“Feedback is a gift. Ideas are the currency of our next success. Let people see you value both feedback and ideas.”
– Jim Trinka and Les Wallace
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” – Ken Blanchard
Tax Office targets slice of banking scandal compensation payments
The Sydney Morning Herald
An ATO spokeswoman said the Tax Office did not have information on how many taxpayers had ...
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Huge Survey of Firmware Finds No Security Gains In 15 Years Security Ledger. My assumption would be it has gotten worse. Complexity and additions to older codebase would tend to do that.
HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Moose crashes pool party, steals taco. Be glad he only took the taco. Moose bites can be pretti nasti.
RICHARD BUTLER-Fake News, Alternative Facts and now Alternative Intelligence
Trump has terminated the supremo of US intelligence, John Coats, and has nominated as the new Director of National Intelligence, Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe. His unstinting commitment to all things Trump and, his inexperience in intelligence and foreign affairs, would seem to guarantee that he will provide alternative intelligence to Trump’s liking.Continue reading
JOHN DWYER. Another hard to believe example of the weakness of our regulators in protecting consumers from healthcare fraud.
When I was much younger I often dipped into Ripley’s “Believe it or not” for a laugh, amazement and even enlightenment. I had a look at their website recently as I prepared to tell you a story that would fit well into their library and found that “Ripley’s” is alive and well, daily producing their remarkable vignettes; Frederic Baur, creator of Pringle’s chips had his ashes buried inside one of his cans, the common Swift can stay in the air for 10 months without landing, men only blink half as often as women, cats can be allergic to humans! Well, here is a serious story that is certainly hard to believe but, regrettably, is true. Continue reading
Economic good news: houses in Perth, Adelaide and Canberra became more affordable in July
CoreLogic has released its house price data for July. Nationally the average price of houses has not moved, but houses have become a little less affordable (by 0.2 per cent) in our biggest capitals – Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – while becoming a little more affordable in other capitals and in the bush. But when one reads press reports – such as on the ABC– the suggestion is that there is something bad about falling or stable house prices and something good about rising house prices.
Perhaps one of our readers could explain why more expensive gasoline, as revealed in thelatest CPI figures, is a bad thing, while more expensive houses are a good thing.
Interest rates at lowest level for 4000 years
On the ABC’s Rear Vision Stan Correy interviews four experts on the history of interest rates, going back to the time of the Babylonian King Hammurabi, who mandated maximum rates. They have never been so low, and negative interest rates, as are being experienced in many markets in Australia and internationally, make no sense and are certainly not sustainable. Professor Richard Sylla of New York University’s School of Business argues that “normal service will be resumed”, but he isn’t sure when. Professor Andrew Odlyzko, reminds us of Marx’s prediction that a period of sustained low interest rates would occur in capitalism’s late stages.
Read your wine labels carefully
PLO leader Hannah Ashrawi draws our attention to a ruling of Canada’s federal court, which has found that wine originating in Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, has been illegally labelled as made in Israel. Ashrawi calls on Canada and the European Union to enforce proper country-of-origin labelling and to amend theirs trade agreements accordingly.
Countercultures
Is there a line of development linking the youth protest movements of the 1960s to today’s evangelical cults and megachurches? What happened to the energy of idealistic young Christians seeking social justice and an end of the Vietnam War? How did faith-based countercultures relate to the secular countercultures of the 1960s? On the ABC’s Soul Search Meredith Lake discusses the soul of the counterculture with various experts, religious and secular. (54 minutes)
Can the countercultures of today – Occupy Wall Street, Me Too – bring about political change? Or are they simply performative and decorative fashions, lacking solid grounding and deep roots in society? Does capitalism co-opt and absorb countercultures, rendering futile any movement that attempts to overthrow capitalism? Can the Proud Boys and similar movements be considered as countercultures? On the ABC’s Future Tense Antony Funnell discusses these questions with five experts offering very different (informed) opinions – Counterculture, consumerism and the far right. (28 minutes)
These are both part of an ABC Radio National series on countercultures.
Barnaby Joyce discovers bush poverty
With the election campaign over, Barnaby Joyce has been allowed out of the car, and is niggling Morrison and Frydenberg on Newstart: “in small towns and villages in rural Australia, people out of work are not sustained on Newstart”, he writes in the Canberra Times.
It’s refreshing to read a politician who doesn’t waste airtime and reading time parroting speaking notes, even if some of Joyce’s views are a little weird, particularly on climate change. On one thing he’s right: “The problem at the root of issues for those in the weatherboard and iron of regional Australia is their loss and lack of political power”, but he fails to point out that that loss of political power stems from their unswerving loyalty to the National Party.
How Barnaby copes on $201 000
Barnaby is doing it hard. He has resorted DIY slaughtering aged hoggetsfor his mutton, and is making other gastronomical economies.
Saturday’s Good Reading and Listening is compiled by Ian McAuley
3 observations about shooting hoaxes
At
least 31 people died in two separate mass
shootings in the U.S. over the weekend And misinformation wasn’t far behind.
In
the hours after the attacks in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart and a Dayton, Ohio,
entertainment district, hoaxes about the gunmen, other shootings and even
prescription drug use proliferated on social media. BuzzFeed News’ Jane
Lytvynenko started
debunking them in an early Twitter thread, while Daniel and John
Kruzel fact-checked
some of the most viral hoaxes in a story for (Poynter-owned)
PolitiFact.
It
wasn’t the first time that online fakery flooded social media following an
American mass shooting. Misinformation has become a staple of such attacks.
But the shootings in El Paso and Dayton highlighted a few trends in
shooting-related misinformation that pose challenges for fact-checkers and
journalists covering future tragedies.
1. False flag conspiracies are now routine
Some
of the most widespread hoaxes PolitiFact
identified about the El Paso and Dayton shootings falsely claimed
that both attacks were planned by the “deep state,” an alleged faction of the
U.S. government working against President Donald Trump.
These
kinds of conspiracies were popularized in 2012 following the mass shooting at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when notorious
conspiracist Alex Jones claimed that
the tragedy was faked. Now, those hoaxes spread after nearly every mass
shooting.
Unfortunately,
these conspiracies aren’t likely to go away any time soon. So fact-checkers
and journalists had best be on the lookout for such hoaxes immediately
following major tragedies.
2. Misinformation spreads on messaging apps
While
much misinformation talk focuses on platforms like Facebook and Twitter,
private messaging platforms have become a big problem in the U.S., too.
The
primary example of this is
WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging app where rumors regularly lead to
violence abroad. But
Lytvynenko reported that, after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton,
rumors spread in group chats, Facebook groups and Snapchat stories
— none of which could be effectively covered by fact-checkers.
The
spread of misinformation in these private spaces is much harder to track. And
as more misinformers and extremists are banned from open platforms, it’s
likely that misinformation will continue to migrate there.
3. Classic hoaxes still thrive online
Misinformers
are getting smarter with their means of distribution following mass
shootings. But the classics are still performing just fine on social media.
Daniel debunked
several fake news stories that claimed police in other American
cities, such as Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska, had foiled similar
atrocities from taking place. Fact-checking site Lead Stories debunked
a hoax perpetrated by Twitter trolls that the El Paso shooter was
someone named Sam Hyde, a comedian who has become the subject of regular
accusations after mass shootings.
Fact-checkers
face big challenges in debunking widespread conspiracies and misinformation
on private networks. But some of the most basic shooting-related misinformation
is still getting thousands of shares on social media — and the
IFCN has
a tip sheet for how people can avoid spreading it.
 ... technology
... politics
... the future of news
This
week we’re choosing a
fact-check from the Turkish platform Teyit.org, which debunked a widely
shared Facebook post that showed a picture of a man carrying a sign during a
protest in Istanbul on July 27 over the city’s demand that some Syrian
refugees be relocated to other parts of Turkey.
The
fact check itself wasn’t particularly sophisticated; it called out a social
media post that showed just part of a sign held up in the protests. It’s what
happened afterward that makes it noteworthy.
In
the post, the sign was partially obscured, so it appeared to say only “Turks
go home.” In fact, those words were from a Dutch politician against Turkish
migrants in The Netherlands. The rest of the sign showed a picture of the
Turkish politician Sinan Oğan, a member of the right wing nationalist
movement and the words: “Syrians Get Out!’ The point of the sign was to liken
Oğan to the Dutch politician.
But
when Teyit showed the whole sign, Oğan
protested on Twitter that those were not his words. Teyit then
included his disavowal in its fact check.
But
that wasn’t the end of the story. Oğan took to Twitter to demand that Teyit
to go further and
actually verify that he never said them. He was essentially suggesting that
Teyit prove a negative, which fact-checkers are loath to do. He then took to
social media to attack Teyit, and some of his allies joined in.
Among
his attacks was the absurd
claim that Teyit’s founder, Mehmet Atakan Foça, was the son of
Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or
PKK, a Kurdish nationalist group that the Turkish government and the United
States consider a terrorist organization.
It
was a demonstration of how fact-checkers can easily become the target of
attacks by politicians who don’t like their rulings. “Politicians’ tool kit
when they are not happy with fact-checkers!”tweeted Baybars
Örsek, the International Fact-Checking Network’s director, who is
Turkish.
What
we liked: The
attacks didn’t stop yet. But they did generate an outpouring of support among
fact-checkers and other journalists around the world for Teyit’s work. It was
a powerful international show of solidarity and it sparked important
discussions about the impact of such attacks on fact-checking platforms —
both positive and negative.
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