One of Learning Life’s interns this summer, Kane Boynton, worked mostly from Michigan, and is still working with us this fall from the Great Lakes State generating some of our most recent quizzes.
Born and raised in Vermont, Kane Boynton’s passions are business and skiing. Kane has been skiing since the age of 4, and has competed in ski racing internationally, most notably in Chile, France, Germany, and Austria. He is a Vermont Alpine Racing Association U21 State Slalom Champion, and was a member of the Association’s competitive team in 2011-12. Currently, Kane is a member of the University of Michigan Alpine Ski Team, and competes nationally as part of U.S. Collegiate Ski Association All-American teams.
Kane’s passion for skiing has involved him in charitable work. In 2011, he launched an annual ski race involving 250 competitors to raise money for various charities, a fundraising event he still leads every year. Also in 2011, Kane helped Vermont residents clean up their homes and yards after the devastation of Hurricane Irene in the state of Vermont.
Kane pursues his passion for business not only as a major in the subject at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but as an independent investor, actively and successfully investing in the stock market for the last eight years (which means he started investing at age 11!). Kane’s keen interest in business has also led him to pursue diverse internships, studying battery storage companies and “end-to-end strategy and corporate development strategies” with the publicly traded San Jose solar power company, SunPower Corporation, in summer 2011, then climbing radio and cell phone towers to install and maintain AM/FM radio and cell phone antennas for Prescott Tower Services in Vermont in summer 2012.
Asked why he chose to intern with Learning Life, Kane says Learning Life’s “goal of educating the general public by spreading knowledge on everyday surfaces intrigued me. I was also happy to intern with Learning Life because as a start-up I could directly help and influence its development.”
As one of our summer interns, Kane pursued his interests in research and marketing by drafting a number of Learning Life quizzes, including the seven most recent quizzes posted about Egypt, world geography, international acronyms, U.S. income inequality, U.S. government income and spending, Americans’ spending and savings, and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). He has also worked on upcoming Learning Life quizzes on a diversity of topics, including U.S. prisons and prisoners, U.S. geography, U.S. presidential history, weights and measurements, financial investment terminology, China, Mexico, heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Learning Life is grateful to Kane for his help in researching and developing so many of our quizzes current and upcoming. We look forward to working with you further, Kane!
To learn more about interning or volunteering with Learning Life and other ways you can help, contact us at email@learninglife.info.
What are the underlying causes of terrorism?
The following Q&A on terrorism is part of Learning Life’s Big Questions Series. The series offers experts’ short answers to big questions, with more information about the experts and their research for those curious to learn more. We inaugurated the series on the 12th anniversary of 9/11 (2013) with three big questions about terrorism and provocative answers from three noted terrorism researchers. This page offers their answers to our first question: what are the underlying causes of terrorism?
Read expert answers to Question 2 (how big a threat is terrorism?) and Question 3(how does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception of terrorism?).
Dr. Ziad Munson:
This is the most important, and most difficult, question facing those who study terrorism. The short answer is: we don’t yet have all the answers. And there is no single “master cause” of terrorism; different terrorist campaigns arise from a different set of interrelated root causes. We do, however, know that a number of well-publicized factors are NOT in fact at the root cause of terrorism. For example, we know that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism. We know that lack of education doesn’t cause terrorism. We know that particular religious traditions don’t cause terrorism. And we know that terrorism is not caused by those who are crazy (at least not in any clinical sense).
We do also know that terrorist attacks are almost all the responsibility of otherwise ordinary kinds of organizations. “Lone gunman” terrorism is exceedingly rare – 99.8% of terrorism is planned and carried out by formal organizations, not individuals acting alone. Organizations turn to terrorism as part of a strategy to pursue political objectives. And yes, their objectives are almost always political, even when cloaked in religious ideology and language as is so often the case today.
Dr. Gary LaFree:
The START Center analyzed the top twenty most active terrorist organizations since the 1970s – including such groups as the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or Basque Homeland & Freedom) in Spain, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) in Ireland, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru, the Taliban in Afghanistan – and found that the vast majority are fighting over land. Moreover, they are fighting locally or nationally, not internationally. The vast majority of terrorist attacks are domestic attacks by citizens, not foreigners. al-Qaeda is a notable and more complex exception because they are like an international social movement franchise, with local affiliates in different parts of the world having somewhat different motivations and goals.
Gary LaFree is Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. START is currently engaged in approximately 40 research projects dealing mostly with the human causes and consequences of terrorism. Dr. LaFree is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a member of the National Academy of Science’s Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. Dr. LaFree has published more than 70 articles and three books. Much of Dr. LaFree’s current research is on trends in criminal and political violence.
Ziad Munson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University, where he founded and currently directs the Social Science Research Center. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996 and 2002. His research and teaching focuses on the intersection of popular mobilization, civic engagement, and religion. He is the author of The Making of Pro-Life Activists, a study of recruitment and mobilization in the American pro-life movement (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He has also authored articles and chapters on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, religion and politics in the U.S., and the role of civil society in wartime. He is currently working on a new project on the organizational infrastructure of international political violence. Click here for more on Dr. Munson’s teaching and research.
How does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception?
The following Q&A on terrorism is part of Learning Life’s Big Questions Series. The series offers experts’ short answers to big questions, with more information about the experts and their research for those curious to learn more. We inaugurated the series on the 12th anniversary of 9/11 (2013) with three big questions about terrorism and provocative answers from three noted terrorism researchers. This page offers their answers to our third question: how does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception of terrorism?
Read expert answers to Question 1 (what are the underlying causes of terrorism?) and Question 2 (how big a threat is terrorism?).
Dr. Gary LaFree:
Terrorism and the media go hand in hand. Indeed, modern terrorism would not exist without mass media. It would have been difficult to terrorize the whole world back in 1850 because terrorists then would have had a harder time widely publicizing their act, but now you can terrorize the world instantaneously through mass media. Further, most of what researchers know about terrorism comes from careful analysis of media reports. Some people have referred to terrorism as theater. One of the main goals of terrorist organizations is to get media attention, and they are very concerned about controlling their image in the media. It’s one of the dark sides of the communications revolution.
Dr. Dennis Mileti:
Let’s focus on the public’s perception of risk because that’s critical. First, there is no objective reality for human beings. What people think or perceive as real is reality for them. Second, what people think or perceive often has little to do with objective risk. This is fundamental to how human beings are wired. It applies to all risk, not just terrorism. Third, the media presents people with information, and that information shapes public perception of risk. Since most of what people know about terrorism is through the media, media is the major player in shaping public perception of terrorism.
The objective of a terrorist is to become an applied social psychologist, to influence the media so as to increase the public’s perception of terrorism risk and disrupt civil society as a result. Thus, when air travel fell off after 9/11, the terrorists were successful in shaping public perception of risk. The impact on the public’s perception of risk is relatively short-lived though. It takes approximately two years after a terrorist event before the population goes back to the risk perception levels they had prior to the event. The media, however, can keep that risk perception elevated, whether or not there is a real risk.
Gary LaFree is Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. START is currently engaged in approximately 40 research projects dealing mostly with the human causes and consequences of terrorism. Dr. LaFree is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a member of the National Academy of Science’s Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. Dr. LaFree has published more than 70 articles and three books. Much of Dr. LaFree’s current research is on trends in criminal and political violence.
Dennis Mileti is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he served as Director of the Natural Hazards Center and as Chair of the Department of Sociology. He is author of over 100 publications, most on the societal aspects of hazards and disasters. His book, Disasters by Design, summarized the U.S. effort to assess knowledge and national policy for hazards and disasters. He played a major role in the research that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) performed for the U.S. Congress on evacuation of World Trade Center Towers 1 & 2 on 9/11. Click here for more on Dr. Mileti’s research.
How big a threat is terrorism?
The following Q&A on terrorism is part of Learning Life’s Big Questions Series. The series offers experts’ short answers to big questions, with more information about the experts and their research for those curious to learn more. We inaugurated the series on the 12th anniversary of 9/11 (2013) with three big questions about terrorism and provocative answers from three noted terrorism researchers. This page offers their answers to our second question: how big a threat is terrorism?
Read expert answers to Question 1(what are the underlying causes of terrorism?) and Question 3(how does news media reporting shape terrorism and public perception of terrorism?).
Dr. Ziad Munson:
Regular Americans trying to judge the threat of terrorism from the media coverage it receives or the amount of tax dollars spent on it, would certainly conclude that terrorism represents a grave threat to our society. The annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, whose principal mission is to prevent terrorism, is over $43 billion (by way of comparison, the budget for the entire Department of Education is about $46 billion). The New York Times ran 184 different articles with “terrorism” in the headline in 2011 and 2012, despite the fact that only a single act of terrorism occurred in the U.S. in those years, a white supremacist attack on a Sikh temple.
The actual risk terrorism looks much different than can be accounted for by either federal spending or media attention. The best way to evaluate the threat of terrorism is to compare the risk of dying in a terrorist attack to the risk of dying due to other causes. Here the facts are clear: You are 8 times as likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack; 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed; and over 1,000 times more likely to die in a car accident. In fact, the chance of dying at the hands of international terrorists is about the same as drowning in a toilet or in an accident involving a deer. None of these statistics mean that terrorism isn’t a threat or that we should be complacent in combating it. But they do suggest that much of our fear of terrorism is misplaced. In fact, recent studies suggest that the fear of terrorism can be more deadly than acts of terrorism themselves: the fear of flying after the 9/11 attacks led to approximately 250 more driving deaths each year than would have occurred had people chosen to fly at the same rate they did before the attack. This is many times more than the number of Americans killed each year in terrorist attacks.
Dr. Gary LaFree:
One’s risk of being injured or killed in a terrorist act is indeed statistically very small, but it’s worth emphasizing that the threat of terrorism can be as important as the actual violence. Terrorism captures the public imagination and incites fear, as we experienced right here in the Washington D.C. metro area when John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo shot and killed nearly a dozen commuters in Maryland and Virginia over 23 days in October 2002. The 9/11 terrorists in turn killed an unusually large number of people, but their impact on policy and public perception of terrorism has been massive.
The great fear terrorism inspires seems to be due to its randomness, but also the seriousness of the potential threat. There is the possibility of even more destructive attacks than 9/11, like a chemical, radiological, biological or nuclear attack. Think, for example, of the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, which killed thirteen people, but could have killed many, many more given crowded subways and the deadliness of sarin gas. The combination of densely packed urban populations and technological advances increase potential damage terrorists can inflict. It used to be that you needed a whole complex to create dangerous weapons of mass destruction, but technological improvements have made it such that you can carry a dangerous chemical lab in a suitcase. Nowadays, you can get instructions for constructing a bomb free on the internet. Thus, we still need policy that protects against the really bad possibilities that are very unlikely, but that would be disastrous if they happened.
Gary LaFree is Director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. START is currently engaged in approximately 40 research projects dealing mostly with the human causes and consequences of terrorism. Dr. LaFree is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), and a member of the National Academy of Science’s Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. Dr. LaFree has published more than 70 articles and three books. Much of Dr. LaFree’s current research is on trends in criminal and political violence.
Ziad Munson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University, where he founded and currently directs the Social Science Research Center. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1993 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1996 and 2002. His research and teaching focuses on the intersection of popular mobilization, civic engagement, and religion. He is the author of The Making of Pro-Life Activists, a study of recruitment and mobilization in the American pro-life movement (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He has also authored articles and chapters on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, religion and politics in the U.S., and the role of civil society in wartime. He is currently working on a new project on the organizational infrastructure of international political violence. Click here for more on Dr. Munson’s teaching and research.
Kane’s passion for skiing has involved him in charitable work. In 2011, he launched an annual ski race involving 250 competitors to raise money for various charities, a fundraising event he still leads every year. Also in 2011, Kane helped Vermont residents clean up their homes and yards after the devastation of Hurricane Irene in the state of Vermont.
