History

Podcast Of The Week: Pablo Escobar's Hippos on NPR Shortwave

Did you know that Pablo Escobar brought 4 hippos into his estate in Colombia? After he died in 1993, the hippos were left run wild. Fast forward almost 30 years and there are now 400 of them ravaging the ecosystem of the Colombian landscape near the estate. This great episode of shortwave debates the different conservation options that the Colombians are investigating to manage the hippo population, which could reach 500 by 2030 if left unchecked.

The Roots Of Corporate Work Culture In Soviet USSR

In 1935 a Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov set a record by extracting 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift, compared to the shift average of 7 tonnes. Stakhanov was hailed as the new standard for super workers in Soviet Russia and used to create a new movement called Stakhanovism to promote workers giving their all in the service of their work. Eighty-five years later, this cult of work is alive and well in the corporate workplace where employees are expected to hand over their lives to their jobs and play the corporate power & optics games that are rife in that environment.

Ancient Storytelling Memory Technique

Researchers in Australia conducted a memory test study where participants were asked to remember and recite a list of butterfly names. Using ancient aboriginal story telling techniques to encode knowledge, one group in the study were taught how to construct a story around the names. Another group were taught how to use the memory palace technique to remember the names, and the control group were left untaught.

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