Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for September 30, 2019

in #rsslog5 years ago
Authored by @remlaps

Harvard study: Physician burnout in the US costs $4.6 billion; Venezuelan national bank exploring the use of Bitcoin and Ethereum; After Christchurch, social media steps up social engineering; Launching a Limited Liability Autonomous Organization (LAO); and Youtube coverage of the 17th week-end of protests in Hong Kong


Question for readers: I'm considering a title change for this series. In your opinion, would something like, "The Daily Internet Digests", be a more accurate and eye-catching title than "Curating the Internet"?


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  1. The Economic Cost of Physician Burnout - According to Harvard visiting scholar, Joel Goh and colleagues, the annual cost of physician burnout in the United States is $4.6 billion, arising from physician turnover and reduced clinical hours. This number was published in a paper last June, and the paper also observed that previous research found that burnout can be reduced with moderate levels of investment. They arrived at the $4.6 billion estimate by studying previous surveys that asked doctors how they planned to reduce hours or leave jobs due to burnout, then correlated those numbers with percentages in age groups and disciplines, then finally created a formula to calculate the cost of those lost hours as well as the cost to hire and train to replace the missing output. (I'll have to think about this, it almost sounds like something is being double-counted there. Or maybe it's just a clarity of language issue in the summary. Please comment with your thoughts.) The team also developed a spreadsheet tool that organizations can use to calculate their own cost of burnout.

  2. Venezuela Has Bitcoin Stash and Doesn’t Know What to Do With It - Citing four anonymous sources, Bloomberg says that Venezuela's national bank is conducting tests to see if it can include cryptocurrencies in its internal holdings. The testing follows on a request from Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) - the nation's state-owned oil company - to use Bitcoin and Ethereum for payments to the central bank and suppliers. Proposals to count cryptocurrencies in the Venezuelan national reserves are also being studied. The article says that the request from PDVSA may be driven by the desire to avoid registering on an exchange, which would require a good deal of due diligence, before selling their Bitcoin holdings. It is not clear how PDVSA came to hold Bitcoin and Ethereum in the first place, and representatives from PDVSA and the Venezuelan national bank did not respond to requests for comment. h/t MIT Technology Review

  3. Consequences of the Christchurch Call: Social engineering by internet platforms? - Last May, seventeen countries and eight tech companies signed The Christchurch call. By signing the pledge, these organizations committed to take steps to "reduce the use of internet services to disseminate violent extremist content." Signatories included Google, Youtube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter, but did not include the United States, China, or Russia. We're now starting to see the results. For example, Facebook has updated its definition of, "dangerous individuals and organizations", and changed search results in particular locations (including the US) so that common "white supremacist" search terms will redirect to sites that help people leave white supremacist groups. This example raises concern because it violates the implicit contract between the searcher and the firm that the search results will be relevant to the searcher's desires. Also, because the results are different in different locations, it raises issues of likely involvement by the particular governments in crafting censorship policies. This excerpt expresses the concern:

    This begs the question therefore of where Facebook draws its mandate to intervene to divert requests in different ways for transactions originating from users in different nation states. The different treatments imply that different “social contracts” have been entered into with the separate “communities of users” in each state. If the sovereign governments of these countries have entered into contracts with Facebook to undertake these activities, then questions must be asked of those governments as to where they draw their mandate to intervene. If there are no contracts, then has Facebook itself presumed to act as if it is the state?

  4. New Interest in DAOs Prompts Old Question: Are They Legal? - After the Ethereum DAO attack, the plausible argument that anyone who was impacted could have sued anyone else in the DAO for damages, which would have been impossibly chaotic. OpenLaw plans to change that with its LAO, a Limited Liability Autonomous Organization. CEO, Aaron Wright, says they'll accomplish this by putting a LLC "legal wrapper" around their DAO in a way that complies with the SEC's guidance from 2016. One of the main drawbacks for this approach is that it will only be available for investment by legally accredited investors.

  5. STEEM 17th weekend: Protests in Hong Kong continue | 2019 - Earlier, @rt-international livestreamed continuing coverage of the protests in Hong Kong. I didn't watch the full video, but it is interesting to skip through. Police in riot gear and protestors with their customary umbrellas can be seen throughout the video. Tear gas is seen around 1:45:00, and arrests are seen around 2:50:00 Protestors with lasers, bicycle helmets, and gas masks are seeen at around 3:46:00.

    Here is the 5 1/2 hour recording:

    (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @rt-international)


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