Guest Host Patt Morrison joins us on AirTalk today. Senator Ted Cruz concluded his 21-hour marathon to defund Obamacare. Did this faux-filibuster help or harm Ted Cruz? Then, a bill on Governor's Brown's desk would allow some community colleges to charge more for popular classes. Is this a disadvantage to low-income students? Next, we talk with actor Lorenzo Pisoni about his one man show, "Humor Abuse." Then, we talk with physicist Carl Haber, who is a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant. Lastly, Popular Science ends its article comments, and when it is okay to take pictures of a stranger?
What’s the impact of Ted Cruz’s faux-filibuster on… Ted Cruz?
Senator Ted Cruz concluded his 21-hour non-stop solo effort to defund healthcare reform this morning. The Texas lawmaker stood the entire time and only took a break from speaking when he fielded questions from fellow lawmakers.
Cruz has set a record for staging the longest political speech ever (by beating Senator Rand Paul's nearly 13-hour speech delivered last March) with the epic all-nighter. Despite earning that distinction, the gambit was considered an exercise in futility from the start.
Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called the maneuver a "big waste of time." Lawmakers within Cruz's own party similarly criticized the move. Republican congressman Peter King, for instance, characterized what Cruz did as "a form of governmental terrorism."
Cruz has not been shy about his presidential ambitions for 2016. Has his stunt harmed or helped him?
Guest:
Tamara Keith, Congressional Correspondent at NPR
Jonathan Strong, Reporter, National Review
Would tiered course pricing help or hurt community college students?
Some California community colleges might soon be allowed to charge more for highly sought after classes during summer and winter intersessions.
A new bill, AB 955, by Assemblyman Das Williams (D-Santa Barbara) has passed in the Senate and Assembly. It’s currently waiting Governor Brown’s approval, which could happen anytime before October 13.
Currently, only six community colleges are considered eligible to implement this voluntary program. Of that list, Pasadena City College has opted out, but Long Beach City College hopes to begin the pilot program as soon as possible.
Long Beach City College currently charges residents $46 per unit and non-residents $190 per unit. Under AB 955, summer and winter classes with long wait lists will have non-resident fees. According to the Los Angeles Times, those are typically core classes such as transfer-level English, algebra and history.
Superintendent-President of Long Beach City College, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, says AB 955 is the “only viable alternative” for community colleges to help students graduate or transfer quickly. With a rise in enrollment and a lack of funding, students are not able to obtain necessary classes in a timely manner.
"We've turned away thousands and thousands of students due to state budget cuts, and we have no other mechanism to be able to offer courses to our students," said Oakley on AirTalk. "We've been hopeful that we can convince the legislature and the Governor...to give our students one more choice."
By charging more for intersession classes, community colleges would be able to offer more classes at no cost to the state.
However, many students and faculty oppose AB 955. Chancellor Brice Harris of the California Community Colleges has spoken publicly against it, saying a two-tiered tuition would create two-tiered classes of students those who can afford to pay and those who can’t. Long Beach students have protested the bill and have called on their peers all over California to stop this legislation.
Would tiered tuition help community colleges? Should more community colleges implement this pilot program? Should it be mandatory? Would it create two classes of students? Does it disadvantage low-income students?
Guests:
Eloy Ortiz Oakley, Superintendent-President of Long Beach City College
Vincent Stewart, Vice Chancellor of governmental relations for the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office
'Humor Abuse' explores growing up in the circus
In the new one-man show, “Humor Abuse,” which opened Saturday at the Mark Taper Forum, actor Lorenzo Pisoni plays a clown reminiscing about a life of pratfalls, juggling, and the divorce of his parents.
Pisoni, the son of a circus clown in real life, created the show along with director Erica Schmidt, and while the stage is simple and the cast is but one man, it’s an action-packed tale of a young man building the courage to run away from a life in the circus...an ironic twist on the cliched boyhood dream of doing just the opposite. Even if you grew up terrified by clowns, Pisoni’s performance may just convert you.
Guests:
Lorenzo Pisoni, star and sole cast member of “Humor Abuse” which opened at the Mark Taper Forum this past Saturday 9/21
Erica Schmidt, director of “Humor Abuse” which opened at the Mark Taper Forum this past Saturday 9/21
MacArthur 'geniuses' Carl Haber and David Lobell on why they won
Among the 24 recipients of the just-announce MacArthur Genius Grants for 2013 is physicist Carl Haber, who has applied the technology used to study subatomic particles at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at UC Berkeley to restoring sounds thought long gone.
In a post on the lab’s website, Haber says:
"About 10 years ago, I happened to hear a report on NPR about the Library of Congress and their large collections of historic sound recordings, which described them in some cases as being delicate, damaged, deteriorating and so forth. Using scientific cameras and measurement tools that just use light, we create essentially a picture ... and then write a program where the computer analyzes the image and calculates mathematically how the needle would move rather than use the needle.”
The result was bringing the voices of America’s past, including Alexander Graham Bell and a Native American speaking a language now gone, back to life.
"In the modern era, when you think phonograph, you think of this sort of disc," said Haber on AirTalk. "As you go back in time, particularly into the 19th century, there was a huge diversity of materials, formats, shapes and sizes of things that people tried to record sound on, mostly experimentally – tin foil, paper, disc cylinders, discs of aluminum foil, sheets of aluminum foil, all different sorts of waxes — just a whole variety of different things.”
What Haber and has developed is a way to scan old records, no matter what surface or shape, to create high-resolution digital images. These images are then analyzed and the once-missing data can be recovered and the music can be played.
“I don’t want to overstate things, but I really feel like anything that has sound recorded on it in the form of a groove or other image-able structures, we can play back if there is information left to retrieve," said Haber.
RELATED: What Caltech MacArthur fellow Colin Camerer will do with the money
One of the youngest MacArthur Geniuses is Stanford’s David Lobell, 34. His research asks very tough questions about how climate change will affect food security for all of humanity.
“We’re not really in the business of saying exactly what will happen in 10 or 20 years. There are a lot of problems with trying to do that," said Lobell on AirTalk. "What we’re trying to say is: these are the things that we’re pretty confident if you do, then you’ll be better off.”
The agricultural ecologist explains, "I'm interested in how to feed the world and protect the environment at the same time … . While there are many theories about how to do that, my work tries to test these theories, often using data that were collected for completely different reasons."
Lobell is optimistic that good public policy can ensure food supplies. What does his work mean for California? How have his world travels influenced his research?
RELATED: Calif. physicist one of 24 MacArthur 'genius grant' recipients
Guests:
Carl Haber, physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at UC Berkeley and one of 24 recipients of 2013 MacArthur Genius Grants
David Lobell, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science, Stanford University and one of 24 recipients of 2013 MacArthur Genius Grants
Click here for more stories on scholars' work in recovering lost sounds
Popular Science ends article comments; is engagement dead?
The science magazine announced yesterday that it has decided to turn off its article comment feature online. Trolls and spammers are primarily to blame. Suzanne LaBarre, PopSci’s online content director, says these bad apples aren’t just disruptive, they have proven to change people’s perception of facts.
"[C]ommenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded—you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the 'off' switch," LaBarre explains.
RELATED: 'Popular Science' shuts comments, citing Internet 'trolls'
Magazines and blogs have been dealing with the thorny issue of how best to get the most out of user comments--and how to weed out the bad ones. Huffington Post said it’d start banning anonymous comments this month and YouTube has just announced an overhaul of its commenting system to ensure that only the most productive remarks get noticed.
Is engagement dead, at least in the form of user comments, dead?
Guest:
Dan Nosowitz, Associate Editor at Popular Science
Andrew Beaujon reports on the media for Poynter Online
When is it okay to snap and share pics of strangers?
Photography has become so easy, instantaneous, fleeting and disposable. To complicate matters, unless you're a flip-phone holdout, your smartphone isn't just equipped with precision cameras but a connection for sharing it with the entire world at the simple touch of your finger.
While it is legal to photograph a stranger in a public place, is it ethical? If you snap a picture for well-intentioned reasons, does that make it okay?
Photographer Adam Marelli believes there are three questions to ask yourself before you click: Am I really interested in this person, or are the just a odd looking person? If they want a copy will I give them one? Would I talk to them if I did not have a camera?
Self-styled street photographers are growing legion thanks to Instagram and the like. But is it exploitative? What if you sneak a photo of someone wearing a ridiculous or hideous outfit? Or someone who is embarrassingly drunk? Or a hipster with a typewriter on the highline?
And if you don't plan to share it on social media, does that make it okay? Do you have to ask permission first? Or should we all be on our best behavior in our Sunday best, because it’s a free-for-all?
Guests:
Adam Marelli, Photographer and Artist based in New York; Marelli teaches photography workshops, including at the Leica Akademie; on the web
Alveraz Ricardo, Street Photographer based in Los Angeles; his current exhibit is showing downtown at the Blackstone Gallery on Broadway St.; on the web