What’s That Noise?!

What is the connection between bedsheet-related incidents and the consumption of cheese? Hopefully none. That would be confusing, and weird. However! There might be a correlation between those unusually paired items! Correlations, correlations. Part two is about the wonderfully bizarre world of data correlations. Is it not correlations at the heart of AI and advertising, after all? That's certainl...

Today we chat Dr. Dillon Mahmoudi , Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County about his confusion with AI and advertising! Join Tommy, Al and Dillon in this first episode of a two-part series that explores the complexities of how targeted advertisements show up in your smartphone. Even with his background in computer science, Dillon is as confu...

Happy New Year, everyone! I am so grateful for two things! First, we have a new co-host! It's truly my pleasure to introduce my dear friend, Al Coombs to you. Al is a seasoned radio broadcaster who hosted and co-hosted shows in London, Ontario for over a decade. He joins us at WTNCast as a freshly-minted public school teacher, too! His warmth and interview experience is truly invigorating. It's su...

This latest episode is a special one. Tommy has wanted to explore predictive policing for a while. He had the opportunity to do so as a sample case study for one of the classes he teaches at Queen's University: AI, Ethics & Society - a Masters of Engineering course where students use any media format they wish to explore the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence systems.  And...

In association with the University of Texas Press , the third instalment of the My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora special series features, Prof. Mehdi Tavana Okasi and Dr. Roger Sedarat. Mehdi is Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College of the State University of New York, who was born in Iran and became a refugee of the Iran-Iraq war, which led him to the suburbs of...

In this second instalment of our special series, in association with the University of Texas Press , Tommy speaks with Dr. Babak Elahi, Head of Department, Liberal Studies at Kettering University. Dr. Elahi is a special contributor to My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora , not only as the musical talent behind the series' music, but also as author of chapter 25: Errand. Dr. Elahi...

From the vault of unpublished episodes comes with a fascinating conversation with Desmond Cox, an IT and software development professional who has a fresh and often competing take on Tommy's understandings and perspectives about data, privacy and ethics. During a trip to Germany in 2019, Tommy and his wife visited Des and Chrissy - good friends who moved out of Ontario to start new lives in Leipzi...

"In the four decades since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iranian-Americans have made sense of their lives and reconciled their sense of belonging and not belonging through writing, first through poetry and memoir in the immediacy of migration and exile, and later in a developing and rich explosion of fiction. In the past decade, we have seen a blossoming of nonfiction writing that reflects compl...

In today's chat, Tommy sits down with his wife, Cristina, and his new second-cousins, Georgi and Florin Stancu, to share their incredible journey. Born, raised, and built lives in Bucharest, Romania, Cristina translates between Tommy and his new family to discuss their decision to leave Romania in search of better opportunities and a better for life for their daughter, Alyssa. Now living in Dachau...

Thank you for joining us on the most important episode we've published to date, and perhaps will be the most important episode we will publish - for more reasons than we could possibly articulate here in written text. In this episode, we discuss the inescapably difficult but exceedingly important matter of quality versus quantity life - when given a terminal diagnosis. It is impossible to convey o...

Happy New Year, everyone!  Derek and I are excited to bring you our first episode of 2020. Today's chat is a follow-up to the last episode of 2019. If you haven't heard it yet, you'll want to go back and check it out or this episode will leave you feeling as confused as Tommy was after Episode 28: Kawhi Leonard and the Expectation of Privacy in the Public Sphere . Over the break, Tommy felt Episod...

After the Toronto Raptors won their first championship in franchise history, attention quickly shifted from celebration to discussions of whether or not the team’s star player and finals MVP, Kawhi Leonard, would resign with the team. What ensued was commonly referred to by media as the “Kawhi Watch,” which captivated the city, and perhaps even all of Canada, and led media and fans on path that wo...

Imagine spending 24.5 years in a specific laboratory. And then imagine switching, to seemingly start all over again. In this show Tommy chats with Dr. Karen Rees-Milton, a veteran bench scientist who is expertly versed in protein biochemistry, enzyme kinetics, classical biochemistry, immunology, microbiology, molecular biology, cell culture, and glycobiology. After nearly a decade as a research co...

In this episode, we continue discussing a long-standing theme of the show: how government develops, mobilizes, and uses surveillance technologies abroad and at home. More specifically, we focus on a program called the "Real Time Regional Gateway," a secretive data processing and mining system introduced by the NSA and deployed during American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In May of...

Tommy sits down with Dr. Midori Ogasawara, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa, and one of the premiere investigative journalists on surveillance in Japan. For nearly twenty years, Midori has researched the legacy of surveillance in Japan, and is the only reporter from Japan to have interviewed NSA whistle blower, Edward Snowden. A recipient over 9 academic awards and the autho...

This episode is centered on the theme of representation and authority in the public sphere. Can we trust what authorities tell us about how we use our digital technologies, or how laws and public policies are developed and mobilized? How can we make sense of official justifications for interventions that are increasingly intrusive in our daily lives? From Apple and Google to our own governments, t...

It's been so long! But we're back! Derek and I have reconnected and we've got a great run of new content coming your way. Today, we begin by touching base - to see where we've been to figure out where we're heading. A big focus of our reconnection is something that has kept Tommy really busy this past half year. In what we might otherwise call "A Day in the Life of Metadata: Part Two", Tommy updat...

An episode to begin the term, and one to close off. Thank you so much, and our deepest apologies, for our hiatus! It has been a great calendar year thus far, and also an exceptionally busy one. In today's episode, Tommy sits down with Dr. Samer Abboud, Associate Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University to chat about language. Tommy and Samer are old buddies and colleag...

Happy New Year, everyone! We're so very excited to share our first episode of the New Year, feat. John Hannant-Minchel, a Masters student of Kinesiology at Queen's University. After meeting at a local breakfast hotspot in the beautiful city of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, John and Tommy found time to sit down again - over another coffee - to explore perspectives from within, and around, the Sociocul...

In Volume 20, Derek and Tommy sit down with Cale Sutherland, an Associate Lawyer practicing injury and health law at Lerner's LLP in the beautiful city of London, Ontario, Canada. Mr. Sutherland helps our co-hosts not only debunk some preconceived ideas they had about how much the law is like our favourite tv shoe, Suits. Cale also helps them debunk the notion that the courtroom and classroom are...

In this week's episode, Derek and Tommy chat about application privacy on iOS and Android. New technologies such as the Samsung Galaxy, Pixel, and iPhone have become so heavily relied upon for communication that it is almost unfathomable to be fully 'disconnected' from the social world. But our phones are not simply communication devices - they are now repositories for a host of sensitive informat...

Tommy is back!  After a summer spent researching data privacy in Bochum, Germany (and traversing the Swiss alps with his newly-engaged parter), Tommy is back in studio to chat with Derek about his research project on visualizing data flows in smartphones. In many ways our cell phones are the most important communication tool in our daily lives. Not only are smart phones embedded into the fabric of...

The ASA annual meeting is almost upon us! In our final pre-ASA episode, Derek chats with one of his own mentors, Dr. Carla Pfeffer , Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina (Derek's alma mater!), about her book Queering Families: The Postmodern Partnerships of Cisgender Women and Transgender Men (Oxford University Press), teaching convers...

Welcome to the second episode of our little University of Toronto mini-series! As we ramp up for the ASA annual meeting this weekend in Philadelphia, Derek chats with Dr. Jooyoung Lee (PhD UCLA), Associate Professor in the Deparment of Sociology at the University of Toronto and faculty member at the Centre for the Study of the United States in the Munk School of Global Affairs. In this episode, we...

Following a few weeks off, we are finally back in the groove in the leadup to the American Sociolocial Association's annual meeting in Philly! In this week's episode,  Derek  sits down with a long time twitter-friend Dr. Neda Maghbouleh (PhD University of California), Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, to chat about her book  The Limits of Whiteness: I...