Police Shootings, Unreliable Senses, Gender and Career Choice

Guest: Amy Brittain, Investigative Reporter for the Washington Post  A year-long Washington Post investigation found nearly 1000 people were fatally shot by police in 2015. Law enforcement officials often describe these incidents as rare and traumatic in the life of an officer. But the Post investigation also found that for some 50 police officers involved in fatal shootings last year, this was not their first time. For a handful of them, it was even their third shooting.

Guest: Ladan Shams, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles Whether it’s a wooly mammoth or an oncoming car, our survival has always depended on our ability to accurately identify objects around us. As a result, you’d think the skill of locating objects in space – using our eyes and ears – would be finely tuned. But the largest study yet on this concept shows we’re not nearly as accurate as we like to think.

Guest: Sam Payne, Host of The Apple Seed on BYUradio    Sam Payne joins us in studio to share a story from Jewish storyteller Syd Lieberman.

Guest: Erin Cech, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rice University  Technically speaking, there are not “jobs for men” and “jobs for women” in the American labor force, and yet many fields remain dominated by one gender or another. There are more female teachers and more male engineers, for example.  One explanation for the division is called the “Family Plan Thesis” and it suggests that men gravitate to jobs that will help them provide for a family, while women go into fields that will give them flexibility to care for a future family. The current crop of college students doesn’t seem to be buying that thesis, though.

Guest: Rachel Kimbro, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology at Rice University and the Associate Director of the Kinder Institute's Urban Health Program  Being hungry is never fun. Living in perpetual hunger – or even just the threat of it – is more damaging to children than previously thought. Sociology professor Rachel Kimbro has just published work looking at what happens to the behavior and mental health of young children when they suddenly find themselves “food insecure.” The results suggest there’s a lasting effect – even into adulthood.

Guest:  Morgan Davis, PhD, Assistant Research Fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Director of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative  The US Department of Education this week sent out an urgent plea for schools to guard against harassment and discrimination of students because of their race, religion or national origin. The call is a response to anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiments that appear to be on the rise since the San Bernardino terror attacks and the ongoing campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump, who says Muslims should temporarily be banned from entering the US.  Fostering understanding of the Muslim faith is a key priority of BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, which translates and publishes ancient philosophical writings of Muslims, Jews and Christians into English.