Vicious Cycles: Theses on a philosophy of news Harpers
Triple play: Two Harbors man fills three community needs in one long day MPR News. Chuck L: “A snapshot small town life for somE
The triumph of the rich, which is one of the defining stories of our time, is generally described as largely the reflection of two factors. The first, of course, is the explosion of income among top earners, in which a tiny minority has vacuumed up a ballooning share of the gains from the past few decades of economic growth.
Gartner Top Strategic Predictions for 2020 and Beyond
Gartner: “Technologies from AI to cryptocurrency and online shopping are changing how we live and what it means to be human. CIOs and IT leaders must help their organizations adapt in this changing world. In Japan, one restaurant is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) robotics technology to enable paralyzed employees to remotely pilot robotic waiters. JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and Ford are hosting virtual career fairs tailored to the needs of neurodiverse candidates. Enterprise Rent-A-Car integrated braille-reader technology into its reservations system for blind employees. Using AI to increase accessibility at work is one of the Gartner Top 10 strategic predictions for 2020 and beyond. The predictions examine how technology is changing the definition of what it means to be human, and IT leaders must be prepared to adapt in a changing environment.
Technology, and its applications, are poised to affect every aspect of what we call humanity. “As the digital age progresses, assumptions around the fixed nature of ‘what’ humans are is beginning to be challenged,” said Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VP Analyst, & Gartner Fellow at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2019 in Orlando, Florida. “Technology, and its applications, are poised to affect every aspect of what we call humanity and the conditions in which humans must live.”…
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues December 7, 2019 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness.
Four highlights from this week: 50 countries ranked by how they’re collecting biometric data and what they’re doing with it; Facebook Asks Supreme Court to Review Face Scan Decision; The United States House Has Approved a New Anti-Robocall Bill; and Do our algorithms have enough oversight?
Records Not Revenue
[‘Records, Not Revenue’ is a non-partisan project coordinated by an ad
hoc group of genealogists, historians, and records access advocates] – Speak Out Now
to Preserve Public Access to Genealogy Records! – On 14 November 2019,
U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) proposed a sudden
and unprecedented 492% increase in fees required to access historical records held by the USCIS Genealogy Program. Many of these records should already be publicly accessible under the law.
USCIS is essentially holding them hostage, demanding individuals pay
exorbitant and unjustifiable fees to access documents of our immigrant
ancestors. All researchers should care about the issues involved, even
if your research does not include these historical records. What can be
done to one type of record can be done to others!..Don’t delay, submit
your comments about the proposed fee hike today! The deadline is
December 16, 2019!..”
The New York Times – Despite Big Tech’s attempts to combat manipulation, companies that sell clicks, likes and followers on social media are easy to find. “Companies like Facebook and Twitter are poorly policing automated bots and other methods for manipulating social media platforms, according to a report released on Friday by researchers from the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence. With a small amount of money, the researchers found, virtually anyone can hire a company to get more likes, comments and clicks. The group, an independent organization that advises the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, tested the tech companies’ ability to stop paid influence campaigns by turning to 11 Russian and five European companies that sell fake social media engagement. For 300 euros, or about $330, the researchers bought over 3,500 comments, 25,000 likes, 20,000 views and 5,000 followers, including on posts from prominent politicians like Ms. Vestager and Ms. Jourova…”
Washington Post, The Massive Triumph of the Rich, Illustrated By Stunning New Data:
The second factor — which will be key to the 2020 presidential race — has been the hidden decline in the progressivity of the tax code at the top, in which the wealthiest earners have over those same decades seen their effective tax rates steadily fall.
Put those two factors together, and they tell a story about soaring U.S. inequality that is in some ways even more dramatic than each is on its own.
A new analysis prepared at my request by Gabriel Zucman — the French economist and "wealth detector" who has become famous for tracing the hidden wealth of the super-rich — illustrates that dual story in a freshly compelling way.
The top-line finding: Among the bottom 50 percent of earners, average real annual income even after taxes and transfers has edged up a meager $8,000 since 1970, rising from just over $19,000 to just over $27,000 in 2018.
Public executive Paul Whyte to plead guilty to $22 million fraud after being hit with 530 charges
The senior public servant at the centre of one of WA's biggest corruption scandals is set to plead guilty to more than 530 charges of stealing $22 million in public funds over 11 years, his lawyer says.
Jennifer Blouin (Penn) & Leslie A. Robinson (Dartmouth), Double Counting Accounting: How Much Profit of Multinational Enterprises Is Really in Tax Havens?:
Putting an end to the base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) activity of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is on the national agenda of nearly every country in the world. While many influential papers suggest that the scope and magnitude of the BEPS problem is quite large, we show that these magnitudes are likely overstated due to the accounting treatment of indirectly-owned foreign affiliates in the BEA’s U.S. international economic accounts data. We explain how this accounting treatment leads to double counting of foreign income and to misallocations to the incorrect jurisdiction. We demonstrate an appropriate correction, and show that the correction significantly reduces the magnitude of the BEPS estimates.
Longstanding Member Of Swedish Academy Boycotts Nobel Ceremony For Peter Handke
Peter Englund, the former permanent secretary for the Swedish Academy and a current member, said, ““To celebrate Peter Handke’s Nobel prize would be gross hypocrisy on my part” He is the only current member of the Academy with firsthand experience in Bosnia, according to a journalist, and Handke’s win has been met with horror by “politicians and writers lining up to condemn his denial of Serb atrocities during the war in the former Yugoslavia, as well as his presence at the funeral of war criminal Slobodan Miloševic.” –The Guardian (UK)
The New Ticket Scalpers Are Scary Complex – And They’re Making Money
The number of casual ticket resellers appears to be on the rise, Fashion said, and it’s his business to know. “It’s pretty chill if you think about it: You get to get a ticket for 20 bucks and then you sell it for 200 bucks, so you get 18 hours of work within 10 minutes.” – The Atlantic
Gartner: “Technologies from AI to cryptocurrency and online shopping are changing how we live and what it means to be human. CIOs and IT leaders must help their organizations adapt in this changing world. In Japan, one restaurant is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) robotics technology to enable paralyzed employees to remotely pilot robotic waiters. JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and Ford are hosting virtual career fairs tailored to the needs of neurodiverse candidates. Enterprise Rent-A-Car integrated braille-reader technology into its reservations system for blind employees. Using AI to increase accessibility at work is one of the Gartner Top 10 strategic predictions for 2020 and beyond. The predictions examine how technology is changing the definition of what it means to be human, and IT leaders must be prepared to adapt in a changing environment.
Technology, and its applications, are poised to affect every aspect of what we call humanity. “As the digital age progresses, assumptions around the fixed nature of ‘what’ humans are is beginning to be challenged,” said Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VP Analyst, & Gartner Fellow at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2019 in Orlando, Florida. “Technology, and its applications, are poised to affect every aspect of what we call humanity and the conditions in which humans must live.”…
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues December 7, 2019 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness.
Four highlights from this week: 50 countries ranked by how they’re collecting biometric data and what they’re doing with it; Facebook Asks Supreme Court to Review Face Scan Decision; The United States House Has Approved a New Anti-Robocall Bill; and Do our algorithms have enough oversight?
FOIA Campaign – Don’t Hold Our History Hostage
Fake ‘Likes’ Remain Just a Few Dollars Away, Researchers Say
- See NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence – How Social Media Companies are Failing to Combat Inauthentic Behaviour Online, November 2019