Christmas Decoration at our Department Christmas Party

NSFW

This week’s song is a coproduction of Urban Species and Imogen Heap - whom I hadn’t known before Spotify introduced them to me recently.

YouTube has a live version with - again - rather poor sound quality, but interesting to watch.

This is (for me) just the perfect soundtrack while walking or running through Vienna’s far too hectic streets during one of these grey afternoons, when shops are still open but the lights are as if it were midnight already.

Retrospect

Data Protection Rethought

I attended- due to conflicting teaching appointments on Saturday only, unfortunately - a symposion organised by Prof. Dr. Christiane Wendehorst and team at Juridicum. I was impressed by the amount of people participating on a Saturday morning close to Christmas and the quality both of contributions and audience was great.

Main point of discussion was a suggestion of a new law (AI Data Protection Code) from Professor Wendehorst.

DATUM Trust

DATUM-Trust is an initiative to support quality journalism and democracy in Austria. It was initiated by Sebastian Loudon and launched in October 2024. This week, the trust presented its advisory board with Mag. (FH) Ingrid Brodnig, Dr. Rainer Esser, Dr. Irmgard Griss, Univ.-Prof. Mag. DDr. Matthias Karmasin, Dr. Daniela Kraus, Patrick Swanson and me. The Austrian Academy of Sciences, Horizont and Extrajournal reported on this. Some more info is also on LinkedIn.

#arsboni

Dr. Gizem Gültekin-Várkonyi from University of Szeged discussed her paper on facial recognition AIA and GDPR.

The most interesting part of the conversation is the big elephant in the room which we do not mention explicitly: what her results mean for Hungarian police and Hungarian law enforcement. I must confess that I did not dare to ask this as I didn’t want to bring her into trouble.

Around the Parliament, Edition 58

Together wth Alexandra Ebert, I was kindly invited to participate in this podcast episode 58.

© Parlamentsdirektion/Johannes Zinner

The topic is “Algorithmen und KI - Gamechanger für unsere Demokratie?”

Alexandra works for mostly.ai and has her own podcast. Host Tatjana Lukáš, Alexandra and me had a very nice chat.

When dressing up in the morning, I hadn’t anticipated that this wasn’t audio only (and neither that I would be somehow underdressed a second time on that day, see Weekly 48/2024 on this), otherwise I would not have appeared in a Hanten, but Johannes Zinner managed to however portrait me very nicely.

© Parlamentsdirektion/Johannes Zinner

Platforms

Boris did a marvelous job in organising the closing event of our OENB-project on platforms. We had three panel discussions, each one chaired by a person from the department (Žiga, Marie-Catherine, Peter) - all three of them were outstandingly interesting.

The perspectives given by the panels were, unfortunately, mainly pessimistic. The Platform to Business Regulation was criticised by many as ineffective, the European regulatory environment for platforms was seen as a hindering factor of European innovation not properly protecting consumers either, the competitiveness of European and in particular Austrian businesses on platforms and in their struggle against Amazon and Temu was seen very pessimisticly and last not least it was doubted by many whether the DSA-concept of trusted flaggers is fit for purpose. And on top of all this, also the draft United Nations convention against cybercrime that is currently in the making after a Russian (!) proposal was seen as highly problematic - with very good arguments.

We recorded the sessions, I will put them online presumably next week, but you should watch them only after having taken some antidepressants. Sorry to say, but we really have a lot of e-commerce problems here in Europe, and some of them are legal.

Christmas

We had an outstandingly nice Christmas party. We had lots of crisps and sodas and Liptauer and several hours of just a good time together. I feel so grateful to be part of this group.

(Most of) us in our seminar room.

Prospect

There aren’t any official appointments/events nex week. I will read a lot, write to little and will possibly do an #arsboni annual review.

There’s however one regular #arsboni on Friday December 20 ahead of us when I am finishing this:

Look and See

Zaho de Sagazan

Her Vienna concert at the beginning of March was sold out very quickly so that I failed when trying to get a ticket (see weekly 46/2024). But I was clearly not the only one still wanting to hear her live so that location and day were moved. Now, this is going to happen on March 20 in Gasometer. Yeah! The moment I am writing this (Wednesday night), tickets are still available, but you should be quick if you want to join. Thank you, Hande, thank you, Clara, for the tip!

Tiny Desk Concerts

One of the many YouTube subgenres worth looking into a little deeper are tiny desk concerts. Billy Eilish did one of them recently. It was released on December 12 and got more than 4 Million views within two days (and 8 Million after a week) - with very good reasons.

Do you notice that they use shotgun-microphones here? Reddit tells me (is there anything, Reddit doesn’t know, actually?) that it’s a Sennheiser MKH 418-S..

Hungry

Billie Eilish is also an important part of the soundtrack of this remarkable series.

It’s about anorexia and other mental health issues of adolescents and their treatment. As far as I can tell, it’s a very sensible and thoughtful presentation of its topic. I like, in particular, the trigger warning at each episode’s beginning which is both - a trigger warning and a story on its own.

Tiny Desc Concerts, again

One of my new year’s resolutions is that I really need to watch more tiny desk concerts. See, for example this (7 years old)

or - very different genre, very different performer, 15 (!) years old - this.

And there are subgenres like Tiny Desk JAPAN yet to discover - isn’t, for example, Fujii Kaze a great name and a good start for this?

Here’s an interview with the audio engineer doing all this, being a key factor of success of this series as he brings all the ‘autheticity’:

Josh Rogosin has his own YouTube-channel, https://www.youtube.com/@globalsoundconcerts, and is on Twitter/X as well, just in case you search something to study during the break. He also did an AMA some years ago about his work.

Rammstein/Lindemann and Mouhamed Dramé, again

I am not the only one (see Weekly 50/2024) who was not entirely sure whether the podcast Rammstein – Row Zero is priceworthy. Dr. Felix W. Zimmermann clearly believes that this was not a good idea.

LTO also has a critical report on the acquittal in the criminal case against police officers who killed Mouhamed Dramé (see Weekly 38/2024 on the case).

Tagespresse

Die Dunkelkammer has a very nice talk with Fritz Jergitsch from Die Tagespresse. Jergitsch studied economics, not law, but he has a lot of legal understanding and talks brilliantly about Austria’s media (corruption) and SLAPPs.

He’s also one of the two (the other one is Clara Porák) winners of this year’s Walter Rode Price and the laudatio (written by Renée Lugschitz) delivered for this reason is worth being read.

Daisy

© Birgit Forgó-Feldner

looks back what the year has brought and is not sure yet whether she wants to look forward too.

Have a wonderful week!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)