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Happy St Patrick and St Jozef Day to Media Dragons everywhere this week

W e live on the thin ice of unexplained phenomena.
-Patricia Highsmith, notebook entry, October 14, 1944

H umor is a far more complex process than primeval pleasures like sex or food, but just as much tied to the inner complexity of the brain. The Tax office does have a sense of humour. It cites Wikipedia as its source for a definition of private equity was about the only amusing aspect for most international investors and tax lawyers as they digested the ATO s draft rulings arising from the TPG Myer case. Media Dragon and Google are the two internet giants whose informal corporate motto is - don't be evil
After all, the dissemination of good ideas and their victory over bad ideas are forms of technological progress.



Media Dragons are huge working horse failures ;-) Failure is a teacher
Run a web search on some phrases built around failure, and you’ll come up with quite a few reflecting a very true statement, “Failure is a teacher.”

Our histories and leadership legends all benefit from the context of understanding the final outcome of the story, but the telling of the story doesn’t adequately capture the powerful emotional forces that occur at the moment of failure. Certainly, the stories are right and the lessons instructional. They inspire us to persevere, but the failure-leading to-success legends don’t guide us how to respond and cope in the moment

• The Bohemian Art of Failure [Simon Sharwood flags the following technologies as ones to watch: cloud computing, new Microsoft upgrades, virtualisation, biometric authentication, next-generation firewalls, employee-owned IT, loyalty schemes, solid state disks, smart grids and hybrid servers Top 10 business technology trends for 2010 ; Contrary to popular myth, “being a visionary” is neither a prerequisite for leading, nor is it bestowed upon the chosen few as they ascend to their lofty perches above us ]
• · Tens of thousands of years of human mating norms are evaporating as Cro-Magnon males drag women into their caves, and the. women love every minute of it ; Tucker for Mafia and Triads
• · · Is media multitasking driven by a desire for new information or a wish to avoid hard thinking? The easy option dressed up like something hard ; The human brain, for all its power, is quite suspicious of difficulty. Effective marketers, politicians, and sales people all know to keep it simple KISS
• · · · “When you say banker, a lot of people think Jewish.” So what if they do? What if people are just a little prejudiced about Jewish bankers?... Bankers ; Casanova made prodigious use of English frock coats, the “little preventive bag invented by the English to save the fair sex from anxiety”... Librarians - it's easier to get forgiveness than permission
• · · · · Threatsaurus: the a-z of computer and data security threats: Whether you're an IT professional, use a computer at work, or just browse the internet, this book is for you. We tell you the facts about the threats to your computers and to your data in simple, easy-to-understand language. Sophos Group; Successful innovation requires as much attention to the soft side of business - people and their knowledge, skills and motivations - as it does to hard financial objectives or strategic reasons. The active management of innovation needs goals, structure, fair process, a diverse skill base and focused support. Gaming innovation

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London is Calling
A snippet from Basement Alex is heading to UK in March 2010 AD for 6 months

Alex aka Sasha aka Roxie Ray has come a long way in a short time and now. heading for UK tour The sassy Sydney native has emerged as one of the soul revivals brightest stars. In a short space of time, she has appeared on several international record releases incl Lack of Afro, Milano Jazz Dance Combo and others and has performed continuously, drawing from her passion for the sounds and feeling of the jazz divas of the last 50 years Roxies voice and presence is unique, striking and emotive. Its a full-on, straight-up, knock-out soul-sister seduction.

http://events.liveguide.com.au/655165_thumbnail_280_The_Liberators_Michelle_Martinez_and_Roxie_Ray_DJ_Russ_Dewbury_plus_special_guest_Toon_Eastside.v1.jpg

Music to our ears



Being Digital and Young Ideas and Sounds
Last week, along with Tom Eslinger, our Worldwide Creative Head of Digital, Kevin Roberts was at Lancaster University talking to HighWire students about our digital world. Digital technology means there are no barriers of scale or production to distributing great ideas and true creative people should welcome learning about this.

We talked about a lot but the key thing on my mind was that digitization, and the power of the Internet and the mobile, should be the most liberating forces ever for creativity. We believe at Saatchi & Saatchi in the unreasonable power of creativity and nothing can set this free more than being digital.

• Being Digital [Binge drinking is a problem which can have devastating results, and it seems to take particular hold in cold dark climates ; This paper contends that the hype surrounding the steep rise of social media networking website use has tended to mask the reality of a corresponding growth in online fraud and crime. New Web 2.0 technologies may enable inventive interactivity online, but they also foster innovative ways for those intent on nefarious means to achieve their ends. Cyber Crime 2.0 versus the Twittering classes ]
• · After a review demonstrated concerns about leadership and communication skills among staff at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, action was deemed necessary. ASIC; TONY Abbott is a latter-day Muhammad Ali dancing around Kevin Rudd's Joe Frazier. He messes with Rudd's mind, taunting him on climate change, industrial relations and health.
Political orthodoxy would suggest that raising the salience of these policy areas -- in all of which Labor leads the Coalition in public perceptions -- should assist the government.
• · · Sadly, one fifth of the workforce keep their Blackberries on at all times, night, day, weekend and wedding anniversary. I’m all for sight, sound and motion, and the enhancement of the screen to become a force for good in the world, but not at the expense of the world itself... Who Needs Information? ; Urban sprawl has nothing on the Internet, in terms of breadth, depth, hidden gems – and frequently, confusion. Some smart people at the BBC have shown the Internet visually, giving an intuitive sense of the big picture… Where In The Web?
• · · · New York magazine had an interesting recent feature, 50 Steps to Simple Happiness. We each develop our own strategies for preventing and relieving stress and promoting joy and contentment in our lives. The key for me is the idea of work / life integration Happiness ; Debate on the upside and downside of the Internet continues to rage, and won’t be settled any time soon. I’m an upsider, and take the view that powering forward imperfectly beats staying still or rolling back perfectly. The liberating and involving nature of the Internet cuts creativity loose on such a fantastic scale, that I think we’ll have the capability to fix the flaws as we go. Good News Travels Faster
• · · · · When Geoffrey Canada's extraordinary and uplifting 'Harlem Miracle' one day makes it on to film, it might be tough to sell as a true story. But as an inspirational teacher movie, it will blow you away. Up where they belong; Google keeps a record of everything: Quincy Tang's (Financial Investigator at Australian Crime Commission) professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest business Quincy Tang - Financial Investigator at Australian Crime Commission

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Just when we thought it was safe to go back to the future we all have to follow our relative Hambrich (sik sic) who identified three kinds of people: those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; and those who wonder what happened.

Malchkeon makes things happen... Happy Birthday and many 18footer-moments wherever you go ;-0

Here we go again … our latest list of the 100 best websites sees short attention spans, the rise of Twitter, more browser wars and celebrity gossip sites setting the news agenda. Slovak born veteran media dragon, Andy Warhol, talked of a time when everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. With hindsight, however, he might have wanted to revise that down to about five minutes. On today's web, phrases such as "here today, gone tomorrow" seem to involve ridiculously long timescales. People who moaned that blogging represented a move to shorter attention spans – 250-to-350-word posts rather than 1,000-word stories – have now seen blog posts start to look big and, frankly, old-fashioned. Today's trendsetters are using "microblogging" sites such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io, which are taking the opportunity for creative "borrowing" to new heights Best of Best Media Dragons


Endless Love of a true visionaries Love and Science are In the Air
Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Romance and science aren’t the most traditional bedfellows – perhaps with the exception of that ultimate first date make-or-break, ‘chemistry’.

However a recent LA Times article revealed that increasingly scientists are finding the chemistry concept isn’t just a metaphor for the sparks that fly (or fizzle) when two people meet. Love and attraction causes real changes in the brain, releasing high levels of the chemical dopamine which provides that first buzz, and then later bonding hormones like vasopressin and oxytocin. And researchers are using MRI machines to observe and measure these effects, with some surprising results.

• Radical Attraction [Life entails more than sitting in a sealed-off room wrapped up in cotton-wool. Mark their words: the battle begins - Maurice Newman's address to ABC staff Avoiding risk or avoiding life? ; The demands of blogging have pushed many to abandon the form for faster, simpler word bursts on Twitter or Facebook. Today, there is increasing evidence that the art of blog writing is losing ground to even faster forms of communication, from 140-character Twitter blasts to one-sentence status updates on Facebook and MySpace. Nielsen Media Research estimates that of the 126 million blogs counted by its crawlers, the vast majority are rarely – if ever – updated. Has blogging peaked? ]
• · DEPRESSION, WAR, AND COLD WAR Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity ; Communist China now has more billionaires than any other country besides the United States, according to Forbes magazine. There are a total of 64 people in that bracket in mainland China, the magazine says in its annual list of the world's richest people Forbes ; BBC on Rich ; Namesake; Guardian
• · · A Gold Coast businessman found guilty after a major tax evasion investigation which is also looking into Crocodile Dondee star Paul Hogan's affairs blogged on Google’s networking site Buzz about beating the authorities in the middle of his Supreme Court fraud trial, it can be revealed. Adam Hargraves and business partner Daniel Stoten, both 38, were found guilty this week of conspiring to cause a loss to a commonwealth entity and remanded in custody for sentencing Blog boasts in fraud trial- Courier Mail, 11/03/2010, ; "We won't lie about our marriage on our tax forms, either, filing as the married people we are," Marla Stevens wrote on a blog in September 2005. "We've racked up about a million dollars in potential criminal fines and about a hundred years in potential prison time under the old sentencing guidelines between us - so far. Marla Stevens once bragged about how she and her spouse, Phyllis, violated federal tax laws
• · · · A new transparency and accountability seal is being developed by Washington News Council, a non-profit forum New transparency 'seal' initiative for online journalists; The attention economy has gotten plenty of, ahem, attention. Competition for limited attention spans has led many companies to get louder, either literally, or figuratively via social media, deep discounts or misguided attempts at technological differentiation. No doubt, the attention arms race has escalated - but this has been to little avail as customers have found ways to tune it out. The Rise of the Inattention Economy
• · · · · Now, this may come as a bit of a shock but over the next couple of months this blog is going to contain, in the words of a 1980s comedian, "a little bit of politics". "We'll still be knocking on doors," one senior party official told me, "it's just that we'll be organising the knocking-on-doors via Facebook". I'm taking up a temporary position as the BBC's digital election correspondent, with the job of examining how politicians and voters are using new technology in the run-up to the general election. I will still keep an eye on the rest of the technology landscape, but the blog will gradually become infused with the political scene. We'll still be knocking on doors ; Why all the fuss about Facebook?; The Hurt Locker upsets Avatar Did Blog Buzz for “Hurt Locker” Predict Its Oscar Win?