Podcasts we love - a place to share information about podcasts we listen to

[Guest]

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[Christopher]

There are similar threads for books, poems and art (which I have thoroughly enjoyed), and a couple of threads contain references to podcasts we might listen to.

I thought it would be nice to have a single thread/place here on KivaFriends where we could share our favourite podcasts.

As a start I thought I would post a few from my "library" of podcasts, so in no particular order...

The BBC now have so many good podcasts, and I regularly listen to 2:
From our own correspondent (FOOC)
Crossing Continents (CC)
Both of which go behind the headlines and provide a greater depth of reporting into very varied topics.  FOOC provides a more personal point of view from the reporter.

Less regularly I download the In Business / Global Business podcast (it was Peter Day's piece in late 2006 about the Honey Bee Network in India that led me to find out about the Grameen Bank / Microlending and thus to KIVA !!)

It is hard for me to judge this, but I would say all 3 have a global interest and appeal to a greater or lesser extent.  Others might be better able to spot a UK / Europe bias in the global stories they report.

My fourth recommendation is Living on Earth - which I found after a recommendation by Scotty on this thread

There are so many podcasts and I am sure I am missing out on a few good ones - do you have any favourites / recommendations?

[Soriak]

I tend to stick to video podcasts, I hope you don't mind them in this thread as well
(links for iTunes)

By far my favorite: TED Talks: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=160892972
The conference features prominent speakers on various topics who outline their work in 20 minutes or so. Covers everything from technology to design to science. Al Gore and Bill Clinton have spoken there, hopefully Kiva will get featured once, too.

Anderson Cooper's 360 Daily - News: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=251316716

David Pogue's (from the NY Times) humorous technology reports: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=210818527

[wind5001]

Christopher,

thanks for starting this thread!

And I saw that we both like BBC World Service's From Our own Correspondents! It's a regular for me. I will check out the other one, too.

Trying to keep up to date with American politics and having fun with it at the same time I listen to NPR's "It's all politics" - a weekly 15 minute show with Ken Rudin and Ron Elving, discussing what's been going on that week in a very amusing manner...http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=5495231

Oli

[Soriak]

For the KivaFriends who don't like podcasts, you can also watch the TED talks on their website. This one might be of particular interest: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/198
A mathematician tells of his work in Africa. He flew over a village and saw an interesting organization of the town's homes - a closer look showed that the town was built in a pattern that we find in fractional geometry, a highly complex branch of geometry. He explains it very well and it's simply amazing.

The people in the village, of course, have no concept of fractional geometry, but they have deeply rooted cultural reasons for building that way and he explains them.

I find this absolutely amazing. There's more than "just" the village design and it continues to impress. There we have people essentially secluded from civilization with no concept of why what they do is amazing to outsiders. They build a pseudo-random number generator out of lines in the sand, the basis of which is what we use in our computers today!


Richard Dawkins also has a talk on TED where he talks about the Queerness of the world and how our brains are not wired to handle some concepts on the very small and very large scale. (we can't imagine that a rock is almost entirely empty space - to us, it's solid) He wonders if we grew up in an environment where this kind of thought was normal, how our brains may be wired differently.

I wonder if this is maybe exactly what's happening in villages like this. Children growing up with "games" that convey a much different way of thinking that we're used to. This opens up a lot of potential in research when individuals join in who approach things entirely different from us... but also the risk that they may adapt too much and their take on the world may get lost.

Dawkins' talk is here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/98