Hospitals are where we go to get cured of infections and diseases, but sadly, sometimes tragically, and ironically, they are also places we go to get them. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “On any given day, about one in 31 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection.” Yet, according to Dr Lee Harrison, “The current method used by hospitals to find and stop infectious disease transmission among patients is antiquated. These practices haven’t changed significan...
Dec 21, 2021•21 min•Ep. 35
Rare diseases are, well, rare. In two not unrelated ways. By definition, they’re diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 people. But because, in the world of big business, in particular big pharma, that’s not enough to bother with, that is, it’s not profitable enough to bother with, rare diseases are rarely worked, to say nothing of cured. For example, hypertryptophanemia is a rare condition that likely occurs due to abnormalities in the body's ability to process the amino acid, tryptophan. How...
Nov 09, 2021•21 min•Ep. 34
Like a lot of people, you may be thinking about trading in your car. Me too. The case, morally and even financially, for an all-electric car is becoming stronger and stronger. And yet, what about recharging? What’s it like going from, say Pittsburgh to New York’s Hudson Valley—a trip that doesn’t even have a solid cellular connection? What about a road trip my partner to Yosemite and back? And even locally, how do you charge up if you live in a townhouse or apartment? Without a driveway and a ga...
Oct 26, 2021•36 min•Ep. 33
IBM is a remarkable company, known for many things—the tabulating machines that calculated the 1890 U.S. Census, the mainframe computer, legitimizing the person computer, and developing the software that beat the best in the world at chess and then Jeopardy. The company is, though, even more remarkable for the businesses it departed—often while they were still highly profitable—and pivoting to new ones before their profitability was obvious or assured. The pivot that people are most familiar wit...
Aug 11, 2021•26 min•Ep. 32
There’s no question that computers don’t understand sarcasm—or didn’t, until some researchers at the University of Central Florida starting them on a path to learning it. Software engineers have been working on various flavors of sentiment analysis for quite some time. Back in 2005, I wrote an article in Spectrum about call centers automatically scanning conversations for anger—either by the caller or the service operator—one of the early use-cases behind messages like “This call may be monitore...
Jul 01, 2021•19 min•Ep. 31
The most honest and inadvertently funny marketing message I ever saw was at a gas station that was closed for remodeling; it had been an Amaco station before that company was bought by BP . The sign said, “Rebranding, to serve you better.” I’m afraid we’re a bit guilty of that here at Spectrum . This is the 30th episode of IEEE Spectrum’s relaunched podcast series, but the first under a new name, “Fixing the Future.” We’ve changed the name partly for marketing and searchability reasons. But it a...
Jun 21, 2021•19 min•Ep. 30
Today’s startup invites us to rethink nuclear energy. Their plan? To put cheap, portable nuclear reactors onto barges and float them out to sea. What could go wrong? According to today’s guest, basically nothing. The reactor design avoids the type of fuel rods that gave us the fictional meltdown in The China Syndrome and the real-life ones in Chernobyl and Fukushima. In fact, my guest will claim his reactor cannot meltdown or explode. One of these reactors would be able to supply electricity, cl...
Jun 11, 2021•24 min•Ep. 29
A few months ago, we had on the show an economist who specialized in the energy sector. She noted that while the Trump administration had put drilling rights the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge, or ANWAR, on the block, there wasn’t much interest from the oil industry, and, more generally, the Arctic and other cold climes, presented logistical—and therefore financial—problems for oil companies. To be sure, oil companies have been drilling in the frigid North Sea for decades, but that doesn’t mean ...
Jun 03, 2021•20 min•Ep. 28
When horses were replaced by engines, for work and transportation, we didn’t need to rethink our legal frameworks. So when a fixed-in-place factory machine is replaced by a free-standing AI robot, or when human truck driver is replaced by autonomous driving software, do we really need to make any fundamental changes to the law? My guest today seems to think so. Or perhaps more accurately, he thinks that surprisingly, we do not; he says we need to change the laws less than we think. In case after...
May 25, 2021•32 min•Ep. 27
As we begin to finally address climate change in a serious way, we need to look at our cities in a serious way. And not just first-tier cities like, well, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and not just flashy growing cities like Las Vegas, Austin, Atlanta, and Columbus. We need to look at cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St Louis—cities that haven’t come back from the problems—deindustrialization, disinvestment, white flight—of 50 and 60 years...
May 18, 2021•33 min•Ep. 26
I suppose it’s elitist and maybe even nationalistic of me but I was surprised to hear the phrase “resource curse,” which I associate with the developing world, used recently in a webinar in the context of a region of the United States. The region is northern Appalachia, comprising 22 counties in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia. And the curse is, as it so often is in the third world, a surfeit of oil and especially natural gas, in this case extractable largely throu...
May 11, 2021•32 min•Ep. 25
In the world of prosthetics, we’re still at the stage where a person has to instruct the prosthetic to first do one thing, then another, then another. As University of Waterloo Ph.D. researcher Brokoslaw Laschowski puts it, “Every time you want to perform a new locomotor activity, you have to stop, take out your smartphone and select the desired mode.” But Laschowski and his fellow researchers have been developing a device that uses wearable cameras and deep learning to figure out the task that ...
Apr 22, 2021•25 min•Ep. 24
Has there been any technology more widely talked about and yet still less understood than 5G? Qualcomm’s Vice President of Engineering, Our guest, John Smee, holds dozens of patents in wireless technologies; his designs and innovations range from CDMA and LTE to Wi-Fi and now 5G. He’ll explain the challenges of 5G—and what 6G will be like. A full transcript of this and all Radio Spectrum conversations are available at https://spectrum.ieee.org/multimedia/podcasts ....
Apr 15, 2021•27 min•Ep. 23
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the world is not only changing quickly, it’s changing at a faster rate than ever. Or does it just seem that way? Surely we can all agree that the Industrial Revolution has changed everything. Or has it? One noted economist says there in fact were three industrial revolutions, and only one of them—the second one, from about 1870 to 1914, was important. In fact he largely discounts what we call the information revolution as insubstantial. If you ...
Apr 08, 2021•39 min•Ep. 22
At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden , former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the audience, “Cyberwar isn’t exactly war, but it’s not not-war, either.” Cyberattacks, at the nation-state level, were already almost a decade old at that point. In 2007, over the course of 22 days a Russian attack on Estonia took out commercial and government servers, online banking, and the Domain Name System,” without which people can’t find or loo...
Mar 23, 2021•25 min•Ep. 21
In the 2020 elections for the North Carolina State House, Democrats received 49 percent of the votes but won only 42.5 percent of the seats. In three-quarters of the state-level elections, the winning margin was more than 20 percentage points—in other words, landslides—even though statewide, the margins between the two main political parties is razor-thin—at the presidential level, Trump beat Biden by less than 2 percent, and a Democrat won the 2020 governor’s race. That’s gerrymandering, the pr...
Mar 11, 2021•28 min•Ep. 20
Let’s face it. The United States, and, really, the entire world, has squandered much of the time that has elapsed since climate change first became a concern more than forty years ago. Increasingly, scientists are warning that taking coal plants offline, building wind and solar farms here and there, and planting trees, even everywhere, aren’t going to keep our planet from heating to the point of human misery. Twenty years from now, we’re going to wish we had started thinking about not just carbo...
Feb 19, 2021•27 min•Ep. 19
Many things have changed in 2020, and it’s an open question which are altered permanently and which are transitory. Work-from-home may be here to stay; as might the shift from movie theatres and cable tv networks to streaming services; pet adoption rates are so high that some animal shelters are empty and global greenhouse gas emissions declined in record numbers. That last fact has several causes—the lockdowns and voluntary confinements of the pandemic; an oil glut that preceded the pandemic an...
Feb 11, 2021•26 min•Ep. 18
Batteries have come a long way. What used to power flashlights and toys, Timex watches and Sony Walkmans, are now found in everything from phones and laptops to cars and planes. Batteries all work the same: Chemical energy is converted to electrical energy by creating a flow of electrons from one material to another; that flow generates an electrical current. Yet batteries are also wildly different, both because the light bulb in a flashlight and the engine in a Tesla have different needs, and b...
Jan 19, 2021•27 min•Ep. 17
The saddest fact about the coronavirus pandemic is certainly the deaths it has already caused and the many more deaths to come before the world gets the virus under at least as much control as, say, chickenpox. The second-saddest fact about the pandemic is the economic and educational havoc it has wrought. Perhaps the third-saddest fact is the unfortunate lack of agreement about the best strategies for living with the virus, which, at least in the U.S., is responsible for many of those deaths, a...
Dec 22, 2020•27 min•Ep. 16
The Federal Communications Commission's very first cellular spectrum allocation was a messy affair. The U.S. was divided up into 120 cellular markets, with two licenses each, and in some cases, hundreds of bidders. By 1984, the FCC had switched over to a lottery system. Unsurprisingly, people gamed the system. The barriers to enter the lottery were low, and many of the 37,000 applications—yes, 37,000 applications—simply wanted to flip the spectrum for a profit if they won. The FCC would soon mov...
Dec 08, 2020•24 min•Ep. 15
In 1936, after polling its readers, the Literary Digest famously predicted a landslide victory for Alf Landon. On 2 November 1948, based on widespread polling that all pointed in one direction, the Chicago Tribune famously headlined its early edition, “ Dewey Defeats Truman .” Polls have been making mistakes ever since, and it’s always, fundamentally, the same mistake. They’re based on a representative sample of the electorate that isn’t sufficiently representative. After the election of 2016, i...
Dec 01, 2020•27 min•Ep. 14
If any cars are mobile phones with wheels, it’s electric cars. And just as the switch from landline phones to mobile phones was quick, and from computers to smartphones was even quicker, the shift from engines to motors, from internal combustion cars to electric cars, is starting to gain momentum and when it reaches scale, it will happen quickly. How quickly? Pandemic aside, Tesla would be on track to sell half a million cars in 2020, all of them electric. By contrast, GM sold almost 3 million c...
Nov 24, 2020•35 min•Ep. 13
A modern hospital operating room often has someone you never see on television: a medical device company representative. The device might be a special saw or probe or other tool for the surgeon to use. It might be an artificial hip or knee—or a mandible or a pacemaker. The surgeon may be using the device and its toolkit for the first time. The medical device company representative often knows more about the device and its insertion than anyone on the surgical team. Even in non-Covid times, it’s ...
Nov 10, 2020•18 min•Ep. 12
November is a big month for the millions of people who devote their time and money to computer games. Within a two-day period Sony will be releasing its fifth-generation Playstation, and its main competitor, Microsoft’s newest Xbox, comes out as well. So it’s a good month to look at the culture of gaming and how it reflects the broader culture; how it reinforces it; and how it could potentially be a force for freeing us from some of the worse angels of our nature—or for trapping us further into ...
Nov 05, 2020•29 min•Ep. 11
Engineers will tell you that for an orchestra to rehearse remotely, it would need at least 500 megabits per second to avoid throwing off the synchronicity of a concert performance. But that’s using high bandwidth as a proxy for latency. Why not work on reducing latency directly? Because it’s hard. Nonetheless, at the cutting edge of network engineering, researchers are working on it. And not for orchestras. Autonomous vehicles, factory robots, virtual reality, piloting drones, robotic surgery, a...
Nov 03, 2020•19 min•Ep. 10
In Get Out the Vote , co-authors Donald Green and Alan Gerber argue that political consultants and campaign managers have underappreciated boots-on-the-ground canvassing in person and on the phone, in favor of less personal, more easily-scaled methods—radio and TV advertising, robocalling, mass mailings, and the like. Unlike campaign professionals, they base their case with real data, based on experimental research. Donald Green is a political scientist at Columbia University focusing on such is...
Oct 29, 2020•24 min•Ep. 9
In 2014, two Google engineers, writing in the pages of IEEE Spectrum , noted that “if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.” One alternative is to stuff carbon dioxide underground. People have been talking about this for well over a decade. But just look at Exxon-Mobil’s website and see how much progress hasn’t been made. In 2015, a bunch of mostly Canadian energy produce...
Oct 20, 2020•23 min•Ep. 8
In 2011, the former executive director of MoveOn gave a widely-viewed TED talk, “ Beware Online Filter Bubbles “ that became a 2012 book and a startup . In all the talk of fake news these days, many of us have forgotten the unseen power of filter bubbles in determining the ways in which we think about politics, culture, and society. That startup tried to get people to read news they might otherwise not see by repackaging them with new headlines. A recent app, called Ground News, has a different ...
Oct 15, 2020•26 min•Ep. 7
Despite what you think, fake news is a tiny fraction of our news diet, according to Jennifer Allen, a Ph.D. student at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and lead author of the research study, “Evaluating the Fake News Problem at the Scale of the Information Ecosystem."
Oct 13, 2020•18 min•Ep. 6
