The Rational View podcast with Dr. Al Scott

Dr. Blake Walters on cancer radiotherapy

In this episode we’re going to learn about cancer radiotherapy, the use of radiation to treat cancer. So many people are afraid that nuclear radiation causes cancer, and yes this is possible if you receive a sudden megadose of radiation, but it is very difficult to get enough just enough radiation to increase the risk of cancer while not getting too much dose and dying from acute radiation sickness.  In the real world, radiation is used to kill cancer cells and save lives. I’m going to interview one of the world experts in this field of medicine.
Dr. Blake Walters received an M.Sc. in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto in 1992. He joined the Ionizing Radiation Standards Group at the National Research Council of Canada in 1994. He received a PhD in Medical Physics from Maastricht University, The Netherlands, in 2017.
With the NRC, Blake helped to develop new computational techniques to greatly improve the accuracy of cancer radiotherapy. This work helps to spare healthy tissue while maximizing the dose to the tumour. This work has been adopted in radiotherapy clinics around the world, and has become the gold standard for accurate radiotherapy planning.
Currently, he continues his work for the NRCC, developing and implementing Monte Carlo techniques to meet the increasingly complex demands of current radiotherapy technologies.  He is also the in-house physicist, specializing in dose calculations for low energy X-rays, for a company that designs and manufactures pre-clinical and clinical irradiators sold around the world.
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#TheRationalView #radiationtherapy #cancer #linearnothreshold #nuclear #radiation #health

A Brief History of CANDU Reactors with Chris Adlam and Tom Hess

Nuclear power is a polarizing issue and there is a lot of misinformation that we can debunk through familiarization. A significant fraction of the public, for example, think Nuclear power adds to carbon dioxide pollution. Many more feel that nuclear waste storage is a uniquely dangerous problem. Many more don’t understand that Ontario’s electrical grid is one of the cleanest in the world thanks to nuclear power which produces 60% of our electricity. I wanted to go to the source and understand a bit about the history of CANDU reactors and nuclear power in Ontario.
In this episode I am interviewing two key figures from Canadians for Nuclear Energy who bring a wealth of experience on the electrical grid and nuclear energy.  
Tom Hess is a retired Independent System Operator with 31 years of experience at Ontario Hydro and its successor company, the Independent Market Operator, which is now the Independent Electric System Operator (IESO).
Chris Adlam is an electricity system and power generation enthusiast whose interest stems from a familial history in power generation as his great grandfather Hubert R. Sills was a hydroelectric engineer for General Electric. Hubert worked on some of the largest hydro installs in the world. Chris' interest in nuclear power began around the time of the disastrous Ontario Green Energy Act. Chris is an IT professional who has been working in the healthcare industry for over 15 years.
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#TheRationalView #podcast #CANDU #netzeroneedsnuclear #greenenergy #cleanenergy #atomicenergy #nuclearenergy #SavePickering

Farzad Khosravi and Cicero--a rational social media option

On this episode I’m interviewing an entrepreneur who is also trying to spread a Rational View by supplanting the AI-driven social media echo chamber with a  new idea. I hope you like it.
Farzad Khosravi is the co-founder and CEO at Cicero. Farzad is an entrepreneur looking to build humane, civic-oriented technology that improves our world. He believes that we need to reverse the trend of misinformation and hate we see online if we are to save our society. A scientist at heart and immigrant who grew up in Kentucky, Farzad learned early on the value of skeptical inquiry.
Discover podcasts, articles, videos and more from world-leading thinkers at Cicero.ly
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#TheRationalView #podcast #rational #education #TOK #socialmedia

Professor Don Gurnett on the Voyager Missions

In this episode I’m continuing in a bit of a ‘space science’ theme to interview Professor Emeritus Don Gurnett, the Primary Investigator on the plasma wave instruments onboard both Voyager spacecraft. These amazing nuclear-powered spacecraft were launched in 1977 and are now the most distant manmade objects known, having recently left the solar system on their way into interstellar space.
 
Prof. Gurnett started his science career by working on spacecraft electronics design as a student employee in The University of Iowa Physics Department in 1959. After completing his B.S. in electrical engineering at Iowa in 1962, he transferred to physics, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1963 and 1965. He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa in 1965 with subsequent promotions to Associate Professor and to Full Professor in 1968 and 1972. Prof. Gurnett is considered by many to be the founder of the field of space plasma wave physics and has participated in over 30 spacecraft projects, most notably the Voyager 1 and 2 flights to the outer planets, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and the Cassini mission to Saturn. Prof. Gurnett has received numerous awards for his research spanning two millenia. These include the 1978 John Howard Dellinger Gold Medal from the International Scientific Radio Union, to the 2005 Hannes Alfven Medal from the European Geosciences Union. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
 
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#therationalview #podcast #science #astrophysics #voyager #exploration #space #plasmawaves #physics #nuclearpower #thermoelectric 

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on The Rational View (2/2)

This episode wraps up my exciting two-part interview with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium. We discuss climate change mitigation, public perceptions and misperceptions of nuclear power and society's progress towards decarbonizing the economy. We chat about the imminent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and justifications for funding of big space astronomy projects.
I hope you enjoy it!
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#therationalview #podcast #science #evidencebased #climatechange #netzeroneedsnuclear #greenenergy #cleanenergy #space #astronomy #neildegrassetyson #nuclearenergy

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on The Rational View (1/2)

The Rational View is proud to present an interview with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is the first in a two-part series. 
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, and witty director of the Hayden Planetarium,  is joining Dr. Scott.  Selected as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world by Time magazine in 2007, Dr. Tyson was awarded the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2017. In this interview we discuss communicating complex scientific issues with a polarized public. Dr. Tyson addresses his non-judgemental approach to spreading rational evidence-based perspectives to inform public policy. 
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Scientific Responsibility and Outreach

This episode includes a talk I gave to the Canadian Association of Physicists at their annual conference, in a special session focused on industrial physicists. It discusses the responsibility of scientists to communicate their work to the public and engage with society. Society sees scientists as disconnected elites who are isolated in academic ivory towers. We need to counter this opinion and show that we are also people who fight similar issues. We also need child care. We also worry about how to put food on the table. To communicate effectively and get society to a 'Star Trek' future we all need to listen and empathize and step out of our social media echo chambers.
Also, please stay tuned for an upcoming episode where I will be interviewing the famous Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson!
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#therationalview #podcast #science #evidencebased #ecomodernism #homeopathy #flatearth #nuclearpower #greenenergy #renewableenergy #startrek

Cool Stuff: The James Webb Space Telescope with Prof. René Doyon

This episode is full of Cool Science. The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s next flagship observatory, is now scheduled for launch on December 18th of 2021. This infrared observatory with a 6.5 metre segmented deployable primary telescope will rocket off to a distant Lagrange point where it will deploy a tennis-court-sized multi-layer foil sunshield to allow it to cool to -223 degrees Celsius. The mission cost over $10 Billion to put together.
René Doyon obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medecine in 1990. He is a full professor at the physics Department of the Université de Montréal, Director of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets and the Mont-Mégantic Observatory. His research activities focus on the search and study of exoplanets, young stars and the development of state-of-the-art astronomical instruments for ground- and spaced-based observatories.
He is principal investigator of the Canadian-built instrument onboard the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in 2021. His research team led the development of novel imaging techniques that contributed, in 2008, to obtain the first images of a multiple planetary system outside the Solar system. His distinctions includes the 2009 Polanyi award, and prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and more recently the 2018 Killam Research Fellowship.
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#therationalview #podcast #science #JWST #spacetelescope #astronomy #astrophysics #exoplanets #SETI #spectroscopy #firstlight

The inexorable advance of Security Theater

In this episode Dr. Scott discusses society's apparent need to spend wads of money performing security theater.
Security theater is an insidious phenomenon whereby people are pressured into pointless and irrational acts of theater in the name of security. This inevitably happens as a result of a seemingly preventable tragedy, followed by a politician or security official who feels pressured to act. Society spends billions of dollars on out-of-proportion security theater every year. The entire US TSA is one example of a security theater that makes people feel safe to fly. Another common example is the driving need to cycle through arcane passwords that nobody can remember every couple months. How about the hygiene theater of scrubbing down everything with disinfectant to supposedly prevent the spread of COVID-19?
How does one fight security theater when it is so easy to cast opponents as monsters who don't care about the safety of children? The answer is that we all need to ask our elected representatives to engage in a rational public policy discussion before we give away our money and our freedoms in pointless acts that are unlikely to provide the desired results.
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#therationalview #podcast #securitytheater #TSA #COVID #freedom #rational #sciencebased 

Inequity and the Pandemic with Edgardo Sepulveda

The Rational View welcomes Edgardo Sepulveda back to discuss the interactions between social inequality and COVID-19. Edgardo has co-authored a paper on the topic providing evidence that societies with higher inequity also suffer higher COVID-19 mortality rates.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827321001798?dgcid=rss_sd_all
It is not immediately clear why this might be the case, and it is difficult to tease out a correlation amidst all of the other confounding factors. This discussion is an interesting exploration of the application of statistics and the scientific method.
Edgardo Sepulveda has been a telecommunications economist for 25 years, the last 15 with his consulting firm in Toronto, Canada. He was born in Chile and has an MA in Economics. As part of his civic policy-related engagement, he also writes about electricity, inequality, COVID-19 and other issues, including at the Progressive Economics Forum, where he wrote the blog that we’ll be discussing on this episode. Edgardo has been the guest on a number of other energy-related podcasts. His Twitter handle is @E_R_Sepulveda.
“The Spirit Level” by UK social epidemiologists Picket and Wilkinson is the book that came out in 2009 and popularized the idea that social and economic inequality negatively affects individual and population health.  It has its own Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book and is highlighted in the Equality Trust (a social NGO set up by them) here: 
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/the-spirit-level
The Economist covered some of the COVID-inequality work in an article in its July 31, 2021 edition in the Finance section titled: “Why have some places suffered more covid-19 deaths than others? Income inequality is a big part of the answer”. 
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/07/31/why-have-some-places-suffered-more-covid-19-deaths-than-others
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#therationalview #podcast #covid #inequity #inequality #pandemic #science #evidencebased #statistics