5/7/19 Show feat. Ruha Benjamin on Power and Manipulation at the Interface of Tech & Society

Featured Image by Malika Favre.

The main part of the show is an interview with sociologist Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Additionally, she is the founder of the JUST DATA Lab and author of two books, People’s Science (Stanford) and Race After Technology (Polity), and editor of Captivating Technology (Duke). She writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, and health and justice. These are the topics discussed in the interview.

The interview is in three parts, beginning about 53 minutes in.

Science News:

IN MICE, the excellent Twitter feed
Promising malaria vaccine to be tested in first large field trial, Nature News, April 2019
First “Marsquake” Detected on Red Planet, Scientific American, April 2019

4/09/19 Show feat. Annette Zimmermann on Algorithmic Injustice

In this show, Dr. Annette Zimmermann joins Stevie in the WPRB studio. Annette is a political philosopher with Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and Center for Information and Technology Policy. We discuss artificial intelligence — what it is and what it isn’t — ethics, fairness, and how these topics come together in our world today. In particular, the current focus of her research is in the area of algorithmic injustice. This is the way through which algorithmic decision making systems (e.g. an AI computer program) could result in imbalanced outcomes for different societal groups.

Interview begins at 50 minutes.

Annette Zimmermann and her colleague (and previous guest of the show) Bendert Zevenbergen recently wrote a post for the CITP blog Freedom to Tinker on AI Ethics: Seven Traps. The piece is meant to be a “resource for readers who want to understand and navigate the public debate on the ethics of AI better, who want to contribute to ongoing discussions in an informed and nuanced way, and who want to think critically and constructively about ethical considerations in science and technology more broadly.” Indeed, it’s a great follow-up read for those interested in exploring these topics further.

Also mentioned in the show was prior work by ProPublica on algorithmic injustice. You can find articles on the topic here and a bit more here.

Science News:

Event Horizon Telescope announcement – they imaged a black hole!
New York Times, A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy. The rise of Candida auris embodies a serious and growing public health threat: drug-resistant germs.
BBC, Dubstep Artist Skrillex Could Protect Against Mosquito Bites. Scientists studied the effect of sound on mosquitos, and found that dub-step had a dissipating effect. You and me both, mosquitos.

03/19/19 Show feat. Bendert Zevenbergen on the Internet, Regulation, and Ethics in Tech

Featured Image: Barrett Lyon, The Opte Project Mapping the Internet (2003), MoMA. Opte is a free, open source project, initiated by Lyon with the goal of making visual representations of metaphysical spaces.

In this show, Stevie brings Bendert Zevenbergen in to the WPRB studio. Ben is a professional specialist at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and Center for Information and Technology Policy, as well as Oxford University’s Internet Institute. In the past, Ben was a practicing information technology lawyer in Europe.

Throughout the show they discuss the Internet (what is it really), why regulating it is hard – try as some government’s might, power dynamics in tech and tech policy, and much more along these lines. Interview begins at 51 minutes in.

Science news:

Playlist:

01/29/19 Show – the Facetime bug, AI and Criminal Justice, Galloping Geckos, NASA and more

In this show, Stevie was back on the mic after a long hiatus, loading up with science news and fresh music.

Science news:

Alexa/Google Home hack to prevent them keeping a bank of your ambient voice recordings.
The Apple Facetime bug. Breaking news – what it is and how to manifest it.
A new development in the Right to Be Forgotten.
MIT Tech Review put out a good review article on AI and the Criminal Justice System in the US.
New research has discovered how geckos run across water.
NASA has plans to test technology to knock an asteroid out of orbit – a way to keep an asteroid from hitting the Earth in the future.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is working with a company on plans to mine the Moon.

Playlist_2019-01-29

5/15/18 Show feat. Paleontologist Evan Saitta

Featured image credit: Smithsonian

In this show Stevie spoke with paleontologist Evan Saitta, expert on dinosaurs and fossilization. We discuss dinosaurs broadly, as well as what what we know, how we know it, and what are the really difficult questions. Stevie also learns how Jurassic Park lied to her, and how we know some dinosaurs have feathers. Towards the end of the conversation, Evan discusses his fascinating work actually making fossils in the lab!

Science News:

Water Geysers Likely Found on This ‘Alien’ Ice Moon, National Geographic
Model of Collective Fish Behavior with Hydrodynamic Interactions, Physical Review Letters

4/17/18 Show feat. Philosophy Professor Adam Elga on Decisions, Risk, and Cascading Failures

Science news and events started out the show. 45 minutes in, Professor Adam Elga came on the mic to speak on some thought problems in philosophy that are pertinent to his research. For instance we start with the problem of contingency: how concerned should we be that much of what we believe is contingent on, for example, the circumstances of our birth?

We then build up the conversation to his current research on cascading failures – this is when systems that depend on each other fail in a kind of domino effect. Think the 2008 Financial Crisis. This gets us in to topics like the Tragedy of the Commons, the Prisoners’ Dilemma, and his (and his collaborator Daniel Oppenheimer’s) new concept of Risk Pollution.

More information on the topics we discussed in the show, provided by Adam Elga:

Problem of disagreement:
- Epistemology of Disagreement: the good news – David Christensen
- Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization – Thomas Kelly
- Why People are Irrational About Politics – Michael Huemer
- The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement – Thomas Kelly
Problem of contingency:
- Irrelevant Influences – Katia Vavova
- Lucky to be Rational – Adam Elga
Cascading Failures:
- This is an unpublished topic being worked on by Adam Elga and Daniel Oppenheimer (Carnegie Mellon). Once it is published, you can find more information here.

Science News:

Viking Seafarers May Have Navigated with Legendary Crystals, Science

4/3/18 Show feat. Matt Weinberg on Algorithms, Incentives, and Game Theory

Trouble with the Mixcloud embed? The live show can be found here.

Science news and events started out the show. Brian spoke on new research on concussions and Stevie on the Chinese space station that fell to Earth recently. 45 minutes in, Professor Matt Weinberg came on the mic to speak on his work as a theoretical computer scientist. He researches mechanism design – these are algorithms that take user incentives in to account. He considers human decision making and economics to design algorithms to guide the user to interact with the algorithm in the optimal way. He uses the example of online dating, ad auctions on sites like Facebook and Google, and cryptocurrencies.

Science News:

Adrian Cho, ScienceMag, “Concussions originate from ringing deep inside the brain, modeling suggests“
Sol Han, CNN, “China’s Tiangong-1 space lab plummets to Earth, breaks up over Pacific”

2/27/18 Show feat. Aaron Wolf on Neanderthal Genomes and Us

This show had tons of great science news and an excellent discussion with Aaron Wolf, doctoral researcher on neanderthal genomes and specifically how neanderthal and modern human genomes mixed (i.e. they reproduced) in ancient times. To begin, Aaron walks us through what we know about neanderthals and our modern misconceptions of them, and how they came about. From there, he discusses how the neanderthal genome was mapped, and why we think that most living humans have about 2% neanderthal DNA — and what that DNA is for.

Science news:

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1/9/18 Show feat. Eve Vavagiakis, Cosmologist on Observing the Universe

Featured image is of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile.

If embed isn’t working, go here instead!

https://www.mixcloud.com/TheseVibes/1918-show-feat-eve-vavagiakis-cosmologist-on-observing-the-universe/

This week on These Vibes, Stevie discussed research with fellow observational cosmologist, Eve Vavagiakis. Eve is a researcher on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, aka ACT, located in the Atacama desert in Chile. She discusses cosmology and astrophysics, her research and how she makes her measurements, and answers excellent listener questions.

Science news:

Twins and Epigenetics: “Identical twins can share more than identical genes” in Medical Xpress
Fungal infections in ants and how it’s a sacrifice for the greater good of their colony: “Ants sacrifice their colony mates as parts of a deadly disinfection” in Phys.org
The Meltdown and Specter computing bugs and what you can do to protect yourself
Tell if someone’s sick or contagious, algorithmically: “Two ways you can tell someone is sick just by looking at them” in Science Magazine
Insanely beautiful images of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft:

juno_pia21972 — Jupiter blues, Juno Spacecraft image. Photo credit: NASA

12/5/17 Show feat. Kieran Bhatia on Hurricane Forecasting and Preparedness & Norbert Cruz-Lebron on the current situation in Puerto Rico

Kieran Bhatia models hurricanes to improve forecasting techniques in the program for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences here at Princeton University. In this episode, he tells us how hurricanes are forecasted, why it’s so difficult and common misconceptions about hurricanes. We discuss this year’s hurricane season and what it does (or does not) say about climate change.

In the last segment, Kieran tells us about how we can prepare ourselves better for hurricanes (NOAA site), his organization Canes on Canes in Florida, which aimed to educate on the science of hurricanes and hurricane preparedness.

Early in the episode, Norbert J. Cruz-Lebron, graduate student in neuroscience and member of the Princeton SACNAS Chapter, jumped on the mic to tell us about the current state of affairs in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Additionally, he tells us about his own experience being in the US while the rest of his family was at their home in PR when the hurricane hit, and shares testimonials from friends and family. (Hopefully he’ll be back on the show next year to tell us about his graduate research!)

You can support the Princeton Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science at @PrincetonSACNAS on Venmo.All donations will go to the Puerto Rico Recovery Fund managed by the Center for a New Economy (CNE) Group, an independent, non-partisan think-tank that advocates for the development of a new economy for Puerto Rico.