UAlbany News Podcast

It’s been about a month since Evo Morales resigned as president of Bolivia following weeks of civil protests over disputed results of the country’s general election in October.

After initially seeking asylum in Mexico, Morales flew to Argentina on Thursday to be granted refugee status.

Gabriel Hetland, an assistant professor of Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latino Studies, shares his insights on the political crisis and why he believes the resignation was a military coup.

Hetland’s research focuses on urban and national politics, participatory democracy and social movements. Learn more about his work.

Article mentioned: “Many wanted Morales out. But what happened in Bolivia was a military coup” (Written by Gabriel Hetland for The Guardian)

Photo credit:”Quito, Acto en solidaridad con el señor Presidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, Evo Morales,” by Cancillería Ecuador.

The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.

Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at [email protected], and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.

James Acker, a distinguished teaching professor at the School of Criminal Justice, and Brian Keough, head of the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, are among the founders of the University’s National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA).

The NDPA contains a repository of publicly-accessible materials that track the history of capital punishment in the United States.

Acker and Keough join the series to share about the digitization efforts of a collection by M. Watt Espy, a researcher who spent three decades of his life gathering and indexing documentation of legal executions for what would become the nation’s largest database on capital punishment.

The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives has since added 6,000 executions to the list through the verification process of Espy’s work.

Espy began the project in the 1970s as a traveling salesman pedaling encyclopedias and cemetery plots, among other goods. While the scholar was originally an advocate for capital punishment, he became an avid opponent following growing concerns about racial prejudice in the legal system.

During a pre-Internet era, Espy documented over 15,000 executions conducted between 1608 and 2002.

Espy died in 2009 at the age of 76.

The University at Albany Libraries was responsible for salvaging the “Espy File” from Espy’s home in Headland, A.L. following his passing and moving the database to its current home at the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives.

The NDPA is a partnership between the University at Albany Libraries and the Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) at the University’s School of Criminal Justice.

Learn more about the Espy Project.

Image from the "Espy File" collection: Mug shot of George Stinney, a 14-year-old who was convicted of murdering two white girls in Alcolu, S.C. He was executed by electric chair in 1944.

The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.

Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at [email protected], and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.

Ahead of the UK's General Election this Thursday (on Dec. 12), we brought Timothy Weaver of Rockefeller College to the show to share what's at stake and what to look out for in the last three days of the campaign trail.

Photo credit: "Brexit protestor flags near the Palace of Westminster, London," by Chiral Jon.

If you're interested in hearing more about Weaver's work, you might like our last episode, where we spoke with the political scientist on the Opportunity Zone Program.

The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.

Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at [email protected], and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced a bill on Nov. 22 to repeal the now controversial Opportunity Zone Program. Other politicians, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, have begun criticizing the tax incentive following reports from The New York Times and other media outlets on the high-profile beneficiaries of the program.

We first spoke with political scientist Timothy Weaver last winter on the program and his major concerns with its potential repercussions. We’ve invited Weaver back to the series to share his insights on what 2019 revealed about the provision's effects on American cities and which of his predictions have already come true.

Weaver is an assistant professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, where his studies place-based tax incentives and their investment outcomes. He is the author of ‘Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom’ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

We'll also be releasing a second episode featuring Weaver next week ahead of the UK's General Election on Dec. 12. We spoke with Weaver about the most contentious issues on the political agenda as well as the sticking points preventing a final deal on Brexit.

You can tune in to that conversation on Monday. We'll see you next week.

The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.

Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at [email protected], and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.

Kevin Knuth is an associate professor of physics whose research focuses on exoplanets, and quantum mechanics and relativity.

He is a former computer scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA’s Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he designed algorithms to analyze astrophysical data as well as earth science data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Knuth is preparing to lead a team of scientists to track unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) off the coast of California.

He is pairing up with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists including Deep Prasad, CEO of the quantum computing company ReactiveQ, and Rizwan Virk, executive director of the startup accelerator PlayLabs@MIT, for the project.

Read more on Knuth’s work.

Knuth is also a member of the Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Studies (SCU), a research organization comprising scientists, former military officers and law enforcement personnel. The group issued a letter to several members of Congress this week containing a series of recommendations for the advancement of UAP research and the public dissemination of the data.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Sejong Univ./Hur et al; Optical: NASA/STScI

Full transcript of the SCU's letter to Congress:

Scientific Exploration of Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena

Subject: Non-profit research organization calls for widespread scientific studies of unidentified aerospace phenomena (UAP).

From: Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Studies (SCU)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Studies (SCU) is committed to the rigorous scientific study of the UAP phenomenon. SCU believes that all data regarding unidentified aerospace objects should be made available in the public domain so that it can be properly investigated by the established scientific community. This is currently not the case with military and other government agency sightings and encounters.

The SCU conducts and publishes peer-reviewed research into UAPs, and encourages the open publication of other agencies’ and institutions’ scientific research into these phenomena. In two recent cases investigated by SCU, from 2004 and 2015 involving the interaction of UAPs with F/A-18 Super Hornets and Navy Carrier Strike Groups, SCU discovered that radar, radio, and other EM data collected by the US Navy had not been released to the public. Based on SCU’s preliminary investigations of these events, it believes that a full scientific investigation of the existing data would be able to uncover valuable information relating to both national security and advancement of our understanding of physics, aerospace engineering, and our world. The SCU recommends the following:

- that Congress should allocate public research funding through the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD), and/or NASA to study these phenomena, whose results would then be published in the public-domain;

- that Congress should require all government branches (e.g. Armed Services, NASA, NORAD, etc.) to disseminate all data (electronic and observational), and consequent research on these phenomena, which does not compromise our national security interests, to the open scientific community;

Scientific Exploration of Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena

The SCU is a research organization composed largely of scientists, former military officers, and law enforcement personnel with technical experience and backgrounds in investigation and who have studied UAP phenomena extensively.

The following SCU affiliates and supporters have endorsed the above statements:

SCU Affiliates

• Timothy D. Brigham, Ph.D. Psychology, University of Georgia, GA
• Silvano Colombano, Ph.D. Biophysics, University at Buffalo (SUNY), Computer Scientist, NASA-Ames, CA
• Joseph S. DiNoto, Ph.D. Strategic Security Studies (ABD), Huntsville, AL
• Mitchell Max Dullnig, M.D. Internal and Emergency Medicine, U.T. Houston Medical School, Houston TX Erol A. Faruk, Ph.D. Chemistry, Queen Mary College, London University
• Paul Kingsbury, Ph.D. Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC
• Kevin Knuth, Ph.D. Physics, University at Albany (SUNY), Albany, NY
• Mark Rodeghier, Ph.D. Sociology, CUFOS, Univ Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL
• Michael D. Swords, PhD. Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Natural Sciences, Western Michigan University, MI
• Gregory B. Vásqu...