Unintended Consequences

Segment 1 — The Cold Open

In June 2009 Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330, lost reliable airspeed data from iced Pitot probes. The autopilot disconnected and the aircraft, already in a high-altitude cruise, entered a stall that the crew did not arrest. ...

Sources: ojs.library.okstate.edu · rosap.ntl.bts.gov · aopa.org · faa.gov · flightsafety.org · bea.aero · skybrary.aero · accidentstats.airbus.com

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

In 2018 the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee examined hospital records and found admissions for dog bites had climbed from 4,110 in 2005 to 7,461 in 2017. The 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act had banned four types outright and placed strict controls on any others thought to be fighting dogs. ...

Sources: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · publications.parliament.uk · commonslibrary.parliament.uk · rspca.org.uk · kclpure.kcl.ac.uk

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

📝 Full show notes, transcript & sources: read the episode page

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

In June 2008, President Lee Myung-bak directed his land minister to add weirs and deepen dredging on the four major rivers rather than rely on dike reinforcement alone. The 22 trillion won project that followed created sixteen concrete structures meant to store water and reduce flood risk. ...

Sources: en.yna.co.kr · dx.doi.org · koreajoongangdaily.joins.com · koreaherald.com · english.hani.co.kr

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

In 1995 the first Phase I units under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments began receiving allowances under Title IV. ...

Sources: epa.gov · eia.gov · journals.tulane.edu · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Correction to episode 155: The episode said the Eastland rolled the opposite way when passengers moved back toward the center and came to rest in fifteen feet of water. She lurched to port, the way she was already listing, and rolled onto her port side in about twenty feet of water. The concrete was not poured in 1915 for the new davits: in 1914 the owners replaced the forward dining room's wooden floor with two inches of concrete and added more near the aft gangway, 15 to 20 tons in all.

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

On the morning of July 24, 1915, the excursion steamer Eastland lay tied to a wharf in the Chicago River with more than 2,500 Western Electric employees and their families already aboard for a company picnic. ...

Sources: gcaptain.com · smithsonianmag.com · damninteresting.com · britannica.com · en.wikipedia.org · nytimes.com · eastlanddisaster.org

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

🎬 Watch on YouTube (public from 9:00 AM ET): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5NueTl7uz0

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

📝 Full show notes, transcript & sources: read the episode page

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

In 1972 the Inco nickel smelter in Sudbury, Ontario, completed a chimney 381 metres tall, the tallest in the Western Hemisphere at the time. The structure was meant to lift sulphur dioxide high enough for the winds to carry it past the city. ...

Sources: thesudburystar.com · csmonitor.com · gao.gov · en.wikipedia.org · encyclopedia.com · archive.org · cbc.ca · osti.gov

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

📝 Full show notes, transcript & sources: read the episode page

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

The Volcani Institute compared orchards after ten years of drip irrigation with treated wastewater and found avocado and citrus yields 20 to 30 percent lower than trees watered with freshwater in the same fields. ...

Sources: library.mevaker.gov.il · oecd.org · sciencedirect.com · acsess.onlinelibrary.wiley.com · agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com · gov.il · ldd.go.th

Correction to episode 152: The article described the callback gap in Agan and Starr's study as 7 and then 43 percentage points and said the move more than doubled the white applicants' relative advantage. The study's gaps are relative: white applicants were called back about 7 percent more often before the ban and about 43 percent more often after it, an advantage roughly six times as large. The audio did not carry this passage.

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

📝 Full show notes, transcript & sources: read the episode page

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

In 2018 the Quarterly Journal of Economics published results from a field experiment that sent roughly 15,000 fictitious job applications in New Jersey and New York City before and after local ban-the-box rules took effect. ...

Sources: academic.oup.com · dataverse.harvard.edu · jezebel.com · papers.ssrn.com · beta.dol.gov

Correction to episode 151: The hook and cold open said India's vultures fell to one-thousandth of their earlier numbers. That figure is the white-rumped vulture's; the long-billed and slender-billed vultures fell by about 97 percent, as the episode said later. The claim that the decline began in 1994 when the diclofenac patent expired is flagged as unverified on the claims record.

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

In 1994, after the patent on the painkiller diclofenac expired, Indian generic manufacturers began selling the drug at low cost for treating cattle. Within a decade the three Gyps vulture species that had once numbered in the tens of millions across the subcontinent fell by roughly 97 percent or more, the white-rumped vulture to about one-thousandth of its earlier abundance. ...

Sources: aeaweb.org · cambridge.org · journals.plos.org · pure.psu.edu · nature.com

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

📝 Full show notes, transcript & sources: read the episode page

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Segment 1 — The Cold Open

On 1 May 2016 Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, and launched the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, promising free LPG connections to five crore poor households so women would no longer cook over wood and dung fires. By September 2019 the scheme had delivered more than eight crore connections. ...

Sources: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · thehindu.com · pib.gov.in · pibindia.wordpress.com · data.gov.in

Correction to episode 149: This episode said Wisconsin's yearly savings from fewer deer-vehicle collisions, about $10.9 million, were roughly 63 times the livestock losses the state had paid out "over the preceding decades", after putting those payments at about $3 million over 35 years. The 2021 PNAS study compares one year with one year: the annual collision savings were about 63 times the state's annual compensation for verified wolf kills of livestock. The headline's "24 percent each year" is also wrong: collisions in counties wolves entered were about 24 percent lower, a drop in level, not a cut repeated every year.

AI Disclosure: This podcast is curated by Patrick but uses AI-generated voice synthesis for audio production.

If this episode was useful, a rating or a short review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is how the next listener finds the show — and following it in your app means the next episode is there when you are.

📝 Full show notes, transcript & sources: read the episode page

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