― Douglas Adams
Bob Dylan expressed the sentiment for Greta in 1963:
How much do I know / To talk out of turn / you might say I am young, you might say I’m unlearned / But there’s one thing I know / Though I’m younger than you / Even Jesus would never forgive what you do. - Barry Mullins, Croydon NSW
To catch a thief: Australia turns to casinos to track tax evader
Tax office to estimate, chase GST when companies don't pick up the Do not pick up the phone ...
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Australian Taxation Office would estimate how much GST a business owes and pursue that ...
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Reckon tackles ATO document processing with new partnership
'A mafia shakedown': Phone transcript shows Trump pushed Ukraine for Biden inquiry - Sydney Morning Herald
'This is a zombie Parliament': Angry scenes as MPs return to the Commons - Sydney Morning Herald
Law Technology Today: “The recent 2019 “ABA Profile of the Legal Profession” report says that only 25% of lawyers personally use or maintain a presence on Twitter for professional purposes. That same report also states that only 14% of law firms use Twitter (down from a high of 21% in 2016).
The Nation – Exclusive: Edward Snowden’s First Adventures in Cyberspace An excerpt from the whistleblower’s new memoir. Excerpted from Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden, published September 17, 2019, by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2019 by Edward Snowden. All rights reserved. “…Nowadays, connectivity is just presumed. smartphones, laptops, desktops, everything’s connected, always. Connected to what exactly? How? It doesn’t matter. You just tap the icon your older relatives call “the Internet button” and boom, you’ve got it: the news, pizza delivery, streaming music, and streaming video that we used to call TV and movies
Use of “Hidden Debt Loophole” Spreads Among Australian Corporations Wolf Street. Kevin W: “Repo 105, Oz-style.”
Big Tech ‘Nudges’ Our Behavior for Its Own Greed: Here’s a 4-Step Social Media Self-Defense Class
Some simple suggestions for how to keep tech from running your life.
Don’t blame the High Court for muzzling public servants
Last week’s ruling by the High Court upheld the right of the public service to fire a public servant who had anonymously tweeted anti-government opinions. She wasn’t revealing state secrets: she was simply doing what citizens take for granted in countries with guaranteed rights of free speech. But as the High Court confirmed, unlike the US, Canada, New Zealand and most of Europe, we have no such guaranteed right in Australia. This means two million Australians, employed by governments, are denied one of the basic rights citizens enjoy in most democracies. Crispin Hull does not criticise the High Court. Rather, he writes:
Australians should understand that to qualify as a liberal democracy a bill of rights is pretty much compulsory. History tells us that liberal democracy is both gained and lost gradually, step by step. In recent years, Australia has been taking some of those steps.
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AI 50: America’s Most Promising Artificial Intelligence Companies - Forbes – “Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every industry, allowing vehicles to navigate without drivers, assisting doctors with medical diagnoses, and mimicking the way humans speak. But for all the authentic and exciting ways it’s transforming the tasks computers can perform, there’s a lot of hype, too. As Jeremy Achin, CEO of newly minted unicorn DataRobot, puts it: “Everyone knows you have to have machine learning in your story or you’re not sexy.” The inherently broad term gets bandied about so often that it can start to feel meaningless and can be trotted out by companies to gussy up even simple data analysis. To help cut through the noise, Forbes and data partner Meritech Capital put together a list of private, U.S.-based companies that are wielding some subset of artificial intelligence in a meaningful way and demonstrating real business potential from doing so. One makes robots that can whir around shoppers to help workers restock shelves. Another scans recruiting pitches for unconscious bias. A third analyzes massive data sets to make street-by-street weather predictions.
The Simple Structure That All Human Languages Share
Sentences and phrases of human languages, all human languages, have an inaudible and invisible hierarchical structure. When we are children, we impose this structure on the sequences of sounds that we hear. Our minds can’t understand continuous streams of sound directly as meaningful language. Instead, we subconsciously chop them up into discrete bits—sounds and words—and organize these into larger units. This means that sentences have a hierarchical structure. – Nautilus
