Exoneration, Creepy Robots, Genetic Diversity

Exonerated After 17 Years in Prison for the Murder of Her Son Guest: Kristine Bunch, Executive Director, Justis 4 Justus, exonerated after 17 years in prison for wrongful conviction Last year, 151 people were exonerated of convictions for crimes they didn’t commit. The average time a person spends in prison for a crime they’re later exonerated for, is eight years. Kristine Bunch was in prison for nearly 18 years after the court said she intentionally set the fire that killed her three-year-old son in their trailer home. But the fire was accidental. Now Kristine Bunch is free and working as an advocate for people exonerated for crimes.   Diversity Human Genetic Resesarch Guest: Scott Williams, Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine By now, you’ve probably spit in one of those vials to get your DNA analyzed for geneaology. If it says you’re of European descent, the info you got back was probably pretty detailed and fairly accurate. People of African or Asian descent aren’t so lucky, because most of the data in those DNA pools right now skews European. The companies who do that testing are working to fix that. But this isn’t just about getting an accurate snapshot of where your ancestors came from. Genetic analysis has become the foundation of disease and drug research. And the data used for that work is also primarily European DNA.   Human Looking Robots May Not Be Ideal Guest: Kerstin Haring, Postdoctoral Researcher of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center, US Air Force Academy Cartoons are full of friendly robots – Disney’s especially good at that: Big Hero Six, Wall-E, the whole crew in the Robots movie. Big eyes, soft, rounded features. You just want to take ‘em home and love ‘em. But in I ROBOT, they’re human-size with human-like faces; they’re supposed to be trustworthy, but Will Smith’s character does not like it. When robots become a central part of our lives in the not-too-distant future, should they loo