A new Gallup poll finds that Americans are concerned with race relations; we look at the power of superdelegates in our presidential primary system; and a RAND study says autonomous cars need billions of miles worth of data before they can be deemed safe.
Race roundtable: why all kinds of Americans are increasingly concerned about race relations
Race relations may still rank at the bottom of the list of Americans’ concerns, but a new Gallup poll shows that more Americans (35%) say they’re worried “a great deal” about race relations in the U.S. than at any point in the last 15 years that Gallup has been asking the question.
What’s more, concern about race relations has increased among Democrats, Republicans, Whites, Blacks, Asians and Latinos. We talk about the results with our roundtable.
35% of Americans are worried a great deal about race relations...
— GallupNews (@GallupNews)
35% of Americans are worried a great deal about race relations... https://t.co/apBs5LKEJB #GallupDaily pic.twitter.com/VZChBPkTej
— GallupNews (@GallupNews) April 11, 2016
Guests:
Joe Hicks, vice president of the Los Angeles-based political think tank Community Advocates, Inc; former Executive Director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission, 1997 to 2001, and former Executive Director of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference)
Jody Armour, law professor at the University of Southern California and author of the book, "Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism"
Debating the Democratic Party's superdelegates and their role in 2016
"Rigged!" shouts MSNBC's Joe Scarborough. "Rigged," declares a New York Post headline. "
This is happening all over our country—great people being disenfranchised by
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2016
politicians. Repub party is in trouble! https://t.co/wNXRqVl9Uu
," blasts Donald Trump.
Some folks on the left and right are heaping scorn on the presidential primary systems.
For Democrats, Saturday's results from the Wyoming caucus offer a muddy illustration of how the system is structured to work. Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders each won 7 pledged delegates - based on proportional winnings by county.
However, Clinton will take a total of 11 Wyoming delegates to the convention because the state's four superdelegates from Wyoming announced their support for her in January. (When they formally announced their support for Clinton, Wyoming Democratic Party's executive director, Aimee Van Cleave, gave a prescient comment, “The four of them do not by any means represent a majority, nor do they reflect the official stance of the Wyoming Democratic party.")
This despite the fact that Sanders won Saturday's popular vote in Wyoming by a convincing 12-point spread, 56 percent to 44 percent.
The Democratic Party’s superdelegate system was created in 1982 to reckon with the losses suffered by President Jimmy Carter and candidate George McGovern - seen by some as “insurgent” candidates who evidently had no chance to secure the Oval Office.
In 2016, is the superdelegate system still working as it’s intended?
If superdelegates were the decider of a nominee, would that change Democrats’ opinion of the role?
Guests:
Todd Donovan, Professor of Political Science, Western Washington University; Donovan specializes in the democratic process and electoral reform
Neil Sroka, Communications Director, Democracy for America - a political action committee described as focused on progressive grassroots movements
RAND, USC experts on why test-driving autonomous vehicles for safety may not be enough
The movement towards driverless cars is already in full swing in California as companies like Google and Tesla, to name a few, are at the forefront of the new technology.
But a new study out from the RAND Corporation says that the amount of miles it would take testing driverless vehicle technology would need to be in the millions and, in some cases, billions, in order to create enough data to demonstrate safety.
The report suggests that it’s designed not to ask whether it’s logical to test-drive autonomous vehicles in real-time traffic conditions in order to assess safety, but rather how practical it is. It also seeks to answer exactly how many miles a driverless car would need to be test-driven without failure to prove its safety.
It goes on to say that manufacturers and engineers will need to come up with alternative ways of testing that will better demonstrate reliability, and that laws and regulations for driverless cars must be designed to adapt as the technology changes so that risks can be recognized and mitigated. All that said, experts also say it’s important to remember that there are risks and uncertainty associated with any new technology.
Guests:
Nidhi Kalra, senior information scientist and co-director of the Center for Decision Making under Uncertainty at RAND Corporation; she is a co-author of the report “Driving to Safety: How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?”
Jeffrey Miller, associate professor of engineering practice at the University of Southern California
Latest critics of trigger warnings and microaggression: University professors
A new sensitivity on college campuses, epitomized by concepts like microaggression and trigger warnings, is causing some professors to cry foul.
A recent report released by the American Association of University Professors says that Title IX enforcement on college campuses insufficiently distinguishes between what constitutes sexual harassment and what constitutes academic speech. That gray area has caused many professors to claim that they’ve be unjustly disciplined.
As an example, the report cited students at several universities who objected to being assigned “Fun Home” – a memoir written by lesbian artist Alison Bechdel -- for class. The students characterized the text’s depiction of lesbian sex as “pornographic,” and called for trigger warnings to be included.
The report calls for the government to establish a clearer standard in evaluating the kind of speech that creates a hostile environment, versus speech used to talk about topics students might find controversial.
The History, Uses and Abuses of Title IX
Guests:
Risa L. Lieberwitz, general counsel of the American Association of University Professors and chairwoman of the subcommittee that drafted the report, titled “The History, Uses and Abuses of Title IX”. She is also a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University
Brett Sokolow, president and CEO of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management and Executive Director of The Association of Title IX Administrators
A look at how often tabloids are sued as Blake Shelton case against InTouch moves forward
Country music star and ‘The Voice’ judge Blake Shelton will be allowed to move ahead with his lawsuit against the company that publishes InTouch Weekly, after a headline on the cover of the magazine’s September issue suggesting that Shelton had a drinking problem and had entered rehab.
Shelton he’s never been to rehab nor does he have a drinking problem, and claims the In Touch cover damaged his reputation by making false claims.
Attorneys for Bauer Publishing say they’ll appeal the tentative ruling by U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder, should it become official, and argue that there is plenty of evidence to support their claim of Shelton’s excessive drinking.
Judge Snyder has urged both sides to settle the case outside of court. The lawsuit raises questions of how far tabloids can go with the claims they make about celebrities, how often tabloids are sued in this manner, and at what point sensationalism turns into defamation.
Guest:
Michael Overing, principal of The Law Offices of Michael Overing and an adjunct professor of media law at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism