I want to be able to say on my deathbed that I reached a few people on Media dragon. That would be very nice, just to be able to say that... Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.
Secret Handshakes Slate
Secret report warned top bureaucrats to delay new rail timetable : Mistrust rules
The Big Tax Lie: Corporations Should Stop Complaining About Taxes They Rarely Paid American Prospect
What undergirds our commitment to equality? For Bernard Williams, it’s our ability to love and to suffer. For Jeremy Waldron, it’s something broader... MEdia Dragon More Equal Than Others
John Gray takes a dim view of reason. Indeed, he takes a dim view of humanity. He is a "card-carrying misanthrope for whom human life has no unique importance"... The Believers
Diamonds in Sudan meteorite ‘are remnants of lost planet’ Guardian
The death rattle sound can vary
Maxine Peake
ASIC investigating AMP exeuctives as Treasurer Scott Morrison warns they could face jail
Treasurer Doorstop Interview
When Identity Thieves Hack Your Accountant
Does anyone in the Australian public service get held to account?
"Bungles are becoming increasingly commonplace in the public service but no one ever seems to be held to account for them, reflecting how poorly bureaucrats manage underperformance." (Crikey)
Can Donald Trump Be Called a Fascist? - SPIEGEL ONLINE
Europe divided over robot ‘personhood’ Politico
Managing Our Hub Economy Harvard Business Review
You can no longer assume cops won’t be able to unlock your iPhone.MotherboardGraincorp Limited - Mike West
First they came ...
[gasp]”‘Russian government-backed hackers had infected computer routers around the world.”Learning from the Best in the Business: CIA and NSA:Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers,Guardian, May 12, 2014WikiLeaks Reveals How the CIA Could Hack Your Router Wired, June 15, 2017
The debate on euro-area reform Bruegel
This story is absolutely insane. At first glance, you think "well done, Companies House, at last they're getting serious about the epidemic of fraud enabled by the misuse of British corporations". https://t.co/HSjMDawuylpic.twitter.com/FiQ1VMkKbv— Oliver Bullough (@OliverBullough) April 15, 2018
Trump might survive firing Rosenstein or even Mueller. The reason: Fox News. Margaret Sullivan, WaPo. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to bemoan tribal politics and treat Media Matters as a serious venue. But I would have been wrong.Private equity owners endanger Daily Camera’s futureDave Krieger, Boulder Free Press Blog. Krieger: “The publisher of the Daily Camera spiked my Sunday editorial, so I elected to publish it on another platform:”The Daphne Project: International media houses to publish Caruana Galizia’s stories Malta Today. The Daphne Project.
Ultranet corruption scandal prompted serious changes in procurement.
The Department of Education and Training has revealed a range of changes it has made to ensure it never faces such a scandal again.
Are there slaves in your supply chain?
Mandatory reporting rules are coming to expose forced labour in supply chains, but it is not clear whether they will apply to government procurement.
Stability is good, but loyalty is better for some incoming ministers.
VERONA BURGESS: Would a Bill Shorten Labor government bring another night of the long knives?
When warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, many doomsayers cite philosopher Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer thought experiment.
Imagine an artificial intelligence, he says, which decides to amass as many paperclips as possible. It devotes all its energy to acquiring paperclips, and to improving itself so that it can get paperclips in new ways, while resisting any attempt to divert it from this goal. Eventually it “starts transforming first all of Earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities”. This apparently silly scenario is intended to make the serious point that AIs need not have human-like motives or psyches. They might be able to avoid some kinds of human error or bias while making other kinds of mistake, such as fixating on paperclips. And although their goals might seem innocuous to start with, they could prove dangerous if AIs were able to design their own successors and thus repeatedly improve themselves. Even a “fettered superintelligence”, running on an isolated computer, might persuade its human handlers to set it free. Advanced AI is not just another technology, Mr Bostrom argues, but poses an existential threat to humanity.
Harvard cognitive scientist Joscha Bach, in a tongue-in-cheek tweet, has countered this sort of idea with what he calls “The Lebowski Theorem”:
No superintelligent AI is going to bother with a task that is harder than hacking its reward function.
In other words, Bach imagines that Bostrom’s hypothetical paperclip-making AI would foresee the fantastically difficult and time-consuming task of turning everything in the universe into paperclips and opt to self-medicate itself into no longer wanting or caring about making paperclips, instead doing whatever the AI equivalent is of sitting around on the beach all day sipping pina coladas, a la The Big Lebowski’s The Dude.
Bostrom, reached while on a bowling outing with friends, was said to have replied, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
“Deepfakes,” currently responsible for dark-web hoax porn, is coming soon to your everyday world.↩︎ The Atlantic
Anew NSW public service commissioner - Emma Hogan
After being the HR boss for shock jock Kyle Sandilands, surely a few hundred thousand public servants shouldn’t present too much of a problem
Misconduct in the public eye?
FAY CALDERONE: Responding the wrong way to employee misconduct can lead to long running legal proceedings.
“Deepfakes,” currently responsible for dark-web hoax porn, is coming soon to your everyday world.↩︎ The Atlantic
Anew NSW public service commissioner - Emma Hogan
After being the HR boss for shock jock Kyle Sandilands, surely a few hundred thousand public servants shouldn’t present too much of a problem
Misconduct in the public eye?
FAY CALDERONE: Responding the wrong way to employee misconduct can lead to long running legal proceedings.
Borgesius and Steenbruggen on The Right to Communications Confidentiality in Europe: Protecting Trust, Privacy, and Freedom of Expression
“In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides comprehensive rules for the processing of personal data. In addition, the EU lawmaker intends to adopt specific rules to protect confidentiality of communications, in a separate ePrivacy Regulation
A study finds that people at higher elevations take more risks—even just riding up in an elevator, versus down.
↩︎ MarketWatch
Singapore prepares to install surveillance cameras with facial-recognition capabilities atop over 100,000 lampposts.
↩︎ Reuters
A group of Mainers have created what they say is the world’s largest ice carousel. An ice carousel is formed when a circular piece of ice is allowed to spin freely within a surrounding sheet of ice. Spinning disks of ice can form naturally in slowly flowing rivers, but the ice carousel in Sinclair at the tip of northern Maine was cut specifically out of the ice on Long Lake.
The carousel is 427 feet across, a quarter mile in circumference, more than two feet thick, and estimated to weigh 11,000 tons. The keep the carousel spinning very slowly with a collection of outboard boat motors fastened to the disk.