Digital Village

On this week's episode of Digital Village, Dr. Addison Killean Stark is back to talk about science literacy in Congress and what happened to the Office of Technology Assessment. In the last part of the show Leilani Albano is joined by the Union of Concerned Scientists Shana Udvardy to talk about FEMA and Unemployment Benefits.

But first, COVID-19 impacts have been far reaching, especially for government. I am joined by LADOT’s Colin Sweeney and CityGrows CEO and co-founder Catherine Geanuracos. To talk about how CityGrows’ technology has helped LADOT (and other governments) adapt quickly during COVID times.

On this week's episode of Digital Village, Joanna Miller gives us A View From the Outside on Experience Design with Jenny Sauer-Klein.

In the first part of the show Dr. Addison Killean Stark of the Bipartisan Policy Center is back to talk about the Crescent Dunes Solar Plant filing for bankruptcy and how we need space for failure to tackle climate change.

On this weeks episode Ric interviews the LA Times' Ryan Faughnder about Trump vs. Tik Tok.

In the first part of the show, Brittney interviews Dr. Tim Tangherlini, a professor in the Scandanavian Department at UC Berkeley. He was formerly at UCLA where he collaborated with colleagues in the engineering and computer science department on a paper called, An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks. In our conversation we talk about the difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories, how conspiracy theory narratives fall apart computationally, and how we can slow the spread of conspiracy theories.

In the second part of the show, Digital Village reporter Leilani Albano talks to the EFF’s Danny O’Brien about the NSA’s surveillance of people in the EU.

In the first part of the show, we talk to Shawn Shan, a PhD student at University of Chicago, who works in privacy and security. Shawn is one of the researchers behind Fawkes, which is software that makes subtle changes to images to make it harder for machines to recognize images as the same, even if to the human eye they appear identical.

In the second half of the show, Dr. Peter Eckersley is back to talk about Language Models. Back in July, Open AI, the AI research and deployment company based in San Francisco, released the 3rd generation of their language model, GPT-3. This version has garnered a lot of excitement. There’s been people who have used it to generate conversations between computing pioneers Claude Shannon and Alan Turing or having it generate entire stories with just a one sentence prompt.

(00:40) We’ve already seen the launch of The Emirates Mars Mission and China’s Tianwen, but of course the veterans of Mars, NASA are set to launch their Perseverance Rover on July 30th. I am joined by Jim Bell, a professor at ASU, President of the Planetary Society. He is the principal investigator on the Mastcam-Z instrument on Perseverance about what's new on this mission (think helicopters, sample collection, and sounds) and why the technology on the rover is more advanced than it seems.

(1:26) Ric interviews Jessica González co-CEO of freepress.net about Stop Hate For Profit's meeting with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg last week.

(01:19) In the first part of the show, Dr. Jun Axup is back to give us a COVID-19 best practices update - hint - wear. a. mask.

2020 has been an eventful year - COVID-19, worldwide protests against police brutality, and of course, climate change has not gone away. I'm joined by The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Dr. Addison Killean Stark to talk about direct air capture, a technology that could play an important part in helping humanity meet the climate goals set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In the second half of the show, Leilani Albano interviews Emory University epidemiologist Zachary Binney about how and when we will see live sports again.