Pod Academy

Research is changing the way we think about energy efficient electronics.  This podcast, from the coalface of electronics and materials research, is produced and presented by Dr Radu Sporea of Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute.  It looks at the work currently being undertaken on the new generation of energy efficient lighting - used not just in lighting rooms, but in screens for our electronic devices. This is the fourth in Radu's occasional series from the Institute.  See also: New frontiers in electronic engineering Solar technology: harnessing the power of the sun The future of electronics is flexible Dr Radu Sporea:  A great advantage of podcasts and audiobooks is that you can still enjoy them after lights-out. But light is an essential ingredient for most active human pursuits. Early members of our species prolonged their hours of activity by burning things in order to imitate sunlight. Even back then they kept an eye on energy efficiency as some things burned less well than others.

It's official, the world's longest echo can be heard at an oil storage complex at Inchindown, near Invergordon in Scotland.  Hear it by hitting the play button above. The 1970 Guinness Book of Records holds the last claim for the longest echo. When the solid-bronze doors of the Hamilton Mausoleum in Scotland slammed shut, it took 15 seconds for the sound to die away to silence. The Inchindown echo is a full minute longer. Professor Trevor Cox of Salford University discovered the Inchdown echo while working with Allan Kilpatrick, an archaeological investigator for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Allan fired a pistol loaded with blanks about a third of the way into the storage tank, and Trevor recorded the response picked up by the microphones about a third of the way from the far end - a standard technique used in concert hall acoustics.  At 125 Hertz, a frequency typically made by a tuba, the reverberation time was 112 seconds. Even at the mid-frequencies important

To ensure their future food security, rich countries are buying up land in poor countries. Ah, that's China, you may think!  But as Stefano Liberti, author of  Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, explains to Craig Barfoot, China is a minor player in this land grab - the truth is much more complex.  Our pension funds, European corporations, and countries like Saudi Arabia are all getting in on the act. The food crisis of 2007/8, resulting from poor harvests and propelled by the movement of capital into corn, soya beans, rice and wheat, was the tipping point. Since then, the race to acquire land in the southern hemisphere has become  ever more intense.  Stefano calls it the new colonialism. But it is not without contradictions. Many African countries are very keen to get this investment and send trade missions to rich countries to 'sell' their land. A country like Ethiopia, a major aid recipient, now exports large quantities of grain.    And under UN laws, if there is famine in a country, they can

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 350 million people of all ages, suffer from depression.  Indeed it is a growing cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease. This podcast looks at what is depression and at the latest research on mindfulness. It is made up of excerpts from two conversations between Professor Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford University and journalist, Dr Danny Penman.   These conversations are part of an Oxford University series, The New Psychology of Depression, formed of 6 podcasts: What is depression* How is depression treated Can treatments such as cognitive therapy help Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: A new approach to treating depression* Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on trial Mindfulness and the brain [The conversations we have drawn on are starred.  They were published by Oxford University under a Creative Commons licence]. Depression is different from usual mood fluctuations

The term ‘ethnomusicology’ was coined in 1959 by Dutch academic, Jaap Kunst.  Put simply, it is the social and cultural study of music – whether that is gamelan, hip hop, British folk or any other kind. A Spanish translation of this podcast is set out below the English transcript.  We are very grateful to Héctor Pittman Villarreal for producing it for us. Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to interview Dr Noel Lobley, the museum’s ethnomusicologist to find out more about ethnomusicology and hear about his personal experiences working particularly in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Jo and Sarah have produced 2 other podcasts from the Pitt Rivers collection: Pitt Rivers Collection: Louis Sarno and the BayAka Pitt Rivers Collection: Reel to Real Noel Lobley:  What is ethnomusicology?  That’s a good question and it has been debated and argued about for at least the last 60 years. Ethnomusicology was coined as an academic term in 1959 by Jaap Kunst, a Dutch scholar

The financial and ecological costs of driving, and the time we waste sitting in traffic jams, is leading many people to think about a more 'walkable' city.  The man who has thought and written most widely on this is city planner and architectural designer Jeff Speck, the author of ‘Walkable Cities - How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time.  Craig Barfoot interviewed him for Pod Academy. In rural, tribal societies with no technology, people move on average at three miles per hour because they are walking everywhere.  In most developed countries, if you add up the costs of driving a car, the time you spend earning that money and the time you spend in traffic, it has been estimated that we, too, move at about 3 miles per hour! Building new roads is no answer because the extra capacity is absorbed within 2 or 3 years by new car journeys.  A better solution might be to price driving at its true cost to society, and Jeff points to London’s congestion charge as one of the successes of this approach. But

The UK government has just announced tax breaks for companies fracking for shale gas. Is that a sound investment in our future energy security, or a misguided waste of public money?  Should the money have been allocated to renewables? Are fracking protesters just 'scaremongering'? Are these tax breaks just another example of business as usual for the big fossil fuel companies? This podcast records the fracking debate in The Rational Parliament, which explored all sides of the argument around hydraulic fracturing for shale gas. The Rational Parliament, founded by science journalist Adam Smith, aims to have rational debates on hot topics of the day, debates that are not subject to unchallenged wild claims, debates that balance views and values alongside research evidence.  The Parliament even has a 'rhetoric officer', Johnny Unger who comments on the rhetorical devices used by speakers in the debate. The first debate of the Parliament, earlier this year, was about GM food.  This, the second debate, looked

Professor Carol Propper, Professor of Economics at Imperial Collect Business School and the Economics Department of Bristol University has just completed a major study on levels of physical activity in Britain which suggests that most adults do so little exercise that they are risking their health. Lee Millam went to talk to her. Most work in this field has involved small scale studies, but Professor Propper’s research involved a million people over 5 years, across Britain, and questions included 400 plus sports. When you have so much data it is possible to  look at the individual correlations of exercise with class, income, ethnicity, geographical location, family size etc. The study was not about attitudes to exercise, so it did not look at why people do or don’t do exercise.  It simply described who does what. And from this we know that education levels appear to have a major influence on exercise.  Only 12% of people with degrees don't do any exercise (so 88% do), but for those who left school with no

Children develop language and literacy skills in all sorts of settings, but perhaps one of the most overlooked settings is the church, the temple, the mosque -  especially for communities who have recently settled in the UK. Focusing on four groups who have come to London in the last 50 years - the Ghanaian Pentecostal community, the Polish Catholic community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community - the three year long ESRC funded BeLIFS project (Becoming Literate in Faith Settings) of the Education Department at Goldsmiths, University of London found that the places of worship, services, classes and home lives of the children, centring around their faith, were important not just for literacy, but for the children's multi-lingual identity. In this podcast, anthropologist Dr Sarah Winkler Reid talks to  Professor Eve Gregory, who headed up the project.  [You can also see and hear Eve Gregory talk about the project in this video] Here is the Transcript: Becoming literate in faith se

Jeremy Seabrook talks to Caspar Melville about life in Muslim communities in the slums of Kolkata, and paints a powerful and shocking picture of people who have suffered centuries of expropriation, loss, driven migration and involuntary separations and now find themselves at the wrong end of globalisation. The conversation draws on the study by Jeremy Seabrook and Imram Ahmed Siddiqui, People Without History (Pluto Press) Caspar started by asking Jeremy to describe  the Kolkata slums. Jeremy Seabrook:   The first thing you notice in the poorest part of Topsia is the canal – which is the channel for waste water.  So the first thing you notice is the smell.  The smell of decaying garbage and sewage.  It is overwhelming. The second is the way houses have been constructed out of industrial debris, old bamboo, wood, boxes, and old bags of fertiliser and phosphate, all kinds of stuff. It is a very improvised looking place.  It is very stony, the houses are very close together.  There is just about room to trundle

This is the first of a new occasional series of ‘Research Bytes’ podcasts – looking very briefly at a cross section of research projects in an academic institution.  In this podcast we talk to six academics from Goldsmiths, University of London. Goldsmiths is, of course,  the alma mater of most of the YBAs - Young British Artists – Damien Hirst, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor Wood and has a long history of cultural study, artistic expression and iconaclism. So it is not surprising to find academics in every department at Goldsmiths concerned about creativity.    And we start the podcast by looking at  Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya 's research project on the neuroscience of creativity. Next up is composer Jeremy Peyton Jones, from Goldsmith’s music department who is involved in practice research – on a project called 'Ending's, around the last pages of books including James Joyce's Ulysses and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Computers and creativity come together in Dr Kate Devlin’s research – sh

“I began to see some of the high profile, very dramatic experiments in social psychology of the 1950s and 60s, as what they were – metaphors. We invest them with a truth and authority that often goes way beyond what we’ve demonstrated in the lab” says Gina Perry. The particular experiments she is taking a fresh look at in her book, Behind the Shock Machine, are the Milgram experiments, conducted at Yale University in 1963, which suggested that 65% of people would give fatal electric shocks to complete strangers if asked to do so by an authority figure.  These experiments have been used to ‘explain’ the behaviour of Nazis in the holocaust. Stanley Milgram’s findings are shocking, but are they valid?  That is the central question Perry seeks to address. Craig Barfoot’s interview with Gina Perry explores the evidence....

In this podcast about how neuroscience is offering new approaches to treatments for drug addiction, science journalist Ryan O'Hare speaks to Harry Shapiro of Drugscope,  the UK organisation supporting professionals working in the field of drug misuse. Dr Amy Milton, a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge Barry Everitt, Professor of behavioural neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Dr Sunjeev Kamboj, a lecturer in clinical psychology at University College London Andy [not his real name], a recovering addict [Andy] - “Trying to justify to yourself that you could take it possibly take it very sporadically, but yeah, there’s a lot of mental trickery going on,” [Sunjeev Kamboj] - “There isn’t really, at the moment, any long-term treatment that you receive and then stop taking and you’re cured,” [Harry Shapiro] “When someone has collapsed all of their problems into one, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else in their lives, that’s addictio

Since the end of the Cold War, American military superiority has been an undeniable fact.  But this superpower dominance is not the norm in world affairs.  With the rise of China as a ‘peer rival’ of the US, are we seeing a return to a more contested ‘business as usual’ ? And if we are, what are the implications? In this podcast, Pod Academy’s Craig Barfoot speaks to Dr Ian Speller, co author of Understanding Modern Warfare (Cambridge University Press 2008, £25.99) about various developments in naval capability, and in particular the naval aspects of China’s resurgence.  China is expanding its navy, and although Washington sees this as a threat, the Chinese themselves say any developing country would want to build up its sea power (given that historically threats to China have come from the seas,  it is perhaps understandable that they would feel this way). But for now, the US navy fleet has greater capability than all the rest of the world’s fleets put together.  This fleet is deployed in international wat

Clasificadores trundle round Montevideo collecting and sorting the rubbish that others throw away.  But now the city authorities want to clean up their act.  Ben Weisz reports. Ben Weisz: Friday 26th July, 2013, Montevideo, Uruguay. Dozens of horse-drawn rubbish carts have blocked the Avenida 18 de Julio, one of the city centre’s main roads. They’ve pulled up to protest outside Montevideo’s Palacio Municipal, headquarters to the city council or Intendencia. The carts belonged to members of UCRUS – the union of clasificadores of solid urban waste. Clasificadores do their rounds of the city, some in horse-drawn carts, others pulling hand-carts or even shopping trolleys, rummaging through the large rubbish containers stationed on Montevideo’s streets. They salvage what they can, sort it, and sell it on. A survey carried out by the Intendencia in May 2013 counted 3188  clasificadores in the city, though as you will hear, UCRUS puts the figure much, much higher. The Union was protesting recent changes proposed

For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, Things Given. In this, the final part of our series, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman analyses Things Given and he reflects on how Duchamp opened new ways of thinking about art and creativity. The series is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes You will find other podcasts in the series here: Podcast 1 on Fashion images Podcast 2 on graffiti Podcast 3 on music videos Podcast 4 on film and climate change Rod Stoneman: For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, or ‘things given’, —one, the waterfall, two, the lighting gas— which no one in the outside world was aware of. These images show the outside door and in that wooden door there are two small peep holes which, if the spectator gets close, you look through into t

‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’  was the title of a famous 1971 TV documentary about how the world was walking towards ecological disaster with its eyes shut. In this, the fourth installment of our series Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman remembers the impact of the images of that programme  and how it echos today in the growing concern about climate change. To listen to other podcasts in the series, which is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes, click on the links below: Podcast 1 on Fashion images Podcast 2 on graffiti Podcast 3 on music videos Rod Stoneman: This photograph [above] is a picture of Los Angeles under smog, a problem that’s been addressed in recent years but for a long time, the inhabitants of Los Angeles were living through a self-inflicted ecological disaster. This came in focus for me personally when I saw a BBC science programme, Horizon in fact, in 1971 when I was in college. The title of this Horizon programme was, ‘Due

The music video:  "What had been a liberating possibility for visual artists working in film, to bring their work towards a wider audience, without the pressure of narrative, without the necessity to tell stories, has become an absolutely fixed promo for the consumerism aimed at the youth market". So says Professor Rod Stoneman in this, the third in Pod Academy’s series based on his book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual. which is produced and presented by Esther Gaytan Fuertes. In this podcast, Rod Stoneman talks about the visual experimentation made possible by the music video, which pushes the boundaries of mainstream narrative film. You can find other podcasts in the series here: Podcast 1 on Fashion images and Podcast 2 on graffiti Rod Stoneman: This image [above] comes from a film called Berlin Horse made by Malcolm Le Grice in 1970, an experimental film from the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. And it’s a striking visual image made from permutations of colour printing, using loops, a horse goin

This is the second in our two-part series on the UN's new offensive mandate in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which SOAS’s Dr Phil Clark talks to Paul Brister from Pod Academy about some of the causes of the conflict in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and some of the challenges facing the United Nation’s (UN) new Intervention Brigade that has recently deployed there. [You can find the first podcast in the series here] This podcast looks at the implications of the UN in DRC and its new proactive and aggressive approach – for the DRC, the wider region and for peacekeeping and the UN itself. It also contains a postscript outlining some of the developments that have taken place since Paul spoke to Dr Clark. First Paul Brister gives some background on peacekeeping... Paul Brister:  UN peacekeeping missions are normally authorised by UN Resolutions passed under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, and are guided by three basic principles: consent of the parties; impartiality; and non-use of force except in

This is the second in our series based on Rod Stoneman's book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual. In the podcast, Rod analyses the subculture of graffiti and its social and political significance, using this Banksy graffito in Cleveland Street London W1 as his jumping off point. The podcast is produced and presented by Esther Gaytan Fuertes. Rod Stoneman: This image is a photograph taken in a central London street and it shows a graffito made by Banksy. The original starting point for street art and for graffiti —obviously there are precedents in ancient cultures in different times and different places, quite apart from Pompeii and Herculaneum and Greek cities in Western civilisations, it’s not just a phenomenon of the West, one could even look further afield to Mexico, where contemporary political graffiti stencilled in Oaxaca, for example, since in 2006 when there there was a teachers’ strike, connects with the mural painting of the 1920s and 30s when politicised painters worked on art that