'’None shall sleep' - 'Nessun dorma'

Facing mortality … From a boys’ wild weekend to fortysomething crisis … male fragility falls under the spotlight in a novel of two halves

Late in the day, O’Hagan implies, it’s easier to see the banter for what it is: a gallant attempt at processing the fact that being human is “an unstable condition that ends badly for all”. This funny and plangent book is shot through with an aching awareness that though our individual existence is a “litany of small tragedies”, these tragedies are life-sized to us. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist working now who writes about both youth and middle age with such sympathy, and without condescending to either.

Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan review – a bittersweet tale of friendship

Ted: How Platform Co-Ops Democratize Work | Trebor Scholz

Taliban beheaded female volleyball player, posted photos online, coach says.

“I don’t like bullies,” Eggers wrote in an email. “Amazon has been kicking sand in the face of independent bookstores for decades now.”

F***  Everything, We’re Doing 32 Book Covers

Senior DPS officials made a mandatory training video for staff responding to 'serious incidents' after Brittany Higgins' alleged sexual assault in Parliament. They approved the vid without watching it, without knowing how long it is (13 mins btw) or when staff must watch it by

While Parliament creating a ‘serious incidents protocol’ is a positive step, it’s really difficult to see how flippantly they continue to regard their duty of care to staff. (1/3)

Surgeons transplanted a pig kidney into a person, and it worked like normal

 Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 24, 2021 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Investigating Cybercrime and the Dark Web; Warranty Repairs and Non-Removable Storage Risks; Can Facebook’s Smart Glasses Be Smart about Security and Privacy?; and Study – How Facebook News Feed Works.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Brew: Everything You Need to Know to Brew Great Beer Every Time. #CommissionEarned

MICROBIOME NEWS:  Gut Bacteria Change as You Get Older—and May Accelerate Aging: Microbe types in older people’s intestines are different and are linked to disease.

Ian Bogost in The Atlantic: People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much. “A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. Maybe her statement would be recorded, but there were few mechanisms for it to be amplified and spread around the world, far beyond its original context … It’s long past time to question a fundamental premise of online life: What if people shouldn’t be able to say so much, and to so many, so often?”…

Employee burnout climbed 100% during the pandemic - TechRepublic: “The percentage of reviews on Glassdoor mentioning burnout jumped 100% during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the proportion of employees who mentioned mental health increased 143%, the job site said in a newly-released report on work-life balance in the U.S. The rise in the discussion of mental health is stark, the job site said. “Soon after the start of COVID-19 in the U.S., a spike in mental health discussion appeared in Glassdoor reviews, followed by a steady increase throughout 2021.” The transition to working from home for the last 18 or so months was meant to be temporary, but now “some companies are taking meaningful steps by introducing permanent flexible or work from home policies, allowing employees to have more autonomy over their own schedule,” the report said. Companies are also encouraging employees to use more paid time off during the pandemic, the report said…”

The Collective Intelligence of Remote Teams - MIT Sloan Management Review – “Over the past decade, our research team has extensively studied group collaboration in both face-to-face and remote settings. Our findings suggest that this decision of where coworkers are located is not as critical as some assume. It’s not where we work that matters the most; it’s how the work is done and who is doing it. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we analyzed the results from more than 5,000 participants in over 1,300 groups across 22 different samples and found that groups working remotely can be as effective as groups working face to face. More specifically, we measured the collective intelligence of groups — their ability to work together effectively on a wide range of tasks — and found very little difference in the factors that explain collective intelligence of the face-to-face and remote teams. We did find that the process of how the work was done and who was doing the work were significant predictors of collective intelligence in both cases. For instance, the largest predictor of collective intelligence is a group’s collaboration process. More specifically, two aspects of how groups coordinate their efforts are important: first, that they figure out which member is the best at different tasks and have that person take the lead on it; and, second, that members coordinate their efforts so that they cover all of the different tasks and don’t leave things unfinished. Our analyses show that coordinating members’ skills and covering all of the tasks are just as important for remote teams as they are for face-to-face teams, and collectively intelligent teams are able to coordinate in these ways regardless of where they are working…”

Decision-Making under Uncertainty

Federal emergency brakes, debt brakes and other methods of constitutional speed control.

A well-functioning constitutional democracy can be recognized by the fact that you can lose in it. You can lose lawsuits. You can lose votes. If you do, you don't have to start a riot about it. You don't need to, because you are protected by human and minority rights. You mustn't do so, because the institutional and procedural framework within which the defeat is inflicted on you is itself generally accepted as fair. You lost, sure, but that's alright. Where this is the expectable reaction to defeats of judicial or political nature, there it's safe to say that constitutional democracy is alright.