Big Deal Knowledge Base: To Everything There Is a Season

“Mistakes should be examined, learned from, and discarded; not dwelled upon and stored.”  
– Tim Fargo  

“Don't let the cruel make you unkind. And don't let the unkind make you cruel.”
― Giovannie de Sadeleer  

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation. Because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
~ John Wooden 
 

Tasmanian poppy farmers should not depend on 'death, addiction', say Greens

After Johnson & Johnson copped an $845 million fine, one lawyer said the US opioid crisis 'began in Tasmania' - the world's hub for legal opium poppies.

An authoritarian government tries to erase the past

Jon Michaud, via The Washington Post

It’s a grim existence, a fascism of forgetting. But not everyone succumbs to the mass amnesia. A handful of people are able to retain memories.

The most surveilled cities in the world (Atlanta making the top ten is the surprise).  I was surprised to see facial surveillance on the Venetian Grand Canal and advertised as such.

Government MPs sound alarm over Chinese government influence at Australian universities

A "crisis of leadership" amid "deliberate efforts to influence": Four government politicians have warned the Chinese Communist Party has too much sway at Australian universities following an unprecedented week of rising tensions in Hong Kong.

Explainer: what is China’s United Front, and how much influence does it have in Australia?

14 Aug 2019

21

Gerry Groot

The Conversation

The United Front has become much more prominent since Xi Jinping became Communist Party general secretary in 2012. Xi has been instrumental in raising its status in the Chinese political system and publicly supporting a dramatic expansion of its roles and target groups

Irish author dives deep into the madness of Boris the 'clown' and Brexit

How does a privileged, modern, Western European country imagine itself to be intolerably oppressed, Fintan O'Toole asks in his latest book.

Peter J. Reilly (Forbes), Law Degree Held Against Defendant In Tax Scam:

Anthony Charles Dwight Box was at what I consider the end of the line in tax litigation — appealing his sentence from prison — when he heard from the Eleventh Circuit last month. It was not good news. The Circuit Court approved the 36 month sentence handed down by Judge Federico Moreno of the Southern District of Florida.

Judge Moreno had made an upward adjustment from the 24 to 30-month sentence called for by the guidelines because Mr. Box's legal education should have made him know better, a conviction in 1989 and failure to make any restitution.

To Everything There Is a Season

 The American Archivist, Frank J. Boles: “Three ideas, not always juxtaposed to one another in the literature, have had a pro-found impact on what archivists preserve. The ideas that archivists should create a universal record of human activity, that social justice should inform archival selec-tion decisions, and that archivists hold a unique form of power that can be exercised through appraisal have led some to posit a professional obligation not only to work toward a more equitable future but also toward a moral one. This article argues that these ideas are generally not helpful to archivists. Local autonomy and unique archival missions better define how archivists can best perform their core functions, rather than ideas based on assumptions of universal documentation or social jus-tice, each rooted in a notion of archival power

What do you care about?

by Patrick Tanguay   

Somewhat as a continuation to the previous post on journalism, which included a call to “look at people and how they use the technology, not just the tech itself.” I’d like to draw your attention to this post by Doug Belshaw which can be summarized as saying that the solution to the problem we have with FOMO, notifications, and busyness might simply be to think of the human (you) first. To be purposeful in your choices, to determine what you need, to focus on how best to answer those choices and needs.

Know who you are, what you care about, and the difference you’re trying to make in the world.

You should read the whole thing, but I’m including it here in part for this great list Belshaw extracted from a Kathy Sierra post from bak in “2006, in the mists of internet time,” The myth of keeping up. 

• Find the best aggregators
• Get summaries
• Cut the redundancy!
• Unsubscribe to as many things as possible
• Recognise that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes 
• Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest
• Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out. 
• In any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is:
  
• Need to know
• Should know
• Nice to know
• Edge case, only if it applies to you specifically
• Useless

Still reads as essential advice thirteen years later. 

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition – SPARC: “This database puts libraries on a more level playing field with vendors by detailing what thousands of peer institutions have paid for journal subscription packages. Institutions can leverage this pricing data, as well as the other resources on this site, to make clearer assessments about the suitability of these Big Deals and to strengthen their negotiating power…Sourcing: Pricing Data: Individual entries are linked to third party resources within the database; non-linked entries come from Freedom of Information requests (courtesy of Ted Bergstrom and Paul Courant). FTE Data: UK Higher Education Statistics Agency for UK FTE (HE student enrollment FTE + HE staff); DOE IPEDS for US FTE (“Full-time equivalent fall enrollment” + “Total FTE staff”); Universities Canada and COPPUL for Canadian FTE (student data only). Institutional Categories: Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education…”
  Ars technica – Parsing email headers needs care and knowledge—but it requires no special tools: “I pretty frequently get requests for help from someone who has been impersonated—or whose child has been impersonated—via email. Even when you know how to “view headers” or “view source” in your email client, the spew of diagnostic wharrgarbl can be pretty overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Today, we’re going to step through a real-world set of (anonymized) email headers and describe the process of figuring out what’s what. Before we get started with the actual headers, though, we’re going to take a quick detour through an overview of what the overall path of an email message looks like in the first place. (More experienced sysadmin types who already know what stuff like “MTA” and “SPF” stand for can skip a bit ahead to the fun part!)…”

FOIA findings: Fox News + White House = ❤️

A headline about President Donald Trump is shown outside Fox News studios in 2018 in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Not that we needed any more proof, but a slew of emails this week revealed more examples of the cozy relationship between Fox News and the Trump White House.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Democracy Forward obtained 270 pages of emails between the Trump administration, Fox News and the Fox Business Network. It then turned those emails over exclusively to The Hollywood Reporter.

One email from April of 2017 showed that Fox Business Network host David Asman gave advice to Treasury Department spokesman Tony Sayegh on how the administration should achieve a major tax cut. That’s just the most glaring example of the many times the Trump administration seemed to working alongside Fox News and Fox Business.

This should not come as any great revelation. As Jane Mayer deftly chronicled in a New Yorker piece in March, Fox News’ ties to Trump run deep and wide, and it’s not unusual to see someone leave Fox News for a White House position and vice versa. When Trump wants to reveal his thoughts beyond Twitter, he often gives extended interviews on Fox News, where he is rarely challenged.

Reading Thursday’s story in The Hollywood Reporter proves the subhead of Mayer’s story is, once again, fair: “Fox News has always been partisan. But has it become propaganda?”

Maybe Fox News, and its viewers, simply don’t care about the optics of this. But when you have a news network and an administration trading information and using each other to get the same message across ... isn’t that what propaganda is?