Pod Academy

"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on," said Winston Churchill.  If that was the case then, how much more valid is it today.  The explosion of social media and its ability to circulate and generate misinformaton has completely changed the political landscape.

And it has led to a whole new branch of journalism - political fact-checking.

This interview was first posted on the New Books Network and was conducted in the heat of the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign.  In it, Lucas Graves, assistant professor in the school of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison talks to James Kates about the emergence of fact checking as a necessary, if often maligned , attempt to get at the this elusive thing called 'truth'.

As George Orwell said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...."

Lucas Graves book,  Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism came out in 2016 from Columbia University Press

Photo of bumper sticker in parking lot near school. By WoodleyWonderWorks

Why and how should we interpret visual art?

With a vast historical sweep - from early medieval art on the walls inside the Basilica of San Vitale to Banksy's 2015 stencils of shipwrecked refugees on walls in Calais,  by way of Caravaggio, Nevelson and Rothko - author, artist and film maker  Gillian McIver looks at various theories of art criticism and helps us understand how to approach visual art.

This lecture was part of series on Thinking put on by the IF Project, the free university in London.  IF is an innovative project offering free humanities courses to young people who have been priced out of today's higher education market.[We have another podcast from the IF lecture series, looking at the relevance of studying history: here.]

Gillian McIver starts from the premise that

"The most important mechanism  for interpreting visual art is your own eyes and your ability to really see and to really look.....Go, stand in front of the work of art, literally, physically,  look at it. Walk around it, look at its texture, look at its colour..."

She goes on to explore how different approaches in art criticism can inform what and how we look.  She considers traditional ways of looking at art (eg the historical approach, looking at historical periods)  looking at influences and techniques, artistic movements, looking at the artist, and looking at the times in which the artist lived, the cultural and social environment in which the artwork operates.

Artworks considered are:

Basilica of San Vitale    Medieval

Hans Memling:  Virgin with the child and angel  (National Gallery, London)  Late Middle Ages

Titian:  Bacchus and Ariadne  (National Gallery, London)   Renaissance

Claude:  A Seaport  (National Gallery, London)   Baroque period.

David:  Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris)

John Singleton Copley  The Death of Major Pierson 6 January 1781  (Tate Britain, London)  History Painting

Also mentioned Henry Osawa Tanner - first major black artist in European tradition

Caravaggio: The Supper at Emmaus  (National gallery London)

Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus (Milan)

Mark Rothko:  Black on Maroon (Tate Modern, London)

Louise Nevelson: Black Wall (Tate Modern, London)

Also mentioned Robert Rauschenberg (forthcoming Tate Modern exhibition December 2016 - April 2017)

Nazeer Tambouli - site specific art on housing estate

Banksy: We're not all in the same boat. Calais.

Ericault: Raft of the Medusa (Louvre)

 

They say a fish can fall in love with a bird, but where would they live?

However, when it comes to fluid dynamics, birds and fish come from more similar neighbourhoods than you might think.  This podcast is about the physics of fish schooling and bird flocking and how these animals use their fluid environment - and each other - to get around.  That's schooling and flocking.

Dr Hassan Masoud is Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno and he recently co-authored a paper on the hydro dynamics of collective locomotion.  Birds fly in flocks and fish swim in schoools - so why?  It turns out that fluid dynamics can go a long way to answering that question.

Dr Masoud talks to Meg Rosenburg in this podcast which first appeared on Physics Central, the 'physics buzz blog' of the of the American Physical Society.

 

Photo: Starlings and sunset, Brighton by Joe Flintham

Always on our smartphones and other digital devices, we live in an expository society, says Prof Bernard Harcourt.  The landscape described in his new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colourful, stimulating, digital world a rich, bright world full of passion and jouissance–and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance.  This is digital exposure, exposing a great deal about our lives.

This podcast is an edited version of a longer interview which first aired on the New Books Network.

Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015) guides us through our new digital age, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual.

Other actors from advertisers to government agencies can compile huge amounts of information about who we are and what we do. Whether they use it to recommend other products to buy or track our movements, Harcourt argues that the influence and interests of other actors is often hidden from us. Despite leaks of classified materials about the extent of this surveillance, public outrage is limited and mild. The scale of data collection and tracking is not a national let alone a global scandal.

According to Exposed, our appetites are too well satisfied and our attentions too distracted. Harcourt prods us to practice digital disobedience, to tackle this digital exposure, lest we will remain in a digital mesh that will only continue to restrict our privacy and anonymity underneath its beautiful, shiny suit.

Watch 'Damn, Daniel' here.

Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age

Photo:  Smartphones by Esther Vargas

You may also like.........

http://podacademy.org/podcasts/digital-breadcrumbs-our-data-trail/

You

This is the second in our series on the 2016 US Presidential election, in which Alex Burd talks to Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. [ The first podcast, on Donald Trump can be found here.]

With the Democrat and Republican conventions now complete and the candidates confirmed, attention turns to the general election. Donald Trump, the self-appointed outsider, faces Hilary Clinton, the first female Presidential nominee in the history of the two main parties. Clinton is no stranger to government however, having been the First Lady of the United States, Senator for New York, and Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in a career of public service that spans three decades. The campaign has been vitriolic from the outset with Trump dubbing Clinton ‘crooked’, while Democrats and been quick to argue that Trump is unfit to hold the office. To predict that battle ahead I’ve been speaking Professor Peter Trubowitz, director of the US centre at the London School of economics. He explains why the he expects the upcoming election to be one of the most negative in history.

ProfessorTrubowitz: I've written and I think this, that this election is going to be about war, sex, and work. Both of these candidate have very high negatives. Both are up in the 50-60% ratio. It may not be unprecedented, maybe the 1968 campaign with Nixon, Wallace and Humphries was similar. It's very unusual and what it means is that both sides are going to hammer away at those unfavorable. And for Clinton what means is that she's going to go after Trump after on something where he scores very low which is a sense that he's in command on the issues, that he's reliable, and his ratings there are unbelievably low. She's going to focus on who's got the finger on the nuclear button. That may not be as salient as it was in the 1964 election when Lyndon Johnson and when people were worried about Barry Goldwater because he talked very loosely about nuclear weapons and using them and I think she's going to hammer that very hard and she's going to get a lot of traction. What Trump is going to do very hard is go after her husband. He'll be able to do two things there, he'll be able to raise issues about the Clintons and whether they can be trusted and where they've taken the country before, but it's also a way to remind the public that Hilary Clinton is not new and she's part of the establishment. By drawing the connection with the husband and the presidency in the 1990s.

Alex Burd: Hilary Clinton has built her campaign on the promise of being a solid, reliable hand on the tiller – in contrast to the erratic and unconventional Trump. With over twenty years experience her time in public life has not been mistake-free and she will not be able to ride the same wave of optimism and hope that carried Barack Obama to power. Her judgement and honesty has been called into question by her opponents following terrorist attacks in Benghazi in 2012 and her use of a private email server when secretary of state.

PT: The way this game is played is that you look for the other sides vulnerabilities and you go after your opponent’s strengths. She comes across who's someone who's much more calculating and steady and she'll really try to play on her experience but I think he'll go after that and say experience doesn’t equal judgment and so forth as Bernie Sanders has done in the Primaries. I think both of them have room to go after the other way and to play on the others unfavorable. Her weakness, especially with young people is that she's not viewed as trustworthy. And whether that's fair or not you can see it in the poll results. While Trump as that shortcoming as well, he'll go after her on that dimension. He'll try and driver her negatives higher,

"The American dream is dead.  I will bring it back and we will make America great again....."

In nine months Donald Trump has stunned the political establishment, brushing aside other contenders to become the Republican nominee in the race for the White House. How has the man made famous for saying 'You're fired' come so close to landing the biggest job in the western world?

To find out, Alex Burd went to talk to Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs, who has been trying to untangle the secrets of the rise of Trump.

Business magnate and reality TV star Donald J Trump announced his intention to run for the Republican presidential nomination on 16 June 2015. His announcement was met with bemusement and ridicule. Within nine months he had stunned the political establishment and forced his final opponent, Ted Cruz, into withdrawing from the race. In that time, he’s announced his intention to build a Great Wall on the border with Mexico, ban all Muslims from entering the United States, and to Make America Great Again.

Prof Trubowitz started by discussing the moment at which he feared Donald Trump had a chance at becoming President.

 

Prof Peter Trubowitz: First you know my reaction was that he was just looking for air time and publicity. But it became clear pretty early on that he was getting some political traction, but the reason that I took him seriously early was because I thought the Republican field was weak. I never thought that Jeb Bush was going to get a lot of traction inside the party, he just had too much baggage given his brother's presidency and the legacy within the Republican party, let along the body politic in general. Ted Cruz I felt was too far to the right and Marco Rubio too inexperienced. There were some other possibilities, some other people that could get traction and I will say that I always thought that the candidate that would be strongest for the Republican party was not trump, but was Jon Kasich. I think that he would have done very well with independents and conservative democrats and would've posed a serious, serious problem to Hilary Clinton.

Alex Burd: The Republican Party has long valued experience and proven leadership in its Presidential candidates but involvement in Washington politics became a smear in many of the recent Primaries. Much of this is down to the development of the Tea Party movement which began in response to Barack Obama’s election and inauguration in 2009. The group combines social and fiscal conservatism with an embedded distrust of authority and government. From small beginnings it has become a key contingent of the Republican party and an increasingly important factor in determining the GOP’s direction.

PT: You can't understand in a sense Trump's rise without understanding the level of anger and resentment inside the Republican Party. You know the rise of the Tea party and its frustration with it's won leadership and the Washington establishment - especially the Democrats, but not only. And that is one of the things that made Donald Trump so attractive to many inside the party, simply because he's viewed as untainted by the political and Washington establishment and the political process. Of course the irony there is this is somebody that has worked the inside of the Republican and Democrat party for years, nevertheless he's never held elected office, he's not party of the Washington establishment. He kind of came up, not self made by any means but pursued an independent trajectory separate from politics. But I think that so many of them were painted with that brush and I think because of he Bush name he just couldn't disassociate himself from that even though he's never held office in Washi...

"We always write - and read - history thought the prism of our contemporary concerns," So why study history?  What do we mean by 'history'?

This podcast is a lecture by Dr Richard Barnett, which was part of a course on Thinking run by the IF Project, the free university in London.

"We always write - and read - history thought the prism of our contemporary concerns," says Dr Barnett.  "There is no such thing as an objective reading of history.  This doesn't render history completely subjective, what it means is that history is always coloured, always brought to light, and sometimes distorted, by our present preconceptions, our own concerns, our political concerns and identity where we stand in our own societies, where we want to go.  So history in some ways always serves the needs of the present.  That doesn't make it worthless, in some ways it can make it even more valuable."

Drawing on the story of John Snow - seen as the father of epidemiology because of his work on cholera - Dr Barnett explores history, heritage, historiography, and historical sources (whose voices are heard and whose voices are absent).  He starts with a visit to the John Snow pub in London's Soho........

John Snow pub, Soho, London

Pictures:

Skull: dncnh

John Snow pub by Ewan Munro

How does life work? How does nature produce the right numbers of zebras and lions on the African savanna, or fish in the ocean? How do our bodies produce the right numbers of cells in our organs and bloodstream?

Biologist Sean B Carroll talks to Craig Barfoot about his latest book, The Serengeti Rules.They explore  how life works at vastly different scales.

We find out how wolves can change the physical shape of rivers and why, on the plains of the Serengeti, 150kg is the number which determines whether you will likely get eaten or not.

This is a thoughtful and at times humorous conversation about the state of our world's wildlife areas and the rules which determine how nature operates.

Reviews of the book:

"In The Serengeti Rules, the author goes from E. coli to elephants to lay out the basic rules that shape so much of what’s around us and inside us."--Brian Switek, Wall Street Journal

"In this remarkably engaging book, Carroll . . . persuasively argues that life at all levels of complexity is self-regulated, from the inner workings of cells to the larger relationships governing the Serengeti ecosystem. . . . Carroll superbly animates biological principles while providing important insights."--Publishers Weekly

"The Serengeti Rules is one of the best biology books for general readers I've ever encountered. It should be required reading for every college student, regardless of major."--Andrew H. Knoll, Harvard University

"A compelling read filled with big, bold ideas. . . . Through compelling storytelling, key insights of distant, isolated biologists are brought to life. . . . I suspect that many will find new insights and inspiration here… Carroll has made a strikingly clear case that ecology is a science on a par with molecular biology and genetics. In many ways, this book is an homage to Charles Elton. . . . Building on his vision, Carroll provides a passionate motto for the twenty-first century: ‘better living through ecology.’ Are the Serengeti Rules a panacea? No, but Carroll convincingly reveals them to be a sturdy foundation for the future of biology, for human well-being, and for conservation and management."--Brian J. Enquist, Nature

"A thought-provoking challenge to complacency."--Kirkus

Once upon a time, in the land of Great Britain, Amanda woke up to the sun shining on a bright Monday morning. Before she got out of bed, she opened the BBC weather app on her phone  to check the weather for the day ahead.  She had started leaving her trail of digital breadcrumbs.......

She took a shower, made some breakfast, brushed her teeth and left the house.  Amanda used Facebook to send a message to her friend telling him she was almost at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom.

Her friend replied:  “No you’re not!  Your message location says you’re still at home!”

Oops. Amanda was busted!

She tapped her Oyster Card at the Underground Station and read the news on The Guardian app using the Wifi available underground.

Arriving at Russell Square Station, she bought coffee at a cafe using her contactless card and made her way to SOAS for her first lecture of the day.

Amanda was blissfully unaware that her morning schedule had created a trail of “Digital Breadcrumbs.”  This means, she can be traced and tracked through the apps she accessed and the technology she used.  But what does that really mean?  Who has access to this information? And can it be used against us?

Are we all blissfully unaware like Amanda?  And should we be worried?

Welcome to Digital Breadcrumbs by George Philip, Jennifer Anne Lazo, Rooham Jamali and Rudy Al Jaroodi. Our podcast explores the digital trails or digital footprints we create in our daily lives. 

The majority of applications we use require our location information. We willingly tag ourselves in specific locations through social media platforms, and freely use contactless cards and debit cards, which give retailers, banks and various other organisations information about our daily movements.  We are constantly monitored on CCTV and everything we research online is data being collected or stored.  In this episode, we’ll be talking to lecturers and students to discover the real cost of our digital footsteps.

So first of all, what is a digital trail?  We interviewed Dr. Elisa Oreglia, a lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at SOAS, to find out more about our digital footprints.

Dr. Elisa Oreglia: A “digital trail” is a trace you leave behind you. It’s almost like Breadcrumbs. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally when you use a mobile phone; but also when you use a computer, or when you use really any kind of technology that has a chip in it.

Basically, when you have a phone, you have a series of censors and you have this constant background communication between the phone and the cell towers, but also if its connected online between the phone and the internet so there are all these apps that are getting information about your phone, about your environment. 

Narrator: Dr. Oreglia tells us that all this communication is sent elsewhere, it doesn’t just stay on your phone.  And it’s constant.  It accumulates over time.  But where is it being stored? According to Dr. Oreglia, it is going to several different places. The signal on your mobile phone tells your mobile phone network where you are.

EA: But then you have (you know) your GPS, that might be signals that go through a satellite, so it's a system to position your phone.

Narrator: She goes on to tell us about how information in your apps is stored locally and via the internet to the app's creators. The information can be dispersed through Wifi, or through your phone’s operator.  Basically, there are a lot of apps, a lot of background processes and often, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing.

We then proceeded to ask Dr. Oreglia about what happens to data we have researched.

EA: When you do a search on google,

When the gun is replaced by the melody: how does music resist?

‘Even if they don’t have a message, the act of actually playing music itself is resistance,’ says Dr. Sara McGuiness, senior teaching fellow in Music at SOAS.

Classical Thai musician Luang Pradit Pairoh fought through the melodies of his songs surrounded by oppression; Ahmed Maher signed petitions to bring down the Morsi government in Egypt whilst at concerts around the country, and the melody of an old Catalonian song travelled almost a century of different resistance movements.

This is a podcast of musical adventures. It features conversations with musicians, writers and academics with special guest appearances from random people pulled off the street.

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The podcast was produced by Lara Şarlak, Fino Patanasiri, Diego M. Mosquera and Kelly O’Donovan, students on  'Digital broadcasting', an MA course taught  as part of the skills training options offered to MA students studying within the school of arts (which combine music, media and history of art and archeology) at SOAS, University of London. This course exposes students to the latest thinking in digital podcasting, social media research and social entrepreneurship. During the course students make a group podcast on a theme related to research at SOAS and are encouraged to disseminate them as widely as possible using digital platforms. Pod Academy is involved in the teaching on the course.

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Ahmed Maher: Listening to the concert on a CD and attending one on the street, in the middle of everything cannot be compared to one another.

Esteve Sala:  They were trying to mobilize a society against the dictatorship with their songs.

Fino Patinasiri:  So instead of fighting back actively, he chose to use music as a weapon of hidden resistance.

 

Vox Pops

E contare e camminare insieme, lo sai fare?

Sì, penso di sì...

Allora forza. Conta e cammina. Dai.

Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto..

[Song: Modena City Ramblers (I Cento Passi) ]

Vox pop: My resistance song is “i cento passi.” It is the story of the son of a mafia boss who resisted against his father and go killed in Italy, and no one ever spoke about it for a long time.

[Song: Chuck Berry (Roll Over Beethoven)]

Vox pop: “Roll Over Beethoven” is a protest song because it was a sort of protest against almost a sort of your parents’ culture, your grandparents’ culture.

[Song: Ton Steine Scherben (Live on TV)]

Vox pop: “Ton Steine Scherben”

[Song: Bob Marley (Exodus)]

Vox pop: Umm, “Exodus”? Bob Marley.

[Song: Victor Jara (Los Estudiantes)]

Vox pop: “Los Estudiantes” by Victor Jara.

[Song: I Solisti Dell’Oltrepo Pavese (Bella Ciao)]

Vox pop: This guy called Deniz Gezmiş. He was executed by the Turkish army. He was whistling this song. “Rodrigo’s Guitar.”

[Concierto De Aranjuez For Guitar And Orchestra: II - Narciso Yepes]

Vox pop: My favorite resistance song is “Bella Ciao.” It’s about the partisan movements and resistance to fascism in Italy.

[Song: Shehzad Roy(Ham Aek Hein)]

Vox pop: In Pakistan there is a growing tradition of songs about unity. There’s one called “Ham Aek Hein”, which in Urdu means “We are one.”

[crowds cheering ‘’Azadi song]

Vox pop: Kashmir is a conflict zone, so there are many resistance songs. People sing against the Indian state. Azadi. “Azadi” means freedom. So they always chant, “What do we want? We want freedom.”

[Song: N.W.A.(Fuck the Police)]