Public Lands, Ranked-Choice Voting, Hearing Aids and Memory

Guest: Brigham Daniels, PhD, Professor of Environmental and Natural Resources Law at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School  The occupation of a national wildlife area in Oregon by a small armed group is now in its second week. The leader of the group – Ammon Bundy – says they will not leave until there is a plan in place to transfer millions of acres of federal land in the area to local control. Armed standoffs are unusual, but in the West there is a long history of conflict between the federal government and local officials over who controls the land.

Guest: Jason McDaniel, PhD, Political Science Professor at San Francisco State University  Picking your first, second and third choice of something feels natural when it’s a lunch order or the office costume contest. It’s not so natural – and maybe even unhelpful – when you’re asked to do it in an election. A few dozen cities, including San Francisco, have been experimenting with the system called “ranked-choice voting,” to avoid the need for a run-off election if the first round of results are too close. But analysis recently published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, suggests the strategy makes things worse for voters, not better.

Guest: Jamie Desjardins, PhD, Audiologist and Rehab Sciences Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso  About a third of Americans in their sixties have hearing loss, but only a fraction of them wear hearing aids to help. There’s a stigma attached to those little wires hooked over your ears which keeps a lot of people from signing up for what could actually be a tremendous help – not just to their hearing, but to their overall cognitive function.

Guest: Claudio Holzner, PhD, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Utah  Infamous drug lord El Chapo is back in the same Mexican prison he escaped from six months ago. Authorities have released video of the raid when they recaptured the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel that looks like footage from a Hollywood movie – heavily armed marines pounding down doors, searching hidden passageways. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped through a sewer into a stolen car before he was apprehended. In a strange twist, authorities say it was Guzman’s desire to see his name in Hollywood lights that led to his capture.

Guest: Beth Gorrie, Director of Staten Island’s OUtLOUD Program  What might happen if everyone in your community was reading and discussing the same book?  Staten Island residents spent a month reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and exploring its themes in community events. What made the experience powerful was the fact that it happened to coincide with a period of heightened racial tension after the death of Eric Garner in police custody on Staten Island.

Guest: Jane Hall, PhD, Professor of Economics at the University of California Fullerton  China’s infamously polluted air poses a challenge to the nation’s leaders, who’ve established aggressive growth plans for the country. Every time a big international event comes to Beijing – the 2008 Summer Olympics, for instance or a summit of world leaders – officials order up blue skies by temporarily shutting down steel mills and coal plants in the area. Profits and output fall temporarily, too. So imagine the costs a longer-term solution might bring – permanent factory closures, limits on automobile traffic and the transition to cleaner, but more expensive fuels.