Start the Week - Loneliness and Inner Voices

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the psychologist Charles Fernyhough about the inner speech in our heads. But what if it's a lone voice? The writer Olivia Laing explores what it's like to be lonely in a bustling city, while the playwright Alistair McDowall explores what happens when you're abandoned on a distant planet with no sense of time. The biographer Frances Wilson writes a tale of hero-worship, betrayal and revenge through the life of Thomas De Quincey, a man who modelled his opium-habit on Coleridge and his voice and writing on Wordsworth. Producer: Katy Hickman.

More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS More or Less: The story of average

In the 1600s astronomers were coming up with measurements to help sailors read their maps with a compass. But with all the observations of the skies they were making, how do they choose the best number? We tell the story of how astronomers started to find the average from a group of numbers. By the 1800s, one Belgian astronomer began to apply this to all sorts of social and national statistics ? and the ?Average Man? was born.

Curious City - Illinois Has No Budget, So Where Do State Tax Dollars Go, Anyway?

The answers are crazy. We’ll have fun looking. But you’ll probably be pretty mad by the end. Things are worse than you thought.

The bad news:
We’re paying out billions more than we take in. Just without setting priorities.
The state comptroller — who makes the payments — calls it “ad hoc” and “ridiculous.”

The worse news: We’re still letting billions of dollars in services go totally unfunded.

And: We’re breaking the non-profits that provide those services.

Full story, complete with charts.

Curious City - Illinois Has No Budget, So Where Do State Tax Dollars Go, Anyway?

The answers are crazy. We’ll have fun looking. But you’ll probably be pretty mad by the end. Things are worse than you thought.

The bad news:
We’re paying out billions more than we take in. Just without setting priorities.
The state comptroller — who makes the payments — calls it “ad hoc” and “ridiculous.”

The worse news: We’re still letting billions of dollars in services go totally unfunded.

And: We’re breaking the non-profits that provide those services.

Full story, complete with charts.

African Tech Roundup - Celebrating The African Tech Round-Up’s First Birthday!

The African Tech Round-up turns one today, and it’s difficult not be sentimental. It’s been an incredibly rewarding year! We set out to provide some much-needed coverage of the biggest digital, tech and innovation news stories from the African continent— minus all the PR-soaked click-bait and consumer-driven tech chatter one tends to find all over the web. We’ve certainly done our best to deliver on that mandate. In producing the show over the last 52 weeks, we hope that like us, you’ve come to better understand the intricacies of Africa’s emerging tech and innovation scene, and that you’ve found the discussions and debates we’ve engaged in as interesting and enlightening as we did. To celebrate our anniversary, on this week’s episode, Tefo Mohapi and I will be sharing audio highlights from the past year. Do join us in revisiting great chats we’ve had with some of the more memorable guests we’ve had on the show-- folks like Rebecca Enonchong, Emeka Okoye, Dominique Collett-Antolik, Mbwana Alliy, and others. We’d like to thank you for supporting this podcast by listening in every week, sharing it with other people, and engaging with us on social media, via email and by sending us audio voice notes that we shared on past episodes of the show. We’re excited to witness the community that is forming around this platform. Let’s keep talking! Finally, we’d like to dedicate everything we’ve so far achieved, and everything we purpose to do going forward to you, and all the other incredible people of the Motherland who continue to work tirelessly in trenches of leading firms and emerging startups alike, to make Africa great. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

African Tech Roundup - Mbwana Alliy of Savannah Fund on the advantages of being a homegrown venture capitalist

Mbwana Alliy is the founder and managing partner at Savannah Fund, an Africa focused Technology Venture Capital fund that runs both an accelerator and seed investments in e-commerce, gaming, education technology and social networking. In this not-so-quick chat with Andile Masuku and Tefo Mohapi, Mbwana shares insights on the venture capital scene in Sub-Saharan Africa, and fields tough questions about the very public troubles at one of his more high-profile investments-- the cloud data service startup, Angani.

African Tech Roundup - Tawanda Kembo of BitFinance & Vusi Ndebele of PayNow on Zimbabwe’s emerging tech scene

At Afrikoin Joburg 2015, hosted at Alpha Code in December 2015, Andile Masuku spoke to two leading Zimbabwean startup founders with businesses in the fintech space, and asked them to unpack why Zimbabwe might be the perfect use-case for disruptive fintech innovations.

PHPUgly - 5:Composer Gold

Show notes: https://github.com/PHPUgly/podcast/blob/master/shows/ep5.md Topics Composer Goes Gold US Taxes and the 1099 contractor life Codebase Rewrite Using Lumen and Twilio to build an IVR Spark news The hosts Eric Van Johnson Twitter / Github / Blog / About.me Tom Rideout Twitter / Github / About.me Follow us on Twitter @PHPUgly Email us at Podacast@phpugly.com

Slate Books - ABC: When Breath Becomes Air

Critics Katy Waldman, Parul Sehgal, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss Paul Kalanithi's bestselling memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. Join us next month to discuss A Hologram for the King by Dave Egger's.

Slate's Audio Book Club is brought to you by Fun Home, winner of five Tony Awards including Best Musical. The Associated Press calls this groundbreaking production, “The best of what Broadway can do.” Get tickets at FunHomeBroadway.com.

And by Audible.com, with more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook at AudiblePodcast.com/ABC.

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