Science Has A People Problem #244
December 20, 2013
This week, we're talking about the people, passions and personalities that shape the pursuit of science. Desiree Schell sits down with Dr. Morton Meyers, Distinguished Professor of Radiology and Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, to talk about his 2012 book "Prize Fight: The Race and the Rivalry to be the First in Science." And she'll speak with linguists James Winters and Sean Roberts, about their study on the strange and sometimes spurious correlations between linguistic and cultural features.
Guests:
- Morton Meyers
- James Winters
- Sean Roberts
Featured Book
Prize Fight: The Race and the Rivalry to be the First in Science
Guest Bios
Morton Meyers
Morton A. Meyers is a distinguished Professor of Radiology and Medicine, and emeritus Chair of the Department of Radiology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
James Winters
James Winters was formerly a student at the University of Edinburgh, and graduated with a MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition in 2009. He's originally from Cardiff, Wales, and as such is an obligatory rugby fanatic. James' research is focused around writing about language and cultural evolution. He can be found writing on these and related topics at the blog A Replicated Typo.
Sean Roberts
Sean Roberts is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He looks at how individual cognition and conversational interaction are related to population-level phenomena. This includes modelling in a variety of frameworks and statistical analyses of large-scale, cross-cultural data. His PhD was on evolutionary approaches to bilingualism, completed at the Language Evolution and Computation research unit at University of Edinburgh. He blogs about language evolution at Replicated Typo.
