Stanford Radio

Evelyn and Alex talk about, what else, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. He says he’s freed the bird, but there’s a whole bunch of restraints he clearly hasn’t thought about. He’s got some not-so-fun meetings and phone calls coming up.

On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, robotics expert Oussama Khatib takes us on a deep dive into the vagaries of creating robots that swim. His most recent project is OceanOneK, a 200-pound, humanoid robot with stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs that can travel nearly a thousand meters below the surface. When the pressure was on, Khatib had to redesign everything he thought he knew about robots, he says, beginning with a new glass-like shell good to 6,000 PSI.

Listen as Khatib and host Russ Altman plumb the depths of underwater robots on this installment of The Future of Everything.

When we talk about content moderation, we often focus on companies at the application layer of the internet, like the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. But there are a whole bunch of other companies in the internet stack that have the power to knock things offline. So what is similar or different about content moderation when it moves into the infrastructure layers of the internet? Evelyn spoke with Alissa Starzak, theVice President and Global Head of Public Policy at Cloudflare and Emma Llanso, the Director of CDT’s Free Expression Project to explore thisincreasingly pressing question.

This week Evelyn and Alex discuss severed fiber-optic cables in France, Kiwi Farms v2.0, worrying moves to crack down on online content in Turkey and Brazil, and how Republicans are going after our last line of defense against an unusable inbox: spam filters. Also Alex reveals Evelyn’s lack of knowledge about 19th Century Railroad regulation.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E198 | Desiree LaBeaud: The curious connection between plastic trash and infectious disease

On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford infectious disease expert Desiree LaBeaud talks trash, literally. She says carelessly discarded plastics can collect water, providing a perfect nursery to mosquitoes that then spread dengue, chikungunya, Zika, yellow fever and other killer diseases worldwide. Plastic trash has become a public health nightmare as LaBeaud tells host Russ Altman and listeners of The Future of Everything. Reducing it is now a critical component of life-saving disease prevention strategies.

This week, Evelyn and Alex went long on one of the weirdest tech reporting stories they've ever heard. Last week, The Wire—an Indian news outlet—released a bombshell report alleging it had seen internal Instagram documents evidencing improper influence by the Indian government over Meta. Meta denied the reports and what followed was a back and forth that got stranger and stranger as the saga went on...

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E199 | Alexandria Boehm: Wastewater helps reveal COVID’s real reach

Civil and environmental engineer Alexandria Boehm joins Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast to discuss how a new form of epidemiology is using the tools of engineering to test wastewater to track COVID-19’s true spread. The wastewater that enters a treatment facility is really just one big biological sample, Boehm says. Testing it is far more accurate than COVID-19 case data, and it is useful for tracking other diseases in our communities, as well.

Listen in to this episode of The Future of Everything, as Boehm and host Russ Altman explore the great promise of wastewater epidemiology.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court granted cert in two cases concerning the scope of platform liability for content on their services: Gonzalez v. Google, about whether platforms lose section 230 immunity when they recommend content to users, and Twitter v. Taamneh, about whether platforms can be found to have aided and abetted terrorism if they are found to have been insufficiently aggressive in removing terrorist content from their sites. The cert grants were a surprise, and the cases are complicated. Evelyn sat down with Daphne Keller, the podcast’s Supreme Court Correspondent, to dig into the details.

Stanford’s Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos bring you the latest in online trust and safety news and developments, including two new Supreme Court cases, a Chinese influence operation targeting the US ahead of the mid-terms and PayPal’s accidental foray into content moderation discourse.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E197 | Is a good diagnosis possible without revealing your medical secrets?

New cryptographic techniques allow patients to get personalized health care yet never divulge their medical secrets to anyone—even their doctors.

On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford bioengineer Jan Liphardt talks about the challenge of getting good medical recommendations and diagnoses while guaranteeing that a patient's health secrets remain private. Computing on encrypted data is the way, he says. Tune in as health data expert Liphardt and host Russ Altman discuss the future of health privacy.