Sunday, March 20, 2022

Julian Assange v. Legal – political - We’re All Sinners, And Accepting That Is Actually A Good Thing

 An anti-lockdown government worker who shared a picture of former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian with a Hitler moustache has been awarded compensation over her sacking.

The NSW Industrial Relations Commission determined child protection worker Vanessa Lichi was justifiably sacked but still treated severely as her family was in a dire financial state from the pandemic.

Sacked worker paid out after sharing image of Berejiklian with Hitler moustache


NY Times Op-Ed: We’re All Sinners, And Accepting That Is Actually A Good Thing



       Pankaj Mishra/Amit Chaudhuri chat 

       At Scroll.in they have: 'A conversation over 12 successive days, about Mishra’s new novel, ‘Run and Hide’, and more', ‘Dear Pankaj...Yours, Amit’: An email chat between novelists Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri
       Among the interesting observations:

I think that there was much more political and artistic variety in the work of novelists in English who struggled to publish their works or get them noticed before 1982 -- Anita Desai, Raja Rao, and of course Narayan come to mind.

       It's been quite a while since Mishra's last novel, The Romantics, came out. so I am very curious about this one; see also the publicity pages from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Hutchinson Heinemann, or pre-order your copy at Amazon.comBookshop.org or Amazon.co.uk

Giant spiders expected to drop from the sky across the East Coast this spring.


Teaming is hard because you’re probably not really on a team

strategy+business: “Hybrid and remote work are complicating many of the collaborative challenges that were present long before the pandemic arrived. We’ve been thinking a lot about teams lately. As more companies release formal policies around hybrid and remote work, leaders are telling us that remote work has made working together, or teaming, difficult and has frayed the culture of their organizations. Of course, many companies, including ours, have long embraced remote work, with great success. And if we listen carefully to the types of problems leaders and workers say they’re encountering with teaming, the reality is that most of these issues existed prior to the pandemic. Many, if not most, workers are frustrated with the groups of people they work with. 

Leaders and members struggle with long hours, inefficient ways of working, lack of accountability, and frustrating group dynamics. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create a teaming crisis. It exposed deficiencies in the in-person model while introducing even more complexity. In the course of our work with our clients, we have identified several issues that contribute to this frustration. But the most basic one is this: in many cases, people are not and have never been on real teams, nor should they be…”


Oxford English Dictionary Blog: “This update contains nearly 700 words, senses, and phrases which have been researched, defined, and included in OED for the first time, from absolute threshold to ydrawAbsolute threshold, the level or point at which a stimulus—such as sound, touch, or smell—reaches sufficient intensity to become consciously perceptible, is a loan translation of a German phrase, first used in English in 1892. Ydraw is a verb obsolete since the fifteenth century and first recorded in Old English with reference to the sweeping of the hem of a garment. More recent linguistic developments covered in this update include burner phone, an inexpensive prepaid mobile phone, especially one used for a short time and then destroyed or discarded to protect the owner’s anonymity, first recorded in a 1996 song by rapper Kingpin Skinny Pimp, and the shortened burner in the same sense, first seen from 2002.

 A trigger warning, a warning before a piece of writing or other content that may cause distress, especially by reviving upsetting memories in people who have experienced trauma, is first recorded in a 1993 Usenet newsgroup for survivors of abuse. Content warning, also added in this update, is now often used in the same sense, but its other current sense—denoting a notice accompanying a film, video game, or written publication, warning that it contains material potentially offensive to some audiences or unsuitable for children—is earlier, with evidence stretching back to 1977…”


MICROBIOME NEWS:  Toxin-producing yeast strains in the gut fuel inflammatory bowel disease