Friday, May 15, 2020

Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life: The Stoics

In my first statistics course in my Economics major, the professors first comment on day one was, "Statistics lie and liars quote statistics." Everything has an inherent bias

Ground truth data is data sourced from outside the model which can be used to feed or verify it.
~Deepblog.com


Deep-speare is a computer that composes poetry. But an original sonnet isn’t necessarily a good sonnet robot  tobor
 

China-born researcher accused of ties to spying

The FBI alleged Qing Wang was a participant in the Thousand Talents program, a scheme the US says is created by China to access foreign technology or data.


My second knee cousin and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is back on track to become world's first trillionaire

Three years ago, Jeff Bezos was struggling to retain his title as the world's richest man, but booming demand for Amazon's services during COVID-19 has sent his wealth skyrocketing.

 
Ryan Patrick Hanley, Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life.  Smith as a practical moral philosopher, this short volume pulls out the side of Smith closest to Montaigne and the Stoics.  You can ponder Smithian sentences such as “The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another.”

Emtrain’s Workplace Culture Report 2020 identifies the root causes of workplace culture failures. The Workplace Culture Diagnostic employs millions of data points to establish a threshold for unhealthy workplace norms. Companies can benchmark their own organizational health against other companies across the country…


Self – “As anxiety around coronavirus increases, more scammers are taking advantage. While scams can happen any time, many companies are now preying on people’s fear about contracting COVID-19 and the financial uncertainty due to job and income loss caused by the virus, among others. Here’s what you need to know to help protect yourself from scams related to the Coronavirus. In this article:




*The WEIRDest People in the World*

That is the new 655 pp. book by Joseph Henrich, due out September 8, and yes it is “an event.”  The subtitle is “How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous,” and that is indeed one of the very most important questions in all of social science.
“WEIRD” of course refers to “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.”  And is it not weird that we (some of us, at least) are WEIRD?

Spiky 'coronavirus hairdo' makes comeback in Kenya

The coronavirus has revived a hairstyle in East Africa, one with braided spikes that echo the virus' distinctive shape

Photos from Belarus, interesting in their own right but all the more so now.

More comments on the models

Hidden Over 2 Years: Dem Cyber-Firm's Sworn Testimony It Had No Proof of Russian Hack of DNC | RealClearInvestigations.

The disclosure that CrowdStrike found no evidence that alleged Russian hackers exfiltrated any data from the DNC server raises critical questions. If CrowdStrike has no evidence that alleged Russian hackers actually removed the emails from the server, on what basis did it accuse them of stealing the emails? Further, if CrowdStrike had no evidence of exfiltration, why did U.S. intelligence officials rely or claim to rely on its forensics? 

Why We’re Still Crazy Over Old Rock Musicians


“There are many reasons why musicians continue to make music, both live and in the studio, right up until the end. In some cases it is out of financial necessity, and in other instances it is because of an addiction to the adrenaline rush of mass adulation, an experience rather harder to reproduce in the lavish surroundings of an exclusive retirement community. Even as we might good-naturedly mock and wince at what we see as the more absurd aspects of their careers, there is an enormous affection that exists between audience and act, especially if their fans have grown up with their favourites.” – The Critic