Monday, October 26, 2015

Father in Law the Physics Guru

INK BOTTLE“The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.”
~ Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

Why Is Physics Beautiful? Project Syndicate. Because it is too daunting for economists to mess it up.

Andrej Imrich


Even if you have all the facts, you may not convince others to agree with your argument. It’s frustrating, but according to Rob Yeung, a chartered psychologist and author of the recently published book How to Stand Out, it happens more than we would like. It turns out that the most effective strategy may be to use emotion, not logic, to make your case Keep losing arguments? A psychologist explains why emotions are more persuasive than logic 

The public sector failed to innovate the taxi industry, but there are other opportunities Why Didn’t Government Invent Uber?

“We can’t trust the corporations, we can’t trust our governments and we certainly cannot trust the spy agencies to respect our privacy and respect the law"  Digital Dissidents

In Law Builder of Bridges ...


Lexington Institute, 8/10/15. A noted U.S. defense expert, Frank Hoffman wrote recently about U.S. military strategy and how to deal with both Black Swans and Pink Flamingoes. The former he defines in a manner similar to Taleb. The new concept, the Pink Flamingo, refers to “a predictable event that is ignored due to cognitive biases of a senior leader or a group of leaders trapped by powerful institutional forces On Vladimir Putin, Black Swans And Pink Flamingoes


Dhillon's Star Wars the force awakens new trailer six things we learned


cranky lion cub links
   
Metal-as-Hell Crazy Man Uses Van Full of Ammo to Put Out a Garbage Fire Gawker 



An awesome new technique is giving doctors an unprecedented look at cancerBusiness Insider 

A Speaker, A Speaker, Their Kingdom for a Speaker. TaxVox headline roundup covers the House Speaker situation, Hockey free agents, and the upcoming Democratic candidate debate.

Michael Seidenberg’s approach to business is mostly as a transaction between bibliophiles. Some books he will only sell if he detects true enthusiasm from the buyer. “I’m a slow bookseller,” said Seidenberg. “I have a huge relationship to my stock.” The Guardian 


Sunday, October 25, 2015

Doubles: Tales of Two Men Down Under

INK BOTTLE“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
~ Albert Einstein (freely rendered by Arthur Koestler inThe Yogi and the Commissar)

Police are describing two of Australia's most wanted men, Mark and Gino Stocco, as The modern day bushrangers

The 58-year-old father and his 38-year-old son, who have spent eight years on the run from police, are believed to be on the move again after allegedly stealing a four-wheel-drive from a small southern NSW town Two Fugitive Stoccos

A white Toyota Landcruiser stolen by on-the-run father and son Gino and Mark Stocco is thought to have been spotted at a service station on the Hume Highway in southern NSW Double Fugitives
a7366-Lana-upbeat-14oct15 links

Every time you log in to Facebook, every time you click on your News Feed, every time you Like a photo, every time you send anything via Messenger, you add another data point to the galaxy they already have regarding you and your behavior. That, in turn, is a tiny, insignificant dot within their vast universe of information about their billion-plus users Book of Faces and Memory

The lonely childhood of Malcolm Turnbull


Dark Side of Digital Realities ...

If nothing else, the spelling of the title should tip you off that this is a thoroughly English movie franchise. Bond is back and Daniel Craig is back in a terrifically exciting, spectacular, almost operatically delirious 007 adventure – endorsing intelligence work as old-fashioned derring-do and incidentally taking a stoutly pro-Snowden line against the creepy voyeur surveillance that undermines the rights of a free individual. It’s pure action mayhem with a real sense of style 007 pro-snowden

The seductive lure of activity and health wearables make it easy to forget, or ignore, the inherent security and privacy risks involved The dark side of wearables: How they're secretly jeopardizing your security and privacy

Finally, we can all sleep well at night ...
Asio Crime Commission granted access to photographs of NSW citizens to aid terrorism fight

USB Killer 2.0: A harmless-looking USB stick that destroys computers Help Net Security: “Soft Malware has been around for a long time. Meet the new guy, Hard Malware.”

A London-based startup, Mana, has launched an app called Thoughts Around Me which allows users to post whatever thoughts they like, anonymously. And unlike Facebook or other social media sites, the app promises to not store any personal information on the user  Anonymity app: A safe place to be ourselves?
In related news, the average economic impact of cyber crime on Australian organisations increased from $4.2 million last year to $4.9 million this year, according to the Ponemon Institute’s 2015 Cost of Cyber Crime Study. Stolen credit and debit card data can be purchased for as little as $21 in Australia, according to a new report. The McAfee Labs report, The Hidden Data Economy, found that the average price for stolen credit and debit cards online ranged from A$21 up to $40. Bank login details for an account containing a balance of $2,200 were on offer for $190.  This 'Fullzinfo' includes the victim’s billing address, PIN number, social security number, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and username/password Darknet. Darknet knows the price for every stolen card but the value of civilisation is not on their radar ... If people do not but there would not be black market ...How much is your stolen data worth on the dark web

It's hard to muster the strength to talk about Windows XP anymore. In March 2014 it still held 30 percent of operating system marketshare, and now it's down to 12 percent, which shows improvement but is still not zero. Don't forget, XP is 14 years old. Organizations have encountered challenges as they work to eliminate XP from their networks, and (suprising no one) a recent audit shows that the Internal Revenue Service is struggling.


Goanna guarding Bylong Valley from Nasty Koreans Sep 2015 AD

Earlier today, Uber released a new “Uber Partner app, designed to give drivers more information so Uber works better for them.” It also inadvertently gave anyone access to an untold number of sensitive scanned documents for almost 1,000 of these same drivers. Uber ID Breach

Uber may be cool but what's it like to be an Uber driver - chased by taxi-drivers, pestered for drugs by private schoolgirls and kicked by little kids. Still, there are advantages, as this driver and blogger tells us over lunch. Uber driver fears crackdown, puts his thoughts down on blog
 
No thanks: JPEG images may soon have copy protection engadget 

These days  A Pom can purchased a Canadian tank that I drove in Old Czechoslovak army for less than $20k ...
 
On Friday 9 October 2015 the SARS Enforcement division busted two suspects allegedly linked to an illicit gold industry syndicate in Nigel.
More arrests of suspected illicit gold industry syndicate members


Call it vigilanteware: Malware in a superhero cape. Instead of stealing your credit card or doing anything malicious at all, a highly virulent piece of malware, recently uncovered by security researchers at Symantec, actually defends your machine against hackers and even remedies other malware infections New vigilante malware protects your computer from the bad guys
 

Big Data Analytics: A Missed Opportunity for the DATA Act. “[T]he Department of the Treasury won’t be setting up an antifraud analytics platform.” Gee, that’s odd.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Leadership and Management: from words to deeds

It’s often said that the culture of an organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour that its leader is willing to tolerate ..
~ Where is Culture



The song When I Grow Up offers an bittersweet view of childhood dreams about adult freedoms (and responsibilities):
When I grow up
I will eat sweets every day
On the way to work
And I will go to bed late every night.
[Waltzing] Matilda the Musical 

It was an inspiring experience to hear man of the future, Alex Malley, of thenakedceo.com aka Naked CEO fame, speak about leadership ...  Alex is proud of his Greek heritage and uses his roots to boldly share number of touching stories about his parents, especially about his loving relation with his mum...

"The Naked CEO is about the pursuit of insight. It reminds us to look deeper, listen harder, reach further and not least of all, to have faith in ourselves. Alex is a true leader and a passionate educator, and everyone--from student to experienced CEO--can take something from the wisdom he shares in these pages."
--Chris Jordan, Commissioner of Taxation, Australian Taxation Office
[Alex's Impression of Chris Jordan]

What if we do nothing? Could this be the most important policy question? Is doing nothing a Nudge?

In episode 32 of InTransition, we are joined by Flip Prior, Twitter Australia’s Partnerships Manager – News & Government. In this episode we examine how government departments and politicians use Twitter to advance the conversation.  Why politicians love Twitter

What is stupid?: People’s conception of unintelligent behavior Science Direct 


Professionalism, which most of us were brought up to admire, implies compartmentalisation. It used to mean something good and noble; leaving petty emotions at home, taking your higher self to work, thinking beyond mere profit, doing good, committing to altruism. Now, it means almost the opposite You do not have a career you have a life

According to Peter Drucker, author of The Practice of Management,1 "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer." While there is some truth to that statement, creating customers or clients is always the easy part; the hard part is retaining those clients and making them ardent advocates to amplify their value to the firm. Amplifying client value does not only mean repeat business but also acquisition of new business for expansion of client base for a measurable impact on the firm's profits. This takes time, effort and a complete change of mindset not to mention investing in the right technological tools available.


INK BOTTLE“The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful then the truths of little men.”

~Friedrich Nietzsche, “Fragment of a Critique of Schopenhauer” (trans. Walter Kaufmann)
peacock_300
In a nutshell, Peacock stands for leadership ..

Harvard Business Review just published its annual ranking of “Best Performing CEOs in the World“. The noteworthy part, picked up by the Financial Times, is that last year’s numero uno, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, fell from his perch to number 87 based on Amazon’s poor social responsibility marks. The new “best CEO” is Lars Rebien Sorensen of Novo Nordisk, a biotech player best known for a diabetes drug. Harvard Business Review courteously confirms that former librarians like Jeff ( and Ronda's of this world ;-) are most predatory ... 

Bank’s severance deal requires IT workers to be on call for two years Computerworld “What leadership ..."

In the Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column TT wrote about surviving sound recordings of the speaking voices of men and women born in the nineteenth century. Here’s an excerpt. 

In 1931, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the oldest person ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, turned 90. By then the seemingly ageless judge was widely regarded as a national treasure, so CBS marked the occasion with a prime-time birthday tribute in which he spoke briefly from his home in Washington, D.C. Justice Holmes was the most eloquent jurist this country has yet produced, and he rose to the near-final occasion (he retired from the bench ten months later and died in 1935) with characteristic grace, closing by quoting his own elegant translation of a passage from amedieval poem in praise of wine, women and song that he bent to his own austere purposes. “To live is to function,” he said. “That is all there is to living. And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago: ‘Death plucks my ear and says, Live—I am coming.’”  Voices from the grave 

Three years ago the Harvard Law School Library, where Holmes’ papers are housed, launched an online “digital suite” (library.law.harvard.edu/suites/owh) that allows anyone with a computer to access its digitized 100,000-document collection of Holmesiana. I knew from having read G. Edmund White’s 2006 biography that the 1931 radio broadcast was recorded off the air and that the Harvard Law School Library, where Holmes’ papers are housed, possessed a tape copy of the recording. Why, I wondered, wasn’t it possible to use the Holmes Digital Suite to listen to that 1931 aircheck? Go here to listen to a RealAudio copy.





Jon Favreau, shown with President Obama in April 2009, was one of the youngest head speechwriters in presidential history.
Jon Favreau, shown with President Obama in April 2009, was one of the youngest head speechwriters in presidential history.

Jon Favreau, the North Reading wunderkind who has channeled Obama’s voice since 2005 after meeting the junior senator at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, was considering a switch to screenwriting. His eagerness became apparent when he told Obama that NBC had picked up “1600 Penn,” a political comedy cocreated by Jon Lovett, another former Obama speechwriter whom Favreau had caught up with before departing Los Angeles. Obama's speechwriter Jon Favreau leaves west wing for screenwriting

With a tight labour market for skilled infosec professionals, many CISOs and IT managers are struggling to recruit and retain talented employeehe. ATO’s solution to the situation, according to its senior director of vulnerability management and research Leonard Kleinman, has been to insource a number of key skills back into the organisation ATO Cyber gurus ...