Flint Water, How to Stop Bullying, Sundance Film Festival

Guest: Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, Pediatrician at Hurley Children’s Hospital in Flint and Michigan State University Medical School  The governor of Flint, Michigan, has declared of state of emergency because of the water crisis and the EPA has stepped in to manage the city’s water because it contains dangerously high levels of lead. The lead is coming from the old pipes that make up Flint’s water system. For nearly two years it was leaching into the bodies of Flint residents because the water wasn’t being treated correctly to prevent pipe corrosion.  While this city of about 100,000 people located an hour north of Detroit was being poisoned by its drinking water, state and local officials denied there was even a problem. Emails released by the governor’s office show months of downplaying the dangers and discounting the data put forward by people like Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha.

Guest: Hana Shepherd, PhD, Sociologist at Rutgers University  You know the saying that one bad apple can spoil the bunch. Well, how about one good apple? Researchers from Rutgers, Princeton and Yale Universities spent a year working with what you might call the “good apples” in 56 middle schools to see if they could use the power of peer influence to reduce bullying and other types of student conflict. And it worked impressively.

Guest: Daniel Mark, PhD, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Villanova University in Pennsylvania 

Guest: Vonda Viland, Principal at Black Rock High School Remember the bad kids in high school? The ones who talked backed to the teacher and disrupted class? That is, if they came to class at all. They partied hard, fell into drugs, got pregnant, dropped out or simply disappeared.  Vonda Viland knows all about the bad kids. She is the principal at Black Rock High School, an alternative high school in a remote small town in the Mojave Desert of California, and when it comes to kids acting out, she’s seen it all. But she’s not discouraged. In fact, her optimism about the future for the kids at her school is the subject of a new documentary called “The Bad Kids” that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Guest: Donald Hoffman, PhD, Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine  Almost 40 years ago, NASA launched a message into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft for any extraterrestrial beings who may happen upon it. Called the Golden Record, it’s a gold-plated phonograph record that carries pictures, music, and greetings from earth in 55 different languages. Ever since then, groups like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute have been listening closely to satellite wavelengths for a sign that our message had been received, but so far there’s no word back from space.  Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says even if extraterrestrials found the Golden Record, they probably couldn’t make out the messages on it.