Economic worries and the global elite

By Chrystia Freeland – Here’s one sign the global elite is starting to get worried that capitalism isn’t working for the Western middle class. At the TED Global gathering in Scotland’s elegant capital city this week, much of the spotlight was on what’s going wrong with the 21st-century economy.

That matters because the TED conferences are one of the obligatory stops on the itinerary of any self-regarding plutocrat.

Former Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece is a son of privilege — both his father and grandfather were prime ministers of Greece — but, in a sign of the times, he inveighed against “plutocrats hiding their assets in tax havens” and “powerful lobbies protecting the powerful few.” His comments made an impact partly because he was so open in declaring his own shortcomings. Nor did he shy away from how angry a lot of people are about them. more> http://tinyurl.com/nbs7s3s

Related>

• Will The 21st Century Be A Horror Show Of Epic Proportions? Tim Reuter, Forbes
• A Rapidly Evolving World, Jean-David Levitte, Brookings Institution

The ‘Black Swan’ Intern Ruling Could Change Unpaid Internships Forever

By Rebecca Greenfield – Just a month after one judge dismissed the class-action suit filed by free New York City media interns at Hearst Magazines, another has now granted the Hollywood coffee-fetchers who worked on Black Swan a precedent-setting win, ruling (pdf) that the two production interns “worked as paid employees” and that Fox Searchlight should have to pay them as such.

The law states that unpaid internships must benefit the worker, not the employer, and should be a part of a formal training program, without replacing a paid employee’s job. The Black Swan “internship” — much like a lot of unpaid intern situations — violated all of those tenets, ruled Judge William Pauley. more> http://tinyurl.com/loqx8nq

Related>

• Google interns pull in the big bucks, Stephen Williams, NY Daily News

Managing Complexity & Reducing Risk

BOOK REVIEW

Normal Accidents, Author: Charles Perrow.

By Kevin Craig – Systems are fundamentally made up of components or parts. A functionally related collection of components forms a unit. An array of units forms a subsystem, which all come together to form the system. An accident is a failure in a subsystem, or the system as a whole, that damages more than one unit and in so doing disrupts the ongoing or future output of the system. What systems are prone to system accidents? To answer this, two concepts need to be considered: interactiveness and coupling. more> http://tinyurl.com/o5e5gma

To Invent Like Edison, Learn to Collaborate

BOOK REVIEW

Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison’s Lab, Author: Sarah Miller Caldicott.

By Charles Murray – If you’re looking for ways to build a better product, then you might start by tapping the wisdom of those around you.

The 10-12 members of Edison’s team accomplished that by sharing a pool of common experience. They often returned to the lab after dinner and checked on ongoing experiments. Edison insisted that they share their notebooks with one another — the better to understand how each team member’s ideas fit in the grand technical plan. They also engaged in “midnight lunches,” occasionally working deep into the night together and in many cases following no prescribed work schedule. Edison was a proponent of flex hours long before it became a corporate practice.

Edison believed that homogeneous teams were less effective. When he was developing his incandescent light bulb, his team members included physicists, mathematicians, and chemists. He also brought in individuals with backgrounds in prototyping. more> http://tinyurl.com/ncnusok

Our Reflection in the N.S.A.’s Prism

By Maria Bustillos – The Prism PowerPoint presentation is set to be declassified in 2036, according to red print in the lower right-hand corner of some of the slides. Eventually, it would appear, we were meant to know all this; we know it now, twenty-three years in advance of the appointed hour. And yet, most of it was already clear.

He (Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive) continued: “Also, if national security letters are used, then they can not say they have ever received them. We got one of them; they are nasty because you can not talk about having received one.”

All of this is a way of saying that anyone who did not suspect that the government would continue to use as much technology as it could to gather as much private information as it could—a rock-solid constant since the time of Hoover’s F.B.I., at least—has not been paying attention. more> http://tinyurl.com/q3f3r8e

Related>

• Does Google Have an Ethical Obligation Not to Spy? ←
• Hong Kong legal battle looms for NSA contractor, James Pomfret and Grace Li, Reuters
• U.S. Prism spying program rattles EU lawmakers, Claire Davenport, Reuters
• Big Data, Big Brother: It’s a Big Deal, James Jay Carafano, nationalreview.com
• Hong Kong May Have Been Ed Snowden’s Biggest Mistake, Dashiell Bennett, Atlantic Wire
• Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America, Daniel Ellsberg, guardian.co.uk
• Edward Snowden Is a Hero and We Need More Whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg, Daily Beast
• Obama administration counts 22 Hill briefings on PRISM program, Daniel Strauss, Hill