Alberto Cairo - Visual Trumpery

04/15/18 • 58 min

Trumpery: worthless nonsense, something that is, simultaneously, deceitful and showy. Cairo explains how to fight fake data, fake facts, fake visualization, demonstrating how choices a data-visualization designer makes have significant impact on how an audience perceives data. He shares strategies to improve rational thinking and understand probability and uncertainty as ways to fight back against a deluge of misinformation.

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Matt Kahle - Archimedes: Mathematical Superhero of the Ancient World

Archimedes — remarkable physicist, engineer, inventor, astronomer — built a heat ray to burn attacking ships’ sails; designed machines predicting motions of planets and eclipses; estimated how many grains of sand it would take to fill the universe. Kahle discusses a few of these amazing inventions and insights, including one that anticipated calculus by thousands of years.

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Michael A. Neblo - Politics With the People

Citizens and scholars alike worry about the health of representative democracy around the world today. They worry about resurgent nationalism across the globe as well as accusations of “democratic deficits” against technocrats. In the United States, public approval of Congress remains near its all-time low, with populist challenges roiling both major parties. This talk explores some realistic reform proposals based on Neblo's research into what ails democratic politics in the U.S. today.