Pod Academy

Disaster and emergency management expert, Samantha Ridler, explores the beginning of modern seismology .

Samantha Ridler

The earth has, since it creation been convulsed by earthquakes.   But mankind has only relatively recently come to study them in a scientific manner.  And much of this is thanks to an Englishman called John Milne.

It is perhaps surprising that a man born in Liverpool in the 1850 is considered by some as the ‘Father’ of seismology.  After all the UK experiences very few earthquakes  that are of a scale even noticeable by residents. The majority of earthquakes that the UK does experience are often out in the North Sea.

However John Milne studied Geology and Mining in the UK and was sent to Japan to teach about these subject, to the Japanese that had only a few decades earlier been forced from seclusion to open up to the rest of the world by the US.

Now Japan is very different to the UK in it’s Geology.  Japan is part of the Pacific ring of fire and sits on top of the junction of 4 tectonic plates pushing and grinding against each other,  which means it quite regularly experiences earthquakes of a moderate to severe nature.  However at the time nobody knew about ‘Tectonic plates’ -  the Japanese superstitiously believed the reason they experienced so many earthquakes, was that beneath Japan there was a large Catfish (or Namazu in Japanese) and this huge catfish was pinned down by a god called Kashima -  whenever the god wasn’t watching or neglected his duties this catfish would wriggle and thrash and it was this wriggling and thrashing that  caused the earth to shake.

John Milne

So John Milne who arrived in Japan in 1876 to teach about geology, would not have been there long before he noticed the earthquakes and decided to study them.

It must have been a very exciting time to be in Japan because in that period Japan was experiencing rapid change.  The majority of men and women still wore Kimonos, there were still some Samurai wearing swords and some married Japanese women would still paint their teeth black.  There was rapid development with western railroads being built, traditional wooden housing being cleared for large masonry structures and western influences creeping into a place long seeped in tradition.

In 1880 a moderate earthquake shook Yokohama – a seaport town not far from Tokyo and populated by many westerners.  And it was after this quake that John Milne called together a meeting of the Japanese Seismological Society the first such society in the world –  and as no 'science of seismology' existed at the time, consisted of a  mix of scientist, engineer and amateurs.  Their first task was to try and create a measurement device for earthquakes.  At the time the European scales for assessing earthquake size was based on damage and cracking to masonry structures, but in Japan, despite the rapid growth, there were relatively few of these  - Japanese traditional wood housing would either wobble and stay upright( with little damage), or be completely flattened providing few degrees of variation to scale earthquake size.

The seismographic device created was a collaborative effort between Milne and two others, Ewing and Grey.  It used a Horizontal pendulum to detect shifts in the earth which is still a concept used in the core of many seismographs today.

 

 

Although Japan has the longest written record of Earthquakes (due to it’s temples keeping records of such events), no centralised system for monitoring existed.  If you felt an earthquake in your village, you would not know where it’s epicenter was or if people in other villages had experience the same earthquake to a greater or lesser extent than yourself.

John said he had ‘Earthquakes for breakfast, lunch and supper’ in Japan,

Mathematician Vicky Neale, senior teaching associate in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in the University of Cambridge and director of studies at Murray Edwards College, is excited.

She’s been watching some recent breakthroughs that mathematicians around the world have been making in a huge and open collaboration on an ancient mathematical problem. Neale tells Adam Smith how she is now building the news into her work that aims to improve the ways maths is taught.

This podcast is produced and presented by Adam Smith

 

Adam Smith: I’m listening to a story about a lightbulb moment. That second when a school pupil’s eyebrows soar and her head lifts up: she’s got it. In this case, she’s found a solution to an algebra problem.

Vicky Neale

Vicky Neale ...She suddenly realised that this algebra, which she’d sort of been introduced to at school, that she sort of half understood, that she could see why these manipulations worked. We drew a little picture, we talked about it, but she also suddenly understood how that had helped her to answer a problem. She’d been trying some numerical patterns, which is really important, that’s a lot of what mathematicians do, but we were chatting about how the next stage is to try and come up with a convincing argument.

I might use the word ‘proof’, that’s sort of technical jargon, and she said, “But I’m not going to be able to do that ‘cause I can’t check all of these examples.” And I said, “That’s right, you’re going to have to come up with some other kind of justification.”

And via this algebra, by a little calculation, she was able to do that and see that it was always going to be true and for her, I could see, “Oh, this is something a bit different from what I’m used to, I’m quite excited by that, I can see how this algebra gives me the capacity to do something much more than I ever thought I was going to be able to do...”

AS: I’m Adam Smith. Welcome to Pod Academy.

Vicky spends most of her time on a project with researchers and teachers trying to improve the ways mathematics is taught. Running beneath all of this work, like an underground river, is the enterprise of mathematics itself—the questions and the problems are flowing and bouncing off rocks and pushing forwards constantly through university mathematics departments across the world. I met Vicky at the college and started by saying that it seems to me that maths is a bit like Marmite—people either love it or hate it...

VN: That’s right and I find that very sad for two reasons. One is that I think very often the people who are saying that who don’t understand why I’m so excited about maths, that’s because they don’t know what it is that I’m excited about. They have this perception that’s very different from my perception. The other is that I think sometimes people have this perception that maths is an ability either you have or you don’t have. It just sort of depends how you were born. And I start from the perspective that everybody is capable of thinking as a mathematician, is everyone going to go and get a Fields Medal in mathematics—the equivalent of a Nobel Prize? No of course not, because not everybody is going to want to spend their time, immerse themselves in it, but I strongly believe that everybody has the capacity to make progress, to understand all sorts of things. And we see in schools, extraordinary examples where successful teachers, successful departments are able to have this impact, of course it's trying to help everybody to have a positive experience so that whatever they go on to do they don't feel that maths is not relevant to them, they don’t feel that they’re unable to engage with it.

AS: One of the other funny perceptions that a lot of people have about mathematics, probably myself included,

"Our minds are made up of all the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature - the architecture of our brains was born from the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happens in flowers, and jellyfish and Higgs particles..."

says astrophysicist Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities. Creative Writing, Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in his new book The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew. 

In this podcast he talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot about the Big Bang (apparently it wasn't like an explosion), and how the universe created time and space when it started to expand.  He also takes us on a trip around multiverses, the many universes that science predicts exist, but which may be very different indeed from our own universe.

But while it is possible that science may soon explain everything in the physical world, will it ever, he muses, be able to explain the feeling of being in love?

Professor Lightman is an astrophysicist and also a poet and novelist. His best selling novel,  Einstein's Dreams, about the young Albert Einstein working on his theory of relativity but troubled by dreams explores human beings' relationship to time. It has been translated into thirty languages.

It is this combination of science and humanities which is at the heart of this podcast.

The night sky, UK 2013, Michael J Bennett

In this podcast, David Garland, Professor of Sociology, Law at New York University and author of Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition talks to Benjamin Concannon Smith, co-host of the American Studies channel of the New Books Network. They explore....

- Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago?

- Many US states were in the vanguard of the 20th century abolition movement - what changed?

- Why does a country so concerned to contain the power of the state, nevertheless allow the state to take the lives of its citizens.

- Why are the majority of death sentences (which are always discretionary, never mandatory) meted out to black men convicted of killing white people - so that the death penalty is widely seen as 'legal lynching' among African Americans and Latinos.

- How come only 'Death Qualified Jurors', those who approve of the death penalty, get to sit on juries in murder cases, making murder juries overwhelmingly white and male?

- What is the role of aggravating evidence, 'victim impact statements'?

- In the past, executions (burning at the stake, firing squad, beheadings) were violent and public, designed to demonstrate power and control . What is the role of lethal injection in relative privacy?

Dr Garland's provocative study highlights the uneven application of capital punishment in America––a phenomenon widely discussed but rarely understood––and offers a succinct and thoughtful analysis of the historical roots of this contemporary issue.

The featured photograph concerns the execution of Troy Davis in 2011, in which Troy Davis was put to death for the 1989 killing of police officer, Mark McPhail.  Troy Davis's case illustrates many of the issues explored in this interview - the black man convicted of a white person's murder in a southern US state, the lengthy appeal process, the issue of doubt about the conviction and the the involvement of the victim's family in 'aggravation' statements.

Professor Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Peculiar Institution is the recipient of numerous awards including: 2012 Michael J. Hindelang Award (American Society of Criminology), 2012 Edwin H. Sutherland Award (American Society of Criminology), 2011 Barrington Moore Book Award (American Sociological Association), Co-Winner 2011 Mary Douglas Prize (American Sociological Association), A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011, and the 2010 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence.

"The Filipino is a truly global labour force. Filipino workers can be found in hundreds of countries around the world.  It is astounding to think that this archipelago in the middle of the Pacific can produce so many people who leave for so many destinations around the world,"

says Dr Robyn Rodriguez, assistant professor of Asian American Studies and author of Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World.

In this podcast, first made for New Books in Asian American Studies, part of the New Books Network,  Robyn Rodriguez explores 'labour brokerage' with Christopher Patterson of University of Washington. Labour brokerage describes how the Philippine state mobilises its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines.

Christopher started by asking Robyn how she came to write about ‘labour brokerage’.

Robyn Rodriguez:   I was born and raised in the bay area, and spent most of my growing up in Union City  California, which has a sizeable Filipino immigrant population.  For many Filipinos in the US, Union City is in our constellation of key sites for Filipino settlement.  I grew up in a place where literally the whole block was Filipino immigrants.  My schools – from kindergarten to high school - had a good number of Filipinos (it felt as if we were the majority, even if we weren’t!).  And my growing up in Union City shaped a lot of what would eventually become my research questions, and the core of my political activism, because so much of my academic work emerges from my political work as an immigrant rights advocate.

When I think and talk about my work, I’m talking about my scholarly work, but also about my activism.

I recall in high school, one of the big issues in the 80s was the proliferation of gangs and gang violence – particularly among Filipino Americans – and I started getting really involved with the different community based projects that were responding to gang violence, initiated by the Filipinos for Affirmative Action based in Oakland, now Filipino Advocates for Justice.  I got involved in different dialogues organised to facilitate better communication between the youth and their parents, dialogues between the police and the youth and parents – a number of different activities.  I think that was where my interest in Ethnic Studies began and that carried through into my undergraduate career.

I eventually attended UC Santa Barbara, where there was an Asian American Studies programme, and where I began to encounter ethnic studies as a student, and to think seriously about being an Asian American scholar.  Along the way I continued my organising work around immigration issues.  As student activists we also took Asian American studies into our own hands, not necessarily waiting to take courses, but to take what we were learning and to educate our peers, creating our own curriculum. That is where a lot of my work as a teacher and scholar began.

That shaped the questions that I would eventually seek to answer in my book, in large part because I continued to do activist organising work.

I entered graduate school in 1996 in the Department of Sociology, at UC Berkeley.  I continued to be involved in social justice work and was taking a keen interest in what was happening to Filipino migration.  1996 was just a year after the hanging of a Filipino domestic worker by the Singaporean government.  Many Filipinos had been falsely accused, there seemed to be a lot of elements to her conviction that seemed to be off (she was convicted of murder).

Christopher Patterson: Was this Flor Contemplacion?

RR: Yes.  A lot of Filipinos were concerned she might have been set up.

How good are we at understanding each other?

Other people are complicated,  so when we try to guess what they’re thinking we often get it wrong.  Even with our partners!  Research suggests that partners are hardly any better (and sometimes worse) at guessing what each other believe or feel than a stranger.

In this wide ranging conversation with Professor Nicholas Epley from Booth School of Business at Chicago University, and author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want,  Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot finds out about empathy, anthropomorphism, hubris and egocentricity.

One thing they discuss is how our egocentricity makes us feel far more noticeable than we are.  As David Foster Wallace said, in Infinite Jest,

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

This was confirmed in what Professor Epley describes as 'the most liberating experiment in the entire field of psychology'. Research by Kenneth Savitsky; Thomas Gilovich; Gail Berger and Victoria Medvec found that no one in a room remembered the person wearing a Barry Manilow teeshirt, whereas the wearer of the teeshirt, embarrassed to be seen in this way, thought 50% of the room would remember!

Other issues covered are: do we know what it is like to be tortured? or what it is like to be poor? and how modern warfare has distanced us from death (because if we are too close it is difficult to kill someone).

This is a fascinating exploration of what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make.

United Nations officials have called for a complete end to genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) to ensure the dignity, health and well-being of every girl. There has been much talk about 'zero tolerance'.  But is zero tolerance the most effective way to

end this abusive practice

?

A huge international drive against female genital mutilation (FGM) by women’s rights and health campaigners has resulted in the outlawing of FGM in many countries,. But it continues to be widely practised.

Amanda Barnes talks to Dr Kirrily Pells from the Young Lives research study at Oxford University’s International Development Department, about their research on FGM in Ethiopia.

Amanda Barnes:  Kirrily, a Young Lives study looked at FGM in Ethiopia and the efforts the government’s been taking to eliminate it there.

Kirrily Pells There’s considerable variation in the country between different ethnic and religious groups and between the different regions of the country in terms of the prevalence of FGM, which form of FGM and at what age it occurs.  For example, it’s less common in urban areas.

In 2011 the proportion of girls in urban areas who underwent FGM was around 15 per cent compared to 24 per cent in rural areas. And then between the different areas of the country it ranges from between ten percent in Addis Ababa, the capital city, to about 60 per cent in the Afar region in the east of the country.

And there are also differences in terms of what type of FGM is practised. In the north of the country it tends to be performed on girls shortly after birth and takes the form of cliterodectomy, which is the partial or total removal of the clitoris. The other form practiced in the northern region of the country is excision, which again involves the removal of the clitoris but also the removal of the inner labia or the inner and outer labia.  In the south of the country FGM tends to be performed just before puberty and it’s very much linked to adolescence and preparation for marriage: and the form practised there tends to be clitorodectomy again.   In the east of the country in the Afar and Somali regions of the country infibulation is practised, and this is what’s often viewed as the most extreme form of the practice where both the clitoris and inner and outer labia are cut off and then the resulting wound is sewn nearly shut, just leaving a small hole through which urine and menstrual blood can pass.

AB:  What’s the Ethiopian government doing at the moment to try and get parents to stop subjecting their daughters to FGM.

KP: The Ethiopian government has taken a very strong stance against FGM.  It’s designated it as a harmful traditional practice and it’s prohibited by the 2005 criminal code. And this sets out the theories of punishment, including fines and imprisonment, for both those who perform the cutting and also those who commission ceremonies: whether that’s parents or other members of the community.  And it’s also a crime to publically encourage the practicing of FGM.  Alongside the legislative efforts, the government has promoted a wide range of other preventative actions. This includes advocacy campaigns within schools and the media and encouraging local associations to also be active in promoting knowledge around the adverse health and social consequences.

Alongside the government there’s  also very active civil society. NGOs have been very active in trying  to combat FGM: both national and international NGOs. And there’s a national network of organisations that are working together to try and combat the practice. AB: So how much have things changed there then? KP: Well, within the country the prevalence of FGM is declining, although quite slowly, and also there’s variation between the different regions. For example, the percentage of mothers who had one daughter being circumci...

In a globalised market economy, even nations have been branding themselves. 'Cool Britannia', Brazil a vibrant world class player, Italy the nation of high fashion and great food are just some examples.  Can rebranding really maintain, extend, or even reconstitute the nation?

Jeff Pooley of Muhlenberg College, interviews Rutgers' Melissa Aronczyk, author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity.

This podcast first appeared on New Books in Communications, a channel of the New Books Network.

Melissa Aronczyk

In Branding the Nation, Melissa locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of a fiercely competitive global economy.

Tracking the history of the nation-branding phenomenon, Aronczyk recounts the rise and spread of the very idea of national “competitiveness,” a discourse that, in effect, created a market that branding specialists then tapped. The book engages with the large scholarly literature on nations and nationalism, arguing that nation branding should not be dismissed as merely the invasion of business practices into the national imaginary—though it has this character, undeniably—but that the practice should also be read as a discourse that maintains, extends, and reconstitutes the nation.

Based on dozens of interviews with nation-branding specialists over a five-year period, Aronczyk develops major case studies of Poland and Canada in particular, and substantial treatments of a number of other cases spanning the globe, including Botswana, Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Jamaica, and Libya. In Branding the Nation, Aronczyk tells the story of how national identity came to be seen, and sold, as a form of added value in a competitive global market, and how these campaigns fed back into the ongoing process of thinking, and imagining, the nation.

You might also be interested to see that just last month, The Atlantic carried an article about the 'rebranding of America'

In 1960 the Congo was in turmoil, facing instability, civil war and secession after its newly won independence.  It asked, not for the last time, for the help of the United Nations and UN troops were sent.

A year later, a Swedish aircraft on a peace mission carrying 16 people, one of them the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, circled over the rain forest of Central Africa.  As it came into land it crashed, killing all on board.

There has never been a satisfactory explanation of that plane crash, despite three inquiries. Unsurprisingly, conspiracy theories and speculation are legion.

Now, more than 50 years later, a Commission of distinguished jurists, has re-opened the case and they have come up with some startling new leads.

The Hammarskjöld Commission is a voluntary body of four international jurists who were invited by an international Enabling Committee to report whether in their view the evidence now available would justify the United Nations in reopening its inquiry pursuant to General Assembly resolution 1759 (XVII) of 26 October 1962.

The Panel of jurists, who make up the Commission are:

The Rt Hon Sir Stephen Sedley (Chair)

Swedish Ambassador Hans Corell

South African Justice Richard Goldstone

Justice Wilhelmina Thomassen (European Court of Human Rights)

You can download a copy of the Commission Report here.

Tess Woodcraft went along to Stephen Sedley's chambers in central London to discuss the Commission's findings. She began by asking him to describe the background to the events of that fateful night in 1961

SS:  Dag Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the UN, a Swede, very highly regarded, who was on a mission at the time of his death, to try to stop the break away of the province of Katanga from the newly independent Congo from escalating into a full scale civil war.  he was flying on the night of 17th September 1961, a Sunday, from Leopoldville in the Congo to Ndola in what was then Northern Rhodesia (and is now Zambia)to meet with the president of the breakaway state of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, to try to negotiate a ceasefire between his forces, which included a large number of European mercenaries, and the UN forces that were trying to pacify Congo.

The geo-political situation was complicated - it always is - but essentially it was a world we'd no longer recognise.  The US and the Soviet Union both supported the efforts of the UN to support de-colonisation, in particularl in Africa, and it was the colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal) who were opposing this in one form or another.

Britain, however, had a very interesting and ambivalent role.  On one hand, it was the parent country of Northern Rhodesia, which was then the Federation of Rhodesia. But it was also a loyal member of the UN, and regarded itself as bound to try to support the efforts of the UN to bring peace to the Congo and reunite it as a political entity - not withstanding that the government of N. Rhodesia were bitterly opposed to everything the UN was doing.  That ambivalence shows up in places in our report.

Tess Woodcraft: The UN was very new at that point, Dag Hammarskjöld was only the second Secretary General.  Do you think there is any significance in that?

SS: Yes.  Secretary General was a relatively new role, which Dag Hammarskjöld had done an astonishing amount to forge into a world diplomatic job, and had succeeded in securing the respect of most of the world political community.  There was nothing in his terms of employment that said he had to fly to combat zones to sort things out - he did it because it seemed to him the best way to carry out his mandate.

TW: That's interesting given the UN's continuing role in in Congo even now.

The abiding rhetoric of US foreign policy is 'freedom and democracy':

"We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom." [President Barack Obama, 2nd term inauguration speech].

But as David Sylvan, Professor of International Relations, and Former Head of the Political Science Department at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, co-author of the book US Foreign Policy in Perspective: Clients, Enemies and Empire, explains to Craig Barfoot, it really isn't quite like that.   Much of US foreign policy (as even the CIA would concede, says Professor Sylvan) revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them.  It is a peculiarly American form of imperialism.

Ranging over examples -  from US support for a monarchy in Saudi Arabia,           its support for coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile (when Henry Kissinger said, 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people'),              its role in persuading Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to step down, and its support for the military in Egypt, Professor Sylvan paints a picture of a US  foreign policy based on maintaining the status quo in its client states. Change is almost always seen as threatening.

The US has military bases in client states. US helicopters in S Korea

The book argues that having all these client states was not a grand planned strategy but one that emerged because of the policy instruments available to policymakers. That the US bureaucratic instruments themselves have created and maintained the situation of a client state empire.

Nevertheless although the US client empire differs from the European Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries in many respects (there is no direct government, for example), there are many similarities - US bases are sited in client countries, the US ambassador often has enhanced access to the client government and will often lecture it on such things as domestic spending or agricultural reform.

This book has a dedicated website featuring additional case studies and data sets,

Notes:

You might also be interested in Risa Arai's podcast Empire: The features of American global power in which she talks to Dr Alex Colas of Birbeck, University of London.