A unified public service: APS Review's ideas for change
APS REVIEW: Common pay, a professional stream model and more transparent secretarial appointments are some of the suggestions in today's interim report.
The internet: optimised for hate, terror and chaos
Perhaps more than any other evil act of our time, the Christchurch attack was born of the internet and engineered to exploit its obvious vulnerabilities.
Stop giving oxygen to 'evil jokers at margins', Shorten says
Friday’s Christchurch massacre shows it's time to stop giving "oxygen" to "evil jokers at the margins" who perpetrate hate speech, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says.
“…the rise of voice computing platforms such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, the world’s biggest tech companies are suddenly, precipitously moving in Tunstall-Pedoe’s direction. Voice-enabled smart speakers have become some of the industry’s best-selling products; in 2018 alone, according to a report by NPR and Edison Research, their prevalence in American households grew by 78 percent. According to one market survey, people ask their smart speakers to answer questions more often than they do anything else with them. Tunstall-Pedoe’s vision of computers responding to our queries in a single pass—providing one-shot answers, as they are known in the search community—has gone mainstream. The internet and the multibillion-dollar business ecosystems it supports are changing irrevocably. So, too, is the creation, distribution, and control of information—the very nature of how we know what we know…”
Wired: “Stochastic Terrorism n. Acts of violence by random extremists, triggered by political demagoguery. “When President Trump tweeted a video of himself body-slamming the CNN logo in 2017, most people took it as a stupid joke. For Cesar Sayoc, it may have been a call to arms: Last October the avowed Trump fan allegedly mailed a pipe bomb to CNN headquarters. No one told Sayoc to do it, but the fact that it happened was really no surprise. In 2011, after the shooting of US representative Gabby Giffords, a Daily Kos blog warned of a new threat the writer called stochastic terrorism: the use of mass media to incite attacks by random nut jobs—acts that are “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” The writer had in mind right-wing radio and TV agitators, but in 2016, Rolling Stone accused then-candidate Trump of using the same playbook when he joked that “Second Amendment people” might “do” something if Hillary Clinton won the election…”
