Stories from The Apple Seed

Guest: Holly Leicht, New York’s Empire State Development, former HUD official overseeing Hurricane Sandy recovery It’s been a devastating month of natural disasters across Mexico, the Southern US and the Caribbean. Thousands of people from Florida to Texas are now in the early stages of what will be a long process navigating government bureaucracy as they attempt to rebuild their homes and lives. Holly Leicht had a front-row seat to the highs and lows of the government's response during Hurricane Sandy, while leading the federal recovery effort in New York and New Jersey. She's compiled a list of what works and what doesn't.  Read her report here.

Guest: Cathy O’Neil, PhD, Data Scientist, Founder of the O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing Are you one of those “lucky” people who gets credit card offers every day? Well, the offer in your mailbox might be different from the offer 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 mysterious process—that algorithm—might not be as objective as you think. Data scientist and mathematician Cathy O’Neil goes so far as to call these algorithms “weapons of math destruction."

Guest: Rodney Benson, PhD, Department Chair, Professor, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University  The story of journalism’s financial decline is no longer front page news. It’s just a fact of life. Many national magazines and newspapers are now digital-only, because the web is where the ad money is these days. Local papers are laying off reporters, merging or closing shop. So when a billionaire like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post or Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs becomes a majority owner of “The Atlantic” magazine, hooray for the press! At least someone is willing to invest in journalism, right? Well, maybe.

Guest: Christopher Mattson, PhD, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Director of Design Research Group, Brigham Young University What started as a student engineering project six years ago has now brought water to more than 100,000 people in countries. It’s called The Village Well and it was designed right here at BYU.

Guest: Mitali Perkins, Author, “You Bring the Distant Near” These days, America doesn’t seem like such a welcoming place for immigrants, but in Mitali Perkins’ new young-adult novel, “You Bring the Distant Near,” we get the hopeful story of three generations of Indian-Americans. The family, parents and two daughters, land in New York in 1973 wishing for a better life. And they get it. The book has been nominated for The National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.