Podcast: The Computer Weekly Downtime Upload – Episode 7

In this week’s episode of the Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast, Brian McKenna, Caroline Donnelly and Clare McDonald dig a little deeper into some of the week’s biggest tech stories and trends.

• Caroline leads the team on a foray into the world of TV reviewing, as the trio cast a critical eye over how the scriptwriters at long-running BBC medical drama Casualty handled telling the story of a cyber attack and how it blighted the working day of the doctors and nurses within the fictional Holby City NHS Foundation Trust. 

• Clare talks about her recent visit to the one-day everywoman in Tech Forum, and how empowering women-only IT conferences can be, before picking out some of the key discussion themes from this year’s event. These include the importance of incorporating concepts like emotional intelligence and data ethics into artificial intelligence and machine learning.

• Brian talks about a project being spearheaded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) involving 5G connected cows, which formed the basis of a recent Downtime column in Computer Weekly. Using an app, members of the public can select and track a cow of their choosing and receive regular updates about what it is getting up to.

• The conversation concludes with a look into how the investigative work Computer Weekly has been doing, in collaboration with The Observer newspaper, into Facebook’s data processing and privacy procedures is progressing.