Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Baby Language, Love Notes

Ambassador Ryan Crocker (1:03) Guest: Ryan Crocker, Dean of the George Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University, US Ambassador six times to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon This week, National Intelligence Director James Clapper said, “Unpredictable instability has become the new normal,” in his annual assessment of security threats facing the United States. Much of that instability emanates from the Middle East, where sectarian violence, brutal dictators and the strength the Islamic State terror group are driving millions of people from their homes and countries. The troubling truth is that America’s own actions have contributed to the problem. Baby Language Acquisition (27:58) Guest: Julie Gros-Louis, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Iowa When babies babble during story time, they’re working out the fundamentals of language, and how adults respond is a crucial piece of the process. A study of mothers reading to their one-year-olds conducted at the University of Iowa offers some insight into why reading – even more so than talking back and forth as parents and children play with toys - is an integral part of language acquisition in children. The next time you read to your baby, you might want to pay more attention to their babbling. Roominate (41:38) Guest: Bettina Chen, Co-creator of the toy Roominate Among the so-called STEM fields – science, technology engineering and math, it’s the E – engineering, where women lag particularly, far outnumbered by men. Getting more women into the field, means getting more girls to consider it, even if just in subtle ways. Bettina Chen is an electrical engineer with degrees from Caltech and Stanford who’s invented a dollhouse-building toy to turn girls into engineers. The toy – called Roominate, was a big hit on the TV show “Shark Tank.” Since making that deal, Chen and her partner have cut a deal for Roominate to be sold at Wal-Mart and Forbes lists it among the “Top 10 toys that kindle creativit