Guantanamo, Gaza, and Boko Haram

Guest: Stanley Rosen, Professor of Political Science and Director of the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California  One of last year’s biggest box office hits in North America did even better in China.  Transformers 4: Age of Extinction earned about $245 million in the U.S., but more than $300 million in China, making it the highest grossing film of all time in that market. And Hollywood is taking note of the possibilities as North American movie ticket sales flag.  “In February last month, China was the largest film market in the world. Last month china past the United States for the first time,” says Rosen.

Guest: Grant Madsen, BYU History Professor  Marcus Smith joins Grant Madsen to discuss the background of the Federalist Papers, written by James Madison to argue for the Constitution’s ratification. Madison essentially wrote the “rough draft” of the Constitution. He wrote Federalist Paper number 10 to discuss some of the key features of the new document.  Madison ran for his local state house back in the day and lost to a tavern-owner, who gave all the voters free beer. Federalist paper number 10 considers this problem: how elites can “buy” votes and wield disproportionate power.  “The term he used was cancelling ‘local faction’—you can overcome the powers of small groups through large groups.” This contradicted common theories of republican governments, which insisted that functioning Republics must be small

Guest: Spencer Behrend, BYU MBA student  When you take a toddler to a crowded public space, you better be prepared to keep one hand on the kid at all times, or risk just the kind of scare that prompted my next guest to invent a new technology.  After Spencer Behrend temporarily lost his 2-year-old son in a massive Fourth of July parade, he invented a Bluetooth device called “Kiband” \[pronounced “Kie-band”], to help parents keep track of their kids without needing a leash.  “There’s no GPS in this version of the Kiband, it’s just for localized supervision of the child,” says Behrend. It only goes as far as the Bluetooth radius of your phone. When a child goes further than the set range a parent sets, an alarm will go off on the Kiband bracelet.  “The problem isn’t ‘when’ is that child getting too far away, but ‘where’ is that child getting too far away,” says Behrend

Guest: Carrick Detweiler, assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska