Fighting Coronavirus | Forest Fires, Memes, & Covid-19 | 14

American Innovations

Wondery

Steven Johnson, History, Kids & Family, Education For Kids, Science

4.6 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Forest fires. Ant colonies. Internet memes.

On the surface, they have nothing in common. But, according to network scientist Samuel Scarpino, they’re all complex systems that spread. Sam’s job is to crack the rules underlying their spread, and then apply them to epidemics such as Covid-19.

Read more about Sam’s work in Steven’s New York Times Magazine article, “How Data Became One of the Most Powerful Tools to Fight an Epidemic”: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/magazine/covid-data.html

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to American Innovations,
0:03.6	Add Free on Amazon Music, download the app today.
0:17.0	From Wondery, I'm Stephen Johnson, and this is Fighting Coronavirus.
0:31.0	Earlier this month, I published a piece in the New York Times magazine called Vital Statistics.
0:37.0	It's a piece about the past and future of using data to fight epidemics.
0:42.0	It tells the story of one of the great pioneers in this field, the British Doctor and statistician William Far,
0:49.0	who was one of the very first to create deep art in the world.
0:53.0	He's famous for being the first person to model the rise and fall of an outbreak mathematically.
0:58.0	When we talk about flattening the curve, the curve in question was first sketched out in the early 1840s by William Far.
1:07.0	One of my goals in writing the piece was to show the world that the world was in a way that was the first to be able to fight.
1:12.0	It was a very difficult time to fight.
1:15.0	It was a very difficult time to fight.
1:18.0	It was a very difficult time to fight.
1:21.0	One of my goals in writing the piece was to showcase the descendants of William Far,
1:25.0	who are working on new innovations in data collection in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
1:30.0	If you've been listening to Fighting Coronavirus over the past few months,
1:34.0	you will have heard from some of these innovators already, people like John Brownstein,
1:38.0	who developed the COVID near you website to track early stage symptoms of the disease.
1:44.0	But one of the people I profiled in the story hasn't been on the podcast yet.
1:48.0	Samuel Skarpino. He's an assistant professor at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University
1:54.0	and holds academic appointments in physics, marine and environmental sciences and health sciences.
2:00.0	He runs the university's Emergent Epidemic Slab.
	...

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