UC Berkeley (Audio)

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, first unveiled Salto’s high-flying capabilities in 2016. Now, they’ve equipped the robot with a slew of new skills, giving it the ability to bounce in place like a pogo stick and jump through obstacle courses like an agility dog. Salto can even take short jaunts around campus, powered by a radio controller. Series: "UC Berkeley News" [Science] [Show ID: 35131]

The proceedings of the 2019 Commencement Ceremony at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Series: "UC Public Policy Channel" [Education] [Show ID: 34877]

Inspired to fight poverty in the Bay Area, Goldman School of Public Policy Alumnus Daniel Lurie (MPP ‘05) founded Tipping Point in 2005. Since then, Tipping Point has raised more than $200 million to educate, employ, house and support those in need in the Bay Area. In the last year alone, the organization has helped put 21,000 people on a path out of poverty through a combination of grantmaking, grantee support, corporate philanthropy, policy and research. Series: "UC Public Policy Channel" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 34759]

Jacqueline Calderon Perl is a first generation Latin-American born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles. After completing her undergraduate studies, she joined Teach for America and moved to Oakland to teach a bilingual 2nd grade class. In 2017, Jacqueline began her Master in Public Policy with the Goldman School and began multiple consulting projects aimed at aligning public, private, non-profit and community partners in service of improving life outcomes for Oakland’s youth. Series: "UC Public Policy Channel" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 34762]

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Samuel Bowles, Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, for a discussion of his intellectual odyssey and his most recent book The Moral Economy. Topics covered include the influence of parents, his encounters with Nehru and Martin Luther King, and his education. He addresses the necessary changes in the agenda of economics as it grapples with the limits of incentives and the opportunities for bringing in a focus on community and altruism in order to confront global problems. He also offers advice to students entering the discipline of economics. Finally, he discusses his involvement in an online global effort to reform the economics curriculum through the creation of an online textbook, curriculum, and a community of economists from around the globe focusing on the economics of inequality, innovation, environmental sustainability and more. https://www.core-econ.org Series: "Conversations with History" [Business] [Show ID: 34594]

Janet Napolitano, the former US Secretary of Homeland Security, discusses her new book, How Safe Are We?: Homeland Security Since 9/11, what we have accomplished since that awful day, where the critical security gaps remain, and where dangerous new ones have opened—and how to close them. While the devastation at Ground Zero is etched in our collective memory as the image of terrorism, the threat landscape has evolved dramatically since the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003. “Rather than collapsed buildings,” Napolitano writes, “today we face collapsed faith in our democratic institutions,” caused by cyber-intrusions into US elections and into other areas of critical infrastructure, including our energy, financial and communications networks. Series: "UC Public Policy Channel" [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 34754]

It is widely held today on grounds of prudence if not realism that in designing public policy and legal systems, we should assume that people are entirely self-interested and amoral. But it is anything but prudent to let "Economic Man" be the behavioral assumption that underpins public policy. Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute) supports his position using evidence from behavioral experiments mechanism design and other sources, and proposes an alternative paradigm for policy making. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Business] [Show ID: 34354]

Sherry Turkle is concerned with how dependence on smartphones affects maturation. Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, advocates for the integration of boredom and solitude in daily life. Series: "Excerpts" [Health and Medicine] [Humanities] [Show ID: 34651]

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Professor Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley for a discussion of her intellectual odyssey that led to the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, a revolutionary tool for gene editing. In the conversation, they explore the implications of CRISPR-Cas9 for agriculture, biotechnology and biomedicine. They also discuss how education and public advocacy can broaden insight into the ethical and policy dimensions of the biological revolution that is upon us. Doudna received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022. Series: "Conversations with History" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 34595]

The view that the sciences make progress, while the arts do not, is extremely common. Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, challenges it. Scientific progress has social dimensions. A socially embedded notion of scientific progress then allows for a parallel concept of progress applicable to the arts. Kitcher specializes in the areas of pragmatism (especially Dewey), science and social issues, naturalistic ethics, and philosophy in literature. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34353]