(Hear the MP3 version with additional commentary in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs Last Week

Here are the programs we’ve published in the last week, ranked in increasing order of listener ratings.

• Convergence Panel – First Tuesday (rated 2.3 by our listeners) This panel discussion regarding VoIP closed the thought leadership forum ‘The road to convergence’ from First Tuesday in Zurich, Switzerland. The panel speakers were Kevin Findlay of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Peter Fischer of the Swiss telecommunications regulatory authority, Stefan Herrlich of Siemens, Paul Hitchman of PlayLouder and Mikko Kukkonen of Nokia. With moderator Bruno Giussani, they discussed VoIP regulation, different forms of convergence and scenarios for the future of communications, network and other technologies.
• Nick Gall – TCP/IP and Shipping Containers (2.8) Arguing that conventional software technologies have led to centralized, difficult to maintain legacy systems, Nick Gall of the META Group points to the internet protocols as an example of a technology that has led to the extensible, scalable, decentralized applications that run on the web today.
• Adele Martz – Improving GM’s Risk Profile (3.0) Adele Martz, Director of Business Continuity Planning and Crisis Support at General Motors, explains how risk management puts GM at a competitive advantage. She was a speaker at the Effective Disruption Management Seminar convened last September by Stanford Graduate School of Business.
• Daniel Steinberg – Advanced Podcast Editing (3.0) In podcasting, the old radio adage that you need good gear and a good ear still holds true. In this talk from the Podcast Academy, Daniel Steinberg of O’Reilly Media’s Distributing the Future podcast discusses tips and tricks for editing digital audio. He focusses on the ear rather than the gear, and demonstrates specific techniques for getting results.
• Geoff Palmer – uLocate (3.0) Entrepreneur Geoff Palmer knows that what counts is location, location, location, but he’s no property developer. Palmer introduces uLocate, which uses location- aware technologies to let you track your pet, check your teen’s driving speed, or even find the spot where you took that wonderful photograph — all from your cell phone.
• Gail Neudorf – Disaster Relief Challenges (3.0) Gail Neudorf is the Emergency Coordinator for CARE Canada. During the Effective Disruption Management Seminar convened by the Stanford Graduate School of Business in September 2005, she explains some of the challenges and issues faced by humanitarian disaster relief operations.
• Christopher Thomas Scott – Stem Cell Research (3.3) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Christopher Thomas Scott, the Director of the Stanford Program in Stem Cell Research, who tells us how the major organized religions of the world each view embryonic stem cell research.
• Steve Gibson – Internet Privacy (3.3) Recently, the news has reported that the US Department of Justice has requested user information from some major internet search engines and service providers. In this conversation, Larry Magid talks with internet security expert Steve Gibson about the ramifications of these requests. They talk about what is possible and, more importantly, what is likely to be learned about an individual’s surfing habits.
• Lisa Dusseault – Calendar Sharing (3.4) Calendar sharing between different types of devices and desktops remains an unsolved problem. At ApacheCon, host Scott Mace talked to Lisa Dusseault, co- author of CalDAV, an open and interoperable protocol for calendar access and sharing. In this conversation, Dusseault explains the history of calendar standard efforts, the WebDAV standard underlying current efforts, and the open source Chandler client, Cosmo server and Scooby Web interface, which will support these standards.
• Brewster Kahle – The Internet Archive (3.7) Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. They’re not just archiving web pages — there’s now books, movies and 3,000 Grateful Dead concerts.
• John Tayman – Author, "The Colony" (3.8) Moira also interviews John Tayman who tells us about Molokai and its famous leper colony. Hawaii may make you think of swaying palms and beautiful weather, but this one desolate spot on Molokai seems more like King Kong’s Skull Island.

The O’Reilly Pick of the Week:

This week’s IT Conversations/O’Reilly Pick of the Week is from 2004:

• Malcolm Gladwell – Human Nature (4.2) IT Conversations audio from Pop!Tech 2004 (Human Nature): Author and New Yorker Magazine journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point has been a tremendous bestseller for over three years and counting. In this presentation he explores why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke’s market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller’s Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail.