Podcasts about Ouyang

Hello Interactors,I've long been a fan of “regreening” cities, imagining replacing bits of asphalt and concrete with trees, plants, mini-parks, and green roofs to cool them down. In many cases these are indeed good interventions. But even these celebrated nature-based solutions to the “urban heat island” effect require closer inspection. It turns out any land cover change alters energy, water, and momentum exchanges between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere. Which are the right ones and where?To understand why cookie cutter greening plans can fail and how planners and policy makers can build cities that can handle climate change, we need to understand how land and the air interact. Environments vary from place to place, and this puts limits on what we can do to land to create urban climates that are both beautiful and healthy.To get a handle on what the research says, I found a literature review from 2025 that synthesized findings from 84 peer-reviewed studies. In was published in the journal Climate Risk Management.Let's see what they, and others, found.BEATING HEAT WITH BIOPHYSICAL FEATSWhat better place to start than science. Let's just delve right into how urban green spaces affect temperature. It starts with determining the energy balance at the surface of the earth. This comes from a budget equation found in physical geography. When sunlight hits the Earth's surface, it breaks down into three main fluxes, or ways heat moves around* Sensible heat flux: the heat that directly warms the surrounding air, which we measure as temperature.* Latent heat flux: the heat that's used to turn water from a liquid to a gas, like when we sweat or plants release water vapor (transpiration).* Ground heat flux: the heat stored in building materials, asphalt, and soil.In conventional urban environments dominated by concrete and asphalt, latent heat flux is minimal because we've built cities in ways that rapidly drain water away as ‘waste'. As a result, incoming solar energy is funneled into sensible heat. This raises daytime air temperatures that gets stored as ground heat, which is slowly radiated back into the city at night. Urban greening can reshuffle this thermodynamic budget through three interconnected physical mechanisms: shading, evapotranspiration, and albedo modification.Mechanism 1. Shading: Intercepting Solar RadiationShading — the most immediate and reliable cooling mechanism provided by vegetation — requires precise microclimatic quantification. Vegetative canopies act as physical shields, intercepting incoming shortwave solar radiation before it strikes impervious surfaces like concrete or asphalt. By preventing these dense materials from absorbing heat and emitting sensible heat flux back into the boundary layer, shading dramatically lowers surface temperatures and reduces the baseline thermal energy transferred to the surrounding air. (Bowler, D. E., et al. 2010)The cooling benefit of urban trees is non-linear, accelerating significantly once neighborhood canopy cover crosses a critical threshold of around 40%. Measuring daytime air temperatures across urban gradients, they found that canopy cover above this 40% mark can lower local air temperatures by up to 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius, effectively offsetting the thermal burden created by surrounding roads and impervious surfaces. (Ziter, C. D., et al. 2019)Mechanism 2. Evapotranspiration: Trading Sensible Heat for Latent HeatWhile shading blocks heat absorption, evapotranspiration actively removes heat from the air. Plants absorb soil moisture through their root systems and release it as water vapor through tiny microscopic pores in their leaves called stomata. This process requires thermal energy that turns phase-changing liquid water into gas. This energy transfer absorbs sensible heat and converts it into latent heat.Evapotranspiration from well-watered urban green spaces can lower local air temperatures by 2-4 degrees celsius. (Coutts, et al., 2013) However, physical geographers emphasize a crucial physical prerequisite that is easy to overlook: evapotranspiration is entirely dependent on available water. When the soil is dry or the air is super dry, plants close their stomata to save water. When stomata close, evapotranspiration shuts down. This leaves shading as the sole remaining cooling mechanism.Mechanism 3. Albedo Dynamics: The Surface Reflectivity ParadoxAlbedo measures the reflectivity of a surface on a scale from 0.0 (total absorption) to 1.0 (total reflection). Urban asphalt has a low albedo (0.05 to 0.10), absorbing up to 95% of incoming solar energy. Vegetation's albedo can range from 0.11 to 0.25.In temperate climates, replacing low-albedo asphalt with greenery or reflective surfaces increases surface reflectivity, sending more solar radiation back into space before it can be absorbed as sensible heat. One study documented that increasing urban surface albedo typically lowers peak ambient air temperatures by 0.3 degres Celsius to 1.0 degree Celsius — alongside much larger drops in surface pavement temperatures. While a temperature change under one degree Celsius may sound modest at first glance, a baseline shift of this magnitude across a neighborhood is enough to redefine a local microclimate. (Santamouris, 2014)But swapping out light urban surfaces for dark vegetation can also have a negative effect. Paradoxically, when researchers in 2023 replaced dry, light-colored desert soil with darker vegetation in hot, arid regions it reduced overall surface reflectivity. The drop in albedo caused an increase in daytime surface warming. (Schlaerth, et al., 2023)Furthermore, dense tree canopies inside narrow urban street canyons can act as thermal blankets at night. While trees provide valuable shade during the day, their foliage reduces the sky view factor at street level, trapping outgoing longwave thermal radiation emitted by surrounding building facades and asphalt. When combined with reduced wind permeability, this canopy barrier restricts nocturnal radiative cooling and holds warm air near ground level (Lee et al., 2016).These are the physical realities that can demonstrate how urban greening is not a consistently inherent cooling practice. It is a complex thermodynamic intervention whose success relies entirely on local environmental conditions.PLACEMENT, PATCHES, AND PARK PATTERNSBecause thermodynamic processes happen across physical spaces, cooling urban green space can be uneven. The literature review reveals that a green space's cooling capacity depends on four spatial and biological variables: vegetation density, species selection, spatial configuration, and urban morphology. Let's break them down individually.Cooling Factor 1. Vegetation Density and Species TraitsNot all greenery cools equally. One way to measure this is through a Leaf Area Index (LAI). This is the total leaf area per unit of ground area and is a primary predictor of thermal performance. As you might imagine, dense foliage absorbs more from the sun and then produces higher cumulative transpiration (so long as there's adequate water).Botanical traits also play a big role. Broadleaf deciduous species (like oaks or maples) feature large surface areas that maximize summer transpiration, but that goes away when they drop their leaves in winter. Evergreen coniferous trees, however, maintain continuous canopy coverage through every season.In temperate rainforest environments like Seattle or Vancouver, researchers found that conifers cooled urban surroundings up to 1.7 degrees celsius more effectively than broadleaf trees. Dense needle canopies continuously block incoming solar radiation due to higher LAI and the fact that clusters of spiny needles better trap a stable buffer of calm air which moderates heat exchange with the surrounding urban environment. (Eyster & Beckage, 2022, 2023) Cooling factor 2. Spatial Configuration: Landscape Ecology PrinciplesEcologists and geographers commonly evaluate green spaces through two main attributes: composition (how much green space exists) and configuration (how those green patches are arranged across the landscape). Over 58% of the mechanism-focused studies in the literature review analyzed spatial pattern metrics. The consensus is the spatial layout of green space is just as important as its total area!Other empirical studies consistently demonstrate that cooling effects decay the further you get from green spaces. Research done in 2016 and 2023 shows how urban parks can produce a primary “cooling footprint” that extends typically 100 to 300 meters from the park boundaries. If you're lucky enough to live within this buffer, temperatures drop between 1.9 and 3.1 degrees celsius, but beyond 300 meters, the cooling influence quickly falls off. (Bao, et al. 2016, Shi et al. 2023)This spatial limit leads to a couple spatial layout choices. A few big parks or connected networks of smaller green spaces. Large, consolidated parks (>2 hectares) generate intense, stable “cool islands” at their core, but their benefits remain localized. For example, a study in Xalapa, Mexico, revealed that parks larger than 2.8 hectares with over 21% tree cover provided reliable local cooling of around 2 degrees celsius . (Lemoine-Rodriguez et al., 2022)Connected networks of smaller green spaces distributed across a city create a more equitable cooling effect. Three studies in 2019 and 2021 show that fragmented, isolated green patches — like big parks — perform poorly compared to continuous, linear green corridors. Linear “green belts” or street-tree networks (in the right environment) can act as ventilation channels, allowing cool air generated by vegetation to flow into adjacent built-up neighborhoods. (Masoudi et al., 2019, 2021; Pramanik, 2019)Cooling factor 3. Urban Morphology: The Built Environment MatrixObviously, green spaces don't exist in isolation. They're embedded within a three-dimensional hodge podge of buildings, streets, and other bits of infrastructure. Urban morphologists can quantify this urban morphological cacophony using building height-to-street-width ratio and sky view factor - the extent to which surrounding structures and canopies obstruct a location's view of the open sky.High-density urban cores with tall buildings create deep “urban canyons” that generate their own shade. In these settings, building shade can combine with tree shade during peak daylight hours to significantly lower temperatures.However, studies show that if tree canopies in narrow street canyons are too dense — particularly in humid environments — they can trap anthropogenic heat emitted by vehicle exhaust and air conditioning condenser units. They can also significantly reduce localized wind speeds. As a result, maximizing green space cooling efficiency requires aligning vegetation density and canopy architecture with prevailing wind corridors to preserve urban ventilation channels (Cheung & Jim, 2019; Morakinyo et al., 2019).Nothing is every as easy as it seems.BRIDGING GAPS WITH BETTER MAPSWhile academic literature can offer detailed insights into microclimatic processes, there remains a big gap between academia and urban planning and governmental policy. That gap may be self-fulfilling. The literature review of 84 papers revealed 61% of the papers simply advocate for expanding green space area, whereas only 26% focus on optimizing existing green infrastructure.Recommending that dense, historical cities “add more large parks” ignores real-world urban constraints. In modern, rapidly expanding cities, urban land is expensive, highly contested, and structurally constrained. Space dedicated to a new park often competes directly with housing, transit infrastructure, or commercial development. To move beyond idealistic slogans, urban planning will have to recon with three major implementation challenges.Challenge 1. The Water-Energy-Heat Nexus in Arid CitiesThe most significant implementation challenge facing nature-based solutions occurs precisely where urban heat stress is most severe — in hot, arid regions. Cities like Phoenix, Cairo, Tehran, or Riyadh already suffer from intense summer heatwaves. You don't have to live in or visit these places to know water there is extremely scarce.Maintaining green spaces in places like this requires pumping groundwater or desalinating seawater. Pumping and desalinating water requires massive amounts of electricity, which only increases greenhouse gas emissions if that power is coming from fossil fuels. Furthermore, if irrigation water runs out during a heatwave, non-adapted vegetation dries out, loses its cooling capacity, and can even become a wildfire risk.To solve this dilemma, physical geographers advocate evaluating urban greening through a standardized resource efficiency metric: evapotranspirative cooling per unit of water applied. In plain language, this ratio measures how many degrees of cooling you get for each liter (or gallon) of water that plants and soil release into the air through evaporation and transpiration.In dry climates — where municipal water is already tightly rationed and turfgrass is increasingly discouraged but rarely banned (I'm looking at you Arizona) — urban greening strategies are going to have pivot away from high-water lawns and non-native foliage. These cities have to move from simply prioritizing or incentivizing drought-tolerant species to requiring them. While drought-tolerant plants transpire less water than many other plants and trees — and still require water — when combined with drip-irrigation using treated municipal wastewater (greywater), they can provide a pretty reliable canopy shade and even modest evaporative cooling without draining water reserves.Challenge 2. Environmental Justice and Thermal EquityUrban heat exposure is rarely, if ever, distributed evenly across socio-economic groups. In many cities worldwide, low-income neighborhoods exhibit significantly lower tree canopy cover, higher proportions of impervious asphalt, and higher building densities than the more affluent suburbs and ex-urbs. This imbalance leaves more vulnerable populations exposed to extreme heat hazards.When municipalities undertake uncoordinated “regreening” projects, they risk triggering green gentrification. Installing fancy attractive parks can then inflate surrounding property values, displacing residents while still not reducing their heat related vulnerability.To address this, requires targeted interventions like deploying small-scale, distributed interventions (think pocket parks, vegetated bus stops, and road corridors) directly in high-vulnerability, low-canopy/vegetation neighborhoods. You could focus on functional shading over high-maintenance aesthetics. This could better ensure that at least transit stops, pedestrian walkways, and playgrounds are prioritized for canopy cover. Lastly, combining situated green infrastructure with social policy could create and/or protect more affordable housing around old and new greened public corridors and spaces.Challenge 3. A Multi-Benefit, Context-Specific Design FrameworkNo single cooling intervention works everywhere. Planners and policy makers need to adopt an integrated, multi-tiered approach that combines nature-based solutions with material interventions.In arid and semi-arid environments, planners should prioritize structural canopy shading and end an over-reliance on water-intensive lawn evapotranspiration. It's time to demand drought-tolerant trees with greywater irrigation networks, shade sails, and high-albedo “cool pavements” that can better reflect solar radiation without draining water resources.In contrast, humid and more temperate climates would likely benefit most from maximizing green spatial connectivity. By linking existing parks through linear street-tree corridors — with select broadleaf and/or coniferous species — summer evapotranspiration can be enhanced while maintaining year-round microclimate regulation.Finally, within high-density, built-up cores where ground space for new parks is limited, cities should leverage vertical green walls and green roofs paired with reflective building materials. But they best also preserve prevailing wind corridors while preventing nighttime heat traps through street canyons.“Regreening” is a compelling slogan, but as physical geography demonstrates, simplistic blanket policies can yield unpredictable thermodynamic results. Simply planting trees without considering local climate, available water, species traits, spatial configuration, and urban geometry can lead to unintended consequences.The exhaustive synthesis of decade-long research provided by Hadi Soltanifard and Majid Amani-Beni (2025) offers a clear path forward. Nature-based solutions are not off-the-shelf products that can be copy-pasted across different global cities. They are dynamic, living interventions that alter energy fluxes across urban surfaces.By moving beyond blanket acreage targets and framing urban greening as the strategic reorganization of surface-energy relations, geographers, urban planners, and policymakers will need to work together. When we design green infrastructure that respects local environmental constraints, honors spatial equity, and optimizes microclimatic processes, urban greening moves from a vague policy promise toward tools of experimentation that can pragmatically evolve our cities and megaregions into truly climate-resilient urbanscapes.ReferencesBowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010). Urban greening to cool towns and cities: A systematic review of the empirical evidence. Landscape and Urban Planning, 97(3), 147-155.Cheung, P.K., Jim, C.Y., 2019. Differential cooling effects of landscape parameters in humid-subtropical urban parks. Landscape and Urban Planning 192, 103651.Coutts, A.M., Tapper, N.J., Beringer, J., et al., 2013. Watering our cities: the capacity for Water Sensitive Urban Design to support urban cooling and improve human thermal comfort in the Australian context. Progress in Physical Geography 37(1), 2–28.Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2022). Conifers may ameliorate urban heat waves better than broadleaf trees: Evidence from Vancouver, Canada. Atmosphere, 13(5), 830.Eyster, H. N., & Beckage, B. (2023). Arboreal urban cooling is driven by leaf area index, leaf boundary layer resistance, and dry leaf mass per leaf area: Evidence from a system dynamics model. Atmosphere, 14(3), 552.Lee, H., Mayer, H., & Chen, L. (2016). Contribution of trees and grasslands to the mitigation of human heat stress in a residential district of Freiburg, Southwest Germany. Landscape and Urban Planning 148:37–50.Lemoine-Rodríguez, R., Inostroza, L., Falfán, I., & MacGregor-Fors, I. (2022). Too hot to handle? On the cooling capacity of urban green spaces in a Neotropical Mexican city. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 74, 127633.Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., 2019. Multi-year comparison of the effects of spatial pattern of urban green spaces on urban land surface temperature. Landscape and Urban Planning. 184, 44–58.Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., Fadaei, M., 2021. The effects of land use on spatial pattern of urban green spaces and their cooling ability. Urban. Clim 35, 100743.Masoudi, M., Tan, P.Y., Liew, S.C., 2019. Multi-city comparison of the relationships between spatial pattern and cooling effect of urban green spaces in four major Asian cities. Ecol. Indic 98, 200–213.Morakinyo, T.E., Ouyang, W., Lau, K.-K.-L., et al., 2020. Right tree, right place (urban canyon): Tree species selection approach for optimum urban heat mitigation-development and evaluation. Sci. Total. Environ 719, 137461.Pramanik, M. (2019). Impacts of urban expansion on land surface temperature and urban heat island in Kolkata Municipal Corporation, India. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 191(12), 738.Santamouris, M. (2014). Cooling the cities—a review of reflective and green roof mitigation technologies to fight heat island and improve comfort in urban environments. Solar Energy, 103, 682-703.Schlaerth, Hannah L., et al. "Albedo as a competing warming effect of urban greening." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 128.24 (2023): e2023JD038764.Soltanifard, H., & Amani-Beni, M. (2025). The cooling effect of urban green spaces as nature-based solutions for mitigating urban heat: Insights from a decade-long systematic review. Climate Risk Management, 49, 100731.Ziter, C. D., Pedersen, E. J., Kucharik, C. J., & Turner, M. G. (2019). Scale-dependent interactions between tree canopy cover and impervious surfaces reduce daytime urban heat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 116(15), 7575-7580. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Hello Interactors,Welcome to summer where Interplace turns its attention to physical geography and the environment. It's already a crazy El Niño — thanks in large part to global warming — and the United States is having a big birthday. How might these be related and what to do about it?What follows is not a celebration or a condemnation, but more of a reckoning. I look at what was built, what was deliberately forgotten, and what is now continually arriving, season by season, in forms of weather the founders could not have imagined.Although Alexander Humboldt — one of the world's most famous scientists at the time — did warn Jefferson of the effects of human-induced climate change in 1804. He based his prediction on changes he observed in forests and water systems as a result of mono-crops and industrial “steam and gas”. Jefferson ignored him.BUILDING, BURNING, BILLOWING BACKOn this momentous 250th Fourth of July, when the world is experiencing record level extreme weather events, let's reflect on how over the last 250 years the United States helped build, extract, and then burn the material and political conditions that made climate change possible. From the beginning, it tied itself to land, extraction, mobility, and expansion. Over time those commitments became an energy system built on coal, oil, gas, highways, suburbs, industrial agriculture, and a development model that treated nature as an inexhaustible storehouse. That legacy is now legible in the atmosphere itself. Let's light a Roman Candle in celebration!Even before the 4th of July fireworks celebrations create another nationwide 42% average increase in fine particulate matter (Seidel, et al., 2015), the United States bears the single largest share of cumulative historical CO₂ emissions of any nation . We represent roughly 20 percent of the global total since 1850 contributing approximately 0.2°C of warming to date (Carbon Brief, 2021; UNEP, 2023). To represent four percent of the world's current population and be responsible for nearly a fifth of its cumulative warming is not a coincidence of geography or fake news. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about how a republic would be organized, energized, and expanded across two and a half centuries.The United States has long imagined freedom in spatial terms: movement, property, settlement, mastery, frontier, and circulation. Those abstract ideals were made real through land theft and remade landscapes, as well as through infrastructure built in significant part by African and African American enslaved labor. Each step along the way depended on ever-greater throughput of energy, labor, and material. In that sense, the country's history is also a history of how thought became organized around extraction and exploitation, until those thoughts and actions themselves became a kind of common sense. But by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries increased industrialization meant emissions grew. They surged during the postwar era and peaked in the early 2000s — a trajectory that maps almost exactly onto the spatial project of suburban expansion, highway construction, and fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture (Climate Change Tracker, 2024). Two-thirds of the country's cumulative warming impact derives from fossil CO₂ alone. The built environment of American freedom is as inseparable from the chemical footprint it left behind as a firecracker's scattered debris and carbon residue.This leaves us with a climate crisis that is not just the result of a few bad policy choices in the late twentieth century. We exist in a cumulative outcome of a long national project that normalized combustion as prosperity and treated atmospheric consequence as some distant abstraction. Kind of like turning up the radio to drowned out the sound of your car making a funny noise. The federal state government played a central role in this process. Not only through direct policy and subsidies, but through the development of roads, ports, power systems, agricultural regimes, and military logistics that expanded the scale of fossil dependence at every scale of national life.The fossil fuel industry understood this trajectory earlier than the public was permitted to know. A systematic analysis published in Science found that ExxonMobil's own scientists accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning from as early as 1977. These projections are consistent with subsequent observations. And yet, for decades, the company publicly pushed doubt and denial (Supran, Rahmstorf, & Oreskes, 2023). Consequently, what America projects as “economic growth”, fueled enormously by the fossil fuel industry, is embedded not only in a collective national memory but in the scientific record.The irony is that America's confidence in its own permanence rested on a false sense of geography. The landscape seemed stable because the costs were displaced in the form of upstream mining, downstream pollution, hidden emissions, imported and exported harm, and deferred climate effects. The effects on the atmosphere made that displacement impossible to sustain. The ‘progress' that had been scattered across space and time returns as heat, drought, fire, flood, and increasingly volatile weather. We built a world in which the rewards of extraction were immediate while the penalties were delayed. Call it what you will — the climate crisis is just the debt of delay, dressed as disaster.KNOWING, NEGLECTING, NEUTERING KNOWLEDGEThe USA did not simply keep burning and expanding on autopilot. By the late twentieth century, it had also begun to lose the institutional capacity to understand what its own trajectory meant. The problem was no longer that the 1970's scientific picture Exxon had already portrayed was absent. The evidence was clear. By the early 1990s the United States had ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and formally accepted the goal of returning greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade.The barrier to progress was not ignorance, but a degraded relationship between knowledge and power. This was engineered in part by more fossil fuel industry campaigns to sow doubt about science it privately accepted. Historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented how a loose-knit network of industry-connected scientists ran effective campaigns to mislead the public on issues from tobacco to climate change. They exploited the media's tendency toward false balance and keeping controversy alive long after scientific consensus had been reached (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). The strategy was to make certainty seem uncertain, and it worked. For decades, political inaction persisted through every window of action that may have helped.By the mid-1990s, climate change had become legible enough for federal institutions to name, study, and plan around, but the machinery of governance was being bent in the opposite direction. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans who rose with him may not have invented anti-government politics, but they weaponized it. Curiously, through pro-governmental politics. While their rhetoric promised efficiency and modernization, in practice it often meant cutting staffs, weakening committees, abolishing subcommittees, and treating the legislature less as a site of deliberation than as a theater of permanent combat. After all, their own staffers affectionately referred to Gingrich and his wrecking crew as ‘jihadists' — even as those same politicians promulgated and attached that term as a slur toward Muslims. One of the most consequential acts of this period was the 1995 defunding of the Office of Technology Assessment. This was a bipartisan, independent body that had produced over 750 reports on complex scientific and technical questions since 1974, including major studies on energy policy, environmental risk, and the long-range consequences of atmospheric change. Gingrich had vowed to kill the OTA during his 1994 election campaign. He kept his promise, and with it eliminated one of Congress's primary mechanisms for converting scientific knowledge into durable legislative capacity (Wikipedia, Office of Technology Assessment; AAAS Science, 2019).A legislature cannot respond intelligently to a long-range atmospheric crisis if it has stripped away the very mechanisms designed to synthesize evidence, test assumptions, and tackle complex questions over time. What replaced deliberations mediated by experts was a vacuum quickly filled by industry lobbyists — the same industry that, amongst themselves, knew exactly what Gingrich was doing. Research on institutional dynamics in climate governance consistently finds that fragmented policy, weak intergovernmental coordination, and the erosion of technical capacity are among the most significant barriers to effective long-range climate action (Jaisridhar et al., 2025; Birchall, Bonnett, & Kehler, 2023).The thinning of Congress's own cognitive infrastructure in 1995 was a bureaucratic adjustment that disabled the country's capacity to govern on topics beyond the timescales and dimensions of a single administration. The political system was becoming less capable of converting recognition into sustained action precisely as the need for that conversion became most urgent. The United States not only helped create the conditions for warming but undermined its own capacity to govern the effects warming created. The atmosphere was warming and so was the willful weakening of the world's most powerful potential partner in planetary protection.CASCADES, CRISES, AND COMING TO TERMSWhat follows is not simply a warmer world, but a less legible and actionable one. Once a political system weakens its own capacity to think long-term, it becomes ill-equipped to face a future that arrives not as a single rupture but as a cascade of self-reinforcing disruptions. We've all experienced or read about hotter summers, fire, more erratic rainfall, stressed coasts, shifting storm tracks, and weather that no longer behaves as the old seasonal calendar once did. Anthropogenic warming is already increasing variability in frequency and severity of weather systems. This in turn can alter local precipitation variability, storm behavior, and the climatic conditions on which seasonal expectations have long depended (Robinson, 2021; Wang et al., 2017; Scher & Messori, 2019). In several regions, climate change is expected not only to shift average conditions but to change seasonal predictability itself — especially for rainfall — making the future harder to read through the calendars and risk assumptions modeled and built from the past (Le et al., 2023; Delsole et al., 2014).Even now, the atmosphere offers a live demonstration of this instability. On June 11, 2026, NOAA officially declared that El Niño has arrived — with a 63 percent probability of reaching “very strong” intensity, defined as sea surface temperature anomalies of at least +2°C in the equatorial Pacific. This would rank it among the largest events in the historical record (NOAA, 2026). What makes 2026 categorically different from prior super events is not just its projected intensity but its baseline. This El Niño begins from the warmest ocean temperatures in human history, layered onto anthropogenic warming that has already pushed the planet to 1.55°C above preindustrial levels.As one paper argued in April, the El Niño is the accelerant; the fuel was already stacked (Hansen et al., 2026). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has placed an 86 percent probability on at least one year between 2026 and 2030 surpassing 2024 as the warmest on record, with 2027 — when El Niño's thermal lag typically produces its most extreme global signals — as the most likely candidate (WMO, 2026).When that variability is layered onto long-term warming, the result is not just discomfort but a deeper erosion of climatic predictability. ENSO — the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system that drives El Niño's periodic warming and its counterpart La Niña's cooling across the tropical Pacific — is not a new phenomenon, but its behavior is changing. Model evidence indicates that ENSO-related rainfall variability is likely to intensify and shift eastward under greenhouse warming, creating more severe and sometimes novel climate conditions across the terrestrial tropics (Cai et al., 2021; Rifai, Li, & Malhi, 2019). The question is no longer whether the climate will change, but how many of the social and political structures built on climatic regularity can survive that change.Climate change is often presented as a technical or environmental problem to be solved. Especially amidst a culture of pervasive techno-optimism. But climate change is way more fundamental than this. It's a reordering of the relationship between how we need to think and the geography in which we exist. This includes political geography and a reordering of political imagination as it relates to physical geography. The old originally envisioned republic of the USA assumed that land could be mastered, seasons could be predicted, and institutions could absorb shock without losing coherence. Those assumptions no longer hold.The old assumption that infrastructure could be planned around stationary baselines is increasingly at odds with the evidence. We can already see how energy systems show measurable vulnerability to climatic uncertainty and extremes. Modeled systems evidence declines in reliability and large performance gaps when future weather variation is not adequately incorporated into planning (Perera et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2023).As a result, the challenge ahead is not adaptation to these changes in the narrow sense, but reconstruction of our relationship to them in the broad sense. This may seem impossible in today's American political system, but truly Democratic societies will need stronger scientific institutions, more durable legislative capacity, and trustworthy public agencies able to interpret risk before disaster becomes routine. They will need not only infrastructure, but intelligence. Embodied intelligence — embodied engagement with physical and social environments rather than as a purely singular-brain augmented by LLM computation. This includes a renewed ability to gather, preserve, and act on knowledge over long horizons.The literature on adaptation governance is clear that resilience depends on organizational learning, intergovernmental collaboration, inclusive planning, and long-term institutional capacity. Short-term, reactive, market or donor-driven interventions that respond to emergencies without building the durable frameworks that prevent them won't work (Birchall et al., 2026; Rahman & Islam, 2024). What this means practically is the reconstitution of the kind of congressional expertise that was dismantled in 1995. We need not merely revive the OTA but to imagine a broader democratic intelligence infrastructure capable of thinking on the timescales that climate change demands — decades, generations, and centuries. Without that, climate change will continue to be experienced as a succession of emergency, political, or market conditions rather than as a governable transformation.We can do this. After all, a country that once imagined itself through movement, expansion, and mastery made a certain kind of freedom seem natural. A new kind of freedom can be made to seem natural too. But right now our current system returns prosperity for many — but heat, flood, instability, and constraint for all. What was built now must be lived within — good and bad — while what was extracted must now live in the atmosphere — all bad. What gets burned today, will burn more later. The political order that was built through extraction, combustion, and territorial expansion must confront the atmospheric and hydrological consequences of those choices.That confrontation will only intensify. Past century's cumulative emissions have already committed the planet to changes that will outlast any government, living generation, or institution that exists. Including you and me. The next 250 years will belong less to societies that imagine escape than to those that can build the institutional intelligence, infrastructural redundancy, and long-term public capacity required to inhabit a less legible and hospitable climate (Ouyang et al., 2023; Jaisridhar et al., 2025).So, as you watch the rocket's red glare and bombs bursting in air — sending even more smoke, chemicals and debris everywhere — know the flag will still be there. But to endure, it must repair an institution to be once again knowledgeable and fair.ReferencesBirchall, S. J., Villeneuve, K., Rose, D., Baran, N. N., & Adams, S. (2026). Exploring the modifying effects of adaptive capacity on resilience to climate change across 4 coastal cities in British Columbia, Canada. Cities.Birchall, S. J., Bonnett, N. L., & Kehler, S. (2023). The influence of governance structure on local resilience: Enabling and constraining factors for climate change adaptation in practice. Urban Climate.Cai, W., McPhaden, M., Grimm, A., Rodrigues, R., Taschetto, A., Garreaud, R., … Vera, C. (2020). Climate impacts of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation on South America. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.Cai, W., Santoso, A., Collins, M., Dewitte, B., Karamperidou, C., Kug, J., … Zhong, W. (2021). Changing El Niño–Southern Oscillation in a warming climate. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.Carbon Brief. (2021). Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change?Climate Change Tracker. (2024). United States of America: Historic contribution to global warming since 1850.Delsole, T., Yan, X., Dirmeyer, P., Fennessy, M., & Altshuler, E. (2014). Changes in seasonal predictability due to global warming. Journal of Climate.Holgate, C., Evans, J., Taschetto, A., Gupta, S. A., & Santoso, A. (2022). The impact of interacting climate modes on east Australian precipitation moisture sources. Journal of Climate.Jaisridhar, P., Nirosha, R., Jasimudeen, S., Senthilkumar, M., Ponsneka, I., & Raja, P. (2025). Institutional dynamics in climate change adaptation: A bibliometric analysis. Frontiers in Environmental Science.Le, P., Randerson, J., Willett, R., Wright, S., Smyth, P., Guilloteau, C., Mamalakis, A., & Foufoula-Georgiou, E. (2023). Climate-driven changes in the predictability of seasonal precipitation. Nature Communications.Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press.Ouyang, H., Tang, X., Zhang, R., Baklanov, A., Brasseur, G., Kumar, R., Han, Q., & Luo, Y. (2023). Resilience building and collaborative governance for climate change adaptation in response to a new state of more frequent and intense extreme weather events. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science.Perera, A., Nik, V., Chen, D., Scartezzini, J., & Hong, T. (2020). Quantifying the impacts of climate change and extreme climate events on energy systems.Rahman, M. M., & Islam, M. S. (2024). Institutional dynamics and climate adaptation: Unveiling the challenges and opportunities in coastal Bangladesh.Rifai, S., Li, S., & Malhi, Y. (2019). Coupling of El Niño events and long-term warming leads to pervasive climate extremes in the terrestrial tropics.Robinson, W. (2021). Climate change and extreme weather: A review focusing on the continental United States.Scher, S., & Messori, G. (2019). How global warming changes the difficulty of synoptic weather forecasting.Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections.UNEP. (2023). Current and historic contributions to global warming and emissions in the United States from 1850 to 2021. Statista.Wang, X., Jiang, D., & Lang, X. (2017). Future extreme climate changes linked to global warming intensity. Science Bulletin.Hansen, J., Kharecha, P., Morgan, D., & Vest, J. (2026, April 15). Super-Duper El Niño. Columbia University Earth Institute.National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2026, June 11). El Niño forms, expected to strengthen, say NOAA forecasters [Press release].NOAA Climate Prediction Center. (2026, June 11). ENSO diagnostic discussion. National Weather Service.Seidel, D. J., & Birnbaum, A. N. (2015). Effects of Independence Day fireworks on atmospheric concentrations of fine particulate matter in the United States. Atmospheric Environment.World Meteorological Organization. (2026). Global annual-to-decadal climate update 2026–2035. WMO. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Today's poem is The Burning Kite by Ouyang Jianghe, translated by Austin Woerner. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Every once in a while, a poem comes along with imagery so startling, phrasing so original, I have to read it several times in a row to be sure I'm taking it all in. Today's poem is one of them.” This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation and get access to the sponsor-free version of The Slowdown today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

La mano alien es uno de esos fenómenos neurológicos que obligan a replantearse qué significa realmente “controlar” una acción: pacientes cuya mano no está paralizada, pero tampoco les obedece, realizando movimientos con apariencia intencional que surgen fuera de su voluntad e incluso interfieren con la otra mano. En este episodio utilizamos este cuadro tan llamativo como clínicamente revelador para ir mucho más allá del síntoma y explorar cómo el cerebro construye la acción, integrando intención, ejecución y percepción dentro de una red compleja que, cuando se desorganiza, rompe la coherencia entre lo que queremos hacer y lo que finalmente ocurre. Desgranamos los distintos fenotipos —frontal, calloso y parietal— como expresiones de fallos en nodos específicos de esa red, analizamos su base neurofisiológica y aterrizamos todo esto en la clínica. Cómo reconocer la mano alien, cómo valorarla desde la fenomenología y la interacción con el entorno, y qué estrategias terapéuticas pueden tener sentido en función del mecanismo predominante. Un episodio que no solo explica un síndrome raro, sino que abre una ventana para entender que el movimiento no es simplemente contraer músculos, sino construir continuamente la experiencia de ser quien actúa. Referencias del episodio: 1.     Biran, I., Giovannetti, T., Buxbaum, L., & Chatterjee, A. (2006). The alien hand syndrome: What makes the alien hand alien?. Cognitive neuropsychology, 23(4), 563–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643290500180282 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21049344/). 2.     Bru, I., Verhamme, L., de Neve, P., & Maebe, H. (2021). Rehabilitation of a Patient with Alien Hand Syndrome: a Case Report of a 61-Year Old Man. Journal of rehabilitation medicine. Clinical communications, 4, 1000050. https://doi.org/10.2340/20030711-1000050 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8054745/). 3.     Di Pietro, M., Russo, M., Dono, F., Carrarini, C., Thomas, A., Di Stefano, V., Telese, R., Bonanni, L., Sensi, S. L., Onofrj, M., & Franciotti, R. (2021). A Critical Review of Alien Limb-Related Phenomena and Implications for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies. Frontiers in neurology, 12, 661130. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2021.661130 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8458742/). 4.     Feinberg, T. E., Schindler, R. J., Flanagan, N. G., & Haber, L. D. (1992). Two alien hand syndromes. Neurology, 42(1), 19–24. https://doi.org/10.1212/wnl.42.1.19 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1734302/). 5.     Graff-Radford, J., Rubin, M. N., Jones, D. T., Aksamit, A. J., Ahlskog, J. E., Knopman, D. S., Petersen, R. C., Boeve, B. F., & Josephs, K. A. (2013). The alien limb phenomenon. Journal of neurology, 260(7), 1880–1888. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-013-6898-y (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23572346/). 6.     Haq, I. U., Malaty, I. A., Okun, M. S., Jacobson, C. E., Fernandez, H. H., & Rodriguez, R. R. (2010). Clonazepam and botulinum toxin for the treatment of alien limb phenomenon. The neurologist, 16(2), 106–108. https://doi.org/10.1097/NRL.0b013e3181a0d670 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20220444/). 7.     Hassan, A., & Josephs, K. A. (2016). Alien Hand Syndrome. Current neurology and neuroscience reports, 16(8), 73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11910-016-0676-z (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27315251/). 8.     Lewis-Smith, D. J., Wolpe, N., Ghosh, B. C. P., & Rowe, J. B. (2020). Alien limb in the corticobasal syndrome: phenomenological characteristics and relationship to apraxia. Journal of neurology, 267(4), 1147–1157. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-019-09672-8 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7109196/). 9.     Ma, Y., Liu, Y., Yan, X., & Ouyang, Y. (2023). Alien hand syndrome, a rare presentation of corpus callosum and cingulate infarction. Journal of the neurological sciences, 452, 120739. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jns.2023.120739 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37536055/). 10.  Mark V. W. (2025). Alien Hand: Current Research Trends. Current neurology and neuroscience reports, 25(1), 63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11910-025-01449-z (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12449344/). 11.  Park, Y. W., Kim, C. H., Kim, M. O., Jeong, H. J., & Jung, H. Y. (2012). Alien hand syndrome in stroke - case report & neurophysiologic study -. Annals of rehabilitation medicine, 36(4), 556–560. https://doi.org/10.5535/arm.2012.36.4.556 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3438424/). 12.  Romano, D., Sedda, A., Dell'aquila, R., Dalla Costa, D., Beretta, G., Maravita, A., & Bottini, G. (2014). Controlling the alien hand through the mirror box. A single case study of alien hand syndrome. Neurocase, 20(3), 307–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/13554794.2013.770882 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23557374/). 13.  Sarva, H., Deik, A., & Severt, W. L. (2014). Pathophysiology and treatment of alien hand syndrome. Tremor and other hyperkinetic movements (New York, N.Y.), 4, 241. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8VX0F48 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4261226/). 14.  Sellal, F., Cretin, B., Musacchio, M., Berthel, M. C., Carelli, G., & Michel, J. M. (2019). Long-lasting diagonistic dyspraxia suppressed by rTMS applied to the right motor cortex. Journal of neurology, 266(3), 631–635. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-018-09178-9 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30631917/). 15.  Wolpe, N., Moore, J. W., Rae, C. L., Rittman, T., Altena, E., Haggard, P., & Rowe, J. B. (2014). The medial frontal-prefrontal network for altered awareness and control of action in corticobasal syndrome. Brain : a journal of neurology, 137(Pt 1), 208–220. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awt302 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3891444/). 16.  Wolpe, N., Hezemans, F. H., & Rowe, J. B. (2020). Alien limb syndrome: A Bayesian account of unwanted actions. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 127, 29–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.02.002 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32155475/).

Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, interviewed Ethan Ouyang, Head of the U.S. Department of Atoms at DeepWisdom, to discuss a new class of AI innovation: autonomous AI teams capable of building, launching, and operating real businesses from a single prompt. Ouyang described Atoms as a next-generation AI business solution designed to move beyond copilots and task-based agents. Rather than assisting humans with discrete workflows, Atoms functions as a coordinated, multi-agent system that can plan, execute, iterate, and grow revenue-generating products. The platform leverages open-source models and modular architecture to deliver enterprise-grade performance while maintaining cost efficiency and flexibility. A central theme of the conversation was the shift from “AI tools” to “AI organizations.” Ouyang explained that Atoms is structured to simulate functional teams—product, engineering, marketing, and operations—working collaboratively to bring an idea to market. This approach enables faster experimentation, shorter development cycles, and measurable business outcomes. For telecom, MSP, and channel audiences, the implication is significant: AI is no longer just about automation within existing businesses—it may also become a mechanism for creating entirely new lines of revenue. Ouyang also addressed the economics of AI deployment. As infrastructure costs and model usage scale, enterprises are increasingly seeking performance-per-dollar advantages. Atoms is positioned to deliver competitive output quality while reducing operational expense through optimized model orchestration and autonomous workflow design. The result, he suggested, is a more sustainable path toward AI-driven growth. Looking ahead, Ouyang framed Atoms as part of a broader transformation in how organizations think about productivity and entrepreneurship. As AI systems gain the ability to operate with greater autonomy, the competitive advantage will shift toward those who can effectively deploy and govern these digital teams. For technology providers and partners, that represents both a strategic opportunity and a call to rethink traditional business models. More information about Atoms and DeepWisdom's autonomous AI initiatives is available at https://atoms.dev/.

AI is no longer just a tool — it's becoming a business operator. In this episode of Right About Now, Ryan Alford talks with Ethan Ouyang, Head of U.S. Operations at DeepWisdom, about the rise of agentic AI and how their platform Atoms enables anyone to build revenue-ready products without writing code or managing teams. Ethan explains how Atoms differs from traditional AI tools by running a full autonomous decision loop — from market research and planning to execution, launch, and SEO-driven monetization. The discussion covers real-world use cases including DTC brands, SaaS products, internal tools, and small-business systems. Topics Covered: What agentic AI actually means Why most AI tools stop at tasks — and Atoms doesn't How AI coordinates multiple agents autonomously Building MVPs without engineering teams Human judgment vs AI execution Cost efficiency through open-source models Who this technology is really for This episode breaks down why the barrier to building businesses has fundamentally changed — and what that means for founders willing to adapt. Sponsors Are you interested in effortlessly growing your bitcoin portfolio?  ↳Gemini Crypto – https://www.gemini.com/card?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=right_about_now&utm_content=host_read&_bhlid=160d7f4fc923d552d3acfd8e1b631d57799c5196

Amardeep Parmar from Bae HQ welcomes Dr. Jing Ouyang, Cofounder and CGO of Patchwork Health.Amardeep Parmar:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/amardeepsparmar⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dr. Jing Ouyang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingouyang1/Patchwork Health: https://www.linkedin.com/company/heypatchwork/

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Jing Ouyang, co-founder and chief growth officer of Patchwork Health discusses the political pressure on health services to streamline operations, the difficulty in digitising NHS clinics and leaving a career as a medical doctor to launch a tech startup.  Patchwork Health is a digital platform for clinics to manage day-to-day operations, organise workflows and reduce agency spending. Ouyang spent years as a resident doctor where he saw first hand the manual processes and bureaucracy needlessly complicating matters. He co-founded Patchwork with another former NHS doctor to directly address the problems the founders had faced in their health careers. 

In today's podcast we were delighted to be joined by the presenters of the top scientific abstracts for the Annual Assembly of the American Academy of  Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) and the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Nurses Association (HPNA).  Eric and I interviewed these presenters at the meeting on Thursday (before the pub crawl, thankfully).  On Saturday, they formally presented their abstracts during the plenary session, followed by a wonderful question and answer session with Hillary Lum doing a terrific job in the role of podcast host moderator. Our three guests were Marie Bakitas, who conducted a trial of tele/video palliative care for Black and White inpatients with serious illness hospitalized in the rural south; Yael Shenker, for a trial of patient-directed Prepare-for-your-care vs. facilitated Respecting Choices style advance care planning interventions; and, Na Ouyang, who studied the relationship between prognostic communication and prolonged grief among the parents of children who died from cancer.  From just the abstracts we had so many questions. We covered some of our questions on the podcast, others you can ponder on your own or in your journal clubs, including: Marie's tele/video palliative care intervention was tailored/refined with the help of a community advisory board. Does every institution need to get a community advisory board to tailor their rural tele-palliative care initiative (or geriatrics intervention) to the local communities served?  Who would/should be on that board? How to be sensitive to the risks of stereotyping based on recommendations from the few members of the board to the many heterogeneous patients served? Advance care planning has taken a beating. For the purposes of a thought exercise, no matter what you believe, let's assume that there are clear important benefits. Based on the results of Yael's study, should resources be allocated to resource intensive nurse facilitated sessions (Respecting Choices), which had significantly better engagement, or to low resource intensive patient-facing materials (Prepare), which had significantly less engagement but still plenty of engagement (e.g. 75% vs 61% advance directive completion)? One interpretation of Na's study is that clinicians can lean on the high levels of trust and high ratings of communication to engage with parents of children with cancer about prognosis.  Another interpretation is that clinicians avoided telling the parents prognosis in order to bolster their ratings of trust and communication quality.  Which is it? Bonus: Simon says he composed the song Sounds of Silence in a dark echoing bathroom about his concerns that people had stopped listening to each other in the 1960s (still resonates, right?).  Garfunkel says Simon was writing about Garfunklel's friend and college roomate Sandy, who was blind.  Who's got the right of it?   Enjoy! -Alex Smith   

Over the past few years, we've heard a lot about artificial intelligence and the algorithms that support public policy, decision making and resource allocations.  By processing reams of presumably neutral data, the algorithms are supposed to produce unbiased results.  But we've also heard concerns about the algorithms themselves: what unrecognized assumptions go into their construction and how they can produce different outcomes depending on programmer choices about the data that goes into them. Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Professor David Rehkopf of the Department of Epidemiology & Population Health at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Derek Ouyang, Executive Director of City Systems and Senior Research Manager in Stanford University's Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab.  We'll be taking about what algorithms are, how they are used to promote environmental justice and guide public funding for disadvantaged communities, and why they can produce different results depending on what goes into them and what comes out. 

Current text generators, such as ChatGPT, are highly unreliable, difficult to use effectively, unable to do many things we might want them to, and extremely expensive to develop and run. These defects are inherent in their underlying technology. Quite different methods could plausibly remedy all these defects. Would that be good, or bad? https://betterwithout.ai/better-text-generators John McCarthy's paper “Programs with common sense”: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59/mcc59.html Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001EQ4OJW/?tag=meaningness-20 Petroni et al., “Language Models as Knowledge Bases?": https://aclanthology.org/D19-1250/ Gwern Branwen, “The Scaling Hypothesis”: gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis Rich Sutton's “Bitter Lesson”: www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html Guu et al.'s “Retrieval augmented language model pre-training” (REALM): http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/guu20a/guu20a.pdf Borgeaud et al.'s “Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens” (RETRO): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.04426.pdf Izacard et al., “Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models”: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.03299.pdf Chirag Shah and Emily M. Bender, “Situating Search”: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816 David Chapman's original version of the proposal he puts forth in this episode: twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1576195630891819008 Lan et al. “Copy Is All You Need”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06962 Mitchell A. Gordon's “RETRO Is Blazingly Fast”: https://mitchgordon.me/ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html Min et al.'s “Silo Language Models”: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.04430.pdf W. Daniel Hillis, The Connection Machine, 1986: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262081571/?tag=meaningness-20 Ouyang et al., “Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02155 Ronen Eldan and Yuanzhi Li, “TinyStories: How Small Can Language Models Be and Still Speak Coherent English?”: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.07759.pdf Li et al., “Textbooks Are All You Need II: phi-1.5 technical report”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05463 Henderson et al., “Foundation Models and Fair Use”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15715 Authors Guild v. Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild%2C_Inc._v._Google%2C_Inc. Abhishek Nagaraj and Imke Reimers, “Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project”: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20210702 You can support the podcast and get episodes a week early, by supporting the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/fluidityaudiobooks If you like the show, consider buying me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattarnold Original music by Kevin MacLeod. This podcast is under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International 4.0 License.

Helen Ouyang is an emergency physician, associate professor at Columbia University, and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She is also a fellow at the Type Media Center. She has written for The Atlantic, Harper's, Los Angeles Times, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. Her writing has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and funded by The Pulitzer Center. Join us for this important conversation about the state of our nation's healthcare and insurance industries. Got somethin' to say?! Email us at BackroomAndy@gmail.com Leave us a message: 845-307-7446 Twitter: @AndyOstroy Produced by Andy Ostroy, Matty Rosenberg, and Jennifer Hammoud @ Radio Free Rhiniecliff Design by Cricket Lengyel

In this episode of NEJM AI Grand Rounds, hosts Raj Manrai and Andy Beam interview Dr. David Ouyang, a cardiologist and AI researcher at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The conversation explores Ouyang's journey from medical training to AI research and entrepreneurship, his groundbreaking work in applying AI to cardiology imaging, and the challenges of bringing AI innovations from academia to clinical practice. Ouyang discusses his experience conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for AI algorithms in echocardiography, the process of commercializing research through Y Combinator, and the hurdles in reimbursement for AI-based medical devices. The episode also delves into the future of AI in cardiology, the importance of clinician involvement in AI development, and the potential impact of large language models (LLMs) on medical practice. Ouyang shares insights on balancing clinical value with business considerations in health care AI and offers advice for researchers looking to conduct clinical trials for AI technologies. Transcript.

Welcome to Season 13 Episode 38 of the ParentingAces Podcast, a proud member of the Tennis Channel Podcast Network. This week, we take an inside look at Intennse, a new team format that was recently showcased as a junior event in the Atlanta area. Lisa chats with two of the players, Sadira Ouyang and Connor Mowrey, as well as their parents about their experience. NOTE: To watch/listen to our earlier podcast with Intennse (aka Time Tennis) founders, go to https://parentingaces.com/podcasts/its-time-for-time-tennis-ft-charles-allen-yannick-yoshizawa/ Intennse (formerly known as Time Tennis) is a new way to compete in our sport. Per the Atlanta event website, 18 participants (9 boys and 9 girls) were selected by WTN to compete in this event. Participants were divided into 3 teams of 3 boys and 3 girls; each team had a professional coach who was present on court during play. There were round robins in the categories of Boys' singles, Girls' singles and Mixed Doubles. Each team played each other once in each category and accumulated points. The winning team received medals and a trophy. Players from all teams will be invited to attend or participate in the Intennse college level rivalry event to be held October 26th. Matches consisted of two 15 minute halves; there was no second serve and the server continued serving as long as they held serve. Like college matches, lets were played; clean winners count two points, and teams can take one time out and make one substitution per half. Live coaching was allowed. Here is what the one-day event looked like, schedule-wise: 09:00 - 10:00.  Arrival 10:00 - 10:30.  Presentation / Rules and Schedule overview 10:30 - 10:45  Coaches introduction and Announcement of Teams 10:45 - 11:30  Teams warm up / practice and discuss strategy 11:30 - 12:00.  Break   12:00.  A Boys v. B Boys 12:30.  B Girls v C Girls 01:00.  C Mixed v A Mixed 01:30.  B Boys v C Boys 02:00.  A Girls v B Girls 02:30.  C Mixed v B Mixed 03:00.  A Boys v C Boy 03:30.  C Girls v A Girls 04:00.  A Mixed v B Mixed   04:30   Winner Presentations & Prizes 05:00   After Party As you'll hear from both families, this is a format they'd like to see included as a regular option on the junior competition calendar. If you'd like more information on Intennse and how to bring an event to your community, visit their website at https://news.intennse.com/ or reach out to Charles Allen at charles@intennse.com. Their social media channels will be live very soon. And don't forget to register for our upcoming trip to Spain! More info at https://parentingaces.com/articles/join-us-for-10-days-in-spain/. If you're so inclined, please share this – and all our episodes! – with your fellow tennis players, parents, and coaches. You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or via your favorite podcast app. Please be sure to check out our logo'd merch as well as our a la carte personal consultations in our online shop. CREDITS Intro & Outro Music: Morgan Stone aka STØNE Audio & Video Editing: Lisa Stone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Follow Jonathan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tumtumsong/ Follow Christy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christyouyang_/ Hi everyone This episode has been planned since Season 1 and I am so honored and thrilled to share this episode with the conversation with Christy Ouyang. As, I was listening through the whole edit, one thing stood out to me and that is that it really don't matter on comparing on everyone's faith walk with Christ. What that means is that I think typically in some point in your walk with Christ, you come across with people who are also in their walk with God but may have disagreements but yet have a fruitful conversation. Each episode is definitely always about learning yet sharing the gospel and how God has impacted myself or the guest. So enjoy, and I catch y'all next time :) As always for Season 2, we are inspired by this scripture: Matthew 5:9 " Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Children of God" See you all soon and catch you August 3rd at 8PM!!! Please don't forget to like and subscribe :) 00:00 start 1:08 intro 7:00 Finding God in Business 12:30 Christy Going Back Home 18:00 Christy's Journey on her Relationship with God 21:30 What is a Godly Centered Relationship? 36:00 What is a Testimony? 45:00 Christy's Relationship 58:00 What is God Showing Christy Through Relationships? 01:12:40 Christy First Memory of Her Dad 01:15:00 Understanding Our Parents 01:25:00 End TO WATCH THE PODCAST ON YOUTUBE: / @jonathanysong For business inquiries / Ad placement: - email: latethoughtspod@gmail.com Check The Team Instagram Out: - Host/Producer: @jonathanysongg - Sound Operator: @nahtand_ - Social Media Manager: @aeris00 - Videographer: @zeke.barrera | @nahtand_ | @alyssashealy - Editor: @tumtumsong | @zeke.barrera To listen to this podcast, check it out on: - Spotify: ⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/0AWYKLt.... - Apple Podcast: ⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast..⁠. Music by Epidemic Sounds Link: ⁠⁠https://www.epidemicsound.com/⁠⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/late-thoughts/support

In this episode, a conversation with Ouyang Yu, author, translator, academic, and renowned poet. Ouyang Yu's first collection of stories in English, The White Cockatoo Flowers, is both assured and tender and at times surprisingly funny. It includes stories set in China and Australia that revel in the truth and candour of lived experience and the joys and constraints of language. In this book Ouyang Yu deftly peels back the layers on what it means to move from one culture to another, and what it means to be a writer, a husband, a parent and a stranger on foreign and familiar ground. Ouyang Yu was joined in conversation by Alice Pung, a writer and editor whose books include the memoirs Unpolished Gem, Her Father's Daughter, and the novel Laurinda.

‘The Cryptic Clue' is a crime novel which puts capable older women in the spotlight and brings laughs about attitudes and happenings from the not so distant past. This is another Tea Ladies mystery written by Amanda Hampson.Ouyang Yu explores the dissonance between cultures which can lead to both comic outcomes and even a sense of loss in his collection of stories, 'The White Cockatoo Flowers'.  

Tori and Mabelle talk with award-winning playwright and screenwriter, Anna Ouyang Moench, about grad school, motherhood, and her incredible catalog of plays. Anna shares about juggling life as an MFA Playwriting student at UCSD with teaching assistant work and parenting a newborn. The episode includes in-depth discussions of Anna's plays “Mothers,” “Man of God,” “Birds of North America,” and her most recent play “Your Local Theater Presents: A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, Again.”

Another episode touching on aspects not featured in past episodes. Today playwright Anna Ouyang Moench sits in the Playwright's Spotlight and, thankfully, after botching her name twice, she was nice enough to stick around. In this interview, we discuss the benefits of writers groups, the pursuit of playwriting, and developing a play during rehearsal through a nontraditional writing approach. We also discuss the techniques of structure, working under time constraints and the the practicality and theatricality of producing, transferring from larger markets to smaller markets as well as building your network as you grow. We also talk about how playwriting helps in the arena of film and television, how to take notes and receive feedback and being mindful when receiving it, how to juggle life's responsibilities and finding discipline while writing, the mechanisms of a play, playing with the structure of timeline as well as obtaining theatrical and literary representation and so much more. Certainly a learning experience on my end which I hope you enjoy. Anna Ouyang Moench is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays have been produced across the country and include Mothers, Birds of North America, and Sin Eaters. She has been supported by fellowships and residencies from The Playwrights Realm, New York Foundation of the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Van Lier Foundation, Yaddo, the Tofte Lake Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Last Frontier Theatre Conference. Her awards include the Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center, the Gerbode Special Award in the Arts, Boulder Ensemble Theater Company's Generations Award, and East West Players' 2042: See Change Award. She is an alum of UCSD's Playwriting M.F.A. program, the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater, Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Jam at New Georges, and writers groups at East West Players and the Echo Theater Company.To view the video format of this episode, visit -https://youtu.be/HbNX6N4sPaAFor tickets to Birds of North America if you're in the Los Angeles area, visit -https://odysseytheatre.com/whats-on/birds-of-north-america/Links to sites mentioned in this episode - Playwright's Realm -https://playwrightsrealm.org/New York Foundation for the Arts -https://www.nyfa.orgJerome Foundation -https://www.jeromefdn.orgVan Lier Fellowship -https://www.aaartsalliance.org/programs/van-lier-fellowshipYaddo -https://yaddo.orgSawanee Writers Conference -https://www.sewaneewriters.orgLast Frontier -http://www.theatreconference.orgUCSD Theatre Dept. -https://theatre.ucsd.eduWebsites and socials for James Elden, PMP, and Playwright's Spotlight -Punk Monkey Productions - www.punkmonkeyproductions.comPLAY Noir -www.playnoir.comPLAY Noir Anthology –www.punkmonkeyproductions.com/contact.htmlJames Elden -Twitter - @jameseldensauerIG - @alakardrakeFB - fb.com/jameseldensauerPunk Monkey Productions and PLAY Noir - Twitter - @punkmonkeyprods                  - @playnoirla IG - @punkmonkeyprods       - @playnoir_la FB - fb.com/playnoir        - fb.com/punkmonkeyproductionsPlaywright's Spotlight -Twitter - @wrightlightpod IG - @playwrights_spotlightPlaywriting services through Los Angeles Collegiate Playwrights Festivalwww.losangelescollegiateplaywrightsfestival.com/services.htmlSupport the show

The active ingredients of ginseng mainly contribute to aging delay through the following mechanisms: (1) the increase in the expression of antioxidant enzymes to achieve a balance between intracellular oxidation and antioxidation, the mitigation of excessive production of ROS, and the reduction in endogenous DNA damage, which prevent cell cycle arrest and delay aging; and (2) the regulation of the activities of DNA glycosylase and sirtuins in the process of DNA damage repair to ensure that the DNA repair pathway can accurately repair DNA damage caused by various factors associated with aging. #ginseng #aging #microbiota Su, J., Su, Q., Hu, S., Ruan, X., & Ouyang, S. (2023). Research Progress on the Anti-Aging Potential of the Active Components of Ginseng. Nutrients, 15(15), 3286. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15153286 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ralph-turchiano/support

The active ingredients of ginseng mainly contribute to aging delay through the following mechanisms: (1) the increase in the expression of antioxidant enzymes to achieve a balance between intracellular oxidation and antioxidation, the mitigation of excessive production of ROS, and the reduction in endogenous DNA damage, which prevent cell cycle arrest and delay aging; and (2) the regulation of the activities of DNA glycosylase and sirtuins in the process of DNA damage repair to ensure that the DNA repair pathway can accurately repair DNA damage caused by various factors associated with aging. #ginseng #aging #microbiota Su, J., Su, Q., Hu, S., Ruan, X., & Ouyang, S. (2023). Research Progress on the Anti-Aging Potential of the Active Components of Ginseng. Nutrients, 15(15), 3286. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15153286 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ralph-turchiano/support

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. James Ouyang, co-founder of 3D Printing industry giant AnyCubic (https://jle.vi/anycubic). This episode is part of an ongoing series of videos and interviews during my tour in Shenzhen - China's technological and industrial hub. AnyCubic was kind enough to sponsor my trip to China, to coincide with a few special events they are hosting and participating in. In this episode, we talk about the 3D Printing landscape as a whole (and the scene here in Shenzhen), the story of AnyCubic as a company, the AnyCubic Kobra 2 series, and much, much more. I particularly appreciated Dr. Ouyang's candidness, and his willingness to also "tease" some new products without giving away information that he cannot give away. I KNOW you'll love this episode, and if you do, don't forget to give a "like" :)

Bem-vindo à Rádio Minghui. As transmissões incluem assuntos relativos à perseguição ao Falun Gong na China, entendimentos e experiências dos praticantes adquiridas no curso de seus cultivos, interesses e música composta e executada pelos praticantes do Dafa. Programa 685: Experiência de cultivo da categoria Autoaprimoramento intitulada: "Vi a inveja ao enviar pensamentos retos", escrita por Ouyang, um praticante do Falun Dafa na China.

Chinese courts have been required to strengthen penalties against those that damage or destroy trees that are more than 100 years old.中国法院被要求加大对破坏或毁坏百年以上树木的违法者的惩罚。The Supreme People's Court, China's top court, issued an interpretation of the Criminal Law on Monday, with clarification on how to handle criminal cases involving forest resources.周一，中国最高人民法院，即中国最高法院，对刑法进行了解释，明确了如何处理涉及森林资源的刑事案件。"We've frequently seen cases in the past few years in which people have cut down, destroyed or even poisoned old trees," said Yu Haisong, an official from the top court's research office.最高人民法院研究室官员喻海松表示：“过去的几年里，我们经常看到有人砍伐、破坏甚至毒害老树的案例。”In one case, three people, surnamed Ouyang, He and Li, were imprisoned and fined after being found to have drilled into camphor trees to inject pesticides from April to December in 2021 in Hunan province to fell them, Yu said.他说，2021年4月至12月，欧阳、何和李在湖南省钻孔灌毒致古樟树死亡，被监禁并罚款。"They poisoned seven such trees in total, and then benefited from the plant sales," he said, revealing that one of the trees was sold at a price of more than 338,000 yuan ($46,600).喻海松说：“他们共毒死古樟树7株并出售牟利”他透露，其中一棵树的售价超过33.8万元（合4.66万美元）。Five of the felled trees were more than 500 years old, and the other two were also over 300 years old, he added.他补充说，被砍伐的五棵树木有500多年的历史，另外两棵也有300多年的历史。The three defendants were convicted of damaging key national protected wild plants.三名被告被法院以危害国家重点保护植物罪判刑。Ouyang was sentenced to five years in prison and fined 20,000 yuan; He was jailed for four and a half years and fined 20,000 yuan; and Li was jailed for three and a half years and fined 10,000 yuan.欧阳被判有期徒刑五年，并处罚金人民币二万元；何有期徒刑四年六个月，并处罚金人民币二万元；李有期徒刑三年六个月，并处罚金人民币一万元。"Ancient trees have special historical, cultural, scientific and ecological value, so it's essential and urgent to increase efforts to protect them and prevent behaviors that harm tree resources," Yu said.喻海松表示：“古树具有特殊的历史、文化、科研、生态价值，因此必须加大保护力度，谨防危害树木资源的行为。”While calling on judges to protect old trees in line with those on the country's list of key protected wild plants, he cited the interpretation, noting that for those that aren't listed, judges are allowed to punish criminals based on research of the species, ages, and the historical and cultural value of the damaged trees.在呼吁法官按照《国家重点保护野生植物名录》保护古树名木的同时，他援引解释，指出，对于不在名单上的，法官可以根据涉案树木的树种、树龄以及历史、文化价值等因素，综合评估社会危害性，依法定罪处罚。The 20-article interpretation will take effect on Tuesday, China's first National Ecology Day.这份20条的解释将在周二，即中国的首个全国生态日生效。Zhou Jiahai, deputy head of the top court's research office, said that such a legal document enables judges to get tough on crimes involving the damaging of forest resources and meet the demand for forest protection.最高人民法院研究室副主任周加海说，这份法律文件使法官可以严厉打击破坏森林资源的犯罪，契合森林保护的要求。"It's the latest move to further implement the central leadership's requirement on the construction of an ecological civilization," he added.他补充说：“这是进一步实施中央领导层对建设生态文明的要求的最新举措。”Data released by the top court on Monday showed that from 2018 to last year, more than 64,000 criminal cases involving the damage or destruction of forest resources were concluded, with punishments handed down to over 82,000 defendants.最高法院周一发布的数据显示，从2018年到去年，已经结案的涉及损坏或毁坏森林资源的刑事案件超过64000件，对超过82000名被告进行了惩罚。Court英/kɔːt/美/kɔrt/n.法院Jail英/dʒeil/美/dʒel/v.监禁

PART ONE (8/15/2022) https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gracedelpino/episodes/NO-EMPTY-SEATS-FT--MICHAEL-OUYANG-e1mhn5v Some topics discussed in todays episode: Why it so important to share the stories of others Imposter syndrome that comes with big life transitions How to not abandoning yourself – figuring out your core values when you don't know where to start How to change the way that you see yourself and shift the perspective and mindset to knowing that this transformation is painful, but you're not falling apart, you're just falling into something different with a new capacity to be beautiful Embodying emotions- how this can help us learn about the emotions we have, and what they mean, not only in relation to the present, but also in relation to our past Pushing past your limits and expanding past your emotional threshold of discomfort And lastly gaining acceptance and confidence in yourself Things I would tell my younger self if I could: Don't drown in comparing yourself to others, you are beautiful and valuable, and no one can take that away. Loving yourself can make life a lot easier. Be gentle with your words because hearts are fragile. It is hard to move forward when you refuse to let go. Your first reaction to a difficult situation is usually not the wisest- pausing to think before acting is empowering. Giving others kindness will be soothing to your mind into your future. Pain doesn't last forever. -Yung Pueblo Cheryl Strayed Quotes: There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be great and continuous unfolding but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. We will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of yours. Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, a few poet friends of mine told me about an assignment they had that require them to listen repeatedly to a poem in a language, they didn't understand, and then translate it into English. Their mission wasn't to know what the words meant, but rather to hear them, to feel them, to imagine them, and then to conjure something from within themselves to translate the impossible mystery of those words into a poem of their own creation in a language they know. It seems audacious and nonsensical as it first seems, the task is ultimately what poetry- and life- asks us to do: attempt to make clarity and meaning out of the incomprehensible. In some ways, what we're all being asked to do right now is to create something beautiful from the unknown languages we've suddenly found ourselves forced to comprehend. We've had to translate the sentence I don't know how I'm going to do this into the opposite of its meaning, and do this, as you have time, and time again. Link to Tiny Beautiful Things Book https://www.amazon.com/Tiny-Beautiful-Things-audiobook/dp/B008J9GE3G/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3EXXVVHI64RN8&keywords=tiny+beautiful+things+by+cheryl+strayed&qid=1690504075&sprefix=tiny+be%2Caps%2C127&sr=8-1 As well as Hulu Show based on the book https://www.hulu.com/series/tiny-beautiful-things-0ee8a395-3270-46ef-9ab0-c200f5f9f89d

Welcome back to another episode! Today, Mak and Ashley sit down and talk about the nature of communication within areas of various sports. They focus on weightlifting, swimming, and running as they have experience in these sports and they tend to emphasize an “ideal body” of individuals, directly or indirectly. Through Ashley's experience of being an elite athlete, who competed in the Olympic swimming trials, to then taking on CrossFit and Mak's experience of running a marathon, they offer a unique perspective that will provide beneficial information. All of the resources used in the podcast are cited below for reference.   Thank you for listening and make sure to comment, review, and subscribe to this podcast! Have a great day!   Sources: (1) Altheide, D. L., & Pfuhl, E. H. (1980). Self-Accomplishment Through Running. Symbolic Interaction, 3(2), 127–144. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.1980.3.2.127 (2) Anderson, L. M., Reilly, E. E., Gorrell, S., & Anderson, D. A. (2016). Running to win or to be thin? An evaluation of body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms among adult runners. Body image, 17, 43–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2016.02.003 (3) Bond, K. A., & Batey, J. (2005). Running for Their Lives: A Qualitative Analysis of the Exercise Experience of Female Recreational Runners. Women in Sport & Physical Activity Journal, 14(2), 69-82. https://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/running-their-lives-qualitative-analysis-exercise/docview/230669301/se-2 (4) Carson, T. L., Tournat, T., Sonneville, K., Zernicke, R. F., & Karvonen-Gutierrez, C. (2021). Cultural and environmental associations with body image, diet and well-being in NCAA DI female distance runners: a qualitative analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 55(8), 433-437. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102559 (5) Drake, C., & Radford, S. K. (2021). Here is a place for you/know your place: Critiquing “biopedagogy” embedded in images of the female body in fitness advertising. Journal of Consumer Culture, 21(4), 800–826. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1177/1469540519876009 (6) Hecht, M. L., & Choi, H. (2011). The Communication Theory of Identity as a Framework for Health Message Design (pp. 137–152). (7) Howells, K., & Grogan, S. (2012). Body image and the female swimmer: muscularity but in moderation. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise, and Health, 4(1), 98–116. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2011.653502 (8) Laynes, I. A., Fagundes, M. G., Barbosa, G. M., de Souza, M. C., & Lombardi Júnior, I. (2022). Exercise dependence, body Dysmorphia, and anxiety in CrossFit practitioners: A cross-sectional study. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 32, 77–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbmt.2022.04.013 (9) Moxham, S. (2021). Rejecting the Runner's Body. Fleet Feet. https://www.fleetfeet.com/blog/rejecting-the-runners-body (10) Neilson, S. (2023). Distance runner Lauren Fleshman on the toxicity of elite sports culture. The Seattle Times. https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/distance-runner-lauren-fleshman-on-the-toxicity-of-elite-sport-culture/?fbclid=IwAR2O2voeU2tQbUYv1ubtP6mqS0O0bY22KlDr1lNpYtMtIWarhP0RcKnIznk&mibextid=Zxz2cZ (11) Ouyang, Y., Wang, K., Zhang, T., Peng, L., Song, G., & Luo, J. (2019). The influence of sports participation on body image, self-efficacy, and self-esteem in college students. Frontiers. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03039/full (12) Smith, R. A., & Bishop, R. E. (2019). Insights into stigma management communication theory: Considering stigmatization as an interpersonal influence. Journal of applied communication research: JACR, 47(5), 571–590. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2019.1675894 (13) Streno, M. (2022). Why do some athletes struggle with body image? TrueSport. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://truesport.org/body-image/athletes-struggle-body-image/ (14) Takano, B. (2023). The body image dilemma for female weightlifters. Breaking Muscle. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://breakingmuscle.com/the-body-image-dilemma-for-female-weightlifters/ (15) Walton-Smith, S., & Walton-Smith, S. (2023). Navigating the growing toxicity of gym culture. Varsity Online. Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://www.varsity.co.uk/sport/22166

In this episode we discuss the paper "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback" by Ouyang et al (2022). We discuss the RLHF paradigm and how important RL is to tuning GPT.

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2023.03.18.533275v1?rss=1 Authors: DeSpenza, T., Kiziltug, E., Allington, G., Barson, D., O'Connor, D., Robert, S. M., Mekbib, K. Y., Nanda, P., Greenberg, A., Singh, A., Duy, P. Q., Mandino, F., Zhao, S., Lynn, A., Reeves, B. C., Marlier, A., Getz, S. A., Nelson-Williams, C., Shimelis, H., Zhang, J., Walsh, L. K., Wang, W., Smith, H., OuYang, A., Deniz, E., Lake, E., Jin, S. C., Luikart, B. W., Kahle, K. T. Abstract: Expansion of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)-filled cerebral ventricles (ventriculomegaly) is the quintessential feature of congenital hydrocephalus (CH) but also seen in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and several neuropsychiatric diseases. PTEN is frequently mutated in ASD; here, we show PTEN is a bona fide risk gene for the development of ventriculomegaly, including neurosurgically-treated CH. Pten-mutant hydrocephalus is associated with aqueductal stenosis due to the hyperproliferation of periventricular Nkx2.1+ neural precursors (NPCs) and CSF hypersecretion from inflammation-dependent choroid plexus hyperplasia. The hydrocephalic Pten-mutant cortex exhibits ASD-like network dysfunction due to impaired activity of Nkx2.1+ NPC-derived inhibitory interneurons. Raptor deletion or post-natal Everolimus corrects ventriculomegaly, rescues cortical deficits, and increases survival by antagonizing mTORC1-dependent Nkx2.1+ cell pathology. These results implicate a dual impact of PTEN mutation on CSF dynamics and cortical networks via the dysregulation of NPCs and their interneuron descendants. These data identify a non-surgical treatment target for hydrocephalus and have implications for other developmental brain disorders. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info Podcast created by Paper Player, LLC

Stanford's RegLab designs real-world scientific experiments to test the outcomes of government interventions, figuring out what works — and what doesn't. Derek Ouyang is a research manager there and he also co-founded City Systems, an organization that explores potential fixes to municipal problems. From deploying Spanish-speaking contact tracers to developing a low-cost kit to turn garages into apartments, Ouyang is exploring equitable solutions to local cities' most intractable challenges. And he has some ideas about how to fix San Francisco's problems, too. | Unlimited Chronicle access: sfchronicle.com/pod Fixing Our City is part of the San Francisco Chronicle's SFNext Project Got a tip, question, comment? Email us at sfnext@sfchronicle.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can hospital care be delivered at home? Will the hospital of the future only consist of ERs, ORs and ICUs? Dr. Helen Ouyang is an emergency physician, Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has written for The Atlantic, Harper's, Los Angeles Times, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. Her writing has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and funded by The Pulitzer Center. Helen has worked in 20 countries across five continents in public health and humanitarian assistance. Her publications have also appeared in many academic medical journals, including The Lancet and JAMA, and she currently serves as a reviewer for Annals of Emergency Medicine and Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. She is also a mentor-editor for The OpEd Project. Until 2015, Helen was the Associate Director of Columbia's International Emergency Medicine Fellowship. After graduating with a bachelor of arts from Brown University, Helen went to medical school at Johns Hopkins and studied for a master's in public health at Harvard, where she was also a Zuckerman Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Center for Public Leadership. Upon completing her training at Harvard, at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women's Hospital, she moved out to the Pacific Northwest before finding her way back to the East Coast. Episode mentions and links: https://helenouyang.com Your Next Hospital Bed Might Be At Home via NY Times Magazine Can Virtual Reality Help Ease Chronic Pain via NY Times Magazine Restaurant Helen would take you to: Bernie's Restaurant Follow Helen: Twitter | LinkedIn Episode Website: https://www.designlabpod.com/episodes/107

This week, Rob and Lee look at a short essay where Ouyang Xiu talks about a Mei Yaochen poem that he finds woven into the fabric of a barbarian's bag. Their discussion touches not only on the poem, but also on questions of the materiality of literature. 

Programa 467: En esta edición les presentamos una experiencia publicada en la página web de Minghui titulada "Experimenté el poder de una "mente recta y una atención sin división" por Ouyang.

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin's Sophia Chen interviews Bin Ouyang of Florida State University about making a better cathode for lithium ion batteries. The current use of cobalt and nickel in their cathodes causes Li-ion batteries to contract in volume and degrade. Ouyang and his colleagues simulated and then fabricated new cathode materials that do not use cobalt or nickel and also degrade less after being charged and discharged. To achieve this, they found that they needed to design a material with disorder in its crystal structure. They found that replacing cobalt and nickel with vanadium and niobium leads to a battery with a small change of volume. The results provide a model for the further search of viable cathode materials to design lithium-ion batteries that are entirely made of solids. This study is published in Joules (doi:10.1016/j.joule.2022.05.018). 

The Power that Improvements on Supply Chains using Blockchain has on Global Social Impact, with Samantha Ouyang and TKS This is part 2 of a 4 part continuing series on the Knowledge Society Samantha Ouyang, TKS Activator Samantha is a 17 y/o TKS Activator who has been working in blockchain research and development for the past 18 months, taking special interest in the social impact of blockchain. She first started off by researching cryptography, the technical workings behind blockchain, and current limitations, publishing her own articles and videos explaining technical components and reviewing interesting applications. She then moved into blockchain development after teaching herself Solidity, building her own decentralized applications (dApps) and other blockchain-related projects to tackle global issues. This included dApps and frameworks to secure property rights in developing countries, prevent cyberattacks on nuclear power plants, render the pet industry more transparent, combat bias in AI, and reduce blood donation expiry, winning hackathons and other competitions that allowed her to present her ideas to companies such as S&P Global. Her efforts compounded and she was soon presented with a job offer. For 5 months, she worked as a smart contract developer at ViewFin, a global fintech company based in Toronto and Shanghai. As the youngest employee, she integrated a decentralized indexing protocol into the company's token exchange platform and spearheaded her own project there to prevent child labour in the chocolate supply chain. Over the summer, she got to conduct research on smart contract evolution under the guidance of a professor at the University of Waterloo as well. As she grew her network in the blockchain enterprise solutions community, she has also gotten the chance to moderate fireside chats with leaders in the blockchain industry and spark insightful conversations on the potential of blockchain in ESG. She hopes to take her work in blockchain further by delving into IoT, bridging the gap between hardware and software so that she can innovate with the synergized power of both. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/crypto-hipster-podcast/support

Today we meet with two South Florida members of the Wolfpack, both of whom are rising juniors in their respective high schools. Theodore Ouyang, a student at Suncoast High School, has been working for several years on his CubeSat proposal, the FlipSat, which seeks to address the mitigation of bit flips in space. When his proposal was not selected by NASA's CSLI for funding, teammate William Mayville, who attends American Heritage, made it his mission to solve the funding issues that preclude many capable students and teams from achieving a launch. Today we will learn how the combination of their efforts may change the way CubeSats can be used as a disruptive educational tool. For information on sponsoring FlipSat and WOLF-C: click here For information on attending the SmallSat Education Conference here: --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/shawna-christenson2/support

主播：Sarrah | 翩翩歌曲 ： Me&God最近热播的《梦华录》（A Dream of Splendor），is quite popular in China，并且，it has high ratings（评分很高）。It has been trending online. 是上热搜的一部剧。今天，我们就和大家用英语聊一聊这部剧。1. A Dream of Splendor《梦华录》(1) Title名字：官方英文名叫做A Dream of Splendor。To dream of something指的是you greatly wish for it, but you might not get.（梦想得到什么东西，却可能得不到），比如说：to win the lottery（中彩票），这属于daydreaming（做白日梦）。Splendor means riches, wealth and fortune. 就是富丽堂皇，指的就是迷人眼的富贵。所以，《梦华录》的英文译名可以理解为：someone (or many people in the show) are wishing for a better life, a rich life, a comfortable life. 人们想要追寻更好的生活。(2)Genre类型：就像我们看韩剧、日剧、美剧、英剧，欧美人把我们的电视剧统一叫Chinese drama，古偶剧就是historical and romantic genres。(3)Aired更新：It's aired from Thursdays to Saturdays. 周四到周六更新。粉丝调侃说，不够看的，每集都盘出包浆了。(4)Episode剧集：Each episode was 45 minute long and the show has a total of 40 episodes.每集45分钟，一共40集。(5)The original network播出平台：It was released onTencent Video. 腾讯平台播放。《梦华录》已经出口到Youtube上了。(6)Four main stars主演：Zhao Pan'er (刘亦菲Crystal Liu饰)Gu Qianfan (陈晓Chen Xiao饰)Sun San Niang (柳岩Ada Liu饰)Song Yinzhang (林允Jelly Lin饰)2. A brief summary of the show剧情介绍Zhao Pan'er is a teahouse owner in Qiantang. 女主赵盼儿在钱塘开了一间茶楼。忽然收到好消息：her fiancé, Ouyang Xu was ranked third in the national civil examination. 未婚夫喜中探花。但欧阳旭却will now be marring the daughter of a high-ranking official（要另娶当朝高官之女）。不甘心的赵盼儿decides to go to Bianjing（决定前去汴京），想要hear the news from Ouyang himself（听到未婚夫亲口承认）。在去汴京的途中，our heroineZhao Pan'er遇见并救出了两个女人——宋引章和孙三娘，她们are suffering abuse in awful marriages（饱受婚姻的痛苦）。然后她们三个就一起travel to the capital。*heroine /ˈheroʊɪn/ n. 女主人公，女性英雄*abuse/əˈbjuːs/ n. 虐待后来，欧阳旭发现 his ex-fiancé is in the same city as him（前未婚妻和自己同城），he tries his best to make her leave（他想方设法让赵盼儿离开）。然而，赵盼儿三人决定stay in Bianjing and rely on their own skills and abilities to make a fortune（留在汴京，靠自己的的技能来挣前途）。她们open a small teahouse（开了个小茶馆），后来这个茶馆becomes a huge success（大获成功）! In fact, their shop turns into the largest restaurant in Bianjing. 最后，小小茶坊一步步发展为汴京最大的酒楼。这是这个故事比较励志的地方。通过这40集，我们能够看到Zhao Pan'er's struggles（奋斗）是如何give her better insight into her situation（让她更好地了解自己的处境），并且，helps resolve (or fix) her hatred towards Ouyang Xu（帮助解决（或解决）她对欧阳旭的仇恨）的。这些挑战，会让强者更强。*struggle/ˈstrʌɡl/ n. 奋斗，努力*insight /ˈɪnsaɪt/ n. 洞悉*hatred /ˈheɪtrɪd/ n. 憎恨赵盼儿通过努力，带着其他女性一起fighting for more equality（争取更多平等）。这种TV shows with strong female characters（大女主），也深受西方人的喜爱。3. 国外网友有何评价It's uploaded on YouTube.这部剧在YouTube上面上架了。*upload上传*download 下载It can be seen by a wider audience. 受众更广。西方人对这部剧什么反映？Let's look at some of the YouTube comments.[Comment 1]喜欢teahouse by the river, 还有beautiful scenery（美景）, 以及喜欢the feel of this drama (这部剧的感觉)。有机智的female lead（女主）。On to the next episodes!（期待后续剧情）全部都是地道的语料。[Comment 2]It also contains a lot of beautiful Chinese cultural elements! 包含了大量优美的中国文化元素。[Comment 3]Main leads are impressive. 主演们很赞！Loving the supporting actors too. 也爱配角。[Comment 4]非常喜欢演员用的原声instead of dubbing over （而不是配音）。*dub /dʌb/ v. 配音[Comment 5]这位说的比较直接：终于能有部剧有 a mature FL（female lead）（成熟的女主）了，而不是the childish one that will annoy you to death（幼稚的让人恼火的女主）。*mature /məˈtʃʊr/ adj. 成熟的These comments are just from the first episode! 第一集就好评如潮。It's great to see so many people fall in love with the drama so quickly. 非常开心我们中国的好剧能够在国外受追捧。It's happy to see that shows like A Dream of Splendor are doing so well. 很开心看到像《梦华录》这样的剧做得越来越好。It's worth a try. 光剧中的中国文化元素，就值得一观。请留言告诉我们：关于这部剧，大家还有什么想要聊的？可以留言告诉我们，下次咱们再聊！

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Deepmind's Gato: Generalist Agent, published by Daniel Kokotajlo on May 12, 2022 on LessWrong. From the abstract, emphasis mine: The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stackblocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens. (Will edit to add more as I read. ETA: 1a3orn posted first.) It's only 1.2 billion parameters. (!!!) They say this was to avoid latency in the robot control task. It was trained offline, purely supervised, but could in principle be trained online, with RL, etc Performance results: The section on broader implications is interesting. Selected quote: In addition, generalist agents can take actions in the the physical world; posing new challenges that may require novel mitigation strategies. For example, physical embodiment could lead to users anthropomorphizing the agent, leading to misplaced trust in the case of a malfunctioning system, or be exploitable by bad actors. Additionally, while cross-domain knowledge transfer is often a goal in ML research, it could create unexpected and undesired outcomes if certain behaviors (e.g. arcade game fighting) are transferred to the wrong context. The ethics and safety considerations of knowledge transfer may require substantial new research as generalist systems advance. Technical AGI safety (Bostrom, 2017) may also become more challenging when considering generalist agents that operate in many embodiments. For this reason, preference learning, uncertainty modeling and value alignment (Russell, 2019) are especially important for the design of human-compatible generalist agents. It may be possible to extend some of the value alignment approaches for language (Kenton et al., 2021; Ouyang et al., 2022) to generalist agents. However, even as technical solutions are developed for value alignment, generalist systems could still have negative societal impacts even with the intervention of well-intentioned designers, due to unforeseen circumstances or limited oversight (Amodei et al., 2016). This limitation underscores the need for a careful design and a deployment process that incorporates multiple disciplines and viewpoints. They also do some scaling analysis and yup, you can make it smarter by making it bigger. What do I think about all this? Eh, I guess it was already priced in. I think me + most people in the AI safety community would have predicted this. I'm a bit surprised that it works as well as it does for only 1.2B parameters though. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Episode 65 is with Harsehaj Dhami and Samantha Ouyang, two International Baccalaureate high school students based in Toronto. Harsehaj is an impact driven student working to bridge the healthcare access gap to low income families and those struggling with their mental health. She is currently helping build a health startup based out of San Francisco that has just raised their seed-round. In her personal projects, she's working on modelling CNN (convolutional neural networks) that uses brain EEG scans to diagnose depression. Samantha is a goal oriented student, passionate about using STEM, design, engineering and innovation to create lasting change in the world. Having started off in competitive programming at an early age, her experiences led her to founding, Superposition Toronto, a non-profit that helps to bridge the gender gap in STEM. Samantha and Harsehaj have both crossed paths in The Knowledge Society - where cohorts of students are encouraged to solve the world's biggest problems using emerging technologies. They have both previously worked together on a project focussed on removing chemical pollutants from drinking water. We talk to Harsehaj and Samantha about their respective journeys in the tech space, the various differences in education and culture between generations, the influence of asian households, and much more. This was such an insightful conversation that brought to light the various evolutions of education, life, culture, and tech through the years. We hope you enjoy! Timestamps 2:45 - Harsehaj Intro & background 6:45 - Samantha Intro & background 11:25 - Early Lessons from their experiences 18:58 - Cultural Influences of an Asian household 27:14 - How can schools encourage more innovation? 30:30 - Challenges of Women in Tech 37:30 - Social Pressures on Millennials & Gen Z 44:42 - Pros/Cons of Social Media for Gen Z 53:19 - Increasing Cost & Competition in Schooling 1:00:12 - What is the current tech focus for Gen Z? 1:03:39 - Lightning Round

Today, there are about 27 million app developers worldwide, it's a big, diverse and dynamic community of mobile software developers who build apps for iOS and Android. If you ever watched the Apple's keynote presentations at WWDC, you saw some of them talking about apps they pour their heart into. It's remarkable to see the commitment of these people to develop an app that will make a difference in somebody's life. Now, at the same time they develop apps to make a living. What is the state of app monetization today? To answer this question we've invited Linda. Today's Topics Include: The Linda's background spans from being a part of the Yahoo team, moving to MoPub team and ultimately becoming a part of the Twitter team and finally joining Fyber - a Digital Turbine company Fyber if the leading monetization platform helping app businesses grow revenue How app publishers adopting to the Apple's SKAdNetwork The impact of COVID-19 to the app publishers business in 2020 and 2021 What should be the focus of app publishers right now, in the midst of this Holiday season Challenges app publishers are facing right now Android or iOS? iOS What features would Linda miss most? Spotify :-) What's missing from mobile app technology? Widely adapted IoT support, being able to manage multiple sensors at home via a smartphone Links and Resources: Linda Ouyang LinkedIn profile. Fyber website. Quotes from Linda Ouyang: "I grew up in a very entrepreneurial mobile tech-forward household. So the apple didn't fall very far from the tree actually. It's become more and more interconnected but specifically on the publisher side, I think the privacy changes with Apple, while the grilling stuff must be faced together, it's causing some innovation. It's a little bit like Renaissance. I think a lot of what we've seen is coming into fruition this Holiday season." Follow the Business Of Apps podcast Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

On this Episode of QLN, we have the pleasure of hearing a story that is not only about sobriety, but it's also about self empowerment, self trust, and, most importantly, self love. Christina Ouyang is a queer ally, a nightlife enthusiast, and a sober person, exuding inspiration to people who want to start their sober journey. By night time you find her at New York City's newest queer night club, The Q, and by day she helps cultivate the colorful world of fashion. In this conversation Christina opens up about the importance of cultural representation, trusting yourself, being present, and more importantly the power in knowing and understanding your triggers. Sobriety doesn't mean isolation or the absence of thrill. Sobriety is a new beginning to a life of fulfilling your goals, chasing your dreams, and having fun while being present for the ones you love.

We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers brings together fiction and poetry by more than 70 women over a span of more than 1500 years. Editor Selma Dabbagh talks about why it's hard to write about sex, and the difficult balance of reaching readers. Show Notes:  The digital launch of We Wrote in Symbols, published by Saqi Books, is scheduled for April 29, hosted by the Arab British Centre. Hanan al-Shaykh, Yasmine Seale, Saida Rouass, lisa luxx, and collection editor Selma Dabbagh will be there. There will also be a workshop launch with Marina Warner, Wen-chin Ouyang, and Emily Selove at Birbeck in June, as part of their Arabic in Translation series. The collection drew classic works from, among other places, two anthologies: Classical Poems by Arab Women: A Bilingual Anthology, edited and translated by Abdullah al Udhari, and The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia, edited and translated by Wessam Elmeligi. Shereen El Feki's Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World was published in 2013. Leila Slimani's Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World was translated by Sophie Lewis and came out last year. Lina Mounzer's “Going Beyond the Veil” talks about navigating the rocky territory of writing about sex as an Arab woman.

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=31723331 How has colonialism influenced Arabic and Chinese literature? Wen-chin Ouyang is a professor at SOAS University of London where she specialises in Arabic and Comparative Literature. She has written extensively on classical and modern Arabic narrative and literary criticism. In this episode of The Know Show, Wen-chin gives us a brief insight on how colonialism left an impact on Arabic and Chinese literature.     PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHANNEL to get the latest and most fascinating research!!! Get the latest episodes and videos on www.theknowshow.net The Know Show Podcast makes the most important research accessible to everyone. Join us today and be part of the research revolution. Follow Us On Social Media: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/theknowshowpod/ Twitter https://www.instagram.com/theknowshowpod/

Today we're rebroadcasting our conversation with Jeffrey Ouyang, who is the Manager of Paid Acquisition at Zumper, a real estate rental search engine. Prior to working at Zumper, Jeffrey has worked in a variety of different marketing roles for various startups in Silicon Valley, building out his toolkit along the way. Show NotesConnect With: Jeffrey Ouyang: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to discuss career development in marketing and technology with Jeffrey Ouyang, who is the manager of paid acquisition at Zumper, a real estate rental search engine. Prior to working at Zumper, Jeffrey has worked in a variety of different marketing roles for various startups in Silicon Valley, building out his toolkit along the way. Episode Transcript Connect with: Jeffrey Ouyang: Linkedin // Website The MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // Twitter Benjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn//  Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's three hundred years since the death of Antoine Galland, a French orientalist and archaeologist, whose translation of The One Thousand and One Nights kick-started its adventures in the West via the works of English orientalists, Richard Burton, Edward Lane and John Payne. Philip Dodd asks a panel of experts on these hugely influential tales, plus story-tellers who continue to wrest new life out of them. He talks to Scholars Robert Irwin and Wen-chin Ouyang, the theatre director Tim Supple and Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh.

It's three hundred years since the death of Antoine Galland, a French orientalist and archaeologist, whose translation of The One Thousand and One Nights kick-started its adventures in the West via the works of English orientalists, Richard Burton, Edward Lane and John Payne. Philip Dodd asks a panel of experts on these hugely influential tales, plus story-tellers who continue to wrest new life out of them. He talks to Scholars Robert Irwin and Wen-chin Ouyang, the theatre director Tim Supple and Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh.