New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Investigating Intelligence is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and neuroscientist John Duncan, University of Cambridge, and examines fascinating questions in neuroscience such as: What is intelligence and what does IQ testing tell us? Can intelligence be measured and improved? What role does our frontal lobe play in executive control? John Duncan has rigorously investigated these types of issues for years and this conversation covers all those questions plus topics such as impairments following brain damage, functional brain imaging, and the brain basis for attention, intelligence and cognitive control, and much more.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity.You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about how people have moved in India historically, and his 2020 book the Age of Pandemics 1817-1920: How They Shaped India and the World (HarperCollins, 2020). The book argues that the period between the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century - an age otherwise known for the worldwide spread of the industrial revolution, imperialism, and globalization - was also the 'age of pandemics'. It documents the scale of devastation caused by different pandemics, cholera, the plague, influenza, and finally Covid. The book has great resources for the classroom and for the general public such as a timeline of pandemics, striking tables such as the death toll in millions for each epidemic, and a set of photographs at the end that is definitely worth viewing.Paula De La Cruz-Fernández is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The Science of Siren Songs: Stradivari Unveiled is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and master violinmaker and acoustician Joseph Curtin, recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. This in-depth conversation explores Curtin’s long quest to characterize the sound of a Stradivari violin and the rigorous series of double-blind tests he and his colleagues developed to probe whether or not professional musicians can really tell the difference between a Stradivari and a modern violin. The conversation also covers violin acoustics and how Joseph Curtin marries acoustic science to the art of violin making and merges time-honoured techniques with new materials and design.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion.In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many.The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed.James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems.Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The ‘Two Cultures’ debate of the 1960s between C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis is one of the most misunderstood intellectual disputes of the 20th century. Most people think that the debate only revolved around the notion that our society is characterized by a divide between two cultures – the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other. The Two Cultures, Revisited is based on an extensive, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and University of Cambridge intellectual historian Stefan Collini— and author of the book, What Are Universities For?— which provides a careful examination and illuminating insights of what the issues really were in this debate.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity (U Nebraska Press, 2019), Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing, made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable geometrical space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Philosophy of Brain is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland, UC San Diego. Patricia Churchland has done extensive research in the fields of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of the mind and neuroethics. During this mind-stretching conversation Patricia explores how the brain works, how we are able to represent the external world of objects and our inner world of thoughts, self and consciousness.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Historian Eszter Varsa’s new book Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the 'Gypsy Question' in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956 (Central European UP, 2020) examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study—based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care—provides a new perspective.Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a “solution to the Gypsy question,” rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived “workshyness” of Roma.Eszter Varsa is a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC project ZARAH: Women's Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century at Central European University, Vienna.Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at lwaters@utep.edu or tweet to @leslieh2Os. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The world is in a midst of a renewable energy revolution, with the price of utility scale photo-voltaic solar power falling by nearly 90% between 2009 and 2019, and the price of wind power falling by 70% during the same period. Annual global investment in renewable electricity generation assets is now more than double that for fossil fuel and nuclear-powered generation facilities combined, and yet the pace of adoption varies greatly across countries.In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Assistant Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and coordinator of Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, moderates a discussion on the various barriers and opportunities countries in Asia and the Nordics face in trying to take advantage of this renewable energy revolution. He is joined by Paul Midford a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, in Yokohama, Japan, Espen Moe, a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and Eric Zusman, senior policy researcher and area leader at the Institute for Global Environmental Studies in Hayama, Japan.The talk focuses on two new books: New Challenges and Solutions for Renewable Energy: Japan, East Asia and Northern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited by Midford and Moe, and Aligning Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies in Asia (Springer, 2021), edited by Zusman with Hooman Farzaneh and Yeora Chae.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastAbout NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society