#pwc fair 2019

[ikeepbookkeeping]

Major Underpayment Discovered in Australian Private Healthcare Sector

A significant underpayment issue has surfaced within one of Australia’s largest private hospital operators, Healthscope, revealing an estimated $21.7 million in unpaid wages. This affects hundreds of disability service workers and possibly several nurses who may not have received their full entitlements.

Healthscope, a prominent national private hospital operator and healthcare provider, reported to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in April that it had engaged external advisers to thoroughly investigate the extent of these underpayments.

The company stated in its report, “While this review is ongoing, based on analysis undertaken during the financial year, Healthscope has recorded provisions of $21.7 million.”

Operating 38 private hospitals across Australia, Healthscope is currently addressing two main issues related to staff payments. One involves historical underpayments affecting 500 current and former employees at Healthscope Independence Services—a disability support service based in Victoria. The other concerns the accrual of annual leave for nurses in hospitals across New South Wales.

Healthscope’s hospitals in New South Wales include the Prince of Wales Private Hospital, Northern Beaches Hospital, Campbelltown Private Hospital, and Newcastle Private Hospital. Following its acquisition by Canadian infrastructure giant Brookfield in 2019, Healthscope has begun making remediation payments where appropriate.

“In both these instances, we have advised the impacted staff and have taken steps to resolve the issues as quickly as possible,” said a Healthscope spokesperson. “These are both historic issues that predate Brookfield’s acquisition of Healthscope in late 2019.”

This revelation comes at a time when the $22 billion private hospital sector in Australia is grappling with a financial crisis, driven by soaring costs and wages alongside declining patient numbers post-pandemic. At least ten private maternity hospitals have closed since 2017, primarily due to workforce shortages, with five closures occurring in 2023 alone.

In 2023, Healthscope reported a loss of $648.9 million after writing down the value of its business by $919 million due to revised expectations of hospital admissions and operating costs.

The underpayment of staff at Healthscope Independence Services impacted approximately 200 current and 300 former employees. A spokesperson explained, “Employees were incorrectly classified in our payroll system, resulting in historical underpayments. Healthscope has engaged PwC to assist with identifying affected employees and calculating the remediation payments.”

Remediation payments to current and former staff have been progressively made, with final payments expected to be completed this quarter. Healthscope has self-reported the underpayments to the Fair Work Ombudsman, which is currently investigating the issue.

The spokesperson for the Fair Work Ombudsman stated, “As this matter is ongoing, it is not appropriate to comment further.”

The other issue involves the accrual of annual leave for nurses in New South Wales hospitals, arising from complex clauses in the relevant enterprise agreement. Healthscope is working with the NSW branch of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation to resolve the matter, which is currently before the Fair Work Commission.

A spokesperson for the NSW branch of the union declined to comment as the matter is under consideration by the Fair Work Commission. Meanwhile, the Health Workers Union, representing some Healthscope workers in private hospitals and disability care, was unaware of the underpayment issue but expressed no surprise given Healthscope’s history in the private hospital sector.

Professor Anthony Scott, a health economics expert from Monash University, remarked that the underpayment of Healthscope employees adds to the pressures faced by private hospitals. He highlighted the sector’s challenges, including workforce shortages, increased wages for healthcare workers, and reduced uptake of private health insurance amidst a cost-of-living crisis.

In response to these pressures, federal Health Minister Mark Butler initiated an urgent review of the private hospital sector in June. This review aims to address skyrocketing costs and intense financial pressures threatening the sector’s viability, with a report expected by the end of August.

[nbmsports]

In Hollywood, the Strikes Are Just Part of the Problem

Existential hand-wringing has always been part of Hollywood’s personality. But the crisis in which the entertainment capital now finds itself is different.Instead of one unwelcome disruption to face — the VCR boom of the 1980s, for instance — or even overlapping ones (streaming, the pandemic), the movie and television business is being buffeted on a dizzying number of fronts. And no one seems to have any solutions.On Friday, roughly 160,000 unionized actors went on strike for the first time in 43 years, saying they were fed up with exorbitant pay for entertainment moguls and worried about not receiving a fair share of the spoils of a streaming-dominated future. They joined 11,500 already striking screenwriters, who walked out in May over similar concerns, including the threat of artificial intelligence. Actors and writers had not been on strike at the same time since 1960.“The industry that we once knew — when I did ‘The Nanny’ — everybody was part of the gravy train,” Fran Drescher, the former sitcom star and the president of the actors’ union, said while announcing the walkout. “Now it’s a walled-in vacuum.”At the same time, Hollywood’s two traditional businesses, the box office and television channels, are both badly broken.This was the year when moviegoing was finally supposed to bounce back from the pandemic, which closed many theaters for months on end. At last, cinemas would reclaim a position of cultural urgency.But ticket sales in the United States and Canada for the year to date (about $4.9 billion) are down 21 percent from the same period in 2019, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. Blips of hope, including strong sales for “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” have been blotted out by disappointing results for expensive films like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Elemental,” “The Flash,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and, to a lesser extent, “The Little Mermaid” and “Fast X.”The number of movie tickets sold globally may reach 7.2 billion in 2027, according to a recent report from the accounting firm PwC. Attendance totaled 7.9 billion in 2019.It’s a slowly dying business, but it’s at least better than a quickly dying one. Fewer than 50 million homes will pay for cable or satellite television by 2027, down from 64 million today and 100 million seven years ago, according to PwC. When it comes to traditional television, “the world has forever changed for the worse,” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at SVB MoffettNathanson, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday.Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and WarnerBros. Discovery have relied for decades on television channels for fat profit growth. The end of that era has resulted in stock-price malaise. Disney shares have fallen 55 percent from their peak in March 2021. Paramount Global, which owns channels like MTV and CBS, has experienced an 83 percent decline over the same period.On Thursday, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, put the sale of the company’s “noncore” channels, including ABC and FX, on the table. He called the decline in traditional television “a reality we have to come to grips with.”In other words, it’s over.And then there is streaming. For a time, Wall Street was mesmerized by the subscriber-siphoning potential of services like Disney+, Max, Hulu, Paramount+ and Peacock, so the big Hollywood companies poured money into building online viewing platforms. Netflix was conquering the world. Amazon had arrived in Hollywood determined to make inroads, as had the ultra-deep-pocketed Apple. If the older entertainment companies wanted to remain competitive — not to mention relevant — there was only one direction to run.“You now have, really in control, tech companies who haven’t a care or clue, so to speak, about the entertainment business — it’s not a pejorative, it’s just the reality,” Barry Diller, the media veteran, said by phone this past week, referring to Amazon and Apple.“For each of these companies,” he added, “their minor business, not their major business, is entertainment. And yet, because of their size and influence, their minor interests are paramount in making any decisions about the future.”A little over a year ago, Netflix reported a subscriber loss for the first time in a decade, and Wall Street’s interest swiveled. Forget subscribers. Now we care about profits — at least when it comes to the old-line companies, because their traditional businesses (box office and channels) are in trouble.To make services like Disney+, Paramount+ and Max (formerly HBO Max) profitable, their parent companies have slashed billions of dollars in costs and eliminated more than 10,000 jobs. Studio executives also put the brakes on ordering new television series last year to rein in costs.WarnerBros. Discovery has said its streaming business, anchored by Max, will be profitable in 2023. Disney has promised profitability by September 2024, while Paramount had not forecast a date, except to say peak losses will occur this year, according to Rich Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm.Giving in to union demands, which would threaten streaming profitability anew, is not something the companies will do without a fight.“In the short term, there will be pain,” said Tara Kole, a founding partner of JSSK, an entertainment law firm that counts Emma Stone, Adam McKay and Halle Berry as clients. “A lot of pain.”Every indication points to a long and destructive standoff. Agents who have worked in show business for 40 years said the anger surging through Hollywood exceeded anything they had ever seen.“Straight out of ‘Les Miz’” was how one longtime executive described the high-drama, us-against-them mood in a text to a reporter. Photos circulating online from this past week’s Allen & Company Sun Valley media conference, the annual “billionaires’ summer camp” attended by Hollywood’s haves, inflamed the situation.On a Paramount Pictures picket line on Friday, Ms. Drescher attacked Mr. Iger, something few people in Hollywood would dare to do without the cloak of anonymity. She criticized his pay package (his performance-based contract allows for up to $27 million annually, including stock awards, which is middle of the road for entertainment chief executives) and likened him and other Hollywood moguls to “land barons of a medieval time.”“It’s so obvious that he has no clue as to what is really happening on the ground,” she added. Mr. Iger had told CNBC on Thursday that the demands by the two unions were “just not realistic.”In the coming weeks, studios will probably cancel lucrative long-term deals with writers (and some actor-producers) by virtue of the force majeure clause in their contracts, which kick in on the 60th or 90th day of a strike, depending on how the agreements are structured. The force majeure clause states that when unforeseeable circumstances prevent someone from fulfilling a contract, the studios can cancel the deal without paying a penalty.Eventually, contracts with the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ union is known, will be hammered out.The deeper business challenges will remain.Nicole Sperling contributed reporting. Source link Read the full article

[sublimeobservationarcade]

Robodebt Disgrace: The Legacy Of The Coalition

It has cost us, the Australian tax payers, $1.8 billion so far. Robodebt disgrace: The legacy of the Coalition government. The Royal Commission into the Robodebt scheme is being handed down today. The findings are being made public post haste. Peter Dutton, the leader of the Opposition, is calling this a political decision. The debacle and disgrace of this Coalition government scheme is like an albatross to hang around the necks of all those involved in its instigation and execution. It was illegal and they all knew that it was both illegal and wrong. It cost innocent and vulnerable people their lives.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com

Robodebt Royal Commission Report Handed Down

Robodebt was predicated on a belief that there were lots of welfare recipients rorting the system. Many Australians believed this and still do. It is not true and the Coalition and their public servant minions discovered this via numerous reviews. Indeed, one lengthy review was carried out by, yes, you guessed it PwC. Despite this, the Coalition pushed ahead with illegally ascribing debts to welfare recipients and going after them via debt collectors. “From 2016 to 2019, the Robodebt scheme raised more than half a million inaccurate Centrelink debts through a method of 'income averaging', which has since been ruled unlawful. Debts were imposed on people like Angelica which they then had to prove they didn't owe.” - (https://www.legalaid.vic.gov.au/learning-from-the-failures-of-robodebt)

Coalition Government Designed Illegal Robodebt Scheme

The frightening thing about this is that vulnerable people, many with disabilities were, put through the ringer and informed they had large debts to the government in the thousands of dollars. The calculations were factually incorrect because income averaging does not take into account the two week periods that the system is predicated upon. Plus, they made it the responsibility of the accused to prove otherwise, which is a reversal of the presumption of innocence. If you have ever tried to get in contact with Centrelink to get information from them, you know that they are so underfunded they don’t have the staff to answer the phone. Thus, you can spend hours attempting to get through and when you do you cannot get the information you require anyway. It is like something out of a dystopian Franz Kafka novel.

Photo by Hugo Heimendinger on Pexels.com RBA Sacrifices 500 000 Australians For Economic Reasons Australia has an economy run by a central bank, the RBA, which defines ‘full employment’ as an inflation rate of 4.5%. This means that half a million Australians must be out of work for their optimal economy to be functioning. This puts the necessary downward pressure on wages to prevent inflation from creeping out of their 2-3% band. Thus, these 500, 000 unemployed Australians are a prerequisite or sacrifice for the smooth running of their ideal economy. Is it then fair to punish the unemployed in Australia by paying a dole well below the poverty line? Is it just to accuse these people regularly of being dole bludgers and welfare cheats? In this country, according to the Coalition it is.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com The Coalition knows all this and doesn’t give a rat’s arse about the suffering of those living on welfare. It makes political mileage out of the ingrained lack of charity within many Australians, who begrudge the false liberty of the unemployed. People on the dole don’t live it up on the tax payer’s expense, this is a furphy, encouraged by politicians who enjoy societal villains other than themselves. Australians far prefer getting a decent job that will pay the bills but the economic settings, as we have seen, do not support this opportunity for all of us. This is an economic fact and it is time governments start making this crystal clear to their constituents.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com The Coalition designed and brought in the Robodebt scheme in complete awareness of these RBA settings and the true state of affairs around the welfare state in Australia. Many lower level public servants railed against the unfairness and probable illegality of the scheme. They were threatened with removal and/or were moved aside. Labour hire staff were brought in to fill the gaps. The relationship between the Coalition and labour hire is an important one to remember, as it has undermined the working environment and prevented wage growth in this country. Those on labour hire contracts have much less job security and are more easily manipulated than those more established public servants and workers more generally. This is all part of the decade in Australia, which saw a massive imbalance of wealth going to a small coterie of business insiders at the expense of the greater majority of Australians. A decade of Coalition rule, where schemes like Robodebt flourished.

Stuart Robert, Alan Tudge, Scott Morrison, Marise Payne, Katherine Campbell.. these are just a few of the more prominent people named in the report, as key stake holders in the implementation and design of Robodebt. Will any of these figures be referred for criminal and/or civil prosecution? “The architects of Robodebt will be referred for criminal and civil prosecution after a royal commission handed down its report into the unlawful scheme today. Former Queensland chief justice Catherine Holmes's report into the coalition government's automated debt-raising policy has been tabled in parliament and released to the public. The three-volume, 990-page report, includes 57 recommendations – the culmination of hundreds of hours of evidence, thousands of exhibits, and nearly a million documents. A sealed chapter, separate to the bound report, recommends referrals of individuals for civil and criminal prosecution.” - (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-07/robodebt-royal-commission-findings-revealed/102531450) Robodebt disgrace: The legacy of the Coalition is a betrayal of the most vulnerable Australians for political purposes. Peter Dutton is right but not for the reasons he says. The Coalition played politics with the disabled, the unemployed, the sick and needy. It cost them and us, economically to the tune of $1.8 billion, but more than that it has cost Australia the trust in our governments, especially for the half a million people who were betrayed by this illegal and just plain wrong scheme. It is no coincidence that Stuart Robert and Alan Tudge have quit politics, the rats leaving the sinking ship. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom ©MidasWord

Read the full article

[vfcatvce2019-blog]

[mahenderkhandelwal]

Mahender Kumar Khandelwal Corporate Insolvency Resolution Professional

I am Mahender Kumar Khandelwal is a registered insolvency professional and a Chartered Accountant. I have successfully completed CIRP assignment of Bhushan Power and Steel Ltd. (lenders exposure >47,000 cr, recovery of ~ 19,700 cr. is at ~ 42%) I bring over 26 years of experience that spans across various areas within finance and financial advisory services. I specialize in the field of resource mobilization, financial restructuring of distressed companies, settlement of debt and regulatory compliance. I have worked extensively on projects involving corporate debt restructuring, rectification advisory, restructuring and settlement of liabilities, fund raising, private placement of equity, OTS and expansion funding etc. for clients across various industry sectors like retail and consumer, metals, pharmaceutical, financial services, auto, etc.

I have a track record of advising more than 100 corporates in wide spectrum of industries, Power, Infrastructure and real estate. Erstwhile Resolution Professional for 5 Prius Group Entities namely - 1. Prius Commercial Projects Private Limited; 2. Pawan Impex Private Limited; 3. Sharan Hospitality Private Limited; 4. SVIIT Software Private Limited; and 5. Payne Realtors Private Limited All the group entities were engaged in the leasing business, providing commercial space to top companies and firms - both domestic and international. The debt-ridden companies were successfully resolved despite the real estate market going for a dive during the pandemic outbreak of Covid 19. Two of the 5 companies were resolved with No Haircut tot the Secured Financial Creditors.

Past Experience

• Apr 2018 – Aug 2019 : Partner & Leader of Business Recovery Services (BRS) practice at PwC India, and re-built BRS practice including restructuring services.

• 2017- 2018 : Partner with BDO India LLP, started BDO Restructuring Advisory LLP, and built BRS Practice in India

• 2005 – 2017 : Founder of M/s Varrenyam Consultants Pvt Ltd, and Varrenyam Financial Advisory Services LLP. Varrenyam was a boutique financial advisory services firm specialized in the field of financial restructuring of distressed companies, settlement of debts, and resource mobilization.

Turnaround in completed CIRP cases: 1. M/s Bhushan Power and Steel Limited as Interim Resolution professional and Resolution Professional

• There has been an all-round growth and complete turnaround in the operations of the company since the commencement of CIRP. When RP took control over BPSL, capacity utilization was meagre at 47% with production level of 82,000 MT per month and EBITDA loss

• Due to a combination of vibrant CoC and decisions taken by the proactive RP for enhancement of capacity utilization, the Company is operating at 75% to 80% capacity utilization with production level at 160,000 Metric Ton per month and positive EBITDA. During CIRP period generated EBITDA >2000 cr and reduced the statutory and worker liabilities and also improved working capital levels

• Due to turnaround and improvement in operations, Resolution applicants improved their bid amount from 12,000 cr to 19,000 cr. Ensured smooth operations while managing 15,000 employees across 9 locations and provided increments to the employees.

Bhushan Power and Steel : Order Highlights

The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), Principal Bench, has approved JSW Steel Ltd's resolution plan for Bhushan Power and Steel vide its order dt. Sept. 6, 2019.

The aforesaid order is a big validation for the RP and the main highlights are as below:

✓ The order passed by the NCLT records that JSW Steel emerged as the "successful Resolution Applicant" after an "extensive evaluation" by the Committee of Creditors in consultation with the representatives of the operational creditors, individual resolution applicants and Directors of Bhushan Steel.

✓ In relation to points raised by various OCs, the NCLT order stressed that the RP has acted with diligence and as per applicable laws. (The Hon'ble NCLT vide its judgement has found no merit in contrary claims raised by the OCs.)

✓ The Hon'ble NCLT also noted that substantial compliance was made by the RP in regard to giving sufficient opportunity to OCs and promoters for perusal of the resolution plans.

✓ The judgment noted that 'the CoC has been a vibrant house with complete participation of the erstwhile members of the Board of Directors and Operational Creditors apart from Financial Creditors’ ✓ The judgement also noted that ‘The process undertaken by the RP and minutes of meeting of CoC conducted by him do not leave any manner of doubt that the process is fair and transparent.

[averagestudent7]

Activism &Protests via Social Media

Social Media activism is a broad form of activism that uses media and communication technology for social and political movements.   It is also a medium for grassroots activists and anarchists to distribute content that is not accessible through mass media or to post censored news stories (PewResearch 2018). Basically this is where all the juicy content resides, so lets dive in. 

#hashtag Activism 

Hashtag activism is a term invented by media sources that refers to the usage of Twitter hashtags for Int

ernet activism.  Hashtag advocacy is a strategy to broaden the use of communication and make it democratic in such a way that everyone has a way to share their views and opinions (GlobalCitizen n.d).

Here are a few #hashtags that have been used in the past by Social Activits;

1.   #HeForShe

We all know that gender equity affects everyone, don't we? And feminism for women?  Well, we have a significant part of the He For She movement to thank for that. This UN Women movement, endorsed by Emma Watson and Justin Trudeau, aims to consciously engage men and boys in a fight that was traditionally thought of as "a woman's matter” (pwc n.d). 

The United States of America, Mexico and the United Kingdom are among the leading countries in the world in terms of contributions and contributions to join the cause.

2.  #ASLIceBucketChallenge

Who doesn't remember the happy summer of 2014, when Facebook's news streams were all over the place, overflowing with people with ice and water flowing over their heads?

In the UK, one in six people engaged in the ice bucket challenge, which allowed people to nominate their mates to grab the baton to keep the momentum rolling (ALS Association 2019).

Turns out those much-mocked Ice Bucket Challenge videos helped do a lot of good. Two summers ago, the challenge, designed to raise money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, took the internet by storm. Supporters ended up raising over $115 million for the A.L.S (Rogers 2016).   

3. #BlackLivesMatter

Black Lives Matter is a decentralized political and social movement promoting non-violent civil resistance in protest of police brutality and other race based abuse towards African-Americans (Anderson 2016).

With its roots in an emotional Facebook post, after the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, this hashtag has sparked a civil rights campaign that would transform the face of the United States. There are currently more than 26 chapters of Black Lives Matter across the United States (Calderwood and Hales 2019).

The campaign is fueled by sorrow at the nearly infinite flood of wrongful deaths; anger at institutionalized racism; indignation at the consistent lack of fair treatment for all African-Americans.

How Protests Become Successful Social Movements

While hashtags used for activism are capable of educating and gaining people's interest and mobilizing as many people as possible, they should understand the implications of posting such content and what is acceptable for posting. Activists are urged to devote their time developing and revealing less divisive knowledge and to help people understand about the root causes of the crisis.

Still, protests such as the huge Black lives matter march that took place earlier this year, while vital to the development of transformational reform, is only the first step. There are obvious reasons that some campaigns languish and die away while others flourish, and protesters need to take the lessons of history to heart (PND 2018). In order to make a meaningful difference, the campaign needs to follow these five golden steps:

Step 1: Define the change you want to see

Defining change obviously is a recurring trend for popular campaigns. Gandhi decided to be independent of the British. The Civil Rights Movement required concrete laws to be enacted. The color revolutions required a change in government. This were both concrete targets that could construct a plan around them (Gribbin 2017).

Step 2: Shift the spectrum of allies

When you have specifically identified the improvement that you want to make, you need to start looking at the spectrum of allies. Find out that you should expect active or passive support from and provide neutrality at best — or, at worst, active or passive resistance. As Sun Tzu wrote, "Know yourself, know your opponent, and know the landscape." The terrain is a continuum of allies (abc news 2018).

Step 3: Identify the pillars of power

While it is vital to attract supporters from up and down the continuum of funding, it is also important to recognize the organizations that have the ability to bring about the reform you want. These "pillars of influence" can include the police, the media, the school system, government departments, or other organisations. As vital as public support is to the cause, nothing is going to improve without structural support (Popovic and Satell 2017) .

Step 4: Seek to attract, not to overpower

Every campaign is trying to fix any inequality, so it's easy to slip into the pit of demonizing the other side. And this is when a lot of movements fall off the rails. Anger is an effective mobilizing force, but anger without hope is a crippling force. You ought to have an affirmative argument for affirmative tactics ( Mongiello 2016 ).

Step 5: Build a plan to survive victory

Ironically, one of the most dangerous phases of the revolt is just after victory has been won. In Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution, the incoming team was unable to establish a single, efficient administration, and soon the nation reverted to anarchy. Secular demonstrators succeeded in Egypt in 2011, but the subsequent elections were won by the Muslim Brotherhood (Popovic et al 2017)

In conclusion, it is crucial not to associate the call for reform with the ideals that the campaign aims to embody. Only because you win an election or have a policy approved and financed doesn't mean it's time to claim victory. In fact, it is at this stage that you need to reinforce relationships and renew the commitment of each stakeholder to what has generated progress in the first place.

References

abc, 2018. 'No-One Is Listening': Tens Of Thousands Mark Invasion Day With Protests. Abc.net.au. viewed 22nd October<https://www.abc.net.au/new s/2018-01-26/invasion-day-protests-in-melbourne-and-sydney/9364940>

ALS Association, 2019. Ice Bucket Challenge Dramatically Accelerated The Fight Against ALS.  The ALS Association. viewed 22nd October <https://www.als.org/stories-news/ice-bucket-challenge-dramatically-accelerated-fight-against-als> 

Anderson, 2016. History Of The Hashtag #Blacklivesmatter: Social Activism On Twitter. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. viewed 22nd October <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/08/15/the-hashtag-blacklivesmatter-emerges-social-activism-on-twitter/>

Gribbin, 2017. Hanson Insists She Can Hold One Nation Together. viewed 22nd October <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-30/pauline-hanson-vows-to-prevent-one-nation-fragmenting/8220196>

Mongiello, 2016. Repository.upenn. viewed 22nd October du<https://reposito ry.up enn.edu/cgi /viewcontent.cgi?article=4267&context=edissertations>

Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. 2018. Activism In The Social Media Age. viewed 22nd October <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/ 2018/07/11/public-attitudes-toward-political-engagement-on-social-media/> 

pnd, 2018. How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don't, Philanthropy News Digest (PND). viewed 22nd October <https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/off-the-shelf/how-change-happens-why-some-social-movements-succeed-while-others-don-t> 

Popovic and Satell, 2017. 8 Massive Moments Hashtag Activism Really, Really Worked. Global Citizen. viewed 22nd October <https://www.globalcitizen. org /en/content/hashtag-activism-hashtag10-twitter-trends-dresslik/>

pws, n.d. Pwc Proudly Backs Heforshe. PwC. viewed 22nd October <https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/about/diversity/he-for-she.html>+

Rogers, K., 2016. The ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ Helped Scientists Discover A New Gene Tied To A.L.S. (Published 2016). Nytimes.com. viewed 22nd October <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/health/the-ice-bucket-challenge-helped-scientists-discover-a-new-gene-tied-to-als.html#:~:text=It %20turns%20out%20t hose%20much,%24115%20million%20for%20the%20A.L.S.>

[reseau-actu]

Par Kati Bremme, Direction de l’Innovation et de la Prospective

Les algorithmes sont faits pour résoudre des problèmes. Source de défiance pour les uns, solution miracle pour les autres, l’Intelligence Artificielle (IA) est partout, et impacte toutes les industries. Quelques-unes ont toutefois plus de mal à s’en emparer. C'est le cas des médias, moins solvables et dynamiques que la finance ou la santé pour se doter des outils nécessaires à son intégration. Le cabinet PwC, dans son dernier AI Predictions Report, démontre bien ces différences, avec 20% des exécutifs interrogés qui prévoient de déployer l’IA dans leur entreprise, mais seulement 7% dans les médias.

Pourtant, les champs d’application de l’IA dans la presse, le cinéma, la radio, la télé et la publicité sont vastes : automatisation des process métier et des relations client, veille et écoute des réseaux sociaux, vérification de l’info, analyse prédictive de succès, création de vidéo et post-production, assistants vocaux et conversation, rédaction automatisée, personnalisation, recommandation, optimisation de la diffusion de contenus, tracking émotionnel et accessibilité.

Loin de se vouloir exhaustif, voici un panorama des utilisations de l'IA dans toute la chaîne de valeur des médias de l’information et du divertissement.  Des applications qui pourraient bien redonner un élan à une industrie en réinvention.

Pourquoi maintenant ?

Née dans les années 50, l'Intelligence Artificielle est rentrée ces dernières années dans son 2ème printemps grâce à une combinaison de trois facteurs bénéfiques : l'augmentation exponentielle de la capacité des ordinateurs, la masse de données disponibles, et des logiciels open source, comme Tensorflow, Keras,Torch, Pytorch, langage Python, qui rendent disponible la technologie à un plus grand nombre.

Les algorithmes et les plateformes pour les faire tourner sont désormais accessibles sous forme de cloud (souvent mis à disposition par les GAFAs) et permettent aux médias de se lancer dans l’aventure des algorithmes. L'apprentissage machine (machine learning) est devenu apprentissage profond (deep learning), avec une IA qui n’a plus besoin des humains pour l’alimenter avec des calculs, mais qui se nourrit de milliards de données pour construire elle-même des fonctions cognitives. L’IA exécutante devient IA apprenante. Le système AutoML de Google a même créé tout seul un réseau de neurones IA sans intervention humaine. L’IA devient contextuelle, multidisciplinaire, et peut-être bientôt consciente d’elle même...

Les usages de l'IA pour les médias vu de l'UER 

Côté audience, l’un des avantages pour l’adoption de l’IA par les utilisateurs est sa simplicité d’appréhension. Les humains n’ont pas besoin de s’adapter à l’IA, ou d’acquérir de nouvelles compétences (comme c’était le cas dans la préhistoire avec le langage MS DOS par exemple). On interagit avec l’IA par l’outil le plus simple et naturel : notre voix, ou même des images. Restent quelques questions éthiques que l’on abordera à la fin de ce texte.

Pour les médias, 4 catégories majeures pour l'utilisation de l'IA se dessinent : Marketing et Publicité, Recherche et documentation, Innovation dans l’expérience utilisateur et Services. 

Il est donc temps d'adopter cette nouvelle technologie au service de l'audience. Pour le nouveau directeur technique de l'UER, Antonio Arcidiacono, “AI is becoming mainstream”. En voici la preuve en 12 exemples d'utilisations :

1L’IA comme outil pour une information augmentée

La peur, non seulement des journalistes, d’être remplacés par un robot ne date pas d’hier. L’IA va en effet remplacer une partie des tâches et rendre caduque certains métiers. En cela, l’année 2020 sera une année pivot : selon Gartner, l’IA va éliminer 1,8 M d’emplois, tout en en créant 2,3 M de nouveaux. Mais l’avenir des journalistes n’est pas en danger. Même si les "journalistes robots" sont déjà une réalité et utilisés dans de nombreuses rédactions pour produire plus vite, il restent confinés à des typologies de contenu bien précis.

L’agence Associated Press publie depuis 2015 des dépêches créées par des robots journalistes pour les annonces standardisées de l’actualité financière. La même année, Le Monde s’attache les services d’un robot-rédacteur de Syllabs pour les élections départementales et régionales. Avec Heliograf, développé en 2016 pour les Jeux Olympiques, Le Washington Post utilise l’IA pour couvrir notamment des événements de petite envergure, comme du sport local d’étudiant, dont l'audience est trop restreinte pour mobiliser un journaliste humain. La TV finlandaise YLE utilise son bot Voitto pour créer 100 articles et 250 images chaque semaine.  On observe toutefois des différences culturelles dans l'adoption des nouvelles technologies par les rédactions. D'une part entre les pays du Nord et du Sud, mais aussi entre service public et médias privés, ces derniers étant davantage poussés par une logique de rendement.

Robots-rédacteurs ? En réalité, il ne s'agit pas vraiment de création, mais plutôt d’assemblage de contenus existants que l’on fait rentrer dans des templates prédéfinis. Mais la technologie progresse, et les générateurs de langage peuvent de plus en plus tenir compte du contexte pour sélectionner le format adapté.

L’IA peut aussi aider les journalistes à analyser les données et détecter des tendances à partir de sources d’informations multiples allant des sources ouvertes habituelles aux sources inédites comme les données publiées par Wikileaks. Par sa capacité de scanner et d’analyser des masses de données importantes, l’IA permet d’effectuer une veille permanente des tendances sur les réseaux sociaux et de détecter des signaux faibles. Elle peut en cela aider à accomplir une des missions du service public : faire en sorte que le public trouve efficacement l’information qu’ils recherchent et soit ainsi mieux informé. Associated Press utilise NewsWhip pour détecter des tendances sur Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest et LinkedIn. News Tracer est utilisé par l’agence Reuters pour détecter les tendances et les breaking news sur Twitter et faciliter la fabrication de contenu. Le système conçu avec Alibaba repère les news, les classifie, les annote et les ordonne. 

Au delà de la détection des tendances, l’IA est capable d’analyser des volumes massifs de données, inexploitables par l’humain, un processus à l’origine d’un nouveau journalisme d’investigation construit sur une collaboration homme/machine. La veille peut combiner des sources d’informations multiples allant des sources ouvertes habituelles aux sources inédites comme les données publiées par Wikileaks ou encore les données émises par chacun via les objets connectés qu’il porte (smartphone, montre connectée, trotinette électrique…). Les Panama Papers sont le résultat du traitement de 2,6 téraoctets de données et d’un repérage de patterns par algorithme. 

Face à l'automatisation d'une partie des tâches du journaliste, l'IA force à repenser et réaffirmer les valeurs journalistiques pour revenir à un journalisme "authentique" en prenant en considération l’utilisateur individuel. Mais attention à ne pas ajouter de la masse inutile à l'infobésité : les contenus créés par l'IA doivent rester pertinents, et cela n'est possible que par une collaboration intelligente entre l’homme et la machine. Il s'agit de trouver la bonne balance entre jugement humain et automation, intuition, expérience et créativité pour devenir plus efficace dans la collecte, le traitement et la vérification de l’information.

2L’IA pour lutter contre les fake news

Si l’IA est capable de générer des fake news, elle peut aussi aider à les détecter. Fausses informations diffusées par des bots à l'accent slave ou Deep Fakes imitant la parole de Barack Obama, les progrès de l'IA pour nuire sont impressionnants. Tellement que Open AI a dernièrement stoppé son projet GPT-2, car l’IA était si sophistiquée qu’elle finissait par faire peur à ses créateurs. L'IA est parfois annoncé comme un remède miracle, notamment par Mark Zuckerberg lors de sa première audience devant le Congrès américain suite au scandale Cambridge Analytica, où il répondait à toutes les questions embarrassantes : "I dont know, our AI team will fix it". Bien sûr, la vérité n’arrive pas magiquement par le Big Data. Mais la technologie pour fabriquer un fake étant la même que celle pour le détecter, l'IA est un allié important dans la lutte contre la désinformation.

On le sait, le problème avec les fake news n’est pas tant que les gens ne font plus confiance aux médias, mais plutôt qu’ils font confiance à n’importe quelle fake news. Grâce à ses capacités d’analyse poussées l’IA peut automatiser, du moins en partie, la vérification de l’information : vérification de l’authenticité des photos/vidéos grâce à la reconnaissance d’images, à l’analyse des métadonnées, à la comparaison en temps réel des informations avec des banques de données.

Combiné à la blockchain, l’IA peut aussi permettre d’authentifier une information. Facebook utilise l’IA pour détecter des “patterns sémantiques” qui seraient caractéristiques des fake news, avec le succès que l'on lui connaît. Truepic et Serelay se basent sur la blockchain pour authentifier les images, utilisés par l’équipe de vérification d’info du Wall Street Journal. ADOBE détecte les images retouchées grâce à un algorithme. DeepNews.ai est un outil surtout destiné aux plateformes d’agrégation. Il sélectionne sur Internet les articles les plus pertinents sur les sujets d’actualité. L’algorithme prend ensuite en compte la profondeur du traitement du sujet, l’expertise, les qualités de l’analyse et les moyens mis en œuvre en s’appuyant sur un réseau de neurones convolutifs.

L’équipe du Medialab de l’AFP a mené plusieurs projets qui aident les journalistes à détecter les fake news en recherchant notamment l’origine exacte de photos et vidéos qui peuvent ne pas refléter les événements qu’ils sont censés décrire, dernier en date : WeVerify. 

Là encore, l'algorithme n'est pas la solution miracle, la plupart des initiatives et des outils fonctionnent en combinaison avec les humains, dont la capacité d'analyse et de vérification des sources, ne serait-ce que par un simple coup de fil, dépasse encore celles des robots. Pour optimiser la recherche, les algorithmes peuvent simplement être entraînés avec les données du taux de clic sur un contenu. Cette technique ne fonctionne pas pour la détection de fake news. Ici, les jeux de données pour entraîner l'algorithme à la détection de fake news doivent être codés par des fact-checkeurs humains.

3L’IA pour améliorer la discussion sur Internet

Discours de haine, discrimination, violence, les trolls sont un fléau d’Internet. L’IA, à travers le traitement automatique du langage naturel (NLP) peut analyser automatiquement des contenus, les classifier, et mettre en place une modération automatique 24h/24. Mais attention, l’analyse automatique des contenus a ses limites. Même les IA très sophistiquées des plateformes ne sont pas capables d’empêcher la diffusion d’images violentes en direct, comme cela était encore le cas récemment avec les directs de la tuerie de Christchurch. Les plateformes ne se fient pas à 100% à la modération par l’IA, leur process de modération de contenu est une combinaison entre IA et humains. L’IA ne résoudra pas si vite, et peut être même jamais – car la technologie ne sera pas capable de saisir certaines nuances comme l’humour – la misère des modérateurs humains de Facebook.

Les systèmes automatiques sont néanmoins incontournables pour analyser des masses de contenu disponibles sur les réseaux sociaux, détecter des nuisances, sélectionner d’éventuelles contenus à supprimer (en qualifiant les cas de doute qui nécessitent une intervention humaine), et même empêcher la mise en ligne de contenus douteux, en bloquant l’upload d’images de haine. Les algorithmes sonnent aussi le retour des commentaires sur les sites, que les éditeurs avaient souvent fermés faute de moyens de modération. L’outil Perspective utilisé au NYT évalue le degré de toxicité des commentaires via reconnaissance de mots-clés. Le NYT souhaite ainsi passer de 10 % d’articles ouverts aux commentaires à 80 %. Il est aussi adopté par The Guardian et The Economist.

L'IA permet donc de donner un peu plus d'espace à l'expression de l'audience en automatisant un certain nombre de tâches, mais sans pour autant remplacer les humains pour la gestion des nuances qui dépassent l'intelligence des robots.  

4L’IA au service de la voix

Le traitement naturel du langage et la reconnaissance vocale ont permis de développer des assistants conversationnels (chatbots, smart speakers) capables de dialoguer avec des humains. Déjà 20% des recherches sont vocales (Meeker), 50% le seront d’ici 2020 (ThinkWithGoogle). Les assistants vocaux sont un nouveau carrefour d’audience pour les médias.

Lorsque nous parlons à Google Home, Amazon Alexa ou Apple Siri, l’IA est utilisée pour comprendre notre voix. Cette même technologie de réseau de neurones et de Natural Language Processing peut être utilisée pour dessiner des concepts spécifiques et définir des mots clés qui déclenchent des actions. Dans le sens inverse, par la Natural Language Generation, l'IA est capable de transformer des textes en voix. Des centaines de milliards de données sont nécessaires pour entraîner les algorithmes afin de traduire nos accents, dialects, formulations rocambolesques et autres originalités de la langue en des formules mathématiques compréhensibles pour un robot. C'est la raison pourquoi Alexa a besoin d'écouter toutes nos conversations, selon Jeff Bezos.

L’arrivée de BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) développé par Google marque une évolution signifiante dans le développement de l’IA pour la voix : arrivant à une précision de 93,2 %, des ordinateurs sont désormais capables d’apprendre les aléas des langues et peuvent appliquer ses apprentissages à une multitude de tâches.

De nombreux outils se développent pour exploiter au mieux la voix, ce moyen de communication des plus naturels : Lyrebird est une start-up canadienne qui crée des voix artificielles ultra réalistes et des avatars vocaux. Alexa a désormais une voix de présentateur professionnel pour la lecture d’infos. L’IA de Google est capable de reconnaître une voix même si elle ne l’a jamais entendue. La voix boostée à l’IA reprend les intonations et formules d’un présentateur d’info humain après un entraînement en text to speech de seulement quelques heures. Snips.ai  propose un service d'assistant vocal entièrement embarqué pour constructeurs professionnels, quel que soit le support, et respectueux de la vie privée des utilisateurs. Le VSO devient le nouveau SEO, un enjeu majeur pour les médias, et Google propose désormais des podcasts dans ses résultats de recherche. 

Mais même derrière Duplex, l’assistant virtuel de Google capable d’imiter votre voix et vos défauts pour prendre des rendez-vous, se cachent 25% d’humains travaillant dans un call center.

5L’IA pour créer l’interactivité et l’engagement

En 1960, le laboratoire d’Intelligence Artificielle MIT a créé la machine ELIZA qui simulait un psychothérapeute rogérien en reformulant la plupart des affirmations du "patient" en questions, et en les lui posant. Grâce à l'IA, les possibilités d'interactions sont aujourd'hui bien plus développées. Le chatbot utilise à l’origine des bibliothèques de questions et réponses, mais les progrès de l’intelligence artificielle lui permettent de plus en plus  "d’analyser" et "comprendre" les messages par le biais des technologies de traitement du langage naturel et d’être doté de capacités d’apprentissage liées au machine learning. Que ce soit pour la consommation d’information ou l’interaction avec des clients (Gartner Marketing prévoit 85% des interactions sans humains pour 2020), l’automatisation du dialogue est de plus en plus sophistiquée et personnalisée.

La fabrication des bots basiques est aussi accessible plus facilement : Facebook propose une solution clé en main dans Messenger, et des plateformes comme Omnibot, Politibot ou encore Sently distribuent des solutions plug and play avec des formats spécialement dédiés aux médias pour ce dernier.

Que ce soit des bots intégrées dans des messageries pour aller à la rencontre des utilisateurs (1,6 milliard d’utilisateurs pour WhatsApp, 1,3 milliard pour Facebook Messenger), ou des bots développés directement dans les sites et applis, l’interaction conversationnelle est pour les médias un moyen de proposer une expérience utilisateur de proximité.

Les chatbots automatisent la relation, favorisent l’engagement et sont immédiatement personnalisées. Quartz a développé son bot studio pour proposer des narrations conversationnelles personnalisées. Le Guardian a son chatbot depuis 2016, CNN et le Wall Street Journal utilisent Facebook Messenger pour diffuser de l’information, NBC propose des breaking news via l’application Slack. La BBC a intégré un bot dans ses articles pour interagir avec l'audience.  

Des contenus interactifs de fiction sont aussi développés : The Inspection Chamber est un format créé par la BBC pour interagir avec un récit par la voix, StoryFlow propose des histoires sonores interactives pour enfants, The Wayne Investigation est une fiction sonore interactive disponible sur les enceintes connectées équipées d��Amazon Alexa. Alexa adapte aussi les Histoires dont vous êtes le héros en version sonore. Avec OLI, Radio France propose des contes de nuit dédiés à l'enceinte connectée de la chambre d'enfant. 

Au-delà de ces exemples, en simple assistant ou créateur de contenus, l’IA peut innover le storytelling dans les secteurs de la pub, du marketing, du cinéma et de l’audio.

6L'IA dans la réalité étendue

Grâce aux avancées de la technologie, les chatbots se transforment en compagnons virtuels, capables de tenir de véritables discussions et débats. L'intelligence artificielle et la réalité virtuelle semblent être deux champs de recherche différents, mais l'évolution technologique montre que les deux domaines sont de plus en plus liés. Au départ réservé au monde du gaming, ces nouvelles technologies arrivent petit à petit dans la création audiovisuelle. L’IA va changer le storytelling grâce à des personnages virtuels capables d’interactions avancées avec des humains.

Avec leur projetdans leur projet “Whispers in the Night”, le studio Fable s’est lancé dans la création de personnages virtuels animé par l’Intelligence Artificielle. Il s’agit de dessin animés par ordinateur augmentés par l’IA et basés sur la même technologie que celle utilisée par Epic Games ou encore Magic Leap, au service d’un storytelling immersif. Emoshape utilise le composant “Emotion Processing Unit” (EPU) pour déterminer en temps réel les émotions des utilisateurs et permettre aux robots de répondre avec un état émotionnel en phase avec celui de l'utilisateur. La technologie s'associe même aux sciences pour optimiser les interactions et les rendre le plus réaliste possible. Le MIT Media Lab a customisé un casque VR qui intègre un dispositif capable de détecter les émotions de l’utilisateur. Ce module de capture physiologique est constitué d’électrodes permettant de collecter les données de "réponse galvanique de la peau" (GSR) et de capteurs de type photoplethysmogramme (PPG) pour collecter les données de rythme cardiaque.

Moins emplie d'appréhension face aux robots humanoïdes que le continent européen, la Chine a lancé des présentateurs JT boostés à l’IA avec son agence de presse Xinhua : d’abord, le 9 nov 2018, la version masculine, Qiu Hao (qui parle chinois et anglais), ensuite, le 19 fev 2019, la version féminine, Xin Xiamomeng. Dopés à l'intelligence artificielle et au machine learning, ils peuvent commenter de manière autonome des vidéos en direct et lire des textes sur un prompteur.

7L’IA pour indexer, archiver et optimiser les recherches

Avant, les moteurs de recherche fonctionnaient exclusivement sur du texte. Avec l’avènement de l’IA, la recherche est désormais possible sur des images, vidéos et sons. Grâce à la combinaison des technologies de reconnaissance d’image, machine learning, speech-to-text, NLP, reconnaissance de visages, d’objets et de lieux, l’IA peut automatiser la création de métadonnées sur les contenus pour améliorer leur archivage et surtout favoriser leur découvrabilité. La structuration des données, à l’instar du format EBUCore, est l’étape incontournable à leur exploitation automatique. Conversions de formats de données, transcodage, extraction d’audio et de sous-titres ou encore déplacements/copies/purges (FTP, HTTP) sont autant de tâches automatisables de la gestion des contenus permettant presque un catalogage en temps réel. L’indexation automatique accélère aussi le travail des journalistes et facilite le fact-checking.

La durée de vie d’un contenu est très courte, et sans métadonnées appropriées il est impossible de retrouver un sujet spécifique parmi tout ce qui a été été produit. D’ou l’importance d’une optimisation de la fabrication des méta-donnes. L’IA rend la fabrication de méta-données plus rapide, moins coûteuse et plus précise, sous condition de l'entraîner avec suffisamment de données.

Développer des solutions propriétaires et maîtrisées à 100% est presque impossible pour un média. De nombreux outils clés en main sont proposés, souvent relayés à des systèmes de cloud de Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, OpenText, Oracle ou tant d’autres. Newsbridge, très présent dans le secteur des médias, propose une solution d’indexation automatique et en temps réel des rushs, via la reconnaissance d’image. Cela permet en même temps d’optimiser le process de production d’un sujet et de pérenniser les contenus en facilitant leur réutilisation plus tard. Une fonctionnalité de traduction en direct est également proposée pour les interviews. 

Editor est un outil à base d’IA utilisé depuis 2015 par le NYT pour simplifier la vérification et la mise en forme de l’information. Lorsqu’il rédige son article, le journaliste utilise des tags pour signaler les éléments clés - la machine apprend à repérer ces éléments, à comprendre le sujet de l’article et fait une recherche en temps réels pour extraire des informations sur ce sujet. Le BBC News Lab a lancé une technologie de taggage similaire appelée Juicer et un autre outil appelé Summa qui utilise la reconnaissance du langage pour mieux indexer les contenus. LEANKR permet une indexation fine de vidéos, avec un taggage automatique, une création de vignettes intelligente, et un moteur de recherche dans la vidéo grâce au Natural Language Processing, speech-to-text et à l’OCR. 

L’IA aide en effet à optimiser la justesse des résultats de recherche. Des technologies de vision ordinateur permettent aussi de mieux traiter les contenus images et accélérer le process de production. Les machines peuvent aujourd’hui facilement identifier des individus ou situations dans des photos, pour générer des légendes ou alimenter des bases de données plus complètes.

8L’IA pour cibler et personnaliser

Les algorithmes de recommandation ne datent pas d’hier. Leur pionnier, Tapestry, a même fêté son 25ème anniversaire en 2017. A travers les algorithmes de recommandation, l’IA est un outil parfait pour adapter la stratégie de distribution des contenus en temps réel : analyse des tendances des réseaux sociaux pour identifier le moment de diffusion le plus opportun, analyse d'audience, génération automatique de titres/résumés/illustrations avec des mots-clés et hashtags qui garantissent d’apporter de la visibilité au contenu, newsletters personnalisées, playlists sur mesure...

Des contenus taillés sur mesure selon le profil de chaque utilisateur, personnalisés selon son profil, son parcours, en prenant en compte des données contextuelles (lieu, moment, météo...). Les focus groups sont désormais remplacées par la base de comportements réels des utilisateurs existants.

Le cas d'école de la personnalisation sont Amazon, Facebook et Netflix. Ce dernier adapte entièrement sa page d’accueil. Son système Meson couplé au machine learning (à travers la collecte de données pour évoluer constamment) propose même le visuel personnalisé (9 versions) sur lequel l’utilisateur est le plus susceptible de cliquer selon son parcours d’utilisation et son contexte. Objectif : trouver le plus grand combo de séries qui pourrait convenir a des segments pour satisfaire les utilisateurs plutôt que du contenu qui correspond au plus grand nombre. L'algorithme est alors à la base de créativité et diversité plutôt que de standardisation. 

L’IA peut automatiser la curation de contenus, mettre à jour régulièrement les playlists thématiques, profiler les utilisateurs pour faire de la recommandation personnalisée. Selon une étude de Reuters, 59 % des médias utilisent l'intelligence artificielle pour recommander des articles ou projettent de le faire. Your Weekly Edition est une newsletter personnalisée du NYT lancée en juin 2018 qui envoie une sélection personnalisée (via curation algorithmique & humaine) de contenus dans un seul but : ne montrer à l’utilisateur que des contenus qu’il n’a pas encore vus. Amazon Personalize permet aux développeurs sans expérience en machine learning de créer facilement des fonctionnalités de personnalisation. Freshr est un bot Messenger qui résume les actus les plus importantes du moment en fonction des goûts de l'utilisateur chaque matin en seulement 5 minutes destiné aux 20-35 ans. 

Les algorithmes de recommandation sont loin d’être parfaits. L'économiste Matthew Gentzkow parle même d’un "personalization paradox" pour décrire leur côté déceptif. Combien de fois nous-a-t-on proposé un contenu déjà acheté, ou juste du contenu posté par nos amis sur Facebook ? Là aussi, les progrès de l’IA pourront aider à trouver le bon équilibre entre personnalisation et promotion intelligente de contenu. Et peut-être que les méthodes traditionnelles sont parfois aussi efficaces :  RAD, le laboratoire de journalisme de Radio Canada, utilise des sondages en ligne auprès de leur audience pour leur proposer un contenu adapté à leurs attentes.

9L'IA pour rendre accessible

Les technologies de retranscription automatiques facilitent d’un côté la vie des journalistes en optimisant leur temps de travail, et rendent en même temps accessible des contenus aux personnes en situation de handicap grâce à l’automatisation des sous-titres (speech to text), la mise en son des textes (text to speech), la reconnaissance contextuelle des images pour l’audiodescription ou encore la traduction en temps réel.

AI Media TV propose sous-titrages et transcriptions pour des événements en direct en en replay. Ils viennent de lancer le service Scribblr.ai. Trint est un outil de transcription financé par Google DNI, qui sert à transcire automatiquement des flux audio et vidéo. Il est utilisé par l’AP et intégré dans Adobe Première. Mediawen gère la traduction de contenus vidéo en temps réel à l’aide d’IBM Watson et du text to speech, en voix de synthèse ou en sous-titrage. L’AFP a développé l’outil Transcriber, qui permet à ses journalistes d’automatiser la retranscription des entretiens. 

10L’IA pour la production vidéo et la création  

Avec le besoin grandissant des médias de fabriquer de formats courts adaptés aux réseaux sociaux, de nombreuses start-ups proposant des solutions clés en main se sont développées. On peut alors utiliser l’IA pour générer automatiquement du texte à partir de documents graphiques, ou une vidéo à partir de textes. L’IA assiste aussi dans les différentes étapes techniques de la captation et de la diffusion. Elle intervient dans la post-production de l’image et les effets spéciaux. Le nombre de solutions contenant des briques IA dans le développement de l’édition vidéo et du média management a augmenté de façon exponentielle ces dernières années.

Grâce à la reconnaissance d’image, l’IA est capable d’analyser des rushs vidéo pour produire un montage cohérent. La plupart des grands éditeurs de logiciels de montage, comme Adobe, Avid et Elemental (filiale d’Amazon) ont, eux aussi, déjà ajouté des fonctions de traitement automatique des vidéos pour faire gagner du temps aux monteurs. Adobe et Stanford ont par exemple développé une IA qui automatise une partie du travail de montage vidéo tout en laissant la main à l’homme sur la partie créative. L’outil peut par exemple faire différentes propositions de montage d’une scène de dialogue. Gingalab crée des vidéos automatisées et personnalisées et génère automatiquement des best-of selon une ligne édito prédéfinie (humour, tension, focus sur un protagoniste…), en mettant à disposition des outils de montage simplifiés, pour publier ensuite automatiquement sur les réseaux sociaux et agréger les analytics.

En septembre 2018, la BBC a diffusé une émission entièrement fabriqué par un robot. “Made By Machine: When AI Met The Archive” a assemblé une partie des riches archives de la BBC dans un format d’une heure, pas forcément toujours cohérent (le même reproche que l’on faisait déjà aux IA scénaristes des Sunspring, It’s No Game et Zone Out).

Même si la technologie des GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks, ou "réseaux génératifs antagonistes") aide à améliorer la copie des créations par robot, du côté de l’art, l’IA n'est clairement pas prête de remplacer les artistes : elle reste basée uniquement sur des systèmes probabilistes et combinatoires qui n’ont aucune intelligence symbolique ni capacité émotionnelle.

11L’IA pour monétiser et prédire le succès

De l’analyse d’audience avancée à la détection de la bonne cible, les algorithmes du machine learning aident le marketing à séparer les conjectures des tâches essentielles. L’IA, en recoupant données comportementales, analyse d’audience et détection des tendances est capable de prévoir les potentiels succès commerciaux des contenus avant leur diffusion. L’analytique avancée sert ainsi à découvrir des modèles, des corrélations et des tendances permettant d’améliorer les processus décisionnels.  L’IA intervient dans toute la chaîne marketing : l'acquisition de clients (analyse d'audience et segmentation, scoring et ciblage, identification visuelle du contexte), la transformation (personnalisation et recommandation, création de contenus, optimisations de sites et de supports, pilotage automatisé des campagnes) et la fidélisation (agents conversationnels, automatisation du programme client, analyse comportementale, calcul de l'attribution et prédictions).

L’IA est même capable désormais de collecter la "data émotionnelle" pour analyser nos comportements non seulement par nos clics, mais aussi par nos émotions. C’est le dernier degré de de la personnalisation : des médias qui proposent des contenus adaptés à notre contexte émotionnel du moment. Frank Tapiro de Datakalab décrit cette transformation de la façon suivante : "Pendant trente ans, j’ai créé de l’émotion. Aujourd’hui, j’utilise les neurosciences et les datas pour mesurer l’émotion". Amazon prépare même un bracelet pour détecter nos émotions.

Prévision.io est une plateforme en ligne (SAAS) qui permet de créer automatiquement des modèles prédictifs à partir de jeux de données (internes ou externes, structurées ou non) et de visualiser les résultats sur des tableaux de bord. Cette plateforme de machine learning identifie des scénarios prédictifs pour prévoir des pertes d’audience, des désabonnements et pour la gestion des tarifs des écrans publicitaires. Elle promeut la transparence de sa solution, en expliquant chaque résultat et en proposant des recommandations d'actions et/ou des évaluations d'impact. Le groupe Le Parisien-Les Echos a remporté récemment un financement Google DNI pour un programme anti churn (anti-désabonnement). Intitulé High Fidelity, ce projet doit permettre la mise en commun des données provenant des call centers, des newsletters, des envois de courriers et des interactions provenant des applis et des sites web, et prédire les désabonnements en cascades pour éviter la perte massive de lecteurs. Avec “Project Feels”, le NYT de son côté vend des espaces publicité premium en fonction du sentiment du lecteur. Vionlabs est une société suédoise qui intervient sur l'indexation des contenus à partir de la reconnaissance automatique des émotions. Elle analyse les contenus, constitue des graphs en représentant les différents moments émotionnels. Ces données vont ensuite pouvoir alimenter un moteur de recommandation basée sur les émotions.

L’IA est utilisée pour connaître le plus finement possible les utilisateurs et être capable de cibler le meilleur moment - et la meilleure façon - de leur proposer de passer à un abonnement payant. L’IA devient aide à la prise de décision et outil anti-churn.

12L’IA et l’éthique appliquée aux médias

En pleine crise de confiance, l’utilisation de l’IA et d’algorithmes opaques de recommandation impliquant l’analyse de comportements n’est peut être pas un choix évident pour les médias. L’usage de l’IA nécessite en effet l’instauration de règles claires et une documentation transparente à destination de l’audience. Le Big Data qui alimente l’IA est basé sur la collecte massive de données (y compris personnelles). La propriété des données et l'indépendance à l'égard de sources tierces est crucial pour le développement d'un écosystème indépendant, et pourrait être déterminant pour la survie à long terme des entreprises, en particulier pour celles du secteur des médias.

Or, la plupart des jeux de données et des algorithmes disponibles dans les clouds des GAFAs sont biaisés, voire même racistes.

Comment alors intégrer les valeurs du service public (information, éducation) dans un algorithme de recommandation ? Comment fédérer autour d’un sujet pour animer le débat public ? Comment continuer à jouer le rôle de la recommandation dans la cohésion sociale ? Quel est le degré de recommandation que nous souhaitons ? Où se trouve la juste balance entre personnalisation et découverte de contenus ?

Le gouvernement anglais a lancé un observatoire de l’utilisation de l’IA dans le service public. La BBC applique ses règles éthiques dans le programme "Responsible Machine Learning in the Public Interest", rejoint par l’UER, dont le groupe de travail Big Data réfléchit à une utilisation éthique des algorithmes dans les médias de service public pour éviter les biais et répondre aux enjeux de cet outil encore peu maîtrisé : l’inégalité face à l’intelligence artificielle, le neurohacking, la souveraineté technologique, et surtout la nécessité de la complémentarité du cerveau avec l’intelligence artificielle.

L’interprétabilité et l'explicabilité de l’IA , deux néologismes anglais, sont le plus grand défi. L’intelligibilité des algorithmes en général et particulièrement ceux de l’intelligence artificielle est devenue un critère prépondérant, évoqué notamment dans le rapport Villani en France et mis en exergue depuis le RGPD en Europe. Le premier moyen d’être transparent étant déjà d’indiquer clairement qu’un contenu ou une recommandation sont totalement ou en partie proposés par un algorithme.

D’un autre coté, les possibilités des l’IA permettent aussi d’atteindre des audiences de niche pour lesquelles un média n’avait pas les moyens de fabriquer du contenu. Les algorithmes permettent de créer des playlists entièrement personnalisées sur des sujets très ciblés. Et peut être que les médias peuvent aussi laisser la place au vide. En ce sens, Jonnie Penn, auteur invité au Workshop The impact of AI on Media de l’UER en novembre 2018, clame le besoin de "data deserts", des "protected areas from data", pour laisser la place à une "healthy differences of opinions".

Conclusion :

Le buzz autour de l’IA peut aussi déclencher des attentes trop élevées : l’A n’est pas la solution miracle, dans la plupart des cas que l’on a détaillés ci-dessus, elle a besoin d’être associée à l’humain, notamment pour créer du contenu. Elle est néanmoins déjà opérationnelle du côté de la demande dans les domaines de la diffusion, de l’accès au contenu et de la monétisation. Elle a un grand potentiel de bien social pour aider à naviguer dans la masse de contenus par l'optimisation de la recherche et la recommandation personnalisée, et pour prévenir la manipulation.

Autant de cas d'usage, en attendant les applicatifs à venir dans les voitures autonomes... Mais cette nouvelle technologie a besoin d’une sensibilisation d’un côté de l’ensemble des acteurs de la chaîne de valeurs des médias, et de l’autre de l’audience, des plus jeunes aux plus âgés, pour leur transmettre les enjeux de l’IA.

L’IA est bonne à certaines tâches, mais ne remplace pas les humains. La plus grande valeur apporté par les médias est (ou devrait être) la production de contenus complexes qui touchent aux domaines du jugement, de l’interprétation, de la créativité et de la communication, où les humains dominent encore les algorithmes, et le feront certainement encore pour des années à venir.

Mais l'IA peut aussi aider à se poser les bonnes questions : Comment créer de la valeur pour l’utilisateur ? L’IA a un impact très fort sur la société, et le rôle des médias est à veiller de l’utiliser à bon escient, en particulier des médias de service public.

Les cas d’usage sont encore à inventer, en faisant attention toufois à ne pas utiliser l’IA sans répondre à un besoin réels et sans apporter de valeur. Juste parce que l’on a la capacité technique de le faire, son intégration n’est pas pertinente partout, comme le remarque Jonnie Penn : "Machine learning is like salt : you can add it but if you have too much it is unhealthy".

Pour accéder à la cartographie complète avec plus d’exemples (non exhaustifs bien entendu), c’est par ici.

N’hésitez pas à partager d’autres exemples d’applicatifs IA dans les médias avec nous pour enrichir cette cartographie. Vous pouvez nous contacter ici  !

Source: Meta-media | La révolution de l'information

[brainfoodgp]

Spring/2019

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”-Vincent Van Gogh-

Today is Earth Day and spring has finally sprung here in New York. We have been experiencing warmer weather and April showers have been falling steadily, a sign that bodes well for May’s flowers. NY’s Cherry Blossoms are in full eruption and the Tulips and Daffodils are poking their tiny heads out from the earth, reaching for the sun, and ready to explode into a full array of colors. After the cold frigid winter the prospects of spring always brings me such hope and a feeling that anything I set my full attention to can and will come to fruition, as long as my intention is equally powerful.

The winter was no time for hibernation for me, I’ve often admired and envied the bear for its ability to hunker down for the colder months. For me, there just don’t seem to be enough hours of daylight. Which is probably why the conclusion of daylight savings time, for me, is as much a day to be celebrated as Earth Day itself. One more hour of daylight means one more hour I have to get things done! Self-care is one of those items on my list that I am still working hard to achieve and unfortunately it often gets shuffled to the next days, and the next days “to do”list.

I am still working hard on the Brain Food Garden Project cookbook 33 Delicious Recipes for the Brain. Chef Annette Tomei’s recipe collection is shaping up nicely. And the peer community that have already shared their food and garden related stories of recovery with us are divine. They will enhance the powerful message of the project immensely. We are pushing the publication of the book back to 2020 so that I am allowed time to collect more of these gems of lived experience for its pages.

BioCities founder Kate Bakewell and I finally signed our fiscal partnership agreement at the offices of the Urban Justice Center in February and I look forward to sharing more on our new relationship in the coming months. It is an exciting step in the evolution of BFGP’s development. To learn more about BioCities click here.

I am equally excited to share an interview I gave over the winter to Community Access’s C Magazine for their Spring/Summer Issue recently published. To read the new issue click here. Also, I am happy to announce that I have been developing and scheduling guests for the new season of The Candor Report podcast. To be the first to learn of our first guests, our second season series premiere, and to keep up with all the doings of my co host Sharon Simon and me, like our TCR podcast Facebook page by clicking here.

And finally, in May I have been invited to be a panelist at the May 29th PWC Working Peer Summit. This year’s theme is “Envisioning the Future of the Peer Workforce”. To secure a reservation for this year’s summit check out the flyer advertisement at the end of this issue for more information.

Which leads me to the spring issue of the Seeds For Wellness Journal. In my BFGP Feature for this issue I discuss two of the amazing organizations that I am a part of and their missions. The first, the NYC Peer Workforce Coalition (NYC-PWC), and the second is the NYC Trauma Informed Approaches Learning Community (NYC-TIALC), both of which have been keeping me extremely busy over the winter, and appears that they will be doing the same well into spring! You’ll want to check out What I’m Reading this month, the one recovery tool I’ve been utilizing more than any of my others lately is reading...and I’ve been gorging myself on book after book. I am as always sharing some of my favorite resistance articles in Notes from the Resistance. And in Delicious Recipes for the Brain I’m sharing one of my favorite Chicken and Cauliflower recipes that I’ve eaten all winter and trust me when I say it caries beautifully over into spring.

And on this Earth Day promise to yourself that wherever you are right now that when you walk out your door you will look up, out, and around you, and take a minute to appreciate all of the beautiful nature surrounding you. It is the least we can all do to honor our earth on this day and everyday. It may even inspire you to get into a garden, work to prevent food waste, stop using plastic bags and straws or find some other way to make a difference in healing our planet. The Great Mother needs us...all of us.

Now...read on an enjoy! 

BFGP Feature:

My Way Of Working To Make The Peer Workforce More Equitable

The quote above that I’ve chosen to illustrate this month’s feature is from a talk I gave recently to a group of peers in the workforce. As I discussed in the Seeds for Wellness Journal Winter/2019 feature “My Thoughts on Avoiding the Status Quo Vortex.” I have been thinking and talking a lot recently about how to advance the peer movement. And what I am consistently hearing from working peers out in the workforce is that they continually feel that their voices go unheard and that they often feel unsafe and abused in their work environment. When I speak to peers in the workforce their concerns often reflects more not on their own conflicts and misery but how the peers they serve, our community, are often treated with little decency or respect by the very agencies tasked with enhancing and making their lives better, and this above all else seems to be what challenges and affects working peers more than anything else. It speaks to the collective and empathetic powers of the Peer Workforce and gets to the heart of why most of us chose to enter the human services field to begin with.

Just as I stated in my feature story in the winter issue. There is no one right or wrong path in navigating these pitfalls that the medical model continues to put in our path. However, I am able, like I did in that issue, to share with you one of the ways I have combated toxic work environments and that I have utilized to empower myself as I have worked in these diminishing environments. I will also say that having worked for two such organizations, one a housing program, and the other a program run by a city government agency, that the lessons they have taught have helped me immensely in avoiding such abusive behavior in the crafting of the model and mission I’m building for Brain Food Garden Project. I say this, simply to share, that I truly believe every unsettling event in life is a possible tool for learning. And if one chooses to look at it that way, traumatic events may be used as a powerful source for enlightenment.

Getting involved in committee work, learning communities, and other organizations outside of the medical model structure has become one of my greatest sources for resistance. Being in a room full of other peers, sharing our stories, and believing in a better system of care than we currently have available for each other, and working hard to build a system that amplifies our voices instead of constantly trying to silence us has literally transformed my neural pathways. I have been able to clearly envision for myself what a world might look like where government agencies had to answer to us instead of the other way around. A world where peers hold agencies, hospitals, and government officials accountable for their poor decisions that affects our lives and our health. A world where that old horrible saying that people use without even knowing how disrespectful it is “The lunatics are running the asylum”, actually comes true, becomes a statement of empowerment, and bites them all in the ass. My envisioning of the “asylum” and taking it over has never looked so good!

Getting involved. I can’t speak enough to its healing and powerful vibrations! I’d like to share with you two of the organizations I am currently working with. I’ve mentioned IDHA in this journal before. If you’d like more information on their incredible work and mission click here. For this issue I would like to focus on the NYC Peer Workforce Coalition (NYC-PWC), and the NYC Trauma Informed Approaches Learning Community (NYC-TIALC). Maybe you will get inspired by the work we are doing and join us at an upcoming meeting.

NYC-Peer Workforce Coalition

The NYC-PWC’s mission is committed to advancing the work of peer supporters employed in diverse behavior health settings. We are trained professionals who are dedicated to improving our work environments, breaking down stigma, and advancing the peer support workforce. We are guided by the principles of mutual support, empowerment, and the ongoing advancement of our workforce.

Currently, the NYC-PWC is working to secure our 501c3 status. We have several sub committees including Professional Development that works to assist and empower those looking for work. The NYC-PWC participates in conferences to expand our message within our community including recently sponsoring the Job Fair at last December’s Substance Use Mental Health Peer Conference.

I am currently chair of the ad hoc committee working to create the NYC-PWC By Laws and have recently been nominated for the Executive Committee position of Community Outreach Coordinator which, if elected, in addition to reaching out to our workforce to expand PWC membership will also work to create partnerships with other organizations that share like minded goals for our community and aligns with our mission. As Community Outreach Coordinator starting in 2020 I would also be responsible for chairing the planning committee for the PWC’s yearly NYC Working Peer Summit that takes place every May.

The NYC-PWC has so many exciting goals for our future. A perfect introduction to learn more about our work would be to attend this year’s NYC Working Peer Summit on Wednesday, May 29th. This year’s theme is “Envisioning the Future of the Peer Workforce” the objective of this year’s summit panel is to promote a unique vision of what our workforce might look like in the future. The panel discussion showcases two peers that have created their own organizations (I will be one of the panelists discussing Brain Food Garden Project), a man that has created an organization that provides resources to peers with a desire to create their own peer lead organizations and businesses, and a peer that through a paper he wrote while becoming a social worker himself, hopes to de stigmatize the idea of those in clinical settings from self disclosure. It is going to be an exciting conversation and a great evening!

To Learn more about the summit and to learn how to make a reservation to attend check out the advertisement at the end of this issue. And click here to go to their website.

NYC-Trauma Informed Approaches Learning Community

The NYC-TIALC’s mission is to learn about trauma and its informed approaches, to advocate for the creation of trauma informed environments, to use these approaches in behavioral health as well as substance use communities, and to build public awareness through community education and advocacy.

We do this by building public awareness through community education and information dissemination. We work with policy makers, recipients and providers of mental health services, and the community at large, as no segment of the population is immune to trauma.

The NYC-TIALC are currently working with NY Assemblywoman Solange on drafting a NYS declaration for a Trauma Informed Approaches Awareness Day. We have convened a conference call with stakeholders state wide to discuss ways to advance NYS in becoming a trauma informed state. And I recently completed the creation of a briefing book on behalf of the learning community that compiles trauma-informed data from the federal government and states all across the country creating trauma Informed approaches for their communities. The briefing book is currently being edited and will be delivered to stakeholders by the end of May. I also created and currently administer the NYC-TIALC’s Facebook presence. The NYC-TIALC is a small but wonderful community and we would love to have more peers join us! So much more is coming in 2019 for the NYC-TIALC and I am proud to be a member of this amazing group of peers. If you would like to learn more about the learning community or attend one of our meetings held the first Monday of each month join our Facebook page by clicking here.

Brain Food Garden Project keeps me very busy. However, being a part of organizations that compliment the work I’m doing only makes me more connected. And I love being with like minded people working together to make our community stronger.

What I’m Reading:

I love reading books that inspire me and feed my soul in some way. These past few months I’ve been attending so many meetings that subway time has been reading time. It also helps my anxiety on overcrowded rides and channels that energy into something more positive. I’ve been consuming about a book a week and it truly brings me great joy! So with that being said, picking just one book for this issue was next to impossible, so I’ll be sharing two. One that was a brand new read, and that I use as a wellness tool every morning when I first wake up. And the second a re-read that I’ve used in my work and have read many times, with an even more exciting reason behind picking it up again to read recently.

First, The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life’s Direction and Purpose by Oprah. Does the queen of Super Soul Sunday really even need to add the Winfrey? It is the second companion book to that wonderful show. And like the first book The Wisdom Of Sundays it sits on my bedside table for me to randomly select a passage to read at the start of each day. Like daily affirmations it lifts me up and gets me out of bed on even my worst mornings. And with extraordinary passages like, “I have a number of different callings. and I think it’s possible to be called away from things I have been called to in the past. There are goodbyes as well as hellos in our callings. Because a calling doesn’t have to be for a lifetime.” One of the many delicious quotes, this one for example by Barbara Brown Taylor that keeps me inspired all day, is there any wonder why this new book sings to me just as much as the first one? 

I am excited to announce that the author of my second book selection Fran Sorin will be Sharon Simon’s and my guest on the second episode of the new season of The Candor Report podcast kicking off in June. A beat up copy of Fran’s book Digging Deep: Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening came into my life during my second hospitalization for manic depression. The Metropolitan Community Hospital where I was hospitalized had a library of donated books that patients were allowed to visit and borrow. At the time I had been in the psych ward for about four months and I was getting better. I was starting to lay out my plan for creating Brain Food Garden Project when I found Fran’s beautiful book, and the two days in which it took me to read it, I believed it to be a sign from the universe that the seeds of my idea for BFGP were destined to grow into something powerful. As I reread it recently, I was astonished by how many peer principles the book encapsulates that I absorbed in school and that today are the roadmap for my life and life’s work. I bought my own copy after getting out of the hospital and years later would use many of the books exercises in my first peer garden that I created for an affordable housing program in Queens. I’m looking so forward to interviewing one of my personal sheroes and having a conversation with her about her transformational work.

Notes From The Resistance: 

 If you are anything like me you’ve had to limit your news intake. Some days I don’t even recognize this country I call home. However, that hasn’t kept me from staying informed and reading through the Mueller Report just to fully understand how Russia interfered with our elections and just what role the authoritarian fascist vulgarian played in it. It is so important for all of us as Americans to be informed that this report is number 1 on my Resistance list for the spring issue.

1.  Americans are getting our first look at the Mueller Report give it a read here

2.  The fascist regime is making sure that all the progress we made ensuring our kids were eating healthier in schools is being demolished. However, we aren’t going to take it read here

3.  A NJ Congressman wants the world to know that right wing extremism is one of the greatest threats to America read here

4.  The USDA continues to weaken under the fascist regime. Hormel lawsuit reveals some scary facts read here

5.   Let’s end on a positive shall we...the 2020 Democratic hopefuls seem to be taking agricultural issues seriously read here

Delicious Recipes for the Brain:

Chicken with Cauliflower and Apples

Ingredients:

bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (about 2 pounds total)

1/2 head green cabbage (about 1/2 pound), cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces

4 sprigs thyme

1 head cauliflower (2 pounds), cut into medium florets

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Coarse salt and ground pepper

2 apples, cored and cut into 1/2-inch-thick wedges

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees, with racks in upper and lower thirds. Place chicken, cabbage, thyme, and half the cauliflower on a rimmed baking sheet and place remaining cauliflower on another sheet. Drizzle each with 1 tablespoon oil and season with salt and pepper. Place sheet with chicken on top rack and cauliflower on bottom. Cook until cauliflower is tender, 20 minutes, stirring twice.


Remove both sheets from oven. Let sheet of cauliflower cool, then transfer cauliflower to an airtight container and reserve for Pasta with Cauliflower and Collards. Add apples to sheet with chicken and remaining cauliflower and return to oven. Cook until chicken is cooked through and apples are tender, about 20 minutes, stirring twice. Serve immediately.

This Year’s NYC- Peer Workforce Coalition’s annual Working Peer Summit is scheduled for Wednesday, May 29, 2019 from 6-8 pm. This year’s theme is: “Envisioning the Future of the Peer Workforce”. There will be resource tables with job opportunities, a Q & A with peer innovators, raffle items, and dinner will be served! To make your reservation to attend email. OCA@health.nyc.gov Attn: Willie Flora Gaines or call 347-396-7194 and leave a message. Mention Brain Food Garden Project when you book your reservation!   

[kayla1993-world]

Replacing RCMP with Alberta police force would cost more but could see better service: report

Replacing the RCMP with a provincial police force could cost Albertans hundreds of millions of dollars more each year, and result in a four percent increase in the number of police officers on the street, according to a report commissioned by the province.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers report, presented to the government last April and released publicly on Friday, provides no precise figure on how much more Albertans would pay for their own police force should they lose the $170 million the federal government contributes yearly for policing by the RCMP.

Justice Minister Kaycee Madu said a provincial police force would be more efficient and cost-effective by relying on Alberta government support services.

"And while the challenges are not insignificant, we believe that a made-in Alberta provincial police service is worth serious consideration," Madu said at a news conference.

Adopting a provincial police force would take up to six years — four years of planning and preparation, and up to two years of transitioning an Alberta Provincial Police Service (APPS) in, and the RCMP out.

PwC estimates the cost of that transition at between $366 million to $371 million. Madu said the report contains innovative ideas that would help address some of the rural Albertans' concerns about the RCMP, help address some of the root causes of crime, and embed nurses and mental health professionals into the force.

He also said an APPS would be more inclusive of, and responsive to, Indigenous communities. Madu said no final decision will be made until he and his department conduct consultations across Alberta with Indigenous people, rural communities, crime watch groups, victims services and others.

However, he made his preference clear, saying: "The time has come for the province of Alberta to do the same for the best interest of our province" by taking control of policing as Ontario and Quebec have done.

The PwC report recommends a provincial police service be overseen by a provincial police commission, which would have at least two government representatives on the board, along with people from rural, urban and Indigenous communities.

The report says Alberta should consider two models, the more expensive one of which relies more heavily on police with more extensive training. It proposes combining Alberta's sheriff service with the provincial police, for a total estimated cost of between $734 million and $758 million per year.

The government commissioned the study after its Fair Deal Panel suggested in 2019 a provincially controlled police force could help the province have more autonomy.

Last year, the government estimated the study could cost around $2 million. In a video statement posted to YouTube on Friday, RCMP Deputy Commissioner Curtis Zablocki said officers were "fiercely proud" to serve Alberta and will continue to do so until a decision has been reached.

"As of today, and until a decision is made, we remain the police service of jurisdiction here in the province and we are resolute in our commitment to the safety and security of Albertans," he said.

[vfcatvce2019-blog]

[phgq]

Travel agencies, tour operators now allowed in GCQ areas

#PHnews: Travel agencies, tour operators now allowed in GCQ areas

MANILA – Travel agencies, tour operators, reservation services, and other related activities are allowed to operate in areas under general community quarantine (GCQ) at limited capacity starting Friday.

This came after the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) issued Memorandum Circular 20-53 dated October 14 that re-categorizes the said travel and tourism-related activities from Category III to Category IV.

These re-categorized activities can operate at 50-percent capacity in GCQ areas.

The MC also expanded the operational capacity of travel agencies, tour operators, reservation services, and other related activities in areas under modified GCQ (MGCQ) to 100 percent.

The DTI reminded travel agencies and tour operators to maintain minimum public health standards upon the re-opening of their businesses.

It added that DTI’s Fair Trade Enforcement Bureau and its regional and provincial offices will monitor the compliance of these business activities.

“Inspection by the DOT (Department of Tourism), DOLE (Department of Labor and Employment), DOH (Department of Health), and the LGU’s (local government units’) Health Office may also be conducted at any time,” the MC added.

According to a survey of PwC Philippines, 97 percent of tourism-related businesses said the Covid-19 pandemic has a significant impact on their business operations and is causing great concern.

Among the top concerns of these businesses include financial and operational impact, the decline in tourism, and a decrease in tourism confidence.

The tourism sector shares 12.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and accounted for 5.71 million jobs in 2019. (PNA)

***

References:

* Philippine News Agency. "Travel agencies, tour operators now allowed in GCQ areas." Philippine News Agency. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1118737 (accessed October 16, 2020 at 06:59PM UTC+14).

* Philippine News Agency. "Travel agencies, tour operators now allowed in GCQ areas." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1118737 (archived).

[theincredibledish-blog]

The Rise of the Hyper Productive Collaborative Chains

By Jorge Vasconcelos, February 2020.

It is common sense nowadays that technology is radically transforming the ways working relationships are established and managed everywhere in the world, on a larger or minor scale, both from the perspective of employers/clients and the one of employees/collaborators.

The basic fact, as already highlighted by the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress through their report Technology and the American Economy (Vol.1, Feb.1966, page 9), is that technology is eliminating jobs, not work. Since there will be work, the challenge resides on how we, as a society, understand the difference between jobs and work, both terms still used as the direct synonym of classic employment.

In order to make such distinction professionals of today have to redefine “work” as their own individual capacity to create competencies for themselves (through continuous skill learning) in order to generate opportunities. So work starts in the individual and culminates in the opportunities that this individual – or a group of highly competent and highly productive individuals – can generate.

The Hyper Productive Collaborative Chain (HPCC) is the free association of highly competent/highly productive professionals around a mature opportunity they have created together or was brought in by one of the members of the HPCC at a given point.

How the old actors are expected to play their parts

National governments are expected to play a supporting part in a society that is reliant greatly on HPCCs, meaning that their role is to work together to put down transnational labor barriers and stimulate the services to migrate heavily to the internet, as predicted in Kenichi Ohmae’s seminal book “The Invisible Continent” (2001). Entities such as the World Trade Organization can help catalyze such governmental collective effort also aiming at the reduction of bureaucracy, as well as establishing global price fairness policies for services (minimum prices allowed globally) as key enablers of this movement.

Nevertheless, in a society that is reliant greatly on HPCCs the government role must also be understood as marginal by people, in the sense that the governmental machine will be unburdened from the duty of “job creation”, since this responsibility will belong first and foremost to the individuals who aim at becoming highly competent/highly productive professionals.

Employers are expected to play the part of opportunity presenters and aggregators, meaning that they will identify ways for improving their own businesses through the usage of HPCCs, one at a time or many simultaneously.

Companies such as Amazon are already implementing this model and playing the role of an aggregator when they open their business platform for collaboration with other retailing partners, who although live majorly upon sales of products also perform a significant load of services in order to optimize their operations and stand out from competition within or outside the Amazon ecosystem.

In the same way the government will be unburdened from being a primary responsible for job creation, employers will be an ancillary source of work and professional training, since the main responsibility of opportunities creation and skills learning will rest over the shoulders of highly competent/highly productive professionals, who will fully embrace this challenge (of generating/finding opportunities and training themselves) and will freely associate themselves with independent HPCCs in order to be at the forefront of their respective industries.

Consequently, this new paradigm also brings a big shift to the way individual professionals educate themselves.

A new educational model

The impact of the rise of the HPCCs in the education of professionals is that the educational model will migrate from a certificate based model to a competence based one. The difference is that the certificate based model relies on professional education acquired from an academic perspective and mostly out of a practical application context, thus not guaranteeing the results that a professional educated that way can produce (in quantity and/or quality) in the real world.

On the other hand, an individual aiming at becoming a highly competent/highly productive professional, ready to be a valuable part of an HPCC, will educate themself in the most practical way always within the context of applying their skills to the commissioned project at hand.

Currently there is an increase in demand of practical actionable knowledge (i.e. knowledge that can be effectively applied right immediately to a professional project) which can be observed through the rise of online education outlets such as Udemy, Coursera, Udacity, edX, Skillshare and many others. The courses provided by these outlets are becoming increasingly recognized by individual professionals and the companies they serve alike.

In May, 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook was open to publicly criticize the time individuals spent at universities, highlighting the need for an immediate educational model switch from certificate based to competence based.

Multi-purpose careers

In a HPCC based global market, acquiring multiple skills necessary to each project will stimulate professionals to have multi-purpose careers. This purpose-centric/purpose-driven career model goes in the opposite direction of the current function-centric career model in which professionals stick to their roles with a given employer or in a given industry throughout their entire productive lives.

In this scenario the highly competent/highly productive professionals of HPCCs come in contrast with the highly specialized/highly experienced (but not necessarily highly competent) professionals of today.

Nevertheless, the free association of professionals with different HPCCs throughout their career time will allow them to specialize in topics they choose, thus also gaining experience, but never in lieu of displaying sheer competence (which is the only way to secure their place within HPCCs).

Shattering the illusion of control

The dynamism of HPCCs is defined by (i) the free association of highly competent/highly productive professionals which can be on the projects’ premises or remotely located around the world and (ii) the transitional leadership within each HPCC which will change throughout a project depending on which member of the team is more competent to lead a given project task.

This configuration puts a significant amount of pressure on the current command and control management models with their on premises teams and pre-assigned project managers.

The dynamism of HPCCs is already represented – although in a very preliminary way and still too focused on software development – by the Agile management methodologies, which dilute the role of a hierarchical project manager distributing their responsibilities to all participants of the project.

The HPCC dynamism also implies that projects and tasks will be planned and executed considering fast (short term) milestones and not only faraway deliveries, majorly achieved at the very end of the project. The consequence is more flexible project schedules in opposition to rigid schedules that attempt to achieve full control and forecast of what is going to happen within 4, 5 or 6 months ahead.

Figure 1 – Multiple HPCCs contributing to different slices of a client’s operation

Social media validation vs. big labels

In this sense, the structure of HPCCs resembles more the one of a rock band than the structure of a traditional project and/or operation team. The same way as rock bands (and their dynamic nature) HPCCs will rely first and foremost on social media validation of their competence rather than years and years of brand creation through traditional advertisement and marketing campaigns, typical of big services and products providers (such as IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Accenture and so forth). This will be invaluable for both the members of the HPCCs and the clients consuming their services as an alternative to the pricy traditional counterparts. 

Where we are today and where we are going

We are currently in a gray zone where some companies and professionals are already aware and moving towards the HPCC era and others are still oblivious (or in denial) practicing the old traditional business models.

Through history, every evolutionary process (in business or in nature) gains momentum after started thus leading to a point of no return where the old is forced to give place to the new.

Instead of staying oblivious, in denial or trying to postpone the rise of Hyper Productive Collaborative Chains/HPCCs – and all the transformational impacts they bring – the best that both clients (companies, employers) and professionals can do is to embrace this model as soon as possible and consequently jump ahead of the competition (in terms of return over investments, cost-cutting and productivity) while there is still plenty of room for that. After all, the early bird catches the worm.

About the Author: Jorge Vasconcelos is a Business Management & IT Consultant with more than 26 years of experience in these industries. Throughout his career he has provided consulting services to clients from North America, LATAM, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions. Jorge Vasconcelos holds a BSC degree in Electrical Engineering (FEI-SP/1997) and a MBA in Business Administration (FGV-RJ/2004). Jorge Vasconcelos is a volunteer and contributing member of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Young Scholars Initiative and of the Singularity University. Jorge Vasconcelos is a former PwC alumnus (1999-2001, Brazil and USA). Jorge Vasconcelos can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgeefv/

[ainvestops]

Auditors feel companies may have to state coronavirus impact in accounts

MUMBAI: Financial statements for Indian and multinational companies may have to reflect the impact of the coronavirus-related shutdown and disruptions, if any, on business operations, auditors have said. Practice alerts issued by audit firms to clients and to audit teams internally have focused so far on the impact on financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019. But auditors say that the same rules will apply to firms for the full fiscal year ending March 2020, and for subsequent quarters.

ET spoke to assurance and audit heads of India’s largest firms who between them audit 60% of the top 1,000 listed companies and nearly 65% of the biggest multinationals.

“While this [coronavirus] will have an impact in the next one or two quarters, companies with strong balance sheets will be able to withstand this. The problem, however, is that no one knows how long this pandemic and its resultant impact on business will last. Auditors have to make judicious calls,” said Sharmila Karve, former audit head of PwC.

Auditors anticipate several significant issues in case of a major damage to business activities. They include impairment resulting from financial losses, breach in bank covenants and the impact on the company as a going concern.

Since much of the virus-related disruptions took place after December last year, companies will now need to revisit their balance sheets and account for these changes, says a top audit firm’s practice alert.

Mostly likely, a majority of Indian companies will find themselves declaring the impact of the coronavirus disruptions in the following two quarters.

Another issue could be whether a company’s accounts need to be drawn up keeping in mind its ability to function as a going concern — an auditing term which indicates a company’s resources to continue. “It is necessary to consider whether the events that have occurred after an entity’s December 31, 2019 reporting date in relation to the coronavirus outbreak have caused a significant deterioration in economic conditions for an entity, or have introduced significant uncertainty,” says the alert.

“If so, an assessment is needed on whether this results in significant doubt on the entity’s ability to continue as a going concern,” it adds.

It’s this uncertainty which is making it difficult for auditors to take calls on issues like a going concern.

For instance, two of the country’s biggest automobile manufacturers are unable to roll out their new products in the coming months. “They do not have raw materials required to finish the product and launch the cars,” said the audit head of a firm. “These two companies will see inventory impairment this quarter or next,” he added.

“There could be a significant impact on the financial statements of businesses affected by coronavirus, including disclosures on a going concern, change in estimates used for impairment, fair value assessments at year-end and reporting as a new key audit matter in the auditor’s report,” said Yogesh Sharma, deputy managing partner of BDO India.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), the CA body, is also looking to come out with guidelines for auditors on how to offer clarifications in the wake of Covid-19 outbreak.

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[accountancyandtaxupdate-blog]

Top 10 lessons learnt on the road to FASB/IASB lease accounting compliance

For many organisations, adopting and complying with the new FASB ASC 842 and IASB IFRS 16 guidelines has been one of their biggest challenges. For some it still is. Many of Trimble’s Manhattan customers have already finished implementing their systems for accounting compliance or are in the process of going live. We’ve seen close up all the challenges they didn’t anticipate at the outset, and the lessons many of them have learned while undertaking this task. To help smooth the way forward for your own organisation, here are 10 of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from these companies … It’s a long and winding road Many companies underestimated the amount of time it would take to implement the new lease accounting standards—both from a systems perspective and their operational and internal controls. In some cases, their timeline for adoption was severely affected by limited resources and pressure from their ongoing business needs. With the new regulations placing greater demands on the capabilities of accounting technology, many companies found their existing lease accounting systems needed to be updated or replaced altogether because they had been made obsolete by the new rules. They had to spend extra time implementing a system capable of identifying, compiling, processing and analyzing all the important lease data that a finance department now needs under the new standards. The compliance team must be cross-functional Many organisations thought the journey to compliance would be limited to their corporate real estate (CRE) team. It’s now clear that key people from multiple business functions need to be travelling on the bus too. Some companies found that finance people weren’t familiar with the way real estate leases are structured, and CRE professionals and other functional departments sometimes weren’t aware of the accounting ramifications of leases. Working closely with each other is now seen as crucial to achieving a successful transition. The right team to oversee your leasing transformation should therefore include specialists from corporate real estate, accounting, financial planning and analysis, financial reporting, internal audit, tax, IT, legal, procurement, and human resources. Treasury should also be involved because of the potential impact on financial ratios and debt covenant compliance. Appoint an ‘executive champion’ for the project Identifying and thoroughly evaluating the impact on all functional departments has proved to be one of the biggest challenges so far. Some companies underestimated the additional company-wide workload that this requires. If you’re only able to apply limited resources across each department, you might not be ready to meet the required timeline for compliance. It’s vital to make sure the people you assign to the project can devote sufficient time to make it a success. After all, their work on compliance may be in addition to the time they spend on their ‘day job’. The project could drift if people give priority to other demands on their time. One way of avoiding this is to appoint a senior level executive as the company’s ‘champion’ for the project—someone who has enough clout within the organisation to drive the project forward. They must make sure sufficient resources are made available, host regular meetings to plan and review progress, and maintain a communication channel for the with the C-Suite. Are you sure you have ALL your lease data? It’s essential to ensure all your leases are properly identified and assessed at the earliest possible stage. Many companies started out believing they had all their lease data on hand, only to find that a number of leases had not been fully abstracted. In some cases, the information required to calculate the lease NPV and ROU had never been captured, or the fair market value and discount rate had not been documented. In other situations, data from ‘hidden’ leases—such as those embedded in service contracts—had not been properly identified. And leases that were unlikely to be subject to the new standards—such as short-term or low value leases—had not been excluded. According to a PwC survey, 60% of companies reported experiencing difficulties in identifying their complete lease population. In many cases, data needed to be collected from thousands of leases and related documents—such as amendments, schedules, and asset listings—and the process required a multi-departmental effort spanning several months. Certain lease information was often found to be missing or, in the case of decentralised operations, there were significant gaps because some leases were held by subsidiaries. Companies that operate in multiple countries have learned to tread carefully when it comes to extracting data from international leases which contain non-standard periods or are written in the local language. Foreign language leases may contain terms and conditions that are only inferred and are not specifically stated. It’s important to have the leases translated so you can document all the data and make sure the new standards are adopted correctly. By Al Dente (CPA, MBA) FASB/IASB Strategic Product Manager and Amy Turner, Global Solutions Expert at Trimble Real Estate & Workplace Solutions The post Top 10 lessons learnt on the road to FASB/IASB lease accounting compliance appeared first on Accountancy Age.

https://www.accountancyage.com/2019/04/08/top-10-lessons-learnt-on-the-road-to-fasb-iasb-lease-accounting-compliance/

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

mo

How to make your firm more diverse and inclusive

Tips for chief executives

Print edition | Business

Nov 7th 2019

To: ceo

cc: pa

Subject: A hard-headed guide to corporate diversity

Dear David,

You face pressure to “do something” about diversity in your company—not only from your wife and woke children. Corporate clients increasingly demand it in your supply chain. Regulators, who use a “stable” or “inclusive” culture as a proxy for low risk, are breathing down your neck. Governments like Britain’s, which now mandates pay-gap reporting, insist on making more of your sensitive data public. And employees, including former ones, can air their complaints on social media.

Small wonder that 87% of your fellow bosses told consultants at pwc that diversity is a business priority. I’m sure you did, too. After all, you recently posted a job opening for a diversity manager. You were not alone; the number of such offers in Britain has doubled in the past year, say analysts at Glassdoor, a recruitment website. Since June 2017 more than 800 American ceos have signed a pledge to “advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace”.

That is where we are: lots of talk, plenty of initiatives, little change on the ground. Between 2015 and 2018 the share of female executives at large (mostly) American and British firms went from 12% to 14%; for ethnic minorities it moved from 12% to 13%. The ftse 100 has fewer female ceos (six) than it does bosses who share your name (seven). In American companies with over 100 employees, the share of black men in management was 3.4% in 2017, half their share in the population as a whole—and virtually unchanged from 3% in 1985. White women make up 25% of executives and senior managers, compared with 60% for white men. Something is clearly amiss.

In the past this letter would have gone straight to your legal department. Since the term “diversity” entered the corporate lexicon in the 1960s it has been code for avoiding lawsuits—especially in America, where companies have coughed up billions in fines for discrimination over the years. The financial sector still treats it mostly as a compliance issue.

Now you are no doubt tempted to forward it to someone in hr, almost certainly a woman with an arts degree, a sound moral compass and too little power. Don’t. This is your problem. Without your leadership it is unlikely to be solved soon.

Keep reading

Deep inside, you may be wondering if anything really needs solving. The short answer is: it does. With that in mind, you should ask yourself three things.

First, why does diversity matter to your firm? Is your reputation in trouble, as it was for Uber, Nike, Lloyd’s of London and others scarred by #MeToo? Do you, like consumer giants such as p&g, hope that more diversity makes for better products? Are you concerned about attracting and retaining bright sparks? You would be in good company: 97% of executives fret about increased competition for talent (according to Mercer’s hr consultants).

Or are you hoping that diversity will boost the bottom line? To be perfectly honest, I have no idea if it does. It is hard to tell if diversity helps firms do well, or if successful firms are also more enlightened on other matters. But variety has been linked to innovation, productivity and, for example in diverse teams of surgeons, fewer mistakes. Lack of it breeds groupthink—which in turn can lead to disasters. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Lehman Brothers collapse stemmed from narrow-mindedness. And employees who believe their firm cares about gender diversity are 40% more likely to be satisfied at work—and possibly more productive as a result.

Once you have sorted out the why, consider where you want to get to. Some firms, like Facebook, Nike or p&g, say they wish to mirror their customer base. Others are keen not to recruit from an artificially thin talent pool. Goldman Sachs claims its new entry-level recruitment targets—50% female and, in America, 14% Hispanic and 11% black—are based on things like graduation rates. Clear goals make it easier to assess if you are on track. But make them attainable. Qantas’s goal of 40% of its pilot intake to be female by 2028 is as admirable as it looks unrealistic: today just one in 20 pilots worldwide is a woman.

The third question concerns barriers that stop diverse talent from flourishing at your firm. Mapping how it flows through your organisation and where the blockages and leaks happen is a start. A McKinsey study of more than 300 companies identified the second step of the career ladder, from entry level to manager, as the “broken rung”: for every 100 men only 72 women (and just 68 Hispanic and 58 black ones) earned that critical early promotion. When Google was losing women in disproportionate numbers it homed in on maternity as the principal cause; the technology giant increased maternity leave and support for mothers returning to work.

Staff surveys can help, provided they are large and comprehensive enough. After its #MeToo moment, Lloyd’s, an insurance market, found that 45% of staff felt unable to raise concerns about improper conduct. Employees are now encouraged to speak up, including through a bullying-and-harassment helpline. A “culture dashboard” tracking progress on survey metrics will be published with the Lloyd’s annual report.

Now you’ve got your diversity-and-inclusion priorities straight and diagnosed what needs fixing. Good. Before you order a rainbow float for a Pride parade and send staff on a micro-aggression avoidance course, here is what not to do.

American firms spend billions a year on training. Half of large ones have unconscious-bias seminars. Most of these “d&i” programmes are a waste. Or worse: recent research from America shows that diversity statements can put off minorities, possibly because they perceive them as tokenism. Often, firms do d but forget i, which is about ensuring that the workforce is not just diverse, but thriving. Too many try to fix people instead of procedures. Training women to be more assertive in asking for a promotion or pay rise is pointless; they are just as likely to ask for these but also likelier to be seen as pushy when they do. Ushering your managers onto the “Check Your Blind Spots bus”, currently touring America as part of the ceos’ drive, is unlikely to do much. “Days of understanding”, popular in American offices, risk causing “diversity fatigue”. It is hard to beat bias out of individuals—easier to root it out of systems.

The don’ts

Take Silicon Valley. Big Tech has splurged on d&i to little effect. Representation of blacks and Hispanics has been flat (see chart). Girls Who Code, an industry-sponsored ngo, found that a quarter of young women who applied for internships at tech firms said they were asked inappropriate or biased questions. Others reported being flirted with or demeaned. It’s no use hiring diverse coders if the message then is: wear a hoodie and pretend to be a guy, or this is no place for you. They will underperform—or flee, leaving you as undiverse as before. Firms that do not change their ways beyond recruitment see high attrition rates of diverse talent. A lack of diversity is a symptom of deeper problems that a few diversity hires won’t mend.

At this point the how should be relatively clear. In a nutshell, it is all about creating a level playing field. When recruiting, software can mute biases by concealing giveaways to a candidate’s gender or ethnic identity. These include names but also less obvious hints like the sports they play. If only the usual suspects apply, look harder. Specialised recruitment drives, such as visiting “black” colleges or advertising in women’s forums, appear to work. The Bank of England no longer visits the Russell group of top universities, whose graduates apply in spades anyway, and focuses instead on less elite schools. bhp, an Anglo-Australian mining giant, broadened its search for female miners by recruiting from professions, such as nursing, with some similar skills.

In an effort to find trainees from different backgrounds, British law firms are trying “contextual recruitment”. An applicant with Bs from a school where everyone got Cs may be more impressive than one with As from a place full of A* pupils. Rare, a recruitment firm, has developed software which screens candidates for disadvantage and gauges their outperformance against the average for their school.

Once in the workplace, the clearer your criteria for professional advancement, the better. Informality is the enemy of women and minorities. It perpetuates bias. Surveys of American engineers and lawyers found that female workers were nearly twice as likely as their male peers to be saddled with “office housework”, like setting up meetings and conference calls. White men were likelier to be given careerenhancing tasks such as client meetings.

Sponsorship schemes are an effective way to ensure traditionally sidelined groups get a fair shot. PayScale, a pay-comparison site, found that employees with a sponsor made 11.6% more than those without. The Bank of England has offered most of its sponsorship places to ethnic-minority women. Staff surveys, if bite-sized but regular, can bring clarity to fuzzy inclusion metrics. “Psychological safety”, lingo for an environment where people feel free to speak their mind, can be tracked with questions like “are your ideas regularly attributed to someone else?” or “are you regularly interrupted in meetings?” Rotating who chairs a meeting, or a firm word with loudmouths who dominate it, can help.

Many employers—yourself included—would be horrified to learn that they implicitly require employees who want to be considered leadership material to adjust their behaviour. Women shouldn’t need to “act like a man”, gay employees to “act straight” or people with frizzy hair to treat it to “look professional” (ie, white). Let grievances fester and your workers will lose motivation or simply leave.

That is a lot to take in. But unless you do, your most valuable resource—workers—will not be as good as it could be. Best to get ahead of the problem. It isn’t that hard. And it can pay off mightily.

Yours,

Shareholder■

[fayeburnsus]

KCL joins forces with PwC in new pro bono legal advice clinic

Free weekly sessions help members of the public and small businesses

KCL’s Dickson Poon School of Law and PwC – image credit (left) Vladgrigore

The legal arm of Big Four giant PwC has today launched a new pro bono offering in partnership with King’s College London (KCL).

The tie-up will see around 30 PwC lawyers offer up their free time to work with KCL student volunteers and deliver the new community legal service. The weekly sessions will take place at King’s Legal Clinic at the Dickson Poon School of Law on Thursday evenings during term time.

The initiative, which was co-founded by PwC’s Kirsty O’Connor and Keily Blair, will provide members of the public, sole traders, small business owners and social enterprises with gratuitous advice on one-off legal matters. It is unclear exactly which areas of law the clinic will focus on.

Commenting on the new project, O’Connor, a solicitor in PwC’s regulatory and commercial disputes team, said:

“This is an exciting and extremely important venture. Legal services should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or personal circumstances. Many of the clinic’s clients have low household incomes and could not otherwise access legal support. For a society to be fair, income should not be a barrier to accessing justice.”

Purchase tickets for The Legal Cheek Future of Legal Education and Training Conference 2019

Shaila Pal, assistant director of clinical legal education at KCL, added:

“King’s Legal Clinic is delighted to be partnering with PwC on this new service for the community. Every year the clinic sees the demand for pro bono legal advice increase. Ordinary people and small businesses with limited means are faced with legal problems that they are unable to resolve without specialist assistance… It’s also a valuable way for King’s students to learn about how the law works in practice.”

The new offering is part of PwC’s wider strategy for community inclusion and wellbeing. The PwC pro bono unit, which launched last year, provides its lawyers with the opportunity to use their skills and experience to support community projects and widen access to the legal profession.

Legal Cheek‘s Firms Most List shows that PwC offers around 25 training contracts each year and has a whopping 743 offices in 157 different countries! Its newly qualified (NQ) London lawyers start on a salary of £63,000.

The post KCL joins forces with PwC in new pro bono legal advice clinic appeared first on Legal Cheek.

from Legal News And Updates https://www.legalcheek.com/2019/02/kcl-joins-forces-with-pwc-in-new-pro-bono-legal-advice-clinic/