US-EU Trade, Scooby Doo, Space Weather, Touch Technology

EU Take on Trump’s Tough Trade Stance Guest: David O’Sullivan, European Union Ambassador to the United States Speaking to Governors at the White House on Monday, President Trump said: European Union is very, very tough. Very, very tough. They don't allow our products in. They don't allow our farming goods in. You people know. Many of you represent farm states. They won't --you know that better than anybody. They won’t allow our farm products –they won’t take any. The President also mentioned the fees European countries put on American cars imported over their boundaries. Trump has threatened to raise the fees America puts on European cars like Mercedes and BMW that come here to be sold in the US. That threat is one big reason European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker came to Washington last summer and agreed with President Trump that the US and EU would hold trade talks.  Scooby Doo Guest: Kevin Sandler, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Arizona State University, Author of the upcoming book “Scooby Doo” Scooby Doo is 50 this year. It was a staple of my childhood, and I hear people in their 30s and 40s are passing the Scooby love down to their kids, too. Would you believe the idea for the show was inspired, partly, by Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night”? A TV executive in 1969 heard Sinatra crooning “dooby dooby doo” at the end of the song and thought it’d be a great name for a mystery cartoon centered around a fraidy-cat dog. What is Space Weather and Do You Need An Umbrella? Guest: Jim Wild, PhD, Professor of Space Physics, Lancaster University A bout of extreme weather –like that polar vortex that turned the Midwest to ice recently –can bring everything to a halt: flights, roads, school classes. For decades, astronomers have been warning of another kind of extreme weather that could wreak even more havoc on our modern technology –frying satellites, knocking GPS off line, zapping electric grids. It’s space weather. How Touch Technologies Could Rock Your World Guest: Chris Harrison, Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University We can all agree touch screens are amazing, but we’ve still got the problem of big thumbs and tiny keyboard buttons or links. So, what if everything around us was a touch screen? Your couch could sense when the cat’s about to scratch and shoo it away. The reminder you scribble on a Post-It would be automatically uploaded to your computer. Ask A Philosopher Guest: Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University If you encountered an academic sitting at a table on the street with a sign that said, “I’m a philosopher –ask me a question!” would you stop? I would not. If it was a therapist or a doctor or even a priest or rabbi, I’d have lots of things I’d like to ask. But philosophers? They’re only interested in big, unanswerable questions. If I’m going to ask a random person on the street a question, I’d like an answer, thank you very much. So, I’m passing right on by that philosopher at the table. Worlds Awaiting: Shakespeare in Comics Guest: Rachel Wadham