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Trump's
pick to lead the tax agency has plenty of offshore experience, but where do his allegiances lie?
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Web Analytics Wednesday Sydney
Stormy seas ahead as TfNSW loses critical Opal Card privacy case.
"A new case challenging the design of a public transport ticketing system on privacy grounds has broad implications for any organisation which collects personal information, especially in this age of Big Data."
Professor Stephen Hawking has died, aged 76
Australian government seeking digital identity credential-proofing
We Can Now Store Light as Sound, And It’s a Game Changer For Computing – Science Alert
“Today, my colleague Rahul Bhargava and I are pleased to launch the Data Culture Project. This is the latest evolution of our DataBasic.io work, now focused on helping organizations build a data culture in creative, hands-on ways. We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data? The Data Culture Project is a totally free and open source, remixable, hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization or community. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other. For those of you teaching data journalism, some of these activities and videos might be fun to use in the introductory period to help introduce new learners to concepts like quantitative text analysis, exploratory data visualization and more. Over the past year, we piloted the Data Culture Project with 25 organizations from around the world ranging from nonprofits to libraries to newsrooms. Check it out at http://datacultureproject.org, and you can read more about it here: https://medium.com/engagement-
Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization, Emerson College. Faculty Director, Emerson Engagement Lab. Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media
In 2013, Vladimir Putin sent Donald Trump a gift. Trump had just flown home to New York from Moscow. He'd traveled to oversee the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned; Trump had tried and failed to meet the Russian leader while there. Now arrived a consolation prize of sorts. The daughter of Aras Agalarov, an oligarch known as "Putin's Builder" after amassing a billion-dollar-plus real estate empire, showed up at the Miss Universe offices in New York, bearing a box. "It was a black lacquered box," write journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette." "Inside was a sealed letter from the Russian autocrat. What the letter said has never been revealed." It's an intriguing jewel of a detail, not least because it hints at how much remains a mystery about Russia's ambitions and activity targeting Trump and the country he now leads. The House and Senate Intelligence committees launched their Russia probes more than a year ago. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team joined the fray last May; countless reporters have spent countless hours digging. Yet Russia, write Isikoff and Corn, remains "the original sin of [Trump's] presidency, a scandal that raise[s] questions about both his legitimacy and the nation's vulnerability to covert information warfare."
Book review of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
We’re All Fascists Now - The New York Times
Yes, these future lawyers believe that free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend them. Which is to say, they don’t believe in it at all
Ten years post-GFC we're still working. That's the good news.
"Just as many Australians of prime working age are employed now as in 2008 – but the workplace is greatly altered." (Guardian)
Australia: Tax whack turns the solvent to insolvent!
Mondaq News Alerts-8 Mar. 2018
Preparation of the solvency report required the liquidators to consider the company's outstanding liabilities, including any liability to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Relevantly, the commercial property sale had generated a large capital gain
The tobacco black market is becoming increasingly violent
... submission to a parliamentary inquiry into illicit tobacco late last year, saying both the ABF and ATO understate losses in duty due to the trade, which Mr Pike estimates to be near $4 billion. At the inquiry, Mr Pike intimated the federal government was focussed on penalising the legal tobacco industry through higher taxes
NextGov: “The Office of Personnel Management inspector general again found flaws in the agency’s contracting for the credit monitoring and ID theft services it provides to the more than 21.5 million current, former and prospective federal employees affected by the 2015 data breaches. OPM has gone through two different contracts for post-breach protections. The IG found “significant deficiencies” in the contracting process of the first one, a $20 million contract to Winvale Group and subcontractor CSID. When that contract expired, OPM opted for a contract with ID Experts to provide services for three years with a potential value of $330 million. In a report released Tuesday, auditors found the agency’s Office of Procurement Operations bypassed some of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and the agencies’ purchasing rules for the ID Experts contract. The IG found 15 areas of noncompliance, such as designating the contracting officer representative after the award, failing to check the System for Award Management and data-entry errors. Auditors also found incomplete or unapproved contractual documents, including the acquisition plan, market research plan and technical evaluation plan. “Without a complete and accurate history of the actions taken to award the contract, it is impossible to know whether following all of the FAR requirements would have resulted in an award of the credit monitoring and identity theft services contract to someone other than ID Experts,” the report states…”
The Real Data Culture - TF, MO'N – Use our videos, guides to run one activity a month at brown bag lunches in your org
“Today, my colleague Rahul Bhargava and I are pleased to launch the Data Culture Project. This is the latest evolution of our DataBasic.io work, now focused on helping organizations build a data culture in creative, hands-on ways. We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data? The Data Culture Project is a totally free and open source, remixable, hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization or community. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other. For those of you teaching data journalism, some of these activities and videos might be fun to use in the introductory period to help introduce new learners to concepts like quantitative text analysis, exploratory data visualization and more. Over the past year, we piloted the Data Culture Project with 25 organizations from around the world ranging from nonprofits to libraries to newsrooms. Check it out at http://datacultureproject.org, and you can read more about it here: https://medium.com/engagement-
Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization, Emerson College. Faculty Director, Emerson Engagement Lab. Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media
In 2013, Vladimir Putin sent Donald Trump a gift. Trump had just flown home to New York from Moscow. He'd traveled to oversee the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned; Trump had tried and failed to meet the Russian leader while there. Now arrived a consolation prize of sorts. The daughter of Aras Agalarov, an oligarch known as "Putin's Builder" after amassing a billion-dollar-plus real estate empire, showed up at the Miss Universe offices in New York, bearing a box. "It was a black lacquered box," write journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette." "Inside was a sealed letter from the Russian autocrat. What the letter said has never been revealed." It's an intriguing jewel of a detail, not least because it hints at how much remains a mystery about Russia's ambitions and activity targeting Trump and the country he now leads. The House and Senate Intelligence committees launched their Russia probes more than a year ago. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's team joined the fray last May; countless reporters have spent countless hours digging. Yet Russia, write Isikoff and Corn, remains "the original sin of [Trump's] presidency, a scandal that raise[s] questions about both his legitimacy and the nation's vulnerability to covert information warfare."
Book review of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
We’re All Fascists Now - The New York Times
Yes, these future lawyers believe that free speech is acceptable only when it doesn’t offend them. Which is to say, they don’t believe in it at all
Ten years post-GFC we're still working. That's the good news.
"Just as many Australians of prime working age are employed now as in 2008 – but the workplace is greatly altered." (Guardian)
