Some Hospitals Are Struggling to Report COVID-19 and Flu Numbers (0:29)

Guest: Eric Toner, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

The US government is now going to crack down on hospitals that aren’t reporting COVID-19 and flu case numbers daily. This comes after a mandate was put into place last month. If hospitals don’t comply, the Department of Health and Human Services has threatened to cut off Medicaid and Medicare funding—which has officials at the American Hospital Association extremely concerned.

 

Nice Guys Don’t Always Finish Last—At Least In Business (19:43)

Guest: Cameron Anderson, Professor of Management of Organizations, University of California Berkeley

You know how the saying goes, “nice guys finish last.” Well turns out that just isn’t true, in business. It might seem like jerks always win because they’ll do anything to get ahead, but they don’t actually have any advantage. Don’t get me wrong, mean people do attain positions of power, they just don’t do it any faster than nice people.

 

Students Are Zoning Out While Learning Online (36:19)

Guest: Han Zhang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan

College students already struggle to pay attention in class sometimes, and now online learning is only making it worse. A research team at the University of Michigan tracked eye movements during video lectures, and, you guessed it, they discovered a lot of zoning out.

 

What are Grade School Kids Learning about Black History? (52:49)

Guest:LaGarrett King, Professor of Social Studies Education, University of Missouri, Founding Director, Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education

What do you remember being taught about black history in grade school? I don’t remember a whole lot, but there was obviously slavery, the civil war, and then it jumped to the action of the civil rights movement. And from there it was mostly the positive aspects–Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and their triumphs. But history isn’t that simple and those are only fragments of Black history.

 

Not Many Voters are Coaxed By Political Ads (1:12:50)

Guest: Seth Hill, Professor of Political Science, University of California San Diego

Politicians spend enormous amounts of money on advertising. Spending on 2020 presidential and congressional campaigns is expected to hit a record-breaking 10.8 billion dollars. But when it comes to TV ads, that money doesn’t do much at all to persuade voters.

 

New Growth Drug Is Controversial Among People with Dwarfism (1:27:53)

Guest: Erin Pritchard, Lecturer in Disability and Education, Liverpool Hope University

Achondroplasia is the genetic condition that causes dwarfism. The only treatment out there for it is a limb lengthening surgery that’s a long, painful, and invasive procedure. But now there’s a new drug that can make children with achondroplasia grow faster–almost as fast as kids without the condition. They still won’t reach average height, but the hope is that it will mitigate some of the negative health effects that come from dwarfism. It’s still being tested, but a study was just published with these promising results. Sounds like it would be a good thing, but a lot of little people find the treatment offensive.