Week 10/2025
The world goes on, another drama
View to Karlskirche from inside Wien Museum.
NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song for the Week)
This week’s song is from a band I had never heard about before it appeared in my Spotify playlist: Jack Leopards & The Dolphin Club
YouTube:
It’s - as I learned on Reddit and then later on “Swiftipedia” - a fake band, founded, inter alia, by Taylor Swift for: surprise, surprise, copyright and licencing reasons. I didn’t know that when I fell in love with the song - but it’s just a great story and a great (version of a) song.
I am - as I also learned this week - clearly not in the original’s target group as I don’t remember that I have ever consciously heard it, although it has 1.5 Billion (!) downloads on YouTube.
There’s some media coverage of this puzzle story.
Retrospect
The #laundry
The laundry made it into ORF III
and also on the ORF website.
Reason for this was an interview on TikTok and platform control. I am not 100 % happy with the light (the face is overexposed, isn’t it?). Interestingly, the camera transmits different colors if one changes the resolution - and 4K (that you see above) is much worse than anything below.
I am not fully happy with the content either. The statement I am quoted with above is (probably) correct from a commercial perspective. However, (at least) X and TikTok (and probably Telegram as well) might have non-commercial, geostrategic goals and purposes so that they don’t care too much about there reputation and their commercial interests and marketing.
I don’t think that people like Elon Musk are too concerned about break or any other economically relevant figure - which makes it even more difficult to regulate their companies.
#arsboni
We had one session with Austria’s Chief Digital Officer, Wolfgang Ebner.
It wa a very interactive and fruitful discussion on how to organise digital matters in a federal state. Digital Souverignty was one of the major topics.
GROW
We had a very nice and very diligently organised team-internal two days project management seminar.
Saskia and Theresa did a terrific job, also by introducing us to the GROW-model that very much steered our thoughts.
EHDS
The European Health Data Space Act (EHDS) was subject of two events I attended this week: I spoke about conflicting ethical values in the regulation in a seminar hosted by Dr. Franz Leisch on Wednesday.
I tried to emphasize on the unsolved ethical dilemmas in the regulation and highligted some of the rather negative statements issued my the more advanced member states (Denmark, Estland, Finland) at the end of the trilogue.
Denmark, for example:
On Thursdaxy I chaired a panel debate on the act.
This was more general, more political and also influenced by the government programme published a few hours earlier. The programme contains a rather “cautious” sentence on the EHDS (“Responsible implementation of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) under the highest security standards under the auspices of Statistics Austria, Austrian Micro Data Center (AMDC) and Gesundheit Österreich (GÖG) and the establishment of appropriate control mechanisms (reports to the Parliament”) that we analyzed in quite some detail.
This is apicture of the closing session with Catarina, Klaudia, Michael, Anna and Katarzyna representing “their” projects.
Prospect
Geopolitical Fragmentation and international Data Flows: The New Reality
Prof. Dr. Christopher Kuner will be in Vienna and speak about the impact of Trump on international data transfers to and from the US on on March 7th 2025 between 10:00-11:30.
Venue: Seminar Room in Schenkenstraße 4/2nd floor, 1010 Vienna
Free entry, registration required, no stream.
#arsboni #laundry
I will do one #arsboni #laundry session with Kurt Judmann, President of the ‘Hauptverband der allgemein beeideten und gerichtlich zertifizierten Sachverständigen Österreichs’ (Main association of generally sworn and court-certified experts in Austria) and will upload it during the week.
Health Data Access
On Thursday, 06/03/25 at 16.30 I join a public panel on health economics and health data access, organised by the Austrian Health Economics Association (ATHEA).
Free entry, registration required, no stream (as far as I know).
AI Literacy and Governance
If you’re reading this on Friday morning, you might still consider joining us at this event: We are fully booked on site, but a stream will be available:
It would be a pleasure to see you there!
Déjà Vu
Vance
VP JD Vance’s speech in Munich see (Weekly 09/2025) was covered in a pre-election edition of a (relatively) new and very interesting and well done podcast I stumbled across: Inside Berlin - hosted by Birgit Schwarz and Andreas Pfeifer.
The political TV-debate after the German election is absolutely worth a look as well. Stupidly, the ARD-Mediathek Link doesn’t work (ouside Germany?) any longer, but this YouTube-Video does:
Vance’s speech is also discussed in the recent edition of “Gerechtigkeit & Loseblatt” that also has an intersting chapter on DSA and X.
AI and University Education
The Bochum Symposion I reported about in last weeks Weekly 09/2025 is quite extensively covered on this website now:
Look and Feel
Winter in Vienna
I visited a nice, yet melancholic exhibition in Wien Museum.
I learned, inter alia, what Pumpanölla, Havelock and Wawalstub’n are.
The exhibition -and the museum - are worth a visit; you have two more weeks to go there for the exhibition.
Daisy
wasn’t that sure what that strange substance under her feet was.
© Birgit Forgó-Feldner
Have a wonderful week!
Kind regards
Nikolaus (Forgó)