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An interview with Jim Fruchterman, founder of Benetech, a Silicon Valley nonprofit that’s involved in projects ranging from making books accessible to the blind, to advancing environmental conservation, to helping human rights defenders. The winner of a MacArthur Fellowship (the MacArthur “genius award”), Jim abandoned his successful tech career in 1989 to do what gave him the most satisfaction, helping other people. He says that Benetech is like a high tech startup company, except that it measures its success not by how much money it earns, but by how many people it helps.
Examination of a specific method of using real time visual graphics in business or government to enhance communication, leverage information and make sure everyone is operating according to the same game plan. There are two guests. David Sibbet is the founder of The Grove Consultants International, which works with many organizations to apply his visual methodology. He’s been doing this type of consulting for over 40 years, and has written 3 books on the subject. Mei Lin Fung is the co-producer of Future Talk and Board Chairman of the Institute for Service Organization Excellence, where she uses David’s methods to do leadership training for her own clients.
A discussion of whether social networking tools such as Facebook can advance the cause of peace. The guests are Margarita Quihuis and Mark Nelson, both from the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford University. Margarita is the director of the Lab, and Mark is one of its cofounders. The goal is to build positive grassroots interactions across conflict boundaries in the hope that this will eventually tip the balance of power in favor of peace. The show also addresses the kind of divisions that have to be overcome to succeed at peacemaking.
A look at the human brain, one of the most important objects in existence and also one of the hardest to study. The guests are Dr. Michael Merzenich, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco, who is best known for his groundbreaking research in brain plasticity, and Dr. Simon Tan, clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist at Stanford Medical Center who specializes in the diagnosis of developmental, psychiatric and neurologic disorders. Topics discussed include recent advances in neuroscience, the untapped potentials of the mind, and the nature of thought, consciousness and intelligence.
An interview with Google research scientist Daniel Russell who discusses what it means to be literate in the Age of Google. He demonstrates some of Google’s powerful search capabilities that many people are unaware of, and talks about his MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) titled “Power Searching with Google” that drew over 275,000 registered students in two presentations. He previously worked at Xerox Parc where the graphical user interface was invented, and was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple. His work at Google involves studying how people search for and organize information, and using that knowledge to produce better search quality and more user satisfaction.
The increasing use of mobile apps in the mental health field. There are two guests. Julia Hoffman is a clinical psychologist and mobile apps lead at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, where she develops apps to help people with post traumatic stress disorder. Nicholas Chapa is mobile team lead at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, which studies ways to help people overcome destructive behaviors and replace them with positive and healthy ones. Although mobile apps are not a replacement for one on one meetings with a trained therapist, they do provide benefits to the user and are sometimes the only help available.
The recent discovery of the Higgs boson was one of the biggest developments in particle physics in decades. The Higgs boson, first postulated in 1964, is believed to be what enables other particles to have mass, and was the last piece in the standard model of particle physics to remain undetected. In this episode we discuss the importance of the Higgs boson with three guests. Su Dong is an experimental particle physicist and head of the Atlas Group at SLAC which participated in the experiment that found the Higgs, Peter Graham is a theoretical particle physicist at Stanford, and Val O’Shea, who was interviewed via Skype, is an electronics engineer at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who has spent the past 20 years working on the Atlas experiment to find the Higgs boson.
Footage from the Maker Faire, one of the world's largest "do-it-yourself" events and part of the Maker Movement which favors crowd sourcing and community based efforts to achieve results. The studio guest is David Lang, co-creator of the OpenROV submarine, which is an open source remotely operated vehicle for underwater exploration. By putting all the design info online, he's tapped into a community of thousands of people who are willing to offer suggestions for improvement, which has greatly aided the development process, and he’s used crowd funding, through Kickstarter, to finance the work. We also have videos of the OpenROV itself, including underwater performance.
A discussion of artificial intelligence with Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, Fellow at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, co-author of the leading college textbook in A.I., and co-creator of an online course in A.I. that drew over 160,000 students. He previously worked for NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he won the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal. The discussion focuses on the basic concepts of A.I., how computers can “see”, “learn” and “understand”, and some of the A.I. projects currently being worked on at Google.
How to start your own online business. Guest Muffi Ghadiali is an adjunct professor at Stanford University where he teaches courses on Internet entrepreneurship, and has started several successful Internet companies himself. He says the biggest advantage of an online company is the low startup cost compared to a “brick and mortar” operation. But he also cautions that just putting items for sale on the Internet is no guarantee that they’ll start selling. On the contrary, it takes just as much time and effort to study the market and research your customers and your competitors as it does for any other type of successful business.
