Rant: Why Podcasts Go Bad...

I started listening to podcasts in 2006, during my Ph.D., or right around the time that they started becoming really popular. There have always been radio shows, of course, but the convenience of being able to listen to shows about topics of interest on my own schedule was hard to beat. I kept trying out new shows regularly, and eventually found a good mix of goofy and serious to listen to while commuting, doing lab work, or exercising.

Unfortunately, I've found that I have to keep changing up my 'mix', sometimes because shows eventually stop (bye, bye, 1Up Network), or more frustrating, because most podcasts eventually 'go bad'. I've discussed this at some length with a buddy, and I have an opinion as to why.

I think that all good podcasts begin with a clear plan: topic(s), segment layout, approximate length in minutes, etc. After some growing pains as the participants to get used to the flow of speaking on the mic, the show gains popularity in the form of a healthy number of subscribers. Simple enough, except that it inevitably appears to go to the host's heads.

In the world of radio, people love personalities - some folks make for particularly entertaining shows and segments. However, I feel like a lot of podcasters, once they've established a fan base, seem to think that people are tuning in to listen to them and not what they're actually saying.

An example, the Tested.com podcast (This is Only a Test) is ostensibly about technology news and reviews (though they've started throwing in some very light 'science'). Their shows used to be ~1 hr and followed the format of discussing tech-related news, talking about the pros and cons of new products, then answering listener questions. As of late though, their podcasts have become more and more bloated with irrelevant junk, like lengthy discussions about the best way to cook hamburgers, boring 'inside baseball' personal anecdotes (you've moved into a new office? Good for you), and long drawn out segments about things that aren't really related to technology except in the most tortuously roundabout ways (I don't care about how nice the hotel was at Comic Con). Oh, and the shows are now > 2 hrs. I've found myself only listening to a few minutes before deleting them and it's likely that I'll unsubscribe soon.

I've singled out Tested as an example, but this phenomenon seems rather common. I'm sure that there are a decent number of people who just want to hear their favorite radio personalities talk and, to be fair, some of the best moments in podcasts come from funny non-sequiturs and tangents. Nevertheless, my criticism here is editorial rather than proscriptive: Just like word counts force you to write clearly and concisely, sticking to a podcasting plan and time-frame keeps said tangents to only the most interesting and at least somewhat relevant.

New podcasts compete for the ears of subscribers and tend to go to much greater pains to stay on track, keep quality high, and edit out uninteresting, extraneous material. Once they hit the 'big-time', at least as far as subscriber counts go, a lot of this tends to go by the wayside in what I assume is the failure to appreciate the qualities of the show that made in popular in the first place. In podcasting, like so many things, I'm beginning to think that it may be better to burn out rather than fade away.

In my experience, the most consistently high-quality podcasts are those that stick to a plan/format and edit judiciously in order to maintain high-quality. I may have a lot of opportunity to listen to shows, but there are always new podcasts competing for my time.

P.S. Another couple of podcast gripes: 1) Audio quality. The best podcasts are generally recorded in studios, though I've heard some excellent Skype-based ones as well. Regardless, even the best 'cast can be ruined by a single participant with awful call quality. If someone keeps dropping from the call, it's better to axe them altogether rather than force your listeners to put up with incomprehensible gibberish. 2) Bad hosts/guests. Not everyone is a good public speaker and there's nothing wrong with admitting that. The official podcast of a particular magazine, for example, doesn't have to have every staff member on the show out of some perverse sense of 'completeness'. Someone who stutters, interrupts the flow of the show, or doesn't have anything interesting to say drags everything down. 

Audiobook Club: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire...

I figured that subscribing to Audible would give me an opportunity to get back into 'reading' fiction again, but this deosn't seem to be the case. I'm not exactly sure why, but for the past several years I've found myself getting bored very quickly whenever I read something that's not at least somewhat educational1. So, when my audible credit came along I took advantage of a 2-for-1 sale to pick up The Modern Scholar: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is actually a series of 14 lectures by Prof. Thomas F. Madden of Saint Louis University. 

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the quality and contents of the series - they're like interesting university lectures if your prof took more time to prepare and had all rambling edited out. 

Prof. Madden begins the series with a discussion about what we mean by the 'fall' of Rome. The Roman Republic itself fell during the 1st century BC and became an empire, primarily because total concentration of power into the hands of one clear dictator ended decades of civil war among various Roman generals out to seize said power for themselves. This is only a preamble, as the lectures are more concerned with the decline of the Empire, traditionally dated to have lasted from 27 BC to 476 AD, when the final Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, abdicated the title. The Eastern Roman Empire, referred to as the 'Byzantine Empire', continued for another thousand years until the fall of Constantinople in 1,453 AD.

One aspect of Roman history that the lectures attempt to emphasize is that there wasn't a single 'ultimate cause' that precipitated the fall of Rome. Rather there were a series of issues, each playing varyingly important roles that served to strengthen or weaken Rome's influence in the known world.

One major problem that Prof. Madden identifies is that Rome tended (though not always) to do better when Emperors were chosen from capable military leaders - such as when a seated Emperor would define a clear successor who was popular with the citizenry. Far more problems seemed to be created during periods of dynasty, or when spoiled sons succeeded their fathers and ran the Empire like their own personal playgrounds (check out Elagabalus as an example of a particularly weak, somewhat insane Emperor who was put into power by his grandmother).

When Emperors died without heirs, or were assassinated after weak rule, power vacuums would lead to massive civil wars. In fact the third century AD saw one such war after another. As civil wars and political assassinations became more frequent, leaders realized that the key to holding power was maintaining a very loyal military. Over a period of many consecutive short-lived reigns, Emperors raised taxes in order to increase the pay of their troops and buy their loyalty. The problem was that the military quickly realized that the more often their leaders changed, the faster their pay rose, leading to a period of extreme taxation and terrible political unrest.

In the 'end' (no actual Roman at the time thought that the Empire 'fell' in 476, though the sacking of Rome in 410 AD by the Visigoths did change perceptions considerably) Rome was laid low by the culmination of very poor leadership, population pressures pushing Germanic tribes into Imperial lands, the arrival of the Huns from the far East, and Persian incursion into the Eastern Empire preventing them from aiding the struggling West.

It's almost impossible to overstate the significance of the Roman state on Western thought and culture. Almost every subsequent 'Empire' has billed itself as reclaiming the 'glory of Rome'. The US Congress doesn't have a 'Senate' for nothing, and the relationship between religious power and the state among Christian nations was largely established during the waning years of the Empire.

I've said it before in previous posts, but I feel the need to reemphasize the sophistication with which classical figures acted and wrote. We have a tendency to view people in the past as 'inferior', but they were only so in terms of their understanding of the world, not in their interpretation. Some Roman figure-heads made brilliant decisions and hatched impressive plans given the lack of rapid transportation or communication. Furthermore, Roman law (and even more so subsequent Byzantine law) was surprisingly effective and progressive compared to many contemporary and subsequent tyrannies.

There's always value in revisiting the past in order to understand what we can learn from it in its own context and not in order to interpret it through the lens of current events. As Prof Madden bookends the entire lecture series: Rome is not a metaphor for modern day America, even though some of its successes and failures can help to inform modern politics. 

1Incidentally, I've found myself pretty much only wanting to watch documentaries when it comes to films.

Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology...

It was some nice to sleep in my own bed again after four days of attending the Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Ottawa (followed by a few days of visiting a childhood friend across the river in Québec). This was actually my first time attending the 'Evolution Conference' (organized by the Society for the Study of Evolution) - I've heard from friends and colleagues that its focus is primarily on non-molecular and non model-organism research, and so I've tended to go to the SMBE1 meetings instead. However, this conference was quite enjoyable and 'useful' in the professional sense, though this may have to do with it being a joint conference of four (?) different societies rather than a single one.

Mah Fravorit Berk.

One reason that I wanted to attend the meeting was that Oxford University Press was premiering the book Rapidly Evolving Genes and Genetic Systems (RS Singh, JP Xu, and RJ Kulathinal eds.), of which I contributed a chapter2. It was a nice opportunity to meet some of the other chapter authors as well as some of the editorial staff at OUP. Apparently I'm going to have the right to host a PDF version of the chapter on my website as long as the PDF contains the full book's table of contents, so I'll make it available as soon as I can.

While I saw a lot of great talks that were relevant to my own interests (I downloaded quite a few papers that I'll now have to make my way through), the sheer number of speakers was somewhat overwhelming. During the vast majority of the conference, there were 15 or 16 concurrent sessions going on, with only relatively loose cohesion of topics - so numerous were the talks that there were no published abstracts. You had to skip from session to session based on title alone, and more than once I ended up at a session that wasn't what I'd expected.

'Twas quite 'teh buseh'.

All of that being said, one of the major aspects to attending these things is meeting colleagues face-to-face and talking science. On this count I think that things went quite well: I got some great ideas for some side projects to tackle as soon as I get the current manuscript that I'm working on out, as well as some interest in future collaborations and career possibilities. All great stuff for getting me pumped about getting back to the grindstone.

I was pretty busy with the conference and evening meetings so I had very little opportunity to do much touristy stuff. Thankfully the Ottawa Convention Center is within walking distance of Parliament, the seat of the Canadian Federal Government, so I did get to take a few nice photos of its environs. As usual, I've made a Picasa Web Album for anyone who's interested in seeing these pics.

Here is one nice panorama that I took of The Parliament and surrounding buildings.

1Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

2Apparently, one of the 'perks' of publishing in an OUP book is a lifetime 25% discount on the OUP catalog. I'm still not sure whether that will make it cheaper than just buying off of Amazon.com, but it sounds nice. (I also get a 40% discount on additional copies of the book itself).

Random Musings Whilst Travelling...

The long time that I spent travelling to the 2012 Evolution Conference in Ottawa today was a perfect opportunity to put the finishing touches on my revisions to a manuscript that I'm soon planning to submit for publication. This is a good feeling for a couple of reasons:

1) Aside from a book chapter to be published soon in a volume from Oxford University Press (Rapidly Evolving Genes and Genetic Systems; RS Singh, JP Xu, and RJ Kulathinal eds.), I haven't published a manuscript that wasn't part of a large consortium since 2010.

2) I've been doing this for long enough that I now have a tradition by which a computer is not 'christened' until it has been used to write and successfully publish a manuscript (weird, I know).

I've somewhat convinced myself of the notion that publication of a new primary-author manuscript will be the first step in regaining my footing towards a career in science (see my previous post about my unintentional 2 years spend working unproductively). It's a small-ish step in that the work that I've written up is interesting, but not revolutionary. It's a side project upon which I've been tinkering away while I generate the necessary data for my primary project1. It's also had the benefit of opening up some more interesting research ideas that I'm aiming toward pursuing later this year.

If you're interested, here's a link to a PDF of the poster that I'll be presenting on this work at the conference this weekend. Unfortunately, I only found out that I'd be able to attend this conference quite late, and the registration for talks was already closed - so poster-only it is. I have to admit that this is a bit depressing as it'll be three years in a row that I don't give a talk about my own work at a conference (in 2009 I gave two separate talks at conference in a single week on two totally different projects - I haven't felt quite so productive since). However, things are looking up and in a few months I may have a lot of interesting work to talk about with colleagues and collaborators. 

I'm going to switch gears here and talk about a book that I tried to read and am embarrassed to say, failed to complete: Jonah Leher's How we Decide (2009; Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt). I think I picked the book up on a lark after seeing the author give an interesting TED talk and after a mildly interesting start have been forcing myself to trudge through the 29% that I've reached on my Kindle.

I came to the 'realization' that I could simply let it go while listening to an economics podcast wherein a co-host explained why he rarely finished books. I'm paraphrasing here, but he basically said that most books written with the intent to teach are way too long - they really only have one central concept that they want to convey and keep wrapping it up in an ever-expanding array of case-studies and examples. Once you get it, everything else is just fluff.

While I don't necessarily agree that even most books are like this, How we Decide fits this bill to a 'T'. It's yet another in a long string of neuroscience books based on fMRI data that give vague clues about the relationship between behaviors and certain areas of the brain. As an acquaintance of my gf is apparently fond of saying: "fMRI and voodoo are basically the same thing."

The major point is interesting: Contrary to classical Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, we need emotions to make decisions - our brain appears to require trained instinct to tip the scales in favor of one choice or another. fMRI studies show that the frontal cortex is involved in combining logic and emotions together and people who suffer different types of damage to their frontal lobes can either be unable to make decisions at all or be a complete slave to their passions (they typically become very hardcore addicts). This requirement that we need emotion and instinct to make basic decisions explains much of why humans are so prone to various forms of cognitive bias. We intrinsically feel 'more worse' about negative outcomes than we should, and choices can be influenced simply by rephrasing the decision in a positive or negative way (keeping the ultimate outcome identical).

It took me a paragraph to lay out about 100 pages of the book. Admittedly, one difference is that I didn't make untestable (though plausible) hypotheses about why we evolved this way, or claim that Neandertals didn't have this or that brain structure despite us having no actual perfectly preserved caveman brains to analyze (this statement in the book is unreferenced)2.

I'm sure that Lehrer's book will delight most - my dislike of it is probably strongly tied to my evolutionary biology engrained dislike of 'just-so stories'. The brain is very complex, and it's unlikely that we can atomize its various functions into specific areas so neatly. fMRI measures where blood is flowing in the brain, not where neuronal signals are travelling. Its resolution, while impressive, is fairly low for so complex a structure. Directionality of signals and importantly, causality, don't seem quite so obvious to me. Brain research is an exciting field, but scientific conservatism probably doesn't sell books.

The above only applies to some of the off-hand statements made in the course of the book - I think that the main theme of How we Decide (i.e., emotional involvement) is solid and entertaining, but could be conveyed in far fewer very speculative words3. Reading over some of the reviews at Amazon.com, I don't think that my opinons are too far out there...

1After several months of technique-optimization, failed-starts, and headaches, I just sent of some samples for analysis yesterday. If these turn out to be acceptable, I'll be able to shift my focus 100% toward my main project in a few weeks. Fingers are very crossed!

2I asked my gf, who is a neuroscientist, about this, and she scoffed at the idea that we could claim that Neandertals lacked any particular brain structure as the brain-case isn't a great proxy for actual sub-organ morphology. If anyone has any evidence to the contrary, I'm all ears.

3Lehrer's writing reminds me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell, who I understand is very, very popular. It's a style that revolves around using extremely detailed and fleshed-out case-studies to repeatedly reinforce a central concept.

Musical Renaissance...

Renaissance: French for 'rebirth'; the revival of learning and culture.

I think that I've always had this oddly 'dead' part of my soul: I've never had much of an emotional attachment to music. Well, that's not precisely true - when I was a pre-teen, I did become somewhat attached to the kind of music that my folks listened to: Elton John, Steppenwolf, The Eagles, Huey Lewis and The News, Billy Joel™1, etc. I remember that when my friends were walking into high-school listening to Daft Punk and that godawful garbage, Prozzäk, I'd have the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack spinning in my enormous portable CD player. What can I say? I was cool.

Classics aside, I've never really generated that mental playlist that so many of my friends associate with their teenage years - you know, like the guys who spend hundreds of dollars on limited edition boxed sets of horrible audio quality Nirvana B-sides? I actually remember other kids making fun of me because I didn't know the names of the people in the hip bands of the 90s, or own any of their albums (but did you know that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon remained on the Billboard sales charts for FIFTEEN YEARS!?!?!? What do you mean, 'What is a Pink Floyd'???).

I think that part of this ties back to a previous discussion that I had on the blog about piracy: around the age that most people would've started developing their die-hard musical preferences, I was exposed to MP3s on the internet (while Napster came around when I was ~18, I've had DSL internet since I was 13). And, as economics and common sense teach us, you generally don't value something that you can get for free as much as you do when you pay for it with your hard-earned dinero. Having endless numbers of songs to shuffle through isn't conducive to making you care about any particular band, I guess.

All of this being said, MP3s are now causing me to 'rediscover' music - in particular the types of bands that I heard during my teenage and college years, but also some new groups that I've heard on the radio here and there. I'm particularly impressed by Amazon.com's MP3 store, which regularly has great deals on albums ($2-5) and provides DRM-free tracks (i.e., bare MP3s that can be played on anything).

Though musicians probably disagree, I think that these low prices are necessary in the era of digital sales. There's no doubt that MP3s are changing the way that we listen to music: what's the meaning of an 'album' when we can pick and choose our own mixes? In reality, most albums have 2-3 catchy songs and a bunch of 'filler' - very few bands can write 15 solid gold hits in a row. If an album is $10-15, I'll just buy the songs that I like a la carte, thank you very much.

However, buying only the singles will cause you to miss some of the great tracks that are out there - and it's these that I'm discovering now. (This is also why I'm typically not satisfied by Pandora or Spotify, which focus on singles and have me constantly skipping tracks that I don't like). While vocal tracks distract me too much from writing and/or doing computational work, they're certainly conducive to lab work, jogging, biking, and also doing house work as well - can you believe that I've only recently clued into the idea that it's nice to have music in the background? I know, it's strange isn't it?

Next time that I decide to dust my appartment, which, incidentally, is probably going to be very soon, I'll do it to the tune of Katy Perry... Umm, I mean, Florence and the Machine. Yeah, that's right.

1While it is not uncommon for bands and performers to trademark their name for the purposes of countering fake/bootleg merchandise (though they're not required to do so), I find it somewhat laughable that Billy Joel™ actually puts the tradmark logo next to his name on some materials (rather than in the legal text below).