Pages

Tuesday, October 06, 2020

James Packer: The Third Generation - 7 Powerful Search Engines for Social Networks

 

James Packer admits threatening businessman over privatisation deal

Billionaire James Packer has admitted to threatening a businessman over a deal in 2015, but says he was mentally ill at the time.


Billionaire James Packer sweats as he admits he's unwell and that strong medication is affecting his memory as he fronts Crown casino inquiry on Zoom from his $200M luxury yacht



7 Powerful Search Engines for Social Networks - Make Use Of: “Are you looking for a long-lost friend or an ex-colleague? Perhaps you’re trying to catch up with the weirdest trends on social media? If so, you’ll need a way to search social networks. There have been some awfully weird trends on social media. How many of these do you remember? How many have you taken part in? Of course, most social networks have their own search engines built in, but they’re fundamentally limited by the fact they can only search their own database. And how you are supposed to know whether Aunt Mary is on Facebook, Twitter, or one of the other myriad options? The solution? Use a network-agnostic social search engine. They can search all of the most common networks, as well as lots of the niche, smaller ones…”



The New York Times – “The singer’s concert recordings have always had a power that her studio outings could only imply. “Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes,” a newly unearthed 1962 performance, magnifies her legacy…You could say that Fitzgerald was to singing what Yo-Yo Ma is to the cello: utter perfection, personified. Fitzgerald thinks of the note, she hits the note. She learns the song, she becomes the song. Still, there’s a sacred exchange going on. Rather than beckoning you in, Fitzgerald is bringing the music to you. And the effect is undeniable — you’re disarmed. It makes sense, then, that Fitzgerald’s live recordings have always had a special power that her studio outings could only imply. As her biographer Stuart Nicholson put it, the best ones “reveal the real Ella, bringing pleasure to others by bringing pleasure to herself.” 

Of those live albums, few made a longer-lasting impression than “Mack the Knife: Ella in Berlin,” from 1960, widely considered one of her greatest captures. And this week, the pleasure grows: On Friday the Verve Label Group will release “Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes,” documenting a concert that she gave there two years after her famed first appearance. Taken together with “Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things,” an informative documentary released on digital platforms earlier this month, it’s a worthy invitation to engage anew with a singer whose constant improvisations — equal parts precision and profusion — are all too easy to take for granted…”


We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make - Scientific American – “In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice. But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from some experiences than others. A few of these biases may already sound familiar: A positivity bias causes us to weigh rewards more heavily than punishments. And a confirmation bias makes us take to heart outcomes that confirm what we thought was true to begin with but discount those that show we were wrong. A new study, Information about action outcomes differentially affects learning from self-determined versus imposed choices, however, peels away these biases to find a role for choice at their core. A bias related to the choices we make explains all the others, says Stefano Palminteri of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), who conducted [the] study published in Nature Human Behaviourin August that examines this tendency. “In a sense we have been perfecting our understanding of this bias,” he says…”



Rights in a time of pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has emphasised the civic split between those who accept that exceptional times demand exceptional measures and those who believe that nothing should trump individual rights. Bioethics should make clear whose argument should dominate, but the customs and beliefs of our pluralist time mean that ethical reasoning lacks authority.

Continue reading