My favorite podcasts
04 Dec 2016I have to be honest: I am addicted to listening to audio podcasts. Every working day I spend at least 30 minutes listening. I have started looking forward to long train rides because I can catch up on my listening. In fact, you are lucky I am writing this post right now because I am on the train from Zurich to Heidelberg and it was a hard choice between listening and writing this :)
Of course I want to share my podcast knowledge with you and please leave a comment if there is another podcast you think I should listen to. I am always interested in more.
There is no ranking here. I have phases in which I prefer listening to one over the other but they are all good.
Science related podcasts
Open Science Radio
I discoverd this podcast by Konrad Foerstner and Matthias Fromm early this summer and loved it from the start. Many of their episodes are in English and some in German. They talk about anything that is going on in the world of Open Science.
Science: Disrupt
This podcast is highly professional and I love the teasers they have in the beginning. They talk about new developments going on in science as a profession. Usually they interview guests with a interesting projects.
The Effort Report
This is a must listen for every young researcher who wants to stay in science. Each episode deals with a different topic researchers struggle with and the hosts Roger Peng and Elisabeth Matsui talk about how they personally deal with the struggles.
TED Radio Hour
This podcasts is all about TED talks. Each episode has a special topic; several TED talks are featured and the speakers iterviewed. The perfect audio alternative to watching the presentations.
PLOScast
I just discovered this podcast very recently after it was brought up in the Open Science Podcast. As the name suggests it is the podcast from the PLOS journal and as such they talk a lot about open science as well.
Stats related podcasts
Not so standard deviations
This podcast by Hilary Parker and (again) Roger Peng is the most relaxing data science podcast. It’s just like listening to an interesting conversation that you can’t contribute to (except by tweeting to @SSDeviations). They talk a lot about R and common problems in the life of a data scientist.
Data stories
This is one of my newer discoveries. In data stories the hosts Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner interview guests who do interesting analyses.
Talking machines
Talking machines is a machine learning podcast. It often features interesting machine learning methods. As such it is sometimes hard for me to understand. Every once in a while they have truly fascinating episodes that I like a lot and for machine learners who want to learn more stuff this is definetly the go-to podcast.
Other good podcasts
Invisibilia
This is definetly the most touching podcast I have listened to. It has happened that I sat on the train crying a little bit. It features the unvisible things in life, which sounds a little superstitious but it really is not. Unfortunately, but considering the research effort they have to go throug understandably, there are quite few episodes each year.
Philosophy Bites
Every episode of Philosophy Bites deals with one philosophical topic. The podcast guests are usually philosophers who deal with this topic every day. The episodes are quite short, so this is a nice podcast for a 20 minute commute.
Echo der Zeit
This is the best daily Swiss news podcast.
Das Computermagazin (B5 aktuell)
B5 aktuell is the news radio in Bavaria (Germany). They have this surprisingly outstanding podcast about anything a geek in Germany would want to know. From new devices to new EU laws dealing with the internet it provides just great information to bavarian listeners each sunday.
I listen to all my podcasts on my smartphone. After having tried a couple of different apps I ended up using BeyondPod with which I am very happy.