Social Bot Battle, Abolishing ICE, The Mathematics of Knitting

Guest: Carolina Salge, PhD, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, School of Business, Wake Forest University Facebook’s stock price plummeted today after it announced that its revenue growth is declining and so is the number of people actively using its site. Twitter will make its quarterly earnings statement on Friday, but its stock has already faltered as the company began aggressively purging millions of fake users – also known as “bots.” Both Twitter and Facebook have been criticized for allowing trolls and spammers and Russian agents to flood their services with misinformation.

Guest: Tanya Golash-Boza, PhD, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Merced Today is the deadline a judge has set for US immigration officials to reunite parents and children separated at the border under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. Outrage over the separations have given rise to calls to “abolish ICE” by protesters and progressive politicians. ICE is the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency. What would abolishing it accomplish, exactly?

Guest: Sara Jensen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Carthage College What do you remember from college algebra class? Whiteboards? Thick textbooks? Knitting needles? Wait, what? Carthage College math professor Sara Jensen designed an entire course around knitting to help her students grasp parts of math that go beyond solving equations in a notebook.

(Originally aired June 7, 2017) Guest: Barbara Crouch, PharmD, Clinical Professor of Pharmacotherapy at University of Utah; Director of the Utah Poison Control Center Caffeine perks you up and can give you the jitters if you overdo it, but did you know that at high enough concentrations it can be very dangerous – even deadly? Getting to that threshold is easier than you might think.

(Originally Aired: 3/21/2018) Guest: Nathan Connolly, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University, Author of the Award-Winning "A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida," Co-Host, BackStory Podcast A little over fifty years ago, the Kerner Commission was organized by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate why young black men were rioting in more than 150 cities around the country. The report was very direct: “White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” Racial discrimination in housing, employment and education had led to pent-up frustration in low-income black neighborhoods, and the report warned that the riots would continue if something didn’t change.  Fifty years later, that legacy is not behind us

(Originally Aired: 4/9/2018) Guest: Steven Wisensale, PhD, Professor of Public Policy, University of Connecticut Baseball has helped broker peace for centuries. Believe it or not, the game played an important role in helping the US and Japan mend relations after World War II. And more recently, when a US submarine collided with a Japanese ship, killing nine high school students and teachers, a youth baseball tournament was organized to honor the victims. That tournament rotates between Japan and Hawaii and has happened every year since the accident in 2001.

(Originally Aired: 11/8/2018) Guest: Mark Elbroch, PhD, Lead Scientist, Puma Program for Panthera BYU’s mascot, the Cougar, lives throughout the West, but since they hunt at night, there’s a lot we don’t know about them. Scientists have always thought that cougars are solitary animals who don’t interact with each other unless they’re mating or fighting. But studies have revealed that they actually don’t mind some company at dinner.