Thirty years ago L and S first exchanged glances after Hunters and Collectors concert at a disco at the Cross ... After last night' celebration with dico styled vows exchanges the union is even stronger as cemented to the Malabar sounds of "putting your arms around " ... The rector who married the was no other but Jim Whild of St Marks Church ... The world is such a tiny spot ... Laat week was peppered with strange facts at various gathering from Monday to Saturday - thruth is so much stranger than fiction :-)
Raising a teenage daughter
What do Belgian princes and American academics have in common?
Australia's new Foreign Influence laws expand phonesnoop powers
And maybe rules about the
kind of dodgy ads Facebook carried in the USA
The large bestselling authors are taking a bigger and bigger share of the market. Just as in every branch of post-industrial capitalism, the rich are getting richer. New authors and struggling authors and mid-list authors are finding it harder. This [is] bad news for the average writer: they get paid less so that publishing houses can hold onto bestsellers with higher advances. The Power of Music
Listening to music while you work can be the best or the worst – depending on whom you ask. In an office there’s always at least one person who can’t stand working while music is playing in the background. That can be a problem – especially in the world of open-plan offices. Pondering that problem I looked at some studies related to music and productivity.
Behavioral scientists and management experts have found that listening to music at work can increase productivity. And that’s not all. It also has been proven to improve workplace cultures and upbeat music can increase co-operation between team members. Project management expert Colin Ellis makes an interesting point. Apparently even people who are against music in the workplace, “get in the swing of it” after three weeks or so. Another positive - upbeat music can increase co-operation between team members. The positive effects music can have on people working are vast. Yet I would guess that most offices are not playing music.
One of the most common counter arguments is the claim that people can’t concentrate when music is playing in the background. Whether or not that’s true might differ from person to person, but studies suggest that people are in fact capable of concentrating with background music as we still focus on the most valuable information when we multitask. I agree. (Am listening to Colter Wall's new album as I write this).
In an article in The Harvard Business Review best-selling author and Associate Professor of Leadership and Innovation at Oral Roberts University David Burkus, writes about the fact that many people can’t concentrate when it’s too silent either. It’s why many people prefer working in coffee shops or shared work spaces. It’s all about the right level of background noise.
The solution many people come up with is to wear headphones in the office – either to listen to music, others to drown out the noise of others working around them. But that creates another set of problems as headphones can be a barrier to collaboration. Agreed.
I’m a believer in the power of music. I think that music can actually make you more creative. The solution for the office lies in the set-up of workspaces. There needs to be a space people can access if they want to work in silence and maybe even more importantly without interruption.
The image is one of the most famous advertising visuals from the 1970s - Maxell's Chair Man - see a great backgrounder here.
The fire this time – the legacy of James Baldwin | Books | The Guardian
He made his name in
fashion photography but a collaboration with James Baldwin changed everything,
writes Philip Gefter. In 1964, Richard Avedon published Nothing Personal, a
lavish coffee table book with gravure-printed portraits of individuals who do
not fit into any single classification: poet Allen Ginsberg standing naked in a
Buddhist pose opposite George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American
Nazi Party; the puffy-eyed Dorothy Parker, her bags containing a lifetime of
tears, side by side with a sullen and deflated, if still-shimmering, Marilyn
Monroe; a young and earnest Julian Bond, the civil rights movement leader,
among members of the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee; and the
grizzled William Casby, who had been born into slavery about 100 years earlier.
Nothing Personal was published only months after the passage of the Civil
Rights Act, in the period of profound cultural soul-searching following
President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Despite Avedon's glamorous
reputation, it was his social conscience - revealed in the range of photographs
in this book - that may be the surprise that deepens his enduring legacy
Richard Avedon and James Baldwin's Joint Examination of American ...
Bitcoin -> Energy Use -> Pollution
Bitcoin uses a computation system to prevent fraud, but computation takes energy, which damages the environment, all at an increasing rate.
How Social Media Make It Difficult To Really Think
"If you’re on social media, you’re being presented with stimuli all the time, stimuli that are demanding a response from you. If that’s the case, how do you navigate that moment? The thesis of the book is that, in reality, we don’t want to master those impulses. We don’t want to, because by responding to those stimuli in an instinctive way, we can signal our belonging. But we ought to resist those stimuli, because the social and personal costs of not resisting those stimuli are enormous." … [Read More]
MSM Watchdog @MSMWatchdog2013
Oh dear. Mr Xu. Close adviser of Mr Huang - denounced by PM 
@TurnbullMalcolm as secret Chinese agent 
- caught by @dailytelegraph campaigning for @LiberalAus in #Bennelong this weekend #auspol
And take a guess which Mr Huang adviser was in *that* meeting with Sam Dastyari?
- caught by 
