The Weekend for Sunday 23 January 2022

 

08:12 UK Royal Society investigates misinformation 

Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2021 was vaccine, but it could just as easily have been 'misinformation'. This nebulous thing has been front and centre since the dawn of the pandemic.Stemming the flow of misinformation has proved difficult, for governments and particularly for social media companies. Do you try to repress it, stop it from spreading - adopt a mitigation approach, as it were? Do you go for an elimination approach, deleting misinformation, pretending it never existed? Do you try to educate people to get better at spotting it - a time-intensive process which might not even yield results?

All these questions and more are the focus of a new report from the United Kingdom's Royal Society. Frank Kelly is a Professor of the Mathematics of Systems at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and Chair of the report.

8:35 Karam Shaar: Syria in the public eye 

Dr Karam Shaar is an economist, a consultant on Syria and the middle east, a policy adviser and a lecturer on middle eastern politics. He lives in Karori in Wellington, a long way from where he grew up in Aleppo in Syria. Dr Shaar is concerned that world has stopped watching what has happened in Syria and how the members of the Syrian diaspora are being treated around the world. 

9:05 90 years of backcountry exploring 

2021 marked the 90th anniversary of FMC, or the Federated Mountain Clubs. As an organisation it predates the Great Walks, but they've made a lot of huge wanders themselves. To tell us more about the history of the clubs and where they're headed this century Emile spoke to Former editor of the organisation's magazine Backcountry Shaun Barnett, and the current President of the FMC Jan Finlayson. 

9:30 Caledonian Noir with Liam McIlvaney 

Liam McIlvanney is one of the most distinguished British crime fiction writers around these days. He also happens to be a Scotsman who lives in Dunedin.After his first novel, All the Colours of the Town in 2009, McIlvanney went on to publish Where The Dead Men Go in 2013, which won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best New Zealand Crime Novel in 2014.

In 2018 he published The Quaker, introducing us to DI McCormack, the detective inspector tasked with solving the mystery of a Bible-quoting serial killer stalking the streets of late-60s Glasgow. The Quaker was met with rapturous acclaim and received the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year - an award named after Liam's father, the acclaimed crime writer William McIlvanney, often referred to as the father of Tartan Noir.

Liam's fourth novel, the Heretic, the second featuring DI McCormack, which was published this week.

10:05 The Medieval secret to a good sleep

How do you sleep? We getting told we need "full 8 hours", but where does that phrase come from?We're constantly being given advice on how to sleep, apps are geared to "unwind" our minds, you can buy countless books about how to be a more rested you. But we don't always interrogate that advice or look at how our ancestors behaved. Professor Roger Ekirch is a historian at the Virginia Tech. He has spent decades looking at the accepted history of sleep trying to understand how our ancestors slept, and how they viewed the concept of rest.

10:25 Emma Vickers: filling the big tent

Now, if  we say cabaret what does that mean to you? A musical about the growing power of the Nazi Party in the Weimar Republic? It's also a thriving art form with a strong presence in Aotearoa. Emma Vickers is a curator and performer who this year is directing The Living Lounge at Splore festival on the last weekend of February. It's a performance stage,which climaxes with  The Wide-Awake Club!' cabaret! She joins Emile to talk the role of the circus tent in a pandemic.

10:40 Who Lived There: Riccarton House 

We're going on a journey into Aotearoa's past now! We're continuing our series 'Who Lived There' this morning, it's based on a book of the same name which came out last year. Jane King took the photographs and Nic McCloy researched and wrote down the stories of dozens of significant buildings and places. Nic is taking us through these amazing buildings over the course of the month. This weekend we're looking at domestic lives. Nic takes us on a journey to the Riccarton House. 

11:05 Paul Bosauder: A life in Flamenco 

Time to put on your dancing shoes! Paul Bosauder is one of Aotearoa's premier musicians, and one of the world's foremost flamenco guitarists. He joins Emile to play through the history of Flamenco, and look towards its future.