Freakonomics

I’ve just finished reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt (with a little help from friend and New Yorker scribbler Stephen J Dubner) and I really enjoyed it. The book starts with a warning that it doesn’t have a central theme (read: rambles a bit) and that was certainly true. However, the central premise – that using economists’ tools to analyse all sorts of data yields interesting and sometimes surprising results – holds water. It’s a very good read and I can highly recommend it even if it does lose a bit of steam towards the end.

eMeta sold

Macrovision has bought eMeta, the access and entitlements company, for $35m according to PaidContent.org. According to the post the company is interested in incorporating the technology into its solution for games, video, music and enterprise software. The company was born out of an Elsevier project to develop a&e for the science sites and todate appeared to view its market as other publishers. Is this ambition now dead, I wonder?