Today, I would like to share with you three podcast episodes. While discussing issues related to COVID-19, they actually offer great insight about consumer psychology, and about the limitations of technology.
Why we stockpile(d) toilet paper
In episode 34 the “It’s all just a bunch of BS” podcast, Caroline Roux discusses decision making in conditions of (perceived) scarcity, illustrated in the stockpiling of toilet paper, when countries started going into lockdown.
Why tracing COVID-19 with an app is tricky
In this episode of the “Big Questions” podcast, Grant Blank discusses some of the technical and social challenges of using mobile apps to track and monitor the spread of COVID-19 in the UK.
Why automated recommendations technology is struggling
At around minute 16 of this episode of “The Future, This week” podcast, Sandra Peter and Kai Riemer discuss how recommendation algorithms struggle to perform in conditions that do not match the historical datasets used to develop them. Peter and Riemer refer to this article published in MIT Technology Review “Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models”.
I hope you enjoy listening to these episodes. What are your podcast recommendations?
Ana Canhoto 
2 thoughts on “Podcast recommendations: Why we stockpile(d) toilet paper; Why tracing COVID-19 with an app is tricky; and Why automated recommendations technology is struggling”