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Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Burning Books Ash - Copying Oscars


WHAT WENT WRONG AT NEWSWEEK: At last, someone has written a big-picture look at how the once respected magazine had fallen into such disreputable journalism and business practices. It stands accused of shady ties to a religious institution and its staff is in disarray. Slate’s Will Oremus gives us the inside story of the magazine’s huge growth and its “spectacular downfall.”

Hackers see democracy as a weakness ripe for exploitation

Employees of the Russian-controlled Internet Research Agency are accused of fraud, deceit, identity theft, breaches of currency laws, falsely claiming to be US citizens, running covert intelligence operations, illegally controlling computer infrastructure and masquerading as social activists for the purposes of ...


What’s powering the digital economy?
As the digital economy infiltrates almost every aspect of our lives, how do you harness every insight for the next insight?


Since 2015, the Storino sisters have been reenacting scenes from Oscar nominated films. This year, Sophia, 7; Sadie, 5; and two-year-old Sloane, have recreated stills from Get Out, Call Me By Your Name, The Post, The Shape of Water, and several others. Vanity Fair showcased the project and ran an interview with the girls’ mother, Maggie.

By helping her three daughters emulate the year’s most-celebrated movie characters, Storino has grown aware of how often her girls are tasked with portraying Hollywood’s many male leads.
“What started as a lark has taken on additional meaning as the conversation around representation has evolved in Hollywood,” says Storino. “In the past, it’s been a struggle to find stills that are identifiable by the female lead. This year felt much different. The future is female, and increasingly so are the films. My girls had so many strong actresses to emulate in 2018, from Saoirse Ronan to Frances McDormand to Sally Hawkins to Meryl Streep. I also loved being able to show them Greta Gerwig in the director’s chair. What I’m most conscious of now is how much imagery matters.”

I wonder if they have had similar conversations about race? You can follow their recreations on their website or on Instagram.


Coming to HBO in May is an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451. It stars Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon.

In a future where the media is an opiate, history is rewritten and “firemen” burn books, Jordan plays Guy Montag, a young fireman who struggles with his role as law enforcer and with his “mentor”, played by Shannon. 

The book, which got its title from “the temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns”, begins like so:

It was a pleasure to burn.
Coming to HBO in May is an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451. It stars Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon.



It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a 

In a future where the media is an opiate, history is rewritten and “firemen” burn books, Jordan plays Guy Montag, a young fireman who struggles with his role as law enforcer and with his “mentor”, played by Shannon.

The book, which got its title from “the temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns”, begins like so:

It was a pleasure to burn.
 
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

The previous film adaptation was by Francois Truffaut in 1966, who cast Julie Christie in two of the main roles. It was Truffaut’s only English-language film and the first one in color.

. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

by Francois Truffaut in 1966, who cast Julie Christie in two of the main roles. It was Truffaut’s only English-language film and the first one in color.

MEdia Dragon: Why do we forget most of what we read and watch?

HBO and John Oliver win a court battle with a coal executive who sued over being called a “geriatric Dr. Evil.”↩︎ The Hollywood Reporter

In America, an annual income of $105,000 is the “satiation point,” when more money doesn’t equal more happy.
↩︎ Quartz
Everything you need to know about the Trump Tower meeting at the heart of the Russia investigation
↩︎ Vox

RIP Anne Treisman, who revolutionized how we understand attention.

This video briefly explains her theory of selective attention, which explains how we pick out a known face in a crowded room. The cognitive psychologist also made waves in the '80s with Feature Integration Theory, which provided the theoretical framework for localizing the parts of the brain that deal with the color, shape, smell and so on of an object while also asking how they get put together again to make an "object." 

The experience Keats describes in the rest of the sentence is rare and precious – when another’s words read like our own, like an old memory, as when Keats writes: “The Poetry of earth is never dead.” “Singularity” implies self-conscious eccentricity, oddness for its own sake, not as the expression of the poet’s sensibility. Keats calls his ideals “axioms,” as in geometry. They are assumed to be true and serve as the premise of all that follows. Later in the letter, Keats is less convincing when he formulates a Romantic article of faith: “But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it - And this leads me to another axiom - That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” Most good poems are labored over, revised sometimes for years.

The passages quoted are from the letter Keats wrote two-hundred years ago on this date, Feb. 27, to his publisher John Taylor, who was editing Endymion

Michaelia Cash threatened to name young women in Bill Shorten’s office “about which rumours in this place abound” in retaliation for ongoing questions about her staff and the Australian Workers’ Union raids. The extraordinary threat in Senate estimates on Wednesday suggests – after Barnaby Joyce’s resignation and changes to the ministerial code of conduct to ban sex between ministers and their staff – that political staffers may be drawn into day-to-day political combat. After first defending the remarks, Cash withdrew what Penny Wong called “outrageous slurs” under the threat of Labor raising the matter in the Senate Michaelia Cash makes outrageous slurs against women in Shorten's office


Michaelia Cash: Rumour and innuendo as a political weapon diminishes them all

Employment Minister Michaelia Cash was quick to wield the threat of airing rumours about Bill Shorten and his staff. Under pressure in a Senate Estimates hearing about her own staffing arrangements, she turned the tables.


Do you remember the plots of books you read and movies you watch, even months later? I rarely do, so Julie Beck’s piece Why We Forget Most of the Books We Readreally hit me square in the forehead this morning (even though I will likely forget having read it next week). Why do we forget all of this stuff we’re constantly consuming? Part of the reason is that we don’t need to: 
In the internet age, recall memory — the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind — has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it.

One of the earliest articulations of the internet’s value in aiding memory was Cory Doctorow’s piece about how Boing Boing had become his “outboard brain”.

The upshot is that operating Boing Boing has not only given me a central repository of all of the fruits of my labors in the information fields, but it also has increased the volume and quality of the yield. I know more, find more, and understand better than I ever have, all because of Boing Boing.
The nuggets I’ve mined are at my instant disposal. I can use Blogger’s search interface to retrieve the stories I’ve posted with just a few keywords. While prepping a speech, writing a column, or working on a story, I will usually work with a browser window open to Blogger’s “Edit Your Blog” screen, cursor tabbed into the search field. I flip back and forth between my browser and my editor, entering a few keywords and instantly retrieving the details of some salient point — it’s my personal knowledge management system, annotated and augmented by my readers.

So hopefully by reading Beck’s piece critically and then writing about it here, I will be able to both remember it a little more on my own and also have placed it somewhere I can easily find again.

One of the relatively few kottke.org posts I remember without having to hunt around for it (which is ironic, considering) is this one about Dick Cavett and compartmentalized memory. Cavett had a really hard time remembering who his guests were on past shows.

A worried Johnny Carson once admitted to me that he frequently couldn’t remember what was said on a show he had just finished taping. And, sometimes, who the guests were. It’s a strange thing, and one I haven’t quite figured out.
Johnny all but wiped his brow when I told him it happened to me too, and that a few days earlier I got home and it took me a good 10 minutes to be able to report with whom I had just done 90 minutes. (It was only Lucille Ball!) It’s an oddity peculiar to the live performer’s divided brain that needs exploring. It has to do with the fact that you — and the “you” that performs — are not identical.

It’s the same with me, as I replied in that post:

If you were to ask me tonight what I’d posted to kottke.org today, I doubt I could tell you more than one or two items (out of the seven to nine items I post during a typical day). When I see friends outside of work, they sometimes remark on stuff I’ve posted recently and it usually takes me a few moments to remember what it is they’re referring to.

Rereading Cavett’s mention of “the live performer’s divided brain” got me thinking about how the way I produce kottke.org every day and lately how it feels more like a performance. I talked about this a little in that interview with NiemanLab:

The blog is half publication and half performance art, because when I wake up in the morning I usually have no idea what I’m going to write about. There’s no editorial calendar or anything. I go online and I see what’s there, I pick some stuff, and I do it, and at the end of the day, I’m done. I come up with a publication on the fly as a sort of performance.

Law.com (sub. req’d) How to Spot a Whistleblower and Prevent Retaliation: 10 Tips: “Each year, employers face increased risk of retaliation claims from self-styled “whistleblowers.” These individuals may file lawsuits using a variety of federal laws, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Dodd-Frank Act, as well as similar state laws.”

Misinformation Rules

When I see a paragraph shrinking under my eyes like a strip of bacon in a skillet, I know I'm on the right track.
— Peter De Vries, born in 1910 a year before Jozef Imrich senior

Fact-check things before you share them on social media...it takes less than a minute to do so. (Whenever I don't do this, it bites me ...)

Praising in good and bad time fatboy slim 




Treachery and the Cold War - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog



 


The Artist Whose Medium Is Big Data


Laurie Frick imagines a future in which your smart watch will know how your body is responding to someone. Then it will combine with Facebook data about their personality. And that will let you know whether that person makes you lethargic, raises your blood pressure or depresses you. "If you start training people that, 'Look at what's happening to your inflammation levels or whatever. This is the best thing for you and you can let go of the guilt.' " … Read More

Go figure: Treasury policy analysis needs wider view than just economics ...




Lloyd makes calls on free speech and union-bargaining policies.
Penny Wong vs the APS commissioner, round two. If an MP "casts aspersions" on a public servant personally, it's only fair they can discuss the matter with friends over office email. And if it comes out in public, that's OK too.

When Art Became A Commodity, Things Turned Ugly


As contemporary art is increasingly viewed as an asset class—alongside equities, bonds, and real estate—Georgina Adam sees artworks often used as a vehicle to hide or launder money, and artists encouraged to churn out works in market-approved styles, bringing about a decline in quality. … Read More

ATO to investigate 'systemic abuse' of $22 billion in work expense claims



"Google Prevails In Suit Over Blog Post": Wendy Davis of Digital News Daily has this report on a ruling that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued today

ICAC warns NSW govt to better screen new hires

Top secret clearance a two-year wait


New Deputy PM faces questions over rent




Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists Bloomberg


Digital Transformation Agency chief Gavin Slater has described the stark differences between the public service and his previous employment at NAB
Public service a large and complex beast



WHEN bankruptcy trustees were appointed over a hectic weekend late in 2008, there seemed no end to the losses caused by the collapse of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Cash in the bank was no more than $150m. But the losses have been less, and the assets available for compensation greater, than had been feared. On February 22nd Irving Picard, the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the liquidation of Mr Madoff’s firm, announced that a fund set up to reimburse customers would make its ninth distribution, of $621m, bringing the total handed out so far to $11.4bn. Another $1.8bn in held in reserve for contested claims. This is on top of a separate distribution of $723m last November from a separate fund run by the Department of Justice. Another $3bn remains to be distributed in that fund and the bankruptcy trustees hold out hope that substantially more will be recovered and returned.
Mr Madoff, who will turn 80 in April, is serving a 150-year sentence in a North Carolina prison. At his... Money stolen by Bernie Madoff is still being found







Assessing site design and other methods children learn for how to spot fake news are now frighteningly obsolete.


Florida shooting misinformation

Last week’s shooting at a Florida high school that left 17 dead and several injured spawned the usual hoaxes that follow American tragedies: fake images of the shooter, posts claiming he was a member of Antifa, false identifications and phony screenshots of his Instagram account. Then there were those that aren’t so typical.
Imposter tweets targeted journalists attempting to cover the shooting, leading to a cascade of online harassment. Twitter at first denied that was against their policies, then said the rules should be revised. Conspiracy theories about students organizing gun control demonstrations took off, trending on YouTube and populating search results (at least for a while). There was an incorrect story that led to careless sharing by professionals and many corrections. Another story led to a congressional aide being fired.
Some students took the conspiracies in stride, but as Snopes’ Bethania Palma put it, “we’re living in a dystopian hellhole of false information.” So what’s the solution?



·        POLITICO Magazine asks: “Are we putting too much pressure on the Parkland survivors? We shouldn’t expect quick wins on gun control — we should be preparing these kids for a long, bitter fight.”
 

The concerted attack on public sector union workers is a coordinated effort financed by wealthy donors Economic Policy Institute

$120 million drug shipment hidden in highlighters seized at border


This is how we do it

This is bad

(AP 



A closer look


  • The New York Times has a deep dive into Brazil’s anti-fake news efforts.
  • Where are the Japanese fact-checkers?
  • Discuss: “Media literacy programs in schools are so outdated, they’re backwards.

Coming up


 


This is fun

  • ESPN “fact-checks” Lonzo Ball’s rap lyrics.
  • Other sites have fake news. SoundCloud has fake music.
  • A local fact-checking project in Nevada is using Abe Lincoln for its ratings.

If you read one more thing

Fake news is an existential crisis for social media.

Quick fact-checking links

The Pope was fact-checked, and it did not turn out well for him.  //  The Secret Service is fact-checking now?  //  Will the Bad News video game help kids spot fake news?  //  Buyers of political ads on Facebook will be verified with postcards this year.  //  The Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism has launched two fact-checking websites, Udeme and Dubawa.  //  The American Bar Association fact-checks politicians’ blathering about treason.  //  Social media platforms need to admit they are trafficking in “automatic weapons,” says John Battelle.  //  Italy is trying to combat Russian influence on its upcoming election.  //  By far, Facebook and Instagram were the go-to sites for Russian interference in the 2016 election, says the Justice Department.  //  Broadcast personality Afia Schwarzenegger will host the “Political Police” comedy fact-checking show on TV Africa.  //  A good thread on what conspiracy theories offer to believers.  //  This game teaches how people spread online misinformation.  //  Here’s a fact check of what a Facebook executive said about Russian disinformation.  //  What we still don’t know about fake news and its growth.  //  Twitter fact-checks a “Hulk Hogan” interview.
Until next week,

You can't pay tax if you don't make profits.' Oh, really? - Crikey

 

Half-built home of accused tax fraudster Adam Cranston listed for sale