Yahoo faces a lawsuit alleging its forced ranking system discriminates against men; UConn experiments with voluntary segregation for Black male students; and some are arguing to bring back long-banned DDT to combat the Zika virus.
Yahoo announced layoffs amid lawsuit alleging its forced ranking review system discriminates against men
The tech company Yahoo is reeling. Investors are putting heavy pressure on CEO Marissa Mayer for the company's lack of growth.
Yesterday, Yahoo announced 15-percent of its workforce will be laid off. That's 1,700 people. But another threat is looming.
A federal lawsuit filed by a former Yahoo editor who oversaw content on multiple websites. He was fired via Yahoo's signature 1-to-5 employee rating scale. Marissa Mayer introduced the system shortly after taking over the company in 2012. Former Yahoo employee Gregory Anderson claims the quarterly numerical rating is used to conduct mass layoffs and replace men with women, not truly rate employee performance.
Forced ranking, where managers across a company are required to rank all of their employees on a bell curve, has been a controversial management technique since then GE CEO Jack Welch popularized it in the 1980s.
Guests:
Jon Parsons, employment attorney in Palo Alto who is representing former Yahoo employee Gregory Anderson in his lawsuit against Yahoo
Tamara Devitt, a labor and employment attorney at Haynes and Boone, a law firm with offices in Palo Alto and Orange County
University of Connecticut black-only learning community draws mixed reactions
The University of Connecticut is setting aside specific rooms in its new dorm building for more than 40 African-American male students.
On average, male Black students academically underperform at UConn. The school hopes having the students live together and will boost their grades and graduation rates.
The Universities of Minnesota and Iowa have set up similar segregated areas in dorms.
Do you think this is a good response to some minority students' concerns that they have a hard time feeling comfortable on some college campuses? If you were in the distinct minority at the college you attended, would you have liked to have a separate area of the dorms for students of your race, ethnicity, or religion?
Guests:
Nolan Cabrera, assistant professor of education at the University of Arizona; Cabrera's primary research interests include race/racism in higher education
Joe Hicks, co-founder and vice president of Community Advocates, Inc., a Los Angeles-based human and civil rights organization
A new study makes a major stride toward understanding the cause of schizophrenia
The landmark study published in the journal Nature will not lead to new treatments nor to widely available testing for individual risk in the near future, but it does explains some mysteries surrounding the disease such as why the disorder often begins in adolescence.
The research pieced together the steps by which genes can increase a person’s risk for developing the disorder. The risk is related to a process called “synaptic pruning,” in which the brain sheds weak or redundant connections. The study suggests that people who carry genes that accelerate or intensify the pruning are at a higher risk of developing schizophrenia.
About 2 million Americans have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a debilitating disease characterized by delusional thinking and hallucinations.
Why has discovering the cause of this disease been so elusive? How did you arrive at this conclusion? How much closer does this research bring us to finding a cure or early detection? How many people in California/Los Angeles have been diagnosed? What kinds of treatments are available? What does this research mean for people living with the disease?
Guests:
Steve McCarroll, Associate professor of genetics at Harvard and the study’s lead researcher
Keith Nuechterlein, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Center for Neurocognition and Emotion in Schizophrenia
Zika virus threat renews interest in DDT insecticide
Without a vaccine or treatment for the Zika virus, experts are debating aggressive campaigns for mosquito elimination including the use of DDT (long banned in the U.S.).
Critics of the ban on DDT say people suffering from the Zika health emergency do not have the luxury of worrying about the environmental impact of the insecticide. Some entomologists argue newer insecticides are likely as effective as DDT on Zika-carrying mosquito species, plus some research has found DDT-resistant mosquito populations.
Is the resurgent interest in DDT based on its efficacy?
Guests:
Robert Zubrin, author, "Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism;" Zubrin wrote “Will the EPA cause a Zika Pandemic” for the National Review; Aerospace Engineer by trade
Dina Fonseca, Ph.D., Professor of Entomology, Rutgers University; Fonseca studies invasive mosquitoes and insecticide efficacy; 2014 study published in PLoS One "Insecticide Resistance Status of United States Populations of Aedes albopictus and Mechanisms Involved"
Why Amazon wants to open up 400 more brick-and-mortar bookstores
Amazon.com, the online “everything store,” opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle late last year.
The company called it a “physical extension of Amazon.com”. For all intent and purposes, it looks just like a regular bookstore, except prices are the same as they are on the site.
Now, a few months after that store’s debut, it looks like Amazon might be thinking of expanding the concept -- to the tune of 300 to 400 physical stores.
Word of the move didn’t come from Amazon, though, but from Sandeep Marthrani, the CEO of the mall operator General Growth Properties. During a conference calls with analysts, Marthrani let the news slip.
Why would this impact brick-and-mortar booksellers from Barnes & Noble to independent bookstores? What is driving Amazon’s decision to expand in the physical retail space?
Guest:
Spencer Soper, Seattle-based e-commerce reporter at Bloomberg who’s been following the story. One of the companies he reports closely on is Amazon
John Mutter, editor in chief and co-founder of Shelf Awareness, which publishes an email newsletter for booksellers, librarians and book readers
New study looks at how religion, class, and gender factor into self-identification of biracial Americans
A Pew report from last year found that multiracial adults make up close to 7 percent of the US population. It’s projected that by 2050, one in five Americans will be multiracial.
As it grows, how those in this population choose to identify themselves racially will have political, policy, and legislative significance.
A new study published in the journal, American Sociological Review, looks precisely at that. Author and Stanford professor Lauren Davenport surveyed how 37,000 biracial Americans (Asian-white, black-white, and Latino-white) and found that gender, class, and religion all play different roles in influencing how they choose to self-identify.
American Sociological Association Multiracial Labeling Study
Guest:
Lauren Davenport, author of the new study, “The Role of Gender, Class, and Religion in Biracial Americans’ Racial Labeling Decisions,” published in the February issue of American Sociological Review. She is also an assistant professor of Political Science at Stanford University