More or Less

Does watching 30 minutes of Netflix have the same carbon footprint as driving four miles?

Dipping into the archive for stories on the art of prediction and wood burner pollution

Artificial Intelligence – or AI for short – is often depicted in films in the shape of helpful droids, all-knowing computers or even malevolent ‘death bots’. In real life, we’re making leaps and bounds in this technology’s capabilities with satnavs, and voice assistants like Alexa and Siri making frequent appearances in our daily lives. So, should we look forward to a future of AI best friends or fear the technology becoming too intelligent. Tim Harford talks to Janelle Shane, author of the book ‘You Look Like a Thing and I Love you’ about her experiments with AI and why the technology is really more akin to an earthworm than a high-functioning ‘death bot’.

A lot has changed since our last episode covering the numbers behind the coronavirus - for a start it now has a name, Covid-19. This week news has broken that deaths are 20 per cent higher than thought, and the number of cases has increased by a third. Tim Harford talks to Dr Nathalie MacDermott, a clinical lecturer at King’s College London about what we know – and what we still don’t.

Covid-19 stats, spreading jam far and wide, cooking with AI, and James Wong on vegetables

We all know that you should never smile at a crocodile, but rumour has it that alligators are great perambulators – at least that’s what a booklet about Florida’s wildlife claimed. Tim Harford speaks to John Hutchinson, Professor of evolutionary bio-mechanics to see whether he could outrun one of these reportedly rapid retiles. Also – our editor thinks he could outrun a hippo, is he right? (…probably not).

Costing counter-terrorism, interrogating tomatoes, the UK's reading age, and the politics of GDP. It's a busy week on More or Less. We start in Streatham, where counter-terrorism officers shot dead a man they'd been following after he began stabbing people. Officials have been tight-lipped about the costs of tracking suspects. But we reached into the archive to find an interview with the former head of MI5, who gives a sense of the scale of the challenge and the expense facing the security services. We fact-check a claim from the Prime Minister about the level of economic growth under 'this government'. And there are broader questions: are today's tomatoes less healthy than those grown in the 1950s? Is there such a thing as a nation's 'reading age'? And are nurses disproportionately led by men?

Presenter: Tim Harford

The WHO have declared a ‘Global Health Emergency’ as health officials are urgently trying to contain the spread of a new coronavirus in China and beyond; but not all the information you read is correct. We fact-check a particularly hyperbolic claim about its spread that’s been doing the rounds on social media.

Health officials are urgently trying to contain the spread of a new coronavirus in China and beyond. We fact-check a particularly hyperbolic claim about its spread that’s been doing the rounds on social media. Elsewhere, a loyal listener has told us about a smelly statistic emanating from Radio 4. We nose around the relationship between our olfactory organs and emotions. And Bill Bryson reacts to our work answering his question about an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal about gun ownership and homicide rates.

Producer: Neal Razzell

Anxiety around sleep is widespread. Many of us feel we don’t get enough. An army of experts has sprung up to help, and this week we test some of the claims from one of the most prominent among them: Professor Matthew Walker. He plays ball and answers some of the criticisms of his bestselling book Why We Sleep.