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Monday, July 15, 2019

The Unbearable Pointlessness of PowerPoint



Slovak leader tells Chinese minister of human rights worries - The Washington Post
 BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Slovakia's president has told China's foreign minister that she is worried about human rights in his country. President Zuzana Caputova met with Chinese Foreign ...


Facial Recognition Tech Is Growing Stronger, Thanks to Your Face NYT

Facebook’s FTC fine will be $5 billion—or one month’s worth of revenue Ars Technica

 

Police Abruptly Evict Artists From Beijing Studio Districts


“Scores of Beijing police, clad in riot gear and rain slickers, were seen yesterday marching artists out of the Luomahu, or Roma Lake, Art District ahead of its sudden demolition, purportedly under the auspices of China’s sweeping campaign against organised crime. Similarly, about 30 riot police moved into Beijing’s Huantie Art District on Sunday (7 July) to begin eviction of the several hundred artists with studios there.” – The Art Newspaper


Many College Students Are Too Poor to Eat The Atlantic


Deutsche Bank bosses fitted for £1,500 suits as thousands of employees are laid off RT. Kevin W: “Best line – “That awkward moment when Fielding & Nicholson tailors get mistaken for fired bankers!”
So you’re thinking of running an online survey
THE ART OF POLLING: Here are five basic standards for trustworthy public consultation.


 How Prohibition came about.  And how Prohibition ended

 Psychologist Robert Levine has passed away (NYT
In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a rival drug dealer. Eighteen years of incarceration later, he reflects on the trials of literary life behin bars 

'I Will Complain, Yet Praise'

We all know, and try to avoid, that growing population that speaks exclusively in one of two modes: order-giving or complaining. They are toddlers costumed as grownups. Like young children, they can be at once charming and tediously annoying. Even their praise is complaint in disguise. Their world is an unsatisfactory place. Just ask them. “Complaint quickly tires, however elegant or however just,” Dr. Johnson writes in The Rambler #73. Just as my hangnail is more important than your cancer, so does my complaint outweigh yours on the cosmic scales of unfairness.


Not that complaint ought to be banished. You might even suggest that I am complaining about complaint. It is, however, merely one violin in the orchestra. We and the world are more complicated than that. Like the world, we are heterogenous. In Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014), John Drury contrasts Herbert’s “Bitter-sweet” with Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “Its lower key matches the maturity of its acceptance: its ‘yes’ to life. Herbert settles for life’s ambivalence . . .”:    



“Ah my deare angrie Lord,

Since Thou dost love, yet strike;

Cast down, yet help afford;

Sure I will do the like.

                                   

“I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.”

The world is more than binary, and so are we.
Chronicle of Higher Education:  The Unbearable Pointlessness of PowerPoint, by Alan Wolfe (Boston College):
PowerPoint 1PowerPoint is everywhere in the contemporary university. And so long as it is, superficiality will eclipse idiosyncratic and original thought.
In the academy, PowerPoint originated with the natural sciences. Then it spread to those social sciences such as psychology and economics that deal with large amounts of data or rely on complex mathematical modeling. It is neither my intention nor my inclination to judge its appropriateness for such fields, although it is worth mentioning that the renegade political scientist Edward Tufte finds them highly problematic even for the sciences. Tufte shows how reliance on PowerPoint, especially its condensation of information into categories ranked in importance, as well as its proclivity to reduce information to fit conveniently onto a slide, led scientists at NASA to misjudge the danger faced by the damaged space shuttle on its return to earth.

The Tax Justice Network is honoured to present the Anderson-Lucas-Norman award for tax justice heroism to Ms Eva Joly MEP. https://youtu.be/VXeLGd7ejAw Ms Eva Joly MEP is an investigative magistrate and a European Parliament member with an extraordinary track record in fighting corrupt … [Read more...]

Dear WEF, let’s tax corporations in the real world

Read Article


Following up on my post a few days ago, about the value of deliberate practice for knowledge workers, a number of you asked me what form my practice takes.  A few of you were skeptical, but it is long since established that practice improves both your writing and your memory, so surely it can do much more than that for your thinking.  Here is a partial list of some of my intellectual practice strategies:
1. I write every day.  I also write to relax.
2. Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own.  I recommend this for most of you.
3. I do serious reading every day.
4. After a talk, Q&A session, podcast — whatever — I review what I thought were my weaker answers or interventions and think about how I could improve them.  I rehearse in my mind what I should have said.  Larry Summers does something similar.
5. I spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to crack cultural codes.  I view this as a comparative advantage, and one which few other people in my fields are trying to replicate.  For one thing, it makes me useful in a wide variety of situations where I have little background knowledge.  This also helps me invest in skills which will age relatively well, as I age.  For me, this is perhaps the most importantly novel item on this list.
6. I listen often to highly complex music, partly because I enjoy it but also in the (silly?) hope that it will forestall mental laziness.
7. I have regular interactions with very smart people who will challenge me and be very willing to disagree, including “GMU lunch.”
8. Every day I ask myself “what did I learn today?”, a question I picked up from Amihai Glazer.  I feel bad if I don’t have a clear answer, while recognizing the days without a clear answer are often the days where I am learning the most (at least in the equilibrium where I am asking myself this question).
9. One factor behind my choice of friends is what kind of approbational sway they will exercise over me.  You should want to hang around people who are good influences, including on your mental abilities.  Peer effects really are quite strong.
10. I watch very little television.  And no drugs and no alcohol should go without saying.
11. In addition to being a “product” in its own right, I also consider doing Conversations with Tyler — with many of the very smartest people out there — to be a form of practice.  It is a practice for speed, accuracy in understanding written writings, and the ability to crack the cultural codes of my guests.
12. I teach — a big one.
Physical exercise is a realm all of its own, and that is good for your mind too.  For me it is basketball, tennis, exercise bike, sometimes light weights, swimming if I am at a decent hotel with a pool.  My plan is to do more of this.
Here are a few things I don’t do:
Taking notes is a favorite with some people I know, though my penmanship and coordination and also typing are too problematic for that.
I also don’t review video or recordings of myself, for fear that will make me too self-conscious.  For many people that is probably a good idea, however.
I don’t spend time trying to improve my memory, which is either very bad or very good, depending on the kind of problem facing me.  (If I need to remember to do something, I require a visual cue, sometimes a pile on the floor, and that creates a bit of a mess.  But it works — spatial organization is information!)
I’ve never practiced trying to type on a small screen, though probably I should.
I’ll close by repeating the end of my previous post:
Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”  If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?
Better training has brought big improvements to the quality of athletics and also chess, and many of those advances are quite recent — when is the intellectual world going to follow suit?  When are you going to follow suit?

Victorian mayors ready to steal Sculpture By The Sea off Bondi

There has been interest in taking the iconic Sydney event to Geelong, St Kilda, the Mornington Peninsula and Lorne.

Hitler, tweets and Trump: What do they have in common? Independent. Robert Fisk.

This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops

Motherboard obtained a Palantir user manual through a public records request, and it gives unprecedented insight into how the company logs and tracks individuals – “Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren’t suspected of a crime…The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide…”
 
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