FORA.tv - Audio Program of the Week

What can playing with the past tell us about the future? VINTAGE TOMORROWS, a book/documentary about the steampunk movement, seeks to answer this question. Join the makers as they share excerpts from the film. ---- James Carrott is a cultural historian, design researcher, tech nerd, game geek, pop culture scholar, anachronist, and contrarian. He is the author of the forthcoming book & documentary film, Vintage Tomorrows: What Playing with the Past Can Teach Us About the Future. Byrd McDonald is a Portland-based producer/director. A graduate of NYU, Byrd worked for Jonathan Demme's production company Clinica Estetico from 1994-1999. A founding producer of Phat Shorts, Byrd ran the New York City short film festival from 1995-2001.

In the wake of the uproar among the technology and entertainment industries over the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA), the search for common ground and a way forward is more urgent than ever. Join NBCUniversal's Richard Cotton and Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson for an open conversation on imagining a digital world in which content creators and tech innovators can thrive and flourish. Rick Cotton was named executive vice president and general counsel of NBCUniversal in August 2004. He supervises the NBCUniversal Law Department, which provides legal advice to all NBCUniversal business units for their ongoing operations and for new strategic plans and acquisitions. In addition, he oversees NBCUniversal's global regulatory and legislative agenda, including the company's worldwide anti-piracy efforts. Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He currently is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Wilson has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He blogs at avc.com.

With 33% of adults and 17% of children obese, the U.S. is facing an obesity epidemic. A major risk factor for expensive, chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, it costs our health care system nearly $150 billion a year. Should government intervene, or is this a matter of individual rights and personal responsibility? Paul Campos is a law professor, author and journalist currently on the faculty of the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author of The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Weight is Hazardous to Your Health. Serving as Chief Medical Correspondent for Discovery Health TV, Dr. Peeke is featured on the award winning National Body Challenge series and is the host of the Could You Survive? series, based upon her national bestselling book Fit to Live. Dr. David Satcher served as the 16th Surgeon General of the United States and published America's first "Call To Action To Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity." Formerly a four-star admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and Director of the CDC, Satcher simultaneously held the positions of Surgeon General and Assistant Secretary for Health from February 1998 through January 2001. The host of "Stossel," a weekly program airing Thursdays at 10 PM EST and midnight on Fox Business Network, John Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Stossel also appears regularly on Fox News Channel providing signature analysis. Prior to joining FBN, Stossel co-anchored ABC's primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20.

Bill Keller, op-ed columnist and former executive editor of The New York Times, speaks with Prof. Peter Beinart, senior political writer for the Daily Beast who teaches Political Reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Bill Keller has enjoyed a long and illustrious career at The Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his coverage of the Soviet Union, and serving as executive editor from 2003 to 2011, a time of transformation and challenge in the news media. He is currently an op-ed columnist and contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Beinart is a faculty member at CUNY’s Graduate Center and Graduate School of Journalism. He is a senior political writer for the Daily Beast, a contributor to Time, and the author of, most recently, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. The Graduate Center’s Perspectives series with Peter Beinart features dynamic thinkers and practitioners examining the pressing political and public policy issues shaping our world today. Previous participants have included Christopher Hitchens, Tina Brown, Andrew Sullivan, and Paul Krugman.

Stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body during early life and growth. In many tissues, they serve as a sort of internal repair system, dividing essentially without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive. San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes is a leading force in stem cell research. In this presentation, Gladstone Investigator Dr. Bruce Conklin explains the surprising past, present, and future of stem cells. Bruce R. Conklin, M.D. is Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. Dr. Conklin's research focuses on using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) as a model system to understand how biological signals orchestrate the development of complex tissues and then modulate essential functions, such as heart contraction.

Join an audience at swissnex San Francisco as scientists from Switzerland and the US discuss their research on humanoid robots, cognitive robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI). Hear how some robots self-reflect, self-improve, and adapt to new circumstances, and whether it’s possible for robots of the future to possess the same cognitive characteristics as humans. Cornell University’s Hod Lipson is seeking to understand if machines can learn analytical laws automatically. For centuries, scientists have attempted to identify and document analytical laws underlying physical phenomena in nature. Despite the prevalence of computing power, the process of finding natural laws and their corresponding equations has resisted automation. Lipson has developed machines that take in information about their environment and discover natural laws all on their own, even learning to walk. Rolf Pfeifer directs the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich. Together with his scientific assistant Pascal Kaufmann, Pfeifer presents current AI research and a humanoid robot in the Ecce family referred to as Cronos. Standard humanoid robots mimic the human form but they generally function quite differently—and their characteristics reflect this. This places severe limitations on the kinds of interactions robots can engage in, on the knowledge they can acquire about their environment, and on the nature of their cognitive engagement. Instead of copying only the outward form of a human, Cronos mimics the inner structures as well—bones, joints, muscles, and tendons—and thus has more human-like actions and interactions in the world.

This program was recorded by the Long Now Foundation, on January 17, 2012. A dazzlingly incisive presenter, Lawrence Lessig specializes in identifying deep systemic problems in public process (such as copyright malfunction and Congressional dysfunction) and then showing how they can be cured. Currently he is bearing down on the corruption of Congress by the practice of private funding for public elections through campaign contributions. He writes: "The dependency of modern campaign finance is the single most important cause of the bankruptcy of Congress. Fixing this bankruptcy is the single most important reform effort that Americans face just now." As he did with helping fix copyright problems via Creative Commons, he has a plan for reforming elections to reestablish Congressional trust and effectiveness. (Public trust in Congress is currently at 12%.) Lessig is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and author of Republic, Lost (2011) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (2000 and 2006).

Culture Project and JANERA.com present Blueprint for Accountability: Truth and Consequences Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, Paul O’Neill, the famously candid Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush and a 2008 adviser to Barack Obama, and Jesse LaGreca (blogger and writer for Daily Kos and Occupy Wall Street activist) meet for a high-voltage conversation about the rise, fall and bailout of Wall Street, the perils of speaking truth to power, and the tough choices ahead for America. This program was recorded on December 7, 2012. Jesse LaGreca is a blogger and writer for Daily Kos and a prominent Occupy Wall Street activist. Paul Henry O'Neill served as the 72nd United States Secretary of the Treasury for part of President George W. Bush's first term. He was fired in December 2002 for his public disagreement with the administration and became a harsh critic. Prior to his term as Secretary of the Treasury, O'Neill was chairman and CEO of Pittsburgh-based industrial giant Alcoa and chairman of the RAND Corporation. Ron Suskind, former national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, is the author of A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League and The Price of Loyalty, George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill. Mr. Suskind was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (Feature Writing) in 1995.

Presented by Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates on November 15, 2011. In the words of Blaise Pascal, mathematician and Catholic, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." Does religion breed intolerance, violence, and the promotion of medieval ideas? Or should we concede that overall, it has been a source for good, giving followers purpose, while encouraging morality and ethical behavior? Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Think2Twice Twitter: @IQ2US and #IQ2US for the debate FOR THE MOTION Matthew Chapman Author, Filmmaker and Co-Founder of Science Debate A.C. Grayling Renowned Atheist and Professor of Philosophy AGAINST THE MOTION Dinesh D'Souza President of The King’s College and author of What’s So Great About Christianity Rabbi David Wolpe Named the #1 Pulpit Rabbi in America by Newsweek

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on November 30, 2011. As founder and librarian of the storied Internet Archive (deemed impossible by all when he started it in 1996), Brewster Kahle has practical experience behind his universalist vision of access to every bit of knowledge ever created, for all time, ever improving. He will speak to questions such as these: Can we make a distributed web of books that supports vending and lending? How can our machines learn by reading these materials? Can we reconfigure the information to make interactive question answering machines? Can we learn from past human translations of documents to seed an automatic version? And, can we learn how to do optical character recognition by having billions of correct examples? What compensation systems will best serve creators and networked users? How do we preserve petabytes of changing data? Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, and digital librarian, founded the Internet Archive in 1996. He is focused on providing universal access to all knowledge, and developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. He was co-founder of Alexa Internet, which helped catalog the Web, which was later sold to Amazon.com.

TerraCycle's Tom Szaky and Banyan Water's Jeff Fulgham discuss how their two companies are working to create new models for commercial waste disposal and reuse. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Compass Summit, on October 26, 2011. Taking out GE's Trash Film and conversation between: Tom Szaky, Chief Executive Officer, TerraCycle, Inc Jeff Fulgham, Chief Sales, Service, Strategy and Sustainability Officer, Banyan Water Compass Summit, a forum for true interaction and exchange, examines some of today's most pressing problems through the lens of global citizenship, recognizing that human ingenuity is an unlimited resource. Guided by NPR's Ira Flatow, an intimate group of some of the world's best thinkers and doers convened along the rugged Palos Verdes coastline on Oct 23-26, 2011 at Terranea Resort to engage in meaningful conversation, ask questions, and challenge ideas -- we invite you to join in the conversation.

This program was recorded in collaboration with the Graduate Center at CUNY, on November 28, 2011. New York Times columnist David Brooks will speak with the Nobel Laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman about the latter’s influential career and his new book Thinking, Fast and Slow. A Nobel laureate in economics (one of the only non-economists to earn this honor) and a research psychologist world-renowned for his seminal work on judgment, decision making, happiness, and well-being, Kahneman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. David Brooks's column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times started in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. He is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.

As neuroscientists are learning more and more about our body's hidden frontier, we have gained fleeting insights into our own intuition, habits and seemingly unexplainable preferences. Can we solve those mysteries by creating a complete computer model of our brain? Or, is the brain an unsolvable puzzle? Two leading neuroscientists discuss these questions and more as we look into the neurology of the brain. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a fiction writer. During the day, he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine. He is best known for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is also a fiction writer. His debut work of fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, became an international bestseller and is published in 22 languages. Henry Markram is the Coordinator of the Human Brain Project, a proposed international effort to understand the human brain. His research career started in medicine and neuroscience in South Africa, then at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, at NIH and UCSF in the United States, and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany. In 2002, he joined the EPFL, where he founded the Brain Mind Institute. His career has spanned a wide spectrum of neuroscience research, from whole animal studies to gene expression in single cells.

Nate Lewis, professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, discusses the future of energy technology at the 2011 Compass Summit. This program was recorded on October 26, 2011. Reinventing the Leaf: Future Sources of Fuel Nate Lewis, George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology Compass Summit, a forum for true interaction and exchange, examines some of today’s most pressing problems through the lens of global citizenship, recognizing that human ingenuity is an unlimited resource. Guided by NPR’s Ira Flatow, an intimate group of some of the of the world's best thinkers and doers convened along the rugged Palos Verdes coastline on Oct 23-26, 2011 at Terranea Resort to engage in meaningful conversation, ask questions, and challenge ideas -- we invite you to join in the conversation. Dr. Nathan Lewis, Professor of Chemistry, at the California Institute of Technology since 1991 is serving as Principal Investigator for the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, the DOE's Energy Innovation Hub in Fuels from Sunlight, and, the Beckman Institute Molecular Materials Resource Center. Dr. Lewis received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published over 300 papers, is Editor-in-Chief of Energy and Environmental Science, and has supervised over 60 graduate students and postdoctoral associates. His awards include the Princeton Environmental Award and Michael Faraday Medal of the Royal Society of Electrochemistry.

Biologist Jonathan Elsen presents "The 'Dark Matter' of Biology." This program was recorded in collaboration with the Compass Summit, on October 25, 2011. IDEAS THAT ACCELERATE: SCIENCE MULTIPLIERS The Dark Matter of Biology Jonathan Eisen, Professor, University of California Davis Compass Summit, a forum for true interaction and exchange, examines some of today's most pressing problems through the lens of global citizenship, recognizing that human ingenuity is an unlimited resource. Guided by NPR's Ira Flatow, an intimate group of some of the world's best thinkers and doers convened along the rugged Palos Verdes coastline on Oct 23-26, 2011 at Terranea Resort to engage in meaningful conversation, ask questions, and challenge ideas -- we invite you to join in the conversation. Jonathan Eisen is a Professor at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on the evolution of new functions and the genomic diversity of microbes and microbial communities. Eisen is also a vocal advocate for “open science”, the Academic Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Biology, an active and award-winning blogger (e.g., http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com), and a scientific prankster.