Thursday, January 23, 2020

Coronavirus: Bullying and Layoffs can be handled tactfully

“You can get excited about the future. The past won’t mind.” ―Hillary DePiano, Author

Read more at: https://yourstory.com/herstory/2019/12/inspirational-quotes-to-boost-you-into-2020?utm_pageloadtype=scroll
“You can get excited about the future. The past won’t mind.” ―Hillary DePiano, Author

Read more at: https://yourstory.com/herstory/2019/12/inspirational-quotes-to-boost-you-into-2020?utm_pageloadtype=scroll

“You can get excited about the future. The past won’t mind.”
 ―Hillary DePiano, Author



Some of the most beautiful things in life come from unsuspecting situations ... The butterfly is a great symbol for change, transition, adaptation, and growth. 

Layoffs can be handled tactfully. They are stressful, but organizations should provide more support


Long work hours linked to doubled risk of mental illness, suicide in junior doctors


However, doctors warned that simply restricting work hours would be a simplistic solution.
A seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, China, now shut down, where some people appear to have contracted the new coronavirus.

Did patient zero really catch new Chinese virus by eating infected bat soup? It’s actually perfectly possible

More people tested for coronavirus in Australia as China locks down 10 cities

Two patients in NSW and two in Queensland are waiting on test results.


Coronavirus: death toll doubles to 17 as China struggles to halt spread

 Abroad, Thailand has confirmed four cases, while the United States, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have each reported one.
IMAGE OF THE DAY: 70 Years of Disease Research.



Custer, S., Prakash, M., Solis, J., Knight, R., and J. Lin. (2019).Influencing the Narrative: How the Chinese government mobilizes students and media to burnish its image. Williamsburg, VA. AidData at William & Mary: “Chinese leaders have mobilized an impressive array of government agencies, media outlets, and educational institutions at home and abroad as a megaphone to tell China’s story to the world. In this report, we take a data-driven approach to answer one overarching question: How does Beijing use informational diplomacy and student exchange to advance its national interests among its closest neighbors in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP)? AidData collected quantitative data on China’s overtures to twenty-five EAP countries between 2000 and 2019, which we analyze to understand which tools Beijing uses to mobilize media and students to promote its preferred narrative. This report updates and extends work first published in 2018 in Ties That Bind, a first-of-its-kind report that quantified multiple aspects of China’s public diplomacy—financial, cultural, exchange, and elite-to-elite diplomacy—across 25 countries from 2000 to 2016 to assess how it is received by foreign publics and leaders and determine whether it is meeting Beijing’s objectives. Data from both Ties That Bind and this report is available through AidData’s China’s Public Diplomacy Dashboard, in which users can create custom datasets, maps, and graphs, and filter based on the type of public diplomacy, recipient countries, and time period. This study was conducted with generous support from the United States Department of State. The report’s findings and conclusions are those of its authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of funder and partner organizations…”

According to smiling assassins aka Nichols Machiavelli ;-) They never feared Imrich  failing. They feared his success, and that’s unforgivable ;-)
“Coolness” and “aggression” were highly linked; bullies enjoyed the highest social   standing among classmates, whereas victims were socially marginalized. This trend, unfortunately, continues as we get older; a recentstudy
 found that workplace bullies often have positive job evaluations and are considered highly skilled in work “politics.” Thus, rather than bullies being socially unskilled outcasts, some bullying might actually be helping people ascend the social ladder. . .. Bullying is seen to be prevalent in organizations where employees and managers feel that they have the support, or at least the implicit blessing of senior managers to carry on their abusive and bullying behaviour.[1] Furthermore, new managers will quickly come to view this form of behaviour as acceptable and normal if they see others get away with it and are even rewarded for it.[2] 

When bullying happens at the highest levels, the effects may be far reaching. People may be bullied irrespective of their organizational status or rank, including senior managers, which indicates the possibility of a negative domino effect, where bullying may cascade downwards, as the targeted supervisors might offload their own aggression onto their subordinates. In such situations, a bullying scenario in the boardroom may actually threaten the productivity of the entire organisation.[3 


A mechanical failure on a tram at Town Hall at 4pm on Tuesday triggered the closure of about one-third of the problem-plagued network.

Recruitment into organised criminal groups: A systematic review


The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has released a paper that synthesises the results of a systematic review of the social, psychological and economic factors leading to recruitment into organised crime.
  • This study examines the international evidence from 47 qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method studies published in or before 2017.
  • The review demonstrates that while the available evidence on the various factors leading to individuals’ recruitment is scarce, there has been growth in the number of rigorous studies in recent years. 
  • The most commonly studied factors relating to the recruitment of organised crime members are social relations and criminal backgrounds or expertise.
  • Familial, friendship and professional ties may build a foundation of trust in potential recruits and propagate recruitment opportunities. Recruits also need to demonstrate competence in carrying out specific criminal activities, avoiding police detection, and maintaining group secrecy.
  • Other factors examined in the studies include economic conditions, demographic characteristics, employment, education, and psychological factors.
  • Areas for policy development are identified, such as targeting the extended social networks of organised crime members.
This research was commissioned by the AIC’s Serious and Organised Crime Research Laboratory and undertaken by researchers at Transcrime and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. The study will assist in better understanding the social and organisational characteristics of criminal organisations and help inform the development of preventive programs to reduce recruitment into organised criminal groups.

The paper is available for free download on the AIC website: https://aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi583
 


Want A Job? Increasingly You’ll Have To Get By The AI Algorithms First


With HireVue, businesses can pose pre-determined questions — often recorded by a hiring manager — that candidates answer on camera through a laptop or smartphone. Increasingly, those videos are then pored over by algorithms analyzing details such as words and grammar, facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice, trying to determine what kinds of attributes a person may have. Based on this analysis, the algorithms will conclude whether the candidate is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on a team, for instance. – CNN
Perfect Murders: Studies in Detection: Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger 



Perfect Murders: Studies in Detection: Thunderstruck 





"Fighting has taught me that the caterpillar takes a while to turn into a majestic butterfly.”
NYT covers minimum wage and suicide debate
       At Eurozine they reprint Maciej Urbanowski's Osteuropaarticle, an extensive look at: "Rightwing literature in Poland after 1989", Conservative revolution     Disturbing if fascinating


Uber Wins Dubious Honor Of Being First Big Tech Company To Bully A Small Nation Using Corporate Sovereignty TechDirt


 Care About Australia’s Wildlife: Please Don’t Give Money To PETA.Well, if we begin to take a look at PETA’s Australia chapter, we can imagine why they are not first in line to help those poor koalas and kangaroos we keep hearing about on the news. For example, PETA’s Australia chapter received over $49 million in contributions in 2019, but only less than 1 percent went into actually helping troubled animals. The rest of the money, in true PETA fashion, was used on advertising, public disturbances, paying off celebrity spokespersons, and lobbying politicians and businesses into getting what they want and they want one thing, and one thing only-total animal “liberations”. This would mean no zoos, no aquariums, no responsible meat, or dairy consumption, no pets, no wildlife conservation efforts that require rehabilitation or breeding programs, and no use of animals for therapeutic purposes. 
  The Evil List Which tech companies are really doing the most harm - Slate – Here are the 30 most dangerous, ranked by the people who know: “…The tech industry doesn’t intoxicate us like it did just a few years ago. Keeping up with its problems—and its fixes, and its fixes that cause new problems—is dizzying. Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook really the danger to democracy it looks like? Is Uber really worse than the system it replaced? Isn’t Amazon’s same-day delivery worth it? Which harms are real and which are hypothetical? Has the techlash gotten it right? And which of these companies is really the worst? Which ones might be, well, evil? We don’t mean evil in the mustache-twirling, burn-the-world-from-a-secret-lair sense—well, we mostly don’t mean that—but rather in the way Googlers once swore to avoid mission drift, respect their users, and spurn short-term profiteering, even though the company now regularly faces scandals in which it has violated its users’ orworkers’ trust. We mean ills that outweigh conveniences. We mean temptations and poison pills and unanticipated outcomes…”
THE WOKE MOB IS ALL ABOUT NOT BEING JUDGED ON QUALITY, BECAUSE THEY’RE AWFUL: Stephen King Savaged by ‘Woke’ Mob For Saying Art Should be Judged on Quality, Not ‘Diversity.’ 


YOU CAN’T TAX THE GENTRY! Many Colorado Resort Homes Sit Empty. So Why Not Tax ‘Em For Affordable Housing? 

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What are the Most Common Nightmares? The top two are “Falling” and “Being Chased,” followed by “Death” and “Feeling Lost.” At the bottom of the list: “Going Bald.”

NOT BEING ABLE TO LOSE WEGHT. 105 KG MEdia Dragon - THE POLITICALLY INCORRECT TRUTH about obesity. 


BE NEITHER TOO LATE NOR TOO SOON: Success of knee replacement depends on timing, study says.


"To write a beautiful book about suicide…to transform the subject into something beautiful―this is the forbidding task that A. Alvarez set for himself…He has succeeded." ―New York Times
"Suicide," writes the notes English poet and critic A. Alvarez, "has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out." 

Chinese delegates cut South China Sea references from resolution Sydney Morning Herald

Esports is preferred career among Chinese youth, survey finds Star Online

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 9 Reasons You Should Have A Baby This Year If You’re Young And Married.

'This is the modern Rome': Joe Hockey reveals plans for a future in the US

"We're going through a tumultuous period and I want to be in the thick of it," Hockey said of Washington.


Meet the Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement Smithsonian

Google to phase out most invasive internet tracking Financial Times

Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday Krebs on Security
Posted by at