So the latest Planet Money podcast consists of this absolutely fascinating interview with Harvard professor turned casino CEO Gary Loveman. The interview is fascinating on a number of levels, chief among them this detailed look into data-driven behavioral manipulations: Gary Loveman: Everybody who gambles knows that the house has an advantage. They are not unhappy [...]

this was mentioned in passing in an item on carbon trading that ran in today’s NOS evening news: the delhi metro is now transporting more passengers per day than the dutch national railways. a quick check on wikipedia shows that this is a bit of an understatement: daily ridership of the delhi metro system is [...]

Stumbled across this little hidden gem in an interview on ‘Tendencies and stakes of copyright’ that Lorena Boix Alonso (Deputy Head of Cabinet of Neelie Kroes) gave to the Forum D’Avignon (emphasis mine)c: For example, according to recent studies many consumers are confused about what they are allowed to copy or record concerning content leading [...]

The Jetlag Society is one of the projects that was on display at the graduation show of the Sandberg Institute last weekend. The Jetlag Society consists of a video installation (on display in the rather amazing vondelbunker) and an unbound book (above). “The Jetlag Society is an unbound book on how technology influences time, space [...]

so one of the more memorable moments of this mornings rather dystopian ICT and management of creative content session at the Digital Agenda Assembly came when the representative from EMI publishing tried to make an argument by stressing that consumers can already buy music via iTunes under clear terms. In reaction to my interruption that [...]

the Los Angeles times has a terrifyingfascinating reconstruction of a US airstrike that killed 23 (or 16 if you believe the US military) afghan civilians on 21 february 2010. The reconstruction focusses on the role played by the pilot and camera operator of a predator drone that observed three ‘suspicious’ vehicles whose passengers had the [...]

over the last couple of month i have completely lost my ability to follow the exchanges on the nettime-l, and i have come close to unsubscribing for a couple of times. Fortunately i have not had the guts to do so yet and have forced myself every now-and-then to scan through the subject lines of [...]

in the last couple of days kevin has been posting an amazing series of images of mid 70′s lego sets, which evoke lots of memories for me (and show how ridiculously non-standard lego has become of the last 3.5 decades). yesterday kevin has published an ode to the magic of lego and the first set [...]

Two weeks ago the 50 minute documentary ‘Money & Speed‘ by Marije Meerman aired in the tegenlicht (backlight) series of the VPRO (a dutch public broadcaster). ‘Money & Speed’ casts a light into the world of high frequency (or rather algorithmic) trading, a subject that i have been fascinated with for a while. The documentary [...]

when i visited Al-Jazeera back in november last year, Moeed showed me around the campus starting at the brand new Al-Jazeera English newsroom (depicted in the photo above) and ending the tour in the original Al-Jazeera newsroom that now seems to serve as a rather unorganized tape archive (this is the newsroom that features so [...]