Most Americans have no idea that there are elaborate pretend Iraqi and Afghan villages scattered around the United States – on US military bases. The villages are designed to look real. There are people in them - many of the people were born in the Middle East and immigrated to the U.S. They now play pretend versions of themselves, in pretend Middle Eastern villages, in the very real forests and deserts of the U.S.

Christopher Sims has been photographing the villages, and he joins Duke Sanford Dean Judith Kelley to discuss his work. Sims is a new faculty member at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He also serves as the Undergraduate Education Director at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies.

Credits/Transcript: https://policy360.org/2021/09/08/inside-military-training-villages/

COVID-19 has ripped through nursing homes and long-term care facilities in the US, painfully unveiling and amplifying the problems that have been inherent in long-term care delivery for decades.

Guest: Nathan Boucher is an assistant research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

What does it take to build a business from the ground up? Are there special challenges that women face? Are there lessons that can be learned from those who have, as they say, been there and done that when it comes to building organizations that matter?

Our guest today is Maya Ajmera, who started her first organization, the Global Fund for Children, shortly after she graduated from Duke University with a Master of Public Policy degree. She's now the President and CEO of the Society for Science and Publisher of its award-winning magazine, Science News.

What role do corporations play in a functioning democracy? Is there a way to encourage companies to be more socially responsible?

Guest: Stan Litow is the author of The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward. At IBM he led the global corporate social responsibility program. Litow now teaches graduate courses at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He has held high level positions for the Mayor and Governor of New York, and served as New York City's Deputy Schools Chancellor.

Our guest this episode is part of a team of researchers that used data from real people's social media accounts to build bots that expose people to news they don't agree with – then they measured how users reacted. What they found is that when people are exposed to views that oppose their own, they actually become MORE not LESS polarized.

Guest: Chris Bail, Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Data Science and director of The Polarization Lab at Duke University; Author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing.

Sometimes we know exactly what the consequences of a policy will be, and sometimes we don't. In this episode, we'll explore a surprising consequence related to stepped-up enforcement of immigration policy in one county in North Carolina: Mecklenburg County.

Guest: Professor Christina Gibson-Davis is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke and co-author of the study Heightened Immigration Enforcement has Troubling Impact on Babies.

In this episode, we look at ways to demystify artificial intelligence (AI) for military commanders and arm military personnel with the right questions to ask to distinguish AI with real, enduring capabilities from so called "drive-by AI."

Guest: Marc Losito is a Master of Public Policy student at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, where he is a Carlucci Fellow in Security Studies. He is also a Warrant Officer in the US Army. He authored an article for the Small Wars Journal, "The Commander's AI Smart Card".

As Elizabeth Warren memorably wrote, "It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street."

That quotation is an apt introduction to Mallory SoRelle's book, Democracy Declined – the Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection.

Consumer financial protections are becoming more and more complex and yet the system still requires individuals to sift through fine print to make sure they aren't going to get taken advantage of by predatory lenders. In this episode we'll look at the history of federal policies related to consumer financial protection, and options for how policies might be changed to benefit Americans and our economy.

Get show notes, transcript, credits.

In this episode, we explore new research into providing healthcare recommendations by algorithm. Professor Kate Bundorf recently published a study examining the impact of algorithmic information and recommendations on consumer choice in health insurance plans.

On January 27, 2021, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security issued a first-ever National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin due to a heightened threat environment across the U.S., which DHS believes will persist in the weeks following the Jan. 6 Presidential Inauguration.

In a recent guest column in the Tampa Bay Times, Duke Professor David Schanzer wrote "Jan. 6 demonstrated to all Americans what many observers have been warning about for years – we have a serious domestic terrorism threat on our hands."

Schanzer joins Judith Kelly to explore options to reduce the threat. Schanzer directs the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Music: Blue Dot Sessions freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/

Music licensed under Creative Commons Attribution creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

Learn more about the Sanford School of Public Policy: sanford.duke.edu