“60 MINUTES” LISTINGS FOR SUNDAY MARCH 3
THIS IS NO ORDINARY LAWSUIT – Steve Kroft reports on an unusual lawsuit filed by children against the federal government. It charges that their constitutional rights are being denied by the government for failing to stop the use of fossil fuels despite being aware of their link to global warming. If it goes to trial, many predict it will eventually find its way to the Supreme Court. Draggan Mihailovich is the producer.
OFF TRACK – A former CSX engineer describes a deadly train accident that could have been prevented by a safety system called Positive Train Control that Congress has mandated for most of America’s major rail lines. Lesley Stahl reports. Sarah Koch is the producer.
CRACKING THE CODE – Women comprise nearly half the American workforce but hold just a quarter of its computing jobs. Sharyn Alfonsi reports on efforts to narrow this gap, especially a program that’s teaching 10 million school girls computer coding. Rome Hartman is the producer.
ON “60 MINUTES”: IN HIS FIRST INTERVIEW, FIRED TRAIN ENGINEER RECOUNTS THE DEADLY CRASH OF AN AMTRAK TRAIN INTO HIS FREIGHT TRAIN
Mark James describes the deadly crash of an Amtrak passenger train into his CSX train in his first interview since the accident that killed two and injured many more. But as Lesley Stahl reports, the crash could have been prevented. Stahl’s investigation will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, March 3 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
On a night about a year ago, James parked his CSX freight train on a siding near Columbia, S.C. That night, the train’s conductor had been manually throwing track switches, like the one that diverted his train onto the sidetrack from the main line. James was outside his engine when the lights of the Amtrak Silver Star approached. “I’m expecting these headlights very bright coming, to get on past us,” he tells Stahl “And then I see—you could tell when that train hit the switch and came in on top of us, you could see where it—where it rocked, my mind was just crazy. [I said] ‘Oh, my God, no. Please no. Please no.’”
James says he had questioned his conductor about the main line switch. “I asked him multiple times. I trusted him that he had gotten the switch back.” The Amtrak engineer and conductor were killed, and more than 90 passengers were injured, some badly. One of the Amtrak cars was bent in half. “They’re bringing people off with broke arms, legs, people mangled really. This is something… I’ll never get over. I couldn’t imagine anybody else that’s ever seen that before,” says James.
A safety technology called Positive Train Control, PTC, designed to prevent train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments, incursions into work zones, and misaligned switches, could have thwarted the fatal crash. In 2008 Congress mandated that most major American railroads have PTC by 2015, but for reasons Stahl investigates in her story, most of America’s mandated tracks do not have the safety system fully implemented yet. Since the mandate was imposed, following a crash in Chatsworth, Calif., that killed 25 people, there have been 22 accidents, killing a total of 29 people and injuring more than 500.
And it’s not only passengers who are endangered by this lag, says Robert Sumwalt, chairman of National Transportation Safety Board. “[One might say] I don’t care about this story. I don’t ride a train. But most communities have railroad traffic going through it,” he tells Stahl. “We’ve certainly seen accidents with toxic chemicals onboard, where a switch was left in the wrong position right here in South Carolina, in fact.”
ON “60 MINUTES”: CODE.ORG TEACHING 10 MILLION SCHOOL GIRLS COMPUTER CODING TO ATTACK THE WIDENING GENDER GAP IN COMPUTER SCIENCE JOBS
Women comprise nearly half the American workforce but hold just a quarter of its computing jobs. And this gap continues to widen, despite the best efforts of foundations and universities to attract women to technology jobs, and even as computing jobs are increasing so fast that there are 500,000 open positions. But one non-profit, Code.org, is reaching girls at younger ages in hopes that an earlier start will create the deeper roots needed to keep them on the tech track now dominated by their male classmates. Sharyn Alfonsi reports on the computer science gender gap on the next edition of 60 MINUTES, Sunday, March 3 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
“Many of the efforts to get women into computer science, I think, start late,” says Hadi Partovi, who co-founded Code.org. Born in Iran, Partovi came to America and launched two successful tech start-ups after working for Microsoft. He is trying to get girls exposed to science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM subjects, before middle school. “Middle school is roughly when girls traditionally drop out of STEM fields. And for computer science, [they’ve] not even been exposed to it at that young age in many cases. And that’s when we need to start,” he tells Alfonsi.
Code.org aims to begin teaching computer science to all children as early as kindergarten. Five years after it started, Partovi says 25 percent of American schoolchildren have an account on Code.org. “What’s even more incredible is among the 11-year-olds, the 10 and 11-year-olds…two-thirds of all American students have an account on Code.org,” he says.
“We now have over 10 million girls coding on Code.org,” says Partovi. He says that if just 1 percent of the girls in the program become computer science majors, many universities will have a 50/50 gender balance in the discipline within a decade. This would be a big step toward narrowing the gender gap in the fast-growing and high-paying computer science workplace.
Alfonsi also speaks to Microsoft executive Bonnie Ross, whose company has thousands of open jobs. Ross says connecting creativity to STEM subjects is a key way to interest girls. “Of the girls we’ve talked to, 91 percent of them feel that they are creative, they identify with being creative. But when asked about computer science, they don’t see computer science as creative.”
At Marymount School of New York, Alfonsi reports on a program that stresses the creative aspects of the STEM subjects and encourages students to make original inventions using electronic building blocks called “LittleBits.”
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