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Alex Gallafent
England’s soccer dilemma
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One of the favorites to win this year’s FIFA world cup tournament in South Africa is England. After all, it’s home to one of the top professional soccer leagues on the planet. But England only won a world championship once, way back in 1966 and The World’s Alex Gallafent (an England fan) is now worried that the English team is unraveling less than 100 days from kick-off. Download MP3 (flickr image by .imelda)
Dancing through the 20th century
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The World’s Alex Gallafent introduces us to ballet dancer Frederic Franklin. At 95 years old, he’s still performing on stage. Franklin got his big break in Paris, back in the 1930s. He later went on to star in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo before making his home in the United States. Franklin tells his own story on today’s show. Download MP3 (Photo courtesy of Frederic Franklin / Maurice Seymour)
Tech Podcast 280: Cross Cultural Training Goes Online, & Reliving the Dot Com Bubble
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Here you see a graph of the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock index from 1994 to 2008. See that peak? That’s the “dot com” bubble. In this week’s podcast, we take a step back in time to those heady days just before that bubble burst. What was it like to live through that? We’ll hear from someone who survived. Also, new body scanners come to US airports, and cross-cultural business training finds a new home online. And we end with some very interesting research on voice recognition technologies.
Crossing the cultural divide to do business
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American business doesn’t end at America’s borders. It hasn’t for a long time: in the 1980s, the trick was figuring out how to do business in Japan or Europe. Now it might be China or India or Brazil. There’s a boom in online software to help international businesses cross the cultural divide. Alex Gallafent surveys a couple of them. Download MP3
Homeopathy in Britain
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British lawmakers have determined that homeopathy, a form of alternative medicine, is not medicine of any kind at all (beyond a placebo.) Britain funds four homeopathic hospitals in the UK, spending about six million dollars per year. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.
Japanese Jazz Opera
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The standard view of Japanese popular culture, at least here in the US, is that it’s wacky, chaotic and impossible to fathom. For instance, there’s a video doing the rounds online that features actors dressed up as peasants singing American jazz standards, with Japanese lyrics. The World’s Alex Gallafent finds out what it all means. Download MP3 Chinese popular with American students
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Medgar Evers College Preparatory School is a public school in central Brooklyn, NY. Most of its student population is African American and Afro-Caribbean. The school runs one of the largest Chinese language programs for students not from a Chinese background in the US. The World’s Alex Gallafent went back to school for us. Download MP3
Polish sound postcards
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Even during the Communist days of the 1960s and 70s, Poles managed to get their hands on western pop music. A Donna Summer track, for example, would come in the form of a sound postcard (pictured), a small plastic rectangle covered in grooves, both literally and figuratively. We hear from Mat Schulz, a collector of Polish sound postcards. Download MP3 The Haitian Revolution
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You can’t understand Haiti without understanding the slave revolt and war for independence that shaped its early days. We hear from Laurent Dubois, author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. First though, a story from Alex Gallafent about Haiti and vodou and historical misunderstandings. (Image of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture: GETTY IMAGES) Download MP3
Haiti’s vodou religion
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The earthquake in Haiti was recently blamed on a ‘pact with the devil’. Anthropologists say the claim has a long history, going back to centuries-old misrepresentations of Haitian vodou. And they say the currency of such ideas will make a difference to Haiti’s future, too. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports. Download MP3
New York’s Haitian community
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Haitians living abroad have been struggling to get in touch with relatives as communication systems in Haiti were badly damaged by this week’s earthquake. Haitians in New York has been donating money and putting together food packets. The World’s Alex Gallafent visits the Haitian community in Brooklyn, New York. Download MP3 (Photo: Alex Gallafent)
Dubai super tower
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The world’s tallest building has been opened in a dramatic fireworks ceremony in the Gulf emirate of Dubai. The Burj Khalifa is more than 2,700 feet high. Construction began in 2004, at the height of an economic boom but now the opening came after a financial crisis which has seen Dubai bailed out by Abu Dhabi. Bernard Zand, is a correspondent for ‘Der Spiegel’ Download MP3 (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)
Hacking into American drone aircraft
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Insurgents in Iraq have hacked into live video feeds from unmanned American drone aircraft, US media reports say. Shia fighters are said to have used off-the-shelf software programs to capture the footage. The hacking was possible because the remotely flown planes have an unprotected communications link. Alex Gallafent reports. Download MP3
Dubai in trouble
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Shares at Wall Street fell on worries about Dubai’s debt problems, with the Dow Jones ending down 154 points on Friday. It was the US markets’ first chance to react to news that state-owned Dubai World had asked for more time to repay its debts. American markets were closed for Thanksgiving when other world markets all suffered steep losses. Alex Gallafent reports. Download MP3(Photo credit: Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images)
Zen archers take aim in Manhattan
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Before there was Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there was the original: Zen in the Art of Archery. The 1953 book chronicled the story of Eugen Herrigel, a German who traveled to Japan to learn Kyudo, the Way of the Bow. But you don’t have to go that far. The World’s Alex Gallafent visits a zen archery class in the heart of Manhattan.Download MP3 (Photo: Alex Gallafent)
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