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Exploring the way we connect, date and mate in the digital age. From NPR's technology reporting team.


NPR Tech Team Podcast: Dating and Love in the Digital Age

Artificial intelligence is often perceived as a black box. Most companies don't know how to approach it and some even fear it. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Brian Garcia, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Welltok, one of the world's leading health optimization platforms.  Together, they explore how Welltok is using artificial intelligence and IBM Watson to create better customer experiences with their data. They then focus in on how companies in other industries can start using these technologies to create greater value. You'll hear about:

-Welltok and its anchor platform, CaféWell (0:39)
-The company’s partnership with IBM Watson (2:14)
-The insights Welltok has gathered from its artificial intelligence projects (4:17)
-How companies can leverage artificial intelligence effectively (8:56)
-How to combat skepticism about artificial intelligence within your organization(10:38)


Episode 3: How AI is Changing the Healthcare Industry with Brian Garcia

Natural language processing (NLP) is a growing application of artificial intelligence. It can bring tremendous value to your client interactions and take your company down entirely new paths of process automation. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Jason Brenier, CTO of Idibon, a San Francisco based company that provides cloud-based natural language processing services. Find out how your business can benefit from this amazing technology.

You’ll hear about:

-What Idibon does and how (1:03)
-Idibon’s biggest challenge taking machine learning from research to applications (2:31)
-What NLP is and the four things you can do with it (5:58)
-Using NLP as the building blocks for more sophisticated systems (8:02)
-What CEOs need to do leverage NLP within their existing infrastructure (9:50)
-The type of skills that companies should be hiring for to succeed in the space (12:30)
-Data needs for doing NLP (14:06)

Episode 13: Tapping into the Power of Natural Language Processing with Jason Brenier

Tay, Boaty McBoatface, New Zealand, emoji, and the madness of crowds

Episode 30: Crowd Control

Natural language generation (NLG) is a technology that allows companies to take vast quantities of data and turn them into compelling narratives that communicate the valuable insights they contain. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Stuart Frankel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Narrative Science. Find out about the amazing advances in NLG technology and how this particular type of artificial intelligence is changing the way that many companies do business.

You'll hear about: 

-Narrative Science and how it helps data rich companies become more efficient(1:03)
-The difference between natural language processing and natural language generation (3:12)
-Why NLG projects have to start with communication goals, not data (5:29)
-The limits of data visualization (8:01)
-Turning various types of data into narratives (9:59)
-Why Narrative Science initially didn’t call itself an AI company (16:15)
-Leveraging other AI engines versus doing everything yourself (18:11)
-Measuring success and getting better with AI solutions (20:08)
-Approaching the many aspects of AI to create a successful strategy (21:29)
-The maturity of the NLG industry (23:06)
-Where CEOs should start with AI (24:15)


Episode 16: Using Natural Language Generation to Give Your Data a Voice

In this week's episode of the Radar Podcast, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Christine Park, senior product designer at Basis, and John Alderman, director of Supereverywhere. They talk about multi-modal design, which is an approach to design that takes into consideration the physical senses and the role they play in the user experience, and they also chat about how multi-modal design applies to the Web.

Using Technology to Design Across the Senses

Your host has a chance encounter with the supposed inspiration for a cult TV show that predicted the future of tech and media. Plus the end of Moore's law?

The Future

Today we travel to a future where America has converted to a direct democracy. Everybody votes on everything! 

We explore the U.S. states that have direct democracy systems in place today, how to apply that model to the whole country, how to even gather all those votes, and what could go so, so very wrong with this idea. 

Full show notes at:  http://www.flashforwardpod.com/2016/04/19/episode-11-swipe-right-for-democracy/


Swipe Right For Democracy

From chicken wings to kale smoothies, we look at what we eat, and how challenging it is to eat well in America with Sophie Egan, author of Devoured. For more info, check out this link: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2016/05/03/devoured-we-are-what-and-how-we-eat


Devoured: We Are What (And How) We Eat

Every year, millions of older Americans are readmitted to the hospital, costing Medicare (and tax payers) billions of dollars. And yet 76 percent of those hospital readmissions are avoidable. The key is knowing how to prevent them. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Wes Little, the business line manager at Kinnser, a software company in the home healthcare space that is using its massive data set to help solve the problem.

You'll hear about:

-Why hospital readmissions are a problem and what’s being done about it (0:42)
-How Kinnser helps in the home healthcare space(3:49)
-The type of data Kinnser used to help solve the hospital readmission problem (5:15)
-Maintaining patients’ healthcare data privacy (6:06)
-What Kinnser’s data reveals about predictors of hospital readmission (7:06) 
-How clinical managers can benefit from these insights (12:14)
-Results from early adopters of Kinnser’s RiskPoint product (16:17)

Episode 20: Using Data Science to Help Prevent Hospital Readmissions

Your host explores the transition from UFO to Drone on stage as part of Radiotopia Live and pinpoints the date he crossed the digital divide (Feb 21st 1997). Also filmmaker Alix Lambert tells us about a group of people who are still on analog time. 



Special thanks to Elyse Blennerhassett who not only introduced us to both Efren and Adolfo but she is also continuing to work with them on a longer term audio diary project that follows their daily life / experiences, and inner worlds. From their fight for innocence to their interactions, dreams, textures, smells, and memories. Visit her  site comfortofconstellations.space more info.



Analog Time

On Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), parts I and II.

We return to existentialism! Instead of describing our predicament as "absurd," de Beauvoir prefers "ambiguous": We are a biological organism in the world, yet we're also free consciousness transcending the given situation. Truly coming to terms with this freedom means not only understanding that you transcend any label of character ("villain") or role ("doctor") that you or anyone else has put on you, but also recognizing that your freedom requires the freedom of others.

And this is the challenge of her book: In an existentialist world view that denies pre-existing moral laws, whether given by God or Reason or anything else, how can ethics be possible? Wouldn't it just be all subjective, or relative, if, as Nietzsche says, we are the ones who create values? What prevents an existentialist from being a self-consistent monster à la the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men?

The key is recognizing and preserving this human ambiguity. We are things in the world, yet qua consciousness, we're really a hole in the world, a little pit of desire, an unpredictable action behind a pair of eyes, and to embrace our negativity means recognizing not only that no external, alien moral law causes or commands our behavior, but also willing that being exist, i.e., the being of the things we desire, the projects we want to enact in the world, and the happiness of other people and improvement of the world. Self-consistently embracing our free nature therefore means willing the good, and this willing is an act of creation much like creation of an artwork.

Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan are all on board this time to fill out this picture and try to figure out whether de Beauvoir is right that not only does this existentialist picture support ethics, but in fact it's the only way to support ethics: a pre-existent, objective standard would not allow us the freedom to actually choose the good. Think about how, for Plato, we never knowingly choose evil; we always want what we think is good but sometimes are just mistaken. De Beauvoir, like Augustine, thinks that we really can perversely choose to deny our nature, deny our freedom (though that denial remains a free choice), where pretending like Aristotle and (in a different way) most theologians that we have a built-in teleological "good" that by our nature we were meant to pursue is just another way of actually denying our total freedom.

Recommended prerequisites: De Beauvoir's book is a great introduction to existentialism, if you haven't read any, and our discussion should be mostly clear, but it may help you especially to listen to our ep. 10 on Kant's ethics, which also argues for the "self-legislation" of ethics. Other touchstones are Nietzsche (most centrally ep. 84), Camus (ep. 4), and especially Sartre (ep. 87). We also bring up Augustine (eps. 121 and 122), Eva Brann's take on Nietzsche (ep. 120), and stoicism (ep. 124).

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De Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition (Part One)

On this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss the plan to create a complete artificial human genome. A few weeks ago, scientists, entrepreneurs, and government officials met in a closed door meeting at Harvard University at an eventintended to create interest and momentum around the follow-up to the Human Genome Project — apublic / private collaboration to synthesize a human genome.

Over the past decade, the technology for encoding genes has improved at a fantastic rate. Since the early 2000s, the cost has dropped from four dollars to just three cents per base pair. However, while big pharma and big agriculture currently synthesize gene sequences for products including biologic drugs and GMO plants, these strands of genetic material are usually only a few thousand letters in length. Contrast that with the 6 billion letters needed for the human genome, and we can begin to see the ambition of this new proposed endeavor. In this episode, we explore some of the arguments in favor of and against writing human code.

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Writing Human Code

"Anybody who is interested in China, who's developing things in China, who's doing business with China needs to be thinking about the instinct towards politics over pragmatism", argues New Yorker staff writer (and former Beijing resident) Evan Osnos. "It will affect your operations there. It's not the kind of thing where you can be, 'Well, look, we're not interested in politics.'"

Osnos, who also wrote the award-winning book The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, shares experiences and views on the tension between one of the oldest civilizations in the world and newer story of nation-building (is it, like the buildings being built, structurally sound?); an evolving demographic (where "kids you have no idea how good you have it" may no longer be a hedge against politics); and middle-class Chinese, not just outside or elite, complaints about pollution (especially since "environmentalism has often been the front edge of a deeper change in political consciousness").

And speaking of political consciousness and complaints, what of the Trump phenomenon? In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- continuing our recent tech/policy/innovation D.C. on-the-road trip -- Osnos, who is based in Washington, D.C., shares field observations from Charleston, South Carolina to West Virginia. And from Silicon Valley, where technologists might be able to do something about the largely public health, political, and economic problem of gun violence.

a16z Podcast: Politics Over Pragmatism -- On China, Trump, and Smart Guns?

Technology has always been a force in how we live, work, and play; only now it's accelerating and compounding in unexpected ways. But just because we don't know exactly what form that tech will take (sharing homes on Airbnb or cars with Lyft and Uber for example) doesn't mean that the larger force at play (e.g., sharing) didn't have a certain predictability to it. It was almost an inherent -- and inevitable -- outcome of the very nature of the internet itself. And there are at least 12 such inevitable technological forces, shares author Kevin Kelly in his new book Inevitable.  

As we now move from an "internet of information" to an "internet of experiences" -- with virtual and augmented reality, AI-as-a-service, and more -- we need to accept the inevitable. Instead of fighting tech outcomes (things like tracking for example), we need to expect it, accept it, plan for it, and civilize it. It's not just about policy and laws, though (which should follow tech use); it's about new business opportunities (imagine if the music industry had bypassed its DRM phase!), cultural change, and new opportunities for humanity, too.

Especially as the future of work changes. But productivity -- and even some forms of creativity -- is for the robots, argues Kelly in this episode of the a16z Podcast (where he is joined by a16z's Chris Dixon, Kyle Russell, and Sonal Chokshi). The irony is that while technology is inevitable, we humans are best suited for what is uncertain, inefficient, and full of failure. Machines may answer, but we will ask the questions. It's not just what we want, but what technology needs.

a16z Podcast: Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)

Sam Rockwell (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Moon, Galaxy Quest) talks with Chris about growing up in San Francisco, the sequel to Galaxy Quest that almost happened and what they would say on Bill Murray’s voicemail. They also talk about method acting, they explain to the listeners how to use a Thomas Guide and how Sam prepared for his roles in Moon. Sam also talks about acting out Hamlet in public and his new movie Mr. Right!

Sam Rockwell

As robots that can weld cars give way to robots that can drive cars, what is ahead for the workforce?

As Automation Advances, Are Jobs in Danger?

By 2050, a projected 9.7 billion people will inhabit the planet. How will we produce enough nutritious food to support this burgeoning population and ensure access to food resources, particularly as climate change stresses the environment? This Forum explored innovative methods and systems for producing food, as well as new types of products and underutilized sources. The panelists talked about emerging technologies, including advances in genomics and aeroponics, to grow food. They also discussed ways to sustain at-risk food resources made vulnerable from climate change, and the impacts for populations in developing countries.

Part of The Andelot Series on Current Science Controversies, this event was presented jointly with PRI's The World and WGBH on December 13, 2016.

Watch the entire series from The Forum at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at www.ForumHSPH.org.

The Future of Food: Feeding the Planet During Climate Change

A pair of urban explores sneak into an abandoned subway tunnel. What happens next is our secret...

performed by
Emily Tarver as Gretchen
Alex Marino as Michael
Louis Kornfeld as Ernie
Christian Paluck as Doc
Ed Herbstman as Flash
Amy Warren as Amy
and Ben Jones as the beggar in the subway
 
Written collaboratively by The Truth, with dialogue improvised by the actors.
Recorded on location in New York City.

Produced and directed by Jonathan Mitchell. 

This story was originally released in two parts. This version combines the two parts into  one complete story.

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