Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers - Bloomberg: Multiple investigations – including a Justice Department criminal probe – are trying to unravel how and when critical decisions were made about the Max's software. During the crashes of Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines planes that killed 346 people, investigators suspect, the MCAS system pushed the planes into uncontrollable dives because of bad data from a single sensor. That design violated basic principles of redundancy for generations of Boeing engineers, and the company apparently never tested to see how the software would respond.
Bitter coffee today? Try changing the colour of your cup: In one experiment, the white mug enhanced the rated “intensity” of the coffee flavour relative to the transparent mug – but given slight physical differences in the mugs used, a second experiment was conducted using identical glass mugs with coloured sleeves.
Once again, the colour of the mug was shown to influence participants’ rating of the coffee. In particular, the coffee was rated as less sweet in the white mug as compared to the transparent and blue mugs.
Federal resources minister Matt Canavan backs Queensland bid to reject scientific reports that interfere with mines | Business Insider: Canavan said he believed science shouldn't be left to dictate mining approvals. [...] It's unclear on what grounds “Office of Science Quality Assurance” would reject a scientific study provided to the government. Former state LNP minister Andrew Cripps, who moved the motion, said it was necessary to fight restrictions which seek to limit farming and mining runoff into the Great Barrier Reef. Corrupt vandals upset that science doesn't also love coal and reef bleaching.
Sydney Football Stadium without a builder as Lendlease loses project - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): While Lendlease has successfully demolished the stadium, leaving a giant hole in the ground, the company looks unlikely to finish the project due to a dispute with the Government.Sydney Football Stadium rebuild in chaos as Lendlease leaves project: [Lendlease] said it was only ever contractually obligated to complete stage one but would not comment if it would put in a revised offer to carry out the rebuild.
The Libs were so desperate to rush the demolition in before the election, they knocked the stadium down without having a contract to rebuild it. We all knew this project would be yet another disaster, but this might be a record for how quickly it got there.
Entrepreneurs don't have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money — Quartz: While it seems that entrepreneurs tend to have an admirable penchant for risk, it’s usually that access to money which allows them to take risks. And this is a key advantage: When basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative; when you know you have a safety net, you are more willing to take risks.
AFP media raids: Federal Police boss Neil Gaughan on ABC and News Corp searches: he didn't explain why a serious matter of national security saw raids conducted two years after the ABC reports ran and more than a year after Smethurst's story was published. ... Mr Gaughan defended the actions of the seven officers who spent seven hours inside Smethurst’s home, rifling through her underwear drawer, bathroom cabinet and kitchen cupboards. ... He didn’t explain why then officers flicked through every page of her recipe books, as Smethurst detailed in The Australian today.
Christopher Pyne and the revolving door of MPs turned lobbyists | Australia news | The Guardian: The former defence minister Christopher Pyne ignited fresh criticism this week when he took a job with consulting giant EY to help expand its defence business.
Pyne's acceptance of the job has again put Australia's revolving door between politics and business into stark relief.
Rules governing post-ministerial employment are weak and unenforced.
Wet Plate Photography Makes Tattoos Disappear: Here's something you may not have known about the 1800s wet plate collodion photography process: it can make certain tattoos disappear in photos. ... [Photographer Michael Bradley] decided to focus his camera on the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand, whose traditional tā moko tattoos have been making a resurgence. ... Bradley realized that when photographs of traditional tā moko were captured back in the 1800s, the tattoos themselves barely showed up at all and where therefore lost to history.
Murdoch media and the myth about Tesla EVs causing blackouts | RenewEconomy: The claim is laughable because most Tesla EVs are powered at home by a 7kW charger, which is about the same as many electric ovens and air conditioning units. And nearly all houses have these, and in the summer heat turn them on at the same time. Also the grid operators confirmed they haven't had any problems.
I spent a week with a doomsday prepper deep in the outback. This is how it changed me - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): As I performed my important role of "torch holder" in the Wolf Creek-esque carpark, I suddenly got it: preppers exist because the rest of us are critically underprepared.
My survival skills extended to holding a torch. I couldn't reboot their car, let alone scavenge bush tucker for dinner. Back in the city, I'd somehow managed to kill a plant specially chosen because it only needed watering every three months.
As my prepper friend worked away, silhouetted in the torchlight, I realised preppers are just a variation on the "Aussie bushman" — perhaps a dying trope in our urban era, where the "unkillable" fern is my nursery's fastest-selling plant.
Inside Scott Morrison's Donald Trump-like election victory - Australia Votes - Federal Election 2019 - Politics - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): Electorates that swung hardest to the Liberal and National parties on a two-party preferred basis had a higher share of voters on low incomes, with low educational attainment, and higher levels of unemployment. ... One explanation is that Labor's agenda of fighting climate change and limiting tax concessions for the wealthy and high-income earners was a turn off for "aspirational voters" on lower incomes in marginal electorates.
...
Another explanation is that swinging voters in electorates characterised by low incomes and low educational attainment succumbed to a scare campaign.
Driverless Metro: trains and doors get stuck after Berejiklian unveils $7.3bn project | Australia news | The Guardian: users took to Twitter to report large crowds at Chatswood station, trains stuck at Macquarie University and Macquarie Park stations, as well as service gaps at numerous stations. The network experienced a hiccup when, at about 1pm, one of the trains overshot the platform at Macquarie Park station. It was realigned but the automatic doors failed to open. They were eventually manually opened by workers. Commuters were taken off the train, which was taken out of service Broke down on day one. Another great moment in Berejiklian transport. Goes well with the time they spent $2b on trains that don't fit through the tunnels.
How did it come to this? Kearah Ronan was locked up for being sick | The West Australian: Ms Ronan said she had offered to provide a medical certificate but was told it wasn't needed and that the next court date would be in October. Unbeknownst to Ms Ronan, the Magistrate ordered an arrest warrant against her for failing to appear in court after it was requested by the police prosecutor.
US demands social media details from visa applicants - BBC News: Nearly all applicants for US visas will have to submit their social media details under newly adopted rules. The State Department regulations say people will have to submit social media names and five years' worth of email addresses and phone numbers.
Volkswagen's Trying to Solve the Problem of Motion Sickness in Autonomous Cars: Volkswagen said in the announcement that car sickness is caused by a confusion in the motion the eyes see and body feels, which drivers can more easily avoid due to knowing what they plan to do next and how to adapt their body to it.
Retiring as a Judge, Trump's Sister Ends Court Inquiry Into Her Role in Tax Dodges - The New York Times: President Trump's older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings....The status change rendered the investigation moot, since retired judges are not subject to the conduct rules. What a fine bunch they are.
Electric aircraft aren't far off, but we need to prepare - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): A scan of global electric aircraft development suggests rapid advancements are likely over the coming decade. By 2022, nine-seat planes could be doing short-haul flight (500-1,000km). Before 2030, small-to-medium 150-seat planes could be flying up to 500 kilometres. Short-range (100-250 km) VTOL aircraft could also become viable in the 2020s. ... electric aircraft could lead to higher-frequency services, enabling more competitive point-to-point flights, and increase the dispersion of air services to smaller airports. A lot of uncertainty about timelines, but it seems inevitable this is how things will go. If low-noise electric planes were allowed to break Sydney's curfew, that alone could be compelling to the industry.
How to Crash Test a $2 Million Koenigsegg Without Going Broke: If a major automaker needs to perform 16 crash tests for their new $25,000 sedan they can crash 16 cars and only lose $400,000 worth of product. For a company like Koenigsegg, 16 cars is a year's worth of production and a $30 million loss.
Around 50% of homes in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have the oldest NBN technology: inferior NBN technology is in abundant use across all three metropolitan cities. 62% of all addresses in the greater Brisbane region, 42% of all addresses in Melbourne, and 55% of all addresses in Sydney are (or will soon be) connected to the NBN via HFC.
For 30 years I worked for News Corp papers. Now all I see is shameful bias | Tony Koch | Opinion | The Guardian: Gone is the requirement for balance. One has only to look at the story selection and headlines on the front pages of the papers each day to see that an anti-Labor angle has been taken, however contorted had been the literary gymnastics required to finally arrive at that particular bit of stupidity.
How infantile is it of the management of these organisations to fool themselves into believing that what they are producing is being accepted by readers as quality product. Noting Tony Koch is an Australian journalist who has won five Walkley awards and an honorary doctorate from the Australian School of Journalism. He has also won 48 state journalism awards, the Sir Keith Murdoch News Limited Award and the Graham Perkin Award. He has been inducted into the Australian media hall of fame.
Good grief: Victimized employees don't get a break | EurekAlert! Science News: The researchers performed their work over the course of four studies. The first two studies showed through surveys of employees and supervisors that supervisors tend to view victims of bullying as being bullies themselves.
Studies three and four were experiments where participants evaluated employees based on descriptions of their work performance, as well as how they treated others and how they were treated.
They found that even when evaluators were clearly informed that a victim did not mistreat others, victims were still seen as bullies. In the fourth study, they found that not only are victims seen as bullies despite evidence to the contrary, but also that they receive lower job performance evaluations as a result of being victimized. (study: How leaders perceive employee deviance: Blaming victims while excusing favorites. | Request PDF)
Australia's gun laws are not as strict as they should be: The number of guns now exceeds the 3.2 million firearms in Australia before the introduction of the 1996 National Firearms Agreement [...] Licence holders now own about 3.9 guns each compared with 2.1 guns in 1997.
Science Fiction and the Philosophical “Ship of Theseus” Problem | Tor.com: How would an uploaded digital consciousness fare against the Ship of Theseus problem? If my mind was recreated perfectly in a digital format, would it in fact be me? What if my fleshy meatsack self was still alive? Would that change your answer?
'Vandals': NSW environment staff fear for jobs as office dissolves: Premier Gladys Berejiklian defended the dissolution of OEH, noting heritage would be shifted to the Arts portfolio headed by Don Harwin as minister. Environment would have "a prominent place within Planning". Translation: heritage shoved in with other stuff they don't give a crap about, environment shifted over so their developer mates can get dodgy approvals in a one-stop-shop.
Keith Flint of The Prodigy, an anti-establishment figurehead, brought a punk ethos to techno - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): Flint had the charming amateurism of the true pioneers of that genre, bands like The Sex Pistols in the UK, The Saints in Australia, and Minor Threat in the US. They, like him, valued passion over musical proficiency.
"It's not just as blatant as piercing your nose and sticking your hair up," he said of the band's punk elements.
"It's the attitude of the band, the aggression. Getting up there and doing it. The fact that we're not all trained musicians or trained dancers. We're just people who've got up there. We're like the stage divers that never get chucked off."
The Shoes of Prey Journey Ends – Michael Fox – Medium: The customisation niche are creative people who enjoy spending the time to create something unique which they can wear. We learnt the hard way that mass market customers don't want to create, they want to be inspired and shown what to wear. They want to see the latest trends, what celebrities and Instagram influencers are wearing and they want to wear exactly that%u200A—%u200Aboth the style and the brand. [...] what they were consciously telling us and what they subconsciously wanted [...] were effectively polar opposites.
Death metal music inspires joy not violence - BBC News: "The dominant emotional response to this music is joy and empowerment," said Prof Thompson. "And I think that to listen to this music and to transform it into an empowering, beautiful experience - that's an amazing thing."
The Tao of Sir Terry: Pratchett and Philosophy | Tor.com: Vimes' reasoning can be understood in terms of virtue ethics, as taught by Aristotle, Mencius, or Confucius, which state that right acts do not depend on some outside set of rules or on their consequences in order to be right, but are inherently right because they are in accordance with certain core values we also deem right.
Why border security should not be a key issue in Federal election 2019: We don't appear to have a problem with asylum seekers who arrive by air and there are about 76 of them every day, far more than ever arrived by boat.
The political obsession with stopping the boats all started with the Tampa affair in 2001 — the same year the World Trade Center was attacked by terrorists. National security became a key issue and politicians have used it to manipulate voters ever since. Political campaigners know fear and negative messages are more persuasive than hope and positive messages.
Catholic Church's massive wealth revealed: A six-month investigation by The Sydney Morning Herald has found that the church misled the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse by grossly undervaluing its property treasures in both NSW and Victoria while claiming that increased payments to abuse victims would require cuts to its social programs. [...] While the property portfolio features many churches, hospitals and schools, so too does it include offices, conference centres, car parks, mobile phone towers, tennis courts, and a restaurant. ... The church also has extensive non-property assets including Catholic Church Insurance and its own internal banks - often known as Catholic Development Funds - with nearly $1 billion in assets in Sydney alone. And it has other investments, including in superannuation, telecommunications and in the stock-market. A Church-owned fund manager has more than $1.4 billion under management.
50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart's ‘Mother of All Demos’ changed personal technology foreverBut the presentation was more than seemingly disparate demonstrations of experimental computer operations. What Engelbart and his team had created from scratch was a holistic system designed to extend human communications capabilities, tools to augment human intellect — hence the presentation's official prosaic academic title, "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect." Engelbart's presentation would later be more appropriately dubbed "The Mother of All Demos."
Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?” - MIT Technology Review: First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won't object.
See also: Spotify top 100 for 2018 (generated playlist). Spotify's wrap claims I am 'adventurous' as I listen to non-mainstream artists 105% more than the average Spotify listener. Err, go me?
Backstory if you care. Entirely optional:
A Tribe Called Quest - Luck of Lucien. Early in the year, chilling out at Thirty Coffee waiting for take-aways, just the perfect track that got stuck in my head for... well half of January. Thirty Coffee's playlist was always awesome (as was the coffee and food of course), pity the cafe's changed hands.
deadmau5 feat. Chris James - The Veldt. I realised that although I'd quite liked for lack of a better name I'd somehow never looked up another deadmau5 album since. So I dug into the extensive back catalogue. This track also has an interesting back story, with the random way the vocals came into it; and the fact it's based on a Ray Bradbury story.
Leftfield - Space Shanty. Saw Leftfield play Leftism start to end; which was basically a religious experience for me. While this was never my favourite track listening to the album, it absolutely came to life played live. So while the recording isn't great, it goes some way to how it felt.
Prophets of Rage - Unfuck The World. It's been years since I've reacted so strongly to a video clip. Sums up how fucked the world is at the moment.
Serj Tankian - Empty Walls. Having thrashed on System of a Down I moved on to Serj Tankian's solo stuff. Also ties in politically with the Prophets of Rage.
The Muppet Show Theme (metal cover by Leo Moracchioli). Leo's covers remain a source of joy. I mean, headbanging muppets - what more do you want?
Killing Joke - New Jerusalem. Reminded of the track after a discussion at work (we have a metalhead channel on Slack). Album subsequently went on high rotation.
Butterfingers - Big Night Out. Digging into Aussie hip hop while expanding a playlist. Tour promo blurb claims it's based on a true story, haven't seen it confirmed anywhere though.
Evil Eddie - Queensland. Probably a bit obvious why I find this one amusing.
James Gang - Ashes the Rain and I. Another playlist dig - this time listening to songs sampled by later hits (3:30 if you're impatient, the later hit if you're baffled).
Underworld - Between Stars. More back-catalogue digging, love Barking and this track seems to capture the vibe of it.
DJ Shadow - Fixed Income. Listened to a ton of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist mixes on YouTube. Also after a long time digging trying to get myself my own copy of DJ Shadow's Live In Tune and On Time, I realised the solution was obvious and bought it off eBay. This is the track that opens the set. Also played the set while driving out to the Hunter Valley for a work event, adding nice associations of a drive in the country.
VNV Nation - When is the Future? New VNV, and love the clip.