Thursday, June 25, 2020

Thumbs Up

“A pair of brothers can’t see eye to eye. Both are suffering losses… In this uplifting story both eventually come to see that the holes in our lives are not just absences; they are shaped by the presences around us. Four Stars.” — Kristie Miller (Sydney) reviews philosophical works as if they were movies. Two thumbs up!


Federal Reserve announces FraudClassifier Model to help organizations classify fraud involving payments - Federal Reserve Board: “The Federal Reserve today published the FraudClassifier model—a set of tools and materials to help provide a consistent way to classify and better understand the magnitude of fraudulent activity and how it occurs across the payments industry. The model was developed by the Fraud Definitions Work Group, which was comprised of Federal Reserve and payments industry fraud experts. “The FraudClassifier model can help address the industrywide challenge of inconsistent classifications for fraud involving ACH, wire, or check payments,” said Jim Cunha, secure payments strategy leader and senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “The FraudClassifier model enables payments stakeholders to classify fraud in a simple and similar manner. It can be applied across an organization to help ensure greater internal consistency in fraud classification, more robust information and better fraud tracking.” The key advantage of the FraudClassifier model is the ability for organizations to use it to classify fraud independently of payment type, payment channel or other payment characteristics. The model presents a series of questions, beginning with who initiated the payment to differentiate payments initiated by authorized or unauthorized parties. Each of the classifications is supported by definitions that allow for consistent application of the FraudClassifier model across the industry. The Fraud Definitions Work Group also developed and recommended an industry adoption roadmap, which outlines a strategy and potential steps to encourage voluntary industrywide use of the FraudClassifier model.

  • Learn more—and sign up to access educational resources and support tools for the FraudClassifier model—by visiting FedPaymentsImprovement.org.”

The Dark Soul of the Sunshine State The Atlantic (Re Silc).

Nation’s Politicians, Law Enforcement, Corporate Executives Marvel At Futuristic Utopia They’re Living In The Onion


2019 Report to the President – Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), June 2020: “…Our Government’s ability to protect and share Classified National Security Information and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) continues to present serious challenges to our national security. While dozens of agencies now use various advanced technologies to accomplish their missions, a majority of them still rely on antiquated information security management practices


  1. For whatever reason, director Shane Carruth can't get a movie made in Hollywood, so he's posting online the scripts, unfinished music, and concept trailers for his two unrealized projects, A Topiary and The Modern Ocean.


Just because a growing number of Terminators have ignored their AI programming and begun slaughtering humans left and right doesn't mean we should take the dangerous and radical step of defunding the Terminator program."


When it reopens next week, Barcelona's Liceu opera house will play to an audience of over 2000 plants. (Humans will have to watch on YouTube.)

A Conservative Reckoning In Book Publishing?

Publishing such authors was once uncontroversial. The conservative publishing industrial complex has been a mainstay ever since Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind topped the bestseller lists. Free speech has always been a slippery concept in book publishing. At times it is presented as a badge of honor—we stand by Salman Rushdie!—but mostly, it is an excuse to publish something that is profitable but otherwise valueless. Beleaguered publishers have understandably cast themselves as slaves to the marketplace: They publish whatever it is people want to buy. – The New Republic


Is Schopenhauer the philosopher for our times? — well, at least The New York Times — with remarks from Agnes Callard, Tamsin Shaw, and others


Two former philosophy students make up half the team running “The Invisible College” — it’s a science and technology scholarship program aimed at people who haven’t graduate from college (via MR)


How should professors supervise/guide their teaching assistants? — a discussion at The Philosophers’ Cocoon


“When does playing with ideas become intellectual work?” — Anil Gomes (Oxford) on boredom, isolation, children, and philosophy