Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Failure and new odd wars

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to killhim. 
~Sir Winston Churchill Attitude ...



Suppose you're an idiot …



… and suppose you hold high office — but I repeat myself.
 (Apologies to Mark Twain, who made this point originally)



How we got where we are: A Timeline Of Mistrust.

The timeline began in the 1990s, and not 2003...



Have you screwed up recently? Well, I often feel like the month can’t be over if I haven’t yet somehow “blown it” — if I haven’t yet let something fall through the cracks; if I haven’t yet realized I made a bad decision; if I haven’t yet hurt someone’s feelings or let someone down, including myself.

I screw up all the time, and I absolutely beat myself up about it.

Many people might feel badly for a couple hours and then move on. I tend to ruminate on the bad decisions I’ve made in my 23 years of living: “I shouldn’t have done that, which led to this, which led to that, which is why my life and I are so screwed up!”
The Importance of Being Able To forgive yourself for failures


Why the current tensions with Russia are as bad as in the worst periods of the Cold War.


32 Percent of Millennials Who Believe George W. Bush Killed More People Than Stalin - Odd Education...


Speaking of education, note the motion of last week's pursuant to standing order 77.

PS NEWS: Senators Cameron, Rhiannon and Lambie: To move—That the following matter be referred to the Education and Employment References Committee for inquiry and report by 30 November 2016: The impact of the Government’s Workplace Bargaining Policy and approach to Commonwealth public sector bargaining ... The Hung Parliamentary Senate APS Bargaining

Robert Gottliebsen on partnerships


A VICTORIAN police internal affairs investigator who was recorded on CCTV being brutally assaulted by Ballarat officers has spoken of her ordeal for the first time.
The local police officers did not realise at the time that the woman they had arrested was one of their own.
Victoria’s independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commision (ABIC) was told in May the footage recorded the abuse of a police officer, on leave for personal issues, who had been arrested for being drunk in public. She was allegedly pepper-sprayed and then given a hot shower to intensify the effects of the spray.
That woman has now identified herself as Yvonne Berry and has spoken to media, including the ABC’s 7.30 Report, for the first time.



The hiring game TechCrunch  Now you’ve got to win a tournament just to get a job.

Hacked by a fridge: The Internet of Things and cyberattacks World Economic Forum

A 2015 analysis published in The BMJfound 727 potential references to Dylan songs in a search of the Medline biomedical journals database; the authors ultimately concluded that 213 of the references could be “classified as unequivocally citing Dylan.””  Link here

It isn’t every day that an academic researcher publicly compares some of her colleagues to terrorists, so it’s probably no surprise that what happened last month sparked a heated debate. That’s when a draft version of an upcoming column in the Association for Psychological Science’s Observermagazine was published online. Written by Susan Fiske, a highly regarded social psychologist at Princeton, the former head of the APS, and a longtime editor at the online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, the column decries the current tone of academic debate within the field of psychology. Fiske portrays a landscape in which the long-standing scientific tradition of thoughtful, collaborative critique has given way to a Wild West of anonymous social-media sniping, personal attacks, and all sorts of other unsavory, incivil tactics Inside psychology methodological Terrorism - To Discuss ...

PCWorld: “The U.K.’s spy agencies breached the European Convention on Human Rights for years by secretly collecting almost everything about British citizens’ communications except their content, a U.K. court has ruled. However, now that the U.K. government has admitted what it is doing, the collection is legal, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled Monday. It has yet to rule on the issue of proportionality, or whether the agencies’ actions were reasonable given the threat they sought to counter. Responding to a June 2015 complaint by campaign group Privacy International, the tribunal said the secret intelligence agencies had breached the ECHR for years because of the way they gathered bulk communications data (BCD) and bulk personal data (BPD)…”