fail, all data on stored evidence would simply cease to exist.
Courthouse News reported that Manhattan Supreme Court judge Arlene Bluth responded repeatedly to the city’s attorney with the same phrase: “That’s insane.”


From network managers to pathfinders: the future of public service skills
Public servants’ work is becoming more complex as government’s role in society changes. What skills will the government employees of tomorrow need?


One of the superannuation directors at the ATO is set to depart in early November.

Howard Dickinson, director for superannuation at the tax office, is retiring. He’s set to depart the ATO on November 10.
ATO loses veteran super director







 The Supreme Court Is Allergic To Math

Oliver Roeder on FiveThirtyEight: “The Supreme Court does not compute. Or at least some of its members would rather not. The justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance — even an allergy — to taking math and statistics seriously. For decades, the court has struggled with quantitative evidence of all kinds in a wide variety of cases. Sometimes justices ignore this evidence. Sometimes they misinterpret it. And sometimes they cast it aside in order to hold on to more traditional legal arguments. (And, yes, sometimes they also listen to the numbers.) Yet the world itself is becoming more computationally driven, and some of those computations will need to be adjudicated before long. Some major artificial intelligence case will likely come across the court’s desk in the next decade, for example. By voicing an unwillingness to engage with data-driven empiricism, justices — and thus the court — are at risk of making decisions without fully grappling with the evidence. This problem was on full display earlier this month, when the Supreme Court heard arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case that will determine the future of partisan gerrymandering — and the contours of American democracy along with it. As my colleague Galen Druke has reported, the case hinges on math: Is there a way to measure a map’s partisan bias and to create a standard for when a gerrymandered map infringes on voters’ rights?…”