13 January 2007

Thoughts on Yale Podcasts

Yale Press Podcast -- http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/podcast.asp

Nice episode #1. Liked description of
The Yale Book of Quotations and Caesar Life of a Colossus (particularly the Addendum on the later). These were good because they gave to easy to understand overviews of well-worked out existing media (i.e. the books). However, it'd be nice if each podcast could have a brief summary and it's own episode page -- e.g. like http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005Publish/Jul/hour2_072905.html

Yale OPA podcast
-- http://www.yale.edu/opa/podcast

The web page of this is a bit more confusing. Again it'd be nice, if each podcast could have a brief summary and it's own episode page, so you could refer to (and blog) an individual podcast. Some thoughts on specific ones: The podcast "American Foreign Policy: Multilateralism or Unilateralism. From the Yale Tomorrow campaign launch, recorded Sept. 30, 2006." was good but it'd be nice if it were connected with some specific textual material. Likewise for "Nutrition and Cancer Prevention: How diet can prevent cancer. Part of the Yale Cancer Center Healthline Series, recorded May 21, 2006." Again, however, I don't know where to go for more -- a paper, the professor's site, etc. The Tian Xu podcast is engaging. Liked the vision at end of a series of all possible mouse knockouts with high-res MRI to show which cells they affect. The Salzman talk gives a nice vision of developing a community of biomedical engineering. Both of these suffer from the lack of visuals referred to and some context given at the beginning. They are just bare recordings.