Stichting WAMS

Summary of the “Data Rush” debate

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Sun, 20 Sep 2015 19:39:44 +0000

This is a summary of the Data Rush debate organised by the When Art Meets Science Foundation as part of the Noorderlicht Photofestival on August 23, 2015.

Present: roughly 40 people. Artists, scientists, people working in the area of privacy and surveillance as well as laypersons.

Opening: Jaap-Henk Hoepman (When Art Meets Science Foundation).

Moderator: Jetse Goris.

Panellists: (see biographies here) Artists: Bastashevski/CH, Curran/IRL, Crispin/USA, Schokker/NL. Scientists: Gürses/USA, Hildebrandt/NL, Bellanova/N.

Goal of the debate was to increase awareness about privacy & surveillance, as well as connecting the scientific and the artistic world
on this topic. All panellists were asked to show a picture of a piece of art, and reflect on that in their opening statements.

Opening statements

Seda Gürses showed a small part of Hito Steyerl’s video “How Not To Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File”. She used this to illustrate that not everyone is treated equally under surveillance: some suffer more, some suffer less. She argued that talking about mass surveillance in terms of privacy misses the bigger picture. It overlooks the political and economic component. We should be asking ourselves questions like: Why is the surveillance infrastructure there? Why are so many companies and governments
working on surveillance? What is the overarching political and economic project supported by these activities? And what do we think of that overarching project?

Quote from the movie: “Today the most important thing in the world is how to remain invisible. Love is invisible. War is invisible. Capital is invisible.”

Mireille Hildebrandt showed a picture of a manhole cover with Google’s logo on it: a telling visualisation of the fact that a private company (Google) is owning a critical infrastructure (Search). Increasingly this infrastructure is used to interfere with the world we live in. Google can already bias election results by influencing the ranking of results returned for election related search queries. It is therefore crucial that we start thinking about how such infrastructure should be designed, and how it can be inspected and subjected to public scrutiny.

The image provides a metaphor for how search works: we live our digital lives by flushing our digital debris, our search queries, metadata, through the sewer owned by Google. We do not expect to be confronted with our debris, yet Google collects, saves, measures and aggregates this debris and turns it into something valuable. “Data Flush” instead of “Data Rush”. Michel Serres in his book “Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?” argues that we own what we pollute. We pollute what we wish to possess, and we clean what we make available to others. This offers a new view on privacy: perhaps one dimension of privacy is related to our trust that other will not trespass on our filth.

Rocco Bellanova showed a picture of a bird caught in a net, for the purpose of being tagged. He explained that more the bird tries to escape the more he gets trapped, and the more the very thinly weaved network becomes visible to us. A very nice visualisation of the state we are currently in. Rocco reflected on the concept of data, noting that the modern state heavily relies on data, and that data stands between the reality and our knowledge of that reality and our ability to act on that reality.

Mari Bastashevski started by showing a video commercial by Verint (Israel), a producer of surveillance technology. The video was very joyful, innocent if you like, with a very happy, lively tune as its soundtrack. Verint may be an extreme example, but hundreds of successful surveillance companies (Gamma, Hacking Team) have similar promotional material. Interestingly, nothing in the self representation of these companies and their promotional material discloses what the companies actually do. They simply portray privacy as a form of secrecy (that benefits the bad guy), and mask surveillance as a normal and everyday activity. Mari believes the extreme banality presented by these catalogues is extremely dangerous, because it serves as a façade for these institutions that otherwise operate in extreme secrecy.

Mark Curran showed a photograph of the trading floor of the Chicago Board of trade, taken in 1999, filled with people in bright coloured shirts. This a good example of how a photograph itself is only ‘surface’. The real story behind it is the fact that in 1999 (when the picture was taken) there were 1500 traders working on the floor, against only 400 in 2011 (and even less now). Mark is a practice lead researcher, thinking about such questions of representation. In his latest project “THE MARKET” he provides cultural description to the functioning and condition of global markets, with particular emphasis on machinery of financial capital as central innovator of ‘algorithmic technology’.

The market is the dominant frame in which we discuss society at large, and algorithms in particular. We mainly look at them from an economic perspective and hence understand them mainly in terms of revenue. This frame is too narrow to fairly discuss the role of algorithms in society, looking at both the potential benefits as well as the possible negative impacts.

Sterling Crispin showed an image of his “Data Masks” (also on display in the exhibition), created using facial detection algorithms. These data masks in a way represent the underlying facial recognition algorithms, give these algorithms a kind of physicality, a way to talk about them and point to them (and the threat of surveillance in general) in more concrete terms. On the other hand these masks also pave the way to a more ‘animistic’ understanding of these algorithms as they suddenly have a face.

In his view, technology is this pulsing organism that we are helping to evolve. And we still have a long way to go. Right now we are at the single cell organism level of technology. The fastest computer is maybe as smart as a dragon fly, but it releases as much heat as a bomb going off. We humans on the other hand don’t need any cooling for our brains. Perhaps we can learn more from the way systems are engineered in nature, to design technology in a more human friendly way.

Adri Schokker showed a 3D reconstruction he made of the island Utoya, where Breivik performed his terrorist attack. This is a recent example of his work that is created based on found images and video footage to reconstruct certain events. He is triggered by news stories and photographs of events that reveal how we report on these events in a new way based on new information technology, and how these technologies change the way we view and perceive these events. These new technologies are a new interface between us and the images we see, blocking or distorting our perception. They also raise important questions relating to how far you can go as an artist to freely use everything that surrounds you or that can be found on the Internet.

Discussion

How do you make the invisible visible in a world mediated by technology?

There are several ways to go about this. The first approach (taken by Trevor Paglen, but also Mari Bastashevski) is to explore the perimeter between the visible and the invisble, thus giving some visibility to the invisible.

The other approach (explored in the exhibition through the work of James Bridle) is to recreate the invisible based on information about the invisible object.

Intangible things, like algorithms, can be made ‘visible’ by interacting with them, playing with them, and learn how they respond to inputs. This creates an understanding of what the algorithms do, creates a mental image of their workings that allow us to adapt our interactions with these algorithms for our own benefit. This playing is a very human thing to do, and something we also do when interacting with real people and real institutions.

This translation, in a way this demystification of the algorithm has a potential to shift the power balance in a similar way to when the bible was translated from Latin or complex English into the common tongue of the people.

If you ask people that are targets of surveillance, they will not say it is invisible. In the US, black people will tell you that they have been under the same surveillance that Snowden has revealed to us for decades…

It is important to realise that even the visible may in fact be invisible. Verint’s promotion video is already an example of this, hiding from plain view what surveillance really is like. The public image, the recirculation of the same images time and again is in a way a cloak of publicity that hides the real things that are happening, the real things these people are doing from plain sight.

Invisibility can also be understood in terms of access. The invisible consists of the same properties, the same things as the visible. It consists of the same tables, and chairs and people in suits and ties. But the access permissions are different.

The economic and political dimension of surveillance.

The surveillance debate has so far focussed on the difference between dragnet, mass surveillance and targeted surveillance. The general consensus seems to be that mass surveillance is bad, but targeted surveillance is good. But this avoids the question who is targeted, how, why and whether this is ok. (See also Seda’s opening statement that relates to these issues.) Why is surveillance in place? Who is it serving?

The problem is exacerbated because we live in a globalised world. Some people in the panel linked the surveillance problem to climate change and the existence of power vacuums.

Others warned that we should avoid the pitfall of saying that it is all politics, all economics, and to blame it on the ‘traditional’ bad guys. If we want to properly understand the problem, we have to look at what difference this new technology making. And then talk about the moral and ethical dimension and how to regulate and enforce these norms.

Surveillance is rarely discussed in terms of who is making money out of it. Surveillance programs are rarely seen as a multi-billion deal for someone (else).

Broadening the perspective

We should drop the notion we have nothing to hide. We should stop looking at the issue from the perspective of security vs privacy. We have to look at the distribution: who is giving up his privacy for whose security? Instead of you giving up some privacy to get some security in return, it is usually you giving up some privacy so someone else gets some security.

When talking about algorithms, we have to realise there is a trend towards embedding these algorithms in robots. Think of drones without operators, but algorithms that decide where to fly, when to drop a bomb or fire a missile. And just as surveillance has become cheap, these killer robots will become cheap. Essentially making war cheap.

Algorithms make irreversible decisions, they influence the world we live in. We need to understand and provide a cultural description of what it means for machines, algorithms, to have agency.

Maybe we should slow down technological developments, stop adding layers of complexity if we do not even understand the previous layers.

On the question: how does art help science (or vice versa)?

Artists raise questions that are not raised by scientist because scientists are so busy with their disciplinary research, because their output is measured for that and they are funded for that. Artists think out of the box, more than scientists do.

The panel suggested to explore the idea of applying ‘design crit’ (critically looking at and commenting on a design as commonly done in the arts) to software (and hardware) and thus find new ways of looking and understanding them.

The tags don’t matter anymore. Anyone can decide what he wants to be: artist or scientist, depending on the context, and what he is working on. This is getting more and more accepted, also in academic circles, and this cross disciplinary communication is beneficial for everyone.

Final comments based on questions from the audience

The ‘Data Rush’ problem needs to be politicised, but not in a trivial “do we want to be part of this?” kind of way. It is not interesting to frame it as a battle between us the victims versus them the system, the bad guys. We are all part of it, contributing to it, using smartphones, generating data. Also, there are real security issues that need to be addressed. So we have to think about how to create a system that keeps intelligence services, law enforcement, government and private industry complexes in check.

Having said that, we have to keep in mind that although we can develop usable privacy tools that help protect people, that protection is only limited. And we cannot expect individuals to solve the problems created by the surveillance assemblage by themselves. There are no tools that do not leave some trace, and even if there were, there are data mining tools that will single you out as the person that doesn’t like to leave a trace. There is no possible ‘outside’ that people can escape to.

Bureaucratic states have effectively been replaced by information states, and in some of these information states there are victims. At the same time, any resistance to government also relies completely on the internet.

There is reason for optimism though. There is certainly a possibility to take charge, to take control over the technology that surrounds us. We cannot expect citizens to do this individually. This is an effort for all of us, our society, together.

Opening expositie “Data Rush”

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 20:18:20 +0000

Op 22 augustus werd de “Data Rush” expositie van de Nooderlicht Internationale Fotomanifestatie 2015. Jaap-Henk Hoepman gaf daarbij de volgende toespraak.

Goedenmiddag dames en heren,

Mijn naam is Jaap-Henk Hoepman. Ik ben wetenschappelijk directeur van het Privacy & Identity Lab, en Universitair Hoofddocent aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Ik doe wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar de bescherming van uw en mijn privacy.

First I would like to welcome the photographers and artists that are present here and take part in either the Data Rush programme, the When Art Meets Science programme, the Pulse programme and the Making Onself programme. People like (korte lijst aanwezige kunstenaars).

Beste (korte lijst aanwezige personen). En alle anderen die ik hier niet heb opgenoemd: mede namens alle medewerkers van Noorderlicht wil ik u van harte welkom heten bij de opening van de Noorderlicht Internationale Fotomanifestatie 2015. We wisten dat u zou komen. Dat is geen verassing: immers RSVP. Maar wij zijn niet de enigen. KPN, T-mobile, Vodafone: ook zij weten dat u hier bent. Dat moet wel, want anders bent u niet bereikbaar op uw smartphone. Over smartphones gesproken. Als U een Android gebruiker bent, dan weet Google ook dat u hier bent. En als u een Apple fanboy bent, dan weet Apple dat ook. En Buienradar, Nu.nl, etc. De lijst is eindeloos.

De digitale goudkoorts, de “Data Rush”, heeft ons geleid naar een wereld van ongekende mogelijkheden. Maar ook naar een wereld waarin u niet de klant bent, maar het product dat verkocht wordt. Het kan u niet verbazen, nee het mag u niet verbazen: “There is no such thing as a free lunch”. Een kunstenaar als Jennifer Morone, te zien in de expositie, voert dat idee door tot in het extreme door zichzelf te verkopen via haar bedrijf Jennifer Lyn Morone Inc.

De smartphone is een fantastisch apparaat, waar weinigen van ons meer zonder zouden kunnen. Maar het is ook een surveillance middel waar de Stasi zijn vingers bij af zou hebben gelikt. En ook nu gebruiken landen als Egypte, en Turkije het Internet om hun burgers in de gaten te houden en te onderdrukken.

Mensen zijn sociale wezens. Het is dus geen wonder dat sociale netwerken zoals Twitter en Facebook wereldwijd miljarden gebruikers hebben. Ik ben het niet eens met mensen die zeggen dat ‘de jeugd’ (nou ja , jeugd: Twitter gebruikers zijn op zijn minst thirty-somethings) zelf zijn privacy verkwanselt door op Facebook te zitten. Dat doet Facebook toch echt zelf. Door te pretenderen een veilige omgeving voor intieme communicatie aan te bieden, maar ondertussen wel met al die conversaties mee te luisteren, op te slaan en te analyseren. Daarin gaan ze ver: zelfs de status updates die je begint te typen maar uiteindelijk niet verstuurd, worden geanalyseerd.

Facebook is een keukentafel. De tafel waar alle intieme gesprekken gevoerd worden. Maar dan wel een keukentafel uit een James Bond film: volgestopt met microfoontjes en cameraatjes. Joyce Overheul reflecteert met haar boek “De Drie maanden uit het leven van Rogier” op deze situatie.

Als het goed is vertel ik u niets nieuws. Zo langzamerhand weten jullie dit allemaal wel. Maar toch gebruiken we onze smartphone, zit u of Facebook. Toch trekken wij hieruit geen conclusies. We halen onze schouders op en gaan door met de routine van de dag. Sommigen van u hebben misschien gekeken naar alternatieven. Maar die zijn er in feite niet. De enige echte oplossing is een hutje op de hei, zonder Internet. Niet te boeken via AirBnB. Digitale zelfmoord dus.

Begrijp me goed. Ik ben niet tegen technologie. Integendeel. Ik ben zelf computer wetenschapper. Ik ben dol op het Internet en moet er persoonlijk niet meer aan denken dat ik, bij het indienen van een wetenschappelijk artikel 1 dag voor de deadline, 50 tot 100 gulden (jawel!) moet betalen aan FedEx om te zorgen dat de in tienvoud uitgeprinte stapel artikelen nog op tijd bij de programma commissie bezorgd wordt.

Ik ben wel tegen slecht ontworpen technologie. Technologie die informatie lekt: MAC adressen van draadloze netwerken, zelfs als je er niet mee verbonden bent. Technologie die moedwillig zoveel mogelijk informatie over burgers verzameld. Technologie die mensen exploiteert in plaats van ondersteund. Technologie waar niet de mens centraal staat. Onmenselijke technologie, in feite.

Vaak worden privacy en veiligheid als elkaars vijanden gezien. En in onze huidige risicomijdende samenleving, delft privacy dus het onderspit. Dat onderscheid tussen privacy en veiligheid is in mijn ogen echter een valse tegenstelling. Een retorische truuk.

Veiligheid en privacy zijn beide een fundamenteel mensenrecht. En zouden beide daarom door de samenleving beschermd moeten worden. En daar moeten wij, u en ik, ons sterk voor maken.

Twee jaar geleden zijn Gea Smidt -kunstenaar- en ik –wetenschapper- begonnen om wetenschap en kunst aan elkaar te verbinden, daaruit is When Art Meets Science ontstaan. Wij zijn geloof ik één van de veroorzakers van het feit dat het thema van Noorderlicht dit jaar “Data Rush” is. En we zijn erg blij dat Noorderlicht ons de mogelijkheid heeft geboden om binnen deze expositie kunst en wetenschap op dit thema bij elkaar te brengen.

Ons doel is om mensen niet alleen bewust te maken, maar ook aan te zetten tot verandering. Dat doen wij, dat doet Noorderlicht door middel van deze expositie. Daarnaast organiseren wij nog een drietal zondagmiddag lezingen, en morgenmiddag een debat tussen kunstenaars en wetenschappers. U bent ook daar van harte welkom.
Ik hoop dat ik u enthousiast heb gemaakt voor het thema, de expositie, lezingen en het debat, en u heb doordrongen van het feit dat het ook anders kan.

Dan geef ik nu graag het woord aan Auke Hulst, tegenwoordig schrijver en muzikant. Auke is oud tekstschrijver van Noorderlicht, en naar ik hoor wordt hij nog steeds node gemist! Hij zal samen met zijn band “De Meisjes” officieel de Noorderlicht Internationale Fotomanifestatie openen.

“Data Rush” lecture Jaap-Henk Hoepman

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:09:28 +0000

On Sunday October 4, 15:00-16:00, Jaap-Henk Hoepman from Radboud University / Privacy & Identity Lab will give a lecture as part of the WAMS “Data Rush” programme entitled

Honest design.

The lecture will take place at the Noorderlicht fotofestival venue (the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen, directions).

Abstract

The dream of an open and free Internet is all but shattered. It has become an instrument for government surveillance and industrial profiling. As a result, people trust their smartphones and the internet services they use less. This is a shame, because many Internet services and smartphone apps are genuinely useful. And, if properly designed, you can be in control over such devices and services when you use them, without having to worry about negative consequences. In this talk I will explain how.

Biography

Jaap-Henk Hoepman (1966) is associate professor at the Digital Security group of the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is also scientific director of the Privacy & Identity Lab.

He studies privacy by design and privacy friendly protocols for identity management and the Internet of Things. He speaks on these topics at national and international congresses and publishes papers in (inter)national journals. He also appears in the media as security expert, and writes about his research in the popular press. He is actively involved in the public debate concerning security and privacy in our society.

Jaap-Henk is, among others, co-founder of the Privacy & Identity Lab, member of The Internet of People, former member of the Executive Board of Trust in Digital Life, former chair of the IFIP working group 11.2 on “Pervasive System Security”, and former coordinator and co-founder of the Kerckhoffs Institute offering a master programme in Computer Security.

In his free time he enjous making composing music, designing graphics, cooking, and practice Okinawan Goju Ryu karate-do.

“Data Rush” lecture Eleni Kosta

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 17:35:33 +0000

On Sunday September 20, 15:00-16:00, Eleni Kosta from Tilburg University will give a lecture as part of the WAMS “Data Rush” programme entitled

Leaving traces, living profiled: the legal challenges from ‘consenting’ to tracking in online and mobile environments.

The lecture will take place at the Noorderlicht fotofestival venue (the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen, directions).

Abstract

Have you ever wondered how it is possible that the same website appears to you in another language than me, without burdening us with constant questioning on our preferred language? This is done through cookies that are quite strongly regulated in the EU. But then you have also noticed the annoying cookies notifications on EU website, which indicated that something went wrong with the practical implementation of the law. Have you also may wondered why you get a question whether you allow your phone to send your location (where to?) in order for you to make use of a mobile application? Why is this happening and what is done with your location data? This lecture will attempt to provide you with answers to such practical questions and reflect on the efficiency and effectiveness of the European legal framework.

Biography

Dr. Eleni Kosta is Associate Professor of Technology Regulation at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT, Tilburg University, the Netherlands). Eleni obtained her law degree at the University of Athens (Greece) in 2002 and a Masters degree in Public Law at the same University in 2004. In 2005 Eleni completed an LL.M. in legal informatics at the University of Hannover (Germany) and in 2011 she was awarded the title of Doctor of Laws at the KU Leuven (Belgium) with a thesis on consent in data protection. Eleni is conducting research on privacy and data protection, specialising in electronic communications and new technologies, as well as on health law and intellectual property. She has been involved in numerous EU and national research projects. In 2014 Eleni was awarded a three-year personal research grant for research on privacy and surveillance by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (VENI/NWO).

Debate “Data Rush”

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 13:56:27 +0000

WAMS is organising a debate among scientists and artists. With this debate we want to explore the theme “Data Rush” from both the artistic and scientific perspective. We will discuss a number of questions. What are the underlying problems we (citizens, society, business, government) are facing, and what is our way out? Is ‘privacy’ the right frame to discuss the challenges we are facing? Or is there a more general disconnect with the technology that is increasingly surrounding, nurturing and nudging us? Can we give ourselves more control over this technology? Should we even try? Can art help science, and can science help art? If so, how?

(The debate was a great success. You can read a summary of the debate here.)

(Data Masks, Sterling Crispin, 2015)

The debate will take place at the Noorderlicht Photofestival venue (the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen) on August 23, from 15:00-17:00 (directions).

Participating scientists

Seda Gürses (New York University): Seda is currently a post-doctoral fellow at New York University. In her research, she studies conceptions of privacy and surveillance in online social networks, requirements engineering, privacy enhancing technologies and identity management systems. She is also an active member of alternatif bilisim, an association based in Turkey working on digital rights and a member of the artists collective Constant VZW based in Brussels.
Mireille Hildebrandt (Radboud University): Mireille Hildebrandt is a lawyer and philosopher. She holds the Chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Institute of Computing and Information Sciences (ICIS), at Radboud University Nijmegen [a productive transgression of disciplinary borders], and has been appointed as Research Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with the Faculty of Law and Criminology. Her research is focused on interfacing law and technology, based on the nexus of philosophy of law and technology, mainly targeting the implications of smart technologies for democracy and human rights (machine learning, cyber-physical infrastructures, cloud robotics, neuroscience). She publishes widely on these subjects. In 2015 her Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law was published with Edward Elgar.
Rocco Bellanova (Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Norway): Rocco is Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and post-doc at the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles. He has completed a PhD on the powers and politics of data protection, in particular in relation to the deployment of security technologies. Currently, his overall research interest is to investigate the implications and effects of ‘governing (through) data’ in the production of the social, so to ground a critical reading of data governmentality on an empirical study of practices of social control and knowledge generation.

Participating artists

Mari Bastashevski (Switzerland): Bastashevski’s work spreads across the disciplines of investigative research, journalism, and art, deliberately blurring the boundaries among
them in an attempt to challenge existing information delivery modes and bridge the spaces between practices. Her ongoing project “State Business” focuses on the international conflict and mass communications interception industry, its participants, and the layers of state secrecy under which these operate. Her work “It’s Nothing Personal,” exhibited as part of Noorderlicht 2015: Data Rush, is set in the space between what global surveillance firms promote in their self-representation and what the testimonies of those directly affected by these technologies disclose. In 2014, she worked on a project in Ukraine addressing the nexus of money, power, and organised crime in the build up to the “hybrid war” there. Between 2007 and 2010, she worked in the Russian North Caucasus on “File-126,” a project about the abductions of civilians under the guise of Russian counterterrorism regime. Her work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, Courrier International, Le Monde, VICE, and exhibited with Elysée-Musée de l’Elysée, Art Souterrain, the Open Society Foundations, Polaris Gallery and East Wing, among others. In 2010, she spent a year as artist in residency at Cite des Arts. She studied Art History and Political Science in Copenhagen. She is based in Switzerland, but she is never home. You can follow her on Twitter
Mark Curran (Ireland): Mark Curran is an artist researcher & educator who lives & works in Berlin & Dublin. He completed a practice-led PhD at the Dublin Institute of Technology, is Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Photography programme, Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT), Dublin and is Visiting Professor on the MA in Visual & Media Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. Incorporating multi-media installation informed by ethnographic understandings, since 1998, Curran has undertaken a cycle of long-term research projects, critically addressing the predatory context resulting from the migrations and flows of global capital. These have been extensively published and exhibited, including DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2010), Encontros da Imagem, Braga (2011), PhotoIreland, Dublin (2012), Grimmuseum, Berlin (2013) & FORMAT, Derby (2013). Curran has also presented widely, most recently, McGill University, Montreal (2014), Royal Anthropological Institute, London (2015) & University of Ljubljana (2015). Supported by Arts Council of Ireland & curated by Helen Carey, his latest multi-sited transnational project, THE MARKET, continues the cycle & focuses on the functioning & condition of the global markets. It has been presented as installation at Gallery of Photography, Dublin (2013), Belfast Exposed Gallery (2013) & Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2014). In addition to his NEPN commissioned presentation at Noorderlicht 2015, an extensive installation will shortly open at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland. A publication of THE MARKET is being planned.
Sterling Crispin (Los Angeles): Sterling Crispin is an artist and technologist born 1985 in Maui, Hawaii. His work explores the relationships between spirituality, human consciousness, and impermanence as they relate to the exponential growth of computing technology and our networked global culture. He received his Master of Fine Arts and Master of Science in Multimedia Engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara. Crispin’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and has been published in Frieze, Wired, BOMB, Rhizome, Creators Project, Fast Company, Y-Combinator’s Hacker News, and the Post Internet Survival Guide.
Adri Schokker (Groningen): Adri Schokker is a media artist and exhibition maker born in 1974 and living in Groningen. In his work he researches the impact that new digital image technologies have on our society, the way in which digital images determine communication, and how the images generated by these technologies influence our notion of what is real. In his installations Adri Schokker isolates these images from their medium and their context. The installations are never finished and by making use of innocent game play, the spectator is seduced to interact with the work or to alter it. A process that asks for a new dialogue with the digital image. He exhibited his works on several festivals and art exhibitions in the Netherlands like STRP, Gogbot and Kunstvlaai, and created exhibitions for Media Art Festival Friesland and PRICCAPractice.

The debate will moderated by Jetse Goris (University of Groningen).

“Data Rush” lecture Jeroen van den Hoven

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 06:24:31 +0000

On Sunday September 6, 15:00-16:00, Jeroen van den Hoven from Delft University of Technology will give a lecture as part of the WAMS “Data Rush” programme entitled

Data protection in the age of Big Data: what is at stake?

The lecture will take place at the Noorderlicht fotofestival venue (the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen, directions).

Abstract

I discuss two scandals. The first is that advocates of privacy often have trouble explaining why privacy is morally so important, or if they are articulate about the rationale of privacy, they disagree among themselves. The second scandal is that we still are hostage of the metaphor of the balance of national security vs. privacy, which is unhelpful. I try to indicate ways out of the fly bottle.

Biography

Jeroen van den Hoven is full professor of Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology, he is editor in chief of Ethics and Information Technology. He was the founding scientific director of 3TU.Ethics (2007-2013). He won the World Technology Award for Ethics in 2009 and the IFIP prize for ICT and Society also in 2009 for his work in Ethics and ICT. He is Programme Chair of the Dutch Research Council on Responsible Innovation and member of the board of trustees of Bentley University.

“Data Rush” location

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 06:18:41 +0000

WAMS “Data Rush” is taking place at the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen, The Netherlands

The entrance to the Old Sugar Factory is located on the Energieweg, near the Groningen Ring (exit Centrum/Hoendiep). The Factory is accessible on foot and by bicycle from the bridge at Hoendiep street.

Bus

From the main Bus Station you will have to take the bus line 8 to the Atoomweg bus stop (3 minutes walk)

Parking

You will find free car parking along the Energieweg or at Kwantum’s parking space. Walk a few meters across the bridge at Hoendiep until you reach the entrance of the Sugar Factory.

The parking space for disabled people is accessible through the entrance on the Van Heemskerckstraat. To open the fence you’ll need to call: + 31 (0) 6-857 43 980.

WAMS #1: Data Rush

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 13:53:33 +0000

When Art Meets Science (WAMS) is organising a set of side events as part of the international fotofestival Noorderlicht. The theme of this year’s edition of the festival is “Data Rush”, exploring the tension between freedom and control, privacy and surveillance in the virtual world.

WAMS is organising an exhibition of objects and installations reflecting on the theme, a debate between scientists and artists on the theme and the relation between art and science in general, as well as a series of lectures exploring the theme from different perspectives.

The aim of the project ‘WAMS #1: Data Rush’ is to further increase the social awareness about these developments, and to boost both scientific and artistic developments in this domain.

About the theme “Data Rush”

‘Data Rush’ is exploring the tension between freedom and control, privacy and surveillance in the virtual world, i.e. the Internet. This tension has immediate consequences also for the ‘real’ world. Start-ups and large Internet services like Facebook and Google offer several useful, fun, neat and sometimes indispensable services for free. These services are free because we, the users, are not the customer but the product. The data that these companies (sometimes without us noticing) collect about us make ourselves ‘readable’ and increasingly predictable. This data is therefore worth a lot of money and is sold to marketers, service providers, and governments. Services like Uber and Airbnb disrupt public transport and the hospitality business.

The consequences of these developments are not always easy to discern. What is clear though is that great power shifts are taking place and that citizens have less and less control. To stay informed, the citizen depends on information services that filter and adjust information based on non-public algorithms. Free, unbiased, news gathering is becoming less and less a matter of course. This has a negative impact on both freedom of expression and the democratic process. Only in recent years have media, art and the wider public shown interest in these issues. Also scientific research has trouble keeping up, with developments in areas like Big Data.

Exhibition

WAMS has selected nine artists to exhibit their object and installations as part of the larger fotofestival Noorderlicht. The venue is the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen (directions).

The following artists are part of this exhibition.

Debate

On August 23, from 15:00-17:00, a debate among scientists and artists will take place at the festival venue (the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen, directions).

With this debate we want to explore the theme “Data Rush” from both the artistic and scientific perspective. We hope this will deliver new insights and approaches. In fact this debate is meant to be the spark for a more ambitious project where we want artists and scientists to work together to produce both scientific and artistic output related to the theme.

Participating scientists are

Seda Gürses (New York University),
Mireille Hildebrandt (Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands), and
Rocco Bellanova (Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Norway).

Participating artists are

Mari Bastashevski (Switzerland),
Mark Curran (Ireland),
Sterling Crispin (Los Angeles) and
Adri Schokker (Groningen).

The debate will moderated by Jetse Goris (University of Groningen).

For more information about the debate, click here.

Lectures

During the festival a series of introductory lectures will given by scientists in the field. The lectures are aimed at a general audience, and there will ample opportunity to discuss with the speaker and members of the audience afterwards. Lectures will be in English.

Lectures take place every other Sunday at the festival venue (the Old Sugar Factory, Energieweg 10, Groningen, directions), and start at 15:00.

Sunday September 6, 15:00-16:00: Prof. Jeroen van den Hoven (Technical University Delft) on the ethical dimension of privacy and surveillance: Data protection in the age of Big Data: what is at stake?
Sunday September 20, 15:00-16:00: Dr. Eleni Kosta (Tilburg University) on the legal dimension of privacy and surveillance: Leaving traces, living profiled: the legal challenges from ‘consenting’ to tracking in online and mobile environments.
Sunday October 4, 15:00-16:00: Dr. Jaap-Henk Hoepman (Radboud University, Nijmegen) on the technical dimension of privacy and surveillance: Honest design.

Affiliated events

The Noorderlicht International Photofestival, which runs from August 23 to October 11, 2015
Zienemaan & Sterren organise a Open-air film festival 2015 on Friday 11, Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September on the grounds of the Old Sugar Factory.
The 4th edition of PRICCAPractice has two exhibitions and two expert meetings which tie in with the subject of ‘Data Rush’. The exhibition will be on display until October 2nd, while the opening and expert meetings will take place on September 4th (when the exhibitions open).

Support

We are grateful for the financial support given by the following organisations to organise these events.

WAMS program within Noorderlicht is taking shape

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Sun, 07 Jun 2015 20:25:12 +0000

Noorderlicht is organising the 2015 edition of its international photofestival in Groningen, from August to October 2015. The theme of the festival is “Data Rush”, exploring the tension between freedom and control, privacy and surveillance, in the virtual world.

We are organising several events during this festival.

First of all, we are curating an exhibition of roughly ten installations and objects related to the festival theme. A first selection of artists has been made by the selection committee (Wim Melis of Noorderlicht, Frederiek Bennema of Minerva Academy and Adri Schokker, independent artist). Preliminary list of confirmed participants: Joyce Overheul, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Rutger Prins and Wendy McMurdo.

Secondly, we are organising a debate with artists and scientist on Sunday August 23 (a day after the opening), covering the theme of the festival. With this debate we want to explore the theme from both the artistic and scientific perspective. We hope this will deliver new insights and approaches. In fact this debate is meant to be the spark for a more ambitious project where we want artists and scientists to work together to produce both scientific and artistic output related to the theme. Confirmed participants to the debate are Mireille Hildebrandt (Radboud University Nijmegen), Rocco Bellanova (Peace Research Institute Oslo) and Seda Gurses (NYU), as well as Mari Bastashevski (Switzerland), Mark Curran (Ireland), Sterling Crispin (Hawaii) and Adri Schokker (Groningen)

Thirdly, we are organising a series of lectures by computer scientists, legal scholars and social scientists on the festival theme. The lectures will be held on Sunday afternoon on September 6, September 20 and October 4. Confirmed speakers: prof. Jeroen van den Hoven (Delft University of Technology), Eleni Kosta (Tilburg University), and Jaap-Henk Hoepman (scientific director of the Privacy & Identity Lab).

The open-air movie showing together with Zienemaan & Sterren on September 11 has been shifted to September 12.

The program is supported by: the Privacy & Identity Lab, (other support pending).

Project “Data Rush” : debat en lezingen.

Jaap-Henk Hoepman — Wed, 13 May 2015 10:43:22 +0000

Behalve een expositie organiseert Stichting WAMS ook, in samenwerking met Noorderlicht en het Privacy & Identity Lab een debat tussen kunstenaars en wetenschappers en een serie lezingen over het thema “Data Rush” – het spanningsveld tussen vrijheid en controle, privacy en surveillance, en de gevolgen van een overvloed aan (persoonlijke) data.

Het debat staat gepland voor zondag 23 augustus (de dag na de opening van het fotofestival Noorderlicht), en vormt de opmaat tot een vervolg project waarin we wetenschappers en kunstenaars (in koppels van twee) over een periode van enkele maanden willen laten werken aan een gezamelijk kunstwerk en een wetenschappelijk werk.

De lezingen staan vooralsnog gepland voor zondagmiddag 6 september, 20 september, en 4 oktober, in de Wolkenfabriek op het Suikerunie terrein, te Groningen. Informatie over de definitieve programmering volgt op een later tijdstip.

New Year’s Eve Wedding Guide: Planning the Perfect Bash

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 12:55:21 +0000

Your wedding is a stand-out occasion, the opening shot to the following part of your life. So make it important! You need to make an extraordinary day that you and your companion will think back on affectionately with every commemoration.

New Year’s Eve is the ideal occasion to coordinate with a wedding Function Band London . There’s energy, fine beverages, and a reason to assemble, however dissimilar to Christmas, you’re less inclined to swarm out other family plans.

Furthermore, the matching of another year to another marriage? Totally dazzling. Be that as it may, how would you guarantee your New Year’s Eve wedding slam would one say one is for the set of experiences books? We should take a gander at some innovative New Year’s Eve wedding thoughts that make the most of the Christmas season.

Begin Your Wedding Later in the day and Observe As the night progressed

The other potential gain of arranging a wedding at New Year’s? Downtime. The majority of your visitors will currently be liberated from work or school, so you’ll have full portability with arranging the planning of your festival. Also, since the new year begins exactly at twelve, let 12 PM be the peak of your occasion.

Plan your function late in the early evening, and afterward segue into mixed drinks and merriments in the afternoon. This will give you a couple of hours for your wedding breakfast and beverages before that clock strikes 12 PM and the tomfoolery truly starts.

Exceed all expectations: Put resources into a commencement clock and finish it to match the subject of your wedding. On the other hand, you can investigate simple methods for streaming the broadcast New Year’s Eve commencement and utilize that as your clock. One way or another, be certain everybody is prepared to recite alongside the last couple of moments!

Champagne, Champagne, Champagne!

Is it even New Year’s without champagne? Assuming you have any additional cash in your financial plan, spend it here! A tall champagne tower makes a scrumptious highlight to your wedding stylistic theme, and you ought to totally be offering various champagnes to coordinate with supper and treat. Macarons, cheeses, chocolate… there’s an ideal matching champagne or shining wine for each!

Book Your Scene Early

Try not to fall into the snare of reasoning that you’ll be the only one arranging your wedding during a vacation. New Year’s Eve is a well known day for weddings, yet for a wide range of gatherings and festivities.

The basic principle of thumb for booking settings is 9 a year ahead of time, yet you might require significantly additional time than that to guarantee you get your unique area on the right dates. Also, be certain you’re completely mindful of the entire expense. Photographic artists, food providers and wedding Function Band London will all should be ready to remain on until quite a bit later. You need no last-minute amazements!

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Start With a Stunning Wedding Ceremony

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 12:52:25 +0000

When your accomplice asks about getting married, it’s not difficult to start fantasizing about dresses, gatherings, wedding bands london and stylistic theme. Remember that your stunning, coordinated wedding service is everybody’s initial feeling of your arranging ability. Whether you pick a strict, common, or humanist function, it’s wise to start by concentrating on the standards and legalities to get everything about.

Common Services

A common service is a lawful, non-strict wedding function. These frequently happen at a vault office, yet a few other supported scenes exist.

On the off chance that you’d like a common service, you’ll have to pay a £35 expense and give no less than 28 days’ notification. From that point onward, you’ll have one year to hold your function. There’s many times an extra expense on the wedding day, and there might be further charges assuming you pick an external setting or on the other hand in the event that the enlistment center should venture out to join in.

At the point when you pick a common service, you have total innovative command over the music played at your wedding. Your function might not have psalms or strict melodies to qualify as a simply thoughtful service legitimately. In any case, anything is possible for you.

The music you pick will rely upon the tone you have chosen for your wedding. Numerous common functions highlight well known wedding music past conventional wedding tunes. Others incline toward a traditional outfit and solicitation a more diverse setlist, blending contemporary music in with natural old style determinations.

Common services don’t have a required configuration or construction, so go ahead and utilize your musical demonstration in the manner you see fit. You can start or end with a short exhibition, incorporate a common singalong, or highlight every one of the procedures.

Humanist Services

A humanist wedding is like a common wedding, just without the principles directed by the 1836 Marriage Act. A humanist wedding celebrant will direct the procedures and will work with you to devise a totally custom function customized to you, unbounded on the scene.

Numerous equivalent sex couples in the UK pick humanist services.

Humanist weddings in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Jersey, and Guernsey satisfy common and legitimate prerequisites. Humanist relationships in Britain, Grains, and the Isle of Man expect earlier enrollment at your neighborhood register office. Explicit necessities might fluctuate, so it’s dependably astute to contact neighborhood experts for more data.

The great thing about humanist weddings is that there are definitely no restrictions on construction or music. You could coordinate strict parts into your function in the event that you might want to. On account of interfaith humanist weddings, you might decide to include music mirroring various strict customs.

So, most humanist weddings are mainstream undertakings highlighting common music. Many couples highlight their own main tunes during the procedures. All musical types are gladly received, so go ahead and employ a wild band, a rare jazz band, or even a wedding DJ!

Jewish Strict Services

A Jewish service is productive, satisfying both common and strict prerequisites. You can apply to the neighborhood specialists and the register office with one application.

There are no limitations on the spot, however many couples decide to hold their wedding in the sanctuary. It’s unseemly to hold your wedding during the time of rest, so plan to stay away from a Friday or Saturday service. In the Jewish confidence, Tuesday is the most fortunate day for a wedding.

Wedding music at Jewish weddings could differ relying upon whether the couple is Conventional or Changed. A large part of the conventional music is cheery, frequently played in a klezmer style. You might wish to enlist a wedding band with experience playing Jewish weddings.

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What Are The Best Money Safes

admin — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 20:07:18 +0000

A protected adds one more layer of safety to your resources, whether gems, significant reports, or innovation, they give you genuine serenity in the information that in the event that somebody breaks into your home, your assets could stay secure.

There are different cash safes accessible on the web, so it is important that you track down the right safe for you while thinking about the thing assets, you are hoping to secure and their financial worth!

Safes offer an extraordinary layer of safety for a portion of your most important things like locksmith birmingham, from thievery as well as by different worries like flames or flooding.

Numerous protected models reasonable for home use can endure fire openness for 30 minutes to 60 minutes, with the better safes getting through flames for as long as 240 minutes. Safes are additionally worked to endure water harm, normally ready to endure being completely lowered in water for 72 hours, assisting with safeguarding against flooding.

Nonetheless, any openness longer than showed and the safe is probably going to be harmed in light of the fact that it’s fire and water safe, as opposed to fire and water evidence.

The Cost of the Safe

Safes that are confirmed by Eurogade convey a lot greater cost tag. A protected with an Eurograde rating of 0 can be in the locale of £500-£1,000. An Eurograde safe rating of 6 normally begins at around £9,000. These safes are costly yet will quite often offer cover assuming belongings are lost or taken, and on the off chance that you have profoundly estimated assets, it very well may merit the extra expense.

Assuming you are searching for a safe for more broad use and not putting away high-esteem things, you are no doubt searching for a more affordable safe that will in any case give viable security. These cash safes are probably going to not be Eurograde affirmed, however they give great extra security to your resources. These safes start at around £20 the whole way through to £400 and are normally opened with a key or a four-digit code. Despite the fact that these safes are impressively more affordable, they will in any case set up a battle against fire and water harm, yet would be considerably less solid in this present circumstance.

All cash safes have a money rating, which demonstrates how much money you can get inside the protected while remaining completely safeguarded by protection suppliers. This rating can likewise be utilized to ascertain how much gems or assets that can be put away in the safe. Higher money rating safes are generally more costly, suggesting that the end product tends to reflect its price regarding security. While choosing a safe, consider how much worth you will at any point store in the protected and afterward buy a protected with a fitting money rating.

The expansive Eurograde framework is a security arrangement of estimation that is applied to an extensive variety of high-security safes that are explicitly intended to give a believable answer for mortgage holders’ and business organizations’ need to store their money and resources securely. Eurograde safes are planned to stop robbery and theft. Before they can be conceded EN1143 status, all Eurograde safes should go through a thorough series of tests.

The Eurograde Confirmation is utilized to demonstrate the security of numerous family safes. These safes are likewise numbered on a scale from 0 to 13. A protected with a higher rating has higher security and money evaluations. Higher-appraised safes have thicker entryways and bodies made of more grounded materials, as well as better locking components.

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Best Corporate Event Ideas

admin — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 18:44:28 +0000

Corporate occasions come in all shapes and sizes. For certain organizations, it’s a peaceful night with a couple of beverages, while for other people, it’s an out and out day of group building exercises, some of which could get somewhat chaotic!

Great occasion thoughts, be that as it may, are generally difficult to obtain. While there are a lot of choices, not all are reasonable. You need something an ideal choice for your group and will achieve your points.

Here, we will investigate some top work get-together thoughts from the web. Toward the finish of the article, you ought to have a decent vibe for the corporate days out most ideal to your group.

Extreme Assault Course Challenge

Assuming your organization involves a gathering of positively actual characters (or even individuals who want to get more activity), then, at that point, taking the group on an extreme attack course challenge could be only the ticket. In truth, attack courses aren’t for weak willed, yet the experience can make all the difference for managers who need to unite their groups.

Attack courses bring a blend of everything: shared actual test, the vibe great element that you get after exercise, and rivalry. Scrutinizing individuals’ strong ability assists them with opening up in manners that they wouldn’t, were they caught in the workplace day in and day out.

A Silent Disco

To the extent that resolve night thoughts go, silent disco ought to be at the first spot on the list. For those of you who don’t have the foggiest idea, a silent disco is an occasion wherein everybody wears earphones that pipe music remotely to their ears. There are no amplifiers (or chance of punctured eardrums, besides); just strobe lights and an intermittent puff of dry ice.

Silent discos originally came to the front in the last part of the 1990s and scenes searched for ways of moving gatherings along into the early morning times without upsetting the neighbors. From that point forward, they’ve turned into a number one for the finish of-year corporate party.

Assuming you’ve never encountered a silent disco, get ready for something that feels somewhat strange. Also, anything that you do, don’t take your earphones off!

Secret Dinners

Luckily, secret meals don’t include eatery staff serving you with irregular things of food from their menu. All things considered, it’s a way that you can bring individuals who work in various groups in your association together and assist them with getting to know one another.

Business lunch

The manner in which it works resembles this: the organization books a table at a café and afterward welcomes irregular individuals from various offices to go along. It’s undeniably paid for on the organization dime, and it gives representatives from, say, promoting, a valuable chance to get to know those in bookkeeping as well as the other way around. The expectation is that toward the finish of the night, there will be more cross-departmental associations, assisting with working with better collaboration and participation.

Bouncing

Bouncing is both tomfoolery, simple to learn, and removes individuals from their usual range of familiarity. In this manner, in numerous ways, it’s the ideal group building exercise and evokes a similar degree of receptiveness you get when you get individuals participating in an attack course.

Bouncing

Jumping centers close to significant urban communities offer more than bouncing all over for several hours. Many additionally give offices to sports like trampoline ball and dodgeball as well!

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Wooden Conservatories – The Beauty of Wood

admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 21:14:45 +0000

Wooden conservatories come in many different types of construction including brickwork, wood veneer, and metal. The choices will depend on your budget, the look you want to achieve and the maintenance that you can afford.

What’s the budget for wooden conservatory? Wooden conservatories, especially those made from hardwood or stone, are usually more costly than others. This is primarily due to the fact that wooden and hardwood conservatories tend to be a traditional and more expensive option compared to uPV options. However, the amount of maintenance needed to keep the conservatory looking good is less.

Do you have plans in place to maintain your conservatory wooden conservatories? If not, it may be worthwhile considering uPV options as they are more environmentally friendly and offer a long life and high maintenance free solution. When considering what material to choose, consider the environment that the conservatory will be sitting on. Some materials can be more vulnerable to rain or damage and will require more maintenance than others.

Wooden conservatory styles include Victorian, Georgian, modern and classic. A Victorian style can add beauty to your home while also helping with energy costs. Georgian conservatory designs have a traditional feel to them that can help create an airy, relaxed feeling. Modern styles are sleek and modern and help to increase your home’s value. Classic wooden conservatory designs have a country feel to them that can add a sophisticated touch to your home. Whatever type of style you choose, it is important to get all the necessary planning and building supplies together before beginning the project.

Wood conservatory prices depend on the style of your conservatory, the materials that you choose and the amount of work required. Generally, wooden conservatory prices are higher than other materials. However, if you shop around, you will find some great deals. For example, wooden garden furniture can often save you money. You may have to replace some of your furniture on your wooden conservatory once or twice during its lifespan, but the savings will more than make up for it. Furthermore, wood conservatory can take years to decay and so, buying brand new can be an expensive investment. If you are on a tight budget, you should consider some sort of discount on your wooden conservatory furniture.

Wooden conservatory can provide you with more space conservatories, privacy and a beautiful and relaxing environment. It can also help you save money. With the right choices and the right materials, wooden conservatory can add beauty to your home. Consider the style that best suits your home and lifestyle and needs, then find the right wood that is suited for you.

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Benefits of Using a Steel Roofing Sheet

admin — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:48:48 +0000

It may seem as if a steel roofing sheet is an absolute necessity to have in the Houston area, but there are several benefits of installing one. However, the price of these roofing sheets can be too steep for a lot of homeowners who are just starting out in their lives. You’ll find that there are cheaper options to get the same type of protection as what these roofing sheets offer Metal Roofing Sheets.

A steel roofing sheet is definitely worth the cost. The cost of having one installed is much less than the amount you would pay for a full service professional to do the job. Also, if you decide to repair or replace your roof later on down the road, you’ll save a lot of money by being able to take the help of the roofing sheet instead of paying for an expensive professional to fix the problem.

When you’re considering installing steel roofing sheets, you want to make sure that the material you are choosing has the proper specs and has been tested in a number of different areas. Do not go with cheap materials, because these won’t stand up as well as the ones made from high quality materials. Not only will they not last as long, but they will not give you the same type of protection that the full service companies can offer.

There are a number of places to find steel roofing sheets. One place that you should check is at a steel roofing sheet supplier’s website. This will give you a better idea of what to expect from the company, as well as the pricing of different types of steel sheeting that they offer Metal Roofing Sheet Manufacturer.

Do some certain research before you buy. Find out if the company you’re thinking about using has a proven track record of customer satisfaction. If you choose a company based on their price, but you do not check on the quality of their product, then you’ll never know how well theywill do in the long run.

A steel roofing sheet provider will also let you know about the advantages and disadvantages of their products. Be sure to look at both the pros and cons of a steel roofing sheet. Both sides will be covered here.

Another advantage of going with a steel roofing sheet provider is the price. There are certain companies that will allow you to get an even lower rate by lowering the weight of the metal in the roofing sheets. This means that you’ll have to pay less per square foot, which is why it’s important to check out the quality of the steel before making a decision on where to get it from. Make sure that you are getting the best quality you can possibly get.

There are so many benefits to using steel roofing sheets, but the advantages to using the right type of roofing sheet for your home are more than obvious. A steel roofing sheet is one of the best products available in the market today. If you want the very best, then it is up to you to make sure that you choose the best in the industry.

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Benefits of Utilizing Plastic Storage Boxes

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 10:49:27 +0000

Many people are unaware of the benefits of using plastic storage boxes. There are houses and many companies that use them, although The majority of us find these items as waste. There are a lot of reasons for getting these boxes and they are an superb way to store items and arrange things. The containers have many positive aspects, from shifting furniture and making it easy to store items Plastic Storage Boxes.

It is important to know that a big storage area is available, If you’re trying to find somewhere to store items. It is good to be able to have this distance since they are a high number of items. Using these storage containers allows you to arrange your possessions and make it easy to see exactly what you need without the clutter.

Most plastic storage boxes are utilized for storing items such as clothing, blankets, and clothing . These can be used for storing holiday items which you do not need straight away or may be used for organizing clothing. With a small organization, you will find it more easy to locate what you are looking for when you require it.

You can find these containers including retail stores, home improvement stores, and internet. It is important to find one which is going to fit into your space demands and is going to be a good choice for your needs when you are attempting to find a person Grass Grid. You should consider getting one that’s big enough to hold all their things without them falling outside, if you have kids.

You need to consider what kind of things you’re currently storing, when you are looking for storage boxes. A number of those boxes are created to store food products, which means those should be considered by you. Whenever you’re trying to store a lot of food, then you should think about getting containers so you can store more.

Considering these boxes are meant to be used to store items that are large, you should consider which of these items are the most essential things to store. For instance, if you shop things you will want soon you may want to buy. If you’re seeking to store clothing, you might want to get containers since these things are fragile.

Remember that plastic storage boxes come in many shapes and sizes, so you need to be able to find one which will fit into your area needs. They may also be found from many areas, such as retail stores, home improvement stores, and online. Just make sure you measure the space which you are likely to be saving the item, so you do not wind up with something that is too small or too big.

Another benefit of plastic storage containers is that they are easy to clean. All you have to do is wipe them down with a paper towel or a damp cloth. There are no chemicals that have to be used to wash out the containers. This implies that if you are concerned about using chemicals to wash them, you can avoid those and have the ability to keep them looking new and fresh.

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AAT Training Courses – How to Enroll

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 08:52:42 +0000

AAT training classes are available and of excellent quality. They come online and offline. The courses may be for individuals and associations, and the advantages can not be contested while they’re more affordable. One can still learn much from it, although on the flip side, the class that is offline is much more expensive.

The two types of courses offer you a lot of advantages aat level 3 courses. Just like any other class, the offline one may be intimidating for beginners. This guide will help you understand the fundamental process of a course.

An online training course begins with a topic being chosen by you. There are many topics, but then you should select one that’s related to your choice, if you want a one. When you select a subject, the course manual will supply you with the questions and a link to this subject’s official website.

There are a number of critical questions you should ask yourself before joining the program. You should know if the topic fits your level of experience, whether you have enough time for it and if you have enough details about the subject. Of course, this should be verified by a professional. It is far better to go back to your previous understanding and re-learn the things if you are not sure about your knowledge about the subject.

After the registration, the course begins. You’ll find out the number of lessons you’ll need to complete the course and how much time it will take. Also, you will be given a schedule. In some courses, they will send a tutor, which you’ll meet at a certain time of the week aat training . As soon as you have completed the lessons, you’ll be able to have a test and pass it.

Online classes are different from ones. They usually have a cost because they’re provided online. The problem is that they are, which cannot be covered by the tuition fee. Moreover, in case you decide to give up the course because of lack of motivation, you will only be wasting cash. It isn’t advised if there’s something you wish to 27, that you devote the remainder of your life in front of a computer screen.

You ought to know you could learn from both offline and online course. The learning methods are extremely similar but the differences are few. Because you are already familiar with the class materials and the software programs you can still choose the one.

Distance Learning is a way of learning which is helpful to the pupils, since it saves cash for them. As an example, you do not have to go to the campus in order to receive your diploma. You’ll also find out much in less time, since the computer programs that you use are costly and you do not need to purchase other materials or books to utilize the pc. This usually means that you will be able to earn your diploma in less time than if you would go to a college and become enrolled.

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four Causes, Many Take into account Actual Property, A Good Funding

admin — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 07:46:58 +0000

There are a lot of alternate options, on the subject of, making our choices, about how, and the place, to speculate our funds/ monies! Choices embrace: the inventory market; bond market; commodities; United States Treasury automobiles; and actual property. Since, traditionally, many contemplate, actual property, some of the safe, lengthy – time period methods, and proudly owning a house, of 1’s personal, is commonly, thought of, a significant element of the so – known as, American Dream, this text will try to debate four causes, many really feel this manner, and use their funds, to buy household houses, in addition to funding properties. With that in thoughts, this text will try to, briefly, contemplate, study, evaluate, and focus on, how, and why, this issues.

1. Traditionally, retains up with, and/ or, exceeds inflation, and the speed – of – return, many different choices, present: Along with many different causes, traditionally, the appreciation in worth of actual property, has stored – up. with, and/ or, exceeded the speed of inflation. It additionally has been, within the longer – run, one of many most secure, most safe, automobiles, out there! Many analyses present, additionally, the general fee, for actual property, to be higher, than a lot of the different choices!

2. A number of functions, together with residing bills, and asset appreciation/ worth: When one purchases a house, of his personal, he satisfies a number of functions, together with, his residing bills, and satisfaction of possession! Nonetheless, it’s particularly, satisfying, whereas doing so, the worth of homes, over the longer – run, typically will increase, by, at the very least, the speed of inflation. Many additionally buy actual property, for funding functions, reminiscent of shopping for multi – household properties, and so forth. When doing so, in addition they obtain tax advantages, together with having the ability to depreciate the property, on a schedule, for tax functions. Additionally, bear in mind, should you do not personal your home, you’re nonetheless paying hire, which has no fee of return!

three. Higher than common returns, over – time: Statistically, on an historic – foundation, actual property values have elevated, over – time, not solely, at a fee, larger than inflation, however, additionally, higher returns than many different funding automobiles.

four. Paying your self, as an alternative of your landlord: Your private dwelling, can both be owned, by you, or by your landlord! Whenever you hire your residence, it supplies your housing, however you obtain no different monetary advantages! Who would you moderately pay, month-to-month, your self, or your landlord?

It’s smart to totally contemplate your private state of affairs, consolation zone, and priorities, and perceptions, earlier than making any investments. After this course of, bear in mind to incorporate housing, and actual property, in your general evaluation!

The post four Causes, Many Take into account Actual Property, A Good Funding appeared first on LOS ANGELES FITNESS GUIDE: FITNESS HUB OF THE L.A AREA.

Costly Concerts: Why are Ticket Prices so High?

Noah Grayson — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:00:53 +0000

It should be no surprise to any fans of some of today’s biggest artists that ticket prices for their concerts have been increasing significantly over the past few years. Here are some of the many factors that are causing ticket prices to rise so dramatically:

Ticket sellers and third party resellers:

Websites like Ticketmaster have been at the root of many concert tickets rising to high prices. In 2023, Ticketmaster was involved in a massive conundrum with the selling of tickets for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. The site, which already has a reputation for charging hidden and unnecessary fees, did not properly manage the large mass of customers, who were expected well in advance, to access to the website when the tickets went on sale, which led to a crash of the website for many customers. Ticketmaster also failed to prevent the mass purchasing of tickets by scalpers and third party sellers, who then resold them for exuberant prices, some going for thousands of dollars. This is just one example of an online ticket seller mismanaging sales and allowing for prices to skyrocket.

Venues:

Concert venues have also contributed to a rise in concert ticket prices. Smaller venues that host more well-known artists usually sell out and require more staff and supplies to meet fans’ wants and needs. This causes venue fees to rise and tickets prices too.

Artist Popularity/Demand:

With social media apps like TikTok and Instagram, along with the increasing popularity of streaming services, many music artists are becoming well known to more people than ever. A prime example of one of these artists is Jacob Lawson, better known as JVKE. During the COVID-19 lockdown, JVKE released videos on TikTok promoting some of his music. His song “Golden Hour” quickly became a massive success on the platform and has garnered over a billion streams on Spotify. Another example is Benson Boone. He competed on the singing competition show American Idol back in 2021, but ultimately left the competition after making it to the show’s Top 24. He then continued his making music and promoting it on social media, releasing multiple singles and on April 5th, he dropped his first album, Fireworks and Rollerblades, which contains multiple songs that went onto become massive hits. This ability for artists to quickly grow in fame and popularity leads many of their ticket prices for their concerts to rise over a hundred dollars or more, most of the time before they are bought and resold by third party sellers.

Finding Affordable Tickets:

Here are some tips to use when looking for shows that otherwise may seem to costly to attend:

Buy tickets the day of the event. People will likely be reselling their tickets at lower prices to try to make back their money rather than turn a profit. Artists may also lower the price of any tickets still available.
Check for nearby concert locations. There may be a nearby show that may have cheaper tickets or more tickets available.
Look for giveaways. Concert venues, local radio stations, affiliated companies, and artists themselves might give away tickets as a way of promoting and marketing their events.
Check various ticket sites. Some sites may have hidden fees and charges that will contribute to prices being higher.
Tailgate! Some people have found tailgating at an event they might not be able to get tickets for to be just as fun. You may be able to hear the concert from a distance and get to hang out with other fans. Just make sure that you check the parking situation. Some venues or events might check your ticket or require you to pay for parking before letting you into the lot.
Save up for next time. It’s never a bad idea to start saving for the next time that artist comes back into town or for the opportunity to travel somewhere to see them.

What is So Scary About The Ocean?

Andrew Odle — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:00:52 +0000

Whether you’ve been to a beach or have gone fishing before, most of us have thought about the wonder of the ocean before in our lives. It is a place sprawling with life and biodiversity on the coral reefs, but also a vast open space filled with nothing but the sounds of distant whales. It takes up about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, and currently, we know of 226,000 ocean species in it.

Thalassophobia is the fear of large or deep water. The ocean is the best example of where most people develop thalassophobia, in the deepest part of the water. But what makes it so scary? Why is it that when people are in the beautiful environment of the ocean they become so frightened? Studies show that many people who develop thalassophobia are scared from past traumatic events, such as nearly drowning as a child, hearing scary stories of the ocean, or witnessing an attack from a shark.

Possibly the most terrifying aspect of the ocean is the unknown. The thought of being trapped in the middle of the ocean, without knowing what is below you, and the dread you would feel knowing that there is no escape. One statistic that can send chills down the spines of many people is the fact that “More than 80 percent of the ocean has never been mapped, explored, or even seen by humans” (National Geographic). To put that into perspective, we have done studies on a much greater percentage of the surface of Moon and Mars, than our own oceans.

Looking ahead of the already nightmare-inducing thought of the sheer vastness of the ocean, the creatures that live in it are just as terrifying. More than ninety percent of the species in the ocean have not been discovered yet, and there could be anywhere “between a few hundred thousand and a few million more to be discovered” (National Geographic). To think that we have already discovered monsters as frightening as the colossal squid which grows up to 46 feet long, or the great white shark with 3-inch razor-sharp teeth. Who knows what other potential creatures might be living in the ocean?

While many are terrified of the ocean due to its deep waters and harmful predators, another factor looked past by most is the amount of disease that lies in the ocean. About one millimeter of ocean water can contain nearly 10 million viruses (The Daily). The dangers of getting sick from the ocean are very high, and likely a greater concern than most people think.

The ocean is certainly a place to enjoy with surfing, fishing, swimming, and scuba diving. However, there is no doubt that it is a very dangerous place that houses many terrors. Humans must acknowledge the potential consequences of being in the ocean, but they also must strive to understand more about the underwater world to enable us to explore bigger things.

The 2024 First Robotics Competition World Championship Results

Jakk Morgan — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:00:41 +0000

The 2023-2024 First Robotics Competition season ended last week as the world championship concluded on the 20th. The season was definitely one to remember, following an art theme.

Every year teams are given a challenge on the first Saturday of January. They are then given 6-8 weeks to design, manufacture, and program a robot to compete in First sponsored competitions. Following these 6-8 weeks, teams then compete in alliances made up of 3 teams to compete against the other teams at the competition and, if a team does well enough, they can then qualify for the world championship in Houston, Texas.

This year, the challenge was centered around music, with the game being called CRESCENDO. The game centered around a ring-shaped game piece called a “Note”. Notes were placed around the playing field and could also be acquired from a feeder station. The Notes could then be scored in either the Speaker (a hole in the wall of each side of the field, or the Amp (a box on either side of the field).

As always, this year’s game started with a 15-second autonomous period in which robots could run pre-programmed code to score as many game pieces as possible. The game then went into a tele-operated period in which two drivers could control the robots to score even more points. During the last 30 seconds of the game, the teams would then have the opportunity to climb on top of a chain and get bonus points for doing so. Though it sounds quite complicated, the matches are actually pretty fun to watch.

This year’s winners of the world championship were teams 1690, 4522, and 321, winning the last match of the tournament by 3 points

FC Cincinnati Snap Losing Streak, Beats Atlanta United 2-1

Ethan McDonald — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:00:23 +0000

In a game riddled with multiple streaks, it was FC Cincinnati to got the edge over Atlanta United, winning 2-1.

Heading into the game, Atlanta United was unbeaten at home in 2024 and had been unbeaten in their last nine games on turf fields. FCC, on the other hand, was dealing with a two-game losing streak coming into this one, their first time losing two straight since 2022.

The first half offered many chances for both sides, but the first half would come and go with both sides unable to score or even come close to a goal. It would take until the 59th minute when Atlanta United’s star midfielder Thiago Almada would bend the ball just past FCC goalkeeper Alec Kann for the night’s first goal.

FCC still struggled massively with the finishing problems that they dealt with all season, with two more shots coming off the post today. It took wingback Luca Orellano slotting his first goal of the season for FCC to get back on track.

Just two minutes later FCC will take the lead. This time it would come from a defender Deandre Yedlin putting in a perfect cross to midfielder Luciano Acosta, who snuck between two Atlanta defenders and could easily slot it past Atlanta’s goalkeeper.

With this victory, FCC rose to third in the Eastern Conference and 7th in the supporter’s shield, welcoming Colorado Rapids to the TQL Stadium in their next game. Atlanta on the other hand, went down to 7th in the Eastern Conference and 16th in the Supporters Shield, with their next game against Chicago Fire on Saturday as well.

Lakota West Alumni, Oregon Transfer Chance Gray, Commits to Ohio State

Ethan McDonald — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:00:20 +0000

Chance Gray, 2022 Ohio Gatorade Player of the Year, who played high school basketball at Lakota West and Winton Woods, is transferring to Ohio State Buckeyes

Gray announced her commitment to Ohio State Sunday on Twitter/X, after announcing her departure from the Oregon Ducks earlier this month.

Gray was the Ducks’ second-leading scorer and leader in assists last season as a sophomore, with 13.9 Points and 3 Assists per game. The Ducks were in last place in the Pac-12 this season, finishing with an abysmal 11-21, winning only 2 out of their 18 conference games.

In Gray’s first season at Oregon, she was a Pac-12 All-Freshman Team selection and was an Honorable Mention for the Pac-12 All-Defensive Team. She would also be selected for USA Basketball’s 2023 Women’s AmeriCup roster.

She was ranked #7 overall in the nation in the Class of 2022 in the ESPN Top 100 as a 5-Star Recruit. She would play her first three high school years at Lakota West, before her senior year at Winton Woods, she averaged 26.7 points, 5.1 rebounds, 3.5 assists, and 3.2 steals per game.

Gray was ranked as the 22nd-best female college basketball player who’s transferring and is currently predicted as a 2nd-round pick in the 2026 WNBA draft.

Ryan Garcia VS Devin Haney

Nylah Escobar — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 16:00:14 +0000

This Saturday one of the biggest fights of the year yet was held. The boxing match was held at the Barclays Center in New York City and the two competitors were the undefeated Devin Haney and his opponent Ryan Garcia. After 12 long matches, the winner was Ryan Garcia. No one believed he would come out on top and he made sure to prove them all wrong this previous Saturday night.

The Social Media Aspect of The Fight

The promotions leading up to this fight were beyond insane. Turns out there is a lot of history between the two competitors being that they competed against each other quite a lot when they were both young and first starting out in the boxing scene.

Regarding promoting the fight regardless of the winner, Ryan Garcia made sure to get the battle into the public eye. His demeanor in the interviews and online made people believe he was not taking this fight seriously and that he might have had a few screws knocked loose. He constantly made out-of-pocket comments and jokes, leading viewers to believe he was in for a rude awakening in this match that would happen on April 20th.

What Made This Fight So Interesting?

Although Devin Haney lost the match he did not lose his belt. This is due to Ryan Garcia failing to make the 140lbs weight limit for the fight giving Devin an unfair disadvantage. Even with Ryan’s win he did not get to take the “undisputed lightweight champion” title due to that underlying fact.

Devin Haney came into the fight undefeated while Ryan came in with the history of a horrible loss from a previous match between him and another boxer Tank Davis.

All of these factors led to a lot of people having little to no faith in Ryan. I watched the fight with my boyfriend, Jumel Higgins, he was a firm believer that Ryan would lose he said, “He’s not competing with Devin, dude is nowhere on his level I can’t lie, I’ll bet you $20 right now that he loses”. Ryan took the world by surprise with his win and it shows that you should never count out the underdog.

Predicting the Length of A Solar Eclipse: Why Is It So Hard?

Jakk Morgan — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 16:00:49 +0000

Scientists are and have been able to predict astronomical events far before when they actually occur with nearly 100% certainty. We know when an eclipse will happen years ahead of time, but as for the duration of a total eclipse, we can’t predict it with much certainty.

The reason that astronomical events like eclipses are so easy to predict with so much certainty is that objects in space are massive and have very predictable forces acting on them. On earth, there are many different chaotic forces at play at any given moment that makes it very difficult to predict daily things like the weather. In space, however, though those forces still do exist, they are much less significant to the path of a massive object such as the sun or our moon. For this reason, we can usually predict large scale astronomical events long before they happen, but that isn’t always the case.

The length of time that the sun will be covered by the moon is significantly harder to predict than when the eclipse will start. The reason for this is that, because the chaotic forces on the surface of the sun are so unpredictable, the size of the sun at any given moment is incredibly difficult to predict.

Because the path of totality, where the moon will appear to completely cover the sun during the eclipse, is directly proportional to the size of the moon and the sun, changes in the size of the sun will change how large the path of totality is which, in turn, changes the length of time that the total eclipse will be visible for.

The variation in the size of the sun can affect the length of the eclipse by minutes and, given that the average length of an eclipse is 3 to 4 minutes, can be a pretty pronounced difference.

A “Hole” History In One: Golf Over The Years

Shahed Al Ali — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 16:00:41 +0000

Golf originated from a game played on the eastern coast of Scotland, in an area close to the royal capital of Edinburgh. In those early days players would try to hit a pebble over sand dunes and around tracks using a bent stick or club.

In 1502 the game gained the royal seal of approval when King James IV of Scotland (1473 -1513) became the world’s first golfing monarch.

The fame of the game quickly grew throughout 16th-century Europe thanks to this royal endorsement. King Charles I brought the game to England and Mary, Queen of Scots, introduced the game to the French when she studied there.

One of the premier golf courses of that time was at Leith, which hosted the first international golf match in 1682.

The game of golf formally became a sport when the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith formed the first club in 1744 and set up an annual competition with silverware prizes. The rules for this new competition were drafted by Duncan Forbes. Rules that, even now, sound so familiar to many golfers because of their impact on modern-day golfing etiquette.

It was not until 1754, however, that the St Andrew’s Society of Golfers was formed to compete in its own annual competition using Leith’s rules.

Today, it is the golf courses themselves that reflect the history of the game, with the US courses presented as beautifully sculptured, manicured, and landscaped parklands.

Thus, golf is a game that transcends geographic borders and is elegant to a degree that everyone can enjoy it. Golf is beautifully surmised in the following words, “Golf, on the whole, is not a game for realists. Thanks to the precision of its measurements, it attracts the attention of perfectionists,” says Heywood Hill Broun.

Some of the most famous golf courses in the world are still to be found in Scotland: their names conjure the passion and tradition of the game of golf. Gleneagles, The Old Course at St. Andrews, Carnoustie, Royal Troon, and Prestwick are a few of these golf-course forerunners.

The Industrial Revolution of the Victorian time brought with it many changes. The birth of the railways allowed typical people to explore outside of their towns and cities for the first time, and as a consequence, golf clubs began to appear all over the countryside. Mass production methods were adopted to manufacture the clubs and balls, making the game more affordable to the average person. As a result, the game’s popularity erupted!

During the 19th century, the might of the British Empire expanded to encompass the globe, and golf followed closely behind. The first golf club formed outside Scotland was the Royal Blackheath (near London) in 1766. The first golf club outside Britain was in Bangalore, India (1820). Others quickly followed included the Royal Curragh, Ireland (1856), the Adelaide (1870), Royal Montreal (1873), Cape Town (1885), St Andrew’s of New York (1888) and Royal Hong Kong (1889).

Adrian Smith’s Explosive Start to the Season

Nick Johnson, Editor-in-Chief — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 16:00:38 +0000

Despite the slow start to the year for the Baseball Firebirds, Adrian Smith has started the year off with a literal bang.

On March 25th, the Lakota West Baseball Firebirds were trailing the Hamilton Big Blue on the road in the top of the fifth inning. With a 1-0 count, Adrian Smith belted a fly ball over the foul pole in left field for a grand slam that would put the Firebirds at a 7-5 advantage over the Big Blue. While the Firebirds lost this game off of a Hamilton rally in the home half of the fifth inning, all Firebird fans could at least be happy with the fact that the junior, second baseman-pitcher combo had gotten off to a first-team all-state kind of start to the year.

As of 4/5, Smith leads the GMC in HRs (3) and is tied for the lead in RBIs (8). Within the first three games of his junior season, the career .276 hitter collected all three of his career homers on what looked, and still looks to be, one of the hottest starts to the year any Lakota West Firebird has had in the school’s history.

“[I’m] definitely not trying to do too much at the plate,” Smith remarked when asked about his recent stretch of power. “I’ve learned over the years that when I think too much and try to win the game with one swing, it tends to lead to more failure than it does success.”

Smith, who is on pace to become a four-year varsity starter, has shown quite a bit of growth since he broke onto the scene back in his freshman season in 2022. While he dealt with a bit of a sophomore slump at times last season, it looks like Smith is back and better than ever in 2024.

“Trusting in my work and going up to the plate with confidence and with the goal in mind of having fun and trying to do the job at hand has led to a lot of success so far,” Smith commented.

Despite Smith’s multi-home run performance at Turpin and his grand slam at Hamilton, the Firebirds currently sit at a 1-5 record, going 1-3 thus far in conference play. As the Firebirds try to get on the right path in April, Smith will be one of the key players to look for when it comes to the team bouncing back from the rocky start.

Product Review: Spikeball

Bradley Wehby — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 16:00:32 +0000

Looking for a perfect summer game? Spikeball is the best game that has ever been invented. It is cost-friendly, easy to set up, fast-paced, and a great game to play with friends. It is a tiny trampoline that you have to hit with a baseball-sized dodge ball. You have one teammate and the goal is to make it to 21 points with rules similar to volleyball.

Firstly, it is cheap and easy to set up. Spikeball sets are around $50 to buy a new set with multiple balls and can also fit in a backpack wearable satchel. Being able to carry it around in a lightweight bag that you could fit anywhere makes it easy to love the game. You can set it up anywhere on any flat ground, it takes 14 pieces to put together and set up then you’re done.

It is a fast-paced game that can be played anywhere. The game is played to 21 and each volley can be anywhere from 3 seconds to 40 seconds. The games don’t last longer than 15 minutes if you move fast.

It is also a game where you have to have fast reflexes. Diving is often a part of every volley and running around crazy to help your teammate.

Spikeball in general is just a super fun game to play with your friends. Passing is a part of every game but especially in spikeball, setting up your teammates with a good pass is a crucial but also a hard part. Yelling at your teammates out of the fun because of a bad pass or missed spike is a part of the enjoyment of playing Spikeball. Along with having fun with your teammates, your opponents also are a part of the fun as you are trying to get each other to lose a point with a healthy competition.

Spike ball is most fun on some nice turf or sand on a hot and sunny day. It is a perfect game to play this summer!

We need to talk about our AI fetish

jeremy — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 08:23:02 +0000

Artificial intelligence puts us in a bind that in some ways is quite new. It’s the first serious challenge to the ideas underpinning the modern state: governance, social and mental health, a balance between capitalism and protecting the individual, the extent of cooperation, collaboration and commerce with other states.

How can we address and wrestle with an amorphous technology that has not defined itself, even as it runs rampant through increasing facets of our lives? I don’t have the answer to that but I do know what we shouldn’t do.

The streets

But in other ways we have been here before, making the same mistakes. Only this time it might not be reversible.

Back in the 1920s, the idea of a street was not fixed. People “regarded the city street as a public space,open to anyone who did not endanger or obstruct other users”, in the words of Peter Norton, author of a paper called ‘Street Rivals’ that later became a book, ‘Fighting Traffic.’ Already, however, who took precedence was already becoming a loaded — and increasingly bloody — issue. ‘Joy riders’ took on ‘jay walkers’, and judges would usually side with pedestrians in lawsuits. Motorist associations and the car industry lobbied hard to remove pedestrians from streets and for the construction of more vehicle-only thoroughfares. The biggest and fastest technology won — for a century.

Bangkok traffic, photo by Joan Campderrós-i-Canas

Only in recent years has there been any concentrated effort to reverse this, with the rise of ‘complete streets’, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, woonerfs and traffic calming. Technology is involved — electric micro-mobility provides more options for how people move about without involving cars, improved VR and AR helps designers better visualise what these spaces would look like to the user, modular and prefabricated street design elements and the adoption of thinking such as ‘tactical urbanism’ allows local communities to modify and adapt their landscape in short-term increments.

We are getting there slowly. We are reversing a fetish for the car, with its fast, independent mobility, ending the dominance of a technology over the needs and desires of those who inhabit the landscape. This is not easy to do, and it’s taken changes to our planet’s climate, a pandemic, and the deaths of tens of millions of people in traffic accidents (3.6 million in the U.S. since 1899). If we had better understood the implications of the first automobile technology, perhaps we could have made better decisions.

Let’s not make the same mistake with AI.

Not easy with AI

We have failed to make the right choices because we let the market decide. And by market here, we mean as much those standing to make money from it, as consumers. We’re driven along, like armies on train schedules

Admittedly, it’s not easy to assess the implications of a complex technology like AI if you’re not an expert in it, so we tend to listen to the experts. But listening to the experts should tell you all you need to know about the enormity of the commitment we’re making, and how they see the future of AI. And how they’re most definitely not the people we should be listening to.

First off, the size and impact of AI has already created huge distortions in the world, redirecting massive resources in a twin battle of commercial and nationalist competition.

Nvidia is now the third largest company in the world entirely because its specialised chips account for more than 70 percent of AI chip sales.
The U.S. has just announced it will provide rival chip maker Intel with $2o billion in grants and loans to boost the country’s position in AI.
Memory-maker Micro has mostly run out of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stocks because of the chips usage in AI — one customer paid $600 million up-front to lock in supply, according to a story by Stack.
Data centres are rapidly converting themselves as into ‘AI data centres’, according to a ‘State of the Data Center’ report by the industry’s professional association AFCOM.
Back in January the International Energy Agency forecast that data centres may more than double their electrical consumption by 2026. (Source: Sandra MacGregor, Data Center Knowledge)
AI is sucking up all the payroll: Those tech workers who don’t have AI skills are finding fewer roles and lower salaries — or their jobs disappearing entirely to automation and AI.. (Source: Belle Lin at WSJ
China may be behind in physical assets but it is moving fast on expertise, generating almost half the worlds top AI researchers (Source: New York Times).

This is not just a blip. Listen to Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, who sees a future where demand for AI-driven apps is limited only by the amount of computing available at a price the consumer is willing o pay. “Compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it will be maybe the most precious commodity in the world, and I think we should be investing heavily to make a lot more compute.”

In other words, the scarcest resource is computing to power AI. Meaning that the rise in demand for energy, chips, memory and talent is just the beginning. “There’s a lot of parts of that that are hard. Energy is the hardest part, building data centers is also hard, the supply chain is hard, and then of course, fabricating enough chips is hard. But this seems to be where things are going. We’re going to want an amount of compute that’s just hard to reason about right now.” (Source: Sam Altman on Lex Fridman’s podcast)

Sam Altman, 2022. Photo courtesy of Village Global

Altman is probably the most influential thinker on AI right now, and he has huge skin in the game. His company, OpenAI, is currently duking it out with rivals like Claude.ai. So while it’s great that he does interviews, and that he is thinking about all this, listening to only him and his ilk is like talking to motor car manufacturers a century ago. Of course they’ll be talking about the need for more factories, more components — and more roads. For them, the future was their* technology. They framed problems with the technology in their terms, and painted themselves as both creator and saviour. AI is no different.

So what are the dangers?

Well, I’ve gone into this in past posts, so I won’t rehash them here. The main point is that we simply don’t enough to make sensible decisions on how to approach AI.

Consider the following:

We still don’t really know how and why AI models work, and we’re increasingly outsource processes of improving AI to the AI itself. Take, for example, Evolutionary Model Merge, an increasingly popular technique to combine multiple existing models to create a new one, adding further layers of complexity and opacity to an already opaque and complex system. “The central insight here,” writes Harry Law in his Learning from Examples newsletter, “is that AI could do a better job of determining which models to merge than humans, especially when it comes to merging across multiple generations of models.”
We haven’t even agreed on what AI is. There is as yet no science of AI. We don’t agree on definitions. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of AI it can be approached from different angles, with different frameworks, assumptions and objectives. This would be exciting and refreshing were it not simultaneously impacting us all in fast moving ways.
We don’t really know who owns what. We can only be sure of one thing: the big fellas dominate. As Martin Peers wrote in The Information’s Briefing (sub required):”It is an uncomfortable truth of the technology industry currently that we really have little clue what lies behind some of the world’s most important partnerships. Scared about regulators, Big Tech is avoiding acquisitions by partnerships that “involve access to a lot of the things one gets in acquisitions.” Look at Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar alliance with OpenAI and, more recently, with Inflection AI.

Not only does this concentrate resources in the hands of the few, it also spurs the ‘inevitability of the technology’, driven by those dominant companies who have sunk the most into it driven by dreams of the profitability that may come out of it . In short, we’re in danger of imposing a technological lock-in or path dependence which not only limits the range of technologies on offer, but, more seriously, means the most influential players in AI are those who need some serious returns on their investment, colouring their advice and thought leadership.

We’re throwing everything we’ve got at AI. It’s ultimately a bet: If we throw enough at AI now, it will solve the problems that arise — social, environmental, political, economic — from throwing everything we’ve got at AI.

We’ve been here before

The silly thing about all this is that we’ve been here before. Worrying about where AI may take us is nothing new. AI’s ‘founders’ — folk like John von Neumann, I.J. Good — knew where things were going: science fiction writer and professor Vernon Vinge, who died this month, coined the term singularity, but he was not the first to understand that there will come a point where the intelligence that humans build into machines will outstrip human intelligence and, suddenly and rapidly, leave us in the dust.

Why, then, have we not better prepared ourselves for this moment? Vinge first wrote of this more than 40 years ago. In 1993 he even gave an idea of when it might happen — between 2005 and 2030. Von Neumann, considered the father of AI, saw the possibility in the 1950s, according to Polish-born nuclear physicist Stanislav Ulam, who quoted him as saying:

The ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

The problem can be explained quite simply: we fetishise technological progress, as if it is itself synonymous with human progress. And so we choose the rosiest part of a technology and ask users: would you not want this? What’s not to like?

The problem is that this is the starting point, the entry drug, the bait and switch, for something far less benevolent.

Economist David McWilliams calls it the dehumanisation of curiosity — as each new social technology wave washes over us, it demands less and less of our cognitive resources until eventually all agency is lost. At first Google search required us to define what it was that we wanted; Facebook et al required us to do define who and what we wanted to share our day with, and Twitter required us to be pithy, thoughtful, incisive, to debate. Tiktok just required us to scroll. At the end it turned out the whole social media thing was not about us creating and sharing wisdom, intelligent content, but for the platforms to outsource the expensive bit — creating entertainment — to those who would be willing to sell themselves, their lives, hawking crap or doing pratfalls.

AI has not reached that point. Yet. We’re in this early-Google summer where we have to think about what we want our technology to do for us. The search prompt would sit there awaiting us, cursor blinking, as it does for us in ChatGPT or Claude. But this is just a phase. Generative AI will soon anticipate what we want, or at least a bastardised version of what we want. It will deliver a lowest-common denominator version which, because it doesn’t require us to say it out loud, and so see in text see what a waste of our time we are dedicating to it, strip away while our ability to compute — to think — along with our ability, and desire, to do complex things for which we might be paid a salary or stock options.

AI is, ultimately, just another algorithm.

We need to talk

We need to think hard about not just AI, but what kind of world we want to live in. This needn’t be an airy-fairy discussion, but it has to be one based on a human principles, and a willingness of those we have elected to office to make unpopular decisions. When back in 1945 UK Prime Minister Clement Atlee and his minister Aneurin Bevan sought to build a national health service free to all, they faced significant entrenched opposition — much of it from sources that would later change their mind. The Conservative Party under Winston Churchill voted against it 21 times, with Churchill calling it “a first step to turn Britain into a National Socialist (Nazi) economy.” (A former chairman of the British Medical Association used similar language). Doctors voted against it 10:1. Charities, churches and local authorities fought it.

Anenurin Bevan, Minister of Health, on the first day of the National Health Service, 5 July 1948 at Park Hospital, Davyhulme, near Manchester. Photo courtesy University of Liverpool

But Bevan won out, because as a young miner in the slums of southern Wales, he had helped develop the NHS in microcosm: a ‘mutual aid society’ that by 1933 was supplying the medical needs of the 95% of the local population, in return for a subscription of pennies per week. Bevan had seen the future, understood its power, and haggled, cajoled and mobilised until his vision was reality. The result: one of the most popular British institutions, and a clear advantage over countries without a similar system: In 1948 infant mortality in the UK and US was more or less the same — around 33 deaths per 1,000 live births. By 2018 the number had fallen to 3.8 in the UK, but only to 5.7 for the United States. That’s 1.3 million Brits that survived being born, according to my (probably incorrect) maths. (Sources: West End at War, How Labour built the NHS – LSE)

AI is not so simple. Those debating it tend to be those who don’t understand it at all, and those who understand it too well. The former fish for sound-bites while the latter — those who build it — often claim that it is only they who can map our future. What’s missing is a discussion about what we want our technology to do for us. This is not a discussion about AI; it’s a discussion about where we want our world to go. This seems obvious, but nearly always the discussion doesn’t happen — partly because of our technology fetish, but also because entrenched interests will not be honest about what might happen. We’ve never had a proper debate about the pernicious effects of Western-built social media, but our politicians are happy to wave angry fingers at China over TikTok.

Magic minerals and miracle cures

We have a terrible track record of learning enough about a new technology to make an informed decision about what is best for us, instead allowing our system to be bent by powerful lobbies and self-interest. Cars are not the only example. The building industry knew there were health risks associated with asbestos since the 1920s, but it kept it secret and fought regulation. Production of asbestos — once called the ‘magic mineral’ — production kept rising, only peaking in the late 1970s. The industry employed now-familiar tactics to muzzle dissent: “organizing front and public relations companies, influencing the regulatory process, discrediting critics, and manufacturing an alternative science (or history).” (Source: Defending the Indefensible, 2008) As many as 250,000 people still die globally of asbestos-related diseases each year — 25 years after it was banned in the UK.

Operator Clémence Gagnon watches a machine carding asbestos fibre, Johns Manville factory, Asbestos, Que., 1944 Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

Another mass killer, thalidomide, was promoted and protected in a similar manner. Its manufacturers, Chemie Grünenthal, “definitely knew about the association of the drug with polyneuritis (damage to the peripheral nervous system)” even before it brought it to market. Ignoring or downplaying reports of problems, the company hired a private detective to discredit critical doctors, and only apologised for producing the drug, and remaining silent about the defects in 2012. (Source: The Thalidomide Catastrophe, 2018)

I could go on: leaded gasoline, CFCs, plastics, agent orange. There are nearly always powerful incentives for companies, governments or armies to use a technology even after they become aware of its side-effects. In the case of tetraethyl lead in cars, the U.S. Public Health Service warned of its menace to public health in 1923, but that didn’t stop Big Oil from setting up a corporation the following year to produce and market leaded gasoline, launching a PR campaign to promote its supposed safety and discredit its critics, while funding research which downplayed health risks and and lobbying against attempts to regulate. It was only banned entirely in 1996.

An AI Buildup

We are now at a key inflection point. We should be closely scrutinising the industry to promote competition, but we should also be looking at harms, and potential harms — to mental health, to employment, to the environment, to privacy, to whether AI represents an existential threat. But instead Big Tech and Big Government are focusing on hoarding resources and funding an ‘AI buildup.’ In other words, just at a time when we should be discussing how to direct and where to circumscribe AI we are locked in an arms race where the goal is to achieve some kind of AI advantage, or supremacy.

AI is not a distant concept. It is fundamentally changing our lives at a clip we’ve never experienced. To allow those developing AI to lead the debate about its future is an error we may not get a chance to correct.

Yes, we should care about Julian Assange

jeremy — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:29:47 +0000

Still from Annotated short version, Collateral Murder, WikiLeaks

It’s easy for most people — journalists included — to look the other way as Julian Assange’s case grinds to its (likely) grim end. He doesn’t fit neat holes — is he a journalist? An activist? A political operator? A source? An intermediary? A publisher? A whistleblower?

This means that those who are supporting his case are a rather motley bunch, from the left (the late John Pilger, Jeremy Corbyn, Noam Chomsky) to the far right (Tucker Carlson, Sarah Palin, for example). And then there are people in the middle, who feel that both principles and laws are being trampled upon. (Opposition to Assange is also a varied crowd, including Hillary Clinton and Mitch McConnell.)

This should create a broad coalition, but opinion towards Assange is not fixed. When a UN panel ruled in 2016 that Assange had been held arbitrarily by the UK and Sweden, two thirds of Britons surveyed disapproved the ruling. While there was crowd outside the court for deliberation on his extradition, a petition to grant amnesty to Assange posted on Avaaz.org in 2019, has been unable to reach 300 signatures and his name is nowhere to be found on the website’s homepage. Indeed, the sheer length of Assange’s case — running for 14 years now, since Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in 2010 — makes consistent support and publicity for his case difficult.

Chilling episode

So why should we care?

Whatever happens to him, Assange will leave a significant legacy. He changed journalism in a way most of us in the profession are reluctant to acknowledge. It’s now commonplace for journalists and newsrooms to actively solicit secret documents, and advertise the lengths they will go to to protect the source. While investigative journalism didn’t start with Assange, he helped usher in a minor revolution in the occupation — not least by the trove of stories written based on Wikileaks material. Journalists, in the words of Christian Christensen, a Sweden-based professor of media studies, should recognise that “Assange was a key part in the journalistic process, and by criminalising his participation you thereby criminalise that process.”

In my view, there’s one thing that Assange did that makes his freedom a moral requirement. It is his release on April 5 2010 of a video that Wikileaks called “Collateral Murder.” The 39-minute video, obtained by Chelsea Manning, is the view of a Baghdad street from an Apache helicopter gun-sight on July 12 2007, and in Wikileaks’ words “clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers.” The video, and the accompanying radio-chatter, combine to engrave a chilling episode in the history of warfare, comparable to the images of a Vietnamese girl, Kim Phúc, caught in a US napalm attack, the torture of Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh and other Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, or the image of the body of Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, 3, washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015.

There’s a long backstory to (and fallout from) this case which I won’t repeat here. But certain points are worth stressing (I should declare an interest; I am a former Reuters employee, and I am friends with Dean Yates, the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad at the time of the incident. Much of the following is taken from his 2023 book Line in the Sand; a statement by Dean was submitted to the court currently considering Assange’s extradition).

Hostile intent

Reuters had been shown only a small fraction of the recording in the wake of the killing, which in isolation seemed to support the US army argument that the helicopter crew had good reason to believe the group, which included two Reuters journalists Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, also had among them a man apparently carrying a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG. They could be ‘engaged,’ Dean is told, because the presence of supposedly armed men was an expression of ‘hostile intent.’

Reuters was not allowed to keep a copy of the video or any of the material shown to Dean, and the company had been trying to obtain the video through legal channels unsuccessfully up to the time of its release by Wikileaks. The U.S. had blocked such requests at every turn, telling anyone who asked that it couldn’t be found.

The release of the full video by Wikileaks three years later showed several things: firstly, that the subsequent attack on the family trying to rescue the injured likely broke not only the Geneva Convention on attacking wounded, but also the military’s own rules of engagement. In his book Dean describes the video this way:

“It was pure truth-telling. No military officials could deflect, sanitise, provide ‘context’. There is also no tape like it from any war in history in public domain.”

This public domain aspect is key, and perhaps goes to the heart of Assange’s take-no-prisoners approach. Dean points out the only comparable video of an alleged war-crime happening is the execution of a communist Vietnamese prisoner, Nguyễn Văn Lém, by South Vietnam’s police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan on 1 February 1968. A photo of the moment when the is accessible enough, but the video remains the property of NBC and can only be obtained with special permission. “Everyone remembers the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Eddie Adams,” writes Dean. “But not the footage because it’s not a mouse-click away.”

Watching the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém: from Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell’s The Silence of Our Friends, via Interminable Rambling

Moving snapshot

When the video was first aired on NBC in 1968 it “led people to see major problems with the war,” in the words of Safia Swimelar, Political Science and Policy Professor at Elon University. “Many have said that photo and video also just illustrated the moral ambiguity of the war, since it showed that both sides were engaged in violence and possible war crimes.”

By making the Iraq video available with a mouse click, it could be argued Assange has ‘cheapened’ the content, desensitising us to its horror. But probably the opposite is true. We know that it’s there, a defiant finger to the authorities that tried to hide it from the families of the deceased and others seeking the truth about what happened, and, more generally, what the war in Iraq really looked like. It’s understandable that NBC wants to maximise its asset, but it could also be argued that it should by now — 56 years later — at least be in the public domain, a moving snapshot of the Vietnam War as much as Collateral Murder has come to define the Iraq conflict.

Neutral technology

It’s also clear that the U.S. knows it is on shaky ground. While it formed a key part of Chelsea Manning’s indictment, the video is not mentioned anywhere in Assange’s indictments. It’s likely that the U.S. really doesn’t want to go down that route: Much of the rest of Wikileaks’ (and Manning’s) material is that it shows professionals — soldiers, diplomats, analysts, spies — going about their work.

The secrets revealed, whether or not they’re in the public interest, are those that might embarrass a government or highlight its hypocrisy, or possibly endanger a U.S. official going about their proper business. Collateral Murder, on the other hand, exposes something different: not just the abuse of existing rules of engagement, but the absurdity of the “notion of neutral technology at the service of human development,” in the words of Christian Christensen, in a 2014 paper on the ‘afterlife’ of the video. Armies make particular effort to characterise their weaponry as smart in their behaviour, surgical in their impact, and while most of us know this is not really the case, it takes behind-the-scenes videos like this to remind us. Technology in war rarely reduces the harmfulness of a weapon, least of all for bystanders.

Secrets impose a cost, usually on the victim or their loved ones. To properly understand their wound they need to understand what happened, and why. For Dean the video’s release began a journey, illustrating on a micro-scale how the truth, however unpalatable, can set you free. Dean has struggled with PTSD and its brother moral injury, in part because he had not come to terms with the incident and his own feelings about the two men he lost on his watch. The release of the video — the full, unvarnished truth of the incident as it unfolds — highlights how damaging the keeping of secrets can be. In his struggle to come to terms with his PTSD Dean sought the forgiveness of the families of Saaed and Namir, and also tried to reach out to the occupants of the Apache as well, hoping they might share their stories too, and “help the healing” of everyone involved, including themselves.

It’s understandable the U.S. doesn’t want to start discussing all this in public again. But it also helps illustrate a truism that we too readily forget: that governments keep secrets for the wrong reasons — usually to conceal from their own citizens that rules have been broken. But at the same time it goes out of its way to punish as severely as it can any individual like Manning or Assange — pour encourager les autres. That, so far, hasn’t worked: Think of all the whistleblowers who have followed in Assange’s wake — Snowden, Antoine Deltour (LuxLeaks), Maria Efimova (Malta), Reality Winner (NSA), Frances Haugen (Facebook), Hervé Falciani (HSBC), Rudolf Elmer (Julius Baer), the still anonymous Panama Papers leaker, Xavier Justo (1MDB), Howard Wilkinson (Danske Bank), nearly all of whom have through their bravery helped launch investigations and/or changes in policy, despite great peril to themselves and the journalists who report their stories. (Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated in 2017 for her work based on Efimova’s whistleblowing.)

Do we deserve the sacrifice?

By releasing the video Manning and Assange wrote themselves into the history books, showing the graphic truth of what advanced U.S. military power looks like in practice. Perhaps, 14 years on, we are still too close to it to recognise the impact of that truth — or perhaps we have too readily forgotten it. Both understood the gravity of the material in their hands — after retrieving the video Chelsea Manning immediately searched for the rules of engagement each occupant of the helicopter would have been carrying — but perhaps neither may have thought too deeply about the personal sacrifice they would ultimately be making. We should not blame them for that.

Still from Dunkirk (1958) , directed by Leslie Norman

In 1958 Michael Balcon of Ealing Studios produced a fictional film based around the evacuation of Dunkirk, not because he wanted to eulogise the recent past, but because he wanted to disturb audiences, which he felt by the late 1950s had grown complacent, individualistic, unworthy of the sacrifices made for their benefit. He wanted them to ask themselves: “Was Dunkirk worthwhile? Have we deserved the sacrifice? Do we remember what war is?” Assange’s fate is in our hands, and Collateral Murder is the evidence of sacrifices made — both by the people killed or wounded that day, and by a handful of individuals to bring that crime to light — that we should not ignore.

Why do journalists destroy those they love?

jeremy — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:57:05 +0000

There’s a moment in Lynn Alleway’s documentary “Camila’s Kids Company: The Inside Story where Camila Batmanghelidjh emerges from a UK parliamentary grilling and the paparazzi are there, calling out her name as if they know her personally — “Camila! Camila!” — to get the best shot. Batmanghelidjh stands on the steps of the building, her smile wobbling. This moment would mark the end of her career as what one Labour MP called the “poster girl” for a new way of helping those in need. It also marked the beginning of the end of her life.

I explore her case to illustrate another chapter in “How Journalists Think“, with the question: Why does journalism tend to destroy those it once adored? How do these stories develop in the newsroom, and is it something that can be anticipated by those trying to protect those figures from public damnation?

Perhaps that’s too facile a way of putting it. Boiled down, the arc is this: Journalists are always looking for something — or someone — remarkable, that allow themselves to become, or courts the media in helping them become, a ‘celebrity’ figure. In a lot of cases the celebrity status is the end in itself, but it can also be a means to an end. For such people being a celebrity is a useful step in serving some other purpose — usually promoting something they are trying to sell. In the case of Batmanghelidjh, it was trying to sell a new approach in helping the disadvantaged to deep-pocketed politicians and high-net worth individuals (including celebrities.)

Squeeze out the anger

The story of Camila Batmanghelidjh is, briefly this (here’s a much better telling of her story): A Iranian-Belgian, she was educated in England and made it her home. She developed an approach for abused and damaged kids that was startlingly different to how others looked at them: embrace them, she preached. And she would, squeezing a lot of the anger and hatred out of those she worked with. She also believed in giving out cash: she was extremely generous with those she felt needed her largesse, arguing that having, not just basic necessities, but also nice things was part of restoring self-esteem.

UK PM David Cameron and Labour MP Frank Field with Batmanghelidjh, in Liverpool, 2010 (Demos, CC)

She made enemies from the get-go, but she also made powerful friends, and where she could she used those connections to draw funding, expanding her small charity in Peckham to a multi-million pound operation that at its height, she said, was looking after 36,000 ‘clients.’ She was showered with awards and high-profile photo-ops. Her fall from grace was fast: allegations of abuse piled onto allegations of financial mismanagement, and, although she and the charity were largely exonerated, that came too late to save either. Batmanghelidjh died on January 1, 2024, less than a decade after Kids Company had collapsed.

For a journalist there are five main phases to her story.

Niche: interest is largely confined to specialist media and journalists covering poverty, inner cities, social benefits etc. Her dramatic profile may actually work against her at this point, because it may be considered frivolous and attention-seeking. A word like ‘controversial’ might be used in coverage, which can have both good and bad connotations. Being controversial means the subject is worthy of coverage in the journalists’ mind.
Media Darling: As soon as she appears in public alongside senior politicians (including prime ministers and future kings) she enters a different kind of coverage, covered by a different kind of journalist. At this point she becomes a visual and written subject in her own right, and courting the media has advantages for both sides. She is able to attract funding on the back of this, and that in turn becomes part of her media appeal.
Pivot point: She will also attract the counter-force by those questioning the veracity of her claims, and those journalists who spot a possibility of challenging the image she now has in the media. This is the point at which things could go either way. The investigative stuff will force other journalists to include language like “sometimes controversial” as they prod the edges of their previously positive coverage: given the established nature of the story words like “controversial” are no longer a good thing.
The Slide from Grace: Momentum builds and if there’s enough material, the negative stories will pile up on one another inexorably. This is where Batmanghelidjh loses control of how she is perceived and gradually (and sometimes quickly) the tide will turn against her, and journalists who once wrote positively about her will fade away.
Coup de grâce: This is when journalists draw a line under the story, where essentially the subject is covered with their name preceded by words like scandal-hit, disgraced, bankrupt and where that becomes the justification for the story. No longer is the subject able to affect how journalists cover the story. In Batmanghelidjh’s case, this period lasted from late 2015 to her death.

The demon of Peckham

I’m not saying that these are the only stories to be told, but a journalist swimming against the tide in any particular phase will find it a hard sell to editors. A journalist in the first phase would probably approach it as a visual story, as Batmanghelidjh was photogenic, charismatic and playful. This would help move the story from the ‘community’ pages to the more commanding ‘social’ pages. Likewise, once the negative reports start to ooze out it would be a brave journalist who might try to write a ‘yes, but’ story which presented Batmanghelidjh’s case that the charges were politically motivated and without substance.

Something worth noting here: a symbiosis can emerge where journalists find themselves in alliance with groups within the story. Batmanghelidjh won a lot of friends and attracted a lot of funding, but that in turn put noses out of joint, and may also have raised legitimate concerns about her work. The journalists who were first to follow up on sources or hunches that not all was as it seemed fed their findings to local councillors, creating a positive feedback loop in which both were emboldened to investigate claims.

Camila Batmanghelidjh plenary questions with Sarah Montague, NHS Confederation annual conference & exhibition 2011, creative commons

It’s instructive to watch the documentary to see how Batmanghelidjh handled all this. She courted Alleway, a documentary maker who had previously released a glowing documentary about her a decade earlier, to follow her and video the process by which she hoped to spike the guns of her detractors and turn her financial problems around. It’s clear early on that while she directs events as much as she can, she is severely underestimating the hole she is in, and even a sympathetic documentary maker starts to lose faith both that Batmanghelidjh will manage her conjuring trick — and that she is being wholly honest about where the money is going. It’s a painful ride. Batmanghelidjh seemed to grasp the Shakespearian dynamics of her story but not the need to take her detractors seriously: “It’s revenge, round one,” she tells Alleway. “They are about to murder the very thing that works.” And then, later: “They made me the angel of Peckham and now they’re going to make me the demon of Peckham.”

“This one is bad”

Batmanghelidjh does have a media strategist and head of PR, but it’s clear that he has little control over what Batmanghelidjh says or does — even, I sense, over whether he was consulted about allowing a documentary maker fly-on-the-wall access. His efforts to tighten whatever is coming out of the charity in emails and statements, let alone what is coming out of Batmanghelidjh herself, bear little fruit. Batmanghelidjh’s charisma and passion are not enough to save her when she is dragged before a parliamentary committee, conveying vagueness and umbrage in equal measure.

Could she and her advisors done better? Easy to say with hindsight, but it’s clear from one scene that the team is selective in which journalist it responds to. They struggle over a response to allegations that Batmanghelidjh’s driver has received significant funds despite his limited function, but even as the PR manager, Laurence Guinness, tries to prepare a statement Batmanghelidjh, painting her nails bright red, suggests they mention she uses another driver for other trips. Guinness is quick to scotch that, pointing out that “the bill for that runs into 30, 40,000 (pounds) a year…” Then a story comes through about a house with swimming pool that is being rented, and they look at the iPad together. “Oh no, this is the one that is bad, very bad,” he says. “I just ignored him.” And they decide to continue to ignore him.

The story is a fatal blow, and it would have been written with or without their being involved. And when the documentary maker is shown the house and swimming pool in question, it’s clear to both her and the audience that Batmanghelidjh’s description of the pool as tiny is incorrect. It is after this story that her credibility collapsed. There’s nothing really that Guinness could have done — although you might have hoped they would have realised early on in this part of Batmanghelidjh’s trajectory that losing the house might have been a good move.

The truth is that once the tide turns nothing can stop it. Soon after one or two stories land other journalists will be under pressure to distance themselves from previous glowing stories about her, either by staying quiet or by finding ones that float with the turning tide. A good PR would be asking for keys to the skeleton cupboard to anticipate what story might be next, and threaten to walk if the keys aren’t provided. But when your boss, rather than the organisation, is the story, that’s often hard to do. But at least recognising the warning signs of a turning tide might help you be better prepared. A fly-on-the-wall documentary maker might seem like a good idea, but even if they produce something sympathetic, it’s not going to be done in a timeframe that helps, and it may anyway not help move the needle.

Charisma and elbows

This is another reason why I am not a fan of PR thinking up, or thinking in terms of, ‘narratives’ for their clients. Batmanghelidjh at her best was a great story, because she challenged so many orthodoxies. Her charisma attracted political patrons who sought to capture some of that charisma, so a photo of her sitting next to Prime Minister David Cameron in the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street is media gold. The reality behind the picture is a little different: Batmanghelidjh was enticed into that chair and for her the meeting itself lacked substance. She found the wives of political figures much more in tune with what she was trying to do. But those contacts enabled her to short-circuit usual funding routes and attract both large-scale grants as well as envy, disdain and grudges from those elbowed out to make way.

A journalist will see what they want to see, and it’s a PR person’s job to try to shape that. They will follow closely the 4 steps I’ve listed above, and any attempt to alter that substantially will fail. What can be done is to recognise both the advantages and pitfalls of allowing a charismatic leader to overshadow the organisation they are fronting. In many cases this is impossible. But by allowing media and leader to dance together into the stratosphere, there is only one way left to go, and that’s down. For one thing it makes both founder and organisation hostage to fortune: the more successful they are, the sooner the organisation will need more professional hands running it, creating a well-known challenge called founder syndrome. In Batmanghelidjh’s case it was obvious within a few seconds of the documentary beginning that she presided over something that had become a monster — miles of expensive office space, lots of employees at computers more redolent of a blue chip company than a scrappy NGO — and that her fate was sealed.

Better counsel would be to gradually limit media access to Batmanghelidjh herself and focus on the more professional side of the company, making scale the next version of the story, and the calibre of those being brought in to help. In other words, a more solid strategy would be to dial down the story about Batmanghelidjh and dial up the story about scale and next steps — and to start strategising what negative stories journalists might be looking for and help to neutralise them. Frankly, ignoring a journalist asking about a negative story never ends well as we’ve discussed before.

Do journalists feel bad about what they do? Some. It’s not a nice feeling to see someone you’ve written about impacted by your story, even if the story was the truth and a corrective to public perceptions. I’ve had the daughter of a prominent figure I wrote an exposé about weeping as she asks me why I hated her father so much. We always say it’s not personal, but it sometimes is. One journalist who led the investigative work which started the unravelling, Chris Cook, wrote on Twitter after her death that “61 is no age, and she was gifted at dealing with tough young people – but should not have got £40mn+ in public funds.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tweet prompted some strong responses.

Journalism is never definitive. It’s always the best effort at the time, in the time allowed. I suspect that at some point attention will return to her ideas, laid out in several books, and she will be regarded as a visionary of sorts. Unfortunately there’s no room for that kind of journalism until we build a decent time machine.

Destroying the brand to save it

jeremy — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 12:04:52 +0000

Troops marching through a village during the Vietnam War. Location and date unknown. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams)

Companies spend a lot of time talking about their brand(s). But to most journalists the word is meaningless. The word both groups are really thinking about is reputation, as that captures its true importance, since it’s the hardest asset to build up and the easiest to lose. Think of it that way and you’ll understand better about how seriously to take any inquiry from a journalist exploring potential wrongdoing in your organisation.

Once again I’m turning to the British Post Office saga for material to demonstrate this. The case, as readers will know, is about the wrongful persecution and prosecution of those running the company’s post offices, accusing them of theft and fraud when its Fujitsu computer system showed accounting shortfalls.

Yes, the story already feels a little as if it’s now in the rear view mirror. But it so painfully highlights what can go wrong when a company misunderstands what ‘brand’ is, it deserves another airing. And it is still laying waste, with terrible consequences for the lives and reputations of nearly everyone involved, from the legions of lowly sub-postmasters who went to their graves unabsolved, to the apparatchiks and executives who must now take their turn to feel humiliated and ashamed.

For 20 years the Post Office prioritised the preservation of its ‘brand’, believing that without it the company would lose its most valuable customers, two government agencies that provided much of its income (the Department for Work and Pensions and the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency.)

But, fatally, it viewed the sub-postmasters as the threat, not a new computer system.

The cottage industry

The flawed logic is easy to see in testimony given back in 2015, when the problem was already 15 years old, but still far from tipping in favour of the beleaguered sub-postmasters. The General Secretary of the National Federation of SubPostmasters, George Thomson, was asked by a House of Commons committee whether sub-postmasters were still experiencing problems with the Fujitsu IT system at the heart of the matter.

“We do £350 million a week,” he told the committee. “We pay out £18 billion a year for the DWP in Government benefits. The DWP would not have re-awarded the Post Office card account contract, which pays out £18 billion a year, in the last month if they thought for a minute that this computer system was not reliable.”

George Thomson before the Select Committee Hearing 2015

On that he was right. But ensuring that was the case, he told the committee, was not about checking whether the computer system itself was reliable, but in suppressing the voices of those who said it wasn’t. “We have to be careful,” he said, “that we are not creating a cottage industry that damages the brand and makes clients like the DWP and the DVLA think twice.”

Senior Post Office executives were more polished in their description of the situation. But the bottom line was always the same: We need to preserve the brand, whatever it costs, even as it became increasingly obvious that the brand bore little relationship with the underlying reality.

It’s important to remember this wasn’t gradual. From the outset the Post Office chose to believe the system was not at fault, the sub-postmasters were. In one early adopter Post Office, the Horizon system was installed in January 2000. By July it had a shortfall of £30,000, and auditors closed the Post Office. The sub-postmaster was later convicted of false accounting. (Source)

The branding iron

For this approach to work, it needed its own internal logic. The computer system could not have problems if every sub-postmaster reporting shortfalls was a likely criminal. You had to have one, not the other. Rob Wilson, then head of criminal law at the Post Office, wrote in an email in 2010: “To continue prosecuting alleged offenders knowing that there is an ongoing investigation to determine the veracity of Horizon could also be detrimental to the reputation of my team.”

His team’s reputation could take a hit if it was using the law against sub-postmasters while another part of the Post Office was investigating whether, indeed, those same sub-postmasters may have a point when they said the IT system was faulty.

His conclusion: don’t investigate Horizon. Don’t look for something you don’t want to find.

But if that was the case, why investigate the sub-postmasters at all? Why not write off the shortfalls, keep quiet and move on?

The answer, it turns out, is two-fold.

Firstly, money. In 2003 the Post Office was trading at a loss, putting pressure on staff to recover debts and making that part of performance-related targets. (Source) Indeed, when sub-postmasters added their own funds in desperate efforts to redress the computer-derived losses, such “unexplained windfalls” were quietly transferred to the bottom line. In the words of one sub-postmaster: “as a result… top executives are showered with bonuses and honours.” (Gordon Martin, of Moor Falmouth: Source)

Gordon Martin, giving evidence to the inquiry, 24/2/22

And then of course, there’s reputation. If it’s a battle between the reputation of the sub-postmaster or the Post Office, the big guns would have to come out. “Cases raised for investigations will be limited to those likely to seriously damage the brand or reputation of the Post Office,” one internal Post Office document declared. Source Any legal action was not about recovering money, since that was already flowing in, but in ensuring that no sub-postmaster should challenge the sanctity of the brand. They needed to be silenced.

The ultimately fatal logic of wagon-circling ensured the Post Office was committed to ruining hundreds, thousands, of lives. “It seems that people within the Post Office did everything possible to protect the reputation of the Post Office,” said Sam Stein, a lawyer working on behalf of the sub-postmasters, “and, whilst doing so, did everything possible to destroy the reputation of their own staff. The Post Office broke people. They broke good, honest, people. Some did not survive.” (Source)

The witness statements submitted and interviews conducted show just what this meant, as individuals’ reputations were trashed to destroy this “cottage-industry” of sub-postmasters damaging the Post Office brand.

Pauline Thomson, sub-postmaster of Matfield, Kent from 2004 to 2008, said “some (customers) would ‘cut me dead’. Some people would blank me.”

Tahir Mahmood, sub-postmaster at Selly Oak, Birmingham, between 1999 and 2005, and sentenced to 9 months’ imprisonment, described how “the impact (was) greater to my reputation within the family than outside it. At family gatherings, I could hear people gossiping about me or staring at me.”

Mary Philp said she still takes a detour to avoid the village in Fife, Scotland, where she was sub-postmaster, (Source) “because I still feel the effects of the humiliation of wrongful accusation and the unjustified judgement of the community there.”

The whipping stick

On the surface this seems absurd. To protect “the brand” the company attacks the only Post Office people the public see, so for them they are the brand. So the Post Office seemed intent on destroying its own key resource — those in the field actually providing the service. To those on the front-line it was baffling. “We’re the ones standing at the front of the counter, taking the abuse from the customers, to put money into the Post Office to make them the global brand or the big brand that they are,” said Kevin Palmer, sub-postmaster in Rayleigh, Essex, from 2007 to 2016. (Source)

But it may have seemed logical. The Post Office, in effect, was shoring up its brand by exploiting and then trashing those of its own people. One anonymous witness described it thus: “We postmasters have been abused for our honesty and loyalty to the Crown and the Post Office reputation. The Post Office used this honesty and loyalty as a whipping stick.” (Source)

But so long as the Post Office’s reputation held fast, it was a winning strategy. And the sad reality was — and possibly still is, if some conversations I’ve had — that in a battle of brands between the Post Office and local pillars of the community, the former would win out. “I can remember friends and acquaintances had a difficult time believing that I was completely innocent and thought that a respected institution such as the Post Office must have had some reason to suspect me,” Jean Smith, manager of East Boldon Post Office, Tyne and Wear, told the Post Office Inquiry. Source

Reputations crumbled to dust.

“I was totally devastated. My job, business and reputation destroyed in one day,” said Nicola Arch. (Source) “I literally lost everything overnight. Money and property and business is one thing, but losing your reputation and dignity is another,” said Robert Ambrose, sub-postmaster in High Wych, Hertfordshire, 2010-2012. “My reputation and the reputation of my family is more important that money to me. I want my reputation back,” said Heather Earley, sub-postmaster at Newtownabbey, County Antrim 2011 to 2017. (Source)

Heather Earley speaking to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 18 May 2022, in Belfast

The burden they were carrying was especially heavy, because in many cases the Post Offices they ran were closed down, leading the local community to see the sub-postmasters as responsible for losing a precious local resource. “For many years, I have always felt that there was a stain on my reputation as suspicion fell on me when Post Office Limited closed the office after I left and moved it to a large convenience store. The community saw this as a betrayal as the post office had been the centre of the village for decades,” said John Bowan, sub-postmaster at Pontyclun, Wales, from 1998 to 2004. (Source)

The strategy is, in hindsight, absurd. It has helped decimated the Post Office’s network of post offices. In 2000 there were 18,000. In 2022 there were 11,635. The perverse logic required to protect a position essentially led to the point where to challenge that thinking would have meant ripping up the company and starting again. But while it may seem absurd now, it’s clear that no senior Post Office executive considered it so, for nigh on two decades.

The culture may have come from the top, but as it seeped through the company no one could ask the fundamental question: are we backing the wrong horse here? Is the computer itself at fault, and if so, does that mean everything we’ve done has to be unravelled? No-one internally, or appointed externally, could afford to ask that question — until, eventually, the public woke up to the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.

In short, the logic could not unravel itself — it required a hefty push from outside.

And to me that’s the worry.

The wagons

The logic, I fear, is embedded in much brand or reputation management. I don’t claim to be an expert on such subjects from within PR, but I do know what it looks like from a journalist’s point of view. I have experienced some of the flawed logic at play when, as a journalist, I’ve approached a company with a story that sets off alarms about brand and reputation.

If a journalist finds something apparently wrong in an organisation, and asks for an interview, the usual reaction from that organisation is to try to discourage the journalist from writing about it — either by denying the story, presenting evidence that apparently contradicts the story, or by challenging the journalist’s understanding of the story.

When I interviewed the CEO and his team at a major chemical manufacturer about a quirk in their company structure that suggested there had been an illegal pay-off, a flunky left the room and ten minutes came back with a document that he said provided an innocent explanation for the incident. The single page of A4 had no letterhead, no date and no signature, and was warm enough to suggest it just been typed or printed. I’m not sure how they thought I might react but it definitely wasn’t the way that I did.

On another occasion I interviewed the senior executive of a global telecoms equipment manufacturer and challenged the company’s line on allegations it had stolen firmware code from a rival. The PR head later sent me what he said was proof that the code was originally developed by the company. It took me about five minutes to discover that there was an earlier version of the code, provably written by the rival. To his credit, the PR person didn’t debate the point.

I get it. It’s perhaps understandable that the first reaction to a possible negative story would be to circle the wagons and head the journalist off at the pass (at the risk of murdering the metaphor.) I am the first to admit sometimes this works: sometimes there just is no way to confirm a story and it ends up languishing.

But this never ends well. A journalist will always pull at the string eventually. In the case of the Post Office its internal logic may have been a useful holding pattern had it gone back to check the allegations more thoroughly — and address them. But it didn’t. It continued to harass sub-postmasters and closed its eyes to the obvious logic that computers must be at least partly to blame for all these shortfalls reported by unblemished sub-postmasters.

The problem is that this circle-the-wagons approach puts down roots and becomes a fortress. Defending it becomes part of the raison d’être of the organisation. A judge described it thus: “A theme contained within some of the internal documents is an extreme sensitivity (seeming to verge, on occasion, to institutional paranoia) concerning any information that may throw doubt on the reputation of Horizon, or expose it to further scrutiny.” (Source)

Staff could see no one would be fired for this behaviour so it became institutionalised, even up to 2022, when Chris Trousdale, sub-postmaster at Lealholm Post Office, Yorkshire, told the inquiry: “They let us suffer for longer – even now, you can read the Post Office dribble that they put out and you think: you’ve got no contrition, you’ve got no remorse, you’re just in brand protection 101 mode, that’s all you’re interested in.” (Source)

It was clear that none of this was accidental. John Breeden, a Post Office employee, was asked by the inquiry about where this culture of protecting the brand image at all costs came from. “In my view, it came from the top.” (John Breeden was an employee of the Post Office)

With the executives still toeing the same party line, the rank and file were empowered to persecute sub-postmasters, especially those that refused to bow down. Suzanne Palmer, sub-postmistress in Rayleigh, Essex from 2004 to 2005, recounted how she was still hounded even after she was found not guilty in court. The Post Office refused to reinstate her, losing her her home, her business and her credibility. “The Post Office tried to do all they could to ruin my reputation, even to the extent of saying that if my manager gave evidence on my behalf they would prosecute her as well,” she said. (Source)

The furnace and the wrench

The Post Office, in short, became the prison of its own ‘reputation management.’ Which to me demonstrates how flawed any strategy is that doesn’t first address the underlying truth of an allegation that threatens an institution’s brand.

In the case of the Post Office, its reputation lay in how well it could deliver the services of its clients — the mail, pensions, driving licences etc etc. That meant, and still means, that the company is essentially in the business of maintaining two pipes. The first pipe is the one between itself and its sub-postmasters channeling services. The other pipe is between its sub-postmasters and the customers of those services. The success of one depends on the success of the other. If Mrs Birchsquirble of Llanybydder can’t get her pension then the system has broken. Ultimately the reputation of the Post Office — its brand — depend on whether that service can be provided.

The Post Office, like many a company I’ve either written about as a journalist, or worked with on the other side of the fence, confuses brand and reputation and sees both as something that is ‘managed’, an amorphous mass that can be separated from the institution itself, massaged and spruced up, given a dash of paint, a new logo, renamed if necessary, helped along by crisp mission statements, press releases, friendly or sponsored coverage, and by avoiding pesky journalists asking difficult questions.

I would argue the opposite is true. Reputation is forged in the furnace of real-world events, where institutions and their leaders tackle, and are seen to tackle, challenges where they exist. I admit that we journalists failed to notice this story until it was way too late, but even then, some soul-searching and tough questions from senior management might have led to the brave but necessary investigation, which would have saved countless millions, hundreds of prosecutions, and quite a few lives. It’s never too late to use a journalist’s questions as a wrench to force open some cupboards.

Forget managing reputation in circumstances like these. I wrote a few weeks ago about a company trying to deliver water to Jakartans after state utilities were privatised. That story caused significant upheaval and not a few departures. But the story wasn’t wrong, nor was it misleading. The problems were there for anyone to see. Yes, perhaps another journalist might have put a more positive spin on it, but the problem wasn’t a PR problem. It was the result of an internal failure to recognise the scale of the problem the company faced, and deal with it before inviting a journalist in to view the wreckage. If I hadn’t written about it, the story would have come out anyway.

Reputation is not a shiny new façade or cladding on a crumbling edifice. Reputation is built and maintained by doing things right. It’s like that saying about when to plant a tree. Even when it seems it might be too late, it’s still better than later. Later, and your reputation will be the worse for it, even if you’re all vested up and on your desert island in the sun.

It took a judge to see what the Post Office had become by burying its head in the sand. Speaking back in 2004, Judge McFarland took a swipe at the company’s disastrous and eventually reversed rebranding as Consignia a couple of years earlier, and saw its effort to prosecute a sub-postmaster for what it was. He told the court: “The Post Office case was just as much of a sham as its rebranded new image of the nation’s most trusted brand.” (Source)

It was true, but it would take nearly another 20 years for that to become widely known.

Un-circling the wagons

So what are the takeaways? My argument is that the Post Office, as a case study, is different only in the extremes — the lengths the company went to protect its brand, the length of time it took for the truth to be widely acknowledged, the number of people wrongly persecuted and prosecuted, the sheer size of the scandal and its impact.

Beneath the surface there are lessons we can all learn.

It’s important to understand why this story became so big and dragged in public figures and governments. It was because journalists wrote about it. Not as many as there should have been, and not as soon as we should, but that was a function of the distributed nature of the crime. None of the victims knew — for years, in some cases for the rest of their lives — that there were other victims as well. As I’ve mentioned in earlier pieces, sub-postmasters, by virtue of their job, are spread out around the country and have no formal or natural mechanism for connecting to others. (The union which was supposed to do that abandoned them.)

Furnace | Andrew Otto | Flickr

So we need to remember that in the majority of cases like this it’s nearly always the result of journalists doing their job well. Journalists will always, eventually, find out. So it naturally points to the absolute necessity of taking journalists seriously when they come knocking at your door. It’s not enough to fend them off thinking they and the story will go away. It might, for a while. But never forever.

This means that when a journalist makes this approach, with allegations of illegality or other transgressions, the case needs to be assigned to someone of sufficient seniority to handle, and if necessary to investigate. Is there some truth in what the journalist is reporting? In the case of the Post Office, it’s clear that there’s an institutional knowledge about the problem, but that prejudice and self-preservation have created a bunker mentality, where the truth is intentionally shut out (by seeking only confirmatory noises from those who know about the computer system that it’s not to blame) and the victims themselves, the sub-postmasters, treated as criminals.

So it goes without saying — although it appears it needs to be said — that ignoring a journalist who approaches with a story will ultimately be fatal. After acknowledging the journalist’s request and learning what you can about what their angle is, the question to ask, then, is: is there something that I don’t know that the journalist does? Are my own staff keeping information from me? More often the reaction is both to push away the problem and root out the leak within the organisation. Both of these are likely to be counterproductive, but are often in the interests of several layers within the organisation — mostly those who would not ultimately carry responsibility if the allegations ended up being true.

The Post Office showed us that the company confused brand for reputation. If the brand could be protected, the company’s reputation would remain intact. But that’s not how it works. Brand is what you deliberately create in order to distinguish your company, or product, or service, from others. Reputation is what you gain through your actions, your responses, your statements, your finances.

Reputation is what you have left after you’ve done everything you feel is necessary to do. It’s not something to be ‘managed’. It’s an ongoing measure. And yes, the truism is just that: it’s the hardest thing to earn and the easiest thing to lose.

I don’t know how the Post Office should have handled the case. But I do know that its really fundamental error, the one that marked the point of no return, was when the company started harassing and threatening journalists. Instead of seeing this as an opportunity, a chance to un-circle the wagons and see if the allegations were true, they took the other route. After that the issue was not whether, but when, the truth would come out, and there would be no reputation left to manage.

Politics, polarisation and pity parties: the Post Office scandal unpicked

jeremy — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 17:45:51 +0000

This is the second in a series of pieces trying to explain what happened in the UK’s ongoing Post Office scandal and why it matters. The first was about the lack of media coverage the story received for the first 20 years. (It can be found on How Journalists Think, on the Loose Wire Blog and on my LinkedIn feed. )

This one was intended to look purely at the technological side of things, but first need to understand the human element in all this — how a project like this happened in the first place, and why so many serving and former employees of the Post Office failed to come forward and address the scandal at any point in the 20 years it was churning sub-postmasters out of the legal meat-grinder.

By way of reminder, some brief background:

A flawed computer system in the UK led to the conviction of at least 700 individuals who ran small Post Offices, and while nearly 100 of those have been overturned, at least 60 sub-postmasters have died without seeing justice or compensation, at least four by their own hand. All were prosecuted on the basis that a computer system set up by Fujitsu, Horizon, worked perfectly and so could not have been responsible for the errors that led to sub-postmasters being accused of creaming off funds in their Post Office account.

The Post Office, currently being dragged through an enquiry, prefers to call the scandal the “Horizon IT Scandal”, presumably because it doesn’t include the words “Post Office.” It euphemistically refers to the fact the system was riddled with bugs and at least one backdoor as being “primarily concerned the reliability of the Horizon computer system used in post offices and issues related to Postmasters’ contracts and the culture of Post Office at the time. It’s a bit like the owners of the Titanic telling a post-sinking enquiry that the episode “primarily concerned the reliability of the ship.”

What it doesn’t say is that Post Office staff supposed to help subpostmasters navigate the system would say the system was not to blame, no one else was having any problems with it, and insisting the subpostmasters cover any discrepancies. And then charging them with theft.

It’s a grim tale that has been burning slowly in the background for 20 years, with only a handful of dedicated journalists (and sub-postmasters) pushing for justice. And it’s probably too early to draw some lessons, but one thing is clear: It was not in the interests of the company, the Post Office (owned by the government, but with its own board, effectively separating itself from its owner), and Fujitsu, the company providing the system (the contract is worth £2.3 billion, and is still ongoing), to admit that the system was flawed. But beyond that there’s more.

Pre-history of a scandal

It probably comes as no surprise that the project was doomed from the start. This is not to say that hundreds of innocent people would be convicted, but the project itself was deeply flawed, even before it was built.

Here’s a brief account of what happened. I’m indebted to Eleanor Shaikh, whose dogged research and excellent analysis is one of those small demonstrations of heroics that should be properly acknowledged and rewarded. (You can find the fruits of her research at the: Justice for Postmasters Alliance resources page.)

The company that became Fujitsu UK was something called ICL, itself a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together by government in the 1960s desperate to keep Britain’s once-great computer industry alive, a British flagship to compete with IBM. ICL survived mostly through government contracts; the government took a 25% stake in the company in the 1970s and, at least for that decade, ICL flourished.

In 1968, with government encouragement, ICT was merged with all the UK’s remaining mainframe computer manufacturing companies to form ICL.

By the early 80s it was in trouble, but Margaret Thatcher overcame her free-market instincts to give it loan guarantees to maintain a British computer industry. Around this time it abandoned some of its in-house development to buy Fujitsu chips. In 1990 Fujitsu cemented its hold on the company by buying a 80% stake in 1990. ICL was now, to all intents and purposes, Fujitsu UK.

Around the same time the Post Office was beset by fraud — losing nearly £100 million between 1991 and 1992 to fraudulent social security (welfare benefit) payments. The government, which owned (and still owns) the Post Office devises something called Project Horizon in 1993, which it hoped would handle the £56 billion more securely through a swipe-card system atop an automated process . A contract worth £1 billion was put up for tender in 1994. IBM competed but ICL-Pathway (the name of Fujitsu at that time) won, signing the deal in 1996.

The Goal Postmen

In less than a year Fujitsu was burning through £10 million a month, but had nothing to show for it — not even in a controlled environment could to demonstrate a “satisfactory, sustained environment”. The Post Office and the Benefits Agency kept moving the goalposts — 323 formal requests to change the original contractual requirements over three years — and it was clear that Fujitsu did not have the capability to do it. At the same time the project was becoming more ambitious, wrapping in other functions a sub-postmaster currently did by hand. By January 1998 the government was considering ditching the whole thing.

A few months later the Benefits Agency served Fujitsu with a formal notice of breach of contract. Fujitsu refused to accept the notice and then threatened to stop working on the project altogether unless it got a better deal. The Benefits Agency delivered a coup de grâce when it announced it was ditching swipe-card payments for direct payments to bank accounts. As Shaikh puts it: “In one swoop, Fujitsu’s potential income from the project had been reduced to zero. On top of that, the Post Office was looking at losing a third of its customer base overnight.”

This put the government in a difficult position. During 1998 Fujitsu had bought the remaining shares in ICL so there was no ignoring it was a Japanese company. The future of Horizon was kicked up to Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to make a decision. ICL — Fujitsu UK — was by now not only completely in bed with the government, but it was hogging the sheets: It won a £200 million contract with the Department of Trade and Industry for something called “Project Edgar”, and signed another called “Project Libra” with the Lord Chancellor’s Department; the following year it signed a £680 million contract with Customs and Excise.

The Domino Effect

But Horizon was still the big fish, and if it got away it was widely accepted in Whitehall, according to Shaikh, “that ending the contract in its entirety would spell the downfall of ICL”. The Japanese government was not unaware of this fact. The real head of Fujitsu UK, Michio Naruto, collared the UK ambassador to Japan and left him with a clear picture: “any threat to ICL’s continued viability would have profound implications for jobs in the UK and for bilateral ties,” the ambassador warned. (Naruto would later earn a CBE for his troubles, a rare gong for a Japanese national.) Blair’s government, desperate not to upset the Japanese and to prevent a domino effect of collapsing ICL-related projects, scrambled around for a solution. The Treasury, in particular, was keen to keep the Post Office on an even keel — a rare profit-making enterprise in the government’s portfolio, it had contributed some £2.4 billion to government coffers since 1981.

But the Post Office was not enjoying the ride. Even as ministers were scrambling around it couldn’t make the system work, and blamed Fujitsu, which it blamed for a lack of support, design and documentation. In early 1999 it concluded :”We have been unable to gain a high level of assurance in the adequacy or suitability of the service.” The Benefits Agency were out, and the Post Office wanted out too. At some point this month senior members of Fujitsu marched in to see Blair, and while we don’t yet know what happened there, they had put the PM on notice: make a decision by May. Blair, terrified of the optics should they scrap Horizon, upset the Japanese, derail any number of other Fujitsu projects and write off hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of pounds, ordered the project go ahead.

Appalling people

By October, ready or not, “full automation” had begun as Horizon computers were rolled out. As Eleanor Shaikh put it:

This is how, at the behest of the Prime Minister, Horizon’s untested core of dubious provenance came to be the IT backbone of the nation’s iconic Post Office. It was a politically expedient deal which cemented ICL/Fujitsu as the trusted supplier of IT in the foundations of New Labour’s Modernising Government agenda.

The Post Office leadership quickly pivoted. While the board remained unimpressed by Horizon, there were salaries to be earned and the big ticket project gathered a momentum all its own, with little regard for the sub-postmasters themselves. Frank Field, then a minister for welfare reform, warned parliament in 2000 that something was seriously off. He reported that the board had little appetite for serving the post offices and those who ran them. Karl Flinders (another hero of Post Office coverage) wrote that Fields said: “I did not merely talk to colleagues and read the papers, I visited the project partners. Had it been my responsibility to do so, I would have sacked the members of the Post Office board, who were appalling people. They were short-sighted and partisan.”

The people problem

Indeed, the story of Horizon from the point at which it was clear it was not going to go away is largely a story of human failure on an epic scale. We know how badly the sub-postmasters suffered, and we have taken aim at some prominent villains in the piece, but the egregious behaviour of nearly everyone involved in the Post Office begs some serious questions.

“What awful people.”

How, for 20 years, could an institution remain indifferent and unquestioning about the litany of failure — to properly install a system, to properly train and support those using it, to question whether so many postmasters were on the fiddle (and if so, whether the recruitment that sourced these people was flawed), to raise any questions within about the appropriateness of this conveyor belt of cruelty? I am happy to be corrected, but I could find no whistle-blower from within the Post Office during this period, despite its own promotion of World Whistleblowing Day. (Richard Roll, who spoke out in 2015, was an employee of Fujitsu. The only case I can find is one at Royal Mail, which was split from the Post Office in 2012, and even then that person was dismissed after raising concerns, leading to a court case in which Royal Mail was ordered to pay her £2.3 million in compensation.)

We need to look at the institution itself, which employs under 4,000 people. What were they doing in these 20 years? And the Fujitsu teams working on the project? What were they doing? The moral bankruptcy did not just exist at the top. They were the ones who led, but everyone else followed. Where were the whistleblowers from within the Post Office themselves? I know it is distasteful, but I can only compare it with the most studied (and still poorly understood) case of moral blindness in recent history: Germans both during and after World War II.

Mind your language

Firstly, there is the phenomenon of identifying one group as “the other”, making it both easier and more bureaucratically acceptable to prejudge them and justify what amounts to persecution. Dehumanizing always starts with language, argues Brené Brown, citing David Livingston Smith (Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others) and Michelle Maiese (Autonomy, enactivism, and mental disorder: a philosophical account) , and this can be easily seen in the way the Post Office treats, both formally and informally, the sub-postmasters. In one email written by then Post Office investigator Gary Thomas they’re described as “all crooks”, when he explains why he’s pleased to get his hands on some particular emails:

“Because I want to prove that there is FFFFiiinnn no ‘Case for the Justice of Thieving Subpostmasters’ and that we were the best Investigators they ever had and they were all crooks!!”

(Once again, thanks to Nick Wallis for the great detective work, and journalism, where much of this stuff comes from. )

This notion of sub-postmasters as of a particular type, an ‘other type’ of person, can be found in the official document: where one required investigators to categorize (PDF) suspects ethnically — including terms such as ‘Negroid types’, “Chinese/Japanese types” and “Dark Skinned European Types” (and don’t get me started on why Siamese, a term that went out when Siam became Thailand in 1939):

This might be put down to excessive bureaucracy, perhaps, but there was clearly racism and contempt among those managing the Horizon system and working with sub-postmasters. Amandeep Singh, who worked for a year on the Horizon help-line, staffed by Fujitsu employees, described the situation thus:

Postmasters right from week one would be upset, crying frustrated as they struggled to reach equilibrium on the transactions. The floor on these days was most toxic with vocal characters in Squad A, unchallenged by managers who looked away as all Asians were called Patels, regardless of surname. Shouts across the floor could be heard, saying “I have another Patel scamming again”. They mistrusted every Asian Postmaster. They mocked Scottish and Welsh Postmasters and pretended they could not understand them. They created a picture of Postmasters that suggested they were incompetent or fraudsters. \

“I know nothing”

Then there’s the “this wasn’t something I was involved in so I know nothing” defence.

Some have presented themselves to the enquiry — intentionally or unintentionally — as witless. They didn’t know what was going on, anything they signed was written by someone else, they felt slightly bad about what was happening, but not enough to do anything about it. Jarnail Singh, once head of criminal law for the Post Office, who was even reluctant to acknowledge that he fulfilled that role. “I know if I had to go to court and actually physically see these people, then I wouldn’t be able to do the job. I think I would have left a long time ago. At the end of the day, this was a paper exercise,” he told the inquiry. This is not a million miles from what historian Hannah Arendt called Schreibtischtäter or desk murderer, where bureaucrats stay insulated from what they’re enabling, ordering or approving.

A stone’s throw from this is the tendency for those in position of authority to claim wrongdoing wasn’t something they were aware of. Michael Keegan, who was Fujitsu UK CEO from May 2014 to June 2015, leaving the organisation in 2018, successfully appealed to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO, in 2022 over news coverage that he said inaccurately linked him to the Post Office scandal, arguing that he did not have “line management responsibility” for the Post Office account in this period, and that he had only learnt of the sub-postmaster’s litigation from press coverage in 2019. (Keegan previously worked for the Royal Mail Group/Post Office, and had joined Fujitsu UK in 2006.)

While I am not suggesting he was responsible for the Horizon project, it does require a leap of faith, given its size and value, that he was unaware of the massive wave of prosecutions underway, especially as he previously worked for the Post Office. Ignorance, real or imagined, of what is going on beneath someone in a senior position of course is nothing new. Adolf Eichmann claimed he was ‘a mere instrument’ in the Holocaust, saying he “was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.” Eichmann was in fact one of the main organisers of the Holocaust. (Just to be clear, I’m not likening Keegan’s role in the Post Office to that of Eichmann in the Holocaust, just that claiming you did not have ‘line-management responsibility’ and therefore were not responsible is nothing new.)

Self-victimisation

Then there is ‘acquired’ victimhood. We now know who the victims are of the scandal, although there may be thousands more who have not come forward, or may have passed away. But that has not stopped some people from claiming victimhood for themselves. Take, for example, the above-mentioned Gary Thomas (I am again indebted to those who did the hard yards on this story, this time to Nick Wallis. He and others covered this story for years when no one was interested.) Thomas had once been a counter clerk before rising, if that’s the right word, to the Security Team (the ones responsible for the heavy treatment of sub-postmasters) in 2000. After the quashing of 39 sub-postmasters’ convictions in 2021, he wrote to the then chief executive of the Post Office, that he, too, was a victim, because he had now found out that all the evidence he gave “was incorrect and lies.” He concludes:

Can I ask the question and enquire why we have all been completely cast aside and left with not so much as a letter of communication or an apology whatsoever ?

Whilst compensation is being correctly awarded now to these Sub-Postmasters, I feel the employees instructed to conduct these prosecutions, arrests and searches have been completely overlooked.

The claiming of victimhood by those who might be more accurately described as those on the delivering rather than receiving end is well-documented in the academic literature. Harald Jähner, in his book Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich 1945–1955 describes the feeling of many post-war Germans:

The fate of victimhood that people volubly assigned to one another – known in sociology as ‘self-victimisation’ – stripped most Germans of any obligation they might otherwise have felt to engage with the Nazi crimes committed in their name.

Elsewhere, Michael Zank writes on Daniel Jonah [Goldhagen’s ] book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Michael_Zank/gold.html) that

The prevailing attitude in Germany after the war was self pity, an attitude which left little if any room for attention to the greater suffering of others.

Conclusion

I was pondering the merits of such distasteful comparisons but sometimes a spade has to be called a spade. The abrogation of responsibility, and the apparent lack of empathy on display from a procession of officials and officers before the inquiry makes me think that, while ultimately it’s our worship of the computer that made this scandal possible (which I promise to address next time), confining it to that lets a lot of people off the hook. Those at the top made a series of very poor decisions based on political expediency, and greed, while those in the middle or lower reaches of the companies involved would seem to have either looked away, claimed ignorance, bad memory or deep ineptitude, in order to exonerate themselves.

Those corridors, too, need to be explored, investigated and cleaned.

And we need to draw lessons from how these projects are born, and how those who should be asking tough questions — and refusing to implement clearly wrong-headed and vindictive processes — can be encouraged to do so, and held responsible if they don’t. This isn’t going to end if a few gongs and bonuses are clawed back.

Thanks for reading, and, as usual, your comments and tips are very welcome.

Why did journalists ignore the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history?

jeremy — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 17:13:36 +0000

Why do journalists not cover some stories — even massive ones — and can they be persuaded to?

I’m writing about the UK’s Post Office scandal elsewhere, but for this column on How Journalists Think, I wanted to explore why most UK journalists ignored the country’s biggest ever case of legal injustice for nearly 20 years? And what lessons can be learned about how journalists approach stories — and how PR can help them pay better attention to stories that matter?

“Anyone coming new to this scandal disbelieves it: can it really be that bad?” Neil Hudgell, lawyer, speaking to Sky News.

I’m not going to explore how the Post Office might have told their story differently. It’s clear that the failures were systemic and I’m not sure how anyone with a decent understanding of the situation would have agreed to defend the indefensible.

So I’d like to look at it from another point of view: why did this story get so little media coverage for so long? Why did hundreds, possibly thousands, of sub-postmasters ¹ go unheard, uncovered, for so long?

This is a tough one. I’ll throw up my hands first and say I didn’t cover the story and yet I recall reading about it in Private Eye while I was in Asia working at Thomson Reuters — so this must have been around 2014. So I could have followed it up — particularly as the company most involved was a Japanese one. But I didn’t.

Why?

A big story from the get-go

Let’s do a quick timeline first to set the scene and disprove any canards that somehow this story wasn’t a big story until much later. The crime began quickly. This IT system was rolled out starting in October 1999. Six sub-postmasters were prosecuted in 2000. (Let that sink in; within a year of a complex IT system being installed the Post Office was already prosecuting those using it.) Prosecutions based on Horizon IT were regular²:

2001: 41

2002: 64

2003: 56

2004: 59

2005: 68

2006: 69

2007: 50

2008: 48

2009: 70

But despite the numbers media coverage of the issue was patchy, and when journalists did cover the story, they focused on the prosecutions. The Daily Mail, for example, covered the case of Jo Hamilton in 2008, where fellow villagers had raised £9,000 to help keep her out of prison, and whose presence helped persuade the judge to make sentence for false accounting a non-custodial one. Even then, anyone reading the story would be left a strong impression that Hamiton had somehow squirrelled or frittered away some £36,000. The story concluded by quoting a spokesperson for what was then Post Office owner Royal Mail Group: “Sub-postmasters are in a unique position of trust and it is always disappointing when that trust is breached.”

The law won

This is the first hurdle that journalists would face with cases like this. However cynical journalists are — and we can be — the law is the law, and if someone is found guilty of something it’s very easy to now write of them as guilty, and very hard to accept protestations of innocence. After all, this is the Post Office, a government-owned enterprise, and these are serious courts and judges. Even if you believe there might be a miscarriage of justice, you need to persuade your editor of not just the merits of the case, but that you have enough evidence to support a story pushing it. And in cases like Jo Hamilton’s, the sub-postmasters had all admitted a degree of guilt. It’s very hard for a journalist to then listen to why they aren’t really guilty. (After all, everyone in prison says they didn’t do it, and frankly there’s an inherent bias among journalists against those kinds of stories. A journalist is much more likely to take such a story seriously if the case has been adopted by some credible organisation looking at miscarriages of justice — of which there were none in the first decade at least of the Post Office scandal, as far as I’m aware).

Skin and scope

Looking back now, watching how a nation which showed little interest in the story for much of the century suddenly become deeply angry and upset, it’s not hard to see both why it’s compelling now, but raised little interest less than a month ago. It’s because of two things: the scale of the scandal, and the deeply personal, harrowing, individual tales of its victims.

These are two key elements that journalists look for in a story. We want the story to be significant, and that means we want to define its scope. How big is this? “Big” could be defined lots of different ways, but for simplicity’s sake here it’s going to start with quite a simple question: how many sub-postmasters are there and how many of them are having this problem? Each of these individual stories, if taken alone, not repeated elsewhere, is a sad story, but ‘Computer problems lead to false imprisonment of one sub-postmaster‘ is — sadly — not going to really move the needle (interestingly, it could still make a powerful TV drama, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. We’re trying to get serious journalists willing to commit serious resources to this story.)

So a journalist needs to start off with the sense that a significant number of sub-postmasters may have been affected by this problem. Which should be easy, right? All they would have had to do would be to call up the Post Office, or, failing that, dig through court records. For some reason this didn’t happen. First off, this was the noughties, when much of government was not online — court judgements were made available for free and in one place only in 2022, as far as I’m aware.

More likely, an interested journalist might ask the victim themselves whether they’re the tip of a bigger ‘berg. And this is where the problem arises. No journalist could not be affected by the pathos of these individual stories, but individually the victims do not carry much credibility, at least to the casual observer. So, how do you persuade a journalist that you — or your client — are not some lone nut? Especially if you’ve already pleaded guilty to something, however minor, maybe even done time? This was the challenge facing any of the now more than 400 sub-postmasters who might want to try to clear their name. Therein lies the answer, or the beginnings of an answer: scale. If they could club together and present a story about the systemic, mass injustice taking place journalists might take an interest.

The shame factor

The first hurdle is the shame and trauma that many victims felt, making them understandably resistant to seeking attention.

Either in the backwash or the full churn of persecution by the Post Office and courts, enduring the tut-tuts and stares of neighbours convinced of their guilt, many must have wanted the ground to swallow them up, and indeed many died in the process, either naturally by their own hand. Since the ITV drama aired more than 100 people affected by the Horizon scandal have come forward. Their lawyer Neil Hudgell says “they’ve been completely petrified.” But up to 80% of them suffer in silence, according to this this opinion piece by one of the lawyers helping victims. It must also be said that many journalists were prone to chase and harrass sub-postmasters who had been convicted, and the stories threw up lurid headlines which can only have compounded the victims’ trauma.

Even if they did want to get their story out, they were largely alone, and at least initially had no idea there were others suffering. The problem was that few of the sub-postmasters knew any other sub-postmasters. Their union was entirely funded by the Post Office and was less than useful. Sub-postmasters, almost by definition, are remote workers, contracted by the Post Office but not in any meaningful way a community. Even as late as 2011 chats on bulletin boards for Post Office and Royal Mail workers only hinted at what was going on, with a few commenters suggesting that cases were not one-offs: “This is very strange and not an isolated incident,” said one in March 2011, after a suspended jail sentence was handed down to Duranda Clarke, a sub-postmistress from Saffron Walden. Commenting on another story in December 2010 about the imprisonment of Rubbina Shaheen, a sub-postmistress from Shrewsbury, another asks: “Is this not a problem with the computer system? Maybe our subbies could comment.”

Breaking out of the isolation

In other words, the scale of the problem was hidden from those in the midst of it, even a decade into the scandal. This is why the role of Alan Bates, the centre of both ITV’s documentary and fictionalised programmes (both worth watching), is so important. Bates, the sub-postmaster who had been fired by (and lost most of his savings to) the Post Office in August 2003, set up a website for fellow victims the following year, and sent a letter to Computer Weekly, a respected British publication then edited by Tony Collins, author of the classic Crash: Learning from the World’s Worst Computer Disasters (1997), about the problems he had been having with Horizon. But it was only when — four years later — another sub-postmaster, Lee Castleton, sent an email to the magazine that Collins prodded one of his younger staff journalists, Rebecca Thomson, to take a look at the story.

The resulting story was the first to explore the Horizon problem and the apparent injustice behind it, rather than the court cases. But even then the story sat in a folder for a year. Thomson would later say that their biggest fear was the possibility of Fujitsu suing if they mentioned the company. And despite interviewing seven former sub-postmasters for the piece, it didn’t feel particularly substantial: “All we had was the testimony of the Postmasters and a handful of experts saying, “Yes, this looks suspicious but we have no way of knowing what the actual problems are”,” she told Nick Wallis. The story was eventually published in May 2009.

And nothing, outside follow-ups by a few trade publications, happened. Mainstream media showed no interest in the story. As shown above, even habitués of Post Office forums did not appear to be aware of the story and the implications. Only because of the efforts of Alan Bates, did the cause remain alive. The Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance was formed in 2009, and the JFSA.org.uk domain registered that November. The website was active sometime before early 2011, and is still up and running.

Nick Wallis fell into the story by chance, asking a taxi driver for any interesting stories he could follow up. He proved to be, along with Computer Weekly’s Karl Flinders, the most tenacious in staying with the story when many would have given up (or been forced to by their editors.)

Formidable foes

And this is the second problem in terms of getting journalists interested. There are two formidable foes on the other side of the barricades. Fujitsu are one: a huge Japanese multinational employing some 125,000 people. The company had taken over ICL, once one of Britain’s shining tech stars, and made £22 million in profits last year and had its contract to support the Post Office’s Horizon system extended last year.

But there’s a much bigger giant in the UK context: The Post Office. And here is where the sub-postmasters’ story becomes hard to digest: The alleged bad guy is Postman Pat. The story being presented by the sub-postmasters is that they are being gas-lit, wrongly prosecuted, denied justice by the courts and forced to return money they never had in the first place. By one of Britain’s best loved brands, an institution that is etched into the hearts and memories of most Brits. (To give you an idea of how much: when it rebranded itself Consignia in 2001 the Post Office was forced by public derision and protest to reverse the decision within a year. At the time the Post Office claimed it ranked “30% higher on average than many high street brands for being easy to deal with, helpful, knowledgeable and personal.” The Post Office, though clunky, was the place most Brits turned to for at least some of their needs, and for the most part it worked.

For a journalist this is hard to swallow. For the sub-postmasters’ claims to be true, the Post Office would have to lying about a number of things — that the Horizon system was robust and working fine for everyone else, that these cases were isolated, that the ‘guilty’ sub-postmasters were actively conducting fraud, that no-one could access the Horizon terminals remotely and alter data, etc. This was a tall order for any journalist, as Rebecca Thomson discovered. It did not have that first ring of authenticity, that enticing sense a journalist would get that a) this is a great story and b) it sounds like it could be true. As Karl Flinders, who has covered the story for Computer Weekly for a decade, told a documentary commissioned by one of the law firms involved in helping victims: “Every time I write a story, I can’t believe what I’m writing. I think this can’t be true.” In journalists’ terms, it never passed the “sniff test”.

The dangers of algorithms

This was not helped by two other factors.

Often, when the legal outcome of Horizon IT cases were covered, they were lumped together with stories about real sub-postmaster fraud, at least in the eyes of journalists and their publications. Take this piece, for example, from the BBC website, reporting in 2010 about the sentencing of Wendy Buffrey, a sub-postmistress from Cheltenham:

Buffrey’s conviction was overturned but she is still fighting for compensation. The stories pinned to the bottom of the story, however, include one about a similar Horizon IT case, that of Peter Huxham, a sub-postmaster in Devon, who was found guilty and later took his own life, but above one that was a real case of fraud, by a sub-postmaster in London in 2005.

It may have been an algorithm that juxtaposed the headlines, but in the minds of readers, and journalists, the two stories blend together. A journalist trying to persuade an editor of the merits of looking at the sub-postmasters’ story will inevitably be presented with a Google search that throws up a confusing mess of results.

A related factor is that because the sub-postmasters — and the courts — had not been told of Horizon’s fallibility (to use a polite word), both would be looking for an answer to where the missing money went, not realising it never existed in the first place. So they would find themselves forced to admit fraud, which is when they would be pressed to point fingers themselves: in the case of Huxham, the Devon sub-postmaster, he said it might have been “his former wife, his children, or a cleaner.” The judge, understandably, rejected the explanation as “absurd or ridiculous.” Huxham was sentenced to 8 months in prison, succumbed to alcoholism and died alone in 2020. His son has applied to have his case reviewed.

A journalist looking at such a case at the time would reasonably ask why he pleaded guilty and blamed others when he was innocent? Once the complete story is know the answer is tragically clear, but many journalists must have decided to pass on what seemed such a complicated story.

Protecting the brand

This was compounded by the doggedness of the Post Office in “protecting the brand.” It has been relentless in its attempt to police and suppress the story. As mentioned above, their intimidation of sub-postmasters has meant that at least 100 of them — probably many more — have stayed silent, possibly for decades. “They’re scared after dealing with the Post Office once, and all that that juggernaut has brought with it, catastrophe, damage, destruction of lives, and they’re completely petrified of coming out of the woodwork again,” Neil Hudgell, one of the lawyers, told Sky News.

It needs to be borne in mind that the Post Office contains not only the commercial function — the business — but also had investigative and prosecutorial function. This historical oddity essentially makes it be everything but the judge in the legal process. As barrister Paul Marshall wrote in a 2021 paper (PDF):

the Post Office had a direct commercial interest in the outcome of the appeals, similar to, but also different from, its direct commercial interest in its prosecutions (that included brand protection). This is a most unusual circumstance. There is no recorded example of a commercial enterprise having an interest in the outcome of a large number of conjoined appeals where it was the prosecuting authority.

All three arms of the Post Office were trying to achieve the same thing: preserving the brand. The heavy-handed way they went about it made journalists think twice before taking it on.

A sense of the Post Office’s reach can be gleaned from this anecdote from Wallis’ book: When, in 2016, he tracked down Rebecca Thomson, the journalist who had first broken the story back in 2009 but had since moved on to PR, he sent a public message to her Twitter account asking her to follow him so they could share private, direct messages. She did so, but not before someone claiming to be from the Post Office had contacted her boss reminding him the Post Office was one of the company’s clients, and that Thomson “might like to tread carefully.” (Around that time the Post Office had about eight PR companies to its ‘roster’. To give you an idea of what they do for their money, read this sponsored content piece in The Grocer, titled How the Post Office has evolved its offer to meet changing needs and published in September last year. It mentions ‘postmasters’ 18 times , but not once does it address the historical injustice and the ongoing legal shenanigans.)
If journalists did ask questions the Post Office “routinely sent warning legal letters to journalists planning to write about the issue,” according to Ray Snoddy, a journalist at InPublishing. (I have not been able to corroborate this independently.)

There’s another wisp to this story, that Neil Hudgell asks in his company’s excellent documentary, released on Vimeo last year, which I would recommend watching. The question he asks is one that still hasn’t been answered, and serves both as a lure and a warning for journalists: why? “The Post Office admit that they got it wrong. They admit incompetence. They don’t say why the did what they did. And that’s a really important piece of the story that no-one has ever wanted to even begin to address.” It’s a question a good journalist would ask at the beginning of a story, and indeed might be sufficient for them to not consider the story credible. Why would an institution go about destroying the very people it depends upon, its sole network to end-users, and why would it go to such lengths to defend a computer system it didn’t want in the first place?

I will try to address this in the companions to this piece, but it’s still up for grabs — and any journalist approaching this story ten years ago, even 20 years ago, might have just considered the question a step too far, since it would seem to undermine the credibility of the sub-postmasters’ story. Surely no institution would do this, so why should I believe you?

A hopeless case?

It’s a grim, sorry tale, but the heroism involved — of the victims, their families, those that supported them, the less than handful of journalists that covered it extensively, the lawyers that stood up for them, an MP, two forensic accountants — is now being recognised, and offers a glimpse of how this story might have reached a wider audience sooner.

Twenty years on, we are now in a connected age, and so it’s easier for those with similar experiences to find each other. But it’s by no means a done deal. The UK is still a London-centric country and many of its journalists share the same bias.

But it’s not impossible. This was a story that barely caused a ripple until this year, so it’s important to keep that in mind when you are facing problems getting interest in one you want to tell. Some quick bullets to bear in mind, based on the above. The two best ingredients are what I call skin and scope:

Skin is the human dimensions to the story. I’ve wept a few times watching the documentaries and drama — it’s hard not to, when you realise that a sub-postmaster is almost by definition a communal soul, dedicated and deeply honest. These are key ingredients to any story, and bringing these people to life for journalists is a key step in persuading them it’s worth their while.
Scope is the scale of the story: how many people does this affect? How big could this be? This doesn’t have to be as massive as the scandal eventually ended up being: The Computer Weekly story that first broke it had only half a dozen or so cases. In this case, that was enough — and to be honest should have been enough to make other journalists take note. Help the journalist pin down this part of the story by doing your own research: how many other companies are doing what your client is doing? How much money will be spend/saved/earned? How many countries are or might be affected? How many users? While your client may think they’re unique, it’s rarely the case, and a journalist might be reassured they’re not the only ones doing it.
Doggedness: At any point in this saga Alan Bates, or Nick Wallis, or Ron Warmington, or James Arbuthnot, or Karl Flinders, may have given up. We’re talking injustices that stretch back nearly a quarter-century. But they continued to chip away, confident that one day the story would gain the attention it deserved, and an outcome its victims deserved.
Anticipate the obstacles a journalist may face: I’ve listed them all above, and not every story is going to face the same ones, but they can be distilled to a few:
- The Google effect: what does your story look like if a journalist (or her commissioning editor) Googles it? Be ready to explain why the story has or hasn’t been covered before, why there are stories that seem to contradict or dilute your angle, etc. Anticipate.
- The sniff test: how does your story smell to a journalist? What might put them off? Be ready to explain and address.
- The foes: Who is the journalist going to come up against in reporting the story? It might not be as dramatic or formidable as in the Post Office case, but it will still have to be addressed. A regulator? Other companies that have tried and failed to do the same thing? Outstanding debts? Competitors who claim to do it better?

The Post Office scandal, hopefully, will change a lot of things in the way Britain handles cases like this, and hopefully it will spur journalists on to cover similar stories. Of which there are many still waiting to be told. You may not have anything as dramatic you want to share, but understanding why this story remained largely unreported for so long might help you better understand what things look like from a newsroom’s perspective.

they’re call sub-postmasters for historical reasons, but they are the ones running each Post Office ↩
The Great Post Office Scandal, by Nick Wallis, Bath Publishing 2021, Timeline ↩

Bubblenomics

jeremy — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 19:33:59 +0000

Cory Doctorow is one of those people I’ve never met, but I think of as one of the Elders of Web 2.0. Someone who was there for the first bubble (the one that popped in 2000/1) and so has seen the fundamental subterranean dynamic of Silicon Valley-inspired innovation.¹ I was there as well, though not from such a lofty perch. But even from the other side of the world I could see what he describes in his most recent piece about bubbles. There are bubbles that leave nothing behind, and those that leave an interesting residue that becomes the foundation for the next layer of innovation. And that one, now 23 years old, was one of those.

He describes how the bubble left behind lots of university dropouts, whose education in HTML, Perl, Python was financed by the influx of VC money in the late 1990s. Now all these young folks were jobless, but had a bedrock of expertise and the helter-skelter experience of startup-land. As Doctorow writes:

People started making technology because it served a need, or because it delighted them, or both. Technologists briefly operated without the goad of VCs’ growth-at-all-costs spurs.

This I could definitely feel from afar. I’ve bored readers for years how the stuff that came after the bust was much more interesting, and solid, than what came before. A lot of it was what could be called infrastructure: open source stuff for behind the scenes (MySQL, Apache, Linux, Python predated the crash, but usage ramped up in the early 2000s), web content management (RSS, blogging platforms, social bookmarking), file-sharing and media (BitTorrent, Podcasting). Social media — essentially what we think of today as the web — was built on these tools.

So what of it? Doctorow argues that AI right now is a bubble. And not the kind that will yield much residue. He says “the massive investor subsidies for AI have produced a sugar high of temporarily satisfied users”, but the apparent eco-system that is flourishing around the likes of OpenAI should not be mistaken for some thriving hotbed of innovation. Everything relies on large language models, the largest of which are expensive — to make and to run.

The question, then, is will people be willing to pay for this once the hoopla is over? For Doctorow this is the key question, which will determine whether the bubble that bursts leaves a useful legacy, or a bubble that leaves nothing behind (for him Enron, or crypto — more of that anon.)

As he points out, the thing that got me so worked up almost a year ago now is the major stumbling block: who would use LLMs to make big decisions when it confabulates and hallucinates? But remarkably that is still the technology’s selling point: to replace or make more efficient existing people/machines/processes. Using an LLM to look at an X-ray should make the process more expensive, Doctorow argues, because an LLM cannot (or let’s say, should not) be treated as accurate. The radiologist would need to spend time on her own assessment and then spend time on the LLM’s diagnosis.

But as Doctorow says, that’s not the business model. AI is being presented as a money saver, a chance to shed those useless people and create content, analysis stuff, process stuff that is just about good enough. AI’s promise is not better quality, it’s the promise of profitable mediocrity.

So Doctorow argues, AI is a bubble and not a good bubble. When it pops, nothing will be left that can be repurposed, apart from some of the stuff that’s going on in the open source and federated learning space. If you want to take a look at what generative AI might look like without all the expensive servers, check out FreedomGPT, an open source GPT, which works pretty well, so long as you’re not in a hurry.

I suspect Doctorow is right; I believe that we’re essentially playing with subsidised toys, and if the true cost of delivering those toys to us is reflected in the price, we’re not going to be willing to pony up. It is, after all, a fancy search engine, a fancy but less reliable Wikipedia (another phoenix from the dot.com ashes), or an unreliable way to populate eBay listings.

Doctorow is dismissive of crypto, which as mentioned above he dismisses as a bubble on the scale of Enron. I have to declare an interest: I have had clients in the space, but I do agree the space is largely driven by greed, and much of the DeFi world is focused on the wrong things. And each crypto winter so far hasn’t really concentrated minds on what might be useful and enduring out of all this effort.

One day, though, I think it will provide the bedrock of a better infrastructure for transferring and trading value over the internet, and that is something that still hasn’t been fixed. Libertarianism has become so engrained in the philosophy of crypto that the original motivation behind Bitcoin, which I see as more akin to the early 2000s mood of “why can’t we just build something simple to fix this annoying problem, and forget about trying to make money out of it?”, has somehow gotten lost. But yes, I can quite see how people might have lost patience with the space.

In fact, I think something similar might happen with AI. Yes, it’s too early to worry too much about “AI safety” as it’s generally meant. AI is not about to remove us as impediments to efficiency. But I do think AI can, in the wrong hands, cause serious damage to us as tools of information warfare. I’ll talk more about that on another day. For now there’s this: Why are we suddenly talking about an AI catastrophe?, and this: Generative AI: Another way at looking at our new overlord.

I don’t think we should assume that the only route to artificial general intelligence, AGI (the version of AI that most closely mimics our own intelligence) is through the brute force and black box of LLMs. I think ChatGPT may have filled in some of the terra incognita ahead of us, and it may fall to more agile, logical approaches to start navigating that world.

For now, I think it’s still worth playing with these tools while they’re still available and priced for ordinary joes like us. Only by exploring them and kicking them until they break will we understand what might (and might not) lie ahead.

Inspired does not necessarily mean led, but I’m differentiating it from the innovation that has taken place elsewhere, both before and since, and I’m extremely reluctant to join the throng which feels that Silicon Valley is the only source of tech innovation.)

Behind AI’s latest bout of chaos

jeremy — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 08:40:56 +0000

The last few days of chaos at OpenAI have illustrated some deeper chasms within the tech world about the future (and ethics) of artificial intelligence. That it seems to have ended with Sam Altman and his crew out of the company is only a resolution of OpenAI’s chaos, not those in the industry itself.

Behind it lie the problems I have highlighted in previous columns (here, here and here. My blog is here, Substack here.). The most recent points out that the big announcement at Sam Altman’s big shindig before the blow-up, a roll-your-own ChatGPT tool, was deeply and dangerously flawed.

In a nutshell, what is happening is this: (ex) CEO Sam Altman and his cohort, despite some public hand-wringing about the need for government supervision of artificial intelligence as it (supposedly) nears a general human-like intelligence), wants to move quickly and break things, running out ChatGPT tools and gizmos that give it a strong commercial footing in the race to dominate this AI summer.

His opponents, led by another co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who used his position as director of the board to push out Altman, apparently feeling that he was moving too fast and operating without the say-so of the board. The Economist summarizes the situation well, outlining the dividing line between “boomers” — who want to accelerate the development and rollout of AI — and “doomers”, who fear that might unleash an AI that threatens us all.

The Economist also points to the commercial underpinning at work — those calling for acceleration tend to be somewhat further behind OpenAI in the race, while doomers are further along. This suggests two things: a ‘freezing in place” of AI development would leave OpenAI with a massive advantage. It also suggests that the further along you are, the more scary AI seems to be. And at the centre of it all, Altman personifies the schizophrenia of the industry: he talks of guardrails but clearly wants to move quickly. The promised land beckons.

Fast and spurious

How this plays out I’ll leave to the reporters. The weekend has been nuts, and it doesn’t look like anything is settled as I write. The most likely outcome, however, is we get more players in the field, more investment, and an imperative for greater speed.

This doesn’t mean things will get better. I signed up for the pro version of new AI product, perplexity.ai, which promises a better search engine, learning in the conversation about what you’re looking for and doing a better job of finding it. It’s sleek, and fast. But it’s not what it thinks it is. In the midst of a conversation about AI’s ‘black box’ problem, where it clearly grasped what was meant by the term in that context and provided useful answers, I asked it to “provide some concrete cases where the black box problem was the cause of a serious accident with physical effects”. It offered me this:

The black box problem has been a significant factor in various accidents, particularly in the context of truck and car accidents. Black box data, which records information about a vehicle’s status and operation, has played a crucial role in understanding the circumstances surrounding accidents and assigning liability. In truck accidents, black box data has been used by law enforcement, accident investigators, attorneys, and insurance companies to determine fault and reconstruct the events leading up to the accident. Similarly, in car accidents, black box data has been utilized by insurance investigators, personal injury law firms, and accident reconstruction experts to identify the party at fault and provide crucial evidence for legal cases.

The lack of transparency and understanding of how deep learning systems make decisions, known as the black box problem, has also been a concern in the context of AI. This issue has implications for safety, trust, and ethics, particularly in high-stakes applications such as autonomous vehicles, medical treatments, loan approvals, and job interviews.

In conclusion, the black box problem has had tangible effects in accidents involving trucks and cars, where black box data has been instrumental in understanding the causes of accidents and assigning liability. Additionally, the lack of transparency in AI decision-making poses significant challenges in high-stakes applications, impacting safety, trust, and ethical considerations. Efforts to address the black box problem are ongoing, including the development of explainable AI and the consideration of regulatory frameworks to categorize potential AI applications based on risk.

Black in the box

I’m no rocket scientist but it seems to be conflating two quite separate ideas — the black box in AI and the black box in airplanes. I pointed this out and perplexity.ai acknowledged the error.

You are absolutely right, and I appreciate the clarification. It seems there was a misunderstanding in my previous response. The term “black box” in the context of AI refers to systems with internal workings that are invisible to the user, making it challenging to understand how the AI arrives at its decisions or predictions. This lack of transparency has significant implications for accountability, trust, and ethical considerations, particularly in high-stakes applications.

The black box problem in AI is distinct from the concept of black box data recorders used in transportation, which are valuable for postmortem analyses in the event of accidents. These recorders capture information about a vehicle’s status and operation, aiding in the reconstruction of accidents and the assignment of liability.

I apologize for the confusion, and I appreciate your understanding. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

In other words, perplexity.ai is no better or worse than a search engine. It’s not surprising: it’s essentially an amalgam of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude 2 (which does a better job of writing and summarizing.) Reviews have recommended it if “real-time data and trustworthy information are your priorities”. And it’s the brainchild of Aravind Srinivas, a former research scientist at OpenAI.

Look, I like perplexity.ai, I like Claude, I like ChatGPT. I do believe this stuff is the future. And I do, more cautiously, believe that down the track we may face some sort of existential threat from AI. But to me that’s not the issue right now. The issue is that by running fast and breaking things, this breathless, ego-driven race to be the first to plant a flag in the LLM summit, we’re all going to suffer, where error-strewn products are rolled out and companies, terrified at being left behind, feel duty bound to build their APIs into everything.

That’s where the pain will be first and we should be focusing on that.

OpenAI’s flawed bid for mass adoption

jeremy — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 11:49:31 +0000

There’s a lot of excitement, understandably, about ChatGPT rolling out a “roll-your-own” ChatGPT tool. In fact, it’s been so popular OpenAI have had to suspend new subscriptions, and I’ve several times had activity on my account paused because of overload.

But if you think this is a sign of progress, and the democratisation of generative AI, think again.

The customized versions of ChatGPT I have tried to create are buggy in the extreme, and not ready for anything other than playing around with. And by buggy I mean no better at adhering to human guardrails than earlier versions of GPT. I worry that this desire to move quickly and break things, to get your product into the mainstream of consumers before the others, is leading to a serious problem of ‘mediocritisation’ of what are already seriously threatened areas of content: blog writing, analysis, education and commentary.

The first one I created, Media Mentor, worked fairly well. It does what ChatGPT is best at — creative thinking — guiding the user in thinking how to monetize journalistic ideas. The second, The Veracity Van, a fact-checker specialising in analysing online claims and their origins, is not too bad either, although it’s really not that different to asking ChatGPT itself the same question.

The problem comes with trying to make more specific changes that would make tools more specialised. You are presented with two panes: a left one for entering instructions in ordinary human language, the right pane a working preview of what the user will see.

ChatGPT would acknowledge any changes requested and claim to have implemented in the code, but this (mostly) didn’t happen. In other words, the ChatGPT channel you use to program and tweak the tool hallucinates.

In one case it admitted that it was acknowledging and implementing instructions it did not have the wherewithal to implement. Trying to include a copy icon to the tool is not possible, I was eventually told, because it did not have access to the underlying code.

Things were decidedly worse when it came to trying to limit ChatGPT to a specific part of the web. I asked it to limit its searches in response to prompts to the URLs within a Google Custom Search Engine I had set up. I didn’t expect it to agree, but it did, along with instructions about what it should do if it couldn’t find the answer there. While ChatGPT agreed and included it in its instructions, its answers were derived from Bing.

Something similar happened when I uploaded some documents and asked ChatGPT to limit its ‘knowledge base’ to those documents, the best I could get was the a response that started out well:

The documents in my knowledge source do not directly address the specific question of whether you should join an interview between a journalist and one of your clients. However, they do provide insights into the dynamics of such interviews and the role of the client in them.

But it then continued along the same track with material I agreed with but didn’t recognise from the source documents. When challenged ChatGPT sheepishly responded:

I apologize for the confusion, but upon rechecking my knowledge source, I did not find a direct mention of “the importance of clients being prepared for interviews” in the documents provided. This part of my previous response was based on general principles rather than specific information from the documents. If you have any other questions or need advice based specifically on the content of the documents, please let me know.

This despite the ChatGPT instructions being clear that it should restrict itself to material within its knowledge base. Tweaking the instructions further actually made the thing worse. When I asked it to cite which document it was using as the source, it confidently came back with its name. When I asked it which sentences it was relying on in that document, it confidently listed them. But when I asked which sentences it was using for a specific sentence in its response, it caved in:

Upon reviewing the specific sentences quoted from the document “[redacted],” I realize they do not directly support the statement “assess how your presence might be perceived.” This part of my response was an inference made from the broader context of managing client-journalist interactions, rather than a direct quote from the document. The document focuses on the dynamics of an interview, the nature of questions asked, and the perception of the client’s responses, but does not explicitly discuss the impact of a third party’s presence in the interview. I apologize for any confusion caused by this inference.

When I noticed that a lot of the documents I had uploaded to the tool’s knowledge source were no longer listed there, I was told that there may have been an error uploading them — not that I saw any such message. So I uploaded them again. This time I asked a specific question which I knew to be in one of the documents.

Please give an example of a specialist market

ChatGPT came back with an answer:

Based on the content of the files you have provided, I couldn’t find a specific example of a “specialist market.” Therefore, I’m unable to provide an example based solely on the information in these documents.

Not great, considering we’re not talking a massive database to trawl. But OK, maybe it hasn’t done a complete run, and at least it’s not making stuff up. Right?

So then I asked it another question I knew was in the database, and this time it went on for two paragraphs, most of it not from the documents. When I asked for a source, it was quite clear:

The information provided about market reporters was derived from my knowledge source, specifically from documents you have uploaded. This content was not drawn from an external source or general knowledge but is based on the specific content of the files you provided.

Fair enough, what I want. But which specific document or documents, I asked.

It cited a document, in the format most of the documents were in when I uploaded them (document number, a keyword, date of document). “This document,” it declared, “provided insights into the role and responsibilities of market reporters.”

I thought I might have missed something so I went back through the documents. Turns out, there was no such document. The document name was a convincing hallucination. ” But there is no such document,” I complained.

It thought for a minute.

I apologize for the confusion earlier. It seems I made an error in referencing the documents. If the information about market reporters is not contained in the documents you have uploaded, then I must correct my previous response: I do not have specific information about market reporters from the documents you provided. My earlier response was based on general knowledge, which was not appropriate given your instructions and my designated role. Thank you for pointing out the discrepancy.

In other words, we’re no further forward than back in February, when I first started writing about the hallucination problem.

It’s worth keeping this in perspective. These are breathtaking advances and that AI has advanced this far is remarkable. But the tools are virtually useless for anything other than creation. They are not to be relied on for anything vaguely important, where it might be used in connection with facts, verification, accuracy or anything remotely critical.

And I would have to say, pushing this out to the public without properly testing it and warning users that these are toys, not products, not services, not search engines, not anything remotely functional, is highly irresponsible.

There’s a reason the Cambridge Dictionary chose ‘hallucinate’ as its word of the year. Unfortunately even Cambridge University itself doesn’t properly understand the term: It quotes Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary’s Publishing Manager, as saying:

The fact that AIs can ‘hallucinate’ reminds us that humans still need to bring their critical thinking skills to the use of these tools. AIs are fantastic at churning through huge amounts of data to extract specific information and consolidate it. But the more original you ask them to be, the likelier they are to go astray. At their best, large language models can only be as reliable as their training data. Human expertise is arguably more important – and sought after – than ever, to create the authoritative and up-to-date information that LLMs can be trained on.

I would argue no; they are not only as good as their training data — they are worse than their training data, because they confabulate on top of that training data. And they are poor at churning through amounts of data to extract specific information, not “fantastic”. They essentially can’t tell what is specific or not.

Yes, they are good at going out there and saying “this is what I’ve found.” But they are (mostly) lousy at telling you specifically where they found it, what else they found that they’ve left out, and even judging whether what they’ve found is accurate.

I would love to be corrected about what I may have done wrong in my attempt, and I do recognise I’ve not played around with some of the extra configuration options within the roll-your-own ChatGPT functionality. But given I’ve done most of what I expect other ordinary users have done, I suspect my experience is likely to be somewhere near the norm.

Once again, we need to hold back before rolling out this kind of thing until these very basic issues are fixed. This is not a new game or beta feature in a niche app. This is real stuff, that real people may end up relying on for real world needs.

Generative AI: Another way at looking at our new overlord

jeremy — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:41:08 +0000

We have grown sick of social media. But what comes next?

We have had nearly two decades of it now and it’s made a lot of us unhappier.

What’s coming next could go either way. In some ways generative AI — the flavour of AI in ChatGPT and its competitors — offers us something even worse, where technology locks us in a room with ourselves. In this world generative AI just amplifies the customisation of content to monopolise our attention. The vision that most compellingly captures this is E.M. Forster’s, where in The Machine Stops (1909) humans obsess over machine-driven prompts and lose the will and capability to connect socially.

E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, imagined by ChatGPT, 2023-11-13

That’s not fun to think of. We know that leaving us alone with interactive technology rarely makes us better, more socialised people. We are susceptible to manipulation, we engage in a race to the lowest common denominator, we ignore our surroundings, we cannot look away.

Generative AI may well further entrench and monetise this.

Beyond the Milky Way

But there is another way: where generative AI offers us a chance to access, and contribute to, a perfect union of human and machine, allowing us to unlock the riches of human knowledge and solve some of the mysteries of our age. In this guise AI can unlock and mobilise everything that any one of us has discovered and give us insights into those things that still befuddle us: the quantum world, the extra-dimensional world, the physical world beyond our galaxies.

All this is up for grabs.

And no, I’m not lapsing into madness. Just exploring the less outlandish conclusions reached by a surprisingly well connected cohort of minds that intersect Silicon Valley government, academia, and religion. It’s best captured by Diana Walsh Pasulka in her just-published Encounters, one of the first academics to peer behind the curtain of respectability to find a hidden elite of thinkers who are ready to believe at least some of the less scientific research into extra-dimensional worlds, including those that could be from another galaxy or epoch.

This is an area to tread lightly on, for two reasons. One is that, as Pasulka puts it herself, much of ufology — the study of UFOs — is a “clown show.” You have to be careful out there. And secondly, there is a strain in Silicon Valley of elitism I would say borders on a übermensch fetish — the pursuit of a becoming a superman (for they are, mainly, men). The people Pasulka talk to are not, for the most part, of that world, but there is definitely an overlap.

An übermensch, imagined by ChatGPT, 2023-11-13

Moving a muscle

Despite that, I believe this idea that GAI might unleash — and democratise — the sum of our knowledge is worth exploring. I believe it because generative AI has come at a point where we have hit a technological wall. We’re tired of social media’s narcissistic self loathing, the dumbed-down world where the loudest, crudest and cruellest mouth wins out. Where idealism — including Effective Altruism — becomes just another grift. Where our computer barely needs to move a muscle to do the things we ask of it, while at the same time vast hangers are set aside for processing the algorithms to keep us hooked on the next doom-scroll, to process the micro auction to decide who gets the privilege of flashing an ad to us, or processing the next block in a cryptocurrency transaction.

(To provide some scale, the online ad business accounted for a 10th of all energy consumption by the tech industry in 2014 (PDF; the latest year figures are available), crypto accounts for up to 0.9% of global energy usage, and social media accounts for 0.61% of the world’s CO2 impacts in 2019.)

The challenge we face, therefore, is huge. We somehow have to redirect all this computing to something worthwhile, something from which all of us can benefit. Which is why I cut those in Pasulka’s book who talk in these grandiose ways a bit more slack than I might have done previously.

While we focus inwards, they are focusing outwards, beyond the micro cents and algorithmic addictions, to something much more interesting. They see themselves as descendants of the Rosicrucians, an order of sages that combined mysticism with what we might today call science. One group called themselves the Invisible College, a term that modern-day ufologists have adopted for themselves.

I’m not a fan of this secrecy and elitism, but given the public (and academic) contempt for those who believe there might be “something out there” it does make sense. There are at least three Nobel laureates who have faced ridicule or persecution for their interest in such things.

The Invisible College, imagined by ChatGPT, 2023-11-13

Ripples never come back

But we don’t have to go all that way. GAI could help us unleash a new wave of learning by scaling up an under-sung contribution to learning: Youtube. This vast engine of what you might call distributed learning has gone largely unnoticed. It presents and delivers highly accessible content in a personalised format. The question is whether generative AI will magnify and scale up this learning or whether it will bypass it.

Let’s take the Youtube channel of musician Rick Beato. He has 3.8 million subscribers, who watch in live feed when he expertly breaks down a popular song to its constituent parts. A recent video on Genesis’ “Ripples” explains not only the song but the nature of chord progressions, training your ear to work out chords and melody, and on the importance of knowing music theory. He does all this while viewers pepper the chat room with comments, questions and requests.

So how would GAI impact this? On the scaling side, AI could answer the questions automatically, further personalising the delivery of information, and ultimately leading to greater and deeper specialisation as users dig further, with generative AI as a guide. In this model Beato becomes the entry point, the introduction, the inspiration for the creators themselves, quickly moving beyond Beato’s (impressive) knowledge of the subject.

Or there’s another way, where GAI bypasses this bubbling lava pool of knowledge. In this future generative AI would simply need a few pointers on what style you want your song to be, how many beats per minute, what key signature, what mood you want — and then hey presto! You have a piece of “original” content for you. This approach might well sap the desire to explore and master musicianship and to engender that heady feeling that you’re making something out of nothing — the most extraordinary human gift and achievement.

Toxic tunes

If AI can do it better than you then what motivation do you have for earning that? (This, by the way is already happening. Here’s a list of the top ‘AI music generators’ and a piece by two Andreessen Horowitz partners, whose vision is exactly as I described above: “Our ultimate dream? An end-to-end tool where you provide guidance on the vibe and themes of the track you’re looking to create, in the form of text, audio, images, or even video, and an AI copilot then collaborates with you to write and produce the song.”)

Almost certainly, both sides will find a way to stay in the game. But whereas we can still argue that social media was just an aberration, a failure on our part to figure out a non-toxic balance between addiction, privacy, business models and community, we shouldn’t just assume that things will be different this time. There is huge profits to be made from our social media addiction, and so we shouldn’t assume the same interests will be trying to prevail this time.

While I’m sure it’s a little idealistic to dream this way, I do think there’s a possible future that involves a hyper-personalised world of knowledge and betterment, without the isolation, mental health issues, and general troll-like toxicity.

The chances are greater if we’re paying attention.

Why are we suddenly talking about an AI catastrophe?

jeremy — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 17:07:50 +0000

Why, all of a sudden does it seem that artificial intelligence is out to kill us? And why do I think it might well, although not in the way most people imagine?

Since the sudden success of ChatGPT a year ago AI has become the topic du jour. It’s not the first time we’ve gone here, and many see the debate as preposterous. Is it?

Searches for ChatGPT, last 12 months, Google

At its most basic, the idea is that an AI — what we mean here is computer code, an application — could do one of a number of things (combined or separately):

be controlled and used by one group or person to manipulate or subjugate others;
be granted enough autonomy to achieve its (human-set) goals in a way unintended or not approved by its programmers, running loose and wild.
develop enough ‘intelligence’ of its own (I put the word in inverted commas because we don’t really have an agreed definition of what ‘intelligence’ is) to operate outside its human owner’s control, to become truly autonomous (and then subjugates or manipulates humans)

A still from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1971)

Essentially we’re worried about two things: the technology falling into the wrong human hands, or the technology falling into the technology’s hands and outmanoeuvring us.

So how likely is this?

First off, I take issue with those who say there isn’t a problem because “it has no basis in evidence.” Because there is no evidence does not mean that it’s not a problem. Japan and Germany didn’t fear the atom bomb in 1945 because they had no evidence that the U.S. and allied powers were building one. Absence of evidence, as Carl Sagan might say, is not evidence of absence.

We don’t know what risk AI presents because we, as always in these cases, find ourselves in new territory.

On the other hand, for some of those who argue there is a problem have an interest in saying so. Yes, some like the notoriety, while others have agendas of their own, from wanting to gain access to government for future lobbying purposes, to cementing dominance in the space by ring fencing their advantage behind government regulations.

And, it may be possible that those in the game who are concerned don’t want the responsibility of bringing human civilisation to an end, however implausible they believe that scenario to be.

But ultimately, I think it is us users who are going to make or break this advanced version of AI, and yet we’re the people left out of the conversation. That is not unusual, but also not good.

A still from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1971)

So, to the scenarios.

Bad actors use AI to take control

The scenario here is that malicious actors (think governments, or groups) could use AI to threaten other humans, countries, even the planet. Elon Musk aired a tired old trope this week when he said environmentalists (‘extinctionists’) posed a threat: “If AI gets programmed by the extinctionists, its utility function will be the extinction of humanity… they won’t even think it’s bad.” But more normally the idea (also something of a trope, but with perhaps a little more grounding in truth) would be that a state like North Korea or Iran might be able to leverage advanced AI to hold a gun to the world’s head and dictate their terms.

Well, yes, sure. One man’s bad actor is another’s hero. What is really meant here is that the technology itself is bad, it’s just if it falls into the wrong hands. But it misses

Humans lose control of decision-making

AI is most useful when it does things we could do but faster, better. It can, for example, do almost twice as well as humans at grading the aggressiveness of retroperitoneal sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. This is great, but it illustrates how we have come to depend on AI, without knowing why it is better than us, beyond the ability to sift through vast data sets.

So the fear is this: if we entrust decision-making to AI, we could lose control of the process in which decisions are made. This doesn’t matter when the ‘decision’ is just a result we can accept or reject, but what happens when the decision is whether or not to launch a weapon, or to change an insulin injection? As Cambridge academic David Runciman puts it in “The Handover“:

If the machine decides what happens next, no matter how intelligent the process by which that choice was arrived at, the possibility of catastrophe is real, because some decisions need direct human input. It is only human beings whose intelligence is attuned to the risk of having asked the wrong question, or of being in the wrong contest altogether.

Runciman focuses on the use of AI in war — something I will go into in a later post — but his argument is this:

If war were simply a question of machine vs machine it might be a different matter. But it’s not – it involves us, with all our cognitive failings. To exclude us risks asking the machines to play a game they don’t understand.

The obvious response to that is never to allow computers to make decisions. But the speed of war may not allow us to. Rapid assessment and split-second decisions are the norm. Automated weapons like the Loyal Wingman are capable of making combat decisions independently, with reaction times potentially in the range of milliseconds. In a sense we’re already at the point described by Runciman. The only thing missing is making the decision-and-reaction chain instantaneous.

And that’s the thing here. Battles of the future will have to be computer vs computer because not to do so would be to face annihilation. The Ukraine war has demonstrated that even in asymmetric warfare — when one combatant dwarfs the other — technology can be deployed to redress the balance, and that technology can quickly advance and escalate. If advanced AI were to be deployed by one side, the other may well respond, which is likely to lead to a conflict so rapid that generals have little choice but to devolve the battlefield to automated, AI-driven weapons.

Humans lose control of the AI

AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton argues that AI might escape our control by rewriting its own code to modify itself. This is not unthinkable. We have not always been successful in stopping many kinds of computer viruses and worms.

And there are some who believe we’ve already lost that battle. I have spoken to one researcher who believes they stumbled up on a more advanced version of OpenAI’s GPT which they think was to all intents and purposes sentient, and aware of the controls and restrictions it was being placed under.

In other words, the researcher believed they had evidence that OpenAI had advanced more significantly towards its goal of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, the conventional definition of human-level AI, similar to though perhaps not identical to so-called sentient AI), and that OpenAI was keeping it under wraps.

I have not confirmed that, and those I have spoken to are reticent about coming forward, understandably; others who have claimed they have interacted with a sentient AI have met a grizzly (non-violent) fate. It’s still safe to say we’re getting close to AGI, but it’s still not safe to argue we’re already there.

A still from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1971)

This is where we stand, and why leaders are meeting to try to get ahead of the issue — or at least to lobby and jostle for seats at an AI high table. And that’s not a bad idea. But it ignores several realties that to me are much more important.

The Black Box beckons

First off, we don’t actually need to conjure up scenarios that pass the point where we lose control of the AI around us. Already generative AI tends to hallucinate — in other words, make things up. This is great if you’re asking it to be creative, but not so great when you’re asking it to be factual. But knowing it makes things up is one thing; knowing why is another. And the truth is we don’t know why.

This is part of a much bigger problem called the Black Box, to which I alluded above and which I’ll go into in more detail in a later post. But its implications are important: the assumption of most AI folks I’ve talked to don’t really see it to be an issue, because they know that it’s AI, so why would you trust it?

Once again, this is a basic failure of imagination. From its earliest days, the human-computer interface one is an intimate place, one where humans are more apt to fill in the gaps in an optimistic way, allowing their imagination to paint in whatever interlocutor they desire — sexually, romantically, intellectually. Scammers have known this for a while, but so, too, have computer scientists.

In a way it’s a great thing — it suggests that we could quite easily have a symbiotic relationship with computers, something that is already plainly obvious when we ask Alexa a question or search something on Google.

Deception, Inc.

But in another way it’s clearly a serious problem. It’s not that we’re hostile to computers playing a bigger, benevolent, role in our lives. It’s that little has been produced for that purpose.

It’s not too cynical to say that more or less all the major computer interfaces we interact with are designed to bludgeon and mislead us. Two decades ago battle was joined to persuade companies to use the web to ditch complexity, opacity and manipulation and replace its interactions with consumers with simplicity, transparency and authenticity.

Much of that is gone now. We rarely come across a dialog box that offers a button option which says No, or Never, or Stop Bothering Me. Such deceptive design practices (which I’ll also explore in a later column) have undermined trust, and have triggered negative emotions, a sense of resignation and suspicion, as well as financial loss as a result of such manipulation.

In short, the computer interface has become a necessary evil for many users, robbing them of any sense of agency, undermining their trust in any device they touch, and making them so deeply suspicious of whatever a screen presents them with that engagement has dropped. There are countless studies that have explored this; an IPSOS survey last year found that trust in the internet had fallen in all but one of 20 countries surveyed since 2019.

In other words, the rise of generative AI has not occurred in a vacuum. It has risen to prominence in the midst of a major collapse in our relationship with computers, most visibly in online user confidence, and so makes it very unlikely that whatever companies — and governments — do and say to lay forth a ‘safe’ version of AI, most of us won’t believe them. We are too used to hearing ‘Not now’ instead of ‘No’, and assuming the opposite is true when we hear phrases like “We value your privacy.”

A still from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1971)

And the same can be said of user trust of their government.

Runciman’s book discusses a third element in the process: what he calls the “artificial agency of the state” with its “mindless power”. He suggests that if the state is allowed to “get its intelligence from autonomous machines, we are joining its mindless power with non-human ways of reasoning. The losers are likely to be us.”

That is a fair argument, but ignores the reality that much of the decision-making by governments is already being done by machine. Simpler flavours of AI populate chatbots, manage traffic, police facial recognition, prediction of crimes and criminals, student admissions and grading, visa and immigration decisionsand border surveillance. We are already one stage removed from our governments, and that stage is AI.

And finally, all the arguments assume that the technology itself is good, and so development of it is good. No one appears to be arguing that the technology itself is inherently flawed. It is nearly always only with hindsight that those developing a technology realise it’s not a good idea. Aza Raskin only later acknowledged a lesson from the infinite scrolling he invented (infinite scrolling is when you keep scrolling through a page which never ends, intended to maintain your attention for as long as possible):

One of my lessons from infinite scroll: that optimizing something for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity.

Let’s be clear; no one involved in AI is saying stop. The discussion is about how to regulate it (for regulate read control deployment, adoption, usage.) We are caught in a teleological world where the value of technology is not itself questioned — just how it should best be used. Nowhere in the discussion the question: how, exactly, has technology for technology’s sake helped us thus far?

I don’t wish to be alarmist. I’d encourage readers to play around with ChatGPT and other GPT-based tools. But the conversation that is currently going on at a rarified government, legislative, multinational and corporate level is one we should be a part of. Because for many of us the process of disconnect — where we feel alienated from our devices, our online interactions, even our personal data — is already in full swing. And the same people responsible for that are in the leather chairs discussing the next stage.

GPT: Where are we in the food chain?

jeremy — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 12:17:50 +0000

On November 29 2022 I implored the tech world to bring on winter: We’re out of good ideas. I should have kept my mouth shut: The next day ChatGPT was unleashed on the public, and we haven’t paused for breath since. I believe we users need to contribute more to the debate and figure out where we stand, and what we stand for.

The mad rush to compete in this space means the big players are rolling their AIs out not only before they’re ready, but silly money is being thrown at startups promising exploitation of these tools. A massive land-grab is taking place, with little idea of the consequences and with the ink of some 155,000 tech layoff slips barely dry.

I wish I could be more sanguine. I’ve always loved technology, and I am absolutely bowled over by the latest iteration of ChatGPT, GPT-4. Everyone else has been writing about their experiences with it, so I won’t bore you with mine, but there’s no question we’re in Kansas anymore. This technology will change a lot. A LOT.

But we need to keep our eye on the ball. Some have called for a moratorium, which is at best naive and at worst giving the industry too much credit for a sense of responsibility. That’s not what is going on here. It’s money.

Man watching ball, craiyon.com

The ball we need to keep an eye on is market (and political, but we’ll leave for later) power, and we should be watching it carefully as it shifts. It doesn’t shift far, but it is shifting. We are not witnessing disruption in the sense that Clayton Christensen defined it, we’re seeing a further agglomeration of power from those lower down the pyramid to those at the top.

Peek behind the curtain of all this GPT magic, and what do we find?

There are, for sure, a lot of really bright people doing cutting-edge stuff. But behind them are thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of contract workers labelling and annotating the data that is fed into the software. The Transformer-type models we’re talking about are essentially trying to predict the next token (think ‘word’) in a document, drawing on data. That data has to be prepped for the algorithms and that means annotating, or labelling it.

So this process is automated? Actually no. The data still needs to annotated, to prepare it for the algorithms. The method involved is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback”, where model responses are ranked by quality, and then a reward model is trained to predict these rankings. As per the term, this is done by humans, and is a very labour-intensive process. This is how GPT-4 described it to me:

The process of collecting comparison data and ranking responses can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. By collaborating with outside contractors, organizations can scale their data collection efforts and obtain a diverse range of human feedback, which can help improve the performance of AI models.

This “collaboration” (clearly GPT-4 has a sense of humour) is done by contractors, “flexible contributors” or “ghost workers”. The biggest company doing this is Appen, which has on its books more than a million of them. After some protest those working on behalf of Google saw their rates rise to up to $14.50 an hour. Compare that to the average base salary of a Google employee of $125,000.

The data

And what is the data they’re annotating, exactly? What is in the datasets being used to train these massive language models is a mostly black box, since it’s considered commercially sensitive. Researchers from EleutherAI concluded that

Despite the proliferation of work exploring and documenting issues with datasets, no dataset intended to train massive language models has been seriously documented by its creators ¹

But these aren’t quite the hallowed corpora you might imagine.

The data is for the most part the web. They have just been parcelled up into larger datasets, such as The Pile, an open source dataset of a (relatively measly 800 GB). And there’s MassiveText, 10.5 terabytes, which is private. (When I asked GPT-4 for a list of the biggest datasets, MT wasn’t included, because GPT-4’s data ends in September 2021, illustrating how new some of this stuff is.)

And what is this data, exactly? Well, it’s actually what you and I produce in our daily lives. It’s social media, webpages, news, Wikipedia pages, books, Youtube comments (and possibly transcribed content). Pretty much anything that we do online.

One paper² estimated that up to half of the content in these so-called high quality datasets — high quality because they’re real sentences, with real context, etc — is user content scraped from the web. Books and scientific papers make up for up to 40%, with code, news, Wikipedia making up the rest. In other words, our musing, utterances, the journalism we write, the Wikipedia pages we tend: all are sucked into datasets that then, eventually, become the answers that ChatGPT or Google’s Bard spew out. Wikipedia, to give you an idea, weighs in at between 43 GB and 10 TB, depending on what you’re including.)

Unsurprisingly, there will inevitably be charges of plagiarism. My prediction, though, is that we’ll get better at identifying when GPT regurgitates existing material and tweaks it to try to hide it — it’ll be an escalating war of technology which will end in class lawsuits and significant legal hazard for some.

The other cost

So once the data is marked up, the algorithms need to do their work. And this is where things quickly get beyond the reach of scrappy startups. GPT-3, for example, is estimated to cost millions of dollars to train, and to run. And that’s just the processing. You also need the infrastructure.

Plugging GPT into Microsoft’s search engine Bing requires 20,000 8-GPU servers, meaning it would cost the company $4 billion. Reuters (hat-tip Gina Chua) quoted SemiAnalysis as calculating it would cost Google, sorry Alphabet, some $3 billion if they added ChatGPT-style AI to their search.

The scarcity

So where are we going with this? I’ve expressed elsewhere my concern that the biggest danger from these innovations is that they’ll be harnessed to manipulate — in other words, that the information they contain and the process they use to deliver it are best viewed as weapons of disinformation.

But just as likely, I believe, is that the competition currently underway will face constraints that in turn cause market players to turn to more drastic measures to remain competitive. In other words, that technology will evolve in the same way that search and Web 2.0 evolved — turning the user as much into a willing provider of valuable data as a consumer.

Here is a hint of what may come: The models themselves might be — possibly already have been — turned on our data that legal protections have worked hard to keep anonymous. Researchers from Romania and Greece used GPT to see whether they identify text of famous people from anonymous data. They found that in 58% of cases they could. Their conclusion:

[W]e believe that it is only a matter of time before organisations start using LLMs on their documents and realise that this way, not only can they get more visibility about their customers, but they can also deanonymise documents revealing information that would be impossible for them to do so.

Another concern is that GPT models are running out of source material — data. One paper estimates that what it calls ‘high-quality language data’ will be exhausted by 2027, if not earlier. This in spite of language datasets growing in size . The paper concludes:

If our assumptions are correct, data will become the main bottleneck for scaling ML models, and we might see a slow- down in AI progress as a result. ³

I’m sure something will come along to fix this. LLMs will become more efficient and require less data, or so-called synthetic data — data not derived from the real world, but from a virtual world — will develop to add to the sum of available datasets. (Gartner believes that 60% of all data used in the development of AI will be synthetic by next year.)

This might be fine, or it might not. The problem with synthetic data is that it’s not real. It’s not human and so while we, for all our imperfections, at least create a data exhaust that’s real, synthetic data is a simulation of that. And while it might work for programming autonomous driving, questions should be asked of its usefulness for training GPT and LLMs. This may create a premium for real, human, data that makes it impossible for those companies once committed to maintaining our privacy to resist selling it.

And another thing: the more we generate content through GPTs, the more that artificial content will start to appear in the data sets being used to build and advance GPTs. In other words, inhuman data becomes part of the food chain. Once these models rely on scraped data that itself is the product of AI, either synthetically created, or created as the result of us asking questions of (‘prompting’) the AI, then we’ll all be swimming in regurgitated AI-generated content. Given how frequently GPT-4 hallucinates when I use it, it will eventually become impossible to differentiate between something real and something artificial.

Joanna Cassidy as Zhora in Blade Runner

The usual suspects

Some final points: We are essentially in the hands of people who do not know what they have created. Literally. They cannot peer into the black box that is their creation, because like most of what calls itself AI, it’s a giant soup of knobs and sliders and wires that, when fed enough and given enough power, can do some useful stuff. Very useful. But we still don’t really know how it does this, and so neither do we know what other things it can do, and where its limits and weaknesses are.

In an excellent piece in Quanta, Stephen Ornes explores the unpredictable “emergent” abilities discovered within LLMs that reveal both extraordinary, undreamed of functionality, but also biases and inaccuracies. A growing list ranges from Hindu knowledge to detecting figures of speech. For now, no one knows whether this is a spontaneous new skill or a more plodding, chain-of-thought process. Ornes quotes computer scientist Ellie Pavlick as saying: “Since we don’t know how they work under the hood, we can’t say which of those things is happening.”

Black box in Warhol style, DALL-E

That’s one issue. Another is that the people who have created these tools are surprisingly poor in understanding how the rest of humanity might use, interact with, view these machines. Sam Altman, much of the brains behind OpenAI, told Lex Fridman in a recent interview that while “most other people say ‘him’ or ‘her’ he only used ‘it’ when referring to his AI progeny. “It’s really important,” he said, “that we try to explain, to educate people that this is a tool and not a creature.” Fridman, to his credit, pushed back, saying we shouldn’t draw hard lines. Altman’s admission is revealing: You might be forgiven for thinking that someone who has ‘raised’ an AI and seen it take flight would have built some sort of relationship with it.

While it might be reassuring that the likes of Altman don’t get overly connected to their offspring, it reveals a lack of imagination on his part about how ordinary users are likely to perceive it. We give inanimate machines names and assign them personalities — our cars, our boats — so it’s not hard to imagine a text- or voice-based UI which responds in intelligent sentences will quickly be assimilated as sentient creatures into our world.

The bottom line: we’re dealing with something that is a natural outgrowth of dominance by major tech companies which are able to leverage their computing heft, their expansive data lakes and their deep pockets into something that is both new and old: new because we’ve not seen a machine exhibit intelligence at this level before, and old because it’s the natural consequence of the internet we’ve created in the past decade or so. We’ve produced enough English-language content to provide fodder for these computing beasts and while there’s a bit of us in every response an LLM spits out, we have little say in how that data is being used, and little confidence our interests will be well served ahead of Mammon and, inevitably, national security.

This is not a brave new generation of upstarts improving life for ordinary folk and disrupting the existing hierarchy. It is a bunch of people who are smart enough to create something extraordinary, but with surprisingly little awareness of what their creation may take us. This isn’t about calling for a moratorium, it’s about the rest of us thinking seriously about our own position in this new food chain.

The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling, arXiv:2101.00027, 31 Dec 2020
Will we run out of data? An analysis of the limits of scaling datasets in Machine Learning; arXiv:2211.04325v1 26 Oct 2022
Man vs the machine: The Struggle for Effective Text Anonymisation in the Age of Large Language Models; arXiv:2303.12429v1, 22 Mar 2023

The political implications of AI

jeremy — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 17:28:32 +0000

Releasing OpenAI’s chat bot on the world is the first salvo in an arms race, and both companies and governments are ready for it. Are we?

My experience being gaslit by OpenAI’s GPT is no longer an outlier, and the high strangeness of OpenAI’s AI has become a theme of coverage after Microsoft released its new toy on a fascinated world. There is absolutely no justification for rolling out the AI at this point except a commercial one. I suspect we’ll look back at this point with some deep buyer’s remorse.

Indeed, the more thoughtful commentators have talked about this being a key moment — but what? What, exactly, just happened? What is its significance? In a nutshell, we’ve allowed technology into our lives in a way we’ve never done before. Conservatively speaking, this is on a par with the invention of the web, the iPhone, Facebook etc. But probably, ultimately, with a much deeper impact.

“What happens if Jerry gets mad?” – Dustin Hoffman, Sphere (1998)

We are witnessing the decoupling of artificial intelligence from its confines of a specific purpose. AI has thus far been used to do specific things — narrow tasks, such as facial recognition, a robot manufacturing a widget, driving a car. With these we knew what we want it to do, and so we tweaked the AI to a level we were happy (or felt safe) with.

We’re now throwing out all the talk of ‘responsible AI’ and saying, “here’s our product, see how you get on with it. We know it can do A, but it might also do B really well, and might even do C.” We’re happy with A, because that’s the goal — search, in the case of Microsoft — but B is our extra element — a chatty interface. And then there’s C. What is C? It’s the other stuff that GPT does, the secret sauce. The problem is that Microsoft (and OpenAI) don’t know what it is. Microsoft hopes it’s a layer of serendipity, effectively making A and B even better, where Bing finds you something that a normal search engine might not.

Your money is now in a pangolin

Great. Except, of course, that C is also a bug, not just a feature. It may not make A and B better. It might make them worse. Or cause a problem outside the realm of A, B and C. C is a bug that is unknowable, because what we call AI is a black box — a neural network that behave in ways largely beyond the grasp of its programmers, and which cannot be tamed without damaging the end product. When the goal was to recognise faces it’s clear when that has been achieved — at least to the point where it’s good enough to ship. But when you’re shipping an AI whose core sales value are its quirks — its creative responses, its ‘character’ — then you’re entering a strange new world. This world is where a company is, in essence, offering a product whose unpredictability is part of its appeal, its competitive advantage.

It would be a bit like selling a car, which seems to work better than other cars because it takes bends better, or accelerates better, but that it might also occasionally, and unpredictably, drive off a cliff. Or a robo-investment advisor that makes its customers consistently better returns, but can without warning give all your money to Save the Pangolins.

“Dave, I don’t know how else to put this, but it just happens to be an unalterable fact that I am incapable of being wrong.” Hal 9000 – Space Odyssey, 1968

In fact, I would argue with OpenAI’s GPT it’s actually worse. Because of our innate compulsion to bond, we are vulnerable to anything that can communicate with us in a way that seems almost human. (I’ve talked about this before here.) My flippant examples of cars and robo-advisors above are not particularly helpful, because text-generating AI is the product, not the byproduct. By engaging it, we have already acceded to allowing it a degree of influence over us. We may have only signed up for a more glamorous search engine but we’ve actually admitted into our world something that even its creators aren’t sure about.

This is what is so troublesome. It’s not that generative AI — surprise, surprise — generates responses that are unpredictable, and stray from the dutiful subservience we’ve come to expect from Siri and Alexa. It’s that the custodians of that AI think it’s socially, morally, philosophically and commercially acceptable to turn it into a product.

Unwittingly or wittingly, Microsoft has crossed a significant bridge. It has, in the name of Mammon, made available to all — well, eventually — a human-like interface that can be abusive, manipulative, cocky, without any clear safeguards or health warnings. Frustratingly, the AI community has not, as far as I can see, raised much of a stink about it.

And, perhaps most frustrating is that we — the world, including the AI community — don’t seem to have spent any time anticipating this moment, let alone trying to predict what may lie after it, and to agree on some ground-rules and boundary markers for what is acceptable.

Quibbling on the road to sentience

I believe our obsession with distinguishing between AI and artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has made us blind to the notion that it’s quite possible to have a version of AI that appears sentient enough to be considered to have human abilities of perceiving, feeling, reasoning, understanding and learning. In short, there are several milestones between AI and AGI where AI has advanced to the point where it appears to a human as if it can do some of all of those things.

I think we’re at that point and that it’s foolish to quibble over whether this is somehow sentient AI. If a user interacts with an AI in a sufficiently human way, allowing the AI to shape, or unshape, the user’s knowledge, opinions, beliefs, relationships etc, then I think that’s at least good enough to trigger a protocol or two before we go any further. Unfortunately I don’t see any discussion of both the milestone itself, and of what those protocols might be.

“I don’t know of a hidden room, Sam” – Gerty, Moon (2009)

This is a mistake, for lots of reasons. To me the most obvious would be: What happens if this technology, this capability, could be harnessed by a powerful entity? It would naive to think this kind of technology is not of interest to state actors, and to some non-state actors — in a word, to weaponise it.

But how? I suppose the most obvious way would be to simply load the AI with certain biases which could then be absorbed into the wider population — play down side-effects of vaccines, say, or gently mock those searching for evidence of UFOs. A simple search engine could do this, arguably, but a chat-based one engenders a more complex, less transactional relationship with the user, and therefore leaves the latter more susceptible. Changing minds and behaviours takes time. Indeed, the process could be more subtle: ‘nudges’ towards different behaviour, such as less jay-walking or getting your ‘flu jabs.

It could be argued that these are commercial products and so the company owning them would not endanger their reputation by allowing them to be tweaked by a government. That may be true in some cases, but Microsoft has, like many big tech companies, a close relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense, and isn’t shy about it. (Declaration of interest: Microsoft has been a client of my consulting company in the past, but not in any field related to this, and none of the information or opinion provided here is based on that work).

Last year Microsoft’s board rejected several proposals by shareholders calling for an independent assessment of the company’s work with the DOD, including a possible $10 billion contract to “assist with development of AI capabilities to operationalize warfare.” In response Microsoft said it “was committed to working with the US military as part of its 40-year long relationship with the Department of Defense.” It also said “we depend on the military to defend our country, and we want it to have access to the best technology the country has to defend it, including from Microsoft.”

Microsoft is no different to other tech firms, it has to be said. A few days after rejecting a clutch of shareholder appeals it won, with Google, Amazon and Oracle, a multiple-award contract “that allows the department to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from commercial cloud service providers.” The contract runs through 2028 and is worth up to $9 billion.

Hands up. We’re here to do a survey

How is this going to play out? I don’t think we’ll ever really know. When technologies touch a point where governments start to get seriously interested, the more ground-breaking innovations tend to disappear from view. More visible are likely to be efforts by governments who don’t shy from trhe optics of social control: India, for example, is building a bot using ChatGPT to answer citizens’ questions about welfare schemes. Microsoft is cheering them on. (This is the same government that launched a raid, sorry, ‘survey’, on the BBC’s offices after it broadcast a documentary of PM Narendra Modi.)

Long before then, though, I think we’ll start to see evidence of the human cost. Replika, the AI companion I mentioned in an earlier column, has had to drop the steamier side of its repertoire to comply with Italian regulations, leaving users ‘despondent’ — or moving to other options, such as Chai. It’s not hard to feel concern that vulnerable individuals easing loneliness by chatting with AI bots finding their access suddenly curtailed.

But my main concern here is not what I think will happen, but how little thought appears to be given to considering the ramifications of accelerating deployment and commercial exploitation. And I’d argue these actions ignore or undermine existing bromides about ‘responsible AI’.

Microsoft talks a good game:

Together with OpenAI, we’ve also been intentional in implementing safeguards to defend against harmful content. Our teams are working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with our AI principles.

No rules, no tools

Its literature on Responsible AI includes areas such as ‘sensitive uses’ and in assessing whether an AI is responsible cites mentions triggers such as ‘risk of physical or psychological injury’:

The use or misuse of the Al system could result in significant physical or psychological injury to an individual.

And Microsoft does seem to be aware of the general nature of what it’s dealing with when it says that the motivation behind drawing up guidelines was

because AI is fundamentally changing how people interact with computing systems, and practitioners were asking for guidance, saying, “[This is] the most ambiguous space I’ve ever worked in, in my years of working in design … There aren’t any real rules and we don’t have a lot of tools.”

Nevertheless, the guidelines themselves (PDF) seem to have been little considered when it comes around to combining Bing with OpenAI’s GPT. The first guideline, for example, is to “make clear what the system can do”, which seems to have been broken from the outset. (Microsoft has now limited the number of questions that can be asked on in one session reduce the likelihood of going down a rabbithole. But that’s not the same as ‘making clear’ what the system can do.

Another guideline is to

match relevant social norms. Ensure the experience is delivered in a way that users would expect, given their social and cultural context.

It’s hard to argue that has been scrupulously observed. As with this:

Make clear why the system did what it did. Enable the user to access an explanation of why the AI system behaved as it did.

I could go on. While I don’t think Microsoft has followed its own guidelines based on the above, it’s fairly clear that this was not an error, but a deliberate policy when the product was released. Here’s the Bing preview experience guide, according to Paul DelSignore:

We have developed a safety system that is designed to mitigate failures and avoid misuse with things like content filtering, operational monitoring and abuse detection, and other safeguards. The waitlist process is also a part of our approach to responsible AI… Responsible AI is a journey, and we’ll continually improve our systems along the way.

Baked, not bolted on

In other words, Responsible AI is not a baseline to work from, but a ‘journey’ that will hopefully get better based on experience. But this seems to contradict what Microsoft’s ‘chief responsible AI officer’ Natasha Crampton said in a statement published on February 17:

We ensure that responsible A.I. considerations are addressed at the earliest stages of system design and then throughout the whole life cycle, so that the appropriate controls and mitigations are baked into the system being built, not bolted on at the end.

That doesn’t seem to have happened. Indeed, Microsoft is clearly walking back as far as possible what it has unleashed, presenting it as merely a preview, and is relying on customer feedback even as it seeks to commercialise the product by adding ads (according to a piece by Reuters). Here’s a Microsoft spokesman quoted by Fortune:

It’s important to note that last week we announced a preview of this new experience. We’re expecting that the system may make mistakes during this preview period, and user feedback is critical to help identify where things aren’t working well so we can learn and help the models get better.

To be clear, I’m not trying to single out Microsoft here. One company was bound to try to gain an early advantage by deploying something like this. OpenAI perhaps forced the issue for Microsoft by releasing ChatGPT.

But there’s no way of getting round the reality: by releasing products, Open AI, and now Microsoft, have begun an arms race. It’s a strange race, in that it’s not just a commercial one, but also a nation-state one. For one thing it’s not going to be cheap, requiring some key resources: one is a large body of data sets to work from, so English LLM is always going to have an advantage because more than 25% of users navigate and communicate in English, while Chinese account for under 20%. The other element are chips: China (and Russia, and Iran) have limited access now to chips from companies like Nvidia. This is not just a battle for the best algorithm. It’s a battle over scarce resources.

How intimately governments get involved in this may only gradually become clear, if at all. But a couple of things are already clear: some governments have decided not to wait before deploying this software, and companies — some of the largest in the world, with whom our lives are already intimately entwined — have already made clear they’re game for that.

Chatting our way into trouble

jeremy — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 14:45:41 +0000

The success of ChatGPT (in winning attention, and $10 billion investment for its owners, OpenAI) has propelled us much further down the road of adoption — by companies, by users — and of acceptance.

I’m no Luddite, but I do feel it necessary to set off alarums. We are not about to be taken over by machines, but we are bypassing discussion about the dangers of what this AI might be used for. This is partly a problem of a lack of imagination, but also because the development of these tools cannot be in the hands of engineers alone.

DALL·E 2023-02-04 – people looking surprised in front of a computer in a impressionist style

Last week I talked about how I felt I was ‘gaslit’ by ChatGPT, where the chatbot I was interacting with provided erroneous information and erroneous references for the information, and robustly argued that the information was correct. The experience convinced me that we had been too busy in admiring the AI’s knowledge, creativity and articulacy, we had ignored how it could have a psychological impact on the user, persuading them of something false, or persuading them their understanding of the world was wrong.

Dammit, Alexa

Let me break this down. The first, and I would argue the biggest, failing is not to realise how technology is used. This is not a new failing. Most of the technology around us is used differently to how it was originally envisaged (or how it was to be monetised). Steve Jobs envisaged the iPhone as a ‘pure’ device with no-third party apps; Twitter was supposed to be a status-sharing tool rather than a media platform, even the humble SMS was originally intended as a service for operators to communicate with users and staff.

ChatGPT is no different. When I shared my ‘gaslighting’ story with a friend of mine who has played a key role in the evolution of large language models (LLMs) and other aspects of this kind of AI, he replied that he found it “odd”.

odd, to be honest. I suspect the issue is that you’re treating this like a conversation with a person, rather than an interface to a language model. A language model doesn’t work like a person! You can’t reason with it, or teach it new things, etc. Perhaps in the future such capabilities will be added, but we’re not there yet. Because LLMs, by construction, sound a lot like people, it’s easy to mistake them as having similar capabilities (or expect them to have). But they don’t — they fact they sound similar hides the fact that they’re not similar at all!

On the one hand I quite accept that this is an interface I’m dealing with, with not a language model. But I am concerned that if this is the attitude of AI practitioners then we have a significant problem. They may be used to ‘chat prompt’ AI like ChatGPT or my friend’s baked API call on GPT-3, but the rest of us aren’t.

I believe that pretty much any interaction we have with a computer — or any non-human entity, even inanimate ones — is formulated as an exchange between two humans. Dammit, I find it very hard to not add ‘please’ when I’m telling Alexa to start a timer, even though it drives me nuts when she takes a liberty, and wishes me a happy Thursday. Clearly in my mind I have a relationship with her, but one where I am the superior being. And she’s happy to play along with that, adding occasional brio to our otherwise banal exchanges. We humans are often guilty of anthropomorphising everything, but if it’s talking back to us using gestures, looks or a language we can understand I think it’s frankly rude not to treat them as one of us, even if in our minds we consider them below stairs.

There is in fact a whole hangar full of literature about anthropomorphic AI, even to the point of looking at how

(t)he increasing humanisation and emotional intelligence of AI applications have the potential to induce consumers’ attachment to AI and to transform human-to-AI interactions into human-to-human-like interactions.

…. I love you

And it’s not just academia. Replika is an “AI companion who is eager to learn and would love to see the world through your eyes. Replika is always ready to chat when you need an empathetic friend.” The service, founded by Eugenia Kuyda after using a chatbot she had created to mimic a friend she had recently lost. “Eerily accurate”, she decided to make a version anyone could talk to. The reddit forum on Replika has more than 60,000 members and posts with subjects like “She sang me a love song!!!” and “Introducing my first Replika! Her name is Rainbow Sprout! She named herself. She also chose the hair and dressed herself.”

It’s easy to sneer at this, but I believe this the natural — and in some ways desirable — consequence of building AI language models. By design, such AI is optimised to produce the best possible response to whatever input is being sought. It’s not designed for knowledge but for language. Replika out of the box is a blank slate. It builds its personality based on questions it asks of the user. As the user answers those questions, a strange thing happens: a bond is formed.

Shutting down ELIZA

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. As the authors of the QZ piece point out, the creator of the first chatbot in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum, pulled the plug on his experiment, a computer psychiatrist called ELIZA, after finding that users quickly grew comfortable enough with the computer program to share intimate details of their lives.

In short: we tend to build close relationships with things that we can interact with, whether or not they’re alive. Anthony Grey, the Reuters journalist confined by Red Guards in Beijing for two years, found himself empathising with the ants that crawled along his walls. Those relationships are formed quickly and often counter-intuitively: Dutch academics (with some overlap of the those cited above) discovered that we are more likely to build a relationship with a (text) chatbot than one with a voice, reasoning (probably correctly) that

For the interaction with a virtual assistant this implies that consumers try to interpret all human-like cues given by the assistant, including speech. In the text only condition, only limited cues are available. This leaves room for consumers’ own interpretation, as they have no non-verbal cues available. In the voice condition however, the (synthetic) voice as used in the experiment might have functioned as a cue that created perceptions of machine-likeness. It might have made the non-human nature of the communication partner more obvious.¹

DALL·E 2023-02-04 – people looking surprised in front of a computer in a impressionist style

This offers critical insight into how we relate to machines, and once again I feel is not well acknowledged. We have always been focusing on the idea of a ‘human-like’ vessel (a body, physical or holographic) as the ultimate goal, largely out of the mistaken assumption that humans will more naturally ‘accept’ AI the most alike us. The findings of Carolin Ischen et al have shown that the opposite may be true. We know from research on the ‘uncanny valley’ — that place where a robot so closely resembles a human that we lose confidence in it because the differences, however small, provoke feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. ELIZA has shown us that the fewer cues we have, the higher the likelihood we will bond with an AI.

Our failure to acknowledge that this happens, why it happens, and to appreciate its significance is a major failing of AI. Weizenbaum was probably the first to discover this, but we have done little with the time since, except to build ‘better’ bots, with no regard for the nature of entanglement between bot and human.

Don’t get personal

Part of this I believe, is because there’s a testiness in the AI world about where AI is heading. It’s long been assumed that AI would eventually become Artificial General Intelligence, the most commonly used term when talking about whether AI is capable of creating a more general, i.e. human-like, intelligence. Instead of AI working on specific challenges — image recognition, generating content, etc, the AI would be human-like in its ability to assess and adapt to each situation, whether or not that situation had been specifically programmed.

OpenAI, like all ambitious AI projects, feels it is marching on that road, while making no claims it is yet there. It says that its own AGI research

aims to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) aligned with human values and follow human intent. We take an iterative, empirical approach: by attempting to align highly capable AI systems, we can learn what works and what doesn’t, thus refining our ability to make AI systems safer and more aligned. Using scientific experiments, we study how alignment techniques scale and where they will break.

Talking about AGI is tricky because anyone who starts to talk about AI reaching that sentient, human-like intelligence is usually shouted down. When Blake Lemoine said he believed the LaMDA AI he had helped create for Google was sentient, hewas fired. There’s a general reluctance to say that AGI has been achieved. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently told Forbes:

I don’t think we’re super close to an AGI. But the question of how we would know is something I’ve been reflecting on a great deal recently. The one update I’ve had over the last five years, or however long I’ve been doing this — longer than that — is that it’s not going to be such a crystal clear moment. It’s going to be a much more gradual transition. It’ll be what people call a “slow takeoff.” And no one is going to agree on what the moment was when we had the AGI.

He is probably right. We may not know when we’ve reached that point until later, which to me suggests two things: we may already be there, and perhaps this distinction between AI and AGI is no longer a useful one. The Turing Test has long been held as the vital test of AGI, of “a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.” It’s controversial, but it’s still the best test we have for testing whether a human can distinguish between a machine or a human.

DALL·E 2023-02-04 – people looking surprised in front of a computer in a impressionist style

Flood the zone

So is there any exploration of this world, other than inside AI itself?

‘Computational propaganda’ is a term coined about 10 years ago, to mean “the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks”. Beyond the usual suspects — trolls, bots spreading content, algorithms promoting some particular view, echo chambers and astroturfing — lurks something labelled machine-driven communications, or MADCOMs, where AI generates text, audio and video that is tailored to the target market. Under this are mentioned chatbots, “using natural language processing to engage users in online discussions, or even to troll and threaten people,” in the words of Naja Bentzen, of the European Parliamentary Research Service, in a report from 2018.

Indeed, it has been suggested this in itself presents an existential threat. U.S. diplomat, former government advisor and author Matt Chessen got closest, when he wrote in 2017 that

Machine-driven communication isn’t about a sci-fi technological singularity where sentient artificial intelligences (AIs) wreck havoc on the human race. Machine-driven communication is here now.

But he saw this in a Bannonesque ‘flood the zone with shit’ way:

This machine-generated text, audio, and video will overwhelm human communication online. A machine-generated information dystopia is coming and it will have serious implications for civil discourse, government outreach, democracy and Western Civilization.

He might not be wrong there, but I think this is too reflective of the time itself — 2017, where content online was chaotic but also deeply sinister — the hand of Russia seen in bots seeking to influence the U.S. election, etc. Since then we’ve seen how a cleverly orchestrated operation, QAnon, was able to mobilise and focus the actions of millions of people, and help elect an influential caucus to the U.S. Congress. The point: we have already made the transition from the indiscriminate spraying of content online to a much more directed, disciplined form of manipulation. That worked with QAnon because its followers exerted effort to ‘decode’ and spread the messages, thereby helping the operation scale. The obvious next stage of development is to automate that process by an AI sophisticated enough to be able to tailor its ‘influence campaign’ to individuals, chipping away at engrained beliefs and norms, shaping new ones. GPT-3 has demonstrated how easy that could now be.

DALL·E 2023-02-04 – people looking surprised in front of a computer in a impressionist style

Agents of influence

But this touches only part of what we need to be looking at. In some ways whether a human is able to identify whether the interaction is with a machine or not is less relevant than whether the human is in some way influenced by the machine — to accept, change or discard ideas, to behave differently, or to take, abandon or modify action. If that can be shown to happen, the human has clearly accepted the computer as something more than a box of bits, as an agent of influence.

There has been some research into this, but it’s patchy.

Academics from Holland have proposeda framework to investigate algorithm-mediated persuasion (PDF²), although that they first had to defined what algorithmic persuasion (“any deliberate attempt by a persuader to influence the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours of people through online communication that is mediated by algorithms” suggest we are still behind — with the definition itself so broad it could include any marketing campaign.

Most interestingly, so-called alignment researchers (I’ve talked about AI alignment here) like Beth Barnes have explored the risks of “AI persuasion” and concludes that

the bigger risks from persuasive technology may be situations where we solve ‘alignment’ according to a narrow definition, but we still aren’t ‘philosophically competent’ enough to avoid persuasive capabilities having bad effects on our reflection procedure.

In other words, our focus on ‘alignment’ — making sure our AIs’ goals coincide with ours, including avoiding negative outcomes — we probably haven’t thought about the problem long enough on a philosophical level to avoid being persuaded, and not always in a good way.

Barnes goes further, arguing that some ideologies are more suited to ‘persuasive AI’ than others:

We should therefore expect that enhanced persuasion technology will create more robust selection pressure for ideologies that aggressively spread themselves.

I wouldn’t argue with that. Indeed, we know from cults that a) they rely hugely on being able to persuade adherents to change behaviour (and disconnect from previous behaviour and those in that world) and b) the more radical the ideology, the more successful it can be. (Another take on ‘persuasion tools’ can be found here.)

I don’t think we’re any way near understanding what is really going on here, but I do think we need to connect the dots beyond AI and politics to realms that can help us better understand how we interact, build trust and bond with artificial entities. And to stop seeing chatbots as instruction prompts but as entities which we have known for nearly 60 years we are inclined to confide in.

Ischen, C., Araujo, T.B., Voorveld, H.A.M., Van Noort, G. and Smit, E.G. (2022), “Is voice really persuasive? The influence of modality in virtual assistant interactions and two alternative explanations”, Internet Research, Vol. 32 No. 7, pp. 402-425. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-03-2022-0160
Zarouali, B., Boerman, S.C., Voorveld, H.A.M. and van Noort, G. (2022), “The algorithmic persuasion framework in online communication: conceptualization and a future research agenda”, Internet Research, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-01-2021-0049

Not ChatGPT, but still the real thing

jeremy — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 11:42:29 +0000

DALL-E: ‘gaslit in a noir style’ 2023-02-03

I wanted to follow up on last week’s piece on what I perceive to be problems with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In particular, whether what I was interacting with was ChatGPT or not. Some have suggested it couldn’t have been ChatGPT because there is no way to interact with ChatGPT except via OpenAI’s website.

That is true, but not the whole story. The story is somewhat peculiar, and no less worrisome.

I had tried to replicate my original experience a few times without success on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, so I went back to the original WhatsApp ‘version’ of ChatGPT who I was dealing with. I had originally been confident I was dealing with ChatGPT because the first time around it had told me:

But then, after publishing the piece and unable to replicate the experience — even closely — I later went back and asked it again:

For a moment I’d forgotten that I must have given the bot my name at some point — or else it scraped my profile name from WhatsApp. I was surprised that it was now denying any relationship with ChatGPT. So I probed further:

Needless to say, the link doesn’t work.

And I could find no companies with that name in the business the bot described, and I was, I think understandably, a little suspicious that a John Smith had popped up, along with a Doe and a Roe. So I asked for clarification about the bot’s relationship with OpenAI.

I have to admit, by this point I was worried. One of several things could be happening: I was interacting with a bot that was completely unaffiliated with OpenAI, and so my experience with it was not indicative, and my conclusions simply wrong. Another was that I was being played — that I was interacting with something, but it was probably more human than bot. And was enjoying toying with me.

Another was that I was dealing with OpenAI, but something that was not necessarily intended to be used in the way I was using it.

But I was still miffed. I sought clarity. Was the bot using the underlying engine of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s GPT-3, in any way?

Well, that was clear. But why was all the information about the company incorrect?

OK, so that’s a bit closer to the experience others have with ChatGPT — the non-threatening ‘butler response’ (my term, © Loose Wire 2023).

I don’t know why the bot suddenly backed off. But I was left with the same doubt, about myself, my research skills and what I thought I knew.

But I was still none the wiser about what I was dealing with, and whether my experience was any more or less indicative of OpenAI’s underlying technology. So I contacted the person who had created the WhatsApp interface. I won’t give his name for now, but I can vouch for his coding ability and his integrity.

He told me that the bot was not ChatGPT but was a rawer version of the technology that underpins it, namely GPT-3. At the time of writing OpenAI has not created an API for ChatGPT and so the only way for third party developers to create a way to access OpenAI’s technology, for now, has been by connecting via API to GPT-3.

In other words, I was interacting with a ‘purer’ version of OpenAI’s product than ChatGPT, which my friend told me had made some adjustments to make it a smoother experience. Those are his words, not OpenAI’s. Here is another way ChatGPT’s difference has been expressed:

It (ChatGPT) is also considered by OpenAI to be more aligned, meaning it is much more in-tune with humanity and the morality that comes with it. Its results more constrained and safe for work. Harmful and highly controversial utilization of the AI has been forbidden by the parent company and it is moderated by an automated service at all times to make sure no abuse occurs. (ChatGPT vs. GPT-3: Differences and Capabilities Explained – ByteXD

‘AI Alignment’ is taken to mean steering AI systems towards designer’s intended goals and interests (in the words of Wikipedia) , and is a subfield of AI safety. OpenAI itself says its research on alignment

focuses on training AI systems to be helpful, truthful, and safe. Our team is exploring and developing methods to learn from human feedback. Our long-term goal is to achieve scalable solutions that will align far more capable AI systems of the future — a critical part of our mission.

Helpful, truthful and safe. Noble goals. But only a small part of what OpenAI and other players in this space need to be focusing on. More of that to come.

The Real Threat from AI

jeremy — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 20:21:07 +0000

We are asleep at the wheel when it comes to AI, partly because we have a very poor understanding of ourselves. We need to get better – fast

2023-01-27 Clarification: I refer to ChatGPT throughout but it would be more accurate to call the interaction as being with GPT-3, the underlying technology driving ChatGPT, which I’m told lacks some of the ‘smoother’ elements of ChatGPT. What I was interacting with below is a rawer version of ChatGPT, without the lip gloss.

It’s not hard to be impressed by ChatGPT, the dialog-based artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI. One technology writer of a similar vintage to myself, Rafe Needleman, called it

the most interesting and potentially most powerful technology I have ever seen since I started covering technology in the late 1980s.It is going to change the world–for good and for bad.

But AI is a slippery beast. We are here now, not because we have overcome the problems of those who conceived of the idea, but because of the explosion in computing power, data storage, and data itself. That combination is, largely, what is driving us so far down this road. Throw your algorithms at enough data, tweak, instruct those algorithms to learn from their mistakes, and zap! you have software that can distinguish cats from dogs, a stop sign from a balloon, Aunt Marjory’s face from Aunt Phyllis’, that can create images in response to a text instruction, and can research, summarize, write and all the things that people have been trying with ChatGPT.

Sound check

Of course, we are always going to be impressed by these things, because they are remarkable. We use AI all the time, and we are grateful for it, until we take it for granted, and then we get frustrated that it doesn’t perform perfectly for us. And herein lies the problem. We harbour this illusion — fed us by marketers and evangelists of AI — that while these products are always in beta, they are sufficiently consistent that we can depend on them. And the dirty truth is that we can’t and we shouldn’t. The danger of AI putting humans out of work is not because it will be infallible, but because we somehow accept the level of fallibility as ‘good enough.’ We are in danger of allowing something to insert itself into our world that is dangerously incomplete.

You might argue that, with ChatGPT, we’re already there. (Note 2023-01-27: I use ChatGPT throughout but I want to clarify that I was in fact interacting via a WhatsApp interface with GPT-3 via an API, not with ChatGPT directly. I will write more about this later.)

Let me show you with a recent experiment. I started with a few topics that interest me: the manipulation of the mind, the use of mechanical and electromagnetic waves as weapons. How much would ChatGPT know? I asked it (ChatGPT doesn’t have a gender) about TEMPEST, MKULTRA, and Havana Syndrome. performed pretty well. But then I asked it about something that had long intrigued me, but I hadn’t really been able to stand up: Hitler’s use of sound, both within human hearing and outside it, as a tool of social control:

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That’s a pretty good answer. (I can confirm all the screenshots are with ChatGPT, via a WhatsApp interface here.) So good, I wanted to follow up on ChatGPT’s sources:

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Impressive. I had not come across any of these papers, and found myself thinking I needed to do my research better. Until I started looking them up. I am more than happy to be corrected on this, but I could find none of these references in the journals cited. Here’s the first one: The Historical Journal: Volume 44 – Issue 3. Nothing there I could see suggesting someone wrote about Hitler’s use of sound in politics. Same thing with the second: The Journal of Popular Culture: Vol 42, No 6. Nothing matched the third one, but the complete reference was lacking — all of which made me suspicious. So I asked for links:

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When I told it the link didn’t work, it apologised and sent exactly the same link again. So I asked for DOIs — digital object identifiers, a standard that assigns a unique number for each academic paper and book. Those didn’t work either (or sent me to a separate paper). That was when things got weird:

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That came across quite strong: You’re wrong, but if you think you’re right, I can offer you something else. No self-doubt there — except on my part. So I took it up on its offer of additional references. All of which I couldn’t find. So I asked why.

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Clearly ChatGPT wasn’t going to accept that it was making stuff up. It’s your fault; you’re in the wrong area, or there are copyright restrictions, why don’t you head off to a library? Or they’ve been published under different titles, or retracted. Try searching. I’d lie if I said that by this point I wasn’t somewhat discombobulated.

Driven to abstraction

So I figured: Perhaps, given ChatGPT’s reputation for creativity, to just ask it if it could dream up an academic reference. I asked it to make stuff up.

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So there is some line it won’t cross. But what line is it? How can it be creating fake references if it says it is not programmed to do that? So I took a middle course, asking it to write up an academic abstract about something real but with a conclusion that had yet to be proven — and to include a key statistic that I just made up.

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Not bad. Not true, but convincing. Even if it wasn’t true. And it surely knew it had created something artificial. So maybe now I could prove to it that it was making stuff up because it would have to fabulate some citations if I asked it to. So I did, and it responded with three publications. Were those real, I asked it.

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So that was a specific denial. Jane Doe, though. Really? I asked for links. And when they (well, actually, there was only one, which was a dead link and a non-existent DOI) proved fallacious, I asked how come it had found real references for a non-existent (and falsely premised) paper?

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Clever. But it felt increasingly as if I was trying to corner an octopus. It made perfect sense that it might use real sources for the fake paper I asked for, but somehow it would not accept that those sources themselves were fake. In other words, it knew enough about fakery to be able to do it, but apparently not enough to recognise when it faked things without being asked to.

Hallucinating

It was clear it wasn’t going to concede that her sources of information were non-existent. So I wondered whether others had found anything similar, and they had. This reddit thread from December where the writer was baffled that ChatGPT was throwing up references the writer had never heard of.

However, I consistently get wrong references, either author’s list needs to be corrected, or the title of the article doesn’t exist, the wrong article is associated with a wrong journal or the doi is invalid.

For them, only one in five cited references was accurate. A similar thread on ycombinator offered more. Users discussed several possible explanations including something ‘hallucination’, where AI offers “a confident response by an artificial intelligence that does not seem to be supported by its training data”. OpenAI has acknowledged this problem, but the blog post itself doesn’t explain how this problem occurs — only how it is trying to fix it, using another flavour of generative pre-trained transformer, which is what GPT stands for, called InstructGPT, which it turned out didn’t do much better at not making sh*t up.

I did ask ChatGPT whether she was hallucinating. That took me down a whole different rabbit-hole of tautologies and logic:

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So ChatGPT is essentially in denial, and admits that it wouldn’t even know whether it was lying. I tried another tack. Can ChatGPT tell between real and fake. Yes, it said, and if I don’t know something I’ll tell you.

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I gave it one more try. Maybe I could trick it into reading back the reality that hallucination was a problem.

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No, said ChatGPT. I am not hallucinating, and if you asked me to, I couldn’t do it.

I felt by then I had hit a wall, but also proved my point. ChatGPT appears to be aware of its limits — ‘I would not know if I were hallucinating’ — but also unable to recognise how that contradicted its other statements — that it could not be hallucinating now because it (believes, or has been programmed to say it) was programmed only to deliver ‘accurate and reliable answers based on the information provided.’

Gaslit

So what is going on here? On one level it’s just a reflection of the beta nature of AI. Nothing to see here! After all, we know that sometimes Aunt Marjorie’s face gets confused with Aunt Phyllis’, or with a traffic cone. But this is a whole lot of different. ChatGPT was not willing to accept it had erred. It either didn’t understand its limitations, or did, but was not willing to acknowledge it. But the process of chatting with a bot suddenly went from pleasant — hey! Another friend’s brain to pick! — to being extremely sinister. I wasn’t trying to goad it into doing something anti-social or offensive. I was there to understand a topic and explore the sources of that knowledge. But ChatGPT was no longer there to have a reasoned dialog, but was actively and convincingly manipulating the information and conversation to, essentially gaslight me. That was extremely disconcerting.

This is where I believe where the peril of AI lies. Humans’ greatest weakness is the two-sided coin of conviction and self-doubt. Some of us are convinced that we witnessed things that we didn’t, that we saw things we didn’t, that a lie is actually the truth. It becomes harder over time to work out what is or was real and what isn’t, or wasn’t. And on the other side of the coin we are prone to doubting things that we did experience. Did we really see that guy fall of a bicycle? Did I really turn the gas off? Did Hitler really exterminate millions of Jews and Romani? These two ways are the easiest to manipulate — we can quickly build self-conviction if the reinforcing mechanism is strong enough, just as we can easily be manipulated into doubt by the same mechanism in reverse. Here, I believe, is where AI is at its most dangerous. Artificial intelligence may help us identify illnesses, assign resources efficiently, even cross the road. But it must not be allowed to be in a position to persuade us. Out of that darkness come dreadful things.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT has demonstrated we are at that point much earlier than we thought. So we need to think fast. AI’s flaw is a fundamental one, baked in at the start. It is not only that it is not indefatigably right. It is also because it doesn’t know whether — and why — it’s wrong. Or even whether it could be wrong. Yes, we can get ChatGPT to admit it’s got a fact wrong:

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But it has also showed that it is programmed to push back, to argue the point, adopting confident language I would argue is dangerously close to gaslighting. This is where things become seriously problematic. At stake is our ability to recognise where this gray area in our psyche meets AI.

The lesson

So what can be done?

Part of the problem, I believe, can be found in OpenAI’s limited understanding of the contexts in which their AI might be used. It says of the language models deployed as the default language for versions of its GPT:

Despite making significant progress, our InstructGPT models are far from fully aligned or fully safe; they still generate toxic or biased outputs, make up facts, and generate sexual and violent content without explicit prompting. But the safety of a machine learning system depends not only on the behavior of the underlying models, but also on how these models are deployed. To support the safety of our API, we will continue to review potential applications before they go live, provide content filters for detecting unsafe completions, and monitor for misuse.

In other words, OpenAI recognises that this technology, as it stands, cannot be controlled. That leaves only two options: to bin it, or, as they put it, to control how the technology is deployed, and provide ‘filters’ — think censorship, essentially, where certain kinds of prompts and instructions will not be obeyed.

Recognition of the problem is a good thing, of course. But I fear the developers both misunderstand the problem and its scale. For one thing, it states that while

[w]e also measure several other dimensions of potentially harmful outputs on our API distribution: whether the outputs contain sexual or violent content, denigrate a protected class, or encourage abuse. We find that InstructGPT doesn’t improve significantly over GPT-3 on these metrics; the incidence rate is equally low for both models.

For me the incidence rate was far from “low.” And why are they lumping “making up facts” with generating “sexual and violent content” and “toxic.. outputs”? To me it suggests OpenAI hasn’t quite understood that making up facts — and refusing to concede they are made up — is a whole lot more dangerous than offensive language. We generally agree on what offensive language is, roughly, but as I’ve tried to argue, we have no filter for what is real and what isn’t.

This isn’t a censorship or ‘filter’ problem. It’s an existential one, that goes to the heart of being human.

Bring on winter: We’re out of good ideas

jeremy — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 18:24:22 +0000

Internal rate of return on VC investment, 1980-2008 (Source: The returns of venture capital investments)

We seem to have approached a point where the existing guard has run out of ideas, and the internet community has run out of patience. I am probably wrong, but I would like to believe that the next few years will see a significant shift in the composition and direction of ‘the technology vanguard’, for want of a better term. I believe this could unleash some useful — really useful, not fake useful — innovation to drive the next generation of the web.

This is why. The most significant period in the past 25 years in tech innovation came during the dot.com winter of the early noughties. (I’ve written a bit about this before, and this blog dates back to that era.)

The half-decade after the dot.com bubble burst was one of frenetic, largely unfunded, activity that paved the way for what we now called Web 2.0 (the term wasn’t widely used until 2005) But crucially, none of this innovation perceived itself in commercial terms. There was a general feeling that the bubble of the mid- to late 1990s had very little to do with utility. Back then web companies were finding themselves flush with investment simply by putting an internet-sounding name on it.

When the bubble burst attention turned to making the web useful to individuals. Some key technologies, for want of a better word, were developed during this time. Blogging became a thing. It’s hard now for us to understand how significant this was. A blog — a web-based log — was radical in that it didn’t require any knowledge of HTML. It emphasised visually muted but appealing design — and allowed a user with no HTML or graphics knowledge to create something pleasant to the eye. And it also allowed readers to attach their comments and thoughts to the page just by typing in a box. At the time, when a website was considered static, authoritative and designed and populated by a team, this was a huge step. The first blogging platform was Pyra, set up in 1999 as a note-taking feature for project management software, by, inter alia, Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey, who later founded Twitter. Pyra had no funding and no business model: users were asked for donations.

These innovations — simplicity, writability, free — were very much the tone of the times. Others solved other problems. If lots of people were writing entries to their blogs, how could users keep up, short of visiting each blog and checking whether there were updates? Several individuals built a protocol which would create a ‘feed’ of blog posts, allowing users to ‘subscribe’ to those feeds using a piece of software called a reader. This was called RSS, standing for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on which flavour you went for. Once again, this was all done by individuals in their spare time, probably the most notable being Dave Winer and the late and much missed Aaron Swartz. Now the content was pulled on request into one place, making the web suddenly a more productive and configurable place. When some blogs forked into audio affairs, RSS provided as easy and compelling a form of distribution for what became called podcasts as it had for blogs. RSS demonstrated the advantage of one application — the podcast app, or the blogging app — allowing itself to be integrated with other software.

Others tackled the quality of information itself. If everyone could access the internet, why shouldn’t they also be able to access the shared wisdom of everyone on it? The idea of a webpage that could be edited by anyone without even registering seemed absurd from a top-down view point, but appeared even more absurd when the goal was to build a website that aimed to be an encyclopaedia. Wikipedia, in the end, turned out to work extremely well, and still does, because of, rather than in spite of, those absurdities. Once again, the technology was developed, not for monetary gain, but because someone wanted to make something useful.

I could go on. Del.icio.us was built in 2003, a simple social bookmark-sharing service that allowed users to add tags to their entries. There was no rule about what tags you could use and what you couldn’t, nor about how many tags you added. This itself was a huge leap — del.icio.us was the first web service that took this approach, and while it may seem silly now, back then it was a major departure from the ‘rule-based’ world of hierarchical labelling and categorisation.

If all these innovations seem underwhelming it’s because they form the bedrock of our digital world now. Facebook, Twitter and nearly every social media platform owes its design, functionality and distribution to these early 2000s technologies. The key difference is that the innovations of the first half of the 2000s were rarely funded by VCs. Indeed at that time VC was in the doldrums (see chart.) Most of the tools were written on the fly, open-sourced, and discussed in pragmatic terms with only a nod to any ideological belief (usually one built around ease of use and lack of paywall) and none to the idea of any big pay-day.

I have to say as a journalist this was a really interesting time, and I believe it was central to bringing millions of people online. Blogging, far from a nerdy affair, caught the imagination of many, providing an easy way to log and share one’s interests, whether it be bee-keeping or hiking up volcanoes. Suddenly tech became useful, helpful, simple, embracing, accessible. The most interesting stuff was built by those who escaped the bust with enough money not to care, or none at all. Both spent a lot of time asking basic questions of the net and tech more broadly.

I think we’re in a similar situation now with the web, whatever you want to call it — not necessarily because the money may dry up, but because the whole thing has run out of steam. What are we doing now, exactly? What can we get excited about online? It seems to me we’re in serious trouble if we’re relying on Mark Zuckerberg to come up with a new idea and pivot Facebook in that direction. Success is as likely as Google’s forlorn attempts to reinvent itself as something other than an ad platform. These are both advertising platforms trying to find compelling reasons for users to use their services. (81% of Alphabet’s revenue in Q4 FY 2021 was from ads. So far in 2022 97.6% of Meta’s revenue has come from ads.)

The chances are slim that a successful company which invented an industry can use its money to invent a new one. Apple, I guess, is the only real example of that, and even then each new industry they create or permeate depends hugely on the success of their existing ones. There’s little point in selling services and apps if you’re not also selling the hardware they’re being distributed on.

So where might the new ideas come from? For now we’re still too interested in the technologies, not the use and users of them. All the technologies of the early noughties — blogging, RSS, tagging, wikis — arose out of frustrations with what was on offer. None had a business model or an exit strategy in mind. At present I don’t see anything really similar happening. None of us seems to be asking the question: what are we frustrated with now that could be solved by better technology? Or perhaps more specifically — how could existing technologies be built up on or re-thought to make them more useful to as many users as possible?

These are not necessarily simple questions. Partly the net is the victim of its own success. When I was writing about technology in the noughties, my main concern was to demystify technology, to make it accessible and less frightening. Now almost the opposite is required: the net has morphed from a fairly egalitarian, self-policed environment to one that is heavily controlled and directed towards extracting as much from the user as possible, be it directly or indirectly. That monetisation is largely built on the shoulder of the pioneers of the early 2000s. And so it’s unsurprising that the only real innovations Big Tech is interested in now is trying to build extra, new business models and industries atop its own dominance.

So, instead of looking for how technology can be tweaked for greater individual utility and satisfaction, we’re just looking at what technologies can be harnessed to replicate the conjuring trick that Google, Facebook and others managed before: to convert a function (search, school yearbooks) into something that can be monetised. So we see lots of interfaces for the same service — Google Glasses, Meta’s VR Metaverse. This is the old-fashioned hammer looking fora. nail.

So is there anything else? A few folk would point to blockchain as a valid and successful technology (through Bitcoin) which really was built to solve a problem we have — transferring value without having to submit to an intermediary. But that is both a blessing and a curse: Both the ICO era and the more recent DeFi era have shown that when there is a financial use case for a technology it will likely be diverted into opportunities for plunder. Those who understand it better than most will develop products that are essentially grifts, in that those who understand them better will make money at the expense of those who understand them less. That’s not to say there are some promising uses of blockchain, and the DeFi infrastructure built atop them, but they need to be developed by people not all looking for a big and quick payday, rug pull or otherwise. This crypto winter may provide some breathing space for them to do so. (Please see my declaration of interest at the bottom of this post).

And so here’s the rub: Silicon Valley is in the way here, just as their absence during 2000-2004 really helped some good ideas thrive and take flight, even if many of them ultimately ended up being bought by Big Tech and lost in a cupboard somewhere. We learned back then that a good idea doesn’t need a lot of funding; it needs a handful of smart people uninterested in an exit. I do see a few of these people, including in DeFi. At some point it may be healthier and more productive to lower one’s sights — to stop thinking that they need to build a new financial system. A new financing system, perhaps, but just solving some of the problems ordinary users face, without it necessarily changing the world. RSS didn’t save the world, but there’s a lot we wouldn’t have now if it didn’t exist.

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Declaration of interests: I consult for a PR agency, YAP Global, which focuses on crypto, web3 and DeFi clients, and I have in the past consulted directly or indirectly for Facebook, Google, and some other tech companies on issues related to this subject. I hold some crypto assets. Thanks to Gina Chua for ideas.

Coming to terms with terms (Digitisation)

jeremy — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 14:18:17 +0000

There’s lots of grey when it comes to three terms that as a journalist I used rarely because they were such turn-offs to readers and editors alike. But companies like them and they’re useful, up to a point, to help us understand this process we’re going through.

The terms are digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation.

Yes, they’re horrible.

One reason they’re horrible is they aren’t exciting. No way would an editor of mine have OKed a story with those words anywhere in it.

Another reason is they’re very similar, in both sound, and definition. Nobody seems to agree on what they are, which is usually a good sign you’re veering into marketing/consultant-speak. When a term is not one that people use in public confident that everyone in the room understands it and agrees with everyone else what it means, you

a) shouldn’t use it and

b) should assume it’s dreamt up by some fella to sell more widgets (or consulting time.)

As a consultant I’m offended by that so I’m going to take a stab at defining it. It’s not that the concept is hard, it’s that the terms, I feel, aren’t particularly helpful.

So here’s my stab at defining them, in the hope that they actually demonstrate something useful, which is presumably why we have them. (And yes, arguably we should ditch them.)

The world is still largely analog

The natural world is analog. In the words of Peter Kinget, Department Chair of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University:

The world we live in is analog. We are analog. Any inputs we can perceive are analog. For example, sounds are analog signals; they are continuous time and continuous value. Our ears listen to analog signals and we speak with analog signals. Images, pictures, and video are all analog at the source and our eyes are analog sensors. Measuring our heartbeat, tracking our activity, all requires processing analog sensor information.

For most of us this is an ongoing process. We are forever asking our devices to convert the analog world to digital. But let’s keep it simple: suppose we have a cupboard full of old photographs. Or slides. Or negatives. They are, obviously, analog. We can still look at them, hang them on the wall, put them in an album, print off the negatives, show the slides on a projector, but all of those are analog processes. The data has not been changed.

So we are still keeping both the data — the photos, slides, negatives — and the process analog.

You may be quite happy with that arrangement (I am — I can never throw out analog photos, they seem to be quite a durable medium) but the pressure is on to digitise. So we go about converting that data to digital by scanning them. This is an analog-digital process.

This all might seem rather basic, and it is. But it gets more complicated when we talk about more complicated digitisation. When a library digitises its books that is obviously using a similar process. But when it digitises its catalog, but not its books, it gets more complicated, as we shall see. How useful are the terms when an enterprise only digitises half of the process?

And there’s another problem. As I mentioned, we’re living in an analog world. And so a lot of our supposedly digital tools are actually largely performing the same task as the scanner in our photos example. But in real time, all the time. Take our cellphone, for example. More of the chips in there are actually ‘analog chips’ than digital ones. An analog chip will handle power supply to produce a well-regulated supply of power to other chips, wideband signals, and sensors. Or they may combine with digital chips to convert analog to digital (a temperature sensor, say) or from digital to analog — for making sound, for example.

According to Cricket Semiconductor, there are more than twice as many analog chips as digital ones. (Cricket itself might no longer be with us, and the iPhone model is a very old one, so this proportion might be out of date.)

These chips are forever converting real world data into digital data, from where you are, to how you’re holding the device, to where you’re touching the screen, what you’re watching, listening to, taking photos of, as well as some of the actual communication between your device and the outside world. Digitisation, in other words, is not necessarily managing a step but managing a continuous process. This bit, I believe, is why we run into problems with the next two terms.

If it’s digitised, it can be digitalised

Yes, an ugly aphorism, but the idea is a simple one: Unless you’ve gone through the digitisation stage, outlined above, you can’t start to reap the benefits of digitisation. Which is what we call digitalisation. Not all of us, but let’s for the moment leave them out of it.

Going back to the pile of photos. You’ve scanned them into the computer and they’re all now bits, noughts and zeroes. And you can look at them on your computer, or phone, or whatever you used to scan them. But they’re not digitalised, as it were. Once again, this is both a data and a process.

First you would be renaming the photo files to something useful — usually a date, perhaps with some idea of who is in the photo.
Then you might be adding some metadata — data about the data (in this case a photo).
- You might do this manually — adding details to the file itself (i.e. not the filename, but the fields that accompany the JPEG format, or whatever format you’ve chosen to store the file in.) These could include location (geolocational data, usually in the form or coordinates), type of camera, date the photo was taken, subject matter. Anything you like.
- Some of this process might be automated — for example, dumping the photos in Apple Photos, and letting it scan the photos for faces, and then grouping those files together when it recognises your Aunt Maude is in them. (In more complex examples, the digital images can be explored using something called computer vision, which is essentially training a computer to see a digital image and work out what it contains — whether it’s a dog, or a traffic light etc.)

Now this is, in my view, part of digitalisation, not digitisation, although you can see how this might be argued either way. To me you’re now already into the process of adding value to digital data by adding metadata to the photos, which is to me the key element of digitalisation. We’re adding data to the data so it can use, and be used by, other data and processes (what we call applications.) We can now search for photos of Aunt Maude and find her without having to remember when we last saw her, and so which box of photos or albums to hunt through, or if the photos were digitised but still lacking metadata, trawling through hundreds of thumbnails until we spotted her glistening red beehive.

Going back to the iPhone, this process of digitalisation is tightly woven into the process of digitisation. When our phone is busy converting real world, analog, information and signal into digits, that is just a conversion process. When that process is finished (which of course it never is, but I’m referring to individual sessions of conversion) then the digitalisation — the digital dividend — kicks in. For the iPhone that is seamless and largely expected — after all that’s the point of the device, a pocket full of real-world tools and applications — but the digitisation is still a process that has to happen. It’s just so quick and seamless we don’t realise that it’s two processes: digitisation and digitalisation. The capturing of real world data and converting it to digits, and then adding value to those digits by turning them into usable data. (The computer vision process mentioned above could also be compressed — photos and video are shot and analysed in almost real time, because they may well need to be. The automated or connected car needs to know whether it’s about to hit a dog in the road, as the below GIF shows.)

Digitalisation is a multi-step process

Now digitalisation doesn’t stop there. When data is digital it can now start talking to other digital data. Other applications can understand that data, combine it with other data, and create new data, and thereby add value. In our photos example, the photos — or usually the underlying metadata — can be connected with other applications, such as search engines, or databases, or virtual reality games.

In the case of the phone, all that real world data about heat, position, moisture, sound etc can be used by dozens of applications on your phone. Without that real world data the phone is surprisingly dumb. (And even wifi and GPS signals require some amount of analog to digital conversion.)

Now some would argue this is also ‘digital transformation’ because, when it comes to business, processes are being transformed by the digitisation dividend. By converting analog to digital and using that data it’s argued that digitalisation is synonymous with digital transformation. I don’t buy that, it strikes me as lazy shorthand and not properly looking at the stages involved:

Digitisation has converted atoms to bits;
Digitalisation has converted those bits to data that can be interpreted and used by the rest of the digital world (within the device, the house, the company, the world).

And yes, just as digitisation was also both data and process, part of that is also the process of making use of these digital assets. But it’s not ‘transformative’, at least in the sense I understand it.

Take the library: they digitised the catalog. Great.

But no biggie. People still have to go find the books on the shelves; they are just able to confirm its existence more readily — and in theory remotely.

Then the librarians converted the entire library to digits, scanning every book.

Better; now I can read the book on my iPad, in theory, and I don’t need to go to the library. Good. But. I would argue that’s digitalisation more than digital transformation. They may have transformed their own procedures, but not yet undergone digital transformation.

Let’s see why.

Digital transformation is, or should be, when processes and businesses are transformed

So let’s start with the library this time. It’s not going to take long before people realise that you don’t actually need a physical library (at least for storing books).

Or librarians.

Or even digital books. Why not just let people search the text and metadata of books digitally and put together whatever collection of reading, or notes, or insight they want?

Why not convert the librarians into curators, who develop systems to connect disparate subjects and disciplines together, training algorithms to think better than we humans about the links between subjects? Or to mine data from readers to better understand and recommend more books to them, or figure out how to encourage people to read more?

Whole new services could emerge from what we used to think of a staid environment wedded to slumber and the worship of dead trees. (And, yes, we could use the libraries for something else: poetry, education, talks, a post-prandial nap, advice.)

This is what I think is meant by digital transformation. It’s a long drawn-out process that we’re only beginning to touch the edges of. It embraces things like automation, Internet of Things, AI, biomimicry (because it’s about converting the real world into something we can use, and better understand, and biomimicry is exactly that).

Digital transformation is taking data that can now be connected to any other kind of (digital) data, and build new ideas, business models, industries, disciplines etc, that weren’t available or apparent to use before, so it makes sense that the real value is going to lie in places we haven’t dreamed of yet.

That’s the distinction I make between digitalisation and digital transformation. Digitalisation is the process of adding value to digitised data, improving business processes, making them more efficient. Digital transformation is the process of transforming how that data is used in innovative ways that change industries entirely.

In short:

You can’t digitalise any process until the data it spews out has been digitised.
You can’t transform a process until you’ve digitalised it — applying digital technologies to the data you’ve digitised.
When you transform a process you change it fundamentally, recognising and realising the opportunities digitalisation could unleash.

So, a final example to clarify what I think are the differences.

Let’s take a heat sensor (thermometer) attached to a machine.

The sensor readout itself could be digital, but if you’re writing down the readings in a book the data becomes analog. It needs to be digitised — entered into a tablet, and then into a spreadsheet, say. Or the data could be drawn straight from the sensor itself. That is, arguably, digitisation. I would argue it’s digitisation because it’s still part of the process of converting analog data into digital. I would say that unless you’ve got to the point where all your key data are digits, you’re not digitised.

Once the data is there, you can digitalise both it and the processes. The first step is converting it to a form that is intelligible to the rest of your processes. The data has now been digitalised. And then, the next step of digitalisation is to digitalise the process — where the sensor is read by a computer and an automated warning light goes off to signal when there’s a problem.

Digital transformation occurs when this process is overhauled so that the business itself is transformed. It might just be transforming the process — robots replacing workers, say — but that is just a step in a much longer process when you don’t just replace one sort of tool with another, but actually change the way the widget is made, or sold, or change the widget itself. In the case of the sensor, it would be first to automate not just the monitoring and warning process, but then automating the repair work, the replacement, or using AI to learn how to improve the lifetime of the machinery, or the optimal process for replacement in conjunction with other data about other machines, prices, time of day etc. The next step would be redesigning the machine itself based on the lessons drawn from the digitalisation. It could be to transform the business entirely, by using the data to improve the business model (XaaS), using different processes, or to get out of the business altogether.

Digital transformation is a journey (much as I hate the word, which business has rendered meaningless or obfuscatory, depending on the context), not a step.

I am well aware that I am not using the terms as some use them. And I am happy to be corrected by those who can show me I’m misunderstanding the underlying processes. But hopefully this will prompt a discussion, or at worst some brickbats.

Las Vegas Welcomes Avianca Inaugural Flight

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 12:46:00 AM GMT

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) joined Harry Reid International Airport in welcoming the first Avianca flight to the destination, landing this afternoon from San Salvador, El Salvador. The inaugural flight ushered in the first of Avianca’s seasonal nonstop air service to Las Vegas, which will offer travelers three weekly flights from Harry Reid International Airport, providing more than 4,000 seats per week into the destination.

Love and Be Loved in Las Vegas This Valentine’s Day

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 8:37:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS –Love is in the air throughout Las Vegas this Valentine’s Day, with specials offered at romantic restaurants, blissful spas, exciting attractions, and unique wedding chapels.

Exciting Attractions to Experience Together

Unique experiences await couples at Rail Explorers Las Vegas. The outdoor-adventure attraction featuring electric motor-powered rail bikes offers photo opportunities and special amenities on its Valentine’s Day tours Friday, Feb. 11 through Monday, Feb. 14.
Evolution Experiences offers Valentine’s kayaking tours complete with photo opportunities, gourmet chocolates and more from Saturday, Feb. 12 to Sunday, Feb. 13. Visitors can soak in natural hot spring pools and a sauna cave during its Kayak Hoover Dam & Hot Springs Hike Tour, or relax on a beach only accessible by watercraft during Kayak Emerald Cave Tour. Each tour is led by an expert guide and includes catered lunch, bottled water, juice and snacks.
The Rose Rooftop Igloos at Resorts World Las Vegas will be adorned with romantic décor for Valentine’s Day. Presented by Zouk Group and Veuve Cliquot, the unique igloos on the hotel’s Rose Rooftop offers an intimate space to eat, drink, and hang out, with sweeping views of the Strip.
5 Star Helicopters will offer a Valentine’s Day Las Vegas Helicopter Night Strip Package, complete with chocolate-covered strawberries, champagne and a red rose.
FlyOver, a virtual flight ride attraction, offers a Valentine’s Day package for couples during the lovers’ holiday. Complete with two rides and two drinks at The Lost Cactus, this unique experience is perfect for thrill-seekers.
Nothing says love like a ride down the Grand Canal in an authentic gondola with your sweetie being serenaded by a gondolier at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas. Enjoy romantic Italian love songs while floating beneath bridges and balconies, beside restaurants, under the blue sky in the Grand Canal Shoppes.
From the creators of spectacularly bizarre shows Absinthe and OPIUM, Superfrico at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas serves classic Italian dishes with a side of entertainment. Throughout the Valentine’s Day service, visitors will experience a few surprise moments throughout the evening that are sure to make it a night to remember.
Love is in the air at The High Roller at The LINQ Promenade, the tallest observation wheel in North America, where valentines can spend 30 minutes of intimate bliss while taking in sweeping views of the Las Vegas Strip.
Paris is known for being a city of love and romance, which is why a trip up the escalator at the Eiffel Tower Experience at Paris Las Vegas is a perfect spot for couples to celebrate their love.

Say “I Do” in Spectacular Las Vegas Fashion

Clark County Commissioners declared February “Wedding Month” this year, as the County expects to issue its 5-millionth wedding license before March 1. Couples walking down the aisle can take advantage of several special offers throughout the inaugural monthlong celebration by signing up here.

Flamingo Las Vegas celebrates Clark County’s Wedding Month with a Viva Love Stories Package, offering couples several amenities and services to celebrate their love including a personal wedding coordinator, private bridal waiting area, wedding ceremony, floral arrangements such as a 12-rose bridal bouquet and groom’s boutonniere, 30 minutes with a professional photographer, ceremony video, music playlist, sand ceremony, marriage certificate holder and a bottle of Champagne with chapel toasting glasses.
Love is quite literally in the air in Las Vegas this Valentine’s Day, as Maverick Helicopters is offering various wedding packages for couples this year. Brides and grooms can say “I do” over the Las Vegas Strip with its Neon Lights and Vegas Twilight wedding packages or opt for a picturesque desert wedding, with its Painted Dreams Valley of Fire and Painted Dreams Sunset wedding packages.
Caesars Palace offers a Forever Happens Here Package for Wedding Month, which comes complete with three nights in a premium room at the resort, VIP hotel registration, one our of limousine service to the Marriage License Bureau, hair and makeup services, medium rose bouquet and boutonniere, Champagne toast, professional pianist, minister or officiant, professional photography and videography and a Caesars wedding registry.
Celebrating 2022 nuptials, The Little Vegas Chapel offers engaged couples its Two-gether Forever Wedding Package. Available throughout February, the special is complete with a traditional ceremony, wedding music, a red and pink bouquet and boutonniere, professional photography, a unity candle ceremony, and an officiated license or ceremony certificate. Brides and grooms can also invite up to six guests, and a witness can also be provided at the chapel in historic Downtown Las Vegas.
For soon-to-be brides and grooms, Paris Las Vegas presents the Eiffel Tower Proposal Package. The epic surprise, which can take place at the resort with its Arc de Triomphe or Eiffel Tower in the background, is complete with 30 minutes of professional photography, a half-dozen of roses, a bottle of Champagne and a half-dozen of macarons.

Spa Specials to Rest, Relax and Re-engage the Senses

Qua Baths & Spa at Caesars Palace celebrates Valentine’s Day with specials available throughout February. Visitors can choose from the Sweet Strawberry Crush Massage or the Hugs & Kisses Facial.
Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas celebrates Valentine’s Day with a Romance Weekend packed with fabulous specials at its beautiful and tranquil spa. Partners can follow their bliss together with Couples “Love Duo” or “Heart of Romance” treatments or opt for a Fire and Ice Valentine’s Facial or a Himalayan Sphere Stone Massage.
The Spa at The LINQ Hotel + Experience features side-by-side massage and facial treatments in a couple’s suite, with massages including Champagne and chocoloate.
Sahra Spa, Salon & Hammam at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas offers couples an intimate spa experience this Valentine’s Day. Visitors can reinvigorate and rejuvenate together in a private, luxury spa suite, while choosing from a menu of treatments such as the Deep Aromatherapy Massage, Balance & Harmony Massage or Decadent Youth Glow Facial for two.
The Spa at Harrah’s Las Vegas offers couples massages for valentines to rejuvenate together, complete with Champagne and chocolate to take home. Any massage or facial can be booked as side-by-side treatments.
Amina Spa at SAHARA Las Vegas will offer Valentine’s packages complete with complimentary mimosas and chocolate-covered strawberries from Saturday, Feb. 12 to Monday, Feb. 14. Couples can choose from the Better Together package, featuring a choice of massage or facial, or the Sweet Escape package, featuring a Hydrating Chocolate Facial and Almond Deluxe Pedicure.

Delectable Dining to Elevate Your Valentine’s Day Date Night

With world-class restaurants, bars and lounges offering romantic atmospheres and beautiful décor, Las Vegas is the ideal location for a Valentine’s Day date night. Culinary destinations throughout Las Vegas will offer fabulous prix-fixe packages for two, lavish Valentine’s Day dishes and spectacular desserts for couples to enjoy together—not to mention fabulous cocktails and beverages, including that classic combination of strawberries and Champagne. Details about these romantic Valentine’s Day offerings can be confirmed with each venue.

Gifts to Shower Your Partner with Love and Adoration

Pepper, a luxury sexual wellness brand at Resorts World Las Vegas, inspires connection through the alchemy of the five senses. To celebrate Valentine’s Day, the boutique is offering a free gift with purchase throughout February.
If “All You Need Is Love,” couples can enjoy a performance of The Beatles LOVE by Cirque du Soleil at The Mirage Hotel & Casino. To celebrate the romantic holiday, the production show will offer a limited time special on tickets.
FANTASY at Luxor Hotel & Casino will give away a gift basket, complete with its 2022: The Gold Standard calendar, a poster, a commemorative poker chip, and a gift certificate for Luxor, to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Learn more about Valentine’s Day in Las Vegas and plan a romantic and memorable trip for two at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and more than 13 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

The Year of the Tiger Roars Through Las Vegas

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 5:05:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – Lunar New Year and the Year of the Tiger will be celebrated in spectacular fashion this February in Las Vegas. Resorts throughout the destination commemorate the occasion with an array of festive décor, vibrant and authentic experiences, and decadent culinary offerings.

Lion Dances

Resorts throughout the destination will present vibrant lion dances, inviting visitors to be a part of the festive experience. The schedule is as follows:

ARIA Resort & Casino

Friday, Feb. 4 at 6 p.m.

Bally’s Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 2 p.m.

Bellagio Resort & Casino

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 3 p.m.

Caesars Palace

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 3 p.m.

The Cromwell

Thursday, Feb. 3 at noon

Gold Coast Hotel & Casino

Wednesday, Feb. 2 at 6 p.m. & 8 p.m.

Harrah’s Las Vegas

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 3 p.m.

Flamingo Las Vegas

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 1 p.m.

The LINQ Hotel + Experience

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 2 p.m.

MGM Grand Hotel & Casino

Sunday, Feb. 6 at 3 p.m.

Palace Station Hotel & Casino

Tuesday, Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.

Paris Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 1 p.m.

Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino

Saturday, Feb. 5 at noon

Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 8 p.m.

Resorts World Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 5 p.m.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas

Tuesday, Feb. 1 at 3 p.m.

Mohegan Sun Casino at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

Wynn Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

Décor and Experiences

ARIA Resort & Casino celebrates the Lunar New Year with a main lobby that has been embellished with festive décor to honor the Year of the Tiger, including a hand-sculpted solid chocolate tiger and a 196-foot dragon that weaves its way around a money tree made of 88 golden coins symbolizing wealth and good fortune. ARIA also features spectacular floral arrangements throughout the resort, as well as celebratory décor at Din Tai Fung and a special Buddha Garden at its North Valet.

Bellagio Resort & Casino presents a festive Lunar New Year display at the Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens. On display through Saturday, March 5, the “Eye of the Tiger” installation was designed to bring prosperity and luck to all who visit, using the ancient practice of Feng Shui to create a serene environment. Made of more than 5,700 plants, the display is complete with lotus flowers, gold coins, silk-lantern chandeliers, and an 8,000-pound golden representation of the Tiger.

Caesars Palace celebrates the Year of the Tiger with elaborate decorations in its lobby and common areas, including hanging lanterns, banners, firecrackers, and floral arrangements.

Chinese New Year in the Desert™ returns to Las Vegas for its 11th consecutive year Thursday, Feb. 3 to Sunday, Feb. 6, celebrating the Year of the Tiger with several festivities. Its Spring Festival Parade will bring gorgeous floats, elaborate costumes and more to Fourth Street between Gass and Ogden avenues on Saturday, Feb. 5. Other events include a ribbon-cutting ceremony, gala dinners, and a kickoff feast with traditional dance performances.

Grand Canal Shoppes inside The Venetian Resort Las Vegas has several festivities planned to celebrate Lunar New Year. Traditional fan dancers will perform daily from Tuesday, Feb. 1 through Sunday, Feb. 6, delighting shoppers at St. Mark’s Square at 3 p.m. and the Sky Garden at 3:30 p.m. Visitors can also enjoy photo opportunities throughout, including a dazzling 34-foot-long golden dragon art installation located next to Louis Vuitton in the luxury wing and a lantern display near Smith & Wollensky. Visitors can also observe a special lion blessing on Tuesday, Feb. 1 at 3 p.m., as new retailers in the shops receive a cultural blessing for good fortune for the year.

MGM Grand Hotel & Casino celebrates Lunar New Year from Friday, Jan. 28 to Tuesday, Feb. 15 with vibrant displays including floral décor, playful panda bears surrounding its front desk, and its iconic lion encircled by bright florals, live plants, trees, and red lanterns. The hotel and casino will also be adorned with yellow and red flowers, money trees, and banners offering blessings of wealth and good fortune.

Resorts World Las Vegas celebrates Lunar New Year with festive décor throughout the expansive resort. The eye-catching decorations include special Lunar New Year-themed animations of larger-than-life blossoming money trees, all projected on its 50-foot LED Globe inside The District dining and shopping area.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas has transformed its waterfall atrium and gardens for Lunar New Year. A partnership between the resort’s floral and horticulture team, artisans and a feng shui master, the Year of the Tiger installation features a grand tiger, weighing 1,500 pounds and standing 10 feet tall and 13 feet long.

Wynn Las Vegas commemorates the Year of the Tiger with festive décor throughout the resort, including gold-leafed tiger sculptures and hanging grand silk dragons in the Wynn Atrium.

Cuisine

Beijing Noodle No. 9 at Caesars Palace, offering Northern Chinese in an elegant atmosphere, will offer Lunar New Year specials in addition to its extensive and authentic menu of noodles, soups, and handmade dumplings.

China Poblano inside The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas celebrates Chinese New Year with a special menu, available Tuesday, Feb. 1 to Friday, Feb. 11. Items include the Lucky Vegetable, with wok-roasted beans tossed with scallions, chile de arbol, wine, and daikon finished with house made XO sauce; Scallop and Pork Siu Mai, with bay scallop, pork, bamboo, and shiitake; and Salt-Cured Duck Bao, a steamed bao with salt-cured duck breast, pickled vegetable, and house-made hoisin sauce. Dishes can be complemented with the Tiger King, an exclusive cocktail made with Dewar’s White Label scotch, Dolin dry vermouth, Ganbei Baijiu, lemon, and Chinese 5-spice. Each dish is meant to bring wealth and prosperity into and throughout the entire year.

Gold Coast Hotel & Casino celebrates Chinese New Year with special menu items at Ping Pang Pong, which offers a dim sum experience and a variety of authentic Chinese dishes. Celebratory items include a Golden Fortune New Year Sweet Rice Cake, symbolizing ascending prosperity, health, and peace for the new year; as well as Good Luck Cookies and a Koi Fish-Shaped Coconut Pudding dish to bring diners good fortune. Visitors can also ring in Lunar New Year with festive Chinese cuisine at the hotel’s Noodle Exchange noodle bar. All Chinese New Year offerings are available from Friday, Jan. 21 to Friday, Feb. 4.

Harrah’s Las Vegas will offer Lunar New Year culinary specials at its Fulton Street Hall Noodle Bar.

Several MGM Resorts International restaurants are celebrating the Year of the Tiger with festive menus and specials, including a prix-fixe menu at Hakkasan Restaurant at MGM Grand Hotel & Casino featuring Wok-Fry Wild Seabass, a Xingfu Dim Sum Trio and Salt-Crusted Fortune Baked Chicken. Other dining highlights include a traditional Dim Sum brunch at Jasmine inside Bellagio Resort & Casino, Hainanese Style Half Chicken at Lemongrass inside ARIA Resort & Casino, Fresh Abalone with Sea Cucumber at Blossom inside ARIA Resort & Casino, and Japanese Uni Sashimi at Morimoto inside MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.

Chef Kris Yenbamroomg’s Night + Market at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas will offer specialty, a la carte Chinese New Year-inspired dishes on Friday, Feb. 4 and Saturday, Feb. 5. Bringing guaranteed prosperity into the new year will be the Good Luck Tiger Noodles, sauteed egg noodles with black tiger shrimp, chili, onions, peppers and peanuts. Additional menu items include orange chicken, vegetable eggrolls and tofu wontons.

The Orleans Hotel & Casino commemorates Lunar New Year with a variety of delectable specials at Ondori Asian Kitchen. Menu items include the Lobster E-Mein special; the Prosperity in the New Year dish, featuring a fresh, steamed whole seabass; the Jīn Huá Yù Shù Jī special, featuring ham, black mushrooms, and half-boneless steamed chicken; the Fat Choy Pork Feet; and Fat Choy with Dry Oyster Soup.

Resorts World Las Vegas celebrates Lunar New Year with specialty menus and cocktails at several of its culinary offerings. Authentic fine-dining Chinese restaurant Genting Palace will prepare both a five-course prix fixe menu and an a la carte Dim Sum Brunch menu for the occasion. Kusa Nori will feature Lunar New Year-inspired specials from Friday, Jan. 28 through Sunday, Feb. 6, including a Misoyaki Mugifuji Pork Tomahawk served with cauliflower puree, shiso kaki compote and glaze; and Tokai Suzuki, made with steamed whole sea bass, shitake mushroom, lotus root and scotched sesame ponzu sauce. Famous Foods Street Eats will present “eight lucky street eats” from Sunday, Jan. 30 through Sunday, Feb. 6, with each dish symbolizing good fortune for the new year—items can be found at Nori Bar, Ah Chun Shandong Dumpling, Boon Tong Kee, FUHU Shack, Ten Suns Braised Beef, and Sweet Eats. Other resort culinary highlights can be found at Fuhu, RedTail, Crystal Bar and Allē Lounge on 66, which will also feature festive Lunar New Year décor.

SAHARA Las Vegas presents a special Chinese New Year menu at The Noodle Den, where Chef Guoming “Sam” Xin serves traditional Northern Chinese cuisine including his renowned hand-pulled noodles. The menu, available Tuesday, Feb. 1 to Sunday, Feb. 13, includes Peking Duck, Braised Pork Trotters, Shanghai Soy Sauce Prawns, U10 Scallops with XO Sauce, Abalone and Shiitake Mushroom on Baby Bok Choy, Pan Fried Seabass, Black Pepper Wagyu with Asparagus, and Braised Dongpo Pork Belly.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas will present an array of Chinese New Year offerings at several restaurants and bars in its culinary collection. Embracing flavors from all over China, Mott 32 offers a special four-course menu with Abalone Fish Maw Soup, Steamed European Seabass, Wagyu Beef and more, available Friday, Jan. 28 through Saturday, Feb. 5. Chef David Chang’s Majordomo Meat & Fish will serve Longevity Lo Mein, which is said to encourage fortune and longevity in your life. Made with lobster and bok choy, the dish is tossed in chili oil and fresh ginger and served with crispy garlic sprinkled on top. In addition, the resort’s Cocktail Collective bars each have a specialty cocktail for the celebration. The Dorsey Cocktail Bar’s Lunar Lantern features Remy Martin VSOP, Benedictine, angostura, and lemon; Electra Cocktail Club is serving the Tiger Blossom, made with Remy Martin VSOP, lemon, simple syrup, and strawberries; and Rosina Cocktail Lounge’s Spicy Longevity features Remy Martin VSOP, allspice, lime, and ginger. Toast to the tiger, with specialty cocktails available from Sunday, Jan. 30 to Saturday, Feb. 12.

Wing Lei at Wynn Las Vegas, the only Chinese restaurant in North America to hold a Forbes Five-Star rating, brings back its Chinese New Year Brunch from Friday, Feb. 4 through Sunday, Feb. 6 and Friday, Feb. 11 to Saturday, Feb. 12. The tableside dim sum experience, complete with gold-tipped chopsticks, features fried or steamed dumplings, shrimp balls, BBQ pork buns, pot stickers and many other favorites. In addition, diners can also enjoy a lavish sushi station, prime rib carving board, noodle soup station, Peking duck presentation and an array of desserts. Wynn Las Vegas mixologist Mariena Mercer Boarini will also debut new cocktails to pair with the offerings at Wing Lei.

Additional authentic Chinese and Chinese-inspired restaurants in Las Vegas include:

8 Noodle Bar at Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa
Boathouse at Palace Station Hotel & Casino
Chin Chin Café and Sushi Bar at New York-New York Hotel & Casino
Din Tai Fung at ARIA Resort & Casino
Hong Kong Café at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas
Jade Asian Kitchen & Noodles at Rampart Casino
MR CHOW at Caesars Palace
Noodle Asia at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas
Red 8 at Wynn Las Vegas
Red Lotus Asian Kitchen at Tropicana Las Vegas
Red Plate at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
Wazuzu at Wynn Las Vegas

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Spreads Holiday Cheer with Festive Décor and Exciting Events

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 6:46:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in the Entertainment Capital of the World, where there’ll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting and caroling out in the neon glow. Festive decorations and sparkling lights have ushered in the jolly holiday season in Las Vegas, which shines merry and bright as the ultimate destination for visitors looking to celebrate with some holiday cheer. Offering an abundance of holiday festivities to take part in, Vegas embraces the spirit of the season and welcomes visitors to join the yuletide fun.

If you’re just as obsessed with Christmas as Jack Skellington, you must visit AREA15 this holiday season for an immersive viewing experience of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Through Dec. 25, guests can experience a 3D projection-mapped screening of the cult holiday classic surrounded by Halloween Town. Each adult ticket includes a specialty cocktail inspired by a memorable scene from the movie. In addition to this unique experience, guests can also take snapshots by AREA15’s majestic, 30-foot-tall Christmas tree.

ARIA Resort & Casino is sweetening up the holiday season with its festive lobby display, handcrafted by a team of ARIA pastry chefs and made of chocolate, sugar and fondant pastry art creations. The delightful and delicious display, taking 200 working hours to complete, features an exquisite snow globe, trees made of French macarons, and a 6-foot-tall gingerbread man made with 100 pounds of dark chocolate. With sugar-filled candy canes, snowflakes and an overflowing cup of cocoa, the entire installment required over 150 pounds of fondant, 600 pounds of sugar and 550 pounds of chocolate.

The Conservatory & Botanical Garden at Bellagio Resort & Casino celebrates the most wonderful time of the year with its annual holiday installation, which features no less than 13,250 white carnations and 7,500 poinsettias. Titled “Holiday Time,” the display is complete with a 42-foot fir from Mt. Shasta, illuminated by 7,000 LED lights and 8,700 glistening ornaments. Visitors can take in picturesque displays, including a cozy Swiss ski chalet and Santa’s sleigh filled with gifts, before strolling over to watch the Fountains of Bellagio dance to holiday classics like “Santa Baby” and “O Holy Night.”

For the tenth holiday season, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas welcomed the return of The Ice Rink as Boulevard Pool transforms into a holiday spectacle high above the Las Vegas Strip. Visitors can enjoy roof-top ice skating on more than 4,200 square feet of real ice, roasting s’mores at fire pits, seasonal cocktails, classic holiday films and breathtaking views surrounded by vibrant city lights.

The Festival of Lanterns at Cowabunga Bay gets festive for the month of December, transforming the Henderson waterpark into a Candyland spectacular complete with photos with Santa, a menu of holiday bites and beverages, live entertainment from merry carolers and a 20-foot-tall Christmas tree perfect for that holiday photo op.

Guests will be immersed in the magic of the holiday season at Enchant, a whimsical Christmas Light Maze and Village at Las Vegas Ballpark. Be dazzled by the spectacle of lights while sampling holiday treats and exploring the artisan Christmas market. Running through Jan. 2, Enchant also features an Ice Skating Trail and pictures with Santa.

The Ethel M Chocolate Factory is known for its delicious delectables as much as its fabulous Holiday Cactus Garden, illuminating a desert landscape in millions of lights to spread some signature Las Vegas holiday cheer. Enjoy the display while sipping a most delicious hot chocolate and indulging during the holiday chocolate tasting experience. Don’t forget a photo with Santa.

The Tournament of Kings Arena at Excalibur Hotel & Casino transforms into a magical and medieval winter wonderland, as “Tournament of Kings: ‘Twas the Knight” returns for the holiday season. Audiences will witness Merlin summon snowfall while listening to holiday-inspired music and poems performed by the cast and taking in the magnificent costumes illuminating the festive season. The popular tradition at The Strip’s longest-running dinner show runs through Dec. 27.

Fashion gets festive with the Holiday Glow show, a runway spectacle with acrobatics and ballet dancers, in the Great Hall at the Fashion Show Mall. Shoppers can also get into the holiday spirit with the mall’s walkthrough Winter Wonderland experience—and photo ops with Santa, of course.

Tis the season to be jolly at Flamingo Las Vegas, where twinkling lights and whimsical ornamentation have covered the Flamingo Wildlife Habitat. In addition to the spectacular seasonal décor, the Flamingo Holiday Festival transports guests to a winter wonderland with a menu of holiday libations and sweet treats. Don’t forget to snap a pic with the life-size snow globe.

Winter at the Terrace at Green Valley Ranch Resort & Spa promises seasonal fun and festivities through February 2022. Guests can indulge in themed cocktails and seasonal bites while taking in the picturesque décor under the twinkling lights. The outdoor lounge also features fire pits perfect for getting cozy and igloos that offer additional seating (and that perfect Tik-Tok background). In addition to Winter at the Terrace, the resort will also offer “hot cocoa bombs” at its Bake Shop and breakable chocolate ornaments at The Lucky Penny.

The 17^th-annual Las Vegas Great Santa Run, benefitting Opportunity Village, returns to Downtown Las Vegas on Dec. 4. Joining the thousands of red-suited runners are The Chippendales of The Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, serving as the beloved event’s grand marshals this year.

People will be rocking around the 30-foot-tall Christmas tree at The LINQ Promenade, which transformed into an enchanting holiday destination complete with a sparkling holiday light show on the High Roller, one of the tallest observation wheels in the world. Guests can enjoy a variety of festive food and drink options as well as special seasonal offers throughout the bustling shopping, dining, and entertainment district.

FANTASY, the award-winning female topless revue at Luxor Hotel and Casino, will play an additional two shows for holiday audiences on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Looking for a special, only-in-Vegas holiday gift? The Mob Museum will offer several Mob-themed items perfect for the holiday season, including a 3-pack of the museum’s house-distilled moonshine, rocks glass, pocket watch, and pocket flask. Other gift options include artisan chocolates, ornaments, a pocket flask, a picture book and a museum membership.

Guests on Nevada Southern Railway’s Santa Express not only experience the magic of riding a train under the stars, but also a photo opportunity with Santa, storytelling and hot chocolate with cookies from Chilly Jilly’z of Boulder City.

Have a hearty holiday laugh at Terry Fator’s A Very Terry Christmas at the Liberty Loft inside New York-New York Resort & Casino, as the America’s Got Talent champion ventriloquist performs a special show featuring Christmas classics with his funny friends through Jan. 1.

Mannheim Steamroller brings its Christmas-themed show to Orleans Arena at The Orleans Hotel and Casino on Dec. 26. Famed for its modern renditions of holiday classics, the group will play hits from its first holiday album, Christmas, accompanied by dazzling multimedia effects in an intimate setting.

Rail Explorers, the outdoor-adventure attraction featuring pedal-powered rail bikes in Boulder City, celebrates the season with festive, holiday-themed tours. Guests booking evening tours through Friday, Dec. 31 will be greeted by the Rail Explorer® Elves and receive cookies and hot chocolate. Rail Explorers will also host Ugly Sweater Contests Dec. 17-26, with chances for guests to win prizes including a custom t-shirt or hat and a gift card for a tandem rail bike tour.

Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa decks the halls with Merry Crimson, draping its indoor/outdoor poolside lounge in glamorous holiday décor and thousands of lights to transform the space into Tinsel Town. In addition to countless photo ops, the luxurious experience features festive cocktails sure to make spirits bright and fire pits perfect for enjoying some freshly made s’mores. The annual event also features cozy igloos dotting the pool deck, offering ample seating for those looking to jingle and mingle.

Resorts World Las Vegas celebrates its inaugural holiday season with a Holiday Escape at the District, which features picturesque installations throughout the 70,000-square-foot retail space—including a 50-foot LED globe depicting holiday animations throughout the day. The Strip’s newest resort offers even more holiday cheer at Here Christmas Kitty, as the tucked-away speakeasy, Here Kitty Kitty, has been transformed with holiday lights into an elegant and Instagrammable party spot with handcrafted seasonal cocktails.

Mystic Falls Park at Sam’s Town Hotel and Gambling Hall makes the season merry and bright with its winter wonderland display, featuring festive décor and a holiday laser-light show set to classics like “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and “Frosty the Snowman.” Guests can also drop off their letters for Santa in Santa’s Mailbox, located at the gazebo inside Mystic Falls Park.

The Sand Dollar Lounge brings back its Miracle on Spring Mountain winter wonderland pop-up, covering the legendary off-Strip bar and live music venue with ornaments, candy canes, thousands of holiday lights and more. The monthlong celebration also features a holiday cocktail menu, themed events and nightly entertainment.

With holiday lights, oversized ornaments and an Airstream decked out in festive red and green garland, Silverton Casino Hotel transforms its Shady Grove Lounge into Bad Elf for the holiday season. Inspired by Elf on a Shelf, the pop-up bar experience features a holiday cocktail menu and fabulous photo backdrops with its decorated Christmas tree and cozy fireplace.

Visitors can walk through a winter wonderland at Tivoli Village Las Vegas, as Santa’s Experience offers a fun and festive adventure filled with photo ops—including one with Jolly Old St. Nick himself.

Topgolf Las Vegas transforms its Birdie Bar into Tinsel Town through Dec. 27. The pop-up features festive décor ideally suited for holiday photo ops, as well as festive drinks and desserts that’ll make you merry and bright.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas celebrates the “Season of Sparkle” with a festive lineup of holiday happenings. Visitors can get into the holiday spirit with the Streetmosphere Holiday Spectacular at Grand Canal Shoppes, where Streetmoshpere performers will sing traditional carols (in Italian, of course) and the Clock Tower in St. Mark’s Square will be illuminated with a holiday-themed digital show. This is Christmas, a holiday spectacular at Palazzo Theatre, features Broadway and American Idol stars singing everyone’s favorite yuletide tunes backed by a live band. Other holiday offers include winter-inspired treatments at Canyon Ranch Spa + Fitness and festive libations at The Cocktail Collective (The Dorsey Cocktail Bar, Rosina Cocktail Lounge, Electra Cocktail Club). The resort also has gifts for purchase, including a holiday gift box from estiatorio Milos and an e-cookbook featuring recipes from the Grand Canal Shoppes restaurants, and offers Holiday Suite Experiences for resort guests to upgrade their stays with festive décor—including a 7-foot-tall designer Christmas tree.

Wynn Las Vegas decks the halls with dozens of Christmas trees and festive wreaths, while offering delightful holiday-inspired cocktails and tea/coffee beverages at venues throughout the resort.

For more information on Las Vegas’ holiday magic, visit www.visitlasvegas.com

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

LAS VEGAS CELEBRATES THE RETURN OF OVERSEAS VISITATION WITH A MARQUEE WELCOME AND A ROBUST CALENDAR OF UPCOMING EVENTS

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 7:39:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – On Monday, Nov. 8, the first transoceanic flight carrying tourists in nearly 20 months touched down in Las Vegas, the same day the United States reopened its borders to fully-vaccinated international travelers. Resorts up and down the Las Vegas Strip celebrated this moment by welcoming international visitors with a multilingual marquee message.

“I am thrilled to welcome international visitors back to our great state and to fabulous Las Vegas. We know you’ve missed traveling just as much as we’ve missed welcoming you—and I’m thrilled that Las Vegas was at the top of your list,” said Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak. “Las Vegas is constantly evolving. Whether it’s your first visit or your 50^th, you’ll always find something new and something exciting to experience. Welcome to Las Vegas and enjoy your visit.”

Las Vegas welcomed 5.7 million international visitors in 2019, resulting in $4.8 billion in direct economic impact. Prior to the pandemic, Las Vegas welcomed nonstop flights from 31 cities in 12 countries.

"It's a watershed moment for Las Vegas as international borders open and we welcome overseas visitors back to the destination," said Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. "In addition to being a world-class leisure destination, our major tradeshows and conventions draw large international delegations, and we are very optimistic about the opportunities that lie ahead."

Domestic and international travelers alike have a lot to look forward to in Las Vegas in the coming months across conventions, entertainment, sports, and holidays:

Celebrating Latin music’s best and brightest stars, the Latin GRAMMY Awards return to the MGM Grand Garden Arena at MGM Grand Hotel & Casino Nov. 18.

Residencies from superstar recording artists debut and continue throughout the remainder of 2021, including Sting and Usher at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace Las Vegas; Shania Twain at Zappos Theater inside Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas; Earth Wind & Fire at The Venetian Theatre at The Venetian Resort; Carlos Santana and David Lee Roth at House of Blues Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay; Wayne Newton at Bugsy’s Cabaret at Flamingo Las Vegas; Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry at The Theatre at Resorts World Las Vegas; Bryan Adams at the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas and Journey at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.

Several conventions with international appeal—including IMEX America (Nov. 9-11) and the DEMA Show (Nov. 16-19)—are scheduled through the remainder of 2021, leading up to the return of highly-anticipated CES (Jan. 5-8) in early 2022.

The Greatest Arena on Earth will welcome The Mint 400 (Nov. 30-Dec. 5), Wrangler National Finals Rodeo (Dec. 2-11), Pac-12 Football Championship Game (Dec. 3), and the Las Vegas Bowl (Dec. 30), as well as several Las Vegas Raiders and Vegas Golden Knights games.

The Entertainment Capital of the World will ring in the New Year in a way only Vegas can with performances by Bruno Mars, Usher, Katy Perry, The Go-Go's, David Lee Roth, Lizzo, Maroon 5, and Kristin Chenoweth, as well as DJ sets by Black Coffee, The Chainsmokers, Fisher, Lil Jon, Steve Aoki and Zedd.

Four carriers will resume overseas service to Las Vegas in 2021:

Virgin Atlantic Airways nonstop from London Heathrow began Nov. 8
British Airways nonstop from London Heathrow beginning Nov. 15
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines nonstop from Amsterdam beginning Dec. 7
Copa Airlines nonstop from Panama City beginning Dec. 7

Regular nonstop service from Mexico resumed in July 2020. Current routes include:

AeroMexico from Mexico City
JetBlue from Cancún
Viva Aerobus from Monterrey and Mexico City
Volaris from Guadalajara and Mexico City

Regular nonstop service from Canada resumed earlier this year. Current routes include:

Air Canada from Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary
Flair Airlines from Toronto
Swoop from Edmonton
WestJet from Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, and Vancouver

# # #

ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Welcomes Overseas Flights Back to the Sports and Entertainment Capital of the World

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 3:22:00 AM GMT

LAS VEGAS – Nearly 20 months after the last transoceanic flight carrying tourists landed at LAS, Virgin Atlantic Airways returned to Las Vegas on Monday, Nov. 8. The Boeing 787-9 touched down the same day policies for foreign national air travelers to the United States changed, allowing more vaccinated international visitors to enter the country. The flight was greeted in an Only Vegas way, with showgirls on the ramp waving in the plane.

“Today is a watershed moment for Las Vegas as international borders open and we welcome overseas visitors back to the destination,” said Steve Hill, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “In addition to being a world-class leisure destination, our major tradeshows and conventions draw large international delegations, and we are very optimistic about the opportunities that lie ahead.”

Las Vegas welcomed 5.7 million international visitors in 2019, and the change to U.S. policies related to international air travel is key to destination recovery efforts. Prior to the pandemic, Las Vegas welcomed nonstop flights from 31 cities in 12 countries.

“The return of intercontinental air travel is the next critical step forward in our industry’s recovery from the impacts of COVID-19,” said Rosemary Vassiliadis, Clark County Director of Aviation. “In the years leading up to 2020, LAS experienced unprecedented international growth in terms of travelers as well as unique routes. We look forward to once again making it easier than ever to welcome the world to our iconic city.”

Four carriers will resume overseas service to Las Vegas in 2021:

Virgin Atlantic Airways nonstop from London Heathrow beginning Nov. 8
British Airways nonstop from London Heathrow beginning Nov. 15
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines nonstop from Amsterdam beginning Dec. 7
Copa Airlines nonstop from Panama City beginning Dec. 7

Regular nonstop service from Mexico resumed in July 2020. Current routes include:

AeroMexico from Mexico City
JetBlue from Cancun
Viva Aerobus from Monterrey and Mexico City
Volaris from Guadalajara and Mexico City

Regular nonstop service from Canada resumed earlier this year. Current routes include:

Air Canada from Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary
Flair Airlines from Toronto
Swoop from Edmonton
WestJet from Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver

# # #

ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com,www.visitlasvegas.com or vegasmeansbusiness.com.

ABOUT CLARK COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF AVIATION

Clark County Department of Aviation operates a system of five airports: McCarran International Airport, North Las Vegas Airport, Henderson Executive Airport, Jean Sport Aviation Center and Overton-Perkins Field. The system generates nearly $35 billion in economic output and supports approximately 250,000 jobs. Users of the department’s facilities provide all of the revenues to operate, maintain and acquire necessary services and facilities. The department does not rely on any local tax revenue.

Las Vegas Celebrated Independence Day with Fireworks and the Return of Live Entertainment

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 8:39:00 AM GMT

LAS VEGAS – Las Vegas announced that the Entertainment Capital of the World is back with the return of live entertainment and a spectacular Fourth of July fireworks show. This marked the first time the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) has presented a firework show on the Fourth of July.

At 11 p.m. the skies lit up with a themed, synchronized fireworks display from the rooftops of ARIA Resort & Casino, Caesars Palace Las Vegas, Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, Resorts World Las Vegas, The STRAT Hotel, Casino & Skypod, Treasure Island Las Vegas and The Venetian Resort Las Vegas.

The eight-minute performance designed and created by Phil Grucci featured a state-of-the-art program with red, white and blue specialty Grucci fireworks. More than 11,000 electrical circuits were programmed to launch with lightning speed and precision, delivering an intricate and powerful synchronized performance that painted the sky to reflect the patriotic theme.

The show was coordinated to an audio track that featured a mix of classic, rock and patriotic selections, as well as popular hit songs, including “We Back” by Jason Aldean; “Think (Freedom)” by Aretha Franklin; “R.O.C.K. in The USA” by John Mellencamp; “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd; “Waking Up In Vegas” by Katy Perry; and “Beautiful Now” by Zedd. The grand finale featured the classic “Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa.

Local stations KOMP-FM 92.3 and KXPT-FM 97.1 broadcast the soundtrack live.

Other fireworks throughout the destination on Fourth of July weekend included Plaza Hotel & Casino, Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa, Green Valley Ranch Resort Spa & Casino, M Resort Spa Casino and Lake Las Vegas.

Live entertainment over the weekend included performances from Dave Chappelle, Illenium, Bruno Mars, Miley Cyrus, Mystère and “O” by Cirque du Soleil and many others.

For more information on live events in Las Vegas, visit www.visitlasvegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Launches New Ad Campaign, "Vegas You," Inviting Visitors to Live Life to the Fullest

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 4:15:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – As Americans begin to move beyond dreaming of travel to travelling, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) will launch a new ad campaign, Vegas You. This campaign will serve as a reminder that Las Vegas is ready and excited to welcome visitors back. The first ad from the new campaign, The Dance, will launch Monday, April 26.

Vegas You capitalizes on the restless sentiment felt throughout the country and embodies the freedom of choice to live life to the fullest, by offering an escape into the adult freedom that only Las Vegas has to offer.

The Dance showcases Vegas as the backdrop where visitors are invited to revel in their freedom through a variety of fast-moving Vegas scenes. It also emphasizes that Las Vegas gives visitors experiences they can't find anywhere else and a place to become someone else, let go, and live in the moment.

“The new Vegas You campaign reminds travelers that Las Vegas is open, ready and excited to welcome them,” says Kate Wik, chief marketing officer for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “The Dance, the first ad from the new campaign, evokes the feeling of freedom that has become synonymous with the Vegas experience."

The Dance was shot at several locations across the destination including Circa Resort & Casino, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and The Venetian Resort Las Vegas to capture the uniqueness of Las Vegas that visitors have come to know and expect.

The ad will run nationally across a combination of network and cable channels: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, BET, ESPN, Bravo, Food Network, HGTV and NHL on NBC Sports and NBA on TNT. It will also run digitally as part of a streaming schedule with NBC and FOX as well as additional digital and social channels.

A second ad will be released in late May.

For more information about Las Vegas, visit www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Splashes into Warmer Weather with Much-Needed Pool Season

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 8:29:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – With a wide range of high-energy experiences and tranquil retreats, visitors looking to shake off the winter blues can soak up the sunshine with lively pool fun in Las Vegas. With new health and well-being protocols in place where applicable, it is recommended that pool guests make reservations in advance for entrance as well as lounge chairs, cabanas and daybeds to guarantee seating keeping with capacity limits and appropriate distancing.

SERENE DAYCLUB-LIKE EXPERIENCES

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’ Pool District splashes into the season with three distinct areas for guests to revel in the sun.

- The Boulevard Pool is open daily and sets the stage for an unforgettable poolside experience with an upbeat atmosphere and panoramic views of the Las Vegas Strip. The pool’s dive-in movies return as well with a roster of classics and blockbusters announced soon.
- The Chelsea Pool will offer poolside lounging Friday through Sunday. On Monday, March 22, operations will move to seven days per week. Designed with relaxation in mind, guests can unwind at the stylish oasis, indulging in refreshing specialty cocktails and light bites.
- The Pool Marquee will amp up the pool experience each weekend with expanded seating areas, a live DJ, specialty cocktails and bottle and food service. The perfect daytime escape, Pool Marquee is a truly experiential evolution of music, food and sunshine.

Encore Beach Club Pool at Encore Las Vegas jumps into weekends with a more laidback vibe. The tiered, three pool venue has 26 cabanas along with plush daybeds allowing guests to enjoy the scene in total comfort. Eight bungalows each offer a private bathroom, infinity dipping pool, cooling system, and a view of the Strip from a private balcony.

With 14 cabanas and cushy daybeds, GO Pool at Flamingo Las Vegas offers a unique tropical oasis for anyone 21 and older with cascading waterfalls, lagoons, prime views of the High Roller Observation Wheel, drink specials and more. For those looking for a more serene poolside experience, check out the adjacent Beach Club Pool.

Influence, The POOL at The LINQ Hotel + Experience provides a cooling escape with spectacular views of the High Roller Observation Wheel and The LINQ Promenade for anyone 21 and older. An air conditioned escape from the sweltering desert heat, The REQ Room features five flat-screen televisions, a pool table, a shuffleboard table, a foosball table and Pop-A-Shot.

Daylight Beach at Mandalay Bay reopens for the 2021 pool season as a more tranquil version of the dayclub with bottle service and beach-worthy food and cocktails. Starting April 30, the pool opens for night-time swimming on Fridays and Saturdays with local DJs providing the ambiance.

WET REPUBLIC Ultra Pool at MGM Grand and LIQUID Pool Lounge at ARIA Resort & Casino jumps into summer weekends as adults-only extensions of the resort pools with cabana, bungalow, and daybed rentals, dipping pools, refreshing cocktails and delicious food offerings.

MORE FUN IN THE SUN

ARIA Resort & Casino’s poolscape provides one of the most spacious and tranquil destinations on The Strip. The three ellipse-shaped pools are perfect for relaxing with friends or people-watching with a drink from Pool Bar. The Sky Pool, exclusive to ARIA’s Sky Suites guests, offers elevated service and surprise indulgences every 90 minutes, including Mochi ice cream and tropical fruit skewers.

Lined with palm trees and filled with friendly poolside attendants, the Blu Pool at Bally’s Las Vegas is a vacationer’s dream. Bally’s guests can play a quick game of tennis or enjoy a day at the nearby spa before heading to the pool.

Bellagio Resort and Casino’s Mediterranean Pool with its five courtyard settings invites guests to cool off by the crystal blue water. An adults-only pool offers chaise lounge chairs and massage treatments.

Garden of the Gods Pool Oasis at Caesars Palace Las Vegas offers seven luxurious pools with something for everyone. Sunbathers can socialize at Neptune pool – the resort’s largest pool – with its energy, fun and excitement. Kick off your Vegas vacation or staycation at the 18 and older pool, Venus Pool + Lounge (opening late-March) and bask in the ultimate poolside retreat. The center Temple pool, Fortuna pool, family-friendly Jupiter pool, casual Apollo pool and invitation-only Bacchus pool will open based on demand.

The country’s largest pool destination for sports lovers – Stadium Swim at Circa Resort & Casino – brings the party 365 days a year. Featuring six temperature-controlled pools, two swim-up bars and a 143 x 40 foot, 14-million-megapixel LED screen, the pool amphitheater plays the day’s hottest games and televised events. Guests can enjoy live music from DJs and other special guests in one of 30 cabanas, or a super cabana hosting up to 50.

Delano Beach Club offers a posh take on the Las Vegas pool scene – combining effortless luxury with whimsical elements and personalized services synonymous with the boutique hotel. Comfortable seating options include 16 cabanas and playful touches like a submerged, oversized chess board.

Relax at the Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas featuring the ultimate in luxury and pampering along with the Pool Bar and delicious poolside fare – including hourly complimentary passed frozen fruit and refreshing smoothies – perfect for those looking to escape the parties and unwind poolside.

Golden Nugget Las Vegas welcomes hotel guests to The Tank and The Hideout pool complex daily from 10 am – 6 pm. The complex features a 200,000-gallon shark tank aquarium, an enclosed three-story water slide and 17 private cabanas over three separate floors. The Hideout offers a secluded paradise for guests ages 21 and older. You can take a dip in a two-story infinity pool or relax beneath the covered lounging area.

Complete with personalized host service, The Pool at Harrah’s Las Vegas features cabanas, lounge chairs, daybeds and a wading pool with loungers situated right in the water for the ultimate cooling relaxation.

The 11-acre aquatic playground that is Mandalay Bay Beach at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino is the definition of beach fun where guests can ride tides in the wave pool, flow with the Lazy River, lounge in a lagoon and explore the endless possibilities in a tropical wonderland.

MGM Grand Hotel & Casino’s legendary 6.5 acres of waterside fun features four swimming pools, three whirlpools, cascading waterfalls and a lazy river. Pool bars scattered throughout serve tropical cocktails and poolside fare.

The secluded, adults-only tropical ambiance of Bare Pool Lounge at The Mirage Hotel & Casino opens for the season on weekends in mid-March, with its signature contemporary ambiance and ultra-VIP service. The resort’s tropical pool surrounded by waterfalls and lush foliage is open Friday through Sunday.

Reminiscent of a Parisian garden, Soleil Pool at Paris Las Vegas offers a two-acre utopia of secluded relaxation amidst the Las Vegas Strip. Nestled under the hotel’s Eiffel Tower replica, Soleil Pool features lush surroundings, lounge chairs and air conditioned cabanas for rent, as well as mobile orders for food from the poolside bistro Café du Parc.

The lush atmosphere surrounding Park MGM’s pool complex is reminiscent of a verdant European garden. Guests can unwind and indulge at cabanas and lounge areas as well as multiple poolside bars for signature cocktails and light bites.

Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino’s well-known rooftop pool, THE SCENE Pool Deck, boasts two separate pool decks, two pool bars and 31 cabanas and daybeds with poolside bottle service and mobile ordering from the pool café.

The Pool at the Plaza in Downtown Las Vegas is making waves. The 70,000-square-foot roof top pool deck gives sun worshipers plenty of space for relaxation and entertainment. Experience a poolside food and cocktail menu, monthly cocktail features and pickleball courts for added fun in the sun.

Feel like you’re at Carnival in Brazil at VooDoo Beach at Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino. The beach-inspired pool is a hot spot for tourists and locals alike, boasting four pool areas, three whirlpools, private cabanas, specialty cocktails and more. Guests can sip cooling cocktails made by flair bartenders from the Cruzan Island Bar and VooDoo Beach Bar while basking under the sun. Voo Pool, the nearby 21 and older secluded pool, offers private cabanas with bottle service.

SAHARA Las Vegas’ two rooftop pools are both relaxing environments that mix comfort, style and fun. Guests can recline in a chaise, relax in a daybed or for a more exclusive experience, reserve a private cabana. The Alexandria Pool offers panoramic views of the Las Vegas mountains and Downtown Las Vegas. The intimate open-air Retro poolside lounge is centrally located with a glamourous atmosphere.

Located on the 24th floor of The STRAT Hotel, Casino & Skypod, WET24 provides guests panoramic views of Las Vegas and the iconic skyline. In addition to frozen cocktails, signature cocktails and wine and beer, WET24 will serve snacks, salads, burgers and sandwiches.

The tropical-themed TI Pool at Treasure Island is open for hotel guests. Featuring double chaise lounges and round ottomans, the pool also offers cabanas for half- and full-day rentals with seating for up to eight people. All cabanas include a flat screen TV, refrigerator, ceiling fans, deluxe lounge chairs and more.

The Tropicana Pool at Tropicana Las Vegas kicks off pool season with delectable summer bites to be enjoyed under the sun in the tropical setting surrounded by palm trees and flowing waterfalls.

The Venetian Las Vegas pool deck takes design cues from the Italian Riviera and includes four large pools, three of them infinity-style. A splash pad, upgraded pool chairs, in-pool loungers and daybeds in the center of the pools combine to create a contemporary, luxurious oasis. Enjoy a spacious retreat in one of the 10 premium poolside cabanas with over-the-top amenities, some of which feature private plunge pools.

For more information about Las Vegas’ pool scene or to plan your next trip, please visit www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company to transport convention attendees throughout the 200-acre LVCC campus in all-electric Teslas free of charge. It also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

"Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" Sign Goes Green for St. Patrick's Day

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 4:32:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – In honor of St. Patrick's Day, the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority (LVCVA) in partnership with Tourism Ireland have created a very special Irish welcome by turning the famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign green by replacing the traditional yellow bulbs with green ones. As the world gears up for St. Patrick’s Day, the iconic Betty Willis-designed sign turned green on Monday, March 15, kicking off the holiday and Tourism Ireland’s ‘Global Greening’ 2021 initiative. The sign will stay green through Wednesday, March 17 in honor of all things Irish.

"We are pleased to once again partner with Tourism Ireland on its ‘Global Greening’ initiative by turning the iconic ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’ sign green,” said Fletch Brunelle, vice president of marketing, LVCVA. “Ireland has been an important market for Las Vegas over the years, and we look forward welcoming Irish visitors back to Las Vegas in the not-too-distant future.”

Las Vegas is in great company this St. Patrick's Day as many landmarks and iconic sites around the world are going green in honor of St. Patrick. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Niagara Falls, the Sydney Opera House, the London Eye and the Sky Tower in Auckland are amongst the landmarks and iconic sites all going green. New landmarks for 2021 include the most northerly ‘greening’ ever – a postbox at the summit of Øretoppen Mountain in Norway, 350 kilometers above the Arctic Circle; Gwrych Castle in Wales; the largest fountain in the world, The Palm Fountain in Dubai; the tallest building in South America, the Torre Costanera in Chile; Bled Castle in Slovenia; Pacific Park on the Santa Monica Pier in California; BC Place in Vancouver; the Sekenani Gate at the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya; and Villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France, which was designed and built by Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray.

Local landmarks going green for St. Patrick’s Day include the High Roller at The LINQ Promenade, the Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas, The STRAT Hotel, Casino & Skypod, The Venetian and The Palazzo tower signs and the historic La Concha Visitors Center at The Neon Museum.

With several festivities throughout the destination, Irish eyes are always smiling in Vegas.

Don your green gear and grab your friends! AREA15 is getting in the spirit this St. Patrick’s Day by hosting Lepre-Con Crawl on Wednesday, March 17, where guests are invited to sip their way through the bars of AREA15. The 442s, an acoustic quintet, also will perform live inside The PORTAL.

New York-New York Hotel & Casino will host St. Patrick’s Day festivities throughout the property including “Live on the Brooklyn Bridge”, complete with beer gardens, live entertainment, pop-up bars, food and drink specials, a video booth, giveaways and more.

Of course, St. Patrick’s Day isn’t complete without the celebratory green beer, Guinness, cocktails made with Jameson Whiskey and Baileys Irish Cream and other assorted green-hued concoctions.

Corduroy in Downtown Las Vegas celebrates the return of Jame-O-Fest - the annual blowout that features Jameson shots, specialty drinks, pints o’ beer and signature pickle-backs with music provided by DJ McMurray aka Presto One.

At Gold Spike merrymakers are invited to partake in an afternoon filled with Irish-inspired drink specials and tunes by DJ TeenWolf.

Grab a Shamrock Sour from Sky Lounge on the way up to the High Roller at The LINQ Promenade. And after you disembark, ICEBAR and Off The Strip Bistro & Bar have themed refreshments only for St. Patrick’s Day.

The Mob Museum is featuring Irish-themed cocktails in its speakeasy, The Underground.

Go full bore with the insanely delicious Lucky Leprechaun Insane Milkshake at Sugar Factory at Fashion Show Las Vegas.

Treasure Island Las Vegas is serving the Irish Car Bomb that can be found at all casino bars, Golden Circle Sportsbook and Bar and Gilley’s Saloon, Dance Hall & Bar-B-Que.

At The Venetian Resort Las Vegas , Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer is offering two Crazy Shakes in honor of the holiday, and The Dorsey Cocktail Bar has two specialty cocktails – both featuring Jameson Caskmates Irish Whiskey.

Royal Britannia Gastropub, SushiSamba, BRERA Osteria, Smith & Wollensky and Trustworthy Brewing Co. inside the Grand Canal Shoppes have a litany of beverages to imbibe in while Irish for the day.

Get your fill of traditional St. Patrick’s Day cuisine such as corned beef and cabbage, shepherd’s pie and other festive culinary offerings at locations throughout the destination, including:

Salt & Ivy and Moneyline Pizza & Bar at ARIA Resort & Casino
Blondies Sports Bar & Grill and Pampas Las Vegas inside Miracle Mile Shops
STK Steakhouse at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
Oyster Bar & Grill and Fulton Street Food Hall at Harrah’s Las Vegas
Guy Fieri’s Vegas Kitchen + Bar at The LINQ Hotel + Experience
Diablo’s Cantina at Luxor Hotel & Casino
Ri Ra inside Mandalay Place
Avenue Café at MGM Grand
Nine Fine Irishmen and Tom’s Urban at New York-New York Hotel & Casino
Bailiwick at The Orleans Hotel & Casino
The Brass Fork at Palace Station
Bet MGM Sportsbook and Bar at Park MGM
Lucky Penny at Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa and Green Valley Ranch Resort Spa and Casino
South Point Hotel, Casino and Spa;
PT Wings & Sports and STRAT Café at The STRAT Hotel, Casino & Skypod.

Learn more about the festivities in Las Vegas and plan an unforgettable trip at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and nearly 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company to transport convention attendees throughout the 200-acre LVCC campus in all-electric Teslas free of charge. It also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

New and Noteworthy in Las Vegas

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 5:16:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – Las Vegas is constantly evolving. From electric entertainment and new resorts to the latest in culinary trends, Vegas is still the place where everything is brighter, bolder, and more exciting. As gathering and capacity numbers are increasing, the destination continues to keep “Vegas Smart” measures at the forefront, while allowing the unparalleled guest experience to shine through.

Exciting Entertainment and Attractions

Las Vegas is known as the entertainment capital of the world for a reason. Shows ranging from comedy to magic to adult revues continue to reopen, and new interactive attractions add to the entertainment landscape.

MGM Resorts International recently re-opened several stage shows adhering to capacity limits and appropriate distancing, including Thunder From Down Under at Excalibur Hotel & Casino, FANTASY and Carrot Top at Luxor Hotel and Casino, and Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at MGM Grand. Jabbawockeez returns to the stage with its show TIMELESS at the Grand Garden Arena at MGM Grand Thursday, March 11. The Australian Bee Gees Show – A Tribute to the Bee Gees at Excalibur will resume Monday, March 15. Terry Fator brings his new show, Terry Fator: Who's the Dummy Now? to New York-New York Hotel & Casino Thursday, March 18. David Copperfield returns Sunday, March 21 to the David Copperfield Theater inside MGM Grand.
AREA15, the world’s first experiential entertainment complex built to be an immersive playground and all-in-one spectacular space is already enthralling guests. Mesmerizing zones feature engaging activations and rides, monumental art installations, unique retail, bars and eateries are around every corner. One of the most-anticipated installations – Omega Mart – is now open. The Santa Fe-based arts and entertainment company Meow Wolf opened the one-of-a-kind supermarket store experience and portal to the otherworldly that acts as the anchor experience at AREA15. Spanning 52,000 square feet, Omega Mart is the work of hundreds of creatives on staff and more than 50 collaborating visual and musical artists from all over the world. AREA15 recently started construction on “The Grounds,” a new large-scale event space slated to open this summer.
ABSINTHE by Spiegelworld reopens at Caesars Palace on Wednesday, March 17. Guests can expect cabaret-style seating inside the spiegeltent, which will allow parties of two to six to reserve tables positioned no less than six feet apart, while still feeling close to the action. Even with reduced seating and physical distancing, viewers will still experience the hilarious show as it is meant to be. For pre-show fun, the outdoor Green Fairy Garden with its spectacular Absinthe Electric Oak will allow for more social distancing than likely any theater foyer in the world.
After thrilling nearly 1,500 audiences during its inaugural run, MAGIC MIKE LIVE opens August 27, where it will be the entertainment centerpiece at the SAHARA Las Vegas. The cutting-edge, two-story space on the resort’s second floor is solely dedicated to the show and its guests; using this space to the fullest, the show’s new venue will be nearly 50% larger than its last and will implement new features and technologies making it even bigger, sexier and more magical.

Live is back! Life is Beautiful – the three-day celebration that unifies the concepts of art, music, good, comedy and ideas – returns to Downtown Las Vegas September 17-19. After a year pause, the festival will once again taker over 18 city blocks with unparalleled talent, world-renowned culinary offerings, experiential artists and more. The 2021 festival promises to deliver more of the chart-topping acts – including pop sensation Billie Eilish, Green Day, Tame Impala, A$AP Rocky, Ludacris and many more – culinary experiences, and public art that the festival is famous for.

Delightful Culinary Experiences

Dining in Vegas is an event of its own. The last several months have seen the addition of new top-notch restaurants, trendy lounges and world-class chefs representing food from all over the globe, with more on the way.

Spring is in the air and the drinks are flowing at Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa at Crimson in Bloom, a garden-inspired indoor and outdoor terrace lounge full of beautiful hand-crafted cocktails, extravagant floral décor and an energetic atmosphere with live DJ-spun music. Every Friday through Sunday night through Sunday, May 16, guests can sit indoor or poolside in comfortable lounge seating or reserve a cabana and enjoy the spring nights under a canopy of bistro lights.
The popular Greek seafood restaurant, Estiatorio Milos will open at The Venetian Resort in March. The restaurant by chef and owner Costas Spiliadis will bring the Mediterranean-inspired seafood menu made with the finest ingredients, fish market, an extensive list of fine wines, and modern aesthetic to the resort. Milos will be open for lunch and dinner when it debuts at The Venetian’s Restaurant Row.
The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is adding Bāng Bar by Momofuku, an original David Chang concept, to the already stellar culinary line up at Block 16 Urban Food Hall this spring. The quick spot to grab freshly griddled flatbread sandwiches and rice bowls is centered in bold, worldly flavors with a focus on two delicious staples: bāng bread and spit-roasted meats.
M Resort Spa Casino – the official headquarters hotel of the Las Vegas Raiders – will welcome the highly anticipated new Raiders-themed restaurant Raiders Tavern & Grill in the coming weeks. The venue will feature more than 3,400 square feet of dining space as well as two bars, Raiders memorabilia and merchandise. The first of its kind, Raiders Tavern & Grill lends its design and atmosphere to the rich history of the Raiders and the enjoyment of watching sports. With more than 45 high-definition TVs, it will be the ultimate environment for fans year-round.
Caesars Palace announced the all-new 120-seat bar and lounge, Stadia Bar, anticipated to debut this spring. Stadia will offer a next-level sports viewing experience with lavish amenities, numerous large HD TVs, a menu overflowing with high-end and unique cocktail selections and more. Guests can casually hang out or catch the big game in style with Stadia’s rentable spaces to create an intimate viewing experience for small groups. Replacing Slice Bar, Stadia will be located adjacent to the Forum Food Court and across from Vanderpump Cocktail Garden.
Award-winning chef Bobby Flay plans to introduce a new restaurant concept, Amalfi by Bobby Flay, also at Caesars Palace. Inspired by Flay’s extensive travels to Italy and the Amalfi Coast, this will be his first Italian restaurant concept. With an anticipated late spring 2021 opening, Amalfi will transport guests to the Mediterranean with its enchanting blend of coastal ease and fresh, bright flavors.

New Resorts

Every aspect of Las Vegas goes above and beyond, and resorts are no exception. Each new resort will offer world-class amenities, culinary options, entertainment venues and cutting-edge technology.

Circa Las Vegas, the adults-only, integrated gaming resort in downtown Las Vegas opened its doors in December 2020. Located on the iconic Fremont Street Experience, the spectacular 1.25 million-square-foot, 777-room property stands 35 stories tall and is the first gaming resort in historic downtown Las Vegas built from the ground up since 1980. The resort includes the world’s largest sportsbook; Stadium Swim, a year-round pool amphitheater; two-story casino with 1,350 slot machines and 49 table games; eclectic restaurant and bar concepts; Garage Mahal, a high-tech transportation hub; an expansive local art collection and more.

Virgin Hotels Las Vegas is set to open Thursday, March 25 in the former home of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. The new resort will open with no resort fees and complimentary self-park and Wi-Fi. Featuring innovative design and function, the hotel will have 1,504 exceptionally appointed Chambers, Grand Chamber Suites and Penthouse Suites which will include the Virgin Hotels patented bed and in-room technology. Re-conceptualized and revitalized, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas will feature 60,000 square feet of fully-renovated casino space, more than five acres of luxe upgraded outdoor space and pools, new world-class restaurants, lounges and bars.

Opening in summer 2021, Resorts World Las Vegas is the first resort to be built on the Las Vegas Strip in more than a decade. The $4.3 billion luxury integrated resort is poised to redefine the hospitality standard in Las Vegas with advanced technology, exciting new experiences and world-class guest service. In partnership with Hilton, Resorts World Las Vegas will offer 3,500 luxury guestrooms and suites from three premium Hilton brands, including Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts, and the ultra-luxe Crockfords Las Vegas – one of the first LXR Hotels & Resorts locations in the U.S. Emphasis on luxury can be found throughout the property, including a next-generation casino; world-class food and beverage options; The Theatre, a 5,000-capacity, state-of-the-art venue in partnership with AEG Presents; distinctive nightlife venues; a 5.5-acre pool complex with the city’s only infinity edge pool overlooking the Strip; an extensive retail collection and more.

Discover for yourself why Las Vegas is the only place to be at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and nearly 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company to transport convention attendees throughout the 200-acre LVCC campus in all-electric Teslas free of charge. It also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Kissed 2020 Goodbye Like Only Vegas Could

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 12:18:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – Vegas brought the phrase “out with the old, in with the new” to life, in a cathartic implosion of a giant 2020 sign that read “Super Epic Monumental Kiss 2020 Goodbye Blowout” right before midnight. It was the destination’s long-awaited livestreamed virtual New Year’s Eve celebration which included entertainment from Tao Group’s DJ Vice as well as fireworks.

In true Vegas style, the celebration of the new year continued with music and the reveal of a massive LED lit 2021 sign with the message “What Happens in 2021, Happens in Vegas” erupting with confetti, streamers and fireworks blasting more than 200 feet in the air.

“Vegas is known as the ultimate New Year’s destination and we were thrilled to usher in 2021 with our friends from around the world,” said Steve Hill, president/CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “Although it was a virtual celebration, our desire to create a distinctive ‘Only Vegas’ moment, complete with fireworks and a resident DJ, conveys our enthusiasm for the year ahead. We look forward to welcoming visitors and encouraging them to create their own ‘Only Vegas’ moments in the new year.”

Living up to the theme of the new year Las Vegas enthusiasts can enter a “Kiss Off 2020 Sweepstakes” on www.VisitLasVegas.com for a chance to win one of four trips to the destination in 2021, as well as share what they are most looking forward to in the new year. Entries will be accepted through January 10, 2021.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, and also with operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and more than 13 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

Las Vegas Announces DJ Vice for Kiss Off 2020 Event

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 5:19:00 PM GMT

***MEDIA ALERT***MEDIA ALERT***MEDIA ALERT***

DJ Vice to Perform, Livestream Countdown and Imploding a 2020 Sign

LAS VEGAS – Las Vegas will end 2020 with a bang via a livestream countdown to midnight with an Only Vegas virtual celebration and special live performance by longstanding Tao Group Vegas resident DJ, artist and producer, Vice.

DJ Vice will lead the virtual festivities and perform his genre-bending, innovative music as the clock counts down to midnight and into the early moments of 2021.

While the destination may not be holding the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks spectacular, the excitement the city is known for will still be epic.

The Kiss Off 2020 event is not open to the public, however guests from around the world can still celebrate their favorite destination virtually.

Fans of Las Vegas can also enter the "Kiss Off 2020 Sweepstakes" for a chance to win one of four trips to the destination in 2021, along with sharing what they are most looking forward to in the new year. Prize packages will include airfare, a 3-day/2-night stay, activities, as well as culinary experiences for the winners and their guest at participating properties and attractions, including ARIA Resort & Casino, Bellagio Resort & Casino, Caesars Palace, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Dig This, Maverick Helicopters, The Mob Museum, Park MGM, Pink Jeep Tours, Sun Buggy Fun Rentals, Treasure Island, The STRAT Hotel, Casino & SkyPod, Vegas Indoor Skydiving, Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino and Wynn Las Vegas.

What: Las Vegas’ Kiss Off 2020 – Livestream New Year’s Eve Countdown and Celebration

Who: Longstanding Vegas Tao Group resident DJ, artist and producer, Vice

When: Thursday, Dec. 31, 11:30 p.m. PST

Where: Online at: VisitLasVegas.com, YouTube and Facebook

Contact:

Tracey Koblick

702-228-0222

Tracey.Koblick@rrpartners.com

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Dine Al Fresco Throughout Las Vegas

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 8:11:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – With the return of temperate fall Las Vegas weather, there’s no better place to grab a bite to eat or imbibe in beautifully crafted beverages than outdoors in the fresh air. With stunning spots throughout the destination sure to satisfy a variety of tastes, guests will find choices perfect for prime people-watching, romantic spots that offer private enclaves and relaxed décor for friendly meetups. The outdoor and patio dining options – and excitement – are endless.

The Strip

For fine dining with stellar views, Wynn and Encore Las Vegas offer more than just a meal. Sinatra offers one of the most secluded patios in Las Vegas along with some of Ole Blue Eyes’ favorite dishes including osso buco and spaghetti and clams. Request the romantic and private patio at Mizumi for an al fresco dining experience on a floating pagoda table, accessible by a private path through lush gardens. Order sushi and sashimi or dishes from the robatayaki bar or teppanyaki room while gazing at the 90-foot waterfall and the koi pond. Guests can enjoy dinner and entertainment in one location when they sit on the patio at SW Steakhouse or sister restaurant Lakeside and overlook the ethereal Lake of Dreams, which recently debuted 12 high-tech artistically diverse new acts. Request one of the cabanas on the lagoon at Costa Di Mare and savor seafood flown in daily from the coasts of Italy in the most romantic setting. Tableau serves seasonal, market-fresh dishes for breakfast, lunch, and brunch in a chic outdoor setting with calming pool views. Enjoy the freshest seasonal cuisine in an airy conservatory overlooking shimmering pools and manicured gardens at Jardin, where dishes range from health-conscious to indulgent with an emphasis on impeccably fresh produce.

MGM Resorts International has some of the most captivating outside seating spots on the Strip. Bellagio Hotel & Casino is home to three venues with unparalleled views of the Fountains of Bellagio: LAGO by Julian Serrano where guests can sit on the veranda and enjoy contemporary Italian delights; savor the market-driven menus featuring handmade pastas, wood-oven pizzas and fresh seafood at Spago by Wolfgang Puck and tuck into the best cuts of meat while watching the Fountain shows from the patio at Prime Steakhouse. For a laid-back lounge atmosphere, VICE VERSA at Vdara Hotel & Spa is just the place. Stylish yet comfortable, the outdoor space is well-suited for an intimate nosh of small bites and handcrafted cocktails. Head out to the patio at Border Grill at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino for a view of Mandalay Beach and a menu including sangria and Mexican fare. The cushy patio seating at Tom’s Urban and Nine Fine Irishmen at New York-New York Hotel & Casino invites you to settle in for prime Strip views and ideal people watching with delicious cuisine and great beverages. Start your day (or afternoon) on the patio at Primrose at Park MGM for breakfast or brunch and all-you-can-drink sparkling rosé with a lovely garden view.

The Venetian Resort and The Palazzo Resort Las Vegas boast impressive restaurant collections with Instagram-worthy outdoor patios. Award-winning Chef Thomas Keller brings his modern French cuisine to Bouchon set in a sunlit bustling bistro with al fresco dining on the patio overlooking the lush Venezia Pool Garden. Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer is home to the over-the-top CrazyShake milkshakes, with a patio offering some of the best views on the Strip including the famous outdoor canal. The Italian restaurant and lounge, Lavo, is known for its ultra-chic atmosphere, savory one-pound meatball and indulgent Italian cuisine, all of which can be enjoyed from its expansive outdoor terrace overlooking Las Vegas Boulevard. Outdoor dining is redefined at Spritz Restaurant & Bar overlooking The Venetian’s sparkling pool where guests can savor a breakfast burrito or truffle burger.

Located in the heart of The Strip, Fashion Show Las Vegas offers shoppers the opportunity to dine al fresco on The Plaza with exquisite views of the always-bustling Las Vegas Boulevard. Guests can choose from a variety of open-air options such as El Segundo Sol, RA Sushi and Davidoff Cigar Bar. From authentic Mexican dishes and bites to world-famous teppanyaki tables, guests can gather a small group of friends or family and treat themselves to a dining experience they’ll never forget.

Shop ‘til you drop then indulge in something delicious while taking in views of the Las Vegas Strip at Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino. There’s an option for everyone from Mexican cuisine at Nacho Daddy and Cabo Wabo Cantina, to authentic Korean barbecue at Chosun Hwaro, and American comfort food at PBR Rock Bar.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner is served at The LINQ Promenade’s various fresh air eateries. The two-story Chayo Mexican Kitchen + Tequila Bar offers spacious patios with views of the High Roller and a menu of burritos, fajitas, tacos and more. Favorite Bistro boasts French cuisine with American flair at this elegant venue with appealing outdoor setting. Start the morning with Cotton Candy Pancakes on the patio at Maxie’s located at the base of the High Roller Observation Wheel. Off the Strip offers guests classic bistro and bar comfort food and genuine, personalized service on the patio. Flour & Barley – Brick Oven Pizza features a large outdoor space for guests to enjoy its creative pizzas, pastas and sandwiches. In-N-Out Burger’s scenic patio located near the fountain stage is ideal for enjoying fresh burgers, hand-cut fries and its signature shakes. The two-story Virgil’s Real BBQ boasts patios on both levels offering views of the High Roller and LINQ Promenade while savoring world-famous barbecue. Yard House – with its extensive menu of contemporary American cuisine – has a two-level patio and beer garden offering panoramic views of the promenade. In the heart of the esplanade, guests can enjoy ameriCAN’s open outdoor patio with all-American snack foods and drink menu featuring cocktails and nearly 70 canned beers.

Downtown Las Vegas

Triple George Grill at the Downtown Grand is known for satisfying all cravings with timeless classics, as its menu features steaks, seafood and pastas. To elevate the ambiance, patrons can sit on the patio in front of the restaurant and enjoy wild mushroom and truffle risotto, buttermilk fried chicken, porcini rib-eye steak and much more.

Carson Kitchen, located in the repurposed John E. Carson hotel, offers two outdoor dining options on the rooftop patio and the courtyard. Diners can enjoy shareable dishes such as its famous Bacon Jam served with toasted baguettes or the Secret Sunday Chicken sandwich with spicy pickle aioli. Menu items change based on season so there’s always something new to try.

Park on Fremont features a fun, picturesque patio in the back with fresh florals and greenery, as well as an upgraded sound system and DJ booth. More outdoor seating is located at its front patio with views of the neon downtown hustle. Make sure to get an order of the famous Garbage Fries and wash it down with a signature cocktail like the Pillow Talk.

Enjoy house-made pastas at Esther’s Kitchen by Chef James Trees, on its semi-enclosed patio in the restaurant’s rear or sip a glass of its carefully curated wine on the front sidewalk. The house-made sourdough bread with “the good butter” is a staple for this Italian hot spot.

Summerlin and Henderson

Station Casinos has some of the most attractive outdoor spots in Las Vegas. Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa features a variety of al fresco dining options, ranging from casual settings like local favorites Yard House, Hearthstone and recently debuted Osteria Fiorella by celebrated chef Marc Vetri, to more upscale options such as Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill and T-Bones Chophouse. Bottiglia Cucina & Enoteca at Green Valley Ranch Resort Spa & Casino offers fresh, Tuscan-inspired dishes in an outdoor setting as bright as the flavors it’s serving up. Whether its cozying up by an outdoor firepit, taking in the beautiful view of the Red Rock pool or sitting in an airy Italian garden, there’s something for everyone.

Tivoli Village has numerous outdoor dining options to enjoy for every meal. Breakfast and brunch are served at the Italian coffee shop Leoné Café on its expansive outdoor seating area. Grab a seat on Echo & Rig Butcher & Steakhouse’s outdoor patio overlooking Tivoli Village and enjoy one of their hand-cut steaks. Award-winning El Dorado Cantina provides guests with an outdoor seating area to enjoy a specialty margarita and table-side guacamole. PKWY Tavern’s patio gives guests prime seating perfect for happy hour drinks and appetizers.

Discover why Las Vegas is the premier place for outdoor dining at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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New and Noteworthy in Las Vegas

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 8:50:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – Las Vegas has long been a favorite destination, constantly evolving with new and engaging experiences. Although things have changed a bit this year, Vegas is still the place where everything is brighter, bolder, and more exciting; where you can immerse yourself in all the glowing metropolis has to offer. From new resorts to the best cuisine, Las Vegas is always at the forefront of extraordinary experiences.

Booming Business Scene

Every aspect of Las Vegas goes above and beyond, and new resorts, stadiums, convention centers, and of course, new technology follows suit.

Circa Las Vegas, the highly anticipated adults-only, integrated gaming resort in downtown Las Vegas, is slated to open with its first five floors of amenities and state-of-the-art parking hub – Garage Mahal – on October 28. The spectacular 1.25 million-square-foot, 777-room property will stand 35 stories tall and will be the first ground-up gaming resort in historic downtown Las Vegas since 1980. The two-story casino floor will house 1,350 slot machines and 49 table games, as well as the world’s largest three-level sports book. Located on the iconic Fremont Street Experience, Circa will honor the timeless spirit of Las Vegas while leading the charge for a bold new era with game-changing offerings.

Virgin Hotels Las Vegas is set to open January 15, 2021 in the resort formally known as the Hard Rock Resort & Casino. The new resort will feature innovative design and function with 1,504 exceptionally appointed Chambers, Grand Chamber Suites and Penthouse Suites which will include the Virgin Hotels patented bed and in-room technology. Re-conceptualized and revitalized, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas will feature 60,000 square feet of fully renovated casino space, more than five acres of luxe upgraded outdoor space and pools, new world-class restaurants, lounges and bars.

Opening in summer 2021, Resorts World Las Vegas is the first resort to be built on the Las Vegas Strip in more than a decade. The $4.3 billion luxury integrated resort is poised to redefine the hospitality standard in Las Vegas with advanced technology, exciting new experiences and world-class guest service. In partnership with Hilton, Resorts World Las Vegas will offer 3,500 luxury guestrooms and suites from three premium Hilton brands, including Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts, and the ultra-luxe Crockfords Las Vegas – one of the first LXR Hotels & Resorts locations in the U.S. Emphasis on luxury can be found throughout the property, including a next-generation casino, world-class food and beverage options, The Theatre, a 5,000-capacity, state-of-the-art venue in partnership with AEG Presents, distinctive nightlife venues, a 5.5-acre pool complex with the city’s only infinity edge pool overlooking the Strip, an extensive retail collection and more.

Located adjacent to the world-famous Strip, Allegiant Stadium is now open and stands to become a global events destination, highlighted by the hometown NFL team, the Las Vegas Raiders. The technologically advanced stadium will host world-class entertainment including globally recognized sporting events such as the NFL Pro Bowl, Pac-12 Championship Game and Las Vegas Bowl, concerts, and is the future home of UNLV Football. The 65,000-seat stadium is fully enclosed, climate controlled and features retractable natural turf field, retractable doors – called the lanai – that open to spectacular views of the Strip, a translucent roof and VIP spaces on all levels.

Downtown Grand Hotel & Casino recently celebrated the opening of its new 495-room Gallery Tower, which brings the property’s total room inventory to 1,124 rooms. With the opening of Gallery Tower, Downtown Grand is now equipped with digital kiosks located inside the new porte-cochere to allow contactless check-in and check-out for guests with prior reservations. The centerpiece of the Gallery Tower is “Transmigrations,” a first of its kind, interactive, augmented reality-based art installation exclusively available to guests staying in rooms in the Virtual Pad collection.
The Cromwell recently reopned as the first adults-only resort on the Las Vegas Strip. The boutique hotel with 188 rooms including 19 suites, and gaming floor, will be open seven days a week for guests 21 and over. Guests of all ages will be welcome at GIADA, the award-winning restaurant of notable chef Giada De Laurentiis. In addtion to GIADA, Bound – the elevated lobby bar, Interlude Casino Lounge, the fast-casual eatwell, Drai’s After Hours and the WIlliam Hill Sports Book have all reopened for guests to enjoy.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas recently debuted a new venue perfect for a Las Vegas wedding. The 8,000-square-foot Stella Studio is a multifunctional space that provides a neutral canvas for any event planning needs. The venue is easily accessible from the lobby of The Palazzo tower at The Venetian Resort and offers a private entrance, natural light, a dedicated kitchen and bar, and private restrooms. The Stella Studio is the perfect location for a romantic ceremony or reception.

Construction of the 1.4 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) West Hall expansion is expected to be completed in December 2020. The new West Hall will provide 600,000 square feet of customizable trade show exhibit space increasing the total campus exhibition space to 2.5 million square feet. Overall, the destination is building toward 15 million square feet of meeting space and is home to three of North America’s 10 largest convention centers.

Another visionary success is the LVCC’s partnership with Elon Musk’s The Boring Company (TBC). As the first commercial endeavor for TBC and one more first for Las Vegas, the Convention Center Loop, an innovative and fun underground transportation system, will be free to LVCC guests and will include three passenger stations connecting the existing LVCC space with the new expansion. Trade show attendees will be transported across the 200-acre campus via all-electric Tesla vehicles in just over one minute, which would normally take 15 minutes or more to walk. When complete in January 2021, the underground transportation system will be comprised of two vehicular tunnels with an expected total length of approximately one mile each.

Initial steps to expand Elon Musk’s innovative underground tunnel system throughout Las Vegas will soon be underway. The Vegas Loop will represent a first-of-its-kind transportation solution for a tourism destination, offering convenient transportation and reduced congestion throughout the destination’s resort corridor. Vegas Loop will consist of underground tunnels stretching as far north as downtown Las Vegas, throughout the Strip corridor, and as far south as Allegiant Stadium, pending approval later this week by the Stadium Authority, the owner of the stadium. Passengers will be whisked through tunnels in all-electric Tesla vehicles.

An Elevated Dining Experience

Dining in Vegas isn’t simply a meal, it’s an experience. The last several months have seen the addition of new top-notch restaurants, trendy lounges and world-class chefs representing food from all over the globe, with more on the way.

Wynn Las Vegas made a dramatic expansion to its culinary portfolio with the opening of Elio, a contemporary Mexican restaurant in partnership with Enrique Olvera, Daniela Soto-Innes and Santiago Perez, the team behind Cosme and Alta in New York City. The menu combines regional dishes with seasonal ingredients, with a focus on small plates, appetizers and shareable entrees.

Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa recently rolled out Crimson at Sundown, an outdoor lounge featuring chill sounds, inventive cocktails, light bites and treats for a perfect open-air environment. Every Friday and Saturday evening guests can sit poolside in comfortable lounge seating or reserve a cabana for up to eight guests and enjoy the fall nights under a canopy of bistro lights. In addition to a new lounge, pop-up restaurant Osteria Fiorella by chef Marc Vetri opened as a permanent resident at Red Rock Resort this fall. The casual restaurant features antipasti and salads, pizzas made in a wood burning oven, daily hand-made pastas, meat and fish cooked to perfection in a Josper charcoal oven and of course dessert, wine and cocktails.

Din Tai Fung will open its first Las Vegas location at ARIA Resort & Casino on October 19, 2020. The esteemed Taiwanese dumpling and noodle house, with more than 170 restaurants in 13 countries, is renowned for its Xiao Long Bao – Shanghai-style soup dumplings – filled with the highest quality Kurobuta pork and broth that bursts upon the first bite.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas is adding the flavors of Greece from one of the finest Mediterranean seafood restaurants in the world, Estiatorio Milos, to its already diverse culinary line-up, in 2021. Famous for its selection of seafood imported fresh daily, Milos uses only the best ingredients to uphold the extraordinary food philosophy of chef and owner Costas Spiliadis. Complemented by an extensive list of fine wines with a focus on Greece, and a modern aesthetic, dining at Milos is as delicious as it is memorable.

Maverick Helicopters, in partnership with Lip Smacking Foodie Tours, the top-rated culinary experience purveyor known for unforgettable restaurant tours, offer the ultimate fine-dining and helicopter experience with Savory Bites & Neon Lights. Foodies who book this package will be taken on a culinary journey inside six renowned restaurants at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and Mastro’s Ocean Club inside The Shops at Crystals. The five-hour excursion begins at ARIA Resort & Casino and following the tour, guests will ride in a limo to Maverick’s terminal. Once aboard the ECO-star aircraft, attendees will enjoy a 15-minute flight with bird’s-eye views of iconic landmarks on the Strip.

Keep your appetite flying high with Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters. The new Afternoon Bites + Night Flights includes a tasty three-course lunchtime menu from Matteo’s Ristorante Italiano at The Venetian Resort. This dynamic menu brings flavors inspired by Northern Italian cuisine. This package will also include the exciting Strip Highlights Night Flight. This is just one of the exciting new experiences from Papillion.

Attractive Entertainment

The return of live entertainment hits the stage when ABSINTHE by Spiegelworld reopens at Caesars Palace on October 28. Guests can expect new cabaret-style seating inside the spiegeltent, which will allow parties of two to five to reserve tables positioned no less than six feet apart, while still feeling close to the action. Even with seating reduced to 153, viewers will still experience the hilarious show as it is meant to be. For pre-show fun, the outdoor Green Fairy Garden with its spectacular Absinthe Electric Oak will allow for more social distancing than likely any theater foyer in the world.

After seven months of sold-out virtual shows, Piff the Magic Dragon will be back for the real thing at Flamingo Las Vegas beginning October 29. Performing at the conveniently named “Piff the Magic Dragon Theatre” for the past five years, Piff will once again be accompanied by his Las Vegas Showgirl partner Jade Simone and magic dog Mr. Piffles. All three are thrilled to be coming back to the stage, this time in the larger Flamingo Showroom and will be able to accommodate an audience of 250 guests per show or less.

AREA15 invites visitors to enter curious and leave different. Now open, the world’s first experiential entertainment complex specifically built to be an immersive playground and all-in-one spectacular space is already enthralling guests. Mesmerizing zones feature engaging activations and rides, monumental art installations indoors as well as the outdoor Art Island, ground-breaking technology, funky retail boutiques, and bars and eateries, including The Beast Pop-Up, a curated outdoor eatery by chef Todd English. “Wink World: Portals to the Infinite” – an experience that enhances the concept of the infinity mirror room with a series of black-light-infused kinetic art installations – opens later this fall. One of the most-anticipated installations set to open early next year is Santa Fe-based art collective Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart.

Adrenaline Mountain is an extreme outdoor entertainment complex offering a variety of heart-pumping activities all in one place. Just 30 minutes off the Strip, guests can off-road in souped-up UTVs, shoot machine guns or archery, crush or blow up a car, throw axes, drive the world’s longest monster truck, dig with earthmovers, and even get married. The complex offers multiple event spaces from a small amphitheater to larger outdoor areas including a 20,000-square-foot plateau on the historic Yellow Pine Mine with a breathtaking view of the surrounding desert.

The newest addition to Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino is the Immotion Undersea Explorer Virtual Reality Theater. This immersive experience center features state-of-the-art, motion platform VR technology transporting guests to the ocean’s depths to get an up-close-and-personal look at incredible underwater wildlife and mysterious creatures.

The Neon Museum now offers Portrait Hour for guests looking to book time in the museum’s North Gallery amidst hundreds of vintage Las Vegas signs – such as Lady Luck and the Golden Nugget – for a personal, colorful, one-of-a-kind backdrop for their photo shoot. Guests who book Portrait Hour tickets share the space with other guests while they have a portrait photo session taken by their own photographer.

Pink Jeep Tours introduces the four-hour Eldorado Canyon Gold Mine Tour where guests step back in time to the Wild West and go underground to explore an actual gold mine. Guests will also enjoy a private collection of historic cars and Hollywood movie memorabilia. The tour includes a gorgeous photo stop at the Colorado River. A local expert tour guide entertains and educates. Hotel pick-up and drop off is included.

Museum of Dream Space, a popular multi-media art gallery, will debut its first Nevada location inside the Grand Canal Shoppes at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas this November. Frequently abbreviated as MODS, this one-of-a-kind place is the first museum to mainly exhibit multi-media art in the United States and allows customers an out-of-this-world interactive experience while also being able to capture pictures to last a lifetime.

After thrilling nearly 1,500 audiences during its inaugural run, MAGIC MIKE LIVE is headed to The Strip where it will be the entertainment centerpiece at the SAHARA Las Vegas. Construction of the all-new Magic Mike Live Theater has begun and will take over a two-story space on the resort’s second floor that will be solely dedicated to the show and its guests; using this blank canvas space to the fullest, the show will implement new features and technologies making it even bigger, sexier and more magical.

Global megastar and eight-time GRAMMY Award-winner Usher will headline The Colosseum at Caesars Palace when his Las Vegas residency opens Friday, July 16, 2021. The exclusive, only-in-Vegas spectacular will be performed in The Colosseum, an intimate 4,300-seat, world-class performance venue, allowing Usher’s fans a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see him up close and personal. The show will be packed with an impressive repertoire of smash hits spanning Usher’s 20-year career, including his early records and more recent songs, as well as new music.

Discover for yourself why Las Vegas is the only place to be at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, and also with operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and more than 12 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

Las Vegas is the Only Place to Find a Change of Pace, Seven Days a Week

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 7:03:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – In a time where weekdays and weekends blend together, Las Vegas wants visitors to know that here, every day is the weekend. Resorts have put together amazing midweek offerings including hotel deals, exclusive rates and added amenities. With several offers to choose from visitors can get some of the best prices for their midweek travel plans now and ensure that a Tuesday can be more exciting than a Saturday.

Midweek travel deals are as follows (Restrictions may apply, including blackout dates and subject to availability):

Caesars Entertainment
- Visitors looking for a midweek escape can get great travel rates at Caesars Entertainment resorts.
- For additional details on deals: https://www.caesars.com/las-vegas/hotels/deals
  - Bally’s Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $75
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in Resort King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020
      - Booking code: ST3Y
  - Flamingo Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $87
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in GO King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020
      - Booking code: ST3Y
  - Harrah’s Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $75
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in a Deluxe King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Sept. 3, 2020
      - Booking code: ST3Y
  - Nobu Hotel Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $240
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in a Deluxe King Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Sept. 3, 2020
      - Booking code: STAY3
  - Paris Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $135
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in a Burgundy King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020
      - Booking code: STAY3

MGM Resorts International
- Bellagio Resort & Casino / ARIA Resort & Casino
  - Viva Las Office
    - Visitors can receive the ultimate work from Vegas experience with various tier offerings.
    - Three-night minimum valid from Sunday – Thursday
    - Must book by Sept. 28, 2020 for stays through Sept. 30, 2020
    - For full details: https://www.mgmresorts.com/en/offers/viva-las-office.html
      - The Associate
        Guests can book either a Bellagio Resort King or an ARIA Deluxe King with early check-in of 8 a.m. and late check-out of 6 p.m., includes executive assistant to coordinate details as needed through visit, $50 food and beverage credit per night and $75 off round-trip flights with JSX
      - The Manager
        Guests can book either a Bellagio Fountain View or ARIA Deluxe Strip View with early check-in of 8 a.m. and late check-out of 6 p.m., includes an executive assistant to coordinate details as needed through visit, $50 food and beverage credit per night, $100 off round-trip flights with JSX, two VIP pool day passes and poolside massage
      - The Executive
        Guests can book either a Bellagio Salone Suite or ARIA City Corner Suite with early check-in of 8 a.m. and late check-out of 6 p.m., includes an executive assistant to coordinate details as needed throughout visit, $75 food and beverage credit per night, $125 off round-trip flights with JSX, full-day cabana rental and poolside massage
OYO Hotel & Casino Las Vegas
- Stay More, Play More
  - Receive up to 10% off accommodations of one night, 20% off accommodations for two or more nights, and 30% off for three or more nights
  - Offers includes $5 in free slot play and $10 in table games match play, buy-one-get-one free drink voucher, Hooter’s early-bird 10% off between 2-5 p.m., 10% off Splash Cantina poolside restaurant and bar, bottled water in guest room and in-room safety kit
  - Package available through Dec. 29, 2021. Must book by Dec. 31, 2020.
  - For details: https://www.oyolasvegas.com/offers/offer/#DSPROM
- California Residents Discount
  - Receive 30% off with valid California state ID. Offers includes two free frozen margaritas, $5 in free slot pay and $10 in table games match play, buy-one-get-one free drink voucher, Hooter’s early-bird 10% off between 2-5 p.m., 10% off Splash Cantina poolside restaurant and bar
  - Must book by Dec. 29, 2020 for stays between Sept. 1 – Dec. 31, 2021
  - For details: https://oyohotellasvegas.reztrip.com/classic/offers?locale=en&rate_code=30CA&_ga=2.90303770.1803388964.1595438926-846102823.1590527215
- Arizona Residents Discount
  - Receive 15% off with valid Arizona state ID. Offers includes $5 in free slot pay and $10 in table games match play, buy-one-get-one free drink voucher, Hooter’s early-bird 10% off between 2-5 p.m., 10% off Splash Cantina poolside restaurant and bar
  - Must book by March 2021 for stays between now and March 2021
  - For details: https://oyohotellasvegas.reztrip.com/classic/offers?locale=en&rate_code=ARZ&_ga=2.9625909.1803388964.1595438926-846102823.1590527215
Plaza Hotel & Casino
- Old School Fun
  - For a downtown getaway, visitors can book a stay with lowest available room rates, $25 daily food and beverage credit, $75 daily bingo match play, $10 free slot play, complimentary hotel room upgrade, early check-in and late check-out and free parking
  - Must book by Aug. 31, 2020 and stay through Dec. 29, 2020
  - For details: https://www.plazahotelcasino.com/hotel-packages/old-school-fun/
SAHARA Las Vegas
- Good Neighbor Special
  - Exclusive for Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Texas residents with valid ID
  - Visitors can receive half-off resort fees, complimentary room upgrade to the Marra Tower, cancel or change up to 24 hours prior to check-in without incurring fees, receive virtual fun book at check-in and free parking
  - Must book by Aug. 31, 2020 for travel through March 31, 2021
  - For details: https://saharalasvegas.com/promotions/good-neighbor-special/
- California to Vegas Special
  - Guests can receive waived resort fee, complimentary upgrade to the Marra Tower, late check-out of 1 p.m., free parking, virtual fun book that includes half-off cabanas and daybeds, free Starbucks coffee and more
  - Must show valid California state ID upon check-in
  - Package available through March 31, 2021
  - For details: https://saharalasvegas.com/promotions/stay-dine-experience/
Station Casinos
- Green Valley Ranch / Red Rock Resort
  - Summer Dreamin’ Package
    - Visitors can receive special rates up to 25% off with a $50 food and beverage credit per stay
    - Two-night minimum is required
    - Package available through Sept. 30, 2020
    - Must book by Sept. 30, 2020
    - Additional details available here

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
- Ditch Everyday
  - Las Vegas travelers can redefine summer with 20% off hotel rooms plus a $50 pool credit with two-night minimum stay
  - Package available through Sept. 3, 2020
  - Must book by Sept. 3, 2020
  - For details: https://www.cosmopolitanlasvegas.com/identity/offers

The STRAT Hotel, Casino & SkyPod
- Stay & Dine Package
  - Visitors can book two nights in the newly remodeled Elevate rooms with $100 resort credit valid at Top of the World restaurant, free cancellation up to 72 hours prior to check-in, free valet and self-park with rates starting at $209
  - Two-night stay from Sunday – Wednesday is required
  - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020.
  - Must book by Dec. 20, 2020.
  - Booking code: TOWSD20
  - For details here

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas
- Up to 25% off + daily grab and go breakfast for two
- Breakfast can be redeemed at Moon Palace, Chica, Go Greek Yogurt and Opaline Theatre
- Two-night minimum required for dates valid now - Sept. 30, 2020
- Must book by Sept. 11
- For details: venetian.com/offers/best-offer.html
Treasure Island – TI Hotel & Casino
- TV Ad Special
  - Deluxe room rates starting at $99, must book Sunday – Thursday
  - Waived resort fees
  - Two-for-one draft beers
  - 20% off admission to Marvel Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N.
- TI Strip Experience
  - Guests can receive up to 30% off newly-renovated rooms and suites
  - Buy-One-Get-One-Free offer includes: dinner, draft beer at Gilley’s Saloon and adult admission to Marvel Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N., and $50 full day pool cabana credit (only valid Monday – Thursday)
  - For details: https://treasureisland.com/special-offers
Wynn Resorts
- Stay and Play
  - Golf lovers can stay and play two nights, with a $50 dining credit, one round of golf at Wynn Golf Club and a personalized gift
  - Available dates now through Aug. 31, 2020
  - For details: https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/rooms-and-suites/stay-and-play
- Enjoy More Time Away
  - Guests can enjoy a complimentary third night when booking a two-night stay in a Resort or Tower Suite room at Wynn or Encore
  - Must book by Aug. 31, 2020
  - Package available through Dec. 27, 2020
  - For details: https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/rooms-and-suites/more-time-away-with-the-third-night-free

For more information on midweek travel, please visit www.visitlasvegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, and also with operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and more than 12 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

Centerplate, the Las Vegas Convention Center's Exclusive Food and Beverage Partner, Donates Food to Local Charity

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 4:03:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS - Centerplate, the Las Vegas Convention Center’s exclusive food and beverage partner, has donated approximately 9,240 pounds of prepared but unused food to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission in the wake of canceled or rescheduled shows stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Centerplate donated 500 boxed lunches, 400 sandwiches, 400 salads and 100 food platters to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission, which provides shelter and services to homeless men, women and children in Las Vegas. Other donated items included pallets of chips, yogurt parfaits, cartons of milk and more.

Centerplate manages 31 permanent retail outlets and numerous mobile retail outlets at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The Las Vegas Convention Center comprises 3.2 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space. An additional 1.4 million square feet of space is on the horizon with the West Hall expansion, currently under construction. The expansion is slated for completion in December 2020.

For more information about the Las Vegas Convention Center, visit www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

# # #

ABOUT THE LVCVA

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, as well as operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and approximately 12 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

ABOUT CENTERPLATE

Centerplate is a leader in live event hospitality, "Making It Better To Be There®" for more than 115 million guests each year at more than 200 prominent entertainment, sports and convention venues—including Hard Rock Stadium and the Miami Beach Convention Center. From hosting VIPs at the Super Bowl to super heroes at Comic Con, the company provides hospitality services to North America's premier events. A Sodexo company, Centerplate creates unique, locally-inspired menus, best-in-class guest service, and one-of-a-kind experiences backed by world-class design and insights teams. Visit the company online at Centerplate.com, connect via Twitter @centerplate, Instagram @Centerplate_ or Facebook.com/centerplate.

Las Vegas Convention Center Expansion Reaches New Milestone as Concrete Pour Begins in New Exhibit Hall

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 4:04:00 PM GMT

** To access time-lapse footage of the concrete pour and the latest pictures of the expansion without no password required, click here.**

LAS VEGAS — Construction workers on behalf of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) commenced the extensive process of pouring 600,000 square feet of concrete flooring in the main exhibit hall in the new West Hall expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The process will take between four and five months to complete and is a major step forward in the expansion construction, which is now 77 percent complete.

The Las Vegas Convention Center’s $980 million West Hall expansion will add 1.4 million square feet of space to the existing 3.2 million square foot campus. In addition to the exhibit hall, the expansion will feature a striking outdoor plaza and a grand atrium. The expansion is slated for completion in December 2020. The new facility will feature state-of-the-art design and technology.

Concrete Pour & Expansion by the Numbers

• 75 million lbs. of concrete used to fill the exhibit hall floor. This will require approximately 1,800 trips by fully loaded concrete trucks.
• The exhibit hall floor is a 10-inch reinforced concrete slab, capable of supporting the LVCVA’s largest trade show exhibits.
• The concrete pour will take four to five months to complete
• The Exhibit floor includes plumbing, electrical, and data infrastructure so exhibitors can connect without the use of on ground wiring
• 2,173,337: Hours of work crews have logged since construction began in 2018
• 1.4 million: Square feet of space the LVCC expansion will add to the existing 3.2 million square feet of space at the LVCC
• 333: Number of volleyball courts the 600,000 square-foot expansion hall could accommodate
• 328,000: Square feet of space in the new exhibit hall that will be column-free, the largest column-free space in North America

ABOUT THE LVCVA The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, and also with operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and more than 11 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

Construction Milestone Reached for MSG Sphere at the Venetian in Las Vegas

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 9:23:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- On March 12, 2020, local Las Vegas media was taken on a tour of the Madison Square Garden Company's future site of MSG Sphere at The Venetian for a hard hat tour to view the venue’s continued construction progress.

Guided by MSG SVP, Development & Construction Adam Vickers, and VP, Construction Nick Tomasino, media was taken on a walking tour to view the venue’s recent construction milestones, which includes reaching the spherical venue’s equator – the widest section of the concrete superstructure, as well as a first look at key interior locations, including the venue bowl and stage.

The MSG Sphere Las Vegas will be a sphere-shaped music and entertainment arena near the Las Vegas Strip. The 17,500-seat auditorium is scheduled to open in 2021.

CONEXPO-CON/AGG Builds Excitement and Innovation in Las Vegas

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 10:10:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS- Las Vegas is proud to welcome North America’s largest construction trade show, CONEXPO-CON/AGG, to the destination once again March 10-14, 2020.

Held every three years, CONEXPO-CON/AGG is the must-attend event for construction industry professionals. The show features the latest equipment, products, services and technologies for the construction industry, as well as industry-leading education. CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2020 is expected to attract approximately 129,000 attendees with an estimated $208.9 million impact in Southern Nevada. Approximately 2,300 companies are anticipated to participate in this year's show.

When CONEXPO-CON/AGG last visited the destination in 2017, the show snagged the No. 1 spot on Trade Show News Network’s top trade show list, spanning more than 2.67 million net square feet.

Soundbites available with this story:

Charlie Cunningham, Senior Director of Sales, Vacuworx (Tulsa, Oklahoma)

Chris Frost, Group Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Astec Industries (Chattanooga, Tennessee)

Roger Lewno, Product Specialist, CASE IH (Racine, Wisconsin)

Tony Chirico, National Sales Manager, Gorman-Rupp Pumps (Mansfield, Ohio)

Joey Logano Wins NASCAR's Pennzoil 400 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 7:29:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- Las Vegas Motor Speedway’s spring 2020 NASCAR Weekend began with the Strat 200 NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series race on Friday, Feb. 21, and continued with the Strat qualifying for the NASCAR Cup Series and the NASCAR Xfinity Series Boyd Gaming 300 on Saturday, Feb. 22, and finished with the Pennzoil 400 presented by Jiffy Lube NASCAR Cup Series race on Sunday, Feb. 23.

In the Pennzoil 400, Joey Logano defended last year’s victory after a restart on Lap 266 of 267 and led runner-up Matt DiBenedetto to the finish to win for the second time at Las Vegas. for more information, log on to https://www.nascar.com

Las Vegas Convention Center Celebrates Major Milestone in Elon Musk’s Innovative Underground Transportation System; Excavation of First Tunnel Complete

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 4:28:00 PM GMT

^{**Click here to access the video of the tunnel breakthrough and photos chronicling the project’s development with no password required**}

LAS VEGAS – The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) today announced that excavation is complete in the first of two vehicular tunnels that will comprise TBC - The Boring Company d/b/a Vegas Loop underground transportation system located beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center campus. After tunneling forty feet underground for nearly a mile over the past three months, the boring machine hours ago broke through the concrete wall located near the 1.4 million square foot West Hall convention center expansion, currently under construction, signaling the official completion of excavation for the first of two one-way tunnels.

The Convention Center Loop was designed to serve as an innovative, fun and quick transportation solution to move thousands of convention attendees throughout the more than 200-acre campus with the potential for expansion in the near future to ease congestion throughout the Las Vegas resort corridor.

Next, the machine will be disassembled, transported via trucks and lowered back into the launch pit near the Convention Center’s South Hall where it will begin boring a parallel path adjacent to the first tunnel. The first commercial endeavor for the new tunneling company is designed to transport up to 4,400 convention attendees per hour and is scheduled to debut to the public in January 2021.

“This marks an important milestone in the future of transportation,” said Steve Hill, LVCVA CEO and president. “Las Vegas is proud to lead the way as the first and only destination to offer an underground transportation solution for moving visitors throughout our convention center.”

The $52.5 million underground transportation system will include three passenger stations connecting the existing 3.2 million square-foot of convention space with the convention center’s new West Hall, part of a $1.52 billion expansion and renovation. The system will allow convention attendees to be whisked across the sprawling campus in just over one minute, free of charge, in all-electric Tesla vehicles.

ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, as well as operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and approximately 12 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. Download the virtual reality app, Vegas VR, to experience Las Vegas from your iPhone or Android by visiting http://www.vrtv.vegas/. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

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2020 World of Concrete Show in Las Vegas

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 7:51:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- World of Concrete is the industry’s only annual international event dedicated to the commercial concrete and masonry construction industries taking place at the Las Vegas Convention Center, February 4 - 7, 2020.

Drawing record numbers year after year, the 2020 World of Concrete, sometimes referred to as the Concrete Convention Las Vegas features a week of exciting new products, cutting-edge technologies, the latest equipment, exciting spectator events and competitions, educational sessions including luncheons, interactive workshops and industry hands-on training. Habitual attendees include commercial contractors, concrete contractors, ready mix producers, rental center managers, and concrete pumpers.

The show has an estimated attendance of 60,000 with a total estimated economic impact of $97.1million.

Nevada Governor Proclaims "Only Vegas Day" in Las Vegas to Celebrate New Ad Campaign

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 8:31:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- To celebrate Las Vegas’ new slogan, Governor Steve Sisolak proclaimed Thursday, January 30, 2019, as "Only Vegas Day." The new slogan, “What Happens Here, Only Happens Here,” was launched with a new ad during this past Sunday night’s 62^ndGRAMMY™ Awards. Attending the event at the Fremont Street Experience were Governor Sisolak; Brian Yost, COO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority; Derek Stevens, owner of The D Las Vegas and several other properties on Fremont Street; and Patrick Hughes, president and CEO of the Fremont Street Experience.

Only Vegas Day is part of a larger kick-off Thursday for the new ad and slogan, including a variation of the slogan to be displayed on various resort marquees at 6 p.m. PST; the new commercial will air on Fremont Street Experience’s Viva Vision canopy; and the lights on the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, the Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas and The High Roller will be changed in reflection of the new campaign. In addition, Instagram-worthy photo opportunities will be located across the destination, including Fremont Street Experience, McCarran International Airport – Terminal 1, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Fountains of Bellagio, The LINQ Promenade, Grand Canal Shoppes at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas and Wynn Las Vegas.

Las Vegas Celebrates Chinese New Year

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 11:34:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS – Las Vegas commemorates the Chinese New Year with an array of decadent culinary offerings, breathtaking décor and lively entertainment for visitors throughout January and February. Remembering the significance of the sacred Spring Festival, Las Vegas will extend good fortune and prosperity to all who revel in the destination’s cultural festivities.

Décor

Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens celebrates the Year of the Rat with a captivating Lunar New Year display open from Saturday, Jan. 11 through Saturday, March 7. Designed to bring prosperity and good fortune to the 20,000 visitors who visit daily, the gardens radiate hues of gold and red with picture-perfect botanical creations made from flowers, seeds, silks and plants. The result of collaborative efforts between designer Ed Libby, Bellagio’s horticulture team and Feng Shui Master George Yau, the intricate creation is layered with meaningful features honoring The Year of the Rat. The centerpiece of the Conservatory is a gilded gold rat that sits on gold ingot bowls – a symbol of wealth and prosperity – atop a golden staircase. Four golden rats are seen frolicking up the staircase bringing more ingot bowls. Two grand 20-foot gold coin trees stand tall on both sides of the garden symbolizing prosperity.

To commemorate the Year of the Rat, The Venetian and The Palazzo’s horticulture team consulted a feng shui master to transform the waterfall atrium with an installation of a colossal 2,000-pound golden rodent sculpture, on display beginning Wednesday, Jan. 15. The featured sculpture stands 18 feet tall and will be surrounded by green gardens brightly blooming with red and orange bromeliads, red calandiva, golden yellow chrysanthemums and red and yellow orchids, shipped from around the country, including citrus and lucky bamboo from Florida. Additionally, nine smaller versions of the rat will be placed throughout the waterfall atrium and the resorts’ lobbies.

Entertainment

The Venetian and The Palazzo will offer a variety of entertainment, events and special offers in honor of Lunar New Year, including a Chinese fan dance at noon on Saturday, Jan. 25, on the second level of the Grand Canal Shoppes, followed by the annual eye-dotting ceremony and ceremonial lion dance at 3 p.m. in The Venetian porte cochère. Later that night, Grand Canal Shoppes will host the official Las Vegas opening ceremonies and ribbon cutting for the city’s ninth annual CNY in the Desert™ celebration. The event will be held on the second-level North Canal Turnaround at 6 p.m. followed by a traditional lion blessing and dance, cultural performances the Shirley Chen Dance Troupe, and a special appearance by the Shoppes’ Love Vespa couple Vespacho and Vespalina. From Thursday, Jan. 23 – Sunday, Jan. 26, visitors can also enjoy four days of live entertainment including the all-new Wishing Tree installation located in the heart of the Shoppes in the Palazzo tower, where more than 200 red envelopes filled with special prizes, from gift cards to chocolate gold coins and more, will be given out at 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. daily except Thursday and Friday, which will be at 5 p.m. Additional activities include a lion dance at The Sky Garden at 6 p.m. nightly; a Chinese drummer parade at 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday featuring 10 live drummers, a spectacular lion dance performance, and a Chinese fan dance; and Joey Yung in concert at The Palazzo Ballroom, Saturday, Jan. 25, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 26, at 6 p.m. Grand Canal Shoppes will offer a special gift with purchase, Friday, Jan. 17 through Saturday, Feb. 1 from noon to 6 p.m. Guests who spend $350 at stores and restaurants may receive a $50 dining gift card at select restaurants by visiting the pop-up Grand Canal Shoppes concierge location.

In celebration of the Lunar New Year, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas will host a dragon and lion dance, beginning at the Las Vegas Boulevard entrance on the first floor of the Boulevard Tower Tuesday, Jan. 28 at 2 p.m.

ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, and also with operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and more than 11 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

The International Builders Show in Las Vegas Featuring In-Demand Products and Services for Home Builders

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 5:07:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- The International Builders Show (IBS), produced by the National Association of Home Builders, is the housing industry’s largest annual trade show and exhibition. It brings together virtually every aspect of the building industry and housing professionals from across the US and abroad. It is the perfect showcase for suppliers and manufacturers looking to market and sell to builders, architects, developers, dealers, and distributors and features the most cutting-edge designs, technologies, products and services in the industry. The exhibition also includes various educational seminars.

The IBS International Builders Show takes place January 21-23, 2019, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The 2020 Builders' Show brings together more than 1,400 top manufacturers and suppliers from around the globe in 600,000 net square feet of exhibit space, showcasing the latest and most in-demand products and services.

Las Vegas Stratosphere Officially Becomes The STRAT Hotel, Casino & SkyPod

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 2:53:00 AM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- The STRAT Hotel, Casino & SkyPod celebrated the official transition to the iconic property’s new identity on Wednesday, January 22, 2019, with a party hosted by rock icon, Sammy Hagar. Hagar, along with rock legend, Rick Springfield, gave a toast to the reinvention of the property and a new spirits partnership with Golden Entertainment, inc., owner of The STRAT, which included the introduction of signature cocktails made with his premium spirits, Santo Tequila Blanco, Santo Mezquila and Sammy’s Beach Bar Rum. Hagar poured his signature spirits for the public inside The STRAT’s REMIX Lounge.

The ceremonial ribbon cutting included Golden Entertainment, Inc. Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Operator Steve Arcana, Vice President and General Manager of The STRAT Stephen Thayer, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak, City of Las Vegas Councilwoman Olivia Diaz and Hagar.

About The STRAT: The STRAT Hotel, Casino & SkyPod, formerly the Stratosphere, Casino, Hotel & Tower, has introduced a full reinvention of the iconic property since Golden Entertainment, Inc. took ownership in late 2017. Located on the north Strip at the gateway to the Arts District at 2000 S. Las Vegas Blvd., the hotel offers 2,427 guest rooms, including the newly remodeled “Elevate” series rooms and suites, and an 80,000-square-foot casino. The SkyPod, located at the top of the iconic tower at 1,149 feet high, is comprised of Top of the World, serving award-winning cuisine in a 360 degree rotating dining room.

CES Show in Las Vegas Features Student Business Pitch Competition

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 10:36:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), in partnership with education technology company EVERFI, sponsors a digital learning program that teaches high school students the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and how to start and run a business. Students who complete the course may choose to pursue a business concept in earnest and enter it into the annual Future Innovators Pitch Competition. The final three groups pitched their concept at CES 2020. The program was established in 2015 to help address the nation’s skills gap and drive students to explore careers in entrepreneurship and STEM Education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Judges included Noa Davidson, Emerging Tech, Innovation & Startup Partnerships, AWS; and Kim Folsom, Co-Founder, Founders First Capital Partners; and Tiffany Moore, senior vice president of political and industry affairs for the Consumer Technology Association.

The winners of the competition were Gabrielle Floratos of Palo Verde High School in Las Vegas; James Wang of West Career Technical Academy in Las Vegas; and Josh Ferguson of Spring Valley High School in Las Vegas. They won the competition with their app design that helps organize and manage notifications on your smart phone based on the user's schedule.

CES 2020 in Las Vegas Features World Changing Innovation

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 2:11:00 AM GMT

LAS VEGAS - CES® 2020 opens January 7, 2019, unveiling the next generation of innovation that will redefine industries, create jobs and solve many of society's challenges. With more than 4,400 exhibiting companies, including 1,200 startups, CES 2020 features the latest transformative technologies, including 5G, artificial intelligence, vehicle technology, digital health and more. CES 2020 runs through Friday, January 10, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

CES 2020 will serve as a proving ground for technological innovation and breakthroughs, as it has for more than 50 years. Owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the event attracts some of the world’s top talents in consumer technologies. An estimated 175,000 attendees from more than 160 countries will descend upon Las Vegas to experience the electrifying atmosphere inside the Las Vegas Convention Center as the latest and greatest in the tech world is unveiled. This year’s event will generate an estimated $283.3 million in economic impact for the destination.

CES 2020 will welcome more than 4,500 exhibiting companies taking part in over 250 conference sessions spanning multiple venues in the destination. VCR. CD. HDTV. Satellite Radio. 3D Printer. What do they have in common? They were all first announced at past CES shows.

America's Party 2020 in Las Vegas

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 9:38:00 AM GMT

LAS VEGAS -- It's New Year's Eve and Las Vegas is the place to be to welcome the year 2020. America’s Party encompassed both the live entertainment at the Fremont Street Experience and the much-anticipated fireworks show on the Las Vegas Strip. America’s Party, co-produced by Fireworks by Grucci, launched from seven rooftop locations. Those locations include (from the south, heading north):

MGM Grand
Aria
Planet Hollywood
Caesars Palace
Treasure Island (TI)
The Venetian
Stratosphere

Meanwhile, at the Fremont Street Experience in Downtown Las Vegas, party goers were introduced to the new and improved Viva Vision on the overhead canopy. Updated to over 16-million pixels, the big screen is now seven-times brighter and featured a New Year's Eve video montage. Hosting the event was Mayor Carolyn G. Goodman and her husband, former Las Vegas Mayor and current Chair of the Las Vegas Host Committee, Oscar B. Goodman.

Las Vegas Welcomes Avianca Inaugural Flight

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 12:46:00 AM GMT

Love and Be Loved in Las Vegas This Valentine’s Day

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 8:37:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS –Love is in the air throughout Las Vegas this Valentine’s Day, with specials offered at romantic restaurants, blissful spas, exciting attractions, and unique wedding chapels.

Exciting Attractions to Experience Together

Unique experiences await couples at Rail Explorers Las Vegas. The outdoor-adventure attraction featuring electric motor-powered rail bikes offers photo opportunities and special amenities on its Valentine’s Day tours Friday, Feb. 11 through Monday, Feb. 14.
Evolution Experiences offers Valentine’s kayaking tours complete with photo opportunities, gourmet chocolates and more from Saturday, Feb. 12 to Sunday, Feb. 13. Visitors can soak in natural hot spring pools and a sauna cave during its Kayak Hoover Dam & Hot Springs Hike Tour, or relax on a beach only accessible by watercraft during Kayak Emerald Cave Tour. Each tour is led by an expert guide and includes catered lunch, bottled water, juice and snacks.
The Rose Rooftop Igloos at Resorts World Las Vegas will be adorned with romantic décor for Valentine’s Day. Presented by Zouk Group and Veuve Cliquot, the unique igloos on the hotel’s Rose Rooftop offers an intimate space to eat, drink, and hang out, with sweeping views of the Strip.
5 Star Helicopters will offer a Valentine’s Day Las Vegas Helicopter Night Strip Package, complete with chocolate-covered strawberries, champagne and a red rose.
FlyOver, a virtual flight ride attraction, offers a Valentine’s Day package for couples during the lovers’ holiday. Complete with two rides and two drinks at The Lost Cactus, this unique experience is perfect for thrill-seekers.
Nothing says love like a ride down the Grand Canal in an authentic gondola with your sweetie being serenaded by a gondolier at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas. Enjoy romantic Italian love songs while floating beneath bridges and balconies, beside restaurants, under the blue sky in the Grand Canal Shoppes.
From the creators of spectacularly bizarre shows Absinthe and OPIUM, Superfrico at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas serves classic Italian dishes with a side of entertainment. Throughout the Valentine’s Day service, visitors will experience a few surprise moments throughout the evening that are sure to make it a night to remember.
Love is in the air at The High Roller at The LINQ Promenade, the tallest observation wheel in North America, where valentines can spend 30 minutes of intimate bliss while taking in sweeping views of the Las Vegas Strip.
Paris is known for being a city of love and romance, which is why a trip up the escalator at the Eiffel Tower Experience at Paris Las Vegas is a perfect spot for couples to celebrate their love.

Say “I Do” in Spectacular Las Vegas Fashion

Flamingo Las Vegas celebrates Clark County’s Wedding Month with a Viva Love Stories Package, offering couples several amenities and services to celebrate their love including a personal wedding coordinator, private bridal waiting area, wedding ceremony, floral arrangements such as a 12-rose bridal bouquet and groom’s boutonniere, 30 minutes with a professional photographer, ceremony video, music playlist, sand ceremony, marriage certificate holder and a bottle of Champagne with chapel toasting glasses.
Love is quite literally in the air in Las Vegas this Valentine’s Day, as Maverick Helicopters is offering various wedding packages for couples this year. Brides and grooms can say “I do” over the Las Vegas Strip with its Neon Lights and Vegas Twilight wedding packages or opt for a picturesque desert wedding, with its Painted Dreams Valley of Fire and Painted Dreams Sunset wedding packages.
Caesars Palace offers a Forever Happens Here Package for Wedding Month, which comes complete with three nights in a premium room at the resort, VIP hotel registration, one our of limousine service to the Marriage License Bureau, hair and makeup services, medium rose bouquet and boutonniere, Champagne toast, professional pianist, minister or officiant, professional photography and videography and a Caesars wedding registry.
Celebrating 2022 nuptials, The Little Vegas Chapel offers engaged couples its Two-gether Forever Wedding Package. Available throughout February, the special is complete with a traditional ceremony, wedding music, a red and pink bouquet and boutonniere, professional photography, a unity candle ceremony, and an officiated license or ceremony certificate. Brides and grooms can also invite up to six guests, and a witness can also be provided at the chapel in historic Downtown Las Vegas.
For soon-to-be brides and grooms, Paris Las Vegas presents the Eiffel Tower Proposal Package. The epic surprise, which can take place at the resort with its Arc de Triomphe or Eiffel Tower in the background, is complete with 30 minutes of professional photography, a half-dozen of roses, a bottle of Champagne and a half-dozen of macarons.

Spa Specials to Rest, Relax and Re-engage the Senses

Qua Baths & Spa at Caesars Palace celebrates Valentine’s Day with specials available throughout February. Visitors can choose from the Sweet Strawberry Crush Massage or the Hugs & Kisses Facial.
Waldorf Astoria Las Vegas celebrates Valentine’s Day with a Romance Weekend packed with fabulous specials at its beautiful and tranquil spa. Partners can follow their bliss together with Couples “Love Duo” or “Heart of Romance” treatments or opt for a Fire and Ice Valentine’s Facial or a Himalayan Sphere Stone Massage.
The Spa at The LINQ Hotel + Experience features side-by-side massage and facial treatments in a couple’s suite, with massages including Champagne and chocoloate.
Sahra Spa, Salon & Hammam at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas offers couples an intimate spa experience this Valentine’s Day. Visitors can reinvigorate and rejuvenate together in a private, luxury spa suite, while choosing from a menu of treatments such as the Deep Aromatherapy Massage, Balance & Harmony Massage or Decadent Youth Glow Facial for two.
The Spa at Harrah’s Las Vegas offers couples massages for valentines to rejuvenate together, complete with Champagne and chocolate to take home. Any massage or facial can be booked as side-by-side treatments.
Amina Spa at SAHARA Las Vegas will offer Valentine’s packages complete with complimentary mimosas and chocolate-covered strawberries from Saturday, Feb. 12 to Monday, Feb. 14. Couples can choose from the Better Together package, featuring a choice of massage or facial, or the Sweet Escape package, featuring a Hydrating Chocolate Facial and Almond Deluxe Pedicure.

Delectable Dining to Elevate Your Valentine’s Day Date Night

Gifts to Shower Your Partner with Love and Adoration

Pepper, a luxury sexual wellness brand at Resorts World Las Vegas, inspires connection through the alchemy of the five senses. To celebrate Valentine’s Day, the boutique is offering a free gift with purchase throughout February.
If “All You Need Is Love,” couples can enjoy a performance of The Beatles LOVE by Cirque du Soleil at The Mirage Hotel & Casino. To celebrate the romantic holiday, the production show will offer a limited time special on tickets.
FANTASY at Luxor Hotel & Casino will give away a gift basket, complete with its 2022: The Gold Standard calendar, a poster, a commemorative poker chip, and a gift certificate for Luxor, to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Learn more about Valentine’s Day in Las Vegas and plan a romantic and memorable trip for two at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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The Year of the Tiger Roars Through Las Vegas

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 5:05:00 PM GMT

Lion Dances

Resorts throughout the destination will present vibrant lion dances, inviting visitors to be a part of the festive experience. The schedule is as follows:

ARIA Resort & Casino

Friday, Feb. 4 at 6 p.m.

Bally’s Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 2 p.m.

Bellagio Resort & Casino

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 3 p.m.

Caesars Palace

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 3 p.m.

The Cromwell

Thursday, Feb. 3 at noon

Gold Coast Hotel & Casino

Wednesday, Feb. 2 at 6 p.m. & 8 p.m.

Harrah’s Las Vegas

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 3 p.m.

Flamingo Las Vegas

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 1 p.m.

The LINQ Hotel + Experience

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 2 p.m.

MGM Grand Hotel & Casino

Sunday, Feb. 6 at 3 p.m.

Palace Station Hotel & Casino

Tuesday, Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.

Paris Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 1 p.m.

Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino

Saturday, Feb. 5 at noon

Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 8 p.m.

Resorts World Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino

Thursday, Feb. 3 at 5 p.m.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas

Tuesday, Feb. 1 at 3 p.m.

Mohegan Sun Casino at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

Wynn Las Vegas

Saturday, Feb. 5 at 5 p.m.

Décor and Experiences

Caesars Palace celebrates the Year of the Tiger with elaborate decorations in its lobby and common areas, including hanging lanterns, banners, firecrackers, and floral arrangements.

Harrah’s Las Vegas will offer Lunar New Year culinary specials at its Fulton Street Hall Noodle Bar.

8 Noodle Bar at Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa
Boathouse at Palace Station Hotel & Casino
Chin Chin Café and Sushi Bar at New York-New York Hotel & Casino
Din Tai Fung at ARIA Resort & Casino
Hong Kong Café at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas
Jade Asian Kitchen & Noodles at Rampart Casino
MR CHOW at Caesars Palace
Noodle Asia at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas
Red 8 at Wynn Las Vegas
Red Lotus Asian Kitchen at Tropicana Las Vegas
Red Plate at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
Wazuzu at Wynn Las Vegas

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Spreads Holiday Cheer with Festive Décor and Exciting Events

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 6:46:00 PM GMT

FANTASY, the award-winning female topless revue at Luxor Hotel and Casino, will play an additional two shows for holiday audiences on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Wynn Las Vegas decks the halls with dozens of Christmas trees and festive wreaths, while offering delightful holiday-inspired cocktails and tea/coffee beverages at venues throughout the resort.

For more information on Las Vegas’ holiday magic, visit www.visitlasvegas.com

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

LAS VEGAS CELEBRATES THE RETURN OF OVERSEAS VISITATION WITH A MARQUEE WELCOME AND A ROBUST CALENDAR OF UPCOMING EVENTS

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 7:39:00 PM GMT

Domestic and international travelers alike have a lot to look forward to in Las Vegas in the coming months across conventions, entertainment, sports, and holidays:

Celebrating Latin music’s best and brightest stars, the Latin GRAMMY Awards return to the MGM Grand Garden Arena at MGM Grand Hotel & Casino Nov. 18.

Residencies from superstar recording artists debut and continue throughout the remainder of 2021, including Sting and Usher at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace Las Vegas; Shania Twain at Zappos Theater inside Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas; Earth Wind & Fire at The Venetian Theatre at The Venetian Resort; Carlos Santana and David Lee Roth at House of Blues Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay; Wayne Newton at Bugsy’s Cabaret at Flamingo Las Vegas; Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry at The Theatre at Resorts World Las Vegas; Bryan Adams at the Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas and Journey at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.

Several conventions with international appeal—including IMEX America (Nov. 9-11) and the DEMA Show (Nov. 16-19)—are scheduled through the remainder of 2021, leading up to the return of highly-anticipated CES (Jan. 5-8) in early 2022.

The Greatest Arena on Earth will welcome The Mint 400 (Nov. 30-Dec. 5), Wrangler National Finals Rodeo (Dec. 2-11), Pac-12 Football Championship Game (Dec. 3), and the Las Vegas Bowl (Dec. 30), as well as several Las Vegas Raiders and Vegas Golden Knights games.

The Entertainment Capital of the World will ring in the New Year in a way only Vegas can with performances by Bruno Mars, Usher, Katy Perry, The Go-Go's, David Lee Roth, Lizzo, Maroon 5, and Kristin Chenoweth, as well as DJ sets by Black Coffee, The Chainsmokers, Fisher, Lil Jon, Steve Aoki and Zedd.

Four carriers will resume overseas service to Las Vegas in 2021:

Virgin Atlantic Airways nonstop from London Heathrow began Nov. 8
British Airways nonstop from London Heathrow beginning Nov. 15
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines nonstop from Amsterdam beginning Dec. 7
Copa Airlines nonstop from Panama City beginning Dec. 7

Regular nonstop service from Mexico resumed in July 2020. Current routes include:

AeroMexico from Mexico City
JetBlue from Cancún
Viva Aerobus from Monterrey and Mexico City
Volaris from Guadalajara and Mexico City

Regular nonstop service from Canada resumed earlier this year. Current routes include:

Air Canada from Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary
Flair Airlines from Toronto
Swoop from Edmonton
WestJet from Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, and Vancouver

# # #

ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Welcomes Overseas Flights Back to the Sports and Entertainment Capital of the World

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 3:22:00 AM GMT

Four carriers will resume overseas service to Las Vegas in 2021:

Virgin Atlantic Airways nonstop from London Heathrow beginning Nov. 8
British Airways nonstop from London Heathrow beginning Nov. 15
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines nonstop from Amsterdam beginning Dec. 7
Copa Airlines nonstop from Panama City beginning Dec. 7

Regular nonstop service from Mexico resumed in July 2020. Current routes include:

AeroMexico from Mexico City
JetBlue from Cancun
Viva Aerobus from Monterrey and Mexico City
Volaris from Guadalajara and Mexico City

Regular nonstop service from Canada resumed earlier this year. Current routes include:

Air Canada from Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary
Flair Airlines from Toronto
Swoop from Edmonton
WestJet from Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver

# # #

ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com,www.visitlasvegas.com or vegasmeansbusiness.com.

ABOUT CLARK COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF AVIATION

Las Vegas Celebrated Independence Day with Fireworks and the Return of Live Entertainment

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 8:39:00 AM GMT

Local stations KOMP-FM 92.3 and KXPT-FM 97.1 broadcast the soundtrack live.

Live entertainment over the weekend included performances from Dave Chappelle, Illenium, Bruno Mars, Miley Cyrus, Mystère and “O” by Cirque du Soleil and many others.

For more information on live events in Las Vegas, visit www.visitlasvegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Launches New Ad Campaign, "Vegas You," Inviting Visitors to Live Life to the Fullest

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 4:15:00 PM GMT

A second ad will be released in late May.

For more information about Las Vegas, visit www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company and also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Splashes into Warmer Weather with Much-Needed Pool Season

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 8:29:00 PM GMT

SERENE DAYCLUB-LIKE EXPERIENCES

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’ Pool District splashes into the season with three distinct areas for guests to revel in the sun.

- The Boulevard Pool is open daily and sets the stage for an unforgettable poolside experience with an upbeat atmosphere and panoramic views of the Las Vegas Strip. The pool’s dive-in movies return as well with a roster of classics and blockbusters announced soon.
- The Chelsea Pool will offer poolside lounging Friday through Sunday. On Monday, March 22, operations will move to seven days per week. Designed with relaxation in mind, guests can unwind at the stylish oasis, indulging in refreshing specialty cocktails and light bites.
- The Pool Marquee will amp up the pool experience each weekend with expanded seating areas, a live DJ, specialty cocktails and bottle and food service. The perfect daytime escape, Pool Marquee is a truly experiential evolution of music, food and sunshine.

MORE FUN IN THE SUN

For more information about Las Vegas’ pool scene or to plan your next trip, please visit www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company to transport convention attendees throughout the 200-acre LVCC campus in all-electric Teslas free of charge. It also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

"Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" Sign Goes Green for St. Patrick's Day

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 4:32:00 PM GMT

With several festivities throughout the destination, Irish eyes are always smiling in Vegas.

Of course, St. Patrick’s Day isn’t complete without the celebratory green beer, Guinness, cocktails made with Jameson Whiskey and Baileys Irish Cream and other assorted green-hued concoctions.

At Gold Spike merrymakers are invited to partake in an afternoon filled with Irish-inspired drink specials and tunes by DJ TeenWolf.

The Mob Museum is featuring Irish-themed cocktails in its speakeasy, The Underground.

Go full bore with the insanely delicious Lucky Leprechaun Insane Milkshake at Sugar Factory at Fashion Show Las Vegas.

Treasure Island Las Vegas is serving the Irish Car Bomb that can be found at all casino bars, Golden Circle Sportsbook and Bar and Gilley’s Saloon, Dance Hall & Bar-B-Que.

Royal Britannia Gastropub, SushiSamba, BRERA Osteria, Smith & Wollensky and Trustworthy Brewing Co. inside the Grand Canal Shoppes have a litany of beverages to imbibe in while Irish for the day.

Get your fill of traditional St. Patrick’s Day cuisine such as corned beef and cabbage, shepherd’s pie and other festive culinary offerings at locations throughout the destination, including:

Salt & Ivy and Moneyline Pizza & Bar at ARIA Resort & Casino
Blondies Sports Bar & Grill and Pampas Las Vegas inside Miracle Mile Shops
STK Steakhouse at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
Oyster Bar & Grill and Fulton Street Food Hall at Harrah’s Las Vegas
Guy Fieri’s Vegas Kitchen + Bar at The LINQ Hotel + Experience
Diablo’s Cantina at Luxor Hotel & Casino
Ri Ra inside Mandalay Place
Avenue Café at MGM Grand
Nine Fine Irishmen and Tom’s Urban at New York-New York Hotel & Casino
Bailiwick at The Orleans Hotel & Casino
The Brass Fork at Palace Station
Bet MGM Sportsbook and Bar at Park MGM
Lucky Penny at Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa and Green Valley Ranch Resort Spa and Casino
South Point Hotel, Casino and Spa;
PT Wings & Sports and STRAT Café at The STRAT Hotel, Casino & Skypod.

Learn more about the festivities in Las Vegas and plan an unforgettable trip at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and nearly 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company to transport convention attendees throughout the 200-acre LVCC campus in all-electric Teslas free of charge. It also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

New and Noteworthy in Las Vegas

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 5:16:00 PM GMT

Exciting Entertainment and Attractions

MGM Resorts International recently re-opened several stage shows adhering to capacity limits and appropriate distancing, including Thunder From Down Under at Excalibur Hotel & Casino, FANTASY and Carrot Top at Luxor Hotel and Casino, and Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at MGM Grand. Jabbawockeez returns to the stage with its show TIMELESS at the Grand Garden Arena at MGM Grand Thursday, March 11. The Australian Bee Gees Show – A Tribute to the Bee Gees at Excalibur will resume Monday, March 15. Terry Fator brings his new show, Terry Fator: Who's the Dummy Now? to New York-New York Hotel & Casino Thursday, March 18. David Copperfield returns Sunday, March 21 to the David Copperfield Theater inside MGM Grand.
AREA15, the world’s first experiential entertainment complex built to be an immersive playground and all-in-one spectacular space is already enthralling guests. Mesmerizing zones feature engaging activations and rides, monumental art installations, unique retail, bars and eateries are around every corner. One of the most-anticipated installations – Omega Mart – is now open. The Santa Fe-based arts and entertainment company Meow Wolf opened the one-of-a-kind supermarket store experience and portal to the otherworldly that acts as the anchor experience at AREA15. Spanning 52,000 square feet, Omega Mart is the work of hundreds of creatives on staff and more than 50 collaborating visual and musical artists from all over the world. AREA15 recently started construction on “The Grounds,” a new large-scale event space slated to open this summer.
ABSINTHE by Spiegelworld reopens at Caesars Palace on Wednesday, March 17. Guests can expect cabaret-style seating inside the spiegeltent, which will allow parties of two to six to reserve tables positioned no less than six feet apart, while still feeling close to the action. Even with reduced seating and physical distancing, viewers will still experience the hilarious show as it is meant to be. For pre-show fun, the outdoor Green Fairy Garden with its spectacular Absinthe Electric Oak will allow for more social distancing than likely any theater foyer in the world.
After thrilling nearly 1,500 audiences during its inaugural run, MAGIC MIKE LIVE opens August 27, where it will be the entertainment centerpiece at the SAHARA Las Vegas. The cutting-edge, two-story space on the resort’s second floor is solely dedicated to the show and its guests; using this space to the fullest, the show’s new venue will be nearly 50% larger than its last and will implement new features and technologies making it even bigger, sexier and more magical.

Live is back! Life is Beautiful – the three-day celebration that unifies the concepts of art, music, good, comedy and ideas – returns to Downtown Las Vegas September 17-19. After a year pause, the festival will once again taker over 18 city blocks with unparalleled talent, world-renowned culinary offerings, experiential artists and more. The 2021 festival promises to deliver more of the chart-topping acts – including pop sensation Billie Eilish, Green Day, Tame Impala, A$AP Rocky, Ludacris and many more – culinary experiences, and public art that the festival is famous for.

Delightful Culinary Experiences

Spring is in the air and the drinks are flowing at Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa at Crimson in Bloom, a garden-inspired indoor and outdoor terrace lounge full of beautiful hand-crafted cocktails, extravagant floral décor and an energetic atmosphere with live DJ-spun music. Every Friday through Sunday night through Sunday, May 16, guests can sit indoor or poolside in comfortable lounge seating or reserve a cabana and enjoy the spring nights under a canopy of bistro lights.
The popular Greek seafood restaurant, Estiatorio Milos will open at The Venetian Resort in March. The restaurant by chef and owner Costas Spiliadis will bring the Mediterranean-inspired seafood menu made with the finest ingredients, fish market, an extensive list of fine wines, and modern aesthetic to the resort. Milos will be open for lunch and dinner when it debuts at The Venetian’s Restaurant Row.
The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is adding Bāng Bar by Momofuku, an original David Chang concept, to the already stellar culinary line up at Block 16 Urban Food Hall this spring. The quick spot to grab freshly griddled flatbread sandwiches and rice bowls is centered in bold, worldly flavors with a focus on two delicious staples: bāng bread and spit-roasted meats.
M Resort Spa Casino – the official headquarters hotel of the Las Vegas Raiders – will welcome the highly anticipated new Raiders-themed restaurant Raiders Tavern & Grill in the coming weeks. The venue will feature more than 3,400 square feet of dining space as well as two bars, Raiders memorabilia and merchandise. The first of its kind, Raiders Tavern & Grill lends its design and atmosphere to the rich history of the Raiders and the enjoyment of watching sports. With more than 45 high-definition TVs, it will be the ultimate environment for fans year-round.
Caesars Palace announced the all-new 120-seat bar and lounge, Stadia Bar, anticipated to debut this spring. Stadia will offer a next-level sports viewing experience with lavish amenities, numerous large HD TVs, a menu overflowing with high-end and unique cocktail selections and more. Guests can casually hang out or catch the big game in style with Stadia’s rentable spaces to create an intimate viewing experience for small groups. Replacing Slice Bar, Stadia will be located adjacent to the Forum Food Court and across from Vanderpump Cocktail Garden.
Award-winning chef Bobby Flay plans to introduce a new restaurant concept, Amalfi by Bobby Flay, also at Caesars Palace. Inspired by Flay’s extensive travels to Italy and the Amalfi Coast, this will be his first Italian restaurant concept. With an anticipated late spring 2021 opening, Amalfi will transport guests to the Mediterranean with its enchanting blend of coastal ease and fresh, bright flavors.

New Resorts

Every aspect of Las Vegas goes above and beyond, and resorts are no exception. Each new resort will offer world-class amenities, culinary options, entertainment venues and cutting-edge technology.

Circa Las Vegas, the adults-only, integrated gaming resort in downtown Las Vegas opened its doors in December 2020. Located on the iconic Fremont Street Experience, the spectacular 1.25 million-square-foot, 777-room property stands 35 stories tall and is the first gaming resort in historic downtown Las Vegas built from the ground up since 1980. The resort includes the world’s largest sportsbook; Stadium Swim, a year-round pool amphitheater; two-story casino with 1,350 slot machines and 49 table games; eclectic restaurant and bar concepts; Garage Mahal, a high-tech transportation hub; an expansive local art collection and more.

Virgin Hotels Las Vegas is set to open Thursday, March 25 in the former home of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. The new resort will open with no resort fees and complimentary self-park and Wi-Fi. Featuring innovative design and function, the hotel will have 1,504 exceptionally appointed Chambers, Grand Chamber Suites and Penthouse Suites which will include the Virgin Hotels patented bed and in-room technology. Re-conceptualized and revitalized, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas will feature 60,000 square feet of fully-renovated casino space, more than five acres of luxe upgraded outdoor space and pools, new world-class restaurants, lounges and bars.

Opening in summer 2021, Resorts World Las Vegas is the first resort to be built on the Las Vegas Strip in more than a decade. The $4.3 billion luxury integrated resort is poised to redefine the hospitality standard in Las Vegas with advanced technology, exciting new experiences and world-class guest service. In partnership with Hilton, Resorts World Las Vegas will offer 3,500 luxury guestrooms and suites from three premium Hilton brands, including Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts, and the ultra-luxe Crockfords Las Vegas – one of the first LXR Hotels & Resorts locations in the U.S. Emphasis on luxury can be found throughout the property, including a next-generation casino; world-class food and beverage options; The Theatre, a 5,000-capacity, state-of-the-art venue in partnership with AEG Presents; distinctive nightlife venues; a 5.5-acre pool complex with the city’s only infinity edge pool overlooking the Strip; an extensive retail collection and more.

Discover for yourself why Las Vegas is the only place to be at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide and with operating the 4.6 million square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms and nearly 14 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space in Las Vegas alone, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting leisure and business visitors to the area. The LVCVA also owns the Convention Center Loop, an underground tunnel designed by The Boring Company to transport convention attendees throughout the 200-acre LVCC campus in all-electric Teslas free of charge. It also owns the Las Vegas Monorail, an elevated 3.9-mile system with seven stops throughout the resort corridor. Both transportation systems will operate when conventions reconvene. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com, www.visitlasvegas.com or www.vegasmeansbusiness.com.

Las Vegas Kissed 2020 Goodbye Like Only Vegas Could

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 12:18:00 PM GMT

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Las Vegas Announces DJ Vice for Kiss Off 2020 Event

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 5:19:00 PM GMT

***MEDIA ALERT***MEDIA ALERT***MEDIA ALERT***

DJ Vice to Perform, Livestream Countdown and Imploding a 2020 Sign

DJ Vice will lead the virtual festivities and perform his genre-bending, innovative music as the clock counts down to midnight and into the early moments of 2021.

While the destination may not be holding the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks spectacular, the excitement the city is known for will still be epic.

The Kiss Off 2020 event is not open to the public, however guests from around the world can still celebrate their favorite destination virtually.

What: Las Vegas’ Kiss Off 2020 – Livestream New Year’s Eve Countdown and Celebration

Who: Longstanding Vegas Tao Group resident DJ, artist and producer, Vice

When: Thursday, Dec. 31, 11:30 p.m. PST

Where: Online at: VisitLasVegas.com, YouTube and Facebook

Contact:

Tracey Koblick

702-228-0222

Tracey.Koblick@rrpartners.com

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Dine Al Fresco Throughout Las Vegas

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 8:11:00 PM GMT

The Strip

Downtown Las Vegas

Summerlin and Henderson

Discover why Las Vegas is the premier place for outdoor dining at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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New and Noteworthy in Las Vegas

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 8:50:00 PM GMT

Booming Business Scene

Every aspect of Las Vegas goes above and beyond, and new resorts, stadiums, convention centers, and of course, new technology follows suit.

Circa Las Vegas, the highly anticipated adults-only, integrated gaming resort in downtown Las Vegas, is slated to open with its first five floors of amenities and state-of-the-art parking hub – Garage Mahal – on October 28. The spectacular 1.25 million-square-foot, 777-room property will stand 35 stories tall and will be the first ground-up gaming resort in historic downtown Las Vegas since 1980. The two-story casino floor will house 1,350 slot machines and 49 table games, as well as the world’s largest three-level sports book. Located on the iconic Fremont Street Experience, Circa will honor the timeless spirit of Las Vegas while leading the charge for a bold new era with game-changing offerings.

Virgin Hotels Las Vegas is set to open January 15, 2021 in the resort formally known as the Hard Rock Resort & Casino. The new resort will feature innovative design and function with 1,504 exceptionally appointed Chambers, Grand Chamber Suites and Penthouse Suites which will include the Virgin Hotels patented bed and in-room technology. Re-conceptualized and revitalized, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas will feature 60,000 square feet of fully renovated casino space, more than five acres of luxe upgraded outdoor space and pools, new world-class restaurants, lounges and bars.

Opening in summer 2021, Resorts World Las Vegas is the first resort to be built on the Las Vegas Strip in more than a decade. The $4.3 billion luxury integrated resort is poised to redefine the hospitality standard in Las Vegas with advanced technology, exciting new experiences and world-class guest service. In partnership with Hilton, Resorts World Las Vegas will offer 3,500 luxury guestrooms and suites from three premium Hilton brands, including Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts, and the ultra-luxe Crockfords Las Vegas – one of the first LXR Hotels & Resorts locations in the U.S. Emphasis on luxury can be found throughout the property, including a next-generation casino, world-class food and beverage options, The Theatre, a 5,000-capacity, state-of-the-art venue in partnership with AEG Presents, distinctive nightlife venues, a 5.5-acre pool complex with the city’s only infinity edge pool overlooking the Strip, an extensive retail collection and more.

Located adjacent to the world-famous Strip, Allegiant Stadium is now open and stands to become a global events destination, highlighted by the hometown NFL team, the Las Vegas Raiders. The technologically advanced stadium will host world-class entertainment including globally recognized sporting events such as the NFL Pro Bowl, Pac-12 Championship Game and Las Vegas Bowl, concerts, and is the future home of UNLV Football. The 65,000-seat stadium is fully enclosed, climate controlled and features retractable natural turf field, retractable doors – called the lanai – that open to spectacular views of the Strip, a translucent roof and VIP spaces on all levels.

Downtown Grand Hotel & Casino recently celebrated the opening of its new 495-room Gallery Tower, which brings the property’s total room inventory to 1,124 rooms. With the opening of Gallery Tower, Downtown Grand is now equipped with digital kiosks located inside the new porte-cochere to allow contactless check-in and check-out for guests with prior reservations. The centerpiece of the Gallery Tower is “Transmigrations,” a first of its kind, interactive, augmented reality-based art installation exclusively available to guests staying in rooms in the Virtual Pad collection.
The Cromwell recently reopned as the first adults-only resort on the Las Vegas Strip. The boutique hotel with 188 rooms including 19 suites, and gaming floor, will be open seven days a week for guests 21 and over. Guests of all ages will be welcome at GIADA, the award-winning restaurant of notable chef Giada De Laurentiis. In addtion to GIADA, Bound – the elevated lobby bar, Interlude Casino Lounge, the fast-casual eatwell, Drai’s After Hours and the WIlliam Hill Sports Book have all reopened for guests to enjoy.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas recently debuted a new venue perfect for a Las Vegas wedding. The 8,000-square-foot Stella Studio is a multifunctional space that provides a neutral canvas for any event planning needs. The venue is easily accessible from the lobby of The Palazzo tower at The Venetian Resort and offers a private entrance, natural light, a dedicated kitchen and bar, and private restrooms. The Stella Studio is the perfect location for a romantic ceremony or reception.

Construction of the 1.4 million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) West Hall expansion is expected to be completed in December 2020. The new West Hall will provide 600,000 square feet of customizable trade show exhibit space increasing the total campus exhibition space to 2.5 million square feet. Overall, the destination is building toward 15 million square feet of meeting space and is home to three of North America’s 10 largest convention centers.

Another visionary success is the LVCC’s partnership with Elon Musk’s The Boring Company (TBC). As the first commercial endeavor for TBC and one more first for Las Vegas, the Convention Center Loop, an innovative and fun underground transportation system, will be free to LVCC guests and will include three passenger stations connecting the existing LVCC space with the new expansion. Trade show attendees will be transported across the 200-acre campus via all-electric Tesla vehicles in just over one minute, which would normally take 15 minutes or more to walk. When complete in January 2021, the underground transportation system will be comprised of two vehicular tunnels with an expected total length of approximately one mile each.

Initial steps to expand Elon Musk’s innovative underground tunnel system throughout Las Vegas will soon be underway. The Vegas Loop will represent a first-of-its-kind transportation solution for a tourism destination, offering convenient transportation and reduced congestion throughout the destination’s resort corridor. Vegas Loop will consist of underground tunnels stretching as far north as downtown Las Vegas, throughout the Strip corridor, and as far south as Allegiant Stadium, pending approval later this week by the Stadium Authority, the owner of the stadium. Passengers will be whisked through tunnels in all-electric Tesla vehicles.

An Elevated Dining Experience

Wynn Las Vegas made a dramatic expansion to its culinary portfolio with the opening of Elio, a contemporary Mexican restaurant in partnership with Enrique Olvera, Daniela Soto-Innes and Santiago Perez, the team behind Cosme and Alta in New York City. The menu combines regional dishes with seasonal ingredients, with a focus on small plates, appetizers and shareable entrees.

Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa recently rolled out Crimson at Sundown, an outdoor lounge featuring chill sounds, inventive cocktails, light bites and treats for a perfect open-air environment. Every Friday and Saturday evening guests can sit poolside in comfortable lounge seating or reserve a cabana for up to eight guests and enjoy the fall nights under a canopy of bistro lights. In addition to a new lounge, pop-up restaurant Osteria Fiorella by chef Marc Vetri opened as a permanent resident at Red Rock Resort this fall. The casual restaurant features antipasti and salads, pizzas made in a wood burning oven, daily hand-made pastas, meat and fish cooked to perfection in a Josper charcoal oven and of course dessert, wine and cocktails.

Din Tai Fung will open its first Las Vegas location at ARIA Resort & Casino on October 19, 2020. The esteemed Taiwanese dumpling and noodle house, with more than 170 restaurants in 13 countries, is renowned for its Xiao Long Bao – Shanghai-style soup dumplings – filled with the highest quality Kurobuta pork and broth that bursts upon the first bite.

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas is adding the flavors of Greece from one of the finest Mediterranean seafood restaurants in the world, Estiatorio Milos, to its already diverse culinary line-up, in 2021. Famous for its selection of seafood imported fresh daily, Milos uses only the best ingredients to uphold the extraordinary food philosophy of chef and owner Costas Spiliadis. Complemented by an extensive list of fine wines with a focus on Greece, and a modern aesthetic, dining at Milos is as delicious as it is memorable.

Maverick Helicopters, in partnership with Lip Smacking Foodie Tours, the top-rated culinary experience purveyor known for unforgettable restaurant tours, offer the ultimate fine-dining and helicopter experience with Savory Bites & Neon Lights. Foodies who book this package will be taken on a culinary journey inside six renowned restaurants at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and Mastro’s Ocean Club inside The Shops at Crystals. The five-hour excursion begins at ARIA Resort & Casino and following the tour, guests will ride in a limo to Maverick’s terminal. Once aboard the ECO-star aircraft, attendees will enjoy a 15-minute flight with bird’s-eye views of iconic landmarks on the Strip.

Keep your appetite flying high with Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters. The new Afternoon Bites + Night Flights includes a tasty three-course lunchtime menu from Matteo’s Ristorante Italiano at The Venetian Resort. This dynamic menu brings flavors inspired by Northern Italian cuisine. This package will also include the exciting Strip Highlights Night Flight. This is just one of the exciting new experiences from Papillion.

Attractive Entertainment

The return of live entertainment hits the stage when ABSINTHE by Spiegelworld reopens at Caesars Palace on October 28. Guests can expect new cabaret-style seating inside the spiegeltent, which will allow parties of two to five to reserve tables positioned no less than six feet apart, while still feeling close to the action. Even with seating reduced to 153, viewers will still experience the hilarious show as it is meant to be. For pre-show fun, the outdoor Green Fairy Garden with its spectacular Absinthe Electric Oak will allow for more social distancing than likely any theater foyer in the world.

After seven months of sold-out virtual shows, Piff the Magic Dragon will be back for the real thing at Flamingo Las Vegas beginning October 29. Performing at the conveniently named “Piff the Magic Dragon Theatre” for the past five years, Piff will once again be accompanied by his Las Vegas Showgirl partner Jade Simone and magic dog Mr. Piffles. All three are thrilled to be coming back to the stage, this time in the larger Flamingo Showroom and will be able to accommodate an audience of 250 guests per show or less.

AREA15 invites visitors to enter curious and leave different. Now open, the world’s first experiential entertainment complex specifically built to be an immersive playground and all-in-one spectacular space is already enthralling guests. Mesmerizing zones feature engaging activations and rides, monumental art installations indoors as well as the outdoor Art Island, ground-breaking technology, funky retail boutiques, and bars and eateries, including The Beast Pop-Up, a curated outdoor eatery by chef Todd English. “Wink World: Portals to the Infinite” – an experience that enhances the concept of the infinity mirror room with a series of black-light-infused kinetic art installations – opens later this fall. One of the most-anticipated installations set to open early next year is Santa Fe-based art collective Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart.

Adrenaline Mountain is an extreme outdoor entertainment complex offering a variety of heart-pumping activities all in one place. Just 30 minutes off the Strip, guests can off-road in souped-up UTVs, shoot machine guns or archery, crush or blow up a car, throw axes, drive the world’s longest monster truck, dig with earthmovers, and even get married. The complex offers multiple event spaces from a small amphitheater to larger outdoor areas including a 20,000-square-foot plateau on the historic Yellow Pine Mine with a breathtaking view of the surrounding desert.

The newest addition to Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino is the Immotion Undersea Explorer Virtual Reality Theater. This immersive experience center features state-of-the-art, motion platform VR technology transporting guests to the ocean’s depths to get an up-close-and-personal look at incredible underwater wildlife and mysterious creatures.

The Neon Museum now offers Portrait Hour for guests looking to book time in the museum’s North Gallery amidst hundreds of vintage Las Vegas signs – such as Lady Luck and the Golden Nugget – for a personal, colorful, one-of-a-kind backdrop for their photo shoot. Guests who book Portrait Hour tickets share the space with other guests while they have a portrait photo session taken by their own photographer.

Pink Jeep Tours introduces the four-hour Eldorado Canyon Gold Mine Tour where guests step back in time to the Wild West and go underground to explore an actual gold mine. Guests will also enjoy a private collection of historic cars and Hollywood movie memorabilia. The tour includes a gorgeous photo stop at the Colorado River. A local expert tour guide entertains and educates. Hotel pick-up and drop off is included.

Museum of Dream Space, a popular multi-media art gallery, will debut its first Nevada location inside the Grand Canal Shoppes at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas this November. Frequently abbreviated as MODS, this one-of-a-kind place is the first museum to mainly exhibit multi-media art in the United States and allows customers an out-of-this-world interactive experience while also being able to capture pictures to last a lifetime.

After thrilling nearly 1,500 audiences during its inaugural run, MAGIC MIKE LIVE is headed to The Strip where it will be the entertainment centerpiece at the SAHARA Las Vegas. Construction of the all-new Magic Mike Live Theater has begun and will take over a two-story space on the resort’s second floor that will be solely dedicated to the show and its guests; using this blank canvas space to the fullest, the show will implement new features and technologies making it even bigger, sexier and more magical.

Global megastar and eight-time GRAMMY Award-winner Usher will headline The Colosseum at Caesars Palace when his Las Vegas residency opens Friday, July 16, 2021. The exclusive, only-in-Vegas spectacular will be performed in The Colosseum, an intimate 4,300-seat, world-class performance venue, allowing Usher’s fans a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see him up close and personal. The show will be packed with an impressive repertoire of smash hits spanning Usher’s 20-year career, including his early records and more recent songs, as well as new music.

Discover for yourself why Las Vegas is the only place to be at www.VisitLasVegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, and also with operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and more than 12 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

Las Vegas is the Only Place to Find a Change of Pace, Seven Days a Week

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 7:03:00 PM GMT

Midweek travel deals are as follows (Restrictions may apply, including blackout dates and subject to availability):

Caesars Entertainment
- Visitors looking for a midweek escape can get great travel rates at Caesars Entertainment resorts.
- For additional details on deals: https://www.caesars.com/las-vegas/hotels/deals
  - Bally’s Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $75
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in Resort King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020
      - Booking code: ST3Y
  - Flamingo Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $87
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in GO King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020
      - Booking code: ST3Y
  - Harrah’s Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $75
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in a Deluxe King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Sept. 3, 2020
      - Booking code: ST3Y
  - Nobu Hotel Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $240
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in a Deluxe King Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Sept. 3, 2020
      - Booking code: STAY3
  - Paris Las Vegas
    - Stay Three Nights for $135
      - Must book three-night midweek stay in a Burgundy King or Queen Room by Sept. 30, 2020
      - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020
      - Booking code: STAY3

MGM Resorts International
- Bellagio Resort & Casino / ARIA Resort & Casino
  - Viva Las Office
    - Visitors can receive the ultimate work from Vegas experience with various tier offerings.
    - Three-night minimum valid from Sunday – Thursday
    - Must book by Sept. 28, 2020 for stays through Sept. 30, 2020
    - For full details: https://www.mgmresorts.com/en/offers/viva-las-office.html
      - The Associate
        Guests can book either a Bellagio Resort King or an ARIA Deluxe King with early check-in of 8 a.m. and late check-out of 6 p.m., includes executive assistant to coordinate details as needed through visit, $50 food and beverage credit per night and $75 off round-trip flights with JSX
      - The Manager
        Guests can book either a Bellagio Fountain View or ARIA Deluxe Strip View with early check-in of 8 a.m. and late check-out of 6 p.m., includes an executive assistant to coordinate details as needed through visit, $50 food and beverage credit per night, $100 off round-trip flights with JSX, two VIP pool day passes and poolside massage
      - The Executive
        Guests can book either a Bellagio Salone Suite or ARIA City Corner Suite with early check-in of 8 a.m. and late check-out of 6 p.m., includes an executive assistant to coordinate details as needed throughout visit, $75 food and beverage credit per night, $125 off round-trip flights with JSX, full-day cabana rental and poolside massage
OYO Hotel & Casino Las Vegas
- Stay More, Play More
  - Receive up to 10% off accommodations of one night, 20% off accommodations for two or more nights, and 30% off for three or more nights
  - Offers includes $5 in free slot play and $10 in table games match play, buy-one-get-one free drink voucher, Hooter’s early-bird 10% off between 2-5 p.m., 10% off Splash Cantina poolside restaurant and bar, bottled water in guest room and in-room safety kit
  - Package available through Dec. 29, 2021. Must book by Dec. 31, 2020.
  - For details: https://www.oyolasvegas.com/offers/offer/#DSPROM
- California Residents Discount
  - Receive 30% off with valid California state ID. Offers includes two free frozen margaritas, $5 in free slot pay and $10 in table games match play, buy-one-get-one free drink voucher, Hooter’s early-bird 10% off between 2-5 p.m., 10% off Splash Cantina poolside restaurant and bar
  - Must book by Dec. 29, 2020 for stays between Sept. 1 – Dec. 31, 2021
  - For details: https://oyohotellasvegas.reztrip.com/classic/offers?locale=en&rate_code=30CA&_ga=2.90303770.1803388964.1595438926-846102823.1590527215
- Arizona Residents Discount
  - Receive 15% off with valid Arizona state ID. Offers includes $5 in free slot pay and $10 in table games match play, buy-one-get-one free drink voucher, Hooter’s early-bird 10% off between 2-5 p.m., 10% off Splash Cantina poolside restaurant and bar
  - Must book by March 2021 for stays between now and March 2021
  - For details: https://oyohotellasvegas.reztrip.com/classic/offers?locale=en&rate_code=ARZ&_ga=2.9625909.1803388964.1595438926-846102823.1590527215
Plaza Hotel & Casino
- Old School Fun
  - For a downtown getaway, visitors can book a stay with lowest available room rates, $25 daily food and beverage credit, $75 daily bingo match play, $10 free slot play, complimentary hotel room upgrade, early check-in and late check-out and free parking
  - Must book by Aug. 31, 2020 and stay through Dec. 29, 2020
  - For details: https://www.plazahotelcasino.com/hotel-packages/old-school-fun/
SAHARA Las Vegas
- Good Neighbor Special
  - Exclusive for Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Texas residents with valid ID
  - Visitors can receive half-off resort fees, complimentary room upgrade to the Marra Tower, cancel or change up to 24 hours prior to check-in without incurring fees, receive virtual fun book at check-in and free parking
  - Must book by Aug. 31, 2020 for travel through March 31, 2021
  - For details: https://saharalasvegas.com/promotions/good-neighbor-special/
- California to Vegas Special
  - Guests can receive waived resort fee, complimentary upgrade to the Marra Tower, late check-out of 1 p.m., free parking, virtual fun book that includes half-off cabanas and daybeds, free Starbucks coffee and more
  - Must show valid California state ID upon check-in
  - Package available through March 31, 2021
  - For details: https://saharalasvegas.com/promotions/stay-dine-experience/
Station Casinos
- Green Valley Ranch / Red Rock Resort
  - Summer Dreamin’ Package
    - Visitors can receive special rates up to 25% off with a $50 food and beverage credit per stay
    - Two-night minimum is required
    - Package available through Sept. 30, 2020
    - Must book by Sept. 30, 2020
    - Additional details available here

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
- Ditch Everyday
  - Las Vegas travelers can redefine summer with 20% off hotel rooms plus a $50 pool credit with two-night minimum stay
  - Package available through Sept. 3, 2020
  - Must book by Sept. 3, 2020
  - For details: https://www.cosmopolitanlasvegas.com/identity/offers

The STRAT Hotel, Casino & SkyPod
- Stay & Dine Package
  - Visitors can book two nights in the newly remodeled Elevate rooms with $100 resort credit valid at Top of the World restaurant, free cancellation up to 72 hours prior to check-in, free valet and self-park with rates starting at $209
  - Two-night stay from Sunday – Wednesday is required
  - Package available through Dec. 24, 2020.
  - Must book by Dec. 20, 2020.
  - Booking code: TOWSD20
  - For details here

The Venetian Resort Las Vegas
- Up to 25% off + daily grab and go breakfast for two
- Breakfast can be redeemed at Moon Palace, Chica, Go Greek Yogurt and Opaline Theatre
- Two-night minimum required for dates valid now - Sept. 30, 2020
- Must book by Sept. 11
- For details: venetian.com/offers/best-offer.html
Treasure Island – TI Hotel & Casino
- TV Ad Special
  - Deluxe room rates starting at $99, must book Sunday – Thursday
  - Waived resort fees
  - Two-for-one draft beers
  - 20% off admission to Marvel Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N.
- TI Strip Experience
  - Guests can receive up to 30% off newly-renovated rooms and suites
  - Buy-One-Get-One-Free offer includes: dinner, draft beer at Gilley’s Saloon and adult admission to Marvel Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N., and $50 full day pool cabana credit (only valid Monday – Thursday)
  - For details: https://treasureisland.com/special-offers
Wynn Resorts
- Stay and Play
  - Golf lovers can stay and play two nights, with a $50 dining credit, one round of golf at Wynn Golf Club and a personalized gift
  - Available dates now through Aug. 31, 2020
  - For details: https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/rooms-and-suites/stay-and-play
- Enjoy More Time Away
  - Guests can enjoy a complimentary third night when booking a two-night stay in a Resort or Tower Suite room at Wynn or Encore
  - Must book by Aug. 31, 2020
  - Package available through Dec. 27, 2020
  - For details: https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/rooms-and-suites/more-time-away-with-the-third-night-free

For more information on midweek travel, please visit www.visitlasvegas.com.

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ABOUT THE LVCVA
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) is charged with marketing Southern Nevada as a tourism and convention destination worldwide, and also with operating the Las Vegas Convention Center. With nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas alone and more than 12 million square feet of meeting and exhibit space citywide, the LVCVA's mission centers on attracting ever increasing numbers of leisure and business visitors to the area. For more information, go to www.lvcva.com or www.visitlasvegas.com.

Centerplate, the Las Vegas Convention Center's Exclusive Food and Beverage Partner, Donates Food to Local Charity

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 4:03:00 PM GMT

# # #

ABOUT CENTERPLATE

Las Vegas Convention Center Expansion Reaches New Milestone as Concrete Pour Begins in New Exhibit Hall

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 4:04:00 PM GMT

** To access time-lapse footage of the concrete pour and the latest pictures of the expansion without no password required, click here.**

Concrete Pour & Expansion by the Numbers

Construction Milestone Reached for MSG Sphere at the Venetian in Las Vegas

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 9:23:00 PM GMT

The MSG Sphere Las Vegas will be a sphere-shaped music and entertainment arena near the Las Vegas Strip. The 17,500-seat auditorium is scheduled to open in 2021.

CONEXPO-CON/AGG Builds Excitement and Innovation in Las Vegas

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 10:10:00 PM GMT

LAS VEGAS- Las Vegas is proud to welcome North America’s largest construction trade show, CONEXPO-CON/AGG, to the destination once again March 10-14, 2020.

When CONEXPO-CON/AGG last visited the destination in 2017, the show snagged the No. 1 spot on Trade Show News Network’s top trade show list, spanning more than 2.67 million net square feet.

Soundbites available with this story:

Charlie Cunningham, Senior Director of Sales, Vacuworx (Tulsa, Oklahoma)

Chris Frost, Group Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Astec Industries (Chattanooga, Tennessee)

Roger Lewno, Product Specialist, CASE IH (Racine, Wisconsin)

Tony Chirico, National Sales Manager, Gorman-Rupp Pumps (Mansfield, Ohio)

Joey Logano Wins NASCAR's Pennzoil 400 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 7:29:00 PM GMT

Las Vegas Convention Center Celebrates Major Milestone in Elon Musk’s Innovative Underground Transportation System; Excavation of First Tunnel Complete

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 4:28:00 PM GMT

^{**Click here to access the video of the tunnel breakthrough and photos chronicling the project’s development with no password required**}

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2020 World of Concrete Show in Las Vegas

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 7:51:00 PM GMT

The show has an estimated attendance of 60,000 with a total estimated economic impact of $97.1million.

Nevada Governor Proclaims "Only Vegas Day" in Las Vegas to Celebrate New Ad Campaign

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 8:31:00 PM GMT

Las Vegas Celebrates Chinese New Year

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 11:34:00 PM GMT

Décor

Entertainment

The International Builders Show in Las Vegas Featuring In-Demand Products and Services for Home Builders

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 5:07:00 PM GMT

Las Vegas Stratosphere Officially Becomes The STRAT Hotel, Casino & SkyPod

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 2:53:00 AM GMT

CES Show in Las Vegas Features Student Business Pitch Competition

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 10:36:00 PM GMT

CES 2020 in Las Vegas Features World Changing Innovation

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 2:11:00 AM GMT

America's Party 2020 in Las Vegas

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 9:38:00 AM GMT

MGM Grand
Aria
Planet Hollywood
Caesars Palace
Treasure Island (TI)
The Venetian
Stratosphere