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The re-election of Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. presidential election marks a pivotal moment in American politics, raising critical questions about the future of democracy, social policy, and international relations. With a strong conservative base and renewed Republican control in Congress, Trump's second term is likely to bring significant shifts to key areas such as reproductive rights, civil liberties, and the role of federal institutions. This election has underscored deepening divides across American society, with shifting support among white male, white female, and Latino voters signaling evolving priorities and a complex response to Trump's policies. Additionally, his victory has implications that extend beyond U.S. borders, potentially reshaping America's commitments to allies and its positions on conflicts such as Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. In today's episode, we explore both the domestic and international implications of a second Trump presidency with this week's special guests. Joining us first is Professor Matthew Lebo, a distinguished scholar in political science from the University of Western Ontario, where he co-directs the Centre for Computational and Quantitative Social Science. Professor Lebo's expertise lies in political methodology and American politics, with a focus on national institutions, political behavior, parties, and public opinion. Professor Lebo is the author of Strategic Party Government: Why Winning Trumps Ideology (2017), and his upcoming book, A Practical Guide to Time Series, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. His work has been featured in over 35 top political science journals, including the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics. Professor Lebo has also held notable roles as department chair both at Western and SUNY-Stony Brook, where he founded the Center for Behavioural Political Economy. Throughout his career, he has held prestigious appointments, including a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, an Academic Visitor role at Oxford, and Visiting Professor positions at the University of Toronto and, currently, McGill University. Our second guest this week is Professor Lawrence LeDuc, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Professor LeDuc's work has made an influential mark in the fields of Canadian and comparative political behavior, with a special focus on political parties, elections, and research methods. Among his published works are key titles such as Absent Mandate: Strategies and Choices in Canadian Elections (2019), Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in a Changing World (2014), and Dynasties and Interludes: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics (2016). His research has also appeared in respected journals, including Electoral Studies, Party Politics, and the American Political Science Review. In recognition of his contributions, Professor LeDuc was awarded the Mildred A. Schwartz Lifetime Achievement Award in Canadian Politics by the American Political Science Association in 2015. Produced by: Julia Brahy
The Creative Process in 10 minutes or less · Arts, Culture & Society
“One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“Getting people to care is the most important thing. I went all the way to the Maldives for research for my book How to Talk to a Science Denier because I wanted to see coral death. I wanted to see the Maldives. I wanted to see the country most under threat from climate change. One of my teachers was a 17 or 18-year-old kid who was the captain of a fishing boat. He said, "Oh, sir, outside the Maldives, no one cares." And that was when I realized that climate denial was not just about belief, it was about caring. He was right. Could you get people to care? How do you get people to care about what happens to the Maldives? They have to go there and meet people and/or know someone in order to care. I've been really fortunate in my life to have had so many teachers in that way, sometimes through short interactions.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“Getting people to care is the most important thing. I went all the way to the Maldives for research for my book How to Talk to a Science Denier because I wanted to see coral death. I wanted to see the Maldives. I wanted to see the country most under threat from climate change. One of my teachers was a 17 or 18-year-old kid who was the captain of a fishing boat. He said, "Oh, sir, outside the Maldives, no one cares." And that was when I realized that climate denial was not just about belief, it was about caring. He was right. Could you get people to care? How do you get people to care about what happens to the Maldives? They have to go there and meet people and/or know someone in order to care. I've been really fortunate in my life to have had so many teachers in that way, sometimes through short interactions.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“I had an absolutely wonderful high school history teacher, Dave Corkran. I dedicated On Disinformation to him. He taught me to think for myself and not to be afraid to express what I thought. And in college, Richard Adelstein, a very philosophical economist, who basically said, “Do not go to graduate school in economics, they won't let you do what you're interested in. You've got to go to philosophy graduate school.” So he was really my mentor in thinking that I could become a philosopher. Then there's my mom. She didn't go to college, but was extraordinarily intelligent and interested in all sorts of things. She was fascinated with Einstein and wanted to understand physics. When I was a little boy, she would wrap me up in a blanket on cold nights, and we would look at the stars. I was four years old, so I would ask, “What are the stars?” And she said, “They're suns. They're just very far away.” I also asked, “So all those stars in the sky, do they have planets like the Earth?” I still remember this to this day. She said, “Probably. We just haven't found them yet.” And this was 1967, so they hadn't found any yet. But when I gave her eulogy a few years ago, they had found 4,000 exoplanets, so she was right. What my mom was saying in 1967, that yes, there are other worlds out there, we just haven't found them yet, was so inspiring to me. She really was the one who made me become a philosopher. I try to channel the teaching she did in raising my own kids. The answer should never be “Because I said so.” It should be “What do you think? Let's have a conversation.” We never talked baby talk to our kids because my mom never talked baby talk to me. She treated me seriously as if my opinions mattered. My mom taking me seriously as a thinker from the age at which I could talk allowed me the confidence to go forward. Even though we grew up in a blue collar family, my dad became disabled, we were poor, I went to terrible public schools for the first part of my life, I always had it better than the other kids because I had parents who believed in education and a mom who talked to me.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.“When AI takes over with our information sources and pollutes it to a certain point, we'll stop believing that there is any such thing as truth anymore. ‘We now live in an era in which the truth is behind a paywall and the lies are free.' One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
“When AI takes over with our information sources and pollutes it to a certain point, we'll stop believing that there is any such thing as truth anymore. ‘We now live in an era in which the truth is behind a paywall and the lies are free.' One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.“One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How to talk to a science denier? How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.“Getting people to care is the most important thing. I went all the way to the Maldives for research for my book How to Talk to a Science Denier because I wanted to see coral death. I wanted to see the Maldives. I wanted to see the country most under threat from climate change. One of my teachers was a 17 or 18-year-old kid who was the captain of a fishing boat. He said, "Oh, sir, outside the Maldives, no one cares." And that was when I realized that climate denial was not just about belief, it was about caring. He was right. Could you get people to care? How do you get people to care about what happens to the Maldives? They have to go there and meet people and/or know someone in order to care. I've been really fortunate in my life to have had so many teachers in that way, sometimes through short interactions.”https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.“One thing people don't realize is that the goal of disinformation is not simply to get you to believe a falsehood. It's to demoralize you into giving up on the idea of truth, to polarize us around factual issues, to get us to distrust people who don't believe the same lie. And even if somebody doesn't believe the lie, it can still make them cynical. I mean, we've all had friends who don't even watch the news anymore. There's a chilling quotation from Holocaust historian Hannah Arendt about how when you always lie to someone, the consequence is not necessarily that they believe the lie, but that they begin to lose their critical faculties, that they begin to give up on the idea of truth, and so they can't judge for themselves what's true and what's false anymore. That's the scary part, the nexus between post-truth and autocracy. That's what the authoritarian wants. Not necessarily to get you to believe the lie. But to give up on truth, because when you give up on truth, then there's no blame, no accountability, and they can just assert their power. There's a connection between disinformation and denial.”https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How to talk to a science denier? How do we fight for truth and protect democracy in a post-truth world? How does bias affect our understanding of facts?Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.“Getting people to care is the most important thing. I went all the way to the Maldives for research for my book How to Talk to a Science Denier because I wanted to see coral death. I wanted to see the Maldives. I wanted to see the country most under threat from climate change. One of my teachers was a 17 or 18-year-old kid who was the captain of a fishing boat. He said, "Oh, sir, outside the Maldives, no one cares." And that was when I realized that climate denial was not just about belief, it was about caring. He was right. Could you get people to care? How do you get people to care about what happens to the Maldives? They have to go there and meet people and/or know someone in order to care. I've been really fortunate in my life to have had so many teachers in that way, sometimes through short interactions.”https://leemcintyrebooks.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyrehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Today, Dr. John Marriott joins Noelle and Janell! Together they discuss reasons why people leave Christian faith, why John is still a Christian, and how he began studying deconversion & faith deconstruction. They explore the difference between having reasons vs. absolute certainty when it comes to faith. They talk about the theme of happiness and the search for deep satisfaction. John explains the concept of flourishing by aligning oneself with God's design and conforming to the nature of reality. The discussion also touches on the pursuit of pleasure, power, and wealth as inadequate sources of lasting happiness. Noelle shares more about why she's not a Christian and John shares some helpful insight for those who have a loved one who has left the Christian faith. We hope you enjoy today's episode! About Dr. John John is a faculty affiliate of The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He is the former Research and Program Coordinator for the Biola University Center for Christian Thought and teaches part-time in the Department of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology. A former pastor, he holds a Ph.D. degree from The Cook School of Intercultural Studies. His dissertation focused on deconversion from Christianity to atheism. He is the author of five books on deconversion, A Recipe For Disaster: How the Church Contributes to the Deconversion Crisis (Wipf & Stock, 2018), The Anatomy of Deconversion: Keys to a Lifelong Faith in a Culture Abandoning Christianity (ACUP, 2021), Going... Going... Gone..! Why Believers Lose Their Faith and What Can be Done to Guard Against it (Renaissance Publishers, 2020), Before You Go: Uncovering Hidden Factors in Faith Loss (Leafwood Publishers, 2022), and Set Adrift: Deconstructing What You Believe Without Sinking Your Faith (Zondervan, 2023). John is also a contributor to an updated edition of the forthcoming book Apologetics for a New Generation (Harvest House 2025). His sixth book, The Good Book? Restoring Your Faith in the Bible by Questioning Everything You Assume About it, (Tyndale) is due for release soon. John is the Director of Cultural Engagement with the Renaissance Forum which focuses on connecting calling to culture for societal wellbeing. He enjoys speaking at churches and conferences on topics related to biblical studies, philosophy of religion, deconversion, and the relationship between the Church and culture. Dr. Marriott is also the International Student Services Coordinator at Whittier Christian High School, in Whittier California. -- -- -- -- -- We would love to thank our Patrons for all their amazing support! To learn more about supporting Finding Something REAL via Patreon, click here! If you are interested in supporting the Finding Something REAL fundraising campaign, you can head to the webpage and click on the orange donate button. To learn more about Faithful Counseling and if it is a good fit for you, you can click here!If you would like to receive Janell's 7 Deep Faith Questions resource click here! Visit the Finding Something REAL Youtube channel! Noelle's First episode Noelle & Drew Noelle & Xandra Noelle & Doug Noelle & J, Warner Wallace Dr. John Marriott Set Adrift - Sean Mcdowell & John Marriott
Continuing from our last episode, we're joined again by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College. In this episode, Brooke and Herbert explore their research findings on the offshore financial system and discuss why policy interventions to date targeting wealth management have largely failed. They then explore how the findings of their research offer a way forward. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.
In today's episode, we're joined by Brooke Harrington, Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and Herbert Chang, Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College, to discuss the world of offshore finance. You'll hear about how using offshore finance is akin to eating at a restaurant and skipping out on the bill, and how Brooke trained to be a wealth manager to better understand how the industry works. Brooke and Herbert then discuss how they used the data from the Panama, Paradise and Pandora Papers to undertake quantitative research into the networks that make offshore finance possible. Connect: Simplifying Complexity on Twitter Sean Brady on Twitter Sean Brady on LinkedIn Brady Heywood website This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.
Uncover the transformative power of high involvement management as we dissect its role in shaping dynamic workplaces. Engaging employees has become an art, and with Dr. Alex Bryson at the helm of our discussion, we promise to illuminate how selective hiring, comprehensive training, and fostering autonomy can significantly impact both company performance and employee satisfaction. Yet, there's more than meets the eye in this intricate dance of management practices; we tackle the variables and complexities that make it a nuanced challenge, resisting the lure of one-size-fits-all solutions.Witness the delicate interplay of ethical and philosophical considerations in managerial decisions, where the quest for productivity meets the guardianship of employee well-being. Through the lens of real-world implications, we navigate the conundrum of optimizing profits while cherishing the happiness of the teams we lead. With vivid insights into the paradoxical nature of management practices, Dr. Bryson helps us reflect on daily leadership choices that inherently define what is right and just within the sphere of organizational management. Join us for a compelling conversation that promises to elevate your understanding of the workplace and equip you with nuanced perspectives for your management toolkit.Dr. Alex Bryson [Guest] is Professor of Quantitative Social Science at UCL's Social Research Institute, and a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and WISERD. He is Chief Editor of Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society and an editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A and the Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership.Travis C. Mallett [Host], received the Masters of Liberal Arts (ALM) in Management from Harvard University Extension School, where he has also earned Professional Graduate Certificates in both Organizational Behavior and Strategic Management. Travis previously received undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering, General Mathematics, and Music from Washington State University. He also served as an Engineering Manager at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, where he led a team responsible for developing and maintaining SEL's highest-selling product line. An innovative force in engineering, Travis holds numerous patents and has authored papers and books across diverse subjects. His passion for continuous learning and organizational excellence propels him to explore and illuminate the intricacies of management theories. Through his podcast, "The Management Theory Toolbox", he offers valuable insights on effective leadership, business innovation, and strategic methodologies.
I interview Lee McIntyre about On Disinformation: How to fight for truth and protect democracy, available from MIT Press. Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a recent Lecturer in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University (where he won the Fraternity and Sorority Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy), Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Sources: This is the Covid graph Lee mentions: https://twitter.com/MarcRummy/status/1464178903224889345?lang=en I wrote a piece on The Permanent Climate Disinformation Campaign and the Elections, incorporating insights from On Disinformation and the interview in this episode. Dutch version: https://www.bnnvara.nl/joop/artikelen/de-klimaatdesinformatieverkiezingen I also ran it through Google Translate for the English version: https://www-bnnvara-nl.translate.goog/joop/artikelen/de-klimaatdesinformatieverkiezingen?_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp This is an independent educational podcast and I appreciate any support you can give me me on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/lifefromplatoscave) or in other ways. I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/ I'd love to hear your questions or comments: Leave me a voicemail: https://www.speakpipe.com/LifeFromPlatosCave Twitter: https://twitter.com/lifeplatoscave Insta: https://www.instagram.com/lifefromplatoscave/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lifefromplatoscave Illustration © by Julien Penning, Light One Art: https://www.instagram.com/light_one_art/
A conversation with Lee McIntyre, author of On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy, available from MIT Press. McIntyre is Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Simmons University, Tufts Experimental College, and Harvard Extension School. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch @otherppl Instagram TikTok Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lee McIntyre is Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Simmons University, Tufts Experimental College, and Harvard Extension School. He is the author of Dark Ages, Post-Truth, The Scientific Attitude, and How to Talk to a Science Denier. His new book is On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. Shermer and McIntyre discuss: default to truth theory • RFK Jr. • whether reason evolved for veridical perception or group identity? • How do we know what is true and what to believe? • What is disinformation? • worst case scenarios if Donald Trump wins in 2024 • trans issues, race issues, GMOs, nuclear power, climate doomsdayism • facts and values • science and morality • What went wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic? • lies and disinformation about masks and vaccines • social media companies responsibility for disinformation • what we should do personally and politically about disinformation.
In this episode I am digging into the topic of ‘fake news' and the risk of weaponized disinformation campaigns on social media. To enlighten us on this topic I have a returning guest who provided us with a great perspective last year on how he reached out across the aisle by going to a pseudo-science conference and talking directly with science deniers. Returning guest Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. McIntyre is the bestselling author of POST-TRUTH (MIT Press, 2018) along with thirteen other works of fiction and nonfiction, including DARK AGES (2006), and THE SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE (2019). McIntyre has had appearances on CNN, PBS, NPR and the BBC -- and has spoken at the United Nations, the Aspen Institute, and the Vatican. He starred in the docu-series INFODEMIC: Global Conversations on Science and Misinformation. In November, 2018, McIntyre went undercover at the Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, Colorado, as research for his newest book, HOW TO TALK TO A SCIENCE DENIER (2021). and he is just about to publish a new book ‘On Disinformation'. Support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Give me you opinions on Facebook @TheRationalView Twitter @AlScottRational Instagram @The_Rational_View #TheRationalView #podcast #disinformation #socialmedia
On episode 178, we welcome Lee McIntyre to discuss the viral spread of disinformation and the motivators behind it, combating science denialism and Lee's foray into the world of Flat-Earthers, how to distinguish between real and fake conspiracies, whether we should debate science deniers and the RFK Jr scandal, why Leon abandoned the conspiratorial mindset, the criticisms of cognitive immunology, the correlations of cognitive inoculation and psychotherapy, changing the law to account for biased algorithms, challenging emotionally based beliefs, the importance of admitting errors to build trust, the elements of totalitarian regimes and authoritarian groups, the achievements and drawbacks of the Bill Nye and Ken Ham debate, and how science denialism puts democracies in danger. Lee McIntyre is Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Simmons University, Tufts Experimental College, and Harvard Extension School. His new book, coming out on August 22nd, is called On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. | Lee McIntyre | ► Website | https://leemcintyrebooks.com ► Twitter | https://twitter.com/leecmcintyre ► Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/leecameronmcintyre ► Linkedin | https://www.linkedin.com/in/lee-mcintyre-73112489 ► On Disinformation Book | https://amzn.to/3JOREIo Where you can find us: | Seize The Moment Podcast | ► Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/SeizeTheMoment ► Twitter | https://twitter.com/seize_podcast ► Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/seizethemoment ► TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/@seizethemomentpodcast
Date of Lecture: Thursday 8 June 2023 About the Lecture: The UK is experiencing its biggest wave of industrial action in over a decade following a long period of wage stagnation for many, particularly in the public sector. At the same time union membership has been in decline for four decades, raising questions about the future of trade unions. Just how relevant are they in the modern workplace? What influence do they have over outcomes that matter to workers and to employers, and what can unions do to improve working conditions and productivity in Britain? Professor Alex Bryson will draw on empirical evidence from his own research and that of others to explain what unions do, both in the UK and elsewhere, and what we can expect from them in the future. About the speaker: Professor of Quantitative Social Science at UCL's Social Research Institute.
In the 1970s the UK was gripped by double-digit inflation driven by energy price shocks. Inflation was controlled by raising interest rates as a recession raged. And that prompted workers to demand higher wages. Sound familiar? This week and next will see rail workers, ambulance staff, nurses, bus drivers, baggage handlers, highway workers, Border Force, driving examiners and the Royal Mail all striking on various days. As things stand, the prospects of a resolution don't look promising. So are we heading back to the 70s and another "Winter of Discontent'?Joining David Aaronovitch in The Briefing Room are:Keith Laybourn, Professor of History at the University of Huddersfield Alex Bryson, Professor of Quantitative Social Science at UCL's Social Research Institute Gemma Tetlow, Chief Economist at the Institute for Government Chris Giles, Economics Editor at the Financial Times Producers: Ben Carter and Kirsteen Knight Editor: Simon Watts Studio manager: Neil Churchill Production co-ordinators: Sophie Hill and Siobhan Reed
In this second part of our series on conspiracy theories and other false narratives, we'll look at practical actions we can take and tools we can use to have fruitful discussions with friends and family who have been misled. There are ways that we can help untangle the snare of a mind-gripping false narrative. They're usually not easy, and they're usually not fast, but they can work in most cases. To help us learn how, Dr. Lee McIntyre, author of How to Talk to a Science Denier, will provide detailed recommendations for countering science denial and other false narratives in one-on-one discussions with friends and family. And be sure to look for the next event in this series, which will discuss actions society can take to defend itself. MLF ORGANIZER Eric Siegel SPEAKERS Lee McIntyre Ph.D., Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, Former Executive Director, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University; Author, How To Talk To A Science Denier and Post-Truth Eric Siegel Chair, Personal Growth Member-led Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on September 6th, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this super insightful conversation with host Shiv Gaglani, Dr. Karim Lakhani breaks down the difference between “strong” and “weak” artificial intelligence, and how the healthcare world can not only adapt to it, but harness its full potential. But, he stresses, the system has some important groundwork to do before that can happen. “Process change is the biggest work that has to happen in healthcare, from discovery to the clinic and beyond. Otherwise, we're basically pouring digital and artificial intelligence asphalt over old cow-paths." As professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, founding director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, and the Principal Investigator of the NASA Tournament Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Lakhani is a powerful intellectual force in understanding AI, open-source software and crowdsourcing. He's also the author of the book Competing in the Age of AI. If you're curious about how artificial intelligence might transform the healthcare system, this is a can't miss opportunity to hear from a leading expert in the field.
In this week's podcast, I had a great time talking with Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and founder of several firms specializing in data analytics and education. As a scientist, he has made major contributions to the fields of statistics and political science, but more than that, he is also just one of the most creative, curious and passionate thinkers I've had the chance to meet. There is too much to summarize so let me just say I think, like I found him, you will likely be inspired as he shares his thoughts about science, the social order, inference and data. This is Mixtape: the Podcast and I am your host, Scott Cunningham!
In this week's podcast, I had a great time talking with Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and founder of several firms specializing in data analytics and education. As a scientist, he has made major contributions to the fields of statistics and political science, but more than that, he is also just one of the most creative, curious and passionate thinkers I've had the chance to meet. There is too much to summarize so let me just say I think, like I found him, you will likely be inspired as he shares his thoughts about science, the social order, inference and data. This is Mixtape: the Podcast and I am your host, Scott Cunningham! Get full access to Scott's Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe
Date of lecture: Tuesday 26 April 2022 About the lecture: The Covid-19 pandemic has caused unexpected disruption to Western countries and studies suggest this has affected women more adversely than men. This is because they were over-represented in the most affected sectors of the economy and women, especially mothers, took a bigger share of housework and childcare responsibilities following school closures. We investigate the gender gaps in remaining in employment, being furloughed and pay by using the data from four British nationally representative cohort studies a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings confirm that the adverse labour market effects were still experienced by women a year into the covid-19 pandemic but adjusting for pre-pandemic job characteristics substantially attenuates the gaps. These effects are likely to have long lasting implications for women's longer-term position and the progress towards gender equality. About the speaker: Dr Bożena Wielgoszewska is a Research Associate dividing her time between the Centre for Longitudinal Studies and Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute, UCL.
If you have listened to more than a few episodes of The Conscious Vibe podcast, you likely have heard the word "flourishing" many times in our conversations as a term to conceptually describe when we as human beings are authentically living out our best lives and thriving as our best selves. Dr. Renae Wilkinson and her research colleagues at Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute of Quantitative Social Science are studying this exact idea of "flourishing" with the hopes of developing systematic approaches to achieve overall human well-being. Join us in this fascinating conversation with Dr. Wilkinson as we discuss her work within this study and explore topics fundamental to "flourishing" such as happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose and close social relationships in addition to the practical applications of this work in our daily life.-----Welcome to The Conscious Vibe Podcast Hosted by Charles Mitchell, Esquire and Daryl L. Jones.An innovative platform for sharing compelling stories, capturing critical concepts, and building sustainable intellectual capital.---Listen on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/37Q0D8nListen on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/39QiTRDListen on Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2VW7sQc----www.tcvpodcast.comRecorded at PS Studios | Scottsdale, Arizona
If you have listened to more than a few episodes of The Conscious Vibe podcast, you likely have heard the word "flourishing" many times in our conversations as a term to conceptually describe when we as human beings are authentically living out our best lives and thriving as our best selves. Dr. Renae Wilkinson and her research colleagues at Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute of Quantitative Social Science are studying this exact idea of "flourishing" with the hopes of developing systematic approaches to achieve overall human well-being. Join us in this fascinating conversation with Dr. Wilkinson as we discuss her work within this study and explore topics fundamental to "flourishing" such as happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose and close social relationships in addition to the practical applications of this work in our daily life.-----Welcome to The Conscious Vibe Podcast Hosted by Charles Mitchell, Esquire and Daryl L. Jones.An innovative platform for sharing compelling stories, capturing critical concepts, and building sustainable intellectual capital.---Listen on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/37Q0D8nListen on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/39QiTRDListen on Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2VW7sQc----www.tcvpodcast.comRecorded at PS Studios | Scottsdale, Arizona
In this episode I talk to a philosopher and best selling author who may be the world's expert on bridging the gap to talk to science deniers. This is the second podcast in series on how to change minds and influence people using the Rational Art of War to spread The Rational View. Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, McIntyre is the bestselling author of POST-TRUTH (MIT Press, 2018) -- along with thirteen other works of fiction and nonfiction, including DARK AGES (2006), and THE SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDE (2019). McIntyre has made appearances on CNN, PBS, NPR and the BBC -- and has spoken at the United Nations, the Aspen Institute, and the Vatican. He starred in the docu-series INFODEMIC: Global Conversations on Science and Misinformation. In November, 2018, McIntyre went undercover at the Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, Colorado, as research for his newest book, HOW TO TALK TO A SCIENCE DENIER (2021), which resulted in over a hundred media appearances including this one. Register for my newsletter at www.therationalview.ca Join the Facebook conversation @TheRationalView Twitter @AlScottRational Instagram @The_Rational_View #therationalview #podcast #communicating #sciencedenial #flatearth #evidencebased #tribalism #fakenews
Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 800 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls Check out StandUpwithPete.com to learn more also please donate to GiveWell.org/StandUp and start a store or shop at Shopify.com/Standup Today's show opens with an almost 45 minute new recap then we get to my conversation with Christine Romans who is CNN's Chief Business Correspondent and anchor of Early Start with Laura Jarrett weekdays from 4 am to 6 am ET. She won an Emmy award for her work on the series "Exporting America" about globalization and outsourcing American jobs overseas, and is author of three books: Smart is the New Rich: If You Can't Afford it—Put it Down (Wiley 2010) How to Speak Money (Wiley 2012) and Smart is the New Rich Money Guide for Millennials (Wiley March 2015). Romans is known as CNN's explainer-in-chief of all things money. She covers business and finance from the perspective of American workers and small business owners, translating what budgets and bailouts and economic data mean for families. Romans brings an award-winning career in business reporting. In 2014, she crossed the country reporting for her series, "Is College Worth it." In 2010, Romans co-hosted "Madoff: Secrets of a Scandal," a special hour-long investigative report examining disgraced financier Bernard Madoff and how he perpetrated one of the largest investor frauds ever committed by an individual. In 2009, her special "In God We Trust: Faith & Money in America" explored the intersection of how our religious values govern the way we think about and spend our money. Her series of reports "Living Dangerously" illustrated the risks and precautions for the nearly 30 percent of America's population living in the path of an Atlantic-coast hurricane. In "Deadly Hospitals," she examined how hospitals spread dangerous infections and what patients can do to protect themselves. Romans joined CNN Business News in 1999, spending several years reporting from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Romans was the anchor of CNNfn's Street Sweep tracking the market's boom through the late 1990s to tragedy of Sept. 11 attacks. She anchored the first democratic elections in Iraq's history from CNN Center in Atlanta. She has covered four hurricanes and four presidential elections, and was part of the coverage teams that earned CNN a George Foster Peabody award for its Hurricane Katrina coverage and an Alfred I. duPont Award for its coverage of the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia. The National Foundation for Women Legislators has honored her with its media excellence award for business reporting and the Greenlee School of Journalism named her the 2009 James W. Schwartz award recipient. ------------------------- My second guest today starts at 1:02 Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He has taught philosophy at Colgate University (where he won the Fraternity and Sorority Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy), Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.McIntyre is the author of How to Talk to a Science Denier (MIT Press, 2021), Philosophy of Science (Routledge, 2019), The Sin Eater (Braveship, 2019), The Scientific Attitude (MIT Press, 2019), Post-Truth (MIT Press, 2018), Respecting Truth (Routledge, 2015), Dark Ages (MIT Press, 2006), and Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences (Westview Press, 1996). He is the co-editor of four anthologies: Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (MIT Press, 1994), two volumes in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science series: Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline (Springer, 2006) and Philosophy of Chemistry: Growth of a New Discipline (Springer 2014), and The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science (Routledge, 2017). McIntyre is also the author of Explaining Explanation: Essays in the Philosophy of the Special Sciences (Rowman and Littlefield/UPA, 2012), which is a collection of twenty years' worth of his philosophical essays that have appeared in Synthese, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Teaching Philosophy, Perspectives on Science, Biology and Philosophy, Critica, Theory and Decision, and elsewhere. Other work has appeared in such popular venues as the New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and the Humanist. Check out all things Jon Carroll Follow and Support Pete Coe Pete on YouTube Pete on Twitter Pete On Instagram Pete Personal FB page Stand Up with Pete FB page
Our Responsibility to Defend the Truth Science denialism has existed as long as science has existed. As a part of our social contract, we're responsible for challenging the spread of misinformation and understanding, especially when it comes to science. If we open ourselves up to these difficult conversations, we can offer up a path into more logical reasoning and avoid a culture where science and truth are rejected. Science Denialism is Dangerous All science denialism relies on a flawed blueprint of cherry-picking evidence, trusting conspiracy theories, trusting fake experts, and relying on illogical reasoning. The internet has given denialism a chance to be amplified, which is especially dangerous because it confuses people and muddies the line between fact and falsehood. Science denialism hurts us in so many ways, from killing our planet by ignoring climate change to taking lives because people don't trust vaccines and masks. Technique Rebuttal Content rebuttal is using facts to combat false claims. Technique rebuttal is challenging the logic of the argument. It may seem logical to defend the truth with the facts, but you can make more progress by talking about the core of people's beliefs. If someone has already made the choice to deny the facts, presenting them with even more facts will not be effective. Instead, build trust by making them feel heard, then point out inconsistencies in their reasoning and use facts judiciously. FIND OUT MORE: Lee McIntyre is a philosopher of science and the author of the 2018 book Post Truth. His new book How to Talk to a Science Denier, tries to figure out how we can have constructive dialogue with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. McIntyre is the author of several books, including Post-Truth, Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age, and How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. Other work has appeared in such popular venues as the The New York Times, Newsweek, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and The Humanist. You can follow Lee on Twitter at @LeeCMcIntyre
In this episode, Jonathan is speaking with Lee McIntyre about how to talk to a science denier. They discuss: •How he became interested in science and philosophy. •How 60 years of unchecked science denial has lead to post truth. •The problem of induction in science. •Identity protective cognition and why it's so difficult to change your mind. •How to have difficult conversations. •That science doesn't actually prove anything, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be trusted. •The five tropes of science denial. •And other topics. Dr. Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He is the author of Philosophy of Science, The Sin Eater, The Scientific Attitude, Post-Truth, Respecting Truth, Dark Ages, Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences, and most recently, How to Talk to a Science Denier. You can connect with Lee and find all of his books here: https://leemcintyrebooks.com/ You can find this episode on YouTube here: https://bit.ly/2XnDk4u Also, don't forget about our book “Thinking Critically. From Fake News to Conspiracy Theories. Using Logic to Safely Navigate the Information Landscape” if you're interested in exploring how logic can be used to better help you to discern fact from fiction. The information landscape is perilous, but with the help of this book as your guide, you will always be able to find your way towards truth. It's available on Amazon today! Book: https://amzn.to/3nWdawV This show is supported and produced by Final Stretch Media. Final Stretch believes in creating something that disrupts attention spans and challenges the marketing status quo. They do this by creating high quality visual content that captivates your audience. Website: https://bit.ly/3AsP3wZ This show is also supported by QuikLee; the creators of Brain Racers. The world's first ever live racing competition for the brain. Download their app and play live on the weekends on an iOS device against the world. We have raced and it's a blast! App Download: https://apple.co/39twqwY
If there was ever a year that had us asking those overarching, existential questions at an accelerated rate, it was 2020. But over the past 20 years, the answers to those questions have seemingly become more complicated. As the paradigm of modern society shifts rapidly with the introduction of technology and new ideas, life here in the Western Hemisphere feels, in a way, simplified, compared to what our ancestors dealt with. So much so that ways of finding purpose, work life balance, and examining the rise of mental health awareness in this more ‘ simplified life' is again newly explored territory. Our guest today, Clay Routledge, is just one of the many doing that exploring. Dr. Clay Routledge is a psychological scientist, writer, consultant, public speaker, and professor. He studies basic psychological needs and how these needs influence and are influenced by family, social and community bonds, economics, work, and broader cultural worldviews. Much of his research focuses on the need for meaning in life.Dr. Routledge is a Professor of Management for the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth and the Department of Management and Marketing at North Dakota State University, is senior research fellow at Archbridge Institute, nonresident scholar at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, and faculty affiliate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.He lives in Fargo, North Dakota with his wife.
In this episode of Policy Matters, hosts Franz Buscha and Matt Dickson talk to Alex Bryson, Professor of Quantitative Social Science at University College London. Alex is one of the UK's leading figures in sports economics and he firstly explains what sports economics is and how it can be used to draw policy inferences in other more familiar areas of economics. Franz, Matt and Alex then discuss the findings of Alex's paper looking at whether people discriminate against black players when picking their ‘fantasty football' team and what this might tell us about labour market discrimination. How football referees' performances are impacted by their employment contract and how having 50,000 vocal fans scrutinising their decisions affects their decision-making are other topics under discussion. Finally, Alex explains how data from baseball can help us understand individual effort choices when working as part of a team.
It's episode #29 of Making Media Now, the Filmmakers Collaborative podcast and host Michael Azevedo is speaking with journalist Heidi Legg. (Twitter @heidilegg) Heidi is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard working on the Future of Media Project. She has written extensively about the media landscape in publications such as The Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, CNN, The Atlantic and more. Most recently, Heidi published 3 exhaustive and insightful indexes tracking the ownership and funding sources of hundreds of news sources. It’s Heidi’s contention that knowing who owns or funds a news organization can better inform news consumers about possible bias or slant. Heidi joined me from her home in Cambridge, MA. Making Media Now is sponsored by Filmmakers Collaborative, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting media makers from across the creative spectrum. From providing fiscal sponsorship to presenting an array of informative and educational programs, FC supports creatives at every step in their journey. About the host: www.mrazvo.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-azevedo/
The gender wage gap has been closing gradually in the UK, as in other countries, but convergence is slower among top earners. We examine the gap among university Vice Chancellors who are among the most highly paid employees in the UK. Although heavily dominated by men the occupation has experienced a recent influx of women “breaking the glass ceiling”. At the beginning of the 21st Century there was a substantial gender wage gap among Vice Chancellors but the gap closed such that it was no longer statistically significant from 2010 onwards. We examine why possible reasons for this closure in the gender wage gap among Vice Chancellors. This lecture will be given by Professor Alex Bryson, Professor of Quantitative Social Science at UCL's Social Research Institute and will be chaired by Professor Almudena Sevilla, Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Co-Director ESRC Centre for Time Use Research in the Department of Social Science at UCL. Date: Tuesday 09 February 2021 Speaker: Professor Alex Bryson, Professor of Quantitative Social Science at UCL's Social Research Institute Free to attend, live stream or watch online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7vFbAmvRA&t=11s More info : events.ucl.ac.uk/lhl Join the conversation on Twitter at #UCLMinds #MadeAtUCL
In 2009, OpenScholar began as an open source research project, led by Gary King, the Weatherhead University Professor and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. Gary shares why he founded the web content management system and how it grew organically at Harvard and other research institutions.
Admittedly, this is not a very Slavic episode, but we would like to balance the scales a little bit and discuss the existential crisis America is facing as well as we approach the 2020 presidential election. A New York Times article a few days ago said that though the United States makes up only 4% of the world's population, our Covid deaths account for 20% of the global totals. We're no math geniuses, but it looks like the U.S. has become Corona Country. So, what happened? Maybe you're wondering the same thing. But the pandemic is not really to blame--there's a lot more to our troubles than 200,000+ deaths and a Covid-downplaying President with Covid. (Hell, yes. It's complicated.) But as it turns out, our symptoms are basically universal. So, to help us measure how far the U.S. has fallen in 2020, several weeks ago (following the Republican National Convention in August), philosopher and scholar Dr. Lee McIntyre joined us to discuss how we (America, the West, take your pick) got to a place of truth denial and what (if anything) we can do about it? Dr. McIntyre discusses his highly relevant book Post-Truth (MIT Press) and the importance of face-to-face discussions (but with masks!) with people in order to "enlarge their circle of concern" as difficult as that may be in a pandemic. We hope you enjoy this discussion. It helped us make sense of the divisions in this nation, politically and existentially, and hopefully it will be of use to you as well. Thanks for listening and if you are an American citizen, please remember to do your civic duty and VOTE! ABOUT THE GUEST https://leemcintyrebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/lee-new-JIG.jpg Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He has taught philosophy at Colgate University (where he won the Fraternity and Sorority Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy), Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean's Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Check out his website: https://leemcintyrebooks.com/ You can find his book Post-Truth on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Post-Truth-MIT-Press-Essential-Knowledge/dp/0262535041 View his appearance on Amanpour & Co. earlier this year here: https://www.pbs.org/video/lee-mcintyre-post-truth-vs-lies-n4mjnd/ Follow him on Twitter: @leemcintyre NOTE: This episode was recorded on August 25th, 2020 via Zoom. CREDITS Co-Producer: Tom Rehnquist (Connect: Twitter @RehnquistTom) Co-Host/Co-Producer: Matthew Orr (Connect: facebook.com/orrrmatthew) Co-Host/Associate Producer: Lera Toropin Associate Producer: Cullan Bendig Associate Producer: Samantha Farmer Assistant Producer: Milena D-K Assistant Producer/Administrator: Kathryn Yegorov-Crate Recording, Editing, and Sound Design: Michelle Daniel Additional Editing: Jada Geraci Music Producer: Charlie Harper (Connect: facebook.com/charlie.harper.1485 Instagram: @charlieharpermusic) www.charlieharpermusic.com (Main Theme by Charlie Harper and additional background music by Charlie Harper and Michelle Daniel, Scott Holmes, Eme Hache, Timecrawlers, and Ion Romania) Executive Producer & Creator: Michelle Daniel (Connect: facebook.com/mdanielgeraci Instagram: @michelledaniel86) www.msdaniel.com DISCLAIMER: The views expressed on this episode do not necessarily reflect those of the show or the University of Texas at Austin. Special Guest: Lee McIntyre.
The SCOTUS Factor (September 28, 2020)How will President Trump's nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barret to fill the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's vacancy and speed with which Republicans in Congress are moving forward with her confirmation factor in the Election?Download the full report at HarvardHarrisPoll.comFollow @Mark_Penn_Polls on Twitter.The Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is a monthly poll released by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Insights and Analytics.The Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is conducted by The Harris Poll online within the United States every monthly and captures the responses of over 2,000 registered voters. The results reflect a nationally representative sample. Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, and education where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.The Co-Directors of the Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll are:Stephen D. Ansolabehere – Professor of Government & Director, Center for American Political Studies, Harvard UniversityMark J. Penn – Visiting Lecturer, Harvard University & Managing Partner, The Stagwell GroupDritan Nesho – Fellow, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science & CEO of HarrisX Together with their students and faculty from the Harvard University community.
As Connecticut and other states begin to reopen during the pandemic, data is more important than ever. Today, we talk about the role of statistics in shaping our understanding of the COVID-19. We hear from one of the researchers behind the How We Feel App, a volunteer system of symptom tracking. They plan to turn the symptoms users record into useful information about emerging hotspots. And later, we talk with statistician Talithia Williams about how all of us are using statistical thinking in our everyday lives. GUESTS: Gary King - Weatherhead University Professor at Harvard, Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science; he is one of the researchers who helped develop the How We Feel COVID-19 symptom reporting app Talithia Williams - Associate professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College; she is also the host of the PBS show Nova Wonders Catie Talarski contributed to this show. Support the show.
Post-Truth Post-truth is the political subordination of reality. It is not a failing of knowledge, but one of politics. Authoritarians use post-truth to corrupt our faith in the truth. The end goal is not to make citizens believe lies, but to make them so cynical and uncertain, they think they can never know the truth. Once this control over the information stream is achieved, leaders begin to have direct control over the populace. Post-truth marks the beginning of the descent into fascism for this reason. Fake News Fake news is intentionally false news. It’s a key tool in the pursuit of post-truth because it muddies the waters of reality. Once misinformation is in the public sphere, it is impossible to remove. The more fake news saturates the information market, the more jaded the target population becomes. Authoritarians can further confuse people by labeling the truth as fake news; they deny facts and demonstrate their control over their country’s information stream. Propaganda Propaganda is the most potent weapon in a post-truth leader’s arsenal. It is not designed to simply fool a population. Instead, it exists to demonstrate the government’s command of truth and that the truth is subordinate to the will of the leader. It shows the government’s ability to lie with impunity. Even if the population doesn’t believe the lie, it overwhelms their defenses, making them easier to rule. Find out more: Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. McIntyre is the author of several books, including Post-Truth and Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age. Other work has appeared in such popular venues as the New York Times, Newsweek, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and The Humanist. You can follow Lee on Twitter @LeeCMcIntyre.
Episode 63: We spoke with Karim Lakhani, Professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of the new book: Competing In The Age of AI. We discuss how AI is disrupting all kinds of businesses, how companies should think about implementing AI, and the rise of the AI factory. Enjoy! More about Karim Karim Lakhani is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He is the founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. He specializes in technology management and innovation. His research examines crowd-based innovation models and the digital transformation of companies and industries. Lakhani is known for his pioneering scholarship on how communities and contests can be designed and managed to achieve innovative outcomes. He has partnered with NASA, Topcoder, and the Harvard Medical School to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. His research on digital transformation has shown the importance of data and analytics as drivers of business and operating model transformation and source of competitive advantage. He serves on the Board of Directors of Mozilla Corporation and Local Motors. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/besttechie/support
Since the 2016 EU Referendum, two narratives have been prominent in the public debate surrounding the outcome of the vote. The first narrative sees Brexit as a revolt of the ‘economically left-behinds', while the second narrative attributes Brexit to the resurgence of an English nationalism. In this lecture, Tak Wing Chan uses data from a large scale and nationally representative survey to evaluate these two narratives. He considers whether Brexit support is associated with neighbourhood deprivation, concentration of migrants, and exposure to the 'Chinese import shock'. He also assesses how social class, social status, low income, and expressions of Britishness and Englishness shape ‘Leave' or ‘Remain' sympathies. Speakers include: - Speaker: Tak Wing Chan, Professor of Quantitative Social Science, UCL Institute of Education - Respondent: Stephen Fisher, Associate Professor of Political Sociology, and Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Trinity College, Oxford - Chair: Sue Rogers, Interim Director, UCL Institute of Education #IOELectures #WeAreIOE
My guests today are Karim Lakhani and Marco Iansiti. Marco Iansiti, the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, also heads the school's Technology and Operations Management Unit and the Digital Initiative. Iansiti is an expert on digital innovation, with a special focus on strategy and business and operating model transformation. He advises Global 1000 companies on digital strategy and transformation and has conducted research on a variety of organizations, including Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Amazon, Alibaba, and Google, among many others. Karim R. Lakhani is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at Harvard Business School. He is the founder and codirector of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the faculty cofounder of the Digital Initiative at HBS. He is also Chair of the Harvard Business Analytics Program. He specializes in technology management and innovation. The topic is their book Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: They show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have restricted business growth for hundreds of years. From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft to Amazon, research shows how AI-driven processes are vastly more scalable than traditional processes, allow massive scope increase, enabling companies to straddle industry boundaries, and create powerful opportunities for learning–to drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions. Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
“AI is the ‘runtime’ that is going to shape all of what we do.” –Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have restricted business growth for hundreds of years. From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft to Amazon, research shows how AI-driven processes are vastly more scalable than traditional processes, allow massive scope increase, enabling companies to straddle industry boundaries, and create powerful opportunities for learning–to drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions. When traditional operating constraints are removed, strategy becomes a whole new game, one whose rules and likely outcomes this book will make clear. Iansiti and Lakhani: • Present a framework for rethinking business and operating models. • Explain how “collisions” between AI-driven/digital and traditional/analog firms are reshaping competition, altering the structure of our economy, and forcing traditional companies to rearchitect their operating models. • Explain the opportunities and risks created by digital firms. • Describe the new challenges and responsibilities for the leaders of both digital and traditional firms. This is an essential guide for rethinking how your firm competes and operates in the era of AI. Marco Iansiti, the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, also heads the school’s Technology and Operations Management Unit and the Digital Initiative. Iansiti is an expert on digital innovation, with a special focus on strategy and business and operating model transformation. He advises Global 1000 companies on digital strategy and transformation and has conducted research on a variety of organizations, including Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Amazon, Alibaba, and Google, among many others. Karim R. Lakhani is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at Harvard Business School. He is the founder and codirector of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the faculty cofounder of the Digital Initiative at HBS. He is also Chair of the Harvard Business Analytics Program. He specializes in technology management and innovation.
A new Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll, conducted among 2,010 registered voters between December 27-29, 2019, sheds light on the public's understanding of the ongoing impeachment fight, the Horowitz Report, the Hunter Biden controversy, the ban on flavored vaping products and takes stock of voters' real concerns as we enter into 2020.FOLLOW @Mark_Penn_Polls (https://twitter.com/Mark_Penn_Polls) for daily updates and SIGN-UP to have the findings of each monthly poll delivered directly to your inbox at https://harvardharrispoll.com/.The Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is conducted by The Harris Poll online within the United States every monthly and captures the responses of over 2,000 registered voters. The results reflect a nationally representative sample. Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, and education where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.The Co-Directors of the Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll are:- Stephen D. Ansolabehere – Professor of Government & Director, Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University- Mark J. Penn – Visiting Lecturer, Harvard University & Managing Partner, The Stagwell Group- Dritan Nesho – Fellow, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science & CEO of HarrisXThank you for listening to the late December Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll Report and thank you to iHeart, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Radio.com, Google, and many other platforms that are now carrying our show. Make sure to follow us at @Marc_Penn_Polls on Twitter. And importantly, sign up to receive updates at the harvardharrispoll.com. Remember, we give you every question, we give you every cross tab. If you don't like my analysis, go ahead and write your own because we give you every piece of information behind every question in every poll.In late December, December 27th to 29th, we interviewed 2010 registered voters by the Harris Poll. The findings also include a flash poll among 1273 registered voters conducted December 30th to 31st. These polls were conducted just before the raid on the Iranian general. If that's changed things, we won't know that until the next poll. But until then, I think that you see a pretty good picture of how America was feeling during this holiday period.Let's take a look at Trump's approval. Obviously, President Trump was impeached just before the holidays. That impeachment has been held up at this point, not yet sent over to the Senate. The impact of impeachment on his job approval was nothing. He was at 47% in November. In late December, he is at 47%. 47% is among some of the higher ratings. He's typically been 44, 45. He's gotten as high as 48. He has not crossed into majority approval since he took office. And the trend here is from June, when he was at 44, to two months at 45, two months at 46 and now two months at 47% approval. Disapproval mirrors it. It's at 53%. Again, down from 56 in May or June; 55, 54 and now 53.We go a little deeper and look at the president's approval by some of the various issue areas. His lowest approval has always been administering the government, 44%, basically unchanged over a long period of time. Foreign affairs, 46%; immigration, 48%; fighting terrorism, 55; stimulating jobs, 59; the economy, 60. The two areas that have moved over time, the economy and stimulating jobs. The others have been relatively stable overtime.
Each month, presidential pollster Mark Penn shares an overview of the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll. This survey was conducted online within the United States from September 22-24, 2019 among 2,009 registered voters. Sign up at https://harvardharrispoll.com/ to have this and future survey reports delivered directly to your inbox.The Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is a monthly poll released by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Insights and Analytics. The results reflect a nationally representative sample. Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, and education where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. Stephen D. Ansolabehere, Professor of Government & Director, Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University, Mark J. Penn, Visiting Lecturer, Harvard University & Managing Partner, The Stagwell Group and Dritan Nesho, Fellow, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science & CEO of HarrisX, are Co-Directors of the Poll with assistance from their students and faculty from the Harvard University community.Welcome to the September Harvard CAPS Harris Poll Podcast. This week, I'd like to welcome Apple, Spotify, Google, and others who are beginning to pick up the podcast and distribute it to more and more listeners. If you've got any feedback or want to follow any developments, go to @Mark_Penn_Polls for updates. And with that, let's launch in to this month's poll that was fielded September 22nd to September 24th 2019, with 2009 registered voters, making this an important and timely poll given everything that's going on today.So, what's happening with the job approval of President Trump, given all of the chaos and issues and the partisan fights that we're seeing over impeachment? Well, this poll was taken just before the formal inquiry really was announced, but during the buildup and already information out about the whistleblower. So given all that, would we be expected a significant change in President Trump's job approval? We might have, but that's not what we saw. What we've seen over the last couple of months, May, June, July, August, September, is a creeping back up of President Trump's approval, this month at 46% approve, 54% disapprove. I looked at a number of other polls out there, saw this similar trend that he was, until hit with a full-scale impeachment and the imbroglio over the whistleblower complaint, he was trending up. We'll see what happened next month, and whether or not he in fact drops to the bottom of the range, which we've seen before after incidents like this breakout.Specifically, let's take a look at some of his job approval on some of the most important areas of the Presidency. His highest approval is for stimulating jobs 55%, the economy 54%, fighting terrorism 52%, immigration 47, approval on foreign affairs 43, and administering the government 44. If you look at the trend data, he's actually doing a little bit better on administering the government, stayed about the same range on foreign affairs, stayed about the same range on immigration, fighting terrorism, a little off highs, which were as strong as 56%, and stimulating jobs, also down from the high of 62 to 55%. So, still a significant majority approving of the job that he's doing on the economy, but off the highs that we had when 3.2% growth was announced.
What does it mean for someone to flourish? Flourishing is more than just being happy—although that’s a part of it. But the idea of flourishing expands beyond happiness to look at a person’s overall well-being, taking into account things like life satisfaction or someone’s sense of purpose. That’s why studying flourishing is an interdisciplinary science drawing on public health, philosophy, psychology, and more. In this week’s episode we’re talking to two researchers from Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University who are tackling big questions about flourishing: What does it mean for people to flourish? How do we measure it? And are there things that make people more or less likely to flourish? Our guests are Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program and John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard Chan School, and Matthew Wilson, associate director of the Human Flourishing Program and a research associate at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. You can sign up here for a monthly research e-mail from the Human Flourishing Program, or click here to follow them on Twitter. You can also check out the Human Flourishing Blog, hosted by Psychology Today. You can subscribe to Harvard Chan: This Week in Health by visiting iTunes or Google Play and you can listen to it by following us on Soundcloud, and stream it on the Stitcher app or on Spotify. If you’re a fan, we’d appreciate you leaving a rating and review wherever you listen.
What does it mean for someone to flourish? Flourishing is more than just being happy—although that’s a part of it. But the idea of flourishing expands beyond happiness to look at a person’s overall well-being, taking into account things like life satisfaction or someone’s sense of purpose. That’s why studying flourishing is an interdisciplinary science drawing on public health, philosophy, psychology, and more. In this week’s episode we’re talking to two researchers from Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University who are tackling big questions about flourishing: What does it mean for people to flourish? How do we measure it? And are there things that make people more or less likely to flourish? Our guests are Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program and John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard Chan School, and Matthew Wilson, associate director of the Human Flourishing Program and a research associate at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Full Transcript: https://hsph.me/flourishingpod
In this episode, Adam Reichardt sits down with Harvard University’s George Soroka to discuss the political, geopolitical and also spiritual implications of the granting of Autocephaly to the newly created Ukrainian Orthodox Church.George Soroka is a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University, where he is also affiliated with the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.Resources:“A house divided. Orthodoxy in post-Maidan Ukraine” by George Soroka. Published in New Eastern Europe issue 3-4/2019“Poroshenko has achieved a second independence from Russia” by Taras Kuzio. New Eastern Europe 15 October 2018Ongoing coverage of Ukraine’s presidential election: http://neweasterneurope.eu/category/ukraine-elections-2019/Music featured in the podcast:Opening theme: Sum of My Fears by Dazie Mae: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Dazie_Mae/Last_Jazz_in_Paris/03-1518107-Dazie_Mae-Sum_of_My_FearsLiturgy of the Faithful / Ukrainian Orthodox chant
Metrics on the average living standards from the best-off countries in the world (say, Norway) to the worst-off (perhaps the Central African Republic) vary by a factor of 40 to 50. So notes James Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict at the University of Chicago and author, with Daron Acemoglu, of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. What explains the living-standards gap? In this Social Science Bites podcast, interviewer David Edmonds posits -- and Robinson rebuts -- several traditional explanations for this inequality. While raw data shows that countries closer to the equator do more poorly than countries further away, Robinson acknowledges, that correlation doesn’t extend to causation. “We try to show in our research in many different ways that things like geography or climate or temperature don’t really predict patterns of economic development.” Instead, institutional factors like colonialism or the slave trade are more likely to be culprits. Cultural factors? Robinson, the institute director for the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, suggests that’s wrong on its face. Drawing on his experience researching and teaching in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he hasn’t seen cultures that reward indolence. “People work pretty hard in Zimbabwe,” he offers as an example. ”They get up early and it’s a struggle to make ends meet in a place like that when there’s so many impediments to prosperity and so many blocks to incentives and opportunity.” He adds that incentives to wealth creation matter, so knowing “some elites are going to expropriate the fruits of your labor” serves as a huge disincentive. Certainly having natural resources must play a role. “This is sort of an accounting relationship,” Robinson counters. “Yes, it’s true that Kuwait is sitting on a big pile of oil, but I guess the relevant question would be is, ‘How rich will Kuwait be when the oil disappears?’” What does make a difference, Robinson insists, are institutions. Looking at a natural experiment like the Korean Peninsula, where a geographically, culturally and linguistically homogeneous population was walled off into two separate nations, supports his view that institutions are the key to understanding the uneven outcomes. But that creates the question of how to define what an ‘institution’ is. “Our view is that you have to take a pretty broad view of what institutions are. ... When we talk about institutions, we mean rules that humans create, which structure their interactions and incentives and opportunities. But I think those rules can be kind of informal – almost like social norms – not just written down in the constitution.” And the institutions best at creating economic success, he continues, are the most inclusive ones. “Inclusivity is about harnessing all that latent talent, giving people opportunities, allowing them to get loans, enforce contracts.” Given his belief in the importance of inclusive institutions, Robinson tells Edmonds nonetheless that his goal remains more to describe the world rather than to change it (a “morally fraught” undertaking). But that description, he adds, includes a possible route forward – a route signposted for those in the less-rich world to take, amend or reject on their own accord. Trained as an economist who “deprogrammed” himself from thinking as an economist, Robinson obtained his PhD from Yale University, his master’s at the University of Warwick, and a Bachelor of Science degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before coming to Chicago, he was the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government at Harvard University and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. In addition to Why Nations Fail, Robinson and Acemoglu wrote Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and in 2013 Robinson was named one of the “World Thinkers 2013” by Prospect magazine.
In this interview, we ask Brown University's Executive Master in Cybersecurity faculty member, Deborah Hurley, how the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal should be viewed from the perspective of laws in the US and beyond. Based on the current facts, Hurley tells us, Facebook probably wouldn’t be liable for violating personal data and privacy protections of the American Facebook users. But, in a world where users and their data are global, US laws aren’t the only ones Facebook needs to worry about. Listen to this podcast to learn more about the potential legal fallout for Facebook from the Cambridge Analytica scandal under different nations’ laws as they exist today and post May 25, 2018 when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect. Hurley is an adjunct professor of the practice of computer science at Brown University, Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, and seminal player in the development of industry standards for information technology for the past 30 years. If you’d like to hear more, listen to our other episode with Hurley where she talks about the Seven Stages of GDPR. Music - "As Colourful As Ever" by Broke For Free (CC BY 3.0)
Gary King (@kinggary) is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University . King focuses on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application. His methods are used extensively in many fields of academia, government, consulting, and private industry. He is a founder, and inventor of the original technology for, Learning Catalytics, Crimson Hexagon, Perusall, and other firms. He is a founder, and inventor of the original technology for, Learning Catalytics, Crimson Hexagon, Perusall, and OpenScholar
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start. Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr David Stillwell, Lecturer in Big Data Analytics & Quantitative Social Science, joins Conrad to discuss the future of big data in this episode on the data analytics theme.
In 2017, the fact that companies have access to personal data about us is common knowledge. But the data available to companies goes beyond just what websites you browse and where you’ve checked in on social media. Your (anonymized) medical information can be sold to drug companies to promote drugs - and to sell those to doctors in a process that is, shockingly, legal. Adam Tanner, a writer-in-residence at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, has written a book on this called “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records.” We talk with him about the alarming trade in health data.
You’ve heard of the Seven Stages of Grief. Get ready for the Seven Stages of GDPR. Brown University's Executive Master of Cybersecurity faculty member Deborah Hurley came up with this model to explain American companies’ painful path to hope and acceptance of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); a European Union law that goes into full effect May 25, 2018 with wide-ranging consequences for companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Listen to this podcast to find out why American companies need to strengthen their understanding of the GDPR’s scope, penalties and requirements for compliance. Learn why this new world of GDPR demands cybersecurity leaders with both technology and policy expertise to drive strategy for the threats and challenges of today and tomorrow. Hurley is an adjunct professor of the practice of computer science at Brown University, Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, and seminal player in the development of industry standards for information technology for the past 30 years. If you’d like to hear more, listen to our other episode with Hurley where she talks about the Cambridge Analytica scandal from a legal perspective. Stay tuned for more podcasts from the Executive Master in Cybersecurity program that covers this industry across the technology and policy spectrum.
Gary King, Weatherhead University Professor at Harvard University and Director of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, talks to the "Harvard on China" podcast about his latest research into online censorship in China. Professor King is the co-author of a 2017 article, "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument." This paper builds on his previous research about how censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expression (2013), as well as the reverse engineering of Harvard's own Chinese social media site to better study censorship. The "Harvard on China" podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Follow us on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and other podcast apps.
Data experts Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman discuss how data is used in today's digital society. They examine the enormous potential offered by big data, explain the new technologies that enable real time analytics and explore best practices for transforming how we plan large-scale computing projects.
In this video, we hear from Joe Twyman, the Head of Political and Social Research for Europe, Middle East and Africa at YouGov (an internet-based market research company) about his experience of conducting research through surveys.Joe explains some of the basic principles of surveying, why web-based surveys are an increasingly important mode of survey data collection and how to read survey results properly.
A sample is a subset of a population. It lies at the heart of survey research. It is sometimes called a ‘miniature of the population’, so the process of drawing a sample should maximise the similarity between the population under study and the sample.In this video, educator Aneta Piekut looks at how we select the members of the population to achieve this goal.
Another way that the media uses data is to report change and risk - how much has something increased or decreased? If you start a particular behaviour, how much does that increase your risk of a particular outcome? As we saw earlier, when numbers are stripped of context, it can be difficult to tell whether they are as dramatic as they seem. This is even more strongly the case when we look at differences between percentages or differences without a common baseline, as in the case of risk.In this video, Mark explains the difference between percentage increases and percentage point increases and between absolute and relative risk. Don’t worry if you don’t quite catch these concepts first time round, we’ll revisit them in the next step to make sure you’re following.
Dr Mark Taylor - Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute explains how to break down bigger numbers in this excerpt from our new free, open online course 'Making Sense of Data in the Media.'
Dr Mark Taylor - Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute explains how to understand the use of small numbers in this excerpt from our new free, open online course 'Making Sense of Data in the Media.'
It may sound like a silly question, but if we want to make sense of data in the media, then whenever we hear numbers quoted, one of the first things we should be asking is - is that a big number? If someone’s spending money on you, they’re likely to want to make that figure sound as impressive as possible; on the other hand, if someone wants you to spend your money on them, they’ll want to make that figure sound as small as possible.In this video, Mark explains some of the ways that big numbers can be made to sound small and small numbers can be made to sound big.
Does 0.1% sound like a big number? Stripped of important context, it’s almost impossible to tell.Context is crucial in understanding whether numbers are big or not, particularly when it comes to percentages. 2% might sound like a small number of people, but if it’s of all people in the world, it’s a lot; 80% might sound like a lot of people, but if it’s of the people who work in your office; it’s a lot less. Whenever we see percentages quoted, we should be asking “as a percentage of what?”, “how much does 100% actually correspond to?” and “what is 100%; a number of people, a sum of money, or something else?”.In this video, Mark demonstrates how numbers can look big or small in relation to the whole ecosystem in which they sit.
We’ve started to get a sense of some of the different ways that the media uses data to make you think numbers are big or small, but sometimes, to understand the size of a number, we need to compare it to something else.In this video, Mark introduces some useful comparisons for particular kinds of data - such as comparing to other countries and looking back through time.
Data experts Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman discuss how data is used in today's digital society. They examine the enormous potential offered by big data, explain the new technologies that enable real time analytics and explore best practices for transforming how we plan large-scale computing projects.
Learn how to make sense of social statistics and economic data with this introductory course on quantitative social science.https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/media-dataIncreasingly, we’re bombarded with all sorts of data about how society is changing: opinion poll trends, migration data, economic results, government debt levels and MPs’ expenses claims. The ability to read such information with confidence is an increasingly important skill for both modern citizens and those studying the social sciences.In this free online course, we’ll look at ways of cutting through the confusion to decide what numbers reveal, and when and why they (sometimes deliberately) mislead.
Measurement is how we quantify objects and events so that we can make comparisons among them. Being aware of the measures used in a dataset will help you determine the quality of the evidence.
This is a phrase used in statistics to emphasise that a correlation between two variables does not imply that one causes the other. Just because two trends seem to fluctuate in tandem, that doesn’t prove that they are meaningfully related to one another.In this video, Todd explains the difference between correlation and causation and advises caution whenever you see an eye-catching headline suggesting that one activity leads to another.
Most reputable organisations will provide some level of information about the data they publish so that we can see how it was collected, who procured it, and for what purpose. Without this basic information, we should be wary of any results drawn from this data. This information is often described in the ‘Methodology’ section of a document (i.e. news article, survey report, academic paper) and it is crucial to whether we should trust the data.In this video, Todd Hartman explains some of the important questions a reliable methodology section should answer:- WHO sponsored the study, and who collected the data?- WHAT is the sample size?- WHEN was the data collected or observed?- WHERE is the data from?- HOW was the data collected?- WHY was the data collected?
What happens when a research question isn’t framed properly? You can end up with misleading conclusions.In this video, educator Andy Bell considers a recent news story and the research question (or questions) that lie behind it.
It’s said that in the last two years, more data has been created than all the data that ever was created before that time. And that in two years hence, we’ll be able to say the same thing. Gary King, the head of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, isn’t certain those statements are exactly true, but certain they are true in essence. And he’s even more certain that the growth in the amount of data isn’t why big data is changing the world. As he tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, roughly 650 million social media messages will go out today. So to someone trying to make statements about what those messages contain, he posited, would having 750 million messages make anything better? “Having bigger data,” King says, “only makes things more difficult.” Or to be blunter, “The data itself isn’t likely to be particularly useful; the question is whether you can make it useful.” Which leads to King’s real passion: the analysis of big data. It’s not the ‘big’ or the ‘data’ that really turns the screw; it’s the analysis. In this conversation, King, uses text analysis as an example of this big data analysis. He notes that some of the tools that text analysis uses are “mathematically similar” to another project he worked on, trying to determine health priorities in the third world by figuring out what’s killing people there. In both cases, the individual, whether someone with a disease or someone with a viral tweet, is less important than the trend. That, explains King, spotlights the difference between computer scientists’ goals and social scientists’ goals: “We only care about what everybody’s saying.” He then talks about work examining social media and censorship in China. While the work clearly falls into an area that King, a political scientist, would be interested in, the genesis was actually as a test case for the limitations of the text analysis program. But it nonetheless gave useful insight into both how the Chinse government censors material, and why. King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard. He’s been elected a fellow or eight honorary societies, including the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. King also has an entrepreneurial bent – he mentions the company Crimson Hexagon that was spun out of the text analysis work during this interview – and has founded or invented technology for companies like Learning Catalytics and Perusall. And here’s some, if not ‘big’ data, at least ‘bigger’ data, to consider: This interview marks the 50th Social Science Bites podcast produced by SAGE Publishing. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.
Adam Tanner is the author of "Our Bodies, Our Data", which tells the story of a hidden dark market in drug prescription and other medical data. In recent years hackers have been able to steal health data on a massive scale -- remember Anthem? In this second part of our interview, we explore the implications of hacked medical data. If hackers get into a data brokers' drug databases and combine with previously stolen medical insurance records, will they rule the world? Transcript Inside Out Security: Today, I'd like to welcome Adam Tanner. Adam is a writer-in-residence at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He's written extensively on data privacy. He's the author of What Stays In Vegas: The World of Personal Data and the End of Privacy As We Know It. His articles on data privacy have appeared in Scientific American, Forbes, Fortune, and Slate. And he has a new book out, titled "Our Bodies, Our Data," which focuses on the hidden market in medical data. Welcome, Adam. Adam Tanner: Well, I'm glad to be with you. IOS: We've also been writing about medical data privacy for our Inside Out Security blog. And we're familiar with how, for example, hospital discharge records can be legally sold to the private sector. But in your new book, and this is a bit of a shock to me, you describe how pharmacies and others sell prescription drug records to data brokers. Can you tell us more about the story you've uncovered? AT: Basically, throughout your journey as a patient into the healthcare system, information about you is sold. It has nothing to do with your direct treatment. It has to do with commercial businesses wanting to gain insight about you and your doctor, largely, for sales and marketing. So, take the first step. You go to your doctor's office. The door is shut. You tell your doctor your intimate medical problems. The information that is entered into the doctor's electronic health system may be sold, commercially, as may the prescription that you pick up at the pharmacy or the blood tests that you take or the urine tests at the testing lab. The insurance company that pays for all of this or subsidizes part of this, may also sell the information. That information about you is anonymized. That means that your information contains your medical condition, your date of birth, your doctor's name, your gender, all or part of your postal zip code, but it doesn't have your name on it. All of that trade is allowed, under U.S. rules. IOS: You mean under HIPAA? AT: That's right. Now this may be surprising to many people who would ask this question, "How can this be legal under current rules?" Well, HIPAA says that if you take out the name and anonymize according to certain standards, it's no longer your data. You will no longer have any say over what happens to it. You don't have to consent to the trade of it. Outsiders can do whatever they want with that. I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that. Very few patients know about it. Even doctors and pharmacists and others who are in the system don't know that there's this multi-billion-dollar trade. IOS:Right … we've written about the de-identification process, which it seems like it's the right thing to do, in a way, because you're removing all the identifiers, and that includes zip code information, other geo information. It seems that for research purposes that would be okay. Do you agree with that, or not? AT: So, these commercial companies, and some of the names may be well-known to us, companies such as IBM Watson Health, GE, LexisNexis, and the largest of them all may not be well-known to the general public, which is Quintiles and IMS. These companies have dossiers on hundreds of millions of patients worldwide. That means that they have medical information about you that extends over time, different procedures you've had done, different visits, different tests and so on, put together in a file that goes back for years. Now, when you have that much information, even if it only has your date of birth, your doctor's name, your zip code, but not your name, not your Social Security number, not things like that, it's increasingly possible to identify people from that. Let me give you an example. I'm talking to you now from Fairbanks, Alaska, where I'm teaching for a year at the university here. I lived, before that, in Boston, Massachusetts, and before that, in Belgrade, Serbia. I may be the only man of my age who meets that specific profile! So, if you knew those three pieces of information about me and had medical information from those years, I might be identifiable, even in a haystack of millions of different other people. IOS: Yeah …We have written about that as well in the blog. We call these quasi-identifiers. They're not the traditional kind of identifiers, but they're other bits of information, as you pointed out, that can be used to sort of re-identify. Usually it's a small subset, but not always. And that this information would seem also should be protected as well in some way. So, do you think that the laws are keeping up with this? AT: HIPAA was written 20 years ago, and the HIPAA rules say that you can freely trade our patient information if it is anonymized to a certain standard. Now, the technology has gone forward, dramatically, since then. So, the ability to store things very cheaply and the ability to scroll through them is much more sophisticated today than it was when those rules came into effect. For that reason, I think it's a worthwhile time to have a discussion now. Is this the best system? Is this what we want to do? Interestingly, the system of the free trade in our patient information has evolved because commercial companies have decided this is what they'd want to do. There has not been an open public discussion of what is best for society, what is best for patients, what is best for science, and so on. This is just a system that evolved. I'm saying, in writing this book, "Our Bodies, Our Data," that it is maybe worthwhile that we re-examine where we're at right now and say, "Do we want to have better privacy protection? Do we want to have a different system of contributing to science than we do now?" IOS: I guess what also surprised me was that you say that pharmacies, for example, can sell the drug records, as long as it's anonymized. You would think that the drug companies would be against that. It's sort of leaking out their information to their competitors, in some way. In other words, information goes to the data brokers and then gets resold to the drug companies. AT: Well, but you have to understand that everybody in what I call this big-data health bazaar is making money off of it. So, a large pharmacy chain, such as CVS or Walgreen's, they may make tens of millions of dollars in selling copies of these prescriptions to data miners. Drug companies are particularly interested in buying this information because this information is doctor-identified. It says that Dr. Jones in Pittsburgh prescribes drug A almost all the time, rather than drug B. So, the company that makes drug B may send a sales rep to the doctor and say, "Doctor, here's some free samples. Let's go out to lunch. Let me tell you about how great drug B is." So, this is because there exists these doctor profiles on individual doctors across the country, that are used for sales and marketing, for very sophisticated kind of targeting. IOS: So, in an indirect way, the drug companies can learn about the other drug companies' sales patterns, and then say, "Oh, let me go in there and see if I can take that business away." Is that sort of the way it's working? AT: In essence, yes. The origins of this trade date back to the 1950s. In its first form, these data companies, such as IMS Health, what they did was just telling companies what drugs sold in what market. Company A has 87% of the market. Their rival has 13% of the market. When medical information began to become digitized in the 1960s and '70s and evermore since then, there was a new opportunity to trade this data. So, all of a sudden, insurance companies and middle-men connecting up these companies, and electronic health records providers and others, had a product that they could sell easily, without a lot of work, and data miners were eager to buy this and produce new products for mostly the pharmaceutical companies, but there are other buyers as well. IOS: I wanted to get back to another point you mentioned, in that even with anonymized data records of medical records, with all the other information that's out there, you can re-identify or at least limit, perhaps, the pool of people who that data would apply to. What's even more frightening now is that hackers have been stealing health records like crazy over the last couple of years. So, there's a whole dark market of hacked medical data that, I guess, if they got into this IMS database, they would have the keys to the kingdom, in a way. Am I being too paranoid here? AT: Well, no, you correctly point out that there has been a sharp upswing in hacking into medical records. That can happen into a small, individual practice, or it could happen into a large insurance company. And in fact, the largest hacking attack of medical records in the last couple of years has been into Anthem Health, which is the Blue Cross Blue Shield company. Almost 80 million records were hacked in that. So even people that did... I was hacked in that, even though I was not, at the time, a customer of them or had never been a customer of them, but they... One company that I dealt with outsourced to someone else, who outsourced to them. So, all of a sudden, this information can be in circulation. There’s a government website people can look at, and you'll see, every day or two, there are new hackings. Sometimes it involves a few thousand names and an obscure local clinic. Sometimes it'll be a major company, such as a lab test company, and millions of names could be impacted. So, this is something definitely to be concerned about. Yes, you could take these hacked records and match them with anonymized records to try to figure out who people are, but I should point out that there is no recorded instance of hackers getting into these anonymized dossiers by the big data miners. IOS: Right. We hope so! AT: I say recorded or acknowledged instance. IOS: Right. Right. But there's now been sort of an awareness of cyber gangs and cyber terrorism and then the use of, let's say, records for blackmail purposes. I don't want to get too paranoid here, but it seems like there's just a potential for just a lot of bad possibilities. Almost frightening possibilities with all this potential data out there. AT: Well, we have heard recently about rumors of an alleged dossier involving Donald Trump and Russia. IOS: Exactly. AT: And information that... If you think about what kind of information could be most damaging or harmful to someone, it could be financial information. It could be sexual information, or it could be health information. IOS: Yeah, or someone using... or has a prescription to a certain drug of some sort. I'm not suggesting anything, but that... All that information together could have sort of lots of implications, just, you know, political implications, let's say. AT: I mean if you know that someone takes a drug that's commonly used for a mental health problem, that could be information used against someone. It could be used to deny them life insurance. It could be used to deny them a promotion or a job offer. It could be used by rivals in different ways to humiliate people. So, this medical information is quite powerful. One person who has experienced this and spoken publicly about it is the actor, Charlie Sheen. He tested positive for HIV. Others somehow learned of it and blackmailed him. He said he paid millions of dollars to keep that information from going public, before he decided finally that he would stop paying it, and he'd have to tell the world about his medical condition. IOS: Actually I was not aware of the payments he was making. That's just astonishing. So, is there any hope here? Do you see some remedies, through maybe regulations or enforcement of existing laws? Or perhaps we need new laws? AT: As I mentioned, the current rules, HIPAA, allows for the free trade of your data if it's anonymized. Now, I think, given the growth of sophistication in computing, that we should change what the rule is and to define our medical data as any medical information about us, whether or not it's anonymized. So, if a doctor is writing in the electronic health record, you should have a say as to whether or not that information is going to be used elsewhere. A little side point I should mention. There are a lot of good scientists and researchers who want data to see if they can gain insights into disease and new medications. I think people should have the choice whether or not they want to contribute to those efforts. So, you know, there's a lot of good efforts. There's a government effort under way now to gather a million DNA samples from people to make available to science. So, if people want to participate in that, and they think that's good work, they should definitely be encouraged to do so, but I think they should have the say and decide for themselves. And so far, we don't really have that system. So, by redefining what patient data is, to say, "Medical information about a patient, whether or not it's anonymized," I think that would give us the power to do that. IOS: So effectively, you're saying the patient owns the data, is the owner, and then would have to give consent for the data to be used. Is that, about right? AT: I think so. But on the other hand, as I mentioned, I've written this book to encourage this discussion. The problem we have right now is that the trade is so opaque. Companies are extremely reluctant to talk about this commercial trade. So, they do occasionally say that, "Oh, this is great for science and for medicine, and all of these great things will happen." Well, if that is so fantastic, let's have this discussion where everyone will say, "All right. Here's how we use the data. Here's how we share it. Here's how we sell it." Then let people in on it and decide whether they really want that system or not. But it's hard to have that intelligent policy discussion, what's best for the whole country, if industry has decided for itself how to proceed without involving others. IOS: Well, I'm so glad you've written this book. This will, I'm hoping, will promote the discussion that you're talking about. Well, this has been great. I want to thank you for the interview. So, by the way, where can our listeners reach out to you on social media? Do you have a handle on Twitter? Or Facebook? AT: Well, I'm @datacurtain and I have a webpage, which is http://adamtanner.news/ IOS: Wonderful. Thank you very much, Adam.
Adam Tanner is the author of "Our Bodies, Our Data", which tells the story of a hidden dark market in drug prescription and other medical data. Adam explains how the sale of "anonymized" data is a multi-billion dollar business not covered by HIPPA rules. In this first part of our interview, we learn from Adam how the medical data brokers got started and why it's legal. Transcript Inside Out Security: Today, I'd like to welcome Adam Tanner. Adam is a writer-in-residence at Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He's written extensively on data privacy. He's the author of What Stays In Vegas: The World of Personal Data and the End of Privacy As We Know It. His articles on data privacy have appeared in Scientific American, Forbes, Fortune, and Slate. And he has a new book out, titled "Our Bodies, Our Data," which focuses on the hidden market in medical data. Welcome, Adam. Adam Tanner: Well, I'm glad to be with you. IOS: We've also been writing about medical data privacy for our Inside Out Security blog. And we're familiar with how, for example, hospital discharge records can be legally sold to the private sector. But in your new book, and this is a bit of a shock to me, you describe how pharmacies and others sell prescription drug records to data brokers. Can you tell us more about the story you've uncovered? AT: Basically, throughout your journey as a patient into the healthcare system, information about you is sold. It has nothing to do with your direct treatment. It has to do with commercial businesses wanting to gain insight about you and your doctor, largely, for sales and marketing. So, take the first step. You go to your doctor's office. The door is shut. You tell your doctor your intimate medical problems. The information that is entered into the doctor's electronic health system may be sold, commercially, as may the prescription that you pick up at the pharmacy or the blood tests that you take or the urine tests at the testing lab. The insurance company that pays for all of this or subsidizes part of this, may also sell the information. That information about you is anonymized. That means that your information contains your medical condition, your date of birth, your doctor's name, your gender, all or part of your postal zip code, but it doesn't have your name on it. All of that trade is allowed, under U.S. rules. IOS: You mean under HIPAA? AT: That's right. Now this may be surprising to many people who would ask this question, "How can this be legal under current rules?" Well, HIPAA says that if you take out the name and anonymize according to certain standards, it's no longer your data. You will no longer have any say over what happens to it. You don't have to consent to the trade of it. Outsiders can do whatever they want with that. I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that. Very few patients know about it. Even doctors and pharmacists and others who are in the system don't know that there's this multi-billion-dollar trade. IOS:Right … we've written about the de-identification process, which it seems like it's the right thing to do, in a way, because you're removing all the identifiers, and that includes zip code information, other geo information. It seems that for research purposes that would be okay. Do you agree with that, or not? AT: So, these commercial companies, and some of the names may be well-known to us, companies such as IBM Watson Health, GE, LexisNexis, and the largest of them all may not be well-known to the general public, which is Quintiles and IMS. These companies have dossiers on hundreds of millions of patients worldwide. That means that they have medical information about you that extends over time, different procedures you've had done, different visits, different tests and so on, put together in a file that goes back for years. Now, when you have that much information, even if it only has your date of birth, your doctor's name, your zip code, but not your name, not your Social Security number, not things like that, it's increasingly possible to identify people from that. Let me give you an example. I'm talking to you now from Fairbanks, Alaska, where I'm teaching for a year at the university here. I lived, before that, in Boston, Massachusetts, and before that, in Belgrade, Serbia. I may be the only man of my age who meets that specific profile! So, if you knew those three pieces of information about me and had medical information from those years, I might be identifiable, even in a haystack of millions of different other people. IOS: Yeah …We have written about that as well in the blog. We call these quasi-identifiers. They're not the traditional kind of identifiers, but they're other bits of information, as you pointed out, that can be used to sort of re-identify. Usually it's a small subset, but not always. And that this information would seem also should be protected as well in some way. So, do you think that the laws are keeping up with this? AT: HIPAA was written 20 years ago, and the HIPAA rules say that you can freely trade our patient information if it is anonymized to a certain standard. Now, the technology has gone forward, dramatically, since then. So, the ability to store things very cheaply and the ability to scroll through them is much more sophisticated today than it was when those rules came into effect. For that reason, I think it's a worthwhile time to have a discussion now. Is this the best system? Is this what we want to do? Interestingly, the system of the free trade in our patient information has evolved because commercial companies have decided this is what they'd want to do. There has not been an open public discussion of what is best for society, what is best for patients, what is best for science, and so on. This is just a system that evolved. I'm saying, in writing this book, "Our Bodies, Our Data," that it is maybe worthwhile that we re-examine where we're at right now and say, "Do we want to have better privacy protection? Do we want to have a different system of contributing to science than we do now?" IOS: I guess what also surprised me was that you say that pharmacies, for example, can sell the drug records, as long as it's anonymized. You would think that the drug companies would be against that. It's sort of leaking out their information to their competitors, in some way. In other words, information goes to the data brokers and then gets resold to the drug companies. AT: Well, but you have to understand that everybody in what I call this big-data health bazaar is making money off of it. So, a large pharmacy chain, such as CVS or Walgreen's, they may make tens of millions of dollars in selling copies of these prescriptions to data miners. Drug companies are particularly interested in buying this information because this information is doctor-identified. It says that Dr. Jones in Pittsburgh prescribes drug A almost all the time, rather than drug B. So, the company that makes drug B may send a sales rep to the doctor and say, "Doctor, here's some free samples. Let's go out to lunch. Let me tell you about how great drug B is." So, this is because there exists these doctor profiles on individual doctors across the country, that are used for sales and marketing, for very sophisticated kind of targeting. IOS: So, in an indirect way, the drug companies can learn about the other drug companies' sales patterns, and then say, "Oh, let me go in there and see if I can take that business away." Is that sort of the way it's working? AT: In essence, yes. The origins of this trade date back to the 1950s. In its first form, these data companies, such as IMS Health, what they did was just telling companies what drugs sold in what market. Company A has 87% of the market. Their rival has 13% of the market. When medical information began to become digitized in the 1960s and '70s and evermore since then, there was a new opportunity to trade this data. So, all of a sudden, insurance companies and middle-men connecting up these companies, and electronic health records providers and others, had a product that they could sell easily, without a lot of work, and data miners were eager to buy this and produce new products for mostly the pharmaceutical companies, but there are other buyers as well. IOS: I wanted to get back to another point you mentioned, in that even with anonymized data records of medical records, with all the other information that's out there, you can re-identify or at least limit, perhaps, the pool of people who that data would apply to. What's even more frightening now is that hackers have been stealing health records like crazy over the last couple of years. So, there's a whole dark market of hacked medical data that, I guess, if they got into this IMS database, they would have the keys to the kingdom, in a way. Am I being too paranoid here? AT: Well, no, you correctly point out that there has been a sharp upswing in hacking into medical records. That can happen into a small, individual practice, or it could happen into a large insurance company. And in fact, the largest hacking attack of medical records in the last couple of years has been into Anthem Health, which is the Blue Cross Blue Shield company. Almost 80 million records were hacked in that. So even people that did... I was hacked in that, even though I was not, at the time, a customer of them or had never been a customer of them, but they... One company that I dealt with outsourced to someone else, who outsourced to them. So, all of a sudden, this information can be in circulation. There’s a government website people can look at, and you'll see, every day or two, there are new hackings. Sometimes it involves a few thousand names and an obscure local clinic. Sometimes it'll be a major company, such as a lab test company, and millions of names could be impacted. So, this is something definitely to be concerned about. Yes, you could take these hacked records and match them with anonymized records to try to figure out who people are, but I should point out that there is no recorded instance of hackers getting into these anonymized dossiers by the big data miners. IOS: Right. We hope so! AT: I say recorded or acknowledged instance. IOS: Right. Right. But there's now been sort of an awareness of cyber gangs and cyber terrorism and then the use of, let's say, records for blackmail purposes. I don't want to get too paranoid here, but it seems like there's just a potential for just a lot of bad possibilities. Almost frightening possibilities with all this potential data out there. AT: Well, we have heard recently about rumors of an alleged dossier involving Donald Trump and Russia. IOS: Exactly. AT: And information that... If you think about what kind of information could be most damaging or harmful to someone, it could be financial information. It could be sexual information, or it could be health information. IOS: Yeah, or someone using... or has a prescription to a certain drug of some sort. I'm not suggesting anything, but that... All that information together could have sort of lots of implications, just, you know, political implications, let's say. AT: I mean if you know that someone takes a drug that's commonly used for a mental health problem, that could be information used against someone. It could be used to deny them life insurance. It could be used to deny them a promotion or a job offer. It could be used by rivals in different ways to humiliate people. So, this medical information is quite powerful. One person who has experienced this and spoken publicly about it is the actor, Charlie Sheen. He tested positive for HIV. Others somehow learned of it and blackmailed him. He said he paid millions of dollars to keep that information from going public, before he decided finally that he would stop paying it, and he'd have to tell the world about his medical condition. IOS: Actually I was not aware of the payments he was making. That's just astonishing. So, is there any hope here? Do you see some remedies, through maybe regulations or enforcement of existing laws? Or perhaps we need new laws? AT: As I mentioned, the current rules, HIPAA, allows for the free trade of your data if it's anonymized. Now, I think, given the growth of sophistication in computing, that we should change what the rule is and to define our medical data as any medical information about us, whether or not it's anonymized. So, if a doctor is writing in the electronic health record, you should have a say as to whether or not that information is going to be used elsewhere. A little side point I should mention. There are a lot of good scientists and researchers who want data to see if they can gain insights into disease and new medications. I think people should have the choice whether or not they want to contribute to those efforts. So, you know, there's a lot of good efforts. There's a government effort under way now to gather a million DNA samples from people to make available to science. So, if people want to participate in that, and they think that's good work, they should definitely be encouraged to do so, but I think they should have the say and decide for themselves. And so far, we don't really have that system. So, by redefining what patient data is, to say, "Medical information about a patient, whether or not it's anonymized," I think that would give us the power to do that. IOS: So effectively, you're saying the patient owns the data, is the owner, and then would have to give consent for the data to be used. Is that, about right? AT: I think so. But on the other hand, as I mentioned, I've written this book to encourage this discussion. The problem we have right now is that the trade is so opaque. Companies are extremely reluctant to talk about this commercial trade. So, they do occasionally say that, "Oh, this is great for science and for medicine, and all of these great things will happen." Well, if that is so fantastic, let's have this discussion where everyone will say, "All right. Here's how we use the data. Here's how we share it. Here's how we sell it." Then let people in on it and decide whether they really want that system or not. But it's hard to have that intelligent policy discussion, what's best for the whole country, if industry has decided for itself how to proceed without involving others. IOS: Well, I'm so glad you've written this book. This will, I'm hoping, will promote the discussion that you're talking about. Well, this has been great. I want to thank you for the interview. So, by the way, where can our listeners reach out to you on social media? Do you have a handle on Twitter? Or Facebook? AT: Well, I'm @datacurtain and I have a webpage, which is http://adamtanner.news/ IOS: Wonderful. Thank you very much, Adam.
Host: Indre Viskontas Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when facts, those bits of information that we believed captured some fundamental truth about our world, are shown to be no longer true? With the exponential rise in our knowledge about our universe comes a tsunami of data overturning what we once thought we knew with complete certainty. Are there patterns that emerge from this wasteland of myths that once were accepted facts. One tried and true solution is to apply math to the problem, and network scientist and author Samuel Arbesman has done just that in his recently published book on the Half-life of Facts. Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. He is a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In addition, he blogs at Wired.com, and his essays about math and science have appeared in such places as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Arbesman was a research fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, where he used network science and applied mathematics to study innovation, scientific discovery, and prosocial behavior. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University in 2008, and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University in 2004. He has also coined a new word, named an asteroid, and created an eponymous constant and the Milky Way Transit Authority subway map.
Audio File: Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Candace Fleming CEO and Co-founder, Crimson Hexagon Date: April 19, 2010 Entrepreneurial Heroes Interview with Candace Fleming [music] Lee: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy. I am a board member for the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT, and I'm also the CEO of Boulder Search. This is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous entrepreneurs, they are women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, all of whom have just fabulous stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs, and with me today is Larry Nelson from W3W3. Hey Larry. Larry Nelson: I'm very happy to be here, and this is a wonderful so reason and you make sure you pass these interviews along to others that you know would be interested and they can give it here at NCWIT.org or W3W3.com. Lee: Great, and I also have Lucy Sanders, who is the CEO of NCWIT. Hi Lucy. Lucy Sanders: Hello. Lee: Great to have you. Well, and just to get right to it, we are interviewing Candace Fleming. Candace is the CEO and co-founder of Crimson Hexagon. Crimson Hexagon's technology analyzes the vast social Internet, so blog posts, forum messages, tweets et cetera, and it's done by identifying statistical patterns in the words used to express opinions on different topics. And the product is called Foxtrot, and it helps you to develop your listening approach to many different Internet channels. So without further ado, I would love to introduce Candace, and have her tell us a little bit about her background and experience. Candace, welcome. Candace Fleming: Thank you, it is great to be here, I am excited about this opportunity to share. Lee: Well, if you could tell us just little bit about Crimson Hexagon, that would be great. Candace: At a very high level, what Crimson Hexagon does is, we have technology that goes out and find millions and millions of blogs and forums and tweets, product reviews and things that are probably available on Facebook, and reads them all everyday and can summarize opinions that are being expressed. So in some ways it's a little bit like an automatic opinion poll, but you are not actually asking a poll question because you are really just harvesting values from conversations that are already happening. Lee: Wow. Candace: And we are a 15% company based here in Boston. Lee: So basically, you have got bots or robots that go out and hit all of these different social sites and pull back the data and then analyze it, is that kind of a nutshell for our novice technology listeners? [laughter] Candace: It is that idea where we get data from lot of different sources, we license some data streams, we also do our own call link, but it is not so much the data collection that is special about what we do, it is really in the content analysis of what we do. So if you imagine, I think a lot of your listeners are familiar with Google Alert, were you can very efficiently and very quickly use keywords, and every day multiple times a day, you will get an email in your in-box with the links to mention of those words. But the problem is, when you start to build a large brand or you have a large company, there are so many mentions that it is nearly impossible to stay on top of them. We end up speaking with marketers and brand managers or PR agencies who sit down with a list of 30,000 links and they say, "How do I make meaning out of all this?" So our technology really allows you... It quantifies for you in that list of 30,000 links, what percentage of people are saying they like a specific feature of your product or what percent of people are saying they actually like your competitor's product better or really getting down to the opinions of what's being said. Lee: So we could use it to figure out what people are saying about Larry. Larry: Uh oh. Candace: Exactly. That's right. Larry: That's a different dinner gig. Lee: I'm liking this more and more. Candace: The only limitation is that people have to actually be talking about the topic. Lee: Oh don't worry, we've got plenty of info, don't worry. Lucy: So Candace, back to you. We'd love to hear about how you first got into technology. Candace: Ever since I was little, I have been noticing how technology improves our lives every day. My dad was an electrical engineering professor, and so we were always talking about science and technology and new innovations and seeing how the world progressed. And so, I've been thinking about it from a very early age, and went on to get an engineering degree in college and have always done work in my professional career around technology and algorithms and the application of technology. Larry: Oh. Lucy: So as a little add on, what technologies do you think are cool today? Candace: Well, of course our technology. Lee: Of course, you want a list. Candace: I could be honest, that I'm very biased about that. Actually I think there are a couple of things, I think there are some really neat consumer electronics coming out like they talk about 3-D TV or the Nexus One phone. But even maybe a little bit less mainstream, I heard about a technology that a Harvard biologist named Pete Gergen developed in microbial fuel cells, and it sounds like a lot of big words, but essentially what he's developed is a way to harness energy as microbes that decompose organic matter. And what that means is you can basically take a bucket of trash, stick one of his apparati into it and have light, or have enough to charge a cell phone. Stuff like that, if you think about the implications of that for third world countries or differences parts of our lives, I think it's incredible. So there's a lot of good stuff laying around. Larry: Yeah. Wow. I'm ordering one of each. Candace, let me ask this. What is it about being an entrepreneur that turns you on? Talk about that. Candace: I think for me it was all about this particular opportunity. I didn't set out to one day start a company of my own necessarily, and so in this instance I saw a huge opportunity that was so exciting that I wanted to literally drop everything and get this off the ground. I think in general, nothing is more exciting for me than pulling together a team and seeing what we can collectively accomplish. And I think in small companies, you really can see the impact of that. Where I walk into our conference room for a team meeting, and a year and a half ago these people didn't even know each other, and now they're doing things for big brands and big name companies, and really doing things that even the people on their team never knew they could accomplish. Lee: Well and forming those teams and forming something from nothing is really an exciting part of entrepreneurship. Now Candace, you mentioned that your father from a very early age was talking about technology, talking about engineering, and we find that that's very typical, especially for women. That their father or mother played a role in their early sort of sense of technology. Can you tell us a bit more about who else influenced or supported you in your career paths, or role models or mentors? Candace: So I would have to say that number one on that list is actually my husband. Lee: Yay husbands! Lucy: Yay! Candace: His name is Lee Fleming. And you know I was at a breakfast on Friday and there was a female entrepreneur who said, "Well you know, everyone knows the saying 'Behind every good man is a good woman,'" and I say the exact opposite is true as well, especially as it applies to start-ups. Behind every entrepreneur, especially if it's one who is a family, there's got to be a supportive spouse there." And so I think my husband wanted me to do this even more than I did. And so even before day one, when I heard about this opportunity, he's been helping me every step of the way. Quite literally, because he happens to be a professor at Harvard Business School, and he teaches a class on commercializing technologies and innovations, so I get some good coaching over the dinner table. Lucy: That's pretty handy! Candace: Very handy! Other than my parents, of course, who have been so supportive along the way, my co-founder, actually, who is also a professor at Harvard, his name is Gary King. He's the one who invented the algorithms that we've commercialized. So, from day one, he has said, "I think you're the one who should grow this company, I think you can make this happen and I want to work with you to do this." So having someone who believes in you so completely, and stands by you every step of the way, and is so fantastic to work with is a great gift. Lucy: That is really exciting. Lee: I downloaded his paper to read. Candace: Did you read it? Lee: Not yet, it was a little long for me, but I downloaded it for plane reading. Lucy: We just had interviewed somebody about advisory boards, and I'm thinking you've got these great built-in advisory boards. So to switch topics just a smidge from all these wonderful things, what's the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Candace: It's actually what I'm doing now, but more specifically, starting and growing a successful company. Basically, in 2008 which is when we had the worst economic meltdown since the Depression, is by far the hardest thing that I've ever had to do. Or, at least chosen to do. But, as I'm sitting here, we just finished putting together our financial plan for the year, and I think it's going to be a great year. I feel like we've made it through and we have a lot of momentum. But, the economy has not been necessarily the friend of any entrepreneur, I think, in the last 18 to 24 months. Lee: You're right. Lucy: That's the truth. Lee: It hasn't been good to anyone. Larry: Yeah, well, boy, that's an interesting lead-in to the question I'm going to ask, and that is: If you were sitting down right now with an entrepreneur and you were going to give them some advice, what advice would you give them today? Candace: That's a great question. I would say maybe three things. First, and I mean this both perhaps literally and figuratively, eat your broccoli. Eat your broccoli because it's good for you, and it will make you healthy. But, figuratively, I mean being an entrepreneur, there are a lot of things that you need to do that are good for you even though you may not want to do them. They're good for the company, they're good for your own personal growth, and so I would say don't shy away from those things. The second thing, also I mean both literally and figuratively is to play team sports. I think, literally, go out there and play volleyball and basketball, soccer, because I think playing in a team is actually very much like working in a small company. You have the same small team environment, you need to give and take and you have rules in a company just like you do on a sports team. Learning about leadership and teamwork, I think sports is an incredible way to learn that. And then the last thing is again, both figuratively and literally, put things to bed earlier than you want to. [laughter] By that, I mean definitely get more sleep than you want to get, but metaphorically, don't set perfection as the bar for everything. I think that in many, many cases good is enough. And if I had learned earlier, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time and stress. Lucy: Well, so, my next question is about the characteristics that make you a great entrepreneur. What we just saw in that last answer was one of them is wisdom. [laughter] Lucy: So, perhaps you can, other things that come to your mind when you think about yourself and entrepreneurship. Those characteristics that you think give you an edge. Candace: I think that I'm an optimist. I think entrepreneurs have to be willing to look reality in the face and convince themselves to see the rosy side of it, perhaps. [laughs] You need to say you can be so focused and drive for something even though there are going to be a lot of obstacles in your way. The second thing is I'm not scared of hard work. That's something that I think is crucial to being able to get a company off the ground. I think the last thing is I'm fairly direct and honest. I think when you're working in a small company environment, there's - somewhat thankfully from my perspective - there's not as much politics. You sit in a room with people, you decide things and you get things done. There's not ten layers of approvals. So, I think being straightforward with people and being honest with people really carries you a long way in being successful, particularly in a small group. Lucy: I have to agree with all of the above. When you have that small group, you just have to be really direct and honest. Candace: Limit to cycles. Lucy: Yeah. Candace: That's it. Lucy: It really does. So, Candace, one of our favorite questions is with building start-ups and being an entrepreneur, as you'd mentioned earlier, it's a ton of work. So, how do you bring balance into your personal and professional life? Candace: Yeah, I think this is a great question. As I thought about this, I have, perhaps, an ironic take on this. And, that is I view my family as an enabler of my professional success. I think that I have a fantastic husband, I mentioned earlier. I have two little kids. I have a two-year-old and a six-year-old. I actually started Crimson Hexagon when my two-year-old was two weeks. Lucy: Oh, my goodness! Lee: Oh, my God! Candace: There is no better way to give you perspective back in life than when you come home from a hard day of work and you get tackle-hugged by these two little people before you can even put your briefcase down. [laughs] So, I actually think that, by having a family, it allows me to be successful at work. Because I work just as hard as the next person and just as many hours. But, I think the trick is, even if it's 15 minutes that you sit down and talk with them in a day, you make that time. And, that time gets paid back to you in a thousand different ways that help you in the rest of your life. So, I just think you have to make sure that you spend time on each, even if the time is very little. But, mentally, it's what keeps me balanced. Lucy: Absolutely the case. Those are great ages for kids, just great, full of energy. So, Candace, you've already achieved a lot. What's next for you? Candace: I have achieved some good things, but I don't view myself as being done here. [laughs] I plan to continue running and growing small companies. I think that what we're doing here at Crimson Hexagon is so exciting. This type of activity is something I want to do for a long, long time. Lucy: Crimson Hexagon is exciting. That is just a cool company. And, I feel like I want to make a plug for a Boulder-based company that's one of your partners. Because we have a lot of Boulder listeners here. Room 214 is a partner of Crimson Hexagon. So, we're just excited about that. If you come out here to Boulder, you need to stop by. It would be great to have you. Thank you so much, Candace. We all appreciate your time. I want to remind listeners where they can find this interview. Larry: At W3W3.com as well as NCWIT.org. Lucy: All right. Thank you very much, Candace. We appreciate it. Lee: Yes. Candace: Thank you. Larry: Bye-bye. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Candace FlemingInterview Summary: Data is abundant on the web, and information is free. But meaning is what matters, and uncovering it requires a good deal more than counting keyword mentions across the social web. Crimson Hexagon's technology – based on groundbreaking work conducted at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science – distills meaning about brands, products, services, markets and competitors from the online conversation. Release Date: April 19, 2010Interview Subject: Candace FlemingInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 16:28