Pod Academy

This interview takes us to the heart of a new age of scientific discovery.

The ability to read DNA has changed how we view ourselves. Genomics is literally changing our understanding of humanity's place in nature.

 

Professor Dawn Field of the University of Oxford, and Dr Neil Davies, Senior Fellow, Berkeley Institute for Data Science are the authors of Biocode -The New Age of Genomics.   In conversation with Craig Barfoot, they take us on a dazzling ride through new fields of scientific discovery.

 

We visit Moorea where Neil Davies and his colleagues have taken on the massive task of mapping the genome of an entire ecosystem, creating a library of genetic markers and physical identifiers for every species of plant, animal and fungi on the island, the database of which will be publicly available as a resource for ecologists and evolutionary biologists around the world.

They help us view the fast developing science of genomics. The structure of DNA was identified in 1953, and the whole human genome was mapped by 2003. Since then the new field of genomics has mushroomed and is now operating on an industrial scale. Genomes can now be sequenced rapidly and increasingly cheaply.  Currently used in crime detection, in paternity suits and to identify susceptibility to medical conditions - the potential for misuse is alarming, but it also opens up unprecedented possibilities.

One of the most fascinating parts of the interview is a discussion about human beings as ecosystems.  Sequencing technology has made the invisible world of microbes visible - biodiversity genomics is revealing whole new worlds within us and without. The findings are transformational.  Our bodies are home to millions of bacteria - in fact we have more bacteria in us than human cells - these species help us to function as human beings.  We have seen microbes as the enemy, and have been fighting them with penicillin since the middle of the last century - but what we now find is that only 200 species of microbes are pathogens out of millions of bacterial species.  When we understand this ecosystem better it will revolutionise healthcare.  "The genome is the foundation of our bodies, like trees in a forest, but there are lots of other flora and fauna that make up the whole ecosystem of the forest."

 

 Photo:  Libertas Academica

"Government is made up of people",  says Dave Seliger, a civil servant in New York City.  So, what might public servants do to change the face of local government?

This is the 6th podcast from Civic Radio. In it Dave Seliger talks to Jo Barratt about the role of civil servants and local government officers in developing a new local government.  Dave is the co-founder of Civic Service at Parsons DESIS Lab and a public servant in the NYC Mayor's Office.

There are 300,000 civil servants in New York, and Dave says it is important to involve all of them, not just the Mayor and City Hall, in rethinking local government.  So he trains and connects civil servants, bringing together Heads of Local Government Innovation, getting them to meet activists and community advocates,  and helping them understand the role and potential of civic tech.

He also asks how we might get people involved in public service, and particularly looks at why tech savvy people rarely join government - why do they opt for working with Google instead, when the problems they'd have to grapple with in government are so much more challenging.......

"Being a citizen is crafting the society you live," in says Aral Balkan, Founder of Ind.ie and a champion of democracy and design.

In this podcast, the 5th from Civic Radio, Aral Balkan talks about how we communicate with each other, the tools and programmes we use to do this (and the perhaps hidden costs we give in exchange) and how we might build systems that better support the interests of the people who use them.

Likening Twitter to a shopping mall, rather than a public park, he questions the way we confuse private spheres, run by Silicon Valley corporations, with public spheres  and calls for more social organisations, independent of venture capital that build things that add to the commons.

 

 

 

The deep past extends its tentacles into the present and, in Work, Sex and Power  Willie Thompson, until his retirement Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University, demonstrates how this affects our species.

He talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfooot about how, in recent years such approaches, covering lengthy stretches of time and continents, have taken on greater prominence, with terms like ‘Deep History’ and ‘Big History’ entering the vocabulary.  This approach has been stimulated by a deepening awareness of the apocalyptic threat to humanity caused by runaway global warming and species destruction. The inability of the small-scope historiography favoured in previous decades to generate much illumination regarding this crisis has proven its limits.

Willie Thompson's book is part of this new tendency but with a differing emphasis in important respects. It begins with argument on humans’ place in the universe and where they stand in the evolutionary process. It is concerned to emphasise both the continuity of humans with the animal kingdom and the wider biosphere, but also the categorical difference of their existence as social creatures equipped with language and, in their forelimbs, manipulative abilities possessed by no other creature. One early chapter discusses the evolution of conscious thought and the unique attribute of humans, in that through a developed form of consciousness they envisage their future selves, and their future projects, unlike any other species.

WORK

In this interview, Willie Thompson and Craig Barfoot explore the Palaeolithic era in which the original Homo sapiens lived their hunter-gatherer foraging lives in  isolated family groupings and clan communities. This was a prehistoric period of human history, distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools and covers roughly 95%[1] of human technological prehistory.

The discussion then turns to the next ten thousand years following what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ which rapidly emerged over all the continents with the exception of Australia.

Crucially, it is notorious for ushering in the shift to production (via agriculture and herding) of animal and vegetable foodstuffs which replaced the earlier process of food acquisition ‘in the wild’. These techniques originated in what we now call the Middle East and also developed quite independently in different areas of the globe such as the Americas and China. The driving force was almost certainly climate change – as the glaciation of the latest ice age melted, humans experienced both environmental catastrophe, but also beneficial effects.

The consequences of this transformation for the societies involved were truly enormous and are still noticeable today. In the words of Jared Diamond,author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years ‘The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us’.

Working the Fields by DaiLuo

The history since the Neolithic Revolution has been the history of forced labour, which has four structural forms varying in their details and frequently intermixed: exaction of tribute from producers; serfdom or bonded agricultural labour; outright slavery and wage labour.  Debt emerged as a powerful mechanism used to force individuals into one or other of these forms of forced labour.

Work, Sex and Power explains how wage labour in the context of market economies became the prevalent form of economic compulsion thanks to the second great historical transformation: the creation of technologies that succeeded in unlocking the immense energies imprisoned in fossil fuels, a process that commenced around 300 years ago and proceeded to give us the world we now experience.

SEX

The deep past extends its tentacles into the present and, in Work, Sex and Power  Willie Thompson, until his retirement Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University, demonstrates how this affects our species.

He talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfooot about how, in recent years such approaches, covering lengthy stretches of time and continents, have taken on greater prominence, with terms like ‘Deep History’ and ‘Big History’ entering the vocabulary.  This approach has been stimulated by a deepening awareness of the apocalyptic threat to humanity caused by runaway global warming and species destruction. The inability of the small-scope historiography favoured in previous decades to generate much illumination regarding this crisis has proven its limits.

Willie Thompson's book is part of this new tendency but with a differing emphasis in important respects. It begins with argument on humans’ place in the universe and where they stand in the evolutionary process. It is concerned to emphasise both the continuity of humans with the animal kingdom and the wider biosphere, but also the categorical difference of their existence as social creatures equipped with language and, in their forelimbs, manipulative abilities possessed by no other creature. One early chapter discusses the evolution of conscious thought and the unique attribute of humans, in that through a developed form of consciousness they envisage their future selves, and their future projects, unlike any other species.

WORK

In this interview, Willie Thompson and Craig Barfoot explore the Palaeolithic era in which the original Homo sapiens lived their hunter-gatherer foraging lives in  isolated family groupings and clan communities. This was a prehistoric period of human history, distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools and covers roughly 95%[1] of human technological prehistory.

The discussion then turns to the next ten thousand years following what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ which rapidly emerged over all the continents with the exception of Australia.

Crucially, it is notorious for ushering in the shift to production (via agriculture and herding) of animal and vegetable foodstuffs which replaced the earlier process of food acquisition ‘in the wild’. These techniques originated in what we now call the Middle East and also developed quite independently in different areas of the globe such as the Americas and China. The driving force was almost certainly climate change – as the glaciation of the latest ice age melted, humans experienced both environmental catastrophe, but also beneficial effects.

The consequences of this transformation for the societies involved were truly enormous and are still noticeable today. In the words of Jared Diamond,author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years ‘The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us’.

Working the Fields by DaiLuo

The history since the Neolithic Revolution has been the history of forced labour, which has four structural forms varying in their details and frequently intermixed: exaction of tribute from producers; serfdom or bonded agricultural labour; outright slavery and wage labour.  Debt emerged as a powerful mechanism used to force individuals into one or other of these forms of forced labour.

Work, Sex and Power explains how wage labour in the context of market economies became the prevalent form of economic compulsion thanks to the second great historical transformation: the creation of technologies that succeeded in unlocking the immense energies imprisoned in fossil fuels, a process that commenced around 300 years ago and proceeded to give us the world we now experience.

SEX

This podcast on the rainforest music of the BayAka was produced and presented by Jo Barratt

It is part of our series on ethnomusicology made with the sound archive  of the Pitt Rivers Museum  in Oxford.

 In this podcast you'll hear the sound of the BayAka people of the Central African Republic. Specifically a collection of recordings made by Louis Sarno.   All of these recordings, and more, are available on the Pitt Rivers Reel to Real sound archive website  

In other programmes in the Pitt Rivers series, we look at different aspects of ethnomusicology, but here we are taking an in-depth look at a single collection of sounds, the rainforest music of the Bayaka and, through it, telling some of the story of the BayAka people. Guiding us through this podcast is Noel Lobley   from the Pitt Rivers Museum.  The interviewer is social anthropologist Sarah Winkler Reid from the University of Bristol.

Here is Noel to introduce us to the man who made these recordings:

Noel Lobley: Louis Sarno is a guy from New Jersey who fell in love with the BayAka music from the rainforest of the Central African Republic/Northern Congo. He bought himself a one way ticket, a tape player, batteries and some spare tapes to record the music and more or less never came back. He became a part of the community and over the last 30 years has made the world's most important collection of BayAka music. It currently stands at about 1500 hours worth of music recorded. He has recorded every hunter-gather community and mapped its relationship to forest and the environment. He has gone from being a recorder to an advocate, living amongst the community and helps to mobilise healthcare.

BayAka singing has been well documented,  but the instrumentation has not been looked at as much.

Amongst the community he has been living with, there is a beautiful four note flute called a mbyo (sometimes called mobio), it is made from climbing palm. A musician may play it for many reasons, sometimes for entertainment.  But it is usually played at night, when the rest of the camp is asleep. They will wonder around the camp and it is played to enter your dreams. If you think about it, when you are asleep, the sound echoes around the canopy and the forest is sometimes described as a cathedral, due to the way the sound resonates. A musician may play at night for benediction, protection or for the camp.

Bear in mind Louis has recorded it in its context: its relationship to the rain forest, acoustic and environment. When you listen carefully, you can sometimes hear musicians playing against the canopy, so the overtones weave in and out as the musicians are playing. So sometimes it sounds like two people singing perfectly together.

You can hear the forest soundscape. You can hear the insects, and if it is a heavy sheet of insects, it can tell you whether it is late at night or early in the morning. Sometimes you can pick out the pulse of the insects the musicians are playing with. You can sometimes hear they are playing to a rhythmical structure that is in the forest. The music is very much of the forest and a gift for the forest. Most of these instruments are made from the forest.  It sounds very much to me like an exploration of the acoustic properties of the forest.

In this community, it is not played any more. Over the time Louis has been there, there were three master musicians, but they have all died. The last player who played this, and who knew how to make the flutes gave one to Louis to look after. Louis says he never hears it played anymore. No one knows how to make it, or which particular plant is needed to make it. He looked after the last flute (mbyo) in Yanduombe and it was on its way to us in April earlier this year. There has been oucoup d'état in the Central African Republic. Seleka Rebels have overthrown the government.

Anna Randle, Head of Strategy at London Borough of Lambeth in south London talks to Jo Barratt about redefining local government in the fourth Civic Radio podcast

If citizenship is a reciprocal relationship between the individual citizen and everyone else in the communities of which we are part, what is the role of local government? This is something that Lambeth councll is grappling with, as they develop the notion of  a 'cooperative council' seeking to establish a more equal relationship with their citizens.

But what does it mean in practice?  What is involved in re-imagining local government? What does it mean to shift from being 'a paternalistic provider of services' to a 'facilitative enabler'.  Is it just about doing local government on the cheap?

In this thoughtful  interview, Anna Randle talks persuasively about how a council can empower its citizens, without washing its hands of its responsibilities.

Open spaces, parks etc,  in the borough provide a good example of the approach as Anna explains, "There was a point at which we realised we needed to say, 'these are your spaces, they aren't the council's spaces, they are the community's spaces, you own them. You don't have to ask for permission to do stuff, we want you to do stuff, so if you want to go and plant some bulbs, just do it'."

Civic Radio is part of Civic Workshop.

 

 

 

 

Picture of Barnsley Council offices by James Sheriff

This podcast was produced and presented by Kieron Yates

Climate change, environmental pollution, privatisation of the biosphere, water crises are all signs of the impact of neoliberal policies on our environment, but where will the solutions to these problems come from?

Thirty years ago, there seemed to be a disconnect between an ecology movement that had emerged in the 1960's and the traditional left - neither readily  embraced the other. But over the last two decades there's been a rediscovery of a strand in Marx and Engels' writings that relates to the environment, and this has led to the growth of an eco-socialist movement that campaigns not just on issues of environmental concern but also social justice.

Pod Academy's Kieron Yates talked to Chris Williams, Adjunct Professor at PACE University in the Department of Chemistry and Physical Sciences and Gareth Dale, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Brunel University

Kieron began by asking Chris Williams what was the reality of the disconnection between the environmental movement and socialist politics of the 1980's.

 Chris Williams:  There was a strand in Britain of what could be termed deep ecology which was more commitment to protecting the earth and naturral systems... saving the whale and natural systems and less concerned with the social world or social justice questions... which is obviously more of a left sociualist concern.

But there was also another strand to environmental concerns in the 1980's, in Britain anyway... which was CND and the campaign for Nuclear Disarmamanet... and just the general idea that the world was in a very bad sitauation with regards to the possibility of nuclear warfare and what did that mean in connection to nuclear power stations and nuclear power.

I think in Britain my recollection is that there were different strands but certainly the left was somewhat disassociated from both in a certain regard but certainly much more so from the idea that we should promote the natural world over and above any concerns for the people in it, as if there was this big split between the two and we didn't depend on each other. That was proababy most evident in the United States with the people of Earth First which split off from what they thought were the sellouts of the mainstream environmental movement and turned anti-human in many ways... and some sections of it embraced HIV and AIDS as a way of cleansing the earth, depopulating it of a human virus and other despicable ideas like that. So, there were different strands even within the deep ecology movement... some of them were overtly racist and so the left would obviously have condemned that anyway. The situation has definitely moved on since then.

Kieron Yates: When I began doing research for this podcast I was surprised to discover Marx and Engels themselves had a highly developed concept of the relationship between capitalism and the environment and it's a theme that is explored in both Marx's Capital and some of Engels' later writings - in fact, to my mind, their thinking still seems remarkably contemporary and holistic. I asked Gareth Dale if this was a fair assessment.

Gareth Dale: I think your surprise is related to the fact that the thought of Marx and Engels was for a long time interpreted in very orthodox ways by social democratic and communist parties for most of the twentieth century and these were parties that were linked to very state centered modernizing projects… geared to economic growth, and geared to urbanising society and to capital accumulation at the end of the day… whether that was in the form of state capitals in Soviet Union and eastern Europe and in social democratic nation states in western Europe and elsewhere.

These were parties therefore that interpreted Marxism in a very growth orientated modernising framework which f...

This is the third of our podcasts from Civic Radio, exploring the role of the 'civic' in today's world - a world in which commerce often squeezes out our collective experience as citizens, and in which the term 'citizenship' is usually used to mean the individual's relationship with government, rather than citizens' interdependence with each other.

 

This is the theme explored by tech activist Laurenellen McCann, in conversation with Jo Barratt, In particular they consider the emergence of the 'Civic Tech' movement, in which Laurenellen played a major role, but of which she is now increasingly critical.

The roots of civic tech are in gov2.0, E.gov, and OpenGov in the early 2000s and are for the tech initiated.  Civic technology is vital, but, says LaurenEllen, what does a white tech dude have in common with a single mother on welfare? How can he really understand what she needs?  Open Gov techies continue to work within a definition of citizenship which focuses on the citizen's relationship to governrnent, how their preoccupations and their 'solutions' work for people with different and specific needs?

Civic tech should be about people, rather than technology, so, Instead, she suggests, a new definition for civic tech,  "Any tool, approach, process or solution which is created with public good in mind" and she argues that we should move from a civic tech which is based on 'hardware, software and APIs' to put technology at the service of deliberative processes, in which everyone can become involved.

Our podcast is an extract from the Civic Radio podcast - for the full version click here.

You can also subscribe to Civic Radio on Itunes.

Laurenellen McCann @elle_mccann.

Laurenellen is a key player in the world of technology and democracy in the US, here she is on a panel at the Code for America Summit 2014  with Catherine Bracy, Diana Nucera and Denise Taylor).......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah_xi31pyoA

In this second podcast from Civic Radio, Jo Barratt talks to Simon Willis, Chief Executive of the Young Foundation about social inequality ad civic participation.

 

 

Willis says that many people in the UK feel forgotten and disenfranchised, he is concerned to find ways to hand voice and power to people who feel excluded, to enable them to establish their own ways of doing things, on their terms, when political parties fail to address their needs.