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Data mining at The Times

Data mining at The Times

Data mining, also defined as KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases), is a subfield of computer science which has extensively raised in the last years, rapidly becoming a discipline known to a widespread audience, mainly because of its use in...
Mind the Gap: Is Crowdfunding Increasing Women’s Access to Financial Capital?

Mind the Gap: Is Crowdfunding Increasing Women’s Access to Financial Capital?

With an estimated market worth of $3-5 billion worldwide, crowdfunding is a rapidly-growing platform for financing new ventures. A recent study shows that women are increasingly participating in crowdfunding, as both entrepreneurs and investors, and outperforming men. As women...
Social Media and Sensitive Content

Social Media and Sensitive Content

Since its inception, Twitter has considered itself a stalwart for free speech. It’s gotten them into some hot water in the past, including outcries over abusive Internet trolls, as well as the intricate balancing act of promoting open dialogue...
Crowdsourcing for the Creative Industry

Crowdsourcing for the Creative Industry

The fact that crowdsourcing affects the behavior of the online marketplace is no surprise. But what about the creative industry? Does it benefit from the new business model or the process of finding a job as a creative professional...
GOOGLE SYNDROME: A Psychological Perspective

GOOGLE SYNDROME: A Psychological Perspective

Usually Google needs no introduction. But what it stands for is quite relative and as all things in life, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Thus, for my mum Google is the whole internet (!), for some tech...
Photo Opportunities, an analytical review

Photo Opportunities, an analytical review

  With Photo Opportunities the Swiss/French artist Corinne Vionnet puts into question the socio-cultural imagery generated by the abundance of images that circulate everyday on social networks by creating a series of works that are formed by overlapping on...
Smart phones and Digital Inclusion in the developing world

Smart phones and Digital Inclusion in the developing world

The Digital Divide is a socio-economic inequality defined by ones access, use or knowledge of Internet and Communications Technology. This can be defined within a country or on a global scale. The later shows that ICT has developed unevenly...
The perfect bell pepper: from sheet film to Instagram

The perfect bell pepper: from sheet film to Instagram

Some eleven or twelve years ago, I went to one of the many Turkish or Moroccan grocery stores in Amsterdam to buy a bell pepper. For the sixteenth time in a couple of weeks. I tried to find the...
Spread the Word: Fund Clean Oceans

Spread the Word: Fund Clean Oceans

96 days ago, a crowdfunding project started and was widely spread through Facebook, Linked-In and other social media. It all started with the 17-year old Boyan who had a plan. A plan to do something about the plastic pollution...
Citizens take back the power

Citizens take back the power

Journalism, Once a profession filled with bureaucracy and governed by large multinational companies, is now more and more falling into the hands of the average citizens. A change that is fueled by ever growing advancements in the field of...
On the Road Trip Mixtape

On the Road Trip Mixtape

I grew up listening to albums from beginning to end. Each of my CDs had a character of its own, presented as a cohesive piece over the course of a half hour or more. Songs flowed in a narrative bound by mutual...
(Digital) Media: Shaping human´s productive force

(Digital) Media: Shaping human´s productive force

Social media marketing, crowdsourcing or the Long Tail – if somebody should tell how the Internet and associated digital media have changed economy, he/she would most likely describe their influence from a marketing perspective: digital media as means of...
The Cloud: The Cost of Digital Comfort

The Cloud: The Cost of Digital Comfort

Last week’s Internet sensation, the leakage of compromising pictures of approximately hundred (mostly female) celebrities, has evoked different reactions that can be divided into three categories: Excitement about the exposure, Indignation about the violation of privacy, and Fear for...
MOOCs – A driver for innovation in teaching?

MOOCs – A driver for innovation in teaching?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) – free and open online courses offered by worldwide leading Universities have attracted much attention (one might even say social panic) amongst higher education (HE) circles and beyond since their rising popularity in 2012. For many here there was not only aseemingly radically...
The reason Heisenberg doesn’t miss not having a smartphone

The reason Heisenberg doesn’t miss not having a smartphone

Season one, Episode two. Walter White supplies his yet to be developed alter ego Heisenberg with an extra cellular phone. Contrary to his possibilities he doesn’t go for fancy, doesn’t go for state of the art, doesn’t go for...
Getting to know Amsterdam through festivals

Getting to know Amsterdam through festivals

Hopefully the new international students already got a glimpse of The Nederlands and noticed that is not only a country filled with tulips, windmills and grazing cows. No, the Dutchies also have a lot to offer regarding art and music: a little under...
Couchsurfing and Airbnb: Sleeping abroad in a sharing economy

Couchsurfing and Airbnb: Sleeping abroad in a sharing economy

Although I planned to get rid of all digital devices during my backpack experience in Thailand this summer, the mini computer in my pocket called iPhone turned out to be an absolute life saver in desperate moments. It for instance...

On Leaked Pictures & Hackerphobia

Over the course of the past week, the celebrity hacking scandal has been widely and diversely discussed. Its victims have posted their comments on the matter on Facebook and Twitter and various media outlets have reported on the issue....
The BB.Suit: Wearable Tech as Fashion’s New Playground

The BB.Suit: Wearable Tech as Fashion’s New Playground

Borre Akkersdijk’s BB.Suit combines built-in technology with 3D printed fabrics offering an aesthetic approach to electronics that challenges the notion of wearable technology. This high tech jumpsuit is a collaboration between the University of Technology in Eindhoven, 22Tracks, CRISP,...
Drug Education 2.0

Drug Education 2.0

   “Im Grunde ist es ja nur eine Biografie, die ich da erzähle. Dass darin auch Drogen und Gefängnis vorkommen, ist fast nebensächlich.” ($ick) ...
Gov 2.0: please like your government

Gov 2.0: please like your government

  Imagine a friend of you unlocking your smartphone, scrolling through your apps and detect the Adopt-a-Hydrant app. Surprised and impressed he asks you what kind of app that is, in which you can respond: ”oh just normal you...
Has internet worsened our grammar?

Has internet worsened our grammar?

Since the advent of the internet and the world wide web, it has never been easier to exchange and share information with people from all around the world. A good part of the technological inventions developed in the last...
Why questioning the code in Facebook and Twitter matters

Why questioning the code in Facebook and Twitter matters

The Internet has created more possibilities for the individual and civil society. Now they can engage in higher connectivity, collective action, and freedom of expression in what Robert Harris and Rebekah Heacock term as “the creation of social capital online.”(1)...
The Fappening: why you shouldn’t trust the Cloud

The Fappening: why you shouldn’t trust the Cloud

  The Fappening On August 31st, 2014, “The Fappening” took place. This ‘event’, or ‘happening’, stands symbol for the leakage of hundreds of nude pictures of female celebrities. The images where first posted on the internet forum 4chan.org, after...