FORA.tv - Video Program of the Week

Protecting Content and Promoting Information

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:25:04 -0700

In the wake of the uproar among the technology and entertainment industries over the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA), the search for common ground and a way forward is more urgent than ever. Join NBCUniversal's Richard Cotton and Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson for an open conversation on imagining a digital world in which content creators and tech innovators can thrive and flourish.

Rick Cotton was named executive vice president and general counsel of NBCUniversal in August 2004. He supervises the NBCUniversal Law Department, which provides legal advice to all NBCUniversal business units for their ongoing operations and for new strategic plans and acquisitions. In addition, he oversees NBCUniversal's global regulatory and legislative agenda, including the company's worldwide anti-piracy efforts.

Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He currently is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Wilson has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He blogs at avc.com.

Obesity is the Government's Business

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:10:13 -0700

With 33% of adults and 17% of children obese, the U.S. is facing an obesity epidemic. A major risk factor for expensive, chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, it costs our health care system nearly $150 billion a year. Should government intervene, or is this a matter of individual rights and personal responsibility?

Paul Campos is a law professor, author and journalist currently on the faculty of the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author of The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Weight is Hazardous to Your Health.

Serving as Chief Medical Correspondent for Discovery Health TV, Dr. Peeke is featured on the award winning National Body Challenge series and is the host of the Could You Survive? series, based upon her national bestselling book Fit to Live.

Dr. David Satcher served as the 16th Surgeon General of the United States and published America's first "Call To Action To Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity." Formerly a four-star admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and Director of the CDC, Satcher simultaneously held the positions of Surgeon General and Assistant Secretary for Health from February 1998 through January 2001.

The host of "Stossel," a weekly program airing Thursdays at 10 PM EST and midnight on Fox Business Network, John Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Stossel also appears regularly on Fox News Channel providing signature analysis. Prior to joining FBN, Stossel co-anchored ABC's primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20.

An Evening with Bill Keller

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:24:46 -0800

Bill Keller, op-ed columnist and former executive editor of The New York Times, speaks with Prof. Peter Beinart, senior political writer for the Daily Beast who teaches Political Reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Bill Keller has enjoyed a long and illustrious career at The Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his coverage of the Soviet Union, and serving as executive editor from 2003 to 2011, a time of transformation and challenge in the news media. He is currently an op-ed columnist and contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Beinart is a faculty member at CUNY’s Graduate Center and Graduate School of Journalism. He is a senior political writer for the Daily Beast, a contributor to Time, and the author of, most recently, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.

The Graduate Center’s Perspectives series with Peter Beinart features dynamic thinkers and practitioners examining the pressing political and public policy issues shaping our world today. Previous participants have included Christopher Hitchens, Tina Brown, Andrew Sullivan, and Paul Krugman.

Stem Cells: Not What They Used to Be

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:22:56 -0800

Stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body during early life and growth. In many tissues, they serve as a sort of internal repair system, dividing essentially without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive. San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes is a leading force in stem cell research. In this presentation, Gladstone Investigator Dr. Bruce Conklin explains the surprising past, present, and future of stem cells.

Bruce R. Conklin, M.D. is Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease.

Dr. Conklin's research focuses on using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) as a model system to understand how biological signals orchestrate the development of complex tissues and then modulate essential functions, such as heart contraction.

Cognitive Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:37:18 -0800

Join an audience at swissnex San Francisco as scientists from Switzerland and the US discuss their research on humanoid robots, cognitive robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI). Hear how some robots self-reflect, self-improve, and adapt to new circumstances, and whether it’s possible for robots of the future to possess the same cognitive characteristics as humans.

Cornell University’s Hod Lipson is seeking to understand if machines can learn analytical laws automatically. For centuries, scientists have attempted to identify and document analytical laws underlying physical phenomena in nature. Despite the prevalence of computing power, the process of finding natural laws and their corresponding equations has resisted automation. Lipson has developed machines that take in information about their environment and discover natural laws all on their own, even learning to walk.

Rolf Pfeifer directs the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich. Together with his scientific assistant Pascal Kaufmann, Pfeifer presents current AI research and a humanoid robot in the Ecce family referred to as Cronos.

Standard humanoid robots mimic the human form but they generally function quite differently—and their characteristics reflect this. This places severe limitations on the kinds of interactions robots can engage in, on the knowledge they can acquire about their environment, and on the nature of their cognitive engagement. Instead of copying only the outward form of a human, Cronos mimics the inner structures as well—bones, joints, muscles, and tendons—and thus has more human-like actions and interactions in the world.

Lawrence Lessig: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:11:05 -0800

This program was recorded by the Long Now Foundation, on January 17, 2012.

A dazzlingly incisive presenter, Lawrence Lessig specializes in identifying deep systemic problems in public process (such as copyright malfunction and Congressional dysfunction) and then showing how they can be cured. Currently he is bearing down on the corruption of Congress by the practice of private funding for public elections through campaign contributions. He writes: "The dependency of modern campaign finance is the single most important cause of the bankruptcy of Congress. Fixing this bankruptcy is the single most important reform effort that Americans face just now." As he did with helping fix copyright problems via Creative Commons, he has a plan for reforming elections to reestablish Congressional trust and effectiveness. (Public trust in Congress is currently at 12%.)

Lessig is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and author of Republic, Lost (2011) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000 and 2006).

The Rise and Fall of Wall Street: Paul O'Neill, Ron Suskind, and Jesse LaGreca

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:05:51 -0800

Culture Project and JANERA.com present

Blueprint for Accountability: Truth and Consequences

Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, Paul O’Neill, the famously candid Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush and a 2008 adviser to Barack Obama, and Jesse LaGreca (blogger and writer for Daily Kos and Occupy Wall Street activist) meet for a high-voltage conversation about the rise, fall and bailout of Wall Street, the perils of speaking truth to power, and the tough choices ahead for America. This program was recorded on December 7, 2012.

Jesse LaGreca is a blogger and writer for Daily Kos and a prominent Occupy Wall Street activist.

Paul Henry O'Neill served as the 72nd United States Secretary of the Treasury for part of President George W. Bush's first term. He was fired in December 2002 for his public disagreement with the administration and became a harsh critic. Prior to his term as Secretary of the Treasury, O'Neill was chairman and CEO of Pittsburgh-based industrial giant Alcoa and chairman of the RAND Corporation.

Ron Suskind, former national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, is the author of A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League and The Price of Loyalty, George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill. Mr. Suskind was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (Feature Writing) in 1995.

Debate: The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion

podcasts@fora.tv — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:17:10 -0800

Presented by Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates on November 15, 2011.

In the words of Blaise Pascal, mathematician and Catholic, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." Does religion breed intolerance, violence, and the promotion of medieval ideas? Or should we concede that overall, it has been a source for good, giving followers purpose, while encouraging morality and ethical behavior?

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Think2Twice
Twitter: @IQ2US and #IQ2US for the debate

FOR THE MOTION

Matthew Chapman
Author, Filmmaker and Co-Founder of Science Debate

A.C. Grayling
Renowned Atheist and Professor of Philosophy

AGAINST THE MOTION

Dinesh D'Souza
President of The King’s College and author of What’s So Great About Christianity

Rabbi David Wolpe
Named the #1 Pulpit Rabbi in America by Newsweek

The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:56:20 -0800

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on November 30, 2011.

As founder and librarian of the storied Internet Archive (deemed impossible by all when he started it in 1996), Brewster Kahle has practical experience behind his universalist vision of access to every bit of knowledge ever created, for all time, ever improving.

He will speak to questions such as these:

Can we make a distributed web of books that supports vending and lending? How can our machines learn by reading these materials? Can we reconfigure the information to make interactive question answering machines? Can we learn from past human translations of documents to seed an automatic version? And, can we learn how to do optical character recognition by having billions of correct examples? What compensation systems will best serve creators and networked users? How do we preserve petabytes of changing data?

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, and digital librarian, founded the Internet Archive in 1996. He is focused on providing universal access to all knowledge, and developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. He was co-founder of Alexa Internet, which helped catalog the Web, which was later sold to Amazon.com.

Taking Out GE's Trash: A New Model for Commercial Recycling

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:46:53 -0800

TerraCycle's Tom Szaky and Banyan Water's Jeff Fulgham discuss how their two companies are working to create new models for commercial waste disposal and reuse. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Compass Summit, on October 26, 2011.

Taking out GE's Trash

Film and conversation between:
Tom Szaky, Chief Executive Officer, TerraCycle, Inc

Jeff Fulgham, Chief Sales, Service, Strategy and Sustainability Officer, Banyan Water

Compass Summit, a forum for true interaction and exchange, examines some of today's most pressing problems through the lens of global citizenship, recognizing that human ingenuity is an unlimited resource. Guided by NPR's Ira Flatow, an intimate group of some of the world's best thinkers and doers convened along the rugged Palos Verdes coastline on Oct 23-26, 2011 at Terranea Resort to engage in meaningful conversation, ask questions, and challenge ideas -- we invite you to join in the conversation.

Daniel Kahneman In Conversation with David Brooks

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:03:45 -0800

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Graduate Center at CUNY, on November 28, 2011.

New York Times columnist David Brooks will speak with the Nobel Laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman about the latter’s influential career and his new book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

A Nobel laureate in economics (one of the only non-economists to earn this honor) and a research psychologist world-renowned for his seminal work on judgment, decision making, happiness, and well-being, Kahneman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.

David Brooks's column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times started in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. He is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.

Will We Ever Understand the Brain?

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:36:54 -0800

As neuroscientists are learning more and more about our body's hidden frontier, we have gained fleeting insights into our own intuition, habits and seemingly unexplainable preferences. Can we solve those mysteries by creating a complete computer model of our brain? Or, is the brain an unsolvable puzzle? Two leading neuroscientists discuss these questions and more as we look into the neurology of the brain.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a fiction writer. During the day, he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine. He is best known for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is also a fiction writer. His debut work of fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, became an international bestseller and is published in 22 languages.

Henry Markram is the Coordinator of the Human Brain Project, a proposed international effort to understand the human brain. His research career started in medicine and neuroscience in South Africa, then at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, at NIH and UCSF in the United States, and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany. In 2002, he joined the EPFL, where he founded the Brain Mind Institute. His career has spanned a wide spectrum of neuroscience research, from whole animal studies to gene expression in single cells.

Reinventing the Leaf: Future Sources of Fuel

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:17:16 -0800

Nate Lewis, professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, discusses the future of energy technology at the 2011 Compass Summit. This program was recorded on October 26, 2011.

Reinventing the Leaf: Future Sources of Fuel

Nate Lewis, George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology

Compass Summit, a forum for true interaction and exchange, examines some of today’s most pressing problems through the lens of global citizenship, recognizing that human ingenuity is an unlimited resource. Guided by NPR’s Ira Flatow, an intimate group of some of the of the world's best thinkers and doers convened along the rugged Palos Verdes coastline on Oct 23-26, 2011 at Terranea Resort to engage in meaningful conversation, ask questions, and challenge ideas -- we invite you to join in the conversation.

Dr. Nathan Lewis, Professor of Chemistry, at the California Institute of Technology since 1991 is serving as Principal Investigator for the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, the DOE's Energy Innovation Hub in Fuels from Sunlight, and, the Beckman Institute Molecular Materials Resource Center.

Dr. Lewis received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published over 300 papers, is Editor-in-Chief of Energy and Environmental Science, and has supervised over 60 graduate students and postdoctoral associates. His awards include the Princeton Environmental Award and Michael Faraday Medal of the Royal Society of Electrochemistry.

Jonathan Elsen on Microbes: The 'Dark Matter' of Biology

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:30:53 -0800

Biologist Jonathan Elsen presents "The 'Dark Matter' of Biology." This program was recorded in collaboration with the Compass Summit, on October 25, 2011.

IDEAS THAT ACCELERATE: SCIENCE MULTIPLIERS

The Dark Matter of Biology

Jonathan Eisen, Professor, University of California Davis

Compass Summit, a forum for true interaction and exchange, examines some of today's most pressing problems through the lens of global citizenship, recognizing that human ingenuity is an unlimited resource. Guided by NPR's Ira Flatow, an intimate group of some of the world's best thinkers and doers convened along the rugged Palos Verdes coastline on Oct 23-26, 2011 at Terranea Resort to engage in meaningful conversation, ask questions, and challenge ideas -- we invite you to join in the conversation.

Jonathan Eisen is a Professor at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the evolution of new functions and the genomic diversity of microbes and microbial communities. Eisen is also a vocal advocate for “open science”, the Academic Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Biology, an active and award-winning blogger (e.g., http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com), and a scientific prankster.

Michael Moore: Here Comes Trouble

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:36:23 -0700

Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore talks politics and reads from his new book, Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life. This program was recorded at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, on October 2, 2011.

Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life is an unflinchingly honest, take-no-prisoners ride through the life of Oscar-winning filmmaker and bestselling author Michael Moore. Moore shares far-ranging, irreverent, and stranger-than-fiction vignettes from his early life. One moment he's an 11-year-old boy lost in the Senate and found by Bobby Kennedy; and in the next, he's inside the Bitburg cemetery with Ronald Reagan. At 17, he goes to get a snack and ends up on the news, creating a firestorm that helps eliminate racial discrimination at private establishments across America. Funny, eye-opening, and moving, it's the book he has been writing and living his entire life. - Sixth and I Historic Synagogue

Michael Moore is an Academy Award-winning American filmmaker, author and liberal political commentator. He is the director and producer of Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, three of the top five highest-grossing documentaries of all time. In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, documenting his personal crusade to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections. He has also written and starred in the TV shows "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." Moore is a self-described liberal who has criticized globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush and the American health care system in his written and cinematic works. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow: War of the Worldviews

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:25:55 -0700

Sixth and I Historic Synagogue presents: Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow discussing their book, War of the Worldviews: Science vs Spirituality. This program was recorded on October 6, 2011.

In War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality, the two bestselling authors debate the most fundamental questions of human existence.

How did the universe begin? Where did life come from? Is there design in nature?

Without defending organized religion, Chopra asserts that there is design in the universe and a deep intelligence behind the rise of life. Mlodinow, CalTech physicist and the writing collaborator of Stephen Hawking, argues for the viewpoint of science, specifically of modern quantum physics.

War of the Worldviews opens the public's eyes to the fascinating frontier where knowledge and mystery converge and every assumption about life, God, and the universe are open to debate. Program moderated by Timothy Shriver, Chairman and CEO of the Special Olympics.

Deepak Chopra is the author of more than fifty books translated into more than thirty-five languages. Dr. Chopra is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. He is founder and president of the Alliance for a New Humanity.

Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and is now at Caltech. His book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives was a New York Times Bestseller, Editor's Choice, and Notable Book of the Year, and was short-listed for the Royal Society book award. His other books include two co-authored with physicist Stephen Hawking -- A Briefer History of Time, and The Grand Design. In addition to his books and research articles, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Forbes magazine, among other publications, and for television series such as McGyver and Star Trek: the Next Generation.

Alain de Botton - The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:25:55 -0700

Rebroadcast: This program originally aired on May 29, 2009.

Author Alain de Botton talks about his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. This program was recorded in Melbourne, Australia, on April 23, 2009.

For most people the word work is synonymous with jobs, labor and occupations. The things we do to pay the rent. The mundane routine can often overshadow the nuances of the work that we do.

In this talk at RMIT in Melbourne, philosopher Alain de Botton reminds us of the importance of appreciating the details of work and workplaces. In this way we can have a greater understanding of the impact our daily tasks have on culture and society, or perhaps decide that it's time for a new career. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Alain de Botton is a British writer and television producer who employs a philosophical and accessible approach to examining a variety of subjects from the abstract--love and happiness--to the material--architecture. In August 2008, he founded an unconventional new educational establishment in central London called The School of Life, which offers intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life. De Botton is a frequent contributor to numerous newspapers, journals and magazines and is a member of the Arts Council of England's literature panel. De Botton owns and helps run his own production company, Seneca Productions, which regularly broadcasts television documentaries based on his work. His most recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is an examination of the modern workplace and the role work has played in our lives throughout history.

Debunking 2012 Myths with NASA's David Morrison

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:13:36 -0700

Rebroadcast: This podcast originally aired on May 14, 2010. For years, NASA's David Morrison has been an active critic of fears that the world will end in 2012... and of imaginative con artists who use mass media to frighten people for profit. In an entertaining lecture titled, "Doomsday 2012: Nibiru / Planet X, Pole Shifts, Planetary Alignments, and the End of the World," Morrison lays out the case against apocalypse.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the SkeptiCal Conference, on April 24, 2010.

Dr. David Morrison is the Director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at the NASA Ames Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard and is internationally known for his research on small bodies in the solar system, including advocacy for developing plans to defend the Earth from impacts by comets and asteroids.

A Fellow of CSI, he has written extensively on such fringe science topics as Velikovsky, cosmic catastrophes, UFOs, the creation science movement, and most recently the climate crisis caused by global warming. For the past two years he has been the primary scientist critic of the widespread fear that the world will end in 2012, and of the doomsday sleaze artists who use the Internet, blogs, and cable TV to frighten people for profit.

John Hodgman: Are Magic Tricks Really Magic?

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:01:48 -0700

Humorist and Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman presents information on the secrets of famous magic tricks, from his forthcoming book That Is All.

This program was recorded in collaboration with Maker Faire New York, on September 17, 2011.

John Kellogg Hodgman is an American actor, author and humorist. In addition to his published written works, such as The Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require, he is known for his personification of a PC in contrast to Justin Long's personification of a Mac in Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign, and for his correspondent work on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

His writings have been published in One Story (to which he contributed the debut story), The Paris Review, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Wired and The New York Times Magazine, for which he is editor of the humor section. He contributes to Public Radio International’s This American Life, and CBC Radio One’s Wiretap. His first book and accompanying audio narration, The Areas of My Expertise, a satirical tongue-in-cheek almanac which actually contains almost no factual information, was published in 2005. His second book, More Information Than You Require, went on sale October 21, 2008.

Hodgman is most recently the author of That Is All, to be released November 2011.

Khan Academy's YouTube Revolution: A New Way to Teach Everything

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:07:29 -0700

Khan Academy founder Salman Khan explains the concepts driving his wildly popular (and free) YouTube-based lecture series. Could this be the groundwork for a new classroom model? This program was recorded in collaboration with WIRED Business Conference 2011, on May 3, 2011.

Salman Khan, Founder, Khan Academy
in conversation with Clive Thompson, Contributing Editor, WIRED

Salman Khan is the founder and one-man faculty of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing free, high-quality education to "anyone, anywhere" in the world. A hedge fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard, Khan was helping a young cousin with math in 2004, communicating by phone and using an interactive notepad. When others expressed interest, he began posting videos of his hand-scribbled tutorials on YouTube. Demand took off, and in 2009 he quit his day job. The Khan Academy website now provides self-pacing software and unlimited access to over 2,200 instructional videos on its YouTube channel, targeting the K-12 grade levels. It's the most-used library of educational videos on the web, with over a million unique students per month and over 45 million lessons delivered. In 2009, the academy received the Microsoft Tech Award for Education. The following year, it was selected from among 150,000 submissions as one of five "world-changing" ideas in Google's Project 10^100.

Anthony Bourdain and A. A. Gill: Food Fighters

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:04:00 -0700

Devilishly-naughty restaurant critic AA Gill goes 50 minutes with “No Reservations” tv show host Anthony Bourdain upending the tables on food pretensions, culinary icons and vegans in what can be only described as a restaurant-lovers’ “food fight”.

Their topics range from the pretension of chefs, dining versus eating, to the selection of last meals and eating human flesh...from Japanese food fetishes and mafia run “lard markets” in Eastern Europe to the importance of communal eating in the development of human civilisation. Prepare to be very amused.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on May 19, 2011.

Anthony Michael "Tony" Bourdain is an American chef, author and television personality. He is well known for his 2000 book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, and is the host of Travel Channel's culinary and cultural adventure program, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.

Adrian Anthony Gill is a British writer who uses the byline A. A. Gill. He is currently employed by the Sunday Times as their restaurant reviewer and television critic and Vanity Fair magazine as a restaurant reviewer.

Geoffrey West: Why Cities Grow, Corporations Die, and Life Gets Faster

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:11:45 -0700

Physicist Geoffrey West presents "Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster." This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on July 25, 2011.

As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot.

These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West's examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. - The Long Now Foundation

Geoffrey West (b. 1940) is a physicist. He was born in a rural town in western England and moved to London when he was 13. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from Cambridge and pursued graduate studies in California at Stanford. He eventually became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory.

After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute, where he works on biological issues (such as power laws in biology such as the allometric law). He has since been honored as one of Time magazine's "Time 100."

Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:39:37 -0700

In this classic FORA.tv program from May 2007, noted atheist Christopher Hitchens discusses his bestselling book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. This event was recorded in collaboration with Washington, D.C.'s Politics and Prose Bookstore.

Christopher Hitchens speaks about his new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Hitchens, an always colorful and sometimes outrageous commentator, now takes aim at God. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have tried, but that hard-to-hit Fellow keeps popping back up. Worse still are the violent ways of his flock: waging religious warfare, keeping women enslaved, fomenting universal hatreds. Hitchens makes a powerful case for atheism. - Politics and Prose Bookstore

Christopher Hitchens is an author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008.

Fatima Bhutto: Pakistan's Nervous Breakdown

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:52:47 -0700

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on May 17, 2011.

In the Opening Address at the 2011 Sydney Writers Festival, Fatima Bhutto, scion of the Pakistani political dynasty, addresses the current state of her country. Her talk focuses on Pakistan’s love/hate relationship with the United States and, in this way, reminds us of their parallel "nervous breakdowns."

Pakistan is, at once, a country plagued by natural disasters, endemic political corruption, religious fundamentalism and is claimed by many to be the central headquarters of Islamist terrorism. Bhutto sees this condition Pakistan suffers as a plain result of crippling conspiracy-theorizing and manifesting as paranoiac nuclear armament.

But Bhutto finds not all the fault lies at home. She speaks to the West’s hypocrisy with regards to its aggressive “freedom fighting”, including its ever-mounting use of Drone strikes under Obama’s presidency and the civilian casualties which are beyond measure. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Fatima Bhutto is an Afghan-born Pakistani poet and writer. She studied at Columbia University and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Bhutto is the granddaughter of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and niece of Benazir Bhutto. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004, majoring in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2005 with a Masters in South Asian Government and Politics. Her books include Whispers of the Desert, 8.50 am 8 October 2005 and most recently, Songs of Blood and Sword. She is a regular contributor to the New Statesman, The Daily Beast and The Guardian.

Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch: What Does Real Education Reform Require?

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:20:21 -0700

In a spirited debate, Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and NYU research professor Diane Ravitch ponder the realities of comprehensive reform for America's public education system. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Aspen Ideas Festival, on June 29, 2011.

What Does Real Reform Require?

WENDY KOPP
CEO and Founder, Teach For America

DIANE RAVITCH
Research Professor of Education, New York University; Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Moderator:
JAMES BENNET
Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic

Entering its seventh year, the Aspen Ideas Festival will gather some of the most interesting thinkers and leaders from around the US and abroad to discuss their work, the issues that inspire them, and their ideas. Presented by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, the Festival is unique in its dedication to dialogue and exchange, and in its commitment to bringing ideas to the public at large. FORA.tv is pleased to present Festival programs taking place at the Aspen Institute's Paepcke Auditorium.

Carl Zimmer: A Planet of Viruses

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:33:34 -0700

"Scientists are discovering viruses faster than they can make sense of them," says science writer Carl Zimmer of the most rapidly-evolving organism on the planet. Zimmer explores how little we really know about these mighty, miniscule lifeforms.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on June 7, 2011.

Carl Zimmer is the author of several popular science books and writes frequently for the New York Times, as well as for magazines including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Science, Newsweek, Popular Science, and Discover, where he is a contributing editor. Carl's books include Soul Made Flesh, Parasite Rex and Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea. His latest book is A Planet of Viruses.

Bill Gates on Energy Innovation: Technologies to Replace Oil and Coal

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:18:19 -0700

In an interview with WIRED's Chris Anderson, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates considers which developing energy technologies may present the best long-term alternatives to oil and coal power plants. This program was recorded in collaboration with the WIRED Business Conference 2011, on May 3, 2011.

Bill Gates III is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. In July 2008, Gates transitioned out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates continues to serve as Microsoft's chairman and an advisor on key development projects.

Chris Anderson is editor in chief of WIRED magazine, a position he's held since 2001. During his tenure, the magazine has received eight National Magazine Awards and seven additional nominations. It won the prestigious top prize for general excellence in 2005, 2007, and 2009. In 2009, Adweek honored WIRED as its Magazine of the Decade.

Planet Money's Adam Davidson: Smart Jobs and the Future of Work

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:27:07 -0700

Adam Davidson, a host of NPR's Planet Money radio show and podcast, takes an engaging look at how technology is rapidly changing even the most traditional of American industries. This program was recorded in collaboration with the WIRED Business Conference 2011, on May 3, 2011.

Adam Davidson is a host and co-founder of the NPR feature Planet Money. In regular reports on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and This American Life, as well as through its blog and biweekly podcasts, Planet Money helps listeners understand how economic changes affect their lives -- and does so in a way that is consistently engaging and accessible.

Before that, he was an international business and economics correspondent for NPR. He also served as Middle East correspondent for PRI's Marketplace and spent a year in Baghdad, from 2003 to 2004, where his reporting on corruption in the US occupation attracted widespread attention.

Davidson has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including the Peabody, the DuPont-Columbia, and the Polk. His documentary on the housing crisis, "The Giant Pool of Money," was named one of the decade's top ten works of journalism by New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

A Conversation with Jimmy Fallon and Sean Parker

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 17:52:45 -0700

Jimmy Fallon, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon
Sean Parker, Founders Fund

This program was recorded on June 22, 2011.

NExTWORK is a one-day, interdisciplinary conference that will feature world-renowned business leaders, technologists, and thinkers exploring the promise and peril of the network's future, as well as the most pressing digital issues and opportunities today.

Sean Parker is an entrepreneur with a record of launching genre-defining companies that reinvent ways to spread information online. In 1999, at the age of 19, Parker co-founded Napster and changed how people think about and share music. Two years later, Parker co-founded Plaxo, pioneering viral engineering technology for updating contact information. Parker served as Plaxo's president until 2004, when he joined with Mark Zuckerberg to develop the online social network Facebook. Parker was Facebook's founding president, helping transform that small start-up into an industry giant.

Parker's latest venture is Causes, which he co-founded in 2007, and which has become the largest online platform for grassroots activism and philanthropy. At Founders Fund, Parker searches for and fosters the same spirit of innovation that he saw at Facebook, Plaxo, and Causes in new company founders, and has provided essential mentorship to the portfolio companies, including helping develop Alamofire's wildly popular PackRat.

Jimmy Fallon is the host of NBC's late-night talk show, having succeeded Conan O'Brien in that role in March 2009. The show is a regular ratings winner and has been praised for reinvigorating the talk-show format, bringing to it a youthful energy exemplified by Fallon's choice of house band, the hip-hop legends the Roots. Among the show's innovations are short videos, ideal for viral distribution, affectionately spoofing popular TV series; it won an Emmy for a Glee takeoff called "6-Bee," where the Late Night crew challenges the cast of Parks and Recreation for glee-club supremacy. Late Night has also been honored for its website, and Fallon himself received the Webby Person of the Year award.

Kevin Kelly: The Future of the Digital Media Landscape

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:30:45 -0700

Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick at WIRED and author of What Technology Wants, discusses the future of the digital media landscape. This program was recorded in collaboration with the NExTWORK Conference, on June 22, 2011.

NExTWORK is a one-day, interdisciplinary conference that will feature world-renowned business leaders, technologists, and thinkers exploring the promise and peril of the network's future, as well as the most pressing digital issues and opportunities today.

Kevin Kelly has been a participant in, and reporter on, the information technology revolution for the past 20 years. His books include the best-selling work on the networked economy, New Rules for the New Economy, and the classic volume on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. His most recent book, What Technology Wants, lays out a provocative view of technology as an autonomous force in the world. Kelly helped launch WIRED in 1993 and served as executive editor for six years, during which the magazine twice won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He currently holds the title of Senior Maverick at WIRED and is the publisher and editor of the Cool Tools website. From 1984 to 1990, Kelly was the publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review. He also helped launch the WELL, a pioneering online service, in 1985 and co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, Harpers, Science, GQ, and Esquire.

Tim Flannery: Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 16:00:40 -0700

Humans now engage the Earth at Gaian scale. How did Earth and humans get to this state? Given how we got here, how should we proceed? Biologist Tim Flannery argues that the evolutionary perspective of Alfred Russell Wallace offers better guidance than the more familiar Darwinian version of evolution.

Australian biologist Tim Flannery is the renowned author of The Weather Makers, The Future Eaters, and a great ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier. His current book is Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on May 3, 2011.

Get Inspired with MythBuster Adam Savage

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:56:09 -0700

Taking a break from his role as co-host of Discovery Channel's MythBusters, Adam Savage talks about inspiration with attendees of the 2011 Maker Faire Bay Area. What inspires you?

This program was recorded on May 22, 2011.

Adam Savage has spent his life gathering skills that allow him to take what's in his brain and make it real. He's built everything from ancient Buddhas to futuristic weapons, from spaceships to dancing vegetables, from fine art sculptures to animated chocolate and just about anything else you can think of.

Since 1993, Adam has concentrated on the special-effects industry, honing his skills through more than 100 television commercials and a dozen feature films, including Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace and Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Galaxy Quest, Terminator 3, A.I. and the Matrix sequels. He's also designed props and sets for Coca-Cola, Hershey's, Lexus and a host of New York and San Francisco theater companies. Not only has he worked and consulted in the research and development division for toy companies and made several short films, but Adam has also acted in several films and commercials -- including a Charmin ad, in which he played Mr. Whipple's stock boy, and a Billy Joel music video, "Second Wind," in which he drowns.

Today, in addition to co-hosting Discovery Channel's MythBusters, Adam teaches advanced model making, most recently in the industrial design department at the San Francisco Academy of Art. Somehow he also finds time to devote to his own art. His sculptures have been showcased in over 40 shows in San Francisco, New York and Charleston, W.Va.

The Psychology of Twitter

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:01:34 -0700

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on April 26, 2011.

Do you post comments online? Blog about your ideas? Tweet your opinion? Perhaps you're a "lurker," listening to, reading and following others who have their say in social media? It's no secret that Twitter, blogs and Facebook have changed the way we communicate, but have they tapped in to our modern pathological need to be "revered"? And, what does it really mean to be "someone" in the Twittersphere?

At a pub in Brisbane, a panel of twittering journos and scientists fess up on their desires, obsessions, and hates of social media and try to unpick the psychology behind our intimate relationship with it. Among the panelists are Dr. Rod Lamberts, a science communications expert from ANU; Andy Gregson, a social networking entrepreneur; and Natasha Mitchell, the presenter of Radio National's "All in the Mind," who's a fervent blogger and Tweeter herself. Leading the conversation is "New Inventors" judge and ABC science broadcaster, Bernie Hobbs.

This event is presented by ABC Cafe Scientific, as part of the Brisbane 'media140' conference.

Steven Levy: Inside Google

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:44:20 -0700

Inside Google: The Myths, the Culture and the Secret Sauce

Is it the five-star chefs, free laundry and on-site masseuses that are the secret to Google's success? Perhaps its unique management style and innovative team? Either way, the revolutionary search engine has so deeply impacted our work and culture that we have turned the company name into a verb.

Despite being one of the most successful and celebrated companies in history, Google maintains an air of mystery, and cultural myths abound. How has Google stayed innovative and cutting edge while making the transition to tech giant? What exactly happens inside the elusive Google campus? Steven Levy takes a deep dive into Google management, its products and its company culture. Join us as he shares untold stories and unpacks the mythology behind Google. - The Commonwealth Club of California

Steven Levy is a Senior Writer for Wired and Formerly Senior Editor and Chief Technology Writer for Newsweek. Levy is the author of the 2011 book, In the Plex.

John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author. Currently founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing, he is also a founder and executive producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries as well as "band manager" with BoingBoing.net.

Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 27 May 2011 16:22:57 -0700

Professor Donald Johanson, founding director of The Institute of Human Origins (IHO) at Arizona State University, discovered the 3.2 million year old hominid skeleton popularly known as "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis) in Ethiopia in 1974. She has become an icon in this field of study and remains an important touchstone for scholars and lay-people alike for understanding our beginnings. This famous discovery forever changed our understanding of human origins.

Dr. Johanson's talk focuses on how paleoanthropological field work over the last 30 years has established the continent of Africa as the crucible for human evolution. - California Academy of Sciences

Donald C. Johanson is the director of the Institute of Human Origins. For the past 30 years he has conducted field and laboratory research in paleoanthropology. Most notably, he discovered the 3.18 million year old hominid skeleton popularly known as "Lucy."

He has written, among other books, the widely read Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (with Maitland Edey) in 1991, and numerous scientific and popular articles. In 1994, he co-wrote Ancestors: In Search of Human Origins and narrated a companion NOVA television series seen by more than 100 million people worldwide. He has also published From Lucy to Language (with Blake Edgar, principal photography by David Brill), 1996, and most recently, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins (with Kate Wong), 2009. Johanson is a frequent lecturer at universities and other forums in the United States and abroad.

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules -- For Now

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:22:57 -0700

Historian Ian Morris lectures on his work, Why the West Rules -- For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on April 13, 2011.

A Malaysian lawyer told a British journalist: "I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films, and today is whatever date it is because you say so."

Do chaps or maps drive history? Human brilliance and folly, or geography? Or maybe genes, or culture? Ian Morris goes a level deeper than Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel to determine why the standards of Europe and North America now prevail in the world when it was the East that dominated for the 1,200 years between 550 and 1750 CE. Why did that happen, and what will happen next?

Ian Morris is an archaeologist and professor of classics and history at Stanford. His splendid book is Why the West Rules -- For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future.

Mark Hertsgaard on Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:44:27 -0700

Healy Hamilton, the director of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics at the California Academy of Sciences, talks with freelance science journalist Mark Hertsgaard about his latest book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences, on March 23, 2011.

Mark Hertsgaard, an independent journalist based in San Francisco, is the author of five books that have been translated into sixteen languages. He covers climate change for Vanity Fair, The Nation, Time and Die Zeit and has written for many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines.

Dr. Healy Hamilton heads the Center for Biodiversity Research and Information at the California Academy of Sciences, and serves as adjunct professor in the Department of Geography at San Francisco State University. Her interests range from researching the effects of climate change on biodiversity to the evolution and conservation of cetaceans and seahorses.

Guy Kawasaki on Enchantment Marketing

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:55:41 -0700

Venture capitalist and Twitter guru Guy Kawasaki talks about his book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on March 24, 2011.

Marketing these days is strategic and holistic and involves a whole lot of genuine social media engagement. Renowned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki is famous for helping to create Apple product evangelism and for his legendary marketing methods. He explains how to develop the highest level of relations with customers, employees and colleagues by affecting their hearts, minds and actions.

Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984. He is currently a Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, and has been involved in the rumor reporting site Truemors and the RSS aggregator Alltop. He is also a well-known blogger, who trades on his association with Apple.

Josh McHugh is CEO of Attention Span Media. Josh's experience at the intersection of technology, media and business began 14 years ago at Forbes Magazine, where he chronicled the brainiacs and billionaires behind the turn-of-the-century tech upheaval. Before joining Attention Span in 2008, he was a contributing editor at Wired Magazine and a writer for Vanity Fair, Outside, and shelfloads of other publications. He has also worked as a copywriter for advertising juggernauts Wieden + Kennedy and Goodby, Silverstein and Partners.

Paul Krugman In Conversation

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:17:07 -0700

Professor and journalist Peter Beinart talks with Paul Krugman, New York Times op-ed columnist and a Nobel Laureate in Economics. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, on April 6, 2011.

Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University, and an Op-Ed columnist for the Times. His numerous books include "The Great Unraveling," "The Conscience of a Liberal," and "The Return of Depression Economics," an updated edition of which was published in 2009. For his contributions to New Trade Theory, he received the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Peter Beinart is an American journalist and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. He is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast website. Beinart worked at The New Republic until 2006, for much of the time writing The New Republic's signature "TRB" column, which was reprinted in the New York Post and other major American newspapers.

Matt Ridley: Deep Optimism

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:41:45 -0700

Everything's going to Hell in a handbasket! Or is it?

Not according to Matt Ridley. Ridley takes a long-term view of humanity's past to project a deeply optimistic view of our future. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on March 22, 2011.

Via trade and other cultural activities, "ideas have sex," and that drives human history in the direction of inconstant but accumulative improvement over time. The criers of havoc keep being proved wrong. A fundamental optimism about human affairs is deeply rational and can be reliably conjured with.

Trained at Oxford as a zoologist and an editor at The Economist for eight years, Matt Ridley's newest book is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. His earlier works include Francis Crick; Nature via Nurture; Genome; and The Origins of Virtue.

Matt Ridley's books have sold over 800,000 copies, been translated into 27 languages and been short-listed for six literary prizes. In 2004 he won the National Academies Book Award from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine for Nature via Nurture.

He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert. They have two children and live at Blagdon near Newcastle upon Tyne.

Former NPR Head Vivian Schiller In Conversation

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:46:35 -0700

Vivian Schiller, former President and CEO of NPR, discusses the state of public media in America, in a conversation with former PBS President and CEO Pat Mitchell. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Paley Center for media, on April 5, 2011.

A media executive and journalist with more than twenty years experience in the industry, Vivian Schiller was president and CEO of NPR from January 2009 to March 2011. She joined NPR from The New York Times Company where she served as senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com.

As president and CEO, Schiller oversaw all NPR operations and initiatives, including the organization's critical partnerships with its more than 800 member stations, and their service to the more than twenty-six million people who listen to NPR programming every week.

During her tenure at the New York Times, she led the day-to-day operations of NYTimes.com, the largest newspaper Web site on the internet, overseeing product, technology, marketing, classifieds, strategic planning, and business development.

Pat Mitchell (born January 20, 1943) is the current President and Chief Executive Officer of The Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) in New York City and the former President and CEO of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

She resigned from PBS in March 2006 and was replaced by the current CEO, Paula Kerger, formerly of New York's PBS station, WNET. At PBS, she was named President and Chief Executive Officer in March 2000, the first woman and first producer and journalist to hold the position.

Jane McGonigal: How Video Games Can Make a Better World

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:42:28 -0700

Can problems like poverty and climate change by fixed through games? Visionary game designer Jane McGonigal thinks they can. With more than 174 million gamers in the United States, McGonigal explores how we can save the world through the power of gaming. McGonigal is helping pioneer the fasting-growing genre of games that turns gameplay to achieve socially positive outcomes.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on January 24, 2011.

Jane McGonigal is the director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California. She has created and deployed games and missions in more than 30 countries on six continents. She specializes in games that help gamers enjoy their real lives more -- and games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, through planetary-scale collaboration.

McGonigal is the author of the newly released book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

Glenn Wilson: Sex Wars

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:01:40 -0700

Acclaimed psychologist Glenn Wilson discusses research on human sexual behavior. This program was recorded in collaboration with Gresham College, on February 22, 2011.

Why do the "selfish genes" of men and women sometimes create conflict? How do monogamy, polygamy and infidelity stack up in terms of adaptive value? Is sex addiction a real disease or just an excuse for bad behaviour? The distinction between explanation and moral justification. Reconciling the discrepancy between male and female instincts.

As well as being one of Britain's best-known psychologists, Glenn Wilson is the Visiting Gresham Professor of Psychology. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs and has published more than 150 scientific articles and 33 books.

He is an expert on individual differences; social and political attitudes; sexual behavior, deviation and dysfunction; and psychology applied to the performing arts. Not one to shy away from contention, his most recent books include: Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation, The Secret of Lasting Love and Psychology for Performing Artists.He has lectured widely abroad, having been a guest of the Italian Cultural Association, and a visiting professor at California State University, Los Angeles, San Francisco State University, Stanford University, the University of Nevada, Reno and Sierra Nevada College.

Apart from being a professional psychologist, Dr. Wilson trained as an opera singer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and still undertakes professional engagements as an actor, singer and director.

P. W. Singer on Wired for War: Robotics and 21st Century Conflict

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:13:19 -0700

Technology is rapidly evolving the state of modern war, notes political scientist P.W. Singer. But as our battles are increasingly fought at arm's length by unmanned drones and robotic soldiers, how will it change the way we think about conflict? This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on October 2, 2010.

The rate of technological change over the last century has been exponential. According to Moore's Law, computing power has doubled for the price every two years, a trend set to continue or even accelerate. It’s a trend that's seen robotics take centre stage in the theatre of war -- and in some cases, saved many lives.

But according to political scientist P. W. Singer, it may be taking us into the ultimate of ethical grey areas. Singer claims "YouTube wars," fought by remote consoles thousands of kilometres away from the battlelines, have profoundly compromised the gravitas that once accompanied the horrors of warfare. For example, unmanned squadrons of "Predator Drones" currently carry out five times the airstrikes in Pakistan that were waged on Kosovo ten years ago. But, as Singer points out, this isn’t actually referred to as a "war."

As the military becomes increasingly disconnected from the battles they are waging, Singer checks up on the cost to the operators and the targets of our newest "killer apps" -- the unmanned robot armies of the twenty-first century. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Peter W. Singer was speaking to the Lowy Institute's Rory Medcalf at the Sydney Opera House for the 2010 Festival of Dangerous Ideas. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Peter Warren Singer is Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution. He is the youngest scholar named Senior Fellow in Brookings's 90-year history.

In his personal capacity, Singer served as coordinator of the Obama-08 campaign’s defense policy task force. In 2009, Singer was named by Foreign Policy Magazine to the Top 100 Global Thinkers List, of the people whose ideas most influenced the world that year.

Dr. Singer is considered one of the world's leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare. He was named by the President to Joint Forces Command's Transformation Advisory Group. He has written for the full range of major media and journals, including the Boston Globe, L.A. Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Current History, Survival, International Security, Parameters, Weltpolitik, and the World Policy Journal.

Dr. Singer’s most recent book, Wired for War (Penguin, 2009), looks at the implications of robotics and other new technologies for war, politics, ethics, and law in the 21st century.

The New Order in Washington: Featuring Gail Collins, Mike Allen, and Peter Beinart

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:56:58 -0700

Journalists Gail Collins, Mike Allen and Peter Beinart discuss the current state of Washington politics, and examine outlooks for the 2012 Presidential election. This program was recorded in collaboration with the City University of New York, on March 1, 2011.

The spring Perspectives with Peter Beinart series opens with an evening examining the new order in Washington. The discussion features Gail Collins, columnist for the New York Times, and Mike Allen, chief political correspondent for Politico. Peter Beinart is a faculty member at CUNY's Graduate Center and Graduate School of Journalism and a senior political writer for the Daily Beast. - CUNY

Mike Allen is the chief White House correspondent for Politico. He comes to us from Time magazine where he was their White House correspondent. Prior to that, Allen spent six years at the Washington Post, where he covered President Bush's first term, Capitol Hill, campaign finance, and the Bush, Gore and Bradley campaigns of 2000.

Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times's editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish her new book: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. She returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007.

Peter Beinart is an American journalist and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. He is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast website. Beinart worked at The New Republic until 2006, for much of the time writing The New Republic's signature "TRB" column, which was reprinted in the New York Post and other major American newspapers.

Joel Salatin: War Stories from the Local Food Front

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:09:17 -0800

American farmer Joel Salatin, the star of the documentary Food Inc, has become a "pin up boy" for the growing food "re-localization" movement. On a recent visit to Canberra, he gives his take on food politics after a lifetime of experience in natural and profitable farming.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on November 24, 2010.

Salatin came to prominence with his ideas about creating abundance on a family farm. His methods include learning how to mimic nature and arrange the facets of farm life so they don't operate as independent operations, but rather a system of "intertwined cycles."

Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, moved cows daily with portable electric fencing, and utilized portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures.

Salatin believes we’re now living through an age of a "food inquisition", not unlike the religious inquisition of 500 years ago, where the powers behind industrialized agriculture and food production are putting heretical farmers like him "on the rack."

In this talk, organized by Milkwood Permaculture in association with Slow Food Canberra, Salatin lays out twelve false assumptions peddled by the "inquisitors," which sustainable farming methods counter. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Joel Salatin has been featured in Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and in the films Fresh and Food Inc. He is also the author of six books including Family Friendly Farming, Salad Bar Beef, and his latest, Everything I Want To Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. He is a full-time farmer of the highly successful Polyface Farms, and winner of the Heinz International Award for Environmental Leadership.

Dambisa Moyo: How the West Was Lost

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:59:06 -0800

Acclaimed international economist Dambisa Moyo discusses her latest work, How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly -- and the Stark Choices Ahead. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on February 17, 2011.

Dambisa Moyo daringly claims that the West can no longer afford to simply regard global up-and-comers as menacing gatecrashers. In a world where Western economies hover on the brink of recession while emerging economies post double-digit growth rates, Moyo calls out the economic myopia of the West and the radical solutions that it needs to adopt to salvage its global economic power.

A former consultant for the World Bank and former emerging markets investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Moyo was named by Time Magazine as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World," and was nominated to the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Forum. - The Commonwealth Club of California

Dambisa Moyo is an international economist who comments on the macroeconomy and global affairs.

She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa. Her latest book is entitled How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead.

She completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University and holds a Masters degree from Harvard University. She completed an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and an MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington D.C.

Robert Sapolsky: Are Humans Just Another Primate?

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 12:31:38 -0800

Just how much separates homo sapiens from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom? Not all that much, as it turns out. Dr. Robert Sapolosky, professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, explains in this discussion on his latest book, "A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons."

This program was recorded in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences, on February 15, 2011.

Dr. Robert Sapolsky discusses his work as professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and as a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. His enviable gift for storytelling led the New York Times to print, "If you crossed Jane Goodall with a borscht-belt comedian, she might have written a book like A Primate's Memoir." Dr. Sapolsky's account of his early years as a field biologist. He is sure to dazzle and delight with tales of what it means to be human. - California Academy of Sciences

Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a professor of Biology and Neurology at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya. Dr. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals.

Tim Ferriss: 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and 'The 4-Hour Body'

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:12:58 -0800

Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of "The Four-Hour Workweek," returns with "The Four-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman." This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on January 6, 2011.

Want to work just four hours a week? Ferriss believes he can show you how. This Jack-of-all-trades has done it all, from becoming the National Chinese Kickboxing Champion and the Guinness World Record-holder for tango dancing to working for education reform. In his controversial book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss advocates throwing out old ideas of retirement and deferred-life plans. His latest sensation, The 4-Hour Body, is a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the human body, covering topics ranging from fat loss to sex, and he says it's all been tested. - The Commonwealth Club of California

Timothy Ferriss (b. 1977) is an American author, public speaker, and productivity guru. Tim received his BA from Princeton University in 2000, where he studied in the Neuroscience and East Asian Studies departments.

In 2007, he published The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich which was a New York Times,Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller. His latest book is The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman.

Ken Robinson: Rethinking Educational Paradigms

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:12:58 -0800

Celebrated education expert Ken Robinson argues that most "modern" approaches to learning are actually relics of an outdated, industrial-age system. This program was recorded in collaboration with the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival, on July 8, 2010.

Sir Ken Robinson is an expert in creativity, innovation, and human resources. He works with governments in Europe, Asia, and the United States, and with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and cultural organizations. Robinson led a national commission on creativity, education, and the economy for the UK government and was central in forming a creative- and economic-development strategy as part of the Northern Ireland peace process. Formerly, he was professor of education at the University of Warwick.

He has received several honorary degrees, the Athena Award from the Rhode Island School of Design, the Peabody Medal, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Royal Society of Arts. He received a knighthood for his services to the arts. His latest book is The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Viking, 2009).

Why Not to Fear Black Holes with Astronomer Ian Morison

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:25:45 -0800

Black Holes seem to have bad press that is largely undeserved. This lecture with professor Ian Morison explains what Black Holes are, and how we can discover them even through they can't be seen.

This program was recorded in collaboration with Gresham College, on October 27, 2010.

Gresham Professor of Astronomy Ian Morison made his first telescope at the age of 12 with lenses given to him by his optician. Having studied Physics, Maths and Astronomy at Oxford, he became a radio astronomer at the Jodrell Bank Observatory and teaches Astronomy and Cosmology at the University of Manchester.

Over 25 years he has also taught Observational Astronomy to many hundreds of adult students in the North West of England. An active amateur optical astronomer, he is a council member and past president of the Society for Popular Astronomy in the United Kingdom.

At Jodrell Bank he was a designer of the 217 KM MERLIN array and has coordinated the Project Phoenix SETI Observations using the Lovell Radio Telescope. He contributes astronomy articles and reviews for New Scientist and Astronomy Now, and produces a monthly sky guide on the Observatory's website.

WikiLeaks: Why It Matters. Why It Doesn't?

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:24:22 -0800

This program was recorded on January 19, 2011. For related videos, visit WikiLeaks: Security Threat or Media Savior? A FORA.tv Series: http://fora.tv/series/wikileaks

The Churchill Club and FORA.tv present "WikiLeaks: Why It Matters. Why It Doesn't?," a panel discussion featuring:

Daniel Ellsberg, Former State and Defense Dept. Official prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers

Clay Shirky, Independent Internet Professional; Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

Neville Roy Singham, Founder and Chairman, ThoughtWorks

Peter Thiel, President, Clarium Capital; Managing Partner, Founder's Fund

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University; Co-founder, Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Moderator: Paul Jay, CEO and Senior Editor, The Real News Network

David Brooks: Politics and Culture

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:12:30 -0800

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on January 11, 2011.

New York Times op-ed columnist and American political and cultural commentator David Brooks offers a fresh perspective on politics and culture in the age of President Obama. Is the country moving further to the left, right or center? What is the future of the tea party movement?

As author of a twice-weekly column for The New York Times, Brooks has written extensively on regional and intergenerational differences in America, America as a consumerist society, the benefits of a free-market economy, and foreign policy.

Brooks regularly appears on PBS' "NewsHour" and on NPR's "All Things Considered." A prolific writer and editor with a long career in journalism, he has also served as contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, senior editor of The Weekly Standard, and editor for The Wall Street Journal. Brooks is the author of three books, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. - Commonwealth Club of California

David Brooks became an op-ed columnist for The New York Times in September 2003. He had been an editor at The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, and a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic.

Currently a commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, he is also the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. His latest book is The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.

Dan Schnur was appointed Chairman of California's Fair Political Practices Commission June 2010. His appointment to the Commission continues a distinguished career that includes working on four presidential and three gubernatorial campaigns. Schnur is on leave from his position as director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, where he works to motivate young people to become involved in politics, government and public service.

Lenore Skenazy: Is Freedom Too Dangerous for Kids?

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 15:45:09 -0800

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on October 3, 2010.

Here in this delightfully theatrical talk at the Sydney Opera House, Lenore Skenazy explains how the rise of experts, fear of litigation, and the media have all led to a culture of overly cautious parents.

Skenazy points out that in the West our children's lives are safer in nearly every respect than ever before. So why do we treat them with such "kid" gloves and deny them basic freedoms like walking to school alone? Is ordinary life too dangerous for our children?

Skenazy argues that in order for children to grow up to be well-rounded, creative and responsible people, we have to set them free. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Lenore Skenazy writes a nationally syndicated column that appears in more than 100 papers through the Creators Syndicate. Her work offers commentary on everything from politics to family life to popular culture phenomena, and includes My Dollar Store Addiction and Don't Call Me From Your Car Just Because You're Bored.

Richard Glover is the author of the book Desperate Husbands, which has been a best-seller in Australia and is published in translation in Italy and Poland and he has also written two short novels for children The Dirt Experiment and The Joke Trap.

Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 17:44:54 -0800

According to Kevin Kelly, technology is not anti-nature -- it's an extension of it. In this presentation, the man listed as Wired magazine's "Senior Maverick" examines how technologies evolve, and what we can do to guide them into their best roles. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on November 3, 2010.

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with new inventions, such as the "crackberry," for example. Kevin Kelly declares this conflict as inherent to all technology. But he also argues that technology is not anti-nature, but rather the "seventh kingdom" of life; it now shares with life certain biases, urges, needs and tendencies. By adopting the principles of pro-action and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. Previously, he was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference and helped launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985.

Kevin Kelly is the author of New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control. He is currently editor and publisher of the popular websites Cool Tools and The Quantified Self. His most recent book is What Technology Wants.

Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values?

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 16:55:27 -0800

Atheist author and cultural critic Sam Harris discusses his book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. This program was recorded in collaboration with Berkeley Arts and Letters, on November 10, 2010.

In this highly anticipated, explosive new book, the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation calls for an end to religion's monopoly on morality and human values. In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values to dismantle the most common justification for religious faith -- that a moral system cannot be based on science.

The End of Faith ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In its aftermath, Harris discovered that most people, from secular scientists to religious fundamentalists, agree on one point: Science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Even among religious fundamentalists, the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence that God exists, but that faith in Him provides the only guidance for living a good life. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science has officially had no opinion. Until now.

Bringing a fresh, secular perspective to age-old questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, Harris shows that we know enough about the human brain and its relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, cultural relativism is simply false -- and comes at increasing cost to humanity. And just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our "culture wars," Sam Harris delivers a game-changing argument about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation. - Berkeley Arts and Letters

Sam Harris is an American non-fiction author, and CEO of Project Reason. He received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, and is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University. He has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. He is a proponent of scientific skepticism and is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), a rejoinder to criticism of his first book, and The Moral Landscape (2010).

Decoded: Jay-Z and Cornel West In Conversation

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:30:00 -0800

Superstar rap artist Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter talks about his book, Decoded, in a conversation with professor Cornel West and the NYPL's Paul Holdengraber. This program was recorded in collaboration with the New York Public Library, on November 15, 2010.

Fiercely candid, uncompromising, provocative, inspiring -- Decoded is the long awaited first book by the multi-platinum, 10 time Grammy Award winning artist, entrepreneur, and icon JAY-Z.

At the New York Public Library, JAY-Z will share his thoughts on growing up as a hustler and feeling judged simply because of where he was from. He will also address issues that informed him and his songwriting:

How did visual art and poetry influence his craft?
How did he get involved in politics when he never really trusted the system?
How did he stay honest to himself in the world of big business and how did he shed stereotypes when he'd been labeled one all his life? - NYPL

Shawn Corey Carter, better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper and businessman. He is one of the most financially successful hip hop artists and entrepreneurs in America. He has sold approximately 50 million albums worldwide, while receiving ten Grammy Awards for his musical work, and numerous additional nominations.

Cornel West is a philosopher, author, critic, and civil rights activist. His works include The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, Race Matters, and The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century.

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of LIVE from the NYPL.

Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 17:01:30 -0800

How does language affect our thoughts, and what are the implications for culture and society? Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky examines these questions and more in this insightful look at the developing field of cognitive linguistics. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on October 26, 2010.

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? For example, how do we think about time? The word "time" is the most frequent noun in the English language. Time is ubiquitous yet ephemeral. It forms the very fabric of our experience, and yet it is unperceivable: we cannot see, touch, or smell time. How do our minds create this fundamental aspect of experience? Do patterns in language and culture influence how we think about time?

Do languages merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express? Can learning new ways to talk change how you think? Is there intrinsic value in human linguistic diversity?

Join us as Stanford cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky re-invigorates this long standing debate with data from experiments done around the world, from China, to Indonesia, Israel, and Aboriginal Australia. - The Long Now Foundation

Lera Boroditsky is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. Professor Boroditsky does research in cognitive science with a specific focus on cognitive linguistics. She studies language and cognition, specifically focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception.

Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. She has received several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER award, the Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and being named a Searle Scholar.

Her work has provided new insights on the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). She has discovered important empirical examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. This work has been influential in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in countering the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.

Michael Krasny's Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:16:03 -0800

Award-winning radio host Michael Krasny discusses his book, Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on October 20, 2010.

Unlike recent authors who emphatically say No! or Yes! to God, Michael Krasny joins the millions who know they don't know. As a radio host, college professor, and literary scholar, he has spent decades leading conversations on every imaginable topic. He has discussed life's most important questions with the foremost thinkers in virtually every discipline. And yet answers to some questions -- the big, three-o'clock-in-the-morning questions -- elude him. Despite this, Krasny does not discount belief systems or ridicule faith. Instead, he seeks. He explores morality, eternal life, why we do good, and why evil sometimes triumphs, and his quest is informed by artists, scientists, world events, and even films. Personal and universal, timely and timeless, Spiritual Envy is a deeply wise yet warmly welcoming conversation, an invitation to ask one's own questions -- no matter how inconclusive the answers.

Michael Krasny, PhD, hosts the nation's most listened to locally produced public radio talk show, Forum with Michael Krasny. Forum is heard weekdays on KQED-FM in San Francisco, an affiliate of National Public Radio, as well as on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio. An award-winning broadcaster who has interviewed many of the great cultural icons of our era, he is the author of Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press) and coauthor of Sound Ideas (McGraw-Hill). Krasny is also an English professor at San Francisco State University.

Michael Krasny, Ph.D., is host of KQED's award-winning Forum, a news and public affairs program that concentrates on the arts, culture, health, business and technology.

Before coming to KQED Public Radio in 1993, Dr. Krasny hosted a night-time talk program for KGO Radio and co-anchored the weekly KGO television show Nightfocus. He hosted Bay TV's Take Issue, a nightly news analysis show, programs for KQED Public Televison, KRON television and National Public Radio, and did news commentary for KTVU television.

Since 1970 he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State University and is a widely published scholar and critic as well as a former regular contributor to Mother Jones magazine and a fiction writer. He has also worked widely as a facilitator and host in the corporate sector and as moderator for a host of major non-profit events.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Eating Animals

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:03:31 -0800

Jonathan Safran Foer talks about his book, Eating Animals, in a conversation with Raj Patel. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on September 21, 2010.

Jonathan Safran Foer looks at our dining habits, insatiable appetites and the cultural meaning of food. He explores the ethical, environmental and health risks behind commercial fishing and factory farming and discusses his journey from carnivore to vegetarian.

Hear from the man that actress Natalie Portman claims changed her from a "20-year vegetarian to a vegan activist."

Jonathan Safran Foer is a novelist and short story writer whose works have appeared in the Paris Review, Conjunctions, The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is best known for his semi-autobiographical novel, Everything Is Illuminated.

Raj Patel holds a doctorate in Sociology from Cornell University and has worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations. He is a writer and activist concerned with land reform politics, development studies, and food sovereignty. He authored Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

Daniel Ellsberg on Howard Zinn's 'The Bomb'

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:07:04 -0800

Daniel Ellsberg, progressive activist and famed leaker of the Pentagon Papers, discusses the late Howard Zinn's final original book, The Bomb. This program was recorded in collaboration with City Lights bookstore, on September 29, 2010.

As an active WWII bombardier returning from the end of the war in Europe and preparing for combat in Japan, Howard Zinn read the headline Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan and was glad—the war would be over. "Like other Americans," writes Zinn, "I had no idea what was going on at the higher levels, and had no idea what that 'atomic bomb' had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima, any more than I ever really understood what the bombs I dropped on European cities were doing to human flesh and blood."

During the war, Zinn had taken part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France, and in 1966, he went to Hiroshima, where he was invited to a "house of rest" where survivors of the bombing gathered. In this short and powerful book, the backstory of the making and use of the bomb, Zinn offers his deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, anti-war historians. - City Lights Bookstore

Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation, sparked a national controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

The Pentagon Papers revealed that the government knew early on that the Vietnam War was not likely winnable and would lead to many times more casualties than ever admitted. After failing to persuade a few U.S. Senators to release the papers on the Senate floor, Ellsberg decided to risk prison and leaked the documents to the New York Times. Ellsberg went underground for 16 days before turning himself in. Fortunately, the charges against him were eventually dropped due to gross government misconduct and illegal evidence gathering by the Nixon administration and the notorious White House "Plumbers Unit."

These efforts included breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and were undertaken directly by the Nixon White House to smear and discredit Ellsberg in the news media in retaliation for his Pentagon Papers whistleblowing.

Condoleezza Rice: Extraordinary, Ordinary People

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:26:32 -0700

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice discusses her memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on October 18, 2010.

In her first public appearance since the publication of her new family memoir, Secretary Rice provides a rare glimpse at the experiences that have shaped her world outlook and discusses her views on current issues. Rice details her remarkable childhood, which began in the late 1950s, when Birmingham blacks lived in segregation, and continued through the '60s, when Rice saw her girlhood friends lose their lives to the bloodshed of the era. Rice was the 66th U.S. secretary of state and the first black woman to hold that office. She talks about the people and experiences that have guided her on her path to occupying one of the nation's highest offices. Prior to serving as secretary of state, she was the first woman ever to serve as national security advisor, was provost of Stanford from 1993 to 1999, and served as the Soviet and East European Affairs advisor during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. - Commonwealth Club of California

Dr. Condoleezza Rice became Secretary of State on January 26, 2005. Prior to this, she was the assistant to the president for National Security Affairs, commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor, since January, 2001.

In June 1999, she completed a six-year tenure as Stanford University's Provost, during which she was the institution's chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students.

As professor of political science, Dr. Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors -- the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Mary Cranston is Senior Partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. She is the Immediate Past Chair of the Commonwealth Club Board of Governors.

Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:43:04 -0700

Acclaimed author Steven Johnson talks about his latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Booksmith, on October 11, 2010.

How and why do world-changing ideas surface? Johnson writes, "The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments. I have distilled them down into seven patterns: the adjacent possible; liquid networks; the slow hunch; serendipity; error; exaptation; and emergent platforms. The more we embrace these patterns – in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools – the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking."

Johnson traces these patterns across centuries and disciplines, from the FBI's tragic failure to grasp the importance of information that might have prevented the 9/11 terrorist attacks to Gutenberg's use of wine-press technology to build the world's first printing press with moveable type to the founding of Google on a Net-transforming hunch. But the relevant question, Johnson insists, is not how these guys got to be so clever (or not). Rather, what we need to ask is: What kind of environment fosters remarkable innovation?

With four critically acclaimed books, the two most recent being New York Times Notable Books, Steven Johnson has demonstrated that he can pinpoint an urgent cultural issue and illuminate it with dazzling cross-disciplinary insights. Whether tweaking conventional wisdom in Everything Bad is Good for You, offering captivating new perspectives on the conflict between science and religion in The Invention of Air, or debunking skepticism about the significance of Twitter in a cover story for Time magazine, Johnson has commanded a prominent perch in the public discourse. Now Johnson bridges natural science, intellectual history, urban sociology, and cutting-edge technology to explore one of our most pressing cultural questions, and to offer persuasive, inspiring, and practical answers that readers can use to propel their lives and careers forward.

Steven Johnson is the founder of a variety of influential websites – most recently, outside.in – and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. With 1.5 million Twitter followers, he is widely regarded as one of the world's most perceptive and thought-provoking thinkers on new media and the evolution of information technology. His previous books are The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad is Good for You, Mind Wide Open, Emergence, and Interface Culture.

John Nichols: The Death and Life of American Journalism

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:45:52 -0700

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on August 10, 2010.

In a time when thousands of newspapers are shedding staff, being closed, sold off or swallowed, John Nichols reasserts the importance of fierce and independent political journalism.

Nichols is a noted U.S. commentator who writes for The Nation and was a visiting guest at the 2010 Walkley Media Conference. He warns his Australian audience that the dip in quantity and quality of American television and print media could spread, if Australia fails to value the institutions and outlets that act as our critical "fourth estate." - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Peter Gleick - Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:56:30 -0700

Peter Gleick, scientist and freshwater expert, talks about his latest book: Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. This program was recorded in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences, on September 30, 2010.

Tap water is safe almost everywhere in the U.S. It takes far more water to make the plastic bottle than it even holds. Most bottled water is simply water from somebody else's tap! Why on earth does this industry continue to thrive? - California Academy of Sciences

Peter H. Gleick is co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. Dr. Gleick is an internationally recognized water expert and in 2003 was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for his science and policy work on water issues worldwide. In 2006 he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. His research and writing address the critical connections between water and human health, the human right to water, the hydrologic impacts of climate change, sustainable water use, privatization and globalization and international conflicts over water resources.

He serves on the boards of numerous journals and organizations and was elected an Academician of the International Water Academy in Oslo, Norway in 1999. Dr. Gleick is the author of many scientific papers and five books, including the biennial water report The World's Water.

Patil Armenian on Poisons, Venoms and Pills: Toxicology 101

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:01:18 -0700

This program features visual aids. A complete video of this event is available for free at http://fora.tv/2010/07/01/Poisons_Venoms_and_Pills_Toxicology_101

Join Patil Armenian, MD of the California Poison Control System for Poisons, Venoms and Pills: Toxicology 101, an uninhibited interactive presentation and talk about all the various toxic substances you can ingest, inject, drink, get stung by, or be bitten with: from pills in your medicine chest to a viper in the wilderness.

This talk includes shocking visuals from the Poison Control Center's vast archives of curiosities in accidental and intentional poisonings and overdoses. - California Academy of Sciences

Niall Ferguson - Empires on the Edge of Chaos

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:58:19 -0700

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson attempts to give context to America's ongoing debt crisis. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on July 28, 2010.

Throughout history the rise and fall of empires isn't slow or cyclical, as we like to think, but arrhythmic...it mostly happens very, very suddenly. America is a superpower on the edge of chaos, according to economic historian and author Niall Ferguson. U.S. debt levels, he says, and its unwillingness to address the problem, has put it in the same category as other great empires which have collapsed throughout the ages.

Ferguson argues the world is changing. There's the rise of authoritarian China as a super-power; a Keynesian president leading a weakened United States; the re-emergence of democratic India as a great power; the continued decline of Japan; and the probability of continued global economic instability ahead.

Is the rise and fall of empires cyclical or arrhythmic? How does economic profligacy -- whether the result of arrogance or naivety -- contribute to the downfall of civilizations? Not to be missed, the address will offer a timely review of primacy, leadership, and the complex factors behind the rise and fall of great powers and civilizations. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Martin Rees: Life's Future in the Cosmos

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:00:42 -0700

Cosmologist Martin Rees posits the question: What if human success on Earth determines life's success in the universe? This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on August 2, 2010.

President of the Royal Society, England's Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees brings a lifetime of cosmological inquiry to a crucial question: What if human success on Earth determines life's success in the universe?

He thinks that civilization's chances of getting out of this century intact are about 50-50. He is hopeful that extraterrestrial life already exists, but there's no sign of it yet. But even if we are now alone, he notes that we may not even be the halfway stage of evolution.

There is huge scope for post-human evolution, so that "it will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."

Appropriately, Rees's Long Now talk was at the Chabot Space and Science Center in the hills above Oakland, in the planetarium.

Martin Rees is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University.

After studying at the University of Cambridge, he held post-doctoral positions in the UK and the USA, before becoming a professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge (continuing in the latter post until 1991) and served for ten years as director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. From 1992 to 2003 he was a Royal Society Research Professor.

Stewart Brand is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, founded and runs the GBN Book Club, and is the president of The Long Now Foundation.

Megan Stack: An Education in War

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 16:29:37 -0700

L.A. Times war correspondent Megan Stack discusses her book, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on August 6, 2010.

Megan Stack started life as a war correspondent almost accidentally. She was 25 years old, a National Correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and holidaying in Paris when the 2001 September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center occurred. Her vacation was cut short, she flew in to Afghanistan, and from there Stack officially became a war correspondent.

Since then, Stack has been a foreign correspondent in over 22 countries and has covered war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Lebanon. It's an experience she recounts in her book, Every Man In This Village Is A Liar: An Education In War.

In this talk at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, Megan Stack discusses her career as a war correspondent. She gives insights into the wars she has covered, many of which still rage on today explaining why in war "You can survive and not survive, both at the same time."

She is joined by journalist Mungo MacCallum who replaces the intended compare for the event Kerry O'Brien (whose plane was delayed). O'Brien rushes in halfway through the talk, takes up his post and continues the conversation with Stack. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Megan Stack has covered the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as the Palestinian intifada. She joined the Los Angeles Times' national desk in 2001 as Houston bureau chief. She was posted to Jerusalem in 2003 and, later that year, was named Cairo bureau chief. In 2007, with her colleagues in the Baghdad bureau, she was named a Pulitzer finalist for Iraq coverage and won an Overseas Press Club award.

A native of Glastonbury, CT, Stack studied Spanish literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and graduated from George Washington University in 1998. She worked as a reporter for the El Paso Times and covered Texas and the Mexican border for the Associated Press.

Bill Gates: In Conversation with Walter Isaacson

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:40:29 -0700

Philanthropist and former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates addresses a variety of topics, including his ideas on how to improve America's educational system, in a conversation with Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Aspen Ideas Festival 2010, on July 8, 2010.

An Afternoon of Conversation engages big thinkers and doers in serious discussion about their work and the future. This conversation features Bill Gates and Walter Isaacson. - Aspen Institute

William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$39.79 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2005, and employs more than 61,000 people in 102 countries and regions.

Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing Editor of Time Magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003) and of Kissinger: A Biography (1992) and is the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). His biography of Albert Einstein - Einstein: His Life and Universe - was released in April 2007.

Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe on Lamb Castration, PETA, and American Labor

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:47:30 -0700

Drawing on his experiences picking up roadkill, feeding swine, and castrating a lamb with his teeth, Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs, discusses how modern American culture belittles necessary labor.

EG is the celebration of the American entertainment industry. Since 1984, Richard Saul Wurman has created extraordinary gatherings about learning and understanding. EG is a rich extension of these ideas - a conference that explores the attitude of understanding in music, film, television, radio, technology, advertising, gaming, interactivity and the web - The Entertainment Gathering

Mike Rowe has had more jobs than you. In fact, Mike has had more jobs than anyone.

As the creator and executive producer of Discovery Channels Emmy-nominated series Dirty Jobs With Mike Rowe, Mike has spent years traveling the country, working as an apprentice on more than 200 jobs that most people would go out of their way to avoid. From coal mining to roustabouting, maggot farming to sheep castrating, Mike has worked in just about every industry and filmed the show in almost every state, celebrating the hard-working Americans who make civilized life possible for the rest of us.

On Labor Day 2008, Mike launched a Web site called mikeroweWORKS.com, where skilled labor and hard work are celebrated in the hope of calling attention to the steady decline in the trades and bolstering enrollment in trade schools and technical colleges.

In addition to Dirty Jobs and his mikeroweWORKS endeavor, Mike is the voice of Deadliest Catch and the national spokesman for Ford Trucks. He has traveled extensively for Discovery Channel, hosting Shark Week in South Africa, where he field-tested a steel-mesh shark-suit, and Egypt Week Live, where he opened and explored newly discovered tombs in the Valley of the Golden Mummies.

Mary Roach: Packing for Mars

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:47:30 -0700

Bestselling author Mary Roach talks about her latest work, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, in a conversation with writer Jeff Greenwald. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on August 19, 2010.

She took us into the world of cadavers and examined the anatomy, physiology and psychology behind sex. Now, Mary Roach discovers the surreality and weirdness of space.

For example, what happens when you've been in space for a year? And is it possible for a human body to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles per hour? From the space shuttle training toilet to NASA's crash simulation tests, Roach explores the strange universe. - Commonwealth Club of California

Mary Roach is the author of the national bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Salon, GQ, Vogue, and the New York Times magazine.

Oakland-based writer and performer Jeff Greenwald is the author of five best-selling travel books, including Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World (for which he created the first international blog). His stories and essays have appeared in many print and online publications--including the New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Afar and Salon.

Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:53:44 -0700

Game designer Jesse Schell discusses the potential benefits and pitfalls of an increasingly video game-oriented world. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on July 27, 2010.

Games perpetually revolutionize computer use toward denser interaction with the human mind. To do that, they perpetually revolutionize themselves. Understanding the next frontiers of the genre is one way to understand where society is going.

In this talk Jesse Schell explores the social, cognitive, and technological trends in computer game design and use.

Prior to starting Schell Games in 2004, Jesse was the Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, where he worked and played for seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest, as well as on Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for kids. Before that, he worked as writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer's Mime Circus and the Juggler's Guild.

Jesse is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University where he teaches classes in Game Design and serves as advisor on several innovative projects. Formerly the Chairman of the International Game Developers Association, he is also the author of the award winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. In 2004, he was named one of the world's Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT's magazine of innovation. His primary responsibility at Schell Games is to make sure everyone is having fun and creating beautiful things.

David Boies - Overturning California's Prop 8: The Case for Gay Marriage

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:25:47 -0700

In the wake of a successful legal challenge to California's gay marriage ban (Proposition 8), David Boies, co-head litigator for the plaintiffs, discusses the case's future as it proceeds on a likely course to the U.S. Supreme Court. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on August 5, 2010.

Attorney David Boies has been deeply involved in some of the most prominent legal disputes of the past two decades. From serving as special counsel to the Justice Department in the United States v. Microsoft trial to representing Vice President Al Gore in the Bush v. Gore case following the 2000 presidential election, Boies' legal experience is extensive and varied.

Currently, Boies and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson are working to overturn California's Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage. In a recent interview with Salon.com, Boies asserted that overturning this legislation will "improve the lives of gay and lesbian couples...it will not in any way harm heterosexual marriage." In 2010, Boies was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Boies will provide a behind-the-scenes look at his most well-known cases, including Prop. 8, and provide insight into what it takes to challenge the status quo and make legal history. - Commonwealth Club of California

David Boies is the founder and chairman of Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP. He was named Lawyer of the Year by the National Law Journal and runner-up for Person of the Year by Time Magazine, served as Special Trial Counsel for the United States Department of Justice in its successful antitrust suit against Microsoft, and from 1991 to 1993 was counsel to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in efforts to recover losses for failed savings and loan associations. The author of numerous publications, he has taught at New York University Law School and Cardozo Law School.

Richard Dreyfuss: Improving Civic Education

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:31:31 -0700

Actor Richard Dreyfuss discusses his Dreyfuss Initiative, a nonprofit group formed to promote civic education in the U.S. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California, on July 19, 2010.

Recognized for his roles in Jaws, American Graffiti, and Mr. Holland's Opus, Richard Dreyfuss has issued a call to action in our classrooms. Dreyfuss believes civic education is the foundation of public education; yet over the years, it has become more about memorizing facts and dates than understanding context and history.

By incorporating logic, history, and critical thinking with a national standard, Dreyfuss hopes to inspire a new way of teaching and preparing America's youth. Learn more about his bold national initiative to enhance civic education in today's classrooms. - Commonwealth Club of California

Richard Dreyfuss is one of the youngest actors to win the coveted Best Actor Oscar, when he snared it for his performance in The Goodbye Girl.

Dreyfuss has been in movie classics such as Mike Nichol's The Graduate and Postcards From the Edge, George Lucas's American Graffiti, Stephen Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Rob Reiner's Stand By Me, Barry Levinson's Tin Men, Barbara Steisand's Nuts, Stakeout, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Lost in Yonkers, and Mr. Holland's Opus, which earned Dreyfuss a second Academy Award nomination. Dreyfuss is also an accomplished stage actor.

Eugenie Scott - Science and Skepticism

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:30:40 -0700

How are science and skepticism related? Is skepticism a part of science, or is science a tool of skepticism? Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, discusses these questions, and explores the importance of teaching both science and skepticism. This program was recorded in collaboration with the SkeptiCal 2010 Conference, on April 24, 2010.

This program features visual aids. A full video version is available at: http://fora.tv/2010/04/24/Dr_Eugenie_C_Scott_Science_and_Skepticism

Eugenie Scott, a former university professor, is the Executive Director of NCSE. She has been both a researcher and an activist in the creationism/evolution controversy for over twenty-five years, and can address many components of this controversy, including educational, legal, scientific, religious, and social issues.

She has received national recognition for her NCSE activities, including awards from scientific societies, educational societies, skeptics groups, and humanist groups. She holds six honorary degrees from McGill, Rutgers, Mt. Holyoke, the University of New Mexico, Ohio State, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A dynamic speaker, she offers stimulating and thought-provoking as well as entertaining lectures and workshops.

Scott is the author of Evolution vs Creationism and co-editor, with Glenn Branch, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.

Christopher Hitchens: Some Confessions and Contradictions

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:22:48 -0700

Celebrated contrarian Christopher Hitchens discusses his memoir, Hitch-22, in a conversation with Paul Holdengraber. This program was recorded in collaboration with the New York Public Library, on June 4, 2010.

Christopher Hitchens, tackling nearly everything with unmatched enthusiasm, erudition and, at times venom, has up to now barely touched upon one subject: his own life.

After many years writing about world issues and traveling to some of the most dangerous places on the planet, comes his memoir Hitch-22. Though Hitchens can navigate any argument with great dexterity, his memoir focuses on those whom he has loved, those he has abhorred, and those who have helped shape him throughout his life. The memoir answers this question: How the hell did Christopher Hitchens become Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England and worked in Britain as book reviewer for the Times, and chief foreign correspondent for the Daily Express. After emigrating to the United States in 1981, he wrote the "Minority Report" column for The Nation. Since 1992, he has been columnist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair and, at different times, Washington editor and columnist for Harper's magazine, American columnist and correspondent for the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Today, and the Sunday Correspondent. Hitchens writes regularly for the Atlantic Monthly and Slate, and is the author of several books, including God is Not Great, Letters to a Young Contrarian and Why Orwell Matters.

Paul Holdengraber is the director of Public Programs - newly created and now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" - for the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library. At the NYPL, his stated goal is to make the lions roar.

Dan Ariely - The Upside of Irrationality

podcasts@fora.tv — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:15:44 -0700

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely discusses his book, The Upside of Irrationality. This program was recorded in collaboration with Booksmith bookstore, on June 6, 2010.

You hear him frequently on public radio -- now meet the incomparable Dan Ariely when he introduces his new book The Upside of Irrationality!

The 2008 economic crisis taught us that irrationality is an influential player in financial markets. But it is often the case that irrationality also makes it way into our daily lives and decision-making -- in slightly different and vastly more subtle ways. In this enthralling follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely shows how irrationality is an inherent part of the way we function and think, and how it affects our behavior in all areas of our lives, from our romantic relationships to our experiences in the workplace to our temptations to cheat.

Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking analysis and new research into our how we actually make decisions, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Using data from original experiments, he draws invaluable conclusions about how -- and why -- we behave the way we do, and reflects on ways we can make ourselves and our society better.

Dan Ariely is the James B Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. Dan publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science and CNN. He splits his time between Durham NC and the rest of the world.