Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Getting the Restart Right: How to Lead When Nobody Has a Map



Asteroid set to pass within 6.3m km of Earth, and will get even closer in 2079

Classed as a potentially hazardous object, an asteroid about 2 kilometres in size will pass Earth tonight, 6.3 million kilometres away from the planet.

 TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE USED TO THAT AT THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC News reporter appears on Good Morning America without pants. “It wasn’t immediately apparent that Reeve, who was clad in a blazer and button-down shirt while broadcasting from his home, wasn’t wearing pants. Yet towards the end of his segment about pharmacies using drones to deliver prescriptions to patients, Reeve shifted his bare leg into camera-view. Viewers flooded social media with messages to Reeve, the son of late actor Christopher Reeve, with many commenting about how relatable his faux pas was. ‘I have ARRIVED,’ Reevetweeted. ‘In the most hilariously mortifying way possible.’”

Kathryn Campbell on DSS’s pandemic response and why she’s proud to be a public servant
THE TIRELESS PEOPLE: On the department’s work throughout the bushfires and pandemic, and what public servants should be considering.

If Ever The BBC Proved Its Worth, It’s Now


Nick Hornby: “Before all this started, the BBC was under assault, apparently because of its independence. It was, is, being threatened with all sorts, including the loss of its lifeblood licence fee. The BBC, one of our crowning achievements as a nation! I will not waste space here listing what it has given us, the comedy and the drama and the sport, some of the things that have helped to define who we are now . You know that already, even if you’re the dimmest Tory MP in Parliament. But right now, the BBC is helping me to live through and understand a crisis.” –Penguin

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Explosive Revelations in the Flynn Case: New documents suggest that Flynn ‘was set up by corrupt agents’ who threatened Flynn’s son and made a secret deal with Flynn’s attorneys.

FCC Commissioner Wants To Know About 1000’s Of Phone Record Pages Received Via Schiff’s Secret Subpoenas. “FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has been looking for answers as to why Rep. Adam Shifty Schiff was behaving like his own personal FISA court in subpoenaing US Citizen’s phone deets. And Shiff is ghosting him.”


Taking the next steps - Jeremy Geale
Jeremy recently provided an update on all the support that the ATO is currently providing to assist Australians through COVID-19. 
 


Captain ClassAfter a sprint of crisis management, the real leadership test is what comes next. Returning to the familiar would be a mistake.

For business leaders, the coronavirus pandemic has been a baptism in crisis management; an exercise in making gut-wrenching choices, staying calm, projecting confidence and providing comfort.

Deep down, however, we all know that the real leadership test is yet to come.

In addition to the staggering human toll, this crisis has upended everything we thought we knew about finance and the global economy and exposed glaring operational weaknesses across business. Early predictions of a “V” shaped recovery have softened to a “U,” or possibly an “L” if we’re not careful.

When the Great Restart begins, many leaders will fall back on an idea once espoused by Machiavelli, who wrote: “The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities.” They will try to reduce the anxiety in the air by restoring familiar routines, procedures and traditions. The problem is that business, as we knew it, cannot be recovered. It will need to be reinvented. ...

In the wake of the pandemic everyone, including leaders, will have work through grief and trauma without letting it affect their performance. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, once wrote that the most difficult skill he had to learn as a chief executive “was the ability to manage my own psychology.” ...

In his 2001 book “Good to Great,” Jim Collins found that most executives who led super-growth companies were ... quiet, reserved and self-effacing. They possessed “indomitable will” but directed their ambition toward the organization and its goals, rather than themselves.

The lesson seems to be this: In moments of radical uncertainty, nobody cares about your God-given eloquence and magnetism. Your leadership is a function of how you behave. And behavior can be modified. ...
[Hubert Joly, CEO of Best Buy] likened his strategy to riding a bike for the first time. You don’t want to go too fast, but it’s a lot easier to make course corrections once you’re moving.
Pandemic or no pandemic, most business leaders are wired to take action. They assume that dramatic challenges demand equally dramatic remedies.
A better approach may be to think ambitiously but advance patiently. ...

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Here are some harmful COVID-19 hoaxes


Misinformation During a Pandemic (April 19, 2020). University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper No. 2020-44. “We study the effects of news coverage of the novel coronavirus by the two most widely-viewed cable news shows in the United States – Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight, both on Fox News – on viewers’ behavior and downstream health outcomes


From director Robert Bingaman, a video interpretation of a timely passage from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasionswhich was written by Donne in 1623 while recovering from a serious illness. The passage is from Meditation XVII and is paired in the video with images of businesses and public places emptied out by the pandemic.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.


In early March, Dr. Caroline Schulman was responsible for calling patients at her hospital to tell them they had tested positive for Covid-19. She shared some of her experiences in a piece for Stat.
Erik lives with his entire family in a one-room rental house with eight other occupants. He didn’t understand the precautions for preventing the spread of Covid-19 and had regularly been socializing in the apartment. He kept asking how to file for unemployment and how to isolate the household when the house itself could barely hold those living in it.

Just the facts

The fact-checking team of The Washington Post has a new book coming out on June 2 called “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies.” Published by Scribner, it was compiled by Post fact-checkers Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly.
According to the Post, Trump spoke or tweeted 16,241 false or misleading statements during his first three years as president. That’s an average of a remarkable 15 misleading claims per day.
 

Here are some harmful COVID-19 hoaxes 

Desperate for protection against COVID-19, some people are acting on dangerous misinformation they've found online. Fact-checkers need help sharing the articles that debunk the most life-threatening hoaxes. And all authorities should get involved too. 
In Tunisia and other Arabic-speaking countries, and in North Macedonia and Greece, the dangerous idea of gargling with Betadine — a topical antiseptic — to avoid COVID-19 has gone viral. Fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked this information and warned that it can harm the mouth, tongue, lips and throat.
On March 14, worried about the spread of the new virus in India, a group of 200 Hindus gathered in Delhi for a cow urine drinking party. Yes — you read that right. 
For religious reasons (and following viral posts), the group met to share Gomutra (cow urine). They believed it could prevent or cure the new coronavirus, ignoring fact-checks published in India and messages from health authorities. There is no evidence that cow urine has anti-viral properties and, even though it is primarily water, it can contain harmful substances if the animal was exposed to chemical residues.
Arbidol, a Soviet-era drug, is the third in this list of popular and dangerous hoaxes because its users have a false sense of security. Politicians and digital influencers in Italy helped spread this Russian anti-flu drug found in pharmacies as a prevention or miracle cure for COVID-19. Arbidol, however, has not been approved for use in Europe or in the United States. In 2007, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences found this substance to be “obsolete with unproven effectiveness.”
How about pure alcohol? Yes. People are drinking that too, believing it could prevent COVID-19. According to the Iranian Tasnim News Agency, at least 2,197 people have been poisoned by alcohol across Iran since February, when the first cases of coronavirus was reported there. A total of 244 people had already died from this.
And what has been the goal for fact-checkers in a situation where hoaxes can be immediately dangerous or falsely reassure people? The fact-checking community should (and is) prioritizing the questions that seem most dangerous and sharing their conclusions about them as quickly as possible. 
Some fact-checking organizations, however, receive more than 2,000 queries per day from readers hungry for accurate information. Counting only on fact-checkers is risky. Authorities, celebrities and media can and should use their influence to share fact-checks about life-threatening hoaxes.
– Cristina Tardáguila, IFCN

. . . technology

  • Three far-right, pro-gun activists are behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests around the country, The Washington Post reported. 
    • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told ABC News in an interview this week that the platform is classifying as “harmful misinformation” some posts from people organizing protests aimed at defying social distancing rules. "It's important that people can debate policy, so there's a line on this,” he told George Stephanopoulos. 
    • Zuckerberg’s comments prompted a tweet from Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee and a critic of tech companies, who said “we are closely watching.”

. . . politics

·         The U.S. State Department is worried about a barrage of new coronavirus disinformation aimed at America from the Russian, Chinese and Iranian governments. Politico reported Tuesday that the U.S sees the three governments pushing "a host of matching messages, including that the novel coronavirus is an American bioweapon." The New York Times did a similar piece on Wednesday.
·         Russian nationals in Italy are offering Italians money to film themselves thanking Russia and President Vladimir Putin for recent coronavirus aid, Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper reported Sunday. The Russian embassy said it was unaware of the effort.

. . . science and health

·         After members of the ruling party in India blamed Muslims for spreading the new coronavirus, The Telegraph reported on Monday that two newborn babies died in the country after hospitals refused to admit their Muslim mothers. It’s another indication of rising Islamophobia in India.
·         LNP’s Mike Wereschagin has a good piece out of Pittsburgh exploring how COVID-19 is feeding conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. “The pandemic exacerbates the problem, but its tendrils reach into nearly every major public policy issue of the day,” he wrote.
AFP found a video shared thousands of times on several social media platforms purporting to show hundreds of Nigerians scrambling for food as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Among those who shared it was a Nigerian senator who called on the government to do something because “Nigerians are hungry.”
It’s true that the coronavirus-related lockdown in Nigeria has cut people off from their only source of income, AFP said, and local authorities are providing relief packages to help.
But the widely shared video was old. It was recorded more than a year ago in Lagos as a political party distributed rice to woo voters ahead of the 2019 gubernatorial election, AFP said. To figure that out, the fact-checkers used reverse image searches that led them to the earlier footage.
What we liked: Context is everything. AFP’s fact-check included its own video of a coronavirus food distribution event in Nigeria It showed that people were not social-distancing, and were eager to get the food, but in a more orderly fashion than the people in the video from a year earlier.
— Susan Benkelman, API 
1.     The International Fact-Checking Network carried out a six-month review and has just updated its Code of Principles. After two months, the IFCN is again accepting applications.  
2.     The New York Times reported on what it called “an explosion of conspiracy theories” surrounding coronavirus and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. 
3.     How is the pandemic enabling surveillance around the world? Roskomsvoboda, the Russian internet freedom advocacy organization, has created a portal to follow up.
4.     Media Matters reported that an April 16 YouTube video suggesting the novel coronavirus is a “false flag” to force “mandatory vaccines” has racked up millions of views.
5.     Bellingcat’s Aric Toler had some qualms with that recent New York Times article on Russian disinformation. Foreign Policy weighed in, too.
6.     More than 300 people have been arrested in 40 countries for spreading COVID-19 falsehoods, reported IFCN’s Harrison Mantas.
7.     The Washington Post announced that Scribner will publish a book that compiles work from the Post’s Fact Checker team cataloguing President Donald Trump's false and misleading claims. 

via  Cristina and Susan 
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