Hurricane Forecasting, Frankenstein at 200, Saving Baseball

Mark Bourassa, PhD, meteorologist, associate director, Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Florida State University Hurricane Florence is Top of Mind today. It’s expected to bring heavy rains, high winds and flooding to North and South Carolina. At least a million people have evacuated coastal areas in the storm’s path, because officials are never sure exactly where the brunt of a hurricane will be felt. To understand why hurricane forecasting is so difficult, we’ve got meteorologist Mark Bourassa on the line. He’s associate director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University.

0 Guest: Dennis Perry, PhD, Associate Professor of English, Brigham Young University Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” was published in 1818. It has since been imagined and reimagined so many times, it may be the most common narrative in popular culture. The book has never been out of print. What accounts for oure enduring fascination with this monster?

Guest: Steven Brams, PhD, Professor of Politics at New York University Any parent with a kid in baseball knows the agony of a lopsided game that just won’t end. It even happens in the Major Leagues and a lot of fans think that’s just part of the sport. Besides, there are worse places than a ballpark to spend several hours on a summer night, right? Well a team of data scientists wants to fix the long, lopsided nature of baseball by changing the number of outs a team gets in each inning.

Guest: Cathy O’Neil PhD, data scientist and founder of the O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing company Are you one of those people who gets credit card offers every day? Well, the offer in your mailbox might be different from the one in your neighbor’s because your credit score, your income, your outstanding debt and other factors are mysteriously processed by a number-crunching algorithm and out pops your APR. But that algorithm is not as objective as you think. Data scientist Cathy O’Neil says they can actually do a lot of harm. Her book is called, “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.” We had this conversations with her last year.

Guest: Jeffrey Hall, PhD, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas  Online dating is no longer a slightly embarrassing thing young single people do when they can’t seem to meet people in the usual ways. Services like Tinder and Match are the way people of all ages now find potential partners. But all the swiping and rating people based on their photos may be ruining our chances of really enjoying the company of a date when we finally meet in person.

Guest: Michael Fox MD, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Deep Brain Stimulation Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 1966, a lone gunman named Charles Whitman perpetrated what’s often considered the first public mass shooting in modern America. He climbed a 300-foot tower at the University of Texas and shot 36 people, killing 14 of them before he was fatally shot by police. An autopsy found a tumor in Whitman’s brain, which some scientists believe may have contributed to his murderous behavior. We know that brain injuries and lesions can change someone’s personality, but can it make someone a violent criminal?