Broad Science

We talked to Courtney Skye, a public policy analyst and activist. She is Mohawk, Turtle Clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, and is a research fellow at the Yellowhead Institute and the co-host of the Red Road podcast. She discusses the report she spearheaded highlighting major gaps of reported COVID-19 cases in Indigenous communities & barriers to getting this information.

Report: “Colonialism of the Curve: Indigenous Communities & Bad Covid Data.”https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2020/05/12/colonialism-of-the-curve-indigenous-communities-and-bad-covid-data/

Follow Courtney @MOHAWKEMOTIONS and @RedRoadPodcast

We chat to Dr. OmiSoore Dryden, James R. Johnston Chair of Black Canadian Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Dr. Dryden discusses how the ongoing disproportionate impact of COVID-19 within Black communities is rooted in a larger Canadian conversation about racism and data that is often dismissed.

This interview is the first of a 2-part investigation on the lack of race-based data collection re:COVID19 here in Canada. We delve into why this lack of information is so dangerous and what barriers it presents to communicating vital information about the pandemic to vulnerable communities.

The Conversation Canada: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-discriminates-against-black-lives-through-surveillance-policing-and-the-absence-of-health-data-135906

Recent estimates of COVID19 cases impacting Black individuals in the US and UK (*please read pre-prints with caution*):

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race

https://ehe.amfar.org/inequity?_ga=2.51214761.1618924293.1588715818-1730120696.1588715818

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1.full.pdf

*The Faculty of Medicine at McGill University was created in 1829

We chat with Neuroscientist, #Scicommer and Digital Media Producer Dr. Samantha Yammine, known to thousands of her followers as Science Sam @heysciencesam

How can we leverage social media to engage often forgotten audiences with vital information, while combatting misinformation that’s intrinsic to those platforms?

We spoke to Liz Neeley, Executive Director of the Story Collider who recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic called How to Talk About the Coronavirus: Four ways to help those around you be better informed about the pandemic.

Liz shares shares her tips for how we can communicate more empathically and constructively with ourselves and others during this pandemic.

Twitter: @lizneeley

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/how-talk-about-coronavirus/609118/

https://www.storycollider.org/

We chat to science communicator (Producer at Science Friday) Kyle Marian (@kylemarian)who co-created Asians Strike Back: A Coronavirus Comedy & Science Show.

How can comedians, scientists and artists come together to tackle misinformation, xenophobia & reclaim narratives with comedy?

Additional notes

ThisNow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuIHXFfz-o0

The Daily episode "I became a person of suspicion": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/podcasts/the-daily/racism-chinese-coronavirus-asian-americans.html

Code Switch episode "When Xenophobia Spreads Like A Virus": https://www.npr.org/2020/03/02/811363404/when-xenophobia-spreads-like-a-virus

Transcripts available: https://www.broadscience.org/new-audio-distancing

The new Broad Science minisode about communicating inclusive science in the time of COVID-19"

Guest: Andre Picard acclaimed health columnist at The Globe and Mail discusses what it’s like to be a science journalist right now and how Canada is really doing in terms of communicating about COVID19, and what we need to be doing better. @picardonhealth

Transcript: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oxQodUjjf1g3teFPluHp0_80_pbX2gMq/view?usp=sharing

Every Monday at 11am on CKUT 90.3fm

Confabulation and Broad Science Presents Bodies. This show explored the theme of Bodies. Storytellers spoke about bodies both as human and celestial shells, as well as exploring the forms that define our lives.

Storytellers:

Alice Fleerackers (00.35) Fleerackers is a freelance writer, a researcher at the ScholCommLab, the Communications Officer at Art the Science, and a Science in Society Editor at Science Borealis. She’s also a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University, where she is working under the supervision of Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin to explore how controversial science is communicated in the digital sphere.

Dr. Natalya Gomez (11:11). Dr. Gomez is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at McGill University and a Canada Research Chair in the Geodynamics of Ice Sheet - Sea Level Interactions. Her research centers around the interactions between ice sheets, sea level and the solid Earth, and the response of these systems to past, present and future climate changes.

On this episode, it’s all about ethics in AI! We’ll be sharing different stories about how AI is being used, what the pitfalls are, and who in the field is trying to make changes. 

We chat to the next generation of AI experts to understand how their institutions are preparing them(or not) to use AI ethically.

Surya Mattu, a data scientist who was part of the Pulitzer nominated Propublica investigation “Machine Bias”, talks to us about the report that jumpstarted a global conversation.

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing (Machine Bias)

To understand the current landscape of Ethics and AI we spoke to one of the most prominent advocates for inclusion and diversity in the field, Dr. Timnit Gebru. Dr. Gebru is a Research Scientist in the Ethical AI team at Google and founder of Black in AI (@black_in_ai).

How has our world has come to associate the assistance of AI with women? Dr. Myriam Sweeney, assistant professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama helps us navigate this.

Hear a reenactment of the 1920’s play Rossum’s Universal Robot by Czech playwright Karel Capek, who coined the term robot(acted by Morgan Sweeney and Matt Goldberg).

Lastly, Dr. Kirk Bansak highlights the possibilities using of AI for good, including to help place refugees in the best possible host communities.

AI guides:

https://www.wired.com/story/guide-artificial-intelligence/

https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-machine-learning-deep-learning-explained-simply-7b553da5b960

Broad Science and Confabulation return on stage for the theme of

It’s a Phase: Stories of stage, changes and transformations.

Storytellers:

Dr. Kika Tuff, Founder of the Impact Media Lab https://www.impactmedialab.com/

Dr. Cristian Zaelzer, Founder & President of the Convergence Initiative

https://www.convergenceinitiative.org/

Journalists Elsie and Giannouli discuss nanoparticles and creating sustainable chemistry with PhD student Alexandra Gellé. Based at McGill, Alex specializes in the field of Green Chemistry, focusing on developing more sustainable and safer alternatives to chemical reactions that already exist.

Alex is also the director of Pint of Science Canada and a contributing writer for many outlets, including the Science Network and The Conversation Canada. You can follow Alex on twitter: @AlexGelle