Bob Edwards Weekend – January 26-27, 2013
HOUR ONE:
Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, joins Bob to discuss the latest political news.
In his new book, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, Dartmouth professor Charles Wheelan explains why we all should care about the amount of data growing every year…and learn how to make sense of those numbers and information.
Then, the latest installment of our ongoing series This I Believe. This week, Jane Martin writes about witnessing her elderly father fall in love.
HOUR TWO:
From 1942 until 1949, Oak Ridge, Tennessee did not exist on any map. It was a secret city, built and operated by the United States Army as one of the sites of the Manhattan Project. And although at its peak 75,000 people lived there, most had no idea what they were working on until the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. There are still plenty of Manhattan Project alumni living in Oak Ridge, and Bob spoke with several of them during a visit. Colleen Black started working as a leak detector when she was just 18-years-old; Bill Wilcox, now the city’s historian, worked as chemist; and Richard Lord arrived 10 days after graduating with an electrical engineering degree.
Bob Edwards Weekend airs on Sirius XM Public Radio (XM 121, Sirius 205) Saturdays from 8-10 AM EST.
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Last Sunday Professor Wheelan explained that it it not possible to create an alternate universe without guns and thereby check to see what happens to crime rates. I was very saddened to hear Dr. Wheelan's apparent assertion that there's no way to know whether more guns make us more or less safe.
Professor David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health has found a way to compare states in the US with the highest rates of gun ownership with states with the lowest rates of such ownership. His findings are pretty clear: more guns raise deaths rates. It seems to me to be pretty good evidence that more guns do NOT make us safer, as some assert.
How about doing a program on this topic? At this time we may be at a tipping point. Passing stronger laws can prevent at least some of the 30,000 gun deaths per year in this country.
The author of Naked Statistics is Charles Wheelan, not Charles Wheelen