FEMA, Robot Spies, Birth of the PC, WWI Poetry, Tech Transfer

Is the Government Equipped to Handle More Natural Disasters? Guest: Jeff Schlegelmilch, Deputy Director, National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Rescue efforts are still underway in the path of Hurricane Michael, which tore into Florida’s panhandle last week. Residents in the storm’s path through Florida, Georgia and Alabama are being warned by FEMA to prepare for extended power outages. Hurricane Michael is just the latest of a dozen weather and climate disasters in the US this year bringing losses of more than billion dollars each. Where is the balance of emergency response and prevention in US federal and local policy? The Canadian View on NAFTA Replacement Guest: Stéphane Lessard, Canada Consul General for the US Mountain West Region It took more than a year of on-again-off-again negotiating and tough talk for the US, Mexico and Canada to come to an agreement on altering NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement. President Trump insisted it be renegotiated or the US would pull out. The US and Mexico got on the same page about a month before the October 1st deadline. Canada signed on just days before the October 1 deadline. What was at stake, and what took Canada so long to make a deal? Are My Devices Spying On Me? Guest: Dale Rowe, Professor of Information Technology, BYU, Head of BYU’s Cybersecurity Research Lab Amazon and Google have personal assistants in million of American homes, and Facebook is about to launch its own. So how risky is it to have all of these internet-connected gadgets around, with access to our credit card info and even the locks on our doors? The Birth of the PC Guest: Margaret O’Mara, Professor of History, University of Washington If you’ve thought about it at all, you probably think your computer mouse first appeared on the early Apple computers around 1983. Few realize that Apple kind of stole the idea. The mouse actually debuted fifteen years earlier at a famous 1968 demo in San Francisco — along with several other key pieces of what became the personal computer. If the PC was born in the 1980s, then that event in San Francisco in 1968 was its ultrasound. How WWI reshaped the literature of the 20th Century Guest: Jarica Watts, Professor of English, Brigham Young University November marks 100 years since the end of World War I. “The Great War” changed perceptions of war among a generation of young men who went off to fight dreaming of glory and returned traumatized by the horrors of trench warfare. Their trauma reflected in the literature of the day, too. Especially in the poetry written by soldiers at the front. Making a Lab-On-A-Chip with a 3D Printer Guests: Gregory Nordin, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University; Mike Alder, Director, BYU Technology Transfer Office Years ago, we would have a computer filling an entire room. Now you’ve got one far more powerful in your pocket. The same push is happening in medical technology. The tabletop equipment in a blood testing laboratory, for example, has been shrunk down to the size of a credit card – or smaller. But these “lab-on-a-chip” devices, as they’re called, are still pretty expensive and complicated to manufacture.