Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk trade during Mexico visit; Darrell Issa: The man behind the AP, IRS and Benghazi investigations; California state parks launch new overhaul effort; Picture This: A laid-off Chicago Sun-Times photographer moves on; GoldieBlox game encourages girls to build engineering skills plus much more.
Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk trade during Mexico visit
Chinese President Xi Jinping is in Mexico today, meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. It comes at a time when China is investing heavily in Latin America and seeking to extend its influence in the region.
Here to tell us more is Amy Guthrie, reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Mexico.
Darrell Issa: The man behind the AP, IRS and Benghazi investigations
There's no doubt that Congressman Darrell Issa is currently at the center of all things Washington.
He called President Obama's press secretary a "paid liar,"and he's presiding over the House Oversight Committee's investigations into Benghazi and the IRS and AP scandals. The California Republican hails from a congressional district covering parts of Orange County and San Diego.
For more on the man, we're joined now by LA Times Washington columnist Doyle McManus.
California state parks launch Parks Forward overhaul effort
It's been a rough stretch for California's state park system, between budget woes and the threat of park closures. Last year, the state parks director resigned after officials learned the department has been sitting on nearly $20.5 million in surplus money for over a decade.
Now state officials are taking new steps to improve the system by launching a new commission called Parks Forward.
Anthony Jackson, state parks director, joins the show with more.
Correction: In speaking about Parks Forward Commission's Lance Conn, state parks director Anthony Jackson misidentified his former employer as Apple. Conn used to work for AOL.
WGA List: Is 'The Sopranos' the best-written TV show of all time?
The Writers Guild of America released its list of the 101 best written television series of all time this week. The shows were voted on by members of the guild, made up of TV and screenwriters across the country.
Topping the list is "The Sopranos," followed by "Seinfeld" at number two, and a blast from the past with Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone," in third place.
For more on this list, we're joined now by our favorite TV critic Alan Sepinwall, writer for Hitfix.com and author of the book "The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever."
WGA's Top 30 Best-Written TV Shows of All Time
1. The Sopranos
2. Seinfeld
3. The Twilight Zone
4. All in the Family
5. M*A*S*H
6. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
7. Mad Men
8. Cheers
9. The Wire
10. The West Wing
11. The Simpsons
12. I Love Lucy
13. Breaking Bad
14. The Dick Van Dyke Show
15. Hill Street Blues
16. Arrested Development
17. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
18. Six Feet Under
19. Taxi
20. The Larry Sanders Show
21. 30 Rock
22. Friday Night Lights
23. Frasier
24. Friends
25. Saturday Night Live
26. The X-Files
27. Lost
28. ER
29. The Cosby Show
30. Curb Your Enthusiasm
Tuesday Reviewsday: Sam Amidon, John Grant and Terence Blanchard
Joining us today for Tuesday Reviewsday is music critic Steve Hochman.
Artist: Sam Amidon
Album: Bright Sunny South
Release Date: May 28
Songs: "Bright Sunny South"
Artist: John Grant
Album: Pale Green Ghosts
Release Date: May 14
Songs: "Pale Green Ghosts," "GMF"
Artist: Terence Blanchard
Album: Magnetic
Release Date: May 13
Songs: "Don't Run"
President Obama targets frivolous patent lawsuits
Today, the Obama administration announced steps to crack down on people or companies known as patent trolls. These trolls file patents with no intent of manufacturing or marketing the invention.
Instead, using patent law, they force tech companies and financial institutions into very pricey litigation to protect their own products.
Robin Feldman, professor of law and director of the Institute for Innovation Law at UC Hastings, joins the show with more.
50 years later, Robert Patch remembers being youngest person with a US patent
On June 4, 50 years ago, Robert W. Patch of Chevy Chase, Maryland was awarded a patent for a toy truck design. It could be taken apart and re-assembled in a variety of configurations by a child. Not so unusual, unless you consider that Robert Patch was 6 years old at the time.
"It turned out I was the youngest person ever to receive a US Patent," Patch said, reached in Maryland by phone. He didn't even realize that it was the golden anniversary of his big day half a century ago, but he says it all started when he was a curious, inventive 5-year-old kid.
"I took some shoe boxes," Patch said, "and some bottle caps and nails, and was making a truck."
He ended up making a toy truck that could be converted into a flat bed, or a dump truck by moving the placement of the axels.
His father, a patent attorney, recognized that his son's design had enough unique elements to be patentable. When it was granted, the younger Patch got a flurry of publicity. But he was so young, he wasn't really sure why everyone was so interested.
"At the time I had to sign the patent application, I couldn't write my name," he said. "So I signed it with an X."
This was Robert Patch's only patent. He built a roofing business, married, had a son. He never made any money off his invention, as his father decided it wasn't worth trying to market it.
Still, there was one small reward.
"US Keds was the brand on the shoeboxes I used," Patch explained.
Somebody at the company saw a story about him, and saw their label on the box. So he got a new pair of sneakers out of the deal, and a little place in history.
GoldieBlox game encourages girls to build engineering skills
The fields of science, technology, engineering and math are some of the fastest growing in the country, but women are under-represented in these jobs. That gender gap is expected to widen.
The White House and the Girl Scouts are two of the many groups that have emphasized the need to get more girls into STEM fields at an early age. One woman — a Stanford engineering graduate — is doing just that with GoldieBlox, a game she created to encourage girls to build spatial and engineering skills.
Reporter Katrina Schwartz has the story.
Meet the girl named GoldieBlox, a toy invented by Debbie Sterling aimed at introducing girls to engineering and offering a new kind of role model that's that's not pink.
"She likes to think outside the box and then right on the first page, we have our icon which tells you to stick an axle into a peg board, so immediately we see that we're going to be building along as we read," said Sterling. "I thought of so many girls out there like me who just probably never got interested in [engineering] because they were never exposed," said Sterling.
She started out by researching how boys and girls differ in play style, looking for the key to capturing girls' interest.
"My ah-ha moment was that instead of a construction toy only, which is spatial skills and object play, I would combine spatial and verbal, so I would have the construction toy plus the book," said Sterling.
So she wrote and illustrated a book starring Goldie, a girl engineer who takes apart a music box to understand how the ballerina inside spins. Then she builds a machine so all her friends can spin too, just like the ballerina.
"By introducing the story of Goldie and her characters, and building for a reason, it gave girls the context that they were craving and the narrative behind the play that was meaningful to them," said Sterling.
Sterling hopes that Goldie will be the kind of offbeat role model that she didn't have growing up.
"She is well liked, she's fun, she's quirky, she's a little messy, and she's curious, and she loves tinkering," said Sterling.
Sterling based Goldieblox on the research showing that girls often prefer narrative-based play. She was sure to include setbacks, since no one becomes an engineer without some failure along the way. Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, studies why there are so few girls in math and science careers. She says a big part of helping girls succeed in these areas is teaching them to persevere.
"If you have little failures along the way and have them understand that that's part of learning, it's part of building and that you can actually derive useful information about what to do next, that's really useful," said Dweck. "Research finds that if you show a role model who's too different from where you are now, it can be intimidating and demotivating. So the girl has to see a way to get there."
A game like Goldieblox could be a good first step, if the play can be clearly connected to actually becoming an engineer. Debbie Sterling says she made the story silly so no one would feel turned away, but the game still exposes girls to how simple machines work.
"A wheel spinning on an axle, a lever, a pulley, gears, these are the basic building blocks of, sort of, all of engineering," said Sterliing. "And they're really simple, but once you understand those you can kind of look at anything and see how it's made."
Goldieblox exploded from makeshift prototype to specialty toy store stardom mostly because of a Kickstarter video. That's how Martin Miller discovered it and bought it for his six-year-old daughter Kaitlin. Like many customers who preordered the game to help fund its manufacturing, Miller is an engineer.
"It touched my heart that it was a mechanical toy that was targeted towards young girls," said Miller. That's unusual and I felt that was perfect for my little daughter," said Miller.
Sterling says industry experts told her Goldieblox wouldn't work and that "princesses reign supreme," but she didn't believe that. "The fundamental idea of parents wanting more for their girls, I instinctually believed that it was true," said Sterling.
It certainly appears that her instincts are on point. Sterling almost doubled her $250,000 dollar Kickstarter goal and pre-sold 25,000 Goldieblox sets. It can also be found in specialty toy stores, like Mr. Mopp's, a Berkeley institution, co-owned by Devin McDonald.
"The whole thing just seemed really great to me because there's not many scientifically, or engineeringly or even constructively, as far as building and stuff, toys directed at girls," said McDonald.
Sterling and her team are already working on three more storylines, with interchangeable parts, so girls can keep building more complex machines.
Remembering star defensive lineman David 'Deacon' Jones
David "Deacon" Jones, a Hall of Fame defensive lineman for the Los Angeles Rams for much of the 1960s, has died of natural causes in his Anaheim home. He was 74.
Jones was a big man — 6-foot-5 and weighing in at 272 pounds — but was a barely-thought-of, 14th-round-draft pick out of Mississippi Valley State. However, Jones was the leader of the Rams' Fearsome Foursome defensive line unit for more than a decade before ending his career with the San Diego Chargers and Washington Redskins.
Jones was famous for using his signature move, the head slap, to get through the offensive line. He used the move repeatedly to bust through and sack the quarterback, a term he is credited with inventing.
The sack did not become an official statistic until 1982, leaving his career total uncertain. However, according to the Rams media guide and his own count, Jones had 173 1/2 sacks — putting him in third on the all-time list.
Jones, an 8-time pro bowler, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1980.
He also had several small acting roles during and after his career as he appeared in episodes of "The Brady Bunch," "Bewitched," "The Odd Couple," "Wonder Woman" and also in the Warren Beatty film "Heaven Can Wait."
Picture This: A laid-off Chicago Sun-Times photographer moves on
The Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff last week, leaving nearly 30 people out of a job. These included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, many of them had been at the paper for years.
One of those people was photojournalist Rob Hart. He may no longer have a job with the paper, but that hasn't stopped him from taking photos. The second Rob left his job he began a new photo project, a Tumblr called Laid Off From the Sun-Times.
"I was sitting in my basement office next to my old dryer and I had all of these photos. I wanted to put a face on this layoff and put attention to the other 27 people," said Hart. "We've gotten a lot of love and support and a lot of people have contacted me through the website."
The tagline for his Tumblr explains, "Rob Hart was replaced with a reporter with an iPhone, so he is documenting his new life with an iPhone, but with the eye of a photojournalist trained in storytelling."
Hart and his colleagues were told that the company was shuttering the photo department and that reporters would be trained on how to take photos and video using iPhones. The paper will still use freelance photographers on a case-by-case basis.
"The technology has made it easier to shoot and send photos across the world quickly. To do what we do takes a lot of experience," said Hart. "You can make a really nice photo after a couple of days learning how to be photographer, but when you're in a breaking news situation (think about the incredible photos from the boston bombing), [professionals] know how to turn it on a react in moments. It's instinct and it's experience."
Interview Highlights:
On what he plans to do next:
"I freelance and I'll do a lot more stuff and spend time with my baby and tell the stories I didn't have time for when I had a job. Maybe I'll start for somebody else. You never know what's going to happen. There are plenty of people hiring people to tell stories."
On the first image he took for the Tumblr project:
"That was the carpet on the 14th floor of the holiday. When I walked into the Sun-Tmes building, there was an extra security guard standing out on the floor… That's when I knew we were all gone. That carpet was a visual representation of what it feels like to be suckerpunched. To have your job ripped out from underneath you, that's what we do as photojournalists. We're not there to show what happened, but what it felt like to be there."
On using his iPhone to take pictures for his Tumblr:
"It was taking something really horrible and making something that was amazing. I love taking photos with my iPhone. It's not about the camera, it's the human being that's behind that camera and their heart and what they value and who they are. It all comes across in photographs…Most of my students are graduate students who are going to be reporters. It's not because we are giving them a camera, they're learning how to feel what's important. It's not the camera, it's the person."