This week we present two stories from scientists searching for that special someone.
Part 1: Zoology student Devon Kodzis’s strategy of attracting boys with fun animal facts proves difficult.
Part 2: Away from her boyfriend for grad school, Meisa Salaita starts to fall for a chemistry classmate who’s her complete opposite.
Devon Kodzis has a degree in biological sciences and professional experience in teaching, animal training, and education outreach, and science program design. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Biological Sciences. Her passions include reading about food, and shouting at the Antiques Roadshow with her cat.
Meisa Salaita is enamored with the beauty of science. Through her work founding and directing the Atlanta Science Festival and as a producer for the Story Collider, she spends her days trying to convince everyone else to fall in love with science as well. To that end, Meisa also writes, has produced radio stories, and hosted tv shows – all in the name of science. Meisa has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has birthed two humans, and has a bizarre level of enthusiasm for shoehorns. If she had the stamina and talent, she’d be dancing hip-hop 24/7.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Erin Barker & Liz Neeley, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
In classrooms all over the world, students take notes every day. What does academic research tell us about the best ways to use note-taking in our classrooms? In this episode, I’ll share 8 important take-aways.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jennifer Gonzalez, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
With a prolific career spanning academia and industry, Susan’s research focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning. She received her PhD at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and taught at MIT and Harvard before returning to Stanford. She was consulting chief economist for Microsoft for six years and the first woman to receive the John Bates Clark medal for her contribution to economic thought and knowledge. Susan sits on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, and Ripple, as well as the nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action.
Throughout her career, she has built upon an early interest in auctions that she developed as an undergraduate at Duke, where she triple majored in computer science, economics and mathematics. Susan first applied her expertise to develop a market-based system for timber auctions in British Columbia that enabled a more efficient allocation of resources that was not subject to trade disputes. The system she developed in the early 2000s is still used today to price almost all of the timber in British Columbia.
While at Harvard, she was working on auction models for search advertising when she got a call from Microsoft. Steve Ballmer asked if she could come help them develop their new search engine. She had accomplished many of her academic goals: earning tenure at MIT, teaching at Stanford and Harvard and receiving this Clark medal. “I realized that this could be a good moment in my life to take a risk,” she said.
“Being a part of the birth of a search engine, and particularly the search-advertising platform was I think just a transformative experience for my life,” she said. While the Bing search engine was ultimately not able to compete with Google, Microsoft’s investment in the research yielded expertise in machine learning and cloud computing, which is now the company’s most important business.
Susan consulted with Microsoft for six years but knew she wanted to continue to pursue her career in academia. After stints at Harvard and MIT, she decided to return to Stanford as she saw it was the best place to collaborate with industry to do cutting-edge research.
As Associate Director at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), she brings a social science perspective to AI questions. She explains how in online advertising, you need to understand the system and the economic incentives of the people operating in the system. An engineering perspective sees a database full of advertiser bids that feels static. An economist’s perspective sees those bids as strategic. If you understand the behavior of those firms, and their objectives, you can predict their responses to a change in the system. “It’s so important to bring in multiple perspectives. There have been many cases where people have made big mistakes because they only look at it from one particular perspective.”
The effectiveness of an application is not determined by the details of the algorithm, what’s really important is that you’re optimizing the right long-term objective. The success of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence in applications is critically dependent on having domain experts and social scientists that think about long-term objectives and how to measure them.
Currently, Susan believes there are opportunities to use technology to tackle inequality problems. She sees potential in using mobile devices throughout the world for education, training, and nudges to guide decision-making. She started the Shared Prosperity and Innovation Initiative at the business school to help social impact firms integrate more AI into their products and services.
Another technology that she thinks can help address inequality is Bitcoin. “I think I was the first economist to take Bitcoin seriously. It’s fascinating from a variety of angles.” She learned how many people in the world are disadvantaged by an archaic financial system that is operated for the benefit of large businesses and banks in large countries. “If we can move money the way that we can move information, we could actually make a lot of people’s lives better off,” she says.
She was used to being the only woman in computer science and economics but a lack of role models made it difficult for her to visualize herself succeeding. She felt the need to overachieve to compensate. “It’s very stressful to overachieve,” she said. “But I think it translated into more accomplishments because I just didn’t think that I had any wiggle room.”
Gender was not as much of an issue for her in business because she came in as a defined expert and was not threatening anybody’s job. However, in academia she says the power balance is unclear, and there are no rules about who gets to choose. “Being a powerful woman actually is hard. People seem to like their women a little less threatening than I am,” she says. “When I advise women, I suggest having a clear expertise where everybody understands why you’re the one who’s talking.”
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Professor Margot Gerritsen, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
This week we present two stories from people who used technology to understand their relationships.
Part 1: Digital consultant Phong Tran navigates his relationship through various digital platforms.
Part 2: Fed up with feeling lonely, Sufian Zhemukhov embarks on a data driven analysis of his own unlikability.
Phong Tran is a Creative Technologist at a digital consultancy. He works on websites and applications in both roles as a designer and a developer. As someone with a preference to dabble and a short attention span, he works on art projects in various mediums. The projects tend to ask questions about our relationship to our digital selves, and overall how that changes how we see each other. Also, at other times it’s just about food Phong ate. A collection of his design can be found at phonghtran.com, and a collection of other things will be at his Instagram account, @phonghtran.
Sufian Zhemukhov is an award-winning author and performer. He received the 2020 J. J. Reneaux Emerging Artist Award, from the National Storytelling Network, “to a storyteller of major and unique performing talent.” He is The 2019 Moth Champion and winner at the 2018 Story Slam at the National Storytelling Festival. Sufian’s recent solo show, Flirting Like an American, received critical acclaim in Washington, DC and Rochester, NY. Sufian’s stories are based on his personal experience as a first-generation immigrant and professor of international affairs at George Washington University that might be much funnier than you would expect. His recent book, Mass Religious Ritual and Intergroup Tolerance, won the 2019 Best Book Award at the International Studies Association.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Erin Barker & Liz Neeley, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Dr. Don Moore is the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Professor of Communication and Leadership at the Haas School of Business, and a member of the Management of Organizations group, at UC Berkeley. Prior to Haas, Dr. Moore served on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, where he held the Carnegie Bosch chair. His research interests focus on overconfidence, including when people think they’re better than they are, when they think they are better than others, and when they are too sure they know the truth. He’s the author of a new book, Perfectly Confident: How To Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely.
In this episode, we focus on Dr. Moore’s new book, and talk about confidence, overconfidence, and underconfidence. We also refer to the above-average effect, ambiguity aversion and risk aversion, overprecision, and the different kinds of overconfidence and underconfidence. Finally, we discuss the relationship between confidence and decision-making and emotions, and the ways by which we can try to calibrate our decisions wisely, applying it to business, politics, and personal relationships.
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, DAVID DIAS, ANJAN KATTA, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, MAX BEILBY, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, OMARI HICKSON, PHYLICIA STEVENS, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, AND NUNO MACHADO!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, ROSEY, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, SERGIU CODREANU, LUIS CAYETANO, AND MATTHEW LAVENDER!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, MICHAL RUSIECKI!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Max Beilby is a Management and Organizational Psychologist and author of the Darwinian Business blog. He’s currently working as a practitioner in the banking industry.
In this episode, we talk about the application of Evolutionary Psychology to Organizational Psychology. We start by tackling the concept of evolutionary mismatch, and then go through some examples of it that apply to the modern workplace, like Dunbar’s number, leadership and hierarchy, overconfidence, and dissatisfaction, stress, and burnout. We also refer to sex differences and if they have any implications in the workplace. Finally, we discuss possible solutions coming from the knowledge we already have and refer to cultural evolution.
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, VEGA GIDEY, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, DAVID DIAS, ANJAN KATTA, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, MAX BEILBY, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, AND CORY CLARK!
A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, ROSEY, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, SERGIU CODREANU, AND LUIS CAYETANO!
AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, MICHAL RUSIECKI!
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ricardo Lopes, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
We chat with Chris Jackson (Imperial College, London) about the “Matthew Effect” in academia, how we can improve work/balance, and whether we should stop citing shitty people.
Here’s more stuff we cover:
Chris climbed the world’s most dangerous volcano for a BBC show
Chris’ email signature
Having a code of conduct for your lab
Work/life balance in academia
Are things worse in academia compared to other desk jobs?
How Chris co-founded “EarthArxiv”, a preprint server for the earth sciences
The point/counterpoint article format (here is an example)
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The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dan Quintana, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
Dr. Meredith Hughes is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at Wesleyan University. In her research, Meredith uses large radio telescopes to study how planets form around other stars. After stars are formed, disks of leftover gas and dust go on to form planets. Meredith studies how this process works, the conditions that exist in these early disks, how the disks form planets, and the types of planets that form around stars. Studying this process in other star systems helps us learn more about our own solar system and how it formed.When Meredith isn’t working, you can find her hanging out with her husband, two young kids, and their dog. She also enjoys reading fantasy and sci-fi books, being outdoors, and volunteering in her community. She received her B.S. degree in Physics & Astronomy from Yale University. Afterwards, Meredith attended graduate school at Harvard University where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy. She was awarded a Miller Fellowship to conduct postdoctoral research in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley before she joined the faculty at Wesleyan University in 2013. Meredith has received the Harvard Astronomy Department’s Fireman Fellowship for her outstanding doctoral thesis as well as Harvard Astronomy’s Bok Prize for research excellence by a Ph.D. graduate under the age of 35. In addition, she was selected as a Cottrell Scholar in 2018 by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. In our interview, Meredith shares more about her life and science.
The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr. Marie McNeely, featuring top scientists speaking about their life and c, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
