In 1949 Albert Einstein said this. 'There will come a time when the #rich own all the #media & it will be impossible for the public to make an informed opinion.' How right he was. Vital that

@AlboMP must immediately invest heavily in expansion of scope & quality of ABC & SBS

Crowds became "trapped" while trying to get home from a drone show at Vivid Sydney.

 I can't remember the last time I felt it necessary to close comments on a post because I felt that they had ceased to be useful, but I've now done so on the post that I have made on education, and why I think it is failing so badly.

My primary reason for doing this is because after 115 comments on just one of these two posts I felt that nothing further was being added by any additional commentary. That does, therefore, seem like a good moment to close discussion

The New York Times is gushing over Rupert Murdoch's choice of sneakers at his fifth wedding. Yes, the same Rupert Murdoch who has done more than any living person to eradicate democracy and replace it with white Christian authoritarianism. But hey, let's talk about his footwear instead!

Guy Trebay's article breathlessly details Murdoch's nuptials to Elena Zhukova, a retired molecular biologist. The scandalous news? Murdoch's decision to pair his suit with sneakers. As Trebay puts it, "critics predictably carped about how the requisite footwear with a formal suit is a hard-soled leather shoe."

Has the London Stock Exchange heard of business ethics?

Newspapers are excitedly noting this morning that the Chinese managed online fashion groupShein is expected to file a prospectus for a London Stock Exchange listing very soon.

I am not excited.

Shein sells very large quantities of clothing that it knows are unlikely to be worn more than a few times, at most. They are intended to arrive in a waste tip sometime very soon after their original purchase.

Garments that are returned to them are apparently routinely binned and not recycled.

This is a company that has set out to abuse the planet.

There are also questions about its tax affairs. It seems to undertake a lot of activity in feeeports. ..

Misinformation works and a handful of social ‘supersharers’ sent 80% of it in 2020

TechCrunch: “A pair of studies published Thursday in the journal Science offers evidence not only that misinformation on social media changes minds, but that a small group of committed “supersharers,” predominately older Republican women, were responsible for the vast majority of the “fake news” in the period looked at. 

The studies, by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were independently conducted but complement each other well. In the MIT study led by Jennifer Allen, the researchers point out that misinformation has often been blamed for vaccine hesitancy in 2020 and beyond, but that the phenomenon remains poorly documented. And understandably so: Not only is data from the social media world immense and complex, but the companies involved are reticent to take part in studies that may paint them as the primary vector for misinformation and other data warfare. Few doubt that they are, but that is not the same as scientific verification. 

The study first shows that exposure to vaccine misinformation (in 2021 and 2022, when the researchers collected their data), particularly anything that claims a negative health effect, does indeed reduce people’s intent to get a vaccine. (And intent, previous studies show, correlates with actual vaccination.) Second, the study showed that articles flagged by moderators at the time as misinformation had a greater effect on vaccine hesitancy than non-flagged content — so, well done flagging. Except for the fact that the volume of unflagged misinformation was vastly, vastly greater than the flagged stuff. So even though it had a lesser effect per piece, its overall influence was likely far greater in aggregate. 

This kind of misinformation, they clarified, was more like big news outlets posting misleading info that wrongly characterized risks or studies. For example, who remembers the headline “A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID vaccine; CDC is investigating why” from the Chicago Tribune? As commentators from the journal point out, there was no evidence the vaccine had anything to do with his death. 

Yet despite being seriously misleading, it was not flagged as misinformation, and subsequently the headline was viewed some 55 million times — six times as many people as the number who saw all flagged materials total…”

• Ransomware in the Digital Age: Multidisciplinary Legal Strategies for Minimizing Cryptocurrency Ransom Payments –  Jawad Ramal explains how using cryptocurrencies to facilitate ransom payments offers complex challenges due to their high transaction costs and regulatory ambiguities that complicate compliance efforts.
• Dissecting The Processes of Law Firm Strategic Planning – Patrick J. McKenna and Michael B. Rynowecercanvassed and received detailed feedback from firm leaders, all from firms of over 100 lawyers in size, on their specific approach to strategic planning and their responses to 16 sequential questions covering everything from who was involved in developing their current strategic plan and how long it took, to how satisfied they were and the one thing they would change with respect to their efforts going into the future.
• AI in Banking and Finance, May 31, 2024 – Seven highlights from this post: Banks could lose $40 billion from fraud with the help of AI, Deloitte predicts; Mastercard’s AI system is helping banks keep fraudsters in check — and it could save millions of dollars; Measuring Development 2024: AI, the Next Generation; Gita Gopinath: Crisis Amplifier? How to Prevent AI from Worsening the Next Economic Downturn; JPMorgan is making a big bet on AI. Here’s how its private bankers are using it; Will banking’s increasing turn toward AI level the playing field or widen the gap between big and small banks?; and Artificial intelligence (AI) act: EU Council gives final green light to the first worldwide rules on AI.
• Evaluating Generative AI for Legal Research: A Benchmarking Project – Rebecca Fordon, Sean Harringtonand Christine Park plan to propose a typology of legal research tasks based on existing computer and information science scholarship and draft corresponding questions using the typology, with rubrics others can use to score the tools they use.
• The Federal Reserve Banks’ New Transparency and Accountability Policy –  On December 21, 2023, the Federal Reserve Banks each announced the adoption of a uniform Transparency and Accountability Policy (TAP). The Banks have begun responding to public records requests under that policy. Following implementation of the new policy, Michael Ravnitzky initiated several records requests directed at individual Fed Banks, utilizing the provisions of the TAP. His extensively documented evaluation of the new process is that TAP is a good start but it has some shortcomings.
• A Chat With Legal Rebel Richard Granat – Jerry Lawson had a conversation with Richard Granat, a lawyer, frequent speaker on legal technology, blogger, and consultant. His professional work has earned many awards, including the ABA’s Legal Rebel Award, the ABA’s Louis M. Brown Lifetime Achievement Award, and the ABA’s James I. Keane Memorial Award. He has long been a leader in using technology to improve access to legal services.
• How to tell if a conspiracy theory is probably false – Conspiracy theories abound. What should you believe − and how can you tell? H. Colleen Sinclair, a social psychologist who studies misleading narratives, identifies seven step you can take to vet a claim you’ve seen or heard.
• AI in Banking and Finance, May 15, 2024 – Four highlights from this post: Artificial Intelligence and the Skill Premium; Rising Cyber Threats Pose Serious Concerns for Financial Stability; The Future Of Banking: Morgan Stanley And The Rise Of AI-Driven Financial Advice; and The Pitfalls of Mixing Up AI and Automation in Finance.
• What Happens When Your Art is Used to Train AI – A conversation with web cartoonist Dorothy Gambrell on the curdled internet, labor, and how we became just numbers.
• As climate change amplifies urban flooding, here’s how communities can become ‘sponge cities’ – Dr. Franco Montalto is a water resources engineer who studies and designs strategies for sustainably managing urban stormwater. In response to recent flooding episodes, some U.S. cities are beginning to take steps toward incorporation of sponge city concepts into their stormwater management plans, but most of these projects are still pilots. If this concept is to evolve into the new standard for urban design, city officials and developers will need to find ways to scale up and accelerate this work.
• If using LinkedIn makes you feel like an imposter at work, here’s how to cope – Dr. Sebastian Oliveracknowledges when it comes to professional social media, LinkedIn, with its billion-plus members, stands unrivaled. The platform for career updates, networking and job searches has effectively become a requirement in the professional world. It can be a great tool to help you progress in your career. But, as Oliver describes, just like other social media, using LinkedIn can lead to feelings of envy, comparison and self-doubt.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues – 4 new columns for May 2024