This episode is a conversation with Dick Butler, pilot and head of design and construction for Concordia, currently the world’s most advanced sailplane. In the episode we discuss the team behind Concordia, the design challenges, the unique aspects of construction as well as Dick’s preliminary experience flying the airplane.

In dieser Episode sprechen wir mit Prof. Dr. Hermann Matthies über seine Arbeit am Institut für wissenschaftliches Rechnen der TU Braunschweig. Dabei geht es um Differentialgleichungen, Diskretisierungs- und Näherungsverfahren, aber auch um rechnergestützte Lösungsverfahren, Anwendungsbeispiele und aktuelle Forschungsthemen.

In this episode we talk to UT Austin’s Ray Mooney about artificial intelligence. We start out by providing an overview over the field in general. We discuss some historical aspects as well as some of its subfields. We then spend some time looking at Ray Mooney’s own specialties: machine learning and natural language processing. We conclude the episode with a brief conversation about IBM’s Watson, the computer than won the jeopardy game.

In this episode we discuss perception and perceptual systems with Wilson S. Geisler, who is the director of the Center for Perceptual Systems at UT Austin. We discuss perception in general and about approaches used in perception research including neuroscience and computation and modeling. We discuss in some detail Bill’s own field work work on vision and visual perception.

This episode covers my flights in CAE‘s Dassault Falcon 50 simulator at CAE’s Dallas/Ft. Worth Training Center. In the episode we first talk to the head of business aviation operations about CAE’s flight training branch in general. The main part of the episode covers my three short flights in the Falcon 50 simulator with my flight instructor Paul Gilbert. In the third part, Paul and I talk about his job as a simulator flight instructor in general. And yes, I managed to land the plane several times :-)

This episode is about chaos, or more specifically non-linear dynamics and sensitive dependency on initial conditions. We talk to Harry Swinney and Michael Marder, both from UT Austin’s Center for Nonlinear Dynamics. We discuss the basics of chaos, the kinds of systems that exhibit chaotic behavior, fractals, the phase space and the strange attractor. We also discussed practical applications of chaos theory and Harry’s and Michael’s current work.

In dieser Episode unterhalten wir uns mit Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Burghof vom Lehrstuhl für Bankwirtschaft und Finanzdienstleistungen der Universität Hohenheim. Wir sprechen über die verschiedenen Arten von Banken, über deren Rolle in der Gesellschaft und der Wirtschaft, sowie über die Konsequenzen von Bankpleiten.

Wir bedanken uns bei Jörg Friedrich, Christian Winkel und Jürgen Starek für die vorgeschlagenen Fragen!

This episode is a conversation with UT Austin’s Hans Hofmann about a number of related topics in biology. We start with computational biology and bioinformatics (the original topic of the episode). From there we moved into genetics and DNA sequencing as an example for where comptutational biology is used. Finally, we talked about Hans’ own research on biological foundations of social behavior.

In this episode we discuss the results of the recent listener survey. We discuss the overall structure of the audience and also look at some of the suggestions for improvement you gave us as part of the feedback. One result of the survey is that very few people listen only to the German episodes — this is why we publish the survey results only in English :-)

In this episode we talk about extra-vehicular activities, also known as spacewalking, with former astronaut Tom Jones. In the episode we cover the underwater training in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, we talk about the preparation of the space walk in the shuttle, and of course we discuss the spacewalking itself. In particular, we talk about Tom’s participation in the STS-98 spacewalks that installed the Destiny lab onto the ISS.