In this week's episode, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum sits down with Richard Cook and David Woods. Cook is a physician, researcher, and educator, who is currently a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State University, and emeritus professor of health care systems safety at Sweden’s KTH. Woods also is a professor at Ohio State University and is leading the Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social, and Engineered Systems, and he's the co-director of Ohio State University’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory. They chat about SNAFU Catchers; anomaly response; and the importance of not only understanding how things fail, but how things normally work.

On this week's episode, I chat with Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton. Wang is also a co-founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, a site focused on analyzing and predicting U.S. national elections. We talk about the site's prediction algorithm and this crazy election cycle, and the role neuroscience may have played. We also talk about the current research Wang and his team are working on, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the powerful role governments play in academic research.

In this episode of the Radar Podcast, I chat with John Bassett III, chairman of the board of the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company. We talk about globalization and the effect it's had on the furniture industry, the international trade battle he waged (which was written about by Beth Macy in her book Factory Man), Bassett's book Making it in America, and what entrepreneurs need to know to succeed in business today.

In this Radar Podcast episode, I chat with Haakon Faste, a design educator and innovation consultant. We talk about his interesting career path, including his perceptual robotics work, his teaching approaches, and his mission with the Ralf A. Faste Foundation. We also talk about navigating our way to a "post-human" world and the importance of designing to make the world a more human-centered place.

This week on the Radar Podcast, we're featuring the first episode of the newly launched O'Reilly Bots Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud and RSS. O'Reilly's Jon Bruner is joined by Pete Skomoroch, the co-founder and CEO of Skipflag, to talk about bots—about what's driving the sudden interest, what we can expect from the technology, and some interesting emerging applications.

This week's Radar Podcast episode is a special cross-over edition from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, or SoundCloud. O'Reilly strategic content director Courtney Nash chats with Cory Doctorow, a journalist, activist and science fiction writer. They talk about nascent pro-security industries, the EFF's lawsuit against the U.S. government, and the new W3C DRM specification.

This week, I talk with Alyona Medelyan, co-founder and CEO at Thematic and founder and CEO at Entopix. We talk about natural language understanding, the challenges of analyzing unstructured text, and her open source indexing tool Maui that she's been working on for the past 10 years.

This week's episode features a special cross-over conversation from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, or RSS. O'Reilly's Courtney Nash chats with Eleanor Saitta, a security architect at Etsy. They talk about the importance of thinking of security in a human context and the increasingly critical relationship between security and design.

This week, I chat with Othman Laraki, co-founder of Color Genomics. We chat about challenges and opportunities in genetic testing, the future of precision medicine, and the hurdles medicine and health care are currently facing (and how we can overcome them).

This week's episode features two conversations I've had recently centered around smart cities. First, I chat with Daniele Quercia, research team lead at Bell Labs. We talk about research he's working on now; the launch of goodcitylife.org (including smelly maps and happy maps); why our use of technology shouldn't just aim to make a city smart, but to improve the day-to-day quality of life of it's citizens; and about the emerging areas of urban informatics he's finding most compelling.

In our second segment, I chat with Frank Cuypers, associate professor at the University of Antwerp and strategist at Destination Think! We chat about the importance of urban DNA, his nonprofit project Why Your City, and why there's no such thing as a smart city.