Moira talks to author David Helvarg about his book, Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes. He tells the story of the Coast Guard and how their missions range from saving fishermen in the icy waters off Alaska to rescuing thousands in the wake of Katrina.

Dr. Moira Gunn talks to JJ Bienaime, President & CEO of BioMarin Pharmaceuticals about the problem of orphan diseases, diseases not yet under research by pharmaceutical companies because of a lack of financial incentive to market new medications for treatment.

Joel and Jeff discuss the value (or lack thereof) of meta-discussion, how much "big iron" popular websites need, and whether code forking is sometimes inevitable.

Even without deep technical knowledge or a fat Rolodex, you can be a community superhero. In this talk from the 2009 MySQL Conference, Sheeri Cabral, the 2007-2008 MySQL Advocate of the Year, shares some pointers on things anyone can do to help the technology and community of your favorite open source project.

President Obama has sent a powerful message to the American public since taking office: Social innovation can play an important role in rebuilding a stronger country. With the passage of stimulus packages in areas such as clean energy, national service, and climate change, it's clear that the White House is approaching national challenges in new ways. In this panel, hosted by Full Circle Fund and sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, key staff in the Obama administration provide the broad outlines for these exciting changes.

Moira speaks with Fresh Air commentator and linguist Geoff Nunberg, who discusses his book The Years of Talking Dangerously and assesses the impact of words in a dynamic, changing world. In the book, he explains why grammar buffs are drawn to sarcasm, and deftly unpacks the telling phrases of our national conversation, from progressive to elite to change, as well as the national conversation itself.

Paul Hastings, president and CEO of Oncomed Pharmaceuticals, discusses the controversial topic of cancer stem cells, what he calls the root of the tumor. He also talks about how his company is working with other pharmaceutical companies who are helping with Oncomed's biotech work.

It's been approximately 6,500 days since Tim Berners-Lee created the first Web page. In such short a time, the Web has achieved far more than could be thought of at the time. What will the next 6,500 days bring us? Noted author, and former editor of the Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, speculates on the future of the Web.

Moira interviews Matt Gardner, President & CEO, BayBIO, the Northern California Life Sciences Organization, about the organization's the new free online Impact 2009 Report about all the biotech companies in California and everything they are working on.

Moira speaks with Rory Cooper and Oz Osborn about quality of life technology. The Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) who's mission is to transform lives in a large and growing segment of the population, people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability.

Moira speaks with former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler about his book The End of Overeating, in which he discusses what has been invisibly added to the American supply, leaving some of us obese, and many of us, unexpectedly overweight. He tells us the science behind what happens to our brains when we eat food laden with salt, fat and sugar.

Joel and Jeff sit down with Damien Katz to discuss non-conventional databases, non-conventional programming languages, and taking on non-conventional programming projects.

Dave Winer discusses how Twitter and other social networking tools are changing the way that people read and react to the news. He talks about how the new ways to keep track of events have changed over the years and how these new methods are also likely to change. He also reviews his work in Twitter stats and what we can learn from them as well as where things may go next.

The Open Invention Network is a collaborative enterprise formed to promote Linux, and protect the open source community from the threats of patent assertion and litigation. Keith Bergelt's job as the CEO is to ensure that the edges of this network are not intruded upon, and that the self-regulatory nature of open source has an opportunity to spread beyond Linux and the 300 plus programs that exist today.

Ruby on Rails has been around for five years and three major versions, and while many small things have changed, the major principles are still the same. In this talk from the 2009 RailsConf, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, lists some of the things that failed to "kill" Rails, the philosophy and details of the upcoming Rails 3 release, and the key to productivity in software development.

There's growing awareness of the need to publish data online, and to support programmatic access to that data. In this conversation, host Jon Udell talks with Steven Willmott about how his company, 3Scale, helps businesses create and manage application programming interfaces to their data.

Joel and Jeff discuss HTML encoding, designing "safe by default", whether a question can be too simple, and the art of beta testing.

As more individuals have an online presence, developers continue to come up with new ways for people to post items. Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan discuss Posterous, a rich microblogging platform. They talk about how the service was developed, the architecture of the process, and the security methods in place to protect people. They also review their business model and their product roadmap.

Voice is the most natural, comfortable form of communication, but most customer interaction is done through text. In this presentation from the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference, Peter Diedrich of Mobivox describes their new voice CRM platform that improves customer satisfaction and retention by including sales messages into typical customer interactions.

Alexander Saint-Amand and Thomas A. Desmond describe how their firms use social networking techniques to meet the unique challenges of investment research and online trading. Saint-Amand explores how Gerson Lehrman Group qualifies & engages a global network of experts. Desmond details how TradeKing uses community features and user-generated content to change trading from a solitary experience to a social one.

Scott Ruthfield describes Jiffy, a new open source performance measurement tool for measuring true client-side performance of web sites. Ruthfield identifies the components of website performance problems and the decision process that led WhitePages.com to develop their own solution. Jiffy's goals, components, and a sample implementation provide a thorough introduction to the toolkit.