Border Initiative, Super Journalists, CO2 to Rocks, Signs

Kino Border Initiative (1:11) Guest: Reverend Sean Carroll, Executive Director of the Kino Border Initiative  The Department of Homeland Security will run out of funding on Friday unless Congress can agree on a budget for the agency that secures our borders. The stand-off is tied to Republican trying to undo President Obama’s executive action on immigration. There’s ongoing political disagreement about how to handle the problem of people crossing into the U.S. illegally. After a decade’s decline in the number of illegal migrants begin apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, the department of Customs and Border Protection says 2014 saw a spike. They attribute that increase to unaccompanied children and families turning themselves in over the summer. Discussion on this side of the border often focuses on what to do with nearly half-a-million illegal migrants who were apprehended last year. Jail them? Send them back to Mexico? The side of the story we rarely hear about is what happens to those people once they’re dropped off on the side of the border.  “For many if not all, it’s the most traumatic experience of their lives,” says Carroll on deportation.  “We have a lot of mothers who are separated from their children who are in the United States. There are no words,” says Carroll, “to describe the experience of a mother who cannot be with her children.”  Super Journalist (20:00) Guest: Lewis DVorkin, Chief Product Officer at Forbes Media  In 2013, the Pew Research Center says 82% of Americans got news on a desktop or laptop and more than had said they received news on a mobile device. Many young people get their news almost exclusively from what shows up from friends and sponsors on Facebook or Twitter feeds. This shifts in news consumption is helping usher in a new role for journalists.  “I have always believed that the mission of journalism is to inform,” says DVorkin.  “If they’re going to understand their audience they need to understand what the audience consumes and how they consume their stories,” says DVorkin on journalists.  “Today’s most successful journalists,” says DVorkin “will be the most knowledgeable about a specific category.”  Turning CO2 to Rock (39:52) Guest: Pete McGrail, Research Fellow at Northwest National Laboratory  Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of life. It’s what we exhale in every breath and it’s one of the things left over from most of our means of transportation and energy production. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat, making it a major contributor to global warming. So the focus on reducing CO2 emissions is twofold: emit less and keep what we do emit from reaching the atmosphere. There’s long been talk of trapping CO2 as it escapes the smokestack of a power plant and pumping it underground. But since the CO2 is still a gas, there’s always a chance it could escape and make its way back into the atmosphere. So what if, rather than burying it under a rock, we turn the CO2 into a rock?  “What happens when we can extract those metals, is they can bond with the CO2 and form carbonate minerals, what people know as limestone,” says McGrail.  Declaration of Independence (51:10) Guest: Grant Madsen, BYU History Professor  This is the weekly appointment we have with BYU history professor Grant Madsen who shares insights with us as he teaches an introductory American History course this semester. Each week brings a new lecture topic and a deeper understanding of how our nation was founded.  Better Traffic Signs (1:14:17) Guest: Ryan Elder, BYU Marriott School of Management Professor  Picture the standard crosswalk sign on roads here in the U.S. It’s the yellow one, usually shaped like a house with the black stick figure on it. The figure looks like it’s kind of ambling along, right? Well, that may be limiting the sign’s effectiveness. Apparently, more dynamic street sign images work better.  Islam (1:30:02) Guest: Shadman Bashir, Professor of Law and International Relations at Dixie State University  Shadman Bashir is a native of the city of Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan. He’s a practicing Muslim and an attorney trained in a mix of English, Islamic, and U.S. law. Bashir recently visited BYU to do something he finds himself doing a lot of these days—explaining what Islam is and what it isn’t. He says it’s not just Westerners who get it wrong, but even people in predominantly Muslim countries misunderstand Islam. They see it as a single monolith—like a rock face with a single way to be Muslim and a single interpretation of Islamic belief.