The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What important data is ignored when it is not easily translated into 1s and 0s? In his new bo ... Show More
Jan 6
Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)
A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond. In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively kn ... Show More
20m 48s
Jan 5
Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point ... Show More
42m 56s
Dec 31
Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinar ... Show More
1h 17m
Mar 2021
A Data Tsunami is Coming, Is Your City Ready? Intel’s GM For Smart Cities, Sameer Sharma, Details Why Your Infrastructure is Your Biggest Obstacle
<p>The term “smart city” might bring to mind images from <i>The Jetsons</i>, maybe flying cars and robots serving humans. And while that’s possible, cities are getting smarter right now in very practical and useful ways. Building a smart city is about its citizens and how their l ... Show More
44m 23s
Aug 2023
Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World
America's once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities--Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others--increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid w ... Show More
12m 43s
Dec 2022
Ask Us Anything: You Asked, We Answered
Welcome to our first-ever Ask Us Anything episode. Recently we put out a call for questions… and, wow, did you come through! We got more than 100 responses from listeners to this podcast from all over the world. It was really fun going through them all, and really difficult to ch ... Show More
42m 51s
Nov 2022
Climate tech to save the planet: Techno-optimism or greenwashing?
<p>Billions of dollars are being spent by tech companies and investors on new technology to fight climate change. In the final episode of this series of Tech Tonic, Eric Toone, from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, tells FT columnist and host Pilita Clark why he bel ... Show More
24m 22s
May 2024
What We're Talking About When We Talk About Rural AI
Last October, Dr. Jasmine McNealy, as an associate professor at the University of Florida, a Senior Fellow in Tech Policy with the Mozilla Foundation, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, wrote in Tech Policy Press abou ... Show More
42m 20s