Friday, October 18, 2019

Scripting News MEdia Dragon: Crawl data analysis of 2 billion links from 90 million domains offer glimpse into today’s web


Happy 25th year, blogging. You've grown up, but social mediais still ...

The Guardian‎ 

Happy 25th year, blogging. You’ve grown up, but social media is still having a brawl

The blogosphere remains a valuable source of information and insight
Last Monday was a significant anniversary in the evolution of the web. It was 25 years to the day since the first serious blog appeared. It was called Scripting News and the url was (and remains) at scripting.com. Its author is a software wizard named Dave Winer, who’s updated it every day since 1994. And despite its wide readership, it has never run ads. This may be partly because Dave doesn’t need the money (he sold his company to Symantec in 1987 for a substantial sum) but it’s mainly because he didn’t want to compete for the attention of his readers. “I see running ads on my blog,” he once wrote, “as picking up loose change that’s fallen out of peoples’ pockets. I want to hit a home run. I’m swinging for the fences. Not picking up litter.”
PREMIUM Facts aren’t cure-alls, but they still matter. The new skills needed for dealing with a hugely changed flow of information and its impact on perception
WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING: Fact-checking is about more than correcting disinformation that is already out there, or shaming those who create or propagate it. It is increasingly about getting in first, building fact-checking into the system and stopping the disinformation before it starts.

OECD report on combatting tax crimes in APEC economies
The OECD has released a report Combatting Tax Crimes More Effectively in APEC Economies recognising the critical role that the fight against tax crimes and other illicit financial flows plays in building resilient economies.
The report was called for in APEC's Cebu Action Plan, a roadmap for a more sustainable financial future for the APEC region. It focuses on the legal instruments, policy tools, and capacity building initiatives that are available to enhance the fight against tax crimes in APEC economies.
The report highlights the standards and best practices available, including the importance of collective efforts by multiple agencies within a jurisdiction. Australia's Serious Financial Crime Taskforce (SFCT) has been cited as a successful example of this approach. The SFCT aims to align the priorities and resources of Commonwealth law enforcement and regulatory agencies to target the highest risk priorities, through an intelligence-led approach. Using the joint effort as an opportunity for information sharing, the SFCT has within three years, raised $738m in tax liabilities and recouped $288m.
Source: OECD media release, 15 October 2019


Who has a right to the taxes of multinationals? (17 Oct 2019)
Alastair MacGibbon pops up as strategy chief at CyberCX, a new firm built via 12-way merger
CAREERS: CyberCX is expected to grow further by subsuming more companies in the future, but it’s already fairly sizeable. 

Wall Street Journal, Who Pays What in Taxes? The Answer Isn't So Simple.:
WSJIt is a tax policy question with a seemingly simple answer: Who pays what?
In reality, how taxes are distributed across income groups is hotly debated by economists—with enormous policy consequences. New findings by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, have added fuel to this debate, challenging the conventional view that the poor pay relatively little and that effective tax rates rise with income.
 

MEdia Dragon: Crawl data analysis of 2 billion links from 90 million domains offer glimpse into today’s web via SearcEngineLand: Data analysis reveals the distribution of PageRank is highly right-skewed meaning the majority of hosts have very low PageRank – “The web is not only essential for people working in digital marketing, but for everyone. We professionals in this field need to understand the big picture of how the web functions for our daily work. We also know that optimizing our customers’ sites is not just about their sites, but also improving their presence on the web, which it is connected to other sites by links. To get an overall view of information about the web we need data, lots of data. And we need it on a regular basis. There are some organizations that provide open data for this purpose like Httparchive. It collects and permanently stores the web’s digitized content and offers them as public dataset. A second example is Common Crawl, an organization that crawls the web every month. Their web archive has been collecting petabytes of data since 2011. In their own words, “Common Crawl is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to providing a copy of the internet to internet researchers, companies and individuals at no cost for the purpose of research and analysis.” In this article, a quick data analysis of Common Crawl’s recent public data and metrics will be presented to offer a glimpse into what’s happening on the web today…”
Google’s new voice recorder app transcribes in real time, even when offline - TechCrunch: “At Google’s hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone’s voice recording functionality, as it will be able to turn the recordings into text even when there’s no internet connectivity. This presents a new competitor to others in voice transcriptions that are leveraging similar AI advances, like Otter.ai, Reason8, Trint and others, for example. As Google explained, all the recorder functionality happens directly on the device — meaning you can use the phone while in airplane mode and still have accurate recordings. 

“This means you can transcribe meetings, lectures, interviews, or anything you want to save,” said Sabrina Ellis, VP of Product Management at Google….”
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