Pod Academy

An estimated 1% of children worldwide are described as autistic.  But what exactly does that mean?  What is autism?  And what are the promises, perils and politics of pharmaceutical intervention - could, should autism be treated?

This podcast features some of the key points raised by autistic people and their families at an event held at Kings College, University of London in late October 2014  to discuss the EU AIMS project (European Autism Interventions - A Multicentre Study for Developing New Medications).  To play this edited version click the button above.  A podcast of the full, unedited, event can be found here.

The event was chaired by Sandy Starr, Progress Educational Trust

Speakers were:

Prof Ilina Singh, King’s College London

Prof Declan Murphy, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London

Prof Richard Ashcroft ,Queen Mary, University of London

Virginia Bovell:  Ambitious About Autism

Russell Stronach:  Autistic UK

Importantly, as Ilina Singh and Sandy Starr say, autism has multiple claims on those involved in this event, both speakers and participants. Many are living with autism or are parents of children with autism.

Autism affects how someone communicates with and relates to other people, it can also affect how they make sense of the world.  But it is what is called a ‘spectrum condition’ – which means that different autistic people are affected in different ways depending where they are on the spectrum.  And it’s a wide spectrum - some autistic people have above average intelligence and some have severe learning disabilities.

So, autism can be described (although as Richard Ashcroft said at the event, 'when you have met one person with autism, you have met one person with autism') but almost nothing is known about why one in a hundred of us will have the diagnosis.  Are the causes genetic, hormonal, social,or is it something to do with the wiring of the brain – or is it a combination of those things?  No one knows.

And that is why the EU AIMS project has been set up.  It is the largest ever academic/industry collaboration aimed at understanding autism and finding new methods for developing drugs for the autism spectrum disorder.

It is led by Kings college London (with partners in 13 other centres of academic excellence around Europe) and by Pharmaceutical company Roche, in partnership with other huge global pharma companies.

Although it is clear that new drugs are the longer term aim of the project (and there is no evidence for the efficacy of any of the current treatments for the core symptoms of autism), the first phase is about understanding Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).  And there is much to understand.  The EU AIMS project has brought together researchers from diverse backgrounds –genetics, neuroscience and cellular biology – and they are all beavering away looking for an answer to the question – what is autism?

So we’ve got big pharma and we’ve got academic researchers. But where are the people with autism and their families?  They live day in day out with autism, they must have crucial insights and experience to feed into the research programme….  Given the fact that the scientists don’t know what autism is, surely their knowledge and perspective is  indispensable.

That gap has been recognised - although perhaps a little late in the day given that EU AIMS is in its second year. This event was just one of a series of events around Europe planned for the next few months.

A video describing the work of EU AIMS can be found here

Photo:  Snorkeling at Surfers for Autism by Robert Neff

What would it mean to develop medical treatment for the core features of autism?

Recent research has enriched our understanding of the biology of autism, as well as the social experiences of being autistic, but the core biological features of autism are still not well understood.

Any medication for the core symptoms of autism is thus still some way off in the future. Nonetheless, much research is now looking for biological markers for which treatments might be developed.

‘EU-AIMS’ is a collaboration seeking new methods for the development of biological markers and drug treatments for autism. There is considerable support for such an endeavour, including from groups representing autistic people, and their families and allies. However, other autistic people, some autism self-advocacy groups, and some ethical and legal scholars, are concerned about autism coming to be defined only as a biological disorder in need of treatment – and have called for wide debate on the relationships between biology, treatment, and difference in autism.

This public dialogue, organised by the Ethics Advisory Board of EU-AIMS, brings together autism advocates and self-advocates, psychiatrists, and ethicists, to discuss these issues. 

Treating Autism: full recording of EU AIMS dialogue October 2014

An edited version of the even can be found here.

"Nature has been defined as a woman, and both nature and women were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women,"

says Dr Vandana Shiva, world renowned Indian environmentalist, activist and scientist, in this conversation with Pod Academy's Lucy Bradley about her book, Ecofeminism (co-authored with Maria Mies, Zed Books).

This podcast, which also includes the presentation by Vandana Shiva at SOAS, in October 2014, is produced and presented by Lucy Bradley.

Vandana Shiva has written many books, (including Staying Alive-Women, Ecology and Development;  Monocultures of the Mind;  and Soil not Oil) and Lucy started by asking her how this book, EcoFeminism, came about:

Vandana Shiva:   Well the book has a very interesting genesis. Maria Mies had written Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale, I had written Staying Alive and that had done very well and it was the first time a title was connecting, the issues of the paradigm of development happening to women in the third world and what was happening to ecosystems in the third world. Zed [publishers] asked if both of us could do a book combining North and South perspectives. Of course we didn’t have the time to actually sit together so we just decided to write our chapters and share them every month.

And it shows there are common patterns [being experienced in these different places] because we’d write chapters and they’d be about the similar phenomena. And one was in rich, rich, rich Germany and the other was in India - which at the time we wrote it was not part of this ‘shining’ India campaign – and the book chapters then just fell into place, not because we’d planned and said we’ll write chapters on this, but because both Maria and I do thinking engaged in activism.

There’s an illusion that you have to be either an intellectual or an activist and the two don’t meet. In my view, real reflection of the world we’re in can only come from engagement in that world, not by sitting in an ivory tower and imagining you know all. When you don’t write with a vested interest, when don’t write because you are serving some master, when you write in the freedom of your mind and your spirit, with a deep connection of compassion and involvement and inclusion with every being and every person whose being trampled on you don’t get dictated [to].

Lucy Bradley: And what’s the main thesis of the book?

VS: Eco feminism is really looking at the dominant world view and structures it has created which have been driven by the convergence of capitalism and patriarchy, and looking at it from the point of view of nature and women. This is for a number of reasons, first because the oppression of nature and women served the building of this paradigm; nature was defined as a woman and both were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women and it is basically in a way waking us up to see the illusion that capital creates.

The new edition of Ecofeminism of course is an update. [But] everything we said –whether it was the violence had just gotten worse and whatever we said about alternatives have just flourished better, and I’m sure if we were to reissue twenty years from now, I don’t’ know if we will be around, but the two trends will just have deepened.

LB: You have anticipated my next question, is ecofeminism gathering momentum?

VS: when we wrote ecofeminism there was a whole new generation of young women who were fed up with academic feminism which had in a way totally turned it’s back on the women’s movement. We mustn’t forget that women’s studies grew out of the womens’ movement and in the early days ...

These days most universities actively help their researchers develop their ideas into products for market.  It's called the commercial exploitation of research.  One such support is the Impact Acceleration Account (IAA)  at Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which aims to accelerate the process of research exploitation in order to enhance the impact of past, present and future EPSRC funded projects.In this podcast Dr Radu Sporea visits a showcase event to talk to some of the researchers taking part.

The projects he hears about include

Pervasive Intelligence Ltd's intelligent sofware that enables museums and art galleries to put together an app to augment their exhibitions at a fraction of the cost of most packages of this type.  The museum visitor has the app on their smartphone, they point it at an exhibit and can get a wide range of different types of information about the artefact. But more than that, the museum can track the visitor's journey through the exhibition and gain valuable visitor statistics which enable them to enhance/streamline the experience.

Tom Mee from the Chemical Engineering Department describes his project that helps the NHS with demand planning - it could revolutionise cancer treatment in the UK.

Plastipack swimming pool covers that heat the water in the pool AND inhibit algae growth- other covers do one or the other.  This is a major advance.

Photo by Kev Shine

More and more women are going into the law as solicitors, barristers, legal executives, academics.  Indeed, in England and Wales more women than men now qualify as barristers.  But far fewer women get promoted to the highest levels. There is only one woman, Brenda Hale, on the UK Supreme Court.

Around the world, feminists have been developing an important critique of legal systems and the assumptions underpinning law making.

So what does it mean, 'being a feminist barrister'? Two feminist lawyers, Alison Diduck, Professor of Law at University College London, and barrister and novelist Elizabeth Woodcraft spoke at a meeting of the Haldane Society - Pod Academy was there to record what they said.

Elizabeth Woodcraft, whose latest collection of short stories, A Sense of Occasion has just been published, made another podcast for Pod Academy, about feminist legal judgments, what would be the impact of having feminism informing the writing of legal judgments. The podcast features supreme court judge Justice Baroness Brenda Hale and Professor Rosemary Hunter of Queen Mary College, Univ of London and Professor Rosemary Auchmuty, of Reading University.

Photo:  Mike Cough/Blogtrepreneur

'Virtual economies' are all around us, from social media, to bitcoin, to the games on our smartphones. But what exactly is a virtual economy?   And is there anything that these virtual economies can teach us about 'real world' economics?

Pod Academy's Alex Burd returned to the Oxford Internet Institute to speak to Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow there.  Alex previously interviewed Vili about Bitcoin for us (podcasts: Bitcoin 1  and Bitcoin 2).

This time he went to talk about Vili's new book, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (by Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, MIT Press, 2014)

 

 

In developing digital games, designers often develop an economy within the game itself.  These economies can drive the game, just as an economy does in the real world.  Then there is bitcoin - is that developing into a useable currency?  And can we learn anything about economics from understanding what is involved in clicking 'like' or 'retweet'? Vili became intrigued by what these virtual economies might teach us.  He started by explaining that he and Edward Castronova first got the idea for the book at a conference of digital game developers in San Francisco:

Vili Lehdonvirta:  I’ve been going every year for the past 5 years to a digital developers' conference to give a talk there about what the academic study of virtual economies can teach game developers and digital developers. In 2010 I was there on a panel about virtual economies in online games, it was a panel where all of the panelists were academics and the game developers were quizzing us. One of the questions was

‘What should I read if I want to make use of economics and economic sociology. Should I just pick up an economic textbook.’

My co-author, Edward Castranova, was also on that panel. The two of us thought ‘well, if you pick up an economics textbook in theory everything is the same. But in practice everything is focused on very different objectives'.

Then we thought, we’ll write the text book for you! Obviously we also wanted to make it interesting to academics so it’s a slightly broader book than just for developers.

Alex Burd: So you you wanted to write a book for developers who wanted to know more about economics and academics who wanted to know more about games.

VL: That’s right, game developers and digital developers more broadly. Not just games but anyone who is developing online communities or shared information pools or crowd sourcing systems or a new virtual currency – that’s one of the audiences.

The other audience is academics and social scientists who are interested in media and social communications and are interested in behaviour and power in digital media.

Basically we’re arguing to scholars that if you want to understand how digital media affects behaviour, whose power it enhances, what kind of behaviours are valued and privileged, and what kind of constraints and budgets are placed on use, then you really have to take this economic perspective on digital media. You can’t just treat it as communication, as speech, as abundant bits that are only restricted by creativity.

There also these very concrete constraints and choices and ownership and exclusivity that are programmed into the infrastructure of digital media, everything from social media to numerous games that people play every day. And understanding that is crucial for any scholar studying digital media.

AB: Looking at social media specifically, it’s about being able to put some kind of value on the interactions that users have with publishers. What value someone clicking 'like', or someone clicking 'retweet', has?

VL: It’s that, yes, but it goes beyond just economic value. Microeconomics fundamentally is a science of choice, choice under constraint.

What is the universe made of?  What is 'dark matter'? Why is the universe still expanding? These are just some of the questions astrophysicist Professor Katherine Freese tackles in this wonderfully accessible interview with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot.

Katherine Freese, is the George Eugene Uhlenbeck Collegiate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan  and author of The Cosmic Cocktail: Three parts dark matter, the inside story of the epic quest to solve one of the most compelling enigmas of modern science—what is the universe made of?

 

 

The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe—from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars—constitute only 5 percent of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The rest is known as dark matter and dark energy, because their precise identities are unknown. 

Prof Freese explains that new galaxies come about when dark matter clumps together, indeed it is dark  matter that dominates structure formation rather than atoms. However, we are not sure what dark matter actually is (though the favourite candidate is WIMPS (weakly interactive massive particles))

Prof Freese is one of the world's leading astrophycists, but this is an interview that the layperson can enjoy.  For example, she talks of telescopes as 'time machines' - light takes 10 minutes to reach us from the sun, but the further out into space we look, towards distant galaxies, the further back in time was the light emitted, maybe even a million years ago.

'My secret mission is to encourage young people, especially young women, to become scientists', says Katherine Freese,   'When people talk about creativity, they think about the arts - but it is scientists who are in the sweet spot here'.

The New Scientist magazine said of The Cosmic Cocktail:

Physicist Katherine Freese drinks deep of her life's adventures and cosmic mysteries alike in her captivatingly frank book The Cosmic Cocktail

Podcast produced by Lee Millam

What makes us happy? It is not just how we think but how we act, says Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author of Happiness by Design.

Professor Paul Dolan: For me happiness is in our experiences of life. Things that we feel day to day, moment to moment. And [in the book] I talk about pleasure and purpose.

OK, so my name is Paul Dolan, I’m at London School of Economics and my book is called ‘Happiness by Design - Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life’. So, happy lives are ones that contain some balance; it’s not the same for everybody and it is not in equal measures. But some kind of balance between things that we find fun on the one hand and things that we find fulfilling on the other.

Music: Abstract Nostalgic Fractals Systems – Floating In A Lake Of Happiness

PD: Well, it is a subjective experience. I think everything ultimately matters because it makes us feel better, so I can describe to you the things I think are pleasurable and the things that I find purposeful.  And I can also give you a good sense of how much I find them pleasurable and purposeful.  And equally, of course, things that I find painful and things that I find pointless, so I think we are now getting a better insight into the quantities and natures of those elements.

 Music: Abstract Nostalgic Fractals Systems – Floating In A Lake Of Happiness

Vox pop: Happiness for me is a very ethereal thing, I think. By that I mean that it is very difficult to say what is, and it can be different, at different stages of my life. But in essence, happiness for me, as I have grown older, is quite a few intangible things, things which make me think that life is worth it, so it is spending time with the people I want to be with, it’s not just living from moment to moment but actually just being in the moment and doing the things that are most important. So the places are really important for me, and often, actually, it is later on that you realise the happy times; well I am getting better at that.

PD: We are getting many observations on many people over many years, and there seems to be something sensible coming through from the answers people give us. We get association with some things which you would expect them to be associated with, you know, poverty makes people more miserable but being rich doesn’t make people happy.   So there are some nice insights coming through from this data. Time we spend with other people that makes us feel nice, time spent on trains and on tubes and on buses, not so nice

Music: Blue Ducks – Floss Suffers From Gamma Radiation

Vox pop: The things that make me happy are: spending time with my friends and family, going out for dinner, going to watch my football team play football, playing with my cat.

PD: Well I think how we use our time is absolutely critical, it’s the scarcest thing we have got right?  The few moments we have been talking now, or I have been talking now, are moments closer to death and it is time I won’t ever get back, so I think it is incumbent on us all to think about how we use that time and just reorient some of it away from things that we find painful and pointless. And spend a bit more time, you know, with things that we find pleasurable and purposeful which would include spending time with people we like being with; will include spending a bit more time outdoors, maybe listening to music, all of these things, I think most use of us know if we stop and think for a moment, would make us feel happier. The interesting question is why we don’t do more of it? And helping others too , makes us feel nice, so all these things that we get good feedback for if we paid attention to those experiences but one of the reasons why we don’t...

In October 2013, the British government gave a green light to the UK's first nuclear power station in a generation.  It will be built at Hinckley Point in Somerset by a consortium which is led by France's EDF Energy and includes Chinese investors.

The government is backing nuclear energy and is guaranteeing to pay £92.50 per megawatt hour for the electricity generated, twice the current wholesale price.

Professor Keith Barnham of Imperial College, author of The Burning Answer, says there are many reasons to think this is far from a sound proposition - not only do we not know the carbon footprint of nuclear power, but the price guarantee for the consortium may end up being way above the costs of energy in 10 years time, with the taxpayer having to foot the extra bill.

This short podcast is an extended extract from Prof Barnham's interview with Dr Radu Sporea of the Surrey University Advanced Technology Institute, in which they discuss the potential for renewables to meet all our energy needs.

You can find the full interview between Keith Barnham and Radu Sporea, Solar power, the burning answer?  It looks at the potential of renewables, in particular solar power.

Photo: Reactor by Paul Stevens .  Photo taken at the decommissioned nuclear reactor in Dounraey, Scotland

We've got to beat global warming within 50 years, and renewables are the way to do it according to Professor Keith Barnham of Imperial College, London, author of The Burning Answer, in this conversation with Dr Radu Sporea of Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute.

Photovoltaics should be at the heart of our energy generation, says Prof Barnham, - even on a gloomy English afternoon, he reckons he can heat all his hot water from solar power.

Professor Barnham, who has worked at Cerne and Berkley,  is a leading researcher and developer of silicon solar cells and, for a while, his team held the world record for the most efficient version of this rapidly improving technology.  Despite the naysayers, he is confident that renewables can deliver, if we are prepared to invest in their development.  It is about action, decision, attitude, a global effort is needed.

That global effort needs governments and scientific establishments to invest, says Prof Barnham.  But he believes we can all do something - switch to all renewable electricity suppliers, use ground source heat pumps, and get involved in one of the growing number of local action groups producing their own electricity.

We have produced a separate short podcast, Nuclear, a safe bet?, drawn from the same interview between Keith Barnham and Radu Sporea,  specifically looking in more detail at nuclear power. 

 

The Burning Answer by Keith Barnham ..."cuts through the current morass of fossil-fuel and nuclear lobbyists' negative propaganda with a clear and original vision for solar power."  (Review in The Guardian)