Past Events

What can a 19th-century mill disaster teach us about workplace safety today?

Join Professor Robert Forrant (UMass Lowell) and Gabriel Porter (Safety and Health Specialist/Process Safety Management Coordinator OSHA Boston Regional Office) for a compelling discussion moderated by Charles River Museum’s Director of Education, Stephen Guerriero. Forrant will delve into the catastrophic Pemberton Mill collapse of 1860—an industrial tragedy that claimed 98 lives, revealed systemic failures, and left questions of accountability unresolved. Porter will explore how OSHA builds on lessons from such events to safeguard workers in today’s industries. Together, they’ll connect history to modern-day practices, offering insights into the ongoing fight for safer workplaces.

Cambridge Forum takes an incisive look at America’s public health system in the light of another potential pandemic, and the prospect of an incoming president who is set to dismantle our current public health care science which is regarded by many, as the best in the world. Alarm bells were sounded early last December when The Lancet, the world’s top medical journal, published an issue dedicated to U.S. public health lauding its remarkable global record and worrying for its future, under a second Trump administration.

Join Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University, in partnership with Brandeis University Press and American Ancestors for a wide-ranging discussion about a fascinating period of global history as experts from both sides of the Atlantic discuss maritime commerce--the innovation, benefits, and damages of the spice trade.

Learn how the drive of sea captains, worldwide consumers’ taste, and technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping— enabled navigation across unprecedented distances, from such embarkation points as Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon to the exotic ports of Malacca, Goa, Bombay, where they tracked down elusive spices. Such travels impacted art, literature, and science worldwide; and they were often disastrous for local populations, who were frequently exploited as slave plantation labor. This wide-ranging account of a fascinating period of global history uses original maps and contemporary artists’ views to tell the story of how each port developed individually; while also encouraging us to consider contrasting points of view of the benefits and the damages of the maritime spice trade.

Dark matter accounts for some 27 percent of the universe but is invisible. One promising technique to reveal it is the analysis of gravitational lensing that very occasionally aligns galaxy clusters.

The much-noted “cosmic question mark” image for this event is the result of a rare alignment between two distant galaxies due to gravitational lensing. Professor Jacqueline McCleary explains how cosmologists use such examples of weak gravitational lensing between galaxy clusters to explore the nature of elusive dark matter and its interaction with galaxies. She discusses how cosmologists gather and analyze data from observatories on mountaintops, in the stratosphere, and in space.

Dr. McCleary is a collaborator in the Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey (LoVoCCS), the SuperpressureBalloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), and COSMOS-Web (a JWST collaboration).

SOLD OUT

GBH, Flour Bakery and Chef Joanne Chang present Sticky Bun School on
Saturday, Jan 11, 2025, 11am-12noon

Sweeten your weekend with an interactive baking event. GBH is partnering with Chef Joanne Chang and Flour Bakery for a special Saturday morning treat. Your $150 ticket includes a baking kit with ingredients to make 8 signature sticky buns, mailed directly to your home. We’ll also email you a Zoom link for special access to the one-hour virtual baking class led by Joanne Chang, the renowned pastry chef and founder of Flour Bakery.

On Saturday, January 11 at 11am, you’ll join Joanne live in a Zoom virtual event and follow along as she demonstrates how to make her signature sticky buns. She’ll share some baking tips with you. At the end of the class, she’ll answer some of your baking questions, too!

This activity is a great way to engage your whole family or gather your friends to make this delightful treat. Learn how to make warm, gooey, delicious sticky buns that will become a new baking tradition in your household.

And this event is the kind that keeps on giving. Whether you buy a ticket for yourself, or a loved one, know that your contribution will also go toward supporting GBH and public media.

Your ticket includes a sticky bun kit that is mailed to your house and the live hour Zoom Webinar class featuring Joanne Chang.
* $150 sticky bun kits shipped to continental USA locations
and
* $170 for sticky bun kits shipped to Canada, Alaska and Hawaiian residents


IMPORTANT: Ticket sales have ended for this event, so that we have time to mail out your sticky bun baking kits.

Photo Credit: Kristin Teig

This month, Vessela Stoyanova plays jazz inspired by Balkan folk music, with her electric marimba, Valerie Thompson on cello, and Fabio Pirozzolo on percussion.

The record-breaking heat of the last few years is, climate scientists say, “not just summer.” Two distinguished researchers, Mathew Barlow and Jeffrey Basara, discuss their recent important article about the sudden uptick in global temperature, why is worrying climate experts, how they analyze the global heat patternsand what must be done to address the problem.

Come down to the GBH Studios at the Boston Public Library for a nerdy night of NOVA science trivia! Get ready for creative categories and exciting prizes as we test your knowledge of the natural world, space, the history of science, and more!

This month, for the our last NOVA Science Trivia Night of 2024, we are going to take a look back at the year in science.

Registration is encouraged for this free event.

Limited seating is available on a first come, first serve basis. If you require a seat, we encourage you to arrive before the start time of this event.

Location: The GBH Studio at the Boston Public Library is located at 700 Boylston St. at the corner of Exeter Street inside the Newsfeed Café.

Parking: Limited metered parking is available in the area. We recommend taking public transportation when possible. MBTA’s Copley stop on the Green Line and Back Bay stop on the Orange Line are located nearby.

Concessions: Food and drink is available for purchase at the Newsfeed Café. Outside food is not permitted.

Cambridge Forum continues its investigation into the impact of AI: Servant or Master?  with FEEDING THE MACHINE on Thursday, December 19.  The proliferation of A.I. offers seemingly limitless implications for the future, however what is less known about, is the hidden human cost of the labor that feeds this machine - and it is horrific.   

Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions, laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible.

Social media content and AI training data are processed in outsource centers in Kenya and Uganda and the global south, where long hours, low pay and exposure to very disturbing material is the norm. The daily demands of the job are inhuman, content moderators for companies like Meta are expected to watch hours of suicides, rapes and torture  -“almost every day… you normalize things that are just not normal.” 

The authors of Feeding the Machine, James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant are based at Oxford University at the Oxford Internet Institute. They describe A.I. as “an extraction machine that feeds off humanity’s collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms.”  The purpose of their investigation was, “to give voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized & colonial exploitation.” 

Muldoon, our guest speaker, is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Essex.  Muldoon, Graham and Cant conducted hundreds of interviews during countless hours of fieldwork collected over more than a decade. The book describes the lives of the workers who are deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. The examples move from California, to Iceland, to Kenya, to Mexico and beyond, featuring stories from different composite characters. The data annotator in northern Uganda clicking through endless footage for $1.16 an hour; to the artist whose voice has been sold online; to the engineer pressured to deliver an imperfect final product, without ethical guidelines.  

The book provides an important and overlooked examination of the network that maintains an exploitative system, revealing the untold truth about the excessively high human cost of creating A.I.

Muldoon is joined in the conversation by Josh Miller-Lewis, co-founder and senior editorial director of More Perfect Union.

GBH Music and JazzBoston are co-hosting a new series to showcase the breadth of incredible jazz talent in the Greater Boston area. The event is held on the second Thursday of every month through February.

This month, Fabiola Mendez and her quartet will be performing original selections from their newest album "Flora Campesina," a fusion of Puerto Rican folk melodies with Afro-Caribbean and Jazz influences.

Tickets are free, but registration is encouraged. Please note that by registering for this event you agree to receive email communications from GBH Music.
 About Fabiola Mendez:

Fabiola Méndez is a Puerto Rican cuatro player, singer, educator, and Emmy-nominated composer focused on the exploration of culture and identity through story-telling. Her music is a blend of Folk, Afro-Caribbean & Jazz, with the cuatro, a ten-string traditional guitar of Puerto Rico, as the lead melody. Recognized as the Latin Artist of the Year by the Boston Music Awards, Fabiola and her band have performed on national and international stages, including: NPR Tiny Desk, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, the Hatch Memorial Shell in Boston, the Harris Theater in Chicago, Santurce Fine Arts Center, among many others. She has received numerous awards, such as the Quincy Jones Award, the Brother Thomas Fellowship, ASCAP Lucille and Jack Yellen Award 2022 and a Children's and Family Emmy nomination for Outstanding Interactive Media in 2023. Fabiola holds a Bachelor's in Music from Berklee College of Music, where in 2018 she became the first graduate to play the Puerto Rican cuatro as principal instrument.