The history and futures of work since the 50s: Top Secret Investigation into innocent Jozef Imrich in 2020 ...

One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.

— Thomas More, born in 1478 

Not everything notable gets noticed, and that’s true in blogging, too. Sydney airport and its broken trolley check out this morning were noticeably annoying ...


Most firms have a CEO. How about a CMP? — a call for business to hire “chief moral philosophers via Disclosure Groupies



Are firstborns really natural leaders The Conversation This last born wants to know….

A GOOD BOSS is better than a good company: Role Models like Dr Cope are hard to come by ... 
 

Better to have a GOOD BOSS in a bad company, rather than a BAD BOSS in a good company ! Agree ?

Understanding the Brain

“Maybe human brains aren’t equipped to understand themselves.”

That thought is offered up by Grigori Guitchounts, a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at Harvard University, in an article surveying some current brain research at Nautilus.

Smarter government or data-driven disaster

“The algorithms helping control local communities – MuckRock’s releasing a new database of algorithms in government – but we’ll need your input – What is the chance you, or your neighbor, will commit a crime? Should the government change a child’s bus route? Add more police to a neighborhood or take some away? Every day government decisions from bus routes to policing used to be based on limited information and human judgment. Governments now use the ability to collect and analyze hundreds of data points everyday to automate many of their decisions. Does handing government decisions over to algorithms save time and money? Can algorithms be fairer or less biased than human decision making? Do they make us safer? Automation and artificial intelligence could improve the notorious inefficiencies of government, and it could exacerbate existing errors in the data being used to power it. MuckRock and the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL) have compiled a collection of algorithms used in communities across the country to automate government decision-making…”

What Ails The BBC

“The BBC needs more than simply defending in its current state, as if any criticism will render it only more helpless in the face of a hostile government. If the BBC is to survive the mid-term review of the Royal Charter in 2022, let alone charter renewal in 2027, it will have to face up to its faults and make some radical changes without giving ground to some of the more specious claims of its opponents.” – London Review of Books

The executive success factors that lead directly to jail FT
 

Parliament House steps back in time: Dr Cope ... - Media Dragon

The history and futures of work since the 50s

Quite interesting and well designed retrospective on the History of Work  at Atlassian, looking at every decade starting in the 50s; what office work looked like, technological innovations, and how the future of work was imagined during each decade.

In a 1964 interview with the BBC, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke nailed almost all of his predictions for the year 2014. He predicted the use of wireless communications, making us “in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be,” as well as robotic surgery, only missing his prediction that workers would no longer commute to their offices and travel “only for pleasure.”

When office work and life-long hopes of employment started losing some of it’s potential and appeal:

Employees increasingly had doubts about the value of long-term company loyalty and started putting their own needs and interests above their employers’. “Office Space” debuted in 1999 and humorously brought this idea to life, satirizing the banal, everyday work of office denizens and their incompetent, overbearing bosses.

Kim Douglas, director of Thomas Jefferson University’s landscape architecture program in Philadelphia, and her colleague Drew Harris, a professor of public health at Jefferson, put together the “park in a truck” program. There are approximately 40,000 vacant lots in the city, the projects wants to make the process of turning these lots into parks much simpler and quicker.

“The Park in a Truck idea is simple: Give local residents the resources and training to design, build and maintain parks on unused land in their own neighbourhoods, they decide whether it’s a place to grow vegetables, a setting to show off local art and culture, a space for child play, or simply a green place for rest and relaxation.”

By building on top of the ground, with no fencing, footings, or foundations, the process doesn’t require permits or special licenses. Once residents have agreed on what kind of park they want to build, a truck drops off the “kit” of components, like simply constructed benches, tables, plant beds and red gravel walkways, and they can get to work, building with their neighbours.

“It’s easy, sort of preassembled … you look at the options, you say ‘I’ll have an Art Park,’ you get a box, and you bring it to the site,” explains Douglas. “[We] provide what I call ‘puzzle pieces,’ these interchangeable park components that people can mix and match and organize.”

Here’s a radical reform that could keep super and pay every retiree the full pensionThe Conversation

Stunning Earth photography by Russian Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin who also happens to have spend 672 days in space. 

  In intellectual history of culinary philosophies and a sketch of a food ethos for today — “there was never a golden age”, says Rachel Laudan

US charges four Chinese military hackers in 2017 Equifax breach

The hackers spent weeks in the Equifax system, breaking into computer networks, stealing company secrets and personal data, Attorney General William Barr said.