After a tense period with Iran, President Donald Trump wants to turn the page. He delivered a speech on Wednesday laying out his goals for peace and a nuclear deal. Today we unpack the latest details with Heritage Foundation expert Luke Coffey.
We also cover the following stories:
Plane crash outside Tehran leaves 176 dead; cause remains unknown
Democrats begin to lose patience with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over impeachment
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry step down from senior royal duties
The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!
What ought to follow hostilities between Iran and the United States after Iran's military response to the death of a high ranking general? Chris Preble and John Glaser comment.
In the interview, Slate’s Jim Newell is here to talk with Mike about John Bolton. They discuss why Bolton has announced he’s available to be subpoenaed by Congress, how this might play out, and where the Senate and the House stand.
Biologist Lesley Hughes from Macquarie University in Australia explains why the recent bushfires there could change the country forever. Hughes is a former federal climate commissioner, and has been the lead author on two reports for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
The news to know for Wednesday, January 8th, 2020!
What to know today about an attack on U.S. forces in Iraq, and a Boeing plane crash in Iran.
Plus: the billionaires buying dueling Super Bowl ads, the popular country music group splitting up, Google's latest smart home tech, and the new type of Girl Scout cookie...
Those stories and more -- in less than 10 minutes!
Award-winning broadcast journalist and former TV news reporter Erica Mandy breaks it all down for you.
Head to www.theNewsWorthy.com to read more about any of the stories mentioned under the section titled 'Episodes' or see sources below...
In politics, language is central -- the words we use, what they mean, and what we want them to mean. As our guest today, The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles, explains, the left is a master of language manipulation. Liberals often win political victories by redefining words and rewiring our brains.
"The lie of the left that they're pushing is that the truth is somehow cruel and harmful and that delusion will make us happy and free," says Knowles. "That has never been true anywhere in history. "
In the interview, journalist Lauren Chooljian is here to talk about her podcast series Stranglehold. It focuses on the New Hampshire primary, how it continues to be first primary in the nation, and what long-running New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner has to do with it.
In a conversation taped live at the Aspen Institute, Dahlia Lithwick speaks to former acting solicitor general of the United States Neal Katyal about impeachment, and how he approaches is it as an “extremist centrist.”
With each new year comes a wave of good intentions as people aim to be better. They want to lose weight, exercise more, be nicer, drink less and smoke not at all. They want to change behavior, and as Susan Michie knows well, “behavior is related to absolutely everything in life.”
Michie is a clinical and health psychologist who leads the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London. She specializes in behavior related to health – for behavior or health practitioners, patients and population as a whole – and in looking at how behavior impacts the natural environment. And while you might think that the essentials of human behavior are pretty similar, one of the things Michie quickly tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast is that it can be unwise to jump to conclusions when studying behavior (or trying to change it).
She notes, for example, that lots of behavioral research is done in North America, where there’s relatively abundant funding for studies, “but the biggest need [for research] is often where there’s the least investment. There’s no point in developing an intervention based on research evidence conducted in parts of the world that are very far away from the type of context we want to implement the findings in – only to find out it’s not going to work.”
So yes, she says, do look at both the rigour of the research, but also base any potential application of the findings on deep understanding of local conditions and using local knowledge.
Michie and her team describe this using a model, COM B, to account for the ‘capability, ‘opportunity’ and ‘motivation’ necessary to change behavior.
Changing behaviors is important – “In order to solve any of these big social challenges we need people at different positions in society to change their behavior” -- so these considerations matter. But that begs the questions of what behaviors need changing – and who decides what those selected behaviors are..
“There’s a big issue about who decides what the key issues are,” Michie says. “But I think there are certain problems which are very self-evident – there are people dying unnecessarily as a result of smoking, obesity but also environmental conditions – poor housing, etc. There are areas where the social consensus is that things needs to change, and I’d say those are the ones we start with.”
In the interview, Michie also addresses the ethics of behavior change and how algorithms and machine learning will be “absolutely vital” to parse through all the relevant data . Her own Human Behaviour Change Project is a collaboration between behavioral scientists and computer scientists combing the global literature to see what works, with an initial focus on smoking cessation. A comprehensive tobacco control strategy, she details, involves those infamous “nudges” beloved of policy makers, but also the legislation, services and taxation, that need to work synergistically to effect real change.
Michie had a long career as a research fellow and clinician before joining the Psychology Department of University College London in 2002. She’s a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Academy of Social Sciences, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, the European Health Psychology Society, the British Psychological Society and a Distinguished International Affiliate of the American Psychological Association.
Some dairy farmers in Massachusetts are using food waste and manure to create renewable energy. Each farm produces enough to power about 1,500 homes. Not only does this process create electricity, NPR Science Correspondent Allison Aubrey tells us it also prevents the release of methane, a greenhouse gas. Follow Short Wave's Emily Kwong on Twitter @emilykwong1234. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
