A true understanding of the pervasive role of software in the world demands an awareness of the volume and variety of real-world software failures and their consequences. No more thorough survey of these events may be available than Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel's Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Scien ... Show More
Oct 2
157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)
When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford UP, 2025), which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowled ... Show More
46m 23s
May 2025
John Horn, "Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success" (MIT Press, 2023)
Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success (MIT Press, 2023) offers a roadmap to help leaders predict, understand, and react to their competitors’ moves. It is a valuable tool to help companies stay ahead of their competitors ... Show More
1h 39m
Jan 2025
Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)
In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration— ... Show More
52m 17s
Dec 2020
Anna Weltman, "Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, th ... Show More
1h 47m
Sep 2022
Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)
From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data gives unprecedented insights into fundamental questions in the social sciences, humanities, and i ... Show More
56m 38s
Aug 2022
🧠 Scientific Machine Learning, FEM + ML, PINNs – Ehsan Haghighat | Podcast #79
Dr. Ehsan Haghighat is a Postdoctoral Fellow at UBC studying stochastic modeling and uncertainty quantification of engineering systems. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT where he studied the assessment of induced seismicity due to CO2 sequestration and oil and ga ... Show More
57m 48s
Jul 2021
155 | Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics
It’s not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It’s even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, positing a simple underlying system and a simple set of rules for it, and hope that everything we know about the world somehow pops out ... Show More
2h 40m
Feb 2010
Mathematics' Unintended Consequences
Melvyn Bragg and guests John Barrow, Colva Roney-Dougal and Marcus du Sautoy explore the unintended consequences of mathematical discoveries, from the computer to online encryption, to alternating current and predicting the path of asteroids.In his book The Mathematician's Apolog ... Show More
41m 54s
Jul 2020
Nora Jones on Resilience Engineering, Mental Models, and Learning from Incidents
In this podcast, Nora Jones, Co-Founder and CEO at Jeli and co-author of O’Reilly’s “Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice”, sat down with InfoQ podcast co-host Daniel Bryant. Topics discussed included: chaos engineering and resilience engineering, planning and running ... Show More
36 m