Topic: Science and Technology (general)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who talks about how words relate to thinking, and how they also don't.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with John Kao, the former Harvard Business School professor who believes America is losing its innovative edge.
On BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Don Debethizy, from Targacept, about our brains and how we can design molecules to directly affect them. On the Bio-Issue of the Week, David Ewing Duncan talks about the technological breakthroughs thanks to treating battlefield injuries.
IBM researchers Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg are the creators of Many Eyes, a new kind of social website dedicated to data visualization and analysis. Members upload batches of data - about politics, weather, or anything else - then chart, interpret, discuss, and even re-visualize one another's data. The process is fun, and it also points toward a future in which our collective interpretation of the world is more firmly rooted in data.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with author Dr. Fritjof Capra, about "The Science of Leonardo - Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance."
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has always been the place where companies announced and demonstrated the newest gadgets and electronic devices. Phil and Scott are joined by three attendees, Brad Baldwin, Scott Barlow, and Randall Bennett, to discuss some of the products. They talk about visual devices, robotics, and how power consumption is an issue that needs to be assessed in new devices.
Phil regularly holds a meeting that he calls the CTO Breakfast. It is an opportunity for people who work in technology to discuss current issues. In this episode, Phil holds an online version of the meeting. The group review such topics as the recently released Amazon SimpleDB, MIT's open courseware project, and how LinkedIn just open their site to developers. They also discuss the status of open source social networking and the problems of monetization. The group finishes with their predictions for early 2008.
Science fiction has had tangible impact on the actual course of science and engineering. Donna Shirley, who works at NASA's Mars Exploration Program, was one such engineer affected by "The Sands of Mars", by Arthur C. Clarke. On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, Shirley talks about the effect of Clarke's work, and her career at NASA.
Richard Wallis is a technology evangelist for Talis, a UK-based provider of library systems which has chosen to base its next-generation platform on semantic web technologies. The company doesn't talk about its mission in those terms, though. In a white paper, it describes the mission of the new platform as: "Harnessing mass collaboration on a global scale."
Yale professor Ian Ayres speaks with Dr. Moira Gunn and talks about who's looking at what numbers and making decisions which affect us.
