Schools Move Towards a Four Day Class Week (0:32)

Guest: Paul T. Hill is Founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Research Professor at the University of Washington Bothell

School districts across America are strapped for cash. One solution that’s been gaining popularity over the last decade is to shorten the school week: four slightly longer days in class, followed by a three-day weekend. More than 500 school districts in 25 states have gone that route, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. How’s it working out?

 

For Better Wildfire Prevention, Look at What Happens to Land That’s Already Burned (17:22)

Guest: Pat Shea, Attorney, Director of the Bureau of Land Management 1997-1999 and Deputy Assistant of Secretary of Interior for Lands and Minerals 1999-2000.

The amount of money the federal government is spending to fight wildfires each year is roughly seven times what it was 20 years ago. More than $3 billion is the typical annual price tag to beat back blazes on forest service and BLM land. As a result, there’s been less and less money dedicated to rehabilitating the scorched land after the flames are out. But that has the perverse consequence of feeding the fire cycle. 

 

How to Catch a Tree Thief: Timber Poaching in the Pacific Northwest (36:37)

Guest: Anne Minden, Retired Special Agent with the US Forest Service, President of Minden and Associates, LLC

Animal poaching is a problem you’re familiar with. But did you know that people also poach trees? Timber thieves will take chainsaws onto forest service land, bring down a Douglas fir or a big leaf maple and make hundreds of dollars selling the wood to a sawmill or a furniture manufacturer. Anne Minden is one of the handful of people who track down tree-robbers.

 

When School Districts Splinter, Segregation Rises (51:08)

Guest: Erica Frankenberg, PhD, professor of Education and Demography, Pennsylvania State University

Sixty-five years ago, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that public schools cannot be segregated by race. Court-ordered desegregation programs, such as mandatory busing, led schools across the country to be far more racially mixed over the next few decades. But beginning in the early 90s, public schools have been steadily re-segregating by race. Some of that has to do with housing segregation. But school district secession is also part of it. There’s a growing trend nationwide of “splinter” districts that are mostly white and wealthy breaking off from larger school districts.

 

Ancient Book Discovered at Northeastern Reveals What Life was Like for 15th Century Nuns (1:09:12)

Guest: Erika Boeckeler is an Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University and Laura Packard is the Lead Student on the Dragon Prayer Book project

For years, no one knew the Dragon Prayer book was gathering dust on a university library shelf. Not even the librarian had any idea the 500-year-old book was there. But then English professor Erika Boeckeler joined the Northeastern faculty and asked for all the ancient books they had. When the librarian handed her the medieval manuscript, she quickly got to work and discovered that it gives a look into the life of German nuns.

 

A New Way of Diagnosing Back Pain (1:25:27)

Guest: Anton Bowden, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, BYU and Ulrike Mitchell, Associate Professor of Exercise Sciences, BYU

Back pain is among the top reasons people miss work or visit a doctor. More than half of regular opioid users report back pain. But opioids don’t seem to work well on back pain. And so, addressing the opioid overuse problem in America requires finding better ways to diagnose and treat back pain. To that end, the National Institutes of Health have awarded two-million dollars grant out of its opioid crisis fund to help a team of BYU researchers with their work on low-back pain.