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Thursday, August 29, 2019

“Boolean Girl” Is on a Mission: How to Turn an iPhone Into a Work-Only Tool

Pessimists are happy dreamers.  They make the world in their own image and so always manage to feel at home.

Zits by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman
 “Sniff- I am getting overtones of desperation with hints of peer pressure”

Joshua Kitson, frontman in Australia's largest tax fraud, jailed for ...

 ATO's R&D clawbacks to be scrutinised

 That is from Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.


Don't talk politics: Heads down and do your job, Google tells staff


No discussions at work about politics, news stories and other non-work related topics. Google has issued new guidelines for its roughly 100,000 employees.



The Trump secrets hiding inside Deutsche Bank


ICAC NSW Labor inquiry as it happened: NSW Labor suspends Kaila Murnain


NSW Labor Party boss Kaila Murnain will give evidence today with the knowledge that many of her colleagues are already calling time on her reign.



The 'brilliant' plan that ended behind bars

Former Plutus Payroll general manager Joshua Kitson has been jailed for at least three years over a $100 million tax evasion plot.







Is Surfing Being Ruined By Ubiquitous Video?


“One of the true gifts of surfing is the privacy of it. That’s going away, and it’s at a great, great, great hazard to the experience. We’re so infatuated with getting looked at now—look at me, look at me, and look at me!—that we’re losing the magic of surfing being a low-profile activity.” – The New Yorker

Fear: False Evidence Appearing Real | Psychology Today Australia
Psycholgist took a deep dive into fear this month. Over this past year, someone I love dearly, a close   

The New York Times – To prevent distractions, Conor Dougherty, an economics writer, dumped social media and anything fun — even his browser — from his smartphone. “…I cover California and the economy and have to read news for work, so the mental bargain I’ve made with myself is that I can use my phone as much or as long as I want — so long as I’m reading books or news. Aside from news, Audible, and service-type things like maps and airline apps, I have nothing on my phone. I even disabled the browser. I find this keeps me mostly sane and mostly productive…Technology is a hard balance for everyone these days, but it’s especially hard for reporters, who in the pursuit of readers and stories can convince themselves that Twitter wars (“being part of the conversation”) and YouTube holes (“cultural research”) are productive uses of time. My biggest problem with social media is that sometimes I used it for work and sometimes I used it to goof off, and somewhere along the way I lost track of which was which…”

Medical cannabis: Barry Lambert's fight for his sick grandchild



Cicero (and others) excuses himself for having written a long letter, by saying he had not time to make it shorter

Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.  A good, short “give it to your high school kid” book on why socialism is not an entirely ideal way to arrange society.

'His Mind Will Thus Live On'



With ill health comes pain and inconvenience and a less noted unpleasantness, embarrassment. Sometimes it wears off.  For six months I’ve relied on a cane, not because I fancy myself a dandy but because I don’t want to fall down. At first I was self-conscious, especially when students would hold a door or ask if I needed help carrying my book bag. I’ve never enjoyed being conspicuous and don’t like preferential treatment. But that’s silly pride and now the cane is part of me, as reliable as an umbrella.

Edward Gibbon was less fortunate. I’ve just read “Decline and Fall of an Author,” an essay published in the journalAustralian Doctor in 2006. The writer is Dr. Jim Leavesley, a retired GP and medical historian in Australia who describes two of Gibbon’s many ailments, gout and a massive hydrocele. The historian was notably obese and sedentary. In 1772, at the age of thirty-five, Gibbon developed what he called “a dignified disorder” – gout, which Leavesley describes as “a malady as widespread and significant to 18th-century gentlemen as is coronary thrombosis in the 21st century.” In his Flesh in the Age of Reason (2003), Roy Porter writes:

“Gout, of course, is a story in itself, being the keynote malady of eighteenth-century gentlemen and men of letters, the lord of diseases and the disease of lords, one of those rare afflictions it was a positive ‘honour’ to acquire, it being a mark of good family and fine living.”


'To Call Something Literature is to Start a Canon'

“Literature is always wider than the class of works which we call literary. Wherever a man has fairly set down the best that he knows about the thing he knows best, and in words that tell his meaning, there, always, will be literature.”


“Boolean Girl” Is on a Mission: Teach Girls to Code and Build Electronics

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All Together SWE – Learn how nonprofit “Boolean Girl” is bringing diversity to tech by engaging girls and under-represented groups with meaningful, hands-on instruction and sustained exposure to computer science and engineering.
First, the good news: girls love coding.  Now, for the bad news: educators face far too many obstacles in teaching girls to code, and low-income families suffer most of all.  I’m co-founder of Boolean Girl, a non-profit whose mission is bringing diversity to tech by engaging girls and under-represented groups in grades three through eight with meaningful, hands-on instruction and sustained exposure to computer science and engineering in a collaborative and welcoming environment. We provide enrichment classes, camps, special events, partnerships and online education.  In 2014, our organization got its start teaching girls from the families in our neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. We paid attention to what the girls liked and didn’t, and we slowly refined our content as we taught larger and larger groups. Since those early days, we’ve taught thousands of girls in camps, schools and online, and we’ve found a couple of broad themes: girls tend to like projects that have a story, they tend to gravitate toward collaborative work, and they tend to be less interested in skill-based video games like ping pong. So we built our teaching content around those interests. (Of course, every child is unique. If a child doesn’t conform to these themes, they have plenty of freedom to code in whatever way works for them. We believe in creativity, not cookie-cutters.)..”
A Week in the Life of Popular YouTube Channels
“An analysis of every video posted by high-subscriber channels in the first week of 2019 finds that children’s content – as well as content featuring children – received more views than other video”
“The media landscape was upended more than a decade ago when the video-sharing site YouTube was launched. The volume and variety of content posted on the site is staggering. The site’s popularity makes it a launchpad for performers, businesses and commentators on every conceivable subject. And like many platforms in the modern digital ecosystem, YouTube has in recent years become a flashpoint in ongoing debates over issues such as online harassment, misinformation and the impact of technology on children. Amid this growing focus, and in an effort to continue demystifying the content of this popular source of information, Pew Research Center used its own custom mapping technique to assemble a list of popular YouTube channels (those with at least 250,000 subscribers) that existed as of late 2018, then conducted a large-scale analysis of the videos those channels produced in the first week of 2019. The Center identified a total of 43,770 of these high-subscriber channels using a process similar to the one used in our study of the YouTube recommendation algorithm. This data collection produced a variety of insights into the nature of content on the platform: The YouTube ecosystem produces a vast quantity of content. These popular channels alone posted nearly a quarter-million videos in the first seven days of 2019, totaling 48,486 hours of content. To put this figure in context, a single person watching videos for eight hours a day (with no breaks or days off) would need more than 16 years to watch all the content posted by just the most popular channels on the platform during a single week. The average video posted by these channels during this time period was roughly 12 minutes long and received 58,358 views during its first week on the site…”

Ben Lewis, The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting.  I felt I knew this story already, but nonetheless found interesting information and conceptual analysis on virtually every page.  And while the author is agnostic and balanced, the text upped my opinion of the “likely Leonardo weighted expected value” component from about 0.1 to maybe 0.25?  Yet so much fuss about a painting that resurfaced in 1907 — model that…  And don’t forget: “None of the great art historians and connoisseurs who saw it before 1958 identified it as a Leonardo.”

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