Stanford Radio

Glasses for kids can be cool and fun! Stanford alums Nathan Kondamuri and Sophia Edelstein of Pair Eyewear tell us how. Nathan Kondamuri and Sophia Edelstein of Pair Eyewear tell us how they have fundamentally changed the world of eyewear for children and adults. Originally aired on SiriusXM on May 29.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E150 | Sam Wineburg: How to improve American students’ fact-checking skills A cognitive psychologist explains why, with so much information at their disposal, American students struggle to tell fact from fiction … and how he thinks we might fix it. Sam Wineburg, a research psychologist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, recently conducted a nationwide study of the fact-checking skills of thousands of American high school students. He didn’t go about it with a survey asking the kids to self-report their own behaviors. Instead, he devised a live experiment that charged the 3,000 students in the study to determine the veracity of a now-famous bit of fake news from the 2016 election. Wineburg and team were then able to follow along as students tried to find the true source of the video, which had been produced in Russia as part of a disinformation campaign. In the end, just three students – one-tenth of one percent – arrived at the right answer. Rather than

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E149 | Julie Parsonnet: How faith in herd immunity may be misplaced An expert in infectious diseases says that an undue focus on herd immunity could actually be doing more harm than good in the fight against COVID-19. Many have now become familiar with the term herd immunity, an idea few outside the infectious disease community knew just a few short months ago. It’s an elusive concept to comprehend, and harder still to achieve, but Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Julie Parsonnet says it’s important to understand just what herd immunity does – and doesn’t – mean for today’s pandemic. Broadly speaking, herd immunity is reached when enough people have either recovered from or have been fully vaccinated against an infectious disease and there are no longer enough susceptible people in the entire population (the herd) to sustain transmission. Herd immunity doesn’t mean there won’t be cases, only that when they crop up, they will then die out. Parsonnet says this term is

A new study from Stanford researchers shows that the content in college essays strongly correlates with income and SAT scores. Our guests discuss what this means for fairness in college admissions. Originally aired on SiriusXM on May 8, 2021.

How disability intersects with race, gender, and social class in education. Originally aired on SiriusXM on May 8, 2021.

While calls to "defund the police" have made headlines, a new Stanford Law report Safety Beyond Policing: Promoting Care Over Criminalization explores alternatives to the use of police in sensitive situations such as mental health crises and in schools. Two of the report's co-authors, Professor Robert Weisberg and Stanford Law student Michelle Portillo discuss key questions about policing, shedding light on promising alternatives that have been piloted in a variety of places around the country—alternatives that deploy mental health professionals, saving lives, police resources, and funds. Originally aired on SiriusXM on May 8, 2021.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E148 |Maneesh Agrawala: How AI is changing video editing Technology is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in video editing. Society must consider the creative possibilities as well as the misinformation risks.. Imagine typing words into a text editor and watching on a nearby television as a well-known celebrity speaks those words within seconds. Computer graphics expert Maneesh Agrawala has imagined it and has created a video editing software that can do it, too. Given enough raw video, Agrawala’s application can produce polished, photorealistic video of any person saying virtually anything he types in. While he acknowledges concerns about manufactured “deep fakes” of political leaders or others speaking words they never said, Agrawala chooses to focus on the profound upside. He envisions the television and film industries using his technology to forgo costly reshoots, for instance, or medical professionals helping people with damaged vocal cords regain

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E147 | Noah Rosenberg: How biology is becoming more mathematical A geneticist explains why biology, a field once thought relatively removed from mathematics, is quickly becoming a hotbed of computational science. Biology is not typically considered a mathematically intensive science, says Noah Rosenberg, an expert in genetics, but all that is about to change. Math, statistics, data and computer science have coalesced into a growing interest in applying quantitative skills to this traditionally qualitative field. The result will be better and more accurate models of life, ranging from genetic inheritance to the entirety of human society. The yield will be a greater understanding and, quite possibly, revolutionary interventions into disease, ecology, demography, and even evolution itself. The tools of mathematical biology have never been more apparent, Rosenberg says, as mathematical models of the spread of infectious disease have been central around the world in t

Anxiety is a natural response to stress. Summer Moore Batte, Stanford alum talks how to effectively manage it in her book “Name and Tame Your Anxiety.” Summer Moore talks managing debilitating anxiety in her playbook for parents who are trying to help their kids with their anxious feelings.

The Importance of Cultural Humility and Mental Health in the Legal Field by Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E145 | Meagan Mauter: How freshwater supply is becoming more circular An expert in freshwater systems says the world’s pending water crisis is only just beginning, but it’s not too late to make the course correction necessary to right the ship. The world’s once linear — take it, treat it, use it, dispose it — model of freshwater usage is changing fast. Despite two-thirds of Earth being covered in water, just 2.5% of it is fit for human consumption. And that share is dwindling by the day, says civil and environmental engineer and expert in water treatment and distribution systems Meagan Mauter. With a rapidly increasing population and climate change disrupting traditional weather and distribution patterns, access to freshwater is headed for, if not already amid, a worldwide crisis. Avoiding calamity will require industrial scale desalination and other technologies that can separate precious freshwater from other less desirable substances in the water, but also a

Relationship coaches and Stanford alumni Nate and Kaley Klemp on seeking greater love, connection and intimacy in our modern world. Nate and Kaley Klemp, best-seller authors offer a transformative guide to the 80/80 marriage, a new model for balancing career, family and love. Originally aired on SiriusXM on April 17, 2021.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E146 | Ram Rajagopal: How the grid is becoming more human-centric An expert in the future of electrical power says that today’s big “dumb” grid is becoming a thing of the past and what’s replacing it is something much smarter and more personal. Slowly but surely, the highly centralized, industrial electric grid that supplies power to the vast majority of American homes and business is changing. Our existing system of massive power plants and huge networks of high-voltage wires is giving way to a much leaner, decentralized system of small-scale power generation on a more personal, neighborhood- or residence-level scale. In other words, we’re going from an “infrastructure-centric” model to a “human-centric” one, says grid expert Ram Rajagopal. He says that the new grid will be much smarter, more inclusive and better able to adapt to the individual needs of users, helping them to schedule power-intensive tasks, like laundry or charging of electrical vehicles, to o

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman E143 | Catherine Gorle: How cityscapes catch the wind A civil and environmental engineer describes how engineering is designing better built environments that shape rather than bend to the will of the wind. Humankind has long harnessed the wind to its advantage. From ancient mariners to millers grinding grist, the wind has been an ally for millennia, but only now do engineers have at their disposal advanced computer simulations to better understand the details of wind flow and to optimize designs. Catherine Gorle is one such engineer who has made it her career to design better built environments able to improve walkability, temper extreme winds, shuffle air pollution far away and dissipate heat islands arising from so much sun-beaten concrete in our cities. Once, that work had to take place in wind tunnels, but now transpires through advanced computer simulations that both speed her work and add critical detail to her understanding of the close interrelationship b

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E144 | Anthony Kinslow: How to close the clean-energy divide An engineer and clean-energy entrepreneur discusses the troubling socio-economic gap in access to sustainable energy and the things we can do now to narrow and, perhaps, close it. As the world moves to more efficient and cleaner energy solutions, there is a growing divide between the clean-energy haves and have-nots, says Anthony Kinslow II, PhD, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering. Too often the divide falls along racial and socio-economic lines, as minority and low-income communities do not benefit from clean energy to the degree that whiter and wealthier communities do. The problem is founded in history and in the federal government’s askew system of financing and incentivizing clean and renewable energy systems. The money flows to certain communities and not to others, Dr. Kinslow says. Fixing the problem won’t be easy, but solutions might begin with energy audits of minority and low-i

Imagine serving a life sentence in prison for stealing a floor jack from a tow truck? Many of the clients our guest today, Michael Romano, has represented were drug addicts or homeless when they got caught up in California’s Three Strikes law that forced minimum sentences and locked up thousands of nonviolent offenders for 20, 30 years and more. Romano, the founder of Stanford's Three Strikes and Justice Advocacy Project, has become a leading voice in criminal reform in California and the nation—shining a light on the high cost to both the imprisoned and the taxpayer, who foots the bill. Romano, who was recently appointed to chair the state’s new criminal law and policy reform committee, the California Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code, joins Stanford Legal to talk about the criminal justice crisis in American and efforts in California to release nonviolent offenders through reform of the Three Strikes law and other legal reforms.

In this episode David Sklansky, a criminal law expert and former federal prosecutor, discusses his new book A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crime and What It Means for Justice, which traces central failures of criminal justice, including mass incarceration and high rates of police violence, to legal ideas about violence—its definition, its causes, and its moral significance. David also discusses the criminal investigations of former president Donald Trump in New York and Georgia.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E142 | Kunle Olukotun: How to make AI more democratic A chip designer talks about how advances in hardware will be needed to make the much-hyped artificially intelligent future a reality. Electrical engineer Kunle Olukotun has built a career out of building computer chips for the world. These days his attention is focused on new-age chips that will broaden the reach of artificial intelligence to new uses and new audiences—making AI more democratic. The future will be dominated by AI, he says, and one key to that change rests in the hardware that makes it all possible—faster, smaller, more powerful computer chips. He imagines a world filled with highly efficient, specialized chips built for specific purposes, versus the relatively inefficient but broadly applicable chips of today. Making that vision a reality will require hardware that focuses less on computation and more on streamlining the movement of data back and forth, a function that now claims 90% of comput

Stanford alum Brodie Van Wagenen, COO and Head of Strategy & Business Dev., ROC Nation on the business of sports and entertainment. Brodie Van Wagenen on the business of elevating athletes' careers on a global scale from conceptualization to marketing and endorsement deals.

Co-hosts Denise Pope and Dan Schwartz discuss a new study from NBC News and Challenge Success about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on student well-being and academic engagement. Originally aired on SiriusXM on March 13, 2021.