Hyde Park Civilizace

Programmer Llewellyn Falco is e.g. the author of the project Teaching Kids Programming. Professor Jack Copeland is a philosopher who specializes in computers and keeps the Turing Archive. Will computers be able to think one day like humans do? And what do they expect the near future of computers to be? We shot this at Academia Film Olomouc. www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/1044129…english/16509/

Denis McQuail, an English scientist specializing in media and communication theories. He wrote more than 12 books on mass media that focus on the usefulness and danger of mass communication. What is the importance of mass media? How do they affect individuals and groups of people? Are media in a crisis? See what one of the most famous media theoreticians thinks about it. www.ceskatelevize.cz/porad...

O české přírodě a čtení z letokruhů stromů. O rostlinách, keřích i nejstarších stromech. O českých zahrádkách i o tom, co - jak říká - "musí být k snědku". www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/1044129…0411058090118/

Lawrence M. Krauss considerably contributed to dark matter research and is so far the only holder of the awards of all three most prestigious physical companies in the world. The magazine Scientific American dubbed him one of the socially most involved intellectuals of our times. He stars in the film Unbelievers where he, together with such icons as Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Woody Allen...

Professor Paul von Blum at the University of California focuses on African-American studies, history and the fight for civil rights. He has almost 50 years of experience with political activism – since the 1960s when the African-American Civil Rights Movement started. He personally participated in several political demonstrations, including the legendary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on...

The former science director of the European Southern Observatory, the world’s largest astronomical observatory. He helped to develop the world’s most powerful telescope (VLT) in Chile and contributed to many major discoveries of current astronomy. He was a member of one of the two teams that confirmed the accelerating expansion of the universe. Three US astronomers were awarded the 2011 Nobel Priz...

What is the future of maritime transport? What is the protection against pirates? These questions were answered in Hyde Park Civilization by Karel Zeman, captain of long-distance maritime transport who managed an attack of pirates by the Philippine Coast. And what is it like to steer the world’s biggest icebreaker? You asked Valentine Davydyants, captain of the icebreaker “50 Years of Victory” who...

Orley Ashenfelter, a professor of economics at Princeton University, a former president of the American Economic Association and an editor-in-chief of the American Economic Review. He was one of the first to use natural experiments in economics years ago, which up until then had been used exclusively in natural sciences. What does one of the world’s most prominent academic economists think about t...

George Elwood Smith, a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physics, was an exclusive guest of Hyde Park Civilization. He is a co-inventor of the charge-coupled device (CCD) that has changed our lives forever. It is used on a daily basis - e.g. in phones and cameras, in medicine by physicians, in mapping by geodesists, in telescopes by astronomers looking into the deep of the universe. Yet, its basic st...

He participated in Skylab projects and international space stations. He designs habitats for extreme environments not only on the Earth but also e.g. on the Moon or Mars. Space architect David Nixon was the guest of Hyde Park Civilization. https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10441294653-hyde-park-civilizace/213411058091109-david-nixon

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a courageous woman who with seven others took part in the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. She was incarcerated, declared to be of unsound mind and locked up in a psychiatric hospital. After her release, she became involved in protests against Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s deportation from the USSR and against the use of psychiatric f...

Astronaut Andrew Feustel was an exclusive guest of Hyde Park Civilization. We overcame 8,793 km and seven time zones to pre-shoot the interview to fit Andrew’s time schedule. The connection between Prague and the Johnson Space Center in Houston worked. We talked about the Space Shuttle Columbia and Challenger disasters and about three other space shuttles. In the studio we also had the book Cosmic...

Professor Gregorii Toshinski, an 85-year-old Russian scientist, one of the fathers of nuclear energy and the inventor of the fastest nuclear submarines in the world and a small reactor that could be the future of nuclear energy, accepted our invitation to Hyde Park Civilization. We pre-shot the interview with our questions in September and provide the Russian version of the professor’s answers. Th...

Rick McCallum produced The Star Wars Trilogy, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles as well as the music video “Undercover” for The Rolling Stones, which MTV named the Best Video of the Decade. How are mega films produced? What are his best memories of the 30-year cooperation with George Lucas? How difficult are the best US actors to work with? What is he planning now? And does he like 3D movies? You...

The Internet – how will it evolve? Where does the freedom on the web end and its abuse start? We contacted Vint Cerf, the vice-president of Google and “the father of the Internet,” in the USA via Google Hangout. He is now working on an interplanetary Internet, i.e. on how to communicate with space probes. The interview is in the original version. Hyde Park Civilization also invited Josef Šlerka, t...

He broke the barrier that was supposed to be unbreakable and thanks to him we can see for example how cells in our brain change - Stefan Hell, a laureate of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He invented the STED microscope that allows us to look at living cells and their parts in much more detail than ever before. The invention has an enormous impact on medicine, biology and chemistry. He was bor...

Freewill, consciousness, understanding but also technology and the impact of religion on our society - these are the topics studied by professor Daniel Dennett. He is a philosofer of the mind who combines his views with evolutionary biology. Among other things he says: We live in a world where people are losing respect for facts. Where are the limits of our free will? How should we approach new te...

Superman, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Flash, Thor or Iron Man - superheroes that save the world and help teach students. The physicist James Kakalios has a special use for them. Their extraordinary feats help him explain various principles of physics - from Newton's laws to quantum mechanics. And he does even more than that. Do you know how your alarm clock or your fridge work? The man who has the answer...

The human brain is not designed for math, it is made for language and stories, says Cedric Villani, a mathematician and a laureate of the Fields Medal, considered by many to be the Nobel Prize in mathematics. He is mainly working on an equations that deals with chaos, how specifically? Where can we see mathematics around us? And why does he think that being a mathematician is a lot like being a po...

Chimpanzees have their own language, they use tools, eat meat, their groups have a strict hierarchy and in many ways they behave just like humans. Those are just some of the discoveries made by Jane Goodall who spent dozens of years with chimpanzees. Gradually she gained the trust of a troop and partially even became its member. Now she mainly fight for the protection of chimpanzees and wild natur...

Paul Rusesabagina saved 1,268 people by hiding them during the Rwanda genocide in the hotel that he managed. He risked his life as well as the life of his family so that others would have a chance to survive. Where does one find the strength to do something like this? And the motivation? “There was nothing heroic about this,” says Paul, who sees himself as a regular man. How did his wife Tatiana s...

Interview about Václav Havel, relationship with China, pope Francis, the crisis in the Middle East, religious harmony, education and relationship between science and religion. www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/1044129…ritual-leader/

How thin is the line between good and evil? How and why good people become evil. Would we all become evil under certain conditions? Professor Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist and the author and participant in the famous Stanford prison experiment, will answer these questions in Hyde Park Civilization. He also researched the nature of good and evil in modern prisons and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib....

The father of modern linguistics. A political activist. One of the world’s most cited scientists. About learning languages. Human rights. US and Russian politics. Events in the Ukraine and the Arab Spring? With your questions. In Hyde Park Civilization. www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/1044129…ical-activist/

John Searle, one of the most famous US philosophers, in Hyde Park Civilization. How does he describe the Chinese Room Argument, a thought experiment which shows the insufficiency of the Turing test? What does he think about artificial intelligence? What fundamental thing distinguishes man from a machine? www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/1044129…-and-linguist/