O'Reilly Radar Podcast - O'Reilly Media Podcast

Manufacturing is hard, but it's getting easier. In every stage of the manufacturing process--prototyping, small runs, large runs, marketing, fulfillment--cheap tools and service models have become available, dramatically decreasing the amount of capital required to start building something and the expense of revising and improving a product once it's in production. In this episode of the Radar podcast, we speak with Chris Anderson, CEO and co-founder of 3D Robotics; Nick Pinkston, a manufacturing expert who's working to make building things easy for anyone; and Jie Qi, a student at the MIT Media Lab whose recent research has focused on the factories of Shenzhen. For more about this episode, visit http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/11/podcast-the-democratization-of-manufacturing.html And for more on these topics, check out Solid, O'Reilly's new conference about the intersection of software and the physical world: http://solidcon.com/

At our Sci Foo Camp this past summer, Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, Roger Magoulas, and Jenn Webb were joined by guests Amanda Parkes, a professor in the Department of Architecture at Columbia University, and CTO at algae biofuels company Bodega Algae and fashion technology company Skinteractive Studio; Ivan Poupyrev, principle research scientist at Disney Research, who leads an interaction research team; and Hayes Raffle, an interaction designer at Google [X] working on Project Glass. Our discussion covered a wide range of topics, from scalable sensors to tactile design to synthetic biology to haptic design to why technology isn't a threat but rather is essential for human survival. For more about this episode and links to a few things that arise in the discussion, visit http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/10/podcast-expanding-our-experience-of-interfaces-and-interaction.html

Jenn Webb and Mary Treseler chat with Involution Studio's Jon Follett, covering the magnitude of the coming disruption in the design space -- including design's increasing role in genomics and synthetic biology, robots taking our jobs, embedded sensor networks, policy as a design problem, and scientists growing burgers in labs.

Is popularity just a matter of simple luck–of some early advantage compounded by human preference for things that are already popular? A paper published today in Science offers some insight into the way that popularity emerges in online ratings. Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean Taylor were able to set up a randomized experiment on a popular Reddit-like message board in which they gave some posts a one-point upvote on publication and others a one-point downvote. Posts that were “born lucky” ended up with 25% higher scores on average than those without modification. In this podcast, Jon Bruner and Renee DiResta are joined by Sean Taylor, Hilary Mason and John Myles White to talk about Sean’s findings and about ratings, rankings and reviews in general. For more about this episode and links to a few things that arise in the discussion, visit http://radar.oreilly.com/?p=57902

We chat with Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, and Bob Lee, CTO of Square, about quantum computing, NASA's collaboration with Google, and fraud prevention. For more about our discussion, visit http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/07/podcast-quantum-computing-with-pete-worden-and-bob-lee.html

Concentration still seems to matter in cultivating innovation, even in a networked world, but concentration of what? Minds, money, markets, or manufacturing know-how? For more information, and links related to this episode, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/07/where-innovation-lives.html

A few weeks ago we recorded a conversation with George Church, a Harvard University geneticist and one of the founders of modern genomics. In the resulting podcast, you'll hear Church offer his thoughts on the coming transformation of medicine, whether genes should be patentable, and whether the public is prepared to deal with genetic data. Here's how Church characterizes the state of genomics: "It's kind of like '93 on the Web. In fact, in a certain sense, it's more sophisticated than electronics because we have inherited three billion years of amazing technology that was just like a spaceship that was parked in our back yard and we're just reverse-engineering and probably not fully utilizing even the stuff that we've discovered so far." For more about this episode and links related to the things we discussed, visit http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/07/podcast-george-church-genomics-spaceship-parked-in-our-back-yard.html

At Sci Foo Camp last weekend we enjoyed sitting down with several thoughtful scientists and thinkers-about-science to record a few podcast episodes. Here we speak with Tom Daniel, a professor of biology, computer science, and neurobiology at the University of Washington, and Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider and a Stanford-trained physicist. First topic: what brings people to science, and how we compare to our icons. For links related to this episode, visit http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/podcast-what-makes-a-scientist.html

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about what's been on their minds this week: the NSA's surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who isn't doing what you think he's doing with hydroponics.

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about anthropology in big data, advances in JavaScript, searching for ancient civilizations, the importance of context, and good sites for checking the weather.

Mike Loukides and Jon Bruner talk about classical music publishing and changes in the ways we play music.

Jim Stogdill, Edd Dumbill and Roger Magoulas have a conversation about in-memory databases and the impact on real time analysis.

Jon Bruner, Mike Loukides and Jim Stogdill from O'Reilly Radar muse on the return of software to the physical world.

Jon Bruner and I continued our Radar coffee talk series of conversations at Astro Coffee in Detroit's Corktown. In the shadow of the abandoned Michigan Central Station we reflected on what we think of as a collision between the second industrial revolution (electric mechanization) and the third (information and networks). Will Google's driverless car be to the automobile industry what Amazon has been to publishing? We hope you enjoy the conversation and we're looking forward to your comments. You can listen to it here in the embedded player or you can also subscribe to them at iTunes. p.s. If you have a favorite coffee shop, tell us about it in the comments. Maybe we'll have our next coffee talk there.

Musing on the culture collisions between silicon valley and the industrial heartland.