Pourquoi le Luxembourg ne pourrait pas accueillir l’Eurovision
L’annonce du grand retour du Luxembourg sur la scène de l’Eurovision après 30 ans de césure soulève plusieurs questions, dont une fondamentale: le pays pourrait-il accueillir un des plus grands spectacles du continent? Sur ce point, le pragmatisme est de rigueur. L’intérêt réside sans doute ailleurs.
Que se passera-t-il dans à peu près un an, au soir de l’édition 2024, si le Luxembourg remporte à la stupeur générale le concours Eurovision de la chanson, 30 ans après sa dernière participation? Quasi immédiatement, théoriquement, Martin Österdahl, le superviseur exécutif de l’événement musical cathodique, transmettrait à l’extatique délégation luxembourgeoise le cahier des charges afférent à l’organisation de l’édition 2025. Un document qui en ferait déchanter plus d’un…
Stanford Professor Reveals a Counterintuitive Secret to Productivity | by Naman Jain | Wholistique | Medium
The Mystery of The Dirty Socks.
In the 1970s, American psychologist Daryl Bem conducted a study on Stanford students. He made the following hypothesis-
- Punctual students were conscientious.
- This character trait would reflect in other areas of life, such as cleanliness.
- Hence punctual students will wear clean clothes
So he noted if the students who came to submit assignments ahead of the time wore clean socks or not. However, when he measured the correlation between these two variables, he was shocked. Not only was the correlation not neutral or positive as he expected, it was highly negative.
How to Sabotage a Scrum Master – DZone Agile
One of my favorite exercises from my Professional Scrum Master classes is how to best sabotage a Scrum Master as a member of the middle management. The exercise rules are simple: You’re not allowed to use any form of illegal activity. Therefore, outsourcing the task to a bunch of outlaws is out of the question. Instead, you are only allowed to use practices that are culturally acceptable within your organization.
Read on and learn more on how to best sabotage a Scrum Master from the exercise results of more than ten PSM I and PSM II classes. (I slightly edited the suggestions for better readability.)
Are scientists less prone to motivated reasoning? | Ars Technica
A new study lays out a bit of a conundrum in its opening paragraphs. It notes that scientific progress depends on the ability to update what ideas are considered acceptable in light of new evidence. But science itself has produced no shortage of evidence that people are terrible at updating their beliefs and suffer from issues like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Since scientists are, in fact, people, the problems with updating beliefs should severely limit science’s ability to progress.
And there’s some indication that it does. Max Planck, for example, wrote that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up.”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/are-scientists-less-prone-to-motivated-reasoning/
Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it’s a trustworthy source
Less frequently edited articles on Wikipedia might be less reliable than popular ones. But it’s easy to find out how an article has been created and modified on Wikipedia. All modifications to an article are archived in its “history” page. Disputes between editors about the article’s content are documented in its “talk” page.
Walt Whitman’s letter to a female admirer is the nicest romantic rejection in history. ‹ Literary Hub
If your writing grows popular enough, sparking feelings in the hearts of admirers is an occupational hazard—and so is having to turn those admirers down. So Walt Whitman did to Anne Gilchrist, a writer and mother of four who had recently lost her literary critic husband to scarlet fever.
To get the wealthy to pay more tax, first we need to work out why they avoid it | Financial Times
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https://www.ft.com/content/fe58948f-f5cb-48a6-968f-188232394252
Of course, wealth is not income and tax avoidance is not evasion. But Disney’s position was straightforward: these two facts are a big part of the problem. What the richest Americans do is perfectly legal. She knows this because she has been doing it her whole life and is as much a beneficiary of the system as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. As she acknowledged, it is a system that allows the rich legally to avoid paying tax on huge fortunes that grow every year.
https://www.ft.com/content/fe58948f-f5cb-48a6-968f-188232394252
I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To. – The Atlantic
“For the last year,” a friend recently wrote to me, “a lot of us have been enjoying unaccustomed courtesy and understanding from the world.” When people asked how you were doing, no one expected you to say “Fine.” Instead, they asked, “How are you holding up?” and you’d answer, “Well, you know.” (That “you know” encompassed a lot that was left unspoken: deteriorating mental health, physical atrophy, creeping alcoholism, unraveling marriages, touch starvation, suicidal ideation, collapse-of-democracy anxiety, Hadean boredom and loneliness, solitary rages and despair.) You could admit that you’d accomplished nothing today, this week, all year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/post-pandemic-dont-want-to-reenter-society/619045/
OPINION: The real ‘trashing’ of Paris is not cycle lanes and benches, but gentrification – The Local
Mayor Hidalgo also emerged from her cocoon of denial (“it’s all political; most of the problems are ephemeral and Covid-related”) to admit that mistakes had been made. Or rather she sent out Emmanuel Grégoire her “first deputy mayor” to make the admission on her behalf. What else are first deputies for?
Grégoire said any new street furniture which had been “unanimously decried” would be removed. This included the so called “mushroom” seats or stools, which have, erm, mushroomed in parts of the capital. It also includes the post-modern “Mikado” benches which look like abandoned piles of railway sleepers.
A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian
The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3
Things I grab, motley collection 