Online Sales Tax, The Education System, Real vs. Fake News

Why Some Sites Change Sales Taxes and Others Don’t Guest: John Barrick, CPA, Professor of Accountancy, BYU People still go to stores for their holiday gift purchases, but online Christmas sales continue to tick steadily up each year. So, it’s no wonder states would like to capture tax revenue from online sales. To date, their efforts have been mixed. But the online behemoth Amazon is more willing than it was even a few years ago to strike deals with states to start charging and collecting sales taxes. The latest of these arrangements is with Utah. In local media reports, Utah officials are practically rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of new revenues, while online shoppers look into the camera rather glumly.  NASA is Sending Astronauts to Mars Guest: Stephen Hoffman, PhD, Senior Systems Engineer and Independent Contractor for NASA’s Journey to Mars Mission NASA hopes to have astronauts on Mars in the next 20 years. Getting there isn’t really the challenge, since scientists have already figured out how to send rovers to the Red Planet and communicate with them from Earth. The larger questions center on how well humans will hold up on the months-long journey to Mars and where they’ll live and work once they get there.  Real or Fake News? Guest: Teresa Ortega, Senior Project Manager of the Stanford History Education Group More than a year ago – long before the outcry over how damaging fake news is online - researchers at Stanford began to study how well young people can tell truth from fiction on the internet. The results are “bleak” to quote the researchers. Most middle school students couldn’t tell ads from news articles and most high school students couldn’t tell real news from fake. College students had trouble judging if a claim in a Tweet came from a biased source.  The Age of Accountability is Making Teachers Miserable Guest: Marc Tucker, President and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy American high school students are falling further behind their international peers in math, and they’re not gaining any ground on science and reading, based on the latest assessment of academic achievement worldwide. Those numbers were released last week. Where does the fault for these failures lie? Is it No Child Left Behind and the policy makers who enforced it for more than a decade? Is it insufficient funding for schools? Is it the obsession with testing and standardized curriculum that now dominates US public schools? Or are teachers to blame – and, if so, how can we hold them better accountable to do right by our kids? The Correction Official’s Take on Solitary Confinement Guest: Rick Raemich, Executive Director of the Colorado Dept. of Corrections More than 50,000 inmates in prisons across the country are spending months – and even years – in solitary confinement. That typically means at least 22 hours of the day alone in a cell roughly the size of a king-sized bed.  Research has shown that extended time in such conditions causes mental and physical health problems that are made even worse by the fact that many prisoners held in isolation already suffer from mental illness. The research also shows that putting inmates in confinement does not make prisons safer. So several national corrections organizations now recommend prisons limit how much they use of solitary confinement.  Children’s Christmas Book Guest: Rachel Wadham, Host of World’s Awaiting Rachel Wadham is the education and juvenile collections librarian, here at BYU, and host of Worlds Awaiting on BYUradio. It’s a show dedicated to encouraging a love of reading and discovery in children. It airs Saturdays at 1:30 p.m. Eastern and you can also hear it weekdays at 8:30 p.m. Eastern on BYUradio.